# Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread



## nULL

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FD10Ad02.html    


TAIPEI - If China ever makes the decision to invade Taiwan it is unlikely to be a large-scale Normandy-style amphibious assault. The reality is that China is more likely to use a decapitation strategy. Decapitation strategies short circuit command and control systems, wipe out nationwide nerve centers, and leave the opponent hopelessly lost. As the old saying goes, "Kill the head and the body dies." All China needs to do is seize the center of power, the capital and its leaders.

If China decides to use force to reunify the mainland with what it terms a breakaway province, the window of opportunity is believed to be 2006. This would give China a couple of years to clean up the mess before the 2008 Summer Olympics. Most analysts estimate that China‘s military strength will surpass Taiwan‘s defense capabilities by 2005. So 2006 - the Year of the Dog - is clearly the year to fear.

United States Defense Department officials now are reexamining China‘s military threat to Taiwan. This rethink has caused a dramatic shift in the way many think of defending Taiwan. Traditionally, Taiwan had always feared an amphibious assault - the Normandy scenario - and its defense strategy was always designed to stop such an attack. Now with a potential decapitation strategy believed to be in the works, US defense officials are beginning to think what had once been unthinkable: losing Taiwan in only seven days.

The Taiwan takeover scenario
China‘s deployment of its special forces and rapid-deployment forces, combined with air power and missile strikes, is the most likely formula for successfully taking Taiwan with the least amount of effort and damage. The military acronym KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) is in full force here. Special forces, which blend strength with deception and flair, offer China laser cutters rather than sledge hammers for defeating Taiwan‘s armed forces.

An airborne assault directly on Taipei by China‘s 15th Airborne Corps (Changchun), with three divisions (43rd, 44th, 45th) would be the first phase of the assault, with additional paratroopers being dropped in Linkou, Taoyuan and Ilian, to tie up Taiwan‘s four divisions assigned to the 6th Army (North). A Chinese airborne division contains 11,000 men with light tanks and self-propelled artillery. Some intelligence reports have indicated that China was able to airlift one airborne division to Tibet in less than 48 hours in 1988. Today, China‘s ability to transport troops has greatly improved. China is expected to be able to deliver twice that number - 22,000 - in two days.

Taiwan‘s 6th Army has seven infantry brigades: 106, 116, 118, 152, 153, 176, and 178. The 152/153 Dragons and the the 176/178 Tigers are said to be the best. Also a direct assault on the 6th Army‘s 269th motorized brigade, 351st armored infantry brigade, and the 542nd armored brigade would be mandatory for Chinese forces.

Most of the initial fighting would be in the Zhong Zheng District, Taipei, which contains the Presidential Building, the Ministry of National Defense, and the Legislative Yuan. As soon as China‘s troops hit the ground they would have to deal with Taiwan‘s Military Police Command (MPC). The MPC is responsible for protecting key government buildings and military installations. Its personnel are the gatekeepers, holding all the keys and guarding all the doors. They are considered no-nonsense and are humorless when approached. China‘s airborne forces would meet immediate resistance from these Taipei forces. Regular army units, all based outside of Taipei, would take hours, perhaps days, to respond. It would be up to the MPC to hold the Chinese back until reinforcements arrived - which might be never.

Assassins, saboteurs would be prepositioned
Pre-positioned special forces, smuggled into Taiwan months before, would assassinate key leaders, and attack radar and communication facilities around Taiwan a few hours before the main attack. Infiltrators might receive some assistance from sympathetic elements within Taiwan‘s military and police, who are believed to be at least 75 percent pro-Kuomintang (KMT), and hence, pro-unification. Many could use taxis to move about the city unnoticed. Mainland Chinese prostitutes, already in abundance in Taiwan, could be recruited by Chinese intelligence to serve as femme fatales, supplying critical intelligence on the locations of key government and military leaders at odd hours of the night; death is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

<snip>

Why is Taiwan worth fighting for?

To anyone who looks at a map of the region, the reasons are obvious. Taiwan‘s strategic location makes it extremely valuable. The Taiwan Strait is a critical sea lane, and taking Taiwan would allow China to choke off international commercial shipping, especially oil, to Japan and South Korea, should it ever decide to do so. In addition, Taiwan serves as a vital window for US intelligence collection. Taiwan‘s National Security Bureau and the US National Security Agency jointly run a Signal Intelligence facility on Yangmingshan Mountain just north of Taipei (see Spook Mountain: How US spies on China, March 6, 2003). Taiwan‘s inclusion into China‘s military power structure would be unthinkable for Japan.

Of course, this is only a scenario based on selected facts and seasoned with conjecture. Speculation about what China could do and what it will do are rarely comparable. Too many media pundits make mention of a Normandy-style invasion, or an apocalyptic-style missile strike, without seriously considering the fastest way between two points. Of course, China, be warned: "No plan survives the first seconds of combat."

Wendell Minnick is the Jane‘s Defence Weekly correspondent for Taiwan and the author of Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action (McFarland 1992). He can be contacted at janesroc@yahoo.com.


___________________________________________________


When looking at the latest poll figures    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/682137.stm    it doesn‘t seem like the pro-independence Taiwanese have a clear majority. Despite the obvious differences in their creation, I can‘t help but want to draw comparisons between Taiwan and Quebec; were the Parti Quebecois to win the next provincial  election, and decide to pursue unillateral independence (with the support of a larger number of like-minded voters than Taiwan‘s DPP) would Canada be justified in taking military action to force reunification? (Pretend the government would play along!)

The author in the article above seemed to abstain from mentioning China‘s nuclear arsenal in any showdown with the US. If China managed to amass a significant nuclear arsenal, and waited until such time that the Taiwanese government began pushing for independence (against the wishes of the US government) couldn‘t it force the US to back off? I mean, even if the US were able to field an effective missile defence system that would actually work when under attack from another superpower, and not some rogue state, in under 2 years, would that really help it keep up with evolving missile tech? (hypersonic cruise missiles...?)

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040329.wruss0329/BNStory/International/    

Is Taiwan really worth the risk of a large scale world war, especially when such a large segment of the population wants reunification?

EDIT: As a sidenote, don‘t the Chinese Special Forces have the coolest insignia _ever?_


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## Infanteer

> I can‘t help but want to draw comparisons between Taiwan and Quebec;


I think comparing de facto and de jure notions of independance shoots that analogy down.


I think this scenario goes to pot once the US decides to revoke China‘s trading privledges (WTO, MFN, etc).  They‘ve worked too hard to bring their economy to where it is to waste it away for that island.

As for the insignia, I think it is too clutered and cheezey.  The coolest cap brass ever has to be the Lancers


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## Bert

As Infanteer suggests, the business intertwinings of China and Taiwan are great.  The people of Chinese ancestory in Taiwan are well aware of their history they just don‘t like the government in China.  Given the various problems China would face invading Taiwan, I doubt they would do it without provocation.

As described, the act and engineering of a Taiwan invasion is possible.  Militarily, the wild card of the USA becoming involved and the re-militarization of Japan and South Korea is not desirable.  The loss of economic benefits is not desirable.  And China itself is not as stable as one would think.  

China has a strong central government and it keeps things in line.  If China were to invade Taiwan, definitely problems of societal control in Hong Kong, southern areas in China, and areas in the west of China would likely occur.  Government corruption would cause problems.

If one remembers the Beijing Tianimen (sp) Square incident in the late 1980s, one Chinese military unit almost fought another military unit over orders to fire on chinese students.  A little civil war nearly brew out of it.

The Chinese have a long bitter history fighting amounst themselves and its uncertain how an invasion of Taiwan, where Chinese could fight against Chinese again, would sit with the lower ranks of the PRC military, the general population, as well as the more unstable parts of the country and the government.

If the PRC does go into Taiwan, they are taking the biggest risk themselves.


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## Bert

From the Stratfor presses...

Northeast Asia: Nationalism, Football and the Koguryo Kingdom
www.stratfor.com

Summary

As China prepares to host the Asian Cup football final in Beijing, South
Korea has lodged a strong protest urging Beijing to stop laying claim to the
ancient Koguryo kingdom. Like the games themselves, this argument over
geographic heritage exemplifies the nationalism that is such a force in
Northeast Asia, one that continues to shape relations in the region.

Analysis

South Korea lodged a strong protest with China on Aug. 6, urging Beijing to
stop laying claim to the ancient Koguryo kingdom, which was comprised of much
of what is now South Korea, all of what is now North Korea and a slice of
northeastern China from 37 B.C. to A.D. 668. This diplomatic row comes as
more than 6,000 Chinese police and soldiers prepare to deploy near the
Workers' Stadium in Beijing to ensure public order during the Asian Cup
football final between China and Japan.

Nationalism runs deep in North Korea and remains a powerful political force
that can often cause diplomatic spats and undermine bilateral initiatives.
This latest dispute began months ago, when Beijing asserted that the Koguryo
kingdom was a Chinese entity. The assertion appalled both North and South
Koreans, who see the ancient kingdom as an integral part of their own
histories.

The People's Daily in China quoted a Chinese scholar July 2, who described
Koguryo as "a regime established by ethnic groups in northern China some
2,000 years ago, representing an important part of Chinese culture." South
Korean scholars say the Chinese are compelled to claim Koguryo because of
concerns over losing sovereignty of the eastern part of Manchuria -- where
many ethnic Koreans live -- after the Koreas are ultimately unified. Even
North Korea chastised its longtime ally; Pyongyang's state-run newspaper,
Rodong Sinmun, accused Beijing of "manipulating history for its own
interest."

Beijing, probably hoping to put the issue to rest, deleted the description of
Korea's ancient history from its Foreign Ministry Web site Aug. 5. However,
Korean sensibilities are not so easily appeased. The next day, Park Joon-woo,
chief of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's Asia-Pacific Affairs Bureau,
lodged a strong protest with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other
senior officials in Beijing.

The historical dispute is so profound in South Korea that it is helping to
heal deep rifts in domestic politics. The same day Park filed his complaint
with Beijing, Rep. Chun Jung-bae, floor leader of the ruling Uri Party,
announced the party has joined with its main opposition, the Grand National
Party, to organize a parliamentary body that will handle the dispute.

As the Koguryo dispute gathers steam, another confrontation fueled by
deep-seated nationalism is about to take place on the football pitch: China
and Japan will face off Aug. 7 for the Asian Cup final. Chinese memories of
Japan's brutal invasion and occupation in World War II still run deep, and
the match is sure to be emotionally charged.

Chinese fans in the southwestern city of Chongqing booed the Japanese team
when it took the field to play Jordan's team Aug. 2. Chinese fans also sat
down during Japan's national anthem and threw garbage at Japanese fans, who
had to be escorted by police out of the stadium after the game. An angry mob
also rushed the Japanese team's bus. Chinese and Japanese fans reportedly
will be confined to separate stands during the match in Beijing, and the
stadium will be packed with Chinese security forces in case a riot breaks
out.

Chinese and Korean sentiments over imperial Japan's militarism in the early
20th century remain an unyielding force, even while their more affluent
neighbor remains one of their largest markets and investment sources. Seoul
and Beijing lodged bitter protests with Tokyo over Japanese textbooks that
gloss over Japanese war crimes, and China and the Koreas voice virulent
opposition to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visit to the Yasukuni
shrine, a memorial to Japanese war heroes that contains the remains of
several World War II war criminals.

China's sensitivity to Japanese actions was demonstrated in September 2003,
when a hotel orgy involving nearly 400 Japanese male tourists and 500 Chinese
prostitutes sparked outrage in the country and a diplomatic quarrel between
Beijing and Tokyo. The timing of the incident was particularly inopportune,
coming as it did two days before the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese army's
occupation of Northeast China.

Occasional bursts of nationalism in Northeast Asia do not destroy bilateral
ties between nations, but they do color them. For example, the issue of the
Koguryo kingdom during upcoming six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear
program helped set the tone for cooperation between the two Koreas after
relations took a hit from a recent mass defection of North Koreans. At the
same time, nationalism has added to the underlying tensions between China and
North Korea.

Patriotic fervor also has contributed to a Sino-Japanese dispute in the South
China Sea over the mutually claimed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and nearby
hydrocarbon riches lying under the sea floor.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.


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## a_majoor

Given our attention is drawn to the Middle East as WW IV unfolds, and the Tsunami turns our thoughts to Humanitarian issues, China might see this as an opportune moment...

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/tkacik200501100715.asp

*The Invasion of Taiwan*
A Chinese law would make it legal.

By John J. Tkacik

News that China's National People's Congress Standing Committee has placed an "anti-secession law" on the agenda for next March's NPC session raises the question, "Don't China's lawmakers have anything better to do?" Indeed they do, but as the Argentine colonels reasoned in 1982, it's clearly easier to whip up national opinion over small islands like the Falklands â â€ or Taiwan, in China's case â â€ than to solve the country's problems. Beijing's top Taiwan-affairs director, Chen Yunlin, was in Washington, D.C., last week to lobby the Bush administration and Congress on the absolute necessity of such a law, and the fact that Taiwanese independence is an existential threat to China's "core national security interests." (This, despite the fact that Taiwan has been de facto independent since 1949, so whatever China's "core" interests are, they have successfully kept for the past half century.)

Although the actual text of the draft "law" has yet to be published, it appears to be a watered-down version of a truly fanatical "Unification Law" advocated by at least one Chinese professor, Yu Yuanzhou of Wuhan University, whose proposed legislation requires the Chinese People's Liberation Army to attack Taiwan as soon as it is able. Yu's legislation, which has been circulating on the Internet for over two years, calls for the PLA to immediately start bombarding Quemoy and Matsu â â€ and it "would not be limited to conventional weapons."

Sadly, the kind of nonsense that Prof. Yu touts via the Internet passes for rational legislative discourse in China, and last May, during a tea party for visiting Premier Wen Jiabao with Chinese expatriates in London, an elderly Chinese demanded the premier pass such a law soon. The flustered premier humored the old man, "Your view on unification of the motherland is very important, very important. We will seriously consider it." But before the thoughtful premier had finished his session, his traveling propaganda entourage had it on all the Chinese newswires, and "unification law" became official policy.

Since then, Chinese propaganda departments have changed the name from "unification law" to "anti-secession law" â â€ not (as some in the Western press have speculated) as a gesture of moderation, but to avoid any misunderstanding that China might not already be "unified." Perish the thought! No, Taiwan is an integral part of China illegally struggling to be "independent." Therefore, Taiwan is already unified with China, so "anti-secession" it is.

One need not wait until March 5 to see the first draft (which, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party, will also be the final draft) of the law to know that its goal is not "anti-secession" and that it is not even a "law." It is clear from the official Chinese media that the "law" is supposed to authorize China's military to invade Taiwan immediately upon some future Taiwanese "declaration of independence." But both China's existing National Defense Law and its legislation governing national territory already require that the military defend China's homeland. This new legislation, as with most exercises in Chinese foreign-policy legislation, is a propaganda tool designed for two audiences.

First, it readies the Chinese people for war with Taiwan, and second, it will be trotted out and exhibited as a diplomatic lever whenever Americans point to the U.S. obligation â â€ under Section 2(b)(6) of our own domestic legislation, the Taiwan Relations Act â â€ to "maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan."

As such, this proposed Chinese legislation is highly destabilizing. Beijing's leaders believe their bellicosity has already prepared Washington for a Chinese military attack against Taiwan. In December 2003, according to CNN's respected China analyst, Willy Lam, a senior politburo member declared that President George W. Bush's "unambiguous opposition to attempts by Taipei to change the status quo" was such that if "we were to respond militarily, the U.S. can't raise objections let alone interfere." In May, another noted China scholar, Bonnie Glaser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned that the U.S. was sending a dangerous message to Beijing. "Some Chinese even believe," she reported, "that the U.S. may acquiesce in a limited use of force by the PLA â â€ for example, to seize an offshore island, temporarily impose a limited blockade, or fire a lone missile at a military target on Taiwan." Yet Chinese leaders still think they need a "law" to legitimize their threats.

On the other hand, American leaders get very defensive in the face of China's increasingly strident threats to launch a military attack against Taiwan. Rather than articulate U.S. interests, they lamely point to the Taiwan Relations Act as somehow tying their unwilling hands. As recently as October 25, Secretary of State Colin Powell stammered that "the Chinese leaders who I spoke to today said that [Taiwan] is an internal matter for [China] to determine . . . and I appreciate their position, but nevertheless, that build-up creates a degree of tension and instability across the Straits and puts pressure on the Taiwanese side to seek additional weaponry. And under our law, we have an obligation to see to their self-defense needs." In essence, the State Department's response to China's demands to halt our defense relationship with Taiwan is to claim that U.S. law requires it.

The Chinese, unfamiliar with a true "rule of law," are now prepared to respond with their own "law," one that probably will say, "China shall wage war against an independent Taiwan." This, notwithstanding that Taiwan is already independent in every way â â€ including by its own insistence â â€ and that Taiwanese have been carrying on their own existence separate from China's for over a century (if one doesn't count the three postwar years of what was legally a Chinese "military occupation" of a former Japanese colonial territory). If the U.S. administration is ruled by principle instead of craven expedience, it will respond to this Chinese ploy with the kind of forceful declaration usually reserved for Taiwan's leaders. So, President Bush should declare explicitly, in terms identical to his jibe at Taiwan's democratically elected president last December, that China's proposed anti-secession legislation "indicates that China may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose." This would be a nice bookend to President Bush's overreaction to Taiwan President Chen's rather benign effort last December to legislate a "referendum" of protest against China's undeniable missile threat to the island.

But above all, the United States must be candid with the American people, with our democratic allies and friends in Asia, and above all with the Chinese dictatorship, about the American commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. Although the State Department seems abashed that the U.S. helps defend democratic Taiwan, it could find an eloquent statement of U.S. policy over at the Defense Department. Last April 21, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman explained to the House International Relations Committee that "the President's National Security Strategy, published in September 2002, calls for 'building a balance of power that favors freedom.' Taiwan's evolution into a true multi-party democracy over the past decade is proof of the importance of America's commitment to Taiwan's defense. It strengthens American resolve to see Taiwan's democracy grow and prosper." That sums it up nicely.

If Chen Yun Lin can take a healthy dose of reality back to Beijing from his Washington visits, perhaps China's National People's Congress can begin to focus on China's real problems â â€ ones like the vast official corruption at all levels of government and party, rural poverty, the collapse of public healthcare, the financial crisis, unsafe mines, AIDS, and the wholesale pollution of its waters and earth.

â â€ John J. Tkacik Jr. is a research fellow in the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation.


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## Slim

Excellent article! Mark this as I bet we'll here much more about it...

Slim


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## vangemeren

If China where to invade Taiwan, what do you think the American response would be?


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## shoguny2k

The author appears to set a double standard for "rule of law". Whereas the so called 'Taiwan Relations Act' can be considered a bona fide piece of legislation that the Americans toss out at every opportunity to justify continuing sales of weapons to Taiwan, China's new anti-secession law is somehow lacking in legitimacy. This smacks of racism and condescending arrogance. Somehow I'm not surprised. Anyone who writes for a right wing mouth piece like the National Review is still nothing more than a frigging redneck - regardless of the eloquence of his expression. 

The "facts" this author presents to substantiate Taiwan's claim to sovereignty is shot full with more holes than a CF Sea King helicopter. Taiwan has been part of China's territory since the Ming Dynasty (read: 700 years, folks). It was annexed by Japan during the late Qing Dynasty as part of China's concessions laid down in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. It seriously pisses me off when a bunch of westerners forcefully attempt to alter the intended destiny of a great nation (by selling 'defensive' weapons) under the guise of promoting multi-party democracy. It pisses me off, but again, I'm not surprised. The U.S. seeks to contain China and having Taiwan on their side just adds another fort to the defensive ring. 

As far as I'm personally concerned, China should invade Taiwan as soon as it's militarily feasible to do so. The balance of power has already tipped in China's favour. By 2007, China will have about 1500 ballistic missiles pointed at the island. I suggest a blitzkrieg type saturation missile attack - in multiple waves to knock out Taiwan's strategic targets of interest in preparation for an amphibious assault. This must be done within 24-48 hrs at the most to prevent large scale American intervention. If all else fails, WMD's must be considered.


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## Infanteer

Wow.

I'm assuming your membership dues to the Party are up to date?


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## Pieman

> As far as I'm personally concerned, China should invade Taiwan as soon as it's militarily feasible to do so. The balance of power has already tipped in China's favour. By 2007, China will have about 1500 ballistic missiles pointed at the island.


China may try to invade some day, but seriously, are they going to risk it as a growing economic power? I'm sure people think they will, but it is still highly doubtful in my mind. For now anyway...



> Taiwan has been part of China's territory since the Ming Dynasty (read: 700 years, folks).


Perhaps you should ask some of the Taiwanese people what they think about being taken over by China. Western ideals are based upon freedom, and the freedom to choose ones own destiny. If you are wondering why Western countries are willing to intervene on Taiwan's behalf, by 'Promoting multy-party democracy', That is the reason. Also, once China does have Taiwan back in it's grip where will her eyes start to wander?


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## Fishbone Jones

shoguny2k said:
			
		

> Anyone who writes for a right wing mouth piece like the National Review is still nothing more than a frigging redneck - regardless of the eloquence of his expression.





			
				shoguny2k said:
			
		

> As far as I'm personally concerned, China should invade Taiwan as soon as it's militarily feasible to do so. The balance of power has already tipped in China's favour. By 2007, China will have about 1500 ballistic missiles pointed at the island. I suggest a blitzkrieg type saturation missile attack - in multiple waves to knock out Taiwan's strategic targets of interest in preparation for an amphibious assault. This must be done within 24-48 hrs at the most to prevent large scale American intervention. *If all else fails, WMD's must be considered.
> *



Speaking of "rednecks"


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## Bruce Monkhouse

Between that post and the masturbation threads he tried to open might explain these posts, ;D


There were these 2 fat-*** NCM guys manning the post who were less than enthusiastic (to say the least) about promoting Naval MARE Officer positions to me. I just asked for an application package and left. Finally, one of 'em told me I should expect to wait between 6 months to a year prior to receiving any feedback on my application. Huh  They're certainly not treating me like they need me.
and,

Dude, 

I'm joining the CF as a MARE Officer in the Navy. And I was told to wait between 6 months - 12 months !!!

These guys certainly don't seem to be taking valued recruits seriously.

.....I'm sure they took the "valued recruits" who came in that day very seriously.


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## Bograt

Back on topic, is it a national pride thing, or a resourse issue? Why is China concerned with Taiwan? 

From what I understand, the Chineese do not have adaquate amphibious capability to mount a credible invasion of Taiwan. If they want the real estate I don't think they would lob missles into the living room.

Are there land issues between the Indians and the Chinese? Contested territory etc..?


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## Bruce Monkhouse

Bograt,
here are some older threads, maybe the answer is in here.
http://army.ca/forums/threads/2941.0.html
http://army.ca/forums/threads/23356.0.html


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## Bograt

This first link was very interesting. I never considered the strategic importance of the straight. Interesting times.


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## jmackenzie_15

Re: Yet another theater opening? 
 « Reply #2 on: Today at 02:25:58  »   

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If China where to invade Taiwan, what do you think the American response would be?


I think the invasion of taiwan is inevitable.Right now would seem the opportune time to do it, taking advantage, as the article suggested, of many of the worlds powers focused on tsunami relief and funding, and the United States having their hands tied up a little bit in the middle east.
What it sounds like to me with this 'law' they are trying to pass is, the Chinese are going to washington and telling them theyre taking over taiwan but they dont want to be cut off from economic aid by the states....... in a summarized, theoretical sense lol.

If China just put it out there to everyone that they were going to invade taiwan as opposed to just blitzkrieging them to death all of a sudden, maybe they figure the worlds reaction would be less harsh and drastic that way.

"Hey guys listen, im going to annex your neighbors house and steal his car... maybe his wife too, but it has to be done! Please dont hate me  I'll make it up to you later I promise!"

I dunno, im rambling, but one thing is for sure, taiwan is doomed =p


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## a_majoor

jmackenzie_15 said:
			
		

> Re: Yet another theater opening?
> « Reply #2 on: Today at 02:25:58  »
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> If China where to invade Taiwan, what do you think the American response would be?
> 
> 
> I think the invasion of taTaiwans inevitable.Right now would seem the opportune time to do it, taking advantage, as the article suggested, of many of the worlds powers focused on tsunami relief and funding, and the United States having their hands tied up a little bit in the middle east.
> What it sounds like to me with this 'law' they are trying to pass is, the Chinese are going to washington and telling them ththey'reaking over taTaiwanut they dodon'tant to be cut off from economic aid by the states....... in a summarized, theoretical sense lol.
> 
> If China just put it out there to everyone that they were going to invade taTaiwans opposed to just blblitzkrieghem to death all of a sudden, maybe they figure the worlds reaction would be less harsh and drastic that way.
> 
> "Hey guys listen, imI'moing to annex your neighbors house and steal his car... maybe his wife too, but it has to be done! Please dodon'tate me  I'll make it up to you later I promise!"
> 
> I dunno, im rambling, but one thing is for sure, taiwan is doomed =p



Tiawan is only "doomed" if we in the democratic West fail to stand up for it. China's "law" is, as the article says, mostly for internal onconsumptionnd to divert attention from pressing internal problems and concerns. Translating that "law" into action presents many problems, and I believe tha invasion of Tiawan would be a very tough go for the PLA even with the worlds attention distracted for the moment. I need to do a search, but an article in Parameters which I read some time ago pointed out the only way to ensure a "quick" victory before the United States could get engaged would involve the use of WMD and even nuclear weapons to decapitate the military and political leadership of Tiawan, and limit the military response to a series of uncoordinated struggles by the Tiawanese military.

China has not yet developed the force projection capabilities that would allow them to ensure victory in any invasion scenario, with the greatest weakness being the logistical support for the invasion and follow-up occupation. A wild card factor might be Japan contesting China's control of the sea lanes leading to Tiawan (even if the JSDF did not get involved on the ground in China or Tiawan). Certainly, the prospect of China flexing its muscles that way would fill SE Asia with alarm, and the political fallout would be difficult for China to manage.


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## squealiox

I'm sure everyone on this board agrees with me when i say we should be increasing our defence spending -- massively. but here is why i think we should be doing it to back up our _own _ interests in the world, and not out of sentimental attachment to the US.



> 2020 Vision
> A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could end in 15 years.
> By Fred Kaplan
> Posted Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005, at 2:48 PM PT
> 
> 
> Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Councilâ â€the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.
> 
> The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:
> 
> The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global playersâ â€similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th centuryâ â€will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.
> 
> In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"â â€probably the single most powerful countryâ â€but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"â â€not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps othersâ â€will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.
> 
> America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror warâ â€far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."
> 
> To the extent that these new powers seek others to emulate, they may look to the European Union, not the United States, as "a model of global and regional governance."
> 
> This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but alsoâ â€as these things doâ â€a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.
> 
> The trends should already be apparent to anyone who reads a newspaper. Not a day goes by without another story about how we're mortgaging our future to the central banks of China and Japan. The U.S. budget deficit, approaching a half-trillion dollars, is financed by their purchase of Treasury notes. The U.S. trade deficitâ â€much of it amassed by the purchase of Chinese-made goodsâ â€now exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China is displacing the United States all across Asiaâ â€in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.
> 
> Meanwhile, as the European Union becomes a coherent entity, the dollar's value against the euro has fallen by one-third in the past two years (one-eighth just since September). As the dollar's rate of return declines, currency investorsâ â€including those who have been financing our deficitâ â€begin to diversify their holdings. In China, Japan, Russia, and the Middle East, central bankers have been unloading dollars in favor of euros. The Bush policies that have deepened our debt have endangered the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.
> 
> What is the Bush administration doing to alter course or at least cushion the blow? It's hard to say. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings last week, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, Dâ â€œMd., raised some questions about the nexus between international economics and political power. Rice referred him to the secretary of the treasury.
> 
> The NIC issued the report a few weeks before Bush's inaugural address, but it serves to dump still more cold water on the lofty fantasy of America delivering freedom to oppressed people everywhere. In Asia, the report states, "present and future leaders are agnostic on the issue of democracy and are more interested in developing what they perceive to be the most effective model of governance." If the president really wanted to spread freedom and democracy around the planet, he would (among other things) need to present America as that "model of governance"â â€to show the world, by its example, that free democracies are successful and worth emulating. Yet the NIC report paints a world where fewer and fewer people look to America as a model of anything. We can't sell freedom if we can't sell ourselves.
> 
> Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.



comments? rants? aneurysms?


----------



## Bert

The report may be slightly alarmist but certainly the concept of emerging regions/countries 
and their relation to US dominance is bang on.

With nuclear proliferation, the industrialization of third world regions, the quest for 
evermore resources, and the impacts on the environment, the stresses placed
on the world will be increasing. 

My great-grandmother was born under British dominance.   I'm familiar with US dominance
and tomorrow it may very well be someone else.   Funny how history and future is.

Anyone read Stephen Baxter's books "Manifold Time" or "Evolution"?   Makes one think.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

Ever empire has its day.


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## Canuck_25

Reading this really scared me. I hope the CIA is wrong about this, 2020 is only 15 years. Although, you have to question the credibility of the CIA, the believed the U.S.S.R. was a perfectly economicaly stable during the 1980's.  :


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## Kirkhill

The report may or may not be alarmist but it does raise a real and potentially alarming prospect.

But all may not be all gloom and doom

On the plus side (at least as far as the report is concerned) as the report seems to suggest, bigger is better in that China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and the EU if taken as a whole certainly have a lot of moral authority as governments representing very large numbers of bodies.   They would have more if all the governments were democratically elected.   They certainly are wealthy and becoming wealthier and they are all technologically capable.

But there may be a "fly in the ointment".   Centrifugal forces.

The European intelligentsia is fighting an uphill battle to convince its "peasantry" that one big government is a good idea.   It seems to have some currency in "Old Europe", especially amongst those that know all the words to the "Internationale",   but less so in Northern Europe, Southern Europe and New Europe.   All of whom treasure their independence.

India, China and Indonesia are all having to deal with separatist elements and as people become more wealthy, educated and involved with the world at large there is no reason to assume that those countries couldn't go the way of Russia, the British, Dutch, French and Spanish Empires as well as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.   (An Empire is just an envious description of a very large State).   They couldn't hold against the wishes of large numbers of people.   What makes us so sure that the Tibetans, Mongols, Han, Dayaks, Punjabis, Tamils will lie down and play dead.   The evidence from all over, including in Africa (think Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of Congo) is the constant slicing of territory, division of peoples and proliferation of states.

While China and India become wealthier will they remain cohesive?   Maybe the pressures won't show by 2020 but how long after that?   And will the EU really be anything different than any of the other Empires that have come and gone within Europe?

15 years is too long for me to be placing bets on a sure outcome.

Having said that I do think that that very uncertainty, and the prospect of increasing uncertainty, demands that Canada, like every other State, prepares itself to be able to defend vigourously its citizens and its interests at home an abroad.


----------



## CBH99

I for one wouldn't mind a more level playing field in terms of there being another major global player besides the United States.   I mean no disrespect to our American friends south of the border, but in terms of America's current policies - it wouldn't hurt for there to be another global player, such as the EU.   During the Cold War, America had to rely just as much on moral highground and ethical superiority as it did military might, since the USSR outweighed the American military in terms of heavy industry.   Both sides were evenly matched in terms of strategic deployment of nuclear missiles, hence MAD.

Now that there is no official "second power" in the world - the US no longer has to rely on the moral highground in order to win over the rest of the world's support.   As we've all seen very recently in regards to the US war on Iraq, the US no longer has to think as heavily about how its policies may be interpreted by the world's citizens, since the US believes they no longer have to win over their hearts and minds in the face of a national adversary of equal or greater power.   This decline in the US moral highground may go unchecked until either another US leader is put in power, or until another global force emerges that causes the US to pause and remember that winning the hearts of the world's citizens is more important than being able to control them via foreign and defense policy.

Lets tell the rest of the world there are WMD in Iraq, and invade them at great human and financial cost.   And, almost 1.5yrs after the end of "major combat operations", lets officially say that no - we were mistaken, there were no WMD.   However, we did manage to oust Saddam - that has to count for something, right?   Lets not officially say we're going to start racial profiling at our airports - after all...its not like we have a history of racial prejudice or anything.   But at the same time, lets give everybody who has a darker skin complexion the gears, after all - they might be from either the Middle East or South America.   Lets tell the rest of the world that they are either with us, or against us - after all, its not like we're supposed to respect the viewpoints or listen to the ideas of other countries, right?   Oh, but how dare they challenge us!   They are either with us, or against us - whats so hard that the rest of the world can't understand?   Sheesh.

Okay, so some of the above might have been embellished just a little bit - but the points remain the same.   We in Canada might see American foreign policy different than people in the US, China, or the Middle East.   We share a border, we have common interests, we share cultural values, we share a similar system of criminal justice and corrections - Canada and the US are essentially very good friends, despite whatever snit we might get into sometimes.   But for people in the EU, China, or the Middle East - they don't have the luxury of a relationship with the US that we do.   People in the regions mentioned above might see the above paragraph as being more true to life, whereas we in Canada might see it as a bit of an embellishment and exaggeration.

The underlying point to all of this is;   a foreign power who has the will and the means to challenge the United States will force the US to start fighting for the moral highground again.   I'm not saying the US has turned into an evil empire by any means;   but lets face the real world - the US has some foreign policies that really do cause a lot of people to shudder.   The US is its own worst enemy - terrorism is a byproduct of continued arrogance.   Its hard for us in the west to truly understand this;   it wasn't until my wife and I were in Tehran last year that we really understood the foundation of terrorism.   Yes - there are extremists out there who would rather kill innocent people than change their way of life - and a bullet to the head would warrant no objection from me.   But, a lot of those the US calls "terrorists" perhaps aren't as extreme as the western media makes them out to be.   Or perhaps they weren't, before the current conflict.   Remember the quote:   Perception is Reality?   Well if certain groups of people in the Middle East PERCEIVE and BELIEVE their religion is coming under attack, that is their REALITY.   And if there is one thing I learned to respect about the Muslim religion in my experiences over the course of 7 months in Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt - is that they will do anything that they feel is necessary to protect their religion.   The real problem lies not just with the groups of actual terrorists or extremists out there - but with the sense of urgency groups within the Muslim world feel as if they are under attack from the west.

I could rant on about this for a long time - but I implore you to think about this issue BROADLY.   Think about certain, specific instances in the past - and in the present, in the form of both military action and developments in foreign policy.   If the United States wanted to continue to dominate the globe militarily, it could easily do so.   If the US managed its economy better, and was determined to continue to dominate the world in terms of economic and military power, it could be done - don't ever doubt the US' ability to accomplish a goal.   However, unless the US has the ability to regain the trust and empathy of the world's citizens, I can't help but see a foreign power gaining enough influence to challenge American policy and influence.   I don't mean to sound alarmist in the sense that it will lead to armed conflict, but unless the US can gain the trust of the people of the world yet again, a foreign power might not have to match the US military capability in order to influence global politics.


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## pbi

I'm not sure that the emergence of a peer competitor might not have exactly the opposite effect of what you are looking for. And I would also question whether, upon close examination, we would really find that US foreign policy in the Cold War and pre-911 world was driven any less by "RealPolitik" and any more by "altruism" than it is driven now. America, like any major power, deploys its forces based on its national interests. It cannot justify the risk and expense to its electorate in any other way.  It was so in both WW's  (hence their late entry in both cases) and IMHO it remains true today. "Fuzzy internationalism", as represented by the UN, has never really appealed to the US except for that short period following WWII in which they were instrumental in establishing that institution and offering it a home. Their committment to NATO (secured to a certain extent through Canadian diplomatic efforts under the St Laurent govt) was an anomaly for the US up to that point. Show me one major world power that has ever made a serious committment based solely on altruistic reasons as opposed to a calculation of risk vs national interest.

Cheers


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## Blue Max

Does this not sound familiar in Canada.

Why Austria Selected Eurofighter EF-2000 Typhoon?
By Georg Mader

http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_476.shtml

â Å“For almost 40 years, Austria, meanwhile the 7th or 8th richest nation in the World, had always been told by the former Social-Democratic- (SPOE) administration (the best friends of 'neutral' Sweden) that "nobody is going to attack or harm us...", "what much more social and humanitarian work we could do with that money...". This standpoint created a climate of "...we have Congress-places with UN, Mozart, our ski-aces, fine food and vine, etc...". Eventually this resulted in there being absolutely no dedication to defence or to the understanding of a collective-security in the Austrian public: the media and half of the politics educated Austrians that way for 40 years. â Å“

One of the important reasons that Canada must not lose its military tradition is exactly because the US may not be a Hyper Power forever, infact it is for Mutual Defence that we must not revert to a overly motivated police force.   If we continue to erode our military capability instead of building it backup to where we can actually add to the security of the free world, then our leaders will doom us to a Neville Chamberlain like debacle some time in the future. 

Despots can always find money to rebuild their tank battalions and submarine fleets, but in the free world tax payers are usually far more selective with what our governments spend money on.   :threat:   We must continue to add to the mutual security of our neighbors or else we will doom our own freedom.   

MHO


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## tomahawk6

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37089-2005Feb19.html?

The Chinese to my mind have one primary goal, unification of Taiwan. The Twainese are unlikely to voluntarily become part of the PRC.
The Chinese are working hard on training troops in amphibious operations and are building amphibious warfare ships. They are acquiring top shelf combat aircraft and air to air weapons. They have obtained the Sunburn a very potent anti-ship weapon. PLAN subs have been trying to get close to USN battlegroups. If their goal is to take Taiwan they must be ready to deal with the 7th Fleet.


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## Cdn Blackshirt

A buddy emailed me a link to a Fox News report that tomorrow Japan may for the first time announce that they will join US efforts to protect Taiwan against a possible Chinese Invasion.

Link for Fox News:   *http://www.foxnews.com/index.html*

Then look for a link on the right hand side called "Wall of Security".

Very interesting indeed....

Kudos to Japan.   I wish Canada would politically make the same statement, rather than selling out at every opportunity to obtain more Nortel and Bombardier orders.




Matthew.     :


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## a_majoor

Fighting China will taks more than straight "head to head" combat in the seas off Tiawan. Look for revolutionary American and alliance strategies, including counter-invading the Chinese mainland, opening a second front with India, unleashing a devastating cyberattack which affects LINUX (China being a holdout against using Microsoft products)  or something equally "out of the box".

As for Canada, if we are so craven in dealing with the "Republia Serbska" or the Sudan; it is hard to imagine the Liberal establishment standing up to a real predetory power like China. I only want to see the look on Paul Martins face when he finds out that Canada's "Magic Pixie Dust" doesn't work at the UN anymore (and indeed realizes IT NEVER DID).


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## S McKee

Your right Majoor our foreign policy (if you want to call it that) is all smoke and mirrors, Canada is going to have to put up or shut up.


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## Edward Campbell

I think the resources China needs â â€œ and the need is massive and pressing â â€œ lie at its doorstep, in Siberia.

The Yenisey River is the _natural_ boundary between Sino-Asia and Eurasia.*

The areas around and especially East of the Yenisey are one of the worlds last great untapped resource treasure-houses.   Many Chinese, including influential officials in the CPC, believe that Central and Eastern Siberia *are* Chinese and that Western Siberia (along with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, etc) can be and should be a Chinese fiefdom.

It may be that the next really big war will be between China and Russia â â€œ with Siberia as the prize.   Our (the American led West) strategy will be challenging; we will, almost certainly, split â â€œ Europe (save, perhaps the far North-West (Britain, Iceland and Norway, especially)) will likely support Russia.   Australia, India and Japan will also, likely, favour Russia; they will all, I think, be wrong â â€œ on the wrong side of history, in any event.

Taiwan is a real problem but, when all is said and done, Taiwan is part of China.   The trick, for us, is to convince the Chinese that they can have Taiwan whenever they want it, without a fight ... all they have to do is reform their own political system.   Taiwan will ... wants to, I think ... rejoin a democratic, law abiding China.
----------

* This puts the area between the Urals (the generally accepted Eastern limits of Europe) and the Yenisey in an interesting category; I think they may become a huge, modern version of the march (Welsh border) of a thousand years ago.   If so then China will play the role of the Normans, from the South East, dominating the region through some local variations of 11th century marcher lords, until it slips, seamlessly into _Greater China_.


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## mainerjohnthomas

Even in the bad old days when we were all practicing REFORGER for possible WWIII in Germany, the Soviets never lowered their defences in the east.  They have too many memories of eastern invasion, and will never, under any political system or regieme permit an inch of mainland Siberia to fall to the Chinese.  Both the Russians and Chinese are aware that the Russians are not rational on this issue (and good on them) and that should the Chinese move east, China will be nuked from the face of the planet, and if that means the end of civilization on earth and 80% of the Russian population, so be it.  This attitude is entirely responsible for the Chinese focus elsewhere.  No pressure the west could exert will force Russian leadership to cede Siberia, or access to its resources to China.  Why do you think the Chinese are buying up mining concerns in North and South America, when the same untapped resources could be developed in a cost effective manner in Siberia with Sino/Russian cooperation?  Because the Russians know better than to let the Dragon get its claws into Siberia, and get an appetite for its riches.  If the Taiwanese were a nuclear power, the world would be a vastly more interesting place.


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## Edward Campbell

21st century Russia is a _paper tiger_, and the Chinese know it.


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## mainerjohnthomas

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> 21st century Russia is a _paper tiger_, and the Chinese know it.


20th century Russia was a steel fist, using their nuclear aresenel to force NATO to keep conflicts on the conventional scale where they figured their numbers could bury our technology.  21st Century Russia has lost the steel fist, and is reduced to a clumsy iron finger or two, their nuclear arsenel is now moved from the bottom, to a place alarmingly far up their strategy tree.  They were safer playing to win; now they are in a position where there options may only include losing alone, or everybody losing together, and their national character is not one that embraces losing gracefully.  A paper tiger, with one plutonium derived Dragonkilling grenade, and the will to use it.


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## Edward Campbell

*I think* - no authoritative references - the Chinese think:

"¢	The Russian nuclear arsenal is poorly maintained, maybe less than 10% of the 1985 capacity and that in another ten years it will be, essentially, worthless;

"¢	The Chinese medium range nuclear arsenal is big enough to deter, at least intimidate the Russians;

"¢	The Russian military is in precipitous decline - unable to deploy into the East in any useful strength;

"¢	The Chinese only have to take Siberia to win - they don't have to go to Moscow;

"¢	The Russians have to make it all the way to Shanghai or they lose; and

"¢	Even if the Chinese nuclear calculus is wrong, China can absorb everything Russia can throw and then rise up, quickly and murderously from the ashes, and ravage the Russians - tossing them back into barbarism.

Talking about quantity vs. quality, US Senator Sam Nunn used to say: _â ?Quantity has a quality all its ownâ ?_ - a remark which was made for China.   Like Fitzgerald's rich, the Chinese, too, _are different_ and we err if we apply Western values to their strategic calculus.


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## Cloud Cover

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37089-2005Feb19.html?
> 
> . The Twainese are unlikely to voluntarily become part of the PRC.



LOL, I agree. I don't think Shania Twain's island empire off of New Zealand wants to be part of the PRC. [this must be the territory which the Twainese inhabit!].


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## mainerjohnthomas

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> *I think* - no authoritative references - the Chinese think:
> 
> "¢	The Russian nuclear arsenal is poorly maintained, maybe less than 10% of the 1985 capacity and that in another ten years it will be, essentially, worthless;
> "¢	The Chinese only have to take Siberia to win - they don't have to go to Moscow;
> "¢	Even if the Chinese nuclear calculus is wrong, China can absorb everything Russia can throw and then rise up, quickly and murderously from the ashes, and ravage the Russians - tossing them back into barbarism.


     The Chinese system is overstrained as it is, they have billions they can feed as long as nothing goes wrong.  Their economy is as strained as Imperial Japan in the 1930-40's for resources They cannot absorb a nuclear attack without the wheels comming off.  Russia has no chance to win a confrontation with China at the moment, or for the forseeable future.  They can make sure China does not survive.  Would China go down swinging?  Lets just say that I'd hate to share a land border with someone that combination of desperate and strong.  If China and Russia ever negotiated in good faith, the West would be in a world of hurt.  As it is, there is a better chance of Osama bin Ladin getting the Republican nomination for Texas Governor than the Russians and Chinese agreeing opening the Manchurian border to serious trade and economic joint development.


----------



## Edward Campbell

mainerjohnthomas said:
			
		

> The Chinese system is overstrained as it is, they have billions they can feed as long as nothing goes wrong.



Yes, I agree, partially.   The system is strained but they can feed their billions even when some things go wrong â â€œ sometimes even when many things go wrong.



> Their economy is as strained as Imperial Japan in the 1930-40's for resources



Agreed, and they are determined â â€œ absolutely determined â â€œ to have learned the right lessons from Japan in the '30s.



> They cannot absorb a nuclear attack without the wheels comming off.



I don't think they agree ... quite the contrary, as far as I can tell from my reading, they are confident that they can and will be the last man standing in any war with anyone except, maybe, a _West_ which includes India.



> Russia has no chance to win a confrontation with China at the moment, or for the foreseeable future.



The Chinese seem to share this view.



> They can make sure China does not survive.



Once again, the Chinese do not agree; we may not like their calculus, but it is theirs.



> Would China go down swinging?   Lets just say that I'd hate to share a land border with someone that combination of desperate and strong.



Me too ... the Chinese plan, I think, to win without swinging, at all, much less going down.   Some Chinese are talking, right now, about simply _populating_ Siberia so that, in 20+/- years the _facts on the ground_ mean it is theirs.   The key point, for the Chinese, I think, again, is that they are not afraid of Russia; they are not afraid of a war with Russia; they are not afraid of total war with Russia â â€œ worried, to be sure, but not afraid.



> If China and Russia ever negotiated in good faith, the West would be in a world of hurt.   As it is, there is a better chance of Osama bin Ladin getting the Republican nomination for Texas Governor than the Russians and Chinese agreeing opening the Manchurian border to serious trade and economic joint development.



Agreed ... but this is, fortunately for us, an emnity which has endured for a thousand years - deeper than anything in Europe.


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## a_majoor

China may face a variation of the question which drove Imperial Japan during the 1930s. One faction of the Imperial staff (the Army, I believe), wanted to invade Siberia and take the rich resources available there. The other faction (led by the Navy) , thought the amount of investment and time needed to bring these resources on line would be far to great, better to look south and take the already developed resources from French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the British Empire, where there was available labour, infrastructure and open mines, oil wells, working farms....

Fast forward to the 21rst century, and the same conditions apply. An interesting conundrum for the Central Committee.


----------



## Zipper

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> Me too ... the Chinese plan, I think, to win without swinging, at all, much less going down.   Some Chinese are talking, right now, about simply _populating_ Siberia so that, in 20+/- years the _facts on the ground_ mean it is theirs.   The key point, for the Chinese, I think, again, is that they are not afraid of Russia; they are not afraid of a war with Russia; they are not afraid of total war with Russia â â€œ worried, to be sure, but not afraid.



I think that is their attitude everywhere. Spread there population across the world and you hold a majority.

If it ever came to blows between the two, it would be a lose/lose situation. Regardless of whether China has a couple of divisions left standing, other country's would jump on the remaining carcasses of both and claim their share. 

And unfortunately the thought of claiming what was yours 1000 years ago doesn't wash in today's world. Even though the Jews and Muslims would argue that to the death. Taiwan is NOT apart of China anymore, nor are they likely to be without something bad happening. 

If that were the case, then damn it Brittany and Normandy should be apart of Britain.


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## mainerjohnthomas

[ 

And unfortunately the thought of claiming what was yours 1000 years ago doesn't wash in today's world. Even though the Jews and Muslims would argue that to the death. Taiwan is NOT apart of China anymore, nor are they likely to be without something bad happening. 

If that were the case, then darn it Brittany and Normandy should be apart of Britain.
     By that standard, I have claim to most of modern Libya, although I'd need the loan of a few divisions to make it stick......


----------



## a_majoor

America and Tiawan's coalition partner can bring a very potent force to the table ( from strategypage.com)



> *The Mighty Japanese Navy*
> by Harold C. Hutchison
> February 25, 2005
> 
> The JMSDF (Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force) is arguably the second-best navy in the Pacific, trailing only the United States Navy. The JMSDF has a large number of modern surface warships and the third-largest submarine force in the Pacific, and it could be a potential player in any fight in the Formosa Strait, due to the fact that Japan's ties with Taiwan have become much closer.
> 
> The primary surface vessels in the JMSDF are the destroyers. Japan's had a long tradition of building a superb destroyer force â â€œ in World War II, their destroyers were arguably the best in the world. The best destroyers in the JMSDF are the Kongo-class DDGs. These 7,250-ton ships carry 90 vertical-launch cells for SM-2MR missiles (with a range of 111 kilometers), and are equipped with the Aegis system. *They are, in essence, copies of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in U.S. Navy service, with a few small exceptions (no Tomahawk capability, an Italian 5-inch gun, and some Japanese electronics).* It is probably the best surface combatant outside the United States Navy. Japan also has a smaller force of older guided-missile destroyers, the Hatakaze and Tachikaze classes. These two destroyer classes are roughly equivalent to the Charles F. Adams-class destroyers. Japan also has four helicopter-carrying destroyers, primarily used for anti-submarine warfare.
> 
> Two other modern destroyer classes are entering service: The Murasame (4,550 tons) and Takanami-class (4,600 tons) destroyers both have vertical-launch cells, but both primarily focus on anti-submarine warfare. They usually carry a mix of vertically-launched ASROC and Sea Sparrow missiles. The two ship classes will comprise fourteen ships total. The major difference between the two ship classes are their main guns. The Murasame has a 76mm gun, the Takanami, a 5-inch gun. Two other classes of destroyer, the Asagiri and Hatsuyuki are also present in strength (20 ships between the two of them).
> 
> *Japan's other major asset is its large force of advanced diesel-electric submarines (eighteen subs)*. The Yuushio, Harushio, and Oyashiro classes displace anywhere from 2,450 tons to 3,000 tons. Each carry six 21-inch torpedo tubes, with a total of 20 weapons (either Harpoon anti-ship missiles or Type 89 torpedoes). *These subs would be a potent force against the Chinese Navy.
> *
> The JMSDF has some problems. Training is difficult, since Japan's waters have many commercial fishing and merchant vessels. Japan is usually able to squeeze in only about ten days of training for mine warfare, when fishing is not so good. The JMSDF also is short on underway replenishment vessels â â€œ a total of four such ships are available to refuel forty-seven destroyers. The new submarines have also been expensive ($500 million apiece), a problem when the Japanese Constitution limits defense spending to one percent of Japan's Gross National Product. Similarly, the Kongos were built to mercantile standards to save money â â€œ which means they cannot take as much damage as a Burke-class destroyer. Furthermore, Japan's efforts to build an aircraft carrier have run into opposition. The official design for the replacement for the Haruna and Shirane-class DDHs have shown a full superstructure and forward and aft helicopter pads. However, alternative designs have looked like a small aircraft carrier. At 13,500 tons, these are not much smaller than an Independence-class light carrier from World War II.
> 
> The JMSDF also has problems with political support. Often, Japan's security needs (such as the ability to protect oceangoing trade) have been subordinated to concerns about whether a posture is too aggressive. This has gone back to 1981, when proposals to ensure defense of sea lanes was controversial â â€œ despite Japan's experience under submarine blockade in World War II. Also, Japan's had problems getting sufficient personnel â â€œ it has been under authorized strength in the past (a shortfall of 3.5 percent existed in 1992). Ultimately, Japan's ability to overcome the political issues and to get an adequate number of trained personnel will determine how well it can carry out its mission of defending Japan.



A mix of the good (potent destroyer force), the bad (limitations on training, and political support, limited replenishment ability) and the ugly (Warships built to mercentile standards!). Perhaps some lessons for our Navy here as well.


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## Bruce Monkhouse

China Steps Up Pressure on Taiwan

By ELAINE KURTENBACH
BEIJING (AP) - China unveiled a law Tuesday authorizing an attack if Taiwan moves toward formal independence, increasing pressure on the self-ruled island while warning other countries not to interfere. Taiwan denounced the legislation as a ``blank check to invade'' and announced war games aimed at repelling an attack.

The proposed anti-secession law, read out for the first time before the ceremonial National People's Congress, doesn't say what specific actions might invite a Chinese attack.

``If possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ nonpeaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' Wang Zhaoguo, deputy chairman of the NPC's Standing Committee, told the nearly 3,000 legislators gathered in the Great Hall of the People.

Beijing claims Taiwan, split from China since 1949, as part of its territory. The communist mainland repeatedly has threatened to invade if Taiwan tries to make its independence permanent, and new law doesn't impose any new conditions or make new threats. But it lays out for the first time legal requirements for military action.
Taiwan's leaders warned that the move could backfire by angering the island's voting public.
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which handles the island's China policy, said the law gives China's military ``a blank check to invade Taiwan'' and ``exposed the Chinese communists' attempt to use force to annex Taiwan and to be a regional power.''

``Our government lodges strong protest against the vicious attempt and brutal means ... to block Taiwanese from making their free choice,'' the council said in a statement.
Taiwanese Defense Ministry spokesman Liu Chih-chien said large-scale military exercises would be held from mid-April to August to build confidence in the island's military preparedness. Troops will practice knocking down Chinese missiles and fighting communist commandos.
Mainland lawmakers immediately expressed support for the measure, which is sure to be approved when they vote March 14. The NPC routinely approves all legislation already decided by Communist Party leaders.

``We must join hands and absolutely not allow Taiwan to separate from China,'' said Chang Houchun, a businessman and NPC member from southern China's Guangdong province.
Chinese officials say the law was prompted in part by Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's plans for a referendum on a new constitution for the island that Beijing worries might include a declaration of independence.
Chen says the vote would be aimed at building a better political system, not at formalizing Taiwan's de facto independence.

The proposed law says Beijing regards Taiwan's future as an internal Chinese matter, rejecting ``any interference by outside forces.''
``Every sovereign state has the right to use necessary means to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' said Wang.
The law says China's Cabinet and the government's Central Military Commission ``are authorized to decide on and execute nonpeaceful means and nonpeaceful measures.''
The United States has appealed to both sides to settle Taiwan's status peacefully, with no unilateral changes by either side. Washington is Taiwan's main arms supplier and could be drawn into any conflict.

In Taipei, Chen Chin-jun, a legislative leader of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, said the island wants peace and trade with China.
However, he said, ``We will not accept any resolution to allow the Chinese Communists to unilaterally decide Taiwan's future, and it will only antagonize the Taiwanese.''
China and Taiwan have no official ties and most direct travel and shipping between the two sides is banned. But Taiwanese companies have invested more than $100 billion in the mainland and the two sides carry on thriving indirect trade.

Until recently, China's military was thought to be incapable of carrying out an invasion across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. But Beijing has spent billions of dollars buying Russian-made submarines, destroyers and other high-tech weapons to extend the reach of the 2.5 million-member People's Liberation Army.
Chinese leaders have appealed in recent months for Taiwan to return to talks on unification. But they insist that Taiwanese leaders first declare that the two sides are ``one China'' - a condition that Chen has rejected.
In an apparent attempt to calm Taiwanese public anxiety, Wang said the law promises that Chinese military forces would try to avoid harming Taiwenese civilians. He said the rights of Taiwanese on China's mainland also would be protected.


----------



## winchable

Crap, better work on my mandarin.


----------



## a_majoor

Concentrate on your principles of marksmanship first!


----------



## winchable

I meant for when they send us to Taiwan to repel the Chinese.
Wasn't saying I was giving up already!

Or were you just reminding me to practice my principles, which makes sense either way I suppose..

Would Taiwan be able to repel a PLA invasion?
Bit simple a question I suppose which would invoke a very long response, but I can't think of how to be more specific.


----------



## a_majoor

Short answer: it depends.

China could launch a gigantic attack under a wave of up to 700 medium range missiles, which would overwhelm the immediate defenses, but also shoot China's bolt. China would have to be very confident of a political or military environment which would preclude outside intervention.

The coalition of the willing would most likely be the United States and Japan, with other interested nations ranging from India to Australia, depending on how they see the Chinese threat. If China shoots its bolt, the coalition forces will basically counterattack and push the Chinese out. If China tries to maintain a reserve, the Tiawanese will have the ability to keep fighting as well. Either way it would be very messy.

Would Mr Dithers support Tiawan against China? Canada's record against naked agression hasn't been to sterling lately....China also sees Canada as a resource base; buying up oil and mineral rights and seeing us as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the 21rst century.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> the law promises that Chinese military forces would try to avoid harming Taiwenese civilians. He said the rights of Taiwanese on China's mainland also would be protected.



Yeah, right.



I suspect this has something to do with the recent declaration on the part of the US and Japan that the Taiwan Strait is a "common strategic objective": which is to say that it is more of a reaction to US posturing (more on this here: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2005/03/04/2003225416 ).

Interestingly, I was reading just the other day (in the context of this announcement) that Japan now arguably has the second 'best' Navy in the Pacific!  http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200522521.asp


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## CBH99

If China is serious about reclaiming Taiwan, which it appears it is - its going to be a LONG road ahead before the western powers, or the coalition, will be able to push the Chinese back.

China is a regional power.  They have the largest army on earth, and the largest air force on earth.  Now, in respect, their air force is still in the process of being modernized, and a majority of their aircraft are still 1960's and 1970's vintage aircraft.  But thats changing rather quickly, as they aquire more and more Russian electronics for their aircraft.

They also have a large brown water navy, that is armed to the teeth.  Sure, the Chinese don't have much in the name of blue water capability, but they don't need it.  They have a powerful brown water navy, that is more than capable of handling anything in the Taiwan Straight.  Their submarines, fast attack craft, and capital vessels are more than plenty enough to secure their objectives - and their missile arsenals could devastate Taiwan's defenses before Taiwan even has a chance to mobilize them.

Bottom line, China could secure Taiwan militarily rather quickly.  Once that is accomplished, its going to take an aweful lot of thick military muscle to push them back.  The United States is already spread thin with their occupation of Iraq, which means they won't be able to do much unless its primarily naval activity.  It'll be messy, any way you look at it.


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## Cpl.Banks

Maybe the Us wont be able to put all its muscle into it but NATO and the U.N will condem the attack on Taiwan in less than a heart beat and most if not all(including Canada) allies will start putting together a force to tackle this threat. At least for our sakes Can you picture it PLA troops in Vancouver then in Edmonton then Calgary etc...Taiwan has also put alot of money into getting an anti-missile capability and out of those 700 missiles i bet less that half will find their mark!hopefully...
UBIQUE!!!!!!!1


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## Sandbag

IMHO, first China definitely wouldn't "shoot its bolt" with 700 missiles, nor would it be a simple matter of any coalition "counterattacking" and pushing China out of one of its provinces.  This is a message to Taiwan, the US and Japan in no uncertain terms, thus "putting the ball in their court" so to speak.  Think of it from the Chinese perspective versus ours for a minute, this is a province of theirs that has special status like Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.  I believe the Chinese are saying to Taiwan, accept it, (of course there is the big or else included in that!).

Don't forget China is a regional power, but considers itself "middle earth" when it comes to any Asian, NE Asian politics.  Thus it will always react to what it considers its national and strategic interests.  The question is what should we do about it, if anything?


----------



## Pikache

Sandbag said:
			
		

> IMHO, first China definitely wouldn't "shoot its bolt" with 700 missiles, nor would it be a simple matter of any coalition "counterattacking" and pushing China out of one of its provinces. This is a message to Taiwan, the US and Japan in no uncertain terms, thus "putting the ball in their court" so to speak. Think of it from the Chinese perspective versus ours for a minute, this is a province of theirs that has special status like Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. I believe the Chinese are saying to Taiwan, accept it, (of course there is the big or else included in that!).


The question is 'Is Taiwan really a mere province of PRC?'

I don't know about you, but I'd rather support a democratic regime than a communist one. 


> Don't forget China is a regional power, but considers itself "middle earth" when it comes to any Asian, NE Asian politics. Thus it will always react to what it considers its national and strategic interests. The question is what should we do about it, if anything?


Or do we let aggression go unpunished?

However, there is another equation to this problem; what about North Korea? If China does draw US and Japanese involvement, North Korea might just decide to go for broke and invade South Korea.


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## Sandbag

We should never let aggression go unpunished IMO, but correct me if I am wrong Canada doesn't recognize Taiwan in the same manner as the US, Japan, Aust?  So, other than issuing condemnations, what do you think our govt would do?

Regarding North Korea, I agree it is definitely a factor, and you come up with a logical conclusion.  It always continues to be a threat to NE Asia stabilization.  So how do you seriously mitigate that threat while trying to assist our southern neighbour in resolving a Taiwan "situation" for lack of a better word?


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## JBP

If North Korea entered the fray, I believe we would have a true WW3 on our hands.

I have heard from people who've lived in Taiwan that it's beautiful and deserves it's own independence, which I believe they do. But, if they really want to get pushy and tell China to go suck a d*ck, we seriously better start practicing our marksmanship principles...

Could any of you folks honestly see anyone simply not doing ANYTHING and just watching it happen like we all know what's going on in Africa? I doubt the world would stand for it. And let's imagine one step further, not only a pseudo China-North Korean alliance, but Russia joins in also. What do we have then?

A sh*tstorm!!!

IMHO that is... 

 :-\


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## 291er

Definitely better work on your principles of marksmanship if we get sent to repel the Red Chinese.....with an Army/Navy/Air Force of an est. 100 million, and approx 150 million in reserve, we may be a bit outnumbered.  Let's see, around 50,000 in the CF...that equates to a ratio of 5000 to 1, so I certainly hope you're a better shot than I.


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## Cdn Blackshirt

I think we should allow continued unfettered access to our markets to these rotten totalitarian pricks so they can use their newfound wealth to expand their armed forces and bully their democratic neighbour.

I find the fact that corporate interests are overriding fundamental principles in this case to be truly pathetic....



Matthew     

P.S.  I intentionally have not bought Chinese products (and yes I check labels) for the last two years because this bugs me so much.


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## oyaguy

I think China's latest move, is what the forum suggests, sabre rattling.

Still, if it came to a shooting contest, even the US might have to take a backseat.

The way the US has financing their budgets, the last few years, could bite them where it hurts when it comes to something like Taiwan, for the reasons the Chinese could precipitate a debt crisis by dumping all the US treasury bonds China has bought to keep their currency low.

I personally think the greatest challenge facing the Chinese {mainlanders}, is there will come a day of reckoning of how the country should be governed. The Chinese aren't blind to democracy. It will be a delicate balancing act for China's leaders, as they want to liberalize the economy, without giving up their powers. Generally the liberalizing of the economy, will lead to the liberalizing of the politics. 

One can hope.


----------



## Pikache

oyaguy said:
			
		

> I think China's latest move, is what the forum suggests, sabre rattling.
> 
> Still, if it came to a shooting contest, even the US might have to take a backseat.
> 
> The way the US has financing their budgets, the last few years, could bite them where it hurts when it comes to something like Taiwan, for the reasons the Chinese could precipitate a debt crisis by dumping all the US treasury bonds China has bought to keep their currency low.


And considering how much of US market is tied to China...


> I personally think the greatest challenge facing the Chinese {mainlanders}, is there will come a day of reckoning of how the country should be governed. The Chinese aren't blind to democracy. It will be a delicate balancing act for China's leaders, as they want to liberalize the economy, without giving up their powers. Generally the liberalizing of the economy, will lead to the liberalizing of the politics.
> 
> One can hope.



Well, the Chinese are pretty good keeping populace quiet.


----------



## oyaguy

RoyalHighlandFusilier said:
			
		

> Well, the Chinese are pretty good keeping populace quiet.



So far, but China isn't say... a North Korea which doesn't give a damn about nothing. China is trying to modernize and open the dam of capitalism, just a little... hopefully without sweeping away the old power structures, but eventually somethings got to give. Rarely does democracy come before capitalism {successfully mind you}, but democracy almost always, comes after capitalism.

I honestly think something like Tianamen Square will happen again, and again and again, and eventually it will take down the government. This could happen tomorrow, ten years from now, or another 20 years from now. This is assuming the Chinese government doesn't do anything to liberalize the government.

 {





			
				RoyalHighlandFusilier said:
			
		

> And considering how much of US market is tied to China...



Actually that is a mark against China. China is running up the trade surpluses against the US. So if trade just dried up... it would mean MacDonalds would have to look elsewhere for their happy meal toys, and China would have a hole in their budget with no real means of fixing it. A lot of the goods the Chinese export aren't exactly necessary, and can be gotten elsewhere.


----------



## daniel h.

a_majoor said:
			
		

> Short answer: it depends.
> 
> China could launch a gigantic attack under a wave of up to 700 medium range missiles, which would overwhelm the immediate defenses, but also shoot China's bolt. China would have to be very confident of a political or military environment which would preclude outside intervention.
> 
> The coalition of the willing would most likely be the United States and Japan, with other interested nations ranging from India to Australia, depending on how they see the Chinese threat. If China shoots its bolt, the coalition forces will basically counterattack and push the Chinese out. If China tries to maintain a reserve, the Tiawanese will have the ability to keep fighting as well. Either way it would be very messy.
> 
> Would Mr Dithers support Tiawan against China? Canada's record against naked agression hasn't been to sterling lately....*China also sees Canada as a resource base; buying up oil and mineral rights and seeing us as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the 21rst century.*




Of course China sees us as that, and doesn't that piss you in the Canadian military off?

I used to think Canadian leaders were just stupid. Then I realized that in a world where many transnational corporations are worth more than some countries, effective democracy was simply not possible. 

I looked for a link to prove this and couldn't find it, but apparently American global tobacco company Philip Morris is worth more than the economy of Norway and the economy Saudi Arabia. [really] 

How is democracy possible when private, undemocratic companies have more wealth than countries?


----------



## daniel h.

CBH99 said:
			
		

> If China is serious about reclaiming Taiwan, which it appears it is - its going to be a LONG road ahead before the western powers, or the coalition, will be able to push the Chinese back.
> 
> China is a regional power.   They have the largest army on earth, and the largest air force on earth.   Now, in respect, their air force is still in the process of being modernized, and a majority of their aircraft are still 1960's and 1970's vintage aircraft.   But thats changing rather quickly, as they aquire more and more Russian electronics for their aircraft.
> 
> They also have a large brown water navy, that is armed to the teeth.   Sure, the Chinese don't have much in the name of blue water capability, but they don't need it.   They have a powerful brown water navy, that is more than capable of handling anything in the Taiwan Straight.   Their submarines, fast attack craft, and capital vessels are more than plenty enough to secure their objectives - and their missile arsenals could devastate Taiwan's defenses before Taiwan even has a chance to mobilize them.
> 
> Bottom line, China could secure Taiwan militarily rather quickly.   Once that is accomplished, its going to take an aweful lot of thick military muscle to push them back.   The United States is already spread thin with their occupation of Iraq, which means they won't be able to do much unless its primarily naval activity.   It'll be messy, any way you look at it.




Are sheer numbers enough to overcome the lack of individual expense on training China's soldiers? Are Taiwanese soldiers any better? I'll still take the Canadian army down 5000-1 versus a bunch of Ak-47s which could hit everything----or nothing. ;D


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## ziggy_99

I may be completely wrong but if North Korea were to attack South Korea the North Koreans wouldn't exactly walk over the south. In terms of advancement the south koreans are pretty far ahead compared to the north, except for nuclear weapons, which when they have an ally like the US then it kind of evens things out a little.
I may be wrong though


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## 1feral1

a_majoor said:
			
		

> Concentrate on your principles of marksmanship first!



It will be marksmanship by the megaton, with over 350,000,000 Communist Chinese fit and available for military service, we might get their first 1,000,000 but not their second in a conventional war!

Food for thought   ;D

And what about the ANZUS Treaty??? If the   the SHTF, the US is in and so are we (Australia)   :warstory:

Lets hope its just sabre rattling.

Wes


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## jmackenzie_15

Frightening to think of what would happen if it isnt just sabre rattling.... we'd all be screwed either way.Lots of economies would go haywire, we'd go poor along with the United States, losing our biggest consumer.... assuming the Chinese dont defeat us.  :-\

With the US tied up as much as it is, what would it take to stop them? like wes said, 350 million..... it doesnt matter if they arent very well trained, if theres 50 of you in a defensive somewhere along taiwan with 3,000 chinese coming to attack you, theres nothing you can do about it.Theyll run your trenches untill you expend all of your ammo, and they still have plenty of guys to go around.You're royally effed at that point.Theres just too many.


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## 1feral1

jmackenzie_15 said:
			
		

> Frightening to think of what would happen if it isnt just sabre rattling.... we'd all be screwed either way.Theres just too many.



Hence why a conventional war would not work. I am afraid the sun would be rising   several times before 10 am on the first day alone.

Wes


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## enfield

From what I've read concerning China's military capabilities, they simply don't have the ability to take Taiwan. The PLA lacks the air and naval resources to a) transport sufficient troops and equipment b) overcome Taiwanese defences (the place is an island fortress afterall) c) get through the US Fleet. 

However, they can make a LOT of trouble. Their surface to surface missiles and their navy (especially submarine assets) could wreak havoc on and around Taiwan, and threaten the stability of the whole region. Their military may be huge, but most of it is outdated equipment and untrained soldiers, despite recent modernization efforts. The nuclear angle is, of course, worrying to say the least...

But, I just don't see the gain to China in taking on Taiwan. Taking on Taiwan means war with the US and Japan (two largest economies in the world, as well as the top two defence spenders), Australia and Canada (main suppliers of raw resources), and various other regional states such as South Korea, Thailand, Russia (thats a long border to defend), India (also with a huge army), etc... They might be able to hold their own for a bit, maybe even preserve their territorial integrity, but the cost would be huge, they'd be back to 1949. Wouldn't be pretty for anyone.  

Personally, I see the increasing distance between the Chinese capitalist economy and their totalitarian government as a strain that has to break eventually. The contradictions in such a system, coupled with the massively uneven development of the country, make China in my eyes unstable in the long term.


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## daniel h.

Wesley H. Allen said:
			
		

> It will be marksmanship by the megaton, with over 350,000,000 Communist Chinese fit and available for military service, we might get their first 1,000,000 but not their second in a conventional war!
> 
> Food for thought   ;D
> 
> And what about the ANZUS Treaty??? If the   the SHTF, the US is in and so are we (Australia)   :warstory:
> 
> Lets hope its just sabre rattling.
> 
> Wes




What about a guerrilla war? I mean, how many of those conscripts can fight?  ....still, it makes you realize how vulnerable Canada could be despite our isolation if it decides to stay small militarily after the U.S. Navy and Air Force cease dominating the seven seas. Of course the Liberals wouldn't see it coming.

But as long as we let China buy us up, I guess we won't be going to war with them--bad for business. :blotto:


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## nULL

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/2941.0.html

I made a post on this awhile ago with an attached news article. It's quite an interesting read on how the Chinese would take Taiwan. 

Personally, I don't see why it is a huge deal. Is Taiwan really worth a large-scale war, especially considering the sizable majority of the the population that would welcome a Chinese takeover?


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## Pikache

Enfield said:
			
		

> But, I just don't see the gain to China in taking on Taiwan. Taking on Taiwan means war with the US


And China might think this is the best time to push the button, considering US op tempo.


> and Japan (two largest economies in the world, as well as the top two defence spenders),


Is there a guarantee that Japan will join the war? They won't, without US support and I don't know what their constitutional amendment went, but I thought Japanese military is forbidden to deploy overseas?


> Australia and Canada (main suppliers of raw resources),


China may risk losing Aussie and Canadian trade if it is decide that PRC would lose face if they don't go for Taiwan. Oriental people are crazy in many ways I tell you. 


> and various other regional states such as South Korea,


Will be too busy to ensure that Kim Jong Il doesn't do stupid, so SK military is tied up.


> Thailand,


Don't see a reason why Thailand would join, esp. having to deal with aftermath of the tsunami, plus China can throw few divisions at Thailand border to tie up whatever Thailand wants to use.


> Russia (thats a long border to defend),


Since China is Russia's biggest military hardware buyer, unless Russia can get money or some sort of huge advantage somewhere else, I doubt Russia would want to fight China.


> India (also with a huge army), etc...


Again, similar story with Thailand. Would you want to fight in the Himalayas and Tibet?


> They might be able to hold their own for a bit, maybe even preserve their territorial integrity, but the cost would be huge, they'd be back to 1949. Wouldn't be pretty for anyone.


The question is can PLA(N) get enough of best of PLA divisions onto Taiwan. For any other nation that wants to invade mainland China, human wave attacks would probably cause horrendous casualties that no nation would want to sustain, except maybe Russia. (And I don't think Russia has as many men as Chinese to throw away)


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## a_majoor

Short answers, various nations will have to decide if an agressive Imperial China is a threat to them. Nations on China's borders will feel the heat much more than nations farther afield. Commercial nations like Japan, India and South Korea may decide that China's use of military power against Tiawan could be an invitation for China's leadership to use military power to coerce them out of markets China covets. Russia may want to secure their borders against Chinese incursions into western Siberia. All these potential threats need to be accounted for, pulling valuable resources away from the Tiawan front.

Vast numbers of Chinese troops might indeed be a threat to cut off or unsupported units, but this is very much like arguments about the "Russian Steamroller" prior to WWI. Although the Russians could pull off surprises, they simply were not capable of commanding or supporting he vast quantities of manpower in an effective manner. American military theory  is very well developed when it comes to identifying and attacking enemy centres of gravity, particularly large scale conventional armies like the Chinese can field. I think the US can pull off some nasty surprises outside of the "conventional warfare" box.

A side thought; since China has been trying to gain resource bases in Canada, an element of economic warfare might take place between the United States and China with Canada as a theater of operations. Canada has signaled to the United States we do not care to support them, and China only sees us as "hewers of wood, drawers of water", so the effect on Canadian corporations and the economy as a whole could be horrendous, and just "collateral damage" in the larger war. American "Grand Strategy" might well be to take the time to identify choke points in the Chinese economy and apply economic pressures to make gaining resources as difficult and expensive as possible.


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## Cdn Blackshirt

The primary problem I see is the more foreign investment that takes place in China, the more leverage they have to act freely against Taiwan, or threaten to nationalize billions in foreign-owned assets.  In essence, they have been inviting our dependence and using to their advantage.  Cunning is a gross understatement....




M.    ???


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## Edward Campbell

oyaguy said:
			
		

> ...
> 
> I personally think the greatest challenge facing the Chinese {mainlanders}, is there will come a day of reckoning of how the country should be governed. The Chinese aren't blind to democracy. It will be a delicate balancing act for China's leaders, as they want to liberalize the economy, without giving up their powers. Generally the liberalizing of the economy, will lead to the liberalizing of the politics. ...



I agree.

Sometimes the full trappings of democracy - elections, representative and responsible legislatures, etc - are the *last* things to arrive on the scene.   (Witness Canada: we still have an appointed legislative chamber ... there to exercise _sober second thought_ lest elected representatives of the _hoi polloi_* get too uppity and decide, for themselves, how to govern themselves.)

It seems to me that the preconditions for democracy are the ones on which the Chinese are, now, working, including, especially:

_The rule of law_ - this is the toughest nut to crack because, like all long lasting, stable oligarchies, the Chinese Communist Party members believe that they, alone, *know* what is 'best' for the Chinese people.   _(This view is not unique to oligarchies; most _social democratic_ movements or parties believe much the same thing.   Broadly, only *liberals* (of whom there are precious few in the Liberal Party of Canada and, probably, none at all in the ever so morally certain _Young Liberals_ and the Liberal _Women's Commission_) believe that the _people_ are wise enough, _en masse_ to govern themselves.)_   In conservative democracies  (Singapore) and illiberal democracies** (followers of the French model) the rule of law obtains, despite the wishes of the governing classes and the _natural governing party_.

_Equality at law_ - this is also tough because it means that all, governed and governors alike must be fully and equally accountable - even Jean Chrétien, in Canada, maybe ...

_Regulatory independence_ - all but the most unrepentant of the Austrian School economists admit (even if they don't quite believe) that some degrees of regulation are required to establish and maintain some degrees of fairness and openness in public institutions, including governments and the marketplace.   This one is, also, giving some Chinese some heartburn - especially the most senior officials of the Ministry of Defence which is a big and largely unregulated actor in the markets, through its ownership of the biggest players in several industrial sectors and its responsibility for the prison system which, in turn, operates factories (using what some regard as slave labour or, at least, unfairly (maybe unlawfully) subsidized labour) in many sectors.

It seems to me that the much celebrated spread of democracy in about 75% of the UN's 200+/- members states is grossly overstated because all it means that someone or other got elected, once; but, since none of the other conditions are operative, democracy can hardly be said to have taken root; *elections ââ€°Â  democracy*.

I think that the growth of market capitalism will spur the growth of the institutions and attitudes (above) which are, in my view, *essential preconditions* for democracy.   Investors *need* the rule of law, equality at law and regulatory independence to protect their investments (those who eschew such protections are gamblers, not investors) and the Chinese need investors (including domestic investors), for the long term, rather than gamblers.   Once capitalism has done its work then democratic reforms will, likely, follow along rather naturally.

It is not clear to me that China will _morph_ into an Anglo-American style _liberal democracy_ or even into a rather illiberal _social democracy_; I suspect that it, like Singapore will become a _conservative democracy_, which may be more in tune with China's _conservative_ culture.   I do believe that China will become a democracy and, as I have written elsewhere, one of our foreign policy goals must be to _contain_ Chinese ambitions while it makes that (long - 35+ years) transition.   (I do not mean Kennan style _containment_, rather I mean engaging China as a competitor and avoiding turning it into an enemy.)   It seems to me that democracies, including _conservative_ democracies are less inclined to see war as a solution to political problems - even though, sometimes, wars are quite necessary and are the only acceptable solutions to some political problems.

----------

* I know _hoi_ means 'the' but the _hoi polloi_ has been accepted for centuries.

** This is Fareed Zakaria's idea; see: http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/democracy.html


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## daniel h.

> . Despite the obvious differences in their creation, I can't help but want to draw comparisons between Taiwan and Quebec; were the Parti Quebecois to win the next provincial  election, and decide to pursue unillateral independence (with the support of a larger number of like-minded voters than Taiwan's DPP) would Canada be justified in taking military action to force reunification? (Pretend the government would play along!)



I think this is a red herring. The federal government could legally end separatism if it had the nerve. Quebec is a province, legally. It's not our fault our feds have decided to weaken the federation.


I think the real comparison is between the U.S. and Canada. If the U.S. tried to give us the Taiwan treatment, are there too may U.S. sympathizers in the Canadian military?  I hope not.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

a_majoor said:
			
		

> A side thought; since China has been trying to gain resource bases in Canada, an element of economic warfare might take place between the United States and China with Canada as a theater of operations. Canada has signaled to the United States we do not care to support them, and China only sees us as "hewers of wood, drawers of water", so the effect on Canadian corporations and the economy as a whole could be horrendous, and just "collateral damage" in the larger war. American "Grand Strategy" might well be to take the time to identify choke points in the Chinese economy and apply economic pressures to make gaining resources as difficult and expensive as possible.



Here's an anecdote: I work for a Taiwanese company.  Everywhere we operate around the world (_including_ PRC) the word "China" is part of the company's proper (registered) name.  Except in Canada: it was determined that use of "China" in the company's name would be too provocative ... they are laughing up their sleeves at us!  I suspect the PRC sees Canada as a crack in Western solidarity that is to be exploited: Canada refusing to support Taiwan/US/Japan will give them all the moral imperative they need.


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese leadership may decide to take the age old "out" of creating a foreign crisis/enemy to deflect attention from the failures that are happening at home. Here in Canada, we may actually have more leverage than we think; Canadians do not have to purchase items "made in China", and business do not have to have dealings with China either. This would require that the short term advantages of dealing with China be outweighed by the disadvantages. (This does not mean a formal trade embargo).

This requires the public be constantly exposed to the reality of life in the PRC; the cultivation of alternative low cost producers (India, Indonesia), and, dare I say it, cultivating the American market even more to keep our producers and resource companies firmly planted in "our" market; and pushing for access to the EU (as part of the Western civilization; they are prefferable than a potential opponent civilization). 

As has been pointed out, China has severe internal problems. Restricting their access to our resources and markets may induce enough strains to pull the Central Committee's eyes off Tiawan, and buy us some more time to prepare to deal with the new Imperial power. This is also an argument to continue to develop conventional military capabilities to deal with "symmetric" warfare, alongside the expanding capabilities to deal with "asymmetrical" warfare.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

a_majoor said:
			
		

> This requires the public be constantly exposed to the reality of life in the PRC



How is this going to happen?  The Canadian Government does not want this ...


----------



## Block 1

So let me get this straight. By not picking up items marked â Å“Made in Chinaâ ? should sort them out, if we all do it, then its a major economical problem for them. With a supper power this will fail. All you need to do is look at the worlds history. Any country in economical hardship most often will go to war with its neighbour. So if you have a big supper power â Å“Tigerâ ? and you stab it with a stick, do you think its going to move? No he's going to rip your head off. But if you coach him, or give him something he needs, he will follow. Now well he ever be your friend, no but at least you know where he is and you can assist with his change for the better. China now, to this present administration is like a good game of chess. You don't want to win in the first 15 moves or you will just anger him; but rather, let him think he's wining and prolong the game until change has come and it's to late for him to react. Know your enemy and exploit his weakness.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Block 1 said:
			
		

> So let me get this straight. By not picking up items marked â Å“Made in Chinaâ ? should sort them out, if we all do it, then its a major economical problem for them. With a supper power this will fail. All you need to do is look at the worlds history. Any country in economical hardship most often will go to war with its neighbour. So if you have a big supper power â Å“Tigerâ ? and you stab it with a stick, do you think its going to move? No he's going to rip your head off. But if you coach him, or give him something he needs, he will follow. Now well he ever be your friend, no but at least you know where he is and you can assist with his change for the better. China now, to this present administration is like a good game of chess. You don't want to win in the first 15 moves or you will just anger him; but rather, let him think he's wining and prolong the game until change has come and it's to late for him to react. Know your enemy and exploit his weakness.



I don't know what history you're looking at, but most miltary expansionism over the last 4,000 years has generally been based on a previous massive economic expansion.   In essence, the improved economy allowed the nation to redirect its resources from substinence activities to imperialist objectives.   

RE:   your chess analogy - before I jump all over this, please elaborate on your master plan because on first pass, your statement seems a trifle simplistic and lacking any substance.




Matthew.         

P.S.   You're misspelling "super"....and "winning".


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Or maybe we just wait them out ...



> China now has 46 million government bureaucrats, new statistics revealed yesterday, a number almost as great as the entire population of England.
> 
> ...
> 
> Its excessive and corrupt bureaucracy was regarded as one of the principal causes of the decline of imperial rule. Yet there are now 35 times as many people on the government payroll, even as a proportion of the population, than at the time of the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Corruption aside, today's civil servants are also expensive, requiring official cars, holidays masquerading as training sessions and receptions.
> 
> All in all, the cost to the nation, before salaries, amounted to  £50 billion, according to state media.
> 
> The figures were disclosed by Ren Yuling, a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a parliamentary advisory body. "The contingent of bureaucrats in China is expanding at an unprecedented speed," he said. ...
> 
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/08/wchina08.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/03/08/ixworld.html


----------



## Sandbag

Talk about red herrings... : I was enjoying the read up until the last point


----------



## Ex-Dragoon

> I think the real comparison is between the U.S. and Canada. If the U.S. tried to give us the Taiwan treatment, are there too may U.S. sympathizers in the Canadian military?  I hope not.



Ok who borrowed my tinfoil hat....I have a feeling I am going to need it.  :


----------



## Rushrules

If China invaded Taiwan, there's nothing the US could do about it.   China has nukes, so that rules out any response.


----------



## Torlyn

Rushrules said:
			
		

> If China invaded Taiwan, there's nothing the US could do about it.   China has nukes, so that rules out any response.



How do you figure?  If there was an invasion (Which the story, had you read it, was against) the economic hardships that the Chinese would face would be catostrophic to them.  They are trying to build themselves in to a superpower, and if the Chinese are anything, it's patient.  If and when they move, it won't be any time soon, and it'll most likely be a non-military take over. 

And the Nuke comment is a fallacy.  The Americans have nukes, and they support taiwan, so with your logic, the Chinese wouldn't invade for that reason, right?

T


----------



## Baloo

The Chinese won't let the island of Taiwan go without a fight, and that is the final answer. We can speculate about damage to their economy and the rest of it, but at the end of the day, if Taiwan declared sovereignty, you can be sure that the missiles would start flying. And you can be sure as s*** that the Americans will not threaten a nuclear war over that move. Sure, they would deploy a fleet, but the American public and government is NOT going to risk an all out nuclear exchange over the Republic of China.


----------



## oyaguy

I think the threat of an Imperial China is somewhat exaggerated.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have lived in one of the "great peaces" of the history of the world. For all the bad stuff that happens around the world, all the cruelty, we have not witness a "great power melee"{Gwynne Dyer, I love how he sums up a World War}.

For example, considering all the news coverage Osama Bin Laden gets, he cannot, by himself, destabilize the fabric of civilization. Only the world's great powers can, and only if they choose to.

For all of China's bulk, 1.3 billion and counting, any war that China fights, will be to the cost of all involved and they have more people to loose.. 

As stated before, we are living in one of the "great peaces" of our time because of the Nuclear Deterrent. As the aptly formed acronym, M.A.D., spells out, Mutually Assured Destruction, the next great power conflict is the last. 

The Chinese can do the math, and the math spells out M.A.D. There is no getting past those three letters. The Chinese might be able to squeak a few things by, {I personally believe Taiwan is one of them} but at the end of the day, they will still have those letters to contend with. 

You can't have your cake, and eat it too if both you and the cake are slag.

Then their is my opinion that China is a ticking time bomb that isn't going to explode, but implode on itself.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

If I was China, I'd be sending a lot of "businessmen" in via legitimate channels prior to the invasion.

They would all be trained to sabotage electric and communications lines.

I would also use the new direct flights between the mainland and Taiwan as my very first strike.  In essence, I would line up (4-5) 747's in a row loaded with elite troops and get them landed at Taiwan's main airport....then I would start my sabotage, followed by staged "Reunification Rallies" (with pre-prep'd news releases) and then push on with a conventional invasion.

The biggest problem is if it doesn't look like Taiwan can stop the first wave of attacks, I think the USA/Japan back out due to the economic leverage I mentioned previously.

JMHO,



Matthew.


----------



## onecat

"Sure, they would deploy a fleet, but the American public and government is NOT going to risk an all out nuclear exchange over the Republic of China"

Taiwan is and has been since 1949 an independent nation, only China doesn't see that way.  With its new found strenghths it realized it can get want it wants if it pushes hard enough.  I don't see the US coming to help Taiwan, although the way I see it, if Taiwan was invaded by China its no different then Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.  The only difference is that fight between Taiwan and China won't be pretty and the US stands a good chance of losing if it gets involved, so it won't take that risk.  And China knows it.


----------



## Nielsen_Noetic

I agree the U.S. would more than likely lose; China's shear numbers for one reason. As well China has been upgrading it's forces, building more technologically advanced naval vessels and aircraft. The only advantage the U.S. has is it's technology, once that's trumped the U.S. will not have what it takes to take on a nation such as China.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

radiohead said:
			
		

> Taiwan is and has been since 1949 an independent nation, only China doesn't see that way.



This is not accurate: many (most?) coountries (including the one we live in) do NOT recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country ... Taiwan was only admitted to the WTO in 2002 and STILL has not been admitted to the UN!

It would be nice to think that our (and other Western) governments would take a stand against Chinese totalitarianism but the reality is that they do not.  :'(

A small backgrounder here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan#Position_of_other_countries_and_international_organizations


----------



## onecat

"
This is not accurate: many (most?) coountries (including the one we live in) do NOT recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country ... Taiwan was only admitted to the WTO in 2002 and STILL has not been admitted to the UN!"

That's true but from my understanding, things ahve changed alot in the last 20 04 30 years.  As China was allowed into the UN and other groups, ithas slowwly been putting  pressure on other nations to remove Taiwan from them.  And as their economy grows they con't to put stress on nations to support their position on Taiwan.

If western nations do valve sovereign nations they should be making it clear now that China's actions will not be allowed.  Of course their only looking at the dollar valve of things.. and in that Taiwan loses out.


----------



## Dare

Nielsen_Noetic said:
			
		

> I agree the U.S. would more than likely lose; China's shear numbers for one reason. As well China has been upgrading it's forces, building more technologically advanced naval vessels and aircraft. The only advantage the U.S. has is it's technology, once that's trumped the U.S. will not have what it takes to take on a nation such as China.



China wouldn't stand a chance. They'd be mostly on the defence in what would be a war on several of it's fronts they would have to move in and engage NATO forces in Afghanistan as well which would certainly engage the whole region, South Korea and Japan would likely get into the mix as well. This equals an eventual loss. As for China breaking out technologically, I would have to say it's very unlikely considering it is still buying from Russia, who itself is quite a bit behind the U.S. It's also begging everyone to let it out of the European arms embargo.That's not to say China is not gaining ground in some areas, but I venture to say that it's quite a bit behind the U.S. and will remain so for quite some time yet. Their unweidly infrastructure of beaurocrats weighs everything down. Their numbers are not an asset, they are a disadvantage. They are trying to cut the fat on their military. Any war with China would not be a repeat of the Korean war, where a human wave pushes the west out. It would be a very fast paced war. It ultimately comes down to China having invade and hold ground in the U.S. to win the war. I suspect many of China's plans included a Vietnam sort of propaghanda campaign of demoralizing the citizenry. Post-Bush Doctrine, I am sure that sort of tactic will no longer be efficient. What China depends on is a huge manufacturing base already controlled by the military.  I do not think they would risk a strategic nuclear strike on the U.S. for the obvious reason, but tactical nuclear strikes I think would be regular on both sides. Is China a serious threat to democracy and the west? Yes. Would it be a difficult challenge? Yes. Will they win? No.

Also, keep in mind this does not take into account a Chinese fifth column and the damage communist sympathizers could conceivably do, especially in terms of European allies.


----------



## daniel h.

oyaguy said:
			
		

> I think the threat of an Imperial China is somewhat exaggerated.
> 
> Since the end of the Second World War, we have lived in one of the "great peaces" of the history of the world. For all the bad stuff that happens around the world, all the cruelty, we have not witness a "great power melee"{Gwynne Dyer, I love how he sums up a World War}.
> 
> For example, considering all the news coverage Osama Bin Laden gets, he cannot, by himself, destabilize the fabric of civilization. Only the world's great powers can, and only if they choose to.
> 
> For all of China's bulk, 1.3 billion and counting, any war that China fights, will be to the cost of all involved and they have more people to loose..
> 
> As stated before, we are living in one of the "great peaces" of our time because of the Nuclear Deterrent. As the aptly formed acronym, M.A.D., spells out, Mutually Assured Destruction, the next great power conflict is the last.
> 
> The Chinese can do the math, and the math spells out M.A.D. There is no getting past those three letters. The Chinese might be able to squeak a few things by, {I personally believe Taiwan is one of them} but at the end of the day, they will still have those letters to contend with.
> 
> You can't have your cake, and eat it too if both you and the cake are slag.
> 
> Then their is my opinion that China is a ticking time bomb that isn't going to explode, but implode on itself.




So does Canada not having nuclear weapons say something about our state of independence, considering we helped invent the things?...Anyone think we should have them?


----------



## dutchie

daniel h. said:
			
		

> So does Canada not having nuclear weapons say something about our state of independence, considering we helped invent the things?...Anyone think we should have them?



We should NOT have nuclear weapons. According to McNamara, and I agree, nuclear weapons have no military value whatsoever. Their only function is to deter your opponent from using theirs. As no sane leader would ever use them, possesing them doesn't protect you from those States. That was written in the 80's regarding the Big Bad Soviet Bear. Of course the enemy is different today, but I think you can extrapolate the following from his original statement: As no insane leader would be deterred by our possesion of nukes, possesion does not protect us form those groups/States either. 

With the exception of Total War, like the war in the Pacific, Nukes could never be used. They destroy the land you attack, along with the infrastructure, the people (ours and theirs), and all life within a certain radius. By using them, you remove the possibility of meaningful victory.

I see no value to expanding the World's nuclear arsenal.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Caesar, I don't think your rationale applies to tactical nukes ... besides, the corollary to your argument is that if you don't have nukes, you have nothing to deter those that do, ergo the sanity argument becomes irrelevent: the sane "enemy" might well attack a nation (by conventional means) with no nuclear deterrent but not attack the same nation with a nuclear deterrent (this was the essence of NATOs Cold War strategy).


----------



## dutchie

I can see how this thread will get split in about 4 or 5 posts, but here goes.....



			
				I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> Caesar, I don't think your rationale applies to tactical nukes ...



Well, it does, but I didn't explain how it does. I'll use the Soviets as the example, because that's how McNamara described it. The US military in the 60's and beyond determined that their Nuclear strategy did not allow for Tactical nukes to be used without an exchange of Strategic nukes resulting shortly thereafter. Basically, IIRC, the theory was that we would trade tactical nukes, but of course they are used merely as a way of destroying defences and enemy troops so that conventional forces can succeed. Any massive attack by either side would escalate the exchange, resulting in the exchange of Strategic nukes, out of fear of losing the ability to respond with them later. Kind of a "If we don't launch our strategic nukes, we run the risk of having our launch sites destroyed by their strategic nukes.....let's launch first." IIRC, it was actually policy that a launch of tactical nukes must be answered with Strategic nukes. Whether the US would have actually launched them is another matter. Keep in mind that all along, there were always some who believed the US had a first strike capability, something that has been largely dismissed then, and especially now in hindsight. There was always a core group, a la Dr. Strangelove, that courted a nuclear exchange...all this according to Blundering towards Disaster by McNamara.



			
				I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> the sane "enemy" might well attack a nation (by conventional means) with no nuclear deterrent but not attack the same nation with a nuclear deterrent (this was the essence of NATOs Cold War strategy).



The theory refuting this is that the sane enemy knows that you will never use those nukes, so they are not a deterrent. Nuclear weapons were developed during Total War, and their usefullness is limited to that scenario. The US will never initiate a Nuclear exchange. Ever. In fact, only an attack with nuclear weapons will allow a response with nuclear weapons. Again, according to policy. 
Basically, McNamara makes the argument that Nuclear weapons are not Military weapons because they serve no military purpose. Their use, no matter how limited, would likely result in the destruction of the state that launches them. He argues that possesion of them doesn't increase your security, it lowers it. I tend to agree. I normally hate basing an argument on another theories, but the theories are sound, and I was just a youngen when they were developed.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

> Any massive attack by either side would escalate the exchange, resulting in the exchange of Strategic nukes, out of fear of losing the ability to respond with them later.



That logic leads inescapably to the conclusion that any massive "hot" confrontation would escalate into a strategic exchange, regardless of whether tactical nukes were ever used or not!




> ... the sane enemy knows that you will never use those nukes, so they are not a deterrent. Nuclear weapons were developed during Total War, and their usefullness is limited to that scenario.



MAD only works when BOTH sides have that deterrent!  To use a more current example, the US did not lead the invasion of Iraq because they believed Saddam had nukes: they believed he was (or would be) trying trying to develop them (among other reasons, but not opening that can of worms)!  Had Saddam already built an arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons, the United States, fearing total destruction, would not have invaded ... conversely, the United States is reluctant to confront North Korea head-on out of fear that _they may already have_ nukes.

I can see that in an abstract sense, strategic nuclear weapons are "not military weapons" insofar as they prevent major wars and are thus merely political or geopolitical 'tools' (although this is veering into a purely sematic argument).  But again this is only the case when the mutual deterrent exists: if your enemy has the bomb and you don't, you have the fear of total destruction to prevent you from attacking him, but he has no fear of attacking you.

Getting back to daniel h.'s original point, it IS a question of sovreignty: we didn't get into a conventional war against the USSR because we didn't have a big nuclear arsenal, but rather because our allies DID!


----------



## Nielsen_Noetic

Some of what you said is accurate; your assertion however that China would lose I truly believe is nothing but speculation. China is a powerful nation, it is the second largest military spender on the face of the earth after the United States. It has the largest population of any nation in existence, and has gawking power over it's people.
It is one of the fastest growing(economically) nations, it is a nuclear power, and I truly believe if it had to would use that power so as no one wins.
here is a link to the military spending stats of 170 nations, these are CIA stats.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2067rank.html
these are China's exclusive military stats, and the United States.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html#Military
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html#Military


----------



## Brad Sallows

A three-division air assault spread out over several days, eh?  China must have a kick-ass SEAD plan.

All that backed up by air and missile strikes and victory is certain, eh?  The Americans will have to pay attention and learn; they've never been able to get quite that much mileage out of air and missile strikes.


----------



## dutchie

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> That logic leads inescapably to the conclusion that any massive "hot" confrontation would escalate into a strategic exchange, regardless of whether tactical nukes were ever used or not!


In the Cold War, that was the case. Not now, of course.


			
				I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> MAD only works when BOTH sides have that deterrent!...Had Saddam already built an arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons, the United States, fearing total destruction, would not have invaded ... conversely, the United States is reluctant to confront North Korea head-on out of fear that _they may already have_ nukes.
> 
> I can see that in an abstract sense, strategic nuclear weapons are "not military weapons" insofar as they prevent major wars and are thus merely political or geopolitical 'tools'. But again this is only the case when the mutual deterrent exists: if your enemy has the bomb and you don't, you have the fear of total destruction to prevent you from attacking him, but he has no fear of attacking you.



Wow! I think were in total agreement here. You have pretty much summarized most of the rest of McNamara's book. He never advocated an imbalance, as it would cause the scenario you described.

Anyhow, back on track.


----------



## Acorn

Nielsen_Noetic said:
			
		

> Some of what you said is accurate; your assertion however that China would lose I truly believe is nothing but speculation. China is a powerful nation, it is the second largest military spender on the face of the earth after the United States. It has the largest population of any nation in existence, and has gawking power over it's people.



Insert "USSR" for China, and change the bit about population (not sure what "gawking power" is though), and you could be a voice from the mid-80s.

But hell, bean counting has always been a popular method of analysis. Why stop now?

Acorn


----------



## from darkness lite

Totally agree with ACORN, and not just because we're the same MOC.  China, on paper, looks unstopable (just like the Warsaw Pact, lots of tanks, lucky if 10% actually worked).  However China has f**k all for sea-lift capability.  By the time the Chinese turn their surviving ships around, go back for the 2nd wave (then 3rd then 4th, then 5th.......), those unlucky souls on the beach will be dead or POW.  For those who "bean count" check China's sea-lift capability out on Janes, etc

cheers..


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Well then, Canada 'exists' mainly because we live under the nuclear umbrella of our allies (read: USA): to me that's a major sovereignty concern ... shouldn't we have nukes for _political_ reasons?

Following your logic, with respect to the thread (and the "Taiwan 2006" one), it would seem that the main reason China has not invaded/reclaimed Taiwan is because of the nuclear deterrent of Taiwan's allies (read: USA).  But the questions remain: does China represent a legitimate threat to Taiwan?  Do they see the US nuclear arsenal as irrelevent and is the sea (with Japanese and American ships) and the threat of retaliation a big enough barrier/deterrent?  Or will China think that they could launch a quick first strike to which the US would not respond (because of the nuclear deterrent)?


----------



## a_majoor

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> Following your logic, with respect to the thread (and the "Taiwan 2006" one), it would seem that the main reason China has not invaded/reclaimed Taiwan is because of the nuclear deterrent of Taiwan's allies (read: USA). But the questions remain: does China represent a legitimate threat to Taiwan? Do they see the US nuclear arsenal as irrelevant and is the sea (with Japanese and American ships) and the threat of retaliation a big enough barrier/deterrent? Or will China think that they could launch a quick first strike to which the US would not respond (because of the nuclear deterrent)?



China has made fairly direct threats in the past, including "war games" where live missiles were launched into the sea approaches to Tiawan. Depending on how the Chinese see the political/military situation in the outside world, and how much pressure they are feeling internally, we could see any number of scenarios. I would tend to think a "decapitating" attack followed by a rapid surge deployment of PLA units to the island is the most likely, given the idea of using speed and surprise to prevent Tiawan from mounting an organized defense and moving in before the United States could react would save the PLA from massive casualties and gain and maintain the political and military initiative in theater.

The western long term strategy should be to bolster Tiawan and make it clear that the invasion of Tiawan would trigger strong economic sanctions as well as a military response, and wait out the internal contradictions that are eating away at the heart of the "Middle Kingdom". A second tier would be to build up the economies of the pacific rim nations and India to wean them off the China trade, deflating China's ability to improve their military forces and also presenting them with a much wider range of potential threats to stretch out their existing capacities. This is really a larger version of the game being played in the middle east, which the US is using to pressure and perhaps topple the Assad regeim in Syria and the Mullahs in Iran.


----------



## a_majoor

http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/002106.html


> *China to Build Stone Wall Around Taiwan*
> by Scott Ott
> 
> (2005-03-08) -- Just a day after enacting a new anti-secession law for Taiwan, the communist Chinese government announced today that it would begin construction of an immense stone wall in the Pacific Ocean to encircle the island of Taiwan and protect its citizens from "foreign encroachment."
> 
> The wall, roughly 1,400 miles long and extending from the ocean floor to 300 feet above the surface, will "reinforce the common bond the Chinese people share with the residents of our island territory," according to an official government news release.
> 
> "The wall will keep out damaging waves from the rising tide of global democracy which threatens our idyllic way of life," the government said. "Some people claim that our communist ideology has already been defeated, and that we are a relic of a failed social experiment. But this mighty stone wall will demonstrate the triumph of the people's revolution over capitalism, religion and western thought."


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think we must consider a few things:

First: for most Chinese, including virtually everyone in the Politburo, Taiwan *IS* part of China and the _struggle_ is a continuation of the Chinese civil war (1945-49, although I prefer to date it from 1929) and is a purely domestic matter.

Second: economic growth is priority one, more (but not too much more) important than Taiwan.

Third: Taiwan is a major source of direct investment in China. It is fifth, after Hong Kong (which provides nearly ââ€¦â€œ of all 'foreign' investment in China), the Virgin Islands, the United States and Japan â â€œ at nearly $3 billion per year.   Some, probably quite a lot of the money from HK ($12+ billion) and the Virgin Islands (approaching $5 billion) is from Taiwan, too. (Source Ministry of Commerce at: http://www.fdi.gov.cn/ltstatic/index.jsp?app=00000000000000000014&language=gb ) 

Chinese politicians are, traditionally, proponents of both a _long view_ and a strategic _indirect approach_.

Chinese politicians, like their Euro-American confreres are masters of the _wag the dog_ technique and Taiwan is an excellent 'tail' with which to keep the people's attention focused on secondary issues while unemployment rises and the _iron rice bowl_ is smashed.

It is my, personal view that:

China will continue to saber rattle but will not attack Taiwan unless provoked by e.g. a Taiwanese _declaration of independence_ or some American provocations â â€œ maybe reversing the _non-recognition_ policy.

China's strategic calculus is quite, radically different from the East/West, USSR/USA or Warsaw Pact/NATO views of the '60s, '70s and '80s.   The Chinese do not want war â â€œ with anyone; but, and this is a big, important *BUT* they believe they can fight, win and survive a major war, in Asia, with anyone, including the USA.   The Chinese strategists understand that the USA can project huge power into Asia but they are not persuaded that the USA can or would try to invade China or use nuclear weapons against China unless China attacked the USA first â â€œ and they, the Chinese will not do that.

----------

New Topic: Australia and China are negotiating a free trade agreement.   See: http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/speechandactivity/speecha/200503/20050300023872.html


----------



## DBA

> The theory refuting this is that the sane enemy knows that you will never use those nukes, so they are not a deterrent. Nuclear weapons were developed during Total War, and their usefullness is limited to that scenario. The US will never initiate a Nuclear exchange. Ever. In fact, only an attack with nuclear weapons will allow a response with nuclear weapons. Again, according to policy.



The US certainly would use nuclear weapons if faced with the defeat of itself or it's major allies. There is zero chance an invasion of the US homeland would not provoke a nuclear response if war planners decided a conventional one wouldn't be sufficient. All countries with nuclear weapons use them as both a deterrent and insurnace in this way. Where they are less likely to use them is when the threat is not as direct. This is why both England and France developed nuclear weapons themselves early on in the cold war. They weren't 100% certain the US would use nuclear weapons if it's own sovereignty wasn't threatened even with NATO then having and still to this day having first use policies. 

Canada isn't clean in this regard at all as it still belongs to NATO which won't rule out first use and in the past contributed a lot to nuclear weapons development from WWII on. For a good summary of Canadian involvement in nuclear weapons see : http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma02bratt


----------



## Dare

Nielsen_Noetic said:
			
		

> Some of what you said is accurate; your assertion however that China would lose I truly believe is nothing but speculation. China is a powerful nation, it is the second largest military spender on the face of the earth after the United States. It has the largest population of any nation in existence, and has gawking power over it's people.
> It is one of the fastest growing(economically) nations, it is a nuclear power, and I truly believe if it had to would use that power so as no one wins.
> here is a link to the military spending stats of 170 nations, these are CIA stats.
> http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2067rank.html
> these are China's exclusive military stats, and the United States.
> http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html#Military
> http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html#Military



Of course it's speculation. It's all speculation. Even the factbook is largely speculation. They do not have exact accurate numbers from China. No one but China does. Yes, it has a large population, and lords over it's people. As I tried to explain, this is *not an asset*. It gives them a large pool of military aged men and a large manufacturing base. It also gives them a massive top weighted beaurocracy and a sizable dissident population. It simply can not compete and innovate a successful victory. It may be able to down a few U.S. battlegroups (may, it's certainly not a simple task) with their fancy Russian missiles, but so what? Can you imagine the drive and determination in the U.S. if that occured? That would be Sept. 11th times Pearl Harbour plus the Cold War. There is little question China could take affirmative control over Taiwan but I believe also that there is little question they would lose that control soon after. We have to remember that quantity is not quality. Most of their armed forces consists of outdated rust buckets. Even more out of date than our rust buckets.  They certainly are modernizing, but as I said, they are consistantly behind, as they do not do a whole lot of innovation, they steal and buy plans for what they need. Cheap and effective but in the long run dooms them to failure.


----------



## a_majoor

Don't forget the true power of the West is the ability to inovate. The battle of Lepanto saw the Ottoman Empire send a huge fleet of galleys copied from the latest Venetian designs agains the combined fleet of Venice, the Papal States and Spain, and they lost horribly.

The Europeans had better guns, made lots of modifications to the galleys to get the best use out of guns, musket armed infantry firing in volleys, as well as having a flexible battle plan and commanders who could adapt the plan on the fly. The Ottomans fought primaraly for individual glory and spoils, were unable to envision modifying their ships, and were niether capable or permitted to make changes to the "plan" once it was decided.

Iraq under the Ba'athist regime had the world's fourth largest army, equipped with a large proportion of modern Russian and European weaponry, yet the Persian Gulf War was a walkover by the West, since we built the equipment and knew how to use it, not just buy it from a catalogue. If you have time, read "Carnage and Culture", Victor Davis Hanson explains his theory that the civilizations of the West have always had this ability as long as it existed, from the Ancient Greeks to today. The Chinese military is a large and ferocious dinosaur, deadly in its own domain, but soon to be vanquished by small furry mammels eating the eggs in the nest......


----------



## SlipStream

If the US would deploy a large naval battle group to help defend taiwan they would most likely never see their homes again. If china deploys and uses their newly SS-N-22 Moskit cruise missile bought from the russians they US navy would be devestated. If these missles are used the US would only have 2.5 seconds to react but by that time the missle would have sunk one of their ships. I dont think the US can withstand one of these attacks.


----------



## tomahawk6

Don't sell the USN short. Any PRC attack on the USN would cause the loss of the entire PLAN. Any confrontation I would suspect the USN would have 75% of their sub force around Taiwan with the carriers south of the island.


----------



## Long in the tooth

As has been stated, it's all speculation, so let me throw a few other variables out.

1.   The US has recently "allowed" Japan to amend it's constitution in order to allow it to partake "more robust military activities".   If China has the second largest military budget, Japan has the third.   It spends twice as much as the UK without the overseas obligations.   Japan's actions would be of critical importance.

2.   The US carriers are especially survivable.   One estimate states a Nimitz class carrier could remain mobile even after as many as 6 exocet hits.   The Aegis cruisers can coordinate the defences of a whole carrier group.   I've played Harpoon enough to know that there carriers and then there are American carriers.

3.   Taiwan has constantly upgraded it's forces in the latest technology.   Their latest highways have been designed to be used as airfields in case of crater bombing.   While no one can really know how a war would go, remember that Egypt and Syria thought they could overwhelm the Israelis in 1973. 

4.   I think the Chinese know that any form of aggression is a tricky call, and the US is capable of matching any escalation level by level.   Even if there were an outcome favourable to the Chinese a political housecleaning would be in order.

As always, just my two cents.


----------



## Nielsen_Noetic

Well it seems the majority of you feel China would lose, I am not an expert in military affairs and I do not claim to be one. So I will concede to the majorities opinion, I will however leave you with an old saying; do not underestimate your enemy. It was Sun Tsu who said do not launch a war unless victory is assured, is it?

the US is capable of matching any escalation level by level.
I doubt that, the U.S. has the majority of it's troops in Iraq at the moment. The only way the U.S. could mustre the man power neccesary to fight China without taking troops from Iraq would more than likely be conscription. No one in the U.S. wants that.


----------



## daniel h.

Caesar said:
			
		

> We should NOT have nuclear weapons. According to McNamara, and I agree, nuclear weapons have no military value whatsoever. Their only function is to deter your opponent from using theirs. As no sane leader would ever use them, possesing them doesn't protect you from those States. That was written in the 80's regarding the Big Bad Soviet Bear. Of course the enemy is different today, but I think you can extrapolate the following from his original statement: As no insane leader would be deterred by our possesion of nukes, possesion does not protect us form those groups/States either.
> 
> With the exception of Total War, like the war in the Pacific, Nukes could never be used. They destroy the land you attack, along with the infrastructure, the people (ours and theirs), and all life within a certain radius. By using them, you remove the possibility of meaningful victory.
> 
> I see no value to expanding the World's nuclear arsenal.




Notice how the U.S. only goes after non-nuclear countries? Perhaps they would increase our independence and allow us to unhitch outselves from the empire before it founders.


----------



## a_majoor

Nielsen_Noetic said:
			
		

> the US is capable of matching any escalation level by level.
> I doubt that, the U.S. has the majority of it's troops in Iraq at the moment. The only way the U.S. could mustre the man power neccesary to fight China without taking troops from Iraq would more than likely be conscription. No one in the U.S. wants that.



No one in the US military wants to go to war armed with muskets either. China has advantages in certain areas (mostly to do with manpower), and a lot of deficiencies in force projection, C4I, Blue water navel power and so on. I am sure the Americans are well aware of the Chinese SS-N-22 Moskit cruise missile, and can take steps to minimise their effect on the battle (steaming on the east side of Tiawan, they can still project air and missile power from beyond the range of Chinese forces...). In any event, the idea of the Americans going toe to toe with the Chinese is an artifact of the 1950s, now the PLA will find itself beset by asymmetric attacks.

China will make its move only if they feel the political or military equation is stacked in their favor, and with the Japanese coming on side with the Tiawanese, it looks like the odds are tilting back towards the West.


----------



## a_majoor

From 1945 to 1989, the United States was "going after" the USSR, a nation which had enough nuclear firepower to pulverize any city, town or villiage of more than @ 5000 people in North America.


----------



## MikeM

Just read today that China passed the anti-succession law, authorizing the use of force if Taiwan does indeed attempt to declare independance.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

I'm not sure Canada is the same country I thought it was....

There is a poll on the Globeandmail.com right now that asks if the USA should intercede if China tries to invade Taiwan - 55% oppose such action by the USA.




M.    ???


----------



## Brad Sallows

>If china deploys and uses their...they US navy would be devestated.

Amazing.  Time and time again we are reminded that everyone but the US has a superweapon which will render pointless any military action by the US.


----------



## Whiskey_Dan

Well true, the only true advantage the American's have over the Chinese is technology. But having been to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (this year) I would also come to the conclusion that Asian troops are very small compared to their North American counterparts. I myself am Asian too...Vietnamese heritage, but having been bornin Canada I am 16 but already bigger then the average adult in Asia. 
So if the democratic forces (so to say) could pull Chinese troops into close quarters or fight them in an open playing field the Chinese forces would have little chance. Let's not also include that almost their entire force is made up of conscripts, and the peasents in rural China are beginning to show more and more unrest at the fact that they haven't seen a penny of the economic growth that the rest of the country in the urban areas has seen. 


Dan


----------



## Long in the tooth

Conscripts never make good soldiers, but at work today I overheard someone say that China could put 200 Million soldiers in the field.  Will that be with pitchforks or shovels?  I wondered.

Information and democratic thoughts are dangerous things for a totalitarian government, but in this day and age no govt can control it.  As the standard of living rises the Chinese will also yearn to be free.  In a democratic and capitalistic society I don't really care which flag you fly as long as you buy my goods.

WRT Taiwan, China knows which side it's bread is buttered.


----------



## P-Free

Here's my take on the Taiwan-China issue; I don't think there will be any armed conflict over the island. Taiwan is of too much strategic significant for the US to let it slip into Chinese hands, and China would become a greater threat to countries in the region like Japan and South Korea. Neither the US, Japan nor South Korea are going to let China control the Taiwan Strait and amass that much more power. 

The Chinese realize how much significance the Taiwan Strait plays in world trade and they realize they wouldn't get away Scots free by seizing it. I doubt the Chinese want to get drawn into a longterm conflict, especially over one province. They aren't stupid people.


----------



## a_majoor

Back in the late 1930s, the Germans made similar calculations, taking a piece of the Rhineland here, a bit of Chech territory there, Austria for dessert...They were not stupid people either, and correctly figured the democracies of the day would not contest bite sized acquisitions or "natural" German territory, until one morning the Reich would be more than twice the size and economic and military potential, at which point the democracies were supposed to cave and accept the imposition of the "New Order".

China has many internal contradictions to work out in the next few decades, the "war option" might be seen as a way to deflect blame and attention, especially if they believe the West would not fight for their fellow democracy because it is "natural" Chinese territory, or the perceived cost of defending Tiawan outweighs the benefits of having a mature and stable democracy in the region.

The other thing which outweighs any preceptions about the relative "smarts" of the Chinese as opposed to the West is pride. The Chinese might find themselves in a situation where their cost of backing down is considered too shameful. Expect irrational decisions (think of August 1914) to dominate the picture then.


----------



## Long in the tooth

Exact right, the Germans made the same calculations... but this time the Chinese don't deal with the British or French but the Americans with 15 US Carrier Groups.  Both sides know they have an escalation trigger....

I have no idea how this will be played out


----------



## Croony

The thing is at the start of WW2 the atomic bomb didn't exist.  If it comes to an american landing on chinese shores and perhaps an eventual spearhead to the capital the chinese will not hesitate to use "the bomb" even if its own people and soldiers are within the killlzone. The leaders there don't care about their own people, it is a corrupt nation that leaves its baby girls in the gutter and allows the poor to get poorer.  No, the next major conflict will not involve china and the US.  The chinese are mostly interested ( and have been mostly interested for thousands of years) in one thing....money...ie properity....having a free taiwan brings china more wealth than if it were conquered and put under its own control.


----------



## a_majoor

Military thinking in the 1920s and 30s was dominated by the chemical warfare threat, and chemical weapons were seen at the time in the way nuclear weapons are seen today. Still, the threat of mustard gas and phosgene didn't slow the Germans down too much.....


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

If it's me and I'm GWB, I immediately start "unofficially" basing US warships in Taiwanese ports.  Once I've been there for a month or so, I get the Taiwanese legislature to issue a formal invitation.  

At that point, I think this whole issue is dead.  It's one thing for the PRC to consider an attack in which they need to calculate if the United States might get involved, versus planning an attack in which they know they would.  




M.


----------



## rice

Whiskey_Dan said:
			
		

> almost their entire force is made up of conscripts
> 
> Dan



you know what's really funny...

china doesnt have conscription


----------



## Ex-Dragoon

rice said:
			
		

> you know what's really funny...
> 
> china doesnt have conscription



You know whats even funnier, you are incorrect. China has _selective conscription_.

http://www.mothersagainstthedraft.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=214&Itemid=62


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Another opinion: http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2005/03/ready-set-go.html



Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Ready. Set. Go?

The Chinese will invade Taiwan.

As this article notes [http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050305/wl_asia_afp/chinanpcmilitary_050305014951], the Chinese are getting ready:

_Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urged greater development of China's military, saying modernizaton of the army was of strategic importance to safeguard the eventual reunification of Taiwan.

"Strengthening national defense and developing the army constitute a task of strategic importance to our modernization drive and an important guarantee for safeguarding national security and reunification," Wen said at the opening session of the annual National People's Congress (NPC).

Wen said it was an "historical objective" to ensure that the army "is capable of winning any war it fights," but also underscored the importance of the military being run "strictly in accordance with the law."_

I've already written about the crash naval building program of China [http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2005/03/meanwhile-in-pacific.html] that seems clearly directed at an amphibious invasion and a naval interference operation to keep us away long enough to conquer Taiwan.

The Chinese are also getting set with a new anti-secession law [http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050308/ap_on_re_as/china_taiwan] that will provide their justification for naked aggression against a free people in a tiny country:

_The proposed anti-secession law, read out for the first time before the ceremonial National People's Congress, does not specify what actions might invite a Chinese attack.

"If possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ nonpeaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Wang Zhaoguo, deputy chairman of the congress' Standing Committee, told the nearly 3,000 members gathered in the Great Hall of the People.

Beijing claims Taiwan, which split from China since 1949, as part of its territory. The communist mainland repeatedly has threatened to invade if Taiwan tries to make its independence permanent, and the new law does not impose any new conditions or make new threats. But it lays out for the first time legal requirements for military action._

The only question is when China will go. I think it will be on the eve of the 2008 Peking summer Olympics. China will have the security issue to cover mobilization and movement of military units. And everybody will assume China is using the attention as a coming out party to highlight their advances and their place in the sun. I think swallowing China under the nose of US and Japanese protection will be even better to demonstrate their power. Why else go on a crash building program for naval units?

This article in the Taipei Times, however, thinks China will use the 2008 Olympics to whip up nationalism [http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2005/03/07/2003225857] and then focus on absorbing Taiwan in the years that follow:

_Some say that China's current focus is on economic development, and that it has no intention of further pressuring Taiwan. But as the communist government is unable to carry out domestic reform, heightened tension with the outside world is the best way to retain its hold on power.

What's more, China is feeling confident, and many specialists in Chinese strategy feel that if China could ride out the storm after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 when it was still weak, there is no reason to worry about the economic cost of a military attack on Taiwan now, when China is strong and Taiwan is weak.

The main target for Hu and his leadership is, however, the Beijing Olympics in 2008. But if the Olympics are concluded successfully, surging nationalist sentiment and strong economic confidence may well convince Hu to seek a resolution to the Taiwan issue before his term in power is over. The anti-secession law can therefore not be passively understood as an anti-independence law. Rather, it has to be understood as an aggressive measure aimed at actively resolving the Taiwan issue._

I think the Taiwanese are underestimating the urgency of the situation. I think the article is exactly right that the Chinese believe their power will compel enough of the world to shrug and get back to business with Peking to make the repercussions of taking a free Taiwan endurable.

Would we mass the Marine Corps to liberate Taiwan? China may not be the old Soviet Union, but they have some nukes that can reach the mainland--not to mention Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii. We have never had two major nuclear powers fight an extended war. Will we risk it? Should we?

The best way to avoid this is to make Taiwan strong enough to hold the line while US and Japanese forces rush to repel a Chinese invasion. If China knows this, they may hold off in the hope that the future will change the strategic situation in their favor.

The second best way to avoid the escalation problem is to win quickly, if the Chinese delude themselves into thinking the US and/or Japan will not defend Taiwan and that the Taiwanese cannot resist. Cripple the first wave; crush the paratroopers and infantry that come across the beach; interdict the follow-up waves with naval and air power; and hit the ports of embarkation. Do all this and make sure Taiwan can throw the Chinese back into the sea so the war ends quickly.

The war against Islamist nutballs is bad enough. I would really like it if the Chinese evolved some sanity and became a normal, civilize country without territorial objectives to be achieved at others expense. You'd think China would recognize it has enough problems 360 degrees without driving us into the enemy camp.

The Chinese are getting ready. They are getting set. When will they go?

posted by Brian J. Dunn


----------



## rice

Ex-Dragoon said:
			
		

> You know whats even funnier, you are incorrect. China has _selective conscription_.
> 
> http://www.mothersagainstthedraft.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=214&Itemid=62



that is pretty funny, becasuse that website is wrong, and so are you. i know the cia world factbook says the same thing about compulsory service, but...what's not true is not true. been to china before seen it myself, perfectly able 18 yr olds going to university or college or job...but not in the army like cia claims

ask a chinese person, PRC (mainland china) has no forced military committment

ROC (taiwan) does, im from there


----------



## Torlyn

rice said:
			
		

> ask a chinese person, PRC (mainland china) has no forced military committment



Funny...  I did, and they have conscription.  Now, if you'd acutally READ Ex-Dragoon's post, (I understand it must be hard to read with your head in your butt, but maybe with a flashlight...) you'd see that he said "selective conscription".  Oh, and from the Chinese, "The PLA has about 2.5 million members, the majority of which are enlisted soldiers who are conscripted".   : 

T


----------



## rice

Torlyn said:
			
		

> Funny...   I did, and they have conscription.   Now, if you'd acutally READ Ex-Dragoon's post, (I understand it must be hard to read with your head in your butt, but maybe with a flashlight...) you'd see that he said "selective conscription".   Oh, and from the Chinese, "The PLA has about 2.5 million members, the majority of which are enlisted soldiers who are conscripted".     :
> 
> T



i dont know why you're being such a dick. i certainly didnt come here with the intention of insulting someone, but you seem to have a real big problem with people who have different opinions
now if you actually READ my post, (i could insert some random trash talk here, but im not you)
you'd see that i said "there are perfectly able 18 year olds going to university or college or jobs...*but not in the army like cia claims*" im not talking about Ex-Dragoon's post

all im saying, is that from my experience as a taiwan-born person, it is my understanding that mainland china does not have a policy of forced military service. im not defending china, im from taiwan. all im trying to convey is what i believe to be the honest truth

have a good day


----------



## loyalcana

Torlyn said:
			
		

> Funny...   I did, and they have conscription.   Now, if you'd acutally READ Ex-Dragoon's post, (I understand it must be hard to read with your head in your butt, but maybe with a flashlight...) you'd see that he said "selective conscription".   Oh, and from the Chinese, "The PLA has about 2.5 million members, the majority of which are enlisted soldiers who are conscripted".     :
> 
> T



While it is true that most most of the enlisted personel of the Chinese Army were conscripted into service most eventually choose to extend beyond their mandated draft terms.


----------



## loyalcana

Croony said:
			
		

> The chinese are mostly interested ( and have been mostly interested for thousands of years) in one thing....money...ie properity...



Well you can replace "chinese" with "humans" and that sentence would still make sense.


----------



## Ex-Dragoon

> all im saying, is that from my experience as a taiwan-born person, it is my understanding that mainland china does not have a policy of forced military service. im not defending china, im from taiwan. all im trying to convey is what i believe to be the honest truth



You have gone from stating a fact to stating a belief. If you are not 100% certain then don't try and opull the wool over our eyes it won't work. BTW why your at it I suggest you read the conduct guidelines. With an attitude like that I think you are a prime candidtate for warnings and probably getting banned, so word to the wise change your tune.


----------



## Torlyn

rice said:
			
		

> i dont know why you're being such a dick. all im saying, is that from my experience as a taiwan-born person, it is my understanding that mainland china does not have a policy of forced military service. im not defending china, im from taiwan. all im trying to convey is what i believe to be the honest truth



First off, don't alter your posts after they've been torn apart.  Makes it look like you're hiding something, or trying to alter the record to make yourself look better.  Second, my respose was a retort to the BS you shovelled on Ex-Dragoon when he said there is "SELECTIVE" conscription, and you told him he was wrong, and said there is no "FORCED" conscription.  If you are unable to coherently post your thoughts, perhaps you shouldn't post.

Lastly, why am I being a dick?  Easy.  You just started posting here, and you have the unmitigated audacity to call one of the senior posters here a liar.  Gee, why would I be a dick to you?  Can't imagine... :  It's super that you were born in Taiwan, and I'm sure you have a hoarde of experience regarding Mainland China living on the island, but face it.  You're wrong.  The Chinese have selective conscription (as Ex-Dragoon said) and as for college/university students, they are actively recruiting.  Just out of curiosity, is everyone who was born in Taiwan an automatic expert on all things Chinese?  As for conveying the truth, Ex-Dragoon and I have shown you what the "truth" is.  You just seemed to have too closed a mind to accept it.

T


----------



## rice

Ex-Dragoon said:
			
		

> You have gone from stating a fact to stating a belief. If you are not 100% certain then don't try and opull the wool over our eyes it won't work. BTW why your at it I suggest you read the conduct guidelines. With an attitude like that I think you are a prime candidtate for warnings and probably getting banned, so word to the wise change your tune.



okay look, i apologize for making an opposing opinion. disagreeing with a senior member is obviously not allowed on this forum, so, if it really irks you that i dont agree with you, ban me. i dont remember china having forced military service, or conscription, but if it makes you feel better that they do, then whatever flows your boat. it's weird how the western web sources agree with you, while asian web sources say the opposite, but then what do asians know. i could be wrong, but then im merely expressing an opinion. sorry if that came across the wrong way


----------



## rice

Torlyn said:
			
		

> First off, don't alter your posts after they've been torn apart.   Makes it look like you're hiding something, or trying to alter the record to make yourself look better.   Second, my respose was a retort to the BS you shovelled on Ex-Dragoon when he said there is "SELECTIVE" conscription, and you told him he was wrong, and said there is no "FORCED" conscription.   If you are unable to coherently post your thoughts, perhaps you shouldn't post.
> 
> Lastly, why am I being a dick?   Easy.   You just started posting here, and you have the unmitigated audacity to call one of the senior posters here a liar.   Gee, why would I be a dick to you?   Can't imagine... :   It's super that you were born in Taiwan, and I'm sure you have a hoarde of experience regarding Mainland China living on the island, but face it.   You're wrong.   The Chinese have selective conscription (as Ex-Dragoon said) and as for college/university students, they are actively recruiting.   Just out of curiosity, is everyone who was born in Taiwan an automatic expert on all things Chinese?   As for conveying the truth, Ex-Dragoon and I have shown you what the "truth" is.   You just seemed to have too closed a mind to accept it.
> 
> T



as long as you admit to being a dick, it's super how you try to justify how being a dick is the right way to behave


----------



## Ex-Dragoon

Rice:
 Opposing viewpoints are welcomed, acting like an idiot like you have in posting them is not.

Read the Forum Guidelines and try again.

Expectation of Respect between Users

All visitors, regardless of age, rank or experience are to be treated as equal unless their conduct dictates otherwise. That means the veteran servicemember and the green private are to assume that they have as much to benefit from the other as they have to offer the other until a reason to contrary is made known. Age, nor number of years excuses anyone from behaving in a manner that isn't civil and polite.

You will not post any information that is offensive, defamatory, *inaccurate*, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law

Guidelines:
http://army.ca/forums/threads/24937.0.html

How many times do we have to tell you no one said _forced_ conscription we said _selective_.  :


----------



## rice

_Expectation of Respect between Users

All visitors, regardless of age, rank or experience are to be treated as equal unless their conduct dictates otherwise. That means the veteran servicemember and the green private are to assume that they have as much to benefit from the other as they have to offer the other until a reason to contrary is made known. Age, nor number of years excuses anyone from behaving in a manner that isn't civil and polite._

and with reference to:

"Lastly, why am I being a dick?  Easy.  You just started posting here, and you have the unmitigated audacity to call one of the senior posters here a liar.  Gee, why would I be a dick to you?  Can't imagine..."

 :


----------



## dutchie

Rice: Could you please take this bun fight to PMs please? Your wasting bandwidth and it has nothing to do with the topic.


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## Infanteer

Ok Stop.

Rice, you were wrong, and you got called on it.   Just let it go and move on with the debate.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I work in an office where only two of us are _not _Taiwanese ... pretty all of the men here are (obviously) ex-military.  I asked, and every single one of them told me that military service in PRC is NOT mandatory.

I think there may be a bit of a language barrier here: the way I understand it China has what they call an annual 'conscription' but it's more akin to what we would call a 'recruiting drive'.  They recruit officer candidates out of universities and those that sign-up get benefits such as free tuition and 'priority' for employment at the end of their term of service.  I don't know what China's actual laws are, but in practice service is not mandatory, even for NCMs.

Rice, I think you might be right, but for the sake of civility please respect what Ex-Dragoon (et.al.) wrote above ...


----------



## Ex-Dragoon

Conscription and the Peoples Republic of China! It sure is amazing that if you google it what you will find.  :

http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/hl669.cfm
http://english.people.com.cn/english/200011/01/eng20001101_54120.html
http://english.people.com.cn/200310/31/eng20031031_127255.shtml
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/C/Co/Conscription.htm

Plus lots and lots more.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Take a look at some more of links you must have found on Google or whatever:  China has an involuntary conscription _policy _ (i.e., it is on the books) however it is not mandatory _in practice_.  If you read the links you provided to People's Daily I think you will see what I was talking about (re: language barrier, specifically the misuse of the word 'conscription' as we understand it: the reference to "well-performing students" should be a little bit of a warning against taking the wording verbatim).

At any rate, I fear the (as yet unproven) idea that "almost their entire force is made up of conscripts" dangerously underestimates their capability ... from what I understand, and is reflected in some of the posts above, China's military has changed drastically since 1979 (including a great deal of force reduction).


----------



## steve-o

Baloo said:
			
		

> The Chinese won't let the island of Taiwan go without a fight, and that is the final answer.



I think the island of Taiwan has been gone for over 50 years now, it is just that Taipei hasn't officially declared itself independent - the lynchpin of the entire problem! Taiwan can probably remain as is indefinitely as long as it doesn't talk too loudly of being separate. In that way, I do believe it is similar to Quebec! Except that Canada has no teeth unlike China. (OK we have   extraordinary teeth , just not a complete set)
Steve


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

steve-o said:
			
		

> I think the island of Taiwan has been gone for over 50 years now, it is just that Taipei hasn't officially declared itself independent - the lynchpin of the entire problem! Taiwan can probably remain as is indefinitely as long as it doesn't talk too loudly of being separate. In that way, I do believe it is similar to Quebec! Except that Canada has no teeth unlike China. (OK we have   extraordinary teeth , just not a complete set)
> Steve



Actually, you may want to check your history.   Taiwan was NEVER part of China.   This is a fantasy created by the PRC to formalize their land claims.

The island was first populated by Malay tribes, became their own republic I believe in the late 1800's which lasted a very short time before they were occupied by the Japanese then independent for another   short time after WWII before being occupied by Chiang Kai-Shek (Nationalist Chinese).   

Bottom Line:   Taiwan has never been part of China, period, end of sentence, full stop.   Look it up if you don't believe me...

Cheers,



Matthew.


----------



## TCBF

Well, that puts it all in a whole new light.

Except the Japanese Army used the natives for bayonet practice, so just about all that is left are the descendents of the Nationalists.  Who are, of course, Chinese.

I hope Taiwan has nukes. ;D

Tom


----------



## Dare

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> Take a look at some more of links you must have found on Google or whatever:  China has an involuntary conscription _policy _ (i.e., it is on the books) however it is not mandatory _in practice_.  If you read the links you provided to People's Daily I think you will see what I was talking about (re: language barrier, specifically the misuse of the word 'conscription' as we understand it: the reference to "well-performing students" should be a little bit of a warning against taking the wording verbatim).
> 
> At any rate, I fear the (as yet unproven) idea that "almost their entire force is made up of conscripts" dangerously underestimates their capability ... from what I understand, and is reflected in some of the posts above, China's military has changed drastically since 1979 (including a great deal of force reduction).



I think if you read what Ex-Dragoon said you'll notice he said selective conscription, which is an accurate discription of China's policy and effectively what you said. It's not a misuse of the word. If conscription is on the books (which it is) and they are selecting to only choose volunteers (which it "seems" they are largely doing publicly, at least) then they have selective conscription. Most conscription is selective, they just have different criteria. It is unusual for a military force to not enforce conscription laws, but when you have 13 million new military aged men a year, you can afford to be even more selective by signing up volunteers only. Now it does seem to be silly having a conscription law you don't need, but it's not the fault of any language barrier. It's the fault of a government that doesn't even follow it's own rules.


----------



## Dare

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> Actually, you may want to check your history.  Taiwan was NEVER part of China.  This is a fantasy created by the PRC to formalize their land claims.
> 
> The island was first populated by Malay tribes, became their own republic I believe in the late 1800's which lasted a very short time before they were occupied by the Japanese then independent for another  short time after WWII before being occupied by Chiang Kai-Shek (Nationalist Chinese).
> 
> Bottom Line:  Taiwan has never been part of China, period, end of sentence, full stop.  Look it up if you don't believe me...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> Matthew.



The problem occurs in the wording, again. "Taiwan" is actually the Republic of China. So, technically, it is a part of China. It would be more accurate to say the island of Taiwan has never been in communist control or under the authority of the People's Republic of China.


----------



## dutchie

I think your getting a little too technical in wording here. Everyone knows what you mean when you say 'Taiwan'.


----------



## Dare

Caesar said:
			
		

> I think your getting a little too technical in wording here. Everyone knows what you mean when you say 'Taiwan'.



Details, like the name of a country, are not trivial.


----------



## a_majoor

> China's Strategy
> They're happy to let us worry about North Korea while they assemble long-term plans to counter American hegemony.
> by Tom Donnelly
> 03/16/2005 12:00:00 AM
> 
> PERHAPS THE WISEST WORDS ever uttered--or attributed--to Ronald Reagan were: Don't just do something, sit there.
> Would that the Gipper were still around to guide U.S. strategy toward North Korea and the "Six Party Talks" meant to deal with Pyongyang's nuclear program. Every time an American starts wringing his hands over the failure of the talks, someone in Beijing smiles contentedly. While we're whipping ourselves over the fact that the North Koreans won't come back to the table--which, actually, is supposed to be China's responsibility--Beijing is advancing its other interests, particularly in putting pressure on Taiwan. The more frustrated and fixated we get, the better the Chinese like it.
> Democrats, in particular, are obsessed by the idea that North Korea's nukes are the most important security issue in East Asia. This was candidate John Kerry's position and former Defense Secretary William Perry has roundly criticized the Bush administration for "outsourcing"--that is, engaging in multilateral diplomacy only--the job of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. These weapons, he insists, constitute an "imminent danger."
> They are exactly that, but the only way to get the North Koreans to even consider getting rid of their nukes or stopping their nuclear program is to offer them a "non-aggression" pact that forswears not only the use of armed force but the policy of "regime change" in Pyongyang. Other liberal commentators, like Selig Harrison, don't think the North has the nukes, but thinks we should guarantee the safety of the Kim regime anyway. Quite rightly, the administration thinks that's too much to pay, even for the best arms control deal. The fundamental problem is the North Korean regime, not the weapons. North Korea--with its million-man army, thousands of artillery pieces, and rockets able to reach Seoul--was an imminent threat before it had nuclear weapons and will be an imminent threat if it gets rid of them.
> But even as proliferation mania distorts U.S. policy toward the Korean peninsula, it also fuzzes our China strategy beyond recognition. The combination of September 11 and North Korean nukes puts us in the position of begging for Chinese help on two fronts where they can't or won't do much and diverts our attention from those issues where China is of greatest concern; we've taken Chinese priorities as our own. Little wonder that Beijing wants to string out the Six Party Talks to eternity and has been trying to portray its repression of Turkic Uighurs in western China as actions against Islamic terrorists.
> In short, the United States continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope. We're thus blinded to a whole host of worrying developments that reveal China's progress as a geopolitical--and increasingly global--competitor. The Chinese "legislature" just passed an "anti-secession law" that not only "legitimizes" an attack on Taiwan but greater internal repression as well; the Beijing government sees secessionists everywhere. China is beginning to string together a necklace of client states in the oil-rich Middle East--Iran and Sudan, to name two--and even into the Americas, cozying up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Venezuela supplies about 13 percent of daily U.S. oil imports, and just as Beijing fears the U.S. Navy's ability to sever China's connection to international energy markets, China wouldn't mind being able to return the favor with Chavez's help.
> 
> Even during the Cold War, the United States has never had a comprehensive strategy for East Asia; all our security arrangements have been bilateral, one-on-one affairs. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire and the initiation of the age of American hyperpower, things have only gotten worse, through two Bush presidencies and two Clinton terms. While we try to deal with individual issues and wait until a time of crisis--as with North Korea--Beijing patiently works out a strategy of unraveling the Pax Americana.
> 
> Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

And what is Canada doing?


Matthew.      

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By GEOFFREY YORK

Wednesday, March 16, 2005 

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

 Beijing - A controversial new roof-of-the-world railway, branded as a threat to Tibet's cultural survival, will begin operation next year with heavy participation from two major Canadian companies.

Nortel Networks Corp. and Bombardier Inc. have been awarded contracts to provide key elements for the spectacular mountaintop railway that could carry up to 100,000 Chinese migrants into Tibet every month.

The Canadian firms are confident their technology can endure the harsh conditions on the railway line - including subzero temperatures, low oxygen, sandstorms, permafrost and some of the most forbidding mountains in the world.

Montreal-based Bombardier will provide the railway with hundreds of special high-tech train cars with enriched oxygen systems and extra protection against ultraviolet rays, while Nortel will supply its wireless communication system.

The Chinese project, the highest-altitude railway in the world, is gaining fame for its extraordinary construction methods in blasting through ice and laying tracks above the permafrost on mountains up to 5,000 metres high.

But it is also provoking fears that it will pave the way for the cultural assimilation and political colonization of the two million Tibetans who live in the region.

The railway line is so far above sea level that its trains will have to be sealed and pressurized like aircraft cabins. Altitude sickness is a daily threat to the 100,000 construction workers who are toiling on the project. The railway tracks will be elevated to keep them above the permafrost as it thaws and buckles on summer days.

The $3.2-billion (U.S.) railway line, due to begin operating in June of 2006, will stretch more than 1,140 kilometres from the city of Golmud, in western China, to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The project has been a dream of Chinese rulers since the early years of the last century, although it was long thought to be impossible to build.

Nortel announced Wednesday that the Chinese Railways Ministry has selected the Brampton, Ont.-based firm to provide the digital wireless communications network for the Tibet railway. It will be the first Chinese commercial use of the wireless technology, known as GSM for Railways, and it will be the first in China to operate without a traditional analog system for backup.

"As a landmark project for China to develop its western region, Nortel is pleased to provide the communications system that will help ignite and power the region's economic growth,â ? Robert Mao, president of Nortel's China operations, said in a statement Wednesday.

He said Nortel was awarded the contract after passing all required tests during a year-long trial of its technology on a 186-kilometre stretch of track at altitudes up to 4,780 metres.

A consortium led by Bombardier has been awarded a $281-million contract to produce 361 rail cars for the Tibet line, including 308 standard cars and 53 special tourist cars. Bombardier's share of the contract is worth $78-million.

The tourist cars will include luxury sleeping rooms with individual showers and cars with panoramic views and luxury dining and entertainment. China expects that 900,000 tourists will travel on the Tibet railway every year.

"This project represents a very important technology challenge,â ? Zhang Jianwei, the chief Bombardier representative in China, said in a statement late last month.

Human rights activists are worried the two Canadian companies could be helping China to swamp the Tibetan culture and assimilate the population into China's ethnic Han majority. They note that relatively few Tibetans have been included among the 100,000 construction workers on the project.

"There have been serious concerns raised by Tibetan groups regarding the negative impact of the railroad itself and also about discriminatory hiring practices in its construction,â ? said Carole Samdup, a program officer at Rights & Democracy, a human rights organization in Montreal that was created by the Canadian Parliament. "Canadian companies who participate in this initiative may find themselves accused of complicity in a variety of human rights violations.â ?

In a detailed report on the railway project in 2003, the International Campaign for Tibet concluded the railway will further militarize the Tibetan Plateau, jeopardize its environment, and trigger a population influx that represents "a significant threat to the livelihoods and culture of the Tibetan people, as well as to their prospect for achieving genuine political autonomy.â ?

The Canadian firms rejected the criticism of their role.

"Nortel categorically rejects in the strongest possible terms that it would participate in repressing the human rights or democratic rights of any individuals,â ? said Marion MacKenzie, vice-president of corporate communications at Nortel.

Hélène Gagnon, a spokeswoman for Bombardier, said the firm cannot comment on any political questions about the Tibet railway. "Any political issues in Tibet are between the citizens and their government.â ?

© The Globe and Mail 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## dutchie

Dare said:
			
		

> Details, like the name of a country, are not trivial.



Next we'll start arguing over 'the occupied territory of Palestine', or whether it's Serbo-Croat,Croatian,Serbian or Swahili. "_No, I want Kava, not Kafa you ignorant slut_!" 

Purely semantics.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Caesar said:
			
		

> Next we'll start arguing over 'the occupied territory of Palestine', or whether it's Serbo-Croat,Croatian,Serbian or Swahili. "_No, I want Kava, not Kafa you ignorant slut_!"
> 
> Purely semantics.



Taiwan is actually much more clear-cut than Palestine-Israel, and it's in the favour of the Taiwanese.

The only reason this whole absurdity isn't dismissed out of hand is world corporations salavating over a market of 1+ billion.

Greed is a terrible thing....



M.     ???


----------



## Spr.Earl

Asians have patience when it comes to a goal.
China has a goal and her goal is to win economically if not by Arms in the future.
They are trying to buy Noranda Mines the worlds largest mining company which is Canadian,they have invested in the Tar Sands big time!!

So should we all start learning Mandarin?


----------



## Dare

Caesar said:
			
		

> Next we'll start arguing over 'the occupied territory of Palestine', or whether it's Serbo-Croat,Croatian,Serbian or Swahili. "_No, I want Kava, not Kafa you ignorant slut_!"
> 
> Purely semantics.


I don't see how giving the proper title of a country is semantic. It's not you say he says. Taiwan itself says and everyone agrees. They are the Republic of China. There's nothing to argue about here, unless you want to talk about Palestine.


----------



## Infanteer

Semantics is right - are we just trying to play the "well, I am smarter then you - it is actually the ROC!" game?   Does it really move the discussion anywhere?

One of my good buddies in University was from there - when I asked him where he was from, he certainly didn't say "Republic of China".

PS: Everyone please remember that, next time we discuss North Korea, that it is not North Korea but the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.   Please refer to the CIA World Factbook before using common vernacular, lest you offend someone's sensabilities.

Sheesh.... :


----------



## Dare

Infanteer said:
			
		

> Semantics is right - are we just trying to play the "well, I am smarter then you - it is actually the ROC!" game?  Does it really move the discussion anywhere?
> 
> One of my good buddies in University was from there - when I asked him where he was from, he certainly didn't say "Republic of China".
> 
> PS: Everyone please remember that, next time we discuss North Korea, that it is not North Korea but the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  Please refer to the CIA World Factbook before using common vernacular, lest you offend someone's sensabilities.
> 
> Sheesh.... :



As I was trying to say in response to this: "Bottom Line:  Taiwan has never been part of China, period, end of sentence, full stop.  Look it up if you don't believe me..."

This is an inaccurate statement. The reason for my response is not some sort of "wow I'm so smart, look at me" thing. If I wanted to bask in the glory of my meager intellect, I'd go join MENSA and chat about rubik's cubes. I'm trying to explain a very key aspect here, that not many people are aware of, (while perhaps you or the poster who replied are). It's not semantic, and it's not trivial. It's the *entire problem*. One side claims to be the legitimate China, while the other side does as well. Only one side can win here. 

The title of Taiwan's Government Information Offices webpage:  "Government Information Office, Republic of China (Taiwan)". I don't think they view it as trivial or semantic, either. Certainly, both names are currently acceptable, but clearly, the Republic of China is not simply achored to the island of Taiwan. It's a very important distinction if one is to understand the situation.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Dare said:
			
		

> As I was trying to say in response to this: "Bottom Line:   Taiwan has never been part of China, period, end of sentence, full stop.   Look it up if you don't believe me..."
> 
> This is an inaccurate statement. The reason for my response is not some sort of "wow I'm so smart, look at me" thing. If I wanted to bask in the glory of my meager intellect, I'd go join MENSA and chat about rubik's cubes. I'm trying to explain a very key aspect here, that not many people are aware of, (while perhaps you or the poster who replied are). It's not semantic, and it's not trivial. It's the *entire problem*. One side claims to be the legitimate China, while the other side does as well. Only one side can win here.
> 
> The title of Taiwan's Government Information Offices webpage:   "Government Information Office, Republic of China (Taiwan)". I don't think they view it as trivial or semantic, either. Certainly, both names are currently acceptable, but clearly, the Republic of China is not simply achored to the island of Taiwan. It's a very important distinction if one is to understand the situation.



You're still wrong, so I'll try to say this as clearly as I can.

1)   Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China.
2)   Chiang Kai-Shek when he occupied and independent Taiwan created the name "Republic of China" in the hopes it would grant him the legitimacy he would need to one day be able to retake the mainland, ergo the name.
3)   The fact that Chiang Kai Shek (an authoritarian) one day made a claim on the mainland and used the name "Republic of China" to legitimize that claim has nothing to do with a reverse claim by the mainland on the island which is complete fraud.

....and if you cannot get that through your head, MENSA wouldn't want you.




M.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> You're still wrong, so I'll try to say this as clearly as I can.
> ...
> 1)   Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China.
> ...



I disagree.

Taiwan was an integral part of China from 1683 until the Treaty of Shimonoseki which ended the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.   At that time China ceded sovereignty over Taiwan to Japan.   China reasserted its sovereignty in 1945.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Dare said:
			
		

> I think if you read what Ex-Dragoon said you'll notice he said selective conscription, which is an accurate discription of China's policy and effectively what you said. It's not a misuse of the word. If conscription is on the books (which it is) and they are selecting to only choose volunteers (which it "seems" they are largely doing publicly, at least) then they have selective conscription. Most conscription is selective, they just have different criteria. It is unusual for a military force to not enforce conscription laws, but when you have 13 million new military aged men a year, you can afford to be even more selective by signing up volunteers only. Now it does seem to be silly having a conscription law you don't need, but it's not the fault of any language barrier. It's the fault of a government that doesn't even follow it's own rules.



"Selecting to choose only volunteers" ... are you joking?  Ex-Dragoon gave an accurate description of their law: I am pointing-out that all of the information I've seen and heard shows that their policy _does not_ reflect their law.  The United States still has Selective Service: does this mean that we can safely assume that their army is almost entirely conscripts?    Give me a break!

I'm trying to stay away from the semantic argument: does anyone have any information (other than a law that does not appear to be enforced) to support the notion that the PLA is almost entirely conscripts?  I don't know when they stopped actively conscripting soldiers (I would guess mid-80's), so I don't know if the statement is accurate.  OTOH, I would think some conscript armies (the IDF comes to mind) compare quite favourably man-for-man against 'decent' all-volunteer forces, anyway.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Oh boy, this is not good:

2005-03-17 13:54     * RUSSIA * CHINA * EXERCISES *

CHINA TRYING TO USE RUSSIAN ARMY FOR ITS OWN PURPOSES

MOSCOW, March 17. (RIA Novosti)-Yesterday, Chief of the Russian General Staff Yury Baluyevsky left for China to settle a scandal over the first Russian-Chinese military exercise, Commonwealth-2005, which is due to be held this fall off the Yellow Sea coast, writes Kommersant.

The initial plans were to practice operational teamwork in combating terrorism during the exercise. However, Beijing, skillfully changing the format of the exercise, has tried to *re-orient the two countries' armies to practicing an invasion of Taiwan.*

The choice of where the exercise will take place became a stumbling block. The Russian military selected the Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region, basing their choice on the area's problematic nature due to Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, which has become an arena in the fight against international terrorism. However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal. Instead, it suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

A joint exercise in this area would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only from Taiwan but also America and Japan, which recently included the island in the zone of their common strategic interests.

*Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island to show it that its policy is also causing dissatisfaction in Russia, from which the Taiwanese are expecting assistance in their dialogue with Beijing and bid to join the WTO and the UN.*

On the Russian military's insistence, the exercise was shifted north to the Shangdong peninsula. However, the Chinese are trying to change the format of the exercise with proposals to enlarge the contingents with Marines and Pacific Fleet warships. Marine landings to seize the area will be practiced during the "antiterrorist" exercise.

Russia's agreement to hold the exercise will inevitably cause a furor in America, Japan and Taiwan. But a refusal will spoil relations with China, which three months ago courteously agreed to Russia's proposal to hold an exercise.


http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=5465430&startrow=1&date=2005-03-17&do_alert=0



Maybe interesting to point-out the significance of Nixon's role in perpetuating Sino-Soviet conflict ... also came-across a statistic that said there was +/- 500,000 'fierce patriotic' Taiwanese (ex-military) businessmen in Shanghai which would affect any war ...


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> I disagree.
> 
> Taiwan was an integral part of China from 1683 until the Treaty of Shimonoseki which ended the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.   At that time China ceded sovereignty over Taiwan to Japan.   China reasserted its sovereignty in 1945.



Excellent historical breakdown found here....which makes both our previous statements appear overreaching:   http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/History-of-Taiwan




Matthew.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> Excellent historical breakdown found here....which makes both our previous statements appear overreaching:   http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/History-of-Taiwan
> 
> Matthew.



Sorry, I don't quite understand.  I'm not trying to be argumentative, but:

I said: "Taiwan was an integral part of China from 1683 until the Treaty of Shimonoseki which ended the Sino-Japanese War of 1894."

The refernce you provide said:


> From 1683 the Qing Dynasty ruled Taiwan as a prefecture and in 1875 divided the island into two prefectures, north and south. In 1887 the island was made into a separate Chinese province ... As settlement for losing the Sino-Japanese War, Imperial China ceded the entire island of Taiwan to Japan in 1895.



I said: "China reasserted its sovereignty in 1945."

The reference you cited said:


> From 1895, when Taiwan was ceded to Japan, to 1945, when it was returned to Chinese administration ...



How was I "overreaching"?

You said, earlier (your emphasis) "Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China."

Both I and the refernce you cited say you were wrong.


----------



## Dare

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> "Selecting to choose only volunteers" ... are you joking?  Ex-Dragoon gave an accurate description of their law: I am pointing-out that all of the information I've seen and heard shows that their policy _does not_ reflect their law.  The United States still has Selective Service: does this mean that we can safely assume that their army is almost entirely conscripts?    Give me a break!
> 
> I'm trying to stay away from the semantic argument: does anyone have any information (other than a law that does not appear to be enforced) to support the notion that the PLA is almost entirely conscripts?  I don't know when they stopped actively conscripting soldiers (I would guess mid-80's), so I don't know if the statement is accurate.  OTOH, I would think some conscript armies (the IDF comes to mind) compare quite favourably man-for-man against 'decent' all-volunteer forces, anyway.



Sorry, I was not trying to defend the idea that all of China's army is conscripts. I don't believe that.


----------



## Dare

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> You're still wrong, so I'll try to say this as clearly as I can.
> 
> 1)  Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China.
> 2)  Chiang Kai-Shek when he occupied and independent Taiwan created the name "Republic of China" in the hopes it would grant him the legitimacy he would need to one day be able to retake the mainland, ergo the name.
> 3)  The fact that Chiang Kai Shek (an authoritarian) one day made a claim on the mainland and used the name "Republic of China" to legitimize that claim has nothing to do with a reverse claim by the mainland on the island which is complete fraud.
> 
> ....and if you cannot get that through your head, MENSA wouldn't want you.
> 
> M.



I suggest you read that encyclopedia entry you quoted in your other message a little more closely. You make Chiang Kai Shek's "claim" seem like he's just one guy rather than a very large movement. The Republic of China was considered the legitimate "China" in the United Nations for a time as well. It in fact was a founding member. 

Edited for bad spelling.  ;D


----------



## Dare

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> Oh boy, this is not good:
> 
> 2005-03-17 13:54     * RUSSIA * CHINA * EXERCISES *
> 
> CHINA TRYING TO USE RUSSIAN ARMY FOR ITS OWN PURPOSES
> 
> MOSCOW, March 17. (RIA Novosti)-Yesterday, Chief of the Russian General Staff Yury Baluyevsky left for China to settle a scandal over the first Russian-Chinese military exercise, Commonwealth-2005, which is due to be held this fall off the Yellow Sea coast, writes Kommersant.
> 
> The initial plans were to practice operational teamwork in combating terrorism during the exercise. However, Beijing, skillfully changing the format of the exercise, has tried to *re-orient the two countries' armies to practicing an invasion of Taiwan.*
> 
> The choice of where the exercise will take place became a stumbling block. The Russian military selected the Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region, basing their choice on the area's problematic nature due to Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, which has become an arena in the fight against international terrorism. However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal. Instead, it suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.
> 
> A joint exercise in this area would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only from Taiwan but also America and Japan, which recently included the island in the zone of their common strategic interests.
> 
> *Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island to show it that its policy is also causing dissatisfaction in Russia, from which the Taiwanese are expecting assistance in their dialogue with Beijing and bid to join the WTO and the UN.*
> 
> On the Russian military's insistence, the exercise was shifted north to the Shangdong peninsula. However, the Chinese are trying to change the format of the exercise with proposals to enlarge the contingents with Marines and Pacific Fleet warships. Marine landings to seize the area will be practiced during the "antiterrorist" exercise.
> 
> Russia's agreement to hold the exercise will inevitably cause a furor in America, Japan and Taiwan. But a refusal will spoil relations with China, which three months ago courteously agreed to Russia's proposal to hold an exercise.
> 
> 
> http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=5465430&startrow=1&date=2005-03-17&do_alert=0
> 
> 
> 
> Maybe interesting to point-out the significance of Nixon's role in perpetuating Sino-Soviet conflict ... also came-across a statistic that said there was +/- 500,000 'fierce patriotic' Taiwanese (ex-military) businessmen in Shanghai which would affect any war ...



Certainly a concern, this should be as well:
US perspective: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/18/82202.shtml
British perspective: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3512088.stm
Chinese perspective: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/16/content_315366.htm


----------



## TCBF

"would think some conscript armies (the IDF comes to mind) compare quite favourably man-for-man against 'decent' all-volunteer forces, anyway."

With a conscript Army, you get to pick and choose your recruits in a tight "Man Market".  All things being equal, a conscript army CAN get a more stable and intelligent cohort than a volunteer force that relies on only what walks in the door.

Bear in mind, the Officers and long service NCOs will be professional volunteers in any case, so the determinant factor is the quality of the officer and NCO corps, not the conscript/volunteer ratio.  All things being equal.  

We have a hard time seeing this in Canada, what with "The myth of the Canadian volunteer" clouding the arguments.

Tom


----------



## Torlyn

Here's an idea!  Let's stop with the semantics, agree to interpret things differently, and return to topic?  I would have thought that the joint exercises between Russia and China would have illicited much more of a response...

T


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting what you might end up reading in Mandrin:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200532120.asp



> *Chinese Bureaucrats Getting Blogged to Death*
> by James Dunnigan
> March 21, 2005
> 
> It's estimated that about a million Chinese are now running blogs (web logs.) This, for Chinese security officials, is worse than chat rooms and bulletin boards. The bloggers have quickly become quite good at saying what the government doesn't want said, but doing it in a way to deceive the software tools the government uses to watch for such misbehavior. Most of the blogs do not cover political issues, but the ones that do are saying things the government doesn't want Chinese people to see. The most worrisome blogging covers government corruption, which officials would rather keep in the shadows while they try to deal with it. Tales of corruption in the military are particularly embarrassing, because the government is stressing the growing power of the Chinese armed forces.


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting look at an alternative strategy:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200532323.asp



> *The Weapon China Fears the Most*
> by James Dunnigan
> March 23, 2005
> 
> The US trade deficit (the value of goods bought from China versus what was sold to them) reached $162 billion. *That amount accounts for over twenty percent of China's GDP (total economic activity.)* This has serious military implications. If China goes to war with the United States, the first impact would not be bombs, but an end to exports to the United States. Putting over a hundred million Chinese out of work would have a larger impact than any bombing campaign. Taiwanese companies also control over $50 billion of economic activity in China. Taking Taiwan, in one piece, would add about ten percent to China's GDP. But the loss of American markets would be far greater.



To put it in perspective, the job losses alone would be the same as putting 1/2 the entire population of the United States out of work. You could say there would be a comparable loss of economic activity in the United States and North America in general, but would losing the toys in our happy meals really be such an economic imposition?

But, history demonstrates that rationality is often not the motivating factor for many nations (via Instapundit



> This will deter the Chinese, if they're rational.
> 
> UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails: True. plus, the more foreign oil they import, the more vulnerable they would be to the US Navy cutting off their supplies. Worked wonders on Japan in WWII. *Of course, they said all of this about Germany before WWI."* Yes, that's the problem with the rational-actor assumption.


----------



## WATCHDOG-81

Strategically, a conflict between the United States and China would be to no ones benefit.  Given the fact that the US has become a debtor empire, a substantial and rising share of foreign holdings of American bonds are in fact in the hands of East Asian Central banks, which have been buying up dollar assets in order to keep their own currencies from appreciating against the dollar.  Since April 2002, the central banks of China alone have bought 96 Billion dollars of U.S. government securities.  The strategic implications of this is the fact that for the U.S to remain economically stable - to be precise, for its ability to finance federal borrowing at around 4% per annum, the U.S is reliant on the central banks of China.  In much the same way that a creditor has leverage over a debtor, if China were to sell of a few Billion in U.S. bonds, this would apply pressure on the dollar and on U.S. interest rates.  Of course, this would have serious implications for China in regards to its exports, however, it goes to show just how interconnected we all are.


----------



## a_majoor

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

*China, U.S. interests conflict*
By Barton W. Marcois and Leland R. Miller
Published March 25, 2005

Lost amid the responses to President Bush's 2005 State of the Union speech was that of China's phlegmatic Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan. Twice asked by a reporter whether China shared the president's hope that democracy would take root in the Middle East, Mr. Kong artfully evaded the question, merely hinting that the issue was not on China's agenda.

In fact, China's agenda is so different that it threatens to seriously undermine American initiatives in the Middle East.

The United States and China have never seen eye-to-eye in the region, but the reasons for this have evolved over time. China's diplomacy in the Middle East began in the 1950s as an ideologicalcrusade in support of socialist Arab leaders such as Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, but by the 1970s its focus had shifted to weapon sales. By the 1990s, China was actively supplying ballistic missiles to Syria, missile technology to Libya, and sensitive missile and nuclear technology to Iran and Iraq.

In the new millennium, China's Middle Eastern strategy has shifted again, from part-time arms salesman to outright energy diplomacy. Under China's current Five-Year Plan, which publicly introduced the concept of energy security, China unveiled its "Twenty-first Century Oil Strategy" in February 2003. While this $100 billion program has a variety of domestic components, priority one is the securing of new energy sources abroad.

*The urgency of this mission can hardly be overstated. Since 2000, China has accounted for nearly 40 percent of the growth in world oil demand and is now the world's No. 2 oil importer. Experts predict the Chinese demand for crude will increase annually by 12 percent until 2020 and by 2025 China's daily imports will exceed that of the entire continent of Europe. To avert this growing crisis, China is undertaking major efforts to expand its energy relationships in Central Asia, Latin America and Africa.*

Yet here is where the conventional wisdom collides with the present reality. Many scholars have simply accepted that China wants to lessen its dependence on the volatile Middle East and the long, vulnerable supply lines through the Indonesian archipelago. All true. But what is actually happening right now is that China's dependence on the Middle East is increasing, not just in absolute terms but as a percentage of its oil imports. Five of its top six oil suppliers (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Oman, Yemen, and Sudan) are located in the Middle East, a region that now provides more than 60 percent of China's total crude imports. This figure may rise to 70 to 80 percent over the coming decade.

On first glance, this may seem surprising. How can China hope to compete in the crowded Middle East with other oil-hungry nations, particularly the United States?

*The answer is that China plays by a different set of rules. As China's support for the rogue regimes in Iran and Sudan has made clear, moral constraints and human-rights considerations are not pillars of Beijing's foreign-policy calculus. While Tehran threatens to go nuclear and Khartoum continues its genocide in Darfur, Beijing has used its clout (and U.N. veto) to shield these regimes from international sanctions. In return, it receives entree into two important energy markets.*

Furthermore, unlike private Western oil companies who are beholden to shareholders and profit margins, Chinese state-owned oil-traders have been given the mandate to secure long-term energy relationships by offering hugely discounted rates, production-sharing arrangements and technical know-how. The fact that China has overpaid for recent ventures in Oman, Sudan and elsewhere is telling. Rather than investing in money-makers, China is buying footholds throughout the Middle East.

These footholds are popping up everywhere. While China's relations with Saudia Arabia and Iran have received the most press, its dealings in countries such as Oman and Sudan are even more extraordinary. In Sudan, China is the single largest shareholder of an oil company consortium that dominates Sudan's oil industry and the chief investor in the country's largest pipeline. In Oman, a phenomenal 85 percent of the country's oil exports is currently earmarked for Beijing.

China is also ensconced elsewhere: In 2004, China inaugurated its first joint oil venture with Syria, made major inroads into Yemen, and expanded its presence in Egypt, Libya and Algeria. *To safeguard these assets, China is constructing a massive harbor for oil tankers in Gwadar, Pakistan, at the tip of the Persian Gulf. This will allow it a permanent naval presence in the Arabian Sea.*

From these developments, two observations can be made: First, *China is now a major regional player â â€ and one that clearly does not share the American vision of a free and democratic Middle East*. Second, *China's Middle East agenda is quickly shaping up to be a direct challenge to that of the United States'.* In addition to remaining a strategic competitor for resources, China's leverage may become increasingly dependent on its ability to undercut U.S. initiatives.

If China has indeed adopted the role of spoiler, as its recent actions in Iran and Sudan seem to indicate, then Chinese intransigence â â€ not Islamic extremism â â€ may prove to be the X factor in the 21st century Middle East.
    
    Barton W. Marcois, a principal at RJI Capital Corp., served as principal deputy assistant secretary of Energy under President Bush. Leland R. Miller, a China specialist, is a lawyer in New York.


----------



## JBP

This clearly shows the intent of Taiwan and what it's people want. I suppose they might be willing to muster an army of about 1 million also? I damn well hope so!!! Freedom seems to always be attained through bloodshed, maybe it's thier turn?  :-


Taiwanese hold massive protest against China
One million march against law authorizing attack on islandThe Associated Press
Updated: 6:24 a.m. ET March 26, 2005TAIPEI, Taiwan - About a million Taiwanese marched through the capital on Saturday at a rally protesting a new Chinese law that authorizes an attack on the island if it moves toward formal independence.

advertisement

Hundreds of thousands assembled at 10 different areas in Taipei, with each route representing one of the articles of the anti-secession law. The marchers converged on the wide boulevard in front of the Presidential Office building.

"China is a violent country. We want nothing to do with it,â ? said protester Wu Chao-hsiung, a carpenter from Taipei. "We have to insist on the freedom to determine our own fate.â ?

Beijing is worried that self-ruled Taiwan is drifting toward independence, and China's legislature recently passed a law codifying the use of military force against Taiwan if it seeks a permanent split. A civil war split the rivals 56 years ago.

"What do we want from China? Peace,â ? lawmaker Bikhim Hsiao led the crowd in chanting.

Thousands of tour buses brought protesters to Taipei from all over the island. Police estimated the crowd at about a million.

Organizers billed the protest as a carnival for peace. A five-story-high white balloon representing peace, and an equally tall model of a red sea urchin, its needles symbolizing the missiles China is pointing at Taiwan, were erected at the protest site. The sea urchin model was deflated at the end of the rally, while protesters climbed over it, trying to tear it apart.

"Taiwan is only a small island, so we must speak out really loud to make the world hear that we are a democracy facing an evil giant,â ? said Vivian Wang, a 38-year-old restaurant worker. She had traveled by bus from the southern city of Kaohsiung - about 190 miles away.

Behind her, U.S. and Japanese flags were flying below a green protest banner. Many Taiwanese see those two countries as the island's most likely allies in any military conflict with China.

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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## Bruce Monkhouse

Behind her, U.S. and Japanese flags were flying below a green protest banner.

...right there the Chinese "govt" would be fuming......


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## Cdn Blackshirt

Sorry for the slow response, but I had to take care of a family funeral....

RE:   "Reaching"?

Your use of the term "Integral":   



> On the eve of the Sino-Japanese War about 45 percent of the island was administered under standard Chinese administration while the remaining lightly populated regions of the interior were under Aboriginal control. Only eight years after Taiwan became a province of Qing, Taiwan was ceded to Japan.



The fact they gave up their claims on the island:



> As settlement for losing the Sino-Japanese War, Imperial China ceded the entire island of Taiwan to Japan in 1895.



Lastly, I find it absurd that historical colonization by royalty-based empires somehow trumps the right of self-determination.   




Matthew.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm sorry for your loss.

I guess I'm still a wee bit confused.

Here was the original exchange:
------------


			
				Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> You're still wrong, so I'll try to say this as clearly as I can ...
> 
> 1)   Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China ...



I disagree.

Taiwan was an integral part of China from 1683 until the Treaty of Shimonoseki which ended the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.   At that time China ceded sovereignty over Taiwan to Japan.   China reasserted its sovereignty in 1945.
----------

I don't want to belabour the exact meaning of _integral_ (of a whole) but since Taiwan was â â€œ for about 200 years, part of the whole of China then, as I understand the language, it was integral â â€œ but I'm sure that my English is deficient.

More to the point: I understand your view that China's imperial reach should not give credence to any modern day claim.   The problem is that the Chinese do not see it that way.   Many, I will venture to say most Chinese people _*believe*_ that everything which ever was China's must always be China's â â€œ it is an extension of the idea that each dynasty (including the modern, _communistic_ oligarchy) has (even today, in the 21st century) a _mandate_ from 'heaven' to rule _all under heaven_.   This may be 2,500 year old stuff but it resonates, today.   The Maoists did not do much to tamper with the _Han_ people's well established sense of their place in the world â â€œ in the _middle_ between 'heaven' and barbarian chaos.

This Chinese cultural attribute complicates life for everyone, including the Chinese in Taiwan and the folks in Kyrgyzstan, who are seen, by many Han Chinese, as members of an important Chinese _minority_.   That is one of the reasons why there is so little public comment by Chinese commentators _against_ China's claims to Taiwan â â€œ most Chinese believe it is a valid claim.

The ongoing visit of Taiwanese opposition Kuomintang officials is another complication   because it reaffirms Chiang Kai-shek's original view (shared by many Taiwanese) that Taiwan was, then and now, and integral part of China.

I agree that China's claim to Taiwan flies in the face of all of our liberal-democratic values.   I am less sure that we â â€œ in the entire American led West â â€œ are willing to go to war with China over Taiwan.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

> Historically, the island of Taiwan has NEVER been part of China ...



My bad....I thought I wrote a retraction in the last post.   My statement was factually 100% wrong....

I had made the mistake of reading one source on Taiwan's chronology and it happened to be a pro-Taiwanese Independence site.




M.     :-[

P.S.   Thank you for the kind thoughts regarding my grandmother.


----------



## Edward Campbell

No problem, Matthew.   I think the reason I was a bit confused was that it is not like you to try to ride a dead horse (or whatever the correct aphorism might be).

Welcome back to the fray.


----------



## a_majoor

One scenario of how this might play out:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/2005448.asp



> *China Plans Surprise Attack on Taiwan*
> by James Dunnigan
> April 4, 2005
> 
> China is apparently planning an â Å“out-of-the-blueâ ? (OOTB) attack on Taiwan, that will initially consist mainly of missiles, warplanes, paratroopers and troops out on "training exercises". What this means is that, during what appears to be peacetime maneuvers, the troops involved will suddenly move against a nearby nation and invade. This tactic was developed by Russia during the Cold War, but never used. They prepared for it by holding large scale training exercises twice a year, near the border with West Germany. The Russian troops were all ready to practice, or go to war. An OOTB attack could be ordered by having the troops to cross the border and attack NATO forces, who would have insufficient warning to deal with the sudden offensive. NATO finally caught on to this plan, and put the troops on alert during the Russian field exercises. *The OOTB was most noticeably used, and successfully at that, when the Russian trained Egyptian army surprised the Israelis and recaptured the Suez canal in 1973. *
> 
> If everyone is on to OOTB attacks, how does China expect to get away with it? Especially when it would involve an amphibious operation involving at least ten hours time at sea for the ships of the amphibious force. *The exact details are kept secret, but the plan involves using over 600 ballistic missiles, and several hundred warplanes, which China has stationed within range of Taiwan. Within an hour, the missiles could hit Taiwanese anti-aircraft missile launchers, radars, airbases, ships in harbor and army barracks and combat vehicles. Launch the attack in the pre-dawn hours, and you catch most of the troops in their barracks, and the ships, warplanes and tanks lined up and vulnerable. Amphibious troops would already be on their ships, for an amphibious exercises, escorted by numerous warships. As the amphibious fleet headed for Taiwan, hundreds of Chinese warplanes would return to hit whatever targets had been missed. *
> 
> Taiwanese commanders have responded with plans to keep warships at sea and some aircraft in the air at all times during Chinese exercises. Even 900 ballistic missiles, which the Chinese will have in place during the next few years, would not be sufficient to shut down the Taiwanese armed forces. But if the missiles, and air strikes soon thereafter, could do enough damage to prevent the first wave of amphibious ships from getting hit bad, Taiwan would be in big trouble. In fact, if the Chinese could get control of the air over Taiwan for a day or so, three Chinese airborne divisions could be dropped on Taiwan as well.
> 
> Taiwan has always expected assistance from the U.S. Navy and Air Force.* But without advance warning to get a carrier or two into the area, and a few hundred U.S. Air Force planes alerted for movement to Taiwan, Japan and Guam, the American assistance would be too late. *Thus, for Taiwan, an OOTB attack, which the Chinese appear to be preparing to carry out, is something to worry about.



The question then becomes what sort of follow up action would the US, Japan, Australia and possibly S Korea and India have up their sleeves?


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## tomahawk6

Every time the PRC conducts major exercises near Taiwan then the USN would have exercises in the region. If an OOTB attack occured they would already be on station.


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## muskrat89

Today, from the International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/07/news/china.html



> Chinese begin to worry U.S. militarily
> By Jim Yardley and Thom Shanker The New York Times
> Friday, April 8, 2005
> 
> 
> Officials say equation has shifted in event of a Taiwan crisis
> 
> ZHANJIANG, China When the flagship of the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet came into view on a recent Monday afternoon, a Chinese naval band onshore quickly began playing as two rows of Chinese sailors snapped into formation and workers hurriedly finished tacking down a red carpet.
> 
> The command ship, the Blue Ridge, answered with music from its own band and raised a Chinese flag below Old Glory.
> 
> But the most apt symbolism in the stagecraft of the ceremonial visit came when the two navies staged a tug-of-war - evoking their emerging competition in East Asia.
> 
> While the American military is consumed with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism, and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America in the western Pacific, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, Pentagon and military officials say.
> 
> China, these officials say, has smartly analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the American military and focused its growing defense spending on weapons systems that could exploit the perceived weaknesses in case the United States ever needs to respond to fighting in Taiwan.
> 
> This rapid military modernization is the major reason President George W. Bush has warned the European Union not to lift its arms embargo against China.
> 
> A decade ago, U.S. military planners dismissed the threat of a Chinese attack against Taiwan as a 160-kilometer infantry swim. Now, the Pentagon believes that China has purchased or built enough amphibious assault ships, submarines, fighter jets and short-range missiles to pose an immediate threat to Taiwan and to any American force that might come to Taiwan's aid.
> 
> Even the most hawkish officials at the Pentagon do not believe China is preparing for an imminent invasion of Taiwan. Nor do analysts believe China is any match for the United States military.
> 
> But as neighboring North Korea is erratically trying to play the nuclear card, China is quietly challenging America's reach in the western Pacific by concentrating strategically on conventional forces.
> 
> "They are building their force to deter and delay our ability to intervene in a Taiwan crisis," said Eric McVadon, a former military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. "What they have done is cleverly develop some capabilities that have the prospect of attacking our niche vulnerabilities."
> 
> Japan, America's closest ally in East Asia, and China's rival for regional dominance, is also watching China's buildup. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi echoed Bush by warning Europe against removing the arms embargo. A think tank affiliated with Japan's Defense Ministry criticized China's increased military spending and warned it was rushing to prepare for possible conflict with Taiwan - an assertion China sharply denied.
> 
> The growing friction between Japan and China, fueled by rising nationalism in both countries, is just one of the political developments exacerbating tensions in East Asia.
> 
> In March, China passed a controversial new "anti-secession" law authorizing a military attack if top leaders believe Taiwan moves too far toward independence - a move that brought hundreds of thousands of people in Taiwan out in protest last month.
> 
> China's most recent military white paper also alarmed U.S. policymakers because it mentioned the United States by name for the first time since 1998. It stated that the American presence in the region "complicated security factors."
> 
> China, meanwhile, blamed the United States and Japan for meddling in a domestic Chinese matter when those two countries recently issued a security statement that listed peace in Taiwan as a "common strategic objective."
> 
> "The potential for a miscalculation or an incident here has actually increased, just based on the rhetoric over the past six months to a year," one U.S. intelligence analyst in Washington said.
> 
> At the welcoming ceremony for the Blue Ridge here at the hometown of China's South Sea Fleet, the American commanding officer, Captain J. Stephen Maynard, and his Chinese counterpart, Senior Captain Wen Rulang, sidestepped questions about the anti-secession law and military tensions.
> 
> Wen, Asked about China's military buildup and how America should view it, praised the U.S. Navy as the most modern in the world.
> 
> "As for China," he said, "our desire is to upgrade China's self-defense capabilities."
> 
> But in China's view, self-defense involves Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province and which the United States has, by treaty, suggested it would help defend. In 1996, when China fired missiles in warning over the Taiwan Strait prior to Taiwanese elections, President Bill Clinton responded by sending a battle group to a position near Taiwan. Then, China could do nothing about it. Now, analysts say, it can.
> 
> In fact, U.S. carriers responding to a crisis would now initially have to operate at least 800 kilometers, or 500 miles, from Taiwan, which would reduce the number of jet fighter sorties they could launch and cut their loiter time in international airspace near Taiwan.
> 
> This is because China now has a modernizing fleet of submarines, including new Russian-made nuclear subs that can fire antiship missiles from a submerged position. America would first need to subdue these submarines before moving ships close to Taiwan.
> 
> China launched 13 attack submarines between 2002 and 2004, a period when it also built 23 ships that can ferry armored vehicles and troops across the 160-kilometer-wide strip of water to Taiwan.
> 
> "Their amphibious assault ship building alone equals the entire U.S. navy shipbuilding since 2002," said an intelligence official in Washington. "It definitely represents a significant increase in overall capacity."
> 
> In the worse-case scenario for a Taiwan crisis, any delay in U.S. carriers reaching the island would mean that the United States would initially depend on fighter jets and bombers stationed on Guam and Okinawa, while Chinese forces could use their amphibious ships to traverse the narrow Strait. Some U.S. military analysts believe China could now defeat Taiwan before America could arrive at the scene.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Thom Shanker reported from Washington.


----------



## tomahawk6

Any PRC invasion would have real trouble with USN submarines. The PRC MUST establish air superiority before they try crossing the straight not any easy task. But I think their greatest worry should be the USAF bomber force. Loaded with ALCM's they could orbit beyond the range of PLAAF fighters and they would sink any large amphibious vessels that approach Taiwan. The PRC would be very foolish to attempt to seize Taiwan. A failed invasion would surely bring down their government.


----------



## a_majoor

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Any PRC invasion would have real trouble with USN submarines. The PRC MUST establish air superiority before they try crossing the straight not any easy task. But I think their greatest worry should be the USAF bomber force. Loaded with ALCM's they could orbit beyond the range of PLAAF fighters and they would sink any large amphibious vessels that approach Taiwan. The PRC would be very foolish to attempt to seize Taiwan. A failed invasion would surely bring down their government.



This scenario assumes the US has sufficient strategic warning to prepare such a response. Even if the Chinese score a strategic surprise, these tactics will certainly hurt the Chinese as they attempt to supply or reinforce the invasion force, as well as prepare for the inevitable counter attack.

The big question is would US forces enter Tiawan, or would they surprise the Chinese by invading mainland China and reducing the logistics bases, air and sea ports needed to support the Chinese invasion? What other tricks would the US have up its sleeve to attack Chinese "niche vulnerabilities"?

Lots of interesting questions.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US could defend Taiwan without operating out of the island. I think the PRC invasion of Taiwan is somewhat similar to the problem that the German's faced as they planned their invasion of Britain. The German's were unable to acheive air superiority so the cross channel invasion was shelved in favor of submarine warfare to starve Britain into submission. Perhaps the PRC might consider a blockade
of the island instead.


----------



## TCBF

Our Gaijin lack of understanding is of course the result of "Cultural Differences."

Tom


----------



## Britney Spears

For some factual evidence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4449005.stm

Japan's decision to approve new school textbooks, criticised by some for glossing over the country's wartime record, have promoted demonstrations in several Chinese cities. But as William Horsley discovers the row between the two countries concerns the future as well as the past.

Yasukuni Shrine
Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to the shrine were criticised by China
The most striking thing about the Yasukuni Shrine is its massive and forbidding black "torii" gate.

A distinctive symbol of the Shinto religion, a gaunt silhouette beneath which, on a bright spring day, I watched men and women of all ages streaming in to pay their respects to ancestors, or to admire the enchanting display of cherry blossoms on the tree-lined avenue.

Each family group would pause, shut their eyes and pray in front of the open-plan wooden building where the souls of two-and-a-half-million Japanese war dead are enshrined.

Those war dead include Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister who was later hanged with a dozen other top leaders as a war criminal.

Japan's present leader, Junichiro Koizumi has made regular visits to Yasukuni Shrine in spite of furious complaints from China, South Korea and other neighbouring countries that in doing so he was condoning Japan's aggressive war in the 1930s and 1940s.

And now, the news from China is bad, very bad.

Demonstrations

Chinese demonstrators burn a Japanese flag
Demonstrations over the text-books have extended to South Korea
Last weekend an angry crowd gathered in Beijing to throw stones at the Japanese embassy.

In other cities young people have attacked Japanese shops and businesses.

In Shanghai two Japanese students were badly beaten up in a restaurant.

Chinese leaders say Japan will not deserve a permanent seat on the UN Security Council until it faces up honestly to its wartime misdeeds.

An e-mail doing the rounds in China calls for a mass boycott of Japanese goods. "Send this on to other Chinese people", the message says, "and we won't need to go to war!"

History

This stream of invective against the Japanese is not new.

Some Asia watchers see it largely as a device by Chinese leaders to extract more Japanese aid or divert attention from their own failings.

It is alarmingly reminiscent of the age of the Communist Red Guards.


The Yasukuni Shrine remains a potent symbol of how the Japanese, intoxicated by fascism and coerced by military rule, once collectively lost their reason and were fed fantastic myths, of racial superiority and the Emperor's divinity
But on this trip to Japan I could not avoid the conclusion that a new mood of nationalism has also begun to take hold in this country which has been publicly devoted to peace and economic prosperity for so long.

One sign is the Japanese authorities' approval of several new school history textbooks written by known right-wing scholars.

One book which has angered the Chinese failed to make any assessment of the number of Chinese civilians killed in the infamous Rape of Nanjing.

The internationally accepted view is that hundreds of thousands died in an orgy of sexual violence and killing by Japanese troops.

And Japan's largest national newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, in what I take to be blatant disregard for the known facts, has called on its readers to celebrate, because the new textbooks have cut out all mention of one of the greatest of all the humiliations inflicted by Imperial Japan on its neighbours: the use of large numbers of women in conquered Asian countries as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

It was right to set the record straight, I read, because the accusations "had been shown to be untrue".

Surely I thought modern Japan could not give in to the poison of such deceit and hypocrisy ever again.

The Yasukuni Shrine remains a potent symbol of how the Japanese, intoxicated by fascism and coerced by military rule, once collectively lost their reason and were fed fantastic myths, of racial superiority and the Emperor's divinity.

'Bitter dispute'

I had come to see the recently expanded Yasukuni museum of Japanese history.

I found that its 18 galleries of high-quality displays, maps and texts amount to a lavish and expensive re-write of the history of Japan's imperial age, to show the Japanese as innocent victims of a conspiracy by the Western colonial powers, to thwart Japan's ambition to lead East Asia and force Japan into war.

By this account annexing Korea, setting up a puppet regime in Manchukuo, the step by step takeover of China, each was done in self-defence, aiming only to bring peace.

As for Nanjing, I found no mention of Japanese soldiers killing civilians.

Instead, these words: "The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace."

However you look at it, that will not do as a record of what happened.

By chance I came across this testimony of a Japanese army veteran who was there.

"No matter how young or old, none of the women we rounded up could escape being raped. Each one was allocated to 15 or 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse."

Afterwards "we always stabbed them and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk."


For 100 years Japan has been number one in Asia. Now China, with 10 times Japan's population, is in a hurry to take over that role


The bitter dispute now raging between Japan and China is both about setting the record straight and about a struggle for power.

For 100 years Japan has been number one in Asia.

Now China, with 10 times Japan's population, is in a hurry to take over that role.

And as with highly-geared racing cars sharing the same circuit, it is the moment of overtaking that brings the greatest risk of a crash.











Now, I think many of us know first hand that mob violence is a very bad thing (tm), and the vandalism and attacks on Japanese students in China are in no way excusable behaviour, but they have helped bring into the western spotlight the legitimate complaints against Japanese revisionist histories. I should also point out that accusations of the protests being "staged" or "orchestrated" are simply hogwash. A conversation with ANY Chinese person (there's a bunch of them) will put those theories to rest. The simultaneous protests and violence in South Korea can attest to this as well.  Now we can only hope that the misguided protestors don't do anything outrageous to discredit the legitimate cause.

Also, I don't think the situation in Japan is quite as dire as the Chinese would like to think. AFAIK, holocaust deniers still represent a lunatic fringe in Japan, sort of on par with the "intelligent design/creationist" faction in the US. While they are a vocal voice, no one actually takes them seriously enough to try reasoning with them. So don't let this be a hinderance to you socializing with Japanese folks. The Chinese, not suprisingly,  still have a hard time understanding why these folks are allowed to voice their opinions in a liberal democracy.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Another take on the demonstrations/protests in China (from Damian Penny, quoting other sources, emphasis mine):



> April 17, 2005
> Big Trouble in Big China
> 
> It's hard to believe anything like the current wave of anti-Japanese protests could be happening in China with at least the tacit approval of the government, and I think Ezra Levant has it right - just as the squalid dictatorships of the Muslim world direct their peoples' anger toward Israel instead of their own corrupt leaders, the Chinese Communists are happy to let the people rage against Japan if it keeps them from demanding free elections and stuff. But according to The Times, the government is surprised and disturbed by the size and scale of the protests:
> 
> _In Shanghai, China's biggest city, police stood by as around 20,000 rioters smashed windows at the Japanese consulate, wrecked Japanese noodle restaurants and overturned nearby Nissan cars. The latest protests recalled the previous weekend's demonstrations in Beijing when windows at the embassy were smashed. Mr Machimura has demanded an apology and compensation.
> [...]
> These protests are more remarkable because popular dissent is not tolerated in China. Any displays of public disobedience are dealt with swiftly, especially since the pro-democracy protests in the spring of 1989, which went on for weeks before they ended in a bloody crackdown.
> 
> In Beijing, hundreds of police blanketed Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital to block a planned demonstration. There have been strong rumours that protests took place with the tacit approval of the Government.
> 
> *But the scale of the protests seems to have taken the Government by surprise. Last week, it called for calm, apparently worried that the riots might encourage others to take to the streets to demonstrate against corruption or to demand political reforms. A front-page editorial in the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily yesterday called for the people to â Å“maintain social stabilityâ ?.*
> 
> The protests have spread across China. Around 1,000 protesters tried to reach the Japanese consulate in the northeastern city of Shenyang yesterday, before being turned away by police._
> 
> The protests are ostensibly about disputed gas reserves and a new Japanese textbook which downplays and denies country's Second World War atrocities, but there's nothing really new about either of those. (Frankly, if American or British educators treated slavery or the Empire the way the Japanese treat the War, you'd never hear the end of it.) The Chinese people are angry about a lot more than a schoolbook - and their leaders know it.



http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/004183.html


----------



## a_majoor

> *The China Mess*
> What are we thinking?
> 
> There's a lot of bad political and economic blood developing between China and Japan, and China and the U.S. None of it is going to lead to any good.
> 
> Anti-Japanese demonstrations have broken out in Shanghai and Hong Kong, with Chinese authorities looking on with winks and nods. The Chinese want Japan to apologize for aggression in the 1930s and 1940s, although Japan has done so about forty times in recent years. The Chinese also claim not to like Japan's newly revised history textbooks on the subject. Then there's the ongoing squabble about oil and gas reserves on some offshore islands and the matter of Japanese membership in the U.N. Security Council.
> 
> But the problems here run much deeper. *China doesn't much like the fact that Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is pulling his country even closer to the U.S. in the world terror war. This renewed U.S.-Japan alliance also implies that a free and democratic Taiwan will be protected against Beijing's new â Å“anti-secessionâ ? law.*
> 
> Japan is also firm in supporting U.S. efforts to stop North Korea's military and nuclear buildup. China dominates North Korea, so it could really put the pressure on Kim Jong Il to renegotiate a nuclear agreement. But China only says it will help with the North Korea problem and never seems to do very much.
> 
> China shows its two faces all the time. It praised the late Pope John Paul II upon his passing and then promptly jailed a Catholic bishop and a priest. It has been liberalizing its economy and reforming local government, but it is still a dictatorship without free national elections. Though it has taken steps to join the community of nations, *it now appears to be launching a newly militant program of nationalism, with a sizeable military buildup. Japan may be the proximate target, but one ultimately suspects that all this is aimed at the U.S.
> *
> The U.S., however, isn't helping matters by threatening to launch a currency- and trade-protection war against China. The U.S., Japan, and the rest of the G-7 nations are putting the heat on China to revalue, or â Å“up-value,â ? the yuan and end its peg to the U.S. dollar. This is allegedly to correct global trade imbalances and stop â Å“cheapâ ? Chinese exports from flooding U.S. and European markets. But any meaningful currency adjustment would have to be a yuan revaluation of at least 25 percent. That would require significant tightening of Chinese monetary policy, which, in turn, would cause a big slowdown in Chinese economic growth.
> 
> Is that what we really want?
> 
> *The threat of a currency war could be an unnoticed factor in the recent U.S. stock market plunge. A much slower China economy would take a percentage point or two off U.S. economic growth, especially in areas like commodities, cyclical industries, tech, transportation, shipping, and trucking. These are the exact market sectors that are getting hammered on Wall Street.
> *
> Have the U.S. Treasury, the G-7, and the IMF forgotten the recent history of misbegotten currency manipulation? When several Asian currencies were forced to de-link from the U.S. dollar in the 1990s, world deflation followed. Floating exchange rates were a big mistake then, and could be a big mistake now.
> 
> Treasury man John Snow insists on floating rates worldwide, but he forgets that emerging-country currencies don't float â â€ they sink. Aren't we yet persuaded that nations cannot devalue their way to prosperity? Or that currency stability is better than currency chaos?
> 
> China, remember, has a shaky banking system plagued with bad state-sponsored loans made to failing nationalized companies. A floating yuan might rise in the short run, but it could crash in the medium term as foreign investors withdraw their capital flows for fear of instability.
> 
> Fortunately, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited China recently, she avoided any mention of forcing a currency change. But John Snow, encouraged by congressional Republicans, keeps pressing the unpopular point. Where's the policy coordination inside the U.S. government?
> 
> Protectionist pressure on the Chinese is also rising. A trade-opening textile agreement has resulted in a temporary burst of Chinese clothing exports to the U.S. American clothing makers have had years to prepare for this, but instead they're suing the U.S. government on so-called â Å“anti-dumpingâ ? grounds. The Chinese government is meanwhile accusing the U.S., and rightly so, of reneging on the free-trade textile deal.
> 
> Why is the U.S. threatening economic warfare against China? *Currency protection and trade protection not only blunt economic growth, they sour international political relations. If you add in the vexing problem of nuclear proliferation in North Korean and the historic ill-feelings between China and Japan, you've got a real geopolitical and economic mess brewing in northeast Asia.* With no apparent solution in sight.
> 
> â â€ Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is host of CNBC's Kudlow & Company and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow's Money Politic$.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200504191337.asp


----------



## enfield

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I should also point out that accusations of the protests being "staged" or "orchestrated" are simply hogwash. A conversation with ANY Chinese person (there's a bunch of them) will put those theories to rest. The simultaneous protests and violence in South Korea can attest to this as well.   Now we can only hope that the misguided pprotestersdon't do anything outrageous to discredit the legitimate cause.



Too imagine that the protests in China could ever be anything but carefully by the government is ridiculous. I'm sure there are very real feelings in China against Japan - but since good old Mao Tse Tung killed more Chinese than the Japanese ever did, I wonder who the people would protest given the chance? If the Chinese really didn't like the Japanese, why did they let Japan become the largest investor in China?
The timing of this - with Japan making a bid for the security council, and the potential oil/gas rights - can't be a mistake. Interesting times ahead.


----------



## Britney Spears

> If the Chinese really didn't like the Japanese, why did they let Japan become the largest investor in China?



If you don't count Hong Kong and the Virgin Islands, the Largest investor in China is South Korea.



> The timing of this - with Japan making a bid for the security council, and the potential oil/gas rights - can't be a mistake.



What do you mean "mistake"? The Chinese have been very vocal about their opposition to Japan joinging the SC, and the textbook issue is one of their stated reasons, the protestors make it quite clear on their banners actually,  but of course you knew that.

It is true that thegoverment was probably dragging its feet to curb the protests, hence the property damage, but you can be sure that they are putting the foot down now. Pretty much the same way things work in any other third would country.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050416/ap_on_re_as/china_japan

New Anti-Japanese Protests Erupt in China

54 minutes ago World - AP Asia


By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

SHANGHAI, China - Chanting "Japanese pigs get out," protesters here threw stones and broke windows at Japanese restaurants and Japan's consulate as thousands of people defied government warnings and staged demonstrations Saturday against Tokyo's bid for a permanent U.N. Security Council seat


Protests were reported in two other cities. But Beijing remained calm as police stood guard at Tiananmen Square to block a planned demonstration in the heart of the capital, a day ahead of a visit by Japan's foreign minister. Meanwhile, paramilitary police surrounded the Japanese Embassy, where protesters smashed windows last weekend.


*The demonstrations â â€ taking place for the third weekend in a row â â€ erupted despite government demands for calm, apparently stemming from fears the unrest might spin out of control and damage ties with Tokyo, which have already plunged to their lowest point in decades.*


In Shanghai, as many as 20,000 protesters gathered around the Japanese consulate. Police in riot helmets kept them away from the building but let protesters throw eggs and rocks. A group of young men broke the windows of a Nissan sedan and flipped it onto its roof.


In a nearby street, protesters broke windows at about 10 Japanese-style noodle shops and bars, many of which are Chinese-owned.


The violence followed a march from City Hall to the consulate by about 5,000 people. They carried banners written in English that said "Say No to Japan in the Security Council" and chanted "Japanese pigs get out!"


A sign outside the consulate said "Be Vicious Toward Japanese Devils."


Tensions between Tokyo and Beijing have been fueled by disagreement over the Security Council, gas resources in disputed seas and new Japanese textbooks that critics say minimize Japan's wartime offenses.


About 2,000 people marched through Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, shouting slogans condemning Japanese militarism, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The rally was watched by 10,000 people, it said. Hong Kong television said a few hundred people held a rally in Tianjin, east of Beijing.


In Beijing, about 400 police stood guard in Tiananmen Square, stopping passers-by apparently at random to question them. About 200 paramilitary police with riot shields guarded the Japanese Embassy.


Police also blocked a protest in the southern city of Guangzhou, shooing away people who tried to gather at a stadium.


Japan's foreign minister was to fly to Beijing Sunday for talks aimed at defusing the tensions. Japan warned its citizens in China about possible danger in advance of the protests.


Some suggested Beijing permitted the protests last weekend to support a campaign to block Tokyo's Security Council bid.


Beijing is alarmed at a proposal to give a permanent Security Council seat to Japan, which it regards as a regional rival. Such status carries veto power over U.N. actions and is now held by only five governments â â€ China, the United States, Britain, France and Russia.


"I think that permitting the demonstrations provides leverage by creating a very public symbol of the depth of anger among the Chinese people toward Japan," said Murray Scot Tanner, a China specialist at the Rand Corp. in Washington.


Premier Wen Jiabao cited the protests Wednesday when he said during a visit to India that Tokyo wasn't ready for a Security Council seat until it faced up to its history of aggression.


But other Chinese officials tried to distance the government from the protesters. A Cabinet official quoted Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency denied that it supported "extremist actions."





Beijing is eager to preserve important economic relations with Japan, which has some $280 million invested in the Chinese mainland.

On Friday, police in Beijing warned that protesters could face legal action. Police appealed to the public to trust the Communist Party to deal with Japan and not to threaten "social stability."

In Shanghai, police watched the protesters but didn't stop them, though state newspapers said no one had received permission to hold a protest. At one point, police posted a sign saying "March route this way."

The march in Shanghai was the first in China's commercial capital in the recent wave of anti-Japanese protests.

In Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, about 3,000 people gathered outside a stadium carrying banners urging a boycott of Japanese goods, according to Hong Kong Cable TV. It said police watched but didn't interfere.

"The Chinese people are angry," said one marcher, Michael Teng, a graduate student at Donghua University. "We will play along with Japan and smile nicely at them, but they have to know they have a large, angry neighbor."


----------



## Dare

During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo.

At the outset of a three-day visit to China, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he supported Beijing's "anti-secession" law on Taiwan, and vowed to keep pushing for an end to an EU arms embargo that could open the door for Paris to sell weapons to the Asian giant.

Raffarin also signed or finalized major business deals with Beijing valued at around $3.2 billion (2.4 billion euros).

Appearing to put his government at odds with the European Union, Raffarin said at the outset of the three day visit that Paris had no objections to the anti-secession law.

Wen Jiabao
"The anti-secession law is completely compatible with the position of France," he said in a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao (photo).

'Anachronistic' embargo

At the same time, he vowed that his government would continue to push for the lifting of what he called the "anachronistic" and "discriminatory" arms embargo against China. The embargo contradicts the current "strategic partnership" between the EU and China, he added.

During his visit to Beijing on Thursday, China Eastern Airlines and Shenzhen Airlines signed a deal with the European consortium Airbus to buy a total of 10 A319/A320 planes. And China Southern completed an agreement on its purchase of five A380 super jumbos.

The deals were signed between the carriers and the European consortium's vice-president, Philippe Delmas, who is in China accompanying Raffarin on his visit.

China's Airbus business

In talking to news agencies, Delmas said the deals were "not letters of intent, but firm contracts." China is responsible for one-sixth of Airbus's annual deliveries, he noted.

France has lobbied hard for Airbus sales in China, and its close political ties with Beijing appear to have helped smooth the way for the deals.

Ahead of the visit, Raffarin had stressed his commitment to push the EU to lift its 16-year-old EU arms embargo against China by the end of June. In an interview with China's Xinhua news agency Wednesday, Raffarin reiterated the EU's decision, taken at a summit in December, to work toward lifting the arms embargo by late June.

He added that the decision should be Europe's alone, and noted that Europe is working to convince Washington of its position.

"France continues to require the lifting of the embargo and does not see what could lead the European Council to change its position on the subject," Raffarin said Thursday in a joint press conference with Wen.

Potential growth

The airplane deals penned Thursday are estimated to be worth some $500 million to $600 million, Airbus said.

SchrÃƒÂ¶der and Wen also got Airbus contracts rolling, in 2004
Some 20 other previously announced contracts were also finalized during the ceremony. Taken together, the value of the deals comes to around $3.2 billion, Delmas said.

"This is a very big market ... in the first four months of the year it grew by 40 percent over the same period last year," Delmas told news agencies.


http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1559253,00.html


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

> So let me get this straight. France, a democracy (sort of) decides to let a communist dictatorship - China - acquire the necessary means and legal clearance to attack a democratic neighbour that has posed no threat or problem whatsoever to France (apart from cheap electronics, maybe).
> 
> I guess that is what is known as nuanced foreign policy. Way to go, Jacques!


http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007475.html


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/world/national/2005/04/22/japan-remorse050422.html

Japan's PM expresses 'deep remorse' over wartime acts
Last Updated Fri, 22 Apr 2005 05:33:15 EDT 
CBC News
JAKARTA, INDONESIA - Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi tried to ease growing tensions between his country and China on Friday by expressing "deep remorse" about what Japan did to its neighbours in the Second World War. 

Koizumi gave the speech of regret as the Asia-Africa summit opened in Indonesia. 
"In the past, Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering for the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations," he said at the summit's opening ceremony. 
"Japan squarely faces these facts of history in a spirit of humility." 

Different "facts of history" contained in a Japanese school textbook have prompted vigorous protests in China over the past few weeks. 
The protesters say the textbook glosses over what Japan did in the 1939-1945 war, including conducting germ warfare and running sex-slave camps for its soldiers based in other Asian nations. 
The issue has gained new power because Japan is seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Chinese demonstrators oppose the bid. 

Koizumi arrived at the Jakarta summit hoping to arrange a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. 
China said Hu has a full schedule on Friday, and has not said whether a meeting with Koizumi can be slotted in. 
The Japanese leader's speech was seen as an olive branch meant to clear the way for a meeting. 

"With feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology always engraved in mind, Japan has resolutely maintained, consistently since the end of World War II, never turning into a military power but an economic power, its principle of resolving all matters by peaceful means, without recourse through the use of force," Koizumi said. 
Japanese leaders have previously issued similar expressions of regret, most significantly when then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama spoke at ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, deeply ingrained anti-Japanese feelings which pre-date the 20th century, is one of those areas where a generally _remote_, mistrusted Chinese national government can show itself to be on the same wavelength as most of the Chinese people.   This is good politics.

The Chinese Communist Party is not an enduring monolith.   It has to acquire and sustain its own _mandate_ â â€œ not necessarily the _mandate of heaven_ anymore but the Party must, constantly, reinvent itself to meet the ever evolving minimum needs of the Chinese people.   The Party brass, like all the leaders of all the dynasties, stretching back thousands of years, understand that the durability of their _mandate_ is a reflection of their capability to meet the people's needs and wants.

Most China's billion plus people are well above the base levels in Maslow's _hierarchy of needs_ and they now want China's (and, by extension their own) _position_ restored â â€œ to something akin to the early Ming dynasty, I suppose.

It is difficult, but important, to try to 'see' China and the Chinese through their eyes, or, at least, on their terms.   Our cultural norms and values are not like theirs; they do not 'see' a world of 'competing' and, therefore, roughly equal nation states.

They see a _heaven_ (sometimes know, by some people, as the _celestial kingdom_) and themselves and their country as _all under heaven_ where 'all' means everything that is worthwhile.   Their concept of being the _middle kingdom_ means that they are between _heaven_ and the dark, barbarous, outside world.   They are part of the _celestial kingdom_ because they were _lit_ by the sun of _heaven_ while the rest â â€œ most of us â â€œ were consigned to darkness.   I know this all sounds very airy-fairy but I believe that the reason we misjudge China over and over and over again is because we insist upon seeing China as an exotic version of our Greco-Roman civilization â â€œ it isn't.   The Chinese people are not _just like_ Europeans except for the shapes of the eyes, and China is not like Germany or America.


----------



## TCBF

Now THAT, is very interesting, and certainly explains the long view they can take on some events (1989 - the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution -  a question posed to a Chinese Diplomat:  "Was the French Revolution a good thing?"  His answer:  "It's too soon to tell.").


----------



## Britney Spears

> to something akin to the early Ming dynasty, I suppose.



Certainly you must mean the early _Qing_ Dynasty? The early Ming dynasty was much smaller than the present day PRC. In relative terms it was one of the weaker dynasties in Chinese history.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Certainly you must mean the early _Qing_ Dynasty? The early Ming dynasty was much smaller than the present day PRC. In relative terms it was one of the weaker dynasties in Chinese history.



No, I meant the Ming.  Although it lost some of the territory previously held by the Yuan it remains a favourite amongst Chinese people for its restoration of Cunfucian values, the development of the South of China and finishing the Great Wall.  The early Ming, especially, saw great prosperity for many Chinese and a flowering of Chinese arts and sciences â â€œ very important in Chinese culture; more important than territory.


----------



## Britney Spears

> No, I meant the Ming.  Although it lost some of the territory previously held by the Yuan it remains a favourite amongst Chinese people for its restoration of Cunfucian values, the development of the South of China and finishing the Great Wall.  The early Ming, especially, saw great prosperity for many Chinese and a flowering of Chinese arts and sciences â â€œ very important in Chinese culture; more important than territory.



Heh, well any one of those points is enough gist for 20 pages of debate, but for now let's just conclude that the Ming dynasty was an excellent source of material for some of the superlative martial arts movies released in mid 90s Hong Kong.


----------



## TCBF

"Heh, well any one of those points is enough gist for 20 pages of debate, but for now let's just conclude that the Ming dynasty was an excellent source of material for some of the superlative martial arts movies released in mid 90s Hong Kong."

And as an added plus, they do not appear to have bothered colouring in Taiwan/Formosa on their maps...

Tom


----------



## Britney Spears

Because at this time, Taiwan had not yet been colonized by the Chinese, and was still inhabited by Austronesian aborigine. The Dutch set up a base there in 1624, which lasted until 1662 when they were defeated by Zheng Chen Gong, a Han chinese Ming loyalist, The Ming at this point was in a state of collapse and was being invaded by the Manchurians, who would in a few years establish the Qing, and who would in 1683 defeat Zheng's descendents and annex Taiwan. It   is interesting to note that during this period, Zheng's descendents continued to refer to themselves as the "Southern Ming", claiming to be the legitimate Han rulers of China and Ming goverment in exile until their eventual (in a naval battle/amphibious invasion) defeat. Not unlike the situation today. 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan


----------



## TCBF

Everything old is new again?  It has occured to me that if things get out of hand in the PRC, we could be looking at the worlds first nuclear civil war.

Now back to Formosa - The Japanese Army and Marines used Formosa as a live fire template and hunted the last of the aboriginals for training value.  Fact, or myth?

Tom


----------



## Britney Spears

> Now back to Formosa - The Japanese Army and Marines used Formosa as a live fire template and hunted the last of the aboriginals for training value.  Fact, or myth?



Myth, AFAIK. Wikipedia(which I use as a quick reference for stats and dates) says nothing of such an atrocity. The Japanese administered Taiwan just as any other colony, doing a fair bit of industrialization. Certainly, it appears in the immediate aftermath of WW2, the returning (nationalist) Chinese administration was plenty brutal enough (massacaring up to 300,000 civies according to Wikipedia). You can read the rest yourself.


----------



## TCBF

Will look it up.

Did a few days on Guam after Op APOLLO.  We had a guided tour of the invasion beaches and so on,  and the local tribe (Chamoros) did not fare well under the Emperor's Army.  Beheadings were common place.  Today, Guam tourism is largely Japanese based, we were told.


----------



## Britney Spears

TCBF:

PM imbound.


----------



## a_majoor

China is setting up conditions to attempt to challenge the West, although this may end up being a race against time as internal pressures eat at the homeland. Either way, an Imperial China or a rapidly destabilizing China are both dangers to the West.




> *China's Zombie Countries*
> Bringing dictators back to life.
> 
> By Dana Dillon
> 
> In Haitian folklore, zombies are people reanimated from near death and enslaved to the witch doctor that revived them. Could it be that China's leaders are taking their cues from Haiti?
> 
> From Burma to Nepal to Zimbabwe, China is providing political, diplomatic, and security support to failing dictatorships. Beijing gives just enough help for the dictator to survive sanctions and domestic popular revolts, while the PRC gains a dependent state.
> 
> The faux-Communist witch doctors of Beijing are not propping up these unsuccessful governments for ideological reasons â â€ quite the opposite. Nepal is an absolute monarchy, Burma is a military dictatorship, and Zimbabwe is governed by a once democratically chosen leader gone bad. *In repayment for reanimating these near-dead regimes, the PRC is demanding â â€ and getting â â€ obedience to its nationalistic policies of creating strategic space around China, isolating Taiwan, securing critical resources, and guaranteeing markets for Chinese products.*
> 
> The partial enslavement of the zombie countries is clearly demonstrated in China's newest acquisition, Nepal. Nepal is struggling through a bloody civil war with Maoist rebels. The Maoists have managed to gain the upper hand in a large part of the country and can, on occasion, isolate Katmandu. King Gyanendra's response to his failing counter-insurgency strategy was to dissolve the government and declare his monarchy absolute. He then ordered the Nepalese security forces to suppress all opposition. Consequently, India, the United States and Britain all condemned the king's actions and cut off military aid to Nepal. China stepped up with a zombie-making potion of political acceptance and security assistance.
> 
> China's Foreign Minister, Li Zaoxing, visited Nepal and declared that the King's seizure of power was â Å“an internal matter for Nepal.â ? For his part, King Gyanendra announced that â Å“China is a reliable friend of Nepal.â ? On April 22-24, Gyanendra will visit China for an economic conference, his first visit abroad since he seized power.
> 
> In exchange for Beijing's diplomatic support, Nepal is turning on its defenseless Tibetan refugees. China's ambassador declared that â Å“Nepal is very important to the stability and prosperity of Tibet.â ? King Gynandera replied to the Foreign Minister that â Å“Nepal firmly supports the one-China policy of your government and will never allow any anti-China activities in Nepal's territory.â ? Gyanendra subsequently shut down offices representing the Tibetan government-in-exile that had operated in Nepal since 1960 and began a pogrom of persecution of Tibetan refugees that included forced repatriations.
> 
> Furthermore, China is enslaving Nepal's economy as well. China is among the top-five donor countries to Nepal, but Chinese aid is largely aimed at supporting Chinese businesses and tapping Nepal's natural resources to the exclusion of Nepalese businesses. Nepal had been pushing for more equal trade terms to counteract its enormous trade imbalance with China, but since Gyanendra took over the country concrete remedies have failed to materialize.
> 
> Zimbabwe's descent to zombie status is no more mysterious than Gyanendra's near-death experience. Zimbabwe is a resource-rich southern African nation, suffering a major economic crisis, with inflation at 400 percent and unemployment at about 70 percent. Zimbabwe's per-capita income has nosedived over the past eight years from $682 in 1998 to $521 in 2002. President Robert Mugabe abused his office to suppress opposition parties and maintain his grip on power. His ruling party won an overwhelming victory in March 2005 in elections not believed to be free or fair by most Western countries.
> 
> Amid sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States, China delivered $240 million in military goods to Zimbabwe including thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, riot gear, and mobile water cannons. Mugabe's security forces used the weapons to break up opposition political rallies and demonstrations. Beijing also provided radio-jamming equipment to Harare, thwarting pro-democracy broadcasts during the last â Å“electionâ ? campaign.
> 
> In return for China's military equipment, President Mugabe is said to have promised China land and access to mineral resources. In November 2004, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the standing committee of China's National People's Congress, paid a visit to Zimbabwe and signed six economic agreements. Emmerson Mnangagwa, speaker of the Zimbabwean national assembly said the national assembly would lay down laws to ensure that high priority be given to the Chinese enterprises.
> 
> Although there are no Tibetan refugees to persecute in Zimbabwe, Mugabe does his best to please his new master by helping to isolate Taiwan. The ministry of foreign affairs of Zimbabwe said in March 2005 that Zimbabwe firmly supports China's anti-secession law, which authorizes the use of military force to prevent Taiwanese independence.
> 
> Burma and North Korea have been zombies so long that they may now be in permanent vegetative states, but the persistence of these two regimes beyond their long-expected demise is a clear demonstration of the efficacy of China's policy. Burma has been under strict international sanctions since it violently suppressed a popular revolt in 1988, but there is no sign of the junta's imminent collapse. North Korea's economy completely failed in the 1990s, starving to death an estimated 1.5 million people, but Kim Jong Il blithely clings to power and is grooming his son as a successor.
> 
> Forced to compete with the American model of representative democracy, the government of the People's Republic of China offers the third world a non-ideological choice â â€ liberty or tyranny. Of course, Beijing does not offer this option to the third world's people, who no doubt yearn for freedom and prosperity. Instead, the Chinese vision appeals only to failed despots whose regimes can survive only with Chinese resuscitation â â€ the Zombies.
> 
> â â€ Dana Dillon is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/dillon200505100804.asp


----------



## Long in the tooth

My feeling is that while the Chinese are aggressively building up Air, ground and naval assets (55 Subs and adding) that they have an extremely small window in which to expand by military means.   I have stated before that this ends unequivocally in 2015, but effects will be felt by 2010.   2007 is the optimum date for them to persue their ambitions.

This is akin to the delay of Barbarossa or Kursk, as the Chinese will have to weigh their combat potential versus "ours".

Homeland pressures are already beginning to mount on three levels:

1.   The Chinese have tacitly admitted that capitalism is a better form of wealth production by creating several "free zones" in industrial/commercial areas;

2.   The internet continues its inexorable march in making information available to the masses; and

3.   The 'One child' policy makes every child a "Pte Ryan".

The greatest danger is when the Chinese believe that they can create an area of exclusion around Taiwan that has a high probability of destroying an American carrier if committed.   On the other hand, if the US is willing to write off a carrier, most of the Chinese first line air and naval assets would be toast as well....


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Everyone needs to remember this every time you consider buying something marked "Made in China".

You are in essence, supporting tyranny in the third world.

I personally, don't shop at Walmart at all due to their policies and have boycotted all Chinese goods (Digital Cameras, Laptops, Shredders, etc) since 2001 and gladly pay the extra money for items made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the United States and in particular Canada.




M.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Quote,
_I personally, don't shop at Walmart at all due to their policies_

You do realize that Wal-mart has WAY more brands that are made in Canada than the Bay/Zellers. Their policy is to buy North American whenever possible, while remaining financially competitive. If there is a policy I don't like there its their "predator pricing".


----------



## Blakey

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> Everyone needs to remember this every time you consider buying something marked "Made in China".


lol, I just looked at the back of my cheap'O watch i bout at the _Kitshop_no less and it has a "Made in China" sticker on the back of it...


----------



## Dare

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> Quote,
> _I personally, don't shop at Walmart at all due to their policies_
> 
> You do realize that Wal-mart has WAY more brands that are made in Canada than the Bay/Zellers. Their policy is to buy North American whenever possible, while remaining financially competitive. If there is a policy I don't like there its their "predator pricing".


COSCO is a far more worrisome company.


----------



## Younghusband

How we would fight china: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan 

More here: http://www.cominganarchy.com/archives/2005/04/30/bloggers-on-kaplans-latest/


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> Quote,
> _I personally, don't shop at Walmart at all due to their policies_
> 
> You do realize that Wal-mart has WAY more brands that are made in Canada than the Bay/Zellers. Their policy is to buy North American whenever possible, while remaining financially competitive. If there is a policy I don't like there its their "predator pricing".



Actually, yes I do, but the fact is their head office promotes North American business to relocate manufacturing facilites to China.

Trust me when I say I look for the "Made in Canada" at every opportunity.  I actually got lucky the other day and picked up a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans that were made in Canada (which I was not expecting to be able to do).




M.


----------



## a_majoor

A few divergent thoughts (need to read the Kaplan article this weekend)

The Chinese "Grand Strategy" is to reestablish themselves as the "Middle Kingdom", which includes regaining the military, political and economic pre-eminence with current US allies and clients such as Tiawan, South Korea and Japan.

The US "Grand Strategy" is the Oceanic strategy, using control of the sea as the lever to apply military, diplomatic and economic power anywhere on Earth. The current Middle Eastern strategy could mutate into a version of the "heartland" strategy, which roughly stated contends "whoever controls the heartland between Europe, Africa and Asia, controls the world". This sort of thinking was very influential in the late 1800s and can be examined today by playing "Risk" (see what happens when someone else has a powerful force occupying the middle east).

Although in the long term an Oceanic Power would seem to have the high cards (even if forced out, the Oceanic power always has the means to return at the time and place of its own choosing), it will be very uncomfortable while these two rival Grand Strategies play themselves out.


----------



## Younghusband

RE: the Middle Kingdom Strategy vs. Oceanic strategy

Read the Kap article!


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Dare said:
			
		

> COSCO is a far more worrisome company.



You mean CostCo, right?

(COSCO = China Overseas Shipping COmpany: owned by the Chinese Government)


----------



## Dare

I_am_John_Galt said:
			
		

> You mean CostCo, right?
> 
> (COSCO = China Overseas Shipping COmpany: owned by the Chinese Government)


I mean COSCO.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

From the American Wal-Mart website,

Myth: 70 percent of the merchandise sold at our stores comes from China.  

Fact: The special interest group who makes this claim doesn't tell you where it got that statistic.  In actuality, Wal-Mart's business with U.S. suppliers remains strong and healthy.  In 2004, Wal-Mart spent more than $137 billion for U.S. products and services sold at our stores.  A single company with sales of that magnitude would rank #5 on the Fortune 500. You can count on this fact, too:  The products and services from US suppliers sold at Wal-Mart stores provide good jobs to more than 3.5 million employees at 68,000 suppliers in states across America.  

Wal-Mart estimates that we purchased about $18 billion from China last year -- about $9 billion imported from direct sources and about $9 billion from indirect sources -- compared to $137.5 billion spent last year with all kinds of suppliers in the U.S.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> From the American Wal-Mart website,
> 
> Myth: 70 percent of the merchandise sold at our stores comes from China.
> 
> Fact: The special interest group who makes this claim doesn't tell you where it got that statistic.   In actuality, Wal-Mart's business with U.S. suppliers remains strong and healthy.   In 2004, Wal-Mart spent more than $137 billion for U.S. products and services sold at our stores.   A single company with sales of that magnitude would rank #5 on the Fortune 500. You can count on this fact, too:   The products and services from US suppliers sold at Wal-Mart stores provide good jobs to more than 3.5 million employees at 68,000 suppliers in states across America.
> 
> Wal-Mart estimates that we purchased about $18 billion from China last year -- about $9 billion imported from direct sources and about $9 billion from indirect sources -- compared to $137.5 billion spent last year with all kinds of suppliers in the U.S.



Regardless, Walmart does promote North American manufacturers to relocate to China....and that doesn't sit well with me.



M.


----------



## a_majoor

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> Regardless, Walmart does promote North American manufacturers to relocate to China....and that doesn't sit well with me.



I suspect WalMart isn't saying "go to China or else", rather US suppliers are looking to maintain thair sales to WalMart and increase their own profit margins; going offshore is one way of doing so. We heard the same thing back in the 1980s about Mexico, and India is now on people's radar as the next big target for outsourcing. Given a choice, I would much preffer strengthening India's economy through free trade, given it is a semi free market democracy, with the added bonus it is on China's southwestern flank, giving the Dragon another thing to watch out for.

Kaplan's article is interesting, especially the observation that PACCOM is far enough removed from Washington to have a degree of independant action, and is capable of assembling "hub and spoke" alliances for different scenarios and situations; Oceanic strategy moving to a higher level. The proposed evolution of the navy makes a lot of sense, although I wonder if the real "Rrevolution in Naval affairs" wouldn't consist of finding ways to make naval platforms a lot faster (similar to the Army obsession with substituting speed for mass). This would make force projection more creditable (getting on station in days or weeks rather than weeks or months), as well as giving opponents a bigger headache in planning tactical or strategic countermoves.

Kaplan is also correct in suggesting the best thing to do would be to find subtle ways to contain China in webs of trade, diplomacy and military alliances and deterrence, the most telling quote in the article is "there are lots of ways a war with China could start, the problem is how do you end it?"


----------



## Long in the tooth

To add to the reasons China has an extremely small window -

News reports last week reported shortages of water in Northern Chinese provinces where 110 Million people live.  Water tables have dropped 1 metre/yr for the last several years.  Not only is there no water for primary heavy industry (steel and chemicals) but huge hydroelectric plants are running way below capacity.  If the Chinese get to the information age, they may have to forego the industrial age.

In a larger sense, this illustrates the systemic advantage that N America and Europe have.  Except for the Amazon, Nile and Congo, most developing areas are bereft of the water resources we take for granted.  Even the richest Mid East countries only produce 5 gal/day/person of potable water.  They may artificially support their economies in the short term with petro wealth, but it's only a temporary fix.


----------



## TCBF

" They may artificially support their economies in the short term with petro wealth, but it's only a temporary fix."

- And after that?  It's back to goat herding in the big sandbox and caging Mars Bars from National Geographic video crews.

Tom


----------



## oyaguy

I'm kind of curious, on reasons we will end up fighting China.

The whole thing on spheres of influence seems kind of interesting, but when we get down to it does Nepal matter? Or Burma, or Zimbabwe? As the U.S. found out in the 70s, Vietnam didn't, and doesn't matter.

I would go as far to say that even Taiwan doesn't matter. 

I admit though,  my knowledge on the matter is superficial, more so when it comes to Chinese motivation to obtaining the crown of super power.


----------



## TCBF

"The whole thing on spheres of influence seems kind of interesting, but when we get down to it does Nepal matter? Or Burma, or Zimbabwe? As the U.S. found out in the 70s, Vietnam didn't, and doesn't matter.

I would go as far to say that even Taiwan doesn't matter."



- You raise a very interesting point.  Darfur doesn't matter.  Neither did Rwanda, or Somalia, after it became 'inconvenient'.

But what happens when we miss one?  Turns out, Ethiopia, the Alsace, Austria, the Sudetenland and Manchuria all mattered.  Who knew?

Tom


----------



## oyaguy

Mr. TCBF, you have a good point.

But the difference is that in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Darfur, a lot of people died, at the hands of their fellow citizens. The failure to intervene was done with full knowledge of what was going on, and is a failure of humanity. 

In Ethiopia, Manchuria, the Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Alsace{less of a salient point here}, a foreign power took these areas by force, in contravention of established international law. Political leaders knew they mattered, but didn't have the will to do anything about it, knowing the consequences could be war. 

The differences is also illustrated in two dictators. Hitler, and Stalin. Hitler killed his own citizens, then started going beyond his own borders for victims. The international community eventually got around to taking care of Hitler because he was "rocking the boat" so to speak. Stalin killed far more people, but they were his own citizens. He didn't "rock the boat" and lived to old age as a result.

China may garner influence in the developing world, but again, does it really matter? As long as China doesn't invade or annex these countries, China is in the clear. As for prosecuting human rights violations in China, can anyone be touched if you're on the UN security council?

The question still stands. Why will we fight China? And does Burma, Zimbabwe, and Nepal really matter? 

Maybe a better question in regard to flashpoints with China, is whether Taiwan is worth a fight with China?


----------



## a_majoor

oyaguy said:
			
		

> The question still stands. Why will we fight China? And does Burma, Zimbabwe, and Nepal really matter?
> 
> Maybe a better question in regard to flashpoints with China, is whether Taiwan is worth a fight with China?



Figthing wars is usually a matter of "national interest". Burma, Zimbabwe and Nepal do not matter so much in the "big picture" (how much trade do "we" do with these places), but from a strategic point of view, they strengthen China.

Taiwan *is* in the national interest of many Western nations, because it is a democracy, because it is an economic powerhouse and because we do a lot of trade with Taiwan, and for important, value added products (open your computer case and count the number oc components markes "Made in Taiwan"). Abandoning a friendly nation in that part of Asia will also send very negative signals to other pro democratic, market friendly trading partners like Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia. 

We may never come to blows with China. Robert Kaplan's article in the "Atlantic Monthly" suggests war is a very "zero sum" option, and proposes keeping China tied up with overlapping multi-lateral engagements. Others both on this site and in the various media have pointed out China's political and structural deficiencies, which may conspire to bring the nation down from the inside. China's history and the reigning communist ideology suggest China has ambitions to regain the mantle of the "Middle Kingdom" and become a regional hegemon, which has disturbing implications since this conflicts with the goals and aspirations of nations like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and even second string nations like Indonesia. Lots of potential flashpoints do exist, so we need to keep our eyes open.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US has made a commitment to help Taiwan in the event of attack. The help can be in the form of weapons resupply [as we did for Israel] or armed intervention. It seem's that the US will probably have to use force. The PRC is building up its amphibious and submarine forces. Delivery of 8 Kilo class subs from Russia has been accelerated. Any attack/invasion by the PRC must be able to neutralize the US carrier force. The Kilo's are one component. The Sunburn another. They also have to be able to control the air space over/around Taiwan. Numbers may have a real advantage over quality.


----------



## paracowboy

oyaguy said:
			
		

> Maybe a better question in regard to flashpoints with China, is whether Taiwan is worth a fight with China?


yes. Tyranny (whether it be by a lone individual, an autocratic Party, or a theocracy) MUST be fought and defeated in order to promote Democracy. This is not a knee-jerk, Right-Wing, statement born of too many bumper stickers. This is a carefully thought out belief bolstered by what I have seen and read over several years. Democracies do not go to war with democracies. Peace is in our best interests. War gets Canadians killed. Dictatorships are like a boa constictor: they have to keep a lethal grip on their prey, or it will escape, and once started on swallowing, it has to continue or it will choke to death. This is why they inevitably spread into their neighbours, and we get involved.
Democracies are like trees. Fragile when growing, very nearly unshakeable once fully developed, and their seeds spread and grow on their own.

(Holy crap! I'm a freakin' poet!)


----------



## oyaguy

paracowboy said:
			
		

> (Holy crap! I'm a freakin' poet!)


Read your analogy on the boa constrictor again.


Points on democracy and tyranny taken. Sometimes though, I see Taiwan turning into the Balkans of our day. The actions of a few Taiwanese and Chinese officials could set off a chain of events that could get a lot of people dead. More importantly, it will have two nuclear armed nations facing off in a conventional arena. The odds of something terrible and nuclear,  going wrong are enormous.

As for taking down tyrannies around the world all in the interest of democracy, easier said then done. Look at Iraq, the weakest member of the so-called axis of evil.


----------



## Edward Campbell

No matter how _good_ the cause, a war with China will be a major policy blunder.

It is unnecessary â â€œ there is no big, serious dispute, not even within Taiwan, over the issue that Taiwan is Chinese â â€œ the dispute is over how and when the inevitable reconciliation with happen.  The Taiwanese, reasonably, want China to be a functioning, perhaps _conservative_ democracy before reunification takes place.  The ruling Chinese oligarchy actually values Taiwanese independence - Taiwan is a _vital_ source of foreign investment capital and it serves as a convenient whipping boy when it is necessary to _wag the dog_ every now and again â â€œ to divert attention from the manifest social and economic failures which are the norm in China, everywhere except on the East coast strip.

A war between China and the USA cannot, in my view, be contained â â€œ there is no way that China resembles Iraq: not strategically.  A US war with China will embolden the entire Islamic world â â€œ forget the Arabs, this will be enough to do what Iraq could not: unite the Muslims â â€œ including Pakistan which will bring in India.  Russia will be a victim of _collateral damage_ â â€œ but it is not clear, to me, how the Russian oligarchy will see its self interest.  _Old continental Europe_ will try to stay out â â€œ the anti-American animus is so very strong there â â€œ but they may be dragged in anyway.

The Americans cannot win a land war in China.

The Chinese cannot win a global war against a major maritime power â â€œ China, at the start of the 21st century, is like France at the start of the 19th.

But: The Chinese will not fight a global war; they will concede defeat.  But: the _rest_ â â€œ the Muslims, etc, will attack â â€œ maybe ineffectively â â€œ on a global basis.  America will have two wars: an un-winnable war on the Asian land mass and a global conflict against a rag-tag _coalition of the envious_.

The only way to defeat China at home is to use so enough nuclear force to give effect to Curtis LeMay's _bomb 'em back into the stone age_ dictum. Americans may find that exercise too inhumane; remember: broadly speaking, the American people are driven by moral rather then pragmatic instincts.

This is a war no one wants or needs.  If it happens it will hand an easy, unearned victory to _Eurabia_.  China should not be our enemy â â€œ even though it need not be our friend.


----------



## paracowboy

honestly, I think the whole discussion is moot, anyway.





> Taiwan is a vital source of foreign investment capital and it serves as a convenient whipping boy when it is necessary to wag the dog every now and again â â€œ to divert attention from the manifest social and economic failures which are the norm in China, everywhere except on the East coast strip


just as Hong Kong was (still is). China rattles the sabre whenever it want to distract it's populace, as Edward states, or when it wants to shake some concessions from the US. Taiwan starts talking about declaring itself independent when it wants to shake some concessions from China, or when there's an election. Nobody wants this war, including China. Maybe especially China. China has been slowly moving towards democracy anyway, and trying rapidly to move towards capitalism. They've long since recognized the failures of communism, but have to reconcile failure with "Face", and the ruling elite still want (of course) to maintain their grip on power. It'll happen, though, eventually. And then the world will have another superpower, both military and economic.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US doesnt need to wage a land war in China. A naval blockade and air campaign would severely restrict China's ambitions.


----------



## tomahawk6

Interesting article from strategypage.

June 5, 2005: China's economy survives at the mercy of the United States Navy. For thousands of years, China has been what is known as a â Å“continental power.â ? That is, it had everything it needed right at home and was not dependent on seaborne trade to survive (like Britain and Japan, which are classic examples of â Å“Oceanic Powers.â ?) But now China is an Oceanic Power, with over half of its GDP coming from exports to foreign nations. Moreover, nearly all the oil China uses is imported via seagoing tankers. China is now more dependent on access to the sea than Japan, which  gets about 20 percent of its GPD from exports, or the U.S., which gets about ten percent. Thus if China were to try and take Taiwan by force, the United States could cause economic collapse in China by blockading China's ports. This could be done with nuclear submarines, a type of warship China is not equipped to deal with. Then there's the American aircraft carriers, which can clear the sea of any Chinese ships that venture too far from the Chinese coast. While China has some capability to go after American carriers and subs, it's not enough to break a blockade. Indeed, the blockade can be established by simply announcing that any ships that violate it will be seized, or sunk. This is because American satellite surveillance can track ships movements accurately. China can threaten nuclear retaliation, but even there they are at a major disadvantage, and to make that threat, opens them to a first (non-nuclear or nuclear) strike against their ICBMs (which at present can only reach part of the west coast of North America.) 

While China's military power is growing, it will be decades before they become strong enough to change the above situation. So any serious threat to Taiwan has to be made under the threat of major economic retaliation. While such a blockade would initially give the Chinese government a boost in popularity among Chinese. A few weeks or months of several hundred million Chinese being jobless would change attitudes, given that the current communist dictatorship is not very popular to begin with.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I suspect I am repeating myself, but It has long seemed logical to me that the next _big war_ ought to be between China and Russia.

The prize ought to be Siberia.

See the map, below.

There is a lot in Siberia that China needs: oil, mineral resources and a bit of _lebensraum_, too.

China and Russia are ancient enemies â â€œ periodic bursts of friendship go against the cultural grains.

There are a lot of hurdles: can China defeat Russia at an _acceptable_ cost in lives and treasure?  This brings up an interesting technical question: just how toothless is the Russian bear?  Can Russia be provoked in aggression?  The Chinese are neither immune to nor unconcerned about international laws and norms.

If, big *Big IF* the Chinese calculate that they can provoke Russia into aggression and then defeat Russia at an acceptable cost, then I fail to see the downside, for them.


----------



## Britney Spears

I must confess I never understood the idea of lebensraum, as if this was some big game of _Civilization_ where people are just numbers that move aorund on a map and produce tanks every turn or something. Most of China is already thinly populated inhospitable tundra and desert, How will seizing more inhospitable tundra solve anything? Do you think you can just pick people up in downtown Toronto, drop them off en mass in Whitehorse and instantly have another Toronto? Sometimes I think you guys only see the heavily populated coastal cities, where the action is, and assume that the rest of China is the same. Those cities have been heavily populated for 2500 years, and for a good reason. Ditto for why Chinese Siberia and Turkestan is not. Similarly, what resources exist in Siberia that are important enough to INVADE RUSSIA(you know, the one with the thousands of nukes) over? If  invading  Russia were that easy you'd think someone else would have tried it already, yes? ( and no, The Russo-Japanese War doesn't count because it was fought in China, not Russia)  China has plenty of oil and natural gas in the western desert and in the south sea, whether they are economical compared to Saudi oil is another matter, but it's there. The only important goods that China relies on the West for are Skilled workers and capital.


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> I suspect I am repeating myself, but It has long seemed logical to me that the next _big war_ ought to be between China and Russia.
> 
> The prize ought to be Siberia.
> 
> See the map, below.
> 
> There is a lot in Siberia that China needs: oil, mineral resources and a bit of _lebensraum_, too.
> 
> China and Russia are ancient enemies â â€œ periodic bursts of friendship go against the cultural grains.
> 
> There are a lot of hurdles: can China defeat Russia at an _acceptable_ cost in lives and treasure?  This brings up an interesting technical question: just how toothless is the Russian bear?  Can Russia be provoked in aggression?  The Chinese are neither immune to nor unconcerned about international laws and norms.
> 
> If, big *Big IF* the Chinese calculate that they can provoke Russia into aggression and then defeat Russia at an acceptable cost, then I fail to see the downside, for them.



You say this as though you expect Russia to lose in such an eventuality. Russia is light years beyond China in technology, and has a vastly superior nuclear force. In a strictly War Games sense, Russia would win without any doubt in my mind. For either country to annex Mongolia would likely trigger a greater war. Any territory grabs would likely go through Mongolia first. Either way, the chance of this being the next war is highly doubtful. I think it's often talked about because it would be, strategically and militarily, a big win for the west either way. There is certainly a very serious territory need that may be required in the semi-near future for China as Russias dwindling population may prove to be tempting but China needs Russia as a friend to challenge the west (our south.. or east as it may be, or the four corners of the world, whichever you choose). There are very strong links between the two, although there are many disputes between the two and many differences, I think they're more on the same page than they'd like us to believe. Now, thinking longer term, I would say a Sino-Russian war would be more and more plausible.


----------



## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I must confess I never understood the idea of lebensraum, as if this was some big game of _Civilization_ where people are just numbers that move aorund on a map and produce tanks every turn or something. Most of China is already thinly populated inhospitable tundra and desert, How will seizing more inhospitable tundra solve anything? Do you think you can just pick people up in downtown Toronto, drop them off en mass in Whitehorse and instantly have another Toronto? Sometimes I think you guys only see the heavily populated coastal cities, where the action is, and assume that the rest of China is the same. Those cities have been heavily populated for 2500 years, and for a good reason. Ditto for why Chinese Siberia and Turkestan is not. Similarly, what resources exist in Siberia that are important enough to INVADE RUSSIA(you know, the one with the thousands of nukes) over? If  invading  Russia were that easy you'd think someone else would have tried it already, yes? ( and no, The Russo-Japanese War doesn't count because it was fought in China, not Russia)  China has plenty of oil and natural gas in the western desert and in the south sea, whether they are economical compared to Saudi oil is another matter, but it's there. The only important goods that China relies on the West for are Skilled workers and capital.


Unlike the Saudis, China consumes far more petrol than they output. China, like everyone else, would like to get itself out from under the thumb of OPEC. Siberia has many natural resources which can attract all sorts of invaders. China also has the highest growing energy needs in the world. They're *going* to need that oil, one way or the other. I'm sure that once China has enough clout, they'll become more vocal of their material desires. Who would come to Russias defence? Ukraine? Bulgaria? Maybe. I don't think there are many nations that would want to wade in the middle of that crapstorm. I still think it's highly unlikely to occur at all in the short term and even still unlikely later on, but nonetheless, stranger things have happened.


----------



## Zartan

_Lebensraum_: German for "Living Space". A term used by Hitler to describe an advantage to invade Russia. It was planned that when the Soviet Union was conquered, the area would be resettled by Germanic peoples (including Britons!), while the native population would be enslaved or liquidated. 

However, Siberia is not totally inhospitable. Over 30 million people live there, mostly in the south. However, a conquest would be useful, as southern Siberia has many of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. As one of the previous threads stated, the Chinese would need this, if the North, is in fact drying up. But the climate is extreme, ranging from desert to tundra.


----------



## a_majoor

History is a useful teacher yet again. In the 1920s and 30s, Imperial Japan was seething with intrigue and even rocked by coups and countercoups over the very subject of exploiting resources.

The invasion of China and the annexation of Manchuria was the logical first step, it was close by and had raw materials and a viable work force, but where to expand next? The Imperial Army had its sights fixed on Siberia, with its untapped treasure trove of resources, especially oil. The relative lack of Russians living in Siberia was thought to be an asset for the cause; the Red Army was too far away to realistically defend Siberia *and* watch the European frontiers (much less export World Socialist Revolution) at the same time.

The Imperial Navy was of the opinion that it would be much quicker and more profitable to take out the established colonies in SE Asia, since the resources were already developed and a work force existed in place, making them more readily available in time of war. In the end, the Navy won the political struggle, with an assist from Marshal Zhukov, who defeated the Japanese Army in a series of campaigns in Mongolia  (This was actually quite dangerous for Zhukov, since being victorious placed him under a cloud of suspicion from Stalin, doubly so since he was using "Deep Battle" theory developed by Marshal M.N. Tukhachevskii, who had been shot by Stalin in a purge in 1937).

China, if it is thinking about this, has the same conundrum with almost the same payoffs: rich but untapped resources which would take decades to develop, or readily accessable resources available now?


----------



## Jascar

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> There is a lot in Siberia that China needs: oil, mineral resources and a bit of _lebensraum_, too.



China would be better off setting its sights on the former Soviet republics if it wants plentiful resources. They're much weaker militarily, very unstable politically, easy to reach for China but hard for anyone else to get into, and the west hardly even knows these countries exist.

China could use the same strategy here as it's doing with Nepal and Zimbabwe. Prop up the weak dictatorships in exchange for oil pipelines to China. Most of those countries are eagerly accepting of any alternative to Russian dominance.


----------



## Jascar

Cdn Blackshirt said:
			
		

> Everyone needs to remember this every time you consider buying something marked "Made in China".
> 
> You are in essence, supporting tyranny in the third world.



Disclaimer: I do not have a doctorate in economics or political science. This is just my opinion, and it could very well be wrong. That being said......

I totally disagree with you. I think we should be spending all the money we can on Chinese goods. As China's economy gets stronger, its people will have a better standard of living and will demand more political freedom. Just look at how much China has changed in the last decade as its economy has grown. Communism is all but dead in the country and the Chinese leadership is realizing that it has to change with the times. Sure, its still a dictatorship, but things are better now than ever before.

As more money is pumped into China, more people will be educated, more people will be able to afford internet, more people will start looking at how people live in other parts of the world. There is a trickle down effect, even if it's small. In short, I believe our money is slowly buying freedom for China.

On the other hand, look at North Korea and Cuba which don't have any American (or ANY in the case of North Korea) dollars pouring in. Communism and opression are still alive and strong there.


----------



## a_majoor

Jascar said:
			
		

> Disclaimer: I do not have a doctorate in economics or political science. This is just my opinion, and it could very well be wrong. That being said......
> 
> I totally disagree with you. I think we should be spending all the money we can on Chinese goods. As China's economy gets stronger, its people will have a better standard of living and will demand more political freedom. Just look at how much China has changed in the last decade as its economy has grown. Communism is all but dead in the country and the Chinese leadership is realizing that it has to change with the times. Sure, its still a dictatorship, but things are better now than ever before.
> 
> As more money is pumped into China, more people will be educated, more people will be able to afford internet, more people will start looking at how people live in other parts of the world. There is a trickle down effect, even if it's small. In short, I believe our money is slowly buying freedom for China.
> 
> On the other hand, look at North Korea and Cuba which don't have any American (or ANY in the case of North Korea) dollars pouring in. Communism and oppression are still alive and strong there.



This is an attractive and at least partially true argument (which is why these debates can get so heated, each side has a part of the truth, the real question is which is the larger part?). China is able to direct its wealth from foreign trade away from the desirable ends you point out; their internet is mostly "closed" to the external world and much of the new wealth is going to military R&D. The dictatorship has most of the levers of power, and like the Liberals, have no interest in surrendering their grip on political and economic power. The example of Cuba shows how a ruthless dictatorship can "milk" foreign investment to buttress its own power, Castro should have been gone ages ago.

The trade argument also hinges upon people being "rational" actors. We all learn this assumption in Economics 101 (if you have taken this), but a short look out the window, or reading a history text demonstrates people are not primarily motivated by the need to maximize their economic "utility". The saddest example was a book written and published in (I think) spring 1914 which pointed out that the global economy was so tightly integrated that war would be a total disaster for all parties and even neutrals; therefore war was obsolete as an instrument of policy since the costs were far greater than any conceivable benefit. The theory was rudely discredited a few months later..... 

Chinese policy is driven by many factors we simply don't understand very well (Edward Campbell has written some excellent posts in this thread about that), so what may seem "rational" may end up being a trigger for an "irrational" response driven by pride, envy, guilt or any other factors we do not think about. Since this is a dictatorship we are talking about, there are very few people involved in the decision cycle, so things may hinge on how one person is feeling that day.


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## Wizard of OZ

This thread reads like a Tom Clancy novel.   Who will help Russia when or if China invades?  The Americans would at least in terms of air power and naval power.  They would not want to see all of those resources funnelled into a military IMOO.  As for India they may even side with China as both nations have huge growing populations but India is a little more pro-West then China.  As for the Taiwan issue.  Numbers good but not so good if they can't even get to the target area.  You must not forget that the Americans have sold alot of front line anti air to Taiwan in order to protect the island from any invasion force.  This would work if you parked one or two carrier groups in behind the island, not a really good chance and of the Chinese would make it to the island in fighting strength.  The Kilos subs are quiet but they have to get into the area to be effective this means running at some speed and having to snorkel if they do that you can beat they will be found and tailed or sunk.  I really don't see this happening anytime soon.  I see a struggle in NK with SK and Japan before I see anything like this happening.

MOO


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## Zartan

I read somewhere that the Chinese have constructed a cannon which can hit Taiwan from the Mainland. Don't ask me where - I don't know, but such weapons have been built before. Remember fellow Canadian, the scientist Bull, and his Babylon Cannon? It could fire something like a thousand kilometres in range.

I don't think the Chinese and Indians will ever ally with each other. At present their economies are  competing for resources, and I don't think they would share. As for foreign assistance with the Russians, I would think it wiser for the West to attack and hold North Korea hostage. Even if they have the bomb, I doubt the Chinese would bother help them, and that makes them a more pressing foe. Plus, have they ever said the "bomb" works? They still haven't tested it yet, though they are preparing. I'm sure the Japanese would give ample support to the invasion, as would the South Koreans (especially, though their army is poorly equipped (they have ten times the personnel and 50% more funding)). Besides, a good commando raid may just do the trick - the North Koreans were able to kidnap folks from Japan during the cold war, so why couldn't we infiltrate NK? As an endnote, the Russians could hold, they have nukes coming out of the ying-yang, and their army is sizeable (through growing decrepit). Last time there was a fight between Russia and an Oriental power, the Russians won (The August Storm of '45).

As for the extraction of resources from the former Soviet States in the area, that is already happening. The Americans are building an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan and other states to friendly areas, and have been trying since 1998. I could see the Indians supporting this, as it would likely go through their territory. 

A timeline of the pipeline is here, aswell as some background: http://thedebate.org/thedebate/afghanistan.asp
Another source which describes the origin of the company: http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/97news/102797a.htm


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## a_majoor

Zartan said:
			
		

> I don't think the Chinese and Indians will ever ally with each other. At present their economies are  competing for resources, and I don't think they would share. As for foreign assistance with the Russians, I would think it wiser for the West to attack and hold North Korea hostage. Even if they have the bomb, I doubt the Chinese would bother help them, and that makes them a more pressing foe. Plus, have they ever said the "bomb" works? They still haven't tested it yet, though they are preparing. I'm sure the Japanese would give ample support to the invasion, as would the South Koreans (especially, though their army is poorly equipped (they have ten times the personnel and 50% more funding)). Besides, a good commando raid may just do the trick - the North Koreans were able to kidnap folks from Japan during the cold war, so why couldn't we infiltrate NK? As an endnote, the Russians could hold, they have nukes coming out of the ying-yang, and their army is sizeable (through growing decrepit). Last time there was a fight between Russia and an Oriental power, the Russians won (The August Storm of '45).



India and China may become partners of conveinience, and China is also reaching out to the EU and Russia. These alliances may or may not work to their mutual advantage, being "anti-American" may not negate the fact that each of these nations and blocks have their own "national" interests which may conflict with their presumptive partners. 

American may end up acting much like the Persian Empire during the Peleponnesian Wars, first they supported Sparta with gold and safe havens, then they switched the support to Athens. Each side was provided just enough help to stave off defeat, and still maintain a creditable threat to the other. Eventually Greek civilization was beaten senseless, and the Great Kings could start to relax (except for that wild eyed king from Macedonia. Satrap, where the hell is that anyway?).

Direct American involvement will occur in the case of Taiwan, or if North Korea slips the leash and attacks or destabilizes its neighbours, but the American dollar is the ultimate smart weapon and gives them far more flexibility and freedom of action than the long arm of the US Navy. I think a combination of "carrot and stick" policies will be the order of the day, with access to the US economy being the ultimate carrot.


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## Jascar

a_majoor said:
			
		

> India and China may become partners of conveinience



Joining China would throw out the window any chance it had of breaking into western markets. If China were to start misbehaving, India could quickly replace it as a supplier of cheap goods for The USA and EU who would probably be more than happy to buy from a developing democracy. Besides, China and India have been enemies for decades and have fought two (I believe it's two) wars. I think India has lots to gain by staying away from China and nothing to gain by working with China.


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## a_majoor

China has extended feelers to India, Russia and the EU, and each nation or block is free to respond as it best fits their perceived national interest. Since one of the major questions for each nation and block named is how to respond to the ascendant power of the United States, a possible solution is to combine forces in an attempt to create equal amounts of political, economic and military power. No one expected Hitler and Stalin to sign a non aggression pact; but it gave each side something they wanted (Poland), and allowed them to secure a flank and deal with pressing issues on the other flank (Germany = France; USSR= Imperial Japan). In the 1970's, Richard Nixon opened relations with China (an avowed enemy of the US) in order to put some pressure on the USSR.

IF the inducement is big enough, then India may choose to forgo access to Western markets in return for some favor or advantage that alliance with China might be able to grant.


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## tomahawk6

Sometimes I think the world would be better off if China and Russia square off over Siberia. A severe defeat would most likely 
cause a purge and possibly a collapse of the communist party.


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## Zartan

I read in the Herald yesterday a report of a test of a cruise missile in Taiwan. According to the article (which was based on a chinese article), the missile was fired at a target 480 km away, and was claimed to have the range to hit the mainland. The Taiwanese military would not comment on this.


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## Edward Campbell

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I must confess I never understood the idea of lebensraum, as if this was some big game of _Civilization_ where people are just numbers that move aorund on a map and produce tanks every turn or something. Most of China is already thinly populated inhospitable tundra and desert, How will seizing more inhospitable tundra solve anything? Do you think you can just pick people up in downtown Toronto, drop them off en mass in Whitehorse and instantly have another Toronto? Sometimes I think you guys only see the heavily populated coastal cities, where the action is, and assume that the rest of China is the same. Those cities have been heavily populated for 2500 years, and for a good reason. Ditto for why Chinese Siberia and Turkestan is not. Similarly, what resources exist in Siberia that are important enough to INVADE RUSSIA(you know, the one with the thousands of nukes) over? If   invading   Russia were that easy you'd think someone else would have tried it already, yes? ( and no, The Russo-Japanese War doesn't count because it was fought in China, not Russia)   China has plenty of oil and natural gas in the western desert and in the south sea, whether they are economical compared to Saudi oil is another matter, but it's there. The only important goods that China relies on the West for are Skilled workers and capital.



Sorry, Britney Spears, I missed this.

A couple of points, beyond those which some others have made:

I think the search for a bit of _lebensraum_ is a well established part of Han Chinese culture.  These good, sturdy people have been on the move, so to speak, in search of something better for a long, long time 3,500 years or more.  Maybe not with great _migrations_ ÃƒÂ  la the Eurasian tribes of 2,000 years ago, but they have expanded, steadily, across China and much of Asia.  In the process they weaned their culture away from _place_ and, starting with the _Shang_, adopted a _portable_ written culture which allowed them to expand while still retaining their strong sense of self.  A bit _airy-fairy_ I know but I think it matters.

Russian Siberia is a relatively - especially in Chinese terms - modern innovation.  The Russians did not begin to colonize Siberia until the time of the _Kangxi_ emperor around the end of the 17th century.  The Russian claim to Siberia was not really solidified until the mid to late 19th century - and most Chinese regard all treaties from this period as _unequal_ and invalid.

There are many people in China who regard the Urals, not the Yenisei as the 'natural' boundary between Europe and Asia and who regard all of North Asia as being wholly within China's _sphere of influence_.  While Europeans are fascinated, constantly, by Russia's _Asiatic_ nature, the Chinese do not accept the Russians as Asians - they are interlopers, foreigners, Westerners, who do not belong in Asia.

Anyway, 'we guys' are trying to provoke debate which, now and again leads to thought.  But, you points are well taken- and it all sounds terribly like the junior common room.


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## Britney Spears

I disagree with you assesment of the Han chinese being an expansionist culture. Han China proper, as seen today, remains relatively unchanged from when it was first solidified by Qing Shi Huang. The extraenous territories of Manchuria, Xingjiang/Turkestan, Tibet, and Mongolia all came within the Chinese sphere of influence when their respective cultures conquered China (or in the case of Tibet and Turkestan, when they were in turn conquered by a Sinicized Mongol or Manchu regime from Beijing), not the other way around. The only well known example of a Han expedition of Conquest was When the Tang penetrated into central Asia to secure the Silk Road during the 7th century, and all traces of that conquest has been wiped out for over a millenia. Up to this day The Chinese part of Siberia is still not heavily populated with Han Chinese, even with the goverment encouraged relocations of recent years. To put this into perspective, Very few Chinese people today feel any attachment to Mongolia, and Mongolia was essentially annexed by the Red Army in 1945! 



> There are many people in China who regard the Urals, not the Yenisei as the 'natural' boundary between Europe and Asia and who regard all of North Asia as being wholly within China's sphere of influence.



I'm sure there are a few of them and I'm sure they are regular members at militaryphotos.net, but I'm also sure that if you brought this up in a bar in China you'd get a lot of funny looks.  When people in China talk about "Lebensraum" today, they are probably talking about Vancouver, not Vladivostok.  ;D

Of course, I wouldn't discount the possibility that a war might result from purely geopolitical machinations, and it looks nice in a Tom Clancy novel,  but you are mistaken if you think many people in China feel they have some kind of manifest destiny in Russian Siberia. 


As an interesting aside, offical maps published by the Nationalist goverment (Republic of China) in exile in Taiwan still reflect pre-World War II Chinese borders, and the ROC goverment still claims Mongolia and large swathes of Sibera as Chinese territory. Most Mainlanders find this somewhat amusing.


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## a_majoor

There are a couple of flash points which might spark a war or confrontation with China, the need for resources to maintain economic growht and internal stability, the question of Taiwan and the appeal of being a regional hegemon and restoring China to its "rightful" place as the Middle Kingdom.

The need for resources is the most pressing, and may involve China in confrontations with "non Western" actors such as Russia or India. If this is the case, we may be interested bystanders, or weigh in as best suits OUR national interests.

In the case of Taiwan, I think the need to support a democracy, an important trading partner and show resolve to other nations in similar circumstances outweighs other considerations. This also applies to the idea of China becoming a hegemonic power, unless the Chinese are content with the highly symbolic and ritualistic sorts of displays of the distant past (where nations on the outside would "trade" with China, not realizing they were being seen within the Middle Kindom as symbolicly paying tribute), it seems unlikely they will be content to be surrounded by US clients like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Sinapore. We could hope that in the fullness of time, these nations might gradually slide into a sort of Pan Chinese orbit, without actually being constrained in any way by China, but things rarely work out that way in the end.


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## Wizard of OZ

I have to agree with the maj on this one.  The resource based economies of India and China are out stripping the local resources at an exponetial rate.  Siberia does have vast untapped reousces but the ability to extract them will be costly and dangerous.  India and China could attempt to do this on there own that is a possibility.  And Yes the American dollar is a powrful smart weapon, but so is greed and willful blindness.  Both of these are present in todays government.  As for Taiwan i agree the Americans could not let that bastion of Democracy slip away without other nations taking note, (IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN) to name a few.  I think Japan would have something to say about that as well as it could cut off the sea lanes that supply Japan with alot of its resources as well, the Aussies may not take to kindly to that either being the friends of the Americans can make you the enemy.   Russia may not be the down and out bear that is outwardly portrayed in alot of American novels but if numbers may beat tecnology that may be the place to prove it.  If it came to a fist a cuff in that region China would definetly do more then just give Russia a bloody nose.  I think we are forgeting about Pakistan in the mix of alot of this as they are a regional pwoer not to be forgetten as they could use nukes on ither China or India if it came down to it.


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## Britney Spears

I am curious as to what kind of war you fellows seem to think China could wage against Taiwan. Cosnidering:

- Taiwan's army, if one includes third/fourth line reserves, number almost a million men, American trained and equipped, with many modern, locally produced weapons. 

- The TWnes armed forces have existed for one single purpose for the last 50 years, and it isn't invading and reconquering China.

- They've had a fair bit of time to dig in, if you get my drift. 

- Taiwan itself is about the size of IIRC Vancouver Island.  How well do you think you could hold Vancouver island with a million well armed and equiped troops and at least local air/naval supremacy? Most of the Chinese Air Force still flies the J-6, a copy of the Mig-19 that might have been pretty good during the Korean war, but not so much against Upgraded F-16s and Mirage 2000 and Israeli/American trained pilots.


See this map below:







See the little island labelled Jing Men? Up to this day it is held by Tawainese troops, with a lot of big calibre artillery that can strike deep into the mainland. the Mainland Chinese have attempted multiple invasions in the last 50 years, all have ended in failiure. The only serious invasion that the TWnese are worried about today is if the PLA could concentrate enough naval assets to attempt another invasion of Jing Men. The offical role of ROC Marine Corps, other than to eventually invade China and throw out the communist bandits back to Russia( hey it works so why change it) , is to rapidly reinforce the Jing Men and Peng Hu garrison via landing ships in the event of a Ml Chinese invasion. They are quite confident of their ability to hold the island should this occur.  

No one, least of all the Chinese, seriously think that China could mount any kind of effective invasion of Taiwan, even Jing Men and Ma Tsu would be rather doubtful, and you can SEE Jing Men from the skyscrapters on the coast in Xia Men! You could Hit Jing Men from the Mainland with a .50 rifle!  I personally don't believe any nation in the world, including the US, could pull off such a feat. Certainly an invasion of Taiwan would make D-Day 1944 look like a minor skirmish in comparison.


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## Wizard of OZ

If they valued human life the way you and i do i would agree with you.  But they seem to be a little behind in the caring for there fellow man.  It would be no cake walk that is for sure but if they were determined and were able to isolate the island it would not be impossible.  They are building up there navy and will soon have the capability to isolate the island with out US interference (if that were possible).


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## Britney Spears

Huh? How will sacrificing more lives help you move tanks across water? You need to stop reading Stalin and Mao (who thought human will can triumph over lack of capital) and get with the real world I'm afraid. The PLA has been shrinking in size for the last 20 years, and on average shrinks another 20 percent ever 2 or 3 years. Pretty soon Taiwain will actually have a bigger army, but none the less with every shrinking the PLA becomes more profesional and capable. Their most recent defence white paper places the profesional development of NCOs and the establishment of a skilled and effective NCO core  as their number 1 priority, in order to move away from the officer heavy soviet system they inherited. I think they've even added a couple of higher level (i.e., Brigade and above) NCO ranks that didn't exist in the soviet system before, so that NCOs have more career prospects as they move up the chain. Sound familiar? Ring any bells?  Heck it sounds better than a lot of the crap WE do.


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## Wizard of OZ

It won't and i never said it would.  All i stated was that if they valued human life the way we do you would not even have to worry or we would not be having this discussion but they don't.   

And even if they left TW alone there is a big flashy pool of resources right up north of them.  Traing and upgrading their army is only one aspect.  If there economy is strong enough they may be able to slowly merge this into there fold with an ever expanding economy and envleope the area by developing the resouces for or even with the Russians.  This would give them huge influlence in Europe and solidify there postion in the Pacific as it could meet there resource needs for years to come.


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## a_majoor

Britney has made a few good points about the relative strengths and wealness of the Chinese and Taiwanese militaries.

China would be in big trouble if they tried a conventional invasion, but there are a lot of indications they are trying to create a creditable asymetrical threat. Why attempt to dogfight F-16s or US Navy F'A -18s when you can demolish the available airfields with a mass ballistic missile attack? China is thought to have up to 700 missiles available to perform a saturation attack against high value targets in Tiawan, and it would be rather easy for them to infiltrate SF and commando type forces on the island in the weeks and months prior to the attack to take advantage of the chaos. A naval "surge" deployment under the guise of an exercise would put assets in the right places to make US and Japanese naval response difficult, and place American carrier aviation at the outside edge of their range. Combine that with the overwhelming number of jets the Chinese could throw into battle (led by top of the line SU 27s to clear a path through surviving high performance Taiwanese and American jets) and the Chinese have obtained the local superioraty they need to lift or ship the occupation forces into position.

Invading Taiwan will not be easy, and may not be successful even if every trick in the book is being used. The threat of invasion, combined with sabre rattling (such as "testing" missiles by firing them into the sea lanes neat Taiwan) forces the Taiwanese to divert a fair portion of their economy away from competing with China for markets, but also has the possibility of slipping out of control one day.


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## Zipper

All this is interesting. But I still struggle with WHY they feel they need to own one little island in the first place? If it is because they did in the past? Then should we not expect them to want to have land all the way to Hungary? Should not the Italians feel they own most of Europe and much of west Asia and North Africa? The Spanish want to have South America and half of North America back? The ideas of vast empires and control of large tracts of land are over. With all the ethnic wars popping up, its a wonder we haven't moved back to tribal sized territory already.


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## Wizard of OZ

I don't think China has ever really given up its claim to TW.  That would be why they would want to reassert control over it.  I don't think the Imperial ambitons of old would make for a good argument for new territory but it never really stops ambitious nations from expanding there own territory with either religion, ideology, economic, or military methods.


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## a_majoor

As Robert Kaplan pointed out in "Balkan Ghosts", most of these people are driven to recover their "historical" territory, but when asked to define what that is, choose the moment their empire or nation was at its zenith. This is not confined to the various peoples of the Balkans or to China either,it also explains why aboriginal land claims in BC amount to 110% of the provincial land area.


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## Britney Spears

Kids, sometimes the only way you're going to figure this stuff out is to go read a history book, it will save you from asking embarrasing questions.

Regarding the Chinese need for Anschluss with Taiwan.

Did you ever wonder why the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) up until very recently still claimed to be the legitimate goverment of all of China (and Mongolia)? Or why they(the majority of Taiwanese) steadfastly refuse to declare independence from China?

You guessed it. The people of Taiwan, except for a small minority of austro-polynesian natives, are Chinese. the vast majority only relocated to Taiwan in 1949, most Taiwanese, when quizzed about their origins, still refer to their home towns and provinces  in mainland China where their grandparents lived until 1949. 

I haven't been keeping up with the current public opinion polls, but unless things have changed drastically, most Taiwanese still favour reunification with China, but NOT under the current communist goverment. Outright seperatists are a rather new phenomenon and still a vocal minority.

Personally I think we in the west, without much understanding of the culture, are more nervous about this thing than the Chinese/Taiwanese are themselves.Taiwan and the prosperous SE portion of China are very tightly integrated culturally and economically, a big percentage of "foreign" investment in the new cities on the coast come from Taiwan.50,000 Taiwanese companies and 500,000 Taiwanese workers live and work in China. China is Taiwan's principle trading partner. War just isn't something that most people even think about.


Here's a more interesting scenario. Suppose there is a reunification of the 2 sides, which I think is rather likely in the next 20-30 years, the combined Chinese taiwanese navy would be giving the Japanese a serious run for the money as far as ruling the Se asian sea lanes. I'm not a squid but from all the numbers, the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force right now is easily the most powerful naval force in Asia, even including the Russian Pacific Fleet, but a Combined Chinese/taiwanese fleet I tihnk might be a tougher nut.


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## Edward Campbell

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Kids, sometimes the only way you're going to figure this stuff out is to go read a history book, it will save you from asking embarrasing questions.
> 
> Regarding the Chinese need for Anschluss with Taiwan.
> 
> Did you ever wonder why the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) up until very recently still claimed to be the legitimate goverment of all of China (and Mongolia)? Or why they(the majority of Taiwanese) steadfastly refuse to declare independence from China?
> 
> You guessed it. The people of Taiwan, except for a small minority of austro-polynesian natives, are Chinese. the vast majority only relocated to Taiwan in 1949, most Taiwanese, when quizzed about their origins, still refer to their home towns and provinces   in mainland China where their grandparents lived until 1949.
> 
> I haven't been keeping up with the current public opinion polls, but unless things have changed drastically, most Taiwanese still favour reunification with China, but NOT under the current communist goverment. Outright seperatists are a rather new phenomenon and still a vocal minority.
> 
> Personally I think we in the west, without much understanding of the culture, are more nervous about this thing than the Chinese/Taiwanese are themselves.Taiwan and the prosperous SE portion of China are very tightly integrated culturally and economically, a big percentage of "foreign" investment in the new cities on the coast come from Taiwan.50,000 Taiwanese companies and 500,000 Taiwanese workers live and work in China. China is Taiwan's principle trading partner. War just isn't something that most people even think about.
> 
> 
> Here's a more interesting scenario. Suppose there is a reunification of the 2 sides, which I think is rather likely in the next 20-30 years, the combined Chinese taiwanese navy would be giving the Japanese a serious run for the money as far as ruling the Se asian sea lanes. I'm not a squid but from all the numbers, the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force right now is easily the most powerful naval force in Asia, even including the Russian Pacific Fleet, but a Combined Chinese/taiwanese fleet I tihnk might be a tougher nut.



One these points, I agree with Britney Spears.


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## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I am curious as to what kind of war you fellows seem to think China could wage against Taiwan. Cosnidering:
> 
> - Taiwan's army, if one includes third/fourth line reserves, number almost a million men, American trained and equipped, with many modern, locally produced weapons.
> 
> - The TWnes armed forces have existed for one single purpose for the last 50 years, and it isn't invading and reconquering China.
> 
> - They've had a fair bit of time to dig in, if you get my drift.
> 
> - Taiwan itself is about the size of IIRC Vancouver Island.  How well do you think you could hold Vancouver island with a million well armed and equiped troops and at least local air/naval supremacy? Most of the Chinese Air Force still flies the J-6, a copy of the Mig-19 that might have been pretty good during the Korean war, but not so much against Upgraded F-16s and Mirage 2000 and Israeli/American trained pilots.
> 
> 
> See this map below:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> See the little island labelled Jing Men? Up to this day it is held by Tawainese troops, with a lot of big calibre artillery that can strike deep into the mainland. the Mainland Chinese have attempted multiple invasions in the last 50 years, all have ended in failiure. The only serious invasion that the TWnese are worried about today is if the PLA could concentrate enough naval assets to attempt another invasion of Jing Men. The offical role of ROC Marine Corps, other than to eventually invade China and throw out the communist bandits back to Russia( hey it works so why change it) , is to rapidly reinforce the Jing Men and Peng Hu garrison via landing ships in the event of a Ml Chinese invasion. They are quite confident of their ability to hold the island should this occur.
> 
> No one, least of all the Chinese, seriously think that China could mount any kind of effective invasion of Taiwan, even Jing Men and Ma Tsu would be rather doubtful, and you can SEE Jing Men from the skyscrapters on the coast in Xia Men! You could Hit Jing Men from the Mainland with a .50 rifle!  I personally don't believe any nation in the world, including the US, could pull off such a feat. Certainly an invasion of Taiwan would make D-Day 1944 look like a minor skirmish in comparison.


I think you're neglecting several factors. One is the increasing modernization of China's air force and naval fleet. Taiwan may have over 100 F-16s, but China has hundreds of Su-27/30s. They also have hundreds of J-11(Essentially a SU-27 copy) /J-10s (Essentially a Lavi copy). China is developing stealthy next generation aircraft as well. These are very modern aircraft, with upgraded electronics and payload. They have their own factories and can build their own aircraft at a rate vastly superior to Taiwan. That *alone* is a huge advantage and virtually guarentees air superiority. China's naval capabilities increase dramatically every year. While not enough to credibly defeat a US battlegroup, it is enough to invade Taiwan. And to assist this invasion they have some very thunderous supersonic anti-ship missiles which can do a wackload of damage. Then there are the hundreds of tactical and strategic missiles ready to hit Taiwan. Another factor is the sympathy towards mainland China in Taiwan. A sizable chunk of Taiwan would actively fight for "reunification" (including elements within the Taiwanese military itself). I think such a conflict would be among a few where we may see western space assets being knocked out. 

To underestimate China would be a serious mistake.  Essentially, such a conflict comes down to who can occupy who. There's no hope of a serious Taiwanese invasion. Taiwan would definitely not win the war without external help. Jing Men? That's a speedbump. Do you honestly think China could not take that island? If they can hit it with a rifle, they sure as hell can hit it with a whole lot of other things.


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## Britney Spears

> but China has hundreds of Su-27/30s.


36 single seat Su-27s, 40 Su-27UBK trainers, maybe 90 J-11s and about 100 Su-30MKK.
J-10 I believe is only just entering production, maybe 20-40 flying at most.

I believe the J-11's engines must still come from Russia.

Versus 150 F-16 and 60 Mirage 2000, and vastly better trained (in the US) pilots. Plus Patriot batteries on Jing Men and Taiwan proper.

Doesn't sound like very good odds to me. The Various Arab-Israeli wars do not instill much confidence in Russian training and tactics.

In the sea, the Chinese probably have a bit of an advantage with the new Russian SSKs (no one is willing to sell subs to Taiwan), but on the surface I'd still bet on Taiwan. Of course I welcome any of the air force and navy types here to correct me since this ain't my lane.......

I think it's generally believed that the Chinese, if things go down, will decide as a show of force to take Jing Men, and no doubt they could probably do it.


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## aesop081

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> In the sea, the Chinese probably have a bit of an advantage with the new Russian SSKs (no one is willing to sell subs to Taiwan), but on the surface I'd still bet on Taiwan. Of course I welcome any of the air force and navy types here to correct me since this ain't my lane.......



When it comes to chinese subs i would tend to agree with you.  Kilo-class SSKs and Han-class SSNs pose a very disproportionate threat to Taiwan and any allied nation.  As demonstrated during the Falklands conflict in 1982 by MHS conqueror, 1 single sub can force an entire Navy to remain in port.  I'm not saying that the US and PRC naval/air forces would not stand up and fight but trust me when i say that hunting subs is a difficult task ( and a tough skill to learn at that as i found out last friday !!).  One or two subs will require you to commit a vast amount of resources to counter it.  Also on the chineses side is the fact that in the last few years, ASW training in "western" forces has not been up to what it used to be.


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## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> 36 single seat Su-27s, 40 Su-27UBK trainers, maybe 90 J-11s and about 100 Su-30MKK.
> J-10 I believe is only just entering production, maybe 20-40 flying at most.
> 
> I believe the J-11's engines must still come from Russia.
> 
> Versus 150 F-16 and 60 Mirage 2000, and vastly better trained (in the US) pilots. Plus Patriot batteries on Jing Men and Taiwan proper.
> 
> Doesn't sound like very good odds to me. The Various Arab-Israeli wars do not instill much confidence in Russian training and tactics.
> 
> In the sea, the Chinese probably have a bit of an advantage with the new Russian SSKs (no one is willing to sell subs to Taiwan), but on the surface I'd still bet on Taiwan. Of course I welcome any of the air force and navy types here to correct me since this ain't my lane.......
> 
> I think it's generally believed that the Chinese, if things go down, will decide as a show of force to take Jing Men, and no doubt they could probably do it.


http://www.sinodefence.com/airforce/fighter/su30.asp
According to this site. They have 152 SU-30MKK's, 24 SU-30MK2's and 90 J-11's. Of course, these are all estimates, and I would not personally guarentee any of these numbers, but the SU-30 is a very capable aircraft. This added to the other thousands of fighter aircraft of older models, but still using effective missiles. It's quite formidable. In an initial engagement, it is my estimation that they would closely follow US tactics and take out many anti-air defences as possible with SF/sabotage and missiles before launching a full air raid. They could level the entire surface of Jing Men. I wouldn't be very concerned with that island if I were the Chinese. It's likely if they even chose to strike, they would have less reservations than we do about using tactical nukes. We all have to remember, that those factories that make our little cheap trinkets will be converted to military purposes if such a large scale war were to break out. They'd start pumping out planes like there's no tomorrow. That's why, despite the initial battle damage, China can sustain a wide prolonged war far longer than Taiwan and can outmatch it's production easily. Without US and/or Significant Others, Taiwan will be "reunited".


----------



## Britney Spears

The source you cite gives 100, not 152 Su-30MKK in total, 76 air force, 24 navy.

I'm not sure how far they have progressed with the production of J-11s, but I doubt they are at this point capable of producing the engines, and may still be at the stage of just assembling Russian kits. I guess that's still pretty far from locally producing any variant of the Su-30, which is a much more complex piece of kit. Heck, the Ethiopians fly Su-27s, they're pretty bog standard nowadays.

In any case, perhaps it's time for me to bow out of the air force and navy discussion and leave it to the experts. All I know is that the New Chinese MBTs (T-89, T98) would beat the hell out of the Taiwanese M48s.......


----------



## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> The source you cite gives 100, not 152 Su-30MKK in total, 76 air force, 24 navy.


"The PLA Air Force (PLAAF) acquired two batches of 76 Su-30MKKs between 2000 and 2003."
Emphasis on "two" and that's just til 2003.


> I'm not sure how far they have progressed with the production of J-11s, but I doubt they are at this point capable of producing the engines, and may still be at the stage of just assembling Russian kits. I guess that's still pretty far from locally producing any variant of the Su-30, which is a much more complex piece of kit. Heck, the Ethiopians fly Su-27s, they're pretty bog standard nowadays.
> 
> In any case, perhaps it's time for me to bow out of the air force and navy discussion and leave it to the experts. All I know is that the New Chinese MBTs (T-89, T98) would beat the heck out of the Taiwanese M48s.......


Heheh, no doubt there, the hard part is getting them there and I can't say I'm an expert either, I'm just a pattern watcher.


----------



## Britney Spears

"The PLA Air Force (PLAAF) acquired two batches of 76 Su-30MKKs between 2000 and 2003."
Emphasis on "two" and that's just til 2003.

They mean 76 all together, not 76 each. See lower down on the page where they have a table of inventory. Each batch is 38 planes, that equips one air division.


----------



## Zipper

So what your saying Brit is that Taiwan as a majority of citizens WANTS to re-join China if conditions are right (no communism)? 

Ok. I can see that, and understand to a point.

Can the same be said about Tibet I wonder?

And I wonder what the States would do if Taiwan began direct overtures to do just that? The naval power balance in the area would be seriously threatened and not to the US's advantage. We can only hope a different administration (ideology wise) will be in if that situation ever happens.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Zipper said:
			
		

> So what your saying Brit is that Taiwan as a majority of citizens WANTS to re-join China if conditions are right (no communism)?



The Taiwanese are really just refugees from mainland China: they were followers of Chiang Kai-Shek, who was the ruler of China before the civil war ... they are really just different factions: would be like if there was a revolution in Canada and the current government was chased to Vancouver Island and remained there {I will avoid going off on an obvious tangent}.   The idea of an independent Taiwan is more of a second choice/compromise.  Moreover, there are very few (any?) native Taiwanese left: they are all "refugees" from the mainland.



> Can the same be said about Tibet I wonder?



No, not even close: the Tibetans are a separate people and consider the Chinese as empirical rulers: they don't have any claim on China, they simply want independence.


----------



## Britney Spears

> The idea of an independent Taiwan is more of a second choice/compromise.  Moreover, there are very few (any?) native Taiwanese left: they are all "refugees" from the mainland.



The idea of independance is gaining ground In Taiwan, as more and more of the older generation die off, and the majority of Taiwanese will be composed of youngsters who have never seen the Mainland. The current ruling party of Chen Shui Bian was a fairly radical pro-independence party, although they had to tone down their rhetoric to increase their mass appeal, and even then they are presently what we would call a minority goverment( with about 35% of the vote, IIRC). CSB probably would not have won the last election had not the ruling Nationalist party split it's own vote with two competing candidates. 



> Can the same be said about Tibet I wonder?



Another whole different kettle of fish entirely, and again one woefully misunderstood in the west. To kick things off, let me dispell one of the common bits of misinformation parroted by the western press, that " China invaded Tibet in 1949, forcing the Dalai Llama to flee".  Continually I am astounded as supposedly "experts" in the area make this statement. Has anyone ever seen a pre-1949 map of China that did not include Tibet as being Chinese?  While the Tibetans are not Chinese and have valid reasons for seeking  independence, Tibet itself has been under Chinese rule since the 1600s. The notion that this land of Brad Pitt Nirvana was somehow annexed by the evil communists in 1949 is pure Hollywood fantasy that a quick reading of any historical work would dispell, but that is obviously too much work for most of the hippies out there.


----------



## Horse_Soldier

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Another whole different kettle of fish entirely, and again one woefully misunderstood in the west. To kick things off, let me dispell one of the common bits of misinformation parroted by the western press, that " China invaded Tibet in 1949, forcing the Dalai Llama to flee".   Continually I am astounded as supposedly "experts" in the area make this statement. Has anyone ever seen a pre-1949 map of China that did not include Tibet as being Chinese?   While the Tibetans are not Chinese and have valid reasons for seeking   independence, Tibet itself has been under Chinese rule since the 1600s. The notion that this land of Brad Pitt Nirvana was somehow annexed by the evil communists in 1949 is pure Hollywood fantasy that a quick reading of any historical work would dispell, but that is obviously too much work for most of the hippies out there.



And yet, all one has to do is a quick search on the internet:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/north_east_asia/tibet/history.htm

Of course, all that is not to say that China's record with respect to Tibet since the Communist take-over hasn't been anything short of atrocious, but then again, Han Chinese suffered from Mao Zedong's mad schemes just as badly.


----------



## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> "The PLA Air Force (PLAAF) acquired two batches of 76 Su-30MKKs between 2000 and 2003."
> Emphasis on "two" and that's just til 2003.
> 
> They mean 76 all together, not 76 each. See lower down on the page where they have a table of inventory. Each batch is 38 planes, that equips one air division.


You're right. My bad.


----------



## Dare

Zipper said:
			
		

> So what your saying Brit is that Taiwan as a majority of citizens WANTS to re-join China if conditions are right (no communism)?
> 
> Ok. I can see that, and understand to a point.
> 
> Can the same be said about Tibet I wonder?
> 
> And I wonder what the States would do if Taiwan began direct overtures to do just that? The naval power balance in the area would be seriously threatened and not to the US's advantage. We can only hope a different administration (ideology wise) will be in if that situation ever happens.


Many Taiwanese are being fooled into believing that a reunion would be formed with Taiwan being the dominant partner. Unfortunately, I think such a reunion would end up looking a lot more like China's slow totalitarian takeover of Hong Kong. The last election was mostly split along this issue.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> common bits of misinformation parroted by the western press, that " China invaded Tibet in 1949, forcing the Dalai Llama to flee".  Continually I am astounded as supposedly "experts" in the area make this statement. Has anyone ever seen a pre-1949 map of China that did not include Tibet as being Chinese?  While the Tibetans are not Chinese and have valid reasons for seeking  independence, Tibet itself has been under Chinese rule since the 1600s. The notion that this land of Brad Pitt Nirvana was somehow annexed by the evil communists in 1949 is pure Hollywood fantasy that a quick reading of any historical work would dispell, but that is obviously too much work for most of the hippies out there.



I think this is a bit of an over-simplification: Tibet operated under suzerainty (almost entirely Chinese, but also under the British) and even had total autonomy for a few periods (although subject to numerous wars and border disputes) ... in any event, Tibet under Communist rule is nothing like anything it had previously experienced (to be fair to the Hollywood Hippies).


----------



## a_majoor

Another one of those "OOPS" moments for US intelligence:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050609-120336-4092r



> The Washington Times
> www.washingtontimes.com
> 
> *Analysts missed Chinese buildup*
> 
> By Bill Gertz
> THE WASHINGTON TIMES
> Published June 9, 2005
> 
> A highly classified intelligence report produced for the new director of national intelligence concludes that U.S. spy agencies failed to recognize several key military developments in China in the past decade, The Washington Times has learned.
> 
> The report was created by several current and former intelligence officials and concludes that U.S. agencies missed more than a dozen Chinese military developments, according to officials familiar with the report.
> 
> The report blames excessive secrecy on China's part for the failures, but critics say intelligence specialists are to blame for playing down or dismissing evidence of growing Chinese military capabilities.
> 
> The report comes as the Bush administration appears to have become more critical of China's military buildup.
> 
> Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Singapore over the weekend that China has hidden its defense spending and is expanding its missile forces despite facing no threats. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also expressed worries this week about China's expanding military capabilities.
> 
> Among the failures highlighted in the study are:
> 
> "¢China's development of a new long-range cruise missile.
> "¢The deployment of a new warship equipped with a stolen Chinese version of the U.S. Aegis battle management technology.
> "¢Deployment of a new attack submarine known as the Yuan class that was missed by U.S. intelligence until photos of the submarine appeared on the Internet.
> "¢Development of precision-guided munitions, including new air-to-ground missiles and new, more accurate warheads.
> "¢China's development of surface-to-surface missiles for targeting U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups.
> "¢The importation of advanced weaponry, including Russian submarines, warships and fighter-bombers.
> 
> According to officials familiar with the intelligence report, the word "surprise" is used more than a dozen times to describe U.S. failures to anticipate or discover Chinese arms development.
> 
> Many of the missed military developments will be contained in the Pentagon's annual report to Congress on the Chinese military, which was due out March 1 but delayed by interagency disputes over its contents.
> 
> Critics of the study say the report unfairly blames intelligence collectors for not gathering solid information on the Chinese military and for failing to plant agents in the communist government.
> 
> *  Instead, these officials said, the report looks like a bid to exonerate analysts within the close-knit fraternity of government China specialists, who for the past 10 years dismissed or played down intelligence showing that Beijing was engaged in a major military buildup.
> "This report conceals the efforts of dissenting analysts [in the intelligence community] who argued that China was a threat," one official said, adding that covering up the failure of intelligence analysts on China would prevent a major reorganization of the system.
> A former U.S. official said the report should help expose a "self-selected group" of specialists who fooled the U.S. government on China for 10 years.
> "This group's desire to have good relations with China has prevented them from highlighting how little they know and suppressing occasional evidence that China views the United States as its main enemy."*
> 
> The report has been sent to Thomas Fingar, a longtime intelligence analyst on China who was recently appointed by John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, as his office's top intelligence analyst.
> 
> Mr. Negroponte has ordered a series of top-to-bottom reviews of U.S. intelligence capabilities in the aftermath of the critical report by the presidential commission headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, Virginia Democrat.
> 
> According to the officials, the study was produced by a team of analysts for the intelligence contractor Centra Technologies.
> Spokesmen for the CIA and Mr. Negroponte declined to comment.
> 
> Its main author is Robert Suettinger, a National Security Council staff member for China during the Clinton administration and the U.S. intelligence community's top China analyst until 1998. Mr. Suettinger is traveling outside the country and could not be reached for comment, a spokesman said.
> 
> John Culver, a longtime CIA analyst on Asia, was the co-author.
> 
> Among those who took part in the study were former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Lonnie Henley, who critics say was among those who in the past had dismissed concerns about China's military in the past 10 years.
> 
> Also participating in the study was John F. Corbett, a former Army intelligence analyst and attache who was a China policy-maker at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration.
> 
> Copyright © 2005 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.



The fact the report was written by a bunch of ex Clintonites might make it seem like this is a case of Bush bashing until you remember the time-line: Mr Clinton was President ten years ago.

China also has something for those who favor freedom of expression:

http://www.themoderatevoice.com/posts/1118362904.shtml



> China Cracks Down -- On Blogs
> by Joe Gandelman
> 
> What more of a sign do you need that weblogs are a feisty new medium that has become disturbing to The Powers The Be in governments everywhere than what's now going on in China - a crackdown on blogs:
> 
> *The Chinese government has announced plans to police web forums, chat rooms and blogs alongside other websites.*
> 
> Websites in China have long been required to be officially registered. The authorities are now determined that blogs should also be brought under state control.
> 
> Press advocacy group Reporters without Borders said the initiative would "enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively".
> 
> Private bloggers must register the full identity of the person responsible for the sites, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) said. Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to one million yuan if they fail to register. All blogs and websites must be registered by 30 June.
> 
> Question: could some of the recent coverage by blogs in China about the anti-Japanese riots - and suggestions that the riots were at the very LEAST enabled by the Chinese government - have had something to do with it? The BBC story also adds these details:
> 
> "The internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits," said a statement on the MII website, explaining why the new rules were necessary.
> 
> * It has developed a system which will monitor sites in real time and search each web address for its registration number. Any that are not registered will be reported back to the Ministry, the statement said.*
> 
> Blogs are often used in countries where freedom of speech is limited as a way of speaking out against the ruling power.
> 
> The new rules could be devastating for bloggers who do not toe the Chinese Communist party line, said Reporters Without Borders.
> 
> "Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party's propaganda," the organisation said.
> 
> *"The authorities hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems," it added.
> 
> Because, believe it or not, there is what is effectively the Great Firewall Of China:
> 
> Known as the Great Firewall, the filtering system used by the Chinese government is not entirely unbreachable; for every new restriction and technical door that it slams shut, the Chinese people find a hack, a workaround or an entirely new way of communicating.*
> 
> According to official figures, about 75% of sites have already complied with the new procedure.
> 
> 
> Lesson for bloggers everywhere: just as governments of all kinds may wish to scrutinize these uncontrollable (of the right and left) pesky blogs, bloggers need to scrutinize the government. All the more reason for bloggers to take a hard-line on any form of government regulation on their freedoms in the United States.


----------



## Britney Spears

Heh, sorry, but the combination of "Washington Times" and "Bill Gertz" on top of anything tends to make my eyes glaze over. Bill Gertz might think of himself as an "expert" on this stuff but I'm pretty sure he's the only one.    Most of the other stuff is vague enough to have some element of thruth to it, but I call BS on this one:



> "¢The deployment of a new warship equipped with a stolen Chinese version of the U.S. Aegis battle management technology.


----------



## Zipper

Either way, to combine advance technology (and be able to use it properly) with China's sheer superiority in numbers would be a very frightening thing for US and other western powers. Aegis or not that is...


----------



## Britney Spears

> China's sheer superiority in number



Sheer numbers of World War 2 vintage U-boats and destroyers?

I am very skeptical of this idea that large numbers of antique ships, with larger numbers of Mig-19 and Mig-21 derivatives, are going to be much good against a modern western navy and air force. Air force and Navy types please fell free to correct me.

I looked further into the Chinese AEGIS rumour. There are some photos on the internet of a new "Project 170" destroyer with some kind of phased array radar and vertically launched  Russian SAMs.  I'm still dubious.

I'll contribute some more tidbits on the history of the Chinese air force and navy. The history is really more my area of interest. I can barely tell the difference between an Su-27 and Su-30, and I don't know shit about modern naval warfare, so I'll shut up about that.

China actually had a pretty good (for a third world country) air force and Navy up until the late 60. In 1971, One of Mao's leading generals, one of his "Ten Great Marshalls", Lin Biao, who was his designated succesor, tried to stage a coup against Mao. The coup failed and Lin was forced to flee to the USSR, but he died when the plane he was flying crashed in Mongolia. Lin's supporters were purged from the party as one would expect.

Problem is that Lin, and many of his supporters were Soviet trained, and were the leaders of China's Air Force and Navy, which obviously demanded leaders with a more technical background, as opposed to the leadership of the army, which was lead by old loyalists of Mao. For the next 20 years the Air Force and Navy became the red headed stepchildren and got no funding, while the army got bigger and bigger. So today the Chinese air force and navy are still waaay behind in terms of technology, more so that one would think for a country of that size and wealth.


For our air force collegues on the board, here's a pic of a Chinese S-70 Blackhawk which they purchased from the US  before the 1989 weapons embargo. They are now flying again, as spare parts can now be procurred from Hong Kong.


----------



## a_majoor

As Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii was wont to claim; "quantity has a quality of its own".

Certainly any allied air force or navy will achieve lop sided victory ratios against the current PLA, but after a while the allies will start running low on missiles, planes and ships have to be withdrawn for maintainence, pilots and crews need rest...but yet another wave of PLA attackers is on the way. Using Asymetrical tactics (from mass missile attacks, old SSKs laying mine fields, "non attributed" cyber attacks against enemy infrastructure) to decatitate the enemy and cut down the number of modern assets, then leading off the initial attack with the "best" systems, following up with waves or secondary systems drawn from the reserve pool and the Chinese will have the potential to beat down the opposition. It will take a while for more American carrier task forces to arrive , so a window then exists to consolodate any gains made during the initial push. 

This analysis is rather one sided, of course. The Taiwanese will resist ferociously with whatever they have left, and the Allied forces will be preparing some unexpected moves of their own. In any event, this would be a messy scenario. Robert Kaplan's article is pretty clear on the consensus view of high ranking menbers of US PACCOM; "Getting into a war with China is easy. You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan. But the dilemma is, how do you end a war with China?".


----------



## tomahawk6

Here is a very good web site that tracks Chinese defense trends/news.

http://www.sinodefence.com/


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

To Brittany,

Just an fyi....there was a great article I read in the last three weeks on the social transformation taking place in Taiwan.  One of the most noteworhty changes was that a new Taiwanese idenity was forming and whereas the Chinese-affiliation percentages you stated were probably accurate 10 years ago, when given the choice between identifying themselves as "Chinese" or "Taiwanese" the numbers are now much closer to 30%:70% (Chinese:Taiwanese).

I'll see if I can't find it over the weekend but my recollection was it was either in the PINR, Council on Foreign Relations or the Asia Times.

Bottom Line:  It's only one source, but it is directly contradictory to the generalization that your making and in my opinion if accurate should give the Taiwanese people the right to self-determination.

Cheers,



Matthew.


----------



## Britney Spears

> Just an fyi....there was a great article I read in the last three weeks on the social transformation taking place in Taiwan.  One of the most noteworhty changes was that a new Taiwanese idenity was forming and whereas the Chinese-affiliation percentages you stated were probably accurate 10 years ago, when given the choice between identifying themselves as "Chinese" or "Taiwanese" the numbers are now much closer to 30%:70% (Chinese:Taiwanese).
> 
> I'll see if I can't find it over the weekend but my recollection was it was either in the PINR, Council on Foreign Relations or the Asia Times.



I don't doubt you. These opinion polls do tend to fluctuate with events like Chinese missile testing off the coast, etc. Taiwan is still a relatively new parlimentary democracy and things  tend to be more dramatic. I'm sure you've seen the TV coverage of Taiwanese MPs getting down to fistfights on live TV. That's the way democracies should work IMO. 

I think Taiwan's internal politics are a little too murky even for me to delve into.....


----------



## a_majoor

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I'm sure you've seen the TV coverage of Taiwanese MPs getting down to fistfights on live TV. That's the way democracies should work IMO.



Harper's young and fit; this could be a good place for him to shine


----------



## a_majoor

Mark Styen on China. If he is even half way right, then China is dangerously unstable, and could tip out (attempting to deflect internal problems through external agression), or implode. Either way will be very ugly indeed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/06/12/do1203.xml



> *Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of course*
> 
> By Mark Steyn
> (Filed: 12/06/2005)
> 
> Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
> 
> Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
> 
> The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-ÃƒÂ -vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
> 
> Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
> 
> Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
> 
> *What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel*. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
> 
> China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". *On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests.* Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.
> 
> How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. *It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even free-ish - society.*
> 
> Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.
> 
> _The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development._
> 
> China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.
> 
> Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.
> 
> *India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas.* Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell  £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
> 
> I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so.
> 
> *China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems.* The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.
> 
> © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.


----------



## Britney Spears

<a href=http://armscontrolwonk.com/>Some comments on the previous Bill gertz article.</a> I wonder if our collegue TCBF is still following this thread....




> it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests.



Well, this guy apparently gets his news from the _National Enquirer_.

4,000 foreign troops, with all their equipment and facilities, and no one is the wiser? Man those Chinese are good at hiding. 

<a href=http://www.cephasministry.com/news_china_sudan.html> Here's a previous article from the same source, with even more hilarious claims</a>



> TENS of thousands of Chinese troops and *prisoners forced to work as security guards* have been moved into Sudan.



 ;D 

I won't bother pointing out all the factual errors in the above articles. His points may not be complete hogwash, and hey, I'm just as prescient as he is, but his grasp of the facts does not inspire much confidence.


----------



## squealiox

steyn's usual factual errors aside, he's pretty incoherent too. china has major structural problems that get glossed over in the business press, but even so, its sheer size almost guarantees its economy will eventually become larger than that of the US, even if it is operating at a fraction of its full potential. do the math, you'll see.

i'm not sure what his solution is (steyn, being a 2nd-rate comedian rather than a serious commentator, rarely seems to have any), but if there is any hope for democracy coming to china, it lies almost entirely in encouraging further trade with them, and letting a middle class develop. that's how countries in the "anglosphere" became democracies. (after all, the UK wasn't really one until 1918, when people without land finally got the vote).

and as for intellectual property, the concept barely existed during the industrial revolution in the West, when ripping off other countries' textile and other production technology was the order of the day. but you can bet a richer china will have more incentive to safeguard its own IP if and when its economy develops to the extent it is more dependent on higher value-added goods and services.

if history is any guide (and it sometimes is), our biggest problems with china are short-term -- ie, taiwan.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

squeeliox said:
			
		

> .
> 
> if history is any guide (and it sometimes is), our biggest problems with china are short-term -- ie, taiwan.


     Of course, if history is any guide, our biggest problems with Germany were short term--ie, France, Poland, Holland, Belgium, etc.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Once again Brittany, I'm confused by the fact that you focus your attention on undermining an attack on the PRC's record and do so by picking one of the very smallest and least relevant sections of the article.

Disregarding all the other information (which in large measure is accurate) and just focusing on Sudan, I'd like you to comment on what you believe to be the veracity of the following statements:
1)  PRC state-owned companies have the biggest foreign share of Sudanese oil interests of any nation in the world (Russia is number two)
2)  Due to this, the PRC has been by far the single biggest roadblock to any real action in the UN due its public commitment to use its veto should the remainder of the UN try to pass sanctions.
3)  Finally, the PRC has been the primary arms supplier to the Sudanese Arab government which in turn have transferred many of those weapons to the Janjaweed who have used them murder, rape and ethnically cleanse an entire population.

Bottom Line:  I'd like you for the record state your position on the PRC because to date the only thing I've seen is support which I find deeply troubling.....

Thanks in advance,


Matthew.


----------



## Britney Spears

> picking one of the very smallest and least relevant sections of the article.



1) The article was not about the Sudan, it mentions Sudan exactly once. So in this context, I suppose you could say that it isn't very relevent.But then, Sudan as a whole isn't very relevent in this day and age, to anyone,  is it?

2) The completely ludicrous claim of 4,000 Chinese soldiers on the ground undermines whatever position the author was trying to establish, betraying the fact that he knows very little about either China or Sudan. That Iraqi information minister guy was probably right about a lot of things too, but why don't we believe him? Heck, For starters I for one would like to see some cite to back up his quote on a quote about the Chinese not liking outwardly opulent displays of wealth. It's the first time I've ever heard of such a phenomenon.



> Disregarding all the other information (which in large measure is accurate)



Uh, no it isn't, but OK.....




> 1)  PRC state-owned companies have the biggest foreign share of Sudanese oil interests of any nation in the world (Russia is number two)
> 2)  Due to this, the PRC has been by far the single biggest roadblock to any real action in the UN due its public commitment to use its veto should the remainder of the UN try to pass sanctions.
> 3)  Finally, the PRC has been the primary arms supplier to the Sudanese Arab government which in turn have transferred many of those weapons to the Janjaweed who have used them murder, rape and ethnically cleanse an entire population.



The article we are discussing, ridiculous as it is, makes NONE of those claims. How about you come back with some proof, and then we'll have something to discuss?



> Bottom Line:  I'd like you for the record state your position on the PRC because to date the only thing I've seen is support which I find deeply troubling.....



What "Position" are you talking about? Do I support genocide in Sudan? No, I don't, but what does this have to do with anything? Chinese companies *may* (since you've already thoroughly researched your position, it won't trouble you at all to provide some sources) have the biggest stake in Sudanese oil projects, but I highly doubt they are the only ones, or the majority. Remember when Talisman sold their stake in Sudan to an Indian oil company? Do I approve of foreign oil companies investing in troubled spots around the world? It depends, would you like to explain to the Chinese why Chinese oil companies should stop doing something that Western oil companies have been doing for close to 100 years? For bonus points try doing that without mentioning Iraq and how the US protects it's oil interests.  

Don't you think it's a litle silly that one could have a single "position" on an entire nation and 1/4 of humanity? Almost sounds like something George W. Bush would come up with....

Upon reading some of your attitudes on Walmart and labour outsourcing, I'm afraid we may just have to agree to disagree.


----------



## Infanteer

Hey, I like Walmart, I just got Sopranos Season 5 for a good price from there....


----------



## Dare

Infanteer said:
			
		

> Hey, I like Walmart, I just got Sopranos Season 5 for a good price from there....


I just bought a cheap Wall.

I apologize for that terrible terrible joke.  :dontpanic:
 ;D


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

First, that's quite a chip you have on your shoulder....  ;D  



> The article we are discussing, ridiculous as it is, makes NONE of those claims. How about you come back with some proof, and then we'll have something to discuss?



Obviously you and I read different material....I don't keep links to everything I read but here are a couple of quick ones.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/26.htm
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GC02Ad07.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/sudan.html

The short version is the PRC is tied in to just about every single tyrant on the planet in their effort to secure resources around the world.

Venezuela - the PRC is there.
Sudan - the PRC is there.
Zimbabwe - the PRC is there.
Iran - the PRC is there.

And before you think about arguing the point do some of the research yourself.

Use google.

China - Iran:  Guarantee by the PRC to buy $70 billion USD of petroleum products
China - Venezuela:  New support for Chavez government.  Large investment into Venezuelan oil/NGL project.
China - Zimbabwe:  Primarily securing mineral resources for cash and military equipment.
Etc.
Etc.

....and my generalizing friend, my "single" position is not on 1/4 of the population of the world.  It is on the PRC government body and strategically-managed state-owned corporations and their documented record.  Research it yourself.

One final note.... I'm not against outsourcing.  I'm against outsourcing to the PRC.  I would be more than happy to open markets to true allies who are undertaking democratic and rule-of-law reform.  My problem with the PRC is they are taking the profits from their trade balance with the western democracies and using those funds to bully a democratic government in Taiwan, to support Kim Il Jong and his nuclear program as well as the other nations I mentioned above. 

By the way, nice reach with the GWB analogy.  Congratulations.  Your discourse has now reached the level of whiney protestor.  Seriously, that was really, really bad....

Cheers Brittany.

Have a good night, and once you've done your research I'll be interested to hear if your opinions have changed at all.

Best wishes,


Matthew.


----------



## Britney Spears

> Obviously you and I read different material....I don't keep links to everything I read but here are a couple of quick ones.






> And before you think about arguing the point do some of the research yourself.



What the devil.....  ??? ???

Look, I don't *think* you're being actively malicious here, but we are plainly not on the same page. I commented on an article predicting China's imminent demise, pointing out some of it's more obvious factual errors. Previously I had been commenting on the balance of military power between China and Taiwan, and I am of the opinion that the Chinese armed forces are still too far behind in technology and training to pose much of a threat to Taiwan.  You then come hijacking in with a litany of allegations, with no proof or source and completely irrelevent to the topic at hand (unless you are claiming that there are, in fact, 4000 or 700,000 Chinese troops on the ground in Sudan), demand that I give you my "position" on you allegations and now you want me to "do my own research"? Of course I haven't read any of the stuff you posted JUST NOW, am I suppose to read your mind or something?

If you're just trolling for a fight, I'm afraid I've no time for you.


As to the rest of your splurge, I'm sure most of it is probably factually accurate. So what? Are you saying that the Chinese tend to act just as any rational state actor would, and just as most Western nations acted during their transition to capitalism and industrialized economies, and most Western nations are still doing today? If so, then we are in agreement.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> What the devil.....   ??? ???
> 
> Look, I don't *think* you're being actively malicious here, but we are plainly not on the same page. I commented on an article predicting China's imminent demise, pointing out some of it's more obvious factual errors. Previously I had been commenting on the balance of military power between China and Taiwan, and I am of the opinion that the Chinese armed forces are still too far behind in technology and training to pose much of a threat to Taiwan.   You then come hijacking in with a litany of allegations, with no proof or source and completely irrelevent to the topic at hand (unless you are claiming that there are, in fact, 4000 or 700,000 Chinese troops on the ground in Sudan), demand that I give you my "position" on you allegations and now you want me to "do my own research"? Of course I haven't read any of the stuff you posted JUST NOW, am I suppose to read your mind or something?
> 
> If you're just trolling for a fight, I'm afraid I've no time for you.
> 
> 
> As to the rest of your splurge, I'm sure most of it is probably factually accurate. So what? Are you saying that the Chinese tend to act just as any rational state actor would, and just as most Western nations acted during their transition to capitalism and industrialized economies, and most Western nations are still doing today? If so, then we are in agreement.



No, you took an op-piece containing large amounts of factual information and did your best to undermine it by pointing to one section about 4,000 troops (which frankly I have never seen mentioned although the number of PRC reps most associated with China National Petroleum Company has been estimated at over 10,000).

I then made a series of specific claims about what the PRC's currently involvement with the world's tyrants and questioned what the fundamental basis is for your position that "China can do no wrong."  (I have yet to see you post a single statement admonishin the PRC's for its record).

You then called BS on the claims I had made arguing I had not presented valid back-up information (eluding to the fact you must live under a rock because if you read any foreign policy documentation or even world economics information, the PRC's drive to secure world resource assets is one of the prime topics of discussion).

I then provided some quick back-up information verifiying the fact the claims I made are in fact accurate (which you've failed to admit to this point) and questioned what it was that you were using as your reference material if you were ignorant of all of the above things.

Your final post is the most classic in which you misrepresent the argument, call me a troll, claim you shouldn't be responsible for information not previously posted on the board and in general make excuses for the fact you cannot back up your position which appears to be "the PRC isn't that bad....let's blame Bush instead."

The only rationale I can come up with is you are very young and very inexperienced and have bought into a bunch of crap you've never done the research for yourself.

In the end, you can respond, you can ignore me, you have the right to do anything you like, but please don't go through life forming your world opinion based on headlines or protest plackards when there are infinite resources for you to dig deeper because it shouldn't be the responsibility of the culture to educate you, you must take proactive steps to educate yourself.

Regardless of what you do....good luck.



Matthew.


----------



## a_majoor

VDH with a somewhat more insightful look at China's place in the world. (Steyn is good for hitting you in the head and arousing argument, Hanson's arguments are compelling but more muted):




> *The Global Shift*
> The world will soon better appreciate the United States
> by Victor Davis Hanson
> National Review Online
> 
> Radical global power shifts have been common throughout history. For almost a millennium (800-100 BC) the Greek East, with its proximity to wealthy Asia and African markets and a dynamic Hellenism, was the nexus of Western civilization - before giving way to Rome and the western Mediterranean.
> 
> Yet by A.D. 300 the Greek-speaking half of the empire, more distant from northern European tribal attacks, proved the more resolute. It would endure for over 1,000 years while the fragmented West fell into chaos.
> 
> And then yet again the pendulum shifted back. The Renaissance was the product of Florence, Venice, and Rome as the Byzantine East was worn out by its elemental struggles with Islam and straitjacketed by an increasingly rigid Orthodoxy and top-heavy imperial regime.
> 
> But by 1600 the galley states of the Western Mediterranean were to lose their restored primacy for good, as to the north the ocean-going galleons of the Atlantic port nations - England, France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain - usurped commerce and monopolized the new trans-oceanic trade routes to Asia and the New World.
> 
> By the time of the industrial revolution, another radical shift had occurred in influence and power. The northern European states of England, France, and Germany, products of the Enlightenment, with sizable Protestant populations, outpaced both the old classical powers of the Mediterranean and the Spanish empire. And in early 20th century, the United States, benefiting from the Anglo tradition of transparency and the rule of law - combined with a unique constitution, exploding population, and vast resources - displaced the old European colonial empires and stood down the supposed new future of Soviet totalitarianism.
> 
> Globalization and technology, of course, can speed up these shifts and accomplish in a few years what used to transpire over centuries. We are told that a third of the planet, the two billion in China and India, is now moving at a breakneck pace with market reforms to remake the world. The old idea of a "population bombâ ? of too many people and too few resources has been turned upside down: The key is not how many people reside in a country but rather what those people do. A billion under a Marxist regime leads to terrible human waste and starvation; a billion in a market economy is actually advantageous - as seemingly endlessly active minds and arms flood the world with cheap consumer goods and rebuild a decaying infrastructure from the ground up.
> 
> Europe - high unemployment, layers of bureaucracy slow growth, unsustainable entitlements, ethnic and religious tensions, shrinking populations, unresponsive central governments - is often juxtaposed with Asia, as if its sun is setting just as the East's is once again rising.
> 
> So far the European Union's decision not to spend on defense; its inherited infrastructure and protocols; and its commitment to the rule of law keep the continent seemingly prosperous. It has some breathing space to decide whether it will reemerge as a rising power or be relegated to a curious museum for cash-laden tourists from Asia and America.
> 
> Somewhere between these poles is the United States. Pessimists point out that we increasingly don't create the cars we drive, the phones we used, or mirabile dictu, soon the food we eat. High budget deficits, trade imbalances, enormous national debt, and growing military expenditures will supposedly take their toll at last, as pampered Americans consume what by the new global rules they don't quite earn.
> 
> Optimists counter with their own set of statistics and point out that immigration and religion have ensured a steady if not rising population. Unemployment, interest rates, and inflation are low, and alone in the world America has an amazing resiliency and flexibility to fashion citizens and a single culture out of diverse races and religions. It also, of course, enjoys a unique constitution and laws that provide freedom without license.
> 
> We seem to enjoy the best of both worlds, symbolized by our two coasts that look on both east and west. Our European traditions ensure the rule of law and the vibrancy of Western civilization. Yet decades ago, unlike the EU, we understood the Asian challenge and kept our markets open and our economy free, often requiring great dislocation and painful adjustment. The result is that for all our bickering, we continue to remain competitive and flexible in a way Europe does not.
> 
> If we have avoided the state socialism of Europe that stymies growth, we have also already passed through all the contradictions of a breakneck capitalist transition - the dislocation of rural people, industrial pollution, unionization, suburban blues, ubiquitous graft, and petty bribery - that will increasingly plague both India and China as they leave the 18th century and enter the 21st.
> 
> But the real question is how both China and India, nuclear and arming, will translate their newfound economic clout and cash into a geopolitical role. If internal politics and protocols are any barometer of foreign policy, it should be an interesting show. *We mostly welcome the new India - nuclear, law-abiding, and English-speaking - onto the world stage. It deserves a permanent seat on the Security Council and a close alliance with the United States.*
> China, however, is a very different story - a soon-to-be grasping Soviet Union-like superpower without any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism. Despite massive cash reserves and ongoing trade surpluses, it violates almost every international commercial protocol from copyright law to patents. It won't discuss Tibet, and it uses staged domestic unrest to send warnings to Taiwan and Japan that their regional options will increasingly be limited by Beijing.
> 
> China could rein in Kim Jong Il tomorrow. But it derives psychological satisfaction from watching Pyongyang's nuclear roguery stymie Japan and the United States. China's foreign policy in the Middle East, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia is governed by realpolitik of the 19th-century American stripe, without much concern for the type of government or the very means necessary to supply its insatiable hunger for resources. The government that killed 50 million of its own has not really been repudiated and its present successor follows the same old practice of jailing dissidents and stamping out freedom. When and how its hyper-capitalist economy will mandate the end of a Communist directorate is not known.
> 
> The world has been recently flooded with media accounts that U.S. soldiers may have dropped or at least gotten wet a few Korans. Abu Ghraib, we are told, is like the Soviet gulag - the death camp of millions. Americans are routinely pilloried abroad because they liberated Iraq, poured billions into the reconstruction, and jumpstarted democracy there - but were unable to do so without force and the loss of civilian life.
> 
> This hysteria that the world's hyper-power must be perfect or it is no good is in dire contrast to the treatment given to China. Yet Pavlovian anti-Americanism may soon begin to die down as the Chinese increasingly flex their muscles on the global stage and the world learns better their methods of operation.
> 
> So far they have been given a pass on three grounds: the old Third World romance accorded to Mao's Marxist legacy; the Chinese role as a counterweight to the envied power of the United States; and the silent admission that the Chinese, unlike the Americans, are a little crazy and thus unpredictable in their response to moral lecturing. Americans apologize and scurry about when an EU or U.N. official remonstrates; in contrast, a Chinese functionary is apt to talk about sending off a missile or two if they don't shut up.
> 
> The Patriot Act to a European is proof of American illiberality in a way that China's swallowing Tibet or jailing and executing dissidents is not. America's support for Saudi Arabia is proof of our hypocrisy in not severing ties with an undemocratic government, while few care that a country with leaders who traverse the globe in Mao suits cuts any deal possible with fascists and autocrats for oil, iron ore, and food.
> 
> *Yes, we are witnessing one of the great transfers of power and influence that have traditionally changed civilization itself, as money, influence, and military power are gradually inching away from Europe. And this time the shake-up is not regional but global.* While scholars and economists concentrate on its economic and political dimensions, few have noticed how a new China and an increasingly vulnerable Europe will markedly change the image of the United States.
> 
> As nations come to know the Chinese, and as a ripe Europe increasingly cannot or will not defend itself, the old maligned United States will begin to look pretty good again. More important, America will not be the world's easily caricatured sole power, but more likely the sole democratic superpower that factors in morality in addition to national interest in its treatment of others.
> 
> China is strong without morality; Europe is impotent in its ethical smugness. The buffer United States, in contrast, believes morality is not mere good intentions but the willingness and ability to translate easy idealism into hard and messy practice.
> 
> Most critics will find such sentiments laughable or naÃƒÂ¯ve; but just watch China in the years to come. Those who now malign the imperfections of the United States may well in shock whimper back, asking for our friendship. Then the boutique practice of anti-Americanism among the global elite will come to an end.
> 
> ©2005 Victor Davis Hanson


----------



## Britney Spears

Cdn Blackshirt:

Please provide proof for the following allegations:


> your position that "China can do no wrong."



or



> your position which appears to be "the PRC isn't that bad....let's blame Bush instead."




or



> the claims I made are in fact accurate (which you've failed to admit to this point)



or



> you were ignorant of all of the above things.



I think will be very difficult, since I've not made any such statements, and have not disputed the accuracy of any of your sources (not because I trust you implicitly, but because I really can't be bothered anymore as they are irrelevent to our discussion. Do you really want me to try?). Apparently you're the only one who can see them.....

Until then, I really don't know what you're trying to get at, other than the fact that you hate China. Why don't you go back and read the stuff I actually posted, as oppose to the stuff you *think* I did, which in fact you pulled out of thin air, and see if you can find any factual errors? If you find any I'll be glad to retract my comments and apologize. 

Obviously one of us here has a bit of a chip on the shoulder, but it sure ain't me. 

BTW:



> The only rationale I can come up with is you are very young and very inexperienced and have bought into a bunch of crap you've never done the research for yourself.




Ad hominem attacks don't really impress me as it does some of the others on the board, and do not help your credibility.


----------



## Zipper

Well I'm glad I'm not the one in the middle of this brew ha ha (for once). But as someone once said of my ravings...    

...things are starting to not make much sense.

Do you guys even remember what the argument/debate was started about?

If so, then lets get it back on track. Whatever that was. ;D


----------



## a_majoor

Back on track it is"

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2005/06/my_response_to_.html



> *My response to Scoble*
> 
> In justifying Microsoft's filtering of politically sensitive Chinese words on MSN spaces, Microsoft's uber-blogger Robert Scoble writes: "I have ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS forcing the Chinese into a position they don't believe in."  He continues:
> 
> I've been to China (as an employee of Winnov about seven years ago). I met with Government officials there. I met with students. I met with professors. They explained their anti-free-speech stance to me and I understand it. I don't agree with it, and I will be happy to explain to anyone the benefits of giving your citizens the right to speak freely, but it's not my place to make their laws. It certainly is not my right to force their hand with business power.
> 
> I lived in China for nine years straight as a journalist, and if you add up other times I've lived there it comes to nearly 12. I don't know what students and professors Scoble met with, and what context he met them in. But to state that Chinese students and professors have an "anti-free-speech stance" is the biggest pile of horseshit about China I've come across in quite some time. And believe me, there are a great many such piles out there these days.
> 
> In my experience, most Chinese, like all other human beings I've ever met, would very much like to have freedom of speech. This goes for students, professors, workers, farmers, retirees, religious practitioners, and even many government officials. Many said so to me in on-the-record interviews. Many more told me so privately, in trusted confidence over beers (or something stronger) among friends.
> 
> What they don't want is to lose their jobs and educational opportunities by pushing too hard at the restrictions their government has placed on their ability to speak. They work within the bounds of the possible, and since people in China can say a lot more now than they were allowed to say 20 years ago, most take the long-term view.
> 
> It's very true, most Chinese hate it when foreigners lecture them about how they should change. They hate being patronized. Many view the common American attitude of "we're here to save you and make you free" as condescending and hypocritical. *They'd rather continue living under their extremely imperfect political situation in hopes that eventually it will change, and that this change will be accomplished by Chinese people in a Chinese way. Only then will they have ownership both of the change and of the result. Otherwise, the change will be considered foreign-imposed, and the Chinese violently detest foreign-imposed anything. Even ones who privately and quietly detest their government.*
> 
> I agree with Scoble: no outsiders, including Microsoft, can force China to change. But nobody's asking Microsoft to force China to do anything. *The issue is whether Microsoft should be collaborating with the Chinese regime as it builds an increasingly sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control.* (See this ONI report for lots of details on that system.)  Declining to collaborate with this system is not "forcing the Chinese into a position they don't believe in."  Declining to collaborate would be the only way to show that your stated belief in free speech is more than ç©ÂºèÂ¯?: empty words. If you believe that Chinese people deserve the same respect as Americans, then please put your money where your mouth is.
> 
> But let's not single out Microsoft for trashing on this point. As this Open Net Initiative report and this 2004 Amnesty International report will make abundantly clear, *China's filtering, censorship, and surveillance systems wouldn't be what they are today without lots of help from a number of North American technology companies.*  Businessman and author Ethan Gutmann wrote about Cisco's particular contribution in this 2002 article which later became a book chapter.
> 
> In the name of free enterprise, Americans so far have acquiesced in U.S. companies' collaboration in the building and reinforcement of the Great Chinese Firewall. The Global Internet Freedom Act is being revived again in congress; but while the Act would allocate money to develop censorship-busting technologies, it makes zero mention of the U.S. companies whose technologies and software services are helping to strengthen this very censorship.
> 
> *Scoble says it's better to be doing business in China than not, implying that this engagement is better for China and its freedoms in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I believe strongly in economic engagement with China. But nobody said Microsoft shouldn't be doing business there. It's a question of how you do business and in what manner.*
> 
> I can tell you one more thing about the Chinese. They hear what you say, then they watch how you do business. From there, it's pretty easy to figure out what your real values are.



Like this blogger, I support the ideal of _targeted_ engagement with China, rather than indescriminate trade and "hoping" this will improve the lot of the Chinese. It is very obvious that the Chinese government uses its power to "direct" the wealth to support their power, military modernization, censorship, and corruption on a vast scale to grease the wheels and pay off suporters are the main beneficiaries, and the farmers in the rural west are simply ignored.

Since targeting is very difficult, and I personally am not in a position to do something directly about it, I have shopped for international mutual funds which are heavily weighted towards India, targeting my snall contribution to International wealth building towards a democratic nation. I hope the rest of you at least consider doing the same.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

No thanks....I officially give up.



Matthew.    ;D


----------



## Gouki

Speaking of recent developments in China..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46778-2004Aug6.html

Won't C/P here for brevity/space sake but in short, it seems the government is moving into and occupying peasant farmer land in rural China. The farmers staged a revolt due to the insane taxes imposed on them (plus land being taken away) and had quite the clash with what I'm assuming to be the PAP (they are not specific in the sources I checked) but I saw, on CNN a few minutes ago (which pushed me to write this post) one of the uniformed officers in the village and his uniform appeared to be consistent with their dress. 

Anyhow, if you guys watch CNN you'll probably see it again soon enough. Once again Chinese officials are trying their best to quell down the clash and suppress information. The information that has leaked out has to deal with their intense propaganda naturally. From what I could gather, it seems the CPC is a bit worried that their attitude may spread to other less than happy areas nearby.

How utterly pathetic is that? How can China still call itself Communist with a straight face when they are oppressing and victimizing the very people that communism is supposed to protect and depend upon? By doing this to the proletariats/peasants they are in fact proving they are so far removed from Communism that it's now just a mask they wear to hide their dictatorship which in some ways eerily reminds me of Orwell's "Oceania" (after reading some of their own sites the comparison became more and more realistic).


----------



## a_majoor

Did you mean PLA?

Communists have always opressed farmers, for the simple reason that farmers can be self sufficient from "the state". Why do you think Stalin arranged the "Harvest of Tears" in the Ukraine, or Mao savagely expropriated land and unleashed a terror against the "wealthy peasants"? Mugabe is doing the same thing against the "white farmers" for the very same reasons; destroy any possible places which can act independently from "the state".


----------



## paracowboy

Steve said:
			
		

> How utterly pathetic is that? How can China still call itself Communist with a straight face when they are oppressing and victimizing the very people that communism is supposed to protect and depend upon? By doing this to the proletariats/peasants they are in fact proving they are so far removed from Communism that it's now just a mask they wear to hide their dictatorship which in some ways eerily reminds me of Orwell's "Oceania" (after reading some of their own sites the comparison became more and more realistic).


 you, ah, don't know too much about "Communism" in history do you? Welcome to reality. Why do you think we fought it for 50 years?
And then, (in Canada) abruptly surrendered to it, inexplicably.


----------



## Britney Spears

The People's Armed Police, seperate from the army, is a  paramilitary organization responsible for internal security, similar in concept to the Interior ministry/MVD/FSB of the USSR and Russia. They can also be used as light infantry to defend cities. Although they are not really deisgned to be a counterweight against the army like their Russian counterparts are. They were not really much more than a centralized border police before 1989. Their numbers, training, and equipment, especially crowd control and riot control training and kit, were beefed up after the army made fools of themselves in that little fracas.  

And yes, this stuff is small potatoes compared to what's happened in the past. Being a peasant sucks.


----------



## squealiox

paracowboy said:
			
		

> And then, (in Canada) abruptly surrendered to it, inexplicably.



excuse my ignorance, but i missed that little development, maybe cause i've been out of the country a few years. does canada now have gulags, collective farms, central planning? or are you just trying to imply that communism is "not so bad"?


----------



## Gouki

Majoor: Nope, but Spears cleared it up

Cowboy: Yes, ah, I do know a fair deal about it. Welcome to reality. I know why it was fought for 50 years. My entire point is that China claims itself to be based on Marxist-Leninist principles, calls itself Communist and claims to work for the people when it does everything completely opposite. I was pointing out the glaring hypocrisy in their - and I suppose, every communist nations - actions. Get off the high horse already.


----------



## paracowboy

> excuse my ignorance, but i missed that little development, maybe cause i've been out of the country a few years. does canada now have gulags, collective farms, central planning? or are you just trying to imply that communism is "not so bad"?


 gulags: not so much. Collective farms: they tried screwing around with us a while back, but got stepped on. Central planning: oh hell, yeah.





> or are you just trying to imply that communism is "not so bad"?


quite the opposite. Which is why I try to educate everyone I know (and complete strangers, for that matter) about the fact that we have been becoming more and more a Socialist People's Republik, and will continue to do so as long as the present government is in power. 



> My entire point is that China claims itself to be based on Marxist-Leninist principles, calls itself Communist and claims to work for the people when it does everything completely opposite. I was pointing out the glaring hypocrisy in their - and I suppose, every communist nations - actions


. hmmm, guess my 'facetious-ness detector' is N/S, then, because even with your explanation, I don't read that into your post. It reads to me as though it were written by someone with no familiarity with 'Communism on the ground', but a with firm grounding in the theories, who has been abruptly disillusioned. Maybe I'm pre-disposed to read that into your post because of the many young troops that I've had to actually explain the evils of 'Communism on the ground' to. I've had several youngsters in the past couple of years, who've honestly believed, due to their teachers, that Communists are the good guys, and that Capitalism/Democracy is the source of all evil. We have soldiers who would rather fight for a dictatorial system, than for Liberty. And that scares the hell out of me.



> Get off the high horse already.


but I can see my house from here!


----------



## Zipper

Oh man. Why do I see the signals of descending into a conversation that has happened but a few times on this board? In this case, I'm staying out of this one (for now  ;D).



			
				paracowboy said:
			
		

> but I can see my house from here!



Must be a paraire boy.


----------



## paracowboy

Zipper said:
			
		

> Oh man. Why do I see the signals of descending into a conversation that has happened but a few times on this board?


oh, I don't think so. I mis-interpreted a post. I'm at fault.


----------



## Gouki

Well, not to sidetrack further but I do want to clear the matter up:

I am familiar with theories and it's effect "on the ground" but you are partially correct with your analysis about being somewhat disillusioned. Not because I fall into that category of how some youngsters think the communists were the good guys (I don't believe that) but more so because I find it unfortunate that the system will never, ever, work. Communism is supposed to be everyone working to help eachother, sharing, blah blah won't go into detail cause you already know it. I was expressing a bit of disappointment on my part I guess, that such a utopian theoretical system will always be, theoretical. 

No need to explain the USSR to anyone. Viet Nam is still a crap hole and I can't even begin to touch the tip of the iceberg of the stuff Communist movement did in that country. Mao's Cultural Revolution, Tianamen Square, the recent peasant clashes in China. Then you got all that internet censorship stuff .. well, the list just goes on, doesn't it? That's where my displeasure is expressed, that China still claims to be communist and work for the people when all it's doing is lobotimizing them so it can do as it pleases. 

I suppose from a philosophical PoV, it's just too bad that such a system will never work because of the nature of man. That's what I was really getting at but I was, admittedly, vague with how I said it and it did tend to sound more like what you said.

With all that being said, just want to let this settle so the topic can get back at hand. Agreed?


----------



## paracowboy

> With all that being said, just want to let this settle so the topic can get back at hand. Agreed?


hey, if you're happy, I'm happy. Like I said: 





> I'm at fault.



But I'm staying up here. Beats the heck outta walkin'. And chicks dig a cowboy.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

On paper, Communism is a beautiful system.  To get to true communism from the nasty state of (insert current political system) you have now, you must first pass through the dictatorship of the proletariate, where all property, real, human, and intellectual, is managed by the state, and a small group of enlightened leaders who will direct the people toward the goal of acheiving a true communist union.  People being people, and utopia being a crack-dream, once a dictatorship of the proletariat has been acheived, there it stays until forcably toppled.  Once absolute power has been concentrated into the hands of a few men/women, and all right to dissent has been removed, they will take whatever steps necessary to hold on to that power.  Whle the next generation of predator fight for succession of the old guard, the rising class of parasites learn to grow fat and rich off the wealth flowing from the masses to the leaders.  Those who wish to point out the corruption of the system, or who commit the terrible crimes of wishing to keep the goods that they have made, or the food that they have grown, can count on re-education camps (torture as a teaching device), or a showy trial, snappy execution, after which your family will receive a bill for the bullets they shot you with.
     To the people at the top, power and wealth are the goals, and the suffering of their people is irrelevant.  This makes expansionism popular, as the little people do the dying, and the new territorries (not having been drained for generatoins by parasitic party officials), can be looted to prop up the grossly inefficient economy, and swell the leaders already unbeleivable personal wealth.
      The Tiawanese people are so much better off than their mainland brethren, much as the West Germans were better off than the East, and for the same reason.  Germany united under the efficient system produced by the free and vibrant West.  China wants to swallow Tiawan, and suck it dry (kind of like what Russia did to East Germany).  China does not want to join with Tiawan, or enter into a partnership, they want to bring it under the yoke.  I've always wondered why the Tiawanese didn't pick up some toys from the Russians when they started demobilizing the bulk of their strategic rocket forces, China is the kind of neighbor that looks friendlier over a medium range ballistic missle.


----------



## Britney Spears

> On paper, Communism is a beautiful system.



Not really, since no one, certainly not Marx or Engles, has really figured out a way to get to communism, we have no way of knowing whether it will work or not. If you read the Marx's body of work, it essentially says: "Well, eventually the prolitariat will overthrow their capitalist oppressors, as they always have, and then end ex!"  Actually achieving the first part has proven to be easier said than done.

In any case, don't you guys think you could go and start  a new topic to debate the communism thing? I think we all know that a purely communist approach to economics is no more viable than a purely capitalist one, the horse is dead, leave it be. You could replace the word "communism" above with "unbridled capitalism" or "libertarian anarchism" or any other academic social construct and get the same result as far as real world functionality goes.  Also, even a cursory examination of of China's social-political history will put it's current situation in perspective, and make the wide generalizations and urban myths (" after which your family will receive a bill for the bullets they shot you with."  :) sound silly in hindisght. Of course, the same goes for any other foreign country that one might try to understand.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Here's a bit of a development here at home (with a heavily-spun headline):



> *Private MP bill could harm relations with China*
> 
> CTV.ca News Staff
> 
> Lawmakers will soon vote on a private member's bill that, if passed, could have serious ramifications for Canadian relations with China.
> 
> Introduced by Conservative MP Jim Abbott in April, the so-called Taiwan Affairs Act would upgrade Canada's relations with Taiwan.
> 
> The bill also opposes China's use of military force or economic sanctions against Taiwan. That policy would directly contradict Beijing, which earlier this year passed a law specifically authorizing the use of force to stop Taiwan from pursuing formal independence.
> 
> Although it stops short of calling Taiwan a state, the bill calls for improved economic, cultural, scientific and legal ties. It would also open the door to Taiwan officials to once again start visiting Canada.
> 
> China's ambassador in Ottawa, Lu Shumin, says that would be going too far.
> 
> "This bill which in essence is to advocate the changing basis of Taiwan and treat it as a separate country," he told CTV News, noting that would not jibe with Beijing.
> 
> And that has members of Canada's business community concerned their livelihood could be at stake.
> 
> Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters policy director Gordon Cherry warns that Canada's telecommunications and aerospace sectors, for example, could face severe repercussions.
> 
> "The effect would be these multi-billion dollar, million-dollar deals that are in the works would be harmed by the bill," Cherry told CTV.
> 
> Abbott thinks it's nevertheless important to keep pushing the issue.
> 
> Considering the breakdown of the minority parliament, and the support, not only of the Bloc Quebecois, but also a handful of sympathetic Liberals, Abbott feels his bill's got a good chance of becoming law.
> 
> "There is a high probability that it could pass," he said.
> 
> This is not the first time Abbott has rallied Parliament to make Taiwan's official status an international issue.
> 
> In May 2003, the House voted 163-67 in favour of an official opposition motion introduced by Abbott -- urging the World Health Organization to grant Taiwan observer status.
> 
> At the time, the push to bring Taiwan into the WHO purview was fuelled by the deadly SARS crisis.
> 
> China voiced opposition at the time, but offered no formal retaliation.
> 
> Should Abbott's bill pass now, Ambassador Shumin said, it would put an inevitable strain on relations with Beijing.
> 
> "If this pass into a law, that will definitely harm the overall relationship. I think you will understand what that means. That means the relations of the two countries would not going forward but backwards.
> 
> "That would be quite serious."
> 
> As Canada's second-largest trading partner, senior cabinet ministers say there's legitimate reason to be worried.
> 
> According to International Trade Minister Jim Peterson, a diplomatic chill could lead to a freeze of economic activity.
> 
> "There is great potential loss and the Chinese have made it very clear to us in every meeting at a high level that a one-China policy is a priority for them," Peterson told CTV.
> 
> *Taiwan history*
> 
> In 1949, when China came under Communist rule, the island of Taiwan became the new home in exile of Chaing Kai Chek. Having failed to stop the Communists, Chaing took Taipei as the capital of the democratic Republic of China.
> 
> Ever since, the People's Republic of China -- comprised of mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau -- has maintained that Taiwan remains a renegade province.
> 
> Canada has had an official one-China policy since Ottawa established diplomatic relations with Beijing 35 years ago.
> 
> Answering critics who say Abbott's Taiwan Act would shatter Canada's 35-year policy, Conservative Foreign Affairs critic Stockwell Day says no way.
> 
> "We are clear in support of the one-China policy," he said. "But we also want to see Taiwan not threatened."
> 
> The United States signed its own similar Taiwan Act in 1979.
> 
> *Economic Ties*
> 
> In recent years, China's booming economy has become one of the main drivers of world growth. According to an annual report by Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, China's economic growth approached 10 per cent last year and exceeded most expectations.
> 
> Canada has long been poised to take advantage of its special relationship with China. Canada made its first wheat sale to the People's Republic of China in 1961. And Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1970 -- getting a five-year jump on the United States with this important trading partner.
> 
> China recently became Canada's second largest trading partner, just behind the United States. This was spurred by 49 per cent growth in trade with China in the first half of 2004 (compared with the previous year), bumping Japan out of its traditional number two spot.
> 
> Yet, Peterson said earlier this year the trade relationship between Canada and China was "minuscule" compared with its potential.
> 
> Most of Canada's exports to China are in the form of such raw materials as copper, zinc, and sulphur. There is still much more Canada could do to promote "value-added" industries such as education, travel and technology.
> 
> And there is a trade imbalance, highlighted in a report issued by Statistics Canada in June 2004:
> 
> - Between 1995 and 2003, Canada's exports to China rose 37.4%.
> 
> - During the same period, our imports from China quadrupled.
> 
> - In 1995, Canada's trade deficit with China was barely $1.2 billion.
> 
> - By 2003, the trade deficit had exploded to nearly $13.8 billion.
> 
> source: The Canadian Government in China (http://www.beijing.gc.ca/index.htm)
> 
> Prepared with a report from CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife


http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1118867654973_114276854/?hub=TopStories


----------



## a_majoor

Given the more advanced nature of Taiwan's economy, I suspect we could be doing boffo business with them shortly after China began "economic retaliation" against Canadian business recognizing Taiwan.

Lets face it, a billion peasants are still a billion poor people, and not at all the market for our value added products and services. China also needs our resources desparatly more than we need cheap consumer goods (most of which can be imported from India or other developing nations anyway), so the Dragon will be back with its food and water dish after it sees us prosper by feeding the "Little Tigers".


----------



## Britney Spears

FWIW, I'd like to point out that Chinese trade with Canada is miniscule compared to Chinese trade with Taiwan, a country with whom they are supposedly teetering on the brink of war. I had quoted some numbers, but later found out that they were from 2001 and outdated. In 2001, Chinese trade with Taiwan stood at about 4x that of that with Canada. Since then, Canada has dropped off most of the lists of China's major trade partners, so exact numbers are not as easy to find. China probably fears the loss of Canadian trade as much as they fear our army.

So, I think it's probably just a slow day at the newsroom....


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> FWIW, I'd like to point out that Chinese trade with Canada is minuscule compared to Chinese trade with Taiwan, a country with whom they are supposedly teetering on the brink of war. I had quoted some numbers, but later found out that they were from 2001 and outdated. In 2001, Chinese trade with Taiwan stood at about 4x that of that with Canada. Since then, Canada has dropped off most of the lists of China's major trade partners, so exact numbers are not as easy to find. China probably fears the loss of Canadian trade as much as they fear our army.
> 
> So, I think it's probably just a slow day at the newsroom....


     So if our trade with the Chinese is so minuscule, we can afford to do the right thing (much as that idea shocks our politicians) and recognize the sovereign state of Taiwan, and establish formal diplomatic relations.  If China wishes to start a trade war, then go for it.  As China is trying to put on its best mask for the international community long enough to get access to the kinds of modern weapons and technology that sanctions have denied them, they are unlikely to risk that by acting against so small a player as Canada.  As they already conduct active intelligence operations in Canada against our citizens, and industrial espionage against our industry, its not as if we are reaping vast benefits from their "good" will.


----------



## Britney Spears

> So if our trade with the Chinese is so minuscule,



 ??? Miniscule? China is Canada's second largest trading partner. Although still peanuts compared to Canada-US trade.



> the sovereign state of Taiwan,



No such thing exists yet. Presumably you mean the Republic of China.



> its not as if we are reaping vast benefits from their "good" will.



Obviously some would have a different opinion on that.



> As China is trying to put on its best mask for the international community long enough to get access to the kinds of modern weapons and technology that sanctions have denied them,



There's a little more to it that that, I assure you.


----------



## neuromancer

Great topic!!

First let me say that I was born and raised in Canada, and my wife was born and raised in China.

A major point a lot of people seem to be over looking is that after WW2 the powers in China were 
roughly equal between the People Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang (the two partys combined forces to 
repel the Japanese but after that threat was gone they went back to fighting each other for control of the country.) 
The PRC succeeded in fighting the KMT out of china and chased them to Taiwan, the KMT retreated to Taiwan 
which the KMT have occupied ever since. 

At that time the land of Taiwan was part of China, the people who were already living in Taiwan before KMT arrived 
were considered Chinese by all accounts, even among themselves, the KMT itself were definitly Chinese people (just of 
a different political party). Taiwan really does belong to China. Anybody who says differently is selling something. 

little fact: About 10 million Chinese died after WW2 when the PRC pushed the KMT 
into Taiwan. It was a brutal and bloody struggle. After KMT retreated to taiwan the war ended and 
that was when China began to rebuild.

Imagine if there was a war right now in Canada and the Easterners chased the Westerners all the 
way back to Vancouver Island, and then stopped fighting. Would the Canadians who lost the war and who 
are now living on Vancouver Island (part of the province of British Columbia) have the right to go 
independent? How would the rest of Canada react to that? 

Wouldnt that be considered a valid reason to go back to war?

Furthermore, Taiwan has never been recognized as an independent nation by the majority of the world. 
There are only about 30-40 country's in the world that recognize Taiwan, and a good chunk of those country's 
are small African/middle-eastern nations of no major significance. The only two major country's that 
recognize Taiwan are USA and Japan, gee.. why do you think they recognize Taiwan? Hmm.. I wonder.

China has said they will not allow Taiwan to separate, China has effectively bound its own hands in this matter.
They have a strong system of honor over there (trust me) and to allow Taiwan to separate now would be a major 
loss of face for them, something they simply can not allow no matter the cost.

Also, China has 1.3 billion people, their emerging economy is growing by 10% per year. Do the math. Not much 
can really stop their economy at this point other than all out war with the West.

I really doubt America and Japan will come to Taiwan's aid if it comes to total war. Taiwan is just not worth it, and 
both USA and Japan have a lot more to gain by trading and partnering with China (1.3 billion with an economy growing 
by 10% per year) than they do with Taiwan.

In the end a lot of this comes down to money, and China has a lot more of it than Taiwan. What would be the ecconomic
insentive for USA coming to Taiwans aid against China? If USA doesnt join the conflict neither will Japan.

USA/Jpn will let China clean up its internal affair. They'll protest, but not much more than that. 

The same way that Japan went from a smoldering wreck at the end of WW2 to an economic powerhouse is similar to whats
happening in China today, only a lot slower due their bloated socialist regime. 

But they're gaining steam now so I think the West does well to play nice and not interfere in an internal conflict.

I have a feeling that the CIA report about 2020 is a lot more on the money than people realize.

China will emerge, and eventually capitalism will give rise to democracy in the middle kingdom. 
The West will fade a little, and life will go on. 

Nothing to see here folks, move along.  :dontpanic:
</rant>


----------



## Britney Spears

> The only two major country's that
> recognize Taiwan are USA and Japan,



This isn't true. Neither the US or Japan have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Remember that big deal back in the 70s when  the PRC took over China's Security Council seat and Nixon went to China? It kinda ended there. The Chinese love to accuse Japan of all kinds of things, they're still sore about Japan ruling Taiwan for 50 years, and from their naval bases in Taiwan, dominating the Chinese coastline (another reason why control of Taiwan is strategically important). But aside from that one mayor of Tokyo Ishihara, who most Japanese think is a lunatic, Japan has bee fairly careful not to rock the boat. <a href=http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Foreign-relations-of-Taiwan>Here's</a> a list of nations that do have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. I found it interesting that Haiti was on that list, considering that until last month there were over 100 Chinese police officers in Haiti as part of the UN mission, responsible for training the Haitian police in methods of crowd control("Crowd control is easy, all you guys need is a few T-54s....." ).

Taiwan's biggest diplomatic victory of recent years was in the late 90s when they were briefly recognized by Nelson Mandela's South Africa. Mandela himself feeling a fraternal bond between the two countries. That ended after Mandela left office.


----------



## Dare

neuromancer said:
			
		

> Imagine if there was a war right now in Canada and the Easterners chased the Westerners all the
> way back to Vancouver Island, and then stopped fighting. Would the Canadians who lost the war and who
> are now living on Vancouver Island (part of the province of British Columbia) have the right to go
> independent? How would the rest of Canada react to that?


You mean, like how the Americans chased the British all the way up to Canada?..

There are situations and times where we must acurately realize the situation on the ground. That situation is that, at this current moment, Taiwan (ROC), is a defacto independant State in all matters but recognition.


> Wouldnt that be considered a valid reason to go back to war?
> 
> Furthermore, Taiwan has never been recognized as an independent nation by the majority of the world.
> There are only about 30-40 country's in the world that recognize Taiwan, and a good chunk of those country's
> are small African/middle-eastern nations of no major significance. The only two major country's that
> recognize Taiwan are USA and Japan, gee.. why do you think they recognize Taiwan? Hmm.. I wonder.


What is wrong with recognizing Taiwan, specifically?


> China has said they will not allow Taiwan to separate, China has effectively bound its own hands in this matter.
> They have a strong system of honor over there (trust me) and to allow Taiwan to separate now would be a major
> loss of face for them, something they simply can not allow no matter the cost.
> 
> Also, China has 1.3 billion people, their emerging economy is growing by 10% per year. Do the math. Not much
> can really stop their economy at this point other than all out war with the West.


That sort of growth is unsustainable. We will see how long that lasts after they are pressured to unpin the yuan.


> I really doubt America and Japan will come to Taiwan's aid if it comes to total war. Taiwan is just not worth it, and
> both USA and Japan have a lot more to gain by trading and partnering with China (1.3 billion with an economy growing
> by 10% per year) than they do with Taiwan.


I would say that this statement is completely underestimating the will on the other side of the fence to keep Taiwan democratic and free. Taiwan is a prize for many reasons, and it is unacceptable, for many in many countries, to allow mainland China to capture it.


> In the end a lot of this comes down to money, and China has a lot more of it than Taiwan. What would be the ecconomic
> insentive for USA coming to Taiwans aid against China? If USA doesnt join the conflict neither will Japan.


You assume that the USA comes to aid only for economic reasons. That's another mistake. I would also state, that Japan might enter the conflict without the States overt assistance. Recent Chinese activity indicates that they're boiling up nationalist sentiments against Japan on a progressive scale. This, of course, has a reactive quality.


> USA/Jpn will let China clean up its internal affair. They'll protest, but not much more than that.


Highly, highly unlikely.


> The same way that Japan went from a smoldering wreck at the end of WW2 to an economic powerhouse is similar to whats
> happening in China today, only a lot slower due their bloated socialist regime.


I do not think modern China's economy is very comparable to the virtually completely self sufficient and isolationist US economy (at the time). 


> But they're gaining steam now so I think the West does well to play nice and not interfere in an internal conflict.
> 
> I have a feeling that the CIA report about 2020 is a lot more on the money than people realize.
> 
> China will emerge, and eventually capitalism will give rise to democracy in the middle kingdom.
> The West will fade a little, and life will go on.
> 
> Nothing to see here folks, move along.  :dontpanic:
> </rant>


Yes, I've heard that before. Nothing to see, move along, indeed. There actually plenty to see, and plenty to observe. The idea that capitalism will definitely give rise to democracy is dependant on many variables. The first one is that the reigning power has to give up their post. I don't see that happening at all. What I see happening is, while many things are being privatized in China. It is merely a tool to attack the US. They have managed to drastically change the entire economic geography of the country with their trade policies. Upon the emergence of an eventual war, they will quickly renationalize their recently privatized factories and companies. The idea of a military economist will (many can say already does) exist.

The bottom line is: They can feign being the Good Guy, benign, or Better than Bush(tm) all they want, but if democracy is to be survived in the region, Taiwan must not fall. To state unequivically that Taiwan's failure must occur in order for capitalism and democracy to prevail, is at best disingenious.


----------



## neuromancer

Thanks Britney Spears, I didnt intend to missinform anyone, I was honestly mistaken myself.
Thanks for the link, very helpful. I've bookmarked it.

According to the link there are only 25 nations in the world that recognize Taiwan.
None of the countrys that recognize Taiwan are major world players, not even one.



			
				Dare said:
			
		

> You mean, like how the Americans chased the British all the way up to Canada?..


No, not at all, we're talking about chinese nationals fighting in their homeland. The only difference between them was
political party, not nationality. It would be like Liberals and Conservatives going to war inside Canada for who
gets to rule the country and (lets pretend) the Liberals win and chase the Conservatives to Vancouver Island.
Then instead of persuing them further and totally eradicating them from the face of the earth the LIBS simply 
stop fighting both sides agree that the LIBS won, then they take stock and start to rebuild the country.

Maybe you need to do a bit more research on just what happened in China after WW2.

Other than that I really dont want to get into a spitting match with anyone, so Im just going to reply to one other thing you said.

[quote author="Dare"]
The bottom line is: They can feign being the Good Guy, benign, or Better than Bush(tm) all they want, but if democracy is to be survived in the region, Taiwan must not fall. To state unequivically that Taiwan's failure must occur in order for capitalism and democracy to prevail, is at best disingenious.
[/quote]

Your missreading me bud. I never said Taiwan MUST fall for democracy to prevail, thats just plain silly.

What I said; Taiwan WILL fall, Democracy WILL prevail in the end... notice how I present 
them as unlinked events?

I really don't see China becoming Democratic any time within the next 10-15 years, if and when it does, it 
will have little or nothing to do with Taiwan. 

However, I do feel Taiwan is going to fall soon, I'd give it two years tops. 

And as far as being "better than bush", I think you've completely missread chinese mentality. 
They simply dont think that way, and they certainly dont buy into Bush's PR BS.

Sorry, not trying to be offensive or rude, but you could use a history brush up, and maybe 
take a trip to China sometime. Who knows, maybe we'll all be there soon enough...  :warstory:


----------



## neuromancer

mainerjohnthomas said:
			
		

> As they already conduct active intelligence operations in Canada against our citizens, and industrial espionage against our industry, its not as if we are reaping vast benefits from their "good" will.



What I love most!! How people are so willing to believe the worst without any proof, yet our big friendly neighbour to the south
is planning to divert a sewage river into Canada and we dont say anything because we have to play nice with George.

Not to mention Softwood or Beef. Lets look at real industrial/environmantal espionage happening in our front yard affecting 
real lives of real Canadians before we go chasing shadows.

Im at the point that I am going to stop believe anything either Cons or Libs say soon, until this is all over.
Who knows when that will be... eh? 

How the hell did I get so jaded?


----------



## Edward Campbell

mainerjohnthomas said:
			
		

> So if our trade with the Chinese is so minuscule, we can afford to do the right thing (much as that idea shocks our politicians) and recognize the sovereign state of Taiwan, and establish formal diplomatic relations.  If China wishes to start a trade war, then go for it.  As China is trying to put on its best mask for the international community long enough to get access to the kinds of modern weapons and technology that sanctions have denied them, they are unlikely to risk that by acting against so small a player as Canada.  As they already conduct active intelligence operations in Canada against our citizens, and industrial espionage against our industry, its not as if we are reaping vast benefits from their "good" will.



It was only a few years ago that CSIS _publicly_ (through _leaks_) warned Canadians that France was - and, I believe, still is - conducting active aggressive industrial espionage in Canada.  Just over 35 years ago France actively _attacked_ Canada - promoting secessionism, encouraging violence, and so on.  By any fair measure France was, and _*may*_ well remain a greater threat to Canada than China is or is likely to become.


----------



## Dare

neuromancer said:
			
		

> No, not at all, we're talking about chinese nationals fighting in their homeland. The only difference between them was
> political party, not nationality. It would be like Liberals and Conservatives going to war inside Canada for who
> gets to rule the country and (lets pretend) the Liberals win and chase the Conservatives to Vancouver Island.
> Then instead of persuing them further and totally eradicating them from the face of the earth the LIBS simply
> stop fighting both sides agree that the LIBS won, then they take stock and start to rebuild the country.
> 
> Maybe you need to do a bit more research on just what happened in China after WW2.


You seem to have missed my analogy. As America and Canada were BOTH part of the same empire at the time, it was akin to the example you provide. Two political factions (Republican and Monarchist) making war on another. We are now two distinct and seperate countries, still one a Republic and one a Monarchy. How often do the British, or Canadians, brood about taking back America for the empire? Or is it just Chinese empires that get the distinction of being permitted an everlasting grudge?


> Other than that I really dont want to get into a spitting match with anyone, so Im just going to reply to one other thing you said.
> Your missreading me bud. I never said Taiwan MUST fall for democracy to prevail, thats just plain silly.


Of course it's silly, your statement that we should allow Taiwan to fall because we wouldn't want to have "interfered in an internal conflict", implies that you really aren't terribly concerned about losing a good democratic country to a very undemocratic country. Yet you insist that democracy will prevail, and that no one would or should defend Taiwan's democratic system. Should we all appease the tantrum of a giant kid (or in your words, "play nice").


> I really don't see China becoming Democratic any time within the next 10-15 years, if and when it does, it
> will have little or nothing to do with Taiwan.


I don't see how you can say that, at all. Taiwan has one of the most profound effects on China. If it did not, China would not make such a fuss.


> However, I do feel Taiwan is going to fall soon, I'd give it two years tops.


You not only feel that Taiwan is going to fall, but you present that no one should, or would, defend her.. 


> And as far as being "better than bush", I think you've completely missread chinese mentality.
> They simply dont think that way, and they certainly dont buy into Bush's PR BS.


I'm not talking about Bush's PR. I'm talking about increasing Chinese nationalist anti-American propaghanda. Which certainly fits well with you calling Bush's PR "BS".


> Sorry, not trying to be offensive or rude, but you could use a history brush up, and maybe
> take a trip to China sometime. Who knows, maybe we'll all be there soon enough...  :warstory:


In your dreams, maybe. I'll go study those history books that tell me how the PRC has always had rightful claim to Taiwan (since the inception of time, apparently) and that the ROC has no rightful claim to anything (especially not Taiwan). I'll also study the history books that tell me how much of a public mandate to govern a communist dictatorship has over a free market democracy. I know these books exist in PRC and DPRK, they make great history books. If I ever find myself in China, I'll be sure to hit up the local book store and purchase a few.

You skipped an important question I had for you (not surprisingly, I might add). What is wrong with recognizing Taiwan, specifically?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dare said:
			
		

> ...
> 
> What is wrong with recognizing Taiwan, specifically?



The answer, specifically, is that we, Canada, explicitly recognized that Taiwan is a province of China and that reunification is, consequently, an internal matter for the Chinese to settle amongst themselves.  Just over a year ago our (then) Foreign Minister, Bill Graham, said:

_â ?Taiwan remains another sensitive issue in our relations with China. As recent events have shown, the possibility and scope for misunderstanding and escalation of tension remain high. We call on Beijing and Taipei to resume dialogue without preconditions, so that solutions can be found that fulfill the legitimate aspirations of people on both sides of the Strait. In keeping with the "One China" policy, which has underpinned Canada's approach for more than three decades, we believe that resolving the Taiwan question peacefully, in a manner acceptable to both sides, will further advance China's standing as an important and responsible pillar of the international system._
http://w01.international.gc.ca/minpub/Publication.asp?publication_id=381075&Language=E 

Earlier this year Canada and China issued a joint communiqué which said, in part:

_â ? China reaffirms that there is only one China in the world, that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government to represent all of China, and that Taiwan is an inseparable part of Chinese territory.  Canada reaffirms its adherence to its One China policy and is opposed to any unilateral action by any party aimed at changing Taiwan's status and escalating tensions which would have an impact on the political stability and prosperity of East Asia.â ?_
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news.asp?id=397 

Canada's _One China_ policy is clear and constant and has been since 1970.

At the risk of being repetitive:

"¢	What the Chinese say and what they do are not always, apparently - to outsiders - closely related.  The government in Beijing is repeating - as it has for 50 plus years - an official _mantra_: Taiwan is a rogue province; Taiwan will rejoin China; we are prepared to fight.  This is an important policy position but it is not the only position China takes on a wide range of issues.  China is an important country: a principle regional power and an emerging global power.  It has many, many fish to fry and it does a very good job of keeping most of the balls in the air at the same time - and whatever other analogies might be appropriate.  The Chinese government is highly sophisticated in balancing domestic and foreign policies and politics.

"¢	I do not think forced unification is going to take place any time soon.  There are manifest advantages, for China, in an independent Taiwan.

"¢	The Taiwan government agrees that Taiwan is an integral part of China.  The area of dispute is which of two ancient _factions_ is the rightful government: the long gone (from its 1975 format) Kuomintang or the rapidly fading (from its 1976 format) Communists in Beijing?  Many people in Taiwan (and on the mainland, too) hope that over a reasonable length of time (which need not be measured in short, four year political _mandates_ as in the West) Hong Kong will, indeed, take over China - bringing a great reduction in corruption, general respect for laws, competent, honest courts and some form of _conservative_ constitutional democracy.  When, rather than if, I think, that happens there will be no significant impediments to reunification.

"¢	What is not in anyone's interest - certainly not in China's or Canada's , is a shooting war between China and the West.


----------



## Dare

neuromancer said:
			
		

> What I love most!! How people are so willing to believe the worst without any proof, yet our big friendly neighbour to the south
> is planning to divert a sewage river into Canada and we dont say anything because we have to play nice with George.



http://www.primetimecrime.com/Articles/Media%20Articles/NP%20China.htm
http://www.asianpacificpost.com/news/article/195.html
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover012605.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/06/15/spies050615.html
http://www.faluninfo.ca/nodes/54/
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1118953947201_114363147/?hub=TopStories
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050617/wl_canada_afp/canadapoliticschina_050617174215
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040925/RCHINA25/TPBusiness/International
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17644

1000 agents, eh? Nothing to see here, move along. Look at the nasty Americans! 

Yeah, yeah.. right.

A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven.


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> The answer, specifically, is that we, Canada, explicitly recognized that Taiwan is a province of China and that reunification is, consequently, an internal matter for the Chinese to settle amongst themselves.  Just over a year ago our (then) Foreign Minister, Bill Graham, said:


Fortunately, there is growing pressure to change that position.


> _â ? China reaffirms that there is only one China in the world, that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government to represent all of China, and that Taiwan is an inseparable part of Chinese territory.  Canada reaffirms its adherence to its One China policy and is opposed to any unilateral action by any party aimed at changing Taiwan's status and escalating tensions which would have an impact on the political stability and prosperity of East Asia.â ?_
> http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news.asp?id=397


It's good to know our values are prosperity and stability over democratic principles and justice.


> "¢	What the Chinese say and what they do are not always, apparently - to outsiders - closely related.  The government in Beijing is repeating - as it has for 50 plus years - an official _mantra_: Taiwan is a rogue province; Taiwan will rejoin China; we are prepared to fight.  This is an important policy position but it is not the only position China takes on a wide range of issues.  China is an important country: a principle regional power and an emerging global power.  It has many, many fish to fry and it does a very good job of keeping most of the balls in the air at the same time - and whatever other analogies might be appropriate.  The Chinese government is highly sophisticated in balancing domestic and foreign policies and politics.
> 
> "¢	I do not think forced unification is going to take place any time soon.  There are manifest advantages, for China, in an independent Taiwan.


If China believes that, then why is it every time Taiwan comes close to declaring independence, China threatens obliteration? Do you believe it all to be a show? I think they are very serious and genuine in their threats.


> "¢	The Taiwan government agrees that Taiwan is an integral part of China.  The area of dispute is which of two ancient _factions_ is the rightful government: the long gone (from its 1975 format) Kuomintang or the rapidly fading (from its 1976 format) Communists in Beijing?  Many people in Taiwan (and on the mainland, too) hope that over a reasonable length of time (which need not be measured in short, four year political _mandates_ as in the West) Hong Kong will, indeed, take over China - bringing a great reduction in corruption, general respect for laws, competent, honest courts and some form of _conservative_ constitutional democracy.  When, rather than if, I think, that happens there will be no significant impediments to reunification.


How can you say that Hong Kong will take over China, when the reverse has already occured? 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3658503.stm 
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/09/09/china9325.htm
One country, two systems? Not for long..


> "¢	What is not in anyone's interest - certainly not in China's or Canada's , is a shooting war between China and the West.


In the short term, perhaps.

EDIT: Spelling error.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dare said:
			
		

> ...
> Not for long..In the short term, perhaps.
> 
> EDIT: Spelling error.



And therein, I think, lies one of our fundamental problems: we do not understand that the _short term_ might, and when dealing with Asia should mean decades.  This hideous fascination with _right now_ does not serve us well - it ranks right down there with the cult of celebrity worship.


----------



## Britney Spears

I don't agree with what neuromancer or Dare  has posted, but I think there are still some fundemental misconceptions that are being repeated ad nauseum in the contex of our discussion.

For example, Dare, your talk of "free markets" and "democracies" do little to support your arguments. Every single one of the Asian "Tiger" economies were built on the basis of heavy state intervention, directing national efforts towards rapid, export oriented industrialization. Of the major "Tiger" economies, Japan was ruled by a foreign imposed goverment and Taiwan and South Korea were ruled by single party military juntas. Taiwan's first democratic election occured in 1991, the year when single party rule by the family of Chiang Kai Shek, in power since the 1920s, ended. The military junta in South Korea was overthrown in 1989. The rapid economic ascent of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the beacons of democracy in the east, was certainly neither "free market" or "democratic", and quite on the contrary were completely dependent on 1) A centrally planned economy, forcibally supplanting an agrarian society with an industrial one, and 2) Repressive, single party authoritarian goverments who used military force  to quell the inevitable dissent.  Although freedom and democracy  eventually came about with economic prosperity, as they do in most developed nations, it is definetly a mistake to think that the opposite is also true.  If you guys want examples of how "free market" economics has resulted in "prosperity", you'd be better off looking in Latin America, where some of the same events are once again repeating themselves.

This isn't meant to be an attack directed at anyone in particular, but again I urge all of the posters here to take off their western-centric blinders about "freedom" and "democracy", do some more reading about the history of the region and try to understand these events in a wider context.


Back on topic, If I were the great leader of the PRC, the LAST thing I would want to do is paint myself into a corner by whipping up more public bloodlust for a goal that is militarily and politically impossible to attain (forced reunification). I'd much rather just suck up the temporary embarrasment now (eh, who cares, I'm still the communist dictator, I still have nukes, bring on the dancing slave girls,  it's all good) say "meh, off you go then." to the Taiwanese and instead capitalize on the economic and cultural ties that are already in place. Given a few years of peace and prosperity on both sides of the strait and the fact that economically Taiwan is already in the Chinese sphere, Taiwan will naturally gravitate into the fold of the Chinese empire willingly. Worst case scenario, in 10 years Taiwan will be China's Canada: wealthy, nice place, nice people, like to wave their little flags and tell people that they aren't Chinese, but everyone knows that they really are....

But I'm too laid back to ever become a politician......


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> And therein, I think, lies one of our fundamental problems: we do not understand that the _short term_ might, and when dealing with Asia should mean decades.  This hideous fascination with _right now_ does not serve us well - it ranks right down there with the cult of celebrity worship.


No, you misunderstand. I meant, in the short term, it probably does not benefit us. I am thinking long term.


----------



## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I don't agree with what neuromancer or Dare  has posted, but I think there are still some fundemental misconceptions that are being repeated ad nauseum in the contex of our discussion.
> 
> For example, Dare, your talk of "free markets" and "democracies" do little to support your arguments. Every single one of the Asian "Tiger" economies were built on the basis of heavy state intervention, directing national efforts towards rapid, export oriented industrialization. Of the major "Tiger" economies, Japan was ruled by a foreign imposed goverment and Taiwan and South Korea were ruled by single party military juntas. Taiwan's first democratic election occured in 1991, the year when single party rule by the family of Chiang Kai Shek, in power since the 1920s, ended. The military junta in South Korea was overthrown in 1989. The rapid economic ascent of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the beacons of democracy in the east, was certainly neither "free market" or "democratic", and quite on the contrary were completely dependent on 1) A centrally planned economy, forcibally supplanting an agrarian society with an industrial one, and 2) Repressive, single party authoritarian goverments who used military force  to quell the inevitable dissent.  Although freedom and democracy  eventually came about with economic prosperity, as they do in most developed nations, it is definetly a mistake to think that the opposite is also true.  If you guys want examples of how "free market" economics has resulted in "prosperity", you'd be better off looking in Latin America, where some of the same events are once again repeating themselves.


Surely, you do not think that South Korea and Taiwan are not currently free market democracies? (Ugh, ugly double negative.)


> This isn't meant to be an attack directed at anyone in particular, but again I urge all of the posters here to take off their western-centric blinders about "freedom" and "democracy", do some more reading about the history of the region and try to understand these events in a wider context.
> 
> Back on topic, If I were the great leader of the PRC, the LAST thing I would want to do is paint myself into a corner by whipping up more public bloodlust for a goal that is militarily and politically impossible to attain (forced reunification). I'd much rather just suck up the temporary embarrasment now (eh, who cares, I'm still the communist dictator, I still have nukes, bring on the dancing slave girls,  it's all good) say "meh, off you go then." to the Taiwanese and instead capitalize on the economic and cultural ties that are already in place. Given a few years of peace and prosperity on both sides of the strait and the fact that economically Taiwan is already in the Chinese sphere, Taiwan will naturally gravitate into the fold of the Chinese empire willingly. Worst case scenario, in 10 years Taiwan will be China's Canada: wealthy, nice place, nice people, like to wave their little flags and tell people that they aren't Chinese, but everyone knows that they really are....


Many like to try to normalize a state as being as rational as a normal person, like you or I. Unfortuntaly, and especially with such a large state controlled by so few, irrational and unexpected outcomes may become the norm.


----------



## Britney Spears

> Surely, you do not think that South Korea and Taiwan are not currently free market democracies? (Ugh, ugly double negative.)



What!? Read the damn thing again.





> Many like to try to normalize a state as being as rational as a normal person, like you or I. Unfortuntaly, and especially with such a large state controlled by so few, irrational and unexpected outcomes may become the norm.



Empircal evidence neither supports or refutes this assertion, but if you want to offer up something other than the "rational actor" model of foreign affairs, feel free. Personally, I'm quite partial to the "revolutionary feminist" model: I blame penises for all the world's troubles.


----------



## Dare

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> What!? Read the darn thing again.


I did read it. I'm not sure what you're arguing. If you agree Taiwan is a free market democracy, I don't see how that hampers my usage of the terms.


> Empircal evidence neither supports or refutes this assertion, but if you want to offer up something other than the "rational actor" model of foreign affairs, feel free. Personally, I'm quite partial to the "revolutionary feminist" model: I blame penises for all the world's troubles.


Well, I'm sure I can pull up quite a few Psych sources on Group Think and Mob Mentality, and it's unpredictable nature (but I'm way too lazy to do that). Real Politik is the most often used forumla when dealing with a state, but when dealing with a small cabal, you must be aware you're really dealing with the whims, emotions and desires of a few. Not the material needs of the masses. The reality is, states are not always doing what we think they are, and even if they are, they sometimes make mistakes, even at that scale. Many people are shocked when they find out about the local serial killer, because they can't imagine why anyone would do that. And they only can't imagine anyone doing it because they can't imagine themselves doing it. It might not seem logical to you for mainland China to attack Taiwan, but as the other fellow mentioned (and about the only thing said I agree with), China is locked in on this. Years and years of making the promise. It's a national obsession that has always been backed by threats. It may be national suicide to attack a US naval battlegroup, but that's exactly what they're planning and I don't see much deviation in the area of threat/force. I only see a different PR tactic to soften their image and make alliances. Sure, democratic activists and capitalist entrepreneurials have made progress, I just don't see it as sufficient, nor a force that is turning the tide.


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Every single one of the Asian "Tiger" economies were built on the basis of heavy state intervention, directing national efforts towards rapid, export oriented industrialization ... Although freedom and democracy eventually came about with economic prosperity, as they do in most developed nations, it is definetly a mistake to think that the opposite is also true.


Well said!



> Back on topic, If I were the great leader of the PRC, the LAST thing I would want to do is paint myself into a corner by whipping up more public bloodlust for a goal that is militarily and politically impossible to attain (forced reunification). I'd much rather just suck up the temporary embarrasment now (eh, who cares, I'm still the communist dictator, I still have nukes, bring on the dancing slave girls,  it's all good) say "meh, off you go then." to the Taiwanese and instead capitalize on the economic and cultural ties that are already in place.


I suspect here you are in danger of wearing "western-centric blinders" yourself ... I was about to add to this, but it looks like Dare beat me to it in the the latter half of his most recent post.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I said, a couple of pages back, _â Å“...Canada, explicitly recognized that Taiwan is a province of China and that reunification is, consequently, an internal matter for the Chinese to settle amongst themselves.â ?_

Dare responded: 



			
				Dare said:
			
		

> Fortunately, there is growing pressure to change that position.



Is there; from where?  It certainly has not been detected by anyone with a six figure salary in DFAIT nor, as far as I can tell, is it anywhere on the Liberal Party of Canada's agenda.  Even the Toronto Star vacillates lest it shed Chinese-Canadian subscribers.

I'm sure good, honest, hard working, down right _decent_ Canadians are writing letters â â€œ and then the PM goes and speaks to the Canada China Business Council.  http://www.ccbc.com/ Call me, please, when he, or even Pierre _Prettycurls_ goes and talks to whatever remains of the Canada-Taiwan Trade Association, if it still even exists.  There are extensive e.g. technology trade partnerships between Canada and Taiwan, including some involving government agencies like the NRC but the last time I can recall a Minister talking to the Taiwanese was back when John Manley was still Minister of Industry â â€œ and a lot of water has passed under the bridges since then.

My sense of the politics here is that everyone likes Taiwan but nobody really cares.  Taiwan is a valued and trusted source of technology and it is a good, albeit small market.  China, on the other hand, looms large on every well paid mind â â€œ and, generally, favourably, too.  No one, except maybe TorStar, seems to be really upset re: China spying on Falun Gong supporters â â€œ as someone else pointed out (here?) some people seem to agree that there are some strange, _cultish_ people at the top of Falun Gong â â€œ maybe the Chinese have cause to worry.  I do not detect any deeper anti-Chinese or pro-Taiwan feeling amongst the Conservatives, save that a few (and a few like minded Liberals) have a generic fear of the _yellow peril_ lurking just off-shore.

That's my personal take on it.


----------



## neuromancer

Dare said:
			
		

> http://www.primetimecrime.com/Articles/Media%20Articles/NP%20China.htm
> http://www.asianpacificpost.com/news/article/195.html
> http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover012605.htm
> http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/06/15/spies050615.html
> http://www.faluninfo.ca/nodes/54/
> http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1118953947201_114363147/?hub=TopStories
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050617/wl_canada_afp/canadapoliticschina_050617174215
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040925/RCHINA25/TPBusiness/International
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17644



Good links, interesting stuff for sure!
Some of that stuff is pretty old though, like the media buy up, that seems to have happened right after
the Tienimen Square fiasco. The rest though is pretty interesting.

However again, look at the big picture; Even if China is spying they certainly are not the only ones.
I still rather focus on whats happening south of our border first, certainly there are larger and more pressing issues there.

Not that we should allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by anyone, in any way. 
Not by China, not Russian, not America. Nobody.


----------



## TCBF

" Worst case scenario, in 10 years Taiwan will be China's Canada: wealthy, nice place, nice people, like to wave their little flags and tell people that they aren't Chinese, but everyone knows that they really are...."

- You said a lot more about Canada here than you did about Taiwan. 
 Picture of Mel Hurtig on your wall?    ;D

"I blame penises for all the world's troubles."

- Good point.   Eliminate penises, and all the worlds troubles would be over in a generation.   Two, tops.

"Not that we should allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by anyone, in any way. 
Not by China, not Russian, not America. Nobody."

- But it's the Canadian way - Canada:   The welcome mat of the Western World.

Tom


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> Call me, please, when he, or even Pierre _Prettycurls_ goes and talks to whatever remains of the Canada-Taiwan Trade Association, if it still even exists.  There are extensive e.g. technology trade partnerships between Canada and Taiwan, including some involving government agencies like the NRC but the last time I can recall a Minister talking to the Taiwanese was back when John Manley was still Minister of Industry â â€œ and a lot of water has passed under the bridges since then.



The Canada-Taiwan Trade Association was dominated by caucasian-Canadians wanting to do business in Taiwan: there weren't enough people on the "other side of the table".  It was dissolved and and most of the members joined the (larger and more senior) Taiwan Chamber of Commerce.  Anyway, from where I sit trade with Taiwan is as strong as ever, and I'm sure the statistics support this (although I don't have any at my fingertips).  I don't disagree with the contention that the government might be paying less lip service to political support of Taiwan, but nothwithstanding multi-million dollar "trade mission" boondoggles, free enterprise goes where the (demand and supply) markets dictate.


----------



## neuromancer

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> I said, a couple of pages back, _â Å“...Canada, explicitly recognized that Taiwan is a province of China and that reunification is, consequently, an internal matter for the Chinese to settle amongst themselves.â ?_



I wonder if this has anything todo with Canadas past issues regarding unification with Quebec, or are we simply 
being political and keeping our noses where they belongs?



> My sense of the politics here is that everyone likes Taiwan but nobody really cares.  Taiwan is a valued and trusted source of technology and it is a good, albeit small market.  China, on the other hand, looms large on every well paid mind â â€œ and, generally, favourably, too.  No one, except maybe TorStar, seems to be really upset re: China spying on Falun Gong supporters â â€œ as someone else pointed out (here?) some people seem to agree that there are some strange, _cultish_ people at the top of Falun Gong â â€œ maybe the Chinese have cause to worry.  I do not detect any deeper anti-Chinese or pro-Taiwan feeling amongst the Conservatives, save that a few (and a few like minded Liberals) have a generic fear of the _yellow peril_ lurking just off-shore.



Generic fear, lol. Indeed, I agree but I laughed at that experssion just the same.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

I just love the one China policy.  It illustrates the innate cowardice of the great nations of the world, or at least their willingness to abandon their principles if the price is right.  What would the nations of the west have done in the 1950's if the DDR would have declared a "One Germany Policy" whereby we could either recognize our ally (West) or the Soviet puppet (East)?  I think that the list of nations backing West Germany would be a little longer than the ROC claims today.  How quickly we forget that the ROC, whose remaining territory is Tiawan, WAS our ally during WWII against Japanese, and the communists who formed the  Peoples Republic were not.   The nations of the west are fond of wrapping ourselves in the defence of democracy, freedom, and human rights, but largely to justify actions that are to our immediate advantage.  Now don't get me wrong, we often do so to oppose those who truly are dangerous and/or evil, but I find that we are utterly uninterested in threats to democracy, freedom, or human rights where large, well armed, modern nations are involved.  Real politics is necessary, I don't argue that.  I just get a little sick at the transparent hypocrisy involved; but I was only a soldier, not a diplomat.


----------



## Britney Spears

> the communists who formed the  Peoples Republic were not.



Where did you get this?


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> I said, a couple of pages back, _â Å“...Canada, explicitly recognized that Taiwan is a province of China and that reunification is, consequently, an internal matter for the Chinese to settle amongst themselves.â ?_
> 
> Dare responded:
> 
> Is there; from where?  It certainly has not been detected by anyone with a six figure salary in DFAIT nor, as far as I can tell, is it anywhere on the Liberal Party of Canada's agenda.  Even the Toronto Star vacillates lest it shed Chinese-Canadian subscribers.
> 
> I'm sure good, honest, hard working, down right _decent_ Canadians are writing letters â â€œ and then the PM goes and speaks to the Canada China Business Council.  http://www.ccbc.com/ Call me, please, when he, or even Pierre _Prettycurls_ goes and talks to whatever remains of the Canada-Taiwan Trade Association, if it still even exists.  There are extensive e.g. technology trade partnerships between Canada and Taiwan, including some involving government agencies like the NRC but the last time I can recall a Minister talking to the Taiwanese was back when John Manley was still Minister of Industry â â€œ and a lot of water has passed under the bridges since then.
> 
> My sense of the politics here is that everyone likes Taiwan but nobody really cares.  Taiwan is a valued and trusted source of technology and it is a good, albeit small market.  China, on the other hand, looms large on every well paid mind â â€œ and, generally, favourably, too.  No one, except maybe TorStar, seems to be really upset re: China spying on Falun Gong supporters â â€œ as someone else pointed out (here?) some people seem to agree that there are some strange, _cultish_ people at the top of Falun Gong â â€œ maybe the Chinese have cause to worry.  I do not detect any deeper anti-Chinese or pro-Taiwan feeling amongst the Conservatives, save that a few (and a few like minded Liberals) have a generic fear of the _yellow peril_ lurking just off-shore.
> 
> That's my personal take on it.


http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1118867654973_114276854/?hub=Canada
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/03/12/2003245898
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050616/CHINA16/National/Idx
http://www.duncanmp.com/speeches/c357.html

There are growing movements towards recognition. Certainly not with much official interest in the Liberal government.


----------



## Dare

neuromancer said:
			
		

> Good links, interesting stuff for sure!
> Some of that stuff is pretty old though, like the media buy up, that seems to have happened right after
> the Tienimen Square fiasco. The rest though is pretty interesting.
> 
> However again, look at the big picture; Even if China is spying they certainly are not the only ones.
> I still rather focus on whats happening south of our border first, certainly there are larger and more pressing issues there.
> 
> Not that we should allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by anyone, in any way.
> Not by China, not Russian, not America. Nobody.


There is no question that they are not the only ones and we must defend against all espionage, but 1000 agents is (I have to emphasize) *alot*. That is a huge operation. And I have a feeling that it's just the tip of the iceberg.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Where did you get this?


 http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/g385_2001/seagrave3.htm
 http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Long-March/Long-March-history-01.html

As the above links show, the Chinese communists were supported by the Soviets, and the Chinese nationalists by the US.


----------



## Britney Spears

I see, and so by your reasoning, the USSR was not an ally during WW2 either? Not that it really matters, since during World War 2,  the Eighth Route and new Fourth Armies were nominally under the command of the Nationalists, and received no support from the USSR.


----------



## TCBF

Seems to me it's time some enterprising Canadians made a movie about the battle of Kapyong, just to watch the Comrades squirm.  "Canada fought WHO?"

Tom


----------



## Britney Spears

Yes, but the only way it would be made is if it got a grant from the CBC and National Film Board.


----------



## TCBF

"Yes, but the only way it would be made is if it got a grant from the CBC and National Film Board."

-Too true.

"It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion" 

â â€ Joseph Goebbells


Tom


----------



## a_majoor

An analysis of why the "Little Tigers" are more likely to come on side with the Western alliance:

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson062005.html



> *Security Threats Warm Our Allies*
> by Victor Davis Hanson
> Tribune Media Services
> 
> Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is busy trying to strengthen the American alliance. In recent months, members of his government have announced new joint military arrangements with the U.S. and announced to the South Koreans that, unlike Japan, they are not to be trusted with sensitive American intelligence.
> 
> Meanwhile, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have been doing just the opposite. They proudly talk up an all-European military force to vie with NATO and insist their stagnant economies will not resort to the American model.
> 
> Of course, we saw these markedly different approaches to relations with the U.S. most starkly over the war in Iraq. Japan sent troops immediately, while Germany and France actively opposed American efforts to topple Saddam Hussein.
> 
> Japan, however, hasn't always been so warm nor Europe so cool to the U.S., and current global strategic realities largely explain their quite different attitudes to America.
> 
> Like the trans-Atlantic relationship, the Japanese-American partnership arose from the ashes of World War II, and in the 1970s and 1980s Japan was every bit as prone to fits of anti-Americanism. Japanese leftists once pushed for withdrawal of American troops. The Japanese right used to lecture us about the superiority of Japan Inc. and brag of a new defiant generation "that could just say no" to U.S. fair trade nagging.
> 
> Fury over our bases in Okinawa always seemed to exceed the European inconvenience about U.S. troops in Germany. Japan had far less cultural resonance with the U.S. than did Europe.
> 
> Why, then, is Japan suddenly warm while Europe is so cool? Is the Bush administration clumsy in Berlin and adept in Tokyo?
> 
> No. Rather, *the answer is the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the Japanese government, China and its nuclear protégé, North Korea, are not abstract threats. Indeed, they are within tactical missile range.*
> 
> *If Europeans dream Chinese break-neck capitalism means only lucrative business, the Japanese fear such dynamism will more likely lead to a new bully in their own backyard.
> *
> If Japan once had bouts of anti-Americanism when its neighbor China was asleep, Europe was relatively friendly to us when we kept 300 Soviet divisions from its borders.
> 
> The moral? Trashing the United States can be a sport for some when one nearby communist enemy disappears but not so for others when another such enemy ascends close by.
> 
> Of course, domestic politics, trade issues and clumsy American diplomacy also help fashion the U.S. image abroad. Still, a government's anti-American rhetoric is often predicated on its perceived self-interest.
> 
> For all the furor over George Bush's "smoke 'em-out" rhetoric, there are a variety of historical and geographical factors beyond our control that determine the relative popularity of the U.S. abroad.
> 
> The small countries Denmark and the Netherlands were invaded twice in the last century by the German Reich. Eastern Europe was swallowed up and nearly ruined by the Russians. These places will thus always be more receptive to the U.S. than a larger and more secure post-Cold War France and Germany.
> 
> New Zealand, meanwhile, tucked safely behind a shielding Australia tends to embrace anti-Americanism. If a naked New Zealand faced Communist China, Islamic Indonesia and Malaysia and nuclear North Korea, it might be more receptive to the visits of U.S. warships.
> 
> In calmer times, South Korea heralded its "Sunshine" policy of engaging the North. Predictable anti-Americanism followed.
> 
> But after a failed appeasement policy, the shocking disclosure of North Korean nuclear capability and some scary rhetoric by Kim Jong-Il, trashing the U.S. fell out of fashion in Seoul. That South Korean about-face was understandable when the U.S. announced it was sending some American soldiers off the Demilitarized Zone and down to Pusan - or home.
> 
> Perceptions of the U.S. are also in constant flux. Greece, for example, was once the most anti-American state in Europe, nursing understandable wounds over past U.S. support for creepy dictators in Athens.
> 
> But the European Union is no longer a cash cow and still without military muscle - and thus of dubious value in a scrape. At the same time Greece's age-old rival, Turkey, shows disturbing signs of Islamic fundamentalism, conducts provocative flights in the Aegean, and talks tough on Cyprus. Suddenly for the Greeks, the conciliatory and militarily powerful U.S. and its 6th Fleet don't seem so hegemonic after all.
> 
> *Through all of this vacillating, the American superpower's behavior remains about the same.* And despite all the shouting and angry editorials, *a nation that is strong, democratic and willing to help does not look too bad.*
> 
> After Iraq, we think the loud hostility of Germany, France and the Arab autocracies represents a global consensus. It doesn't.
> 
> The world changes as we speak. With new economic powerhouses like China and India, universal concerns about terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism and recognition of how weak both the E.U. and the United Nations are in a real pinch, expect easy, fashionable anti-Americanism to recede.
> 
> Indeed, it already has. Just ask a warm Japan - and look soon for the same change of mood in a once cool but now increasingly vulnerable and worried Europe.
> 
> ©2005 Victor Davis Hanson


----------



## a_majoor

> Chinese dragon awakens
> By Bill Gertz
> THE WASHINGTON TIMES
> Published June 26, 2005
> Part II: Thefts of U.S. technology boost China's weaponry
> 
> Part one of two
> 
> China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.
> 
> U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
> 
> China's military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has stepped up military exercises involving amphibious assaults, viewed as another sign that it is preparing for an attack on Taiwan.
> 
> "There's a growing consensus that at some point in the mid-to-late '90s, there was a fundamental shift in the sophistication, breadth and re-sorting of Chinese defense planning," said Richard Lawless, a senior China-policy maker in the Pentagon. "And what we're seeing now is a manifestation of that change in the number of new systems that are being deployed, the sophistication of those systems and the interoperability of the systems."
> 
> China's economy has been growing at a rate of at least 10 percent for each of the past 10 years, providing the country's military with the needed funds for modernization.
> 
> The combination of a vibrant centralized economy, growing military and increasingly fervent nationalism has transformed China into what many defense officials view as a fascist state.
> 
> "We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production," a senior defense official said.
> 
> For Pentagon officials, alarm bells have been going off for the past two years as China's military began rapidly building and buying new troop- and weapon-carrying ships and submarines.
> 
> The release of an official Chinese government report in December called the situation on the Taiwan Strait "grim" and said the country's military could "crush" Taiwan.
> 
> Earlier this year, Beijing passed an anti-secession law, a unilateral measure that upset the fragile political status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The law gives Chinese leaders a legal basis they previously did not have to conduct a military attack on Taiwan, U.S. officials said.
> 
> The war fears come despite the fact that China is hosting the Olympic Games in 2008 and, therefore, some officials say, would be reluctant to invoke the international condemnation that a military attack on Taiwan would cause.
> 
> Army of the future
> In the past, some defense specialists insisted a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a "million-man swim" across the Taiwan Strait because of the country's lack of troop-carrying ships.
> "We left the million-man swim behind in about 1998, 1999," the senior Pentagon official said. "And in fact, what people are saying now, whether or not that construct was ever useful, is that it's a moot point, because in just amphibious lift alone, the Chinese are doubling or even quadrupling their capability on an annual basis."
> Asked about a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, the official put it bluntly: "In the '07-'08 time frame, a capability will be there that a year ago we would have said was very, very unlikely. We now assess that as being very likely to be there."
> Air Force Gen. Paul V. Hester, head of the Pacific Air Forces, said the U.S. military has been watching China's military buildup but has found it difficult to penetrate Beijing's "veil" of secrecy over it.
> While military modernization itself is not a major worry, "what does provide you a pause for interest and concern is the amount of modernization, the kind of modernization and the size of the modernization," he said during a recent breakfast meeting with reporters.
> China is building capabilities such as aerial refueling and airborne warning and control aircraft that can be used for regional defense and long-range power projection, Gen. Hester said.
> It also is developing a maneuverable re-entry vehicle, or MARV, for its nuclear warheads. The weapon is designed to counter U.S. strategic-missile defenses, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The warhead would be used on China's new DF-31 long-range missiles and its new submarine missile, the JL-2.
> Work being done on China's weapons and reconnaissance systems will give its military the capability to reach 1,000 miles into the sea, "which gives them the visibility on the movement of not only our airplanes in the air, but also our forces at sea," Gen. Hester said.
> Beijing also has built a new tank for its large armed forces. It is known as the Type 99 and appears similar in design to Germany's Leopard 2 main battle tank. The tank is outfitted with new artillery, anti-aircraft and machine guns, advanced fire-control systems and improved engines.
> The country's air power is growing through the purchase of new fighters from Russia, such as Su-30 fighter-bombers, as well as the development of its own fighter jets, such as the J-10.
> Gen. Hester compared Chinese warplanes with those of the former Soviet Union, which were less capable than their U.S. counterparts, but still very deadly.
> "They have great equipment. The fighters are very technologically advanced, and what we know about them gives us pause for concern against ours," he said.
> Missiles also are a worry.
> "It is their surface-to-air missiles, their [advanced] SAMs and their surface-to-surface missiles, and the precision, more importantly, of those surface-to-surface missiles that provide, obviously, the ability to pinpoint targets that we might have out in the region, or our friends and allies might have," Gen. Hester said.
> The advances give the Chinese military "the ability ... to reach out and touch parts of the United States -- Guam, Hawaii and the mainland of the United States," he said.
> To better deal with possible future conflicts in Asia, the Pentagon is modernizing U.S. military facilities on the Western Pacific island of Guam and planning to move more forces there.
> The Air Force will regularly rotate Air Expeditionary Force units to Guam and also will station the new long-range unmanned aerial vehicle known as Global Hawk on the island, he said.
> It also has stationed B-2 stealth bombers on Guam temporarily and is expected to deploy B-1 bombers there, in addition to the B-52s now deployed there, Gen. Hester said.
> 
> Projecting power
> China's rulers have adopted what is known as the "two-island chain" strategy of extending control over large areas of the Pacific, covering inner and outer chains of islands stretching from Japan to Indonesia.
> "Clearly, they are still influenced by this first and second island chain," the intelligence official said.
> The official said China's buildup goes beyond what would be needed to fight a war against Taiwan.
> The conclusion of this official is that China wants a "blue-water" navy capable of projecting power far beyond the two island chains.
> "If you look at the technical capabilities of the weapons platforms that they're fielding, the sea-keeping capabilities, the size, sensors and weapons fit, this capability transcends the baseline that is required to deal with a Taiwan situation militarily," the intelligence official said.
> "So they are positioned then, if [Taiwan is] resolved one way or the other, to really become a regional military power as well."
> The dispatch of a Han-class submarine late last year to waters near Guam, Taiwan and Japan was an indication of the Chinese military's drive to expand its oceangoing capabilities, the officials said. The submarine surfaced in Japanese waters, triggering an emergency deployment of Japan's naval forces.
> Beijing later issued an apology for the incursion, but the political damage was done. Within months, Japan began adopting a tougher political posture toward China in its defense policies and public statements. A recent Japanese government defense report called China a strategic national security concern. It was the first time China was named specifically in a Japanese defense report.
> 
> Energy supply a factor
> For China, Taiwan is not the only issue behind the buildup of military forces. Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil and gas resources.
> The report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, which conducts assessments of future threats, was made public in January and warned that China's need for oil, gas and other energy resources is driving the country toward becoming an expansionist power.
> China "is looking not only to build a blue-water navy to control the sea lanes [from the Middle East], but also to develop undersea mines and missile capabilities to deter the potential disruption of its energy supplies from potential threats, including the U.S. Navy, especially in the case of a conflict with Taiwan," the report said.
> The report said China believes the United States already controls the sea routes from the oil-rich Persian Gulf through the Malacca Strait. Chinese President Hu Jintao has called this strategic vulnerability to disrupted energy supplies Beijing's "Malacca Dilemma."
> To prevent any disruption, China has adopted a "string of pearls" strategy that calls for both offensive and defensive measures stretching along the oil-shipment sea lanes from China's coast to the Middle East.
> The "pearls" include the Chinese-financed seaport being built at Gwadar, on the coast of western Pakistan, and commercial and military efforts to establish bases or diplomatic ties in Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and disputed islands in the South China Sea.
> The report stated that China's ability to use these pearls for a "credible" military action is not certain.
> Pentagon intelligence officials, however, say the rapid Chinese naval buildup includes the capability to project power to these sea lanes in the future.
> "They are not doing a lot of surface patrols or any other kind of security evolutions that far afield," the intelligence official said. "There's no evidence of [Chinese military basing there] yet, but we do need to keep an eye toward that expansion."
> The report also highlighted the vulnerability of China's oil and gas infrastructure to a crippling U.S. attack.
> "The U.S. military could severely cripple Chinese resistance [during a conflict over Taiwan] by blocking its energy supply, whereas the [People's Liberation Army navy] poses little threat to United States' energy security," it said.
> China views the United States as "a potential threat because of its military superiority, its willingness to disrupt China's energy imports, its perceived encirclement of China and its disposition toward manipulating international politics," the report said.
> 
> 'Mercantilist measures'
> The report stated that China will resort "to extreme, offensive and mercantilist measures when other strategies fail, to mitigate its vulnerabilities, such as seizing control of energy resources in neighboring states."
> U.S. officials have said two likely targets for China are the Russian Far East, which has vast oil and gas deposits, and Southeast Asia, which also has oil and gas resources.
> Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon official and specialist on China's military, said the internal U.S. government debate on the issue and excessive Chinese secrecy about its military buildup "has cost us 10 years to figure out what to do"
> "Everybody is starting to acknowledge the hard facts," Mr. Pillsbury said. "The China military buildup has been accelerating since 1999. As the buildup has gotten worse, China is trying hard to mask it."
> Richard Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said that in 10 years, the Chinese army has shifted from a defensive force to an advanced military soon capable of operations ranging from space warfare to global non-nuclear cruise-missile strikes.
> "Let's all wake up. The post-Cold War peace is over," Mr. Fisher said. "We are now in an arms race with a new superpower whose goal is to contain and overtake the United States."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Well, that's one side of the story.  Here's another:

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200506/27/eng20050627_192610.html 


> The Pentagon plays up "China threat theory"
> 
> The pentagon's evaluation on China's military spending is "seriously inflated", said a Rand research report on the annual report on the military power of China by US Department of Defence, which will be delivered to the Congress soon. The report said that the play-up of "China military threat" theory on purpose should be rectified.
> 
> *China's military expenditure suffers repeated "inflation"*
> 
> On May 19, the Rand Corporation referred a report to the US Air Force entitled "The Modernization of Chinese National Defence: Opportunities and Challenges", which gave an assessment of the future development of Chinese military power. In this report, many senior Rand experts on China affairs believe that Chinese spending on national defence accounts for about 2.3 to 2.8 percent of its GDP. According to latest data Rand has gained, in 2003, the total military expenses of China were between 31-38 billion US dollars.
> 
> The figure was already 70 per cent higher than that published by the Chinese government. Yet the Pentagon claimed in its 2003 report that the year's military outlay was as high as 65 billion US dollars, still 71 per cent higher than the highest Rand estimation.
> 
> The US Congress passed its National Defence Authorization Act in 2000, requiring the Department of Defence to hand in "report on Chinese military power" to the Congress annually with analysis on China's present and future military strategy. In such reports, the Pentagon has more than once viciously exaggerated Chinese military outlay, spreading "China threat theory." In 2004, Pentagon offered a 54-page report with tens of thousands of words, trying its utmost for exaggeration and instigation. The report asserted luridly that China's military expenditure reached between 50-70 billion US dollars.
> 
> Later, a Pentagon spokesman preached that the Chinese army is devoting itself to the modernization drive and developing a capacity to win a partial war under high-tech conditions. Accordingly, the Department of Defence will continue to closely monitor Chinese army's modernization process, "especially that involving Taiwan".
> 
> *What is the Pentagon up to?*
> 
> Therewith, on the expenses, the US government does not sit down to make an earnest research on the first-hand data, but instead, indulges in guessing, said James Mulvenon, an expert on international issues and one of the authors of the Rand report. So, the Rand has to correct "many estimations from the US government".
> 
> Many international observers pointed out that strong political motives and huge economic interests have been driving the Pentagon to recklessly fabricate "China threat" theory.
> 
> First, exaggeration of China's military power can not only exacerbate Congress suspicion and hostility against China, but also dredge for benefits for all US military departments in order to obtain a bigger defence budget. The exaggeration can also enable the US to find a pretext for its opposition to the European Union's lifting of arms embargo on China and for making public opinions in order to enlarge its arms sales to Taiwan.
> 
> *A long way for developing Chinese military power*
> 
> The report believes that whether China's economy can maintain a rapid and sustainable growth will be a decisive factor influencing the changes of its defence expenses. As the world second largest economy in many fields, China has enough economic strength to build a modernized powerful army. Experts from the Rand forecast that, despite the prediction that by 2025, the growth rate will be down to 3 per cent from the present 9 per cent, China will by then still retain an economic scale more than three times the present size.
> 
> Meanwhile, Rand experts also pointed out that in the next 20 years, the speed and way of the military power growth will be affected and conditioned by many factors, including the reduced scale of cheap labor force, the sharp reduction of bank savings caused by the use of savings due to the aging population, dwindled exports and the decline of industrial output caused by market saturation, financial frailty with high risks and problems existed in agriculture and rural areas.
> 
> To sum up, the Rand report believes that although there is a good momentum for the development of the military power, it will not be a smooth path. It is too early to preach "China military threat" theory, as there is a long way to go with heavy responsibilities ahead for Chinese national defence and the army building.
> 
> _This article is carried on the Global Times, June 24, and is translated by People's Daily Online_



Now, you can argue that _The People's Daily_ is just a government controlled propaganda machine â â€œ as some say about e.g. Fox News, where Bill Gertz (who wrote the piece just above) works as an analyst.


----------



## a_majoor

A good analysis of free trade with China. For people who think it is the "best hope", it has a lot of potential, but it will still take a long time to turn things around internally. In my opinion, we should be mounting an all out effort to invest in the Indian economy; to provide a counterweight to China, as well as to support a fellow democracy.

As for those who are concerned about outsourcing manufacturing jobs to the third world; unless we get our own act together, the flow of jobs will continue. People want quality products at low prices. (Why do you think the "big three" American car makers can only sell their products with steep discounts and incentives?). Canada's high tax and regulatory environment is certainly an impediment to investing in manufacturing capacity or hiring workers.



> *The Insanity of Smoot Schumer and Hawley Graham*
> Their China policy defies economic history.
> 
> If a store is selling quality products at low prices, why would anyone want to shut it down? This rhetorical question was asked by economist Arthur Laffer last week in connection to an unprecedented attack on China trade by numerous U.S. senators. In response to the China bashing, the stock market plunged.
> 
> How fitting that such a misguided approach to both the economy and national security would come on the 75th anniversary of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. According to economist Thomas Sowell, that massive tariff helped trigger the Great Depression, with U.S. unemployment rising from 9 percent in 1930 to 16 percent in 1931 and 25 percent in 1932.
> 
> Today, senators Smoot Schumer and Hawley Graham have proposed a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese imports unless China raises significantly the value of its yuan currency. The senators seem to be angry at a rising bilateral trade deficit resulting from Chinese imports to the U.S. But so what? Free trade only empowers our consumers. In the last couple of years the U.S. has created about 3.5 million new jobs, the unemployment rate is only 5.1 percent, and the nation's GDP is expanding at a 4.5 percent pace. Meanwhile, China's economy continues to climb near a 10 percent rate, with the heretofore impoverished Chinese population slowly but surely entering the modern realm of rising global prosperity.
> 
> Schumer and Graham believe that a higher yuan would narrow the trade deficit. But Alan Greenspan completely disagrees. The Fed chairman told a Senate panel that â Å“some observers mistakenly believe that a marked increase in the exchange value of the Chinese renminbi [yuan] relative to the U.S. dollar would significantly increase manufacturing activity and jobs in the United States. ... I am aware of no credible evidence that supports such a conclusion.â ?
> 
> More, Art Laffer argues that a stable yuan linked to the dollar has promoted strong economic growth at low inflation for the U.S., China, and the rest of the world. â Å“We have outsourced Alan Greenspan to China,â ? said Laffer, â Å“and that's a good thing for everyone.â ?
> 
> Think of the dollar-link as China's gold standard, stabilizing the value of its currency and attracting foreign investment inflows to rebuild its economy. *Destabilizing the yuan would be just as disastrous as the so-called Asian contagion of 1997-98 when Robert Rubin and the IMF forced the smaller Asian Tiger economies to de-link from the greenback. That only led to recession in the Pac Rim and intense deflation around the world.*
> 
> Ironically, since the dollar has been floating freely, the dollar-linked yuan has also floated compared to a market basket of currencies. Between 1995 and 2001 the yuan-dollar appreciated by nearly 50 percent and in recent years has fallen by about 30 percent. Both the U.S. and China adjusted internally to deflation and inflation. But the common link between the two has given the yuan global financial confidence while at the same time giving the U.S. enormous leverage over the Chinese economy. What's wrong with that? We buy their goods and they invest in our country through the purchase of Treasury bonds and more recently through direct investment in large U.S-based corporations (like Maytag and Unocal).
> 
> Unlike the sale of defense-related technologies there's no national security problem here. American firms like Anheuser-Busch, the Bank of America, and numerous tech firms are all investing in China. This is free and open trade for the mutual benefit of both nations. *Trade and monetary cooperation also provide the basis for national security cooperation, especially in the areas of stopping nuclear proliferation in North Korea and protecting a free Taiwan.* (_Interpolation; this has yet to be demonstrated_)
> 
> Clearly China is not perfect, though it has reduced government ownership of the economy from 90 percent twenty years ago to about 30 percent today, according to Laffer. Yes, the communist government in Beijing prevents free elections and free speech, continues to persecute religious groups, and has a record of pirating music and software as well as other intellectual property. But according to a recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations, China has also changed 2,600 legal statutes to comply with World Trade Organization rules.
> 
> The freedom to trade and the freedom to choose are central to the economic freedom that's necessary for nations to grow and prosper. Centuries of economic history confirm this, and yet some people seem to want to repeat the worst mistakes of the past. Open trade and currency stability enormously benefit both the U.S. and China and may well lead to improved international relations. Why do senators Smoot Schumer and Hawley Graham want to disrupt the 21st century march to peace and prosperity?
> 
> Cutting off your nose to spite your face makes no sense for individuals, nor for nations. Hasn't history taught us that free trade is part of the solution â â€ not the problem?
> 
> â â€ Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is host of CNBC's Kudlow & Company and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow's Money Politic$.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200506241442.asp


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Chinese economic expansion is a worry, in the sense that a resource starved Chinese economy, coupled with the highest ever potential for power projection, leads to fears of another Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was unacceptable when forged by the Imperial Japanese Navy, and is no more tolerable from Red China.  Ask Tibet how the Chinese respect the sovereignty of their neighbors, when they calculate that they have the ability to take what they desire.  Building up the Indian, Taiwanese and other Asian democratic economies will act to keep those nations aligned with us, rather than China, and serve to counterbalance the growing Chinese economy.  It is not in our long term interest to allow the Chinese to form an economic hegemony in Asia, as economic, political, and military power are far too closely linked in the centralized Chinese authoritative state for such an economic hegemony to lead shortly to nothing less than the fall of a second Iron Curtain, this one over Asia, not Eastern Europe.
      As long as the balance of power is preserved in the east, then China's economic expansion can be directed towards international intergration, rather than regional domination, with its attendant military/political dangers.  Just as with the Japanese in the last century, stopping the Chinese expansion is most easily accomplished in the beginning, tentative forays, and becomes prohibitively expensive if they are allowed enough early successes to throw their whole weight behind it.


----------



## Britney Spears

> Chinese economic expansion is a worry, in the sense that a resource starved Chinese economy, coupled with the highest ever potential for power projection, leads to fears of another Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere



So I presume US and North American enonomies don't need resources to grow, right?  Our standards of living were achieved without the need for any resources and with absolutely no harm to the enviroment?

This is the thing about protectionists that annoy me: It always has to be us versus them, and it's always about me me me, but they've never got the guts to come out and admit it. I see the same idiotic ranting from people who whine about losing their tech jobs to cheaper workers in India. " Don't let them take OUR jobs!"  :  Because how can anyone give a job to an Indian when a white man is forced to go back to school and learn a *real* skill, right? God darnit I was born in Canada so I've got a RIGHT to be overpaid and those dirty Indians will just have to go without.

Tell me, what exactly is it about the Chinese and the Indians that makes them undeserving of resources/jobs? 50%(or some ridiculous number) of Americans and Canadians drive their behemoth SUVs 2 blocks to the 7-11 but god help us if those evil Chinese ever get more oil than they need for their little ditty wagon ambulances to get over those dirt roads huh?  

Look, if you're angry and paranoid that the Chinese and Indians might want to raise their standard of living up to 1/4 of yours, because that just means less grease and slightly more expensive gas for you, then come out and say it and you can at least be consistent. Please stop with the silly morality play because I'd like to see you go face to face with a Chinese or Indian man and explain to him why you deserve the jobs and resources more than he does.


----------



## neuromancer

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Please stop with the silly morality play because I'd like to see you go face to face with a Chinese or Indian man and explain to him why you deserve the jobs and resources more than he does.



What a great comment!  

However I think your overstating something as well. I dont think most people are so very concerned with Mr Chang getting
a higher standard of living and that costing us slightly higher gas prices, as you put it. Instead, I think people
are more worried about CPC gaining so much of an advantage that they use their newly aquired power to 
dominate/destroy/do-bad-thing. 

I dont begrudge Mr Change buying a new dvd player, good for him. But China as
a world player is a little worrysome. Not because I begrudge anything for China, 
no, I just worry because they are gaining power so incredibly quickly!

Internally china must just be a total beehive right now! Im worried
the beehive might turn into a powder keg.

Also, it is a worry because power corrupts, as history proves nicely, and
China is indeed becomeing powerful. 

I sincerely think China is occupying a very powerful position right 
now, and enless they defeat themselves by bad planning then they definitly 
have the potential to move into an even more powerful place in the world 
market and global scheme. I just hope they do so with grace and wisdom, 
not arrogance and a great big chip on their shoulder.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> So I presume US and North American enonomies don't need resources to grow, right?   Our standards of living were achieved without the need for any resources and with absolutely no harm to the enviroment?


    Actually, you totally missed the point.  I encourage them to seek those resources through free and open trade.  I oppose quite strongly any moves towards appeasement on our part that would permit them to take these resouces by direct force of arms, or threat of same.  I encourage China to join more fully in the world economy.  I think that the intergration of the growing Chinese economy with that of the rest of the world can only lead to a greater understanding, and a general lessening of tensions on all sides.  That is behind door number one.  Behind door number two, is China determining that they have the force to seize the resources that their growing economy needs, the power to defy and or intimidate the west into non-interference, and tight enough domestic control to pay the cost in blood and treasure to pull it off.  The problem with China choosing door number two is that it is awfully hard to return to door number one, once you've started playing conquistidor, and a whole heck of a lot of people get to die when China guesses wrong about what we will let them get away with.


----------



## Infanteer

Interesting article by William Lind - although he may not always be on the ball, his writing is interesting to read - thoughts?:

http://www.military.com/Opinions/0,,Lind_062405,00.html



> ----
> 
> William S. Lind: The Sun Also Rises
> 
> June 24, 2005
> 
> [Have an opinion on a William Lind column? Sound off in the Discussion Boards.]
> 
> For the first time since 1942, Japan has resumed the strategic offensive. Since the beginning of the year, Japan has claimed the island of Takeshima, now occupied by South Korea; seized control of an area in the South China Sea also claimed by Beijing; and, most ominously, announced that Tokyo might intervene militarily to defend Taiwan.
> 
> Taiwan was Japanese from 1895 to 1945, a fact that neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese have forgotten; if they had to chose, many Taiwanese would rather be governed from Tokyo than from Beijing.
> 
> I do not know what has motivated the Japanese government to resume the strategic offensive. I do know it is a mistake. Japan's low-profile, defensive strategy has served her well for more than half a century. It is exactly the right strategy for a Fourth Generation 21st century, where survival will depend heavily on staying off other people's hit lists. As in the 1930s and early '40s, Japan shows an odd sense of timing.
> 
> The Takeshima issue offers an example. A divided Korea is very much in Japan's interest. By laying claim to what is now Korean territory, Japan brings South and North Korea together. In fact, North Korea missed an opportunity. Had Pyongyang said that in the face of any Japanese claims, the armed forces of both Koreas were one in defending Korean soil, it would have scored a propaganda triumph.
> 
> While a united Korea would be no danger to the United States, it would be perhaps the most dangerous state threat to Japan. Even today, South Korea's navy and air force are structured more for a war with Japan than for a conflict with North Korea. Any war with Japan, including an aggressive one, would be wildly popular with the Korean people. Asian memories run deep, and Japan's current military weakness offers an opportunity that may not last forever (although given Japan's demographics, it might).
> 
> Taking the offensive against China is an even greater blunder on Tokyo's part. Here, the danger is less Chinese aggression than internal Chinese dissolution and the regional instability that would result. Any humiliation of China by Japan damages the legitimacy of the Beijing government. A Chinese defeat by Japan and America in a crisis over Taiwan could well bring that government down. Contrary to neo-con blather, its likely successor would not be parliamentary democracy but a new "Period of Warring States" within China, which is to say Fourth Generation war throughout the most critical part of the Asian landmass. The resulting chaos would not be good for Japanese interests, especially if nukes started to fly. Putting a few on Japan would be an easy way for a Chinese contender to establish its patriotic credentials.
> 
> Predictably, the strategically imbecilic Bush administration is supporting Japan's new offensive posture. In reality, with its military forces tied down in the Middle East, the last thing America needs is a new source of crises in East Asia. The mix there is already volatile enough; adding a Japan on the strategic offensive is the equivalent of smoking in the powder magazine.
> 
> American interests require that both China and Japan follow defensive strategies - as indeed they require the United States to follow a defensive strategy. China wants to do exactly that, knowing that time is on her side. Only the Taiwan question is likely to push here to take the offensive, which means we should let that sleeping dog lie. As for Tokyo, I suspect the new Japanese offensive would collapse quickly if Washington quietly signaled its disapproval. Without American support, any rising of the Japanese sun will quickly prove a mirage made of hot air.
> 
> All that is required is a morsel of strategic sense in Washington. Alas, that horizon remains blank.


----------



## a_majoor

An unfriendly view of free trade with China:



> *China's Charge*
> We ignore China's acquisitions strategy at our peril.
> 
> What are we to make of the hostile takeover bid for Unocal Corporation unveiled Thursday by the PRC's state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC)? Is it, as the Chinese and their friends would have us believe, just another commercial transaction â â€ an example of the natural and desirable free movement of capital and a test of America's oft-stated commitment to free trade?
> 
> Or is it, instead, but the latest manifestation of a long-term â â€ and increasingly ominous â â€ Communist Chinese plan for translating its immense trade surpluses into strategic advantages â â€ advantages that will ineluctably redound to the detriment of the United States and its vital interests?
> 
> Despite efforts to construe this proposed purchase as desirable by Wall Street types and others whose willingness to do China's bidding has earned them the derisory moniker of â Å“panda-huggers,â ? a sizeable bipartisan group on and off Capitol Hill is correct in perceiving CNOOC's gambit as very much the latter.
> 
> At this writing, it is far from clear whether the Bush administration will concur. In the face of critical comments about the deal last week, Treasury Secretary John Snow and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan aligned themselves with the see-no-evil crowd. The sheer brazenness of the CNOOC play for a U.S. oil company at a moment when energy is much on Americans' minds, however, may translate into a case of strategic overreach by China â â€ and compel even an unwilling executive branch to oppose such a purchase.
> 
> It is not just that a PRC takeover of Unocal vividly illuminates the many moves the Communist Chinese have been making all over the world lately to acquire and otherwise assure access to energy resources. From Siberia to Venezuela, from Indonesia to Sudan, from Iran to Canada, from Azerbaijan to Cuba, *China's efforts can be seen â â€ in a world in which such resources are certainly finite, and possibly contracting â â€ as designed not only to secure them for Chinese needs, but to take them off a global market upon which the United States is increasingly dependent.
> *
> Indeed, China's yawning appetite for oil has contributed directly to the soaring costs of gasoline at America's pumps in recent months. Thus, the in-your-face quality of this proposed purchase â â€ whereby U.S.-owned energy assets, know-how, and technology would migrate to what is, at best, a competitor â â€ is sure to produce widespread opposition across the country that official Washington cannot ignore.
> 
> The larger problem, however, is that China is not simply interested in cornering the market on energy â â€ and the Unocal deal underscores this point. The oil company happens to own the only mine in America capable of producing what are known as â Å“rare earthâ ? minerals: the MolyCorp mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. These minerals are used today in a host of important industrial applications, including as ingredients for permanent magnets. Such magnets are critical components in many advanced weapon systems, for example the U.S. military's precision guided munitions known as JDAMS.
> 
> According to George Washington University professor Peter Leitner, an expert in strategic technologies and materials, the MolyCorp mine was shut down a few years ago in the wake of several suspicious instances of alleged environmental damage. In Leitner's estimation, it was no coincidence that family members of top Chinese officials (known as â Å“princelingsâ ?) had been tasked a short time before with securing a dominant position in rare earth minerals for the PRC. An agent for the princelings representing the PRC's rare-earths industry in San Francisco even boasted that he would put the MolyCorp mine out of business. In any event, the United States today depends entirely on imports of rare earth minerals largely from, guess where â â€ China.
> 
> *In short, Communist China's play for Unocal is of a piece with a broader plan for securing dominant positions with respect to strategic energy resources, minerals, materials, technologies, choke points, and regions all over the planet (including, notably, our own hemisphere and Africa). The unifying purpose: China is positioning itself to supplant the United States economically and strategically and, if necessary, to defeat us militarily in the decades to come.*
> 
> In keeping with the admonitions of the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tsu, the PRC appears confident that by doing the first two decisively, it can accomplish the third without having to fire a shot. Just in case, Beijing is also feverishly giving its armed forces the capability to fight us should push come to shove.
> 
> It is against this backdrop that the China National Offshore Oil Corporation's attempt to outbid the American oil giant Chevron Corp. by nearly $2 billion for Unocal must be viewed. With the resources of the unfair-trade-enlarged Chinese national treasury at CNOOC's disposal, no firm in the American private sector is likely to be able to compete financially.
> 
> Therefore, it will almost certainly require government action to prevent Beijing from once again having its way with sensitive American assets and national-security equities. And such action will probably only be forthcoming if a larger view of the stakes is adopted by American officials â â€ particularly those in the Treasury Department-led interagency group responsible for evaluating potentially problematic foreign investments.
> 
> Unfortunately, past experience with this Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) does not inspire much confidence. Treasury â â€ whose job it is to encourage foreign investment in this country â â€ is the classic fox guarding the chicken coop. And federal departments such as Defense and State that are supposed to bring national-security-mindedness to CFIUS deliberations have rarely voiced objections to the piecemeal sell-off of strategic American assets, let alone succeeded in blocking them.
> 
> A contributing factor to this sorry record has doubtless been the absence of any formal national appraisal of the strategies being employed against us by the Chinese and their business operations. In a letter to congressional leaders last week, Richard D'Amato and Roger Robinson, the chairman and vice chairman respectively of the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, warned that quadrennial reports required by law concerning â Å“whether foreign governments or companies have a coordinated strategy to acquire U.S. critical technology companiesâ ? have not been submitted for the past twelve years. Presumably, that is because â â€ were such studies to be rigorously done â â€ their findings would be inconvenient to the panda-huggers and their agenda.
> 
> Clearly, in today's China, we are up against a country that has a strategy to acquire U.S. critical technology companies. If we continue to ignore it â â€ let alone enable it by acquiescing to the sale of companies like Unocal â â€ we will do so at our peril.
> 
> â â€ Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is an NRO contributor and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/gaffney/gaffney200506280909.asp


----------



## Zipper

So I wonder if it can be said that China is a "True" free market economy since they have no social programs to speak of to sap their spending, and can use almost all of their revenue to basically take over the world financially? 

Oh, and line the pockets of a few at the top. 

2 billion over bid from Chevron? Holy cow!!


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Zipper said:
			
		

> So I wonder if it can be said that China is a "True" free market economy since they have no social programs to speak of to sap their spending, and can use almost all of their revenue to basically take over the world financially?
> 
> Oh, and line the pockets of a few at the top.
> 
> 2 billion over bid from Chevron? Holy cow!!




The big problem with the Unocal bid is the strategic implication that you have the PRC owning large energy reserves in Thailand, Mayanmar, Bangladesh and Indonesia.  Now should the PRC attack Taiwan, what are the odds that any of those nations would be willing to restrict energy exports in protest out of fear of military action by the PRC to secure those assets.  This is not to mention the fact that since the PRC plays by "The Art of War" rulebook, it is likely that a good portion of the CNOOC employees deployed to these non-PRC locaitons would be dual-functioning agents of PRC intelligence.

Bottom Line:  We have to be aware that they are buying a lot more than reserves when they try to make acquisitions like this....they are buying political control and a large stick with which to threaten the nations in which the reserves are located.   In short, sell them Maytag, sell them IBM, but this one crosses the line.  I should add that if they want to buy whole companies on world markets, then they should play by the rules and be willing to sell whole companies to foreign interests as well (which they will not do now)....



Matthew.


----------



## Gunner

Chinese dragon awakens

By Bill Gertz
The Washington Times

First of two parts

China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials. 

    U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. 

    China's military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has stepped up military exercises involving amphibious assaults, viewed as another sign that it is preparing for an attack on Taiwan. 

    "There's a growing consensus that at some point in the mid-to-late '90s, there was a fundamental shift in the sophistication, breadth and re-sorting of Chinese defense planning," said Richard Lawless, a senior China-policy maker in the Pentagon. "And what we're seeing now is a manifestation of that change in the number of new systems that are being deployed, the sophistication of those systems and the interoperability of the systems." 

    China's economy has been growing at a rate of at least 10 percent for each of the past 10 years, providing the country's military with the needed funds for modernization. 

    The combination of a vibrant centralized economy, growing military and increasingly fervent nationalism has transformed China into what many defense officials view as a fascist state. 

    "We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production," a senior defense official said. 

    For Pentagon officials, alarm bells have been going off for the past two years as China's military began rapidly building and buying new troop- and weapon-carrying ships and submarines. 

    The release of an official Chinese government report in December called the situation on the Taiwan Strait "grim" and said the country's military could "crush" Taiwan. 

    Earlier this year, Beijing passed an anti-secession law, a unilateral measure that upset the fragile political status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The law gives Chinese leaders a legal basis they previously did not have to conduct a military attack on Taiwan, U.S. officials said. 

    The war fears come despite the fact that China is hosting the Olympic Games in 2008 and, therefore, some officials say, would be reluctant to invoke the international condemnation that a military attack on Taiwan would cause. 

    Army of the future 

    In the past, some defense specialists insisted a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a "million-man swim" across the Taiwan Strait because of the country's lack of troop-carrying ships. 

    "We left the million-man swim behind in about 1998, 1999," the senior Pentagon official said. "And in fact, what people are saying now, whether or not that construct was ever useful, is that it's a moot point, because in just amphibious lift alone, the Chinese are doubling or even quadrupling their capability on an annual basis." 

    Asked about a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, the official put it bluntly: "In the '07-'08 time frame, a capability will be there that a year ago we would have said was very, very unlikely. We now assess that as being very likely to be there." 

    Air Force Gen. Paul V. Hester, head of the Pacific Air Forces, said the U.S. military has been watching China's military buildup but has found it difficult to penetrate Beijing's "veil" of secrecy over it. 

    While military modernization itself is not a major worry, "what does provide you a pause for interest and concern is the amount of modernization, the kind of modernization and the size of the modernization," he said during a recent breakfast meeting with reporters. 

    China is building capabilities such as aerial refueling and airborne warning and control aircraft that can be used for regional defense and long-range power projection, Gen. Hester said. 

    It also is developing a maneuverable re-entry vehicle, or MARV, for its nuclear warheads. The weapon is designed to counter U.S. strategic-missile defenses, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The warhead would be used on China's new DF-31 long-range missiles and its new submarine missile, the JL-2. 

    Work being done on China's weapons and reconnaissance systems will give its military the capability to reach 1,000 miles into the sea, "which gives them the visibility on the movement of not only our airplanes in the air, but also our forces at sea," Gen. Hester said. 

    Beijing also has built a new tank for its large armed forces. It is known as the Type 99 and appears similar in design to Germany's Leopard 2 main battle tank. The tank is outfitted with new artillery, anti-aircraft and machine guns, advanced fire-control systems and improved engines. 

    The country's air power is growing through the purchase of new fighters from Russia, such as Su-30 fighter-bombers, as well as the development of its own fighter jets, such as the J-10. 

    Gen. Hester compared Chinese warplanes with those of the former Soviet Union, which were less capable than their U.S. counterparts, but still very deadly. 

    "They have great equipment. The fighters are very technologically advanced, and what we know about them gives us pause for concern against ours," he said. 

    Missiles also are a worry. 

    "It is their surface-to-air missiles, their [advanced] SAMs and their surface-to-surface missiles, and the precision, more importantly, of those surface-to-surface missiles that provide, obviously, the ability to pinpoint targets that we might have out in the region, or our friends and allies might have," Gen. Hester said. 

    The advances give the Chinese military "the ability ... to reach out and touch parts of the United States -- Guam, Hawaii and the mainland of the United States," he said. 

    To better deal with possible future conflicts in Asia, the Pentagon is modernizing U.S. military facilities on the Western Pacific island of Guam and planning to move more forces there. 

    The Air Force will regularly rotate Air Expeditionary Force units to Guam and also will station the new long-range unmanned aerial vehicle known as Global Hawk on the island, he said. 

    It also has stationed B-2 stealth bombers on Guam temporarily and is expected to deploy B-1 bombers there, in addition to the B-52s now deployed there, Gen. Hester said. 
     
    Projecting power 

    China's rulers have adopted what is known as the "two-island chain" strategy of extending control over large areas of the Pacific, covering inner and outer chains of islands stretching from Japan to Indonesia. 

    "Clearly, they are still influenced by this first and second island chain," the intelligence official said. 

    The official said China's buildup goes beyond what would be needed to fight a war against Taiwan. 

    The conclusion of this official is that China wants a "blue-water" navy capable of projecting power far beyond the two island chains. 

    "If you look at the technical capabilities of the weapons platforms that they're fielding, the sea-keeping capabilities, the size, sensors and weapons fit, this capability transcends the baseline that is required to deal with a Taiwan situation militarily," the intelligence official said. 

    "So they are positioned then, if [Taiwan is] resolved one way or the other, to really become a regional military power as well." 

    The dispatch of a Han-class submarine late last year to waters near Guam, Taiwan and Japan was an indication of the Chinese military's drive to expand its oceangoing capabilities, the officials said. The submarine surfaced in Japanese waters, triggering an emergency deployment of Japan's naval forces. 

    Beijing later issued an apology for the incursion, but the political damage was done. Within months, Japan began adopting a tougher political posture toward China in its defense policies and public statements. A recent Japanese government defense report called China a strategic national security concern. It was the first time China was named specifically in a Japanese defense report. 
     
    Energy supply a factor 

    For China, Taiwan is not the only issue behind the buildup of military forces. Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil and gas resources. 

    The report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, which conducts assessments of future threats, was made public in January and warned that China's need for oil, gas and other energy resources is driving the country toward becoming an expansionist power. 

    China "is looking not only to build a blue-water navy to control the sea lanes [from the Middle East], but also to develop undersea mines and missile capabilities to deter the potential disruption of its energy supplies from potential threats, including the U.S. Navy, especially in the case of a conflict with Taiwan," the report said. 

    The report said China believes the United States already controls the sea routes from the oil-rich Persian Gulf through the Malacca Strait. Chinese President Hu Jintao has called this strategic vulnerability to disrupted energy supplies Beijing's "Malacca Dilemma." 

    To prevent any disruption, China has adopted a "string of pearls" strategy that calls for both offensive and defensive measures stretching along the oil-shipment sea lanes from China's coast to the Middle East. 

    The "pearls" include the Chinese-financed seaport being built at Gwadar, on the coast of western Pakistan, and commercial and military efforts to establish bases or diplomatic ties in Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and disputed islands in the South China Sea. 

    The report stated that China's ability to use these pearls for a "credible" military action is not certain. 

    Pentagon intelligence officials, however, say the rapid Chinese naval buildup includes the capability to project power to these sea lanes in the future. 

    "They are not doing a lot of surface patrols or any other kind of security evolutions that far afield," the intelligence official said. "There's no evidence of [Chinese military basing there] yet, but we do need to keep an eye toward that expansion." 

    The report also highlighted the vulnerability of China's oil and gas infrastructure to a crippling U.S. attack.

    "The U.S. military could severely cripple Chinese resistance [during a conflict over Taiwan] by blocking its energy supply, whereas the [People's Liberation Army navy] poses little threat to United States' energy security," it said. 

    China views the United States as "a potential threat because of its military superiority, its willingness to disrupt China's energy imports, its perceived encirclement of China and its disposition toward manipulating international politics," the report said. 
     
    'Mercantilist measures' 

    The report stated that China will resort "to extreme, offensive and mercantilist measures when other strategies fail, to mitigate its vulnerabilities, such as seizing control of energy resources in neighboring states." 

    U.S. officials have said two likely targets for China are the Russian Far East, which has vast oil and gas deposits, and Southeast Asia, which also has oil and gas resources. 

    Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon official and specialist on China's military, said the internal U.S. government debate on the issue and excessive Chinese secrecy about its military buildup "has cost us 10 years to figure out what to do" 

    "Everybody is starting to acknowledge the hard facts," Mr. Pillsbury said. "The China military buildup has been accelerating since 1999. As the buildup has gotten worse, China is trying hard to mask it." 

    Richard Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said that in 10 years, the Chinese army has shifted from a defensive force to an advanced military soon capable of operations ranging from space warfare to global non-nuclear cruise-missile strikes. 

    "Let's all wake up. The post-Cold War peace is over," Mr. Fisher said. "We are now in an arms race with a new superpower whose goal is to contain and overtake the United States."


----------



## Gunner

Thefts of U.S. technology boost China's weaponry

By Bill Gertz
The Washington Times

Second of two parts

China is stepping up its overt and covert efforts to gather intelligence and technology in the United States, and the activities have boosted Beijing's plans to rapidly produce advanced-weapons systems. 

    "I think you see it where something that would normally take 10 years to develop takes them two or three," said David Szady, chief of FBI counterintelligence operations. 

    He said the Chinese are prolific collectors of secrets and military-related information. 

    "What we're finding is that [the spying is] much more focused in certain areas than we ever thought, such as command and control and things of that sort," Mr. Szady said. 

    "In the military area, the rapid development of their 'blue-water' navy -- like the Aegis weapons systems -- in no small part is probably due to some of the research and development they were able to get from the United States," he said. 

    The danger of Chinese technology acquisition is that if the United States were called on to fight a war with China over the Republic of China (Taiwan), U.S. forces could find themselves battling a U.S.-equipped enemy. 

    "I would hate for my grandson to be killed with U.S. technology" in a war over Taiwan, senior FBI counterintelligence official Tim Bereznay told a conference earlier this year. 

    The Chinese intelligence services use a variety of methods to spy, including traditional intelligence operations targeting U.S.. government agencies and defense contractors. 

    Additionally, the Chinese use hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors, students and other nonprofessional spies to gather valuable data, most of it considered "open source," or unclassified information. 

    "What keeps us up late at night is the asymmetrical, unofficial presence," Mr. Szady said. "The official presence, too.. I don't want to minimize that at all in what they are doing." 

    China's spies use as many as 3,200 front companies -- many run by groups linked to the Chinese military -- that are set up to covertly obtain information, equipment and technology, U.S. officials say. 

    Recent examples include front businesses in Milwaukee; Trenton, N.J.; and Palo Alto, Calif., Mr. Szady said. 

    In other cases, China has dispatched students, short-term visitors, businesspeople and scientific delegations with the objective of stealing technology and other secrets. 

    The Chinese "are very good at being where the information is," Mr. Szady said. 

    "If you build a submarine, no one is going to steal a submarine. But what they are looking for are the systems or materials or the designs or the batteries or the air conditioning or the things that make that thing tick," he said. "That's what they are very good at collecting, going after both the private sector, the industrial complexes, as well as the colleges and universities in collecting scientific developments that they need." 

    One recent case involved two Chinese students at the University of Pennsylvania who were found to be gathering nuclear submarine secrets and passing them to their father in China, a senior military officer involved in that country's submarine program. 

    Bit by bit 

    To counter such incidents, the FBI has been beefing up its counterintelligence operations in the past three years and has special sections in all 56 field offices across the country for counterspying. 

    But the problem of Chinese spying is daunting. 

    "It's pervasive," Mr. Szady said. "It's a massive presence, 150,000 students, 300,000 delegations in the New York area. That's not counting the rest of the United States, probably 700,000 visitors a year. They're very good at exchanges and business deals, and they're persistent." 

    Chinese intelligence and business spies will go after a certain technology, and they eventually get what they want, even after being thwarted, he said. 

    Paul D. Moore, a former FBI intelligence specialist on China, said the Chinese use a variety of methods to get small pieces of information through numerous collectors, mostly from open, public sources. 

    The three main Chinese government units that run intelligence operations are the Ministry of State Security, the military intelligence department of the People's Liberation Army and a small group known as the Liaison Office of the General Political Department of the Chinese army, said Mr. Moore, now with the private Centre for Counterintelligence Studies.. 

    China gleans most of its important information not from spies but from unwitting American visitors to China -- from both the U.S. government and the private sector -- who are "serially indiscreet" in disclosing information sought by Beijing, Mr. Moore said in a recent speech.. 

    In the past several years, U.S. nuclear laboratory scientists were fooled into providing Chinese scientists with important weapons information during discussions in China through a process of information elicitation -- asking questions and seeking help with physics "problems" that the Chinese are trying to solve, he said. 

    "The model that China has for its intelligence, in general, is to collect a small amount of information from a large amount of people," Mr. Moore said during a conference of security specialists held by the National Security Institute, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm. 
     
    In the learning phase 

    Mr. Szady acknowledges that the FBI is still "figuring out" the methods used by the Chinese to acquire intelligence and technology from the United States. 

    Since 1985, there have been only six major intelligence defectors from China's spy services, and information about Chinese activities and methods is limited, U.S. officials said. 

    Recent Chinese spy cases were mired in controversy. 

    The case against Katrina Leung, a Los Angeles-based FBI informant who the FBI thinks was a spy for Beijing, ended in the dismissal of charges of taking classified documents from her FBI handler. The Justice Department is appealing the case. 

    The case against Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was suspected of supplying classified nuclear-weapons data to China, ended with Mr. Lee pleading guilty to only one count among the 59 filed. 

    The FBI has been unable to find out who in the U.S. government supplied China with secrets on every deployed nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, including the W-88, the small warhead used on U.S. submarine-launched nuclear missiles. 

    "I think the problem is huge, and it's something that I think we're just getting our arms around," Mr. Szady said of Chinese spying. "It's been there, and what we're doing is more or less discovering it or figuring it out at this point." 

    Mr. Bereznay said recently that Chinese intelligence activities are a major worry. FBI counterintelligence against the Chinese "is our main priority," he said. 

    In some cases, so-called political correctness can interfere with FBI counterspying. For example, Chinese-American scientists at U.S. weapons laboratories have accused the FBI of racial profiling. 

    But Mr. Szady said that is not the case. 

    China uses ethnic Chinese-Americans as a base from which to recruit agents, he said. 

    "They don't consider anyone to be American-Chinese," Mr. Szady said. "They're all considered overseas Chinese." 

    So the answer he gives to those who accuse the FBI of racial profiling is: "We're not profiling you. The Chinese are, and they're very good at doing that." 
     
    Pushing an agenda 

    China's government also uses influence operations designed to advance pro-Chinese policies in the United States and to prevent the U.S. government from taking tough action or adopting policies against Beijing's interests, FBI officials said. 

    Rudy Guerin, a senior FBI counterintelligence official in charge of China affairs, said the Chinese aggressively exploit their connections to U.S. corporations doing business in China. 

    "They go straight to the companies themselves," he said. 

    Many U.S. firms doing business in China, including such giants as Coca-Cola, Boeing and General Motors, use their lobbyists on behalf of Beijing. 

    "We see the Chinese going to these companies to ask them to lobby on their behalf on certain issues," Mr. Guerin said, "whether it's most-favored-nation trade status, [World Health Organization], Falun Gong or other matters." 

   The Chinese government also appeals directly to members of Congress and congressional staff. 

    U.S. officials revealed that China's embassy in Washington has expanded a special section in charge of running influence operations, primarily targeting Congress. 

    The operation, which includes 26 political officers, is led by Su Ge, a Chinese government official. 

    The office frequently sends out e-mail to selected members or staff on Capitol Hill, agitating for or against several issues, often related to Taiwan affairs. 

    Nu Qingbao, one of Mr. Su's deputies, has sent several e-mails to select members and staff warning Congress not to support Taiwan. 

    The e-mails have angered Republicans who view the influence operations as communist meddling. 

    "The Chinese, like every other intelligence agency or any other government, are very much engaged in trying to influence, both covertly and overtly," Mr. Szady said. 
     
    Taking technology 

    The real danger to the United States is the loss of the high-technology edge, which can impair U.S.. competitiveness but more importantly can boost China's military. 

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a part of the Department of Homeland Security, is concerned because the number of high-profile cases of illegal Chinese technology acquisition is growing. 

    "We see a lot of activity involving China, and I think it would be fair to say the trend is toward an increase," said Robert A. Schoch, deputy assistant director in ICE's national security investigations division. 

    Mr. Schoch said that one recent case of a South Korean businessman who sought to sell advanced night-vision equipment to China highlights the problem. 

    "We have an awesome responsibility to protect this sensitive technology," he said. "That gives the military such an advantage." 

    ICE agents are trying hard to stop illegal exports to China and several other states, including Iran and Syria, not just by halting individual exports but by shutting down networks of illegal exporters, Mr. Schoch said. 

    Another concern is that China is a known arms proliferator, so weapons and related technology that are smuggled there can be sent to other states of concern. 

    "Yes, some of this stuff may go to China, but then it could be diverted to other countries," Mr. Schoch said. "And that is the secondary proliferation. Who knows where it may end up." 

    As with China's military buildup, China's drive for advanced technology with military applications has been underestimated by the U.S. intelligence community. 

    A report prepared for the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission found predictions that China was unable to advance technologically were false. 

    In fact, the report by former Pentagon official Michael Pillsbury highlights 16 key advances in Chinese technology -- all with military implications -- in the past six months alone. 

    The failure to gauge China's development is part of the bias within the U.S. government that calls for playing down the threat from the growing power of China, both militarily and technologically, Mr. Pillsbury stated. 

    "Predictions a decade ago of slow Chinese [science and technology] progress have now proved to be false," the report stated. 

    Unlike the United States, China does not distinguish between civilian and military development. The same factories in China that make refrigerators also are used to make long-range ballistic missiles. 

    At a time when U.S. counterintelligence agencies are facing an array of foreign spies, the Chinese are considered the most effective at stealing secrets and know-how. 

    "I think the Chinese have figured it out, as far as being able to collect and advance their political, economic and military interests by theft or whatever you want to call it," Mr. Szady said. "They are way ahead of what the Russians have ever done."


----------



## neuromancer

Ok. Now Im gong to just pull one out of my hat.

But maybe all this arms build up is just a Chinese self-defense syndrome.

Remeber, these are the same people that built a 6350km wall about 450 years ago 
to keep out turkic and mongol raiders. 

Again, just pulling this idea out of my hat, but what if the arms build up in China 
is a similar, although modern, attempt at overkill-self-defense?

cheers!


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

neuromancer said:
			
		

> Ok. Now Im gong to just pull one out of my hat.
> 
> But maybe all this arms build up is just a Chinese self-defense syndrome.
> 
> Remeber, these are the same people that built a 6350km wall about 450 years ago
> to keep out turkic and mongol raiders.
> 
> Again, just pulling this idea out of my hat, but what if the arms build up in China
> is a similar, although modern, attempt at overkill-self-defense?
> 
> cheers!


      The difference between protective and projective force is critical in deducing intent.  Protective force is military force which is generated in and limited to that country (like our Leopards; we can't deploy them so they are NOT a method of force projection).  Projective force are those military forces deployable outside your homeland, to enforce the will of your nation upon another. The Chinese concentration on developing a blue water navy, sufficient heavy sealift for large scale assault operations, better sea based SAM and aircraft based Air to Air missiles indicates that they are preparing a force mix consistent with force projection, not simple protection.   The Chinese prepare for assaults outside Chinese territory, such assaults expected to be resisted by naval surface and aviation forces.  Since this is the war they are preparing to fight, one of Chinese offensive operation against targets that may be protected by heavy air and naval aviation assets, one can only assume that they are aiming at Tiawan, and preparing to go through the US Pacific fleet if it gets in the way.  Since Russia and China joined together in denouncing the US from unilaterally interfering in the sovereignty of other nations in dealing with their internal rebellions, directly linking Chechnya and Tiawan in this context, it appears that China is laying the political groundwork to permit offensive operations without fear of international reaction.  The strong language used in recent Chinese legislation prohibiting Tiawan (ROC) from making any formal declaration of independence, shows that they are still resolved to take Tiawan, by force if necessary.


----------



## Britney Spears

On a doctrinal scale, every major army in the world has been moving away from the passive defence of the cold war to force projection in order to safeguard national interests outside of their borders. The Chinese are just late to the game because of their internal problems. 

Also, modern strategic thinking emphasizes smaller, faster, harder hitting units for both offense and defence. The big deal for a country surrounded by enemies ike China is that speed can replace numbers. Instead of keeping huge numbers of troops to secure  every hostile frontier,  a smaller more mobile force can quickly deploy to trouble spots. 

One of the main reasons for the 1979 Vietnamese fiasco was that the Chinese were forced to deploy second line militia units because the bulk of thier first line units had to stay on the northern border to guard against a Soviet intervention. 1979 and GW1 pretty much convinced the Chinese (and rightly so) that a strategy of static defence("People's War") was obsolete.


----------



## TCBF

the current GW2 may convince them that they need modern, mobile proffessional expeditionary forces (as per the USA), but for their own homeland defence, a massive 'village militia' "peoples war" is the answer if they have to give up ground - as per the Iraqis.

Our previous posts about Chicom espionage appears to have been supplemented by Bill gertz, above.

Still, they do make a damn good M-14.

Tom


----------



## Dare

For those who do not view Bill Gertz as credible..


> China aims spy network at trade secrets in Europe
> By Damien McElroy
> (Filed: 03/07/2005)
> 
> 'Defector' reveals Beijing's plan to use espionage to achieve its objective of commercial dominance
> 
> A network of Chinese industrial spies has been established across Europe as the Communist government's intelligence agencies shift their resources and attention from traditional Cold War espionage towards new forms of subterfuge aimed at achieving global commercial dominance.
> 
> The extent of the spying was laid bare after a leading Chinese agent "defected" in Belgium. The agent, who has worked in European universities and companies for more than 10 years, has given the Sûreté de l'Etat, the Belgian equivalent of MI5, detailed information on hundreds of Chinese spies working at various levels of European industry.
> 
> With the number of Chinese entering Europe about to increase as Beijing relaxes travel restrictions, Western intelligence agencies fear that the spying will be even more difficult to combat. Britain is likely to be one of the countries where significant infiltration is planned.
> 
> "There is a large Chinese intelligence operation in northern Europe spanning communications, space, defence, chemicals and heavy industries," said Claude Monique, a Brussels-based intelligence analyst.
> 
> "The Chinese agent has given details of hundreds of experts and their activities. As a result national inquiries have been launched, certainly by the German, French, Netherlands and Belgian agencies and, I believe, in Britain too."
> 
> A former British official, who runs a private consultancy specialising in fraud and risk management in Beijing, said that the Ministry of State Security systematically extracted the information it wanted from Chinese people travelling aboard, including tourists, businessmen and scientists.
> 
> "Any ethnic Chinese with relatives or business interests in China is vulnerable," he said. "There are a large number of people who live at or travel to key locations who are regularly debriefed or given orders to obtain various types of strategic information that Beijing finds is militarily or economically useful.
> 
> "Traditionally, the Chinese who went abroad since the late 1970s for trade or study purposes were in businesses controlled by the state. That apparatus of spying has grown over time as Chinese ambitions have risen."
> 
> Visa regulations easing restrictions on Chinese tourism have recently come into force in the UK, as well as continental Europe, and attempts to monitor travellers' activities and telephone calls are at risk of being overwhelmed. A spokesman for the security services said that Chinese spying already represented a significant intelligence challenge that mirrored the threat previously posed by Russian agents.
> 
> The defector making the allegations of spying in Belgium has refused to come forward in public because he has not yet received political asylum. He is described by Western intelligence officials as a leading figure in the Chinese Students and Scholars' Association of Leuven, an alleged front organisation based in a Belgian university town that co-ordinated industrial espionage activities across Europe.
> 
> According to an intelligence official, the association enabled Beijing's Ministry of State Security to maintain contact with a wide spectrum of Chinese citizens living across the continent: "The Chinese operate at many levels, from the pure intelligence agents based at embassies to researchers sent to Europe for training to individual citizens who work apparently independently for five or 10 years until they are in a position to prove their usefulness."
> 
> Among the companies targeted by the Chinese network, according to Belgian officials, is the French communications company Alcatel. It is contracted to build the ââ€šÂ¬1 billion ( £676m) Galileo satellite communications system that European leaders have promoted as a rival to the American Global Positioning System, which has a monopoly of satellite communications systems.
> 
> The Western intelligence official said that China had been brought in as an official partner on the technology, largely because its successful espionage made it futile to keep Beijing out.
> 
> The strongest complaints about Chinese spying have emerged in America. David Szady, the chief of FBI counter-intelligence operations, has said that China is rapidly eroding America's technological superiority: "I think you see it where something that would normally take 10 years to develop takes them two or three.
> 
> "What they are looking for are the systems or materials or the designs or the batteries or the air-conditioning or the things that make that thing tick," he said. "That's what they are very good at collecting, going after both the private sector, the industrial complexes, as well as the colleges and universities in collecting scientific developments that they need."
> 
> A recent report to the American House of Representatives listed 16 "remarkable" Chinese technological breakthroughs that could have been achieved only by industrial espionage. These included a supercomputer that runs at speeds previously achieved only by America and Japan. Sophisticated communications systems, advanced satellite technology and advances in nano-technology were also identified as suspect in the report.
> 
> Among recent Chinese military advances, which experts believe increase Beijing's military strength in the sensitive Taiwan Strait, is a new cruise missile copy of America's Tomahawk weapon and a sea-borne defence system based on stolen Aegis system blueprints.
> 
> A Chinese adage holds that one good spy is worth 10,000 men. As China strives to displace America and Europe as a global economic powers, that ancient insight could help propel the country to new economic heights.
> 
> BG Group
> 
> Foster Wheeler
> 
> © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions of reading.


http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/03/wchin03.xml


----------



## Edward Campbell

Welcome to the world.

China is doing to us what everyone else is doing to us, has been doing to us and will continue doing to us as long as we are a _first world country_.

We are, rightfully, concerned about spying by America, Brazil, China and so on and so forth, and we have been for some time.  As I have mentioned before, China is just a newcomer.  Much of the French space and high tech programmes were stolen, including stolen from us,  

(See: http://vikingphoenix.com/news/archives/1997/mil97004.htm  especially (bear in mind, please, it is a 1997 story) â â€œ
_ ... a Southern Ontario company that does classified work for the Department of National Defence called in a security expert specializing in electronic countermeasures because it fears it may be a target of France's foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, which is well-known for its electronic intelligence interception capabilities. 

"They see a great potential to be hit," says Doug Ralph, the former RCMP veteran hired to protect the company from clandestine electronic surveillance. He wouldn't elaborate, except to say, "The threat is out there. The French are known, it's documented, that they're good at what they do in their trade craft." 

(It was the DGSE a few years ago that allegedly bugged the Air France seats of Northern Telecom officials and reportedly sabotaged a major Nortel contract in Hungary by forwarding the information to French competitors. Nortel didn't respond to a request for an interview for this story.)_)

If memory serves the French were quite miffed at being singled out as a major threat to Canada's security â â€œ even more than they were miffed about being caught red-handed committed espionage and major crimes in New Zealand.  Canada, to its credit, did not apologize to France â â€œ Canada needs never apologize to France for anything, ever.

We need a vigorous counter-intelligence programme in Canada â â€œ a secretive programme, I suggest.*

We also need to bear in mind that we have few, very, very few _friends_ and even they are not above spying on us when it suits their purposes.  In my opinion our list of friends does NOT include: Austria, Belgium, China, Djibouti, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Moldova, Nigeria, Oman , Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Slovenia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe (no UN member states appear to start with W or X).  That does not mean that many, even any of those states are our enemies â â€œ they are, simply, not our friends.  I think we can count solidly, consistently friendly nations on one hand.

I'm not apologizing for China but I am not prepared to get all excited about the Chinese being, finally, unmasked â â€œ being caught doing what everyone else does, including most of our so-called _friends_ and allies, like the _friend_ which is one of the two countries in which our Foreign Affairs Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, holds citizenship.

----------

* I understand and accept that, in a democracy, especially, we need to _watch the watchers_ and the _watchers_ need to ensure that their vital tasks enjoy a measure of public support which involves, consequentially, some publicity â â€œ even a bit of scare mongering, now and again.


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> Welcome to the world.
> 
> China is doing to us what everyone else is doing to us, has been doing to us and will continue doing to us as long as we are a _first world country_.
> 
> We are, rightfully, concerned about spying by America, Brazil, China and so on and so forth, and we have been for some time.  As I have mentioned before, China is just a newcomer.  Much of the French space and high tech programmes were stolen, including stolen from us,
> 
> (See: http://vikingphoenix.com/news/archives/1997/mil97004.htm  especially (bear in mind, please, it is a 1997 story) â â€œ
> _ ... a Southern Ontario company that does classified work for the Department of National Defence called in a security expert specializing in electronic countermeasures because it fears it may be a target of France's foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, which is well-known for its electronic intelligence interception capabilities.
> 
> "They see a great potential to be hit," says Doug Ralph, the former RCMP veteran hired to protect the company from clandestine electronic surveillance. He wouldn't elaborate, except to say, "The threat is out there. The French are known, it's documented, that they're good at what they do in their trade craft."
> 
> (It was the DGSE a few years ago that allegedly bugged the Air France seats of Northern Telecom officials and reportedly sabotaged a major Nortel contract in Hungary by forwarding the information to French competitors. Nortel didn't respond to a request for an interview for this story.)_)
> 
> If memory serves the French were quite miffed at being singled out as a major threat to Canada's security â â€œ even more than they were miffed about being caught red-handed committed espionage and major crimes in New Zealand.  Canada, to its credit, did not apologize to France â â€œ Canada needs never apologize to France for anything, ever.
> 
> We need a vigorous counter-intelligence programme in Canada â â€œ a secretive programme, I suggest.*
> 
> We also need to bear in mind that we have few, very, very few _friends_ and even they are not above spying on us when it suits their purposes.  In my opinion our list of friends does NOT include: Austria, Belgium, China, Djibouti, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Moldova, Nigeria, Oman , Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Slovenia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe (no UN member states appear to start with W or X).  That does not mean that many, even any of those states are our enemies â â€œ they are, simply, not our friends.  I think we can count solidly, consistently friendly nations on one hand.
> 
> I'm not apologizing for China but I am not prepared to get all excited about the Chinese being, finally, unmasked â â€œ being caught doing what everyone else does, including most of our so-called _friends_ and allies, like the _friend_ which is one of the two countries in which our Foreign Affairs Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, holds citizenship.
> 
> ----------
> 
> * I understand and accept that, in a democracy, especially, we need to _watch the watchers_ and the _watchers_ need to ensure that their vital tasks enjoy a measure of public support which involves, consequentially, some publicity â â€œ even a bit of scare mongering, now and again.


I think a key element of the concern is the *scale* and nature of Chinese espionage operations and their consistent escellation. I also agree that we should ramp up our counter-intelligence capabilities even more than the average per-capita of nations of comparable population and economics. I do not consider it scare mongering when it is a genuine threat to national security.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dare said:
			
		

> I think a key element of the concern is the *scale* and nature of Chinese espionage operations and their consistent escellation. I also agree that we should ramp up our counter-intelligence capabilities even more than the average per-capita of nations of comparable population and economics. I do not consider it scare mongering when it is a genuine threat to national security.



My guess is that a significant share of the information Gertz and company are giving us was composed in counter-intelligence agency _communications_ departments.   Those agencies have a vested interest in provoking discussions just like this one.   That doesn't mean the Chinese, and others, do not pose a real threat to our national security.   It does mean that _threats_ need to be advertised.


----------



## Britney Spears

I trust that none of us here have any illusions as to the agenda and "accuracy" of either Mr. Gertz, or _The Washington Times_. for whom Mr. Gertz works. I mean, really, a newspaper that in 20+ years has never made a penny in profit, created by a guy(below) who thinks of himself as "The Messiah" and with his wife "The true parents of human kind", to "fulfill god's desperate desire to save the world"?  Ooookaaay then.....


----------



## Infanteer

I liked the previous picture of you better, Britney....


----------



## Dare

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> My guess is that a significant share of the information Gertz and company are giving us was composed in counter-intelligence agency _communications_ departments.  Those agencies have a vested interest in provoking discussions just like this one.  That doesn't mean the Chinese, and others, do not pose a real threat to our national security.  It does mean that _threats_ need to be advertised.


So you think this information is barely more than propaghanda?


----------



## a_majoor

For real propaganda, we can read the "People's Daily". The Chinese are meanwhile working on a cooperation agreement with Russia (would be superpower + has been superpower. There is an interesting combination of motives).

While this blog is a bit over the top, it is illuminating:

http://treyjackson.typepad.com/junction/2005/07/diabolical_move.html



> Diabolical Moves on the Global Chessboard
> 
> China and Russia reaffirmed their strategic alliance in summit talks and took a broad -- if veiled -- swipe at US global power by vowing resolute opposition to attempts by any state to "dominate international affairs."
> 
> Pamela aka Atlas is back from Gay Paree (eurodisney for adults, they are in complete denial) to find the most startling news story of the week virtually ignored by all media.
> 
> China and Russia, enemies - a love story.
> 
> In this axis of evil, who metaphorically  is Stalin and who is Hitler..........? My guess is China will be the one that screws Russia much the way Stalin was screwed.
> 
> Putin stressed there were "vast bilateral possibilities for inter-regional cooperation," adding that Russia and China "intend to develop our military ties and cooperation" He said the neighbors would hold joint large-scale military exercises by the end of this year.
> 
> Beijing and Moscow have particularly sought to enhance security cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and has made fighting "extremism" in Central Asia a prime goal despite growing Western criticism of hardline methods by regional governments to counter unrest.
> 
> This new love affair is a strategic alliance to counter America's hyperpower and increasing influence in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern European regions.  The two are going to start joint military operations. Also - the countries they are talking about are fighting for Freedom.
> 
> Democracy is poison to totalitarian regimes. Poison to societies of fear.
> Natan Sharansky understood  the critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom,  *the former the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is the moral clarity to see evil *An alliance between two world powers - two of the  greatest violators of human rights - is an alignment in the global chessboard of diabolical proportion.
> 
> It is the fear of freedom that America is spreading, sowing, that these regimes will stop at nothing, nothing to stop. And we in America must stop the hand wringing and be absolute in our moral clarity. As Natan Sharansky so brilliantly explained in The Case for Democracy, without moral clarity, sympathy can also be placed in the service of evil.
> 
> A world without moral clarity is a world in which dictators speak about human rights even as they kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and even tens of millions of people. It is a world in which the only democracy in the Middle East is perceived as the greatest violator of human rights in the world.
> 
> A lack of moral clarity is also the tragedy that has befallen efforts to advance peace and security in the world in the world. Promoting peace and security is fundamentally connected to promoting freedom and democracy. Sharansky learned from his teacher Andrei Sakharov, the world cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their own people.
> 
> THINK ABOUT THAT






Diabolical Moves on the Global Chessboard

China and Russia reaffirmed their strategic alliance in summit talks and took a broad -- if veiled -- swipe at US global power by vowing resolute opposition to attempts by any state to "dominate international affairs."

Pamela aka Atlas is back from Gay Paree (eurodisney for adults, they are in complete denial) to find the most startling news story of the week virtually ignored by all media.

China and Russia, enemies - a love story.

In this axis of evil, who metaphorically  is Stalin and who is Hitler..........? My guess is China will be the one that screws Russia much the way Stalin was screwed.

    Putin stressed there were "vast bilateral possibilities for inter-regional cooperation," adding that Russia and China "intend to develop our military ties and cooperation" He said the neighbors would hold joint large-scale military exercises by the end of this year.

    Beijing and Moscow have particularly sought to enhance security cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and has made fighting "extremism" in Central Asia a prime goal despite growing Western criticism of hardline methods by regional governments to counter unrest.

This new love affair is a strategic alliance to counter America's hyperpower and increasing influence in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern European regions.  The two are going to start joint military operations. Also - the countries they are talking about are fighting for Freedom.

Democracy is poison to totalitarian regimes. Poison to societies of fear.
Natan Sharansky understood  the critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom,  the former the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is the moral clarity to see evil An alliance between two world powers - two of the  greatest violators of human rights - is an alignment in the global chessboard of diabolical proportion.

It is the fear of freedom that America is spreading, sowing, that these regimes will stop at nothing, nothing to stop. And we in America must stop the hand wringing and be absolute in our moral clarity. As Natan Sharansky so brilliantly explained in The Case for Democracy, without moral clarity, sympathy can also be placed in the service of evil.

    A world without moral clarity is a world in which dictators speak about human rights even as they kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and even tens of millions of people. It is a world in which the only democracy in the Middle East is perceived as the greatest violator of human rights in the world.

    A lack of moral clarity is also the tragedy that has befallen efforts to advance peace and security in the world in the world. Promoting peace and security is fundamentally connected to promoting freedom and democracy. Sharansky learned from his teacher Andrei Sakharov, the world cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their own people.

    THINK ABOUT THAT






> Diabolical Moves on the Global Chessboard
> 
> Pamela_dining_1China and Russia reaffirmed their strategic alliance in summit talks and took a broad -- if veiled -- swipe at US global power by vowing resolute opposition to attempts by any state to "dominate international affairs."
> 
> Pamela aka Atlas is back from Gay Paree (eurodisney for adults, they are in complete denial) to find the most startling news story of the week virtually ignored by all media.
> 
> China and Russia, enemies - a love story.
> 
> In this axis of evil, who metaphorically  is Stalin and who is Hitler..........? My guess is China will be the one that screws Russia much the way Stalin was screwed.
> 
> Putin stressed there were "vast bilateral possibilities for inter-regional cooperation," adding that Russia and China "intend to develop our military ties and cooperation" He said the neighbors would hold joint large-scale military exercises by the end of this year.
> 
> Beijing and Moscow have particularly sought to enhance security cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and has made fighting "extremism" in Central Asia a prime goal despite growing Western criticism of hardline methods by regional governments to counter unrest.
> 
> This new love affair is a strategic alliance to counter America's hyperpower and increasing influence in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern European regions.  The two are going to start joint military operations. Also - the countries they are talking about are fighting for Freedom.
> 
> Democracy is poison to totalitarian regimes. Poison to societies of fear.
> Natan Sharansky understood  the critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom,  the former the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is the moral clarity to see evil An alliance between two world powers - two of the  greatest violators of human rights - is an alignment in the global chessboard of diabolical proportion.
> 
> It is the fear of freedom that America is spreading, sowing, that these regimes will stop at nothing, nothing to stop. And we in America must stop the hand wringing and be absolute in our moral clarity. As Natan Sharansky so brilliantly explained in The Case for Democracy, without moral clarity, sympathy can also be placed in the service of evil.
> 
> A world without moral clarity is a world in which dictators speak about human rights even as they kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and even tens of millions of people. It is a world in which the only democracy in the Middle East is perceived as the greatest violator of human rights in the world.
> 
> A lack of moral clarity is also the tragedy that has befallen efforts to advance peace and security in the world in the world. Promoting peace and security is fundamentally connected to promoting freedom and democracy. Sharansky learned from his teacher Andrei Sakharov, the world cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their own people.
> 
> THINK ABOUT THAT


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think this article from today's _Globe and Mail_ points us at the 'real' Chinese 'threat' and the underlying reason for the current US anti-Chinese rhetoric.

My emphasis  at the end.

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050705.wxryuan05/BNStory/Business/


> G8 leaders confront China challenge
> *Beijing aims to deflect pressure on yuan *
> 
> By BARRIE MCKENNA
> 
> Tuesday, July 5, 2005 Updated at 3:49 AM EDT
> From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
> 
> Washington - His name isn't on the program, but Chinese President Hu Jintao will be the guy everyone wants to talk to when world leaders gather at the posh Scottish golf retreat of Gleneagles tomorrow for their annual summit.
> 
> The Group of Eight leaders are expected to take advantage of the cozy environs to press Mr. Hu to inflate the value of the yuan.
> 
> The yuan, which has been pegged to the U.S. dollar for a decade now, has become a proxy for a fierce global debate over China's emergence as an economic power. Critics accuse China of keeping the yuan artificially low in order to flood the United States and other key export markets with everything from bras to brake pads.
> 
> The conventional wisdom is that while China is likely to bend a little, perhaps even some time this year, the immediate impact won't be dramatic. U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan and other experts have cautioned that raising the value of the yuan -- even letting it float -- would have a relatively small effect on the swelling U.S. trade deficit.
> 
> And it won't diminish a growing chorus of anti-Chinese rhetoric from U.S. industry and its allies in Congress, who blame China for stealing millions of factory jobs.
> 
> "The baby steps that the Chinese are inclined to take won't provide political cover in Washington, and it won't change the economic dynamics," argued Daniel Rosen, once an economic policy adviser to former U.S. president Bill Clinton and now a New York-based business consultant specializing in China.
> 
> "A modest revaluation of the yuan would have no significant impact on the U.S. trade deficit and it wouldn't do a thing for all those laid-off factory workers in Ohio."
> 
> There is a growing anti-Chinese mood in the United States, and it's not just because of the yuan. Increasingly, many Americans see China as an economic rival and a competitor for oil and other scarce resources. A bid by Chinese state-run oil firm China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) for U.S. oil producer Unocal Corp. has already become a political flashpoint in Congress. If Unocal accepts the takeover, the Bush administration is likely to face intense pressure to block the deal on national security grounds.
> 
> A concession on the yuan by the Chinese would do little to ease these broader concerns, suggested Russell Smith, a former trade counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives energy and commerce committee "The noise level may subside for a while, but it won't change the dynamic of U.S.-China trade, and it doesn't resolve the question of how we deal with China as an economic and political superpower," said Mr. Smith, trade policy adviser at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Washington.
> 
> It's been two years since a Chinese leader attended a G8 summit. The United States purposely didn't invite the Chinese to last year's summit on Sea Island, Ga.
> 
> But China has become too important to exclude, or ignore. In the past two years, China has expanded its share of global trade by two-thirds while doubling its foreign currency reserves to nearly $700-billion (U.S.) on the strength of booming exports.
> 
> This week's summit is the first of several milestones in the coming months that G8 officials hope will prod the Chinese to move. Mr. Hu is slated to make his first visit to the United States in September. A month later, China plays host to the Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers.
> 
> In mid-November, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow must report to Congress on whether China is guilty of currency manipulation. And Mr. Snow has warned that's exactly what he'll do unless the Chinese show some hint of currency flexibility soon. That could open the door to unilateral sanctions against China.
> 
> The U.S. Congress has also signalled that if Mr. Snow isn't prepared to get tough, it will. A bill that would slap a 27.5-per-cent blanket tariff on all Chinese imports unless the yuan is revalued enjoys broad support from Republicans and Democrats.
> 
> But some analysts said China is unlikely to bow to these threats.
> 
> "This meeting will be China's chance to flex its geopolitical muscles and stake out its seat at the table with the global superpowers, where it belongs," said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y.
> 
> Unless China sees the benefit of revaluing the yuan, it's unlikely to respond to pressure from the United States or Europe, Mr. Weinberg suggested. And so long as Americans keep buying Chinese-made products at Wal-Mart, filling Chinese coffers with U.S. dollars, there's little incentive for the Chinese to move, he said.
> 
> "It is not in China's interest to revalue its currency," Mr. Weinberg explained. "It will not do so willingly, and no one can compel it to respond to dictates from Washington and Brussels."
> 
> And yet top Chinese finance officials know that revaluation is necessary, inevitable and almost certainly good for the country's long-term economic health, analysts said.
> 
> The last thing China wants is to see the U.S. economy come undone because of unsustainable trade and current account deficits.
> 
> On the other hand, the Chinese fear that any sign of weakness would tip currency speculators that its central bank "can be gamed," Mr. Rosen said. And so the Chinese will be looking for an out in the months ahead -- a chance to move when people least expect it and when the international spotlight fades.
> 
> © Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.​



The biggest threats to America's economic security are:

"¢	A spendthrift administration; and

"¢	A _gimme_ culture - fuelled by cowardly legislatures and administrations which refuse to reward saving/investing over consumption.

(Parenthetically: the best thing to be done *to* and *for** Canada since 1967 was the GST - consumption taxes work: they raise revenue and they reward savings.

Two things contributed to Canada's current enviable federal financial position in the world:

1.	GST revenues; and

2.	Offloading of social programme costs to the provinces - which also shifted the deficits downwards.)

*


----------



## Zipper

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> 2.	Offloading of social programme costs to the provinces - which also shifted the deficits downwards.)



On a sidenote that would be better on some other thread no doubt. The above would work even better if some of that offloading downward continued to the municipalities to bring it closer to those who need it (read less bureaucracy).


----------



## a_majoor

Zipper said:
			
		

> On a sidenote that would be better on some other thread no doubt. The above would work even better if some of that offloading downward continued to the municipalities to bring it closer to those who need it (read less bureaucracy).



Actually, we have quite enough "downloading", which in the case of London is claimed to consume $352 million dollars of "our" budget. In other words, Queens park is dictating what programs we "must" have, and also defining the city budget (without my voting Dalton McGuinty for mayor either).

IF we are really serious about reducing government spending and getting our financial house in order, then we might consider "*unloading*" instead. Many government programs at all levels are basicly welfare for people, groups and companies which either don't need the money (many profitable companies get millions of dollars in subsidies); or wouldn't exist without the handout. Frankly if you are not going to offer a good or service that I want, *why should I be forced to pay for that good or service through my taxes*?

Shifting deficits and debts downward is only a shell game, the total amount of Canadian debt is still enormous, and combined with the unfunded liabilities of pensions (everything from CPP to Military Pensions) we are still hanging over the abyss. Economic corrections which would inconveinience the Americans would probably have our economy completely unravel, and only Alberta, which has no debt and a large resource revenue base will emerge unscathed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The GST *did** reduce and, eventually, eliminate the deficit â â€œ it was helped by EI premiums and downloading but it was, mainly, Lyin' Brian Mulroney's much hated (by ignorant Canadians) GST which put our fiscal house in order.  (Source: statement(s) by David Dodge, DM Finance ('92 to '97), now Governor of the Bank of Canada, to the press and to parliamentary committees in the late '90s â â€œ I'm too lazy to go find them but he did say that).

Canadian politicians â â€œ including most Conservatives â â€œ are spendthrifts.  They are not quite as bad as the current crop in the USA, but they're close.  The Bush administration's spending is disgraceful and is endangering America.


*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Back to China.

As I have said before, and elsewhere, some of this _sabre rattling_, on both sides of the Pacific, is just that, and some, also on both sides, is just _fear mongering_ aimed at distracting public attention from other, equally pressing problems.

This is from today's _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050706/CHINA06/TPInternational/?query=Alarm+bells+sound


> Alarm bells sound over China's 'fascist society'
> 
> *Economic clout, perceived militarism sparking fear in Washington and Tokyo*
> 
> BY GEOFFREY YORK
> WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2005 UPDATED AT 11:47 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING -- A sudden drumbeat of panicky warnings about China's growing military and economic power is sparking fears that the United States and Japan could soon be entangled in conflict with the world's most populous nation.
> 
> The ominous warnings have been everywhere in the American and Japanese media in recent weeks, ringing alarm bells over China's rapid military modernization and its voracious appetite for Western corporations.
> 
> Pentagon officials have been quoted anonymously as saying that China is a "fascist state" of Nazi proportions. One major U.S. magazine, The Atlantic, has published a cover story on how the United States would wage a war with China. Another magazine, The New Republic, has suggested that China could be "the first nation since the fall of the Soviet Union that could seriously challenge the United States for control of the international system." Both the United States and Japan are preparing new official defence papers that will focus largely on the Chinese threat. Both papers have been leaked to sympathetic media, and the leaks portray China as a potentially belligerent superpower with a frightening arsenal of missiles and high-tech weaponry.
> 
> The Japanese defence paper is warning that China has shifted to "aggressive" military strategies -- including an expansion of its naval activities -- that must be carefully watched, according to a report this week in the Yomiuri Shimbun, an influential Japanese newspaper.
> 
> In a major speech in Singapore last month, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave a preview of the Pentagon defence paper. He sharply criticized the Chinese military buildup, predicting that China's advanced new missiles could hit targets around the world.
> 
> "Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment?" he said. "Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?"
> 
> China's economic muscle is equally alarming to both countries. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming 398-15 to oppose a Chinese takeover of Unocal, the California-based oil giant. The resolution said the takeover bid by CNOOC Ltd., the state-owned Chinese oil company, would "threaten to impair the national security of the United States."
> 
> A white paper by the Japanese trade ministry this month, meanwhile, is warning of the growing risks of investment in the Chinese market. It suggests that Japanese investors should shift production to Southeastern Asia instead.
> 
> Beijing is expressing outrage at the foreign criticism. Yesterday it lashed out at Japan, accusing it of adding a "chill" to the already frosty relationship between the two Asian neighbours.
> 
> "The two white papers smack of all-out hostility on the part of Japan, which is counterproductive," the state-owned China Daily newspaper said in an editorial. "Its attitude toward China is an unease over its neighbour's progress." The comments by Mr. Rumsfeld have provoked similar anger from Beijing.
> 
> "In trumpeting the 'China threat theory' abroad, Rumsfeld's intention is to evoke doubts and worries among China's neighbouring countries, so as to drive a wedge in the relations between China and the East Asian neighbours," said the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, in a front-page article last month.
> 
> A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, rejected the American criticism of China's military spending. The annual U.S. military budget, he said, is 77 times bigger than the Chinese military budget in per capita terms.
> 
> But with no hint of any slowdown in China's military growth, and with CNOOC still pushing ahead relentlessly in its pursuit of Unocal, the controversy over China's intentions is bound to continue. Much of the U.S. commentary is painting China as a potential successor to the Soviet Union.
> 
> "China's emergence as a growing power could threaten America's role as the primary guarantor of stability in Asia," a lengthy article in The New Republic concluded last week.
> 
> The Washington Times, a right-wing daily with close links to the Pentagon, predicted that China could be ready to attack Taiwan within two years. "We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production," it quoted a senior U.S. defence official as saying.
> 
> © Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.​



The danger is that the media - state controlled or just rabidly partisan - can whip up fear and hate and _expectations_.   The leaked white papers have already served their purposes - they are propaganda rather than considered policy.

We, the American led West, need to have a serious, _strategic_ debate about how we plan to live with China in 2050.   We need to _contain_ China in an array of socio-economic snares while it, gradually but inevitably, evolves into a law abiding, law respecting, albeit, probably, conservative democracy and trading partner and competitor.   The alternative is a land war in Asia which is a stupid choice.

We need to be prepared to fight China, and to win, but we mustn't plan on it - and there is a big difference.

Edit: I mean prepare and plan in the political/strategic sense.  The military must plan and prepare for operations in war anywhere and everywhere, but politocal leaders must plan to _contain_ not fight.


----------



## Edward Campbell

_Containing_ is exactly what we â â€œ many, only loosely affiliated Western nations, *led* by Canada when Louis St. Laurent was Minister of External Affairs â â€œ did to the United States in the '40s.

St. Laurent and some others understood that the _new world order_ â â€œ King used that phrases in about 1940 to describe Canada's changing relations with Britain and the USA â â€œ needed an _engaged_ America.  Many (St. Laurent less so) feared that isolationism would rise again in America, quickly and powerfully, as soon as the war was over.  Although the United Nations was, essentially, an American invention and although Truman and Acheson were committed internationalists, many people feared â â€œ with some justification, I think â â€œ that the American people are _naturally_ and _historically_ isolationist.

Truman was succeeded by another committed internationalist: Eisenhower and we had a decade plus during which America consented to be ensnared within a vast maze of agreements and alliances and arrangements â â€œ all of which tied it, more and more tightly, to a real _new world order_ â â€œ one _managed_ by voluntary standards.  That _order_ is a fair guarantor of peace and prosperity so long as all the real superpowers join and remain 'in.'


----------



## I_am_John_Galt

We need more of this (discrediting and destabilizing the Chinese government):





> *Hackers 1, China 0*
> by James Dunnigan
> July 5, 2005
> Discussion Board on this DLS topic
> 
> Hackers, apparently Chinese, worked their way into the website of a Chinese government Internet security firm, and defaced the company web page. This caused some embarrassment, although the company, Beijing General Security Service, was not noted for Internet security, but for hiring and supervising 4,000 "internet security guards" to monitor what Internet users in the Chinese capital do online. While much message traffic on message boards and in chat rooms is monitored with software (often from American suppliers), human monitors are needed to go after "subversive citizens" who might be speaking in code. China is making a determined effort to prevent the Internet from becoming an uncontrolled source of information the government does not approve of.
> 
> Police states, like China, have a serious problem with the Internet. They need it, for economic reasons. The Internet has become part of the worldwide economic infrastructure. But the Internet also allows unfettered exchange of information. For a police state, this is bad. A police state remains in power, in part, by controlling the media. China has a booming economy, and cannot afford to lock down, or keep out, the Internet, as has happened in police states with poor economies (North Korea, Cuba, Burma). So China is adding more software, and personnel, to police Chinese Internet users. So far, their approach has made many casual Internet users wary of saying, or looking for, anything the government does not approve of. But millions of more savvy Chinese Internet users know of ways to get around the â Å“Great Firewall of China,â ? to do as they wish on the Internet. This attack on the Beijing General Security Service was just a reminder that the Chinese war on the Internet is far from over.


http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/2005756243.asp


----------



## TCBF

Subject: CCP Believes Australian Government Can Be Bought 

Chen Yonglin: CCP Believes Australian Government Can Be Bought
Jun 24, 2005


Picture:Chen Yonglin at the press conference on June 22, 2005 (The
Epoch 
Times) 

When Chen Yonglin, the former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) diplomat 
seeking asylum in Australia, first announced his intention to defect,
he 
told the world about the close relationship between the CCP and the 
Australian government, and stressed that the CCP operates a 1,000
person 
spy network in Australia. Since then the media has been trying to
follow 
up on this sensitive topic, but Chen has remained silent. On June 22nd 
Chen held a press conference during which he began to elaborate on his 
knowledge of the dealings between the two governments. What follows
are 
excerpts of Chen speaking at the conference. 

China Seeks To Make Australia Part of Its "Great Border Area" 

"In February of 2005, Zhou Wenzhong, the Chinese Vice Minister of
Foreign 
Affairs, held a meeting at the Chinese Embassy in Australia with the 
ambassadors and consuls general to Australia and New Zealand, and the 
general consuls and the diplomats in charge of political affairs. I 
accompanied Qiu Shaofang, the general consul of the Chinese consulate
in 
Sidney, to attend the meeting. 

"The main purpose of the meeting was to implement the decision made
during 
the 10th Meeting of the Chinese Diplomats in Foreign Counties held in 
mid-August of 2004, at the suggestion of Hu Jintao, the General
Secretary 
of the CCP, to make Australia part of the "Great Border Area" of
China. 
They asked each consulate to provide its point of view and suggestions
for 
the next step. 

"During the meeting, Zhou Wenzhong shared information about the CCP 
Central Government's strategic planning toward Australia and the
United 
States, which is related to the close ties between these two
countries. 
The CCP wants to break through the military union of the two countries
and 
turn Australia into a second France. It hopes to shape Australia into
a 
country that dares to say "no" to the United States. 

"China first started crafting its plan to reshape Australia when it 
learned that Australia was planning to give up ties with Asia in favor
of 
stronger ties with the United States. At that time the free trade 
negotiations between Australia and the United States were at a climax
and 
Australia had high hopes of being included in the North America Free
Trade 
Agreement (NAFTA). Meanwhile, Australia had a big court case pending
with 
Guangdong Province in China, concerning natural gas, which was making
it 
less and less popular with the Chinese government. 

"In March of 2003 Tang Jaixuan, the Chinese Minister of Foreign
Affairs, 
visited Australia and questioned the Australian government on certain 
issues, including issues related to Falun Gong. On the day before Tang 
Jiaxuan arrived in Canberra, Alexander Downer, the Australian Minister
for 
Foreign Affairs, signed an article banning Falun Gong practitioners
from 
setting up signs and banners or using loud speakers to protest in
front of 
the Chinese embassy. Since then Downer has continued to sign similar 
articles every month, which has made Tang Jiaxuan very happy. 

"That same year, China initiated the celebration of the 30-year 
anniversary of the establishment of the relationship between China and 
Australia. The Chinese government sent many groups to Australia to
promote 
Chinese culture and political ideology. 

"In 2003 when Hu Jintao visited Australia he received unprecedented 
treatment in Canberra. Bob Brown, a congressmen belonging to the
Greens- 
the opposition party- was not allowed to enter the building where
congress 
was being held. This was done to prevent the attendance of dissidents
and 
Falun Gong practitioners that might have shown up as the congressman's 
guests. Hu Jintao was delighted and commented to his staff that this
was a 
sign that the Australian government could be influenced. 

"In 2005 when Wu Bangguo visited Australia, he requested the same 
treatment- not to see or hear any protestors or dissidents. Next Year, 
China plans to send Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to visit
Australia, 
and in 2007 Hu Jintao will be in Australia to attend the World
Economic 
Summit." 

The CCP Thinks The Australian Government Can Be Bought 

"Over the past several years, Chinese officials have successfully
built 
close personal relationships with their Australian counterparts, all
for 
the purpose of establishing leverage in the Australian government. The
CCP 
is convinced that the Australian government can be coerced to follow
its 
aims through application of economic pressures and incentives. It
plans to 
use economic pressure to force Australia to cave on political and
human 
rights issues. 

"The dialogue on human rights between China and Australia over the
past 
several years was merely a show put on to appease the Australian
public. 
In fact, there was no progress made. When high-ranking Australian 
officials visited China, they did not raise any human right issues. I
knew 
what was said during their visits, because a summary news brief of
each 
visit was sent to the consulate." 

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Helped the CCP to Wriggle Out
of a 
Difficult Lawsuit 

"Due to the nature of my work as a diplomat, I have witnessed many 
instances of secret dealing between the Chinese and Australian 
governments, and such knowledge has weighed heavily on my conscience.
I 
know that the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Chinese 
Embassy in Canberra share all of their information with each other.
The 
Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs even gives suggestions to the 
Chinese government on how to handle difficult political issues. 

"For example, Zhang Cuiying, a Falun Gong practitioner, lodged a
lawsuit 
in the Supreme Court of New South Wales against the former Chinese 
president and the 6-10 Office for genocide, torture and crimes against 
humanity. Based on an article of the national amnesty code of
Australia, 
the lawsuit was not handled by the Department of Foreign Affairs and 
Trade, but by a special substitute process. This greatly embarrassed
the 
Chinese government and caused it much distress, because it did not
want to 
have to face Falun Gong practitioners in open court proceedings. 

"To help the CCP, the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and
Trade 
provided several solutions. Dr. Geoff Raby, Deputy Secretary of the 
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, promised the
Chinese 
government that when he visited China in March, 2005 that he would ask
for 
the materials from the Supreme Court, cancel the lawsuit by the Falun
Gong 
practitioners and put an end to the charges against the Chinese
leader. 
Raby later regretted making this offer. 

"The Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade offered another
solution: to 
have the Chinese government send a representative to stand trial in
place 
of the leader, and thus expedite the lawsuit. The Chinese government
did 
not adopt this suggestion and instead decided to put pressure on the 
ministry, which resulted in the ministry's cooperation in preparing
many 
legal documents to assist the CCP." 

Chen ended the press conference with this comment: "I have witnessed
too 
many secret deals between the Australian and Chinese governments. I am 
really concerned that I will be betrayed. Therefore, in case I should
run 
into sudden misfortune, I have spoken my mind to the public." 

Please see Part I, "Chinese Defector Tells of Government Plot" and
Part 
II, "Chen Yonglin Describes Abduction by Chinese Agents in Australia".

(<http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-6-24/29770.html>


You are able to help and please do help:

1. You may help Australian by letting more Australian or citizen in 
Commonwealth countries to aware the story.

2. Talk to your local MPs, Senators. They may be able to help.

3. Write letters to Australian government to express your concern.


----------



## jmackenzie_15

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/07/14/china.taiwan.nuclear.reut/index.html

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- A senior Chinese general has warned that China was ready to use nuclear weapons against the United States if Washington attacked his country over Taiwan, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Friday.

Zhu Chenghu, a major general in the People's Liberation Army who said he was expressing his own views and did not anticipate a conflict with Washington, nevertheless said China would have no option but to go nuclear in the event of an attack.

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," he told an official briefing for international journalists.

A spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry noted that the general had said in the article he was not speaking on behalf of the government. A spokesman later said the ministry was looking into the matter.

The Defense Ministry declined to comment, saying the Foreign Ministry had organized the event at which the general spoke.

Beijing considers Taiwan part of China, and has vowed to bring the self-governed democracy back into the fold. In March, China's parliament passed an anti-secession law authorizing the use of "non-peaceful means" to do so.

Zhu said the threat to escalate a conflict might be the only way to stop one because China did not have the capability to fight a conventional war with the United States.

"If the Americans are determined to interfere ... we will be determined to respond," he said.

"We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds ... of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese," he added.

China first tested a nuclear bomb in 1964. It has declared a policy of not using such weapons unless it has already suffered nuclear attack.

The newspaper observed that it was unclear what prompted the remarks, but noted that they were the most specific by a senior Chinese official in nearly a decade.

During a visit to Beijing earlier this month U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said there should be no unilateral change in the status quo over the disputed island of Taiwan.

"That means that we don't support unilateral moves toward independence by Taiwan. It also means that we are concerned about the military balance, and we'll say to China that they should do nothing militarily to provoke Taiwan," she added.


----------



## Zartan

Doesn't seem like some South Korean children have much affection for the Japanese:
http://aog.2y.net/forums/index.php?s=584a34d836c56dc1a4aed2d8c8bed659&showtopic=1558


----------



## Zartan

Oh yes, and this too,
http://aog.2y.net/forums/index.php?s=584a34d836c56dc1a4aed2d8c8bed659&showtopic=1550

It's the same thing from above, but with different pics and an introduction.

About the Australians being bought by China, the Americans have a similar feeling regarding China's shopping for Unocal.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3265441

Perhaps we Canadians should also be wary of China's investments into our oilfields?


----------



## dante7sins

This is very scary. From a lot things i read and from PBS front line, it seems china will become even more hostile in the future with conflicts over raw goods, ie: oil n' grain. Since they need these goods in order to maintain their economy, they will import these from other countries.  China atm doesn't have the ability to project force beyond its immediate area but they are pursuing a blue water navy in order to protect their interests. China is also spying on canadians too...
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-6-19/29643.html
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1408570.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1408571.htm


----------



## jmackenzie_15

like it or not, theyll transform into the world superpower in the next decade or two.

I dunno how they would fight a war really though, how do you feed that many soldiers?
the logistics of the whole thing are crazy.
Theyd probobly find a way though.

Something else that im certain is a sure thing, is the invasion and devouring of taiwan.


----------



## daniel h.

jmackenzie_15 said:
			
		

> like it or not, theyll transform into the world superpower in the next decade or two.
> 
> I dunno how they would fight a war really though, how do you feed that many soldiers?
> the logistics of the whole thing are crazy.
> Theyd probobly find a way though.
> 
> Something else that im certain is a sure thing, is the invasion and devouring of taiwan.




That assume that we live in the same political paradigm. It is mostly western corporations that have made China powerful...China is dependent on resources which are running out, and in other's possession.

China was allowed to become more powerful. They did some of it on their own, but if they had to rely on their own market, they would have fewer people to sell to, as they have undervalued labour and have few who can afford their products. They have industrialized, but could have political instability as they pay people horribly and are very repressive.

They won't be THE superpower, the  world will be multi-polar.


----------



## a_majoor

This should be added to the China "superthread" in the politics section.

As you wish, sire. 

One thing to note is, given China's political system and culture, Generals (or anyone else) do not just "sound off". The political give and take we take fro granted watching American politics simply does not exist in China, statements are allowed to be made in support of government policy and for very specific purposes.

Should Taiwan be invaded, the best and most practical response would be counterstrikes against the Chinese mainland to disrupt the logictical support of the invasion force, and allow the Taiwanese to neutralize and throw out the attackers. The General is clearly attempting to raise the stakes against that response, and limit American and Allied options.

China has become more powerful for many reasons, our tapping into their human resources is perhaps the primary driver of current economic growth (as is our very short term point of view; i.e. the next quarterly report), but rest assured they have their own drives and motivations, many of which clash with our interests.


----------



## a_majoor

Fourth Generation war to the nth power. Interestingly enough the date of publication is close to Al Qaeda's "Declaration of War" against the West, and both are coincident with the nadir of the Clinton Administration. When you look and act weak, people will try to take advantage of you.

American (and Western) political and economic power can be deployed against this threat, and mostly by benign policies like opening investment and free trade opportunities to fellow democracies, and strengthening potential partners like India. Other methods like "international law warfare" will have limited effect as the American public become impatient with the obstructionist UN, and "ecological warfare" may end up rebounding horribly on the perpetrator (one reason Biological Warfare is more potential than reality).

Still a prescient warning against threats coming from way out of arc.



> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot20jul20,0,89656.column?coll=la-home-headlines
> *
> China's stealth war on the U.S.*
> Max Boot
> 
> July 20, 2005
> 
> Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.
> 
> This saber-rattling comes while China is building a lot of sabers. Although its defense budget, estimated to be as much as $90 billion, remains a fraction of the United States', it is enough to make China the world's third-biggest weapons buyer (behind Russia) and the biggest in Asia. Moreover, China's spending has been increasing rapidly, and it is investing in the kind of systems â â€ especially missiles and submarines â â€ needed to challenge U.S. naval power in the Pacific.
> 
> The Pentagon on Tuesday released a study of Chinese military capabilities. In a preview, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Singapore audience last month that China's arms buildup was an "area of concern." It should be. But we shouldn't get overly fixated on such traditional indices of military power as ships and bombs â â€ not even atomic bombs. Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu, are working on craftier schemes to topple the American hegemon.
> 
> *In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.
> *
> "Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."
> 
> *Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).*
> 
> Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" â â€ clearly a red, white and blue enemy â â€ would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."
> 
> This isn't just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That would be psychological warfare against a major Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, fall into the same category.
> 
> The bid by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Co., to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International law warfare. Gen. Zhu's threat to nuke the U.S.? Media warfare.
> 
> And so on. Once you know what to look for, the pieces fall into place with disturbing ease. Of course, most of these events have alternative, more benign explanations: Maybe Gen. Zhu is an eccentric old coot who's seen "Dr. Strangelove" a few too many times.
> 
> The deliberate ambiguity makes it hard to craft a response to "unrestricted warfare." If Beijing sticks to building nuclear weapons, we know how to deal with that â â€ use the deterrence doctrine that worked against the Soviets. But how do we respond to what may or may not be indirect aggression by a major trading partner? Battling terrorist groups like Al Qaeda seems like a cinch by comparison.
> 
> This is not a challenge the Pentagon is set up to address, but it's an urgent issue for the years ahead.
> 
> Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.


----------



## Britney Spears

> In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.
> 
> "Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."
> 
> Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).
> 
> Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" â â€ clearly a red, white and blue enemy â â€ would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."



OOOHHH!

Has anyone here read this work? I was going to bring it up earlier, but I didn't think there would be enough interest.

It's kind of old news, but it caused quite a stir when it came out!
<a href=http://missilethreat.com/static/19990200-LiangXiangsui-unrestrictedwar.pdf>Read the translation here</a>


----------



## Britney Spears

> This isn't just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That would be psychological warfare against a major Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, fall into the same category.
> 
> The bid by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Co., to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International law warfare. Gen. Zhu's threat to nuke the U.S.? Media warfare.



  

Resource warfare, indeed!


----------



## a_majoor

> *Tied on Taiwan*
> Current U.S. defense policy suffers from needless restrictions.
> 
> By Gary Schmitt & Dan Blumenthal
> 
> Deterring China's attempt to coerce Taiwan into unification with the mainland through military force has been United States policy for five decades The success of that policy has rested on Taiwan's willingness to maintain a robust self-defense capability and, in turn, on America's retaining the ability to project military power quickly and decisively into the region in a time of crisis. To support this policy, the Pentagon assists Taiwan through a program of arms sales, in developing a modern military force, and by investing in our own capabilities to meet Chinese aggression.
> 
> As important as these measures are, neither Taiwan nor the United States is getting its money's worth because of the unnecessary restrictions placed on our military-to-military ties with Taiwan. In some cases these restrictions are just petty, such as requiring Taiwanese military personnel to wear civilian clothes when they train in the United States, or forbidding Taiwanese pilots from wearing name badges on their flight suits during U.S. training. In other cases, they are far more serious and debilitating. Chief among these cases is the self-imposed prohibition on trips by U.S. generals, admirals, and senior defense officials to Taiwan.
> 
> In order to develop an appreciation for Taiwan's specific military needs and, in turn, to spell those needs out to America's civilian policymakers, U.S. generals and flag officers have to be able to visit Taiwan and see its military in action. Although visits by expert teams of U.S. captains and colonels to Taiwan can and do help, these lower-ranking American military officers lack the authority and the â Å“jointâ ? command experience of general officers necessary to have an effective exchange with Taiwan's senior military leaders. And, back home, anyone familiar with the ways of Washington knows that having a well-informed general or admiral make a case for a new initiative is vital if it is to be given a respectful hearing by senior military and civilian decision-makers.
> 
> Similarly, it is difficult for Taipei and Washington to discuss contingency responses to possible Chinese aggression when U.S. generals and flag officers are not able to meet regularly with their Taiwanese counterparts. Again, colonels and captains can talk about a lot of things, but only the most senior officers can really push their respective institutions to be forthright about what they can and cannot do, and to take whatever steps are necessary to fix holes in those plans. Failing this, too much uncertainty can creep into our contingency planning and, in turn, create doubts about our actual ability to deter Chinese aggression.
> 
> Should deterrence fail and conflict erupt in the Taiwan Strait, we currently face the prospect of managing an ad hoc coalition. Senior officers from Taiwan and the United States will have had little opportunity to discuss routinely and in depth how to fight together. The mid-career officers who are currently the backbone of professional-service relationships with Taiwan cannot be expected to make strategic decisions with the full confidence of their governments during wartime. A general officer tasked with executing a contingency plan would benefit greatly from familiarizing himself with Taiwan's command centers, terrain, and operational capabilities. *Indeed, one only has to think back to the difficulties the American military had operating with its key NATO allies â â€ with whom they had trained and held high-level exchanges for years â â€ in Kosovo to realize just how difficult a situation we might face in the case of a military conflict in the Strait.* The cost of the current restrictions could come at a high price, then: diminished American military effectiveness and, potentially, increased loss of American lives in combat.
> 
> Although China will object to allowing U.S. general and flag officers in Taiwan, the proposal would not violate the existing American policy toward China and Taiwan. The current restrictions on visits to Taiwan by general officers are based on â Å“guidelinesâ ? issued by the State Department's Bureau of East Asian Affairs in 1979 following the Carter administration's decision to end formal relations with Taiwan and establish them with Communist China. But the restrictions were not part of any formal agreement with China, nor was it in response to any particular demand by Beijing. In short, this is a self-imposed proscription which has not been properly reexamined in light of either America's obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act or the growth of a much more capable Chinese military force. Indeed, permitting U.S. generals and flag officers to visit Taiwan would reaffirm the essentials of America's one-China policy: While the United States does not endorse any specific political outcome on unification, it is also committed to preventing the mainland from attempts to annex the island by force.
> 
> The American policy of deterring Beijing from using military force against Taiwan and reassuring Taipei in its dealings with the mainland has facilitated peace and great cross-straits economic growth for decades. But it is a policy that is increasingly put in jeopardy by the ongoing development of China's military power. Removing an outdated restriction on defense cooperation with Taiwan is a sensible step to take now in light of this new threat. The idea that generals and admirals can travel to China, Libya, and Uzbekistan but not Taiwan is a restriction that is not only ridiculous on its face but, increasingly, dangerous to the very men and women who will be asked to risk their lives should deterrence fail.
> 
> â â€ Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century. Dan Blumenthal is resident fellow in Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and former senior director for China, Taiwan, Hong, and Mongolia in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/schmitt_blumenthal200507210813.asp


----------



## a_majoor

> Assessing China's Mini-Float
> What it will mean to trade, the markets, and the U.S.
> 
> Yesterday, China adopted a managed float of its currency, the yuan, ending the dollar-peg system that has lasted since the early 1990s. (Malaysia followed suit.) China will now use an undisclosed basket of currencies to set the value of the yuan, and will announce the resulting dollar/yuan exchange rate on a daily basis. For July 21, this was 8.11 yuan per dollar, about 2 percent stronger than the 10-year 8.27 yuan per dollar peg. China will also limit intraday moves in the dollar/yuan exchange rate to plus or minus 0.3 percent.
> 
> China's basket, I believe, is primarily made up of dollars, and also may include euros, yen, and several other currencies in relation to their trade with China. To maintain a basket, China would not in any way be required to change the makeup of its (now largely dollar-based) international reserves, but it may gradually match its reserves with the currency weights in the trading basket. Note, however, that some 90 to 95 percent of all China's foreign trade is denominated in dollars, minimizing the â Å“needâ ? for the country to significantly alter its reserve composition.
> 
> In its announcement, China stressed phrases that the U.S. and G7 had encouraged: â Å“Moving into a managed floating exchange rate regime based on market supply and demand. ... RMB [yuan] will no longer be pegged to the U.S. dollar and the RMB exchange rate regime will be improved with greater flexibility.â ?
> 
> The U.S. had made noises in recent weeks that a move was expected, and Malaysia's immediate parallel move indicates that China's move was in fact coordinated.
> 
> If the U.S. maintains its initially positive reaction, China's announcement will be a constructive development in that it will have relieved protectionist tension and, at least for a while, the threat of the Bush administration allowing current tariff legislation to make progress. It also reduces the risk that the U.S. Treasury would name China a â Å“currency manipulator.â ?
> 
> I don't, however, think this will have a major impact on world financial markets or trade flows. The impact would only be significant if the new regime were managed in such a way as to allow for larger yuan-dollar changes over a relevant time horizon.
> 
> In this respect, I do not assume that China's move is necessarily the â Å“first in a series of moves,â ? or that it automatically translates into an effective â Å“crawling pegâ ? by which China's currency would begin a long upward march against the dollar. Rather, China may use this move to satisfy U.S. and EU demands for greater flexibility â â€ and I stress here that China sees strong domestic and economic reasons to oppose large-scale currency appreciation.
> 
> This managed float also does not materially change the fundamental value of the dollar (established by U.S. monetary policy), commodity prices expressed in dollar terms, or bond yields (which are more heavily influenced by the value of the dollar, inflation expectations, and U.S. monetary policy).
> 
> On the margin, China's move should be viewed as mildly favorable for equities, commodities, Asian currencies, and the Mexican peso, and a mild negative for dollar-denominated bonds.
> 
> By having taken maxi-revaluation scenarios off the table, the move is likely to reduce speculative â Å“hot moneyâ ? flows into China. These flows were the largest single contributor to China's FX reserve accumulation over the past twelve months. As such, China's FX reserve accumulation would be likely to slow in the months ahead.
> 
> How will the U.S. react? I assume positively. Where will China peg the dollar today? I assume at roughly 8.11 yuan per dollar in order to make clear the stability of the new system. What additional announcements will China make in the near-term regarding capital account flexibility? I expect it to liberalize capital outflows, perhaps in the near future.
> 
> â â€ David Malpass is the chief economist for Bear, Stearns.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_malpass/malpass200507220842.asp



http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/darda200507220844.asp
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_nugent/nugent200507220843.asp

Are two other comments on the issues involved with the "China trade". Once again, I would hope free traders expand their horizons to include the "Litle Tigers", India and the Anglosphere nations as a means of diversifying portfolios and reducing the various risks that may accrue from over dependence and investment in the Chinese market.


----------



## tomahawk6

DoD released a report today on the Chinese military. Good read.

www.defenselink.mil/ad...-1561.html


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> DoD released a report today on the Chinese military. Good read.
> 
> www.defenselink.mil/ad...-1561.html


      The good news of the report, they are not yet ready to act unilaterally, as they do not yet have the blue water capacity to supply and defend an invasion force, and are not yet able to guarentee sufficient electronic dominance to neutralize Tiawanese command and control to assure success in landing operations.  The bad news of the report is that they are well on their way to assuring these elements, and spending freely to accomplish this goal.  The implications are clear, far from being an unthinkable act, war to secure Tiawan is being not only planned but prepared for.  The data on Chinese satelite coverage and anti-satelite capabilities, electronic warfare, both conventional and HEMP nuclear, makes it clear that they are quite prepared to deny the west any long range low risk options to interfere in Chinese actions.  This leaves the question of would the US and its allies risk a direct conventional war half way around the world with the only Eastern Superpower.


----------



## a_majoor

A passage from "The Anglosphere Challenge". India may well be our "ace in the hole" when it comes to dealing with China. From today's Instapundit http://instapundit.com/



> A STRONG ANTITERROR SPEECH from Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh:
> 
> Every time terrorists strike anywhere all of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law must stand together and affirm our firm commitment to fight this scourge resolutely and unitedly. *I sincerely hope that all of those who cherish and value open and free societies will join hands in the war against terrorism wherever it is fought.* I wish the people of London well. I pray that their lives will soon return to normal and they can resume their celebrations for having been chosen the venue for the 2012 Olympics.
> 
> And, like Blair and Howard the other day, he sounds as if he's read Jim Bennett's book:
> 
> Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day. . . .
> 
> It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. I am afraid we were partly responsible for sending that adage out of fashion!
> 
> But, if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English speaking people, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component.
> 
> Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language and the modern school system. That is, if you leave out cricket!
> 
> As The Economist recently noted, *India is moving much closer to the United States these days -- and vice versa. *I guess they've all read Jim Bennett's book.


----------



## Kirkhill

It does this old imperialist's heart good to hear those words of PM Manmohan Singh.  ;D  Interestingly enough I was just taking a look at the Indian Army ORBAT the other day on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Regiment_of_the_Indian_Army.  In addition to the ranks, drill, attire and symbols the Regiments have maintained there Raj designations, particularly true of the Indian Army Gorkhas (eg 1st King George V's Own).

Anyway enough pining for the "good old days" .

Anybody else noted in this lengthy confab on the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (the Sequel) the latest non-Kyoto agreement amongst the US, Japan, S.Korea, Australia, India and China?  I found it fascinating.  With this one treaty the US relegates the European Kyoto agreement to the dustbin where it belongs and at the same time opens the door to removing a casus belli in the future.  WWII Pacific, and arguably WWII Europe, were Energy Wars.  Japan and Germany needed it.  Everybody else had it and weren't to willing to share.

Now China's big push is for energy to fuel 400,000,000 Honda and Hyundai knock-offs (Pook's estimate of future market - 1 car / 2.5 people and 1,000,000,000 people).  This, more than ideology, is driving expansion into the South China Seas and associations with central Asia.  India needs a similar amount of energy.  America would be just as happy to wean itself and everybody else off of Arab oil and onto something else.

The American's have their own coal and nuclear sources. They have technology, money and management skills.
The Aussies have coal and uranium to sell and need something other than oil, which they import.
The Japanese and S. Koreans import oil, but have investment capital, technology and factories.
The Indians and Chinese need a better energy solution than oil as well and represent a massive market - either draining current oil reserves pushing up prices or driving new investment in something else.  (I refuse to use alternative because everybody thinks windmillls and photocells, neither of which will cut it).

With that mass of bodies, better than half the world's population and most of the world's future growth potential, any solution is likely to put your average Middle Eastern Despot's nose out of joint.  Have to reduce the annual Rolls Royce and Bentley budget donchano.  Also upsets old Europe and the environmentalists - both pluses in my book.

I believe it was Larry Niven or Jerry Pournelle that pointed out that with energy anything is possible.  Sand can be fused into glass walls for houses.  Drinking water can be distilled from sea water and pumped anywhere.  Deserts will bloom, the Arctic will thaw (OK that's happening anyway), the Lion will lie down with the Lamb and peace will guide the planets - at least until Saturday Week, after the World Cup finals.

Anyways, hyperbole aside, it makes for a really interesting RealPolitik play.  Wonder why we weren't invited to join the club?  Sounds like a lot of investment dollars moving soon.

Cheers.


----------



## a_majoor

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Anyways, hyperbole aside, it makes for a really interesting RealPolitik play.  Wonder why we weren't invited to join the club?  Sounds like a lot of investment dollars moving soon.



Investment dollars are moving at a rate of $6 billion a year into Alberta to open the "Tar Sands" to the global market. There was an interesting article in Macleans (June 13 2005) suggesting the influx of wealth will drastically alter the political power arrangements here in Canada (which may be a good thing), although it was given as an either-or scenario ("It's Alberta's oil if you live in Alberta and it's Canada's oil if you live in Ottawa" pg 37). Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea it belongs to the investors who bet on these projects never seems to be discussed anywhere in the article.

Canada could become a nexus in the potential "Eagles vs the Dragon" scenarios, since both the United States and China will want access to the tar sands, and our political culture, economy and military are not up to the task of effectively gainsaying who should get access.

In terms of WW IV, American access to the tar sands will reduce the pressure to seek short term solutions or (heaven forbid) accommodation with terror supporting regimes in order to maintain a stable energy market. Kirkhill is correct that other alternatives need to be examined as well, but tar sands are THE short and medium term solution to the energy needs of the West; and also remove the "oil weapon" from the hands of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Jihadis, and reduce the amount of funding these regimes get through the sale of oil.


----------



## Kirkhill

Arthur, wouldn't simple logisitics determine who gets access?  Multiple exisiting pipelines, proliferating in the near future, internal lines of communication if you will, vs movement by sea, especially if the movement is contested would seem to make the logic simple.

Investors or not, it would be exceedingly difficult for an offshore, or for that matter a remote power like Ottawa, to force the transfer of "assets in the ground" in the face of a domestic desire not to do the same.

Let's not think about the Iraqi scenario of destroying infrastructure to prevent the transfer, how about oil companies deciding not to produce or the Alberta government temporarily suspending licences.  Unless there are willing producers (eg Chinese oil workers in Alberta) and secure lines of communication (Chinese guards on the pipelines?  A blue water Chinese Navy?) I think we and the Chinese would be hard pressed to ensure them supply in the face of both domestic and American desire not to supply them.

Whatever arrangements are made are going to have to be acceptable to all.  Unless the RCR and R22R plan on ganging up on the Alberta oilfields  ;D.

Cheers.  Chris.


----------



## Britney Spears

> the idea it belongs to the investors who bet on these projects never seems to be discussed anywhere in the article.



Perhaps because it's completely ridiculous? Pray, explain how exactly these projects and the oil sands "belong" to their investors. Are they going to go to provincial bench in Edmonton and get a court order to  put all the oil on a big ship and take it back to China? Those French and Russians who invested so much (supposedly) in Iraq before 2003 must still be rolling in it, right?

I never thought I would ever need to explain the merits of naked military force to readers here at army.ca, typically as bloodthirsty as anyone else,  but what the hey. 

Gentlemen, international investors, when investing in other countries, take into account this little thing called "Sovereign risk". The risk that the host country's goverment might one day decide your investments to be detrimental to their national securty and wellbeing, and expropriate your entire investment.  

Small countries fear US investment because US military power puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to sovereign risk. Chinese investments in the US or Canada must account for sovereign risk. since if the US gov't decided to unilaterally seize all Chinese assets in the US, there's nothing  they can do about it. When Guatamela or Panama decides to seize US assets, they generally, if history is any guide,  find the gringo investors back the next week with friends from the 82nd Airborn and USMC to show them the error of their ways. This generally does not happen between industrialized nations.

So in the case of the tar sands, so what if the Chinese buy the entire thing? What if one day we decided it wasn't such a great idea and just took it all back? Are they going to invade Canada? I imagine we should be a little bit more of a speedbump than the Iraqis were. 

Energy security is gained by force of arms, not by open market transactions, which for a fungible commodity such as oil are pretty much meaningless anyway. People whine about the Chinese purchase of Unocal without understanding that Unocal is a concept that doesn't even exist on paper,  only on the computer memories of the NYSE.  Energy security is when the entire flow of oil from the Persian gulf flows only under the eye and at the whim of your CVBGs, and only to countries that you like. I'd say the current setup isn't going to change anytime soon, no matter how many nearly bankrupt oil companies the Chinese take over.  In the mean time, open markets, at least amongst the industrialized nations, are the best way of ensuring that everyone gets equitable treatment, and to stave off future conflicts.


----------



## a_majoor

a_majoor said:
			
		

> Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea it belongs to the investors who bet on these projects never seems to be discussed anywhere in the article.



This was in reference to internal Canadian politics, since the thrust of the Macleans article was that the oil either belongs to Alberta or to Ottawa. Without the private investors, it will just sit in the ground as it has for several million years and be a benefit to no one regardless of which province claims ownership.

The sovereign risk argument is quite correct, but before the 82nd Airborn cuts the new pipeline from Alberta to the BC coast, there are a lot of other options and plays available. However you slice it, a pair of hostile and aggressive powers arm wrestling over the Canadian economy will have some "spillover" effects on the likes of you and I, manifesting itself in the political, legal and economic spheres in ways I am sure no Canadians will enjoy regardless of their political views.

Kirkhill, the logistics arguments are unsettled, since in the past, Canada made great efforts to ensure the flow of resources was East-West rather than North-South. Pipelines are being built both to the United States and to the BC coast, with vast amounts of money being used to build the infrastructure (and who knows what might be going on below the surface as well?) This is probably the most open and obvious manifestation of the effects I am referring to in the previous paragraph, and you can imagine the sudden hash court challenges, environmental regulations, native land claims and so on "could" make of what should be a fairly orderly investment process, especially if they are being spurred on by outside interests.


----------



## Britney Spears

Good points. My last post was needlessly confrontational, I apologize. I should keep the finger off the trigger for a bit....


----------



## Kirkhill

Right enough Arthur.

At the end of the day though, as Britney was noting, there is the situation when the guns are silent and the situation when they are not.  In 1941 Standard Oil was selling Venezuelan Oil to the Fuhrer.  In 1942 it wasn't (or at least not as much).

Chris.


----------



## a_majoor

Building the Western alliance:



> *Indian Tiger*
> Anglospheric alliance rising.
> 
> By Larry Kudlow & William P. Kucewicz
> 
> *In what could become the world's most significant 21st-century strategic alliance, a strengthened partnership is forming between the two largest English-speaking democracies: the U.S. and India. President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cemented bilateral ties in recent White House talks, paving the way for greater trade, investment, and technological collaboration. In time and with the cooperation of other friendly powers in the region â â€ notably, Japan and Australia â â€ this new alliance could emerge as an essential counterweight to China. Essentially, it will be an Anglospheric alliance in Asia and the Pacific Rim.*
> 
> *U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, commenting on the multipoint joint statement issued following the White House meeting, declared the two countries had forged "a broad global partnership of the likes that we've not seen with India since India's founding in 1947."
> *
> But it's the economic front that has the greatest potential. The world's largest democracy, peopled by an industrious and increasingly educated population, is among the fastest growing economies, with real GDP expanding at a 5.9% average annual rate, seasonally adjusted, over the last eight years, including a 7.0% gain in the 2005 first quarter.
> 
> However impressive this performance may be, India's economy has had to endure some stifling restrictions â â€ and in certain cases outright bans â â€ on foreign direct investment. FDI, in fact, hasn't grown in at least five years, averaging around $1.3 billion per quarter since 2000. In some sectors, such as retailing, mining, and railways, FDI is strictly prohibited, while in others, like banking and telecommunications, foreign investment is permitted but closely regulated.
> 
> The new bilateral accord promises to change this, and there's every reason to be optimistic. Informal links are being forged every day as large numbers of India-based firms service IT equipment and software in the U.S. In addition, India's current stock-market boom owes much to international investors. Foreign portfolio investment in India totaled $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005 versus $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2004 and $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2004. These inflows compared with a 2000-2003 quarterly average of just $840 million.
> 
> The performance of Indian equities has been nothing short of fabulous, with many prices doubling and even tripling in the past two years. The Bombay Sensex 30 Index is up about 150% since May 2003, and the broad Bombay Stock Exchange 500 Index has gained around 175%. Particularly impressive have been the nearly 200% rise in the IT Index and increases of roughly 250% in both the Consumer Durables and Capital Goods Indexes.
> 
> *A small public sector and concomitant low taxes have also aided the economy.* In the 2004-2005 fiscal year ended March 31, the Union (or central) government's net tax revenue amounted to 7.9% of nominal GDP and total receipts equaled 10.8%. With expenditures running at 17.6% of GDP, last year's fiscal deficit (or total government borrowing requirement) equaled 4.5% of GDP, according to the Reserve Bank of India Bulletin.
> 
> Prime Minister Singh, as finance minister in the early 1990s, crafted many of the reforms responsible for India's economic renaissance, including lower tariffs, fewer import and forex restrictions, the lifting of industrial licensing and price controls, and a reduction in the top marginal income-tax rate from a staggering 97.5% to a more sensible 35%. Sound monetary management nowadays leaves little room for complaint, with consumer price inflation trending around 4.4% on a twelve-month basis over the past five years. Monetary stability has helped keep interest rates down, too. Since 2000, 10-year government bonds have yielded 7.8% on average, making for a mean real interest rate of 3.4% over the period.
> 
> But only through an ever-increasing ratio of financial capital to labor capital will labor productivity make the gains necessary for substantial improvements in the country's overall standard of living. Capital availability will rise with the expansion of the domestic economy, of course. But more is needed. Given the immense size of its labor force, India requires massive injections of foreign capital to make the investments in technology and equipment needed to augment output per hour. So, of the panoply of potential governmental reforms, liberalizing foreign capital flows is far and away the single most important one.
> 
> *If India becomes a more hospitable home for foreign investment, their economy can grow 10 percent yearly for the next decade, representing an economic shot across China's bow. Embracing Anglo-Saxon market economics will strengthen both the Indian and American economies, thereby adding even more power to the new diplomatic entente.
> *
> â â€ Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is host of CNN's Kudlow & Company and author of the daily weblog, Kudlow's Money Politic$. William P. Kucewitz is editor of GeoInvestor.com and a former editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow_kucewicz200508041929.asp



Welcome the newest "middle power"; as the years go by it will be India which sets the agenda for the other middle powers, since it is a notion which has the people and economic resources coupled with the willpower to make thier mark in the world.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&pubid=968163964505&cid=1141474839078&col=968705899037&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=

China plans steep hikes in military budget
14.7% increase continues trend
Mar. 4, 2006. 07:30 AM
ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING — China's military budget will rise by 14.7 per cent this year to the equivalent of $40 billion Cdn, a government spokesman said today.
The figure was announced by Jiang Enzhu, a spokesman for China's legislature, the National People's Congress, on the eve of its annual session.

China has announced double-digit spending increases for its 2.5-million-member military nearly every year since the early 1990s.


----------



## big bad john

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4773358.stm

China's military budget jumps 14%  

The Chinese army is the biggest in the world 
China has said it will increase its military spending by 14.7% this year to 283.8bn yuan ($35.3bn; £20bn). 
However, a spokesman for the Chinese parliament said much of the rise would be to cover fuel and salaries and that China was a "peace-loving nation". 

Jiang Enzhu said the US spent a greater proportion of its economy on defence and that China had "no intention of vigorously developing armaments". 

The US has several times accused China of understating its military budget. 

Neighbours' concerns 

China's armed forces are the biggest in the world and have seen double-digit increases in military spending since the early 1990s. 

  China is committed to a path of peaceful development 

Jiang Enzhu
Chinese parliament spokesman 
The increases have caused concern for neighbours Japan and Taiwan. 

The US has also expressed fears over the spending on the 2.5m-strong military. 

Washington has several times accused China of understating its military budget. 

It said last year's spend was not the $30bn stated but closer to $90bn. 

China insists its spending is in line with rises in other governments. 

Mr Jiang said: "China's defence budget has risen in recent years along with the development of its economy. 

"But the proportion of the budget given over to defence spending is much the same as in past years." 

China also says its military spending is dwarfed by the US. The US department of defence had a base budget of $400bn in 2005. 

Mr Jiang said China's increases would go on salaries, new equipment, training and higher fuel costs. 

He added: "I wish to emphasise that China is a peace-loving nation. China is committed to a path of peaceful development."


----------



## karl28

China keeps talking about being a peaceful nation . Now I am not an expert by any standards and this will sound real cheese so I apologize up front but a guy I new from high school had this crazy shirt that said peace through superior fire power .I'm wondering if that is the peace that china is thinking of  but like I said I am by far not expert on this so its just my two cents .


----------



## Kirkhill

Related to Bruce's observation maybe?

An acquaintance in Seattle is indicating that there is currently a world-wide shortage of titanium which is pushing the prices way up.  We use it in our industry to build salt-water resistant equipment like heat exchangers and pumps.  It is also used in many other alloys subjected to high-stress environments - turbines and armour as I understand it.  It is considered a strategic metal and is integral to a lot of modern weapons systems.

If the west isn't building aircraft and tanks (although it is building a lot of armoured vehicles) who is using up the titanium supplies?  It may be going into the civilian market.  Then again, maybe not.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Take a good look at who is picking up the pieces in Africa, now that the cold war no longer has NATO/Warsaw pact arming training and supporting the regimes of Africa, China has started to play a large role.  Africa has the resources, and represents the potential market that China needs. India acted as a break to Chinese expansionism on land, but hegemony in Africa is attainable.  South America is another area where Chinese capital and influence is being felt.  Perhaps the day will come when the OAS sees the protector in China that the Arabs found in Russia in the 50-60's.  China is moving to become a true superpower, and they are playing the long game; taking the time and investment to sew up whatever can be had without resistance, against the day when they feel they can/must take what is left against resistance.  This is not a condemnation, my own family has followed the Union Jack to conquer a quarter of the globe when we played that game.  The problem with China's quest for hegemony rests in its willingness to use its massive military, and the lavish spending to bring its quantity up to the qualitative standards of the military leaders. The continued technological transfers to the Chinese from the west really worry me, we cannot match their quantity, so why are we so hot to assist them to matching our quality?  What happens when they reach out to take something (Like Taiwan) and we tell them no?


----------



## Kirkhill

Excellent point mainer.

I had forgotten the source issue - titanium is mined in Africa, amongst other places.

Was it on this site that I read an article commenting on the fact that the West's emphasis on human rights in international affairs is tying its hands by denying it the ability to make the deals that China makes?  They do not care if the person they sign the contract with has the full legal and moral right to sign the contract - only that they have sufficient de facto right as to allow the contract to be signed.  Once signed China can "support" the contract in the same manner that our ancestors supported contracts out of places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Vancouver and Halifax.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Nice to see this thread ‘alive’ again.

This is from today’s _Globe and Mail_, from the *Focus* section.  It supports mainerjohnthomas’s point:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060304.CHINA04/TPStory/?query=


> China keeps bad company
> *Beijing is willing to make deals with the most reprehensible regimes and its growing influence is threatening to undercut the U.S. democracy crusade.*
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK reports
> 
> Saturday, March 4, 2006 Posted at 2:30 PM EST
> 
> BEIJING -- When Chinese President Hu Jintao jets into Washington next month for his first White House summit, he will be arriving not merely as an economic rival of the United States but increasingly as a geopolitical rival.
> 
> For the first time since the days of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leadership is emerging as a quiet threat to U.S. dominance on the world stage. This time, however, Beijing is not pushing the discredited ideas of Maoism and Marxism. Instead, it is offering a more alluring idea: that the autocracies of the developing world can stand up to Washington's pressure by forming their own profitable alliances in business and trade.
> 
> From Angola to Zimbabwe, from Myanmar to Sudan, some of the world's nastiest regimes are enjoying the fruits of China's financial support. With its newfound economic muscle and its amoral zeal to do business with anyone, China is propping up a host of tyrants and dictators who might not otherwise survive.
> 
> Most of the geopolitical rivalry will be politely ignored in the discussions between Hu Jintao and George W. Bush. But the enigmatic Chinese President will be viewed warily in Washington, where concern is growing that China now has the economic clout to challenge the U.S. democracy crusade in the "rogue states" of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
> As China moves rapidly toward superpower status, its model of moral neutrality is increasingly attractive to many developing countries -- especially at a time when the United States is often seen as a self-righteous bully. The new mantra of Chinese foreign policy was enunciated by a deputy foreign minister, Zhou Wenzhong, when he was asked about China's support for the brutal military regime in Sudan, which stands accused of war crimes and genocide. "Business is business," Mr. Zhou said. "We try to separate politics from business. I think the internal situation in the Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to impose upon them."
> 
> What Mr. Zhou failed to mention was the self-interest of the dealings between China and Sudan. In the wake of U.S. sanctions against it in 1997, Sudan needed a foreign sponsor. China, meanwhile, needed oil to fuel its economic boom. Beijing supplied tanks and fighter aircraft to Sudan in a deal beneficial to both sides.
> 
> Today, Sudan provides 10 per cent of China's oil imports, while Beijing provides enough economic and diplomatic aid to shield Sudan from U.S. pressure.
> 
> This basic creed -- business comes first, and self-interest is all that matters -- was more explicitly illustrated last year when Beijing gave a red-carpet welcome to Uzbekistan strongman Islam Karimov.
> 
> Just two weeks earlier, Mr. Karimov's regime had launched a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters in the town of Andijan, killing hundreds of them.
> 
> But when he arrived in Beijing, he was given a 21-gun salute and a state dinner. China called him "an old friend of the Chinese people" and praised him for his crackdown on the "extremists." And then the two countries rewarded each other with a $600-million (U.S.) oil and gas deal.
> 
> Iran and North Korea provide another example. China is giving so much economic and diplomatic support to both regimes that they can resist U.S. pressure to dismantle their nuclear programs.
> 
> Again, self-interest is at the core of these alliances. Iranian oil is the biggest item in the $10-billion annual trade between Iran and China -- and this two-way trade is expected to jump to $100-billion a year as a result of a new deal to send Iranian natural gas to China.
> 
> In the Korean peninsula, China provides 80 per cent of North Korea's consumer goods and 40 per cent of its foreign trade, and it has invested about $2-billion in infrastructure. Look at any of the world's most autocratic regimes and you can usually find a Chinese role in propping it up. China is providing billions of dollars worth of military aid to countries such as Russia and Myanmar, despite their internal wars and human-rights abuses. It has close relations with Cuba and Venezuela.
> 
> It gives loans and military aid to Robert Mugabe, the iron-fisted ruler of Zimbabwe, who has offered China access to his gold and platinum and other mineral resources. It gave a $2-billion loan to Angola, a key supplier of oil to China, despite the country's long record of human-rights abuses. It gave military aid to Nepal, even after its king seized absolute power last year.
> 
> China has another reason for its moral neutrality, of course. By promoting the concept of non-interference in domestic affairs, it is making it harder for the outside world to interfere in its own domestic policies, including its human-rights abuses, its jailing of dissidents, its crackdown on Tibet, its attacks on religious freedom and its threats of war against Taiwan.
> 
> China's global influence has been immensely strengthened by its economic boom, which is triggering a far-reaching shift in the worldwide balance of power. Its extraordinary growth has helped legitimize a new model of governance, sometimes called the "Beijing Consensus."
> 
> In the years of triumphalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the "Washington Consensus" dominated the ideology of most developing countries. This was the ideology of privatization, deregulation, free markets and democratic governance, all promoted heavily by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund from their head offices in Washington.
> 
> The Beijing Consensus rejects the Washington Consensus and promotes other priorities: rapid growth, state-led development, technological modernization, state intervention in the economy, tight political control over society to ensure social stability, and a respect for "national sovereignty" regardless of a regime's internal practices.
> 
> "The Washington Consensus was a hallmark of end-of-history arrogance; it left a trail of destroyed economies and bad feelings around the globe," says Joshua Cooper Ramo, a consultant and professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who coined the term "Beijing Consensus" in a paper for the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
> 
> "China's rise is already reshaping the international order by introducing a new physics of development and power," he wrote. "China's new ideas are having a gigantic effect outside of China. . . . China is in the process of building the greatest asymmetric superpower the world has ever seen, a nation that relies less on traditional tools of power projection than any in history and leads instead by the electric power of its example and the bluff impact of size."
> 
> The ideas of the Beijing Consensus, he wrote, are "defined by a ruthless willingness to innovate and experiment, by a lively defence of national borders and interests, and by the increasingly thoughtful accumulation of tools of asymmetric power projection."
> 
> China is too cautious to embrace these ideas as an official doctrine, but it clearly approves of them. In an article in People's Daily last year, Chinese scholars praised the concept of a Beijing Consensus. "Because of its . . . practical superiority, it will be a 'consensus' accepted by more and more people and of growing influence in the world, particularly among developing countries," former Beijing University president Wu Shuqing said.
> 
> As the China model expands across the developing world, the United States is still struggling for a response. But its anxiety is growing. One U.S. scholar, Kenneth Lieberthal, says there is a split among China-watchers in Washington. One group sees China as a potential enemy of the United States by about 2020. The other group sees China as an inevitable enemy by 2020.
> 
> And so, despite the friendly rhetoric that will emanate from the White House when Mr. Hu arrives in Washington, many U.S. strategists will see him not as a partner but as a competitor -- perhaps the only competitor strong enough to challenge U.S. dominance in the world.
> 
> *Into Africa*
> 
> China had warm words of praise for Robert Mugabe when the autocratic Zimbabwean ruler arrived in Beijing last year.
> 
> The tyrant of Harare was given an honorary degree by the leaders of Beijing's foreign affairs college, who lauded him for his "brilliant contribution" to diplomacy and international relations. Chinese officials called him "a man of strong convictions, a man of great achievements [and] a man devoted to preserving world peace."
> 
> In Zimbabwe, where Mr. Mugabe is widely reviled as a dictator, China has rushed to provide gifts to the strongman. It donated the roofing material for his lavish $9-million Saddam Hussein-style palace and filled it with luxurious knickknacks.
> 
> China has also given him military hardware, fighter aircraft, interest-free loans, technology for his censors and secret police, and even T-shirts for his election team. Thousands of Chinese businessmen and farmers have poured into Zimbabwe, replacing the Western investors who have almost all withdrawn from the country because of Mr. Mugabe's blatant human-rights abuses.
> 
> It's all part of China's relentless campaign to win influence in Africa. While the West is losing interest in the continent, Beijing sees it as a crucial source of oil and minerals.
> 
> The signs of Chinese largesse are evident all across Africa. Luxury housing is a popular gift. In addition to the roof for Mr. Mugabe's palace, China donated almost $7-million to build a palace for the President of Namibia. When it gave a $2-billion loan to Angola, it included a gift of a housing compound for high-ranking Angolan officials -- surrounded by a security fence to ensure that the rabble cannot enter.
> 
> More than luxury villas are involved, of course. China launched Nigeria's first satellite into orbit and has promised more help on satellite launches. It has invested $300-million in copper mines and other industrial projects in Zambia. It has become the top supplier of military aid to Sudan.
> 
> In exchange for its generosity, China has signed at least 40 oil agreements with various African leaders, and it has signed a further 31 agreements to provide debt relief.
> 
> Chinese investment in Africa soared to $18-billion in 2003, up from $10-billion in 2000. At the same time, China has become the third-biggest trading partner in Africa, behind only the United States and Britain. Trade between China and Africa reached almost $30-billion in 2004, up by 59 per cent from the previous year.
> 
> All of this has helped to guarantee future supplies of oil and minerals to fuel China's industrial growth. But more than these concrete rewards, China has gained something else: a huge increase in influence in the developing world.
> 
> It remains to be seen how China will exploit this influence, but so far it has provided one obvious result: It has helped to ensure the survival of the rulers of Zimbabwe and Sudan, two of the most autocratic and abusive regimes in the world.
> 
> _-- Geoffrey York_
> 
> © Copyright 2006 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.



(Reproduced in accordance with the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act)


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Quote,
_It remains to be seen how China will exploit this influence, but so far it has provided one obvious result: It has helped to ensure the survival of the rulers of Zimbabwe and Sudan, two of the most autocratic and abusive regimes in the world_.

No, it can't be true...its must be the Americans fault somehow. :
China,
billions of unwitting slaves to support an unscrupulous regime bent on subversive world domination...


----------



## tomahawk6

Found these 6 sat photos of China's secret nuclear facilities. Rather good imagery from a commercial satellite, you can imagine how good military imagery is. 8)

The US is moving 6 LA Class Attack subs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This will raise the total number of subs to 31 and 21 in the Atlantic.

http://www.imagingnotes.com/go/page4a.php?menu_id=23


----------



## chanman

After the mention of satellite imagery, I had to do a bit of a double take at the title of the linked article: 





> The World’s First Look at China’s Underground Facilities for Nuclear Warheads



China builds new sub base on Hainan Island: http://www.janes.com/defence/naval_forces/news/fr/fr060224_1_n.shtml

I wonder if that's what the USN EP-3 was looking at when that fighter collided into it.


----------



## Britney Spears

> China,
> billions of unwitting slaves to support an unscrupulous regime bent on subversive world domination...



Really? Would you care to elaborate?


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

No


----------



## Britney Spears

I didn't think so.  ;D


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I didn't think so.  ;D


     You could always go to Tibet and ask them what he means.  Or you could enquire of the rust coloured smear in Tienanmen Square.  You could perhaps wander to the shores of Tiawan where the watch nervously as their neighbor eyes them with unconcealed avarice and ramps up both its rhetoric and arms production.


----------



## TCBF

"Really? Would you care to elaborate?"

Bruce, I can't believe you turned that down.

The sad thing is, they make really good M-14s.  Must be all of those well educated Falun Gong slave labourers in the NORINCO factories.

Tom


----------



## Britney Spears

> You could always go to Tibet and ask them what he means.  Or you could enquire of the rust coloured smear in Tienanmen Square.  You could perhaps wander to the shores of Tiawan where the watch nervously as their neighbor eyes them with unconcealed avarice and ramps up both its rhetoric and arms production.



I've addressed all of these at length in previous threads, except for the Tiananmen one, which doesn't seem to me particularly good evidence for a Chinese plot for world domination. Pretty good indication of what happens to hippies in third world countries, though.

So, same offer: Have new arguments? Care to elaborate?



> Must be all of those well educated Falun Gong slave labourers in the NORINCO factories.



I can't understand this infatuation with "slave labour". I got news for you, guys: Wages in China are  pretty damn low! The major element of cost in any product made in China will be materials and capital (plant, machine equipment). Do you seriously think anything can be produced in China more cheaply with unwilling slave labour than SKILLED workers willingly working their fingers to the bone for 15c/hour? And producing RIFLES, no less!  ;D This sounds like a twist of the "Chinese resturants/Cat meat" story, where no one ever bothers to think about the cost of Chicken/Beef in North America(pretty damn low) vs the theoretical cost of procureing and proccessing cat/dog meat, also considering that dog meat is generally considered to be a delicacy by the Chinese, you might as well be worried about Mcdonald's slipping a lobster tail into your Big Mac.

Aside from the fact that there's no evidence at all to support either assertion, neither of them even make any economic sense. Let's try and engage the mind a little, shall we?


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

2.5 Million men under arms, 15% yearly increases in their military budget without any external threat to justify the increase, an arms race not against an external rival, but against some perceived need for unopposable military superiority.  You can Google to search out China's military expansionism in the recent past, unless of course you are in China, in which case such an internet querry could cost you your freedom and/or life.


----------



## Britney Spears

> 2.5 Million men under arms,



Compared to almost 5 million under arms in 1985 with more cuts still on the way? Of course, both you and I know that these numbers are meaningless in the context of modern warfare, especially since the nature of socialist militaries like Chinas would mean that a large percentage of the "soldiers" are (literally) farmers, construction workers, ballerinas and opera singers who happen to work for the PLA, but who most likely have seen a rifle all of once in their lives. 

I'll assume you meant this as a strawman. 



> 15% yearly increases in their military budget without any external threat to justify the increase,



Is this a joke? You honestly believe China has no external threats to contend with? 



> an arms race not against an external rival, but against some perceived need for unopposable military superiority



Elaborate please. Which "arms race" are we talking about? The replacement of the Mig-19s which still compose of the bulk of the Air Force? The WW2 vintage Romeo class SSKs and Kotlin class DDs (are these even DDGs?) that still compose the bulk of the Navy? Unopposable military superiority indeed.......  



> You can Google to search out China's military expansionism in the recent past



I've done a lot more than Google, and suprisingly enough, I haven't found ANY evidence of "China's military expansionism". I've said as much in <a href=http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/36723.15.html>this thread</a> and asked for some specific examples, but no one took me up on the offer. If you have some examples then I am anxious to hear them.



> unless of course you are in China, in which case such an internet querry could cost you your freedom and/or life.



No, it won't. The Chinese block access to sites that they find offensive, such as wikipedia and the BBC. All you'll get is a 404 page not found.


----------



## TCBF

"Is this a joke? You honestly believe China has no external threats to contend with?"

- He might not want to say 'Yes' but I will : China has no external threats to contend with.

Tom


----------



## a_majoor

> No, it won't. The Chinese block access to sites that they find offensive, such as wikipedia and the BBC. All you'll get is a 404 page not found.



I suppose this is why the US Senate is castigating American companies who provide limited search services, technical assistence to maintain the "Great Firewall of China" and providing the names of Chinese citizens who use the Internet to exercise the right of freedom of expression to the Chinese government? http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/39864.0.html

If I find something offensive in the BBC, I turn it off. If I find an inaccurate or poor entry in Wikipedia, I attempt to modify it. I don't expect someone else to turn it off on me or for me, and such action is offensive to the dignity and rights of adults who it is being done to.


----------



## Britney Spears

> - He might not want to say 'Yes' but I will : China has no external threats to contend with.



You don't think that the US, with its historical attitude towards China, counts as an external threat? The large American armies and navies, and those of American satellite states like the Philippines and Taiwan surrounding China's borders seem to indicate otherwise. Perhaps American intentions are purely benelovent, but recent US military activities would make that a rather unconvincing argument.

Or how about Japan? With the world's second largest military budget, the most powerful air force and navy of any Asian nation, and a (real this time) history of militaristic expansionism, you can't see them being a threat?

Osumi class LST. You see it's for "self defence".....






Russia? India? Vietnam? I think China is the only country in the world that has fought wars against both North and South Vietnam, as well as both the USSR and the US....... 



> I suppose this is why the US Senate is castigating American companies who provide limited search services, technical assistence to maintain the "Great Firewall of China" and providing the names of Chinese citizens who use the Internet to exercise the right of freedom of expression to the Chinese government? http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/39864.0.html
> 
> If I find something offensive in the BBC, I turn it off. If I find an inaccurate or poor entry in Wikipedia, I attempt to modify it. I don't expect someone else to turn it off on me or for me, and such action is offensive to the dignity and rights of adults who it is being done to.



I never said it was a good thing, I(when I am in China) and most Chinese hate it too, I was merely pointing out that the claim of  





> could cost you your freedom and/or life.


 was inaccurate.


----------



## mainerjohnthomas

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I never said it was a good thing, I(when I am in China) and most Chinese hate it too, I was merely pointing out that the claim of   was inaccurate.



http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA170012004

 http://seclists.org/lists/politech/2002/Dec/0059.html

     Britney, I should have included these links in the original message.  When I said that internet searches could result in your summary imprisonment and possible death, I was actually basing that on the results of those Chinese who have encountered the benevolence of the Peoples Republic, and its outstanding tradition of respecting human rights (as set forth both in its own laws, and the UN Charter).  The links above describe real people, engaging in the same activities that you and I are engaging in right now, suffering punishment from a brutal and repressive regime that mocks its own laws.  Forgive me if I am suspicious of the motivations of the leadership of the Peoples Republic, but their own actions prove them hypocritical and brutal liars.  Heavily armed hypocritical brutal regimes have a nasty tendency to not mention to their neighbors when they plan to invade.  Its a sad little trend in human history.


----------



## chanman

Going back to Taiwan, I wonder if the current president is going to try something more provocative than what he has already in the next two years.  His term ends in 2008, and his support last election was thin enough that it seems unlikely that he will return to power.  The opposition KMT, which ARE for reunification, and their allies maintained a slim majority in the legislature.

Oddly enough, it seems that time works against both causes.  The people in Taiwan who arrived or immigrated from China in the first half of the 20th century are getting older, and their children and grandchildren have less and less attachement to what some of their relatives may still think of as home.

On the other hand, economic ties between the two are growing rapidly.  It may eventually reach the Canada-US level of economic integration.

Emphasis added in *bold*



> *Onshoring*
> Jan 13th 2005
> From The Economist print edition
> 
> 
> Taiwan is shifting much of its manufacturing to the mainland
> 
> IN THE smoke-and-mirrors statistics for foreign investment in China, Hong Kong appears as the biggest investor, followed, oddly, by the Virgin Islands. Trailing in sixth place, behind Japan, South Korea and America, is Taiwan. But if investments were traced back to their true origins, Taiwan might well turn out to be the largest.
> 
> The capital flow from Taiwan to China is turning the mainland into a global leader in information-technology (IT) equipment, albeit one that still relies mainly on imports for the more advanced components. *In 2002, China overtook Japan and Taiwan to become the world's second-largest IT hardware producer after America. The steep upward curve of China's IT exports is almost exactly matched by its imports of IT components from Taiwan. *China is now the world's biggest IT hardware exporter to America. Yet *more than 60% of these exports are made in China by Taiwanese companies.*
> 
> China's latest list of its *top 200 export companies is headed by subsidiaries of Taiwanese IT firms*: Hon Hai Precision Industry (whose exports from China in 2003 were worth $6.4 billion), Quanta ($5.3 billion) and Asustek ($3.2 billion). Altogether Taiwan has 28 entries on the list, all of them high-tech companies. Far from being undermined by competition from China, Taiwanese IT businesses are benefiting from their production on the mainland, increasing their global market share across a broad range of products, says Nicholas Lardy of the Institute for International Economics in Washington.
> 
> Thanks to a huge trade surplus with mainland China, Taiwan has built up the world's third-biggest holding of foreign-currency reserves: a record $239 billion at end-November 2004. *Taiwan is second only to Japan as a source of Chinese imports. And for Taiwan, China is the biggest export market. Taiwanese companies employ some 10m people on the mainland. *For China, worried as it is about growing unemployment, this is an enormous contribution to stability. In just a few years, a strong economic symbiosis has developed across the Taiwan Strait.
> 
> Take the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province (which borders on Hong Kong). The municipality is a vast sprawl of factories, many of them Taiwanese, stretching mile after mile through what were tiny villages a few years ago. Dongguan is awash with Taiwanese money, much of which has been there for a decade or so. Dongguan was an obvious choice for the first wave of Taiwanese investors who flocked to the mainland after the Taiwan government began to ease investment restrictions in the early 1990s. It is close to Hong Kong, which together with nearby Macao offers the only direct flights from Chinese cities to Taiwan.
> 
> To start with, Dongguan was a magnet for low technology, labour-intensive industries. But since the late 1990s, Taiwanese investment in the mainland has moved rapidly up the technological ladder. Dongguan is still booming, but the investment hotspot has shifted north to the Yangzi River valley, particularly in the area around Shanghai, an area with good access to skilled workers and potentially better placed for China's domestic market. *The town of Kunshan, an hour's drive from Shanghai, has become almost a replica of Taiwan's high-tech industrial zones. Some 300,000 Taiwanese businessmen and their dependants now live in the greater Shanghai area*, causing property prices to soar.
> 
> Taiwan is rife with stories of kidnappings, robbings and murders of Taiwanese businessmen on the mainland. There is also speculation about how many really make money; Tsai Ing-wen, a former head of Taiwan's mainland-affairs office under President Chen, estimates that only half of them do. Even so, *more than 70,000 Taiwanese firms have set up on the mainland, notwithstanding political tensions, Taiwan's restrictions on some investment and the absence of direct flights.* “This is a time of global competition,” says Preston Chen, chairman of the Ho Tung Group, which has invested over $100m on the mainland. “If you don't go [to China], others will, and the first to suffer will be you.”
> 
> 
> In Dongguan, some Taiwanese businessmen in low-value-added industries are getting restless as the stampede of Taiwanese capital shifts to the north. Some have begun to move elsewhere, including neighbouring Vietnam. “If you come back in ten years it's hard to say whether you'll find any Taiwanese business here,” says Juei Chen Wong, the boss of a Taiwanese electric-wire factory in Dongguan.
> 
> He is exaggerating: more likely, other Taiwanese businesses less dependent on cheap labour will move in. *For labour-intensive manufacturers geared to the export market, China may be losing some of its shine. But the new wave of Taiwanese investment is looking for skilled labour*, and is setting its sights not only on markets abroad but also on a fast-growing group of affluent consumers in China itself. This *investment is helping to transform China's trade, now fuelled increasingly by higher-value-added production. In 2003, China exported some $130 billion-worth of electronic and IT products, up 41% on the previous year. Such products accounted for nearly one-third of total exports. *Chinese officials say that output of IT products will triple by 2010.
> 
> To achieve this, China needs Taiwanese businesses, even if they support independence. In May 2004, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily newspaper, accused Hsu Wen-lung, the founder of Taiwan's Chi Mei Group, which has a large chemical plant on the mainland, of using his profits for pro-independence causes. But China has not taken any direct action against the company. “There are a very small number whom we do not welcome,” says Mr Zhang, the Chinese government spokesman. “But as long as they uphold the law, we let them invest. We have not said we will expel them.”
> 
> So near and yet so far
> 
> At government level, the two sides still bicker over what they call the “three direct links”: communication, trade and transportation, which have been disrupted since the end of the civil war. But barriers have been quietly dismantled. Mail is channelled through Hong Kong; direct telephone calls have been possible since the 1980s; cross-strait cargo shipping can be routed through a third area, but can go directly if not carrying local freight.
> 
> The absence of direct flights except to Hong Kong and Macao is the biggest nuisance, though it really is no more than that. If you set off an hour before dawn from downtown Taipei, you can reach most of the big cities on the mainland by the afternoon. But direct flights would certainly help. Getting to Shanghai currently takes six or seven hours. Flying direct would take 90 minutes.
> 
> The Taiwan government estimates that direct air and sea links would reduce shipping costs by 15-30%. Sea transport would be twice as quick, and air travellers would save $390m a year. But direct flights are fraught with symbolism, so both sides are determined to extract maximum political advantage from any move they make.
> 
> For Taiwan, direct flights are part of a bigger question: how much economic integration with the mainland it should allow. Should it stop trying to curb investment in certain technologies; open its doors wider to trade with the mainland; and allow mainlanders to work, invest and holiday in Taiwan? The economic arguments are compellingly in favour, particularly in information technology.



http://www.economist.com/research/backgrounders/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3535161

As for the military - the trend in Asia seems to be to expand lately.

http://www.economist.com/research/backgrounders/displaystory.cfm?story_id=157104 has some more info on ongoing changes in China's military

http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/1-2005/at/russian_arms/ lists some arms sales - In the last few years, for instance, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and the RoK have all bought/planned to buy new combat aircraft.


EDIT:  Attached something some might find interesting.  Labour in China is cheap, but in comparison to some of the neighbours, not THAT cheap


----------



## TCBF

"You don't think that the US, with its historical attitude towards China, counts as an external threat?"

- Historical?  I grant you there have been some disputes, but a lot of allies died helping the Chinese defend themselves in - and even before the USA entered -  WW2.  Flying Tigers, and all that.

- It was China that invaded Vietnam - "To teach them a lesson"  - in 1979. (I was in Cyprus at the time, and we were almost as surprised as the PLA at how fast the Viets mobilized their village defence forces and re-deployed their reserves.  I guess being at war for a while hones ones skills. )

- I don't think anyone envisions imposing their will on China by inserting an Army onto Chinese soil.  Most of the Chinese fascism of the moment is a holdover from the Communist Party of the Long March generation, and probably provides an attempt to prevent a serious deterioration of their civil structure which might in fact lead to the worlds first nuclear civil war.

It's a tough call: the out of control train keeps going faster and faster, but you can't find a clear spot to jump off.  So you keep looking, hoping to find a soft spot, all the while realizing that the train will eventually go so fast that no soft spot in the world will do you any good.

So:  At what point do you unite the populace in a war to liberate Formosa?  Or will a miscalculation result in another Falklands?

Tom


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## chanman

TCBF said:
			
		

> "You don't think that the US, with its historical attitude towards China, counts as an external threat?"
> 
> - Historical?  I grant you there have been some disputes, but a lot of allies died helping the Chinese defend themselves in - and even before the USA entered -  WW2.  Flying Tigers, and all that.



Britney might be referring to foreign military presence and concessions to Imperial powers until WW2 really got under way.



> It's a tough call: the out of control train keeps going faster and faster, but you can't find a clear spot to jump off.  So you keep looking, hoping to find a soft sopt, all the while realizing that the train will eventually go so fast that no soft spot in the world will do you any good.
> 
> So:  At what point do you unite the populace in a war to liberate Formosa?  Or will a miscalculation result in another Falklands?
> 
> Tom



Since his decline in popularity, the incumbant president in Taiwan might try to do the same thing with an independence bid.


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## TCBF

"Britney might be referring to foreign military presence and concessions to Imperial powers until WW2 really got under way."

- Yup. Hence my: "I grant you there have been some disputes,"

"Since his decline in popularity, the incumbant president in Taiwan might try to do the same thing with an independence bid."

- So, you equate a bid for independance with a full blown amphibious and airborne assault?  Please explain.

Tom


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## chanman

> - So, you equate a bid for independance with a full blown amphibious and airborne assault?  Please explain.



Similar in that in both cases, the respective parties are taking an internationally confrontational position in order to rally nationalist sentiment and political support maybe?


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## Britney Spears

> Britney, I should have included these links in the original message.  When I said that internet searches could result in your summary imprisonment and possible death, I was actually basing that on the results of those Chinese who have encountered the benevolence of the Peoples Republic, and its outstanding tradition of respecting human rights (as set forth both in its own laws, and the UN Charter).  The links above describe real people, engaging in the same activities that you and I are engaging in right now, suffering punishment from a brutal and repressive regime that mocks its own laws.  Forgive me if I am suspicious of the motivations of the leadership of the Peoples Republic, but their own actions prove them hypocritical and brutal liars.  Heavily armed hypocritical brutal regimes have a nasty tendency to not mention to their neighbors when they plan to invade.  Its a sad little trend in human history.



The issue is far more complex than that, and your original statement that an internet query would result in imprisonment or death is still inaccurate. The people mentioned in your links were imprisoned for dissemination of subersive information, not seeking it.

Look, you're going off on a tangent here. Censoring the internet is peanuts compared to the other nasty things that the regime has been responsible for.  I'm not trying to apologize for the actions of the regime in this matter, but life in the third world sucks, eh? I don't see how this indicates that there is some Chinese plan for world domination afoot.



> - Historical?  I grant you there have been some disputes, but a lot of allies died helping the Chinese defend themselves in - and even before the USA entered -  WW2.  Flying Tigers, and all that.



I was thinking more about post WW2. Things sort of went sour after 1949.



> I don't think anyone envisions imposing their will on China by inserting an Army onto Chinese soil.



No one expected Desert Storm to be as succesful as it was. Hence my comment about the uselessness of comparing sheer numbers of soldiers. The Chinese military leadership has already seen the writing on the wall. Hence the shift from the old defence in depth and numbers to well equiped and MOBILE rapid reaction forces. This is the same shift that we (NATO) have already gone through, the Chinese just didn't realize it until 1991. The change is just beginning. The Chinese army is still organized to fight the USSR. 



> t's a tough call: the out of control train keeps going faster and faster, but you can't find a clear spot to jump off.  So you keep looking, hoping to find a soft spot, all the while realizing that the train will eventually go so fast that no soft spot in the world will do you any good.
> 
> So:  At what point do you unite the populace in a war to liberate Formosa?  Or will a miscalculation result in another Falklands?



They've done a lot better than anyone really expected them to. See Russia for an example of how it could be far worse.


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## TCBF

"They've done a lot better than anyone really expected them to. See Russia for an example of how it could be far worse."

- I actually think Russia has done it better.  Whether they continue as a nominal democracy remains to be seen, but at least the party left office - for awhile. 

"Things sort of went sour after 1949."

- Hardly the USA's fault, was it?

"No one expected Desert Storm to be as successful as it was."

- Invading a country of 21,000,000 is not invading a country of 1,200,000,000.  For defence, the PLA peasent army  - with a professional cadre and the 400 nukes (of which maybe 100 are ICBMs)  are deterrent enough.  The bulk of the Japanese Army fought the Chinese - not the Americans.  If the Japanese then could not do it with the bayonet, I doubt ANY country, or group of countries today could give it a shot.  You know how the west - include modern Japan in this case - abhors ground combat, and Russia and India lack the transportation and logistics to just harass the edges.

So, who, seriously, are they worried about, other than themselves?

Tom


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## Britney Spears

> - Hardly the USA's fault, was it?



I didn't say it was anyone's fault, but as it turns out the USA spent a few decades trying to "contain" China, and they didn't like it.



> - Invading a country of 21,000,000 is not invading a country of 1,200,000,000.



I meant Desert Storm, AKA GW1, not GW2, although the lesson is the same: A green, inexperienced but well equipped and technically competent western army smashed an experienced WW1 army with 60s era soviet equipment. The defeat of the Iraqis was so total, the Americans didn't NEED to actually invade Iraq(and thus get caught up in the defence in depth which is what the Chinese/Iraqis would have expected) to achieve their political aims.  The Chinese were trying to do the same thing in 1979 and it was a complete disaster. 

What the Chinese realized was that an all out invasion would be unlikely, but a regional, high intensity, short duration conflict where training, equipment, mobility and airpower counted for more than numbers or political indoctrination would now be the norm. Thus the new emphasis on power projection, rapid downsizing of the army and (most importantly) the establishment of professional NCO academies and much more enticing NCO career progression, something that most third world armies never manage to pull off. This type of western style army would NOT be very well suited for wars of conquest (that would require numbers), but better for the type of regional skirmish that the Chinese leadership envision themselves getting into around, say, the Diaoyu islands or the South China sea.  To put this into a cultural context, defeat in these kinds of little wars was exactly what send China into the downward spiral in the late 1800s, and no Chinese, whatever their political bent, wants to see a repeat of that era. 

Thus, I would argue that the current shifts in Chinese military posture is not an indication of aggressive expansionism but only an adjustment to face modern military realities.


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## TCBF

Chinese military official calls for stepped up training, denounces Taiwan independence 
06-Mar-2006 05:32 GMT
News Service: The Associated Press 
BEIJING_China's military is ready to step up training and boost its ability to defend the nation's territory, a top army official said in remarks published Monday, warning Taiwan against attempting to declare independence.
"We resolutely oppose 'Taiwan independence' and will never allow 'Taiwan independence' secessionist forces to make Taiwan secede from China under any name and by any means," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Guo Boxiong, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, as saying.
China stepped up its rhetoric against Taiwan after the self-ruled island's president, Chen Shui-bian, recently shut down a Taiwanese government body devoted to seeking unification with the mainland.
The two sides have been divided since 1949, but Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory and has threatened to use force to attain unification if necessary.
Guo denounced Chen's move as a step toward independence for Taiwan, calling it a "grave provocation" that would seriously undermine peace and stability, Xinhua said.
"We will make utmost efforts with maximum sincerity to safeguard and promote peaceful and steady development of relations across the Taiwan Strait and seek peaceful reunification," Guo told a gathering of military delegates to China's parliament in Beijing.
On Sunday, the government announced that its military budget will rise 14.7 percent this year to 283.8 billion yuan (US$35.3 billion; euro28.6 billion). China has announced double-digit spending increases for its military nearly every year since the early 1990s, causing unease among its neighbors.
JANE'S DEFENCE WEEKLY - MARCH 08, 2006


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## warrickdll

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> defeat in these kinds of little wars was exactly what send China into the downward spiral in the late 1800s, and no Chinese, whatever their political bent, wants to see a repeat of that era.



Perhaps "little wars" is a bit subjective as both a term and as the cause of the downward spiral. As well as the numerous "foreign adventures" (a completely subjective term) there was the Taiping Rebellion (how many millions of people need to die for it to be a "big war") and, if you weren't referring to the Taiping Rebellion as a "little war", you appear to be glossing over its contribution to the downward spiral. 

Combating the Taiping Rebellion, the Nien Rebellion, and the Moslem uprisings in the west would severely weaken an already floundering state.




> Thus, I would argue that the current shifts in Chinese military posture is not an indication of aggressive expansionism but only an adjustment to face modern military realities.



I would argue that aggressive expansionism (is there leisurely expansionism?) by China has historically been contained by either China's own tendencies towards feelings of (hmmm....) condescension of non-Chinese cultures, and by China's ability to be preoccupied with internal uprisings and rebellions (it wasn't just Mao or the 20th century Civil War). 

While the historical holds on Chinese expansionism may not now be present, I would agree that Chinese expansionism is not the likely course, for the near future. China is a growing threat because it is growing, and shares no common bond with other nations. 

You do bring up 1979, which is the more likely threat from China, limited military punishments against nations that impede China's interests (Gunboat diplomacy - no irony), or as a show of force. Or squatting in disputed areas and then daring anyone to move them.


On another note - China is often heard complaining about the Japanese occupation, but says nothing of when it was an imperial power. China might not have occupied much more territory then it now has, but it did control other nations by threat and demanded tribute be paid to it - No apologies from China for its demands for concubines from Korea for the Emperor.


Again though, I agree, any nation in China's position would be doing exactly the same militarily. A nation of that size and economic power won't sit around without any modern military capability.


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## Britney Spears

> Perhaps "little wars" is a bit subjective as both a term and as the cause of the downward spiral. As well as the numerous "foreign adventures" (a completely subjective term) there was the Taiping Rebellion (how many millions of people need to die for it to be a "big war") and, if you weren't referring to the Taiping Rebellion as a "little war", you appear to be glossing over its contribution to the downward spiral.
> 
> Combating the Taiping Rebellion, the Nien Rebellion, and the Moslem uprisings in the west would severely weaken an already floundering state.



Examine the context of the Taiping rebellion more closely. The defeat of the Qing in the two Opium wars, their inability to check the expansion of western commercial interests, the bankrupcy of the Imperial administration due  to indemnities and looting in the aftermath of the peace treaties were crucial in the Taiping rebellion's beginnings and later success. Nor is it lost on the Chinese that the rebellion was crushed largely with Western arms and advisors (Remember "Chinese" Gordon? He's a household name in China to this day). While the Qing certainly had a host of other internal issues that served to undermine their rule, in purely military terms the British and French invasions (Both were limited wars) were one of the principle causes of the Qing decline in the mid 1800s. Of course, lets not forget the Boxer rebellion (another reaction to Qing weakness in the face of the Western imperial powers) and the Sino-Russo-Japanese wars of the early 1900s whcih were the final nails in the Qing coffin. 

Besides, it's always more fun to blame the evil foreigners, the Chinese are no exception to this rule. One must take into account that influence in strategic thinking regardless of its historic validity.

As an aside, I always like to half seriously point out  that Hong Xiu Quan's theology was supposedly influenced quite heavily by an American Baptist missionaries, and the Taiping rebellion as an example of Fundamentalist American Protestant theocracy.   



> I would argue that aggressive expansionism (is there leisurely expansionism?) by China has historically been contained by either China's own tendencies towards feelings of (hmmm....) condescension of non-Chinese cultures, and by China's ability to be preoccupied with internal uprisings and rebellions (it wasn't just Mao or the 20th century Civil War).
> 
> While the historical holds on Chinese expansionism may not now be present, I would agree that Chinese expansionism is not the likely course, for the near future. China is a growing threat because it is growing, and shares no common bond with other nations.



Fair enough. No serious disagreements here, although I personally would emphasize a different set of factors.





> On another note - China is often heard complaining about the Japanese occupation, but says nothing of when it was an imperial power. China might not have occupied much more territory then it now has, but it did control other nations by threat and demanded tribute be paid to it - No apologies from China for its demands for concubines from Korea for the Emperor.



That's a pretty awful comparison. 8 years of occupation and the massacre of millions, versus demanding a marriage to cement an alliance during a period where it was customary to do so? Somehow I can't see those as being on the same level.

In any case, the ancient Chinese tribute system was generally meant as a token show of respect for the dominance of Chinese civilization and culture, and reciprocated with a similar transfer of Chinese goods to the tributees. Sometimes this evolved into goverment sactioned trade, but  it was never used to economically subjugate wholesale entire countries like Western colonialism was.


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## TCBF

I think they could accomplish the same aim, yet perhaps be a bit more subtle.  In a decade or two (well, OK, three), we may well be buying high quality Chinese made autos like we buy high quality Japanese and Korean ones now.  China will be even more dependant on the security of international sea lanes for trade, and there may come a time when certain countries in the west urge China to help with the burden of 'global policeman', much as the Japanese have been asked to assist (with funding).  Sabre rattling across the Straights of Formosa are counter-productive to the aim.

If China truly does plan 'long term', they should listen to their western educated anylists when they explain which messages push the wrong buttons in Washington.  They could modify the message and accomplish the same mission.

The sale of IRBM and advanced SAM and ASM technology to governments the west considers less than stable could perhaps be explained in better terms - or stopped.  It's not like they need the money.


----------



## Kirkhill

Britney:

Are you sure you're not confusing lack of capability with lack of intent when you state "... it was never used to economically subjugate wholesale entire countries like Western colonialism was."  In China's various empires most of the subjugated states were City-States or regional empires of City-States,  just as they were in the West, the Middle East, India and the Americas.  The reason that those older empires didn't expand it that they were restricted to the speed of a man on horseback to act and communicate and the ability of the mark one eyeball to see.  Tribute empires were common everywhere.  The fact that the Chinese never got past such an empire doesn't seem to me to indicate any greater disposition not to seek a greater empire.


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## TCBF

Well, at one point a faction did decide not to maintain a seafaring capability.  Had they not taken that turn, the Americas may well have been colonized from the west coast rather than the east.

Now THAT would make an interesting premise for an alternate history series of novels.

Brit, got lots of time on your hands?

Tom


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## Britney Spears

> In China's various empires most of the subjugated states were City-States or regional empires of City-States,  just as they were in the West, the Middle East, India and the Americas.  The reason that those older empires didn't expand it that they were restricted to the speed of a man on horseback to act and communicate and the ability of the mark one eyeball to see. Tribute empires were common everywhere.  The fact that the Chinese never got past such an empire doesn't seem to me to indicate any greater disposition not to seek a greater empire.



See TCBF's point about the decision to not maintain a seafaring capability. The Chinese of the Ming dynasty made a decision to b forego seaborne expansion "over the horizon", as it were. Chinese culture even before that had already been insular, and military thinking shifted from naval power to the construction of the Great Wall (The "Ming Wall" that you see today). China has pretty much never had a professional military like the Romans or the 16th Century European powers, and the Chinese concept of defence has for millenia been to station military colonies made up of peasant conscripts on it's borders, near a big honking wall. The Manchu "Banner armies" of the 17th Century being a short lived expection that provided China with most of it's modern day Non-Chinese holdings in Tibet and XinJiang, before being swallowed into the Sinicized Manchu administration.  The concept of having professional colonial armies specifically for service outside its borders simply doesn't exist in Chinese thinking. I suppose it is possible that such ideas may one day develop but I've not seen any evidence of this happening.



> Now THAT would make an interesting premise for an alternate history series of novels.




<a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/books/review/02WILFORT.html?tntemail1>1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered the World</a>

<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt>The Years of Rice and Salt</a> The Plague does European civilization in, and world development centers instead on Islamic and Chinese empires.


----------



## TCBF

Good thing Gavin Menzies was a RN Submarine Commander: a lot of his critics appear to be bent on hunting him to exhaustion.  Oh well.


----------



## warrickdll

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> Examine the context of the Taiping rebellion more closely. The defeat of the Qing in the two Opium wars, their inability to check the expansion of western commercial interests, the bankrupcy of the Imperial administration due  to indemnities and looting in the aftermath of the peace treaties were crucial in the Taiping rebellion's beginnings and later success. Nor is it lost on the Chinese that the rebellion was crushed largely with Western arms and advisors (Remember "Chinese" Gordon? He's a household name in China to this day). While the Qing certainly had a host of other internal issues that served to undermine their rule, in purely military terms the British and French invasions (Both were limited wars) were one of the principle causes of the Qing decline in the mid 1800s. Of course, lets not forget the Boxer rebellion (another reaction to Qing weakness in the face of the Western imperial powers) and the Sino-Russo-Japanese wars of the early 1900s whcih were the final nails in the Qing coffin.



So much was going wrong for China all at the same time: Floods, Wars, Strife, and the final acceptance that the world had moved forward while China had not. There is no shortage of factors that go into the collapse of imperial China. 

A century of nothing but context, and there is no way to view the Taiping and Nien Rebellions without the foreign attacks, but without them (and the other mid-century uprisings) there might have been some longevity in the empire.



> Besides, it's always more fun to blame the evil foreigners, the Chinese are no exception to this rule. One must take into account that influence in strategic thinking regardless of its historic validity.



No matter how valid Chinese xenophobia might appear to someone in China - that it exists at such a level only adds credence to seeing China as a threat - as it shows a China unable to see the context of foreign actions.



> As an aside, I always like to half seriously point out  that Hong Xiu Quan's theology was supposedly influenced quite heavily by an American Baptist missionaries, and the Taiping rebellion as an example of Fundamentalist American Protestant theocracy.



The Heavenly Kingdom did have some progressive ideas. Who knows, maybe if a new religion catches on with the peasants there will be another need for the Ever Victorious Army.




> That's a pretty awful comparison. 8 years of occupation and the massacre of millions, versus demanding a marriage to cement an alliance during a period where it was customary to do so? Somehow I can't see those as being on the same level.
> 
> In any case, the ancient Chinese tribute system was generally meant as a token show of respect for the dominance of Chinese civilization and culture, and reciprocated with a similar transfer of Chinese goods to the tributees. Sometimes this evolved into goverment sactioned trade, but it was never used to economically subjugate wholesale entire countries like Western colonialism was.



Yes it is an awful comparison - an awkward attempt to vilify. Moving forward from that though - the tribute system varied in levels of severity, but it did always show vassal status. You can't seriously say China's relationship with Korea was one of Trading Partner can you?


----------



## Britney Spears

> So much was going wrong for China all at the same time: Floods, Wars, Strife, and the final acceptance that the world had moved forward while China had not. There is no shortage of factors that go into the collapse of imperial China.
> 
> A century of nothing but context, and there is no way to view the Taiping and Nien Rebellions without the foreign attacks, but without them (and the other mid-century uprisings) there might have been some longevity in the empire.



I meant in terms of purely military factors. Of course other socio-economic factors did play a role but there is hardly a military remedy for those. Besides, I think modern westerners have difficulty understanding how much the economic issues were a direct result of defeat in the Opium wars. For example, China in the 18th and 19th centuries had a two metal currency system based on silver bullion for large transactions(i.e. rents on land) and copper coins for smaller ones (daily expenses for peasants). The massive outflow of silver currency through the opium trade resulted in decades of rapid inflationary pressures (copper being worth less and less) that crushed peasant farmers and sent millions fleeing the land into banditry (or opium addiction). The sheer size of the post war indemnities(another outflow of silver) were such that the goverment was for years simply bankrupt, and being forced to squeeze the peasants for more cash to purchase foreign weapons in the hopes of coming out in one piece in the next foreign war, which of course never happened.



> No matter how valid Chinese xenophobia might appear to someone in China - that it exists at such a level only adds credence to seeing China as a threat - as it shows a China unable to see the *context of foreign actions*.



That works both ways, of course.



> Yes it is an awful comparison - an awkward attempt to vilify. Moving forward from that though - the tribute system varied in levels of severity, but it did always show vassal status. You can't seriously say China's relationship with Korea was one of Trading Partner can you?



Of course not, you're trying to view pre-19th century relations with a modern concept (equal trading partners) in mind. *Why* would the Chinese view the Koreans in the 15th century as an equal trading partner? The disparities in the levels of economic development between China proper and the prehiphery most of the time was so great that nations like Korea and Japan were generally eager to pay tribute (a minor expense with no economic consequence)in return for either Chinese technology or political support. I just don't think the 18th-19th century Western concept of aggressive colonial expansion(generally based on a percieved racial superiority) can really be applied.


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## Kirkhill

> (generally based on a percieved racial superiority)



Don't even go there.  The Chinese not only demanded tribute from vassals but they took tribute as their divine right - by reason of "racial superiority".  This was their attitude up until the 19th century and made the shock of encountering the west all the greater.  This in turn fired the Boxer rebellion, Sun Yat Sen and ultimately Mao Tse Tung.

The Japanese saw the world in similar terms, as did the Muslims, as (no doubt) did the Veddic peoples of India when the Northern Races came through a couple of thousand years ago.

Racial Superiority is not a White Problem.  It is genetically coded in every race.  Every race seeks to survive and prosper in a competitive environment.  It is simply a reality of the geo-politics as much as mountains and rivers and cities.


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## Britney Spears

No it isn't. Cultural chauvunism is one thing, but the pseudo-science of scientific racism as a cornerstone and rationale of imperialist ideology is purely a Western European/American phenomenon arising out of a need to exlain in rational terms the holocaust that was unleashed upon the Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks. No equivilant ideology or body of writings such as scientific racism and "the white man's burden" exists in other cultures and slavery based soley on race does not exist anywhere else in the world. 

Check out the number of extremely successful non-Chinese emperors in Chinese history.

Perhaps this could be spun off into a different topic.


*And the "Muslims" are not a race.


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## Bruce Monkhouse

Yep, nice to know the "white man" [your words] are the only ones 'big" enough to want to understand and reason why......notice your lovely Chinese culture won't.


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## a_majoor

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> What the Chinese realized was that an all out invasion would be unlikely, but a regional, high intensity, short duration conflict where training, equipment, mobility and airpower counted for more than numbers or political indoctrination would now be the norm. Thus the new emphasis on power projection, rapid downsizing of the army and (most importantly) the establishment of professional NCO academies and much more enticing NCO career progression, something that most third world armies never manage to pull off. This type of western style army would NOT be very well suited for wars of conquest (that would require numbers), but better for the type of regional skirmish that the Chinese leadership envision themselves getting into around, say, the Diaoyu islands or the South China sea.  To put this into a cultural context, defeat in these kinds of little wars was exactly what send China into the downward spiral in the late 1800s, and no Chinese, whatever their political bent, wants to see a repeat of that era.
> 
> Thus, I would argue that the current shifts in Chinese military posture is not an indication of aggressive expansionism but only an adjustment to face modern military realities.



The force structure of the modern Chinese military does not seem well suited for regional skirmishes in the south China sea, or other "regional" duties, but seems very explicitly structured around asymmetrical counters to "blue water" forces, denying them the ability to enter or conduct operations (for example, US carrier Battlegroups attempting to reinforce Tiawan). That they can also conduct regional operations of this sort is more of the fallout effect, just as the United States has sufficient capability to conduct "2 regional wars" gives it the ability to take on smaller taskings as a side effect. In terms of numbers, the Chinese still overmatch almost any conceivable force in the region, either individually or in combination with regional or external allies. Numbers still count, even if it is just a means of forcing the enemy to expend his logistics stocks before you do, so having an airforce of MiG 19 and 21 derivatives is not always a bad thing (especially if used in conjunction with 800+ short range ballistic missiles).

As a side note, I have read 1421, and while it is a good read, the idea of a "round the world" expedition seems very tenuous at best, and I would like to see a lot more supporting evidence before I buy into the treasure fleets breaking out of the Indian ocean. The "why" they never seem to have gone on and colonized the Indian Ocean basin or the West Coast of North America is an interesting one, if they really are that insular then much of how we "read" Chinese civilization and actions needs to be reappraised.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> No it isn't. Cultural chauvunism is one thing, but the pseudo-science of scientific racism as a cornerstone and rationale of imperialist ideology is purely a Western European/American phenomenon arising out of a need to exlain in rational terms the holocaust that was unleashed upon the Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks. No equivilant ideology or body of writings such as scientific racism and "the white man's burden" exists in other cultures and slavery based soley on race does not exist anywhere else in the world.
> 
> Check out the number of extremely successful non-Chinese emperors in Chinese history.
> 
> Perhaps this could be spun off into a different topic.
> 
> *And the "Muslims" are not a race.



Oh geez....

Last time I checked Western European/American weren't a race either.  Regardless, that's an absurd statement to make.  The Japanese and Chinese both have a long history of racial superiority as cornerstone of their civilizations and that other races by virtue that they were divine and others were not, were inferior.  Wars of expansion by those civilizations were therefore fought to "for their race to gain land, resources and territory from other inferior races."  Of note, although politically incorrect, tribal warfare in Africa is fought on the same grounds.  If they see their race as Hutus and Tutsis as an inferior race, then that war of expansion was no less racially motivated than the Nazi expansion into Poland.

On the other hand both the American Manifest Destiny and British Imperialism although obviously bigoted, were about expanding their ideologies.

Got anymore apologist merde to share with us?



Matthew.   :


----------



## TCBF

"No it isn't. Cultural chauvunism is one thing, but the pseudo-science of scientific racism as a cornerstone and rationale of imperialist ideology is purely a Western European/American phenomenon arising out of a need to exlain in rational terms the holocaust that was unleashed upon the Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks."

- I don't recall ever reading a rational or scientific explanation for either.

" No equivilant ideology or body of writings such as scientific racism "

- if it is rascism, it is not scientific. If it was scientific, it would not be rascism.  Right?  

 " and slavery based soley on race does not exist anywhere else in the world." 

- The Arab enslavement of blacks in Africa?

Slavery was on it's way out in the USA anyway.  It was a paternalistic form of cradle to grave socialism (albiet colour coded) that was ill suited to an emerging technical revolution requiring educated, motivated workers.  How hard will a slave work? Just hard enough to avoid being beaten, and that is not good enough to build an economy on.  Just ask the Communists.


----------



## Britney Spears

> As a side note, I have read 1421, and while it is a good read, the idea of a "round the world" expedition seems very tenuous at best, and I would like to see a lot more supporting evidence before I buy into the treasure fleets breaking out of the Indian ocean. The "why" they never seem to have gone on and colonized the Indian Ocean basin or the West Coast of North America is an interesting one, if they really are that insular then much of how we "read" Chinese civilization and actions needs to be reappraised.



As I understand it is discredited in most scholarly circles, although I have not yet read it.



> Last time I checked Western European/American weren't a race either.



Of course not. Took them the better half of a century to realize it though. See why I called it a pseudo-science?



> The Japanese and Chinese both have a long history of racial superiority as cornerstone of their civilizations and that other races by virtue that they were divine and others were not, were inferior. Wars of expansion by those civilizations were therefore fought to "for their race to gain land, resources and territory from other inferior races."



Cite? I grant you that the Japanese conquests during WW2 did have a racial element, but the Japanese have proven themselves remarkably adaptable when it comes to foreign influences.



> Of note, although politically incorrect, tribal warfare in Africa is fought on the same grounds.  If they see their race as Hutus and Tutsis as an inferior race, then that war of expansion was no less racially motivated than the Nazi expansion into Poland.




*shrug* I think you're right to some degree, but equating tribal warfare in Africa with the Nazis? Straining credulity if you ask me, but I'm not an expert in that conflict so I will limit my comments.



> On the other hand both the American Manifest Destiny and British Imperialism although obviously bigoted, were about expanding their ideologies.



Really? Do you require me to provide some quotes from American and British leaders to indicate what they thought of the "little brown men"?



> Got anymore apologist merde to share with us?



I'm not apologizing for anyone, but if you have something _factual_ to share with us, I'm all eyes.



> - I don't recall ever reading a rational or scientific explanation for either.



Well, yeah, that would be why we've advance past that stage now, haven't we?



> - The Arab enslavement of blacks in Africa?
> 
> Slavery was on it's way out in the USA anyway.  It was a paternalistic form of cradle to grave socialism (albiet colour coded) that was ill suited to an emerging technical revolution requiring educated, motivated workers.  How hard will a slave work? Just hard enough to avoid being beaten, and that is not good enough to build an economy on.  Just ask the Communists.



Try this:



> Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861.]



This is sort of going all over the place here, but it is generally accepted that the institution of slavery in 19th century Europe and America were unique in that black Africans and Native Americans(before most of them died) were slaves SOLEY by virtue of their skin color, and that all sorts of scientific pronouncements were made in an effort to justify this. Consider the Dred Scott case, where it was decided that a black man, even in a non slave holding state, could be stripped of his rights and "returned" to the south on the word of any white man, with no legal recourse. While slavery in some form or other existed throughout most of the world, it was usually based on the premises that POWs were considered spoils of war.  The Romans, Arabs, Indians, and mostly everyone else never considered a specific race or color of people to be only suitable for slavery, and there was never a general law to prevent Romans and Arabs from becoming slaves themselves through debt or criminal behaviour. They, and that includes the Chinese, generally found it much more economical to enslave their fellow citizens than to bring in large numbers of fit young foreigners.



> It was a paternalistic form of cradle to grave socialism



Sorry, I'm not easily offended but I find this offensive.

James Loewen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong_ is a good introduction to the whitewashing, if you will pardon the pun, of the history of American race relations.


----------



## Kirkhill

> Cite?





> Do you require me to provide some quotes



So which way do you want to carry on this discussion...

What a pile of claptrap you do spout.

By the way Britney .... congratulations.  You managed to push enough of my buttons to make me forget an earlier vow to ignore you.

Thanks for the reminder.


----------



## TCBF

"Sorry, I'm not easily offended but I find this offensive."

- Why?  Of course it was an odious, murderous, callous system.  But so are many other forms of totalitarian systems.  Whether a person is enslaved on a plantation because they are another race, or enslaved in a labour camp because they are politically unreliable is moot.  One is as bad as another, no?

Rascist  view other races as inferior.

Communists viewed other political animals as inferiour.

Islamo-fascists view Jews, specifically, and infidels in general as inferior.

PETA-toids view carnivores as inferior.

Are these forms of injustice not merely variations on a theme, or has what Bruce Catton once called "The undigestible lump that was slavery" become the new "White Man's Burden?"

Oh, and I would not be suprised if tribal issues in Africa exceded the holocaust in deaths.  Rwanda proved that the ratio of 12,000,000 in ten years set by the Germans can be exceded in short spurts.


----------



## Britney Spears

> The Japanese and Chinese both have a long history of racial superiority as cornerstone of their civilizations and that other races by virtue that they were divine and others were not, were inferior. Wars of expansion by those civilizations were therefore fought to "for their race to gain land, resources and territory from other inferior races."



What exactly am I saying that so offends you? I asked as politely as I could for clarification of the above statement because I've never encountered such a view in any of my readings, either Western or Chinese. For example, what/who is the source of the quote? If there is a "long history", then why can you not provide an example? 



> So which way do you want to carry on this discussion...



Do you dispute my statement? I am asking if you want a quote because I really don't think any are neccesary, as it is fairly common knowledge amongst historians that scientific racism was a cornerstone of 19th century Western imperialism. Asking for a cite for something so obvious would seem to me meaningless fillibustering, but if you want one just say so and I will provide it.

None of this is meant to be offensive or accusatory, I'm certainly open to discussion on any of my points, but until one of you actually comes back to clarify/qualify your points as I have requested, or indeed bring back something, anything factual to debate(as Iterator has done quite eloquently), there's nothing else I can add here.



> - Why?  Of course it was an odious, murderous, callous system.  But so are many other forms of totalitarian systems.  Whether a person is enslaved on a plantation because they are another race, or enslaved in a labour camp because they are politically unreliable is moot.  One is as bad as another, no?



That isn't the typically accepted meaning of "cradle to grave socialism" and you know it, but let us get back to the topic at hand.


----------



## TCBF

"That isn't the typically accepted meaning of "cradle to grave socialism" and you know it, but let us get back to the topic at hand."

- In retrospect, I should have written "a murderous, brutally extreme example of cradle..."  The point formed in my mind that way because the changing economy of the USA was in the process of rendering slavery uneconomical and therefore finally financially - as well as morally - obsolete. 

In any case, now that we have finished illustrating the methods by which various cultures convince themselves that other cultures have been far more murderous than their own, we should ask ourselves:

Is the Chinese Central Committee receiving sound advice on the reason the west looks suspiciously on their build up?    Have they made a risk assessment regarding the state of their economy and the effect on trade - if any - saber rattling over Taiwan may have?

Do they Care?


----------



## warrickdll

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> I meant in terms of purely military factors. Of course other socio-economic factors did play a role but there is hardly a military remedy for those.



Well... Its not that I don't see your point, there are differing opinions on what are the precursor events, the main events, and the "final-straw" events of the end of Imperial China.

The Opium Wars and the Treaty obligations were huge consumers of China's wealth, Taiping and Nien prevented China from regaining much of that wealth (by preventing tax and revenue flow, and further accelerating increased military expenditure). 

Aside from what "cost" more, just indicating that the mid-century rebellions and uprisings might not have occurred without the Opium Wars (or at least without the outcomes), and that because of this the Opium Wars can be seen as more the root cause of the downfall - is a strong position by itself - so I will cease trying to prevail against it (or constructing really, really long sentences).



> Besides, I think modern westerners have difficulty understanding how much the economic issues were a direct result of defeat in the Opium wars.



Well if you feel you understand it, and I feel I understand it, and we're both modern Westerners, we probably should allow other modern Westerners some benefit of the doubt (it is the modern Westerner way of doing things  ).



> That works both ways, of course.



Re: Xenophobia. 
It would, but have we agreed that modern Western nations are xenophobic? I'm no longer sure that I even think China is.




> Of course not, you're trying to view pre-19th century relations with a modern concept (equal trading partners) in mind.



Re: Imperial China's relationship with Korea.
Then aren't you viewing Western colonial expansion from 50 to 550 years ago with a modern Western concept (egalitarianism and democratic freedoms) in mind?




> Why would the Chinese view the Koreans in the 15th century as an equal trading partner? The disparities in the levels of economic development between China proper and the prehiphery most of the time was so great that nations like Korea and Japan were generally eager to pay tribute (a minor expense with no economic consequence)in return for either Chinese technology or political support. I just don't think the 18th-19th century Western concept of aggressive colonial expansion(generally based on a percieved racial superiority) can really be applied.



Fast thread! Half a dozen posts and I haven't responded to this one yet. I'll make a combined response to the above quote and from posts after the one I'm responding to:

	- China, along with Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, Britain, and most other cultures (especially in their prime), all have projected cultural bigotry and viewed other cultures as being barbaric or culturally illiterate. I have been swayed to agree that this is not the same as projecting racial superiority. 

	- Most cultures seem to have had slavery, or at least servitude, and this was not confined to outside their race. As an example: Dublin was once a major slave trading port. Some cultures did have (or developed) conventions to allow only slaves from outside their own tribes.

	- Christian conquest/conversion of Europe was probably the leading cause of European/Christian restrictions on European/Christian slaves (manpower shortages would also factor in)


I submit that if the Americas, Australia and the South Pacific islands had not been "discovered" and colonized, there would have been far less slavery by the Western nations. 

Combining the perceived need for mass slavery, the restrictions on European/Christian slavery, and the rebirth of Western sciences led to a toxic and entrenched level of racial perceptions. If other cultural spheres had met the same circumstances would their racial views have been altered? Would Western Imperial racial views have been altered if the circumstances had been different? 

I don't know.

But what was then is not now. Western philosophical thought did not stop (for most), and has progressed. Western reactions to developments in China should not be mistaken for Western practices in China in the previous millennium. And China today should not be viewed as just Imperial China set in contemporary guise.



And to merge up with * TCBF *:



> Is the Chinese Central Committee receiving sound advice on the reason the west looks suspiciously on their build up?    Have they made a risk assessment regarding the state of their economy and the effect on trade - if any - saber rattling over Taiwan may have?
> 
> Do they Care?



I will * speculate * that yes, they have done a risk assessment and they do care, at least enough not to try for the closer rocks, Quemoy and Matsu. Arguably they should have enough overall military capability now, so why wouldn't they? Does China believe that:
	1) a negotiated settlement is inevitable?
	2) the assessed success rating is not high enough?
	3) the assessed international economic response rating is not high enough?
	4) the assessed international military response rating is not high enough?
	5) it's the whole enchilada approach (and see 1 - 4 above)?


And side note to * a_majoor *:



> As a side note, I have read 1421, and while it is a good read, the idea of a "round the world" expedition seems very tenuous at best, and I would like to see a lot more supporting evidence before I buy into the treasure fleets breaking out of the Indian ocean.



I agree it was a nice read up until the Cape of Good Hope, after that, even taking it from his point of view - well... I didn't need to wait until reading the critiques.


----------



## Britney Spears

Well, how do they say, six of one and half dozen of the other?





> I will  speculate  that yes, they have done a risk assessment and they do care, at least enough not to try for the closer rocks, Quemoy and Matsu. Arguably they should have enough overall military capability now, so why wouldn't they? Does China believe that:
> 1) a negotiated settlement is inevitable?
> 2) the assessed success rating is not high enough?
> 3) the assessed international economic response rating is not high enough?
> 4) the assessed international military response rating is not high enough?
> 5) it's the whole enchilada approach (and see 1 - 4 above)?



Perhpas I could add that the Joe public setiment in China right now ranges from "We can do Taiwan easily", to "We can do Taiwan but they'd give as good as they'd take", and that only the threat of US intervention currently limits China's ability to act. As far as I can tell the military leadership has a substantially more realistic view of the situation, but obviously does not want to admit their weakness. If the actions of Taiwanese business is any indication, it would seem that the locals are fairly optimistic about the prospects (and by "locals" I mean large multinational corporations).


----------



## TCBF

I suppose this go go two ways, the Logical Solution and the  Human Solution.  Logically, this may eventually 'sort itself out', as did the Berlin wall.  Of course, THAT could have turned out far worse as well.

But it didn't, and - all other things being equal -  would it probably take some fairly serious internal disputes to cause:

1. Taiwan to poke the giant in the eye with a pointed stick, then hope the world will save them (in the end, they won't); and/or

2.  China to pull an Argentina and expend precious political capital by seizing that which will end up theirs eventually anyway?

Does the mainland truly see Taiwan as a shining example of a 'free Chinese people' which creates a subversive threat merely through it's existance, or is the root of the perceived threat less politically dogmatic and more cultural?


----------



## chanman

It probably depends on who you're talking to, and how they're feeling that day.

I think a lot of people will sleep a little easier if the KMT wins the next presidential election in a couple years.


----------



## TCBF

Maybe if they won it on the mainland, you mean?

 ;D


----------



## a_majoor

The emphasis on submarines makes sense if the aim is to undercut the USN and be able to enforce naval blockades against Tiawan, Japan or other littoral areas. I am curious if the PLA has the command and control capabilities to effectively use a large submarine force.

http://strongconservative.blogspot.com/2007/01/chinese-building-up-submarine-forces.html



> Chinese Building Up Submarine Forces
> China has begun construction of its second Yuan class attack sub that will likely be deployed by 2010. "The new submarine is a key element of China's huge increase in submarine forces that some analysts say reveals Beijing is on a war-footing, while many U.S. military and intelligence officials play down Beijing's arms buildup. "(source)
> 
> *Since 2002, China has deployed 14 new submaries with more in the works, an astonishing number. Two nuclear powered attack subs are also being built by China. "China also purchased four diesel Kilo submarines from Russia and is getting eight more over the next several years."(*id)
> 
> Discovery of the first Yuan-class submarine in the summer of 2004 will long be remembered for the surprise of the deployment. The submarine was built and deployed without ever being detected in development by U.S. intelligence agencies in what officials say is part of a string of intelligence failures on the Chinese military buildup. Officials said the reason the submarine remained secret was that it was built completely underground in a secret Chinese production facility that included underground waterways to a port.
> 
> The question must be asked, why are so many in Washington, Ottawa, London and elsewhere not taking the threat China poses more seriously? China should not be viewed as an ally, partner, or even as a competitor. It is a potential enemy and a massive violator of human rights, a threat to its neighbors, and the main culprit behind the violence in Sudan.


----------



## warspite

Another light on the China threat board just clicked from green to red.....
This only goes to show the danger china poses, and we should begin expanding our navy for our own safety (wether we can expand our navy due manning issues and financial constraits is unkown to me)


----------



## GUNS

There is only one way to fight China's military expansion. STOP buying products made in China.

We are only providing the necessary funds for China to do what they are doing.

Canadians have lost jobs due to China's ability to undercut costs.

First there was a fear that we would have to learn German, then it was Russian. Now it would appear that our children's children will have to brush up on their Chinese.


----------



## George Wallace

GUNS said:
			
		

> There is only one way to fight China's military expansion. STOP buying products made in China.
> 
> We are only providing the necessary funds for China to do what they are doing.
> 
> Canadians have lost jobs due to China's ability to undercut costs.
> 
> First there was a fear that we would have to learn German, then it was Russian. Now it would appear that our children's children will have to brush up on their Chinese.



Have you ever wondered why Power Corps' Maurice Strong, Paul Demarais, and our friend Chretien are so heavily invested in China?


----------



## Edward Campbell

The ‘threat’ posed by China’s naval build-up – and it is a real build-up – is that every dollar devoted to new submarines and even aircraft carriers is a dollar which cannot be used to buy US bonds which, in their turn, underwrite the incredibly stupid and wasteful spending spree upon which President George W Bush has been embarked lo these six years.  In case someone hasn’t noticed the Chinese are financing an American spending spree.  Chinese taxes underwrite American governments’ (plural) programmes and services; Chinese labour makes things Americans could only dream of owning if they had to make them at home, at their current wage rates; China is poised to replace Canada as America’s top trading partner.  China is a ‘threat;’ _riiiiiight_.

I am reminded in the China as enemy rhetoric of the world about 100 years ago.

There were, _circa_ 1900, two emerging ‘threats’ to Britain’s global hegemony – to _Pax Britannica_: Germany and America.  In 1904, in what must rank as one of stupidest foreign policy blunders in the 1,500 year history of an independent Britain, Britain succumbed to panic about Germany and signed the incredibly dumb _Entente Cordiale_ with France which led Britain, inextricably, into World War I, which, left to itself, could have been, should have been just another in the centuries old series of Franco-Prussian wars - which are good for the human gene pool because they reduce, however slightly, the number of ‘breeders’ from each national group.

The situation was remarkably similar to the world today.  Britain was just coming off a disastrous military adventure in Africa – the Boer War – which had shattered the myth of British military invincibility.  Britain was financing its _lifestyle_ from:

•	Imperial revenues;

•	_Invisible_ exports – a service economy; and

•	Bond sales to, _inter alia_ America and Germany.

The Brits were dumb in the Edwardian era; they made enemies out of _competitors_ because they forgot the old lesson that a balance of power between competing states and empires is easier to maintain than a unipolar _imperium_.  We, the American led West, are the inheritors of Britain’s global influence; we need not repeat their mistakes.

Let us acknowledge China’s ‘build-ups’ for what they are: the actions of an emerging, *competitor* super-power.  Competitor ≠ enemy.


----------



## PQLUR

Forget learning French or English in school as a second language . . .


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> The ‘threat’ posed by China’s naval build-up – and it is a real build-up – is that every dollar devoted to new submarines and even aircraft carriers is a dollar which cannot be used to buy US bonds which, in their turn, underwrite the incredibly stupid and wasteful spending spree upon which President George W Bush has been embarked lo these six years.  In case someone hasn’t noticed the Chinese are financing an American spending spree.  Chinese taxes underwrite American governments’ (plural) programmes and services; Chinese labour makes things Americans could only dream of owning if they had to make them at home, at their current wage rates; China is poised to replace Canada as America’s top trading partner.  China is a ‘threat;’ _riiiiiight_.
> 
> I am reminded in the China as enemy rhetoric of the world about 100 years ago.
> 
> There were, _circa_ 1900, two emerging ‘threats’ to Britain’s global hegemony – to _Pax Britannica_: Germany and America.  In 1904, in what must rank as one of stupidest foreign policy blunders in the 1,500 year history of an independent Britain, Britain succumbed to panic about Germany and signed the incredibly dumb _Entente Cordiale_ with France which led Britain, inextricably, into World War I, which, left to itself, could have been, should have been just another in the centuries old series of Franco-Prussian wars - which are good for the human gene pool because they reduce, however slightly, the number of ‘breeders’ from each national group.
> 
> The situation was remarkably similar to the world today.  Britain was just coming off a disastrous military adventure in Africa – the Boer War – which had shattered the myth of British military invincibility.  Britain was financing its _lifestyle_ from:
> 
> •	Imperial revenues;
> 
> •	_Invisible_ exports – a service economy; and
> 
> •	Bond sales to, _inter alia_ America and Germany.
> 
> The Brits were dumb in the Edwardian era; they made enemies out of _competitors_ because they forgot the old lesson that a balance of power between competing states and empires is easier to maintain than a unipolar _imperium_.  We, the American led West, are the inheritors of Britain’s global influence; we need not repeat their mistakes.
> 
> Let us acknowledge China’s ‘build-ups’ for what they are: the actions of an emerging, *competitor* super-power.  Competitor ≠ enemy.



+1

This is going to sound a bit leftist, but instead of taking a confrontationl approach to China, why does the west not work harder and help grow China into a real legimate democracy. This has already been happening to a point as China has made great strides since the last 50 years. It still has many areas to work on of course; poverty and human rights for example. The stratigic advantages to having China as an ally would be enormous in my veiw at least. I'm not saying we should go and invite them into NATO tomorrow, just that we should help them become a democracy though non-confrontational diplomatic means. This of course would be heavily dependent on the Chinese politicians, but hey, two super-powers on your side are better than one ;D


----------



## PQLUR

Good point Boater, I agree with you that China would be a huge ally but modern China has brought about a lot of queries for Westerners: Why the Chinese economy has taken a sudden leap? Why China can bring forth such a top basketball star like Yao Ming? Will China use up all the global oil reserve? Will China eventually overtake the U.S. in term of its economic strength?


----------



## GAP

Just because China has started doing some things that sell over here, and other things that make it look like it is changing, never, never forget that the goal of the Chinese is total domination. How they get there is irrelevant, they just want to get there.


----------



## CrazyCanuck

The goal of any major power is domination in one form or another, but I also do not believe that the US will not remain top dog forever, no power in the world has ever been able to achieve this. As it looks like China is a raising power I believe it is in the best interest of the West to make it as sympathetic to us as possible before it can exert too much control over our economies, and if this means pushing democratic reforms through diplomatic means (such as Harper's stance last summit) I believe we should pursue those reforms for our own good.


----------



## GAP

If you seriously think that the manner in which the West treats China is going to speed them up towards democratic rule...dream on.  I am not trying to slag you or your opinion, but I seriously believe what I just said, and even just a quick view of Chinese history will confirm it.


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Most great ideas start out as dreams, but all I'm saying is that if there is anything that we can do to further China's democratic development in the future we should seriously consider doing it, allies are always better to have than enemies. I do not believe we should appease them in anyway or overlook any of their indiscretions as that would be setting a dangerous precedent. In a sense lets at least try to put them on the same path as India. (China and India are apples and oranges, but it's the idea behind India's transformation not so much the country itself that I see as significant.)


----------



## GAP

If China ever embraces a form of Democracy, it's going to by way of a massive bloodbath. To accomplish anything remotely similiar to democracy they, the populace must first depose those who's star has been hitched to the Communist Party for 40+ years.


----------



## tomahawk6

The best counterweight to China is to support Taiwan,Japan, Australia and India. Japan already see the PLAN as a threat to the home islands and it appears that they are taking a forward leaning position.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting analysis from the current (Jan/Feb 2007) issue of _Foreign Affairs_, reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070101faessay86109/david-m-lampton/the-faces-of-chinese-power.html

It is a bit long (nearly 4,500 words) but well worth the read.   I have highlighted some (20+) bits I find especially important.



> The Faces of Chinese Power
> By David M. Lampton
> 
> From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007
> 
> Summary: Accurately assessing the rise of China is a critical task. Yet U.S. policymakers often overestimate China's military might. And if they continue to view China's power in substantially coercive terms when it is actually growing most rapidly in the economic and intellectual domains, they will be playing the wrong game, on the wrong Þeld, with the wrong team.
> 
> _David M. Lampton is Dean of Faculty, George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This article was adapted from his upcoming book, The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds._
> 
> *MISUNDERESTIMATIONS*
> 
> Assessing China's growing power incorrectly has always proved to be hazardous. U.S. policymakers have underestimated China's power at least twice since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, once catastrophically and another time with serious consequences for U.S. credibility. In the fall of 1950, one U.S. official dismissed the possibility that the war-weary government in Beijing would intervene to stop the United States' drive to unify Korea. "I don't think China wants to be chopped up," he said. But he was wrong, and this and other misjudgments led to Beijing's intervention in the Korean War, at enormous human cost to China, the United States, and the Korean people on both sides of the 38th Parallel. President Bill Clinton also underestimated China. In 1993, his administration threatened to suspend normal tariff treatment if Beijing did not improve its human rights record within a year. China proved tougher than expected, and the Clinton administration made an embarrassing U-turn as the ultimatum was about to expire. The episode convinced the Chinese that Washington's tough talk on human rights was little more than campaign rhetoric and that for the United States human rights were an interest secondary to strategic and business concerns.
> 
> Accurately assessing the power of China is still a critical task today, especially with renewed tensions on the Korean Peninsula and continuing volatility in the Taiwan Strait. Overestimating China's leverage over North Korea is a problem. Since 2002-3, the Bush administration has subcontracted most of the effort to halt North Korea's nuclear programs to Beijing, mistakenly assuming that Beijing has the power and the inclination to stop Pyongyang. The Chinese government does not want nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has considerable leverage over Kim Jong Il, but exercising this power would bring substantial costs to China, and its muscle is unlikely to be sufficient if the United States does not simultaneously give North Korea positive incentives to comply. Washington and Beijing may be cooperating better now, following North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006, but it remains far from clear whether Beijing can compel Pyongyang to accept an agreement that may seem contrary to its core interests.
> 
> In terms of economic power, Americans tend to exaggerate China's role as a seller and exporter while underappreciating its activities as a buyer, importer, and investor. And they underestimate China's intellectual, leadership, diplomatic, cultural, and other symbolic power. If U.S. policymakers continue to view China's power in substantially coercive terms when it is actually growing most rapidly in the economic and intellectual domains, they will be playing the wrong game, on the wrong field, with the wrong team.
> 
> *THE BALANCE OF POWERS*
> 
> Power is the ability to define and achieve one's goals, especially relative to the capacity of others to define and achieve their own. Over 40 years ago, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni broke down the concept of power according to the means employed to exercise it: coercion, material inducement, or intellectual motivation. Power can be constraining, remunerative, or normative -- expressing, to put it crudely, guns, money, or ideas.
> 
> Chinese leaders are working to develop all three kinds. After dozens of interviews and meetings with senior policymakers, midlevel officials, scholars, and policy analysts in China, as well as government officials in neighboring countries, it is apparent to me that their broad objective is to modernize China in order to boost its military, economic, and intellectual might. Their strategy involves both openness (or globalization) and reform through marketization and urbanization, while they deemphasize and limit political liberalization. Their goal distinguishes China from both the Soviet Union, a military giant but an economic Lilliputian, and Japan, so far an economic giant but largely a bystander in military and diplomatic matters.
> 
> The Chinese people do not see their quest for economic growth as upsetting a global equilibrium; they see it as restoring an equilibrium that persisted throughout much of recorded history. As Angus Maddison, an economic historian at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, points out, from the first century AD until the early nineteenth century, China's economy represented between 22 percent and 33 percent of total global GDP, peaking around 1820. With the industrialization of Europe, the United States, and Japan, and with China's collision with the West and Japan, China's share of global GDP declined, down to 4.5 percent by 1950. The figure stayed at that level until Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong in the 1970s. This long drop, and the national tragedies it generated, is known to every Chinese schoolchild as the hundred-plus years of "national humiliation." Since the late 1970s, China's economy has been regaining its share of global GDP; according to the International Monetary Fund, the figure reached 15.4 percent in 2005. Although admittedly imprecise, these data underscore at once China's progress to date and the great distance the country has yet to go.
> 
> Fortified by both globalization and its economic policies, China has thus become an ardent supporter of the existing international economic order -- an almost total reversal from Mao's opposition in the 1950s and 1960s. In international relations, dominant states typically want to preserve the status quo and rising states want to change it. But today, it is China that wants to preserve key features of the current world order, whereas the United States, the lone superpower, seems bent on shaking it up by creating "coalitions of the willing" assembled outside established international organizations. China's national strategy is designed to continue its fast domestic economic growth, the regime's principal legitimizing factor besides nationalism; attract maximum resources (technology, investment, and strategic materials) from the international system; and reduce external threats that might deplete its resources. This strategy does not emphasize rapid military growth, and with good reason: fast expansion of the armed forces would alarm the outside world and likely produce countervailing coalitions; high military expenditures would also drain Beijing of badly needed human and material resources just as President Hu Jintao, emphasizing the importance of turning China into a "harmonious society," sets out to expand human, environmental, and infrastructure investment for those Chinese left behind by the country's rapid development. After Mao's dependence on coercive power and Deng's on economic power, China now seeks a more balanced mix that also uses "idea power."
> 
> *IRON FIST, VELVET GLOVE*
> 
> Coercive power typically has four broad uses: homeland defense, deterrence, power projection, and reassurance. Beijing is enhancing its capacities along all these dimensions. It is attaching particular importance to reassuring its neighbors and to using military, economic, and diplomatic instruments to do so.
> 
> The Chinese military budget has been growing at double-digit rates for about 15 years (in terms not adjusted for inflation). Beijing is not worried about the threat of a land invasion and so has continually cut its ground forces since the 1980s, while upgrading the remaining forces and the military's communications capabilities and capacity to conduct joint operations. It is worried, however, about the ability of its small nuclear force to withstand a first strike. Thus, it is modernizing and somewhat enlarging its arsenal. (It could, according to U.S. Department of Defense estimates, have 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2010.) And it is seriously concerned about the possibility that Taiwan might permanently break away from the mainland: Beijing has deployed 700 to 800 missiles within striking distance of the island, increased its amphibious capabilities, continually upgraded its naval and air forces at a significant pace, and sought to discourage Washington from intervening if a conflict in the Taiwan Strait occurs. Still, China's capacity to project meaningful conventional military power far beyond its borders is quite limited and will remain so for a considerable period. As one Chinese military officer recently explained to me, "Earlier this year in the Solomon Islands we had to evacuate people, but we lacked airpower, and had to lease [foreign] aircraft, and Australia was helpful. In the Lebanon-Israel war [of the summer of 2006], we had to lease aircraft to get our nationals out."
> 
> One key challenge for China's grand strategy is to continue military modernization without overburdening the domestic budget. (According to official Chinese sources, China's military expenditures in 2004 were 12.7 percent of total expenditures.) China's military budget is growing at the same rate as is the total budget but not as rapidly as some components of the total budget, such as those for rural support, health, education, and welfare. Given the decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2006 to "put people first," the tension between military and domestic spending promises to become a bigger issue.
> 
> Another medium-term challenge will be to manage the anxieties of other states, especially the United States' concerns about its commitments to Taiwan. Have China's growth and the greater economic interdependence between the island and the mainland made Taiwan indefensible militarily? What would be the consequences of an attack for U.S. policy, given that, according to a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll, 61 percent of Americans would oppose deploying U.S. troops "if China invaded Taiwan"? Thus, for China, reassurance is now key. As one Chinese scholar put it to me, "We used to hide our power, deny our power. But then this became increasingly impossible as our strength increased. We had to find ways to reassure people, use power constructively, because our power became increasingly undeniable."
> 
> In late 2002, Beijing reviewed its interactions with other nations' militaries and law enforcement and space agencies. It encouraged such exchanges partly in order to increase the comfort level of foreigners with the Chinese armed forces. After a tsunami hit the Indian Ocean region in 2004, China kept a low profile, sending a small contingent of military personnel on a humanitarian mission. Almost by stealth, of all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, China has become the largest contributor of military observers, peacekeepers, and police to UN operations around the world. These deployments have included missions to Haiti and southern Lebanon, where Beijing pledged to send 1,000 personnel after the war between Hezbollah and Israel last summer. China has observed and conducted joint exercises with the militaries of Central Asian states, Australia, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom, among others. In September 2006, the U.S. and Chinese navies held their first joint naval search-and-rescue exercise, off the coast of California. Chinese law enforcement agencies have also cooperated with the U.S. Container Security Initiative to secure freight from three of China's largest ports, and Beijing cooperates with Latin American and European countries on space projects, such as satellites, and hopes to work with the United States in this area as well.
> 
> Despite China's velvet-glove approach, its neighbors are wary, mindful that its capabilities are mounting and its intentions could shift. This is one reason that virtually every country in the region welcomes a strong U.S. presence. Even Beijing may have quietly approved the U.S. government's statement, in October 2006, that it will continue to provide a nuclear umbrella for Japan and South Korea, because the move reduces the pressure on Tokyo and Seoul to acquire their own nuclear deterrents against North Korea.
> 
> *SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS*
> 
> Even more important to China's grand strategy are its efforts to strengthen its economic power and build what Beijing hopes will be a stabilizing middle class. So far, China has done rather well, thanks to a high national savings rate, rapidly growing and improving secondary and tertiary education, increased expenditures for research and development, the fact that a significant fraction of the population is still of working age, an expanding middle class, massive investment from ethnic Chinese abroad and foreign investors in search of high-growth opportunities, the productivity-enhancing content and continuity of Beijing's economic policies, and a growing private sector. Economic power, the most convertible form of strength, makes China attractive in a world that respects material success.
> 
> One should not assume that China's growth rate will slow dramatically anytime soon. But it is time to see it for what it is. Most outside observers exaggerate China's strength as a seller and underestimate its capacities as a buyer, investor, and aid provider.
> 
> This is partly because of China's dramatically rising global trade surplus. It holds $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves -- a significant fraction in U.S. government debt instruments -- and surpassed Japan as the holder of the most foreign exchange reserves in February 2006. China's global share of industrial output as measured by real value added went up from 2.2 percent in 1990 to 6.6 percent in 2002. In textiles, shoes, sporting goods, and, increasingly, electronics, China is already a superpower, and Chinese exports have affected manufacturing employment in other countries, such as Mexico.
> 
> There is, however, another side to the story. The fact that an item bears a "Made in China" label does not mean that it was actually made in China. China hosts final assembly stages, which add less value, while lucrative parts of the production chain remain in other countries. (In 2002, value added per capita in the manufacturing industry in the United States was more than 15 times that in China.) In other words, China takes all of the heat for profiting from the globalized production chain even though, as the last link, it reaps only a modest share of the products' value. China, therefore, seems stronger than its underlying production capabilities actually make it. Although exports accounted for over 30 percent of China's GDP in 2005, firms with foreign investment accounted for 57.3 percent of total exports and about 85 percent of high-tech exports. A critical implication is that if the United States throws up barriers to nominally Chinese exports, it will be punishing its friends, its allies, and itself along with Beijing.
> 
> Meanwhile, China's strength as a buyer and an importer is underappreciated. China's middle class continues to expand. China was the third-largest consumer of luxury goods in the world in 2006 -- and the third-largest market for Rolls Royce vehicles. Because China imports so many of the primary and intermediate goods used to make its exports, it has given the rest of the world, particularly Asia, a piece of the action and, therefore, an interest in its success. Since 1979, Chinese imports have grown at an annual average rate of nearly 15 percent, making the country today the world's third-largest importer, after the United States and Germany. In 2003, China accounted for 68 percent of Taiwan's export growth, 36 percent of South Korea's, 32 percent of Japan's, 28 percent of Germany's, and 21 percent of the United States'. One report by the Chinese government estimates that 3-4 million jobs in South Korea are related to trade with China. Asian economies that previously exported predominantly to the United States, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, now do so to China. One official in Canberra quipped to me that the Australians now define their interest vis-à-vis China as being the export of "wools, alumina, iron ore, and educational services." Throughout much of Asia, the perception of China has changed from threat to economic opportunity.
> 
> As China's "going global" strategy gains steam, its role as an investor abroad is also growing. Beijing's ability to coordinate corporate investment, tariff and other trade policies, development assistance, and military aid is a potential asset when competing with more pluralized systems. In late 2005, a poll by China's International Chamber of Commerce reported that 23 percent of responding firms intended to increase their investment abroad in 2006. At the end of 2005, China announced that its cumulative foreign investment totaled $57.2 billion, up from $7.6 billion in 2000. China's sizable social security and insurance funds are also beginning to seek opportunities for investment abroad.
> 
> Many developing nations appreciate the deals Beijing offers, especially since it doles out investments without imposing conditions, other than the recognition of its "one China" policy. In late 2003, after securing a promise of $500 million in loans, trade increases, and tariff reductions from Beijing, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf gushed, "The past belongs to Europe, the present belongs to the United States, and the future belongs to Asia." Chinese investment is aggressively sought by Latin America, Russia, Southeast Asia, and Africa -- as well as by U.S. municipalities. A Chinese-owned plant for refrigerators was put into operation in Camden, South Carolina, in March 2000; in Ardmore, Oklahoma, there are plans for a Chinese joint venture to run an auto plant that would employ about 550 people. Beijing is taking a page out of Tokyo's playbook: building production capacity in countries that are losing manufacturing jobs in order to get closer to its consumers and forestall protectionist countermeasures. An August 2006 article in _Caijing_ magazine on lobbying in the United States advised, "An effective and long-term solution [to China's image problem in the United States] is to build a factory or to set up a company on the soil of the United States. This means hiring American employees -- their influence over the congressmen from their constituency is much stronger than any foreign institution or enterprise."
> 
> *MARK THE WORDS*
> 
> Besides coercion and material rewards, Beijing is using symbolic, intellectual, ideological, diplomatic, and cultural resources to increase its influence. It is strong in some of these areas and weak in others, but Americans generally tend to underestimate its capacities in this domain.
> 
> Corruption remains a serious problem for the Chinese leadership. Nonetheless, as former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has said, "The quality of people in charge of China is impressive. ... They have capacious minds, analytical and quick on the uptake." Equally important, *the Chinese Communist Party is growing and recruiting dynamic new members. Professor Cheng Li, of Hamilton College, reports that in 2004, 34 percent of private-enterprise owners were CCP members.* China's leaders are relentless travelers and spend substantial time with foreign dignitaries; China's diplomats are capable, experienced, and language proficient, and they increasingly understand their host societies.
> 
> China currently lags greatly behind in discovering and developing new technologies, but its capacity to innovate with production processes and adapt existing technologies to local markets is growing. It is boosting expenditures for research and development, and as of 2006, there were 750 research-and-development centers backed by foreign investment in the country. Beijing is also building its own global communications and broadcasting systems, with increasingly diverse programming, and heavily investing in the promotion of Chinese language education worldwide.
> 
> In that spirit, it promotes all kinds of exchanges. Chinese corporations and universities are increasingly recruiting talent globally, and a growing percentage of technically proficient and business-proficient Chinese students who studied abroad are returning to China. In 2003, China surpassed Japan as the leading source of Asian tourists (spending $48 billion in the process), and it is estimated that by 2020 Chinese will be taking 100 million trips abroad every year.
> 
> The payoff in terms of image is good, even though China's reputation in the United States still suffers. International public opinion polls uniformly reveal that Americans have more negative views of China than do most other people, predisposing Washington to be tougher with China than are other governments. In fact, according to polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, the BBC, and The financial Times and Harris Interactive, in much of the world, including most of Europe, China is perceived more favorably along many dimensions than is the United States. And although other nations generally do not wish to emulate China's political system, its combination of high-speed economic growth and apparent stability is a development path that appeals to many.
> 
> These quickly developing facets of Chinese "idea power," however, should not obscure two countervailing considerations. first, the Chinese political system does not adequately reflect the diverse interests of the increasingly pluralized society that marketization, urbanization, and globalization have created. Consequently, the CCP's legitimacy is not robust, and the government tends to play the nationalism card in moments of stress. Second, the Chinese system's appeal, at home and abroad, rests largely on the country's economic success. If China's economic performance falters, the system's weaknesses will become more apparent.
> 
> *HOME, SWEET HOME*
> 
> Beijing's priority is sustained, rapid economic growth, because growth is fundamental to the regime's legitimacy -- and most everything else. Even China's foreign policy is judged by its consequences for growth and internal stability. Chinese authorities are also fixated on domestic incidents of social disorder: increasingly, Beijing simultaneously represses dissent, pursues reform, redistributes resources to neglected regions and social sectors, and makes intermittent efforts to fight corruption.
> 
> China's leaders have an ambitious domestic agenda that will preoccupy them for decades. They are struggling to achieve a precarious balance between rising demands and the state's capacity to meet them. Between now and 2020, about 300 million rural dwellers will move to cities, bringing with them huge needs for infrastructure. (At that rate, the government will have to build a city the size of New York every four months for the next 14 years.) China already counts 111 million Internet users and a middle class that numbers, according to midrange estimates, 130 million people. But the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is increasing. Whereas ten percent of the national population lives on incomes higher than those of residents of moderately developed nations, according to the Chinese scholar Hu Angang, more than 50 percent of the population lives on incomes typical of the world's poorest states. Many governments at the county and township levels are starved for revenue. China's population is aging: the ratio of workers to the elderly is anticipated to drop from 6.4 to 1 in 2000 to about 2 to 1 by 2040. There is no effective nationwide social security system, and it is unlikely there will be one before the demographic challenge hits. Other major issues include severe health-care delivery problems, infectious diseases, and educational inequalities.
> 
> Chinese power is also limited by the international system itself. Nations balance against threats. Beijing is coming to realize, just as Washington and Tokyo do, that for every international action it takes, an equal and opposite reaction will occur. As China's global trade surplus mounts, so does pressure that it revalue its currency; Beijing has long resisted the push, but it is slowly acquiescing. If China extracts resources from poor nations, brings its own laborers to low-income countries already burdened by unemployment, tries to strong-arm regimes that recognize Taiwan, or cozies up to local elites who alienate their own people, Chinese interests will face resentment (or even riots, as recently occurred in Zambia). If China fails to fulfill its promise to invest $100 billion in Latin America by 2014, its credibility will suffer. If China deploys more missiles that can hit Japan as well as Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait, Tokyo will react by deploying antiballistic missiles and strengthening its Self-Defense Forces. China is already surrounded by skeptics: according to a mid-2006 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of Japanese surveyed, 76 percent of Russians, and 63 percent of Indians thought that China's growing military power was a "bad thing" (95 percent of Chinese thought it was a "good thing"). In short, the rise of Chinese power generates global responses that Beijing cannot fully control and that may not be in its interest.
> 
> *ALL ABOARD*
> 
> For the United States, the rise of China can mean only one thing: engagement. *Washington has no choice. China is too big, too important, too dynamic, and has too many other nations with an interest in cooperating with it to be pushed around. Americans cannot compel cooperation; they must earn it on the strength of their ideas and the two countries' mutual interests.* For one thing, Washington must stop defining Chinese power principally as a military challenge; otherwise, it will squander scarce resources and push Beijing to adopt the type of truculence Washington wishes to avoid. Instead, the United States -- and the rest of the world -- will have to adapt to the centrality of economic and idea power in China's national strategy. As China becomes more competitive, the United States must move up the value-added ladder. And there is no way to effectively do so with a large percentage of the U.S. population testing "below basic" in reading and math or with health-care costs reaching 18 percent of GDP, as is predicted will happen by 2014.
> 
> China wants to be a responsible stakeholder in the international system because it recognizes that the system works to its broad benefit. But like Washington, Beijing will define its responsibility according to its interests. Regarding the Korean Peninsula, for example, Washington asserts that a responsible position is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons; Beijing would also prefer to see no nuclear weapons on the peninsula, but it places primacy on avoiding war. As of late 2006, Beijing was most concerned about the economic progress of its 1.3 billion people, whereas the United States was focused on a broad range of security issues, not least of which was nuclear proliferation.
> 
> The danger is that the outside world will feel Chinese power principally through the massive, often unintended spillover effects of its appetite for economic growth. Although Beijing's domestic and foreign policies are not malevolent by design, they often have harmful effects, and for those countries on the receiving end of them, intentions may not matter much. A major focus of U.S.-Chinese cooperation should be to reduce the causes and consequences of such unintended spillover effects, especially in the areas of energy and the environment, particularly in regard to global warming.
> 
> This, of course, will require putting an end to the mutual suspicion that currently afflicts U.S.-Chinese relations. Both sides could take positive steps. Beijing needs to accelerate policies that reassure the outside world -- for example, increasing transparency in its military budget. China would boost confidence enormously if it stopped deploying more missiles across from Taiwan. Additional deployment does little to further deter Taiwan's independence movement, but it alienates Taiwan's people and creates anxieties throughout the region, especially in Japan.
> 
> For its part, Washington should instill trust in Beijing by not acting in ways that jeopardize China's nuclear deterrent. Both sides would benefit from much more extensive military-to-military exchanges and cooperation in space. The United States, China, and Japan must find ways to reduce the acrimony in Sino-Japanese ties and build a security partnership. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's trip to China in October 2006, his first abroad as prime minister, was a good first step, but there are mountains of suspicion and resentment yet to be scaled. China's growing power calls for other states to respect the country and work with it constructively. The twenty-first century requires U.S. leaders who have the imagination to see possibilities for cooperation with China and to devise ways to motivate Americans to meet the economic and intellectual challenges that China's dynamic growth increasingly present.



I *double* emphasized this point _” the Chinese Communist Party is growing and recruiting dynamic new members. Professor Cheng Li, of Hamilton College, reports that in 2004, 34 percent of private-enterprise owners were CCP members” because I think it (expanding the CCP’s membership) is one of the ways the Chinese are trying to legitimize their government – to gain the all important ‘consent of the governed’.  I expect to see increased membership in the Party, proper, and some nascent democracy *within the party* – election, etc.

_


----------



## tomahawk6

Its a no brainer in a communist country to be a member of the party I can think of no better way than to use party contacts to get business contacts/contracts. While I have been watching China for a long time now I have found that the Chinese have been very impressed with how the US wages war and seeks to emulate our capabilities. It is a fact that if China is to be taken seriously as a military power they must have power projection capabilities. However China cannot afford to modernize its forces in its entirety so they modernize in selected areas such as improving the PLAN, selected modernization of the air force and modernization of its mechanized forces. For the next twenty years China will be a regional power with nuclear weapons. I doubt we will ever see the Chinese Navy for example have true global reach. Modern weapons are very expensive and China's military is too large for a massive overhaul. Remember the large army is as much for internal control as it is for national defense.

I was reading somewhere recently that the reason for so many different Chinese ship classes was because its almost like trial and error with a surface type. They may only build 2-3 ships in a class and move on to another class as a way to improve the design.Chinese ships are less capable than western ships and have been plagues with quality issues. Of course at some point in ship design they will finally have obtained enough experience to build a decent warship.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Its a no brainer in a communist country to be a member of the party I can think of no better way than to use party contacts to get business contacts/contracts ...



The _sine qua non_ for the CCP is to find some way to legitimize its one party rule.  They have to find an acceptable way - to themselves and to the people - to garner the 'consent of the governed.'  We in the liberal democratic West are accustomed to the idea that such consent can only be obtained by a universal franchise and regular general elections.  We *could* be wrong; there *might* be other mechanisms which are acceptable to a deeply conservative society.  I don't know what it is but I am 100% sure the Chinese are looking for it.



			
				tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... While I have been watching China for a long time now I have found that the Chinese have been very impressed with how the US wages war and seeks to emulate our capabilities. It is a fact that if China is to be taken seriously as a military power they must have power projection capabilities. However China cannot afford to modernize its forces in its entirety so they modernize in selected areas such as improving the PLAN, selected modernization of the air force and modernization of its mechanized forces. For the next twenty years China will be a regional power with nuclear weapons. I doubt we will ever see the Chinese Navy for example have true global reach. Modern weapons are very expensive and China's military is too large for a massive overhaul. Remember the large army is as much for internal control as it is for national defense ...



I would be careful about saying 'never.'

My assessment is that: China has no fear of an invasion by anyone.  Thus the PLA is being cut and cut and cut again and modernized at the same time.  (It is important to remember that the PLA performs a wide range of _paramilitary_ tasks including e.g. those which equate to the US Border Patrol and Canada Customs.)

But: I believe the Chinese are intent upon building just the sort of global power projection capability tomahawk6 doubts we will ever see.  I'm not sure what their timetable might be: but 15 to 25 years sounds reasonable, as I read their past budgets.  Why?  China intends, as Lampton suggested, to restore _"an equilibrium that persisted throughout much of recorded history."_  That equilibrium was not just economic.  China was the key power in Asia 500 years ago - when there were no global powers.  Equilibrium, for the Chinese, means a rough parity in 'face' with the USA and India.



			
				tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ...
> I was reading somewhere recently that the reason for so many different Chinese ship classes was because its almost like trial and error with a surface type. They may only build 2-3 ships in a class and move on to another class as a way to improve the design.Chinese ships are less capable than western ships and have been plagues with quality issues. Of course at some point in ship design they will finally have obtained enough experience to build a decent warship.



That would square with what i saw during a recent (2006) trip through South China.  I had no way to assess the utility of the many, many different warships - mainly smaller amphibious landing ships in a vast array of sizes and shapes - but it was clear that there were many varieties.


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward Campbell said:
			
		

> The _sine qua non_ for the CCP is to find some way to legitimize its one party rule.  They have to find an acceptable way - to themselves and to the people - to garner the 'consent of the governed.'  We in the liberal democratic West are accustomed to the idea that such consent can only be obtained by a universal franchise and regular general elections.  We *could* be wrong; there *might* be other mechanisms which are acceptable to a deeply conservative society.  I don't know what it is but I am 100% sure the Chinese are looking for it.



I don't know what legitimization model the Chinese might find but there are other models out there that we constantly ignore.  The clans and the loya jirga of Afghanistan are legitimate power brokers as far as the locals are concerned.  The same goes for those we regularly disparage as Warlords - the Sheikhs of Arabia and the leaders of the clans that infest the mountains from the Balkans to the Himalayas and from the Caucasus to Ethiopia (add in the Atlas if you like).  And the followers of various religious leaders, and even some mercernary leaders, all consider their leaders legitimate, even if we don't.

China's problem is that it has DE-legitimized every normal binding mechanism.  They took on the Warlords of Chiang Kai Shek first.  They "aren't ready" for the universal franchise.  They destroyed religion.  They even tore up the little red book and shattered the "cult of personality".  In a society that is split by class, ethnicity and "religion (including the secular religionists)" it seems that the only card they have left to play is  the Galtieri card - the external enemy.

Taiwan would be an interesting test piece for them.  If they can take Taiwan successfully then they could start thinking about challenging Japan in your 25 year time frame.  I don't think though, that taking Taiwan is a sufficiently sure thing that the Party is willing to risk failure.  They can contemplate what happened to Galtieri.


----------



## LakeSup

China is complicated by all the US and European manufacturing investment and infrastructure there.  Japan never allowed foreign companies a foothold but China (and India) are open for business.  Much capital is stranded there if things get tense.


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## CrazyCanuck

The best time for China to invade Taiwan would be today, as the US would not have the ground forces to help the Taiwanese. The only way the US could help the Taiwanese would be through naval means and being so close to the Chinese mainland the danger to US forces could possibly be unacceptably high. I omit air strikes from Japan as I am not sure about the Japenese stance on another war with China. Now if China really wanted to stir the pot they would launch an attack on Taiwan and tell the North Koreans to invade South Korea. Now I doupt the Americans have the ability (in their current situation) to defend both of these places, so this will most likely force them to pick and choose who to 'save' and they are closer to South K(diplomatically) so that is probably where they would place the majority of their forces. Now I doupt the Chinese are interested in an all out war in their frontyard at this point in time so I believe that Taiwan is safe... at least for the next decade or two.


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## George Wallace

Boater

I think you have over simplified your assessment a tad.  If any of your scenarios were to happen the state of the world would be drastically changed.  The US and all other nations would upgrade their stance on the WOT to Total War and would concentrate on on part of the world which would include all of what you have mentioned; Asia.  I am sure you will be able to check the numbers that the US dedicated simultaneously to the campaigns in Europe and also those in the South Pacific during WW II and find that they greatly outnumber the resources they are currently dedicating to South Central Asia today.  

You also seem to have overlooked other nations who would be affected directly besides Japan, such as Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, etc.  I am sure that NATO would also become involved immediately too, as would India and Pakistan.  

Would you hazard any guesses as to what Israel would unleash?


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## CrazyCanuck

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6254155.stm 
After looking at that I doubt Israel would want to get on China's bad side, but they also wouldn't want to get on America's so I'm pretty sure they would stay neutral.
As to NATO, Taiwan isn't their problem and judging by the less than stellar commitment to Afghanistan of some countries I doubt it would be of much use. As to over simplification, I was trying to think of what would occur if this happened today and I don't see the American economy on the level of production of war materials that it had during WW2. Any war on two fronts would also require the reinstation of the draft for a sufficient number of troops and I doubt this would go over well. I have trouble seeing India and Pakistan cooperate militarily against another nation but if they ended up on different sides they would probably nuke each other and that would take them out of the picture. Thailand is in no condition to fight a war as a coup just took place there and as to Australia and New Zealand my best guess is that they would support the US, though in what way I can't say for certain.


----------



## George Wallace

Actually CSA 105, I was throwing Israel in as a 'wildcard', and wondering what they would unleash on their neighbours given the opportunity that these scenarios may have presented with most of the world's attentions elsewhere.  I in no way intended to insinuate that Israel would be involved in any way as an Allie of the US or NATO.  As you point out, their interests are in the defence of their own lands and they have quite an arsenal with which to do so.  This could, however, turn into quite a 'sideshow' in itself.  

I don't think Boater realizes the alliances that have been developed and in some case have become quite binding.  NATO currently has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  Attacks on a NATO member would involve all members.  I am sure any activities towards South Korea would involve UN Troops, which includes many other than NATO signatories.  South East Asia and the Pacific Rim nations also would have a stake in any activities in those areas.  India and Pakistan, although showing many hatreds towards each other, are also in alliances with other British Commonwealth nations.  

Boater's oversimplification of China and/or North Korea taking on the US on a second front is ludicrous.  The Politics and alliances involved would involve a large number of nations, not only from the Pacific Rim and South East Asia, but from around the World.


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Taiwan is not a NATO member, I do not see where NATO comes into play in defending it, now it may be Americas problem but that does not necessarily make it NATOs problem. Would the UN come into play here? Yes, but would NATO? that is debatable. As to oversimplification, I am neither a defence nor a political analyst, and to go into the depth of detail that you seem to be looking for would require me to write an essay, which I do not feel inclined to do. What I have said before was a scenario that I saw as a possibility, if you do not see it as so you are more than welcome to throw your own in.


----------



## George Wallace

Taiwan is not a member of NATO, but the US is.  The US 'supports' Tiawan.  Tiawan is also a strategic concern for Japan.  I imagine it is also a major strategic concern for other States such as Singapore, and other South East Asia nations.  

Have you though of the Russian interests that still exist in that area?


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Russia may have interests but it's in no condition to wage a massive land war. And a quick question; how reliant are those South East Asian nations on China economically?


----------



## George Wallace

I would imagine they are quite reliant on economic centers such as Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, Canton, etc. as opposed to Bay Street, the DAX or Wall Street.


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Well in that case I doubt they would want to get on China's badside and strongly support the US. IF they were to be invaded by China it may be a different story, but I don't see any reason for China to invade them.


----------



## chanman

Is the PLAN *really* that big?

16 Type 051 Luda DDG's (from 1971)
2 Type 52 Luhu DDG's (from 1994)
1 Type 51B Luhai DDG (1998)
2 Type 52B Guangzhou DDG (2004)
2 Type 52C Lanzhou DDG (2004)
2 Type 51C Luzhou DDG (not yet commissioned)
4 Sovremmeny DDG's (two versions 1999, 2005)

Total: 27 destroyers + 2 on trials, 43 frigates + 4 building, some of the ships being fairly old.


After the sale of the Kidds and retirement of some oldies, the ROCN now has

4 Kidd DDG's
8 Knox FF
8 Perry FFG's
6 La Fayette FFG's


The ROKN has

7 KDX destroyers (built in the last few years), with 2 more on the way
9 Ulsan frigates


The JMSDF has

34 Destroyers including the 4 Aegis ships, with 3 more under construction, and more planned.


If/when the PLAN finally retires its oldest frigates, it's numbers aren't that unusual for the area or population or GDP... even Thailand has a light Harrier carrier.


----------



## aesop081

IMHO, the threat from the PLAN lies in its developing  SSN / SSBN capability


----------



## CrazyCanuck

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/55192/post-503368.html#msg503368

There's an article that I posted a few weeks ago that also talks about the Chinese upping their military spending.


----------



## LakeSup

The Chinese realize that , in large part, their current boom is the result of them making a lot of low cost stuff for US consumers to buy.  It is a symbiotic relationship...US companies (I work for one doing this) invest millions in building plants in China...using low cost labour to make products to ship to the US (and Europe, Japan..etc).  The US essentially exports their manufacturing base to China and gets low inflation in return.  Walmart is the #7 trading partner (country) with China!  In return China takes those trillions of US $ and buys US Treasuries which allows the US to run huge defecits.
Both sides gain and this is a really high stakes "game".  There may be tension at times (like the spy plane in 2001) or build ups of Chinese military (have to spend all  that money sometime) but I don't think it is anyone's interest to upset the apple cart and lose the "prosperity"
I think the BIG threat is when we lose enough jobs in North America and the unemployment rate goes up as a result...then politicians will stir the pot with trade barriers, etc which could increase tension.  Wait for the low cost Chinese cars to come to NA in 2008!


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is a _strategic_ indicator –  I suggest such strategic indicators (or predictors of Chinese intentions and behaviour) are much more significant than the number or types of ships in the PLAN or the latest _specs_ of Chinese combat aircraft and missiles.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act; my emphasis added:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8MKCAJ80.htm


> China foreign currency reserves pass $1T
> 
> BEIJING
> 
> China's foreign currency reserves, already the world's largest, passed US$1 trillion at the end of November, two central bank researchers said in a paper released Saturday.
> 
> China's reserves have skyrocketed as the bank drains money from the economy by issuing bonds in an effort to contain inflationary pressures amid a flood of export revenues. The growth has prompted debate in China over how the country should use the mountain of money.
> 
> Reserves reached $1.039 trillion at the end of November, researchers Jiao Jinpu and Liu Xiangyun said in a paper released at a conference in Beijing, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
> 
> Outside experts had estimated earlier that China's reserves passed the $1 trillion mark in November. Since then, the reserves are believed to have risen to at least $1.1 trillion.
> 
> The central bank officially announces the size of its reserves only four times a year, and said in its last quarterly report they had risen to $987.9 billion by the end of September.
> 
> That mountain of money is equal to about 40 percent of China's annual economic output and accounts for half of all Asian reserves. Japan has the world's second-biggest foreign reserves, which stood at $875 billion at the end of December.
> 
> The composition of China's reserves is secret, but economists believe about 70 percent is in U.S. Treasury bills, much of the rest in euros and a small amount in yen.
> 
> Purchases of assets in other currencies are believed to be growing as the bank diversifies its holdings.
> 
> Economist Stephen Green at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai said in a report this week that the central bank made an estimated $29 billion profit last year from its foreign assets.
> 
> The central bank has been forced to buy up tens of billions of dollars worth of currency every month in order to keep the flood of money from China's trade surplus, which reached a record $177.5 billion last year, from igniting inflation.
> 
> Beijing has begun easing currency controls in an effort to reduce such strains.
> 
> Economists are debating how China's reserves might be put to use to address pressing needs.
> 
> Some have suggested Beijing use the money to buy oil and other resources abroad for China's booming economy. Others say it could pay for more schools and social programs.



A gentle reminder: China’s *foreign currency reserves* are about equal to the entire GDP of Spain, or *Canada*.

The fact that China holds, perhaps, as much as $700 Billion in US Treasury Bills means that China and the USA are hugely inter*dependent*.  Neither is in a position to take risks with the social and economic stability of the other; in other words, their _strategic_ interests are the same.  Both need stability (peace) in order to promote their own, inter*dependent*, prosperity.  Countries with coincidental strategic interests need not be friends but they should not be enemies, either.


----------



## Kirkhill

> Countries with coincidental strategic interests need not be friends but they should not be enemies, either.


 
However, neither need they be at peace.  Balance is the critical factor in all things - that yin and yang thing.  A good leader needs to know how much he can punish his friends and reward his enemies while still retaining arbitrary power.  Likewise it is not impossible that a government could see its role as determining how much friction it can impose on its friends, to slow down their progress, without turning them into enemies. 

I don't think China (more critically the Party Oligarchy) wants a war with the US, the West or anyone else for that matter.  As long as the world operates on the US Dollar then the US Treasury has the high strategic hand.  They may want to curb the US a bit though, add a bit of friction.

Economically they have tied the Americans to them as much as they are tied to the Americans.   The Euro may or may not prove to be an effective counter to the Dollar.  Politically they are drawing "neutrals" away from the Americans.  Militarily it serves their interests to have the Americans dissipate their military dealing with sand, gravel, brushfires and insurgencies - none of which directly implicate them.

All of this allows "China" the chance to catch up with the US and leapfrog their ancient competitors, Russia and India.  The big factor for them though is, as always, time.  Can they keep their power base, the tax payers and labourers of China's provinces, under control long enough to catch up?  Or do they need to take more risks by increasing the friction to which the US is exposed to slow it down faster?


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Catch up as in; socially, economically, militarily, or politically?


----------



## Kirkhill

Well, I think they are behind the US in all categories, as well as the West generally.  Which fields they choose to emphasize in their growth programme is pretty much the crux of the matter.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Boater said:
			
		

> Catch up as in; socially, economically, militarily, or politically?



Go back to Lampton (bottom of the 1st page of this thread) and note:



> Power is the ability to define and achieve one's goals, especially relative to the capacity of others to define and achieve their own. Over 40 years ago, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni broke down the concept of power according to the means employed to exercise it: coercion, material inducement, or intellectual motivation. Power can be constraining, remunerative, or normative -- expressing, to put it crudely, guns, money, or ideas.



I think the Chinese are aiming to catch up in all three but, in my opinion, _normative_ (idea) power is at the top of the list because it is, ultimately, the key to the CCP retaining control/management of China.  If the CCP loses the battle of ideas inside China - and such a battle *is going on*, right now -  then all bets are off.  Another revolution, even a democratic one, is the last thing China (or the West) needs, *now*.


----------



## CrazyCanuck

Thanks for the clarification


----------



## a_majoor

Although the thread is drifting away from strictly naval matters (heh) this is an interesting discussion. Here is some longer term demographic and economic predictions about China's future. As Mark Styne points out, demography really is key:

http://www.autonomoussource.com/2007/01/the_second_biggest_issue_of_th.html



> *The second biggest issue of the 21st century*
> The Chinese state media agency Xinhua has admitted that China gender imbalance is growing deeper:
> 
> A report released here Thursday said there will be 30 million more males of marriageable age in China than females by the year 2020, which will make it difficult for men to find wives.
> 
> The report, issued by the State Population and Family Planning Commission, said China's sex ratio for newborn babies in 2005 was 118 boys to 100 girls, compared with 110:100 in 2000. In some regions, the sex ratio has reached 130:100.
> 
> The Chinese Communist government has decided this is a bad thing, but that their brutal family planning policies had nothing to do with it.
> The report predicted that in the year 2020, Chinese men of marriageable age will find it difficult to find wives, especially those with low income or little education. This will create social instability.
> 
> Liu said the sex ratio imbalance was not connected to China's family planning policy. "It is more a result of the deep-rooted notion in Chinese culture that men are superior to women," she said.
> 
> It's hard to imagine what China will be like when there are four men to every three women. I'm very pro-woman myself; I believe that those of the female gender contribute much more to the 'glue' that binds civilization together. Single men are capable of all kinds of trouble -- especially in groups -- but when matched with women they become contributing members of society. *Without women, these unmatched Chinese men will be attracted to gangs or aggressive political movements.*
> 
> I'm also of the opinion that the booming Chinese economy is due to throw a piston in the next five years. Too much of the business of the country is driven by state-managed industry and financing, and not enough by real demand. It will run into trouble for the same reasons that Japan's government-managed economy fell flat fifteen years ago. Will Hutton summarizes it like this:
> 
> China's economic growth is based on the state channelling vast under-priced savings into huge investment projects driven by cheap labour. Some 200m of China's 760m workforce are migrant peasants employed in factories, construction sites and offices in its new towns and cities—the biggest migration in history. The Communist party has permitted free movement of prices, encourages profit-seeking and has sharply lowered tariffs on imports and obstacles to inward investment. Its success in creating annual growth of some 9.5 per cent for a generation, lifting 400m people out of poverty, is widely acknowledged. *But the party keeps firm control of ownership, wages and company strategies—and of the state. In other words, China occupies an uneasy halfway house between socialism and capitalism;* its private sector, although growing, is still puny. It is a system of Leninist corporatism—and it is this that is breaking down. (_Interpolation: this halfway house is known in correctly political terms as Fascism_)
> 
> The breaches in the model are all around. How much longer can China's state-owned banks carry on directing billions of dollars of savings into investments that produce tiny or even negative returns and on which interest is irregularly paid? Poor peasants' ability to create the savings needed to fuel growth is reaching its limits. And in any case, for how long can a $2 trillion economy save at more than 40 per cent of GDP? It is reaching the limit of its capacity to increase exports (which in 2007 will surpass $1 trillion) by 25 per cent a year; at this rate of growth they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that likely? Are there sufficient ships and ports to move such volumes—and will western markets stay open without real reciprocity on trade? Every year China acquires $200bn of foreign exchange reserves, mainly dollars, as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. It is absurd for a poor country like China to be lending to a rich one like the US; in fact, it is unsustainable, and the financial markets seem to agree.
> 
> China would like to lower the current feverish growth rates, but the tools available in the west—raising taxes, cutting spending and lifting interest rates—are not available to China. The party dare not trigger protests by raising taxes; officials in state enterprises and provincial governments ignore orders to lower spending because their careers depend on generating growth and jobs. And raising interest rates could create a credit crunch as loans go sour.
> 
> Chinese history is remarkably consistent. China is always united under one dynasty, which grows corrupt and weak. Sparks erupt in the backwaters -- minor revolts against local rulers -- but most are snuffed out. But eventually one catches fire and starts to claim more territory until a new dynasty is founded. In this way the Ming were replaced by the Qing, who were replaced by the Kuomintang, who were replaced by the Communists. In each of those transitions, there was a huge loss of life.
> 
> With the growing gender imbalance and the teetering economy, the groundwork is definitely in place for a dynastic change. And it's not going to be pretty.



It is difficult to imagine a soft let down of the Chinese economy, and the social forces of millions of unattached males seeking soem sort of outlet will also be difficulot to deal with; the combination could become quite volitile as the article points out. Longer term, the mismatch between men and women could lead to a population crash, with China facing the same situation we are: fewer and fewer working age people relative to the number of retired people needing or wanting support.


----------



## CougarKing

I am aware this was obviously discussed before in this forum.  Just thought that this particular aspect of China's military-industrial "build-up" should also be examined on its own.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070126/ap_on_re_eu/world_forum_china_missile



> China's WEF envoy sees space weaponizing
> 
> By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer
> Fri Jan 26, 1:47 PM ET
> 
> DAVOS, Switzerland - A senior Chinese military officer predicts that weapons will be deployed in outer space despite the government's long-standing desire to prevent an arms race in space.
> 
> Yao Yunzhu, a senior colonel in the People's Liberation Army, brought up China's recent successful test of an anti-satellite weapon during a        World Economic Forum dinner Thursday focusing on        North Korea.
> 
> "My wish is we really want to keep space as a peaceful place for human beings," she said, adding that China would like all countries to come to a consensus that space should be used only for peaceful purposes.
> 
> "But personally, I'm pessimistic about it," said Yao, 52, who directs the Asia-Pacific Office at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing. "My prediction: Outer space is going to be weaponized in our lifetime."
> 
> Yao's remarks were the first time a member of the Chinese military has commented on the test. The only other official comment, from the Foreign Ministry, offered the barest confirmation and repeated stock positions about China's wish to keep space free of weapons.
> 
> "This isn't the act of a country who remains fiercely committed to peace and harmony in the world," said Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of U.S. Northern Command. "This is a cause for concern ... In executing this test they have created potential significant problems for international space flight."
> 
> Keating told the Associated Press in an interview this week that there are ongoing worries that such tests have other consequences "intended or otherwise," that China must realize, including possible damage to other satellites or the Space Station by debris.
> 
> He added that the U.S. does not now plan a direct response to the test, but "there are a number of things that are on the list of potential military options" if it happens again.
> 
> The Jan. 11 test sparked criticism from the United States and Japan, and raised concerns over the rising militarization of space. Analysts said it also represented an indirect threat to U.S. efforts to remain predominant in space and on the ground — because it raised the possibility that the network of U.S. spy satellites could be shot down.
> 
> The U.S. military has had the capability to shoot down satellites since the 1980s. Russia has a similar capacity, and now China is the third potential military power in space.
> 
> China confirmed the test on Tuesday, but did not provide details — and neither did Yao. The magazine Aviation Week, which first reported the test, said the satellite was hit by a kinetic kill vehicle launched from a ballistic missile.
> 
> China's long-standing policy was to ban weapons in space, Yao said, noting that Russia and China presented a draft outline for a treaty to prevent the deployment of weapons in space to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in June 2002.
> 
> The United States objected at the time, saying the 1967 Outer Space Treaty provided sufficient guarantees against the weaponization of space. The Russians countered that while the 1967 treaty banned weapons of mass destruction in space, it did not contain any legal barriers to putting other weapons in orbit around the Earth.
> 
> Without naming any country, but in an apparent reference to the United States, Yao said if there's going to be "a space superpower, it's not going to be alone, and China is not going to be the only one."
> 
> "It will have company," she said.
> 
> Her rank of senior colonel is equivalent to that of a brigadier or one-star general in the U.S. military. She belongs to a small group of fluent English speakers the usually secretive People's Liberation Army uses to deal with foreigners.


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese cannot win a "space race" with the US. The problem for the US and the west in general is that we are too reliant on space based systems from GPS to weather.To blind US satellites should be considered an act of war and cause an immediate launch of ICBM's. The Chinese know that this is the achilles heel of the US but we need to let our potential enemies know that to attack a US satellite should be cause for an immediate nuclear attack which hopefully would be a deterrant.


----------



## tabernac

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The Chinese cannot win a "space race" with the US. The problem for the US and the west in general is that we are too reliant on space based systems from GPS to weather.To blind US satellites should be considered an act of war and cause an immediate launch of ICBM's. The Chinese know that this is the achilles heel of the US but we need to let our potential enemies know that to attack a US satellite should be cause for an immediate nuclear attack which hopefully would be a deterrant.



We can only hope China keeps it head in the right place, and never lets the situation deteriorate tat far. On another note, any chance that North Korea might be able to steal this technology via industrial espionage?


----------



## CougarKing

Cheeky Monkey,

How can be sure that China's state-owned NORINCO defense companies aren't already handing this information to their North Korean counterparts? After all, most DPRK equipment is either ex-PLA equipment or a North Korean copy of a Chinese copy of a Soviet design.

Take for the example, the PLA Type 59, tank, based on the T-54/55, which the North Korea People's Army has in considerable numbers as well.


----------



## a_majoor

The last military space race saw the United States coming up with all kinds of really exotic military concepts but very little real hardware, while the former USSR actually armed satellites and space stations, as well as tested ICBM based ASATS in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

I suspect the Chinese don't have enough "Long March" launch vehicles to do more than create a temporary "corridor" of cleared space to cover one activity. This should be enough to create a short window of uncertainty for a potential enemy (and it might not be the United States, India and Russia come to mind). As for North Korea, their last attempt at sub orbital launches was less than stellar so the Chinese might be advised to do this project on their own.

The best counter is to disperse space born assets and increase the number of operating platforms so it is difficult or impossible to blind or deny our space born assets. A small Canadian satellite called MOST http://www.astro.ubc.ca/MOST/ is an example of what can be done, it is the size of a barracks box and cost $10 million, which is peanuts for a hand built satellite. Since it is a space telescope, the implications of building them on an assembly line should be obvious. Launching these is easier since they are small, the Pegasus is a suitable launcher, and other small rockets will do as well.

Hey, we're the people who created the AVRO Arrow, and the Americans put men on the moon, so I think we have a few cards up our sleeves yet......


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The Chinese cannot win a "space race" with the US.



Yet.



			
				tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... The problem for the US and the west in general is that we are too reliant on space based systems from GPS to weather ...



But see a_majoor's comment, just above; and, faced with a major sea denial weapon system, one could say we are too reliant on the sea lanes for our commerce and resupply.  Space is excellent 'ground' and all nations need to find ways to coexist there and that may include using more complex orbital techniques, 'armouring' spacecraft and flooding 'areas' with cheap, redundant systems, much a we overwhelmed the U-boat threat in WWII with thousands of cheap 'Liberty Ships.'



			
				tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... To blind US satellites should be considered an act of war and cause an immediate launch of ICBM's. The Chinese know that this is the achilles heel of the US but we need to let our potential enemies know that to attack a US satellite should be cause for an immediate nuclear attack which hopefully would be a deterrant.



And this gets us what, exactly?

My Opinion: The Chinese are not, I think, deterred because they do not believe that the USA (and certainly not the entire West) have either the will or the way to invade, much less conquer China.  The Chinese believe, I think, correctly that the USA cannot fight a land war on the East Asian mainland - not without suffering a catastrophic defeat.  They also believe, again, I think correctly, that the USA would be unable to organize a coalition for a war against China, based on any *reasonable and probably* Chinese offensive act, including an invasion of Taiwan.


----------



## Bert

There are a number of points made by the Chinese Senior Colonel that are simple and true 
that everyone hopes space will not be weaponized but it will eventually.  The article is
is well done.

The US maintains a fair number of civilian and military communications, acquisition and sensing
satellites as well as command and control comms.  Unlike a sea lane that passes cargo, these 
comms are critical.  Loss of US satellites means increasing the fog of war and reducing the 
level of comms to deployed operations.  From a US perspective, no country can win a space-based
war.  Thats a statement of the times but not a fact in the future.

China's perspective is competitive and emergent.  They too seek space for tactical be netfit and 
communications.  At this point, the American's have the ability to move and communicate with 
their military effectively anywhere in the world.  China's ability is limited, they know it, and
are seeking ways to undermine American dominance.  Historically, the Americans have not
forgotten Pearl Harbour and the Chinese have not forgotten how they were treated by
European and Japan from the 1800's until the end of WW2.  This influences matters of defense.
A space race is on.

There are various methods the US can protect its satellite fleets in orbit.  Unfortunately, orbital space
is limited.  Injecting vast amounts of satellites will pollute the region and make it a nightmare for
navigation and potential collisions.  The space race is best done with international cooperation
but probably not as the article suggests.

Unlike the past, the US and China have a strong economic ties now, the populations seek the same
things, however they do not share political compatibility.  It is absurd on many levels to think the US 
would want to invade China, yet if they could, China would like to control the US and the US would like
to control China (control in the respect of no political, military, or economic threat).  The political 
well-being of their respective large and strong countries now resides the in protection, acquisition, 
and continuity of resources that drives their economies.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Bert said:
			
		

> ...
> There are various methods the US can protect its satellite fleets in orbit.  Unfortunately, *orbital space
> is limited*.  Injecting vast amounts of satellites will pollute the region and make it a nightmare for
> navigation and potential collisions.  The space race is best done with international cooperation
> but probably not as the article suggests.
> ...



But not as limited as some believe.  In the past 20 years (since 1989 when I was required to take notice of the matter, anyway) the _"capacity"_ of the geostationary orbit has doubled and doubled again as nations (including China) _"challenged"_ both the regulations and the science governing how close one spacecraft could be placed relative to another.  The use of non-geostationary orbits - including low earth orbit, medium earth orbit and, especially, highly elliptical orbit - also increase the _"real estate"_ available.

The International Radio Regulations have been revised again and again to allow for more intensive use of the radio frequency spectrum to/from/within space and of the geostationary orbit itself.  Technology is anything but static.


----------



## a_majoor

The technology of spacecraft is evolving (and indeed there are many concepts "on the shelf" which are known but have never been deployed) so the idea of "us" or "them" being reliant on relatively dumb satellite vehicles based in fixed orbits is something we should start thinking about in historical terms.

I believe many military satellites are already capable of limited forms of manoeuvre, and American satellites are probably best able to take advantage of this since they are smaller and lighter than their competitors (small, light spacecraft are easier to manoeuvre in space; X-Wing fighters really can take on the Death Star). The Americans also have decades of experience with "Stealth" and other "Low Observable" technologies, and even spacecraft which can re enter the atmosphere in one piece (starting with film cannisters ejected from spy satellites back in the early 1960's).

Putting these trends together suggests that there are or soon will be satellite systems which can make large orbital changes, are very difficult to find and can even escape harm by "ducking" into the atmosphere (either a controlled descent into friendly territory or "bouncing" off the atmosphere to make a hard course correction which enemy ASATS will have difficulty following). In case anyone thinks I have read too much Science Fiction, I offer this: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/spauiser.htm, which was designed in the 1970's for use by the US Navy (to be launched on short notice from SLBM's). The state of the art is considerably improved since then.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Still drifting further away from the Chinese Navy, _per se_, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, is the reverse of the China _coin_ in a column/book review by Doug Saunders from a recent (3 Feb 07) _Globe And Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070203.DOUG03/TPStory/International/columnists 


> Underneath China's gold-lamé robes is a poor servant
> 
> DOUG SAUNDERS
> 
> LONDON -- We are living in the age of the heroic continent -- a time when enormous land masses, packed with hundreds of millions of people, are casually transformed into celebrities, major and minor. They are glamorous individuals, sometimes fabulous and sometimes dangerously flawed, imbued with human characteristics and superhuman powers.
> 
> In dinner conversations and opinion-page prognostications, we talk casually about India's courageous leap, South America's well-meaning error, Africa's fatal misstep. We collect them as if they were action figures, and play them off against each other.
> 
> All this metaphoric pressure makes it difficult to talk realistically about the actual state of life in the world's largest entities. Notably, when the word "China" is almost always preceded or followed by the word "rising," and often accompanied by the word "superpower," when we automatically assume that China is on the verge of becoming the world's mightiest power, for better or worse.
> 
> We make certain assumptions about China: Because it has seen an annual growth rate of more than 9 per cent for the past 30 years, because it has lifted 400 million of its citizens out of poverty and because it now exports a trillion dollars worth of products every year and owns the lion's share of America's consumer and mortgage debt, we assume that China must be following the path that Europe and then the United States once did: toward dominance of the world.
> 
> But a small circle of well-informed people are painting quite a different picture of China, stripping the gold-lamé robes away from its imperial figure and examining the actual decisions being made by the specific actors behind the curtain. China is not by any stretch a superpower, they argue -- it is a crude manufacturing economy built on monetary legerdemain, without any capability for economic or ideological leadership.
> 
> This case is strongly argued in a new book by British economic writer Will Hutton. _The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the Twenty-First Century_ offers a fascinating antidote to all those magazine cover stories about the Next Great Superpower and the Emerging Colossus. In an extremely detailed scrutiny of the Chinese corporation, he finds almost nothing that could be described as a sustainable economy. "There are no Chinese brands in the world's top hundred; and so far only two Chinese companies -- Huawei and Lenovo -- both very small -- can be called genuine multinationals," writes Mr. Hutton, a respected former editor of the Observer newspaper and head of the Work Foundation think tank.
> 
> China, he observes, has failed to develop a genuine entrepreneurial economy -- all but 15 per cent of its firms are state-controlled, and even the "private" firms are prisoners of the state; it relies on the West for inventiveness and entrepreneurship, largely because it "has developed neither a viable concept of the company nor the institutional network to support a company."
> 
> This is not an argument for simple free-market economics; Mr. Hutton is a left-wing economist, one of the authors of Britain's social-democratic transformation under the Labour Party. The most impressive thing about his book is that he proves, using a huge weight of evidence, that China's authoritarian government and state-run economy are not just annoying carbuncles on the side of a booming economy -- or, as some on the far left would argue, necessary tools for the growth of capital in the early stages of development. Rather, they are the specific impediments that prevent China from becoming anything more than a poor servant of the world's economy.
> 
> "Some people have called me a monotheist, Western, Anglo-Saxon liberal forcing my views on China, but that's not it -- these are basic facts of the economy," Mr. Hutton said in an interview this week. "China will fail unless it develops civil rights, guarantees of minimum living standards through a universalistic welfare state, property rights, education. These are what you have to endow individual citizens with in a functioning capitalist liberal democracy. Some say, 'You're trying to thrust Western values on China.' And I would say that I regard pluralism, justification and investment in human capabilities as universal human appetites."
> 
> His argument is drawn from the fundamentals of China's success story. Its industry is almost entirely dependent on two things: an artificially undervalued currency driving vast export sales, and finance from state-run banks, which draw their funds from the enormous savings of 900 million Chinese peasants, who rarely buy anything and put away most of their earnings.
> 
> Those bank loans are a disaster waiting to happen: A third or more of them, valued at $900-billion, have been deemed non-performing -- in other words, they won't be repaid. This is one element in a market-like economy burdened by all the worst features of a government-run system: From 13 to 17 per cent of the country's gross domestic product each year is lost to corruption; it takes $4 in investment to create $1 in return (many times higher than the rate in any other industrialized country).
> 
> The rural economy is shrinking, and the artificially low currency combined with the complete lack of a domestic economy is going to create enormous inflation. The only way to prevent this is to shift the country's savings abroad -- which would collapse the finance system -- or allow the currency to reflect its actual value. This is the disaster that beset Japan in the 1980s, and it has taken 15 years to recover.
> 
> Japan's recovery was a result of its strong domestic economy: People started buying things, and companies started making money. But China can't seem to break through that wall. This is where Mr. Hutton's argument is strongest. China's peasants and poor workers don't buy things, he demonstrates, because their country offers no pensions, hardly any public medical care, very little free education, and no welfare protections. That, combined with the disastrous one-child-per-family policy, means that Chinese use their earnings to protect themselves against future risk. They don't dare spend, because they don't have the basic guarantees and social protections that are the backbone of a functioning market.
> 
> "In order to lower the savings rate, you've got to do two things: You've got to provide a cradle-to-grave welfare state, and you've got to provide property rights," he says "In other words, you've got to give people capabilities. And you've got to have pensions and free health care for your kids and free education until you're 16. Otherwise, people will just save, colossally, and they won't create a domestic consumer market."
> 
> This should be no source of relief, since so much of our well-being is tied up with China's success (and we sure don't want the place to become an angry nationalist closed economy, as it was under Mao). But I'm persuaded by Mr. Hutton's argument: If this century is actually going to be China's century, then China is going to have to become a lot less like China, and a lot more like the rest of us. If you're one of the country's billion poor, harassed people, that should be welcome news.



*I have not yet read Hutton’s book* and I am unlikely to get to it until the Spring, at the earliest, so I don’t know if Hutton failed to make the argument or Saunders failed to report on the _restlessness_ (I guess that’s the right word) of the emerging middle class.   There is considerable concern, I saw/heard during my last visit and I hear, again, from friends and acquaintances amongst the young (40 something) prosperous urban middle class about the safety of their property and investments.  They are pressing the government apparatus for a ‘rule based’ system in which there is equality at law.  They are getting tired of corruption and favouritism in the investment and real estate domains.  This is, purely, selfishness, of course but it is almost identical to _Magna Carta_ 800 years ago – the rich will, inevitably, help the poor when they help themselves.


----------



## GAP

What happens when all those people find out that they are living in a paper mache economy and their savings have been stolen by the government? 

At some point the Chinese economy is going to have to come out and integrate with the rest of the world's economies, and it is going to find itself lacking in value and credibility.


----------



## CougarKing

Economics aside,

While some may think that the Chinese Navy/PLAN may not necessarily be much of a threat now, it will certainly be a growing threat in the coming decades- especially to Taiwan/the ROC. Regardless of whether the CCP/the state focuses on economic or military buildup or even political reform (more unlikely), the mainland Chinese economy will still grow as long as the govt.s keep some form of stability. But ensuring that stability calls for the threat of force, of which a larger military is what would make sure this is not an idle threat. Thus, a core part of China's naval build-up as mentioned earlier would be on the submarine front.

While Taiwan's surface fleet is of comparatively better quality  (including the French-built _Lafayette/Kang Ding _ class as well as the US _Kidd _ class DDGs and the US _Perry _ Class Frigates leased/sold to the ROCN in recent years) than the Chinese destroyers and Frigates, its submarine force is still vastly outnumbered. Namely, it only has 2 Dutch-built _Hai-Lung _ class subs and the two "Guppy"-type modernized WW2-era subs, which are all it has to face the more than 60 Chinese Submarines, including the 5 _Han_ Class SSNs, a number of_ Kilo _ class SSKs bought from the Russians as well as the single _Xia_ SSBN, not to mention the new _Yuan_ class submarine.

I discused the possibility of Taiwan possibly buying the old USS _Dolphin_, a research submarine that is also the USN's last SSK, but those who responded to this other thread said it would be of "doubtful" value or use since it is not really in fighting shape.

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/57053/post-522391.html#new

In my Mandarin language studies in Taipei for a semester in early 2006, I came across a China Post article that said that the ROC govt. had planned to buy 8 Diesel submarines from the US, but that the deal had not fallen through because of Chinese actions to block the sale. The _Kidd_ class DDGs were recently leased to Taiwan by the US to help make up for the lack of submarines, though I'll leave it to the naval experts on this thread to confirm just how good an ASW capability these destroyers have- with or without an ASW chopper.

I think the ROCN should have found a way to acquire subs at all costs, instead of leasing those _Kidds_. Unfortunately, most of the prospective submarine vendors recognize Beijing as the "one China" and only have trade links with Taipei. That includes the Swedish with their AIP subs, as well as the Russians, French, Brits, Germans and Americans with their SSNs and SSKs. The lack of diplomatic recognition has always been a problem for the ROC, it did not prevent them from acquiring more defensive weapons from the US such as F-16 fighters and Mirage fighters from France; it is more offensive weapons like subs that can be a problem.

Of those 30 or UN member nations who still recognize the ROC as the "one China", none of them I think has a sub capability or are too poor to have much of a decent navy, such as Nicaragua, Guatemala and Liberia. The last nation to have a sub capability which recognized Taiwan as "China" was South Africa, but they recently switched recognition to Beijing back in 1999.


----------



## karl28

Maby  Taiwan should consider trying to by some of the US Los Angeles class attack subs when they are retired and phased out by the newer Virginia class subs


----------



## tomahawk6

Great article on PLAN shipbuilding.
http://www.freewebs.com/jeffhead/redseadragon/planbuildup.htm


----------



## karl28

tomahawk6   Thanks for posting  I just skimed over it briefly but will look more into it later on


----------



## CougarKing

karl28 said:
			
		

> Maby  Taiwan should consider trying to by some of the US Los Angeles class attack subs when they are retired and phased out by the newer Virginia class subs



I really doubt that the US govt. would be willing to sell any advanced attack subs to any ally, especially the Flight II and Flight III groups of the _Los Angeles_ attack boats are still quite advanced with their BSY-1 systems, with the latter flight having the Tomahawk missile launch capability. The Flight I group of the class may be a possibility since they're older and less advanced, but they are still nuclear boats and I doubt they would like their nuclear propulsion technology to be shared as well to non-NATO allies like Taiwan.

The US hasn't sold any subs to any foreign ally/buyer since the 50s and 60s when a few modernized "Guppy" modified _Gato/Balao _ class boats left over from WW2 were sold to a number of nations, including Pakistan and Taiwan (the ROC).


----------



## tomahawk6

CK you are correct. There are proprietary secrets unvolved in our nuclear submarines so putting them on the market wouldnt be likely. I think if a close ally like Australia or Canada expressed an interest something could be worked out. Neither country wants nuclear warships so in the end the subs will either be mothballed or scrapped.


----------



## R0B

China will eventually outgrow the symbiotic relationship it has with the United States. It’ll trade the Yuan and start selling off its US currency reserves. It will be a super-power in its own right; and conflict will arise if America does not move to accommodate it.


----------



## chanman

R0B said:
			
		

> China will eventually outgrow the symbiotic relationship it has with the United States. It’ll trade the Yuan and start selling off its US currency reserves. It will be a super-power in its own right; and conflict will arise if America does not move to accommodate it.



The US is still China's single largest export customer for goods and the largest source of direct investment as well.  That stands regardless of what its currency reserves are denominated in.  Trade implies an exchange willingly made by all parties involved; as such freely-entered exchange is technically always symbiotic - or else you wouldn't be trading.


----------



## R0B

chanman said:
			
		

> The US is still China's single largest export customer for goods and the largest source of direct investment as well.  That stands regardless of what its currency reserves are denominated in.  Trade implies an exchange willingly made by all parties involved; as such freely-entered exchange is technically always symbiotic - or else you wouldn't be trading.



I'm saying that the economic needs of both countries will not forever be entwined.


----------



## TangoTwoBravo

Edward,

Very interesting article that I enjoyed reading.  The huge trade deficit (in US terms) of US-China trade is primarily in the manufacture of consumer goods such as toys, TVs, radios, computer accessories and household appliances.  

The US may have huge trade deficits with China, but I wonder about where the profits from all this go?  US manufacturing firms may spend their wage dollars in China, but I imagine that the profits come back to the US as opposed to staying in China (to some degree).  In addition, US retailers get to make profits and US consumers get cheaper goods.  Its hard to think of an economy not based on manufacturing or natural resources.

I wonder what will happen when wages begin to rise in China?  I've read reports of 40% wage increases in some companies.  The irony of labour unrest in a "communist" country will be delicious to some and disastrous to others.  Capital is mobile, and no doubt China will have its comparative advantage of cheap labour eroded by the next "giant."  Rising wages drove manufacturing jobs out of North America, so it stands to reason that the same can happen to China.  The question will be whether China can put in place an economy that can survive the resultant loss of manufacturing jobs.   The US and the West in general have other sectors or industries to rely on (service, finance, technology for example) along with a functioning consumer economy.

Perhaps the creation of a middle class will truly transform China.  Alternatively, corruption could end up siphoning off the profits and resulting in a hollow shell that caves in when trouble comes.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

CougarKing said:
			
		

> I really doubt that the US govt. would be willing to sell any advanced attack subs to any ally, especially the Flight II and Flight III groups of the _Los Angeles_ attack boats are still quite advanced with their BSY-1 systems, with the latter flight having the Tomahawk missile launch capability. The Flight I group of the class may be a possibility since they're older and less advanced, but they are still nuclear boats and I doubt they would like their nuclear propulsion technology to be shared as well to non-NATO allies like Taiwan.
> 
> The US hasn't sold any subs to any foreign ally/buyer since the 50s and 60s when a few modernized "Guppy" modified _Gato/Balao _ class boats left over from WW2 were sold to a number of nations, including Pakistan and Taiwan (the ROC).





They sold the design of the Tridents to the British did they not, who built them under licence?
http://www.submariners.co.uk/Boats/Barrowbuilt/Vanguard/index.htm


----------



## aesop081

Colin P said:
			
		

> They sold the design of the Tridents to the British did they not, who built them under licence?
> http://www.submariners.co.uk/Boats/Barrowbuilt/Vanguard/index.htm



The warheads are british-built IIRC


----------



## CougarKing

Colin P said:
			
		

> They sold the design of the Tridents to the British did they not, who built them under licence?
> http://www.submariners.co.uk/Boats/Barrowbuilt/Vanguard/index.htm



Well obviously that's because Britain is a long-time close WW2 and NATO ally. Still, from this, are you suggesting that the US govt. may still sell the Flight I _Los Angeles_ class boats to the ROC/Taiwan?

But then again, there was an article on military.com stating that Japan may be allowed to be the first foreign buyer of the F-22; previously I had assumed only the F-35 would be in reach of foreign allies aside from other older plane types. Still, one can't say the same for the Airborne Laser project on a 747 platform that would have been used to shoot down ICBMs or even the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber or even the F-117 stealth "fighter", which would not be in reach of foreign buyers. A nation's self-interest must come first when they decide their own foreign policy relative to that of their allies.


----------



## chanman

Red_Five said:
			
		

> I wonder what will happen when wages begin to rise in China?  I've read reports of 40% wage increases in some companies.  The irony of labour unrest in a "communist" country will be delicious to some and disastrous to others.  Capital is mobile, and no doubt China will have its comparative advantage of cheap labour eroded by the next "giant."  Rising wages drove manufacturing jobs out of North America, so it stands to reason that the same can happen to China.  The question will be whether China can put in place an economy that can survive the resultant loss of manufacturing jobs.   The US and the West in general have other sectors or industries to rely on (service, finance, technology for example) along with a functioning consumer economy.



Well, Rising wages are already moving jobs there as well.  Some labour intensive industries that don't require much capital are moving to neighbouring countries with lower costs (Vietnam, Indonesia).  Manufacturing jobs don't disappear completely so much as the firms are forced to adapt to new competitors.  If your costs are higher, you better be making things that are worth more, or making more things.... etc.  China's advantages over India are less regulatory red tape, and perhaps more importantly, much better infrastructure (power, water, roads, ports).  Being able to move your export goods from the factory to the market is usually a good thing.


----------



## TangoTwoBravo

Chanman,

Agreed.  Other factors such as "stability" can play a part as well, and China looks better for foreign manufacturers than many other nations outside the West that may have cheap labour but uncertain security situations.  Still, you can only adapt so much if your products cost more than competitors. 

I have read that China's workforce of "qualified" workers is not quite as inexhaustible as first thought, and that they are also growing less willing to live in company dorms and work for low wages.  The same labour dynamics that the west saw during the industrial revolution will manifest themselves in China, although they will have unique cultural and political dimensions.

The optimist in me sees great hope for China in that a middle class will rise and demand democratic reforms.   We'll see.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

My friend gets quite a bit of stuff made to order in China. the quality varies greatly from region to region. Parts of China are rapidly improving their production and other parts are not. I also shoot Norinco firearms and have watched a steady improvement in quality of the last 5 years. My latest 1911 Commander from them is quite nice.


----------



## chanman

Red_Five said:
			
		

> Chanman,
> 
> Agreed.  Other factors such as "stability" can play a part as well, and China looks better for foreign manufacturers than many other nations outside the West that may have cheap labour but uncertain security situations.  Still, you can only adapt so much if your products cost more than competitors.
> 
> I have read that China's workforce of "qualified" workers is not quite as inexhaustible as first thought, and that they are also growing less willing to live in company dorms and work for low wages.  The same labour dynamics that the west saw during the industrial revolution will manifest themselves in China, although they will have unique cultural and political dimensions.
> 
> The optimist in me sees great hope for China in that a middle class will rise and demand democratic reforms.   We'll see.



Demands for reform hinge on the level of incompetance.  The big draw of reforms is the ability to hold gov't accountable - something that only really matters when they're totally screwing the pooch.  In that light, the Middle Class can pay for the services they want - better education, medical care, etc.  The skilled workers, esp. the ones you would expect to be in demand are going to be the ones seeing more of rising wages.  Disconent and drive for reform will come from trouble caused by the have-nots - farmers who don't have tenure over their land being evicted by local authorities, unregistered transient workers getting shafted by their bosses (think of the illegal immigrant situation in a US border state and the potential for mistreatment by an employer when the rule of law is less binding)

It is already driving what modest attempts at reform there are - pressure comes from those with the least less to lose.  A skilled machinist in Shenzhen or a financial analyst in Shanghai are probably less likely to cause a ruckus than a small-time farmer whose land is getting confiscated or a construction worker 500km from home who's just found out he's not getting paid after finishing a project.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, is an article from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070220.wcorussia20/BNStory/specialComment/home 


> Notes from underground
> *Don't look now, but Moscow's squaring off with the wrong 'enemy,' says Russian analyst ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY*
> 
> ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY
> Globe and Mail Update
> 
> The attitude of the Russian political class to Europe, and to the West in general, over the latest three to four centuries has always been contradictory, hypersensitive, and extremely emotional. The best Russian political text on the subject remains, even today, Alexander Blok's 1918 poem, The Scythians, with its famous lines about Russia and its attitude toward Europe: "She stares, she stares at you with hatred and with love," and "We will turn our Asiatic snout toward you." Just as 300 years ago, and 200, and 20, Russians know perfectly well that we cannot do without Western technology and investments, and that autarky and an Iron Curtain spell economic and geopolitical disaster for Russia. We understand that Russian culture is an integral part of European culture.
> 
> And yet, the West seems to irritate us by the very fact of its existence. We see it as a psychological, informational, spiritual challenge. We are constantly trying to convince ourselves that the West is inherently hostile and malevolent toward Russia, because this flatters our vanity and helps to excuse our shortcomings and failures.
> 
> If you take any mainstream Russian publication and read the last 100 articles dealing with foreign policy matters, 98 will be full of bitterness, complaints, irritation, poison and hostility toward the West. This despite the fact that most of the authors of those articles like to spend as much time as possible in Western capitals and Western resorts, keep their money in Western banks, and send their children to study in Western schools and universities.
> 
> As in Blok's famous poem, a passionate declaration of love for Europe turns, at the slightest doubt as to whether it is reciprocated, into a threatening "And if you won't, there's nothing we can lose, and we can answer you with treachery!"
> 
> What have "5,000 bayonets" deployed in Bulgaria (about which the Russian President has complained), three airplanes in Lithuania, Kosovo, or the Jew-baiter of Iran to do with anything? The whole lot of them are mere opportunities for the manic-depressive Russian elite to check and recheck its endless love-hate relationship with the West. That existential Russian question, "But do you respect me?" is, in reality, addressed not to our latest drinking partner, but to the starry firmament in the West.
> 
> Last week that question was asked again at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in the latest spiritual striptease show put on by the latest Russian Patient. It doesn't matter what his name is: Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov, Yeltsin, Primakov, Putin . . .
> 
> For some reason, it is considered statesmanlike and patriotic to pout your lips and enumerate before various Western audiences the same old list of "grievances" about the unipolar world, the ABM treaty, the expansion of NATO, the creeping up of NATO, our encirclement by NATO.
> 
> Wake up, intellectual "heavyweights" of Russia. What world and what century are you living in? Where now is that mammoth aggressive military machine of NATO you have so long been warning of? It truly has lumbered up to the sacred borders of the former Soviet Union, but not from the direction you expected.
> 
> 
> Indeed, my fear is that, there, it will meet its end, defending those borders from the advance of Islamic radicals. When to the ululating of those fighting against "a unipolar world" NATO finally departs from Afghanistan and from history, the front of the Islamic revolution will cut through the countries of Central Asia. If we look a little further to the East, there too significant events are afoot.
> 
> As Izvestia recently reported, in September, the Chinese People's Liberation Army conducted a 10-day military training exercise on an unprecedented scale in the Shenyang and Beijing Military Regions, the two most powerful of the seven Chinese MRs. These border Russia -- Shenyang confronting the Russian Federation's Far East Military District, and Beijing the Siberian Military District. In the course of the exercise, units of the Shenyang MR performed a 1,000 kilometre advance into the territory of the Beijing MR and engaged in a training battle with units of that region.
> 
> The nature of the exercise tells us that it is in preparation for war with Russia and, moreover, that what is being planned is not defence but attack. Against Taiwan this scenario makes no sense. Deep invasive operations are being worked out on dry land, in a region of steppes and mountains. The lie of the land in the region where the exercises were held is similar to that of the Transbaikal region, and 1,000 kilometres is precisely the distance from the Russo-Chinese border along the river Argun to Lake Baikal.
> 
> But who is bothered about all that in our little psychiatric hospital? It is far more fun to go on about the usual grievances: bayonets in Bulgaria, Russophobes in Courchevel, calumniators of Russia in Scotland Yard.
> 
> So, there we have it. In the not too distant future, the centuries-old, tortuous psychological relationship between this patient and the West may finally be much simplified. No longer will anybody need to attend psychoanalytical conferences in Munich or turn their special Asiatic snout toward anyone there. Russia's Asiatic streak will be only to clear for all to see.
> 
> _Andrei Piontkovsky is executive director of the Strategic Studies Center in Moscow._



Fortunately, for the Chinese, the Russian _intelligentsia_ is unlikely to be able to shift its focus away from the West.  The _prize_, as I have said before, is the resource treasure house which is in Siberia.  The Chinese are perfectly happy, I think to negotiate and pay for these resources but they intend that they will come to China – one way or another.


----------



## enfield

New Russia - Putin's Russia - has been squaring off with Europe for some time now, and has been working hard to re-assert its control over the former satellite states. Eastern Europe depends on Russia for energy, and Putin has used that to directly control affairs in that region. Russian energy, troops, and money are at work across the Caucuses and Central Asia. 

That said the New Russian Empire remains weak, unstable, and economically unbalanced. But despite its domestic contradictions, shallow resource-based economy, and general mismanagement it's still the biggest guy on the block by far. The domestic intelligentsia seems to believe aggression = independence, and that power = respect. However, Russia can only bully weak ex-Soviet states and will fall very fast if it directly challenges the West.

I don't fear China (militarily, at least). It craves Siberian resources, yes, but they have no problem buying what they want - its still cheaper than invading, and it will be easy for China to assert a monopoly over Siberian oil. I'm not sure its even possible to invade and occupy Siberia.

Militarily, China is in a weak strategic position - Russian to the north, India to the south-west, American allies South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to the east, plus a long coastline with a lot of major cities, a fragmented difficult border in south-east Asia, and huge amounts of territory in the west to control and police. I can't see them getting expansionist anytime soon, no matter how open and weak Russia becomes.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Enfield said:
			
		

> ...
> Militarily, China is in a weak strategic position - Russian to the north, India to the south-west, American allies South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to the east, plus a long coastline with a lot of major cities, a fragmented difficult border in south-east Asia, and huge amounts of territory in the west to control and police. I can't see them getting expansionist anytime soon, no matter how open and weak Russia becomes.



Good analysis, Enfield.  While the Chinese are not interested in going to war with anyone – they are confident they can achieve their goals without armed conflict – they are not terrified of the prospect, unlike so many in the West.

My sense, coloured as it is by contact with too many Chinese academics and business people and too few military people, is that the Chinese are very keen to keep building.  They recognize that they have a long, long way to go.  The _’economic miracle’_ is, largely, confined to cities on the Eastern seaboard.  Most Chinese remain poor and ‘backward’ – in the sense that _globalization_ and the _consumer society_ have not penetrated much beyond Hebei, Henan, Hubei and Hunan provinces.  The folks with whom I have talked recognize that they face a series of hurdles and that jumping them all requires, first and foremost, sustaining the current, steady economic growth, albeit not, probably, at the current rates.  One big stumble, even a moderate recession, could provoke unrest in the provinces and could upset the (unstable) social _’harmony’_ which prevails, for the moment, because the central government is selling ‘hope’ above all.  If we, in Canada, have a _culture of entitlement_ then our Chinese friends have a _culture of *expectation*_ – the central government is, relentlessly, promising everyone, everywhere, that _”every day, in every way, things are getting better and better”_ and _”you will all prosper if you just wait your turn.”_

It is important, however, not to underestimate the power of the _idea_ that *”The East is Red.”*  The slogan resonates in Chinese, with the Chinese.  I was struck in one public school which I visited by the big (mosaic) map which made up one of the main entrance hall walls.  It was a huge world map with China in the middle.  China was formed in bright red tiles.  Neighbouring areas – including Mongolia, Indo-China, Burma, Japan, the Central Asian _‘Stans’_ and Eastern Siberia were made of other varying shades of red tiles which ‘faded’ to a pale pink in Indonesia, Thailand and Siberia East of the Urals.  Europe was green, I think.  I recall that North America was blue, as were Australia and New Zealand.  India was brown, ditto, I think, Singapore and the Philippines.  I saw variations of that map again and again.  The Chinese regard Asia as being divided into: East or Sinic-Asia, South or Indo-Asia, Central Asia and West Asia.  They regard East Asia as their own and the rest as being, to some degree or another, within their _’sphere of influence’_.

Of course, the Indians have a similar view – with themselves at the centre.  Last summer the Chinese were on a major _’charm offensive’_ in India but I haven’t heard much about the state of improvement in relations since.  These two competing ‘visions’ of Asia – with Russia’s _Asiatic_ pretensions and Japan’s economic wealth  thrown in – create a potential for conflict which, I believe the Chinese want and need to minimize.

The last thing the Chinese want or need is war but they are proudly nationalistic and mistakes can happen.


----------



## enfield

Your description of that map immediatley reminds me of The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but I think it also represents a very traditional Chinese view of the region. European Russia is a relative newcomer to the region,and only solidified their power in the region because of the weakness of Imperial China. I think there's little doubt China is aiming at a future where it controls the region, and outsiders - Russia and the US - are pushed out.

I remember a East Asian Politics lecturer at university who described how Chinese notions of imperialism, power, and dominance were very different from the West's. Western concepts revolve around soldiers, governors, and direct control, where China has a more arms-length concept, based on tribute and respect rather than garrisons and gun boats. Trade, migration, and cultural osmosis were often their tools of imperialism, and we see them working again today. 

Thoughts of the Co-Prosperity Sphere remind me of why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour: to safeguard their energy supply. China, which imports nearly all of its energy, may be similarly vulnerable to such fears. But militant 1930's Japan is not 21st China. Most importantly, the Chinese are patient. They will secure East Siberian resources, but I see immigration, treaties, political baragining and money as their tools - slower, but surer.

But I agree, Edward - China's energy and resources are vulnerable, their economy and political structure are dependant on that energy. Mistakes, which happen often, could upset that balance and leave the Chinese leadership with few options. I don't think they could win, but thats not much reassurance.


----------



## Kirkhill

> Notes from underground
> 
> Don't look now, but Moscow's squaring off with the wrong 'enemy,' says Russian analyst ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY
> 
> 
> By ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY
> 
> Tuesday, February 20, 2007 – Page A19
> 
> ......Indeed, my fear is that, there, it will meet its end, defending those borders from the advance of Islamic radicals. When to the ululating of those fighting against "a unipolar world" NATO finally departs from Afghanistan and from history, the front of the Islamic revolution will cut through the countries of Central Asia. If we look a little further to the East, there too significant events are afoot.
> 
> As Izvestia recently reported, in September, the Chinese People's Liberation Army conducted a 10-day military training exercise on an unprecedented scale in the Shenyang and Beijing Military Regions, the two most powerful of the seven Chinese MRs. These border Russia -- Shenyang confronting the Russian Federation's Far East Military District, and Beijing the Siberian Military District. In the course of the exercise, units of the Shenyang MR performed a 1,000 kilometre advance into the territory of the Beijing MR and engaged in a training battle with units of that region.
> 
> The nature of the exercise tells us that it is in preparation for war with Russia and, moreover, that what is being planned is not defence but attack. Against Taiwan this scenario makes no sense. Deep invasive operations are being worked out on dry land, in a region of steppes and mountains. The lie of the land in the region where the exercises were held is similar to that of the Transbaikal region, and 1,000 kilometres is precisely the distance from the Russo-Chinese border along the river Argun to Lake Baikal. ......



http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com//servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20070220/CORUSSIA20/Comment/comment/comment/somnia/

Interesting take on this situation.

I am one of those that find Russia and China to be too friendly by half.  They regularly seem to be working towards a common goal of crippling the west, at least sufficiently to allow them to catch up and not enough to inflict fatal wounds.

On the other hand Molotov and von Ribbentrop were sufficiently friendly in Aug of 1939 to sign a Non-Aggression Pact.  That didn't last 2 years.  Nor did antipathy to the UK and the US prevent Stalin finding common cause for two or three years.  Things in that part of the world have a longstanding tradition of rapid and unanticipated, if not unpredictable, change.  Something like 6000 years or men on horseback with no fixed address.

So how long is China's long game?  If they were to move into Siberia is it enough to sideline the Stans as compliant neutrals - accepting both Western and Chinese investment?  Or do they need a firmer commitment on their left flank?  Do they need to dominate them and have them support a Siberian takeover militarily?

Do they need more man-power than they have? Do they need to wait for the Russians to become older and more decrepit and pickled in Vodka?

Is the purchase of Russian hardware merely a case of using Lenin's dictum that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang himself against the Russians?

While everybody is focusing on the Straits of Taiwan, Czech radars and Afghanistan what would be the effect if the Chinese were to launch an Army, or even a Corps in the direction of Lake Baikal and the Altai?  How about the Urals as a forward line of exploitation?  

I think it might be possible for the Chinese to exploit along the northern border of the Stans as far as the Urals, keeping to the Steppes and have it accepted as a net benefit by the minor neighbours as a security enhancing move.  Better a strong state and order than a weak state and disorder.  

If they stay away from the tree line then militarily they can seize ground quickly - while still staying close to oil reserves - then wait another 10-20 years before considering infiltrating north and following up with an "invitation" to invade from the locals.

Russia wouldn't be pleased, needless to say.  But could it do anything effective beyond nuclear strikes?  India might not be pleased but would it be any worse off than it is now? Especially if the Stans maintain a buffer zone of "neutral" states and India maintains friendly relations with the west and commercial ties with Beijing.  As for the US - might it not serve the US to make loud noises and do little if it buys China a resource base and the US control over a hinterland with a demonstrated history of unpredictability?

Does China need to wait for the US to deploy a working ABM capability in Europe to counter the Russian missile threat to China?

With respect to the latter point I note that the US is likely to have had the technology available for a number of years to kill tanks in large numbers with low cost munitions.  It continued to maintain large tank forces and apparently to suppress the deployment of technologies like the Fibre Optic Guided missiles and Kinetic Energy Missiles.  (Before this goes off on tanget re tanks they still have their uses and we should but the Leo2A6s).  However it would certainly be a winning strategy to keep your enemy investing billions of dollars and man-hours, not to mention investing your entire tactical, operational and strategic structure on a technology that you know you can defeat - easily and quickly.  If you were the only person with a gun would you let everyone know or would you waot to show up at the next sword fight armed like everyone else but with the gun as well?

China's moves against the Satellite may not be so much directed against the US who has many more satellites operating in much higher orbits but against Russian capabilities.

A Russia-China confrontation would be more in keeping with some of the scenarios that Edward has posited and it is also in keeping with what I consider a flaw in Barnett's Gap. He considers China and Russia to be functioning states.  I disagree.  Neither state can control their people (the number of rebellious acts in China's hinterland appears to be growing) and Russia almost certainly can't control its territory.  Even there China's ability to control its borders seems suspect - It couldn't stop people moving to Hong Kong and it can't stop people being smuggled out of Fujian.  Even if we allow for the fact that both of those emigrations may be state-sanctioned because they offer benefits to the state - how are we to explain the fact the China can't stop North Koreans claiming refugee status in China?  And apparently one of China's major concerns in propping up North Korea is that the last thing they need is a sudden influx of more people.

I think the Chinese might be able to pull off a Sudetenland adventure in the near future:

A relatively small but well trained and motivated force with great reserves
Opposed by a small, demoralized, poorly equipped and led Russian force
Limited, non-threatening objectives
An international community with populations that are already war-weary and frightened
And "the British and French, in an effort to appease Hitler, gave into his demands rather than go to war over, in the (in)famous words of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing” " http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/praguepage/introlecture.htm

Add the US to the British and French, especially if the US is tied up in Iraq and Iran, and swap Czechoslovakia and Germany for Russia and China - but with less foreign empathy for Russia than Czechoslovakia could garner.

An interesting window of opportunity in the spring of 2009? After the election of Hilary or Obama and when Canada is due to withraw from Afghanistan?

I hope the US and the West hold on to command of the seas as a counter and to be able to support our friends with secure external lines of communication.  Ceding "control" over billions of people is one thing.  History shows that nobody can control 3 people for very long.  Ceding control over lines of communication in uninhabited space is another matter entirely.


----------



## Kirkhill

No sooner had I finished with the earlier blurb than I read this - in the Democrat friendly Washington Post....

Who might be the preferred "predictable" steward of Eurasian resources?



> Our Strange Devotion to the Kremlin
> 
> By Anne Applebaum
> Tuesday, February 20, 2007; Page A13
> 
> "I have a difficult time explaining that speech. It doesn't accord with either the world as we see it nor with the character of our interactions with the Russians."
> 
> -- Condoleezza Rice, Feb. 15
> 
> Ten days have passed since the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made a speech in Munich accusing the United States of plunging the planet into "an abyss of permanent conflicts," of deliberately encouraging the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and (this from a country that regularly blackmails and manipulates its neighbors) of having "overstepped its national borders in every way." During that time, the American secretary of state -- quoted above -- has not been alone in expressing surprise. With varying degrees of shock, commentators and politicians have speculated about the significance of Putin's "new" language, wondering whether it means Russia's road to democracy has reached a fork, whether Putin was really speaking to his domestic audience or whether the speech heralded some kind of policy change.
> .........



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/19/AR2007021901172.html


----------



## 3rd Herd

Thanks Kirkhill for interrupting my pleasant day dreams about a "Vodka train" holiday. And yes historically they combine to "seem to be working towards a common goal of crippling the west." But are we not just seeing a continuation from 1628.The territorial dispute between the former Soviet Union and China in 1960's was an extension of a long existing conflict, that can be traced back to the 17th century. It broke down when in 1628 the Russians invaded the territory inhabited by the Buryats, a Mongol People living west of Lake Baikal. (author unknown)

Off and on again both the leaders of the slumbering tiger and great bear have fought a war of words, occasionally with weapons. In two countries who both firmly believe in a closed society and therefore a closed boarder area it is difficult to separate reality. Three cases in point:

"In May, 1966, foreign minister Ch'en yi reiterated the Maoist theme in an interview with a group of visiting Scandinavian journalists: the Russians, he said, were thieves who had annexed one and a half million kilometers of Chinese territory in the nineteenth century and even afterward. In October, as the Revolution swirled around the gates of the Soviet embassy in Peking, the Moscow press charged that Chinese troops had begun to fire indiscriminately at Russian ships plying the Amur, and Occidental correspondents in Moscow reported that, according to a Soviet source, organized Chinese "people's" movements in the Amur region and Sinkiang were calling for the return of "lost territories". "

"On March 2, 1969, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed on obscure Damanski (Chen Pao) Island in the Ussuri River, and the Soviets suffered thirty-four killed. Given the heavy Soviet casualties, and the circumstance that only a Soviet border patrol was involved, logic leads to the conclusion that, as charged by Moscow, China initiated the attack."

"The Sino-Soviet border dispute was particularly disturbing since both the USSR and China were now nuclear powers. However, in order to limit the danger of escalation, a tacit bargain was apparently reached that neither side would resort to air power. In the following years, annual rounds of talks were held, all without significant progress. Border provocations occasionally recurred in later years--for example, in May 1978 when Soviet troops in boats and a helicopter intruded into Chinese territory--but major armed clashes were averted."

There are also several interesting articles on Bush's role in this, ranging from Taiwan recognition to Russian bashing. 

Source:

Sino-Soviet Amur Conflict: Historical Background of the Amur Conflict
http://www.american.edu/ted/ice/3sinosov.htm


----------



## CougarKing

I'm sorry to break up this exploration of the China vs. Russia scenario, which is pretty much what Tom Clancy wrote about in his "The Bear and the Dragon" novel, but...

...aren't both mainland China and Russia both members of the Shanghai Six or the Shanghai Cooperative Organization- the Alliance formed between China and a number of Soviet satelites for common security interests- such as counterterrorism?

China has purchased a great deal of Russian arms over the past two decades, including the Sorenemmy class Destroyers as well as around 100-200 Su-27s, not to mention a number of Kilo Class submarines. I doubt the Chinese would want to alienate one of their most willing equipment vendors, even if the Germans used Czech Tank designs such as the Skoda Panzer Tank acquired during the occupation of Czechslovakia in the 1938/Sudentenland example.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Meanwhile the 800lb gorilla in the room is India


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Good analysis, Enfield.  While the Chinese are not interested in going to war with anyone – they are confident they can achieve their goals without armed conflict – they are not terrified of the prospect, unlike so many in the West.
> 
> My sense, coloured as it is by contact with too many Chinese academics and business people and too few military people, is that the Chinese are very keen to keep building.  They recognize that they have a long, long way to go.....
> 
> The last thing the Chinese want or need is war but they are proudly nationalistic and mistakes can happen.



That's more direct contact than I have had but I remain constantly troubled by an anecdote from one of my seagoing buddies in Seattle.  He was in China to repair a component on a western vessel.  Consequently he was down at the dockyards where the tourists don't go.  After a long a busy day he headed for a bar for a couple of beers only to discover it was Karaoke bar full of PLN types in uniform.  All these sailors took their turn at the mike singing along to the popular tunes.  Unfortunately there were no rockers, no babes and no skin on the screen behind - there were old Maoist movies of Banners flying and firm young (uniformed) bodies straining into the future.  And the whole crowd was singing along.

My buddy left - claiming he had a sense of how a Jew in a bar full of Nazis singing the Horst Wesel might have felt.

Only an anecdote - but as you say Edward accidents can happen - and it was the military that got Japan into such hot water in the 1940s.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> That's more direct contact than I have had but I remain constantly troubled by an anecdote from one of my seagoing buddies in Seattle.  He was in China to repair a component on a western vessel.  Consequently he was down at the dockyards where the tourists don't go.  After a long a busy day he headed for a bar for a couple of beers only to discover it was Karaoke bar full of PLN types in uniform.  All these sailors took their turn at the mike singing along to the popular tunes.  Unfortunately there were no rockers, no babes and no skin on the screen behind - there were old Maoist movies of Banners flying and firm young (uniformed) bodies straining into the future.  And the whole crowd was singing along.
> 
> My buddy left - claiming he had a sense of how a Jew in a bar full of Nazis singing the Horst Wesel might have felt.
> 
> Only an anecdote - but as you say Edward accidents can happen - and it was the military that got Japan into such hot water in the 1940s.




Do you mind if I ask which Chinese port that was that your friend went to? The large number of PLAN officers there suggests it was probably Guangzhou, Dalian or Shanghai or Qingdao. When I took a study abroad program to study Mandarin in Beijing, the only military types I saw were individual PLA officers in uniform, aside from People's Armed Police Officers in their distinct green uniforms, which were lighter than the PLA's green work/dress uniforms; the only other PLA stuff I saw were at the People's Military Museum at Jian Guo Men Da Jie/Road to the west of Tiananmen Square.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarKing said:
			
		

> I'm sorry to break up this exploration of the China vs. Russia scenario, which is pretty much what Tom Clancy wrote about in his "The Bear and the Dragon" novel, but...
> 
> ...aren't both mainland China and Russia both members of the Shanghai Six or the Shanghai Cooperative Organization- the Alliance formed between China and a number of Soviet satelites for common security interests- such as counterterrorism?
> 
> China has purchased a great deal of Russian arms over the past two decades, including the Sorenemmy class Destroyers as well as around 100-200 Su-27s, not to mention a number of Kilo Class submarines. I doubt the Chinese would want to alienate one of their most willing equipment vendors, even if the Germans used Czech Tank designs such as the Skoda Panzer Tank acquired during the occupation of Czechslovakia in the 1938/Sudentenland example.



And Russia was training German Paratroops and Tankers in the 1930s before the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty of August 1939 and Operation Barbarossa of June 1941.  The Russians and the Chinese were shooting at each other along the Amur at the same time as they were both opposing the US in the UN.  The Finns found themselves allied with the west to fight the Russians in 1940 then with the Germans to fight the Russians in 1941.  And we shall ignore the conniptions that poor old Poland went through - having no idea who her friends and enemies were from one day to the next.  Treaties don't mean a lot.

As to the exact port I can't honestly remember - I am pretty sure it wasn't Shanghai or the name would have clicked with me.  This happened in the last two years and the tale was relayed to me last year.


----------



## rmacqueen

When looking at any scenario that involves Asia it has to be kept in mind that the two largest holders of American debt are China and India.  This gives them enormous power over any US initiatives as a sudden dumping of US dollars would cripple the economy and could easily plunge the US into a recession, seriously hampering any military action.  Would any US president risk economic ruin to counter Chinese aggression in Asia, especially if it was not a direct threat to American interests?

The other thing to keep in mind when analysing possible scenarios in Asia is the Chinese ideology of self-sacrifice for the greater good.  While we in the west don't accept the idea of winning at all costs, Chinese history is full of stories of sacrifice to reach strategic goals.  China may currently be able to purchase all that it needs but that does not equate to security.  If the leaders in China feel that they need secure resources in "defence" of their country they, IMHO, would not hesitate to risk annihilation in order to achieve it.  Couple that with their traditional disdain of western resolve and it makes for a dangerous mix.


----------



## Exarecr

Wow, interesting stuff, but the prospect of a Indo-Chinese alliance must give the Russians nightmares. All those billions of people out of resources and no direction to go except of course,any direction they damn well please.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

India and China have already clashed and have a border dispute on the low boil, they will trade and talk, but they don't trust each other at all.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarKing said:
			
		

> Do you mind if I ask which Chinese port that was that your friend went to? The large number of PLAN officers there suggests it was probably Guangzhou, Dalian or Shanghai or Qingdao. When I took a study abroad program to study Mandarin in Beijing, the only military types I saw were individual PLA officers in uniform, aside from People's Armed Police Officers in their distinct green uniforms, which were lighter than the PLA's green work/dress uniforms; the only other PLA stuff I saw were at the People's Military Museum at Jian Guo Men Da Jie/Road to the west of Tiananmen Square.



Just got off the phone to "buddy".  He was in Nantong - North Shore of the Yangtze estuary between Shanghai and Nanjing.  Bar crowd was 25 to 45.  Mixture of PLAN uniforms and civvies, men and women.  Many movies of Armed Forces Day parades - goose-steps and missile launcher.  The whole crowd singing along like "Another Saturday Night....."

Traffic in the streets consisted of bicycles, home-made conveyances powered by 2-Stroke Briggs and Stratton knock-offs,  cabs with ratty looking tires and the occasional Mercedes.


----------



## a_majoor

More on China as a potential adversary. Since nations have permanent interests rather than friends, China, like all nations maintains relationships with other nations insofar as that relationship is in her (China's) interest. This explains the seeming contradiction of China's acting in concert with Russia; they are working against a common threat (the United States and the West), even though they otherwise are in competition for the same resource base, territory etc.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view453.html#China



> Nationalists, Communists, and Chinese
> 
> I have said for years, both here and in various conferences and at speeches, that if the Chinese decide to seize Formosa (Taiwan, Taipei, the former Republic of China, whatever name you care to give it), the first move will be the detonation of a sub-megaton nuclear device about 100 miles above the interior of China.
> 
> This will effectively remove all US space assets; some temporarily, some permanently. Since we have no sortie capabilities for replacing them, the US Navy will be effectively blind and unable to operate in the Taiwan Straits and Yellow Sea. Taiwan will fall.
> 
> That may not be the most probable scenario. My old mentor, associate, and partner, Stefan Possony, was once chosen by the Republic of China to argue their case before the World Court; he did well. He was, like me, inclined to favor the Chinese Nationalists over the Communists back in the days when those designations were current and didn't sound quaint. He once told me this:
> 
> "It will be years from now, but one day we and the Nationalists will be standing on one side of a table and the Communists on the other. The Communists will be yelling at both us and the Nationalists. Then we will look away. When we look back, the Communists and the Nationalists will be on the other side of the table and both will be yelling at us, and we will not understand what happened."
> 
> Possony was one of the most astute analysts of historic trends who has ever lived. He was one of the architects of the eventually successful Containment strategy (See The Protracted Conflict) and was of course the principal co-author of The Strategy of Technology (The chapter on Surprise was very much his); his views have always been worth taking seriously.
> 
> Whatever the future, we have a lot at stake in the Far East.
> 
> If you have any interest in that subject, go read:
> 
> http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20070211-102909-6598r.htm
> 
> This was recommended to me by both a high tech entrepreneur and a serving naval officer. My entrepreneur friend said
> 
> In terms of threats to our security we finally have an enemy we can both agree on - The Red Chinese Army. I was in NY City last week and some hedge fund managers were talking about the unraveling of the Chinese economy. It drives them crazy when people say the Chinese are capitalists these days. They say there is no capitalism in China. Only state owned industries and foreign companies willing to toe the Red Army line do business in that country.
> 
> This subject is important.


----------



## Bigmac

> China continues to deprive USA of its military predominance
> 
> 21.02.2007 Source:  URL: http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/87639-china_missiles-0
> 
> It is easy to explain the fact that leading centers studying international relations are usually based in most developed Western countries. The latter, as a rule, define modern tendencies in world politics. However, there is an exception from the rule – the Institute of International Research in Denmark. Denmark is a small European country, which can hardly be dubbed as a leading member of international relations. However, the Dutch institute regularly prepares high-quality research works for the international expert community. In February, the center published the results of the missile potential of China.
> 
> When it goes about the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, experts usually pay attention to technologies used for the production of lethal nuclear, chemical and biological weapon. However, any kind of weapons has to be delivered to the point of its destination. The global system of control for the non-proliferation of missile technologies is therefore extremely important in today’s world. The system was founded by the Group of Seven in 1987.
> 
> China is not listed as a member of this initiative. Beijing probably prefers not to burden itself with redundant international obligations. On the other hand, Western countries may try to follow this structure to expose China as a country that does not follow international standards.
> 
> China was not playing an important role on the market of ready-made missiles and missile technologies before the end of the Cold War. The situation changed in the beginning of the 1990s. The Chinese economy took a turn for the market development. The leaders of the Chinese defense complex were allowed to make earnings on their own without state’s participation and control. To crown it all, Beijing was becoming more active in terms of foreign policies.
> 
> China struck its first important deals in the missile industry with Saudi Arabia in 1988 and with Pakistan in 1992. It is worthy of note that the two contracts were signed with USA’s staunch allies. However, the USA did not rejoice over the growing military potential of its friends. Quite on the contrary, the USA lost its monopoly on many technologies which guaranteed the military predominance of the United States.
> 
> The Chinese administration prefers to avoid international scandals. Therefore, China currently sells spare parts, equipment for technical servicing, missile fuel technologies and provides technical support. China’s clients in this industry can be divided into three groups: members of the ‘axis of evil’ (Iran and North Korea for instance), USA’s allies that can bring unpleasant surprises for the superpower in the future (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) and Latin American countries (Argentine and Brazil).
> 
> Chinese officials take certain efforts to join the global system for control of non-proliferation of missiles and missile technologies. If China becomes a member of the organization, the country will be able to access leading technologies of the West.
> 
> Politcom



      China is certainly becoming the next great superpower on the global map. They are business savvy and training on all the latest technologies out there. The Chinese are smart, quiet about their continuing achievements and most notably patient.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is much Chinese internet chatter right now re: the forthcoming government meetings in March and the rather strange official silence which prevails in the face of ongoing Taiwanese _’provocations’_.  People are wondering if, given the 2008 Olympics, this (spring 07) is the last window (until fall 08) for action.

The Chinese people I know are united, almost without exception, in the firm belief that Taiwan is a Chinese province and cannot be an independent, sovereign state.  *“One country – two systems”* is, I believe – based on my observations/conversations, a perfectly acceptable approach, for an overwhelming majority of Chinese, for Taiwan as well as for Hong Kong and, maybe, for Tibet too.

Many Chinese believe America is tied down in Iraq and the _Islamic Crescent_.  The people I have heard say that they are confident that America will not, because it *cannot* engage China militarily or economically to prevent _unification._  Japan and South Korea are focused, almost entirely on North Korea.  Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore has anything to lose if Taiwan becomes a province, like Hong Kong.  Europe – with or without Russia - doesn’t matter.


----------



## Bigmac

> 27 November 2006
> ''Russia-China Security Cooperation''
> Russia and China have joined together in a strategic partnership aimed at countering the U.S. and Western "monopoly in world affairs," as was made clear in a joint statement released by the Chinese and Russian presidents in July 2005. The long standing border disputes between the two countries were settled in agreements in 2005, and joint military exercises were carried out in the same year. Furthermore, Russia, in addition to its arms exports, has been increasing its oil and gas commitments to China. Clearly, the recent comprehensive improvement of bilateral relations between China and Russia is a remarkable development. What is the meaning of this military and security related cooperation, and is the Sino-Russian military liaison likely to expand? Should this rapprochement be considered as a structural shift of power with the goal of repelling Western influence from Central Asia and the adjacent areas?
> 
> Russian-Chinese Military Maneuvers
> 
> In August 2005, for the first time in 40 years, Russian and Chinese armed forces carried out joint military exercises. China took the lead in proposing the size, participating type of forces and content of the maneuvers. Allegedly, China also took care of most of the costs of the exercises. The formal objectives of the mission were to strengthen the capability of joint operations and the exchange of experience; to establish methods of organizing cooperation in the fight against international terrorism, separatism and extremism; and to enhance mutual combat readiness against newly developing threats. [See: "The Significance of Sino-Russian Military Exercises"]


http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=588&language_id=1

    See link for a little more light reading on the relationship between Russia and China. China has now become Russia's big brother in world affairs. China is probably the most disturbed by the missile defense proposal but are using little brother Russia to do their dirty work.


----------



## Kirkhill

The other thing that military exercises do is show you how the other side works, and how well it works.

Would it be unusual for China to "fake" running at American strength (an amphibious assault against the US Navy and Air Force in Defence of Taiwan) while at the same time actually "reversing the field" by sending the PLA against a weak Russia, moving away from American strength?

If they were to make moves on Taiwan, necessitating mobilization and exercises during a period of high tension,  how difficult would it be to actually launch a land offensive against Russia?

Schwarzkopf did something of the sort in Gulf War 1 with the Marines.


----------



## enfield

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Many Chinese believe America is tied down in Iraq and the _Islamic Crescent_.  The people I have heard say that they are confident that America will not, because it *cannot* engage China militarily or economically to prevent _unification._  Japan and South Korea are focused, almost entirely on North Korea.  Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore has anything to lose if Taiwan becomes a province, like Hong Kong.  Europe – with or without Russia - doesn’t matter.



I find that perspective interesting. 

First, the Chinese military remains weak in its expeditionary potential - invading Taiwan would be a bloody and risky affair, even without foreign interference. 
Secondly, Japan and South Korea are neither economic nor military lightweights and US intervention is not necessarily required to make the event a bloody one. As far as I know, Japan more than equals China in high-tech Naval and Air power and combined with South Korea and Taiwan they represent a fairly serious military coalition. 
Third: China is no position to pretend to be a military superpower and throw its weight around when it is completely dependent on imported resources, especially oil, and lacks the means to safeguard those supplies. 
Finally - I'm curious why Chinese decision makers would think the US is too busy to intervene. _Politically_ another war may be difficult to justify, but the _capability_ stands - events in Iraq and Afghanistan barely concern them; the US Navy and Air Force could certainly handle a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The east coast of China certainly doesn't lack for targets. 

Looking at those three points, I'm not sure the potential price of invasion would be worth the gain, and I think China is well aware of it. China is certainly a military power, but more of a defensive power, and her primary strength and greatest weapon is her economic weight and she definitely sees time as being on her side.  

To Kirkhill's question-
In an Siberian Invasion Scenario, with or without a feint at Taiwan, China has two weak areas: the long, open east coast that is home to its wealth, industry, and biggest assets, and its northern border with Russia that is difficult to patrol and occupy. In any war scenario, I think the West, including allies such as Japan, would avoid a ground war with the PLA - there's no need to play to a Chinese strength. The easiest and most obvious target is that long coast line - wide open to air and naval power, both of which are Western (ie, Japan and US) strengths and Chinese weaknesses. While the PLA attempts to invade and occupy Siberia (and good freakin' luck to them!) their coastal infrastructure, shipping, and industrial base will be whittled away. 

In short, wherever China might make a move - east to Taiwan, north to Russia, south into Vietnam or India, or east into Central Asia, I think the American reaction will always be to concentrate on the east coast of China, use its strengths and capitalize on regional allies, and hammer the industrial and resource base rather than try to fight the PLA head on.


----------



## Kirkhill

Enfield said:
			
		

> To Kirkhill's question-
> In an Siberian Invasion Scenario, with or without a feint at Taiwan, China has two weak areas: the long, open east coast that is home to its wealth, industry, and biggest assets, and its northern border with Russia that is difficult to patrol and occupy. In any war scenario, I think the West, including allies such as Japan, would avoid a ground war with the PLA - there's no need to play to a Chinese strength. The easiest and most obvious target is that long coast line - wide open to air and naval power, both of which are Western (ie, Japan and US) strengths and Chinese weaknesses. While the PLA attempts to invade and occupy Siberia (and good freakin' luck to them!) their coastal infrastructure, shipping, and industrial base will be whittled away.



I agree the East Coast is vulnerable.  I am just not sure that the West, and the US in particular would deem it necessary to expend effort on securing resources for Russia, France and Germany.  Especially seeing as how China is at least as capable of honouring a contract as the Russians.  

Also, with respect to the PLA occupying Siberia, I don't know that they need to do that either.  Lots of Chinese in China, cold and crowded.  Lots of Land and trees to burn in Siberia.  Let the PLA deal with the Russian Army - the people of China can take care of the rest themselves.  Use the same strategy the Americans used on Mexico in the 1830s and the Mexicans are using on the Americans today.  Unarmed infiltration by civilians.  All they have to do is move back the Russian border forces, because unlike the Americans, I am pretty sure that they WOULD fire on civilians.


----------



## CougarKing

> south into Vietnam or India


Well the PLA already invaded Vietnam in the brief Feb. to March 1979 Sino-Vietnam War and suffered up to around 26,000 casualties while the Vietnamse suffered around 20,000. They occupied several cities north of Hanoi, including Lang Son and Cao Bang, but eventually withdrew after a month of occupation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-vietnamese-war

China mainly invaded Vietnam in response to a united Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia in 1978, since the Hanoi govt. had decided to oust the Khmer Rouge govt. (China's ally) by invading and occupying the country. Back then, the Communist World was stil in a Beijing vs. Moscow schism with Cambodia as China's ally and Vietnam as the Soviet Union's ally (Soviet warships were known to dock and use Cam Ranh Bay not long after the last US forces left and after the fall of Saigon).  Hanoi grew increasingly distrustful of Beijing especially because of this worldwide Communist Schism, even if China did send around 320,000 anti-aircraft, engineering and logistics troops to Northern Vietnam to help in during the 1960s-70s Vietnam War against the Americans and her allies.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

My only point is that the PLA will think twice before invading their ex-ally again, especially with the increased number of Vietnamese divisions sent to Vietnam's northern border during the past twenty years to guard against another such invasion.




> In short, wherever China might make a move - east to Taiwan, north to Russia, south into Vietnam or India, or east into Central Asia, I think the American reaction will always be to concentrate on the east coast of China, use its strengths and capitalize on regional allies, and hammer the industrial and resource base rather than try to fight the PLA head on.



As for the suggestion that PLAN will be a pushover for the US Navy or US Air Force intending to attack China's East Coast and industrial heartland, I doubt they will continue to be a pushover at the rate they are modernizing as their already large economy continues to grow. Kilo Class submarines and Su-27s  fighters are just the beginning. Within 20-30 years they may have carrier groups patrolling that coast. We must not allow ourselves or our American friends to be complacent and underestimate the Chinese when it comes to the naval front.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarKing said:
			
		

> As for the suggestion that PLAN will be a pushover for the US Navy or US Air Force intending to attack China's East Coast and industrial heartland, I doubt they will continue to be a pushover at the rate they are modernizing as their economy grows. Kilo Class submarines and Su-27s  fighters are just the beginning. Within 20-3o years they may have carrier groups patrolling that coast. *We must not allow ourselves or our American friends to be complacent and underestimate the Chinese when it comes to the naval front.*



Like the Dutchman from ING said - Couldn't have said it better myself.

I don't know if carriers will be the answer in 20-30 years or OHIO SSBN conversions launching long range 250 lb PGMS or it will still be airfields in Japan, Korea and Taiwan..... whatever it turns out to be, we need to keep ahold of the hammer (Edit: from the sea).


----------



## enfield

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Also, with respect to the PLA occupying Siberia, I don't know that they need to do that either.  Lots of Chinese in China, cold and crowded.  Lots of Land and trees to burn in Siberia.  Let the PLA deal with the Russian Army - the people of China can take care of the rest themselves.  Use the same strategy the Americans used on Mexico in the 1830s and the Mexicans are using on the Americans today.  Unarmed infiltration by civilians.  All they have to do is move back the Russian border forces, because unlike the Americans, I am pretty sure that they WOULD fire on civilians.



Agreed - to some extent I believe this is already happening and in the long term there may be a cultural/demographic shift in that region as ethnic Chinese become a large minority or the majority in Eastern Russia. 
However, I don't think invading Russia is ever a good idea - ever - for anyone. 



			
				CougarKing said:
			
		

> Well the PLA already invaded Vietnam in the brief Feb. to March 1979 Sino-Vietnam War and suffered up to around 26,000 casualties while the Vietnamse suffered around 20,000. They occupied several cities north of Hanoi, including Lang Son and Cao Bang, but eventually withdrew after a month of occupation.
> 
> My only point is that the PLA will think twice before invading their ex-ally again, especially with the increased number of Vietnamese divisions sent to Vietnam's northern border during the past twenty years to guard against another such invasion.



I was using Vietnam as a single example (they've also fought India) - they could just as easily push into the entire SE Asia region. The PLA of 1979 is different from the PLA of 2007, and 26,000 casualties don't mean much to the Chinese military. Irony would be the US going to war to protect Vietnam.... 



			
				CougarKing said:
			
		

> As for the suggestion that PLAN will be a pushover for the US Navy or US Air Force intending to attack China's East Coast and industrial heartland, I doubt they will continue to be a pushover at the rate they are modernizing as their already large economy continues to grow. Kilo Class submarines and Su-27s  fighters are just the beginning. Within 20-30 years they may have carrier groups patrolling that coast. We must not allow ourselves or our American friends to be complacent and underestimate the Chinese when it comes to the naval front.



In 20-30 years anything could happen (in 2037 Canada might carrier have battlegroups!) - but in the next five to ten, the US has complete supremacy over the air and waters of the region. Combined with Japan (world's second highest defence budget) and Taiwan and South Korea, they have the eastern seaboard of China wrapped up tightly. A blockade on oil would strangle China - and grind that massive army to a halt - very quickly.

China is certainly strong enough to defend itself (in any element, against anyone) but lacks the ability to project its strength - it lacks a high-tech modern military, in many areas substituting quantity for quality, it lack the resources to support itself, and it is in a weak strategic position, with too many potential enemies around it. An aggresive move by the Chinese military would concentrate its high-value assets in vulnerable positions, whether at sea and on the beaches of Taiwan or on the Siberian steppe, and leave other areas garrisoned but second-rate equipment and troops and open to attack.


----------



## tingbudong

In 20-30 years anything could happen (in 2037 Canada might carrier have battlegroups!)

I agree with this statement completely.  One often reads Chinese development indicators for a number of areas and usually they all predict a rise.  I am not privy to the data that these predictions are based upon, yet I find that many appear to make the assumption that the west is stagnant and is not developing.  Using a military example...In twenty years, China probably will have a carrier battlegroup, but they sure as hell are not going to have 10, nor will they have the 100 years experience of the US Navy in regards to carrier operations.  Personally, I believe oil is their key issue.  A confrontation with China would take place on their doorstep, with US and allied oil reserves safely positioned in the rear.  Pipelines from Central Asia could easily be hit, and sea lanes could easily be closed.  They would be living off their strategic reserves...which would be dedicated to military operations, leaving little for civilian purposes, thus creating some problems for their economy.  I've also believed that the CCP only hold legitimacy because its current ability to bring wealth and prosperity to the middle classes.  As soon as that class can't drive their VW's and their stocks start to go down, they are going to have some serious questions, and they won't be as easily muted as the farmers.  Some Chinese people expresses scary levels of nationalism, but if their pocket book begins to shrink....I don't even think that would save the CCP.

Furthermore, I believe that in a move against Taiwan, China would viewed by the world (with the exception of their two-bit dictator buddies) as the aggressor nation.  If they started utilizing nuclear weapons....all those years trying to build up their reputation, only to have it blasted back to 1960 levels over piece of rock and an inflated sense of nationalism.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chinese threats
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/008977.html

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

This story, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from _Bloomberg.com_, is a couple of weeks old but still pertinent:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aPxLMB78_Xpc 


> Corruption in Chinese Banks to Go On for Decades, Auditor Says
> 
> By William Mellor and Le-Min Lim
> 
> March 22 (Bloomberg) -- China's financial watchdog, Auditor- general Li Jinhua, has a mixed message for the investors who've spent $74 billion on shares in his country's banks since 2001.
> 
> The good news, says the man nicknamed ``Iron Face'' for his perceived incorruptibility and because he rarely smiles in public, is that his campaign against corruption, embezzlement and waste has helped to improve banking practices in the past seven years.
> 
> The bad news: It may be a couple of decades more before the banks' management is acceptable by Western standards.
> 
> ``It would be naive to think that once these state-owned banks are listed publicly they won't suffer any operational problems,'' says Li, 63, whose position at the head of China's National Audit Office gives him cabinet minister rank. ``It might take a whole generation to get these banks into reasonable shape.''
> 
> After three decades of economic growth averaging 10 percent a year, China's boom is still precarious, as the 9.2 percent plunge in mainland Chinese shares on Feb. 27, the beginning of a $3.3 trillion global stock selloff, shows. China's financial institutions hold $161 billion of bad loans, according to the country's central bank. Since 1999, Li and his 80,000 auditors have uncovered $6.4 billion worth of irregularities at state-owned banks.
> 
> *Olympics, Dam*
> 
> While Li is making financial institutions his priority, he's also scrutinizing the accounts of China's other big state-owned enterprises. And he and his team are keeping an eye on the $34 billion of spending on next year's Olympic Games in Beijing; construction projects such as the $22 billion Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric project; government departments; and even the Communist Party itself.
> 
> Li reports directly to Premier Wen Jiabao, who said at a March 16 news conference that corruption cases were increasing innumber and gravity, and involving more senior figures. "No matter how high-ranking the officials involved, we'll make sure they are brought to justice," Wen said.
> 
> Li doesn't flinch at taking on China's biggest state-owned companies. On his to-audit list this year are China Everbright Bank, which is controlled by the State Council, China's Cabinet; state oil company China Petrochemical Corp., or Sinopec; and insurers China Reinsurance Co. and PICC Holding Co. He also plans to view the books of the four asset management companies China set up in 1999 to clean up the big banks' nonperforming loans and to audit four unidentified heads of government-controlled companies.
> 
> ``When pressure comes on in China, it's serious pressure,'' says Allen Blewitt, 55, chief executive officer of the London-based Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants. ``A lesser person would have crumbled. He's vigorous, independent and outspoken.''
> 
> *`Sunshine Cures Diseases'*
> 
> Li says one of his most-effective weapons is exposing wrongdoers publicly. ``We try to make everything transparent,'' he says. ``Sunshine cures diseases.'' Those sent to trial face more than shame: The country's courts can impose life prison sentences or even the death penalty for corruption.
> 
> The ills are widespread, Li says. The National Audit Office estimates that his auditors have exposed 1.74 trillion yuan ($225 billion) in misspent funds over the past 20 years. In 2006 alone, audits of 7,000 state-owned companies uncovered 1 billion yuan worth of abuses, Li said at a meeting of 200 of his top auditors in Beijing in January.
> 
> ``The numbers Li quotes are scary,'' says Blewitt, whose group awarded the auditor-general its global prize for achievement last year. ``On those figures, governments would fall in a Western system.''
> 
> *Discrepancies*
> 
> In a two-hour interview conducted in Chinese, Li says his team unearthed financial discrepancies that ultimately led to the downfall of one of China's leading bankers, Liu Jinbao, and one of the country's most-powerful politicians, Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu, a member of the Politburo, the country's highest policy-making body.
> 
> Li's auditors were also called in to investigate Liu Zhihua, a vice mayor of Beijing in charge of Olympic construction.
> 
> Liu Jinbao, 54, former CEO of Bank of China's publicly listed Hong Kong unit, was given a suspended death sentence in 2005 for embezzling $1.8 million and for being unable to account for almost $2 million in personal assets.
> 
> Shanghai Party Secretary Chen, 59, who's accused of misusing pension funds, and Beijing Vice Mayor Liu, who is said by the official news agency, Xinhua, to have taken millions of yuan in bribes, were both fired. Chen and Liu could not be reached for comment.
> 
> Li also cited two other top-level bank corruption cases as examples of the type of graft his auditors have to fight. They involved Zhang Enzhao, 60, former CEO of China Construction Bank Corp., who was jailed in November for 15 years for accepting 4.9 million yuan in bribes, and Wang Xuebing, 57, who had been president of both Bank of China and China Construction Bank and was sentenced to 12 years in jail in 2003 for taking what Xinhua described as millions of yuan in bribes.
> 
> *`He's a Hero'*
> 
> China's citizens back Li's efforts to root out corruption. ``I think he's a hero,'' says Fu Jie, 40, an office manager in Beijing. ``Given the pressure he must be under, he's shown a lot of courage.''
> 
> The wealth gap between the booming cities of eastern China and the countryside -- where 200 million people still live on less than $1 a day -- has widened, according to the World Bank. Last year, there were about 72,000 protests involving more than 100 people, according to the party's Central Committee for Public Security.
> 
> Still, in a one-party state, it can be hard to differentiate between a genuine corruption drive and a political purge, says May Yan, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Moody's Investors Service. ``Li seems to be one of the objective ones, but the politics are always difficult to see through,'' she says.
> 
> *No. 2 in Bribes*
> 
> Graft is so bad it could even destabilize China's 58-year-old communist regime, says Steve Vickers, CEO of International Risk Ltd., a Hong Kong-based consulting firm. ``If corruption continues unchecked, it's going to bring the roof down on this government,'' Vickers says.
> 
> Transparency International, a Berlin-based advocacy group, ranks China as second only to India in its annual bribe payers' index. Almost 100,000 party members were disciplined last year for bribe taking and other rule breaches, the party announced in February.
> 
> Looking relaxed in a brown jacket over a gray sports shirt, Li says he's undeterred by political pressures. ``We have experienced resistance from auditees because we have made many government departments' private interests suffer,'' says Li, who's 5 feet 6 inches (1.7 meters) tall. ``I am not scared. The constitution has given me the power to do what I have done.''
> 
> *Illegal Acts*
> 
> Li says his office forwards to China's courts about 10 percent of the 2,500 corruption cases they deal with each year. Bank employees also could be caught and reported to the police by the China Banking Regulatory Commission, a financial watchdog established in 2003 under the leadership of former Bank of China Chairman Liu Mingkang.
> 
> At the auditors' meeting in January, Li said his employees last year had uncovered 37 illegal acts involving 55 people at Bank of China, China Merchants Bank Co. and Shanghai-based Bank of Communications Ltd. -- all of which are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Li's office declined to disclose further details.
> 
> The three banks say they haven't yet been officially notified of the auditor-general's findings, so they say they can't comment.
> 
> The misappropriation of vast amounts of money from China's banks has polarized investors, says Arthur Lau, who helps manage $1 trillion at JF Asset Management Ltd., a unit of JPMorgan Asset Management, in Hong Kong.
> 
> *Bank Shares Soar*
> 
> ``There are two types of investor,'' says Lau, who declined to identify his holdings. ``Some will stay away from this sector because of the risk and also the valuation. But others can't get enough of it. I hope and hope there will be fewer and fewer of these incidents going forward, but the accounting system is still not up to par, and you may see some anomalies.''
> 
> So far, the risk has paid off for investors prepared to bet on China's leaky banks. Shares of China's biggest lender, Beijing- based Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., in which Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Allianz SE and American Express Co. have a combined 10 percent stake, soared 41 percent to 4.34 Hong Kong dollars on March 21, from HK$3.07 on Oct. 26, when the company sold US$22 billion of shares.
> 
> Industrial & Commercial Bank is now the world's 9th-biggest company by market value, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Since their IPOs, beginning in mid-2005, shares of Bank of China have risen 31 percent; Bank of Communications, 215 percent; and China Construction, 89 percent, as of March 21.
> 
> *Impoverished Childhood*
> 
> Li has traveled a bumpy road on his journey to cabinet minister and custodian of China's vulnerable financial assets.
> 
> He was born in Rudong, a coastal township of 60,000 in Jiangsu province, 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Shanghai, in 1943, when most of China was under Japanese occupation and much of the rest was controlled by the Nationalist Party government of Chiang Kai-shek.
> 
> The son of an impoverished pastry cook, Li says his fortunes changed when Mao Zedong's Communist Party came to power in 1949, enabling him to finish his schooling with government support.
> 
> In 1963, Li won a place at Beijing's elite Central Institute of Finance and Economics, later renamed the Central University of Finance and Economics. Among his contemporaries were Jin Renqing, China's current finance minister, and Dai Xianglong, former People's Bank of China governor and now mayor of Tianjin, China's fourth- largest city.
> 
> *Top Student*
> 
> Even amid such company, Li stood out, says Wang Peizhen, 89, who taught finance at the time and still gives tutorials at the university.
> 
> ``It wasn't easy to get into this institute,'' she says. ``It picked 100 students from among tens of thousands. And then, every year, the faculty would pick seven or eight of the most-outstanding students in the graduate class to stay behind as teaching staff. Li was one of those.''
> 
> Wang recalls him turning up at the start of school in a gray cotton jacket, which he wore every day. ``He was among the most down-to-earth students I had that year,'' she says. ``He had no political backing -- none at all. He gained what he did purely through hard work.''
> 
> Wang says that in 1966, as the Cultural Revolution loomed, some students began to turn on her and other teachers. Li, who had joined the party in 1965, never took part, she says.
> 
> The Cultural Revolution prevented Li from taking up the teaching post in Beijing, Wang says. After graduating in the fall of 1966 with the highest grade of ``excellent'' (the others were ``good,'' ``fair'' and ``fail''), Li was dispatched to the mountainous Shaanxi province, 1,000 kilometers away, to teach at the Northwest Institute of Finance and Economics.
> 
> *First Job*
> 
> In 1971, with the Cultural Revolution still raging, he became an accountant at aircraft factory number 572 in Shaanxi, where he worked for the next 14 years, rising to become the factory's director. In 1978, two years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping came to power in China.
> 
> Deng began introducing a free-market economy, helping spark China's current economic boom. In 1983, Deng also reintroduced the government audits that Mao had allowed to lapse. Auditing is a Chinese tradition going back 3,000 years to the Western Zhou dynasty.
> 
> In 1985, Li became deputy auditor general -- a job he says he was given because of his finance training. At the time, he says, he knew little about government auditing. ``Now I know this profession much better,'' he says.
> 
> So much so that in 1998, Premier Zhu Rongji appointed Li head of the National Audit Office. Since then, Li has been raising its public profile. That year, it held a rare press conference. In 1999, Li published parts of his report to the standing committee of the National People's Congress, China's parliament.
> 
> *Iron Mask Slips*
> 
> In 2004, in a China Central Television poll, viewers voted him the country's economic personality of the year, beating People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan and Yang Yuanqing, then CEO of Lenovo Group Ltd., the technology company that had just acquired the personal computer business of International Business Machines Corp.
> 
> During the live presentation, Li's iron mask slipped. He wept as he told viewers he didn't deserve the award because he could have achieved nothing without his 80,000-strong team spread across China.
> 
> ``The television channel showed a film of how difficult some of the auditors' working conditions were,'' Li recalls. ``There was one whose mother was dying at home, but the auditor was still working in the field. I was very much moved by that.''
> 
> Li, who keeps a miniature, red hammer-and-sickle party flag on his file-stacked desk and who does calligraphy in his spare time, says he's immune to political pressure. ``I am a person who always practices in accord with the law and sticks to principles,'' says Li, whose office in Beijing's Xicheng district is half an hour's drive from Zhongnanhai, the walled compound adjacent to the Forbidden City where China's political leaders live. ``No one can tell me what to do,'' Li says.
> 
> *Confronting Ministries*
> 
> Among his targets are other ministries. Since 1999, Li has exposed officials of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's powerful planning ministry, for diverting funds to buy 9.6 million yuan worth of commercial housing. He's also uncovered evidence that the sports ministry was doing the same thing with funds intended for the Olympics, according to Xinhua.
> 
> The roads authority, Xinhua says, spent $205 million on bonuses, conferences and other indulgences when the money should have gone to farmers for land requisition. Spokesmen for the sports ministry and the Ministry of Communications, which oversees roads, declined to comment. The planning commission didn't return phone calls seeking comment.
> 
> Li's January report said he and his auditors had uncovered 5.4 billion yuan of state budget funds misused by 48 central government departments and their affiliates in 2006. He added that his team had audited 34,000 government and party officials and handed over 116 suspects to judicial departments.
> 
> *Free Rein*
> 
> The government knows there would be international repercussions if it were to try to rein in Li, says Blewitt of the accountants' group. ``If someone started sitting on the auditor- general, it would destroy investor confidence,'' he says. ``At the highest level, they have decided that they have got to give this guy his head.''
> 
> Even when China's state-owned enterprises are listed on the world's stock exchanges, Li and his team still conduct audits. That's because, in most cases, the majority of the shares remain in Chinese government hands, Li says.
> 
> That's good news for foreign investors, says Templeton Asset Management Ltd.'s Mark Mobius, who oversees $30 billion in emerging- market shares, including Chinese state-owned stocks. ``We feel a little more comfortable with the Chinese state-owned companies since not only do you have independent auditors looking at the books, but you also have the government investigative and monitoring agencies looking at them,'' says Mobius, who's based in Singapore. ``It is wonderful what they are doing.''
> 
> *`Continuous Battle'*
> 
> Mobius says he's not worried by Li's prediction that it could take a generation to clean up the banks. ``We know it will be a continuous battle,'' he says.
> 
> China's banks began running up hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans in the 1980s, in large part because the government forced them to lend money to prop up insolvent state enterprises. Local Communist Party committees approved the appointment of branch managers. Risk management and fraud detection were nonexistent.
> 
> In 1998, then President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu decided to clean up the banks as part of a plan to sell shares and attract Western strategic investors. That year, Li says, his audit team examined two of the four biggest banks.
> 
> They found that of 600 billion yuan of bad loans, only 58 percent could be blamed on inherent business risk. ``The remaining 42 percent was due to the improper management of the banks,'' Li says.
> 
> *Bank Bailout*
> 
> Since then, the government has spent 3.5 trillion yuan bailing out and recapitalizing the banks, according to New York- based rating company Moody's Investors Service.
> 
> Starting in 2001, China raised $21.4 billion by selling minority stakes in some banks to international financial institutions such as Bank of America Corp., HSBC Holdings Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, UBS AG and Goldman Sachs, as well as Singapore government-owned investment company Temasek Holdings Pte. Since 2002, Chinese banks have sold $52.4 billion of shares in public offerings.
> 
> Wang Zhaowen, Bank of China's Beijing-based spokesman, says earlier fraud and embezzlement scandals have hurt his bank's image.
> 
> *Bank of China*
> 
> The biggest to come to light so far: embezzlement over a nine- year period from 1992 to 2001 of $482 million from a Bank of China branch in Kaiping, a small town in Guangdong province, about 110 kilometers west of Hong Kong. Three Kaiping managers were arrested in the U.S. in 2002 and 2004. One, Yu Zhendong, 44, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was returned to China, where he was jailed for 12 years, according to Xinhua.
> 
> The two others, Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun, remain in jail in Las Vegas, awaiting trial on charges of racketeering, money laundering and visa fraud. In a jailhouse interview with Bloomberg News, they denied the charges and claimed they were framed.
> 
> In January, a Hong Kong couple, Hui Yat-Sing and Wong Suet-Mui, both 48, were convicted by a Hong Kong court of money laundering in connection with the case. The pair, who denied the charges and planned to appeal, were jailed for six and a half years.
> 
> Bank of China wrote off the $482 million, according to its share sale prospectus. The 2003 arrest of Liu Jinbao happened after the 2002 listing of Bank of China's Hong Kong unit, which Liu presided over, but before the sale of shares in the mainland parent.
> 
> *Hurting the Brand*
> 
> ``It really affected the Bank of China brand,'' spokesman Wang, 53, says. ``But after our banking reform and restructuring, we have plugged the holes in our system and installed strict accountability, so that should anyone think of committing these crimes, they really have to consider the costs of doing so.''
> 
> One of the National Audit Office's longest-running assignments has been going through the books of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games and the government bodies and companies that have been building the stadiums and other construction projects that are transforming China's capital.
> 
> The Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress last June fired Liu Zhihua, the Beijing deputy mayor in charge of overseeing major Olympic construction, and stripped him of his party membership for taking millions of yuan in bribes, ``depraved behavior'' and obtaining project contracts for his mistress, according to Xinhua.
> 
> *After the Olympics*
> 
> Li says his investigations so far have found that Liu's alleged crimes had nothing to do with the Games and that Olympic organizers are in the clear. Liu could not be reached for comment.
> 
> Li, who turns 65 in July 2008, says he won't start thinking about retirement until then. That means he could be around to audit the final receipts after the Olympic Games end in August of that year.
> 
> Until then, those who cross paths with Li -- even old friends -- had better keep their books in order. Guo Yucheng, head of the finance and economic secretariat at Li's alma mater, still recalls the day six years ago when Li was invited back to give a speech. Afterward, instead of sending a note of thanks for the invitation, Li sent his auditors in to check the books, as part of a broader nationwide audit of educational institutions. ``To everybody's surprise, the poorest department was the department of accounting,'' Li says with one of the broad smiles he never shows in public. For once, the iron-faced auditor didn't find any wrongdoing.
> 
> _To contact the reporters on this story: William Mellor in Beijing at wmellor@bloomberg.net Le-Min Lim in Hong Kong at lmlim@bloomberg.net _



A couple of points I think are important:

•	The road to prosperity is still full of potholes and the ‘car’ could come a cropper;

•	The Chinese administration is well aware of this and have, in the person of Mr. Li, started remedial action; and

•	Mr. Li enjoys some of the same status as Ms. Fraser does here – _’China's citizens back Li's efforts to root out corruption. ``I think he's a hero,'' says Fu Jie, 40, an office manager in Beijing. ``Given the pressure he must be under, he's shown a lot of courage.''’_


----------



## Edward Campbell

Mods: please consider merging  ’China to strengthen military’ and ’China vs Russia with this thread.  I think they are related and there is, indeed, some overlap.

Perhaps the resultant ‘Chinese super-thread’ could be named something like “China: Friend or Foe?”

Any objections from other members?

Thanks


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Mods: please consider merging  ’China to strengthen military’ and ’China vs Russia with this thread.  I think they are related and there is, indeed, some overlap.
> 
> Perhaps the resultant ‘Chinese super-thread’ could be named something like “China: Friend or Foe?”
> 
> Any objections from other members?
> 
> Thanks



Seconded.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Mods: please consider merging  ’China to strengthen military’ and ’China vs Russia with this thread.  I think they are related and there is, indeed, some overlap.
> 
> Perhaps the resultant ‘Chinese super-thread’ could be named something like “China: Friend or Foe?”
> 
> Any objections from other members?
> 
> Thanks



IMHO, there are many issues surrounding mainland China and simply putting them into one thread just doesn't cut it for me. Issues involving Chinese politics such as political dissidents, the Taiwan issue, the Tibet issue, the Xinjiang issue, and Political Reform could under one thread. Issues that deal with PLA defense procurements, NORINCO's advances, the Shanghai Six/Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the current Chinese Naval buildup thread could also go under one thread.

Other members might disagree since it's all the same to them, but I feel all these China issues merit more than just one superthread.


----------



## tomahawk6

Chinese power is built on a house of cards. They barely require mention at all. Too many people want to puff the Chinese up into a superpower when they are nothing more than a regional power with nuclear weapons. Gotta keep your eye on the ball - radical islam.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Chinese power is built on a house of cards. They barely require mention at all. Too many people want to puff the Chinese up into a superpower when they are nothing more than a regional power with nuclear weapons. Gotta keep your eye on the ball - radical islam.



With all due respect, you probably mean "they are NOT YET a superpower", but from the current rate their economy is growing, they will be a superpower within the next 50 years, provided the Chinese Communist Party can keep stability. During my study abroad program in Beijing, a  _Bei Da _ professor named Dr.  Pan Wei once lectured to us that he foresaw Chinese GDP per capita and standard of living reaching on par with US incomes and standard of living by the mid 2020s. And mind you, this guy is considered to be more of a moderate. He advocates that in order to keep power without sacrificing economic growth, that the Beijing govt. must follow a system similar to that of Singapore, which also has a One-Party System as well as a prosperous economy. Dr. Pan Wei advocated what was called a "Rule of Law Regime", which called for the following features:

1.) A one party-system which had  a civil service which advanced through Merit
2.) an independent anti-corruption agency like those agencies both Singapore (the CPIB) and Hong Kong (the ICAC) has
3.) though it was a one party system, there was a separate judiciary

Singapore's CPIB info
http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm

Hong Kong's ICAC
http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm

Dr. Pan Wei's "Rule of Law Regime"
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/content/qy59mu0p3fpfqx3j/

Source: Pan, Wei (2003). Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China
In Journal of Contemporary China, 12(34), pp. 3-43. 
Location: Journal of Contemporary China 

Thus China's CCP wanted to use Singapore's People Action Party as an example of how a one-party regime could survive in a modern world where the trend was thought to be going toward multiparty, liberal democracies. 

Thus, the CCP is observing and adapting, while ensuring that nothing interferes with the nation's continuining economic prosperity. The large amount of corruption in China's govt. may indeed make that govt. a "house of cards", but if the CCP consolidates like Singapore's PAP did under all those decades of prosperity under Premier Lee Kuan Yew, then the CCP may yet survive and make China a superpower.  The fact that the Chinese also makes a large portion of Singapore's current population makes their system more attractive to Beijing, since it proves it can work with Chinese people.

(One more thing...Dr. Pan Wei obviously profits from his political consultation to the govt., since he drove an Mercedes SLK to class)


----------



## Kirkhill

T6 - I don't like to indulge overmuch in conspiracy theories but I don't necessarily consider China and Radical Islam as disconnected.  I don't see a central organizing principle within radical islam, a clearly defined centre of gravity.  Osama and Co in caves don't strike me as having the necessary structures in place to keep the heat on.  

By contrast, while I don't see China launching any major invasions in the near term (and that includes Taiwan), I do see an opportunity for them to continue to do everything possible to slow down the West and simultaneously manage their internal problems by making the external world as unattractive as possible.

Back to Suvorov's "The Liberators".  In 1968 Czechoslovakia wanted to leave Moscow's orbit.  So did Romania.  Only Czechoslovakia was invaded.  As Suvorov put it - nobody was trying to defect from Russia to Romania.  The more "democracy" looks to mean insecurity and bloodshed the less attractive it may become to those folks arguing for it in China......and elsewhere.  

While I don't think China is orchestrating world events I do think it might find advantage in outcomes that are contrary to the West's notions of successful outcomes.  And I think they will find fellow travellers in many parts of the world.

Therefore a China-centric prism tends to bring a lot of issues into a different focus that might be worthwhile noting.

Cheers.


----------



## tomahawk6

China's economic success is tied to the export market. Anything that hurts China's trading partners hurts China. Radical islam is not exactly business friendly and would ban many of the goods that China makes. China could insulate itself a bit by building up its domestic markets but its foreign capital that China needs.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China's economic success is tied to the export market. Anything that hurts China's trading partners hurts China. Radical islam is not exactly business friendly and would ban many of the goods that China makes. China could insulate itself a bit by building up its domestic markets but its foreign capital that China needs.



True.

Apparently they Chinese realize that as well- that they need foreign capital. Their Foreign Exchange Reserves just surpassed those of Japan recently, as the ff. articles show:

http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/story_english.jsp?id=001007745

http://www.hangseng.com/hsb/eng/mar/eu/hsem/m1005e.pdf

And note that they even in the late 1990s, their foreign exchange reserves were substantial enough for them to buy the plethora of foreign equipment they now possess, including those French-made Crotale SAM launchers and Dauphin ASW Helos their PLAN Frigates have aboard, as well as those 8 Kilo Class Submarines and over 150+ Su-27s/J-11s from the Russians. 

In the book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recounts that as he was giving Bush's cabinet a briefing about Al-Qaeda before 9/11, Clarke remembers Rumsfeld as saying why are we "swatting flies" like Al Qaeda when there were bigger potential adversaries to watch out for at the time, such as China and Iran. One can infer that Clarke quoted Rumsfeld as saying that since he wanted to make the point that Bush's cabinet- the "Vulcans" as Brookings figure Ivo Daalder calls them- never took Al-Qaeda seriously before 9/11 and even after it, since they only saw nation-states as Iraq or Iran as the biggest threat rather than sub-state actors like Al-Qaeda, which is probably one of the reasons they rushed to attack Iraq- but that is the subject of another thread.

Rumsfeld may be gone now and the current US administration discredited for its handling of Iraq, but just because radical Islam is the current enemy doesn't mean one should dismiss China altogether as another credible threat to the US/West just because they are just as dependent on international trade as we are.


----------



## a_majoor

CougarShark said:
			
		

> In the book "Against All Enemies", Richard Clarke recounts that as he was giving Bush's cabinet a briefing about Al-Qaeda before 9/11, Clarke remembers Rumsfeld as saying why are we "swatting flies" like Al Qaeda when there were bigger potential adversaries to watch out for at the time, such as China and Iran. One can infer that Clarke quoted Rumsfeld as saying that since he wanted to make the point that Bush's cabinet- the "Vulcans" as Ivo Daalder calls them- never took Al-Qaeda seriously before 9/11 and even after it, since they only saw nation-states as Iraq or Iran as the biggest threat rather than sub-state actors like Al-Qaeda, which is probably one of the reasons they rushed to attack Iraq- but that is the subject of another thread.



I think what Rumsfeld is alluding to is the fact that all insurgencies require a "safe haven" from which to operate, and that nation states provide the best possible safe haven since they have the logistical muscle that non state actors lack. Hezbollah and Hamas or the Shiite militias in Iraq are certainly  dangerous due to their ability to access Iranian money, equipment, intelligence, Revolutionary Guard trainers and mentors etc. etc. Funding for the AQ can be traced to Saudi Arabia's ruling class and as mentioned, China has an interest in certain outcomes, although I would expect them to be far more indirect and subtle. A military or economic blow against Iran would affect the AQ and their fellow travellers far more effectively than killing or capturing any number of AQ leaders and members.

As far as China is concerned, as long as we look at their actions through the prism of Chinese "permanent interests", then we should understand what they are up to and perhaps be able to predict their possible range of actions. We also need to remember that China is not a "friction free" state, and there are many internal challenges such as demographic imbalance, endemic corruption, resource shortages and vastly unequal wealth distribution to overcome in order to remain a viable state, much less become a superpower.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China's economic success is tied to the export market.



Surprising? Not really. One of the reasons why China must not be dismissed as merely a "regional/economic power", since economic growth increases China's influence in the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070412/ap_on_bi_ge/wto_china



> WTO: China overtakes U.S. in exports
> By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
> Thu Apr 12, 7:47 AM ET
> 
> GENEVA - China surpassed the United States as the world's second-largest exporter in the middle of last year, according to figures released Thursday by the        World Trade Organization, and the Asian country is pulling further and further ahead.
> 
> Export growth from China boomed 27 percent last year, outpacing all other major trading nations, the WTO said in releasing its first batch of global trade statistics for 2006.
> 
> While China finished behind Germany and the United States in total exports for the full year, it overtook the United States in the last six months of 2006 and will almost certainly finish above the U.S. in the 2007 totals.
> 
> At current growth rates, China is projected to overtake Germany as the world's biggest exporter in 2008.
> 
> "China's merchandise trade expansion remained outstandingly strong," the WTO said in its 21-page report. "Office and telecom equipment continued to be the mainstay of Chinese export growth, but significant gains in world market shares in 2006 could be observed in 'traditional' exports such as clothing and 'new' products such as iron and steel."
> 
> The WTO report comes at a time of rising tension between China and the United States and some of the findings will surely fuel debate that Beijing's trade policies are preventing American goods from entering its vast market. U.S. critics accuse the Chinese economy of benefiting from an undervalued currency, illegal government subsidies, unfair barriers to foreign competition and widespread piracy.
> 
> The United States filed two new complaints against China at the WTO on Tuesday over copyright policy and restrictions on the sale of American movies, music and books — the culmination of years of agitation in Washington over one of the world's biggest sources of illegally copied goods ranging from DVDs, CDs and designer clothes to sporting goods and medications.
> 
> The new cases are the latest move against China by the Bush administration, which is trying to deal with America's rising political anger over its soaring trade deficit that set a record for the fifth consecutive year in 2006 at $765.3 billion. The U.S. imbalance with China grew to $232.5 billion, the highest ever with a single country.
> 
> The WTO report said China's imports rose 20 percent last year to $792 billion — a surge that was "faster than global trade but continued to lag behind export growth."
> 
> The commerce body partly attributed the weaker import figures to lower oil prices, but did not cite any other factors. The WTO tends to avoid issues tied to energy or currency valuation.
> 
> Since 2000, China has more than doubled its share in world merchandise exports to 8 percent. Those figures do not include the goods sold abroad by Hong Kong producers because the "special administrative region" entered the WTO as a separate member in 1995 while still under British rule.
> 
> Overall real goods trade throughout the world achieved 8 percent growth in 2006, the highest in six years, the report said. High prices for fuels and metals meant the trade expansion was 15 percent when measured in monetary terms, reaching $11.76 trillion.
> 
> "The strong performance in 2006 is welcome, particularly the gains made by developing and least-developed countries," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said.
> 
> The world's poorest countries boosted their trade by about 30 percent, fueled by sales of petroleum and other basic commodities. Developing nations as a whole increased their share of global goods trade to a record 36 percent.
> 
> Europe recorded its strongest growth in merchandise exports since 2000, but continued to lag behind the global rate of expansion, the report said. Even as its trade deficit soared, the U.S. recorded its best export growth in more than a decade.
> 
> Africa's goods exports rose 21 percent to give the continent its highest share of global trade since 1990, but most of the growth was due to increased oil sales, the WTO said. Latin America's commercial expansion decelerated slightly, while Asia remained the most buoyant of all regions for exports.
> 
> For 2007, the WTO predicted that a slowdown in global economic growth to 3 percent could also keep real goods trade growth to about 6 percent. Risks facing financial and property markets, and the large trade imbalances in goods and services have raised the level of uncertainty for this year and the likelihood of weaker trade expansion, WTO economists said.
> 
> Lamy said the current round of global free trade talks, which have stumbled through nearly six years, could help stabilize the global trading system.
> 
> "The uncertainties that lie ahead are a warning for us not to lose sight of the need to continue to reform the world economy," he said.
> 
> Top trade officials from the U.S., the        European Union, Brazil and India said Thursday they were making progress in talks aimed at reviving treaty negotiations, but many months of inaction have dimmed prospects for a breakthrough.


----------



## tomahawk6

China may be a competitor but they are nowhere near the threat that radical islam is. Their economy while making progress is a generation or two behind the western economies.Their great rural population has not been included in the economic boom seen in the large cities. This is creating a large under class that the government is already having problems with. If the government cannot find a way to bring the rural population along with the rest of the population it could be the foundation for another revolution.


----------



## Kirkhill

A Times' columnist's take on the scramble for Africa by the New Imperialists: China and Russia.  I still think there is a "market" for the Old Imperialists, especially as the locals get a better look at the new ones. (Edit: and with 50 years of experience of the local aristocracy.)



> A century on, the new scramble for Africa
> 
> Our columnist is troubled by oil and water
> 
> Camilla Cavendish
> Oil doesn’t just power our lives. It also fuels violence. The new scramble for Africa – about 120 years after the first one – is inflaming conflicts that could dog the rest of this century. This remake of history could have some even nastier endings than the Victorian version.
> 
> On Tuesday Russia and China were accused by Amnesty International of breaching international law by arming the Sudanese militias that have murdered almost 300,000 people in Darfur in the past three years. Russian helicopters and bombers have been used to strike targets in Darfur. Some of these planes were apparently painted white, with UN lettering. So while the UN debates whether to send in peacekeepers, and tries to isolate the Sudanese regime orchestrating the genocide, two of the five permanent members of its Security Council are aiding and abetting that regime. And someone is brazenly forging the UN’s signature....





> ....The problem there is that the Sudanese regime has been emboldened by the Chinese pipeline that sucks out 350,000 barrels a day. It has defied every UN initiative to resolve the Darfur crisis. The refugee camps grow daily, and the conflict is spreading to Chad and the Central African Republic.
> 
> In the midst of this untold misery, China’s President is reported to have promised to finance a new presidential palace in Sudan. If that is true, it would be a tragic return to the old cliché that aid funds despots and their palaces. *Paradoxically* this comes just as Western aid agencies have finally started to demand more accountability from dubious governments.....



Nothing "paradoxical" about it.  The "other guys" are supplying the better deal. No strings and all the kickbacks you ever wanted..... Time to re-invigorate the Commonwealth as a counter. 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article1769266.ece

A good read, if contentious in spots.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Time to re-invigorate the Commonwealth as a counter.



I SECOND that suggestion. Perhaps the Commonwealth should be developed into a military alliance similar to NATO, but that's the topic of another possible future thread.


----------



## Flip

One word  INDIA.

India is a natural enemy for the Chinese.

India also has warmed up to the west of late.

In 20-30 years?

Hmmmm


----------



## rz350

On a side note, if China invaded Russia, do you think Russia would have real reservations about causing mega deaths via their potent Nuclear forces? I do not think they USA, Britain or France would pull them selves into a Nuclear cluster**** over China, which thus leaves Russia with a very strong upper hand on China, as Chinese Nuclear Forces have no where near the level of Russian Nuclear power. For this reason, I do not see China invading Sibera, I think they would aim for something like Vietnam to the South, where no one really would interfere with them to any hard level. (its not worth while for any world power to enter war with China over Vietnam)


----------



## Kirkhill

> Chinese Nuclear Forces have no where near the level of Russian Nuclear power



Is that a true statement?  Given the standard of care of Russian technology, the availability of scientists and technicians, general maintenance of facilities, Quality Assurance testing of weapons in storage, the requirement to rebuild, replace and develop new weapons is it necessarily reasonable to assume that the arsenal that Russia held on to in the 90s is still as effective as it was?

By contrast China seems to be advancing technologically........many more Chinese businessmen with cameras taking photographs at western trade shows than Russians and many more western factories being built in China.

Is it a safe bet for the Russians that they can outshoot the Chinese?  I don't think so.

Having said that - while I agree that the west might be inclined to stand back in the event of a conventional Russo-Chinese war contained within their borders I can't see them being as laisser-faire about a nuclear exchange which by its nature would have implications beyond their borders.


----------



## CougarKing

rz350 said:
			
		

> For this reason, I do not see China invading Sibera, I think they would aim for something like Vietnam to the South, where no one really would interfere with them to any hard level. (its not worth while for any world power to enter war with China over Vietnam)



Rz530,

Have you even read my previous post about the Chinese 1979 invasion of Vietnam???? The Chinese are unlikely to try that stunt again especially since they are currently on good diplomatic terms with Hanoi, although Hanoi and Beijing have always mistrusted each other.



> Well the PLA already invaded Vietnam in the brief Feb. to March 1979 Sino-Vietnam War and suffered up to around 26,000 casualties while the Vietnamse suffered around 20,000. They occupied several cities north of Hanoi, including Lang Son and Cao Bang, but eventually withdrew after a month of occupation.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-vietnamese-war
> 
> China mainly invaded Vietnam in response to a united Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia in 1978, since the Hanoi govt. had decided to oust the Khmer Rouge govt. (China's ally) by invading and occupying the country. Back then, the Communist World was stil in a Beijing vs. Moscow schism with Cambodia as China's ally and Vietnam as the Soviet Union's ally (Soviet warships were known to dock and use Cam Ranh Bay not long after the last US forces left and after the fall of Saigon).  Hanoi grew increasingly distrustful of Beijing especially because of this worldwide Communist Schism, even if China did send around 320,000 anti-aircraft, engineering and logistics troops to Northern Vietnam to help in during the 1960s-70s Vietnam War against the Americans and her allies.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
> 
> My only point is that the PLA will think twice before invading their ex-ally again, especially with the increased number of Vietnamese divisions sent to Vietnam's northern border during the past twenty years to guard against another such invasion.



And I doubt China would nuke the Vietnamese while they are invading that country.


----------



## a_majoor

China faces the same problem Imperial Japan faced in the 1930's: go north into Siberia and access the rich but untapped resources there or go soouth and grab the already developed resources of the European Empires. There was almost a civil war over this question, with the Imperial Army faction backing the Siberia option while the Imperial Navy looked south.

Two things decided the issue (and incidentaly WW II); the Imperial Army received a drubbing at the hands of the Red Army in Mongolia, and the fact that Japan did not have the capital resources required to develop the virgin resources of Siberia.

China will face similar issues. They already access developed resources throughout the world (i.e. Sudanese oil) but are aware this is terribly vulnerable to interruption. On the other hand, China does not have the capital base to develop Siberian resources (although they have a trillion dollars to hire Western companies to do it for them  >). This would also leave them vulnerable to Russian interference and at the mercy of Western industry. Although Western companies have shown a shameful record of bowing to Chinese demands, this may not always be the case, and I suspect the Chinese will work to avoid that scenario.


----------



## Long in the tooth

The Russia/China conflict is complicated by others with stakes in the issue.  These include Japan, Iran, India and Pakistan.  Not to mention Tiawan and the USA.  The European countries also have unique affiliations with the various factions - the Germans with Iraq and French and Russians with Iran (to greater or lesser extent).  I seriously doubt that either the Russians or Chinese would actually start a shooting war but use threats and coercion on and for their proxies.


----------



## Kirkhill

> I seriously doubt that either the Russians or Chinese would actually start a shooting war but use threats and coercion on and for their proxies.



Essentially back to the chronic, low grade fever of the Cold War....a position I agree with.  Personally I think that this is China's preferred method of warfare, coupled with a patient economic policy and diplomacy.  Russia has historically been more of "bear" in a china shop but Putin comes from another side of the house.  I believe that he believes that the KGB and their "friendship" societies which allied Soviet interests to disaffected westerners were, and still are, a much more effective weapon than all of the money spent on tanks and missiles.  Curiously he is a "soft power" advocate - but one with a ruthless streak and a willingness to employ "other means".

PS.  The Islamists seem to be trying to play the same game, out of necessity ...... the question that is unanswered as far as I am concerned is:  are all three following common strategies independently or are the Islamists being coached?


----------



## Long in the tooth

The cold war is a good comparison, but I prefer the period of the late 1800s when the 'Great Game' was being played by the Europeans, Japanese and Americans around the world, especially in Africa.  I think that WW 1 was a miscalculated extension of the Boer War.  If Queen Victoria had reigned in 1914 she would have slapped some sense into her nephews.  My parents lost 4 uncles in that war, so a cloak and dagger, low level conflict at least offers the prospect of fewer casualties (I hope).


----------



## rz350

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Is that a true statement?



If I recall, just off my head, China has about 600 nuclear weapons vs ~2200 for Russia. Russian has the SS-18 Missile with its 10 MIRV capability, and its TOPOL with its ninja moves that avoid anti missile missiles. China has  operational ICBMs, which are not MIRV. The Russian missiles also have a CEP of about 250 yards, vs 3500 yards for the Chinese Missiles. So the Russians can put a Nuke right on top of China's silo, but not vice versa.
Russia also has the Supersonic heavy bomber Tu-160 blackjack to deliver these weapons, China has some fighters, but no supersonic strategic bombers.




http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/index.html is a rough overview of it, but I'm kind of a nerd for this stuff and Like to read up on it. So alot of it is from memory.

EDIT: better numbers: China has 128 ICBM's and 12 SLBMs. They are non MIRV, so its 128+12 in their amount of deliverable Missiles, as their bomber fleet is somewhat (very) lame.

Russia can deliver1748 warheads by ICBM.
609 can be delivered from SSBN's
and bombers to carry and deliver 884 Air fired Cruise Missiles.


----------



## Kirkhill

rz350, I think what I was more questioning was not so much the numbers as whether or not the rockets will ignite when the button is pushed, fly where they are intended and detonate on command.  I have a fairly jaundiced view of Russian technical capabilities having seen how they treat their fishing vessels in comparison to the Americans and Norwegians.  Frankly I don't have a much better opinion of the Chinese and their knock-offs but somebody obviously does because they keep selling them on the international market.

and WOG:  You're right.  The Great Game is a better analogy.


----------



## rz350

Both the numbers I gave above are estimates of WORKING and capable numbers. Russian Forces suffered a lot in the mid nineties, however, the Nuclear forces where maint to a high standard, as its their main capability to keep China/NATO/USA/the various -istans/whoever out of their nation.

And since Putin took office, Russian forces are getting alot more funding.

As far as my Google research tells me, Russian Nuclear power is FAR superior to Chinese Nuclear power, its only at all competed with by the USA, this may be because everyone else keeps just a deterrent, but Russia and USA seem to have offensive Nuclear capabilities, as opposed to just reactionary.


----------



## Kirkhill

Thanks rz350.  I'll take your point as read.

Regardless, I still think it would be a mug's game for either one of them to go nuclear - and they know it.


----------



## rz350

I think it would be a dumb thing to do too, but I can see Russia doing it, if they believe they can not hold them back with ground forces, as they would then have nothing to loose.


----------



## Long in the tooth

Under the old ABM treaty between the USA and Soviets they were only permitted ABMs around their capitols.  Of course, the US has long abrogated the treaty and is placing them in Alaska, the UK and other places.  What is the state of Russian ABMs?  I don't like to reference Tom Clancy, but in The Cardinal of the Kremlin the Americans have difficulty with producing enough energy, whereas Russia has difficulty with accuracy.

We know that the Russian population is imploding, but soon the Chinese will have the social problem of 30 million unmarried men roaming around.  Russians still win a good proportion of Nobel prizes and crank outengineers from their technical schools (Chernobyl notwithstanding).  China only produces the same number of technical grads as France or the UK, despite the 20 times difference in population.

Russia retains a formidable nuclear underwater fleet and recently launched a new class of submarine, on a par with western platforms.  The end of the cold war enabled Russia to rationalize its weapons and scrap older systems on land, sea and air.  We used to joke about their fighters being built from steel with tube radios, then realized they could survive the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear strike.  The Americans spent a million dollars to develope a pen that would write in zero gravity.  The Russions used mechanical pencils.

My bet is the Russians would sustain any strategic losses as they always have and massively retaliate against any aggressors.  As for conventional warfare, it's a long approach march to Novosibirsk or Omsk.


----------



## GAP

Don't forget that little test the Chinese did last winter....something about blowing a satellite out of orbit. They are also developing their own GPS system, with one in place at present. 

One more set of options.


----------



## Bert

Putin is making some interesting changes and consolidations in Russia.   An
article from Stratfor suggests a resurgence in Russian strength.

Geopolitical Diary: Restructuring the Russian Military?
11 May 2007
www.stratfor.com

Rumors about the dismissal of Russian air force commander Gen. Vladimir Mikhailov began circulating late Thursday after Interfax news service reported the general had been fired, citing unnamed Defense Ministry sources.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked hard during the last two years to consolidate his economic, financial, political and social power, but he has yet to reign in the military, the leaders of which have historically enjoyed much political power. Neither the air force nor the Kremlin has confirmed Mikhailov's dismissal; however, if the general was indeed sacked, the move could mark the beginning of Putin's military restructuring.

The ability to fire a senior military commander belongs to the president alone. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no Russian leader has made significant changes in the military that were not designed to appease the powerful generals. Putin changed this in 2001 by naming the first civilian to hold the post of defense minister. The appointment of Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB officer and personal friend to the president, was meant to keep the generals under Putin's thumb by promoting someone they fear until Putin could consolidate the last piece of the Russian system and gain total control.

Mikhailov has served in the military since 1975 and has held top positions throughout the air force. He commands respect in both Russian and international circles. The general, who is 63, has been set to retire on three occasions due to age restrictions, but his term has been extended repeatedly. It would not be strange for a man of his age to retire at this point. However, the Interfax report said he was "dismissed," which likely means he was fired. 

The timing of his dismissal is particularly strange considering the state of Putin's ongoing consolidation. In his April 26 state of the union address, Putin laid out his vision for a new, stronger Russia. Though he has been working toward this since he took office in 2000, he has moved rapidly during the past two years to increase his party's power, securing Russia's energy wealth, cracking down on dissident movements and purging members of the government's opposition. Putin also has begun advocating a new common identity for Russians, as evidenced in his May 9 Victory Day speech. 

The largest force Putin has had to keep in check are the generals, many of whom have plagued the military by holding it back from modernization, opposing reforms and using up massive amounts of money. Under former President Boris Yeltsin, generals were appointed by the handful. The Russian military had been demoralized by the war in Chechnya, and Yeltsin was facing an opposition backlash. To appease the middle and top ranks, Yeltsin handed out titles like food rations. Putin has had to deal with the glut of generals created by his predecessor -- the main problem being that the generals can also enter the government and cause problems for him there.

Putin recognized the generals' popularity and influence within the country, as well as their history of aiding revolutions. Much to the horror of the military, he appointed Ivanov as defense minister. The generals hated that a former KGB (now FSB) officer had taken the top office. It was unheard of to place a member of the siloviki -- Russia's old intelligence establishment -- at the head of the military. However, the intelligence establishment was the only other institution that held as much power as the military. Fearing Ivanov, the generals did not move against Putin while he turned his attention to other things. 

Now that Putin has consolidated all the major Russian sectors, the military is all that is left. Putin has said he would like to revamp the decaying military, but reigning in the generals could be his trickiest and most dangerous task. Though during the Soviet era Russia posed a serious threat to the United States, today's Russian military is a mere shadow of what it once was. Russia ranks third in the world behind the United States and China in military spending; however, it is estimated that nearly half of this spending is unaccounted for. If Russia is serious about revamping its military -- which is imperative if it wants to reclaim its status as a world power -- it will have to trim the fat.

Putin's Feb. 16 move to replace Ivanov with Anatoly Serdyukov, who is also a civilian and is more accustomed to heading up Russia's tax department than dictating military strategy, might have been his first step toward restructuring this dilapidated institution. Serdyukov has said he plans to purge all wastefulness from the military, and Russian tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in April that Mikhailov was being investigated for misuse of funds. If this is the real reason behind Mikhailov's departure, Russia has a long road of purges ahead of it. However, if the Kremlin is successful in ridding the military of superfluous personnel and freeing up some of those funds, Russia could be on its way to seriously overhauling its military and reasserting itself in ways the West thought would never again be possible. 

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act - http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#rid-33409


----------



## Kirkhill

Is one thing related to the other?
According to the Daily Mail this incident happened during a NATO exercise in the North Atlantic sometime between April 22 and May 3.  Noteworthy because while this used to be common during the Cold War similar activity hasn't been seen since then.




> RAF jets responded to Russian incursion
> DUNDEE, Scotland, May. 9 (UPI) -- The Royal Air Force dispatched two jets from a Scottish base to intercept two Russian spy planes that were nearing British airspace, The Daily Mail reported.
> The RAF would not specify when the aerial incident took place, but newspaper said Wednesday that officials confirmed there was no interaction between the two nations' aircraft.
> 
> The appearance of the Russian planes occurred just as the Royal Navy was conducting an exercise in international waters near Scotland.
> 
> RAF squadron leader Keith Wardlaw compared the incident to those that typically occurred during the Cold War.
> 
> "It's a throwback to the Cold War when they used to fly in regularly to poke and prod at the edges of British airspace and test our reaction times," he told the newspaper. "It's normal to let such aircraft know we're there by pulling up alongside them and they left quietly. The whole encounter probably lasted 15, 20 minutes."


http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/05/09/raf_jets_responded_to_russian_incursion/



> ...Britain's air-defence radar system picks up a long-range Russian Bear bomber speeding towards the UK across the North Sea, apparently on a spying mission.
> 
> Within minutes, at a windswept RAF base, four airmen race to their fighter jets and roar away to intercept the intruder.
> 
> It is the type of incident which was routine two decades ago. But this took place last week.
> 
> Two Bears were spotted during a major Royal Navy exercise to the north of the Outer Hebrides. Commanders believe they were planning to spy on the warships, including the aircraft carrier Illustrious.
> 
> Two Tornado F3 fighters took off from RAF Leuchars in Fife and intercepted the Bears in international airspace.
> 
> The pilots were close enough to wave but there was no radio contact.
> 
> After shadowing the Russians for some 15 minutes, they watched as the giant bombers turned and headed home to their base in Murmansk. In similar skirmishes during the 1970s and 80s, Soviet spies were sometimes spotted watching from the perimeter of RAF stations to time exactly how long it took jets to take off and intercept Bear bombers, probing the UK's defences and testing the response.
> 
> Nato pilots in those days were well accustomed to an almost daily aerial game of cat-and-mouse.
> 
> While such visits from the Russians have become extremely rare, the latest one is a reminder that Moscow's long-term ambitions are not entirely clear and that the old Cold War rivalries could well resurface.
> 
> Under President-Putin - a former KGB general - Russia has been flexing its economic muscle by cutting off gas flows to the West, highlighting Europe's growing dependence on its energy.
> 
> The Kremlin has also begun to take a more aggressive stance in foreign affairs.
> 
> Paul Jackson, editor of Jane's All The World's Aircraft, said, "The exercise was in international waters and the Russians have got just as much right to be there as we have.
> 
> "The RAF are telling them, 'We could do this for real if we wanted to, so go and tell your mates.'"
> 
> The Russian Embassy in London declined to comment.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=453672&in_page_id=1770

It isn't that the Russians have done anything threatening.  It is just that they have done something different......followed by a dismissal.  Putin has got about another 10 months as President but aims to stay a Power Broker even if he isn't President.  (Putin Says He'll Retain Influence In Russia After Term Ends in '08....http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501079.html ).


----------



## Kirkhill

> Russia Inc.'s murky lineage hardly matters any more. The Russians aren't just coming any more. They're here.
> 
> Meet Russia's oligarchs: Some ruthless. Some exiled. All filthy rich
> 
> Enter stage left: *39-year-old oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who this week bought a $1.54-billion (U.S.) piece of car parts giant Magna International Inc. and its dream of acquiring DaimlerChrysler's U.S. operations*. Canadians got their first glimpse of Mr. Deripaska when *Magna chairman Frank Stronach * (Edit: Belinda's Dad) introduced the nuclear physicist turned automobiles-to-aluminum tycoon to North Americans at the company's annual meeting in Toronto on Thursday.
> 
> The deal makes a lot of sense for both men. Mr. Deripaska, whose empire includes Russia's No. 2 auto maker and UC Rusal, the world's leading aluminum producer, needs foreign technology to build his Russian auto-making company and diversify geographically. Mr. Stronach, 74, needs capital and a global strategy if he is to avoid Chrysler becoming a quagmire.
> 
> But the deal is equally important to Mr. Putin, who has made no secret of his desire to see his champion companies step confidently out on to the world stage.
> 
> *The Magna investment is part of a multibillion-dollar buying binge by Russia Inc. in Canada, the United States and Europe*. Russian companies have bought steel makers, alumina and platinum mines, construction companies and gas pipelines. OAO Lukoil operates more than 2,000 gas stations, from Maine to Virginia. And OAO Gazprom wants to invest in liquefied natural gas projects in Canada and the U.S. to help create export markets for trapped resources.
> 
> *To some analysts, the increasing global reach of Russian companies is the next stage of the Cold War, fought with rhetoric and petro-dollars, instead of missiles*. “This process has been going on since the mid-nineties,” explained Steven Rosefielde, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and an expert on the Russian economy. “At that point, it was about capital flight. *Now, with Putin pulling all strings behind the scenes, it has become an intriguing dimension of the second phase of the Cold War*.”
> 
> *Not unlike China, the economic objectives of the Russian state are never far from the global aspirations of its companies, and vice versa.
> 
> “There are definitely echoes of the Cold War,*” agreed Marshall Goldman, professor emeritus of Russian economics at Harvard University's Wellesley College in Boston. *“Do we really trust these guys? Are they playing dirty?”*



http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070512.wxrcover-russia12/BNStory/Business/home

Putin's playing this cannier than the Chinese.  It is easier to write a law opposing investment by a foreign company when it is state owned (as in the case of China) than when it is privately owned by someone intimately tied to the government (as in the case of Russia ..... and Canada?).  

"The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope."
Karl Marx

Forget the religion - it is all about the proselytizer .... and his cronies.


And this one deserves reading as well



> A new cold war
> Peter Goodspeed, National Post
> Published: Saturday, May 12, 2007



http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=f0fe44e8-2285-46da-8432-a3a31794162a


----------



## Kirkhill

Try figuring this one out.

As I read this one the Islamists of the MMA are complaining that the government is covertly supporting the Islamists of a madrassa that have kidnapped 5 Chinese civilians.  The MMA Islamists are complaining that the Government's actions/inactions are separating Pakistan from their friends the Chinese and the Iranians.

Put that together with Indians sending even a small contingent of troops into Afghanistan, the observations on Chaos, American moves in Iraq, activities in Gaza with Hamas and now the attacks on the UN in Lebanon and it looks to be an interesting summer.



> Pak Govt providing covert support to radical clerics: Fazal
> 
> Islamabad, June 24: Pakistan's Islamist Alliance MMA leader has flayed the government for tolerating the violent activities of the radical students of a madrassa involved in moral policing, alleging that the government was providing "covert support to Lal Masjid clerics to divert the people’s attention from real issues."
> 
> Opposition leader Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman questioned the governments writ in the face of violent activities of the madrassa students a few miles from the Parliament (National Assembly) and the Presidency.
> 
> Criticising the government for failing to take action against the radical students of Jamia Hafsa madrassa and the clerics of Lal Masjid in central Islamabad involved in a stand off with the authorities for the enforcement of Sharia, the Maulana questioned its writ in the face of the kidnapping of Chinese nationals from a health club for "un-Islamic" acts.
> 
> "It’s a matter of grave concern and shame that we have once again failed to protect the people of our friend China. This could be an outcome of the government’s policies and its covert support to Lal Masjid clerics to divert people’s attention from real issues," Fazl said.
> 
> "We condemn obscenity but it should be stopped through good conduct, not by force," he was quoted as saying by the Daily Times.
> 
> The Islamic leader said no action was taken against the madrassa and local clerics when they had earlier kidnapped three women and a six-month-old child, and then took security forces hostage more than once.
> 
> Speaking in the National Assembly, the Maulana said Pakistan’s relations with Iran, ring countries were not cordial and this incident harmed its relations with China.
> 
> Bureau Report


http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=378884&sid=SAS


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese are very worried about the impact of rampant _Islamism_ on the Uiger minority which is centred in the North-West in Xinjiang province.

One of the primary goals of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (discussed elsewhere in Army.ca) is to bring the Muslim Central Asia republics, Kirgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, much more firmly into Beijing's _sphere_ - allowing, _inter alia_, Beijing to keep much closer track of the goings on inside those countries.  That's, in part, why a Canadian (dual citizenship) was arrested in one of the 'stans' and shipped to China where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison without the Chinese ever once acknowledging that he is a Canadian citizen.  In their eyes he is an Uiger _separatist_ and the normal punishment for _separatism_ is a bullet in the back of the head - after a summary trial.

It's not Canada; separatists are not tolerated.  Islam is _tolerated_ just as Christianity is: as something akin to a quaint _folkway_, so long as it is a loyal, Chinese version of Islam.


----------



## exspy

Kirkhill,

This is indeed a surprising decision on the part of the Pakistani government to not crack down on such an overt anti-Chinese act.  The Chinese government has demonstrated that it is, as opposition leader Fazl-ur-Rehman says, "our friend China".  It will continue to be Pakistan's friend for two very different but compelling reasons, both of which are of great benefit to China.

First is the ever popular 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' theory of political alliance.  India is one of only two nuclear powers on China's borders and the only one with whom there are ongoing border disputes.  Nepal and Bhutan are the pawns in this game (witness the Chinese backed Nepalese guerrillas operating for the past 20 years) for the domination of the Himalayan region.  China is not unhappy with the current political tensions between India and Pakistan.

The second reason, which is much less known, is that yes Virginia there are Chinese Muslims.  Most estimate at least 20 million (2% of the total Chinese population) although some would claim a figure as high as 100 million (or 10%).  China of course will not give an official figure.  A small population of ethnically Chinese Muslims known as Uighur (pronounced wee-gar and there are many different spellings) live in western China.  Some of the inmates in Guantanamo are Uighur.  They were captured by the US after fighting the good fight in Afghanistan.  So, killing two birds with one stone and not wanting another situation similar to Tibet on its hands, there is no better foreign policy for China in order to reach a rapprochement with its Muslim population than to be seen to be politically supporting Pakistan.

This means that of the three major powers only China, over the US and Russia, has a pro-Muslim foreign policy.  In the Middle East and South West Asia the ramifications are pretty well obvious.  I believe you've written about this very situation in earlier threads.  If you have I apologize for rehashing old topics.

So Fazl-ur-Rehman is correct in asking the government of Pakistan to control any overt anti-Chinese actions from disturbing the status quo.  There is way too much at stake for whatever perceived contravention of Sharia Law these Chinese nationals my have committed.

Dan.


----------



## Pte AJB

Interesting discussion, thought I might throw in some copy and paste (plus some minor addition or subtractions for relevance’s sake) from an essay I wrote for a politics of China class. 

“The geopolitical challenge of every major Asian nation, including China, is not so much how to conquer neighbours as how to prevent these neighbours from combining against it.” 

The view espoused by Kissinger is particularly relevant to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Out of the 16.6 million people living in the Xinjiang region, 7 million are Uighurs (ethnic Turks and Muslims). The region shares a border with Kazakhstan, which is comprised of a Muslim majority. Problematic as, “fundamentalist influence in the 1990’s has thus brought an element of instability to Xinjiang, and radical Islamists have become a political force opposed to society and government.”   

I recall reading of quite a few incidents of terrorism perpetrated by separatists in the Uighur region. Though they’re not well publicized, as the Chinese government doesn’t want anyone seeing that it’s house isn’t in order.


----------



## Kirkhill

Is it just "Islamism" the Chinese are worried about? Or is it "separatism" generally?

I regret that this article seems to be most commonly saved on some rather spurious sites with agendas that I don't favour but the article itself is sound.  Victor Mair is well known and accepted in his field.

The reason I am citing it is to demonstrate how seriously China takes potential challenges to its claims to local hegemony.  It has sat on this archaeology story for a number of years because it seems to suggest that, at very least, tall blondes and redheads ended up in Xinjiang before the "Chinese", the Han,  made it up out of the coastal lands and river valleys, across the mountains and the Gobi to the Altai and the Steppes.  They have similar problems with the Tibetans (of course), Hong Kong and (in their view) Taiwan.

Note: I am not claiming that China should be a Swedish protectorate  .  It seems, though, that the Uighur and the rest of the Horse Peoples of the Steppes can lay claim to very diverse origins that legitimately separate them from the Han.  That would be a major political and propaganda problem if the Han were trying to establish fraternal links with the Steppes to gain access to their oil and gas. Not to mention establishing a historical claim to the land itself.




> Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang's famous mummies
> 
> ROBERT J. SAIGET of Agence France-Prese in Urumqi Tuesday, April 19, 2005
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China's Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived.
> The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fuelling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades.
> 
> 
> "It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicised because it has created a lot of difficulties," Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of "Mummies of the Tarim Basin", said.
> 
> "It would be better for everyone to approach this from a purely scientific and historical perspective."
> 
> The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old "Beauty of Loulan" and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the "Charchan Man" are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research.
> 
> In historic and scientific circles the discoveries along the ancient Silk Road were on a par with finding the Egyptian mummies.
> 
> But China's concern over its rule in restive Xinjiang has widely been perceived as impeding faster research into them and greater publicity of the findings.
> 
> The desiccated corpses, which avoided natural decomposition due to the dry atmosphere and alkaline soils in the Tarim Basin, have not only given scientists a look into their physical biologies, but their clothes, tools and burial rituals have given historians a glimpse into life in the Bronze Age.
> 
> Mr Mair, who played a pivotal role in bringing the discoveries to Western scholars in the 1990s, has worked tirelessly to get Chinese approval to take samples out of China for definitive genetic testing.
> 
> One expedition in recent years succeeded in collecting 52 samples with the aide of Chinese researchers, but later Mr Mair's hosts had a change of heart and only let five of them out of the country.
> 
> "I spent six months in Sweden last year doing nothing but genetic research," Mr Mair said from his home in the United States where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
> 
> "My research has shown that in the second millennium BC, the oldest mummies, like the Loulan Beauty, were the earliest settlers in the Tarim Basin.
> 
> "From the evidence available, we have found that during the first 1,000 years after the Loulan Beauty, the only settlers in the Tarim Basin were Caucasoid."
> 
> East Asian peoples only began showing up in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin about 3,000 years ago, Mr Mair said, while the Uighur peoples arrived after the collapse of the Orkon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern day Mongolia, around the year 842.
> 
> "Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story," he said.
> 
> Mr Mair hopes to publish his new findings in the coming months.
> 
> China has only allowed the genetic studies in the last few years, with a 2004 study carried out by Jilin University also finding that the mummies' DNA had Europoid genes, further proving that the earliest settlers of Western China were not East Asians.
> 
> In the preface to the 2002 book, "Ancient Corpses of Xinjiang," written by Chinese archaeologist Wang Huabing, the Chinese historian and Sanskrit specialist Ji Xianlin soundly denounced the use of the mummies by Uighur separatists as proof that Xinjiang should not belong to China.
> 
> "What has stirred up the most excitement in academic circles, both in the East and the West, is the fact that the ancient corpses of 'white [Caucasoid/Europid] people' have been excavated," Jin wrote.
> 
> "However, within China a small group of ethnic separatists have taken advantage of this opportunity to stir up trouble and are acting like buffoons, [styling] themselves the descendants of these ancient 'white people' with the aim of dividing the motherland."
> 
> Further on, in an apparent swipe at the government's lack of eagerness to acknowledge the science and publicise it to the world, Ji wrote that "a scientist may not distort facts for political reasons, religious reasons, or any other reason".
> 
> Meanwhile, Yingpan Man, a nearly perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old Caucasoid mummy, was only this month allowed to leave China for the first time, and is being displayed at the Tokyo Edo Museum.
> 
> The Yingpan Man, discovered in 1995 in the region that bears his name, has been seen as the best preserved of all the undisturbed mummies that have so far been found.
> 
> Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask - a Greek tradition - covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.
> 
> His nearly 2.00 metre long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region.
> 
> When the Yingpan Man returns from Tokyo to Urumqi where he has long been kept out of public eye, he is expected to be finally put on display when the new Xinjiang Museum opens this year.
> 
> China has hundreds of the mummies in various degrees of dessication and decomposition, including the prominent Han Chinese warrior Zhang Xiong and other Uighur mummies.
> 
> However, only a dozen or so are on permanent display in a makeshift building until the new museum is completed.



http://www.strategypage.com/militaryforums/69-19170.aspx


And FifthHorse - here is a reference to they Uighur bombings in 1996 and the Chinese response. http://mondediplo.com/1997/09/uighur

And of course it plays to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and the establishment and maintenance of a common front.  http://www.sectsco.org/html/00026.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

We've known about the mummies at Urumqchi for year and years.  In fact Elizabeth Barber, a well respected textiles expert, says (The Mummies of Urumchi, New York, 1999) that the people used ancient Celtic techniques.  I tell my good lady that it was the Scots who brought civilization to China about 4,000 years ago!


----------



## Kirkhill

I'm glad you said that Edward.       
As the "Professional Scot" on the site I didn't dare try to get away with it.  Slainte mha.


----------



## exspy

Guys,

OK, I apologize.  Every time I think I'm adding something new and previously unheard to the discussions on the 'International' thread I always find that whatever I've brought forward is already old news to the enlightened.  It's getting to be embarrassing for me as I've always fancied myself as being somewhat well read.  I'd only heard of the Uighur about 5 years ago and the idea of Chinese Muslims was a complete surprise to me.  Exposing their existence was my one and only trump card on this thread.  I can't believe people have become as familiar with the Uighur as they have with Celts in China!

I think I'll just keep myself entertained by reading these excellent threads, being jealous of the skills displayed and staying the heck off.

Humility is hard lesson to learn for an A type personality.

Dan.


----------



## Kirkhill

Dan, for pete's sake keep throwing in your knowledge.  Everybody's input keeps the discussion interesting by opening up new avenues for consideration.  

Cheers, Chris.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Off topic alert!



			
				Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Is it just "Islamism" the Chinese are worried about? Or is it "separatism" generally?
> ...
> The reason I am citing it is to demonstrate how seriously China takes potential challenges to its claims to local hegemony.  It has sat on this archaeology story for a number of years because it seems to suggest that, at very least, tall blondes and redheads ended up in Xinjiang before the "Chinese", the Han,  made it up out of the coastal lands and river valleys, across the mountains and the Gobi to the Altai and the Steppes.  They have similar problems with the Tibetans (of course), Hong Kong and (in their view) Taiwan.
> ...



I do not agree that the Chinese have attempted to thwart research into the mummies of Urumchi.  They have been in a publicly accessible museum in Urumchi for 20 years.  Western scholars have been visiting, and speculating on, the mummies since they were found.

The Chinese do not attach a huge importance to these mummies.  As far as I can read they have no difficulty with the idea that a proto-Indo-European people may have come to and then lived in Xinjiang 4,000 and 3,000 years ago.  But, that’s not the ‘big story’ in China.  The big story (over the past half century) is the discovery that the _Shang_ dynasty was, certainly, real and that there must have been something very like to the (previously mythological) _Xia_ dynasty in its described time (2100-1600 BCE) and place (Henan province).   The fact that some nomads settled on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert and, evidently, stayed and established trade links to the East and West is fascinating but hardly, for the history obsessed Chinese, overly important.  They were, even to the supposedly contemporary _Xia_, ‘barbarians.’  (Parenthetically, I have heard it posited by an internationally recognized linguist, that words like ‘barbarian’ and ‘tartar’ have their roots in sounds like “_ba-ba_,” “_bar-bar_,” “_ta-ta_” or “_tar-tar_” which were used to describe the ‘primitive’ and incomprehensible sound of the language of the ‘other’ people – from outside of the settlements in China, the Caspian basin, Iran, the fertile Crescent and so on.) 

In addition to Barber there have been many papers on the mummies of Urumchi.  Some (many?) tend to get bogged down in the ‘problem’ of a proto-Indo-European people in China saying, “See, we were here first.”  My question is: so what?  We appear to have a long settled population that appears to have traded East and West – *maybe* for obsidian,  which was well known and valued 4,000 years ago and is plentiful in Xinjiang.  Climate change was, almost certainly, partially responsible for their demise – see? It was all George W. Bush’s fault, after all!  But, at bottom, their arrival, ‘culture’ and passing are of minor interest to Chinese scholars.

Let me be clear: the Chinese are racist – we can see that in a whole host of linguistic and cultural attributes, beginning with how they describe themselves, their language and their country.  Institutionalised, ethno-cultural racism is not, however, unique to the Chinese. I believe it is common to almost all cultural and linguistic groups.  The Chinese, like most other peoples, mix up the issues of race, language and culture.  The current Chinese government, following 2,000± years of consistently ‘traditional’ policy is trying to make the _Han_ people = the Chinese people with minorities, of all kinds, relegated to the margins, existing as happy folk dancers.   The Uiger are just one, albeit a problematical one , of the many minorities (the Kazak minority in Xinjiang is less of a problem).  There is a _separatist_ movement – with _Islamist_ overtones amongst the Uiger of Xinjiang.  The ongoing  _Hanification_ of Xinjiang province is designed to smother that – a sort of _revanche du berceau_ in reverse.  The central government in Beijing aims to make the Uiger a minority in their own home province.  Initially, shortly after the revolution, Han migration to Xinjiang was forced; now it is a ‘pull’ system based on economics – a slow but surer system, the Chinese believe (I think) of achieving their aim.

On balance, however, I think Prof. Mair is overstating the case.  Euro-centric scholarship bumps Sino-centric scholarship.  “We’re more important than you!”  “It’s all about us!”


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...  I tell my good lady that it was the Scots who brought civilization to China about 4,000 years ago!



The consequence of which, by the way, was a prolonged 'diet' of cold shoulder and hot tongue!


----------



## a_majoor

There are certainly many currents flowing here.

Although the Chinese are trying to flood the region with Han colonists, I think the birthrate of the local Muslim population is growing much faster than colonization. Given the skewed demographics of the Han Chinese themselves (due to the "one child" program), this problem will only increase over time.

While the Chinese are concerned about the growing Muslim population in Xinjiang, they also see a similar population boom happening in the "Stans" as well. The East may not be Red after all, but Green. All these people will be in competition with China for water and natural resources in the years to come, with the contest spreading from Central Asia into Siberia. Russia may hold the trump cards for the first few rounds with the combination of resource wealth and military power, but Russia is in its own demographic slump, and will have fewer and fewer people to man the border posts as time goes on.

Pakistan is teetering between Islamic radicalization and the current autocracy. Neither sort of government or society is stable (this is my "brittle societies" argument), but Pakistan is a _nuclear_ power. China may have to contend with three nuclear powers on their borders (four, counting the DPRK), each with wildly different national interests, in addition to the more distant American nuclear umbrella sheltering Tiawan, Japan and the ROK.

How the Chinese deal with this combination of pressures will be interesting to watch. How we deal with the Chinese as they deal with these pressures will be crucial.


----------



## Kirkhill

See Dan?  This is what I mean.  There is always someone around here to disagree with you.  

Edward and Arthur - more to follow

Cheers.


----------



## Pte AJB

Thanks for the link Kirkhill, a good read! 

Is it just "Islamism" the Chinese are worried about? Or is it "separatism" generally?

I would have to concur with Mr. Campbell, in the eyes of the Chinese Islamism and separatism are mutual. There exist the real fear within Beijing, which is shared with Moscow, that if the region were to activate some sort of pan-Islamic movement it would really upset entrenched geopolitical interests. Recall that there’s no love lost between Russia and the “Stan’s” for, 

“During World War II, Russia tried to impose a final solution on her unruly Caucasian dominion, the most brutal attempt yet – genocide through deportation of entire North Caucasian nations. Six Muslim nations were deported in 1944, four of them from the North Caucus…Approximately 1/3 of the nations perished through transportation alone.”

Most of these states have far more in common with each other than they do the central, and provided the fact that both China and Russia have shown little qualms at using force to crush domestic dissent, and then throw in the countries that a_majoor has mentioned and we have one real interesting recipe! 

Mr. Campbell’s your statement that it “is a ‘pull’ system based on economics” is true, but I think it should be noted that providing Xinjiang with Autonomous Region Status was largely done as a means to quell calls for greater independence. The economics of such could actually result in a distancing, through increased inter-regional trade, of Xinjiang from Beijing. 

Excellent discussion all around, I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread so far, 

Adam


----------



## Edward Campbell

a_majoor said:
			
		

> There are certainly many currents flowing here.
> ...
> Pakistan is teetering between Islamic radicalization and the current autocracy. Neither sort of government or society is stable (this is my "brittle societies" argument), but Pakistan is a _nuclear_ power. China may have to contend with three nuclear powers on their borders (four, counting the DPRK), each with wildly different national interests, in addition to the more distant American nuclear umbrella sheltering Tiawan, Japan and the ROK.
> 
> How the Chinese deal with this combination of pressures will be interesting to watch. How we deal with the Chinese as they deal with these pressures will be crucial.





And just a year ago (Jun 06) the Chinese were on a major _charm offensive_ in/towards India.

I think we (many of us anyway) are confused by the Chinese who, generally, think and act in the long term.  That capacity *may* be blunted in liberal democracies - the pressures of electoral politics ("what have you done for me lately?") being what they are.  Additionally, as this whole thread (except my off topic contribution) discusses, China is involved in a classic regional _balance of power_ exercise with India, Japan/Taiwan/America, Russia, Pakistan and others.  That may help to explain why, even as Mao proclaimed that China and India needed to become fast friends (1970), the Chinese were helping Pakistan to become nuclear power.

Last year the Shanghai Cooperation Council meeting dominated the news in Beijing in early June.  The big story was 'security cooperation.'  The Chinese appeared highly relieved that their fears (fanned by their own government) of _Islamist_ influence would be assuaged by increased Chinese involvement in the 'internal security' of its Muslim neighbours in Central Asia.  I'm guessing that some (many?) senior officials wished they had been less kind to Pakistan in the '70s, '80s and '90s.  The problem with thinking in the long term is that it's a highly imperfect art.  I suspect that in the '90s the Chinese were mightily pleased with themselves; they had forced India to refocus its growing power in its own backyard.  In the '90s _al Qaeda_ seemed like a problem for the Americans and the West.  The Chinese had applauded the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet empire.  How quickly the 'long term' plan comes face to face with an immediate reality.

For many Chinese - including those in positions of responsibility - the _natural borders_ of China are defined by any and all territory which was ever Chinese.  It's a form of long term, historically based 'manifest destiny.'  That's why, I think China often pursues apparently groundless claims to e.g. The South China Sea.  If you argue that anything which ever was Chinese is always Chinese then _separatism_ (breaking China apart, taking territory away from China) must be a mortal sin.  Hence Uiger separatism is a major threat and _Islamist_ 'forces' which support and sustain the Uigers are enemies.


----------



## a_majoor

Shades of "The Coming of the French Revolution"

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/china/articles/20070625.aspx



> * The Worst Nightmare Comes True*
> 
> June 25, 2007:  For Communist Party officials, their worst nightmare is becoming reality. The new middle class often own their homes, and when property values are threatened by some government policy, these middle class Chinese organize and show their displeasure. There have been several recent mass demonstrations by middle class Chinese, usually protesting efforts to put factories, or other property value destroying facilities,  in the middle of newly built middle class communities. Local government officials, who control the local police, find that they cannot just use force to disperse the middle class demonstrators, as they do farmers, or  poor, working class protestors. The middle class crowd is better organized, and have useful connections themselves. The middle class have cell phones and Internet access. The middle class also has access to the upper reaches of the Communist Party, which relies on middle class administrators and technocrats, to make things happen. If the middle class turns on the Communist Party, the communists will lose. The revenge of the bourgeoisies, so to speak.  So far, the Communist Party has a deal with the growing Chinese middle class. The latter can get rich, as long as the communists remain in power. But when that power, now corrupted by all that money, interferes with property values, who prevails? Historically, the protectors of property values prevail.


----------



## Kirkhill

I caught the end of an interview by Chris Patten, last Governor of Hong Kong (and not one of my favourite people) on the BBC yesterday.  

In sum he said this:  The military and the conservatives claim that if the reforms continue then the Communist Party will lose power.  The reformers claim that if the reforms don't continue then the Communist Party will lose power.  The unfortunate thing is this - in his view - they are both right.  No matter what is done, sooner or later the Communist Party will lose power.

I have long subscribed to the notion that revolutions occur when the person next to the throne can no longer tolerate not sitting in the throne AND has access to a power base.

The reformers seem to have access to a body of people: the middle class.  Is there also as geographic separation suggesting that Shanghai, Guangzhou or even Hong Kong are sufficiently secure to support a "reformist" culture to oppose (what I presume is) a conservative culture in Beijing?

My supposition is that the reformists, and in particular the middle class, are looking for a soft landing when the CPC falls.


----------



## a_majoor

Soft landings are rarely an option. Most revolutions in history did have a "soft" option at the beginning, but examples ranging from the American Revolution to the Provisional Government of Russia, attempts to make incrimental changes by the moderates are thwarted by the powers that be and eventually swept away by the more zealous revolutionaries.

The only real exceptions that I have seen are the surge of populist movements in New Europe and Lebanon (Velvet Revolution, Orange Revolution, Cedar Revolution...) where the regime has accepted the size and scope of the populist revolution and quietly stepped aside. Hordes of "Democracy Babes" in the demonstrations help as well.

China has alternated between being a unitary "Kingdom" and a collection of warring states. The current Imperial court would prefer a unitary "Kingdom", but there are many forces in play that will make that dream harder to sustain. Besides the growth of the Islamic population in the West of China, there is the North/South divide, the huge income gap between urban and rural China, demographic change, environmental degradation and the fact that resources are not located where the economic action is (the south coast). Imagine if Xinjiang becomes the "Alberta" of China. 

We are living in "interesting times".


----------



## Kirkhill

Not on Pakistan but definitely on China and Chaos.

This is from the Christian Science Monitor and specifically addresses South Sudan and Darfur.



> *Beijing has "a vested interest in the continuation of a low level of insecurity. It keeps the other major investors out," * charges the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) in a report. The report argues that China welcomes the absence of real peace in Sudan as enhancing its business opportunities, whatever the cost to southern Sudanese civilians: "There is [on the part of the Chinese] an almost total disregard for the human rights implications of their investments."



And



> "China doesn't want another government in charge," adds a Khartoum-based humanitarian aid worker, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They're used to dealing with this government."



http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0626/p01s08-woaf.html


----------



## Pte AJB

The idea of the Chinese ‘middle-class’ as a reformist element has been grossly overstated by Western sources. Indeed, even the term ‘middle-class’ has misleading connotations, as the Chinese ‘middle-class’ is really best described as the Chinese upper-class. They are the relatives and associates of Party leaders, the one’s that through being close to the source of power have been able to gain economic concessions not available to the average Joe or Chan. There is much interplay between the two as in terms of how agendas are set. I believe the Chinese ‘middle-class’ to have a vested interest in the maintenance of the Chinese Communist Party. That is not to say transformation is unlikely, a progression to an oligarch structure is already occurring as the power structure is expanding to include big business. 

I took a few economic courses and could tell you that at least half of those in the class were Chinese international students. The fact I met one or two Chinese international students in my political science courses says something about the nature of the information exchange with the West.

I think the greatest issue facing China is the growing disparity between urban and rural. It will be interesting to see how Chinese communist political philosophy justifies/copes with this dynamic.


----------



## CougarKing

FifthHorse said:
			
		

> I took a few economic courses and could tell you that at least half of those in the class were Chinese international students. The fact I met one or two Chinese international students in my political science courses says something about the nature of the information exchange with the West.



FifthHorse,

I agree with you entirely. During my study abroad program in Beijing back in my college days, one of the locals asked me "what is your major?" and when I answered "Political Science", he bluntly said "I think Political Science is useless...that's why I am taking business." That's the gist of what he said, IIRC.
Oh well...apparently they've been raised to think that trying to effect political change as an individual is futile, such as the right to vote, which they don't have at the national level (though some counties in Yunnan province, IIRC, are experimenting with a secret ballot) and that one must focus on practical things such as trying to cash in on China's current prosperity.

On a side note about a different kind of "chaos", they need more English teachers there since the English signs done by local translators are ridiculous, since I once saw on a train station the words "CHOO-CHOO Station" printed on a huge sign.

Oh well... ;D


----------



## Kirkhill

The question that intrigues me is how long do either of you (5th Horse and Cougarshark) think it might take before some of those mercantilist "middle class" types figure that they can serve themselves better by overthrowing the guys on top with the aid of the rural "have nots"?


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill,

Overthrow them? Aren't you aware that the CCP has inducted several successful entrepreneurs into its party membership??? (in other words, why overthrow the party when you can buy them off especially with the rampant corruption that's hard to stamp out  :blotto Old-style hardliners like Li Peng in the background and his Politburo Standing Committee protege Luo Gan might not be bought off but they are a minority in the party nowadays.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarShark, I was aware of that.

The problem lies not so much with the guys (and gals) that get the contracts as those that don't.


----------



## Kirkhill

PS - with respect to inducting entrepreneurs into the CCP I would suggest that was unnecessary.  In my view in order to succeed in any of the Communist Parties a considerable degree of entrepreneurship and self-interest seems to have been the key.  Certainly a number of CCP Generals in the PLA apparently have exhibited significant entrepreneurial expertise in running toy factories in prison camps.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

> I think the greatest issue facing China is the growing disparity between urban and rural. It will be interesting to see how Chinese communist political philosophy justifies/copes with this dynamic.



This, IMHO, is the biggest elephant in the room.  I was in Shanghai in 2003 on a port visit.  During the visit, we hosted a "Pacific Rim" roundtable onboard where a bunch of Chinese and Canadian academics got together (along with a couple of semi-interested officers, like myself) and discussed the future.  I posed a question to one of the Chinese academics along the lines above, pointing out that while generations of rural Chinese have been content (for lack of an alternative) to live a 10th century existence, how is the Chinese government going to manage expectations amongst the rural poor, who can see their urban brethren getting rich on TV, but not seeing much in trickling down to them.

The near complete lack of a response to my specific question (the answer was alot of generalities about economic growth and distribution of wealth), led me to believe that I had struck a chord- the CCP is intensely worried about what happens when expectations of the rural poor can no longer be managed.

FWIW.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> PS - with respect to inducting entrepreneurs into the CCP I would suggest that was unnecessary.  In my view in order to succeed in any of the Communist Parties a considerable degree of entrepreneurship and self-interest seems to have been the key.  Certainly a number of CCP Generals in the PLA apparently have exhibited significant entrepreneurial expertise in running toy factories in prison camps.



Well in 1998 Premier Zhu Rongji ordered the PLA to divest itself of all those PLA-run enterprises (Does Bao Li Enterprises ring a bell?). It happened eventually but the PLA was slow in execution of Zhu's order.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think FifthHorse is spot on re: the ‘middle class’ and, especially, the East/West (urban/rural – rich/poor (really, really poor!)) split.

But, one word of caution: in a nation of 1,300,000,000 (broadly) well educated, hard working, entrepreneurial people things can happen very, very fast.

I’m impressed (maybe depressed) at the large (and growing) number of Chinese families with children who cannot pass their (national, standardized and very rigorous) university entrance exams with high enough marks to get into one of the top 20 universities who are borrowing money to send those children to North America and Europe for their undergraduate degree, at least.  Only a very few families have ready access to that kind of money – the overwhelming majority (tens of thousands last year, I’m told)  are mortgaging the entire family’s future on each (only, now) child.  How many, really?  A young acquaintance who is one of them told me there are a half dozen like her at Ottawa’s Carleton University (BComm programme) alone.  Extrapolate that across Canada, to the (more popular) USA and to the incredibly popular UK and Australia and ten thousand per year, year after year, is not too hard to believe.

Will they try to ‘topple’ the government?  Not yet.  This is a new dynasty – the Red Dynasty, as Echo-9 another Army.ca member described it.  Most Chinese dynasties have fairly long lives – leaders have to lose their ‘mandate.’

Anson Chan was on the radio recently talking about Hong Kong vs. the Central Government.  She reiterated that, despite the deeply entrenched positions of a lot of octogenarian generals the Central Committee’s Political Bureau Standing Committee (the inner cabinet) is composed of mainly young, nimble minds who are willing and able to embrace change before it overwhelms them.

So long as the government stays out of the people’s hair and governs ‘fairly’ (that’s the corruption issue which is a HUGE problem for the Chinese leadership) it is likely to survive for quite a while longer.

The Chinese are very interested in their own history.  They are aware of how problematical interregnums can be and, I think most would like to avoid one if they can.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced from today’s _Globe and Mail_ under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, is another piece to the puzzle:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070627.wreynolds27/BNStory/robColumnsBlogs/?query=


> China growing old before it grows rich
> 
> NEIL REYNOLDS
> From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> 
> June 27, 2007 at 6:16 AM EDT
> 
> OTTAWA — Economist Phillip Swagel has held positions with the U.S. Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Here is an excerpt from his observations, written last year after spending time in China, on the prospects of the world's fastest-growing economy:
> 
> "You see [China's aging society] just by walking down the street. There are hardly any children. It's eerie. The one-child policy has been in place for three decades and China is heading into a snap demographic transition - they've created an aging society, but they haven't put into place any social welfare system or any pensions.
> 
> "They allowed state enterprises to jettison pensions. There's no formal safety net, and they have put an end to the informal safety net of the extended family. No wonder they save so much. It's all precautionary.
> 
> "Who knows what all of this will do to China as the family structure of thousands of years comes to an end?"
> 
> China will indeed grow old, in other words, before it grows rich.
> 
> Writing in the June issue of The American Interest, Washington-based political economist Nicholas Eberstadt explores further the fascinating economic implications of China's demographic decline - the withering away not of a state but of an entire society.
> 
> "Thanks to decades of subreplacement fertility, China's population growth stands to decelerate sharply, and its society to age dramatically, in the coming generation," he says.
> 
> Indeed, by UN population analysis and by U.S. Census Bureau calculations, the U.S. (projected population: 350 million) will deliver more babies into the world - in absolute numbers, not in percentages - than China (projected population: 1.5 billion) by 2025.
> 
> China has consciously crafted its own authoritarian destiny for the past half century, relying always on coercion to compel progress. Millions of expendable people died in the Great Leap Forward (1957-1960), the Great Famine (1960-1965), and the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977). Millions more have died in the one-child policy (launched in 1978) - in abortions performed for the sole purpose of eliminating girl babies, in post-natal abandonment, and in outright killing. (Abortion is free in China, available through the ninth month of pregnancy.)
> 
> In its 2000 census report, China reported that it now has 120 male births for every 100 female births; in some parts of the country, it said, there are 135 male births for every 100 female births; other authorities have put the ratio at 150:100. By 2025, the country expects it will have more than 40 million adult bachelors for whom wives will not exist. Meanwhile, China permits adoption abroad of 12,000 abandoned girl babies a year - 8,000 alone, ironically, to the U.S.
> 
> As everyone knows, and knew in the 1970s, the only policy that China (or any other country) ever needed to limit population growth was economic growth. This economic mechanism offers the additional advantage of gender balance. China now officially recognizes that it has a huge problem - but officially maintains its barbaric, coercion-first approach.
> 
> Mr. Eberstadt says Americans have regarded child bearing differently from Europeans and Asians since colonial times.
> 
> In 1800, the U.S. Census Bureau determined the American total fertility rate was 7.0 (seven births per woman per lifetime); the fertility rate in Britain at that time was 5.7; France, 4.5.
> 
> These rates fell as the countries grew richer, but the U.S. rate never fell as far or as fast - "making the United States peculiarly fecund for a contemporary affluent democracy."
> 
> The U.S. fertility rate has remained steady for the past 20 years at 2.05 births per woman, 50 per cent higher than Japan's rate, 45 per cent higher than Europe's rate, 35 per cent higher than Canada's rate - and precisely at the rate needed to maintain population. With present immigration included, demographers expect the U.S. to still be growing by 2.5 million people a year in 2025, perhaps the only rich country in the world that won't be shrinking.
> 
> Hispanics have the highest fertility rate in the U.S. But Mr. Eberstadt says white, Anglo women are doing their part, too: "The single most important factor in explaining America's high fertility rate these days is the birth rate of the country's Anglo majority - which still accounts for 55 per cent of all U.S. births."
> 
> In the generation ahead, Mr. Eberstadt says, "America's exceptional demographic profile will confer advantages on U.S. society" - among them, a youthful population and a growing labour force. The U.S. will be able to afford old people. China won't. What coercive solution then?
> 
> _nreynolds@xplornet.com_
> ***
> By the numbers
> 120:
> The number of male births for every 100 female births in China, according to a 2000 census.
> ***
> 40 million:
> The number of adult bachelors, for whom wives will not exist, that China expects to have by 2025.
> ***
> 12,000:
> The number of abandoned baby girls China permits to be adopted abroad each year.



China’s *cultural* predisposition to have children care for elders/parents will be stretched but is unlikely to actually break.  I was interested to observe a mini housing ‘boom’ in parts of rural China last year.  When I enquired as to why there seemed to be so many new, relatively large houses in traditionally poor agricultural areas (in Hunan, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces) I was told that farmers were building them to attract young *women* to come and marry their sons and to stay on – to care for the old folks, as all good daughter-in-law should.

China is not the only country to have nonexistent to poor ‘social’ programmes to care for the elderly.  The consequence is not pleasant but it need not be ‘revolutionary.’ 

----------

This thread has swerved well away from its original intent, as exemplified by the title, and, with all respect to CougarShark, it should be merged with China vs Russia and China, Chaos and Pakistan.  It is better to have one 'superthread' than to search through the index to find the most appropriate one of three or more.


Edit: typos - provisions (§29) of the  Copyright Act, and awkward structure - not pleasant but it need not be  ‘revolutionary.’


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Done.
I love When Mr. Campbell does my work for me.................now if only he was in my back yard right now with my _other_ hedge trimmer.

Oh well, back to it......................


----------



## CougarKing

Campbell,

There used to be an article on the _Times_, either online or in the actual magazine which discussed there is an emerging generation of Chinese men who won't have wives of the same age group, which is partially the result of China's decades-old "One-Child Policy" and urban families' desire that their one-child quota be filled with a SON! There have even been stories of female children being drowned in wells by poor rural families who couldn't support any more daughters after bearing several of them, but with no son in sight. 

As a result of this creation of a generation of Chinese men without mates, there have also been stories of  women from neighboring countries or in remote rural areas of China being kidnapped and brought to the Eastern/coastal cities of the Chinese heartland. Someone please correct me if they know the actual details of that story/rumor. And yes I am aware that the policy was less enforced in rural areas when the policy was at its height and that people of minority "zus" or minority races such as Uighurs and Tibetans were allowed to have a many children as they wanted while it was the Han "zu"/race  that they had too much of... 



Oh well...thus how can one expect a good Chinese daughter to take care of her-in-laws when those potential Chinese daughter-in-laws are in short supply????


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarShark said:
			
		

> Campbell,
> 
> There used to be an article on the _Times_, either online or in the actual magazine which discussed there is an emerging generation of Chinese men who won't have wives of the same age group, which is partially the result of China's decades-old "One-Child Policy" and urban families' desire that their one-child quota be filled with a SON! There have even been stories of female children being drowned in wells by poor rural families who couldn't support any more daughters after bearing several of them, but with no son in sight.
> 
> As a result of this creation of a generation of Chinese men without mates, there have also been stories of  women from neighboring countries or in remote rural areas of China being kidnapped and brought to the Eastern/coastal cities of the Chinese hearltand. Someone please correct me if they know the actual details of that story/rumor. And yes I am aware that the policy was less enforced in rural areas when the policy was at its height and that people of minority "zus" or minority races such as Uighurs and Tibetans were allowed to have a many children as they wanted while it was the Han "zu"/race  that they had too much of...
> 
> 
> 
> Oh well...thus how can one expect a good Chinese daughter to take care of her-in-laws when those potential Chinese daughter-in-laws are in short supply????



As to the last question: money, that age old, highly effective _motivator_.

I too heard horrific rumours re: female children and I also was told that _foreign_ (but Asian) women are being _imported_ to overcome the whatever number of millions of 'missing' women.

The other interesting side effect is that we now have the *Little Empresses*.  Many urban and even some rural families are glad to have girls - knowing that each girl will be able to attract a highly _profitable_ husband.

All that being said, I don't think the consequences of either the 'one child' policy or its impact on the senior:worker ratio will be a 'revolution' maker.  But, add in a long drought and some _Islamo-separatist_ terrorism in the urban East and ... who knows?


----------



## Pte AJB

Cougarshark, I recall reading, in I believe National Geographic, of a young man and his buddies venturing from their small town in rural China to the city to find a bride. They ended up kidnapping a girl from a local store and taking her back to their village. The plans were that they would marry, however the girls continuous crying saved her as this man’s mother deemed her not of hardy enough stock. No exaggeration this is the exact chain of events. One can imagine similar events that end differently.  



			
				Kirkhill said:
			
		

> The question that intrigues me is how long do either of you (5th Horse and Cougarshark) think it might take before some of those mercantilist "middle class" types figure that they can serve themselves better by overthrowing the guys on top with the aid of the rural "have nots"?



As for the chance of a ‘middle-class’ or even rural revolution, there just doesn’t seem to be any issues that could result in a deep fracture between Party and people. There are tensions (urban/rural, male/female, have/ have not), but not of the gravity required for critical mass. 

As a lot of the articles posted have alluded to, China likes the status quo, GDP is growing near 10% per year, it’s industries are developing expertise and experience, and people are getting rich. China was virtually unaffected by the Asian financial crisis, one of the few Asian nations to be able to say so. It is likely sometime in the future the bubble will burst, or at least descend a bit.

It is at this point changes will have to occur. Either that or risk legitimacy. As some have already mentioned, the legitimacy of the CCP is currently rooted in its ability to foster and maintain a healthy economy (what government’s rule isn’t?). An economic downturn will call many to question the continuing role of the CCP.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> All that being said, I don't think the consequences of either the 'one child' policy or its impact on the senior:worker ratio will be a 'revolution' maker.  But, add in a *long drought * and some _Islamo-separatist_ terrorism in the urban East and ... who knows?



Well the disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of the 1950s (which should be called backward) which saw an estimated 60 million Chinese starved to death according to one source shocked then PLA commanding General Peng Dehuai to the point that he told Mao that he would take the PLA and go back into the countryside and wage a guerrila war against the CCP if Mao and the Politburo did  not do anything about it.  My point is, drought or some other terrible disaster (such as a possible collapse of the 3 Gorges' Dam, causing a massive flood in the Yangtze river area/the Chinese heartland) might just do the trick.



On another side note, in my time in Taiwan as well, local politicians there also debated whether using ROCAF/Guo Min Kong Jun Fighter bombers, or even land-based SSMs to bomb the Three Gorges' Dam or even the Shanghai metropolis were suitable retaliatory responses to a possible PLA invasion of Taiwan.

Thoughts?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarShark said:
			
		

> Well the disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of the 1950s (which should be called backward) which saw an estimated 60 million Chinese starved to death according to one source shocked then PLA commanding General Peng Dehuai to the point that he told Mao that he would take the PLA and go back into the countryside and wage a guerrila war against the CCP if Mao and the Politburo did  not do anything about it.  My point is, drought or some other terrible disaster (such as a possible collapse of the 3 Gorges' Dam, causing a massive flood in the Yangtze river area/the Chinese heartland) might just do the trick.
> 
> 
> 
> On another side note, in my time in Taiwan as well, local politicians there also debated whether using ROCAF/Guo Min Kong Jun Fighter bombers, or even land-based SSMs to bomb the Three Gorges' Dam or even the Shanghai metropolis were suitable retaliatory response to a possible PLA invasion of Taiwan.
> 
> Thoughts?



Taiwanese politicians, like their counterparts in Beijing, bring to mind the Bard: *"a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."*


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Taiwanese politicians, like their counterparts in Beijing, bring to mind the Bard: *"a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."*



Well one of the most amusing things for any foreign expatriate to watch on the local TV there is all those scuffles they have in the Legislative Yuan at the time, which beats pro-wrestling any day- hell, one of the MPs/politicians there even went as far as to grab a stapler and staple an opponent's hand to a table as they prepared to exchange blows...  ;D


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced from today’s _Globe and Mail_ under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, are two articles which provide further grist for our China mill:

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070704.wibasia04/BNStory/robColumnsBlogs/home


> Clues to India's future prosperity
> 
> MARCUS GEE
> From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> 
> July 4, 2007 at 6:14 AM EDT
> 
> When Henry Ford's Ford Motor Co. introduced the Model T in 1908, it sold for $850 (U.S.), less than half the $2,000-$3,000 charged by competing auto makers. The Tin Lizzie (as it came to be known) was so successful that by the time the 10 millionth rolled off the assembly line, nine out of 10 cars roaming the roads of the world were made by Ford.
> 
> Next year, exactly a century later, India's Tata Motors hopes to repeat the trick when it brings out a no-frills car for the masses that will sell for about 100,000 rupees ($2,600 Canadian). That's one lakh in Indian terms of measurement, and the one-lakh car would be the cheapest by far, not only in India, but in the world.
> 
> Many in the auto industry doubt that mastermind Ratan Tata, head of one of India's biggest business empires, can keep the cost that low. But if he even comes close, he will have done for India what Ford did for the United States 100 years ago: Put the dream of car ownership within reach of the common people.
> 
> At present, most Indians get around by train, bus, motor scooter and three-wheeled auto rickshaw. Indians buy about 1.3 million passenger cars a year, less than Canadians, even though India's population is 36 times as big. But with India's economy growing at 8 or 9 per cent a year, the market is set to boom. One study estimated it will double within a decade. With a population of 1.1 billion, and a middle class expected to grow tenfold over the next two decades, India is a potential motherlode for car makers.
> 
> Rather than cater to the upwardly mobile "New Indians" who want a flashy car to advertise their success, Tata is aiming at the lowly striver who wants to get around while getting ahead. The cheapest competing car, Suzuki's Maruti 800, goes for more than $4,000.
> 
> But Tata's car wouldn't be a bucket of bolts like East Germany's infamous Trabant. If reports of the secretive project are correct, Tata's rear-engine one-lakh car would have four doors, a top speed of around 120 kilometres an hour and a 33-horsepower engine, but no power steering or air conditioning on the basic model.
> 
> No one knows what the creature will look like yet, but Mr. Tata trained as an architect and brought in Italian car designers for the project, so it is bound to be much more than a tin box on wheels. If it catches on, Tata hopes to sell them not just in India but in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia - wherever incomes are still relatively low but aspirations high.
> 
> Tata is not the only one to see the potential of a low-cost car for the developing world. Every important global car maker, from Toyota to Volkswagen to Peugeot, has plans to produce a low-cost people's car. Chrysler is working with China's Chery and General Motors is working with South Korea's GM Daewoo on no-frills models. Germany's Roland Berger Strategy Consultants predicted in a recent report that 18 million cars priced at less than $14,300 would be sold around the world annually by 2012, an increase of four million a year from the current figure.
> 
> Renault's Logan has already sold more than half a million of its basic Logan model, which made its debut at $7,600 in 2004. Now it plans to take on Tata by producing a new model that Renault-Nissan chief executive officer Carlos Ghosn hopes to sell for less than $3,000 and market in Asia, with low-cost India as the manufacturing base.
> 
> If it's smart, India could become a hub for the production of small, cheap cars for the world. It has low-cost labour in abundance, hordes of skilled engineering graduates and a growing number of inexpensive parts makers.
> 
> Tata honed its low-cost car-making skills with the Indica, a compact hatchback it sells in Europe, and the Ace, a small, sturdy truck that went on sale two years ago for $5,400 and became a huge hit with Indian drivers.
> 
> India's recent economic success has been founded to a large extent on supplying services like software development to wealthy overseas clients. Its future success may lie with supplying inexpensive, good-quality products and services to its own people, cutting costs through creative innovation. That was Henry Ford's trick, after all.



*But:*

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070704.wchrychery0704/BNStory/robNews/home


> China's Chery signs export deal with Chrysler
> 
> JOE MCDONALD
> Associated Press
> 
> July 4, 2007 at 2:26 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group signed a deal Wednesday with China's biggest auto maker, Chery, to manufacture small cars to export to the United States and other markets.
> 
> The deal marks the first attempt by a major U.S. auto maker to use China as a manufacturing base to serve world markets.
> 
> The companies expect to export their first vehicle within a year to Latin American or Eastern Europe, and models should reach the United States and Western Europe with 2½ years, Chrysler chairman Tom LaSorda said.
> 
> “As of today, we're committed to building vehicles here for export,” Mr. LaSorda said at a signing ceremony conducted at a Chinese government guesthouse. “We will combine Chrysler's research and technology and global reach with Chery's lean manufacturing.”
> 
> The deal is part of Auburn Hills, Mich.-based Chrysler's effort to cut costs and become more flexible through manufacturing arrangements with local partners around the world.
> 
> Chery, founded in 1997, is China's biggest and fastest-growing auto maker, with output last year of 350,000 vehicles.
> 
> The Chrysler deal gives Chery an opportunity to improve its skills at it tries to expand exports of its own models, said the company's chairman and CEO, Yin Tongyao.
> 
> “Chery is still young, so we should learn from Chrysler and improve our own competitive edge in the near future,” Mr. Yin said.
> 
> The first vehicle exported will be a based on Chery's A1 compact sedan and sold under the Dodge brand, Mr. LaSorda said.
> 
> He and Mr. Yin said the companies would jointly develop future models, probably with Chrysler styling on a Chery platform.
> 
> China is the world's second-largest and fastest-growing vehicle market. It has been a bright spot for U.S. auto makers amid lacklustre sales in their home market. Most major auto makers have set up factories in China, but until now most production has been aimed at satisfying booming Chinese demand.
> 
> Mr. LaSorda said that depending on the model and the market, production under the deal could reach several hundred thousand vehicles per year.



Remember that we laughed at the first generation Toyotas back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s – who’s laughing now?  Not the ‘big three.’


----------



## GAP

The 800 lb gorilla sitting in the room is the total lack of road infrastructure that will be demanded within the next 20-30 years to accommodate all those cheap vehicles. Henry Ford's success was largely responsible for the massive road network the US enjoys today.

Remember "Route 66"?


----------



## Benny

Cars becoming affordable in india? Move to the hills and watch the snow melt with all that CO2...

The kidnapping in china is not a rarity unfortunately, and is usually done in rural areas, with the full support of the kidnappers family. I watched a documentary on one such girl being rescued. She had tried to escape multiple times (resulting in beatings) and had attempted suicide. Tragic story.


----------



## CougarKing

GAP said:
			
		

> The 800 lb gorilla sitting in the room is the total lack of road infrastructure that will be demanded within the next 20-30 years to accommodate all those cheap vehicles. Henry Ford's success was largely responsible for the massive road network the US enjoys today.
> 
> Remember "Route 66"?



With all due respect, have you ever been to China or India? Please don't assume that either China or India are as backward as is the common perception is for most people who haven't left North America (I know you've been to Taiwan at least during your Vietnam days) If you've been taken a bus on the way to Urumqi on the way you'll see lots of well paved roads courtesy of the Engineering Corps of the People's Liberation Army and private companies. If you've ever been to Xiahe, the traditional border of Tibet and China before Beijing annexed it,  you'll see a huge flyover/freeway being built through the mountains. And let's not forget the new road discussed in a recent online article that's supposed to link China to India's Kashmir province...the first road to link the two nations since the 1962 War between both nations. China has been modernizing in leaps and bounds since they opened up to the West in the 80s; as for India, they aim to catch up as well.


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## GAP

No, I have not been to China or India, and I do not assume they are backward. 

That given, I do not think they have the massive road infrastructure similar to the US built over 50-60 years and their love of the auto. 

This discussion revolved around to the impact a cheap vehicle will have on economies, and infrastructure is going to be a major part of that. 

Your mention of major thoroughfares is good, but I am more concerned about the road gridwork in between them. Drive anywhere where it is reasonably populated in N.A. and you will find a grid road (not necessarily paved) at least every mile, is that the case over there?


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## CougarKing

GAP said:
			
		

> Your mention of major thoroughfares is good, but I am more concerned about the road gridwork in between them. Drive anywhere where it is reasonably populated in N.A. and you will find a grid road (not necessarily paved) at least every mile, is that the case over there?



It is well developed in the Eastern and Southeastern, industrial coastal provinces that fuel China's economy as well as the Chinese heartland around the Yangtze and Pearl River areas. Of course, many of the poorer or more mountainous provinces will tend to have less roads, but the fact that CCP has focused on building major thoroughfares to connect Urumqi, Lhasa and other major provincial cities with the rest of China means that a paved grid road system is well on its way to being built, since it is a necessity for any nation with a growing population that aims to call itself a "developed superpower".


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## GAP

I did not know that, thank you. 

edited to add: Is India is the same category?


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## Edward Campbell

The Chinese built and build remarkably quickly and well.

Last summer I drove on excellent, limited access, toll highways which connect most of China, not just the 'rich' Eastern Seaboard.  They were better than almost any highway in Ontario and as good as most in Texas.  Even rural roads are well maintained – commerce demands it; local government responds.

My younger son was in India 18 months ago - it, he tells, me is behind China in infrastructure and some building is more difficult but it is happening.  New, good roads are being built to accommodate the needs of a vibrant, fast growing economy. 

It helps, I guess, when the ‘zoning hearings’ and ‘environmental impact’ studies are done quickly and almost always favour development.

I think we all need to understand that in both China and India we are dealing with very, very advanced societies - in every single respect at least as ‘advanced,’ ‘cultured,’ ‘educated,’ and ‘sophisticated’ as anything I have ever seen in North America and Europe – the great universities like  Peking University and TsingHua are in the same league as Oxford and MIT.

China and India are poor, very poor, and underdeveloped but they can do and they do remarkable things and they can (although they don’t always) do those things well, too.  The Chinese and Indians have learned from us - they understand how to do in 25 years what we needed 50 to achieve.  Not because they're all that much smarter but they will be able (although they may not choose to) avoid our mistakes. 

The Chinese, especially, are meeting a huge pent-up demand for ‘progress’ and a material ‘payoff’ for 50 years of sacrifice.  The Indians are now planning to satisfy similar demands based on their 50 years of democratic development. 

China has a long way to go to put in place the sorts of ‘governance’ institutions which will make capitalism work best.  India has a long way to go in dismantling the sort of socialistic red tape which inhibits the best of capitalism.  Both have *HUGE* corruption issues to overcome; both, I believe will do that quickly, fairly efficiently, and, in China’s case, a wee bit brutally because everyone understands that it is an impediment to the progress they all understand they*need* to make.

Back on my Culture matters! horse.  Both China and India are highly _enlightened_ societies – not _liberal_, not even a tiny bit in China’s case, but _liberalism_ is the English (and some of the West’s) response to the ideas of their _enlightenment_, Confucianism is the Chinese response to their, (about 2,300 years) older, _enlightenment_.

I’m a bit of the fan of the _cyclical_ theory – it works best with China which, over the past 3,000 years, has ‘peaked’ several times – every few hundred years, and has bottomed, too, in between each ‘peak.’  It bottomed, arguably in 1850, after a ‘peak’ during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor about 150 years earlier.  On that basis it’s due another peak within the next 50 years or so.


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## a_majoor

India and China are indeed very capable societies, they can muster the ability to create satelites and in China's case launch a manned space mission.

The problem, which Edward alluded to is they have been run as "Command economies" for most of the modern era, which really means the things that get done are what the elites want done. In Capitalist societies, resources are drawn to where the highest rate of return is available, which is why we shop at Wal-marts and the Chinese and Indians make the products for the Wal-marts (but don't have any there, yet).

In the short run, command economies can be very efficient at what the elites choose them to be good at (the surface success of Facist Italy in overcoming the Great Depression was an inspiration to FDR's "New Deal"), but in the longer run, market forces exert themselves and the ship of State ends up creaking along with the crew frantically bailing. The USSR culd launch missions into planetary space, but could not feed its own people.

India and China are moving away from command economies, but I suspect the transition is very tricky, and Russia supplies an example of what can go wrong.


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## tomahawk6

New Chinese FAC-M.

http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/littoral/type022.asp


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## chanman

a_majoor said:
			
		

> India and China are indeed very capable societies, they can muster the ability to create satelites and in China's case launch a manned space mission.
> 
> The problem, which Edward alluded to is they have been run as "Command economies" for most of the modern era, which really means the things that get done are what the elites want done. In Capitalist societies, resources are drawn to where the highest rate of return is available, which is why we shop at Wal-marts and the Chinese and Indians make the products for the Wal-marts (but don't have any there, yet).



The problem when discussing anything to do with that area of the world is you have to update your information every few months.

Stores in China

http://www.wal-martchina.com/english/walmart/wminchina.htm


Wal-mart in China, the story so far

http://www.wal-martchina.com/english/walmart/index.htm

Like most major retailers, they've been aggressive in trying to move into China and India, (They signed off on a large joint-venture in India just last November).  Of course, while they seem like indomitable forces in their established market, like Tesco or Carrefour in Britain and France, they can still get pushed out of other markets by competition - Wiki says Wal-mart withdrew from the German and South Korean markets.


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## Edward Campbell

As of a year ago _Carrefour_ appeared, to me, to be doing much better than _WalMart_ in Beijing.  It was the old location, Location, *LOCATION* thing: the _Carrefour_ stores are better located, for now.  As Beijing expands out past the 4th and 5th ring roads - and it will continue to do that - _WalMart_ will likely benefit.

For now foreign _brand_ stores - even if full of local products - are highly popular.  Foreign brands command a premium, quality not being a big issue - and a lot of the 'foreign' stuff is Indonesian and Indian junk.

I agree with the comment about currency of information - things are changing quickly.


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## chanman

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> For now foreign _brand_ stores - even if full of local products - are highly popular.  Foreign brands command a premium, quality not being a big issue - and a lot of the 'foreign' stuff is Indonesian and Indian junk.
> 
> I agree with the comment about currency of information - things are changing quickly.



I wonder how much that has to do with having someone to hold responsible in case of defective products, as well as experiencing staff trained to serve customers.

The thing about a large store is that they have a lot of, well, hostage capital.  The act of spending years and large sums of money to train people and build up a lot of rather nonliquid assets signals that a firm is planning to be there, and be there for a while.  The (literal) textbook example used in my classes was that of old mail-order catalogues showing pictures of large, ornate office buildings or warehouses belonging to the company in question, the idea being that if they ran off with your money, they stand to lose a lot more than they would gain.

Anyway, was traffic any better the last time you were in Beijing?  I've been there once, 5 years ago, and seem to remember lane markings being regarded as optional and large 8 lane x 8 lane intersections being directed by a single Beijing Security guy in the middle (perhaps people are loathe to follow traffic lights?).

Infrastructure, stability, and economies of scale are advantages China has over countries with potentially lower labour costs (Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, etc.), so it would make sense for them to continue to invest heavily in infrastructure, even as they run into power and water supply problems (something shared by most rapidly expanding cities, it seems)


----------



## CougarKing

> As of a year ago Carrefour appeared, to me, to be doing much better than WalMart in Beijing.  It was the old location, Location, LOCATION thing: the Carrefour stores are better located, for now.  As Beijing expands out past the 4th and 5th ring roads - and it will continue to do that - WalMart will likely benefit.
> 
> For now foreign brand stores - even if full of local products - are highly popular.  Foreign brands command a premium, quality not being a big issue - and a lot of the 'foreign' stuff is Indonesian and Indian junk.



What about Japanese "junk", or rather knockoffs of those Japanese goods, whether they be electronics or clothes or whatever? hehehe...you can probably find them in the Silk Market (xiu shui jie), known for those pirated goods, but last time I heard from a friend that had been there recently that it had been buldozed down...

Perhaps to make way for a new Mitsukoshi or Takeshimaya chain mall like they have in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan? ;D

To think I bought a knockoff of a top Rolex watch there for only 150 _Kuai/Yuan _ and the day I get back to North America, it ceases to work!

Campbell,

As for Walmart (or should I say "Wu" mart- you'll get the joke if know a little _Bei jing hua'r_, hehehe), they should face some growing competition in Hong Kong at least- I'm not sure about other Chinese cities- from this competitor called "Welcome" Supermarket, which I believe is an Australian-owned chain.




			
				chanman said:
			
		

> Anyway, was traffic any better the last time you were in Beijing?  I've been there once, 5 years ago, and seem to remember lane markings being regarded as optional and large 8 lane x 8 lane intersections being directed by a single Beijing Security guy in the middle (perhaps people are loathe to follow traffic lights?).



Last time I was in Beijing, I thought the traffic was not that bad- at least not bad compared to Manila or Bangkok's traffic problems until recenlty. The overwhelming number of Volkswagen brand cars, such as VW "Bora" which looks like a "Jetta" , was almost as annoying as that moronic vendor who shouted "BEI JING WAN BAO/Beijing Nightly Newspaper" outside my dorm for a number of nights.

 Surprisingly I heard of a new Beijing law enacted for the municipality calling for the outlawing the use of Bicycles within Beijing, probably to encourage the use of more cars...which doesn't make sense at all. I did notice some considerable construction near the Third Ring Road area of Chaoyang district where I stayed at in the Study Abroad program through my university, but I assumed that had more to do with the Olympics Preparations...

Here's an interesting note comparing Beijing at its height with Taipei- while Beijing at one point had more bicycles than cars, Taipei, on the other hand is a city full of scooters! SCOOTERS everywhere and the whole freaking city from the 101 building to Yangmingshan seems to resemble a huge parking lot since cars are parked in every conceivable nook and cranny since it is apparent everyone just wised up to using scooters instead!  ;D


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 1 of 2*

Here, reproduced from the July/August 2007 _Foreign Affairs_ under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, is another take on economic/political systems – to add to liberal and conservative democracy, illiberal democracy, illiberal kleptocracy, etc:

It’s long so it’s in two parts.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86405/azar-gat/the-return-of-authoritarian-great-powers.html


> The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers
> *By Azar Gat*
> 
> From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007
> 
> Summary: Liberal democracy, led by the United States, may have emerged triumphant from the great struggles of the twentieth century. But the post-Cold War rise of economically successful -- and nondemocratic -- China and Russia may represent a viable alternative path to modernity that leaves liberal democracy's ultimate victory and future dominance in doubt.
> 
> _Azar Gat is Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University and the author of War in Human Civilization._
> 
> THE END OF THE END OF HISTORY
> 
> Today's global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam -- and it is the lesser of the two challenges. Although the proponents of radical Islam find liberal democracy repugnant, and the movement is often described as the new fascist threat, the societies from which it arises are generally poor and stagnant. They represent no viable alternative to modernity and pose no significant military threat to the developed world. It is mainly the potential use of weapons of mass destruction -- particularly by nonstate actors -- that makes militant Islam a menace.
> 
> The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.
> 
> Capitalism's ascendancy appears to be deeply entrenched, but the current predominance of democracy could be far less secure. Capitalism has expanded relentlessly since early modernity, its lower-priced goods and superior economic power eroding and transforming all other socioeconomic regimes, a process most memorably described by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Contrary to Marx's expectations, capitalism had the same effect on communism, eventually "burying" it without the proverbial shot being fired. The triumph of the market, precipitating and reinforced by the industrial-technological revolution, led to the rise of the middle class, intensive urbanization, the spread of education, the emergence of mass society, and ever greater affluence. In the post-Cold War era (just as in the nineteenth century and the 1950s and 1960s), it is widely believed that liberal democracy naturally emerged from these developments, a view famously espoused by Francis Fukuyama. Today, more than half of the world's states have elected governments, and close to half have sufficiently entrenched liberal rights to be considered fully free.
> 
> But the reasons for the triumph of democracy, especially over its nondemocratic capitalist rivals of the two world wars, Germany and Japan, were more contingent than is usually assumed. Authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and Russia, may represent a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy's ultimate victory -- or future dominance.
> 
> CHRONICLE OF A DEFEAT NOT FORETOLD
> 
> The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, fascist, and communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the twentieth century -- the two world wars and the Cold War. In trying to determine exactly what accounted for this decisive outcome, it is tempting to trace it to the special traits and intrinsic advantages of liberal democracy.
> 
> One possible advantage is democracies' international conduct. Perhaps they more than compensate for carrying a lighter stick abroad with a greater ability to elicit international cooperation through the bonds and discipline of the global market system. This explanation is probably correct for the Cold War, when a greatly expanded global economy was dominated by the democratic powers, but it does not apply to the two world wars. Nor is it true that liberal democracies succeed because they always cling together. Again, this was true, at least as a contributing factor, during the Cold War, when the democratic capitalist camp kept its unity, whereas growing antagonism between the Soviet Union and China pulled the communist bloc apart. During World War I, however, the ideological divide between the two sides was much less clear. The Anglo-French alliance was far from preordained; it was above all a function of balance-of-power calculations rather than liberal cooperation. At the close of the nineteenth century, power politics had brought the United Kingdom and France, bitterly antagonistic countries, to the brink of war and prompted the United Kingdom to actively seek an alliance with Germany. Liberal Italy's break from the Triple Alliance and joining of the Entente, despite its rivalry with France, was a function of the Anglo-French alliance, as Italy's peninsular location made it hazardous for the country to be on a side opposed to the leading maritime power of the time, the United Kingdom. Similarly, during World War II, France was quickly defeated and taken out of the Allies' side (which was to include nondemocratic Soviet Russia), whereas the right-wing totalitarian powers fought on the same side. Studies of democracies' alliance behavior suggest that democratic regimes show no greater tendency to stick together than other types of regimes.
> 
> Nor did the totalitarian capitalist regimes lose World War II because their democratic opponents held a moral high ground that inspired greater exertion from their people, as the historian Richard Overy and others have claimed. During the 1930s and early 1940s, fascism and Nazism were exciting new ideologies that generated massive popular enthusiasm, whereas democracy stood on the ideological defensive, appearing old and dispirited. If anything, the fascist regimes proved more inspiring in wartime than their democratic adversaries, and the battlefield performance of their militaries is widely judged to have been superior.
> 
> Liberal democracy's supposedly inherent economic advantage is also far less clear than is often assumed. All of the belligerents in the twentieth century's great struggles proved highly effective in producing for war. During World War I, semiautocratic Germany committed its resources as effectively as its democratic rivals did. After early victories in World War II, Nazi Germany's economic mobilization and military production proved lax during the critical years 1940-42. Well positioned at the time to fundamentally alter the global balance of power by destroying the Soviet Union and straddling all of continental Europe, Germany failed because its armed forces were meagerly supplied for the task. The reasons for this deficiency remain a matter of historical debate, but one of the problems was the existence of competing centers of authority in the Nazi system, in which Hitler's "divide and rule" tactics and party functionaries' jealous guarding of their assigned domains had a chaotic effect. Furthermore, from the fall of France in June 1940 to the German setback before Moscow in December 1941, there was a widespread feeling in Germany that the war had practically been won. All the same, from 1942 onward (by which time it was too late), Germany greatly intensified its economic mobilization and caught up with and even surpassed the liberal democracies in terms of the share of GDP devoted to the war (although its production volume remained much lower than that of the massive U.S. economy). Likewise, levels of economic mobilization in imperial Japan and the Soviet Union exceeded those of the United States and the United Kingdom thanks to ruthless efforts.
> 
> Only during the Cold War did the Soviet command economy exhibit deepening structural weaknesses -- weaknesses that were directly responsible for the Soviet Union's downfall. The Soviet system had successfully generated the early and intermediate stages of industrialization (albeit at a frightful human cost) and excelled at the regimentalized techniques of mass production during World War II. It also kept abreast militarily during the Cold War. But because of the system's rigidity and lack of incentives, it proved ill equipped to cope with the advanced stages of development and the demands of the information age and globalization.
> 
> There is no reason, however, to suppose that the totalitarian capitalist regimes of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would have proved inferior economically to the democracies had they survived. The inefficiencies that favoritism and unaccountability typically create in such regimes might have been offset by higher levels of social discipline. Because of their more efficient capitalist economies, the right-wing totalitarian powers could have constituted a more viable challenge to the liberal democracies than the Soviet Union did; Nazi Germany was judged to be such a challenge by the Allied powers before and during World War II. The liberal democracies did not possess an inherent advantage over Germany in terms of economic and technological development, as they did in relation to their other great-power rivals.
> 
> So why did the democracies win the great struggles of the twentieth century? The reasons are different for each type of adversary. They defeated their nondemocratic capitalist adversaries, Germany and Japan, in war because Germany and Japan were medium-sized countries with limited resource bases and they came up against the far superior -- but hardly preordained -- economic and military coalition of the democratic powers and Russia or the Soviet Union. The defeat of communism, however, had much more to do with structural factors. The capitalist camp -- which after 1945 expanded to include most of the developed world -- possessed much greater economic power than the communist bloc, and the inherent inefficiency of the communist economies prevented them from fully exploiting their vast resources and catching up to the West. Together, the Soviet Union and China were larger and thus had the potential to be more powerful than the democratic capitalist camp. Ultimately, they failed because their economic systems limited them, whereas the nondemocratic capitalist powers, Germany and Japan, were defeated because they were too small. Contingency played a decisive role in tipping the balance against the nondemocratic capitalist powers and in favor of the democracies.
> 
> AMERICAN EXCEPTION
> 
> The most decisive element of contingency was the United States. After all, it was little more than a chance of history that the scion of Anglo-Saxon liberalism would sprout on the other side of the Atlantic, institutionalize its heritage with independence, expand across one of the most habitable and thinly populated territories in the world, feed off of massive immigration from Europe, and so create on a continental scale what was -- and still is -- by far the world's largest concentration of economic and military might. A liberal regime and other structural traits had a lot to do with the United States' economic success, and even with its size, because of its attractiveness to immigrants. But the United States would scarcely have achieved such greatness had it not been located in a particularly advantageous and vast ecological-geographic niche, as the counterexamples of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand demonstrate. And location, of course, although crucial, was but one necessary condition among many for bringing about the giant and, indeed, "United" States as the paramount political fact of the twentieth century. Contingency was at least as responsible as liberalism for the United States' emergence in the New World and, hence, for its later ability to rescue the Old World.
> 
> Throughout the twentieth century, the United States' power consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on. If any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the existence of the United States rather than any inherent advantage. In fact, had it not been for the United States, liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the twentieth century. This is a sobering thought that is often overlooked in studies of the spread of democracy in the twentieth century, and it makes the world today appear much more contingent and tenuous than linear theories of development suggest. If it were not for the U.S. factor, the judgment of later generations on liberal democracy would probably have echoed the negative verdict on democracy's performance, issued by the fourth-century-BC Greeks, in the wake of Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War.




Edit: format


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 2 of 2*

(Reproduced from the July/August 2007 _Foreign Affairs_ under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act.)



> THE NEW SECOND WORLD
> 
> But the audit of war is, of course, not the only one that societies -- democratic and nondemocratic -- undergo. One must ask how the totalitarian capitalist powers would have developed had they not been defeated by war. Would they, with time and further development, have shed their former identity and embraced liberal democracy, as the former communist regimes of eastern Europe eventually did? Was the capitalist industrial state of imperial Germany before World War I ultimately moving toward increasing parliamentary control and democratization? Or would it have developed into an authoritarian oligarchic regime, dominated by an alliance between the officialdom, the armed forces, and industry, as imperial Japan did (in spite of the latter's liberal interlude in the 1920s)? Liberalization seems even more doubtful in the case of Nazi Germany had it survived, let alone triumphed. Because all these major historical experiments were cut short by war, the answers to these questions remain a matter of speculation. But perhaps the peacetime record of other authoritarian capitalist regimes since 1945 can offer a clue.
> 
> Studies that cover this period show that democracies generally outdo other systems economically. Authoritarian capitalist regimes are at least as successful -- if not more so -- in the early stages of development, but they tend to democratize after crossing a certain threshold of economic and social development. This seems to have been a recurring pattern in East Asia, southern Europe, and Latin America. The attempt to draw conclusions about development patterns from these findings, however, may be misleading, because the sample set itself may be polluted. Since 1945, the enormous gravitational pull exerted by the United States and the liberal hegemony has bent patterns of development worldwide.
> 
> Because the totalitarian capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were crushed in war, and these countries were subsequently threatened by Soviet power, they lent themselves to a sweeping restructuring and democratization. Consequently, smaller countries that chose capitalism over communism had no rival political and economic model to emulate and no powerful international players to turn to other than the liberal democratic camp. These small and medium-sized countries' eventual democratization probably had as much to do with the overwhelming influence of the Western liberal hegemony as with internal processes. Presently, Singapore is the only example of a country with a truly developed economy that still maintains a semiauthoritarian regime, and even it is likely to change under the influence of the liberal order within which it operates. But are Singapore-like great powers that prove resistant to the influence of this order possible?
> 
> The question is made relevant by the recent emergence of nondemocratic giants, above all formerly communist and booming authoritarian capitalist China. Russia, too, is retreating from its postcommunist liberalism and assuming an increasingly authoritarian character as its economic clout grows. Some believe that these countries could ultimately become liberal democracies through a combination of internal development, increasing affluence, and outside influence. Alternatively, they may have enough weight to create a new nondemocratic but economically advanced Second World. They could establish a powerful authoritarian capitalist order that allies political elites, industrialists, and the military; that is nationalist in orientation; and that participates in the global economy on its own terms, as imperial Germany and imperial Japan did.
> 
> It is widely contended that economic and social development create pressures for democratization that an authoritarian state structure cannot contain. There is also the view that "closed societies" may be able to excel in mass manufacturing but not in the advanced stages of the information economy. The jury on these issues is still out, because the data set is incomplete. Imperial and Nazi Germany stood at the forefront of the advanced scientific and manufacturing economies of their times, but some would argue that their success no longer applies because the information economy is much more diversified. Nondemocratic Singapore has a highly successful information economy, but Singapore is a city-state, not a big country. It will take a long time before China reaches the stage when the possibility of an authoritarian state with an advanced capitalist economy can be tested. All that can be said at the moment is that there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that a transition to democracy by today's authoritarian capitalist powers is inevitable, whereas there is a great deal to suggest that such powers have far greater economic and military potential than their communist predecessors did.
> 
> China and Russia represent a return of economically successful authoritarian capitalist powers, which have been absent since the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but they are much larger than the latter two countries ever were. Although Germany was only a medium-sized country uncomfortably squeezed at the center of Europe, it twice nearly broke out of its confines to become a true world power on account of its economic and military might. In 1941, Japan was still behind the leading great powers in terms of economic development, but its growth rate since 1913 had been the highest in the world. Ultimately, however, both Germany and Japan were too small -- in terms of population, resources, and potential -- to take on the United States. Present-day China, on the other hand, is the largest player in the international system in terms of population and is experiencing spectacular economic growth. By shifting from communism to capitalism, China has switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism. As China rapidly narrows the economic gap with the developed world, the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower.
> 
> Even in its current bastions in the West, the liberal political and economic consensus is vulnerable to unforeseen developments, such as a crushing economic crisis that could disrupt the global trading system or a resurgence of ethnic strife in a Europe increasingly troubled by immigration and ethnic minorities. Were the West to be hit by such upheavals, support for liberal democracy in Asia, Latin America, and Africa -- where adherence to that model is more recent, incomplete, and insecure -- could be shaken. A successful nondemocratic Second World could then be regarded by many as an attractive alternative to liberal democracy.
> 
> MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
> 
> Although the rise of authoritarian capitalist great powers would not necessarily lead to a nondemocratic hegemony or a war, it might imply that the near-total dominance of liberal democracy since the Soviet Union's collapse will be short-lived and that a universal "democratic peace" is still far off. The new authoritarian capitalist powers could become as deeply integrated into the world economy as imperial Germany and imperial Japan were and not choose to pursue autarky, as Nazi Germany and the communist bloc did. A great-power China may also be less revisionist than the territorially confined Germany and Japan were (although Russia, which is still reeling from having lost an empire, is more likely to tend toward revisionism). Still, Beijing, Moscow, and their future followers might well be on antagonistic terms with the democratic countries, with all the potential for suspicion, insecurity, and conflict that this entails -- while holding considerably more power than any of the democracies' past rivals ever did.
> 
> So does the greater power potential of authoritarian capitalism mean that the transformation of the former communist great powers may ultimately prove to have been a negative development for global democracy? It is too early to tell. Economically, the liberalization of the former communist countries has given the global economy a tremendous boost, and there may be more in store. But the possibility of a move toward protectionism by them in the future also needs to be taken into account -- and assiduously avoided. It was, after all, the prospect of growing protectionism in the world economy at the turn of the twentieth century and the protectionist bent of the 1930s that helped radicalize the nondemocratic capitalist powers of the time and precipitate both world wars.
> 
> On the positive side for the democracies, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire stripped Moscow of about half the resources it commanded during the Cold War, with eastern Europe absorbed by a greatly expanded democratic Europe. This is perhaps the most significant change in the global balance of power since the forced postwar democratic reorientation of Germany and Japan under U.S. tutelage. Moreover, China may still eventually democratize, and Russia could reverse its drift away from democracy. If China and Russia do not become democratic, it will be critical that India remain so, both because of its vital role in balancing China and because of the model that it represents for other developing countries.
> 
> But the most important factor remains the United States. For all the criticism leveled against it, the United States -- and its alliance with Europe -- stands as the single most important hope for the future of liberal democracy. Despite its problems and weaknesses, the United States still commands a global position of strength and is likely to retain it even as the authoritarian capitalist powers grow. Not only are its GDP and productivity growth rate the highest in the developed world, but as an immigrant country with about one-fourth the population density of both the European Union and China and one-tenth of that of Japan and India, the United States still has considerable potential to grow -- both economically and in terms of population -- whereas those others are all experiencing aging and, ultimately, shrinking populations. China's economic growth rate is among the highest in the world, and given the country's huge population and still low levels of development, such growth harbors the most radical potential for change in global power relations. But even if China's superior growth rate persists and its GDP surpasses that of the United States by the 2020s, as is often forecast, China will still have just over one-third of the United States' wealth per capita and, hence, considerably less economic and military power. Closing that far more challenging gap with the developed world would take several more decades. Furthermore, GDP alone is known to be a poor measure of a country's power, and evoking it to celebrate China's ascendency is highly misleading. As it was during the twentieth century, the U.S. factor remains the greatest guarantee that liberal democracy will not be thrown on the defensive and relegated to a vulnerable position on the periphery of the international system.
> 
> www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.



I agree with Gat that Germany, 1870-1918 and 1932-45, and China post Deng Xiaoping were/are *authoritarian capitalist* polities.

I’m not sure Russia is or ever was; Russia seems chronically unable to ‘do’ politics or capitalism – some sort of oligarchy, ‘managing’ both the government and the economy has been the tradition for about 1,000 years.  ‘Command economy’ has dominated since Peter the Great.

I also agree that *authoritarian capitalist* regimes can, and have, excelled at the rational commitment of resources, education, work force mobility and so on – just (only almost?) as well as *democratic capitalist* societies have done.

Command economies, which is what Russia had for about 300 years, until 1990, cannot (at least never have) been able to manage (for any reasonable period) anything as well as any capitalist economy. 

I think gat misclassifies Singapore as a “nondemocratic” state.  The ‘problem’ for modern liberals like Gat, is that Singapore is a highly _conservative_ society and in such societies *consensus* is all important.  That 85% of the (85%) Chinese majority vote the same way, time after time, does noit mean that Singapore is ‘nondemocratic.’  Rather it means that Lee Kuan Yew (and now his son, Lee Hsien Loong) understood how to develop and, politically, exploit an acceptable consensus amongst most of the Chinese – that guarantees majority government after majority government, election after election.  It is not that Singapore is ‘nondemocratic,’ it is that it is _conservative_.  In terms of democratic institutions and the rile of law Singapore is probably more democratic than are nearly half of  NATO’s members.

I disagree with Gat’s thesis that China and Russia might form an *authoritarian capitalist* ‘New Second World.’  My guess is that Russia, being an _*illiberal*_ society will drift back towards some sort of oligarchy.

China is a more interesting problem.  I think (but the modern history of capitalism is too short to be anything like sure) that capital craves some sort of political ‘say’ or, at least, discourse with government.  Capital and capitalists want to be able to operate in a fairly safe environment so they want/need e.g. a consistent rule-of-law based political system which is something which only democracy does well.  Thus, Singapore’s success: maybe the governing party doesn’t change (rather as the Liberal Democratic Party has governed Japan, almost non-stop, since 1950) but the rule-of-law is equally consistent as are people’s rights, including their right to property.  Hong Kong is enjoying similar success for similar reasons: capital prefers Hong Kong to Shanghai because the rules are consistent in Hong Kong.  That, consistent and equal application of the rule-of-law to all, governors and governed alike, is the _sine qua non_ of democracy.  Elections are the way we assure ‘government with the consent of the governed’ – there _may_ be other ways to accomplish that but the rule of law must be there, no matter how consent is measured, or democracy will crumble.  So long as China wishes to remain *capitalist* it must:

•	Provide consistent, fair and equal ‘rule of law’ for all – workers, capitalists, farmers and the _new mandarins_, too; and

•	Allow the people, including the capitalists, to influence socio-economic ‘outcomes.’

When a society does those two things it starts to look democratic.


----------



## a_majoor

I suspect Edward is right about Russia, and if she does harbour renewed Imperial ambitions, they will probably have to be directed at the "near Beyond"of the Trans Caucus and central Asia (with the added problem of US forces staged in the "Stan's" and formal or informal alliances being formed between the United States, some of the 'Stans and Mongolia). China has several hurdles to overcome (many of which have already been discussed on this thread, particularly the Urban/Rural divide, systemic corruption and the coming demographic crunch ["China will grow old before she grows rich"]).

I am not as sure of the author's thesis that "authoritarian capitalist" societies can be viable long term challengers. All authoritarian societies tend to be brittle and unable to respond to unexpected stressors. The biggest stressor is the growth of the middle class inside the society, this is the thesis of Georges Lefebvre's "The Coming of the French Revolution". http://www.amazon.com/Coming-French-Revolution-Georges-Lefebvre/dp/0691007519 The middle class are the true drivers of revolution, they have acquired some wealth and position in society which is threatened from both above (the aristocrats or oligarchy can attempt to confiscate the wealth through arbitrary taxes and regulation, or freeze the middle class out of opportunities through favoritism and "crony capitalism") and below (the poor can come in overwhelming force and steal what the middle class have; the "rich" can withdraw into secure cantonments, deploy security forces ranging from the Army and Police to private retainers, or simply pack up and leave). The middle class therefore have the need to grasp the levers of power so they can protect themselves and their wealth. 

Incidentally, liberal democracies have always been more powerful than their competitors, historical examples range from Athens fighting against the Peloponnesian  League (Sparta and her allies, bankrolled by the Persian empire) for nine years *after* the destruction of her army and fleet, England and the United Provinces (the Netherlands) able to maintain themselves against the vastly superior financial and manpower resources of Imperial Spain or the Republic of Venice (a city state) holding its own against the vastly larger and richer Ottoman Empire. Relative to their competitors, the named powers were far more liberal and democratic for their time and place than the rival empires.

I suspect the real long term threat to us is internal, as our societies become increasingly illiberal through such factors as "political correctness", out of control bureaucracy and government agencies (and governments) becoming more opaque and less accountable to the people. So long as there are powerful formal (as in the United States) or informal (as in the UK) institutions and conventions that transcend personal ambitions and "petty politics" ( and can continue functioning if a Ronald Reagan _or_ a Bill Clinton are in charge) then we will retain our freedom. Of course, this takes lots of hard work, something not much in evidence these days.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think gat misclassifies Singapore as a “nondemocratic” state.  The ‘problem’ for modern liberals like Gat, is that Singapore is a highly _conservative_ society and in such societies *consensus* is all important.  That 85% of the (85%) Chinese majority vote the same way, time after time, does noit mean that Singapore is ‘nondemocratic.’  Rather it means that Lee Kuan Yew (and now his son, Lee Hsien Loong) understood how to develop and, politically, exploit an acceptable consensus amongst most of the Chinese – that guarantees majority government after majority government, election after election.  It is not that Singapore is ‘nondemocratic,’ it is that it is _conservative_.  In terms of democratic institutions and the rile of law Singapore is probably more democratic than are nearly half of  NATO’s members.
> 
> I disagree with Gat’s thesis that China and Russia might form an *authoritarian capitalist* ‘New Second World.’  My guess is that Russia, being an _*illiberal*_ society will drift back towards some sort of oligarchy.
> 
> China is a more interesting problem.  I think (but the modern history of capitalism is too short to be anything like sure) that capital craves some sort of political ‘say’ or, at least, discourse with government.  Capital and capitalists want to be able to operate in a fairly safe environment so they want/need e.g. a consistent rule-of-law based political system which is something which only democracy does well.  Thus, Singapore’s success: maybe the governing party doesn’t change (rather as the Liberal Democratic Party has governed Japan, almost non-stop, since 1950) but the rule-of-law is equally consistent as are people’s rights, including their right to property.  Hong Kong is enjoying similar success for similar reasons: capital prefers Hong Kong to Shanghai because the rules are consistent in Hong Kong.  That, consistent and equal application of the rule-of-law to all, governors and governed alike, is the _sine qua non_ of democracy.  Elections are the way we assure ‘government with the consent of the governed’ – there _may_ be other ways to accomplish that but the rule of law must be there, no matter how consent is measured, or democracy will crumble.  So long as China wishes to remain *capitalist* it must:
> 
> •	Provide consistent, fair and equal ‘rule of law’ for all – workers, capitalists, farmers and the _new mandarins_, too; and
> 
> •	Allow the people, including the capitalists, to influence socio-economic ‘outcomes.’
> 
> When a society does those two things it starts to look democratic.



Campbell,

You forgot to mention that after Lee Kuan Yew "stepped down" Minister Goh Chok Tong took his place for quite a while as  Singapore's head of state while Lee groomed his son Lee Hsien (Xian) Long to eventually assume the position. However, like many of China's retired CCP and State leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping before he died, these "retired" leaders often controlled, or at least greatly influenced the current leaders from the background.

BTW, you have yet to comment on this other post of mine regarding China's using Singapore's example as template for a stable polity, as demonstrated by Bei Da Professor Dr. Pan Wei with his "Rule of Law Regime" concept:



> With all due respect, you probably mean "they are NOT YET a superpower", but from the current rate their economy is growing, they will be a superpower within the next 50 years, provided the Chinese Communist Party can keep stability. During my study abroad program in Beijing, a  Bei Da professor named Dr.  Pan Wei once lectured to us that he foresaw Chinese GDP per capita and standard of living reaching on par with US incomes and standard of living by the mid 2020s. And mind you, this guy is considered to be more of a moderate. He advocates that in order to keep power without sacrificing economic growth, that the Beijing govt. must follow a system similar to that of Singapore, which also has a One-Party System as well as a prosperous economy. Dr. Pan Wei advocated what was called a "Rule of Law Regime", which called for the following features:
> 
> 1.) A one party-system which had  a civil service which advanced through Merit
> 2.) an independent anti-corruption agency like those agencies both Singapore (the CPIB) and Hong Kong (the ICAC) has
> 3.) though it was a one party system, there was a separate judiciary
> 
> Singapore's CPIB info
> http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm
> 
> Hong Kong's ICAC
> http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm
> 
> Dr. Pan Wei's "Rule of Law Regime"
> http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/content/qy59mu0p3fpfqx3j/
> 
> Source: Pan, Wei (2003). Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China
> In Journal of Contemporary China, 12(34), pp. 3-43.
> Location: Journal of Contemporary China
> 
> Thus China's CCP wanted to use Singapore's People Action Party as an example of how a one-party regime could survive in a modern world where the trend was thought to be going toward multiparty, liberal democracies.
> 
> Thus, the CCP is observing and adapting, while ensuring that nothing interferes with the nation's continuining economic prosperity. The large amount of corruption in China's govt. may indeed make that govt. a "house of cards", but if the CCP consolidates like Singapore's PAP did under all those decades of prosperity under Premier Lee Kuan Yew, then the CCP may yet survive and make China a superpower.  The fact that the Chinese also makes a large portion of Singapore's current population makes their system more attractive to Beijing, since it proves it can work with Chinese people.
> 
> (One more thing...Dr. Pan Wei obviously profits from his political consultation to the govt., since he drove an Mercedes SLK to class)


----------



## CougarKing

New Chinese "Jin" (or Gold- not the name of a major dynasty, but a kingdom in one of the warring state eras of China's long history) class SSBN spotted on Google Earth...the real thing, mistaken identity or a wooden mockup made to intimidate the US?
http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2007/07/the-jin-class-s.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarShark said:
			
		

> ...
> BTW, you have yet to comment on this other post of mine regarding China's using Singapore's example as template for a stable polity, as demonstrated by Bei Da Professor Dr. Pan Wei with his "Rule of Law Regime" concept:



Sorry, CougarShark, I didn’t think you were soliciting my commentary.

As I understand Prof. Pan’s thesis in “Crossing the River”, China will chose ‘rule-of-law’ over conservative democracy because, in his words: _“Traditionally, Chinese society has not been divided by social classes. It was a society of small family farms that lacked a history of class struggle for representation. Citizens expected to sustain a neutral, self-restraining, and meritocratic government, so power politics according to either status or majority rule had little room in Chinese society.”_

I have no argument with that.

(Nor, by the way, do I object to Pan’s analysis of American policy and its impact on China of America as, under the poor leadership of President George W. Bush, _“a previously “benign hegemon” is becoming an oppressive tyrant that suffers opposition almost everywhere in the world.  Such a foreign policy will ultimately cause the decline of US power, and it may not succeed in precluding China’s emergence from a new decade of political reform. Instead, belligerent confrontation will only lead to an escalation of tensions—a result that neither China nor the United States really desires. What is needed for the future is the cooperation of both states: a reformed and emergent China, and a powerful United States that pursues its potential for genuine and valuable leadership in international justice.”_  But many, in America, will object.)

There is no question in my mind that the matter of the utmost urgency is corruption and instituting systems like CPIB and/or ICAC are necessary steps to get to a _regime_ where capital can be invested in reasonable legal security.

Pan does not suggest how the Chinese will, as I think they must, jump the “government with the consent of the governed” hurdle.  I do not think capital (and the ‘ordinary’ people who own and invest it) will go on for too long without having some say in how it is used.  It is all well and good to remove the corruption, that provides ‘security’ but ‘best use’ requires _consultation_ and that is best managed in some sort of democracy.


----------



## CougarKing

CougarShark said:
			
		

> Campbell,
> 
> You forgot to mention that after Lee Kuan Yew "stepped down" Minister Goh Chok Tong took his place for quite a while as  Singapore's head of state while Lee groomed his son Lee Hsien (Xian) Long to eventually assume the position. However, like many of China's retired CCP and State leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping before he died, these "retired" leaders often controlled, or at least greatly influenced the current leaders from the background.
> 
> BTW, you have yet to comment on this other post of mine regarding China's using Singapore's example as a template for a stable polity, as demonstrated by Bei Da Professor Dr. Pan Wei with his "Rule of Law Regime" concept:



I was just correcting my own typos...LOL

Thank you for your response, Campbell.


----------



## a_majoor

More about China. Interesting how apologists for China do their "fact checking"

http://stevejanke.com/archives/235000.php



> Let's not blame China for everything...but if it is China's fault, then blame away
> 
> Lyn Cockburn, writing for the Edmonton Sun, argues that too much effort is being expended on demonizing China. She proves her point on China not being the source of all ills by bringing attention to a toy recall unrelated to China, and to international incidents that are unrelated to China. Having established that the press is suffering from tunnel vision, she wants more focus on Darfur and less on China.
> 
> Problem #1: The toy she discusses in detail is manufactured in China.
> 
> Problem #2: Those international incidents involved China.
> 
> Problem #3: China in primarily responsible for the lack of action in Darfur.
> 
> Problem #4: The editor at the Edmonton Sun seems to have gone missing.
> 
> I can infer the last one based on the sad lack of factual correctness in this column.
> 
> Lyn Cockburn of the Edmonton Sun has written a column today on the current fashion to blame everything bad on China. She points out that China is not the only country where people make mistakes or do bad things.
> 
> Her point is, well, obvious.
> 
> At this point, the column seems like filler, but then she tries to make her point by describing an American toy that explodes:
> 
> For example, in North America right now, some 80 products - food and toys in particular - have been recalled. This week, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency warned the public not to consume Great Value brand Original Chili with Beans and Hot Chili with Beans for fear of botulism contamination.
> 
> And here's but one example of a recall of a dangerous toy, the Sky Rangers Park Flyer Radio Control Airplanes, made in Colorado. The hazard report warns that these toys can explode. The company has received at least 45 reports.
> 
> Yet the publicity over China's shoddy products is so pervasive it leads us to believe China is the only country in the world with this problem.
> 
> Excellent point. So China makes shoddy, even dangerous, products. But even the Americans can make toys that explode in a child's hand. Except...the Sky Rangers Park Flyer Radio Control Airplanes is not made in Colorado.
> 
> The Sky Rangers Park Flyer Radio Control Airplanes is made in China:
> 
> WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.
> 
> Name of Product: Sky Rangers Park Flyer Radio Control Airplanes
> 
> Units: About 21,000
> 
> Distributor: Estes-Cox Corp., of Penrose, Colo.
> 
> Hazard: The airplanes are launched by hand and can explode near the consumer’s head, posing a risk of temporary hearing loss and injuries to eyes, face and hands.
> 
> Sold at: Hobby stores and other retailers nationwide from September 2005 through December 2006 for between $20 and $40.
> 
> Manufactured in: China
> 
> Good one, Cockburn.
> 
> To be fair, she says not enough attention has been paid to Libya and Pakistan as sources of problems. In Libya, there is the issue of the Bulgarian medics accused of injecting children with HIV. Why is no one criticizing the EU talking about normalizing ties with China now that the medics, imprisoned for 8 years, have finally been released?
> 
> Good question. The answer is that the normalization was part of the price of getting those people released.
> 
> Some news reports referred to the partnership deal between Libya and the European Union as something to "complete a process of normalizing its ties with the West."
> 
> Translation: "We've finished torturing these people, so can we talk about getting all sorts of trade benefits from the EU now?"
> 
> And what was China doing while these people were still in a Libyan jail? Signing contracts to build pipelines in Libya, taking advantage of the vacuum that existed while the EU refused to do business in Libya.
> And what of Pakistan, asks Cockburn?
> 
> And if we insist on having a demon to demonize, what's wrong with Pakistan with its tolerance for the Taliban?
> 
> If Pakistan feels it can resist Western pressure to cut off ties with the Taliban, it might be because Pakistan feels like it has a powerful patron that will support it in the face of Western criticism. Pakistan's new patron? China:
> 
> There are about 8,500 Chinese working in Pakistan, almost three times the size of Americans in the country. Of these, 3,500 are engineers and technicians assigned to a variety of Sino-Pakistani projects. The remaining 5,000 are engaged in private businesses. China’s investment in Pakistan has jumped to an all-time high of $4 billion. Its companies make up 12% -- 60 of 500 – of all the foreign firms operating in Pakistan. Chinese presence in Pakistan has grown dramatically since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which brought Beijing and Islamabad together to build a naval-cum-commercial port at Gwader, a coastal town in Baluchistan. The Gwadar port alone, where construction began in 2002, employs 500 Chinese engineers and technicians. This growing Chinese presence forces Beijing to go beyond diplomatic niceties to protect its human and non-human interests in Pakistan.
> 
> Pakistani authorities never spare any effort to safeguard China’s interests. Soon after the abduction of seven Chinese on June 23, Islamabad decided to lay siege to the Red Mosque, whose radical clerics were behind the sordid affair. On July 2, barely a week after the abduction, the government ordered 15,000 troops around the mosque compound to flush out the militants. On July 4, it arrested the leader of the militants, Maulana Abdul Aziz who, in an ironic twist, is believed to have close relations with Pakistani intelligence agencies. After apprehending the leader, government troops moved to choking off the militants’ supplies of food, water, and power. But as soon as word of the revenge killing of three Chinese on July 8 reached Islamabad, it created a “perfect storm” for Gen. Musharraf. Embarrassed and enraged, he reversed the troops’ strategy and ordered them, on July 10, to mount an all-out assault at the mosque, in which Aziz’s brother and his deputy, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, together with as many as 1,000 people, was killed.
> 
> This is not the first time that Musharraf did Beijing’s bidding.
> 
> U.S. pressure on Pakistan to clear the region of the Taliban and al-Qaeda has forced Pakistan into an ever-tighter embrace of China. Musharraf's crackdown on the Lal Masjid, a potent symbol of this strategic Sino-Pakistani alignment, also sent a blood-soaked message to religious militants that Chinese interests will remain off-limits. Musharraf is not apologetic about defending Chinese interests in Pakistan and punishing those who dared to harm them.
> 
> She wants people to start worrying about Darfur more and China less, and points to the Sky Rangers exploding airplane and Libya and Pakistan as proof that we should stop worrying about China so much. Cockburn seems to think that Darfur is somehow disconnected to China:
> 
> But when the demonization of China starts to push the horrific situation in places like Darfur out of the news spotlight, then something's out of whack.
> 
> But I thought China was responsible for much of the suffering in Darfur?
> 
> Last week Wang Guangya, China's ambassador to the United Nations, made a formal statement on Darfur that calls into question China's claim to be treated as a responsible international player. Mr. Wang began by saying that China wants U.N. peacekeepers to be deployed in Darfur, calling this a "good idea and realistic option," one that should be done "as soon as feasible." But then he went on to explain that China was refusing to support the U.N. resolution calling for such a deployment. Unless China changes its position, the result may well be tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
> 
> Mr. Wang argued that China could not support the resolution because Sudan's government was not yet ready to accept U.N. peacekeepers on its soil. But the reason that Sudan is refusing to allow in peacekeepers is that it has faced little international pressure to do so. The United States and its European partners have called upon Sudan to let the U.N. force in. But China, which has enormous leverage over Sudan because of its investment in Sudanese oil fields, has failed to push the Sudanese into accepting the "realistic option" of a U.N. deployment. Indeed, China lobbied hard and successfully to prevent Russia from supporting the peacekeeping resolution, further undermining pressure on Sudan's government to allow in peacekeepers.
> 
> At the end of last week's statement, Mr. Wang lamented that the United States and Britain, the two sponsors of the peacekeeping resolution, "have failed to earnestly heed China's sincere efforts." What efforts, precisely? If China really is sincere about its desire to see peacekeepers in Darfur, it should tell its allies in Sudan's government to call off their military offensive and accept U.N. peacekeepers immediately.
> 
> Lyn Cockburn, when China is no longer the mired in issues like exploding toys, the propping up of Libyan despots, the manipulation of a key player in the war on Terror, and in the lack of action on African genocides, then China will stop being the centre of attention.
> 
> But as far as I can tell, focusing on these issues requires focusing on China, and being very critical of China.
> 
> In the mean time, keep cranking out these winning columns. Soon your editor will be back from vacation or will be returned by the aliens who kidnapped him or will be thawed from his cryogenic slumber or whatever. When he does, he might start demanding a modicum of factual accuracy in your writing going forward.


----------



## Pte AJB

I stumbled across this documentary entitled “The Tank Man” and found it to be most excellent. http://joox.net/cat/44/id/1452500 It offers a concise summary of issues facing China today. It may not contain any new information for some of those who have been posting here, but is an excellent watch nonetheless. 

I found the last fifteen minutes (the whole is 1:15) particularly interesting as it raises the issue of the partnership between American multi-national corporations and the CCP. Highlighting notable cases where American information technology has contributed to the arrest and persecution of political activists. If you have some time to spare this is definitely worth a view.


----------



## tomahawk6

Here is some food for thought for those folks who feel that China is going to be a rival to the US. They have some serious economic and social problems that will continue to fester until upheaval occurs.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070819/china_inflation_fears.html?.v=3

Food Prices Fuel China Inflation Fears
Sunday August 19, 2:05 pm ET 
By Joe Mcdonald, AP Business Writer 

China's Sharp Jump in Food Prices, Which Have Risen 15.4 Percent, Fuels Inflation Fears 

BEIJING (AP) -- Grocery shopping has become a painful experience for Zhang Xueyi. Meat prices have risen 50 percent in the past year, and eggs and other products are not far behind, forcing the 31-year-old railway technician's family to spend a third of its $400 monthly income on food.

"If prices go up more, we have to pay. We'll cut back somewhere else," said Zhang as he hefted bags of eggs, vegetables and rice from the market down a narrow Beijing lane.

After a run that has seen sizzling growth top 10 percent for four years, analysts say China's supercharged economy is facing strains that could break out into an upsurge of inflation.

So far the worst damage has been confined to food prices, which jumped 15.4 percent in July over the same month a year ago and drove overall inflation to a decade-high 5.6 percent. But wages are rising too, as are the costs of oil and electric power. Record-setting exports and a stock market boom are sending cash flooding through the economy, stoking demand for goods.

The Chinese economy "might have entered a region where we should be on guard," said a central bank official, Zhang Tao, quoted last week by the state newspaper China Securities Times.

If the trend goes unchecked, the impact could be felt abroad as consumers who depend on China as the world's low-cost factory have to pay more for appliances, shoes and other goods. Pinched Chinese consumers might spend less on foreign goods, widening a yawning trade surplus that has strained relations with Washington and other trading partners.

Economists say the latest price spike is due mostly to temporary shortages of pork, the staple meat whose price soared 86 percent in July from a year ago.

Pressure is growing in energy, where Beijing is holding down retail prices by blocking state-owned gasoline and power companies from passing on higher costs, said Nicholas Kwan, an analyst for investment bank CLSA in Hong Kong.

Chinese oil refiners are losing $5 per barrel of oil that they process into gasoline or diesel, he said.

"I think it's just a matter of time until they have to bite the bullet and raise domestic prices," Kwan said. "Otherwise they risk an artificial shortage because oil companies will refuse to refine oil into gasoline if they are losing money."

Wages rose 21 percent in the first quarter of the year over the same period of 2006, according to the government, as companies competed for labor. Even that rise might not reflect the extent of pressure faced by employers, because those data cover only government companies, not the booming private sector.

"There's very little spare labor for manufacturing now, so we think we're seeing more wage pressure," said Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai.

Add to rising costs the "wealth effect" produced by a stock market boom. The country's main stock index is up more than 70 percent this year, making speculators rich on paper and fueling spending.

Exporters already are struggling with the steady rise of China's currency, the yuan, which has pushed up the U.S. dollar prices of their goods by almost 10 percent over the past two years.

The price surge has alarmed Chinese leaders, who remember that 1989's Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests were driven in part by anger at raging inflation that exceeded 18 percent a year.

Premier Wen Jiabao has ordered urgent measures to boost food production, promising farmers free vaccinations and other aid to raise more pigs. Local authorities have been ordered to subsidize the grocery bills of poor families.

Beijing has raised interest rates three times this year to cool the boom and avert a rise in inflation. After seeing the July price data, economists said they expect another rate hike shortly.

Until now, intense price competition in a Chinese market filled with low-cost goods has prevented makers of most goods from passing on rising costs to consumers. But economists say struggling companies might finally be forced to stand their ground and rise prices.

Last week, the government said an investigation into rising food costs found that makers of instant noodles illegally colluded to push up prices by up to 40 percent.

An official of a noodle trade group defended the increase as a response to rising raw material costs that have slashed profit margins to as little as 1 percent.

"If we don't lift the prices, there will be no profit," the official, Meng Hesu, was quoted as saying.


----------



## CougarKing

China- Dysfunctional Nation? Well I think this article hits on the right points when it comes to political, social and economic issues facing that nation.
(I only partially pasted it here, but the rest of the article is available at the source link below)
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/BrokenChinaADysfunctionalNation.aspx



> [Broken China: A dysfunctional nation
> Beijing can't clean up the environment, rein in stock speculation or police its companies. Here's why the country's problems could keep it from becoming the next superpower.
> 
> When the bureaucratic machinery of China rolls into action, it is a sight to behold.
> 
> A mayor announces a plan to reclaim hundreds of acres from the sea and build a massive industrial complex.
> 
> A few years later, busy factories and roads stretch as far as the eye can see, families are living in thousands of new apartments and 10,000 workers have launched phase two (see " '4 Manhattans a year' ").
> 
> This is the side of China that awes the outside world.
> 
> The country's extraordinary ability to mobilize people and capital to accomplish daunting feats in record time is the reason it has averaged annual growth of 9.5% for three decades. It is why China is an export juggernaut in everything from T-shirts to TVs, has the world's fastest-growing consumer market (see "Keeping Up With the Wangs") and has amassed enough wealth to snap up South American mineral reserves, IBM Corp.'s (IBM, news, msgs) personal-computer division and a big stake in private-equity company Blackstone Group (BX, news, msgs).
> 
> Will Beijing complete all of the stadiums, expressways and hotels in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics? Count on it. It's also a decent bet China will achieve its goal of winning the most gold medals.
> 
> Why, then, is it so hard for this same government to crack down on exporters of dangerously tainted seafood, toothpaste and medicine despite years of warnings by local and foreign experts?
> 
> The relentless headlines about unsafe products from China reveal a scary truth: Probe even a little into the Chinese economic miracle, and glaring administrative failures abound. Product safety is just one aspect of Beijing's inability to enforce needed regulation in everything from manufacturing and the environment to copyrights and the capital markets.
> 
> The same Communist Party apparatus so proficient at censoring the Internet can't keep peddlers in the heart of Beijing from selling knock-off Callaway golf clubs and fake iPods despite solemn promises to Washington since the early 1990s about enforcing intellectual-property rights. Shanghai's stock exchange may be one of the world's hottest and may boast a state-of-the-art paperless trading system. But it was a casino when it opened in 1990 with eight listings, and after years of flaccid regulation, it's an even bigger casino with 1,118 (see "China's Olympian stock-market sprint").
> 
> Beijing proclaims all sorts of green initiatives, yet heavily polluting new factories and coal power plants keep going up (see "How long can China pollute for free?"). The party has talked for decades about building a social safety net, yet as the working population ages, the government isn't investing nearly enough to head off looming crises in health care, education and pensions. China spends more than Japan on research and development, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but its record of innovation is underwhelming.
> 
> Economy is at 'a critical point'
> China observers dismiss these flaws as the growing pains of a nation making a breathtakingly fast transition from a command economy to a free market. But it's becoming clearer that these and other structural problems aren't being addressed.
> 
> The same policies that have been so successful at boosting the gross domestic product by developing export industries and public-works projects, it turns out, undermine initiatives that might move China's economy to a higher level. In its pursuit of growth at all costs, China has skimped on investments needed to provide basic, affordable health care and the regulatory machinery that can enforce environmental, safety and corporate governance regulations nationwide.
> 
> Taking the "made in China" out of one's life is harder than it sounds. Sara Bongiorni documents her family's attempt in her a recently published book.
> 
> Solving these shortcomings will require a massive shift of the resources that are now being plowed into capital projects. Though Beijing would like to cool the economy (see "The China Syndrome"), however, it is wary of doing anything that would slow the high growth needed to generate jobs for the millions of youths pouring into the work force each year, especially with a pivotal leadership conference scheduled in the fall.
> 
> "China's economic-development model was based on the simple concept of expansion of production," says economist Chen Xiushan of People's University in Beijing. "This model has reached a critical point."
> 
> A more intractable problem is China's power structure itself. Although Beijing holds a monopoly on politics, local Communist Party officials enjoy wide latitude over social and economic affairs. They also have huge professional and financial incentives to spur GDP growth, which they often do by ignoring regulations or lavishing companies with perks.
> 
> Broken China: A dysfunctional nation
> Continued from page 1
> 
> August 17, 2007 -- 16:20 ET
> As a result, China has built a bureaucratic machine that at times seems almost impervious to reform. Even if Beijing has the best intentions of fixing problems such as undrinkable water and unbreathable air, it is often thwarted by hundreds of thousands of party officials with vested interests in the current system.
> 
> Beijing knows it must change course. China's $1.2 trillion in foreign reserves -- the most ever amassed by any country -- and soaring trade surplus may seem like signs of strength, but they're actually evidence of an overreliance on exports, weak domestic consumption and a primitive financial system (see "China: Tons of money, wanton waste").
> 
> And a dearth of social services makes a widening income gap between urban and rural areas politically explosive. Conjuring ancient Confucianism, President Hu Jintao harps repeatedly on the need to attain a "harmonious society," implying that China today is anything but.
> 
> What do Chinese teens want?
> 
> In March, Premier Wen Jiabao labeled the economy "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable."
> 
> Some reforms are under way
> To their credit, Chinese officials have unveiled a blitz of corrective measures. Regulators this year shut more than 180 illegal food producers. A directive ordering government agencies to use legitimate software has helped cut the share of pirated programs to 82% from 92% in 2001. Beijing is launching health-care initiatives, trying to tame the runaway stock market and passing stringent environmental rules. And in 2006 alone, nearly 30,000 officials were prosecuted for corruption.
> 
> If this reformist agenda fails, watch out. The working assumption from Washington to Tokyo is that China is on a trajectory to become a modern market economy and a responsible global citizen. But if its problems persist, the world will have to keep living with a giant trade partner that can't guarantee safe products, control piracy or curb pollution. China could keep growing rapidly for years, but a scenario of dysfunctional administration calls into question whether it will really become an economic superpower with world-beating corporations that challenge the West in innovation -- a Japan Inc. on steroids.
> 
> China doesn't lack the finances to fix its shortcomings, and it has the legal structure for regulating the environment, health care and worker safety. What Beijing does lack is the will to overhaul a political structure that gives party officials down to even the smallest villages huge influence over many facets of economic life.
> 
> "The laws in China compare with some of the best in the world," says activist Liu Kaiming, the founder of the Migrant Workers Community College in Shenzhen. "But it is not able to enforce the laws fully because local governments are focused on pleasing the big bosses in companies."
> 
> What's more, few of the country's enterprises are proving they can move beyond low-cost commodity goods and succeed on a global stage with innovative products, a function of both their limited managerial vision and flawed high-tech policies from Beijing.
> 
> The roots of China's ersatz capitalism go back to devil's bargains made in the 1980s and '90s to accelerate China's takeoff. Late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping declared it was OK to "get rich" (see "Luxe life in China"), a green light for legions of cadres to discard their Mao suits and rush into business, often by setting themselves up as middlemen or grabbing stakes in communal assets.
> 
> Not my father's China
> 
> Beijing also granted great latitude to provincial and local officials to manage development and social services such as education and health care. The two requirements: Remain loyal to the party and meet high economic-growth targets.
> 
> Taking the "made in China" out of one's life is harder than it sounds. Sara Bongiorni documents her family's attempt in her a recently published book.
> 
> The system spans China's 657 municipalities, 2,862 counties and 41,636 townships. Because roughly 70% of a typical official's annual performance assessment is based on GDP growth, says Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the University of Michigan, the cadres shower local businesses with perks. These can include access to cheap credit, land, licenses, protection from competitors and exemptions from regulations. The opportunities for graft are staggering.
> 
> "What is unsaid, but understood, is that if your locality becomes wealthy, so do you," Lieberthal says. "Instead of the Chinese Communist Party, it ought to be called the Chinese Bureaucratic Capitalist Party."
> 
> Broken China: A dysfunctional nation
> Continued from page 2
> 
> The fuzzy nature of corporate ownership in China heightens the conflicts of interest. Officially, state enterprises account for just one-third of the economy, compared with 80% two decades ago. But that statistic is misleading because it includes only companies directly controlled by ministries in Beijing.
> 
> In truth, many companies have financial ties to county, city and township governments. In some respects, that policy of giving members of China's immense bureaucracy a personal stake in growth has worked brilliantly. Big-ticket industrial projects get finished in record time, and infrastructure is smoothly put into place. Daniel H. Rosen of the Institute for International Economics estimates that while it takes four years to build an aluminum smelter in the West, similar projects can take less than a year in China.
> 
> Why there are roadblocks
> These communist capitalists, though, have evolved into a powerful and wealthy elite with an enormous stake in the status quo. Truly private capital markets would strip officials of their power to reward cronies with bank loans and stock market listings. Copyright enforcement might do wonders for China's software industry, but it's blocked at the local level by cadres more interested in safeguarding the jobs and profits that flow from knock-offs.
> 
> Although Beijing gives provinces funds for schools and health clinics, much of that money winds up elsewhere. The National Audit Office has reported that 10% of audited central government funds -- including money allocated for pensions, health care and unemployment -- are diverted into illegal loans to companies, construction of posh government buildings and other questionable investments.
> 
> "All the things we see as competitive advantages for China now are translating into disadvantages," Rosen says.
> 
> Beijing is doing what it can to rein in rogue players. On July 10, Zheng Xiaoyu, the former commissioner of the State Food & Drug Administration, was executed for accepting bribes of about $850,000 from eight drug companies seeking quick product approval. Worse, on his watch the agency gave the green light to many flawed drugs, including an antibiotic that killed more than 10 people. The Shanghai party secretary, Chen Liangyu, was fired last year after being accused of plowing $400 million in pension funds into real-estate projects and toll roads. And in September, authorities discovered that two senior executives at a state-owned insurer had deposited $4 million-worth of premiums in the bank accounts of friends and family.
> 
> These high-profile punishments serve as a warning, and enforcement is improving. But the central government still struggles to impose its will on local officials nationwide. China's State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) employs about 300 people at its headquarters in Beijing, while about 60,000 employees are scattered at environmental protection bureaus across the country.
> 
> Those numbers may look impressive compared with the U.S. EPA, which has a payroll of 17,500. But those 60,000 environmental watchdogs report to provincial and local governments, which tend to favor economic development over green considerations. A 2006 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that while pollution fines are rising, they're usually far below the cost of installing equipment to cut pollution. And authorities often negotiate down the charges.
> 
> "For the sake of their own political scorecards, some local officials have joined forces with businesses seeking windfall profits," Pan Yue, SEPA's deputy chief, told the China Daily on July 3.
> 
> How things don't work
> To understand how bureaucrats and business leaders flout SEPA's rules, take a trip to Lake Taihu, the source of drinking water to 2.3 million residents of the city of Wuxi.
> 
> In the 1990s, as industry sprang up on the lakeshore and Taihu grew more polluted, authorities ordered local factories to clean up their waste water. In 1999, local officials said the problem had been licked as factories installed treatment plants. But those new facilities were often idled as companies refused to shoulder the cost of operating them, and factories continued to dump untreated waste into the lake. The situation worsened until this spring the lake turned an iridescent green.Taking the "made in China" out of one's life is harder than it sounds. Sara Bongiorni documents her family's attempt in her a recently published book.
> 
> "I'm angry with the government because it can't solve the pollution problem," says Lydia Li, an executive assistant at a foreign-owned manufacturer in Wuxi. In May, she says, she had to buy nearly 50 gallons of bottled water after yellowish water smelling of sulfur started running from her tap.
> 
> Oversight of food production in China is similarly troubled. The State Food & Drug Administration employs 1,700 people, but 80% of China's food producers -- about 350,000 enterprises -- have fewer than 10 employees and often lack any real understanding of safety standards. Again, there's little local incentive to crack down on scofflaws.
> 
> "If local governments close all the companies that violate food safety regulations, a lot of workers will lose their jobs," says Luo Yunbo, the dean of the food and nutrition college at China Agricultural University in Beijing.
> 
> Broken China: A dysfunctional nation
> Continued from page 3
> 
> August 17, 2007 -- 16:20 ET
> The misplaced economic priorities explain the decrepit state of social services. Top leaders have been pledging to provide basic public health-care and retirement plans since they began downsizing giant state enterprises in the 1980s, dismantling the "iron rice bowl" of cradle-to-grave benefits. But responsibility was divided among different ministries, and funding of social programs was delegated to local governments.
> 
> Compared with spurring growth, social services got short shrift. It would cost Beijing around $40 billion, a sum it could easily afford, to set up a national health-care system similar to Britain's, figures Huang Yanzhong, the director of the global-health-studies program at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
> 
> "But I'm not optimistic," Huang says. Responsibility is fragmented among too many competing ministries in Beijing, and at the local level, cadres still are judged on GDP growth. "If you try to tackle this with policies rather than deep changes in political institutions, the government won't be able to bring accessible, affordable health care," he says.
> 
> So many people go without. Huang cites government surveys showing that nearly half of Chinese say they can't afford to visit a doctor when ill, 70% lack health insurance and 30% refuse hospitalization due to cost. And the system is corrupt. Hospitals earn most of their revenue selling drugs and get kickbacks from pharmaceutical suppliers, creating an incentive to over-prescribe. The Chinese news media are filled with stories such as that of a 75-year-old cancer patient in Harbin who was billed more than $500,000 for imported medicines, many of which were found to be unnecessary.
> 
> Meddling by party officials is hobbling China's stock markets, too. The booming Shanghai Stock Exchange, started in 1990 to raise funds for state enterprises, boasts first-rate facilities, and shares have nearly tripled since 2005. In the first five months of this year, companies raised $17 billion, and issues that will likely fetch tens of billions more are in the pipeline.
> 
> But despite some improvements in oversight, trading remains volatile, weakly regulated and driven by rampant speculation. That's in large part because the exchange has evolved little from its original mission. Markets are supposed to allocate capital efficiently to the best companies. But in China, notes Carl E. Walter, the managing director at JPMorgan Chase (JPM, news, msgs) in Beijing, "the primary function remains funneling money to state-owned companies."
> 
> Again, it comes down to the cozy relationship between government and industry...
> (ARTICLE CONTINUED AT LINK)


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## tomahawk6

I dont see China as a nation rather its more like an empire held together by the military and security apparatus. If the communists went away tonight would China remain as it is today ? I think not. It is too large and diverse to be ruled from Beijing. In a post communist world some type of federal system might work but I suspect it would splinter much as did Yugoslavia.


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## 3rd Herd

Tom,
you also have the story hitting the media up here about the pollution factor for the up coming Summer games. Right know they are restricting traffic depending on even or odd licence plate numbers. Some of the masses are not to happy about that one. Additionally,
Canada already has medical/monitoring staff in place doing  hourly/daily tests. There is also some complaints coming out about event schedules as they are trying to schedule events around the worst pollution times. I do not think any records will be set.


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## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I dont see China as a nation rather its more like an empire held together by the military and security apparatus. If the communists went away tonight would China remain as it is today ? I think not. It is too large and diverse to be ruled from Beijing. In a post communist world some type of federal system might work but I suspect it would splinter much as did Yugoslavia.



I'm afraid I must DISAGREE with you, T6.

China may be just as ethnically diverse as past ill-fated ancient empires in history, such as the Roman Empire which stretched from Spain to present day Israel and Palestine, but one must not simply dismiss the Chinese case as another Yugoslavia waiting to happen. 

This is because that even though all these different provinces have their own dialects, such as the Cantonese of Guangdong province, the Shanghainese, and Sichuanese as well as the Hui Ren of the inner provinces, they all ethnically identify themselves as Han Chinese. While China does have so-called ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans and the Uighurs and so forth among the 50 or so "Min Zu" recognized by PRC law, Han Chinese still comprise the overwhelming majority of those people who populate all of China's provinces and vastly outnumber all the other minority populations. 

Thus, since most of these people identify as Han Chinese regardless of region or dialect, this concept of a single "Chinese nation" is so ingrained within them and their culture from centuries of rule of dynasty after dynasty that I doubt even the collapse of the PRC/CCP Regime in Beijing will mean the end of a single China. A foreigner who spends time trying to study Chinese culture will notice that while there are slight differences between the culture of the people of Hong Kong and Beijing, besides the dialect, as well as the rest of Han China, they all still identify with a single Chinese culture. The _Waishengren_ of Taiwan (those whose forefathers retreated there with the Nationalists in 1949), the large Chinese community of Singapore as well as all those Chinese expatriate communities all over the world all identify with a single Chinese culture, regardless of their political affiliation belongs to Taipei, Beijing or the adoptive nation. Thus, this is why I don't see China splitting up as Yugoslavia or even the Soviet Union did, because of the cultural strength of Han Chinese identity.  This is also why the _Waishengren_ of Taiwan, such as former Premier Lien Chan and another GMD leader named James Soong, eventually see Taiwan as reuniting with the mainland.

The only exception, or rather, the only instance I see where any Han Chinese are starting to split away from that mainstream Chinese identity are possibly Taiwan's _Benshengren_ who are native Taiwanese, but still Han Chinese, whose shared history with China was abruptly severed when Taiwan became a territory of Japan between 1894-1945; when Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist soldiers went there in 1946, they found a thoroughly "Japanized" Chinese province, which led to conflicts between the Taiwanese and the soldiers such as the infamous "2-28 Massacre".  Although the native Taiwanese/_benshengren_ have gradually gained power within the ROC/Taiwan, there is still a lot of historical resentment among them towards the _Waishengren_/mainlanders who still live among them and who prefer reunification, as well as a growing desire for independence among the _benshengren_. Singapore might also count as an exception from the sheer number of Han Chinese who live there, as well as the power they continue to hold within the PAP-ruled govt., though they consider themselves outside China's sphere of influence, unlike Taiwan.

 The CCP is just another notch along the many so-called dynasties who have ruled China, which ascribes to the Chinese concept of history as "cyclical" where regimes/dynasties rise only to fall later depending on how long they hold llegitimacy. So, essentially the only difference between the CCP and previous dynasties (except for the Guomindang-ruled ROC when it was on the mainland before the retreat to Taiwan) is the fact the party derives its mandate not from heaven, but from the continued stability  and economic prosperity  it currently maintains.  However, it will only be a matter of time before the CCP loses its llegitimacy; what will replace it, whether it will be the ROC/Guomindang returning to the mainland from Taiwan (unlikely) or some other regime still remains to be seen.


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## a_majoor

While you have shown a powerful "centralizing" argument for China based on shared history and culture; Chinese history is a cycle of central empires followed by "warring states". Don't forget the most recent "warring states" period was during the first quarter of the 20th Century, and Tiawan is the last remmnant of that period. 

As mentioned before, there are many powerful forces which are pulling against central authority; a growing demographic imbalance, regional disparities in wealth and development, the rising Islamic population in the Western regions, ecological decline (especially where it affects agriculture) and so on. The article highlights the inability of the government to provide flexible and timely responses to problems, and some of the perverse incentives which cause and amplify problems.

Now we will be spectators seeing if history and culture are strong enough to hold the centre, or if the accelerating spiral of problems will pull things apart. My own suspicions are China will "fracture", but not disintigrate as dramatically as Yugoslavia. The situation will be more like the pan Hellenistic civilizations that grew up on the ruins of Alexander the Great's conquests; ambitious men may indeed fight each other for power on the borderlands, but there is also enough shared history, cultural and economic ties to keep them looking at each other rather than the outside world.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Interesting to see how others feel about China.

From the NYT
August 21, 2007
New Power in Africa
China’s Trade in Africa Carries a Price Tag 
By LYDIA POLGREEN and HOWARD W. FRENCH
KABWE, Zambia — The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air. 

The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 years ago, the vast compound had shuddered to the whir of rollers and the clatter of mechanical weaving machines spooling out millions of yards of brightly colored African cloth. 

Today, only the cotton gin still runs, with the company’s Chinese managers buying raw cotton for export to China’s humming textile industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen. 

“We are back where we started,” said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.” 

Chinese officials and their African allies like to call their growing relationship a win-win proposition, a rising tide that lifts all boats in China’s ever-widening sea of influence.

This year, China pledged $20 billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over the next three years. In Zambia alone, China plans to invest $800 million in the next few years. 

From South Africa’s manganese mines to Niger’s uranium pits, from Sudan’s oil fields to Congo’s cobalt mines, China’s hunger for resources has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping push some of the world’s poorest countries further up the ladder of development. 

But China is also exporting huge volumes of finished, manufactured goods — T-shirts, flashlights, radios and socks, just to name a few — to those same countries, hampering Africa’s ability to make its own products and develop healthy, diverse economies.

“Most of our countries have been independent for 35 to 50 years,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African entrepreneur and a political analyst. “Yet they have failed to develop manufacturing for a variety of reasons, and for the Chinese that’s a huge opportunity. We are a very important market for China.” 

On the one hand, Chinese imports give Africans access to goods and amenities that developed countries take for granted but that most people here could not have dreamed of affording just a few years ago — cellular telephones, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, computers. And cheaper prices on more basic items, like clothing, light bulbs and shoes, mean people have more money in their pockets.

“There is no doubt China has been good for Zambia,” said Felix Mutati, Zambia’s minister of finance. “Why should we have a bad attitude toward the Chinese when they are doing all the right things? They are bringing investment, world-class technology, jobs, value addition. What more can you ask for?” 

But across Africa, and especially in the relatively robust economies of southern Africa, there are clear winners and losers. Textile mills and other factories here in Zambia have suffered and even closed as cheap Chinese goods flood the world market, eliminating jobs in a country that sorely needs them.

The Chinese investment in copper mining here has left a trail of heartbreak and recrimination after one of the worst industrial accidents in Zambian history, a blast at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in Chambishi in 2005 that killed 46 people, most of them in their 20s. 

“Who is winning? The Chinese are, for sure,” said Michael Sata, a Zambian opposition politician who campaigned in last year’s presidential election on an anti-China platform. He lost, but with a surprisingly strong showing, and his party, the Patriotic Front, won many seats in local and parliamentary elections in Lusaka, the capital, and the Zambian industrial heartland, where China has made its biggest investments. 

“Their interest is exploiting us, just like everyone who came before,” he said. “They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa.” 

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the country’s role in Zambia. But Chinese diplomats across Africa and top officials in Beijing have emphasized the money and opportunity they bring to Africa. In Zambia, for example, government officials say that the Chinese are sending dozens of workers for training in China and that their investments will create thousands of high-wage jobs.

Measured in some ways, Zambia’s economy is booming. Copper prices have soared from 75 cents a pound in January 2003 to more than $3 a pound this year, driven in large part by Chinese demand. That demand has pushed Zambia’s long-dormant copper mines into record production. 

China’s Nonferrous Metals Corporation, a state-owned company, purchased rights to develop a mine in Chambishi, in the heart of the copper belt, in 1998, and it plans to build factories in an export processing zone that will bring as many as 60,000 jobs, according to government officials. 

But China’s growing presence in global trade is wiping out thousands of jobs in countries with fledgling manufacturing sectors like Zambia and South Africa. 

Despite relatively low wages in many countries, African manufacturers find it very hard to compete, arguing that China’s currency policies undervalue the yuan and give Chinese exporters a huge advantage. 

Many industries in China also benefited at various points from subsidies and free or low-cost government financing, making their costs lower. Beyond that, there are major infrastructure problems in Africa, where industry struggles with inadequate roads and railways, and unreliable electricity and water supplies.

“So who do you blame?” said Martyn J. Davies, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “You can’t blame China for being too competitive. China is doing what every other emerging market is doing.” 

The textile and clothing industry, one of the engines China used to fuel its own economic expansion in the 1980s, has been particularly hard hit in Africa. For decades, African countries exported large quantities of clothes and textiles to developed countries under a trade agreement intended to protect European and American markets from competition from China and others, while encouraging exports from the world’s poorest nations. But the trade provision, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, expired in January 2005, putting these countries in direct export competition with China. 

Africa found itself once again on the losing end of globalization. If copper is Zambia’s bread and butter, manufacturing should have been its main meal — just as many economies across the globe have progressed from producers of raw materials to low-tech manufacturing and beyond, a well-trod path to development. 

Ms. Zimba, 40, a quality-control worker at the plant here who asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country with her brother. 

She earned a little less than $100 a month, as well as free health care and a pension, and a little three-room house in the workers’ compound. But since she lost her job, her family’s standard of living has plummeted. The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will come up with next semester’s tuition for her 20-year-old daughter’s trade school. 

“We will see what God brings me,” Ms. Zimba said.

For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she thought she had escaped — her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 and reduced to selling in the market as well. 

“I am right back where I started,” Ms. Zimba said. 

As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as “briefcase investors.” 

“They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave,” she said. 

Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was nasty. A trip to the site of China’s big new investment, Chambishi, had to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely understood. 

The mine at Chambishi had for decades been run by the government, and had limped along while copper prices slumped in the 1980s. When the Non-ferrous Metal Mining Group bought the rights to develop the mine in 1998, local residents cheered, hoping for new jobs. 

In 2003, Keegan Chibuye got one as a mechanic at the mine, a job he was grateful to have in a country where even skilled men like himself struggled to find work. Mr. Chibuye’s sister, Vennie, 27, also found work for the Chinese, as a computer specialist at an explosives factory on the mine’s grounds. Ms. Chibuye was the eldest of seven, and her parents had sent her to Britain at great expense, to a technical college in Derbyshire, where she earned a diploma in information technology. A brother, Mwape, got a job as a casual worker in the explosives factory, for a little more than a dollar a day, to save money for college. 

Keegan Chibuye said he had concerns about the way the Chinese managers were running the mine almost from the beginning. “They were careless,” he said. “Safety was not their priority. Everything was about productivity no matter what.” 

On April 20, 2005, Keegan Chibuye heard an ear-splitting boom that would shatter his world — a huge blast at the explosives factory. 

There was almost nothing left of Vennie and Mwape left to bury. Virtually all the bodies had been incinerated. Only fragments were buried just off the main road at the graveyard built by the Chinese owners — a finger, an ear, a bit of scalp. As the 46 headstones testify, most of the workers were young, born after 1980. 

Officials of the company that runs the mine did not respond to repeated telephone requests for an interview to talk about working conditions and safety at the mine. But at the Chinese workers’ compound in Chambishi, Han Yaping, who identified himself as the company’s human resources manager, said that the company hoped to help Zambia develop. 

“China works here in cooperation with Zambia,” Mr. Han said in English. “It is friendship.” 

Asked why the wages at the mine were lower than those paid by other companies, Mr. Han said that Zambian workers had limited skills and no experience with technology. By way of example, he said, a Chinese worker trying to remove a screw would use a screwdriver.

“But a Zambian worker,” he continued with a chuckle, “he use his finger.” 

A look around the compound for Chinese workers illustrates why China is able to do business so profitably in Africa. While Western companies must provide relatively plush and private accommodations to attract expatriate workers, the Chinese employees at Chambishi live in barracks-like conditions, several to a room. A table for table tennis and a dusty soccer field are the only recreational facilities. 

“We like simple,” Mr. Han explained. 

Many African scholars and political leaders say Africa has no need for the colonial baggage and paternalism of the West, and they welcome the Chinese approach of cowboy capitalism. “Let the Chinese come,” said Mahamat Hassan Abakar, a lawyer in Chad, a former French colony in central Africa with deepening ties to China. “What Africa needs is investment. It needs partners. All of these years we have been tied to France. Look what it has brought us.”

In South Africa, dozens of clothing and textile companies closed, according to trade organizations representing manufacturers. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost because of Chinese imports, and in response the government negotiated temporary voluntary restraints on some items. 

But Iqbal Meer-Sharma, deputy director of South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, said that the clothing industry was ultimately less valuable to South Africa than the other benefits of its growing relationship with China. 

“We’ve always known we have a dysfunctional relationship with the West,” Mr. Sharma said. “Now with China we have a relationship as equals. They don’t look down on us. They are not condescending.”

In an era of ruthless global competition, Mr. Sharma said, Africa should stop trying to compete with China at what it does best — producing cheap goods for export — and find other ways to compete instead.

In the meantime, many Africans are caught in limbo.

Clarissa Fabrik, 19, lives at the edge of Atlantis, a depressed industrial town in South Africa’s Western Cape. She had hoped to earn an engineering degree, courtesy of the scholarship fund from her mother’s clothing workers’ union benefit package. But her mother’s factory closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job. 

“I don’t know what the future will bring,” she said.

Lydia Polgreen reported from Kabwe, and Howard W. French from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/world/africa/21zambia.html?ex=1345348800&en=2e3548b6d1803348&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss


----------



## Kirkhill

> Today, only the cotton gin still runs, with the company’s Chinese managers buying raw cotton for export to China’s humming textile industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen.
> 
> “We are back where we started,” said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.”



Gandhi, who used to dress pretty nattily when he was "at the bar" (as did Nehru and Jinna), started to wear his dhoti as a protest against the shirts made in India from cheap Cotton made in Manchester from Egyptian Cotton and then sold back to the Empire.  He called it colonialism.  Today we call it trade.  He got his wish and India became a basket case for 60 years until they started putting all that Dipper socialist nonsense behind them.

The difference between then and now are the terms of the trade.  I still don't accept that the Chinese will give their "trading partners" as good a deal as Gandhi's "partners" gave theirs.


----------



## LakeSup

Charles Krauthammer said this week:  (parphrasing)  The Chinese found out that they could commit genocide in Tibet and the world would give them a pass....but you don't mess with Elmo.


----------



## retiredgrunt45

Who said the cold war was over?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9dba9ba2-5a3b-11dc-9bcd-0000779fd2ac.html



> By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
> 
> Published: September 3 2007 19:00 | Last updated: September 3 2007 20:53
> 
> The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials.
> 
> The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.
> 
> Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.
> 
> Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, raised reports of Chinese infiltration of German government computers with Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, in a visit to Beijing, after which the Chinese foreign ministry said the government opposed and forbade “any criminal acts undermining computer systems, including hacking”.
> 
> “We have explicit laws and regulations in this regard,” said Jiang Yu, from the ministry. “Hacking is a global issue and China is frequently a victim.”
> 
> George W. Bush, US president, is due to meet Hu Jintao, China’s president, on Thursday in Australia prior to the Apec summit.
> 
> The PLA regularly probes US military networks – and the Pentagon is widely assumed to scan Chinese networks – but US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt  systems at critical times.
> 
> “The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system...and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” said a former official, who said the PLA had penetrated the networks of US defence companies and think-tanks.
> 
> Hackers from numerous locations in China spent several months probing the Pentagon system before overcoming its defences, according to people familiar with the matter.
> 
> The Pentagon took down the network for more than a week while the attacks continued, and is to conduct a comprehensive diagnosis. “These are multiple wake-up calls stirring us to levels of more aggressive vigilance,” said Richard Lawless, the Pentagon’s top Asia official at the time of the attacks.
> 
> The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.
> 
> John Hamre, a Clinton-era deputy defence secretary involved with cyber security, said that while he had no knowledge of the June attack, criminal groups sometimes masked cyber attacks to make it appear they came from government computers in a particular country.
> 
> The National Security Council said the White House had created a team of experts to consider whether the administration needed to restrict the use of BlackBerries because of concerns about cyber espionage.
> 
> Additional reporting by Richard McGregor in Beijing
> 
> To contact the reporter email demetri.sevastopulo@ft.com


----------



## LakeSup

"The National Security Council said the White House had created a team of experts to consider whether the administration needed to restrict the use of BlackBerries because of concerns about cyber espionage"
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

That's one I have never been able to figure out:  Why the US Govt and Armed Forces, police, politicians, bureaucrats..everyone uses Rim Blackberry service with servers in Waterloo Ont.  If you've ever been to U of W, which is basically a campus of Rim as far as the engineering Dept goes,  there are a lot of foreign national students working there......I'm just sayin'


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese work on space weaponry continues. Just as in the past when the USSR tested weapons in space, there is silence from the Left:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8SETSN80&show_article=1



> *China to test space weapon in launching moon satellite: rights group+ *
> 
> Oct 23 07:41 AM US/Eastern
> 
> HONG KONG, Oct. 23 (AP) - (Kyodo)—A Chinese submarine will send test signals that could change the course of a satellite when China launches its first moon orbiter, as part of the country's effort to develop space war technology, a human rights watchdog said Tuesday.
> 
> The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said two survey ships are deployed in the South Pacific Ocean and South Atlantic Ocean to send signals to maneuver the lunar exploration satellite, expected to be launched Wednesday. At the same time, a nuclear-powered submarine will send simulated signals to the satellite as a test, it said in a statement.
> 
> Once the satellite-maneuvering technology matures, the group said, China would have the know-how to destroy other satellites in space in wartime. China could launch cheaply-made weapon-carrying objects into space and change their courses to destroy or damage satellites of other countries by sending signals from submarines, the center said.
> 
> China shocked the world in January by firing a missile at an old weather satellite without notifying anyone in advance, showing off its anti-satellite weaponry and its ability to shoot down satellites without being immediately noticed.
> 
> Hong Kong's media reported that a rocket that will carry the satellite was being fueled up, banners of greetings on the successful launch were prepared and farmers living near the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, in mid-western China's Sichuan Province, will be evicted one hour ahead of the launch.
> 
> China plans to launch the satellite around 6 p.m. Wednesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, quoting a spokesman of the China National Space Administration. The satellite is named Chang'e I after the legendary Chinese goddess who, according to legend, flew to the moon.
> 
> China's space industry enjoyed its first major success after astronaut Yang Liwei reentered Earth after 21 hours in space in 2003 in the spacecraft Shenzhou 5, marking China's first successful manned space mission.
> 
> A second manned space mission was successfully concluded in 2005 after astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng finished orbiting the Earth for five days in the spacecraft Shenzhou 6.


----------



## Greymatters

Cougarshark, excellent article on dysfunction in China, nice find!


----------



## MarkOttawa

Gates in Beijing for Talks on Military Buildup
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/world/asia/05gates.html?ref=todayspaper



> Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived Sunday in Beijing to begin two days of talks with senior leaders, and Pentagon officials said he planned to press for a more open dialogue on China’s military while discussing ways to build trust and cooperation.
> 
> “I don’t consider China at this point a military threat to the United States,” Mr. Gates said before he left for China.
> 
> “I have concerns with a variety of military programs that they have under way,” he added. “I have concern with the lack of transparency. And those are the kinds of issues that we will be talking about, in addition to how we can strengthen the relationship.”
> 
> Senior Defense Department officials say China has undertaken an aggressive military modernization campaign that will result in more submarines, surface warships and combat aircraft able to challenge foreign armed forces across the region.
> 
> But the Chinese military operates in ways that are far more opaque than Western armed forces, Pentagon officials say, leaving the United States uncertain about the exact size of China’s military budget or its long-range military goals.
> 
> “What does the military buildup mean for us and the rest of the region?” a senior Defense Department official said, speaking anonymously because he was commenting in advance on high-level meetings, as he described issues Mr. Gates planned to discuss with his hosts.
> 
> According to Pentagon statistics, the official Chinese military budget grew by almost 18 percent this year. But Pentagon officials say that figure does not represent the nation’s entire spending on national security...
> 
> Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived Sunday in Beijing to begin two days of talks with senior leaders, and Pentagon officials said he planned to press for a more open dialogue on China’s military while discussing ways to build trust and cooperation.
> 
> “I don’t consider China at this point a military threat to the United States,” Mr. Gates said before he left for China.
> 
> “I have concerns with a variety of military programs that they have under way,” he added. “I have concern with the lack of transparency. And those are the kinds of issues that we will be talking about, in addition to how we can strengthen the relationship.”
> 
> Senior Defense Department officials say China has undertaken an aggressive military modernization campaign that will result in more submarines, surface warships and combat aircraft able to challenge foreign armed forces across the region.
> 
> But the Chinese military operates in ways that are far more opaque than Western armed forces, Pentagon officials say, leaving the United States uncertain about the exact size of China’s military budget or its long-range military goals.
> 
> “What does the military buildup mean for us and the rest of the region?” a senior Defense Department official said, speaking anonymously because he was commenting in advance on high-level meetings, as he described issues Mr. Gates planned to discuss with his hosts.
> 
> According to Pentagon statistics, the official Chinese military budget grew by almost 18 percent this year. But Pentagon officials say that figure does not represent the nation’s entire spending on national security...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

Mainland China/the PRC's being able to put a man on the Moon is closer than you think. Placing a Taikonaut (the PRC term, as opposed to Astronauts or Cosmonauts) on the moon will, in the eyes of the CCP, help solidify/symbolize to the whole world that China is not only a superpower, but one almost on par with the United States, since the Russians have not reached the moon, placing the Chinese one notch higher.



> China One Step Closer to Planting Flag on Moon
> It’s kind of funny that on the same day we posted a piece on the pros and cons of American space weapons, the Chinese flew its first survey satellite of the moon into lunar orbit.
> 
> 
> From the AP:
> 
> A Chinese satellite successfully entered lunar orbit Monday, a month after rival Japan put its own probe into orbit around the moon, but Chinese officials denied there was any competition between the two nations.
> 
> Chinese space officials said the Chang'e 1 satellite, part of the country's ambitious space exploration plans, entered lunar orbit after completing a planned braking operation.
> 
> China plans to keep the Chang'e 1 — named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon — there for one year, about the same length of time as Japan's probe. China launched its satellite late last month, while Japan put its into space in September.
> 
> The timing of the launches raises the prospect of a space rivalry between the two Asian nations, with India possibly joining in if it carries through on a plan to send its own lunar probe into space in April.
> 
> But Long Jiang, deputy commander of spacecraft systems of China's lunar exploration program, said Beijing wanted to use its space program to work with other countries.
> 
> It also was perfectly timed to coincide with a visit by U.S. defense chief Robert Gates, who was forced to be conciliatory in his remarks on the development. According to the AP he congratulated China’s achievement, saying “it’s a clear credit to Chinese industry and innovation” (as long as they’re not using lead paint).
> 
> More AP:
> 
> "We are willing to cooperate with the rest of the world to the benefit of humankind, but as to what kind of cooperation, it depends on specific circumstances," Long told a news conference.
> 
> The Chang'e 1 blasted off on top of a Long March 3A rocket on Oct. 24 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province in southwestern China.
> 
> "All of the subsystems of the Chang'e 1 are in normal operation so far," said Pei Zhaoyu, spokesman for the China National Space Administration.
> 
> The Chang'e 1 has survived the most critical part of its journey, Pei said. It had to enter the moon's orbit at the right time and speed, otherwise it could have hit the moon or flown by it.
> 
> He said the satellite's success was a sign of China's advanced engineering. "The project is a comprehensive demonstration of China's economic, scientific and technological power."
> 
> U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is on a two-day visit to China, commended China's Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan over the lunar mission.
> 
> "I congratulate him and the people of China on this achievement. It's clearly a credit to Chinese industry and innovation," Gates said.
> 
> The lunar mission adds depth to a Chinese space program that has sent astronauts orbiting the Earth twice in the past four years.
> 
> Chang'e 1 is the first step of a three-stage moon mission. In about 2012 China plans an unmanned lunar landing with a rover. In the third phase, about five years later, another rover is to land on the moon and be returned to Earth with lunar soil and stone samples.
> 
> China plans a new generation of more powerful Long March 5 rockets able to lift more weight to the moon — and possibly a manned mission — but Pei told the news conference these wouldn't be used until after 2012, missing the second phase.
> 
> According to Japanese news reports last week, Japan plans to send an unmanned probe to land on the moon by 2015.
> 
> It would cost about $437 million and consist of an unmanned lander, a rover to study the lunar surface and a small satellite to transfer data, according to the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers.
> 
> Chang'e 1's goal is to analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the lunar surface. It will use stereo cameras and X-ray spectrometers to map three-dimensional images of the surface and study the moon's dust.
> 
> The 5,070-pound satellite is expected to transmit its first photo back to China late this month.
> 
> China sent its first satellite into Earth orbit in the 1970s but the space program only seriously took off in the 1980s, growing apace with the country's booming economy.
> 
> In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to put its own astronauts into space.
> 
> But China also alarmed the international community in January when it destroyed an old satellite with a land-based anti-satellite missile.
> 
> I tend to think it’s kind of cute that the Chinese are just now getting into lunar exploration. I’ve been watching the Discovery Channel special on the upcoming mission to Mars, and the challenges are so far beyond what the Chinese are now attempting, it’s staggering.
> 
> And the specter of some Chinese military moon base, bristling with laser weapons and nukes pointed at New York is at best far fetched.
> 
> America’s space race and launch to the moon was an amazingly maturing phenomenon for the country, maybe it can do the same for China ... and India.
> 
> -- Christian


----------



## MarkOttawa

Result:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2007/11/06/2003386411



> China and the US agreed yesterday to open a military hotline as US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held talks in Beijing that aimed to strengthen ties overshadowed by distrust...



Forty-four years ago:
http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/4785.htm

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

The technology to fly to the moon is pretty straight forward, although the scale is quite large (watch "Apollo 13"  to see the size of the Saturn V launch vehicle, or consider a Space Shuttle stack is putting out _Gigawatts_ of energy as it lifts off the pad). Robert A Heinlein was writing about moon landings in the 1950's using known technologies of that time, and Werner Von Braun had a plausible Mars mission mapped out in the 1950's as well. 

The real issue isn't technological prowess; Indian engineers are pretty sharp and I am pretty sure they will be able to reach the moon with their probe as well; rather it is political will. Since the amount of energy needed to reach the moon is so immense, the problem does not scale down very well (even the tiny US Clementine probe needed a Titan 23B booster to get there), so it will be a long time before private operators will be able to launch probes (much less men) to the Moon. Only governments have the resources to do this sort of thing on the scale required.

Given the fleet of ships heading to the Moon, American pride might demand they join in, or even accelerate current plans to put the ARES into production. On the other hand, without strong public support, the American civilian space effort will wither on the vine and we may end up seeing the only US manned space presence being USMC "SUSTAIN" units on their way to some hot spot.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The thing about space is that making the first step is what takes all the energy, breaking free of the atmosphere and gravity of Earth is what takes all the power. Once you are out there, the amount of power required is fairly minimal. Depending on the timeframe for the trip from point A-B, you can use a low power constant source engine like the Ion drive. Of course for manned space flight, time is of the essence, time equals, fuel, food, water, O2, waste and radiation/low gravity effects. 

If some of the ideas like the space elevator or magnetic rail launcher become feasible then the major obstacle to space will be overcome. Both of these technologies require positioning near the equator, so certain countries might do very well out of this new space age.


----------



## CougarKing

Before taikonaut PLAAF Colonel Yang Liwei can go back into space and perhaps plant the PRC flag on the moon, perhaps the US will get there first. Here's an article describing the possible American plan(s) for a settlement/permanent base.

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,157069,00.html?wh=wh



> The Lunar Base: How to Settle the Moon
> Popular Mechanics | Thomas D. Jones | November 27, 2007
> 
> Moderate temperatures, nearly perpetual sunshine, flat landing areas and subterranean resources make the rim of the Shackleton Crater -- situated within the solar system's largest impact crater -- an ideal location for a lunar homestead, down near the moon's south pole. NASA hopes to send the first pioneers there by 2020.
> 
> "Hardscrabble" was what future president Ulysses S. Grant named his ramshackle homestead on the pre-Civil War Missouri frontier. That might be an apt title for NASA's planned lunar outpost, for its residents will find the moon a harsh place to settle. Survival will depend on their ability to evade micrometeoroids, extract oxygen from rocks and even, like Grant, grow wheat.
> 
> The space agency announced its strategy to return to the moon last December. Instead of emulating the series of six Apollo landings, it chose as its initial goal the establishment of a single lunar outpost. Using the new crew exploration vehicle, Orion, NASA plans to send four astronauts to the moon as early as 2020 ("Mission: Moon," March '07). Eventually, four-man crews will rotate home every six months. Their goal will be to live off the land, extend scientific exploration and practice for an eventual leap to Mars.
> 
> The moon, says NASA, is the place to get our space-suited hands dirty. "The lunar base is part of an overall plan that has legs, that makes sense," says Wendell Mendell, chief of the Office of Lunar and Planetary Exploration at Johnson Space Center. "We're moving the human species out into the solar system."
> 
> Choosing a Homestead
> 
> The Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972 were restricted by fuel limitations to destinations fairly close to the lunar equator. This time, NASA is drawn to the practical and scientific attractions of the lunar poles. Temperature is one factor: At the poles, the sun's slanting rays produce a moderate daylight range of minus 22 to minus 58 F, compared to the equatorial high of 270 F.
> 
> But the real advantage of the poles is access to resources. Near the south pole, for example, some high crater rims are bathed in nearly constant sunshine. Sun-tracking solar arrays placed there would provide steady power and charge storage batteries to supply electricity during the brief periods of darkness.
> 
> An even more valuable resource may lie in the craters' depths. Spacecraft data suggest they could harbor hundreds of millions of metric tons of water ice, accumulated from billions of years of comet impacts. Using a simple electric heater, robot ice miners could free water for drinking and agriculture. Electrolysis could break it down further, supplying oxygen for breathing and hydrogen fuel for moon-to-Earth transportation.
> 
> The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be launched late next year, will search for ice just beneath the moon’s surface. Another mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, will crash a spacecraft into one of the lunar poles in early 2009 and analyze the debris plume for water and other chemical compounds.
> 
> If the moon proves to be dry, which ground-based radar suggests, oxygen can still be pried out of lunar volcanic rock. Combining hydrogen gas brought from Earth with the mineral ilmenite, then heating the mixture to 1652 F, produces iron, titanium dioxide and water. Other chemical processes can also release oxygen from rocks, given enough heat and electricity. Lawrence Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee, is developing a magnetic "vacuum" hose, designed to suck lunar dirt into a dumptruck or pipeline leading to an oxygen extraction plant.
> 
> At first, the power for these industrial processes would come from lightweight solar arrays. A compact nuclear reactor, tucked safely into a shallow crater away from living quarters, might be needed later.
> 
> The south pole is also attractive scientifically. It lies within the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the largest impact crater in the solar system. This 7.5-mile-deep, 1500-mile-wide depression, gouged out by a titanic asteroid or comet impact, should harbor bedrock excavated from deep within the lunar crust. Mike Duke, a retired NASA scientist, suspects that it also holds samples of impact melts -- igneous rocks formed from the collision's molten splash. Examining those rocks would open a window into the moon’s ancient history.
> 
> Living on a Hostile Moon
> 
> How will residents cope with the hazards littering this airless, blasted body? Arriving crews will unload pressurized habitation modules, like those on the International Space Station (ISS), or perhaps inflate living spaces made of a tough, Kevlar-like fabric. For protection from cosmic rays and micrometeoroids, the pioneers could bury their habitats in trenches or heap lunar soil over them. With no atmosphere or magnetic field to shield them, as on Earth or Mars, lunar explorers will need to retreat to these shelters during a solar flare's deadly shower of charged protons. A lucky find might be a lava cave to insulate the living quarters.
> 
> Exploring the surface will require a better space suit than the one I used as an astronaut to help assemble the ISS in 2001. That suit was too stiff at the waist for easy walking or bending, and its fiberglass torso and bulky life-support backpack made it top-heavy. The old Apollo suits wouldn't cut it, either: The gloves were clumsy, even painful after prolonged use, and the suits so stiff in the waist and knees that crews found it nearly impossible to reach for a rock.
> 
> Dean Eppler, a senior scientist at Science Applications International, a private firm in Houston, has spent hundreds of hours in prototype space suits, working out the kinks. "The moon suit is a work in progress," Eppler says, but "compared to Apollo's, it will have more flexibility for walking, bending and grabbing stuff off the ground, and be much more intuitive to work in." Lighter electronics and improved life-support systems should keep the weight between 150 and 200 pounds, just 25 to 35 pounds in lunar one-sixth gravity.
> 
> Future explorers will also need an improved version of the Apollo lunar rover, which two astronauts could drive about 40 miles before its silver-zinc batteries were exhausted. A new model might use solar rechargeable batteries, or electricity from hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells.
> 
> Both space suits and machines will have to cope with lunar dust: gritty, sharp-edged, and murder on seals and bearings. Engineers hope to use electromagnetic filters and shielding systems to prevent dust from working into critical components. Taylor is also developing a microwave-powered paving machine capable of reducing damage by turning lunar soil into hard landing pads or roads.
> 
> To minimize the number of costly cargo shipments, the outpost will need efficient recycling technology.
> 
> Wastewater, including urine, will be returned to a drinkable state using systems soon to be tested on the ISS. Carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere using a catalytic scrubber that recovers some oxygen. But a lunar greenhouse will offer the biggest benefit. A few plants have been grown experimentally on the ISS, but never on a scale large enough to produce usable oxygen or food. The moon’s steady polar sunlight would be ideal for greenhouse agriculture. Chris Brown, a plant biology professor at North Carolina State University, leads a group that has been experimenting with ways to grow lunar-ready white potatoes, soybeans and wheat.
> 
> "Plants doing photosynthesis are fundamental to life on Earth," Brown says. "That same system should enable us to colonize other worlds." The brightly lit greenhouse at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is popular with those wintering over in Antarctica, providing humidity, fresh food and visual relief from the six-month-long night. A greenhouse, coupled with radio and TV contact with Earth, might be just the tonic for lunar pioneers living a quarter-million miles from home.
> 
> Big Plans, Tight Budgets
> 
> Congress has endorsed NASA's lunar goals, but has not provided much money to get the effort moving. The space station and Orion have taken priority over research for outpost technology, space agriculture, advanced life support, nuclear power, rovers and the crucial robot precursors. There's also no guarantee that Congress will approve NASA's big-ticket hardware: the Ares V heavy cargo rocket and the Orion lunar lander.
> 
> Funding may well prove the biggest hurdle. "We know how to explore the moon," says geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt. "In fact, we are far, far better prepared to explore this nearby body … than were Lewis and Clark as they planned to head west into the new Louisiana Territory. We must go back."


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The bright side of having the Chinese land on the moon is that very shortly thereafter they will open a restaurant on the moon and the US astronauts can eat there, just bring cash...... ;D


----------



## CougarKing

Thoughts of orange chicken and dumplings being served on the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon aside, here's a little update which states that the latest "cyberattack" on a US nuclear weapons lab may have originated in China. 

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,157961,00.html?wh=news



> China Tied to Cyberattack on U.S. Lab
> International Herlad Tribune  |  December 11, 2007
> A cyberattack reported last week by one of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons laboratories may have originated in China, according to a confidential memorandum distributed to public and private security officials by the Department of Homeland Security.
> 
> Security researchers said the memorandum, which was obtained by a reporter from an executive at a private company, included a list of Web and Internet addresses that were linked to locations in China.
> 
> But they noted that such links did not prove that the Chinese government or Chinese citizens were involved in the attacks. In the past, intruders have compromised computers in China and then used them to disguise their true location.
> 
> Officials at the lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the attacks did not compromise classified information, though they acknowledged that they were still working to understand the full extent of the intrusion.
> 
> The Department of Homeland Security distributed the confidential warning to computer security officials on Wednesday after what it described as a set of "sophisticated attempts" to compromise computers used by the private sector and the government.
> 
> Government computer security officials said the warning, which was issued by the United States Computer Emergency Response Team, known as US-Cert, was related to an attack in October that was also disclosed last week by officials at the Oak Ridge laboratory.
> 
> According to a letter to employees written by the laboratory's director, Thom Mason, an unknown group of attackers sent targeted e- mail messages to roughly 1,100 employees as part of the ruse.
> 
> "At this point, we have determined that the thieves made approximately 1,100 attempts to steal data with a very sophisticated strategy that involved sending staff a total of seven 'phishing' e- mails, all of which at first glance appeared legitimate," he wrote in an e-mail message sent to employees last Monday.
> 
> "At present we believe that about 11 staff opened the attachments, which enabled the hackers to infiltrate the system and remove data."
> 
> In a statement posted on the laboratory's Web site, the agency stated: "The original e-mail and first potential corruption occurred on October 29, 2007. We have reason to believe that data was stolen from a database used for visitors to the Laboratory."
> 
> The laboratory said the attackers were able to gain access to a database containing personal information about visitors to the laboratory going back to 1990.
> 
> The US-Cert advisory, which was not made public, stated: "The level of sophistication and the scope of these cybersecurity incidents indicate that they are coordinated and targeted at private sector systems."
> 
> The US-Cert memo referred to the use of e-mail messages that fool employees into clicking on documents that then permit attackers to plant programs in their computers.
> 
> These programs are then able to copy and forward specific data - like passwords - to remote locations.


----------



## Blackadder1916

China Scouts Colleges to Fill Ranks of Modern Army
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/16/AR2007121602056_pf.html


> By Maureen Fan Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, December 17, 2007
> 
> BEIJING -- The fliers circulating last month on the campuses of China's most prestigious universities showed three soldiers positioned against a Chinese flag and an appeal that read in part: "Carry Your Pen to the Army to Become More Accomplished."
> 
> In ancient times, the phrase was "Throw Away Your Pen and Join the Army," a challenge to China's intellectuals to stop wasting time and help defend the country. Now, the People's Liberation Army is recruiting college students in an ambitious modernization program designed to attract smart soldiers who can handle sophisticated equipment and transform the 2.3 million-strong force into a high-tech adversary.
> 
> "With the rise of China, China needs a powerful army," said Tan Zhenwen, a junior at Tsinghua University in Beijing who recently headed to Guangdong province to join the South China Sea Fleet. " . . . I don't worry about the low social status of soldiers. With more and more college students joining the army, the situation is changing and getting better."
> 
> While China's rising diplomatic power has helped fuel a desire for a more professional army, military commanders also need highly educated soldiers to maintain the "information-based" military power that has become increasingly important -- both internationally and as a means to dissuade Taiwan from declaring independence.
> 
> Domestically, the army already has come a long way. A military that 18 years ago was most readily associated with the shooting of protesters in Tiananmen Square is increasingly helping in relief efforts after floods and other natural disasters. The army has also been the driving force behind recent achievements in space exploration.
> 
> In a speech in August marking the 80th anniversary of the army, President Hu Jintao called for accelerated modernization of weapons and equipment, enhanced personnel training and strengthening of combat capabilities through technology.
> 
> *One of the most important aspects of the modernization is a huge effort to shed the impoverished farmhands who have traditionally signed on as a way to ensure three solid meals a day. The once-bloated force had 4.2 million people two decades ago but has gradually reduced its infantry. It has, however, increased the number of personnel who serve in the navy, air force and Second Artillery Corps, which maintains China's nuclear missiles.*
> 
> The army now advertises itself as an opportunity for young people to acquire technical skills and experience not easily attained in the private sector. This year, for the first time, the army took out full-page advertisements in newspapers. The ads featured an astronaut, a naval college professor and Peking University's first recruit since its students began signing up in 2005.
> 
> *Six years ago, 26 universities produced roughly 1,400 army recruits through a special government program similar to the U.S. military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or ROTC. This year, the program has grown to include 110 universities, and officials hope to recruit 11,000 students, including some majoring in philosophy, law and medicine.*
> 
> "Compared with the private sector, army salaries are not very high. But in recent years, the army has increased the salary for soldiers and officers," said Li Shengqiang, an officer at the army's Beijing Recruitment Office. "Because the army is trying to equip itself with advanced weapons and equipment, the quality and knowledge of soldiers has become correspondingly higher. . . .* In the 1980s, primary school graduates could join the army. But now, no way."*
> 
> Recruits are lured by financial incentives and programs that allow students to return to university after two years in the army with preferential standing for graduate school. Officials have introduced psychological tests to weed out unsuitable candidates and imposed penalties for ineligible applicants who try to bribe their way in. *Also this year, for the first time candidates who want to be air force pilots must pass a language test in English or Russian.*
> 
> Undergraduates from outside Beijing may be offered Beijing residency, an important perk, in exchange for two years of service, according to a proposal now under discussion, said another recruitment official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a decision has not been announced.
> 
> For Zhou Hao, 20, a third-year journalism student at Tsinghua University, joining the army had been a childhood dream. He was unaware that university students were eligible until he spotted a recruitment poster and discovered financial rewards for signing up. Last week he headed off to join the Second Artillery Group in Chuxiong city, Yunnan province.
> 
> "I prefer to work for the government after I graduate, and I think my experience in the army will help me to get a position," Zhou said. "I don't think I really give up anything for the army. But one thing is that more eyes will look at you. So, there must be more pressure, which will force me to do my best."
> 
> China's growing military budget has generated intense debate in Washington, where some analysts believe China's defense spending is much higher than the $45.3 billion officially earmarked.
> 
> Whatever the amount, one Beijing-based military expert added that some of that money is going toward China's military education system.
> 
> "We didn't use all those funds just for missiles or defense" but also for "better welfare" for troops, the expert said, noting that more than $1 million has been spent recently on uniforms.
> 
> "Maybe five years ago IBM had the most advantage. Most students wouldn't have joined the army. But now the situation is different," he said. "The army now offers higher salaries, higher status than before and more opportunities for advancement. If you wore the uniform before, maybe you couldn't get a girlfriend. Now, even that's different."
> 
> In addition, with an increasingly competitive job market, a growing number of college graduates are finding it difficult to secure a stable job with a good salary. Many are beginning to think two years of army experience will give them advantages over other candidates. Others worry that their lives are too comfortable and that they're unprepared for the world.
> 
> "Most young people my age have only focused on their studies since childhood. We are relatively delicate and fragile," said Jia Na, 21, a journalism student at Tsinghua University. "When you enter society, there are even bigger hardships. If I join the army and experience hardship, I will be well-prepared to face challenges in society."
> 
> Jia, from Shanxi province, is the first from her peasant family to attend university. She signed up after speaking with another Tsinghua student who had returned to campus after two years in the army.
> 
> "A teacher who knew him before said he had changed a lot in two years. I found his attitude to be serious and precise and his stories about the army impressed me," Jia said. "He said the labor in the last two years was more than all the work he'd done in his first 18 years of life."
> 
> Last week she packed her bags and headed for an East China Sea Fleet base in Zhejiang province, taking jeans, a sweater and a few books. She left behind her makeup, most of her clothes, her computer and her MP3 player.
> 
> Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The PLA has been undergoing its own _transformation_ for several years. The ‘good old days’ of a mass, peasant army are gone and unlamented. China’s ‘new model army’ is small (by Chinese standards), sophisticated (technical) and professional.

But, there is an important, perceived by officialdom – even by ‘young’ (forty-something) officials – need to do one of the things the PLA did in the ‘good old days’: instil a sense of _national_ pride and a _memory_ of the ‘revolution’ in all Chinese, especially the young and the non-Han population.

With regard to the specific issue of recruiting on universities: I think the PLA has undergone some sorts of crises which have led the leadership to the same sorts of conclusions we came to _circa_ 1997 in the wake of the Somalia Inquiry.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Hopefully they did not adopt the "Grandfather" traditions from the Russians. The Chinese are well on the way to moderizing their army, but I suspect the Russians are to hobbled by outdated methods to make much headway.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The PLA has been undergoing its own _transformation_ for several years. The ‘good old days’ of a mass, peasant army are gone and unlamented. China’s ‘new model army’ is small (by Chinese standards), sophisticated (technical) and professional.
> 
> But, there is an important, perceived by officialdom – even by ‘young’ (forty-something) officials – need to do one of the things the PLA did in the ‘good old days’: instil a sense of _national_ pride and a _memory_ of the ‘revolution’ in all Chinese, especially the young and the non-Han population.
> 
> With regard to the specific issue of recruiting on universities: I think the PLA has undergone some sorts of crises which have led the leadership to the same sorts of conclusions we came to _circa_ 1997 in the wake of the Somalia Inquiry.



Campbell,
The "good old days" of the grassroots-based peasant guerrila army you mean is called "People's War" or _Renmin de Zhan_ as explained in Mao's "red book"; Sinologists like David Shambaugh explain how the latest CMC and General Staff Department officers have reevaluated "People's War" and updated it to modern military methods, to the new doctrine of "Local War under High-tech conditions".

As for leadership crises, the PLA indeed has gone through crises in the past where it found itself sacrificing professionalism to satisfy the requirement of loyalty to the party.  If you read Shambaugh's work on the PLA, you will see that today the influence of the commissars of the General Political Department (GPD) has waned, with these commissars now focused on providing for the more practical needs of the troops such as on-base housing, as opposed to the weekly local party members' meetings.   :

An example of this is demonstrated during the harsh times of the "Great Leap Forward" which saw millions of Chinese people starved to death, PLA Marshal Peng De Huai, the battle-hardened-commander of PLA troops in the Korean War, was so appalled by the suffering he saw that he actually threatened Mao and the Politburo. Peng said that he would actually take his troops to the mountains and wage a guerrila war against Mao and the Party/State if he didn't do anything to alleviate the situation. 

Yet another example is Marshal Lin Biao, one of the PLA's best tactical commanders during the guerrila war days against the Nationalist and the Japanese through the 30s and the 40s, as well as the continuation war of 1945-49 which saw the Reds overthrow the Nationalists. Lin Biao's story in some ways parallels that of German Wehrmacht General/Field Marshal Erwin Rommel of WW2 Nazi Germany, since official Chinese sources for many years put the blame of a possible attempted coup in the late 60s on Lin Biao. It was one way to explain why the Marshal and his family had been escaping aboard a plane to Soviet/Mongolian territory and were supposedly shot down by PLAAF planes or AA fire before they could escape.

Furthemore, even in the current generation of GSD and CMC leaders, political reliability is still one of the premier qualifications for promotion, since the membership of the most recent CMC included General Liang Guanglie, who commanded the 54th Group Army that helped suppress the Tiananmen Square student movement, along with the notorious 38th Group Army whose units led the assault. Another general named Liao Xilong commanded the forces that put down some Tibetan rebels in Lhasa between 1990-1992.; General Guo Boxiong also proved his political loyalty at the helm of the 47th Group Army by putting down some Uighur seperatists in Xinjiang. (43-65, Flanagan)

With all these examples in PLA history in mind, it would be premature to conclude that the PLA is now closer to the goal of satisfying the process of _dang-jun fen kai_ or the process of making the PLA supposedly more professional through making the influence of the CCP on the PLA less potent than the influence of the State as a whole.


Sources: Flanagan, Stephen J. and Marti, Michael E., et al eds. The People s Liberation Army and China in Transition
              Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2003 (.)

             Nathan, Andrew and Gilley, Bruce China s New Leaders: The Secret Files
             New York: New York Review Books, 2002 (.)

Colin P.,

By "Grandfather" traditions, do you mean retired leaders who control the current party, state and military leaders from behind the scenes? Then you are wrong. Deng Xiaoping exercised much influence and power over the Politburo over the 80s and 90s even after he supposedly retired; his influence on Jiang Zhemin was marked until Deng died before the Hong Kong handover. The fear and respect Deng inspired as a so called "paramount leader" on the level of Mao was such that during the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, Deng had then Premier Zhao Ziyang- who was sympathetic to the student leaders in the protest- and another Politburo Standing Committee member purged, although Zhao was just put on house arrest for the rest of his life till he died not too long ago.

In the same fashion, Jiang Zhemin continues to exercise influence on his proteges in the current Politburo Standing Committee such as Zeng Qing Hong and  Wu Bangguo from the Shanghai clique of Jiang in the CCP, even if Jiang has officially stepped down as a PBSC member and CMC chairman and had given the reins to Pres. Hu Jintao.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Actually I was referring to the practices within the army structure that allows senior conscripts to prey upon the new ones.

Thanks for the backgrounds on the leadership in the PLA, I don't think that anyone expected loyalty to be removed from the table as a requirement within the leadership of the PLA. I suspect they like the idea of a "Republican Guard" to protect the leadership and to counter balance the other forces in the country. 

The only difference for the West in regards to loyalty is that we demand totally loyalty to the country and it's laws rather than the party.


----------



## CougarKing

This article speaks for itself. All the more reason for the army.ca poster known as "Tingbudong" (which means "can't understand by hearing") to study his characters well.  ;D

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22362982/



> MSNBC.com
> China controlling more of U.S. economy
> Country leads surge of foreign investments in Wall Street banks
> The Associated Press
> updated 2:21 p.m. PT, Fri., Dec. 21, 2007
> NEW YORK - There's a good reason schools across the country are scrambling to find people who can teach Chinese: It's quickly becoming business' second language as Wall Street seeks to tap China's $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves.
> China has been making increasingly aggressive investments in some of the world's most prestigious financial companies in recent months — most of them American. Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Blackstone Group, and Britain's Barclays have all negotiated major stakes by Chinese government-controlled investment funds.
> 
> Investment banks ailing from the subprime mortgage mess are looking for money to shore up their balance sheets. And China is leading a surge of strategic investments from Asia and the Middle East that so far have sunk about $25 billion into Wall Street banks.
> That's just the start of what some believe is a dramatic reversal of financial power in the shadow of Wall Street's credit turmoil.
> 
> "Both Chinese private and government interests are controlling more and more of the U.S. economy, and this is a result of the big trade and budget deficits we have," said Alan Donziger, professor of economics at Villanova School of Business. "These investments will make the U.S. somewhat less independent, but this is inevitable when we live in a global economy."
> To be sure, Wall Street's current predicament is "our own doing," he said. Turmoil in the credit markets have been fueled by defaults on subprime mortgages, and that's caused the Federal Reserve to attempt a bailout of the industry through interest rate cuts.
> 
> Lower interest rates have caused the dollar to slide in value against other major currencies. And, for foreign governments, the devalued dollar makes investments in these financial institutions cheap.
> 
> In the 1980s, Japanese investors snapped up real estate and invested in businesses across a number of sectors. This new wave of foreign investment is different because Asian and Middle Eastern governments are taking stakes in financial institutions — a cornerstone of the U.S. economy.
> 
> China agreed to pay $5 billion for a 9.9 percent stake in Morgan Stanley, and those securities pay 9 percent a year until they convert to shares in 2010. That translates to a gain of about $450 million of cash next year.
> But, for Morgan Stanley investors, the infusion of new stock two years from now will dilute their shares — and potentially make owning Morgan Stanley's securities less valuable. The same can be said about other banks that receive foreign investments.
> 
> The deals have been structured so that the sovereign funds are passive investors with no seat on the board, and this escapes regulatory scrutiny. This week President Bush said Thursday he was "fine" with foreign investors snapping up big stakes in U.S. banks and financial firms.
> 
> By keeping investments under 10 percent, it does not trip an automatic review by the government. Bush, and others, believe the injection of foreign capital helps keep the banks competitive and restores faith in an industry beaten down this year.
> 
> "These are non-controlling investments, provides capital, and really is a statement of confidence," said John Douglas, a partner with law firm Paul Hastings who heads its global bank regulatory practice. "There's a lot of good things here."
> 
> But, some banking analysts believe these government-sponsored funds might get more say than the banks are admitting.
> 
> "The Chinese are putting $5 billion into Morgan Stanley without there being some kind of quid pro quo of what they're going to get other than interest on their investment," said Dick Bove, an analyst with Punk Ziegler & Co. "It's part of a major shift in the worldwide financial system that I think will be very negative to the U.S."
> 
> 
> He said these kind of investments are not over, and expects to see others surface next year. In some cases, investment banks that have already received investments might strike other deals to increase capital.
> Next up? Speculation swept through Wall Street on Friday that Merrill Lynch & Co. is on the hunt for a foreign investment to help cushion what could be a huge fourth-quarter writedown in January.
> 
> "The whole situation has changed with financial power moving dramatically toward China and the Middle East, and that will have significant impact over time," Bove said.
> 
> 
> © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
> © 2007 MSNBC.com



This second article below details a supposedly more realistic assesment of how big an economic powerhouse China is compared to other major economies.



> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22317937/
> 
> MSNBC.com
> China's economy not that mighty
> U.S. holds steady as world's economic power with 23 percent GDP
> The Associated Press
> updated 4:57 p.m. PT, Tues., Dec. 18, 2007
> SHANGHAI, China - The World Bank said the economies of China and India are about 40 percent smaller than earlier estimates after it revised calcuations using consumers' relative purchasing power to measure economic might.The new figures released by the World Bank on Monday differ from conventional gross domestic product figures, which are calculated by simply converting local statistics into U.S. dollars — but don't take into account the wide variations in the purchasing power of a dollar from country to country.
> 
> A dollar converted into 7.4 yuan will generally buy more food in China, for example, than it would buy in the U.S.
> The bank's latest revision under its purchasing power parity method, based on updated data, shows that India and China — two of Asia's fastest-growing economies — are about 40 percent smaller than originally thought.
> "While PPP is not useful for commercial purposes, it is far and away the best measure of a country's standard of living," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commented on the report.
> 
> By the new figures, China is ranked the world's second-largest economy, with its gross domestic product accounting for 9.7 percent of the world total, behind the U.S., which accounts for 23 percent, it said. Earlier estimates based on older data said China's economy accounted for 14 percent of global GDP.
> Japan was No. 3, Germany was ranked fourth, and India came in fifth, with more than 4 percent of total world output.
> Together, those five countries account for half of world economic output, the Washington-based bank said.
> 
> "These results are more statistically reliable estimates," the World Bank said in a statement. "It was the most extensive and thorough effort ever to measure PPPs across countries."
> 
> Still, the report noted that PPP estimates, like all statistics, are subject to errors and should be treated as approximations.
> 
> Under the new estimates, the number of Chinese living on less than $1 a day — a widely used benchmark for poverty — is nearly 300 million, according to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. The earlier estimates put that figure at 100 million.However, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, in Beijing as he wrapped up a visit to China, cautioned that the new estimate also may be flawed in that the price benchmarks were collected from urban areas.
> 
> "One has to be extremely careful about trying to draw judgements about poverty based on these statistics," Zoellick told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.
> He said even more accurate measures would be based on the kinds of goods that China's poor majority would buy, which would be weighted toward food.
> "We're working with the Chinese government to refine that work and as I think that will be out some time next year," he said.
> 
> © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
> © 2007 MSNBC.com



Surprise, Surprise- the number of Chinese people living on less than a dollar a day is between $100 to 300 million people.  :

The latter figure is as large as the population of the United States, as some of you are well aware. There's a whole sea of people as large as the US population either wandering as part of China's recent wave of mostly unskilled, urban migrants or simply working in industries that have seen no increase of wages, while the sons and daughters of China's noveau rich wing it through Shanghai cram schools and get drunk at the bars of San Li Tun'er ("twer") all the more naive or indifferent to the fact that the gap between rich and poor there is widening daily.


----------



## Kirkhill

Meanwhile we can add direct PLA incursions into India  to the list of interesting events.




> China tries to sabotage border roads
> 22 Dec 2007, 0116 hrs IST,Amalendu Kundu,TNN
> 
> GANGTOK: The Kunming bonhomie notwithstanding, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China is undercutting Indian Army's efforts to strengthen its presence on the border. On November 23, a week before the visit of defence minister A K Antony and chief of army staff Gen Deepak Kapoor to Sikkim, PLA soldiers unloaded boulders in an effort to wreck the construction of a metalled road at Fingertips, a strategic spot near Gurudongmar in North Sikkim. The area is close to the Kangra La pass bordering south-west Tibet.
> 
> Indian troops, however, swung into action the next morning, and removed the obstruction. The road construction — at an altitude of 18,500 feet — was completed on November 27. Chinese representatives, however, did not speak about the offensive at Fingertips during a meeting between army representatives from both sides on November 23. They also kept quiet on the bunker dispute at the trijunction of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet.
> 
> Significantly, prior to the Fingertips manoeuvre, Chinese troops had entered Indian territory and asked Indian Army personnel manning the border post there to stop construction of the road.


  

And...



> TNN INDIA - China tries to sabotage border roads
> 
> "PLA soldiers unloaded boulders in an effort to wreck the construction of a metalled road at Fingertips, a strategic spot near Gurudongmar in North Sikkim"
> 
> "Significantly, prior to the Fingertips manoeuvre, Chinese troops had entered Indian territory and asked Indian Army personnel manning the border post there to stop construction of the road"



Add in this observation derived from the December 14th Global Incident Map:



> China's proxies appear to be engaging the Indian and Bangladeshi railway system on the Sino-Indian border today....harassing fire.




And the ongoing turmoil in Assam, Nepal (with the Maoist rebels) and Kashmir, as well as Tibet,  and the Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran conflicts may be seen in a different light.








This follows on from


----------



## CougarKing

> And the ongoing turmoil in Assam, Nepal (with the Maoist rebels) and Kashmir, as well as Tibet,  and the Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran conflicts may be seen in a different light.



I really don't think Beijing is supporting the Nepalese Maoists or any other Maoist/seperatist group in any nation that borders the PRC.    :

The CCP is more occupied with ensuring its own interests are not threatened- namely continued internal political stability and economic growth- that causing any unrest in neighboring nations by supporting those Maoist groups would go against these interests and might even threaten trade with these countries.


----------



## tomahawk6

Well the PRC economy isnt as mighty as some had thought. The economy is 40% smaller !! This from the World Bank:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-mead30dec30,0,1035099.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary

The great fall of China
Revised GDP calculations show that Beijing isn't the giant we thought it was.
By Walter Russell Mead 
December 30, 2007 
The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.

About 40% smaller.

China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product?

Statistics. When economists calculate a country's gross domestic product, they add up the prices of the goods and services its economy produces and get a total -- in dollars for the United States, euros for such countries as Germany and France and yuan for China. To compare countries' GDP, they typically convert each country's product into dollars.

The simplest way to do this is to use exchange rates. In 2006, the World Bank calculated that China produced 21 trillion yuan worth of goods and services. Using the market exchange rate of 7.8 yuan to the dollar, the bank pegged China's GDP at $2.7 trillion.

That number is too low. For one thing, like many countries, China artificially manipulates the value of its currency. For another, many goods in less developed economies such as China and Mexico are much cheaper than they are in countries such as the United States.

To take these factors into account, economists compare prices from one economy to another and compute an adjusted GDP figure based on "purchasing-power parity." The idea is that a country's GDP adjusted for purchasing-power parity provides a more realistic measure of relative economic strength and of living standards than the unadjusted GDP numbers.

Unfortunately, comparing hundreds and even thousands of prices in almost 150 economies all over the world is a difficult thing to do. Concerned that its purchasing-power-parity numbers were out of whack, the World Bank went back to the drawing board and, with help from such countries as India and China, reviewed the data behind its GDP adjustments.

It learned that there is less difference between China's domestic prices and those in such countries as the United States than previously thought. So the new purchasing-power-parity adjustment is smaller than the old one -- and $4 trillion in Chinese GDP melts into air.

The political consequences will be felt far and wide. To begin with, the U.S. will remain the world's largest economy well into the future. Given that fact, fears that China will challenge the U.S. for global political leadership seem overblown. Under the old figures, China was predicted to pass the United States as the world's largest economy in 2012. That isn't going to happen.

Also, the difference in U.S. and Chinese living standards is much larger than previously thought. Average income per Chinese is less than one-tenth the U.S. level. With its people this poor, China will have a hard time raising enough revenue for the vast military buildup needed to challenge the United States.

The balance of power in Asia looks more secure. Japan's economy was not affected by the World Bank revisions. China's economy has shrunk by 40% compared with Japan too. And although India's economy was downgraded by 40%, the United States, Japan and India will be more than capable of balancing China's military power in Asia for a very long time to come.

But don't pop the champagne corks. It is bad news that billions of people are significantly poorer than we thought. China and India are not the only countries whose GDP has been revised downward. The World Bank figures show sub-Saharan Africa's economy to be 25% smaller. One consequence is that the ambitious campaign to reduce world poverty by 2015 through the United Nations Millennium Development Goals will surely fail. We have underestimated the size of the world's poverty problem, and we have overestimated our progress in attacking it. This is not good.

There is more bad news. U.S. businesses and entrepreneurs hoping to crack the Chinese and Indian markets must come to terms with a middle class that is significantly smaller than thought. Investors in overseas stocks should take note. Companies with growth plans tied to the Indian and Chinese markets could face disappointing results, and the high prices of many emerging-market stocks depend on buzz and psychology. Investor sentiment on China and India may now be significantly more vulnerable to future bad news.

China's political stability may be more fragile than thought. The country faces huge domestic challenges -- an aging population lacking any form of social security, wholesale problems in the financial system that dwarf those revealed in the U.S. sub-prime loan mess and the breakdown of its health system. These problems are as big as ever, but China has fewer resources to meet them than we thought.

And there is the environment. With poor air quality, acute water shortages, massive pollution in major watersheds and many other environmental problems, China needs to make enormous investments in the environment to avoid major disasters. Globally, it will be much harder to get China -- and India -- to make any sacrifices to address problems such as global warming.

For Americans, the new numbers from the World Bank bring good news and bad. On the plus side, U.S. leadership in the global system seems more secure and more likely to endure through the next generation. On the other hand, the world we are called on to lead is poorer and more troubled than we anticipated.

Maybe the old Chinese curse says it best: We seem to be headed for interesting times.

Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World."


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Well the PRC economy isnt as mighty as some had thought. The economy is 40% smaller !! This from the World Bank:
> 
> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-mead30dec30,0,1035099.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
> 
> The great fall of China
> Revised GDP calculations show that Beijing isn't the giant we thought it was.
> By Walter Russell Mead
> December 30, 2007
> The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.
> 
> The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.
> 
> About 40% smaller.



Tom,

Scroll up. The 2nd article I posted from NBC a week or so ago draws the same conclusions...

In spite of such a pessimistic outlook, I remember Bei Da professor once telling me in my study abroad program in Beijing he believed that the standard of living for most Chinese would equalize that of the US/Canada/Europe by the mid-2020s. Of course, this was the same professor who argued with me that he really believed that people in Taiwan- even the _benshengren_, in his point of view- were culturally the same as in any other of China's 30 or so provinces.  :


----------



## tomahawk6

Pure fantasy Cougar that the Chinese could have our standard of living in anything less than 40 years. Somehow they need to figure out how to bring the rural population along for this to happen.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Pure fantasy Cougar that the Chinese could have our standard of living in anything less than 40 years. Somehow they need to figure out how to bring the rural population along for this to happen.


T6,
Very true. And surprise, surprise- the professor who came up with that fantasy belief, if I can recall correctly, was a party member and poli sci professor. :-\


----------



## tomahawk6

China has alot of potential. But they have alot of issues that will limit their progress towards being a super power. They face a major water shortage in the cities being just one problem.


----------



## CougarKing

T6,

You still have to admit that the progress that China made in the last 20 years, since Deng Xiaoping first opened up the PRC in the early 1980s with greater trade with the West as well as privatizing many state-run industries, is amazing. China should qualify as the fifth Asian Tiger right after Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, whose economies developed so fast in a matter of a few decades on a scale similar to that of Japan's rebuilding and rise to the economic power it is today, even if Japan is in a whole different category altogether from the "Asian Tigers". The first four Asian Tigers built their economies gradually through the process of import substitution and by eventually shifting to capital-heavy industries. Taiwan, for example, at the end of the Second World War and Chinese Continuation of Civil War of 1945-49 was primarily an agricultural society which had a few leftover industries from the long Japanese occupation (1894-1945); today it is one of the world's largest suppliers of semi-conductors and last time, I checked, was the eighth or seventh largest economy, either ahead or right behind South Korea. 

Going back to China, my point is that the progress they made in those decades since Deng opened up China is amazing mainly because the PRC did not collapse and become the economic mess that the former Soviet Union used to be at the beginning of the 1990s, when they went too quickly from a Marxist-style command economy to a market one not too long after the _glasnost_ and _perestroika_ years. And to top it off, the CCP has survived until this day and has kept power in spite of the succesful market economy that its members once abhorred. One should read Barry Naughton's Growing Out of the Plan, which I cited in one of my posts earlier, to get a better appreciation of the scope of this transformation.

BTW, if one follows any Mandarin language news source (Xinhua is crap by the way), one will notice that in the three years Pres. Chen Shui-Bian of Taiwan/the ROC has been taking an increasingly nationalistic stance with regard to Taiwan as a sovereign nation instead of the last remaining province of the ROC. Pictures and other memorials of Guo Min Dang leader Chiang-Kai Shek (Jiang Jie Shi)were supposedly removed from their display areas in spite of expected protests from ethnic mainlanders/_waishengren_ who live on the island. Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport has changed its name and ROC passports now have the word "TAIWAN" instead of "China" or the "Republic of China" printed on them. One can infer that since Chen was imprisoned during the Martial Law years when Chiang and then his son Chiang Ching Kuo (Jiang Jing Guo) were in power, Chen wanted to "get some payback" and assert Taiwanese nationalism by expunging all references and memorials to Chiang. One has to take in mind that this happened even when Chen has had to manuever through the corruption/bribery charges thrown on his wife and brother-in-law not too long ago. Furthermore, although Chen is supposed to step down in March when new elections are held, it is rumored that Chen himself may declare martial law partially as a means to stay in power and effect more measures that will completely abolish all trappings of the old ROC and declare Taiwan independence. These martial law rumors do not come from the official media, but the last time I went there, ICRT radio reported that it would be more likely that a popular referendum might be held by the govt. on the independence question. We can only wait till March and wait and see what happens.

It's interesting to note as well that Chen has gotten as far as he has, from the humble maritime lawyer he used to be who was also imprisoned during the Martial Law years.

Here's a source that confirms what I stated above: (scroll to the section on Chen Shui-Bian's biography)

http://www.ibiblio.org/chinesehistory/contents/06dat/bio.5roc.html

Here are also two interpretations of Chen's actions during his term:



> There have been two interpretations of Chen's actions during the election in terms of independence politics. The first is that he is ideologically committed to advancing Taiwan independence and that his actions are intended to systematically remove the constraints which prevent this from occurring. Seen in this light, his actions are intended to provoke a crisis in which the PRC must either start a war or accept independence, with the expectation that the PRC would back down. Ironically, this interpretation of his actions is shared both among his most fervent supporters (who think it is a good thing) and his most bitter opponents (who think that it is a bad thing). It is largely to counter this possibility that the PRC has issued statements that it will definitely go to war if certain red lines are crossed. However, they in reality carry little meaning, as Beijing has made such statements warning against electing former President Lee and Chen in the 1996 and 2000 elections, which both failed to materialize. Some people regard these statements now as reverse psychology, as Lee and Chen may help to weaken ROC and advance the unification process.
> The second interpretation is that Chen's actions are primarily intended to placate his core supporters rather than provoke a crisis. People who subscribe to this interpretation point out that Chen's early efforts to moderate his pro-independence position did not create a positive reaction either from Mainland China or from his anti-independence opponents on Taiwan. He also alienated some pro-independence supporters. Therefore Chen was forced to take a more assertive approach both as a negotiation tactic with the PRC and to keep support from his core supporters. This strategy is consistent with the oft-stated position that Taiwan would only seek independence as a preemptive measure in the face of evidence of PRC military aggression. However, even this interpretation provokes unease among many people, especially among policy makers in Mainland China and the United States. The first problem is that this interpretation makes Chen seem like an old-style Taiwan politician that seems to say whatever pleases people. The second, more serious problem is the fear that through misunderstanding and misinterpretation, Chen may provoke a war without intending to do so, as Mainland China has repeatedly claimed that any progress towards independence would provoke war.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The so called ‘Overseas Chinese’ pay rapt attention to Chen Shui-Bian and Taiwan. Those two points were reinforced at a very recent gathering. Either:

1. Chen Shui-Bian is resolutely, but fatally, leading Taiwan down some sort of _yellow brick road_ towards a mythical state of real independence and prosperity – fatally and mythically because Beijing cannot tolerate such a state and will put it down; or

2. Chen Shui-Bian is laying the foundation for a “one nation, two systems” solution for Taiwan. He is beating the independence drums to placate his own hard core and to remind Beijing that he negotiates from a position of real strength – Taiwan is neither a military nor economic pushover.

Personally, I’m inclined to the second position. I don’t think Chen Shui-Bian or any but the most fanatical _nationalists_ want an independent Taiwan – most Taiwanese believe they are Chinese and they believe that China should be reunited, with Taiwan as a province, again. The question is: on what terms?

Taiwan wants at least as much independence as Hong Kong has – maybe more. Hong Kong appears to crave more independence – it continues to enjoy (associate) membership status in some international bodies and appears to wish to expand its _sovereign_ influence. It is hard to imagine Taiwan ever settling for less.

If I’m correct then China is headed, albeit slowly, towards some new sort of federal status with some provinces (like Hong Kong and Taiwan) enjoying a degree of international _sovereignty_ - which might apply, *in varying and differing degrees*, to the _Autonomous Regions_, too.


----------



## tomahawk6

I suspect that Taiwan hopes for a collapse of the communist regime at some point as many of the other hard line regimes have.


----------



## CougarKing

> Personally, I’m inclined to the second position. I don’t think Chen Shui-Bian or any but the most fanatical _nationalists_ want an independent Taiwan – *most Taiwanese believe they are Chinese and they believe that China should be reunited, with Taiwan as a province, again*. The question is: on what terms?




Campbell,

I must disagree with you on this point. As I have stated before, the majority of people in Taiwan are _benshengren_, who are still ethnically Han Chinese, but whose experience mainstream Chinese history was cut off from the mainland by more than 50 years as a Japanese colony (1894/5-1945) and by events such as the infamous 2-28 massacre of hundreds, if not thousands of Taiwanese, by mainlander Guo Min Dang troops who set to reclaim the island for the ROC in 1945.   These _benshengren_ also speak the local Taiwanese/Tai Wan Hua dialect (which itself is a dialect of the Fujian Hua/Hokien spoken in Fujian province on the mainland, just adjacent to Taiwan) and comprise over 90% of the island's population. Pres. Chen Shui-Bian and even ex-Pres. Lee Tung Hui are members of the _benshengren_ majority; Lee even stated in an interview with a Japanese correspondent not too long ago that he identified himself as Japanese prior to 1945. However, the majority of _benshengren_ who were born and raised during Chiang's rule, such as Chen, see themselves as distinctly different and seperate from the Chinese mainstream/_waishengren_, and thus explains their strong desire for independence.

The _waishengren_, on the other hand, comprise those ethnic Han Chinese who either fled to Taiwan from the mainland during the 1945-49 Civil War, or their descendants. The _waishengren_ or "ethnic mainlanders" are those who dominated the culture of the island for the past 60 years and imposed Mandarin language and mainstream Chinese culture on the already thoroughly Japanized _benshengren_; most of these "ethnic mainlanders" speak only Mandarin and get around Taiwan easily because everyone speaks it, although a few have picked up Taiwanese as well, especially local officials and those who intermarried with Taiwanese. Still, it was these _waishengren_ who then dominated many of the Guo Min Dang and Legislative Yuan's positions until the end of Martial Law years and the rule of both Chiang-Kai Shek and Chiang-Ching Kuo.

Unlike the "Overseas Chinese" or _Hua Qiao_ you see in North America or scattered in every Chinatown across the world who identify themselves as "Chinese first" and have provincial roots second, regardless of their dialect (Cantonese, Fukienese), the Taiwanese/ _benshengren_ see themselves as being VERY DISTINCT within pan-Chinese culture and thus now increasingly see themselves "Taiwanese first, Chinese second".  Thus, just because the Taiwanese have reclaimed many of their pre-1894-1945 Japanization (doka/kominka) mainstream Chinese cultural values and now seem indistinguishable from Chinese culture DOES NOT MEAN they see themselves as just being Chinese anymore, but as Taiwanese first and foremost. 

If you applied the same logic you used for all Chinese, regardless of provincial origin, that you used in the quote above to Singapore as well, you would also be mistaken, since the large _Hua Qiao_ community there has a shared experience with the Malays and the Indians who populated that island nation during British rule and thus see themselves as Singaporeans first as well.

Furthermore, if the Taiwanese were not as nationalistic as you assumed, then why have changes such as the ff. changes received such support that they were quickly implemented?

from the above earlier post of mine:


> notice that in the three years Pres. Chen Shui-Bian of Taiwan/the ROC has been taking an increasingly nationalistic stance with regard to Taiwan as a sovereign nation instead of the last remaining province of the ROC. Pictures and other memorials of Guo Min Dang leader Chiang-Kai Shek (Jiang Jie Shi)were supposedly removed from their display areas in spite of expected protests from ethnic mainlanderswaishengren who live on the island. Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport has changed its name and ROC passports now have the word "TAIWAN" instead of "China" or the "Republic of China" printed on them.



And from a passage quoted from this site:

http://www.ibiblio.org/chinesehistory/contents/06dat/bio.5roc.html



> After his first year in office, Chen seemed to move away from sending conciliatory gestures. In the summer of 2002, Chen became the chairman of the DPP. During his tenure, images of Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang Ching-kuo (and to a lesser degree Sun Yat-sen) have disappeared from public buildings. The word "TAIWAN" is now printed on new ROC passports. Also continuing a trend from the previous administration, the Education Ministry has revised the school curriculum to be more Taiwan-centered.The "Free China Press" has been renamed the Taiwan Press and Who's Who in the ROC has been renamed Who's Who in Taiwan. In January 2003, the Cabinet-level Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission was abolished and replaced by a newly-formed Taiwan-Tibet Exchange Foundation. Though Chen has proposed talks with the PRC, relations remain deadlocked as Chen has refused to pledge to the One-China Policy, as required by the PRC for talks to begin. Such a pledge seemed unlikely for Chen since there remains strong opposition within his own party. Despite these symbolic gestures, Chen moved away from "no haste, be patient" policy and opened the three mini links.


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## tomahawk6

The PRC have a new LCAC to fit in their new Type 071 LPD.


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## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The PRC have a new LCAC to fit in their new Type 071 LPD.



They are obviously slowly increasing their amphibious capabilities so they can land more than the single-500 man strong PLA Marine brigade they have on their obvious target: any port on the Taiwan coast where commandeered Ro-Ro ships can unload more of their armor.  Or is this possibility just an unlikely assumption on my part?

One shouldn't ignore the PLA's 3-division strong 15th Airborne Corps based in Wuhan either in a Taiwan invasion scenario. However, I'll leave it to the professionals here to comment on whether they think any such airborne landing would still be feasible given the types of defenses Taiwan has; whether Taiwan's vaunted F16s or its SAM batteries on its warships will affect such an airborne drop is not in my lane to say. 

http://www.sinodefence.com/organisation/airforce/airborne.asp


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## Greymatters

Its not the F-16s or SAMs that count, its how good their EW system is that will make the day.


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## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Campbell,
> 
> I must disagree with you on this point ...



We’ll have to agree to disagree.

No matter how hard I look, I cannot find a single good reason why *either* China, proper, or Taiwan would want to fight over reunification. It can be allowed to fester quietly but, I think both Chinese and Taiwanese interests will be best served, in the mid to long terms, by peaceful reunification on the _”one nation, two systems”_ model.

Despite the effects of various policies the fact is that China is starved for the natural resources needed to sustain a growing economy for the decades and decades required to modernize the entire country and, therefore, legitimze the rule of the _Red Dynasty_. There is a resource treasure-house in Siberia, East of the _Yenisei_, that China, rather than Russia, may be best positioned to exploit, but that will not be sufficient to meet China’s needs. Resources, especially petroleum, from around the world will be required and China understands, I believe, that it needs right mix of the political/diplomatic, economic, cultural and military power to guarantee that it can have free, _*fair*_ and unchallenged access to the resources it needs. 

I do not think the ongoing Chinese naval build-up is aimed, specifically, at Taiwan. Rather, I think China is working, steadily, towards making itself into a global power – and a navy is the _sine qua non_ of global power projection.

China has global _interests_ that require _protection_; thus China requires a capable blue water navy. The fact that such a fleet _threatens_ Taiwan is icing on the cake – but the cake is global power.

The other thing China needs, for at least the rest of the first half of the 21st century is: *PEACE*. Despite its huge population and growing economic and military powers, China is weak and fragile. War, any war, is not in its interest. The Chinese leadership _system_ allows, even encourages long range, _strategic_ thinking; thus it is less likely to stumble into an ill-considered war than are many competing nations.

I think that factor (“No war, thanks; we’re Chinese.”) serves to explain why China is playing a larger and larger role in _traditional_ (baby-blue beret) UN peacekeeping – they want to engage and expand their political/diplomatic _footprint_ without resorting to force -anywhere.

I take your point about the ethnic _benshengren_ majority in Taiwan but I think the _waishengren_ Chinese in Taiwan and their confreres on the mainland will, ultimately, decide the issue for the greater good – which I think means peaceful reunification.


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## CougarKing

Campbell,

Thank you for your responses, although we disagree on the point about Taiwan. However, I do agree with your statements about China seeking to eventually develop a blue-water navy and increase its influence through both diplomatic and economic initiatives; China's past and present efforts to cultivate its ties with several African nations including those visits by Premier Zhou En Lai, when he was still alive, demonstrate Beijing's eagerness to increase its "footprint" as you so aptly put it.

As for China's involvement in peacekeeping missions through the UN, you are also correct, since the PLA did send observers, doctors, nurses, engineers and so forth to Cambodia, East Timor and the Democratic Republic of Congo (the former Zaire), among other missions, if I can recall correctly.


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## Kirkhill

A question to both Edward and CougarDaddy.

How "in sync" are the PLA leadership and the civil leadership of the CCP?  My understanding was that there have been some significant stressors in the past that saw the PLA and the, if I may, Mandarins.


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## Edward Campbell

I'll defer to CougarDaddy on the PLA but, I think, there is a new generation of Chinese leaders on the rise - we can see them in those recently elected at the party congress. They strike me as being _pragmatists_ which, in a Chinese sense, means, to me, that they are party/dynastic (but *not* communist) _apparatchiks_. It appears to me that the _Red Dynasty_ might be better named the _*Deng* Dynasty_ - Sun and Mao may have been just the sorts of _upsets_ that, traditionally, characterize the _interregnum_ between stable dynasties in China's history.

Strategically, I think that means "stay the course" and for us - the West - that means China will be a serious competitor but not an enemy; not unless we, wilfully, stumble into some avoidable disagreement with her.


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## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> A question to both Edward and CougarDaddy.
> 
> How "in sync" are the PLA leadership and the civil leadership of the CCP?  My understanding was that there have been some significant stressors in the past that saw the PLA and the, if I may, Mandarins.



Kirkhill,

I am going to answer your question assuming that you mean "in sync" to signify military compliance to party policy following a certain adage put forth by any serving CCP leader, such as Deng's "Three Represents", etc. 

The PLA, as you well now, is linked to the CCP via the Central Military Commission (CMC), of which the PRC President is usually the chairman. The other members also include some heads of the major PLA commands, such as the General Staff Department (GSD), the General Political Department (GPD), the General Armaments Department (GAD) and so forth. However, one must have in mind that the CMC in fact is not one, but two bodies under the same name: a Party CMC and a State CMC. For most of PRC history, their membership has coincided; I think the exceptions may include times when there was an internal power struggle, such as the late 70s following Mao's death, when the Gang of Four led by Mao's widow Jiang Qing competed with Deng Xiaoping and his supporters for control of the party while Mao's so-called initial successor Hua Gaofeng had a fragile grip on power before Deng eventually prevailed, if I can recall correctly. 

With that in mind, the current membership of both the State and the Party CMC still coincide, though this may be later affected by the ongoing process of _dang-jun fen-kai_ and _dang-zheng fen-kai_.

The former means the "seperation of the military from the party" and the latter means "the seperation of the party from the state". Sinologist David Shambaugh mentions both concepts repeatedly in at least one of his books and emphasizes the importance of the former if the PLA is to become a truly more professional force. Such a process would include deemphasizing the role of commissars/political officers attached to military units; Shambaugh has even stated that such political officers now focus on more practical needs regarding the troops' welfare, such as arranging housing for the families of service members, although they are still first ones to go to report any signs of political dissent. Although at least two of the current CMC members still rose through the ranks via the General Political Department/GPD in various roles such as being political officers/commissars, the process of _dang-jun fen kai_ is ensuring that more officers from the GSD, GLD and other departments are making it into the CMC's membership in more recent years.  
I already discussed in a previous post how individual past PLA leaders such as Marshal Peng Dehuai and Marshal Lin Biao either opposed the party leader(s) or party line and ended up with an uneviable fate, such as being purged/disgraced like Marshal Peng or dying in a plane crash as Marshal Lin supposedly did. It would be premature though, to assume that any PLA senior leaders today would not meet such a fate for making an enemy of anyone in the CCP's Politburo Standing Committee; the purge of Premier Zhao Ziyang at the behest of Deng Xiaoping, following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, is another important reminder that if the CCP can still purge civilian state leaders as high as Zhao, they can do so as well with any CMC member or PLA officer at any level.  
However, one must also note that in the immediate aftermath of the Tianamen Square Massacre, when the dissidents were being rounded up, the CCP ordered a sort of "political re-entrenchment" or "political reinforcement" of hardliner principles not only within civilian govt. agencies state-run corporations, but also among the PLA's leadership as well; no doubt the political officers/comissars from the GPD were key to making this "ideological reinforcement" campaign work. Instrumental to this "ideological reinforcement" campaign were the notorious Yang brothers: Generals Yang Shangkun and Yang Baibing, whose work at supposedly ordering and effecting martial law and the numerous systemic purges and arrests of many suspected dissidents throughout Beijing and so forth seems like a horrific throwback to the hardliner days of the Cultural Revolution. Some sources say General Yang Shangkun, then the Vice-Chairman of the CMC and also the PRC President (more of a ceremonial role back then since Deng held the real power as the CCP's paramount leader), initially sympathized with the student protestors along with Premier Zhao, though he quickly changed his position when it became apparent that Deng would crack down on the students; it was Yang Shangkun who declared martial law. Furthermore, his brother Yang Baibing- surprise, surprise-had risen through the ranks of both the CCP and PLA through his work as a political commissar, eventually to head the GPD itself. On another interesting note, Yang Shangkun's nephew General Yang Jianhua headed the 27th Ground Army, which participated in the actual Tiananmen Square crackdown alongside the 38th and 54th Ground Armies (the 54th was commanded by General Liang Guanglie, whom I mentioned earlier, who was serving in the CMC as of 2002, though he is no longer a CMC member now). Read any detailed account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the immediate period of purges and crackdowns in the following months and Yang Shangkun will be mentioned, if not Yang Baibing; however, one can infer that they were merely pawns for Deng himself. The work of Shambaugh, Nathan and Gilley, among other sources I mentioned earlier, will continue to emphasize Deng's role influencing the past and current CCP and PLA.

Now that we have a better idea of how "in sync" were relations between the PLA and the CCP in the past, this better helps others on this board gauge or predict how relations between those two entities will transpire in the China of today.

One last thing to note, is the role of the PLA Second Artillery (_di er da pao_), or its nuclear weapons brigades. They receive their orders directly from the Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP itself, not from any Military Region command or type commands as those one would find in the General Staff Department (GSD). It would make sense to place your most powerful deterrents firmly in your control if you were a civilian CCP leader who was wary of any PLA regional commander or ground army commander going rogue and instigating a coup; this mirrors the arrangement the now defunct Soviet Union had for its own missile brigades, if I can recall correctly, by directly linking the highest party leaders with their country's nuclear arsenal.


----------



## Kirkhill

Many thanks for an enlightening summary CougarDaddy.

Digestion time.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2

I have often preached in these fora that:

1.	There is an _Anglosphere_ that has a unique and (I suspect unreproduceable) liberal, democratic, secular and capitalist _culture_ that has moved from success to success for the past 300+ years and that can (must need not) continue to do so with a modicum of good management. See Walter Russell Mead’s recently published _God and Gold_ for more on this;

2.	There is no basis for the _triumphalist_ tendencies which existed in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries and which persist today in Amera. _Gott_ is not _mit uns_ and “_uns_” (such as there is any sort of coherent “we”) must make our own way forward or, as surely as the _gotts_ made little green apples, be left behind to be trampled in the rush, à la Belgium, Portugal and Turkey;

3.	The current unipolar strategic situation in which America’s power in unchallenged cannot last – indeed, ought not to last; and

4.	China, while undoubtedly _rising_ is not now and need not be our enemy in the future.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Jan/Feb 08 issue of _Foreign Affairs_ is an article by  G. John Ikenberry with which I am pretty much in full accord:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080101faessay87102-p0/g-john-ikenberry/the-rise-of-china-and-the-future-of-the-west.html 


> The Rise of China and the Future of the West
> *Can the Liberal System Survive?*
> 
> By G. John Ikenberry
> 
> From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008
> 
> ________________________________________
> Summary: China's rise will inevitably bring the United States' unipolar moment to an end. But that does not necessarily mean a violent power struggle or the overthrow of the Western system. The U.S.-led international order can remain dominant even while integrating a more powerful China -- but only if Washington sets about strengthening that liberal order now.
> 
> _G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars._
> 
> The rise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century. China's extraordinary economic growth and active diplomacy are already transforming East Asia, and future decades will see even greater increases in Chinese power and influence. But exactly how this drama will play out is an open question. Will China overthrow the existing order or become a part of it? And what, if anything, can the United States do to maintain its position as China rises?
> 
> Some observers believe that the American era is coming to an end, as the Western-oriented world order is replaced by one increasingly dominated by the East. The historian Niall Ferguson has written that the bloody twentieth century witnessed "the descent of the West" and "a reorientation of the world" toward the East. Realists go on to note that as China gets more powerful and the United States' position erodes, two things are likely to happen: China will try to use its growing influence to reshape the rules and institutions of the international system to better serve its interests, and other states in the system -- especially the declining hegemon -- will start to see China as a growing security threat. The result of these developments, they predict, will be tension, distrust, and conflict, the typical features of a power transition. In this view, the drama of China's rise will feature an increasingly powerful China and a declining United States locked in an epic battle over the rules and leadership of the international system. And as the world's largest country emerges not from within but outside the established post-World War II international order, it is a drama that will end with the grand ascendance of China and the onset of an Asian-centered world order.
> 
> That course, however, is not inevitable. The rise of China does not have to trigger a wrenching hegemonic transition. The U.S.-Chinese power transition can be very different from those of the past because China faces an international order that is fundamentally different from those that past rising states confronted. China does not just face the United States; it faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations. The nuclear revolution, meanwhile, has made war among great powers unlikely -- eliminating the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems defended by declining hegemonic states. Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join.
> 
> This unusually durable and expansive order is itself the product of farsighted U.S. leadership. After World War II, the United States did not simply establish itself as the leading world power. It led in the creation of universal institutions that not only invited global membership but also brought democracies and market societies closer together. It built an order that facilitated the participation and integration of both established great powers and newly independent states. (It is often forgotten that this postwar order was designed in large part to reintegrate the defeated Axis states and the beleaguered Allied states into a unified international system.) Today, China can gain full access to and thrive within this system. And if it does, China will rise, but the Western order -- if managed properly -- will live on.
> 
> As it faces an ascendant China, the United States should remember that its leadership of the Western order allows it to shape the environment in which China will make critical strategic choices. If it wants to preserve this leadership, Washington must work to strengthen the rules and institutions that underpin that order -- making it even easier to join and harder to overturn. U.S. grand strategy should be built around the motto "The road to the East runs through the West." It must sink the roots of this order as deeply as possible, giving China greater incentives for integration than for opposition and increasing the chances that the system will survive even after U.S. relative power has declined.
> 
> The United States' "unipolar moment" will inevitably end. If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.
> 
> TRANSITIONAL ANXIETIES
> 
> China is well on its way to becoming a formidable global power. The size of its economy has quadrupled since the launch of market reforms in the late 1970s and, by some estimates, will double again over the next decade. It has become one of the world's major manufacturing centers and consumes roughly a third of the global supply of iron, steel, and coal. It has accumulated massive foreign reserves, worth more than $1 trillion at the end of 2006. China's military spending has increased at an inflation-adjusted rate of over 18 percent a year, and its diplomacy has extended its reach not just in Asia but also in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Indeed, whereas the Soviet Union rivaled the United States as a military competitor only, China is emerging as both a military and an economic rival -- heralding a profound shift in the distribution of global power.
> 
> Power transitions are a recurring problem in international relations. As scholars such as Paul Kennedy and Robert Gilpin have described it, world politics has been marked by a succession of powerful states rising up to organize the international system. A powerful state can create and enforce the rules and institutions of a stable global order in which to pursue its interests and security. But nothing lasts forever: long-term changes in the distribution of power give rise to new challenger states, who set off a struggle over the terms of that international order. Rising states want to translate their newly acquired power into greater authority in the global system -- to reshape the rules and institutions in accordance with their own interests. Declining states, in turn, fear their loss of control and worry about the security implications of their weakened position.
> 
> These moments are fraught with danger. When a state occupies a commanding position in the international system, neither it nor weaker states have an incentive to change the existing order. But when the power of a challenger state grows and the power of the leading state weakens, a strategic rivalry ensues, and conflict -- perhaps leading to war -- becomes likely. The danger of power transitions is captured most dramatically in the case of late-nineteenth-century Germany. In 1870, the United Kingdom had a three-to-one advantage in economic power over Germany and a significant military advantage as well; by 1903, Germany had pulled ahead in terms of both economic and military power. As Germany unified and grew, so, too, did its dissatisfactions and demands, and as it grew more powerful, it increasingly appeared as a threat to other great powers in Europe, and security competition began. In the strategic realignments that followed, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, formerly enemies, banded together to confront an emerging Germany. The result was a European war. Many observers see this dynamic emerging in U.S.-Chinese relations. "If China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades," the realist scholar John Mearsheimer has written, "the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war."
> 
> But not all power transitions generate war or overturn the old order. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom ceded authority to the United States without great conflict or even a rupture in relations. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, Japan's economy grew from the equivalent of five percent of U.S. GDP to the equivalent of over 60 percent of U.S. GDP, and yet Japan never challenged the existing international order.
> 
> Clearly, there are different types of power transitions. Some states have seen their economic and geopolitical power grow dramatically and have still accommodated themselves to the existing order. Others have risen up and sought to change it. Some power transitions have led to the breakdown of the old order and the establishment of a new international hierarchy. Others have brought about only limited adjustments in the regional and global system.
> 
> A variety of factors determine the way in which power transitions unfold. The nature of the rising state's regime and the degree of its dissatisfaction with the old order are critical: at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, a liberal country an ocean away from Europe, was better able to embrace the British-centered international order than Germany was. But even more decisive is the character of the international order itself -- for it is the nature of the international order that shapes a rising state's choice between challenging that order and integrating into it.
> 
> OPEN ORDER
> 
> The postwar Western order is historically unique. Any international order dominated by a powerful state is based on a mix of coercion and consent, but the U.S.-led order is distinctive in that it has been more liberal than imperial -- and so unusually accessible, legitimate, and durable. Its rules and institutions are rooted in, and thus reinforced by, the evolving global forces of democracy and capitalism. It is expansive, with a wide and widening array of participants and stakeholders. It is capable of generating tremendous economic growth and power while also signaling restraint -- all of which make it hard to overturn and easy to join.
> 
> It was the explicit intention of the Western order's architects in the 1940s to make that order integrative and expansive. Before the Cold War split the world into competing camps, Franklin Roosevelt sought to create a one-world system managed by cooperative great powers that would rebuild war-ravaged Europe, integrate the defeated states, and establish mechanisms for security cooperation and expansive economic growth. In fact, it was Roosevelt who urged -- over the opposition of Winston Churchill -- that China be included as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The then Australian ambassador to the United States wrote in his diary after his first meeting with Roosevelt during the war, "He said that he had numerous discussions with Winston about China and that he felt that Winston was 40 years behind the times on China and he continually referred to the Chinese as 'Chinks' and 'Chinamen' and he felt that this was very dangerous. He wanted to keep China as a friend because in 40 or 50 years' time China might easily become a very powerful military nation."
> 
> Over the next half century, the United States used the system of rules and institutions it had built to good effect. West Germany was bound to its democratic Western European neighbors through the European Coal and Steel Community (and, later, the European Community) and to the United States through the Atlantic security pact; Japan was bound to the United States through an alliance partnership and expanding economic ties. The Bretton Woods meeting in 1944 laid down the monetary and trade rules that facilitated the opening and subsequent flourishing of the world economy -- an astonishing achievement given the ravages of war and the competing interests of the great powers. Additional agreements between the United States, Western Europe, and Japan solidified the open and multilateral character of the postwar world economy. After the onset of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan in Europe and the 1951 security pact between the United States and Japan further integrated the defeated Axis powers into the Western order.
> 
> In the final days of the Cold War, this system once again proved remarkably successful. As the Soviet Union declined, the Western order offered a set of rules and institutions that provided Soviet leaders with both reassurances and points of access -- effectively encouraging them to become a part of the system. Moreover, the shared leadership of the order ensured accommodation of the Soviet Union. As the Reagan administration pursued a hard-line policy toward Moscow, the Europeans pursued détente and engagement. For every hard-line "push," there was a moderating "pull," allowing Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue high-risk reforms. On the eve of German unification, the fact that a united Germany would be embedded in European and Atlantic institutions -- rather than becoming an independent great power -- helped reassure Gorbachev that neither German nor Western intentions were hostile. After the Cold War, the Western order once again managed the integration of a new wave of countries, this time from the formerly communist world. Three particular features of the Western order have been critical to this success and longevity.
> 
> First, unlike the imperial systems of the past, the Western order is built around rules and norms of nondiscrimination and market openness, creating conditions for rising states to advance their expanding economic and political goals within it. Across history, international orders have varied widely in terms of whether the material benefits that are generated accrue disproportionately to the leading state or are widely shared. In the Western system, the barriers to economic participation are low, and the potential benefits are high. China has already discovered the massive economic returns that are possible by operating within this open-market system.
> 
> Second is the coalition-based character of its leadership. Past orders have tended to be dominated by one state. The stakeholders of the current Western order include a coalition of powers arrayed around the United States -- an important distinction. These leading states, most of them advanced liberal democracies, do not always agree, but they are engaged in a continuous process of give-and-take over economics, politics, and security. Power transitions are typically seen as being played out between two countries, a rising state and a declining hegemon, and the order falls as soon as the power balance shifts. But in the current order, the larger aggregation of democratic capitalist states -- and the resulting accumulation of geopolitical power -- shifts the balance in the order's favor.
> 
> Third, the postwar Western order has an unusually dense, encompassing, and broadly endorsed system of rules and institutions. Whatever its shortcomings, it is more open and rule-based than any previous order. State sovereignty and the rule of law are not just norms enshrined in the United Nations Charter. They are part of the deep operating logic of the order. To be sure, these norms are evolving, and the United States itself has historically been ambivalent about binding itself to international law and institutions -- and at no time more so than today. But the overall system is dense with multilateral rules and institutions -- global and regional, economic, political, and security-related. These represent one of the great breakthroughs of the postwar era. They have laid the basis for unprecedented levels of cooperation and shared authority over the global system.
> 
> The incentives these features create for China to integrate into the liberal international order are reinforced by the changed nature of the international economic environment -- especially the new interdependence driven by technology. The most farsighted Chinese leaders understand that globalization has changed the game and that China accordingly needs strong, prosperous partners around the world. From the United States' perspective, a healthy Chinese economy is vital to the United States and the rest of the world. Technology and the global economic revolution have created a logic of economic relations that is different from the past -- making the political and institutional logic of the current order all the more powerful.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2 



> The Rise of China and the Future of the West
> *Can the Liberal System Survive?*
> 
> By G. John Ikenberry
> 
> From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008
> 
> ACCOMMODATING THE RISE
> 
> The most important benefit of these features today is that they give the Western order a remarkable capacity to accommodate rising powers. New entrants into the system have ways of gaining status and authority and opportunities to play a role in governing the order. The fact that the United States, China, and other great powers have nuclear weapons also limits the ability of a rising power to overturn the existing order. In the age of nuclear deterrence, great-power war is, thankfully, no longer a mechanism of historical change. War-driven change has been abolished as a historical process.
> 
> The Western order's strong framework of rules and institutions is already starting to facilitate Chinese integration. At first, China embraced certain rules and institutions for defensive purposes: protecting its sovereignty and economic interests while seeking to reassure other states of its peaceful intentions by getting involved in regional and global groupings. But as the scholar Marc Lanteigne argues, "What separates China from other states, and indeed previous global powers, is that not only is it 'growing up' within a milieu of international institutions far more developed than ever before, but more importantly, it is doing so while making active use of these institutions to promote the country's development of global power status." China, in short, is increasingly working within, rather than outside of, the Western order.
> 
> China is already a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a legacy of Roosevelt's determination to build the universal body around diverse great-power leadership. This gives China the same authority and advantages of "great-power exceptionalism" as the other permanent members. The existing global trading system is also valuable to China, and increasingly so. Chinese economic interests are quite congruent with the current global economic system -- a system that is open and loosely institutionalized and that China has enthusiastically embraced and thrived in. State power today is ultimately based on sustained economic growth, and China is well aware that no major state can modernize without integrating into the globalized capitalist system; if a country wants to be a world power, it has no choice but to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). The road to global power, in effect, runs through the Western order and its multilateral economic institutions.
> 
> China not only needs continued access to the global capitalist system; it also wants the protections that the system's rules and institutions provide. The WTO's multilateral trade principles and dispute-settlement mechanisms, for example, offer China tools to defend against the threats of discrimination and protectionism that rising economic powers often confront. The evolution of China's policy suggests that Chinese leaders recognize these advantages: as Beijing's growing commitment to economic liberalization has increased the foreign investment and trade China has enjoyed, so has Beijing increasingly embraced global trade rules. It is possible that as China comes to champion the WTO, the support of the more mature Western economies for the WTO will wane. But it is more likely that both the rising and the declining countries will find value in the quasi-legal mechanisms that allow conflicts to be settled or at least diffused.
> 
> The existing international economic institutions also offer opportunities for new powers to rise up through their hierarchies. In the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, governance is based on economic shares, which growing countries can translate into greater institutional voice. To be sure, the process of adjustment has been slow. The United States and Europe still dominate the IMF. Washington has a 17 percent voting share (down from 30 percent) -- a controlling amount, because 85 percent approval is needed for action -- and the European Union has a major say in the appointment of ten of the 24 members of the board. But there are growing pressures, notably the need for resources and the need to maintain relevance, that will likely persuade the Western states to admit China into the inner circle of these economic governance institutions. The IMF's existing shareholders, for example, see a bigger role for rising developing countries as necessary to renew the institution and get it through its current crisis of mission. At the IMF's meeting in Singapore in September 2006, they agreed on reforms that will give China, Mexico, South Korea, and Turkey a greater voice.
> 
> As China sheds its status as a developing country (and therefore as a client of these institutions), it will increasingly be able to act as a patron and stakeholder instead. Leadership in these organizations is not simply a reflection of economic size (the United States has retained its voting share in the IMF even as its economic weight has declined); nonetheless, incremental advancement within them will create important opportunities for China.
> 
> POWER SHIFT AND PEACEFUL CHANGE
> 
> Seen in this light, the rise of China need not lead to a volcanic struggle with the United States over global rules and leadership. The Western order has the potential to turn the coming power shift into a peaceful change on terms favorable to the United States. But that will only happen if the United States sets about strengthening the existing order. Today, with Washington preoccupied with terrorism and war in the Middle East, rebuilding Western rules and institutions might to some seem to be of only marginal relevance. Many Bush administration officials have been outright hostile to the multilateral, rule-based system that the United States has shaped and led. Such hostility is foolish and dangerous. China will become powerful: it is already on the rise, and the United States' most powerful strategic weapon is the ability to decide what sort of international order will be in place to receive it.
> 
> The United States must reinvest in the Western order, reinforcing the features of that order that encourage engagement, integration, and restraint. The more this order binds together capitalist democratic states in deeply rooted institutions; the more open, consensual, and rule-based it is; and the more widely spread its benefits, the more likely it will be that rising powers can and will secure their interests through integration and accommodation rather than through war. And if the Western system offers rules and institutions that benefit the full range of states -- rising and falling, weak and strong, emerging and mature -- its dominance as an international order is all but certain.
> 
> The first thing the United States must do is reestablish itself as the foremost supporter of the global system of governance that underpins the Western order. Doing so will first of all facilitate the kind of collective problem solving that makes all countries better off. At the same time, when other countries see the United States using its power to strengthen existing rules and institutions, that power is rendered more legitimate -- and U.S. authority is strengthened. Countries within the West become more inclined to work with, rather than resist, U.S. power, which reinforces the centrality and dominance of the West itself.
> 
> Renewing Western rules and institutions will require, among other things, updating the old bargains that underpinned key postwar security pacts. The strategic understanding behind both NATO and Washington's East Asian alliances is that the United States will work with its allies to provide security and bring them in on decisions over the use of force, and U.S. allies, in return, will operate within the U.S.-led Western order. Security cooperation in the West remains extensive today, but with the main security threats less obvious than they were during the Cold War, the purposes and responsibilities of these alliances are under dispute. Accordingly, the United States needs to reaffirm the political value of these alliances -- recognizing that they are part of a wider Western institutional architecture that allows states to do business with one another.
> 
> The United States should also renew its support for wide-ranging multilateral institutions. On the economic front, this would include building on the agreements and architecture of the WTO, including pursuing efforts to conclude the current Doha Round of trade talks, which seeks to extend market opportunities and trade liberalization to developing countries. The WTO is at a critical stage. The basic standard of nondiscrimination is at risk thanks to the proliferation of bilateral and regional trade agreements. Meanwhile, there are growing doubts over whether the WTO can in fact carry out trade liberalization, particularly in agriculture, that benefits developing countries. These issues may seem narrow, but the fundamental character of the liberal international order -- its commitment to universal rules of openness that spread gains widely -- is at stake. Similar doubts haunt a host of other multilateral agreements -- on global warming and nuclear nonproliferation, among others -- and they thus also demand renewed U.S. leadership.
> 
> The strategy here is not simply to ensure that the Western order is open and rule-based. It is also to make sure that the order does not fragment into an array of bilateral and "minilateral" arrangements, causing the United States to find itself tied to only a few key states in various regions. Under such a scenario, China would have an opportunity to build its own set of bilateral and "minilateral" pacts. As a result, the world would be broken into competing U.S. and Chinese spheres. The more security and economic relations are multilateral and all-encompassing, the more the global system retains its coherence.
> 
> In addition to maintaining the openness and durability of the order, the United States must redouble its efforts to integrate rising developing countries into key global institutions. Bringing emerging countries into the governance of the international order will give it new life. The United States and Europe must find room at the table not only for China but also for countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. A Goldman Sachs report on the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) noted that by 2050 these countries' economies could together be larger than those of the original G-6 countries (Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) combined. Each international institution presents its own challenges. The UN Security Council is perhaps the hardest to deal with, but its reform would also bring the greatest returns. Less formal bodies -- the so-called G-20 and various other intergovernmental networks -- can provide alternative avenues for voice and representation.
> 
> THE TRIUMPH OF THE LIBERAL ORDER
> 
> The key thing for U.S. leaders to remember is that it may be possible for China to overtake the United States alone, but it is much less likely that China will ever manage to overtake the Western order. In terms of economic weight, for example, China will surpass the United States as the largest state in the global system sometime around 2020. (Because of its population, China needs a level of productivity only one-fifth that of the United States to become the world's biggest economy.) But when the economic capacity of the Western system as a whole is considered, China's economic advances look much less significant; the Chinese economy will be much smaller than the combined economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development far into the future. This is even truer of military might: China cannot hope to come anywhere close to total OECD military expenditures anytime soon. The capitalist democratic world is a powerful constituency for the preservation -- and, indeed, extension -- of the existing international order. If China intends to rise up and challenge the existing order, it has a much more daunting task than simply confronting the United States.
> 
> The "unipolar moment" will eventually pass. U.S. dominance will eventually end. U.S. grand strategy, accordingly, should be driven by one key question: What kind of international order would the United States like to see in place when it is less powerful?
> 
> This might be called the neo-Rawlsian question of the current era. The political philosopher John Rawls argued that political institutions should be conceived behind a "veil of ignorance" -- that is, the architects should design institutions as if they do not know precisely where they will be within a socioeconomic system. The result would be a system that safeguards a person's interests regardless of whether he is rich or poor, weak or strong. The United States needs to take that approach to its leadership of the international order today. It must put in place institutions and fortify rules that will safeguard its interests regardless of where exactly in the hierarchy it is or how exactly power is distributed in 10, 50, or 100 years.
> 
> Fortunately, such an order is in place already. The task now is to make it so expansive and so institutionalized that China has no choice but to become a full-fledged member of it. The United States cannot thwart China's rise, but it can help ensure that China's power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century, rules and institutions that can protect the interests of all states in the more crowded world of the future. The United States' global position may be weakening, but the international system the United States leads can remain the dominant order of the twenty-first century.



The key point, for me, is the matter of the OPEN ORDER that Ikenberry suggests characterizes the US led West. I agree it is the dominant characteristic of what we call the “West” but I suggest that the degree of openness varies greatly: it is very high in Australia, Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand Norway, Singapore and a few others and very low in France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Spain and many others in the OECD. China, I believe is economically, socially and _culturally_ more attuned to the _*liberal*_ Open Order than it is to the _*illiberal*_ economic systems of many Western nations.

If we can manage our _collective_ policies well then we shall have China as a competitor in a market for trade and influence in a large global market for goods, services and ideas, not as an enemy.


----------



## Kirkhill

If it is an error to define the West as an entity is it equally wrong to define China as an entity?  I accept that it is a unitary state but it appears to be far from a "Nation-State".  Can the "Red Dynasty" manage a transformation from empire to federation?

The reason for the question is that I believe that part of the reason for the stability of the west that the author identifies is that the West is comprised of States that range in size from the 300,000,000 of the US to the 900 of the Vatican.  Despite the efforts of the EU the current world order makes a place for small, autonomous populations.  As I have stated before, I believe that the best the EU can ever hope to be, if it erases the current national borders, is an agglomeration of variously autonomous city-states with strong internal blood and culture ties.  Another form of tribalism.

The USSR dissolved.  Yugoslavia dissolved. Czechoslovakia dissolved.  France and Spain and Belgium and Britain are struggling against dissolution.  Many of the nationalist groups within those countries openly support and are supported by the EU (the principle of subsidiarity) because they perceive the EU as a way to reduce the power of Paris, Madrid, London and Brussels.  Small countries aspire to independence when they can afford it.  

In a poor Chinese empire there are contradictory tendencies for communities to compete for scraps or to cooperate to take on the outside.  (This is not peculiar to the Chinese.  It is universal.)  In a rich Chinese empire will all regions equally "float with the rising tide" of prosperity. (They don't appear to be doing so now.  In Canada we struggle with the same problem ourself, despite our liberal, western traditions).

If we accept the premise of the article that China need not be an enemy even if it is a competitor/partner is it still a safe bet that Beijing will be China in 50 years time?  Can Beijing continue to maintain its position of speaking for all 1,000,000,000 inhabitants it represents internationally currently?  Or will Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong continue to push for more autonomy as our on, more profitable, Canadian provinces do?

Couple this with China's struggle with the ongoing dessication that began 9000 years ago and really started to bite in the hills 4-5000 years ago, concurrently with the rise of the river civilizations.  It seems to me that the riverine Shang/Zhou/Qin/Han dynasties of Henan pushed down river with a successful survival strategy until they reached the sea.  They eventually reached the carrying capacity of the deltas, carrying capacity which shrinks with dessication, and were forced to push up into the southern hills (which coincidentally, like Taiwan, have become wetter as the north became drier).  Consequently, from where I sit, it appears to me as if the Han Chinese still have a lot of "unassimilated" members of their empire living within their borders.  What are the real limits for an autonomous Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Tibet, "Western Autonomous Region" ....Taiwan?.

If China can manage the transition from a political empire of subjects to a commercial empire of partners then I think that Ikenberry has a point.  But if China chooses to pursue a traditional military/political empire as a counter to the internal centrifugal forces does't it risk going the way of the Soviet Union with all the attendant dangers that presents?

It is my personal belief that our western dynasts never went away.  They just figured out how to maintain their lifestyles without the personal expense of maintaining standing armies.  The cities of the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stewarts and Oldenburgs, and the dynastic Houses they carried, are as prosperous as ever. If not moreso.


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## Greymatters

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> If China can manage the transition from a political empire of subjects to a commercial empire of partners then I think that Ikenberry has a point.  But if China chooses to pursue a traditional military/political empire as a counter to the internal centrifugal forces does't it risk going the way of the Soviet Union with all the attendant dangers that presents?



Bear in mind, the USSR existed for about 75 years (1917-1992) before dissolving into its current independent (mostly) components.  The old United Kingdom disintegrated into seperate nations after over a hundred years of being the dominant world player, albight willingly (or unwillngly, or half-heartedly, depending on whose hostory you read).  The US faced its challenge of unity with its civil war after about 90 years of existance, but survived the event.  Canada faced its own challenge to unity after a hundred years.  The current political regime in China has only been in place since 1949 (barely fifty years) so is still a 'young' country and has yet to face the spector of disintegration that faces every large nation after long periods of time...


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## Edward Campbell

Greymatters said:
			
		

> ...
> The current political regime in China has only been in place since 1949 (barely fifty years) so is still a 'young' country and has yet to face the spector of disintegration that faces every large nation after long periods of time...



While the current _dynasty_ is young (I say it started in 1980 when Deng Xiaoping took power - I think Sun and Mao represented an interregnum) the Chinese people's sense of their own national identity - within their current _core_ territorial bounds* - is very old. If you want to be conservative it goes back to only the Tang dynasty (1,400 year ago); I suggest it (China's own sense of itself as a nation) goes back 2,000 years. 

The Chinese have endured a wide range of dynasties, foreign and domestic - they accept them all so long as they appear to hold the _mandate of heaven_ which _might_ be *very loosely* translated as the _consent of the governed_. There is no reason to think that the current _Red Dynasty_ or, as I prefer _*Deng* Dynasty_, will not last as long as, say, the the Sui or the Yuan dynasties (37 and 97 years respectively) - it has already outlasted the Qin.

I don't think it is _fair_ or wise to consider China as anything like a conventional, Western, empire. I agree that the vast _Autonous Regions_ are, essentially, colonies, but the Chinese aim to turn them into something akin to Australia and Canada - replacing or, at least, overwhelming the indigenous _minorities_ with _right thinking_ Han Chinese. They just do not plan to make them really _autonous_. In fact they want to make then _organic_ provinces - Chinese in all respects. This is the work of generations, even an epoch, but the Chinese are not afraid of long-term planning.


----------

* That's one of the reasons Tibet and Xinjiang are _Autonomous Regions_ - they are not part of the ancient _core_ of China.


----------



## appletreecdn

Greymatters said:
			
		

> Bear in mind, the USSR existed for about 75 years (1917-1992) before dissolving into its current independent (mostly) components.  The old United Kingdom disintegrated into seperate nations after over a hundred years of being the dominant world player, albight willingly (or unwillngly, or half-heartedly, depending on whose hostory you read).  The US faced its challenge of unity with its civil war after about 90 years of existance, but survived the event.  Canada faced its own challenge to unity after a hundred years.  The current political regime in China has only been in place since 1949 (barely fifty years) so is still a 'young' country and has yet to face the spector of disintegration that faces every large nation after long periods of time...



Through out the entire recorded history of China the trend has cycled between unity and disintegration.  It seems after a certain period of cohesion a shuffle that is destained to produce anarchy while planting future seeds of cohesion would occur and then the cycle goes on.  

With today's PRC, some observers have claimed that even though allowing the 'motherland' to break apart is considered the eternal sin on CCP's psyche, people shouldn't be suprised that the CCP would trade its own survival with the disintegration of the current territoty and it has happend in the past - Mongolia, Tang Nu Wu Liang Hai, Jiang Xin Pao, to name a few.


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## Kirkhill

China 50 years in 20091999
China 75 years in 2033 (Russia) 2024
China 90 years in 2039 (US) 
China 100 years in 2049 (Canada)
China +100 years after 2049 (UK) (actually 1759-1944 would be a fair assessment - Quebec/Quiberon/Pondicherry to Bretton Woods or about 200 years which would delay China's unity crisis to 2149 or thereabouts)

Ikenberry's planning horizon is the 21st Century (pre 2100).  Most speculative discussions centre around 2050.


In point of fact though All the countries you mentioned only enjoyed their time in the sun AFTER they faced their unity crises.  Only after they had come to terms internally could they push externally and then, as noted only until the next unity crisis showed up. At most you are looking at maintaining a particular status over one to three lifetimes.  Arthur Herman points out that the institution of the Admiralty was defined from the time of Samuel Pepys to Horatio Nelson (1660-1805 = 145 years) by the overlapping lives of 3 men. Junior, faceless cogs in the wheel right enough but physical connections over 6 generations of sailors.  Edit: Who are the equivalents in the CCP?  Not the tall poppies but the roots and stems.

There is a body of literature that looks at the American Revolution as a Second Anglo Civil War (1640 being the first with 1860 being the third - 1640, 1776,1860) that was occasioned by the prosperity that the Yankees enjoyed. They had their backers in Britain that were just as happy to be relieved of the local defence burden as long as they could continue to invest in the country.  (Britain is still the 3rd largest investor in the US after Japan and China, 592,388 and 297 BUSD respectively and appears to be significantly increasing its holdings now that its WW1 and 2 debts are finally paid off - up from 61 BUSD in Oct of 2006)

*Thanks to The Skeptical Optimist for the US Treasury link -makes me wonder if the Bank of England hasn't reverted to type.  In the 18th century they paid Germans to fight the French and created an empire. In the 20th century they did the fighting themselves and lost an empire.  Now they seem to be paying the Americans to do the fighting with just enough 18th century type input to not be seen as shirkers.

Sorry for the usual anglo-centric ramble but the point is this - some folks in Europe/The West - have managed to figure out how to stay on top of the game regardless of the military/political situation.  That engenders a form of stability that the rest of us all benefit from - its good to have the Royal Warrant to supply the Royal Household with Kiwi shoe polish,  there's money to be made there.  And if the Grimaldis are wearing Prada this year Prada is probably going to have a good year.  

So while I take Edward's and Ikenberry's point about the US and the west accomodating China (actually Ikenberry seems to believe that it is only the US that needs to do the accomodating/leading - a point of contention) my contention is that China (sorry the Red Dynasty of Beijing) has to make a lot more accomodations if it is to fully join the liberalized western system of wealth generation.



Edited to correct some faulty maths.


----------



## Greymatters

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Chinese have endured a wide range of dynasties, foreign and domestic - they accept them all so long as they appear to hold the _mandate of heaven_ which _might_ be *very loosely* translated as the _consent of the governed_. There is no reason to think that the current _Red Dynasty_ or, as I prefer _*Deng* Dynasty_, will not last as long as, say, the the Sui or the Yuan dynasties (37 and 97 years respectively) - it has already outlasted the Qin.



I agree this represents their cultural and ethnic identity, but I was thinking more of their current political identity, as you pointed out.  

Overall, you and Kirkhill both present good points.  It challenges and changes some of the viewpoints I have on the nation, and I look forward to reading more of it...


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## tomahawk6

I have been impressed by the posts in this thread. Alot of interesting viewpoints. The Russians tried to compete with the US with their state run economy and ended up collapsing because it couldnt compete with the US economy. The Chinese on the other hand still has a state run economy with a form of capitalism. Like Russia China has a huge underclass that so far has been left out of the economic boom. This is the basic weakness of the two major competitors of the US. Unless they can improve the standard of living of most of their population their economic house is built on sand.

The US economy on the otherhand faces a crisis from within, which is the only way for the US to lose its economic power. The crisis comes from the corporation hating socialists within both major parties. If they are able to come to power and implement their agenda then we will see the US economy will see negative growth. This is a worst case scenario and would probably see a reversal through the ballot box but its quite possible. As a major world consumer I think this would push the global economy into depression. I guess thats the problem with electing politicians who have no clue about economics.


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## TCBF

Perhaps a few of those 'corporation hating socialists' should have screamed a little louder about the events which led to the current sub-prime crisis.   Right now, bankers the world over are looking at their American counterparts and screaming "What the f_uck were you thinking?" over and over again.  An act of economic sabotage has taken place and the perpetrators have received hundreds of millions in bonuses and stock options, and now want the feds to bail them out.

Odds are, the ranks of 'corporation hating socialists' will increase after this, and that IS a bad thing.  But a little blood flowing down Wall Street might do some good as well.


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## Kirkhill

> But a little blood flowing down Wall Street might do some good as well.



I trust you are indulging in hyperbole.  THAT is the last thing I would wish to see.  Capital seeks safety. It can accomodate a bit of incompetence from time to time.  It can even accomodate the occasional revolution.  No country survives the flight of capital though.

And the reason the foreign bankers are squawking is that they are the ones that bank-rolled the sub-prime loans.....


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## tomahawk6

The sub prime issue only affects 6% of homeowners and is a blip on the radar.


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## TCBF

- Point is the sub-prime crisis and the current ABCP (Asset Backed Commercial Paper) are both self-inflicted blips.  This is not so much a case of people loosing faith in a currency as loosing faith in the people entrusted to manage that currency and look out for the investors.  Who was looking out for the investors as the robber-barons took their profits and laughed at what they knew was coming? 

- If the Chinese can develop an investment system structured over the next thirty years so that their regulators have teeth, investors may have more confidence in their system rather than the one stalling on the edge of recession in New York.

- I have no doubt the US can make it work, after all, they recently crossed the line in the sand most thought existed regarding corporate law: they actually found a lawyer guilty the same time they found Conrad Black guilty.  Up until then, the CEO et al normally took the heat (if any) while their accessory-to-the-crime lawyers walked.  No more.


----------



## Cloud Cover

- Conrad Black was a lawyer;
- It is true that the US Sarbanes Oxley act has special provisions of accountability for lawyers - these were required in order to get around the principle of solicitor or attorney client privilege- which many dirty, low down, good for nothing clients such as CEO's attempted to hide behind in the USA, and continue to hide behind and recieve generous protection from the courts in Canada.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Many thanks for an enlightening summary CougarDaddy.
> 
> Digestion time.



Kirkhill,

Did my recent posts on the PLA and CCP leadership's past relations at least partially answer your question?  I assume you would have read or gotten most of the gist of it by now.




> What are the real limits for an autonomous Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Tibet, "Western Autonomous Region" ....Taiwan?.



Also, Kirkhill, Guangzhou is a not province but merely a city within Guangdong province, although I believe it deserves the same level of provincial status that Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin have gotten, since they are all megatropolis cities. In fact all those SEZs- Special Economic Zones- such as Zhuhai, Shenzhen and Xiamen, as well as non-SEZ industrial cities like Wuhan all deserve some level of special megatropolis provincial status.

In 2047, when Hong Kong's period as merely a "Special Administrative Region" with all the pre-handover democratic rights and freedoms instituted during British rule, is supposed to expire, I think Hong Kong might qualify as yet another megatropolis with provincial status, provided the PRC govt. still exists that far into the future.



> With today's PRC, some observers have claimed that even though allowing the 'motherland' to break apart is considered the eternal sin on CCP's psyche, people shouldn't be suprised that the CCP would trade its own survival with the disintegration of the current territoty and it has happend in the past - Mongolia, Tang Nu Wu Liang Hai, Jiang Xin Pao, to name a few.



Appletree,

That "sin" of letting the "motherland" disintegrate is a sin of many past dynasties as well. The _Taiping_ Rebellion of the mid-1800s comes to mind, although the Manchus/_Man Zu_/ Qing Dynasty eventually stamped it out with their banner armies; if I can recall correctly, these Qing banner armies even relied upon some Western mercenaries to help quash the rebellion.

Do you remember the story of *Koxinga/Zhèng Chénggōng *(鄭成功)? The story of that half-Japanese, half-Chinese sea pirate who eventually ended up as the Ming Dynasty's last warlord admiral? The one who conquered and expelled the Dutch colony on Taiwan/Formosa and reclaimed it in the name of the Ming? The one who held out in the island for many years while the mainland fell and the Ming Dynasty fell to the Manchu conquest of the mid-1600s? His story is quite interesting; the fact that his forces expelled the Dutch presence in 1662 is probably the only major instance in Chinese history, other than in certain battles in the Korean War (I don't think there many Chinese victories of much note in the Opium War or the Boxer Rebellion), when a Chinese force defeated a Western force. However, Koxinga's stronghold was later stamped out by a Qing invasion force that took Formosa in 1683; will history repeat itself with the last ROC holdout being quashed by the PRC for simply changing the name of the de-facto island nation?


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarDaddy:

Your response was most helpful, as is your clarification on the Province/City/SEZ/SAR question.  That latter though raises a point that I think is particularly germain to the discussion.

It is my belief that Cities are real and Countries/Provinces/States are abstractions.  

Cities are outgrowths of the nuclear family.  They originate when, in microbiological terms, a Colony Forming Unit (CFU=a number of organisms sufficiently large to establish a viable colony that can grow on a Petri Dish to the point it can be clearly seen by the naked eye) lands by volition or accident on a chunk of terrain where it can prosper and reproduce.  Once established, like black mold, it spreads like billy-be-damned and is virtually impossible to eliminate.  (Carthago delenda est IIRC does not mean Carthage is deleted but Carthage should be deleted - despite "salting the earth" Carthage was still competing with Rome when Rome fell and Augustine and Pelagius were fighting it out about 410 AD, 600 years after the salting).  

The original CFU and its descendants create an environment of walls and holes that is every bit as real as mountains and rivers.  The City becomes an artifact that even if the inhabitants did leave would remain for a pretty long time.

If left undisturbed the original CFU establishes an inbred monoculture that likely either dies from eating itself out of house and home or else by fouling the area so completely it has to move.

Fortunately it is seldom left undisturbed.  Other cultures wash over it and sex miscegenation occurs.

9 months later a hybrid is born.

Who lays claim to the hybrid depends on who gets to write the tale.

Interestingly when the Vikings settled France they ended up speaking French and becoming Normans.  When they arrived in England they ended up ruling but speaking English.  When the Franco-Viking Normans showed up in England they too ended up speaking English, all the while proclaiming the superiority of their mongrel upbringing.  I believe something similar can be seen in the territory of China with the Manchu's coming in from the hills but learning to speak Han in order to rule (and bringing the occasional blue-eyed, red-headed gene from the steppes along with them).

With that in mind I find it interesting to look at political geography not from the standpoint of borders, which vary from year to year, but from the standpoint of the cities, towns, villages and hamlets.  That is where the culture is defined and definable. It is where people live, communicate, compromise and have sex.  It is where they eat, work and defecate.    The boundaries they claim may appeal to their vanity but ultimately they only control the space they live in.  Everything else is negotiable.

From that Beijing and Guangzhou have very different starting points as colonies and have been exposed to very different influences.  They exist in very different envirionments and are subject to different opportunities and threats.  What gives us to assume that Beijing's appreciation of what is best for Guangzhou will continue to be seen by the people of Guangzhou as being in their continued best interest?  Does there come a time when Guangzhou, or any of the other SEZs/SARs become sufficiently wealthy in their own right (or develop the support of a strong external patron to counter Beijing) that they can contemplate ignoring directives from the centre?


----------



## Kirkhill

Some more grist for the mill

China by language and dialect (maps)

Map 1 - Chinese and Non Chinese language areas
Map 2 - Mandarin Chinese and Southern Chinese language areas
Map 3 - Mandarin Chinese and Chinese dialect areas
Map 4 - Population density and distribution of linguistic groups in China

Mandarin seems to be the language/dialect of the Huang He or Yellow River valley and delta.  A variant Mandarin form is found in the contiguous Yangtze Delta.  The further you move into the southern hills you go the more variants you find until by the time you reach the southern border you are into separate languages entirely.  In the north the language difference is starker with Beijing being the eastern portal connecting Mandarin with Mongolian.

If that were Britain I would be looking at Devonshire and Newcastle speaking mutually unintelligible forms of English, the Channel Islands speaking French and the North of Scotland speaking Gaelic or Norwegian.....not far off the mark.  And despite 300 years of unification Huddersfield and Plymouth might as well be on different planets.  There is a move to break England into seven modern districts that would have been recognizable to King Alfred the Great 1200 years ago.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill,

Perhaps India would make a better comparison to China regarding the diversity of the people within a single nation. You have Hindu speakers forming the majority- correct me if I'm wrong, as well as regional ethnic differences including Kashmiris and Sikh and Tamil(yes I think there are Tamils on mainland India aside from those in Sri Lanka), etc. I'll defer to someone more informed about Indian cultures and minority groups to elaborate.

As for Chinese languages and dialects, you have Mandarin (which is actually a development/variation of the Beijing dialect/_Bei Jing Hua_); the way you can tell a Beijinger from the rest of Chinese is when they say and slur an "r" any Mandarin word that ends in a vowel.

For example:

A regular Mandarin speaker would say: "Hao, Hao de" (Good, good) but a Beijinger would say "Hao Hao'r de" to say the same thing.

Mandarin is a tonal language  and was developed through the centuries by the scholar-official class as a means by which the dynastic center/capital could communicate with the rest of the regions of the empire/Middle Kingdom. Mandarin has four tones  for every word like "hao"- (pronounced "how"), and pronouncing the word with a different tone will change the word's meaning entirely. 

For example, "Hao" in 3rd tone means "good" while "Hao" in 4th tone means a number/figure in the ordinal sense- #1, #2, #3= yi hao, er hao, san hao, etc.

Shanghainese has more than 5 tones, while Cantonese has as many as six or seven, if I can recall correctly. Of course, the locals will always switch to their provincial/native/minority dialect when trying to be deceiving or want to relate something to each other in confidence, when a foreigner (lao wai) or even a Chinese outsider from another province is in hearing distance. 

While spoken languages all differ in varying ways, just about all the dialects spoken by all Han groups- such as Cantonese- will almost certainly have a WRITTEN equivalent that is the same and readable even by Mandarin speakers. Everyone in mainland China uses *Simplified* Chinese (jiǎntǐzì, 简体字)for their writing, which was developed when the PRC came into power not only to standardize the writing system on the mainland, but also as a means by which the CCP could further isolate Taiwan, who still use the *Traditional* Chinese (fántǐzì, 繁体字) writing.   Furthermore, people in Hong Kong- though they speak Cantonese- use Traditional characters for their writing, as does every overseas Chinese person living in any of the many Chinatowns scattered across the world; Singaporeans of Chinese descent use Traditional Chinese as well.  

As their names suggests, the Simplified writing system uses less strokes and is quicker to write, while Traditional characters are closer in stroke number to Classical Chinese characters. 

For example:

the word China or Zhong(1st tone) Guo (2nd tone) would be written as: 

中国 in Simplified Chinese


中國 in Traditional Chinese

Soldier= zhan (4th), bing (1st)   战士 in Simp. 
                                             戰士 in Trad.  

Some characters will obviously be the same in both systems, while the more complex characters will obviously be reduced to one or even two radicals or parts of the original Traditional character if they are converted to Simplified.
                                          
If reunification between Taiwan and the mainland is INEVITABLE though, as Campbell suggests, they will have to give up one of these systems and institute the other; it would be a very costly undertaking if Traditional Mandarin were to be reimposed on all forms of media/medium throughout the mainland if the ROC govt. ever came back to liberate the mainland (fat chance-Chiang Kai-Shek gave up that dream just before he died, though his body is preserved/interred in Taiwan awaiting burial on the mainland), although I have heard from local students while I was studying in Beijing that mainlanders are also taught the Traditional as well- probably so they can read older texts like those on surviving Buddhist or Taoist temple inscriptions. However, everything OFFICIAL is written in Simplified in the mainland though. Thus, what writing system Taiwan will use after reunification with China will be another issue they will have to deal with.

 Interestingly, anyone who studied both Mandarin and other East Asian languages such as Korean or Japanese will notice that the latter two languages also use borrowed Chinese characters for some of their older, more traditional words; this demonstrates the cultural influence China has had on its neighbours through the centuries. 

For example:   中国 - pronounced "Zhong (1st) Guo (2nd)" in Mandarin will be called 
                                                  "Chu Goku" in Japanese. (the 2nd "u" is silent here)

Borrowed Chinese characters used in the Japanese language are called "Kanji" (which itself is pronounced "Han Zi" in spoken Mandarin if you read the same characters for Kanji-  漢字 = Hanzi/Kanji).

I'd also like to close this post with a little Mandarin wordplay joke which attests to why Chinese people REALLY DISTRUST politicians.

As you know, Pres. Chen Sui Bian is the President of the ROC/Taiwan, while Mayor Ma Ying Jiu was the mayor of Taipei the last time I checked.  The joke is that if you put the two men together into one person, you would get a liar.

The last character in Chen's name- "Bian"- when combined with the first character in Ma's name-"Ma"- are themselves individual radicals/parts that, when combined into one character, literally embodies the Mandarin verb for lying, and when modified with the noun particle "zi", then becomes the word for LIAR= PIAN ZI= 骗子.

 ;D


----------



## Kirkhill

Very Punny these Chinese.  Where's the "groaner" smiley when you need it?

Your point about India is well taken CougarDaddy.  It too is an Empire.  The difference though is that it has always been a "community of communities" in the Canadian idiom, especially under the British.  They were just as happy to deal with a local Nawab or Prince instead of having to take on the expense of a local District Commissioner and his staff.    Where Mao opted for centralization in order to impose the one True solution on his "Warlords"  India opted for the Westminster model of decentralized interests centrally recognized.  In Britain we call our Warlords Barons, Earls, Dukes, Counts, Marquesses etc and gave them a guaranteed seat in Parliament for the best part of a thousand years while democracy developed.  Now we call them General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress or some such.  In Canada we call them Premier.


----------



## tomahawk6

Interesting article by strategypage today about the hurdles China faces if they tried to invade Taiwan. Many of these points have been made in this thread.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/20080105.aspx

China Rues The Waves

January 5, 2008: China's big problem with invading Taiwan is not just whether or not they could defeat the defending forces. The big problem is American control of the world's oceans. It's been that way for over sixty years, and many people just take it for granted. Chinese military planners see that control, which they can't break, as a major obstacle to their success in grabbing Taiwan. Like Japan, in 1941, China has to import (a third of) its oil. That will increase to 50 percent in a few years. America can instantly turn off that supply. The U.S. did that to Japan in 1941, and then Japan went to war. But China would find that supply cut after they went to war.

For the last five years, China has been building a national fuel reserve. These oil tanks are still being filled. In a year or two, they will have 14 million tons (China imports that much every five weeks). That's to keep the civilian economy and  military operations going for 30 days, but that would be on the assumption that use of personal vehicles would be restricted, and even the commercial sector would have to get by on less. China wants to expand that reserve to 75 days, but that would take 5-10 years.

For an attack on Taiwan, the military would need about 300,000 tons of fuel a day. Most of that would be burned by aircraft and ships. Normally, the Chinese military uses about 3,000 tons a day. This is increasing as aircraft fly more often to train pilots up to Taiwanese standards, and warships spend more time at sea so they can handle a naval assault on Taiwan.

A Chinese invasion would have to succeed fairly quickly. Running out of oil is only one of the considerations. China can produce about a million tons a day. The Taiwanese would have a hard time attacking China's oil fields (which are largely deep in the interior), but putting some smart bombs on pipeline pumping stations near the coast (where most of the oil is consumed) would severely diminish access to that oil for a while.

In other words, cutting off oil supplies for the military is a problem, but not THE problem. Keeping the economy going is the major consideration. The current Chinese government, which is basically the unelected leadership  of the Chinese Communist Party, survives only as long as the economy flourishes. Without that ten million tons of oil imports every month, or the ability to export goods, the economy collapses, and along with that so does support for the Communist Party.

It's all about the economy, control of Taiwan is only a political sideshow.


----------



## CougarKing

> They are obviously slowly increasing their amphibious capabilities so they can land more than the single-500 man strong PLA Marine brigade they have on their obvious target: any port on the Taiwan coast where commandeered Ro-Ro ships can unload more of their armor.   Or is this possibility just an unlikely assumption on my part?
> 
> One shouldn't ignore the PLA's 3-division strong 15th Airborne Corps based in Wuhan either in a Taiwan invasion scenario. However, I'll leave it to the professionals here to comment on whether they think any such airborne landing would still be feasible given the types of defenses Taiwan has; whether Taiwan's vaunted F16s or its SAM batteries on its warships will affect such an airborne drop is not in my lane to say.



Gentlemen, 

Since we've come back to the topic of a PLA invasion of Taiwan, I was wondering if the above observations of mine seem possible/feasible from the point of view of professionals? Greymatters' point about the importance of EW to the ROC/ _Guo Min Jun_/Taiwan forces who have to defend against such an invasion is well taken.

Also, in the event of such an invasion, do you think that the ROC forces stationing some of its crack ground units on the islands of Kinmen (pronounced "Jin-men Dao" or "Jinmen" Island), Quemoy and Matsu, which are ROC-held islands just a few kilometers offshore from the mainland that have been held since 1949 (purportedly Chiang-Kai Shek's stepping stone to his imagined liberation of the mainland before he died) would make a difference in delaying the PLA at all?


----------



## tomahawk6

The key is how much damage does the PRC want to inflict on the island ? They have to gain both air and sea control before launching the invasion.Also an invasion is not easy to conceal. If the PRC didnt care about damage they could rain missiles on military targets throughout the island. If the runways are closed there goes their air superiority problem. Getting the subs will be critical but doable if you dont mind losing some frigates/DDG's. Once you have control over the sea and air the invasion can commence and then you will see airborne forces. If I were Taiwan I would launch a pre-emptive strike on the naval staging areas.Take out the amphibious ships and no invasion.


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## Edward Campbell

In my view there is no _*strategic* rationale_ for China to attack Taiwan; It will, in due course, fall into China's lap of its own accord. Equally, there is no reason for Taiwan to provoke a Chinese attack by declaring independence – it gains nothing but an inevitable military defeat because the USA will not come to its aid, certainly not with ships or troops, probably not even with materiel.

Apologies for being repetative but I think you're debating someone's pipe dreams.


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## tomahawk6

The odds are just as good that the PRC will fall apart.


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## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The odds are just as good that the PRC will fall apart.



I disagree.

Even during bloody invasions and civil wars China has not, for the past 1,500 years or so, "fallen apart."  Even in periods of great disunity - e.g. between dynasties - China remains China in the minds of the Chinese people. Even during the last civil war, 1927-1950, there was always a cohesive China. During the 1919-1927 era there were two (sometimes more) _national_ governments in China - all at war with the others but China still existed, just as America existed from 1861-1865.

The current dynasty may, indeed, fail and fall and if that happens there will, certainly, be another period of trouble and strife but it is highly unlikely that the Chinese, themselves, or the world, will see anything but a cohesive China - even if it has a wholly ineffective central government and even if provinces and regions act as quasi-independent states.

I think you're letting hope prevail over experience.



Edit: typo - "... just as America ..."


----------



## tomahawk6

I respect your opinion immensely,however I have found through the years that nothing is absolute and anything is possible. China may prove to be ungovernable without some form of dictatorship or it may break up into smaller pieces.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> In my view there is no _*strategic* rationale_ for China to attack Taiwan; It will, in due course, fall into China's lap of its own accord. Equally, there is no reason for Taiwan to provoke a Chinese attack by declaring independence – it gains nothing but an inevitable military defeat because the USA will not come to its aid, certainly not with ships or troops, probably not even with materiel.
> 
> Apologies for being repetative but I think you're debating someone's pipe dreams.



Campbell,

You make a point there about it not being in the USA's interest to come to Taiwan's aid, though you forgot about the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). While it does not require the United States to necessarily to any action against the PRC in the event of a Taiwan invasion, it still...



> requires the United States "to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character", and "to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan."



http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive_Index/Taiwan_Relations_Act.html

And the United States has just done that so far, with the sales of new equipment to Taiwan such as F16s in the 1990s and those ex-USN _Kidd_ class destroyers. While the Nanjing and Guangdong Military Regions' forces of the PLA still outnumber the total paper strength of the ROC/_Guo Min Jun_ forces, I doubt that such an invasion will happen in the next decade or so, partially because the superior quality of the ROC forces' equipment, though their training is another matter since they haven't seen action since the 1950s, save for a few air-to-air skirmishes over the Taiwan Strait and the artillery bombardments of Kinmen, Quemoy and Matsu up until the 60s and 70s. However, if the PRC govt. is still in power a few decades from now and the Taiwan question is STILL an issue that far into the future, who knows what kind of capabilities a the PLA will have then? 

My point is that I agree with you that it's against the PRC/CCP's interest to make a risky invasion of Taiwan with the PLA's limited amphibious capabilities FOR NOW, but if the Deng/CCP dynasty is going to last, it has to demonstrate that it is willing to crackdown on dissent and stretch its muscles from time to time, as other ascendant world powers have done in the past. Maintaining the economy and internal political unity/stability are and will probably always will be the PRC's foremost interests, but from how I see it, the latter interest will be theatened if Taiwan's _benshengren_ continue on their course to outright independence and any inaction by the CCP if the Taiwanese achieve that will be interpreted as a sign that the regime is weak and only concerned for the economy, which may signal to other Chinese minorities- Tibetans/Xi Zhang Ren, Xinjiang people/Hui Ren/Uighurs- that the time for self-determination is ripe, though past such resistance has been easily been put down. 



> I respect your opinion immensely,however I have found through the years that nothing is absolute and anything is possible. China may prove to be ungovernable without some form of dictatorship or it may break up into smaller pieces.



Furthermore, Campbell, while I have disagreed with T6 before because I pointed out unifying centrality of mainstream Chinese culture, which you reiterated just now by saying...



> Even in periods of great disunity - e.g. between dynasties - China remains China in the minds of the Chinese people. Even during the last civil war, 1927-1950, there was always a cohesive China.



...I must however disagree with you now that I think of how the Soviet Union and the Yugolsav Federation broke up; all those former satellite republics within the USSR, such as Kazakhstan, still sought self-determination though all spoke Russian and had been influenced by the Russians since the rule of the Czars, I assume. Tito's Yugoslavia stressed unity through diversity and any outright nationalism by the Croats, Albanians, Slovenians, Bosnians and even the Serbs would have been quashed; Yugoslavia did not last more than a decade after Tito died, resulting in the mess that plunged that region of the Balkans into ethnic conflict in the 1990s, which included the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts. 

I agree that the notion of one China is so ingrained into the minds of all Chinese on a level that is deeper than Russian culture had appeal or influence among Kazakhs or Ukrainians and deeper than Yugoslavia had on Croatians and Bosnians, even in those periods of disunity such as the Three Kingdoms' period and the 1945-49 Continuation Civil War, BUT from how I see it, that notion is losing appeal and strength among Taiwan's _benshengren_ to the point that eventually, they may become the first minority within the greater China _proper_ sphere that will seperate from that mainstream Han Chinese culture. The notion of Hong Kong becoming the first sovereign city-state on the mainland- which may also absorb neighboring Macao partially because of their proximity and commonality of Cantonese culture- may also be possible if Taiwan achieves independence and encourages the people there to follow the Taiwan and Singapore examples.

I do not see any other regions of China seperating though; the other Han minorities such as the Hakka, Fukienese and the Shanghainese have not experienced long periods of Western colonial rule, as those in Hong Kong have, or Japanese colonial rule, as the Taiwanese, for them to have developed any sense of regional identity seperate from mainstream Chinese culture yet. It may be possible for Tibet (called _Xi Zhang_ province in Mandarin, not to be confused with _Xin Jiang_ province), in spite of the large numbers of Han settlers the PRC has encouraged to settle in Tibet and the amount of development these settlers have brought with them that the local Tibetans may not see any economic benefit in self-determination. 

Going back to the TRA, the United States also continues to fulfill other provisions of the TRA by maintaining "quasi-diplomatic relations" with the ROC/Taiwan in spite of its "One-China Policy"; the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) is a quasi-embassy in Taiwan which employs US State Dept. personnel and handles all consular/trade relations between the two nations such as visa applications. The AIT is also probably the only US Embassy in the whole world (it's bigger than a mere consulate and it's definitely an embassy in spite of what China thinks) not guarded by USMC sentries, since having Marines there would make the AIT more than "quasi-official" to the chagrin/annoyance of China.  ;D


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## tomahawk6

Tibet would go in a NY minute - not that Tibet is crucial to the future of China.


----------



## Kirkhill

I disagree on Tibet not being critical to China.  I think it is highly important to China.  I alluded to the dessication of China over the last 9000 years or so.  

During the Holocene Optimum of 6000 years ago China actually became very humid up to the Northwest.  China benefited from the Global Warming of the Period (perversely, if the Global Warming Theory is true, that means that China has a vested interest in burning as much coal as possible  ;D )

http://www.episodes.org/backissues/213/152-158%20Zheng.pdf

Since that time the Yellow River valley has been drying out.  By about 2-3000 years ago the Tarim Basin seems to have dried out and changed from steppes to desert.

China doesn't have any ancient lakes that predate the ice ages.  The closest ones are Baikal, Balkash and Issykul in Siberia and the Stans.  All the water that comes down the rivers seems to be remnants of the last ice age.    Tibet holds those last remnants in a field of glacial lakes.  If you look at China on Google Earth and take a look at the Tibet region you will see what I mean.

I wonder if China needs Tibet to secure its water supply.

Even that, in geological and possibly Chinese time scales might only be a stop gap measure.  If the primary water source is glacial water that has been steadily disappearing over the last 20,000 to 5,000 years then China may have to weight for the next cold snap to rebuild the ice reservoirs in the Himalayas AND THEN wait for it to warm up again long enough to start melting that ice.  Energy intensive desalination is probably not an option given that China is already struggling with finding energy to meet its other needs.

All of this traditionally I would suggest, would put outward pressure on the Chinese population causing it to migrate to find water by heading south to the rain forests, up river to whatever water remains, possibly North to the Steppes and also, possibly, across the seas.

A bit of a tangent here:

Genetically I find it interesting to note from McDonald's Haplogroup maps  that the males of the nation seem to be much more homogeneous in origin (as represented by the dominance of Blue on the Y Map) than the females.  The females seem to be much more mixed as seen in the MTDNA maps.  In the rest of the world the same pattern can be seen (reds in NW Europe - violets in the Americas).  This is often construed as the results of a dominant male culture slaughtering the competition while being "equal opportunity employers" when it comes to procreating with the local ladies.  

The Male grouping of the Han seems to have much in common with the coastal nations and the south.  The polyglot female line seems to be fairly consistent in the interior in terms of being uniform in its diversity (they all share a similar array of colours in a similar pattern).  The male group also seems to bisect a gene pool that connects Tibet with Japan suggesting to me a later incursion.  Taiwan also exhibits its own highly unique aboriginal gene pool.

My question then becomes: which China are we talking about?  The Yellow River cultures seem to me to be a combination of an indigenous female population and a newer (within the last few thousand years like the O'Neils and Genghis Khan) Male, if you will excuse the expression, overlay.

The reason I bring all of this up is because if, as we regularly give credit, the Chinese do see themselves on a continuum of thousands of years and engage in long term planning, is it possible that these types of considerations enter into the discussion?  Does CougarDaddy or does Edward see any element of planning for race survival on very long horizons?

I know that the PRC, like a lot of other people to be sure, seem to be spending a lot of money on understanding this type of stuff.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 3

Here is more grist for the mill in the form of another article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Jan/Feb 08 issue of _Foreign Affairs_. This one is by _John L. Thornton_ of Tsinghua University:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080101faessay87101/john-l-thornton/long-time-coming.html


> Long Time Coming
> *The Prospects for Democracy in China*
> 
> By John L. Thornton
> 
> From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008
> ________________________________________
> 
> Summary: Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.
> 
> _JOHN L. THORNTON is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution._
> 
> China's leaders have held out the promise of some form of democracy to the people of China for nearly a century. After China's last dynasty, the Qing, collapsed in 1911, Sun Yat-sen suggested a three-year period of temporary military rule, followed by a six-year phase of "political tutelage," to guide the country's transition into a full constitutional republic. In 1940, Mao Zedong offered followers something he called "new democracy," in which leadership by the Communist Party would ensure the "democratic dictatorship" of the revolutionary groups over class enemies. And Deng Xiaoping, leading the country out of the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, declared that democracy was a "major condition for emancipating the mind."
> 
> When they used the term "democracy," Sun, Mao, and Deng each had something quite different in mind. Sun's definition -- which envisioned a constitutional government with universal suffrage, free elections, and separation of powers -- came closest to a definition recognizable in the West. Through their deeds, Mao and Deng showed that despite their words, such concepts held little importance for them. Still, the three agreed that democracy was not an end in itself but rather a mechanism for achieving China's real purpose of becoming a country that could no longer be bullied by outside powers.
> 
> Democracy ultimately foundered under all three leaders. When Sun died, in 1925, warlordism and disunity still engulfed many parts of China. In his time, Mao showed less interest in democracy than in class struggle, mass movements, continuous revolution, and keeping his opponents off balance. And Deng demonstrated on a number of occasions -- most dramatically in suppressing the Tiananmen protests of 1989 -- that he would not let popular democratic movements overtake party rule or upset his plan for national development.
> 
> Today, of course, China is not a democracy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a monopoly on political power, and the country lacks freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, and other fundamental attributes of a pluralistic liberal system. Many inside and outside China remain skeptical about the prospects for political reform. Yet much is happening -- in the government, in the CCP, in the economy, and in society at large -- that could change how Chinese think about democracy and shape China's political future.
> 
> Both in public and in private, China's leaders are once again talking about democracy, this time with increasing frequency and detail. (This article is based on conversations held over the past 14 months with a broad range of Chinese, including members of the CCP's Central Committee -- the group of China's top 370 leaders -- senior government officials, scholars, judges, lawyers, journalists, and leaders of nongovernmental organizations.) President Hu Jintao has called democracy "the common pursuit of mankind." During his 2006 visit to the United States, Hu went out of his way to broach the subject at each stop. And Premier Wen Jiabao, in his address to the 2007 National People's Congress, devoted to democracy and the rule of law more than twice the attention he had in any previous such speech. "Developing democracy and improving the legal system," Wen declared, "are basic requirements of the socialist system."
> 
> As with earlier leaders, what the present generation has in mind differs from the definition used in the West. Top officials stress that the CCP's leadership must be preserved. Although they see a role for elections, particularly at the local level, they assert that a "deliberative" form of politics that allows individual citizens and groups to add their views to the decision-making process is more appropriate for China than open, multiparty competition for national power. They often mention meritocracy, including the use of examinations to test candidates' competence for office, reflecting an age-old Chinese belief that the government should be made up of the country's most talented. Chinese leaders do not welcome the latitude of freedom of speech, press, or assembly taken for granted in the West. They say they support the orderly expansion of these rights but focus more on the group and social harmony -- what they consider the common good.
> 
> Below the top tier of leaders (who usually speak from a common script), Chinese officials differ on whether "guided democracy" is where China's current political evolution will end or is a way station en route to a more standard liberal democratic model. East Asia provides examples of several possibilities: the decades-long domination of politics by the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the prosperity with limited press freedom of Singapore, and the freewheeling multiparty system of South Korea. China might follow one of these paths, some speculate, or blaze its own.
> 
> In a meeting in late 2006 with a delegation from the Brookings Institution (of which I was a member), Premier Wen was asked what he and other Chinese leaders meant by the word "democracy," what form democracy was likely to take in China, and over what time frame. "When we talk about democracy," Wen replied, "we usually refer to three key components: elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances." Regarding the first, he could foresee direct and indirect elections expanding gradually from villages to towns, counties, and even provinces. He did not mention developments beyond this, however. As for China's judicial system, which is riddled with corruption, Wen stressed the need for reform to assure the judiciary's "dignity, justice, and independence." And he explained that "supervision" -- a Chinese term for ensuring effective oversight -- was necessary to restrain abuses of official power. He called for checks and balances within the CCP and for greater official accountability to the public. The media and China's nearly 200 million Internet users should also participate "as appropriate" in the supervision of the government's work, he observed. Wen's bottom line: "We have to move toward democracy. We have many problems, but we know the direction in which we are going."
> 
> FREE TO CHOOSE
> 
> Given the gap between the democratic aspirations professed by leaders such as Hu and Wen and the skepticism that their words elicit in the West, a better understanding is needed of where exactly the process of democratization stands in China today. Chinese citizens do not have the right to choose their national leaders, but for more than a decade, peasants across the country have held ballots to elect village chiefs. What is happening in the vast space between the farm and Zhongnanhai, the CCP's leadership compound in Beijing? Some answers can be gleaned by examining the three pillars of Wen's definition: elections, judicial independence, and supervision.
> 
> The Chinese constitution calls for a combination of direct and indirect polls to choose government leaders. In practice, competitive popular elections occur widely only in the country's 700,000 villages. With over 700 million farmers living in these villages, this is not an insignificant phenomenon, but the details tell a complex and at times contradictory story.
> 
> The original impulse behind village elections, which began in the early 1980s, was to promote competent local leaders who would grow the rural economy and implement national priorities such as the one-child policy. With the abandonment of collectivization at the end of the Cultural Revolution, a power vacuum emerged in the countryside. By most accounts, at first elections enjoyed the central government's active support and were generally conducted fairly. But in the early 1990s, authorities were reportedly taken aback by figures showing that only 40 percent of elected village chiefs were CCP members. Beijing eventually instructed local officials to ensure that the "leading role" of the Communist Party was maintained. Today, the majority of village chiefs are again party members, although the size of that majority can vary widely by region. Over 90 percent of the village heads in the provinces of Guangdong, Hubei, and Shandong belong to the party, but the figure drops to 60-70 percent in Fujian and Zhejiang. And even these figures overstate the actual percentage of village chiefs who were elected as party members: when nonparty candidates are elected, the CCP nearly always recruits them so as to ensure that it remains in charge while giving farmers the leaders they want.
> 
> Village elections have serious problems, including nepotism, vote buying, and the selection of incompetent or corrupt leaders. Proponents nonetheless maintain that the polls serve as a grass-roots training ground for democratic habits. In fact, the most fervent opponents of village elections in China tend to be the township officials whose own jobs would be in danger if the central government decided to expand direct voting to the next level up.
> 
> Some of the more intriguing electoral experiments in China over the past decade have in fact taken place in townships. Burdened with administering the numerous social programs and benefits on which many citizens depend, township governments are often the focus of antigovernment sentiment and social unrest. Effective leadership there is thus critical to preserving social stability, a top priority for Chinese leaders. A few competitive township polls took place as early as 1995-96; the boldest experiment occurred in 1998 in Buyun, in a remote corner of Sichuan. The local Buyun government conducted a competitive, direct election in which some 6,000 eligible adults cast votes. The process received wide media coverage inside China and was criticized in the official press for violating the constitution, which grants the local People's Congress authority to choose the township leader. But to the surprise of many, the central government neither approved the Buyun results nor nullified them, and the elected mayor, Tan Xiaoqiu, remained in office. In 2001, the CCP Central Committee reaffirmed that directly electing a township head was unconstitutional. Buyun responded by tweaking its election process to bring it in line with the letter of the law but not its spirit: in the next election, citizens elected a candidate for township head, who was then recommended by the local party committee and elected unopposed by the People's Congress.
> 
> Perhaps in part due to Buyun's legal troubles, most townships that have experimented with elections have chosen the less radical model called the "open recommendation and selection" system, under which any adult resident can run for township head, a council of community leaders then narrows the candidate pool to two finalists, and the local People's Congress makes the final selection. This is not a direct ballot but a way of introducing a measure of competition and transparency in the selection of local leaders. By 2001-2, there was some form of competitive ballot in almost 2,000 township elections, five percent of the national total.
> 
> The significance of township elections should not be overstated. Townships are at the lowest administrative rung in the Chinese government structure, and even election supporters acknowledge that the process is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, when conducted successfully, such electoral experiments can give township leaders a degree of popular legitimacy. They introduce competition among cadres and, to a lesser extent, between party and nonparty members where absolutely none existed before. The expectation is that competition, even if controlled, will raise the quality of governance. Some Chinese scholars also find it notable that some township heads are conducting themselves with greater confidence because they know they enjoy a popular mandate and are therefore more willing to challenge the local party secretaries. This can create headaches for the CCP, one central government researcher noted, but it may also be the first seed of a culture of checks and balances.
> 
> Authorities in Beijing, for their part, are closely watching the experiments. In an echo of the dynamic that initiated market reforms in the 1980s, the center now encourages governance experimentation at the local level, albeit within boundaries. A senior official at the Central Party School told me, for instance, that in the prosperous province of Jiangsu, a pilot program would soon have all of the townships conducting competitive polls. As different localities try different things, he said, the Central Party School will study the results.
> 
> Electoral experiments at the county level -- one administrative rung up from a township -- have also attracted attention. Since 2000, 11 counties in Hubei and Jiangsu have conducted "open recommendation and selection" polls for the position of county deputy chief. This represents less than half a percent of the counties and county-level cities nationwide, but any reform of leadership selection in counties, which have an average population of about 450,000 each, would be significant news.
> 
> Limited experimentation has also occurred in urban areas. In 2003, 12 private citizens stood as independent candidates for district People's Congresses in the city of Shenzhen, with two of them winning seats. A handful of independent candidates have also run for the People's Congress of the Haidian district in Beijing, home to China's top universities. Almost all independent candidates for people's congresses fail in their bids, yet the number of such candidates is exploding: from fewer than 100 nationwide in 2003 to more than 40,000 in 2006-7, according to Li Fan, a former government official who is now a leading election-reform advocate. Li predicts that the number of independent candidates will reach the hundreds of thousands in 2011-12 and thinks popular demand for political participation will continue to grow as Chinese society diversifies and opens up.
> 
> In recent years, China's leaders have also made an effort to expand competitive selection within the CCP. Some experts believe that the development of "intraparty democracy" is even more significant for China's long-term political reform than the experiments in local governance. They consider a CCP that accepts open debate, internal leadership elections, and decision-making by ballot to be a prerequisite for democracy in the country as a whole. President Hu and Premier Wen routinely call for more discussion, consultation, and group decision-making within the CCP. Intraparty democracy was a centerpiece of Hu's keynote address to the CCP's 17th Party Congress last fall. Not long after the meeting, Li Yuanchao, the newly appointed head of the Party Organization Department, published a 7,000-character essay in the People's Daily elaborating on Hu's call for further reform in the party. The fact that Hu himself does not wield the personal authority of Mao, Deng, or his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and relies on consensus within the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, is itself noted as progress in unwinding the overcentralization of power at the national level.
> 
> One of the ways the CCP has begun to introduce intraparty democracy is by putting forward multiple candidates for positions. Fifteen percent of the nominees for the 17th Party Congress were rejected in party ballots. In the 2006-7 national election cycle, the official media reported, 296 townships in 16 provinces chose local party leaders through direct voting by party members as part of a pilot project. In a handful of localities, one government scholar told me, county party secretaries were also being elected through a direct vote.
> 
> If intraparty democracy takes hold, some scholars predict a trend in which like-minded cadres will coalesce to form more distinct interest groups within the CCP. A senior official of the Central Party School told our Brookings delegation that "interest groups" were no longer taboo within the party, although organized "factions" were not permitted. Still, some analysts predict that the CCP may one day resemble Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, within which formal, organized factions compete for senior political slots and advocate different policy positions.
> 
> In a major speech at the Central Party School in June last year, Hu exhorted the CCP's top leadership to "perfect the intraparty democratic system and bring into full play the party's creative vigor." Then, seemingly in a demonstration of the very intraparty democracy Hu was advocating, a nonbinding straw poll was conducted among the several hundred senior leaders present to gauge their preferences for candidates to the next Politburo and its Standing Committee -- in other words, for who should rule China over the next five years.
> 
> Some Chinese analysts believe that Hu, in his remarks at the Central Party School, may have been foreshadowing a new policy approach. "Emancipating the mind, an essential requirement of the party's ideological line and a magic weapon of ours in dealing with all kind(s) of new situation(s) and problems lying on the road ahead of us and in our continuous efforts to create a new phase in our cause, must be upheld firmly," Hu told his audience. In asking his colleagues to unshackle themselves from rigid thinking, he was understood to be encouraging them to be more pragmatic in their thinking as China evolves politically. More specifically, Hu was thought to be both indicating to orthodox party thinkers that Mao's was not the only way to define "democracy" and signaling to more reform-minded members of the Central Committee that simply copying Western models was not necessarily the answer either.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 3

 Long Time Coming 
*The Prospects for Democracy in China*

By John L. Thornton 

From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008  _cont_



> THE RULE OF LAW
> 
> Of Wen's three pillars of democracy -- elections, judicial independence, and supervision -- judicial independence is in some ways the most striking. The question of whether the CCP serves the law or vice versa has always made judicial independence a delicate subject in China.
> 
> The Chinese judicial system has made great strides over the past three decades, but it still has far to go. In 1980, when the judicial system was just starting to rebuild itself after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese courts nationwide accepted a total of 800,000 cases. By 2006, that number had jumped tenfold, reflecting the transformation of the place of law in society. China has passed over 250 new laws in the past 30 years and is in the midst of creating an entire national code from nothing.
> 
> Until the mid-1980s, the majority of Chinese judges and prosecutors were former military personnel with little formal education of any sort, let alone legal training. Judicial independence was not the goal of such a system; if anything, it was something to be guarded against. Unsurprisingly, given that the purpose of the courts was to carry out the party line, judges and prosecutors were highly ideological. But starting in the mid-1980s, university graduates were assigned by the state to become judges and prosecutors. By the late 1990s, a master's degree in law was considered an unwritten prerequisite to becoming a senior judge.
> 
> Paralleling the rise in the quality of judges and prosecutors has been the change in the status of China's lawyers. Before the late 1980s, all lawyers were employees of the state; private practice did not exist. The first "cooperative law firms" appeared in 1988-89, and today China has 118,000 licensed lawyers practicing in 12,000 firms. (To compare, the United States has more than eight times as many lawyers for a population one-fourth the size of China's.) The growth of private practice has propelled the further professionalization of the system as a whole, partly because lawyers need to win cases (or at least lighter sentences) for their clients in order to prosper. Prosecutors still win over 90 percent of their cases, but as the quality of lawyers has improved and arguments have grown more intricate, prosecutors -- and judges -- have had to improve their own competence. Party bosses still interfere in the judicial process, and the central government still decides politically sensitive cases, but most observers agree that with disputes becoming more complex, the frequency and degree of such interference are declining.
> 
> China has adopted a number of major statutes intended to protect citizens from government wrongdoing. The Public Servants Law of 2005 sets a high standard for conduct by officials. The State Compensation Law of 1994 is meant to make amends for government failures. Perhaps most significant, the Administrative Litigation Law, adopted in 1989, enables citizens to sue the state; some 13,000 suits were filed in the law's first year. Today, more than 150,000 cases are filed annually against the government, and several successful ones have been hailed in the media.
> 
> Still, Chinese officials acknowledge that the judicial process remains rife with problems. One of the most serious obstacles to impartial verdicts is the web of personal relationships known as guanxi -- bonds forged over years by the exchange of favors and assistance -- on which so many decisions in China are based. These ties can have an especially constraining effect on prosecutorial and court decisions. Judges in China routinely talk to the parties in a case privately, creating situations in which guanxi and corruption can readily contaminate the process. Some experts have suggested raising judges' salaries and taking other steps to create a judicial elite distinct from other government officials in order to address this endemic weakness.
> 
> China's main challenge is no longer the lack of a comprehensive legal code but the chasm between what is on the books and its implementation, especially at the local level and in politically sensitive cases. Rights guaranteed by the landmark Criminal Procedure Law of 1996, such as timely access to counsel and exculpatory evidence, are often denied or simply ignored. A small but growing group of private lawyers -- sometimes referred to as "rights defenders" -- take on sensitive cases and unjust prosecutions, in part to highlight instances in which the judicial system itself violates the law. Although they rarely win and are sometimes themselves harassed or even jailed, these activist lawyers believe that insistently pointing out the discrepancy between the official goal of a fair judicial system and the reality on the ground can over time narrow the gap.
> 
> Another major obstacle is the sway that local officials continue to hold over the courts. Local CCP committees are integrally involved in the appointment of judges and prosecutors, and local governments have discretion over salaries and budgets throughout the judicial system. The situation shares some similarities with the Chinese banking system a decade ago, when the influence of local officials over bank branches resulted in a vast pool of so-called policy loans. The explosion in nonperforming debt eventually forced Beijing to spend $60 billion from central government coffers to bail out the banks, after which then Premier Zhu Rongji pushed through a reorganization that transferred final authority over personnel and loan decisions to the banks' headquarters. Banking reform may offer a promising model for the restructuring that the judicial system needs.
> 
> According to the 1999 amendment to the constitution, China is now officially a "country governed according to law." But the CCP, not the government, holds ultimate power. An increasing number of scholars argue that what the country needs, therefore, is a party and party members who unambiguously understand that they are not above the law. One proponent of this view, Professor Zhuo Zeyuan, of the Central Party School, last year gave a two-hour talk on his ideas to all 24 members of the Politburo. A Central Party School leader told me later that the proper relationship between the ruling party and the constitution was unambiguous: the CCP should be governed by the law. As with so many things in China today, the rub is the gap between theory and practice.
> 
> The CCP firmly maintains the levers that control the courts and manipulates them when necessary. In addition, it operates a separate, parallel system for dealing with errant party members that includes the use of detention and interrogation and in some cases is more draconian than the regular legal system. Recently, there have been signs that the party may be starting to see the need for more due process in its practices. Professor Jerome Cohen, of New York University Law School, one of the West's foremost experts on the Chinese legal system, has noted that local party organizations in at least 20 provinces have established a disciplinary system for CCP members that includes guarantees such as a notice of alleged wrongdoing, the opportunity to defend oneself against charges (including the right to call supporting witnesses), a statement of reasons for a final decision, and an opportunity to appeal. Some of these rights have long been in the CCP charter but were never implemented seriously.
> 
> Chinese leaders appear to realize that the China of 2008 is far too complex to be ruled entirely by fiat from Beijing and has to be governed by laws through a competent legal system enjoying the public's confidence. Lack of faith in the courts is one reason people take to the streets, and official figures show that tens of thousands of public protests occur in China each year. It is not surprising then that leaders such as Premier Wen want the party and the state to stop interfering in routine judicial matters. But the leadership still insists on controlling sensitive cases and the judicial system at the macro level. The question is whether the CCP can succeed in building a fair and independent judicial system while maintaining control at the very top.
> 
> OVERSIGHT
> 
> The Chinese system does not lack for institutions meant to keep officials honest. The oldest of these is the traditional petition system, dating to the imperial era, which allows people to take their grievances directly to higher authorities. Each ministry in Beijing has an office that handles such complaints. But the petition is seen as a last resort, and few cases are satisfactorily resolved: the process is opaque and depends on the goodwill of the anonymous officials evaluating the appeals.
> 
> Another oversight institution, the CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, staffed by eight deputies and 120 senior members and headed by a Politburo Standing Committee member, is charged with fighting corruption and other misconduct by party members. Its counterparts on the government side are the Ministry of Supervision and the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, responsible for prosecuting errant government officials. One of the functions of the official Xinhua News Agency, finally, is to gather information on corruption nationwide and produce internal reports for the central leadership.
> 
> Yet despite these multiple mechanisms, the problem of official corruption remains serious, and leaders routinely cite moral turpitude as one of the party's main challenges. As the economy has surged for more than two decades, so have opportunities for graft. High-profile cases such as that of Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration executed this past July for taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies, feed the perception of endemic rot. According to the CCP, over 97,000 officials were disciplined in 2006, of whom 80 percent were guilty of dereliction of duty, taking bribes, or violating financial regulations. "The formal [supervision] system on the whole has failed," one government researcher told me. At lower levels, a basic structural flaw in the supervision system mirrors that of the courts: the heads of the discipline inspection commissions are appointed by local leaders, who predictably tend to select relatives, friends, protégés, or colleagues. It was only in 2006 that a rule was implemented requiring that commission heads at the provincial level be appointed by the central government.
> 
> President Hu and Premier Wen face a basic dilemma. They know that rooting out corruption, which makes citizens cynical about one-party rule, must be their top governance priority. But they must act while maintaining the loyalty of local officials, through whom the CCP governs the country. To augment the formal mechanisms of supervision, the government is increasingly turning to alternative channels. In Beijing, some districts are using public opinion polling to gauge satisfaction with individual government offices, and Beijing's Urban Planning Commission has retained a consulting firm to help it take better account of public opinion in assessing redevelopment projects.
> 
> Another promising trend is the rapid commercialization of the Chinese press. The government still exercises extensive control over the media through government ownership of outlets and censorship. The redlines that journalists cannot cross still exist. But changes are taking place. As independent Chinese publications seek readers and advertisers, they pursue stories that people want to read; like their counterparts in the West, they have discovered that investigative journalism sells. In one widely discussed case, a veteran reporter for the China Economic Times wrote an in-depth account in 2002 of the Beijing taxi-licensing system. Due to alleged collusion between company owners and the government supervisory body, drivers were being forced to work shockingly long hours for low wages. The newspaper sold out almost immediately. The Central Propaganda Bureau responded by banning other publications from reporting on the story. The city's Transportation Bureau ordered drivers not to read the article. Some of the taxi drivers quoted in the article received death threats, and the author had to be protected by bodyguards for three months. The public uproar mounted, however, as the news spread to the Internet. Eight days after the story was printed, then Vice Premier Wen Jiabao issued an official statement supporting the taxi drivers and directing that a report on the situation be prepared for then Premier Zhu Rongji.
> 
> One experiment that has caught the attention of many Chinese is the government's decision to allow foreign journalists to travel and report freely throughout China (with the exception of Tibet) from January 2007 through the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "It's clearly a test," a Chinese newspaper editor said, "to see how the foreign press uses its new freedom. Unless something goes terribly wrong, it's hard to see how the government can reimpose the old system when the Olympics are over." Not surprisingly, there have been numerous teething problems: in July, several foreign journalists covering an antigovernment demonstration held by an international human rights group were detained for several hours. Still, foreign correspondents in Beijing report that, in general, restrictions on their movements and activities have been relaxed noticeably since the new policy was announced.
> 
> In the past several years, the Internet and cell phones have started to challenge traditional media by becoming channels for the expression of citizen outrage, at times forcing the government to take action. One celebrated instance was the "nail house" incident in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, in central China. For three years, a middle-class couple stubbornly refused to sell their house to property developers who, with the municipal government's permission, planned to raze the entire area and turn it into a commercial district. The neighbors had long ago moved away. The developer tried to intimidate the couple by digging a three-story canyon around their lone house, but the tactic backfired spectacularly. Photos of their home's precarious situation were posted on the Internet, sparking outrage among Chinese across the country. Within weeks, tens of thousands of messages had been posted lambasting the Chongqing government for letting such a thing happen. Reporters camped out at the site; even official newspapers took up the couple's cause. In the end, the couple settled for a new house and over $110,000 in compensation. The widely read daily Beijing News ran a commentary that would have been inconceivable in a Chinese newspaper a decade ago: "This is an inspiration for the Chinese public in the emerging age of civil rights. . . . Media coverage of this event has been rational and constructive. This is encouraging for the future of citizens defending their rights according to the law."
> 
> In another example of the marriage of new technology and citizen action, last May angry residents in the southern coastal city of Xiamen launched a campaign to force the city government to stop the construction of a large chemical plant on the outskirts of the city. Their weapon was the cell phone. In a matter of days, hundreds of thousands of text messages opposing the plant were forwarded, spreading like a virus throughout the country. Xiamen authorities, who had ignored popular opposition to the plant before, suddenly announced that construction would be suspended until an environmental impact study could be completed. Dissatisfied with this half measure, citizens again used message networking to organize a march of some 7,000 people to demand a permanent halt to the construction. Although local party newspapers blasted the protest as illegal, it was allowed to proceed without incident, marking one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in China in recent years.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 3 of 3

 Long Time Coming 
*The Prospects for Democracy in China*

By John L. Thornton 

From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008  _cont_



> DEMOCRACY IN CHINA
> 
> Recent progress in elections, judicial independence, and oversight is part of the transformation of Chinese society and the expansion of personal freedoms that have accompanied three decades of breakneck economic reform and development. The government remains intrusive in many areas but much less so than before.
> 
> In the past 20 years, several hundred million Chinese have migrated from the countryside to the cities -- the largest wave of rapid urbanization in history. Until a decade ago, the government enforced stringent controls on internal migration. Today, officials cite the additional 300 million farmers expected to move to cities over the next two decades as a positive force that will help alleviate China's urban-rural income gap. The state once assigned jobs and housing to every urban resident. Now, urban Chinese enjoy overseas travel to study, work, or play. Ten years ago, a Chinese citizen needed to get permission from his supervisor, his work unit's party secretary, and the local police just to apply for a passport, a process that could take six months, assuming the passport was approved at all. The entire procedure takes less than a week today, and approval is nearly as automatic as it is in the United States. Less than two decades ago, all foreigners in Beijing were forced to live in designated locations, such as hotels or compounds guarded by military police. Today, foreigners and Chinese live side by side. When Chinese are asked about the democratization of their society, they are as likely to mention these sorts of changes as they are elections or judicial reform. They may be confusing the concept of liberty with that of democracy, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the expansion of their personal freedom as insignificant.
> 
> A senior Communist Party official I know marveled privately that ten years ago it would have been unimaginable for someone in his position to even be having an open discussion about democracy with an American. Now, the debate in China is no longer about whether to have democracy, he said, but about when and how. One thing the party should do immediately, he felt, was reform the National People's Congress so that it does not become a "retirement home" for former officials; the National People's Congress should be populated by competent professionals and eventually become a true legislative body. The government should also implement direct elections up to the provincial level, he argued, not Western-style multiparty elections but at least a contest involving a real choice of candidates.
> 
> The chair of one of China's largest corporations, who is also an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee, told me that better corporate governance in companies listed on overseas stock exchanges (and thus held to international norms), such as his, was another example of the expansion of "democratic habits" in China. Although corporate governance in China remains a work in progress, this chair said, the general trend among state-owned enterprises, especially those listed abroad, is toward greater transparency, stronger and more independent boards of directors, and management by mutually agreed rules. Over time, working in such an environment is likely to inculcate more democratic patterns of thinking in China's business elite, as well as in senior government officials who sit on the boards of state-owned enterprises.
> 
> Over the last century, no one has thought more about the promise of democracy in their country or been more dismayed by its elusiveness than the Chinese themselves. Again and again, they have witnessed a native democratic impulse surge and crash or be crushed prematurely. The empress dowager Cixi quashed the 1898 "hundred days of reform" initiated by advisers to the emperor Guangxu. The optimism that surrounded Sun's inauguration as provisional president of the Chinese Republic on January 1, 1912, was soon extinguished by the military ruler Yuan Shikai, who tried to crown himself as the first emperor of a new dynasty in 1915. Progressives within both the Nationalist and the Communist Parties espoused democratic forms of government in the 1930s before the onslaught of wars with Japan and then with each other. The establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 augured an era of self-determination, prosperity, and democracy. But that hope was crushed under the foot of Mao's relentless political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Before the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989, the 1980s were a period of intense political ferment, when democracy was debated inside the government, think tanks, universities, and intellectual salons.
> 
> Compared to in those periods, the way in which China's leaders talk about democracy today may seem cautious. Critics argue that this reflects the government's lack of real commitment to political reform. Optimists believe that gradualism will make the current liberalization last longer than the euphoric, but ultimately failed, experiences of the past. One of China's elder statesman -- who has known personally all of the country's top leaders since Mao -- insisted to me that democracy has always been the "common aspiration" of the Chinese people. They are determined to get it right, he argued, but they require patience from the West. "Please let the Chinese experiment," he said. "Let us explore."
> 
> Where that exploration will lead is an open question. There is a range of views among Chinese about how long will be required for democracy to take root, but there is also some agreement. One official put it this way: "No one predicts five years. Some think ten to 15. Some say 30 to 35. And no one says 60." Others predict that the process will take at least two more generational changes in the CCP's leadership -- a scenario that would place its advent around the year 2022.
> 
> In 2004, a survey was conducted among nearly 700 local officials who had attended a provincial training program. More than 60 percent of the officials polled said that they were dissatisfied with the state of democracy in the country then, and 63 percent said that political reform in China was too slow. On the other hand, 59 percent of them said that economic development should take precedence over democracy. And tellingly, 67 percent of the cadres supported popular elections for village leaders and 41 percent supported elections for county heads, compared with only 13 percent for elections for provincial governors and just 9 percent for elections for China's president.
> 
> Some Chinese like to point out that it took the United States almost two centuries to achieve universal suffrage. In the first several American presidential elections, most states restricted voting to white male landowners -- no more than ten percent of the adult U.S. population at the time. Women had to wait until the twentieth century, and blacks in effect until the 1960s. "This is one issue," a Beijing newspaper editor joked, "about which we Chinese may be less patient than you Americans."
> 
> Last spring, an article provocatively titled "Democracy Is a Good Thing" caused a small sensation in China. Published in a journal closely linked to the CCP, the article was authored by Yu Keping, the head of a think tank that reports directly to the CCP Central Committee. Although hardly blind to democracy's drawbacks (it "affords opportunities for certain sweet-talking political fraudsters to mislead the people"), Yu was forthright and specific in his approval of it: "Among all the political systems that have been invented and implemented, democracy is the one with the least number of flaws. That is to say, relatively speaking, democracy is the best political system for humankind."
> 
> Yu did not predict an easy road to democracy in China. "Under conditions of democratic rule," he observed, "officials must be elected by the citizens and they must gain the endorsement and support of the majority of the people; their powers will be curtailed by the citizens, they cannot do whatever they want, they have to sit down across from the people and negotiate. Just these two points alone already make many people dislike it. Therefore, democratic politics will not operate on its own; it requires the people themselves and the government officials who represent the interests of the people to promote and implement [it]."
> 
> Clearly, some people at the center of the Chinese system are thinking actively about these fundamental questions. The issue is whether and how these ideas will be translated into practice. China must now complete the transition begun in recent years, from a system that relies on the authority and judgment of one or a few dominating figures to a government run by commonly accepted and binding rules. The institutionalization of power is shared by all countries that have successfully made the transition to democracy. China's ongoing experiments with local elections, reform of the judicial system, and the strengthening of oversight are all part of the shift to a more rule-based system. So are the ways in which Chinese society continues to open and diversify, incrementally creating a civil society.
> 
> Institutionalization may progress the most over the next few years in an area that could be decisive in determining China's political evolution: leadership succession. How a country manages the transfer of power at the very top sends an unmistakable signal to all levels below. On this point, China has already come some way. To be chosen as Mao's successor was the most perilous position one could be put in. Deng had his own problems anointing a durable successor; he remained the most powerful man in China for nearly a decade after relinquishing all his official posts in 1989. It was his successor, Jiang, who saw the first peaceful transfer of power in modern Chinese history, when he gave up his positions to Hu. Jiang has remained a power behind the scenes, but no one would suggest that he holds the influence that Deng did.
> 
> One senior leader told me that the issue of succession can no longer be managed effectively in the ad hoc manner of the past. Both China and the world have changed too much; the process of selecting the country's leaders needs to be institutionalized. The problem, he explained, was that an acceptable new process has yet to be put in place, and until one is, it would be impractical to jettison the old system. China finds itself in an ambiguous transition at the moment. For his part, this leader believed that progress might be seen by the time of the Third Plenum of the 17th Party Congress, in 2009. Some party members have even suggested that Hu's heir as general secretary of the CCP could be chosen through a vote of the entire Central Committee when Hu retires in 2012. The method by which Hu's successor is selected will be an unmistakable indicator of the political future China's current generation of leaders envisions -- signaling whether they believe, as Sun did a century ago, that democracy can best deliver the prosperity, independence, and liberty for which the Chinese people have struggled and sacrificed for so many years.



Those who follow my ramblings on Army.ca will know that I disagree with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s definition of democracy as having three components: “elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.” While I agree that elections and judicial independence are necessary, the second is only a subset, as Thornton later discusses, of the rule of law and I believe that *respect for the rule of law* is, even above elections, the _sine qua non_ of democracy. I agree with Thornton that this is a delicate matter in China. For us liberals (real liberals, not what the lazy, ill-educated US media means when it misuses the term) there is no question that the law – all laws and regulations must apply equally and consistently to all, governed and governors alike; there is no law unless it binds both citizen and sovereign.

It may be of interest to know that I am not worried by Wen’s last attribute: “supervision.” As I have said before, there are three kinds of democracies:

1.	Liberal democracies – such as we find in e.g. Australia, America, Britain and Canada, however _retarded_ Canada’s democracy may be as we retain appointed legislatures and grotesquely unequal representation by population in the chambers we do elect;

2.	Illiberal democracies – which are the norm in most of the world, including, I suggest throughout some (most?) of Europe; and

3.	Conservative democracies – which, as Thornton also points out, are rather common in East Asia.

It is not or, at least, ought not to be surprising that deeply _conservative_ societies (cultures) like those in Japan and Singapore adopt highly conservative forms of democracy ion which form of *oversight* is maintained in a way which is acceptable to the very conservative citizens. Singapore is a full, functioning democracy despite the fact that a whole array of Western commentators don’t like how the society and the political _culture_ operate. What *is* surprising, to me, is that there is a such a vibrant multi-party system in Korea. (I am less surprised in about the multi-party system in Taiwan because there, I think there is a very real, open, political disagreement between the _reunification_ and _sovereignty_ parties.) My guess is that the Korean, too, have some basic, unresolved issues, unlike Japan and Singapore,  in both of which, I think there is a broad and deep socio-cultural consensus about the direction those nations ought to be taking.

Therefore, I think I should say I guess that China will, slowly but surely, adopt a variant of the Singapore model in which a single _national_ party controls an increasingly _democratic_ (as we tend to understand the word) federal system. The real democracy will be most evident at the local level and in the selection of delegates to provincial party congresses. In some respects this will look rather like an _idealized_ form of democracy about which I have mused, now and again, in which local people, in their neighbourhoods, villages and districts, elect some representatives from whom local, regional, provincial and finally national legislators are selected. I would prefer that the people, themselves, select everyone for every post but I am prepared to accept that in deeply conservative societies some will want a _higher_ (more trusted, perhaps remote) body to _oversee_ selection for higher level offices to ensure a *harmonious* outcome – social harmony being one of the mainstays of the _conservative_ value system.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Those who follow my ramblings on Army.ca will know that I disagree with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s definition of democracy as having three components: “elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.” While I agree that elections and judicial independence are necessary, the second is only a subset, as Thornton later discusses, of the rule of law and I believe that *respect for the rule of law* is, even above elections, the _sine qua non_ of democracy. I agree with Thornton that this is a delicate matter in China. For us liberals (real liberals, not what the lazy, ill-educated US media means when it misuses the term) there is no question that the law – all laws and regulations must apply equally and consistently to all, governed and governors alike; there is no law unless it binds both citizen and sovereign.
> 
> It may be of interest to know that I am not worried by Wen’s last attribute: “supervision.” As I have said before, there are three kinds of democracies:
> 
> 1.	Liberal democracies – such as we find in e.g. Australia, America, Britain and Canada, however _retarded_ Canada’s democracy may be as we retain appointed legislatures and grotesquely unequal representation by population in the chambers we do elect;
> 
> 2.	Illiberal democracies – which are the norm in most of the world, including, I suggest throughout some (most?) of Europe; and
> 
> 3.	Conservative democracies – which, as Thornton also points out, are rather common in East Asia.
> 
> It is not or, at least, ought not to be surprising that deeply _conservative_ societies (cultures) like those in Japan and Singapore adopt highly conservative forms of democracy ion which form of *oversight* is maintained in a way which is acceptable to the very conservative citizens. Singapore is a full, functioning democracy despite the fact that a whole array of Western commentators don’t like how the society and the political _culture_ operate. What *is* surprising, to me, is that there is a such a vibrant multi-party system in Korea. (I am less surprised in about the multi-party system in Taiwan because there, I think there is a very real, open, political disagreement between the _reunification_ and _sovereignty_ parties.) My guess is that the Korean, too, have some basic, unresolved issues, unlike Japan and Singapore,  in both of which, I think there is a broad and deep socio-cultural consensus about the direction those nations ought to be taking.
> 
> Therefore, I think I should say I guess that China will, slowly but surely, adopt a variant of the Singapore model in which a single _national_ party controls an increasingly _democratic_ (as we tend to understand the word) federal system. The real democracy will be most evident at the local level and in the selection of delegates to provincial party congresses. In some respects this will look rather like an _idealized_ form of democracy about which I have mused, now and again, in which local people, in their neighbourhoods, villages and districts, elect some representatives from whom local, regional, provincial and finally national legislators are selected. I would prefer that the people, themselves, select everyone for every post but I am prepared to accept that in deeply conservative societies some will want a _higher_ (more trusted, perhaps remote) body to _oversee_ selection for higher level offices to ensure a *harmonious* outcome – social harmony being one of the mainstays of the _conservative_ value system.



Campbell,

Didn't I already point out that China is seriously considering the Singapore model, as well as recognizing the importance of "Rule of Law" according to Dr. Pan Wei when he elaborates on the "Rule of Law Regime" in this previous post of mine:



> With all due respect, you probably mean "they are NOT YET a superpower", but from the current rate their economy is growing, they will be a superpower within the next 50 years, provided the Chinese Communist Party can keep stability. During my study abroad program in Beijing, a  Bei Da professor named Dr.  Pan Wei once lectured to us that he foresaw Chinese GDP per capita and standard of living reaching on par with US incomes and standard of living by the mid 2020s. And mind you, this guy is considered to be more of a moderate. He advocates that in order to keep power without sacrificing economic growth, that the Beijing govt. must follow a system similar to that of Singapore, which also has a One-Party System as well as a prosperous economy. Dr. Pan Wei advocated what was called a "Rule of Law Regime", which called for the following features:
> 
> 1.) A one party-system which had  a civil service which advanced through Merit
> 2.) an independent anti-corruption agency like those agencies both Singapore (the CPIB) and Hong Kong (the ICAC) has
> 3.) though it was a one party system, there was a separate judiciary
> 
> Singapore's CPIB info
> http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm
> 
> Hong Kong's ICAC
> http://www.cpib.gov.sg/aboutus.htm
> 
> Dr. Pan Wei's "Rule of Law Regime"
> http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/content/qy59mu0p3fpfqx3j/
> 
> Source: Pan, Wei (2003). Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China
> In Journal of Contemporary China, 12(34), pp. 3-43.
> Location: Journal of Contemporary China
> 
> Thus China's CCP wanted to use Singapore's People Action Party as an example of how a one-party regime could survive in a modern world where the trend was thought to be going toward multiparty, liberal democracies.
> 
> Thus, the CCP is observing and adapting, while ensuring that nothing interferes with the nation's continuining economic prosperity. The large amount of corruption in China's govt. may indeed make that govt. a "house of cards", but if the CCP consolidates like Singapore's PAP did under all those decades of prosperity under Premier Lee Kuan Yew, then the CCP may yet survive and make China a superpower.  The fact that the Chinese also makes a large portion of Singapore's current population makes their system more attractive to Beijing, since it proves it can work with Chinese people.
> 
> (One more thing...Dr. Pan Wei obviously profits from his political consultation to the govt., since he drove an Mercedes SLK to class)



As for your and Thornton's definitions of the "Conservative Democracies" of East and Southeast Asia, perhaps a better term would be the *Conservative Tiger Economy Democracies*, since those that fit those characteristics would be the 4 Asian Tigers: Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore- as well as Japan. 

I do agree that the CCP may want a variant of the Singapore system, but you've probably already noticed that its appeal among them lies primarily in the fact that it is pretty much a one-party system- with the PAP in power- in Singapore.

You've also yet to comment on my response in the previous page about how PRC needs to periodically demonstrate its power as one precondition to maintaining to the internal stability its economy also relies upon, as well as my comments regarding how the Taiwanese/_benshengren_ is distinct enough for them to seek independence and seperation from that mainstream Chinese culture which the PRC is trying to represent not only to Taiwan, but to all overseas Chinese. (I mean the particular long post of mine towards the bottom of page 17, just before the post of Kirkhill at the bottom of the page)

Kirkhill,

As for your comments on those glacial lakes, so you mean to tell me you haven't even looked at Sichuan province downriver down the Yangtze/Chang Jiang from Tibet/Xi Zhang province? So what is Sichuan? Chopped Tofu?  ;D Chinese civilization did begin along the Huang He/Yellow River, but the more recent incarnations of China- including the Ming, Qing, the 1927-1949 ROC of Chiang, and the PRC, have also depended on the Pearl River and the Yangtze as water sources; the Pearl River Delta is in fact surrounded by at least five Chinese major cities in that region: Guangzhou, Macao (called Aomen in Mandarin), Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Shenzhen. You may have a point that Tibet would be important because its glacial lakes feed the Yangtze, but I would not completely overlook the importance of the other two rivers, in spite of the pollution from the water traffic and other sources that plague sections of all 3 rivers today.

Of course, there is some long-term planning element in Chinese society- there should be one in any society. An element of this planning you should not overlook is the Grand Canal waterway built by the Sui Dynasty (though at least one section predates that), which flows through Beijing and ends in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province (that's 6 provinces it crosses!), of which parts are still usable by boats today! ;D 

You also have Lake Dongting which borders both Hubei and Hunan provinces, (the former means the North of the Lake, while the latter means South of the Lake  ;D ); while Dongting is filled by the Yangtze and obviously does not date back to any ice-age or glacial period, it is one of the many lakes of China and a probable source of freshwater, aside from the rivers. 

As for which China we are talking about, we can go off all day about which China we are talking about- the Huang He or Yellow River ancient civilization or the PRC or the Han Chinese mainstream Culture- but the ones of interest to Canada should be the latter two, with the former because of how we deal with Beijing in our foreign policy, and the latter because it will better help other Canadians understand Canadians of Chinese descent, whether they are new immigrants or were born here.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarDaddy - 1 Billion into Sichuan would be a pretty tight fit - and the water there still has to come from someplace (Tibet).  

I agree every society SHOULD engage in long term planning.  

Or do I?  With long term planning you get long term answers, or Truths, and Monocultures which are very susceptible to the Unforeseen and Random Events anyway.... We in the west don't do long temp planning. Full Stop.  Perhaps that's the reason we're still here.  Some go left. Some go right. One side guesses wrong and dies.  The other side guesses right and survives.  If everybody did the same thing perhaps we would all die.....

Nope.  I don't like long term planning.  Bad for the health.  

I think I do finally see where Edward and the CCP are heading though, given my Anglo-Centric blinders.  Our democracy didn't develop out of a group of people sitting around a table one day having a vote on democracy and writing a constitution.  It happened in a controlled environment with a power aristocracy that fought amonst itself supplying a negative feedback control loop.  Unfettered democracy results in a runaway positive feedback system with no limits.  The CCP is setting itself up as the House of Lords.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> CougarDaddy - 1 Billion into Sichuan would be a pretty tight fit - and the water there still has to come from someplace (Tibet).



I meant Sichuan as one of the alternative water sources other than Tibet, but the point is now moot because it's apparent that most of the water in Sichuan(a name that translate to the land of "4 river gorge systems") also flows from Tibet.  :-\


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## tomahawk6

Plenty of water in Siberia.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> I meant Sichuan as one of the alternative water sources other than Tibet, but the point is now moot because it's apparent that most of the water in Sichuan(a name that translate to the land of "4 river gorge systems") also flows from Tibet.  :-\



As does the Mekong of Indo-China, the Irrawaddy of Burma and the Brahmaputra of Bangladesh.  

Maybe all Beijing really needs is a good waterless toilet and some drip agriculture systems.... ;D


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## CougarKing

Waterless toilets? I'm sorry, I gave up squatting toilets that you don't sit on when I left Asia.  ;D

BTW, who taught English to people nowadays in the PRC??? The English on some bilingual signs is not just bad, it's ludicrous!  

For example, a train station is not called a "CHOO-CHOO" station"- but there it was printed in English on a Beijing terminal, right below the Chinese translation. SHEESH!   (A train is called _huo che_ in Mandarin, for those of you who are wondering, not CHOO-CHOO, either, hehehe)

 ;D

And who came up with the term "water closet"? (A lot of bathrooms/washrooms in mainland China have the English letters "W. C." printed on them, which obviously stands for "water closet") It's a freaking bathroom/_ce suo_ or washroom/_xi shuo jian_! I guess those Olympic/tourism planners figured every North American tourist/European tourist would know what "W.C." stands for. Hehehe...

 ;D


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## Kirkhill

I did say a "good" waterless toilet.  Not a longdrop.


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## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> I did say a "good" waterless toilet.  Not a longdrop.



Who said anything about the squatting toilet/long drop having any water?  ;D

You go past the W.C. sign and behind the door is just a frigging pit! Well, as you would expect, this would be more common as you travelled Westwards through China. Toilet and Pepto-Bismal will be your close friends the next few weeks if you come with an appetite.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> ...
> You've also yet to comment on my response in the previous page about how PRC needs to periodically demonstrate its power as one precondition to maintaining to the internal stability its economy also relies upon, as well as my comments regarding how the Taiwanese/_benshengren_ is distinct enough for them to seek independence and seperation from that mainstream Chinese culture which the PRC is trying to represent not only to Taiwan, but to all overseas Chinese. (I mean the particular long post of mine towards the bottom of page 17, just before the post of Kirkhill at the bottom of the page)
> ...



I’m not really ducking your question, CougarDaddy, it’s just that it touches on yet another of that humungous range of topics on which I have no useful or informed opinion.

With specific regard to the _benshengren_ vs _waishengren_ issue and Taiwan’s future, I said, a couple of pages back, that I expect the _waishengren_ to prevail because, in my reading of history, the dominant ethnic group in a region (i.e. China, proper, rather than just the islands of Taiwan) tends to prevail in, at least, the short and medium terms – although the Balkans may (as they so often do) confound that analysis.

I think the idea that any country must “periodically demonstrate its power as one precondition to maintaining ... internal stability” is popular but not too well founded. There are certainly examples, going back as far as 2,500 years or so and as recently as today (North Korea), which _appear_ to demonstrate that such is the way of totalitarian governments facing domestic/economic difficulties, but, once again, my reading is somewhat different.

I’m sure there were/are some rulers who did/do exactly as you suggest – Vladimir Putin comes to mind. But, in the main, I think aggressive _demonstrations of power_ are usually the result of a desire to grow and expand in order to increase the _commonweal_ and, consequently, the ruler’s share thereof. I see these as _positive_ aggressive acts or postures – designed to accomplish something, rather than _negative_ acts or postures – designed to _hold the line_ or distract the people from the government’s deeper, domestic problems. There is, at least, an even chance my analysis is quite wrong – but it’s mine, and absent any better arguments than I’ve heard to date, I’ll stick with it.

_Caveat lector_:The closer we get to Chinese specifics the less firm my ground becomes – my _knowledge_ of China, poor as it is, is _organic_ rather than _systemic_: informed by people close to me and others with whom I have been fortunate enough to discuss issues that interest me.

My main interests are in the _nature_ of democracy and how (and why) it works or, too often, doesn’t work. That has led me to thinking about _culture_ and how they (because there are many) lead people towards (or away from) democracy. That, in turn has led me to consider (ever since I read Fareed Zakaria’s _ The Rise of Illiberal Democracy_ about ten years ago) the idea that _our_ idea of a _liberal democracy_ à la America, Britain, Canada and Denmark, might not be the only possibility. Unlike Zakaria, I have come to believe that _illiberal democracies_ can and do work in _illiberal_ societies and that there are, also, _conservative_ democracies (albeit few in number) that work in _conservative_ societies. Thus my (other than personal) interest in China: It is a deeply conservative society that understands, intuitively (I think) at a societal level, that (some form of) democracy is the handmaid of a sound economy and the essential (for conservatives) social harmony. I’m guessing – but I hope it’s an educated guess- that China will opt for some form of a conservative democracy.

I am fortunate to know a few _forty-something_ educated, ambitious Chinese people who are, right now, approaching or entering the senior ranks of academe, business and government and they have been generous in telling me their views and, now and again, arranging for me to meet their superiors and discuss ideas with them – but that doesn’t replace solid, supervised academic research. I have, simply, sought to learn a bit about how some Chinese look at some of the ideas that animate my thinking.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Plenty of water in Siberia.



Indeed, and plenty of other stuff, too, including much needed resources and _lebensraum_.


----------



## TCBF

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Indeed, and plenty of other stuff, too, including much needed resources and _lebensraum_.



The return of the "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere."


----------



## CougarKing

> The return of the "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere."



All the more reason to pay attention to the "Shanghai Six"/Shanghai Cooperative Organization/SCO alliance led by China and Russia.



I think that the scenario Tom Clancy details in his novel The Bear and the Dragon might not be too much of a stretch when it comes to reasons why you might find the PLA rolling through the Siberian plains in a future war. However, I really doubt the factors/catalysts for China making that desperate invasion will all happen as simultaneously as it did in the novel. Futhermore, I don't think Clancy did enough research, since he mentions the US still having an official embassy in Beijing (not a quasi-embassy or trade office like the AIT in Taiwan) even if the govt. of "Pres. Jack Ryan" switched their "One-China recognition" from the PRC to Taiwan as what happened in the novel.  :


----------



## Kirkhill

Right now China and Russia can both agree on the need to co-operate to "catch-up" to "The West".  When/if that day occurs is there anything in their mutual track-records to suggest that they can come an amicable distribution of assets?  

I don't see a Russia-China based Asian Union as a viable option.  Should I?


----------



## tomahawk6

What mystifies me about China-Russia is that the Chinese are migrating into Siberia and the Russians dont seem to be doing anything about it. Unchecked the Chinese could absorb alot of territory. If the Russians try to move them out there could be trouble.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Russians are streaming *out* of Siberia while the Chinese are streaming *in*.

I just read, within the past few days, that the Russian population of Siberia has declined by something like 16% while the Chinese _recorded_ population has increased by an order of magnitude! (Or some such numbers.)

Tom Clancy aside, Siberia is very, very attractive as a resource base. The Chinese, I think would rather buy those resources from a friendly neighbour but they *must* have some of them - one way or another.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Right now China and Russia can both agree on the need to co-operate to "catch-up" to "The West".  When/if that day occurs is there anything in their mutual track-records to suggest that they can come an amicable distribution of assets?
> 
> I don't see a Russia-China based Asian Union as a viable option.  Should I?



So you doubt the SCO security alliance will expand on anything more than "terrorism" and other internal security threats common to all its members, which the Chinese media often describes as the targets for those annual SCO military exercises? You doubt it will become another Warsaw Pact?



> Russians are streaming out of Siberia while the Chinese are streaming in.



Some of those Russians, unfortunately, end up in China's sex trade, as a number of Russian women end up as prostitutes for high-paying Chinese businessmen even in places as far in Western China as Urumqi, in Xinjiang province.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don't think the SCO is meant to tie Russia in.

It is, I believe, a way to extend Chinese influence into Central Asia. Russia is "in" only because, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, China wants then "in the tent pissin' out" rather "outside pissin' in." I suspect, also, that China is doing a little not so subtle "nose rubbing" - letting the Russians see that after only a very few years Central Asia is now in China's _sphere of influence_.

The Chinese are deeply suspicious of Islam and of the "stability" of their Islamic neighbours. The _separatists_ in Xinjiang are perceived to be a real, significant threat to China and, therefore, China needs to "control"the neighbourhood.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I don't think the SCO is meant to tie Russia in.
> 
> It is, I believe, a way to extend Chinese influence into Central Asia. Russia is "in" only because, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, China wants then "in the tent pissin' out" rather "outside pissin' in." I suspect, also, that China is doing a little not so subtle "nose rubbing" - letting the Russians see that after only a very few years Central Asia is now in China's _sphere of influence_.
> 
> The Chinese are deeply suspicious of Islam and of the "stability" of their Islamic neighbours. The _separatists_ in Xinjiang are perceived to be a real, significant threat to China and, therefore, China needs to "control"the neighbourhood.



Campbell,

Since you pointed out that the PRC intends to expand its "sphere of influence", do you think that the PRC intends to possibly make all the neighboring former Soviet satellite republics, such as Kazakhstan, into its own satellites or protectorates? While the Soviet Red Army technically "liberated" from the Nazis/occupied much of what later became the now-defunct East Bloc of Eastern Europe, the Chinese may use economic factors instead of force at first to expand their influence in Central Asia.

An example of this westward expansion of the Chinese sphere of influence would be the Tibet precedent. The Qing dynasty certainly had an influence on Tibet under both Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong; the latter emperor sent an expedition which occupied the country and made it a _de facto_ protectorate with the Dalai Lama, as Tibet's spiritual head, if I can recall correctly while the Chinese maintained a sort of resident commissioners called "Ambans" as Peking/Beijing's representative to Lhasa. The ROC also had a similar arrangement with Lhasa, and the ROC govt. in Taiwan has never given up its claim to Tibet up to today, though Tibet has been fully integrated as a province of the PRC.

It's a shame though that the only instance in Western/Hollywood popular media where the influence between China and Tibet is depicted is the movie _Seven Years of Tibet_, in a small scene where the Chinese representative to Lhasa in the local ROC embassy/consulate has to leave Tibet, not long after the new PRC govt. makes a claim on Tibet as yet another Chinese province. You see the Chinese "Amban", played by Victor Wong, and his embassy delegation as well as the embassy detachment of _Guo Min Jun_ soldiers leaving Lhasa together in one scene.  

Perhaps closer ties to India and Pakistan will help the US/Canada/Europe would serve as a counterweight to any westward Chinese expansion into Central Asia? Maybe your idea that you mentioned before about turning the Commonwealth into a security alliance would work as a framework to not only entice India to join (I doubt Pakistan will be reinstated into the Commonwealth with the current mess that it is in), but would serve as another incentive for Western powers to ensure that the two new nuclear powers will not go to war against each other, even if India does have its own interests.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don't think we should consider that the _Stans_ could be anything like as useful to China (in the role of _satellites_) as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland were to the now defunct USSR. For that reason and bearing in mind China's mistrust (at least the mistrust I perceive) of Islam, I doubt China wants them too close.

The British always preferred to rule indirectly; a good sound policy which I'm guessing the Chinese would like to emulate.  _Sphere of influence_? Yes. _Satellite_? No, not on the Warsaw Pact model, at any rate.


----------



## a_majoor

In terms of resource development, China is facing a similar problem that Imperial Japan faced in the 1930's.

The Imperial Army faction wanted to expand from Manchuria into Siberia in order to secure the resources known and suspected to be there. The two down sides to the project were the vast expense of actually developing the resources from scratch out of the hostile Russian wilderness, and the Red Army. The Japanese defeats in a series of battles between the Imperial Army and the Red Army in 1938 in Northern Manchuria and outer Mongolia ended that particular line of thought.

The Imperial Navy supported aggression against European colonies in SE Asia, with the rational that most resources were already developed and therefore accessible, European Empires would be unable to resist Japanese incursions and the local peoples could be co-opted to act as a ready labour force. As it turned out, the Navy faction was right up to that point, but had totally miscalculated the response of the United States.

The Chinese might establish a defacto colony in Siberia through "squatter's rights", but I suspect they may have difficulty in mobilizing the manpower and resources to develop the resources in a timely manner (note; they can accomplish this with either a patient approach, or alternatively rape Siberia of whatever there is to grab and leave). On the other hand, looking south provides a source of well developed resources and markets, and the Chinese may well be content to act as notional overlords of a trading hub without establishing an actual presence. In the 1400's, the Chinese sent tribute fleets throughout the Indian ocean basin to proclaim their power and accept notional acceptance of their supreme place in the order of things by other regional powers, but never established colonies, cities, markets or any of the other signs of presence that we as Westerners would take for granted.

The Stans provide an interesting case, they are regarded as part of the Russian "near abroad", watched by the Chinese as hotbeds of radical Islam and a threat to the Chinese "west" and potential "wedge" states being courted by the United States (who now operate bases and promote investment into the region). The Americans are being far more subtle in this region as reported by Robert Kaplan in "Imperial Grunts"; the thrust is "building relationships rather than bases". Perhaps the presence of large scale US forces in SW Asia is more of a red flag to distract the world from actions in the rest of the "Arc of Decision"


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> In terms of resource development, China is facing a similar problem that Imperial Japan faced in the 1930's.
> 
> The Imperial Army faction wanted to expand from Manchuria into Siberia in order to secure the resources known and suspected to be there. The two down sides to the project were the vast expense of actually developing the resources from scratch out of the hostile Russian wilderness, and the Red Army. The Japanese defeats in a series of battles between the Imperial Army and the Red Army in 1938 in Northern Manchuria and outer Mongolia ended that particular line of thought.
> 
> The Imperial Navy supported aggression against European colonies in SE Asia, with the rational that most resources were already developed and therefore accessible, European Empires would be unable to resist Japanese incursions and the local peoples could be co-opted to act as a ready labour force. As it turned out, the Navy faction was right up to that point, but had totally miscalculated the response of the United States.



According to the book Kaigun:Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941, by David Evans and Mark Peattie, the idea of northwards expansion was called the "Hoku Shin" strategy by IJA planners, while the expansion in Southeast Asia- especially the oil-rich the Dutch East Indies- was called "Nan Shin" by IJN planners.



> The Chinese might establish a defacto colony in Siberia through "squatter's rights", but I suspect they may have difficulty in mobilizing the manpower and resources to develop the resources in a timely manner (note; they can accomplish this with either a patient approach, or alternatively rape Siberia of whatever there is to grab and leave). On the other hand, looking south provides a source of well developed resources and markets, and the Chinese may well be content to act as notional overlords of a trading hub without establishing an actual presence. In the 1400's, the Chinese sent tribute fleets throughout the Indian ocean basin to proclaim their power and accept notional acceptance of their supreme place in the order of things by other regional powers, but never established colonies, cities, markets or any of the other signs of presence that we as Westerners would take for granted.



Thucydides,
The slow process by which Texas Republic came to seperate from Mexico by the 1840s and its later annexation by the United States by the Mexican-American War comes to mind as a parallel of gradual colonization of another nation's territory. The ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, which saw the creation of so-called "Republic of Serbian Krajina" within what is now Croatia and another sister Serb Republic called the "Republika Srpska" within what is now Bosnia, both of which Belgrade supported until the Dayton Accords were signed, could be another similar example, even if their fates were unfavorable to the Serbs in both countries.

As for those tribute fleets that set out across the Indian Ocean under the Ming Dynasty, they were mostly commanded by Admiral Zheng He, who is _Hui Ren_ or from a Han Chinese ethnic group which follows Islam. Part of the reason why there is a large Han Chinese community in Singapore today (who speak mostly Cantonese and Fukienese dialects) is because Singapore was one of the first Ming trade outposts Zheng He's fleet established on his way to the Indian Ocean; this goes contrary to your saying that the Chinese left no "colonies" behind when they sent their tribute fleets outward, since not only Singapore, but all those _Hua Qiao_/Overseas Chinese minority groups in the many nations of Southeast Asia today are the enduring legacy of Admiral Zheng He's fleets. 

Campbell,

Now that we have Admiral Zheng He in mind, perhaps one should reconsider whether the Beijing govt. really distrusts Muslims in general, since both the Uighurs and the _Hui Ren_ are two ethnic minorities within China that practice Islam. While the distrust you meant obviously refers to the foreign Muslims in the Central Asian "stans", the Muslim minorities within China are another story altogether. 

Like China's 50 or so _Zu_ or ethnic groups within China, aside from the _Han Zu_ these Muslim ethnic groups would have been given special attention by the PRC govt. not long after establishment with their efforts to better integrate them into mainstream Chinese society. Admiral Zheng He was and is probably still used by PRC schools as a symbol by which to inspire people in Muslim minority groups to better integrate with mainstream Chinese culture. Ethnic minorities which had smaller populations such as the Uighurs were allowed to have more than one child at the onset of the "One-Child Policy". Also, the greater exposure to Han/mainstream Chinese culture brought by the waves of Han Chinese settlers moving to western provinces like Xinjiang. IIRC, one interpretation of the PRC flag's symbolism holds that the five yellow stars symbolize the five largest _zu_/ethnic groups within China, with the Han obviously symbolized by the largest star; the _Hui Ren_/Muslim groups are supposedly symbolized by one of the smaller stars. My point is that in spite of recent Uighur nationalism, for the most part, Chinese Muslims are seen by Beijing as just another ethnic minority that it can trust no more or no less than other ethnic minorities; the Hakka minority have proven especially trouble to the Qing Dynasty during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1800s, to illustrate an example. For now, the PRC govt. is more concerned with keeping the Han Zu united, or at least hopes to be perceived as doing so, in order not to lose face or be perceived not only by the people, but by subversive elements as being too weak to maintain control and national unity; the recent handovers of Hong Kong and Macao back to mainland China, as well as the conciliatory gestures and diplomatic initiatives by both sides of the Taiwan Strait which demonstrate this.


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## Bruce Monkhouse

I won't post this as a Mod, as it is not in the guidelines but, listen up CougarDaddy, ........Edward Campbell, has on many different fronts, earned the right to be either addressed as Sir, or at least having  Mr.or Edward, placed in front of his last name.


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## Edward Campbell

No worries, Bruce Monkhouse or CougarDaddy. Had I been offended by anything CougarDaddy said I would have told him so.

It is not an issue, for me. In many languages it is customary to address people by "titles" - when no "titles" (like "uncle" or "elder brother" or "comrade" or "master") are evident one falls back on to a single word name. I know two people who speak and write absolutely unaccented English; one would have no idea of their Chinese ethnicity until you hear them address one another or refer to one another - not as "Eric" and "Vanessa" but rather as "Bother" and "Sister," as in "Sister, have you seen my _such 'n' such_?" That is the form they inherited as part of their _milk tongue_ - the language they learned at their mother's breast.

Serious students of a second language often pick up some of the linguistic habits of that language.

I don't know CougarDaddy's first language or his status re: other languages, but being addressed as "Campbell" does not jar and I do not take it as anything other than yet another linguistic peculiarity - I've gotten used to several over the decades.

He does not offend; I only wish I had his facility with languages; I only wish I was young again; it's a good thing I'm so devilishly handsome, eh? 

Maybe a Mod could delete both these messages so as not to clutter up the thread with extraneous details ...


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## TangoTwoBravo

While Taiwan, Siberia and perhaps places inside China are all indeed potential hotspots or fault lines for conflict, I sometimes wonder about a potential conflict involving Chinese interests in Africa.  Africa offers resources with a reduced threat of direct confrontation with peer powers such as Russia, the US, Japan and others.  Nevertheless, the expansion of power in an area can lead to either direct or indirect conflict with competing powers (perhaps India at some point in the future).

Anyhoo


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## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> No worries, Bruce Monkhouse or CougarDaddy. Had I been offended by anything CougarDaddy said I would have told him so.
> 
> It is not an issue, for me. In many languages it is customary to address people by "titles" - when no "titles" (like "uncle" or "elder brother" or "comrade" or "master") are evident one falls back on to a single word name. I know two people who speak and write absolutely unaccented English; one would have no idea of their Chinese ethnicity until you hear them address one another or refer to one another - not as "Eric" and "Vanessa" but rather as "Bother" and "Sister," as in "Sister, have you seen my _such 'n' such_?" That is the form they inherited as part of their _milk tongue_ - the language they learned at their mother's breast.
> 
> Serious students of a second language often pick up some of the linguistic habits of that language.
> 
> I don't know CougarDaddy's first language or his status re: other languages, but being addressed as "Campbell" does not jar and I do not take it as anything other than yet another linguistic peculiarity - I've gotten used to several over the decades.
> 
> He does not offend; I only wish I had his facility with languages; I only wish I was young again; it's a good thing I'm so devilishly handsome, eh?
> 
> Maybe a Mod could delete both these messages so as not to clutter up the thread with extraneous details ...



Mr. Campbell,

I do apologize for my not addressing you as Monkhouse said, for I do highly respect your opinion which is why I continually seek it. I also await your response to my last post, but am thankful for your insights so far. The same goes for Mr. Kirkhill and a few others on this thread as well.

Aside from my last post, I am also curious about what any of you would think about my comments  that discuss the Tibet precedents for Chinese protectorates predating the PRC occupation of Tibet, which I mentioned in the latter half of an earlier post in this page; my purpose is just to point out that there are precedents for China expanding westward through Central Asia and making such protectorates.

CD


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## Kirkhill

The feeling's mutual CougarDaddy.  And in my case Kirkhill is strictly a net name.  Chris is my actual name.

But to get back on topic - you mentioned a few posts back about how southerners with 5 and 6 tone languages/dialects would often switch to their local tongue "when trying to be deceiving or want to relate something to each other in confidence, when a foreigner (lao wai) or even a Chinese outsider from another province is in hearing distance."  Presumably Beijing is "another province" as far as the southerners are concerned.

If you will allow me to stipulate that culture is essentially organic and originates from the nuclear family via the tribe to the city and then and only then to the nation/state/country and finally the empire then I would suggest that there is an inherent, institutionalized distrust of "the other" within the PRC (and the Republic of China for that matter).  This would find echoes in Britain in terms of children's rhymes like "Taffy was a Welshman. Taffy was a thief.  Taffy came to our house and stole a pound of beef."  which was recited by Scots and English kids.  400-500 years after the Welsh Tudors incorporated the Welsh into England the rhyme still indicated that the Welsh were "other" than English and today they have their own parliament and are re-creating a Welsh language community.

Your observation to Edward that because Zheng He was muslim and Chinese, and that there are other Chinese muslims, and therefore muslims will find a welcoming in China as a trusted member of the community seems to me to be a bit weak.  In fact, IIRC, didn't the Emperor of the Day (Ming?) reject Zheng He's advice?

From what I understand Chinese suzerainty outside of the river lands, especially up into the Tarim, only goes back to the Tang's (roughly the days of the Viking raids on Lindisfarne and Charlemagne).  Prior to that there was lots of water coming down river so no need to move upstream and as well there was a desert in the Huang He loop through Mongolia preventing easy passage.  This seems to track with the high concentrations of Chinese speaking the northern dialects of the Han.  It also is contiguous with the highly urbanized areas (including high density farming communities). 

When we talk about "Chinese" moving into Siberia, are we talking about Beijing civil servants and Shaanxi farmers moving out to establish new communities on, essentially, virgin ground?  Or are we talking about Uighurs and Mongols moving north to continue their traditional lives amongst distant relatives that are living the same lives?  It seems to me that one is a threat to Beijing's hegemony and the other extends it.

Would the son of a farmer on the Han in Shaanxi move downriver to seek opportunity in Shanghai or would they consider moving upcountry to set up as a pioneer outside or Irkutsk?

Given my assumption on the institutionalized nature of culture I could see some moving north to continue as farmers but more moving downriver to continue in an urban setting.  Meanwhile the Uighurs and the Mongols will more and more ignore an increasingly porous border putting distance between themselves and Beijing and Beijing's hold/claim on them becoming more and more tenuous.

You mentioned Texas.  You might recall that Davy Crockett et al were late arrivals in America.  Their parents arrived in Virginia in the 1700s from the Border of Scotland and England via Northern Ireland.  They weren't welcome at home because of their independent, violent streak.  They weren't welcome in Ireland. Equally they weren't welcome in coastal Virginia which was settled by moneyed Englishmen with attachments to London.  They were sent off to the hills to act as a buffer between the slightly more "savage" Indians and the "civilized" slave owners in the Tidal Lands.  Texas was established as an independent Republic that only applied for help from the US after it got into trouble with the Mexicans and that happened when it became an irritant to the Mexican government.  I don't believe that the Texas expansion was centrally driven from Washington.

So there's the other question: Is Beijing in control of its northern populations?  

And finally, does that play into Beijing's fear of the chaos that might/will ensue when North Korea falls?


----------



## CougarKing

> Your observation to Edward that because Zheng He was muslim and Chinese, and that there are other Chinese muslims, and therefore muslims will find a welcoming in China as a trusted member of the community seems to me to be a bit weak.  In fact, IIRC, didn't the Emperor of the Day (Ming?) reject Zheng He's advice?



My points about Zheng He were mainly aimed at Thucydides and were meant to disprove the notion that Ming tribute fleets did not leave anything of consequence in the Southeast Asian nations they passed by, such as colonies, when in fact the tribute fleets of Admiral Zheng He as well as successive waves of Chinese traders and immigrants in the following centuries laid the seeds for the large _Hua Qiao_ communities/Chinese diaspora who continue to live in those Southeast Asian nations today. In fact, the _Hua Qiao_ communities in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia own a considerable portion of the wealth of those countries and exert considerable economic and political influence on the govt.s of those nations; the wealth of these Chinese communities is resented by many among the local populations of Malays and other ethnicities that members of some of these prominent local Chinese have been kidnapped and ransomed. Examples include the families of tycoons such as Lucio Tan, Henry Sy and the Gokongwei clan of the Philippines, as well as the Widajaja clan of Indonesia, if I can recall correctly.  

Regarding your other point about how much the PRC govt. "trusts" any of the Muslim groups, I did not say they trusted them at all, only that the PRC regarded them with the same level of distrust they would give any ethnic minority. BTW, just because CCTV News/Xinhua/PRC schools has told members of any Muslim minority/_Hui Ren_ to emulate Zheng He does not necessarily mean those minority members will necessarily believe that; neither will Han children taught verbatim to memorize the names of all the heroes throughout Chinese history up to the heroes of the Revolution will necessarily believe in the legendary exploits of Lei Feng or Cai Yongxiang. However, regardless of whether they are historically accurate or not, such historical figures are still emphasized in PRC schools and PRC propaganda- though not as much as before- in order to inspire a sense of nationalism and even a sense of belonging to a nation even bigger than one's ethnic group; still, such blind hero worship has obviously waned in importance in the two-three decades since Deng Xiaoping to the West, with more practical skills such as mathematics, science and foreign languages being emphasized.



> When we talk about "Chinese" moving into Siberia, are we talking about Beijing civil servants and Shaanxi farmers moving out to establish new communities on, essentially, virgin ground?  Or are we talking about Uighurs and Mongols moving north to continue their traditional lives amongst distant relatives that are living the same lives?  It seems to me that one is a threat to Beijing's hegemony and the other extends it.



Are we discussing the present day when you mention those Chinese civil servants and Shaanxi farmers? I really doubt any scholar-official from the Qing or Ming periods would want to move to a place they would consider a wilderness. When T6 mentions the Chinese moving into Siberia, he probably just means the usual migrant workers- some skilled and some unskilled- who would go to Siberia mainly to find jobs or possibly even to set up businesses; a not-so similar comparison would be the flow of a lot of cheap, unskilled and illegal labor into the Southern United States from Mexico.



> Would the son of a farmer on the Han in Shaanxi move downriver to seek opportunity in Shanghai or would they consider moving upcountry to set up as a pioneer outside or Irkutsk?



If you were just a poor farmer's son, do you think you would seriously have the money to travel all the way to Irkutsk??? Shanghai seems more probable. I take it this question was a rhetorical one?



> So there's the other question: Is Beijing in control of its northern populations?



I don't see any current problem with any minorities in the Northeast- Heilongjiang province, Jilin province, etc.- although the North Korean refugees streaming into those provinces adjacent to the Yalu may be a problem. 



> And finally, does that play into Beijing's fear of the chaos that might/will ensue when North Korea falls?



Does Beijing care much at all for their former proteges- the DPRK govt.- as much as in the past? I don't think so. The PRC acts in own self-interest and does not seem to see any "communist camraderie" anymore among neighboring Maoist/Marxist states such as Vietnam and the DPRK; in fact the PRC invaded Vietnam in 1979 although their relations are much better now and Vietnam has opened its markets to capitalism and full trade with the West in the same manner as the PRC. 

However, the PRC does care if Kim Jong Il starts his usual saber-rattling and has been helpful by participating in Six-Party talks with the US, Russia, Japan, the ROK/South Korea and the DPRK. Also, if I can recall correctly, the PRC cut off the electricity/gas pipeline supply that goes into the DPRK temporarily during one those times the DPRK tested its missiles or when there was a diplomatic crisis, in order to signal to Kim Jong Il of just how Beijing would tolerate; furthermore, the PLA has moved more troops to its border with the DPRK in one of those past diplomatic rows that involved Pyongyang.


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## a_majoor

WRT the treasure fleets, I was perhaps glossing it over a bit too quickly, but considering the size and numbers of ships in the "Treasure Fleet", the actual Chinese presence in the Indian ocean basin was insignifigent, especially when compared to the results of much smaller and less organized incursions of the same area by the various European Empires shortly thereafter. 

I was also under the impression that the large scale presence of Chinese people throughout SW Asia was the result of musch later disporias, including the recruitment of Chinese workers (voluntary or otherwise) to serve in the various European colonies. Regardless, they are there now....

Kirkhill raises an interesting point. There is a huge internal migration from the rural areas to the southern coastal industrial cities, and the bulk of these people are very likely from the Han Chinese ethnic community, while the shadowy illegal immigration into Siberia is very likely the groups identified by Kirkhill, and going for the reasons he suggested (getting away from the central government, as opposed to the central government encouraging or controlling this in any way). I suppose the interesting long term question will be who ends up with Siberia? The Russians? The Chinese? The Uighurs and Mongols rejoining their relatives? Will the Russians use force to assert their sovereinty over the area? Will Beijing send in the PLA and police to control their wayward citizens and bring them back under Chinese control?


----------



## a_majoor

Moving to a different topic: China's ForEx reserves

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/jan08/economicriseofchina.htm



> *China's trillion dollars*
> Posted by Richard Spencer on 07 Jan 2008  at 21:48
> Tags: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, US, dollars
> 
> Last week I wrote a piece for the paper's comment pages putting forward the view that a trillion dollars wasn't a lot of money. It was another of my attempts, possibly self-serving, to play down the hype over the economic rise of China that has started to take hold of some areas of public life in the UK and beyond.
> 
> US Dollars
> What does the Chinese government use to buy those dollars?
> 
> Self-serving? Because it's my job to hype China stories, and no-one else's, of course.
> 
> So you can say I'm biased, but in any case, re-reading the piece after publication I decided I ought to go on a bit more. I omitted for a general audience some of the economic niceties, so here for the suffering loyal reader they are, as I see them.
> 
> It's basically true that a trillion and a half dollars divided between a billion and a half people (that's the Chinese people, as in the People's Republic, which owns a trillion and a half dollars in foreign exchange reserves). However, that sounds a bit amateurish, and since I did check out some aspects of my theory with the professionals I thought I should flesh it out.
> 
> The attitude I was attacking is that attitude that states that by itself, China's admittedly huge forex reserves, as of last year the largest in the world, were an enormous sign of wealth which, as the government set it into action overseas, would see the idea that China was taking over the world become reality.
> 
> If you have a trillion and a half dollars, you can buy up swathes of western companies, hold indebted countries who have borrowed the cash (like the United States) in your thrall, and generally play at economic neo-colonialism.
> 
> There's one, to me, very dramatic counter-argument: if huge forex reserves make you a giant, what about other big forex holders. Let's not talk about such mighty titans as Qatar, or Taiwan, or South Korea. Let us instead talk of Japan, the only other country with (nearly) a trillion in reserves - and let's face it, no-one's been talking about Japan as a giant throwing its weight around in the last few years.
> 
> If a trillion in spare cash makes you a strong nation, what happened there?
> 
> There's a good answer, for which I am indebted in part to Michael Pettis, the hedge fund director/professor of finance at Beijing University whose blog follows this issue closely. (As with everyone I quote, wisdom is his, mistakes are mine.)
> 
> He points out that forex reserves seem like cash and sometimes are cash, but are also sometimes just an accounting issue.
> 
> While Qatar has made money by selling a dollar-denominated asset (oil), China has got those reserves like this: it sells lots and lots of stuff, nearly all in its own currency. It sells far more than it buys.
> 
> While that seems like a good thing, and is, you would expect its currency to rise, making its stuff more expensive and less buyable.
> 
> But China wants to stay competitive (and to keep its currency stable, which has other advantages) so it keeps the renminbi artificially low by buying up the dollars of the companies that have sold the "stuff" at an artificially high price. It also has to buy dollars off foreign companies investing in China. End result: it has lots of dollars, but overpriced ones.
> 
> Well, better to have overpriced dollars than none at all, it's true: the dollar is still the main reserve currency, and having them is a good hedge against the sort of currency crisis that afflicted much of Asia a decade ago. But still, you have bought an asset at too high a price - and, as we now see, that asset's value is decreasing all the time.
> 
> Still, better to have the asset - but just how valuable is it? Now here's the thing: what does the Chinese government use to buy those dollars? Of course, being the government, it can just print money.
> 
> But that's inflationary - no governments should just print money. It could pay it out of its budget - but what government has the hundreds of billions of spare dollar-equivalents necessary to build up those reserves?
> 
> In fact, it is largely issuing bills - ie, it is borrowing money off banks to buy the dollars. Michael Pettis tells me that no-one knows the exact details - it's that opaque thing, the party state, at work again - but a guess might be two-thirds of the forex reserves are matched by government bills. In other words, its net wealth is much, much smaller than a trillion and a half dollars.
> 
> There's an interesting way of looking at this (this is purely my own doing, and I welcome people telling me it's nonsense). Why are the banks lending money to the government on this scale to buy dollars? Remember that these are ultimately state-owned banks, which operate according to a mixture of commercial and political imperatives. Is this a good investment of their savers'/depositors/investors' money, or are they doing what they are told?
> 
> Well, there's the rub. Banks are difficult places for depositors: as we know, ordinary savings accounts attract very little interest, which is one reason people are flocking to the stock market and the property market.
> 
> Individuals are banned from investing abroad (say, in dollars) and it is also difficult for domestic financial institutions. Yet modern investment advice suggests that one should diversify one's holdings - I bet if you look at your pension/investment fund, if you have one, you will find that while most is in your home currency, some has been diversified to other currencies and their equities and other markets as a hedge. So this represents a sensible diversification by the banks.
> 
> Except the actual decisions on where to invest are not being taken by the banks,  but by the state. The already nationalised assets of the banks have been renationalised once turned into dollars. And liberal economists would suspect that as with all state-run business decisions, the investments are not necessarily wise: as in, perhaps, putting your trillions in a fast-declining currency backed by an economy which appears to be in trouble.
> 
> Creating a sovereign wealth fund with some of the money (200 billion) looks like a sensible move, as that puts the investment fund at arms-length from the government. But how long is an arm?
> 
> We are waiting for that 200 billion to start buying up western companies, and some of it no doubt will - 3 billion has gone to the private equity firm Blackstone, and 5 billion to the troubled US investment bank Morgan Stanley.
> 
> But the biggest sums - 65 billion, more or less - has so far been ear-marked to bail out troubled Chinese banks. It's not being used to take over world-beating western companies yet!
> 
> In fact, it doesn't strike me at all as far-fetched to describe the forex reserves a nationalised pension fund. After all, their existence is part and parcel of a non-liberalised financial system which discourages long-term private pension fund building.
> 
> As we know from the Shanghai pension fund scandal, such pension funds as there are in China aren't necessarily the safest bets for your future, and they are, in total, rather small.
> 
> Last time I looked, the government's own pension funds were in the low tens of billions of dollars: compare that to the Japanese government pension fund which is the largest single pension fund in the world (guess what - it's around a trillion dollars).
> 
> So in a best-case scenario - where the government doesn't have to use the reserves to rescue itself from a currency crisis, or to bring them back home to pay off the debts it's taken out to buy them - the reserves represent a long-term, rather poorly invested savings fund.
> 
> In fact, they the government's major savings fund for all its many future dependent pensioners.
> 
> Which is why, with a number of elderly that will grow fast in the next couple of decades, a trillion dollars is not a large sum of money.
> 
> As I say, I'm not saying it's better not to have reserves than have them: but excessive reserves are a sign of something that's not quite right.
> 
> As with everything else (including the American sub-prime crisis) if growth continues, and reform happens, you could grow out of the underlying problem - the weakness of the financial system and lack of confidence in the industrial sector that causes the government to undervalue its currency.
> 
> Then you will be left with a healthy-looking, but not particularly enormous, starting point for future investment.
> 
> All well and good, though as I pointed out once before, a sum not unlike other country's (Japan's) pension funds, and not unlike the international holdings of big western wealth management firms. But nothing, in the overall view, so very spectacular.
> 
> At the moment, China's growth is heading in the right way, and the financial system is getting better. That's the best-case scenario, then. Let's just hope it continues.
> Posted by Richard Spencer on 07 Jan 2008 at 21:48


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## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> WRT the treasure fleets, I was perhaps glossing it over a bit too quickly, but considering the size and numbers of ships in the "Treasure Fleet", the actual Chinese presence in the Indian ocean basin was insignifigent, especially when compared to the results of much smaller and less organized incursions of the same area by the various European Empires shortly thereafter.
> 
> I was also under the impression that the large scale presence of Chinese people throughout SW Asia was the result of musch later disporias, including the recruitment of Chinese workers (voluntary or otherwise) to serve in the various European colonies. Regardless, they are there now....



I was only referring to the Chinese diaspora/_Hua Qiao_ communities in Southeast Asia, not SW Asia or the Indian Ocean basin as you stated, unless you had Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore in mind as well when you mentioned the "Indian Ocean basin", since the Strait of Malacca leads to the Indian Ocean.


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## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, from this morning's _Globe and Mail_ should give us pause to wonder about the purported drive for sovereignty by Taiwan:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080112.wtaiwanelection0112/BNStory/International/home


> Taiwan opposition wins landslide
> 
> PETER ENAV
> 
> Associated Press
> 
> January 12, 2008 at 9:20 AM EST
> 
> TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party won a landslide victory in legislative elections Saturday, dealing a humiliating blow to the government's hard-line China policies two months before a presidential poll.
> 
> President Chen Shui-bian, who has been criticized for aggravating relations with China by promoting policies to formalize Taiwan's de facto independence, resigned as chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party immediately after the extent of the defeat became clear.
> 
> “I should shoulder all responsibilities,” Mr. Chen said. “I feel really apologetic and shamed.”
> 
> Critics say Mr. Chen's policies have allowed Taiwan's once vibrant economy to lose competitiveness and ratcheted up tension in the perennially edgy Taiwan Strait. Washington has made it clear it finds Mr. Chen's China policies dangerous and provocative — particularly a planned referendum on Taiwanese membership in the United Nations, which appears designed to underscore the island's political separateness from the mainland.
> 
> A March 22 presidential election to chose a successor to Mr. Chen, who must step down after eight years in office, pits Frank Hsieh of Mr. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party against the Nationalists' Ma Ying-jeou. Recent opinion polls give Mr. Ma a 20-point lead.
> 
> The DPP wants to formalize the independence Taiwan has had since an inconclusive civil war nearly 60 years ago, but has held off out of fears that China would make good on threats to attack. In contrast, the Nationalists favour more active engagement with China and do not rule out eventual unification.
> 
> With most votes counted, TV station San Li projected the Nationalists would win 82 seats in the 113-seat Legislature, against only 27 for the DPP, with four going to independents. In Taiwan's bitterly partisan media environment, San Li is a strong DPP supporter.
> 
> Speaking at Nationalist headquarters in Taipei, Mr. Ma said the party had won 81 seats — enough to give it a three-quarters majority together with four pro-Nationalist independents — but cautioned against overconfidence.
> 
> “We need to be cautious about the presidential poll, and hopefully we can win,” he said. “With a Nationalist presidency and Nationalist-controlled legislature, we can push forward the reform expected by the Taiwanese people.”
> 
> If the Nationalists do go on to recapture the presidency, they will be in a strong position to end years of deadlock between Taiwan's legislative and executive branches, and stabilize the island's rocky relations with China. In Taiwan's bitterly partisan media environment, San Li is a strong DPP supporter and offered the most conservative assessment of the Nationalist sweep.
> 
> Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan specialist at North Carolina's Davidson College, said in order for Mr. Hsieh to win the presidency, he must distance himself from Mr. Chen, who has grown increasingly unpopular after a series of corruption scandals and a sputtering economy.
> 
> “He needs to convince people that he is different from the rest of the party,” Ms. Rigger said.
> 
> During Mr. Chen's two terms as president, the Nationalists used a slender legislative majority to block many of his policy initiatives, including the purchase of a multibillion-dollar package of American weapons. Also left stagnating have been negotiations to open direct air and shipping routes between Taiwan and China.
> 
> In the legislative campaign, Mr. Ma emphasized his message that Mr. Chen's reluctance to engage China inflamed tensions and hurt the island's economy — one of the 20 largest in the world and a major research and manufacturing base for the computer industry.
> 
> Mr. Ma also drew attention to American unhappiness with Mr. Chen's China policies. Twenty-nine years after it shifted recognition from Taipei to Beijing, the U.S. remains Taiwan's most important foreign partner, supplying it with the means to defend itself against any future Chinese attack.
> 
> In contrast to Mr. Ma, Mr. Hsieh maintained a relatively low profile in the legislative campaign, apparently because of his ambivalence over Mr. Chen's pro-independence stance.
> 
> Mr. Hsieh hews to the DPP's pro-independence line in principle, but has made it clear he rejects some of Mr. Chen's hard-line policies, including his moves to limit Taiwanese economic ties to the mainland.
> 
> He favours ditching Mr. Chen's requirement that Taiwanese companies limit investments in China to less 40 per cent of their asset value. He has also indicated a willingness to expand direct charter flights across the Taiwan Strait.
> 
> Mr. Ma and the Nationalists go considerably farther. They want to remove the asset requirement altogether, and sanction scheduled flights between China and Taiwan.
> 
> China's government did not immediately react, but was likely to be comforted by the election results.
> 
> “The election will have a positive impact, benefiting stability across the Taiwan Strait,” said Yu Keli, head of the Taiwan Studies Institute, a Chinese government-backed think tank in Beijing. “The Taiwanese electorate has delivered a no-confidence vote on Chen Shui-bian.”



But, a split administration - a "sovereignist" president held in check by a pro-Chinese legislature - might satisfy many Taiwanese.


----------



## CougarKing

Mr. Campbell,

I am actually a little bit surprised by this _Guo Min Dang_ victory, and just weeks before Chinese New Year- a good omen for them?  ;D

I don't think I overestimated the DPP's pro-independence appeal among both the _benshengren_; it can be inferred that perhaps all those recent scandals such as those that involved Chen-Shui Bian's brother-in-law and Chen's First Lady were among the many things that made their party less appealing, aside from the fact that cooler, more pragmatic heads who are more worried about NOT being invaded for simply declaring independence and about the economy.

Poor "Ah-Bian"...as the Taipei locals affectionately call him, partially because he was their former mayor, if I can recall correctly.


----------



## Kirkhill

Just curious - Who would the Taiwanese vote for if they wanted both the Weapons Package AND More Flights and Trade?   Is that an option?


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Just curious - Who would the Taiwanese vote for if they wanted both the Weapons Package AND More Flights and Trade?   Is that an option?



For BOTH, of course, you'd want the Nationalists/_Guo Min Dang_ of course. But they've already been doing more trade since the 1980s, during the rule of President Chiang-Ching Kuo, the son of Chiang-Kai Shek, who began all these conciliatory gestures at opening trade links/_waishengren_ family visits to the mainland before he died, although there were no DIRECT trade and postal links between mainland China and Taiwan before March 21, 2000, if I can recall correctly, since prior to that, Hong Kong had to be the conduit for all Taiwanese trade and other links to the mainland; I've also heard something about there being talks to restart direct air routes between Taiwan and the mainland without having to go all the way to Hong Kong for a layover anymore, regardless if their destination in the mainland was Beijing or Qingdao or even Xian!


----------



## CougarKing

The GPD and Xinhua are at it again, trying to downplay the PLA's buildup, even if this article was from a US site.

 :

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159976,00.html?wh=news



> Chinese General Downplays Buildup
> Associated Press  |  January 14, 2008
> BEIJING - China's top general sought to allay U.S. concerns Monday about his country's military buildup, but defended a decision late last year to deny Hong Kong port calls by an American aircraft carrier and other navy ships.
> 
> Gen. Chen Bingde, in charge of day-to-day operations for the 2.3 million-member People's Liberation Army, offered no new explanations as to why Beijing turned away the U.S. ships, a move that sparked consternation at the Pentagon.
> 
> "The distance between China and U.S. militaries is big. ... We don't have the ability to make you afraid of us," Chen, chief of the general staff, said at the beginning of talks at the Defense Ministry with Adm. Timothy Keating, the top U.S. commander in the Asia-Pacific region.
> Keating, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, was making his first trip to China since Beijing turned away the USS Kitty Hawk and five ships accompanying it for a Hong Kong port call in November. The same week, two U.S. Navy minesweepers also were turned away after seeking shelter during a storm.
> 
> "China is a country with its own territory. If your ship wants to stop by in Hong Kong you have to follow the international rules and go through some procedures," Chen told Keating.
> He did not say whether the ships had failed to follow proper procedures, but said they were welcome to make port calls in the future.
> 
> China hinted at the time that its actions were triggered by the U.S. Congress' honoring of the Dalai Lama and U.S. arms sales to China's rival Taiwan. China views the Dalai Lama - a spiritual leader to Tibetans - as being intent on separating Tibet from China. Beijing considers self-governing Taiwan a breakaway province that it hopes to reclaim.
> Keating's Hawaii-based Pacific Command oversees a vital strategic area for the U.S., including busy trade routes that feed China's booming economy and the potentially unstable Taiwan Strait, a 100-mile-wide body of water that divides Taiwan from the mainland.
> 
> U.S. politicians and military leaders have voiced worries about China's rapidly rising military spending and the country's secretiveness about its military aims. Beijing has overseen double-digit percentage growth in its military spending annually for the past decade.
> 
> Keating was scheduled to go to Shanghai on Tuesday and then southern Guangdong province to visit a military base there.



Still, if one looks at the biography of General Chen Bingde (陈炳德), one may get a better idea of whether this current leader of the PLA GSD will be more of a party sycophant or a real, professional soldier.

http://www.chinavitae.com/biography/Chen_Bingde/career

The above link shows that he spent most of his time with combat arms units-especially the infantry- before going through a number of high positions that included the Director of the GAD and later one of his current positions/hats: the head of the PLA's GSD/General Staff.



> Biography
> Chen Bingde, male, Han nationality, is a native of Nantong, Jiangsu Province. He was born in 1941 and holds the equivalent of a technical college degree. Chen joined the PLA in 1961 and the CPC in 1962.
> 
> A section chief of the Military Training Section, Chen was a division commander and deputy commander in the 1980s. He joined the Nanjing Military Region as chief of staff in 1985 and was promoted to major general in 1988.
> 
> A year after receiving his lieutenant general stars, Chen became the commander-in-chief of the Nanjing Military Region. He served concurrently as deputy secretary of the command's Party committee. A member of the 16th CPC Central Committee, Chen was made commander-in-chief of the Jinan Military Region in 1999. He became a member of the CPC Central Military Commission and Director-General of the PLA General Armaments Department in 2004.
> In 2007, he became chief of the PLA Headquarters of the General Staff, a member of the 17th CPC Central Committee and a member of the 17th CPC Central Military Commission.]


----------



## TCBF

- Notice how, even with a population of over one billion, they STILL have on strength a soldier who joined in 1961.  Our HR Mil types could learn a lot by visiting China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese have a tradition of very old (senior) soldiers.

They respect (revere might be an appropriate word) age and experience - sometimes too much, perhaps.

Octogenarian generals were (are?) common in the Central Committee a few years ago - they were a _shoo in_ if they had participated in the "Long March."  We might suggest that Deng Xiaoping owed part of his power base to being a "Long March" survivor - otherwise the _Cultural Revolution_ and the _Gang of Four_ (Mao's widow +) might have been able to have treated him more harshly.


Edit: spelling Deng Xiaoping


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Chinese have a tradition of very old (senior) soldiers.
> 
> They respect (revere might be an appropriate word) age and experience - sometimes too much, perhaps.
> 
> Octogenarian generals were (are?) common in the Central Committee a few years ago - they were a _shoo in_ if they had participated in the "Long March."  We might suggest that Deg Xiaoping owed part of his power base to being a "Long March" survivor - otherwise the _Cultural Revolution_ and the _Gang of Four_ (Mao's widow +) might have been able to have treated him more harshly.



Mr. Campbell,

The reverence for age and experience goes a bit too far for the "paramount leader" of China with a kind of personality cult, as you well aware, as demonstrated with Mao Zedong and to a much more limited extent with Deng Xiaoping; a similar personality cult arose in North Korea with Kim Il Song when he was still alive, and obviously with his son Kim Jong Il. However, I have not observed or seen any instances where Dr. Sun Yat Sen or Generalisimo Chiang Kai-Shek were revered as almost "deity-like" as with the other two countries, even if Dr. Sun can be argued to be the father of modern/Republican China before the main schism of Chinese history led to a diverging of paths between Mao's CCP and Chiang's GMD. I have heard of and seen statues and numerous portraits of both Sun and Chiang at memorial parks and I think govt. buildings when I used to study in Taiwan. 

As for the idea of "octogenarian generals" or really old, senior generals within the PLA, I do not think that this is limited to China, since US Army General Douglas MacArthur was about 70 when he took part in the Korean War and I think that Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg of Germany and Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim of Finland still served their respective nations in spite of their age.


----------



## CougarKing

Ahh yes...the Spratleys island chain...the point of contention claimed by the PRC, ROC and a few other Southeast Asian nations in the region because of its supposedly rich oil deposits. 

http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20080123-114334/Taiwan-sends-military-aircraft-to-disputed-Spratlys



> Taiwan sends military aircraft to disputed Spratlys
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 19:43:00 01/23/2008
> 
> 
> TAIPEI -- Taiwan has for the first time sent a military aircraft to the disputed Spratly islands, a defence official said Wednesday, amid reports of a planned visit there by President Chen Shui-bian.
> "The C-130 aircraft landed on the Taiping islet on Monday and returned to Taiwan later that day," the defense ministry official told Agence France-Presse without giving details.
> The Taipei-based United Daily News said Wednesday Chen was planning a trip to the Spratlys before the March 22 presidential election to underscore Taipei's claim to the disputed archipelago in the South China Sea in a move expected to spark tensions in the region.
> 
> Presidential office spokesman Lee Nan-yang declined to confirm the planned visit and rejected speculation that it was aimed at drumming up support for Frank Hsieh, presidential candidate for the ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
> 
> Chen, who is to retire in May after eight years in office, planned to take an air force C-130 transport aircraft to the Taiping islet, the biggest island in the Spratlys, the newspaper said.
> 
> The trip, if it goes ahead, would likely lead to protests from neighboring countries -- including Taiwan's rival China -- which also lay claim to the islands, the daily said.
> 
> Taiwan's defense ministry began building a 1,150-meter (3,795-feet) runway on the fortified Taiping islet in mid-2006, despite protests from Vietnam, and the project has been completed, the paper said.
> 
> Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines claim all or part of the potentially oil-rich Spratlys.
> All claimants except Brunei have troops based on the archipelago of more than 100 islets, reefs and atolls, which have a total land mass of less than five square kilometers (two square miles).
> 
> The DPP suffered a humiliating defeat in parliamentary elections on January 12, with the main opposition Kuomintang and its smaller allies winning 86 of 113 seats. Chen immediately resigned as DPP chairman.



Yes, Mr. Chen...way to "build cooperation" by emphasizing ROC/Taiwan sovereignty over the area by going there during the last week before Chinese New Year; that'll really show you really want to reconcile with the mainland or seek diplomatic recognition for the ROC from other neighbours.   :


----------



## CougarKing

Ahh yes...Beijing wants the satellite shootdown data from the US DoD.  :

What hypocrites! They want info on the US shootdown when the PRC government themselves didn't provide advanced info. on their own satellite shootdown not too long ago, even when the US officials requested it. In contrast, a lot of advance warning was given by the US government on the satellite downing over the past week. 

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,162524,00.html?wh=news



> *China Wants US Satellite Downing Data*
> Associated Press  |  February 21, 2008
> BEIJING - China asked the U.S. to release data on the shootdown of an ailing spy satellite, while the Communist Party's newspaper blasted what it called Washington's callous attitude toward the weaponization of space.
> 
> China registered its objections well before the satellite's destruction by a missile launched from a Navy cruiser on Wednesday, which likely accounted for a mild response Thursday from the Foreign Ministry.
> 
> "China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regularly scheduled news conference.
> "China requests the U.S. ... provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way," Liu said.
> 
> In contrast, the overseas edition of People's Daily excoriated Washington for opposing a recent Russian-Chinese proposal on demilitarizing space.
> 
> "One cannot but worry for the future of space when a great nation with such a massive advantage in space military technology categorically refuses a measure to prevent the militarization of space," the paper said.
> 
> Washington has rejected the Russian-Chinese proposal for a global ban on space arms because it would prohibit an American missile interceptor system in the Czech Republic and Poland, while exempting Chinese and Russian ground-based missiles that can fire into space.
> 
> China's official Xinhua News Agency on Thursday reported the satellite downing without comment, while a Defense Ministry spokesman, who identified himself only by his surname, Ji, said no statement on the issue would be forthcoming.
> 
> China's objections signal its skepticism over whether the satellite downing was truly necessary and unease over apparent U.S. mastery of a key military technology that Beijing is also pursuing. They also appear aimed at turning the tables on U.S. criticism of Beijing's own shootdown of a defunct Chinese satellite last year.
> 
> "The concern is whether the U.S. version of the story is true: Whether that satellite is indeed failing and out of control and if this kind of missile shooting is the best way to remove the threat," said Shen Dingli, an America watcher at Fudan University in Shanghai.
> 
> Or, he said, the reasons could be a pretext for an anti-satellite weapons test.
> 
> Unlike Beijing, which gave no notice before using a missile to pulverize a disabled weather satellite in January 2007, Washington discussed its plans at length and insisted it was not a test.
> 
> Subsequent requests by U.S. officials for more information were ignored and none of Beijing's recent statements mentioned China's own satellite shootdown.
> 
> China's anti-satellite test was also criticized for being more dangerous. The targeted satellite was located about 500 miles above the earth and the resulting debris threatened communication satellites and other orbiting space vehicles. Foreign space experts and governments labeled China a space litterbug.
> 
> Still, the distinction between the two actions may be lost for many, said Denny Roy, an expert on the Chinese military at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
> 
> "What the Americans (have done) greatly undercuts the condemnation heaped on China last year," Roy said. While the circumstances are different, that is "a fine point that is easily overlooked," he said.
> 
> Beyond propaganda, the potential tie-in to missile defense is a source of real worry to China. Beijing sees those plans as a way of integrating the U.S. defense with regional partners such as Japan, while reducing the threat that China's growing arsenal of medium range ballistic missiles poses to Taiwan, the self-governing U.S. ally that China claims as its own territory, to be recovered by force if need be.
> 
> While some in the Pentagon may believe it is wise to put China on notice about U.S. capabilities, it could serve to further embolden Beijing, said Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information, a security policy group in Washington, D.C.
> 
> "This may give the hard-liners in the PLA (People's Liberation Army) what they need to prevail," she said.


----------



## a_majoor

Perhaps the Chinese are on a fishing expedition. The shoot down of a satellite is of a different order of magnitude than ABM defense (something the Americans have demonstrated to their own satisfaction), and doing a shoot down with a mobile weapon such as the SM-3 represents a much more developed capability than using larger, land based launchers.

For China, this represents a possible counter to the threat of 800+ missiles aimed at Taiwan, US Navy warships have a demonstrated potential to intervene in a crisis and make the targeting solution far more difficult (which missiles will actually make it through?), as well as making the PLAN's job more difficult as well, since they will have to sail into the open waters of the Pacific to find and neutralize the USN missile cruisers.

The USN will have to get a lot more of these weapons into service, and qualify many more platforms to carry them as well in the near future to deal with potential missile threats in East and Southwest Asia......Arsenal ship anyone?


----------



## tomahawk6

The Burke class DDG is also capable of firing this specific SM-3.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080304.wchina05/BNStory/International/home


> Beijing gives its military a double-digit boost
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> 
> From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> March 4, 2008 at 11:43 PM EST
> 
> BEIJING — The dispute between China and the United States over military spending took a turn for the worse Tuesday as Beijing announced another sharp rise in its defence budget and angrily accused Washington of “Cold War thinking.”
> 
> China disclosed that its military budget will jump by 17.6 per cent this year, continuing its controversial trend of boosting its military spending by significantly more than the growth rate of its economy.
> 
> China has given a hefty double-digit budget increase to the People's Liberation Army in 19 of the past 20 years, provoking criticism from rivals such as the United States and Japan.
> 
> A day earlier, the Pentagon released a report accusing China of concealing the true magnitude of its military spending. The report estimated that China's actual military spending could be more than triple its official budget. And it warned that the Chinese secrecy could trigger a military crisis.
> 
> “The lack of transparency in China's military and security affairs poses risks to stability by increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation,” the report says. “This situation will naturally and understandably lead to hedging against the unknown.”
> 
> The report expressed alarm over China's rapid push into high-technology warfare tactics, including anti-satellite weapons, sophisticated missiles, nuclear submarines and cyber-warfare capabilities.
> 
> And it said China is putting new emphasis on what it calls “Assassin's Mace” programs, which are designed to give it an advantage over a technologically superior adversary.
> 
> Japan echoed those concerns Tuesday, noting the rapid rise in Chinese military spending and calling for “transparency” in the Chinese military budget.
> 
> China lashed back at the U.S., denouncing the Pentagon report as “interference” in China's internal affairs.
> 
> “We demand that the U.S. abandon Cold War thinking and correctly recognize China and China's development and revise the mistaken ways of the report,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Tuesday. “We are extremely dissatisfied.”
> 
> Under its latest budget, China is planning to spend about $59-billion (U.S.) on its military this year. This is a 17.6-per-cent increase over its actual spending last year, and a 19.1-per-cent increase over its original budget for the year.
> 
> China's total spending on its military arsenal, however, is much bigger than its official budget would suggest. For example, the official budget does not include the cost of China's strategic forces, its military research and development, its paramilitary forces and its foreign military purchases.
> 
> The Pentagon estimates that China's total military spending last year was between $97-billion and $139-billion. This amount is still dwarfed by the U.S. military budget, which will be around $620-billion this year. But the Chinese budget can finance a much bigger military machine than it might seem at first glance, since Chinese wages are far smaller than American wages.
> 
> A research institute in Stockholm estimated that the Chinese military budget was around $188-billion in 2006 if measured in terms of purchasing power. This made it second only to the U.S. military budget of about $529-billion in 2006.
> 
> Jiang Enzhu, a spokesman for the Chinese parliament, argued that China's military budget as a proportion of gross domestic product is smaller than the military spending of the U.S., Britain, France and Russia.
> 
> Most of the latest increase will be spent on higher salaries and better meals and training for its two million soldiers, he said.
> 
> “China's limited military capability is solely for the purpose of safeguarding independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and does not pose a threat to any other country,” Mr. Jiang told reporters Tuesday.
> 
> “In recent years, the Chinese government has moderately increased its spending on national defence on the basis of sustained, steady and fast economic growth and rapid build-up of government revenues,” he added. “These increases were of a compensatory nature to make up for the weak defence foundation.”
> 
> Mr. Jiang's talk of “territorial integrity” is a codeword for Taiwan, which China considers to be part of its territory. China often makes military threats against Taiwan, and Chinese President Hu Jintao yesterday made an unusually pugnacious attack on Taiwan's pro-independence government, calling it “the biggest menace to national sovereignty and territorial integrity … and the biggest threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”



A friend who has just returned from a lengthy visit in China (his first trip “home” in nearly a decade) commented on the extraordinary self confidence being displayed by all levels of _official China_. It’s not just the Olympics – although they promise to be spectacularly successful in every respect, especially as a major propaganda _coup_ for China; almost everything, he says, seems to be working (well enough). The economic growth is spreading from the East Coast Strip into the central Chinese provinces (like Hunan) and even into the West. The Party is more and more open to (Chinese) criticism and citizens are more prone to expressing their grievances in public – he told me a about a _revolt_ by ‘old age’ pensioners (who can be as young as 45 in China!) over the cost of their annual park passes; something that would have been unheard of 10 years ago.

The increase in the defence budget is, I think and expression of that increased confidence. Five, maybe even three years ago the priority would have been on regional economic expansion because the Chinese were worried about civil unrest caused by economic inequality. (Remember the Canadian Department of Regional and Economic Expansion? It was created in 1969 by Pierre Trudeau - as his answer to Stalin’s Five Year Plans, I suppose.) China would also have worried about the reactions of the bankers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – no longer: the Chinese hold enough credit to dictate now, not obey.

This is *not*, in my opinion, a cause for great worry. China is a major power, an emerging superpower and she should be expected to want to be able to assert herself. There is a need to balance (nout necessarily ‘counter’) China with a more prosperous India and strengthened Western “core*s* – Europe and a US led _Anglosphere_ +.”


----------



## CougarKing

Ahhh yes...the continued hypocrisy of the CCP. They host the Olympic Games in Beijing while human rights abuses there are ignored. Say something bad about the party in public or start doing morning exercises that resemble those of _Falun Gong_ and you might notice plain-clothes _Guo An Bu_ agents suddenly following you around everywhere by the end of the day.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23576671/



> *U.S. cites China for repression, torture*
> State Dept. report says Olympic host has poor record on human rights
> BREAKING NEWS
> The Associated Press
> updated 11:14 a.m. PT, Tues., March. 11, 2008
> WASHINGTON - China, host of the summer Olympics, is an authoritarian nation that denies its people basic human rights and freedoms, harasses journalists and foreign aid workers and tortures prisoners, the United States charged Tuesday.
> 
> China is still among the world's human rights abusers despite rapid economic growth that has transformed large parts of Chinese society, the State Department said in an annual accounting of human rights practices around the world.
> 
> Portions of the report were obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release Tuesday. The report gives a chilling account of alleged torture in China, including the use of electric shocks, beatings, shackles, and other forms of abuse. It includes an account of a prisoner strapped to a "tiger bench," as device that forces the legs to bend sometimes until they break.
> 
> The report details then lengths some Chinese officials have taken to enforce China's well-known "one child" policy, and says forced relocations went up last year. The report notes claims that people were forced from their homes to make way for Olympic projects in Beijing.
> 
> "The year 2007 saw increased efforts to control and censor the Internet, and the government tightened restrictions on freedom of speech and the domestic press," the report says of China. "The government continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison journalists, Internet writers and bloggers."
> 
> The country-by-country report is compiled separately from U.S. diplomatic efforts and presented to Congress. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was releasing it at the State Department.
> 
> The report also notes further backsliding in President Vladimir Putin's Russia last year, and ticks off a string of undemocratic moves taken by close U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
> 
> "In Russia, centralization of power in the executive branch, a compliant State Duma, corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the law," onerous restrictions on aid groups and the media "continued to erode the government's accountability to its citizens," the report said.
> 
> The report said Pakistan's human rights situation worsened during the year, "stemming primarily from President Musharraf's decision to impose a 42-day state of emergency, suspend the constitution, and dismiss the Supreme and High Provincial Courts."
> 
> Political adversaries Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe and Syria were all listed as human rights abusers. Sudan's record was called "horrific."
> 
> North Korea is called an absolute dictatorship with repressive policies that control the most basic aspects of daily life. The report does not mention the intensive U.S. campaign for nuclear disarmament in North Korea, which included the first regular visits in decades by U.S. diplomats to the secretive regime in 2007.
> 
> "Pregnant female prisoners underwent forced abortions in some cases, and in other cases babies were killed upon birth in prisons," the report noted in its section covering detention and imprisonment in the North.
> 
> © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
> URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23576671/
> MSN Privacy . Legal
> © 2008 MSNBC.com


----------



## CougarKing

Will the PRC end its notorious "one-child" policy soon?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23626472/



> *End for China's one-kid rule? *
> Government advisers warn rule has sparked social, economic problems
> Reuters
> updated 2:44 a.m. PT, Fri., March. 14, 2008
> BEIJING - China faces a grim mismatch between population and social needs unless it soon relaxes its one-child rule, government advisers and experts have warned, stoking fresh debate about the once untouchable policy.
> 
> The warning has come from members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and separately from prominent population experts in a newspaper on Friday.
> 
> Their calls come after officials sought to play down recent comments from a senior family-planning administration official who said the government was considering relaxing rules that restrict most urban couples to one child and farming couples to two.
> 
> With the world's biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy, China has enforced rules limiting family size since the 1970s and argues that keeping the current restrictions is crucial to economic growth.
> 
> But during the annual session of the Consultative Conference, a literature scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and 28 other members signed a proposal urging "abolition of the one-child rule as quickly as possible," according to a report on the Xinhua news agency Web site on Friday.
> 
> A deputy of the National People's Congress, or parliament, which is still meeting, also called for "appropriately altering family planning policies," the report said.
> 
> No caretakers for elderly
> 
> Scholar Ye Tingfang and her supporters in the Conference argued that the one-child rule is generating serious economic and social-welfare problems and creating a nation of lonely, socially-maladapted children and elderly parents without caretakers.
> 
> "If we enforced the old coercive policies out of desperation, now desperation calls for ending that policy," she earlier told the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a bold tabloid published in Guangzhou. She suggested urban couples be allowed two children.
> 
> The Consultative Conference is a powerless body, and the central government is unlikely to relax the "one-child" policy any time soon. Ye made a similar call last year.
> 
> But the open calls from the politicians, together with warnings from demographers -- in the wake of the official's comments -- suggest that debate is growing.
> 
> Heavy fines for offenders
> 
> In the Southern Metropolitan Daily on Friday, three Chinese experts assembled a case for quickly relaxing the restrictions, which threaten offenders with heavy fines, restricted government services and, especially in the past, forced abortions.
> 
> Officials contend that the policy has prevented 400 million births that would have put even greater strain on already stretched food stocks and other resources.
> 
> Keeping the controls for much longer will sap the population of young people in coming decades when the country faces growing numbers of aged, a shrinking workforce and a huge demand for old-age pensions, Zeng Yi of Peking University and two others said.
> 
> Zeng, a well-known expert on China's population dynamics, said now would be the "best time" for relaxing family size controls -- while the workforce is strong and the proportion of aged relatively low.
> 
> "If we wait five, 10, 15 years to adjust population control policies," Zeng told the paper, "that would be compounding one disaster with another -- then will be too late for regrets."
> 
> 
> Copyright 2008 Reuters. Click for restrictions.


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese security forcecs swarm all over Tibet in the biggest crackdown on dissent in recent years! At least 30 rioters were killed so far!  

The relative quickness with which the PRC govt. came down on the protests only further proves that the CCP is very much paranoid about losing stability and will crack down on any threats to it.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4456111



> *Exile Group Says 30 Killed in Tibet*
> Tibetan Exile Group Says at Least 30 Killed in Chinese Crackdown on Riots
> By AUDRA ANG
> The Associated Press
> BEIJING
> 
> China ordered tourists out of Tibet's capital Saturday while troops on foot and in armored vehicles patrolled the streets and confined government workers to their offices, a day after riots that a Tibetan exile group said left at least 30 protesters dead.
> 
> The demonstrations against Chinese rule of Tibet are the largest and most violent in the region in nearly two decades. They have spread to other areas of China as well as neighboring Nepal and India.
> 
> In the western province of Gansu, police fired tear gas Saturday to disperse Buddhist monks and others staging a second day of protests in sympathy with anti-Chinese demonstrations in Lhasa, local residents said.
> 
> The protests led by Buddhist monks began Monday in Tibet on the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. They turned violent on Friday when demonstrators burned cars and shops. Witnesses said they heard gunshots on Friday and more shooting on Saturday night.
> 
> The eruption of violence comes just two weeks before China's Olympic celebrations kick off with the start of the torch relay, which passes through Tibet. China is gambling that its crackdown will not bring an international outcry over human rights violations that could lead to boycotts of the Olympics.
> 
> Beijing's hosting of the Olympics in August has already brought scrutiny of China's human rights record and its pollution problems.
> 
> But so far, the international community has reacted to the crackdown in Tibet only by calling for Chinese restraint without any threats of an Olympic boycott or other sanctions.
> 
> China's official Xinhua News Agency reported at least 10 were killed Friday when demonstrators rampaged in Lhasa, setting fire to shops and cars.
> 
> "The victims are all innocent civilians, and they have been burnt to death," Xinhua quoted an official with the regional government as saying.
> 
> The Dalai Lama's exiled Tibetan government in India said it had confirmed Chinese authorities killed at least 30 Tibetan protesters but added the toll could be as high as 100. There was no confirmation of the death toll from Chinese officials and the numbers could not be independently verified.
> 
> China maintains rigid control over Tibet, foreigners need special travel permits to get there and journalists rarely get access except under highly controlled circumstances.
> 
> Streets in Lhasa were mostly empty Saturday as a curfew remained in place, witnesses said.
> 
> China's governor in Tibet vowed to punish the rioters, while law enforcement authorities urged protesters to turn themselves in by Tuesday or face unspecified punishment
> 
> Tourists reached by phone or those who arrived Saturday in Nepal described soldiers standing in lines sealing off streets where there was rioting on Friday. Armored vehicles and trucks ferrying soldiers were seen on the streets.
> 
> "There are military blockades blocking off whole portions of the city, and the entire city is basically closed down," said a 23-year-old Western student who arrived in Lhasa on Saturday. "All the restaurants are closed, all the hotels are closed."
> 
> Plooij Frans, a Dutch tourist who left the capital Saturday morning by plane and arrived in the Nepali capital of Katmandu, said he saw about 140 trucks of soldiers drive into the city within 24 hours.
> 
> "They came down on Tibetan people really hard," said Frans, who said his group could not return to their hotel Friday and had to stay near the airport. "Every corner there were tanks. It would have been impossible to hold any protest today."
> 
> Government workers in Lhasa said Chinese authorities have been prevented from leaving their buildings.
> 
> "We've been here since yesterday. No one has been allowed to leave or come in," said a woman who works for Lhasa's Work Safety Bureau, located near the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama. "Armored vehicles have been driving past," she said. "Men wearing camouflage uniforms and holding batons are patrolling the streets.
> 
> Tourists were told to stay in their hotels and make plans to leave, but government staff were required to work.
> 
> Some shops were closed, said a woman who answered the telephone at the Lhasa Hotel.
> 
> "There's no conflict today. The streets look pretty quiet," said the woman who refused to give her name for fear of retribution.
> 
> Xinhua reported Saturday that Lhasa was calm, with little traffic on the roads.
> 
> "Burned cars, motorcycles and bicycles remained scattered on the main streets, and the air is tinged with smoke," the report said.
> 
> In the western Chinese province of Gansu, several hundred monks marched out of historic Labrang monastery and into the town of Xiahe in the morning, gathering hundreds of other Tibetans with them as they went, residents said.
> 
> The crowd attacked government buildings, smashing windows in the county police headquarters, before police fired tear gas to put an end to the protest, residents said. A London-based Tibetan activist group, Free Tibet Campaign, said 20 people were arrested, citing unidentified sources in Xiahe.
> 
> "Many windows in shops and houses were smashed," said an employee at a hotel, who did not want either his or the hotel's name used for fear of retaliation. He said he did not see any Tibetans arrested or injured but said some police were hurt.
> 
> Pockets of dissent were also springing up outside China.
> 
> In Australia, media reported that police used batons and pepper spray to quell a demonstration outside the Chinese consulate in Sydney. The Australian Associated Press reported that dozens of demonstrators were at the scene and five were arrested.
> 
> Dozens of protesters in India launched a new march just days after more than 100 Tibetan exiles were arrested by authorities during a similar rally.
> 
> And in Katmandu, police broke up a protest by Tibetans and arrested 20.
> 
> ———
> 
> Associated Press writers Anita Chang in Beijing, Ashwini Bhatia in Dehra, India, and Binaj Gurubacharya in Katmandu, Nepal, contributed to this story.
> 
> ———
> 
> On the Net:
> 
> International Campaign for Tibet: http://www.savetibet.org
> 
> Chinese official news agency: http://www.xinhuanet.com
> 
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
> 
> Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures


----------



## Yrys

Report: 100 dead in Tibet violence



> NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- Violent protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa against Chinese rule have left at least 100 people dead, according to unconfirmed
> reports from exiles in India, while official media put the death toll at 10.
> 
> The protests, sparked by the anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising that sent Tibet's Dalai Lama into exile, are the latest embarrassment to hit 2008 Olympic-host
> China, which has attracted international criticism over its human rights record. Quoting the Tibetan government, China's state-run Xinhua news agency said 10 were
> killed in Lhasa Friday after police blocked a march by monks, sparking the violence. "The victims are all innocent civilians, and they have been burnt to death," an
> official with the regional government told Xinhua.
> 
> Tibetan exiles in India meanhwile cited unconfirmed reports that at least 100 people were killed and many more injured. Video broadcast on China's CCTV Saturday
> showed flames and black smoke rising the market, where hundreds of rioters used hands, feet and sledge hammers to break down doors and shatter windows.  One
> of the targets of their violence was a Bank of China branch. Protesters, including some monks dressed in red robes, could be seen overturning cars and throwing rocks
> to chase away other people. There was no sign of Chinese police in the video.
> 
> The protests in Tibet began Monday when hundreds of monks rallied on the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Beijing that forced the Dalai Lama into exile.
> Police used gunfire and tear gas to quell the Lhasa protest, according to witnesses, human rights groups and Xinhua. Demonstrators set fire to vehicles and shops.
> One source said late Friday that up to a third of the city may be on fire and that power lines had been cut.
> 
> Some ethnic Tibetan shopkeepers hung scarves outside their stores in an effort to spare them from the protesters' wrath, a witness reported.
> 
> Chinese bloggers and U.S.-based human rights groups said Chinese security forces had sealed off the three main monasteries around Lhasa after the violence
> broke out. The bloggers also said police wearing armored vests were moving toward Lhasa in armored personnel carriers.
> 
> Beijing is hosting the Summer Olympics in August, and Tibetan exile groups told CNN they plan to hold demonstrations when the torch is carried through India in April.
> ...
> Chinese authorities blamed the Dalai Lama for the unrest, but the Dalai Lama said the protesters were simply acting out of "deep-rooted resentment" of the
> Chinese government. "As I have always said, unity and stability under brute force is at best a temporary solution. It is unrealistic to expect unity and stability
> under such a rule and would therefore not be conducive to finding a peaceful and lasting solution," he said in a written statement.
> 
> "I therefore appeal to the Chinese leadership to stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue with the
> Tibetan people. I also urge my fellow Tibetans not to resort to violence."



Article link


----------



## chanman

You can pick up a couple stories on the front page of The Economist.  Seems like one of their correspondents is actually in Lhasa, and hasn't been told to get out yet.


----------



## Yrys

chanman said:
			
		

> You can pick up a couple stories on the front page of The Economist.  Seems like one of their correspondents is actually in Lhasa, and hasn't been told to get out yet.



If a journalist has the stomach to stay in a country in unrest time, it must be akin of a golden mine,
in being in the whirl of history, publicity and money. Which seem to me to be even truer in Tibet nowadays, 
with the JO looming soon in China, all eyes are looking that way. On the article that I read, the corespondent isn't identify,
 so maybe chinese official don't know yet who it is...


End Tibet unrest, says Dalai Lama



> The Dalai Lama has called for an end to violent protests in Tibet, denying claims by China that he was responsible for the unrest. He said he would resign
> as head of Tibet's government-in-exile if the violence in his homeland worsened.
> 
> Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao earlier accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding the protests against Chinese rule.China says 13 people were killed by rioters in Lhasa.
> Tibetan exiles say 99 have died in clashes with authorities. The protests began on 10 March - the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule - and
> have gradually escalated.



More on article link


----------



## CougarKing

Interestingly, the current PLA General in charge of the General Logistics Department of the PLA- General Liao Xilong (廖锡龙)- was the commanding general of the PLA forces that crushed a rebellion in 1989 in Tibet, that is similar in some ways to the current violence in Tibet. Coincidentally, soon after the rebellion, he befriended Hu Jintao- the current PRC President- and who was then the local CCP party secretary/party chief for Tibet's provincial government. Not surprisingly, Liao is not only the commander of the GLD, but also a member of the current Central Military Commission.

Liao has risen through the PLA's ranks quite proficiently and even commanded a PLA regiment during the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam; that "regiment captured the border village of Phong To", for which he received a commendation from the CMC (54, Flanagan).

Liao is thus an example of the fine balance that PLA Officers must make between professional soldiering and towing the party line.

Perhaps Hu and Liao are giving their proteges "hands-on" experience in Tibet for succeeding them?

Sources: Flanagan, Stephen J. and Marti, Michael E., et al eds. The People's Liberation Army and China in Transition
             Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2003 (.)

             http://www.chinavitae.com/biography/Liao_Xilong%7C489


----------



## Yrys

Coincidentally, the BBC correspondent in Beijing when Tienanmen happened is now in Tibet for another media...


----------



## Yrys

Prince Charles to meet with Dalai Lama in London



> LONDON (AFP) - Prince Charles will meet with the Dalai Lama in London in May, a spokesman confirmed Thursday, just a day after Prime Minister
> Gordon Brown said he would do the same, much to Beijing's ire. The announcement by the prince is likely to also draw opposition from Beijing, which said
> it was "seriously concerned" over Brown's plans to meet the Tibetan leader when he vists London. Asked by AFP whether the prince would meet with the
> Dalai Lama, a spokesman for the royal said: "Yes, that is accurate." The spokesman declined to comment further, however.
> 
> In January, Charles told a group that campaigns against human rights abuses in Tibet that he would not be attending the Beijing Olympics in August. The
> prince is a well-known supporter of the Tibetan cause, and hosted a reception at St. James's Palace in May 2004 for the spiritual leader, whom Beijing regards
> as a separatist. He has also not spoken kindly of China's leaders in the past -- in a diary entry made public in 2006, Charles wrote on the occasion of Hong Kong's
> handover to China in 1997 that China's leaders resembled a "group of appalling old waxworks".
> 
> China, meanwhile, articulated its concerns over Brown's meeting with the Dalai Lama, with foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang describing him as "a political
> refugee engaged in activities of splitting China under the camouflage of religion," according to the official Xinhua news agency. He added that Beijing was
> "seriously concerned" by the news of Brown's announcement.
> 
> But the Dalai Lama's representative in Britain, Tsering Tashin, told Channel 4 News: "This is the standard official Chinese statement. If anything happens
> they make this sort of statement." "The most important thing for China is to recognise that there is a real problem inside Tibet." Brown's confirmation came after
> he spoke by telephone to Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao and pressed him to end violence in Tibet, which has triggered a swift clampdown by Chinese authorities.
> "I made it absolutely clear that there had to be an end to violence in Tibet... I called for an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties," he told parliament during his weekly question period. "The premier told me that, subject to two things that the Dalai Lama has already said -- that he does not support the
> total independence of Tibet, and that he renounces violence -- that he would be prepared to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama." "I will meet the Dalai Lama
> when he is in London," he added.
> 
> A spokesman for Brown's office could not say when the Dalai Lama might be coming, but the Tibetan leader is due to be in London on May 22 for an event at
> the Royal Albert Hall, a spokeswoman from the Tibet Society UK said. The talks would be the Dalai Lama's first with Brown since the prime minister took office
> last June. His predecessor Tony Blair was criticised when he declined to meet the Dalai Lama in 2004.
> 
> German Chancellor Angela Merkel triggered a deep freeze in relations between Berlin and Beijing for several months after she met the exiled Tibetan leader
> in her chancellery offices in September last year.
> 
> An aide of the Dalai Lama said Wednesday that he wants talks between his government-in-exile and China to resume and is committed to a non-violent settlement
> of the Tibet issue. Tibet's government-in-exile has put the "confirmed" death toll from a week of unrest at 99, while the exiled Tibetan parliament in Dharamshala
> has said "hundreds" may have died in the Chinese crackdown.
> 
> China, however, has denied using deadly force to quell the unrest and said the only deaths so far were 13 "innocent civilians" killed by rioters in Lhasa on Friday,
> while 325 people were injured.



Article link


----------



## CougarKing

Here are actual photos that leaked from Tibet:


----------



## Yrys

Dodgy translations being scrapped in the run-up to China's Olympics



> THOUSANDS of dodgy translations are being scrapped in Beijing in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic Games in the Chinese capital.
> 
> Signs, shops, restaurants and hotels will be for the high jump if mistakes aren’t corrected. Menus offering “steamed crap” and warnings to “mind crotch” will
> vanish. And disabled loos will no longer be described as “deformity man’s passage”. Tourism chiefs believe the awful attempts to translate Chinese into English
> – known as Chinglish – could lead to sports fans taking the mickey out of the Olympics.
> 
> To give you a taste of what they are up against, DAVE MASTERS has picked out some of the best – or should that be worst? – howlers.
> 
> Click here to find link for slideshow (link article)
> 
> But while they may be a bit of a giggle, let’s face it – their English is probably better than your Mandarin.


----------



## CougarKing

Yrys said:
			
		

> Dodgy translations being scrapped in the run-up to China's Olympics



I guess most people did not notice my own comments earlier in the thread about these dodgy translations:



> For example, a train station is not called a "CHOO-CHOO" station"- but there it was printed in English on a Beijing terminal, right below the Chinese translation. SHEESH!   (A train is called huo che in Mandarin, for those of you who are wondering, not CHOO-CHOO, either, hehehe)


----------



## a_majoor

China isn't inscrutable for people who know and understand history:

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0308/applebaum.php3?printer_friendly



> *Could Tibet bring down modern China?*
> 
> By Anne Applebaum
> 
> http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China's Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?
> 
> That covert cell phones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident. Lhasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang, and North Korea: All of these places are, directly or indirectly, dominated by the same media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime. *Though we don't usually think of it this way, China is, in fact, a vast, anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules over a host of reluctant "captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods not so different from those once used by Austro-Hungary or czarist Russia: political manipulation, secret police repression, and military force.*
> 
> But, then, modern China bears many surprising resemblances to the empires of the past in other ways, too. Like its Soviet imperial predecessor, for example, China encompasses both an "inner" empire, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are the most prominent components, and an "outer" empire, consisting most notably of its Burmese and North Korean clients. Like its French and British predecessors, the Chinese empire must wrestle constantly with nations whose languages, religions, and customs differ sharply from its own and whose behavior is, therefore, unpredictable. And like all its predecessors, the Chinese imperial class cares deeply about the pacification of the imperial periphery, more so than one might think.
> 
> For proof that this is so, look no further than the biography of Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president — and also the former Communist Party boss of Tibet. In 1988 and 1989, at the time of the last major riots, Hu was responsible both for the brutal repression of dissident Tibetan monks and dissidents and for what the Dalai Lama has subsequently called China's policy of "cultural genocide": the importation of thousands of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet's cities in order to dilute and eventually outbreed the ethnic Tibetan population.
> 
> Clearly, the repression of Tibet matters enormously to the members of China's ruling clique, or they would not have promoted Hu, its mastermind, so far. The pacification of Tibet must also be considered a major political and propaganda success, or it would not have been copied by the Chinese-backed Burmese regime last year and repeated by the Chinese themselves in Tibet last week. Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire.
> 
> Keep that in mind, over the next few days and months, as China tries once again to belittle Tibet, to explain away a nationalist uprising as a bit of vandalism. The last week's riots began as a religious protest: Tibet's monks were demonstrating against laws that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai lama. The monks' marches then escalated into generalized, unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han Chinese shops and businesses, among them — as you can see on the cell-phone videos — the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.
> 
> However the official version evolves, in other words, make no mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese. As such, it must have significant reverberations in Beijing. The war in Algeria brought down the French Fourth Republic. The dissident movements on its periphery helped weaken the Soviet Union. Right now, I'd wager that Hu Jintao's Tibet policy is causing a lot of consternation among his colleagues.
> 
> And if they aren't worried, they should be. After all, the history of the last two centuries is filled with tales of strong, stable empires brought down by their subjects, undermined by their client states, overwhelmed by the national aspirations of small, subordinate countries. Why should the 21st century be any different? Watching the tear gas roll over the streets of Lhasa yesterday on a blurry, cell-phone video, I couldn't help but wonder when — maybe not in this decade, this generation, or even this century — Tibet and its monks will have their revenge.


----------



## CougarKing

With the Taiwan Presidential Election ocurring this weekend, the Mandarin news services of various overseas Chinese communities all over the world (except for Xinhua  : ) are featuring it as one of their top international stories.

With current Taipei mayor Ma-Ying Jiu of the Pan-blue coalition (which is pro-unification with mainland China) set to run against DPP candidate (and pro-independence) "Frank" Hsieh, it surely will be an interesting contest.

No doubt the CCP is also watching from the mainland to see whether their former arch-enemies (from the 1945-49 Chinese Civil War) the KMT/Guo Min Dang/the Pan-Blues actually aim to move Taiwan closer to reunification with the mainland if they win, while a DPP win will surely mean disaster for the PRC's future reunification plan.

The mention of Mayor Ma reminds me of a Chinese joke I mentioned earlier in the thread: ;D


> As you know, Pres. Chen Sui Bian is the President of the ROC/Taiwan, while Mayor Ma Ying Jiu was the mayor of Taipei the last time I checked.  The joke is that if you put the two men together into one person, you would get a liar.
> 
> The last character in Chen's name- "Bian"- when combined with the first character in Ma's name-"Ma"- are themselves individual radicals/parts that, when combined into one character, literally embodies the Mandarin verb for lying, and when modified with the noun particle "zi", then becomes the word for LIAR= PIAN ZI= 骗子.


----------



## CougarKing

The people of Taiwan have spoken: KMT/_Guo Min Dang_/Pan-Blue candidate Ma-Ying Jiu has won. Perhaps even the majority of the local Taiwanese/_benshengren_ really do favor the status quo more (for obvious economic reasons) rather than incur the wrath of the mainland. Whether President Ma really will move the island nation more toward reunifying with mainland China remains to be seen.

http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=134066



> *Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party's (KMT) presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has won more than half the vote in Saturday's election, the party said, auguring improved ties with diplomatic rival China.*
> 
> Ma had won more than 7 million votes, the party said, more than half the total 13 million people who cast their ballot.
> 
> The Central Election Commission said that Ma had 58 percent of the vote, while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's candidate Frank Hsieh had 42 percent, with counting still continuing.
> 
> *Ma favours closer economic ties and political dialogue with China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control.
> 
> Voters had to choose a successor to President Chen Shui-bian, an anti-China firebrand who steps down in May and who has repeatedly angered Beijing with his pro-independence rhetoric.*
> 
> China has claimed self-ruled Taiwan as its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
> 
> *Hsieh's DPP favours formal independence while Ma's Nationalist Party (KMT) wants eventual reunification once China embraces democracy.*
> 
> "Whether you vote for Hsieh or for Ma, be sure to vote for Taiwan," Chen told reporters. "...Don't let Taiwan become the next Hong Kong. Don't let Taiwan become the next Tibet."
> 
> The former British colony of Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Chinese troops marched into Tibet, the scene of anti-Chinese rioting last week, in 1950.
> 
> Ma told reporters after voting his commitment to Taiwan was not in doubt.
> 
> "I have always said that if I get elected I will engage with mainland China on many issues, that I will protect Taiwan, not just its identity but its security, to my fullest strength," he said in fluent English.
> 
> "I have said also many times that Taiwan is not Tibet. Neither is it Hong Kong. So we will keep this democratic country running as it is."
> 
> INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION
> 
> The election has drawn keen international attention, with the United States, Russia and Britain criticising a referendum on U.N. membership, to be held alongside the vote, which they believe could upset the delicate balance with China.
> 
> Malaysia added its voice of opposition on Saturday, with its Foreign Ministry saying the referendum as "a provocative move".
> 
> *Whatever the referendum result, U.N. membership is out of the question with just 23 countries recognising Taiwan, and with China a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.
> 
> The United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, recognising "one China", but remains the island's biggest ally.
> 
> Two U.S. aircraft carriers are in the region for training exercises. China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait in 1996, trying to intimidate voters during an election.*
> 
> "China hopes the United States and Japan will carry out their promises of not supporting 'Taiwan independence' or Taiwan authority's proposed 'referendum on U.N. membership'," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
> 
> In Taiwan, a faltering economy is a priority with voters.
> 
> "Domestic issues, such as the economy and corruption, are bigger than China or foreign policy," said Ralph Cossa, president of the U.S.-based think tank Pacific Forum CSIS.
> 
> *The two candidates had toughened their stances on China following Beijing's crackdown in Tibet, but to help the economy, both advocate more direct flights, tourism and investment opportunities between Taiwan and China.
> 
> Ma advocates a common market with China*.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This quote, from a story on today's _Globe and Mail_ web site may tell a big part of the story:

"The people of Taiwan hope for clean government, with no corruption. Taiwan people hope for a flourishing economy. The people of Taiwan hope for peace across the straits, they don't want war."

While the second sentence is aimed at Beijing the first is for more general consumption - in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and New York, too.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don’t want to be accused of being part of the CCP’s propaganda machine, because that’s certainly not my intention, but here is *my own* somewhat contrarian view on Tibet.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that China withdrew from Tibet – took out all the troops and police, all the officials and so on. (That probably means all the money, too, but that’s another issue.) *Qui bono?* Who will gain? Who will take over and exercise political and economic power in Tibet? Where is the _Tibet Liberation Movement_? Where, beyond in the fervid imaginations of sundry Hollywood celebrities, are the liberal democrats?

My guess is that power will move, quickly and completely, to the monasteries. We will, in other words, get a theocracy and the Dali Lama will be the theocrat in chief.

The Dali Lama has one weapon, one that he wields with great skill and effectiveness: public relations. But, it has not been effective at all in China, until 2008. The Chinese have made the Olympics a _national_ and international celebration OF Chinese accomplishment and potential. The Chinese, themselves, the _ordinary_ Chinese, are caught up in the Olympic fever. The Dali Lama, aided and abetted by groups and agencies (from around the world) with an anti-Chinese agenda, can try and maybe succeed in tarnishing, if not disrupting the Beijing Olympics.

I’m not here to argue that Tibet should or should not be a province of China, _comme les autres_ – although I will argue that the Tibetan people are much, much better off with a remote, interfering, sometimes cruel and often capricious and corrupt Chinese government than they would have been had a Tibetan theocracy survived and prospered, or than they will be if another one is imposed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My personal dealing with _overseas Chinese_ and my reads (mostly read to me by an impatient friend) of the Chinese website and blogs tends to confirm Geoffrey York’s story which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080325.wTibetanalysis25/BNStory/International/home


> The great call of China: fight a free Tibet
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> 
> From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
> March 25, 2008 at 1:58 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — Two weeks of often violent Tibetan protests have triggered a surge of angry nationalism across China, helping the Communist Party maintain its grip on the country but also sharply limiting its ability to offer any compromise.
> 
> Chinese websites, blogs and newspapers are full of anti-Western fury these days. Many of them say that the West has financed the Tibetan protests of the past two weeks in an evil conspiracy to sap China's strength.
> 
> “The Tibetan monks were all paid by the United States of America to weaken China,” one person wrote on the Web forum of China Daily, the state-owned propaganda newspaper.
> 
> Said another: “Let's face it, Tibet is just the trial balloon not only for the Dalai Lama but for the West as well. They just wanted to find out again how far they can go to destroy and balkanize China.”
> 
> The government has deliberately fuelled such xenophobic rage, blaming external forces for the Tibetan protests and using its propaganda organs to force-feed a steady diet of inflammatory images to the nation. It accuses its enemies of trying to “sabotage” the Beijing Olympics. But now it is riding a tiger of emotion that won't be easy to dismount.
> 
> In many ways, it is a repeat of the Chinese nationalist anger that has exploded repeatedly in recent years, including 2005, when massive anti-Japanese protests were held, and 1999, when mobs attacked U.S. diplomatic offices in China after an American bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
> 
> When the Tibetan protests first turned violent on March 14 in Lhasa, the Chinese authorities allowed only a few terse reports in the state media. But over the past few days they have ratcheted up the publicity, orchestrating a media campaign with repeated images of knife-wielding Tibetan protesters, the torching of the Chinese flag and the charred bodies of Chinese victims of the Lhasa riots.
> 
> An outpouring of nationalist vitriol has followed. A deluge of angry phone calls and faxes has flooded into the Beijing office of CNN, which China has accused of “dishonest” reports on the Tibet story. The vast majority of Chinese citizens have no access to CNN, which is often censored or blocked in the few places where it is available, but Chinese bloggers and websites have convinced most people that the U.S. television network is unfairly biased against China.
> 
> The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has warned Western journalists in China to be “vigilant” of their personal safety because of the widespread Chinese anger at the Western media.
> 
> At least one Western media organization in Beijing has received hate messages by telephone and fax, the FCCC said in a statement, without naming the media outlet. “The organization has adopted extra security measures,” it said.
> 
> China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, says “tens of thousands” of Chinese Internet users have “condemned” CNN and other Western media.
> 
> Pro-Tibet activist groups in London and New York, meanwhile, have been bombarded with harassing phone calls and virus e-mails. One activist said he got abusive calls every two minutes on his cellphone from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. last Tuesday and also at his office. The calls often contained patriotic Chinese music, he said.
> 
> Tibetan activists have also been targeted by a sophisticated campaign of cyber attacks, which send out viruses in well-disguised e-mails. The attacks have been traced back to Chinese-based computer systems.
> 
> The virulence of the verbal attacks has alarmed some observers. In an open letter on the weekend, a group of 29 Chinese dissidents warned that the “one-sided propaganda” was stirring up “inter-ethnic animosity” in China. “We appeal to the Chinese people and overseas Chinese to be calm and tolerant,” the letter says. “Adopting a posture of aggressive nationalism will only invite antipathy from the international community and harm China's international image.”
> 
> Analysts say the Communist Party has mobilized nationalist themes – in the media and in “patriotic education” classes at school – as a way of bolstering its legitimacy and ensuring social stability at a time when Communist ideology has been widely discredited. But this nationalism has boxed the government into a corner, leaving it few options in a crisis.
> 
> “Chinese leaders are prone to public muscle-flexing because they feel the need to stay out in front of a growing tide of popular nationalism,” U.S. scholar and former diplomat Susan Shirk wrote in a book published last year.
> 
> “Whenever the public pays close attention to an issue, leaders feel they have to act tough to show how strong they are. Like Chinese Clark Kents, they abandon their usual mild-mannered international demeanour and reveal themselves as nationalist superheroes.”



A lot of Western people tend to forget (or never understood) the depths of Chinese patriotism and the deep, deep resentment that many (most?) Chinese still feel about 19th and 20th century humiliations suffered by China at Western hands.

There appears to be near universal belief that the “Free Tibet” movement is CIA funded. That’s not true, in my opinion: “Free Tibet” and the like appear to have lots of private funding but I, personally, would not be even a tiny bit surprised to find that most of the various anti-Chinese movements get _some_ money, maybe quite a lot, from Western and Indian government agencies.


----------



## time expired

Obviously some Tibetans don't feel that they are better off
under the autocratic rule of an Imperialistic China.The Han
Chinese invasion will leave the Tibetans a minority in their
own country.I wonder were the Chinese drive for lebensraum
will end, is it just coincidence the the rebel group in Nepal
call themselves Maoists or are they next?.
                               Regards


----------



## TCBF

- Having a deep sea port in the Bay of Bengal might be a long range plan of theirs.


----------



## CougarKing

TCBF said:
			
		

> - Having a deep sea port in the Bay of Bengal might be a long range plan of theirs.



Well isn't Burma with its military junta a PRC ally? I believe the PRC has sold them some of their military equipment, IIRC. We might see the PRC lease/have a special joint agreement on a port like the approaches to Yangon/Rangoon for the use of the PLAN in the same way the Russian Navy used to be able to dock its ships at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam when the Soviet Union still existed and had an agreement with the Hanoi government then, IIRC.

Furthermore, didn't the government of Bangladesh also buy some fighter-bombers from the PRC for its own air force even though the Dhaka government has its own problems with local Communists/Maoists as well like its neighbors India and Nepal?


----------



## a_majoor

More from Jerry Pournelle's blogsite. The reply by Dr. Pournelle is very succinct and quite true in my opinion:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail509.html#inflation



> *China, Taiwan and the 2008 DoD "Military Power of the People's Republic of China"*
> 
> The Beijing government only formally annexed Taiwan in 1683, well over a century after Spain was well seated in the New World. Taiwan was a Dutch colony (1624) before it was a Chinese possession. Dutch rule was ended by a regional warlord from Fujian Province, not by the central government. As late as 1871 the Q'ing regime in Beijing informed the Government of Japan that China lacked effective political control over the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan. Beijing did not even make Taiwan a formal province until 1887. The Unequal Treaties period of western dominance of China was well underway by then. In 1895 China and Japan went to war over the control of Korea. China lost and Beijing ceded Taiwan to Japan as part of the price of defeat. Japan then ruled Taiwan for 50 years until 1945.
> 
> Chang Kai Shek's regime exerted a fleeting period of 'unified' rule over China (minus the vast tracts already controlled by Mao) between 1946 and 1949. Chiang Kai Shek was then driven in retreat from the mainland to Taiwan, thus becoming another in a sucession of regional warlords to use Taiwan as a refuge from mainland defeat. A period of minor hot (or "kinetic" to use the report's adjective) military actions followed in the 1950s and 1960s. This period ended once Chiang Kai Shek and his claim to rule all of China expired.
> 
> Three conclusions are available from this historical review.
> 
> 1. No Beijing government has ever made Taiwan a causus belli for a foreign war. The First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 that transferred Taiwan to Japan was fought for control of Korea, not Taiwan. And to that earlier Korean War we can add the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in late 1950.
> 
> 2. There is no living tradition or any real history of stable Beijing bureaucratic rule over Taiwan.
> 
> 3. The Beijing regime will only take direct military action against Taiwan when it perceives an imminent and serious political threat radiating from the island.
> 
> To this we can a small modern detail. Mainland China presently imports over 4 million barrels/day of oil. Nearly all of this oil arrives in tankers that must transit the South China Sea to reach Chinese oil terminals. This vital sea line of communication would become a war zone in the event of a mainland Chinese air-sea campaign against Taiwan.
> 
> The above historical and modern facts provide no basis for the prominence given to the China-Taiwan contingency by the authors of the "Military Power of the People's Republic of China". What would essentially be a Chinese civil war over Taipei cannot help China's fuels, natural resources or political positions. It can only hurt. The economic, political and military costs of such a campaign would have a vastly greater payoff if used to secure real control of Myanmar (Burma). This would provide China a port on the Indian Ocean and cut several thousand miles and several chokepoints off the Middle East/African Oil Route.
> 
> Mark
> 
> *I think you do not understand the Chinese cast of mind. I assure you that while your analysis is correct, few Chinese will agree.
> 
> I also think it will be settled in ways we in the west will neither predict nor understand.*


----------



## CougarKing

Before reading the article, I would have been surprised if the PRC authorities had closed the Muslim quarter of the city for reasons such as their seeing the _Hui ren_/回人 as a possible threat in conjunction with the Tibetans/_Xi Zang ren_/西藏人.

One must not confuse the _Hui ren_ with the Uighurs/ 维吾尔 from Xinjiang province, since the _Hui ren_ are a very integrated group within Chinese society and have been so for centuries; they are still ethnically _Han_ in spite of following the Islamic religion and prominent Chinese who are from that group include Ming Admiral Zheng He  from the 1400s and ROC General Tang Enbo from the 1930s/World War II, who handed the Japanese one of their first land defeats in the Battle of Tai Er Zhuang, IIRC.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/tibet.china.ap/index.html



> *Police shut Muslim quarter in Lhasa*
> Story Highlights
> Police close off Lhasa's Muslim quarter, two weeks after mosque was burnt down
> 
> Officers blockade streets into area, allowing in only residents and worshippers
> 
> Clean-up crews wade through destruction in other parts of Lhasa's old city
> 
> Dalai Lama says China's portrayal of the protests may incite ethnic conflict
> Editor's note: CNN was denied permission to join the group of reporters to Tibet by China's foreign ministry.
> 
> LHASA, Tibet (AP) -- *Police closed off Lhasa's Muslim quarter on Friday, two weeks after Tibetan rioters burned down the city's mosque amid the largest anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades.
> 
> Officers blockaded streets into the area, allowing in only residents and worshippers observing the Muslim day of prayer.
> 
> A heavy security presence lingered in other parts of Lhasa's old city as clean-up crews waded through the destruction inflicted when days of initially peaceful protests turned deadly on March 14.
> 
> Tibetans torched hundreds of buildings and attacked members of China's dominant Han ethnic group and Chinese Muslims known as Hui, who have dominated commerce in the city.*
> The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, raised concerns Friday that China's portrayal of the protests in Lhasa was fanning the flames of ethnic conflict.
> 
> "The state media's portrayal of the recent events in Tibet, using deceit and distorted images, could sow the seeds of racial tension with unpredictable long-term consequences. This is of grave concern to me," he said in a statement from his headquarters in northern India.
> 
> The protests were the longest and most-sustained challenge to China's rule in the Himalayan region since 1989. See photos of the Tibetan protests. »
> 
> The ensuing crackdown by Chinese authorities has focused international attention on China's human rights record in the run-up to the Olympic Games.
> 
> China has faced growing calls from the United States and other nations to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, along with suggestions from some leaders that they were considering boycotting the Olympics' opening ceremony in protest at Beijing's handling of the Tibetan situation.
> 
> Apparently as a result of the pressure, the Foreign Ministry is allowing a group of foreign diplomats to visit Lhasa on Friday and Saturday. A United States diplomat will be on that trip, said U.S. Embassy Spokeswoman Susan Stevenson. She had no other details.
> 
> A woman who answered the phone at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said she did not know about the trip. She would not give her name, as is common among Chinese bureaucrats.
> 
> A small group of foreign journalists, including an Associated Press reporter, was taken to Lhasa earlier this week on a three-day government-organized trip that was to end Friday.
> 
> The otherwise tightly-scripted visit was disrupted when 30 red-robed monks pushed into a briefing being given by officials at the Jokhang Temple on Thursday, complaining of a lack of religious freedom and denouncing official claims that the Dalai Lama orchestrated the March 14 violence. See latest footage of the media in Lhasa. »
> 
> "What the government is saying is not true," one monk shouted out.
> 
> "They killed many people. They killed many people," another monk said, referring to Chinese security forces.
> 
> The outburst by the monks lasted for about 15 minutes before government officials ended it and told the journalists it was "time to go."
> 
> China has strenuously argued that the widespread arson and looting were criminal acts orchestrated by separatists, while refusing to discuss the root causes of the anger and alienation blamed for sparking the violence. Watch a former spokesman for China speak about Tibet »
> 
> A vice-governor of Tibet, Baima Chilin, later told reporters the monks would not be punished.
> 
> "We will never do anything to them. We will never detain anyone you met on the streets of Lhasa. I don't think any government would do such a thing," he said.
> 
> However, Tibet activists on Friday voiced concern over possible Chinese government retaliation against the Buddhist monks.
> 
> "There are serious fears for the welfare and whereabouts" of the monks, the International Campaign for Tibet said in a statement.
> 
> "The monks' peaceful protest shattered the authorities' plans to convey an image that the situation in Lhasa was under control after recent demonstrations and rioting," it said. Watch monks disrupt the media tour »
> 
> Other than the incident at the Jokhang, one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest shrines, most of the second day of the tour went according to plan, with officials sticking to the government line that the most violent anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades were plotted by supporters of the Dalai Lama.
> 
> The Dalai Lama has denied the accusations and threatened to resign as head of the India-based Tibetan government-in-exile if the violence continued.
> 
> The government says at least 22 people have died in Lhasa; Tibetan rights groups say nearly 140 Tibetans were killed, including 19 in Gansu province.
> 
> One of the monks protesting Thursday said the death toll was far higher than the government was saying, but did not give the source of his information.
> 
> "The cadres and the army killed more than 100 Tibetans. They arrested more than a thousand," he said.
> 
> After the violent 1989 uprising in Lhasa, Tibetans claimed many more Tibetans died than the official toll of 16 because families feared punishment if participants went to hospitals.
> 
> Fu Jun, head of the News Affairs Office of the Propaganda Department of the Tibet Communist Party, said Friday the monks were spreading rumors.
> 
> "We are keeping an open mind about their complaints. The rumor is misleading the media without a shred of evidence ... We will clear up facts in a few days time when appropriate," Fu said.
> 
> The Chinese-installed vice governor of Tibet, Baima Chilin, told the reporters late Thursday that the monks would not be punished for their outburst.
> 
> State TV, which has widely covered the foreign journalists' tour, showed the Jokhang visit on its evening newscast, but not the monks' outburst.
> 
> Journalists were taken Friday morning to interview members of the Communist Party-run Buddhist Association, who reiterated standard Chinese accusations against the Dalai Lama.
> 
> "This was premeditated," said Drubkang, a reincarnated lama and member of Beijing's top government advisory body, who like many Tibetans uses just one name.
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press


----------



## TCBF

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Well isn't Burma with its military junta a PRC ally? I believe the PRC has sold them some of their military equipment, IIRC. We might see the PRC lease/have a special joint agreement on a port like the approaches to Yangon/Rangoon for the use of the PLAN in the same way the Russian Navy used to be able to dock its ships at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam when the Soviet Union still existed and had an agreement with the Hanoi government then, IIRC.
> 
> Furthermore, didn't the government of Bangladesh also buy some fighter-bombers from the PRC for its own air force even though the Dhaka government has its own problems with local Communists/Maoists as well like its neighbors India and Nepal?



- I see no reason why a long term planner would not try to position for Bangladesh AND Burma.  Play one against the other for competing benefits.


----------



## a_majoor

China demonstrates its Imperial ambitions in yet another field (as part of the propaganda fest being put on for the summer Olympics)

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20463/?nlid=961



> *Weather Engineering in China*
> How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers and artillery.
> By Mark Williams
> 
> To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.
> 
> First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.
> 
> Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.
> 
> Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that "the results with light rain have been satisfactory."
> 
> Modifying the weather may seem a hubristic exercise. But arguably, given what else the Chinese have already invested to make this year's Olympics a showcase for China's emergence as a 21st-century superpower, it's almost the least they could do. Following the announcement in 2001 that the 2008 Games had been awarded to Beijing, the government of the People's Republic initiated $40 billion of new construction there, bringing 120,000 Chinese migrant workers into the city (at about $130 each a month) and triggering a five-year steel shortage worldwide. Today, Beijing boasts, alongside the vast Bird's Nest, megastructures like a new airport terminal that on its own is bigger than any airport elsewhere in the world. One measure of the city's transformation is that today 300 or so new towers, some designed by the most avant-garde architects on the planet, rise where a few short years ago there were only siheyuans (traditional Chinese courtyard residences) interspersed with bland 1950s-era boxes in the Sino-Soviet style.
> 
> Equally, though, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million of Beijing's natives will have been displaced from their homes by government edict when the Olympics finally begins. This preemptory modernization is of a piece with China's scale, its 1.32 billion population, and the authoritarian control exerted by its Communist central government, which nowadays is dominated by technocrats and engineers who favor mega-projects like the world's largest dam (the Three Gorges dam over the Yangtze River), its highest railway (the Qinghai-Tibet line), and even its biggest Ferris wheel (in Beijing, opening in 2009). Unsurprisingly, therefore, China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers--mostly peasant farmers--who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.
> 
> The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian's weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.
> 
> Although they possess the world's largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986, Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow, and in 2000 they cleared clouds before an anniversary ceremony commemorating the end of World War II; China's then president, Jiang Zemin, witnessed the results firsthand and pushed to adopt the same approach back home. As for the historical credit for starting the whole weather-engineering ball rolling back in 1946, that belongs to employees of General Electric in Schenectady, NY--most notably, scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of the late novelist Kurt), who worked out silver iodide's potential to provide crystals around which cloud moisture would condense. During the 1960s and '70s, the United States invested millions of federal dollars in experiments like Stormfury (aimed at hurricane control), Skywater (aimed at snow- and rainfall increase), and Skyfire (aimed at lightning suppression). Simultaneously, the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War, by rain-making over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to close it.
> 
> Nevertheless, because weather is the epitome of a complex, emergent system, no analytical models or methodologies existed that produced data conclusively, proving that weather modification worked. In the United States, research funding died down and commercial weather modification efforts became hemmed in by stringent regulation. A 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that despite more than 30 years of efforts, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts."
> 
> Still, according to William Cotton, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, "as far as the science of weather modification is concerned, the evidence that it works in certain situations is very compelling." The Chinese are certainly in no doubt: once they have demonstrated their capabilities to the rest of the world at the Olympics later this year, the party's central planners intend to expand their national weather modification program in 2010, turning the Weather Modification Office into a separate government ministry that will double the amount of rain-making and other weather engineering that China is now doing.
> 
> Copyright Technology Review 2008.


----------



## Bane

Seems like a roof or two would have been cheaper.


----------



## chanman

I thought cloud seeding was old hat.  Seems like a number of groups in various places do it already.  Would it have made the news without the Olympics link?


----------



## Kirkhill

On the other hand it is one way to justify maintaining Regiments of AAA and SAMs.  And give them a regular workout.


----------



## chanman

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> On the other hand it is one way to justify maintaining Regiments of AAA and SAMs.  And give them a regular workout.



Why hire extra folks to do it when you have bored air defence units around?  

Putin apparently tried it too http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1135006.ece, but it seems like it didn't work too well at the G8 summit though http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5189048.stm (bottom paragraph)

So who's going to be the first with a 'rain on your parade' crack?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Piper said:
			
		

> http://www.ctvtoronto.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20080329/chinese_canadians_concert_080329/20080329/?hub=TorontoNewHome
> 
> Interesting, I really hope people don't fall for this. I saw a report on this on Global National, while they didn't come outright and say 'this was an organised and controlled Chinese propaganda mission' they did explain how the protest was tightly controlled, with protestors having un-authorised signs taken down and being told not to speak to the media.
> 
> The Chinese government's reach extends pretty darn far these days....a little too far IMHO.



If those _overseas_ Chinese are anything like those I know (some very well) then their views (China is being "unfairly portrayed by the media") are quite normal.

I have no doubt that the Chinese government has some hand in organizing and/or supporting this sort of thing, just as I have no doubt that the anti-Chinese protesters get support from someone for their demonstrations and media placements.


----------



## tomahawk6

Chinese security troops with their Tibetan monk robes.


----------



## CougarKing

Those PAP (People's Armed Police) troops are missing their covers/their version of US Army garrison caps!  UNSAT on inspection! UNSAT! UNSAT! ;D


----------



## TCBF

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Those PAP (People's Armed Police) troops are missing their covers/their version of US Army garrison caps!  UNSAT on inspection! UNSAT! UNSAT! ;D



- Forage Caps don't travel well.  Once the 'Monk's Robes Tasking' is complete, the Forage Caps will be retrieved.


----------



## a_majoor

The campaign continues with the auxiliary troops:

http://ezralevant.com/2008/03/who-is-posting-antitibet-comme.html



> *Who is posting anti-Tibet comments on North American blogs?*
> By Ezra Levant on March 31, 2008 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | Trackback
> 
> I've received a spate of anti-Tibet, pro-Communist China comments in response to my blog entries about Tibet.They are all signed by folks with English names, but the language has the slightly clunky style of Chinese propaganda. I mean, other than in China's denunciations of Taiwan and Tibet, have you ever heard the word "splittist" used before? I can spot Chinese government spin when I see it, and unless it is properly signed by the Chinese foreign ministry, I'm just not going to go along with the charade by posting the comments.
> 
> On what basis -- other than the clunky Maoist rhetoric -- do I make this claim? A year ago, the Western Standard published a story by Kevin Steel about one such Internet soldier for China (quick but free registration required). Here are some excerpts:
> 
> He posts his messages everywhere under several different names on Internet blogs and discussion groups. He writes letters to the editor anywhere and sends e-mails to anyone--anyone who might take seriously shocking evidence that the Chinese government "harvests" and sells live organs from political prisoners. His main message is that the Falun Gong--the group which first brought evidence of live organ harvesting to light--and the Epoch Times newspaper that broke that story are spreading propaganda against China's Communist government. And he's not even Chinese. He is Charles Liu, a 40-year-old Taiwanese-born technology consultant who lives in Issaquah, Wash., and does business in China.
> 
> :::.
> 
> He doesn't really explain, when asked, why he started a blog last year called "The Myth of Tiananmen Square Massacre" under the name of Bobby Fletcher (one of his online aliases, which he also uses to comment on the Western Standard's online blog). On that blog, he pushes the minimal 250 casualty figure that the Chinese government has always maintained died that night in 1989 (more reliable estimates put the figure at at least ten times that).
> 
> *Liu's actions mirror disinformation campaigns waged by the Chinese government in the past.* Typically, these include the deliberate spreading of false or misleading facts to sow confusion or doubt among the conflicting accounts. The classic example is the Tiananmen Square massacre; the Chinese government has maintained that no one died in the square itself, that there was only pushing and shoving on the streets around the square, resulting in a few military casualties. Overseas, the CCP relies on its United Front Work department, part of the Chinese intelligence service, to propagate its message. During the Cold War, the Soviets employed many overseas flunkies through their Disinformation Department.
> 
> :::
> 
> Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer, and Kilgour's co-author, David Matas, really doesn't know what to make of Liu. "I don't know who he is, but what he does is spend a lot of time replicating nonsense to defend the Chinese government," Matas says.
> 
> The only concern Matas has is that Liu seems to know who he and Kilgour met with in the United States to discuss their report. *Matas discovered Liu had sent e-mails to politicians--and their staff--prior to the meetings. "The only people who would have that information would potentially be the Chinese government. I can't imagine how Liu would know we were meeting with those people," Matas says.* "We're not super-secretive, but you can't find information on the Internet or in any public place about who we're meeting with, where and when." He himself has received at least 10 e-mails from Liu, all of which he's ignored. Maybe Matas is onto something with that approach.


----------



## CougarKing

Very disturbing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...AR2008033101573.html



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - *A U.S. Defense Department analyst pleaded guilty to passing classified information about Taiwan to a Chinese government agent, the Justice Department said on Monday.*
> 
> The plea came in one of two China espionage cases disclosed last month -- the second involved a former Boeing engineer arrested on suspicion of stealing secrets about aerospace programs including the space shuttle.
> 
> Gregg William Bergersen pleaded guilty at federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, to conspiracy to disclose national defense information to unauthorized persons. Much of the information pertained to U.S. military sales to China's arch rival, Taiwan, and communications security issues, court documents said.
> 
> Bergersen faces up to 10 years in prison.
> 
> Bergersen, a weapons system policy analyst with a top-secret clearance, was arrested in February, along with Tai Shen Kuo and Yu Xin Kang, both of New Orleans.
> 
> Bergersen admitted in court papers that he gave national defense information to Kuo several times and that Kuo had cultivated a friendship with him that included gifts, cash payments and gambling money for Las Vegas trips.


----------



## Blackadder1916

Tibet isn't China's only problem, resentment still simmers among Muslims
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/080406/w040629A.html



> Published: Sunday, April 6, 2008 | 12:27 AM ET
> Canadian Press: William Foreman, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
> 
> HOTAN, China - The chirpy Chinese coffee shop waitress smiled as she rattled off sites travellers should see in this jade-trading Silk Road town in Xinjiang - a vast western region of China that, like Tibet, has a long history of unrest.
> 
> The woman frowned and her brow furrowed with worry Saturday when she mentioned Hotan's main tourist draw: a sprawling bazaar popular among the Muslim minority Uighurs.
> 
> "Oh, don't go to the bazaar on the weekend. It gets too crowded and things can get chaotic. A couple weeks ago, there was a protest. Some Muslim separatists caused some trouble.
> 
> "It's terrible," said the waitress, who would only give her surname, Zheng, because she was afraid she'd run afoul of officials for discussing the sensitive subject.
> 
> The fear and distrust she felt about the Uighurs is common among many Chinese, even though the situation seemed calm in Hotan since the brief March 23 protest.
> 
> Animosity against the Chinese runs deep among the Uighurs as well, and the recent trouble was a new reminder that Tibet isn't China's only problem. Resentment still simmers in its traditionally Muslim Central Asian frontier.
> 
> Chinese authorities blamed the demonstration on Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, a radical group that wants to create a worldwide Islamic state, the China News Agency reported late Friday.
> 
> The group, which has claimed to disavow violence, has been banned in Russia and Central Asia, where it reportedly has a large following among the predominantly Muslim former Soviet republics.
> 
> Xinjiang leaders have accused the group of handing out "reactionary" leaflets and calling for people to demonstrate in Hotan as well as Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi, the state-run China News Agency reported on its Web site.
> 
> The protest came at a bad time for China.
> 
> The Communist government was already grappling with Tibetan unrest that has spread to neighbouring provinces.
> 
> Pictures of police and troops cracking down on the Tibetan protests have turned into a public relations nightmare for the government, which is trying to paint a peaceful and prosperous image of the country ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
> 
> But, in Hotan on Saturday, the situation seemed to have cooled off.
> 
> Only a small number of uniformed police were patrolling the massive bazaar, where the air was thick with smoke from charcoal ovens and grills cooking sizzling lamb kebabs and wheels of flat bread that looked like large pizza crusts.
> 
> Hawkers selling mangos yelled over the din of honking taxis and the clip-clopping of donkey carts hauling mountains of vegetables and eggs from the countryside.
> 
> Women wearing spectacularly colourful head scarves watched over stands piled high with walnuts, almonds, dates and raisins for mostly Uighur customers.
> 
> Men wove through the crowds on motorcycles with the bloody carcasses of freshly butchered sheep draped over the passenger's seat.
> 
> Although things seemed calm, animosity between Muslims and Chinese was almost palpable. People on both sides were quick to criticize each other.
> 
> "The Chinese are too bad, really bad," said a Uighur fabric merchant who would only provide his given name, Hama.
> 
> "The protesters two weeks ago wanted the Chinese to get out of here. There were a couple hundred. Then the Communists came in and broke it all up. I can't say more or I'll get arrested," he said.
> 
> "We aren't free to talk."
> 
> China has often used harsh repression to control the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and whose customs and religion are distinct from the ethnic majority Han Chinese.
> 
> The government has also flooded Xinjiang, which means "New Frontier," with military personnel and migrants who control much of the economy.
> 
> The Chinese are also quick to voice their fears, disdain or distrust of the Uighurs.
> 
> They often say the Uighurs are ungrateful for all the government investment that has modernized the region - bigger than Alaska and one-sixth of China's territory.
> 
> "They have no culture and they don't try to study and improve themselves," said a Chinese delivery driver who would only give his surname, Wang, because he said the government didn't want him to speak ill of the Uighurs.
> 
> "Most businesses don't want to hire them. That's why they hire Han Chinese. Their religion, Islam, it's no good. It fills their heads with nonsense."
> 
> Often, it seems the two groups are content to live in their own worlds and make little effort to bridge differences.
> 
> During the two-hour China Southern Airlines flight from Urumqi to Hotan, none of the young Chinese flight attendants spoke Uighur to the passengers.
> 
> Even basic phrases like "Please sit down" or "Fasten your seat belts" were spoken in Mandarin to the Uighurs, who often asked the attendants to repeat themselves.
> 
> A Uighur university student who would only give his English name, Steve, said he didn't have to go to class last Friday because it was a national holiday - Ching Ming, a day when Chinese clean their ancestors' graves.
> 
> "I don't know what the holiday is called or what it's about," the 20-year-old student said. "It's a Chinese holiday. It has nothing to do with me."


----------



## Edward Campbell

IOC President Jacques Rogge is in Beijing today as anti-Chinese (or _”free Tibet”_ or whatever) demonstrations intensify.

I’m guessing that Hu  Jiantao’s staff are asking M. Rogge to issue a statement decrying the anti-Chinese demonstrations and asking the Beijing Olympic Committee to help the Olympic movement by rethinking the global torch relay. He might ask the Chinese to stage the relay within China.

I’m guessing, again, that China can live without intensifying protests in Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Canberra, Seoul and points in between. It might be tempting to bring the torch home and stage a public _”love-in”_ all over China – to be broadcast world-wide because the 24/7 “news” machines need images to fill time.

The relay could be restarted on the Chinese slopes of Mt.Qomolangma (the mountain we call Everest) and pass through Lhasa – with images of adoring crowds, and then make its way throughout China to an increasing crescendo of nationalist fervor.


----------



## a_majoor

Since one of the root threads was about the PLAN (People's Liberation Army Navy), this is appropriate.:

http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2008/04/if-mr-nicholls.html



> If Mr. Nicholls wants meaningful actions . . .
> 
> . . . and he's not willing to consider the propaganda bonanza that the Communists will reap from having the Western powers attend the Games, perhaps this Armed Forces Journal (US) story will get his attention:
> 
> _China has launched more than 36 new submarines since 1995 — far outpacing U.S. intelligence estimates from a decade ago. Additionally, supersonic indigenous cruise missiles, rumored development of an anti-ship ballistic missile, dynamic mine warfare and amphibious warfare programs, invigorated aerial maritime strike capabilities, as well as a variety of new, sleek and modern surface combatants, suggest a broad front effort by the People’s Liberation Army Navy. _
> 
> If Mr. Nicholls is willing to call for an increase in the Canadian Navy to help combat this threat (I've been asking the U.S. Navy to do this for years), then we can agree to disagree about the meaning of an Olympic boycott.
> 
> Posted by D.J. McGuire on April 9, 2008 in International Affairs, International Politics, Military | Permalink


----------



## CougarKing

A historic cross-strait relations summit is coming up. 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/04/11/taiwan.china.ap/index.html



> *Taiwan set for historic China summit
> 
> Story Highlights
> Taiwan's vice president-elect to have historic meeting with China's president
> 
> Vincent Siew will meet with Hu Jintao for 20 minutes on Saturday at forum
> 
> It will be the highest-level contact ever between officials of the longtime rivals
> 
> Ma succeeds Chen, who steps down after eight years in power*
> 
> SANYA, China (AP) -- Taiwan's vice president-elect is due to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao on Saturday in the highest-level contact ever between officials from the longtime rivals.
> 
> The historic talks carry the potential of opening a new era in relations between the two, indicating the direction Taiwan-China relations will move toward under a new Taiwanese administration set to take office in May.
> 
> Vincent Siew will meet with Hu for 20 minutes on the sidelines of an economic forum in the southern Chinese resort of Boao, Siew's spokesman, Wang Yu-chi, said Friday. No other details were given.
> 
> Heading a delegation of Taiwanese business leaders, Siew arrived Friday afternoon in the island province of Hainan where the forum is held each year.
> 
> "We will use the occasion to make more friends and exchange views," said Siew, a former premier who has dedicated his years out of office to expanding economic relations with China. "We will present the new blueprint for Taiwan's economic development."
> 
> The meeting could be a watershed in relations between the two neighbors, which have alternated between angry threats and icy scorn for the last eight years under Taiwan's independence-leaning President Chen Shui-bian.
> 
> *Siew's future boss, President-elect Ma Ying-jeou, was elected on strong hopes he would boost relations with China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province.
> 
> China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949 and Beijing threatens to attack if the Taiwanese try to formalize their de-facto independent status.
> 
> Beijing refuses to recognize the island's elected government, and on Thursday Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu referred to Siew only as chairman of the Cross-Strait Common Market Foundation, a private group that seeks to build economic cooperation between China and Taiwan.
> 
> Ma and Siew represent the Nationalist Party that ran Taiwan for almost five decades after fleeing the mainland ahead of the communist victory. Despite decades of antagonism, the Nationalists and their former communist foes have opened up a dialogue in recent years, in part out of common opposition to Chen's moves to assert Taiwan's independent identity.
> 
> Ma has pledged to liberalize investment rules and launch direct air and maritime links between Taiwan and China. On Friday, Siew had to fly to China via Hong Kong because Taiwan still bans direct flights.*
> 
> However, the president-elect has been vague on the prospects of improved political ties, saying he hopes to sign a peace agreement but won't discuss unification during his presidency.
> 
> On Saturday, Hu and Siew are to attend the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual Chinese government-sponsored event attended by leading businesspeople and a smattering of world leaders.
> 
> The forum's secretary-general, former Chinese official Long Yongtu, also confirmed Siew's meeting with Hu, according to China's official Xinhua News Agency.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think we should all pay attention to his story, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080411.wchina0412/BNStory/International/home


> China spins protests to buttress support at home
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> 
> From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> April 11, 2008 at 10:54 PM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — It was a moment so perfect that it could have been scripted by Beijing's propaganda masters. A beautiful young Chinese woman, bravely ignoring her physical handicap, is shielding the Olympic flame with her body to protect it against Western attackers.
> 
> The incident, captured on video, has galvanized China's masses and created a new national hero. A star has been born, and she is 27-year-old Jin Jing of Shanghai, an amputee in a wheelchair who was carrying the Olympic torch in Paris this week when she was confronted by protesters who wrestled for the torch.
> 
> The one-legged Paralympic fencing champion, whose picture has been splashed across front pages in China, has become an iconic image of everything the Chinese want to believe about the innocence of their country and the dastardliness of the West.
> 
> All week she has been mobbed by fans and glorified in the Chinese media, who dubbed her the "smiling angel in a wheelchair" and "saviour of the national honour."
> 
> Police officers apprehend an anti-China, pro-Tibet demonstrator, waving a Tibetan flag, right, as he tries to interrupt the Olympic torch parade before an athlete in a wheelchair, left, takes the relay, shortly after its beginning near the Eiffel tower in Paris, April 7. Security officials extinguished the Olympic torch several times amid heavy protests during the torch relay in Paris. The flame was being carried out of a Paris traffic tunnel by an athlete in in a wheelchair when it was stopped because protesters booed and began chanting 'Tibet.' (Thibault Camus/AP)
> 
> Her fans describe her as fearless and modest. "She has captured the hearts of millions of Chinese people," the state news agency says. As for Ms. Jin, she smiles sweetly and then says, of the protesters, "I despise them."
> 
> China in 2008 has become a story with two dramatically contrasting narratives, each isolated in its own solitude, almost unaware of the other. While the West sees the Chinese government as the violent oppressors of Tibetans and other dissidents, the Chinese see their country as the victim of external attacks, and the "wheelchair angel" is their ultimate symbol.
> 
> After initially censoring the televised reports on the torch protests in London and Paris, the Chinese government soon found it better to encourage the reports, which were carefully edited to portray China as the victim.
> 
> Last month, the state media gave huge publicity to another iconic image of the Tibet crisis: the five young Chinese saleswomen who were killed in their clothing shop in Lhasa when it was set ablaze by Tibetan protesters. Again, the Chinese saw their women as innocent victims of Western-supported attackers.
> 
> With images such as those to mould the national mood, it has been surprisingly easy for China's autocratic rulers to rally their country to support them. And here is the unexpected reality of the Chinese Communist Party in 2008: Its international image might be bruised and battered, but its internal grip on power is stronger than ever.
> 
> There is mounting evidence — in Internet chat rooms, on the streets and everywhere else where public opinion can be measured — that the Chinese Communist Party has gained popularity and strength as a result of the violence and chaos of the past month.
> 
> It might be facing an Olympic opening ceremony boycott and mounting criticism from abroad, but the government has largely succeeded in mobilizing its 1.3 -billion people into a unified force, giving it the domestic legitimacy it craves for its survival.
> 
> "Thanks to the protests, the Chinese Communists may have consolidated support by its citizens for years to come," says Roland Soong, a shrewd observer of Chinese politics who runs a blog analyzing the Chinese media.
> 
> "For the Chinese Communists, the responses from Western governments, media and citizens are immaterial," he wrote in his blog. "The paramount goal of the Chinese Communists is to retain control of China, and therefore it is the response from the Chinese citizens that matter."
> 
> The legend of Jin Jing has been a huge coup for Beijing in its efforts to exploit the torch protests for its own self-interest, Mr. Soong says. "Faced with the beautiful heroine with one leg, how is any liberal dissidence on behalf of Tibet going to work inside China? This was a bonanza handed to the Chinese Communists by the pro-Tibet protesters."
> 
> In many ways, Tibet and the Olympics were the ideal issues for Beijing to face, if it was going to face any crisis in 2008. Western activists may have inadvertently blundered by choosing these two issues as the focus of their strategy this year. Ethnic minorities rarely get much sympathy among China's people. Tibet and the Olympics are relatively simple for Beijing to frame as an "us-against-them" narrative, in almost tribal terms, drawing upon China's painful memories of foreign attacks from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasions.
> 
> "The Chinese government has been able to strengthen its credentials as a defender of Chinese nationalistic pride," said Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing who is now a political scientist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.
> 
> "People who were not fully supportive of the Communist Party's rule have now united strongly around the party's political agenda for Tibet. The attacks on the Olympic flame have polarized the differences between China and the West, and the West is much more demonized than before."
> 
> This political dynamic has changed drastically in the past two decades. In 1989, there was huge Chinese sympathy for the university students who held hunger strikes at Tiananmen Square to seek freedom and oppose corruption. Most of the Tiananmen protesters were of the same Han Chinese ethnicity as the national majority. As university students, they were the best and brightest, the hope of the nation, and they garnered much sympathy from across the country.
> 
> But in 2008, in a growing climate of nationalism after years of "patriotic education" in the schools and media, there is little sympathy, and much hostility, toward the Tibetan protesters who live abroad or in their remote ethnic enclave. The Tibetan "splittists" are widely portrayed as uncivilized, violent, anti-Chinese, ungrateful for the government's help and controlled by foreign agitators. For the Han majority, the Tibetans are often seen as outsiders who even fought wars against China in the past. Their support from the West makes them even more hostile in Chinese eyes.
> 
> The Olympics, too, are seen as an "us-against-them" story. Foreign activists and boycott advocates are seen as malicious enemies who want to destroy the moment of China's greatest pride and prestige.
> 
> And so, while the Tiananmen Square protests rocked the Chinese leadership in 1989, the Tibet crisis of 2008 has had the opposite effect: It has strengthened the government's hand.
> 
> "In a crisis, the nationalist card is one of the most potent that the government can play," said Willy Lam, a long-time China watcher and political analyst based in Hong Kong.
> 
> "If you read the Chinese websites, there is a campaign of hatred against the Tibetans," he said. "I think it works. It enables the leadership to divert attention from the mistakes that they have made."
> 
> Despite China's toughest crisis in years, its rulers have shown far more resilience than many expected. They have won support from the country's influential middle classes, who have profited from the economic boom of recent years. They have learned how to manipulate events to create public outrage and pro-government feelings.
> 
> And they have learned how to benefit from the high-speed communications technology that is now ubiquitous in China. The technological tools that were supposed to democratize China — websites, blogs, video sites and slickly produced television channels — are actually bolstering the Communist government by allowing it to mobilize anger at foreign critics.
> 
> Howard Balloch, a former Canadian ambassador to China who now heads an investment bank in Beijing, says the Chinese government is worried about the international reaction to its handling of the Tibet crisis and the torch relay, but not the domestic reaction. "I think they know that the people support them on this," he said in an interview.
> 
> "It has buttressed their support across the whole country. I don't think they are worried about it."
> 
> External pressure on an authoritarian regime often has the unintended effect of boosting the regime's domestic power. Sanctions and embargos actually helped to strengthen the internal popularity of autocrats and dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic and the mullahs of Iran.
> 
> Although some were eventually ousted, the sanctions helped them to extend their rule for years. They were able to portray themselves as the victims of hostile foreign powers, and their populations rallied around them. The foreign protests against China this spring are creating the same rally-round-the-leader phenomenon.
> 
> The irresistible saga of Jin Jing, the wheelchair angel who had part of her right leg amputated at the age of 9 because of cancer, has been useful in stoking the emotions of patriotism and victimhood in China — especially since there is a distinct lack of personal charisma among the relatively faceless members of China's Politburo.
> 
> The Chinese Internet is buzzing with thousands of homages to Ms. Jin, linking her to the fate of the nation. Many vowed to kill the protesters who had tried to seize the Olympic torch from her.
> 
> "Jin Jing, you are pretty, but your heart is even prettier," one person wrote. "We all support you. Long live the motherland!"
> 
> A blog by one of her torch-relay companions said: "Let the storm be even stronger! Our heroes are unafraid. Victory will be ours in the end!"



The story is *not* that the CCP and the Government of China _spin_ the news to their advantage – the ‘news’ is spun here, throughout the West, too – to the advantage of governments, agencies, corporations and individuals like the Dalai Lama.

Nor is the story about Jin Jing.

The real story is summed up by Chinese blogger Roland Soong and Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing who is now a political scientist at Brock University:

•	"For the Chinese Communists, the responses from Western governments, media and citizens are immaterial, Song says. “The paramount goal of the Chinese Communists is to retain control of China, and therefore it is the response from the Chinese citizens that matter."

•	"The Chinese government has been able to strengthen its credentials as a defender of Chinese nationalistic pride,” accoding to Burton. “People who were not fully supportive of the Communist Party's rule have now united strongly around the party's political agenda for Tibet. The attacks on the Olympic flame have polarized the differences between China and the West, and the West is much more demonized than before."

The important first ‘battle of the torch’ has been won by China.

The matter of how we, in the West, approach the rest of the Beijing Olympics is important. I will reiterate what I have said before:

•	China matters – it is a major power, now, and will be a global superpower during the lifetime of most Army.ca members;

•	China is not our enemy. It does not want to be our enemy. We do not ‘need’ China as an enemy. But: we can, by action and inaction, turn China from a ‘competitor’ to an enemy;

•	Our vital interests might be summed up as “peace and prosperity” and China (as competitor, not enemy) is part of that equation;

•	We need to _”engage”_ China at every level to make it a better place for us to do business – a better, safer, more secure market for our goods and services;

•	We do not “engage” by boycotting anything; a boycott is, by definition, disengagement. Nor do we “engage” by insulting the Chinese people – and that is what a boycott of the Olympics will (not might) do.

China has a whole host of problems, including _separatist_ movements in some provinces. Tibet has a whole host of problems – none of which, in my opinion, can be solved by returning to an inept, corrupt Buddhist theocracy. None of Taiwan, Tibet or Xinjiang are of great import to Canada or even to the West at large - not important enough to make China into an enemy. Taiwan can be, and, I believe, will be absorbed into China under a variation of the “one country, two systems” policy. Tibet and Xinjiang are, like it or not, *internal* Chinese matters. We can sympathize with the minorities in China but there is not, even remotely, any possible *”Responsibility to Protect”* or even to hector.


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward, 

While I have great respect for your opinions and share many of them, including the need for realpolitik policies that are guided by national self interest I fear that you progress too far when you state: "None of Taiwan, Tibet or Xinjiang are of great import to Canada or even to the West at large - not important enough to make China into an enemy."  That, I am afraid, sounds awfully like "....a quarrel in a far-away land between peoples of whom we know nothing.....", a Chamberlain reference I am sure you recognize.

You have argued strongly that China is not, and is not likely to become, a liberal democracy.  I concur.  You have also argued that Han Chinese society is both conservative and authoritarian.  Again I concur.  At what point does the realpolitik requirement of maintaining the peace in the interest of commerce and order become appeasement with an authoritarian regime that considers our ways as far too chaotic and disordered?

We don't always get to choose our enemies.  In fact, do we ever?

A secondary point, as you have also referenced before is that China is not a nation.  It is a State and as a State it is an Empire or nations, each claiming aboriginal territory, dominated by the Han Chinese Majority - a Majority that feels put out because the Tibetans, Taiwanese, Uighurs, Manchus etc reacted violently to the Han's kind offer to manage their lives and lands for them. While Jin Jing is doing wonders for the CCP amongst the Han I wonder if the same can be said of all the subject races?

Those internal stressors amongst the races will inevitably lead us back to Chamberlain's conundrum and require us, again to decide if we need a Chamberlain or a Churchill.


----------



## Edward Campbell

But, what's the tipping point?

I cannot believe any sane person wants to go to war with China over either Tibet or Xinjiang.

I think some, indeed many people think Taiwan is worth fighting for - so do many Chinese. I am, personally, confident that the CCP/Gov't of China doesn't want to fight over it - not anytime soon, anyway. I believe the Chinese leadership believes that Taiwan will, eventually, rejoin China without a fight. I'm guessing the Gov't of Taiwan believes the same thing.

Thus, what's the issue now?

None, I suggest.

So let's focus on *our own* interests that involve engaging China and making it a better market for our goods and investments.


----------



## Kirkhill

What's the tipping point?  Damfino.

That doesn't mean that at some point in the near or distant future we will not reach it.

While I share your assessment of the current government of Taiwan and the current faction that is in control of the CCP neither of those are immutable.  One changes democratically, in the open, and the other changes democratically behind closed doors.  (democracy being defined as the will of "people" not "THE people").  But both change.

I consider myself reasonably sane most of the time and while I don't see a current need, or capability (the West is pretty stretched and split) for war I could posit a casus belli in India and China debating Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Kashmir for control of the head waters of the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Irrawady, Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers.

Or from Japan and South Korea feeling threatened if China were to successfully launch an assault on Taiwan. 

In the meantime, as a good capitalist, I too will continue to make hay while the sun shines and sell the Chinese the rope with which they intend to hang me, if they can.


----------



## tomahawk6

I dont see China changing into a democracy.What they have done is liberalize some of their economic policies while cementing their political goals.The CCP runs the country and will not tolerate dissent because of the millions of non-Chinese that they control might actually demand independence.They want to merge Taiwan into their empire the only real question is will they do so by force ? The only way Taiwan willingly rejoins China is if there is democracy in full bloom and I dont ever see that happening. If the Generals get tired of waiting they will have to pick their invasion to coincide with a "friendly" administration in Washington. That day might not be far off if Obama gets into the White House.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I dont see China changing into a democracy.What they have done is liberalize some of their economic policies while cementing their political goals.



I agree 100%.

I don’t see many countries becoming democracies – and that includes most of hose, even in Latin America, that are, currently, experimenting with the system.

I know I’m repeating myself, but democracy is a whole helluva lot more than just a few free elections. It is a whole _system_ that rests on a foundation of:

•	Government with the consent of the governed – elections being he best but maybe not he only way to determine hat consent;

•	A firm respect for the rule of law – in all aspects of life including politics; and

•	Equality at law – for governors and the governed alike.

China has no experience with democracy. They have had and have prospered under _meritocracies_. Their current big problems are “rule of law” and the idea of “equality at law.” Those are problems they share with the other BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries and with about 165 of the UN’s nearly 200 members. Even a few OECD members have had a few problems making democracy work: France 1958-59 and Greece 1967-74, for example.

Democracy is delightful and people do want to decide, for themselves, how they should be governed but, as experience in Algeria, for example, showed, we might not like the results of the peoples’ choices.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China has no experience with democracy.



Mr. Campbell,

Well this statement would be true only if you count mainland China, proper. However, one cannot overlook Taiwan, which is very much within the greater Pan-Chinese sphere of influence, regardless of whether they become independent later on. Pres. Lee Tung-Hui got elected President in the island's first "free and fair" elections in spite of the 1996 China Missile crisis which saw the mainland taunting Taiwan. This was to be followed by his successor Chen Shui Bian in 2000, IIRC, then to the current President-elect Ma-Ying Jiu; Taiwan/the ROC thus has had a very vibrant and intense multiparty democracy since 1996- when Pres. Lee Tung Hui was just ending his emergency term as President when he took over from the late Pres. Chiang Ching-Kuo, Generalissimo Chiang-Kai Shek's son- which shows that a _Han _ Chinese society living seperately from China- if not _the_ China itself- is ready and compatible with Democracy.

One little thing that I'd like to add: both the _waishengren_ and the _benshengren_ in Taiwan, in spite of their initially diverging and later converging histories, are ethnically Han Chinese; the _benshengren_, although they speak a bastardized version of Fujianese/Hokien, must not be confused with the local Aboriginal peoples, like the Atayal, IIRC, who in turn are probably closer ethnically and culturally to the Northern tribes in the island of Luzon in the Philippines just to the South.

Also, are we forgetting about Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, when the local British Colonial government led by Governor Chris Patten allowed the local Chinese to have a real election? Even though it was Tung-Chee Hwa, a local businessman with strong CCP connections (my, my, these sycophants are everywhere  :, even if he did attend the University of Liverpool), who got elected, this is yet another example of Chinese people practicing true universal suffrage.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Touché, CougarDaddy. Taiwan is, indeed, a vibrant democracy – a good demonstration that democracy and _conservative_ values are quite compatible. Ditto, albeit to a lesser degree, for Hong Kong.

There is, I believe some very tentative grass-roots democracy experiments underway at local levels in China, _per se_. One of the interesting things I have observed is that CCP membership is no longer as highly prized as it once was. I know, personally, of one person who, respectfully but not at all nervously, turned down an offer of Party membership – something that would have been inconceivable 20, perhaps even 10 years ago. She thought that the rewards of Party membership were no sufficient. I think the Party is looking for ways to burnish its reputation and enhance its perceived value by allowing some local ‘democracy.’


----------



## tomahawk6

Cougar you have cited the exception. The mainland has been governed by warlords of one stripe or another and a land with that many people would be a nightmare to govern as a democracy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Cougar you have cited the exception. The mainland has been governed by warlords of one stripe or another and a land with that many people would be a nightmare to govern as a democracy.



*Rubbish!*

China will be just as easy to govern, as a conservative democracy, as the European Union is, it (the EU) being a mix of liberal and emerging democracies.

China has to lick the problems of "rule of law" and "equality at law" (both tied to the corruption problem). When, rather than if, it does so it will be as democratic as Singapore - a country with better ratings for honesty and transparency in government than either Canada or the USA.


----------



## tomahawk6

What is that old line ? The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away. I think that sums up the Chinese penchant for warlords.


----------



## Kirkhill

Tomahawk6, I think it might also be applicable to Richard Daley, Tip O'Neil, Tammany Hall and Jean Chretien - not to mention Clintonistas and Obamaniacs.  Faction is the essence of politics, democratic or otherwise.  One of your chaps penned a line to the effect that a people are entitled to choose the form of government which they wish to live under.  It seems to me that it follows from that that if people want an autocrat for life then they are entitled to have one.  Of course you were also careful to make sure that you kept in hand the tools necessary to remove an autocrat who had overstayed his or her welcome - the Second Amendment.


----------



## tomahawk6

China is a very old culture and society,much older than the US. One was ruled by an Emperor or other autocrat and yet from its inception as a country the US has enjoyed a democratic form of government. Mao realized that power comes from a rifle barrel.The CCP could not have survived without the support of the military. It is by looking at Chinese history that I dont see much hope for a democracy to take hold.The best one could hope for is a continuing liberalization of China,however there are strains within China that can only be contained through the use of force. I dont see similar strains in the western democracies.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China is a very old culture and society,much older than the US. One was ruled by an Emperor or other autocrat and yet from its inception as a country the US has enjoyed a democratic form of government. Mao realized that power comes from a rifle barrel.The CCP could not have survived without the support of the military. It is by looking at Chinese history that I dont see much hope for a democracy to take hold.The best one could hope for is a continuing liberalization of China,however there are strains within China that can only be contained through the use of force. I dont see similar strains in the western democracies.



It appears, to me,that you're suggesting that states cannot evolve and that they cannot _learn_ from history. On that basis, since most of continental Europe, including, for a period, the traditionally _liberal_ Scandinavians, were ruled by autocrats until the early 19th century – warlords might be a better word to use until 1650 – they could not have evolved into democracies. Indeed, during the Thirty Years War it must have appeared, to an unbiased outside observer, that continental Europe was beyond hope.

The Chinese _learned_ communism easily enough – by 1960 they were ‘better’ communists than their Russian teachers: they had a more egalitarian society with huge, world beating, improvements in education, health and food distribution. They relearned capitalism easily enough, too.  By 2005 they had become a full blown capitalist society – more so than some Western _nanny states_. They made that transition at double quick speed.

Why can they not _learn_ integrity in government? Other Chinese people, with very similar socio-economic values, in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, have managed Why can they not rid themselves of corruption? Singapore did; as I have mentioned it is generally regarded as being much less corrupt than Canada or the USA. We don’t need to expect China to be as ‘honest’ and Singapore (ranked 4th in the world) but maybe they can approach the USA (ranked 20th) or even our NATO ally Turkey (ranked 64th). China is, after all, currently ranked 72nd - the ‘worst’ country in the world is Somalia at 179 and America’s _pupil_, Iraq, is 178th.

I repeat, T6: *Rubbish*. No one here, I hope, is defending the PRC or the CCP, but it is muddle-headed to try to demonize it – I think you are demonstrating the eternal triumph of hope over experience.


----------



## tomahawk6

Actually Edward I havent demonized China I have just observed their history and concluded that for the immediate future communism is their choice of government.Democracy would be the hope perhaps,but a faint one and not without an upheaval that would wash away the communist system.If that day occurs it will be spawned in rural China.The present system is totalitarian in nature with the sole purpose of keeping the CCP in power.

China's present economic success is the result of a liberalization of communist economic policy. Hong Kong is certainly the model for mainland China's economic revitalization or modernization if you will. I think they did this out of necessity both to pacify their people's desire for modern goods and the need to modernize their armed forces.To understand modern China you must remember Mao's influence on the Party particularly power comes from the barrel of the gun.Political power and military power go hand in glove not only for China but also for the major countries in the world.I think economic power is as integral to the strength of a nation as is political and military strength.Notice I did not once use the word rubbish with regard to your comments Edward.


----------



## tomahawk6

Food for thought.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSPEK28373420071015?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

By Chris Buckley and Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Communist Party must stay firmly in charge as the nation embraces economic and social change, President Hu Jintao said on Monday in an agenda-setting speech vowing tightly controlled political reforms.

In a "state of the nation" report to the 17th Party Congress, Hu said that the country he has led for five years would pursue an increasingly open economy but also had to surmount social fissures and an environment battered by breakneck growth.

"Our economic growth is realized at an excessively high cost of resources and the environment," he said, drawing dutiful applause from carefully chosen delegates.

But Hu said the country's future was promising -- and even some political loosening was possible -- as long as the Communist Party maintained its long-unchallenged domination.

"China is going through a wide-ranging and deep-going transformation. This brings us unprecedented opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges," Hu told over 2,200 delegates -- one of them his predecessor Jiang Zemin, who appeared to doze through stretches of Hu's recital of slogans and goals.

"We must uphold the Party's role as the core of leadership in directing the overall situation and coordinating the efforts of all quarters," Hu said in the speech lasting more than two hours.

The five-yearly Congress is a chance for Hu to spell out his agenda for the next half of his presidency, entrench his doctrine of a "harmonious society" free of discontent, and promote officials who will enforce his policies and probably emerge as top leaders five years hence.

But the tight security, with rings of police stopping ordinary citizens getting anywhere near the carefully vetted delegates, underscored how wary Hu and his colleagues are of any challenge to their one-party rule. 

Go to the link to view pages 2 and 3 of this article.


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## Flip

I have always regarded post Mao communism in China as new dynasty.
Different warloards - fundamentally the same very old system.

I don't think the Chinese learned communism as "easily" as Edward suggests.
I think there is a tendency for China to pragmatically accept new rules as dynasties change.

What's new and exciting is the inevitable growth of the middle class and liberal
(western) deas.  This will bring the state into some conflict with the new trends and forces within China. So what happens? eveyone gets fat and happy?
Actually , I hope so.

In what appears to be a state vs. people conflict (to my little western mind) there seems to be a flow for the people.  Once the people develop a new set of social rules, and there seems to some evidence that this occuring, the state no longer makes the rules.

If the state controls your daily rice - they are in charge.
Once you have Ipods, Art, Cars, Punk Music, Booze, and maybe a little porn, some free expression is sure to follow.  Once the kids with weird hair growup and join the party, the party changes.  Maybe the meaning of the word "party " changes too.  ;D


----------



## a_majoor

China is maintaining an age old system of governance and civilization (i.e. the rules and assumptions that underly the way people relate to each other and the State). The forms may have changed, but the underlying rationals have not. Edward has pegged this perfectly in many posts, and most people seem to understand that modern China has recreated their Imperial system. The counterpoint that the Chinese fear is a breakdown of the Imperial structure and a reversion to "warring states", which last happened in the first half of the 20th century, as the old Empire collapsed and China was engulfed in civil war.

Having a hostile, unfriendly or even indifferent  "Middle Kingdom" competing with the West for influence and access to resources may be one thing, but having a number of nuclear armed warlords vying for power within and around China may be something even worse.



For those of you who are interested in a "China Aggregater", this one highlights the "anti" side. I have posted one article which is very disappointing to me as a Canadian, although the record of our State bureaucracies should not make this a surprising development.

http://china-e-lobby.blogspot.com/2008/04/news-of-weekend-april-12-14.html



> China e-Lobby
> 
> Dedicated to exposing the abuses of human rights, threats to the security of the free world, and attacks on general decency committed by Communist China, and to influencing policy in the free world to ensure these egregious acts do not go unopposed.
> 
> Monday, April 14, 2008
> News of the Weekend (April 12-14)
> 
> *Canadian Int'l Olympic Committee tells athletes with consciences to "stay at home": In a breathtaking display of arrogance, Richard Pound - the senior Canadian on the IOC - had this to say about Olympians who do not wish to be gagged, "The moral dilemma, you solve it before you get on the plane. If it is so tough for you that you can't bear not to say anything, stay at home" (Epoch Times).*


----------



## tingbudong

Flip wrote:


> Once you have Ipods, Art, Cars, Punk Music, Booze, and maybe a little porn, some free expression is sure to follow.  Once the kids with weird hair growup and join the party, the party changes.  Maybe the meaning of the word "party " changes too.



Unfortunately, using the current situation as evidence, the youth, the educated and current/future middle class of China are becoming increasingly (possibly too weak of a word?) nationalistic and anti-western.


----------



## CougarKing

tingbudong said:
			
		

> Flip wrote:
> Unfortunately, using the current situation as evidence, the youth, the educated and current/future middle class of China are becoming increasingly (possibly too weak of a word?) nationalistic and anti-western.



tingbudong,

Hao jiu bu jian le!/好久见了! Ni hai zai da lu huo zhe hui lai Jia na da?/ 你还在大陆或著回来加拿大?(Long time no see! Are you still on the mainland or have you gone back to Canada? hehehe.  ;D

quote by Tomahawk6:


> If the Generals get tired of waiting they will have to pick their invasion to coincide with a "friendly" administration in Washington. That day might not be far off if Obama gets into the White House.



IIRC, as I stated earlier in this thread or in an earlier thread, that it was after all a US Democrat as President- Bill Clinton-who got the mainland to back off from taunting Taiwan voters during its 1996 Presidential elections then and from lobbing more missiles over Taiwan, by sending two USN carriers to the Taiwan Strait during the 1996 Taiwan Missile Crisis. 

And it was another Democrat- Jimmy Carter- under which the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which allows the US government to aid Taiwan in the event of a PRC invasion, came into being. 

Regardless of who is in the White House, both parties obviously realize the possible threat that comes from mainland China to stability in the region, even if the CCP itself is obsessed with stability.


----------



## CougarKing

Not surprising at all.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080415/wl_asia_afp/uschinaclimatewarming;_ylt=AkUPQCKqsFHRl2n77M7gU1NvaA8F



> *China surpasses US as top carbon polluter: study *
> 1 hour, 41 minutes ago
> 
> China has already surpassed the United States as the world's largest carbon polluter, the authors of a California study said Tuesday.
> 
> "Our best forecast has Chinas CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions correctly surpassing the United States in 2006 rather than 2020 as previously anticipated," said the study by researchers at the University of California.
> 
> The report, written by economic professors Maximilian Aufhammer of UC Berkeley and Richard Carson of UC San Diego, is to be published next month in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
> 
> Researchers compiled information about the use of fossil fuels in various Chinese provinces and forecast an 11 percent annual growth of carbon emissions from 2004 to 2010.
> 
> Previous estimates had set the growth rate at 2.5 to five percent.
> 
> The spike in air pollution by China has largely cancelled out efforts by other countries' attempts to reduce greenhouse greenhouse gas emmissions in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol, the authors said.


----------



## CougarKing

China is now telling India to get rid of the Dalai Lama "or else". Talk about PRC outright hypocrisy when it comes to their belief in not meddling in another country's domestic affairs or who they choose to harbor; perhaps New Delhi should switch recognition of the "One China" from Beijing to Taipei just to send them a message. :

http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14650753



> *'Dump the Dalai Lama, or else…'*
> 
> *“India cannot keep China and the Dalai Lama simultaneously,” says a April 7 commentary carried by China’s official news agency, Xinhua. *
> The brief commentary went on to say that the Indian government was under pressure from various social and political groups on the Tibetan issue, and it would find it difficult to play host to the Tibetan government in-exile while maintaining good relations with China.
> 
> The gravity and veiled threat embedded in this commentary can only be ignored at India’s peril. The Chinese are masters in indirect and couched messages. The opposite party is expected to understand the message and respond accordingly. If the response is not to China’s satisfaction, then it will exercise its options.
> 
> The options are never clearly spelt out to keep the opponent guessing, nor is the exact timing of actions indicated clearly. The matter is noted, and options exercised at a time of China’s convenience. Surprise is a crucial element of Master Sun Tzu’s strategy.
> 
> ---
> 
> *Xinhua’s news reports follow the guidelines laid down by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government. But such commentaries come from the Party Central Committee and the Political Bureau level -- the highest authority. The commentary was in Chinese, suggesting that officials, party cadres and people were being assured that improvement in India-China relations were not at the cost of the pride of the Chinese nation. One reads in this a dangerous trend – raising Chinese nationalism against India. *
> 
> The Chinese leadership must realise, and they are highly experienced in this, that “national pride” is very different from “nationalism”. The term nationalism can quickly slip into Adolf Hitler’s “Aryan Superiority” or Benito Mussolini’s “Fascism”.
> 
> The Chinese message to India is quite clear. Dump the Dalai Lama, or else. The “or else” is not a difficult riddle to solve. They are confident they have many instruments squeeze India – the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), India’s APEC membership, sparking problems on the borers, and others.
> 
> ---
> 
> *The leadership in Beijing is under rising international pressure to address the Tibetan issue and the Tibetan cause, and talk to the Dalai Lama to resolve it peacefully. No one is asking for independence of Tibet, especially the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual head has been steadfastly supporting the Beijing Olympics, and is emphatic in every way that he wants “genuine autonomy” for Tibet. He is also willing to negotiate on the aspects of autonomy. The Dalai Lama’s bottom line is to keep the Tibetan religion, culture and civilisation alive. And the lineage of the Dalai Lama is the life blood of the Tibetan Lamaist culture, religion and civilisation. A civilisation grows on the purity of certain beliefs, which get ingrained in its genes.*
> ---
> 
> *Chinese policies in Tibet suggest it wants to destroy all these. According to Chinese law, the Dalai Lamas have to be recognised by the Chinese Government. They have derecognised the 11th Panchen Lama recognised by the Dalai Lama, and put up their own 11th Panchen Lama, who is not recognised by the Tibetans. *
> 
> *Human rights is a multi-dimensional concept. No country has the right to impose its own understanding of human rights on another country*. Since China practices communism at the initial stage of socialism, it has every right to protect it if the majority subscribes to this concept. *Then, human rights also have a universal concept. An age old civilisation cannot be crushed for their beliefs and culture.* This becomes an international issue of humanity, and cannot be ignored by the people of the world.
> 
> *Unfortunately, China is yet to understand the democratic world.* It is depending on democratic governments to fall in line, with the conviction that people do not matter. US President George W Bush, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appear to have proved China’s thesis. After all, it is the lure of the Chinese market, especially at the time of a global economic meltdown. *But there is something called people’s power, as the French have demonstrated. Democracy moves slowly, but eventually it wins.*
> 
> ---
> 
> *China claims the Olympics is a non-political sporting event. But the Olympics has hardly been a purely sporting event in its modern history. China’s Beijing Olympics is designed to be a major international political statement. The design of the Olympic torch is a statement of President and CCP General Secretary General Hu Jintao’s political thought: “harmonious development”. This theory is much more than neutral harmony of people of China and the world. It is a statement of “harmony” that can be achieved only under what the CCP ordains. *
> 
> After an initially politically correct position asking China to resolve the Tibetan issue peacefully and through dialogue with the Dalai Lama, India seems to have gone on the back-foot. While stating the Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader and an honoured guest, he has been advised not to respond to the most vitriolic and abusive attacks heaped on him by Chinese officials. The words and phrases used by the Chinese officials against the Dalai Lama are, at best, ghetto language of dehumanised communities.
> 
> *The language used in the Chinese attacks on the Dalai Lama are shocking, especially coming from the leaders of a race which claims four thousand years of culture. The Beijing Olympics is choreographed to showcase their culture, civilisation and power to the world. All have been waiting to see this awesome spectacle. But the abuses hurled at the Dalai Lama has irreversibly tainted all that. The question being asked is: Which is the real culture of China? *
> 
> The Tibetan refugees in India also have their responsibilities. They are free to protest peacefully, and this will be noted all over the world. But physically assaulting the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, or preparing to forcefully disrupt the Olympics torch run, is unfortunate. The Indian government cannot be embarrassed in this manner. India is bound to protect foreign envoys and their representatives under the Geneva Convention.
> 
> *On the other hand, how far back can the Indian government bend, and why, to accommodate the Chinese diplomatic and political aggression? The more India does so, the more the Chinese will demand. The BJP-led NDA government suffered this humiliation quite willingly during Prime Minister Vajpayee’s visit to China in June 2003. India got nothing in exchange. The BJP never explained their action, or inaction. *
> 
> Strangely, India is behaving like a battered boxer in a corner of the ring, eyes closed and hands over his head, hoping the raining blows would stop. This behavioural pattern has been common to both the NDA and the UPA, the BJP and the Congress, when in power.
> 
> *Encouraged by Indian timidity and willingness to accommodate China, Beijing attempted to place their special forces’ personnel to provide security to the Olympics torch relay in New Delhi on April 17. It was a relief that the Indian government declined. But the mere fact the China attempted to impose on India’s sovereignty is a matter of great affront to the Indian people. *
> 
> It will be a matter of historical regret if the International Olympics Committee (IOC) decides to cancel future Olympics torch relays. The problems that have visited upon the Beijing Olympics were created by China. Why should future hosts of the Olympic games be made to suffer?
> 
> *Finally, in the context of the Xinhua commentary, the Indian government, its political leaders and people must not fail to see the ultimatum conveyed by the Chinese. If India fails to respond with its sovereign independence, it may have to pay a heavy price in the future.
> 
> The Great Wall climbers in India must decide which is more important – ideological compatibility, or sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.*
> 
> 
> _Bhaskar Roy, who retired recently as a senior government official with decades of national and international experience, is an expert on international relations and Indian strategic interests. In this exclusive column for Sify.com, he argues that 'the more India bends to accommodate Chinese diplomatic and political aggression, the more the Chinese will demand.' _


----------



## tingbudong

> tingbudong,
> 
> Hao jiu bu jian le!/好久见了! Ni hai zai da lu huo zhe hui lai Jia na da?/ 你还在大陆或著回来加拿大?(Long time no see! Are you still on the mainland or have you gone back to Canada? hehehe.  Grin



哈哈， 我还在中国但是我马上回来加拿大。 我申请到了王后大学。我要读城市规划。

Heh heh...yeah, I'm still in China, but heading back to Canada pretty quick.  I was accepted to Queen's urban planning master program for this september!

Time for change...especially now.  The past month and half has been very englightening and most likely the most educational time of my entire stay here on the Mainland, but if I don't leave soon I'm going to end up hating the place. 

Nationlism IS on the rise, and it is of the old-school WW1 style.  Make no mistake, the much vaunted middle-class and youth of China are the leading edge of this anger and they are growing mistrustful of the West each passing minute.  I think it is extremely important to recognize that these people represent the future leadership of China.  Look at the nastiness that is going on down at Duke University.

http://iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/america/17student.php?page=2



> DURHAM, North Carolina: On the day the Olympic torch was carried through San Francisco last week, Grace Wang, a Chinese freshman at Duke University, came out of her dining hall to find a handful of students gathered for a pro-Tibet vigil facing off with a much larger pro-China counterdemonstration.
> 
> Wang, who had friends on both sides, tried to get the two groups to talk, participants said. She began traversing what she called "the middle ground," asking the groups' leaders to meet and making bargains. She said she agreed to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one student's back only if he would speak with pro-Chinese demonstrators. She pleaded and lectured. In one photo, she is walking toward a phalanx of Chinese flags and banners, her arms overhead in a "timeout" T.
> 
> But the would-be referee went unheeded. With Chinese anger stoked by disruption of the Olympic torch relays and criticism of government policy toward Tibet, what was once a favorite campus cause — the Dalai Lama's people — had become a dangerous flash point, as Wang was soon to find out.
> 
> The next day, a photo appeared on an Internet forum for Chinese students with a photo of Wang and the words "traitor to your country" emblazoned in Chinese across her forehead. Wang's Chinese name, identification number and contact information were posted, along with directions to her parents' apartment in Qingdao, a Chinese port city.
> 
> Salted with ugly rumors and manipulated photographs, the story of the young woman who was said to have taken sides with Tibet spread through China's most popular Web sites, at each stop generating hundreds or thousands of raging, derogatory posts, some even suggesting that Wang — a slight, rosy 20-year-old — be burned in oil. Someone posted a photo of what was purported to be a bucket of feces emptied on the doorstep of her parents, who had gone into hiding.
> 
> "If you return to China, your dead corpse will be chopped into 10,000 pieces," one person wrote in an e-mail message to Wang. "Call the human flesh search engines!" another threatened, using an Internet phrase that implies physical, as opposed to virtual, action.



These are savy, smart and motivated indivduals and it is very disturbing to hear about what they are doing. 

I don't speak much about the current situation with my local friends...it is just too easy to see where the conversation would end up. For an example...I fired up my MSN yesterday morning and 60% of my local friends had place (L) China next to their screen name. 

I would argue that Chinese nationalism NEEDS to be a seriously considered factor in dealing with this country.


----------



## Kirkhill

Tingbudong and Cougardaddy,  

Is this Nationalism a Han phenomenon or is it a Pan-Chinese phenomenon?   Does it carry the minorities with it?  Is there a territorial differentiation: Interior vs Coast, Urban vs Rural etc?


----------



## tomahawk6

Nationalism would be strongest among the Han Chinese and the "occupied" people probably lack that strong identification. Certainly there isnt pro-Chinese nationalism in Tibet. The biggest divide among the ethnic Chinese has to be between rural vs city dwellers. As the cities prosper there isnt any trickle down to the peasants in the countryside. As the cities grow there is a growing water shortage which will also increase the strains. If the government can resolve both issues they can remove the seeds of future instability.


----------



## Flip

T6,

If what Tingbudong says is true ( I assume it is ) the short answer to internal strife could be to blame the west for all of their problems.  It doesn't have to be true to be effective.

If "Tibet" is blamed on the US then I would guess people will rally around the government rather than try to change it.


----------



## tomahawk6

If people start going hungry it will be the government that gets blamed.But as we have seen in N Korea it is possible to avoid food riots with enough troops and police.China is a much larger country and it might not be possible to keep the lid on. I dont see a control issue only if the government isnt able to provide water or food.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Tingbudong and Cougardaddy,
> 
> Is this Nationalism a Han phenomenon or is it a Pan-Chinese phenomenon?   Does it carry the minorities with it?  Is there a territorial differentiation: Interior vs Coast, Urban vs Rural etc?



Mr. Kirkhill,

From what I have observed, it is more of a Han Chinese phenomenon, although the PRC has styled its education to the point in Tibet, Xinjiang and other areas with predominantly minority populations to make these native peoples think they are just as Chinese as their ethnically Han neighbours.

That is why when a Han from say, Henan, would meet someone from Tibet, they would address each other as "brother" (gege/didi/lao di) or "sister" (meimei/jiejie) even if they may be complete strangers. However, from what I observed, it may be more of just an expression in the same way some people here would say "buddy" or "pal" to some random guy who did something polite for you or did a business transaction with you.



> These are savy, smart and motivated indivduals and it is very disturbing to hear about what they are doing.
> 
> I don't speak much about the current situation with my local friends...it is just too easy to see where the conversation would end up. For an example...I fired up my MSN yesterday morning and 60% of my local friends had place (L) China next to their screen name.
> 
> I would argue that Chinese nationalism NEEDS to be a seriously considered factor in dealing with this country



Yes. I agree, tingbudong. (Seriously, you should change your name to tingDEdong sometime, hehehe.)
 :rofl:

Most of the Chinese people I know personally are from Taiwan, although I still keep in contact with a couple of people I knew from the time I studied on the mainland.

However, I have encountered these ultra-nationalist PRC types online and it can be quite annoying to deal with them on their own forums, especially if they respond to your pointing out the flaws in their arguments about Tibet with the usual NI GAI SI LE or GWUNNN KAI! response.  : Oh well.


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## TCBF

Us Whities need a quick and dirty guide to the phrases and words you are scripting so we can keep up with this thread!


----------



## Yrys

China to loan Pakistan $500M



> SLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP)  -- China will offer its close ally Pakistan a low-interest $500 million (315 million euro) loan to help ease its growing financial problems, Pakistan's
> foreign minister said.
> 
> Shah Mehmood Qureshi made the announcement Thursday after a recent visit to China and after Pakistan hosted a protest-free, security-heavy leg of the Olympic torch relay amid
> Western criticism of its giant neighbor's human rights record in Tibet. Qureshi, who accompanied President Pervez Musharraf on the April 10-15 trip, said that it had been "highly
> successful." "If we have any reliable friend, my experience says it is China," Qureshi said at a news conference in the capital, Islamabad.
> 
> Qureshi is a loyalist of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose party defeated Musharraf's political supporters in February elections and now leads a new coalition
> government. The government has inherited an ailing economy. It faces yawning budget and balance of payments deficits driven by rising world prices for commodities such as oil.
> 
> The World Bank last month urged the new administration to take urgent action or risk a crisis, even though the economy was still growing at an annual rate of more than 6 percent.
> On Thursday, Qureshi said that Pakistan faces "huge economic problems" but that he hoped the government would overcome them. He said that trade between Pakistan and China
> was worth $6.8 billion (4.28 billion euros), and that he hoped that it would reach $15 billion (9.45 billion euros) by 2011.
> 
> The two countries' alliance goes back decades, and China is a leading source of investment and arms supplies for Pakistan. They are also rivals of India, which neighbors both.


----------



## tingbudong

Flip wrote:


> If what Tingbudong says is true ( I assume it is ) the short answer to internal strife could be to blame the west for all of their problems.  It doesn't have to be true to be effective.



I will not push as far to say that promoting anti-western sentiment and focusing blame on foreign powers is "official" government policy but it probably is only one or two signatures and bills away from becoming dogma.  Nationalism has proven to be a good fill for the void left by Marxism.  The central government is aware of the double-edged nature of utilizing nationalism as a nation binder.  For example, in many cases (sorry, not cites available, just items/conversations I've read/had over the years) *the government* is heavily criticized by many for coming off as too 'soft' against the West, especially during the Embassy airstrike in 99' and the Hainan Island incident in 2001, especially among the new generation.   Keep in mind, this new generation has been shaked and baked in patriotic/nationlistic sauce since kindergarten -  they will find themselves in a very controlled, monitored and paternal environment, protected against all of the negative outside influences. Within such a context, I feel that this generation has developed a _substantially over-positive_ view regarding their country and the direction it is heading. But more importantly, this vocal and visible end of this generation has also never had to cope with any sort of economic or social unrest...unlike previous generations who take a somewhat more cautious, tempered and overall realistic outlook on the present and future direction of their country. 

@CD - In complete argreement with you regarding the Han-centric orientation of nationalism.  Also arguing online with an Mainland uber-nationalist is probably the most frustrating thing one can engage in  On an related note, a rather new phenonomenon is the increasing usage of the term 'brainwashed' by Mainlanders in referring to Western people.  I never I'd read/hear that one...

Currently there is a noticiable anti-western edge in air.  A lot of people are becoming increasingly convinced that the West is out to ruin the Olympics, divide China and basically lay down the humiliation like we did in the past.  Our media is seen as the front line of this assault and I believe that their actions have been translated incorrectly.

There much difficulty by many here in separating political/policy criticisms from cultural criticisms. The role of the press in China is a positive one, while in the West it is firmly entrenched in a tradition of rabble-rousing and causing change. I think it is possible to argue that _the western media approach was underpinned in the western assumption that investigative and revealing journalism and critique will spur the masses, create dissent and be the instrument of change. _However it appears to have been interpreted as a direct, blatant and bias attack on China/Chinese people. This misunderstanding is also extended to people on the mainland who (hardly their fault) are not aware that this is what the western media does. The search out problems, the attack, they hurt and they are very unrelenting (often making many mistakes in the process). I've noticed that there seems to be the belief that China is alone in these attacks...and attitude of "you always pick on us" but in the reality, they are merely this months whipping boy. When something more sinister (and therefore interesting) arrives on the world stage, the beats head over there. It is not an 'anti-china' crusade...the media will take on anyone, anywhere, for anything...just as the United States what it is like to be on the end of the media baton.


----------



## TCBF

- Now THAT makes a lot of sense to me.  It would probably make sense to a lot of Chinese too, if they could be convinced that a lot of our Western processes were inherently chaotic, inefficient, and often downright unfair.


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## CougarKing

Some humour to brighten your Sunday; another reason why they need more English teachers over there on mainland China.  ;D (ZAO GAO/WHAT A MESS!!!!  :rofl













I think the second picture is from Taiwan, Macau or Hong Kong since the characters are in Traditional Chinese characters/_Fan ti zi _ and not the Simplified characters/_Jian ti zi_ that they use on the mainland.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

Interesting thread.  I had a sneaking suspicion, based on my three all-too-brief visits to China, that the Tibet protests in the West around the Olympics would have a completely undesired effect.  It would be rather ironic if a bunch of "Free Tibet" protestors caused (at best) a new Cold War.  Western Governments should temper their responses to China's actions in Tibet with a realistic understanding of the enormous loss of face China would undergo if the Olympics were boycotted.  This should be done not out of a fear of China, per se, but out of a cautious approach in the face the unpredictable nature of ultra-nationalism.


----------



## time expired

Ah yes, the voice of appeasement,the same voices that say we should
not complain too much about the actions of Muslin terrorists as it
may upset them and perhaps drive the price of oil up even further.
Fortunately,we in the west have the freedom to protest against what
we perceive as injustice and oppresion even though it may upset
those who are making a good buck from turning China into a super-
power,incidentally,one with no apparent moral compass something
they seem to share with all ex-communist regimes,and those who
find it very disappointing that there is no easy way to blame George
Bush for what is happening.
                  End of rant.
                                 Regards


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's an additional factor: it is not clear to me that Tibet is repressed or exploited.

_Caveat lector_: I have not been to Tibet and I'm unlikely to get here before 2010, at the earliest.

But: I have met a few Tibetans, in China, who were quite emphatic in their distaste for any return to some sort to Buddhist theocracy. The last one (1912-1950) is, I think geneally regarded as having been corrupt and inept. The CCP does not provide much in the way of good government for anyone anywhere but it appears to be 'better' than what the Dalia Lama and his cronies have on offer.

Finally: I cannot find any good case that Tibet is not an integral part of China. It's few and brief periods of independence do not, in my view, offset its long history as a Chines province or client.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There's an additional factor: it is not clear to me that Tibet is repressed or exploited.
> 
> _Caveat lector_: I have not been to Tibet and I'm unlikely to get here before 2010, at the earliest.
> 
> But: I have met a few Tibetans, in China, who were quite emphatic in their distaste for any return to some sort to Buddhist theocracy. The last one (1912-1950) is, I think geneally regarded as having been corrupt and inept. The CCP does not provide much in the way of good government for anyone anywhere but it appears to be 'better' than what the Dalia Lama and his cronies have on offer.
> 
> Finally: I cannot find any good case that Tibet is not an integral part of China. It's few and brief periods of independence do not, in my view, offset its long history as a Chines province or client.



I'm just curious though- were these Tibetans whom you met ones who actually had lived in Tibet before and were now living in a different province or Tibetans/_Xizang ren _ who had spent all their lives outside of Tibet? Perhaps their older relatives who remember the initial PRC invasion in 1949-50, IIRC, and the failed 1959 uprising may have a different opinion from their younger generations.

The issue of self-determination is a messy one and has been a messy one since the Pan-Slavism of the 1800s, Wilsonian self-determination that saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War One and then with the waves of decolonization after World War II that saw the Western Allies give up most of their overseas empires. 

If one takes a relativist definition of it, a Tibetan exile or sympathizer will then ask you if Tibetan self-determination is any less valid than that of the Kosovars or the East Timorese?

Then take an absolutist definition of self-determination and a Chinese ultra-nationalist will accuse you of trying to incite instability where none is needed, and they will often ask how come you are meddling into their affairs when "you Westerners/_Lao Wai_" are indifferent about the Kurds in Northern Iraq or various seperatist movements that have cropped up all through the history of the United States.  :


----------



## SeaKingTacco

> Ah yes, the voice of appeasement,the same voices that say we should
> not complain too much about the actions of Muslin terrorists as it
> may upset them and perhaps drive the price of oil up even further.



Ah no.  This is not about appeasement.  This is about ensuring that we understand the second and third order effects of our actions wrt China.

Let's make sure that if we are going to pick a fight, that we make sure that we understand precisely what it's all about.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> I'm just curious though- were these Tibetans whom you met ones who actually had lived in Tibet before and were now living in a different province or Tibetans/_Xizang ren _ who had spent all their lives outside of Tibet? Perhaps their older relatives who remember the initial PRC invasion in 1949-50, IIRC, and the failed 1959 uprising may have a different opinion from their younger generations.
> 
> The issue of self-determination is a messy one and has been a messy one since the Pan-Slavism of the 1800s, Wilsonian self-determination that saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War One and then with the waves of decolonization after World War II that saw the Western Allies give up most of their overseas empires.
> 
> If one takes a relativist definition of it, a Tibetan exile or sympathizer will then ask you if Tibetan self-determination is any less valid than that of the Kosovars or the East Timorese?
> 
> Then take an absolutist definition of self-determination and a Chinese ultra-nationalist will accuse you of trying to incite instability where none is needed, and they will often ask how come you are meddling into their affairs when "you Westerners/_Lao Wai_" are indifferent about the Kurds in Northern Iraq or various seperatist movements that have cropped up all through the history of the United States.  :



I'm not really sure about the Tibetans' pedigree; they were of an age to remember 1949/50; I have the _impression_ they were 'real' Tibetans but I have no idea, now, why I think that.

I agree with you about the messy nature of the Tibet separatist debate. I prefere to call them _separatists_ because, as I read it, the Dalai Lama's followers look a lot like old PQ types seeking some ill-defined form of _sovereignty association_.


----------



## tomahawk6

China stole Tibet fair and square and since the Tibetans are such losers they dont deserve to be free of Chinese domination.Israel captured land in its wars but by that rationale though Israel must give up those lands. We have Chinese and North Korean troops patroling the streets in Zimbabwe. They are a long way from home dont you think ?

China has its own agenda and is pursuing it. Many countries that should know better are willing to turn a blind eye to China saying that to do otherwise means war. China has its pressure points and we shouldnt be afraid to apply pressure to get them to moderate their aggressive policies.


----------



## cavalryman

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China has its own agenda and is pursuing it. Many countries that should know better are willing to turn a blind eye to China saying that to do otherwise means war. China has its pressure points and we shouldnt be afraid to apply pressure to get them to moderate their aggressive policies.



tomahawk6 - don't get me wrong - I'm about as contemptuous of anti-americanism as it comes living in Canada's capital, but it just bears pointing out that a chunk of the planet, for whatever cackheaded reasons, would substitute "China" for "United States" in your statement, including a fair number of our so-called European allies, to make a similar point.  China is able to exploit the anti-western, anti-anglo (in Mugabe's case) and anti-american sentiment in what used to be called the Third World the same way we (writ large as in NATO pre-Berlin Wall collapse) used to exploit anti-soviet expansionism.  We should not be blind to the fact that the "West" isn't well seen in many countries, for whatever reasons, good or bad, and China is stepping in as the alternative.  Is it good? Is it bad?  We can look at the way western countries did the same in the last two hundred years and come up with the same spectrum of divergent opinions.  Fact is, China is positioning itself as the alternative in Africa and elsewhere, and in that we agree.  We should simply be ready to make a strong case that the Chinese intervention is a lesser brand than Western (read US) intervention.  Of course, one of the big factors militating for Chinese superiority is their ability to sell crap to every willing buyer and raking in hard currency, something we, the West can't do.

Anyways, some musings for a Monday night that saw the Habs pull off in 7 games what they should have pulled off in 5.

Cheers


----------



## SeaKingTacco

> China has its pressure points and we shouldnt be afraid to apply pressure to get them to moderate their aggressive policies.



But that is precisely my point- understand the effects of your pressure.  It is not about giving the Chinese a free pass- it is about boycotting an Olympics over Tibet, which, IMHO is likely to do little but needlessly enrage the uber-nationalist Chinese public, which will be the opposite of moderating Chinese policy.  Better, IMHO, to go to Olympics and beat their ass on home turf.

Better still- you don't like Chinese foreign and domestic policy- stop buying their crap.  That will apply pressure very nicely, should enough people do it.

My two Yuan...


----------



## tomahawk6

I agree that boycotting the Olympics is not the way to go. Nor is giving China a pass. I agree that some countries fear/hate the US more than they do China. Take the US out of the equation in the world today and what will the world look like ? Would it be a more dangerous place ? I think so.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> We have Chinese and North Korean troops patroling the streets in Zimbabwe. They are a long way from home dont you think ?



I've heard of PLA engineering troops working in African nations often under the UN mandate, as in the case of Sudan, but I have never heard of North Korean troops there. This is very surprising to me. Got any pictures or a good link?  

Also, I'm curious about what you think of the shipment of Chinese-made weapons that is headed to Zimbabwe on a Guangzhou-registered cargo ship named the _An Yue Jiang_, IIRC.

Here's an article on that story: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/04/19/safrica.china/index.html?iref=mpstoryview 



> JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) -- A Chinese ship loaded with arms and ammunition sailed away from a South African waters and is on its way to Luanda, Angola to unload its cargo bound for Zimbabwe.
> 
> South Africa's High Court ruled Friday the cargo could be offloaded in the Durban port, but it could not pass over South Africa roads to get to Zimbabwe, a country in crisis because of an election stalemate.
> 
> Durban's dockworkers also said they would not handle the cargo, fearing the arms would be used by the Zimbabwean government against its own people.
> 
> A South African government source told CNN the China-flagged An Yue Jiang had sailed away from Durban Friday evening before the High Court's order could be served to the ship's captain.
> 
> The ship was headed to the port of Luanda, Angola, according to the South African Department of Transport.
> 
> Zimbabwe is in turmoil after elections last month that saw the opposition Movement for Change party win a majority of seats in the parliament, although Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has contested 16 seats, claiming the MDC cheated.
> 
> The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission began a recount of 23 of those districts Saturday morning.
> 
> The presidential election, however, has sparked much more concern. The government of President Robert Mugabe, who has been in power since Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, has refused to release results of that vote before a recount.
> 
> The MDC says its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election, but ZANU-PF has claimed the MDC engaged in election tampering. The delay in releasing the vote sparked violence and a government crackdown on opposition members.
> 
> "This union has a proud history of taking action against regimes which it disapproves of in the past, but this is certainly the first time it has gotten involved in an African regime like Zimbabwe," David Cockroft, general secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation, said.
> 
> "I don't think there's much doubt that the (dock) workers ... are very strongly against the Mugabe regime," he said.
> 
> Cockroft said that arms had almost certainly been shipped to Zimbabwe through Durban in the past, but the size of this shipment -- "more than a million pounds" and 3.5 million rounds of rifles, small arms, mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades -- made it more noteworthy.
> 
> Earlier, South African Revenue Service spokesman Adrian Lackay told CNN "that it is commonplace for landlocked neighboring states in southern Africa to use South African ports of entry for the transshipment of goods."
> 
> Lackay indicated that the ship had complied with South African regulations requiring it to disclose the contents of the cargo it is carrying.
> 
> A government spokesman, Thembo Maseko, told CNN, "There were arms on the ship."
> 
> The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement in a fax to the Reuters news agency saying that China and Zimbabwe have normal trade relations, that the Chinese government takes a "prudent and responsible" position on arms deals and that it does not involve itself in the internal affairs of other countries.
> 
> CNN's Nkepile Mabuse and Bridget Fallon contributed to this report.



quote by Tomahawk6:


> China has its own agenda and is pursuing it. Many countries that should know better are willing to turn a blind eye to China saying that to do otherwise means war. China has its pressure points and we shouldnt be afraid to apply pressure to get them to moderate their aggressive policies.



They are not afraid of war with China as much as they are afraid of losing Chinese foreign economic aid; one of the ways Beijing lures away potential allies of Taiwan/the ROC is to use economic aid to get them to recognize Beijing instead of Taipei as the "One China". That is why only about 20 or so nations in the world, which includes mostly Third-World nations like Liberia and Panama, recognize Taipei's government as the one China as opposed to Beijing.

The lesser the number of nations who recognize the ROC as opposed to the PRC, the less chance that Taiwan has of getting UN membership (through its allies who are UN members) in the annual motion each year to vote on whether to introduce the issue of Taiwan's prospective membership in the UN, which is blocked by the overwhelming number of allies China has who vote against the motion.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US is going to add a Marine guard to the unofficial embassy in Taipei.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The US is going to add a Marine guard to the unofficial embassy in Taipei.



Wow, that will definitely irk China a bit. When I went to the AIT (The American Institute in Taiwan/the unofficial embassy) one day back in 1998, I noticed an empty sentry post by the gate which had a sort of "pillbox" look. If this goes through, this will be the first time since the 1970s (when the AIT was the official embassy and before the US withdrew recognition of Taipei's government as the "One China") that there will be Marines in that quasi-embassy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> But that is precisely my point- understand the effects of your pressure.  It is not about giving the Chinese a free pass- it is about boycotting an Olympics over Tibet, which, IMHO is likely to do little but needlessly enrage the uber-nationalist Chinese public, which will be the opposite of moderating Chinese policy.  Better, IMHO, to go to Olympics and beat their ass on home turf.
> 
> Better still- you don't like Chinese foreign and domestic policy- stop buying their crap.  That will apply pressure very nicely, should enough people do it.
> 
> My two Yuan...



This is a +2 in the system to which I am accustomed.

Fanning the flames of Chinese nationalism serves the CCP, none else.

The Chinese *can* be pressured, but to apply pressure one must, first, _engage_ them - a boycott is, by definition, disengagement. Economic tools as the easiest and best but they must be applied with great care, especially by Americans, because the Chinese are not without economic levers of their own.


----------



## CougarKing

That Chinese cargo ship carrying weapons supposedly destined for Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe- possibly to intimidate opposition voters- has been ordered to return to China because of its difficulties at African ports, IIRC.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/22/us.zimbabwe/index.html



> *Ship bound for Zimbabwe may return home, says Chinese official*
> 
> (CNN) -- *A Chinese ship that was blocked from unloading its cargo in South Africa may return to China because of difficulties at African ports, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday.*
> 
> The ship, which is suspected to be carrying weapons destined for Zimbabwe, left South African waters Friday after that country's High Court ruled that the cargo could not be transported over South African roadways to landlocked Zimbabwe -- where violence continues in a dispute over election results.
> 
> It was last believed to be headed toward Angola, South African officials said.
> 
> The United States has asked that other southern African countries not allow the ship to dock, a senior U.S. administration official in Washington said Tuesday.
> 
> *Deputy U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey told CNN the United States has been "tracking this vessel for a few days now and we don't think it is appropriate for anyone to provide additional weapons in Zimbabwe as they are going through a political crisis."
> 
> The United States has contacted South Africa and Mozambique, as well as China, regarding the ship's movements, Casey added.
> 
> The United States is "pleased no country in the region has allowed the vessel to offload" its cargo of weapons, Casey said.
> 
> Jiang, speaking in Beijing, said it's up to the shipping company to determine if the An Yue Jiang would return to China.*
> 
> After Friday's High Court ruling in South Africa, dockworkers in the port of Durban said they would not handle the cargo, fearing the arms would be used by the Zimbabwean government against its own people.
> 
> *The ship sailed away from the port even before the court's order was delivered to the captain, a South African government source told CNN.*
> *The ship was headed for the port of Luanda, Angola, according to the South African Department of Transport, but it is unclear if it has reached that destination.
> 
> Another U.S. administration official said the ship's cargo -- which they said includes small arms, rifles and ammunition -- was bound for Zimbabwe's security forces. The official did not want to be identified because the situation is ongoing.*
> 
> It's "the kind of stuff the police and military would hold," the official explained.
> 
> The best case scenario would be for the Chinese to recall the ship, the official added.
> 
> *Zimbabwe is landlocked and must use the ports of neighboring countries to unload shipments for transit.*
> 
> The ship also tried to dock in Mozambique but was refused permission, the official said.
> 
> *China is a major small arms supplier for several countries, but the U.S. official said "the timing of this arms shipment is important" given the instability in Zimbabwe, where tensions are high over the current government's refusal to release the results from last month's presidential elections.*
> 
> *The government of incumbent President Robert Mugabe, who has been in power since Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, has refused to release the results of that vote before a recount.
> 
> The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election, but the ruling party ZANU-PF claims the MDC engaged in election tampering.*
> 
> The delay in releasing the results of the vote sparked violence and a government crackdown on opposition members.
> 
> In an interview last week with CNN, Tsvangirai said he was concerned about the Chinese ship and feared that the weapons could be used to intimidate voters.
> 
> CNN's Wen-chun Fan in Beijing and Zain Verjee in Washington contributed to this report


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.janes.com/news/security/jir/jir080421_1_n.shtml

China is constructing a major underground nuclear submarine base near Sanya, on Hainan Island off its southern coast, Jane's can confirm. Although Asian military sources have disclosed this fact to Jane's since 2002, high-resolution commercially available satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe allows independent verification of the previous suggestions. 

The extent of construction indicates the Sanya base (also known as Yulin) could become a key future base for People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) aircraft carriers and other power-projection ships. In December 2007, perhaps in concert with a major PLAN exercise the previous month, the PLA moved its first Type 094 second-generation nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) to Sanya. 

An underground submarine base and the positioning of China's most advanced sub-surface combatants at Sanya would have implications for China's control of the South China Sea and the strategically vital straits in the area. Further satellite imagery suggests the construction of Sanya has been supported by a gradual military build-up in the Paracel Islands over the last 20 years, and the transformation of the Chinese-occupied features in the Spratly Island group into assets that could support a range of military operations. 

China's nuclear and naval build-up at Sanya underlines Beijing's desire to assert tighter control over this region. China's increasing dependence on imported petroleum and mineral resources has contributed to an intensified Chinese concern about defending its access to vital sea lanes, particularly to its south. It is this concern that in large part is driving China's development of power-projection naval forces such as aircraft carriers and long-range nuclear submarines. 

China has pursued this build-up at Sanya with little fanfare, offering no public explanations regarding its plan to base nuclear weapons or advanced naval platforms there. 

For both regional and extra-regional powers, it will be difficult to ignore that China is now building a major naval base at Sanya and may be preparing to house and protect a large proportion of its nuclear forces here, and even operate them from this base. This development so close to the Southeast Asian sea lanes so vital to the economies of Asia can only cause concern far beyond these straits.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Hmm, well maybe the US will have some juicy targets for those space based large mass KE penetrators they have talked about for so long.


----------



## TCBF

Colin P said:
			
		

> Hmm, well maybe the US will have some juicy targets for those space based large mass KE penetrators they have talked about for so long.



- Off topic, but hyper-velocity tungsten carbide darts plunging down from space would be worthy of their own thread, would they not?  I see them as an excellent anti-ship weapon.  The target need not be stationary.


----------



## a_majoor

An excerpt from Wikipedia. This is actually a fairly old idea (I first read about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" [written in 1966] where the Lunar colony uses a mass driver to bombard targets on Earth)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment



> *Real life concepts and theories*
> 
> *Project Thor*
> 
> Project Thor is an idea for a weapons system that launches kinetic projectiles from Earth orbit to damage targets on the ground. It is said that the concept originated in a classified study for the United States Air Force in the 1950s.[citation needed]
> 
> The most described system is 'an orbiting tungsten telephone pole with small fins and a computer in the back for guidance.' The weapon can be down-scaled as small as several meters long, an orbiting "crowbar" rather than a pole.
> 
> The time between deorbiting and impact would only be a few minutes, and depending on the orbits and positions in the orbits, the system would have a world-wide range. There is no requirement to deploy missiles, aircraft or other vehicles. Although the SALT II (1979) prohibited the deployment of orbital weapons of mass destruction, it did not prohibit the deployment of conventional weapons.
> 
> The weapon inflicts damage because it moves at orbital velocities, at least 9 kilometers per second. The amount of energy released by the largest version when it hits the ground is roughly comparable to a small nuclear weapon or very large conventional bomb. Smaller weapons can deliver measured amounts of energy as small as a 500 lb conventional bomb. (_Interpolation: A few ounces of copper in a HEAT warhead moving at Mach 25 cab cut through the armour of a tank. Imagine a few kilograms of tungsten hitting you at Mach 27. KE=1/2MV2_)
> 
> The "pole" shape is optimal because it enhances reentry and maximizes the device's ability to penetrate hard or buried targets. The larger device is expected to be quite good at penetrating deeply buried bunkers and other command and control targets. The smaller "crowbar" size might be employed for anti-armor, anti-aircraft, anti-satellite and possibly anti-personnel use.
> 
> The weapon would be very hard to defend against. It has a very high closing velocity and a small radar cross-section. Launch is difficult to detect. Any infra-red launch signature occurs in orbit, at no fixed position. The infra-red launch signature also has a small magnitude compared to a ballistic missile launch. One drawback of the system is that the weapon's sensors would almost certainly be blind during reentry due to the plasma sheath that would develop ahead of it, so a mobile target could be difficult to hit if it performed any unexpected maneuvering.
> 
> While the larger version might be individually launched, the smaller versions would be launched from "pods" or "carriers" that contained several missiles.
> 
> It was most recently popularized by Jerry Pournelle, on his website, under the title "Project Thor."
> 
> *Rods from God*
> 
> "Rods from God" is a space-based kinetic energy weapon that has been discussed since the early 1980s.
> 
> They would conceivably be particularly well adapted to penetrate hardened targets, such as underground nuclear facilities.
> 
> There are major difficulties involved. One of them is where to position the rods. They need to be high enough to deliver enough energy upon impact, but not so high that they vaporize in Earth's atmosphere. The other difficulty is the number of satellites that would be required to cover a material portion of the Earth.


----------



## CougarKing

A rally of 10,000 Chinese Australians- most probably presumably immigrants, students or even just tourists from mainland China- were able to drown out the protest rallies by Free Tibet protesters. This is the kind of resurgent, Han-centric, nationalism that we WILL encounter in the future and which we we cannot ignore in any future interaction with the PRC.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24268336/



> *Pro-Beijing crowds drown out torch protesters *
> *Australian leg of relay largely peaceful as 10,000 Chinese show patriotism*
> MSNBC News Services
> updated 6:35 a.m. PT, Thurs., April. 24, 2008
> 
> CANBERRA, Australia -* More than 10,000 Chinese Australians staged the biggest pro-Beijing rally of the protest-marred Olympic torch relay on Thursday, bringing a sea of red Chinese flags and drowning out Tibetan demonstrators.
> 
> Protests and tight security have followed the Olympic torch around the world over the past month, putting China's domestic and foreign polices under the spotlight ahead of the Games in August.
> 
> Anti-Chinese protests during the previous relay legs have sparked a wave of patriotism amongst Chinese at home and abroad, and on Thursday thousands of Chinese chanting "One China" packed the start and finish of the torch relay in the Australian capital.*Police made seven arrests, but for the most part the event was peaceful.
> 
> The event began without major incident as a half-dozen officers — in jogging pants, T-shirts and baseball caps — formed a loose cordon around the runner. Overhead, an airplane sky writer wrote the words “Free Tibet” in white letters.
> 
> Security had been boosted with officials saying the expense doubled in recent weeks to $1.9 million for the three-hour event.
> 
> 'Magnificent day'
> A momentary scare came an hour into the relay when a man leaped out from the crowd and sat cross-legged about 35 feet in front of the runner. Police quickly hauled him away and the runner didn’t stop.
> 
> "This is a magnificent day for us today to show that Australia can have a peaceful rally. Watching overseas protests, I felt shamed that they can behave like that," Wellington Lee, from the Chinese Association of Victoria state, told Reuters.
> 
> *Chinese lined the 10-mile relay route six-deep, and hundreds of cars drove around Canberra carrying Chinese flags.
> 
> "It was highly organized," free-Tibet supporter and Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown told Reuters. "Australians will feel a little bit uncomfortable by the fact that communist China came to town and just showed it can buy anything."
> 
> China denied the charge.
> 
> "I don't know how this question is relevant," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in Beijing. "If someone is interested in it, then has he asked those people who disrupt and sabotage the torch if there are any organizers and instigators behind them? I think that question is more newsworthy."
> 
> Patriotic fervor
> Jiang also defended the outpouring of patriotic fervor among Chinese as a legitimate response to "provocation".
> 
> Beijing has accused the Dalai Lama of being behind March 14 riots in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, and unrest that followed in other ethnic Tibetan areas, as part of a bid for Tibetan independence and to ruin the Olympics.
> 
> 
> On Saturday, the torch will be run through Nagano, Japan, where officials have changed the route due to security concerns and complaints from locals.
> 
> The route for the torch's visit to Ho Chi Minh City on April 29 still has not been revealed.
> 
> Unlike London, Paris or San Francisco, where torch bearers were jostled by anti-Beijing protesters as they ran, in Canberra a heavy police presence, steel barricades and the city's wide boulevards ensured runners were unobstructed.
> 
> Scuffles broke out between Tibetan protesters and China supporters, who included Australian Chinese and Chinese students in Australia, before the start of the relay and as a few Tibetan protesters tried to block the runners.
> 
> Two pro-Tibet women charged the torch convoy as it neared parliament house and were dragged away by police, as one yelled: "They're torturing my country."
> 
> Star among protesters
> 
> Police were at times forced to escort Tibetan protesters through a sea of Chinese yelling "Liar, Liar, Liar". *
> 
> Tibet protesters included Canadian singer K.D. Lang, a Buddhist who interrupted her Australian tour to travel to Canberra. "Tibet is a global heritage. It's something we want to protect, it's something that enriches the entire universe," she said.
> 
> Officials claimed a victory because it largely avoided the chaotic protest scenes that marred the portions held in Europe and the United States.
> 
> “We obviously feared the worst,” local government spokesman Jeremy Lasek said. “We feel right now relieved but elated — we think we’ve pulled it off.”
> 
> The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.





> Police were at times forced to escort Tibetan protesters through a sea of Chinese yelling "Liar, Liar, Liar".



Now that is a lot of people shouting "PIANZI, PIANZI, PIANZI" (骗子,骗子,骗子) again and again at those poor pro-Tibet protestors and the sound of that will be even more vicious than a popular Taiwan pop song by the same name sung by the pop singer A-mei.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I went to the recent pro-Olympics/anti-media demonsration in Ottawa. Somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 people attended. (Two different RCMP officers gave me two different estimates of 3,500 and 5,000+ within about five minutes of one another.) I spoke to several 'protesters' from Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto.

There were somewhere between 10 and 25 pro-Tibet/anti-Chinese demonstrators who were given, by the police, a brief chance to say their piece before they were hustled away, by the police. Those few garnered at least as much Canadian media attention as the larger,* by more than two orders of magnitude*, pro-Chinese crowd. That may, in large part, have been the fault of the pro-Chinese organizers. I asked a young person (a university student I (correctly) thought) where the media liaison person was. She didn't know but she directed me to an organizer. He didn't know either and sent me higher up the chain.The last person I spoke to, who admitted to being a member of the organizing committee, thought there was no such thing. "Who," I asked, "translates the speeches and explains the songs for the TV cameras?" "Oh," he said, sadly, "we didn't think about that." I'm pretty sure the Chinese Embassy didn't organize the event - they would have thought about the media. The pro-Tibet crowd sure did.

I think the Chinese _nationalism_, amongst 'overseas Chinese' as well as mainlanders, is very real. I do not think it needs to be threatening but it is a tool *for* Beijing (the CCP) and we fan the flames at our own risk.


----------



## CougarKing

Although this article is already close to 2 weeks old, as the article states, both CVBGs must still be in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait with the aim of staving off any aggressive moves by either side until President Ma's May 20 inauguration.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VUAM680&show_article=1



> TAIPEI, April 9 (AP) - (Kyodo)—*Two U.S. aircraft carriers will remain deployed in waters near Taiwan to ensure a smooth transition of government in Taipei amid heightened regional tensions, Taiwan Defense Minister Michael Tsai said Wednesday. *
> 
> Tsai told a parliamentary interpellation session that the Kitty Hawk and Nimitz will stay in the "Western Pacific" near Taiwan after deploying here since shortly before the island's March 22 presidential election.
> 
> *"The deployments have their strategic significance," Tsai told lawmakers, citing what he said was the U.S. Pacific Command's position that "the period between March 22 and May 20 is an uncertain time for the Taiwan Strait."
> 
> Taiwan's President-elect Ma Ying-jeou will be inaugurated May 20.*
> 
> Although Ma campaigned largely on vows to improve cross-strait ties, presidential elections and transitions of government on Taiwan are traditionally sensitive periods in the strait.
> 
> *China, which claims Taiwan as its own, sometimes resorts to saber- rattling when the self-ruled island exercises its democratic autonomy.
> 
> Central to Beijing's geopolitical strategy is to eventually bring Taipei under its political fold, by force if necessary.
> 
> Asked by lawmakers Wednesday if the deployments' objective "is to deter China or to ensure a smooth transition of government in Taiwan," Tsai replied, "Both."
> 
> For military affairs expert Andrei Chang, "the deployments are a message to both Taiwan and China: 'Don't provoke each other,'" said Chang, who runs Kanwa Defense Review, a military affairs magazine. *
> 
> Pro-independence rhetoric from Taipei typically invites a threatening posture by Beijing, which in turn unnerves Washington, Taipei's chief security guarantor.
> 
> Although nominally committed to Taipei's defense, Washington seeks to rein in independence moves by Taipei to head off a cross-strait conflict that could involve the U.S. military.
> 
> *In 1996, China fired unarmed missiles near Taiwan in exercises meant to curb independence rhetoric by then President Lee Teng-hui and intimidate voters on the eve of the island's presidential election that year. *
> 
> *The maneuvers led to a deployment of the Kitty Hawk in the strait and a stand-off between U.S. naval forces and China's People's Liberation Army.*
> 
> *China's threatening exercises quickly stopped and the Kitty Hawk later left the strait without further incident.*
> 
> The latest deployments, however, appear larger, with opposition Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers Wednesday asking Tsai whether patrols by both the Nimitz and Kitty Hawk "constituted unusual naval activity in regional waters."
> 
> According to Taiwan's Defense Ministry, the Kitty Hawk left its port in Japan just days before Taiwan's election, while the U.S. Pacific Command said the Nimitz has been in the Western Pacific since January.
> 
> For the Kitty Hawk, defending the strait amid Taipei's latest government transition is likely the supercarrier's last mission.
> 
> *The aircraft carrier Washington left its U.S. port earlier this week to eventually replace the aging Kitty Hawk as the chief supercarrier in the Asia Pacific region. *
> 
> *Both the Kitty Hawk and Nimitz are expected to patrol waters near Taiwan until after Ma takes office. *
> 
> The Nimitz is patrolling with its entire strike group, which includes an array of destroyers, submarines and other vessels, while the Kitty Hawk is patrolling with just one destroyer, a U.S. Pacific Command spokesman said last month.


----------



## Bert

An interesting perspective by Stratfor and some insights not found in mainstream media.  

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/chinese_geopolitics_and_significance_tibet


----------



## TangoTwoBravo

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think the Chinese _nationalism_, amongst 'overseas Chinese' as well as mainlanders, is very real. I do not think it needs to be threatening but it is a tool *for* Beijing (the CCP) and we fan the flames at our own risk.



I don't really have an opinion on Tibet.  I should also admit that I am no great fan of the Olympics in any country.

Still, when does engagement and worrying about the fanning of flames of Chinese nationalism turn into appeasement?  I would hope that we would make decisions based on what we believe to be right and not on the fear that visiting students might get upset.  

Cheers


----------



## Edward Campbell

I do not see _appeasement_ as an issue.

For the moment China needs us, specifically our resources, more than we need China. They can have them so long as they do not antagonize us too much. *We* do not need to appease *them*; if anything the reverse _might_ be true.

But, in the medium to long term I think China will achieve *great power*, even *superpower* status at which time, I continue to believe it will be incumbent on us – the big US led, Western us – to _engage_ them on some basis other than outright enmity.

Thus, I believe we need to learn to ‘see’ China through some lens other than our familiar, liberal Western one because China is not a liberal, Western country. The Chinese are *conservative* in the very real sense of that word: they value hierarchy, in is instilled in each and every Chinese child as it learns the language at its mother’s beast; they value order – there were a whole lot of thing’s wrong with Mao’s _great cultural revolution_ but most Chinese people *hated* it – not too strong a word – for its lack of order and lack of respect for the _natural_ hierarchy of age. Although the Chinese are as _naturally_ capitalistic as anyone else they are not as _individualistic_ (liberal) as Westerners – which makes me wonder if Max Weber was a right as many, me included, think he was. The Chinese had a different historical experience than the West – we ‘grew up’ differently over the past 2,500 years. We need to recognize that and deal with the consequences.

I don’t think agreeing to _engage_ the Chinese on a basis of _understanding_ that they are not liberal Westerners (but accepting that may not be a bad thing) is _appeasement_. I prefer to think of it as something other than bad policy.


----------



## TangoTwoBravo

I believe in the sovereignty of states, and I think that we should always be hesitant about getting involved in the internal workings of another state.

We should indeed seek to understand where a foreign culture is coming from on a given issue and we have to accept that not everybody is like us.  That being said, a sovereign state should reserve the right to not engage in the sending of athletic delegations to an event hosted by another state.  Just because a given nation has always been a certain way doesn't mean that I must be OK with it.  I am speaking beyond the China/Tibet issue here.


----------



## Yrys

CIA director: China is not an 'inevitable enemy'



> WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The director of the CIA told an audience at Kansas State University on Wednesday that China is "not the inevitable enemy" of the United
> States. Michael Hayden spoke about three main challenges facing the United States: burgeoning populations, China's increasing economic power and America's prickly
> relationship with Europe.
> 
> Hayden said the world's population is expected to grow by 45 percent to 9 billion people by midcentury, mostly in countries that cannot sustain such growth, such as Asia,
> Africa and the Middle East. Combine that with the likely mass migration to developed countries, and resources will be strained, leading to an increased risk of violence,
> civil unrest or extremism, he said. China will become an economic and political competitor to the United States, he said, but should not be treated as "an inevitable
> enemy."
> 
> Although the rapid growth of the Chinese military could pose a threat to the United States and Taiwan, Hayden said, he believes that the nation's aim of military modernization
> is about "projecting strength" and demonstrating that it has "great-power status."Hayden did warn that China is focusing too narrowly on its own objectives. "If Beijing
> begins to accept greater responsibility for the health of the international system -- as all global powers should -- we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive
> path," he said. "If not, the rise of China begins to look more adversarial."
> 
> Differences over the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism continue to strain relations with Europe, Hayden said. Although Europe and the United States agree about
> the urgent threat of terrorism, he said the United States considers itself at war with terrorists. Europe sees terrorism as primarily "an internal, law-enforcement
> problem." He questioned whether "the United States and Europe will come to share the same views of the 21st century, as we did for the last half of the 20th century,
> and then forge a common approach to security."
> 
> Hayden said the global context has changed considerably from the struggle of the Cold War, when America dominated the world economically, politically and militarily.
> "In this new century, the world will be far more complex, and the capacity of others -- both nation-states and non-state actors -- to influence world events will grow," he
> said. The "overriding challenge" for the intelligence community will be to "do a better job of understanding cultures, histories, religions and traditions that are not our
> own," he said. He warned "against viewing the world exclusively through an American prism," saying that "while we cherish and live our own values, we must know and
> appreciate those of others."


----------



## tomahawk6

Images of Hainan Island naval base.


----------



## Kirkhill

Tango2Bravo said:
			
		

> I believe in the sovereignty of states, and I think that we should always be hesitant about getting involved in the internal workings of another state.
> 
> We should indeed seek to understand where a foreign culture is coming from on a given issue and we have to accept that not everybody is like us.  That being said, a sovereign state should reserve the right to not engage in the sending of athletic delegations to an event hosted by another state.  Just because a given nation has always been a certain way doesn't mean that I must be OK with it.  I am speaking beyond the China/Tibet issue here.



The question, of course, is what do you do when one "state" or "proto-state" like Darfur, or Tibet does not recognize the suzerainty claims of another state like Sudan or China? One group considers it an internal matter (The Czechs) another group considers it an external matter (The Sudeten Germans).


----------



## MarkOttawa

The future menace (sounds a bit like Wilhelmine Germany?

China's next-generation nationalists
They're educated, richer and more aggressive toward the West.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kurlantzik6-2008may06,0,3394254.story?track=ntothtml



> As human rights protesters dogged the Beijing Olympics' torch relay around the world, as supporters of Tibet condemned the violent crackdown in Lhasa, and as Darfur activists demanded change in China's Sudan policy, Chinese young people worked themselves into a different form of righteous anger. In online forums and chat rooms, they blasted Beijing's leaders for not being tougher in Tibet. They agitated for boycotts against Western businesses based in nations that object to Beijing's policies, and they directed venomous fury against anyone critical of China.
> 
> The anger has even spread to American college campuses. In April, Chinese students at USC blasted a visiting Tibetan monk with angry questions about Tibet's alleged history of slavery and other controversial topics. When the monk tried to respond, the students chanted, "Stop lying! Stop lying!"
> 
> At the University of Washington, hundreds protested outside during a speech by the Dalai Lama, chanting, "Dalai, your smiles charm, your actions harm." When one Chinese student at Duke University tried to mediate between pro-China and pro-Tibet protesters, her photo, labeled "traitor," was posted on the Internet, and her contact information and her parents' address in China were listed for all to see.
> 
> The explosion of nationalist sentiment, especially among young people, might seem shocking, but it's been simmering for a long time. *In fact, Beijing's leadership, for all its problems, may be less hard-line than China's youth, the country's future* [emphasis added]. If China ever were to become a truly free political system, it might actually become more, not less, aggressive...
> 
> Hardly uneducated know-nothings, young nationalists tend to be middle-class urbanites. Far more than rural Chinese, who remain mired in poverty, these urbanites have benefited enormously from the country's three decades of economic growth. They also have begun traveling and working abroad. They can see that Shanghai and Beijing are catching up to Western cities, that Chinese multinationals can compete with the West, and they've lost their awe of Western power.
> 
> Many middle-aged Chinese intellectuals are astounded by the differences between them and their younger peers. Academics I know, members of the Tiananmen generation, are shocked by some students' disdain for foreigners and, often, disinterest in liberal concepts such as democratization. University students now tend to prefer business-oriented majors to liberal arts-oriented subjects such as political science. The young Chinese interviewed for a story last fall in Time magazine on the country's "Me Generation" barely discussed democracy or political change in their daily lives...
> 
> In the long run, this explosive nationalism calls into question what kind of democracy China could be. Many Chinese academics, for example, believe that, at least in the early going, a freer China might become a more dangerous China. Able to truly express their opinions, young Chinese would be able to put intense pressure on a freer government to adopt a hard line against the West -- even, perhaps, to invade Taiwan. By contrast, the current Chinese regime has launched broad informal contacts with Taiwan's new rulers, including an April meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and incoming Taiwanese Vice President Vincent Siew -- contacts denounced by many bloggers. One day, Hu may find even he can't defend himself before a mob of angry Chinese students.



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFoWCbQjwXw&feature=related

The first line of subtitles in Simplified Mandarin in the lower part of the screen in the link above read as "Zhong Mei Lu Zhan Dui Yuan" and "Da Bi Wu", which could be translated to mean "Chinese and US Marines" and "big exercise(bi sai)/competition" respectively.

This was filmed about several months ago, but it's interesting to see how the US Marines/"Leathernecks" do against their Chinese counterparts.


----------



## CougarKing

Here is a propaganda video song/music video with the title "Beijing Huan Ying Ni/北京歡迎你" or "Beijing Welcomes You"; I am surprised- well not really- by the sheer number of Mandopop stars that have been hired to perform this music video, including of course, Hong Kong pop stars Jackie Chan and Karen Mok and a number of Taiwan pop stars as well including Jolin Tsai. I am surprised, however, that Singaporean Mandopop singer Sun Yan Zi/Stephanie Sun was also hired for that video, though it seems that Beijing is also trying to reach out to the Overseas Chinese/Hua Qiao/華僑 all over the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EC_s4vrpW8

One thing is sure- the Beijing/PRC government has spent a lot on public relations this year in order to cover up its Tibet crackdowns. :


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> ... it seems that Beijing is also trying to reach out to the Overseas Chinese/Hua Qiao/華僑 all over the world ... One thing is sure- the Beijing/PRC government has spent a lot on public relations this year in order to cover up its Tibet crackdowns. :



No question on either issue.

I think, after the Paris and SF fiascoes, that the _outreach_ to the _Hua Qiao_ intensified and appears to have worked.

The PR blitz was planned long, long ago - using it to 'cover up' the steady state muzzling of internal dissent is just a _bonus_ for he CPC.


----------



## tomahawk6

China's new SOSUS system.Hope it works better than the USSR's. 
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080509/NATION04/52232777/0/RSS_BUSINES&template=nextpage

China surveillance
Bill Gertz 

Defense officials said China has deployed a new wide-area ocean surveillance system that includes an underwater sonar network of sensors, and ground- and sea-based long-range radar that will make it more difficult for U.S. submarines to protect the fleet and to track China's growing force of new attack and missile submarines.

A former U.S. government defense specialist on China said on the condition of anonymity that there are indications China is operating a rudimentary underwater Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS. The sonar network includes fixed sensors that can pinpoint U.S. submarines operating in some areas of the western Pacific.

The U.S. Navy operates a similar system at strategic underwater choke points around the world.

The Chinese SOSUS has been detected underwater in the Bohai Sea, off the northern Chinese coast, north of the Yellow Sea, a major Chinese navy operating area. Additionally, China also has set up at least five long- and medium-range radar sites along its coast that have over-the-horizon capability, the former official said.

The sonar and radar are part of China's key strategic wartime goal of knocking out the five or more aircraft carrier strike groups that would be rushed to the region near Taiwan in any future conflict. Those carrier battle groups are defended by submarines.

"If they are after carriers, we protect carriers with subs and if they know where they are, they can find the carriers," said the former defense official, who confirmed that the Chinese are developing various ground, sea and space sensors designed to "target the American fleet."

The Chinese sonar and radar also complicates the Navy's mission of tracking China's submarine fleet, which includes large numbers of newer and quieter attack and ballistic missile boats with JL-2 nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States.

"If the Chinese can do SOSUS that would be a tremendous leg up for their submarines," the defense official said. "Because the best way to hunt a sub is with a sub."

China's SOSUS array "will make it more difficult to follow and prosecute their [missile submarines] with all their missiles aimed at the U.S.," the former official said. The radar-sonar network provides the Chinese military with "constant air and sea coverage of the western Pacific for the first time, so they can keep a 24-7 trail on American naval assets for the first time."


----------



## RickDevlieger

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> "If they are after carriers, we protect carriers with subs and if they know where they are, they can find the carriers," said the former defense official, who confirmed that the Chinese are developing various ground, sea and space sensors designed to "target the American fleet."



 :rofl:

The author of this doesn't have a fricking clue.


----------



## CougarKing

Wow. Very unfortunate.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080512/ts_afp/chinaquake_...oVrEOb5pVn70Xgn9xg8F



> BEIJING (AFP) - *A massive earthquake stunned southwest China on Monday, killing more than 8,000 people and flattening schools, factories and homes in a powerful tremor that was felt across a swathe of southeast Asia.
> 
> The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck close to densely-populated areas of Sichuan province in what Premier Wen Jiabao called a "major disaster."*
> China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported 8,533 confirmed dead in that province alone, but there were fears the toll will rise far higher with others killed in neighbouring regions and reports of hundreds buried under debris.
> 
> Buildings swayed in Beijing and Shanghai, while the quake was also felt in Hong Kong, Hanoi and Taipei and in the Thai capital Bangkok, 1,800 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the epicentre.
> 
> "Facing disaster, the most important thing is calm, confidence, courage and strong leadership," Wen told China's CCTV television on a flight to the heart of the quake-hit zone.
> 
> China's state-run Xinhua news agency cited local disaster relief officials saying 3,000 to 5,000 people were estimated to have died in just one district of Sichuan, Beichuan County.
> 
> A further 10,000 people were injured in the county, where officials said 80 percent of buildings had collapsed.
> 
> "I heard the vents ruffling and then started to feel the building shake and a couple of bits of the ceiling fell," Richard Morgan-Sanjurjo, a 30-year-old business consultant who lives in Chengdu, told AFP.
> 
> "I ran so fast. I thought the building was going to come down on my head," he said.
> 
> US President George W. Bush expressed his condolences and said the United States "stands ready to help," and Japan said it was ready to provide as much relief aid as possible.
> 
> The quake damaged two chemical plants in Shifeng, about 50 kilometres from the epicentre, burying hundreds of people and forcing more than 6,000 others living nearby to be evacuated, Xinhua said.
> 
> It earlier reported up to 900 students buried when a high school collapsed in Dujiangyan, northwest of the provincial capital Chengdu. At least 50 bodies were recovered as frantic parents looked on.
> 
> A local official in the city said "rows of houses" had crumbled, while two primary schools were demolished in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing.
> 
> President Hu Jintao urged an "all-out" effort to rescue victims. Military troops were ordered to help with the disaster relief work.
> 
> All trains to and from Chengdu were ordered to stop, the city's airport was shut down and planes diverted for engineers to assess the runways, and mobile phone and Internet communications were disrupted.
> 
> An Olympic spokesman said none of the 31 venues for the Beijing Olympics in the capital and other host cities had been damaged.
> 
> "They are earthquake proof to a high degree and no damage was done," said Sun Weide, deputy director of the Olympic media and communications office.
> 
> The quake struck 93 kilometres from Chengdu, a city of more than 12 million people, and some 260 kilometres from Chongqing and its 30 million.
> 
> The State Seismological Bureau located its epicentre in Wenchuan County, a mountainous region home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, China's leading research and breeding base for endangered giant pandas.
> 
> Both the Chinese seismological bureau and the US Geological Survey, which use different scales, measured the quake at 7.8.
> 
> It struck shortly before 2.30 pm (0630 GMT) at a shallow depth of just 10 kilometres, the USGS said.
> 
> Xinhua quoted an official saying the landmark Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan province had not been affected.
> 
> However, buildings shook in Beijing and Shanghai, residents reported, with many people evacuating tower blocks and rushing onto the street.
> 
> The quake was felt in the Taiwanese capital Taipei, where buildings swayed for half a minute, and in the southern Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
> 
> In Hanoi, residents said some high buildings shook for around five minutes but there were no reports of damage.
> 
> One of the biggest quakes ever recorded was in China in 1976, which killed 242,000 people.
> 
> That quake, centred in the northern city of Tangshan, lasted for 15 seconds and flattened 90 percent of buildings. The death toll, out of a population of one million, made it one of the world's deadliest in the 20th century.


----------



## tomahawk6

Very tragic with over 10,000 dead and thousands homeless.The government is deploying 50,000 troops to the region to assist recovery efforts.A major earthquake in the US midwest would be similarly devestating.


----------



## chanman

Seems like the aid that the Junta was slow in accepting might find a new place to go


----------



## CougarKing

Adm. Keating talks about how the new sub base reveals the PRC's intention to possibly project power beyond the Taiwan Strait, as the article states. I think that ex-CINCPAC James Lyons' suggestion that the US reinforce its old military ties with the Philippines, even if it becomes official policy, will still find resistance from factions within the Philippine government since the current Arroyo administration and its previous Estrada administration were criticized, IIRC, for allowing US troops back into the country (since the withdrawals from Subic and Clark AFB) under the VFA Treaty and allowing the annual "Balikatan" Exercises between US and Filipino forces.

http://www.defencetalk.com/news/publish/na...ns120015775.php



> *China's new naval base triggers US concerns*
> Agence France-Presse | May 13, 2008
> 
> WASHINGTON: *China's new underground nuclear submarine base close to vital sea lanes in Southeast Asia has raised US concerns, with experts calling for a shoring up of alliances in the region to check Beijing's growing military clout.
> 
> The base's existence on the southern tip of Hainan Island was confirmed for the first time by high resolution satellite images, according to Jane's Intelligence Review, a respected defence periodical, this month.
> 
> It could hold up to 20 submarines, including a new type of nuclear ballistic missile submarine, and future Chinese aircraft carrier battle groups, posing a challenge to longstanding US military dominance in Asia.*
> 
> China should not pursue such "high-end military options," warned Admiral Timothy Keating, the top commander of US forces in Asia, in an interview with the Voice of America last week.
> 
> *He underlined America's "firm intention" not to abandon its dominating military role in the Pacific and told Beijing it would face "sure defeat" if it took on the United States militarily.*
> 
> Worried mostly about Taiwan's security, Washington has often questioned China's military expansion on the back of rapid economic growth.
> 
> *But American military experts attending a forum on China's naval expansion in Washington Monday said the nuclear submarine base underscored Beijing's interest in projecting power beyond the Taiwan Strait.*
> 
> *"The most important thing about the Hainan development is that if you look at the map, there is really nowhere China could go except south," said Arthur Waldron, an expert at the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the South China Sea and critical sea lanes, including the Strait of Malacca straddling Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.*
> 
> "This Hainan facility is going to raise questions in the minds of all of the neighbours because this is a fixed facility and cannot be removed," Waldron said. "My own sense is that it is going to make ripples and waves."
> 
> *He said Washington should "tighten" its alliances in Asia to check China's growing military might and develop "interoperability" capabilities among allies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore, as well as Indonesia and Malaysia.
> 
> James Lyons, an ex-commander of the US Pacific Fleet, said the United States needed to reestablish high-level military ties with the Philippines as part of efforts to enhance US deterrence in the wake of China's naval expansion.
> 
> He said "operational tactics" used against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War should be applied against China.
> 
> He suggested US leasing a squadron of F-16 fighter jets and navy vessels to the Philippines, where Washington once had naval and air bases, as part of the deterrence strategy.*
> 
> "We don't need a permanent base but we need access," Lyons said, suggesting also that Japan play a more "meaningful" role in protecting critical sea lanes in the region.
> 
> "Again the Soviets, we raised that deterrence equation and we won the war without firing a shot basically ... there is no cheap way out and we have to improve our posture in the Western Pacific along with our allies," he said.
> 
> Richard Fisher, an expert of China military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a US think tank, expected US confrontation with China as Beijing modernized its nuclear ballistic missile submarines, referred to in military jargon as SSBNs.
> 
> "Absent a higher military diplomatic relationship with the Chinese, I foresee a period of growing confrontation in the South China Sea," he said.
> 
> "If they are going to be maintaining SSBN patrols within guarded areas of the South China Sea, the US has no choice but to maintain contacts or to monitor these SSBNs so as to be able to take them out in the event they come to threaten the US -- just as we did against Soviet SSBNs during the Cold War," he said.
> 
> The Hainan facility, he said, was a timely replacement for Beijing's first nuclear ballistic missile submarine base at the Bohai Gulf north of the country, which he added was too shallow to support nuclear deterrent patrols.
> 
> The Chinese would not allow the American navy to enter the air space and waters around the Hainan base uncontested, Fisher said.
> 
> "There is a very strong likelihood that there would be incidents at sea and that ships and aircraft and their crew members could be lost," he said.


----------



## CougarKing

Never mind about what I said earlier about retired Adm. James Lyons in a previous edit of this post. Still, here is another, though older article that some of you will find interesting, if it has not already been posted before:

http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/wm1001.cfm



> *China's Submarine Challenge*
> by John J. Tkacik, Jr.
> WebMemo #1001
> Sea-power trends in the Pacific Ocean are ominous. *By 2025, China’s navy could rule the waves of the Pacific. By some estimates, Chinese attack submarines will outnumber U.S. submarines in the Pacific by five to one and Chinese nuclear ballistic missile submarines will prowl America’s Western littoral, each closely tailed by two U.S. attack submarines that have better things to do. The United States, meanwhile, will likely struggle to build enough submarines to meet this challenge.*
> 
> A misplaced diplomacy leaves some U.S. Navy commanders reluctant to admit publicly that China’s rapidly expanding submarine force in the Pacific is a threat, but if the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the latest Pentagon “Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China” (MPPRC Report) are any indication, they are undoubtedly thinking it. In a speech sponsored by the Asia Society in Washington earlier this month, for example, Admiral Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, commented,
> 
> I’m always asked about the Chinese threat and I say, ‘It’s not a threat,’ because you have to have two things to have a threat, and that’s capability and intent. There is no question that the PLA navy is modernizing and building its capability and is moving very quickly, but what is the intent?
> 
> The Pentagon has already begun to answer this question, but it has yet to do so in a way that shows it takes this threat seriously.
> 
> *China’s Intent*
> 
> The QDR addresses the question of China’s intent:
> 
> *Chinese military modernization has accelerated since the mid-to-late 1990s in response to central leadership demands to develop military options against Taiwan scenarios.* The pace and scope of China’s military build-up already puts regional military balances at risk. China is likely to continue making large investments in high-end, asymmetric military capabilities, emphasizing electronic and cyber-warfare; counter-space operations; ballistic and cruise missiles; advanced integrated air defense systems; next generation torpedoes; advanced submarines; strategic nuclear strike from modern, sophisticated land and sea-based systems; and theater unmanned aerial vehicles…
> 
> *According to the MPPRC Report’s executive summary, China’s specific intent is to “build counters to third-party, including potential U.S., intervention in [Taiwan] Strait crises.” * The report continues, “Deterring, defeating, or delaying foreign intervention ahead of Taiwan’s capitulation is integral to Beijing’s strategy.” To this end, China is expanding its “force of ballistic missiles (long-range and short-range), cruise missiles, submarines, advanced aircraft, and other modern systems.”
> 
> China’s Sea-Power Goals
> 
> If they are curious about China’s intent, Pentagon planners might look to comments by General Wen Zongren, Political Commissar of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s elite Academy of Military Science. *The MPPRC Report quotes General Wen as asserting that China must “break” the “blockade [by] international forces against China’s maritime security… Only when we break this blockade shall we be able to talk about China’s rise… [T]o rise suddenly, China must pass through oceans and go out of the oceans in its future development.” * In fact, it is the explicit goal of the Chinese Communist Party to “increase the comprehensive strength of the nation.”
> 
> The Chinese navy—and its submarine fleet, in particular—is a key tool in achieving that goal. *The September 2004 promotion of Admiral Zhang Dingfa, a career submariner, to Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and a full seat on the Central Military Commission was a clear signal of the primacy of submarine warfare in China’s strategy for the Asia-Pacific region.*
> 
> Growing Submarine Force
> 
> *Admiral Zhang led PLAN’s submarine modernization program and oversaw the acquisition of four modern Russian-built KILO subs, including the stealthy Type-636.* *Orders for eight more are on the books,* with the first new boats to be delivered this month. That three Russian shipyards are at work to fill China’s orders for new submarines betrays this build-up’s urgency.
> 
> Admiral Zhang isn’t relying solely on the Russians.* He has also increased production—to 2.5 boats per year—of China’s new, formidable Song-class diesel-electric submarine. China is also testing a new diesel-electric that the defense intelligence community has designated the “Yuan.” The Yuan is heavily inspired by Russian designs, including anechoic tile coatings and a super-quiet seven-blade screw. The addition of “air-independent propulsion,” which permits a submarine to operate underwater for up to 30 days on battery power*, will make the Song and Yuan submarines virtually inaudible to existing U.S. surveillance networks—and even to U.S. subs.
> 
> These new submarines will be more lethal when armed with *Russian SKVAL (“Squall”) torpedoes, which can reach 200 knots. There are reports that the SKVAL is already operational on some Chinese subs.* As well, Russia has also transferred the *Novator 3M-54E three-stage anti-ship cruise missile to China’s submarine fleet for use against aircraft carriers. Each Chinese KILO is armed with four of these missiles.*
> 
> America’s Endangered Submarine Supremacy
> 
> In February 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld commented that the size of the Chinese fleet could surpass the United States Navy’s within a decade. “It is an issue that the department thinks about and is concerned about and is attentive to.” Indeed, the U.S. Navy will hold a series of major naval exercises in the Pacific this summer that will involve four aircraft carrier battle groups, including a carrier normally based on the U.S. East Coast. This will be the first time the Navy has deployed an Atlantic Fleet carrier to a Pacific exercise since the Vietnam War.
> 
> However, there is little indication that the Pentagon is taking the Chinese submarine challenge seriously. If it were, the QDR issued earlier this month would have recommended that the erosion of the U.S. submarine fleet come to an end.
> 
> But the QDR envisions a “return to a steady-state production rate of two attack submarines per year not later than 2012 while achieving an average per-hull procurement cost objective of $2.0 billion.” This means that the U.S. sub fleet will continue to decline for another six years, during which time America’s industrial base for constructing subs will further diminish and the per-unit cost of submarines will jump past $2 billion, impelling further cuts in the fleet.
> 
> *Of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s 35 submarines (including three nuclear attack submarines based in Guam during 2006), about a dozen are underway at sea on operational duties at any one time. Under the QDR’s most optimistic estimates, Pacific Command’s sub fleet will diminish to about 30 by 2025.*
> 
> Electric Boat (EB), the nation’s preeminent submarine contractor, has announced plans to lay off 900 of its 1,700 designers and marine draftsmen engineers over the next three years. This is a crisis. It will mark the first time in 50 years that the U.S. has not had a new submarine design on the drawing board. EB laid off nearly 200 submarine engineers and machinists in early February—and EB is the only shipbuilder in the nation that maintains submarine designers. As the build-rate for subs collapsed, EB used maintenance and repair work to pay designers’ salaries and maintain its staff of highly-skilled steelworkers. But without new orders, EB will lay off almost half of its workforce of over 5,000 over the next three years
> 
> U.S. Navy combatant commanders already require 150 percent of the attack submarine days currently available, and these requirements will only increase as the submarine force dwindles. If the United States allows production to dwindle further, expertise will be lost and costs will skyrocket for any new classes of submarines contemplated for the post-2012 period.
> 
> *Meanwhile, China’s fleet of modern attack submarines is growing: China already has ten Song/Yuan/Kilo submarines in the Pacific today, over 50 older Ming-class and Romeo boats, five Han class nuclear attack submarines, and one Xia-class ballistic missile submarine. In addition, China has 25 new boats under contract now; 16 are under construction today, including a new class of nuclear attack submarine designated the Type-093 and a new nuclear ballistic missile sub, the Type-094.
> 
> The U.S. has three submarines under construction today. Although the Navy’s new 30-year shipbuilding plan calls for 48 nuclear attack submarines in the fleet by 2035, the Navy’s top submarine commander, Vice Admiral Charles L. Munns, has testified before Congress that the Navy needs at least 54 boats to fulfill current critical missions. This number will rise as China’s navy expands.
> 
> If the Navy does not start launching new subs at the rate of two per year until several years after 2012, the force would dip to a low of 40 in 2028, or 17 percent below the Navy’s stated needs. And that rate will not even permit the Navy to reach its sub-minimal target of 48 attack submarines until 2034. All of this assumes that the Navy does not decommission ships faster than expected due to expanded operations in coming years.
> 
> Recommendations for the Administration and Congress
> 
> The United States must return to building at least two, and preferably two-and-a-half, new attack submarines per year beginning in FY 2009. The U.S. must begin procurement for long lead-time components, such as nuclear reactors, in FY 2007 and 2008. These steps are necessary just to hold U.S. subsurface strength steady.
> 
> The Administration should also work with key strategic partners in Asia to bolster their fleets. Japan and India are potential submarine warfare partners. Japan must also be encouraged to upgrade its anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and surveillance systems.*
> 
> Congress should hold hearings into reports on the editorial pages of DefenseNews (February 13, 2006) and Jane’s Defence Weekly (February 15, 2006) that the *U.S. Navy has sabotaged Taiwan’s efforts to procure modern diesel-electric boats from U.S. shipyards by hyper-inflating prices in order to keep U.S. yards from building anything but nuclear boats. A robust Taiwanese fleet would be a welcome relief as the U.S. Navy attempts to counter increasing Chinese sub-surface fleet pressures in Asian littoral waters. * The United States and Japan also need an enhanced partnership with Taiwan in airborne and subsurface ASW reconnaissance and surveillance in waters under Taiwanese administration.
> 
> John J. Tkacik, Jr., is Senior Research Fellow in China Policy in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.


----------



## tomahawk6

Missile Base revealed.







http://www.timesnow.tv/Newsdtls.aspx?NewsID=8418
Images from Google earth reveals missile deployment equipment at a large facility in downtown Delingha 

In what could cause concerns for India, Commercial satellite imagery revealed an extensive nuclear missile site in central China with nearly sixty launch pads for medium-range missiles capable of striking Russia as well.

The images from Google Earth show different types of launch pads, command and control facilities, and missile deployment equipment at a large facility in downtown Delingha, said Hans Kristensen, a researcher with the Federation of American Scientists.

"The US government often highlights China's deployment of new mobile missiles as a concern but keeps the details secret, so the discovery of the deployment area provides the first opportunity for the public to better understand how China operates its mobile ballistic missiles," he wrote.

The find comes only two weeks after the discovery of a secret Chinese nuclear submarine base on Hainan Island in South China Sea, also using commercial satellite imagery and published by Jane's Intelligence Review.

The latest images were posted along with Kristensen's analysis on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. Kristensen said the imagery revealed missile launch sites along a 275-kilometer (170 miles) stretch of highway leading from the city of Delingha through Da Qaidam to Mahai in the northern part of Qinghai province.

Thirty-six launch pads were arrayed in three strings extending north of the highway and west of Delingha. Another 22 launch pads were detected in an area running west of Da Qaidam to Mahai, according to Kristensen's analysis.

"From these launch pads DF-21 missiles would be within range of southern Russia and northern India (including New Delhi), but not Japan, Taiwan or Guam," he wrote. DF-21s are medium range solid fuel missiles that have been replacing China's older DF-3 and DF-4 liquid fuel missiles.

Kristensen said the imagery shows what appear to be a buried command and control bunker marked by antenas at each of the deployment area. In downtown Delingha, images show what appear to be the headquarters of a missile brigade base with tentlike structures of identical size and design as structures previously detected on DF-21 launch pads.

An open area near the base contained what appeared to be camouflaged nets over unidentified vehicles, he said.


----------



## Kirkhill

That missile base would seem to confirm Chinese interests in securing its back door.  While New Delhi might be a target at the limits of range of an IRBM in Delingha it seems to be more useful to note that the base casts an umbrella over the Tibetan Plateau and the Altai, two water sheds, as well as a traditional invasion route into China travelled by Scythians, Huns and Mongols.

I still believe that China's greatest strategic weakness is access to water and that that is why it is so desparate to hold on Tibet, which by any definition, is NOT and never has been Han territory.


----------



## CougarKing

some pics from the zone..







And yes, that's a PLA Blackhawk; they do have some from the batch they bought in the 1980s, though I'm surprised at least one is still flying considering that the US does not provide any military equipment or spare parts to the PRC anymore, IIRC. (This source confirms it: http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2008/ea_china0088_04_25.asp)





This Sept. 14, 2007 picture released by GeoEye Satellite Image shows the Zipingpu Dam, upriver from the town of Dujiangyan, Sichuan, China. On Wednesday, May 14, 2008, thousands of Chinese troops rushed to plug cracks in the dam in earthquake-hit Sichuan province, but experts later said it was safe.





The Zipingpu Dam buildings are seen at left near a bridge [below] where the middle section is fallen after Monday's earthquake near Dujiangyan, southwestern China's Sichuan province, Thursday, May 15, 2008





Disaster relief personnel work at a staging area where earthquake victims are being ferried to by boat from areas at the epicenter of Monday's earthquake that are inaccessible by road, at the Zipingpu Dam near Dujiangyan, southwestern China's Sichuan province, Thursday, May 15, 2008.


----------



## Yrys

Amazing pictures...


 Peace and placards greet Dalai Lama


----------



## CougarKing

Strong aftershocks hit China, adding to the already horrendous toll on human lives! 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/25/china.earthquake/index.html



> 70,000 homes 'damaged' in new China quake
> Story Highlights
> *China's water ministry says 69 dams near collapse after quake*
> Paraplegic rescued 11 days after May 12 earthquake, state-run TV reports
> 
> *Death toll surpasses 60,000, officials say*
> 
> CHENGDU, China (CNN) -- A powerful 5.8 magnitude aftershock hit China's Sichuan province Sunday, reportedly damaging more than 70,000 homes in the region where at least 60,000 people were killed by a powerful earthquake on May 12.
> 
> State media said at least two people died and 400 were hurt as a result of the latest seismic jolt, which came as Chinese officials warned that 69 dams in the province damaged in the original quake were in danger of bursting their banks.
> 
> The province has experienced dozens of aftershocks since a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake on May 12.
> 
> But Sunday's aftershock, coming 13 days after the earthquake, was the strongest since another 5.8-magnitude shook the region a day after the initial quake.
> 
> More than 70,000 homes in the area were damaged by the aftershock, according to local television reports.
> 
> The aftershock was felt in Chengdu, one of the largest cities in the Sichuan province and about 150 miles from the epicenter of the aftershock. A CNN employee, on the 24th floor of a highrise hotel, reported that the building swayed.
> 
> On Saturday, when China's Premier Wen Jiabao gave United Nation Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a dramatic look at the damage, a strong aftershock shook the town they were in. Watch Ban Ki-Moon's tour of damage »
> 
> *Meanwhile, the death toll from this month's earthquake in China reached 62,664, a government official said Sunday. Another 23,775 are still missing.*
> 
> At the Sunday news conference, a civil affairs ministry official said rescue workers have pulled alive 6,537 people from the rubble of the May 12 earthquake.
> 
> The earthquake has left more than 5,000 children without their parents and more than 4,000 elderly without caregivers, China's state-run news agency said Sunday.
> 
> A Water Ministry official said at the same conference that 69 dams are in danger of bursting in Sichuan province.
> 
> Since the quake struck, workers have made several dramatic rescues. But the numbers have dwindled in recent days as time has passed. And continued rain in the coming days threatened to make relief efforts more difficult.
> 
> On Friday, rescue workers pulled an 80-year-old paraplegic man from the rubble of his home on Friday, 11 days after the quake, state media reported Sunday.
> 
> The man, Xiao Zhihu, had been trapped for nearly 266 hours.
> 
> The beam of Xiao's house in Mianzhu City in the Sichuan province collapsed during the quake, trapping him, China's state-run television CCTV said.
> 
> The station said Xiao's wife could not go and call for help. She brought him food, until he was found and freed by rescue crews Friday.
> 
> The government estimates that 45 million people, mostly in the Sichuan province, were affected by the earthquake and that five million were left homeless.



As the rescue and recovery efforts continue, the fact that so many buildings- including state-run schools- collapsed so quickly is making so many of those survivors suddenly start calling for something rarely heard in CCP-controlled China: government accountability. 

If any of you recall a CBC report last week from the earthquake site in a certain town called Dongxi, in Sichuan province, IIRC, there was one man in the crowd of survivors seen in the report who was distraught over the fact that he wanted answers about why the government was not properly prepared for such a disaster; the CBC reporter was initially blocked from interviewing him by a local official, who chastised the reporter's translator, saying, "Why do you bring foreigners here?...Don't trust what they say...they'll never tell the truth the way it really is here."  : However, the young man insisted on voicing his opinion to the reporter, saying that "People elsewhere should know what happened here.", and IIRC, he briefly got to talk with the reporter.

Another woman survivor who was interviewed said that the school buildings collapsed because officials failed to reinforce the buildings even when they began to show their age; the local authorities simply paid lip service to the fact that work was needed and only made cosmetic changes such as repainting the walls. While it is easy to conclude that the PRC government granted foreign media unprecedented access to the disaster-hit areas to show the world the professionalism and the readiness with which the local emergency services and the PLA responded, I think that this unprecedented access was also a double-edged sword since it gave those with substantial grievances of corruption an alternate conduit with which to express those grievances against the CCP.

Regardless, while I recall that the CBC report showed footage of what used to be the CCP local HQ in Dongxi now reduced to rubble, I doubt that many locals would grieve for those CCP members who lost their lives during the quake(s).

Still, will the cancer of corruption be the first of many nails to seal the coffin of China's current ruling dynasty- the CCP? This next article below certainly provides some food for thought:



http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/05/23/china_s_lethal_mix_of_earthquakes_corrup



> *China’s Lethal Mix of Earthquakes, Corruption, and Greed *
> 
> Peter Navarro
> 
> Imagine that your government forced you to have only one child – under penalty of sterilization, beatings, and/or stiff fines. Imagine further that your one child is crushed to death during an earthquake because that same government allowed your child’s school to be built with shoddy building materials and in violation of numerous building codes.
> 
> For many grieving mothers and fathers in China, this stark imagining has become the harshest of realities. In fact, the real tragedy of the recent China earthquake is that a significant number of the deaths and injuries were not the result of a merciless Mother Nature but rather a lethal combination of government corruption and entrepreneurial greed.
> 
> The quake in question hit Sichuan province on May 12th and registered a highly destructive 7.9 on the Richter scale. While the official death toll has already risen to more than 20,000, when all of the bodies are eventually counted, that toll will likely exceed 50,000. The grim reality is that many of the dead and injured perished in poorly constructed schools and homes and other buildings that had no absolutely chance of withstanding the earthquake’s deadly force.
> 
> *The problem of shoddy building materials is endemic in China, and it is a particularly severe problem with cement and steel. It’s not that the Chinese don’t know how to properly make these materials. Rather, inferior cement and steel creep into the construction process because as a common characteristic of the Chinese business culture and lax regulatory environment, entrepreneurs regularly skimp on product quality as a way of boosting profits. *
> 
> A similar problem exists with ultra-lax building code enforcement. At least on paper, China has a set of building codes almost as tough as those of the United States or Japan. In practice, however, the central government’s codes are rarely enforced at the local level – particularly outside the confines of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai and particularly in poorer provinces such as Sichuan.
> 
> This problem of local autonomy goes far back into China’s history and its imperial times and is reflected in the ancient Chinese proverb “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” It is a problem that plagues China on everything from environmental protection and worker health and safety to the construction process.
> 
> On top of this, China’s extremely weak legal system makes it virtually impossible for victims to seek any proper redress. Not only are the laws unclear, but the judiciary is often pro-developer. Moreover, as a by-product of the repressive nature of the Chinese regime, would-be claimants are subject to beatings. The result is precisely the kind of shoddy construction that has claimed so many lives in the recent quake.
> 
> Given China’s incredibly dark earthquake history, there is absolutely no excuse for the government to allow any of this. In fact, in 1976, China suffered an earthquake that resulted in the highest number of quake-related casualties in the last four centuries. This earthquake occurred in the Tangshen area of China and damage reached as far as Beijing. While official statistics place the number of dead at 255,000, the actual number is more likely to be well above 600,000.
> 
> The only close competitor in modern times is the deadly Sumatra earthquake of 2004 which killed 228,000 – but many of those died not from the quake but the ensuing tsunami. And it must be noted that the only other quake topping 200,000 in casualites was also in China – the deadly 1920 Gansu earthquake. That’s why there is absolutely no excuse for government officials to condone the type of fly-by-night development process that exists.
> 
> There are important lessons in these frank observations for both a repressive Chinese government in desperate need of reform and a world increasingly reliant on Chinese manufacturers who are far too willing to cut corners on safety. Chinese government officials must come to understand that the brutal suppression of free speech and the lack of legal protection for Chinese citizens provide the ideal breeding ground for corruption and greed. At the same time, consumers in the West have yet another data point to illustrate the deadly hazards of relying on Chinese manufacturers to provide us with everything from car parts, food, and toys to pharmaceuticals and, yes, building materials.


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 1 of 2*

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_ are two articles framed in he print edition,  as a bit of a debate on the *Commentary* page between Frank Ching and Jack Granatstein:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080526.wcoching26/BNStory/specialComment/home


> Actually, it's time to imagine a new world order
> 
> FRANK CHING
> 
> From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> May 26, 2008 at 7:30 AM EDT
> 
> 'When many Western observers look at China," former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani writes in his latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere, "they cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system. They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is taking place in China."
> 
> At a time when the Chinese people have mobilized themselves to cope with the May 12 earthquake, with untold numbers volunteering to give blood, donate money and travel to devastated towns and villages to help the afflicted, it is easy to see the country's vibrancy.
> 
> There is a new spirit, different from that before Deng Xiaoping launched the country on the road to reform and openness 30 years ago.
> 
> This book is full of insights - and contradictions. Mr. Mahbubani praises the West for Asia's development. Asian countries progressed, he says, because they implemented seven pillars of Western wisdom: free-market economics, meritocracy, pragmatism, a culture of peace, the rule of law, an emphasis on education and a willingness to pursue advances in science and technology.
> 
> But while he says the United States has done more good for the world than any other country, he also calls it an international outlaw that refuses to be bound by "the constraints of international law."
> 
> What makes his book controversial is his assertion that "the era of Western domination has run its course," although so far, "the West has refused either to admit its domination of the world or to contemplate sharing power in a new world order. This is a prescription for eventual disaster."
> 
> The thesis of the book is in its subtitle: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Mr. Mahbubani says Asia is returning to the position it occupied for most of the past 2,000 years, before the industrial revolution catapulted the West forward.
> 
> "In the period from 1 CE to 1820, as British historian Angus Madison has recorded, the two largest economies of the world were China and India," he notes.
> 
> "The past two centuries of Western domination of world history are the exception, not the rule, during two thousand years of global history."
> 
> Citing Goldman Sachs, Mr. Mahbubani says that by 2050, three of the world's four largest economies will be Asian - China, India and Japan, along with the United States. And that, he seems to say, is the way it ought to be. But that raises the question: Why did China and the rest of Asia fall behind the West in the first place?
> 
> He offers a partial explanation: "We have not fully understood why the West leaped ahead. But we know some of the reasons why Asia slipped behind: a religious mindset that spurned the material world, a lack of belief in the idea of human 'progress,' a natural deference to authority, and a lack of critical questioning."
> 
> He left out one crucial factor, which was identified by Mr. Deng in diagnosing China's backwardness: self-imposed isolation after the 15th century, during the Ming dynasty.
> 
> "A closed-door policy prevents any country from developing," the Chinese leader said in a speech in 1984. "We suffered from isolation, and so did our forefathers. ... As a consequence, the country declined into poverty and ignorance."
> 
> Since Mr. Mahbubani says he doesn't know what it was that made the West advance, it is possible to question his conclusion that the West must decline. No one doubts that Asia will rise, but that does not necessarily imply a Western decline, other than in a relative sense.
> 
> It may be true that certain things will change, such as the current cozy arrangement whereby the World Bank is always headed by an American and the International Monetary Fund by a European, with Asians excluded.
> 
> The rise of Asia means change, but it doesn't necessarily mean that all global power will pass from West to East. A sharing of power - and responsibilities - is a more likely and more acceptable outcome.
> 
> Whether one agrees with Mr. Mahbubani or not, his book is well worth reading. It is crammed with interesting information and provides an Asian perspective frequently missing in Western discourse on issues of global importance.
> 
> In 2006, China produced a 12-part documentary series called The Rise of the Great Powers, clearly an attempt on its part to understand the West. It is now incumbent on the West to try to understand Asia.



And

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080526.wcogranat26/BNStory/specialComment/home


> Yes, but Canada's future is still American
> *Those who hope to see the new Asian giants rival the U.S. do not realize such a change would be an unmitigated disaster for us*
> 
> J. L. GRANATSTEIN
> 
> From Monday's Globe and Mail
> May 26, 2008 at 7:34 AM EDT
> 
> Canadians don't like the United States these days. A BBC World Service opinion poll in 34 countries published in April found that, while the view of the United States was improving in most, in Lebanon, Egypt, and Canada it was worsening. Only 27 per cent of Canadians had a positive view of the U.S., while 62 per cent held dark thoughts, up six percentage points from last year. Moreover, according to an Environics poll for the "Canada's World" project, published at the beginning of this year, more than half of Canadians described the United States as a "negative force" in the world. In second place? Iran, with only 21 per cent calling the oil-rich theocracy a negative force. These are stunning figures.
> 
> Their force is compounded by a Globe and Mail self-selected opinion poll that ran online on March 29 and 30. Fifteen thousand readers registered opinions; 54 per cent said that America's "current decline" will continue. In other words, more than half of Globe and Mail readers, supposedly an elite group, believe the U.S. is likely to slip into irreversible strategic or economic decline tomorrow. There are few signs of unhappiness about this. Indeed, such is the force of anti-Americanism in Canada that there sometimes seems to be a barely restrained glee.
> 
> This schadenfreude is simply foolish. The U.S. is Canada's greatest market, the sole democratic superpower, the defender of last resort for every democracy in the world, not least Canada. If it falls, if it is replaced by new superpowers such as China or India, there will be consequences.
> 
> Canadians who hope to see the new Asian giants rival the U.S. in a few decades as the great global engine and Canada's new big market simply do not realize that such a change would be an unmitigated disaster for us. China is a brutal one-party dictatorship, a mixture of totalitarianism and unbridled capitalism that is as tough on its restive provinces as it is on foreign suppliers and markets. India is a strife-ridden giant that might follow a path to peaceful economic expansion, but it is a relatively new democracy. However both of these rising powers develop in the next few decades, one thing seems certain: Neither has interest in Canada as anything other than a source of raw materials, oil, and food, and as a market for their goods produced by cheap labour. Canadians historically have always feared being hewers of wood: China and India want only timber from us.
> 
> Canada has many disputes with the U.S. on trade, but we both play by the same rules (most of the time), and our present disputes are as nothing to the probable situation if China, say, had more than three-quarters of our trade, the way the U.S. has today. Could any sensible Canadian want that? Will a future China be benign or aggressive? No one can answer with real confidence today but, in either case, no one should believe that Chinese domination of our export and import economy could serve our national interests. We should pray this will not happen and that the American decline foreseen by so many Canadians doesn't materialize.
> 
> If it does, we are in trouble. The rise of China and India, and of Brazil, Russia and the European Union will not pull Canada out of the American orbit. Far more likely is that it will force Canada to draw closer to the United States - in our own national interests. Strategic forecasters do not see India, Brazil, or the EU as likely security threats to North America in the next 20 years, but most have concerns about China and Russia, both great land powers that are developing their navies rapidly. So should we all.
> 
> Of course, Canada should seek to expand its trade with all these rising powers, but we must recognize that North American security interests will have an impact on us in a world that may soon have more than one superpower and many more unstable nations and organized terrorist groupings. There are now and will be more potential threats.
> 
> In decline or not, the United States will remain a military superpower well into this century. Future Canadian and U.S. governments will be even more concerned about air, space, and sea threats, and the U.S. in particular will need to ensure that the area to its north is secure. That means Canada. And just as in the U.S., where security trumps trade, Canada's geography trumps everything else. No matter what Canadians think about the United States, Canada is not about to become an island. For good or ill, the Canadian future is American.



First: while I have a brand new copy of Manbubani’s book on my desk I have yet to open it.  Is in the queue so we (I, anyway) will have to take Mr. Ching’s word for what he (Manbubani) says; and

Second: Jack Granatstein has fallen into the BRIC trap. While I do not take serious issue with the *theory* behind the 2003 _Goldman Sachs_ thesis it hasn’t turned out that way and, I suspect will not turn out that way. I believe that Brazil and Russia will find new ways to fail – as they have, fairly consistently, in the past centuries. I think China and India have both the basics (as do Brazil and Russia (although Russia faces a demographic nightmare)) and the _socio-cultural infrastructure_ to translate the basic into long term success.

Thus, I accept the basis of Ching’s presentation of Manbubani’s thesis: China and India are, indeed, implementing (*not* “have implemented”) the _”seven pillars of Western wisdom: free-market economics, meritocracy, pragmatism, a culture of peace, the rule of law, an emphasis on education and a willingness to pursue advances in science and technology.”_ I contend that Brazil and Russia have not.

I agree with Granatstein that the *demise* of the USA will be a disaster for Canada – *IF* we do not adapt to the reality that America *will* be sharing power and global leadership in the next half century or so.


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 2 of 2*

That leads me to a third _Globe and Mail_ article, also reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080523.wcoessay0524/BNStory/specialComment


> Dealing with China
> 
> PETER HARDER
> 
> From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> May 24, 2008 at 12:01 AM EDT
> 
> China's catastrophic earthquake last week in Sichuan province has prompted words of condolence from Canada's government, in a written press release. But there is no sign of any personal exchange with the senior leadership in Beijing. Nor has Ottawa sought to mobilize support through the Chinese-Canadian community — in contrast to our active responses to the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
> 
> This is a striking symptom of something missing in the Harper government's policy toward China on other fronts, too. In our business relationship with China, public policy matters.
> 
> This is not a new idea to Canadians. Over the past several administrations, prime ministers, senior ministers and other officials, premiers and business leaders have led trade missions to China. These public expressions of support and confidence are vital. When China's presidents and premiers and Canada's prime ministers take part in these contacts, that demonstrates to Chinese business that the Canada-China relationship is important to their political leaders and that there will be political support for trade and investments. The message is clear and unequivocal.
> 
> The opposite can be just as convincing.
> 
> Members of the Canada China Business Council are often asked whether the currently cooler political relationship between Ottawa and Beijing is costing Canadian businesses. Until very recently, the answer was, "Not yet."
> 
> That is no longer true. Canadian business leaders are reporting that contracts are definitely being lost as a direct result of the chill between our most senior political leaders. Meanwhile, the presidents of the United States, France and Russia, the Chancellor of Germany and other heads of state and government in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Australia all understand that personal attention, face-to-face meetings with China's presidents and premiers, and advocacy for their global companies, are part of their job descriptions. Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian President, this week took his first foreign trip, heading almost straight for China, with a day's stopover in Kazakhstan on Thursday; Germany will have to wait till next month.
> 
> The significance of these presidents' and prime ministers' commitment is not lost on China's leaders, its business community or its people. It leads directly to agreements signed and business opportunities concluded. At any given moment, dozens of trade missions from Canada's competitors are crisscrossing China, working at every level to cement their places on the China trade horizon.
> 
> Canada's premiers are now considering a trade mission of their own to China, as if to fill a gap, but our companies need to have confidence in Ottawa's approach, too. We cannot yet put a dollar value on the Chinese business and opportunities we have lost or let slip. The bill will arrive in due course.
> 
> *DON'T MISS THE BOAT*
> 
> Canada has had a privileged position with China. Every Chinese student learns about Dr. Norman Bethune. China's leaders have not forgotten that, when the rest of the world refused to do so, we sold wheat to China during the famine of 1959 and 1960, and that Canada was one of the first Western nations to recognize the People's Republic, in 1970.
> 
> We need to build on that precious heritage, but with a clear-eyed realism and a sense of self-interest.
> 
> Trade and investment between Canada and China is still growing. Our exports to China in 2007 were worth $9.2-billion and our imports thence were worth $38.2-billion. However, our market share in China is falling proportionately to those of other nations. Trade with China is barely more than 6 per cent of Canada's total global merchandise trade, compared to 80 per cent for our trade with the U.S. Though higher commodity prices and inflationary creep have increased the total value of Canadian-U.S. trade, the proportion of our trade going to the U.S. is falling, down from 87 per cent in 2002.
> 
> Meanwhile, the Americans themselves are positioning themselves economically to cultivate relations with China, while we — or our political leaders — are not.
> 
> In the 20th century, we benefited from our close connection with the United States, the superpower of that era. In the 21st, we should do likewise with the emerging new superpower, rather than taking a proverbial slow boat to China.
> 
> At first, our trade with China was mainly in agricultural products. Today, Canadians are doing business there in energy, education, the environment, information and communication technologies and financial services. China is a huge market for technology, business services and quality-of-life consumerism, as the size of the middle class rapidly expands.
> 
> For example, a Canadian company that first entered China in a joint venture to publish educational books has launched a new project in co-operation with the Chinese education ministry to offer online interactive English-language lessons to millions of university students, at no cost to the students.
> 
> Such successes prove that, when politics do not impede their efforts, our companies, large or small, can compete with the best in the world and win in the Chinese marketplace.
> 
> In spite of the current controversies about China, its government has a mostly commendable record of responsible international behaviour. Membership in the World Trade Organization means that China adheres to international commercial values and standards, and to the rule of law. Joining the WTO has significantly advanced Chinese transparency and accountability.
> 
> China's participation in the G8 outreach and in the United Nations Security Council are important commitments to abiding by the rule of international law and to membership in the global community. Its role in the six-nation talks on North Korea is an example of its efforts to take on responsibilities in world affairs. Clearly, there are some blemishes in its behaviour. In Sudan and some other parts of Africa, Chinese diplomacy has not always supported the best way forward. Yet China understands and is committed to global stability and to the importance of openness to the world.
> 
> *WORLD CITIZEN*
> 
> By undertaking to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, China made a big commitment to openness. Though Beijing did not serve itself well by hiding behind rhetoric and restricting media during the Olympic-torch relay and the demonstrations in Tibet, we should remember that opening its doors to the world for the Olympics is a courageous act for a nation that is in the midst of taking a crash course on capitalism and public relations.
> 
> Still, Canada and the rest of the world should insist that China honour its international commitments, including those made in the Olympic bid: for example, unrestricted media access to all Olympic-related events, including those leading up to the opening ceremonies and during the Games themselves.
> 
> Re-engagement does not mean avoiding the difficult issues that divide us.
> 
> Over the years, Canadian prime ministers, cabinet ministers and their officials, myself included, have not shied away from discussing with Chinese leaders the importance that Canadians place on the respect for human rights in China and around the world. In face-to-face meetings with China's most senior leaders, Canada has helped influence Chinese thinking on issues of accountability, the rule of law, transparency and good government. Western leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany show how it is quite feasible to engage with China while, for example, meeting with the Dalai Lama — an act at which Beijing takes offence when there is no surrounding context of friendly diplomacy.
> 
> A successful, peaceful evolution will not mean that China becomes another Western-style democracy. It is finding its own path, a way that works with its mammoth population and diverse history and geography.
> 
> The United Nations Development Program tells us that 200 million people in China have been lifted above the UN poverty line. That is two-thirds of the number of people in the entire world who have crossed over that line since 1978. If we have any hope of meeting the millennium goals, it is because of China and India and the progress they have made.
> 
> China has stated its priorities as economic growth that is environmentally sustainable, political stability and regional development. These are front-and-centre in the new five-year plan.
> 
> China is not a monolith. There are many competing factions within its political structures, and these have different views on their country's place in the world. The promotions in March of Xi Jinping and Li Kechiang, in particular, show that the internationalists are prevailing. Both men are determined to increase China's participation in the global economic and political system, and they appear to be on the fast track to China's highest political positions.
> 
> If we do not re-engage China at the most senior political level, we will be disengaging ourselves from any role in the integration of China into global economic and geopolitical institutions. China's unprecedented candour and openness to foreign assistance in response to last week's earthquake are evidence of how much Premier Wen Jiabao and his ministers have learned from their clumsy media management of Tibet and how resolved they are that China be looked upon as a "normal" member of the international community. A positive consequence of this horrific tragedy is that Canadians have seen the people of China and their government manage this crisis in the shared experiences of grief, empathy, urgent response and determination to carry on. These events and their aftermath are an opportunity for Canadians to recover some of what we have lost in the past two years.
> 
> _Peter Harder is senior policy adviser with the law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain and is a director of the Canada China Business Council. He is a former deputy minister of foreign affairs._



Peter Harder is, essentially, lobbying the government, through the pages of he _Good Grey Globe_ (to which he has easy access thanks to his previous career) on behalf of his client The Canada China Business Council, but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong!


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 1 of 3*

I’m leaving this in the China thread because even though the author deals with Asia, broadly, China is the key.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act, from the current (May/June 2008) issue of _Foreign Affairs_, is an article entitled “The Case Against the West” by Kishore Mahbubani which is based on the book to which Frank Ching referred in the article I posted earlier today:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501faessay87308/kishore-mahbubani/the-case-against-the-west.html


> The Case Against the West
> 
> 
> By Kishore Mahbubani
> From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2008
> 
> *Summary:* The West is not welcoming Asia's progress, and its short-term interests in preserving its privileged position in various global institutions are trumping its long-term interests in creating a more just and stable world order. The West has gone from being the world's problem solver to being its single biggest liability.
> 
> _KISHORE MAHBUBANI is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. This essay is adapted from his latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (Public Affairs, 2008)._
> 
> There is a fundamental flaw in the West's strategic thinking. In all its analyses of global challenges, the West assumes that it is the source of the solutions to the world's key problems. In fact, however, the West is also a major source of these problems. Unless key Western policymakers learn to understand and deal with this reality, the world is headed for an even more troubled phase.
> 
> The West is understandably reluctant to accept that the era of its domination is ending and that the Asian century has come. No civilization cedes power easily, and the West's resistance to giving up control of key global institutions and processes is natural. Yet the West is engaging in an extraordinary act of self-deception by believing that it is open to change. In fact, the West has become the most powerful force preventing the emergence of a new wave of history, clinging to its privileged position in key global forums, such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G-8 (the group of highly industrialized states), and refusing to contemplate how the West will have to adjust to the Asian century.
> 
> Partly as a result of its growing insecurity, the West has also become increasingly incompetent in its handling of key global problems. Many Western commentators can readily identify specific failures, such as the Bush administration's botched invasion and occupation of Iraq. But few can see that this reflects a deeper structural problem: the West's inability to see that the world has entered a new era.
> 
> Apart from representing a specific failure of policy execution, the war in Iraq has also highlighted the gap between the reality and what the West had expected would happen after the invasion. Arguably, the United States and the United Kingdom intended only to free the Iraqi people from a despotic ruler and to rid the world of a dangerous man, Saddam Hussein. Even if George W. Bush and Tony Blair had no malevolent intentions, however, their approaches were trapped in the Western mindset of believing that their interventions could lead only to good, not harm or disaster. This led them to believe that the invading U.S. troops would be welcomed with roses thrown at their feet by happy Iraqis. But the twentieth century showed that no country welcomes foreign invaders. The notion that any Islamic nation would approve of Western military boots on its soil was ridiculous. Even in the early twentieth century, the British invasion and occupation of Iraq was met with armed resistance. In 1920, Winston Churchill, then British secretary for war and air, quelled the rebellion of Kurds and Arabs in British-occupied Iraq by authorizing his troops to use chemical weapons. "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," Churchill said. The world has moved on from this era, but many Western officials have not abandoned the old assumption that an army of Christian soldiers can successfully invade, occupy, and transform an Islamic society.
> 
> Many Western leaders often begin their speeches by remarking on how perilous the world is becoming. Speaking after the August 2006 discovery of a plot to blow up transatlantic flights originating from London, President Bush said, "The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world." But even as Western leaders speak of such threats, they seem incapable of conceding that the West itself could be the fundamental source of these dangers. After all, the West includes the best-managed states in the world, the most economically developed, those with the strongest democratic institutions. But one cannot assume that a government that rules competently at home will be equally good at addressing challenges abroad. In fact, the converse is more likely to be true. Although the Western mind is obsessed with the Islamist terrorist threat, the West is mishandling the two immediate and pressing challenges of Afghanistan and Iraq. And despite the grave threat of nuclear terrorism, the Western custodians of the nonproliferation regime have allowed that regime to weaken significantly. The challenge posed by Iran's efforts to enrich uranium has been aggravated by the incompetence of the United States and the European Union. On the economic front, for the first time since World War II, the demise of a round of global trade negotiations, the Doha Round, seems imminent. Finally, the danger of global warming, too, is being mismanaged.
> 
> Yet Westerners seldom look inward to understand the deeper reasons these global problems are being mismanaged. Are there domestic structural reasons that explain this? Have Western democracies been hijacked by competitive populism and structural short-termism, preventing them from addressing long-term challenges from a broader global perspective?
> 
> Fortunately, some Asian states may now be capable of taking on more responsibilities, as they have been strengthened by implementing Western principles. In September 2005, Robert Zoellick, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, called on China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system. China has responded positively, as have other Asian states. In recent decades, Asians have been among the greatest beneficiaries of the open multilateral order created by the United States and the other victors of World War II, and few today want to destabilize it. The number of Asians seeking a comfortable middle-class existence has never been higher. For centuries, the Chinese and the Indians could only dream of such an accomplishment; now it is within the reach of around half a billion people in China and India. Their ideal is to achieve what the United States and Europe did. They want to replicate, not dominate, the West. The universalization of the Western dream represents a moment of triumph for the West. And so the West should welcome the fact that the Asian states are becoming competent at handling regional and global challenges.
> 
> *THE MIDDLE EAST MESS*
> 
> Western policies have been most harmful in the Middle East. The Middle East is also the most dangerous region in the world. Trouble there affects not just seven million Israelis, around four million Palestinians, and 200 million Arabs; it also affects more than a billion Muslims worldwide. Every time there is a major flare-up in the Middle East, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, Islamic communities around the world become concerned, distressed, and angered. And few of them doubt the problem's origin: the West.
> 
> The invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, was a multidimensional error. The theory and practice of international law legitimizes the use of force only when it is an act of self-defense or is authorized by the UN Security Council. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could not be justified on either count. The United States and the United Kingdom sought the Security Council's authorization to invade Iraq, but the council denied it. It was therefore clear to the international community that the subsequent war was illegal and that it would do huge damage to international law.
> 
> This has created an enormous problem, partly because until this point both the United States and the United Kingdom had been among the primary custodians of international law. American and British minds, such as James Brierly, Philip Jessup, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Hans Morgenthau, developed the conceptual infrastructure underlying international law, and American and British leaders provided the political will to have it accepted in practice. But neither the United States nor the United Kingdom will admit that the invasion and the occupation of Iraq were illegal or give up their historical roles as the chief caretakers of international law. Since 2003, both nations have frequently called for Iran and North Korea to implement UN Security Council resolutions. But how can the violators of UN principles also be their enforcers?
> 
> One rare benefit of the Iraq war may be that it has awakened a new fear of Iran among the Sunni Arab states. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, among others, do not want to deal with two adversaries and so are inclined to make peace with Israel. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah used the opportunity of the special Arab League summit meeting in March 2007 to relaunch his long-standing proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, the Bush administration did not seize the opportunity -- or revive the Taba accords that President Bill Clinton had worked out in January 2001, even though they could provide a basis for a lasting settlement and the Saudis were prepared to back them. In its early days, the Bush administration appeared ready to support a two-state solution. It was the first U.S. administration to vote in favor of a UN Security Council resolution calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, and it announced in March 2002 that it would try to achieve such a result by 2005. But here it is 2008, and little progress has been made.
> 
> The United States has made the already complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict even more of a mess. Many extremist voices in Tel Aviv and Washington believe that time will always be on Israel's side. The pro-Israel lobby's stranglehold on the U.S. Congress, the political cowardice of U.S. politicians when it comes to creating a Palestinian state, and the sustained track record of U.S. aid to Israel support this view. But no great power forever sacrifices its larger national interests in favor of the interests of a small state. If Israel fails to accept the Taba accords, it will inevitably come to grief. If and when it does, Western incompetence will be seen as a major cause.


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 2 of 3*


> The Case Against the West (con’t)
> 
> *NEVER SAY NEVER*
> 
> Nuclear nonproliferation is another area in which the West, especially the United States, has made matters worse. The West has long been obsessed with the danger of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons. It pushed successfully for the near-universal ratification of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
> 
> But the West has squandered many of those gains. Today, the NPT is legally alive but spiritually dead. The NPT was inherently problematic since it divided the world into nuclear haves (the states that had tested a nuclear device by 1967) and nuclear have-nots (those that had not). But for two decades it was reasonably effective in preventing horizontal proliferation (the spread of nuclear weapons to other states). Unfortunately, the NPT has done nothing to prevent vertical proliferation, namely, the increase in the numbers and sophistication of nuclear weapons among the existing nuclear weapons states. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to work together to limit proliferation. The governments of several countries that could have developed nuclear weapons, such as Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, restrained themselves because they believed the NPT reflected a fair bargain between China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the five official nuclear weapons states and five permanent members of the UN Security Council) and the rest of the world. Both sides agreed that the world would be safer if the five nuclear states took steps to reduce their arsenals and worked toward the eventual goal of universal disarmament and the other states refrained from acquiring nuclear weapons at all.
> 
> So what went wrong? The first problem was that the NPT's principal progenitor, the United States, decided to walk away from the postwar rule-based order it had created, thus eroding the infrastructure on which the NPT's enforcement depends. During the time I was Singapore's ambassador to the UN, between 1984 and 1989, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, treated the organization with contempt. She infamously said, "What takes place in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving." She saw the postwar order as a set of constraints, not as a set of rules that the world should follow and the United States should help preserve. This undermined the NPT, because with no teeth of its own, no self-regulating or sanctioning mechanisms, and a clause allowing signatories to ignore obligations in the name of "supreme national interest," the treaty could only really be enforced by the UN Security Council. And once the United States began tearing holes in the fabric of the overall system, it created openings for violations of the NPT and its principles. Finally, by going to war with Iraq without UN authorization, the United States lost its moral authority to ask, for example, Iran to abide by Security Council resolutions.
> 
> Another problem has been the United States' -- and other nuclear weapons states' -- direct assault on the treaty. The NPT is fundamentally a social contract between the five nuclear weapons states and the rest of the world, based partly on the understanding that the nuclear powers will eventually give up their weapons. Instead, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union increased both the quantity and the sophistication of their nuclear weapons: the United States' nuclear stockpile peaked in 1966 at 31,700 warheads, and the Soviet Union's peaked in 1986 at 40,723. In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union developed their nuclear stockpiles so much that they actually ran out of militarily or economically significant targets. The numbers have declined dramatically since then, but even the current number of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia can wreak enormous damage on human civilization.
> 
> The nuclear states' decision to ignore Israel's nuclear weapons program was especially damaging to their authority. No nuclear weapons state has ever publicly acknowledged Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. Their silence has created a loophole in the NPT and delegitimized it in the eyes of Muslim nations. The consequences have been profound. When the West sermonizes that the world will become a more dangerous place when Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the Muslim world now shrugs.
> 
> India and Pakistan were already shrugging by 1998, when they tested their first nuclear weapons. When the international community responded by condemning the tests and applying sanctions on India, virtually all Indians saw through the hypocrisy and double standards of their critics. By not respecting their own obligations under the NPT, the five nuclear states had robbed their condemnations of any moral legitimacy; criticisms from Australia and Canada, which have also remained silent about Israel's bomb, similarly had no moral authority. The near-unanimous rejection of the NPT by the Indian establishment, which is otherwise very conscious of international opinion, showed how dead the treaty already was.
> 
> From time to time, common sense has entered discussions on nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan said more categorically than any U.S. president that the world would be better off without nuclear weapons. Last year, with the NPT in its death throes and the growing threat of loose nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists forefront in everyone's mind, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former Senator Sam Nunn warned in The Wall Street Journal that the world was "now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era." They argued,"Unless urgent new actions are taken, the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence." But these calls may have come too late. The world has lost its trust in the five nuclear weapons states and now sees them as the NPT's primary violators rather than its custodians. Those states' private cynicism about their obligations to the NPT has become public knowledge.
> 
> Contrary to what the West wants the rest of the world to believe, the nuclear weapons states, especially the United States and Russia, which continue to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, are the biggest source of nuclear proliferation. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned in The Economist in 2003, "The very existence of nuclear weapons gives rise to the pursuit of them. They are seen as a source of global influence, and are valued for their perceived deterrent effect. And as long as some countries possess them (or are protected by them in alliances) and others do not, this asymmetry breeds chronic global insecurity." Despite the Cold War, the second half of the twentieth century seemed to be moving the world toward a more civilized order. As the twenty-first century unfurls, the world seems to be sliding backward.
> 
> *IRRESPONSIBLE STAKEHOLDERS*
> 
> After leading the world toward a period of spectacular economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century by promoting global free trade, the West has recently been faltering in its global economic leadership. Believing that low trade barriers and increasing trade interdependence would result in higher standards of living for all, European and U.S. economists and policymakers pushed for global economic liberalization. As a result, global trade grew from seven percent of the world's GDP in 1940 to 30 percent in 2005.
> 
> But a seismic shift has taken place in Western attitudes since the end of the Cold War. Suddenly, the United States and Europe no longer have a vested interest in the success of the East Asian economies, which they see less as allies and more as competitors. That change in Western interests was reflected in the fact that the West provided little real help to East Asia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. The entry of China into the global marketplace, especially after its admission to the World Trade Organization, has made a huge difference in both economic and psychological terms. Many Europeans have lost confidence in their ability to compete with the Asians. And many Americans have lost confidence in the virtues of competition.
> 
> There are some knotty issues that need to be resolved in the current global trade talks, but fundamentally the negotiations are stalled because the conviction of the Western "champions" of free trade that free trade is good has begun to waver. When Americans and Europeans start to perceive themselves as losers in international trade, they also lose their drive to push for further trade liberalization. Unfortunately, on this front at least, neither China nor India (nor Brazil nor South Africa nor any other major developing country) is ready to take over the West's mantle. China, for example, is afraid that any effort to seek leadership in this area will stoke U.S. fears that it is striving for global hegemony. Hence, China is lying low. So, too, are the United States and Europe. Hence, the trade talks are stalled. The end of the West's promotion of global trade liberalization could well mean the end of the most spectacular economic growth the world has ever seen. Few in the West seem to be reflecting on the consequences of walking away from one of the West's most successful policies, which is what it will be doing if it allows the Doha Round to fail.
> 
> At the same time that the Western governments are relinquishing their stewardship of the global economy, they are also failing to take the lead on battling global warming. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a longtime environmentalist, and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms there is international consensus that global warning is a real threat. The most assertive advocates for tackling this problem come from the U.S. and European scientific communities, but the greatest resistance to any effective action is coming from the U.S. government. This has left the rest of the world confused and puzzled. Most people believe that the greenhouse effect is caused mostly by the flow of current emissions. Current emissions do aggravate the problem, but the fundamental cause is the stock of emissions that has accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. Finding a just and equitable solution to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions must begin with assigning responsibility both for the current flow and for the stock of greenhouse gases already accumulated. And on both counts the Western nations should bear a greater burden.
> 
> When it comes to addressing any problem pertaining to the global commons, such as the environment, it seems only fair that the wealthier members of the international community should shoulder more responsibility. This is a natural principle of justice. It is also fair in this particular case given the developed countries' primary role in releasing harmful gases into the atmosphere. R. K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argued last year, "China and India are certainly increasing their share, but they are not increasing their per capita emissions anywhere close to the levels that you have in the developed world." Since 1850, China has contributed less than 8 percent of the world's total emissions of carbon dioxide, whereas the United States is responsible for 29 percent and western Europe is responsible for 27 percent. Today, India's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to only 4 percent of those of the United States and 12 percent of those of the European Union. Still, the Western governments are not clearly acknowledging their responsibilities and are allowing many of their citizens to believe that China and India are the fundamental obstacles to any solution to global warming.
> 
> Washington might become more responsible on this front if a Democratic president replaces Bush in 2009. But people in the West will have to make some real concessions if they are to reduce significantly their per capita share of global emissions. A cap-and-trade program may do the trick. Western countries will probably have to make economic sacrifices. One option might be, as the journalist Thomas Friedman has suggested, to impose a dollar-per-gallon tax on Americans' gasoline consumption. Gore has proposed a carbon tax. So far, however, few U.S. politicians have dared to make such suggestions publicly.


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Part 3 of 3*



> The Case Against the West (con’t)
> 
> *TEMPTATIONS OF THE EAST*
> 
> The Middle East, nuclear proliferation, stalled trade liberalization, and global warming are all challenges that the West is essentially failing to address. And this failure suggests that a systemic problem is emerging in the West's stewardship of the international order -- one that Western minds are reluctant to analyze or confront openly. After having enjoyed centuries of global domination, the West has to learn to share power and responsibility for the management of global issues with the rest of the world. It has to forgo outdated organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and outdated processes, such as the G-8, and deal with organizations and processes with a broader scope and broader representation. It was always unnatural for the 12 percent of the world population that lived in the West to enjoy so much global power. Understandably, the other 88 percent of the world population increasingly wants also to drive the bus of world history.
> 
> First and foremost, the West needs to acknowledge that sharing the power it has accumulated in global forums would serve its interests. Restructuring international institutions to reflect the current world order will be complicated by the absence of natural leaders to do the job. The West has become part of the problem, and the Asian countries are not yet ready to step in. On the other hand, the world does not need to invent any new principles to improve global governance; the concepts of domestic good governance can and should be applied to the international community. The Western principles of democracy, the rule of law, and social justice are among the world's best bets. The ancient virtues of partnership and pragmatism can complement them.
> 
> Democracy, the foundation of government in the West, is based on the premise that each human being in a society is an equal stakeholder in the domestic order. Thus, governments are selected on the basis of "one person, one vote." This has produced long-term stability and order in Western societies. In order to produce long-term stability and order worldwide, democracy should be the cornerstone of global society, and the planet's 6.6 billion inhabitants should become equal stakeholders. To inject the spirit of democracy into global governance and global decision-making, one must turn to institutions with universal representation, especially the UN. UN institutions such as the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization enjoy widespread legitimacy because of their universal membership, which means their decisions are generally accepted by all the countries of the world.
> 
> The problem today is that although many Western actors are willing to work with specialized UN agencies, they are reluctant to strengthen the UN's core institution, the UN General Assembly, from which all these specialized agencies come. The UN General Assembly is the most representative body on the planet, and yet many Western countries are deeply skeptical of it. They are right to point out its imperfections. But they overlook the fact that this imperfect assembly enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of the people of this imperfect world. Moreover, the General Assembly has at times shown more common sense and prudence than some of the most sophisticated Western democracies. Of course, it takes time to persuade all of the UN's members to march in the same direction, but consensus building is precisely what gives legitimacy to the result. Most countries in the world respect and abide by most UN decisions because they believe in the authority of the UN. Used well, the body can be a powerful vehicle for making critical decisions on global governance.
> 
> The world today is run not through the General Assembly but through the Security Council, which is effectively run by the five permanent member states. If this model were adopted in the United States, the U.S. Congress would be replaced by a selective council comprised of only the representatives from the country's five most powerful states. Would the populations of the other 45 states not deem any such proposal absurd? The West must cease its efforts to prolong its undemocratic management of the global order and find ways to effectively engage the majority of the world's population in global decision-making.
> 
> Another fundamental principle that should underpin the global order is the rule of law. This hallowed Western principle insists that no person, regardless of his or her status, is above the law. Ironically, while being exemplary in implementing the rule of law at home, the United States is a leading international outlaw in its refusal to recognize the constraints of international law. Many Americans live comfortably with this contradiction while expecting other countries to abide by widely accepted treaties. Americans react with horror when Iran tries to walk away from the NPT. Yet they are surprised that the world is equally shocked when Washington abandons a universally accepted treaty such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
> 
> The Bush administration's decision to exempt the United States from the provisions of international law on human rights is even more damaging. For over half a century, since Eleanor Roosevelt led the fight for the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States was the global champion of human rights. This was the result of a strong ideological conviction that it was the United States' God-given duty to create a more civilized world. It also made for a good ideological weapon during the Cold War: the free United States was fighting the unfree Soviet Union. But the Bush administration has stunned the world by walking away from universally accepted human rights conventions, especially those on torture. And much as the U.S. electorate could not be expected to tolerate an attorney general who broke his own laws from time to time, how can the global body politic be expected to respect a custodian of international law that violates these very rules?
> 
> Finally, on social justice, Westerns nations have slackened. Social justice is the cornerstone of order and stability in modern Western societies and the rest of the world. People accept inequality as long as some kind of social safety net exists to help the dispossessed. Most western European governments took this principle to heart after World War II and introduced welfare provisions as a way to ward off Marxist revolutions seeking to create socialist societies. Today, many Westerners believe that they are spreading social justice globally with their massive foreign aid to the developing world. Indeed, each year, the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the organization's own estimates, give approximately $104 billion to the developing world. But the story of Western aid to the developing world is essentially a myth. Western countries have put significant amounts of money into their overseas development assistance budgets, but these funds' primary purpose is to serve the immediate and short-term security and national interests of the donors rather than the long-term interests of the recipients.
> 
> The experience of Asia shows that where Western aid has failed to do the job, domestic good governance can succeed. This is likely to be Asia's greatest contribution to world history. The success of Asia will inspire other societies on different continents to emulate it. In addition, Asia's march to modernity can help produce a more stable world order. Some Asian countries are now ready to join the West in becoming responsible custodians of the global order; as the biggest beneficiaries of the current system, they have powerful incentives to do so. The West is not welcoming Asia's progress, and its short-term interests in preserving its privileged position in various global institutions are trumping its long-term interests in creating a more just and stable world order. Unfortunately, the West has gone from being the world's primary problem solver to being its single biggest liability.



It is not going too far, I think to compare Mahbubani’s thesis with Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ – he says that we, the Anglo-American led (for 400 years) West, have abandoned our strong principles and let our principled strength wither. We are bound, therefore, to _fall_ to the energetic people of the East.

I’ll leave you to make up your own minds about the rest.


----------



## GAP

We certainly have increased our appeasement output....for good or bad, I can't tell, but it sure seems that way....


----------



## Kirkhill

I see a parallel with the Clinton-Obama debate.  With the issue in the balance one party demands the other quit as it may turn out messily.  Clinton could as easily demand that Obama stop trying.....


----------



## TangoTwoBravo

His bit about social justice being the cornerstone of the West reveals some biases.  Calling the USA an outlaw and trying to relate the Rule of Law to nation-states is another indicator.  Seeming to advocate global democracy is another funny one for me.   Nation-states are not people and the world is not a nation-state.  I am all for democracy within a nation-state that has an underlying consensus on how to do things.  Extending that to the world is not, in my view, an option.


----------



## a_majoor

A more ominous interpretation of China's actions:

http://feer.com/essays/2008/may/beijing-embraces-classical-fascism?searched=ledeen&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1



> *Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism*
> by Michael Ledeen
> 
> In 2002, I speculated that China may be something we have never seen before: a mature fascist state. Recent events there, especially the mass rage in response to Western criticism, seem to confirm that theory. More significantly, over the intervening six years China’s leaders have consolidated their hold on the organs of control—political, economic and cultural. Instead of gradually embracing pluralism as many expected, China’s corporatist elite has become even more entrenched.
> 
> Even though they still call themselves communists, and the Communist Party rules the country, classical fascism should be the starting point for our efforts to understand the People’s Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the fascist revolution. Mussolini would be dead and buried, the corporate state would be largely intact, the party would be firmly in control, and Italy would be governed by professional politicians, part of a corrupt elite, rather than the true believers who had marched on Rome. It would no longer be a system based on charisma, but would instead rest almost entirely on political repression, the leaders would be businesslike and cynical, not idealistic, and they would constantly invoke formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the “great Italian people,” “endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors.”
> 
> Substitute in the “great Chinese people” and it all sounds familiar. We are certainly not dealing with a Communist regime, either politically or economically, nor do Chinese leaders, even those who followed the radical reformer Deng Xiaoping, seem to be at all interested in treading the dangerous and uneven path from Stalinism to democracy. They know that Mikhail Gorbachev fell when he tried to control the economy while giving political freedom. They are attempting the opposite, keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise. Their political methods are quite like those used by the European fascists 80 years ago.
> 
> Unlike traditional communist dictators—Mao, for example—who extirpated traditional culture and replaced it with a sterile Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese now enthusiastically, even compulsively, embrace the glories of China’s long history. Their passionate reassertion of the greatness of past dynasties has both entranced and baffled Western observers, because it does not fit the model of an “evolving communist system.”
> 
> Yet the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 1930s used exactly the same device. Mussolini rebuilt Rome to provide a dramatic visual reminder of ancient glories, and he used ancient history to justify the conquest of Libya and Ethiopia. Hitler’s favorite architect built neoclassical buildings throughout the Third Reich, and his favorite operatic composer organized festivals to celebrate the country’s mythic past.
> 
> Like their European predecessors, the Chinese claim a major role in the world because of their history and culture, not just on the basis of their current power, or scientific or cultural accomplishments. China even toys with some of the more bizarre notions of the earlier fascisms, such as the program to make the country self-sufficient in wheat production—the same quest for autarky that obsessed both Hitler and Mussolini.
> 
> To be sure, the world is much changed since the first half of the last century. It’s much harder (and sometimes impossible) to go it alone. Passions for total independence from the outside world are tempered by the realities of today’s global economy, and China’s appetite for oil and other raw materials is properly legendary. But the Chinese, like the European fascists, are intensely xenophobic, and obviously worry that their people may turn against them if they learn too much about the rest of the world. They consequently work very hard to dominate the flow of information. Just ask Google, forced to cooperate with the censors in order to work in China.
> 
> Some scholars of contemporary China see the Beijing regime as very nervous, and perhaps even unstable, and they are encouraged in this belief when they see recent events such as the eruption of popular sentiment against the Tibetan monks’ modest protests. That view is further reinforced by similar outcries against most any criticism of Chinese performance, from human rights to air pollution, and from preparations for the Olympic Games to the failure of Chinese quality control in food production and children’s toys. The recent treatment of French retailer Carrefour at the hands of Chinese nationalists is a case in point. It has been publicly excoriated and shunned because France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy dared to consider the possibility of boycotting the Olympics.
> 
> In all these cases, it is tempting to conclude that the regime is worried about its own survival, and, in order to rally nationalist passions, feels compelled to portray the country as a global victim. Perhaps they are right. The strongest evidence to support the theory of insecurity at the highest levels of Chinese society is the practice of the “princelings” (wealthy children of the ruling elites) to buy homes in places such as the United States, Canada and Australia. These are not luxury homes of the sort favored by wealthy businessman and officials from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Rather they are typically “normal” homes of the sort a potential émigré might want to have in reserve in case things went bad back home.
> 
> Moreover, there are reasons to believe that eruptions of nationalist passion do indeed worry the regime, and Chinese leaders have certainly tamped down such episodes in the past. In recent days, the regime has even reached out to the Dalai Lama himself in an apparent effort to calm the situation, after previously enouncing the “Dalai clique” as a dangerous form of separatism and even treason.
> 
> On the other hand, the cult of victimhood was always part of fascist culture. Just like Germany and Italy in the interwar period, China feels betrayed and humiliated, and seeks to avenge her many historic wounds. This is not necessarily a true sign of anxiety; it’s an integral part of the sort of hypernationalism that has always been at the heart of all fascist movements and regimes. We cannot look into the souls of the Chinese tyrants, but I doubt that China is an intensely unstable system, riven by the democratic impulses of capitalism on the one hand, and the repressive practices of the regime on the other. This is a mature fascism, not a frenzied mass movement, and the current regime is not composed of revolutionary fanatics. Today’s Chinese leaders are the heirs of two very different revolutions, Mao’s and Deng’s. The first was a failed communist experiment; the second is a fascist transformation whose future is up for grabs.
> 
> If the fascist model is correct, we should not be at all surprised by the recent rhetoric or mass demonstrations. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were every bit as sensitive to any sign of foreign criticism as the Chinese today, both because victimhood is always part of the definition of such states, and because it’s an essential technique of mass control. The violent denunciations of Westerners who criticize Chinese repression may not be a sign of internal anxiety or weakness. They may instead be a sign of strength, a demonstration of the regime’s popularity. Remember that European fascism did not fall as the result of internal crisis—it took a bloody world war to bring it down. *Fascism was so alarmingly popular neither Italians not Germans produced more than token resistance until the war began to be lost. * It may well be that the mass condemnation of Western calls for greater political tolerance is in fact a sign of political success.
> 
> Since classical fascism had such a brief life span, it is hard to know whether or not a stable, durable fascist state is possible. Economically, the corporate state, of which the current Chinese system is a textbook example, may prove more flexible and adaptable than the rigid central planning that doomed communism in the Soviet Empire and elsewhere (*although the travails of Japan, which also tried to combine capitalist enterprise with government guidance, show the kinds of problems China will likely face*). Our brief experience with fascism makes it difficult to evaluate the possibilities of political evolution, and the People’s Republic is full of secrets. But prudent strategists would do well to assume that the regime will be around for a while longer—perhaps a lot longer.
> 
> If it is a popular, fascist regime, should the world prepare for some difficult and dangerous confrontations with the People’s Republic? Twentieth-century fascist states were very aggressive; Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were both expansionist nations. Is it not likely that China will similarly seek to enlarge its domain?
> 
> I believe the answer is “yes, but.”  Many Chinese leaders might like to see their sway extend throughout the region, and beyond. China’s military is not so subtly preparing the capability to defeat U.S. forces in Asia in order to prevent intervention in any conflict on its periphery. No serious student of China doubts the enormous ambitions of both the leadership and the masses. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Chinese tyrants do not urgently need quick geographical expansion to demonstrate the glory of their country and the truth of their vision. For the moment, at least, success at home and global recognition of Chinese accomplishments seem to be enough. Since Chinese fascism is less ideological than its European predecessors, Chinese leaders are far more flexible than Hitler and Mussolini.
> Nonetheless, the short history of classical fascism suggests that it is only a matter of time before China will pursue confrontation with the West. That is built into the dna of all such regimes. Sooner or later, Chinese leaders will feel compelled to demonstrate the superiority of their system, and even the most impressive per capita GDP will not do. Superiority means others have to bend their knees, and cater to the wishes of the dominant nation. Just as Mussolini saw the colonization of Africa and the invasion of Greece and the Balkans as necessary steps in the establishment of a new fascist empire, so the Chinese are likely to demand tribute from their neighbors—above all, the Chinese on the island nation of Taiwan, in order to add the recovery of lost territory to the regime’s list of accomplishments. Even today, at a time when the regime is seeking praise, not tribute, in the run-up to the Olympic Games, there are bellicose overtones to official rhetoric.
> 
> How, then, should the democracies deal with China? The first step is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that wealth is the surest guarantor of peace. The West traded with the Soviet Union, and gave them credits as well, but it did not prevent the Kremlin from expanding into the Horn of Africa, or sponsoring terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East. A wealthy China will not automatically be less inclined to go to war over Taiwan, or, for that matter, to wage or threaten war with Japan.
> 
> Indeed, the opposite may be true—the richer and stronger China becomes, the more they build up their military might, the more likely such wars may be. It follows that the West must prepare for war with China, hoping thereby to deter it. A great Roman once said that if you want peace, prepare for war. This is sound advice with regard to a fascist Chinese state that wants to play a global role.
> 
> Meanwhile, we should do what we can to convince the people of China that their long-term interests are best served by greater political freedom, no matter how annoying and chaotic that may sometimes be. I think we can trust the Chinese leaders on this one. Any regime as palpably concerned about the free flow of information, knows well that ideas about freedom might be very popular. Let’s test that hypothesis, by talking directly to “the billion.” In today’s world, we can surely find ways to reach them.
> 
> If we do not take such steps, our risk will surely increase, and explosions of rage, manipulated or spontaneous, will recur. Eventually they will take the form of real actions.
> 
> Mr. Ledeen is an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He served as a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission from 2001-03.




If (very big *if* here) the author is correct, we do have powerful economic levers to use against the regime. Reducing our imports of cheap Chinese goods is one; much of it is pretty dodgy anyway (in terms of quality or even your health) so there will only be limited personal pain to do so. Shop around.

The second is more drastic, and it was the cause of the Pacific phase of the Second World War (Imperial Japan vs USA and colonial empires), which is to throttle the flow of resources to China. We in Canada have a vast market in the United States already, so once again, selling our oil, coal, lumber, wheat etc to the Americans rather than the Chinese isn't going to cause a great deal of personal or overall economic pain.

So long as China does not embrace the Rule of Law, they are a potential threat to us and our interests. I personally don't see them as a direct military threat, but do expect to see Canada and the West becoming engaged in political competition with the Chinese to influence events and nations in ways favorable to them as opposed to ways favorable to us. And therein lies the danger........


----------



## RickDevlieger

Considering that Chinese companies own the Panama Canal access and they are investing heavily in Central and South America, Perhaps we may be a little late with trying to limit their access to natural resources or markets. The Pacific rim has quietly become the worlds largest economic block while we in Canada continue to ignore the fact we are dependant on that trade. 51 cents of every dollar of our GNP is dependant on shipping on the Pacific ocean. The Port of Vancouver moves more tons of freight than the rest of  the Canadian ports combined. We contine to look eastward at our peril.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Interesting thoughts, China is in a sense colonizing Africa as we speak using their money, expertise and lack of interests in Human rights to encourage countries to deal with them. I suspect a direct war between China and West as to damaging and a series of prolonged proxy wars to take place. A big unknown for everyone is the Chinese people themselves, the current rulers are like cowboys, they can normally control the herd with minimal effort, but if the herd begins to move in unanticipated directions there may be little they can do. If the Chinese leaders can keep the conflict off the front pages I think they will be fairly successful, if they can not, then the herd instinct may take over, a threat to the leadership far greater than the West I suspect.

Malaysia is a good case study, a benevolent somewhat fascist dictatorship disguised with the trappings of democracy, can it be maintained with the passing of DR. M? The Chinese are better at succession planning I should note.


----------



## chanman

Thucydides said:
			
		

> If (very big *if* here) the author is correct, we do have powerful economic levers to use against the regime. Reducing our imports of cheap Chinese goods is one; much of it is pretty dodgy anyway (in terms of quality or even your health) so there will only be limited personal pain to do so. Shop around.



Markets are places of many sellers and many buyers.  I notice most of those cheap Chinese goods are not sold, designed, or marketed by a Chinese company - one reason their net trade surplus is much smaller than some of their bilateral trade surpluses (notably with the EU and the US).  Taiwanese electronics are assembled into computers in the PRC, or Samsung assembles Sony TVs in Shenzhen.    As an addendum to that, Western firms have lots of physical capital in-country that could be vulnerable to nationalization or less direct means of economic retaliation (the sudden appearance of Indian levels or red tape comes to mind).  Making use of economic levers is much easier said than done.  You'd need to unravel all the trading links and affected third parties just to make sure that any given action affects the party you directed it at instead of some third party further down the line.




> The second is more drastic, and it was the cause of the Pacific phase of the Second World War (Imperial Japan vs USA and colonial empires), which is to throttle the flow of resources to China. We in Canada have a vast market in the United States already, so once again, selling our oil, coal, lumber, wheat etc to the Americans rather than the Chinese isn't going to cause a great deal of personal or overall economic pain.



But these are all fungible goods, easily sold and resold via proxies or third parties.  Even if Canadian resources never made it to China's shores, if the amount on the market remains the same, then all it will do is displace other suppliers.  Countries and companies that we undercut to supply the US will find that they can get a better price from China than before, now that Canadian suppliers no longer compete.  Or they can simply have it re-exported from say... Singapore or Taiwan or Australia.  Markets are not very segregated, especially in the raw bulk resources you've mentioned.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, essentially an interview with *Henry Kissinger*, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Financial Post_, could go in another Army.ca forum but I have put it here because it supports my “China ought not to be our enemy” position:

http://www.financialpost.com/reports/oil-watch/story.html?id=580387


> Kissinger: '70s proposals could have reversed oil crisis
> *Exclusive interview with the Financial Post*
> 
> Sean Silcoff, Financial Post
> 
> Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008
> 
> MONTREAL -- Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state during the height of the 1970s oil crisis, says solutions proposed then -- but not implemented -- could have helped stave off the current energy crisis that some speculate could lead to US$200/barrel oil.
> 
> "When we went through the crisis, we thought US$30 oil was unbearable," the 85-year-old Dr. Kissinger said in an exclusive interview with the Financial Post before a speech to the International Forum of the Americas in Montreal. "And ironically the steps that we proposed at the time, which were more or less accepted, but never implemented, are still the steps people are talking about, and are not yet implemented."
> 
> Dr. Kissinger said the International Energy Agency, created in 1974 as a countermeasure to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), had been "very successful" in efforts to amass emergency stockpiles, while efforts to share information with consumers "has been fairly successful."
> 
> "But they have not gone the next step, to see at what point countermeasures can be taken" or what countermeasures should be taken to battle rising prices.
> 
> Dr. Kissinger declined to offer what countermeasures should be taken, but said development of alternative energy sources, better global co-operation on prices and the creation of "an overall approach" had not happened. "I think that American energy policy has done what you can do without great pain," he said. "But I think American energy policy for the last 20 years has not done what it should have done. But neither has anyone else's energy policy."
> 
> Dr. Kissinger, who is supporting his old friend John McCain's run for president, said he felt the war in Iraq -- one of the key points of differentiation between the presumptive Republican nominee and Democrat Barack Obama -- "is going in a direction in which I think a political solution becomes feasible and visible," following a "surge" effort championed by Mr. McCain.
> 
> Asked what he felt were the greatest foreign policy challenges in the world, he spoke of "four or five upheavals that are going on around the world simultaneously," including the growth of the European Union and the adjustments that has brought to the continent, the changing order in the Islamic world, the rise of Asia and "the gap between global economics and global politics."
> 
> In addition, Dr. Kissinger – who helped open the way to Sino-American relations with a secret visit to China in 1971, when he was assistant to President Richard Nixon for national security affairs – said the emerging Asian superpower and the U.S. "must on both sides make every effort to avoid building [the relationship] into a classic adversarial relationship, because that could have the same impact" as the forces that led to the First World War, at a time "where the world is even more dependent on positives and creative answers," he said. "I am a great advocate of constructive relations with China.



Here are some addition (verbatim) comments (same source) from the interview:



> *Q* _What do you think are the top foreign policy challenges today?_
> 
> *A* What I say in my speech is there are four or five upheavals that are going on around the world simultaneously. The change of the state system in Europe toward the European Union, which has benefits but produces a need for massive adjustments. (The) existing order in the Islamic World. The rise of Asia. The gap between global economics and global politics. And the emergence of problems that can only be solved on a global basis, like energy, environment and nuclear proliferation.
> 
> *Q* _What do you think of the situation in Iraq?_
> 
> *A* The war is going in a direction in which I think a political solution becomes feasible and visible.
> 
> *Q* _Could you have imagined when you helped open China to the West how far it would come in 37 years?_
> 
> *A* Absolutely not. When I came to China, if anyone had told me that we would be worrying about China as an economic competitor in 30 years it would have been inconceivable.
> 
> *Q* _What do you think of China now? Is the relationship between China and United States bound to emerge as the new superpower tension point globally?_
> 
> *A* China will be an increasingly powerful and increasingly important country. We must on both sides make every effort to avoid building it into a classic adversarial relationship, because that could have the same impact [as the geopolitical forces that gave rise to] World War I, where the world is even more dependent on positives and creative answers. I am a great advocate of constructive relations with China.



Obviously, given my well established position here, I think Kissinger is correct: we, the American led West and others, will have to *compete* with China for markets – for both goods and services and ideas. Despite the views of some (especially Washington based) experts China should not be wedged into the strategic position occupied by the USSR for a half century or so.

We have enough real, live enemies; we don’t need to invent new ones.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems that Mayor COUGH*, I mean President Ma is going ahead with the _waishengren_-backed Guomindang's plan to make closer ties with their CCP nemesis across the strait.

http://news.ph.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1454092



> *China, Taiwan talks move ahead in Beijing*
> China and Taiwan agreed on Thursday to open representative offices to handle visa issues, despite a lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries, reports here said.
> 
> The deal was reached in Beijing during the first formal talks in a decade between the long-time rivals, Taiwan delegation spokesman Pang Jian-guo was quoted saying by local station TVBS.
> 
> The offices will be represented by Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation and its mainland counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait. Currently visas between the two are handled in Hong Kong.
> 
> News of the deal comes as the two rivals began their first formal talks in a decade as part of a rapprochement that is likely to see the development of trade and tourism ties.
> 
> With big smiles and a warm handshake, the chief negotiators from each side began the two days of talks in Beijing's Diaoyutai State Guesthouse that often serves as China's choice for conducting high-level diplomacy.
> 
> "As long as we have mutual trust and understanding... these talks are going to become an important communication mechanism for cross-strait development," chief Chinese envoy Chen Yunlin said before the media was ushered out.
> 
> The talks, suspended since the mid-1990s, are resuming as part of a dramatic warming in relations that began with the election of Ma Ying-jeou as Taiwan's president in March.
> 
> *Ma and his Kuomintang party swept to power promising closer ties with China, following eight years of tensions across the straits as then Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian tried to steer the island closer toward independence. *
> 
> *China and Taiwan split at the end of a civil war in 1949, and the mainland's ruling Communist Party ratcheted up threats during Chen's reign that it was prepared to use military force to bring about reunification. *
> 
> *But Ma, who began his term in May, has managed to begin letting some steam out of the pressure-cooker environment between China and Taiwan that made their relationship one of the world's potential military flashpoints. *
> 
> Agreement to restart the talks was reached when Chinese President Hu Jintao met Kuomintang chief Wu Poh-hsiung in Beijing last month.
> 
> That in itself was an historic event, as it was the first meeting between the heads of the ruling parties of each side since Kuomintang forces retreated to the island in 1949 and the communists took power in Beijing.
> 
> Direct trade and tourism links have been severely restricted ever since, but this week's talks in Beijing are expected to see some tentative steps towards changing that situation.
> 
> One of the top items on the agenda is establishing regular direct flights between the mainland and China.
> 
> Except for national holidays, people wanting to travel the less than 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the mainland currently have to make a much longer journey with a stopover in Hong Kong.
> 
> *Taiwan media reported that the two sides will Thursday discuss establishing 18 direct flights a week between China and Taiwan. *
> 
> *As many as 3,000 Chinese tourists would be allowed to fly to Taiwan a day, under the plans due to be discussed in Beijing that were first published in the Taiwanese press and carried again in China's state-run media on Thursday. *
> Taiwan is pushing for the first of these visitors to arrive on the island on July 4.
> 
> Taiwan's chief envoy to the talks, Chiang Pin-kun, also said ahead of the talks that he would raise the issues of starting direct chartered cargo flights and allowing island's financial institutions to operate on the mainland.
> 
> Chiang is expected to meet Hu on Friday.
> 
> China's official Xinhua news agency said agreements on some of the issues being discussed would be formally reached on Friday, the final official day of the dialogue.
> 
> Ma's overtures are seen to be as much about economic issues as political, because closer ties with China would help inject fresh cash and momentum into Taiwan's economy as it battles the US-led global downturn.
> 
> *The two sides have already built up strong economic links despite the long political freeze. Since 1991, approved Taiwan investment on the mainland has risen by a factor of nearly 60, standing at 9.97 billion dollars in 2007. *


----------



## Edward Campbell

More on the China/Taiwan talks, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080612.wchinataiwan0612/BNStory/International/home


> China, Taiwan hold first talks since 1999
> 
> BEN BLANCHARD
> Reuters
> 
> June 12, 2008 at 3:08 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — China and Taiwan began talking for the first time in almost a decade on Thursday, though the two often bitter diplomatic rivals are focusing on just a few practical issues and avoiding sensitive political problems.
> 
> The only two topics on the agenda are starting direct flights, banned since defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island at the close of the civil war in 1949, and opening Taiwan's doors to masses of Chinese tourists.
> 
> Negotiation teams including tourism and transport officials sat facing each other at a long table, rimmed by TV cameras, after a lengthy televised handshake between the two smiling team leaders. They were due to talk all day and sign agreements on Friday.
> 
> “We feel the great responsibility of this glorious mission and we must spare no effort in realizing the aspirations of people on the two sides,” China's lead negotiator, Chen Yunlin, said at the opening of the talks, according to Xinhua news agency.
> 
> Mr. Chen and his Taiwanese counterpart, P.K. Chiang, head semi-official bodies set up to talk in the absence of formal ties.
> 
> There is not expected to be any mention of signing a peace treaty, of the missiles Taiwan says China has aimed at the island or of any of the other much trickier subjects both sides are ignoring in favour of first solving less contentious matters.
> 
> “I believe that in this recent atmosphere of goodwill between the two sides, this meeting has already established mutual trust and can certainly ... lay the foundations for long-term peace and stability across the straits,” Mr. Chiang said.
> 
> This round should also pave the way for regular talks at which harder issues can be discussed, said Alexander Huang, a professor of strategic studies at Taipei's Tamkang University.
> 
> “Both sides understand we need to talk about more stuff. We are trying to put all the difficult issues on the shelf this time,” Mr. Huang said.
> 
> The plain-spoken Mr. Chiang, 75, is expected to invite Mr. Chen to visit Taiwan and propose a long-term co-operation mechanism, Taiwan media reported on Thursday.
> 
> Mr. Chiang's 19-member team, including senior government officials seldom allowed passage to China, was scheduled to return to Taiwan on Saturday.
> 
> China and Taiwan last spoke formally in 1999, before former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui enraged Beijing by describing ties as “a special state-to-state relationship”.
> 
> China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communists won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists (KMT) fled to the island. Beijing has vowed to bring Taiwan under its rule, by force if necessary.
> 
> Yet China, keen to avoid diplomatic rows in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in August, is expected to take a conciliatory line this week.
> 
> Ties have also warmed considerably after the KMT's China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou won the presidency in March.
> 
> In a further sign of a thaw, Taiwan's central bank said on Wednesday it would allow financial institutions to sell Chinese yuan to individuals as well as buying the currency from them.
> 
> Taiwan's parliament on Thursday approved an amended bill that will help speed the process of allowing wider convertibility between the Taiwan dollar and the yuan, signalling improving ties on both sides.
> 
> The parliament's approval will let the island's Financial Supervisory Commission and central bank work on plans to let financial institutions buy and sell the Chinese yuan to individuals, which might happen by end-June at the earliest.
> 
> But Taiwan's the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party accused the government of courting Beijing because of the ruling party's business connections in China and implored it to “negotiate on equal footing”.
> 
> “We can't belittle Taiwan's sovereignty, and we can't lose the country's dignity,” a party official said in a statement.
> 
> There are currently no direct flights between the two rivals except on major holidays, meaning the hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese who live and work in China have to make time-consuming flights via Hong Kong, Macau or other third territories.
> 
> “I think it's a good sign,” said Beijing university student Jane Chen of the talks. “They can help understanding, and solve problems.”
> 
> A Taipei resident expressed guarded optimism.
> 
> “It's a good start,” said Tien Ya-wen, 21, a university law student. “I think it's hard to say that they can sign an agreement due to the differences in the two sides.”



And this, also reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act but his time from the _Ottawa Citizen_:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=4fa9cdbb-edb0-4595-a600-818624b3bc44


> Taiwanese want independence, better economic ties to China: poll
> *Major survey before first high-level talks shows clear majority*
> 
> Aileen Mccabe, Canwest News Service
> 
> Published: Thursday, June 12, 2008
> 
> SHANGHAI - As officials from Beijing and Taipei sit down today for their first high-level talks in nearly a decade, a new poll shows a clear majority in Taiwan oppose a union with mainland China and consider themselves purely Taiwanese.
> 
> Most of those polled said they wanted better economic ties with China, but on the political front they only expected talks to lead to a closer friendship between the two rival nations.
> 
> Nothing nearly as contentious as unification is on the agenda in Beijing for the inaugural meeting. Officials are limiting their sights to establishing regular weekend charter flights between China and Taiwan, plus easing the restrictions on Chinese nationals visiting the island. Currently, the only flights across the Taiwan Strait are specially arranged charters on major holidays.
> 
> The two sides are expected to sign an agreement on both issues before talks finish on Saturday.
> 
> Before leaving Taipei, P.K. Chiang -- Taiwan's top negotiator -- said the flights were "a starting point" and a confidence-building measure for renewed relations.
> 
> "Although the schedule sounds simple, the task is very heavy and the significance is also quite heavy," he said.
> 
> Taiwan's popular television station TVBS polled 1,015 people on the island between June 6 and 9. It said 65 per cent supported continued independence for Taiwan, and just 19 per cent welcomed unification with their giant neighbour.
> 
> Respondents said the focus of newly elected Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's policy toward China should be an improved economic link and an end to ongoing diplomatic spats. They also wanted him to negotiate a halt to the military presence across the strait.
> 
> Beginning political negotiations with China was at the bottom of their agenda for Mr. Ma, supported by only 13.6 per cent.
> 
> Mr. Ma led his Nationalist party to victory in March on a promise of improving relations with China that had deteriorated badly under the government led by former president Chen Shui-bian, and China quickly seized on his success.
> 
> In May, Chinese President Hu Jintao met with the head of Mr. Ma's party -- Wu Poh-hsiung -- in the Great Hall of the People.
> 
> © The Ottawa Citizen 2008​



This is a _good news_ story for the region; China and Taiwan need one another for social, economic and political reasons. I continue to believe that a “one nation, *several* systems” model will emerge, allowing China and Taiwan to reunify peacefully, à la Hong Kong.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This is a _good news_ story for the region; China and Taiwan need one another for social, economic and political reasons. I continue to believe that a “one nation, *several* systems” model will emerge, allowing China and Taiwan to reunify peacefully, à la Hong Kong.



Not unless a very strong, destabilizing factor will cause the CCP to lose its "mandate of heaven" or its current popular llegitimacy. That is why I am still willing to bet that the Guomindang will still outlive its Chinese Civil War-era rival, not unless the CCP continues further to adapt and preferrably in the same way that the People's Action Party of Singapore has. Bei Da professor Pan Wei and his "Rule of Law Regime" concept mentioned earlier again come to mind.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Not unless a very strong, destabilizing factor will cause the CCP to lose its "mandate of heaven" or its current popular llegitimacy. That is why I am still willing to bet that the Guomindang will still outlive its Chinese Civil War-era rival, not unless the CCP continues further to adapt and preferrably in the same way that the People's Action Party of Singapore has. Bei Da professor Pan Wei and his "Rule of Law Regime" concept mentioned earlier again come to mind.



I'm guessing that the CCP thinks (hopes?) it can and, indeed, plans to keep its _mandate_ and adapt itself, à la Singapore’s PAP, maybe even through something akin to Singapore’s White Paper on Shared Values.

The _White Paper_ idea may be essential, even without Taiwan, because of the need to keep minorities ‘happy.’


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, highlights an interesting dilemma:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080613.wcelil13/BNStory/International/home


> Why U.S. is quietly pressing for Celil's release
> *Uyghur activist brings Washington onside*
> 
> OMAR EL AKKAD
> 
> From Friday's Globe and Mail
> June 13, 2008 at 3:00 AM EDT
> 
> OTTAWA — The United States has quietly become one of the most aggressive advocates for Huseyin Celil after Washington politicians risked the ire of Beijing and made him the subject of two motions calling for his release.
> 
> The backing of U.S. legislators for the case of Mr. Celil, a Canadian citizen imprisoned in China, is in large part due to the efforts of Rebiya Kadeer.
> 
> Ms. Kadeer is considered the most important leader of the Uyghur people - the Muslim minority group to which Mr. Celil belongs. She met with Canadian officials this week, and is in Toronto today kicking off Amnesty International's annual general meeting.
> 
> She also has first-hand experience of Mr. Celil's predicament, having spent time in a Chinese prison accused of "leaking state secrets." In 2005, she was released early, a move believed to have been prompted by pressure from the United States. Other members of her family have not been so fortunate.
> 
> Even though Ottawa has so far failed to persuade Beijing even to accept Mr. Celil's Canadian citizenship the level of access Ms. Kadeer is granted shows the government isn't overtly or covertly opposed to bringing the Canadian home.
> 
> But Ms. Kadeer's biggest impact on Mr. Celil may well come in Washington, where U.S. officials now have not only benevolent, but possibly political reasons to push for his release.
> 
> In late May, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown sponsored a resolution "expressing the sense of the Senate that the Government of the People's Republic of China should immediately release from custody the children of Rebiya Kadeer and Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil and should refrain from further engaging in acts of cultural, linguistic, and religious suppression directed against the Uyghur people."
> 
> The resolution wasn't the first time Washington has expressed a formal opinion on the Celil case.
> 
> Last September, the House of Representatives passed a similar motion, in part calling on China to "immediately release Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil and allow him to rejoin his family in Canada."
> 
> A month later, the United Kingdom passed what is called an early day motion calling for Mr. Celil's immediate release.
> 
> There also may be a political upside for Washington if Mr. Celil is released.
> 
> Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail reported that the Canadian government came close to accepting as refugees a group of Uyghur prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, only to back off in part because of fears that such a move would worsen the chances of getting Mr. Celil out of China.
> 
> The United States has desperately searched for a place to send the detained Uyghurs, who have been deemed not a security threat.
> 
> Mr. Celil's return would give Canada one less reason not to accept the detainees.
> 
> But any move to have him released faces serious hurdles. Beijing has made it clear it considers the case closed, and rather than risk other aspects of the China-Canada relationship by pushing harder, Ottawa appears to have chosen to tone down efforts.
> 
> The Uyghur minority group has for years found a sympathetic ear in Washington.
> 
> Ms. Kadeer, whose husband was in the United States, was released in 2005 just before a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In exchange for her release, it is believed that the U.S. softened its public criticism of China, especially at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
> 
> Ms. Kadeer, a millionaire businesswoman in China before running afoul of authorities, has used her considerable determination and influence as head of the World Uyghur Congress to fight for her ethnic group.
> 
> She has found several allies in Washington, where many politicians blame China for the loss of millions of jobs.
> 
> This week, she is in Canada, meeting with top government officials and hoping to keep Mr. Celil's case alive.
> 
> She will also be the keynote speaker at Amnesty International's annual general meeting in Toronto, part of what AI secretary-general Alex Neve calls a concerted effort to put the spotlight on China's human-rights record ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
> 
> "It's hard to imagine a more eloquent, courageous and persuasive voice to propel us on in those efforts than Rebiya Kadeer," he said.
> 
> Mr. Celil was travelling on a Canadian passport when he was arrested in Uzbekistan two years ago and eventually handed over to Chinese officials. Beijing accused him of terrorism and sentenced him to life in prison in April of 2007.
> 
> He and his supporters have always denied the charges against him.



That China is “engaging in acts of cultural, linguistic, and religious suppression directed against the Uyghur people" is beyond doubt. Equally doubtless is the *fact* that there is a Uyghur *separatist* movement, à la the FLQ in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that is, almost certainly, funded and _animated_ by allies or ‘soul-mates’ of al Qaeda.

So, whose ox is being gored?

Is China on *’our’* side, however reluctantly we might be to have them there, because it is fighting the hydra like _Islamist_ movement? Or are some US legislators on Osama bin Laden’s ‘side’ because they are aiding and abetting the _Islamist_ movement by trying to _’twist the dragon’s tail’_, so to speak? Or is it smart to try to discomfit our Chinese *competitor* even as we ‘play nice’ with parts of the _Islamist_ movement.


----------



## Kirkhill

Or is it an opportunity to demonstrate to Muslims that not all Muslims are our enemies?  I don't know the details of Celil's case but I am unaware of his personal involvement with any violence and while the Uyghur may indeed have a separatist movement we, Canada, apparently believe that secessionism itself is no crime.  We supply secessionists with stipends, pensions and platfingorms.

On the other side China has no trouble at all twisting the West's tail, or at least ignoring the West's outrage, and for that matter domestic outrage and the outrage of the Third World not capable of delivering oil and copper, in pursuit of its own interest.

Earlier in this thread you asked "But what's the tipping point?" and I responded I didn't know.  But like the Yankee judge said about pornography, I'll recognize when I see it (I hope).  That makes me a poor, and useless, analyst but honestly I don't think there is ever a continuous, distinct and logical path that takes nations to war.  Its more like two pans being filled from multiple streams of grains of sand.  Some streams are stopped and new ones start.  Some turn into torrents while others are choked to a trickle.  But at the end of the day it can be a single grain (or Ear in 1739) that makes the difference.

While I continue to agree that we would be unwise to "make an enemy of China" it appears to me that there is a very sizable portion of Chinese, and perhaps just the Han, have come to, and continue to, see us as the enemy.

A national programme of restoring "Face" to expunge historical slights, real and imagined, without reference to their own atrocities.


----------



## a_majoor

While the Chinese, Russians and even Europeans have problems of greater or lesser extent with Islamists in their midst or on the borders, they believe that the United States and the Anglosphere West represent the greater "threat" to their freedom of action. The Jihadis can oppose actions, but only the creative abilities of the Anglosphere West canmake fundimental changes to the world order (changes they have no hand in making and probably not to their liking). By triangulating between the US and Iran and the Jihadis, they hope to offload the Islamist problem on "us" and maintain their own freedom of action. In this respect I think they are living in a fool's paradise, but they will reap what they have sowed.

We are not helpless spectators in this affair, and so it does make sense to put the Islamist problem front and centre on their tables as well. We have our own national interests to see to, and our own freedoms and freedom of action to preserve. What is really needed is to articulate our principles (Freedom of expression, Property rights, the Rule of Law) *and ensure that all of our actions are designed to preserve these principles at home and extend them throughout the world*. Inconsistent application of our animating principles is more of a problem in the way we are preceived than anything else.

Even in cases where we choose to husband our resources and not take direct action (i.e. the Sudan), we should look to how second and third order effects of our actions elsewhere can be spun to our benefit there.


----------



## tomahawk6

Imagine a world with the US on the sidelines. Some probably would cheer that but the reality of a world that the dictators have free reign to pursue their agenda's unchecked by US power somewhat like the US pre-WW2.A scary prospect for me anyway.

China's involvement in Africa is seen by some experts as a form of colonization to acquire raw materials for China's economy.The Chinese see Africa as an opening because the west has pretty much given up there and as a result confrontation with the west is unlikely. I do not see China as a friendly nation. They are not an ally. They are usually in opposition to our positions in the UN.

Does India view China as a friend ? No they do not. Recent Indian defense moves have been to strengthen their border defenses with China, a prudent move to be sure. The old adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is quite evident with the positions of both China and Russia. Siding with the islamists isnt in their best long term interest as both countries have growing muslim minorities and could see this adder come back to strike them. But for now its beneficial from their standpoint to oppose us by supporting the jihadists. Exporting their own islamists like the Chechens keep them busy and from their view its a one way trip. I wonder what the Chinese will think if the middle east explodes in a nuclear war ? Their clients may be utterly destroyed which they may also view as beneficial in a peverse way. Sky high energy prices will help the Russian bottom line for sure and will hurt China who most buy their energy on the open market.

All the while China continues to modernize its military. I doubt due to its size that China can expand its entire ground force but they can buy a quality Navy and Air Force. Segments of the ground force like armored units would also see the latest and best equipment.They are maintaining quality special operations units and airborne units - but they lack the airlift for these assets. The leaders know that the only country that could invade them are India and Russia and as a result can plan accordingly. If the US is sidelined by a neosocialist regime in Washington then Taiwan could well be invaded without fear of the 7th Fleet intervening. Is that an earth shattering event ? Not in of itself. The German occupation of Austria,Sudetenland and even Poland didnt bring on WW2 until the Germans marched on Belgium and France. What would the world look like today if Hitler had simply stopped ? Its not in the nature though of totalitarian regimes to stop reaching for power. Edmund Burke was right when he said "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> *If the US is sidelined by a neosocialist regime in Washington then Taiwan could well be invaded without fear of the 7th Fleet intervening. * Is that an earth shattering event ? Not in of itself. The German occupation of Austria,Sudetenland and even Poland didnt bring on WW2 until the Germans marched on Belgium and France. What would the world look like today if Hitler had simply stopped ? Its not in the nature though of totalitarian regimes to stop reaching for power. Edmund Burke was right when he said "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."



The US Democrats are not that stupid as to allow a foreign enemy to undermine international stability and security to the point that international trade is disrupted, which would mean that there would be no imports for them to raise high tariffs on.

Are we forgetting that it was a Democrat in the White House- Bill Clinton- who ordered US two carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait in the Taiwan Missile Crisis of the mid-1990s to warn China to back off and not attempt more than the extensive "wargames" they were conducting at the time? The PLA did so, but not before they launched a couple of missiles over Taipei and into the sea beyond the Eastern part of Taiwan.

Not all democrats are Hippie Peaceniks. And remember that it was during the term of another Democratic President-  Jimmy Carter- when the Taiwan Relations Act came into its final form? HMMM???


----------



## tomahawk6

Jimmy Carter brought us Op Eagle Claw too. 
Obama is without question closer in ideology to the communists in Beijing than to Ottawa or London. I dont say that idly.Read his position papers on his own web site. He even states that he would bring war crimes charges against Bush administration officials as well as massive new taxes [income redistribution]. After the convention I expect his proposed policies will come under scrutiny by October. I just dont think the country is ready for the most liberal Senator in the Senate.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The leaders know that the only country that could invade them are India and Russia and as a result can plan ...



- Russia would be fighting at the end of a long and tenuous supply chain.  The Trans Siberian Railroad is already up to 120 trains per day, and once the PRC drops the Ob bridge at Novosibirsk...

- As for India, she would have to secure her flanks first.


----------



## Kirkhill

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... the most liberal Senator in the Senate.



T6, I agree with you on Obama.

I do wish, however,  that the perfectly respectable word "liberal" had not travelled the path as the word "gay".  My Grandfather, the Presbyterian Elder and Mason, would have been quite happy in the company of a "gay liberal" 70 years ago although he would have been expecting a cheerful supporter of freedom and not a queer statist.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _National Post_, is an article I find interesting for its description of Uighur _*separatism*_:

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays_paper/story.html?id=594871
My emphasis added.


> Beijing puts torch run on lockdown
> *Muslim Region; Chinese urged to watch on TV instead of live*
> 
> Dan Martin, Agence France-Presse
> 
> Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2008
> 
> URUMQI, CHINA - Police imposed a security lockdown yesterday as the Olympic torch started its run through China's mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang, seen as one of the most sensitive legs on its nationwide journey.
> 
> The centre of the regional capital, Urumqi, was largely shut down and police checkpoints restricted movement throughout the normally bustling city.
> 
> Security was especially tight at the central People's Square, where the relay kicked off, with anyone entering having to go through metal detectors and bag searches.
> 
> The flame's passage through Xinjiang and the Tibetan regions of China is considered the most sensitive of the three-month journey to the Beijing Games in August because of simmering discontent among local ethnic groups.
> 
> The three-day, four-city Xinjiang leg began with a 12-kilo-metre relay through Urumqi from People's Square, regarded as a symbol of Communist power in the city.
> 
> The crowd, numbering about 3,000, chanted "Go, China!" and "Go, Olympics!" as the run got under way under sunny skies. Many had stickers of the Chinese flag on their cheeks.
> 
> They were overwhelmingly Han Chinese, with only a few Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in the region.
> 
> Leading away from the square, the crowds lining the route were also mostly Chinese, many of them young people given a break from their studies and government employees.
> 
> "What I am passing on is the friendship and solidarity of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang," one torchbearer was widely quoted as saying on state-run television.
> 
> After the torch had passed, the security apparatus was quickly dismantled.
> 
> The relay ended at about noon, after the flame had been carried by 208 torch bearers.
> 
> Xinjiang is a region of vast deserts and stunning mountains that is home to more than eight million Uighurs, central Asian Muslims who speak a Turkic language.
> 
> Many Uighurs discreetly allege Chinese political and religious oppression and systematic discrimination against them in employment, education and business.
> 
> Yesterday's relay appeared to proceed without trouble, but journalists were required to choose just one vantage point.
> 
> People were also urged to watch the relay on television to keep the proceedings more controllable.
> 
> A large red banner at the square called for unity among Xinjiang's ethnic minorities, while a giant TV screen showed video footage proclaiming its 47 minorities "get along so well."
> 
> Despite yesterday's fanfare, some Uighurs were bemused by the relay's arrival.
> 
> "What does it have to do with us? That is China's Olympics. We don't care," a shop owner named Azatjan said dismissively before the start, as his daughter urged him to be quiet.
> 
> Uighur exiles and residents said Chinese authorities had detained thousands of Uighurs, and confiscated the passports of many others, in recent months.
> 
> Some Muslims said the passport measure was to prevent anyone linking up abroad with "terrorist" plots aimed at the Olympics.
> 
> The sensitivity of the Xinjiang leg was heightened earlier this year when Beijing said it had smashed Xinjiang-based terror plots targeting the Games.



Anyone who lived in Canada in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond will recognize the highlighted bits. They are from the standard separatist _party line_: applicable in Xinjiang, the Basque Autonomous Community, Catalonia, Kurdistan and Québec. 

One need not sympathize with China’s *response* to Muslim/Uighur separatism to admit that it (separatism) exists. If the Canadian government could invoke the old War Measures Act to deal with an _“apprehended insurrection”_ then, surely, China may use large red banners to try to stifle their separatists – in fact, of course, the Chinese do use oppression and _Gestapo_ like tactics to deal with their ‘problem,’ not just red banners.


----------



## Kirkhill

Yes but .... our separatists are bad. Their separatists are good. Surely?  

In a related, if tangential fashion, in all the commentary on the Irish rejection of the EU I heard a German (I believe) MEP describe the debate/battle as one between Sovereignist and Federalists.  I thought that to be a refreshingly honest utterance of particular clarity.

Perhaps all these questions boil down to: Is it possible to create a stable system of governance based on a polity of some 1200 independent and sovereign states with populations of 5,000,000.  That seems to be a good number for a relatively homogeneous society.  (Quebec, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore are all in that order of magnitude).  Or do we need the larger, hegemonic empires for stability?  

If the mantra "Democracies don't go to war against each other" is true, perhaps due an inability to achieve not just consensus but societal focus, then is it possible that a large number of small states each pursuing their own interests might acheive a greater stability than a "bipolar/two party" world?  On the other hand it might end up being a chaotic equilibrium rather than an ordered equilibrium.


----------



## a_majoor

The small state scenario seems to have been in force through most of the Middle Ages of Europe, and generally was a roiling boil of conflict, territorial ambition and brigandage. The High Middle Ages and the early Renaissance was hardly better; indeed there were several attempts during that period to incorporate larger empires in an attempt to gain some stability and security (not to mention coralling more resources, which seems to be the major driving force behind the formation of empires....). The formation of modern nation states after 1648 is the nost stable solutioin to date.

Europe in the interwar period was also wracked by small wars as the newly created states carved out of the wreakage of WWI decided that they wanted/needed to gain their historic borders (naturally the historic borders from the zenith of their ancient Imperial periods), and the Balkens of the 1990s seems to have made the point yet again.

Does this mean your scenario is invalid, Kirkhill? Maybe not. Small nations like Denmark, the Netherlands and England have long histories, and Venice is still the longest lived Republic (they were an independent city state for @400 years, the United States is only 222 years old as a Republic). I suspect the _real_ shape of stability is a mixture of sizes, similar to rock walls where small stones fit in the spaces between the larger ones. The United States, as a Federal Republic seems to have one of the best and more stable systems of governance for large geographical areas, so there are many models to choose from.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2



			
				Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Yes but .... our separatists are bad. Their separatists are good. Surely?



Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the current (July/August 2008) issue of _Foreign Affairs_, is an interesting Article with some of the same _”it’s OK when we do it but bad when they do”_ logic by   C Fred Bergsten of the  Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080701faessay87404/c-fred-bergsten/a-partnership-of-equals.html


> A Partnership of Equals
> *How Washington Should Respond to China's Economic Challenge*
> 
> C. Fred Bergsten
> 
> *Summary:  Beijing is shirking its responsibilities to the global economy. To encourage better behavior, Washington should offer to share global economic leadership.*
> 
> _C. FRED BERGSTEN is Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming, co-authored book, China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (Peterson Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008)._
> 
> To be an economic superpower, a country must be sufficiently large, dynamic, and globally integrated to have a major impact on the world economy. Three political entities currently qualify: the United States, the European Union, and China. Inducing China to become a responsible pillar of the global economic system (as the other two are) will be one of the great challenges of coming decades -- particularly since at the moment China seems uninterested in playing such a role.
> 
> The United States remains the world's largest national economy, the issuer of its key currency, and in most years the leading source and recipient of foreign investment. The EU now has an even larger economy and even greater trade flows with the outside world, and the euro increasingly competes with the dollar as a global currency. China, the newest member of the club, is smaller than the other two but is growing more quickly and is more deeply integrated into the global economy. Its dramatic expansion is therefore having a powerful effect on the rest of the world. (China is often paired with India in such discussions, but India's GDP is less than half of China's. The value of the annual growth of China's trade exceeds the total annual value of India's trade. China will dominate its Asian neighbor for the foreseeable future.)
> 
> China poses a unique challenge because it is still poor, significantly nonmarketized, and authoritarian. All three characteristics reduce the likelihood that it will easily accept the systemic responsibilities that should ideally accompany superpower status. The integration of China into the existing global economic order will thus be more difficult than was, say, the integration of Japan a generation ago. The United States and the EU would like to co-opt China by integrating it into the regime that they have built and defended over the last several decades. There are increasing signs, however, that China has a different objective. In numerous areas, it is pursuing strategies that conflict with existing norms, rules, and institutional arrangements.
> 
> Some take this lightly, viewing it as simply the usual free-riding and skirting of responsibility by a powerful newcomer cleverly exploiting the loopholes and weak enforcement of existing international rules to pursue its perceived national interests. After all, they say, even the United States and the EU do the same on occasion, as do other major emerging-market economies. And to be sure, there is no evidence that China's challenges to the current economic order derive from any cohesive or comprehensive strategy concocted by the country's political or intellectual leadership. Despite calls in Beijing for "a new international economic order" and talk of how a "Beijing consensus" might supplant the so-called Washington consensus, to date China's proposed alternative approaches do not add up to a revisionist challenge to the status quo.
> 
> Nevertheless, the situation is worrisome. Given its status as a powerful newcomer benefiting from an efficient economic order, China actually has a profound interest in seeing that the international rules and institutions function effectively. It should be trying to strengthen the system, whether the present version or an alternative version more to its liking.
> 
> Moreover, Chinese recalcitrance seems to be increasing rather than decreasing over time. At the outset of its economic reform process, in the late 1970s, China was eager to join (and to replace Taiwan in) the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutional ties subsequently played important, and apparently welcome, roles in China's early development success. Later, Beijing not only endured lengthy negotiations and an ever-expanding set of requirements in order to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) but also used the pro-market rules of that institution to overcome resistance to reform among die-hards inside China itself.
> 
> But a country's attitudes can change dramatically along with its circumstances. Russia, for example, was a supplicant for international capital and support after its bankruptcy in 1998 and with world oil prices near $20 a barrel, but it is aggressively pursuing a resumption of great-power status now that it has recovered and with oil over $100 a barrel. China appears to be undergoing a similar evolution, albeit with a more cautious leadership and an incremental style. It is also experiencing the same internal backlash against globalization as have the United States and many other countries. This attitudinal shift simply has to be reversed, even if doing so requires a fundamental adjustment of the international economic architecture.
> 
> *TOWARD AN ASIAN BLOC?*
> 
> On trade, China has been playing at best a passive and at worst a disruptive role. It makes no effort to hide its current preference for low-quality, politically motivated bilateral and regional trade arrangements rather than economically meaningful (and demanding) multilateral trade liberalization through the WTO. Since China is the world's largest surplus country and second-largest exporter, this poses two important challenges to the existing global regime.
> 
> First, China's refusal to contribute positively to the Doha Round of international trade negotiations has all but ensured the talks' failure. Beijing has declared that it should have no liberalization obligations whatsoever and has invented a new category of WTO membership ("recently acceded members") to justify its recalcitrance. Such a stance by a major trading power is akin to abstention and has practically guaranteed that the Doha negotiations will go nowhere. And since the global trading system does not stay in place, but is always moving either forward or backward, a collapse of the Doha Round would be quite serious: it would represent the first failure of a major multilateral trade negotiation in the postwar period and place the entire WTO system in jeopardy. China is not the only culprit in the Doha drama, of course. The United States and the EU have been unwilling to abandon their agricultural protectionism, other important emerging economies have been unwilling to meaningfully open their markets, and several poor countries have resisted contributing to a global package of reforms. But China, with its major stake in open trade, exhibits the sharpest contrast of all the major players between its objective interests and its revealed policy.
> 
> Second, China's pursuit of bilateral and regional trade agreements with neighboring countries is more about politics than economics. Its "free-trade agreement" with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), for example, covers only a small share of its commerce with the countries in question; it is simply an effort to calm their fears of being swamped by their huge neighbor. Again, it is true that the United States and other major trading powers also factor foreign policy considerations into their selections of partners for regional and bilateral trade agreements. But they also insist on economic standards that largely conform to the WTO's rules. China is able to escape legal application of those rules by continuing to declare itself a "developing country" and by taking advantage of "special and differential treatment." But for a major global trading power to hide behind such loopholes provokes substantial international strains.
> 
> China is also hurting the global trading system by supporting the creation of a loose but potent Asian trading bloc. The network of regional agreements that started with one between China and ASEAN has steadily expanded to include virtually all other possible Asian permutations: parallel Japanese-ASEAN and South Korean-ASEAN deals; various bilateral partnerships, including perhaps a Chinese-Indian one; a "10 + 3" arrangement that brings together the ten ASEAN countries and all three Northeast Asian countries, and possibly even a "10 + 6" agreement that would broaden the group to include Australia, India, and New Zealand. All this activity is likely to produce, within the next decade, an East Asian free-trade area led by China.
> 
> Such a regional grouping would almost certainly trigger a sharp backlash from the United States and the EU, as well as from numerous developing countries, because of its new discrimination against them. Even more important, it would create a tripolar global economic regime -- a configuration that could threaten existing global arrangements and multilateral cooperation.
> 
> China's challenges to the global trading system are most visible in its opposition to the U.S. proposal, launched at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 2006, for a free-trade area of the Asia-Pacific. The APEC initiative, immediately endorsed by a number of those smaller member economies that fervently want to prevent trade conflict between the group's two superpowers, seeks to head off the looming confrontation between an Asia-only trading bloc and the United States, which could draw a line down the middle of the Pacific. The initiative would eventually consolidate the many preferential pacts in the Asia-Pacific region and offer an economically meaningful Plan B for widespread trade liberalization if the Doha Round definitively fails. China has led the opposition to the idea, demonstrating its preference for bilateral deals with minimal economic content and its lack of interest in trying to defend the broader trading order.
> 
> *TRASHING THE IMF?*
> 
> China's challenge to the international monetary order, meanwhile, is at least as serious. Alone among the world's major economies, China has rejected the adoption of a flexible exchange-rate policy, which would promote adjustment of its balance-of-payments position and avoid a buildup of large imbalances. Under IMF rules, China has the right to peg its currency -- but it does not have the right to intervene massively in the foreign exchange market, as it has for the past five years, to maintain a hugely undervalued yuan and thereby boost its international competitive position. This violates the most basic norms of the IMF's Articles of Agreement, which require members to "avoid manipulating exchange rates ... in order to prevent effective balance of payments adjustment or to gain unfair competitive advantage." It is also a violation of the IMF's implementing guidelines, which explicitly proscribe the use of "prolonged, large-scale one-way" interventions to maintain competitive undervaluation.
> 
> The results are unprecedented for a major trading country. China's current account surplus has reached 11-12 percent of its GDP. By next year, its annual global surplus could approach $500 billion, approximating the value of the U.S. current account deficit. Its hoard of foreign currency exceeds $1.6 trillion and is by far the world's largest. These imbalances and the unprecedented flow of international funds that they require could trigger a crash of the dollar and a "hard landing" for the global economy, severely compounding the current global financial crisis.
> 
> Previous surplus countries, notably Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, have also resisted making necessary and inevitable adjustments to their currency pegs. But no earlier imbalances have ever approached the current Chinese one in terms of its share of the country's GDP. Moreover, all of these countries eventually agreed to conform to the international rules.
> 
> To date, however, China has resisted all entreaties to alter its behavior. Its announced move to "a managed floating exchange rate based on market supply and demand" in July 2005 has still not produced any significant rise in the trade-weighted value of its currency, despite the recent acceleration of the yuan's appreciation against the dollar, nor has it prevented continued huge surpluses in China's external accounts. The number of interventions in the currency markets that China has undertaken to block faster appreciation of the yuan has at least doubled since that time.
> 
> China has actually questioned the basic concept of international cooperation in dealing with these problems, claiming that a country's exchange rate is "an issue of national sovereignty" (rather than a quintessentially international concern in which foreign parties have an equal interest). It has objected even to the IMF's consideration of the issue. Its actions have raised an implicit threat that it might promote the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund, further eroding the global role of the IMF, and may seek a regional or even global role for its national currency over the long term. These monetary steps intensify the challenge to the global trading system because large exchange-rate misalignments are a potent stimulus for protectionism in deficit countries, as indicated at present by the numerous bills in Congress to address the China currency issue with trade sanctions.
> 
> On energy (China will shortly become the world's largest consumer of energy), the challenge China poses is less frontal, but only because there exists no body of agreed global doctrine, rules, and institutions. There are at least two conflicting energy regimes, the (periodically effective) producer cartel embodied in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the (very loose and incomplete) consumer anticartel embodied in the International Energy Agency. China is creating problems for both with its drive to line up "secure sources of supply" through long-term contracts with selected producing countries. It is unwilling to rely solely, or even primarily, on market mechanisms, attempting to insure itself against both output interruptions by the producers and the market power of other large consumers.
> 
> Here, as elsewhere, China is hardly alone in its behavior. But as the driving force behind the single most important commodity market in the world, the country has a particular interest in (and responsibility for) forging systemic responses rather than trying to carve out exceptions and special privileges for itself. China appears to be either unaware of the abject failure of such strategies in the past or confident that its contemporary clout will suffice to sustain its contractual arrangements even in difficult periods, and it is pursuing such strategies with respect to other raw materials as well as oil and gas.
> 
> On foreign aid, China may have already become the largest national donor (depending on how "aid" is defined), and it is posing a direct challenge to prevailing norms by ignoring the types of conditionality that have evolved throughout the donor community over the past quarter century. Beijing rejects not only the social standards (on human rights, labor conditions, and the environment) that have become prevalent but also the basic economic standards (such as poverty alleviation and good governance) that virtually all bilateral and multilateral aid agencies now require as a matter of course. As with its trade and commodity pacts, China's "conditionality" on aid is almost wholly political: insistence that the recipient countries support China's positions on global issues, in the United Nations and elsewhere, and funnel their primary products to China as reliable suppliers.
> 
> _End of Part 1_


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> *NEW RULES OF THE GAME*
> 
> What these policies demonstrate is that China's international mindset has not kept pace with its breathtaking economic ascent. China continues to act like a small country with little impact on the global system at large and therefore little responsibility for it. Such a lag in perceptions is not difficult to understand, particularly as it regards a conservative leadership still following Deng Xiaoping's directive to maintain a low international profile. The central thrust of contemporary Chinese foreign policy is not to assume a large role in the world but to avoid international entanglements that could disrupt the country's ability to focus on its huge domestic challenges. Moreover, the speed at which China has risen is difficult for even the most experienced observers to comprehend. (The pattern is similar to the one that accompanied Japan's growth from the early 1970s into the 1980s, when its meteoric rise also triggered sharp global reactions, while Tokyo maintained a passive and reactive stance on almost all international issues.)
> 
> Even the strongest defenders of the current world trading system would concede that at least some of China's criticisms are valid. At best, the Doha Round will achieve only marginal liberalization of world trade after almost a decade of effort. The IMF has failed to enforce its own rules and is being forced to downsize. The World Bank has lost any clear direction. The G-7 (the group of highly industrialized states) has adopted a mutual nonaggression pact among its members, making its criticisms of outsiders such as China seem hypocritical. And by failing to adapt their governance structures to the dramatic changes in the relative economic power among nations, the international economic institutions have lost much of their legitimacy. The fact that some Chinese attitudes are understandable and some Chinese concerns legitimate does not lessen the significance of the challenge but rather suggests some of the logical components of an intelligent response.
> 
> To deal with the situation, Washington should make a subtle but basic change to its economic policy strategy toward Beijing. Instead of focusing on narrow bilateral problems, it should seek to develop a true partnership with Beijing so as to provide joint leadership of the global economic system. Only such a "G-2" approach will do justice, and be seen to do justice, to China's new role as a global economic superpower and hence as a legitimate architect and steward of the international economic order.
> 
> The present U.S. approach seeks to entice China to join the existing global economic order. Washington's fondness for the status quo is understandable given its basic success and the prominent role it accords Washington. But China is uncomfortable with the very notion of simply integrating into a system it had no role in developing. Both Chinese officials and Chinese scholars are actively discussing alternative structures for which China can be present at the creation. At one particularly contentious point in its negotiations to enter the WTO, the Chinese ambassador reportedly thundered, "We know we have to play the game your way now, but in ten years we will set the rules!" The existing system, moreover, has become increasingly sclerotic, and it might well be that the only way to overcome the enormous resistance to change (manifested in positions such as Europe's refusal to wind down its excessive quotas and give up some of its IMF executive-board seats) is to undertake a fundamental overhaul.
> 
> Current U.S. policy also purports to include tough enforcement measures to punish noncooperation: Washington has taken Beijing to the WTO for dispute settlement on a number of occasions and has tried to mobilize the IMF and the G-7 to penalize China for its undervalued currency. But Washington's criticism of Beijing has not been translated into any serious retaliatory pressure because too many Americans receive too many benefits from their actual or potential dealings with China for policymakers to jeopardize the relationship and because other key countries are also unwilling to confront China. Abandoning the present position and adopting a less confrontational approach might be the only way to persuade China to start cooperating.
> 
> *THE BIG TWO*
> 
> In part, the strategy proposed here would treat old issues in new ways, recasting conflicts as opportunities for progress. The United States and China could agree to construct their regional trade agreements in ways that support, rather than impede, subsequent multilateral liberalization -- and even permit eventual linkage between the regional bodies. Failures to offer significant new market-opening opportunities in the Doha Round would be addressed not as legitimate mercantilist behavior but as threats to the WTO that would jeopardize both countries' stake in an open world economy. Competitive currency misalignments would be treated as deviations from IMF norms that hurt all trading partners, especially poor countries. Washington would concede that its errant fiscal policy has contributed to the overvaluation of the dollar, just as Beijing would concede that undervaluation of the yuan has reflected inadequate Chinese internal demand and excessive government intervention. The United States could escort China into the International Energy Agency to help organize the response of consuming countries to high oil prices.
> 
> More far-reaching steps might involve the creation of new international norms and institutional arrangements to govern issue areas that are important but currently unregulated, such as global warming and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date, China has steadfastly refused to even contemplate binding constraints on its greenhouse gas emissions. So has the United States, but that stance seems likely to change dramatically after the presidential election in November, no matter who wins. An emissions regime, however, may well lead to the installation of trade barriers in participating countries against carbon-intensive products from nonparticipating countries. Moreover, global warming cannot be seriously addressed without China, which has become the world's largest polluter. Unless Washington and Beijing find ways to cooperate in attacking the problem together, the result could be a trade war between them and little or no action on the environment.
> 
> China has already indicated some skepticism about the adoption of new international guidelines, even if voluntary and nonbinding, regarding the structure and investment activities of SWFs. But the United States is championing such codes in order to permit continued foreign investment and head off the risk of protectionist domestic reactions. Since the U.S. economy is especially dependent on Chinese capital, without some new agreement a frontal clash could develop over this issue, triggered either by China's rejection of proposed new guidelines or by the United States' rejection of Chinese investments in particularly sensitive areas.
> 
> Whether in dealing with old or new issues, the basic idea would be to develop a G-2 between the United States and China to steer the global governance process. Other major powers, such as the EU and, on some issues, Japan, would of course need to be deeply involved as well. The new rules, codes, or norms could frequently be implemented through existing multilateral institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO. Some of them might work better through new worldwide organizations created to deal with truly new issues, such as a global environmental organization to manage climate-change policy. But effective systemic defenses against international economic challenges in today's world must start with active cooperation between its two dominant economies, the United States and China.
> 
> Given other powers' sensitivities, of course, it would be impolitic for Washington and Beijing to use the term "G-2" publicly. But for the strategy to work, the United States would have to give true priority to China as its main partner in managing the world economy, to some extent displacing Europe. Nothing less is likely to attract China or engage the United States sufficiently to create the effective leadership that the world so desperately needs.
> 
> Some initial steps have already been taken in this direction. After I floated the idea of a G-2 in late 2004, Robert Zoellick, in his new capacity as deputy secretary of state, which he undertook in February 2005, launched initial discussions with Chinese counterparts. In 2007, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson escalated the engagement to what is now known as the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, which involves the leaders of ten or so cabinet agencies in each country. The beginnings of an institutional framework for a working G-2 have thus already been put in place, and patterns of cooperation are already developing on topics such as the environment and international finance. But it is not nearly enough for China to be seen as a "responsible stakeholder." It must be seen, and accorded full rights, as a true leadership partner.
> 
> Such a relationship between a rich developed country and a poor developing one would be unprecedented in human history -- as is there being a poor economic superpower, which is what China is. There are enough examples of similar cooperation on specific issues, however, to suggest that converting U.S.-Chinese disputes into systemic management issues can be extremely effective. In the late 1970s, for example, the United States was applying countervailing duties to scores of Brazilian products because Brazil's export subsidies accounted for almost half the value of all of its foreign sales. A frontal assault on the subsidies was politically unacceptable in Brazil, but the two countries agreed to cooperate closely in negotiating a new subsidy code for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the WTO): this agreement turned out to be simultaneously the linchpin of a successful Tokyo Round of trade talks, a basis for adding an injury clause to the U.S. countervailing-duty law, and a foundation for phasing out the Brazilian subsidy policy.
> 
> Are the United States and China ready for such a substantial reorientation? Washington would need to accept China as a true partner in managing global economic affairs, the development of an intimate working relationship with an Asian country rather than its traditional European allies, and constructive collaboration with an authoritarian political regime rather than a democracy. All these changes would pose substantial challenges for U.S. policymakers and would likely encounter domestic political resistance.
> 
> China is rapidly approaching a moment when its chosen strategy of integration into the world economy will force it to assume increased responsibility for the successful functioning of that economy. China's own interests, in other words, should lead it to accept an invitation from the United States to help steer the system in a mutually acceptable direction. The Chinese today are hotly debating whether their country should proceed unilaterally or work within the international system, and an offer of true partnership could tilt the outcome of that debate decisively and constructively, raising the possibility that China could continue its upward trajectory without provoking the clashes that previous rising powers have.
> 
> If China is reluctant to get too close to the United States -- say, because of continuing controversies over security issues -- alternative institutional arrangements are of course available. The EU could be a member from the outset of a G-3, a group of the current global economic superpowers. The new G-5, recently created by the IMF to conduct its intensified multilateral consultative process, which adds Japan and Saudi Arabia (to represent the oil producers) into the mix, is another possibility. The central need is to embrace China in the context of a new and effective leadership grouping in light of its critical role in the world economy and its legitimate desire to be engaged in systemic management at all relevant stages of the process.
> 
> Under seven successive presidents, the United States has chosen to engage, rather than confront, China, taking the eminently sensible view that provoking an unnecessary confrontation would be profoundly contrary to U.S. interests. Given the signs that China's economic advance will continue, the same logic suggests that Washington should make every effort to engage Beijing as a true partner in steering global economic affairs. At a minimum, creating a G-2 would limit the risk of bilateral disputes escalating and disrupting the U.S.-Chinese relationship and the broader global economy. At a maximum, it could start a process that might, over time, generate sufficient trust and mutual understanding to produce active cooperation on crucial issues.
> 
> Right now, the prospects of such active cooperation are uncertain. But in addition to their differences, the two countries share many common interests, and their global economic positions are converging rather than diverging. Developing a partnership of the sort outlined here will not be easy and will take much time and effort. But the issues at stake are so important that even partial success would be worthwhile, and the only way to gauge the idea's feasibility is to try it. The upcoming negotiations to create a global strategy to counter global warming offer a compelling opportunity for just such an experiment.




Bergsten notes, wholly correctly, that most of the criticisms he levies on China are equally applicable to the USA and the EU and that China’s criticisms of the IMF and WTO are valid. He also notes that in e.g. refusing to revalue its currency China is _guilty_ of exactly what Germany and japan were doing a generation ago – but now it’s bad.

Firm dealing (by the US) with China in trade matters is also difficult because (Bergsten again):  _”provoking an unnecessary confrontation would be profoundly contrary to U.S. interests”_.

If , somehow, _punishing_ China for its (perceived) disdain for the Euro-American gobal trade system is too difficult then the alternative is _partnership_.

Bergsten’s idea of a G2 – in which America and China _”steer the global_ [trade and commerce] [/i]governance process”[/i] is bold and good but, as Bergsten himself notes, it will be difficult to implement because:

•	_”Washington would need to accept China as a true partner in managing global economic affairs”_;

•	_”China is reluctant to get too close to the United States”_; and

•	Europe, Japan, Brazil, India and others, including Canada, would be reluctant, to say the least, to allow a G2 to run things.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Yes but .... our separatists are bad. Their separatists are good. Surely?
> 
> In a related, if tangential fashion, in all the commentary on the Irish rejection of the EU I heard a German (I believe) MEP describe the debate/battle as one between Sovereignist and Federalists.  I thought that to be a refreshingly honest utterance of particular clarity.
> 
> Perhaps all these questions boil down to: Is it possible to create a stable system of governance based on a polity of some 1200 independent and sovereign states with populations of 5,000,000.  That seems to be a good number for a relatively homogeneous society.  (Quebec, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore are all in that order of magnitude).  Or do we need the larger, hegemonic empires for stability?
> 
> If the mantra "Democracies don't go to war against each other" is true, perhaps due an inability to achieve not just consensus but societal focus, then is it possible that a large number of small states each pursuing their own interests might acheive a greater stability than a "bipolar/two party"
> 
> world?  On the other hand it might end up being a chaotic equilibrium rather than an ordered equilibrium.



China is unique in that despite a turbulent past it’s borders have remained relatively consistent, lending a strong claim and historical lineage that is ingrained on most of the inhabitants.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _National Post_, is an article I find interesting for its description of Uighur _*separatism*_:
> 
> http://www.nationalpost.com/todays_paper/story.html?id=594871
> My emphasis added.
> Anyone who lived in Canada in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond will recognize the highlighted bits. They are from the standard separatist _party line_: applicable in Xinjiang, the Basque Autonomous Community, Catalonia, Kurdistan and Québec.
> 
> One need not sympathize with China’s *response* to Muslim/Uighur separatism to admit that it (separatism) exists. If the Canadian government could invoke the old War Measures Act to deal with an _“apprehended insurrection”_ then, surely, China may use large red banners to try to stifle their separatists – in fact, of course, the Chinese do use oppression and _Gestapo_ like tactics to deal with their ‘problem,’ not just red banners.



Mr. Campbell,
Speaking of Uighurs and Xinjiang Province, this brings up an interesting dilemma of how the US government will deal with the Uighurs in its GITMO facility:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/04/congress.chinese.muslims.ap/index.html



> *Release Chinese from Gitmo, U.S. lawmakers urge
> Story Highlights
> House members say Chinese government, U.S. military interrogated men
> 
> Ethnic Uighurs should receive apologies and compensation, lawmakers say
> 
> They were swept up in post-September 11 search for terrorists
> 
> U.S. opposes releasing them except to another country*
> WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lawmakers chastised the Bush administration on Wednesday for allowing the Chinese government to interrogate Chinese Muslim detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and demanded that they be freed in the United States.
> 
> The two lawmakers, Reps. Bill Delahunt, D-Massachusetts, and Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, said the Uighurs -- members of a Chinese ethnic group -- should be compensated and apologized to for any abuse they may have suffered while held in the detention center at U.S. naval base in Cuba.
> 
> Uighurs fled their homeland in western China and settled in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to be swept up in the U.S.-led dragnet for terrorists after the September 11 attacks.
> 
> A federal judge has called their imprisonment unlawful, but the Bush administration opposes releasing them unless they can go to a country other than the United States.
> 
> *At a House Foreign Affairs hearing on interrogation methods at Guantanamo, Delahunt asked Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to confirm that Chinese officials were let into the prison.
> 
> "We were informed that the Chinese government sent people to interview and interrogate the Uighurs," Fine said.
> 
> Additionally, Fine said, FBI officials reported that U.S. military personnel woke Uighurs every 15 minutes in a sleep-depravation interrogation tactic known as "the frequent flyer program" before the Chinese interrogators arrived.
> 
> "Did they draw the conclusion that this was, that we had American military personnel collaborating, doing this to, if you will, soften up the Uighurs for examination by Chinese communist agents?" Delahunt asked.
> 
> Fine answered: "They reported this was the technique that was used, what they call the frequent flyer program, to put the Uighurs in a position to be interrogated by the Chinese government."
> 
> Rohrabacher called the military's involvement "ridiculous." He said the Uighurs should be freed in the U.S.
> 
> "And we will call on the government to do so forthwith," Rohrabacher said. "And if it indeed looks like they've been unjustly treated that we offer some compensation as well as an apology."
> 
> Both lawmakers agreed to push the Bush administration to release the Uighurs in the U.S., although Delahunt predicted that Rohrabacher, a Republican, "will have more access to the powers that be than I will."
> 
> White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment on the issue, and a spokesman for the State Department did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
> 
> Under U.S. law, the Uighur men cannot be sent back to China because they are likely to face persecution and torture. The administration has been seeking refuge for them in other nations, and five were sent to Albania in 2006. As of two months ago, 17 Uighurs remained at Guantanamo, awaiting countries to take them.*
> 
> In March, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the U.S. has "no desire to be the world's jailer, and we look forward to the day Guantanamo is shut down. And part of that solution is working with other countries to take people back under the right circumstances."
> 
> A report by the human rights group Center for Constitutional Rights indicates that officials from at least 17 countries have been allowed to interrogate their citizens being held at Guantanamo. The report accuses interrogators from six nations -- China, Uzbekistan, Libya, Jordan, Tajikistan and Tunisia -- of abusing Guantanamo detainees with the consent of U.S. officials.
> 
> The group has for the past seven years sought access to U.S. courts for detainees at Guantanamo.



It also makes me wonder how many _Hui Ren_ could be there in GITMO as well; they should not be confused for Uighurs and are ethnically Han Chinese. And why was the US government allowing those Chinese officials- most certainly Ministry of State Security or _Guo An Bu _ agents- into that facility to interrogate them?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> ...
> ... And why was the US government allowing those Chinese officials- most certainly Ministry of State Security or _Guo An Bu _ agents- into that facility to interrogate them?



That's easy: the enemy of my enemy is my friend - and all that. Not very subtle, I know, but this is the GWOT - and all that.


----------



## CougarKing

With Russia now reluctant to sell hardware to the PRC and the US not likely to sell them anything sensitive I always wondered where the PRC would get new choppers.  Apparently from Poland.  Expect to see Chinese knock-offs flying soon.   

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3394355&c=ASI&s=AIR



> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESS
> Published: 27 Feb 12:22 EST (07:22 GMT) Print | Email
> 
> WARSAW - China will buy 150 helicopters from Poland's PZL Swidnik over 10 years under an agreement signed between the Polish aircraft firm and China's Jiujiang aeronautics plant, PZL Swidnik confirmed Feb. 27.
> 
> "It is a framework agreement for co-operation over a decade. We will deliver three types of helicopters: PZL Sokol, PZL Kania and SW-4, according to orders that will be specified on a yearly basis," PZL Swidnik spokesman Jan Mazur told AFP.
> 
> A standard version PZL Sokol helicopter costs $4 million dollars (2.6 million euros), while a SW-4 costs less than a million dollars.
> 
> "We also intend to assemble our PZL Sokol machines in China," Mazur said, but declined to provide further details.
> 
> According to Poland's Rzeczpospolita daily, PZL's Chinese partner is preparing the ground for the assembly plant.
> 
> Poland's State Treasury controls 87 percent of the PZL Swidnik aeronautics manufacturer, while the remaining shares are held, among others, by the municipality of Swidnik, southeast Poland.
> 
> Italy's Agusta company is reported to have purchased a share in PZL Swidnik.


----------



## chanman

Isn't their main medium chopper these days a locally produced Eurocopter Panther?


----------



## CougarKing

chanman said:
			
		

> Isn't their main medium chopper these days a locally produced Eurocopter Panther?



You mean the Z9 right?


----------



## chanman

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> You mean the Z9 right?



That's the one; the local-produced Dauphin/Panther


----------



## Mike Baker

LINK




> TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan Monday began its annual computer-simulated war game which anticipates an invasion by China, despite warming ties between the island and its mainland rival.
> 
> Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense Spokeswoman Lisa Chi said the Hankuang war game would last five days, but she declined to offer further details. Hankuang means Chinese glory.
> 
> Major General Huang Kun-tsung, director of military training affairs, said in March the computer-simulated war game, like past ones, would focus on the Chinese military threat to Taiwan. He said there would also be extensive military exercises in September.
> 
> Taiwan's United Daily News and Apple Daily both reported Monday that the computer simulation this year presents a scenario, set in 2009, in which Taiwan loses its air and naval defense to Chinese troops one day after the invasion. The scenario envisions the Taiwan military battling Chinese invaders on the ground, according to the reports.
> 
> The newspaper reports also said President Ma Ying-jeou would participate in the war game for the first time as commander-in-chief.
> 
> According to Taiwan's defense ministry, the 2007 scenario simulated a sudden invasion in 2012, with the attack led by the Chinese air force. That war game focused on air and naval encounters between the two sides in which Taiwan managed to preserve most of its personnel and military equipment while having difficulties deterring Chinese submarines.




More on link.

Baker


----------



## a_majoor

Update on Chinese economic figures. The "lower cost of infrastructure" cited is mostly due to shoddy construction practices: look at how quickly the buildings collapsed in the earthquake, and corruption is also a factor: you get money for rebar and concrete but only supply a fraction of the contract, add lots of sand to the concrete and build fast so people don't see how little rebar there is.......

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/05/updated-china-economic-projection.html



> *Updated China economic projection*
> 
> China's GDP in 2007 was 24.66 trillion yuan ($3.38 trillion) and per capita GDP was $2,556, official figures suggest.
> 
> UPDATE of this May article:
> China's currency is now 6.88 yuan to 1 USD. China's GDP is now $3.78 trillion.
> 
> *Hong Kong's GDP is $409 billion in 2008*
> 
> *Including Hong Kong and Macau China has $4.2 trillion GDP.*
> 
> China reports its own military spending at about 417.8 billion yuan. [US$60.7 billion] which would put China as the fourth largest spender after the USA, France and the UK
> 
> Rand has estimated China's spending to be 33% higher than reported amounts and DoD doubles the military spending. Either adjustment would put China as the second largest military spender but well behind the USA's military spending.
> 
> The Economist magazine noted that China's national economic figures have been inaccurate but that the provincial numbers which show 10% higher growth have historically been shown to be more correct.
> 
> Stephen Green, an economist at Standard Chartered, calculates that in 2007 the combined output of the provinces was 10% more than that reported by Beijing. Their average growth rate of 13.1% was also still 1.2 percentage points higher than the revised national growth rate, although the gap has narrowed from almost three points in 2005.
> 
> Updated projection for currency, US recession and China but not with the 10% higher provincial growth numbers and the new 2007 GDP number. If growth did average 1.2% faster and US growth was weaker then China could pass the USA on an exchange rated basis in 2014. My updated likely estimate is for 2015-2018 for China's economy to pass the USA economy. The most likely years are 2016-2017. The latest exchange rate is 6.94 [6.88 June 20, 2008] yuan to 1 USD. Key factors are the pace of change in the exchange rate, the degree to which China can maintain high growth and how fast the US economy grows. As previously noted at nextbigfuture: China should maintain high growth until 2020 because of the migration of 1-2% of the population each year from rural areas to urban areas. Those people over a few years provide 4 times as much gdp per capita. This provides a boost of 3-6% to the annual growth rate.
> 
> Year GDP(yuan) GDP growth Yuan per USD China GDP China+HK/Ma US GDP 2007 24.66      11.9%      7.3           3.38      3.7       13.8  Jun08 26.0                 6.88          3.78      4.2            Past GermanyOct08 26.7                 6.65          4.0       4.452008 27.3       10.2%      6.35          4.3       4.8       14.0 2009 30.1        9.8%      5.62          5.4       5.9       14.2 Pass Japan2010 33.7        9.5%      5.11          6.6       7.1       14.62011 37.0        9.5%      4.64          8.0       8.5       15.02012 40.6        9.5%      4.26          9.5       10.0      15.42013 44.2        9.0%      3.91         11.3      11.8       15.92014 48.2        9.0%      3.72         13.0      13.5       16.42015 52.0        8.0%      3.54         14.7      15.2       16.92016 56.2        8.0%      3.53         16.7      17.2       17.4 Passing USA2017 60.4        7.5%      3.38         18.8      19.4      17.9 Past USA2018 64.2        7.0%      3.20         20.9      21.5      18.42019 69.2        7.0%      3.09         23.0      23.6      19.0 2020 74.0        7.0%      3.0          25.2      25.8      19.62021 78.4        6.0%      2.9          27.2      27.8      20.22022 83.1        6.0%      2.9          29.4      30.0      20.82023 87.3        5.0%      2.8          31.5      32.2      21.42024 91.7        5.0%      2.8          33.7      34.4      22.02025 96.3        5.0%      2.7          36.1      36.8      22.72026 101.1       5.0%      2.6          38.7      39.4      23.4 2027 106.1       5.0%      2.6          41.4      42.1      24.12028 111.4       5.0%      2.5          44.4      45.1      24.82029 117.0       5.0%      2.5          47.5      48.2      25.52030 122.8       5.0%      2.4          50.9      51.6      26.3  Close to double USA
> 
> FURTHER READING
> China's economy now third largest passing Germany.
> 
> Part of the reason for China's GDP growth, *lower cost of infrastructure*
> 
> China is planning to complete rebuilding from the recent earthquake within 3 years. This compares to longer timeframes for US rebuilding after the San Francisco earthquake (still working on the Bay bridge) and from Katrina. The replacement of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge appears like it will cost $6.3 billion and be completed in 2013. 24 years after the 1989 quake.
> 
> The rebuilding of damage from China's quake will cost a lot less than repairs in the USA. $10 billion has been set aside for repairs in China.
> 
> The new Olympic stadium (the bird nest) only cost $500 million and was completed in 52 months
> 
> China has already started demolition of unsafe structures and towns.
> 
> Beijing's new airport (the world’s largest and most advanced airport building)is larger than all five London terminals and cost an estimated $3.75 billion to construct, occupies 14 million square feet and was finished in four years. London Heathrow's Terminal 5 took nearly 20 years to build and cost at least twice as much as the one in the Chinese capital.
> 
> Chinese and Russian officials signed a $1 billion deal Friday to have Moscow build a nuclear fuel enrichment plant in China and supply uranium.
> 
> The deal calls for Russia to build a $500 million nuclear fuel enrichment plant and supply semi-enriched uranium worth at least $500 million. Earlier this year, a Russian company completed work on two 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors for China's Tianwan nuclear power plant south of Shanghai. China plans to build 40 plants by 2020, tripling the nuclear share of its power generation to 6 percent.
> 
> Westinghouse secured a $5.3 billion order from China National Nuclear in July to provide four AP1000 nuclear power reactors in Haiyang, Shandong Province and Sanmen, Zhejiang Province, both in eastern China. Four AP1000 in the USA for Florida Power and Light are contracted in 2008 for $13.7 billion, $2927/kw.


----------



## tomahawk6

Chinese preparations for protecting the Olympics.






A view of a newly installed military airbase near the Olympic green on in Beijing, China. In preparation for the summer Olympic Games the Chinese military has installed surface-to-air missile launchers in close proximity to the major venues.


----------



## Kirkhill

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/77733/post-730045.html#msg730045



> Singapore, for example, is a conservative-democracy because the Chinese decided, over the course of 1,000+ years and for their own good reasons, to internalize Confucianism – it made for simple and effective government and facilitated stability in all things. It also made for deeply conservative societies – ones, lke Singapore, that hold their conservative values more tightly than we hold our liberal ones, I think.



I lifted this quote by E.R. from his Comparing Leaders.... thread because I think it speaks to something important on this Chinese discussion.  E.R. has made the point in the past that the Conservatism he describes is tied to clan and tribe and family.

There I think is the nub of the matter.  Our "liberalism" is essentially a religion. It is a belief system.  Individuals consciously review their world and make personal decisions as to wheth wer or not they can define themselves as what they understand to be liberals. They know they want to be liberals because liberals are good (unless you are one of those godforsaken Yanks whose failure to understand English begins with the inability to spell colour and aluminium properly).  Therefore liberals believe what they believe.  Over time though individuals may find themselves to be out of sync with those they thought were liberals and come to identify themselves by some other label. They may become anarchists or libertarians.  In like manner Communists become socialists become social democrats.  Catholics become protestants and presbyterians become methodists.  Peoples beliefs are in constant flux.  Therefore any society based on beliefs can only be a temporary association.

Meanwhile the family continues - despite the best efforts of the social engineers, family courts and kibbutzim.  Adopted children will go to great lengths to discover their blood trail regardless of how well they were raised by their adoptive parents.  Many people from good family backgrounds study history and submit to DNA analysis in order to find blood ties.  I believe that these tendencies, and the tendencies of families to hang together despite varying beliefs within them demonstrate the enduring strength of the family.

Or to put it another way: family blood is thicker than the thin baptismal water of belief.

If the Chinese, and the Arabs, and the Afghans and most of the Third World is still explicitly tied to social structures based on family then it is little wonder that they retain a resilience that makes it possible to outlast our social fashions.  That puts us at a considerable disadvantage in the long game: not an insuperable disadvantage as our society started from the same origin, but a disadvantage nonetheless.

By the same token our internal "conservative" families, with their high birth rates and strong internal ties, I believe, are better placed to survive the long haul than those guilt-ridden, or sybaritic liberals, that choose not to procreate.

Thucydides has posted numerous times on this point.  I find the concept persuasive.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/77733/post-730045.html#msg730045
> ...
> If the Chinese, and the Arabs, and the Afghans and most of the Third World is still explicitly tied to social structures based on family then it is little wonder that they retain a resilience that makes it possible to outlast our social fashions.  That puts us at a considerable disadvantage in the long game: not an insuperable disadvantage as our society started from the same origin, but a disadvantage nonetheless.
> ...



I think it is wrong to mix the Chinese, especially, but East Asians in general - to a lesser degree - with Central and West Asians and, especially, Arabs. The latter two have very, very little connection with e.g. Confucian thought and the _conservatism_ that results is, in my experience (limited - but some amongst the Arabs) quite different.

I saw little in Arab _culture_ that corresponds to the Chinese desire for social harmony based on filial piety, community standards, merit, humanity ( 仁 - which Cougar Daddy can explain far better than I! (but it's one of the few characters I can recognize/use readily)) and the concept if the _"large person"_ or gentleman vs. the _"small person"_ - who, thought he might be of 'noble' birth or high status is unfit to rule/govern/administer. 

West Asian _culture_ appears, to me, from a distance, to be even weaker than Arab culture. Certainly the Turkic/Uighur* people of Xinjiang  province are, _culturally_, quite different from the Han majority.

----------

* There are, at least, a three or four ways to spell this word.


----------



## Kirkhill

While I understand your argument that the cultural systems of itinerant Arab traders, central Asian nomads and urban Chinese peasants, merchants and bureaucrats are very different, and I would agree with the observation, my argument goes less to the nature of what has been internalized than the means of internalization.

It is my contention that whatever the culture believes it is believed as a result of training received with the breast milk. It is about Great-Grandfather's example and Granny's discipline.  An Arab, an Uighur and a Han Granny will all teach different things but in this they will, in my opinion, agree: "Follow the way of your Father".  That reinforces what is, again in my opinion, a tendency to find commonality with those of your blood.

By contrast, western individualism, encouragesfor the individual to come to their own conclusions and "Follow their own path".  That makes for a lonely path and one which, if one accepts the "puil" of blood, requires one to actively move against a natural tendency.  Humanity being social, all those lonely wanderers seek company on their journeys.  But if each individual is making decisions on an ongoing basis, and choosing their society based on commonality of decisions and beliefs then those societies are in constant flux.  Their membership constantly changes and their credo likewise changes.  This makes it difficult for the outsider to understand these societies and makes it hard for them to predicate the actions of these groups.

We as a fellow society of individuals find it difficult to deal with the lack of constancy in US policy as the pieces of the US kaleidoscope reorganize themselves every four years.h  To a conservative society like the Chinese, and I accept that premise, it must appear bewildering and, perhaps, frightening.  The flooding of the Yangtze can be predicted.  It can even be controlled by man's collective effort.  The US, with even greater impact than the Yangtze, can neither be controlled nor predicted.

The Arabs and the Uighurs, with their tribal societies, and their similarly kaleidoscopic confusion of changing confederacies are equally threatening.  But where in the west the constantly changing unit has been internalized as the individual, in the Arab and Nomad cultures the individual is constrained by blood, family, clan and tribe.  They follow the patriarch (or occasionally the matriarch).

In that they are more like the Chinese than they are like Westerners (although you may get some contrary examples amongst mediterranean European cultures).


----------



## Edward Campbell

I’m afraid I still don’t agree.

The fact that both the Chinese and some other Asians and the Arabs are different from us does not mean that they are, amongst themselves, much alike.

At the risk of oversimplifying:

•	You are comparing Western *liberals* – some, actually many of whom are actually quite _culturally_ *il*liberal – to a whole host of other _cultures_ (civilizations if you like Sam Huntington and his clash(es) thereof) on a linear scale: ‘we’ are at one end ‘they’ are at the other; but

•	A better model is a triangle: ‘we’ are at one vertex, China is at another and some other Asians are at a third. Each _culture_ is unique and quite separate from the others.

Of course we are really viewing a polyhedron, perhaps a _Great Strombic Icositetrahedron_ with a _culture_ at each vertex.

I don’t know enough about the Asian or Arabic languages, *but* Chinese _conservatism_ and some of the basic tenets of Confucianism are rooted in language. Going back to your image of things learned at the breast, some linguists refer to the very first language we learn as our “milk tongue.” If you are Chinese you learn, very, very quickly, that there are different words for elder brother or sister and younger brother or sister. There are two words for “Grandmother” – one for Dad’s mother and one for Mom’s mother. You auntie who is your dad’s sister has a different ‘title’ from your aunties who is your Mom’s sister. Hierarchy, itself, and a respect for hierarchies is, therefore, part of ‘you;’ you (if you learn Chinese as your "milk tongue") are innately _conservative_.

Later you lean that words related to old and elder are ‘better’ than those related to youth and younger. You come to *know* that age and seniority matter. More _conservatism_ is instilled within the family – no school teachers or government officials are required to do the job.

After his parents made him innately _conservative_ it is not surprising that Confucius decided to codify a ‘system.’ It is interesting, but not too surprising, I think, that ‘we’ (Western liberals) find Confucianism difficult to imagine, much less practice. Our “milk tongue” made most of us _liberal_ – but less so for the French and Spanish, for example, who retain the remnants of hierarchy in their languages; we (Anglos) got rid of the last vestiges of that over 500 years ago.

All that to say that Chinese _conservatism_ is natural, for them, and we must understand that they are going to think, plan, act and react as their _nature_ requires – and their nature is quite different from ours and quite different from the _natures_ of the Uighurs and other Turkic peoples, different from _natures_ of the Russians and Arabs and the Indians and Indonesians, too.

When thinking strategically I believe it is critical to use the right mental model: that polyhedron works for me.


----------



## Kirkhill

If I presented the argument linearly then it was merely an attempt to differentiate.  An oversimplification.

My own personal model is closer to the polyhedron but still closer to quantum physics.  Individually we are clouds of decisions.  Individually my decisions make me different from you.  Crossing cultures, the cloud of decisions made by two Han will be closer to each other than they will be to the package that defines me and, dare I say, you and most of the people on this forum.  Now that doesn't mean that you can't find Hans whose individual clouds are more like Anglo clouds or that an individual Anglo can't have affinities with Hans. It just means that on balance there will be more commonalities amongst Han than between Han and Anglo.

I think it is this clustering of decisions (that is a poor word for what I am trying to express for it is not just the active decisions but also the perceptions that define the individual) that outwardly manifests itself as what we choose to call stereotypes.

From that I take that it is possible to predict the likely reaction of a crowd with a reasonable degree of probability more easily than it is possible to predict the actions of an individual.  However, since crowds can be swayed by individuals and individuals are unpredictable therefore it is always possible to be surprised and have the crowd choose to do something unexpected.

I don't know the matrix of perceptions and decisions that define the Han any more than I could accurately define my own with its mixed Anglo Scots heritage, and Brit/Canuck/Yankee acculturation, but I do strongly believe that their matrix weights different aspects differently than most Anglos, or Westerners do.

I think there we agree.

My sense of the West versus the Rest is that one of the outliers where we weight things differently is with respect to the family.  Traditional societies, from all regions and all "races" (to use an oldfashioned term) more heavily weight the family than, I believe, your Western Liberal.  This tendency is particularly acute the further you shift to the Left.

I mention the Kibbutzim, I could have easily mentioned Kindergarten, Day Care, Schooling, family courts, social services...... the myriad of ways in which the West intervenes between parent and child to diminish, and often sever, the links.  This, I believe, is an explicit result of the belief that everybody comes into the world naked and should start on an equal footing. It is perceived as an unfair advantage if one's parents are able to offer more than the parents of another child.  That, in turn, is in direct counter-point to the nurturing instinct of every being to give one's offspring the best possible chance of survival, if only to preserve the seed.  Death taxes, discriminatory practices on school loans that favour the poor, wealth redistribution generally......all well intentioned, founded in the belief that if there are no differences there is no conflict.

But differences will always exist.  My cloud will always be different to everyone else's just as they will alway's be different from each others.   With my friends much of our clouds will look alike. With my enemies much of our clouds will be different.

At bottom, you suggested that we were less tied to our "world view" for lack of a better term than the Chinese are tied to theirs.  You implied that that gave them a strength that our society doesn't possess.  If I understand you correctly then I agree.

And I would put the "attack on the family" at the core of our weakness.

At the same time the cohesion of the Han, may be able to inflict a lasting effect on the west, and I leave the effect undefined, but I don't think they can eliminate the chaotic liberalism of our culture, or the chaotic authoritarianism of other cultures that, I believe, causes them disquiet.  That is because, ultimately, the chaos will continue as long as there exists John Stuart Mill's "lone voice".  And there are many "lone voices" even amongst the Han.

My money is always on the Nomad, not the pampered urbanite.  And that is another characteristic of the Han, a greater tendency to congregate and I believe "concentration of forces" is often seen as opening a window of vulnerability.

From my personal standpoint that same tendency to congregate is found amongst the Western Leftists (Yankee Liberals).  That in itself gives me comfort because in the long haul they are exposing themselves to the same risks as the Chinese but with out the benefit of their "Big Battalions".

I agree entirely that finding the right mental model is key to developing a strategy.

Maybe its appropriate that my own model is defined in terms of 6 billion constantly changing, kaleidoscopically coloured, fuzzy clouds of indistinct size and shape and form.  When viewed up close there is nothing there.   When viewed within the mass of clouds there is only constantly changing confusion.  But if you go up above the clouds then the individual nature of the clouds fade and the kaleidoscope moves from the individual to the group.

Oh dear, getting all philosophical and social science artsy here. 


Edit, on that score, think Jackson Pollock if you want a visual analogy to my worldview.  Each canvas looks the same and they all look different and they can all be made into each other by continuing the process that created them.


----------



## a_majoor

China is likely to affect us in ways we don't even recognise at first....

http://www.wired.com/print/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/st_essay



> *How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand*
> By Michael Erard  06.23.08
> 
> 
> The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")
> 
> But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?
> 
> Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.
> 
> In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.
> 
> It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."
> 
> English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"
> 
> One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say "xin" with an even tone, it means "heart"; with a descending tone it means "honest.") According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.
> 
> Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.
> 
> And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.
> 
> Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what's happening to English may be its own thing: It's mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it's on a path toward a global tongue — what's coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to learn may be their own.
> 
> Michael Erard (author@umthebook.com) wrote about the spread of the Chinese language in issue 14.04.


----------



## Blindspot

Thucydides said:
			
		

> China is likely to affect us in ways we don't even recognise at first....
> 
> http://www.wired.com/print/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/st_essay



I don't think this is much of an issue. As stated in the article itself, this is a natural course of languages. Every language is derived from an earlier proto-language. Languages that develop into a regional lingua franca split into different dialects and sometimes into other languages over time. You can't say that Hellenic Greek was exactly the same as Egyptian Greek. Even today, how many Canadians or Americans could understand some (by our standards) British linguistic peculiarities such as 'lorry', 'bonnet', 'loo' or "How's your rabbits?".


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I saw little in Arab _culture_ that corresponds to the Chinese desire for social harmony based on filial piety, community standards, merit, humanity ( 仁 - which Cougar Daddy can explain far better than I! (but it's one of the few characters I can recognize/use readily)) and the concept if the _"large person"_ or gentleman vs. the _"small person"_ - who, thought he might be of 'noble' birth or high status is unfit to rule/govern/administer.



I think you explained it quite well in layman's terms in English, Mr. Campbell. It is pronounced "ren", btw, in Mandarin. It should not be confused with the other characters that are also pronounced with the same pinyin, such as the characters  人 (which means person) or 认(which means to know) in simplified Mandarin.

Furthermore, if you examine the two radicals combined in the character, with the left meaning the person radical or 亻, and the right side meaning the number two or "er",  which is a character of its own when used in an ordinal sense, shown like this 二, you can infer its meaning to be one person, but with two aspects or facets within one important essence or kernel of the popcorn, to put it simply.

As for your continued emphasis on the importance of conservative values with regards to Chinese culture, you are correct in saying in that Chinese society is very much compatible with those values, since I remember Dr. Pan Wei explaining how the Chinese people on the mainland , in spite of all their experiences with Communism, still thought with the same individualism that their self-interested peasant farmer forebears used to survive within a society where it was hard to rely upon or trust anyone other their own family or their JIA (家). Relations outside one's immediate or extended family were called GUANXI or links, since a lot of them were forged upon friendship and conditional trust and a Chinese salaryman who is the successor of the farmer would try to get as many GUANXI, written as 关系, and get to know as many people as possible since one never knew when that relative or acquiantance would come in handy, such as the cousin who is a lawyer or the friend who is a tow truck driver. Even with the variables of age and hierarchy thrown in, GUANXI is still very important and that is why the chaffeur would take his family to visit the house of their boss on the day after Chinese New Year, acting the whole time like sycophants for the boss and even bearing gifts to him in the hope they may even get favour with them at work.

That is why any foreign company that attempts to do business in China alone will fail because the GUANXI or local links or contacts are essential when making or establishing a business in China; a joint venture with a local company, called a HE ZI (合资),  is always the best first step.  



> Over time though individuals may find themselves to be out of sync with those they thought were liberals and come to identify themselves by some other label. They may become anarchists or libertarians.  In like manner Communists become socialists become social democrats.  Catholics become protestants and presbyterians become methodists.  Peoples beliefs are in constant flux.  Therefore any society based on beliefs can only be a temporary association.



Mr. Kirkhill,

While I agree with what you said about the ideas and beliefs of people and individuals being always in a state of constant flux, they do not necessarily evolve in the direction that you specified above. And there are certain individuals who stay true to their faith their whole lives because they are not easily influenced by whatever circumstances- positive or negative- that would otherwise cause weaker minds to change.

Moving on, here is another topic:

When I was in Beijing for a semester studying under Bei Da professor Dr. Pan Wei, he said that the PRC would surpass, if not just equalize 1st world nations like the US in GDP per capita and standard of living within the next 20-30 years, IIRC.



> *China's economy to become world's biggest in 2035 -- study *
> http://business.inquirer.net/money/breakingnews/view/20...est-in-2035----study
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 09:01:00 07/09/2008
> 
> WASHINGTON -- China’s economy will overtake that of the United States by 2035 and be twice its size by mid-century, a study released Tuesday by a US research organization concluded.
> 
> The report by economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said China's rapid growth is driven by domestic demand more than exports, and will sustain high single-digit growth rates well into the 21st century.
> 
> "China's economic performance clearly is no flash in the pan," Keidel writes.
> 
> "Its growth this decade has averaged more than 10 percent a year and is still going strong in the first half of 2008. Because its success in recent decades has not been export-led but driven by domestic demand, its rapid growth can continue well into the 21st century, unfettered by world market limitation."
> 
> Keidel said the rise of China to the world's biggest economy will happen regardless of the method of calculation.
> 
> Under current market-based estimates, China's gross domestic product is about $3 trillion compared to $14 trillion for the United States.
> 
> Based on a more controversial purchasing power parity (PPP) measure used by the World Bank and others to correct low labor-cost distortions, he said China's GDP is roughly half of that of the United States.
> 
> "Despite this low starting point, if China's expansion is anywhere near as fast as the earlier expansion of other East Asian modernizers at a comparable stage of development, the power of compound growth rates means that China's economy will be larger than America's by mid-century -- no matter how it is converted to dollars," Keidel wrote.
> 
> "Indeed, PPP valuation distinctions will diminish and eventually disappear."


----------



## tomahawk6

It is statistically impossible for the PRC to surpass the GDP of the US. The people in rural China are at least 50 years behind those in the west. I would bet that half the population live in the countryside.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> It is statistically impossible for the PRC to surpass the GDP of the US. The people in rural China are at least 50 years behind those in the west. I would bet that half the population live in the countryside.



I think it is statistically impossible for China *not* to surpass the US in gross, national GDP by, say, 2050.

Right now China's GDP is about 20% of that of the USA. At sustainable, positive growth rates (pessimistic for China, optimistic for the USA) the ratio should be close to 50/50 by 2030. I didn't bother to run a sensible projection out to the point where China actually surpasses the USA in GDP, proper.

What *will* take more time is for China's _per capita_ GDP to reach and eventually surpass that of the USA. Europe isn't quite there yet, and it started the 'race' - after massive US (Marshall Plan) support - from a 'better' position (skilled, educated labour force and new (thanks to allied destruction and US financed reconstruction) infrastructure).

The issue is China's immense population. That huge work force - which is making impressive gains in productivity (that will, inevitably, decline) - cannot help but produce more and more wealth (product) at a much higher rate of growth than is possible in the USA. But the poor, backward, rural part of that immense population - while increasingly productive - will hold down the _per capita_ rate for a long, long time.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _National Post_, is a related article by a reputable scholar:

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=645965


> Malthus was right
> 
> Sally F. Zerker
> 
> National Post
> 
> Published: Friday, July 11, 2008
> 
> It may be time to bring Thomas Malthus back from the dead -- intellectually speaking. Believe it or not, the 18th-century thinker has a lot to say to us about problems that are here and now: population increase and the food needed to deal with it.
> 
> Malthus saw the 18th-century phenomenon of continuous population increase as a threat to human civilization. Left unchecked, be believed, populations would double themselves every 25 years, a growth rate that would quickly outstrip the available food supply. This Malthusian idea soon took on the mantra of certainty: Unlimited population growth could only end in disastrous famines and starvation.
> 
> This was a widely held belief throughout the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. Since the mid-20th century, however, Malthus' theories have lost credibility because the world has experienced (seemingly) unchecked population growth without the dismal result he predicted. Here we are in the first decade of the 21st century, with a world population of 6.6 billion --about six times what it was in Malthus' era -- and yet we're not starving. Malthus must have been wrong.
> 
> Or was he?
> 
> Until now, technological improvements have caused food supply to increase along with population growth -- something Malthus admittedly did not foresee. But as demand bumps up against supply, the green revolution may be over.
> 
> In recent months, food prices have risen dramatically and suddenly. In the past year, the price of wheat is up 120%. The cost of cooking oil, rice and other staples have doubled since January. For the 1.5-billion people who live on less than $2 a day, food typically accounts for almost all of their meager budget. Soaring food prices represent a calamity for these people, which explains
> 
> At current inflated prices, we can expect outright starvation in the poorer regions of the world why food riots have broken out across the globe.
> 
> A significant factor straining the food supply is the entry into the market of large middle-class populations in China and India -- people who want to live (and eat) like North Americans and Europeans. Higher incomes in these nations have resulted in increased consumption of meat, chicken and other protein foods, all of which strain grain supplies. (It takes four pounds of grain to make one pound of meat.) The formerly poor are no longer content to eat rice, bread and lentils.
> 
> During the 20th century, food production generally was not a restrictive factor on population growth. But that was during a period when only one-sixth of the Earth's inhabitants had incomes high enough to make them gluttons. This low ratio of rich to poor left enough of the pie for meager but sufficient distribution to the rest of the world.
> 
> In other words, the world seems to have avoided Malthus' dismal outcome only because the vast majority of humanity did not eat well. They were able to eat amounts sufficient to procreate and have their offspring survive, but not enough to enjoy the health-giving effect of a high protein diet.
> 
> That global social division between rich and poor is undergoing a shift, and it is one that has the potential for unleashing a massive humanitarian crisis. Malthus may yet be vindicated.
> 
> _Sally F. Zerker is an economist, professor emeritus and senior scholar at York University._



I disagree.

The _green revolution_ was all about science – the sorts of science that do not need trillion dollar budgets. In fact, agricultural science is, arguably, amongst the oldest of all – having its origins in the Neolithic period. (I guess physics always ‘wins’ – I’m guessing the lever, for example, goes all the way back to the Lower Palaeolithic.)

I have heard/read (but I cannot cite sources) that, right now, in 2008, in China, alone, there is more agricultural research and development underway than has been done in all of human history – everywhere.*

I’m also guessing that, if even 1% of that R&D is actually worthwhile, another _green revolution_ is inevitable.

Malthus was wrong because he failed to assign a value to human ingenuity and progress and then factor that into h,is calculations. Prof. Zerker falls into the same trap: “things” are bad, right now, they may even get worse but, over the past 10,000+ years, we have demonstrated a consistent ability to solve problems and avert disasters. I see nothing in 21st century humanity to suggest that ability has, suddenly, disappeared.

----------
* I think that estimate was based on assigning some R&D _value_ to everything from the domestication of the first goat around 11,000 years ago through to e.g. the invention of _Roundup_™ _circa_ 1970 and assigning _related_ values to the work being done on (agriculture – broadly defined) by scholars (MSc and above) in China, right now. I have no way of knowing how valid those data might be. But, add India and Europe and America into that mix and imagine how much *new* work is being done!


----------



## a_majoor

The main problem with food isn't production, it is distribution.

Starvation in many parts of the world is a deliberate policy instituted by governments to repress potential opponents, or the inadvertent side effect of socialistic policies to "help the poor" (although it is hard to see who is being helped when these policies result in food shortages). Current examples of "a" are Zimbabwe and "b" are Venezuela.

To add to the misery is the subsidization of agriculture in the West. "We" produce "butter mountains" and "wine lakes", then try to dump them on the developing world, hurting third world farmers with cheap, subsidized food they can't compete against.

Taking government out of agriculture in the West would go a long way to improving the situation (not to mention relieving taxpayers of funding expensive and inefficient subsidies and making food cheaper for us as well!).

WRT who will have the largest GDP in 50 years is a mugs game, forecasting farther than five years in the future is dangerous because so many variables change the political and economic assumptions behind these forecasts. I am also sceptical based on demographic factors, the so called "China will get old before it becomes rich" argument and demographic and social turmoil caused by the "one child" program, although other factors can and will intrude over the next five to fifty years


----------



## tomahawk6

Owners of US debt.
Source http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=1001

Graph
http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=1001


----------



## CougarKing

Pacific choke point? The Strait of Malacca is a venue for a great deal of the world's maritime trade and blocking it may hold an advantage of any potential aggressor; modern day pirates are not the only threat around that area.



> Ian Storey, a scholar at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, calls the South China Sea policy "China’s Malacca Dilemma."
> 
> On one hand, Beijing claims the waters from the island of Hainan south to the Indonesian island of Natuna as an internal sea, and has suggested that the United States withdraw from the region.* A Chinese admiral suggested that the US and China split the Pacific, with China controlling the western half and the US moving to the east. Keating immediately stated explicitly that the US was in Asia to stay. On the other hand, China’s Navy, while modernizing, is still not strong enough to enforce its claim to the South China Sea and to ensure that the strait remains open for the ships plying the China trade and bringing in the bulk of the nation’s oil imports.
> 
> "At present, China lacks the naval power necessary to protect its sea-lanes," Storey wrote. "Beijing fears that during a national security crisis ships carrying energy resources could be interdicted by hostile naval forces. Any disruption to the free flow of energy resources into China could derail the economic growth on which the Chinese government depends to shore up its legitimacy and pursue its great power ambitions."*
> American Pretext?
> 
> Thus, China has "a vested interest in the elimination of transnational threats in the waterway," said Storey, "yet Beijing remains uneasy at the prospect of a greater role for external powers in securing the strait."
> 
> Some Chinese analysts have accused Washington and Tokyo of "using the threat of terrorism" as "a pretext to expand their naval presence in and around the strait." The Chinese have watched with concern as India has enhanced its presence in the area, especially the modernization of military facilities on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at the strait’s northwest terminus.
> 
> *Some in the Chinese commentariat have demonstrated worries that have "bordered on the paranoid," Storey said. One Chinese newspaper, he observed, recently condemned US Indonesia military cooperation as "targeting China" and aiming at "controlling China’s avenue of approach to the Pacific."
> 
> US strategy is to rely on Southeast Asian nations to take the lead in protecting the waterways. The supporting role of the US ranges from providing equipment and training, combined exercises, bilateral exchanges, ship visits, multilateral conferences, and planning sessions, to medical and humanitarian assistance.*
> 
> >>LINK<<



Should be very interesting over the next 10-15 years once the PLAN has the capability to patrol the straits itself...


----------



## Kirkhill

> "Over time though individuals may find themselves to be out of sync with those they thought were liberals and come to identify themselves by some other label. They may become anarchists or libertarians.  In like manner Communists become socialists become social democrats.  Catholics become protestants and presbyterians become methodists.  Peoples beliefs are in constant flux.  Therefore any society based on beliefs can only be a temporary association."
> 
> 
> Mr. Kirkhill,
> 
> While I agree with what you said about the ideas and beliefs of people and individuals being always in a state of constant flux, they do not necessarily evolve in the direction that you specified above. And there are certain individuals who stay true to their faith their whole lives because they are not easily influenced by whatever circumstances- positive or negative- that would otherwise cause weaker minds to change.



CougarDaddy:

On reading my quote the way that you apparently read it I can see how it might be taken as a statement of "progression".  In some historical sense I suppose that was the way that I meant it.  But I don't equate the historical progress, necessarily, with improvement or inevitability.  I quite take your point that not all individuals "progress".  Many do indeed hold fast to entrenched beliefs.  And indeed it isn't uncommon for the offspring of those that have "progressed" to "regress" to familiar, traditional beliefs and mores.

But enough digression....

Back to your regularly programming.


----------



## CougarKing

So are the various Southeast Asian nations now starting to pick sides- either China or the US and its other Allies? Interesting...



> *Thai massage for China's military muscle*
> 
> LINK
> 
> --[excerpt]--
> 
> Last week, Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej was in China for a four-day visit, his first since taking office after last December's elections. Samak, who is concurrently defense minister, met with Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie and the two sides agreed to strengthen bilateral military ties.
> 
> Although Thailand has in recent years been wracked by political uncertainty, this has not impaired the close relationship between Bangkok and Beijing. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the September 2006 coup, the People's Republic of China, or PRC, moved to embrace the new military government while its treaty ally, the United States, looked on disapprovingly at the regression of Thai democracy.
> 
> As with other countries in Southeast Asia, Thailand seeks to balance the interests and influence of America and China. A central element of Bangkok's hedging strategy is to keep its military alliance with the US well lubricated, while at the same time expanding defense ties with China. Given the cozy relationship that has developed between Thailand and China over the past few decades, it is unsurprising that military-security links are among China's most well-developed in the region - second only to Myanmar, China's quasi-ally - and the Thai kingdom has chalked up some impressive firsts in the arena of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-China defense ties, including a groundbreaking agreement with Beijing in 2007 that outlined the parameters of future cooperation...


----------



## chanman

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> So are the various Southeast Asian nations now starting to pick sides- either China or the US and its other Allies? Interesting...



Interesting; I had no idea that the Chinese had good military relations with Thailand, but maybe I was thrown off by Thailand's use of Western military equipment.

Not mentioned are Thailand's relations with Vietnam, with which China's relations might be cordial, but not particularly friendly.  Is the situation analogous at all with China's backing of successive governments in Pakistan?


----------



## CougarKing

chanman said:
			
		

> Interesting; I had no idea that the Chinese had good military relations with Thailand, but maybe I was thrown off by Thailand's use of Western military equipment.
> 
> Not mentioned are Thailand's relations with Vietnam, with which China's relations might be cordial, but not particularly friendly.  Is the situation analogous at all with China's backing of successive governments in Pakistan?



It is not that analagous from what I have read, though Thailand does also use Chinese equipment; its CHAO PHRAYA class Frigates were made in China (Type 52 and Type 53 JIANGHU class).

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/row/plan/jianghu.htm

Moving on to other news, there has been a return to violence in China's predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang in Western China; it is not surprising that Xinhua or CCTV would report this attack, since the CCP would probably want to paint the Uighur seperatists to the world as more terrorists in this current GWOT, especially with only days before the Olympics.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080804.wchinaraid0804/BNStory/International/home?cid=al_gam_mostemail



> CHARLES HUTZLER
> 
> ASSOCIATED PRESS
> 
> August 4, 2008 at 1:42 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — *Attackers rammed a dump truck into a patrol station in China's restive Central Asian border province Monday morning, tossing grenades in a raid that killed 16 officers and wounded more than a dozen others, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
> The attack in Xinjiang province was in an area where local Muslims have waged a sporadic rebellion against Chinese rule.
> It came just four days before the start of the Beijing Olympics — an event that at least one radical Muslim group has vowed to attack.*The brief Xinhua account said the attackers drove the dump truck to get inside the paramilitary police compound in the Kashgar area and then exploded two grenades. A state television report gave a different version, saying the police were attacked while marching in front of a hotel while conducting morning drills.
> Besides the 16 dead, another 16 armed policemen were wounded, the reports said.
> Two of the attackers were arrested, Xinhua reported. It called the attackers "rioters" but did not further identify them.
> Local government officials declined comment Monday. An officer in the district police department said an investigation was launched.
> The exact location of the attack could not immediately be determined. Kashgar, or Kashi in Chinese, is the name of an oasis town that was once a stop on the Silk Road caravan routes and is also the name of the surrounding region that abuts Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
> A local Turkic Muslim people, the Uighurs, have chafed under Chinese rule, fully imposed after the communists took power nearly 60 years ago. Occasionally violent attacks in the 1990s brought an intense response from Beijing, which has stationed crack paramilitary units in the area and clamped down on unregistered mosques and religious schools that officials said were inciting militant action.
> Chinese defence and police commanders have warned that radical Uighurs fighting for what they call an independent East Turkistan in western China pose the single greatest threat to the Olympics.
> In recent months police claimed to have foiled a plot to explode a Chinese passenger plane and plans by terrorist cells to kidnap athletes, journalists and others involved in the Olympics.
> One militant group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, pledged in a video that surfaced on the Internet last month to "target the most critical points related to the Olympics." The group is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, with some of its core members having received training from al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, according to terrorism experts.
> Terrorism experts and Chinese authorities, however, have said that with more than 100,000 soldiers and police guarding Beijing and other Olympic co-host cities, terrorists were more likely to attack less-protected areas.


----------



## a_majoor

China is courting allies (like all nations do), and most of the nations it courts have both resources the Chinese want and authoratarian governments which have no limits or scruples as to how they get those resources. This has been discussed a bit in Grand Strategy for a Divided America, particularly in these two articles:

So Popular and So Spineless By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Hugs For Thugs  Robert Kagan,  National Post  Published: Thursday, July 24, 2008 

Potential American responses are discussed here: The United States building a 21rst Century alliance system

This has lots of implications for Canada; where do *we* stand in a world divided between the American West and increasingly powerful autocracies (China clearly wishes to be the leading power in this bloc, but Russia also has ambitions in these matters)? Where does the EU fit in, with its nominaly "free" society increasingly hemmed in by unreachable bureaucratic strictures and rules? How about South America? (Africa is a write off, and will become the cockpit for conflict as predatory nations fight for resources on the continent).

Looking at the behaviour of China over the years, it is quite clear that the hopes of people who thought "engagement" would liberate China or make it a partner in the global community were dashed, so what is *our* next move?


_edit for spelling_


----------



## a_majoor

Great (long) article from Spigel on line:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,569951,00.html



> *China's Summer of Living Dangerously*
> By Ullrich Fichtner
> 
> The Chinese Communist regime's had planned to stage the 2008 Olympic Games as a triumphant celebration of itself as a model of success. But anyone traveling through the country's provinces will encounter a crumbling realm threatened by forces released by its economic boom.
> 
> The man who can explain China is sitting in a private booth in an old teahouse in Beijing, holding court at an antique table with a laptop on it. Black and white photos hang on the walls and silk cushions adorn the benches. In the world outside, the Olympic Torch is making its way through the country and slowly approaching Beijing. The man says that the West is taking the easy route with China, despite its enormous complexity. "*In this country, every movement takes place at the edge of an abyss*."



Read the rest


----------



## a_majoor

Anjd another countervailing view of China's future progression. If this is accurate, then there is a danger waiting in the future as the Chinese people become bitter and vengeful as power and recognition slip away without their acsent to "Great Power" status:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502255_pf.html



> *A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness*
> 
> By John Pomfret
> Sunday, July 27, 2008; B01
> 
> Nikita Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury us, but these days, everybody seems to think that China is the one wielding the shovel. The People's Republic is on the march -- economically, militarily, even ideologically. Economists expect its GDP to surpass America's by 2025; its submarine fleet is reportedly growing five times faster than Washington's; even its capitalist authoritarianism is called a real alternative to the West's liberal democracy. China, the drumbeat goes, is poised to become the 800-pound gorilla of the international system, ready to dominate the 21st century the way the United States dominated the 20th.
> 
> Except that it's not.
> 
> Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper's Beijing bureau chief, I've been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what's actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China's becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China's missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.
> 
> But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.
> 
> It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.
> 
> *Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.*
> 
> In the West, China is known as "the factory to the world," the land of unlimited labor where millions are eager to leave the hardscrabble countryside for a chance to tighten screws in microwaves or assemble Apple's latest gizmo. If the country is going to rise to superpowerdom, says conventional wisdom, it will do so on the back of its massive workforce.
> 
> But there's a hitch: China's demographics stink. No country is aging faster than the People's Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party's notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today -- below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today. Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China's key competitive advantages.
> 
> Worse, Chinese demographers such as Li Jianmin of Nankai University now predict a crisis in dealing with China's elderly, a group that will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. How will China care for them? With pensions? Fewer than 30 percent of China's urban dwellers have them, and none of the country's 700 million farmers do. And China's state-funded pension system makes Social Security look like Fort Knox. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and economist at the American Enterprise Institute, calls China's demographic time bomb "a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making" that will "probably require a rewrite of the narrative of the rising China."
> 
> I count myself lucky to have witnessed China's economic rise first-hand and seen its successes etched on the bodies of my Chinese classmates. When I first met them in the early 1980s, my fellow students were hard and thin as rails; when I found them again almost 20 years later, they proudly sported what the Chinese call the "boss belly." They now golfed and lolled around in swanky saunas.
> 
> But in our exuberance over these incredible economic changes, we seem to have forgotten that past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Not a month goes by without some Washington think tank crowing that China's economy is overtaking America's. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is the latest, predicting earlier this month that the Chinese economy would be twice the size of ours by the middle of the century.
> 
> There are two problems with predictions like these. First, in the universe where these reports are generated, China's graphs always go up, never down. Second, while the documents may include some nuance, it vanishes when the studies are reported to the rest of us.
> 
> One important nuance we keep forgetting is the sheer size of China's population: about 1.3 billion, more than four times that of the United States. China should have a big economy. But on a per capita basis, the country isn't a dragon; it's a medium-size lizard, sitting in 109th place on the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook Database, squarely between Swaziland and Morocco. China's economy is large, but its average living standard is low, and it will stay that way for a very long time, even assuming that the economy continues to grow at impressive rates.
> 
> The big number wheeled out to prove that China is eating our economic lunch is the U.S. trade deficit with China, which last year hit $256 billion. But again, where's the missing nuance? Nearly 60 percent of China's total exports are churned out by companies not owned by Chinese (including plenty of U.S. ones). When it comes to high-tech exports such as computers and electronic goods, 89 percent of China's exports come from non-Chinese-owned companies. China is part of the global system, but it's still the low-cost assembly and manufacturing part -- and foreign, not Chinese, firms are reaping the lion's share of the profits.
> 
> When my family and I left China in 2004, we moved to Los Angeles, the smog capital of the United States. No sooner had we set foot in southern California than my son's asthma attacks and chronic chest infections -- so worryingly frequent in Beijing -- stopped. When people asked me why we'd moved to L.A., I started joking, "For the air."
> 
> China's environmental woes are no joke. This year, China will surpass the United States as the world's No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases. It continues to be the largest depleter of the ozone layer. And it's the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean. But in the accepted China narrative, the country's environmental problems will merely mean a few breathing complications for the odd sprinter at the Beijing games. In fact, they could block the country's rise.
> 
> The problem is huge: Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China, 70 percent of the country's lakes and rivers are polluted, and half the population lacks clean drinking water. The constant smoggy haze over northern China diminishes crop yields. By 2030, the nation will face a water shortage equal to the amount it consumes today; factories in the northwest have already been forced out of business because there just isn't any water. Even Chinese government economists estimate that environmental troubles shave 10 percent off the country's gross domestic product each year. Somehow, though, the effect this calamity is having on China's rise doesn't quite register in the West .
> 
> And then there's "Kung Fu Panda." That Hollywood movie embodies the final reason why China won't be a superpower: Beijing's animating ideas just aren't that animating.
> 
> In recent years, we've been bombarded with articles and books about China's rising global ideological influence. (One typical title: "Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World.") These works portray China's model -- a one-party state with a juggernaut economy -- as highly attractive to elites in many developing nations, although China's dreary current crop of acolytes (Zimbabwe, Burma and Sudan) don't amount to much of a threat.
> 
> But consider the case of the high-kicking panda who uses ancient Chinese teachings to turn himself into a kung fu warrior. That recent Hollywood smash broke Chinese box-office records -- and caused no end of hand-wringing among the country's glitterati. "The film's protagonist is China's national treasure, and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn't we make such a film?" Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, told the official New China News Agency.
> 
> The content may be Chinese, but the irreverence and creativity of "Kung Fu Panda" are 100 percent American. That highlights another weakness in the argument about China's inevitable rise: The place remains an authoritarian state run by a party that limits the free flow of information, stifles ingenuity and doesn't understand how to self-correct. Blockbusters don't grow out of the barrel of a gun. Neither do superpowers in the age of globalization.
> 
> And yet we seem to revel in overestimating China. One recent evening, I was at a party where a senior aide to a Democratic senator was discussing the business deal earlier this year in which a Chinese state-owned investment company had bought a big chunk of the Blackstone Group, a U.S. investment firm. The Chinese company has lost more than $1 billion, but the aide wouldn't believe that it was just a bum investment. "It's got to be part of a broader plan," she insisted. "It's China."
> 
> I tried to convince her otherwise. I don't think I succeeded.
> 
> pomfretj@washpost.com
> 
> John Pomfret is the editor of Outlook. He is a former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post and the author of "Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China."


----------



## a_majoor

"China is an island"; an interesting veiw on the geographic and demographic reality of China:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/292-china-as-an-island/



> *292 - China As An Island*
> Filed under: Uncategorized — strangemaps @
> 
> 
> China has land borders with 14 other countries – a world record*. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours. In fact, as shown in this dramatic map, you should rather consider China to be an island.
> 
> That stark image can be found illustrating this article on John Mauldin’s Outside the Box, a blog at Investors Insight, which is a website dedicated to ‘Financial Intelligence for the Informed Investor’. On his blog, Mr Mauldin hebdomadally profiles one of the many articles he reads each week, to challenge and stimulate investors to ‘think outside the box’. What follows is a very brief summary of the article he recently highlighted: ‘The Geopolitics of China’, taken from a series of Geopolitical Monographs by Stratfor.
> 
> The Chinese heartland, pictured here as the part of China above water, is favourable to agriculture and has traditionally held the bulk of the Chinese population (i.e. the ethnic Han, whom we think of as ‘the’ Chinese); Over a billion people live here, in an area half the size of the US. The heartland’s northern part is dominated by the Yellow River and speaks Mandarin, the southern part by the Yangtze River and by Cantonese.
> 
> Population pressure has always pushed China to expand into Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Manchuria. Another factor is the historical threat emanating from this non-Han ‘shell’ surrounding the Han heartland, for example from the nomad Mongol horsemen that have long threatened and occasionally dominated the sedentary, agricultural Han.
> 
> In the past, when the Chinese state was strong, it managed to conquer and rule these outlying areas, providing a defensive buffer for the heartland. When central authority was weak, these fringes broke off – leaving the heartland vulnerable to invasion. China is strong again, even up to the point where the fringes now are the target of large migrations of Han, much to the chagrin of the native peoples.
> 
> This Han-ification of the Chinese fringe does not necessarily imply that the Chinese have more contact with the countries beyond their borders. Only in three places are the Chinese borders naturally permeable: at the Vietnamese frontier, via the Silk Road, and near Russian Far East. Hilly jungles separate China from Laos and Burma, the Himalayas shield it from the Indian subcontinent, almost impassable deserts divide it from Central Asia and the forbidding expanses of Siberia have never appealed to Chinese expansionism (until now, as the Russians fear).
> 
> With the exception of the Ming dynasty’s sponsorship of admiral Zheng He’s naval expeditions (as far away as Sri Lanka, Arabia and Africa) in the early 15th century, China has never attempted to be a naval-based power – so for most of its history, China’s ports on the Pacific were hardly windows on the world either.
> 
> China’s relative isolation, combined with the size of its population (1 in every 5 humans is Chinese), means China is virtually impossible to subdue militarily (as the Japanese discovered to their disadvantage in the 1930s). It also means China can – and often has – turned its back on the world, existing in splendid isolation.
> 
> Its size and its penchand for autarkism dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:
> 
> maintain unity of the Han heartland;
> maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
> deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.
> 
> Clearly isolationist, these objectives also condemn China to poverty: as a densely populated country with limited arable land, China needs internatioal trade to prosper. The paradox is that prosperity will lead to instability. Prosperity will tend to be concentrated in the areas trading with the outside world (i.e. the coastal regions), creating economic tensions with the poorer interior. This might destabilise the Han heartland.
> 
> This is exactly what happened during an earlier ouverture towards the outside world, in the early 20th century. And this is why Mao’s revolution first failed in the coastal areas, and only succeeded after his Long March towards the poorer interior. Mao’s victory allowed him to reassert central control from Beijing (also over the buffer regions which had ‘drifted away’, such as Tibet). He also ‘re-isolated’ the country, in the process making everybody equally poor again.
> 
> *In the late 1970s, early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping took the gamble of reopening China in order to make it prosperous again. He counted on Mao’s strong, centralised, single-party state system to keep the country together. Time will tell whether he was right, for the main threat to China’s geopolitical goals has again become the economic bifurcation of the Han heartland, with 400 million Chinese living in the relatively wealthy coastal areas, and 900 million in the often still desperately poor interior.*
> 
> China is now less isolated than it once was – although its points of contact remain coastal rather than terrestrial, meaning the insularity portrayed in this map has not completely vanished. But what makes the Chinese leadership nervous is that its Deng-instigated preference for prosperity over stability is precariously linked to circumstances beyond Beijing’s total control: the health and growth of the global economy. What will happen if a global recession threatens the Chinese model? Will the fringe rebel, will the heartland fracture? Or will the center hold – if necessary by again choosing the stability of an isolationist, hardline dictatorship over openness and prosperity?
> 
> Many thanks to Eric Johnson for providing a link to this map.
> 
> * North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar/Burma, Laos and Vietnam. China shares the world record with Russia, which also borders 14 countries: Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea.


----------



## Kirkhill

Fascinating.


----------



## CougarKing

And so goes the passing of a man known in history as the man who held power in China between Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

However, Hua Guafeng was still very instrumental in Deng's return to power after his second purge, without whom we would not have seen the economically developed China we see today.

http://news.ph.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1634078



> *Mao's successor Hua Guofeng dead at 87: state media
> Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao Zedong as chairman of China's ruling Communist Party and briefly ruled the country, died Wednesday at the age of 87, state media reported. *
> 
> State television CCTV and the official Xinhua news agency said Hua -- one of the last of the revolutionary old guard -- died in Beijing from an unspecified illness.
> 
> Hua spent a brief period at the helm of the Communist Party after Mao's death in 1976, but was eased out of power a few years later by Deng Xiaoping, who introduced reforms that opened up China's economy.
> 
> An official statement quoted by Xinhua praised Hua as "an outstanding CPC (Communist Party) member, a long-tested and loyal Communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionary who once held important leading posts in the CPC and the government."
> 
> Delia Davin, professor emeritus of Chinese Studies at Leeds University, said he was someone "to whom history happened."
> 
> "He wasn't adequately strong, he should never have become Mao's successor, and then he was deposed very gently. It was rather a sad life," she said.
> 
> Born in north Shanxi province in 1921, Hua rose rapidly through the ranks under Mao's reign -- which began in 1949 -- from an obscure cadre in central Hunan province to premier in 1976 after the death of Mao's premier Zhou Enlai.
> 
> Davin, who was in Beijing at that time, said the news came as a surprise to most people as Hua was still relatively unknown at the time.
> 
> But he became party chief that same year after Mao's death, based on the Great Helmsman's simple remark, "With you in charge, I am at ease."
> 
> *At one time, Hua was head of the party, the government and the armed forces, having courted the faction led by Deng in order to eject the notorious "Gang of Four" -- including Mao's widely-reviled widow Jiang Qing -- who were blamed for the excesses of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. *
> 
> *As such, he is credited with ending that turbulent time of power struggles and political instability in China.
> 
> But Deng then manoeuvered to oust Hua, who was determined to continue the Maoist line, and replaced him with younger men more attuned to his own ideas of economic reforms in top party and government posts.
> 
> In 1980, he was replaced as premier by Zhao Ziyang, and by Hu Yaobang as party chairman in 1981 -- two of Deng's proteges who were dedicated to economic reform. *
> 
> "If you compared him with Deng Xiaoping, he didn't have the gravitas, the seniority that Deng had," Davin said.
> 
> At the 12th party congress in 1982, Hua's political fall culminated in him losing his politburo seat, but he remained as one of the members of the central committee.
> 
> He lost his seat on the central committee in 2002, but was invited to the 17th Party Congress last year as a special delegate.
> 
> But from the early 1980s, Hua stayed away from the public eye and it is not known what he thought of the changes that shook China in the decades that followed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from, respectively, the _Globe and Mail_ and the _Winnipeg Free Press_, are two articles on the Olympics. The first displays some understanding of China, the second: none:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080823.wolympicssuccess23/BNStory/beijing2008/home


> China's tour de force
> *Heavy-handed police controls, massive state resources and the muzzling of protesters helped ensure the Games were a triumph - for China and its Communist rulers*
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> 
> Globe and Mail Update
> August 23, 2008 at 8:07 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — When they gaze down at the 7,000 choreographed performers in the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics tomorrow, China's Communist rulers will allow themselves a quiet moment of satisfaction.
> 
> The bureaucratic men of the Politburo, who will oversee the dazzling martial-arts displays and opera singers from their air-conditioned seats at the Bird's Nest stadium, will know that their gamble paid off. The triumphs of the past two weeks have boosted their domestic power - and global influence - to greater heights than almost anyone had expected.
> 
> The Beijing Games were primarily designed as a spectacle for television - the smartest way to communicate the government's carefully shaped message of peace and power to a massive domestic and global audience. And it succeeded. These Olympics were the biggest broadcast event in world history, with a global television audience of at least 1.2 billion at its peak, according to the latest estimates this week.
> 
> The vast majority of the television coverage was glowingly positive. Record audiences kept sponsors happy around the world. "Can the Olympics get any better than this?" asked SportsBusiness Journal, a trade publication. "Ever again?"
> 
> This month, after the demise of a long-ruling party in Paraguay, the Chinese Communist Party became the most successful political party in the world today. It has dominated China for every moment of the past 59 years - longer than any other government in the world. (Even the totalitarian regime in North Korea was forced out of Pyongyang briefly during the Korean War.) After the overwhelming popularity of these Olympics among the 1.3 billion Chinese, there will be no loosening of the party's grip in the foreseeable future. The gold-medal bonanza and the overpowering mood of patriotism has swept everything before it.
> 
> "The Chinese leadership's popularity has certainly been enhanced," says Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong who specializes in Chinese politics.
> 
> "The vast majority of Chinese people accepted that this was a very important chance to improve national solidarity and to show China's progress to the world. These goals have been reinforced, and the Chinese government has been quite successful at it."
> 
> President Hu Jintao and his Politburo colleagues knew that any number of potential disasters - terrorism, uncontrollable protests, suffocating smog or political boycotts - could have ruined their message. None of those fears were realized, largely due to relentless planning, heavy-handed police controls, some well-timed doses of good fortune (especially the smog-dispersing weather) and the media's predictable focus on feel-good athletic stories.
> 
> These have been the Potemkin Olympics, with China's social and political problems hidden behind a façade of spectacular architecture, cheerful volunteers and enthusiastic crowds.
> 
> In the end, the government's calculations were correct. There would be no serious repercussions for its crackdown on dissent. The world's politicians still beat a path to Beijing's door. None of the brief protests during the Games had any serious impact on the media. And thanks to massive state resources and centralized sports planning, China dominated the gold-medal table, crushing the United States and providing a daily diet of joyous news for its domestic audience.
> 
> One of the engineers of China's triumph was the filmmaker Zhang Yimou. Once the darling of the Western art-house crowd for his subtle portraits of Chinese peasants, he is now the master of the state-approved big-budget epic, often with patriotic pro-China messages. The famed filmmaker was the man chosen to orchestrate the glittering performances at the opening and closing ceremonies. He was candid in his explanation of Beijing's preference for vast spectacle - even at a human price that most other countries could not afford.
> 
> "I have conducted operas in the West, and it was so troublesome," he said in an interview with Southern Weekend, a Chinese newspaper. "They only work four-and-a-half days each week. Every day there are two coffee breaks. There cannot be any discomfort, because of human rights. ... We do not have that. We can work very hard, we can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month. Other than North Korea, no other country in the world can achieve this."
> 
> Mr. Zhang acknowledged that the Beijing Olympic ceremonies were inspired by North Korea's socialist tradition of mass gymnastics, where thousands of performers are synchronized in every tiny detail. "Their performances can be so uniform!" he said. "This kind of uniformity brings beauty. We Chinese can do it too."
> 
> This spirit of sacrifice and uniformity, he said, was hitched to one of China's greatest strengths: its ultramodern technology. And the rehearsals were supervised almost constantly by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Dozens of senior party officials watched the rehearsals to approve every detail, Mr. Zhang said. "Our program had the highest level of political review since the founding of the People's Republic of China. Basically all reviews were from the Central Committee."
> 
> Political control, advanced technology, a spirit of sacrifice and solidarity, attention to the smallest detail - these were the ingredients of Beijing's Olympic triumph. They produced an astonishing 47 gold medals for China (with two days of competition still remaining), and they produced a show that captivated audiences around the world. It left little space for anyone who wanted to protest.
> 
> One of the very few Olympians who tried to protest against China's policies in Tibet was a Polish weightlifter named Szymon Kolecki. After winning a silver medal in his event, he shaved his head as a gesture of solidarity with Tibet's Buddhist monks. But because of strictly enforced rules that prohibit athletes from making political gestures, he was unable to tell anyone publicly about the reasons for his shaved head.
> 
> "I can't directly say why I did it," he told a Polish magazine. "But I will say that it's symbolic."
> 
> More than 40 Olympic athletes downloaded Songs for Tibet - an album containing songs that protested against China's handling of Tibet. But none of the Olympians could publicly disclose their names, because they could be expelled from the Olympics under the rules of the International Olympic Committee. Shortly after the downloading incident, China blocked access to Apple's iTunes website, where the album was available.
> 
> While the Olympic athletes had to stay silent on human-rights issues, a series of pro-Tibet demonstrations were held in Beijing by foreign activists who called for greater rights for Tibet. These protests, too, went largely unnoticed in China. The police swiftly broke up the protests, and the Chinese media did not report them.
> 
> With the protesters mostly silenced or censored, the enduring memory of the Beijing Olympics will be the deafening noise of China's flag-waving fans, screaming at victories and singing loudly to the national anthem. It has been an impressive display of patriotism and pride, and it helps rally the nation around the Communist Party's leadership.
> 
> One key question is how the party will choose to use this nationalism. What will it do with this massive pride in China's gold medals, this sense of victory for the party itself? Will it become a more self-confident and secure government, willing to relax and compromise and reform on some issues? Or will the Olympic victory be interpreted as proof of the correctness of the Chinese government's policies, proof that the status quo should be entrenched?
> 
> Mr. Cheng said that the Olympics is unlikely to lead to any significant reforms in China. "We don't see any sign by the Chinese leadership that it wants to establish genuine political reform. It's obvious that the party has no intention of accepting any diminution of its monopoly on power."
> 
> On the global stage, the Olympics is a huge breakthrough for China's prestige and national power. Some commentators are even calling it "the first moment of the post-American era."
> 
> But for many Chinese, the goal of the Olympics is simply to demonstrate China's rise to superpower status. For them, the gloating has already begun. "Soon the world will accept that China is a rich and strong country," said one Chinese blogger. "Foreigners will say, 'China is amazingly rich. It can afford things that even the developed countries cannot afford.' "



and 


http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/columnists/top3/story/4217175p-4809986c.html


> Chinese are own worst enemies...
> *Giving western world all kinds of reasons to belittle their country*
> 
> Randy Turner
> 
> Updated: August 23 at 08:32 AM CDT
> 
> BEIJING -- Their architecture is stunning, their organization makes a Swiss watch seem as accurate as the knockoffs they sell for peanuts in the manic city markets. Their politeness is to the point of suffocating.
> 
> Yet there's always this nagging, unnerving question that hangs like the smog that used to hang in the Beijing air before they ingenuously shut down half the city's automobiles, transport trucks and dozens of industrial factories.
> 
> And that is: What the hell are the Chinese thinking?
> 
> Seriously, for all the immaculate preparation, unimaginable dedication and commitment to these 2008 Summer Games, the Chinese -- at least, for an admittedly uneducated foreigner's point of view -- have at so many turns been their own worst enemies.
> 
> In fact, if this 29th Olympiad were a morality play on the pitfalls of obsession, it would rival anything Shakespeare could have penned.
> 
> Let's start with the dazzling Opening Ceremonies, a triumph of human vision and spectacle.
> 
> But wait. Turns out, that little pixie who supposed to have sang the opening hymn that night was, in fact, just another pretty face mouthing the words of a more plain child with the voice of an angel. That's not even OK for Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live, much less the world's largest stage.
> 
> And then there was the pre-taped lighting of the footsteps leading to the stadium, a goosebump moment, which Chinese officials later admitted was pre-recorded in case the array of lights was obscured by smog.
> 
> Really? Out of a cast of 1.3 billion, they couldn't have found a cute little girl who could sing too?
> 
> And what of the heavy-handed approach to Tibetan protesters? Not only did Chinese police this week arrest a small clutch of six pro-Tibetan protesters waving flags near the National Stadium, they threw two Associated Press photographers into the paddy wagon, too. No questions asked.
> 
> Feeding frenzy
> 
> So naturally, each morning's press briefing, which includes International Olympic Committee and Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games spokespersons, has been nothing more than a feeding frenzy for Western journalists with an insatiable hunger to expose the Chinese as a totalitarian society which believes human rights are punches thrown in an Olympic boxing ring.
> 
> And they're getting all the fodder they could hope to desire.
> 
> Just this week, Chinese authorities arrested two elderly women, aged 79 and 77, for "disturbing the peace" and sentenced them both to one year of "re-education through labour." Although we're assured both women will serve their sentence without being incarcerated, the damage -- in terms of global public sentiment -- is beyond every penny of the mammoth $60 billion the Chinese have invested in these Games in order to present their best face to the world.
> 
> Why were the women arrested? Because they applied for a right to demonstrate to protest being forcibly evicted from their homes in 2001 to make way for Olympic construction.
> 
> We repeat: What the hell are they thinking?
> 
> Now there's reports surfacing again about the age of a Chinese gymnast who has long been suspected, but so far not proven, of being 14 years old. The required age for gymnasts is 16.
> 
> "Let's wait and see what kind of proof there actually is," cautioned Canadian Gymnastics President and CEO Jean Paul Caron to Canwest News Service. "If it does turn out to be true, I'd be very surprised that the Chinese would take that big a risk hosting the Games and them doing such a good job of welcoming the world. But you never know."
> 
> Still, do the Chinese, with their wealth of 86 medals, 46 of them gold, really need to be seen as bending the rules just to get one more? Again, the jury is out, but the obsessive posturing of the host nation -- whose top officials have publicly decreed that gold is the only medal worth winning -- only leads to more suspicion.
> 
> Honestly, if you'll pawn off a little girl to lip-sync because the real kid wasn't deemed attractive enough as a representation of China, then what won't you do?
> 
> Why not just let the pro-Tibetan protesters stage their demonstrations? Because it's not the protests that make the world's newsreels, it's the heavy-handed reactions from local police. That's what the world sees.
> 
> Responding to these issues on Friday, the Chinese Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games spokesman Wang Wei made a passionate speech about how many foreign journalists were ignorant of the Chinese and their ways.
> 
> "(So much) criticism in this room just reflects how biased some of the media are of China, how little they know of China," Wei said, during the daily IOC press briefing/interrogation.
> 
> Wei is correct. There is a lack of understanding of his country. Much ignorance and misinformation, frankly.
> 
> But how do you engage in changing that perception by arresting little old ladies and using a cute little girl as an aesthetic pawn?
> 
> And then fail to fess up.
> 
> Asked by an English journalist Friday if the world can trust what they see in the Closing Ceremony Sunday, a fair question given what has transpired, Wei replied: "I can assure that the Closing Ceremonies will be very nice looking, will be wonderful. I don't believe we would spend so much time and so much money of faking the ceremonies. It's not worth it."
> 
> In Beijing, truer words could never be spoken.
> 
> _randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca/i]_


_

York is broadly correct but the ruling Red Dynasty did not need the Olympics to cement its control over the people. The ‘dynasty’ – if not the Chinese Communist Party, itself – remains popular. Most Chinese people are, broadly, satisfied with their government – not pleased, not overly happy, but satisfied. There is a revolution, of sorts, underway at the local, town/district level: free (and seemingly fair) elections. The political centre in Beijing hopes, I’m guessing, that a degree of ‘freedom’ at the local level (where, as in Canada, most of the really, really critical decisions – for ordinary people – are made, and where the CCP is least popular) will stave off any concerted push for anything like the popular will at the provincial and national levels.

Turner simply fails, miserably, to understand either China or what the Chinese government’s aims were. Does he really imagine that anyone in the Central Committee of the CCP cares one wee tiny wit about what any foreigner or any Chinese thinks about “human rights” in China? If he does he is a bloody fool.

In a few hours the whole world will have forgotten, forever, about protests in Beijing, or the lack of same. The lip synching ‘incident’ is equally old, dead, news. If there is some truth in the gymnasts’ age ‘scandal’ the Chinese will sweep it under the international rug. The IOC will be, because it wants to be, quite unable to find any hard evidence of wrongdoing. “Chinese people,” the IOC will note, “often change their ages for perceived advantage. Records are often inconsistent. When dealing with 1,300,000,000 people, names are often identical – even amongst young female gymnasts. Small, young looking girls are common n China. The gold medals remain Chinese.” No one on the IOC or its staff has the courage to annoy China.

To demonstrate his near total lack of understanding of China and the Chinese, Turner asks: “Why not just let the pro-Tibetan protesters stage their demonstrations?” The answer is: “Because they (protests) are *bloody rude!*” The purpose of the Olympics is NOT about abusing China’s hospitality – as an overwhelming majority of Chinese people see it – by staging protests. Most Chinese people are not interested in our views on Tibet. In fact, since for most Chinese Tibet is an “internal matter,” they cannot even understand why we even have views on Tibet. The Chinese are, as York notes, proud of their multiple accomplishments in Beijing: organizational, artistic and athletic. They have invited the world to join them in celebrating their achievements. As far as most Chinese know that is what is happening. The Olympics, for most of those 1,300,000,000 Chinese and for the millions and tens of millions of overseas Chinese – including around a million in Canada, the 2008 Olympics go some way to erase the effects of a century of humiliation. They are happy; they neither know nor care about what we think beyond recognizing and admiring China’s accomplishments.

York (mostly) got it, Turner didn’t; too bad for those who read only the Turner article.
_


----------



## CougarKing

Are the Chinese closer to building a carrier than some have originally predicted?



> Much of the attention on PRC’s aircraft carrier programme has been previously focused on the ex-Soviet Navy Admiral Kuznetsov class carrier Varyag, which was 70% competed when its construction stopped in 1992 and later bought by a Chinese company based in Macau for commercial purpose. The 67,500t vessel has been docked at the Dalian Shipyard in northern China since 2002, reportedly to be commissioned by the PLA Navy as a training carrier after its refurbishment finished. However, despite the completion of the hull restoration and removal of the scaffolding on the ship bridge in late 2006, the installation of weapons, electronics and propulsion has yet started. In fact, little activities onboard the vessel has been spotted since then, suggesting that the project may have been put on a halt.
> 
> At the same time, new details began to emerge on a possible indigenous aircraft carrier programme carried out by the CSSC Jiangnan Shipyard (Group) Corporation at its newly built Changxing Shipbuilding Base. Some sources suggested that the PRC is planning to build 1~2 medium-size (50,000~60,000t displacement) carriers at the Changxing facility, possibly based on the design of the Varyag. If this turns out to be true, the first Chinese indigenously-built aircraft carrier could be expected to join the PLA Navy service by 2015.
> 
> *Changxing Shipbuilding Base*
> 
> In 2003, China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) signed an agreement with the Shanghai City Council to relocate its subordinated shipyards from their current locations alongside the Huangpu River banks near city centre to Changxing, an Island off the coast of Shanghai. The purpose of the project was to provide valuable land spaces for Shanghai’s urban development, as well as to utilise the deep water coast of Changxing Island for construction of larger vessels.
> 
> 
> Construction of the new Changxing Shipbuilding Base began in June 2005. In the first phase of the US$3.6 billion project, four large dry docks, nine outfitting piers, and two cargo piers have been built along a 3.8km coastline. The facility became the new home for the CSSC Jiangnan Shipyard (Group) Corporation, which has been relocated from city centre to make way for Shanghai Expo 2010. With the new facility in place, the Jiangnan Shipyard will expand its shipbuilding capacity from the current 800,000 deadweight tons (DWT) a year to 4.5 million by 2010. The relocation has been completed by mid-2008 and the first vessel built by the facility is expected to be delivered by 2009.
> 
> In the second phase of development, the other CSSC two subsidiaries, Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding (Group) Corporation and Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Corporation, will add more shipyards along Changxing island's 8km coastline. By 2015, CSSC is expected to have an annual capacity of 8 million DWTs, half of China's current production capacity. By then, Changxing is expected to have become the world's largest shipyard. Shanghai will also become the world's largest shipbuilding base, tripling its capacity to 12 million DWTs by 2015. PRC Government has called on China to become the largest shipbuilder in the world, and the Changxing base is the most important step forward in this plan.
> 
> The Changxing Shipbuilding Base also offers the capability to build large naval vessels including aircraft carriers. The largest dockyard in the facility is 580m in length and 120m in width, enough to build a Varyag-size carrier. In fact, a scaled mock up of the Cahngxing Shipbuilding Base displayed by CSSC has revealed an aircraft carrier in one of the facility’s dry docks.





Sino Defense


----------



## tomahawk6

Building a carrier and operating one are two different matters entirely. Frankly I think its a waste of money and the resources could be applied elsewhere such as modernizing more of its armor force,buying more combat aircraft,more ships,subs, ect. Having just one carrier it would be very vulnerable.


----------



## tomahawk6

China has a power shortfall.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/21/cnchina121.xml



> "... The Daily Telegraph  is reporting that China's industrial heartland is facing crippling power shortages, with more than a dozen provinces already rationing electricity. The country is suffering from its biggest power crisis since 2004, when a 40-gigawatt shortfall left three quarters of China in the dark.
> 
> The proximate cause is a shortage of coal  ... More to the point, the actual cause is a highly regulated internal market which caps the prices of coal and electricity, making it difficult for companies to invest in new capacity - on top of a creaking infrastructure, leaving a shortage of rail transport to deliver coal where it is needed.
> 
> Anyhow, so serious has the situation become in China now that, in order to keep the lights burning in Peking, and the television cameras rolling, that other areas are being starved of power."


----------



## Colin Parkinson

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Building a carrier and operating one are two different matters entirely. Frankly I think its a waste of money and the resources could be applied elsewhere such as modernizing more of its armor force,buying more combat aircraft,more ships,subs, ect. Having just one carrier it would be very vulnerable.



I can see them catapulting one of the deck into the sea and the pilot coming onto the flightdeck saying: "Where's my plane?"  ;D


----------



## Edward Campbell

I’m a bit perplexed.

I’ve said, often enough to be tiresome I think, that:

•	China and Russia are enemies – not just ‘_not friends_,’ they are real enemies and there are good and valid reasons for the enmity;

•	China organized the SCO and invited Russia in partly to rub Russia’s nose in China’s assertion of its power and influence in the ‘_Stans’_; and

•	China has consistently and rigorously defended the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign  states.

Given all that, I still thought China would find a way to offer Russia a wee bit of support, some sort of diplomatic fig leaf. The aim, I thought, would be to keep the crisis boiling – to the long term detriment of both Russia and the West. Instead China led the other four SCO members in a condemnation of Russia.

Another thing to remember about the Chinese is that they ‘_play the long game_’ – they generally eschew short term gains.

For the last five years or so the Chinese have been, fairly consistently, thumbing their noses at the West and ‘_playing nice_’ with Russia. All of a sudden they turn their backs on Russia and give explicit support to George W Bush, John McCain and the NATO hardliners (a minority, to be sure, but an important one). I wonder: Why?

What makes it more valuable, in the long term, for China to dump Russia, suddenly, and ‘_make nice_’ with the West? What am I missing?


----------



## tomahawk6

The west may offer more to China long term than does Russia. The only thing the Russians do well is sell weapons.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The west may offer more to China long term than does Russia...



I think that was always a given; it's fully in line with e.g. Barnett and Friedman and I agree with that position. But why right now? I'm having trouble seeing China's vital interest in skewering Russia in mid 2008.


----------



## tomahawk6

Perhaps the leadership is somewhat alarmed by Putin's aggressiveness and taking this step is putting Putin on notice to back off a bit. Every former republic is fair game for Russian intervention including two the Chinese have a financial stake in.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think that was always a given; it's fully in line with e.g. Barnett and Friedman and I agree with that position. But why right now? I'm having trouble seeing China's vital interest in skewering Russia in mid 2008.



Many of the pro-Russian officials in the CCP like Luo Gan and ex-Premier Li Peng (who studied in Russia when it was still the USSR, IIRC) don't have that much influence anymore- Li Peng is retired, IIRC. His protege Luo Gan (who studied in East Germany) is no longer part of the Politburo. 

Perhaps it is no coincidence that China chose to condemn Russia after the Beijing Olympics to demonstrate to its people that the projection of power and modernity that the world saw during the games was not merely a projection. A China supporting Russia's invasion of Georgia- simply because Russia and China were old allies- would go against the tenet of respecting a nation's sovereignty, which China has repeatedly emphasized on many occasions ad nauseam, and would make the CCP appear weak before their people and seem nothing more than "foreign running dogs" or "lao wai de zuo gou"/老外的走狗 to quote a Cultural Revolution phrase, IIRC.


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese should reach and offer the Dali Llama a seat on the Politburo.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The Chinese should reach and offer the Dali Llama a seat on the Politburo.



- What possible advantage would that result in?  Any Central Committee member who proposed it would find themselves institutionalized in a rubber room to recover from 'overwork'.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Perhaps the leadership is somewhat alarmed by Putin's aggressiveness and taking this step is putting Putin on notice to back off a bit. Every former republic is fair game for Russian intervention including two the Chinese have a financial stake in.



- Now THAT would be a war of logistics, wherever they fought it.  One suspects that locomotive engineers and railway repairmen would have higher wastage rates than the combat arms.


----------



## tomahawk6

I wasnt serious about the Dali Llama just thought I would stir the pot.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I wasnt serious about the Dali Llama just thought I would stir the pot.



- Worked.

 ;D

- Anyway, they probably lack the room service capacity, what with Maurice Strong in Peking on the lam from the Oil-For-Food scandal.


----------



## a_majoor

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think that was always a given; it's fully in line with e.g. Barnett and Friedman and I agree with that position. But why right now? I'm having trouble seeing China's vital interest in skewering Russia in mid 2008.



I can think of several reasons:

1. First and foremost, to assert their power. This is a message not only for Russia, but for the EU and the United States as well, saying that the affairs of Asia are of Chinese concern, and it is the *Middle Kingdom* that should rightfully adjudicate regional disputes.

2. To cement their position that territories may _not_ be dismembered. Remember China wants to "reunite" Taiwan and takes issue with the idea that Tibet is an independent nation they are occupying. Russia dismembering Georgia without challenge is a big threat to that legal position.

3. To offer assurances to their clients in the 'Stans that the Middle Kingdom will look out for their best interests against Russia (as opposed to the feckless westerners who are all talk but not so much on action). This is very important as America is also courting the 'Stans in the long game of "building relationships, not bases" (Robert Kaplan; Imperial Grunts)

4. To position themselves for the demographic crash. Russia will see its ethnic Russian population decline in the 2030's, and China is also facing demographic difficulties in the 2020's due to the "one child" policy (Mark Steyn's hilarious take on this is "China will be the first gay superpower since Sparta"). In the mean time, "the East is Green" as Islamic populations grow in the 'Stans and Xinjiang province. Establishing their power in the here and now means the next generation or two of leaders will look to China for military, economic and political leadership. A stable and pro Chinese central Asia will allow the leadership to deal with whatever turmoil results from the unbalanced demographics at home.

Of course there might be other reasons that I haven't thought of, but I think this is a good place to start.


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> I can think of several reasons:
> 
> 3. To offer assurances to their clients in the 'Stans that the Middle Kingdom will look out for their best interests against Russia (as opposed to the feckless westerners who are all talk but not so much on action). This is very important as America is also courting the 'Stans in the long game of "building relationships, not bases" (Robert Kaplan; Imperial Grunts)



So like Kirkhill, you do not place much stock in the SCO/Shanghai Six alliance and are thus not surprised as Mr. Campbell that China would not show even a little shred of support for Russia in this case, despite the fact that both are members of this same entity and Putin was expecting even some form of support?


----------



## Kirkhill

I would say that China is playing its hand much better than both Vladimir and the EU just now.

China has the advantage of a much more truncated decision making process than the shambles at the EU.  But what is Vlad's excuse?

He seems to be demonstrating a real talent for screwing up a deal.

If he wanted to make money he would build pipelines east and west, become a reliable supplier and invest his funds in other pipelines (as he was given the opportunity in Turkey and the Caucasus) so that he would gain additional income.

But, he seems more intent in being the Macho Strongman (always a problem for wee fellas, pace the German Corporal and the Corsican).  It is more important for him to be seen to have power and to exercise it.  Consequently he plays his hand early and over plays it.

His latest gambit, sees him cutting himself off from Europe, his best and most lucrative market, and offering his resources to China.  This all or nothing strategy results in the loss of influence in Europe, and the world at large, and the loss of revenue from both Europe and China.  (With China as his Monopoly Customer China gets to set the price to its advantage).

Net effect:  Russia gets weaker; China gets fuel; China gets to take over Russian built pipelines in something like twenty years......
Historical Analogies? Darius and Cyrus built roads to connect and control an Empire -  Alexander the Great ran along them and toppled the Empire (which he couldn't hold)
The Romans spent 400 years expanding Darius's network up to the North Sea.  Those roads were subsequently used by Goths and Huns and Franks to reduce Rome to a destitute squabble of families.

Reprinted under the Fair Dealings provision of the Copyright Act.

From The Telegraph.




> Vladimir Putin threatens Europe over energy supply
> Vladimir Putin has warned Europe that Russia's energy reserves will flow to the Far East if the continent's leaders seek to punish his country for invading Georgia.
> 
> By Damien McElroy in Tbilisi and Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
> Last Updated: 6:56AM BST 01 Sep 2008
> 
> Central to Vladimir Putin's nationalistic policy is a conviction that the power of the West is on the wane Photo: REUTERS
> The Russian prime minister travelled to Siberia to demand that work on a new pipeline to supply oil to Asia is speeded up.
> 
> In an echo of the photographs released last year that showed the bare-chested leader in a series of macho hunting poses, Mr Putin posed with a rifle for the cameras as scientists tranquilised a tiger at the Ussuri reserve.
> 
> The announcement on the eve of an emergency European Union summit in Brussels on Russia's occupation of Georgia put EU states on notice that Moscow is developing an alternative client base in the Far East.
> 
> Mr Putin lashed out at the European summit, defending the country's incursion into Georgia. "The truth is on our side," he told Vesti-24 television.
> 
> "We act absolutely correctly, morally and in accordance with international law. Someone in Europe wants to serve someone else's foreign-policy interests."
> 
> To stave off tough measures, including possible EU sanctions, Moscow has sent a variety of signals that it will use its energy clout to retaliate against any European reprimand for its refusal to implement a ceasefire with Georgia.
> 
> While expectations of a tough pan-European response have steadily diminished, Europe's energy dependence on Moscow will be overhauled. Officials will tell EU leaders that plans to reduce the continent's energy dependency on imports of Russian oil and gas supplies are advanced.
> 
> A feasibility study is already underway on the costs of creating gas stockpiles to prevent Russia using the threat of switching the lights out or turning off heating supplies to pressure Europe.
> 
> British officials said that Gordon Brown would propose that the G7 - the G8 minus Russia - would begin meeting again as a route to humiliating the Kremlin. "Russia does not like it when people get together get together and talk about them," a Foreign Office official said.
> 
> To avoid a damaging split between EU states, other direct measures against Russia and its allies in the breakaway Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be left to later meetings.
> 
> Efforts behind the scenes have focused on drawing up a travel ban on individuals associated with the Russian-backed enclaves that triggered the Georgian crisis.
> 
> Officials involved believe it will take at least two weeks to agree on a list Timur Yakashvili, the Georgian reunification minister, told The Daily Telegraph that he plans to provide information on up to 150 individuals implicated in the struggle over the two breakaway regions to European diplomats.
> 
> "It will take time to compile the information necessary but what we want to do is focus on activities that sustain these places," he said.
> 
> "We want to make sure that individuals who are important to both administrations are exposed and subject to bans."
> 
> However a French official derided calls from ex-Soviet bloc EU members for targeted sanctions on Russia.
> 
> "The time for sanctions has certainly not arrived", said an Elysée official.
> 
> "While this is not the case, our relations with Russia will remain under observation. We are still in a phase of dialogue, firm dialogue, but not in a sanctions phase."
> 
> Mr Brown warned that if fraught energy links with Moscow's were not reviewed the EU would "risk sleepwalking into an energy dependence" with Russia.
> 
> "No nation can be allowed to exert an energy stranglehold over Europe and the events of August have shown the critical importance of diversifying our energy supply," he said. "With states such as Russia increasingly using their energy resources as policy tools it is apparent that the security grounds for this shift are stronger as well."
> 
> Eventually the EU hopes to create an "energy Nato", with pooled supplies of fuel on hand to cushion European countries, expected to rely on Russia for up to three-quarters of their natural gas by 2020.
> 
> Under the plan, if Russia threatened to cut a country off - as it did during a price dispute with Ukraine in 2007 - other EU member states would have the gas resources to come to its aid.
> 
> EU officials have also been working hard behind the scenes to develop new relationships with oil and gas producers outside Russia's orbit.
> 
> Officials have confirmed that energy talks are ongoing with Nigeria, including possible pipeline supply, Iraq, Algeria, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to find an alternative to oil and supplies from Russia.
> 
> Russian defiance has so far been undented. President Dimitri Medvedev said that Russia would hit back with sanctions of its own if it is penalised.
> 
> He said: "If needed, we also can adopt such special laws."
> 
> He also declared that Moscow would boost support for the two Georgian enclaves. "We will provide all kinds of assistance to these republics," he said.
> 
> "These international agreements will spell out our obligations on providing support and assistance: economic, social, humanitarian and military."
> 
> Meanwhile, Magomed Yevloyev, a vocal critic of the Kremlin's policies in the Ingushetia region in the Caucuses, died from a bullet wound to the head while in police custody, prosecutors said.


----------



## Kirkhill

From today's Telegraph



> Georgia conflict: Gordon Brown heads for clash over Russia at EU summit
> Gordon Brown will clash with other European Union leaders after he demanded the suspension of "partnership and co-operation" negotiations with Russia over Moscow's military intervention in Georgia.
> ....
> 
> France, the current holder of the EU's six-month rotating presidency, will clash with Britain as it seeks to bridge "very different positions" on the issue of sanctions against Russia with action to support Georgia.
> 
> EU countries, France, Germany and Italy, are seeking to avoid direct confrontation with Russia and to sidestep demands for sanctions from Britain, Poland and other East European member states.
> 
> Francois Fillon, the French prime minister, has signalled that Paris will back Berlin in trying to take the heat out of any conflict with Russia over Georgia.
> 
> ....



This follows from the statement in my previously posted article



> However a French official derided calls from ex-Soviet bloc EU members for targeted sanctions on Russia.
> 
> "The time for sanctions has certainly not arrived", said an Elysée official.
> 
> "While this is not the case, our relations with Russia will remain under observation. We are still in a phase of dialogue, firm dialogue, but not in a sanctions phase."




And it also links to http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,572686,00.htmlthis:



> SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH GERHARD SCHRÖDER
> 'Serious Mistakes by the West'



I would note that Schroeder is on the Board of Gazprom

that the German Foreign Minister is of the same party as Schroeder (Socialists in a coalition government with Merkel) and is counselling the same course as Schroeder  



> German Foreign Minister: Security and stability in Europe could only be achieved with, not without Russia
> Read it in Russian
> 
> European Union should not get itself isolated from Russia following the latter's action regarding Georgia, stated Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier Aug 31.
> 
> According to the ministry's head, criticism of Russian leadership for its action does not alter the fact that security and stability in Europe can be only achieved with, not without Russia.



I would further note that Vladimir's previous predicament in the KGB was in Germany  where as 





> a young major in the Soviet secret police spent the last half of the 1980s recruiting people to spy on the West.


----------



## Kirkhill

And then there is this:



> Dutch withdraw spy from Iran because of 'impending US attack'
> The Dutch intelligence service has pulled an agent out of an "ultra-secret operation" spying on Iran's military industry because spymasters in Netherlands believe a United States air attack was imminent.
> 
> By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
> Last Updated: 9:24AM BST 01 Sep 2008
> 
> ...."Well placed" sources told the paper that a top agent had been recalled recently "because the US was thought to be making a decision within weeks to attack Iran with unmanned aircraft". ....




A Strike against Iran would be a slap to Russia.  It would also rip the guts out of the EU and NATO and prompt the formation of a new alliance.  The only question remaining for me is: would France/Germany/Belgium/Luxembourg follow the route of Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and Austria in the Cold War, or would they actively take sides?   My sense is they would opt for neutrality and become thorns in the side of the New West Alliance.

Spain and Italy?  Weather Gages.

China - Smiling

Russia and the US fighting equals a weaker and Russia and a weaker US.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don’t think the Chinese decision making process is quite as neat and tidy as Kirkhill suggests. See, e.g.  http://english.gov.cn/ and http://www1.china.org.cn/english/27743.htm - and there are many others.

The ‘system’ is convoluted and designed, I believe to *force* a *consensus*. Power is, contradictorily, concentrated and diffused: concentrated when consensus is achieved – as now, I’m guessing, and diffused while consensus is being built – as during the period just after Mao Zedong and, again, after Deng Xiaoping. The military manages to retain its own power base by ‘convincing’ the National People’s Congress to make the most senior official (President, Chairman, Party Secretary – whoever) the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, too.

Amongst the important factions that compete in the formal government organs are:

•	The provinces- which have most of the competing factions listed below;

•	The military;

•	Industrial/commercial _magnates_ – the *very* _nouveau_ *very, very* _riche_;

•	Universities and intellectuals – who have a ‘power base’ (based on status) of their own;

•	The big cities – some of which have provincial status while others compete with their provincial governments for status;

•	The Party – which has all the competing factions listed above.

 The Party is having problems. Its influence is diminishing. I know, personally, a lady who, just recently, turned down a party membership she had chased for decades. Her primary reason was that she no longer needs the influence Party membership confers, she also doubts that the influence (for her grandchildren, upon whom she dotes, now) is as powerful or as important as it used to be. As an example: Party members are unable – *almost universally unable* – to overturn the annual university entrance exams – not even to get a student from a good to a very good university much less, as was possible just 10 to 20 years ago, from failure to a top ranked university. Getting  a couple of granddaughters into better faculties in better universities will be facilitated by a son who is a university professor and two daughters who are successful (that really means rich, by Chinese standards) overseas Chinese. Status and money are more valuable than a Party membership. This same lady participated, a few years ago, in a major protest in Beijing when the entrance fees for parks were raised. Despite Party warnings to cease and desist, tens of thousands of pensioners (pensions start at age 50 for some workers) marched in Beijing to protest the park fees (the public parks are the major source of ‘recreation’ for most Beijingers). They won! Pensioners can now buy a very cheap annual pass for all of Beijing’s parks and historic sites.* The Party lost and it lost ‘face,’ too, which is much more serious. In the local (municipal) elections the Party candidates are, routinely, I am told, being defeated by popular non-Party and even *anti-Party* candidates.

The military has been stripped of much of its previously overwhelming commercial power and there *might* be some new kinds of university/commercial and military/industrial alliances being built. 

The overseas Chinese, especially those in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore who invest billions each year, year after year in China, do not like or trust he PLA. They don’t mind the Party, which they regard as providing stability for China, but they are dismayed by the corruption problem – which is exacerbated by the Party. The overseas Chinese and the _nouveau riche_ inside China want a government of laws and equality at law because, when all is said and done,** that’s what protects their investments, their *property rights*. Money talks in China and the leadership – national and Party – is listening, I think.

While I do not disagree with anything Thucydides and Kirkhill have said, I remain convinced that one of the ‘principles’ of Chinese policy is *surprise*.† I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop and I’m still convinced that we haven’t seen it (foreseen it) yet.

China cannot afford an economic slowdown. Progress, while great by any historic standard, is totally insufficient. Most Chinese, in most of the country are still in the second and third worlds by almost every measure except healthcare and education. If the economy and economic progress falters then stability will falter, too, and the regime will fail. Oil is the fuel of progress, progress is required for stability and stability is the key to power.



--------------------
* Restricting access to China’s historic sites and monuments and public parks is vital. A billion people, most of whom feel compelled to climb the sacred mountains, do a lot of damage. The stone steps in many historic sites and temples are, quite literally, being worn away in years, not centuries.

(By the way, I climbed Tianmenshan, it is 999 steps to the top - after the cable car ride – about the equivalent of walking up the stairs in a 40+ story building!)

** And please don’t forget the old adage that, in politics “when all is said and done” more is said than done.

† Old joke: In the staff college candidates are required to memorize, analyze and explain the principles of almost anything. There are Principles of War and Principles of Leadership, Principles of the Attack, Principles of the Defence and so on, nearly _ad infinitum_. One (too early) morning (just after a dinner night) the directing staff (LCol) decided to quiz the students in his syndicate on the Principles of Administration. He jabbed a finger at candidate after candidate: “Planning!” said the first, “Foresight,” said another. “Cooperation,” a third offered. The finger finally pointed towards our hero who couldn’t remember any principles of anything. He looked stricken as he blurted out: “Surprise!” 


Edit: typo


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward - "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!"  ;D

I take your point about factions and power in China, and yes I do believe they are playing an economic game rather than a military game.  Just as Russia is trying to play the economic game as well.  (But I don't sense that Vlad has the patience or the cultural understanding to play that game successfully and so he resorts to what he knows - Tanks in the Street).

But I would still contend that China's ability to react to Geopolitical Changes is significantly greater than the EU which not only has to contend with factions, as the Chinese do, but also with a disparate group of sovereign governments, each with their own interests at stake and a right to act independently.

Lets just say that no matter how fractious China's politics might be their OODA is faster than that of the EU.  Likewise Vlad has, potentially, the fastest OODA of them all.    (On that basis Vlad's errors are his and his alone..... a lonely place if a strongman becomes weak).


----------



## a_majoor

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> So like Kirkhill, you do not place much stock in the SCO/Shanghai Six alliance and are thus not surprised as Mr. Campbell that China would not show even a little shred of support for Russia in this case, despite the fact that both are members of this same entity and Putin was expecting even some form of support?



The SCO is more of a propaganda exercise than a functional alliance at this point in time, and I suspect the Chinese will not shed any tears if the SCO folds. If it serves their purposes, the SCO can also be turned into a real alliance (or a tributary system like the ancient Delian League).

I suspect Edward is right, there is some sort of surprise still waiting in the wings, but I have no idea what it could be. Russia's threat to send its energy exports to China is a convenience for China, since they *already* have access to oil from the middle east and Africa. From their point of view, it means the USN cannot potentially cut the energy artery, providing a greater degree of flexibility. In an ironic twist, China now can play off the US and Russia, like the US used to play China and the USSR against each other in the 1970's and 80's.

I suspect the stress of the "restart of history" will undo much of the EU project. My own take is the UK will drift back into the American orbit (and take its place in the Anglosphere), the EU will retrench in "Old Europe" and "New Europe" will pull together to resist the threat of Russia, while linking to the Anglosphere West for military, political and economic support. (Then again, people who know me think I am a hopeless romantic).

We live in interesting times


----------



## CougarKing

> *Beijing residents are becoming increasingly vocal about their demands to keep emergency measures introduced for the Olympic Games. *
> 
> These measures, which run until 20 September, include keeping drivers off the roads, closing polluting factories and shutting down rubbish dumps.
> 
> The result has been a less polluted city with blue skies and clearer roads.
> 
> More than 400,000 residents have joined online discussion groups to talk about retaining the measures, reports say.
> 
> *Clearer roads *
> 
> These temporary rules were only supposed to last until the end of the Paralympics, which begin on Saturday.
> 
> They were introduced to help China fulfil its commitment to provide the best possible environment for the Olympics and Paralympics.
> 
> But many residents like them, and some want them to continue.
> 
> A survey conducted by the Beijing News found that nearly 70% of respondents supported continuing the traffic restrictions.
> 
> These have kept up to half the city's vehicles off the roads, leaving the streets noticeably less congested.
> 
> Even drivers seem impressed with the restrictions - nearly half told the daily that they wanted the traffic rules made permanent.
> 
> The writer of a commentary piece in the Beijing News suggested lanes reserved for Olympic vehicles should be turned into bus lanes.
> 
> "This will make the public transport situation much better and lead to more people with cars joining the ranks of public transport users," the article said.
> 
> *'Higher expectations'*
> 
> It is not just the roads that have benefited from the temporary rules. The skies above Beijing have been unusually clear and blue.
> 
> Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau announced last month that it had fulfilled its Olympic pledges, but on Monday it gave more details.
> 
> It said air pollution during the Olympics was down by 50% - a 10-year record.
> 
> Not only do Beijing residents like their cleaner city, they also appear more willing to fight to keep it that way.
> 
> There are reports that Beijing residents protested outside a rubbish incineration plant on Saturday.
> 
> Residents, who claim the site gives off noxious fumes, staged their demonstration when the site opened again after being closed during the Olympics.
> 
> The authorities acknowledge that many Beijing residents will not be content if the city's improvements are not maintained.
> 
> "Citizens' expectations have already been driven up by the Olympics," Tan Zhimin, one city official, told China's state-run news agency Xinhua.



Hey, if they are willing to slightly inconvenience themselves for the sake of air quality and/or traffic congestion….why not? 


BBC


----------



## a_majoor

CougarDaddy's post is interesting to me because it seems to fit into a hypothesis about how societies change and revolutions happen (propounded best by Georges Lefebvre in his book The Coming of the French Revolution and Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks)

The basic argument is that true revolutions (or revolutionary changes, since armed revolution may not always be required) are based on the growth of a large and viable middle class. The middle class of merchants, businesspeople, artisans and others have an interest in preserving and expanding their property rights, as well as the social, political and economic muscle to support asserting their rights. Hanson takes us right back to Classical Greece, where the primary economic activity was agriculture, but practiced by family farmers who owned the land they worked (hence they had the same social and economic concerns of middle classed French Revolutionaries 2000 years later).

The poor (peasants, serfs, enslaved etc.) have risen in armed revolts throughout history, but lack the sort of vision and organizational skills to make a true revolution; the best they can hope for is to kill a bad set of overlords and get a different set in exchange. The Rich are very conservative, and work hard to preserve the existing order as it is the source of their advantage and privilege (which is the reason for the "Limousine Liberals" and "Champaign Socialists" that infest modern western societies). 

If the Chinese middle class is organizing and demanding to take more control over their environment, then the interesting question is how the Party and Central government will respond. If they resist, then they risk creating a social pressure cooker as the middle class build up demands and resentment, but (especially as the Chinese favor stability above all else) allowing increasing freedom might be too much risk for them to take. The "best" result might be a series of stepwise changes, mirroring the evolution of British democracy from the late Middle Ages as Parliament became the vehicle of the growing middle classes to extract power and responsibility from the Crown.

A very interesting post indeed.

(edit for spelling)


----------



## Edward Campbell

But there are three Chinas and only one – the rich one on the Eastern seaboard – has a middle class.

There is a second world China, in e.g. Henan, Hubei and Hunan provinces where a middle class is now emerging (by the way Hebei and Henan and Hubei and Hunan mean North and South of the river and lake, respectively – the Chinese are a practical people).

There is also a third world China where a vigorous, ambitious middle class is a generation away.

As I mentioned middle class ‘revolts’ are becoming more common and the local authorities – even the authorities in big, powerful and autonomous *local* governments like Beijing - are, I think afraid to (or at least nervous about) offending the middle class. I doubt that provincial or national authorities are quite as ‘sensitive’ to the issues.

But, I think, the new and emerging middle classes are most concerned about pocketbook issues and corruption is near the top of their list – they understand that corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude threaten their newfound wealth and their property. Imagine that: *property rights* being the ‘issue _du jour_’ in Red China!


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ... Imagine that: *property rights* being the ‘issue _du jour_’ in Red China!



That would be quite the kick in the pants, wouldn't it Edward, if Maoist China entrenched "property rights" before liberal Canada.  ;D >

That is where Marx and his acolytes got it (and get it) wrong.  They think that just because people trade money and money is associated with capital that capitalism is about money.  As you well know, it ain't.  It is about communication and trade and barter.  Some of the most successful capitalists are those ordinary citizens that have managed survive in a command economy bartering goods, skills and services (I get you a car that fell off the back of truck - you get me a Party membership and an apartment.  Capitalism in its purest form.  Maybe that's Vlad's problem.  As a member of the Nomenklatura, with everything handed to him, he never had to learn "The Art of the Deal")

As for the Chinese, you continue to make a persuasive case for not assuming anything about China.   It has a large population, with a large portion of that population and its central authorities seemingly inclined towards a conservative, hierarchical, authoritarian and collective world view.   And yet, at the same time, as Cougar Daddy is a pains to point out there are traditional, subjugated peoples with varying degrees of animus towards the dominant society.

Add into the mix personal wealth giving individuals access to the means to carve out individual futures, craft different opinions through information and communication with others and you have the potential for 150 Quebecs in China.  

Back to a question you have asked before.  Can China and the CPC manage a transition from an Autocratic Empire to a loose Confederation of States like the EU?   Russia and Yugoslavia are not particularly encouraging harbingers.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> ...
> As for the Chinese, you continue to make a persuasive case for not assuming anything about China.   It has a large population, with a large portion of that population and its central authorities seemingly inclined towards a conservative, hierarchical, authoritarian and collective world view.   And yet, at the same time, as *Cougar Daddy is a pains to point out there are traditional, subjugated peoples with varying degrees of animus towards the dominant society.*
> ...



And that's a key point and one of the great things about this forum: we get multiple points of view.

The China/Chinese I know are almost* all _Han_ and, broadly, speaking all quite nationalistic and, perhaps a bit less broadly, supportive of the _Red Dynasty_. That even includes the woman (in her late 60s) who turned down Party membership when, finally, it was offered. Cougar Daddy sees and understands part of the Chinese _mosaic_ that is _terra ingognito_ for me.


--------------------
* I had to go back and insert the "almost." A good friend always manages to find a way to comment, in public, that her husband (who is from the far North of China) is not _Han_. She says it cheerfully, even lovingly, I guess, but it's a bit of a 'dig' - she's telling everyone that he _"married *up*"_ in terms of status.


----------



## tomahawk6

Taiwan has come up with a new anti-ship missile to counter the threat of a Chinese invasion.



> Taiwan has begun production of a new anti-ship missile (Hsiung Feng 3) for its warships. The 19 foot long Hsiung-feng 3 weighs a ton (with a 400 pound warhead) and has a top speed of 2300 kilometers an hour. Max range is 300 kilometers. It uses inertial and GPS guidance to get to the general vicinity of the target, then several other sensors to lock on to a specific ship and hit it.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Taiwan has come up with a new anti-ship missile to counter the threat of a Chinese invasion.



- With a 300 km range, they can - moored alongside the jetty - whack PLAN vessels moored alongside their jetties.  No?


----------



## chanman

TCBF said:
			
		

> - With a 300 km range, they can - moored alongside the jetty - whack PLAN vessels moored alongside their jetties.  No?



It'll reach across the straits, yes.  From Taipei to Fuzhou with range to spare.  I wonder if the long range may have been specified in case Taiwan decides it needs to assert sovereignty over some of the disputed islands in the area that are claimed by multiple countries.  IIRC, they work from similar maps as the PRC, so just about anything where the PRC is contesting ownership with the Phillipines, Vietnam, Japan, etc, Taiwan technically lays claim to as well.

There have been a couple heated incidents between Taiwan and Japan in the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands involving fishing rights and actions of their respective coast guards.  (Reminds me of the cod wars)


----------



## Kirkhill

T6's article simply state that Taiwan "has begun production.....for its warships".   Any chance that it had previously "begun production.....for" coastal batteries?


I'm thinking that a coastal artillery version of such a missile would be very useful, but also very vulnerable.  There again the whole of Taiwan is very vulnerable, so much so that the Taiwanese have adopted similar tactics to the Swiss and buried facilities, including airfields, inside mountains.

To me it would make sense to generate that type of capability and first deploy it without fanfare then, once I have what I need for the primary defence, put the same capability on the even more vulnerable surface fleet to enhance my manoeuver capability.  I might even wait on deploying the missiles in the open until I have their replacement ready for deployment on shore........

Shear speculation, I know.

 (By the way T6 a link or a reference would be appreciated.  Thanks  )


----------



## tomahawk6

Primary story line is strategypage.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htsurf/articles/20080905.aspx

One link.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Rest_of_World/Taiwan_set_to_unveil_missiles_at_National_Day_parade/rssarticleshow/2444506.cms


----------



## Kirkhill

Thanks T6


----------



## CougarKing

What worries me is the fact that the US still has to make good on its pledges to sell Taiwan diesel submarines, which the ROCN/_Guo Min Hai Jun _ desperately needs to counter the growing strength of the PLAN's surface and submarine fleets. The four submarines that the ROCN has- including two newer Dutch submarines sold to them in the 1980s-might not be enough to counter the PLAN threat.

An article that I posted here earlier on page 28 of this thread- from the Heritage Foundation's website- offers one explanation as to why the US cannot do so just yet. 



> Recommendations for the Administration and Congress
> 
> The United States must return to building at least two, and preferably two-and-a-half, new attack submarines per year beginning in FY 2009. The U.S. must begin procurement for long lead-time components, such as nuclear reactors, in FY 2007 and 2008. These steps are necessary just to hold U.S. subsurface strength steady.
> 
> The Administration should also work with key strategic partners in Asia to bolster their fleets. Japan and India are potential submarine warfare partners. Japan must also be encouraged to upgrade its anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and surveillance systems.
> 
> *Congress should hold hearings into reports on the editorial pages of DefenseNews (February 13, 2006) and Jane’s Defence Weekly (February 15, 2006) that the U.S. Navy has sabotaged Taiwan’s efforts to procure modern diesel-electric boats from U.S. shipyards by hyper-inflating prices in order to keep U.S. yards from building anything but nuclear boats. A robust Taiwanese fleet would be a welcome relief as the U.S. Navy attempts to counter increasing Chinese sub-surface fleet pressures in Asian littoral waters. * The United States and Japan also need an enhanced partnership with Taiwan in airborne and subsurface ASW reconnaissance and surveillance in waters under Taiwanese administration.
> 
> John J. Tkacik, Jr., is Senior Research Fellow in China Policy in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.


----------



## Kirkhill

Do US yards know how to build Conventional Subs?

They seem to be having difficulty meeting their times and budgets on nuclear subs and conventional surface craft that they supposedly know how to produce.  How likely is it that the US can't produce the vessels and doesn't want it broadcast?  Or, if they did produce and failed what impact would that have on some of the intangibles of conflict - ie a generalized fear of the US technical superiority?

Barrow-in-Furness proved that even with a recent history of producing conventional and nuclear subs that it doesn't take long for skill fade to set in.  And the US has been out of the conventional game for a lot longer than Vickers was when it tried to refit the Upholders.

It might make more sense for the Yanks to buy Swedish or German subs for the Taiwanese. - But that wouldn't hire Americans.


----------



## chanman

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Do US yards know how to build Conventional Subs?
> 
> They seem to be having difficulty meeting their times and budgets on nuclear subs and conventional surface craft that they supposedly know how to produce.  How likely is it that the US can't produce the vessels and doesn't want it broadcast?  Or, if they did produce and failed what impact would that have on some of the intangibles of conflict - ie a generalized fear of the US technical superiority?
> 
> Barrow-in-Furness proved that even with a recent history of producing conventional and nuclear subs that it doesn't take long for skill fade to set in.  And the US has been out of the conventional game for a lot longer than Vickers was when it tried to refit the Upholders.
> 
> It might make more sense for the Yanks to buy Swedish or German subs for the Taiwanese. - But that wouldn't hire Americans.



I don't think the US has built non-nuclear subs in close to half a century now.  They could employ Americans, I suppose by hiring a Swedish or German firm to train, equip, and license a US shipyard to do so, but as a BC resident... that screams 'Fast Ferry' to me.  It might even be cheaper to buy the subs and just give US workers handouts than it would be to create a domestic manufacturing capability for one order for one small country...


----------



## tomahawk6

The biggest problem with the submarine deal is that the countries that make the good ones dont want to cross the PRC.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The biggest problem with the submarine deal is that the countries that make the good ones dont want to cross the PRC.



The French have official diplomatic ties with Beijing and just economic ties with Taipei, but that didn't stop them from selling those _Lafayette_ class /_Kang Ding _ class Destroyers to the ROC in the late 1990s or even those Mirage 2000 fighters, IIRC.

Nor did it stop Washington from selling the Taiwanese those batches of F16s or those ex-USN KIDD class Destroyers.

Beijing can denounce France and the US all it wants for these arms purchases to Taiwan but they know that for now they cannot jeopardize their trading relationships with two of their larger trading partners- France and the US- although US trade is much larger of course.


----------



## tomahawk6

If that was the case those submarines would be completed by now.

http://www.nti.org/db/submarines/taiwan/index.html



> Since the acquisition of the two Hai Lung submarines in the early 1980s, the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense has been exploring ways to procure new diesel submarines.  In April 2001, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush proposed the acquisition of eight diesel submarines to Taiwan.  However, European shipyards have been preventing from pursuing such a sale by national export policies (after its sale of Hai Lung submarines to Taiwan, China almost severed relations with the Netherlands).[4] Germany has also rejected the possibility of a sale.  In 2003, the US Department of Defense suggested that Taiwan might consider buying refurbished submarines:  the Italian Ministry of Defense reportedly agreed to a sale of four Sauro-class boats, and four more as they are decommissioned by the Italian Navy, but Taiwan rejected the offer, preferring new submarines instead.[5] Taiwan has also been offered Indian and Russian vessels.  In late 2004, the suggestion that the United States might build the submarines for Taiwan itself, voiced three years earlier in discussions over whether the U.S. Congress would support the Bush Administration's decision to assist in the sale, was repeated.  The refurbishment of the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, is one of the most likely options for US-based production.[6] Taiwan has also been exploring the possibility of building submarines itself.  A cross-ministry task force found that Taiwan's China Shipbuilding Corporation could build submarines without additional large-scale investment if provided with blueprints and submarine weapons systems.  However, Taiwanese Vice Minister of National Defense Huo Shou-yeh said that the United States had indicated it would not help Taiwan build the boats in Kaohsiung.[7]  (For more information on Taiwan's efforts to import submarines, please see the Taiwan: Import Behavior file.)
> 
> As of March 2005, Taiwanese officials were reporting that U.S. officials had assured them that the U.S. policy of assisting Taiwan in submarine procurement had not changed.  However, Taiwan will have to pay for the procurement, and the opposition Kuomintang Party has blocked passage of the relevant legislation in the Taiwanese legislature (balking at the $7-11 billion cost of the vessels).[8]  In 2005, the Ministry of National Defense has been lobbying hard for the legislature to pass a special budget of $18.23 billion for arms procurement.  The eight submarines top the list in the procurement package.[9]


----------



## TCBF

- They should have taken the Italian boats.  A mixed fleet is expensive, but would broaden their skill base and experience prior to building and crewing their own boats (if it came to that).


----------



## Kirkhill

What is the state of the Collins boats from Australia?  Are they sufficiently debugged yet that they are a contender?  Would the Aussies be willing to sell new vessels, or even just the plans?

The Taiwanese are not bad engineers themselves.  With the Collins plans and knowledge of what went wrong they may be able to do the Aussies a favour and reverse engineer an improved Collins.


----------



## CougarKing

People in Hong Kong are going to the polls for the territory's Legislative Council (LegCo) election as we speak. So is this continued proof that "one country, two systems" works?

Here is the website for LegCo candidate Cyd Ho/何秀蘭, a member of the political group known as "Frontier" or the Hong Kong pro-democracy camp, who are not only very vocal in calling for better human rights and better rule of law, but they are also very anti-Beijing/anti-CCP.

http://www.cydho.org.hk/main/index.php


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> People in Hong Kong are going to the polls for the territory's Legislative Council (LegCo) election as we speak. So is this continued proof that "one country, two systems" works?
> ...



One country/two systems (OCTS) has to *work* - no matter how much a whole lot of powerful people in Beijing may not like it.

If OCTS fails then:

1. *ALL* hope of peacefully enticing Taiwan into China and of reconciling Tibet to its place in China fades away; and

2. Investment slows to a near trickle. Continued, indeed increased investment is the key to continued progress (growth) which is necessary to preserve social stability and thereby sustain the _Red Dynasty_.

It appears that Anson Chan (陳方安生) will not run again but she remains, simultaneously, a major ally of the progressive forces in Beijing and a significant threat to those who oppose OCTS.


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward, it may be necessary for "OCTS" to work for a peaceful and prosperous China to emerge.

But I don't have that much faith in humanity's collective decision making capability to be able to accept that as a safe bet.  Too many failed states in history.

Having said that, in the long-haul, and as I have said before, I am an optimist.  No matter how many wars and failed states we suffer - We're still here.


----------



## a_majoor

Time to take off the rose coloured glasses:

http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/011853.html



> *Former diplomat says West has 'fantasy' view of China*
> 
> Donna Jacobs
> The Ottawa Citizen
> 
> Monday, September 08, 2008
> 
> Canadians have fallen for a Chinese government "charm offensive," says a former Canadian diplomat and specialist on Chinese mafia "Triad" gangs and Communist China's government-directed espionage in Canada.
> 
> "I think politicians have to take off rose-coloured glasses and realize what China is all about," says Brian McAdam. "The Canadian government thinks it has to pander to China's needs and to align its foreign policy towards China. This is foolhardy."
> 
> Mr. McAdam had a 30-year career in Canada's diplomatic service with assignments in Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Far East. His career ended soon after he discovered a lucrative visa-for-sale scam operating inside Canada's consulate in Hong Kong.
> 
> He spent several years warning the Canadian government that Canada was admitting Chinese criminals and government spies. Immigration and External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs and International Trade) ignored his consular reports.
> 
> Ostracized and in ill-health, Mr. McAdam took early retirement in 1993, at age 51. However, he later instigated a joint CSIS-RCMP investigation, Project Sidewinder, which, in its 1997 report, confirmed his findings.
> 
> "This document," said the Sidewinder Report preface, "does not present theories but indicators of a multifaceted threat to Canada's national security based on concrete facts drawn from the databanks of the two agencies involved (RCMP and CSIS), classified reports from allied agencies and various open sources." A few days after the Sidewinder team submitted its report, CSIS ordered all copies destroyed and the investigation disbanded. CSIS justified the report's destruction as "conspiracy theories -- rumour and innuendo."
> 
> Mr. McAdam has now become an international consultant, expert and author on Triads, Chinese Intelligence Services, their partnership and activities in Canada and worldwide.
> 
> He says that five myths perpetuate the West's "fantasy" view of China.
> 
> *Myth 1: Trade with China benefits Canada*
> 
> "How many times have you heard that China is now Canada's second largest trading partner?" asks Mr. McAdam. "This means that China is our second-largest source of imports after the U.S. -- not that our trade with China has improved."
> 
> He notes that China now exports more than four times as much to Canada ($38.3 billion) as we are selling to them ($9.3 billion). Statistics Canada says the Canadian trade deficit with China expanded from $3.9 billion in 1997 to $26.8 billion in 2006.
> 
> "China is really using Canada almost as a colony," says Mr. McAdam, "getting raw materials from us and selling them back to us in finished products ranging from furniture and clothes to plastics and high-tech equipment.
> 
> "Canada doesn't need China," he says. "China needs Canada."
> 
> *Myth 2: China has 1.3 billion customers*
> 
> "It's a mirage -- there are one billion peasants who cannot afford a bottle of Coke," Mr. McAdam says. The real customer base is 300,000 -- people with privileged government positions.
> 
> He says that the West's widespread trade deficits with China spring from low wages and prisoner slave labour, counterfeit products and pirated intellectual property.
> 
> While a few Canadian companies make money in China, he says, the fantasy of broad-based beneficial trade has been "created by people to justify" a close relationship with China.
> 
> *Myth 3: China is becoming a democratic nation
> *
> "Trade has not brought democracy to China and never will," says Mr. McAdam. Nor will it bring China free speech, free media, free worship or free demonstrations -- graphically confirmed in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and this year in Tibet.
> 
> He quotes Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who said last year that "democracy is probably still 100 years away."
> 
> *Myth 4: China has improved human rights*
> 
> With Olympic visitors gone home, Mr. McAdam predicts, China "will crack down" on its citizens.
> 
> Mr. McAdam laments that "nobody is really taking China to task over its human rights violations." Even in Canada, Chinese émigrés and students are "intimidated by the Chinese government, which leads them to think that they, or their families back home, will be harmed -- unless they spy." This includes some targeted students, scientists, businessmen, foreign delegations and public servants, he says.
> 
> Most of the Chinese media in Canada are controlled by the Communist government or its proxies, says Mr. McAdam. "The information that the Chinese population is getting here in Canada -- they might as well live in Communist China."
> 
> *Myth 5: China is benign*
> 
> "China is engaged in a stunning espionage effort, buying ... its way towards high-tech superpower status as fast as it can," says Mr. McAdam. "It wants to have the world's best military."
> 
> Ten months ago, the U.S. government concluded, in a 350-page analysis titled 2007 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: "China is supplementing the technologies that its defense industry obtains through commercial transfers and direct production partnerships with an aggressive and large-scale industrial campaign. Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies."
> 
> (The Sidewinder Report, incidentally, had reached a similar conclusion in Canada: "China remains one of the greatest ongoing threats to Canada's national security and Canadian industry. There is no longer any doubt that the ChIS [Chinese Intelligence Services] have been able to gain influence in important sectors of the Canadian economy, including education, real estate, high technology, security and many others. In turn, it [influence] gave them access to economic, political and some military intelligence of Canada.")
> 
> In 2005, during question period, Stephen Harper, then-Conservative leader of the Opposition, criticized the Liberal government for not taking the Chinese espionage threat seriously.
> 
> "Today the former head of the CSIS Asia desk (Michel Juneau-Katsuya) confirmed reports from defectors that close to 1,000 Chinese government agent spies have infiltrated Canada,' said Mr. Harper. He quoted Mr. Juneau-Katsuya's estimate that Chinese spies cost Canada $1 billion each month through industrial espionage. Mr. McAdam's conclusion today: "China has dangled billions of dollars of trade, seducing many countries into ignoring human rights issues in China and allowing China to acquire their industrial and military secrets.
> 
> *"Canada's foreign policy in a nutshell, is 'Shhh, don't upset China because it might affect trade.'*
> 
> "We need politicians, the media, and others to tell the truth to Canadians and not continue the fantasies. And Canadians must let the government know that a comprehensive China policy based upon facts is long overdue."
> 
> Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is
> 
> donnabjacobs@hotmail.com
> © The Ottawa Citizen 2008


----------



## Edward Campbell

Mr. McAdam has a specific axe to grind. He has a big grievance with DFAIT, and _Official Ottawa_ in general, over serious flaws in the Canadian immigration programme.

That being noted I have a few comments on his points:



> *Myth 1: Trade with China benefits Canada*
> 
> "How many times have you heard that China is now Canada's second largest trading partner?" asks Mr. McAdam. "This means that China is our second-largest source of imports after the U.S. -- not that our trade with China has improved."
> 
> He notes that China now exports more than four times as much to Canada ($38.3 billion) as we are selling to them ($9.3 billion). Statistics Canada says the Canadian trade deficit with China expanded from $3.9 billion in 1997 to $26.8 billion in 2006.
> 
> "China is really using Canada almost as a colony," says Mr. McAdam, "getting raw materials from us and selling them back to us in finished products ranging from furniture and clothes to plastics and high-tech equipment.
> 
> "Canada doesn't need China," he says. "China needs Canada."



Quite right. But that doesn’t mean that it is good business to ignore or worse, annoy customers.

More important: China’s current dominance of the cheap consumer goods markets  is reminiscent of Japan in the 1950s – when “Made in Japan” was synonymous with cheap, poor quality goods. Influenced by Americans like W Edwards Deming and their own ambitions the Japanese moved quickly to shed low skill metal bending jobs, to Korea, and to focus on high quality, high value production with the concomitant jobs. China will, I think go through a similar process. The Chinese, as Thomas Friedman has said, do not want to engage us in a ‘race to the bottom;’ they do not want to be producers of ‘toxic toys’ – the profit margins are too slim; they are seeking a place at the top. Chinese wages are rising and some low value, low quality production is already shifting to e.g. Indonesia – and there will be always lower wage rates available elsewhere.



> *Myth 2: China has 1.3 billion customers*
> 
> "It's a mirage -- there are one billion peasants who cannot afford a bottle of Coke," Mr. McAdam says. The real customer base is 300,000 -- people with privileged government positions.
> 
> He says that the West's widespread trade deficits with China spring from low wages and prisoner slave labour, counterfeit products and pirated intellectual property.
> 
> While a few Canadian companies make money in China, he says, the fantasy of broad-based beneficial trade has been "created by people to justify" a close relationship with China.



Both the math (maybe the reporter’s) and the conclusion are faulty. At a _moment in time_ there were just 300,000,000 Chinese in the emerging middle class – most in the lower middle class. But the Chinese economy is growing rapidly and, with it, so is disposable income for more and more Chinese. Soon the Chinese middle class will be larger than that in the USA; then it will be larger than that of the EU, then ...

China is a big, important market and it is getting bigger and more important. We need to treat it as such. That doesn’t make China our friend, but it is not our enemy, either; it is an increasingly important and valued trade partner. 



> *Myth 3: China is becoming a democratic nation*
> 
> "Trade has not brought democracy to China and never will," says Mr. McAdam. Nor will it bring China free speech, free media, free worship or free demonstrations -- graphically confirmed in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and this year in Tibet.
> 
> He quotes Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who said last year that "democracy is probably still 100 years away."



True enough – as far as it goes. But, maybe, our Western style liberal democracy isn’t what China or the Chinese need right now. Maybe respect (from top to bottom) for the ‘rule of law’ and the idea of ‘equality at law’ are essential preconditions to better national governance. It is, I believe, well understood by the Chinese leadership that they are essential preconditions for a sound business/investment environment – which is essential to continued growth, which is, in turn, essential for social stability and, therefore, is essential for the survival of the _Red Dynasty_.



> *Myth 4: China has improved human rights*
> 
> With Olympic visitors gone home, Mr. McAdam predicts, China "will crack down" on its citizens.
> 
> Mr. McAdam laments that "nobody is really taking China to task over its human rights violations." Even in Canada, Chinese émigrés and students are "intimidated by the Chinese government, which leads them to think that they, or their families back home, will be harmed -- unless they spy." This includes some targeted students, scientists, businessmen, foreign delegations and public servants, he says.
> 
> Most of the Chinese media in Canada are controlled by the Communist government or its proxies, says Mr. McAdam. "The information that the Chinese population is getting here in Canada -- they might as well live in Communist China."



I have two points:

1.	It is nonsense to say that ‘human rights’ have not improved in China. They have not improved as much as most people might wish but they are better than 10 years ago, much better than 20 years ago and so on; and

2.	China is a very *conservative* society and the position of liberal, individualistic ‘human rights’ is not as high amongst real, true conservatives as it is amongst we liberals.

McAdam is being hyperbolic, as I am wont to be, now and again  ;D, in his comments about how Chinese Canadians and Chinese in Canada get their information.



> *Myth 5: China is benign*
> 
> "China is engaged in a stunning espionage effort, buying ... its way towards high-tech superpower status as fast as it can," says Mr. McAdam. "It wants to have the world's best military."
> 
> Ten months ago, the U.S. government concluded, in a 350-page analysis titled 2007 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: "China is supplementing the technologies that its defense industry obtains through commercial transfers and direct production partnerships with an aggressive and large-scale industrial campaign. Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies."
> 
> (The Sidewinder Report, incidentally, had reached a similar conclusion in Canada: "China remains one of the greatest ongoing threats to Canada's national security and Canadian industry. There is no longer any doubt that the ChIS [Chinese Intelligence Services] have been able to gain influence in important sectors of the Canadian economy, including education, real estate, high technology, security and many others. In turn, it [influence] gave them access to economic, political and some military intelligence of Canada.")
> 
> In 2005, during question period, Stephen Harper, then-Conservative leader of the Opposition, criticized the Liberal government for not taking the Chinese espionage threat seriously.
> 
> "Today the former head of the CSIS Asia desk (Michel Juneau-Katsuya) confirmed reports from defectors that close to 1,000 Chinese government agent spies have infiltrated Canada,' said Mr. Harper. He quoted Mr. Juneau-Katsuya's estimate that Chinese spies cost Canada $1 billion each month through industrial espionage. Mr. McAdam's conclusion today: "China has dangled billions of dollars of trade, seducing many countries into ignoring human rights issues in China and allowing China to acquire their industrial and military secrets.



True, but China is not the only espionage threat to Canada and it *may* not even be the most dangerous. The fact that someone spies on us does not make the our enemy; if it did we would have damned few friends.


----------



## CougarKing

From Strategy page:



> *First Chinese Carrier Aviators*
> September 19, 2008: *China announced that its first class of carrier aviators had begun training at the Dalian Naval Academy. The naval officers will undergo a four year course of instruction to turn them into fighter pilots capable of operating off a carrier. China already has an airfield, in the shape of a carrier deck, built at an inland facility. *  The Russians have warned China that it may take them a decade or more to develop the knowledge and skills needed to efficiently run an aircraft carrier. The Chinese are game, and are slogging forward.
> 
> *Earlier this year, the Russian aircraft carrier Varyag was renamed the Shi Lang (after the Chinese general who took possession of Taiwan in 1681, the first time China ever paid any attention to the island) and given the pennant number 83. The Chinese have been refurbishing the Varyag, one of the Kuznetsov class that Russia began building in the 1980s, for several years now. It is expected to be ready for sea trials by the end of the year. *
> 
> The Varyag has been tied up in a Chinese shipyard at Dailan since 2002. While the ship is under guard, it can be seen from a nearby highway. From that vantage point, local military and naval buffs have noted that some kind of work is being done on the ship. The only visible signs of this work are a new paint job (in the gray shade used by the Chinese navy) and ongoing work on the superstructure (particularly the tall island on the flight deck.) Many workers can be seen on the ship, and material is seen going into (new stuff) and out of (old stuff) the ship. The new contracts are believed to be for more equipment for the Varyag, in addition to the non-custom stuff already going into the ship.
> 
> Originally the Kuznetsovs were conceived of as 90,000 ton, nuclear powered ships, similar to American carriers (complete with steam catapults). Instead, because of the cost, and the complexity of modern (American style) carriers, the Russians were forced to scale back their goals, and ended up with the 65,000 ton (full load ) ships that lacked steam catapults, and used a ski jump type flight deck instead. Nuclear power was dropped, but the Kuznetsov class was still a formidable design. The thousand foot long carrier normally carries a dozen navalized Su-27s (called Su-33s), 14 Ka-27PL anti-submarine helicopters, two electronic warfare helicopters and two search and rescue helicopters. But the ship can carry up to 36 Su-33s and sixteen helicopters. The ship carries 2,500 tons of aviation fuel, allowing it to generate 500-1,000 aircraft and helicopter sorties. Crew size is 2,500 (or 3,000 with a full aircraft load.) Only two ships of this class exist; the original Kuznetsov, which is in Russian service, and the Varyag. Currently, the Kuznetsov is operating in the Mediterranean.
> 
> *The Chinese have been in touch with Russian naval construction firms, and may have purchased plans and technology for equipment installed in the Kuznetsov. Some Chinese leaders have quipped about having a carrier by 2010 (this would have to be a refurbished Varyag). * Even that would be an ambitious schedule, and the Chinese have been burned before when they tried to build new military technology in a hurry.




Plus here is a flight deck depiction of one of their future carrier (not the Varyag) concepts from a Chinese language forum: 






The island is up front right by where it says "A".


----------



## tomahawk6

Doesnt seem to be a workable design.


----------



## chanman

You sure that's their's and not some trimaran concept?  

That's a really weird deck layout


----------



## SeaKingTacco

I can see several problems with this design...but I'm sure the PLAN will find them, too- during sea trials.


----------



## chanman

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> I can see several problems with this design...but I'm sure the PLAN will find them, too- during sea trials.



Hey, is it me, or will you have aircraft crossing paths if you use both landing areas at the same time?


----------



## CougarKing

chanman said:
			
		

> Hey, is it me, or will you have aircraft crossing paths if you use both landing areas at the same time?



Impractical carrier designs, aside, is anyone here not surprised the content of the article above the picture? That they PRC finally decided to use that ex-Soviet hulk that used to be called the VARYAG and will be renamed the SHI LANG/施琅?

And in other news:

the PRC will be conducting their 1st spacewalk soon:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/chinas-moon-s-1.html



> China's Moon Shot
> By David Axe September 22, 2008 | 12:00:00 PMCategories: Chinaphobia, Space
> Last week NASA worried aloud that chilling relations with Russia would cut off U.S. astronauts from catching rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station, once NASA's Space Shuttle fleet has completely retired around 2010.
> 
> Based on news coming out of China today, maybe they can hitchhike on China's new moon-landing, space-station-building rocket fleet, which this week will support Beijing's first spacewalk.
> 
> The "Shenzhou 7" mission and spacewalk "will help China master docking techniques needed for the construction of a space station, likely to be achieved initially by joining one Shenzhou orbiter to another," The Associated Press reports.
> 
> Future goals are believed to include an unmanned moon landing around 2012, a mission to return samples in 2015, and possibly a manned lunar mission by 2017 — three years ahead of the U.S. target date for returning to the moon.
> 
> Don't fret: "China's space experts have denied any military intent in its space program," Bernama assures us.



And Confirmed by MSNBC:



> *China eyes its first spacewalk
> Space officials preparing for October launch*
> By Leonard David
> Space.com
> updated 12:39 p.m. PT, Tues., June. 24, 2008
> China is stepping up and out in the world of space exploration.
> 
> Space officials in the country are readying the Shenzhou 7 spacecraft for an October sendoff, one that will carry a trio of their "taikonauts" into Earth orbit. The mission not only promises to strengthen China's human space travel agenda, but also provides a glimpse into actions to be undertaken in the future.
> 
> China has initiated a step-by-step approach in flying their taikonauts: The single-person Shenzhou 5 flight in 2003 of 14 orbits; the two-person voyage of Shenzhou 6 in 2005 lasting 5 days; and soon to head skyward, a threesome of space travelers. And on this flight, one of those space travelers is to carry out China's first spacewalk, also known as extravehicular activity, or EVA for short.
> 
> In some ways, the upcoming mission spotlights the hop, skip, and jump abilities of China in comparison to U.S. space history.
> 
> For the U.S., the Mercury series of single-seat flights led to the two-person missions of Gemini spacecraft, followed by sojourns of the Apollo three-person crew capsule. More to the point, in the U.S., the first human-carrying orbital flight of Mercury was in 1962; Gemini in 1965; and Apollo in 1968.
> 
> So is there a true measure of growth, albeit somewhat skewed given the driving nature of the Soviet Union versus the U.S. "Moon race"?
> 
> Case in point: If this next mission for China is successful in attaining orbit, that country will have taken something like a year less time to move from single-seat orbital flight to Apollo three-seat space travel — contrasted to U.S. human spaceflight progress in Earth orbit.
> 
> Learning curve
> On one hand, China's steadfast evolution in human space treks is laudable. On the other, given that status card, leading spaceflight aficionados seem to sense different take-home messages.
> 
> "Implications, as far as I can see ... few, if any," said Joan Johnson-Freese, an analyst of China's space policy and Chair of the National Security Decision-Making Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
> 
> Johnson-Freese told Space.com that the U.S. Mercury program of the 1960s was spearheading research just to see if humans could swallow in space ... or how the human psyche would react once in Earth orbit. There were lots of medical questions, she noted.
> 
> NASA's Project Mercury was quickly followed by a salvo of 10 human-carrying Gemini flights from March 1965 to November 1966. All-in-all, piloted Mercury and Gemini orbital outings tally up to 14 flights in five years, Johnson-Freese observed — and don't forget those two earlier and piloted suborbital Mercury missions.
> 
> "Technology development was incremental because it was all new, but consistent," Johnson-Freese stressed.
> 
> "The Chinese will have three flights with a successful mission next fall. They have been able to benefit from lots of lessons learned from both the Americans and the Russians. That is not to downplay the difficulty of the technology or the achievements of the Chinese...they just have the luxury of starting much higher on the learning curve," she concluded.
> 
> Pow ... pow ... pow
> Given the years of mastering human space travel, is China's blossoming to-do list in order to operate in Earth orbit worth spotlighting?
> 
> "Yes, absolutely ... it is worth flagging," said Dean Cheng, an Asian affairs specialist at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia.
> 
> "Now, the flip side to that, of course, is that it has also been done before. So it's not like they need to engineer everything from scratch," Cheng told Space.com, adding that China can depend on designs similar to those proven to work by the U.S. and former Russians. "But, yes, it is nonetheless impressive."
> 
> Cheng points out, however: "The main difference ... there were more Mercury and Gemini flights in the intervening period. What is interesting about the Chinese effort is that they are doing it with so few flights. Four unmanned flights ... then pow-pow- pow ... one-man, two-man, three-man/EVA."
> 
> 
> Cheng also underscored the built-in danger to nations that ramp up human spaceflight expertise. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost people during their respective run-ups.
> 
> "You have to wonder if the Chinese can sustain a perfect space record," he added. "Obviously, one hope's that they can."
> 
> 
> Take-away knowledge
> In terms of where China is really headed in human spaceflight, crystal ball gazing is not easy.
> 
> Stacking up their one-two-three punch in the field of human spaceflight against U.S. space program heritage doesn't quite match up, said Roger Launius, senior curator for the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
> 
> "Learning what China needs to know about conducting a lunar trip, probably a circumlunar trip, on three missions seems a bit thin to me," Launius told Space.com.
> 
> While Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs might have been exceptionally cautious — and thus took more time and a greater number of missions than the Chinese effort — the knowledge return from the American programs versus China's three flights cannot be anywhere near each other, Launius explained.
> 
> "Let's take the Gemini program," Launius said. "A central reason for it was to perfect techniques for rendezvous and docking, EVA, and long duration flight. Assuming that these same skills will be required in a Chinese moon program, and I believe they will, where will the knowledge and experience for them come from in these three missions?"
> 
> Launius said that the Gemini flights swamp China in terms of demonstrated skills. The country has yet to rack up the experience base of spacewalking, rendezvous and docking that is now standard in the U.S. and Russia, he added.
> 
> "A core question, it seems to me, is this: "Will ground simulation be able to compensate for the lack of orbital experience?" Launius said. "Perhaps, but I'm not sure."
> 
> More acclaim than deserved?
> Stepping back and taking a larger look at where China's human space program is headed, Launius observed: "Personally, I think the Chinese program is moving forward at a modest pace and is getting a lot of mileage out of the fact that it is a secret effort that forces us to speculate about it. It is receiving among the space community more acclaim than I think it deserves."
> 
> Launius said that there's enough in China's statements on future manned moon missions to fuel Western speculation that the country has a vast program, immensely capable, and seeking to at least equal the Americans in a Moon program of its own.
> 
> "There is no official Chinese evidence to support the concept of a Chinese human moon program, despite the wishes of some inside the Chinese space program who would love to do it. Occasionally, someone will say something about this to Western media but official documents available do not say anything about such a program," Launius said.
> 
> There are those in the U.S. space community that would like to see China hell-bent on sending taikonauts onto the moon's surface, Launius said, because they believe it would spark a new space race. "I'm not sure that would be the outcome of these Chinese efforts ... but I also see no evidence for serious Chinese efforts in that direction," he added.
> 
> Picking up speed
> Meanwhile, preparations to launch Shenzhou 7 are picking up speed in China.
> 
> According to Chinese news services, the spacecraft has undergone modifications to accommodate an airlock. A spacewalking-qualified space suit has been okayed for flight. There have been extensive checkouts of the craft to fulfill its mission objectives.
> 
> What day the three-person crew takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on its Long March booster in October is yet to be announced. Earlier, there has been comment about broadcasting the spacewalk live on television.
> 
> Moreover, the spacewalk mission — and the duties to be performed during the EVA — has been deemed as crucial for China to make possible a space laboratory or station in Earth orbit.
> 
> Earlier this month, it was noted that six taikonauts had been selected for the upcoming mission from 14 candidates — a crowd that included Yang Liwei, China's first space explorer who flew solo on Shenzhou 5. For Shenzhou 7, three will fly the actual mission with the others tagged as substitutes.
> 
> 
> Also, Yuanwang 6, an ocean-going tracking ship, has been delivered for service in Shanghai to participate in the Shenzhou 7 flight and to assist in the slated spacewalk. It joins sister ship, Yuanwang 5, to take part in maritime space surveying and mission controlling operations.
> 
> Qi Faren, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and researcher of China Spaceflight Technology Research Institute — credited as chief designer of China's first five Shenzhou spaceships and chief consultant for Shenzhou 6 and Shenzhou 7 - has been quoted as saying that plans are already underway for Shenzhou 8 and Shenzhou 9. He added that "the intervals between each launch will become shorter."
> 
> © 2007 Space.com.


----------



## tomahawk6

Have they ever conducted a space launch before ?


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Have they ever conducted a space launch before ?



Doesn't the name Colonel Yang Li  Wei/杨利伟, the 1st PRC Taikonaut in space, ring a bell?


----------



## George Wallace

No?


----------



## tomahawk6

Ok did some reading.First Chinese astronaut launched in 03 and two others last year. I think they are finding out space exploration is very expensive but hey if it keeps them from invading Taiwan or their neighbors I wish them all the best.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is an interesting perspective on what I think is the *real* ‘contest’ between China and the USA – the competition in which aircraft carriers are quite irrelevant:

 http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080923.wasia0924/BNStory/robColumnsBlogs/home


> The tables have turned on Wall Street
> 
> MARCUS GEE
> 
> Globe and Mail Update
> September 24, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT
> 
> As far as we know, U.S. President George W. Bush didn't exactly ask China for help when he discussed the Wall Street crisis with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the telephone Monday. Mr. Bush is a proud man and the United States a proud country, still certain of its position at the centre of the economic and financial universe.
> 
> But the shift in power from West to East must have been palpable all the same. Wall Street, the citadel of Western capitalism, is in its worst crisis in decades. The American economy, once the powerhouse of the world, is on the brink of recession. China, meanwhile, continues to grow at a pace of more than 10 per cent a year, with most experts predicting only a modest slowdown as a result of the troubles in the United States.
> 
> Two famous U.S. investment banks, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, have vanished from the face of the earth as independent entities. Two more are transforming themselves to survive.
> 
> China's four biggest banks all report healthy balance sheets and big cash reserves. None has been seriously compromised by the Wall Street debacle.
> 
> The biggest bank in the world, based on its market capitalization as of Sept. 15, was Chinese: Industrial & Commercial Bank of China. In fact, three of the top 10 banks by that measure are Chinese (while four are American).
> 
> After it bails out Wall Street, the United States will be another $700-billion (U.S.) in the hole. Its government budget deficit is already the highest ever recorded in dollar terms. Next year, with the bailout costs added in, it could approach $1-trillion, which would also make it one of the biggest on record as a percentage of the economy.
> 
> China, meanwhile, sits Buddha-like atop $1.8-trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Its debt and deficit are negligible by American standards.
> 
> The United States needs China, economically and financially, as never before. For some time now, China has helped prop up the U.S. economy by plowing the earnings from its soaring exports into U.S. government securities such as Treasury bonds. That has effectively financed the growing U.S. government debt, at the same time keeping U.S. interest rates relatively low and (until recently) the dollar relatively high. That, in turn, has allowed U.S. consumers to snap up Chinese-made consumer goods for cheap, buoying the American standard of living.
> 
> The Wall Street crisis means that Washington relies even more on Chinese wealth. Just three years ago, American legislators felt confident enough to spike the purchase of Unocal Corp., a leading U.S. oil producer, by China National Offshore Oil Corp. It was a snub to Beijing from a United States that felt uneasy about seeing its corporate assets snapped up by a foreign power.
> 
> Today, slices of Wall Street corporate giants are being shopped around to Chinese investors like so many used cars. China Investment Corp., Beijing's $200-billion sovereign wealth fund, is being courted to increase its 9.9 per cent stake in Morgan Stanley, for example. Suddenly, Chinese money doesn't look so bad.
> 
> It's a breathtaking reversal of fortune. Remember that in past financial crises – Russia's loan default of 1998, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the Mexican devaluation crisis of 1994 – it was Washington or its stand-in, the International Monetary Fund, that galloped to the rescue. Now it is Wall Street that is in need of rescuing.
> 
> No, it hasn't quite come to the point where Mr. Bush is pleading to Mr. Hu for a lifeline. Even if he did, Asian governments are trying to steer as far away from the Wall Street mess as they can. But Asia's new influence is being felt all the same. The dominoes started falling in the first place partly because Asian investors were getting frightened about the money they had tied up in U.S. mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. When they started pulling some of their money back, the mortgage twins began to crumble.
> 
> It is not just the U.S. financial system that has been weakened by the past week's crisis. It is the whole brand of U.S.-style capitalism. Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, has been fond of delivering lectures to Beijing on everything from how they value their currency to how they run their banking system. Just imagine him trying to do that now.




The global economy is being _rebalanced_ – a process that got underway, seriously, in about 2000 - when the € market was born. This ought not to surprise us because it has happened over and over again – most recently when the $(US) replaced the £(UK) as the world’s _reserve_ currency, but that process, too, took a long time to accomplish.

Will the 圆 (Chinese ¥ or RMB) really challenge for position as the global reserve currency? Not in my lifetime and not, I expect in most of yours, either. But, China is a major power – politically and economically – and we must treat it and deal with it on that basis.


----------



## a_majoor

There are several flies in the ointment of this rebalancing (although it will take place regardless of what "we" might want or believe). In no particular order:

1. *The Demographic crisis*. The economic future of the EU, Russia and China is not looking good as their populations are expected to crash in the 2020-2040 time frame. Holding the Euro as the global reserve currency might not make a lot of sense if the EU's population and economy is shrinking. Similarly, the Chinese "one child" policy is set to bite them in the 2020's. Mark Steyn's "Gay Superpower" trope aside, the social turmoil caused by the population imbalance (not to mention the ever increasing ratio of retired people to workers) will almost certainly have a negative impact on the Chinese economy, and thus the East Asian economic zone. Russia will see its ethnic Russian population reduced by the most dramatic amount in the 2030's. Lots of unpredictable things could happen as they no longer have hands to man the factories or secure the borders.

2. *The weakening of the Liberal Democratic order*. By this I mean the Anglosphere's prescription of Individual Rights, Property ownership and the Rule of Law. We will be trading in an environment where these things are partially or totally absent, and Fascist, Autocratic, Theocratic or Conservative powers really won't care about our views of contract law or labour relations.

3. *The "rebalancing" of international institutions*. This will also not be in our favour. If China, the EU, Russia etc. decide to throw their weight around in changing the rules of the WTO, ICC or other International fora in their favour we will look back fondly on the corrupt and ineffective UN of the 1990's. I suspect autocratic, Fascist, Theocratic or Conservative powers will want a "lean and mean" anti American institution rather than a slack and corrupt ones like they have to work with now.

This rebalancing will not reach a stable equilibrium like the last changeover from the _Pound Sterling_ to the USD.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Ok did some reading.First Chinese astronaut launched in 03 and two others last year. I think they are finding out space exploration is very expensive but hey if it keeps them from invading Taiwan or their neighbors I wish them all the best.



T6,

That Chinese astronaut/taikonaut that went up in late 2003 was Colonel Yang Liwei, IIRC. I suppose it was wrong for me to assume that his name had already reached the same level of fame as other space greats such as Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin or US astronauts John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. 

Chinese space exploration is just a further manifestation of Chinese ultra-nationalism, but it certainly will not distract Beijing from eyeing on getting Taiwan back.


----------



## tomahawk6

I dont think these have been photo shopped. ;D





Chinese astronauts, (L-R) Jing Haipeng, Zhai Zhigang and Liu Boming, all born in 1966 and all holding the rank of colonel, salute during a press conference inside the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in a remote desert area in northwest China's Gansu province, on September 24, 2008. The three Chinese astronauts due to blast off on September 25 for the country's third manned space mission, including a first space walk.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile "La Boca Grande"... COUGH... I mean Hugo Chavez arrives in Beijing for talks with PRC officials.

 http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/23/china.chavez.visit/index.html



> *Venezuelan president arrives in China*
> Story Highlights
> Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez visits Beijing to meet with top Chinese officials
> 
> Talks expected to include "bilateral relations and issues of mutual concern"
> 
> Venezuela is reportedly looking to purchase Chinese K-8 military training planes
> 
> In July, Chavez made a similar visit to Russia, purchasing military equipment
> 
> (CNN) -- *Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived in Beijing Tuesday to meet with top Chinese officials and to discuss the possibility of buying weapons, state-run media reported.*
> 
> Chavez is in China for meetings with President Hu Jintao, along with other "relevant state leaders," according to the Xinhua news agency.
> 
> *Their discussions are expected to include "bilateral relations and issues of mutual concern," Xinhua reported. Venezuela is reportedly working on a deal to purchase Chinese K-8 military training planes.*
> 
> *The nations are also expected to sign cooperation agreements in the areas of "justice, sports, and quality supervision and inspection."*
> 
> Two months ago, Chavez made a similar visit to Russia, meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev and is scheduled to be there again this week.
> 
> During the July visit, the Venezuelan leader negotiated for the purchase of Russian military equipment.
> 
> *Since then, Chavez has bragged that it has Russia as an ally. Two Russian strategic bombers have been deployed to Venezuela and three Russian warships have sailed for Venezuela for joint maneuvers with the leftist government.*
> 
> The moves come amid increasing tensions with the United States over the Russia-Georgia conflict last month. The intensifying contacts with Venezuela appear to be a response to the U.S. dispatch of warships to the Black Sea delivering aid to Georgia, which angered the Kremlin.



BTW, for those of you who wonder what the phrase "shut up" in Mandarin is...just say BI ZUI(bee zwei)/闭嘴. However I really doubt that the CCP leaders will even say such a thing if Chavez again goes off one of his inflammatory speeches against the US and the West like he did during this Pan-Hispanic conference last year, IIRC, when Spain's King told him to "shut up".

Still, one must not mistake this meeting as a sort of friendly meeting between two Communist nations, since China' s main interest in Venezuela lies principally in the oil that Venezuela offers and not in reviving some old Pan-Communist movement.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _BBC’s_ web site,  is an interesting article on the Chinese space programme:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7635397.stm


> What's driving China space efforts?
> 
> ANALYSIS
> By Paul Rincon
> Science reporter
> 
> *The launch of Shenzhou-VII by China is another reminder of the country's growing confidence and capability in space.*
> 
> It delivers a message to the traditional space powers: after a slow start, China is rising fast.
> 
> This mission is a critical step in a "three-step" human spaceflight programme aimed at docking spacecraft together to form a small orbiting laboratory and, ultimately, building a large space station.
> 
> It has sent a robotic spacecraft, Chang'e, to the Moon and there are plans to land a robotic rover on the lunar surface in 2010.
> 
> Last year, China faced international criticism when it used a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy an ageing weather satellite in a weapons test.
> 
> But what are the forces driving Beijing's space endeavours?
> 
> Economic reasons are first and foremost, explains Dean Cheng, senior Asia analyst at think tank CNA in Washington DC.
> 
> "From a civilian perspective, you are fostering the development of advanced technologies," he explains.
> 
> Another driver is diplomacy, said Mr Cheng. A wide-ranging space programme showed the rest of the world that China had arrived on the international stage.
> 
> "That fits with hosting the Olympics, that fits with a burgeoning economy, and that fits with the world's largest foreign capital reserves," he explained.
> 
> There is also a domestic motivation: success in space helped legitimise China's regime in the eyes of its population.
> 
> "There are problems like melamine in milk. There are issues of corruption. But the party has shown it is able to achieve things that no previous Chinese government has ever done, and that China is among the first-rank powers in advanced technology," Mr Cheng told BBC News.
> 
> *'Luxury item'*
> 
> Then there is the military rationale: a nation that could launch multiple satellites on one rocket could put multiple warheads on a single rocket.
> 
> Space technology also required the development of precision capabilities which carried over to weapons systems.
> 
> Beijing's manned efforts should be considered separately from the rest of its space programme, Mr Cheng said.
> 
> "The manned programme is all the things I have mentioned and more. It is a sign of a wealthy country - this is a luxury item. It puts China ahead of every other Asian country - significantly - in terms of space," he explained.
> 
> Human spaceflight also served as advertising for the country's commercial launch capability.
> 
> If China was sufficiently confident in its own space technology to launch its citizens into space, then it was certainly safe enough to launch another country's satellites.
> 
> "It is a prestige programme, no question," said Dr Roger Launius, senior curator in the division of space history at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
> 
> "I think China has entered the [manned spaceflight] arena for the same reasons that the United States and the Soviet Union did in 1961.
> 
> "It is a demonstration of technological virtuosity. It's a method of showing the world they are second to none - which is a very important objective for them."
> 
> *Steady progress*
> 
> China's steady, methodical progress in space has certainly highlighted the challenges faced by Nasa as it grapples with the transition to a post-shuttle era.
> 
> The space shuttle is due to be retired in two years. But its replacement, Ares-Orion, will not begin flying until 2015. In the interim, the US will be reliant on Russia for launching crew to the International Space Station.
> 
> But tensions between the two nations over the Georgia conflict mean that Nasa has faced considerable political pressure to keep the shuttle flying beyond 2010.
> 
> And, unlike China, the European Space Agency has not developed a manned space transportation system of its own.
> 
> However, suggestions that China has engaged in a new space race with the US or the other traditional space powers are wide of the mark, experts say.
> 
> "This is not the 1960s. We are not watching China put up repeated manned shots one after the other. But they are intent on ensuring they don't have any spectacular failures either" said Dean Cheng.
> 
> Dr Launius agreed: "There is not the same level of concern or interest registered in the US for a competition with China in space. I don't think they view that as an issue in Europe either."
> 
> He added: "There is a space race underway, but it is an Asian space race. It is between China, Japan, maybe Korea, certainly India. They are competing with each other for stature in that context.
> 
> "And the Chinese, because of their full service capability - humans, robots and military - are at this point in time probably the leaders in that race. But those other countries have lots of capability too."
> 
> Though China may only be the third country to launch a human into orbit, it still has a long way to go if it plans to mirror the achievements of the US and Russia.
> 
> "When you look at the programme as an observer from the outside, they've shown success in building spacecraft that can fly humans and do certain things," said Roger Launius.
> 
> "You can't build space stations until you can do those kinds of activities. You can't go to the Moon until you can do those kinds of activities. And they're not there yet.
> 
> "They're planning an EVA (spacewalk) this time and I hope they are successful. But one EVA does not make a programme."
> 
> *Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk*




I think that the economic factors are the main driver. That would square with what some Chinese people (academics, admittedly, with vested interests) told me. They believe that some areas of pharmaceutical and materials research can only be done in a space station and they also believe that these areas are central to China winning the “race to the top.”

I also think the diplomatic and military motives are one in the same. The Chinese want a strategic missile force but they want it as part of a larger programme to make China a respected (rather than feared) global leader. Military power is an essential component of ‘respect’ but, as I understand the Chinese, that ‘respect’ must have a *balance* of soft and hard power with none of the components being overwhelming.

I believe that the Chinese ‘see’ the world as a circle, with China in the ‘middle’ and surrounded by three arcs:

•	The *West*, which can be subdivided into North America, Europe and Australia/NZ – this is a very important region;

•	The *South*, Africa and Latin America – which is the least important region but, still, not to be ignored or insulted; and

•	*Asia*, including East and South Asia, the Pacific nations and West Asia (the “Stans,” Iran and the Middle East) – which, being their ‘backyard’ is the most important region.

The Chinese do not want any enemies but the *need* friends and clients in Asia and client/resource providers in the South.


----------



## GAP

In the past decade China has extended its' influence to the Africa nations, some with oil reserves, some not. It seems to be pursuing what used to be Russian sphere of influence in the Africa's/Middle East.


----------



## CougarKing

Here's an interesting web blog article that discusses the US Presidential Election's effects on the Chinese who are observing it, especially the 253 million internet users on the mainland. 

Some of the effects of the candidates have on people is also cross-cultural, such as Barack Obama's appeal to the Chinese youth as well as the older Chinese generations' wariness and surprise that a black man/_hei ren_/黑人 would even be able to succeed up to that level of American society. 


http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/09/25/1448502.aspx



> BEIJING – Last week, three books about Barack Obama were published in China – to little fanfare.
> 
> Despite being prominently displayed inside one of Beijing’s larger bookstores, the books – two were his own and the third was a collection of his speeches and writings – attracted little interest the day we visited.
> 
> The shop clerk said sales were "healthy" for a new release, but "The No. 1 Bodyguard in China," a biography of a former Chinese security guard, sitting next to "The Audacity of Hope," drew more curiosity. *No books by John McCain were available; apparently his writings have yet to be translated into Chinese.*
> 
> Adrienne Mong / NBC News
> Books about Barack Obama were just translated into Chinese.
> 
> 
> *"At the average person’s level in China, I’ve just found [the U.S. presidential election] to be less interesting than any other thing – the Olympics, the earthquake, other things going on in China that are of huge historical importance to China itself," observed James Fallows, who’s been based here for two years writing for The Atlantic Monthly. *
> 
> Apart from the events he mentioned, there were also the winter storms that paralyzed half the country; the Tibet riots; torch relay protests; violence in Xinjiang; and now the melamine-tainted milk scandal. No surprise then that most Chinese have been focusing on domestic events.
> 
> But, as usual when it comes to China, it’s never that simple. As we talked to people about the American election, we found varying levels of interest and curiosity.
> 
> ‘*It’s just for fun’
> "Many people pay attention to the election but with different motivations," said Professor Jin Canrong, Associate Dean at the School of International Studies. According to Jin, interest in China is broken down into three broad categories: official (government), intellectual (academics and policy analysts), and laobaixing (ordinary people). (my addition: laobaixing/老百姓 actually means more of "crowds" to me, though it depends on the context, obviously)
> "For intellectual communities, they want to learn something from the process and try to improve China’s approach of governance," said Jin. "But for the average people, especially young people, it’s just for fun."
> 
> "It’s entertaining for an outsider," agreed Li Xin, a young woman who edits an economic magazine. "That makes you want to watch and follow and see what’s going on next."
> 
> 
> And while the government and think tanks have a sophisticated grasp of how the U.S. election campaign works, ordinary Chinese seem bewildered by the process. "I think the election process is quite complicated with all the rules of caucuses, primaries, and the general election," said Li.
> 
> Especially the election conclusion. One Chinese acquaintance told me he was stunned, when he first witnessed a presidential election after moving to the United States, to see a candidate concede defeat. "The only form of democracy we Chinese have ever seen really is what is in Taiwan," he said. "And that is completely different. The loser never just gives up." ( my comment:  COUGH Guomindang candidate Lien Chan from a couple of years ago...COUGH ;D)
> 
> Personality, not policy
> "We noticed some differences in their policy towards China," said Jin. "For John McCain, he will pay more attention to [the] so-called military build-up of China, the religious freedoms, and Taiwan…. For Obama, we have some concern about the possible trade protectionism, some dispute around climate change, human rights, especially the human rights issue relating [to] Tibet."
> 
> But because the policy differences at this stage seem minute or elusive to most Chinese, they focus instead on the candidates’ personalities. "McCain, he’s a veteran, he’s very patriotic, and he’s 70. He’s got all this old stuff going on," said Annie Gong, a 20-year old college junior. "Obama, of course, he’s young, cute…but I think he’s kind of lacking in experience."
> 
> In general, young Chinese, however, seem drawn to the Illinois senator. "I think Obama is really exciting," said Li, who is 29. "He represents the fresh face of America. The typical American dream."
> 
> And in a country which counts 253 million people as internet users – more than in the United States – Obama’s internet savvy has been noted. "His team is very skillful in communicating with young people by the internet," observed Jin.
> 
> But for older Chinese, Obama’s race is a stumbling block. "I’ve been struck by how many high-level people in China are sort of thrown off their feet by the idea of a black person possibly as the president of the U.S.," said Fallows.
> 
> Racism isn’t enough to explain their reaction to Obama. Throughout the Cold War, the Chinese were fed a diet of anti-capitalist propaganda, a narrative that portrayed the U.S. political and economic system as corrupt and immoral. American capitalism, according to this viewpoint, was the root of its manifold social ills: inequality, sexual immorality, urban poverty, violence, and, especially, racism.
> 
> On Wednesday, one of our interns noticed that a translation of a U.S. article discussing how race could cost Obama votes was being widely circulated on some of China’s popular websites.
> 
> The fact of Obama as a U.S. presidential candidate creates anxiety for this older generation of Chinese. "How is it possible that someone who grew up in that system can succeed?" a local Chinese journalist asked rhetorically."I think his success upsets those people’s world view – their understanding of what American society is."*
> 
> U.S. - China relations
> So far, the Chinese government has stayed mum on its preferences. The leadership in Beijing appears to favor neither candidate, but "If there were a huge debate over the future of Taiwan, huge U.S. debate over a military rivalry with China, it might be different," said Fallows.
> 
> Also, relations between Beijing and Washington have been on a stable course in recent years.
> 
> "People tend to think, there will be no dramatic change in policy [with the incoming administration]," noted Jin.
> 
> But whoever ends up as the U.S. president, one thing remains clear to those living here: he will need to cooperate with the Chinese leadership. "There is such thoroughgoing connection that it just is fantasy that one can go without the other," said Fallows.
> 
> Ultimately, though, what is important to the Chinese is that America stays a true friend. "As a Chinese, I will be very happy if I saw one candidate say he [wants to] establish a very good contact with China," said Edmund Lu, a business school student. *"But if he says he doesn’t like China or he supports Taiwan independence, I will feel very sad. I will not support him*." (_my comment: how typical   : ) _


----------



## CougarKing

And the 1st spacewalk goes off without any problems. 

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-09/27/content_10122755.htm




> *President Hu says spacewalk a major breakthrough  *
> 
> www.chinaview.cn  2008-09-27 18:35:59
> 
> Special Report: Third Manned Space Mission
> 
> Commentary: Taikonaut Zhai's small step historical leap for China
> 
> Backgrounder: Chinese footprints in outer space
> 
> BEIJING, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- The spacewalk performed by Chinese taikonauts Zhai Zhigang Saturday afternoon marks a major breakthrough in China's space program, Chinese President Hu Jintao said.
> 
> *    Hu talked with the trio taikonauts at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center for the Shenzhou-7 mission at 6:35 p.m. Saturday, when he inquired the physical conditions of the three taikonauts. *
> 
> "Your country and your fellow citizens thank you for your devotion to the space program," he said.
> 
> He congratulated the trio over the success of the spacewalk, and encouraged them to continue the efforts for a "complete success.
> 
> Zhai Zhigang was assisted during the spacewalk by Liu Boming in the orbit module. China is the third country in the world to accomplish the feat after the United States and Russia.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It worked.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is a report on the successful conclusion of the Shenzhou VII mission:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080928.wchinaspace0928/BNStory/Science/home


> China's spacewalk astronauts return as heroes
> 
> EMMA GRAHAM-HARRISON
> Reuters
> 
> September 28, 2008 at 8:58 AM EDT
> 
> BEIJING — Three Chinese astronauts landed safely back on earth on Sunday after a 68-hour voyage and space walk that showcased the country's technological mastery and were hailed as a major victory by its leaders.
> 
> Their Shenzhou ("sacred vessel") spacecraft parachuted down to the steppes of northern Inner Mongolia region at dusk. Doctors rushed to open the capsule and check the men as they readjusted to gravity and recovered from the punishing re-entry.
> 
> Spacewalker Zhai Zhigang was the first to emerge and was helped to a nearby folding chair, where he was greeted with flowers and applause and said he was "proud of his motherland".
> 
> Premier Wen Jiabao told the nation minutes later that the three were heroes for their efforts, which put China in an elite club of three nations that have managed a space walk.
> 
> "The complete success of the manned Shenzhou VII is a great stride forward for China's space technology," he said, adding that the country's efforts were focused only on science.
> 
> "Chinese people have ceaselessly sought the peaceful development and use of space technology," he said. China's rapidly advancing program has raised disquiet among Western governments and in Japan that it may have military ambitions in space, especially after conducting an anti-satellite missile test last year.
> 
> Mr. Zhai's brief but historic outing in a Chinese-designed space suit that cost $4.4-million capped a year in which the country has both coped with the tragedy of the devastating Sichuan earthquake and revelled in the Beijing Olympics.
> 
> The ability to conduct a space walk is key to a longer-term goal of assembling a space lab and then a larger space station, and maybe one day making a landing on the moon.
> 
> The feat has also provided the government with a welcome diversion from a scandal about toxic milk that has poisoned thousands of infants and killed four, inciting anger at home and tainting the "made in China" brand abroad.
> 
> From cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai to tiny rural hamlets, the astronauts' exploits have been followed on television by a mesmerized population, with millions glued to live broadcasts of the takeoff, space walk and landing.
> 
> The trio can expect an adoring welcome from the whole country when they are allowed out of quarantine, which the official Xinhua agency said would last around half a month.
> 
> Previous space pioneers, now national icons, have been showered with tributes and gifts ranging from luxury housing to traditional operas performed in their honour.
> 
> The fast-growing Asian power wants to be sure of a say in the future use of space and its resources, and has come a long way since late leader Mao Zedong lamented that China could not even launch a potato into space.
> 
> China's first manned spaceflight was in 2003, followed by a two-man flight in 2005. The only other countries that have sent people into space are Russia and the United States.
> 
> The mission is also a great success for the Chinese Communist Party, which next year celebrates the 60th anniversary of its ascent to power, and Premier Wen's speech was peppered with jargon that emphasized its role in the space program.



One revealing thing about this mission is that the TV coverage of the mission was live for most Chinese. This indicates a high level of official confidence in the technical aspects of the programme.


----------



## GAP

Because it was already filmed maybe?  ;D

On liftoff there were congratulations and kodos to all, but they boobooed.......it was posted hours before the liftoff.... ;D


----------



## Edward Campbell

And here is a link to extensive (and extensively self congratulatory) English language TV coverage of the mission.


----------



## tomahawk6

Hitchens has a pretty bleak assesment of China's involvement in Africa. The article is too long to paste. One point he makes is the failure of the European colonists in Africa and he wonders if the slave state approach might be more pragmatic. Somehow I dont see Africans putting up with their Chinese overlords,but I might be wrong.He who has guns rules.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1063198/PETER-HITCHENS-How-China-created-new-slave-empire-Africa.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I’m a bit perplexed.
> 
> I’ve said, often enough to be tiresome I think, that:
> 
> •	China and Russia are enemies – not just ‘_not friends_,’ they are real enemies and there are good and valid reasons for the enmity;
> 
> •	China organized the SCO and invited Russia in partly to rub Russia’s nose in China’s assertion of its power and influence in the ‘_Stans’_; and
> 
> •	China has consistently and rigorously defended the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign  states.
> 
> Given all that, I still thought China would find a way to offer Russia a wee bit of support, some sort of diplomatic fig leaf. The aim, I thought, would be to keep the crisis boiling – to the long term detriment of both Russia and the West. Instead China led the other four SCO members in a condemnation of Russia.
> 
> Another thing to remember about the Chinese is that they ‘_play the long game_’ – they generally eschew short term gains.
> 
> For the last five years or so the Chinese have been, fairly consistently, thumbing their noses at the West and ‘_playing nice_’ with Russia. All of a sudden they turn their backs on Russia and give explicit support to George W Bush, John McCain and the NATO hardliners (a minority, to be sure, but an important one). I wonder: Why?
> 
> What makes it more valuable, in the long term, for China to dump Russia, suddenly, and ‘_make nice_’ with the West? What am I missing?




Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is an article that addresses some of my questions:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080926.wcochina29/BNStory/specialComment/home


> The marriage of convenience is over
> *In the wake of the invasion of Georgia, China is seriously rethinking its relations with Russia*
> 
> DIMITRY SHLAPENTOKH
> 
> From Monday's Globe and Mail
> September 28, 2008 at 11:24 PM EDT
> 
> Second honeymoons rarely, if ever, recapture the zest of lost love. Yet ever since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Russia and China have sought to rekindle the close relations that once, supposedly, existed between the USSR and Mao's China. But this renewed Sino-Russian marriage always smacked more of convenience - aimed as it was at checking U.S. hegemony - than of true romance. And, with Russia's recent invasion of Georgia, even the illusion of attraction has now been shattered.
> 
> During Vladimir Putin's presidency, Chinese and Russian troops engaged in joint military manoeuvres, and the two countries became dominant powers in the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, which, to some Western observers, looked like an effort to counterbalance the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There were also years of “Russia in China” and “China in Russia” cultural exchanges, meant to underscore that the two countries were tied together not just by geopolitical pragmatism, but by genuine cultural and historical ties.
> 
> But the fact is that 17 years of high-level bilateral co-operation have produced little of substance. Indeed, in the wake of the invasion of Georgia, China may be seriously rethinking its relations with Russia. It may not yet be ready to embark on a full-fledged policy of “containment,” but after the dismemberment of Georgia - and with Russia claiming a zone of “privileged influence” throughout the former Soviet world - China clearly views Russia as an emerging strategic threat.
> 
> For example, China has refused to endorse Russia's recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and has encouraged the SCO's other members to do the same. The reasons are not hard to find. As a general principle of foreign policy, China believes national borders are sacrosanct. No power, not even the United Nations, should be allowed to change them without the consent of the country concerned.
> 
> More importantly, China views the breakup of the USSR as one of the greatest strategic gifts in its history. Instead of confronting a (usually hostile) Russian/Soviet empire on its border, a vast swath of buffer states appeared after 1991. Their continued independence is now deemed essential to China's national security. As a result, any more Russian efforts to establish even informal suzerainty over the Soviet successor states are, following the dismemberment of Georgia, likely to meet Chinese resistance.
> 
> The economic components of the Sino-Russian relationship - where real attachments are tested - are also dissatisfactory, at least from China's point of view. China's major interest in Russia is oil and gas. But, while Russia is firmly committed to being a major supplier of gas and oil to Europe, it is hesitant to play a similar role with China. Moreover, Russia's efforts to gain monopoly control of the gas pipeline networks across Eurasia pose a direct danger for China, because monopolists can not only gouge their consumers, but also shut off supplies for political purposes, as Russia has done repeatedly over the past two decades. So China's national security interest is to ensure that the gas-supplying nations of Central Asia have outlets to sell their gas that are not under Kremlin control.
> 
> Other than oil, gas and other commodities, China has rather limited interests in Russia. Russia has been China's major supplier of weapons since the late 1990s. But, given the stagnant state of Russian science and technology, even the best Russian equipment now seems out of date. Indeed, although the war with Georgia demonstrated the revived combat spirit of the Russian army - at least when compared to its ineptness in the two Chechen wars of the 1990s - it also exhibited the grave defects of Russian military technology. Most of the arms used were yesterday's weapons. As China is now able to harness its own technological might to produce sophisticated weapons, Russia's usefulness in this area is waning fast.
> 
> Nor do the Chinese have much interest in assuming de facto control of Asiatic Russia, despite shrieks from Russian strategic pundits that this is China's real goal. China might, indeed, have an interest in some border areas with fertile soil and moderate climate. But it hardly wishes to colonize the frozen wastes of Siberia. In fact, Siberia is not much different from China's own almost empty mountain/desert borderlands, where even agriculture is a daunting task. As for Russia's Far East, the Chinese believe it will eventually fall to China anyway, so there is no need to hasten the process.
> 
> China is far more interested in focusing on the United States, its major trade partner and rival, and on South Asia and Iran, which supplies much of China's oil and regards it as a more reliable ally than Russia. Thus, the recently signed agreement settling China's ongoing border dispute with Russia was not aimed so much at building a geopolitical marriage as securing each other's rear, offering both sides a free hand to explore opportunities elsewhere.
> 
> What China wants and what it gets may be different things. With its long borders with Russia, China knows it would have much to regret if a new, oil-fired Russian empire appeared on its doorstep.
> 
> _Dimitry Shlapentokh is associate professor of history at Indiana University, South Bend._




I think the Iranian oil ‘connection’ is very important to Sino-American relations. It is not just a ‘pipe dream’ and China’s friend (client?) Pakistan, which is ‘central’ to the scheme was interested as late as the Spring and so, just a year ago, were the Iranians. While some Asians may believe that ”Israeli pre-emption [is] better than [an]Islamist cure” for the Middle East, I think China will see any attack on Iran as a very unfriendly, dangerously provocative and American _directed_ act.


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese dont care who they get their oil from. They are buying Iraqi crude because the  democrat  Congress wont allow the US to buy it.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The Chinese dont care who they get their oil from. They are buying Iraqi crude because the  democrat  Congress wont allow the US to buy it.



Quite correct. In that they are just like (almost) everyone else. Most countries, the US excepted, don't care where their oil comes from.

But most countries,including China, want a secure supply - and China would rather not rely upon tankers for its supply; it would rather have oil from a friend that flows through pipelines that run through friendly, ideally client, states.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Quite correct. In that they are just like (almost) everyone else. Most countries, the US excepted, don't care where their oil comes from.
> 
> But most countries,including China, want a secure supply - and China would rather not rely upon tankers for its supply; it would rather have oil from a friend that flows through pipelines that run through friendly, ideally client, states.



You know I just realized that the South China Sea/_Zhong Nan Hai _ claim by Beijing up may just be based on the need to secure the passage of these tankers to the mainland after all rather than any real sense of "Han" entitlement/right to these waters reminiscent of the Ming Dynasty reach up to the area through their expeditions.


----------



## tomahawk6

Actually the tankers have to go through the Indian Ocean and into the Strait of Malacca.Thats the choke point for tankers bound for China and thats the mission of the Indian Navy.


----------



## TCBF

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... and thats the mission of the Indian Navy.



- Which I am sure the Chinese find very re-assuring...

 ;D


----------



## tomahawk6

All they have to do is play nice with India.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Actually the tankers have to go through the Indian Ocean and into the Strait of Malacca.Thats the choke point for tankers bound for China and thats the mission of the Indian Navy.



Well the Southeastern end of the Malacca Strait enters the South China Sea near Singapore. Of course it is a chokepoint that is also pirate-infested and thus the sealanes there are the responsibility for a number of navies in the region. Still, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia would be still in a better position than India or the US to take advantage of this chokepoint by blockading it -specifically China-bound sea-commerce- if the need ever arises, because of these 3 nations' proximity to where the Strait meets the South China Sea. Also, it was a good move for the US to make an agreement with Singapore to allow the USN to periodically dock their ships at Seletar Naval base, IIRC.


----------



## a_majoor

The USN's long suit is the carrier battle group, so they have the ability to shut down the Malacca Strait from the positions in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. (This could also be done with attack submarines, or other combinations of systems). Their physical presence is not entirely necessary (and they could also grit their teeth and watch the USAF shut down the Malacca Strait using airpower; B-52's could mine the strait and launch anti ship missiles at targets).

The Indian Navy might not have the same strength and reach as the USN, but they also have a potent combination of submarines, surface forces and limited carrier aviation to control the western approaches, and the Japanese Navy is a very sophisticated and world class force which could establish control over the eastern approaches. Even the RAN can project power into the region, although not with the same weight as the other navies.

Since war planners have to go by capabilities, not intentions, the tanker route through the Malacca Strait probably keeps lots of people up at night....


----------



## GAP

I have not seen anything where these companies pick up protection teams prior to transiting through the Malacca Strait  and the Somalia stretch, then drop them off at a collection point once they are safely past....

This concept has to be a whole lot cheaper than paying ransoms, losing cargo and ships, and paying exorbitant insurance rates as more and more ships are attacked....

In fact I am surprised that entrepreneur hasn't done it already.....


----------



## a_majoor

The law of unintended consequences strikes again:

http://china-e-lobby.blogspot.com/2008/10/even-wall-street-panic-means-bad-news.html



> *Even the Wall Street panic means bad news for Communist China*
> 
> I'm sure there are many, many cadres in Beijing who are deeply grateful that the Wall Street panic has dominated the news for so long.
> 
> Whatever one thinks of the panic (either as a localized problem in the financial sector or a prelude to a global economic meltdown), it has done what the Korean colony's nuclear antics (CNN and One Free Korea) could not do - distract attention from the melamine fiasco (Epoch Times), to say nothing of more recent reports of fraud (Epoch Times) and repression (World Net Daily).
> 
> The initial Congressional refusal to approve the Wall Street bailout meant even more time when these pesky problems would stay away from the spotlight, but it also meant that Congress would remain in session past its expected adjournment. That could mean a welcome surprise for anti-Communists everywhere: approval of the U.S.-India nuclear deal (Washington Times):
> 
> Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said Tuesday he was close to
> an agreement to let debate proceed on the controversial pact, which U.S. officials see as the centerpiece of new strategic alliance with one of the world's emerging economic and military powerhouses.
> 
> "I'm quite sure that we can finalize [an agreement] so that there can be a vote on that tomorrow," said Mr. Reid.
> 
> Over the objections of opponents who said the pact would undercut global efforts to restrain nuclear proliferation, the House passed the India agreement in a 298-117 vote Saturday. But it was not clear that the Senate would have time to act until lawmakers were kept in session to deal with the Wall Street credit crisis.
> 
> 
> In other words, the Wall Street shenanigans will give Congress enough time to cement the emerging U.S.-India alliance.
> 
> The further context of this is equally damning for Beijing: increasing concern within the American military about the buildup of the so-called People's Liberation Army (Forbes, Washington Times, and Yomiuri Shimbun), further exposure of the Long Arm of Lawlessness (Epoch Times), the nomination of Hu Jia for the Nobel Peace Prize (Epoch Times), and the continuing focus on Tibet (Epoch Times and more Epoch Times).
> 
> At the very least, the Wall Street brouhaha was supposed to make the United States look bad, make the cadres look good by comparison, and as I said earlier, distract attention from a host of troubles. It was not supposed to accidentally allow Washington and New Delhi to move closer together.
> 
> Yet that appears to be exactly what it will do. I guess Bismarck's adage will be proven true once more!
> 
> 
> Talk about unintended consequences
> I'm sure the folks in Beijing are having a lot of fun watching us work through the Wall Street panic - tut-tutting at the markets, hooting at the Congressional vote Monday (I was happy with the vote, too, but for very different reasons) ...
> Posted by D.J. McGuire at 10:49 AM


----------



## tomahawk6

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ic8Xn_aWRe5NctNY-Kg8nLaj-EmwD93J95V00

US announces Taiwan arms package

By FOSTER KLUG – 1 hour ago 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration announced plans Friday to sell up to $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan, a decision sure to anger Taiwan's rival China and one that could complicate stalled North Korean disarmament efforts.

The announcement of the package, which includes Apache helicopters and Patriot III missiles, came in a notification to Congress posted on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Web site. The State Department said lawmakers, who were expected to leave Washington on Friday to campaign for November elections, have 30 days to comment on the proposed sale. Without objections, the deal would proceed.

The arms package enjoys support among senior lawmakers, who were briefed on the deal by administration officials. China, however, vehemently opposes the provision of weapons to Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory and has threatened to invade should the self-governing island ever formalize its de facto independence.

U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are a sensitive matter because any dispute between China and Taiwan could ensnare the United States, Taiwan's most important ally and largest arms supplier.

The United States and China are part of troubled six-nation negotiations to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons. A successful result to the stalled talks is an important foreign policy goal of the Bush administration in its remaining months in office. China, which hosts the talks, is seen as having economic and political leverage with the North.

The State Department said in a statement that the arms package, which also includes Harpoon missiles, Javelin missiles, upgrades for Taiwan's E-2T aircraft and spare parts for Taiwan's air force, is "a significant and tangible demonstration of the commitment of this administration to provide Taiwan the defensive arms its needs to be strong."

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said judicious arms sales constitute "an essential element of United States support for a secure, stable and democratic Taiwan, as well as peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Now is not the time to backtrack from that historic and bipartisan policy."

This year's U.S. Defense Department report on China's military said Beijing continues its huge military buildup opposite Taiwan, further pushing the balance of power between the two rivals toward the mainland's favor.

Taiwan relies on U.S. weapons to keep pace with China. Washington shifted its recognition as China's official government from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but it remains committed to Taiwan's defense and has hinted it could come to the island's aid if China should attack.

U.S. caution about selling arms to Taiwan reflects China's growing economic and political clout. The Bush administration needs China's help in a host of international efforts, including attempts to confront Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.

Among the principal contractors for the Apache sales are Boeing Co., General Electric Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. For the Patriot missiles, the principal contractors are Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin. 

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan of the upgrade of four E-2T Aircraft to the HAWKEYE 2000 configuration
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-47.pdf

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan of 30 AH-64D Block III APACHE Longbow Attack Helicopters
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-41.pdf

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan of 330 PATRIOT Advanced Capability (PAC-3) missiles
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-56.pdf

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan of 32 UGM-84L Sub-Launched HARPOON Block II missiles and 2 UTM-84L HARPOON Block II Exercise missiles
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-46.pdf

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan which provides funds for the establishment of a blanket order requisition case for follow-on spare parts in support of F-5E/F, C-130H, F-16A/B, and Indigenous Defense Fighter IDF aircraft, communication equipment, radar, and other related elements of logistics support
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-57.pdf

(WASHINGTON, October 3, 2008)
DSCA notified Congress today of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan of 182 JAVELIN guided missile rounds and 20 JAVELIN command launch units
http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36...iwan_08-70.pdf


----------



## a_majoor

The Great Firewall of China disgorges some more secrets:

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=21468&channel=communications&section=



> *China's Eye on Web Chatter*
> Poorly protected files reveal a massive surveillance scheme.
> By Erica Naone
> 
> That Chinese Internet companies censor communications is well known, but a new report from a Canadian computer scientist reveals a new front in their efforts to monitor users online. The study shows that users of TOM-Skype, a Chinese voice and chat service that is compatible with the popular Internet phone system Skype, have been subject to extensive surveillance. To make matters worse, the records of their chat conversations, as well as detailed personal information, were stored insecurely on the Web.
> 
> Skype has previously acknowledged that its Chinese partner, TOM Online, blocks chat messages containing certain politically sensitive keywords. The new findings, however, reveal a level of surveillance that goes far beyond this.
> 
> Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, uncovered the surveillance scheme by examining the behavior of the TOM-Skype client application. He used an application called Wireshark, which analyzes traffic sent over a computer network, to see what happens when different words are sent via chat using the software. Villeneuve discovered that an encrypted message was automatically sent by the client over the Internet when some words were entered. Following this encrypted packet across the Net, Villeneuve uncovered a directory of files on an open Web server. Not only was the directory publicly accessible, but the data within it could be unlocked using a password found in the same folder. Within these files were more than a million chat messages dating from August and September 2008.
> 
> Villeneuve used machine translation to convert the files he found from Chinese into English, and he analyzed the contents to determine likely trigger words. The list he came up with includes obscenities and politically sensitive words and phrases such as "Falun Gong," "democracy," and "Tibet." *But Villeneuve also found evidence that completely innocuous messages--one, for example, contained nothing more than a smiley face--were logged. This suggests that certain users were targeted for monitoring, he says*.
> 
> Villeneuve's report, which was issued jointly by the two university-affiliated digital censorship groups, the Open Net Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor, reveals that some records even contained sensitive personal information, including passwords, phone numbers, and bank-card details. Villeneuve also found a file from August 2007 that contained usernames and IP addresses of people who made voice calls through the network, as well as the date and time of these call and the recipients' telephone number. Since the report was released, Villeneuve says, the Web server directory has been secured, and the latest version of the TOM-Skype client does not seem to exhibit the same logging behavior.
> 
> On Thursday, Skype president Josh Silverman said in a statement that, while the keyword filtering is standard procedure for communications businesses operating in China, his company was not aware of the logging. "It was our understanding that it was not TOM's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed," he said.
> 
> U.S. Internet companies have come under fire for cooperating with the Chinese authorities in the past. In 2005, Yahoo was roundly criticized for handing over information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. Villeneuve says that the discovery serves as a further wake-up call for foreign dissidents. "In a lot of cases, especially if you look at the Yahoo e-mail cases in the past, people really put their trust into these foreign brands that have privacy policies and talk about end-to-end encryption," he says.
> 
> "The real issue here is that if you're an American company and you value your public image, you should be very careful about who your partners are in foreign countries," says Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, U.K. "It used to be the case that surveillance was done more or less on a per-country basis," he adds. "But more and more, the censorship may be on a per-company basis."
> 
> Jedidiah Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico, who has studied keyword filtering by the Chinese government, says that the filtering discovered by Villeneuve is much more aggressive than the filtering applied to web pages. "For any given keyword and any given application," he says, "the censors have different goals that they're trying to achieve."
> 
> Anderson says users concerned about their privacy should be aware that companies often cooperate with governments. In the case of companies with enormous market share, he says, *those governments that get access to their data could unlock huge amounts of intelligence and personal information.*
> 
> Copyright Technology Review 2008.


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan's momenteous 10-10 or "Double 10" celebration which is to celebrate the anniversary of the 1911 Revolution against the Qing Dynasty and the subsequent forming of the Republic of China is approaching. They usually hold a large parade and with a lot of pomp and ceremony that rivals their PRC cousins' Tiananmen Square parades on the mainland in the display of their military hardware, although last year's parade was the first time since 1991 that they held one.  The celebration is a carryover from the time when the ROC/Guomindang government was still based in Nanjing and Chungking and Nanjing again before they moved to Taipei at the end of the 1949 Chinese Civil War.

Here are some pictures from the parade of last year reposted from another forum:

(Comments and translations are mine)






ROCMC AAVs














-- Soldiers from Taiwan's special operation units 





-- Taiwanese Navy S.E.A.L. teams- in Chinese they are called Te Zhong Bu Dui or just "Zhong Dui" in common parlance.





-- A home-grown Tien Kung 3 ship-to-ship missile 






-- Taiwan's indigenous Hsiung Feng III missile





-- AT-3 attack trainer jets





-- Taiwan's US-made Patriot surface to air missile batteries 





-- Taiwanese military TOW anti-tank missile vehicles





Avenger missile batteries on Humvees.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/512931

China furious with U.S., cancels military meetings

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON–China has abruptly canceled a series of military and diplomatic contacts with the United States to protest a planned $6.5 billion package of U.S. arms to Taiwan, American officials told The Associated Press today.
Beijing has notified the U.S. that it will not go forward with several senior level visits and other cooperative military-to-military plans because of the sale, which was announced last week, Pentagon and State Department officials said.

"In response to Friday's announcement of Taiwan arms sales, the People's Republic of China canceled or postponed several upcoming military-to-military exchanges," said Marine Corps Maj. Stewart Upton, a Defense Department spokesperson, lamenting that "China's continued politicization of our military relationship results in missed opportunities."
The Chinese action will not stop the country's participation with the United States in international efforts over Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs, U.S. officials said.

But it does include the cancellation of an upcoming U.S. visit by a senior Chinese general, other similar visits, port calls by naval vessels and the indefinite postponement of meetings on stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the officials said.
China will also not participate in an exchange with the United States on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief that was to take place before the end of November, they said.
"It's an unfortunate step," said deputy State Department spokesperson Robert Wood.

Beijing is furious with the U.S. decision to sell Taiwan the huge package of advanced weaponry, including 182 Javelin guided missile rounds and 20 launch units, 32 Harpoon missiles, 330 Patriot missiles and 30 Apache attack helicopters. China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, says the sale interferes with internal Chinese affairs and harms its national security.

"The Chinese government and the Chinese people strongly oppose and object to the U.S. government's actions, which harm Chinese interests and Sino-U.S. relations," its foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday, adding that U.S. diplomats had been summoned to hear a strong protest.
China's Ambassador to the United States, Zhou Wenzhong, registered a similar protest at the State Department on Monday. A Chinese Embassy spokesman in Washington said it would be "only natural" for the ambassador to lodge a protest.

Upton stressed that the sale does not represent a change in U.S. policy and that Washington is only upholding the provisions of the Taiwan Relations Act under which the U.S. makes available items necessary for Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense.
Taiwan relies on U.S. weapons to keep pace with China's massive arms buildup across the Taiwan Strait. U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are a crucial matter because any dispute between China and Taiwan could ensnare the United States.

Washington is Taiwan's most important ally and largest arms supplier.
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency on Friday notified Congress of the plan to sell up to $6.5 billion in advanced weaponry and military items to Taiwan. Under procedures for such foreign military sales, the deal would proceed if lawmakers do not voice objections within 30 days of the notification.

Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory and has threatened to invade should the self-governing island ever formalize its de facto independence.


----------



## CougarKing

Maybe it's time this was merged with the China superthread? Too many overlaps in topics.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/512931
> 
> China furious with U.S., cancels military meetings
> THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
> WASHINGTON–China has abruptly canceled a series of military and diplomatic contacts with the United States to protest a planned $6.5 billion package of U.S. arms to Taiwan, ... a Defense Department spokesperson, [lamented] that "China's continued politicization of our military relationship results in missed opportunities."
> 
> The Chinese action will not stop the country's participation with the United States in international efforts over Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs, U.S. officials said.
> 
> But it does include the cancellation of an upcoming U.S. visit by a senior Chinese general, other similar visits, port calls by naval vessels and the indefinite postponement of meetings on stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction ...



In fact the ‘opportunity’ is too good for China to miss. The US is _staggered_ by a series of economic body blows, that is the perfect time for a _jab_ to the head. This is, as Chinese actions so often are, a multi-pronged attack, aimed at:

•	The Chinese people, themselves, for internal consumption – a fine distraction from China’s own, serious economic troubles;

•	The West – reminding them us that Taiwan matters to China and that they (China) will not tolerate anything that changes Taiwan’s status as a _province awaiting reunification_; and

•	The ‘rest’ – reminding everyone else that China is a big _player_ quite willing and able to threaten the USA.





			
				CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Maybe it's time this was merged with the China superthread? Too many overlaps in topics.



I agree! Can we merge this with the existing Chinese superthread, please? It really isn't a uniquely Canadian political issue - at least the most recent item isn't.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I agree! Can we merge this with the existing Chinese superthread, please? It really isn't a uniquely Canadian political issue - at least the most recent item isn't.



..and done. I guess this makes it a "super duperthread" now.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> ..and done. I guess this makes it a "super duperthread" now.



No, I think the correct expression would be *The Chinese Super-Duper Thread (about almost everything)* - which is _waaaaaay_ neater (more neat?) than _mega-thread_, dontcha think?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Thucydides said:
			
		

> The Great Firewall of China disgorges some more secrets:
> 
> http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=21468&channel=communications&section=



The weakness of key word search engines is that they can be attacked and overwhelmed with basically spam messaging software, or in this case VOIP software rigged to work as spam.


----------



## CougarKing

As the world looks to China for a bailout, it looks like the PRC won't be willing to loan anymore money.



> http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/09/1522548.aspx
> 
> *Can’t loan anymore money*
> As for whether Beijing will step up by loaning the U.S. more money, the notion is "nonsensical," said Pettis. "It’s not really meaningful."
> 
> *China already owns an estimated $1 trillion of U.S. debt – most of which is U.S. Treasury bonds and the rest in U.S. agency debt. "The U.S. credit crisis has led to losses in China’s own wealth," noted Zhang. So where are they going to get more money for new loans to the U.S. – to buy more debt?
> 
> "The argument was that China already has almost $2 trillion. Yes, but those are already lent to the U.S. and European governments," argued Pettis. "So they can’t re-lend them. They would have to take the money back and then lend it, which is not a new loan."*
> 
> Rumors of a China-led bailout have been so rife, in fact, that the central bank here, the People’s Bank of China, had to deny reports carried in Hong Kong newspapers that the government would buy up to $200 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries to ease the financial crisis in America."...



Foreign owners of US Treasury Securities (July 2008) 
Nation billions of dollars percentage 
Japan 593.4 22.17% 
*Mainland China 518.7 19.38%*
United Kingdom 290.8 10.87% 
Oil exporters 173.9 6.50% 
Brazil 148.4 5.54% 
Caribbean banking centers 133.5 4.99% 
Luxembourg 75.8 2.83% 
Russia 74.1 2.77% 
*Hong Kong 60.6 2.26% (still technically an SAR so they have to be counted seperately)*
Switzerland 45.1 1.69% 
*Republic of China (Taiwan) 42.3 1.58%*
Norway 41.8 1.56% 
Germany 41.1 1.54% 
Mexico 36.0 1.35% 
South Korea 35.3 1.32% 
Turkey 32.4 1.21% 
Thailand 31.8 1.19% 
Singapore 31.4 1.17% 
*Canada 26.6 0.99%*
Netherlands 14.9 0.56% 
Poland 13.9 0.52% 
Egypt 13.4 0.50% 
Chile 13.1 0.49% 
India 13.0 0.49% 
Sweden 12.4 0.46% 
Belgium 12.0 0.45% 
Ireland 11.2 0.42% 
All other 139.5 5.21% 
Grand Total 2676.4


----------



## Edward Campbell

See this article: *Big red machine hits speed bump* over here in the 'US/World Economic Impact on Canada' thread.


----------



## CougarKing

This is old news, but definitely something to pay attention to in the future.



> http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20081012.aspx
> 
> Chinese Victory At Sea
> 
> *October 12, 2008: In 1974, China fought a naval battle with the Vietnamese near the Paracel islands, and took control. China has recently been expanding military facilities on these tiny islands. Among the more notable additions has been an expanded electronic monitoring facility, and a lengthened runway, now long enough to support Su-30 fighters. Several large fuel tanks have also been built, indicating an intention to base Su-30 fighters there. About a thousand military personnel are stationed there.
> 
> Taiwan recently built a 1,150 meter long, and 30 meter wide air strip on Itu Aba, one of the Spratly Islands, 500 kilometers to the south. * The Spratlys are a group of some 100 islets, atolls, and reefs that total only about 5 square kilometers of land, but sprawl across some 410,000 square kilometers of the South China Sea. Set amid some of the world's most productive fishing grounds, the islands are believed to have enormous oil and gas reserves. Several nations have overlapping claims on the group. About 45 of the islands are currently occupied by small numbers of military personnel from China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
> 
> Called Taiping Island by the Taiwanese, Ita Aba is one of the largest of Spratly Islands, at about 120 acres (489,600 square meters). It has been in Taiwanese hands since the mid-1950s, and has largely been used as a way station for fishermen. The island is also claimed by the Vietnamese, who call it Thai Binh. Taiwan has long maintained a small military presence on the island, and the new air strip is meant to cement that control. Protests were made by Vietnam, which controls the largest group of islands, and the Philippines, which also claims Itu Aba island. The Vietnamese earlier refurbished an old South Vietnamese airstrip on Big Spratly Island.
> 
> In 1988, China and Vietnam fought a naval battle, off the Spratly islands. The Chinese victory was followed by Chinese troops establishing garrisons on some of the islands. In 1992, Chinese marines landed on Da Lac reef, in the Spratly Islands. In 1995, Chinese marines occupied Mischief Reef, which was claimed by the Philippines.
> 
> The next war in this part of the world may break out because of a dispute over an uninhabited island in Southeast Asia. Border disputes have long been a cause for wars. All it takes is a country that feels it is losing out because a border is not where everyone agrees is should be. Same thing with islands. There are dozens of these island disputes worldwide. Most are not active issues, except for the fact that an international treaty (the 1982 Law of the Sea) gives whoever owns these uninhabited rocks rights to fishing, and oil drilling, for over three hundred kilometers from each of these tiny bits of land.
> 
> Thus, aside from prestige and possible historical ties, the primary reasons folks are claiming ownership of these uninhabited bits of land has to do with the ability to control sea lanes, defining maritime economic zones, possible tourist dollars in some instance, and oil, rumored to underlie much of the area. The principal islands involved (and the nations claiming ownership) are;
> 
> -- Padra Branca Islands, claimed by Malaysia & Singapore.
> 
> -- Sipadam & Ligatan Islands, claimed by Malaysia & Indonesia -- this is one that seems most likely to cause trouble in the near term.
> 
> -- Louisa Reef, claimed by Malaysia & Brunei.
> 
> -- *Spratly Islands, claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, & Brunei: China claims them all, but occupies only 8, Vietnam has occupied or marked 25, the Philippines 8, Malaysia 6, and Taiwan one.
> 
> -- Paracel Islands, claimed by China, which occupies them, Taiwan, & Vietnam contest Chinese claims. *
> 
> -- Sabah, claimed by Philippines & Malaysia. This is a province of Malaysia, which the Filipinos claim was ceded to the Sultan of Sulu (now part of the Philippines) back in the 1870s.
> 
> In some of these there have also been periodic clashes over who maintains aids to navigation. All of the nations making claims in this area understand that it is the U.S. Navy that still has the final say over who controls what. Someday China may contest that, and the new facilities in the Paracels are part of that.


----------



## CougarKing

chanman said:
			
		

> Is the situation analogous at all with China's backing of successive governments in Pakistan?



Speaking of China's relationship with Pakistan...



> http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1851332,00.html
> 
> Friday, Oct. 17, 2008
> *Why Pakistan's Zardari Is Cozying Up to China*
> By Ishaan Tharoor
> 
> Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari completed his first state trip to Beijing on Oct. 17, signing a raft of new agreements with a nation he had hailed in Islamabad four days earlier as "the future of the world." China and Pakistan tied up at least 11 deals on trade and economic cooperation, infrastructure projects, agriculture, mining rights and telecommunications; they now aim to double bilateral trade, which currently stands at around $7 billion, by 2011.
> 
> *The two countries have a long-standing, all-weather relationship, forged over decades of mutual animosity toward neighboring India, with whom they separately have fought wars. But Zardari's visit comes at a pivotal moment. His fledgling democracy is not only threatened by terrorism, but is also teetering toward bankruptcy. Spiraling inflation, now at 25%, has eaten into Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves at a rate of $1 billion a month and the country risks defaulting on debt repayment loans. These fiscal headaches have been compounded by a flare-up in tensions with its most vital ally, the U.S., which recently launched raids against terrorist targets in Pakistan's remote tribal areas without notifying Islamabad — actions that have triggered a firestorm of protest and clouded relations with Washington.
> 
> Enter China. With nearly $2 trillion amassed in foreign currency holdings, China's government had the largesse this week to grant Zardari an immediate soft loan of upwards of $1 billion, according to a report in the Financial Times. "As a long friend of Pakistan, China understands it is facing some financial difficulties," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang at a briefing with journalists on Oct. 16. Other new measures include the increase of access Pakistani goods will have in China's markets as well as agreements to launch special economic zones within Pakistan with tax incentives for Chinese companies.
> 
> Beyond this, Zardari's strengthening of ties with Beijing sends a clear signal to the U.S. On Oct. 8, Washington concluded a landmark nuclear energy deal with India — a pact that upset both Beijing and Islamabad, in part because it enabled India to skirt international regulations regarding the purchase of nuclear fuel, something the U.S. has ruled out offering Pakistan. Su Hao, professor of Asia-Pacific studies at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, says China's foreign policy establishment is "highly concerned about the U.S.-India contract, because it was a unilateral decision by the U.S."
> 
> A burgeoning Sino-Pakistani alliance may check what many in Islamabad and Beijing fear to be a solidifying Indo-U.S. consensus in the region. Though no official statement from either government was made, Pakistan's ambassador to Beijing, Masood Khan, told The Nation, a Pakistani daily, that obtaining nuclear reactors and fuel for civilian nuclear technology would be the "main item" in talks with Beijing this week. Apart from being Pakistan's main conventional arms supplier, China has played an integral part in building Pakistan's nuclear weapons industry. In turn, Islamabad allowed the Chinese to build a deep-sea facility in Gwadar, a $250 million project that, once completed, will give Beijing an immensely strategic listening post on the Persian Gulf.*
> 
> Still, a geopolitical Cold War is not at hand. The fate of Pakistan's government remains tightly bound to the White House, and China's booming trade with India is exponentially more lucrative than its transactions with Pakistan. Zardari's trip this week, though, is a sign of the many poles springing up in the multi-polar 21st century. Su of China Foreign Affairs University insists shoring up Pakistan's economic and industrial prospects can only be good for its historic foe. "Pakistan is such an important anti-terrorism frontier," he says. "Instability there will jeopardize the safety of all other countries in the region, including India."
> 
> — With reporting by Jessie Jiang/Beijing


----------



## GAP

Interesting Article

Getting China just right
PAUL EVANS From Monday's Globe and Mail October 20, 2008 at 6:30 AM EDT
Article Link

Though rarely seen during the election campaign, Canadians have China on their minds. China is no longer “over there,” but a daily part of our economic lives. Surveys conducted by the Asia Pacific Foundation and others reveal that Canadians sense the power shift under way across the Pacific and have mixed feelings about the opportunities and threats that come with it. 

The current financial crisis underscores the significance of China's new global role in unmistakable ways. And it underlines the policy problem that the new Harper government will have to handle more adeptly than it did in its first term. 

Part of the financial story is how closely China's economy is linked to the American. It is the number two trading partner of the United States (and of Canada). Far from being decoupled from America's economic fortunes, the consequences of the American financial meltdown are significant for China. Stock prices have fallen further in Shanghai than on Wall Street. Property prices are also falling faster. Its financial institutions have suffered enormous losses if only because about 60% of its $1.8-trillion in foreign reserves are in U.S. dollar assets. And about half of China's fund management companies are joint ventures with foreign institutions that are hemorrhaging at home. Exports to the U.S. are slowing and China's growth rate is expected to fall to single digits this year and next. 

The other part of the story is that China is not just affected by the meltdown; it has a major role in how it plays out. When America sneezes, China, like Canada, catches a cold. The difference is that China is now in a position to prescribe the medicine and help build the hospital where the patients will be treated. 

Related Articles
Recent

Meltdown boosts anti-Western forces in China  
China eases media restrictions  
 China continues to prop up the U.S. dollar by maintaining its stock of U.S. treasuries. Chinese companies will eventually find a role in recapitalizing financial companies in the U.S. when the price is right and security of investment value guaranteed. 

China's biggest role is keeping its economic engine running and increasing domestic and regional consumption to dampen the recession. It has dropped domestic interest rates. And, more significantly, it is increasing consumption of goods and services from its East Asian neighbours. China already has eclipsed the U.S. as the biggest customer of exports from Japan and Korea. 

All of this does not signal the end of American economic dominance or the ascendance of capitalism Chinese-style. But we can expect that the arrangements and institutions that come into play will reflect the new realities of global economic power and Chinese interests and perspectives. It may be premature to predict the emergence of a G2 as the architecture of the future, yet the G8 already seems a relic of an earlier era. 

This is a financial drama playing out on a geopolitical stage. If the Bretton Woods system is to be reinvented as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposes, is it farfetched to hold the meetings in a quiet Chinese location? 

For Canadians, the stakes are much bigger than slumping commodity prices, bilateral trade numbers, and reduced container flows. “Cool politics, warm economics” as our approach to China has hit a dead end. Canada needs China far more than the reverse. In perilous times, both countries have a common interest in keeping markets open, beating back protectionism and dampening the global recession. 

What can Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government do? A prime ministerial visit, already announced, can do more to re-establish a constructive tone than a dozen ministerial missions. To be successful the visit will need to be accompanied by some creative thinking and bold gestures. 

First, make the ambassadorship in Beijing, like Washington, a political appointment of a very senior person affiliated with the current government. 

Second, phase out the official development assistance program in China and replace it with a new institution for Canada-China policy partnerships in areas including human rights and environment, but also including human security, financial systems, and product safety. 

Third, deepen the approach to promoting human rights and good governance by working with Chinese partners on a range of social justice issues that include political rights, but also social and economic ones. 

Fourth, develop a strategy that connects Canada to the new East Asian regionalism in the same way Canada supported similar processes in Europe a half century earlier.

Fifth, help small- and medium-sized Canadian companies succeed in Asia through better preparation and new instruments including trading companies. 

Sixth, clarify the foreign investment rules as quickly as possible to create a favourable environment for major new plays, including in energy.

Seventh, expand the Gateway concept beyond transportation infrastructure and into building Gateway economies in Canada that link North America to global Asia. 

In responding to the economic crisis, we need an Asia policy with China at its centre as much as we need immediate remedial action at home. 
More on link


----------



## CougarKing

More reason to worry?





> *And now the Manchurian microchip *
> Robert Eringer
> 
> October 18, 2008 7:13 AM
> 
> The geniuses at Homeland Security who brought you hare-brained procedures at airports (which inconvenience travelers without snagging terrorists) have decreed that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. This means The Investigator -- at the risk of compromising national insecurities -- would be remiss not to make you aware of the hottest topic in U.S. counterintelligence circles: rogue microchips. This threat emanates from China (PRC) -- and it is hugely significant.
> 
> *The myth: Chinese intelligence services have concealed a microchip in every computer everywhere, programmed to "call home" if and when activated.
> 
> The reality: It may actually be true.
> 
> All computers on the market today -- be they Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Apple or especially IBM -- are assembled with components manufactured inside the PRC. Each component produced by the Chinese, according to a reliable source within the intelligence community, is secretly equipped with a hidden microchip that can be activated any time by China's military intelligence services, the PLA.
> 
> "It is there, deep inside your computer, if they decide to call it up," the security chief of a multinational corporation told The Investigator. "It is capable of providing Chinese intelligence with everything stored on your system -- on everyone's system -- from e-mail to documents. I call it Call Home Technology. It doesn't mean to say they're sucking data from everyone's computer today, it means the Chinese think ahead -- and they now have the potential to do it when it suits their purposes."
> 
> Discussed theoretically in high-tech security circles as "Trojan Horse on a Chip" or "The Manchurian Chip," Call Home Technology came to light after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a security program in December 2007 called Trust in Integrated Circuits. DARPA awarded almost $25 million in contracts to six companies and university research labs to test foreign-made microchips for hardware Trojans, back doors and kill switches -- techie-speak for bugs and gremlins -- with a view toward microchip verification.*
> 
> Raytheon, a defense contractor, was granted almost half of these funds for hardware and software testing.
> 
> Its findings, which are classified, have apparently sent shockwaves through the counterintelligence community.
> 
> "It is the hottest topic concerning the FBI and the Pentagon," a retired intelligence official told The Investigator. "They don't know quite what to do about it. The Chinese have even been able to hack into the computer system that handles our Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system."
> 
> *Another senior intelligence source told The Investigator, "Our military is aware of this and has had to take some protective measures. The problem includes defective chips that don't reach military specs -- as well as probable Trojans."*
> 
> A little context: In 2005 the Lenovo Group in China paid $1.75 billion for IBM's PC unit, even though that unit had lost $965 million the previous four years. Three congressmen, including the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, tried to block this sale because of national security concerns, to no avail. (The PRC embassy in Washington, D.C., maintains a large lobbying presence to influence congressmen and their staffs through direct contact.)
> 
> *In June 2007, a Pentagon computer network utilized by the U.S. defense secretary's office was hacked into -- and traced directly back to the Chinese PLA.*
> 
> A report presented to Congress late last year characterized PRC espionage as "the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies." Almost simultaneously, Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, Britain's domestic security and counterintelligence service, sent a confidential letter to CEOs and security chiefs at 300 UK companies to warn that they were under attack by "Chinese state organizations" whose purpose, said Mr. Evans, was to defeat their computer security systems and steal confidential commercial information.
> 
> The Chinese had specifically targeted Rolls-Royce and Shell Oil.
> 
> *The key to unlocking computer secrets through rogue microchips is uncovering (or stealing) source codes, without which such microchips would be useless. This is why Chinese espionage is so heavily focused upon the U.S. computer industry.
> 
> Four main computer operating systems exist. Two of them, Unix and Linux, utilize open-source codes. Apple's operating system is Unix-based.
> 
> Which leaves only Microsoft as the source code worth cracking. But in early 2004, Microsoft announced that its security had been breached and that its source code was "lost or stolen."*
> 
> "As technology evolves, each new program has a new source code," a computer forensics expert told The Investigator. "So the Chinese would need ongoing access to new Microsoft source codes for maintaining their ability to activate any microchips they may have installed, along with the expertise to utilize new hardware technology."
> 
> No surprise then that the FBI expends much of its counterintelligence resources these days on Chinese high-tech espionage within the United States. Timothy Bereznay, while still serving as assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, told USA Today, "Foreign collectors don't wait until something is classified -- they're targeting it at the research and development stage." Mr. Bereznay now heads Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems division.
> 
> *The PRC's intelligence services use tourists, exchange students and trade show attendees to gather strategic data, mostly from open sources. They have also created over 3,500 front companies in the United States -- including several based in Palo Alto to focus on computer technology.*
> 
> Back in 2005, when the Chinese espionage problem was thought to be focused on military technology, then-FBI counterintelligence operations chief Dave Szady said, "I think the problem is huge, and it's something we're just getting our arms around." Little did he know just how huge, as it currently applies to computer network security.
> 
> *The FBI is reported to have arrested more than 25 Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans on suspicion of conspiracy to commit espionage between 2004 and 2006. The Investigator endeavored to update this figure, but was told by FBI spokesman William Carter, "We do not track cases by ethnicity."*
> 
> Excuse us for asking. We may be losing secrets, but at least the dignity of our political correctness remains intact.
> 
> Oh, and Homeland Security snagged comic icon Jerry Lewis, 82, trying to board a plane in Las Vegas with a gun -- no joke.
> 
> If you have a story idea for The Investigator, contact him at reringer@newspress.com. State if your query is confidential.
> 
> http://cryptome.org/manchu-chip.htm


----------



## CougarKing

Very disturbing.



> *Rand Study Suggests U.S. Loses War With China*
> 
> Published: 16 Oct 11:45 EDT (15:45 GMT)
> 
> http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3774348&c=ASI&s=TOP
> 
> *TAIPEI - A new RAND study suggests U.S. air power in the Pacific would be inadequate to thwart a Chinese attack on Taiwan in 2020. The study, entitled "Air Combat Past, Present and Future," by John Stillion and Scott Perdue, says China's anti-access arms and strategy could deny the U.S. the "ability to operate efficiently from nearby bases or seas."*
> 
> According to the study, U.S. aircraft carriers and air bases would be threatened by Chinese development of anti-ship ballistic missiles, the fielding of diesel and nuclear submarines equipped with torpedoes and SS-N-22 and SS-N-27 anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), fighters and bombers carrying ASCMs and HARMs, and new ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.
> 
> *The report states that 34 missiles with submunition warheads could cover all parking ramps at Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa.
> 
> An "attack like this could damage, destroy or strand 75 percent of aircraft based at Kadena," it says.*
> 
> *In contrast, many Chinese air bases are harder than Kadena, with some "super-hard underground hangers."*
> 
> To make matters worse, Kadena is the only U.S. air base within 500 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait, whereas China has 27.
> 
> U.S. air bases in South Korea are more than 750 miles distant, and those in Japan are more than 885 miles away. Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, is 1,500 miles away. The result is that sortie rates will be low, with a "huge tanker demand."
> 
> The authors suggest China's CETC Y-27 radar, which is similar to Russia's Nebo SVU VHF Digital AESA, could counter U.S. stealth fighter technology. China is likely to outfit its fighters with improved radars and by "2020 even very stealthy targets likely [would be] detectable by Flanker radars at 25+ nm." China is also likely to procure the new Su-35BM fighter by 2020, which will challenge the F-35 and possibly the F-22.
> 
> *The authors also question the reliability of U.S. beyond-visual-range weapons, such as the AIM-120 AMRAAM. U.S. fighters have recorded only 10 AIM-120 kills, none against targets equipped with the kinds of countermeasures carried by Chinese Su-27s and Su-30s. Of the 10, six were beyond-visual-range kills, and it required 13 missiles to get them.*
> 
> If a conflict breaks out between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, the authors say it is difficult to "predict who will have had the last move in the measure-countermeasure game."
> 
> *Overall, the authors say, "China could enjoy a 3:1 edge in fighters if we can fly from Kadena - about 10:1 if forced to operate from Andersen. Overcoming these odds requires qualitative superiority of 9:1 or 100:1" - a differential that is "extremely difficult to achieve" against a like power.*
> 
> If beyond-visual-range missiles work, stealth technology is not countered and air bases are not destroyed, U.S. forces have a chance, but "history suggests there is a limit of about 3:1 where quality can no longer compensate for superior enemy numbers."
> 
> A 24-aircraft Su-27/30 regiment can carry around 300 air-to-air missiles (AAMs), whereas 24 F-22s can carry only 192 AAMs and 24 F-35s only 96 AAMs.
> 
> Though current numbers assume the F-22 could shoot down 48 Chinese Flankers when "outnumbered 12:1 without loss," these numbers do not take into account a less-than-perfect U.S. beyond-visual-range performance, partial or complete destruction of U.S. air bases and aircraft carriers, possible deployment of a new Chinese stealth fighter around 2020 or 2025, and the possible use of Chinese "robo-fighters" to deplete U.S. "fighters' missile loadout prior to mass attack."
> 
> *The authors write that Chinese counter stealth, anti-access, countermissile technologies are proliferating and the U.S. military needs "a plan that accounts for this."*


----------



## Edward Campbell

I do not see this as _”disturbing”_; I do not even find it surprising.

First: It is not surprising. The US has been _drawing down_ its combat forces for a generation; what remains is quantitatively better – more flexible, longer range, etc - but there is, of necessity, less and less of it. The Chinese have also _drawn down_, perhaps even at a greater rate – but from a much larger starting ‘base,’ it has also modernized more. The end result is that the US has, relatively, few first rate combat formations available in SE Asia while China has many, many almost first rate formations available. This is, in part, the result of the US being a *global* superpower on the _Roman_ model – with a strong, balanced force in each region while China looks like it is following something closer to a version of the 19th century British strategy – the (army) ‘main force’ is deployed at the ‘jewel of the crown’ which, in China’s case, is at home, not half way around the world. Thus, China has a large, capable, military force in its home region; the Chinese have spent HUGE amounts on their national defence; we ought not to be surprised that force structure _reform_ and spending pay off.

Second: It is not disturbing. Taiwan IS part of China; everyone, including the Americans, British, Canadians and Taiwanese recognize that political *fact*. The question is: when and how will reunification take place? The worst case scenario is soon and violently. As far as I can guess from my readings, and a few very occasional discussions with some Chinese academics etc, no one is looking for the worst case ‘solution.’ But, it could happen and the Chinese are preparing for that eventuality. Being prepared for the _nightmare_ scenario does not equal taking an aggressive stance. I continue to believe  that we will see, probably in what’s left of my lifetime, another version of “one country/two systems” – this one designed to accommodate a highly independent Taiwan, with similar status granted to Hong Kong and, eventually and on a lesser scale, even to Tibet and Xinjiang.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I do not see this as _”disturbing”_; I do not even find it surprising.
> 
> First: It is not surprising. The US has been _drawing down_ its combat forces for a generation; what remains is quantitatively better – more flexible, longer range, etc - but there is, of necessity, less and less of it. The Chinese have also _drawn down_, perhaps even at a greater rate – but from a much larger starting ‘base,’ it has also modernized more. The end result is that the US has, relatively, few first rate combat formations available in SE Asia while China has many, many almost first rate formations available. This is, in part, the result of the US being a *global* superpower on the _Roman_ model – with a strong, balanced force in each region while China looks like it is following something closer to a version of the 19th century British strategy – the (army) ‘main force’ is deployed at the ‘jewel of the crown’ which, in China’s case, is at home, not half way around the world. Thus, China has a large, capable, military force in its home region; the Chinese have spent HUGE amounts on their national defence; we ought not to be surprised that force structure _reform_ and spending pay off.
> 
> Second: It is not disturbing. Taiwan IS part of China; everyone, including the Americans, British, Canadians and Taiwanese recognize that political *fact*. The question is: when and how will reunification take place? The worst case scenario is soon and violently. As far as I can guess from my readings, and a few very occasional discussions with some Chinese academics etc, no one is looking for the worst case ‘solution.’ But, it could happen and the Chinese are preparing for that eventuality. Being prepared for the _nightmare_ scenario does not equal taking an aggressive stance. I continue to believe  that we will see, probably in what’s left of my lifetime, another version of “one country/two systems” – this one designed to accommodate a highly independent Taiwan, with similar status granted to Hong Kong and, eventually and on a lesser scale, even to Tibet and Xinjiang.



I only found it surprising because I assumed that the US technological advantage would still win out in the end and still nullify the supposed numerical advantage China has, no matter what China bought from Russia; the RAND analysts seem certain that China may be able to narrow the technological gap on the air front within just a decade. And I already was aware that China has been drawing down its forces, though this was more on the land front, where many of its troops have been transferred to the People's Armed Police to help cut down on redundancy, IIRC.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarDaddy, 

Remember what Rand's mission is when producing these reports.  Generally it is not to determine who would win.  It is usually to determine how the other guy could win with their known available assets.  That allows the US, and it is usually the USAF in particular, to plan how to shore up their perceived weak spots.

Cynics have also charged that the primary role is actually to allow the US, and the USAF in particular, to shore up their budget.

These types of reports were standard fare all through the Cold War.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> I only found it surprising because I assumed that the US technological advantage would still win out in the end and still nullify the supposed numerical advantage China has, no matter what China bought from Russia; the RAND analysts seem certain that China may be able to narrow the technological gap on the air front within just a decade. And I already was aware that China has been drawing down its forces, though this was more on the land front, where many of its troops have been transferred to the People's Armed Police to help cut down on redundancy, IIRC.



Those, most people here, who keep much closer tabs on the PLA and Chinese military technology will correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that China is doing more than just buying Russian technology.

I think the biggest and 'best' Chinese military decision was to scrap the huge, conscripted PLA and replace it with much smaller but much, much more professional forces. My experience says that well trained *regulars* can always make good use of whatever kit is available - even when it is not the very latest technology.

But I also think China is developing new, very modern weapon systems of its own. I believe it is loss of military secrets that prompted the most recent US crackdowns on Chinese expatriates in America. Which is to say that I believe the American suspicions are well founded and that there is - has been for 30 years - a large, active Chinese military-industrial espionage network in the USA.


----------



## a_majoor

The other thing this report neglects is potential counters not based on USAF numbers and technology, as well as unorthodox methods the USAF "could" employ; anything from using ICBMs with conventional warheads as the strike force or SOF teams taking out Chinese air bases (or even more outlandish schemes like space war or releasing a 48 hr flu virus in the Chinese industrial heartland). As well, the USAF and Navy have other long levers; mining Chinese ports or cutting the flow of oil and resources by attacking pipelines in Kazakhstan or shipping in the Strait of Malacca .

Of course, this also works both ways, and the more outlandish the scheme, the less likely it is to succeed or at least not divert critical resources from elsewhere.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of Chinese airpower, here' s a link to the recent PLAAF air show at Zhuhai/珠海 airport.

http://mil.huanqiu.com/Focus_photo/2008-10/259859.html

The imprint of the IAI Lavi on those J10 aircraft is just amazing!


----------



## armyca08

I can only hope this doesn't get interpreted as a flame, so under the 1 china policy which all countries who have diplomatic contacts and even Taiwan agrees to.. China is the #1 holder if counting all provinces and administrative regions of china. Outranking Japan - of course de facto control of those securities may be another matter completely.





			
				CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> As the world looks to China for a bailout, it looks like the PRC won't be willing to loan anymore money.
> 
> Foreign owners of US Treasury Securities (July 2008)
> Nation billions of dollars percentage
> Japan 593.4 22.17%
> *Mainland China 518.7 19.38%*
> United Kingdom 290.8 10.87%
> Oil exporters 173.9 6.50%
> Brazil 148.4 5.54%
> Caribbean banking centers 133.5 4.99%
> Luxembourg 75.8 2.83%
> Russia 74.1 2.77%
> *Hong Kong 60.6 2.26% (still technically an SAR so they have to be counted seperately)*
> Switzerland 45.1 1.69%
> *Republic of China (Taiwan) 42.3 1.58%*
> Norway 41.8 1.56%
> Germany 41.1 1.54%
> Mexico 36.0 1.35%
> South Korea 35.3 1.32%
> Turkey 32.4 1.21%
> Thailand 31.8 1.19%
> Singapore 31.4 1.17%
> *Canada 26.6 0.99%*
> Netherlands 14.9 0.56%
> Poland 13.9 0.52%
> Egypt 13.4 0.50%
> Chile 13.1 0.49%
> India 13.0 0.49%
> Sweden 12.4 0.46%
> Belgium 12.0 0.45%
> Ireland 11.2 0.42%
> All other 139.5 5.21%
> Grand Total 2676.4


----------



## CougarKing

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/29/china.comment
> 
> 
> *Complex legacy of Chairman Mao
> He may have been a despot, but the leader of the largest country in the world unintentionally did his people good*
> 
> Will Hutton
> The Observer,
> Sunday May 29 2005
> Article history
> 
> It is less than 30 years ago that the 20th-century's bloodiest dictator was approaching death, his country still dirt poor, his vision in ruins, with tens of millions of his fellow citizens dead at his hands. Today, that same country has enjoyed three decades of the most unparalleled economic growth. Mao's death has proved the trigger for an extraordinary economic renaissance.
> 
> *Nobody can disagree that he was a cruel and authoritarian despot who murdered millions;* even his successor, Deng Xiaoping, pronounced that he was at least 30 per cent wrong and guilty of 'excesses'.
> 
> The open question is how much more wrong he was than the official assessment, how much of his legacy still informs the communist leadership and whether his long shadow and his thinking is any guide to what China might do in the future. If you think he was 100 per cent wrong, you must worry; China's Communist party has an evil DNA in its genes that will one day provoke war and mayhem with global implications. Agree with Deng and you might be more hopeful.
> 
> A new book, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape), places Mao unambiguously in the 100 per cent wrong category. Jung Chang, author of the compelling Wild Swans, the story of today's China through the pained eyes of three generations of women, and her husband, Jon Halliday, have used 10 years of research to indict comprehensively Mao's cynical lust for power and careless disregard for humanity. Whether it's the news that Mao never actually marched in long stretches of the Long March but was, instead, carried in a bamboo litter he designed himself, or of the scale of his purges and executions, this is a catalogue of disclosures that overturns almost all our received wisdom. The impact will be substantial.
> 
> It's an impressive achievement, but the book's unyielding view that there is not one even unintended benefit from his legacy leaves me uneasy. Mao is presented as an evil genius visited upon an innocent China courtesy of communist ideology which he cynically manipulated, who delivered nothing but murder and economic disaster.
> 
> It is blood lust and quest for world domination, for example, that drove Mao to consecrate the overwhelming share of China's scarce resources to the military in the first five-year plan; the drive to build dams and irrigation systems was carried out irrespective of the lives either of the builders or those later drowned by their collapse. When he saw violence at close quarters, he acknowledged it induced a kind of ecstasy.
> 
> *And any idea that Mao was a great military strategist is dashed; even his victories are revealed as either disguised fiascos or the results of political fixes. Essentially, he led the communists to power by betraying efforts to find a common front against the invading Japanese, which he openly acknowledged, while carefully courting Moscow.*
> 
> *We are spared no detail of Mao's weaknesses - his failure to take a bath for 25 years,* his 50-odd personal estates and his habit of having fresh fish delicacies from Wuhan carried 1,000 kilometres for his epicurean delight. I agree; guilty on all charges.
> 
> But Mao didn't come from nowhere. If you don't know about the century of China's humiliation, the complete bankruptcy of the Qing dynasty as it imploded in 1911 and the subsequent ungovernability of China and the apparent hopelessness of any project that might even half successfully modernise it, then it's hard to understand how it could be that Mao and Chinese communism would have any appeal. You will learn little of such context in this biography.
> 
> There is no country in modern times that has ever suffered so many defeats at so many hands as China did between 1842 and 1911; the British, the French, the Russians and the Japanese all easily disposed of Chinese armies and fleets. In 1898, the Western powers, including Germany, took great chunks of China and Chinese ports to administer for their own benefit. China was so weak that there was no point in spending money colonising it; foreign powers could get all they wanted by expending much less effort.
> 
> For the Chinese, their weakness was a complete bouleversement of their universe, and the contemptuously low status in which self-consciously racist foreigners held them (little more than animals) poured further salt in a gaping and humiliating wound. The system that had provided them with order for millenniums, granaries for famine, law, canals, agricultural prosperity and a sophisticated Confucian bureaucracy - and which presented the astounded Marco Polo as a civilisation more advanced, more peaceful and evidently superior to the never-ending conflict and barbarism of Europe - could neither rejuvenate itself from within nor begin to match the overwhelming achievements of the West.
> 
> How was this vast country, now collapsing into a myriad of local wars with peace provided by rapacious local warlords routinely deploying torture, to be governed? How was it to be industrialised? How could it defend itself against further despoilment by foreigners?
> 
> *Communism, paradoxically building on the Confucianism it deplored, provided an answer, the reason it drew so many adherents. The strategy for modernisation - raising agricultural productivity by trial-and-error attempts at combining collectivisation with respect for village structures while building up industry on an equally decentralised basis - was very different from Stalin's centralised Sovietisation, despite the surface parallels.
> 
> It was more closely modelled on the imperial system than either critic or supporter ever concedes. And when Mao died, the second paradox is that the decentralisation and pragmatism he fostered, notwithstanding mad forays such as the campaign to kill sparrows, allowed Deng, the architect of today's China, quickly to put in place policies that would drive the astonishing economic turnround.
> 
> As for Mao's preoccupation with military spending, I submit that any new government in the 1950s would have placed an overwheening priority on defence, given China's history.
> 
> While the Great Leap Forward and the disaster of the Cultural Revolution are famed exercises in futility, personal delusion and inhumanity, brilliantly documented by Chang and Halliday, don't forget that between one and the other Chinese growth averaged 15 per cent per annum, never achieved before in a single year in China's long history.
> 
> China's vast rural hinterland was becoming, via the conception of village enterprise, the springboard for today's economic growth.
> 
> It would take Deng's opening up to trade and investment along the coast, and the reintroduction of capitalism, to make the most of the opportunity. But a Stalinistic communism would never have created the chance in the first place, as today's Russia bears grim witness.*
> 
> Mao is now revealed as more of a monster than we ever guessed, thanks to Chang and Halliday. But even monsters can create good they may never have self-consciously aimed for or wanted.
> 
> History is the story of contradictions and unintended consequences. This book - and our understanding of China - would have been stronger still had it acknowledged them.



What I highlighted above in red gives a partial explanation for the recent displays of Han-centric/China-centric ultra-nationalism that have marked this year, from the mobs of Chinese students at Western universities ganging up on pro-Tibetan protestors in the months leading up to the Olympics to the widely televised scenes of those PRC taikonauts doing their first spacewalk. This Han nationalism, fueled by all the decades of conflicts, humiliation and suffering, which started with the unequal treaties with the West imposed since China's defeat in the 1840s Opium Wars and continued all the way to the 2nd Chinese Civil War of 1945-49, is but a tool that the CCP has learned how to harness in order to ensure its continued legitimacy. 

To put it simply, no other previous government other than the CCP one (even the ROC/Guomindang at its height when Chiang-Kai Shek ruled from Nanjing in the early 1930s, could not stamp out all the warlord holdouts), for the 1st half of the 20th century, was able to unite China and keep it relatively stable for the other half of the 20th century, and keep China together in spite of such upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping would not have been able to open up China it if it had not been mostly unified and stable in the first place and the ensuing growth and prosperity would not have occurred. It is this promise of stability and a greater, stronger China, which has allowed the CCP to redefine itself and grow out of Communist ideology, and keep the "mandate of heaven", or rather of the people.

And as final sidenote in response to the comment that Mao was not a military genius, it was already commonly known that he was more of a political commissar than a military commander, since it was his generals such as Zhu De, Peng De Huai and Lin Biao who helped him conduct a successful guerrila war against the Japanese and later to victory in a more conventional campaign against the Nationalists/Guomindang during the 1945-49 Civil War.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I cannot recall any other place, and I travelled a lot in 65+ years, that _celebrates_ *humiliation* quite the way China does. The ‘century of humiliation’ is taught in schools, displayed in museums and in shows and so on. There is a _national humiliation day_ but the Chinese had to fight over  which humiliation was worst.

The points, as CougarDaddy notes are:

•	Provide a _low_ baseline against which the accomplishments of the CCP can be measured; and

•	Instil a sense of anti-foreign grievance that was used to persuade Chinese that they didn’t want what the evil Westerners had and now is used to convince Chinese to work harder to make and get more of whatever the evil Westerners have.

It works.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I cannot recall any other place, and I travelled a lot in 65+ years, that _celebrates_ *humiliation* quite the way China does. The ‘century of humiliation’ is taught in schools, displayed in museums and in shows and so on. There is a _national humiliation day_ but the Chinese had to fight over  which humiliation was worst.
> 
> The points, as CougarDaddy notes are:
> 
> •	Provide a _low_ baseline against which the accomplishments of the CCP can be measured; and
> 
> •	Instil a sense of anti-foreign grievance that was used to persuade Chinese that they didn’t want what the evil Westerners had and now is used to convince Chinese to work harder to make and get more of whatever the evil Westerners have.
> 
> It works.



The baseline is intentionally low. Note that I am not praising the party, but only pointing out how it is perceived; of course if one has a much higher baseline and takes into account things like standard of living, human rights, and so forth its record would be abysmal.

On another note, I am surprised this next incident has not been posted yet here: a mainland Chinese official Zhang Ming Qing (張銘清) in Taiwan got roughed up last week by angry Taiwanese locals.

Mr, Campbell,

In spite of your mentioning that you have discussed with Chinese academics (whom I assume to be _da lu ren _ or mainlanders or at the very least even ardent Taiwan _waishengren_ who are more than eager to reunite with the mainland), I infer that your agreeing that Taiwan is part of China is in part based on what they say. I met the same reception/opinion when I was in one of Pan Wei's classes; they are all of the same opinion that Taiwan will one day go back to the mainland. I think you have to look at another perspective of the equation to get a fuller picture of the situation; there is some simmering _benshengren_ resentment just below the surface in Taiwan, and it is more than just what the MSM of both Taiwan and Western media seem to want to portray: 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-taiwan22-2008oct22,0,6777951.story




> Reported from Beijing -- China condemned an assault on one of its envoys by an angry crowd in Taiwan on Tuesday, an attack that came as the two longtime adversaries are trying to ease decades of tension.
> 
> *Taiwanese television showed Zhang Mingqing, vice chairman of a mainland association handling cross-strait relations, lying on the ground beside his eyeglasses. Other footage showed an elderly woman hitting his car window with her cane and a pro-independence activist with a green headband stomping on the roof of the car.*
> 
> That followed an incident Monday in which about 200 demonstrators yelled, cursed and heckled Zhang as he took the podium at Tainan National University of the Arts. Zhang was in Taiwan for an academic symposium, ostensibly in a nonofficial capacity. Taiwan and China often communicate through unofficial channels, given their strained relations.
> 
> Analysts said both sides have an interest in preventing public anger from raging out of control as they work to reduce tensions and boost transportation, cultural and business links.
> 
> "I strongly condemn the violence," P.K. Chiang, Taiwan's top negotiator on cross-strait policy, said at a news conference Tuesday. "We want people to be more rational when others come from mainland China."
> 
> 
> Beijing, however, was not soothed. The official New China News Agency condemned the incident, quoting a protest letter from Zhang's semiofficial group, the Assn. for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits.
> 
> "We are astonished at this," it said. And a spokesman for China's Taiwan Affairs Office called for "severe punishment" for those involved.
> 
> China and Taiwan are scheduled to hold talks in the next few weeks on improving relations. They will be closely watched, and Chen Yunlin, chairman of the association, will head the Chinese side.
> 
> China views Taiwan as part of its territory. The two sides parted ways in 1949 after an extended civil war.
> 
> *In recent months, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has made improved relations a cornerstone of his administration, although the island remains politically divided.
> 
> Much of the anti-China anger in Taiwan comes from supporters of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, which until May presided over eight contentious years under the leadership of then-President Chen Shui-bian.
> 
> "It's pathetic to see how divided Taiwan is," said George Tsai, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, the capital.
> 
> "Violence is wrong and must be condemned," he said. "It's not in anyone's interest if China and Taiwan go back to confrontation."
> 
> Opposition leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed regret over Zhang's harassment in an article in the Liberty Times. But she said China's negotiators should think twice before coming to Taiwan for further talks since "you should consider their feelings when visiting."
> 
> The attack on Zhang points to deep underlying tensions in Taiwan, said Lo Chih-cheng, a former official research director in Chen's administration, arguing that the new president is moving too fast.
> 
> "This has to do with the speed and scope of Ma Ying-jeou's opening to China," he said. "It generates concern among people, particularly in the south."
> 
> Zhang cut short his trip. "Why am I leaving early?" he said to reporters before his flight this morning. "The place where I was hurt is sore, and my head is a bit dizzy."
> 
> Many Taiwanese expressed concern about the attack.
> 
> "Regardless of what position [Zhang] holds, he's still our guest," said Hsu Hsi-tsun, a Taipei commercial driver. "We should arrest those people and convict them. This is bad for Taiwan's image."
> 
> The media on both sides of the Taiwan Strait played up the confrontation. Television stations on the island aired a continual loop of Zhang being jostled by protesters at the Confucius Temple in Tainan. "Zhang beaten, pushed to the ground," read a headline in the United Evening News.
> 
> One Taiwanese website, called Spicy News, suggested that Zhang wasn't pushed and that his tumble was planned to test the island's reaction.
> 
> China reported on the incident on the official wire service and major Web portals.
> 
> "I can't contain myself anymore," read an Internet posting by a writer identified as Gangan on the discussion group Tianyu. "Let the Taiwanese who work in China go back!"*
> 
> The incident occurred as plans were unveiled to allow direct commercial flights between Taiwan and China starting next month, a move that will save 90 minutes and significant fuel and spur fare reductions. Planes now must pass through Hong Kong airspace.
> 
> Special correspondent Cindy Sui in Taipei contributed to this report.
> 
> Magnier is a Times staff writer.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is a column by Jeffrey Simpson that is worth considering:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081028.wcosimp29/BNStory/specialComment


> Ottawa should hit the restart button on relations with China
> 
> JEFFREY SIMPSON
> 
> From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> October 29, 2008 at 3:25 AM EDT
> 
> TORONTO — The gap between civil society and the Harper government over Canada's relations with China yawns wider than ever.
> 
> The Harper government can't seem to understand China's importance. The Prime Minister hasn't been there, nor have the Chinese sent a very high official to Canada. Instead, a group of premiers who form part of the Council of the Federation are heading to China this week to join Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is already there.
> 
> It's a sad commentary when normally parochial premiers are in front of the federal government in working on relations with China. It's one thing for the Harper government to be so bereft of talent in foreign affairs that no obvious candidate for that portfolio exists; it's another thing for the government to let premiers frame relations with another country, especially one as important as China. If this is the Harper government's idea of “open federalism,” kill it now before it spreads.
> 
> Monday night, a sampling of civic society in the form of about 500 people gathered in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum for a fundraising dinner organized by the Canadian International Council (CIC). The dinner followed a two-day conference about China and was capped by the award of Globalist of the Year to a distinguished Chinese official, Cheng Siwei. The council is the brainchild of Research in Motion's brilliant co-founder Jim Balsillie, who understands the importance of deepening Canada's understanding of the world. Mr. Balsillie has helped finance the new council and the excellent Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.
> 
> Mr. Balsillie laid it on the line, with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty seated at the head table: “We need to hit the restart button on Canada-Chinese relations.” The audience agreed, applauding Mr. Balsillie's observation.
> 
> Mr. Harper said late in the election campaign that, yes, maybe he would like to visit China. A few of his ministers have been there, but the one who seemed to understand China's importance, foreign affairs minister David Emerson, did not seek re-election. (In fairness, the government has opened new trade-promotion offices in China.)
> 
> During the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics in Beijing, Mr. Harper's absence was noted on Chinese television. When Canada's deputy minister of foreign affairs went to Beijing, nobody of importance in the Chinese hierarchy would see him.
> 
> It seems obvious to just about everybody in the business and academic worlds that you don't have to like China's regime, or admire its human rights record, but you do have to deal seriously with the emerging economic superpower. A Canadian-inspired idea will make this evident Nov. 15 in Washington when leaders of 20 countries, including China, gather to discuss the global economic crisis. Canada, under prime minister Paul Martin, pushed hard for a G20, but the idea was predictably pooh-poohed by the big European countries and the U.S.
> 
> They have now accepted the idea, because it's obvious that China and other major players cannot be excluded from debating major questions, given their economic clout. In China's case, it is the principal foreign banker to the over-consuming, indebted and underproducing Americans.
> 
> The Harper government, completely inexperienced in foreign policy upon arriving in office, had no idea how to engage China, except by focusing on a few high-profile human-rights cases. The government seemed to believe that Canada mattered a lot to China whereas, in fact, Canada does not.
> 
> It was all very touching at the Toronto dinner to hear yet again about Norman Bethune and his medical work in China during the Maoist revolution. But if the memory of Dr. Bethune is the best Canada can do by way of linking itself to today's China, that fading link inferentially tells a story of today's neglect.
> 
> The Harper government made one of those partisan assumptions that because the previous Liberal government had “done” China, it would “do” India, a classic case of refusing to give a preceding government credit for doing something right.
> 
> Alas, the Harper government hasn't done India very well. What's happened, therefore, is that relations with India have not gone far, while those with China have gone backward.
> 
> Mr. Balsillie said it best: Push the “restart button.”



Simpson is partially right: Harper’s Conservatives are “doing India” because the evil Grits “did China,” but the problem is, also, that Harper is, intentionally, appealing to the Canadian branch of the (sadly quite large) _Lou Dobbs_ lunatic fringe that sees reds under the beds, again.

Jim Balsillie is quite right: it is time to press the restart button with China. This does not mean hat we should move away from India, quite he contrary, we ought to be able to walk and chew gum by dealing with both files – and America and Europe, and, and, and ... – simultaneously. China is not a friend but nor is it an enemy. It is a major power and an important trading partner – more important than e.g. France or Germany or both together with Portugal and Ireland and a half-dozen others thrown in.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> ... Mr, Campbell,
> 
> In spite of your mentioning that you have discussed with Chinese academics (whom I assume to be _da lu ren _ or mainlanders or at the very least even ardent Taiwan _waishengren_ who are more than eager to reunite with the mainland), I infer that your agreeing that Taiwan is part of China is in part based on what they say. I met the same reception/opinion when I was in one of Pan Wei's classes; they are all of the same opinion that Taiwan will one day go back to the mainland. I think you have to look at another perspective of the equation to get a fuller picture of the situation; there is some simmering _benshengren_ resentment just below the surface in Taiwan, and it is more than just what the MSM of both Taiwan and Western media seem to want to portray:
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-taiwan22-2008oct22,0,6777951.story



I agree there is another perspective, I just don't think it matters very much.

*I have never been to Taiwan and I have only discussed politics with a very, very few Taiwanese expats* (enough to count on one hand with a finger or two left over) but I remain convinced that:

•	China's claim to Taiwan is valid;

•	The Taiwanese political _elites_ are committed to eventual reintegration - many Taiwanese, especially indigenous people, might differ;

•	The US is committed to eventual reintegration; and

•	China and the majority of the Chinese people *demand* reintegration - but they are not worried about the time line. What China cannot and will not tolerate is any Taiwanese move away from an explicit commitment to reintegration.


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC is and should be a trading partner.They should not be your only trade partner because there may come a time when they could become your enemy.Last time I looked the PRC IS a communist country whose ideology is in conflict with our own way of life. The reds under the bed are the worst kind - those that are at home working to change our society from the inside. The bold ones still call themselves communists but most prefer to be called socialist.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ...Last time I looked the PRC IS a communist country whose ideology is in conflict with our own way of life. The reds under the bed are the worst kind - those that are at home working to change our society from the inside. The bold ones still call themselves communists but most prefer to be called socialist.



China is *not* a communist country and the overwhelming majority of Chinese with whom I have spoken are eternally grateful for that. The Chinese are not, culturally or philosophically, even _socialist_ - they might be the world's most _natural_ capitalistic entrepreneurs.

The Communist Party of China is not communist, either - except in name. It is just another _dynasty_; one that appeared after a slightly longer than average interregnum that included 30 years of a disastrous communist experiment - as dynasties have been appearing and disappearing for nearly 3,000 years.

For the time being the capitalistic CPC has an implicit _mandate_ from the Chinese people. Eventually that mandate will be withdrawn; the Chinese hope the subsequent interregnum will be very short. The ones I know crave a Western style orderly and peaceful change of regimes, à la Taiwan.


----------



## tomahawk6

Well I for one take them at face value. The Communist Party exists and has some 73.36 million members. To be sure its a totalitarian system with its prison camps,block wardens,informants,secret police but they do have capitalism of a sort.The economic system has been relaxed but the Party remains in charge and for the foreseable future.Only party members get a shot at the good jobs just as was the case in Nazi Germany or the USSR.It remains the ultimate insiders club.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> ... Only party members get a shot at the good jobs just as was the case in Nazi Germany or the USSR.It remains the ultimate insiders club.




That was true 25 years ago, but, as I mentioned a few weeks back, some people are turning down Party membership offers because they (the memberships) are no longer very useful unless one wants to be a civil servant or politician.

Twenty-five years ago a parent’s Party membership might help a really bright youngster get into one of China’s top universities – now one can be the president of that top university (more exclusive than Harvard) or CEO of a major technology company without being a Party member.

I read, some weeks/months ago (I’m too lazy to go find the article) that the winning candidate(s) in one (some?) local (mayoral) election(s) was (were) not Party members.

China is changing. But it is a big, complex, diverse country and change is slow, sporadic and sometimes goes in unexpected and unplanned directions.


----------



## tomahawk6

Yet in the countryside nothing has changed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually, it has. _Deep, deep_ in the countryside I saw/experienced _”old China”_ but with satellite TV and cell phones.* People in the countryside now have 24/7 ‘access’ to the whole country and, within limits, the world. They see and hear primarily, but not exclusively, what the Communist Party wants them to see and hear. But: there is considerable ‘leakage’ of news and opinion on the dozen or so TV channels available in remote farmsteads.

Perhaps the most profound political changes are being made in the ‘countryside.’ It is there, not in towns and especially not in cities, that the Chinese are experimenting with real democracy. There were, in the recent past (several times since 1998), pretty free and, as far as I have heard, fair elections for local governments in smaller towns and rural districts. (There are ‘elections’ for some offices in big cities but I think they are all rigged.)

Of course, local democracy is designed, in part, to shift the blame for inept central administration to local, elected people. But, I think the rural folk are smart enough to see through that ruse.


--------------------
* In fact, in one place I visited when I commented on this I was made to “sing for my summer” by repeating a very, very old essay on ‘Rural Electrification in Canada’ to explain why I saw parallels in Canada _circa_ 1930 and China _circa_ 2005.


----------



## Kirkhill

But Edward, isn't that how China ended up with "the Century of Humiliation"?  Local interests ignored the Beijing/Peking Dynasty and made their own accomodations with foreign devils?

You argue that China is not Communist and that the Centre (Dynasts) are Communist in name only.   Yet it is not the countryside that is our problem.  It is the Centre, with the levers (and dare I say switches) it has to hand that it our problem.

The Centre seems to be working overtime to ensure that the countryside stays where they are, far away from the switches and levers.  And yet you seem to be relying on the countryside (periphery) to exert a balancing influence on the Centre.

Am I misreading you that badly?

Also, I think I find myself siding with CougarDaddy on the Taiwan issue.  The Taiwanese elites - would it not be fairer to describe them as Aristocratic Refugees?  Much after the fashion of White Russians in Paris after the Revolution (although the French never allowed them to develop into a political force).


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> But Edward, isn't that how China ended up with "the Century of Humiliation"?  Local interests ignored the Beijing/Peking Dynasty and made their own accomodations with foreign devils?
> 
> You argue that China is not Communist and that the Centre (Dynasts) are Communist in name only.   Yet it is not the countryside that is our problem.  It is the Centre, with the levers (and dare I say switches) it has to hand that it our problem.
> 
> The Centre seems to be working overtime to ensure that the countryside stays where they are, far away from the switches and levers.  And yet you seem to be relying on the countryside (periphery) to exert a balancing influence on the Centre.
> 
> Am I misreading you that badly?
> 
> Also, I think I find myself siding with CougarDaddy on the Taiwan issue.  The Taiwanese elites - would it not be fairer to describe them as Aristocratic Refugees?  Much after the fashion of White Russians in Paris after the Revolution (although the French never allowed them to develop into a political force).




Clearly, I’m not being clear. 

???


The ‘centre,’ the _Red Dynasty_, is experimenting with local democracy and with several other ‘solutions’ to some of China’s most vexing problems: especially corruption and nepotism.

The centre is not philosophically democratic but it is not unalterably opposed to democracy, _per se_, so long as the dynasty’s ‘mandate’ is respected. If I’m correct, the thinking in the ‘centre’ is that the Party can build a sustain a constantly evolving honest meritocracy to manage the country so that participatory democracy will be unnecessary, even undesirable, at the national and provincial levels. Democracy may be more desirable at local levels because even the ‘centre’ understands that its ‘mandate’ can only be managed on a limited scale and the tens of thousands of local governments, each with its own problems and solutions, simply defy central management. The local people, it is thought, are best able to identify and select people of merit to manage their local affairs - without too much corruption. Eventually, the process of identifying meritorious people may be more open, more democratic.

The relationship of Paris to the _provincials_ is analogous to the relationship of the ‘centres’ (in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing) and the _regions_ in China. China is governed run – like a business - from the ‘centres’ and the locals are expected and expect to respond to the centres’ management.

But the ‘centres’ want the *ever shrinking* countryside to grow (or, at least, stabilize) and prosper – and that means they want the countryside to modernize: to become productive and prosperous – only then will the countryside no longer be a source of discontented people who might become radicals and rebels.

Over 550 Million of China’s 1.3 Billon people live in fairly medium (> 1.5 Million), large (> 5 Million) and giant (> 15 Million) cities; that means 800 Million – as many people as in America and Europe combined - live in small cities, towns, villages and farmsteads. They and their prosperity must be on the minds of the ‘leadership’ in the dynasty. Not all of the ½ Billion in the big cities are rich, either – but they, like their confreres in he country are much, much better informed than any Chinese in history have ever been and their discontent must be kept at a low level. This is, I think the constant preoccupation of the _upper classes_.

Finally: we can all agree to disagree on Taiwan.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> The Taiwanese elites - would it not be fairer to describe them as Aristocratic Refugees?  Much after the fashion of White Russians in Paris after the Revolution (although the French never allowed them to develop into a political force).



Those are the _waishengren_ (外省人) of Taiwan, though I wouldn't go as far as to call most of them "aristocratic" in the White Russian sense. They did include the bankers, the landholders, the rich businessmen (the Soong Family), the remnants of the scholar-official/進士 class and of course the Guominjun's best remaining soldiers and officials of the disgraced Guomindang who sought to follow Chiang Kai Shek to his island bastion. Even a generation later, many of them and their offspring still consider themselves more mainlander than Taiwanese and thus this helps explain why the GMD and the CCP have been concialiatory recently, with such top GMD leaders as Lien Chan even going to mainland China to meet PRC President Hu, IIRC.


But as recent history as has shown, the native Taiwanese or _benshengren_(本省人) have begun to enter into positions of power (where in the past the best Guomindang postions were often reserved for _waishengren_), with Lee Tung Hui and even Chen Shui Bian as prime examples of _benshengren_ who have achieved the highest office in the ROC government. In contrast the current President Ma, is technically a _waishengren_ since he is Hong Kong-born.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Clearly, I’m not being clear.
> 
> 
> .....
> Finally: we can all agree to disagree on Taiwan.



Actually you are much clearer now.  Although I still think there is room for T6's scepticism over the Centre's motives - especially given that the Centre is itself a prize to be squabbled over and not an entity.  That is especially true, IMHO in a  society with deep hierarchical, authoritarian traditions.  There is a demonstrated willingness to accept the man on the white horse.  And I think that is ultimately what concerns me about any community - a willingness to suspend individual thought and play follow the leader.

I understand your realpolitik balancing act the Centre must play with the Regions and the rural.  But that white horse thing keeps getting in my way.....

And as far as agreeing to disagree on Taiwan, I think that is pretty much where most of the world is at today.

Cheers, Chris.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I’m not sure the “man on a white horse” is all that common in China.

He’s always there, of course, striking the fatal blow when a dynasty dies – loses the ‘mandate of heaven’ or, today, the ‘mandate of the people.’  Another one pops up to end the interregnum and start a new dynasty – e.g. Deng Xiaoping in 1980.

(Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong preside over a 70 years long interregnum.)

Since then we’ve had “men in grey flannel suits” like Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. I don’t want to suggest for even a µsecond that the competition to get to the top of the Party is anything but brutal and intense in the extreme, but these people, while being well beyond _apparatchiks_, are members of a new managerial class - they are anything but “men on white horses.”

While Hu Jintao has immense power – his finger is on all those switches, after all – he is also immensely constrained by the _checks and balances_ provided by the Party apparatus, especially within the Political Bureau and the Military Committee. To the degree that there are “white horses” they are being ridden there – inside the Party’s backrooms.

But, I think, that the whole Party apparatus is focused on one thing: keeping _“old hundred names”_ (lao bai xing 老百姓) – the ordinary folk – happy or, at least, contented, and the last thing the ordinary folk want is turmoil and upset (70 years was enough!) so a “man on a white horse” will, likely, be most unwelcome.


----------



## Kirkhill

And, in that case, long may it remain so.


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/10/25/2003426904

War game prepares US forces for next threat

By Richard Halloran

Saturday, Oct 25, 2008, Page 8 
In a war game called “Pacific Vision” run by the US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) in Hawaii, aviators concluded that US air power would defeat a “near-peer competitor” in the Asia-Pacific region over the next seven years — provided a strategy of dispersal is adopted and certain investments are made.

For “near-peer competitor,” read China. But Air Force officers said that the adversary could also be a resurgent Russia. In any case, the war game was intended not only to test strategy but also to deter others from miscalculating US power and intentions.

General Carroll Chandler, who commands PACAF, said in an interview: “I asked them to look at what we think we need to carry out our mission, particularly when we have finite resources.” A staff officer said the general, in effect, “asked us to tell him where he should spend his next dollar.”

Meanwhile, the publication Defense News reported on a RAND study that suggested “US air power in the Pacific would be inadequate to thwart a Chinese attack on Taiwan in 2020.”

Among the conclusions drawn from the war game were:

Dispersal: Before hostilities begin, US fighters, bombers and aerial tankers should be dispersed to bases along an arc anchored in Alaska and wending south through Japan, South Korea and Guam and on to Southeast Asia and Australia. Said one officer: “This would complicate targeting for an adversary.”

Access: The US should intensify efforts to cultivate nations along that arc, including treaty allies, to ensure access to bases there and the freedom to operate in the event of hostilities.

Hardening: Aircraft hangers, command posts, electrical plants, ammunition depots and supply warehouses should be hardened to withstand attack, particularly from missiles rapidly being acquired or developed by China.

Repair: Crews and equipment to repair damaged bases should be trained and positioned so they can move quickly to bases where needed. Airfield runways, for instance, would need to be repaired quickly after an attack.

Tankers: The age of the Air Force’s tankers was documented. Because of distances in the Pacific, more tankers would be needed to defend the region than were needed in Europe to deter the former Soviet Union.

Stealth: Advantages of stealth technology that permits B-2 bombers and F-22 fighters to evade radar detection were validated. “We are sure that we can shoot them before they can see us,” a staff officer said.

Communications: The war game underscored the vulnerability of communications because the Air Force relies on unprotected commercial channels. Moreover, China destroyed an inactive satellite last year with an anti-satellite missile.

Integration: Aircraft carriers and submarines armed with cruise missiles would need to be dispersed like land-based aircraft. The Navy was represented in the war game but work was needed to integrate war plans.

Intelligence: The need for Global Hawk, an unmanned reconnaissance plane that can fly great distances, covering 100,000km² a day in all weather, was confirmed. The first of three Global Hawks will be sent to Guam next year.

Cyber Warfare: Officials discovered that the US is lagging in cyber warfare, from jamming radar to attacking computer networks as well as protecting radar and computers. China has emphasized cyber operations.

Control: The Air Operations Center in the 13th Air Force has been running for two years. PACAF and the 13th Air Force would fight an aerial war in the region through the center, which must improve controls over widely dispersed forces.

PACAF plans to apply these lessons. One officer said: “We’ve maintained a long period of peace because we continually prepare for war. That’s what Pacific Vision was all about.”


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _National Post_, is some interesting news from Taiwan:

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=925445


> Taiwan ready to open doors wider to China
> *Island to change investment rules radically*
> 
> Duncan Mavin, Financial Post
> 
> Published: Saturday, November 01, 2008
> 
> HONG KONG - The Taiwanese government is expected to announce dramatic rule changes that will allow Chinese investment in the island, opening the door for China's institutional funds and wealthy investors.
> 
> The Chinese capital will be well-received by Taiwanese businesses, who hope the infusion will give a boost to the island's sluggish economy.
> 
> But the new rules, which could be unveiled as early as Monday, will likely face opposition from anti-China groups in Taiwan who fear the mainland's growing influence on the island.
> 
> "There's a lot of anticipation on the part of the Taiwanese business community," said Joseph Cheng, professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong. "Even before the financial tsunami, Taiwan's economy was not doing well and investment from China is very welcome."
> 
> Unemployment in Taiwan has risen to its highest level in three years and consumer confidence is at a record low as the island recovers from the bursting of a credit bubble that hit the economy hard in 2005. GDP growth has also been in decline all year and the country's export-driven economy is expected to contract further in a global slowdown.
> 
> "The bottom line is that Taiwan's growth will slow significantly from a global demand shock," said UBS analyst Sean Yokota.
> 
> The island's economic difficulties helped Ma Ying-jeou to a landslide presidential election victory in May, won on a platform of building better ties with China to improve the island's flagging economy. A cornerstone of the campaign was a pledge to open Taiwan to Chinese investment. Several deadlines for an announcement on the new rules have passed, with government officials citing unresolved issues. Sources said the much-anticipated investment guidelines, which are likely to be similar to existing regulations on foreign investment in Taiwan, could be announced next week.
> 
> China's top Taiwan negotiator, Chen Yunlin, and his Taiwanese counterpart, P. K. Chiang, are holding a series of meetings on the island starting on Monday. At the same time, a vice-governor from China's central bank will lead a delegation from China's top 10 commercial banks to the island to explore investment opportunities, according to reports in Taiwanese media.
> 
> Chinese investment in Taiwan has been on the agenda for a while, and is not as controversial as it seems, Prof. Cheng said. But he added there are concerns among some that Chinese investors could get access to the secrets of Taiwan's prized high-tech sector, as well as fears that Chinese state-owned funds could end up with significant influence over Taiwanese media companies and other politically sensitive sectors.
> 
> Indeed, despite the election victory of President Ma and his pro-China platform, Taiwanese opinion on China remains divided. Last weekend saw hundreds of thousands of anti-China protestors take to the streets of Taipei -- some estimates suggest as many as 600,000 people -- the biggest demonstration against Beijing since President Ma took office. A week earlier, a Chinese official on a visit to southern Taiwan was pushed to the ground by a group of protesters who reportedly shouted "Taiwan does not belong to China."
> 
> Trade and travel between China and Taiwan have been severely restricted since the two sides split in 1949 following a civil war. But, since taking office, President Ma has proceeded with a slew of policy changes to improve relations.
> 
> The new rules on Chinese investment in Taiwan will likely govern a wide range of investors, including China's powerful banks and China Investment Corp., the US$200-billion investment arm of the Chinese government.
> 
> The rules are likely to allow Chinese companies to set up subsidiaries in Taiwan and permit Chinese investors to buy shares in a wide range of businesses, including finance, shipping and telecommunications.
> 
> dmavin@nationalpost.com




This will be a major step away from threats of war and invasion - assuming it happens.


----------



## CougarKing

And the on-going cross-strait dialogue continues.  With its critics and opponents on both sides.



> Agence France-Presse - 11/3/2008 7:02 AM GMT
> *China's envoy arrives in Taiwan for historic talks*
> The most senior Chinese official to visit Taiwan since the end of a civil war 60 years ago said Monday that historic talks to take place this week are the only way to build trust between the arch rivals.
> 
> *Chen Yunlin arrived in Taipei on a charter flight from Beijing for talks on strengthening economic ties, even as supporters of independence for the island staged demonstrations and planned mass rallies against his visit.*
> 
> He landed amid tight security at Taiwan's international airport just before midday (0400 GMT) for a five-day visit during which he will meet his Taiwanese counterparts, as well as the island's President Ma Ying-jeou.
> 
> *In a sign of warming ties, Chen, head of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), was accompanied by a delegation of more than 60 officials and business leaders.
> 
> Chen waved to waiting reporters as he descended from his plane to be met by Kao Koong-lian, the vice chairman of Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation, the local equivalent of ARATS. *
> 
> After arriving at Taipei's Grand Hotel, he told a brief welcoming ceremony the talks were a "milestone" in cross-strait relations.
> 
> "Peaceful development is the wish for both sides. Communication will promote mutual trust and cooperation will lead to a win-win situation," Chen said.
> 
> The talks would benefit both sides, he said, adding they would "not cover political issues".
> 
> This week's meetings aim to build on talks held in Beijing in June, the first direct dialogue� between the two sides after a 10-year gap, which led to the launch of regular direct flights across the Taiwan Strait and measures to boost tourism.
> 
> *Chen confirmed agreements would be signed on direct passenger and cargo flights and shipping links, direct postal services, and food safety issues. *
> 
> Boosting tourism would be also be discussed, Chen said. The June talks reached a daily quota of 3,000 Chinese tourists to Taiwan, but China still restricts travel to Taiwan by its citizens.
> 
> The two sides would "exchange views" on how to deal with the impact of the current global financial problems, he said, without further detail.
> 
> China and Taiwan have been split since 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communists vanquished the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) who fled across the strait to the island.
> 
> Beijing still claims sovereignty over the island of 23 million, and has vowed to retake it, by force if necessary.
> 
> *Officials say more than 7,000 police have been deployed to ensure Chen's safety, after his deputy Zhang Mingqing was jostled and knocked to the ground by anti-China protesters during a visit to Taiwan last month. *
> 
> The envoys will also hold a joint press conference on exchanges of endangered species, with China making good on a 2005 offer to the island's main zoo of two giant pandas.
> 
> *Chen's presence here has become a flashpoint for anti-China protesters who fear closer ties could erode the island's sovereignty, although analysts have pointed to the economic benefits they would bring. *
> *Protesters outside his hotel unfurled banners reading: "The communists are coming." *
> 
> They scuffled with police as they tried to release coloured balloons, on which were written slogans about tainted Chinese food products.
> 
> Taiwan is among many countries and territories to ban Chinese dairy products after they were found to contain an industrial chemical, melamine, which has sickened thousands of children in China, in a few cases fatally.
> 
> "I don't trust the Ma government," said a protester in her 60s, referring to the president's policy of moving the island closer to China.
> 
> "I think it is going to sell out Taiwan to China," she said.
> 
> *Supporters of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party plan to stage large demonstrations throughout Chen's stay. Some anti-China groups have even offered cash rewards to protesters who throw eggs at Chen, with a direct hit to his face worth 1,000 Taiwan dollars (30 US). *



http://news.ph.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1765415


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is a ‘good news’ story:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081104.wchinataiwan1104/BNStory/International/home


> China, Taiwan sign historic trade pact
> 
> DEBBY WU
> 
> Associated Press
> November 4, 2008 at 6:00 AM EST
> 
> TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Setting aside decades of animosity, Taiwan and China on Tuesday agreed to expand passenger and cargo flights and allow shipping links across the Taiwan Strait, an area that has long threatened to become a war zone.
> 
> The historic deal highlighted the dramatic improvement in relations in the past half year between the rivals that split amid a bloody civil war in 1949. They agreed Tuesday to hold high-level talks every six months and focus on building closer financial ties in the next round of meetings.
> 
> After signing the pact, Chinese envoy Chen Yunlin smiled and shook hands with his Taiwanese counterpart, Chiang Pin-kung. They sipped champagne and held up two lines of framed calligraphy that said, “Peaceful negotiation creates a win-win situation.”
> 
> For nearly six decades, Taiwan banned direct flights and shipping with China, fearing China might attack with bombers and warships disguised as civilian vessels.
> 
> But the rivals began relaxing restrictions on flights in July when their envoys met in Beijing. They signed a confidence-building deal then that allowed 36 weekly flights from five mainland cities.
> 
> Tuesday's agreement, which becomes effective in 40 days, more than tripled the number of weekly flights to 108 and allows planes to take off from a total of 21 cities. Under the deal, cargo planes can also begin flying the route, with 60 allowed each month.
> 
> In the past, cargo ships had to sail to the Japanese island of Okinawa before going to the other side. Tuesday's agreement allows them to sail directly across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.
> 
> “The direct shipping will finally help Taiwan become a transport hub in Asia and better explore the mainland market,” Mr. Chiang told reporters after the meeting. “With each cruise they won't have to go to Okinawa and they save about 16 hours and cut costs by between 15 and 30 per cent.”
> 
> A Chinese official, Zheng Lizhong, said the air links will save the airlines about $60-million (U.S.) a year. He said the direct shipping links will trim their costs by $30-million annually.
> 
> Mr. Chiang said the two sides would seek an agreement that allows banks to set up branches on each side. They would also set up agencies that would help resolve trade disputes, he said.
> 
> The agreement also includes measures for greater co-operation on food safety. The deal allows faster recalls of unsafe products and better exchange of information.
> 
> The drastic warming in relations began after Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou was elected in March, pledging to ease military tensions and forge closer economic ties with China.
> 
> Mr. Ma's predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, was vilified and shunned by Beijing because he leaned toward independence. His eight years in office were also marred by policy blunders and corruption. China has repeatedly warned that Taiwan has two choices: eventual unification or a devastating attack.
> 
> Mr. Ma's Nationalist Party has long supported eventual unification with China, a policy that has helped the new president win Beijing's trust. But Mr. Ma himself has promised not to pursue unification talks or move the island toward independence.




This is ‘good news’ not because it serves the interests of China (or Taiwan, for that matter) but, rather, because it reduces tensions and, therefore, the probability of an unnecessary and potentially destructive conflict in the region.


----------



## CougarKing

An even more interesting question is what will happen to the ROC military/the _Guo Min Jun_/國民軍 if and when the ROC does reunify or at least become an autonomous province within one country two systems?

It will be very hard for the ROC military, which has mostly Western European traditions and some US influences, to be absorbed into the PLA(_Jie Fang Jun_) which many outsiders view as yet another former East Bloc-like military. Interestingly, 2 Russians did have a part in its creation when Chiang was still teaching and mobilizing his troops at Wei Fu/Whampoa Military Academy in the 1920s, before Chiang started relying on German Wehrmact advisors from the mid-30s onward and then US advisors like US Army General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell and General Claire Chennault with the US entry into World War II.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My sense of things, a couple of years ago, was that the Hong Kong Police retained most of their pre-reunification _character_ despite new leadership and loyalties.

I'm guessing that an reunified Taiwan *might* have a small, *provincial* security force for several years - only being slowly replace by the PLA.

Alternately, and perhaps a more likely choice, they might adopt the German model: fire all the 'old' East German (Taiwan) generals and colonels and, fairly quickly, meld 'old' East German (Taiwanese) units into the 'new,' unified German army (PLA).


----------



## chanman

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> An even more interesting question is what will happen to the ROC military/the _Guo Min Jun_/國民軍 if and when the ROC does reunify or at least become an autonomous province within one country two systems?
> 
> It will be very hard for the ROC military, which has mostly Western European traditions and some US influences, to be absorbed into the PLA(_Jie Fang Jun_) which many outsiders view as yet another former East Bloc-like military. Interestingly, 2 Russians did have a part in its creation when Chiang was still teaching and mobilizing his troops at Wei Fu/Whampoa Military Academy in the 1920s, before Chiang started relying on German Wehrmact advisors from the mid-30s onward and then US advisors like US Army General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell and General Claire Chennault with the US entry into World War II.



Depends a lot on what the PLA looks like by the time they start talking about a unification process.  Isn't the PLA/PLAAF/PLAAN trying to move towards a professional, better equipped service?  The gulf between the two services might not be as far in 10, 20, 50 years


----------



## CougarKing

chanman said:
			
		

> Depends a lot on what the PLA looks like by the time they start talking about a unification process. * Isn't the PLA/PLAAF/PLAAN trying to move towards a professional, better equipped service?*  The gulf between the two services might not be as far in 10, 20, 50 years



Yes they are. We discussed that earlier in this long super duper thread, IIRC. ;D


----------



## chanman

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Yes they are. We discussed that earlier in this long super duper thread, IIRC. ;D



In some places, things with this many posts turn into a sub-forum...  Still has a ways to go to catch up with the AFV identification thread though


----------



## tomahawk6

The PLA were the first to enter Hong Kong and they will be the first into Taipei. 
Will Taiwan give up their freedom to rejoin China ? Perhaps the people may decide that its worth losing personal freedom in exchange for rapproachment with China.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> *The PLA were the first to enter Hong Kong and they will be the first into Taipei. * Will Taiwan give up their freedom to rejoin China ? Perhaps the people may decide that its worth losing personal freedom in exchange for rapproachment with China.



Not if the ROC military/the Guo Min Jun/國民軍 has anything to say about that. As I said earlier, the _benshengren_ resentment, which reared its ugly head when those locals beat up that PRC official visiting Taiwan nearly 2 weeks ago- and which Mr. Campbell so easily dismisses as of no consequence- still cannot be ignored and they still constitute over 90% of the island's population. Even though the _benshengren_ are Han as well like their _waishengren_ cousins, many events unique to their history such as the infamous "2-28 massacre" of 1947 have alienated them from the other groups within China's sphere of influence which include both Han and other minorities or other "zu".

Furthermore, the Taiwanese/_benshengren_ also speak their own language which is a dialect of the Hokien/Fujianese dialect spoken on the adjacent mainland province of Fujian just across the Taiwan Strait, although they are taught Mandarin in school and all official business is done in Mandarin. Also they should not be confused with the local non-Han tribes which are now just a small minority compared to the two Han groups on the island. My point is that from all that I stated above, the Taiwanese _benshengren_ group have more of a case for self-determination, and one should not be surprised if the PRC's attempts to appeal to all overseas Chinese across the globe has less appeal among them. And yes, T6, they would be wary of giving up their freedoms to a mainland Chinese government the way it is right now.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_ is a report on the talks between Taiwan’s president and China’s envoy:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081106.wtaiwan1106/BNStory/International/home


> Taiwan's president meets Chinese envoy
> 
> RALPH JENNINGS
> Reuters
> 
> November 6, 2008 at 3:08 AM EST
> 
> TAIPEI — Taiwan's president met briefly on Thursday with a Chinese official in one of the highest-level contacts between the two sides since the Chinese civil war, while thousands of protesters clashed with riot police outside.
> 
> President Ma Ying-jeou shook hands and exchanged gifts with China's top Taiwan affairs negotiator, Chen Yunlin, who has already signed agreements opening up trade and transport between the two sides that in past years have edged to the brink of war.
> 
> Outside the presidential office, at least 10,000 protesters wearing “Taiwan is my country” ribbons shouted abuse, telling Mr. Chen to leave and Mr. Ma to step down.
> 
> Some pushed down barricades and jousted with lines of police armed with riot gear, while others hurled plastic bottles. Several officers were hurt in the melee.
> 
> “What cannot be denied is that between the two sides some differences and challenges still exist, especially on the issues of Taiwan's security and international space,” Mr. Ma said at the five-minute meeting with the Chinese official.
> 
> According to security-conscious Taipei, China has more than 1,000 missiles aimed at the island just across the Taiwan Strait, one the world's most dangerous flashpoints.
> 
> Beijing, with about 170 diplomatic allies compared with Taiwan's 23, also bars the island from international organizations such as the United Nations, which requires statehood as a precondition for membership.
> 
> Communist China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949 and has vowed to bring the island of 23 million people under its rule, by force if necessary.
> 
> Mr. Ma's predecessor advocated formal independence from China, outraging Beijing and freezing high-level contacts.
> 
> Mr. Ma told Mr. Chen he wanted to see more high-level exchanges and said the two sides should not “mutually deny” each other's existence. Mr. Chen's reply to Mr. Ma was inaudible to the audience.
> 
> “The meeting is highly symbolic, mainly to show a parity between the two sides,” said Chao Chien-min, a political science professor at National Cheng Chi University in Taipei.
> 
> Mr. Ma is under pressure at home to be politically tough on China while improving the island's sagging economy by getting a piece of the other side's booming markets.
> 
> Negotiators from Taiwan and China signed a series of deals on Tuesday expanding daily direct flights and agreeing on new air routes, direct cargo shipments and direct postal services.
> 
> But protesters have been camping out in the streets since Mr. Chen arrived on Monday, accusing Mr. Ma of selling out.
> 
> “I'm here to resist China,” said Lin Ting-fung, a 52-year-old from Chungli city, just south of the capital. “I don't know how to express myself clearly, but I just don't feel comfortable when Chen Yunlin is here.”
> 
> Late on Wednesday, protesters mobbed a Taipei hotel where Mr. Chen had attended a banquet. Mr. Ma brought forward the time of his historic meeting with Mr. Chen on Thursday to avoid further trouble.
> 
> He defended the deals with China and condemned the overnight protests, which blocked Mr. Chen's exit from the hotel.
> 
> “You can't say that love for Taiwan will become the selling out of Taiwan,” he said.
> 
> Mr. Chen also attended a ceremony on Thursday to mark an upcoming exchange of two giant pandas, a gift symbolic of China, for an indigenous goat and deer from Taiwan.
> 
> He is set to watch _Cape No. 7_, a made-in-Taiwan blockbuster movie that has become a source of pride for the island and which is expected to be shown in China, the first Taiwan film to be allowed a screening in years.
> 
> Mr. Chen returns to China on Friday.




Clearly, as CougarDaddy has told us, many, many Taiwanese are not in favour of any ‘better’ relations with China.

On the other hand, I remind you of Churchill’s dictum that _”To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”_

We, the American led West, don’t need another war in Asia.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> On the other hand, I remind you of Churchill’s dictum that _”To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”_
> 
> We, the American led West, don’t need another war in Asia.



I agree with the notion that we don't need another war in Asis.

The danger associated with the 'jaw-jaw' strategy, in a world full of lawyers and propagandists, is that when it comes to "war-war" you may have already lost the diplomatic battle for being on the right side of history.  It doesn't help your cause if you repudiate treaties on the grounds that you were coerced, or that the previous adminstration didn't reflect the current will of the people.  All that matters is the signature on the document.  As an earlier "Empty Suit" - John Baliol aka Toom Tabard - found to his cost.


----------



## tomahawk6

Talking is an age old asian strategy to either stall or to acheive something that cannot be obtained by force. In this case by talking with the PRC you hopefully avoid the use of the military option by China.If Taiwan refuses to talk then they dont leave the PRC many choices but to either go away[unlikely] or prepare for several military options.By talking Taiwan hopes to string the Chinese along until some point in the future when the communist government has given way to democracy[a pipedream].


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from yesterday’s _Daily Telegraph_, is a report on another step on China’s road to secure broad, general recognition of its sovereignty over Tibet:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/tibet/3385803/UK-recognises-Chinas-direct-rule-over-Tibet.html


> UK recognises China's direct rule over Tibet
> *The British Government has been accused of undermining the Dalai Lama in negotiations with China by recognising Beijing's direct rule over Tibet for the first time.*
> 
> By Richard Spencer in Beijing
> 
> Last Updated: 8:27PM GMT 05 Nov 2008
> 
> 
> A historic change of position to recognise Chinese sovereignty was announced in a little-noticed parliamentary statement by the Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
> It will be regarded as a major triumph by Beijing, especially in the wake of worldwide condemnation of its suppression of anti-China protests and violence in Tibet this spring.
> 
> Critics are already asking what Beijing offered – or was asked for – in return.
> 
> Mr Miliband gave his strong backing to talks between the Chinese Communist Party and envoys of the Dalai Lama, the latest round of which has finished in Beijing.
> 
> He also backed the Dalai Lama's call for autonomy, rather than independence, for his homeland as a basis for agreement.
> 
> But in the last two paragraphs of his statement he referred to a historic agreement dating back almost a century which acknowledged Chinese interest in Tibet but asserted that Tibet had never been fully part of the country.
> 
> He described it as an "anachronism" and added: "Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China."
> 
> The change in position is being attacked by a growing coalition of academics, Tibet support groups and the Tibet government-in-exile itself.
> 
> Thubten Samphel, the government-in-exile's spokesman, said it was "greatly disappointed". "For the British Government to change its position at this stage to us seems counter-productive," he said.
> Britain's position derives from its colonial history – a reason why ministers and the Tibetan movement itself have rarely emphasised it.
> 
> The Simla accords of 1913 set the boundary between Tibet and British-ruled India.
> 
> They reflected the fact that Tibet had fallen within first the Mongolian and then the Chinese military orbit in previous centuries but had mostly governed itself. Britain was said to recognise Chinese "suzerainty" but not "sovereignty" over the region.
> 
> While the distinction might be obscure, it meant there was a basis in international law, backed by a permanent UN Security Council member, for Tibet to be recognised as distinct from other "provinces" of China.
> Mr Miliband said this distinction, and the whole idea of "suzerainty" was outdated.
> 
> "Some have used this to cast doubt on the aims we are pursuing and to claim that we are denying Chinese sovereignty over a large part of its own territory," he said.
> 
> He was supported by Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong. He told the Foreign Correspondents Club of China at the weekend that the position was a "quaint eccentricity".
> 
> But the Free Tibet Campaign and the International Campaign for Tibet fear the change has cut the ground from under the Dalai Lama's feet.
> 
> The ICT called the sudden change "baffling and unfortunate". The Free Tibet Campaign said the Government was "rewriting history".
> 
> The timing could not be more sensitive. Many of the issues being discussed between Beijing and the Dalai Lama's representatives, such as the boundaries of Tibet and the extent to which it is allowed to handle its own affairs, are exactly the same as those addressed by the Simla accords.
> 
> Most strikingly, Britain's position in the accords, repeated since, was that its recognition of Chinese "suzerainty" was dependent on China granting Tibet political autonomy.
> 
> Robbie Barnett, a British historian of Tibet at Columbia University in New York, said that Mr Miliband's statement stressed Britain's concern for human rights in Tibet but gave away the only leverage the outside world had to influence events there.
> 
> "This is more than a bargaining chip," he said. "This is the entire legal and political foundation for these talks."
> 
> The Foreign Office insists that there has been no change in policy, and that Mr Miliband was merely "clarifying" its current position.
> 
> A spokesman refused to be drawn on whether Britain had been offered or asked for anything in return for its concession to Beijing.
> 
> She confirmed that the Chinese were “glad” when informed by the British Ambassador to China, Sir William Ehrman, but added: “We did not give in to Chinese pressure. China was not pushing us on this.”
> 
> Stephanie Brigden, director of the Free Tibet Campaign, said Britain had given away a bargaining chip in return for absolutely nothing.
> 
> ”It’s extraordinary that Britain has rewarded China in such a way in the very year that China has committed some of the worst human rights abuses in Tibet in decades, including torture and killings,” she said.




This is, clearly, an unpopular move but I think it is good, sound 21st century policy and I'm guessing that the rest of Europe will, quietly, follow suit lest the UK secure some trade advantage over the _rest_.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Talking is an age old asian strategy to either stall or to acheive something that cannot be obtained by force. In this case by talking with the PRC you hopefully avoid the use of the military option by China.If Taiwan refuses to talk then they dont leave the PRC many choices but to either go away[unlikely] or prepare for several military options.By talking Taiwan hopes to string the Chinese along until some point in the future when the communist government has given way to democracy[a pipedream].



Isn't another US concern that if the two ever reunify of what will happen if all that US military equipment currently in ROC use like those F16 fighters, and those _Perry_ class frigates might fall into PLA hands?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Isn't another US concern that if the two ever reunify of what will happen if all that US military equipment currently in ROC use like those F16 fighters, and those _Perry_ class frigates might fall into PLA hands?



I doubt that would ever be an issue.

Reunification will not come suddenly; there will be long, protracted negotiations and provisions will be made for the protection of US interests. Equipment, for example, will be returned to the US for re-use or destruction.


----------



## CougarKing

More of that local resentment that I mentioned earlier again manifests itself when Pres. Ma meets another high-ranking PRC envoy in Taipei.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/11/06/vo.taiwan.protests.ap?iref=24hours

The place of protest appears to be somewhere along _Zhong Shan Bei Lu _/逸仙北路 or Dr. Sun Yat Sen North Road, since I recognize the building behind the crowd as a hotel that I stayed at once- the Regent, IIRC.


----------



## CougarKing

A CNN report titled: "The China challenge for Obama"

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/11/06/vause.china.challenges.cnn?iref=24hours


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another sign that the center is weakening? BTW, the city of Shenzhen is not that far from Hong Kong, IIRC.



> *Thousands attack police in southern China: state media*
> 
> AFP
> Fri Nov 7, 4:37 pm ET
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AFP) – *Thousands of people attacked Chinese police in the southern city of Shenzhen from Friday afternoon to early Saturday morning, state media reported.
> 
> Xinhua news agency reported the unrest in an "urgent" report, quoting Shenzhen city's government saying a police car was burnt when thousands of people protested the death of a 31-year-old motorcyclist on Friday.*
> 
> The report said the motorcyclist died after driving through a police checkpoint set up as part of a crackdown on illegal motor vehicles in the city's Bao'an district.
> 
> *A police officer threw his "interphone" at the passing motorcyclist, the report said, "who reeled down to an electric pole, got injured, and died with futile rescue efforts."
> 
> A subsequent Xinhua report, quoting the city's police authority, said no police were at the checkpoint and it had been set up by a subdistrict office of Bao'an district.
> 
> However, a police patrol was nearby and relatives of the dead man attacked it, blaming the police, the later report said, as 400 people gathered while another 2,000 looked on.
> 
> The police car was burnt as the crowd became angry, while some of the onlookers threw stones, Xinhua said.
> 
> The later report made no mention of injuries and said the crowd had dispersed by 2:00 am Saturday (1800 GMT Friday).*
> 
> An official with the subdistrict office had been detained by police, the report added.
> 
> *Shenzhen is a booming coastal city just over the border from Hong Kong.
> 
> It has a population of about eight million people, according to its official website, which made no mention of the violence.
> 
> China sees thousands of such disturbances each year as marginalised segments of society rise up against what they see as the heavy-handed practices of local governments, police or powerful businesses.*
> 
> In June, tens of thousands of people rioted in southwest Guizhou province over claims police had covered up an alleged rape and murder of a teenage girl.
> 
> The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said that over 10,000 people took to the streets in that protest, with up to 150 people injured in clashes with police.
> 
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081107/wl_asia_afp/chinaunrestpolice_081107213742


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Yet another sign that the center is weakening? BTW, the city of Shenzhen is not that far from Hong Kong, IIRC.



Shenzhen is right across the border from HK. It was the first 'special economic zone' that Deng established. It grew from a small fishing village - a few thousand - into a bustling city of millions, in 20 years.


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081107145825.op2k0ggd&show_article=1

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and a top UN official urged industrialised nations Friday to alter their lifestyles and not let the global financial crisis hamper climate change efforts. 
Industrialised nations should also help developing countries respond to climate change, Wen said at the opening of a two-day international meeting on global warming in Beijing. 

"The developed countries have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to global climate change by altering their unsustainable way of life," the state news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying. 

"As the global financial crisis spreads and worsens, and the world economy slows down, the international community must not waver in its determination to tackle climate change." 


The gathering in Beijing is focused on the development and transfer of technology that can help tackle climate change ahead of next month's talks on creating a new global treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Representatives from 76 nations are attending. 

China proposed last week that rich nations devote one percent of their economic output to helping poor countries fight global warming. 

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said Friday a lack of firm funding commitments could derail efforts to cut emissions in developing countries, especially during the financial crisis. 

"The financial crisis is definitely going to affect international climate change policy," he said. 

But "the financial crisis offers the world an opportunity to move away from toxic investments and make sustainable investments, for example into low emissions energy infrastructure," he said. 

In the landmark Kyoto Protocol, rich nations agreed to targets for cutting greenhouse gases as well as helping to transfer clean technology to developing nations to help them reduce their emissions. 

But much of the pledged transfers are not happening, said de Boer. 

"Industrial countries must meet their technology transfer obligations," he told journalists. 


"Given their historical responsibility for the problem, it is essential that industrialised countries take the lead in reducing emissions and that they show real leadership (in climate change negotiations)." 

Formal negotiations on a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012 will begin in Poznan, Poland next month, with the UN hoping that a new agreement will be ready by the end of 2009, de Boer said. 

"Governments have used 2008 to gather information and clarify their positions on a number of topics. At Poznan governments need to go into full negotiation mode and make concrete results," he said. 

China has long resisted calls to join rich nations in setting targets for emissions cuts, saying its relatively low per capita emissions and recent emergence as a major source of greenhouse gases should exempt it from action. 

Scientists said in September that China had leapfrogged the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the principal gases that cause global warming.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081107145825.op2k0ggd&show_article=1
> 
> Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and a top UN official urged industrialised nations Friday to alter their lifestyles and not let the global financial crisis hamper climate change efforts.
> ...
> Scientists said in September that China had leapfrogged the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the principal gases that cause global warming.



Now that's _chutzpah_!  :


----------



## Kirkhill

I wonder how many tonnes of CO2 this economic downturn has already prevented from adding to the insulation.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Shenzhen is right across the border from HK. It was the first 'special economic zone' that Deng established. It grew from a small fishing village - a few thousand - into a bustling city of millions, in 20 years.



Yes, Shenzhen benefitted as an SEZ partially because of its proximity to Hong Kong (pronounced _Xiang Gang _ in Mandarin since I think the name Hong Kong is Cantonese) the same way that Zhuhai benefitted from nearly the same extent for its proximity to Macao (pronounced _Ao Men _ in Mandarin).


----------



## Edward Campbell

According to this report reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_ web site, China is stepping up, big time:

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081109.wchinastimulus1109/BNStory/Business/home


> China announces $586-billion stimulus plan
> 
> SCOTT MCDONALD
> Associated Press
> 
> November 9, 2008 at 9:11 AM EST
> 
> BEIJING — China announced a $586-billion stimulus package Sunday in its biggest move to stop the global financial crisis from hitting the world's fourth-largest economy.
> 
> A statement on the government's Web site said China's Cabinet had approved a plan to invest the amount in infrastructure and social welfare by the end of 2010.
> 
> Some of the money will come from the private sector. The statement did not say how much of the spending is on new projects and how much is for ventures already in the pipeline that will be speeded up.
> 
> China's export-driven economy is starting to feel the impact of the economic slowdown in the United States and Europe, and the government has already cut key interest rates three times in less than two months in a bid to spur economic expansion.
> 
> Economic growth slowed to 9 per cent in the third quarter, the lowest level in five years and a sharp decline from last year's 11.9 per cent. That is considered dangerously slow for a government that needs to create jobs for millions of new workers who enter the economy every year and to satisfy a public that has come to expect steadily rising incomes.
> 
> Exports have been growing at an annual rate of more than 20 per cent but analysts expect that may fall as low as zero in coming months as global demand weakens.
> 
> The statement said the Cabinet, at a meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, had “decided to adopt active fiscal policy and moderately easy monetary policies.” It did not give details.
> 
> The statement said the spending would focus on 10 areas. They included picking up the pace of spending on low-cost housing — an urgent need in many parts of the country — as well as increased spending on rural infrastructure.
> 
> Money will also be poured into new railways, roads and airports. Spending on health and education will be increased, as well as on environmental protection and high technology.
> 
> Spending on rebuilding disaster areas, such as Sichuan province where 70,000 people were killed and millions left homeless by a massive earthquake in May, will also be sped up. That includes $2.93-billion planned for next year that will be moved up to the fourth quarter of this year.
> 
> The statement, without giving details, said rural and urban incomes would be increased.
> 
> Credit limits for commercial banks will also be removed to channel more lending to priority projects and rural development, it said.
> 
> As well, reform of the value-added tax system will cut taxes by $17.5-billion for enterprises, the statement said.
> 
> The plan was announced before President Hu Jintao goes to Washington to push Western leaders to give poorer countries a bigger role in global financial institutions at a Nov. 15 summit of the Group of 20 major economies on the financial crisis.




_Proportionately_ (to the size of the economy), I think that makes China the biggest provider of _stimulus_ and it constitutes a major break with previously very secretive Chinese economic measures.

I also means that China wants, likely will demand a leadership role when the G8/G20 meets in Washington next weekend.

Watch for a new G10 – the current G8 plus China and India – starting almost immediately.


----------



## GAP

> Watch for a new G10 – the current G8 plus China and India – starting almost immediately



What better time for them to get in.....but with the status, also comes the responsibility and limelight....


----------



## a_majoor

Look more closly at the plan:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081109/as_china_stimulus_package.html



> *China announces $586 billion stimulus plan*
> Sunday November 9, 2:15 pm ET
> By Scott Mcdonald, Associated Press Writer
> China unveils $586 billion stimulus plan to fight effects of global meltdown
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- China unveiled a $586 billion stimulus package Sunday in its biggest move to inoculate the world's fourth-largest economy against the global financial crisis.
> The Cabinet approved a plan to invest the money in infrastructure and social welfare by the end of 2010, a statement on the government's Web site said.
> 
> Some of the money will come from the private sector. The statement did not say how much of the spending is on new projects and how much is for ventures already in the pipeline that will be speeded up.
> 
> China's export-driven economy is starting to feel the pinch of weakening U.S. and European economies, and the government has already cut key interest rates three times in less than two months in a bid to spur economic expansion.
> 
> Economic growth slowed to 9 percent in the third quarter, the lowest level in five years and a sharp decline from last year's 11.9 percent.
> 
> That is considered dangerously slow for a government that needs to create jobs for millions of new workers who enter the economy every year and to satisfy a public that has come to expect steadily rising incomes.
> 
> Exports have been growing at an annual rate of more than 20 percent but analysts expect that may fall as low as zero in coming months as global demand weakens.
> 
> The International Monetary Fund has urged governments to adopt economic stimulus packages and, in some cases, to cut interest rates further, to counteract the slowdown.
> 
> China joins other major economies such as the U.S., Japan and Germany which have already introduced their own stimulus plans.
> 
> The U.S. allocated $168 billion earlier this year for tax rebates to individuals and tax breaks for businesses. Germany set aside $29 billion for tax breaks on new cars and credit assistance for companies. Japan allotted $275 billion for loans to small- and mid-sized businesses and discounts on highway tolls among other measures.
> 
> On Wednesday, finance officials from the G-20 group of major wealthy and developing nations convene in Washington to discuss a strategy for strengthening the global economy. Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected to attend.
> 
> China's statement said the Cabinet, at a meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, had "decided to adopt active fiscal policy and moderately easy monetary policies."
> 
> The statement said the spending would focus on 10 areas. They included picking up the pace of spending on low-cost housing -- an urgent need in many parts of the country -- as well as increased spending on rural infrastructure.
> 
> Money will also be poured into new railways, roads and airports. Spending on health and education will be increased, as well as on environmental protection and technology.
> 
> Spending on rebuilding disaster areas, such as Sichuan province where 70,000 people were killed and millions left homeless by a massive earthquake in May, will also be accelerated. That includes $2.93 billion planned for next year that will be moved up to the fourth quarter of this year.
> 
> The statement said rural and urban incomes would be increased.
> 
> *Credit limits for commercial banks will also be removed to channel more lending to priority projects and rural development, it said.*
> 
> Reform of the value-added tax system will cut taxes by $17.5 billion for enterprises, the statement said.



That sounds familier........(*cough* subprime crisis *cough*)


----------



## Drag

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Look more closly at the plan:
> 
> http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081109/as_china_stimulus_package.html
> 
> That sounds familier........(*cough* subprime crisis *cough*)



Good!! If you give them enough rope....  China needs to be forced to spend some of that surplus money they keep accumulating.  Better to spend it on bailing out their failing economy than military modernization


----------



## CougarKing

D3 said:
			
		

> Good!! If you give them enough rope....  China needs to be forced to spend some of that surplus money they keep accumulating.  Better to spend it on bailing out their failing economy than military modernization



Not to mention to help improve the lives of those millions of people living a hand to mouth existence in the countryside/_nong cun_ (ts'un)(though in certain areas of the countryside of some provinces it has improved somewhat).The PRC central government must deal with the increasing problem of urban migration by all these unskilled farmers heading to the city only to be unable to find work since they don't have the coveted urban residency card.

http://www.unesco.org/most/apmrnw10.htm


----------



## a_majoor

Alas, everyone seems to have missed the point: the Subprime crisis was caused by the removal of credit controls on US banks to "channel money" to a political constituency. China can easily consume their accumulated surplus and crash their economy by following that one simple step. 

The Clinton Administration started enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act in the mid to late 1990's, and the Democratic Congress refused to impose control or regulation on "Freddie and Fannie" despite repeated warnings starting in 1999 and attempts by the Bush administration to impose controls in 2003 and Senator McCain in 2006. (A certain junior US Senator from Chicago is one of the ones who voted against the imposition of regulations in 2006 BTW....), so from experience it can take a decade or less. China's economy is much smaller than the US economy and run by a more brittle authoritarian regime, so I would say maybe 3- 5 years before the implosion.


----------



## CougarKing

Not that surprising .

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27637812/



> updated 3:29 a.m. PT, Mon., Nov. 10, 2008
> BEIJING - *China said Monday that no progress was made at recent talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama, slamming the Tibetan leader's demands for greater autonomy as a mask covering a campaign for the Himalayan region's independence.
> 
> "The sovereignty is the most fundamental issue. The Dalai has — by denying Chinese sovereignty over Tibet — been trying to seek a legal basis for his claims of independence or semi-independence for Tibet," said Zhu Weiqun, a vice minister of the United Front, the government department in charge of the talks.
> 
> The Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, says he does not seek Tibetan independence from China but wants meaningful autonomy that would ensure the survival of the region's unique Buddhist culture.
> 
> However, in a string of recent comments, the Tibetan spiritual leader has sounded increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for such a deal and called a special meeting of Tibetan exile communities and political organizations to discuss the future of their struggle.
> 
> Envoys of the Dalai Lama have said they would not comment on last week's talks until after the meeting of Tibetan groups, to be held Nov. 17-22 in Dharmsala, India.
> 
> Many Tibetans insist they were an independent nation before Communist troops invaded in 1950, while Beijing says the Himalayan region has been part of its territory for centuries.
> 
> Both sides have accused the other of being not serious about resolving the Tibetan issue.
> 
> Zhu said that talks would be successful only if the Dalai Lama gives up what Zhu said was his bid to split the country.*
> 
> "However, the door for Tibet independence, half independence and disguised independence have never been open and never will be open in the future," Zhu told a news conference.
> 
> Olympic protest accusations
> Zhu also accused the Dalai Lama of ignoring an appeal from Beijing in July to stop efforts by some overseas Tibetan groups to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in August.
> 
> "Not only did the activities to damage Beijing Olympics not stop, but they escalated. The responsibility is on the Dalai's side that the talks failed to make progress," he said.
> 
> Last week's meeting was the third round of talks since anti-government riots rocked Tibet's capital, Lhasa, in March.
> 
> Beijing says the protests were part of a violent campaign by the Dalai Lama and his supporters to overthrow Chinese rule in Tibet and sabotage the Olympics. The Dalai Lama has denied involvement in the violence.
> 
> China responded with a massive crackdown in Tibet and the surrounding region in which exile groups say at least 140 people were killed and more than 1,000 were detained.
> 
> *But activists — many of them foreigners — continued to stage small protests in Beijing during the Olympics.*


----------



## CougarKing

Corrupt or not, I believe his pro-independence initiatives when he was in power were genuine and not just for show. 
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27662352/



> *Taiwan's Chen ordered detained
> Chen Shui-bian, an independence supporter, faces corruption case*
> The Associated Press
> updated 8:58 a.m. PT, Tues., Nov. 11, 2008
> TAIPEI, Taiwan - *A court ordered the detention of former President Chen Shui-bian on corruption charges Wednesday, marking an ignominious fall for the man who incensed China and roiled the United States with his contentious pro-independence policies.
> 
> Chen was expected to be sent to Tucheng Jail, the suburban Taipei facility where as a dissident leader 21 years ago he served eight months for defaming an official of the ruling Nationalist Party during the waning days of Taiwan's infamous martial law regime. *
> 
> Under Taiwanese law, Chen can be detained for up to four months. His detention does not constitute a formal indictment.
> 
> Legal proceedings against Chen — including a prosecutorial interrogation — extended for nearly 21 hours from start to finish.
> 
> Interrupted by injury complaint
> They were interrupted for several hours after the former leader complained that he had been injured while being transported from a prosecutors' office in downtown Taipei to the nearby court building.
> 
> He was returned to the court after doctors found he had sustained only a minor muscle tear that required no special treatment, said court spokesman Huang Chun-ming.
> 
> *Wednesday's court order against Chen has implications far beyond Taiwan, where he is reviled by millions for his apparent toleration for corruption, but lionized by millions of others for his willingness to stand up to both Chinese threats and American opposition to his anti-China line.
> 
> Chen, who has denied any wrongdoing in the corruption case against him, is an ardent supporter of Taiwanese independence, a cause decried by Beijing, which insists that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory. China has threatened war if the island moves to make its 59-year break with the mainland permanent.
> 
> Chen has also earned repeated condemnation from the United States, Taiwan's most important foreign partner. Despite shifting its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, Washington remains committed to helping the island defend itself against a Chinese attack. During Chen's just concluded presidency, it saw him as a loose cannon who could well provoke a Chinese invasion across the 100-mile-(160-kilometer)wide Taiwan Strait.
> 
> Denies policies are provocative
> Chen himself denies any insinuation that his pro-independence policies are provocative.
> 
> He defiantly predicted his arrest late Monday, and then early Tuesday, attempted to link it to alleged attempts by newly installed Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou to placate China in the wake of violent protests last week against a visiting Chinese envoy.
> 
> "Long live Taiwanese democracy," Chen declared to his supporters outside the prosecutors' office in downtown Taipei. "Long live Taiwanese independence." *
> 
> Not related to China
> Li Yihu, a Taiwan expert at Peking University in Beijing said Chen's prosecution is not related to China in any way.
> 
> "It is a case involving a great amount of money and has had a negative influence, so it must be dealt with," he said. "It is nothing to do with placating the mainland."
> 
> Led from the prosecutors' office in handcuffs Tuesday afternoon en route to a waiting vehicle and the drive to Taipei District Court, Chen blamed the Ma administration for his troubles.
> 
> "This is a political persecution," he declared. "Cheers for Taiwan."
> 
> In sharp contrast to Chen, Ma has made reconciliation with China the centerpiece of his six-month-old administration.
> 
> Detention is latest chapter
> Chen's detention is the latest chapter in a continuing corruption saga that badly undermined his authority during his last two years in office, and provoked mass demonstrations demanding his resignation.
> 
> Family and close advisers were imprisoned on a variety of graft charges, his wife went on trial for allegedly looting a special presidential fund, and Chen himself became the subject of a complex series of judicial probes.
> 
> His questioning Tuesday by a special team of prosecutors focused on allegations he laundered money and made illegal use of the special presidential fund during his eight years in office that ended in May.
> 
> 
> In a dramatic television appearance in August Chen admitted that he broke the law by not fully disclosing campaign donations he had received, after a lawmaker from Ma's Nationalist Party alleged that Chen's son and daughter-in-law moved millions of dollars to Switzerland in 2007, and then forwarded the funds to the Cayman Islands.
> 
> Leftover donations or bribery?
> At the time prosecutors said they wanted to determine whether the funds were indeed donations left over from political campaigns — as Chen insisted — or whether bribery might have been involved.
> 
> Under Taiwanese law, false declaration of donations is subject to a fine of $9,670, but money laundering carries a seven-year prison sentence.
> 
> *Several Nationalist lawmakers have also alleged that the ex-president took large bribes in connection with a spate of mergers initiated by the government in 2005, when several small banks took over a number of well-established financial institutions.
> 
> Taiwanese newspapers have reported that Chen received millions of dollars in bribes from Taiwan's Far Eastern Group. Both the company and Chen have denied those reports.*
> 
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.



And good God- he has gained weight; look at those cheeks!







Compared to before:


----------



## a_majoor

I suspect part of the article is an attempt to point fingers away from the Democratic Congress' role in all this, but there is probably a kernel of truth buried within as well:

http://mesopotamiawest.blogspot.com/2008/11/dragon-in-room.html



> *The Dragon in the Room*
> 
> Recently I castigated Allan Greenspan for lowering interest rates to one percent because this caused investors to rush into phony-baloney mortgages and related bonds and Credit Default Swaps. It seems Greenspan wasn't at the wheel when the Good Ship U.S. Economy was heading for the rocks. It was China.
> 
> This intriguing concept is part of the lead story in the Financial Post this morning, entitled The Dragon at World Summit by Jacqueline Thorpe. *Her thesis is that China is behind the world liquidity crisis because of its policy of keeping its currency weak*.
> 
> One of the reasons yields were so low was simple: China and other emerging markets were voraciously buying up U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities and selling yuan, Hong Kong and Singapore dollars in order to keep their own currencies weak and exports humming -- the time-honoured mercantilist approach to economic development.
> 
> Although the U.S. Federal Reserve tried to drive up interest rates as the economy recovered from the tech wreck through 2004, it found it had lost "all control" over its ability to influence longer-term U.S. treasury rates, explained Alan Greenspan during an appearance in Toronto last week.
> 
> So, according to Greenspan, he did try to increase interest rates--and thus the desirability of government securities--but failed because of China's currency manipulations. So here's the sequence:
> 
> 1. China buys U.S. treasuries to keep the yuan low, trillions of dollars worth.
> 2. Federal interest rates fall, causing investors looking for secure investments to look elsewhere
> 3. Merchant banks find a way to convert sub-prime mortgages into AAA rated securities.
> 4. Investors switch massively to mortgages, mortgage bonds and Credit Default Swaps.
> 5. Mortgages become so cheap, some people purchase two, three or four homes all on credit.
> 6. When 'teaser pricing' expires, they find they can't pay any of the mortgage payments and can't get new mortgages.
> 7. These speculators default on their mortgages and walk away from them.
> 8. The mortgages turn overnight from assets into liabilities.
> 9. Non-banks, banks and merchant banks have to find the liquidity to make up the difference in their books as all their wine turns to vinegar.
> 10. Short sellers make wonderful profits.
> 11. The Merchant banks start to fail.
> 
> Well, there are lots of people to blame, but really, Wall Street was just acting to meet the demand. Where was the demand coming from that ruined the value of U.S. Treasury notes; from China.
> 
> *So the question is this, was China aware that it would create a bubble of credit in the United States and that this bubble would eventually burst, or was this a surprise? If it was a deliberate policy, it was more than a "time-honoured mercantilist approach" to economic development, it was a trade war*.
> 
> In effect, China was stoking the credit market in the United States so Americans could buy flat-screen TV sets, Japanese cars and 3,500 square foot McMansions. When the bubble really got going, both Wall Street and main street began speculating on housing like gamblers in a casino.
> 
> What does China get out of this: rapid development of its own economy, a huge war chest of currency and a demonstration for all the world that the United States economy is not the one to follow. In effect, the Communists have tried to demonstrate that Capitalism is a fraud. We didn't notice this because we were too busy thronging the malls to buy more Chinese-made goods.
> 
> What a pleasant war this is. I can watch it unfold on my Chinese made TV set just as soon as I stop typing this very worrying post.
> 
> Update
> So how does the Federal Reserve Board set interest rates? Here's the somewhat opaque explanation by Governor Ben Bernanke. If you plough through this you'll find this nugget:
> 
> The funds rate is a market rate, not an administered rate set by fiat--that is, the funds rate is the rate needed to achieve equality between the demand for and the supply of reserves held at the Fed.
> 
> Or to put that another way, outside forces can change the rate the U.S. government pays for U.S. securities. What a concept!
> 
> Being banker to the world is one thing, but letting the world set the rates you charge has got to be like riding a tiger. Or rather, a dragon.



Since _my_ thesis is political malinvestments and regulatory failure created the mess in the first place, I would say the Chinese are at best a second order enabler of the problem, in that they sussed out the game and played it within the rules ultimately created by the US Congress. They were better and smarter players than (for example) we were; we played a good zone trap and kept our financial markets functioning, but they played a strong offensive game, and have a big pile of currency to ride out the liquidity crisis (unless they consume it in some boneheaded "stimulus package" nonsense instead).

If tarriffs or non tarriff regulatory barriers are erected, I suspect the US Congress and Administration will be the first the set them up, in an attempt to appease their union sector constituencies. At that point, the trade wars are well and truly on.


----------



## CougarKing

Here's a funny comment by a PLA General about carriers described in the article link below:



> He suggested that the United States had nothing to fear should China acquire one for *strictly defensive purposes*.



An aircraft carrier for 'defensive purposes'? HAH. A carrier's very 'raison d'etre' is force _projection_ right?  ;D

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/world/asia/18china.html?hp




> *General Hints China’s Navy May Add Carrier *
> 
> By ANDREW JACOBS
> Published: November 17, 2008
> BEIJING — *A high-ranking Chinese military official has hinted that China’s fast-growing navy is seeking to acquire an aircraft carrier, a move that would surely stoke tensions with the United States military and its allies in Asia.
> 
> In an interview published in The Financial Times of London on Monday, the official, Maj. Gen. Quan Lihua, did not say whether China was building a carrier. But the general, a senior official of the Ministry of National Defense, said having one was the dream of any great military power. He suggested that the United States had nothing to fear should China acquire one for strictly defensive purposes.
> 
> “The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier,” he said in the interview. “Even if one day we have an aircraft carrier, unlike another country we will not use it to pursue global deployment or global reach.”
> 
> In recent years, Pentagon officials have been following Beijing’s naval buildup. Since 2000, China has constructed at least 60 warships. Its fleet of 860 vessels includes about 60 submarines.
> 
> Tensions between China and the United States were heightened last month after the Pentagon announced the sale of $6 billion in advanced weapons to Taiwan. China warned that the move could worsen relations between the countries. The deal includes Apache attack helicopters and an array of missiles, radars and antiaircraft defense systems.*
> 
> In the interview, the general insisted that China would not deploy a carrier with aggressive intent. “Navies of great powers with more than 10 aircraft carrier battle groups with strategic military objectives have a different purpose from countries with only one or two carriers used for offshore defense,” he said.
> 
> Although he did not mention any country by name, his comments were clearly aimed at the United States, which has 11 aircraft carriers, including the George Washington, which was recently deployed to Japan. Of the handful of other nations that have aircraft carriers, including Britain, France, Italy and Russia, none have more than two.


----------



## CougarKing

More on America's response to the growing Chinese cyber threat.



> *US Congress warned of Chinese cyber, space threats
> China has developed a sophisticated cyber warfare program and stepped up its capacity to penetrate US computer networks to extract sensitive information, a US congressional panel warned.
> 
> "China has an active cyber espionage program," the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its annual report to the US Congress. "China is targeting US government and commercial computers."
> 
> In its 393-page report, the panel also criticized Beijing for exercising "heavy-handed government control" over its economy and "continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes" such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.
> 
> The commission also issued a warning about China's space program. "China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity," it said. *
> 
> "Although some Chinese space programs have no explicit military intent, many space systems -- such as communications, navigation, meteorological, and imagery systems -- are dual use in nature," the commission said.
> 
> *The commission, which was established by Congress in 2000 to analyze the economic and national security relationship between the two nations, said China was investing heavily in cyber warfare.
> 
> "Since China's current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts," the commission said. *
> 
> It said Chinese hacker groups may be operating with government support.
> 
> *"By some estimates, there are 250 hacker groups in China that are tolerated and may even be encouraged by the government to enter and disrupt computer networks," the commission said. *
> 
> It quoted Colonel Gary McAlum, chief of staff for the US Strategic Command's Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations, as saying China has recognized the importance of cyber operations as a tool of warfare and "has the intent and capability to conduct cyber operations anywhere in the world at any time."
> 
> "China is aggressively pursuing cyber warfare capabilities that may provide it with an asymmetric advantage against the United States," the commission said. "In a conflict situation, this advantage would reduce current US conventional military dominance."
> 
> The commission recalled that unclassified US military, government and government contractor websites and computer systems were the victims of cyber intrusions in 2002 codenamed "Titan Rain" and attributed to China.
> 
> And earlier this month The Financial Times, citing an unnamed senior US official, reported that Chinese hackers -- possibly with backing by the Beijing government -- had penetrated the White House computer network and obtained emails between government officials.
> 
> The commission made 45 recommendations to Congress including possible "additional funding for military, intelligence and homeland security programs that monitor and protect critical American computer networks."
> 
> On the economic front, the commission said "China relies on heavy-handed government control over its economy to maintain an export advantage over other countries."
> 
> *"The result: China has amassed nearly two trillion dollars in foreign exchange and has increasingly used its hoard to manipulate currency trading and diplomatic relations with other nations," it said. *
> 
> *"Rather than use this money for the benefit of its citizens -- by funding pensions and erecting hospitals and schools, for example -- China has been using the funds to seek political and economic influence over other nations," said Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission.
> 
> Beijing's "continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes, namely Sudan, Burma, and Iran, threaten the stability of fragile regions and hinder US and international efforts to address international crises, such as the genocide in Darfur," the commission added.
> 
> The commission acknowledged some progress by China, specifically its adherence to non-proliferation agreements and involvement in the six-party talks to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons production capacity.
> 
> But it criticized China's use of prison labor to produce goods for export and an "information control regime" that it said regulates the print and broadcast media, Internet, entertainment and education. *
> 
> The report is available on the commission's website at www.uscc.gov.


----------



## tomahawk6

The Pentagon has experienced an extremely serious cyber attack that has DoD sytems on lockdown.Now I dont blame the PRC for this attack but it is well within their capability.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/11/military_thumbdrives_computerworm_112108w/
DoD confirms computer virus in networks

By William H. McMichael and Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writers
Posted : Friday Nov 21, 2008 21:24:08 EST
   
The Defense Department confirmed Friday that a virus has infected some of its computer networks but declined to identify the infection, say whether it was a direct attack on the networks or confirm published directives that ban the use of portable storage media such as thumb drives.

“We are aware of a global virus for which there are some public alerts,” said Bryan Whitman, Pentagon spokesman. “And we’ve seen some of this on our networks. We’re taking steps to identify and mitigate the virus.”

Whitman wouldn’t characterize the infection further except to call it a “global issue” that also is affecting worldwide networks outside the Defense Department.

He also declined to confirm a ban on the use of thumb drives, although the ban was spelled out in at least two recent Air Force directives, one of which says the order comes from the Defense Department command that oversees the military computer domains shared by all the services.

Whitman also would not comment on whether officials think the infection may have been transmitted to the military’s networks by way of a thumb drive or other flash media.

“We don’t discuss specific defensive measures that we’re taking or may be taking to protect and defend our networks,” Whitman said.

He called cyberspace a “warfighting domain that’s critical to our operations. And we have to protect it.”

He said military computer network intruders range from recreational hackers to “cyber vigilantes,” ideologically motivated attackers and “transnational actors and national states” that probe the department’s networks “millions” of times daily.

Neither Air Force directive details why the ban on portable digital media was imposed throughout the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid, which includes more than 17,000 local- and regional-area networks and approximately 7 million individual computers.

But the thumb drive ban outlined in the directives was clearly in reaction to a network intrusion, one computer security expert said.

“If it’s preventive, why wasn’t it preventive last week?” said Bruce Schneier, renowned security expert and chief security technology officer for BT, a British-based global communications firm. “Something happened, and they’re worried about it propagating.”

“They’ve got something they need to deal with,” Schneier said. “And they can deal with it better if things don’t move in and out of network. The problem with things like USB sticks is that they’re off-line storage.”

The Internet security firm Symantec reported Nov. 19 that it has noticed an increase in malicious applications that use USB flash drives to spread. The malicious code most commonly being spread in this manner, the firm says, is the SillyFDC worm.

Worms are similar to viruses. According to the Web site 2Spyware.com, the SillyFDC worm is relatively harmless, “designed only to spread and … does not contain any destructive payload.”

Neither of the Air Force directives stated explicitly that a department-wide ban is in place. But one noted that the order to stop using flash media was issued by U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for operating and defending the .mil and .smil domains.

That memo, directed at Washington, D.C., Air Force offices and dated Nov. 17, ordered “immediate suspension” of the use of such devices on all NIPR and SIPR networks.

A similar message, which did not mention StratCom, was posted online by Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo.

“The Chief of Staff of the Air Force recently implemented a policy prohibiting the use of memory sticks, thumb drives, flash memory cards such as XD, SD, Micro, Mini, CF, MS, cards etc., cameras, portable music players and [Personal Digital Assistants],” the message states. “Excluded are Blackberry devices that do not have the flash memory such as a Micro SD card installed.

“All remaining removable media such as external hard drives, CDs or DVDs, and other various items can be used if the following policies are met: All removable media must be labeled with the appropriate security classification. All other removable media such as external hard drives, CD/DVD reader/writer items must be scanned with a virus scanner prior to use.”

StratCom, and its Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, which manages the Global Information Grid, would not comment.


----------



## CougarKing

And the talks continue. Remember that this is not the first time that Lien Chan and Hu Jintao have met. It further demonstrates that the _Guo Min Dang _ are aiming for a more reconciling approach with their Cold War nemesis- the CCP.



> Agence France-Presse - 11/22/2008 2:56 AM GMT
> *China, Taiwan hold historic meeting
> Chinese President Hu Jintao met here with a senior Taiwan envoy in the highest-level meeting to take place overseas between the rivals since their split in 1949.
> 
> Taiwan's former premier Lien Chan, who is honorary chairman of the island's ruling Kuomintang party, met with Hu for about 40 minutes at a hotel in Lima, Peru, where leaders are meeting for an Asia-Pacific summit. *
> 
> Officials in Taiwan's summit delegation called it the highest-level meeting in an international setting since 1949, when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan after losing China's civil war to the communists.
> 
> "It is very significant for old friends to meet far away from Asia," Lien, who has met Hu twice in China this year, told reporters after the meeting.
> 
> China has historically opposed any hint of international recognition of democratic Taiwan, which Beijing considers a part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
> 
> Friday's chat at the mainland Chinese delegation's hotel was the latest step forward for the two Cold War rivals, whose relations have improved dramatically this year.
> 
> *Taiwan in March elected Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou, ending two decades of rule in Taipei by leaders who rattled China with their support for a separate identity for the democratic island.
> 
> Ma earlier this month became Taiwan's first president to meet with a senior Chinese official, who signed four deals that will see the two sides cooperating in air travel, post and cargo shipping.
> 
> But the official's visit to Taipei also triggered mass demonstrations by tens of thousands of anti-Beijing protesters.
> 
> Lien said that in the near future, the two sides would try to build on this year's agreements by taking up more complicated issues, including financial and legal concerns.
> 
> "These sort of issues take a longer time to deal with," he said.
> 
> Lien, a strong supporter of reconciliation with Beijing, is representing Taiwan at the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a 21-member group representing half of global trade. *
> 
> Taiwan has traditionally sent business leaders or prominent citizens as representatives to international fora to avoid rankling China. A former premier in the 1990s, Lien is easily the most prominent sent so far.
> 
> Lien said his closed-door talk with Hu touched on regional issues facing the APEC meeting opening on Saturday, offering few details when asked.
> 
> Officials in Beijing's delegation made no immediate comment.
> 
> However, Lien stressed the historic significance of this year's rapprochement between the sides, saying its benefits would extend beyond the borders of either side.
> 
> "This will be beneficial to the peoples of both sides, the Asia-Pacific region and the entire world," Lien said.
> 
> Following Ma's election, top officials from both sides met in Beijing in June for the first direct dialogue between the two parties in 10 years.
> 
> *Those talks led to the launch of regular direct flights between China and the island, and measures to boost tourism. *
> 
> The two sides split in 1949 after a civil war that saw Mao Zedong's Communists seize power, banishing the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan.
> 
> A survey of Asian opinion leaders conducted for the APEC summit showed the region's fears of a conflict between China and Taiwan have ebbed dramatically since Ma's election.


----------



## tomahawk6

Each side is trying to buy time,but talk is better than war anyday.


----------



## Kirkhill

CougarDaddy - here's an admittedly provocative question for you.  And it is intended to provoke discussion and nothing else.

Given your interests on this site I think it safe to say thay you have a concern for Taiwanese independence and are also an Obama supporter.

Now that Obama is in within arms reach of the levers of power do you think Taiwan is more or less secure?

If Obama is perceived to be weak/conciliatory might that provoke rasher elements of the PLA/CPC to consider launching against Taiwan?

Do you perceive Obama as being likely to move the Carriers into the Formosa Straits region to "Face Down" the Chinese government?

Would you want him to?


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> CougarDaddy - here's an admittedly provocative question for you.  And it is intended to provoke discussion and nothing else.
> 
> Given your interests on this site I think it safe to say thay you have a concern for Taiwanese independence and are also an Obama supporter.
> 
> Now that Obama is in within arms reach of the levers of power do you think Taiwan is more or less secure?
> 
> If Obama is perceived to be weak/conciliatory might that provoke rasher elements of the PLA/CPC to consider launching against Taiwan?
> 
> Do you perceive Obama as being likely to move the Carriers into the Formosa Straits region to "Face Down" the Chinese government?
> 
> Would you want him to?



I only supported Obama because he is a Democrat and the Democrats from what I have observed have never forsaken their WW2 allies- the Guomindang/the ROC government.

- you have FDR continuing to send lend-lease/military aid to Generalissimo Chiang-Kai Shek during WW2.
-this policy continued with Truman and even beyond 1949 even when the Chinese Civil War seemed lost 
-even when that GOPer Nixon started making these initiatives to recognize the PRC with his historic visit there in the early 70s, it was a later a democratic president named Carter that same decade who made sure to not abandon the ROC since the critical *Taiwan Relations Act * became law during his presidency.
- when China started making all those war games and missile firings just off Taiwan during the 1995-96 Missile Crisis in order to influence the 1996 Taiwan Presidential Elections, Clinton established a precedent by sending two carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait to warn the PRC from escalating this any further.

Granted, the Republicans also did their share of helping Taiwan as well,

- such as the covert help to develop the IDF Chiang Ching Kuo fighter in Taiwan during the 1980s
-the first batch of the ROCAF's F16s were actually ordered during the 1st Bush administration but actually delivered during Clinton's terms
-the current Bush also sent two carrier groups to watch the Taiwan Strait during the last ROC presidential election
- the KIDD class DDGs now in ROCN service were delivered during the current Bush's term- when Taiwan could have used diesel submarines
as a better defense, but as pointed out in an earlier article, most of those US yards were busy building for USN orders

But still gave the PRC more attention prior to 1989

- allowing the PRC purchase of those Blackhawks for use by the PLAAF during Reagan's years
- the PRC allowing US intelligence officers from the US military to occupy listening posts on the-then China-USSR border during th 1970s/80s to gather intelligence on Soviet movements-which was also one of the agreements hammered out during Nixon's overtures, IIRC.
- the US continuing to support the PRC's motions to block the ROC's attempts to get UN membership- which continues to this day-every year since the ROC was kicked out of its UN Security Council seat, those 30 or so nations, such as Panama or Nicaragua which still recognize the ROC as the "one China" attempt to bring a vote in the UN General Assembly to introduce the motion to recognize Taiwan as a member- and it is blocked each year by an overwhelming vote which includes the US and the PRC. 

Perhaps T6 might be right in saying that President Obama might be a socialist trade protectionist or an isolationist luddite as Mr. Campbell says and thus apathetic about what might happen if the PRC invades Taiwan. Or he might disappoint those expectations altogether. It remains to be seen.


----------



## Kirkhill

Thanks CougarDaddy.

The most interesting aspect of your reply, for me, is your apparent belief that the party will trump the man.  I wouldn't necessarily have believed that prior to the election, and the jury IS still out on that,  but I have to say that given Obama's choices for cabinet you seem to be right on that.

I was confused as to what an Obama was.  In my mind he could have been one of many things:

Muslim,
Christian,
Immigrant,
American, 
White with Black blood
Black with White blood
Establishment Scholar
Student Radical
PLO supporter
IZL supporter
Marxist
(Can't find any Capitalist indications but perhaps that is yet to come)

In the end I simply find him to be vacuous (or in his own words a blank slate): a pretty boy willing to be a mouthpiece for whoever will get him the threads, the house and the limo.  And he doesn't car if it is ACORN, Daley, Soros or the Democrats that he is fronting.  He also doesn't seem to care if he upsets the people he leaves behind.

For that I suppose we should be truly grateful  because that means that the "adults" (and I am not including Reid, Pelosi or Franks) in the Democrats will be driving.  Just consider Hillary as Secretary of State and her positions on Iraq.

She politiced one way but voted the other.

I truly do hope this is true because the prospect of Obama acting on principles in keeping with his various speeches and writings I find to be truly frightening. (Depending on which speeches and writings you are talking about).


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese leadership has to create 25m jobs a year and they have to keep rural dwellers out of its cities to avoid an internal breakdown in central government control.There have been reports of attacks on government offices and battles with police. Right now these instances are sporadic but if China feels the effects of the global recession the government will have no choice but to call out the tanks to retain control.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7747333.stm

The World Bank says China's economy will grow by less than expected next year, adding to the country's, and Asia's economic gloom. 

China's economy is expected to grow by 7.5% in 2009, according to the Bank. 

A few months ago, before the global financial crisis, it predicted the Chinese economy would grow by about 9%. 

But the Bank says China will still do well enough to avoid the worst effects of the global recession, and could still help other developing countries. 

The World Bank has revealed it is in talks with Beijing about providing additional money to help developing countries through the current crisis. 

Speaking at a press conference, David Dollar, head of the World Bank's China office, said economic recession in the United States, Europe and Japan would affect China. 

No immunity 

Until recently, China had largely avoided the effects of the global crisis because its financial system is insulated from the rest of the world. 

But that crisis is now leading to a worldwide economic recession - and that will affect China. 

If people across the world have less money to spend, they will buy fewer Chinese imports; that will lead to factory closures and job loses in China. 

"So far [the crisis] hasn't impacted all that much [in China], but we will see that impact intensifying," said World Bank economist Louis Kuijs. 

But it is not all bad news - the Bank says the Chinese economy will still grow at a reasonable rate. 

That is partly thanks to a $586bn (£387bn) economic stimulus package recently announced by the government in Beijing. 

As part of the package, China will be spending more on infrastructure projects over the next few years, including railway lines, urban subway systems, and water and sanitation projects. 

Chinese leaders have appeared increasingly gloomy about the prospects for the country's economic outlook. 

Last week, one senior official warned that unemployment would rise next year. 

But World Bank officials believe China will be able to weather the coming global economic downturn.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Right now these instances are sporadic but if China feels the effects of the global recession the government will have no choice but *to call out the tanks to retain control.*



Doubt they'll need to. The People's Armed Police (PAP) have their own APCs. 

The PAP was specifically created to help quash internal dissent and to find something to do with all those demobilized troops as the PLA was being scaled back, IIRC.


----------



## tomahawk6

If rioting is widespread it will require backup by the military.


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/3525052/China-slashes-interest-rates-as-panic-spreads.html

China slashes interest rates as panic spreads
The People's Bank of China cut interest rates by more than 1pc point as the economy crumbles and millions of jobs are predicted to go ahead of Christmas.

The move came just one day after the World Bank predicted that China would grow by 7.5pc next year. The level of growth may appear robust by Western standards, but it would represent the slowest economic expansion in China for the last two decades. 

It is also perilously close to the 7pc minimum level of growth that Chinese economists believe is necessary in order to create enough jobs for the 6m university graduates who will enter the jobs market next year. 

It is the fourth interest rate cut from the Chinese central bank in the last ten weeks as the government desperately battles an evident economic collapse. "China is out to save itself here," said Patrick Bennett, an analyst with Societe Generale in Hong Kong. 

The PBOC reduced its main borrowing rate by 1.08pc points to 5.58pc, the biggest one-off cut since the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. 

In recent weeks, a series of riots across central and southern China have flowered as disgruntled employees aired their grievances at the downturn. 

Today, around 500 protesters rioted at the Kai Da toy factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River delta, flipping over a police car and trashing computers in a dispute over payoffs to 80 fired workers. Tens of thousands of factories across the region have already shut their gates. 

Yin Weimin, China's Social Security minister, has revealed that employment is the Communist Party's number one concern in the downturn and said the "situation is critical". Unemployment is expected to rise from 4pc to 4.5pc by the end of the year and anecdotal reports have suggested that 3m people have already been fired in the industrial province of Zhejiang alone. 

Two major provinces, Shandong and Hubei, have already responded by banning companies from firing staff without permission from the government. 

The Chinese government has also announced a £373bn bailout to stimulate domestic growth by investing in infrastructure. However, only a fifth of the money is likely to come from central government coffers, with the rest coming from a mix of private enterprise and local government funds. 

"We're seeing a government that steps in, that is trying to do everything it can to keep growth at a decent rate, and has the financial means and the administrative capacity to make that happen," said Louis Kuijs, the head of the World Bank's China economics analysis. 

"All my colleagues were shocked by such a big easing. It signals the government may believe the economic situation is really serious for it to call for such a drastic move," said Liu Dongliang, a currency analyst at China Merchants Bank in Shenzhen. 

The reserve requirements of Chinese banks were also cut by 1pc point, and 2pc points for smaller banks, freeing up around 360 billion rmb (£34bn) for lending.


----------



## tomahawk6

Factory workers overturn a police car during a protest outside Kaida toy factory in Dongguan, China. November 26 , 2008 (REUTERS)


----------



## CougarKing

This is not only a reminder of typical PRC justice, but also shows that the distrust between both sides of the Taiwan Strait remains in spite of the positive tone of the recent cross-strait talks.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27956301/



> *China executes researcher for spying
> U.S. 'deeply disturbed,' says trial fell 'far short' of international standards*
> The Associated Press
> updated 10:12 a.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 28, 2008
> BEIJING - *A Chinese medical researcher and businessman was executed Friday on charges of spying for Taiwan, his family said.
> 
> Ran Chen, who has Austrian citizenship, said her father's execution by gunshot was confirmed at 5 p.m. via the Austrian embassy in Beijing.
> 
> "Today, our beloved father, Wo Weihan, was executed," a statement from Chen and her sister Di Chen said. "His life was taken from him before he or our family could say its last goodbyes."*
> 
> The family were hopeful he might be spared after they visited him at a Beijing court Thursday morning, their first meeting since he was detained almost four years ago, and were later told a second visit had been approved.
> 
> Neither the family nor Wo had received official notification about the execution, and so he did not leave any final words with them, the statement said. He had been surprised and happy to see them, it said.
> 
> The sisters had planned to submit the paperwork on Friday to visit Wo again, as one of them, Di Chen, was unable to make the first visit, but they received no response from the court.
> 
> "We were all misled, led to have false hope, denied the fundamental right to be informed, and forced to suffer," it said.
> 
> The U.S. State Department said it was "deeply disturbed" by news of Wo's execution and that his arrest and trial "fell far short of international standards for due process."
> 
> Wo was sentenced to death by the Beijing court in May 2007 and his final appeal was denied on Feb. 29. The sentence was automatically forwarded to the supreme court for approval.
> 
> *Human rights groups and diplomats from the EU, Austria and the United States had appealed to China on Wo's behalf, contending that he did not receive a fair trial and was given an overly harsh sentence.*
> 
> "We had hoped that the Supreme People's Court, in its review of the case, would recognize that such a severe punishment simply didn't fit the criminal allegations against Wo Weihan," John Kamm, executive director of the U.S.-based Dui Hua Foundation, said in a statement Friday.
> 
> Wo was accused of passing data on missile guidance systems and other sensitive information to a group linked to Taiwanese intelligence agencies. Taiwan and mainland China have been divided amid civil war since 1949.
> 
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.


----------



## Flip

> In the end I simply find him to be vacuous (or in his own words a blank slate): a pretty boy willing to be a mouthpiece for whoever will get him the threads, the house and the limo.  And he doesn't car if it is ACORN, Daley, Soros or the Democrats that he is fronting.  He also doesn't seem to care if he upsets the people he leaves behind.



Thanks Kirkhill!  :rofl:

I liked the addition of Soros. Merchant of gloom and the king of the short sell.

I'm glad for this thread - adds some depth to the situation. If you add a dimension it isn't so murky.....

Interesting times........

These last few posts imply that western capitalism will triumph , by providence or accident.

 Interesting times........


----------



## a_majoor

Oh oh......

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/3546471/Chinese-economy-1930s-beggar-thy-neighbour-fears-as-China-devalues.html



> *1930s beggar-thy-neighbour fears as China devalues*
> 
> China has begun to devalue the yuan for the first time in over a decade, raising fears that it will set off a 1930s-style race to the bottom and tip the global economy into an even deeper slump.
> 
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
> Last Updated: 10:39AM GMT 04 Dec 2008
> 
> The central bank has shifted the central peg of its dollar band twice this week in a calculated move that suggests Beijing aims to offset the precipitous slide in Chinese manufacturing by trying to gain further export share abroad.
> 
> The futures markets are pricing in a 6pc devaluation over the next year. "This is clearly a big shift in policy and we are now on alert," said Simon Derrick, currency chief at the Bank of New York Mellon.
> 
> The move follows a Politburo speech by President Hu Jintao warning that China is "losing competitive edge in the world market".
> 
> China has allowed a crawling 20pc revaluation over the past three years. Any reversal risks setting off conflict with the incoming team of President-Elect Barack Obama in Washington. Mr Obama called China a "currency manipulator" during the campaign, a term that carries penalties under US trade law.
> 
> Outgoing US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is viewed as a "friend of China". He called for a stronger yuan this week before embarking on a visit to Beijing, but the plea was couched in friendly terms. This soft-peddling may soon change.
> 
> Hans Redeker, currency head at BNP Paribas, said China's policy switch could set off a dangerous chain of events. "If they play this beggar-thy-neighbour game, it will cause a deflationary shock for the whole world," he said.
> 
> It makes sense for countries with current account deficits such as the UK, US or Turkey to let their currencies fall, but China has the world's biggest trade surplus.
> 
> Michael Pettis, a professor at Beijing University, said it was "very worrying" that a pro-devalulation bloc seemed to be gaining the upper hand in the Communist Party. "I really do believe that we are on the brink of a very ugly period for trade relations," he said.
> 
> China has relied on exports to North America and Europe as its growth engine, making it acutely vulnerable to the contraction in global demand. Mr Pettis said this recalls the role played by the US in the 1920s, a parallel fraught with danger. "In the 1930s the US foolishly tried to dump capacity abroad, but the furious reaction of trading partners caused the strategy to misfire. China already seems to be in the process of engineering its own Smoot-Hawley," he said, referring to the infamous US Tariff Act in 1930.
> 
> China showed restraint during the Asian crisis in 1998, holding the line against domino devaluations across the region. It may yet hold the line this time.
> 
> However, this crisis is more serious. The manufacturing sector has seen the steepest decline since the records began, with devastation sweeping the textile, furniture and toy sectors. Civil unrest has begun to rock the Guangdong and Longnan regions.
> 
> Beijing has slashed rates and unveiled a fiscal stimulus of 14pc of GDP, but most of the spending comes in the form of instructions to local governments to spend more – but without giving them the money. Does China really intend to step in to prop up global demand? The jury is out.


----------



## CougarKing

Bu hao yi si! (what a shame!)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28190703/



> *Taiwan ex-leader indicted for graft *
> Ex-president Chen denies bribery, money-laundering allegations
> The Associated Press
> updated 2:19 a.m. PT, Fri., Dec. 12, 2008
> TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwanese prosecutors indicted former President Chen Shui-bian on graft charges Friday, a stunning blow for a man who rode to power 8 1/2 years ago on promises to reform the island's corrupt political culture.
> 
> Chen, 57, has been held in a suburban Taipei jail since Nov. 12 pending the results of an investigation into allegations he engaged in money laundering and other offenses during his recently concluded time in office.
> 
> Indicted together with Chen were his wife, Wu Shu-chen, his son and daughter-in-law, three of his former aides in the presidential office, and eight other associates and family members.
> 
> Prosecutorial spokesman Chen Yun-nan said the former president and his wife together embezzled 104 million New Taiwan dollars ($3.12 million) from a special presidential fund, and received bribes of $9 million in connection with a government land procurement deal.
> 
> He said Wu alone took another bribe of $2.73 million from a government construction project.
> 
> "Chen Shui-bian undermined justice again and again and showed no regret," Chen Yun-nan said. "We ask the judges to give him ... Wu, (son) Chen Chih-chung and Chen Chih-chung's wife, Huang Jui-ching ... the most severe sentence."
> 
> Chen could face up to 20 years in jail.
> 
> Chen has denied all charges, saying he is being persecuted by President Ma Ying-jeou's new government for the strong anti-China stance that marked the waning years of his presidency.
> 
> 'Not true'
> At a news conference convened shortly after the indictments were announced, Chen's lawyer echoed his client's claims of innocence.
> 
> "What prosecutors are charging President Chen and his wife with is not true," said Cheng Sheng-chu.
> 
> Ma's office said it would not comment on the indictments.
> 
> Chen, who ended a 50-year monopoly on power by Ma's Nationalist Party in 2000, was first elected on promises to end official corruption in Taiwan.
> 
> His desire to carve out an independent political and cultural identity for Taiwan's 23 million people became the hallmark of his administration, which ended due to term limits seven months ago.
> 
> The son of poor farmers from the southern part of the island, Chen first came to prominence in the early 1980s defending dissidents jailed under the Nationalists' martial law regime.
> 
> In 1985 Chen's wife was run down by a truck and paralyzed from the waist down at the conclusion of a failed election campaign in the southern county of Tainan. The Chen family charged that the Nationalists were responsible, but the Nationalists denied the accusation.
> 
> Hunger strike
> Since Chen was jailed on Nov. 12, the corruption scandal has galvanized Taiwanese from all walks of life.
> 
> The former leader went on hunger strike the day of his incarceration but began eating again after 16 days, heeding pleas from his wife and family to preserve his strength.
> 
> Chen, a former maritime lawyer, is expected to mount a vigorous defense against the corruption charges.
> 
> He still retains a core of enthusiastic supporters, but many former political allies have turned their backs on him, regarding him as a liability to the pro-independence cause both he and they espouse.
> 
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.


----------



## CougarKing

And the dissent within the PRC grows.

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28273651/



> *China's middle class vents anger
> Actions have caught a government fearful of labor movements off guard*
> By Ariana Eunjung Cha
> The Washington Post
> updated 12:01 a.m. PT, Wed., Dec. 17, 2008
> CHONGQING, China - When 9,000 of Shin Guoqing's fellow taxi drivers went on strike early last month, he felt he had to join them.
> 
> *Soaring inflation had undermined what his $300-a-month income could buy for his family, and Shin said he was frustrated that the government had done nothing to help. "After running around the whole day, you have only a few renminbi for it," he said, referring to China's currency. "You don't feel good about your life."
> 
> For two days, the drivers held this Sichuan province metropolis of 31 million people under siege, blocking roads and smashing cars. The Communist Party quickly stopped the violence by promising to address the drivers' demands for easier access to fuel and better working conditions.
> 
> From the far western industrial county of Yongdeng to the southern resort city of Sanya and the commercial center of Guangzhou, members of China's upwardly mobile working class — taxi drivers, teachers, factory workers and even auxiliary police officers — have mounted protests since the Chongqing strike, refusing to work until their demands were met.
> 
> China's government has long feared the rise of labor movements, banning unauthorized unions and arresting those who speak out for workers' rights. The strikes, driven in part by China's economic downturn, have caught officials off guard.
> 
> Protests come to the cities
> Rural protests, often led by impoverished farmers angry over land seizures that leave them unable to feed their families, have occurred sporadically over the past decade. But richer, more educated Chinese are behind the recent strikes, which have disrupted life in China's cities. The success achieved by the drivers in Chongqing has inspired work stoppages elsewhere.
> 
> Urban workers say they are worried about being unable to pay for their children's college education, missing payments on car loans, and not having enough money left each month to dine out with friends or go on vacation.
> 
> In the past 30 years of economic liberalization, younger Chinese have come to see these things not as a luxury of modern life but as a right.
> 
> In the central province of Hunan on Dec. 2, more than 100 auxiliary police officers seized control of a Communist Party office in Leiyang county and demanded that the government reinstate a bonus it had taken away after the Olympics. According to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the group smashed chairs and did not allow anyone to enter or leave the building for three hours. Tan Caiyu, a municipal official, said in an interview that the government is considering raising the auxiliary officers' salaries as a result.
> 
> That same week, more than 1,000 teachers in neighboring Longhui county went on strike over unpaid allowances. The teachers accused the local government of misappropriating 400 million yuan, or about $60 million, over the past 10 years.
> 
> 
> In other places, such as the inland province of Shaanxi and in northeastern Liaoning province, teachers protested because they said they deserved to be paid as much as other government employees with the same experience.*
> 
> Taxi drivers feel the pinch
> In Gansu province's Yongdeng county, taxi drivers said their income had fallen because of the rising number of illegal taxis that the government had allowed to proliferate. Chen Yongshun, 44, who like many other taxi drivers across the country fell into his job when his state-owned factory closed, said that he has a child who will go to college next year and that he needs to make sure he will be able to afford the tuition.
> 
> *"The government is for the people. If they can't do a good job, then they should be apologetic to ordinary citizens," said Chen, who participated in a Nov. 10 strike with about 160 others.*
> 
> Huang Shuzhong, a driver in Sanya, said he and his colleagues had been upset for months because the taxi companies refused to lower their management fees despite falling demand for transportation.
> 
> Huang said that taxi drivers had brought their concerns to government officials and the companies several times earlier in the year but that nothing had come of it. Some of the braver taxi drivers began talking about a strike in the fall, but everyone had been afraid to act, he said. "After hearing about Chongqing, everything changed. We felt we could do it, too," Huang said.
> 
> In Chongqing, leaflets urging the taxi drivers to go on strike appeared overnight in the first two days of November at places where they congregate. They were taped on the walls at the place where they change the white fabric seat covers each night and scattered on the ground at gas stations.
> 
> *"Rise up!" one leaflet urged. "Let us all unite and strike together!"*
> 
> In concise and eloquent prose, it listed four complaints — it was difficult to get gasoline, the management fee they pay to taxi companies was too high, there were too many illegal "black" taxis taking away their work, and the meter was charging too little for waiting time. The leaflet also specified a date: Nov. 3.
> 
> Drivers shared plans for the strike by text message and word of mouth. Taxi driver Liu Mingsheng said the purpose of the strike "spoke to my heart."
> 
> "With my salary, I can have an ordinary life. I can buy books, toys and have medical treatment when I need it. But I can no longer have money to pay the bills and to go to dinner and drinks with friends," said Liu, 38, who used to work as a chauffeur for a state-owned company.
> 
> Drivers said the strike appeared highly organized — although none would admit to knowing who set it up. Blockades were erected at parking lots and places were taxis line up. The few drivers who dared to work that day were roughly pulled out of their cars, and their vehicles were damaged.
> 
> *Chongqing's Communist Party secretary, Bo Xilai, China's former commerce minister, responded by convening a meeting to discuss terms for ending the strike. No leaders emerged to take credit for organizing the protest, so the taxi companies selected their own representatives.
> 
> The meeting was broadcast live by the local TV station and even the official state news agency's online portal, Xinhuanet.com.
> 
> Sitting next to Bo was Tang Zhirong, who represented female taxi drivers in the city. Tang, 38, who has a college degree in accounting, said she has no regrets about the strike because the outcome was so positive.
> 
> "Before, we really didn't have any way to make complaints, and without the strike the government wouldn't have given in," Tang said in an interview.
> 
> Crackdown
> Even as government officials publicly praised the taxi drivers for their candor, they were hunting for organizers and trying to detect connections between Chongqing and other protests across the country.*
> 
> Shin said that he had saved a copy of the leaflet in his car, without thinking about it, and that the police had found it. A few days after the strike, he said, officers brought him in for questioning and demanded he tell them who had written the leaflet.
> 
> Shin, 40, said he told them he had found the leaflet on the ground and had no idea who was behind it.
> 
> Shin's story is typical. He worked at a state-owned heating company until it shut down 17 years ago and has been a taxi driver since. He says that he and his wife, who works at a gas station, make "enough, just enough," but that these days, they are working more hours — often more than 10 each day — for the same pay they got for working eight hours in the past.
> 
> Drivers in Chongqing said they were discussing a possible second strike — although no new leaflets have appeared. One of the things that the Communist Party promised after the protest was to work with the taxi companies to set up a pension and health-insurance system. The details, however, are still pending and some drivers are worried that it won't happen.
> 
> These days, said Shin, who was impressed by Bo's leadership in ending the strike, "I trust the government . . . but I don't yet trust the taxi companies."
> 
> Researchers Crissie Ding and Wu Meng in Shanghai contributed to this report.
> 
> 
> © 2008 The Washington Post Company


----------



## a_majoor

Anyone who didn't think this would happen after the Olympic Games was not paying attention. Weather it works or not is a different story:

http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/21911/?nlid=1595&a=f



> *China defends right to censor Web sites*
> By Associated Press
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- With the glare of the Olympic spotlight gone, China has resumed blocking access to the Internet sites of some foreign media, reversing itself on earlier promises to expand press freedom as part of its bid to win the games, human rights groups and press advocates said Wednesday.
> 
> The Chinese-language Web sites of the British Broadcasting Corp. and Voice of America, along with the Hong Kong-based media Ming Pao and Asiaweek, are among the sites that have been inaccessible since early December, said the press rights group Reporters Without Borders.
> 
> *"Right now, the authorities are gradually rolling back all the progress made in the run-up to this summer's Olympic games, when even foreign Web sites in Mandarin were made accessible. The pretense of liberalization is now over," the group said in a statement, as it urged China to unblock the sites.*
> 
> Earlier this week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao had defended China's right to censor Web sites that have material deemed illegal by the government, saying that other countries regulate their Internet usage too.
> 
> He said that some Web sites -- which he did not identify by name -- breached Chinese laws by recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. China maintains that the self-ruled Taiwan is a part of China, and has even threatened to use force if Taiwan moves to make a permanent split.
> 
> "I hope that these Web sites exercise self-discipline and abide by the Chinese laws, in order to pave the way for better Internet cooperation," Liu said.
> 
> During the Summer Games held in August, China allowed access to long-barred Web sites such as the BBC site and Human Rights Watch after an outcry from foreign reporters who complained that Beijing was failing to live up to its pledges of greater media freedom.
> 
> The fact that China has now chosen to re-block those sites is not so surprising, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalism professor who teaches about media and the Internet at the University of Hong Kong.
> 
> "I don't think very many people expected to see the Olympics herald a whole new era in China, at least not as far as politics and media," she said.
> 
> MacKinnon noted that the policing of the Internet in China, which has the most online users in the world with more than 250 million, swings between phases of looser monitoring and then tighter regulation.
> 
> "There were a lot of foreigners running around covering the Olympics. It made sense to unblock at that time," she said. "But things always go in phases. And during politically sensitive times, you always get a tightening."
> 
> Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said Beijing is also taking advantage of the fact that the world's attention has shifted away from China after the Olympics.
> 
> "The spotlight has moved out of China, so it's easier to suppress dissent when you don't have 10,000 journalists in town," he said.
> 
> Bequelin said he believes that the Internet restrictions are part of a larger attempt at political control during a period of uncertainty and potential instability for the government. China is facing a serious economic downturn this year, and social unrest has increased.
> 
> "I think we're heading toward a sensitive period for the leadership. This is a time of many anniversaries" such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Tibetan uprising and 30 years of economic reform, he said. "Information control is the basic tool of political control in China."
> 
> The Web site censorship also comes as the government continues a clampdown against more than 300 writers, academics and critics who signed a recent bold appeal circulating on the Internet calling for greater freedoms and an end to China's one-party rule.
> 
> The manifesto, dubbed "Charter 08," is one of the broadest calls for multiparty democracy in recent years. One of its signers, Liu Xiaobo, a writer and former professor, remains in police custody more than a week after being detained. Dozens of other signers have reported being summoned and harassed by police.
> 
> Bequelin said it is unclear whether the Internet restrictions are related to the crackdown, but that Beijing's attempts to stifle the Internet and control public information are ultimately futile.
> 
> "The free flow of information in China now is huge. Jailing journalists, closing down Web sites and blocking foreign Web sites, even arresting people like (dissident writer) Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo, it's illusory to think that's going to stop Chinese society from demanding more accountability, rights and more transparency," he said.
> 
> Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
> 
> Copyright Technology Review 2008.


----------



## CougarKing

A closer look at a Type 730 CIWS mounted on one of the destroyers headed for Somalia shows something that looks awfully like a Goalkeeper CIWS.


----------



## TCBF

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Anyone who didn't think this would happen after the Olympic Games was not paying attention. Weather it works or not is a different story:
> 
> http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/21911/?nlid=1595&a=f



- Rank amateurs.  Better to provide the illusion of a free society and form human rights tribunals to stifle free thought.  A much more nuanced approach.


----------



## old medic

China to start construction of 1st aircraft carriers next year
BY KENJI MINEMURA, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200812310046.html



> BEIJING--China will begin construction of the country's first domestically produced aircraft carriers in Shanghai next year, with an eye to completing two mid-sized carriers by 2015, military and shipbuilding sources said.
> 
> Beijing is also expected to complete work on a never-finished former Soviet aircraft carrier moored in the northeastern port of Dalian, to provide training for carrier-based pilots and crew.
> 
> The two 50,000- to 60,000-ton carriers will rely on conventional propulsion systems, not nuclear power. They will be assigned to the People's Liberation Army Navy south sea fleet, tasked with patrolling the South China Sea, sources said.
> 
> China's carrier ambitions and the build-up of its blue-water fleet have long been of interest to Pacific nations.
> 
> National defense ministry spokesman Huang Xueping recently commented that China might build its own aircraft carriers.
> 
> However, this is the first time the goals of Chinese naval planners have been clarified in such detail.
> 
> If China does bolster its naval combat capabilities by deploying aircraft carriers, it could significantly impact the delicate military balance in East Asia.
> 
> According to sources close to Shanghai municipal authorities, one of the world's largest shipbuilding facilities was completed this fall on Changxingdao island at the mouth of the Changjiang river near Shanghai.
> 
> One of the four docks there is for construction of the aircraft carriers, they said.
> 
> Shipbuilding sources said there are plans to import electrical control parts from Russia and that orders have already been placed with domestic military suppliers.
> 
> If procurement goes as planned, the carriers could be completed about two years earlier than planned.
> 
> Meanwhile, shipbuilders in Dalian are nearing completion of the 60,000-ton former Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier Varyag, as a training ship for carrier-borne aircraft pilots and crew. The ship, which was about 70 percent complete at the time of its purchase, was first acquired by a Macao tourism firm in 1998. Since 2002, it has been under construction by a Dalian-based shipbuilder with ties to the navy.
> 
> A ranking Chinese navy officer told The Asahi Shimbun that as China increasingly relies on Mideast oil, the aircraft carriers would likely see duty guarding sea lanes in the Malacca Strait and in the Indian Ocean. The officer contended that because the ships will be smaller than U.S. carriers they will not pose a threat.
> 
> Ikuo Kayahara, a professor of security studies at Takushoku University and a former research department director at the National Institute for Defense Studies, said China's plan to build aircraft carriers is a "key pillar to enhancing its naval capabilities."
> 
> "China hopes to broaden its buffer zone to protect its coasts from a perceived threat from the United States," Kayahara said.(IHT/Asahi: December 31,2008)


----------



## CougarKing

old medic said:
			
		

> China to start construction of 1st aircraft carriers next year
> BY KENJI MINEMURA, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
> http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200812310046.html


 

This makes me wonder what they will name these carriers after. The sub classes after named after imperial dynasties and the destroyers  and frigates are named after towns and cities, IIRC. Maybe they will name these ships after CCP leaders, in the same fashion after US CVNs nowadays are named after presidents and statesmen or even prominent military leaders like Admiral Nimitz. 

Trivia aside, would it be safe to assume that the Russians may be the first to leap at the opportunity of reaming and refurbishing the VARYAG, since it was mentioned in the article that she will be completed by the Chinese as a training carrier? In the same way the Russians are refitting the GORSHKOV for Indian use?


----------



## a_majoor

More potential trade troubles:

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/node/15027



> *The known unknowns of the economic crisis*
> Fri, 01/09/2009 - 11:03am
> 
> I was less impressed than Steve Walt with Roger Altman's Foreign Affairs essay on the geopolitics of the financial crisis.
> 
> Altman's tick-tock on the whys of the crisis is fine.  Saying that China will benefit and the free market model is in peril is, as Walt points out, "obvious."  It's the non-obvious stuff that we need to puzzle out.
> 
> To be fair to Altman, I suspect that he handed in his essay in early November; the extent to which the crisis would affect the BRIC economies was still to be determined.  Still, this paragraph seems way off:
> 
> _ Beijing will be in a position to assist other nations financially and make key investments in, for example, natural resources at a time when the West cannot. At the same time, this crisis may lead to a closer relationship between the United States and China. Trade-related flashpoints are diminishing, which may soften protectionist stances in the U.S. Congress. And it is likely that, with Washington less distracted by the war in Iraq, the new administration of President Obama will see more clearly than its predecessor that the U.S.-Chinese relationship is becoming the United States' most important bilateral relationship. The Obama administration could lead efforts to bring China into the G-8 (the group of highly industrialized states) and expand China's shareholding position in the International Monetary Fund. China, in turn, could lead an effort to enlarge the capital base of the IMF._
> 
> Where to begin.  First, China has taken a pass on bailing out key allies.
> 
> Second, trade-related flashpoints are not diminishing.  The crisis has prompted China increase its export tax rebates and let the yuan fall against the dollar.  This will increase rather than decrease bilateral trade tensions.  On the U.S. side, there are many reasons to be pessimistic of the trade-friendliness of the Obama administration.  And none of this mentions the toxic combination of fiscal stimuli and protectionism.
> 
> Third, the problem for the past few years has not been getting the U.S. on board with bringing China into the G-8 -- *it's been China's reluctance to join. *
> 
> So, what are the non-obvious geopolitical implications of the global financial crisis?  I suspect the biggest one will be that the "decoupling" of the global economy will begin in earnest.
> 
> The tight coupling of the global economy caused export-dependent economies to face significant downturns because of the collapse in demand from the OECD nations.  These governments will respond to the current crisis by creating the trade equivalent of currency reserves - that is to say, creating a protected space of demand for national champions.  The most direct way to do this will be to boost domestic demand while restricting competition from foreign producers.  As states plan to expand their fiscal policy, it should be relatively easy - via procurement rules and concentrating expenditures on non-tradable goods - to target new government spending towards domestic firms.
> 
> This kind of decoupling would contribute to the unwinding of the macroeconomic imbalances caused by the Bretton Woods II arrangements.  It would also, however, be sure to reduce overall economic growth even further.  It would also reduce whatever constraints economic interdependence has placed on aggressive action in world politics.
> 
> Beyond that, perhaps the best way to think about this is to consider the "known unknowns" of the current situation:
> 
> *      Which great power will recover more quickly?  Altman thinks it's China, and he may well be correct.  Still, in the past, the United States has rebounded more quickly than other countries in response to marco shocks like this one.  On the other hand, today's employment report makes it clear that the U.S. is still on the downward slope.
> 
> *      Which weak state will implode?  Consider the past month or two.  Pakistan looks like it will crack up (of course, this isn't anything new for Pakistan).  There are riots in Greece, and cholera in Zimbabwe.  Which government will collapse -- and who will be expected to intervene?
> 
> *      Which petrostate will get desperate?  As I wrote in November, a sharp fall in oil prices will have dramatic effects on Iran, Russia and Venezuela.  How will they respond?  Will they try to engage in diversionary conflicts to deflect domestic discontent?
> 
> This just scratches the surface.  Readers are warmly encouraged to submit other possible "known unknowns" in the comments.
> Daniel W. Drezner


----------



## CougarKing

In spite of ROC Pres. Ma's recent cross-strait initiatives, I am not as optimistic as Xinhua is assuming that just one Taiwanese ship escorted by the PLAN means a greater thaw in Sino-Taiwanese relations.



> *Chinese mainland naval fleet escorts Taiwan merchant ship off Somalia*
> www.chinaview.cn 2009-01-13 00:45:09
> 
> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/13/content_10647707.htm
> 
> ABOARD DESTROYER WUHAN, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland navel fleet on Monday began to carry out an escort mission for four merchant ships including one from Taiwan in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia.
> 
> The mission is also escorting two other ships from Shanghai and one from the Philippines to protect them against pirate attacks.
> 
> At 6:00 a.m. (0300 GMT), the four ships set out in a line for a voyage of 553 sea miles (1019 km), accompanied by the destroyer Wuhan. Two groups of naval special forces were aboard the first and the last ships.
> 
> Another Chinese destroyer Haikou will join the mission later in waters, where the pirates are more likely to appear.
> 
> Rear-Admiral Du Jingchen, commander of the naval fleet, said safeguarding transport in the Gulf of Aden and maintaining security of ships was the common wish of all pacifists including compatriots across the Taiwan Straits.
> 
> The Gulf of Aden is a key trade route linking the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal.
> 
> Chinese missile destroyer Wuhan (R) escorts a cargo ship in the waters of the Gulf of Aden on Jan. 12, 2009. The Chinese fleet started to carry out the second escort mission against pirates in the Gulf of Aden on Monday.
> 
> The fleet, including the two destroyers and one supply ship, conducted its first escort mission from Jan. 6 to 8.
> 
> The fleet has about 800 crew members, including 70 soldiers from the Navy's special force, and is equipped with missiles, cannons and light weapons.
> 
> The London-based International Maritime Bureau said more than 100 vessels had been attacked in the Gulf in 2008 and more than 10ships are still being held for ransom.
> Editor: Mu Xuequan
> 
> === ~~~ ===
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A Chinese navy helicopter keeps alert over a cargo ship in the waters of the Gulf of Aden on Jan. 12, 2009. (Xinhua Photo)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese missile destroyer Wuhan (R) escorts a cargo ship in the waters of the Gulf of Aden on Jan. 12, 2009. The Chinese fleet started to carry out the second escort mission against pirates in the Gulf of Aden on Monday. (Xinhua/Zhu Hongliang)


----------



## CougarKing

It was only a matter of time.



> *China passes Germany in economic rankings*
> 
> BEIJING, China (CNN) -- *China has become the world's third-largest economy, surpassing Germany and closing rapidly on Japan, according to government and World Bank figures.*
> 
> The Chinese government revised its growth figures for 2007 from 11.9 percent to 13 percent this week, bringing its estimated gross domestic product to $3.4 trillion -- about 3 percent larger than Germany's $3.3 trillion for the same year, based on World Bank estimates. Beijing is expected to release its 2008 GDP figures next week.
> 
> Although the world's top economies, the United States and Japan, are in recession, the most pessimistic estimates for China's growth in upcoming years runs about 5 percent. That could allow China's GDP to overtake Japan's, currently $4.3 trillion, within a few years.
> 
> The U.S. economy, the world's largest, was about $13.8 trillion in 2007.
> 
> The World Bank's estimate of China's economic growth is about 7.5 percent. But China has seen a sharp decline in exports in November and December as other major economies struggle, and the bank's analysts say rates below 6 percent could worsen the rest of the world's slump
> 
> And Michael Santoro, author of the 2008 book "China 2020," said China will have other problems to overcome if it is to maintain its rapid expansion.
> 
> "It's no longer sufficient for China to become a manufacturer of sneakers or toys and the like," Santoro said. "Now they're looking to become players in the area of pharmaceuticals and foods and other high value-added products, where safety and quality are important characteristics for improving in the global economy."
> 
> China recently announced a $600 billion economic stimulus package, and its State Council on Wednesday laid out a new plan to boost its steel and auto industries -- including about $1.5 billion to develop alternative-fuel vehicles.


----------



## CougarKing

As usual, Beijing tries to speed up the reunification process.



> _Defense News
> 
> 01/12/09
> 
> *China Suggests Mil-to-Mil With Taiwan*
> 
> TAIPEI — In what many consider a sea change in cross-Strait relations, both China and Taiwan are openly discussing military relations, a move that could end future U.S. arms sales to Taiwan but also resolve 60 years of tension between Taipei and Beijing.
> In an unprecedented act, Chinese President Hu Jintao called for military exchanges and a peace accord with Taiwan during a speech on Dec. 31. Hu said that at the proper time, military contacts and confidence-building measures would stabilize the situation in the Taiwan Strait.
> “People on both sides of the Strait share the responsibility of ending the history of confrontation,” Hu said. “Under the common understanding of one China, the two sides can talk about anything. We will promote anything that is conducive to peaceful development across the Strait, and we will firmly oppose anything that harms it.”
> After a nine-year suspension, Taiwan and China resumed cross-Strait talks in June. Progress came quickly with weekend charter flights across the strait in July, a visit by a Chinese government delegation in November, and the launching of direct shipping, air transport and postal services in December.
> The legislative and presidential election victories in early 2008 by the Beijing-friendly Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) spurred the change. Taiwan’s new president, Ma Ying-jeou, promised closer relations with China and was the first to suggest confidence-building measures and a possible peace accord with China.
> “It does seem that there is an ongoing thaw across the Taiwan Strait, not only politically, but also militarily,” said Wu Yu-Shan, a political specialist at Academia Sinica, here.
> “Goodwill gestures are taken in a reciprocal manner. How far this will go remains to be seen.” After Hu’s speech, the Hong Kong-based Yazhou Zhoukan magazine printed an uncon­firmed report that China was considering reducing the number of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), now numbering about 1,300, aimed at Taiwan.
> Though the report came from a Chinese-language media source, the news was taken seriously inside Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND).
> “The ministry welcomes the idea of China withdrawing missiles and believes it would be a positive development between the militaries of both sides,” an MND spokesman said.
> However, China’s Dong Feng 11/15 SRBMs are mobile and can easily be redeployed.
> “If China drastically reduces its military buildup opposite Taiwan, which is unlikely, that would be welcome,” said Bonnie Glaser of the China Studies Center, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington.
> “It would then be up to Taiwan to decide how much it would continue to spend on defense and what weapons it would continue to need to provide for its security. This scenario is not likely to take place in the next few years, if at all.”
> Will Taiwan Need U.S. Arms?
> Closer relations could influence U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
> In October, the United States released a $6.4 billion arms package that included AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, Patriot PAC-3 air defense systems, Javelin anti-tank missile systems, sub-launched Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and F-16 fighter and E-2 Hawkeye parts.
> Taiwan is still pushing the United States to release F-16 fighters to replace aging F-5s, and has plans to ask Washington for M1 Abrams tanks, Aegis-equipped destroyers and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
> Now the question is, will Taiwan need any more U.S. arms as relations with China become cozier?
> “They [China] do not need a military to take Taiwan. They can use economic, political and cultural links to absorb Taiwan,” said Lin Chong-Pin, former Taiwan deputy minister of defense.
> Lin said China’s intelligence services will get more access to Taiwan’s military as relations improve.
> Taiwan has long been happy hunting grounds for China’s espionage efforts, and there are fears in Washington that advanced U.S. arms technology could end up in Beijing’s hands.
> In 2002, a Taiwan military officer was accused of selling operational manuals for the Patriot PAC-2 Plus air defense system to China. A Taiwan arms broker, Bill Moo, was convicted in the United States in 2006 for attempting to ship an F­16 fighter jet engine to China. In 2008, a Taiwan arms broker was arrested in the United States, along with a Pentagon official, for selling secrets to China.
> After Hu’s speech, Ma acknowledged the need for peace talks with China, but also emphasized Taiwan’s need for a strong defense. However, Taiwan’s minister of national defense, Chen Chao-min, has cut the annual Han Kuang military exercises to every two years. The official explanation was to improve the defense ministry’s ability to absorb lessons from the exercise, but others wondered whether the Ma administration was seeking to further placate China.
> During the first week of January, a Chinese academic delegation visited Taiwan and met with senior military officials to discuss closer relations. The delegation was headed by officials from the Institute of International Studies, Center for U.S.-China Relations, based at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Sources said this effort would be followed by official military delegations.
> One issue being discussed is confidence-building measures, although these appear unlikely in the near future. CBMs will reduce tensions but not resolve differences, Glaser said.
> “They will, however, end the 60­year estrangement between the two militaries, and may reduce the chances of miscalculation, enhance understanding and trust, and build habits of cooperation,” she said.
> Better relations across the strait will no doubt be welcomed in Washington, which has been in the awkward position of providing for Taiwan’s defense while maintaining good relations with China.
> “Easing of cross-Strait tensions brings many benefits to the U.S. It reduces the danger of war that would likely involve the U.S.; it may help the Taiwan economy, and the U.S. has a strong interest in a pros­perous Taiwan; it reinforces the view in China that Beijing should rely on peaceful means of seeking reunification and eschew use of force; and it reduces tensions in U.S.-China relations,” Glaser said.
> The real question is whether Ma can balance good relations with both China and the United States.
> “Whether he is able to do so, improving ties with both Beijing and Washington simultaneously, remains to be seen,” Wu said. “That would be his major challenge.”
> If Taiwan falls into China’s political and military orbit, it would redefine the U.S. role in Asia._


----------



## CougarKing

Using ballistic missiles -without their nuclear warheads- as SSMs against USN carriers?



> By MICHAEL RICHARDSON
> Special to The Japan Times
> 
> SINGAPORE — U.S. President George W. Bush commissioned America's newest aircraft carrier Jan. 10 at the Norfolk naval base in Virginia. Named after his father, former President George H.W. Bush, the giant ship, which carries 85 planes and nearly 6,000 crew, is a potent symbol of America's global power and presence, despite recent U.S. economic and foreign policy failures.
> 
> It is also the last of 10 nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carriers to enter service with the U.S. Navy. They are the largest warships in the world. However, by 2015 the first of an even bigger and more advanced class of carrier, also nuclear-powered, is scheduled to start replacing the Nimitz vessels. Two years ago, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said that the successor ships "will help ensure the sea power of the United States for the next half century.�
> 
> To defend its interests in Asia, the U.S. has been steadily transferring more aircraft carriers and other warships from its Atlantic fleet to the Pacific. As a result, the Pacific fleet's share of the 280 ships in the Navy has risen from 45 percent in earlier years to around 54 percent and continues to increase. *The U.S. Pacific fleet now includes six of the Navy's 11 aircraft carriers, almost all of the 18 Aegis cruisers and destroyers that have been modified for ballistic missile defense operations, and 26 of the 57 attack submarines.
> 
> To counter the Asia-Pacific focus of the U.S. Navy, China is reportedly planning to deploy ballistic missiles with nonnuclear warheads and special guidance systems to hit moving surface ships at sea in the Western Pacific before they can get within range of Chinese targets.
> 
> If China fielded such a weapon, one that could reliably sink or cause heavy damage to aircraft carriers and other major warships far from its shores, it would make a potential adversary think long and hard before sending naval forces to intervene in a crisis over Taiwan or any other regional conflict in which China was involved.
> 
> This would reduce the value and deterrent effect of U.S. alliances in the Asia-Pacific region, including its mutual defense pacts with Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Fortunately, Beijing and Taipei have greatly improved their relations in recent months and an armed confrontation between them that could bring the U.S. into the fighting on the side of Taiwan seems less likely to happen.*
> 
> Still, Ronald O'Rourke, a specialist in naval affairs for the Congressional Research Service, told U.S. lawmakers in November that the U.S. Defense Department and other analysts believed that China was developing anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs). They would have a range of up to 3,000 km and carry maneuverable re-entry vehicles with warheads designed to hit moving naval ships. The missiles would be launched by rocket propulsion from land in an arc-like trajectory high into the atmosphere and travel at speeds of up to 24,000 km per hour when coming down, making them very hard to defend against.
> 
> Ballistic missiles have traditionally been used to attack fixed targets on land and O'Rourke noted that the U.S. Navy had "not previously faced a threat from highly accurate ballistic missiles capable of hitting moving ships at sea. Due to their ability to change course, maneuverable re-entry vehicles (MRVs) would be more difficult to intercept than nonmaneuvering ballistic missile re-entry vehicles."
> 
> Some analysts are skeptical and doubt that China has made all the technical breakthroughs needed for an accurate ASBM system. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence concluded in 2004 that it would be "very difficult" for China to field an ASBM force that could successfully track faraway aircraft carriers and other major warships, which can travel at sustained speeds of over 30 knots (55 km) per hour, and then hit them with MRV warheads.
> 
> The Bush administration spent billions of dollars to develop defenses against ballistic missiles. However, President Barack Obama says that while he supports missile defense, he wants to be sure that programs are affordable and proven.
> 
> One of the more successful parts of the U.S. program, the Aegis ship-based system to defend against shorter-range missiles, experienced two recent test failures, bringing its record to 13 hits in 17 intercept attempts. Even so, it is not designed to provide a shield against the longer range missiles China is reportedly trying to turn into weapons for use against naval vessels.
> 
> The Pentagon's latest annual report to Congress on Chinese military power, published last year, said that when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system, China's ASBMs would be a key component of its strategy to give the Chinese armed forces "the capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances" so as to deny access to waters around China. Some analysts claim that China already operates over-the-horizon radar installations to detect and track ships far out at sea and is backing this up with maritime surveillance using its own satellites in space. They say that China will soon test an ASBM.
> 
> If they are correct and the new system works, it could turn potent symbols of naval power into sitting ducks.
> Michael Richardson is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
> 
> http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20090122a3.html


----------



## Kirkhill

Victory to Dreadnought.  Dreadnought to Bismarck.  Bismarck to Enterprise.  Enterprise to SSB.

Bombardment is the message.   The Enterprise era is noteworthy because the bombs were guided by ride-on bombardiers.  The others were, and are, guided by mathematics. Denuclearizing ballistic missiles will make them a lot more useable.


----------



## a_majoor

Swarms of small aircraft carriers deploying UAV's might be new direction the USN could go. The "Arsenal Ship" concept might also be revived as the next generation means of carrying the fight to the enemy from the sea. Finally, although the DDX concept has been shelved for now, next generation "all electric" ships using 40+ Megajoule railgun weapons can attack targets 4-600 Km distant on much smaller platforms than current USN carriers.


----------



## CougarKing

Looks like Beijing and the PLA are trying their own hand at "soft-power" after noticing the impact of such ships like the USNS COMFORT.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/26/beijing-hospital-ship-harbors-soft-power/



> BEIJING
> 
> *China's military has a new weapon in the country's soft-power arsenal that copies a technique long used by the United States - a 10,000-ton hospital ship to be deployed for humanitarian purposes in Asia and beyond.
> 
> The vessel, dubbed Ship 866, is meant to soften China's image overseas and allay concerns among its neighbors over its navy´s growing strength, while at the same time adding to its military capabilities, analysts say.
> 
> The ship's arrival coincides with clear signs that the Chinese military is tentatively moving away from its policy of maintaining a low international profile to avoid provoking those who doubt its commitment to a "peaceful rise" doctrine. *
> 
> Chinese warships last month began patrolling the pirate-plagued waters in the Gulf of Aden - the first time they have ventured out of the Pacific on a combat mission since the 15th century. A top Chinese defense military official said recently that China is seriously considering adding its first aircraft carrier to its naval fleet.
> 
> Ship 866 makes "the country one of the few in the world that has medical care and emergency rescue capabilities on the high seas while also raising the capability of the Chinese navy to accomplish diversified military missions," the Communist Party newspaper People´s Daily said recently.
> 
> Specialized hospital ships have military purposes - to treat battlefield casualties and provide support to amphibious assault ships - but are used most often for humanitarian and disaster relief missions, said Robert Work, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
> 
> "A hospital ship becomes an extremely important symbol of a country´s soft power," he said. "Even if it does have a military mission, 99 percent of its service life is probably going to be spent on soft-power missions."
> 
> The United States has two dedicated hospital ships, each equipped with 1,000 hospital beds: the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy.
> 
> The Mercy completed a four-month humanitarian deployment in the Western Pacific last year, treating patients in Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States also deployed its assault ship USS Kearsarge, which possesses extensive medical facilities, on a four-month aid tour of Latin America toward the end of last year.



Links:

 	http://www.google.com/search?q=Ship+866&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a






http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90786/6526458.html

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Article.aspx?id=2908

"If they were only building a hospital ship, I'd be prepared to start thinking about it on humanitarian assistance level, but when they build this [Type 071] landing ship dock simultaneously, I tend to think the decision to build them was made at the same meeting, part of a common plan" for potential island attacks.
http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/amphibious/type071.asp
http://www.google.com/search?q=Type+071+landing+ship+dock&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a


----------



## Yrys

Sharp rise in China birth defects






The report suggests China's rapid 
development has a human cost


A senior family planning official in China has noted an alarming rise in the 
number of babies with birth defects, a Chinese media report says. 

Jiang Fan, from China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, 
said environmental pollution was the cause of the problem. He said a child 
was born with physical defects every 30 seconds because of the degrading 
environment. The report said China's coal-rich Shanxi province had the 
highest rate. The commission blamed emissions from the region's large 
chemical industry for the problems there.

*'Prevention plan*'

Correspondents say the report suggests there is a human cost to China's 
rapid economic development. Researchers also blamed exposure to nitrogen 
dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulates for the increase.

"The number of newborns with birth defects is constantly increasing in both 
urban and rural areas," China Daily newspaper quoted Ms Jiang as saying. 
"The rather alarming increase has forced us to kick off a high-level prevention 
plan." The commission had introduced a screening programme in the eight 
worst-affected provinces, Ms Jiang explained.


----------



## CougarKing

More evidence that Beijing has been increasing its footprint in Africa:



> *China’s Unusual Deals Working to Grow African Arms Presence*
> 01-Feb-2009 17:49 EST
> 
> In July 2008, *“Africa: The Next Defense Market Opportunity?” * looked at projected trends, and discussed the reasons behind China’s resurgent status as an arms vendor to those states. UPI Asia’s recent *“China expanding African arms sales”*  offers additional details.
> 
> In 2008, the point was underlined by sales like the deal with Zimbabwe for 12 K-8/JL-8 jet trainers and light attack aircraft, but a number of deals are reportedly pending with various countries. These reportedly include everything from K-8 Karakorum jets and FC-1/JF-17 fighters, to WMZ-551 wheeled APCs, artillery, and of course the usual set of small arms and ammunition deals. One of the challenges that the July 2008 Forecast International report had discussed is the region’s economic weakness, but UPI Asia notes that China has a solution. Zambia has used its copper resources to pay China in a number of military deals, Kenya has been negotiating with China to trade fishing rights for arms, and similar deals are under discussion elsewhere.
> 
> While China’s economy has cooled as a result of the global recession, long-term, secure access to the resources needed to supply its growing economy is one of the regime’s top strategic priorities. Africa is poor by policy, but the continent has rich resources of oil and key industrial metals. This Chinese arms thrust looks set to be combined with soft-power approaches, such as the recent launch of a PLAN hospital ship that can serve in diplomatic roles, as well as offering high-capacity medical support for amphibious assaults. If arms sales and naval activities can be combined with economic ties and other forms of local relationship-building and military presence, China will gain the full range of tools for influencing these regimes in favorable ways.
> 
> Oddly, none of this was mentioned in a recent SIPRI analysis of China’s stepped-up deployments of peacekeeping troops, which appear to have a strong focus on African operations.


----------



## CougarKing

Yikes. Another worry for the USN?


> *China increases sub patrols*
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 09:45:00 02/04/2009
> Filed Under: Defense, Military, Espionage & Intelligence, Waterway & Maritime Transport
> 
> WASHINGTON -- *China nearly doubled the number of patrols by its fleet of attack submarines last year, surpassing Russia but still far behind the United States, the Federation of American Scientists reported Tuesday*.
> *
> The report, based on declassified information provided by US naval intelligence, said Chinese attack submarines conducted 12 patrols in 2008, compared to seven in 2007, two in 2006 and none in 2005.*
> 
> "While the increase in submarine patrols is important, it has to be seen in comparison with the size of the Chinese submarine fleet," said Hans Kristensen, director of the organization's nuclear information project.
> 
> *"With approximately 54 submarines, the patrol rate means that each submarine on average goes on patrol once every four and a half years," he said.*
> 
> The patrols may have been carried out by just the most modern and capable types of submarines in the Chinese fleet, the report said, noting that a new class of nuclear-powered Shang-class attack submarines is replacing the aging Han-class.
> 
> In an interview, Kristensen said the information, although sketchy, was a window into how Chinese naval operations are changing as it builds up its forces.
> 
> "We don't know where they went or for how long. But it certainly seems to be a new mission. They have been very modest in their patrols in the past," he said.
> 
> "The fact that from one year to another they have doubled their patrols seems that they have something new to do," he said.
> 
> "It could be, as we've heard for the last four years or so, an attempt to expand their naval defense barrier further eastward into the Pacific," he said.
> 
> In comparison with other major navies, a dozen patrols a year "are not much," the report said.
> 
> "The patrol rate of the US attack submarine fleet, which is focused on long-range patrols and probably operate regularly near the Chinese coast, is much higher with each submarine conducting at least one extended patrol per year," it said.
> 
> "But the Chinese patrol rate is higher than that of the Russian navy, which in 2008 conducted only seven attack submarine patrols, the same as in 2007," it said.
> 
> *China has yet to conduct a single patrol by a ballistic missile submarine, according to the report.
> 
> "The old Xia, China's first SSBN, completed a multi-year overhaul in late-2007 but did not sail on patrol in 2008," it said.
> 
> "Neither the Xia-class (Type-092) ballistic missile submarine nor the new Jin-class (Type-094) have ever conducted a deterrent patrol," it said.*


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese leadership has set very ambitious goals, while the new Administration seems to be looking in the wrong direction. The fly in the ointment is the mismatch between the Chinese goals and the means to achieve them, and the underlying fragility of China itself. How the Chinese deal with the issues at home will determine how they can achieve their goals abroad.

I think it is safe to say for the next four years no one will be answering the phone at 0300; the Administration and Congress has a goal of politicising large portions of the US economy rather than looking outwards:

http://newledger.com/2009/02/its-not-just-generals-who-fight-the-last-war/



> *It’s Not Just Generals Who Fight the Last War*
> 
> by Christopher Badeaux
> 
> There’s really no rhyme or reason to the conflict between great powers. Sometimes it comes with no real warning: No one in January of 1913 could have reasonably imagined that a mere five years later Europe would be a war-torn mess, with the best and brightest of a generation rotting in graves across France and Germany, Russia at the mouth end of a civil war that would yield the world’s first Marxist regime, and America washing its hands of the whole, sordid mess. By contrast, for a decade, everyone from London to Moscow feared and expected the French Revolution to boil over across the Continent at some point, making the little Corsican’s run from 1799 onward all the more embarrassing to the armies he trounced.
> 
> American Presidents from 1948 to 1991 had one advantage that offset the fact that their country faced nuclear annihilation on a daily basis: Their country faced nuclear annihilation on a daily basis, and so identifying their most important foreign policy focus became and remained easy. They lived in a world where, for the most part, the conflicts of their age were relatively well-signaled by the time they took their respective oaths of office, and so they could more reasonably be held to their campaign promises about how they would handle those conflicts.
> 
> The demise of the Soviet Empire led to a decade that we in the West thought pretty relaxed, the genocides in the Balkans, Africa, and Asia being the things of campaign rhetoric and gladhanded self-absolution. The 2000 election’s main foreign policy themes revolved around the candidates’ abilities to pronounce foreign leaders’ names and whether we would commit troops to low-intensity, more-or-less permanent “nation-building” exercises abroad.
> 
> As everyone noted for about a year after the World Trade Center fell, and some suggest even now, the Nineties were a vacation from reality. The Clinton Administration swept into office determined to enjoy a peace dividend and to manage international crises in such a way as not to spend that peace dividend. The relentless criticism of the first Bush Administration’s approach to the Balkan wars and China turned out, in the end, to be well-intentioned rhetoric backed by boots on the ground only when the worst had passed.
> 
> Put differently, the graveyards of Srebenica and Kigali are testaments to a foreign policy determined to manage problems out of the headlines, rather than out of existence.
> 
> This is not merely to pick on the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton’s approach to foreign policy was not merely well-understood by the time he faced re-election, it was endorsed by a plurality of the American electorate and, frankly, George W. Bush’s first eight months in office. As just one example, the Clinton Administration’s feckless response to high-level Chinese espionage and its clearly enunciated intention to supplant America as the regional hegemon was really no different than the Bush Administration’s approach to Han fascism.
> 
> Indeed, Bush deserves more scorn here, because China’s rise as a fairly open and obvious enemy was a recurring feature of the 1990s, all of the blather about low-intensity warfare on Europe’s back porch notwithstanding. From their expedited efforts at military reform, to the espionage at Los Alamos, to their increased posturing over Taiwan and the Senkakus, to the array of various-colored papers China released as part of its endless posturing, *China made clear that it intended to assume hegemony over Asia and as much of the Pacific as possible, and that it viewed the United States as an enemy, not a “strategic partner.” * Despite this, as one of the last major diplomatic acts of the period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Age of Terror, after the People’s Republic forced down an American plane over international waters, the Bush Administration kowtowed to Beijing, a tacit capitulation in the face of a clearly designed effort by Beijing to test the new administration’s resolve.
> 
> In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush Administration’s foreign policy changed significantly, in tone and substance. However, on everything from North Korea policy to trade to regional power conferences, the Bush Administration continued to treat what Michael Ledeen famously, and correctly, identified as the world’s only truly functional fascist state as a legitimate power of nations, and as a regional partner rather than an enemy.
> 
> And that’s just China. It doesn’t even touch on the resurgence of a Russia returned from anarchy and a less functional kleptocracy; or on the dissolution of the weak bonds of NATO in Western Europe; or on the final stages of complete nuclear proliferation; or on the growth of a Pacific-centered foreign policy by Australia and many of the nations of Southeast Asia, of which America is frequently treated as a peripheral part. For eight years, the world has become a more chaotic, more dangerous place, with fewer wars and genocides, and more wars and genocides in the offing, than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.
> 
> For eight years, the world has been trying to teach the United States, and its new President, some vital lessons. President Obama shows no signs of learning them.
> 
> An observer who lapsed into a coma in early 1998 and awoke a few days ago could reasonably conclude, if given only the names and curriculum vitae of President Obama’s foreign policy team, that the world had been remarkably static since the end of the Clinton Administration. Such an observer would not be remotely surprised to find that American foreign policy was almost obsessively preoccupied with the Middle East, even beyond Israel and the question of strategic access to oil supplies. That observer would be surprised to find out that Israeli foreign policy has basically yielded on the question of Palestinian control over large parts of Gaza and the West Bank; that the free flow of oil to the West is not really in doubt; and that all of this focus is the result of a war in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an unpopular war now basically won and winding down.
> 
> The origins of this manic focus — this unrelenting determination to fight yesterday’s foreign policy battles — lie in the eighteen-month rush to war with Iraq. In October of 2002, then-State Senator Barack Obama made a speech on which he would touch, again and again, during the portion of his Presidential campaign that masqueraded as a stint in the United States Senate. Speaking to a friendly, anti-Iraq War crowd, Obama touched on all of the classic anti-war themes of the modern age: Jewish neoconservatives, Karl Rove, oil, and the looming depression that was a booming economy. Snark aside, some variant on that speech, in substance and text, was probably offered by thousands if not millions of people at rallies, in Congress, at coffee houses, and in dorm rooms across the country. During his meteoric rise to the Presidency, that speech became an essential aspect of his political identity, allowing him to position himself on the Left flank of the Democratic Party (where a goldmine of campaign contributions was waiting) and in opposition to the more centrist Democrats who had been backing some sort of conflict with Saddam Hussein for half a decade or more.
> 
> Through the weird thaumaturgy of American politics of the last eight years, American politics — and the Democratic Party in particular — grew increasingly obsessed with a war with a casualty rate of staggeringly small proportions, that had been basically won by the time of the 2008 elections. This myopic focus will have eventful consequences in the years ahead.
> 
> Most of the countries with whom the United States enjoys extremely tense relations have a view of the world that is considerably more akin to Vatican foreign policy than American: Ordinarily, they think in terms of decades and centuries, where we think in terms of Presidential terms. *China, Iran, and Russia, while sharing virtually no other foreign policy views or assumptions, all believe that they have been here before the rise of the West, they will be here after, and their first goal is to identify Western (especially American) weakness and exploit it. Worse for us, each of those countries is facing both an economic collapse — where material well-being was one of the only reasons not to overthrow the regime — and a demographic collapse, both of which leave them keen to find advantage and use it.*
> 
> President Obama’s first public act of foreign policy was to apologize on behalf of the United States to the Muslim world (apparently for freeing millions of Muslims from tyranny in Iraq, helping seize Kosovo Field from the Serbs, and only repeating the phrase “religion of peace” to describe Islam 2.6 million times the last eight years). Even before taking office, his transition team was reaching out to the Middle East to try to return America to its footing there in the late 1990s. The essential stupidity of these acts is no less for being entirely consistent with both a Clinton-era style of problem management (”I feel your pain”) and the odd, modern Democratic fixation on the Middle East and correcting the policies of the Bush Administration. Obama is pretending that the Middle East is the most important thing going in the world right now, and that the rest of the world can be managed, Clinton style. This is a profound misallocation of political capital and diplomatic resources, and one for which there is no excuse.
> 
> *Take China. Sino-American relations have been marked for the last two decades by a handful of ironclad assumptions by American foreign policy makers which are both items of faith and largely false. Among these: That China is a highly stable, growing, prosperous society, with no large-scale internal unrest, a booming economy, and a desire to take its place in the world as a friendly, if mercantilist, power. If ever these assumptions were true, they are in serious doubt now. China is a stewpot in serious danger of boiling over*.
> 
> Most Americans have no idea that somewhere on the order of ten percent (according to official government figures, which in turn probably means closer to fifteen percent) of Chinese are migrant workers, moving from rural homes to work in factories and other blue collar jobs in the coastal cities. In other words, scores of millions of Chinese are basically rootless, and for the last fifteen years have put bread to mouth by moving between the booming areas of China and doing whatever jobs needed to be done. Those people have only not become wandering mobs because of the booming economy, which of course went ka-boom a few months ago.
> 
> The results are terrifying. According to official Chinese figures — which are usually only half to three-quarters as bad as the truth — twenty million of the country’s migrant workers “have returned home,” by which they mean, have fled the coastal areas and relocated in the rural areas that could not support them when they left. Given that the number is probably more like thirty million, to put this in perspective for Americans, imagine that the entire population of the Houston Metropolitan Area simply packed up and headed to Nebraska and resettled there. Now imagine that those people generally don’t have cars and instead have to rely on an unreliable train system; that they don’t have the money to buy all of the food and water they need on the way and once they get there; and that even if they did, the infrastructure and the resources to supply them simply don’t exist.
> 
> All of this, in the first six months of a global recession which shows no signs of ending soon. *Against the backdrop of a rapidly slowing economy — official Chinese estimates put growth down to nine percent per annum, which probably means that China is at or near a recession — China’s internal stability and the cool decision making that come with it are in doubt. This comes well in advance of the demographic bomb awaiting China in less than ten years.*
> 
> Chinese reaction has been predictable, as, sadly, has been the American response. China released its latest, posturing, military white paper on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, essentially announcing its intent to secure regional hegemony by the end of the next decade. In both what it announced (strategic goals and obstacles) and what it didn’t (specifics of military development and power projection capabilities), the PRC made clear that it intends to constantly expand its sphere of influence through Asia and beyond. In response, the Obama Administration had Hillary Clinton promise no change in the foreign policy of the last twenty years in prepared remarks for her Senate confirmation as Secretary of State.
> 
> That’s right: The world’s most populous nation, a nuclear power with dreams of regional hegemony and global preeminence, is extending its military and foreign policy goals and power projection capabilities while its population begins to enter that condition delicately known as “France, 1788,” and the leader of the free world spends his diplomatic capital putting down a crisis that, insofar as it existed, ended a year before he took office. In so doing, he essentially told China that it would have a free hand for the foreseeable future.
> 
> Nor is the world merely becoming more dangerous in Zhongguo. The Korean peninsula is marked by a dangerous uncertainty even greater than usual. Is Kim Jong-Il still alive? In power? If not, who is? Relations between the North and the South, so promising (if one finds promise in attempts to treat bloodthirsty Marxist dictatorships as members of the community of nations) just a year ago, have once again entered the dysfunctional stage. Recent phone calls notwithstanding, there is no indication that the Obama Administration plans to handle North Korea and its clearance-aisle approach to nuclear weapons any differently than did the prior two administrations, which is to say, it apparently hopes that this round of talks will turn a paranoid, insular, military dictatorship prone to spontaneous military violence into a well-adjusted nation-state.
> 
> But even with all that, who could forget Russia? Russia, with nuclear weapons that may or may not still work. Russia, with a resurgent dictatorship, that has been resurging for eight years. Russia, riding high on oil wealth and adventurous in the Caucuses until oil’s collapse, with the internal political unrest one would expect of an economy whose only real support has collapsed. Russia, expansionist and assertive because that’s the only way it sees out of its economic and demographic trap. Russia, which took the occasion of Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency to announce that America has a nice Poland, it would be a shame if anything happened to it. Russia, whose revanchism and adventurism are directly and knowingly enabled by Germany — the same Germany that gave Obama the best crowds a politician has experienced in Berlin in seventy years.
> 
> In the interest of brevity, I’m not even touching on the challenges waiting outside of Eurasia, including the collapse of Brazil’s export market, the effect of cheaper oil on Venezuela, the return of the Islamic Courts to Somalia, the bloodletting in Central Africa, Iran’s nearly complete possession of nuclear missiles … you get the idea. The world is actively becoming a more dangerous, more chaotic place, from forces set in motion decades ago to the recent economic collapse. In response, President Obama plans to use the same toolkit and approach that gave us the world in which we live.
> 
> He is fighting the last war, using the old weapons, and seems to believe he’s waging a future peace. Even in this time of hope and change, that’s a recipe for disasters new and old.


----------



## CougarKing

A response to Russia's recently announced intent to quadruple its nuclear weapons production?

Btw, read any work by such prominent Sinologists such as David Shambaugh and they often cite the focus that the PRC government has put into the a "non-1st strike" policy regarding its nuclear weapons, meaning that they supposedly would only use its nuclear weapons in retaliation for a nuclear strike on their own country. 



> *China's Nuclear Commander Vows Buildup*
> 
> By wendell minnick
> Published: 3 Feb 12:10 EST (17:10 GMT)
> 
> Taipei - *The commander of China's strategic missile and nuclear force has vowed to strengthen its nuclear and conventional missile capabilities.
> 
> The proclamation was made by Gen. Jing Zhiyuan, commander of the Second Artillery Corps, in an article co-authored with the Corps' political commissar, Gen. Peng Xiaofeng. The article appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of the state-run Quishi [Seeking Truth] Journal (#496), which is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee.
> 
> The article read like old-school Communist rhetoric.*
> 
> "We must always strive to use the theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and arm our minds, and unswervingly implement the Party Central Committee and Central Military Commission and President Hu's [Jintao] decision-making instructions for their strategic missile force firmly casting eternal soul," the article said.
> 
> Most of the article rehashes the history of the Second Artillery Corps, name-drops important Chinese leaders who helped in the corps' evolution and raves about the outstanding performance of the corps' troops.
> 
> However, the Quishi article has invoked a rash of media reports touting China's intent to expand its nuclear and conventional missile arsenal.
> 
> "We should deepen the Second Artillery Corps of innovation in military theory, strengthen the use of strategic deterrent and nuclear operations forces," it reads. The authors also called for better training programs and improved combat systems.
> 
> Despite the media hype, the comments largely ape the defense white paper released by China in January.
> 
> "Most of Jing's quotes closely follow the text of the white paper, and thus add little, though coming in Quishi, his comments gain the weight of Party authority," said John Lewis, author of the book, "Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War."
> 
> "U.S. military experts are not especially concerned about growth in the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute.
> 
> *What concerns U.S. defense circles is the increasingly flexibility and accuracy of China's ballistic missile arsenal, including the introduction of mobile launchers, maneuvering warheads, improved target sensors, and command and control, Thompson said.
> 
> "The various improvements to Chinese missile forces means they will be better suited for actual war fighting, for example by targeting U.S. aircraft carriers," he said.
> 
> China has been developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), but the goal may be beyond its reach. The problems a Chinese ASBM face include targeting and maneuverability, a capability beyond the U.S. military.
> 
> The missile, dubbed the Dong Feng 21C (East Wind), is to be based on the road-mobile, 2,500-kilometer Dong Feng 21 medium-range ballistic missile. The development of the missile is part of China's anti-access strategy designed to restrain U.S. aircraft carriers from drawing too close to Taiwan waters during a war. The strategy would force aircraft carriers to keep a safer distance and thus render aircraft sorties useless.*


----------



## tomahawk6

An armor brigade of Xin Jiang military region in the field.


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese plans for an ambitious industrial policy. Before people start tooting horns or saying "gosh, we should be doing that too", think back to the 1980s. Japan, France and Germany made vast investments in industrial policy in an effort to boost their economies and not coincidentally, drive American firms out of many markets. While they were successful with goal 2, they also had vast amounts of resources locked in the "wrong" sectors of the economy and ended up worse off in terms of economic growth and unemployment by the end of the 1980's. It is also no coincidence that there really is no IT hardware and software sectors in "managed" or regulated economies; things like that don't occur to bureaucrats.

Highlighted is the other flaw in managing economies: attempting to pick winners and losers:

http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/02/09/china-aims-for-its-own-silicon-valley/



> *China aims for its own Silicon Valley*
> 
> Like the 'Asian tigers' before it, China is pushing into higher-end manufacturing and innovation.
> By Carol Huang| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ February 9, 2009 edition
> 
> Staff writer Carol Huang
> 
> Shenzhen, China
> 
> The land of Nike shoes and plastic Christmas trees – and 40 percent of China’s factories – has been battered by falling foreign demand. But that doesn’t mean Guangdong Province is sitting idle. A pioneer in China’s capitalist experiments, it’s using the country’s worst slowdown in seven years to push ahead with a complete economic makeover.
> 
> Like Japan and the Asian tigers before it, China is moving to loosen the grip of high-volume, low-end manufacturing on its economy – and transform itself into a corner-office innovator that can dream up an idea and build it to exacting specifications.
> 
> Instead of just assembling iPods, in other words, China wants to invent the next “it” music player.
> 
> In an unusual silver lining, the economic crisis may be helping: By shaking out low-profit companies, it’s making room for more advanced ones.
> 
> The policy is known as “emptying the cage, removing the bird,” says Mei Xinyu, a senior researcher at the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing. The slowdown “sped up the process.”
> 
> China’s Silicon Valley?
> 
> Last month, the National Development and Reform Commission announced revised plans to transform Guangdong and neighboring Hong Kong and Macau into a “significant innovation center” by 2020.
> 
> One hundred R&D labs will be set up over the next three years. By 2012, per-capita output in the region should jump 50 percent from 2007, to 80,000 yuan ($11,700) And by 2020, the study predicts, 30 percent of all industrial output should come from high-tech manufacturing.
> 
> “While some traditional competitive industries such as household appliances, textiles and garments, papermaking, and Chinese herbal medicine will be upgraded to increase competence, inefficient energy-consuming sectors will gradually be phased out,” the plan states.
> 
> Low-end factories will have to relocate to cheaper provinces or countries.
> 
> For provincial officials, whose standing rises with Guangdong’s economic performance, that’s the only way forward. As global recession hit Chinese exports last year, growth in this region dropped to 10.1 percent, from 14.7 percent in 2007.
> 
> “Restarting outdated capacities for the sake of growth would just be like drinking poison to quench thirst,” Guangdong’s Communist Party boss Wang Yang, an advocate of upgrading, wrote in a recent opinion piece.
> 
> Still, the economic crisis has forced some compromise. To stem the troubling tide of millions of layoffs, officials decided to prop up the struggling companies they’ve sought to run into the ground, by reinstating an export tax rebate to help them cut costs.
> 
> “They’re trying to provide enough benefits to companies so they don’t go out of business, while at the same time not backtracking too much,” says Arthur Kroeber, head of Dragonomics, a consultancy based in Beijing.
> 
> Stimulus measures aim to balance spurring the economy with not sacrificing hi-tech upgrading. The elimination last month of the value-added tax for capital equipment is a case in point, says Mr. Kroeber.
> 
> Greener autos
> 
> Another example is an auto-industry aid package that halves sales tax on certain cars and subsidizes owners of high-emission vehicles who exchange them for more fuel-efficient, cleaner ones. It also includes a 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) fund to promote new technology, including the mass production of electric vehicles.
> 
> The Chinese government has deep pockets to help push manufacturing up the value chain, says the Commerce Ministry’s Mr. Mei – tapping an array of perks from subsidized infrastructure, tax breaks, investment, and generous government contracts.
> 
> *Favored companies, like Huawei Technologies, China’s leading telecommunications equipmentmaker, got free or low-cost land and utilities, says Kroeber.*
> 
> It also enjoyed liberal policies on resident permits for workers who had the right skills.
> 
> From Beijing’s perspective, the returns are worth the investment. The auto stimulus will benefit companies like BYD (“Build Your Dream”), a battery manufacturer-turned-carmaker that has advanced China’s green-car prospects and won it prestige as a globally recognized brand.
> 
> Already the world’s No. 2 batterymaker, it’s now the first company to have mass-produced hybrid, plug-in vehicles; it has also made an electric car.
> 
> “BYD is a key player in the world market,” says Duan Chengwu, an auto industry analyst with Global Insight, based in Shanghai.
> 
> The company’s international profile soared even higher last September when Warren Buffett bought a 10 percent stake in the company. At the Detroit Auto Show in January, BYD models got space on the main show floor – until then, Chinese carmakers had always been relegated to a basement or foyer.
> 
> Needed: workforce upgrade
> 
> In addition to putting massive resources into developing the infrastructure of high-tech upgrades, China needs to upgrade its workforce, says Liu Kaiming, head of the Shenzhen-based Institute for Contemporary Observation.
> 
> A lavish science park in Dongguan, a nearby factory city, illustrates the mismatch. The expansive campus – complete with apartments, hospital, school, mall, KFC, and a Hyatt hotel, all built around a natural lake and dotted with saplings and flower beds – is meant to impress.
> 
> But actually upgrading the “software” of manufacturing takes time. While some A-list companies like Huawei are setting up shop, many of the buildings remain uninhabited.
> 
> There are many “empty cages” these days, especially due to the economic crisis, says Mr. Liu. “But they are still waiting for the birds to come.”


----------



## CougarKing

Would it be fair to say that the PLA got a rude awakening when they invaded Vietnam in 1979, in their first major military operation since the Korean War or even that 1962 border conflict with India? Adept China watchers such as David Shambaugh certainly think so, as expressed in at least one of his books, by emphasizing that the PLA's shift from "People's War" to supposedly more modern doctrines began with events like these. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7892296.stm?lss



> *Vietnam tense as China war is marked  *
> 
> By Nga Pham
> BBC News
> 
> 
> Vietnam is marking the anniversary of its border war with China with an uneasy quiet, as official channels avoid mentioning the events of 30 years ago.
> 
> 
> Neither Vietnam nor China seem to wish to repeat the bitter events of 1979
> But simmering nationalistic emotions are being brought to the surface by painful memories.
> 
> Hoang Thi Lich, 72, remembers vividly the morning of 17 February 1979, when she and her family woke to a suffocating sense of panic in the mountains of Cao Bang.
> 
> *As dawn broke, China launched attacks on a number of positions in Vietnam's northernmost provinces with a staggering display of so-called "human waves" and artillery power. *
> Mrs Lich's family was quickly evacuated from her small hamlet in Hoa An district, along with a dozen other ethnic Tay families.
> 
> She recalls: "We were told to run southwards... I could hear loud gunfire. I was so frightened I froze for a long while, I did not know what to do."
> 
> Mrs Lich's family escaped to safety.
> 
> *Just 18 days later, in the same Hoa An district, retreating Chinese soldiers reportedly hacked to death 43 people - mostly women and children.
> 
> Naive hopes
> 
> The Chinese attacks caught the Vietnamese off-guard, despite rumours of a war initiated by China's then-leader Deng Xiaoping circulating for months within Vietnamese political circles.
> 
> A former top official at Vietnam's embassy in Beijing, Duong Danh Dy, warned from early 1978 that the bilateral relationship between Hanoi and Beijing was worsening by the day.
> 
> In July 1978, after what Beijing considered mistreatment of ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, China halted assistance to its neighbour, prompting Hanoi to sign a "co-operation and friendship" pact with Moscow soon after.
> 
> Around the same time Hanoi intensified its efforts to topple Beijing's ally, the Khmer Rouge's ultra-Maoist regime.
> 
> The bloody Vietnam-Cambodia conflict marked the first ever war between two communist nations.
> 
> Chairman Deng vowed to "teach Vietnam a lesson".
> 
> Vietnam's Duong Danh Dy, referring to a televised news briefing by the Chinese leader in December 1978, recalled: "I would never forget his face when he described Vietnam as a 'hooligan'.
> 
> "At that stage, we all thought 'that's it, a war is no longer avoidable'," Mr Dy said.
> 
> "But deep down inside we still hoped, perhaps naively, that since Vietnam and China had been so close and brotherly, they [the Chinese] wouldn't turn on us so fast and so strongly."
> 
> Isolation
> 
> Instead, Beijing mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops and volunteers in its largest military operation since the Korean War.
> 
> Vietnam, meanwhile, was in a difficult situation having to deal with its Cambodian conflict and reconstructing a near-collapsed economy. *
> We have been faithful to our promise not to bring up old events for the sake of the relationship between the two countries
> 
> Vietnam's former first deputy foreign minister, who was in office when the border war began, said his country's isolationism had left it vulnerable.
> 
> "We were too dependent on our ideological allies, and by that time the only ally we had was the Soviet Union," said Tran Quang Co.
> 
> "Being a small country living next to a big country, we needed more friends. We needed to expand our ties and diversify our relations."
> 
> *China's "pedagogical war" lasted just over a fortnight, with both Vietnam and China claiming victory. *
> 
> Though disputable, estimates suggest that up to 60,000 lives were lost on both sides.
> 
> As well as the loss of life, the trust and fraternity that the two communist parties had struggled to build during the previous half a century suffered a severe blow.
> 
> In his memoir Memories and Thoughts, Tran Quang Co cited Vietnam's late leader Vo Van Kiet as saying in 1991 - the year the two countries normalised their relationship - that China "was always a trap".
> 
> 'Too compromising'
> 
> The mutual distrust has lingered through the years, occasionally flaring when bilateral disputes occur.
> 
> Vietnam saw mass protests in December 2007, when China reportedly announced plans to establish an administrative unit to govern the Spratly and Paracel islands - territories claimed by Vietnam.
> 
> A smaller demonstration took place when the Beijing Olympic torch reached Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City.
> 
> 
> China's actions in the South China Sea sparked protests in Vietnam
> However, such protests are uncommon.
> 
> Hanoi is trying hard not to jeopardise the warming ties with its giant neighbour. Neither Vietnam nor China seem to wish to repeat the bitter experience of 1979.
> 
> With bilateral trade rapidly growing and a land border agreement expected to be finalised soon after 35 years of negotiations, some say relations between the two are the best they have ever been.
> 
> The Vietnamese government is therefore keeping a close eye on what the media write about Vietnam-China relations - especially sensitive issues such as border or territorial claims.
> 
> "China is getting stronger so Vietnam needs to learn more [cleverly] how to co-exist with it," said senior diplomat Le Cong Phung.
> 
> Last week, the newspaper Saigon Tiep Thi published an article by well-known journalist Huy Duc on the 1979 border war on its website. The story was removed within hours.
> 
> "We have been faithful to our promise not to bring up old events for the sake of the relationship between the two countries," said Duong Danh Dy, who is now one of Vietnam's leading China experts.
> 
> The official stance has been condemned by the public as too soft and too compromising.
> 
> Internet forums and personal blogs are flooded with anti-China comments as the anniversary of the border war approaches.
> 
> In the Du Lich newspaper, a recent essay slipped past the state censors, praising the "pure patriotism and proud spirit" of the anti-Chinese protesters in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
> 
> As this nationalistic flame burns, the question of whether it will spread like wildfire depends on both governments' policies towards each other.


----------



## CougarKing

The benefits of a continued alliance between Moscow and Beijing?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7895350.stm



> *Russian and China sign $25bn deal
> 
> Oil will be pumped from Siberia to China
> Russia and China have signed a $25bn (£17.54bn) deal that will see Beijing supplied with oil from Siberian fields in exchange for loans to Russian firms.
> 
> China Development Bank will lend $15bn to Russian state oil firm Rosneft, and $10bn to pipeline firm Transneft.
> 
> In return Russia will supply 15 million tons - 300,000 barrels a day - of oil annually for 20 years.
> 
> China is the world's second biggest oil importer, and has looked to diversify its imports away from the Middle East. *
> 'Lot of funds'
> 
> Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the deal was one of "political importance".
> 
> In recent years China has turned to Russia, Kazakhstan, and countries in Africa and South America, as it seeks new oil supply avenues.
> 
> Russia views China and Japan, another huge importer of oil, as key markets for its East Siberian oilfields.
> 
> "Rosneft and Transneft can't borrow easily, so China steps in...with a lot of funds to lend because of China's huge wealth funds," said Leo Drollas, deputy director and chief economist at the Centre for Global Energy Studies.
> 
> "They have trillions of dollars of reserves and they're saying 'we'll lend you this amount to develop the oil fields and the pipeline infrastructure needed' and it will be paid for by deliveries of oil," Mr Drollas added.


----------



## CougarKing

Just an update:



> Agence France-Presse - 2/21/2009 3:54 AM GMT
> *Clinton calls for deeper US-China partnership*
> US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for a deeper partnership between the United States and China, saying the world powers needed to unite to tackle the economy and climate change.
> 
> After controversially saying she would avoid the sensitive issue of human rights in her talks with China's leaders, Clinton struck a warm and engaging tone in her first meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
> 
> "As we start the new administration of President (Barack) Obama, we want to deepen and broaden our relationship," Clinton said in introductory remarks in front of the media.
> 
> "We believe we have established a solid foundation but there is much work to be done.
> 
> "And it is in our view imperative that the United States and China cooperate on a range of issues from the economy to global climate change to development and so much else."
> 
> Yang expressed similar sentiments, saying China was looking forward to working with the United States, but he did not go into specifics.
> 
> "We have always believed that the world's biggest developing country and biggest developed country... should and can establish a long-term relationship that enjoys sound and steady growth," Yang said.
> 
> The pair then went into private talks, with Clinton scheduled to meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao later on Saturday.
> 
> Extending the diplomatic hand of friendship further, Clinton said Obama wanted to meet Hu on the sidelines of the Group of 20 leaders' summit in London in April.
> 
> *"President Obama looks forward to seeing President Hu in London around the G20 summit," Clinton said.
> 
> Obama has not met Hu since becoming US president last month, although the pair spoke on the phone on January 31. *
> 
> Clinton said ahead of her meetings with China's leaders that she wanted to focus on the most pressing global problems, such as the economic crisis, global warming and security concerns in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.
> 
> *However Clinton triggered an angry reaction from groups critical of communist China's attitude towards human rights when she said she would not allow the issue to block progress on the most pressing global problems.
> 
> "Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these (rights) issues and we have to continue to press them," Clinton told reporters in Seoul just before leaving for Beijing.
> 
> "But our pressing on those issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."
> 
> Human rights groups immediately voiced disappointment at her remarks.*
> 
> T. Kumar, an advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, said the global rights lobby was "shocked and extremely disappointed."
> 
> "The United States is one of the only countries that can meaningfully stand up to China on human rights issues," Kumar said, with his comments echoed by other activist groups.
> 
> North Korea was also set to be in focus after Clinton issued a warning to the isolated regime's leaders while in Seoul to stop being provocative and for it not to go ahead with a threatened missile launch.
> 
> China, regarded as North Korea's closest ally, is host of the six-nation talks that also involve the United States and are aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
> 
> Aside from meeting the Chinese leadership, Clinton will visit a General Electric power plant on Saturday that runs on natural gas, to highlight potential cooperation on clean energy.
> 
> On Sunday she will attend a church service and meet civil society leaders before flying home.
> 
> Clinton began her Asian trip, her first overseas trip as secretary of state, in Japan on Monday, then visited Indonesia and South Korea.


----------



## a_majoor

This should be stressful for the Chinese government:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/20/china.economy.family/index.html#cnnSTCText



> *Road to riches ends for 20 million Chinese poor*
> 
> By Tomas Etzler and Jaime FlorCruz
> CNN
> 
> JING SHI, China (CNN) -- Tang Hui and his family prospered as migrant workers during China's economic boom, earning $10,000 a year: enough to build a house, send a cousin to school and pay for his grandmother's medical bills.
> 
> Tang Hui lost his manufacturing job in October just days after getting married.
> 
> But those good days are over. The family's cash earnings have evaporated, snatched away by a manufacturing crash cascading across China caused by falling global demand for its goods.
> 
> The nine people in the Tang family are facing an income of zero; their best hope to survive is to grow rice and raise pigs at home in the Sichuan Mountains.
> 
> "Farming is really hard. It needs a lot of hard labor," says 22-year-old Tang Hui, who lost his manufacturing job four months ago. "None of the young people want to farm nowadays. The income is extremely low."
> 
> A Chinese proverb says: "Going on the road to Sichuan is as hard as going to heaven." Isolated and mountainous, Sichuan is China's third most populous province; 60 percent of its 87 million residents are poor and live in the countryside, authorities say.
> 
> It became the nation's biggest source of the 130 million farmers who migrated into Chinese cities, especially in the south, to provide cheap labor for factories that churned out products, mainly for export to the United States. The province was also rocked last May by a massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people.
> 
> Five years ago, Tang Hui left for southern Guangdong province to work in a factory producing handbags and backpacks. He had to drop out of high school because his family was so poor.
> 
> There, he earned enough to stash away savings for his wedding. But last October, just days after he got married, his factory abruptly closed down. It was receiving no more orders from its American clients.
> 
> "I hope the government can help us during this crisis," he says. "I hope it won't be like this for too long. Now, there is not even enough money to celebrate the holidays."
> 
> At least he was able to spend the most important Chinese holiday of the year, the Spring Festival, at home in Qingbadong village.
> 
> The road uphill to the village was muddy and slippery. The winter rice fields were brown; the slopes were covered in winter fog. "In two, three months," Tang Hui says, "everything will be green and blooming."
> 
> And the festive mood -- the first time in six years the whole family celebrated the holiday together -- was short-lived.
> 
> Reality is never far away. Many of the villagers are unemployed. The Tang's next-door neighbors, a married couple, lost their jobs in a Guangdong shoe factory after working there for 16 years.
> 
> "A few months without jobs would be disastrous for us," Tang Hui frets.
> 
> Before they ventured out as migrants, the Tangs lived in a wooden shack. Now, they live in a two-story brick house, with 10 rooms, concrete floors, an open fire pit for cooking. Still, it has no running water and one outdoor latrine.
> 
> In the past months, about 70,000 factories nationwide have closed. Beijing official Chen Xiwen estimates about 20 million migrant workers have lost jobs. Tens of thousands of villages in the countryside depend on migrant workers' income.
> 
> China analysts say the spike in unemployment has caught China off guard. "The central government is now telling local governments to provide help and job training, re-employment," says Wenran Jiang, a political science professor and China expert at Canada's University of Alberta.
> 
> Vice Minister of Commerce Jiang Zengwei says China is offering "a one-off subsidy of 100-150 yuan ($15 to $22) to 74 million low-income people ... for temporary relief." Still, it will take some time before such measures make a difference.
> 
> Some analysts have suggested that a "rural revolution" is imminent amid the economic turmoil. However, Wenran Jiang says such talk is premature. But he also says the central government must do more in the coming months.
> 
> "Many migrant workers have lived a very hard and simple life," he says. "They have some savings for a rainy day like this, so in the short-term they may be able to cope -- but if eight or 12 months later things continue to deteriorate, it could turn volatile."
> 
> Most farmers like the Tangs do not get social security. So villagers who lost factory jobs have few choices except go back to farming. But it is not easy.
> 
> Farming feeds people but brings little cash. Millions of the jobless are second-generation migrant workers, young people who grew up in cities.
> 
> "It would be very hard," says Tang Hui. "I have never farmed. I don't know how to do it."
> 
> To cope, China is creating training programs in the countryside. One of the pilot centers is in Chongqing municipality. Some 30,000 workers have so far taken classes in farming, farming machinery repairs, tailoring and other vocational skills. The trainees got a one-time incentive of about $45.
> 
> But the Tangs have never heard about such programs. When asked about the central government's plan to invest billions of dollars in countryside infrastructure as a part of a huge stimulus package, they expressed anger.
> 
> "The central government has good ideas and intentions, but the local officials often ignore them. The road in our village was built by the local government but we had to pay for it. Every family had to pay $100 or more. We get nothing from the government," says Hui's father, Tang Zhong Min.
> 
> In the evening, the family huddles around an open wood stove. The stove and a small portable electric heater are the only sources of warmth during the cold winter nights. A flickering fluorescent lightbulb barely lights the room.
> 
> Tang Hui's wife, Li Xiaochun, is 21 years old. She used to cut leather in a textile factory, and will soon head back to Guangdong with her husband to search for work.
> 
> "I think to be at home is better. I didn't get used to living outside. I didn't get used to Guangdong. It is better at home," she says.
> 
> Tang Hui then interrupts. "Of course, I also like it at home, but it is better in other places. Coming home is only good during the Spring Festival," he says.
> 
> Despite the uncertainty, they remain optimistic.
> 
> "We are young. There must be some factories still open out there. We should be OK to go out and do something," Li Xiaochun says.
> 
> But Tang Hui's mother is not so convinced. "Of course I am worried. How can they live without jobs, with no money so far away from home?" asks 46-year-old Hu Xiaoju. "But I will definitely go, too."
> 
> For the Tangs and millions of others in China, the road to Guangdong and employment may prove even more difficult then the proverbial road to Sichuan.


----------



## a_majoor

Another real estate bubble pops. The southern Chinese coast is probably in even worse shape after a decade of frantic building...





> *Beijing's Olympic building boom becomes a bust*
> 
> By Barbara Demick
> February 22, 2009
> 
> Reporting from Beijing -- "Empty," says Jack Rodman, an expert in distressed real estate, as he points from the window of his 40th-floor office toward a silver-skinned prism rising out of the Beijing skyline.
> 
> "Beautiful building, but not a single tenant.
> 
> "Completely empty.
> 
> "Empty."
> 
> So goes the refrain as his finger skips from building to building, each flashier than the next, and few of them more than barely occupied.
> 
> Beijing went through a building boom before the 2008 Summer Olympics that filled a staid communist capital with angular architectural feats that grace the covers of glossy design magazines.
> 
> Now, six months after the Games ended, the city continues to dazzle by night, with neon and floodlights dancing across the skyline. By day, though, it is obvious that many are "see-through" buildings, to use the term coined during the Texas real estate bust of the 1980s.
> 
> By Rodman's calculations, 500 million square feet of commercial real estate has been developed in Beijing since 2006, more than all the office space in Manhattan. And that doesn't include huge projects developed by the government. He says 100 million square feet of office space is vacant -- a 14-year supply if it filled up at the same rate as in the best years, 2004 through '06, when about 7 million square feet a year was leased.
> 
> "The scale of development was unprecedented anywhere in the world," said Rodman, a Los Angeles native who lives in Beijing, running a firm called Global Distressed Solutions. "It defied logic. It just doesn't make sense."
> 
> Construction cranes jut into the skyline, but increasingly they are fixed in place, awaiting fresh financing before work resumes.
> 
> Boarded fences advertise coming attractions -- "an iconic landmark" or "international wonderland" -- that are in varying states of half-completion. A retail strip in one development advertised as "La Vibrant shopping street" is empty.
> 
> In a country where protests are rare, migrant workers stand in front of several construction projects, voicing their grievances.
> 
> "Our boss ran away with the money and he is nowhere to be found," said Li Zirong, a migrant worker from Shaanxi province, who was a supervisor on a stunning building with windows shaped like portholes.
> 
> What makes this boom-and-bust cycle different from those in the West is that there is no private ownership of land in China, making local governments de facto partners in the real estate industry, which earn huge fees from leasing and transferring land.
> 
> Huang Yasheng, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces the blame for the bust to the Chinese Communist Party and its reluctance to allow a true market economy.
> 
> "The lack of land reform fed into the real estate bubble and now it's coming back to haunt them," said Huang, author of "Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics," published last year. "There should have been more checks and balances on the ability of the government to acquire land."
> 
> The government spent $43 billion for the Olympics, nearly three times as much as any other host city. But many of the venues proved too big, too expensive and more photogenic than practical.
> 
> The National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, has only one event scheduled for this year: a performance of the opera "Turandot" on Aug. 8, the one-year anniversary of the Olympic opening ceremony. China's leading soccer club backed out of a deal to play there, saying it would be an embarrassment to use a 91,000-seat stadium for games that ordinarily attract only 10,000 spectators.
> 
> The venue, which costs $9 million a year to maintain, is expected to be turned into a shopping mall in several years, its owners announced last month.
> 
> A baseball stadium that opened last spring with an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, is being demolished. Its owner says it also will use the land for a shopping mall.
> 
> Among the major Olympic venues, only the National Aquatics Center, nicknamed the Water Cube, has had a productive afterlife. It's used for sound-and-light shows, with dancing fountains in the swimming lanes where Michael Phelps won his gold medals.
> 
> All around the Olympic complex, there are cavernous empty buildings, such as the main press center for the Games, that still await tenants.
> 
> A shopping arcade that stretches for a quarter of a mile across the street from the complex is empty, the storefronts papered over with signs reading "famous stores corridor."
> 
> "They wanted to build 'the world's biggest this' and 'the world's biggest that,' but these buildings have almost zero long-term economic benefit," economist Huang said.
> 
> Moreover, the makeover of Beijing for the Olympics led to an estimated 1.5 million residents being evicted from their homes, according to the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions.
> 
> In this vibrant capital city of 17 million, there is an insatiable demand for housing, yet prices remain far out of reach of most residents. American-style free-standing homes are being advertised for more than $1 million in gated communities with names like Versailles, Provence, Arcadia and Riviera. Within the Fourth Ring Road, a beltway that defines the central part of the city, two- and three-bedroom apartments are offered for $800,000 in compounds named Central Park and Riverside.
> 
> "These are like New York prices, but we are Chinese. We don't have that kind of money," said Zhang Huizhan, a 55-year-old businessman who owns a Chinese furniture factory. He has been looking for five years for an apartment for him and his wife within their budget of $150,000.
> 
> The average salary in Beijing is less than $6,000 a year.
> 
> Louis Kuijs, a senior economist at the World Bank in Beijing, said a lack of government supervision of the real estate industry tempted developers to build only for the luxury market and to ignore the mass market.
> 
> "If you think demand is endless for anything you build and you have just 200 square meters of land, you will build high-end apartments to make the highest profit," Kuijs said.
> 
> To its credit, the government recognized in 2007 that the real estate market was headed toward a bubble, economists say. In an attempt to make real estate more affordable, restrictions were introduced on ownership of second homes and on foreign home buyers. But the measures came too late, accelerating the crash of an already weakening market.
> 
> The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics reported this month that housing sales in the city dropped 40% last year. Chinese economists have predicted that housing prices will drop 15% to 20% in Beijing this year. Shanghai has experienced a similar decline.
> 
> "You can look at this perhaps as a healthy correction in the market," Kuijs said.
> 
> In the longer term, he said, "China's urbanization and overall development is going to lead to a very large additional demand for housing in the city."
> 
> Before that happens, the situation could get worse. Most of the real estate has been financed by Chinese banks, which have avoided writing down the loans. Eventually, they will be forced to, and that probably will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.
> 
> "At the end, somebody is going to have to pay the piper," real estate expert Rodman said.
> 
> barbara.demick@latimes.com
> 
> Nicole Liu and Eliot Gao of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.


----------



## CougarKing

Obviously the PRC covets the ability to show the flag with its own warships worldwide, because it is all too aware of its past history when Qing-era China faced a series of humiliations, like the infamous _unequal treaties_ forced upon them as what they saw as "Gunboat diplomacy" of the Western colonial powers from the 1800s to the 1900s.



> HONG KONG, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- *In the future, wherever Chinese merchant ships go, that area may be taken as China's national interest frontier and the trace of the "Chinese Aegis" class DDG may appear. Moreover, this theory gives the People's Republic of China a more convincing rationale for building its own aircraft carriers.*
> 
> Clearly, the conventional Western analysis that the People's Liberation Army navy is following a progressive defense path by trying to first secure the waters within the "first island chain" -- the stretch of islands running parallel to China's coast, including Japan's Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and the northern Philippines -- and then proceeding to the "second island chain" -- bordered by Guam, northern Australia and Indonesia -- is out of date.
> 
> Which island chain includes the coastline of Somalia? China's concept of a national interest frontier is not just a theoretical discussion. It is founded on the actual demands of combat operations. The People's Liberation Army Daily carried another article on Dec. 2, 2008, titled "Abandoning the Doctrine of Peaceful Military Build-up and Preparing for Military Confrontation That May Break Out Anytime." This caught the attention of Western military observers.
> 
> The belligerent wording in this treatise, at a time when tensions in the Taiwan Strait have greatly eased, has confused and worried analysts. Why did the author openly advocate preparations for military conflict at such a moment? Conflict with whom?
> 
> "Unless China is in possession of a credible core capability to win a regional war in the information era, China will not have the fundamental ability to accomplish other military missions," the article warned. "For China, although the possibility of a large-scale foreign invasion can be excluded, the danger of involvement in a regional war, military conflict and the interference of a superior opponent has never decreased," it said.
> 
> *From the perspective of Chinese military strategists, China no longer has any national interest frontier, because all corners of the planet have established ties with China through trade. Chinese merchant ships are already navigating the waters of the four great oceans and have reached all parts of the five continents. This is an advantage that the Soviet Union did not have in earlier years.
> 
> In Africa, China is already the continent's third-largest trading partner, after the United States and France. In 2006 China's trade with Africa broke the $50 billion mark. It is critically important that Africa's natural resources provide a lifeline to China's economy.
> 
> China has been providing large quantities of Chinese-made weapons and military equipment to many countries in Africa,* as this writer has described in earlier articles published by United Press International. Many of these were traded for oil.
> 
> http://www.upi.com/Security_Industry/2009/02/27/Chinas_navy_to_protect_nations_trade_all_around_the_world/UPI-84621235764864/


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing continues to express its displeasure.



> *China: U.S. Shouldn't Sell Arms to Taiwan*
> 
> By DAN MARTIN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 27 Feb 10:57 EST (15:57 GMT)
> 
> BEIJING - China told the United States on Feb. 27 that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan remained a major obstacle to easing military tensions, as the world powers resumed defense contact here after a five-month suspension.
> 
> *The start of the talks had raised hopes of greater cooperation on security issues and an easing of enduring tensions, after China cut military exchanges in anger over the proposed $6.5 billion U.S. arms package to Taiwan.
> 
> China's offer to once again hold the annual talks was widely seen as an olive branch extended to the new administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.
> 
> But the head of the Chinese delegation signaled a tough approach in his opening remarks, emphasizing that there were problems between the two sides and it was up to the United States to fix them.
> 
> "China-U.S. military relations remain in a difficult period. We expect the U.S. side to take concrete measures for the resumption and development of our military ties," Qian Lihua, co-chair of the talks and defence ministry press director, said in comments quoted by the state-run Xinhua news agency.*
> 
> Qian emphasised that the two days of talks in Beijing did not mean that the suspended military exchanges - such as more senior-level contacts and disaster relief co-ordination - would automatically resume.
> 
> "Frankly speaking, it will take a long time to restore our military exchanges as not a single obstacle in military ties has been removed so far," he said, specifically mentioning arms sales to Taiwan.
> 
> The situation of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island claimed by China, has long been one of the most sensitive issues in Sino-U.S. relations.
> 
> *The planned U.S. arms package that derailed military exchanges could still go ahead, and if it is carried out, Taiwan would receive advanced weaponry, including 30 Apache attack helicopters and 330 Patriot missiles.
> 
> The Pentagon has also proposed selling Taiwan 30 AH-64 Apache Longbow attack helicopters and 1,000 Hellfire missiles to beef up its anti-armor capabilities, and for close air support of its ground forces.*
> 
> The helicopters are worth up to $2.5 billion, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
> 
> Taiwan and the mainland have been governed separately since they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, but Beijing sees the island as part of its territory that is awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
> 
> Both sides have stationed vast weaponry on their own side of the Taiwan Strait in the event of war between them.
> 
> Qian's comments appeared to douse hopes that Taiwan would be less of an obstacle to Sino-U.S. ties now that the island is ruled by a relatively China-friendly president less likely than his predecessor to push for independence.
> 
> Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Sedney, who headed the U.S. delegation, told Qian he was looking to deepen dialogue between the sides, according to Xinhua.
> 
> "We must increase communications to reduce the chance of strategic misunderstanding," Xinhua quoted Sedney as saying.
> 
> Sino-U.S. military relations remain marked by deep tensions over other issues aside from Taiwan.
> 
> Mistrust has grown as China has poured money into modernizing its armed forces in recent years, fueling concerns in the United States that it plans to project its power more boldly in the region.
> 
> The talks are taking place just days before China unveils its military budget for 2009, likely announcing yet another large increase in defense spending.
> 
> *The United States and its allies have repeatedly accused China of not being transparent with its military spending.*
> 
> Aside from Xinhua, there was no foreign media access to the talks. But U.S. officials were to hold a press round table Feb. 28.
> 
> *Sedney will also meet with Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese army, before leaving for South Korea, Xinhua said.*
> 
> The talks, which began in 1997, were last held in February 2008.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems that China will fare better than others in the current recession, at least according to PRC leaders.

From the AFP:



> Agence France-Presse - 3/5/2009 7:05 AM GMT
> 
> *Wen declares China can ride out economic storm*
> 
> Premier Wen Jiabao said Thursday that China was facing unprecedented challenges from the global crisis but *he was confident the country would still achieve growth of about eight percent this year.
> 
> In his annual "state of the nation" address to open parliament, Wen gave the most detailed blueprint yet of a four-trillion-yuan (585-billion-dollar) stimulus plan aimed at steering China through the downturn.
> 
> The premier acknowledged the Chinese economy, the third-biggest in the world, was hurting and the climate was not expected to get better soon in the face of a global recession that has weakened demand for Chinese goods.
> 
> "We face unprecedented difficulties and challenges. The global financial crisis continues to spread and get worse," Wen told the 3,000 delegates gathered for the Communist Party's showpiece political event of the year.*
> 
> "Demand continues to shrink on international markets. The trend for global deflation is obvious and trade protectionism is resurgent," he told the lawmakers, who will be gathered for nine days.
> 
> But Wen said China's economy was still expected to grow by about 8.0 percent this year -- *a rate officials have stressed is needed to prevent social unrest triggered by widescale unemployment.*
> 
> "We are fully confident that we will overcome difficulties and challenges, and we have the conditions and ability to do so," Wen said.
> 
> China's economic growth dipped to 6.8 percent in the final quarter of last year, worrying figures for a government long used to double-digit expansions and marking a dramatic slowdown from 13.0 percent growth in all of 2007.
> 
> *The slowdown in China's economy, which is reliant on exports to developed economies that are now in recession, has made 20 million rural migrant workers jobless in recent months amid countless factory closures.
> 
> China typically sees tens of thousands of protests each year even in economic boom times, and rising unemployment has fuelled fears among the communist leadership of social unrest.
> 
> Wen also acknowledged problems that could fuel tensions and had been exacerbated by the crisis, such as an inadequate social safety net and health care system, as well as a wealth gap and corruption.
> 
> But he said the 8.0-percent target was achievable and would provide a sound platform for creating millions of jobs and soothing social tensions.*
> 
> "Maintaining a certain growth rate for the economy is essential for expanding employment for both urban and rural residents, increasing people's incomes and ensuring social stability," he said.
> 
> *Wen's assessment was more optimistic than that of the International Monetary Fund, which has forecast economic growth for China this year of 6.7 percent.*
> 
> Highlighting unrest concerns, security was tight around the Great Hall of the People, where parliament was sitting, and dissidents told AFP that authorities had placed new restrictions on their movements.
> 
> "There are police stationed outside 24 hours and I can't go anywhere unless I travel in a police car," dissident Gao Hongming told AFP by phone from his Beijing home.
> 
> *Adding to the sense of unease are tensions surrounding China's 58-year rule of Tibet as a sensitive 50th anniversary of a failed uprising falls on March 10.
> 
> Wen gave details of the wide-ranging plan for the four-trillion-yuan stimulus package, which is to be spent over two years and contribute to a record budget deficit of 950 billion yuan (140 billion dollars) in 2009.
> 
> This included plans to boost domestic consumption, raise incomes for the nation's roughly 800 million people living in the countryside and give support for the steel, auto and other industries.
> 
> Spending to improve the social safety net will increase 17.6 percent this year to 293 billion yuan, Wen said.*
> 
> The budget for medical and health care will rise 38.2 percent to 118.06 billion yuan, according to budget papers, with Wen pledging that health insurance would cover 90 percent of the population in three years.


----------



## tomahawk6

If their factories receive fewer orders then the PRC will either pay people to do nothing or lay off workers.


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the Dalai Lama and Beijing will never see eye-to-eye.



> Agence France-Presse - 3/10/2009 9:18 PM GMT
> *Dalai Lama says Chinese-ruled Tibet 'hell on earth'*
> Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama Tuesday accused China of having brought "hell on earth" to his homeland, in a speech on the sensitive 50th anniversary of a failed uprising.
> 
> As Chinese authorities deployed a massive security force across the Tibetan plateau to prevent protests, he demanded "legitimate and meaningful autonomy" for the region in a speech at his exile base in northern India.
> 
> Residents of Tibet's capital, Lhasa, reported no protests Tuesday morning but -- as in other Tibetan areas of China -- it appeared to be partly because armed soldiers and police were patrolling the streets in a show of force.
> 
> The state Xinhua news agency reported late Tuesday that "the holy city of Lhasa was quiet and peaceful" amid the security clampdown.
> 
> *The Dalai Lama said China had brought "untold suffering and destruction" to the Himalayan region in a wave of repressive campaigns since the uprising on March 10, 1959 that forced him to flee.
> 
> "These thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth," he said, adding they caused the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of his people.
> 
> "Even today Tibetans in Tibet live in constant fear," he said. "Their religion, culture, language, identity are near extinction. The Tibetan people are regarded like criminals, deserving to be put to death."
> 
> The anniversary of the failed uprising is being marked by vigils and protests in Dharamshala, as well as in places as far afield as Kathmandu and Canberra.
> 
> In Washington, a US lawmaker introduced a resolution to Congress that would urge China to end its "repression" of the Himalayan region. *
> "The situation in Tibet challenges the conscience of the world," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime supporter of Tibet, told Tibetans and their supporters inside the US Capitol.
> 
> In Beijing, the foreign ministry called for the measure to be withdrawn and dismissed the Dalai Lama's comments as "lies."
> 
> "We believe the US Congress resolution proposed by a few anti-China representatives disregards the history and reality of Tibet," foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters.
> 
> "The Dalai Lama clique is confusing right and wrong. They are spreading rumours. The democratic reforms (under Chinese rule) are the widest and most profound reforms in Tibetan history," Ma said.
> 
> Late Tuesday, the state Xinhua news agency released two commentaries lambasting the Dalai Lama, saying his comments showed he was "apparently at his wits' ends" and accused him of talking "some gibberish".
> 
> "This 'hell on earth' is precisely 'paradise on earth' for the ordinary Tibetans," one of the commentaries said.
> 
> China has ruled Tibet since 1951 after sending in troops to "liberate" the region the previous year.
> 
> However, the 73-year-old Dalai Lama still retains enormous support among the roughly six million devoutly Buddhist Tibetans who live in China, despite Beijing's efforts to demonise him.
> 
> In his speech, the Dalai Lama voiced frustration that repeated rounds of talks between the India-based Tibetan government-in-exile and Chinese officials have yielded no progress.
> 
> "And quite apart from the current process of Sino-Tibetan dialogue having achieved no concrete result, there has been a brutal crackdown on the Tibetan protests that shook the whole of Tibet since March last year," he said in his speech, broadcast via the Internet to exiles and supporters worldwide.
> 
> The Dalai Lama has resisted pressure to radicalise his campaign against China, sticking to his "middle way" policy of non-violence.
> 
> "We Tibetans are looking for legitimate and meaningful autonomy, an arrangement that would enable Tibetans to live within the framework of the People's Republic of China," he said.
> 
> Peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks in Lhasa on last year's anniversary of the 1959 uprising erupted four days later into anti-Chinese rioting that swept into other parts of western China with Tibetan populations.
> 
> Tibetan exiles say more than 200 people died when Chinese security forces clamped down following the unrest. Authorities deny this, saying that "rioters" were responsible for 21 deaths.
> 
> Foreign tourists are banned from visiting Tibet in March, travel agencies have told AFP, and witnesses there reported strict security.
> 
> Last year's unrest deeply angered China's leaders as they prepared for the Beijing Olympics in August, and they responded with a huge military crackdown across Tibet that triggered condemnation around the world.


----------



## tomahawk6

Who can compromise their principles ?


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps the USNS _Impeccable_ might run into this ship as well.



> *China's largest fishery patrol ship starts mission *
> www.chinaview.cn 2009-03-11 21:34:56
> 
> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/11/content_10993996.htm
> 
> GUANGZHOU, March 11 (Xinhua) -- China's largest fishery patrol ship has started its way to the Xisha Islands to enhance the fishery protection and maritime surveillance efforts in the South China Sea.
> 
> The ship, China Yuzheng 311, sailed at midday Tuesday from Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province.
> 
> Yang Jian, a Ministry of Agriculture engineer, said given the country's heavy task of maritime rights and interests protection, the vessel would reinforce the fishery administration in the South China Sea.
> 
> China Yuzheng 311 was converted from a rescue vessel of Chinese navy. It is 113.5 meters long and 15.5 meters wide and at 4,450 tonnes.
> 
> The patrol ship will be in charge of maritime patrol in China's exclusive economic zones, navigation protection and fishery emergencies.


----------



## tomahawk6

Future missions will have more than a sub for backup. :camo:


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another concession on the part of Pres. Ma and the Guomindang to show that they are committed to reunifcation. 



> *Taiwan to end conscription*
> 
> http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_347888.html
> 
> TAIPEI - TAIWAN will phase out its decades-old military conscription policy over the next five years, the defence minister said on Monday, amid warming ties with China.
> 
> *Currently all men aged over 20 are required to do one year's military service.
> 
> But Defence Minister Chen Chao-min told reporters that the structure of Taiwan's military manpower will undergo a dramatic change over the next few years.*
> 
> 'From 2011, the number of conscripts will be reduced by at least 10 percent each year, to be replaced by professional soldiers,' Mr Chen said.
> 
> 'That is to say, eventually, conscript measures will come to an end by 2014.' Critics have argued that the island's armed forces have struggled to enhance their defence capabilities because conscripts are unable to become proficient in high-tech weaponry in their short military service.
> 
> However, the new proposals sparked concerns over whether the defence ministry would be able to recruit sufficiently qualified professional soldiers at a monthly salary of NT$35,000 (S$1,550).
> 
> The plan to phase out conscription was a campaign pledge of President Ma Ying-jeou during the 2008 election.
> 
> *The number of service personnel in Taiwan stands at around 275,000, down from a peak of 600,000 during the Cold War.*
> 
> Taiwan's relatively large army is a legacy of decades of tensions with China, which has regarded the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification since the two sides split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
> 
> *However, ties between Taiwan and China have improved dramatically since Mr Ma's Kuomintang party took office last May promising to boost cross-strait trade and tourism.* -- AFP


----------



## tomahawk6

An all volunteer force isnt advisable for Taiwan. Manpower costs would increase and the manpower pool of trained personnel will shrink to a level that would be dangerous.


----------



## medaid

THAT... is the stupidest thing the Taiwanese government has ever done... and they've done MANY.

The quality of their soldiers have gone drastically down hill in the past 10yrs. With conscripted soldiers serving soft berths, and toned down the training standards. It's a sad day... really sad...


----------



## chanman

1 year is pretty short as far as conscription goes, isn't it?  I think South Korea is two years, as is Singapore.


----------



## CougarKing

Another sign of the continuing relationship between Islamabad and Beijing.



> *Chinese destroyer leaves for home after multinational exercise in Pakistan*
> 
> http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70867&Itemid=2
> 
> BEIJING, March 14 (APP): Commander and Senior Captain of Chinese destroyer “Guangzhou” who took part in AMAN-09 exercise said Saturday that China sticks to its policy of peaceful development and the Chinese Navy hoped to broaden exchanges and cooperation with other navies.
> 
> Before departure from Karachi for home, in an interview on board the “Guangzhou”, Commander Senior Captain Chen Yueqi told Xinhua that China had sent its naval ship and a 12-member special force team to the AMAN 09 exercise.
> 
> He said that the purpose was only to show its goodwill for peace and its responsibility to maintain world peace and stability as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
> 
> The Military Attache at the Chinese Embassy Major General Li Mengyan, Consul-General in Karachi Chen Shanmin and Rear Admiral of the Pakistani Navy Kamran were among some 150 Pakistani sailors and Chinese at the port to see off the Chinese ship and its sailors.
> 
> Earlier, a flag-lowering ceremony was held at the Pakistan Navy Dockyard, marking the end of Exercise AMAN 09.
> 
> From March 9 to 12, some 20 warships carried out exercises like going past mines, anti-terror operations, shooting floating objects, search and rescue, night encounter exercise, and cross deck landings by helicopter.


----------



## a_majoor

China imposing fiscal discipline on the Obama administration?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/023061.php



> *Barack and Beijing*
> 
> March 14, 2009 Posted by John at 6:52 PM
> 
> There's an adage that if you owe a bank a little money and can't pay it, you're in trouble. If you owe a bank a lot of money and can't pay it, the bank is in trouble. But what happens if you owe the bank a lot of money and can't pay it, but still need to borrow more?
> 
> That's the basic dynamic, I think, in our relationship with China. So far, China has been willing to lend us money to finance our debt--around a trillion dollars to date--and the Obama administration is counting on China to lend much more. This has been going on for a while, but for the first time, the Chinese are worried:
> 
> Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had said Friday he was concerned about the safety of the estimated $1 trillion his country has invested in U.S. government debt. China is Washington's biggest foreign creditor, and Obama's administration is counting on the Chinese to help pay for the $787 billion economic stimulus package by buying U.S. bonds.
> 
> "Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried," Wen said. "I would like to call on the United States to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets."
> 
> President Obama immediately rushed to assure the Chinese that their investment in America is safe:
> 
> "There's a reason why even in the midst of this economic crisis you've seen actual increases in investment flows here into the United States," Obama said. "I think it's a recognition that the stability not only of our economic system, but also our political system, is extraordinary.
> 
> "I think that not just the Chinese government, but every investor, can have absolute confidence in the soundness of investments in the United States," he added.
> 
> Of course, what the Chinese are worried about is not that the United States government will default on its bonds. That obviously won't happen. The Chinese concern, now being expressed openly for the first time, is that the U.S. will adopt the standard debtor's remedy of inflating its currency and paying back its debts in shrunken dollars. Why are the Chinese worried about this? Because Barack Obama's budget proposes to borrow trillions of dollars, injecting them into the U.S. economy without any offsetting wealth being created. The inevitable result, as any economist not in the pay of the Obama administration or the Democratic Party will tell you, is inflation. (_Interpolation. The debt crisis is also affecting government employee pension plans to the tune of tens of billions of dollars of unfunded liabilities which Federal, State and Municipal Public Service Unions will insist be made up. Stae and Municipal governments are on the edge of bankruptcy, and if one goes over the edge, it could trigger a wave of defaults that bring down the US economy_).
> 
> Some experts say that the Chinese are stuck, like the bank to whom you owe a lot of money you can't pay. Therefore, they shouldn't talk down the dollar lest they further devalue the trillion dollars' worth they already own:
> 
> "*I think they're clearly sending a signal to the U.S. that they're very concerned with how we're managing the (economic) crisis," said Steven Schrage, the director of the international business program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think they're also very concerned that this could lead to the helicopter jump of money generation, more cash and inflation. As a way out of the huge fiscal problems that we're going to be spending huge amounts ... which could weaken the value of the U.S. Treasuries they own.*"
> 
> Schrage was referring to infamous comments made by Ben Bernanke, before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, that in the event of a deep crisis the Fed could always shower money on the nation from helicopters.
> 
> Still, Wen's criticism reflects a misunderstanding of China's own risks. In questioning the U.S. ability to make good on its debts, China threatens to undermine the value of the very assets it's holding.
> 
> That confidence may be misplaced, however. Barack Obama's budget contemplates that *over the next five years, the federal government will borrow more money--run up more debt--than has been incurred during the entire history of the Republic*, from George Washington to George Bush. It's easy to draw up a budget that contemplates debt if you're confident that someone is willing to lend you the money. In reality, though, the only plausible creditor is the Chinese.
> 
> With their shot over the bow, I think the Chinese are telling Obama that they don't like his budget. It is obvious to them that it will cause inflation, even if Obama himself doesn't understand the problem. Thus, I think they are telling Obama that they are willing to lend our government more money only if 1) the Obama administration follows a more responsible fiscal policy, and 2) in any event, they will insist on higher interest rates in the future to compensate themselves for the risk of inflation. I assume Obama will have to go along, since there seems no prospect of a Plan B.
> 
> How ironic: we American conservatives may well be in the position of hoping the "Communist" Chinese can impose fiscal discipline on our shamefully incompetent government.


----------



## CougarKing

Just an update on the PRC presence in the South China Sea:



> in Chinese map Xisha Islands
> 
> http://english.gov.cn/2009-03/17/content_1261548.htm
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's largest fishery administration vessel, China Yuzheng 311, arrives in the Xisha Islands March 17, 2009. The vessel will patrol the South China Sea.(Xinhua Photo)
> 
> 
> *China's largest fishery administration vessel began patrolling the South China Sea Tuesday afternoon.*
> 
> "China Yuzheng 311" will patrol the Xisha Islands such as Zhaoshu, Yongxing and the East Island to give Chinese fishermen in this area more powerful protection for their interests and safety, said Liu Guimao with the Administration of Fishery and Fishing Harbor Supervision for the South China Sea.
> 
> "Despite hot weather of nearly 30 degrees Celsius, the 311 crew was in good spirits and confident with their tasks," Liu told Xinhua.
> 
> "China Yuzheng 311" made a week-long voyage to the region from its home port in Guangzhou before arriving Tuesday noon. The vessel stopped at a naval base in Sanya in the southern Hainan Province last Thursday for supplies and set sail for the islands, which are about 180 nautical miles southeast of Hainan.
> 
> However, the vessel encountered a storm which delayed its arrival in the islands which was expected to be on Sunday, the vessel's captain, who preferred not to be named, told Xinhua.
> 
> With 112.68 meters in length, 15 meters in width, and a maximum displacement of 4,600 tonnes, the vessel is the largest of its kind in China.
> 
> Equipped with the Global Maritime Distress Safety System (GMDSS), an advanced communication system initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), "China Yuzheng 311" can sail non-stop for 8,000 sea miles at a maximum speed of 22 knots. It was converted from a rescue vessel of Chinese navy
> 
> Wu Zhuang, director of the Administration of Fishery and Fishing Harbor Supervision for the South China Sea, said the vessel *will escort Chinese ships around the islands where "fishing illegalities by neighboring countries are on the rise."*
> 
> *"China has indisputable sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea and their adjacent waters,"* Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Tuesday.
> 
> His comments came after he was asked to respond to accusations of China "flexing military might" by sending....
> 
> (...)


----------



## a_majoor

China takes action against the escalating financial risks posed by the Obama administration. Is Canada in a position to limit our exposure?:

http://atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KC18Cb01.html



> *China inoculates itself against dollar collapse*
> By W Joseph Stroupe
> This article concludes a three-part report.
> 
> PART 1: Before the stampede
> PART 2: The not-so-safe haven
> 
> *There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.
> 
> There is also mounting evidence that China's increasingly energetic new campaign of capitalizing on the global crisis by making resource buys across the globe may be (1) helping its central bank to decrease exposure to the dollar, while (2) simultaneously positioning China to make much greater profit on its investment of its reserves into hard assets whose prices are now greatly beaten down, while (3) also affording it greatly increased control of strategic resources and the geopolitical clout that goes with it. This is turning out to be a win-win-win situation for China as it capitalizes upon the important opportunities afforded it by the present global crisis.*
> 
> The exact size and the precise composition of China's huge forex reserves, the exact degree of China's exposure to the dollar and its viable options, if any, in decreasing that exposure are matters of intense interest, because China's policies in this regard could have gargantuan implications for the US and the global financial systems and for the dollar.
> 
> One of the foremost experts who continues to research and track these matters is the highly respected Brad W Setser, a Fellow for Geoeconomics at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His work is providing significantly deeper insight into the size and composition of China's reserves and is affording the world a better view of that country's options in managing its reserves going forward and what the implications of those options might be.
> 
> Another expert whose ongoing work is also adding very important, deeper insight into such matters is the highly respected Rachel Ziemba, lead analyst on China and the oil exporting economies at the prestigious RGE Monitor, founded by Nouriel Roubini.
> 
> Drawing on the work of these two experts, let's examine the matter of the likely size and composition of China's forex reserves and its investment options going forward, and the probable implications of those options for the dollar.
> 
> The first issue is to determine the actual size of China's foreign exchange reserves. Its central bank officially confirms the current figure of about US$1.95 trillion. However, Setser's work reveals that China's actual reserves are significantly higher and may actually be as high as $2.4 trillion, according to his latest figures [1]. About $2.2 trillion of this total figure is easily identifiable, according to Setser, with the remaining $200 billion being his estimate of the amount currently held in China's state banks.
> 
> As for the issue of the composition of these reserves and its total exposure to the dollar, the most recent Treasury International Capital (TIC) report by the US Treasury has China's holdings of Treasuries at $696 billion as of the end of 2008. However, Setser's research indicates China's total holdings of US Treasuries is likely to be more than that figure, since some of the purchases of Treasuries by the UK and Hong Kong should actually be attributed to China's central bank. China also holds US government-sponsored agency debt (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paper) and corporate bonds, but the recent TIC reports indicate its central bank has been steadily divesting itself of these assets in favor of short-dated Treasuries.
> 
> As for China's purchases of Treasuries over the most recent three months (October - December of 2008), note this statement from Setser:
> And over the past three months, almost all the growth in China's Treasury portfolio has come from its rapidly growing holdings of short-term bills not from purchases of longer-term notes.
> Setser goes on to make the point that China's central bank is unquestionably divesting itself of the comparatively less-safe assets such as agency debt in favor of very short-dated Treasuries. The best estimates of the total exposure of China's central bank to dollar-denominated assets of all kinds is about 70%, or somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion depending upon whether you use the $2.2 trillion figure or the $2.4 trillion figure for the total sum of China's reserves.
> 
> That uncomfortably high level of exposure to the dollar is what has been causing concern to flare in China most recently. A much more desirable figure, from China's standpoint, of its total exposure to the dollar would be 50% or less of its total reserves. A reserve composition of 50% dollars to 50% everything else is much safer because an excessive decline in the value of the dollar would tend to be offset by corresponding increases against the dollar in the value of the non-dollar assets comprising the rest of the reserves.
> 
> In order to get to that more desirable composition fairly quickly over the next several months, China would have to somehow divest itself of as much as $450 billion of its existing dollar-denominated assets, not purchase a significant amount of new dollar-denominated assets, and accomplish all this without triggering a global dollar panic. That's a very tall order indeed - but it is not by any means impossible. How so?
> 
> If we stand back to look at Setser's work from a distance, we see what appears to be a clear strategy on China's part that is potentially very compelling. The country has its official reserves, which it acknowledges now total about $1.95 trillion, and it also has its unofficial or secret reserves, which Setser estimates at about $450 billion at present.
> 
> Coincidentally (or perhaps not merely coincidentally) the secret reserves total about the same sum that China needs to divest itself of in order to reach the desired composition of its reserves noted in the previous paragraph - about $450 billion. At this point, recall the intriguing and potentially very important statement quoted earlier (see DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING, Part 2), a statement made by Fang Shangpu, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and reported by the Xinhua News Agency on February 18, 2009:
> Fang Shangpu, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, noted Wednesday that the report released by the US Treasury of the amount of government bonds held by China included not only the investment from the reserves, but also from other financial institutions. It might be a hint that Chinese government is not holding as much US government bonds. [Italics added]
> 
> China is managing its foreign exchange reserves with a long-term and strategic view, Fang told a press briefing. "Whether China is to purchase, and to buy how much of the US government bonds will be decided according to China's need," Fang said. "We will make judgment based on the principle of ensuring safety and the value of the reserves," Fang said.
> Is Fang Shangpu hinting that China has intentionally, as a deliberate strategy, divided its reserves into two general holdings, official and secret, and that SAFE (the State Administration of Foreign Exchange) has ensured that the composition of the official (government) holdings of the $1.95 trillion is such that its exposure to the dollar is not the roughly 70% assumed in the West, but rather something much closer to the desired target of 50%, while the secret reserves hold predominantly dollar-denominated assets?
> 
> If this is the case, then China could employ a number of schemes to clandestinely further reduce its total exposure to the dollar, using its secret reserves, all the while maintaining safety for the official reserves. Note Fang Shangpu's recent statement to the Wall Street Journal regarding how carefully, and with what foresight, China manages its reserve holdings:
> "Since the subprime crisis evolved into the international financial crisis in September last year, we have executed the central authorities' plans to cope with the international financial crisis and launched the emergency response mechanism. We have closely followed developments, made timely adjustments to risk management, taken decisive and forward-looking measures to evaluate and remove risks ... "
> Chinese officials have been painfully aware, for several years now, of the increasing risks of too great an exposure to the dollar. It simply isn't believable that their level of prudence and foresight in this regard was so low as to allow them to fail to formulate and execute strategies designed to limit that exposure to safer levels
> 
> than is presently assumed in the West. But if China has indeed prudently and deliberately structured its official reserves (now totaling $1.95 trillion) to be much less exposed to the dollar than is assumed in the West, while off-loading the riskier, dollar-denominated assets into its secret reserves, how might it propose to use those secret reserves to further decrease its exposure to the dollar?
> 
> Conversion into resource reserves
> Enter China's resource buys. Several Chinese experts have been saying that China needs to spend a significant portion of its dollar-denominated reserves on hard assets, thereby further reducing its exposure to the dollar. It certainly appears that China is embarking upon just such a strategy.
> 
> According to research by Rachel Ziemba of RGE Monitor, in the first two months of 2009 alone China has already confirmed such deals for hard assets worth a total of over $50 billion [2]. Clearly, China is just now opening its global strategy of pursuing such resource buys at a time when the prices of hard assets are extremely attractive and many more such buys are in the offing. This is made evident by the recent February 23, 2009 report by China Daily which stated the following:
> 
> As part of the National Energy Administration's three-year plan for the oil and gas industry, the government is considering setting up a fund to support firms in their pursuit of foreign mergers and acquisitions, the report said.
> 
> Fang Shangpu, deputy director of SAFE, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said earlier this week that more measures will be introduced to support firms seeking to expand overseas.
> 
> Veteran analyst Han Xiaoping said the time is now ripe for China to convert some of its capital reserves into resource reserves, as global oil prices have fallen 70% since last year, to about $40 a barrel. [Italics added]
> 
> "We shouldn't miss this opportunity to use our foreign exchange reserves to build up our oil stocks," he said.
> 
> Jiang Jiemin, chairman of PetroChina, said recently: "The low share prices of some global resource companies provide us with some fresh opportunities."
> RGE Monitor's Ziemba says the resource buys are a smart move now because they decrease the role of increasingly uncertain financial assets such as Treasuries, which now carry little profit appeal and diminishing appeal as safe stores of wealth, and increase the role of hard assets, which now carry an ever greater profit potential and a mounting appeal as safe stores of wealth: "For China, these investments seem to be a relatively efficient way to use its financial resources given the likely long-term appreciation of resource prices and uncertainty about financial assets."
> 
> Ziemba, in response to questions e-mailed to her, also alerts us to watch for forthcoming details about the currencies employed in China's resource buys. If these deals are being transacted largely in dollars, then she notes that there will likely be no negative near-term effect upon the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. But if they are arranged outside of the dollar, it might well serve to undermine the dollar's international role to some extent.
> 
> However, it should be noted that almost no matter what currencies these resource buys are being transacted in, there does exist a potential negative impact for the dollar itself further down this path. How so?
> 
> Obviously, with China's uncomfortably large present exposure to the dollar, it is in its interests to concentrate on converting much of the dollar-denominated portion of its secret reserves into resources reserves. In other words, China will undoubtedly spend dollars, whether directly or indirectly, to fund its resource buys. But it must do so in a largely opaque manner that leaves little, if any trace in official data such as the US Treasury's TIC report. It will also be likely to be a net buyer of Treasuries, though nowhere near its 2008 pace, or else refrain from selling significant amounts of Treasuries, while it clandestinely reduces its exposure to the dollar. Otherwise, its actions could spark a dollar panic.
> 
> Increased buying of Treasuries by US citizens and investors, and by various foreign investors other than China, as the global crisis rapidly deepens and increases risk aversion, may likely take significant pressure off of China to soak up the huge issuance of new sovereign US debt now getting underway. That will help to provide breathing room for China to address its problem of reducing exposure to the dollar.
> 
> Whether China will approach the problem with a scheme of swaps amongst its various state-controlled entities and wealthy private Chinese investors, or by some other nearly opaque means, probably cannot be determined with any certainty at present. But it has undoubtedly worked out the problem of clandestinely converting significant sums of its dollar-denominated financial assets into hard assets without dumping Treasuries and triggering a dollar panic.
> 
> It is most unlikely, therefore, that its actions in this regard will be sufficiently proved before it has already succeeded in accomplishing its goals. Furthermore, since resource prices are now very attractive, China will certainly expand and accelerate its resource buys while prices remain attractive, converting ever-larger sums of its dollar-denominated reserves into resource reserves.
> 
> If China averaged a conversion of only $35 billion per month from dollars into resources, it could convert the entire $450 billion in little more than 12 months' time. Hence, I predict that the next eight to 15 months will provide China with sufficient time to bring its total exposure to the dollar much more in line with its strategic goals.
> 
> What about the problem of dealing with any ongoing accumulation of dollars? A number of analysts note that China's trade surplus is worsening even in the global slowdown because, while China's exports are falling, its imports are falling much faster. However, Chinese officials have made clear that they will use their reserve holdings to bolster imports, and that measure should alleviate China's need to accumulate large sums of dollars and other currencies in order to keep the yuan stable.
> 
> China is extremely unlikely, therefore, to accumulate dollars at anywhere near the rate at which it did in 2008. China is also funding its domestic stimulus package designed to spur domestic consumption. All these measures denote a much wiser use of its huge reserves and a steadily decreasing focus on the dollar. All in all, China looks set to weather the storm quite well in spite of some significant hardships along the way.
> 
> Summarizing the escalating risks of a dollar crisis
> The bubble in US Treasuries is getting increasingly massive and unstable with each week that passes. Deepening global risk aversion is keeping investors lined up, so far, to buy Treasuries - especially short-dated ones. And the deepening economic crisis in the US is moving its own citizens to join in the buying spree.
> 
> If the Treasuries bubble persists for much longer, and especially if it continues to mount, the massive and dangerous distortions in the global financial system and the Treasuries-induced strangulation of its credit markets will only become more severe, likely leading to a meltdown somewhere in the emerging markets, one of whose effects will almost certainly spread to engulf the severely weakened Western European and US financial sectors and plunge particularly the US economy into a deep depression, with potent negative effects upon the dollar.
> 
> Such an eventuality will tend to force global investors to evaluate the safe-haven appeal of the dollar based much more on the fundamentals of the US economy, and that will portend a stampede out of the dollar and a potentially chaotic bursting of the massive Treasuries bubble. Hence, even if the US finds buyers for its huge sums of new sovereign debt now beginning to flood the markets, the picture does not look good for the dollar beyond the short term.
> 
> Obviously, if the US reaches the point where it fails to find sufficient buyers for its new flood of Treasuries, that will also become a perilous situation for the dollar and for the huge Treasuries bubble, which will almost certainly burst as global investors seek better stores of wealth in hard assets, following the lead of China's central bank.
> 
> Either way, the US is engaged in the implementation of extremely risky and potent inflationary, dollar-debasing policies, making a loss of global confidence in the dollar in the short to medium term a virtual certainty. Even if the massive spending does restore economic growth, the US economy is likely to remain very weak for some time. That will make it extremely difficult for the US Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy to fight off the inevitable and potent inflation that will result from today's shortsighted policies.
> 
> When the Fed attempts to tighten, the US economy will likely be plunged into a second-round recession or depression, with obviously awful effects upon the dollar. But if the Fed fails to tighten sufficiently and quickly, runaway inflation will ravage the currency anyway.
> 
> Prudent, forward-looking Chinese officials have clearly assessed the entire situation as one demanding careful but swift action to ensure that its huge reserves are not imperiled by what has obviously become an untenable global rush into an unstable and perilous dollar bubble.
> 
> Hence, China's central bank is enacting with a sense of urgency prudent measures, both explicit and clandestine, to significantly decrease exposure to the dollar. If the details of such measures should become sufficiently public and should attract undue global attention before China accomplishes its goals, a dollar panic might be triggered.
> 
> This risk, though perhaps not major, does exist nonetheless, and it is significantly increasing as China undertakes new measures that might attract undue and unwanted global attention. However, it is also likely that China will enjoy cover and gain breathing space to enact its prudent measures while much of the rest of the world continues to rush into the bubble.
> 
> Notes
> 1. See "China's Record Demand for Treasuries in 2008", by Brad Setser, The Council on Foreign Relations.
> 2. See "China's Resource Buys" by Rachel Ziemba, RGE Monitor.
> 
> W Joseph Stroupe is a strategic forecasting expert and editor of Global Events Magazine online at www.globaleventsmagazine.com
> 
> (Copyright 2009 Global Events Magazine, All Rights Reserved.)


----------



## CougarKing

Two very interesting articles that gives outsiders better insight into how the 3 predominantly Sinophone nations of East Asia- China , Taiwan, and Singapore- plan their defence strategies.



> by Andrei Chang
> Hong Kong (UPI) Jan 11, 2007
> *China, Taiwan and Singapore all share the Chinese language and culture. Yet due to their different positions in the international sphere and the capabilities of their respective military industries, the three have chosen very different military strategies and weapons systems. It is interesting to compare the three approaches.*First, in terms of military strategy, China is now gradually transforming itself from the passive defense of the Cold War years to today's active defense, with balanced offensive and defensive capabilities. China's navy is also turning from coastal defense to offshore defense.
> 
> The two sides of the Taiwan Strait are now under abnormal adversarial conditions. Taiwan's strategic goal has changed from staging large-scale counterattacks on mainland China to engaging in a decisive battle away from Taiwan Island and establishing balanced offensive and defensive capabilities.
> 
> Singapore's approach is proactive defense, typical of a small country. Since Singapore is much better off than other countries in the region, and it has a sensitive historical relationship with Malaysia, Singapore's national defense policy has followed the dual-track principle of diplomacy and deterrence.
> 
> While building up formidable military strengths to dissuade potential enemies from reckless action, Singapore also tries to reinforce its national defense through diplomatic ties, hoping it will receive support from the outside world should the regional situation deteriorate. Singapore learned from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that wealth does not equal peace.
> 
> *The military strategies and doctrines of Singapore and Taiwan are becoming increasingly close. Both are attempting to establish effective deterrence against potential adversaries through building up their military machines. Both also rely on the diplomatic or even military involvement of world powers should they face a protracted conflict.**
> By procuring large batches of arms and establishing special military ties with the United States, both Singapore and Taiwan hope to guarantee their own security, expecting that the United States would come to their rescue should a major conflict arise.
> 
> Singapore's practice of purchasing AIM-120C air-to-air missiles and storing these weapon systems in the United States is clearly an attempt to establish a tangible military alliance with the United States and to integrate diplomatic deterrence with military deterrence. If a conflict broke out, Singapore would inevitably ask the United States to deliver the weapon systems stored on U.S. territory, which would make it impossible for the United States to remain neutral.
> 
> Taiwan's approach in recent years has been more or less similar. For the same purpose, Singapore may also deposit the 66 Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks it procured from Germany in Australia, as a tactic to contain the latest move of the Malaysian army to import PT91M main battle tanks from Poland.
> 
> Secondly, Singapore hopes to win additional layers of protection through its "diplomatic deterrence" strategy. Through reinforcing its ties with Australia, Canada and the joint defense cooperation among the five ASEAN countries, Singapore intends to implement the strategy of multilayered diplomatic deterrence; that is, using different diplomatic deterrence strategies to deal with different adversaries.
> 
> In recent years, Taiwan has also sought to weaken the dominance of the United States in the dynamics of the Taiwan Strait and actively expand its military exchanges with Japan, Australia and India, with the same strategic objectives as Singapore.*
> 
> Although China, Taiwan and Singapore all seek to balance their offensive and defensive capabilities, Singapore's navy and air force have the most advanced Western military technologies and the most formidable attack power in comparison with Taiwan and China. In other words, in implementing the strategy of balanced offensive and defensive deterrence, the Singaporean military forces place much greater emphasis on offensive operations than the Taiwanese and Chinese forces.
> 
> *Singapore's "active defense" strategy is probably influenced by traditional British military ideology. Similar traces can be found in the military strategies of fellow former British colonies India and Pakistan. With the import of 12 plus 8 F-15ST fighters from the United States, Singapore has become the first of the three militaries to acquire joint direct attack munition bombs.*
> 
> In addition, Singapore has acquired APG-63V3 active electronically scanned array radar systems ahead of Japan and Korea. The Singaporean air force is also equipped with 20 of the most powerful AN-64D attack helicopters in the region.
> 
> *Because of the differences in the combat capabilities of their prospective adversaries, Taiwan and Singapore also have different deterrence strengths. The powerful offensive weapon systems mentioned above are already sufficient to give Singapore the capability to paralyze the enemy through pre-emptive standoff operations, which could be followed by diplomatic measures to resolve the conflict.**
> 
> Singapore's latest replacements of military equipment, particularly in the navy and air force, show that the deterrence capability it aspires to is not directed solely at Malaysia. Thanks to the procurement of F-16 Block52 fighters and the KC-135R tanker, plus the fact that four E-2C aerial early-warning aircraft are already in service, the Singaporean air force can now project its power over almost all of Southeast Asia.*
> 
> Singapore is already armed with 70 F-16 fighters, among which 62 are F-16 Block52s. These fighters are equipped with the Israeli Python-4 and AIM120C AAM. The Taiwanese air force also dreams of acquiring the F-16 Block52. Both the Singaporean and the Taiwanese air forces are equipped with AGM-65G infrared-guided anti-ship missiles.
> 
> Singapore is favored by the West and Russia and has experienced no restrictions in the import of arms. Unlike Taiwan, Singapore has access to diversified weapons sources. The Singaporean army is equipped with Russian Igla (SA-18) ground-to-air missiles, for example.
> 
> *As for military cooperation between Singapore and Taiwan, there has been constant speculation and many unconfirmed reports about this. Sources say that Singapore's batch of SA-18 missiles was actually ordered by Taiwan. Both Taiwan and Singapore are now employing the French-made La Fayette guided missile frigates. The Singaporean variant of the La Fayette and the same model of FFG assembled indigenously are called the Delta Project, which has undergone major upgrading, but the price is said to be less than two-thirds the price Taiwan paid for its La Fayettes. Obviously the two received far different treatment in their purchase deals.**
> As a matter of fact, Israel has close ties with all three of the militaries under discussion. Singapore's ground forces, air force and navy use a lot of Israeli-made equipment. The Singaporean navy's "Victory" class missile patrol boats are equipped with the Barak I vertical launch surface-to-air systems made by Israel Aerospace Industries/Rafael, while the F-16 Block52 fighters of the Singaporean air force are equipped with Israeli-designed electronic warfare systems.*
> 
> As is widely known, both Taiwan and Singapore have acquired Gabriel I surface-to-surface missiles from Israel's IAI. In addition, Singapore has also purchased submarines from Sweden. In 1990 Singapore received the first batch of two A17 submarines, and four Sjoormen-class submarines were delivered to Singapore in 2004. The Sjoormen submarine has a standard displacement of 1,130 tons. As a result, Singapore has become the first country in Southeast Asia with genuine underwater combat capability.
> 
> *Since international attitudes toward Singapore have been the most open and favorable, it has had the broadest training opportunities for its military personnel. The pilots of the Singaporean air force not only receive training in the United States, they also actively participate in joint military exercises with India, Australia and other countries*, including joint naval and air force operations. The Singaporean air force has even carried out confrontational exercises in which the Su-30MKI fighter planes faced Singapore's F-16 Block52s.






> Taiwan military presents preventive doctrine toward China in Quadrennial Defense Review
> 
> http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=893776&lang=eng_news&cate_img=1033.jpg&cate_rss=news_only_on_taiwannews
> 
> TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Taiwan’s military will concentrate on a more preventive policy as relations with rival China improve, the Ministry of National Defense reportedly said in its first-ever Quadrennial Defense Review published Monday.
> 
> The document is the result of a legal amendment passed last year which requires the military to come up with such a report within 10 months of a new president taking office.
> 
> *The basic principles of the new preventive defense doctrine were that Taiwan should not fire the first shot or launch the first attack, but use contact, communications, negotiations to protect the country, media reported.*
> “If war is unavoidable, then the military will make sure the enemy is unable to bite, unable to swallow, unable to beat us to pieces,” the document said according to quotes in the Chinese-language media.
> 
> Nevertheless, this would not mean that Taiwan’s military would seek to improve links with its Chinese counterpart on its own. Establishing mutual confidence-building measures was a job for the government, not for the military, officials told reporters.
> 
> *The military would also focus efforts on how to respond to a military attack. Under the previous Democratic Progressive Party administration, the military emphasized the capability to keep a war outside Taiwan’s main island, with some reports saying the military would strike back at China by firing missiles at its main cities.*
> China has about 1,500 missiles targeted at Taiwan, and has been waging a robust campaign of military modernization led by the expansion of its budgets. China has also been preparing its military for the transformation from a purely continental force to a naval power capable of launching submarines and aircraft carriers.
> 
> As confirmed by government statements earlier this month, Taiwan wants to introduce all-volunteer armed forces by the end of 2014. The military’s total manpower should be cut to 215,000 at that time from the 275,000 listed in the current budget, Defense Minister Chen Chao-min said. He promised to cut the number of senior officers, often a point of criticism from lawmakers and defense experts.
> The defense review proposed folding the existing six branches of the military into just three, the army, the air force and the navy. The military police will become part of the army but will still be entrusted with the protection of top officials such as the president.
> 
> Chen denied Monday that Taiwan’s defense was at risk because it was sending one out of its three Patriot missile units to the United States for upgrading. The two other sets could cover for the shortage, Chen told reporters.
> 
> Taiwan is also applying to purchase 66 F-16C/D fighter jets from the U.S. because the 150 F-16A/B planes it bought in 1992 are no longer deemed advanced enough to counter the Chinese threat. The new high-tech jets would cost an estimated US$4.9 billion, reports said.
> Chen told lawmakers Taiwan would continue to develop Hsiung Feng IIE missiles as a purely defensive weapon needed to hit back after an eventual attack. If China didn’t attack Taiwan, then Taiwan wouldn’t use them, the minister said, emphasizing the military would never fire its missiles at civilian targets.
> 
> Experts associated with the opposition DPP said the government should pay more attention to “asymmetrical” or alternative military strategies used by weaker powers to defend themselves against strong opponents.
> Upgrading reconnaissance, information gathering and missile defense were more important as ways to offset numerical shortcomings, said Michael Tsai, a former defense minister, now heading the Institute for Taiwan Defense and Strategic Studies.
> 
> He predicted the quantity and quality of China’s military would exceed Taiwan’s by 2010, causing a dangerous imbalance. Tsai questioned whether it was the right time to abolish military conscription.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Recently some Chinese political scientists have examined the rise of several modern countries, specifically: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The scholars concluded that these nine nations shared a half dozen _attributes_ that led to and sustained their relative success:

•	Political Stability
•	Military Strength
•	Economic and Technological Success
•	National Cohesiveness
•	Cultural Creativity
•	Magnetism

The last two, cultural creativity and “magnetism” combine to create what Joseph Nye has described as “soft power.”

Clearly not all of the countries examined had all of those attributes in great abundance but a couple, and only a couple - Britain and America, were able to possess and maintain all six for protracted periods.

Interestingly, the Chinese scholars identified military strength as a double edged sword – coupling it with an aggressive policy spelled defeat for Spain, France, Germany and Japan. Building it at the expense of other attributes led to the defeat of Russia while failing to build enough led to the demise of Portugal and the Netherlands.

The lesson some Chinese are drawing or, more specifically, want their fellows to draw is that China must amass and sustain all six attributes.

In many respects the first, political stability, may be the one which is most worrisome to Chinese leaders. Traditionally China is ruled or governed by those possessing the “mandate of heaven” - 天命 or _Tiānmìng_ – which, unlike the European concept of the “divine right of kings” is highly conditional. The “mandate” is maintained only so long as the ruler/governor is wise and just – paralleling debates in ancient Greece about the nature of tyranny. While the Chinese “heaven” may, 2,500 years ago, have been a ‘place’ in the sky where gods lived it _morphed_ over the millennia into a compound of all this spiritual and the whole universe. As the supreme “god” and, more importantly, source of all power and justice it is _Tiān_ or 天 but it is also part of a “trinity” of three realms: heaven, earth and humanity. 

(Parenthetically, the ruler of China is said to rule “all under heaven” or, for the Chinese, the whole of the _civilized_ world. For many Chinese, educated, thoughtful Chinese, this translates into a “feeling” that China is “rightfully destined” to rule all of Asia and to lead the world. This is, subliminally, taught in most schools. In several visits I never missed the (usually decorative) map of the world centred on China, in bright red. The red faded away to pink or to other colours as one got father and father from China but the message, to hundreds of millions of school children, is that China is at the centre of a “red” world.)

Be that as it may, Chinese rulers/governors still need a “mandate” which the current crop believe is demonstrated by a peaceful, happy populace – evidenced by a lack of the sorts of popular revolts that were common over the past 2,000 years or so. But the Chinese leadership is poor at _retail politics_ so it is unsure of its mandate – but afraid to adopt the sorts of democratic tools that make verifying the “mandate” so easy. Thus, even in the absence of open revolts, China is still not _politically *stable*_.

There are some tentative steps in the right direction: local elections that appear to be free and fair. The Chinese leadership hopes, I think, gradually to shift some decisions downwards from provincial and even national levels and, simultaneously, to allow – even encourage – free and open politics at local – village, town, district – level. It’s a gamble that may – or may not – pay off; it will be interesting to watch.

For now, China’s main weakness is in the _political stability_ domain – at any given moment the government’s ‘control’ over China is impressive but the government lacks the most effective tools for determining the people’s wants and needs and for determining how ‘best’ to meet them: elected politicians who, of necessity, are in close contact with their constituents.  

An observer1 has suggested that China is trying to follow a path to global power that minimizes the requirement to build and maintain overwhelming military force à la the USA. Ramo suggest that China is emphasizing its economic and technological prowess and its well earned and carefully guarded reputation for non-intervention/respect for national sovereignty as the mainstays of a push for increased global influence. Another observer2  suggests that America is poorly positioned, strategically, to respond to an _asymmetrical_ Chinese “charm offensive” that aims to supplant American influence – especially throughout Asia.

The Chinese have a _*cultural*_ propensity towards the ‘long’ view – in contrast to the Euro-American preference ‘immediate’ results. This is part of a broader, more general, Asian *conservatism* – the sort of thing that leads to long, long periods of “stable” government in Asia’s functioning democracies3 and that “permits” dictatorships (as in China) that “serve” the immediate, physical and security needs of the people. But it is also a product of China’s own cultural heritage. The risk, in analyzing China, is that one mistakes patience for inactivity or uncertainty.

The Chinese military/security superstructure is changing rapidly. The PLA has been “professionalized” and the defence budget continues to grow at an impressive rate. China is building a large, balanced, effective navy4 that I am *guessing* will include, by _circa_ 2035 a half dozen or so modern carrier battle groups5 and at least three or four brigade sized amphibious task forces. I’m also guessing that the Chinese, 25 years from now, will have comparable and compatible land and air forces making them a major, *global* power.

I think that a wholly asymmetrical approach based on an overwhelming preponderance of economic and “soft” power cannot work. I also think the Chinese leadership share this view and that they will take steps to increase their “hard” (military) power – for use on the global stage – but not to anything like the levels currently held by the USA..

Thus, China is likely, over the next half century and beyond, to possess all six of the factors which some Chinese scholars have identified as critical for the development and maintenance of great power. Some of these factors – especially those related to “soft power” are likely be abundant and well exercised. China’s “hard power” is growing quickly but I share the belief that China will not attempt to match the US bomber for bomber and so on – rather they will focus on a *global* power projection capability centred on their own back yard: East Asia, the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. This should be sufficient to neutralize America in a strategic sense.

I think China will try to create a _Sinosphere_ (汉字文化圈 – the idea is well enough established in China to have its own title) embracing, at least, Taiwan (with a status similar to that enjoyed by Hong Kong) Burma, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. This implies loosening (not breaking) the ties Japan and Korea have with the USA and strengthening their social, cultural and economic ties with China.

(Singapore’s status as a “neutral” safe haven for business is likely to render it “safe” from too much Chinese influence. It also serves as a useful economic “safety valve” for all of Asia, including Hong Kong. If Singapore didn’t exist the Chinese would have to invent it.)

China’s weakest link will be political stability. The current regime, the _Hóng_ (紅 or Red)_ Dynasty_ for want of a better name, wants to strengthen political stability by taking very tentative steps towards local democracy and counting on innate Chinese conservatism to bestow a continuing _mandate_ on those who govern honourably and virtuously but, above all effectively.

(CougarDaddy or others will correct me if I’ve used _Hóng_ and 紅 incorrectly.)

My guess is that we, the American led West, will have difficulty countering a Chinese “charm offensive” based on a mix of sharing economic and technological achievements and adhering to strict non-interference in the internal affairs of other independent states – and demanding the same in return. The West has a long tradition – going back a few centuries – of taking rather than sharing (although many will argue, with considerable merit, that Britain gave much more – in social, legal and political philosophy – than it ever took in gold, goods and slaves) and of “interfering” wherever and whenever it wanted. There is nothing to choose between Christian missionaries, opium traders and George W Bush: all used overwhelming military force to impose their will on unwilling “victims.”


-------------------------

1. Joshua Cooper Ramo in The Beijing Consensus
2. Fareed Zakaria in The Post American World
3. E.g. The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has been in power nearly continuously for over 50 years and the People’s Action Party in Singapore celebrates its 50th year in power in 2009.
4. See US Congressional Research Service Report RL33153 dated 19 Nov 08
5. Three or four probably reserved for home waters and two or three regularly deployed to the Indian Ocean region – including the East coast of Africa – and the Western and South Pacific.


----------



## CougarKing

Mr. Campbell, I will go further than merely agreeing with you by saying that the Sinosphere already exists, and has existed since China began exacting tribute from neighbouring nations since the Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, IIRC. How much of a cultural impact China has had on its neighbours cannot be denied, as demonstrated by the many residual influences of past interactions, such as the borrowed Chinese characters still in use by the Koreans and Japanese in their written languages, with the Japanese word for borrowed Chinese characters or Kanji/汉字 simply read as the word "Hanzi"/汉字 or Chinese characters in Mandarin.

Also, the Sinosphere does still exist today and its effect is all the more potent when you consider the "Hua Qiao/华侨" or the overseas Chinese who not only reside in many Southeast Asian countries, but also control two-thirds of the economy and 80% of the private sector in their adoptive countries. Their influence on their adoptive countries, which is disoproprotionate to their small numbers compared to the large native populations, definitely cannot be ignored. Consider that some have even used this wealth to participate in or at least influence the local politics; these powerhouse Chinese tycoon families, such as that led by Henry Sy or the Gokongwei family in the Philippines or comparable parallels in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. 

Interestingly, a large number of these _Hua Qiao _ within these countries are also either mainly Cantonese-speakers from Guangdong and Hong Kong, or are Fujianese or Hokien speakers from Fujian province.

------------------------------------

Continuing on about what you said about China's, or rather the CCP's, *overwhelming need to maintain political stability*, this point has already been emphasized a number of times on this thread. Still, the CCP is looking toward Singapore's model of government as one alternative by way it can ensure its continued survival, as demonstrated by Bei Da professor Dr. Pan Wei when he pitched and discussed the "Rule of Law Regime" to our class of foreign students in my one  study abroad semester there (2003); he did mention that he was a consultant for the Chinese government in our class, which suggests that the CCP was strongly considering it. It would not be hard to see why the CCP would find such a the "Rule of Law Regime" attractive, since Singapore is not only arguably a predominantly Chinese society, but also because Singapore has _effectively_ been a one-party system under Lee Kuan Yew's People Action Party (PAP).
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Btw, if you are going to use the word "hong"(2nd tone) meaning red to signify part of "Red Dynasty" you might as well use two words or two characters. Thus the words "hong cao/ts'ao" (both pinyin here are in 2nd tone or rising) or 紅朝 is the way to say/write it. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lastly, I am also curious about what you think about the Taiwan government recently ending military conscription, which many see as yet another concession by Ma Ying Jieou's Guomindang government to continue the conciliatory stance toward the mainland? Furthermore, what do you think of the above article comparing the defence strategies of the PRC, Taiwan and Singapore in relation or in comparison to each other?


----------



## a_majoor

WRT Taiwan, I suspect they are following the global trend towards smaller forces based on long service professionals. Can they do this and be successful? Maybe. Given the island is targeted by 800 to over 1000 missiles, large standing forces might not be the best way to go, so a small, professional military with the ability to operate under difficult conditions and apply asymmetric force against potential enemies seems to be the smart way to go.

China has its own asymmetric forces to apply against the West:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7851925a-17a2-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1



> *China calls for new reserve currency*
> 
> By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
> 
> Published: March 23 2009 12:16 | Last updated: March 24 2009 00:06
> 
> China’s central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund.
> 
> In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies”.
> 
> Analysts said the proposal was an indication of Beijing’s fears that actions being taken to save the domestic US economy would have a negative impact on China.
> 
> “*This is a clear sign that China, as the largest holder of US dollar financial assets, is concerned about the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money,” said Qu Hongbin, chief China economist for HSBC*. (_Interpolation: If the Federal Reserve is not able to devalue the US deficit and debt through inflation, then the Administration and Congress cannot carry out their economic and political programs without risking catastrophic economic failure in the United States: imagine the cascade effect if Governments must declare bankruptcy due to the inability to service $12 trillion+ of debt. The resulting deflation won't be pretty either_)
> 
> Although Mr Zhou did not mention the US dollar, the essay gave a pointed critique of the current dollar-dominated monetary system.
> 
> “The outbreak of the [current] crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflected the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system,” Mr Zhou wrote.
> 
> China has little choice but to hold the bulk of its $2,000bn of foreign exchange reserves in US dollars, and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
> 
> To replace the current system, Mr Zhou suggested expanding the role of special drawing rights, which were introduced by the IMF in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime but became less relevant once that collapsed in the 1970s.
> 
> Today, the value of SDRs is based on a basket of four currencies – the US dollar, yen, euro and sterling – and they are used largely as a unit of account by the IMF and some other international organisations.
> 
> China’s proposal would expand the basket of currencies forming the basis of SDR valuation to all major economies and set up a settlement system between SDRs and other currencies so they could be used in international trade and financial transactions.
> 
> Countries would entrust a portion of their SDR reserves to the IMF to manage collectively on their behalf and SDRs would gradually replace existing reserve currencies.
> 
> Mr Zhou said the proposal would require “extraordinary political vision and courage” and acknowledged a debt to John Maynard Keynes, who made a similar suggestion in the 1940s.
> 
> Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009


----------



## Yrys

China voices on financial crisis 


*China voices: ' I feel the pressure'

As China's growth rate continues to slow, there are fears that its economy could be 
heading for a severe downturn.

The BBC spoke to a shipping employee in Shenzhen and a geologist's assistant outside 
Lhasa to find out how the financial crisis had affected their lives. *

WANG HAO, GEOLOGICAL ASSISTANT, MU COUNTY, TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION





_Wang Hao_

I work for a copper exploration company, a joint venture run by a British mining firm and 
a Chinese mining bureau. I feel the economic pressure in this industry. Metal prices are 
going down and I am worried that investors in Europe and the US will also reduce their 
exploration activities in China.

What people think about the metal sector thousands of miles away affects my livelihood 
here - even though I feel very removed from it. I work and live in an extremely rural 
area. The scenery is beautiful, especially in the summertime. It's getting cold now and 
the landscape is barren. We are planning to shut down the project temporarily because 
it is simply too cold.

We look at areas with high grades of copper. A geologist can identify the grade of copper 
from the appearance of outcrops on the land. But we are not a very big firm, our assets 
are influenced by our investors.

China is an export-oriented country and manufacturing is big. The economic downturn could 
have a big impact.

Food and commodity prices haven't changed hugely where I am because it is so rural here. 
This is farming country and people here carry on with their lives. They eat the cattle and the 
sheep they raise, they eat local vegetables. They seem quite self-sufficient. They have no idea 
what is going on outside in the financial world, they have concerns such as the number of yaks 
they can raise this year. 

But when I go to the city, I hear people talking about the financial crisis. In Chengdu, I've heard 
that real-estate companies are downsizing and house prices are getting lower.

We are getting very pessimistic; I think the government needs to introduce incentive policies and
co-operate with US and European governments. Otherwise, the economy in China could slump.

XIONG MING, SHIPPING EMPLOYEE, SHENZHEN

I've been working at the Dragongate Logistics shipping company for three years now.

We've seen dramatic changes to our export-related business here in Shenzhen since the global 
financial downturn started. If you compare this year to last year, the volume of exports from 
the port of Yatian has plunged. 

Take our shipping company for example; this time last year, we were handling something like 
100 to 200 containers a week, but this year, it has dropped by more than a half.

Export factories face a really depressing future. Unofficial estimates show that 20% of export 
companies have closed down, the actual figure could be even higher.

Personally, my salary and those of my colleagues has been reduced by a quarter or more. This 
time last year, I was earning between 10 and 20,000 RMB ($1,500 -$3,000) each month. Now I 
don't even earn 10,000 RMB. Since the cost of living in Shezhen is relatively high, that affects 
my life a lot.

Job-wise, the sense of crisis is constantly there because there is every chance that the company 
will go under and you'll lose your job. You never know.


----------



## Yrys

China Urges New Money Reserve to Replace Dollar

China suggests switch from dollar

China's central bank has called for a new global reserve currency run by the International Monetary 
Fund to replace the US dollar. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan did not explicitly mention the 
dollar, but said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one currency.

With the world's largest currency reserves of $2tn, China is the biggest holder of dollar assets.
Its leaders have often complained about the dollar's volatility.

China has long been uneasy about relying on the dollar for trade and to store its reserves and 
recently expressed concerns that Washington's efforts to rescue the US economy could erode 
the value of the currency.

His speech was, unusually, published in both Chinese and English, signalling it was intended for 
an international audience. "The outbreak of the crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflected 
the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system," said 
Mr Zhou in an essay on the People's Bank of China website. Mr Zhou said the primacy of the US 
currency in the financial system had led to increasingly frequent crises since the collapse in the 
early 1970s of the system of fixed exchange rates.

On Tuesday, the dollar weakened against most major currencies following the announcement of 
a US plan to buy up toxic debt.

*'Light in tunnel'*

Mr Zhou said the dollar could eventually be replaced as the world's main reserve currency by 
the Special Drawing Right (SDR), which was created as a unit of account by the IMF in 1969.
"The role of the SDR has not been put into full play, due to limitations on its allocation and the 
scope of its uses," he said. "However, it serves as the light in the tunnel for the reform of the 
international monetary system."

The essay comes before the G20 summit in London on 2 April, at which reform of the international 
financial system is top of the agenda.

"This confirms that China intends to play fully its role of global economic and political power 
at the next G20 summit," said Sebastien Barbe, an analyst at French financial service firm 
Calyon in Hong Kong. 

*CURRENCY RESERVES*
- Foreign currency held by a government or a central bank
- Used to pay foreign debt obligations or influence exchange rates
- The dollar is viewed as the world's reserve currency as the vast 
  majority of reserves are held in the US currency
- Smaller amounts are held in euros, pounds and yen


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Mr. Campbell, I will go further than merely agreeing with you by saying that the Sinosphere already exists, and has existed since China began exacting tribute from neighbouring nations since the Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, IIRC. How much of a cultural impact China has had on its neighbours cannot be denied, as demonstrated by the many residual influences of past interactions, such as the borrowed Chinese characters still in use by the Koreans and Japanese in their written languages, with the Japanese word for borrowed Chinese characters or Kanji/汉字 simply read as the word "Hanzi"/汉字 or Chinese characters in Mandarin.
> 
> Also, the Sinosphere does still exist today and its effect is all the more potent when you consider the "Hua Qiao/华侨" or the overseas Chinese who not only reside in many Southeast Asian countries, but also control two-thirds of the economy and 80% of the private sector in their adoptive countries. Their influence on their adoptive countries, which is disoproprotionate to their small numbers compared to the large native populations, definitely cannot be ignored. Consider that some have even used this wealth to participate in or at least influence the local politics; these powerhouse Chinese tycoon families, such as that led by Henry Sy or the Gokongwei family in the Philippines or comparable parallels in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
> 
> Interestingly, a large number of these _Hua Qiao _ within these countries are also either mainly Cantonese-speakers from Guangdong and Hong Kong, or are Fujianese or Hokien speakers from Fujian province.
> 
> ------------------------------------
> 
> Continuing on about what you said about China's, or rather the CCP's, *overwhelming need to maintain political stability*, this point has already been emphasized a number of times on this thread. Still, the CCP is looking toward Singapore's model of government as one alternative by way it can ensure its continued survival, as demonstrated by Bei Da professor Dr. Pan Wei when he pitched and discussed the "Rule of Law Regime" to our class of foreign students in my one  study abroad semester there (2003); he did mention that he was a consultant for the Chinese government in our class, which suggests that the CCP was strongly considering it. It would not be hard to see why the CCP would find such a the "Rule of Law Regime" attractive, since Singapore is not only arguably a predominantly Chinese society, but also because Singapore has _effectively_ been a one-party system under Lee Kuan Yew's People Action Party (PAP).
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Btw, if you are going to use the word "hong"(2nd tone) meaning red to signify part of "Red Dynasty" you might as well use two words or two characters. Thus the words "hong cao/ts'ao" (both pinyin here are in 2nd tone or rising) or 紅朝 is the way to say/write it.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Lastly, I am also curious about what you think about the Taiwan government recently ending military conscription, which many see as yet another concession by Ma Ying Jieou's Guomindang government to continue the conciliatory stance toward the mainland? Furthermore, what do you think of the above article comparing the defence strategies of the PRC, Taiwan and Singapore in relation or in comparison to each other?




Thank you, CougarDaddy, for the explanation of _Red_; I was afraid I was using it incorrectly because my language skills are very rudimentary.

I will stick to the term _Red Dynasty_, however, on the understanding that Red signifies prosperity in Chinese folk culture, and it is prosperity and its fruits (social order, etc) that the Chinese leadership is “selling” to the Chinese people.

While I acknowledge the long history of the Sinosphere, I think the modern _Red Dynasty_ wants to bring it back in a newer form: one based on economic  and cultural, even racial, interests. One might argue for something akin to the _Greater Britain_ which, in 1897, the New York Times, described as being “so plainly destined to dominate the planet.”1. I’m sure the Chinese are not averse to the idea of leading a _Greater China_ that would dominate the planet but I’m pretty certain that they want to dominate East Asia and the Western Pacific from - from the Arctic to  the Banda Sea – and sooner rather than later. Before the middle of this century – less time than it took the USA from fantasizing about being part of “Greater Britain” to actually being the world’s leading power.

Thucydides has dealt with Taiwan’s military reforms better than I could have done. I think there is a time for conscripted forces for some countries. Perhaps Singapore gets it about right with a system that was designed, back in the mid ‘60s, by Israelis. But Singapore is a very small country in a very rough neighbourhood with a traditional distaste for formal alliances.

I think we, the American led West, need to accustom ourselves to the notion that America cannot and will not sustain itself as the only significant global power. China aspires to and, almost certainly, will reach such a status. India might grow to become a very important regional power – counterbalancing both China and the USA in South Asia and the India Ocean. Europe is very unlikely, in my opinion to ever achieve the sort of unity necessary to become, in any _unified_ way, a global “great power.”

But the Chinese strategy will not, I’m guessing be to try to match America tank for tank and missile for missile. Rather, China will try to _weaken_ America’s “soft power” even as it works very hard to enhance its own. The goal will be leave America as a huge, powerful, but essentially, friendless giant while China will be seen, even in Europe, as a less threatening, more “responsible” global power – one with which all can treat fairly and without fear. But, remember, as Joseph Nye himself pointed out, “soft power” is useful *only* when it is supported by respectable *hard* power – one magnifies the other but while hard power can be used on its own the same is not true for the “soft” variety – something Pink Lloyd Axworthy either forgot or, more likely never learned at Princeton.

But it is “soft power,” that *magnetism*  and  *cultural creativity* stuff, coupled with a burgeoning economy – assuming China can sustain that year after year and decade after decade, à la the USA in the several decades following the 2nd World War- and a consistently non-interventionist foreign policy, that will be China’s primary “weapon.” 


-------------------------
See: Mead, Walter Russell -  *Special Providence*, American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, Chap. 1, New York, 2001. The _Greater Britain_ which the New York Times foresaw did, indeed, come to “dominate the planet” – but in the form of the USA with the _Anglosphere_ and Western Europe in (often reluctant) tow.


----------



## Kirkhill

Jewish Han
Cohesion
Anti-Military
Little Englanders
Anti-Colonialism
Success of Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta as well as Pre-Victorian Britain, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

Cougardaddy's description of the Han in SE Asia in some ways reminded me of descriptions of the Jews.  "... the overseas Chinese who not only reside in many Southeast Asian countries, but also control two-thirds of the economy and 80% of the private sector in their adoptive countries. Their influence on their adoptive countries, which is disoproprotionate to their small numbers compared to the large native populations, definitely cannot be ignored. Consider that some have even used this wealth to participate in or at least influence the local politics; these powerhouse Chinese tycoon families, such as that led by Henry Sy or the Gokongwei family in the Philippines or comparable parallels in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand."

Judging from the reaction of locals in places like Burma and Indonesia perhaps the analogy is not so far-fetched.   Both countries have experienced "anti-Han" pogroms.  Often with suggestions of government support.  And both Jews and Han have reason to be suspicious of the intentions of the rest of the world.

I wonder if the Chinese, in reviewing the histories of successful hegemonies will head down the trail of Colonialism or take the opposite route.

There are many that would argue that Britain's downfall came as a result of a change of direction taken around the time of the Opium Wars.  

The "Improving" section of society, the Chartists or Manchester faction were determined that it was their duty to reform the benighted savage.  Much to the chagrin of the Commercial establishment.  

The Improving faction, who were in large part responsible for generating the unrest that resulted in the Indian Mutiny, and who were spurred on by that same rebellion, became the Victorian Imperialists.

In my view, the commercial establishment, derided as Little Englanders, found their outlets in Hong Kong, Singapore and Calcutta.  They sought not to create a military empire but merely create a secure trading environment.  The seas were their domain and the RN their arbiter.

Perhaps the Han could be convinced that they are better served NOT by trying to convince Tibetans, Burmans and Taiwanese that they are Lesser Han but instead rely on the internal cohesion that ties the Han just as it ties the Jews and used to tie the Scots.  (Had to get that reference in there  ;D ).

Britain would have been much better served if it had continued with its Pre-Victorian commercial empire.   Other examples of successful commercial economies include Pre-Restoration Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden..... and it could be argued that similar strategies are working for those countries today.


----------



## tomahawk6

Chinese cities continue to have civil unrest and the government has warned of the likelihood of more violence.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Chinese cities continue to have civil unrest and the government has warned of the likelihood of more violence.



Maybe the PAP and PLA will come in greater numbers?

From the AFP: Agence France-Presse - 3/25/2009 4:07 AM GMT



> *Call for calm after violent protest in China*
> Officials are scrambling to restore peace in a rural area of south China after a teenage brawl caused a violent riot with an angry mob setting a police station ablaze, state media said Wednesday.
> 
> Hundreds of people from a village in the tropical island province of Hainan gathered outside a local government building Monday claiming authorities had failed to properly intervene after the fight, the official China Daily said.
> 
> According to a local newspaper, the Hainan Daily, a student from one village had been slightly hurt by assailants that were suspected to be school children from a neighbouring village.
> 
> The student's relatives and friends subsequently descended on the local government building after going to the police, and the group attracted more and more onlookers, the local newspaper reported.
> 
> By Monday evening, the crowd had swelled to several hundred people, and some of the protesters set fire to parts of the local government and police buildings, and destroyed three cars and 10 motorcycles, the Hainan Daily said.
> 
> At least two bystanders were injured in the protest, the China Daily said.
> 
> Calm had since returned to the area, but financial losses from the protest were expected to exceed one million yuan (150,000 dollars), the paper reported.
> 
> China sees tens of thousands of demonstrations every year, many of which stem from dissatisfaction with local authorities.


----------



## Long in the tooth

China's call for an artificial reserve currency is so ludicrous to be funny.  The US Dollar is just that for several reasons - it's very liquid and convertable, and the Americans have a vested (very) interest in maintaining the value of the currency.

The Chinese are free to hold any currency they like, just like you are I could.  The only major alternative is the Euro, but that is showing strains with various sections of Europe changing gears.

An artificial reserve currency, run presumably by the rocket surgeons at the UN, would have no one to be accountable to for it's security and convertability.  The UN would quickly debase the currency by printing money and we would be using the UN paper to wipe our backsides.

There's another reason why the dollar is the world reserve currency - it's because everyone else holds it too.  I'd be interested to see who would be running to cash their national currency in for the UN bills - it would probably be poor buggers from Rhodesia (did I write that?) I mean Zimbabwe.  And then the UN holdings would again be worthless.... unless you want to go back to a gold standard.  Then again, who does the UN steal the gold from?


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53642

China’s Military Capabilities Continue to Grow, Report Says
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service


WASHINGTON, March 25, 2009 – Transformation of the Chinese military has gained speed, but U.S. officials would like to see China become more transparent about military and security affairs, according to a report to Congress released today. Video

The report, called “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” provides some new details, “but there are no new, major strategic insights revealed or capabilities revealed,” Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said today. 

In the report, officials said that Chinese transparency has improved over the past year, “but much remains to be learned about China’s national and military strategies, progress and trends in its military modernization, and the related implications for regional security and stability.” 

China’s increased military ability stems from the nation’s emergence as an economic superpower. With 8 percent per year economic growth, the Chinese have been able to invest significant sums in military modernization. 

Morrell said the United States continues to ask for “more dialogue and transparency in our dealings with the Chinese government and military, all in an effort to reduce suspicions on both sides.” 

The Chinese still look at transparency as “a transaction to be negotiated.” U.S. officials would like the Chinese to see transparency as a responsibility that accompanies the accumulation of national power. Without this transparency, conclusions in the report are subject to best guesses by U.S. experts. 

To begin, the Chinese need to be more transparent in budgeting, the report says. The People’s Liberation Army budget has more than doubled since 2000 -- from $27.9 billion to $60.1 billion. Officials believe the Chinese are underreporting the amount they spend on security. The real budget in 2008 is probably between $105 billion and $150 billion, they said. 

Llimited transparency can be dangerous and lead to instability. Also, the Chinese reluctance creates uncertainty and increases the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation, U.S. officials say. 

“The United States continues to work with our allies and friends in the region to monitor these developments and adjust our policies accordingly,” the report says. 

Chinese military capabilities have increased tremendously. People’s Liberation Army officials have invested in the acquisition of advanced foreign weapons, and they have fueled hothouse growth in domestic defense industries. The Chinese military also has poured money into research and development. On top of this, there is a far-reaching organizational and doctrinal reform of the People’s Liberation Army. 

“China’s ability to sustain military power at a distance remains limited, but its armed forces continue to develop and field disruptive military technologies, including those for anti-access/area-denial, as well as for nuclear, space and cyber warfare, that are changing regional military balances and that have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region,” the report says. 

China continues to put military pressure on Taiwan. “China’s armed forces are rapidly developing coercive capabilities for the purpose of deterring Taiwan’s pursuit of de jure independence,” the report says. More advanced missiles, more equipment and better-trained troops have deployed to the military regions opposite the island. The military balance in the region continues to shift in Beijing’s favor, the report says, and Taiwan no longer enjoys “air dominance” over the Taiwan Straits. 

The capabilities the Chinese are putting in place “could in the future be used to pressure Taiwan toward a settlement of the cross-Strait dispute on Beijing’s terms while simultaneously attempting to deter, delay or deny any possible U.S. support for the island in case of conflict,” the report says. 

Some of the Chinese capabilities have allowed the military to contribute to peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and counter-piracy. “However, some of these capabilities, as well as other, more disruptive ones, could allow China to project power to ensure access to resources or enforce claims to disputed territories,” the report says. 

The Chinese assert that the People’s Liberation Army is purely defensive and aimed solely at protecting China’s security and interests. “Over the past several years, China has begun a new phase of military development by beginning to articulate roles and missions for the PLA that go beyond China’s immediate territorial interests,” the report says. But these statements have not cleared up international community questions about the purposes and objectives of the PLA’s evolving doctrine and capabilities. 

China has modernized its intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal with the deployment of DF-31 and DF-31A missiles, the report says. They also are readying to launch a new class of ballistic missile submarines soon, it says. 

The Chinese military has worked to develop anti-access and area-denial weapons, the report says. This capability goes beyond the nation’s borders. China has developed the capability to hold surface ships, including aircraft carriers, at risk. The weaponry includes quiet submarines, advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, wire-guided and wake-homing torpedoes, or anti-ship ballistic missiles. They are working to deny use of shore-based airfields, secure bastions and regional logistics hubs via conventional ballistic missiles with greater ranges and accuracy, and land-attack cruise missiles, the report says. 

The Chinese also can project air power using new advanced aircraft, advanced long-range surface-to-air missile systems, air surveillance systems and ship-borne air defenses, the report says. China’s space-based reconnaissance and positioning are leading to a precision-strike capability. 

China still lags in developing an amphibious and airborne capability, airborne, air-to-air refueling, at-sea replenishment and joint integration, the report says.


----------



## CougarKing

Just a couple more updates showing the progress of China's efforts to get carrier aircraft:

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/china-to-buy-su33-carrierbased-fighters-from-russia-02806/



> *China to Buy Su-33 Carrier-Based Fighters from Russia?*
> 11-Mar-2009 13:46 EDT
> 
> Near the end of October 2006, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper revealed that Russian state-run weapon exporter Rosoboronexport is completing negotiations with China to deliver up to 48 Sukhoi SU-33 (NATO codename: Flanker-D) carrier-capable fighter aircraft in a purchase deal reportedly worth $2.5 billion. The SU-33 is a variant of Sukhoi’s SU-27 Flanker with forward canards, foldings wings, an arrester hook, a reinforced structure, and other modifications that help it deal with carrier operations and landings.
> 
> At present, reports regarding the sale and China’s aircraft carrier intentions both remain somewhat murky. china’s intent to field aircraft carriers is becoming clearer and clearer, but the availability of aircraft could be a problem – Russia has reportedly refused to sell the SU-33s, citing past pirating of Russian designs…
> 
> *A Carrier for China? *
> Reports and Key Events
> Additional Readings
> 
> A Carrier for China?
> 
> The PLA Navy has made contradictory statements regarding its wish to have an operational aircraft carrier, but most expert observers believe they are working on a program to do so. Assurances that the Varyag is destined to be a floating hotel do appear somewhat at variance with the PLAN paint job – the question is whether the Chinese believe they can bring it up to operational status, or are simply using the ship as a learning platform in preparation for their own construction efforts later.
> 
> In October 2006, SinoDefence.com reported that China will spend $100 million to buy 2 Su-33 fighters from Komsomolsk-on-Amur Production Association for ‘trial and evaluations,’ with delivery expected in 2007-08. Reports claim there is also an agreed option for another 12 Su-33 fighters, with the potential for the deal to grow to 48 SU-33s and $2.5 billion. They add that China’s Dalian Shipyard is currently refitting the ex-Soviet Navy aircraft carrier Varyag, acquired in extremely poor condition from the Ukraine in 1999.
> 
> Reports and Key Events
> 
> March 10/09: *The Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reports that Russia is refusing to sell China SU-33 jets, citing past piracy of the design for its SU-27 fighters.* China initially sought 2 SU-33s for its “trial basis” order, which are a modified variant of the SU-27. Subsequent negotiations reportedly raised the “trial” order to 14 of the 50 aircraft China said it wanted, but that was not enough to remove the basic problem.
> 
> *In 1995, China received a license for the production of 200 Su-27SK fighters; that agreement was later terminated at 95 planes. China cushioned the blow by ordering a total of 110 SU-30MK2s between 1999-2003, but they are now producing a “J-11B” fighter that appears to be an SU-27 with Chinese radar and avionics, and Chinese WS-10 engines in place of Russian Lyulka AL-31s. The issue was reportedly raised at the 13th meeting of the Russian-Chinese Committee for Military Cooperation in December 2008, without resolution.
> 
> If Russia believes that its SU-33s are being ordered so they can be cloned by the Chinese, creating a future with no further orders from China, and a cheaper version of their weapons offered for global export, then their lack of interest in a deal is understandable. *
> 
> Note that concerns are also being raised in Russia around ongoing production of Russian-derived Cold War era designs by Eastern European countries, which could create future diplomatic incidents. Pravda report.






> *China to Buy Su-33 Carrier-Based Fighters from Russia?*
> 26-Mar-2009 08:46 EDT
> 
> March 20/09: Chinese defense minister Liang Guanglie reportedly tells visiting Japanese Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada that:
> 
> *“Among the big nations only China does not have an aircraft carrier. China cannot be without an aircraft carrier forever…. China’s navy is currently rather weak, we need to develop an aircraft carrier.”*
> 
> The Agence France Presse report adds that earlier in March 2009, *China Daily quoted Admiral Hu Yanlin as saying:
> 
> “Building aircraft carriers is a symbol of an important nation. It is very necessary…. China has the capability to build aircraft carriers and should do so.”*
> 
> March 13/09: Jane’s Defence Weekly reports that negotiations are continuing for the SU-33 sale:
> 
> “Negotiations for the sale of Sukhoi Su-33 carrier-capable combat aircraft to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) are still continuing with both sides interested in coming to a final agreement, Russian industry sources have told Jane’s . “Previous reports that these discussions are at an end or that the ‘contract has been cancelled’ are incorrect,” said a Russian source close to the programme.”


----------



## markpoint

What are Chinese Military forces doing on N Korea's launching nuclear test since US and Japan claimed to intercept N Korea's missile? I believe that they are not sleeping even though nothing of clues can be seen in public media. It is reasonable and helpful to make some assumptions on the bases of personal experiences and Chinese military chronic behaviors:

1. N Korea PM visited China and met China president and PM in Beijing this month, which could be seen in public and considered as the highest level behavior to coordinate both-side-activities for upcoming challenges.  It seems that there was not any Chinese military officers involved in this visiting, but don't forget that President Hu Jintao is the Chairman of Chinese Military Committee and controlling PLA. 

2. I affirm that US and Japan will be failure in their interception efforts because of China's secretly assisting and involving in N Korea's launching test. Chinese military will not do the same stupid things as what they did in Yugoslavia war about twenty years ago. According to personal experiences and Chinese military chronic behaviors, they will never be an audience this time. 

3. What can be done by Chinese military forces to assist and to involve in N Korea's launching missile test will be disabling US and Japan's interception system at the most critical moment with electronic war. It is a great time for Chinese military electronic war system to practice and test their efforts which is the only meaningful thing and a great demand for improvment of PLA.

4. Possibility: considering US and Japan President, DOD Secretaries, Commanders' laptop computers all shut down at that moment that the Chinese Electronic Army shoosed, what will be happened then?


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Alcan called,....they want to thank you for their stock prices.


----------



## markpoint

All Chinese hacker behaviors are controlled and supported by Government and military because of China's severely internet surveillance and censorship system. There is no any possibilitities and spaces for any non-governmental hacker group and  behaviors to exist in China


----------



## George Wallace

As if on cue:


Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

   Reported internet spy network just tip of iceberg: researcher   
30/03/2009 1:39:06 PM  
      (Link in Title)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


An internet spy network that targeted hundreds of "high value" computers belonging to government departments and other organizations in 103 countries is likely just one of many, says one of the Canadian researchers who uncovered it.


CBC News 
"We happened to discover and publicize this particular one. But you can safely guess that there are many of these going on," said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto Monday.

Deibert's organization and the Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group released a report on the spy network Sunday after a 10-month investigation. The network, dubbed GhostNet, infiltrated at least 1,295 computers, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices around the world.

While some of the IP addresses used by the hackers were traced back to Hainan Island, the location of China's major signals and intelligence agency, Deibert told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning that the attack could have been carried out by anyone, as the control servers were not set up securely.

"I do know that China is not the only country that engages in this kind of activity," he said. "It's almost like cyberspace has become a wild west."

He added that United States, for example, has openly talked in its unclassified defence and intelligence literature about fighting and winning wars in cyberspace.

Nor is this a new type of intelligence practice.

"What is new is that we discovered it and documented it."

Rafal Rohozinski of SecDev Group, one of the principal authors of the report had told CBC News earlier that cyberspying allegations have been made for years against government and non-governmental organizations alike.

"But beyond allegations, we really haven't had any hard evidence," Rohozinski said. "So, what we decided to do in our investigation is build that hard evidence."

Policy response needed: Deibert

Deibert said now that people are aware that this type of activity is taking place, policy-makers in Canada and other countries need to develop strategies to prevent this type of espionage from happening.

The GhostNet investigation began after the authors were asked to look into allegations that the Chinese were hacking into computers set up by the Tibetan exile community. The researchers eventually found a much wider network of computers that had been infected by hackers with malware that allowed the hackers to gain control of the computers and look at all files.

Three out of the four servers in the network were based in China while a fourth was in the United States.


----------



## markpoint

Chinese Cyber Warfare Targets US and Japan but not others in Asia  

Chinese government and military have recruited almost half million to conduct its cyber warfare strategy against US, Japan, Taiwan, etc. which are distributed at military, security, central governmental and some of provincial governmental organizations. Since Yugoslavia war in 90s, Chinese government and military realized that China's primary threaten is US and Japan and its strategy target focus on the future war against US, Japan and other forces.


----------



## dangerboy

markpoint said:
			
		

> Chinese Cyber Warfare Targets US and Japan but not others in Asia
> 
> Chinese government and military have recruited almost half million to conduct its cyber warfare strategy against US, Japan, Taiwan, etc. which are distributed at military, security, central governmental and some of provincial governmental organizations. Since Yugoslavia war in 90s, Chinese government and military realized that China's primary threaten is US and Japan and its strategy target focus on the future war against US, Japan and other forces.



Do you have any sources to back these claims, or are these just your opinions ?


----------



## tomahawk6

Strategypage:

Ghost Net
March 30, 2009: Nearly a year ago, the Dali Lama asked computer security experts to examine whether his computers, and those of organizations that support freedom for Tibet (which the Dali Lama is the exiled spiritual leader of). Soon, more experts at the University of Toronto were also called in, and after ten months of carefully examining thousands of PCs, it was discovered that 1,200 computers belonging to anti-Chinese Tibet groups, and other governments they were in communication with, had been infected with a hidden computer program (a virus inserted by hackers) that gave control of the computers to someone, or some group, in China. The security experts dubbed the clandestine hackers effort, Ghost Net. The University of Toronto team did not accuse the Chinese government of being behind this Cyber War operation, although they did find evidence of the Chinese government taking advantage of information gathered by Ghost Net. Some at the University of Toronto speculated this might actually be a CIA operation, to try and discredit China. 

When confronted with all this evidence, the Chinese government denied any knowledge of it. Computer security researchers at Cambridge University in Britain, who participated in the investigation, do accuse China of being responsible for Ghost Net.


----------



## a_majoor

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Some at the University of Toronto speculated this might actually be a CIA operation, to try and discredit China.



Seems like computers were not the only things infected and compromised.

Only in Canada eh?....Pity


----------



## Journeyman

*DNI OPEN SOURCE CENTER VIEWS PRC MEDIA*

The structure and operation of China's growing news media sector were examined by the U.S. Intelligence Community's Open Source Center in two previously unpublished reports.

"Sweeping social and economic changes triggered by more than two decades of reform in China have led to equally sweeping changes in China's vast, state-controlled media environment, particularly in the quantity and diversity of media sources and the development of the Internet," according to a 2007 OSC survey.

At the same time, however, "all pertinent information continues to be filtered through party censors to ensure that it is consistent with official policy. The party exercises especially tight control over the core mainstream media which deliver domestic and international news along with politically sensitive information."

See "PRC Media Guide," Open Source Center, March 21, 2007:
http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/prc-media.pdf

The state organs that supervise and regulate Chinese media were discussed recently in "PRC State Council Websites Overseeing Media," OSC Media Aid, March 17, 2009:
http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/prc-media-state.html


-------------
Produced by _SECRECY NEWS_,  a publication of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, and forwarded via IntelForum, a forum dedicated to the scholarly study of intelligence history, theory, and practice.


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese and Indians have made it clear they want to place manned missions on the Moon, now the Russians seem set to get back in the game as well:

http://technology.sympatico.msn.ca/News/ContentPosting?newsitemid=0744824027&feedname=CP-SCIENCE&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True&paginationenabled=false



> *Russia moves to design next generation spaceship capable of reaching moon*
> 
> 07/04/2009 2:16:00 PM
> 
> Vladimir Isachenkov, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
> MOSCOW - The Russian space agency has ordered design work to start for a next-generation spaceship capable of flying missions to the moon, setting the ground for a potential new space race with the United States.
> 
> 
> The space agency granted the state-controlled RKK Energiya company a US$23 million contract for initial work on a new, reusable craft to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz.
> 
> The as-yet-unnamed Russian spaceship could emerge as a potential competitor to NASA's prospective Orion spacecraft.
> 
> Design requirements for the Russian craft appear similar to Orion's specification, prompting some experts to nickname it "Orionski."
> 
> Orion is scheduled to carrying humans to the International Space Station beginning in 2015, and to the moon by 2020.
> 
> Alexei Krasnov, the chief of manned space programs for the Russian space agency, said last week that the prospective Russian spacecraft is set to make its maiden flight before 2020, without elaborating.
> 
> James Oberg, an experienced aerospace engineer who worked on NASA's space shuttle program and is now a space consultant, wrote in a commentary that the new Russian space program could help NASA win funds for its plan to return astronauts to the moon.
> 
> "This will give NASA a long hoped for boost in Congress by echoing the space race motivations of the 1960s," Oberg said.
> 
> Energiya beat the other leading state-controlled spacecraft builder, the Khrunichev company, for the prestigious order. It was announced on a government website.
> 
> Energiya has until June 2010 to complete the initial design. The company builds the Soyuz and its unmanned cargo version, named Progress, which are not reusable.
> 
> Krasnov said the new spacecraft will be capable of carrying a crew of six and a payload of 500 kilograms to orbit around the Earth. The Soyuz can only carry a crew of three.
> 
> Krasnov told reporters last week that the new spaceship should also be capable of delivering a crew of four to lunar orbit.
> 
> "We want the new ship to be a step into the future, not just a scaled up version of the Soyuz," he said.
> 
> Russia plans to start construction next year of Vostochny, a new space launch facility in the far eastern Amur region near China. The new cosmodrome is expected to host launches of unmanned spacecraft beginning in 2015 and the first manned missions starting in 2018.
> 
> Russia currently uses the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for all of its manned space missions and most important commercial launches. Another launch facility in Plesetsk, northern Russia, is mostly used to launch military satellites.
> 
> Windfall oil revenues of the past years have allowed the Kremlin to spend more on Russia's space program, which had suffered badly in the post-Soviet economic meltdown. But with Russia facing its worst financial crisis since 1998, observers say the government may find it hard to fund the ambitious new program.


----------



## CougarKing

Yet more to worry about as China seeks to challenge the West on close to equal terms?



> http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,188787,00.html
> 
> 
> China Adds Precision Strike to Capabilities
> Aviation Week's DTI | Richard D. Fisher, Jr. | April 09, 2009
> This article first appeared in Defense Technology International.
> 
> China has been developing and purchasing weapons for precision-strike warfare. This is the hard edge of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) doctrinal drive toward using increasingly sophisticated information technologies such as C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to improve the capabilities of weapon systems. The PLA's near-term goals appear to be greater asymmetric capabilities to target U.S. naval assets in the western Pacific and in space as part of an anti-access strategy.  Long-term, however, greater precision will be a feature of most new weapon systems.
> 
> 
> China's growing C4ISR capabilities were demonstrated in March by its coordinated two-fleet operation to intercept two U.S. Navy ocean survey vessels. Chinese ships found and harassed the USNS Victorious, operating in the Yellow Sea, and USNS Impeccable, which was about 75 mi. south of Hainan Island. The fallout was diplomatic, as Washington and Beijing clashed over interpretations of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which Beijing contends gives it rights to deny access to military survey missions. This incident, though, was reminiscent in timing and scope to the April 2001 clash that saw China "capture" a U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic intelligence aircraft off Hainan.
> 
> China's aggressive challenge of Japanese claims in the East China Sea, plus Washington's refusal to cease its survey missions could be flashpoints. In February, a provincial Communist Party newspaper contained a threat to sink U.S. survey ships.
> 
> In this second of three articles on China's growing regional power, DTI examines the country's efforts to improve its ability to target and destroy threats.
> 
> Since the early 1990s, Chinese military scholars have been warning of the need for China to prepare to defend against, and if necessary, conduct military operations in space. In late 2006 reports emerged of China's use of high-power ground-based lasers to "dazzle" U.S. surveillance satellites. On Feb. 11, 2007, China launched the first successful intercept by its SC-19 direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) system, derived from its KT-1 solid-fuel space-launch vehicle, with an interceptor stage whose development was likely aided by China's micro-satellite programs. A target FY-2 weather satellite was probably illuminated by large phased-array radar developed for tracking Shenzhou manned space capsules. A far less-noted potential co-orbital ASAT demonstration occurred on Sept. 27, 2008, when the Shenzhou-7 manned spacecraft, which had just launched a BX-1 nanosatellite, passed within 45 km. (28 mi.) of the International Space Station. Following the U.S. Navy's shootdown of an errant satellite on Feb. 21, 2008, and a Mar. 5, 2008, announcement that Russia would resume ASAT development, it is likely that China will continue ASAT testing.
> 
> China's direct-ascent ASAT also proves that it is capable of developing a long-range antiballistic missile (ABM) system, a U.S. pursuit that China has opposed. China had an ABM program from 1963-80 that produced a short-range interceptor prototype and long-range radar. Chinese sources told DTI at the recent IDEX expo in Abu Dhabi that they have tested the new FD-2000 surface-to-air missile (SAM) in an antitactical ballistic missile (ATBM) mode. Developed with help from Russia's Almaz-Antey Co., the FD-2000 also draws from the earlier passive-guided FT-2000 SAM, which reportedly benefited from U.S. Patriot SAM technology. These indigenous SAMs are entering PLA service, and will complement about 1,000 Almaz-Antey S-300/PMU-1/PMU-2 SAMs purchased since the early 1990s, giving the PLA air force the most formidable air-defense network in Asia. The PLA has also developed short-range SAM systems -- including man-portable air-defense systems -- for tracked vehicles and trucks. Among these is the TY-90 Yitian for trucks and armored personnel carriers that was disclosed in 2005, but displayed for the first time at IDEX this year.
> 
> Increasing precision is also the hallmark of new PLA surface-to-surface missiles and air-launched weapons. New Chinese nuclear ballistic missile warheads feature smaller sharp-tip warheads, signifying higher precision. One warhead configuration for the 12,000-km.-range DF-31A ICBM places at least one warhead on a delivery bus that is apparently capable of radical maneuvering to evade ABM defenses.
> 
> Medium- and short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) are also being upgraded for greater precision. The U.S. and Japanese navies have long been concerned with the PLA program to create an antiship ballistic missile, by placing a maneuverable terminally guided warhead on the 2,400-km.-range DF-21, and likely, on the 600-km. DF-15. Asian military sources are also concerned that a new 3,000-km. version of the DF-21 may have multiple terminally guided warheads.
> 
> An early 2009 Taiwanese estimate places the DF‑15, DF-11 Mod2 and new land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs) of the second artillery missile force targeting Taiwan at more than 1,500, with newer versions having navigation satellite (navsat) guidance. In 2007 a Chinese source told DTI that the PLA will also be using two new shorter-range SRBMs, the truck-mounted 250-km. B-611M and 150-km. air-transportable P-12. Both are maneuverable, navsat-guided weapons with modular warheads. The PLA is also developing longer-range artillery rocket-based SRBMs, like the 200-km. navsat-guided WS-3. Some Chinese sources indicate that an antiradar or passive-guided 300-km. version of the WS series is possible.
> 
> Asian sources say the PLA has developed two families of strategic-range LACMs: the DH-10, which equips new units of the Second Artillery, and YJ-62/C-602, which equips PLA navy destroyers and land-based antiship missile units, and is to be developed into an air-launched version for the PLA air force. The air force is expected to equip a new version of the 1950s-era Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 Badger bomber, the Xian H-6K, with the weapon. The H-6Ks modified with more powerful engines, now have a potential 3,000-km. radius -- enough to reach Guam. Rumors have long surrounded a potential long-range bomber program at Xian Aircraft Co., and a new stealthy version of Xian's JH-7A fighter bomber is also in development.
> 
> Tactical combat aircraft in the PLA air force and navy are receiving new Russian and indigenously designed air-to-air and ground-attack weapons. The air force's first Sukhoi Su-27SK fighters had the helmet-sighted Vympel R-73 missile a decade before the Raytheon AIM-9X entered U.S. service. The BVR self-guided Vympel R-77 followed the Su-30MKK into PLA service early this decade. But new Chengdu Aircraft Corp. J-10 and Shenyang Aircraft Corp. J-11B multirole fighters will carry air-to-air missiles designed by Luoyang Opto-Electric Co. (LOEC), which include the self-guided PL-12, thought to have a range approaching 100 km. in lofted delivery. Chinese sources also indicate LOEC is developing a high off-boresight air-to-air missile (AAM) similar to the South African Denel A-Darter, and a long-range ramjet-powered AAM.
> 
> Russian Su-30s in PLA service have been equipped with several guided munitions, including the Zvezda Kh-31 antiradar and antiship ramjet missile, Zvezda Kh-59 interdiction missile and optical image-correlation-guided KAB series bombs. At the 2005 Moscow air show, a Russian source disclosed that Russia had assisted China's development of electro-optical targeting pods, which have been photographed on J-10, JH-7A and some Hongdu Q-5 fighter-bombers. These will help guide two new families of laser- and navsat-guided bombs developed by LOEC and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC). The latter's FT family includes the 500-kg. (1,100-lb.) FT-1 navsat-guided bomb, the FT-2, which adds range-extending wings, the 250-kg. FT-3 and the 100-kg. FT-5, which is reportedly comparable with Boeing's Small Diameter Bomb. At last November's Zhuhai air show, LOEC revealed a dual-optical navsat-guided bomb. CASC's bombs can be expected to follow suit.
> 
> Precision is being packed into smaller munitions like the new 45-kg. AR-1, a laser-guided missile designed for the CH-3 unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), similar in capability to the U.S. Predator-1. Guizhou Aircraft Co. has likely developed a larger turbofan UCAV comparable to the MQ-9 Predator-B/Reaper.
> 
> Most of China's new precision-strike systems are for sale. Pakistan and Iran have benefited from China's ballistic and cruise missile technology, and from sales of conventional systems. Many more countries are likely to consider the $22-million Chengdu FC-1 and $41-million J-10 fighters, especially when equipped with precision-guided munitions like the PL-12 and FT-1. This form of power projection will soon be joined by the PLA's increasing power-projection capabilities, the subject of the final installment.
> 
> Richard D. Fisher, Jr., is a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center of Arlington, Va., and author of China's Military Modernization: Building for Regional and Global Reach (Praeger, 2008).
> 
> Photo: Richard D. Fisher, Jr. for DTI


----------



## Michael OLeary

*China's birth limits create risky gender gap
One study suggests result could be increasing crime, social problems*
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30155400/



> BEIJING - China has 32 million more young men than young women — a gender gap that could lead to increasing crime —



I can't find a reference, but didn't some sociologists a few years ago try to make a connection between demographic or social stresses in male populations and conditions leading to conflict and war?


----------



## CougarKing

Michael O'Leary said:
			
		

> *China's birth limits create risky gender gap
> One study suggests result could be increasing crime, social problems*
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30155400/
> 
> I can't find a reference, but didn't some sociologists a few years ago try to make a connection between demographic or social stresses in male populations and conditions leading to conflict and war?



Both Mr. Campbell and Mr. Thucydides emphasized that earlier in this thread, as well as the coming demographic crisis in China for that generation of males who were the result of China's one-child policy. Hence Mr. Thucydides' allusion to the "next gay superpower" since Sparta may apply?  ;D

But somehow, on a more serious note, would we really expect that generation of single males born from that flawed one-child policy to seriously lead their country on a war path once some of them are in charge? Perhaps while they are in their 20s and 30s, they would be more susceptible to influence by elements of the "Red Dynasty" who would use Han-centric nationalism as a distraction from any economic troubles at home.  In at least one of his lectures, Dr. Pan Wei discussed how he noticed a growing number of what he called "effeminate, lazy, spoiled, even fat, boys" (pang zi)in mainland schools. China, in spite of its experience with Maoist-Communism, has always been more of a patriarchial society, and the fact that boys were favoured in such a one-child policy meant that couples who were lucky enough to have a son meant they would spoil that son rotten, at least in urban settings; the rural areas (nong'cun/tsun-农村) would obviously see both sons and daughters working the fields. He also said that daughters, in contrast,  who were born to such families who preferred sons, and didn't appreciate them as much, often ended up being more strong-willed and brazen when it counted, so therefore more hardworking than the boys of that particular group/generation.


----------



## tomahawk6

Killing their female newborns so the parents could try again to have a son was one out growth of this policy.


----------



## Kirkhill

Mom and Dad may not value "brazen" 20-something daughter but I'm betting many 20-something lads are all to willing to chase after that particular butterfly.  Lots of free meals and expensive gifts.....earned the old fashioned way.

Let's see: opportunities for males?

Thucydides's Spartan solution, with or without the gore.
Self-service.
Celibacy.
Serial monogamy.
Polyandry.
Disappear down the mines or fall off a high-rise under construction.
Join the army and you are back to the Spartans with or without the peculiar associations.

Some guys are just going to be really busy trying to out compete the other guys.  Not much time left in the day for troublesome stuff like earning a living and taking over the world.


----------



## a_majoor

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Mom and Dad may not value "brazen" 20-something daughter but I'm betting many 20-something lads are all to willing to chase after that particular butterfly.  Lots of free meals and expensive gifts.....earned the old fashioned way.
> 
> Let's see: opportunities for males?
> 
> Thucydides's Spartan solution, with or without the gore.
> Self-service.
> Celibacy.
> Serial monogamy.
> Polyandry.
> Disappear down the mines or fall off a high-rise under construction.
> Join the army and you are back to the Spartans with or without the peculiar associations.
> 
> Some guys are just going to be really busy trying to out compete the other guys.  Not much time left in the day for troublesome stuff like earning a living and taking over the world.



Which is really the point. Most of these solutions are at odds with the social and cultural makeup of Chinese civilization (in the Huntington sense of the word), and while I am sure Edward and Cougar Daddy can supply lots more details, I think the short answer is the breakdown of the cultural foundations of a society is the downfall of that society.

Remember Chinese civilization has a very long and (relatively) stable tradition; today's "Red Dynasty" has lots of cultural similarities with the preceding Imperial dynasties which provide a great deal of stability and legitimacy. Breaking these bonds with large numbers of unattached males doing any or all of the things Kirkhill outlines breaks the legitimacy of the Red Dynasty, with potentially disastrous results (the Warring States period, anyone?)

(edit for spelling and grammer)


----------



## Yrys

Chinese schools on the credit crunch, on BBC News for children

A cluster of schools from Shaan Xi Province in the heart of China have joined the Cruncharama.  
See pictures from two of the schools and read some of their views.


Find them on the Cruncharama map.


----------



## chanman

Michael O'Leary said:
			
		

> *China's birth limits create risky gender gap
> One study suggests result could be increasing crime, social problems*
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30155400/
> 
> I can't find a reference, but didn't some sociologists a few years ago try to make a connection between demographic or social stresses in male populations and conditions leading to conflict and war?



An older article from 2005 (subscription required) http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_PGRJNGV




> The other consequence of smaller families has been a sex ratio strongly skewed in favour of boys. In China there are 118 boys for every 100 girls born, compared with a natural ratio of 105 to 100. India's figures are also skewed, but to a lesser extent. The most recent census, in 2001, showed 108 boys under the age of seven for every 100 girls. In some of the most prosperous states, however, the imbalance is much more marked: in Delhi, for instance, the ratio at birth in the first half of last year was 122 boys to 100 girls.
> 
> In both countries, the alarming numbers result from a confluence of tradition and modern technology. Sons carry the family name and land and provide an insurance policy for old age; daughters go off to look after somebody else's old age, and, in India, require a dowry. As more people can afford to pay for ultrasound scans and illegal selective abortions, they choose to avoid the longer-term expense of having girls.
> 
> Nobody knows what effect this preponderance of boys will have on Chinese and Indian society in the future. The trend might correct itself as scarcity forces up the value of girls. Yet in prosperous northern Indian states, far from commanding a bride-price, women whose families have failed to stump up a sufficient dowry still get killed and disfigured. It is the saddest of market failures.



I guess there could be room for two Spartas?  Or perhaps the big markets for Activision Blizzard's MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) division.

IIRC, many other countries have more girls than boys.  If the global ratio isn't too far off, then very theoretically, some migration can resolve the gender imbalance.  In practice... many of the men unable to find wives will be the poorest of society - especially poor peasant farmers.  Millions of poorly educated, underemployed, undersexed young men roaming the countryside... maybe not the best thing for social stability.

My 2008 Edition Pocket World in Figures from The Economist lists Chinese military as having 2.25 million regulars and 800,000 reservists and continuing to draw down, so the 'Sparta' option would require a reversal of that trend.  And that's not going to do much more than put a dent in the numbers of potentially discontented young men.


----------



## medaid

nULL said:
			
		

> EDIT: As a sidenote, don‘t the Chinese Special Forces have the coolest insignia _ever?_



That is not a Chinese Special Forces patch... It is a Taiwan, Republic of China Army Amphibious Frogmen patch.

It's Republic of China, not People's Republic of China. 

EDIT: Just realized that .jpg was damn long time ago... oh well... good to clarify things I suppose


----------



## a_majoor

Although this can also go under the "US economy" thread, it seems appropriate here since it indicates China's reaction to the mounting US debt and potential for inflation devaluing their holdings of US Treasuries, as well as the declining amount of control the Chinese (and by extention other large scale holders of US debt) potentially have over the US economy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/business/global/13yuan.html?_r=2&ref=global-home



> *China Slows Purchases of U.S. and Other Bonds*
> 
> By KEITH BRADSHER
> Published: April 12, 2009
> 
> HONG KONG — Reversing its role as the world’s fastest-growing buyer of United States Treasuries and other foreign bonds, the Chinese government actually sold bonds heavily in January and February before resuming purchases in March, according to data released during the weekend by China’s central bank.
> 
> Cutting Back China’s foreign reserves grew in the first quarter of this year at the slowest pace in nearly eight years, edging up $7.7 billion, compared with a record increase of $153.9 billion in the same quarter last year.
> 
> China has lent vast sums to the United States — roughly two-thirds of the central bank’s $1.95 trillion in foreign reserves are believed to be in American securities. But the Chinese government now finances a dwindling percentage of new American mortgages and government borrowing.
> 
> In the last two months, Premier Wen Jiabao and other Chinese officials have expressed growing nervousness about their country’s huge exposure to America’s financial well-being.
> 
> Chinese reserves fell a record $32.6 billion in January and $1.4 billion more in February before rising $41.7 billion in March, according to figures released by the People’s Bank over the weekend. A resumption of growth in China’s reserves in March suggests, however, that confidence in that country may be reviving, and capital flight could be slowing.
> 
> The main effect of slower bond purchases may be a weakening of Beijing’s influence in Washington as the Treasury becomes less reliant on purchases by the Chinese central bank.
> 
> Asked about the balance of financial power between China and the United States, one of the Chinese government’s top monetary economists, Yu Yongding, replied that “I think it’s mainly in favor of the United States.”
> 
> He cited a saying attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.”
> 
> Private investors from around the world, including the United States, have been buying more American bonds in search of a refuge from global financial troubles. This has made the Chinese government’s cash less necessary and kept interest rates low in the United States over the winter despite the Chinese pullback.
> 
> There have also been some signs that Americans may consume less and save more money in response to hard economic times. This would further decrease the American dependence on Chinese savings. (_Interpolation. This is the response of US Citizens. The Administration and the Congress have gone entirely in the opposite direction_)
> 
> Mr. Wen voiced concern on March 13 about China’s dependence on the United States: “We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.”
> 
> The main worry of Chinese officials has been that American efforts to fight the current economic downturn will result in inflation and erode the value of American bonds, Chinese economists said in interviews in Beijing on Thursday and Friday.
> 
> “They are quite nervous about the purchasing power of fixed-income assets,” said Yu Qiao, an economics professor at Tsinghua University.
> 
> Economists said there was no sign that the Chinese government had deliberately throttled back its purchases of overseas bonds to punish the United States for pursuing monetary and fiscal policies aimed at stimulating the American economy.
> 
> While those policies may run a long-term risk of setting off inflation, they also may benefit China if they rekindle economic growth in the United States and thereby revive China’s faltering exports.
> 
> The abrupt slowdown in China’s accumulation of foreign reserves instead seems to suggest that investors were sending large sums of money out of mainland China early this year in response to worries about the country’s economic future and possibly its social stability in the face of rising unemployment.
> 
> Evidence of such capital flight included a flood of cash into the Hong Kong dollar. Mainland tourists were even buying gold and diamonds during Chinese new year holidays here in late January.
> 
> China’s reserves have soared in recent years as the People’s Bank bought dollars on a huge scale to prevent China’s currency from appreciating as money poured into the country from trade surpluses and heavy foreign investment. But China’s trade surpluses have narrowed slightly as exports have fallen, while foreign investment has slowed as multinationals have conserved their cash.
> 
> Jun Ma, a Deutsche Bank economist in Hong Kong, predicted that China’s foreign reserves would rise only $100 billion this year after climbing $417.8 billion last year.
> 
> Some economists contend that slower growth in Chinese foreign currency reserves is not important to the economic health of the United States, even though it may be politically important. In the first quarter, instead of the Chinese government sending money out of the country to buy foreign bonds, Chinese individuals and companies were buying many of the same bonds.
> 
> “The outflow would mostly end up in the U.S. anyway,” even if China is no longer controlling the destination of the money, said Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University, in an interview on Thursday.
> 
> Heavy purchases of Hong Kong dollars by mainland Chinese residents early this year also have the indirect effect of helping the United States borrow money. The Hong Kong government pegs its currency to the American dollar, and stepped up its purchases of Treasury bonds this winter in response to strong demand for Hong Kong dollars.
> 
> But China’s economy appears to be bouncing back from the global economic downturn faster than its trade partners’ economies. If that proves true, the result could be an increase in imports to China while its exports recover less briskly. This would limit trade surpluses and leave the People’s Bank with less money to plow into foreign reserves.


----------



## CougarKing

Here is an article where journalist/writer Chip Tsao, who some argue to be the Hong Kong's version of John Stewart, mocks Chinese ultra-nationalists by writing a satirical piece, where he feigns lecturing his maid from the Philippines on how a poor country like theirs should not be challenging China's supposed claim to certain areas of the South China Sea. However, the article sparked an outrage in the Philippines which forced the Hong Kong newspaper which first ran his article to finally withdraw it and even issued an apology, IIRC. The Philippine government even responded to the popular outrage by supposedly banning Chip Tsao from ever entering the Philippines.

It sparked an outrage since there are many poor Filipinos who go overseas to neighbouring countries/territories such as Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong and work menial jobs such as being maids or domestic helpers in order to send remittances back home. Thousands work in Hong Kong alone, where the women in particular get the stereotype of being _A-mas_ (Cantonese word for maid) and the predominance of such a stereotype has made the Hong Kong locals develop a sense of biased resentment and feeling of superiority over the Filipinos, since many can barely speak English and don't even speak Cantonese/Mandarin at all. This has led to many of them being abused or maltreated by their employers.

Still, the Han-centric, PRC-inspired "Sinosphere" Nationalism which Tsao mocks, arguably, is also starting to make itself felt in Hong Kong as well more than a decade after the 1997 Handover. Whether such racially-charged conflicts will explode into armed conflict with China's neighbours as China later begins to assert itself remains to be seen.
   



> http://hk-magazine.com/feature/war-home#comment-2675
> 
> 
> *The War At Home*
> March 27th, 2009
> 
> The Russians sank a Hong Kong freighter last month, killing the seven Chinese seamen on board. We can live with that—Lenin and Stalin were once the ideological mentors of all Chinese people. The Japanese planted a flag on Diàoyú Island. That’s no big problem—we Hong Kong Chinese love Japanese cartoons, Hello Kitty, and shopping in Shinjuku, let alone our round-the-clock obsession with karaoke.
> 
> But hold on—even the Filipinos? Manila has just claimed sovereignty over the scattered rocks in the South China Sea called the Spratly Islands, complete with a blatant threat from its congress to send gunboats to the South China Sea to defend the islands from China if necessary. This is beyond reproach. The reason: there are more than 130,000 Filipina maids working as $3,580-a-month cheap labor in Hong Kong. As a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.
> 
> As a patriotic Chinese man, the news has made my blood boil. I summoned Louisa, my domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics from the University of Manila, hung a map on the wall, and gave her a harsh lecture. I sternly warned her that if she wants her wages increased next year, she had better tell every one of her compatriots in Statue Square on Sunday that the entirety of the Spratly Islands belongs to China.
> 
> Grimly, I told her that if war breaks out between the Philippines and China, I would have to end her employment and send her straight home, because I would not risk the crime of treason for sponsoring an enemy of the state by paying her to wash my toilet and clean my windows 16 hours a day. With that money, she would pay taxes to her government, and they would fund a navy to invade our motherland and deeply hurt my feelings.
> 
> Oh yes. The government of the Philippines would certainly be wrong if they think we Chinese are prepared to swallow their insult and sit back and lose a Falkland Islands War in the Far East. They may have Barack Obama and the hawkish American military behind them, but we have a hostage in each of our homes in the Mid-Levels or higher. Some of my friends told me they have already declared a state of emergency at home. Their maids have been made to shout “China, Madam/Sir” loudly whenever they hear the word “Spratly.” They say the indoctrination is working as wonderfully as when we used to shout, “Long live Chairman Mao!” at the sight of a portrait of our Great Leader during the Cultural Revolution. I’m not sure if that’s going a bit too far, at least for the time being.
> 
> *Chip Tsao is a best-selling author and columnist. A former reporter for the BBC, his columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.  *



(Chip Tsao (real name To Kit) has had other racially charged articles before:Whites.This dates back to 2005.)

And here is a page scan of the "War at Home" article.


----------



## Journeyman

For two contradictory views on China's potential future, you may want to read Minxin Pei and Jonathan Anderson, "The Color of China," in the current online edition of The National Interest. 

Both Minxin and Anderson debate the how the global financial situation will impact upon China's advances to date, bearing in mind its already problematic societal ills (environment, infrastructure, resentful population).


It's a somewhat lengthy article. Sorry, that's the price of informed opinion


----------



## CougarKing

PLAN Admiral Wu Sheng Li(吴胜利), (the commander of China's East Sea Fleet of the Nanjing Military Region just opposite from Taiwan before he became the PLAN head), reiterates what has long been increasingly evident.



> Reuters | 04/16/2009 11:58 AM
> 
> 
> BEIJING – China will accelerate development of warships, stealth submarines and long-range missiles as the country makes a stronger navy a priority in military modernization, a Chinese admiral told state media.
> 
> Admiral Wu Shengli said the Communist Party leadership had ordered the navy to upgrade preparedness to defend the nation's expanding interests, Chinese newspapers reported on Thursday.
> 
> "The Party central leadership has demanded that the navy make preparedness for military struggle at sea a priority in national security strategy and military strategy," Xinhua news agency cited Wu as saying in the interview first issued on its website (www.xinhuanet.com) on Wednesday.
> 
> "We must accelerate progress in developing key weapons equipment," Wu added, singling out big warships, long-distance stealth submarines, supersonic jet fighters, and high-accuracy long-range missiles.
> 
> Chinese media have highlighted the government's hopes to build an aircraft carrier, seen as the badge of a mature ocean-going power. But Wu's remarks highlighted the country's broader ambitions to expand its naval reach.
> 
> China's navy had become an "ocean-going iron Great Wall" to "counter a range of security threats," Wu said.
> 
> He gave the interview to highlight the 60th anniversary of China's navy, which will be marked next Thursday with a ship parade. But his outline of Beijing's ambitions also comes after recent friction in the South China Sea with a United States navy ship, and also while China is showing its expanding reach by joining anti-piracy operations off east Africa.
> 
> Wu, a member of the Central Military Commission, which steers China's military forces, said the People's Liberation Army Navy was becoming more adept at long-distance operations.
> 
> Chinese military plans have long centered on Taiwan, the self-ruled island close to the mainland coast that Beijing says must accept eventual reunification, by force if necessary.
> 
> But with China's appetite for energy and resources increasingly dependent on distant sources, strategists have called for a navy that can protect the nation's interests in distant seas.
> 
> "Training on high seas has become the norm," Wu said.
> 
> But the PLA navy has a long way to go before it approaches U.S. naval power. China has about 290,000 navy personnel, many working on aged vessels. And even with new technology, China has some way to catch up in mastering joint operations.


----------



## CougarKing

And Beijing increases its presence in the Spratlys.



> _*Beijing sends 6 more patrol ships to Spratlys * _
> BEIJING—China has dispatched more civilian patrol boats to the South China Sea, where tensions have risen recently over a long-standing territorial dispute, state press said Thursday.
> 
> *At least six patrol vessels belonging to provincial units of the Maritime Safety Bureau of China have been sent to the South China Sea in recent weeks, with several others being prepared for departure, China Daily reported.
> 
> Some of the busiest international shipping lanes cut through the South China Sea, which is home to the disputed Spratly and Paracel islands that are valued for potentially vast mineral and oil deposits.
> 
> China announced last month it had sent one civilian patrol vessel to waters around the Spratlys, drawing concern from the Philippines, one of the nations claiming sovereignty over the area.*
> 
> Recently renewed claims by nations over parts of the Spratlys were one reason for China stepping up its presence in the area, China Daily reported.
> 
> The increased patrols also come after a near collision last month between Chinese boats and a US naval surveillance ship in international waters within China’s exclusive economic zone off Hainan island.
> 
> “This year could be the starting point of many more disputes,” the paper quoted Zhou Zhonghai, a maritime law expert at China University of Politics and Law, as saying.
> 
> “Strategies with a firm stance to protect marine territories are of vital importance.”
> 
> *Zhou said a United Nations effort this year to chart maritime territory had led to a rise in tensions, as nations hurry to submit claims and other legal documentation to the international body.
> 
> Apart from China and the Philippines, the Spratlys are claimed in whole or in part by Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam.*
> 
> Authorities in Vietnam recently shut down a newspaper for three months for articles that criticized China for asserting its sovereignty over territories claimed by both nations, state-controlled media reported Thursday.
> 
> The Ministry of Information and Communication shut down the semiweekly Du Lich (Tourism) for its “serious violation” of Vietnam’s press law, the Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper said.
> 
> Although Vietnam’s government opposes Chinese policy toward the disputed territories, it wants to maintain friendly relations with its powerful northern neighbor.
> 
> Authorities accused the newspaper of publishing untruthful information, inciting violence and sowing hatred between nations, Thanh Nien said.
> 
> The report did not specify the untruthful information.
> 
> Ministry officials and newspaper executives were not immediately available for comment Thursday.
> 
> Communist Vietnam maintains strict control over all local media. The closure of the newspaper took effect Tuesday, and the ministry also ordered it to install new leadership, Thanh Nien reported.
> 
> In its Lunar New Year edition earlier this year, the newspaper ran several articles supporting anti-China protesters, praising them for their “pure patriotism.”
> 
> Thousands of demonstrators, mostly university students, gathered in late 2007 near China’s diplomatic missions in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to protest Chinese policy toward three disputed archipelagos in the South China Sea, including the Spratly Islands.
> 
> *China had announced a plan to create an administrative region called Sansha to manage the territory. The issue struck a nationalist chord in Vietnam, which has fought several wars against China, and the protesters took to the streets even though the government generally prohibits public protests of any kind.
> 
> The largely uninhabited islands and surrounding waters are believed to have large oil and natural gas reserves. They straddle busy sea lanes and are rich fishing grounds.
> 
> Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also claim sovereignty over all or some of the Spratlys.* AFP and AP


----------



## tomahawk6

Fleet Maneuvers.


----------



## tomahawk6




----------



## Edward Campbell

They're in a nice straight line ... I guess that means good station keeping which, I suspect is indicative of good seamanship.


----------



## CougarKing

These pics which T6 just posted are from the PLAN's 60th anniversary naval review.



> *China Parades Naval Might*
> By MARIANNE BARRIAUX, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 23 Apr 2009 13:07
> 
> BEIJING - China paraded its warships and nuclear submarines April 23 in an unprecedented display of maritime might attended by 14 other nations to mark the 60th anniversary of its navy.
> 
> Fifty-six Chinese subs, destroyers, frigates, missile boats and planes were displayed off the eastern port city of Qingdao just weeks after tensions flared after a naval stand-off with the U.S. in the South China Sea.
> 
> The review - only the fourth to take place since 1949 and the first on such a large and international scale - was opened by two of China's nuclear-powered submarines, the first time in history they have been unveiled to the public.
> 
> President Hu Jintao boarded the destroyer Shijiazhuang, after having sought to reassure the heads of foreign navy delegations that China's maritime power posed no threat to anyone.
> 
> "Both now and in the future, no matter to what extent we develop, China will never seek hegemony," he said, in comments reported by Xinhua.
> 
> State television showed Hu standing on the deck of the Shijiazhuang saluting and calling out to the ships that passed before him.
> 
> But Jean-Pierre Cabestan, professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, described the event as "a show of force, of power."
> 
> "It's a public relations display with a double message - China as an integrator, showing it is keeping with the rules of the international game, but also showing it is now in the big power arena," he said.
> 
> Ships from 14 countries, including the U.S., Russia and France, took part in the fleet review, which Chinese officials have said is aimed at promoting understanding about China's military development.
> 
> "Suspicions about China being a 'threat' to world security are mostly because of... lack of understanding about China," Ding Yiping, deputy commander of the navy, told the official Xinhua news agency this week.
> 
> China has always stressed its military build-up, watched with a wary eye by the U.S. - which accuses the Chinese of a lack of transparency - does not pose a threat to other countries.
> 
> A number of recent incidents at sea have heightened tensions.
> 
> In March, the U.S. complained that Chinese boats had harassed one of its ships in the South China Sea, forcing it to take action to prevent a collision.
> 
> China denied the claim and accused the U.S. vessel of "illegal activities".
> 
> Early this month, China's dispatch of civilian patrol vessels to waters around disputed islands in the same sea - the Spratlys - sparked concern in the Philippines, which also claims sovereignty over the archipelago.
> 
> China's increasing maritime confidence was also reflected in its decision to send ships to the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, for an anti-piracy assignment in the first potential combat mission for its navy beyond its territorial waters.
> 
> And the navy's commander-in-chief, Admiral Wu Shengli, said in April China would develop a new generation of warships and aircraft to give it much longer-range capabilities.
> 
> But Hong Kong Baptist University's Cabestan said China's navy still lagged behind other countries, with no aircraft carriers despite plans to build some.
> 
> "In terms of technology they are still far behind the Americans, the Japanese, or even the Russians, but in tonnage, they have now become the first navy in Asia," he said.
> 
> The U.S., which has sent navy chief Admiral Gary Roughead and the destroyer Fitzgerald to the event, would be watching the parade very closely, according to the professor.
> 
> "The United States are participating, they are playing the card of integration, of the policy of engagement," he said.
> 
> "But they are also watching attentively the progress of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), all the new missions that the Chinese navy do."
> 
> Sixty years ago, the PLA's navy was formed when a unit of the Kuomintang's coastal defense fleet defected to the rival communists, bringing with it nine warships and 17 other boats.
> Kuomintang nationalist forces had been locked in a civil war with the communists, who eventually won and came to power on Oct. 1, 1949.


----------



## Snakedoc

Some pretty impressive looking pictures, the Chinese sure know how to put on a good show.


----------



## CougarKing

Another update, this time on the effect of the economic downturn on Taiwan. 



> Agence France-Presse - 5/1/2009 11:08 AM GMT
> Taiwanese protesters scuffle with police
> Demonstrators scuffled with police in the Taiwanese capital Taipei on Friday during a May Day march to protest at the deteriorating job market after unemployment hit a record high.
> 
> However there were no arrests and organisers said the 12,000 turnout was one of the biggest May 1 protests in recent years and showed people's resentment against the government was brewing as more and more workers lost their jobs.
> 
> "Anti-unemployment! We want dignity!" the crowd shouted while marching through Taipei, where 100 demonstrators tried but failed to break through a line of riot police armed with shields and batons.
> 
> Several of the protesters reported slight injuries in their attempt to push their way to the sealed-off cabinet building.
> 
> Labour Minister Wang Ju-hsuan was then repeatedly booed as she attempted to address the crowd on top of a van as the protesters, largely from the island's eight leading unions, demanded her resignation.
> 
> They blame her and the government for failing to stop growing unemployment, up to a record 5.81 percent in March as businesses slashed jobs in the ongoing recession.
> 
> Taiwan, Asia's sixth biggest economy, has been hit hard by the global financial crisis with record falls in its key export sector, particularly at electronics firms.
> 
> "In the face of the worsening job market, the government may have created some temporary jobs, but what people really need is stable and long-term jobs," one demonstrator said.


----------



## a_majoor

Enough words; actions speak....

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/996b1af8-43ce-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1



> *Brazil and China eye plan to axe dollar*
> By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo
> 
> Published: May 18 2009 18:24 | Last updated: May 18 2009 23:31
> 
> Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.
> 
> The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.
> 
> Mr Lula da Silva, who is visiting Beijing this week, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, first discussed the idea of replacing the dollar with the renminbi and the real as trade currencies when they met at the G20 summit in London last month.
> 
> An official at Brazil’s central bank stressed that talks were at an early stage. He also said that what was under discussion was not a currency swap of the kind China recently agreed with Argentina and which the US had agreed with several countries, including Brazil.
> 
> “Currency swaps are not necessarily trade related,” the official said. “The funds can be drawn down for any use. What we are talking about now is Brazil paying for Chinese goods with reals and China paying for Brazilian goods with renminbi.”
> 
> Henrique Meirelles and Zhou Xiaochuan, governors of the two countries’ central banks, were expected to meet soon to discuss the matter, the official said.
> 
> Mr Zhou recently proposed replacing the US dollar as the world’s leading currency with a new international reserve currency, possibly in the form of special drawing rights (SDRs), a unit of account used by the International Monetary Fund.
> 
> In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Mr Zhou said the goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations”.
> 
> In September, Brazil and Argentina signed an agreement under which importers and exporters in the two countries may make and receive payments in pesos and reals, although they may also continue to use the US dollar if they prefer.
> 
> An aide to Mr Lula da Silva on his visit to Beijing said the political will to enact a similar deal with China was clearly present. “Something that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago is a real possibility today,” he said. “Strong currencies like the real and the renminbi are perfectly capable of being used as trade currencies, as is the case between Brazil and Argentina.”
> 
> In what was interpreted as a sign of Chinese concern about the future of the dollar, the governor of China’s central bank proposed in March that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s de-facto reserve currency.
> 
> In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency ”that is disconnected from individual nations” and modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs.
> 
> Economists have argued that while the SDR plan is unfeasible now, bilateral deals between Beijing and its trading partners could act as pieces in a jigsaw designed to promote wider international use of the ­renminbi.
> 
> Any move to make the renminbi more acceptable for international trade, or to help establish it as a regional reserve currency in Asia, could enhance China’s political clout around the world.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Enough words; actions speak....
> 
> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/996b1af8-43ce-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1




I invite members to refresh their memories about the Chinese proposal which is, essentially, to make the existing Special Drawing Rights (an internationally recognized  unit of account, already) into a reserve currency.


----------



## a_majoor

Indeed. This activity (direct use of Chinese currency in bilateral trade) seems to be a step in the road to displacing the USD. This could have serious implications for Canada as an international trading nation: since much of our trade is with the US and our currency holdings are necessarily USD; will we be at a grave disadvantage when trying to trade with the rest of the world that does not use USD as the reserve currency?



> Economists have argued that while the SDR plan is unfeasible now, bilateral deals between Beijing and its trading partners could act as pieces in a jigsaw designed to promote wider international use of the ­renminbi.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The “solution” to Canada’s US trade dilemma is simple:

First: shades of  the 1988 election campaign, follow the advice of the Liberal campaign ad and *erase the border* by harmonizing import rules and standards (relatively easy as they are about 95% common now) and harmonizing immigration and tourism regulations (more difficult but nothing like really hard to do); and

Second: to pick up on one of Trudeau’s inept acts, develop second and third and fourth markets with Asia, especially China, and Europe and Latin America, and so on. Chrétien/Martin/Manley wanted to do this but Canadian industrial “leadership” is notoriously risk averse, lazy and short sighted. Harper/Flaherty/Day are less enthusiastic about trade and commerce – probably because they let grade school ideology get in the way of the brains one must believe they have. 

How much of which currencies we hold in reserve is not terribly important.

There is nothing special about having one reserve currency. We could have two or three or more, even, eventually, when the Chinese central bank is worthy of the respect it demands, the RMB. If/when one has multiple reserve currencies then pooling them into a tradable SDR might make sense.


----------



## CougarKing

This latest update, in the wake of the Sri Lankan victory of over the Tamil Tigers, shows that Beijing not only has had a role in that victory, but continues to work behind the scenes in competing with India in this part of the world.



> *THE pitiless success of Sri Lanka's military offensive delivers one salutary lesson: if you have China as an ally, you can afford to ignore pressure from anywhere else.*
> 
> President Mahinda Rajapaksa's Government has won China's financial, military and diplomatic support - along with the confidence to brush off Western protests.
> 
> [SNIP]
> 
> As well as diplomatic cover, China gave Sri Lanka $1.3 billion of aid last year. The air force was given six F7 jet fighters as a gift, and the army received $50 million of Chinese ordnance in 2007.
> 
> What has Sri Lanka given in return? The answer is that China has acquired a strategic ally near the crucial Indian Ocean shipping lanes along which energy supplies from the Middle East are carried. Beijing is now building a port on Sri Lanka's southern coast that could serve as a naval base...
> 
> 
> http://www.smh.com.au/world/military-emboldened-by-beijings-embrace-20090519-be7k.html


----------



## a_majoor

When China figures out how to escape the debt trap, things will be very bad for the rest of us. If the US repudiates their debt (possibly as early as 2016 when Social Security and Medicare become insolvent) then things will be very bad for China.....

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cb2e1262-48c3-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1



> *Beijing is caught in 'trap' over dollar*
> By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
> 
> Published: May 25 2009 03:00 | Last updated: May 25 2009 03:00
> 
> China's official foreign exchange manager is still buying record amounts of US government bonds, despite Beijing's increasingly vocal fear of a dollar collapse, according to officials and analysts.
> 
> In recent months, senior Chinese officials, including Premier Wen Jiabao, have repeatedly signalled their concern that US policies could lead to a collapse in the dollar and global inflation.
> 
> But Chinese and western officials in Beijing say China is caught in a "dollar trap" and has little choice but to keep pouring the bulk of its growing reserves into the US Treasury, which remains the only market big enough and liquid enough to support its huge purchases.
> 
> In March alone, China's direct holdings of US Treasury securities rose by $23.7bn (£14.9bn) to reach a new record high of $768bn, according to preliminary US data, allowing China to retain its title as the biggest creditor of the US government.
> 
> *"Because of the sheer size of its reserves Safe [China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange] will immediately disrupt any other market it tries to shift into in a big way and could also collapse the value of its existing reserves if it sold too many dollars," said a western official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.*
> 
> The composition of China's reserves is a state secret but dollar assets are estimated to comprise as much as 70 per cent of the $1,953bn total. China owns nearly a quarter of the US debt held by foreigners, according to US Treasury data.
> 
> The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US mortgage financiers, last summer prompted Safe to adjust its strategy and buy far more short-term US government securities, instead of longer-maturity bonds and notes.
> 
> But Safe has not fundamentally changed its strategy of allocating the bulk of its burgeoning foreign exchange reserves to US Treasury securities, a western adviser familiar with Safe thinking told the Financial Times.
> 
> He said Safe traders were "very negative" on sterling because of expectations of renewed weakness of the UK currency, but Safe was neutral on the euro and bullish on the Australian dollar.
> 
> The pound ended last week at its strongest since December, shrugging off a warning over the UK's soaring public debt from ratings agency Standard & Poor's.
> 
> *The US dollar fell to its lowest level of the year against major currencies last week. Treasury yields spiked to six-month highs as investors focused on the willingness of creditors to fund a deficit that was expected to be about 13 per cent of GDP this year.*
> 
> China's buying of US debt helps Washington fund its soaring deficit and there is no indication that Beijing will shy away from purchases, the Obama administration's budget chief said last week.


----------



## a_majoor

Remembering when freedom almost broke out....

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/27/tiananmen-square-anniversary-mao-opinions-columnists-china.html



> Freedom's Edge
> *Remembering Tiananmen Square*
> Claudia Rosett, 05.28.09, 12:00 AM EDT
> Twenty years later, we recall lessons of freedom and tyranny.
> 
> Next week brings the 20th anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square uprising--or rather, of its suppression, on June 4, when China's government sent in troops to crush the democracy movement then blooming out of Beijing.
> 
> How should we remember that day?
> 
> In Beijing, it was a day of horror. I was there, as a reporter, and during a night lit up in memory with flame and tracer bullets, watched troops and armored personnel carriers move toward the square--as street protesters set fire to barricades, and then, unarmed and overwhelmed by the guns of the People's Liberation Army, fell back. In the early hours of the morning, I watched a few thousand protesters make a last stand in the square, weaponless and surrounded on three sides by thousands of AK-47-toting soldiers. Shortly before dawn, I saw those troops, on foot and in tanks, force the remaining protesters out.
> 
> I saw buses and trucks burned, banners crumpled on the pavement and people shot. The number killed that day, as China's communist government took back its despotic control of Beijing, remains one of the mysteries of the People's Republic--estimated at hundreds, maybe thousands.
> 
> But those horrors are not what gave Tiananmen its compelling place in modern history. There was far more at work here than any straightforward arithmetic of death. After all, the high-end estimate of the number killed in the Tiananmen uprising is dwarfed many times over by the millions of Chinese who died under the horrific communist experiment of Chairman Mao: forcibly collectivized, rusticated, starved, executed outright or dispatched to the torments of China's prison camps, the laogai.
> 
> What gave Tiananmen its historic heft was the movement that brought millions into the streets, not only in Beijing, but in other major cities like Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou. The precise point of conflict was the yearning for individual liberty and the crushing reply of the despotic state.
> 
> Out of this confrontation came some of the modern era's most haunting images of the struggle for freedom: the sea of banners and the Chinese statue of liberty--or the goddess of democracy, as its builders called it--erected in Tiananmen Square itself, holding a torch in both hands, facing the huge portrait of Mao, which still hangs over the main gate to the old imperial Forbidden City.
> 
> All this was then summed up by that astounding scene--as the army consolidated its control over the city--of a lone man, at the edge of Tiananmen Square, stopping a column of tanks.
> 
> But today, 20 years later, is this anything more than fading history?
> 
> Did it matter? That lone man stopped the tanks, but not for long. He has vanished, and China's despotic one-party state carries on. Does Tiananmen today add up to anything more than a collection of memories? It is of obsessive interest to a number of scholars, to many who were there, to the families of those who were killed--but is it otherwise irrelevant to the world, or even to China, today?
> 
> Since 1989, layer upon layer of Tiananmen has been peeled back, examined, debated. Student leaders of the time have escaped China and told their tales. The Chinese government has pushed out assorted versions of its own, including a book-length photo essay, published for wide consumption shortly after June 4, 1989. Its English version opens with the almost wistful sentence: "In 1989 when spring was passing to summer, a shocking turmoil happened in Beijing, which attracted the close attention of people at home and abroad." Documents have emerged--"The Tiananmen Papers," published in English translation in 2001--providing windows on the party deliberations.
> 
> On my desk right now is the recently published Prisoner of the State, the secret journal of the late Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, whose sympathy with the Tiananmen protesters, and push for reform, landed him under house arrest in China for the rest of his life, from 1989 until his death in 2005.
> 
> As details have emerged, and the years have gone by, experts of many stripes have questioned whether the Tiananmen uprising was really about democracy; whether the uprising, if not stopped, might have derailed China's economic progress; and whether China was "ready" for democracy.
> 
> But cut through the debate and hypotheticals, and I'd say at least two enduring and important messages came out of Tiananmen. Both sorely need remembering, especially as the world today seems to be losing its bearings on the immense value of individual freedom. That applies to an alarming extent even in America, where President Obama instinctively defaults to the policies of a statist, cradle-to-grave collective, while moving human rights abroad onto the foreign policy back burners in a push to "engage" with despots from Iran to Syria to nuclear-testing, missile-launching North Korea, as well as China.
> 
> *The first of these messages is that the Tiananmen uprising did not occur in a vacuum. It mattered greatly that as 1989 dawned, Ronald Reagan had just finished his second term as a U.S. president unapologetic about America's values of capitalism and freedom. He was willing to stand up to the Soviet Union, build up America's defenses and demand that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall.*
> 
> In this way, Reagan reversed the totalitarian spread abroad, during which the apologist policies of Jimmy Carter were answered in 1979 by Iran's Islamic revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By the late 1980s, dictatorships were falling, withering, coming unglued. In the Philippines, in 1986, Ferdinand Marcos had departed. In South Korea, in 1987, despotism gave way to democracy. And the Republic of China on Taiwan lifted martial law and began evolving at speed toward the democracy it is today.
> 
> Around the globe, the push for democracy seemed contagious. In the Soviet bloc, the countries of Eastern Europe were shaking loose. The Soviet Union itself, immersed in Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika attempt to keep the evil empire together, was just 18 months from collapse. In Myanmar--or Burma as we then called it--thousands of democratic protesters took to the streets in 1988. They were gunned down, their leaders killed, confined, silenced.
> 
> But out of Burma had come unmistakable stories of heroism and calls for freedom. Their neighbors took note. One of the signals flashed around the globe was that individuals isolated and silenced by repressive regimes were far from alone in their desire for something better. For America to serve as standard-bearer of that message really did matter.
> 
> So came the spring of 1989, and in China, home to roughly one-fifth of humanity, the people spoke. And that brings me to the second message I glean today from the Tiananmen uprising of 20 years ago.
> 
> Since the founding in 1949 of the People's Republic, that 1989 groundswell was the only chance that China's people have ever enjoyed to speak their minds openly, to organize massively as they saw fit, to stand in the center of their own capital in huge numbers and call on their government to account. They seized it with both hands.
> 
> From a government that fed them lies and propaganda, they demanded truth. In a country where all power belonged to one party, they demanded the rights of democracy. They asked for the chance to honor the best in themselves--and for that, they demanded the rights to be free to speak and free to choose.
> 
> If you have ever looked at that famous photo of the lone man in the square, facing a column of tanks, and been deeply moved, then I would say you have understood the heartfelt cry we now refer to by the shorthand of Tiananmen.
> 
> Whatever the complex forces still playing out beneath the surface in China, that uprising was a message about the universal desire for freedom, a message with which--however muffled it may often seem--it would be richly rewarding to keep faith.
> 
> Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.com.


----------



## Yrys

Hong Kong holds Tiananmen vigil, BBC News


Hong Kong Tiananmen Vigil Is Enormous and Somber, NY times





_Tens of thousands of people took part in a candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park 
on Thursday to mark the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on the pro-democracy 
movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989._ 

HONG KONG — Throngs of men, women and children gathered at a park here on Thursday evening 
for an enormous, somber candlelight vigil to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square 
killings.

The organizers said that 150,000 people joined the vigil, tying the record set by the first anniversary 
vigil in 1990 and dwarfing every vigil held since then. The police estimated the crowd at 62,800, their 
largest estimate for any vigil except in 1990, which they put at 80,000.

Even before the vigil began at 8 p.m., the tens of thousands of people assembled represented the largest 
crowd for the annual event here in recent years. The only crowd since the early 1990s that came remotely 
close was in 2004, when the fifteenth anniversary of the military crackdown coincided with a surge in 
pro-democracy sentiment in Hong Kong.

Around the park on Thursday, numerous banners in Chinese demanded the vindication of the students and 
other Beijing residents who perished during the Chinese government crackdown against the protesters. 
There were people of all ages, from grey-haired retirees to young children whose parents accompanied 
them to explain why they felt so deeply about an event that took place before they were born.

Yvonne Chow, a middle-aged social worker, said that she had come to the vigil every year for two 
decades and was heartened to see the turnout on Thursday night. “I am very happy that people have 
not forgotten the massacre in Tiananmen on June 4,” she said. “I am very sad because it destroyed 
our hopes for democracy.”

Brian Cha, a 35-year-old interior designer, said that while the twentieth anniversary was an important one, 
he also came because he was angered by recent comments by Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, 
who suggested that critics of the crackdown should also take into account China’s many successes since 
1989.

Carrie Ho, a 35-year-old marketer, said that she came to the annual vigil for only the second time partly 
because of the Hong Kong government’s decision to bar some activists from entering the territory in recent 
weeks. The government’s action undermined freedom in the territory, she said.

In 2004, organizers estimated the crowd at 82,000, though police then gave a lower estimate of 48,000. That 
had been the largest vigil since 1991, when 100,000 attended. Heavy rainstorms dumped 1.45 inches of rain 
on Hong Kong early Thursday morning, but the streets dried and the skies cleared through the day. The 
crowds gathered under cloudless skies and a nearly full moon that rose past the skyscrapers to shine down 
among the park’s palm trees.

When a large crowd showed up in 2004, it was after public pressure had forced the government to retreat 
from plans to impose stringent internal security legislation sought by Beijing. The local government has not 
sought since then to reintroduce the legislation. The push for democracy has lost some of its impetus in 
Hong Kong over the past five years, as the economy has improved and as Mr. Tsang, who is more politically 
adept, has taken office.

The success of Hong Kong residents in halting the internal security legislation in 2004, however, had an 
indirect affect on allowing the vigil here to grow to the huge size it was this year. “Prisoner of the State,” 
the secret journal of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the two years 
leading up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown, has just been published here and has immediately sold out. 
Mr. Zhao’s posthumous revelations about discord at the top of the Communist Party on how to respond to 
the student protests — he opposed the crackdown — have revived discussion of the events 20 years ago 
and Chinese-language copies of the book from Hong Kong are said to have been smuggled to the mainland.

In an addition to the usual schedule of the vigil, the organizers played an excerpt from a recording that 
Mr. Zhao made of his journal. Mr. Zhao defended the students in Tiananmen Square, saying that they 
wanted the Chinese Communist Party to correct its wrongs but did not seek to overthrow it.

Bao Pu, one of the three translators and editors of the book, said in a lunch speech at the Foreign 
Correspondents’ Club here on Thursday that it would have been much harder to publish the book 
here if the internal security legislation had been approved. He attributed the government’s retreat 
to a huge march here on July 1, 2003, with a crowd that police put at 350,000 and organizers at 
up to 700,000.

“Those people who were on the streets that day made a contribution,” Mr. Bao said.


----------



## Yrys

China's Tiananmen generation speaks, BBC News


Police Swarm Tiananmen Square to Bar Protests, NY Times





_Police stopped journalists from reporting near Tiananmen gate, 
across from Tiananmen Square, in Beijing on Thursday._ 

BEIJING — China blanketed Tiananmen Square with police officers Thursday, determined to prevent 
any commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters 
that left hundreds dead.

Visitors to the sprawling plaza in central Beijing were stopped at checkpoints and searched, and 
foreign television crews and photographers were firmly turned away. Uniformed and plainclothes 
officers, easily identifiable by their similar shirts, seemingly outnumbered tourists.

A few pursued television cameramen with opened umbrellas trying to block their shots — a comical 
dance that was broadcast on CNN and BBC. There was no flicker of protest. Other than the intense 
police presence and the government’s blockage of some popular Internet services, the scorchingly 
hot day passed like any other in the capital.

The scene was vastly different in Hong Kong, where throngs gathered at a park here on Thursday 
evening for an enormous, somber candlelight vigil to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen 
Square killings. The organizers said that 150,000 people joined the vigil, tying the record set by 
the first anniversary vigil in 1990 and dwarfing every vigil held since then. The police estimated 
the crowd at 62,800, their largest estimate for any vigil except in 1990, which they put at 80,000.

Hong Kong, returned by Britain to Chinese rule in 1997, is still semi-autonomous and is the only 
place in China where large public gatherings are allowed to mark the anniversaries of the 1989 
killings. The peaceful assemblage spilled out into nearby streets, shutting down traffic. Inside 
Victoria Park, thousands listened to songs and speakers who recounted the events on the night 
of the crackdown. A half-hour into the vigil, the lights in the park were extinguished and the 
attendees lit a forest of white candles in inverted conical paper shields.

Around the park on Thursday, numerous banners in Chinese demanded the vindication of the 
students and other Beijing residents who perished during the Chinese government crackdown 
against the protesters. There were people of all ages, from grey-haired retirees to young 
children whose parents accompanied them to explain why they felt so deeply about an event 
that took place before they were born.

Gary Leung, a 42-year-old interior designer, came with his two daughters, aged 8 and 4. “I 
want to see Tiananmen vindicated,” he said. “I feel very old — I hope the apology will come 
before I die, and if not, my children will continue the struggle.”

China’s government has tried hard over the years to obliterate the memory of the huge student-
led protests that shook the Communist Party and captivated the world for weeks. An official 
reacted angrily Thursday to a call by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a full public 
accounting of the incident. “The U.S. action makes groundless accusations against the Chinese 
government,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, told reporters at a regular briefing. 
“We express strong dissatisfaction.“The party and government have already come to a c
onclusion on the relevant issue,” he said. “History has shown that the party and government 
have put China on the proper socialist path that serves the fundamental interests of the 
Chinese people.”

In a statement Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton urged China to publish the names of the dead, missing 
or detained when the military crushed the protest, saying an accounting would help China “to 
learn and to heal.” “A China that has made enormous progress economically and is emerging 
to take its rightful place in global leadership should examine openly the darker events of its 
past,” her statement said. She also called on Chinese authorities to release all prisoners still 
jailed for taking part in the demonstrations and to stop harassing bereaved relatives, who 
have formed a group called Tiananmen Mothers.

The president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who has fostered closer ties to the mainland, also urged 
China to confront the episode. “This painful period of history must be faced with courage and 
cannot be intentionally ducked,” he said in an unusually strong statement.

Their remarks contrasted with the enforced public silence throughout China. There was no mention 
of the day’s significance in Thursday’s Beijing newspapers. The state-run mass-circulation China 
Daily led with a story about job growth signaling China’s economic recovery.

Access was blocked to popular Internet services like Twitter, as well as to many university message 
boards. The home pages of a mini-blogging site and a video-sharing site warned users they would 
be closed through Saturday for “technical maintenance.”

Some Internet users tried to evade the censors by referring to June 4 as May 35 on electronic bulletin boards or message sites. Others proposed wearing white, the Chinese traditional color of mourning, as a silent form of protest.

One government notice about the need to seek out potential troublemakers apparently slipped onto the 
Internet by mistake, remaining just long enough to be reported by Agence France-Presse. “Village cadres 
must visit main persons of interest and place them under thought supervision and control,” read the order 
to Guishan township, about 870 miles from Beijing.

In a report released Thursday, the rights group Chinese Human Rights Defenders said 65 activists in nine 
provinces have been subjected to official harassment to keep them from commemorating the anniversary. 
Ten have been taken into police custody since late May, the group said. Dozens of others, mostly from 
Beijing, are either under police guard or have been forced to leave their homes, according to the report.

Jiang Qisheng was imprisoned for four years in 1999 after he published a letter asking the government to 
reassess the June 4th crackdown. “They started watching me in my apartment building on May 15,” he said 
in a telephone interview Thursday morning from his Bejing apartment.

Ding Zilin, a retired professor and activist whose son was killed during the crackdown, told The Associated 
Press: “They won’t even allow me to go out and buy vegetables,” she said. “They’ve been so ruthless to us 
that I am utterly infuriated.”

A former key student leader of the demonstrations, Wu’er Kaixi, was detained Wednesday night at the 
airport in Macao, a special administrative region in China. On Thursday afternoon he was sent back to 
Taiwan, where he lives with his wife and two children. Mr. Wu’er, now a 41-year-old investment banker, 
said he wanted to surrender to Chinese authorities and face trial because he has not seen his parents 
in 20 years. “I also want to be in a courtroom so that I can talk,” he said in an interview Wednesday 
night from an airport detention room. “We dissidents in exile, that’s what we do,” he said. “We try 
very hard to come home, all of us, but the door is shut very tightly.”

_Zhang Jing and Xiyun Yang contributed research, and Keith Bradsher and Mark McDonald 
contributed reporting from Hong Kong._


----------



## CougarKing

The iconic image from the day after that dreadful day 20 years ago:


----------



## CougarKing

And the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown is commemorated from an unexpected source: a PLA Soldier who was in one of the units that was there on the night of the crackdown.




> Agence France-Presse - 6/7/2009 8:10 AM GMT
> Former Tiananmen soldier depicts crackdown through art
> 
> An eerie realism permeates Chen Guang's oil paintings of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, for he was one of the first soldiers to arrive in the square on the night Chinas democratic hopes were crushed.
> 
> Now a member of Beijings alternative art scene, 37-year-old Chen's hair is greying, but he is determined to pass his recollections on, giving rare testimony of the event from a soldier's perspective.
> 
> "My friends, my family, my army buddies, all tell me not to touch this subject. Thats how sensitive it is," he said.
> 
> "I hope that through my art, people will understand my experience and understand what happened in China," he said, showing off his work on a laptop -- images of protesters, soldiers and tanks.
> 
> Hundreds, perhaps thousands, lost their lives when China's communist rulers sent the army in to quell peaceful demonstrations in the capital on June 3 and 4, 1989.
> 
> In the week that the 20th anniversary passed without incident in China, a chain-smoking Chen described what the traumatic event felt like for a scared 17-year-old who had spent only a few months in uniform.
> 
> Born into a blue-collar family in central Chinas Henan province, he only cared about art and did poorly at school, which was why he joined the army.
> 
> Chen, attached to the 65th Group Army headquartered near Beijing, was first in line to face the protesters.
> 
> In May, his unit was ordered on to trucks to put down what was branded a "counter-revolutionary rebellion", but once inside the city, the column met a wall of protesters and ground to a halt.
> 
> For three days and nights, his unit was stuck on the trucks, surrounded by crowds of students and ordinary citizens who scolded them, but also brought them food and water.
> 
> "We soldiers were from all over China, and so were the students," said Chen. "There were youngsters, too, from Henan, and slowly we struck up conversations, and we got to hear their side of the story."
> 
> Eventually, the army withdrew the trucks, and when it re-entered the city, on June 3, the soldiers wore civilian clothes to avoid detection.
> 
> They travelled in small groups, with orders to meet at the Great Hall of the People, the parliamentary building next to Tiananmen.
> 
> "I was in an ordinary bus filled with weapons and ammunition right up to just below the windows, so it looked innocent enough from the outside," said Chen.
> 
> After his unit had gathered at Tiananmen, night fell and the crackdown began.
> 
> Chen and other soldiers of the 65th were lined up at the east gate of the Great Hall, waiting for orders.
> 
> In surrounding streets the gunfire was so loud it reminded him of Chinese New Year firecrackers, but the square itself was quiet. Suddenly around midnight, all the lights went out.
> 
> "That was the scariest moment. We knew there was a huge crowd of protesters just opposite us on the square," he said.
> 
> "We were aware that weapons had fallen into the hands of the protesters, and we couldnt know for sure if someone out there wasnt armed."
> 
> However, the students withdrew in an orderly fashion, and Chen was among the soldiers stepping on to the square without firing a shot.
> 
> "We were so relieved," Chen said. "But a few hours later, we learned that soldiers had been killed in the streets, and after several days had passed we also found out that many, many students had died."
> 
> The foundation was laid for Chens later career as a Tiananmen artist when on the night of June 3, an officer gave him a camera and ordered him to take photos of his units actions, a routine army procedure.
> 
> But he kept about 100 of his photos, which now form the basis of his paintings.
> 
> Chen was a soldier for little more than a year before he enrolled at a military-run art school, eventually qualifying for the prestigious Chinese Academy of Fine Art.
> 
> As an artist, he has pushed the envelope before, but with his Tiananmen paintings, he is venturing into new, dangerous territory. And he knows it.
> 
> "Of course, Im worried, but everything has a risk," he said. "Ive received phone calls from officials about my work but I cant stop just because of that."
> 
> He feels this even more keenly when observing how others deal with the past.
> 
> "Im still in touch with about a dozen from my old military unit. None meditates about the past the way I do. Some are policemen today, or officials. Theyve got good jobs, and they owe that to what happened back in 89."


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think the Chinese are in a bit of a pickle. Their evident _impotence_ on the North Korean file (elsewhere on his page) being just one indicator of their dilemma. 

Politically and socially the country – government and people – are, or want to be, on the _strategic_ offensive but, militarily, they have shifted to the _strategic_ defensive.

My “read” – and it’s free, so take it for what it’s worth – is that there was, over the past 15 years a huge debate within the Chinese military and the “young” generals (men in their 60s and 70s) won out over the old  generals (men in 80s and 90s). The result is a massive transformation of the armed forces that involves major cuts in personnel and enormous infusions of new, modern, sophisticated doctrine, training, procedures and equipment. The biggest changes will, I guess be seen in the navy which will have a global, blue water, _power projection_ role and commensurate capabilities.

( I have intentionally used words like massive, huge and enormous because I believe the struggle amongst the generals was, truly, titanic and came with global consequences.)

But there’s a problem: the Chinese people are displaying a renewed sense of nationalism, even _jingoism_. I think they identify with the sentiments Burns attributed to Robert Bruce’s Scots: they see the _approach of proud America’s power_ and for them (ordinary Chinese) it feels like _“Now’s the day and now’s the hour”_ when they, the Chinese, should _“Lay the proud Usurpers low!”_

This renewed nationalism was carefully nurtured. China is one of the few countries that “celebrates” humiliation. There are museums and holiday dedicated to the _“century of humiliation”_ (not to be confused with our very own _”decades of darkness”_). The aim was to reinforce the idea that the “old regime” (the _Qing_ dynasty and its successors, the _Kuomintang_ or Chinese Nationalist Party) let the Chinese people down and led hem into defeat and humiliation while, after 1950, the Chinese Communist Party gave the Chinese people the tools and “freedom” to reassert their sovereignty and strength. (It wasn’t quite that tidy – here was the “cult of personality” and so on, but ...) The fact is that the programme worked; the Chinese came to see themselves as victims of foreign (largely Anglo-American) _barbarism_ (every Chinese who visits the ruins of the Summer Palace in Beijing gets the message) and they hope or wish, perhaps even _long_ for a return to their “rightful” place as (one of) the world’s leading nation(s).

The political leadership needs to balance the “needs” of an increasingly assertive, nationalistic, _expectant_ population with the limitations imposed by a military establishment that is about half way through a major “retooling.”

The situation is further complicated by the difficult economic relationship between China and the USA, what historian Niall Ferguson calls _Chimerica_ – something he likens to a dysfunctional marriage in which one partner (old and weary) works, earns and saves while the other (young, attractive and sexy) maxes out the credit cards. But they are tied together by “love” and money, and divorce will be too hard and too expensive for either or both.

My sense is that the Chinese people are becoming increasingly anti-American. They blame America for the global financial crisis – the subtext is that the Americans (government and people) cannot be trusted to “care” for the world’s economy. They blame America for Taiwan’s situation – even for the ongoing, soap-opera like, scandals involving the former president. They blame America for the Tibet “problem.” Many (probably most) Chinese are convinced that Tibet is much better off, politically and materially, under Chinese rule than it would be under a Tibetan Buddhist theocracy. They blame America for stirring up the world’s Muslims, including the (sometimes violent) Uyghur separatist movement in Xinjiang province. They blame careless, greedy, high living America for global climate change. Now, their government is telling them that China is being “pressed” to finance America’s bailouts – they, the Chinese, will have to scrimp and save and “do without” e.g. a new refrigerator in order for Americans to drive SUVs and live in huge, air conditioned houses.

Many Chinese are wondering if they have to wait until the bicentennial of the great humiliation (First Opium War (1839)) before they can reclaim their “self respect.” This poses a huge problem for the government and the Chinese Communist Party which must, now, find new ways to suppress popular expectations and, still, maintain – for the Chinese – the all-important social harmony, without which China is ungovernable. It is also a problem for the rest of us: if the CCP fails, if social harmony breaks down, the crisis will not be confined within China’s borders.


----------



## a_majoor

Too true.

China's rapidly growing economy masks many fundamental weaknesses, particularly in uneven distribution of wealth and resources, unbalanced demographic profile and environmental breakdown. External stressors like a global economic slowdown or perceived challenges to the Chinese hegemony (North Korea, Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang province come to mind) only make matters worse.

Since authoritarian regimes are rather brittle, a breakdown in any one area could cause a series of cascade failures and bring down the entire regime and State, something we should view with alarm. This is not to say the Chinese are at all interested in our opinion (except insofar as we foster or at least don't thwart their national interests), but we need to see the situation in China (and everywhere else, for that matter) in terms of how this affects *our* national interests.


----------



## CougarKing

*China starts national anti-terrorism drill "Great Wall-6"*






_A member of the special police reacts during an anti-terrorism drill in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 9, 2009. China on Tuesday started a national anti-terror exercise "Great Wall-6", which composes a series of specialized drills and will be carried out in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Shanxi and Hebei provinces.(Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)_






_Members of the special police put on gas masks during an anti-terrorism drill in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 9, 2009. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)_






_Members of the special police check the site of a "dirty bomb" during an anti-terrorism drill in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 9, 2009. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)_






_Members of the special police rescue a "victim" during an anti-terrorism drill in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 9, 2009. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)_






_Members of the special police check a "suspect" during an anti-terrorism drill in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 9, 2009. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)_

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-06/..._11515206_4.htm


----------



## a_majoor

sewing the seeds......

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23654/?nlid=2098



> *China's "Green Dam" Censorware Could Spawn a Zombie Network*
> The country's latest attempt to control its citizens' Internet use could backfire badly.
> Thursday, June 11, 2009
> By Erica Naone
> 
> Controversy erupted this week over reports that the Chinese government plans to require all computers sold in the country to come with software that screens for objectionable websites. Although initial criticism came from privacy advocates and those most concerned about censorship, experts have also now found that the software could introduce critical security risks to computers across the country.
> 
> According to the BBC, the software communicates in plain text with central servers at its parent company. Not only does this potentially place personal information in the hands of eavesdroppers, but it could also allow hackers to take over PCs running the software, creating a massive zombie network that could deliver spam or attack other computers across the globe.
> 
> The report adds that the software does not seem to work as intended, sometimes blocking ordinary websites and failing to block others that contain objectionable content. And the software appears to work only on Microsoft Windows, not on Macs or Linux machines.
> 
> The news, while disturbing, is unsurprising. It's not the first time that attempts to censor and monitor users have placed personal information at risk. Late last year, for example, researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto uncovered massive surveillance of users of instant-messaging service TOM-Skype, largely because the data being collected was unprotected and accessible over the Internet.
> 
> The Internet does not lend itself to central control, and China's government continues to struggle with that fact, both on a philosophical level, as the larger debate on censorship shows, and on a technical level.


----------



## Yrys

China mulls Afghan border request






Chinese and Afghan foreign ministry officials may open up a strategically important and scenic border area, 
officials say after a meeting. The two sides met in Beijing this week to discuss the 76km (47 mile) border 
that divides the two countries, known as the Wakhan Corridor.

Afghanistan wants the border to be opened as an alternative supply route to help forces battling the Taliban.
The Chinese say they will "earnestly study" the proposal.

*'Positive attitude'*

"The (terrorism) solution must be comprehensive, regional and international," Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin 
Dadfar Spanta said in a speech earlier this week. He said it was his "personal wish" to open the Wakhan 
Corridor.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said his country would adopt "an earnest and positive attitude"
on co-operation with Afghanistan "on transport, trade and economy". "We're willing to earnestly study his 
suggestions," he said.

The Wakhan Corridor is about 210km long (130 miles) long.

Correspondents say that the idea of using it as an alternative route for supplying US and Nato forces in 
Afghanistan has been floated before. They say the call by Afghanistan is likely to fall on deaf ears in China, 
which fiercely resists any initiatives viewed as undermining its national sovereignty.


----------



## Yrys

China storm leaves many homeless






Recovery efforts have begun in eastern China following a severe hail storm on Sunday that killed 
at least 14 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Hail stones and winds of more than 100km/h 
(62mph) lashed the province for nearly 90 minutes, uprooting trees and scattering debris across roads.

The Civil Affairs bureau in Anhui province says more than 10,000 people had to be taken to emergency 
shelters. It was the second deadly storm to hit the province so far this month.

In eastern China storms batter the region during the typhoon season each year. Officials in Anhui province, 
one of the poorer parts of the country, say this latest bout of severe weather caused around 9,000 homes 
to collapse. As well as those who died, more than 180 others were injured. Earlier this month another 
severe hail storm killed 23 people in Anhui and injured 200 others.

Officials say they are worried that more extreme weather will follow and new contingency plans 
are needed.


----------



## Yrys

Part 1: In search of the real China






I have started my China journey in Yanchi County. Yanchi is all about sheep. It is a major lamb producing 
area and home to the Tan Yang breed of sheep, whose wool is so naturally curly it looks like perfectly 
coiffed dreadlocks.






For the Tan Yang sheep this means an early and final visit to the halal slaughterhouse in downtown 
Yanchi. There is more to lament for the Tan Yang. Here the Great Wall of China runs in a kind of 
jagged, sandy mound for hundreds of miles alongside the motorway. It is a haunting sight, dotted 
with swallows' nests and shepherds' huts. But the ground is so barren here that the government 
has banned sheep grazing. So the Tan Yang have to spend most of their days in the farmyards, 
eating their staple diet of cornmeal and liquorice bush.

For the people of Yanchi life is hard, but for 20 years the upside has been perpetual economic growth 
and incremental improvement. I meet Li Xiao Li as she carefully removes the skin of a Tan Yang, 
taking care not to get blood on her designer jeans. "I want my kids to have a job like yours," 
she tells me. "I keep telling them - don't be like us. Don't live the hard life we've lived."

To send her daughter to school she spends most of her monthly income, and puts the rest aside 
to cover health costs.

This is the big problem in China: absent a welfare state, even poor-ish Chinese people save lots 
of their money, or spend it on health and education. The actual consumer economy is weak.

*Escaping the propaganda*

That is a problem now because the export economy has taken a massive hit - exports were 22% 
down in the first quarter of this year. China has to try and rebalance its economy towards domestic 
demand.

Easy for economists to say, but it would mean a revolution in the life of people like Ms Li. It is to find 
out if they can do this that I am on this journey, with legendary Chinese fixer and translator, Edera 
Liang, and driver Wang Zhi Gang.

I am trying to dodge the usual obstacles that greet foreign journalists in China - the dinners, the rice wine, 
the official briefings from propaganda chiefs - and just see it as it is. 

Part 2: The mathematics of migrant labour
Part 3: China's mass consumer culture
Part 4: Sixty years of Communism
Part 5: The chill of China's economic crisis
Part 7: The multiple realities of China


----------



## Edward Campbell

It's a good series but we must all remember that we _foreigners_, unless we are fluent in Mandarin and one if two of the major dialects and very well schooled in Chinese culture, can only "see" China through the lenses (and prejudices) of our guides and interpreters.

We are, by and large, cautiously aware of the cultural gap between e.g. English and French Canada, and some of us have experienced the "cultural gap" between Canadians, of one sort or another, and Pastuns or Canadians and Serbs and so on. Most of us are, rightfully, cautious about saying that we "understand" Afghanistan or the Balkans or Quebec and we must be equally cautious about thinking that a foreigner, just because (s)he's a journalist, "understands' what (s)he is seeing and hearing in China.

You should be equally cautious about my prognostications. They, too, are suspect because they, too, reflect what I have seen and heard through the "filter" of other people.


----------



## Yrys

Foreign journalists visit Lhasa, People's Daily

this article shows a different visit that the following one :


Tibetan Monks Tell Tale of Escape From China, NY Times






DHARAMSALA, India — Lobsang Gyatso and his fellow Tibetan monks had been biding 
their time, walking around the main square of the monastery nestled in the barren 
hills of northwestern China. Now the moment had arrived.

As a group of 20 foreign and Chinese journalists climbed out of minivans, Lobsang and
the other monks unfurled banners they had wrapped inside the folds of their crimson 
robes and held aloft the banned flag of Tibet.

“We have no human rights now,” one monk told reporters in Chinese.

That daring protest, in April 2008, was transmitted around the world by the journalists 
on the government tour, putting a dramatic face on Tibetan defiance. Chinese officials 
had brought the journalists to the sprawling Labrang Monastery, in the town of Xiahe to 
show that Tibetans were content under Chinese rule, despite the widespread Tibetan 
uprising the previous month. The enraged monks, about 15 in all, punctured the official 
narrative.

“If we monks hadn’t seized the opportunity to express our feelings, which are feelings in 
all Tibetan monks, then we would have missed a chance to tell the world,” said Lobsang, 
24, a squat man with a thin goatee who now lives in India. Following Tibetan custom, he 
goes by his given name.

The journalists left later that afternoon without knowing the names or the fates of the 
protesters. Some would be arrested and beaten, Lobsang said. For him and two other 
monks, it was the start of a harrowing year of flight from the Chinese authorities that 
ended only last month, when they arrived in this Himalayan hill town where the Dalai 
Lama lives in exile.

Over that year, the monks slipped out of their monastery, trekked into the mountains, 
slept in nomads’ tents, sneaked into Lhasa aboard a high-altitude train and crossed a 
raging river to Nepal. It was only here in a refugee center that they could tell their tale 
to a reporter, opening a rare window into the deep-rooted resentment that bloomed last 
year into the largest Tibetan uprising in decades.

Chinese officials insist that the protests were orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual 
leader of the Tibetans. The monks from Labrang say harsh Chinese policies sparked the 
tinder, especially limitations on Buddhist practice.

“I and my friends decided on our own to protest,” Lobsang said. “The protests were caused 
by human rights issues and Chinese policies toward Tibet. We couldn’t tolerate it anymore.”
He added, “I joined the protests with the idea of saving Buddhism, which is endangered by 
Chinese policy. I want His Holiness the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, but the Chinese don’t 
even allow us to display his picture.”

Labrang Monastery is one of the most important centers of religious study in the Tibetan world, 
a white-walled labyrinth of monks’ cells and temples dating from the 18th century. It housed 
about 500 monks before last year’s protests. Chinese policies in this frontier land called Amdo, 
at the nexus of the Tibetan, Hui Muslim and Han Chinese worlds, have traditionally been less 
strict than in central Tibet. But even there, the Communist Party employs heavy-handed methods 
to control religious practice, said the three monks and two others who fled with them to 
Dharamsala. The government limits the number of monks allowed to live in the monastery, 
they said. Officials cracked down on festivities honoring the Dalai Lama. When the Chinese-
appointed Panchen Lama visited Labrang several years ago, monks were forced to stay indoors 
to prevent disturbances.

Last year, when monks in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, began leading peaceful protests on March 10, 
word spread quickly to Labrang. Thousands of monks and lay people in Xiahe marched to government 
offices demanding the return of the Dalai Lama. Some protesters broke into buildings and threw stones 
at riot police officers. From then on, the government tightened the screws on the monastery, the monks 
said. A curfew was imposed. Security officers arrested several monks each night. The monastery began 
to empty out. “Some monks ran off to their homes in the countryside,” said Jamyang Jinpa, 24.

The authorities began holding daily hourlong patriotic education classes, in which the monks were forced 
to read tracts denouncing the Dalai Lama and pledge loyalty to the Communist Party. “As a Buddhist monk 
who believes in the Dalai Lama as our foundation, it was unbearable to read this,” Lobsang said.

On the night of April 8, some monks heard on the radio that foreign journalists were to arrive in Labrang 
the next day on a government tour. “We immediately stopped what we were doing that night and started 
discussing the protest,” Jamyang said. A half-dozen monks brought out a Tibetan flag and scrawled slogans 
on three white banners. “We have no freedom of speech,” read one. They wrote their wills on the back of 
the flag because they thought there was a good chance they would be killed by Chinese security forces, 
Jamyang said.

When they went to the main temple the next morning, they were struck by a strange sight: Hundreds of 
people were milling about the square outside. Most were plainclothes Chinese security officers. “We knew 
then that the journalists were coming,” Jamyang said. “We pretended to visit the temple.” When the 
journalists and their government escorts pulled up in minivans, the monks dashed across the square, 
unfurling their flag and banners. A few words were exchanged in Chinese. Some monks draped white 
ceremonial scarves around the necks of several journalists.

“The Chinese people in plainclothes took photos of us, but they dared not stop us in front of the journalists,” 
Jamyang said.

That night, security officers searched the cells of the monks involved in the protest, but the monks had 
hidden elsewhere. The next night, Jamyang slipped into the mountains and kept walking until dawn. “After 
the protest, I felt I would be arrested at any time,” he said. Jamyang spent the first two months mostly 
sleeping outdoors, he said, sometimes in ditches that he had dug himself. He tossed away his red robes 
and began growing out his hair. In the summer, he wandered to the high pastures and slept in the tents 
of nomads. “In my dreams, sometimes I would see myself getting shot and dying,” he said.

Two other monks from the protest, Lobsang and Jigme Gyatso, also fled the monastery in the days after 
Jamyang left. The three stayed apart. After nearly a year in hiding, the monks learned of a guide in Lhasa 
who could smuggle them into Nepal. Using fake identification cards, they boarded the new high-altitude train 
to Lhasa. A driver then sneaked them past checkpoints to the Nepal border, where they crossed a river on 
logs. Of the 15 monks who took part in that protest in front of the journalists, only these three have escaped 
to India. That they made it here is considered extraordinary given how tightly Chinese authorities clamped 
down on Tibet. The refugee center here usually gets 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans per year, but that dropped to 
550 last year. By the end of May, only 176 refugees had arrived, said Ngawang Norbu, the center’s director.

The monks say they have no regrets about holding the protest — to them, there was no other way to show 
the world their true feelings about Chinese rule.

“I miss my friends and family in Tibet, but I try to bury my feelings,” Jamyang said. “At the moment, I can’t 
return to Tibet, and I don’t know about the future.”


----------



## CougarKing

No doubt this is a response to mainland China's own increased presence in the area.



> *Taiwan likely to boost South China Sea presence*
> AFP
> AFP - Sunday, June 14
> 
> TAIPEI (AFP) - – Taiwan's coastguard said it was likely to increase its presence in a disputed South China Sea archipelago, in response to a significant rise in the number of foreign fishing boats there.
> 
> Taiwan's coastguard, which has a base on Taiping, the biggest island in the Spratlys, has reported a steep rise in the number of foreign fishing vessels in the area, media reports said.
> 
> "Yes, it's likely," said Shih Yi-che, a spokesman for Taiwan's coastguard, when asked if the service would send more patrol boats to the archipelago, which lies around 1,500 kilometres (937 miles) south of Taiwan.
> 
> Taiwan's coastguard operates three patrol boats from Taiping, known as Ba Binh in Vietnam, where it has also built a runway for providing logistical support and humanitarian assistance.
> 
> By the end of May, Taiwan's coastguard had counted more than 500 foreign vessels, mostly from China, off Taiping, more than double the number reported for the whole of 2008, media reports said.
> 
> Meanwhile, Taiwan's foreign ministry reaffirmed the island's claim to the Spratlys, along with three other archipelagos in the South China Sea, which straddle important shipping lanes.
> 
> "The Spratly islands are the territory of the Republic of China (Taiwan), whether from the point of view of history, geography, and international law," acting foreign ministry spokesman James Chang told AFP.
> 
> Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines claim all or part of the potentially oil-rich Spratlys.
> All claimants except Brunei have troops based on the archipelago of more than 100 islets, reefs and atolls, which has a total land mass of less than five square kilometres (two square miles).
> 
> http://asia.news.yahoo.com/afp/20090614/ta...ys-beb1011.html


----------



## CougarKing

Another article on China's increasing influence in Africa:



> *China’s Africa Strategy Blossoms as Relationship Develops*
> 
> _China-Briefing .com
> June 8, 2009_
> 
> NAIROBI, Jun. 8 -China has stepped up its foreign policy of friendship and trade with Africa this year as it seeks to further strengthen its ties throughout the continent. With President Hu Jintao having already visited Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius, China announced a new Beijing summit of African nations aimed at actively developing a strategic China-African partnership. Chinese influence pan-Africa, unencumbered by colonial history, the politics of aid, and an understanding of how sometime dictatorial governments work, is set to rise significantly across the region.
> 
> Hu’s visit, coming as it did during the shock waves of the global financial crisis, appears structured to convince African nations that China intends to be rather more than a fair-weather friend. With Africa having been apparently placed at the bottom of the pile of importance by economically battered European nations, China has been quick to assert itself in their absence. Accusations that China has cherry-picked African nations for strategic alliances appear to have been reversed. None of the four nations visited are particularly rich in resources. That means hats off to China’s foreign policy and strategy in Africa, recognizing that rather than national borders, Africa remains, despite previous colonial attempts to draw lines, largely a tribal continent. Doing business based purely on Africa’s national borders and localized mineral or resource wealth doesn’t necessarily cut it. China’s strategy of dealing with Africa carefully, but as a whole, appears to be paying dividends that the previous colonial powers just cannot match due to their inherent historical bias.
> 
> China has also uncovered a powerful windfall in its acquisition through trade of trillions of U.S. dollars. While to the West, the appreciation of the dollar has been hurting large sectors of the U.S. economy, for China, away from the prying eyes of Washington, it means both China and several other Asian countries – such as India and Thailand – have acquired significant purchasing power in world markets. Additionally, oil and other commodities have been at their lowest levels for several years, resulting in China finding itself in a powerful bargaining position in what has become a global buyers market to those nations who have the cash. China is signing long-term deals with many African nations for a variety of natural resources. When the global recovery comes, as one day it must, China will find itself in control of considerable portions of the world’s natural resources, including oil. Africa therefore now finds itself in the rare position of being courted by the United States, the EU and Asia; with China currently the top player.
> 
> *Exporting aggressively, and undercutting traditional, mainly European producers, Asia rapidly began to view Africa as both a large potential export market but also as a source of resources. In some cases, however, Africa still has to learn to insist on quality control measures. As China politically strengthens its position in Africa, many low-end Chinese exports are just not up to standard and the country is generating a reputation for poor quality goods. Friends of mine reference a Chinese made hammer, which after just six blows to knock a wooden peg in the ground to secure a safari camp tent, broke in several pieces – the wooden handle cleaving in two and the metal head fracturing into pieces. I have heard recurring stories across Africa of similar incidents involving cheap Chinese products; the dumping perhaps of shoddy goods long discarded by more sophisticated markets? China still has a large number of low-level, poor quality-producing state-owned enterprises to maintain for the sake of its workers, and it wouldn’t surprise me if such products are now being sent to Africa, where corruption, a lack of QC supervision on imports, and possible political pressure allow such product entry.*
> 
> Regardless, trade volumes between Africa and Asia have sky-rocketed. Exports from Africa grew annually at 15 percent from 1990 to 1995, and has reached 20 percent plus for each of the past twelve years. African trade with China alone in 2008 was US$106.84billion, up 45 percent over 2007. At present, African trade with Asia is running at about 30 percent of that which it enjoys with the EU and the United States, however, the volume of trade has grown exponentially partly due to improvements in infrastructure and the proximity of the two continents. It takes just five hours to fly from Nairobi in Kenya across the Indian Ocean to Mumbai – the same time it takes to fly from Urumqi to Beijing.
> 
> Currently, just five African nations account for 85 percent of all Asian trade, however, with infrastructure developments and political reform occurring in Africa too, bottlenecks that have traditionally gotten in the way of such commerce are gradually – and in several cases quickly - being removed. Asian demand for finished product from Africa is increasing, and has been growing at about 20 percent per year, particularly in textiles and apparel. African imports on the other hand include machinery and equipment, vehicles (including Indian and Chinese made motorbikes and trucks), and electronic goods and appliances. Beijing has encouraged this trade by removing or reducing tariffs on a wide variety of African imports and has signaled it may do so again to further boost trade.
> 
> China’s long arm of commerce therefore is moving steadily and strongly to Africa. It is time to take heed.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile... in Hong Kong...

Another challenge to "one country two systems"? Tung-Chee Wah's successors must be worried.



> Agence France-Presse - 7/1/2009 11:59 AM GMT
> Tens of thousands march for democracy in Hong Kong
> Tens of thousands of people took to the sweltering streets of Hong Kong on Wednesday for an annual pro-democracy march, as the city marked the 12th anniversary of its return to China.
> 
> The huge crowd, estimated by organisers at 76,000, snaked through the city to demand the early introduction of universal suffrage and also to express frustration at the government on a whole gamut of issues, including its response to the economic slowdown.
> 
> Despite temperatures nudging 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit), many protesters gathered at the city's Victoria Park more than an hour before the march, sporting umbrellas to protect them from the scorching sun.
> 
> Dennis Chan, a 28-year-old salesman, who joined the march for the third time, said: "We want to let the government know that this is not our government."
> 
> The protesters sang the anthem "We Are Ready" and held banners to demand universal suffrage for the city's chief executive and legislature in 2012.
> 
> Beijing has said that universal suffrage would not come before 2017 at the earliest.
> 
> Organisers were hoping for a turnout that would shock the government in a similar way to the 2003 march, which saw 500,000 people take to the streets.
> 
> "The issues this year mirror those in 2003," Lee Cheuk-yan, a march organiser and leading trade unionist, told AFP.
> 
> "People are frustrated with a government which is unable to lead them through economic hardship and political crisis, although not to a point where they want the chief executive Donald Tsang to step down."
> 
> The 2003 march was galvanised by an economic downturn, the unpopular then-chief executive Tung Chee-hwa and controversy over the introduction of a proposed national security bill.
> 
> The show of people power saw the security legislation shelved and was a key factor in Tung's decision to resign the following year.
> 
> Opposition to the government, which is mainly driven by pro-democratic political parties, has grown in recent months as the latest global economic crisis has hit the financial and export hub hard.
> 
> The city fell into recession in the third quarter of 2008 and the government expects the economy to contract 5.5-6.5 percent in 2009.
> 
> Democracy supporters were further buoyed by the record turnout of 150,000 at the candlelight vigil last month to mark the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
> 
> Among the crowd were also migrant workers who demanded to be included in new minimum wage legislation, one of the many concerns among the marchers.
> 
> The protest coincided with celebrations for the 12th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, after the former British colony was returned to China in 1997.
> 
> A separate, smaller pro-Beijing parade took place early Wednesday, with marchers waving China's national flag and traditional Chinese dragon dances.
> 
> Chief executive Tsang officiated at a flag-raising ceremony and government reception Wednesday morning and said he was confident Hong Kong would sail through the financial crisis and other challenges with the support of China.
> 
> "With perseverance and determination, and most importantly with the all-out support of our country, I am sure we will again prove our resilience and mettle," he said at the reception.
> 
> A separate march also took place by disgruntled investors who had lost money through complex financial products called "mini-bonds", whose value collapsed when the bank that backed them, US investment house Lehman Brothers, went bust last September.
> 
> Amid the serious politics, there were some lighter moments.
> 
> A 40-strong "Complaints Choir" took advantage of Hong Kong's freedom -- the city has a different legal system from mainland China including the right to protest -- to perform a five-minute moan about various aspects of life from taxes to bad bosses.


----------



## CougarKing

Unrest in Xinjiang.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090705/world/international_us_china_xinjiang_unrest



> Three killed in riot in China's Xinjiang region
> 
> 1 hour, 20 minutes ago
> 
> 
> By Chris Buckley
> 
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Three people died in rioting in China's restive far west Xinjiang region on Sunday, state media reported, in a confrontation that underscored the tense divide there between Han Chinese and the Uighur ethnic minority.
> 
> 
> The official Xinhua news agency said rioters "illegally gathered in several downtown places and engaged in beating, smashing, looting and burning" in the regional capital Urumqi.
> 
> 
> The dead were "three ordinary people of the Han ethnic group," Xinhua said. It did not say how they died.
> 
> 
> Nor did the official reports specify the ethnicity of those involved in the unrest or the reasons behind it, and calls to the Xinjiang government spokesperson's office and Urumqi police were not answered.
> 
> But other sources told Reuters the clash involved members of the Uighur ethnic minority, many of whom resent the Chinese presence in the region, and the cultural and religious controls imposed by China's ruling Communist Party.
> 
> 
> Dilxat Raxit, an advocate of Uighur independence exiled in Sweden, said the unrest was sparked by anger over a confrontation between Han Chinese and Uighur factory workers in far southern China in late June, when two Uighurs died.
> 
> 
> "It began as a peaceful assembly. There were thousands of people shouting to stop ethnic discrimination, demanding an explanation. This anger has been growing for a long time," he said of the gathering in Urumqi.
> 
> 
> Many Uighurs complain they are marginalized economically and politically in their own land, which has rich mineral and natural gas reserves.
> 
> 
> An eyewitness in Urumqi, who requested anonymity, told Reuters the police moved in and the confrontation turned violent.
> 
> 
> Rioters overturned traffic rails and smashed buses until thousands of police and anti-riot troops swept through the city, using tear-gas and high-pressure water hoses to disperse crowds.
> 
> 
> "Now the whole city is on lock-down," he said.
> 
> 
> CRACKDOWN EXPECTED
> 
> 
> Alim Seytoff, General Secretary of the Uyghur American Association, based in Washington D.C., said the peaceful protest was led by students angry over the recent factory deaths, and it showed that government efforts to quell Uighur aspirations were failing.
> 
> 
> "Urumqi is a tightly controlled city, but the students have access to all sorts of information on the Internet," he said.
> 
> 
> "Now, I hear, the authorities have been going through university dorms to hunt down participants. ... There will be a harsh crackdown, but the basic problems won't disappear."
> 
> 
> The Chinese video website Youku (www.youku.com) ran footage titled "Urumqi riot" that showed smoke rising from an expressway as a firetruck stopped at the scene.
> 
> 
> An overseas Chinese news website, Boxun (peacehall.com), showed pictures it said were of the Urumqi riot, including hundreds of civilians pressed against a row of police, burning wreckage on a city street, and anti-riot police in shields and helmets.
> 
> Almost half of Xinjiang's 20 million people are Uighurs. Many of them resent controls imposed by Beijing and an inflow of Han Chinese migrants. The population of Urumqi is mostly Han Chinese, and the city is under tight police security even in normal times.
> 
> Xinjiang has been under increasingly tight security in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, when the region was hit by several deadly attacks that authorities said were the work of militants.
> But human rights groups and Uighur independence activists say Beijing grossly exaggerates the threat from militants to justify harsh controls restricting peaceful political demands.
> 
> (Reporting by Chris Buckley; editing by Myra MacDonald)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

A good read of an interview with Robert Kaplan

http://www.michaeltotten.com/

_Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that’s over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they’re not. 

What are the Chinese getting out of this? They’re building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they’re doing all sorts of other building on the island._

More on link


----------



## CougarKing

More unrest in China's westernmost province.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090706/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest



> By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer William Foreman, Associated Press Writer – 35 mins ago
> URUMQI, China – Violence in the capital of China's volatile Xinjiang region killed 140 people and injured 828, an official said Monday, following rioting by members of a Muslim ethnic group and a police crackdown on their demonstrations.
> 
> The official toll makes the unrest the deadliest single incident of unrest in Xinjiang in recent decades.
> 
> The violence in Urumqi apparently happened after a peaceful protest Sunday of about 1,000 to 3,000 people spun out of control, with rioters overturning barricades, attacking vehicles and houses, and clashing with police.
> 
> Uigher exile groups said the violence started only after police began violently cracking down on the peaceful protest.
> 
> Wu Nong, director of the news office of the Xinjiang provincial government, said more than 260 vehicles were attacked or set on fire and 203 houses were damaged. He said 140 people were killed and 828 injured in the violence.
> 
> The official Xinhua News Agency also said 140 people died and that the death toll "was still climbing."
> 
> Tensions between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese are never far from the surface in Xinjiang, China's vast Central Asian buffer province, where militant Uighurs have waged sporadic, violent separatist campaign. The overwhelming majority of Urumqi's 2.3 million people are Han Chinese.
> 
> State television aired footage that showed protesters attacking and kicking people on the ground. Other people sat dazed with blood pouring down their faces.
> 
> Mobile phone service provided by at least one company was cut Monday to stop people from organizing further action in Xinjiang.
> 
> The protest started Sunday with demonstrators demanding a probe into a fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese workers at a southern China factory last month. Accounts differed over what happened next in Urumqi, but the violence seemed to have started when a crowd of protesters — who started out peaceful — refused to disperse.
> 
> Uigher exile groups said the violence started when Chinese security forces cracked down on the peaceful protest.
> "We are extremely saddened by the heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces against the peaceful demonstrators," said Alim Seytoff, vice president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association.
> 
> "We ask the international community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uihgurs. This is a very dark day in the history of the Uighur people," he said.
> 
> The association, led by a former businesswoman now living in America, Rebiya Kadeer, estimated that 1,000 to 3,000 people took part in the protest.


----------



## MarkOttawa

A post at _Dust my Broom_:

The Dragon and selective diplomatic disapproval 
http://dustmybroom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11994:the-dragon-and-selective-diplomatic-disapproval&catid=65:bastards

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

An Armoured Personal Carrier patrols the main square of Urumqi in Xinjiang province July 6, 2009. At least 140 people have been killed in rioting in the capital of China's northwestern region of Xinjiang, the worst case of ethnic violence in the Muslim area in years. REUTERS/Nir Elias (CHINA CONFLICT POLITICS IMAGES OF THE DAY)






Chinese paramilitary police march by a square closed following riots in Urumqi, western China's Xinjiang province, Monday, July 6, 2009. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)






Chinese paramilitary police rest inside an armored vehicle at the entrance to a Uighur district which has been closed following riots in Urumqi, western China's Xinjiang province, Monday, July 6, 2009. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)






Chinese paramilitary police stand guard outside a market which was closed following riots in Urumqi, western China's Xinjiang province, Monday, July 6, 2009.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)






A CCTV grab shows a crowd of men pushing over a police car on a street in Urumqi, the capital of China's Autonomous Region of Xinjiang on July 5. China said at least 140 people were killed in rioting by Muslim Uighurs in its restive Xinjiang region in the deadliest ethnic unrest reported in the country for decades.
(AFP/CCTV)






A CCTV grab shows a crowd clashing with security forces on a street in Urumqi, the capital of China's Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, on July 5. China said at least 140 people were killed in rioting by Muslim Uighurs in its restive Xinjiang region in the deadliest ethnic unrest reported in the country for decades.
(AFP/CCTV)


----------



## Cloud Cover

Unless the guy in the forground has 3 hands, this picture has been phtoshopped for some reason:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090706/China_riots_090706/20090706?hub=TopStories


----------



## CougarKing

How President Ma will act next in this situation should be the next question.



> EDITORIAL: No time for weakness on the Spratlys
> Tuesday, Jul 07, 2009, Page 8
> 
> http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2009/07/07/2003448078
> 
> Another sign that Taiwanese concessions are not being met with goodwill by Beijing is the series of incidents involving Taiwanese fishermen and Chinese vessels in the contested Spratly Islands.
> 
> The chain, which is believed to have rich oil and gas deposits and high fisheries value and is claimed by Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, is seen by many military analysts as a potential flashpoint. Tensions were exacerbated in March when Manila signed a law laying claim to part of the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal, which prompted a heated response from Beijing.
> 
> The last time the Chinese navy engaged in battle over the Spratlys was in 1996, when its vessels engaged in a brief shootout with a Philippine gunboat. Since then, China has engaged in an ambitious naval modernization plan and announced in March that it could convert navy ships into patrol vessels to extend its reach over the Spratlys.
> 
> With this modernization and Beijing’s growing self-confidence, the Philippines has observed — and at times been alarmed by — a growing presence of Chinese vessels patrolling the area. As it flexes its muscles, China has also bullied fishermen from other countries in the area, including Taiwanese. This prompted Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) over the weekend to call on President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to protect the rights — and given the nature of the job, the lives — of Taiwanese fishermen operating in those waters.
> 
> The latest incident occurred last week, when a Chinese “sea exploration” boat harassed a Pingtung fishing boat. Chinese fishing boats were observed nearby.
> 
> So far, the Ma administration has failed to support Taiwanese fishermen and the nation’s claims over the Spratlys, ostensibly to avoid offending Beijing as it strives to improve cross-strait relations. Underscoring that point was his administration suspending a plan initiated by the former DPP government allocating NT$28 billion (US$850 million) to strengthen the Coast Guard’s presence in the area.
> 
> While it would be reckless to risk derailing a cross-strait agenda over the Spratlys, Taiwan must not be seen by Beijing to be capitulating, especially when the livelihood of Taiwanese fishermen is at stake. As in everything else, Taiwan must negotiate from a position of strength, and if this means making its presence felt in the Spratlys, then so be it.
> Beyond this, if Taipei is as pragmatic as Ma would like us to think, it should be proactive in proposing mechanisms to avoid future conflict over the island chain. One way to achieve this would be to assemble all parties involved, or even create a multilateral conflict-resolution mechanism, with Taiwan as a full member. This would be a means for Ma to appease his detractors by showing that he intends to uphold the nation’s dignity, while seeking ways to defuse tensions with China and its neighbors.
> 
> To this end, the Taiwanese government could propose a summit in Taipei — or Pingtung, for that matter — inviting the foreign ministers, navy officials and fisheries organizations from all the countries involved in the dispute. Doing so would force China to prove, by participating, that it means what it says when it claims its rise is a peaceful one.
> 
> Should the Ma government fail to act as a responsible stakeholder on so minor a problem as the Spratly Islands, the rest of the world would be justified in doubting that it would deal any more peacefully on more serious matters.


----------



## CougarKing

And the protests and unrest continue.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090707/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest



> *Fresh protest erupts in China's Xinjiang region*
> William Foreman, Associated Press Writer – 38 mins ago
> URUMQI, China – *Ethnic Uighurs scuffled with armed police Tuesday in a fresh protest in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where at least 156 people have been killed and more than 1,400 people arrested in the worst ethnic violence there in decades.*
> 
> Most of the group of about 200 Uighurs were women protesting the arrests of their husbands in the massive crackdown on members of the Muslim minority by Chinese authorities since the violence was sparked Sunday in the Xinjiang provincial capital.
> 
> _The incident played out in front of reporters who were being taken around Urumqi to see the aftermath of Sunday's riots, when hundreds of vehicles and shops were attacked.
> 
> The women, wearing ornate flowered headscarves, blocked a road. Some screamed that their husbands and children had been arrested. Riot police were at one end of the road and paramilitary police were at the other.
> 
> One woman said her husband was taken away and she would rather die than live without him.
> 
> As they marched down the street, paramilitary police in green camouflage fatigues with sticks marched toward them and pushed the crowd back. A woman fell. The brief scuffle ended when the police retreated. Police in black uniforms with assault rifles and tear gas guns took up positions on the other side of the crowd.
> 
> The women, however, stayed in the street, pumping their fists in the air and wailing. Meanwhile, police tried to weed the men out of the crowd, herding them down a side street. Two boys ran out of a side alley, and a policeman barked at them, "Go home" and grabbed one around the neck, pushing him.
> 
> The 90-minute protest ended when the women walked back into a market area without any resistance._
> 
> (...)
> 
> Mobile phone service and the social networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links also were cut or slowed down.
> 
> A nonviolent protest by 200 people Monday was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua News Agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organize more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu.
> 
> It said police had raided several groups plotting unrest in Dawan township in Urumqi, as well as at a former race course that is home to a transient population.
> 
> (...)
> 
> *Many Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) haven't been wooed by the rapid economic development. Some want independence, while others feel they're being marginalized in their homeland. The Han — China's ethnic majority — have been flooding into Xinjiang as the region becomes more developed.
> 
> The government often says the Uighurs should be grateful for the roads, railways, schools, hospitals and oil fields it has been building in Xinjiang, a region known for scorching deserts and snowy mountain ranges.
> 
> A similar situation exists in Tibet, where a violent protest last year left many Tibetan communities living under clamped-down security ever since.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Uighurs frequently compare their persecution to that imposed on Tibet, but say their cause is not as well known because they lack a Dalai Lama to publicize their cause.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

A woman on a crutch argues with a Chinese soldier in front of an armoured personnel carrier and soldiers wearing riot gear as a crowd of angry locals confront security forces on a street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed with riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic unrest left 156 dead and more than 800 injured. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA CONFLICT MILITARY POLITICS RELIGION)






Chinese riot police get into position as Uighur protesters gather during a demonstration in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic violence broke out leaving 156 people dead and more than 800 injured. REUTERS/Nir Elias (CHINA CONFLICT)






Armed Chinese policemen march towards a group of local women during a confrontation along a street in the city of Urumqi, in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Hundreds of Uighurs protesting against the arrest of relatives clashed with police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday two days after ethnic unrest left 156 dead and 1,080 wounded.
REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA CONFLICT MILITARY POLITICS)






A local woman on a crutch shouts at Chinese armoured personal carriers and soldiers wearing riot gear as a crowd of angry locals confront security forces on a street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. China said a riot that shook the capital of the western Xinjiang region on Sunday killed 140 people and the government called the ethnic unrest a plot against its power, signalling a security crackdown. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA CONFLICT MILITARY POLITICS)






A Chinese police officer holds his gun near a demonstration by Uighur residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic violence broke out leaving 156 people dead and more than 800 injured. REUTERS/ Nir Elias (CHINA CONFLICT POLITICS)






REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA CONFLICT MILITARY POLITICS RELIGION)






Chinese soldiers wearing riot gear run towards a crowd of angry locals during a confrontation on a street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 7, 2009. Hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed with riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic unrest left 156 dead and more than 800 injured. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA CONFLICT MILITARY POLITICS RELIGION)


----------



## CougarKing

Apparently the riots and unrest in Xinjiang seem serious enough to force PRC Pres. Hu to go home early.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090708/world/international_us_china_xinjiang



> *China's Hu skips G8 to deal with Xinjiang riots*
> 1 hour, 41 minutes ago
> 
> By Chris Buckley
> 
> 
> URUMQI, China (Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao abandoned plans to attend a G8 summit in Italy on Wednesday, returning home early to deal with ethnic violence that has left at least 156 dead in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang.
> 
> 
> The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on its website that Hu had left for China "due to the situation" in energy-rich Xinjiang, which borders central Asia, where 1,080 were people have been injured and 1,434 arrested in unrest between Han Chinese and Muslim Uighurs since Sunday.
> 
> 
> State Councillor Dai Bingguo will attend the G8 summit in Hu's place, the ministry added.
> 
> 
> The summit was due to open in the central Italian city of L'Aquila later on Wednesday and Hu had been scheduled to join the talks on Thursday. He arrived in Italy on Sunday and had visited Florence on Tuesday.
> 
> 
> Urumqi, Xinjiang's regional capital, woke up on Wednesday after an overnight curfew that authorities imposed after thousands of Han Chinese stormed through its streets demanding redress and sometimes extracting bloody vengeance for Sunday's violence.
> 
> 
> The city was quiet, except for soldiers shouting in unison as they went about their morning exercises.
> 
> 
> Squads of anti-riot police blocked off main streets, while armored personnel carriers cruised back and forth.
> 
> 
> Late on Tuesday, mobs of Han Chinese wielding clubs, metal bars, cleavers and axes had melted away, but many said Sunday's killings had left a lasting stain of anger.
> 
> Li Yufang, a Han who owns a clothes store in Urumqi, said he was still outraged by what had happened over the weekend, and wanted to protest again, although he admitted it was unlikely amid the heavy presence of troops.
> 
> 
> "I couldn't sleep last night I was so angry," he said, clutching a club and what appeared to be a carving knife wrapped in a black plastic bag.
> 
> 
> "Uighurs are spoiled like pandas. When they steal, rob, rape or kill, they can get away with it. If we Han did the same thing, we'd be executed," Li added, as a friend standing next to him nodded in agreement.
> 
> 
> ETHNIC TENSIONS
> 
> 
> On the other side of Urumqi's now tensely divided neighborhoods, Uighurs protested on Tuesday, defying rows of anti-riot police and telling reporters that their husbands, brothers and sons had been taken away in indiscriminate arrests.
> 
> 
> Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Han Chinese, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities, including Urumqi.
> 
> 
> But controlling the torrid anger on both sides of the region's ethnic divide will now make controlling Xinjiang, with its gas reserves and trade and energy ties to central Asia, all the more testing for the ruling Communist Party.
> 
> 
> The government has sought to bridge that divide by blaming the Sunday killings on exiled Uighurs seeking independence for their homeland, especially Rebiya Kadeer, a businesswoman and activist now living in exile in the United States.
> 
> 
> Kadeer, writing in the Asian Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, condemned the violence on both sides, and again denied being the cause of the unrest.
> 
> "Years of Chinese repression of Uighurs topped by a confirmation that Chinese officials have no interest in observing the rule of law when Uighurs are concerned is the cause of the current Uighur discontent," she wrote.
> 
> The Communist Party boss of Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, sought to press forward that effort in a speech broadcast on regional TV and handed out as a leaflet to Urumqi residents late on Tuesday.
> 
> "This was a massive conspiracy by hostile forces at home and abroad, and their goal was precisely to sabotage ethnic unity and provoke ethnic antagonism," said Wang.
> 
> "Point the spear toward hostile forces at home and abroad, toward the criminals who took part in attacking, smashing and looting, and by no means point it toward our own ethnic brothers," he said, referring to Uighurs.
> 
> Uighurs, a Turkic people who are largely Muslim and share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia, make up almost half of Xinjiang's 20 million people. The population of Urumqi, which lies around 3,300 km (2,000 miles) west of Beijing, is mostly Han.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Shanghai and Benjamin Kang Lim in Beijing; Editing by David Fox)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Based on the sample of those I have met, I would suggest that *most Chinese people are irreligious*; based on my reading of history I would suggest that trend – away from formal, organized religion – is long standing but got a big boost when Sun Yat-sen _et al_* overthrew the, weak, corrupt Qing dynasty in 1911. Sun was, mainly, a Christian but one who, like many Chinese Christians, still observed old folk customs.

Broadly, I think, the Chinese, like most irreligious people, are _tolerant_. Tolerance, I remind readers, does not mean that one supports those beliefs or actions which (s)he tolerates; rather it means that one does not support the suppression of beliefs or actions one finds, at least, distasteful. But there are always limits to tolerance and I suspect the Uyghurs in Xinjiang may have pressed too hard.

In my opinion *most* Chinese are conservatives – not the idiotic Rush Limbaugh_esque_ American bastardizers of that good term, but *real*, rock ribbed conservatives with, real, rock solid, family and social values grounded in Confucianism, not Kristol and Buckley. In my mind, real liberals are believers in protecting the *rights* of the sovereign individual against the depredations of all collectives: church, state, neighbours and so on, while real conservatives value social harmony.

Many people think Islam is a conservative belief system but that is not true because Islam, like Christianity, posits that it can, indeed should or even must *impose* social harmony by requiring that all either adopt Islam or, at least, voluntarily suppress their own, non-Islamic beliefs systems. That position is, as it must be, morally unacceptable to both real liberals and real conservatives.

_Unacceptable_ beliefs and actions, for some (many? most?) Chinese, include: subordination of women;† vandalism against Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist shrines and temples;** and religious schools. (Although many Asian Muslims eschew the Arab/Persian *cultural* values that seek to make e.g. subordination of women into a central tenet of Islam‡ there is intense pressure from the Islamic centre to make Islam into an essentially Arab-Persian belief system to be _embraced_ by all.)

Both the Uyghurs and the Tibetans are _separatists_ but there is a huge difference in how China deals with the two _Autonomous Regions_. China appears intent on winning over Tibetans by buying their loyalty with public works projects and job, Jobs, JOBS! (Shades of Mulroney/Chrétien!) In Xinjiang, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the Chinese aim is, quite simply, to overwhelm the Muslim Uyghurs by pouring millions and millions of Han Chinese into the region until the Uyghurs are a relatively insignificant minority. I’m guessing that there is a long term plan to _encourage_ Uyghurs to migrate to Central and Western China, further diluting their socio-political power.

Thus, I have, partially, changed m mind. I have said, again and again, that Islam is not the enemy. I need to change that. Islam is not *our* (the US led West’s) enemy but it is China’s enemy and, for more complex reasons, India’s, too. Not because it is a ‘foreign’ religion, but because it will not (cannot?) adapt itself to China’s conservative values. In a conservative society, where social harmony is the primary ”good,” those who threaten harmony are “bad” and worthy of being an enemy.


--------------------
* Sun was not even in China at the time of the _Wuchang Uprising_; he returned from exile in the USA and was elected as China’s first president by a hastily convened national congress.
† China is, probably, one of the most ‘equal’ societies on earth; it (equality of output) was imposed by Mao but embraced by Chinese – women, especially.
** Which has happened, in China, in the 21st century. These are, probably, classic insurgent tactics aimed at provoking a disproportionate response from the established authorities.
‡ _Paternalism_ is a tenet of Islam – as it is of Christianity and Judaism – but such things as _burkas_ and _hijabs_ are not required to achieve the Muslim ideal of female *modesty*; they are Arab-Persian cultural _artifacts_.


----------



## tomahawk6

The Army is being sent in to help stop the rioting.The center surely wants to prevent a widespread rebellion and will do whatever is necessary to restore order.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,530561,00.html?test=latestnews

China's president cut short a G8 summit trip to hurry home Wednesday after ethnic tensions soared in Xinjiang territory, with sobbing Muslim women scuffling with riot police and Chinese men with steel pipes and meat cleavers rampaging through the streets.

The new violence in Xinjiang's capital erupted Tuesday only a few hours after the city's top officials told reporters the streets in Urumqi were returning to normal following a riot that killed 156 people Sunday. The officials said more than 1,000 suspects had been rounded up since the spasm of attacks by Muslim Uighurs against Han Chinese, the ethnic majority.

In a rare move, President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy to take part in a Group of Eight meeting later Wednesday to travel home to deal with the violence, the Foreign Ministry said on its Web site.

In Tuesday's chaos, hundreds of young Han men seeking revenge began gathering on sidewalks with kitchen knives, clubs, shovels and wooden poles. They spent most of the afternoon marching through the streets, smashing windows of Muslim restaurants and trying to push past police cordons protecting minority neighborhoods. Riot police successfully fought them back with volleys of tear gas and a massive show of force.


Urumqi had a heavy security presence Wednesday morning after an overnight curfew in the city of 2.3 million was lifted. Two helicopters flew over the city watching the scene.

Uighurs have said this week's rioting was triggered by the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a brawl in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. State-run media have said two workers died, but many Uighurs believe more were killed and said the incident was an example of how little the government cared about them.

The ugly scenes over the last several days highlight how far away the Communist Party is from one of its top goals: Creating a "harmonious society." The unrest was also an embarrassment for the Chinese leadership, which is getting ready to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist rule and wants to show it has created a stable country.

But harmony has been hard to achieve in Xinjiang, a rugged region three times the size of Texas with deserts, mountains and the promise of huge oil and natural gas reserves. Xinjiang is also the homeland for 9 million Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers), a Turkic-speaking group.

Many Uighurs believe the Han Chinese, who have flooded into the region in recent years, are trying to crowd them out. They often accuse the Han of prejudice and waging campaigns to restrict their religion and culture.

The Han Chinese allege the Uighurs are backward and ungrateful for all the economic development and modernization the Han have brought to Xinjiang. They also complain that the Uighurs' religion — a moderate form of Sunni Islam — keeps them from blending into Chinese society, which is officially communist and largely secular.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called the violence a "major tragedy" and said all sides should "exercise great restraint so as not to spark further violence and loss of life."

The authorities have been trying to control the unrest by blocking the Internet, including social networking sites such as Facebook, and limiting access to texting services on cell phones. At the same time, police have generally been allowing foreign media to cover the tensions.

In a sign the government was trying to address communal grievances after the factory brawl in southern China, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday that 13 people had been arrested, including three from Xinjiang. Two others were arrested for spreading rumors on the Internet that Xinjiang employees had raped two female workers, the report said, citing a local police official.

Chinese officials dismiss claims that the Urumqi rioting was caused by long-simmering resentments among the Uighurs. They said the crowds were stirred up by U.S.-exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer and her overseas followers, who used the Internet to spread rumors.

"Using violence, making rumors, and distorting facts are what cowards do because they are afraid to see social stability and ethnic solidarity in Xinjiang," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in Beijing during a blistering verbal attack on Kadeer. She has denied the allegations.

In Washington, D.C., Kadeer accused China of inciting the ethnic violence, saying peaceful Uighur demonstrators have been targeted as part of the continuing repression in the region by the Chinese government.

"I'm not responsible," Kadeer, president of the Uyghur American Association said, during a rally. "The Chinese authorities instigated the violence."


----------



## CougarKing

Gee I wonder where this PRC official learned this suggested course of action of executing rioters/protestors...oh riiight.  

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090708/ap_on_...s_china_protest



> *Chinese troops flood streets after riots*
> By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer William Foreman, Associated Press Writer
> 13 mins ago
> 
> URUMQI, China – *Thousands of Chinese troops flooded into this city Wednesday to separate feuding ethnic groups after three days of communal violence left 156 people dead, and a senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting in western China.
> 
> Long convoys of armored cars and green troop trucks with riot police rumbled through Urumqi, a city of 2.3 million people. Other security forces carrying automatic rifles with bayonets formed cordons to defend Muslim neighborhoods from marauding groups of vigilantes with sticks.
> 
> Military helicopters buzzed over Xinjiang's regional capital, dropping pamphlets urging people to stay in their homes and stop fighting. Special police from other provinces were called in to patrol the city.
> 
> The crisis was so severe that President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy, where he was to participate in a Group of Eight summit.* It was an embarrassing move for a leader who wants to show that China has a harmonious society as it prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist rule.
> 
> The heightened security came amid the worst spasm of ethnic violence in decades in Xinjiang — a sprawling, oil-rich territory that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries. The region is home to the Uighur ethnic minority, who rioted Sunday and attacked the Han Chinese — the nation's biggest ethnic group — after holding a protest that was ended by police.
> 
> Officials have said 156 people were killed as the Turkic-speaking Uighurs ran amok in the city, beating and stabbing the Han Chinese. The Uighurs allege that trigger-happy security forces gunned down many of the protesters, and officials have yet to give an ethnic breakdown of those killed.
> 
> *Li Zhi, the highest-ranking Communist Party official in Urumqi, told reporters that some of the rioters were university students who were misled and didn't understand what they were doing. They would be treated leniently, he said, as long as they weren't involved in serious acts of violence and vandalism.
> 
> But Li added: "To those who committed crimes with cruel means, we will execute them."*
> He also repeated allegations that the riot was whipped up by U.S.-exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer and her overseas supporters. "They're afraid to see our economic prosperity. They're afraid to see our ethnic unity and the people living a stable, prosperous life," he said.
> 
> Kadeer has denied masterminding the violence, and many Uighurs laughed off the notion that they were puppets of groups abroad.
> 
> "Not even a 3-year-old would believe that Rebiya stirred this up. It's ridiculous," said a shopkeeper who only identified himself as Ahmet. Like other Uighurs, he declined to give his full name because he feared the police would detain him.
> 
> Ahmet was quick to rattle off a long list of grievances commonly mentioned by Uighurs. He accused the Han Chinese of discrimination and alleged that government policies were forcing them to abandon their culture, language and Islamic faith.
> 
> "After all this rioting, I'm still filled with hatred. I'm not afraid of the Han Chinese," Ahmet said.
> 
> *His neighborhood in southern Urumqi was targeted by mobs of Han Chinese who roamed the capital Tuesday seeking revenge. Ahmet's friends had video shot by mobile phones and cameras that showed the stick-wielding Han men beating Uighurs. He pointed to blood stains on a white concrete apartment wall, where he said a Uighur was severely stabbed.
> 
> A Uighur college student who called herself Parizat added, "The men were carrying a Chinese flag. I never thought something like this would happen. We're all Chinese citizens."
> The Uighurs accused paramilitary police of allowing the Han Chinese to attack their neighbors. But in the video, the troops appeared to be trying to block or restrain the mobs.*
> 
> On Wednesday, the government warned residents against carrying weapons on the street, and most people generally complied. But there were groups of Han Chinese who tried to find soft spots in police cordons and rush into Uighur neighborhoods.
> 
> One such failed attempt sent a wave of terror and panic through the biggest Uighur neighborhood, Er Dao Qiao.
> 
> When someone yelled, "The Han are coming!" children scampered indoors and women ran shrieking through a backstreet market with carts of watermelons, shops selling cold soft drinks and smoky grills with sizzling lamb kebabs.
> 
> Within seconds, the men armed themselves with spears stashed behind doors and under market stands. The weapons were long poles with knives and meat cleavers tied to the ends. Piles of rocks were placed across the street for ammunition.
> 
> One Uighur graduate student who called himself Memet greeted a foreign reporter in English by saying, "Welcome to the jungle!"
> 
> "I think the Uighur people lately are kind of happy. You can see it in their eyes, a bit of happiness. We've spoken up. People know we exist now," he said.
> 
> The ethnic hatred in Xinjiang appears to run so deep that many Uighurs won't express sorrow for the Han Chinese who were attacked Sunday.
> 
> One of them was Dong Yuanyuan, 24, a newlywed who said she was on a bus with her husband getting ready to leave on their honeymoon. She said Uighur attackers dragged them off the bus and beat them until they were unconscious. Her husband was still missing, said the woman, who had abrasions on her face, arms and knees.
> 
> "My aunts have been going to all the hospitals to search for him. He must still be unconscious," she told reporters who joined a government tour at the People's Hospital.
> 
> Another victim was Ma Weihong, who said she was walking home from a park with her 10-year-old son when the riot started. The boy suffered minor injuries, but the mother had a broken arm and wrist, missing teeth and head wounds.
> 
> "The stores all closed up and we tried to run for home," she said. "That is when they caught us. We couldn't get away."


----------



## CougarKing

So why isn't Iran screaming bloody murder over their fellow Muslims in Xinjiang like they normally do for Palestine? Oh rigght. They got better relations with China.  :

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090711/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest



> By WILLIAM FOREMAN and GILLIAN WONG, Associated Press Writers William Foreman And Gillian Wong, Associated Press Writers – 20 mins ago
> URUMQI, China – *China raised the death toll from riots in its Xinjiang region to 184, state media said Saturday, giving an ethnic breakdown of the dead for the first time after communal violence broke out in this far western city.**
> 
> The official Xinhua News Agency said 137 of the victims belonged to the dominant Han ethnic group. The rest included 45 men and one woman who were Uighurs, and one man of the Hui Muslim ethnic group, the report said, citing the information office of the regional government.
> 
> The previous death toll was 156. Xinhua gave no details on the newly reported deaths, including whether any were from Tuesday, when Han men seeking revenge for the original Uighur-led protest that turned violent marched through the streets with clubs and cleavers, trying to push past police guarding minority neighborhoods.
> 
> Nearly a week after the rioting began, paramilitary police carrying automatic weapons and riot shields blocked some roads leading to the largely Muslim Uighur district of the city Saturday, and groups of 30 marched along the road chanting slogans encouraging ethnic unity.
> 
> Some shops were still closed, and a police van blared public announcements in the Uighur language urging residents to oppose activist Rebiya Kadeer, a 62-year-old Uighur businesswoman who lives in exile in the U.S., whom China says instigated the riots. She has denied it.
> 
> Protests continued Friday after a petite Muslim woman began complaining that the public washrooms were closed at a crowded mosque — the most important day of the week for Islamic worship. Muslims perform required ablutions, or washing, before prayer.*
> 
> When a group gathered around her on the sidewalk, Madina Ahtam then railed against communist rule in Xinjiang.
> 
> The 26-year-old businesswoman eventually led the crowd of mostly men in a fist-pumping street march that was quickly blocked by riot police, some with automatic rifles pointed at the protesters.
> 
> Women have been on the front line in Urumqi partly because more than 1,400 men in the Muslim Uighur minority have been rounded up by police since ethnic rioting broke out July 5. As the communist government launches a sweeping security crackdown, the women have faced down troops, led protests and risked arrest by speaking out against police tactics they believe are excessive.
> 
> The violence came as the Uighurs were protesting the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers in a brawl in southern China. The crowd then scattered throughout Urumqi, attacking Han Chinese, burning cars and smashing windows.
> 
> Many Uighurs who are still free live in fear of being arrested for any act of dissent.
> 
> Thousands of Chinese troops have flooded into Urumqi to separate the feuding ethnic groups, and a senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting.
> A report in the Urumqi Evening News on Friday said police had caught 190 suspects in four raids the day before.
> 
> In many Uighur neighborhoods during the crisis in Urumqi, the women did much of the talking with reporters as the men gathered in small groups on street corners and in back alleys, speaking quietly among themselves.
> 
> "I can't speak freely. The police could come any minute and haul me away," said a Uighur man who would only identify himself as Alim.
> 
> But on Friday, some men challenged officials when they showed up for prayers at Urumqi's popular White Mosque and found the gate closed. Officials had earlier said the mosque would be closed for public safety reasons as security forces tried to pacify the capital.
> 
> The mosque was eventually opened when the crowd swelled and there was a threat of unrest, police said.
> 
> Most Muslim Uighurs practice a moderate form of Sunni Islam or follow the mystical Sufism tradition. The women often work and lead an active social life outside the home. Many wear brightly colored head scarves but the custom is not strongly enforced. Young Uighur women often wear jeans, formfitting tops and dresses.
> 
> As the faithful streamed into the White Mosque, Ahtam arrived holding a lilac umbrella and told foreign reporters in broken English, "Toilet no open. No water."
> 
> She led reporters to an area where the faithful are supposed to cleanse themselves before prayers and said with tears running down her cheeks, "Washing room not open. Everybody no wash."
> 
> After the prayers, she continued speaking on the sidewalk and attracted about 40 people who applauded when she criticized the government.
> 
> "Every Uighur people are afraid. Do you understand? We are afraid. Chinese people are very happy. Why?" said Ahtam.
> 
> The government believes the Uighurs should be grateful for Xinjiang's rapid economic development, which has brought new schools, highways, airports, railways, natural gas fields and oil wells in the sprawling, rugged Central Asian region, three times the size of Texas.
> 
> But many of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, with a population of 9 million in Xinjiang, accuse the dominant Han ethnic group of discriminating against them and saving all the best jobs for themselves. Many also say the Communist Party is repressive and tries to snuff out their Islamic faith, language and culture.
> 
> As Ahtam's crowd became more agitated, about 20 riot police with clubs marched toward the group. The Uighurs pumped their fists in the air and walked down the street with Ahtam leading the pack.
> 
> About 200 more riot police arrived and cut off the group, with some of the security forces kneeling down and pointing their automatic rifles at the marchers. Foreign reporters were led to a side alley, out of view of the protesters, who were forced to squat on the sidewalk along a row of shuttered shops.
> 
> Hours later, calls to Ahtam's cell phone went unanswered and it was unknown what happened to her.
> 
> ___
> 
> Associated Press writer Charles Babington contributed to this report from L'Aquila, Italy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The fact that most Chinese Muslims are Sunni might also account for Iran's antipathy towards them.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The fact that most Chinese Muslims are Sunni might also account for Iran's antipathy towards them.




That thought came to me as well, but remember that aren't most of the Palestinians Sunni as well? But yet Iran is one of the most vocal critics of Israel.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> That thought came to me as well, but remember that aren't most of the Palestinians Sunni as well? But yet Iran is one of the most vocal critics of Israel.




I think the very existence of Israel dominates the politics of the region. Sunni and Shia are united in their detestation of a Jewish state near the "heart" of Islam, occupying one of the holy places. In terms of competition for the leadership of the Arab/Persian (and North African and West Asian?) "community" it is vital to be the one that professes the most virulent hatred for Israel. A leading nation need not actually *do* anything about Israel. It can, as Egypt does, even have _normal_, peaceful relations with the Zionist state, but each Arab/Persian nation must, ritually, pronounce its loathing of Israel and the Jews, just as, equally ritually, Israel must protest and react against the Arab/Persian threats and periodic acts of terrorism.

Further, China is not the sort of nation against which one rants and raves with impunity. The Chinese are proud and prickly and prone to respond, forcefully, to perceived insults. (Juts look at the problems Canada has trying to gain “Approved Destination Status” for China’s millions of tourists. The Chinese are withholding it – and the high value trade it represents for Canada – as punishment for the Harper government’s amateurish policies towards China.)


----------



## a_majoor

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> That thought came to me as well, but remember that aren't most of the Palestinians Sunni as well? But yet Iran is one of the most vocal critics of Israel.



"The enemy of my enemy is my friend"


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another update.

From: Agence France-Presse - 7/13/2009 4:35 PM GMT



> *US-China strategic-economic dialogue set for July 27*
> Top US and Chinese leaders will meet for the first "strategic and economic dialogue" with the administration of President Barack Obama in Washington July 27-28, US officials said Monday.
> 
> *The dialogue "will focus on addressing the challenges and opportunities that both countries face on a wide range of bilateral, regional and global areas of immediate and long-term strategic and economic interests," according to a statement from the US Treasury and State Departments.
> 
> "This first meeting of the dialogue will also set the stage for intensive, ongoing and future bilateral cooperative mechanisms."
> 
> The meeting is the first in a series agreed by Obama and China's President Hu Jintao that replaces a "strategic economic dialogue" established by former president George W. Bush's administration and Beijing.*
> 
> US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will be joined by their respective Chinese co-chairs, State Councilor Dai Bingguo and Vice Premier Wang Qishan.


----------



## CougarKing

As said, China's government still has yet to provide more than scant evidence of an Al-Qaeda link to any Uighur dissenter group.

 http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=1789242



> SHANGHAI -- *A North African offshoot of al-Qaeda has China in its crosshairs because of its treatment of Muslim rioters in Urumqi last week.
> 
> A group called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQM) is threatening attacks on the 50,000 Chinese workers in Algeria*, according to a report prepared by international risk consultants Sterling Assynt and revealed in the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
> 
> The Chinese government is taking its first threat from Osama bin Laden's deadly network seriously. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters: "We will keep a close eye on developments and make joint efforts with relevant countries to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of overseas Chinese institutions and people."
> 
> The al-Qaeda warning comes just a week after ethnic riots in Urumqi, capital of China's western Xinjiang region, left at least 184 dead. Ironically, the Chinese government claims only about one-third of the dead are Uighurs, who are Sunni Muslims of Turkic extraction. It says the vast majority are Han, the dominant ethnic group in China.
> 
> *Although it has offered scant proof, Beijing has maintained since the trouble began on July 5 that exiled Uighurs with ties to al-Qaeda fomented the violence.
> 
> Sterling Assynt was apparently tipped to the impending al-Qaeda attacks by Internet "chatter" among angry jihadists.*
> 
> Beijing frequently blames "terrorists" for attacks in Tibet and the Xinjiang Autonomist Region, but China has actually been spared attacks on its territory by anyone other than homegrown troublemakers. Its ability to ramp up security at its borders, as it did in advance of last summer's Olympic Games, is legend -- and effective.
> 
> The fledgling superpower isn't quite so lucky outside its own boundaries, however, particularly as it increases its economic interests in Africa.
> 
> While not specifically targeted, Chinese workers have been caught up in local fights and been kidnapped in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sudan in recent years. And, just last month, AQM attacked Algerian police guarding the Chinese workers who are building Algeria's east-west highway. Some 19 Algerians were killed.
> 
> AQM's sudden interest in defending Uighurs comes after a week of near indifference to their plight by the Islamic world. The sole exception was Turkey, where public opinion prompted the government into a quick defence of its ethnic blood brothers.
> 
> Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was particularly outspoken.
> 
> "The incidents in China are a genocide," he said. "There's no point in interpreting this otherwise."
> 
> On Tuesday, the official China Daily called on Erdogan "to take back his remarks."
> 
> Meanwhile, in Iran, no stranger to internal turmoil, the official response was so muted some of the more activist mullahs were spurred to protest on their own when China closed most mosques in Urumqi in an effort to prevent Uighurs from gathering in numbers for Friday prayers last week.
> 
> "Although the Chinese government has regarded the event as an ethnic conflict, the government's support for the opposing group, the severe repression of the Muslims and the closing of their mosques are all signs of a conspiracy against the Muslims in the region," Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said in a statement.
> 
> While the western world was not vociferous in its support of the Uighurs, the Arab world was quieter still. And, its overwhelming silence was probably as gratifying to China as it was expected.
> 
> This year, China replaced the U.S. as the biggest exporter to the oil soaked and trouble-ridden Mideast countries that were once prosperous way stations along the famous Silk Road trading route. As author Ben Simpfendorfer points out in his recently published book, "The New Silk Road," China didn't steal the U.S. trading crown in the region by selling an astronomically priced rocket to Egypt, either. Rather, it triumphed by connecting hundreds of thousands of Mideast traders with factories in China that make everything from shoes to mixing bowls. Beijing facilitated ties that bind more firmly than political ideals and even religious ideals, particularly among governments who often have their own internal bogeymen to fight. Simply put, Sino-Arab relations withstood their first major test and trade trumped.


----------



## a_majoor

A different way of viewing China. I found the final paragraph very interesting indeed, one rarely thinks of Turkey as being an international player anymore (after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during WWI).

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/15/uighurs-china-great-game-russia-al-qaeda-opinions-contributors-charles-hill.html



> *The New Great Game*
> Charles Hill, 07.16.09, 12:01 AM EDT
> China's best-kept secret is out.
> 
> For years it's been a closely held secret: The People's Republic of China is an empire desperately trying to make the world think it's a state.
> 
> The riots by Uighurs in China's far northwest are not something new; the place really erupted back about the time of the American Civil War. Clashes between Han Chinese moving into the basin, range and uplands inhabited by the much different ethnic people of the Central Asian heartland began at least 2,000 years ago in the Han Dynasty. Some of the most powerful pieces in Chinese literature, like the Tang Dynasty Ballad of the Army Carts by the eighth-century poet Du Fu, tell of the bitter hardships of lonely soldiers sent to garrison military settlements far to the west of China proper.
> The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) conquered East Turkestan in the 18th century and began to consolidate control there in the late 1800s. But the Qing court, terminally beleaguered by Western encroachments along the China coast, was too feeble to impose central control on its far-flung takings.
> 
> The collapse of the Qing in 1912 intensified China's Search for a Political Form, as historian Jack Gray titled it. Mao Zedong's successful guerrilla wars and 1949 takeover imposed the form: a Communist internationalism under which the acquisitions of dynastic empires past, as well as ethnic and nationalistic movements, were swiftly and powerfully subsumed by a Marxist-Maoist ideology aimed at bringing world revolution. The new People's Republic of China declared the far northwest to be its "Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region."
> 
> Ever since the rise and conquests of the Arabs in the seventh century, waves of Muslim influence began to reach Chinese Central Asia. Arab traders, indigenous converts, mystical Sufi enthusiasts and, eventually, the radical Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood arrived and even played a role in bringing about an end to the Qing Dynasty. Across the years, one constant theme was periodic rebellion by Muslim Uighurs and a growing sense in Beijing that the locals were intractable, treacherous and violent.
> 
> With China's rise to wealth and power in the post-Mao era, the PRC, now lacking the cover of world revolution, was forced to find some way to legitimate its possession of Xinjiang. World history's age of empire had ended by the mid-20th century. Communist China's evil twin, the USSR, had been the territorial successor to the Tsarist empire as Mao's PRC had been to the Qing.
> 
> At the Cold War's end, the Soviet Union came apart; its counterparts to China's Xinjiang became independent sovereign states and UN members. The PRC, determined to avoid a like fate, began a fervent campaign to convince the international community that all lands behind its borders, acquired in the imperial past, are inviolable internal possessions of its sovereign statehood.
> 
> Whatever the forum, notably in the United Nations and its associated international agencies, and whenever an issue touches on sovereign statehood, as when Kosovo was detached from Serbia in 2008, the PRC can be counted on as the most determined defender of the proposition that nonintervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state within the Westphalian international system is the most sacrosanct principle of world affairs. China takes every care to present itself as the perfect, and most particular, international citizen.
> 
> It's no wonder why. China's vast borderlands today encompass a dizzying variety of languages, ethnicities, religions and nationalities: Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs are the most prominent; a lengthy list of other distinctive minority peoples are spread all along China's southern and southeastern marches.
> 
> *And yet China's apparent ambitions beyond its borders seem to belie its insistence on tightly wound statehood. Some of the Qing possessions not still under PRC control are in its sights--Taiwan and the entirety of the South China Sea down to Brunei are included. As the U.S. Navy is starting to realize, a major PRC aim is to transform all the waters of maritime Asia--those between the continental mainland and the offshore states of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia--into a Chinese "lake." If nominally still in the category of international straits or high seas, these waters would become de facto a "no go" zone for the world's shipping. Chinese authorities would have to be prenotified and approve passage there--imperial-era influence regained.*
> 
> The 1989 Tiananmen killings occurred when students confronted soldiers. The uprising was crushed but left a feeling that the Chinese Revolution, which might be dated back to 1911 or even 1839, was not over. Predictions were that when the next round came, it would not be students but urban workers who would have to be put down. The Uighur riots of July 2009 look something like that but with the added volatility of ethnicity and religion at work as well.
> 
> The epicenter of the Islamist war on world order (a more accurate term than the "war on terror") is now on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a fact that should be keeping China's leaders sleepless in Beijing as a restive Uighur population in "East Turkestan," as the locals call it, offers a new front for radical Islamist warfare. Perhaps this possibility was in President Hu Jintao's thoughts as he broke off from the G-8 summit in Italy to return to oversee the Xinjiang crisis.
> The July riots in Urumqi are not just one more case of "every 30 years a small rebellion," as the Uighur-Han confrontation has been described. A new concatenation of claims is taking shape.
> 
> The Chinese will have to accelerate their program to overwhelm Xinjiang with Han-dominated population, culture, and economy--to complete their centuries-long imperial plan even as they insist on their privileges as a sovereign state.
> The Uighurs and their external supporters in the World Uighur Congress will seek a solution in the autonomy promised by the original creation of the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region, but they won't get it any more than Tibetans will be allowed true autonomy in their autonomous region, where another process of Chinese-ization has been long under way.
> By frustrating legitimate Uighur aspirations, Beijing will provide al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants with the means to radicalize the Muslim population of China's northwest in a jihad. China's minorities policy recognizes the existence of ethnic nationalities like Uighurs and Tibetans but refuses to recognize religion. This plays into the hands of Muslim extremists. Beijing has already branded the Uighur uprising as "Islamic terrorism."
> 
> The idea of a ''clash of civilizations'' may be superseded by a clash of ''spheres of influence,'' an old concept in world affairs that has raised its head again. China is extending its de facto power westward to fit its de jure state boundaries. Russia is seeking a sphere of influence over its lost territories in Central Asia; Russia approves what the PRC is doing with the Uighurs because it wants approval for its own ambitions in the area. The U.S. has important interests there as a staging area for its ''Af-Pak'' counter-insurgency efforts.
> 
> *And the rising power Turkey has come on the scene to claim a sphere of influence across all the Turkic ethnic-linguistic Central Asian lands that range well inside China's borders. The Turkish prime minister has called the situation in Xinjiang a "genocide." There are layers of complex factors in play here involving power politics, economic exploitation, ethnic rivalries and religion. A new "Great Game" is under way, and the Chinese Revolution is still not over.*
> 
> Charles Hill, a former U.S. diplomat, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he is co-director of the Hoover working group on Islamism and International Order.


----------



## Yrys

China admits Uighur riot killings





_Chinese forces are still out 
in force in Urumqi_

A Chinese official says police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in Urumqi this month, 
in a rare government admission of deaths inflicted by security forces.

Nuer Baikeli, governor of Xinjiang region and himself a Uighur, said those killed 
had ignored police warning shots and were attacking civilians and shops. He said 
police had shown restraint and had no choice but to act.

Some 200 people - mostly Han Chinese - died in the clashes between Muslim 
Uighurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi.

"The rioters, the criminals, continued to act in an extremely vicious manner, 
insisted on having their way, and continued to threaten the lives of others," 
he told reporters. "It was at this point that our public security forces and 
military police decisively fired. They shot dead 12 rioters. Of them, three 
died on site, and nine died as people tried to save them."

The violence in Xinjiang began on 5 July during a protest by Uighurs over 
a brawl in southern China in late June in which two people were killed.
Uighur groups in exile have said hundreds of Uighurs were killed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, admitting Uyghur deaths, is for internal consumption. The Han want some blood. Please note that every Chinese TV newscast, for days and days and days, will have played up the 200 Han casualties.

There is a large audience who need to be made to "understand" that the Uyghurs are violent separatists.

Now, in fairness, we Canadians were pretty excited when, back nearly 40 years ago, a gang of separatists here in Canada kidnapped a couple of "ranking" people and killed one of them. The old war Measures Act, with some pretty draconian provisions, was quickly applied and so on.


----------



## burnaby

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This, admitting Uyghur deaths, is for internal consumption. The Han want some blood. Please note that every Chinese TV newscast, for days and days and days, will have played up the 200 Han casualties.



Well you got to understand, the media is state controlled, you can't say anything else. The Han and Uyghur have been' living together for more than a 100 years. The problem is that the Communist Chinese government policy on minorities increased(because the "War on Terror") and the flood of Han to that region. Further more the economical despairity between the two is wide. Its like saying these bloody immigrants (Han) is taking all the good jobs, this fear this triggers violence, this also happened to Canada once upon a time. From speaking to friends, they don't really believe that this rioting was caused by terrorist groups, just bottle up ethnic hate and fear. Its easy to blame terrorist, because they could be anyone that the state deems to be.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually, the Han and the Uyghur peoples have been living “together” for well over 2,000 years – usually none to happily, either. The Han started to “settle” the West when they needed to secure the Northern Silk Road; the Turkik peoples who lived there, herding, trading and raiding, were less than pleased to see them. The latest Han _in migration_ is large and aims, specifically, to reduce the Uyghurs to (small) minority status by overwhelming them, peacefully.

Regarding Chinese media: It is true that all media is “state controlled” but there are many, many _competing voices_ in print and, especially, on TV. There is a rough and competitive TV market featuring _national_ government channels, _provincial_ and _city_ government channels and _private_ channels. Any can be yanked off the air for a variety of infractions but it is very wrong to assume that there is one single message or one single voice. There is no message, not for long anyway, that runs too far counter to the Beijing _party line_, but not all the “messages” faithfully toe that line, either.


----------



## CougarKing

Another update about the upcoming conference/summit:



> Agence France-Presse - 7/21/2009 8:24 PM GMT
> Obama to address China-US economic talks
> US President Barack Obama will address the opening of top level strategic and economic talks between Chinese and US leaders here next week, a White House official said Tuesday.
> 
> "President Obama will address the opening session of the first US-China strategic and economic dialogue on Monday July, 27," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
> 
> Gibbs added Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao "launched this dialogue during their meeting in London in April as a way of strengthening relationships between the two countries."
> 
> The new high-level discussions, set for Monday and Tuesday, are an extension of economic talks begun under the previous administration of George W. Bush, but with a broader focus.
> 
> The dialogue "will focus on addressing the challenges and opportunities that both countries face on a wide range of bilateral, regional and global areas of immediate and long-term strategic and economic interests," according to a joint statement from the US Treasury and State Departments last week.
> 
> Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will chair the American side of the dialogue.
> 
> Hu and Obama agreed when they met in April that Clinton and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo will chair the "strategic track" and Geithner and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan will chair the "economic track" of the talks.
> 
> The US leader also accepted an invitation to visit China later in the year.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is an interesting report:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/imf-shines-a-light-on-chinas-rising-star/article1227772/


> MF shines a light on China's rising star
> *Toned-down criticism a recognition lecturing, bullying was having little effect*
> 
> Kevin Carmichael
> 
> Ottawa — Thursday, Jul. 23, 2009
> 
> There's a new way to measure China's rising clout: A sudden reluctance to criticize its currency policy.
> 
> The International Monetary Fund's board of directors Wednesday released a report on China's economy notable for its lack of decisive criticism.
> 
> Rather than make accusations of currency manipulation, the report allowed a split opinion.
> 
> It noted that “some directors” are of the view that China's currency, the yuan, is “substantially undervalued” while “a number of other directors” accept that it's difficult to make accurate assessments of proper foreign exchange rates.
> 
> The wording is significant because the IMF prefers consensus. Compromise was necessary to get China to remove a veto over the release of the fund's annual review of its economy, which it has enforced since 2007 to protest a change in the way the IMF assesses exchange rates. The report signals countries such as the U.S., Britain and Germany have given up their long-standing effort to put the institutional weight of the IMF behind their contention China holds down the value of its currency to give its exporters an unfair trade advantage.
> 
> “Directors welcomed the important progress made in the past few years in increasing the market's role in determining the exchange rate,” the report states.
> 
> The report goes on to note “the consequent substantial real appreciation that has been achieved since the exchange rate reform in 2005.”
> 
> China's holdings of foreign currency reserves climbed above $2-trillion (U.S.) this year, a reflection of the government's efforts to control the value of the yuan.
> 
> Under pressure from the United States, Chinese authorities loosened the yuan's peg to the U.S. dollar in 2005 and allowed the currency to edge higher.
> 
> The financial crisis has dampened enthusiasm in China for a more-flexible exchange rate. The IMF review noted that the nominal exchange rate of the yuan hasn't risen against the dollar since the middle of 2008.
> 
> The Chinese currency, which traded at 6.83 yuan to the U.S. dollar Wednesday, should be 15 per cent to 25 per cent higher against major currencies after adjusting for inflation, according to Morris Goldstein and Nicholas Lardy, economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
> 
> Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven major industrial countries also have toned down their criticism of China, choosing to highlight the country's progress in adopting more market-oriented policies.
> 
> The shift is a result of a growing desire on the part of the world's economic powers to coax China into playing a greater role in international affairs, recognizing that the previous strategy of lecturing and bullying was having little effect.
> 
> Mr. Hu's government has the world's third-largest economy on track to grow 7.5 per cent in 2009, even though almost all of the world's developed economies are in recession.
> 
> Economic success is creating a boldness that is causing the Chinese regime to stand up to criticism and take a more assertive stand on policy issues.
> 
> “The Chinese felt they were being ganged up on,” said Bessma Momani, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ont.-based Centre for International Governance Innovation, of the country's reaction to the debate over the valuation of its currency.
> 
> As a result of China's success in fighting the global recession, “there's a feeling that they are vindicated,” said Ms. Momani, who is writing a book on the history of the IMF. “They are in a higher position.”
> 
> The IMF's 24-member board of directors commended China for its $585-billion stimulus program, and said the government's debt was low enough to do more to boost private consumption.
> 
> The board did nudge China's government to move away from its dependence on exports, saying any short-term job losses would eventually be replenished by a stronger services industry.




The Chinese appear to have made the _right_ choices over the past few months and they want some credit, in the halls of the mighty, for doing more than their “fair share” to help us all dig out of the Euro-American fiscal fiasco.

The IMF board is, undoubtedly, correct to encourage China to focus less on exports and to build its service sector but they have to understand that the overarching goal for China is to maintain social harmony and that means maintaining the jobs they have and creating lots and lots of new ones. The process, for the Chinese, has to be _slowing_ the growth of their export business while they, more slowly than they might like, build a service sector.


----------



## CougarKing

More updates on both cross-strait relations as well as another China initiative:



> Agence France-Presse - 7/25/2009 5:30 AM GMT
> *Taiwan, China to talk trade in October: report
> Taiwan and China will begin negotiations on a comprehensive trade pact in October, in a further step towards closer economic ties between the two neighbours, a report here said Saturday.
> 
> Vice trade ministers from both sides will head the negotiations for the economic cooperation framework agreement, or ECFA, the China Times reported, quoting Taiwanese economic minister Yiin Chii-ming. *
> Yiin, who met *his Chinese counterpart Chen Deming * during last week's APEC conference in Singapore, said Beijing was keen to push for the pact, similar in scope to a free-trade agreement, the report said.
> 
> *The two sides will aim to conclude discussions by the end of the year so that an agreement may be ready for signing at an upcoming meeting between their top envoys -- Taiwan's Chiang Pin-kung and Chen Yunlin of China, it said.
> 
> The two are expected to meet in Taiwan later this year, following talks in April which led to agreements on expanding air links and promoting mainland Chinese investment on the island.
> 
> Taiwan's government is counting on the pact to help free the flow of goods and personnel and to help it tackle recession, but critics warn against the island becoming overly dependent on its giant neighbour.*
> 
> China and Taiwan split in 1949 after a civil war, but Beijing still sees the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
> 
> Relations have improved dramatically since Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou took office last year.





> Agence France-Presse - 7/25/2009 6:02 AM GMT
> *China launches Arabic international TV channel
> China Saturday launched an international Arabic-language television channel as part of an ambitious programme to promote the communist country's views abroad.
> 
> State-run China Central Television (CCTV) said the new service would broadcast news, entertainment and education programmes 24 hours a day to a potential audience of about 300 million people in 22 countries.
> 
> CCTV vice-president Zhang Changming said in a statement the channel "would serve as an important bridge to strengthen communication and understanding between China and the Arab countries." *
> 
> The network, which already broadcasts in English, French and Spanish, also has plans for a Russian-language service.
> 
> CCTV began work last September on launching its new Arabic channel.
> 
> The satellite channel can be received across the Middle East, North Africa and in the Asia-Pacific region, the statement said.
> 
> The move is part of an ambitious programme of international expansion by the state-controlled media to promote the image of China abroad. Xinhua news agency, which already reports from more than 100 countries and territories, also plans to open more foreign bureaus.
> 
> "We must increase our broadcasting capacity to positively influence international public opinion and to give an good image of our nation," propaganda chief Wang Chen declared in January, as quoted by Xinhua.
> 
> *Hong Kong daily the South China Morning Post has reported that Beijing was prepared to put 45 billion yuan (6.6 billion dollars) into the development of its media, an amount which could not be confirmed by Chinese sources.
> 
> Beijing has complained about "biased" coverage of China by foreign media but strictly controls its own media.*


----------



## CougarKing

Another update:



> *Obama: US-China relations to shape 21st century*
> 
> _July 27, 2009
> Associated Press_
> 
> WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama said Monday that the relationship between the United States and China will shape the history of the 21st century.
> 
> Obama, speaking at the start of two days of high-level talks between the two nations, said that Washington and Beijing needed to forge closer ties to address a host of challenges from lifting the global economy out of a deep recession to nuclear proliferation.
> 
> "I believe that we are poised to make steady progress on some of the most important issues of our times," the president told diplomats from both countries.
> 
> Obama said he was under "no illusions that the United States and China will agree on every issue" but he said closer cooperation in important areas was critical for the world.
> 
> The discussions in Washington represent the continuation of a dialogue begun by the Bush administration, which focused on economic tensions between the two nations. Obama chose to expand the talks to include foreign policy issues as well as economic disputes.
> 
> Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, welcoming the Chinese, said the two nations were "laying brick by brick the foundation for a stronger relationship."
> 
> Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Vice Premier Wang Qishan, China's top economic policymaker, both spoke of hopeful signs that the global economy was beginning to emerge from its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
> 
> Geithner said that the so far successful efforts of the two economic superpowers to move quickly to deal with the downturns with massive stimulus programs marked a historic turning point in the relationship of the two nations.
> 
> Speaking through a translator, Wang said that "at present the world economy is at a critical moment of moving out of crisis and toward recovery."
> 
> State Councilor Dai Bingguo said that the two countries were trying to build better relations despite their very different social systems, cultures, ideologies and histories.
> 
> "We are actually all in the same big boat that has been hit by fierce wind and huge waves," Dai said of the global economic and other crises.
> 
> 
> http: //news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090727/ap_on_bi_ge/us_china_talks


----------



## a_majoor

On one hand we have the prediction that China will overtake the US economically by 2050 and rule the world, and on the other naysayers claiming "China will grow old before it becomes rich" and everything in between. There is another possibility: the rug will be pulled out from under them resulting in massive global instability (stuff to keep you awake at night):

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/23/the_china_bubbles_coming_but_not_the_one_you_think



> *The China Bubble's Coming -- But Not the One You Think*
> Forget about a Shanghai stock bubble. The whole Chinese economy's getting ready to burst.
> 
> BY VITALIY KATSENELSON | JULY 23, 2009
> 
> Financial commentators are obsessively debating whether the recent rise in the Chinese stock market means there's a bubble -- and if so, when it's going to burst.
> 
> My take? Who cares! What happens to the broader Chinese economy is what we should really be watching. It will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world -- much more far-reaching than a decline in stocks.
> 
> Despite everything, the Chinese economy has shown incredible resilience recently. Although its biggest customers -- the United States and Europe -- are struggling (to say the least) and its exports are down more than 20 percent, China is still spitting out economic growth numbers as if there weren't a worry in the world. The most recent estimate put annual growth at nearly 8 percent.
> 
> Is the Chinese economy operating in a different economic reality?  Will it continue to grow, no matter what the global economy is doing?
> 
> The answer to both questions is no. China's fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups -- and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent's equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn't factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.
> 
> Funds to buy Lucent's equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance the purchase of its own equipment. This worked well enough, until it came time to pay back the loans.
> 
> The United States, of course, isn't a dot-com. But a great portion of its growth came from borrowing Chinese money to buy Chinese goods, which means that Chinese growth was dependent on that very same borrowing.
> 
> Now the United States and the rest of the world is retrenching, corporations are slashing their spending, and consumers are closing their pocket books. This means that the consumption of Chinese goods is on the decline. And this is where the dot-com analogy breaks down. Unlike Lucent, China has nuclear weapons. It can print money at will and can simply order its banks to lend. It is a communist command economy, after all. Lucent is now a $2 stock. China won't go down that easily.
> 
> The Chinese central bank has a significant advantage over the U.S. Federal Reserve. Chairman Ben Bernanke and his cohort may print a lot of money (and they did), but there's almost nothing they can do to speed the velocity of money. They simply cannot force banks to lend without nationalizing them (and only the government-sponsored enterprises have been nationalized). They also cannot force corporations and consumers to spend. Since China isn't a democracy, it doesn't suffer these problems.
> 
> China's communist government owns a large part of the money-creation and money-spending apparatus. Money supply therefore shot up 28.5 percent in June. Since it controls the banks, it can force them to lend, which it has also done.
> 
> Finally, China can force government-owned corporate entities to borrow and spend, and spend quickly itself. This isn't some slow-moving, touchy-feely democracy. If the Chinese government decides to build a highway, it simply draws a straight line on the map. Any obstacle -- like a hospital, a school, or a Politburo member's house -- can become a casualty of the greater good. (Okay -- maybe not the Politburo member's house).
> 
> Although China can't control consumer spending, the consumer is a comparatively small part of its economy. Plus, currency control diminishes the consumer's buying power. All of this makes the United States' TARP plans look like child's play. If China wants to stimulate the economy, it does so -- and fast. That's why the country is producing such robust economic numbers.
> 
> Why is China doing this? It doesn't have the kind of social safety net one sees in the developed world, so it needs to keep its economy going at any cost. Millions of people have migrated to its cities, and now they're hungry and unemployed. People without food or work tend to riot. To keep that from happening, the government is more than willing to artificially stimulate the economy, in the hopes of buying time until the global system stabilizes. It's literally forcing banks to lend -- which will create a huge pile of horrible loans on top of the ones they've originated over the last decade.
> 
> But don't confuse fast growth with sustainable growth. Much of China's growth over the past decade has come from lending to the United States. The country suffers from real overcapacity. And now growth comes from borrowing -- and hundreds of billion-dollar decisions made on the fly don't inspire a lot of confidence. For example, a nearly completed, 13-story building in Shanghai collapsed in June due to the poor quality of its construction.
> 
> This growth will result in a huge pile of bad debt -- as forced lending is bad lending. The list of negative consequences is very long, but the bottom line is simple: There is no miracle in the Chinese miracle growth, and China will pay a price. The only question is when and how much.
> 
> Another casualty of what's taking place in China is the U.S. interest rate. China sold goods to the United States and received dollars in exchange. If China were to follow the natural order of things, it would have converted those dollars to renminbi (that is, sell dollars and buy renminbi). The dollar would have declined and renminbi would have risen. But this would have made Chinese goods more expensive in dollars -- making Chinese products less price-competitive. China would have exported less, and its economy would have grown at a much slower rate.
> 
> But China chose a different route. Instead of exchanging dollars back into renminbi and thus driving the dollar down and the renminbi up -- the natural order of things -- China parked its money in the dollar by buying Treasurys. It artificially propped up the dollar. And now, China is sitting on 2.2 trillion of them.
> 
> Now, China needs to stimulate its economy. It's facing a very delicate situation indeed: It needs the money internally to finance its continued growth. However, if it were to sell dollar-denominated treasuries, several bad things would happen. Its currency would skyrocket -- meaning the loss of its competitive low-cost-producer edge. Or, U.S. interest rates would go up dramatically -- not good for its biggest customer, and therefore not good for China.
> 
> This is why China is desperately trying to figure out how to withdraw its funds from the dollar without driving it down -- not an easy feat.
> 
> And the U.S. government isn't helping: It's printing money and issuing Treasurys at a fast clip, and needs somebody to keep buying them. If China reduces or halts its buying, the United States may be looking at high interest rates, with or without inflation. (The latter scenario is most worrying.)
> 
> All in all, this spells trouble -- a big, big Chinese bubble. Identifying such bubbles is a lot easier than timing their collapse. But as we've recently learned, you can defy the laws of financial gravity for only so long. Put simply, mean reversion is a bitch. And the longer excesses persist, the harder the financial gravity will bring China's economy back to Earth.


----------



## CougarKing

Hmm. Obviously any extremely severe economic stability might threaten the CCP's hold on power and its "mandate of heaven" which should rightly be called "mandate of the people"/popular legitimacy.

And here's another update regarding the Uighurs:



> Agence France-Presse - 7/27/2009 7:44 AM GMT
> *Uighur premiere a sell-out in Australia*
> The premiere of a documentary about a Uighur activist that Chinese officials tried to have pulled from Australia's biggest film festival was a sell-out success, organisers said Monday.
> 
> The Melbourne International Film Festival called in security guards for Sunday night's premiere of "Ten Conditions of Love" fearing trouble amid Chinese anger over the film about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.
> 
> Festival director Richard Moore has accused Chinese officials of trying to bully him into pulling the documentary, while Chinese directors have withdrawn their films in protest and hackers have attacked the festival website.
> 
> Event spokeswoman Louise Heseltine said the website remained partially disabled Monday because of the cyber-attacks, in which hackers replaced information with the Chinese flag and left anti-Kadeer slogans.
> 
> But she said the screening at a city centre cinema was peaceful and the audience response was positive.
> 
> "No one came to protest or demonstrate against it," she said, adding that efforts to stop the film had only enhanced its profile.
> 
> China accuses Kadeer, the US-based head of the World Uighur Congress, of masterminding violent unrest in China's northwestern Xinjiang region on July 5 that left more than 190 people dead. She denies the charges.
> 
> Foreign ministry officials in Beijing have said they oppose countries providing Kadeer with a platform "to engage in anti-China separatist activities".
> 
> The Australian film-maker behind the documentary, Jeff Daniels, said he was surprised at the strength of the campaign against his film.
> 
> "I understood that the Chinese government certainly didn't want the film to be screened but I never thought people would put that much pressure on the festival," he told Sky News.
> 
> Daniels, who will host Kadeer when the film next screens in Melbourne on August 8, said he was pleased Sunday's premiere was peaceful.
> 
> "I know emotions are running high at the moment. It's a very dark time for the Uighurs in China and there are a lot of angry people from China on both sides, he said.
> 
> "So I'm very happy that it went peacefully, as a documentary should, and people were able to see different sides of the story."
> 
> The Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority group who mainly live in western Xinjiang province, complain of political and religious repression under Chinese rule.


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another update:



> Agence France-Presse - 7/29/2009 11:28 AM GMT
> *Uighur leader says 10,000 'disappeared' in China
> The exiled leader of China's Uighurs said Wednesday nearly 10,000 of her people were detained or killed this month in ethnic unrest and appealed for the United Nations to investigate their fate.
> 
> Rebiya Kadeer, the US-based head of the World Uighur Congress, also said she was "perplexed" at the muted US response to the violence as she spoke during a visit to Japan that has drawn angry protests from Beijing. *
> 
> Citing local sources and speaking through an interpreter, she said almost 10,000 people "disappeared" in one night on July 5 when authorities cracked down on the unrest in the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang.
> 
> "Where did those people go?" she said. "If they died, where did they go?"
> 
> Kadeer, 62, said Chinese police opened machine-gun fire at Uighur people after dark once the electricity was turned off, and that the following morning large numbers of Uighur men had gone missing.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another sign that reunification is closer than previously thought?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32167361/ns/world_news-asiapacific/



> Taiwan, China make rare direct exchange
> Fresh sign of warming relations as Beijing originates contact with Taipei
> The Associated Press
> updated 2:44 a.m. PT, Mon., July 27, 2009
> TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwanese and Chinese leaders directly exchanged messages on Monday for the first time in 60 years, the latest sign of warming relations between Beijing and Taipei.
> 
> A Nationalist party press statement said the correspondence originated with a congratulatory message from Chinese President Hu Jintao to Taiwan's leader Ma Ying-jeou after he won an election for the ruling party's chairmanship.
> 
> Ma was elected Sunday following monthslong efforts to improve ties with Beijing as president.
> 
> The party statement said Hu also asked Ma to help bolster mutual trust between the rival sides and Ma urged Hu to promote cross-strait peace and stability.
> Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949. China continues to claim the island as part of its territory.
> 
> 
> © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


----------



## CougarKing

Another update:



> *China's fishing fleet sets challenge to US*
> By Lyle Goldstein
> 
> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KH07Ad01.html
> 
> With much attention focused on China's growing naval, shipbuilding and port infrastructure developments, it is easy to forget another important dimension of China's maritime rise: China's status as a major global fishing power. With a total haul of over 17 million tonnes in 2007, China's take is four times that of the nearest competitor, and far exceeds the catch of Japan, the United States and other major Pacific maritime powers [1].
> 
> China's massive fishing fleet is concentrated in the Western Pacific, but is also active now on all the world's oceans. This issue should foremost be evaluated in an environmental context since the world's oceans are now under severe strain from overfishing. Yet, there are also vital foreign policy and international security aspects to Chinese fisheries developments that can not be neglected by US policymakers.
> 
> Indeed, fisheries issues are a significant security concern among Chinese maritime strategists, because they fit squarely into perceived resource and sovereignty imperatives now driving current maritime development [2]. As a whole, China's actions as the largest world fishing power can serve as an important signal for determining Beijing's willingness to conform to global maritime norms as a "responsible maritime stakeholder".
> 
> During 2009, Chinese fishing vessels and fishing policies made global headlines with increasing frequency. Beginning in March with the so-called Impeccable incident, in which a few Chinese fishing trawlers in the company of two other enforcement ships and at least one Chinese naval vessel surrounded and harassed a US surveillance vessel 120 kilometers south of Hainan, one of a number of recent and similarly dangerous incidents at sea.
> 
> Shortly thereafter, China's largest fishery enforcement vessel, Yuzheng 311, was sent on a lengthy patrol in the South China Sea following legislation by the Philippines to formalize its offshore claims to several islets in the South China Sea. In June, Chinese enforcement of fishery claims came under international scrutiny when Vietnam lodged a series of protests concerning alleged rough treatment of their own fishing vessels by Chinese authorities.
> 
> According to one report, incomes of Vietnamese fishermen have declined because of "China's stepped up [fisheries] enforcement", in the vicinity of the Paracel Archipelago. Then in late June, a major incident erupted between Beijing and Jakarta after Indonesian authorities seized eight Chinese fishing vessels and detained 75 Chinese fishermen, who were allegedly fishing illegally in Indonesia's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) - 59 of the 75 Chinese fishermen detained were permitted to return to China in July.
> 
> Such incidents illustrate how the activities of fishing vessels and related enforcement authorities of the Western Pacific region represent one of the jagged edges of volatile maritime territorial disputes. There is a real potential in China - and also among its neighbors - for fishing nationalism to take hold because resources coupled with sovereignty disputes are at the heart of naval development in the East Asian region. Unfortunately, fishing tensions could aggravate these disputes to the point of military conflict.
> 
> The potential for this nationalism is implied, for example, in one recent Chinese assessment that concludes: "Although our country has signed one after another fishing agreements with neighboring states, the number of fishing industry security incidents involving foreigners has unceasingly increased ... Some [countries] even send warships to bump and sink our side's fishing boats …" [3].
> 
> Official figures suggest that China has about 297,937 motorized fishing vessels and approximately eight million fishermen. Chinese are largely catching, among fin-fish, species such as anchovy, Japanese scad, hairtail and small yellow croaker, while significant subsectors also catch shrimp, crab and squid.
> 
> The dominant method is trawling, and gill nets, set nets, line and hooks, as well as purse seines are also used. The East China Sea accounts for the largest catch, followed by the South China Sea and then the Yellow Sea. Among these sea areas, only the South China Sea region has seen increasing catches of late. Of China's major marine industries, marine fisheries and related industries are ranked as the largest sector. Guangdong and Shandong are the leading provinces measured by fishing output, with Fujian and Zhejiang close behind [4].
> 
> Similar to other fisheries worldwide, China is now confronted by a legacy of massive overfishing that left its proximate fishing grounds depleted. As one Chinese study recently opined: "Now, the fact is obvious that the development of our nation's fishing industry has reached an extremely important juncture. Most - if not all - of the fisheries have been fully exploited, and many are already exhausted" [5].
> 
> Another study, published in Marine Policy, one of the leading international academic journals on oceans policy, further reveals the scope of the problem. Since the 1960s, fish species in the Beibu Gulf area of the South China Sea have declined from 487 to 238. Stock density reached its lowest level in 1998 at just 16.7% of that in 1962, though fish stocks have recovered somewhat in recent years [6]. Unlike most Chinese citizens, it is clear that marine fisheries in Chinese coastal areas have not benefited from the economic boom of the past 20 years, but rather have been the victims of rapid, loosely regulated development.
> 
> The fact that Chinese fisheries are in a state of near collapse have prompted some bold initiatives by the Beijing government, which includes a "zero growth" plan for production initiated in 1999. By 2004, 8,000 fishing vessels had been scrapped and there is an effort to bring down China's total fishing fleet to 192,000 vessels by next year. Summer fishing moratoriums now exist for almost all of China's coastal areas [7].
> 
> Along China's southern coasts alone, tens of thousands of fishermen are reportedly out of work as a consequence of the stringent limits associated with the 2000 Beibu Gulf Delimitation Agreement with Vietnam. With respect to such agreements, one China expert recently observed, "[such agreements] have dramatically compressed the work space for our nation's fishermen. These new difficulties for our hard pressed fleets … constitute one disaster after another. [The agreements] could touch off social instability in various coastal towns and villages." [8].
> 
> The Chinese authorities have offered substantial subsidies to displaced fishermen and supported aquaculture as a viable economic alternative to marine fisheries. Indeed, the aquaculture sector has witnessed enormous growth in China during the past decade. One potential bright spot regarding the country's fisheries and coastal environmental protection is that China has designated a very considerable number of marine reserves along its lengthy coast [9]. Experience suggests that marine reserves may be an effective tool for recovering the health of damaged fisheries, but related enforcement measures are not especially promising to date.
> 
> Indeed, China's Fisheries Law Enforcement Command (FLEC), as Beijing's major enforcement tool for fisheries management, appears to face significant challenges. Unlike the United States and Japan, ChVarious modern methods, such as vessel monitoring systems for example, have been introduced into FLEC management practices. Nevertheless, interagency difficulties are amply evident, for example in a study written by faculty members at China's coast guard academy in Ningbo (a part of the People's Armed Police of the Public Security Ministry), which states: "The fisheries enforcement department has the function of escorting fishing vessels … but are unarmed… The public security maritime police … [are] equipped with all types of weaponry … [but] because of limitations on jurisdiction can only play a supporting role, and are in an awkward position" [11].
> 
> The further development of China's maritime enforcement capabilities, perhaps in the direction of a unified coastguard, could have profound consequences for both regional maritime governance and Chinese ability to better enforce its maritime claims in the region.
> 
> Yet, Chinese fishing fleets' activities are much more than a regional issue. Although China's distant water fishing (DWF) fleet was only created in the mid-1980s, by 2006 it had grown to nearly 2,000 vessels operating on the high seas and in the EEZs of 35 countries [12].
> 
> The Chinese DWF fleet is supported by subsidies from the central government as part of an effort to divert Chinese fishermen out of local waters that have been fished out. For instance, according to an authoritative source, the number of Chinese fishing vessels in West African waters at any one time could be close to 300 vessels [13]. With relatively low technology
> compared to European distant water fishing fleets, Chinese vessels are not pursuing prized blue fin tuna, but are more likely to be fishing for mackerel and other lower value species.
> 
> Often, this fishing is legal within the EEZs of the given state, but it is precisely these fish that have previously sustained coastal fishermen around the developing world, creating the possibility that Chinese fishing practices could contribute to a food crisis in Africa and other poor countries. Indeed, one theory informally circulating in maritime circles posits that piracy in the Gulf of Aden is actually a byproduct of overfishing by external powers, who have forced local Somali fishermen into other "careers". China has thus far refused to ratify the UN Fish Stocks Agreement (in force as of 2001), though it should be noted that some concrete reforms have been undertaken by Beijing to control and monitor its DWF fleet.
> 
> Beyond the potential for dislocations associated with unsustainable fishing practices, there are a number of implications of China's major role in world fisheries for international security.
> 
> First, it is quite plausible that China's wide-ranging fishing fleets offer quite extensive opportunities for enhanced "maritime domain awareness" in certain strategically sensitive sea areas, ranging from the Indian Ocean to the Central Pacific. If China adopts a more expansive blue water naval posture in the coming decades, with an enlarged presence in the Indian Ocean and off of Africa's coasts for example, then these fishing fleets will have been important in developing China's knowledge base with respect to prevailing local conditions.
> 
> Second and consistent with the Chinese tendency towards close integration of civil and military institutions, China's large fishing fleet is already integrated into a maritime militia that could render crucial support in a hypothetical military campaign, whether ferrying troops across the Taiwan Strait or laying mines in distant locations. The sheer number of fishing vessels that could be involved would present a severe challenge to any adversary attempting to counter this strategy.
> 
> Most importantly, there is the unfortunate potential that a fishing dispute involving loss of life - which happen in East Asian waters with disturbing regularity - could serve as tinder for nationalists on one side or another, provoking actual hostilities between disputing and well-armed claimants in the region.
> 
> Finally, there is the strong likelihood that Beijing will continue to use the Chinese strategy of "defeating harshness with kindness" (yi rou ke gang) and thus deploying unarmed fishing vessels or fisheries enforcement vessels to confront foreign vessels operating in its EEZ and claimed waters.
> 
> Despite the above concerns, evolving Chinese fisheries policies could also serve as a catalyst for cooperation with other states in East Asia, as well as with Washington. Indeed, the US Coast Guard has been working for more than a decade in the North Pacific with the China FLEC to enforce a UN prohibition on drift net fishing. This cooperation has involved FLEC personnel temporarily being assigned to US Coast Guard cutters - a highly innovative form of cooperation.
> 
> Other forms of operational and scientific cooperation might address environmental, weather emergency, rescue, and enforcement aspects of fisheries management. One further encouraging example is that fisheries are now playing a role in the important warming trend between Beijing and Taipei, itself a major fishing power.
> 
> Indeed, this warming trend has gone a long way to calming tensions in East Asian waters of late. China's counter-piracy mission off the Gulf of Aden is another example of the great potential of Beijing's positive contribution to international maritime security and stewardship. Recent tensions in the South China Sea area should not spoil the new climate of cooperation and collective responsibility.
> 
> The evolution of Chinese fishing practices in the Pacific and around the globe will provide a useful and concrete gauge of Beijing's intent to abide by global norms of international security and environmental sustainability as a genuine responsible, maritime stakeholder.
> 
> Notes
> 1. The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008 (Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2009), p 11.
> 2. See, for example, the discussion in Sun Jingping, Notes on Maritime Security Strategy in the New Period in the New Century, China Military Science, June 2008, p 77.
> 3. Li Zhujiang (ed), The Ocean and the Fishing Industry: Emergency Management (Beijing: Ocean Press, 2007), p 299.
> 4. This paragraph draws on information from "Fishery and Aquaculture Country Profiles: China," and also from Li Deshui, Wang Shugang, China Marine Statistical Yearbook 2004 (Beijing: Ocean Press, 2005), pp XI-XVI.
> 5. Mu Yongtong, Fisheries Management: Focusing on a Rights-Based Regime (Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2006), p 292.
> 6. Yunjun Yu and Yongtong Mu, "The New Institutional Arrangement for Fisheries Management in the Beibu Gulf," Marine Policy 30 (2006), p 251.
> 7. "Fishery and Aquaculture Country Profiles: China," p 3.
> 8. Mu, Fisheries Management, pp 292-93.
> 9. Ma Yingjie, Research on the Legal Protection of Chinese Treasured, Rare and Endangered Marine Species (Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2008), pp. 92-100.
> 10. Mu, Fisheries Management, p 292.
> 11. He Zhonglong, Ren Xingping, Feng Shuili, Luo Xianfen, Liu Jinghong, Research on the Building of the Chinese Coast Guard (Beijing: Ocean Press, 2007), p 40.
> 12. Guifang (Julia) Xue, "China's Distant Water Fisheries and Its Response to Flag State Responsibilities," Marine Policy 30 (2006), p. 653.
> 13. Wang Ning (ed), Handbook on Long-Distance Fishing Technology and Economy (Beijing: Ocean Press, 2002), p 74.
> 
> Lyle J Goldstein, PhD, is director of the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
> ina lacks a single unified coastguard with a broad maritime enforcement mandate. As a result, according to one China fisheries expert: "Although the central government has taken steps … the results are minimal … Fisheries enforcement is congenitally deficient … The failure of fisheries management is already beyond dispute" [10].
> 
> Among the various agencies responsible for coastal management responsibilities in China, the FLEC, which is subordinate to the Ministry of Agriculture, appears to lag well behind better funded and managed agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration (of the Ministry of Communications). Recent reporting does suggest that the further development of FLEC is an increasing priority for Beijing.


----------



## CougarKing

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090809/ap_on_re_as/as_china_plane_bomb_threat



> *China says plane diverted to Afghanistan by threat*
> Gillian Wong, Associated Press Writer – 16 mins ago
> BEIJING – *A plane scheduled to land in China's western region of Xinjiang that was rocked by ethnic riots last month was diverted to southern Afghanistan by a bomb threat, state media said Sunday.
> 
> Xinhua News Agency did not identify the airline or the type of plane, but said the airport in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi had been told to not to allow the plane to land.
> 
> Urumqi was the scene of the worst ethnic violence in China in decades when deadly rioting killed 197 people and injured more than 1,700, according to official count.*
> Xinhua had earlier reported that the plane had been hijacked, but said it had landed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, after a bomb threat.
> 
> A Xinjiang regional government duty officer, who refused to give his name, said he had not received any information about the incident, while calls to the region's public security bureau rang unanswered.
> 
> Calls to the Urumqi airport's information counter also rang unanswered.
> 
> The government has said that Urumqi has slowly been returning to normal since the rioting erupted on July 5 after police stopped a protest by ethnic Uighur residents. The Uighurs went on a rampage, smashing windows, burning cars and beating Han Chinese — the nation's dominant ethnic group. Two days later, the Han took to the streets and attacked Uighurs.
> 
> The government said the violence was the work of terrorists, separatists and foreign forces as part of a plot to carve up China.
> 
> In early August, an Internet message purportedly from the leader of an Islamic group fighting Chinese rule in a western province urged Muslims worldwide to attack Chinese interests in retaliation for what it called the oppression of minority Uighurs.


----------



## CougarKing

In this image taken on Monday, Aug. 10, 2009, and released by the Taiwan Military News Agency on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009, a soldier sifts through debris from Typhoon Morakot in southern Taiwan's Kaohsiung county. A mudslide touched off by the deadly typhoon buried a remote mountain village in Taiwan, leaving at least 400 people unaccounted for, while officially there are 38 dead and 62 missing.
(AP Photo/Taiwan Military News Agency)







Rescuers help people in Chishan, Kaohsiung county, after they were evacuated by a military helicopter from a landslide-affected village in southern Taiwan following Typhoon Morakot August 11, 2009. REUTERS/Pichi Chuang (TAIWAN DISASTER ENVIRONMENT)






REUTERS/Pichi Chuang (TAIWAN DISASTER ENVIRONMENT IMAGES OF THE DAY)






Soldiers walk through floodwater caused by Typhoon Morakot in Chiashien, in southern Taiwan's Kaohsiung county during a rescue operation. Flooding in Taiwan triggered by Morakot has killed 38 people and another 62 are missing, rescuers said Tuesday. (AFP/File/Patrick Lin)






A rescuer carries a man in Chishan, Kaohsiung county, after he was evacuated by military helicopter from a landslide affected village in southern Taiwan following Typhoon Morakot, August 10, 2009. About 600 people are missing and may be buried under a mudslide in a mountainous village of southern Taiwan following torrential rainfall over the weekend from the typhoon, disaster officials said. REUTERS/Stringer (TAIWAN ENVIRONMENT DISASTER) TAIWAN OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN TAIWAN






Armored Personnel Carriers bring rescue workers through a flooded street of Pingtung county, southern Taiwan, Monday, Aug. 10, 2009. An estimated 400 Taiwanese are unaccounted for after the landslide spawned by Typhoon Morakot struck their isolated mountain village of Shiao Lin, a police official said Monday, and a newspaper quoted a resident as saying as many as 600 were buried. (AP Photo) 






Paramilitary policemen stand on a pile of sand bags at a section of Yangjia Stream of Xiapu county in Ningde, Fujian province August 10, 2009. Typhoon Morakot battered China's commercial east coast on Sunday, killing a child and flattening houses. Half a million people in coastal Fujian province were moved to safer parts ahead of the typhoon's arrival, along with a similar number in neighbouring Zhejiang, Xinhua reported. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA ENVIRONMENT DISASTER SOCIETY) CHINA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN CHINA






Medical personnel evacuate children by a military helicopter from a landslide affected village after Typhoon Morakot swept Taiwan in Kaohsiung county, southern Taiwan August 10, 2009. Typhoon Morakot killed an estimated 14 people with another 51 missing, according to local media. REUTERS/Stringer (TAIWAN ENVIRONMENT DISASTER) TAIWAN OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN TAIWAN








Rescuers in rafts and the military search for residents trapped by flooding from rains brought by Typhoon Morakot in Chiatung, Pingtung county, in southern Taiwan. At least 14 people were confirmed dead and 51 others were missing in Taiwan on Monday after Typhoon Morakot caused the island's worst flooding in half a century, the rescue services said. (AFP/Sam Yeh)

Plus an article:

Taiwan rescues up to 300 Typhoon victims


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## CougarKing

Soldiers evacuate a stranded resident to a safe area as Typhoon Morakot hits Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province August 9, 2009. REUTERS/China Daily






Soldiers patrol along the shores as Typhoon Morakot approaches in Wenling, Zhejiang province August 9, 2009. As Typhoon Morakot neared, more than 970,000 people in two coastal east China provinces were evacuated to safety Sunday, Xinhua News Agency reported. REUTERS/China Daily (CHINA DISASTER SOCIETY ENVIRONMENT) CHINA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN CHINA






Soldiers run from waves triggered by Typhoon Morakot along the shores of Quanzhou, Fujian province, August 8, 2009. A light typhoon swept through northern Taiwan, killing one and leaving four missing as it headed out to China, Taiwan's government said on Saturday. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA DISASTER SOCIETY ENVIRONMENT) CHINA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN CHINA






A helicopter looks for survivors in heavy flooding brought by typhoon Morakot in Taitung, eastern Taiwan August 8, 2009. A light typhoon swept through northern Taiwan, killing one and leaving four missing as it headed out to China, Taiwan's government said today. REUTERS/Stringer (TAIWAN ENVIRONMENT TRANSPORT) TAIWAN OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN TAIWAN






A Taiwanese woman rides a life cutter with rescuers in floodwater following a heavy rain brought by typhoon Morakot in a street in Linbian town, southern of Taiwan, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2009. A typhoon slammed into Taiwan overnight, leaving scores of people dead or missing and more than a dozen injured, officials and media reported Saturday. The Central Weather Bureau said. It is expected to weaken to a tropical storm before it hits southern China late Saturday or early Sunday. (AP Photo)


----------



## CougarKing

An exercise that focuses on "long-range projection", as stated below? Another reason why Ma should not be so eager to reunify Taiwan with the mainland.

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4229262&c=ASI&s=LAN



> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> China Kicks Off Unprecedented Military Exercise
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 11 Aug 2009 06:56
> 
> BEIJING - China's military on Aug. 11 launched its largest tactical military exercise, involving 50,000 heavily-armored troops in a long-distance deployment spanning thousands of kilometers, state press said.
> 
> The live-fire maneuvers, dubbed "Stride-2009," will involve a division each from the Shenyang, Lanzhou, Jinan and Guangzhou regional military commands and will last for two months, Xinhua news agency said.
> 
> "In the unprecedented exercise, one of the PLA's major objectives will be to improve its capacity of long-range projection," the report said, citing the general staff of the People's Liberation Army.
> "Unlike previous annual tactical exercises, the army divisions and their air units will be deployed in unfamiliar areas far from their garrison training bases by civilian rail and air transport."
> 
> This means troops, tanks, vehicles and weapons systems from Shenyang in the northeast will be deployed to Lanzhou in the northwest, while similar exchanges will take place between Jinan in the east and Guangzhou in the south, it said.
> 
> According to the People's Liberation Army Daily, the exercises will simulate Chinese victories in the war against Japan (1937-45) and victories against U.S. troops during the Korean War (1950-53).
> 
> Following annual double-digit growth in defense spending over most of the last 20 years, China's rapidly modernizing military has kept pace with the nation's rising political and economic clout.The United States, Japan and their allies have repeatedly expressed concern about China's military build-up and what they see as a lack of transparency about the intent behind the expansion.
> 
> With 2.3 million soldiers, the People's Liberation Army is the world's largest military.


----------



## CougarKing

I remember going to the 1999 version of the 1st TADTE, when it was held at the Taipei World Trade Center, and grabbing a couple of brochures at the Raytheon booth.  >

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4237571&c=ASI&s=AIR



> Taiwan's CSIST Shows Off Missiles, UAVs at TADTE
> By wendell minnick
> Published: 16 Aug 2009 10:17
> 
> TAIPEI - Military-run Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology (CSIST) showed off its wares, including new missiles, at the biennial 10th Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition and Conference (TADTE), August 13-16.
> 
> In a surprise move, CSIST displayed the Hsiung Feng 3 (Brave Wind) anti-ship missile and Tien Kung-3 (Sky Bow) air defense missile. It is only the second time the military has allowed public access to the two missiles. The first time was in 2007, when both were displayed during the Ten-Ten military parade.
> 
> CSIST also exhibited a sounding rocket. A Taiwan defense analyst said the rocket was originally a cover program for Taiwan's ballistic missile development. However, CSIST officials denied this, stating the rocket was for scientific experiments conducted by the National Space Program Office (NSPO).
> 
> "CSIST and NSPO joined together on this program in 1997," said a CSIST official. "We have 10-15 sounding rocket launches planned with the NSPO before 2018. We build them as NSPO needs them."
> 
> The two-stage solid fuel rocket is 7.7 meters in length, has a speed of Mach 7, a maximum altitude of 280 km and can carry a 130 kg payload. The Taiwan defense analyst said the fact that it is a two-stage sounding rocket raises questions and "CSIST was careful to make sure they only acknowledged a maximum altitude of 280 km," just short of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 300 km/500 kg range/payload minimum.
> 
> 
> UAVs showcased
> 
> CSIST also displayed a wide variety of UAVs at this year's TADTE, including an operational Chung Shyang for the first time. A CSIST representative said the first one was built in 2007 and CSIST now has five operational prototypes.
> 
> "The army and air force are interested in the Chung Shyang," he said. "With the recent typhoon, the army could have conducted a damage assessment, but the army has no UAV capability at this time. We expect a decision from the military in 2010 with a potential order of twenty."
> 
> The Chung Shyang has both day and night surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. It can also serve as a communications relay. It has a range of 100 km, cruising speed of 60 knots with an eight-hour endurance. The Taiwan coast guard has dropped interest in the platform for budgetary reasons, he said.
> 
> CSIST also showed off its Cardinal mini-UAV system and Blue Magpie mini-UAV system, both hand-launched platforms. The 2.1 kg Cardinal began development in 2007 and there are now ten in production for further testing. It has a range of 15-20 km, speed of 30 knots, endurance of 1.5 hours, and a maximum altitude of 4.5 km. Payload options include a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, night vision camera, goggle manual and autopilot. The military has expressed interest in procuring the Cardinal, but no decision has been made.
> 
> However, the Blue Magpie has garnered no interest by the military. The system is extremely small with a weight of only 1.0 kg. It has a CCD payload and can be flown by autopilot or manual. It has a range of three kilometers, maximum altitude .6-1.5 km, cruising speed of 25 knots with a one-hour endurance. The UAV can "transmit real-time images … and can be used for reconnaissance and target acquisition," said a CSIST representative. It has been in development since 2006.
> 
> 
> Clouded Leopard
> 
> A representative of the Combined Logistics Command, under the Ministry of National Defense, confirmed the 8x8 CM-32 Clouded Leopard was still being considered by the military, despite local media reports the program had been killed.
> "The army will make a final decision in 2010 on the fate of the platform," he said.
> 
> There have been reports in the local media the CM-32 was overweight, suffered from transmission problems, lacked amphibious capabilities, and the turning radius was too wide.


----------



## CougarKing

More Patriots for Taiwan.



> *Taiwan to procure additional Patriot systems*
> 
> 19 August 2009
> 
> Taiwan is set to receive up to six additional Patriot air and missile defence systems, in a contract estimated to be worth around USD6 billion, on top of an ongoing programme to update its three existing facilities from Patriot Advanced Configuration-2 (PAC-2) to PAC-3.
> 
> Taiwanese government sources have told Jane's that a signed letter of offer and acceptance (LOA) was received from US officials earlier this month for four new operational fire units (OFUs), in a contract worth USD3.2 billion.
> 
> The LOA means that the existing Foreign Military Sale (FMS) for a USD600 million upgrade programme of three OFUs, will be enlarged to include four additional OFUs as well as 264 PAC-3 missiles from Lockheed Martin.
> 
> However, sources told Jane's that it was not known if and when the Obama administration would notify Congress and subsequently release an LOA to Taiwan for the remaining two new OFUs and fire unit training system. Any contract for these remaining systems is estimated to be worth an additional USD3 billion, sources said.
> 
> http://www.janes.com/news/defence/idr/idr090819_1_n.shtml


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## a_majoor

The stability and growth of China are interesting subject, especially when you realize you are not actually getting the numbers you need. The normalized GDP figures and the mouontain of non performing debt that the Chinese government is taking on seems very similar to the situation the United States was getting into starting in the 1990's:

http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/dinner-party/



> *A revolution is not a dinner party. Thoughts about the future of China*
> Filed under: Geopolitical news — Tags: china, gordon chang, mao tse-tung, michael pettis, revolution — Fabius Maximus @ 12:01 am
> This is a follow-up to Will China collapse? (5 August 2008).
> 
> Recent analysis:
> 
> “Get ready for lower Chinese growth“, Michael Pettis, op-ed in the Financial Times, 29 July 2009
> ”The spend is nigh“, Economist, 30 July 2009 — “The second article in our series on global rebalancing asks whether China can reduce its trade surplus by consuming more.”
> “China’s economic policy: A ‘Great Wall’ or Capuan complacency?“, Arthur Kroeber, Financial Times, 11 August 2009 — See excerpt below.
> Excerpt from The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon G. Chang — See excerpt below.
> Quote of the decade about China
> 
> Secondly, a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
> — Mao tse-tung, “”Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”, March 1927
> 
> (3)  China’s spirit is not a Great Wall
> 
> “China’s economic policy: A ‘Great Wall’ or Capuan complacency?“, Arthur Kroeber, Financial Times, 11 August 2009 — Excerpt:
> 
> The Romans bounced back from calamity because they had a resilient set of alliances based on well-developed political and economic ties and a constitutional system that enabled a broad array of talent to come forward and express itself. No error lasted too long unchecked.
> 
> … China’s ability to maintain economic growth of around 8% despite the global shock took many by surprise. But this ability has nothing to do with systemic advantages, a distinct “China model” of growth, or skill in macroeconomic management.
> 
> … China’s present economic vitality results from a Great Wall all right – a Great Wall of borrowed cash. There is nothing remarkable or spiritual about an economy growing at 8 per cent when credit is allowed to expand by 34%.
> 
> The fact becomes even less remarkable when we recognise that nominal GDP (the appropriate comparator for nominal credit growth) grew just 3.8% in the first half. In other words, 10 dollars of new loans were required to generate just one dollar of economic growth.
> 
> In fact China’s first-half growth shows one thing and one thing only: the existence of a powerful state with the ability to commandeer its citizens’ wealth and plough it into more buildings, bridges and roads, with no regard for the return those investments will bring.
> 
> (4)  Excerpt from The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon G. Chang (2001)
> 
> There are plenty of Chinese this evening, but nothing is horrible and no one is sad. If anything, some are a bit too merry. The crowd, numbering in the hundreds, is boisterous as free-flowing liquor enlivens the revelers on the rooftop terrace of Shanghai’s historic Peace Hotel. The city around them is sparkling, floodlit in clashing colors against a pitch black sky, and the Huangpu River just below is bustling with commerce even at this late hour.
> 
> On the roof this perfect evening the wealthy and the famous mingle with Shanghainese on the make; pride, arrogance, and envy all on display. Personalities in black tie chat with gentlemen in long gray robes, and women in floor-length gowns mix with friends in tight-fitting qi pao split almost to the waist.
> 
> Guests have traveled across China and halfway around the world to be on display this evening in the radiant city that is Shanghai. But now the guests take their seats and the table chatter slowly dies. They look at the figure standing before them this Saturday evening in October 1999, just days after the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. The ornate ballroom at the top of the Peace Hotel is finally quiet.
> 
> The tall American woman is particularly striking; she’s in her finest revolutionary red. Her gown, covered in hundreds of Mao buttons of red and gold, is a fashion statement, however, not a political one, because she’s here to have fun. She takes a look around the room before starting. “The Revolution has become a dinner party,” says Maggie Farley, and the crowd cheers.
> 
> Yes, the revolution has become a dinner party. The People’s Republic today is not gentle, temperate, or kind, but it is not revolutionary either. The country and the party that leads it are now both old in their ways. The zeal that carried Mao from near defeat to total victory has been spent, lost in all the campaigns and programs that have gone wrong. Here, in the city where the Chinese Communist Party was born, there is nothing that is revolutionary. Nothing, that is, except the opponents of the current regime. They are weak today, but that will change.
> 
> The Chinese now want something different, as they did at the end of the Qing Dynasty and at the fall of the Kuomintang. The people are no longer poor and blank. They know what they want. The Chinese will take what they want one day, and that day will be soon.
> 
> The truth is that Party cadres will have only themselves to blame when that time comes. They have, over more than five decades, failed. Their republic is corrupt, repressive, and brutal. Its sheet of paper is no longer unblemished. China, for all its recent progress, is still poor. Chinese history has a pattern: governments like the current one fall.


----------



## CougarKing

We'll see if this a genuine attempt at transparency...

From the AP:



> *China's secretive military launches Web site*
> Updated August 20, 2009 11:48 AM
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- China's Defense Ministry launched its first official Web site Thursday, part of an effort by the normally secretive military to be more transparent.
> 
> The site's launch — including an English version — comes as the US Army's top general visits Beijing for talks with his Chinese counterparts. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey will visit the headquarters of the People's Liberation Army on Thursday and meet PLA Chief of the General Staff Chen Bingde.
> 
> China has long been tightlipped about its military strength and capacity, drawing criticism from other countries wary of the Asian giant's growing power and skyrocketing military spending. Beijing says it is modernizing is military, but for purely defensive purposes.
> 
> But in recent years, China has been increasing its international military ties. Earlier this year, Chinese warships were sent to patrol waters off Somalia as part of the international effort against piracy.
> 
> Defense Minister Liang Guanglie said earlier this month the army would develop peacefully and increase cooperation with foreign armed forces to fulfill its international obligations.
> 
> A Defense Ministry spokesman last month said the military planned to establish more information offices nationwide and hold more news conferences.
> 
> The Web site includes sections on China's defense policies and laws and news about military exercises, peacekeeping roles and international military exchanges.
> 
> A picture of President Hu Jintao, who is also chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, which controls the military, is prominent on the home page. Pictures and information on weapons and equipment are also displayed.
> 
> China's military spending has jumped by double-digit percentages for nearly two decades. This year, Beijing announced a 14.9 percent rise in military spending to 480.68 billion yuan ($70.27 billion), though it was a smaller increase than previous years.
> That spending puts it on par with Japan, Russia and Britain, but it is still dwarfed by the US, which spends nearly 10 times as much.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

English version of website here: http://eng.mod.gov.cn/index.htm


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _National Post_ is a bit of common sense from a _usual_ source of that rare commodity:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/22/conrad-black-much-ado-about-china.aspx


> *Conrad Black*: Much ado about China
> 
> August 22, 2009
> 
> Overblown announcements heralding the supposed coming of the Age of China have become a staple of journalistic futurism in recent years. When Maclean's magazine banners across the top of its cover "When China Rules the World," as it did last month -- and it is not a Monty Python send-up of swarms of incomprehensible people in Mao suits -- I know it is time to raise a peep of dissent.
> 
> Does any of this sound familiar? It was not even 20 years ago that the same was being said about Japan, when U. S. president George H. W. Bush went to Tokyo and was patronized by the Japanese prime minister for being at the head of a declining power. At an official dinner, the president vomited and returned to his embassy in an ambulance (but explained privately that his indigestion was the consequence of eating plain fish while facing Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca for two hours).
> 
> And it was only 15 years before -- during the Carter doldrums, following the Kennedy assassinations and the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate -- that the world was abuzz with predictions that the U. S. S. R. would surpass the United States.
> 
> In fact, the most serious threat came from the Nazis. The official borders of Germany at the end of 1940, including Austria, Bohemia (the Czechs), Moravia, most of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Benelux and the Atlantic coast of France, gave the Reich 130 million people, the same population as the United States, and almost equivalent industrial potential. This was why Roosevelt ran for a third term, determined to help keep Britain (and Canada) in the war, and to assist all who resisted the Nazification of Europe. The Nazi threat was so serious that it required the entire combat strength of the British Commonwealth, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to defeat it.
> 
> In the Cold War that followed, the Soviet challenge simply imploded, crumbled, after 40 years of containment by a U. S.-led alliance, in which no fire was exchanged between the major powers. As for Japan, it simply ran out of steam, lost a whole decade in financial stagnation while its stock market declined by 90% -- even though it continued, to this day, to be a brilliant manufacturer and marketer of automobiles and many sophisticated products from cameras to television equipment.
> 
> None of this means that China won't continue to rise, or that the U. S. won't again have to prove its staying power as a world force. But matter-of-fact assertions, complete with timetables, of an imminent Chinese assumption of world leadership, are rubbish.
> 
> The takeaway message on the failure of the brief era of U. S. unipolarity that followed the demise of the U. S. S. R. is not that the U. S. is finished as the world's leading country, but that multipolarity, not the hegemony of a sole superpower, will replace the bipolarized Cold War. There are about 40 reasonably important countries in the world (of a total of 192), and the major powers will compete to build relations within that group.
> 
> The theory of the inevitable rise of China is similar to the recent theory of the inevitable end of the U. S. as a mainly Caucasian country: It is based on the extrapolation of current statistics that will not continue, and that in the case of the Chinese economy, are a fiction anyway.
> 
> China has a centrally directed economy, and calculates growth rates as a function of production, not spending; and production is deemed to occur when it is commissioned by the state. Thus, all Chinese predictions of economic growth are self-fulfilling: The central economic leadership orders production of toasters or submarines and announces construction of roads and sports stadiums, and the anticipated costs are added to the GDP at once. (In western countries, by contrast, GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending and exports.)
> 
> The government monitors the progress of state construction and inventory levels, but doesn't release these numbers. It regularly claims 15% annual retail sales increases, but that reflects shipments to retail outlets, not sales, and even less, sales revenue. Such a system preserves some aspects of the catastrophic Soviet-style command economy. There are reports of consumer goods being virtually given away at point of sale, i. e., at below their cost of production.
> 
> All outsiders can do to judge the progress of demand is to see what the central bank does with credit and the money supply. The country has had a 21% decline in exports this year, so to achieve its 8% economic growth for 2009, there will have to be a 15% to 17% increase in domestic economic activity. There has been a strenuous effort to increase domestic demand, and the much-ballyhooed US$586-billion Chinese stimulus plan was really an excuse for the relaxation of credit and the redesignation of categories of already approved expenses.
> 
> The money-supply increase for this year is a very audacious 34.5%, to stimulate domestic demand. The two Shanghai stock exchanges almost doubled (before a recent 20% downturn) and major city residential prices are up around 13% so far this year. So bubbles are clearly developing. The country's claimed savings rate of 50% is not real, because it includes provision for all health care, retirement benefits and other social spending that is provided by the state in most western countries.
> 
> China claims to be expanding health care and other social services, but has not allocated realistic amounts to accomplish this. The country also has no credible legal system, and is rife with corruption (as evidenced by the shoddily built schools -- used as shelters during the recent earthquakes -- which were built on the cheap with no structural steel, and then collapsed, killing thousands of people). It has one billion peasants who largely live as they did 3,000 years ago. Almost every great urban development attracts swarms of expropriated people throwing rocks at bulldozer drivers, and the Chinese navy regularly steals the catches of commercial fishermen. The one-child-per-couple policy is creating an ageing and male-unbalanced population. It is a rough country, oscillating between near chaos and Tiananmen-like exertions of authority.
> 
> The rise of China is impressive and an objectively good thing, and the United states is labouring. But the U. S. has a functioning, if conspicuously imperfect, political and legal system, formidable resources, an incomparably productive work force, nearly four times China's GDP, and a popular culture that dominates the world. It must put its house in order, which will be painful, but a trifle compared to the challenges facing China. The United States has seen off greater challenges than this.
> 
> National Post
> cbletters@gmail.com



The key points, it seems to me, are:

•	None of this means that China won't continue to rise, or that the U. S. won't again have to prove its staying power as a world force;

•	Matter-of-fact assertions, complete with timetables, of an imminent Chinese assumption of world leadership, are rubbish;

•	Multipolarity, not the hegemony of a sole superpower, will replace the bipolarized Cold War;

•	[China] has no credible legal system, and is rife with corruption;

•	The rise of China is impressive and an objectively good thing;

•	The United states is labouring;

•	The U. S. has a functioning, if conspicuously imperfect, political and legal system, formidable resources, an incomparably productive work force, nearly four times China's GDP, and a popular culture that dominates the world. It must put its house in order, which will be painful, but a trifle compared to the challenges facing China; and

•	The United States has seen off greater challenges than this.

“Multipolarity” is the way of the world. The US is one *major* pole; China is another but not the other. Europe is also one of the “multi poles”, but not quite as strong in so many areas as either America or China; ditto India, but weaker still as are Japan, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and, and, and ...


----------



## CougarKing

More details as the large exercise continues:



> *China Sends 4 Divisions on Long-Range Exercise*
> By wendell minnick
> Published: 21 Aug 2009 15:25
> 
> TAIPEI - Four Chinese armored divisions are traveling more than 1,200 kilometers to sharpen their ability to move long distances and conduct exercises in unfamiliar territory.Dubbed Stride-2009, the two-month exercise, which began Aug. 11, involves 50,000 troops from the Shenyang, Lanzhou, Jinan and Guangzhou regions. Chinese media are calling it the People's Liberation Army's largest-ever tactical armor exercise.
> 
> "We know that four divisions from four Military Regions will each travel separately by road, rail and air to four separate combined-arms training centers in distant Military Regions," said Dennis Blasko, a former U.S. Army foreign area officer specializing in China.  "As with all Chinese use of superlatives, one must be careful to determine exactly what is meant by the 'largest-ever tactical military exercise.'"
> 
> For example, Blasko said,the tri-service 2001 Liberation-1 amphibious exercise conducted at Dongshan Island lasted four months and involved nearly 100,000 troops. And in the Peace Mission 2007 exercise, 1,600 troops traveled over land from Xinjiang, China, to the mountainous Ural region of Russia.
> 
> Another analyst said Stride-2009 appeared to be part of China's effort to test and develop its ability to mobilize its armed forces on a large scale.
> 
> "No matter where it ultimately chooses to send its forces, its first step will be to concentrate them at some point of embarkation within China. That will involve movements of this type," said Thomas Kane, author of the book, "Chinese Grand Strategy and Maritime Power."
> 
> Kane noted that recent years have seen an increase in internal unrest, with uprisings in Tibet and the Uighur Xinjiang region; angry protests about the response to last year's Sichuan earthquake; and public disruptions linked to a rise in unemployment. But he said these situations simply do not require 50,000 heavily armored troops.
> 
> Instead, Kane linked Stride-2009 to China's attempt to mimic the C4 revolution in the U.S. military.
> "In my interpretation, the primary reason for deploying troops in unfamiliar levels is to test command and control procedures," he said. "I scarcely need to add that effective procedures for command, control, communications and whatever else the Pentagon has bolted onto its latest acronym for such concepts are an important part of what distinguishes forces that are effective in warfare from forces that merely look impressive on paper."
> 
> Stride-2009 is at least the third large PLA exercise this summer. In July, four brigades from the Second Artillery Division had a field exercise, and in June, about 100 aircraft from the Guangzhou Military Region Air Force were involved in another large exercise, Blasko said.
> 
> "However, it is noteworthy that the earlier Second Artillery and PLAAF exercises were not joint, though at least the deployment phase of Stride-2009 is," he said. "It will be interesting to see how much the PLA Air Force participates in the live-fire phases of the exercise."


----------



## CougarKing

Not very surprising, though still quite gruesome.



> http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/686493
> 
> BEIJING–*The majority of transplanted organs in China come from executed prisoners, state media reported Wednesday in a rare disclosure about the country's problem of dubious organ donations*.
> 
> Despite a 2007 regulation barring donations from people who are not related to or emotionally connected to the transplant patient, the China Daily newspaper said 65 per cent of organ donations come from death row.
> 
> It quoted Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu as saying written consent is required from condemned prisoners but that they are ``definitely not a proper source for organ transplants."
> 
> To curb transplants from prisoners and other abuses, a new national organ donation system managed by the Red Cross Society and the Health Ministry was launched Tuesday, the newspaper said.
> 
> China has previously acknowledged that kidneys, livers, corneas and other organs were routinely removed from prisoners sentenced to death, but gave no figures to show how widespread the practice was.
> 
> Voluntary donations remain far below demand in China, partly because of cultural biases against organ removal before burial.
> 
> The newspaper said about only 1 per cent of the estimated 1 million people in China who need transplants are able to get one.
> 
> *The scarcity of available organs has led to a lucrative black market, with traffickers selling organs from people pressured or forced into donating. The newspaper said traffickers forge the necessary documents required since tighter regulations went into effect in 2007.*
> 
> China executes more people than any other country.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Meanwhile, here is an interesting, maybe slightly controversial, article about China’s economy, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from Saturday’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/reading-the-tea-leaves/article1268517/


> *China's economic recovery*
> Reading the tea leaves
> 
> *There's the good, the bad and the ugly: Beijing's strong growth is the envy of the west, but empty wallets in the U.S. and Europe and thrifty Chinese consumers threaten to choke off the comeback*
> 
> Andy Hoffman and Brian Milner
> 
> Friday, Aug. 28, 2009
> 
> _*THE GOOD*: A 7.9-per-cent growth rate is the envy of the West; stockpiling and infrastructure have driven the global rebound in commodity prices
> 
> *THE BAD*: Who's buying? Empty wallets in the U.S. and Europe and thrifty Chinese consumers threaten to choke off the comeback
> 
> *THE UGLY*: When will Beijing stop boosting inefficient state enterprises and open the credit taps to millions of aspiring entrepreneurs? _
> 
> Investment banker Ken Courtis has his own personal gauge for determining the health of the Chinese economy, and it has nothing to do with often-questionable government statistics, an overheated stock market or soaring purchases of commodities.
> 
> If traffic is light enough that he can make it to five or more meetings a day in the usually choked streets of Beijing or Shanghai, and if people can actually fit him into their schedules, he knows business is bad. Conversely, if he can be squeezed into only two meetings a day, it means business is booming.
> 
> And these days? “At the moment, you can do three,” says Mr. Courtis, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia. It's as good a signal as any that China's economy is on the rebound.
> 
> Reading the Chinese tea leaves has become a prerequisite for global business. Every reported statistic is carefully scrutinized, and every blip – whether up, down or sideways – has the ability to move equity, bond and commodity markets around the world. Quite simply, the planet is pinning its hopes of a recovery from the depths of the worst recession since the Dirty Thirties on China being able to sustain its surprisingly boisterous growth of recent months.
> 
> Yet no one, least of all the experts, is sure about the true state of the Chinese economy, or whether it has the ability to carry the rest of the world on its coattails.
> 
> On paper, China's economy is blowing the doors off the West. Despite sharply falling exports, it grew at an impressive 7.9-per-cent annual clip in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to government data, and a stunning 15 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. There are predictions China will overtake Japan to become the world's second-largest economy by 2010. Five years ago, that didn't seem likely until 2020 at the earliest.
> 
> But China's all-star performance comes with a major-league-sized caveat: Official data are notoriously unreliable. Even the most bullish analysts concede the GDP numbers are flawed. That's because the Chinese rely on lower levels of government to collect the data.
> 
> Local officials win promotions based on the figures they produce, so they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. Each level is eager to juice the numbers to please those above.
> 
> China's National Statistics Bureau recognizes this and typically cuts the tallied figures, which helps explain why, even in the official statistics yearbooks, the provincial and national figures rarely add up.
> 
> The official stats also fail to account for the enormous impact of China's burgeoning underground economy, which includes such services as restaurants and an army of small, illegal mining operations.
> 
> Such under-the-radar activity accounts for about 20 per cent of China's economy, says Scotia Capital China analyst Na Liu. But it never shows up in the figures of economic output. “It's like a major city in China never goes shopping, according to the GDP,” Mr. Liu says.
> 
> *ALTERNATIVE INDICATORS*
> 
> To get a better read on the country's economic health, China watchers are increasingly turning to alternative indicators to supplement the government stats. They're tracking everything from electricity consumption to satellite images from Google Earth to make their calls on the economy.
> 
> What they're finding are reasons for equal measures of optimism and concern.
> 
> A massive four trillion yuan ($586-billion U.S.) stimulus package has spurred a deluge of domestic infrastructure projects. Looser credit conditions have spawned a record 7.4 trillion yuan in new loans in the first six months of the year – that's nearly a quarter of China's gross domestic product, and well in excess of the government's own target of five trillion yuan in new loans for the entire year.
> 
> As much as one-third of this cheap money has flowed straight into speculative investments in real estate, stocks and commodities. And at least another third has gone to shore up struggling businesses in a tough economic environment. But there has been enough government money sloshing around to trigger fresh growth – and to create furious demand for Western commodities, including copper, iron ore and oil.
> 
> But the infrastructure spending and access to easy credit will soon come to an end. And that is where things could get dicey for China's economy.
> 
> The government's moves have likely exacerbated the overcapacity and inefficiency issues that have plagued some of China's largest state-controlled industries, such as steel making, that have received the lion's share of the new business loans. At the same time, smaller, more dynamic and entrepreneurial businesses, considered vital to China's long-term economic transformation, have been largely shut out of the government's stimulus and lending schemes.
> 
> Meanwhile, long-dormant Chinese consumers have sprung to life amid the current economic renaissance. Sales of vehicles and appliances have soared with the help of government rebates. But domestic consumption won't be enough to sustain current domestic growth once the stimulus measures peter out, let alone drive the global economy the way the American consumer did for so many years.
> 
> Daniel Rosen, a partner with the Rhodium Group, a New York-based advisory firm, is concerned that the rest of the world has become complacent about China's growth and “too laudatory” about what China has done to contribute to global recovery.
> 
> While China has admirably handled the stimulus element of its economic plan, it has failed to address deep-rooted constraints on the domestic economy. The Chinese remain too reliant on exports: “They haven't made the jump to domestic consumption-driven growth yet,” Mr. Rosen says.
> 
> Trying to decode the signals from China's hulking economy these days is no easy task. There are legitimate reasons to believe that a rebound is under way – but also signs that it may be fragile and unsustainable, once such vital props as unprecedented government spending and extremely loose monetary policy disappear.
> 
> *COMMODITIES*
> 
> No sector has benefited more from China's current financial might. China's aggressive purchasing has almost single-handedly driven an incredible rebound in copper prices and helped keep demand for iron ore and oil strong.
> 
> Amid the market meltdown last fall, China took advantage of low prices to stockpile copper in anticipation of the need for the metal used to make wire and pipe that would result from the slew of infrastructure projects. The buying also correctly predicted a pickup in housing construction.
> 
> “Looking at the commodities can give you a lot of confidence of where the economy is,” says Mr. Liu of Scotia Capital, who specializes in tracking Chinese commodity data as a gauge of overall economic health.
> 
> Last winter, when much of the world was bearish on China amid economic statistics indicating a major slowdown due to slumping export demand, Mr. Liu turned exceedingly bullish.
> 
> “When everybody was so bearish and thought things were going in the toilet, I talked to local people [in China] and I understood that people were buying copper and molybdenum and coking coal. Talking to these people, you were able to understand the tide was changing even though the macro data was still negative,” Mr. Liu says.
> 
> In the first six months of this year, China's consumption of refined copper jumped 48 per cent or 1.2 million tonnes. Even Chinese pig farmers have been jumping on the stockpiling bandwagon, storing scrap copper in their barns as a speculative investment.
> 
> China's massive steel industry has also picked up sharply, driving demand for iron ore and coking coal.
> 
> Mr. Rosen of The Rhodium Group agrees that commodities are a “fairly powerful” indicator, in part because the data is reliable. China's demand for foreign commodities can be correlated with export statistics from producing countries.
> 
> “There is no way for China to hide the supply and demand for things like iron ore and oil,” Mr. Rosen says.
> 
> *INFRASTRUCTURE*
> 
> New roads, bridges, tunnels, railways – they're all getting the green light in China right now.
> 
> The bulk of China's $586-billion stimulus package is flowing to infrastructure and there's no shortage of projects. Scores of construction plans that had been delayed during the heady days of 2006 and 2007, when the government was actually trying to temper growth, have now been given the go-ahead.
> 
> “The stimulus has simply brought the future expenditures to the forefront,” says Michael Deng, a China specialist with Canaccord Adams based in Calgary.
> 
> “The reason they can ramp up so quickly is because these projects had already been planned, but over a longer period. Now they are accelerating it.”
> 
> Infrastructure initiatives create jobs, improve the standard of living in underserviced areas and keep China's economy growing. As long as the money keeps flowing, there's almost no end to potential projects to finance because of China's sprawling geography and underdeveloped system of roads and railways.
> 
> *LENDING*
> 
> Credit is easy to come by in China today. The record pace of loans has helped prop up struggling businesses and offered consumers and industry the funds needed to expand.
> 
> Loosening credit flows is exceedingly simple in China. Under the state-controlled banking system, Beijing doesn't ask banks to lend. It orders them to. So far, the stimulus has not stoked inflation. In fact, Chinese consumer prices have been falling.
> 
> The majority of the record 7.4 trillion yuan in debt doled out this year has gone to state-controlled companies instead of more-vibrant private firms that are expanding at a quicker pace.
> 
> Critics argue that China's banks are setting themselves up for a wave of bad debt in coming years that could shake confidence in the country's financial institutions. But others believe that most of the debt has been adequately vetted.
> 
> “A lot of the feasibility for the new loans was made years ago,” says Scotia's Mr. Liu. “In the past few years, the Chinese government was fighting against overheating, so they killed a lot of legitimate investment projects.”
> 
> Fears of a U.S.-style real estate meltdown driven by easy mortgages are also overblown, argues Mr. Liu. Chinese home buyers generally put down 30 per cent of a property's value. For a second home, they must put down 40 per cent.
> 
> *THE TREND*
> 
> Even if one doesn't believe China's economic stats, the trend can still be a friend. Most China watchers say the data is more than accurate enough to show the overall direction of the Chinese economy, and that is all that really matters.
> 
> “There is so much data on the Chinese economy today and so much is integrated with the global markets that while the headline statistical releases from Beijing do generate considerable debate about Chinese statistics, by and large people feel they can gauge the general direction of China's economic movement,” Rhodium Group's Mr. Rosen says.
> 
> *OFFICIAL STATISTICS*
> 
> To put it simply, many of China's statistical indicators can be extremely opaque. Those that aren't, often don't add up. The most recent example came earlier this month, when first-half GDP figures released individually by China's 31 provinces were 10 per cent higher than the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics.
> 
> At a time when the world is looking to China as an engine of growth, the inconsistencies have become a continual source of embarrassment to the central government. Most analysts don't rely on the government-issued numbers.
> 
> Take the nearly-useless unemployment stats, for example. The Chinese version measures only local employment and completely ignores the vast numbers of migrant workers, who number about 150 million people – nearly five times the population of Canada. Beijing recently announced that nearly all of the more than 20 million migrant workers laid off earlier this year from their factory jobs had managed to find new jobs when they returned home. But the government didn't explain where it got such good news.
> 
> Even the Chinese media is doubting the data. China Daily, a state-backed English-language news outlet, quoted a poll recently that said 91 per cent of respondents are skeptical of the government official numbers, up from 79 per cent in 2007.
> 
> *THE CONSUMER*
> 
> Chinese shoppers are definitely spending more, with retail sales growth of 15 per cent in the first half of the year. But they remain frugal by Western standards. Chinese household spending as a percentage of GDP is about 35 per cent, half the U.S. level and well below even the Japanese ratio.
> 
> The Chinese consumer is spending more. Retail sales increased 15 per cent in the first half of the year. Sales of autos and appliances have been boosted by government incentives. However, China’s transformation from an export-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy is still in its infancy.
> 
> The consumer expansion roughly offsets the decline in export earnings, leaving stimulus spending and public sector investment to account for just about all the current growth in the economy. Private sector investment is noticeably absent, as might be expected when the most profitable part of their business, exports to Western consumers, has fallen off a cliff.
> 
> Government largesse is not the recipe for sustained consumer-led growth. That task belongs to the private sector and the jobs it is capable of creating, provided it has access to the capital needed to shift away from exports and ramp up production of goods and services targeted at the domestic market.
> 
> To replace its reliance on exports, China is going to have to boost household consumption to 50 per cent of GDP, a tall order in any economy. In China, it will require a dramatic shift of capital and resources that could take years.
> 
> “They can't turn themselves inside out overnight,” says Mr. Courtis, the Hong Kong-based investment banker.
> 
> *PERSISTENT OVERCAPACITY*
> 
> The flow of easy credit to inefficient state-backed entities in sectors like steel and cement has been a setback to hopes of purging China's economy of its less-competitive companies. For China's economy to truly mature, more financing must be made available to small and medium-sized businesses and private companies. Instead, 70 per cent of all loans still go to state-owned enterprises.
> 
> Chinese officials said this week that they intend to curb overcapacity in steel and cement, which have expanded as a side effect of the stimulus package, the construction boom and easy credit.
> 
> These statements, however, exacerbated concerns that China's commodity consumption is slowing, and the so-called restocking process is now largely complete. Chinese steel prices are falling after months of gains. The head of BHP Billiton Ltd., the world's largest mining company, has warned of sluggish Chinese metals demand.
> 
> The fear now being voiced in some circles is that any significant Chinese cutback will send shock waves through world commodity markets and cause prices to crash again. China could, in fact, spur another downturn in resource-producing nations such as Brazil, Russia and Canada.
> 
> *FEAR OF SOCIAL UNREST*
> 
> The biggest threat facing China's economy is what happens when the funds from the stimulus package and government loans have been exhausted. The fledgling Chinese consumer can't do the heavy lifting for the global economy, which means that Western demand for China's exports will have to come to the rescue. “I would argue we're probably going to be seeing a W-shaped recovery,” says Jennifer Richmond, senior China analyst with Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Tex. “Everything that they're doing really isn't long-term. They're still not addressing some of the root issues.”
> 
> Within the corridors of power in Beijing, the darkest fear is that economic change will bring with it social instability. In the northeastern province of Jilin last month, a mob of steel workers beat an executive to death after he arrived to tell workers their factory was to be privatized in a takeover that would lead to job cuts.
> 
> The paramount need to maintain stability at any cost underlies every economic policy move. It explains why, for example, long before the global downturn, Chinese banks were providing cheap credit to anyone promising to employ people, no matter how shaky their business plan. And it is also the reason Chinese authorities have started fretting about asset bubbles.
> 
> The last thing Beijing wants is an inflation problem. “It's so hard to manage social stability when you've got inflation,” Ms. Richmond says. “When people can't be fed, that's when you've got a problem.”




The fear of social unrest is, I believe, the main factor for _official_ China. But there is another, “new” and growing _business_ China that may be at odds with the government.


----------



## CougarKing

Another update:



> Chinese helicopters enter Indian air space twice; dozens of incursions in Leh
> 
> Two Chinese helicopters have reportedly violated the Indian air space in recent months in Leh area of north Jammu and Kashmir during which they air-dropped some canned food in barren land at Chumar, northeast of this Himalayan town, along the border.
> 
> The MI series helicopters were reported to the nearby defence post by residents of this high altitude area living along the Pangong lake, located in the lap of majestic hills, prompting the Army Aviation Corps to rush its Cheetah and Chetak helicopters.
> 
> However, they could only find tell-tale signs left by Chinese helicopters which hovered in the Indian territory for nearly five minutes dropping the food material on June 21 this year, sources said.
> 
> When contacted, Army spokesperson for Udhampur-based Northern Command told PTI that “there was a report of a helicopter flying in the area south of Chumar, where India and China have differences in perception on the Line of Actual Control. It was reported by grazers.”
> A confidential defence document accessed by PTI shows that Chinese helicopters entered into Indian air space along Damchok area and Trig Heights in Ladakh and air dropped canned food containing frozen pork and brinjal, which had passed the expiry date.
> 
> *Chinese People’s Liberation Army has been crossing over into the Indian side in this region quite frequently with
> August reporting the maximum number of incursions.
> Trig Heights also known as Trade junction, which connected Ladakh with Tibet in earlier days, is an area where*
> Chinese patrol have frequented this year in June, July and August.
> Chinese Army patrols have made 26 sorties in June, including two incursions by helicopters, and 21 in July.
> In August this year, Chinese patrols have entered into the Indian territory 26 times and walked away with Petrol and
> kerosene meant for jawans of the border guarding forces. The Chinese army had made 223 attempts last year and left
> tell-tale signs.
> 
> The Army spokesperson, however, tried to downplay these incursions attempts saying "there are a few areas along the
> border where India and China have different perceptions of the LAC. Both sides patrol upto their respective perceptions of LAC."
> "Due to perceived differences in the alignment of LAC, the Chinese patrol does transgress beyond our perception of
> the LAC in a few areas. The pattern of transgressions has remained similar over a long period of time," the spokesperson
> said.
> 
> Incursions have taken place in eastern Ladakh and on the northern bank of Pangong Tso Lake, located 168 kilometres from Leh. Chinese patrols come frequently on the North and South of this lake, whose 45 kilometres are on Indian side while another 90 on Chinese side.
> 
> India and China have been engaged in talks over the Line of Actual Control and had exchanged maps in 2002. In the western sector (East Jammu and Kashmir), the Samar Lungpa area, between the Karakoram Pass and the Chipchap river, is contentious, with Chinese maps showing the LAC to be south of the Samar Lungpa.
> 
> This is the northernmost part of the border, far to the north of Leh. But while the Indo-Tibetan Border Police operates north of the line the
> Chinese claim to be the border, they remain south of the Lungpa. South of the Chipchap River are the Trig Heights, comprising Points 5495 and 5459.
> Chinese troops frequently enter the area and in fact, they have a name for Point 5459; Manshen Hill. The area, south-east of Trig Heights, called Depsang Ridge is also contentious. Differences were found when Chinese small-scale maps were interposed on large-scaled Indian ones.
> 
> http://www.hindustantimes.com/China-...e1-448535.aspx


----------



## CougarKing

And the Dalai Lama visits Taiwan, further irking Beijing...

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090831/n_top_news/cnews_us_taiwan_dalai_5



> China again decries Dalai Lama visit to Taiwan
> 2 hours, 33 minutes ago
> 
> 
> KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan (Reuters) - China denounced the Dalai Lama's trip to Taiwan, saying the visit by a man Beijing brands a separatist could have a "negative influence" on relations, Chinese state media said on Monday.
> 
> 
> The Tibetan spiritual leader arrived late on Sunday in Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by China, to comfort victims of the island's worst typhoon in 50 years which struck this month, triggering floods that killed about 570 people.
> 
> "I'm very, very strict, (the trip is of a) non-political nature," the Dalai Lama told reporters on arrival from India, appearing to try to reassure Beijing.
> 
> 
> Organizers had originally planned to host a news conference for the Dalai Lama on Monday, but that was cancelled, with the 1988 Nobel peace prize winner starting his day visiting flood-ravaged villages.
> 
> 
> As with a denunciation it issued when the visit was announced last week, China focused its criticism on the opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
> 
> *By not blaming Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou or the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), Beijing may have indicated that it does not wish to escalate the issue which brings together China's two most sensitive territorial issues -- Tibet and Taiwan.*
> 
> China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong's forces won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to the island. Beijing has vowed to bring Taiwan under its rule, by force if necessary.
> 
> 
> The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
> 
> 
> "The Democratic Progressive Party has ulterior motives to instigate the Dalai Lama's visit to Taiwan, who has long been engaged in separatist activities," a spokesman for China's State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
> 
> 
> "We resolutely oppose this and our position is firm and clear," the spokesman said. "The Dalai Lama's visit to Taiwan is bound to have a negative influence on the relations between the mainland and Taiwan."
> 
> 
> China, which is considered unlikely to retaliate by choking off growing economic ties between the long-time political rivals, has always opposed the Dalai Lama's trips abroad and blames him for stirring up riots in Tibetan regions ahead of the Beijing Olympics last year.
> 
> 
> Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a reactionary who seeks to split off nearly a quarter of the land mass of the People's Republic of China. It has been using its diplomatic clout to try to block the pro-Tibetan message.
> 
> 
> The Dalai Lama denies the charge and says he seeks greater rights, including religious freedom, and autonomy for Tibetans.
> 
> 
> (Reporting by Ralph Jennings and Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing; Writing by Lee Chyen Yee and Nick Macfie)



And someone else:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090831/world/taiwan_china_politics_tibet_ties



> Protest accuses Dalai Lama of 'politics' in Taiwan
> 
> 1 hour, 15 minutes ago
> 
> BEIJING (AFP) - A group of 30 people who said they were Taiwan typhoon victims demonstrated against the Dalai Lama Monday, accusing him of using a visit to the island to stage a "political show."
> 
> The group, from Taiwan's aboriginal community, were standing outside the Tibetan spiritual leader's hotel in the southern city of Kaohsiung, holding up banners, one reading: "We don't want Dalai politics."
> 
> 
> "The Dalai Lama is only staging a political show here," said the leader of the protesters, who declined to give his name.
> 
> 
> The protest follows comments from a senior offical in Taiwan who warned that the current visit to the island would have a "negative influence" on ties between Beijing and Taipei, quoted by China's official Xinhua news agency.
> 
> "The Dalai Lama's visit to Taiwan is bound to have a negative influence on the relations between the mainland and Taiwan," a spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said.
> 
> 
> The spokesman took aim at Taiwan's opposition Democratic Progressive Party for inviting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, who began his visit on Sunday and aims to comfort victims of Typhoon Morakot.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, will create yet another tempest in the Chinese teapot:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/safeguard-democracy-dalai-lama-says/article1270856/


> Safeguard democracy, Dalai Lama says
> *Political message contradicts assurances the spiritual leader would stay away from political issues during visit to typhoon ravaged island that angered China*
> 
> Peter Enav
> 
> Shiao Lin, Taiwan — Associated Press
> Monday, Aug. 31, 2009
> 
> The Dalai Lama exhorted Taiwan on Monday to safeguard its democracy, interspersing prayers for the victims of Typhoon Morakot with a challenge to Communist China.
> 
> The call from the Tibetan spiritual leader appeared to contradict assurances that his five-day visit to comfort the victims of the worst storm to hit the island in 50 years would steer clear of the political – a concern for President Ma Ying-jeou's administration, which is seeking closer ties with the mainland.
> 
> Kneeling on the ground to pray for the hundreds killed in this remote mountain village when torrential rains triggered two catastrophic mudslides earlier this month, the Dalai Lama acknowledged that Taiwan and China should maintain “their very close and unique links.”
> 
> However, he said, Taiwan should never lose sight of the importance of its democratic political system, which stands in marked contrast to China's one-party dictatorship.
> 
> “You enjoy democracy,” he said, addressing a crowd of several hundred amid a landscape of jagged boulders and twisted, upended tree trunks. “That must be preserved. No matter what political party, think common interest and work united.”
> 
> The trip has infuriated Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and resents any outside effort to influence its future. It is likely to be particularly irked by such comments from the Dalai Lama, whom it denounces as a “splittist” – alleging he seeks independence for his native Tibet.
> 
> Beijing also regularly uses that sobriquet for advocates of formal independence for Taiwan, which split from the mainland amid civil war in 1949 – ten years before Chinese troops invaded Tibet and sent the Dalai Lama into exile in northern India.
> 
> The Buddhist spiritual leader, however, told the crowd, which included friends and relatives of those killed in Morakot, that he had a moral responsibility to visit the island – a seeming rebuke to his detractors, both in China, and here in Taiwan, where some 60 pro-China demonstrators hurled insults at him as he boarded a special train for the southern city of Kaohsiung on Sunday night.
> 
> But in Shiao Lin itself, some 50 former residents returned to greet him, many wearing T-shirts with pictures of the village before the mudslides buried the community under tons of rocks and rubble.
> 
> “We welcome him, and we're very happy that he's here,” said Liu Ming-chuan, 44, as he stood amid friends and family, his back toward the ruins of his former home.
> 
> The Dalai Lama's comments were followed by a simple prayer service, in which he held his palms together as a monk next to him recited a Buddhist sutra. When the prayers were finished he rose slowly and embraced two weeping relatives of Shiao Lin victims, holding their heads in his hands as they knelt on the ground beside him.
> 
> His arrival on the island created a dilemma for President Ma, who in his 15 months in office has turned the corner on his predecessor's pro-independence policies, reducing tensions across the 100-mile- (160-kilometre-) wide Taiwan Strait to their lowest point in six decades.
> 
> Mr. Ma was backed into a corner when seven mayors and county magistrates affiliated with the opposition Democratic Progressive Party invited the Tibetan spiritual leader to visit their area, amid mounting charges the president and his government had botched Morakot relief efforts.
> 
> While Beijing has said it “resolutely opposes” the Dalai Lama's visit, it has been careful not to blame Mr. Ma personally, putting the onus instead on the opposition mayors and magistrates – an apparent effort to keep cross-strait relations going on their current positive track, though even before the Dalai Lama's more political comments, it had also said the trip could harm ties.



The Dalai Lama is making mischief but, in so doing, he is drawing everyone’s attention to a huge problem for China: _one country/two systems_ will be much, much harder to implement in Taiwan than it has been in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong was and remains much less _democratic_, albeit somewhat more law abiding, than Taiwan. The _one country/two systems_ compromises required for Hong Kong were, largely, *regulatory* rather than *political*, _per se_. Absorbing Taiwan will oblige the Chinese to accept, at a _provincial_ level – in what will, almost certainly be the richest and most _visible_ province – a political system that it denies to all but a few Chinese (in relatively small cities, towns and villages).


----------



## CougarKing

And a slightly different development from your oil sands update:

*The PRC will lose face (diu mian/丟面) among overseas Chinese across the world if the crackdown of an ethnic Chinese group like that one in Kokang continues. It remains to be seen whether the CCP will realize which of the two courses of action- supporting their allies in the Burma Junta or intervene in the plight of an ethnic Chinese group- will better serve China's interest in the long run. But the writer of this article seems to say that there is already a good indication how the CCP will act.



> From today's Times
> 
> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article6816392.ece
> 
> For China, the cost of oil and gas has just doubled. You will not find this new oil price quoted anywhere, but its burden will weigh heavily on the leadership in Beijing.
> It is not an oil price that can be measured in dollars per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. There has been no cutback by Opec, nor has a hurricane toppled offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. It is China's oil price; the cost of oil for the People's Republic is now measured in refugees, in tens of thousands of people fleeing Burma into China.
> The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday that as many as 30,000 people had crossed the Burmese border into Yunnan province in southwest China. *An assault by the Burmese Army on the Kokang militia, an ethnic Chinese rebel group in Shan state, started the flight, but the refugees mean much more than a spot of trouble on the border. The brazen assault by Rangoon threatens to wreck China's carefully drawn strategy to transform Burma into a trading corridor of highways and oil and gas pipelines bringing energy and minerals into China's heartlands.
> It is trouble for Beijing because the refugees are ethnic Chinese, traders who have established small businesses in remote northeast Burma. About 7,000 Burmese troops moved to the border and reports suggest that they pursued the rebels on to Chinese soil.*
> 
> 
> *Wrong-footed by the unexpected assault by an ally, a government on which Beijing has lavished military aid, China's response has been timid. A spokesman for the Chinese Government urged Burma to protect the legal rights of Chinese citizens and said Beijing hoped that Myanmar could "appropriately solve its relevant internal problems and safeguard the stability of the China-Myanmar [Burma] border".
> China's loss of face might not have been so obvious had it not been for Daewoo's announcement of last week.* *The South Korean conglomerate trumpeted its participation in the Shwe gas project, a $5.6 billion (£3.4 billion) venture to exploit an offshore gasfield in the Bay of Bengal and pipe the gas to fuel-hungry cities in southwestern China. It is a massive undertaking, a steel tube stretching more than 1,000km across Burma and into the mountainous Yunnan province. The Shwe partners, which include Moge, the Burmese state oil company, have to supply gas to CNPC, the Chinese state oil group, for 30 years.
> China outbid India for the right to buy the gas and the Shwe venture is only one of a gamut of Chinese collaborations with one of the world's detested regimes. America has banned investments in Burma by US citizens since the 1988 pro-democracy protests and the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader. The European Union prohibits military sales and has imposed a visa ban and asset freezes on the Burmese generals.
> China has no such qualms. There are plans for an oil highway, a second pipeline that would link southwest China to the Burmese coast. The link would provide cheaper and safer transport for Middle Eastern and African crude, avoiding a lengthy and dangerous passage through the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca. Chinese companies are sinking cash into Burmese mines, logging its forest and digging up its precious stones.
> After the bloody suppression of the monks' street protest in 2007, the West banged the table and harangued the generals, but for China it was business as usual. Foreign direct investment in Burma rose fivefold last year to almost $1 billion; almost all of the money was Chinese.*
> Last week the lapdog bit its master's hand, not badly but a wound that will, nonetheless, create embarrassment and expense for Beijing. In London and Washington, there will be smirks as Beijing's cynical realpolitik gets its just desert.
> We should not be too smug. Britain was recently slapped by a general who turned out to be no poodle. We wanted lots of things from Libya - an end to its support for terrorism, diplomatic friendship, oil and gas deals and petrodollar investment. We may get some of those things but, in the embarrassing celebrations on the return to Tripoli of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has reminded us that we have no right to presume; in diplomacy, everything is negotiable.
> China's calculation over Burma is unlikely to be so different from our Government's assessment of Libya. Arguably, China is more realistic, less prone to moral histrionics. Burma's generals have waged war for decades against the country's ethnic minorities. Its Government is engaged in an intermittent but brutal campaign to subjugate a constellation of tribal groups whose stubborn independence mocks the generals' claim to dominion over the state that they renamed Myanmar.
> Beijing knows the history, geography and ethnography better than we do - the warring tribes, the heroin trade, Rangoon's dubious peace deals with opium warlords on the Thai and Chinese borders. The ceasefire between the Burmese Army and the rebels appears to be unravelling and we could speculate as to the reasons. As Burma's links with China multiply, as roads are built, as pipe is laid, the risk posed by the rebels and the drug trade become more inconvenient than the short-term profit. Burma's new friend is not keen on insurrection and it might be prepared to look away while the Burmese Army cracks a few heads on Chinese soil.
> We looked away; we dumped Burma, abandoning its people to their fate in a fit of righteous indignation over the pigheaded behaviour of the generals, a violent clique who showed not the slightest interest in bowing to the teachings of former colonial masters. We had Tony Blair's "ethical foreign policy" and Burma was the pilot test, the first and last occasion when we put morality before money. Premier Oil, a small British company, was told to quit Burma. Eventually, it did. Burma turned its face East and found bigger friends.
> Our writ no longer runs east of Suez. It is China's dominion and one good outcome of this Burmese refugee crisis is that Beijing must begin to acknowledge that, if it wishes to plunder the world like a colonial power, it must police it, too. Power brings responsibility and refugees. A more civilised Burma would bring Beijing less trouble and more profit.
> The same can be said of Libya. Our new "ally" is a staging post for African migrants who make their way in leaky boats to Sicily. It is a flow that could easily turn to a flood. As Burma is to China, Libya is our southern border. It is there, an opportunity for profit and for trouble, whether we like it or not.


----------



## CougarKing

And the PLA shows off new _fei dan_.



> China to Unveil New Missiles At National Day Parade
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 2 Sep 2009 05:43
> 
> BEIJING - China will unveil a range of previously unknown missiles during its National Day parade Oct. 1, including intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles, state media said Sept. 2.
> 
> New hardware on display also will include conventional cruise missiles, and both short- and medium-range missiles, the Global Times newspaper reported, citing an unnamed People's Liberation Army source.
> 
> "These missiles are domestically designed and manufactured and have never been officially reported before," the source, who is with the PLA's strategic missile defense unit, was quoted as saying.
> 
> The weapons have already been distributed to the military and are ready for operation, the source said.
> 
> China's missile development program has caused concern overseas, particularly in the United States, amid projections that it could soon tip the security balance in the Taiwan Strait.
> 
> An August report by the Rand Corporation, a U.S. think-tank, said China was increasing both the quantity and quality of its short-range ballistic missiles, which could challenge the United States' ability to protect Taiwan from possible attack.
> 
> China also caused alarm overseas in 2007 when it successfully tested an anti-satellite missile, raising fears of a space arms race.
> 
> China issued a military policy white paper earlier this year, saying its missile program was aimed mainly at "deterrence." However, it added it was also capable of "conducting nuclear counter-attacks and precision strikes with conventional missiles."
> 
> *China will stage a huge military parade and pageant Oct. 1 in Beijing to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of communist China.
> 
> The parades, held every 10 years, typically showcase new-generation weapons systems and are closely scrutinized by both domestic and foreign military watchers for clues about Chinese development trends.*
> The expert quoted by the Global Times did not reveal the model names or numbers of the missiles.
> 
> However, missiles believed to have been developed by China include the Dongfeng 41, a solid-fuel ICBM with an estimated range of up to 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers).
> The missile would be China's longest-range ICBM, according to U.S.-based GlobalSecurity.org, a leading independent source of military information.


----------



## CougarKing

If this proves true, so much for China's "non-interference in another nation's domestic afairs" policy. 



> China training, arming militants against India
> *China denies incursions by its troops into Indian territory across the Line of Actual Control. But NDTV has exclusive information that China is actively training and arming insurgent groups in Manipur and Nagaland.
> 
> On video, an alleged Manipur militant is interrogated. Intelligence officials say he confirms that China is training Manipuri militants.*
> Sources say at least 400 cadre of a Manipuri insurgent group, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), have been undergoing arms training in China's Yunnan province for the last year. Ronie, alias Robindro, a self-styled major of the Manipur PLA, brags "16 platoon went to China recently, some of them have come back."
> 
> The insurgents travel to Yunnan via Myanmar. Arms for these militants also come via this route. And China's role doesn't stop at training militants.
> 
> Issac Chisi Swu, chairman of the NSCN, a Naga insurgent group, which is still upholding a ceasefire with India, has been hosted in Beijing and Kunming this May. His main officer in charge of acquiring weapons has also been twice to China.
> 
> According to intelligence operatives, a Chinese company supplies machine guns and hi-tech communication equipment to both Naga and Manipuri militants. Anti-aircraft guns have also been acquired from China by these groups, which are currently in Myanmar.
> 
> The arrested Manipuri militant has told interrogators that the PLA and other Manipuri groups are being armed and trained by Chinese experts in Myanmar. This is apparently in preparation for a major showdown with Indian security forces next year.
> 
> http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/china...inst_india.php


----------



## Edward Campbell

This sort of _"interference"_ - support for armed revolutionaries - has been part of the CCP's *official* policy since the end of the 2nd World War, before there even was a Red China. The _Malaya Emergency_ (1948 to 1960 (and beyond)) is my favourite example, but it's not the only one.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and mail_ website, is a report on another sort of “interference:”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/china-us-trade-tensions-mount/article1285968/


> China-U.S. trade tensions mount
> *Beijing launches antidumping probes into imported U.S. auto, chicken products after U.S. slaps tariffs on tires*
> 
> Gillian Wong
> 
> Beijing
> The Associated Press
> Sunday, Sep. 13, 2009
> 
> China is launching antidumping investigations into imported U.S. auto and chicken products, the government said Sunday, adding to a string of trade disputes with Washington including a recent decision to raise tariffs on Chinese-made tires.
> 
> The Commerce Ministry said it would look into complaints that American auto and chicken products are being dumped into the Chinese market or are benefiting from subsidies. The ministry said there are concerns the U.S. imports have “dealt a blow to domestic industries.”
> 
> The ministry statement did not elaborate on the complaints or how the investigation would proceed.
> 
> Washington and Beijing have recently traded accusations of protectionism, which they agree will hurt efforts to end the global economic crisis.
> 
> The U.S. and China, the world's largest and third-largest economies, have been engaged in a series of battles over access to each other's markets for goods such as tires, steel pipe, music and movies.
> 
> President Barack Obama on Friday approved new tariffs on all car and light truck tires coming into the U.S. from China, a move Beijing condemned as protectionist and a violation of global trade rules.
> 
> The Commerce Ministry's statement said China remained firmly opposed to protectionism.
> 
> “Since the financial crisis, China's actions have proven this point,” it said. “China is willing to work with countries around the world to act together to promote the quick recovery of the world economy.”
> 
> China and the U.S. banned each others' poultry in 2004 following an outbreak of bird flu in Asia. But China lifted the ban after a few months and has complained that Washington refused to do the same.
> 
> Since then, China has imported more than 4 million tons of U.S. poultry — mostly feet and other parts that are popular in China but not elsewhere.
> 
> The World Trade Organization launched an investigation of the U.S. ban on Chinese poultry at the end of July. Beijing told the WTO's dispute settlement body that Washington had imposed protectionist measures in completely banning Chinese chicken products entering the U.S. market. The United States said it was still examining whether Chinese poultry was safe for human consumption.
> 
> Last month, China said it revised its tariffs on imported auto parts after losing an appeal of a WTO ruling against its policy of requiring foreign automakers to buy more than 40 per cent of the components used in any China-made vehicle from local suppliers or pay more than double the usual tariff on imported parts.
> 
> Beijing's revision was such that all imported auto parts will be taxed at the same rate regardless of the percentage of foreign-made parts used to make a vehicle.
> 
> China argued the higher tariffs were needed to prevent auto makers from evading steep vehicle import duties by importing cars in large chunks. The U.S., the 27-nation EU and Canada contended that the tariffs encouraged car parts companies to shift production to China, costing Americans, Canadians and Europeans their jobs.




“We” contend, probably correctly, that _”the tariffs encouraged car parts companies to shift production to China, costing Americans, Canadians and Europeans their jobs.”_ Sauce for the goose/sauce for the gander, and all that.

Watch for China to snipe, more and more, at America as it (China) tries to elbow its way into the “front row” of the world’s powers.


----------



## George Wallace

This could also result in the Americans, Canadians and Europeans turning around and stopping the exporting of parts to China, preferring instead to assemble vehicles using those parts at home, reversing the trends and keeping auto workers at home happy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

George Wallace said:
			
		

> This could also result in the Americans, Canadians and Europeans turning around and stopping the exporting of parts to China, preferring instead to assemble vehicles using those parts at home, reversing the trends and keeping auto workers at home happy.




That is, roughly, what Jeff Rubin predicts in his recent book, albeit for a different reason.

But the problem for America, Canada and Europe is the demand curve. The demand curve for automobiles (and therefore for auto parts) is trending down in North America and Europe. The places where the demand curve for automobiles are still trending upwards are China and India. China wants to create a domestic parts industry and it can, probably will, use unfair trade practices to get one. Watch for India to follow suit.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This sort of _"interference"_ - support for armed revolutionaries - has been part of the CCP's *official* policy since the end of the 2nd World War, before there even was a Red China. The _Malaya Emergency_ (1948 to 1960 (and beyond)) is my favourite example, but it's not the only one.




Well one does not really hear about China supporting the Maoists in Nepal or India? Or a similar movement in Bangladesh.

I have read though about a possible Chinese link in the past to the Marxist rebel movement in the Philippines called the New People's Army(NPA), though it is still unclear on whether they still support the NPA nowadays. 

And speaking of rebellion- or more rather a possible seperatist Uighur Jihad- in China's own backyard...it seems the UAE's Emirati may have more sympathy for the Uighurs in China than previously thought.(even if the article says the plane was not heading directly to Xinjiang but to Hanyang in Hubei province, IIRC)

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/09/07/India-detains-UAE-plane-crew/UPI-41251252380039/



> *India detains UAE plane, crew*
> 
> 
> Published: Sept. 7, 2009 at 11:20 PM
> Order reprintsCALCUTTA, India, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- *A United Arab Emirates transport plane bound for China was detained in Kolkata after it was found to be carrying weapons, Indian officials said.
> 
> The plane's nine crew members were being questioned as to why the cargo was not declared when the craft, bound for Hanyang in China*, landed in Kolkata, formerly called Calcutta, for refueling, the BBC quoted an Indian Defense Ministry spokesman as saying.
> 
> It was not clear why the plane was carrying arms to a country which is an exporter of such items, the BBC report said.
> 
> *The Times of India reported the C-130 Hercules aircraft was flying to China after taking off from UAE's Western Air Command base in Abu Dhabi.*
> The report said the UAE government had applied to Indian authorities for clearance, which is required for a military aircraft not only to fly over Indian airspace but also to land at a civilian airport.
> 
> "As permission was sought through proper diplomatic channels and UAE is a friendly country, the clearances were given," one official told the newspaper.
> 
> However, the official said spaces on the request form requiring mention of any arms aboard were marked "nil."
> 
> "This was in clear violation of rules and the crew was detained," the official said.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The “drama” appears to be over, according to this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Times of India_ website, but there are still questions:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/kolkata-/Drama-over-UAE-plane-flies-to-China/articleshow/4997031.cms


> Drama over, UAE plane flies to China
> 
> 11 September 2009
> KOLKATA:
> 
> The United Arab Emirates Air Force C-130 J Super Hercules aircraft, which had been held up at the Kolkata airport since Sunday evening following the discovery of arms, ammunition and explosives in its cargo, finally took off for Xiangyang in China at 9.24 am on Thursday. The nine crew members left by the flight as well.
> 
> Though there were speculations on whether the plane would be escorted back to Sunday's entry point into Indian airspace over the Arabian Sea, the defence ministry and Indian Air Force allowed it to take its original path. The plane reached Xiangyang around noon after flying over Dhaka, Chittagong and Kunming.
> 
> The plane had been seized by Customs authorities on Sunday night as the documentation submitted prior to its arrival did not disclose the cargo. The technical halt for refuelling and giving the crew rest was originally scheduled to last 13 hours, but stretched to 88 hours.
> 
> Though crew members had been cleared by the immigration department on Tuesday and the ministry of external affairs (MEA) and ministry of defence (MoD) indicated they would allow the aircraft to proceed the day after, the flight was held up due to delay in applying for Air Defence/AOR clearance by the UAE government.
> 
> The crew had gone down to the airport on Wednesday afternoon, expecting a clearance to take off, but had to return to the hotel after a four-hour wait. They heaved a sigh of relief when the permissions arrived late on Wednesday.
> 
> It was learnt that the UAE government has admitted to a mistake in the documentation and apologized for failing to report the weapons. Since UAE has friendly relations with India, the government considered the matter sympathetically to avoid a diplomatic row.
> 
> The matter could have been resolved earlier had conventional weapons been on board. But the presence of three boxes, marked "combat missiles", led to the logjam. Sleuths suspected that deadly US-made Harpoon missiles were being channelized to China from UAE and Egypt. If that suspicion were proved true, the unauthorized proliferation could lead to regional imbalances and trigger a crisis, felt experts.
> 
> "The presence of missiles on board made the situation grave. Already, there are reports of Pakistan having modified Harpoon missiles to strike land targets in India," an analyst pointed out.



And, from the _China Digital Times_:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/09/arms-laden-uae-plane-gets-nod-to-leave/


> Arms Laden UAE Plane Gets Nod to Leave
> 
> The plane held in China allegedly carrying undeclared arms heading for China from the United Arab Emirates has been released, the Times of India reports:
> 
> Sources say that the China-bound UAE Air Force aircraft detained at the NSC Bose International airport in Kolkata after arms and
> ammunition were found on board as the Customs authorities has been allowed to leave India. It is said that the defense ministry has been told to leave the plane after the crew were found to be cooperative. The UAE has expressed regret over the incident. ( Watch Video )
> 
> The C-130 Hercules aircraft has been waiting to resume its flight for the past four days.
> 
> An external affairs ministry statement on Tuesday said that the UAE authorities, both in New Delhi and Abu Dhabi, had formally regretted the omission of items carried by the aircraft and had described it as a ‘technical error’.
> 
> See also an article from The Times which gives more details about the plane:
> 
> The discovery has raised eyebrows, as the UAE buys most of its weapons from the United States and European Union, which impose strict controls on arms transfers to China.
> 
> The most controversial theory is that the weapons include high-tech equipment that China would like to examine or copy.
> 
> Last year the UAE purchased 14 Maverick air-to-ground missiles from the United States and also signed a contract to buy US Patriot air defence missiles.
> 
> The UAE has refused to comment on the matter, fuelling suspicions that the three boxes of weapons found on the Hercules C130 transport plane were supposed to be secret. The aircraft was refuelling en route from Abu Dhabi to the northern Chinese city of Xianyang — a big arms production centre.




There are at least two “alternate theories” (other than arms for Uighur separatists):

•	Arab weapons to be smuggled into Pakistan (or to other Muslim Asians outside of China); or

•	US technology being (illegally) sold to China.

My personal inclination – based on next to nothing, I hasten to add -  is to believe the latter.


----------



## CougarKing

Not really that surprising- any foreign reporter in mainland China should be aware of the risks of trying to cover topics like these.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/ap/20090919/tap-as-china-journalists-bb10fb8.html



> *3 with Japanese news agency assaulted in Beijing* Updated September 19, 2009 03:05 PM
> 
> BEIJING (AP) — *Three employees from the Japanese news agency Kyodo were assaulted in their Beijing hotel room as they tried to cover a rehearsal of a military parade celebrating 60 years of China's communist rule, the news agency today (Sept. 19).
> 
> The three were kicked and made to kneel Friday evening at the Beijing Hotel, close to Tiananmen Square at the heart of Beijing, Kyodo reported.*
> 
> Yasushi Kato, bureau chief of the Kyodo News Beijing office, told The Associated Press several men stormed into the hotel room after one of the journalists opened the door, but they did not identify themselves. Kyodo reported they destroyed two computers by throwing them into the corridor.
> 
> Kato said a reporter and a cameraman were Japanese and the third was a Chinese assistant.
> 
> China has been preparing for the Oct. 1 celebration with tightened security.
> 
> *On Friday afternoon, police cleared streets and office buildings in parts of the capital before parade floats, tanks and trucks bearing intercontinental ballistic missiles rumbled toward the square for the late-night rehearsal.*
> 
> Some foreign media were told not to film and photograph the parade. AP Television News carried a live feed of military convoys, but China's Foreign Ministry asked it to stop.
> 
> A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said she had not heard about the Kyodo case and said the ministry had not asked news agencies not to take photos of the parade.
> 
> A woman at the information office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau said she had not heard about the case.
> 
> An employee at the front desk of the Beijing Hotel said the hotel had asked guests not to stand on the balconies to watch the rehearsal, but they could watch from inside their rooms. He did not give his name.
> 
> Kato said the Kyodo employees had been on the balcony to watch the rehearsal but had not taken pictures from there. He said they were inside the room when the men entered.
> 
> The journalists returned to their office this morning, he said.
> 
> The official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday a planned rehearsal for Sept. 26 had been called off to avoid further affecting the public.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There is a good article, here, in CDAI’s 2008 Vimy papers by Christian Constantin and Brian Job in which they set out China’s 21st early century strategic aims:
> 
> _”First, China’s priority remains domestic economic development and successfully dealing with the economic, social and political challenges resulting from reform. In order to deal with these domestic challenges, PRC leaders expect that the international environment will remain stable and conducive to economic interactions.
> 
> Second, China will defend agreed-upon international norms based on the fundamental norm of sovereignty and the national right to chose one’s path of development. In other words, Beijing remains dedicated to the reunification of territory —read Taiwan— and will remain cautious about international interventions unless authorized by the U.N.
> 
> Third, China is already a great power and expects to be treated as such; nonetheless it will behave responsibly by exercising caution and self-restraint in order not to threaten its partners while it develops.”_
> 
> 
> The key phrase is, _”China is already a great power and expects to be treated as such.”_ That’s why the Chinese are _”looking for more input on how the world runs,”_ and if they do not get it, if Europe and America demur, then China may just upset the economic apple cart.




Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from yesterday’s _National Post_ is further commentary of China’s aims and concerns:

http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/story.html?id=2008801


> Saturday Interview: Yuen Pau Woo
> 
> Eric Lam, Financial Post
> 
> Friday, September 18, 2009
> 
> *If economists had to pick a winner in the global recession, China might be it. Ruled by a communist government, but also home to a chaotic market, China has sailed through the economic crises of the past year relatively unscathed. Now, cash-rich and armed with a burgeoning middle class, China may be getting set to fulfill its destiny as the next great world power. But is this what the Chinese even want?
> 
> The Financial Post's Eric Lam spoke with Yuen Pau Woo, chief executive of the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, about the China conundrum.*
> 
> _Q. How did the global economic crisis play out in China?_
> 
> A. Well, there wasn't a crisis. In the period leading up to the fall of 2008, the problem in China was that it was growing too fast. The Chinese government in the 12- to 18-month period before September 2008, had been trying to slow the pace of Chinese growth. So when the Lehman Bros. implosion took place, the Chinese suddenly realized they should no longer decelerate the economy because the spillover effects of the U.S. recession would eventually affect Chinese exports. And it did.
> 
> _Q. So how did China avoid financial ruin?_
> A. The key is to understand China entered the crisis in a strong position. If China was a locomotive, it was already gathering speed and the Chinese were stepping on the brakes. When the Chinese decided to put in place their stimulus package last November, they took their feet off the brakes. They could resume their acceleration very quickly. In the United States, the stimulus was about putting more gas in the engine to climb up already difficult terrain.
> 
> _Q. The Chinese must be feeling pretty good about themselves right now?_
> A. You'd think the Chinese would be pretty smug about the crises and gloating about how the U.S. is in such a funk. But my conversations with Chinese leaders show no signs of triumph. On the contrary, they are petrified about what the U.S. downturn will mean for the Chinese economy. The comfortable modus operandi that the world lived in until September 2008 was for the U.S. to spend beyond its means and for exporting powers like China to supply them with consumer goods. The Chinese and most Asian leaders now recognize the U.S. downturn will be prolonged and economic growth will be subpar.
> 
> _Q. Has this changed the power dynamic between China and the United States?_
> A. China's relative political and economic weight in the world has increased. With the crises, industrialized countries are forced to pay closer attention to China's role in the world and on international governance issues. Interdependence is still the watch word. China is seen as an emerging superpower, but it is emerging as a status quo power rather than a disruptive force.
> 
> _Q. No plans for world domination then?_
> A. This is one of the big misconceptions of fear mongerers who have the idea China wants to dominate the world. When you speak to Chinese leaders, their principal concern is not how to run the world economy but domestic, economic and social challenges. The Chinese don't like to be mentioned in the same breath as the United States, because they don't believe they are the same level, and don't want the responsibility of being the policeman or the economic engine of the world because they are not ready for it.
> 
> _Q. China may not have a choice?_
> A. The U.S. economy will not provide the engine of growth it provided in the first part of this decade. The Chinese understand that and they're terrified. China was a closed economy until the late 1970s. Can you imagine the kind of fear and apprehension Chinese citizens felt when their government told them they would open China to the world economy? Expose China to Western competition and all the ravages of Western capitalism? Change is frightening and fear works on both ends of the equation. As Canadians now prepare for an era of more visible Chinese presence, the only way to equip ourselves is to learn more about China.
> 
> _Q. How does Canada fit in? What do the Chinese think of us?_
> A. The man on the street understands the Canada-China relationship has gone through a rocky spell. You hear that from taxi drivers and students and office workers. But the government seems to be trying to change course. A very important test coming up will be the regulatory review process of the [$1.9-billion] PetroChina bid in the [Athabasca] oil sands. This investment will likely be reviewed by Industry Canada, which can, on the grounds of national security, reject the investment. That would send a very negative signal to the Chinese both at the business level and at the political level.
> 
> _Q. Does this mean you'll have to move to China to smooth things over?_
> A. You know, I've never lived in China, but I go there often. I consider myself Canadian, born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore. I came to Canada to go to school, and I've lived in Vancouver and Newfoundland. But maybe the tables will flip and I will be of more use there. We will see.
> 
> Financial Posterlam@nationalpost.com





Consider:

•	_“They_ [the Chinese leadership] _are petrified about what the U.S. downturn will mean for the Chinese economy;_


•	_”China's relative political and economic weight in the world has increased;”_


•	_”Industrialized countries are forced to pay closer attention to China's role in the world and on international governance issues;”_


•	[China] _”is emerging as a status quo power rather than a disruptive force;”_ and


•	[Chinese leaders’] _”principal concern is not how to run the world economy but domestic, economic and social challenges.”_

This is, pretty much, the _mainstream_ view of China, as I understand it. Most people who might be described as “experts” or _old China hands_ and the like say, roughly, the same thing.

China IS a “great power,” but it is not, à la the USA, a _hyper-power_, yet and while it wants, expects to be treated as a great power it will, for many years, eschew a self-imposed global “leadership” role. China still needs to sort out China; the internal, Chinese job is not done; it has gotten off to a good start but it is still just starting.

China is building its military muscle but it is not a threat, despite the best efforts of a huge, well funded “China threatens us” lobby in Washington.


----------



## Kirkhill

The fear of the Chinese hierarchy, in my distant view, derives from the nature of China.  Like Edward, I believe, I see China as an old-fashioned kind of empire as opposed to a unitary, national state.  It defines itself by walls and boundaries and spheres of influence and taxable clients.

China’s conservatism demands that it is reluctant to let go of the ancient paradigm that they trace back to the Yellow Emperor.  The well defined hierarchy and controlled economy is their preferred position.  This is not a unique cultural position…..even my Scots were (are?) afflicted despite Adam Smith.  In the 1200s people lamented the death of Alexander III with the comment that “all their gold turned to lead” when he died leaving the country leaderless and setting the stage for the Bruces, the Balliols and ultimately the Stewarts and 400 years of war.   There is a comfort in the notion of the benevolent dictator, or the Great Leader.

Historically though that system is only as good as the Leader and seldom outlasts him or her.  That results in empires suffering the fate of the French, the Spanish, the Russians and the Victorian Brits (as opposed to the Georgian Brits of which more shortly).  One of China’s problems is that there is no singular historical entity that is China.  There have been many Chinas and the Chinese follow an ancient human tradition of seeing their past in the best possible light and lay their claims based on the sum of their ancestors conquests, much as Lithuanians look back on their glory days when they ruled the empires of Moscow, Kiev and Warsaw.

It seems to me that the Chinese have yet to have the Little England discussion that characterized the Georgian and Early Victorian period of Britain after the loss of the American colonies.

Put succinctly the Little Englanders argued for an empire of trade vs a political empire.  This empire of trade was characterized by more Calcuttas, Singapores and Hong Kongs and fewer Indias, Canadas and Australias.  It manifested itself in support for the Royal Navy maintain freedom of commerce on the high seas vs an army dedicated to controlling restive populations.

China, like Prussia, Russia, France and Spain is still spending too much energy and effort trying to control “its” people.  It can’t let go and accept the chaos that comes with letting people make their own decisions.  It is expending effort and resources trying to hold its political empire together and missing the opportunity to become a hyper-power like the US.

When the US cut away from Britain that gave Brits the opportunity to rethink what had happened to their empire.  Initially their political empire was tiny.  They only governed the many dialects and languages found on the British Isles.  They made money the way the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes had, by trading.  That led to York Factory and Calcutta and the early ports in the US.  They were trade emporia.  IKEAs of their day if you will.  The problems arose when settlers moved into the shadow of the emporia, disrupted the lives of the natives and then demanded protection, for which they were unwilling to pay.

When the US settlers finally decided to quit the protection of the Empire, the reaction of the Little Englanders was: “Thank God”.  They promptly turned around and started investing billions of pounds in the US economy.  Other Little Englanders, like Raffles, ran off to Singapore, or the Mathesons and Jardines to Hong Kong, and set up their own little trading posts.  They had no desire to dominate the locals.  They just wanted to milk them.

The British Empire fell when the Victorians, on grounds that combined morality and national pride, decided they wanted to start painting maps pink.  The cost of doing business, which now included the cost of governance, rose exponentially and ultimately bankrupted the treasury (circa 1947).

The US, which is the son of the Georgians, in my humble opinion, was content to let the dollar work for it.  Its empirical urges could be contained at a relatively limited cost within the constraints of the continental US.  Once the continent had been tamed then the discussion became between those harbouring empirical urges and those just seeking liberty to live and trade.  By and large the traders have won out in the US, both domestically and internationally.  The hegemony of the US was largely built on the Dollar, not on the army or the navy.  (The yanks seem determined to turn all of that around now….. but that is too much of a digression, even for me).

Until the Chinese can let go of their need for a physical empire then I don’t see the likelihood of a Chinese hegemony any time soon. 

That doesn’t mean that, in trying to maintain and, needs must, expand their empire they will not create problems for us.  Just like Louis XIV had to keep pushing outwards to keep his population both fed and occupied so the CCP will have to keep acquiring new resources, as Thucydides alludes to in his thread on Canada and the impact on nationalism.

For me that suggests potentials for conflict that could impact Canada both at home and abroad.

Internationally, what do we do when China and its ancient enemy India, finally come to serious blows for control of South East Asia and the Stans?  

Domestically, what do we do if China invests in our oilsands and a pipeline to Rupert and we decide to turn off the taps to protest a human rights violation, or to take sides in the aforementioned conflict, and China decides to support a Haida land claim in order to exert control over the pipeline that they built?  Call it a Canadian Suez Crisis with China in the role of Britain and Canada’s Prime Minister acting as Nasser.  As we are constantly reminded China has a strong need for energy and it remains an open question, as far as I am concerned, as to whether or not China would let us become a major contributor to their economy and then live with the vagaries of decisions made by our democratically elected governments.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A few rather random arguments follow.

The Chinese are accustomed to having to _”accept the chaos that comes with letting people make their own decisions.”_ There have been, by my _guesstimate_, about 25 _interregna_ over the past 4,000± years – about one period of chaos and local, if not really individual, decision making every 160 years. That’s, probably, more often than the Brits have done the same thing.

In fairness, in every case the Chinese have fallen back on a “strong” (stronger than its competitors, anyway) government – but so, by my (very imperfect) reading of history, did pretty much everyone over about 5,700± of the past 6,000± years of world history. 

The Chinese *may* be the exception to the decline and fall rule. Chinese “empires” have declined and, indeed have fallen in the past – most recently in 1644 when the Qing ( 清 ) replaced the Ming ( 明 ) (with an extended, named, interregnum by the Shun ( 順 ). China, Han China, those descended from the Yellow Emperor, is, once again, a great power and *may* (but not in my lifetime) be a great “empire” again. If fact some might argue that by “holding” Tibet and Xinjiang, by regaining Hong Kong and by having secured broad international acceptance of its position that Taiwan is just a “missing” province,  China is, already, a great empire “again.” 

Confucian thought gets in the way.

There are five important “relationships” that are central to Confucian thought:

1.	*Father to Son* – requiring kindness in the father, and filial piety in the son;
2.	*Elder Brother to Younger Brother* – requiring gentility (politeness) in the elder brother, and humility in the younger;
3.	*Husband to Wife* – requiring righteousness in the husband and obedience in the wife;
4.	*Friend to (younger) friend* – requiring consideration among the elders and deference among the younger; and
5.	*Ruler to Subject* – requiring benevolence among the rulers and loyalty among the subjects.

Also central is the idea of the “gentleman” (for want of a better word) who is:

•	Moral;
•	Bound by filial piety and loyalty where these are due; and
•	Humane and benevolent.

These relationships with their required conduct and the required attributes of the gentleman do not leave much, if any, room for the sort of *liberalism* that allows, much less encourages people to accept, even embrace the _”the chaos that comes with letting people make their own decisions.”_

In fact the very nature of *real* conservatism is that one accepts that _society_ is like the water in which the fish swims and it must be tended – kept clean and safe. A Chinese conservative is bound, by the rules of filial piety and loyalty, to do his best for his family within very real, important and *respected* limits imposed by social custom and the “needs” of morality, humanity and benevolence. The decisions of the rulers, so long as they do not conflict with filial piety (the first _commandment_, in a way), gentility, righteousness, consideration, etc, must be *loyally* supported. This is diametrically opposite to “our” (Anglo-American) history and traditions. It leads to a diametrically opposite political “model,” too. That’s why the idea of the “mandate of heaven” ( 天命 ) lasted so long, and, indeed, lasts still. The “mandate” of the current  _Red Dynasty_ will last so long as the rulers are able and just – but it will, as every other dynasty has, fall when the rulers forget their duty of “benevolence” (which goes well beyond kindness and includes justice and “good” governance, too).




			
				Kirkhill said:
			
		

> ...
> Domestically, what do we do if China invests in our oilsands and a pipeline to Rupert and we decide to turn off the taps to protest a human rights violation, or to take sides in the aforementioned conflict, and China decides to support a Haida land claim in order to exert control over the pipeline that they built?  Call it a Canadian Suez Crisis with China in the role of Britain and Canada’s Prime Minister acting as Nasser.  As we are constantly reminded China has a strong need for energy and it remains an open question, as far as I am concerned, as to whether or not China would let us become a major contributor to their economy and then live with the vagaries of decisions made by our democratically elected governments.



Very interesting prospect! Lots of fuel for debate. Good question!


----------



## Kirkhill

> The Chinese are accustomed to having to ”accept the chaos that comes with letting people make their own decisions.” There have been, by my guesstimate, about 25 interregna over the past 4,000± years – about one period of chaos and local, if not really individual, decision making every 160 years. That’s, probably, more often than the Brits have done the same thing.
> 
> In fairness, in every case the Chinese have fallen back on a “strong” (stronger than its competitors, anyway) government – but so, by my (very imperfect) reading of history, did pretty much everyone over about 5,700± of the past 6,000± years of world history.



One of the triumphs and curses of Chinese society, one that is shared by the Jews, is that they have had a literate bureaucracy for a few thousand years that has recorded their history and thus has a body of "case law" available to them to justify precedence.

My illiterate, barbarian ancestors have only been so afflicted for the last 1000 years (and it spawned a radical offshoot that required everyone to write their own history).  We're still making it up as we go along.

I take your point on reversion to strong central government, as I noted in my missive,  my brethren may be more inclined than I care to admit towards a Great Leader.....cf the discussions about controlling socialists and the tendency for Clydesiders to elect the likes of Red Rory and George Galloway.

But, I think the net tendency of the Chinese in the foreseeable future is towards a centralized government while the "West", broadly and largely defined, still has a significant element that pines for a degree of chaos in their lives.

Are we violently agreeing again?


----------



## CougarKing

And Liang emphasizes something that is already increasingly evident:

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4287428&c=ASI&s=LAN



> China Defense Minister: We Can Compete with West
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 21 Sep 2009 15:37
> 
> BEIJING - China's military capability has taken a "quantum leap" thanks to a modernization drive and its weaponry rivals that of Western countries, the nation's defense minister said in an interview Sept. 21.
> 
> The comments by Liang Guanglie came in an interview published by Xinhua News Agency 10 days before China is set to roll out a range of advanced weaponry in a National Day military parade.
> 
> "Our capabilities in waging defensive combat under modern conditions have taken a quantum leap," Liang was quoted as saying.
> 
> Liang rattled off a list of achievements in military technology and hardware by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), including military-use satellites, advance aircraft, tanks, artillery and missiles.
> 
> "It could be said that China has basically all the kinds of equipment possessed by Western countries, much of which reaches or approaches advanced world standards.
> 
> "This is a very remarkable achievement, which not only reflects the level of modernization of our army, but also tremendous changes in national science and technology strength."
> 
> Chinese media said earlier this month that "52 types" of new homegrown weapons would debut during the Oct. 1 parade, and recent rehearsals through the capital have offered glimpses of the hardware, notably an array of powerful missiles.
> "It is no exaggeration to say that our Army has a strong combat capability," Liang said.
> 
> China has poured money into its armed forces in recent years in a bid to transform the once-backward PLA into a lean, professional and high-tech fighting force.
> 
> China's military spending rose 15.3 percent in 2009 to $69 billion, according to a budget submitted to parliament in March, the latest in a string of double-digit increases.
> 
> Amid growing concern overseas about China's military intentions, Beijing stresses the defensive nature of its armed forces.


----------



## CougarKing

Another update regarding Cross-Strait Relations and US-China relations:



> *U.S. NSC Reviewing Taiwan Issues*
> By wendell minnick
> Published: 21 Sep 2009 14:39
> 
> TAIPEI - The U.S. National Security Council (NSC) is conducting a review of U.S. defense programs for Taiwan amid great recent changes in China-Taiwan relations, said sources in Taipei and Washington.
> 
> A Taiwan defense official said the NSC is conducting an overall review of U.S. policy on Taiwan, but a U.S. government source would only confirm that the "administration is working on decisions for various [Taiwan] defense programs still on the books, but not on a Taiwan policy review."
> 
> Programs under review include the release of 60 Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters and 66 Lockheed F-16C/D Block 50/52 fighters the United States has on hold. Taiwan has been pushing hard for the release to replace ageing Bll UH-1 utility helicopters and Northrop F-5 Tiger fighters.
> 
> There are still calls for a policy review that first emerged in April in Washington policy circles. The recent shift in China-Taiwan relations has placed the Obama administration in an awkward position of trying to improve ties with China while supporting Taiwan's defense needs.
> Dennis Wilder, former senior director for East Asian affairs on the Bush administration's NSC, said a "review at this time is quite appropriate."
> 
> "There is a new U.S. representative in Taipei and it has been over a year since [Taiwan] president Ma Ying-jeou entered office," Wilder said, now with the Brookings Institution.
> 
> "There will be higher attention at the White House to Asia as President Obama plans for his November trip to Asia to attend the APEC Summit in Singapore and make stops in other Asian capitals, including Beijing," he said.
> 
> Current policy does not account for the dramatic changes in cross­strait relations and internal politics since the United States switched official recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Since then, China has emerged as a diplomatic, military and economic powerhouse, and Taiwan has shed dictatorial rule to become a thriving democracy.
> 
> Cross-strait negotiations, stalled since 1998, have progressed quickly since the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) retook the Taiwan presidency and legislature in 2008 elections. In November 2008, China and Taiwan signed 13 agreements, including a formal end to the 1949 ban on direct travel.
> 
> China and Taiwan are now working on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement and a memorandum of understanding on final supervision cooperation across the Taiwan Strait. There have been open discussions both in China and Taiwan of military confidence-building measures and a possible peace treaty.
> 
> "Cross-strait relations are changing and U.S. policy must adapt to these changes. However, I think any review should and will reaffirm strong U.S. support for Taiwan as codified into law in the Taiwan Relations Act," Wilder said.
> 
> Improved relations between China and Taiwan could actually serve as a silencer of debate on Taiwan in the U.S. government.
> 
> "With North Korea and China sucking up most people's time, the cross-strait issue seemingly is going smoothly, and with the no-troublemaking policy of the Ma administration, I just don't see Taiwan getting a lot of attention," said a former U.S. defense official.
> 
> From 2000-2008, the United States was distracted by the antics of Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian, now serving life in prison for corruption. Chen's pro-independence position and a tendency to irritate China and the United States forced Washington to focus on Taiwan issues. However, with the return of the KMT to power in Taipei, cross-strait relations have been on the fast track.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems that Pres. Ma may not want to irk Beijing further especially after what transpired during the Dalai Lama's visit.



> Agence France-Presse - 9/25/2009 10:55 AM GMT
> Taiwan will not allow Uighur leader visit: official
> Taiwan has decided not to allow Rebiya Kadeer to visit, an official said Friday, two days after the exiled Uighur leader, branded a "separatist" by Beijing, expressed a wish to travel to the island.
> 
> "We have decided not to allow Kadeer entry considering that her visit could affect national interest and social order," Interior Minister Jiang Yi-huah said, according to an official with the Government Information Office.
> 
> "We don't wish to see the shadow of terrorism fall on Taiwan," he said in response to a lawmaker's question. He did not elaborate.
> 
> Kadeer said this week in Washington she planned to visit Taiwan in December following an invitation by groups advocating independence for the island.
> 
> If Taiwan's government had granted Kadeer a visa, it would in all likelihood have infuriated Beijing, which says she is a "criminal" who orchestrated ethnic violence in her home region of Xinjiang in northwest China in July.
> Beijing is already angered by the screening this week in Taiwan's second-largest city Kaohsiung of a biopic about Kadeer, "The 10 Conditions of Love".
> 
> The Kadeer film and a recent visit by exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama to Taiwan have strained cross-strait ties, which have otherwise improved markedly since President Ma Ying-jeou came to power here in 2008.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems that Japanese report that the PLA-N's plans to refurbish the "Varyag" and rename her as the "Shi Lang" are edging closer to reality:

Her superstructure appears to have been cut open and been worked on.


----------



## tomahawk6

What better way to learn how to make a carrier ?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from yesterday’s _Globe and Mail_ is a report on Red China at 60:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/maos-revolution-at-60-he-wouldnt-recognize-it/article1302241/


> Mao's revolution at 60: He wouldn't recognize it
> *After decades of brutal struggle and civil war, China's economic progress outstrips its political reforms*
> 
> Mark MacKinnon
> 
> Hangzhou, China
> 
> Saturday, Sep. 26, 2009
> 
> This Thursday, as tanks and missiles roll through Tiananmen Square in Beijing and fireworks explode overhead to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China, a retired factory worker will gather with her children and grandchildren in this historic city on China's booming east coast, and sigh a little – regret mixed with relief – at what those six decades have brought them.
> 
> Ms. Wu, the factory worker, was a 13-year-old girl listening to the radio with her schoolmates when Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic on Oct. 1, 1949. She and the others cheered at the time, because it meant the long war between the Communists and the Kuomintang was finally over.
> 
> She soon got caught up in the fervour of those early days of the revolution, sporting a red scarf and leading a youth group as landlords were evicted from their plots. A decade later, she wound up on the other side of that political divide when her husband – a professor at Beijing University – was denounced as a “rightist” and sent to the countryside for three years of re-education-through-labour.
> 
> “I was left to raise four children by myself,” Ms. Wu, 73, says matter-of-factly. More than three decades on, she won't let her full name be used, still trained to be worried that just telling her story could land her in trouble. “It's not good to publicize some things.”
> 
> The carefully orchestrated pageantry of this week will portray the Communist Party as having made this country of 1.3 billion into an economic and military superpower over the past 60 years. There's truth in that, but the story of the past six decades is also one of a strikingly resilient people who endured one of history's cruellest regimes for the first 30 years of Communist rule, then sprinted forward as soon as their shackles were loosened.
> 
> “ This forgetting will have terrible results. It will make us weak to prevent the same things from happening again ”— Dissident Chinese lawyer Zhuang Daohe
> 
> How China grew from a backwards country of 540 million people in 1949 to the rapidly modernizing, third-largest economy in the world is a story that – for all the recent success – pitted a paranoid and murderous regime against its own people for long periods. Much of that history was written on the shores of West Lake, the graceful heart of this little-known city. It was here that Mao worked on the constitution of his People's Republic and conjured up the purges of the Cultural Revolution. Former U.S. president Richard Nixon visited West Lake during his breakthrough visit to China in 1972.
> 
> But it's a past that remains largely buried and unaddressed, forgotten by all sides in the name of letting the country carry on its current upward trajectory.
> 
> Ms. Wu's husband's name was eventually rehabilitated in 1978, but the damage was done. “He was affected physically. He was very healthy before,” Ms. Wu says, her voice drifting off. Her husband never fully recovered, and he died a decade ago.
> 
> Like many Chinese, times got better for the family after Mao died and was succeeded by the diminutive Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Deng irrevocably changed the direction of the country by opening it to the outside world and embracing the market economy. The silk factory where Ms. Wu worked in this scenic coastal town got busier, and wages gradually rose. She retired with a pension, and she and her husband had enough money to put all four of their children through university.
> 
> “In the beginning, we were short of money and couldn't even send the children to kindergarten,” she said, pride seeping into her voice as she neared the end of her tale. “Now they have several apartments each. Except for my son who moved to America.”
> 
> When the Red Army arrived in Hangzhou in early 1949, it entered a war-battered and predominantly agricultural city of 1.2 million people, situated around West Lake, a vast and placid body of water ringed by parklands and pagodas. In the new government's first five-year economic plan for the country – there have been 11 – it was decreed that Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, should be a “Geneva of the East.”
> 
> In a time of disastrous economic moves, the decision to spare Hangzhou the heavy industry that fouls the air of so many Chinese cities was a stroke of good fortune. Mao came to love the tranquillity of the place, and stayed here at the State Guesthouse on the shore of West Lake in 1953 as he went over his draft constitution for the People's Republic. In all, the chairman made more than 40 visits to the city, and Hangzhou is dotted with monuments to him.
> 
> But his affection for the place did not spare Hangzhou from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, which he launched shortly after another of his sojourns on the shore of West Lake in December, 1965, where he met with his second-in-command and drew up a list of those they wanted to see purged first in the violence they were about to unleash.
> 
> Zhejiang province was in an effective state of civil war for much of the 1960s and 1970s, with competing factions that both claimed to be acting in Mao's name slaughtering each other and destroying farms and homes. Hangzhou's university campuses became centres of leftist extremism and Red Guard activity, and the scale of the purge of party ranks, combined with widespread labour unrest, led to a more dramatic economic collapse in Zhejiang than in other parts of the country.
> 
> It was a time of fear, disappearances and public executions. In all, Mao is blamed by some for more deaths than Stalin or Hitler. But at a 60th anniversary photo exhibit held this month in downtown Hangzhou, it is almost as if none of it ever happened.
> 
> Before-and-after photographs taken around the city emphasize how much it has changed and grown. Crumbling bridges and empty fields shown in black-and-white photographs from decades ago give way to multilane highways and forests of high-rise towers in the colour photos from 2009. Sometimes the gap is smaller, showing how entire developments have sprung from the ground in a matter of years, sometimes less. There's no hint of the famine and ruin of the Great Leap Forward, no evidence that the persecution and mass murder of the Cultural Revolution ever happened. Just 60 years of moving forward at breakneck speed.
> 
> “The policy of wiping out history has been successful,” said Zhuang Daohe, a dissident lawyer and signatory of Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto that calls for, among other things, a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission to address China's recent past. “This forgetting will have terrible results. It will make us weak to prevent the same things from happening again.”
> 
> Shortly after the interview, Mr. Zhuang and a colleague who took part in the interview were contacted by local security agents and warned not to speak to foreign media until after the anniversary. In the days that followed, several others in Hangzhou who had agreed to be interviewed by The Globe and Mail suddenly cancelled their appointments.
> 
> For all its suffering, Hangzhou was one of the first places where China started to emerge from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. When Nixon visited the city, the document known as the Shanghai Communiqué – which for years formed the basis of the critical U.S.-China diplomatic relationship – was actually negotiated inside the same West Lake diplomatic compound where Mao wrote the constitution.
> 
> The city was among the first to benefit in the decades that followed from the “reform and opening” economic policies introduced by Deng Xiaoping. While retaining its laid-back feel and the idyllic scenery around West Lake, today's Hangzhou is a city of 6.4 million that has seen high-technology and auto parts industries grow alongside traditional specialties such as tea, silk and tourism.
> 
> Yang Liangen spent the 1970s trying to evade arrest as he moved through the countryside performing free magic shows and selling throat lozenges to the audience afterward. Such freelance performances, as well as the lozenges nicknamed Little Fuzzy Brains, have a nearly a century of history on Hangzhou street corners, with the shows often involving music, storytelling and funny anecdotes about the ruling classes of the day. They were banned during the Cultural Revolution, forcing entertainers like Mr. Yang underground. He kept on performing, but says he was arrested “tens” of times in that era.
> 
> But with the introduction of reform and opening in the 1980s, Mr. Yang suddenly found himself being sought out by the government in a very different way. Zhejiang province was one of the quickest to embrace the new economic openness, and thousands of businesses sprang up. The nearby city of Wenzhou was opened to overseas investment in 1984, a change that had dramatic effect on Hangzhou and the entire province.
> 
> Mr. Yang was contacted by the Hangzhou city government and asked to head up a new business that would manufacture and sell the same aniseed-flavoured lozenges that he had once sold by hand after his performances. There was very little money for the venture, but a small factory producing Little Fuzzy Brains opened in 1990, with six employees.
> 
> “In the beginning, we couldn't balance our costs, so we lost money,” Mr. Yang explained, shuffling papers around on a desk cluttered by two ashtrays, an abacus and an ancient Philips telephone. Even when he's trying to look important, the 70-year-old grandfather seems more like the charming travelling magician he was than the busy chief executive officer he became.
> 
> Business took off in 1996 after Beijing launched a privatization campaign and Mr. Yang was allowed to go it alone without a state partner. His company now employs 12 people, and produces 9,000 boxes of Little Fuzzy Brains a year for sale across the country and occasionally for export.
> 
> “If there was no reform and opening, this business would be impossible. We'd still be selling underground, in a secret way,” Mr. Yang said.
> 
> With his children grown and successful – and affluent enough to send his grandchildren to expensive universities – Mr. Yang is an optimist about where China is now headed. But instead of celebrating on Oct. 1, he says he'll be at his desk.
> 
> Like many in this country, where tens of millions are now lifting themselves out of poverty, it's as if he's still trying to make up for all the money he could have made had his early years gone differently.
> 
> For all China's recent economic progress, this still nominally socialist state has only rudimentary public health care and just the barest of pension programs, forcing people like Mr. Yang to worry about money at a time when someone like him in the West might be retired and enjoying his success. “I'd like to take the day off, but there's no time. I need to make more money. I need to save for my retirement.”
> 
> The bestselling novel _Brothers_ begins during the Cultural Revolution when one of the two main characters is caught trying to catch a glimpse of women's bottoms inside the public latrine. In those puritanical times, the character, then a teenage boy, is marched through the town and he and his family are publicly shamed. By the end of the novel, set amid the anything-goes capitalism of today's China, the same character owns a gold-plated toilet seat and hosts a beauty contests for virgins.
> 
> The book was criticized in some circles for its vulgarity, but Yu Hua, the Hangzhou-born author of _Brothers_, says he used graphic and sexual scenes to both capture the wild changes China has gone through in the past six decades and to shock readers into contemplating subjects – such as recent history and today's political system – that are often not discussed. The tactic worked: The novel sold more than one million copies inside China (“Not including fakes,” Mr. Yu added proudly), while many others downloaded the book over the Internet, or directly onto their mobile phones.
> 
> “Many of my readers were shocked. But after the shock, they realized that yes, life really is like this,” the 49-year-old said, sipping an espresso in the lobby of a Beijing hotel.
> 
> Like his characters, Mr. Yu came of age during the Cultural Revolution. Later, while studying at Beijing University, he joined the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square. Mr. Yu argues that the military crackdown on those demonstrations – ordered by Mr. Deng – was the most important moment in the past 60 years since it led to today's awkward hybrid of a relatively open market economy with a tightly controlled, one-party political system. It was only this year that Mr. Yu acknowledged publicly for the first time that he had taken part in the Tiananmen protests.
> 
> “Before 1989, China's economic and political reforms were both developing. The political reforms were not moving as fast as the economic ones, but they were happening. After 1989, political reform completely stopped,” he said. “This caused the social polarization and wide corruption in our society.”
> 
> As critical as he is of the China's political system, Mr. Yu acknowledges that the fact that _Brothers_ was published at all inside China is yet another sign of how far things have come since the madness of the Mao era.
> 
> “There's a lot for China to be proud of. People are richer, we enjoy more freedom,” he conceded after some prodding. “For example, I'm talking to you right now, and I don't think I will get in a lot of trouble afterward, maybe just a warning. But if we had this conversation 30 years ago, I would be arrested right away.”
> 
> Mr. Yu adds some more caveats. China's breakneck economic growth of recent decades is unsustainable, he says, and the rapidly expanding gap between largely urban upper and middle classes and the predominantly rural poor will cause major problems. Like Mr. Zhuang, the dissident lawyer, he worries that the collective amnesia induced by the Communist Party about its past crimes will leave the door open for a slide back into extremism.
> 
> But there's one point on which Mr. Yu and Mr. Zhuang agree with optimists such as Mr. Yang and Ms. Wu: The country is heading somewhere completely new that couldn't have been predicted when Mao proclaimed the People's Republic back in 1949.
> 
> Mr. Yu chuckled at the thought. “If Chairman Mao were alive today and he saw what China has changed to, I think he'd request that his portrait be taken down from Tiananmen Square.”




Stories like those of Mrs. Wu and Mr. Yang abound. I, personally, a foreigner, have met several people with similar – some better, some worse – stories.

If you are interested in the history of part of that period but do not want to _invest_ the time necessary to read all 600 pages of _Brothers_, get this movie, _To Live_, also based on a Yu Hua novel.


*“If Chairman Mao were alive today and he saw what China has changed to, I think he'd request that his portrait be taken down from Tiananmen Square.”*

Statues of Chairman Mao are disappearing. Chinese people who have lived away from China for several years express surprise at the “missing” statues. Twenty years ago he was everywhere, all pervasive; now, save for that huge monstrosity at _Tiananmen_, he is hard to find. I did manage, a couple of years ago, to find one on a Beijing university campus.


----------



## CougarKing

Just a picture of the ski jump used for training their soon-to-be carrier aviators:






And below is the previous article from last year that discusses their future carrier pilots:

"Chinese Navy begins training carrier aviators!"


----------



## tomahawk6

Chairman Mao's grandson Mao Xinyu at 39 was promoted to major General.





In this photo he is wearing the shoulder boards of a Senior Colonel 

BEIJING - MAO Zedong's only grandson has become the youngest general in the People's Liberation Army at age 39, a Chinese newspaper said on Thursday.

Military historian Mao Xinyu is the son of Mao's second son Mao Anqing, who died in 2007 at the age of 84. The younger Mao is a member of the main advisory body to the country's rubber stamp parliament and a fierce defender of his grandfather's legacy.

The state-run Changjiang Daily reported that the promotion came 'recently' and said the move made Mao Xinyu the first PLA general born in the 1970s.

Known around the world as Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong led the bloody two decade-long revolution that overthrew Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and established the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Mao retained an iron grip on power right up to his death in 1976, and his embalmed body continues to lie in state in a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital, Beijing.

Mao Zedong had a notoriously chaotic personal life, marrying four times and siring nine children, including a daughter by his last wife, Jiang Qing. His second wife, Mao Xinyu's grandmother, was executed by the Nationalists in 1930.

While Mao Zedong remains venerated in China, his offspring have played little role in affairs of state. First son Mao Anying was killed in action during the Korean War and Mao Anqing is believed to have suffered from mental illness for most of his adult life.

In recent years, Mao Xinyu has become best known for his considerable girth, and a photo of him taken on this year's Sept. 9 commemoration of Mao Zedong's death shows him bearing a strong resemblence to his famously pudgy grandfather.

Son Mao Dongdong, Mao Zedong's only great-grandson, was born on the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birthday in 2003. -- AP


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## Edward Campbell

He's gonna have a bit of trouble with the BFT. But he'd "fit" in NDHQ, sadly.  :'(


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## Edward Campbell

This is the 60th anniversary (week) of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. There will me massive celebrations in Beijing tomorrow. It will be *celebratory*, I think. I doubt that anyone, save a few tens of thousands of old and rather feeble minded people in Lhasa (actually, mainly in Dharamshala (India) where the “government in exile) is headquartered), Taipei and Washington wish for a return of the Kuomintang or worse.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_ is a bit of _précis_ of the celebrations:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/no-stone-unturned-in-preparations-for-beijing-celebration/article1306182/


> No stone unturned in preparations for Beijing celebration
> *Even pigeons will be regulated during the festivities for the 60th anniversary of Mao's revolution*
> 
> Mark MacKinnon
> 
> Beijing
> 
> Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009 07:09AM EDT
> 
> One year after China wowed the world with the spectacular precision that marked the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, the government is seeking to put on an even bigger show Thursday as the Communist Party of China celebrates its 60 years in power.
> 
> The spectacle Planners are reportedly celebrating with twice the fireworks used ahead of the 2008 Games, and a new portrait of Mao Zedong was hoisted over the rostrum on Tiananmen Square, the same spot where he proclaimed the establishment of the Peoples Republic on Oct. 1, 1949.
> 
> The 187,000 soldiers and civilians who will take part in the parade have been training for weeks at a secret location outside the capital, separated from their families and barred from speaking to the press about their plans.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Female members of a Chinese militia march in formation during a training session for the 60th National Day Parade Village on the outskirts of Beijing on Sept. 15, 2009.
> Photo Credit: Joe Chan/Reuters[size]
> (This is the picture that appeared in the print edition of today’s _Globe and mail_.)
> 
> Nothing is being left to chance. Photographs posted online show sailors marching with their hats on upside down to correct posture. Officers were shown using rulers to make sure marchers didn’t step too high and to measure the distance between the noses of participants.
> 
> Beyond the goose-stepping, the parade is expected to offer observers a rare chance to see some of the most advanced weaponry possessed by the Chinese military. Media reports indicate that some 52 new weapons will be on public display for the first time, including intercontinental and anti-ship ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial drones and the Chinese-made J-10 fighter plane.
> 
> *The weather*
> 
> Even Mother Nature will be silenced for a day of admiring what Chairman Mao wrought. With rain threatening to dampen an anniversary parade that will showcase the pride and growing military prowess of this emerging superpower, Mao’s political heirs will send 18 converted transport planes into the air to bomb the clouds into submission with chemicals that will prompt an early downpour. Forty-eight other “fog-clearing vehicles” will be on standby, the China Daily newspaper reported.
> 
> *Banned objects and activities*
> 
> Carrier pigeons have been banned from the skies for the day, lest they interfere with the military jets that will roar over Beijing during the celebrations. Residents with apartments along the parade route have been instructed to stay inside and away from their windows and balconies, and not to put their pets outside either. Kites, blimps and model airplanes also made the holiday no-fly list, and Beijings busy main airport will also be shut for three hours during the parade.
> 
> *Viewing protocol*
> 
> While the parade will roll right through Tiananmen Square and the heart of the city, most Beijingers will only see the festivities on television. For several days before and after the celebration (many Beijingers fear it will be anything but a good time) Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City will be closed, as will dozens of hotels and businesses along the parade route.
> 
> *Security measures*
> 
> While Beijing is one of the safest cities anywhere, the government is on high alert for trouble following a summer of ethnic unrest in the western province of Xinjiang, where Muslim Uighurs native to the area clashed repeatedly with the growing number of Han Chinese who have settled in the region.
> 
> Tibet, another regular flashpoint that saw rioting last year, has been closed to all foreign tourists for the National Day celebration and the week-long autumn holiday that follows.
> 
> Heavily armed police wearing black vests and carrying automatic weapons have been deployed since last week throughout Beijing’s city centre. Snipers are reportedly stationed on rooftops around the downtown, and an armoured personnel was parked this week on Wangfujing Street, a pedestrian-only shopping area in the heart of the city.
> 
> In the wake of a recent stabbing incident around Tiananmen Square, department stores in the vicinity were instructed to remove all sharp kitchen utensils from their shelves until after the holiday. According to the state media, some 40,000 security cameras will keep an eye on the proceedings.
> 
> As many as 800,000 yellow-shirted citizens were stationed around the Beijing, sporting red armbands identifying them as public security volunteers. However, many of the volunteers were elderly, and seemed less concerned with the possibility of trouble than with catching a nap on a warm weekday afternoon.
> 
> *Reactions*
> 
> “The more serious the security efforts are, the more it proves that you are afraid.” – Anonymous commentator posting in a popular Chinese online forum“
> 
> I participate, I contribute, thus I feel honoured. I wish wealth and prosperity for our great motherland.” – Zhang Xiaojing, one of those setting up seats, speaking with the Associated Press
> 
> “The Air Force pays high attention to the artificial weather manipulation and we believe that the more equipment applied, the larger the area we can manipulate, and the better weather we can have.” – Cui Lianqing, deputy director of the Air Forces meteorological department
> 
> “The parade will embody China’s economic and technological progress with new achievements in the modernization of its national defence. Whether a country’s military power would raise threats to other nations depends on the nature of the [other] country’s defence policies.” – Major-General Gao Jianguo, military spokesman
> 
> “I don’t know what kind of stuff you have in New York. But people could strap all sorts of mini-bombs to pigeon legs.” – Dong Jingbei, president of the Dongcheng District Carrier Pigeon Association, speaking with The New York Times


 


Much is made of the security measures, but they are not unique. Every _Canada Day_ we *close* downtown Ottawa – making it nearly impossible for anything but emergency vehicles to move anywhere within about 1 km of Parliament Hill.

I spent 4 Jul 09 in Washington, DC – right down on the Mall with hundreds of thousands of other happy, proud revellers. The downtown was, also, *closed* to most vehicles and I have *never* seen so many _”heavily armed police wearing black vests and carrying automatic weapons”_ anywhere, including Beijing at an important anniversary.

I’m not surprised that much of the Beijing security consists of senior citizen volunteers who _”seemed less concerned with the possibility of trouble than with catching a nap on a warm weekday afternoon”_. It is always this was in China. Interestingly enough senior citizens are “good” at control: many seniors, especially older women, are _natural_ bossy busybodies who believe that they should and will be obeyed; most 21st century Chinese are still accustomed to the idea that one should _obey_ an elderly “auntie” when she tells you to move along or queue up or whatever – it worked during the Olympics.


And we (we serving and retired soldiers, anyway) have all been here, haven't we?





Instructor aligns the formation of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Airborne Corps during a training session at the 60th National Day Parade Village on the outskirts of Beijing
[size=8pt]Photo Credit: Joe Chan/Reuters


----------



## tomahawk6

I certainly never thought the US would be celebrating the PRC's 60th anniversary.I think its an affront to every veteran that fought the communists in Korea and Vitenam but in this new quasi-marxist America it must be ok.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I certainly never thought the US would be celebrating the PRC's 60th anniversary.I think its an affront to every veteran that fought the communists in Korea and Vitenam but in this new quasi-marxist America it must be ok.



But the US "celebrates" with Germany, Italy and Japan; what about the veterans of World Wars I and II? And the US "celebrates" with Spain; what about the Spanish American War? And the US "celebrates" with the UK and *Canada*: what about 1812 and 1776?

The gentleman "_doth protest too much, methinks_."


----------



## CougarKing

I take it no one else other than T6 is interested in those VARYAG updates I just posted? Or do the rest of you just think it's just being scrapped and studied as they figure out how to build a carrier themselves?

Furthermore, here's another article on the continuing PLA naval buildup:



> BEIJING (Reuters) - *China plans to cut back its army and boost the navy and air force, sources with ties to the People's Liberation Army said, extending its military reach and risking greater regional tensions.*
> 
> China, which celebrates the 60th founding of the People's Republic on Thursday with a massive military parade, aims to cut its army by 700,000 troops over two to three years as part of its drive to modernize the world's biggest military into a leaner high-tech force, the two sources said.
> The PLA also plans to boost navy and air force personnel over that period, the sources said. Both requested anonymity to avoid repercussions for speaking to foreign reporters without authorization.
> 
> Xu Guangyu, a former PLA officer now at the government-backed China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, said he had not heard of the 700,000 figure but was sure cuts were coming.
> 
> "After several years there will have to be more reductions so we can continue improving weapons and creating crack troops," Xu told Reuters. "The land forces will remain dominant, but the navy and air force will rise as a proportion of the PLA."
> 
> China watchers are monitoring international deployments for signs of China's rising global status translating into a more assertive foreign policy and presence. Chinese warships steamed to waters off Somalia in December to help in anti-piracy patrols.
> 
> Recently, Chinese vessels have become involved in jostling with U.S. surveillance vessels in seas off the Chinese coast that Beijing claims are in its exclusive economic zone.
> 
> And China has never renounced the use of force to bring self-ruled and democratic Taiwan, which it considers sovereign territory, under its rule. But ties have improved since the election of Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou last year.
> 
> Increased Chinese military activity around a series of disputed atolls and rocks in the South China Sea has worried Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, which have their own territorial claims. Japan urged China this week to cut its nuclear arsenal, illustrating its wariness of China's might.
> 
> "Cutting the army doesn't affect the rest of Asia very much, what people are concerned about is boosting the air force and navy, such as by having aircraft carriers," said Ikuo Kayahara, professor of security studies at Takushoku University and a retired major general in Japan's ground forces.
> 
> "If they are increasing them by the same amount as they cut the army, this is a very big problem. But I do wonder if it's actually possible."
> 
> Uday Bhaskar, of the National Maritime Foundation in India, which has long-festering border disputes with China, said any large army should concentrate on technology over manpower.
> 
> "For India, I think if the Chinese are able to implement this particular policy that they're now articulating, it would heighten the asymmetry between India and China in terms of straight military capacity in China's favor," he said.
> 
> *NUMBERS SHRINK, WEAPONS IMPROVE
> 
> The PLA was born out of the Red Army, a five-million-strong peasant army, and became the national armed force after Communist leader Mao Zedong swept to power 60 years ago
> The cuts to land forces and additions to the other arms of the military would mean that PLA troop numbers shrink from 2.3 million, but the final tally is unclear.
> 
> China has cut troop numbers in recent years to free up cash for better training and conditions and more advanced weapons. The navy is considering building an aircraft carrier.
> 
> Neither source was sure when the planned reduction would be announced. It needs the approval of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, which is headed by President Hu Jintao.
> 
> One of the sources said China plans to retire and replace aged aircraft over the next three to five years. The streamlining will also involve hiving off military hospital personnel and performing troupes, the sources said.
> 
> Xu, the former PLA officer, said that under Beijing's long-term plan for military modernisation, reductions could happen gradually over the coming decade.
> 
> "Costs are rising, so we have to keep military spending in line with budgetary capacity," he said.*
> China's armed forces are far bigger than the world's second-largest military, that of the United States, whose forces number around 1.5 million.
> 
> Thursday will be marked by a show of military force along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, which is expected to feature an array of new and improved weaponry, including missiles.
> 
> President Hu has made the navy's modernization his personal project, but it has far from erased a technological gap with the United States and other major powers. The PLA Navy has about 290,000 personnel, many on aged vessels.
> 
> China has become increasingly vocal about its ambition to become a deep-water power, concluding it must master the logistical and technological demands of a blue water navy.
> 
> China boasts the world's third-largest air force, with about 400,000 personnel and 2,000 combat aircraft.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Chris Buckley and Emma Graham-Harrison in BEIJING and by Isabel Reynolds in TOKYO; Editing by Nick Macfie)
> 
> http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSTRE58T14T20090930


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> I take it no one else other than T6 is intersted in those VARYAG updates I just posted? Or do the rest of you just think *its just being scrapped and studied as they figure out how to build a carrier themselves*?
> 
> Furthermore, here's another article on the continuing PLA naval buildup:





That's my guess. My sense of the place is that China wants to do less and less dependent on buying and rebuilding and more and more on domestic _design and build_, thereby strengthening both capabilities.

I have no doubt that China wants aircraft carriers with all that implies for _global_ power projection. They don't really need them for _regional_ power projection - there are enough islands and friendly or client states on the territories of which (relatively) short range aircraft can be based and from which land forces can be "launched."


----------



## CougarKing

Was there not an earlier series of troop cuts to PLA ground forces earlier this decade or in the late 1990s, thus demonstrating the PLA's adherence to "People's War(人民战争) under modern conditions(现代情况)" adage uttered by the late Deng which called for leaner, more quickly deployable, as well as better equipped/trained units?

 I think the last batch of cuts involved 500,000 and a great part of that group were actually transferred to the PAP(People's Armed Police), which is more of a "dissent-crushing second army" than a real police force, as some would argue.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Was there not an earlier series of troop cuts to PLA ground forces earlier this decade or in the late 1990s, thus demonstrating the PLA's adherence to "People's War(人民战争) under modern conditions(现代情况)" adage uttered by the late Deng which called for leaner, more quickly deployable, as well as better equipped/trained units?
> 
> Yes, as far I recall.
> 
> 
> I think the last batch of cuts involved 500,000 and a great part of that group were actually transferred to the PAP(People's Armed Police), which is more of a "dissent-crushing second army" than a real police force, as some would argue.
> 
> I don't know the numbers, but I agree with the "dissent-crushing second army" characterization.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## tomahawk6

Too bad we cant make a case for the PRC to join us in Afghanistan. An extra 20,000-30,000 troops would be super.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Too bad we cant make a case for the PRC to join us in Afghanistan. An extra 20,000-30,000 troops would be super.



Nothing did come out of the old article from below from last year, did it?

"NATO may ask for China's support in Afghanistan" army.ca thread


----------



## a_majoor

Unless China sees a compelling reason to get involved in Afghanistan, they will watch from the sidelines. As it stands right now, several of the powerful Western nations are embroiled militarily in a place they can't extract from quickly, and a nasty sapping of Western political and military will is also taking place, all which can be beneficial for the Middle Kingdom.

Better yet, these are "self inflicted" wounds; the Chinese are not and cannot be implicated for anything that happens there.

Long term, if the US and ISAF leave, the Chinese can walk in behind to "stabilize" Afghanistan and demonstrate to the world they are willing to do what the West cannot or will not do. This will also totally unravel the US policy of engageing in central Asia (the 'Stans) and deny a traditional ally in central Asia to India.

A pretty sweet deal, if they can swing it.


----------



## Edward Campbell

If you want to watch the celebrations, including the military parade, go to: CCTV9, the Chinese English service, in just a few minutes for live coverage.


----------



## CougarKing

An unmanned aircraft is seen during a parade to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing October 1, 2009.
REUTERS/David Gray






In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, the phalanx of national flag receives inspection in a parade in Beijing of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of China on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009. China celebrated its rise to a world power over 60 years of Communist rule Thursday, staging its biggest-ever parade of military hardware with over 100,000 marching masses in a display that stirred patriotism, and some unease. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Huang Jingwen






A Marine Corps vehicle receives inspection during a military parade to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, in central Beijing October 1, 2009. REUTERS/China Daily 







A float depicting China's space achievements participates in a parade to mark the 60th China anniversary in Beijing, China, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009. China celebrated its rise to a world power over 60 years of Communist rule Thursday, staging its biggest-ever parade of military hardware with over 100,000 marching masses in a display that stirred patriotism and some unease. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese People's Liberation Army missile carrier trucks drive past the Tiananmen Square during a military parade marking China's 60th anniversary in Beijing, China, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009. To mark 60 years of communist rule China put together its biggest-ever military parade: hundreds of thousands of marchers, batteries of goose-stepping soldiers and weaponry from drone missiles to amphibious assault vehicles.
(AP Photo/Vincent Thian)






 (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)






(AP Photo/Vincent Thian)






 (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)






(AP Photo)






(AP Photo/Vincent Thian)






REUTERS/Jason Lee


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps one of China's so-called African allies would probably want to look closer at these fighters again.

*China's AVIC steps up sales push for FC-1, J-10 fighters*



> DATE:30/09/09
> SOURCE:Flight International
> 
> "While AVIC's main job is to manufacture aircraft, the company also fulfills a national agenda by producing military aircraft for China's political allies around the world," says a source close to Chengdu's state-owned parent company. "There are also countries that would like to buy a good fighter, but not at the cost of a Western fighter.
> 
> *"While China's military aircraft have been exported for many years, this is the first time that there is a concerted effort to properly market them and establish a support network," the source adds.*
> 
> Beijing could extend loans to purchasing countries and offer local assembly if there are sufficient orders, the source adds.
> 
> Flightglobal


----------



## CougarKing

Such statements reaffirming so-called "Communist solidarity" between these two should be taken as nothing more than as statements meant for public or international consumption, since some would argue that the benefits to China of further propping up the North would not outweigh the disadvantages. 

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/091005/world/international_us_korea_north_china



> China vows to stand by North Korea
> 
> 1 hour, 43 minutes ago
> 
> 
> By Chris Buckley
> 
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - *China vowed to strengthen bonds with North Korea, saying on Monday that its traditional ties with the isolated state were a boon to peace.
> 
> 
> The renewed commitment between the two communist neighbors came in messages between President Hu Jintao as well as other Chinese leaders and North Korea's top leader, Kim Jong-il, who on Sunday greeted Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the start of a visit focused on bolstering bilateral relations.
> 
> 
> The messages marked 60 years since the two countries established formal ties on October 6, 1949, and did not mention North Korea's nuclear weapons program, instead stressing their focus on shoring up sometimes tense bilateral relations.*
> "History demonstrates that developing China-North Korea relations is in keeping with the fundamental interests and shared wishes of both countries' people," said the congratulatory message from China, issued by the official Xinhua news agency. "It also benefits protecting regional peace and stability."
> 
> 
> In a message to China, Kim Jong-il and other North Korean leaders said relations between the two countries would "constantly consolidate and develop," Xinhua reported.
> 
> 
> The mutual wooing between the world's third biggest economy and the impoverished and reclusive North has underscored how Beijing's approach to Pyongyang diverges from the harder line long favored by Washington, Tokyo and other regional capitals.
> 
> 
> Other governments have pushed China to use its crucial energy and food supplies to the North to put more pressure on Pyongyang to curb nuclear weapons development.
> 
> 
> *Analysts have said China, the closest North Korea has to an ally, would not send Wen unless it had some assurance from Pyongyang that could ease tensions following its second ever nuclear test in May and its claims to have made progress in enriching uranium.
> 
> 
> China wants North Korea to return to international talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons plans.
> 
> Six-party talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States ground to a halt about a year ago, with Pyongyang saying it would boycott the sessions aimed at curtailing its nuclear weapons capability in return for aid.
> 
> 
> But Beijing does not want international pressure on North Korea to risk political turmoil there that could release a flood of refugees into China.*
> 
> North Korea's Kim Jong-il made a rare appearance to greet Wen at the start of his trip, showing how serious he is about shoring up ties with China. Kim is widely believed to have suffered a serious illness last year.
> 
> 
> Wen also held talks with North Korean Premier Kim Yong-Il -- no relation to his supreme leader -- who told him Pyongyang was open to talks on its nuclear weapons program, which has drawn United Nations Security Council sanctions backed by Beijing.
> 
> 
> (Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Jeremy Laurence)


----------



## a_majoor

China's energy needs and some of the areas where they will come into conflict with others:





> *Power-Hungry China*
> 
> The International Consequences of China’s Quest for Energy
> 
> The Middle East, the oil baron of the world, is the region on everyone’s mind today when it comes to energy policy. Too little attention, however, has been paid to power-hungry China, where economic expansion, a burgeoning car craze, population growth, and strained power generation have resulted in rolling blackouts across the country and unleashed a newfound hunger for energy supplies, especially oil.
> 
> At present, the vast majority of China’s energy supply comes from coal. Mushrooming mining towns, a specter from early American history, are springing up across China’s landscape with a vengeance. In 1949, China had just over 300 developed mines. By 2002, the government counted 489 large mines, 1,025 medium mines, and over 140,000 small mines under development. China has cherry-picked from the pool of modern drilling technology in the hopes of producing an energy boom.
> 
> “In the past 50-odd years, China has made great progress in its use of geophysical exploration, geo-chemical exploration, remote sensing, drilling and tunneling technologies, laboratory test and computer technology for mineral resource prospecting,” the Chinese government said in a report released in December 2003. “It has raised the scientific and technological level of its mineral resources exploration.”
> 
> While China would like to depend “mainly on the exploitation of its own mineral resources” to meet the needs of its “modernization program,” according to the Information Office of the State Council, there remains “a fairly large gap” between the country’s energy demands and its domestic supplies of oil, natural gas, coal, clean coal, and coalbed methane.
> 
> Twenty-two of China’s 29 provinces and regions were hit by blackouts in 2003, ten more than the previous year. “Last year, Chinese power use rose 15 percent to a record 1.908 trillion kilowatt-hours as the economy grew at its fastest pace in six years,” according to the International Herald Tribune. In February 2004, the Chinese government announced it would invest roughly $24 billion in new power plants that would generate three times the electricity used by New York City. “I don’t know of another country besides China that’s adding more generating capacity in a single year,” said Hao Weiping, an official at the National Development Reform Commission.
> 
> China’s oil industry is also producing at record levels. According to an account published in Fortune magazine in February, “Daqing, China’s largest oilfield, is a sprawling state-run colossus: 90,000 workers tending 50,000 wells linked by a maze of pipelines and storage tanks across an 800-square-mile expanse in the northeastern corner of the country. In the city of Daqing itself, hundreds of rusting pumps bob methodically—beside government office buildings, behind restaurants and karaoke bars, and in the midst of dingy housing blocks.”
> 
> Thanks to a booming oil industry, China is now the world’s fifth-largest producer of crude oil. But growing production still isn’t enough to keep up with growing demand. China is set to become the second-largest consumer of oil in 2004, behind only the United States. Last year, China consumed an average of 5.46 million barrels of oil per day, forcing the country to import $16.5 billion worth of refined oil products—roughly a 30 percent increase over the previous year.
> Late in 2003 the government also announced plans to develop four “strategic oil reserve” sites capable of holding 75 days worth of oil, mirroring the U.S. underground reserves stored in salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico.
> 
> At present, roughly four-fifths of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East—a fact that worries American lawmakers and Chinese officials alike, albeit for very different reasons. “By 2015...three-quarters of the Gulf’s oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China,” said Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat (quoting Mother Jones). “China’s growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq.”
> 
> But the real fights of the future may involve the search for expanded oil resources outside the Middle East. China knows it needs to reach into its own territories, out into the seas, and out to neighbors in the hopes of scoring more of the world’s precious oil from less volatile areas of the world. “China, the United States, Japan, Europe and, increasingly, India—all growing leery of dependence on the volatile Middle East—are elbowing each other in a rush to nontraditional oil sources in West Africa, the Caspian Sea, Russia, South America and elsewhere,” according to the Associated Press. The dueling aims of the United States and China may have placed the two countries on a collision course over oil supplies, with implications far beyond the energy sector.
> 
> “Interestingly, the three African countries visited by President Hu Jintao in late January and early February—Egypt, Gabon and Algeria—are all oil-exporting states,” according to the Singapore Business Times. “The trip’s main purpose was to secure oil sources and to build up energy relationships with those countries.” China has signed agreements with France’s Total Gabon oil company to ship Gabonese oil to China, and China has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in refineries in Algeria in the past year.
> 
> The race for international energy supplies will create a new series of energy alliances and new twists on existing ones. What this means for geopolitics and American interests in the years ahead is an open question—one of great strategic, economic, and ethical significance. As the Singapore Business Times recently observed: “The Chinese realize that they are late arrivals while the U.S. already has secured its sources of oil, primarily in Saudi Arabia. China therefore feels that it has to compete aggressively with the U.S. and Europe, and is willing to take the oil wherever it can be found. While Western countries are sensitive to dealing with governments suspected of proliferation or of human rights violations, the Chinese are not deterred by such inhibitions.”
> 
> The Editors of The New Atlantis, "Power Hungry China," The New Atlantis, Number 4, Winter 2004, pp. 114-116.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A comment by Bruce Riedel, in response to a question by me, got me to thinking about the hideously complex relationships between Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan. Each is connected to all the other by _ties_ and _divisions_. There are a few _coincidental_ interests between China and India – mostly economic and most of those related to how they will deal with “us,” in the West.

The India-Pakistan dispute is well enough known. Ditto the Pakistan-Afghanistan situation. What may be less clear is the evolving nature of the China-Afghanistan and China-India relationships.

China borders Afghanistan but only for a short distance that in what is in one of the most remote and difficult regions in the world. But China’s neighbours, especially, Tajikistan are also neighbours of Afghanistan and _unrest_ in Afghanistan can and does spread through them into China, especially into the “troubled” Xinjiang province with its own Muslim _separatist_ problems. China stoutly opposes _militant Islam_ and takes some pretty “firm” measures against it.

China and India have a very complex relationship. They have been at war, time and again, over disputed borders and they were, and still are, “competitors” in Asia. But the relationship has _softened_ since around 1990 and there is much trade, commerce, investment and even tourism between them. But China is still Pakistan’s _protector_ and Pakistan is still the most significant threat to India. China is also, I think a *restraining* influence on Pakistan, even as it tries to counter growing Indian influence in Asia.

These relationship stretch further to embrace e.g. Burma and Sri Lanka and to put the “Stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) into play in a _competition_ between China and Russia which also brings the long standing and generally warm India-Russian relationship (now considerably cooled or, at least, overshadowed by a much warmer India-US relationship) back to life.

Finally, of course, there is the USA. Both China and India are being actively _courted_ by the USA and both are trying to exploit that courtship to their own, particular advantages.

It’s not a mess but it is a minefield into which only the most astute and careful diplomats (or angels) will want to tread. Sadly, not everyone who will rush in will be astute and careful or an angel.


----------



## Kirkhill

According to Wikipedia (sorry but its speedy) India under the Raj comprised *8 major provinces, 5 minor provinces and 565 Princely States - extending from Aden to Singapore.*    There are your original fault lines.  They existed prior to the Raj and the Raj briefly united them.  They didn't survive as an entity with the end of the Raj.... par for the course for any Empire.

Russia couldn't handle the Stans.  China is struggling with its regions and its home population.

3 billion people  or so, roughly the world's population in 1900, is too diverse a bunch of opinions for any one (or three) government(s) to represent and govern effectively.  Consider the potential numbers of Georgias, Azerbaijans, Ossetias, South Ossetias and Nagorno-Karabakhs.

Until you have a multitude of Singapores and Hong Kongs will you really be able to realize the democratic ideal of commercial states pursuing their own enlightened self-interest?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> ...
> 3 billion people  or so, roughly the world's population in 1900, is too diverse a bunch of opinions for any one (or three) government(s) to represent and govern effectively.  Consider the potential numbers of Georgias, Azerbaijans, Ossetias, South Ossetias and Nagorno-Karabakhs.
> 
> Until you have a multitude of Singapores and Hong Kongs will you really be able to realize the democratic ideal of commercial states pursuing their own enlightened self-interest?




Some Chinese will tell us that the way to manage a huge and diverse "country" (empire, if you like) is through _*one country* _n_ systems_. For some Chinese there is a _philosophical_ problem: they believe they are entitled duty bound to rule "all under heaven" (天下) or, perhaps, the entire most of the _Sinic_ world. For the Chinese who believe this, the tenet is, roughly, that anything that ever was Chinese is always Chinese. Thus a "way" must be found.

A _syndicate_ (Bruce Riedel used the phrase today and I like it) of small states and even statelets bound only loosely to a great power would be a better model but I cannot see the Chinese reconciling themselves to it any time soon.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Some Chinese will tell us that the way to manage a huge and diverse "country" (empire, if you like) is through _*one country* _n_ systems_.



Isn't that, effectively, the tale of the Holy Roman Empire?  Infamously derided as neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  It rumbled along as an entity for the best part of a thousand years only really coming to grief when the "elected" Emperor started to take himself seriously and dictated to his realm.  As long as he was content to be a figurehead the system worked.  His reputation survived intact.   When he started to rule then the competitors came out of the woodwork.


----------



## Edward Campbell

In a way, but the Chinese, unlike any Europeans, thus far, have reinvented themselves and have, *perhaps*, learned something in the process.

The ethnically _Han_ Chinese _Ming_ succeeded the Mongol _Yuan_ and were succeeded, in their turn, by the Manchu _Qing_ dynasty. Each was an “empire” that endured for at least a century and, in the process, _Sinified_ the “northern barbarians” and incorporated many of the Northerners’ values and ideas and the Northerners, themselves, into the _Chinese_ “system.” It was, in fact, the Northerners’ broader view of empire that dragged the Chinese out of their traditional xenophobia and prompted them to see “all under heaven” as more than just the _Han_ (汉人) people. 

Whether the Chinese can continue, now, in the _Red Dynasty_, to rebuild their empire remains to be seen. But the new “emperors” (Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao)
do (did) take themselves and, especially, their “mandate” very seriously, even when they play _Mister Dressup_ for the masses.









Please remember Zhou Enlai’s famous quip when he was asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to tell,” he said in 1971, nearly 200 years after the fact. The Chinese take a long, patient view, when assessing their plans and policies and those of others; we must do the same when we assess them.

My guess is that the Chinese, _Han_ and “minorities” alike, are more united than they have ever been and that while unity does not equal strength it does magnify it. I also guess that the Chinese leadership has a long term plan with a well defined aim – I’m not sure I understand either – and I am fairly certain they, the Chinese people and their leaders, have the patience and the *will* to see it through.


----------



## a_majoor

Looking at the power of the "economic card":

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/06/assessing_chinas_financial_power



> *Assessing China's financial power*
> Tue, 10/06/2009 - 1:35pm
> Your humble blogger has a rather long essay in the Fall 2009 issue of International Security.  What's a lowly IPE scholar doing publishing in a high and mighty security journal?  Assessing whether China's massive holdings of dollar-denominated assets is a big deal or not.  The title may or may not give away my argument:  "Bad Debts: Assessing China's Financial Influence in Great Power Politics."
> 
> Here's the abstract:
> 
> Commentators and policymakers have articulated growing concerns about U.S. dependence on China and other authoritarian capitalist states as a source of credit to fund the United States' trade and budget deficits. What are the security implications of China's creditor status? If Beijing or another sovereign creditor were to flex its financial muscles, would Washington buckle? The answer can be drawn from the existing literature on economic statecraft. An appraisal of the ability of creditor states to convert their financial power into political power suggests that the power of credit has been moderately exaggerated in policy circles. To use the argot of security studies, China's financial power increases its deterrent capabilities, but it has little effect on its compellence capabilities. China can use its financial power to resist U.S. entreaties, but it cannot coerce the United States into changing its policies. Financial power works best when a concert of creditors (or debtors) can be maintained. Two case studies—the contestation over regulating sovereign wealth funds and the protection of Chinese financial investments in the United States—demonstrate the constraints on China's financial power.
> 
> Read it and weep.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> In a way, but the Chinese, unlike any Europeans, thus far, have reinvented themselves and have, *perhaps*, learned something in the process.
> 
> The ethnically _Han_ Chinese _Ming_ succeeded the Mongol _Yuan_ and were succeeded, in their turn, by the Manchu _Qing_ dynasty. Each was an “empire” that endured for at least a century and, in the process, _Sinified_ the “northern barbarians” and incorporated many of the Northerners’ values and ideas and the Northerners, themselves, into the _Chinese_ “system.” It was, in fact, the Northerners’ broader view of empire that dragged the Chinese out of their traditional xenophobia and prompted them to see “all under heaven” as more than just the _Han_ (汉人) people.
> 
> Whether the Chinese can continue, now, in the _Red Dynasty_, to rebuild their empire remains to be seen. But the new “emperors” (Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao)
> do (did) take themselves and, especially, their “mandate” very seriously, even when they play _Mister Dressup_ for the masses.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Please remember Zhou Enlai’s famous quip when he was asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to tell,” he said in 1971, nearly 200 years after the fact. The Chinese take a long, patient view, when assessing their plans and policies and those of others; we must do the same when we assess them.
> 
> My guess is that the Chinese, _Han_ and “minorities” alike, are more united than they have ever been and that while unity does not equal strength it does magnify it. I also guess that the Chinese leadership has a long term plan with a well defined aim – I’m not sure I understand either – and I am fairly certain they, the Chinese people and their leaders, have the patience and the *will* to see it through.



I think you may be a bit too hard on the "Europeans" or at least ALL the Europeans.  You may be confounded by the Bourboniste tendency of the Western European aristocracy (those which remember everything and learn nothing).  Many other Europeans seem to go through regular reinventions.

It can fairly be claimed that I am overly Eurocentric in my outlook ( h*ll, I am Scotocentric).   But what I am doing is trying to find the underlying commonalities so as to better appreciate the differences.  For me the Han are the archetypical "Other".  Their language, and to a lesser extent their appearance, defines their difference.  The lack of commonality in language is the real "barrier".  I can puzzle my way through the Euro languages, even when written in cyrillics but Chinese, like Arabic,  is closed to me.

When looking at the way they order their lives I find myself trying to compare it to that which I know and, recognizing that all societies change over time and often end up ploughing old ground I also look for instances where one society's past may be reflected in a similar situation in another society's present.  

You have to be careful though because in culture, as in biology and linguistics similarities may be the result of common causes, or the may be result of divergent causes or they may be pure coincidence.....

To that end, and with those caveats in mind, I would point to a couple of instances in British and Canadian history.   It is well recognized that when England "conquered" Scotland (politically) with the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 that the chief beneficiaries were the Scots.  They ran down the road to London and proceeded to make a fortune and, more importantly, became the "British" political class providing many of the leading politicians and entrepreneurs for the next century or so.  Less well recognized is that they were following a pattern established when London "conquered" the Welsh and ended up with the Welsh Tudor's on the throne, Bristol merchants dominating the overseas trade and West Country sailors ripping off the Spaniards.

The Canadian example is one that I believe is a current example that we are seeing unfolding today - and that is, following the colonization of the West by Eastern Canada interests, and Montreal (followed by Toronto post 1970) using the west as its empire the "conquered" or at least the "junior partners" of the west are now running back down the road to the East and establishing themselves in the power structure.

I believe there is something about the complacency of entrenched interests at the core of a society versus the dynamicism of the fringes, and especially conquered fringes that results in the core being confronted with the need to "adapt or die".   In the case of London, to the Scots and the Welsh I might add Normans, Jews, Genoans and Huguenots each of which came and changed London even as they became Londoners.

Your observation that the Han became Mongols even as the Mongols became Han falls into line with that...  Or as another Scot put it " I experience you as you experience me.  My experience of you changes your experience of me even as your experience of me changes my experience of you."  R.D. Laing - or words to that effect.

So while I accept that the Han adapt, I don't accept that they are particularly, or uniquely adept in that regard.  They may be but you are going to have to supply more convincing proof.

I have more sympathy with your oft repeated observation that "culture matters" and that they have a strong and sufficiently rigid cultural core that bends but slightly.  It is that rigidity that gives me pause and makes it hard for me to see them, for the foreseeable future, as anything other than "the Other".   It is that "Otherness" that makes it easy for me to perceive a future with conflict between "Us" and "Them".

I don't think their experience of me is that much different than my experience of them.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I wasn’t clear, happens a lot with me.

What the Chinese, _Han_ and other “minorities,” learned from the Mongols, especially, was the “art of empire.” 

Prior to about 1115, when the _Jin_ (金) (as opposed to the other _Jin_ (晋)) took over, the Chinese – except for the remarkable and _sui generis_ _Tang_ (唐) – were generally inept imperialists, in fact they were so divided that they couldn’t even unite their own “country” much less make it into an empire.

The _Han_, because of their sheer numbers and the richness of their culture, _Sinicized_ the invaders but there are still perceived “differences.”

(Parenthetical anecdote: Some years ago some friends, a married couple, invited me to join them at a luncheon in honour of the husband’s parents. I was a little reluctant because I understood that the wife and her mother-in-law were, to be kind, _at daggers drawn_. (Chinese mothers-in-law are a bit notorious and put most of the _dragons_ in our, Western, mother-in-law jokes to shame.) Anyway I went and, because my Chinese is totally inadequate, the conversations were able to flow past me like deep water over a pebble. My friends translated bits and pieces, to keep me “in the loop” but it was obvious, thanks to body language and facial expressions – which are pretty much the same in China as in the West, that mother-in-law was “putting the boots” to daughter-in-law, while father-in-law and husband tried to divert my (and the children’s) attention away from them. But, suddenly, it all changed: mother-in-law went quite pale, then blushed furiously, daughter-in-law/wife beamed and the body language reversed itself: mother-in-law was submissive. An hour or so later, as we walked away, I finally said: “OK, what was *all that* about?” Wife, still beaming, said, _“I reminded her that she and her oh so smart son,”_ (husband has a PhD in physics from China’s famous Tsinghua University) _”married above their station. I am Han,”_ she pronounced, _”and they are Manchu.”_ Now, the _Manchu_ “minority” is, for all intents and purposes, gone, fully _Sinicized_ for generations centuries – more so, I would suggest, that the Scots are _Anglicized_, but the _Han_ still look down their noses at them!)

My point, finally, is that the Chinese *were* a great empire; it crumbled and was rebuilt and crumbled again and is, right now, being rebuilt yet again. This is the difference between China and Europe: the Chinese have rebounded because, I think they “learn” from their history. (I know Mussolini tried, but he was hardly a Trajan, was he?)

(Another parenthetical anecdote: the Chinese may be the only people to “celebrate” their _humiliations_. During those interminably boring, _Stalinist_ 60th anniversary celebrations there were several references to China’s great national humiliations. One, of which I took note, involved the flag raising. There were a carefully noted 169 steps to the flag pole, representing the 169 years since 1840, when, in the _1st Opium War_ the British humiliated the Chinese at the Pearl River Delta. The goal, discussed in the English TV coverage, was to remind the Chinese viewers that China is recovering (not has recovered) from humiliation by foreigners. (Westerners are, generally, called _foreigners_, Russians (and many others) are still, very often, called _barbarians_ - if the speaker thinks the stranger might not understand.)

The Chinese are different and culture does matter, but I think that the calculus of imperialism is pretty standard, across the board. It appears to me that the Chinese have the ability to comprehend that calculus (so, probably, does everyone else) and they have the resources (geopolitical “position,” population and hard and soft power) and the *will* to apply it in their region and the world. That’s what I believe they learned from the _barbarians_.

This is the _Social_ bit in the title.



Edit: two typos


----------



## Kirkhill

Reading you is always a learning experience for me Edward.  Thanks, Chris.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> According to Wikipedia (sorry but its speedy) India under the Raj comprised *8 major provinces, 5 minor provinces and 565 Princely States - extending from Aden to Singapore.*    There are your original fault lines.  They existed prior to the Raj and the Raj briefly united them.  They didn't survive as an entity with the end of the Raj.... par for the course for any Empire.
> 
> Russia couldn't handle the Stans.  China is struggling with its regions and its home population.
> 
> 3 billion people  or so, roughly the world's population in 1900, is too diverse a bunch of opinions for any one (or three) government(s) to represent and govern effectively.  Consider the potential numbers of Georgias, Azerbaijans, Ossetias, South Ossetias and Nagorno-Karabakhs.
> 
> *Until you have a multitude of Singapores and Hong Kongs * will you really be able to realize the democratic ideal of commercial states pursuing their own enlightened self-interest?



Chris, 

Did you ever read this older thread reply about why I doubt mainland China will fracture along the same lines as Yugoslavia?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

And in other news, Taiwan is in talks with Germany over acquiring those rejected Greek subs, as described in this other thread update.


----------



## Kirkhill

After reading that reference CD I do recall reading it the first time.  I accept your argument of internal cohesion.

But.

Surely internal cohesion isn't so absolute as to prevent fracturing along tribal, clan, hong or even triad lines?  It used to be an article of faith in Britain that we could beat up on each other (Tcheuchters, Sassenachs, Geordies, Taffs, Brummies, Scouses, Micks.......) but we came together when confronted by others (Frogs, Dons, Dagos....) and yes I am being purposely offensive.

Having said that my comment wasn't so much wondering if the split was likely, much less inevitable, as wondering if it was desirable.... even a necessary pre-condition for a stable order.  Its the centralizing/decentralizing argument.

For the west, in my opinion, the most stable orders have been those that allow for degrees of autonomy, and where authority is institutionalized rather than personalized.  When institutionalized then stable governance can last for a century or three.  When personalized it only lasts decades - the life of the individual.

You report regularly on the problems that the CCP has with unrest in the hinterlands, and even in the Han home regions.  Won't that pressure at least cause the CCP to consider enhanced autonomy?  I thought that that was the intent of "one country -  many systems".


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> After reading that reference CD I do recall reading it the first time.  I accept your argument of internal cohesion.
> 
> But.
> 
> Surely internal cohesion isn't so absolute as to prevent fracturing along tribal, clan, hong or even triad lines?  It used to be an article of faith in Britain that we could beat up on each other (Tcheuchters, Sassenachs, Geordies, Taffs, Brummies, Scouses, Micks.......) but we came together when confronted by others (Frogs, Dons, Dagos....) and yes I am being purposely offensive.
> 
> Having said that my comment wasn't so much wondering if the split was likely, much less inevitable, as wondering if it was desirable.... even a necessary pre-condition for a stable order.  Its the centralizing/decentralizing argument.
> 
> For the west, in my opinion, the most stable orders have been those that allow for degrees of autonomy, and where authority is institutionalized rather than personalized.  When institutionalized then stable governance can last for a century or three.  When personalized it only lasts decades - the life of the individual.
> 
> You report regularly on the problems that the CCP has with unrest in the hinterlands, and even in the Han home regions.  Won't that pressure at least cause the CCP to consider enhanced autonomy?  I thought that that was the intent of "one country -  many systems".



I was talking about cultural cohesion more than political cohesion in that other post, IIRC. And I was talking about all those Han groups already within the PRC, not those that have recently incorporated (Tibet is arguably recent but more so with Hong Kong and Macau) or yet to be incorporated (Taiwan).

Essentially my point back then was that no matter how China was organised politically- whether fractured such as in the 3 Kingdoms period or the 1945-49 Continuation Civil War or united as it was during the Qin, Han or Ming dynasties- there will always be an established Chinese culture or national consciousness that outlasts any dynastic cycle and which negates all provincial differences among Hans.  This will be true not only for Mandarin/_Bei jing hua/Putonghua_-speaking Hans, but those who speak Cantonese, Fukienese, Hakka and so forth. 

For example, have you ever wondered why Cantonese opera was still based on such common themes such as tales of emperors and concubines which mirrored _Jing Ju_(京剧) or Beijing Opera? 

The Tibetans and Uighurs are not part of this greater Chinese cultural cohesion in spite of Xinhua/CCTV's efforts to help the government portray the Tibetans/_Xizang ren_ and the Uighurs as just two more groups of the 50 or so _zu_/族/ethnicities within the greater PRC.

The Taiwanese _ben sheng ren_/native Taiwanese self-determination cause is a more recent phenomenon borne out of their common experience during their years as a subjugated, _Japanized_ people from 1895-1945 and the initial cruel years of _Guo Min Dang _ occupation when Taiwan was returned to the ROC.

One of the closer foreign parallels (to pan-Chinese cultural cohesion) might be Pan-Slavism from the 1800s, the movement which made the Slavic people of Eastern Europe, such as the Serbians, etc., look to Russia and made them hope they could be liberated from the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, IIRC.

I also thought about possibly thinking of Germany as another parallel because even if Germany as a united country has only been around since the late 1800s, all those princely states like Bavaria, Brandenburg-Prussia, etc. all spoke German. Also, all those Germanic tribes and "Teutonic" culture have been around since before the Romans, in spite of being divided among many clans. Even the Austrians identified with this during 1938 _Auchluss_ when Nazi Germany assimilated them into the Third Reich.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> ...
> You report regularly on the problems that the CCP has with unrest in the hinterlands, and even in the Han home regions.  Won't that pressure at least cause the CCP to consider enhanced autonomy?  I thought that that was the intent of "one country -  many systems".




I think the problems the _*Deng* Dynasty_ has are “normal.” Canada has Aboriginal and Québec _problems_; New Zealand has a Maori _problem_; Spain has Basque and Catalan _problems_ and so on. China’s _problems_ are neither unique nor overly dangerous – no matter what the _Han_ in Xinjiang province might claim. That doesn’t mean that China doesn’t have Tibetan and Uyghur _separatists_ (and a few others, too, I think). _= Does anyone know is there is an established English (real English, please) spelling of Uyghur? =_

China is doing two things:

1.	One country _n_ systems is designed to _accommodate_ provinces and territories like Hong Kong, Macao and, eventually, Taiwan that have _advanced_ socio-economic/political systems that are, broadly, incompatible with the _standard_, national regime. One country _n_ systems applies even in Red China, proper – there are dozens of “special” this, that and the other _zones_ and the like where _special_ provisions are made to allow (actually to experiment with) _different_ socio-economic/political ideas; and

2.	Local autonomy is designed to provide both a _safety valve_ for and a _window_ on Chinese opinion. Right now local autonomy is pretty much confined to (apparently free and fair) local elections in villages and small towns with, consequential, local decision making.

I suspect _official_ Beijing is both fascinated and worried. What happens, I’m told, is that the locals tend to elect non-Party mayors and councillors who tend to make decisions that are, often, at odds with the district, province and national policies but which work. But how long can this, popular, I have heard, local autonomy be confined to a (relatively) few villages and towns? Soon the bigger towns and cities will want the same thing. And where and how can it be stopped? The _*Deng* Dynasty_ knows that it must find a way to tap and measure and, above all, *comprehend* the public opinion and the public will and it appears to have decided that elections are the best (only?) way to do that. But popular, free, fair elections are dangerous, even destructive to oligarchies, especially to those that derive their mandate from _heaven_ (天) rather than from the people.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> That doesn’t mean that China doesn’t have Tibetan and Uyghur _separatists_ (and a few others, too, I think).



You have heard the of the _Taiping_ (太平) rebellion which occurred during the Qing Dynasty, right? Many of those rebels were from the _Hakka_ minority of China, IIRC.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _separatist_ chickens are coming home to roost, according to this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today's CNN web site:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/12/china.xinjiang/


> China issues death sentences over Xinjiang riots
> 
> *Story Highlights*
> * Six sentenced to death over riots that killed 200 people in western China
> * Riots prompted by simmering resentment between Uyghurs and Han Chinese
> * Uyghurs are mostly Muslims in western China's Xinjiang province
> 
> BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Six people were sentenced to death for murder and other crimes in riots that killed about 200 people in western China, state media reported Monday.
> 
> A seventh person was sentenced to life in prison, the Xinhua news agency said.
> 
> The riots in July were prompted by long-simmering resentment between minority Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese. The Uyghurs are mostly Muslims in western China's Xinjiang province. Some Islamists refer to the region as East Turkistan.
> 
> Last month, China sent 7,000 officials to Urumqi to ease tensions after Han Chinese protested a series of attacks in which syringes were used as weapons. The syringe attacks by Uyghurs started August 17.




This is not as much as the Han Chinese in Xinjiang wanted; it's more than many Westerners will find _acceptable_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

But there is a fine _balance_ in these things as this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Reuters (India) web site, shows:



> China gives death sentence over Uighur brawl case
> 
> Sat Oct 10, 2009 6:12pm IST
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - A court in southern China has handed out a death sentence to a man involved in a brawl in July blamed for being the trigger to deadly riots in the restive far western region of Xinjiang.
> 
> State media said the fight erupted between a group of Han Chinese and ethnic Uighur workers from Xinjiang at a factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, after a rumour spread that some Uighurs had raped two women.
> 
> The courts in Shaoguan also gave another man life imprisonment, and nine others got sentences ranging from five to eight years in jail, the official Xinhua news agency said.
> 
> Two Uighur workers were beaten to death in the fight, and three others were severely injured, the report said.
> 
> "The court was told that the brawl started after a Uighur male worker was found by other workers chasing a Han woman intern surnamed Huang in the factory," Xinhua said.
> 
> Other Han then turned on the Uighurs, beating them with iron bars and stopping medical personnel from treating the wounded, it added.
> 
> The man given the death sentence was a Han Chinese.
> 
> Nearly all Uighurs to whom Reuters spoke in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi, where almost 200 people died in the July riots, traced the protests back to their own anger over the confrontation in southern China.
> 
> _(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Bill Tarrant)_




Thus, one Han Chinese was given a death sentence, clearing the way for several Uyghurs to receive the same.


----------



## CougarKing

Back to the naval front:



> *Beijing To Build Large Destroyers*
> Beijing plans to build a new generation of large destroyers as part of its effort to develop a blue-water navy, a report from an official ship-building institute shows



http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2c913216495213d5df646910cba0a0a0/?vgnextoid=0e63fb2db0534210VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=teaser&ss=China&s=News


----------



## CougarKing

While this applies more to the civil aviation industry, perhaps this might be another possible troop ferry/airlifter for the PLAAF if the need ever arose?



> *China wants to rival Boeing, Airbus with its C919 'big plane' *
> 
> BEIJING — For now, China's big entry into the standard passenger jet business is little more than a 20-foot-long model plane on display here at Beijing Expo air show.
> But the model — of the planned C919, single-aisle jetliner designed to seat up to 190 passengers — represents something much larger.
> 
> It's what's called the "big plane" project here. It symbolizes the country's stepped-up efforts to get into the commercial passenger jet business in a big way and challenge U.S. plane-making giant Boeing and European rival Airbus, which dominate the global jetliner market. And it will be a showcase for China's ambition to be more than a low-tech producer of consumer goods for the world.
> 
> "To develop the large-scale airliner is a strategic decision of the Chinese government and one of the major programs for building up an innovation-oriented country," Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang said last month, according to the Xinhua state news agency.
> 
> The model of the C919 was unveiled in August. Work on a prototype began only last month. A maiden flight isn't scheduled until 2014, and the jet won't be available commercially until 2016. Even then, it's aimed at China's domestic market rather than for U.S. or other countries' airlines.
> 
> But the Chinese manufacturer already says the twin-engine, narrow-body design of the C919 is superior to the planes it would compete against: the Boeing 737, the best-selling jetliner in the world, and its competitor, the Airbus A320.
> 
> Read full article at...
> 
> http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2009-10-12-china-planes-c919-boeing_N.htm?csp=Travel


----------



## MarkOttawa

Obamapolicy:

U.S. Hopes to Strengthen Ties With China's Expanding Military
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/14/AR2009101403715.html



> During his first visit to China next month, President Obama hopes to strengthen ties with Beijing on efforts to combat climate change, address the global financial crisis and contain nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran. Perhaps most important, he also aims to improve the U.S. relationship with China's military.
> 
> The once-insular nation is broadening its international interests and investing around the globe, and its military is rapidly modernizing. So there is concern that U.S. and Chinese forces may find themselves bumping into each other without formal mechanisms in place for the two militaries to iron out disagreements.
> 
> Even as those worries grow, a longtime issue for China remains: It does not want the United States to sell weapons to Taiwan, which it still claims as part of its territory, and views that as the baseline of any talks. "The military relationship is a red-meat issue in China," said a senior Chinese diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "It is the one issue that could jeopardize our relations with the United States."
> 
> White House officials hope to diffuse that concern, arguing that the bigger matters between the two countries are more pressing than ever. Even at the height of the Cold War, senior administration officials have noted, the Pentagon had a more substantive relationship with the Soviet Union's military than it does with the People's Liberation Army today...
> 
> In the past, some U.S. officials said forging ties with the Chinese military wasn't that important. Even though its defense spending had risen dramatically, outpaced only by the United States', China's intentions were limited to defending its sovereignty.
> 
> But two developments have changed American thinking, analysts say. The first was the realization that every crisis between the United States and China -- including the Chinese army crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators in 1989 and the accidental bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999 by U.S. planes -- has involved the nations' militaries.
> 
> The second was the *conclusion that the People's Liberation Army wants to expand its activities around the world as China expands its international investments* [emphasis added]. Last year, China dispatched three navy ships outside of Asia for the first time in its modern history, sending them to fight piracy off Somalia alongside an international task force.
> 
> The Obama administration has held a series of high-level contacts with the Chinese army that will culminate with a visit to the United States this month by Xu Caihou, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and the highest-ranking Chinese military official to come here in years.
> 
> But beyond that, China's military seems intent on keeping the Pentagon at arm's length, and U.S. officials point to number of concerns...



More on the Chinese military build-up follows.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

China again demonstrates that any dissent and disorder will not be tolerated:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091015/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest



> BEIJING – *China sentenced three more people to death Thursday for murders committed during riots in the far western Xinjiang region in July, bringing to nine the number of people facing execution for the unrest.
> 
> Nearly 200 people were killed when Muslim Uighurs and members of China's dominant Han ethnicity turned on one another in the streets of the regional capital, Urumqi. First, Uighurs assaulted random people in the overwhelmingly Han city. Days later, Han vigilantes retaliated in Uighur neighborhoods. It was the country's worst communal violence in decades.
> 
> The official Xinhua News Agency said three new defendants were sentenced to death by the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court and three others were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve — a penalty usually commuted to life in prison.
> 
> The condemned men were all Uighur except for one Han Chinese man who was convicted of beating a Uighur man to death with a steel bar during the revenge attacks, Xinhua said.
> 
> The Uighurs sentenced to death were convicted of murder for the beating deaths of two people on July 5. One of those given a two-year reprieve was found guilty of a beating death and the other an arson attack on an auto dealership that destroyed 40 cars and resulted in heavy financial losses.
> 
> In all, 14 people were sentenced Thursday, including three who received life sentences for attacking people, setting fires and destroying private property. Of those, five were jailed for between five to 18 years for arson or assault, Xinhua said. A spokeswoman for the Xinjiang regional government, Hou Hanmin, said all those given jail terms were Uighur except for one.*
> The report did not say what pleas the defendants entered or if they would appeal.
> 
> Dilxat Raxit, a Uighur rights activist and spokesman for the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress, condemned the rulings. He said local sources in Xinjiang told him the defendants were not allowed to pick their own lawyers and spent just 10 minutes with the lawyers before the trial began.
> 
> "China does not have an independent justice system," he said in an e-mailed statement. "Judgments like these for the July 5 cases are mostly political and symbolic in nature. They are done for show and reported as lofty propaganda in order to serve a political purpose."
> 
> On Monday, six Uighur defendants were sentenced to death by the same court. Those sentences were the first to be handed down in the trials of scores of suspects arrested during and after the riots.
> 
> The violence flared on July 5 after a protest by Uighur youths demanding an investigation into a deadly brawl between Han and Uighur workers at a toy factory hundreds of miles (kilometers) away in southern China.
> 
> The government has blamed the rioting on overseas-based groups agitating for more Uighur rights in Xinjiang. Beijing has presented no direct evidence, and overseas Uighur activists have denied supporting violence.
> 
> Swift punishment of those arrested over the rioting was among the demands of Han protesters who swarmed Urumqi's streets early last month calling for the firing of Xinjiang's powerful Communist Party boss Wang Lequan. Five people died in those protests under circumstances that remain unclear.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> While this applies more to the civil aviation industry, perhaps this might be another possible troop ferry/airlifter for the PLAAF if the need ever arose?




It certainly looks dual purpose, keeping in the tradition of Warsaw bloc civil airliners with glass noses.

China is in a push to make it own brands world known rather than producing for others. Many of the pianos are made in China under other well known brands, the fctory is now marketing them under their own. QC is still an issue, my friend works with Chinese factories a fair bit, they are hungry for feedback, but not sure what to do with it when they get it.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> China again demonstrates that any political dissent and disorder will not be tolerated:
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091015/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest




I don't think I would call what so many Uyghurs are doing _political dissent_. They are, at the very least, worse than our own, violent, FLQ _separatists_ of the '60s and '70s and we certainly didn't call that _political dissent_. In fact "apprehended insurrection" was the phrase I recall being used.

The Uyghurs are an 'oppressed minority,' no question about that, but so, arguably, are the Tujia people who live in Hunan province and, by that definition, so were (are) French Quebecers. We didn't allow that "oppression" to excuse murders in Quebec in 1970; "we" imposed the (now defunct) War Measures Act and set about searching for the perpetrators with the intent of punishing them.

The sad fact is that the government of the day in Ottawa, in 1970, *caved* and allowed the murderers of a Quebec cabinet minister to be exiled to Cuba. The government of the day in Beijing is not doing the same.


----------



## CougarKing

Not surprising.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091015/wl_time/08599193033700



> As Asia's economic growth races ahead of that of the U.S., the investment portfolios of Asia's wealthiest people are picking up enough momentum to slingshot them past their North American counterparts.
> 
> 
> A report released Oct. 13 by Merrill Lynch and consulting firm Capgemini Financial Services projects that with the global recession easing, the total net worth of Asia-Pacific's wealthy - those with at least $1 million in investable assets - is set to grow at a faster pace than the holdings of rich people in other parts of the world. If this trend takes hold, the total value of assets held by Asia's rich could surpass the combined assets of North America's wealthy by 2013. All the world's millionaires will have a combined net worth of $48.5 trillion in four years, according to Merrill Lynch/Capgemini. Of that, $13.5 trillion will be held by Asia's Élite, compared with $12.7 for all of North America. Arvind Sundaresan, Asia Pacific sales chief for Capgemini, says the projection is based on economic data and growth rates as well as interviews with wealth managers. He adds that his company's estimate "is very much on the conservative side." (See pictures of Shanghai today.)
> 
> This doesn't necessarily mean Bill Gates (net worth: $40 billion) will lose his place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's richest man any time soon. But as Eastern economies, powered by a resurgent China, bounce back, the ranks of the planet's wealthiest are becoming increasingly populated by Asians. China in particular is minting nouveaux riches at a remarkable rate. Five years ago, the country had just three billionaires, according to the Hurun Rich List, which annually ranks the country's 1,000 wealthiest individuals. Today, China has 130 billionaires, according to Hurun's latest ranking released Oct. 13. That's up from 101 in 2008 (the U.S. has 359 billionaires, according to Forbes magazine).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Topping China's rich list is Wang Chuanfu, founder of BYD, a Chinese car manufacturer making hybrid electric cars. Wang, who's worth an estimated $5.1 billion, wasn't even on the list last year. But BYD's stock price has been soaring since Warren Buffett - who is ranked by Forbes as the world's second richest man with a $37 billion fortune - invested in the company in September 2008. Fast-growing BYD is also getting help from China's buoyant car market, which despite the sluggish global economy is expected to grow 5% in 2009.
> 
> 
> Wong Kwong Yu, named by Hurun last year as China's richest person with $6.3 billion, fell off the list this year after the tycoon was convicted and sent to jail for manipulating share prices of a medical company controlled by his brother. This year's second-richest Chinese is so-called "paper queen" Zhang Yin, who has accumulated $4.9 billion by buying recycled paper from the U.S. and turning it into cardboard boxes.
> 
> 
> Although Asians have been getting rich quicker than most, this doesn't mean the region's millionaires were unscathed by the financial crisis. In fact, during the depths of the market meltdown, they fared more poorly than the average Daddy Warbucks. According to the Merrill Lynch/Capgemini survey, wealthy Asians in 2008 lost 35% of their net worth, compared to a global average loss of 24%. But Asian stock and property markets - and the investments of wealthy Asians - have rebounded sharply since March as regional economies shrugged off recession. China's GDP is projected to expand 8.5% this year, compared with 1.5% growth in the U.S.
> 
> 
> Wang of BYD may have a ways to go before he challenges Gates for the title of world's wealthiest. But Rupert Hoogewerf, founder and compiler of the Hurun Rich List, says that given current trends, "there's a very strong possibility that in 15 years time you'll see somebody in China being number one in the world."


----------



## CougarKing

"Sexy Beijing: Beijing or Hong Kong"

Just a sampling of cultural differences between Beijing and Hong Kong- this topic episode in particular deals with views of which region's men make better husbands.   :rofl:


Note: the word "shuai"(帅) more means "sexy", not just good-lookiing as translated by the host.


----------



## PPCLI Guy

Britney Spears said:
			
		

> OOOHHH!
> 
> Has anyone here read this work? I was going to bring it up earlier, but I didn't think there would be enough interest.
> 
> It's kind of old news, but it caused quite a stir when it came out!
> <a href=http://missilethreat.com/static/19990200-LiangXiangsui-unrestrictedwar.pdf>Read the translation here</a>



Apologies for the necro-post, but yesterday I read this book as part of the research for a paper (due Tuesday - I should probably be writing it instead of goofing off here...).  The book has an excellent if scorching review of Desert Storm, and despite a foray into out and out weirdness in Chapter 7 (the principle of 0.168) it comes to relatively sound conclusions on how to take on a larger country (read the US) and win.  Perhaps more interesting is that elements of the book appear in the PLA PJO (principle of joint operations) publication of 1999 that kickstarted China's "revolution in doctrinal affairs".

All in all, well worth the read.


----------



## CougarKing

The influence of the _Varyag_ design is obvious:



> *Wuhan mock-up showcases naval ambitions*
> 
> Greg Torode Chief Asia correspondent
> Oct 19, 2009
> The emergence of a giant concrete ship in the unlikely setting of Wuhan is the latest sign that Beijing's desire for aircraft carriers is fast moving towards a full-blown production programme....



http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2c913216495213d5df646910cba0a0a0/?vgnextoid=36b0cac098864210VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=teaser&ss=china&s=news








  
A general view of the mock aircraft carrier being constructed on top of a building in Wuhan.






  
A general view of the control tower 







  A leaked security picture of the shipyard at Changxing shipyard showing heavy lifting cranes that have recently been put in place.


----------



## CougarKing

More pics with "aircraft" on the "flight deck":














"Chinese Military Mash-up" Wuhan training flight deck article link



> This odd building is found in Huang Jiahu (黄家湖), where there is a huge University City. According to Chinese news resources, this so-called “Comprehensive Testing Platform” project was initiated in about June or July of 2008.
> 
> This project is run by the well-known Chinese Warship Research & Design Center (No.701 Institute under CSIC).
> 
> *From the picture, you can see a mock flight deck, one Su-27 fighter and one Z-8 helicopter (both are probably full scale models). The most obvious is the “Island” commanding structure which is very similar to the one of “varyag” in Dalian. It is very interesting that Chinese people cut a big square opening on the commanding structure. For the picturing angle, there are possibly 3 square openings on other 3 sides of the structure.*
> 
> Since “China-Defense-Mashup” has reported that “varyag” Aircraft Carrier’s commanding structure has been being improved since the end of August. The “big square openings” indicate that Chinese Navy will certainly equip “varyag” carrier with domestic ship-borne AESA radars, perhaps a improved version on Type 052C Destroyer.


----------



## CougarKing

Not gonna happen.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/091020/world/taiwan_us_china_diplomacy



> Taiwan has invited Eric Shinseki, US secretary of veterans affairs, officials here said Tuesday, as the island aimed for the highest-level American visit in a decade.
> 
> Tseng Jing-ling, minister of Taiwan's Veteran Affairs Commission, confirmed the invitation during a parliamentary session on Monday, his aide told AFP.
> 
> 
> Shinseki could travel to Taiwan as early as spring next year for a symposium on veteran issues, an area that is not considered politically sensitive and therefore more palatable to China, the United Daily News said.
> 
> He would be the first cabinet-level US official to arrive in Taiwan since a visit in 2000 by Rodney Slater, transportation secretary in the Bill Clinton administration.
> 
> 
> Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 but has remained a key ally and a leading arms supplier to the island.
> 
> 
> *The triangular relationship between China, the United States and Taiwan was strained under the island's former president Chen Shui-bian who often irked Washington and Beijing with policies pushing for formal independence.*
> 
> *Ties have improved markedly after Chen was succeeded by Ma Ying-jeou last year, becoming the least confrontational president in the island's history as a de facto separate country.*
> 
> 
> However, Beijing still considers Taiwan part of its territory awaiting reunification, and it opposes official foreign contacts with the island, which split from the mainland in 1949 after a civil war.


----------



## Cloud Cover

Female Chinese Jet Fighter Pilots to Be Equipped with New Suits 

http://big5.cri.cn/gate/big5/english.cri.cn/6909/2009/08/31/45s512398.htm

Interesting pictures [of the aircraft].


----------



## CougarKing

Some comments from CMC Vice-Chairman Xu Caihou in his visit to Washington:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/091026/us/politics_us_china_usa_military



> *China's military sought to assure the United States on Monday that its arms buildup was not a threat and said Beijing wanted to expand cooperation with the Pentagon to reduce the risk of future conflicts.
> 
> At the start of a visit to Washington, Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the People's Liberation Army Central Military Commission, said military ties were generally moving in a "positive direction" and defended China's fast-paced military development as purely "defensive" and "limited" in scope.*
> 
> 
> "We are now predominantly committed to peaceful development and we will not and could not challenge or threaten any other country" and "certainly not the United States," Xu told a Washington think tank ahead of talks with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
> 
> 
> *Xu described China's development of advanced weapons systems, including cruise and ballistic missiles, as "entirely for self-defense" and justified "given the vast area of China, the severity of the challenges facing us."
> 
> 
> "As you know, China has yet to realize complete unification," Xu said, in an apparent reference to Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. "So I believe it is simply necessary for the PLA to have an appropriate level of modernity in terms of our weapons and equipment."
> 
> 
> Xu's visit, which will include a tour of major U.S. military bases, including U.S. Strategic Command, was meant to give a boost to military-to-military dialogue, which Beijing resumed this year after halting it in 2008 to protest a $6.5 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan.*
> 
> 
> NAVAL INCIDENTS
> 
> 
> U.S. officials have expressed alarm about what they see as China's unprecedented military expansion over the past year. Last week, Gates said better dialogue was needed to avoid "mistakes and miscalculations."
> 
> 
> "I want to make clear that the limited weapons and equipment of China is entirely to meet the minimum requirements for meeting national security," Xu said through a translator.
> 
> 
> He said military mechanization was still at an early stage. "China's defense policy remains defensive" and was designed to repel attacks, not initiate attacks, he said. "We will never seek hegemony ... military expansion."
> 
> 
> *Chinese vessels have confronted U.S. surveillance ships in Asian waters repeatedly this year and Beijing has called on the United States to reduce and eventually halt air and sea military surveillance close to its shores.
> 
> 
> Xu said those U.S. missions "infringed upon Chinese interests," adding: "It is encouraging to see that both sides have recognized that we should not allow such incidents to damage our ... mil-to-mil relations."
> 
> 
> Xu said U.S.-Chinese military relations have improved since President Barack Obama took office in January and can be expanded further.*
> 
> 
> "The military-to-military relationship constitutes an important part of overall bilateral relations. It is important not only to strategic trust ... but also to regional stability," he said. "The Chinese military is positive toward developing mil-to-mil relations with the U.S. military."
> 
> 
> Last month, U.S. intelligence agencies singled out China as a challenge to the United States because of its "increasing natural resource-focused diplomacy and military modernization."
> 
> 
> (Reporting by Adam Entous; editing by Stacey Joyce)


----------



## CougarKing

More executions, this time for some involved in Tibet riots last year:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/091027/world/international_us_china_tibet_1



> *Two people have been executed in China for their involvement in deadly riots in Tibet last year, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, the first officially confirmed to have been carried out.*
> 
> 
> The International Campaign for Tibet, which campaigns for self-rule for the restive mountain region in far-west China, said on Monday that Lobsang Gyaltsen and Loyak were executed for arson-related crimes committed in Lhasa, the regional capital, in March last year. Tibetans sometimes use just one name.
> 
> 
> *Tibetan protests led by Buddhist monks against Chinese rule on March 14 last year gave way to torrid violence, with rioters torching shops and turning on residents, especially Han Chinese, who many Tibetans see as intruders threatening their culture.
> 
> 
> At least 19 people died in the unrest, which sparked waves of protests across Tibetan areas. Tibetan exile groups say more than 200 people died in the subsequent crackdown.
> 
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu did not give any details about the executions but said they were linked to the violence, which Beijing blamed on the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. The Dalai Lama had denied responsibility.*
> 
> "The procedural rights of the defendants were fully ensured," Ma told a regular news conference. "The two criminals who were executed had strictly conducted first and second trials and the Supreme People's Court examined and ratified the sentences."
> 
> 
> Some exiled Tibetan groups have said that another two Tibetans were executed over the unrest that rippled out from Lhasa to other ethnic Tibetan regions.
> 
> 
> Last week, 500 Tibetans, mostly Buddhist monks and nuns, marched with candles through Dharamsala in north India, where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based, denouncing what they said were executions of four Tibetans for the protests last year.
> 
> 
> (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Ben Blanchard)


----------



## CougarKing

A unique story from an unexpected source:



> http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/091104/entertainment/china_us_politics_obama_family
> 
> 
> GUANGZHOU, China (AFP) - US President Barack Obama's half-brother *Mark Ndesandjo* Wednesday broke his silence to speak of their abusive father at the launch of his first novel.
> 
> *Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years, said he wrote "Nairobi to Shenzhen" after a string of extraordinary events -- including his brother being elected president -- made him come to terms with his past.*
> 
> 
> "My father beat me. He beat my mother. You just do not do that," he told a press conference hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China and attended by representatives of the US Consul-General here.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Obama's Kenyan father and American mother separated when Obama was just two and the president has spoken about the problems children face growing up with an absent father.
> 
> 
> *Ndesandjo, son of Obama's late father and his third wife Ruth Nidesand, had been dodging the media since his identity came to light during Obama's election campaign.
> 
> 
> He had not used the name "Obama" and had not even told his close acquaintances about his connection with the president until it was reported in the media. But the backdrop at his book launch Wednesday named him as "Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo".
> 
> 
> Bearing a strong resemblance in facial features and voice to President Obama, Ndesandjo recalled scenes of the election night at Chicago's Grant Park which helped him come to terms with the many issues "I had shut out of my life, including the Obama name."*
> 
> 
> "I saw all the hope and joy in the people's eyes. I was so proud of my brother Barack. That peeled away the hardness I had felt for so many years."
> 
> 
> *Ndesandjo said his novel, which was originally meant to be his autobiography, was about a man who was forced to confront his early experiences in Kenya and the United States after arriving in China in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
> 
> 
> He said he would publish his second book, an autobiography, in the next few months.*
> 
> 
> "I want to tell my story, not have others tell it for me."
> 
> 
> A graduate of Stanford and Brown universities, Ndesandjo said he left his hometown for China when he lost his job and did not know where his life was heading. He said he eventually decided to devote most of his time to music and service.
> 
> 
> He reportedly runs a business consultancy in Shenzhen helping to connect Chinese exporters with US buyers.
> 
> 
> Harley Seyedin, president of American Chamber of Commerce in South China and host of the book launch, described Ndesandjo as a talented pianist, writer, artist, and businessman, and a long-time good friend of his.
> 
> 
> Ndesandjo said that 15 percent of the proceeds of his novel would go to helping disadvantaged and orphaned children in China and the rest of the world.
> 
> 
> Asked if there was anything he would like to tell his brother ahead of Obama's first presidential visit to China in November 15, Ndesandjo, who speaks fluent Chinese, said: "I would encourage not only my brother President Obama, but also American people, (to understand) that China is about family. Family is always a recurrent theme here."


----------



## a_majoor

"Smart Diplomacy" indeed:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6b6956e6-cb01-11de-97e0-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1



> *China brands US ‘protectionist’
> *
> By Geoff Dyer in Beijing
> 
> Published: November 6 2009 18:39 | Last updated: November 6 2009 18:39
> 
> China on Friday accused the US of protectionist and biased trade policies less than a week before president Barack Obama’s first visit to Beijing.
> 
> In a stinging rebuke to Washington, China’s commerce ministry promised to take measures to protect its domestic industry after the US slapped anti-dumping duties on $2.6bn of Chinese steel pipe imports. The duties are part of a growing roster of trade conflicts between the two countries, despite a high-level meeting last week in China aimed at reducing tensions.
> 
> “China resolutely opposes such protectionist practices and will take steps to protect the interests of our domestic industries,” Yao Jian, ministry spokesman, said on its website.
> 
> “The US should give objective consideration to the fact that the fundamental problem of the US industries in question is the fall of demand brought about by the financial crisis.”
> 
> The decision by the US Commerce Department, which imposed tariffs of up to 99 per cent on some Chinese steel pipes, follows a move earlier in the week by the US, European Union and Mexico to file a formal complaint at the World Trade Organisation against Beijing’s restrictions on exports of specialised raw materials. Last month the Obama administration levied 35 per cent tariffs on tyres made in China.
> 
> In response, the Chinese have opened probes into US exports of poultry on grounds of safety and into cars and car parts because of the state aid those industries have received.
> 
> Lawyers in Beijing say that the government has raised the issue of state aid to push its case for China to be awarded market economy status, which would make it harder for the US to bring anti-dumping cases against Chinese products and has long been a sore issue in Beijing. “They are trying to show that every country’s markets have imperfections,” said a US trade lawyer in Beijing.
> 
> In its statement on Friday, the Chinese commerce ministry said: “We hope that the US will set aside its biases and act as quickly as possible to recognize China as a market economy.” At the US-China meeting in Hangzhou last week, Gary Locke, the US Commerce secretary, promised to set up a panel to consider the issue.
> 
> “We should be aware of this kind of trend of western countries using the WTO and free trade as an excuse to challenge us,” said Mei Xinyu, a researcher at a think tank connected to China’s commerce ministry. “Western countries adjust their own trade policies depending on the market needs of their own interest group.”
> 
> At the meeting last week, China agreed to allow US imports of pork and to relax restrictions on importing wind power components. However, Paulo Soares, head of the Chinese operations of Suzlon, the Indian wind power group, said the new rules would make little difference. “The big companies already have installed manufacturing operations and established supply chains, so it is not going to change anything,” he said.


----------



## CougarKing

The Dalai Lama up to his "mischief"?  

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091108/ap_on_re_as/as_india_dalai_lama



> *The Dalai Lama brushed off Chinese protests and traveled Sunday to a remote Himalayan town near the Tibetan border to lead five days of prayers and teaching sessions for Buddhist pilgrims.*
> 
> Thousands of poor villagers braved freezing temperatures and icy winds for a rare chance to glimpse the Tibetan spiritual leader.
> 
> Monks clanged cymbals and sounded traditional Tibetan horns to greet the Dalai Lama as he arrived at the Tawang monastery from a nearby helipad.
> 
> The Dalai Lama smiled and chatted with the gathered crowds. One monk shaded him with a giant yellow silk umbrella, while scores of others bowed before him as he walked into a hall to lead a prayer session.
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

China increasing its Africa footprint:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091108/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_china_africa



> SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt – *China's premier on Sunday pledged $10 billion in new low interest loans to African nations over three years, offering the beleaguered continent sorely needed cash while dismissing criticism that Beijing's motives in Africa are far from altruistic.
> 
> Wen Jiabao's promise at the start of a two-day China-Africa summit was warmly received by African leaders and officials, most of whose nations confront a miasma of despair further accentuated by a global financial crisis that is only now showing signs of abating.*
> 
> "The Chinese people cherish sincere friendship toward the African people, and China's support to Africa's development is concrete and real," Wen said at a forum that attracted leaders such as Sudan's Omar al-Bashir — who faces an international arrest warrant — and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Both are heads of state out-of-favor with the West.
> 
> *Wen said China wants to help Africa build its financing capacity and would provide $10 billion in concessional loans — ones with generous terms.
> 
> As part of an eight-point plan, he said China would also forgive government debts of the poorest African nations that have relations with Beijing and would build 100 new clean energy projects for the continent. It would also gradually institute a zero-tariff policy on 95 percent of goods from some of the poorest countries. All this would take place over three years.
> 
> The latest offer marks a doubling of the $5 billion loan pledge China made in 2006 to African nations — a promise that Beijing and most at the summit said China has upheld. Over the past eight years, trade between China and Africa has surged tenfold to almost $107 billion by the end of 2008, and Wen said despite the financial crisis, Chinese investments in Africa were up 77 percent in the first three quarters of 2009.
> 
> But China's inroads into Africa have drawn accusations by some in the West that the Asian powerhouse has ignored Africa's needs and the dismal rights records of some nations while looking only to sap the continent of the resources it needs to fuel its bustling economy. Critics contend that its aid is predicated on these countries renouncing ties with Taiwan — a belief Wen appeared to validate by stipulating that assistance was pegged to having diplomatic relations with China.
> 
> But more troubling for some has been Beijing's willingness to pour money into some countries irrespective of their internal politics.
> 
> China has, for example, been a key force in developing Sudan's vital oil sector even as the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum is accused of atrocities in the Darfur region. More recently, a $7 billion mining deal was signed between a little-known Chinese company and Guinea's government — an agreement that came weeks after soldiers there opened fire on demonstrators and raped women in the streets.
> 
> The Chinese premier said he took issue with claims that "China has come to Africa to plunder its resources and practice neocolonialism."*
> 
> "This allegation, in my view, is totally untenable," Wen told reporters. "Any person who is familiar with China-Africa interaction knows that relations between the two sides did not begin yesterday."
> 
> China has been active in Africa for decades, working on infrastructure projects and supporting African nations in their fight against colonial powers in the early 1950s and 60s. He said that at that time, China did not take a "single drop of oil or a single ton of minerals."
> 
> Wen said China's imports of African mineral resources and energy account for only 13 percent of the continent's total exports and its investments in Africa's oil and gas sector were only one-sixteenth of the total investments in the continent.
> 
> "So, why do some people only criticize China?" Wen asked.
> 
> Earlier, the Chinese premier invited others in the international community to step up and do their part to support Africa. The comments appeared to be a subtle nudge at Western nations with a checkered colonial past on the continent.
> 
> Zimbabwe's Mugabe — blamed by many in the West for driving his country's economy into the ground — praised China's growth as a model.
> 
> "Over the past 60 years, China has achieved phenomenal economic growth and development, purely from its own efforts without having to resort to the colonization and economic plunder of other nations," Mugabe said. "Its economic miracle is indeed a source of pride and inspiration to all of us."
> 
> Other leaders, like Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, expressed frustration with fallout from the global economic crisis that she said has "eroded benefits accumulated over years of reform."
> 
> Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the summit's host, said participants should seize the opportunity to press developed nations, "given their responsibility in the financial and economic crisis," to live up to their obligations in helping developing nations cope with the fallout.
> 
> (This version CORRECTS the style on the transliteration of the Sudanese president's last name.)


----------



## Kirkhill

OK - lets stipulate that Africa needs cash

The Copenhagen Greens aim to transfer cash from US (those with cash) to THEM (those without cash) to redress the lack of cash

However the problem is not just a lack of cash.  It is a lack of cash in the hands of the people that need it. As long as you are dealing with statist regimes that is not going to happen.

Problem No. 1 -  Getting it by the bast**ds that the UN recognizes as leaders (including the King of Kings).  

The various African Aristocrats do not want for cash - Transferring funds to them will only result in more Mercedes being driven by Aristos. The Greenies, believers in the altruism of idealistic bureaucrats, think that continuing to feed the Aristos will eventually result in a change of behaviour.  Wall: Meet Forehead.  Forehead, Wall. This way to Bedlam.  Thus I am opposed to the paying of Maundy Money to assuage someone else's sense of guilt.  No truck nor trade with enviro-socialists.

But - Africa does need cash, and it needs to reach Africans, not African states.

Conventionally individuals are rewarded with cash  when they sell something - either some Good that they own or a Service that they can provide.

There is little that Canada needs in the way of Goods that Africa can supply.  Africa supplies resources.  We have resources.  We don't need their resources.  We compete with them to supply resources.  The fact that we don't need their resources actually saves us from having to support the Aristos of the state mafia.

Africa doesn't supply manufactured Goods, the one thing we might be interested in.  They don't manufacture Goods.

What Africa needs is a good Sweat Shop, complete with Company Store and Company Scrip.  They need Nike. Or RIM.

China's fund transfer meets two of their strategic goals:  The supply of resources for a billion hard-done-by subjects ( I can't bring myself to call  Chinese citizens of China); The support of like-minded Statists who will vote with them in world governance fora like the UN.

We need to find ways to exploit "subsidiarity" to undercut that State regimes and exploit the innate Capitalist that exists in every living, breathing, communicating and trading human.  We need to export Canadians to manage African Sweat Shops.


----------



## tomahawk6

Choose your poison,an ascendant China or one in economic collapse. The Chinese economy is an export oriented economy with huge infrastructure problems,a huge under class that hasnt benefited from the boom in the cities. The cities face a severe water shortage in the near term. Right now they are flush with cash. Continued recession or even depression in the west will severely hurt the Chinese economy.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29330.html



> The conventional wisdom in Washington and in most of the rest of the world is that the roaring Chinese economy is going to pull the global economy out of recession and back into growth. It’s China’s turn, the theory goes, as American consumers — who propelled the last global boom with their borrowing and spending ways — have begun to tighten their belts and increase savings rates.
> 
> 
> The Chinese, with their unbridled capitalistic expansion propelled by a system they still refer to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” are still thriving, though, with annual gross domestic product growth of 8.9 percent in the third quarter and a domestic consumer market just starting to flex its enormous muscles.
> 
> 
> That’s prompted some cheerleading from U.S. officials, who want to see those Chinese consumers begin to pick up the slack in the global economy — a theme President Barack Obama and his delegation are certain to bring up during next week’s visit to China.
> 
> 
> “Purchases of U.S. consumers cannot be as dominant a driver of growth as they have been in the past,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said during a trip to Beijing this spring. “In China, ... growth that is sustainable will require a very substantial shift from external to domestic demand, from an investment and export-intensive growth to growth led by consumption.”
> 
> 
> That’s one vision of the future.
> 
> 
> But there’s a growing group of market professionals who see a different picture altogether. These self-styled China bears take the less popular view: that the much-vaunted Chinese economic miracle is nothing but a paper dragon. In fact, they argue that the Chinese have dangerously overheated their economy, building malls, luxury stores and infrastructure for which there is almost no demand, and that the entire system is teetering toward collapse.
> 
> 
> A Chinese collapse, of course, would have profound effects on the United States, limiting China’s ability to buy U.S. debt and provoking unknown political changes inside the Chinese regime.
> 
> 
> The China bears could be dismissed as a bunch of cranks and grumps except for one member of the group: hedge fund investor Jim Chanos.
> 
> 
> Chanos, a billionaire, is the founder of the investment firm Kynikos Associates and a famous short seller — an investor who scrutinizes companies looking for hidden flaws and then bets against those firms in the market.
> 
> 
> His most famous call came in 2001, when Chanos was one of the first to figure out that the accounting numbers presented to the public by Enron were pure fiction. Chanos began contacting Wall Street investment houses that were touting Enron’s stock. “We were struck by how many of them conceded that there was no way to analyze Enron but that investing in Enron was, instead, a ‘trust me’ story,” Chanos told a congressional committee in 2002.
> 
> Pages12»Back to top Back to top
> 
> Now, Chanos says he has found another “trust me” story: China. And he is moving to short the entire nation’s economy. Washington policymakers would do well to understand his argument, because if he’s right, the consequences will be felt here.
> 
> 
> Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.
> 
> 
> First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”
> 
> 
> Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth.
> 
> 
> Another data point cited by the bears: overcapacity. For example, the Chinese already consume more cement than the rest of the world combined, at 1.4 billion tons per year. But they have dramatically ramped up their ability to produce even more in recent years, leading to an estimated spare capacity of about 340 million tons, which, according to a report prepared earlier this year by Pivot Capital Management, is more than the consumption in the U.S., India and Japan combined.
> 
> 
> This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.
> 
> 
> The Pivot Capital report was extremely popular in Chanos’s office and concluded, “We believe the coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed event for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom.”
> 
> 
> And the bears also keep a close eye on anecdotal reports from the ground level in China, like a recent posting on a blog called The Peking Duck about shopping at Beijing’s “stunningly dysfunctional, catastrophic mall, called The Place.”
> 
> 
> “I was shocked at what I saw,” the blogger wrote. “Fifty percent of the eateries in the basement were boarded up. The cheap food court, too, was gone, covered up with ugly blue boarding, making the basement especially grim and dreary. ... There is simply too much stuff, too many stores and no buyers.”


----------



## a_majoor

An amazing picture essay on China's polution problems: http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/


----------



## CougarKing

:rofl: Chris is gonna love this.

 Yahoo News link



> BEIJING – Chinese officials are being told to dump their mistresses, avoid hostess bars, and shun extravagances as part of the Communist party's efforts to clamp down on the corruption that is threatening its rule and sullying its reputation.
> The language of the new morality push, one of countless such campaigns informally under way, is surprisingly bold, often cutting through the bureaucratese to make a clear link between moral lassitude and corruption. One statistic trotted out at a recent speech to bureaucrats: 95 percent of officials investigated for corruption were found to be keeping mistresses.
> 
> *"It's just not possible to keep a mistress on your salary because maintaining this sort of extravagant lifestyle requires a large amount of cash money," Qi Peiwen, a party discipline enforcer, told officials in southern China.
> 
> "So what do you do if you don't have the money? Naturally, you'll use the power at your disposal to go find some," Qi said, according to a transcript carried by state media.
> 
> The message was reinforced in a series of speeches at party academies last month by Li Yuanchao. He runs the organization department that controls senior appointments.
> 
> Morality drives date back long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, but the current one seems to stem more from a recognition that rampant corruption threatens to undermine the party's authority and permanently warp the value system of this rapidly developing nation of 1.3 billion people.*Meanwhile, a campaign against pornography, lewd content and advertising for sexual services has bolstered efforts to control potentially subversive content on the Internet.
> 
> Authorities recently banned more than 1,400 erotic writings and 20 Web sites, including those that discussed one-night stands, wife-swapping, sexual abuse and violence that "disregarded common decency," according to the government's General Administration of Press and Publication.
> 
> Without fixed definitions of what constitutes indecent material, the drive allows censors virtually unfettered authority to block material, including scads of blogs and personal networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and tumblr.
> 
> Not everyone is so willing to comply, however. This year the government has had to drop a heavy-handed attempt to increase Internet censorship by ordering pornography filters to be installed on all computers. It provoked a litany of complaints including that it denied access to much material that could not reasonably be considered offensive.
> That climbdown is part of a wider trend in Chinese society — the gradual decline in the party's ability to insert itself into citizens' personal affairs.
> 
> Although it retains absolute political control, the 73 million-member party no longer wields total authority over access to jobs, housing and travel, and no longer requires government employees to seek their bosses' permission to marry.
> 
> June Teufel Dreyer, a China expert at the University of Miami, thinks the morality drive might stem from "the idea that pleasure-loving people don't work as hard as they should."
> 
> Chinese have toiled for 30 years to build their country's economic might, and "Doubtless the leadership has noticed that in other societies, the prosperity-creating generation is likely to be succeeded by a frivolous generation," Dreyer said.
> 
> In one prominent example, Chen Liangyu, a Politburo member and former Shanghai party boss became the most powerful official to fall in recent years. He was accused of being a greedy lothario who indulged his sexual urges with multiple girlfriends. The focus on Chen's alleged indecency was seen as an attempt to weaken support for him among other officials whose careers he had nurtured.
> 
> During the morality campaign, party officials could receive demerits on their character assessments if found patronizing hostess bars, where young women accompany men in drinking, singing, and often much more, said Li, the organization department chief.
> 
> The campaign coincides with the sentencing of 16 high-ranking officials this year, four times more than last year.
> 
> In the end, however, the campaign's effectiveness may be fleeting, largely because it could expose much more corruption than the party had bargained for.
> 
> Dreyer said officials and others are likely to initially offer minimal compliance and that the campaign will then lose steam.
> 
> "Then, gradually, the old patterns will reassert themselves," she said.


----------



## Kirkhill

If your talking about this Chris, he is utterly bemused and doesn't even know where to start with that one.

Mistresses are fine as long as you can afford them?  H*ll that's the reason I'm still married.  I can't afford to contemplate an ex-wife much less two wives drawing on my one bank account.


----------



## a_majoor

Back to the train wreak. Check out the figurines Day by Day cartoonist Chris Muir ordered from China for his fans (see, this is about China!)


----------



## a_majoor

Prime Minister Harper epic win! Trumps Obama Game, Set and Match:

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/16923



> *Look Who’s upstaging Obama in China!
> *
> by Judi McLeod  Monday, November 16, 2009
> 
> Laid back and unassuming—typically Canadian—Canada’s Prime Minister does not project rock star status. But quiet, likable, get-the-job done Stephen Harper is trumping Obamamania in China.
> 
> Modest in entourage, Harper unlike President Barack Obama, didn’t depart the Beijing airport in a 71-car motorcade (including Chinese greeting vehicles).  Ed Henry, CNN.
> 
> Harper proves that a business head and a business agenda trump charisma.
> 
> With the mainstream America media in fawn mode over Obama’s first trip to the Orient, the China Daily carried an above-the-fold, huge front page picture of Prime Minister Harper today,  relegating Obama’s pic miniature fashion well below the fold.
> 
> “Monday is Obama-Day in China.  Obamamania and all that is supposed to be taking hold in China since the U.S. president’s arrival in Shanghai Sunday night.” crowed Canwest News Service, citing the China Daily News photo lineup.
> 
> *It’s been a win-win situation for Harper ever since he started talking business to the Pacific Rim nations who agreed yesterday on a “new growth paradigm” which included a rejection of “all forms of protectionism” and a commitment to slash the cost of doing business in the region by 25% by 2015.* ( Canwest News Service, Nov. 16, 2009).
> 
> That’s what thousands of Canadian and American workers losing their jobs to U.S. protectionism would call taking care of business, quiet Stephen Harper style.
> 
> “*While Canada’s economy was built through trans-Atlantic trade, our future prosperity will increasingly depend on our ties to the Pacific*,” Harper said Sunday at the conclusion of the two-day summit.
> 
> Talks at the two-day summit were dominated by issues around trade.  Many APEC countries, including, Canada, Mexico and China had raised concerns about the rising tide of protectionism in the United States.
> 
> “Canada’s number one priority (is) responding to the global economic downturn,” said Harper.
> 
> Even though Harper had stood his ground on China’s record on human rights, he managed to find solid agreement for anti-protectionism from Chinese President Hu Jintao.
> 
> “There are obviously things with China on which we don’t agree, but when it comes to economics, China is a strong voice for opening up trade internationally,” Harper said Saturday.  “That’s a strong position of the government of Canada to promote free trade and oppose protectionism.”
> 
> “In speech after speech on the first day of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, one leader after another took to the podium to hammer the U.S. for its rising protectionist sentiment.”
> 
> “*We must continue to promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and oppose protectionism in all its manifestations, particularly the unreasonable trade and investment restrictions imposed on development countries*,” Hu said.
> 
> Obama had promised during his first official visit to Canada last February that protectionism would not be a problem for Canada.
> 
> Harper has buttonholed Obama on his public promise at every opportunity ever since.
> 
> Kudos to Canada’s Prime Minister for putting the spotlight where it belongs: opposing U.S, protectionism.
> 
> And P.S. to the Chinese Daily: PM Harper is a great piano player too.


----------



## CougarKing

The headline of this TIMES article states: "Why China won't be tough on Iran and North Korea."

Debateable, considering the article I posted earlier which highlights one prominent China analyst's views of why Beijing can't afford to support North Korea anymore.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091118/wl_time/08599194022200



> China's government, as President Barack Obama by now no doubt knows, loves to talk about climate change. But it's an issue that exists for Beijing at 30,000 ft., far from earthly, everyday concerns. So President Hu Jintao can play the responsible global citizen by making vague commitments, as he did at the U.N. this fall, to reduce his country's carbon gas emissions by a "notable amount" at some point in the future without actually doing anything that might disrupt China's economy. But he doesn't have the same luxury of deferring action on the increasingly urgent global concerns over nuclear developments in Iran and North Korea.
> 
> 
> Obama's sense of urgency over Iran is pretty apparent. Before arriving in Beijing, he conferred on the issue with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the APEC summit in Singapore and warned that "time is running out" for Iran to accept a deal to send its uranium to Russia for reprocessing into reactor fuel. The implicit message was clear: unless Iran accepts the plan, the U.S. will press for further sanctions against Tehran, this time possibly seeking restrictions on investment in Iran's vital energy sector. (See pictures of the world's worst nuclear disasters.)
> 
> 
> A U.S. push for harsher sanctions against Iran won't be welcomed in Beijing, for two reasons. First, for all the talk of China as the other half of a G-2 that will - together with the U.S. - set the world's agenda, Beijing has not yet embraced the idea that it has the power and responsibility to shape events far beyond its borders. "Beijing is interested in domestic stability first, and stability on their frontier after that," says a senior East Asian diplomat based in Beijing.  "The notion that they are ready and willing to stand up and run the world with the U.S. now is very premature." Adds Willem van Kemenade, an expert on the China-U.S. relationship at the Netherlands Institute for Security Studies, on the question of Iran sanctions: "[China's] first instinct will be to look to see what the Russians do."
> 
> 
> *That's odd on the face of it because China's interests in Iran are very different from Russia's. * Moscow is a huge energy exporter whose responses to Iran's nuclear program are primarily based on geopolitical calculations. Under Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - who tells Medvedev what to do - Moscow is in the process of deciding whether accepting a nuclear-armed Iran fits with its strategy of pushing back against U.S. global dominance.
> 
> 
> Unlike Russia, China defines a harmonious relationship with the U.S. as being among its core interests. But China now imports a growing share of Iran's oil output - Tehran is China's third largest foreign supplier (behind Saudi Arabia and Angola), and Beijing has also significantly increased its investments in natural-gas projects in Iran. Being forced to choose between an expanding energy relationship with Iran and maintaining diplomatic accord with the U.S. is precisely the kind of dilemma that makes China's leadership assume the foreign policy equivalent of the fetal position. Thus, Hu's public remarks on Tuesday afternoon, after meeting with Obama: "We both stressed that to uphold the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and to appropriately resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations is very important to stability in the Middle East and in the Gulf region."
> 
> 
> Got that? No talk about "time running out." It's all about "dialogue and negotiations" (even if Iran has been talking to the West for years about its nuclear programs and just rejected the best offer it had ever gotten). The template China would like the U.S. to follow in responding to Iran is the same one that is used in dealing with North Korea - the topic that will dominate the conversation in Seoul, Obama's next stop.
> 
> 
> Unlike Iran, North Korea is already a nuclear-armed nation, and it says it continues to reprocess plutonium to build more bombs. (The U.S. estimates that Pyongyang has eight to 10 nukes so far.) China has used its leverage to get North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to rejoin negotiations over its nuclear program after a lengthy hiatus, and Obama is eager to engage - to Beijing's enormous relief. "Kick the can down the road" is its guiding principle in nuclear diplomacy, whether in its backyard (North Korea) or farther afield (Iran). China, first and foremost, wants stability on its border, and not even North Korea going nuclear did much to change that equation.   *China also needs Iran's energy exports, and anything that mucks that up - like tougher sanctions - is unlikely to interest Hu. *
> 
> 
> For now, Hu has what he wants in respect to North Korea - both Pyongyang and Washington are willing to resume talks. Keeping the Iran nuclear stalemate off the boil won't be as easy. Obama said on Tuesday that if Iran failed to assure the outside world that its nuclear intentions were "peaceful," there would be "consequences." For the record, that's not a phrase the Chinese came anywhere close to using.
> 
> 
> *Three times in the last four years, Beijing has voted for limited sanctions against Iran at the U.N. And right now, insists senior Administration adviser David Axelrod, "there is more unity than there has ever been in dealing with Iran." * But such unity is based on the U.S.'s emphasizing diplomacy rather than ratcheting up pressure on Tehran. How long it will last is one of the questions Obama will have to worry about on his long flight home.


----------



## CougarKing

The Chinese C919 was also mentioned earlier in this thread.



> *Chinese airplane firm takes step in becoming world aviation leader*
> 11/19/2009 | 03:40 PM
> 
> SHANGHAI - *Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China plans to build an assembly line for its homegrown C919 jetliners  in Shanghai, the latest step in the country's ambitions to become a leader in world aviation.*
> 
> The company announced the showcase project following a signing ceremony Wednesday with officials of Shanghai's Pudong district, where the plant will be located.
> 
> China is counting on the narrow-body, single-aisle C919, China's newest and biggest homegrown commercial jetliner, to compete against Western rivals in the high-stakes international aviation market.
> 
> Construction of the factory is to begin soon, with capacity to reach 20 C919s and 50 ARJ 21-series regional jets by 2016, the company, which is also known as COMAC, said in a statement.
> 
> Shanghai-based COMAC was set up in 2008 to develop and build passenger aircraft. The company also has research and development facilities in Pudong.
> 
> The C919 is due to make its maiden flight by 2014 and to begin deliveries to customers by 2016.
> 
> Earlier this week, General Electric's aviation unit teamed up with Aviation Industry Corp. of China, COMAC's state-run parent company, to develop and market electronic systems for commercial aircraft customers, including the C919 narrow-body aircraft.
> 
> GE is also supplying engines for the 70 to 110-seat ARJ-21 passenger jet, designed for the local market.
> 
> China's huge aviation market has continued to grow quickly, despite the world economic slump.
> 
> Air passenger traffic rose nearly 20 percent in the first 10 months of the year from the year before, to 191.9 million, according to the country's Civil Aviation Administration.


----------



## Journeyman

The Federation of American Scientists has posted a copy of the US Office of Naval Intelligence's current Chinese Navy survey. Available here (it's 21+ MB; lots of pretty pictures for various government officials   )

The bulk of the PLA efforts has centered around three areas:


> Anti-Surface Warfare: The PLA(N) has more than quadrupled the number of submarines capable offiring anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), installed missiles with longer ranges and more sophisticated guidance packages on its surface combatants, built over 50 highspeed ASCM-carrying patrol craft, and *developed the world's only anti-ship ballistic missile.*
> 
> Naval Air Defense: Historically a weak area for the PLA(N), its newest combatants now
> feature mid and long-range surface-to-air missiles, and the Luyang II DDG possesses a sophisticated phased-array radar system similar to the western AEGIS radar.
> 
> Force Projection: China has increased its underway replenishment capability by 67
> percent, allowing greater sustainment of operations far from shore. China has also constructed a large amphibious ship (Yuzhao LPD) and a hospital ship (Anwei AH), which could be used either for humanitarian reliefmissions or support to amphibious combat. Finally, China is refurbishing an aircraft carrier bought from Ukraine and plans to build its own within the next five to ten years.



I suspect PRC's focus continues to remain focused on the East Asian region, with Taiwan being a constant thorn.

The summary states that China has developed the world's only anti-ship ballistic missile [possibly a DF21 MRBM variant], specifically designed to defeat U.S. carrier strike groups in the event of military conflict over Taiwan. Closer reading, however, indicates that it's still very much in the experimental stages.


----------



## a_majoor

more on China's demographic future. 2030 looks to be the critical date (don't forget we will be experiencing a demographic crash in the 2020's, and Russia will also be suffering a demographic crash as well)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/economist-world-in-2010.html



> *Economist - The World in 2010*
> 
> The Economist magazine has their annual projections for the coming year. This year it is the World in 2010
> 
> Projected statistics for 80 countries in 2010 (9 page pdf)
> 
> Statistics for 15 industries countries in 2010 (4 page pdf)
> 
> The Economist long term projection for China's economy is still a positive one.
> 
> Over the next decade, China’s annual growth will slow from the 10%-plus pace of the past few years to perhaps 7%—still one of the fastest rates in the world. But future growth will be less dependent on exports. As China’s share of world exports hits 10% in 2010, up from 4% in 2000, Japan’s experience will be instructive. It suggests that there are limits to a country’s global market share: after reaching 10%, its share of world markets fell as the yen strengthened. Likewise, China will be under foreign pressure to allow the yuan to resume its climb against the dollar in 2010.
> 
> China's aging population and population in general are discussed
> 
> *China is running out of children to look after the elderly, a state of affairs often summed up by the formula “4-2-1”: four grandparents, two parents, one child. The country has about 20 years to get its act together. Although its workforce will start shrinking from 2010 relative to the population, in absolute terms both its number of workers and its population as a whole will grow until about 2030, when the population will peak at around 1.46 billion. After that it will begin to decline gently.*
> 
> If the government really wants to rejuvenate the population, it will need to loosen its policy. More children would increase the dependency ratio until they were old enough to join the labour force. But if it were done soon, some of those children would reach working age just before the crunch time of 2030, easing the labour shortage from then on.
> 
> Most officials are adamant that the policy remains in place. But in Shanghai, where the birth rate is well below the national average, the city government is now encouraging couples entitled to more than one child to take full advantage. Where it leads, others may follow.
> 
> China's 2010 census could turn up an undercount. The 2010 census undercounted by 22 million. The current population estimate for China could be low by 20-30 million. Instead of 1.339 billion the population of China could be 1.36 or 1.37 billion.
> 
> 
> Country        2010 GDP       2010 Growth   Percap GDP   PPP      Percap PPP
> USA           14.84 trillion      2.4%                $47,920      14.84 t   $47,920
> China          5.59 trillion      8.6%                $ 4,170       9.85 t     $ 7,350
> Japan          5.13 trillion     1.3%                 $40,440      4.23 t     $33,340
> Germany        3.20 trillion   0.5%                $38,520       2.81 t    $33,840
> France         2.72 trillion      0.9%                $43,240      2.16 t    $34,310
> UK             2.26 trillion        0.6%                $36,250       2.16 t   $34,730
> Italy          2.14 trillion        0.4%                $36,820       1.72 t    $29,630
> Brazil         1.67 trillion       3.8%                 $ 8,480       2.11 t    $10,740
> Canada         1.48 trillion   2.0%                 $43,450      1.32 t    $38,850
> India          1.47 trillion      6.3%                 $ 1,240       3.88 t    $ 3,270
> Spain          1.44 trillion    -0.8%                 $31,250       1.39 t   $30,360
> Russia         1.41 trillion      2.5%                $10,030       2.16 t   $15,330
> Australia      1.13 trillion     1.7%                 $52,290        .84 t   $39,020
> Mexico          .89 trillion       3.0%                $ 7,890       1.67 t   $14,830
> South Korea     .88 trillion   2.8%               $17,810       1.42 t   $28,700
> Netherlands     .81 trillion   0.4%               $49,250        .66 t   $40,080
> add to ChinaHong Kong       .22 trillion   2.8%         $30,720        .31 t   $43,180


----------



## CougarKing

Seems mainland Chinese companies have worn out their welcome in the 3rd world countries they are setting up shop in.



> ------------------------
> Monday  Dec. 07, 2009
> 
> *The World of China Inc.*
> By Hannah Beech / Ramu
> 
> TIME MAGAZINE
> 
> 
> When China began its global investment push in the early part of this century, the flood of new money was welcomed, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America that felt abandoned by the West. China's promise not to politicize aid and investment by attaching pesky conditions like improved human rights pleased many governments.
> 
> Some countries, however, are no longer as willing to extend a red carpet toward the globetrotting Chinese. Although political strings might not come with Beijing's cash, there are economic catches. The roads, mines and other infrastructure on offer are most often built by armies of imported Chinese labor, cutting down on the net financial benefit to recipient nations. Chinese companies investing abroad also tend to ship in nearly everything used on building sites, from packs of dehydrated noodles to the telltale pink-hued Chinese toilet paper. It's not only the contracted Chinese workers who show up, either. Within a few years, their relatives invariably seem to materialize to set up shops selling cheap Chinese goods that threaten the livelihood of indigenous entrepreneurs. Locals who do get work on Chinese-funded projects complain that their bosses don't heed national labor laws ensuring minimum wage or trade-union protection. Over the past three years, anti-Chinese riots have erupted everywhere from the Solomon Islands and Zambia to Tonga and Lesotho. Tensions are also simmering in India, where the Chinese are involved in several major infrastructure projects. Even high-level officials are speaking up.  In Vietnam, plans for a $140 million Chinese-operated open-pit bauxite mine were publicly excoriated by none other than revolutionary hero General Vo Nguyen Giap because, he said, of "the serious risk to the natural and social environment."
> 
> 
> Full article here: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1943087,00.html


----------



## a_majoor

More on the changing perception of China in Asia:

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/11/chinas_soft_power_hits_an_economic_wall



> *China's soft power hits the brick wall of economics*
> Fri, 12/11/2009 - 12:08pm
> 
> Lost in the Nobel hoopla yesterday was this fascinating New York Times story by Michael Wines about the ways in which China's economy and foreign economic policy are vexing its neighbors.
> 
> China has long claimed to be just another developing nation, even as its economic power far outstripped that of any other emerging country.
> 
> Now, it is finding it harder to cast itself as a friendly alternative to an imperious American superpower. For many in Asia, it is the new colossus.
> 
> “China 10 years ago is totally different with China now,” said Ansari Bukhari, who oversees metals, machinery and other crucial sectors for Indonesia’s Ministry of Industry. “They are stronger and bigger than other countries. Why do we have to give them preference?”
> 
> To varying degrees, others are voicing the same complaint. Take the 10 Southeast Asian nations in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as Asean, a regional economic bloc representing about 600 million people. After a decade of trade surpluses with Asean nations that ran as high as $20 billion, the surplus through October totaled a bare $535 million, according to Chinese customs figures, and appears headed toward a 10-year low. That is prompting some rethinking of the conventional wisdom that China’s rise is a windfall for the whole neighborhood.
> 
> Vietnam just devalued its currency by 5 percent, to keep it competitive with China. In Thailand, manufacturers are grousing openly about their inability to match Chinese prices. India has filed a sheaf of unfair-trade complaints against China this year covering everything from I-beams to coated paper.
> 
> Read the whole thing -- Wines does a nice job of contrasting China's policy responses in 2008 to what it did a decade earlier.  To sum up:  those dogs that were not barking previously are starting to growl.
> 
> This problem is not going away anytime in the near future.  The problem for the rest of the Asia/Pacific is that their comparative advantages (labor costs, process innovations) are also China's comparative advantages.  Unless China starts acting as an important consumer market as well -- which admittedly might be happening as I type this -- then China's mantra of being a "responsible power" is going to meet a greater level of static very, very soon.
> 
> UPDATE:  The Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Tom Wright has a report on how the financial crisis has affected China's soft power in the Asia/Pacific region that buttresses the Wines story.


----------



## a_majoor

The demographic bomb...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121104378_pf.html



> *In aging China, a change of course*
> Looming population crisis forces officials to rethink one-child policy, but couples hesitate
> 
> By Ariana Eunjung Cha
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Saturday, December 12, 2009
> 
> SHANGHAI -- Wang Weijia and her husband grew up surrounded by propaganda posters lecturing them that "Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children" and "One more baby means one more tomb."
> 
> They learned the lesson so well that when Shanghai government officials, alarmed by their city's low birthrate and aging population, abruptly changed course this summer and began encouraging young couples to have more than one child, their reaction was instant and firm: No way.
> 
> "We have already given all our time and energy for just one child. We have none left for a second," said Wang, 31, a human resources administrator with an 8-month-old son.
> 
> More than 30 years after China's one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed "little emperors," a population crisis is looming in the country.
> 
> The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent.
> 
> The imbalance is worse in wealthy coastal cities with highly educated populations, such as Shanghai. Last year, people 60 and older accounted for almost 22 percent of Shanghai's registered residents, while the birthrate was less than one child per couple.
> 
> Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission, has said that fertile couples need to have babies to "help reduce the proportion of the aging population and alleviate a workforce shortage in the future." Shanghai is about to be "as old -- not as rich, though -- as developed countries such as Japan and Sweden," she said.
> 
> A gradual easing
> 
> Written into the country's constitution in 1978, China's one-child policy is arguably the most controversial mandate introduced by the ruling Communist Party to date. Couples who violate the policy face enormous fines -- up to three times their annual salary in some areas -- and discrimination at work.
> 
> Chinese officials have credited the policy with helping the country avoid critical strain on its natural resources, while human rights advocates have denounced abuses in the enforcement of the policy. In rural areas, some officials have forced women pregnant with a second child to undergo abortions. In addition, many couples have had sex-selective abortions, leading to an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio.
> 
> In recent years, population officials have gradually softened their stance on the one-child policy. In 2004, they allowed for more exceptions to the rule -- including urban residents, members of ethnic minorities and cases in which both husband and wife are only children -- and in 2007, they toned down many of their hard-line slogans.
> 
> Qiao Xiaochun, a professor at the Institute of Population Research at Peking University, said central government officials have recently been debating even more radical changes, such as allowing couples to have two children if one partner is an only child.
> 
> In July, Shanghai became the first Chinese city to launch an aggressive campaign to encourage more births.
> 
> Almost overnight, posters directing families to have only one child were replaced by copies of regulations detailing who would be eligible to have a second child and how to apply for a permit. The city government dispatched family planning officials and volunteers to meet with couples in their homes and slip leaflets under doors. It has also pledged to provide emotional and financial counseling to those electing to have more than one child.
> 
> The response has been underwhelming, family planning officials say.
> Disappointing response
> 
> Although officials in one rural town on the outskirts of Shanghai say they saw an uptick in applications from couples wanting a second child after the campaign was launched, the more urban districts report no change. Huinan township, with a population of 115,000, for instance, is still receiving just four to five applications a month.
> 
> Disappointed Shanghai officials say that, despite the campaign, the number of births in the city in 2010 is still expected to be only about 165,000 -- slightly higher than in 2009 but lower than in 2008.
> 
> Feng Juying, head of the family planning committee in Shanghai's Caolu township, said financial considerations are probably the main reason many people don't want more children. "They want to give the best to their first," she said.
> 
> Yang Jiawei, 27, and his wife, Liu Juanjuan, 26, said they would love to have two children and are legally allowed to do so. But like many Chinese, they have only the scant medical and life insurance provided by the government. Without a social safety net, they say, the choice would be irresponsible.
> 
> "People in the West wrongly see the one-child policy as a rights issue," said Yang, a construction engineer whose wife is seven months pregnant with the couple's first child. "Yes, we are being robbed of the chance to have more than one child. But the problem is not just some policy. It is money."
> 
> Other couples cite psychological reasons for hesitating.
> 
> Wang, the human resources administrator, said she wants an only child because she was one herself: "We were at the center of our families and used to everyone taking care of us. We are not used to taking care of and don't really want to take care of others."
> 
> Chen Zijian, a 42-year-old who owns a translation company, put it more bluntly. For the dual-career, middle-class parents who are bringing the birthrate down, he said, it's about being successful enough to be selfish. Today's 20- and 30-somethings grew up seeing their parents struggle during the early days of China's experiment with capitalism and don't want that kind of life for themselves, he said.
> 
> Even one child makes huge demands on parents' time, he said. "A mother has to give up at least two years of her social life." Then there are the space issues -- "You have to remodel your apartment" -- and the strategizing -- "You have to have a résumé ready by the time the child is 9 months old for the best preschools."
> 
> Most of his friends are willing to deal with this once, Chen said, but not twice.
> 
> "Ours is the first generation with higher living standards," he said. "We do not want to make too many sacrifices."
> 
> Staff researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.


----------



## Rifleman62

This could be posted elsewhere, but it follows the previous post. Ms Francis was interviewed on Fox News Friday. From The National Post;

*The inconvenient truth? Overpopulation * 
Posted: December 07, 2009, 4:54 PM by Diane Francis 
Filed under: Environment 

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently of one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The intelligence behind this is the following:

• If only one children per female was born as of now, the world’s population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.

• By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world’s forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.

• Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of 9 billion by 2050.

The world is crazy

Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it. Medical and other scientific advances have benefited by delivering lower infant mortality rates as well as longevity. Both are welcome, but humankind has not yet recalibrated its behavior to account for the fact that the world can only accommodate so many human beings, especially if billions get indoor plumbing and cars.

The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms then cap and trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world’s big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. 

And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children [i.e. sons] stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

Middle Kingdom knows the way

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food and one out of five human beings that live there are not overpopulating the planet.

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pasture land into desert as is now the case or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

The point is that Copenhagen’s talking points are beside the point.

The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese shipping giant Cosco is considering building a fleet of nuclear powered container cargo ships. These would be much bigger and somewhat faster than conventional container ships. Other possible benefits include the ability to convert them rapidly to auxilliary warships using containerized weapons and electronics, or escort carriers on the model of WWII escort carriers. In this case a lot af fast "honking big ships" would add some extra muscle to the PLAN. Long articles so follow the links:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/containter-ship-modules-for-nuclear.html

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/military-and-resilience-spinoff.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Quote from: George Wallace on 2009-09-13, 13:34:55
> 
> 
> 
> This could also result in the Americans, Canadians and Europeans turning around and stopping the exporting of parts to China, preferring instead to assemble vehicles using those parts at home, reversing the trends and keeping auto workers at home happy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> That is, roughly, what Jeff Rubin predicts in his recent book, albeit for a different reason. But the problem for America, Canada and Europe is the demand curve. The demand curve for automobiles (and therefore for auto parts) is trending down in North America and Europe. The places where the demand curve for automobiles are still trending upwards are China and India. China wants to create a domestic parts industry and it can, probably will, use unfair trade practices to get one. Watch for India to follow suit.
Click to expand...




			
				Thucydides said:
			
		

> Chinese shipping giant Cosco is considering building a fleet of nuclear powered container cargo ships. These would be much bigger and somewhat faster than conventional container ships. Other possible benefits include the ability to convert them rapidly to auxilliary warships using containerized weapons and electronics, or escort carriers on the model of WWII escort carriers. In this case a lot af fast "honking big ships" would add some extra muscle to the PLAN. Long articles so follow the links:
> 
> http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/containter-ship-modules-for-nuclear.html
> 
> http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/military-and-resilience-spinoff.html




Which might solve the problem (for China) that Jeff Rubin foresees in his recent book. Essentially Rubin predicts that sky high transportation costs (fuel costs) will offset China's wage advantage and _force_ some industrial production back to America and Europe - closer to the customer. Nuclear ships, built at (Chinese) taxpayers' expense, might offset higher fuel costs, retaining China's price advantage.


----------



## CougarKing

The PRC's fixation with large structures (e.g. the 3 Gorges Dam) continues to be evident:



> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/15/worlds-longest-sea-bridge
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Much of the bridge will be fabricated offsite and will be designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 201kmph (125mph)
> 
> China today announced it had begun construction of the world's longest sea bridge – barely 18 months after opening the current record-holder.
> 
> The Y-shaped link between Hong Kong, Macau and China will be around 50km (31 miles) long in total, 35km of which will span the sea, said the state news agency Xinhua. Due to be completed by 2015, the 73bn yuan (£6.75bn) cost of the bridge will be shared by the authorities in the three territories.
> 
> The structure also includes a 5.5km underwater tunnel with artificial islands to join it to bridges on each side. According to the engineering group Arup – which has helped with the design – it is the first major marine bridge-and-tunnel project in China. But the engineering firm described the structure as 38km in length; the reason for the disparity was unclear.
> 
> Work is expected to begin with land reclamation to create an artificial island of around 216 hectares (540 acres) off Zhuhai. This will become the customs point for those making the crossing.
> 
> But much of the structure will be prefabricated offsite, so, for example, the concrete deck sections can be produced at the same time as the foundations are laid. The tunnel will be made of precast sections – each 100 metres long.
> 
> "It is designed with a service life of 120 years. It can withstand the impact of a strong wind with a speed of 51 meters a second, or equal to a maximum Beaufort scale 16 (184 to 201kmph)," said Zhu Yongling, an official in charge of the project construction. "It can also resist the impact of a magnitude-8 earthquake and a 300,000-tonne vessel."
> Six lanes of traffic will pass across the bridge at a maximum speed of 100kmph, cutting driving time from Hong Kong to Zhuhai from four hours to one.
> 
> The bridge was first proposed in 1983 as a way of fostering economic ties between China, Hong Kong and Macau. But it will be particularly welcome as the Pearl River Delta – for many years the hub of China's manufacturing – is buffeted by economic problems. The area's attempt to move up the value chain, combined with the rise of the yuan and the global economic crisis, has seen exports plummeting.
> 
> The bridge is one component in a plan issued in January by China's top economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission, which aims to fuse the area and the two special administrative regions, Hong Kong and Macau, into one of the world's most vibrant economic centres by 2020. In particular, the government hopes it will help to develop the western side of Guangdong province.
> 
> "It is a move for Hong Kong, Macau and the Pearl River Delta region to cope with global economic downturn, boost investment and inspire people," said the vice-premier, Li Keqiang, at the inauguration ceremony in Guangdong. "Meanwhile, it can also further increase [their] links and promote economic co-operation."
> 
> Hong Kong has said the bridge should generate $HK45bn (£3.6bn) of economic benefits within the first two decades of use, Reuters reported.
> 
> According to an article in New Civil Engineer magazine earlier this year, the bridges cross three navigation channels while the tunnel goes under a fourth.
> 
> "There is an airport nearby, so we could not build a bridge [in that area] which was the reason for the tunnel. The immersed tube is the longest in the world at 5.5km long," Naeem Hussain, global bridge leader at Arup, told the publication.
> 
> He said the bridge's piers would each be 170 metres high and that the design team had minimised the structures impact on estuary flows by limiting the size and number of columns in the water.
> 
> But the WWF and other environmental campaigners have warned that construction could devastate marine ecosystems and endanger the rare Chinese white dolphin, which is found in the estuarine waters of the Pearl river. Officials say they have already considered environmental issues in planning the project.
> 
> "We will control the construction noises and turbidity of seawater, and prevent oil pollution," Zhu told Xinhua.
> 
> It is only a year and a half since China opened a 36km span across Hangzhou Bay – in the eastern province of Zhejiang – which is currently the longest sea-bridge.
> 
> Wang Yong, the head of that project, said the design had led to more than 250 technological innovations and engineering breakthroughs, many of which will no doubt prove useful in building the new construction. He added that the Hangzhou bridge survived 19 severe challenges, including typhoons, tides, and geological problems during the three and a half years of construction.
> 
> The longest water-spanning bridge in the world is the Lake Pontchartrain causeway bridge in New Orleans, at 38.4km. But officials said that Hangzhou was a particularly difficult site to build because of its complex climate.


----------



## CougarKing

A key mainland Chinese envoy will be visiting Taiwan next week.

 From the Associated Press via Yahoo News



> By DEBBY WU, Associated Press Writer Debby Wu, Associated Press Writer – 32 mins ago
> TAIPEI, Taiwan – President Ma Ying-jeou's signature effort to boost ties with Beijing faces a key test next week when Taiwan's pro-independence opposition plans to take to the streets to protest the visit of a senior Chinese envoy.
> 
> Buoyed by a strong showing in local elections earlier this month, the Democratic Progressive Party says it will muster 100,000 supporters Sunday in the central city of Taichung ahead of Monday's arrival of *Chen Yunlin*,  China's top Taiwan negotiator.
> 
> Chen's visit to Taipei a year ago led to violent confrontations between police and anti-China demonstrators.
> 
> Chen will be in Taichung this time to sign four new economic accords between the once bitter rivals, which split amid civil war in 1949, and ever since have eyed each other warily across the 100-mile- (160-kilometer-) wide Taiwan Strait.
> 
> Since taking office in May 2008, Ma has eased cross-strait tensions to their lowest level in 60 years, turning his back on his DPP predecessor's pro-independence policies amid a welter of business-boosting initiatives.
> 
> These include launching regular air and sea links between the sides and ending across-the-board restrictions on Chinese investments in Taiwan — precursors, Ma says, to a partial Taiwan-China trade agreement meant to be signed next year.
> 
> Taiwan's powerful business community strongly favors Ma's approach, seeing it as necessary to prevent the island's economic marginalization amid growing trade ties between Beijing and neighboring Asian countries.
> Washington also supports it enthusiastically. Despite shifting its China recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, it remains Taiwan's most important foreign partner and fears being drawn into the armed conflict that Beijing threatens would follow any opposition move to formalize Taiwan's de facto independence. It sees Ma's policies as strongly reducing that possibility.
> 
> The DPP, however, believes the president's China-friendly push sets the stage for an eventual Chinese takeover of the island — a charge Ma vehemently denies.
> 
> The DPP says Ma's trade deal — formally known as the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement or ECFA — will flood the island with cheap Chinese products, prompting massive job losses.
> 
> "We are holding protests partly because studies have shown Taiwan's unemployment rate will shoot up after the signing of the ECFA," party spokesman Tsai Chi-chang said.
> 
> As recently as five months ago, most of the Taiwanese public accepted Ma's argument that closer economic ties with China would aid Taiwanese prosperity — even allowing for the global economic downturn.
> 
> But Ma's mishandling of the response to a devastating typhoon in August began to dent his popularity, as did a more recent miscue involving secret negotiations on the removal of a ban on some U.S. beef imports.
> 
> Earlier this month Ma's Nationalists bested the DPP by only two percentage points in local elections — a far cry from the 17 point margin that Ma enjoyed over his DPP rival in the March 2008 presidential poll.
> 
> Now, even some of Ma's Nationalist allies fear that if he does not respond effectively to DPP doubts about growing China economic ties, his political problems could multiply.
> 
> "If we sign the ECFA and it goes awry, the party's chances in future elections will face serious threats," lawmaker Lo Shu-lei said.


----------



## Edward Campbell

For those who wonder about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ web site, is a report on how China’s influence grows in Central Asia, at Russia’s expense:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/points-east/a-victory-for-beijing-in-the-new-great-game/article1399290/


> Points East
> 
> *Mark MacKinnon, The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief, blogs on life and happenings in China and East Asia.*
> 
> Monday, December 14, 2009 8:26 AM
> 
> *A victory for Beijing in the New Great Game*
> 
> Beijing – A few hours ago, in a place called Samadepe on the rarely visited border between the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the global balance of power tilted ever so slightly.
> 
> Flanked by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Chinese President Hu Jintao today turned a symbolic wheel as oil started flowing into a new 1,833-kilometre pipeline that snakes east from Turkmenistan and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in the far west of China, where it will connect with China’s own pipeline network.
> 
> Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that Russia is not bothered by the opening of the pipeline, but that’s difficult to believe. Mr. Putin’s nine years in power (the first eight as president) have been spent trying to reestablish Russia as a global force. Key to that effort has been its role as one of the world’s biggest producers of natural gas, a position that was strengthened by its effective monopoly over the pipelines coming out of the former Soviet states of Central Asia.
> 
> That monopoly has now been broken. The Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline is the first that will transport gas from Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to market without going through Russian territory. When it reaches full capacity in another three years, it will pump up to 40 billion cubic metres annually, feeding China’s rapidly-growing and energy-starved economy, meeting half of the country’s current demand.
> 
> In building the new pipeline, China can also claim victory in a race with both the United States and Europe. Both have sought for years to establish a route to bring Turkmen gas west without going through Russia, efforts that were repeatedly thwarted by interference from Moscow as well as Iran, which blocked efforts to build a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea.
> 
> Though Mr. Hu was characteristically understated about the importance of the moment his new partners were effusive in welcoming Beijing to centre stage in Central Asia.
> 
> “This project not only has commercial or economic value. It is also political,” Turkmen Presidnet Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told reporters. “China, through its wise and farsighted policy has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”
> 
> It’s a change that happened slowly. Russia has seen its already waning influence over its former backyard plummet since the onset of the global recession, which has hit the Kremlin’s coffers – and thus its ability to speak the language the Central Asia’s kleptocrats prefer – hard. The United States and Europe, meanwhile, have danced back and forth between courting the region’s leaders and condemning them, occasionally breaking ties completely, over human-rights abuses.
> 
> In the meantime, China, a late joiner to struggle for influence in Central Asia (dubbed “The Great Game” in the 19th Century as Russia and Britain jostled there), has quietly used its financial clout to make fast friends in the region, handing out massive loans and building the pipeline connecting Kazakhstan to Xinjiang. China’s Communist leaders, naturally, have no qualms about doing business with the unelected “presidents-for-life” who rule Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
> 
> Last year, I was invited to the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan to address the Eurasian Media Forum on the theme of a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West, sitting on a panel alongside such combatants as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky.
> 
> When the Americans and the Russians took a break from verbally attacking each other, an audience member asked a Chinese panelist where Beijing stood in the escalating dispute. His response came back to me today as I watched the television footage from Turkmenistan.
> 
> “We leave matters of war and peace to the Americans and the Russians,” he said, adding that China preferred to focus on building up economic relations with its neighbours.
> 
> The audience, made up of Central Asia’s business and political elite, gratefully applauded.



China must have resources. They are _best_ bought and paid for close to home but Canada remains an attractive source of supply.

China is not interested in war. The Chinese military leaders need not invent ‘enemies’ to justify their annual budgets.

China expects the sort of _respect_ and deference accorded to a great power, and it expects it from Russia, too.

My impression of the Chinese leadership and top level _management_ is: smart, _focused_, visionary (long term thinkers), _disciplined_ and patient.


----------



## CougarKing

As expected, renewed protests- mostly by Taiwanese/_benshengren_ who would most probably vote for the pro-independence DPP- erupt as the mainland's envoy arrives in Taiwan.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo News



> TAICHUNG, Taiwan – *Thousands of anti-government protesters gathered in the central Taiwanese city of Taichung for a massive rally Sunday to denounce the arrival of China's senior Taiwan negotiator*.
> 
> *Buoyed by a strong showing in local elections earlier this month, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party is seeking to press home its message that President Ma Ying-jeou's tightening of commercial ties with China is undermining Taiwan's de facto independence and threatening the economic well being of its people.*
> 
> Sunday's rally, a day ahead of the arrival of Chen Yunlin, is *expected to attract some 100,000 demonstrators*. DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen has promised it will be peaceful — unlike last year, when DPP supporters and police clashed repeatedly during an earlier Chen visit.
> 
> Police have sealed off roads surrounding Chen's hotel to ward off protesters, some of whom say they will follow him wherever he goes.
> 
> *Chen is coming to Taichung to sign four new economic accords between the once bitter rivals, which split amid civil war in 1949, and ever since have eyed each other warily across the 100-mile- (160-kilometer-) wide Taiwan Strait.*
> 
> He is set to return to China on Dec. 25.
> 
> *Since taking office in May 2008, Ma has eased cross-strait tensions to their lowest level in 60 years, turning his back on his DPP predecessor's pro-independence policies amid a welter of business-boosting initiatives.
> 
> These include launching regular air and sea links between the sides and ending across-the-board restrictions on Chinese investment in Taiwan — precursors, Ma says, to a partial Taiwan-China trade agreement meant to be signed next year.
> 
> Taiwan's powerful business community strongly favors Ma's approach, seeing it as necessary to prevent the island's economic marginalization amid growing trade ties between Beijing and neighboring Asian countries.*
> 
> Washington also supports it enthusiastically. Despite shifting its China recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, it remains Taiwan's most important foreign partner and fears being drawn into the armed conflict that Beijing threatens would follow any opposition move to formalize Taiwan's de facto independence. It sees Ma's policies as strongly reducing that possibility.
> 
> *The DPP, however, believes the president's China-friendly push sets the stage for an eventual Chinese takeover of the island — a charge Ma vehemently denies.
> 
> The DPP says Ma's trade deal — formally known as the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement or ECFA — will flood the island with cheap Chinese products, prompting massive job losses.*
> "We are holding protests partly because studies have shown Taiwan's unemployment rate will shoot up after the signing of the ECFA," party spokesman Tsai Chi-chang said.
> 
> As recently as five months ago, most of the Taiwanese public accepted Ma's argument that closer economic ties with China would aid Taiwanese prosperity — even allowing for the global economic downturn.
> 
> But Ma's mishandling of the response to a devastating typhoon in August began to dent his popularity, as did a more recent miscue involving secret negotiations on the removal of a ban on some U.S. beef imports.
> 
> Earlier this month Ma's Nationalists bested the DPP by only two percentage points in local elections — a far cry from the 17 point margin that Ma enjoyed over his DPP rival in the March 2008 presidential poll.


----------



## CougarKing

PRC "justice" at it again, but this time, dealing with a prominent Chinese political dissident.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo News



> BEIJING – *A high-profile Chinese dissident accused of subversion was tried at a two-hour hearing Wednesday that shut out foreign diplomats concerned over a case that reflects the communist government's deep suspicion of calls for political reform.
> 
> Liu Xiaobo*  was detained a year ago, just before the release of an unusually direct appeal for more civil rights in China he co-authored called Charter 08, signed by scores of China's top intellectuals. He faces up to 15 years in jail. The verdict is due Friday.
> 
> International human rights groups and Western nations have heavily criticized Liu's detention. *A dozen diplomats, including from the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia and Canada, stood outside the Beijing courthouse in freezing weather, barred from entering, along with a handful of Liu's Chinese supporters. At least one diplomat said he would try to be present for the verdict.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## a_majoor

China is everyone's great white hope, but...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_year_of_bankrupt_gov_ts_vv1vR5wWL7yNqe7FPTtXFL



> *2010: The year of bankrupt gov'ts*
> 
> By RALPH PETERS
> 
> Last Updated: 3:35 AM, December 24, 2009
> 
> Posted: 1:35 AM, December 23, 2009
> 
> Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But he only comes for kids -- not for governments that have bragged, borrowed and spent their way into bankruptcy. Two Thousand Ten is going to belong to the Grinch.
> 
> For spendthrift governments around the world, the new year's going to bring massive defaults. The new globalization may be the globalization of a second wave of financial crises.
> 
> The world economy is not convalescing. It's just been pumped full of unaffordable medicines. Borrowing madly, countries as diverse as Greece and Dubai have been buying time, not fiscal health.
> 
> Built on financial quicksand, Dubai (an Arab Las-Vegas-without-the-fun) is in collapse (predicted by this column years ago). Quasi-governmental corporations backed by the ruling family are at least $80 billion in the hole. The recent transfusion of 10 billion bucks from Abu Dhabi merely applied a Band-Aid to a hemorrhage. Dubai can't pay.
> 
> Eighty billion in bad debts may not sound high in President Obama's Washington, but Dubai's just a city pretending to be a country. It produces nothing. There's no inherent wealth. It Madoff-ed the world with extravagant brochures and nutty projects.
> 
> Speculators went nuts, proclaiming Dubai the city of the future, where wealth could only beget more wealth. The frenzy produced the craziest real-estate bubble in the world, as gullible investors mistook a couple of shopping malls for a civilization.
> 
> Dubai's approach to development mirrored that of much of the Arab world, expecting money to do all of the work. But Dubai's ambitions weren't backed by oil wealth, only vast development schemes that never should have fooled a single investor. But investors wanted to be fooled.
> 
> Speculation hasn't been the only villain generating financial ruin around the world. Another villain has been exploding entitlements. Several European states (plus my favorite foreign country, California) have been downed by a self-inflicted one-two punch.
> 
> In Ireland and Spain, housing bubbles created the illusion of roaring economies -- and pandering governments inflated already generous social programs. In Italy and Greece, state giveaways, bubble economies and rabid corruption created national debts in excess of GDP.
> 
> Even in this age of globalization and complex financial instruments, one law of the financial jungle remains brutally true: The bills come due eventually.
> 
> Dubai's bankrupt, but frightened investors pretend otherwise. Greece is bankrupt, and the other Euro-currency states don't know what to do: The strict fiscal-policy rules for the Euro-zone are crumbling.
> 
> Will EU governments -- each with its own problems -- cobble together a rescue package? Greece's socialist government certainly isn't going to embrace painful austerity measures -- and the population, conditioned to an entitlement mentality, would tear Athens apart.
> 
> And after Greece, what about Spain? With 20 percent unemployment and an economy strangled by disincentives to job creation, Spain counts on being considered too big to fail.
> 
> The Baltic states' economies are tubercular. Central Europe's headed for the post-modern equivalent of debtors' prison. And even Britain (and the global bankers' fortress, the City of London) is still in deep treacle.
> 
> Then there's California (and New York).
> 
> Taken in isolation, any of these problems could be managed. But these "local" crises refuse to be isolated. Toss in suspect statistics from other troubled states and hollow economies from Argentina to Russia, and 2010 looks unpredictable, to put it gently.
> 
> Perhaps the world's financial wizards will head off this looming debacle, too -- but don't count on it. Chain reactions could devastate European banks and budgets .
> 
> The good news? Venezuela's also in serious economic trouble. The bad news? Venezuela's also in serious economic trouble.
> 
> Then there are the great unknowns, a Russian economy that may be far more fragile than anyone wants to admit, as well as China, opaque and insatiable.
> 
> *One of the reasons China's desperate to keep expanding its trade is that its banking sector is flimsier than chopsticks -- plagued by uncollectible sweetheart loans made to favored firms and institutions. Perhaps Beijing will dominate the 21st century. But it's also possible that China's economy will turn out to be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.*
> 
> The best scenario we could see in the global economy in 2010? Rescue-package fire brigades rushing to deal with these crises individually. What's the worst? A chain reaction that leads to a rash of national defaults, followed by a world banking and liquidity crisis, Part II.
> 
> What of our own country, with its soaring debt, congressional irresponsibility and an administration whose No. 1 priority is expanding unaffordable entitlement programs? Draw your own conclusions.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§9) of the Copyright Act from the CCTV (China Central Television) web site, is a report that says that China will not establish a naval base in the Middle East “at this time:”

http://english.cctv.com/program/worldwidewatch/20100102/101235.shtml
<click on oink for full video report>


> China has no plans for overseas naval base
> 
> 2010-01-02 10:12 BJT
> 
> China has no plans to establish a base of operations in the Mid East and will continue using a supply vessel to service its anti-piracy naval task force in the Gulf of Aden. The Defense Ministry issued the clarification after a rear admiral suggested that Beijing should set up a permanent base in the region.
> 
> An overseas supply base might be an option in the future, but it's not being considered at this time.
> The Ministry of Defense says some countries have overseas supply bases, but the Chinese fleet ships are supplied at sea and through port in the Gulf of Aden region.
> 
> The statement is in response to an outspoken retired rear admiral, Yin Zhou. He says a base would bolster China's long-term participation in anti-piracy operations.
> 
> Yin's suggestion came after a Chinese cargo ship and its crew of 25 were rescued from Somali pirates on Monday.
> 
> The suggestion has evoked wide international concern.
> 
> The BBC reports that China's international deployments are being closely monitored for signs of increasing assertiveness in its foreign defense policy.
> 
> The AFP news service reports Yin's proposal raises the idea that China could build foreign bases elsewhere.
> 
> China has sent four naval task forces to the region since the end of last year. The first group of ships were at sea for more than four months without docking.
> 
> Since then, Chinese vessels have docked at a French naval base for supplies. The US, European Union and Japan also have supply bases in the region.



Chinese ships working in the anti-piracy role currently use a French naval base in the region.

My _guesstimate_ is that RAdm (ret’d) Yin Zhou let the cat out of the bag and we will see a Chinese naval base just a wee tiny bit later than planned.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> My _guesstimate_ is that RAdm (ret’d) Yin Zhou let the cat out of the bag and we will see a Chinese naval base just a wee tiny bit later than planned.



Perhaps a PLA-N base in Burma/Myanmar- in the same way the USSR used to have a joint naval base with Vietnam (Cam Ranh Bay) during the later years of the Cold War from the late 70s onward- might also be a worthwhile prediction considering the article about the Indian Ocean being another future area of competition for China and India you posted last year?


----------



## a_majoor

A somewhat more realistic view of China's economic trajectory:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/pessimist-view-of-china-economic-future.html



> *A Pessimist View of China Economic Future*
> 
> Gordon G. Chang,author of The Coming Collapse of China, indicates why he thinks China will not have a $123 trillion economy in 2040
> 
> This related to previous articles at this site and are directed at 1993 nobel prize winning economist Robert Fogel predicting China to have a $123 trillion economy in 2040 (Note: others like Goldman Sachs predict China to have a $57 trillion economy in 2040
> 
> First, he neglects to mention that China’s educational system, despite all the money it receives, remains inappropriate for a modern society.
> 
> Second, Fogel is right to note that migration of labor to cities has been the engine of Chinese growth, but that process has stalled in the global economic downturn. Yes, China still has cheap labor, but not mentioned in the article are the generally accepted projections that the labor force will level off in a half decade and then shrink.
> 
> Third, it’s true that Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics does not fully account for the output of the fast-growing service sector. That’s why its estimate of 13.0% growth for 2007 is low by about two percentage points. Then, small businesses were the most vibrant part of the economy. Today, the failure to properly assess the output of small business is resulting in an overestimation of GDP because these enterprises, which tend to be more dependent on exports, are suffering more than the larger ones.
> 
> Quantcast
> 
> Fourth, Fogel’s views of the political system are questionable. He neglects to say that Hu Jintao has presided over a seven-year crackdown and that the Communist Party tolerates less criticism today than it did two decades ago. Economic reform has stalled because China has progressed about as far as it can within its existing political framework. A true market economy, for example, requires the rule of law, which in turn requires “institutional curbs” on government.
> 
> Fifth, Fogel apparently knows almost nothing about Chinese consumer spending. Historically, consumption contributed about 60% of China’s economic output. Today, it accounts for about 30%--and that number is going lower. Why? Beijing’s stimulus spending, about $1.1 trillion last year, is devoted almost entirely to building infrastructure and industrial capacity. As a result, the role of consumer spending is decreasing.
> 
> 
> Nicholas Consonery is a China analyst at Eurasia Group also has a more negative view on China's future economy
> 
> The most important reason why we won't see 1.4 billion Chinese earning an average of $85,000 per year is simply that the Earth can't sustain such rapid growth. The biggest environmental challenge for China's leadership will be in securing enough water to keep the economy afloat.
> 
> Fogel warns that Europe faces some serious demographic challenges. True enough, but as Fogel only briefly acknowledges, China has an aging population of its own to reckon with. Chinese statistics show that the country's birthrate fell 42 percent from 1990 to 2007, and government projections suggest that by 2025, nearly a quarter of China's population will have celebrated its 60th birthday.
> 
> China can rely less on cars and planes and more on high speed rail.
> 
> Also, advanced electric bikes will also be part of China's transportation solutions.
> 
> China is developing cleaner energy with a plan that is compatible with high growth
> 
> China is building grand canals to address water shortages and is also building up desalination capabilities.
> 
> China is now ranked second in scientific research output.
> 
> An annual report by data analyst Evidence, published today by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, shows that China has moved into second place after the US in a ranking of nations by their research output.
> 
> Although the UK published 91,273 papers in 2008 – an average of 2.3 per researcher and up more than 11,000 on 2007 – it was not enough to keep pace with the most populous country in the world, which has experienced a four-fold rise in its output over the past decade.
> 
> China produced more than 110,000 papers in 2008 – an increase of about 30,000 on the 2007 figure.
> 
> The Evidence data show that the UK was responsible for 7.9 per cent of the world’s research papers in 2008, down from an average of 8.5 per cent over the past five years. The US retained its lead, although its world share has also dropped, from 34 to 29.5 per cent over the period.
> 
> The report notes an “exceptional” global increase in the number of papers published this year, driven largely by China, Brazil, India and Iran.
> 
> Despite the drop in its share of publications, the UK’s share of the world’s citations – formal references of papers by fellow academics – increased. It rose from an average of 11.2 per cent over the past five years to 11.8 per cent in 2008, putting the UK in second place after the US.


----------



## CougarKing

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100111/ap_on_re_as/as_china_missile_defense




> BEIJING –* China's military successfully tested a system for intercepting missiles in mid-flight on Monday, state media reported.*
> 
> Few details were given about the test, with the official Xinhua News Agency saying only that "ground-based midcourse missile interception technology" was tested within Chinese territory and achieved the expected objective.
> 
> "The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country," Xinhua said.
> 
> *The report follows repeated complaints in recent days by Beijing over the sale by the U.S. of weaponry to Taiwan, including PAC-3 air defense missiles. These sales are driven by threats from China to use force to bring the island under its control, backed up by an estimated 1,300 Chinese ballistic missiles positioned along the Taiwan Strait.*
> Communist-ruled China split with Taiwan amid civil war in 1949 and continues to regard the self-governing democracy as part of its territory. Beijing has warned of a disruption in ties with Washington if the sale goes ahead, but has not said what specific actions it would take.
> 
> China's military is in the middle of a major technology upgrade, spurred on by double digit annual percentage increases in defense spending. Missile technology is considered one of the military's particular strengths, allowing it to narrow the gap with the U.S. and other armed forces.
> 
> Xinhua did not further identify the system tested, although China is believed to be pursuing a number of programs aimed at shooting down stealth aircraft and downing or disabling cruise missiles and precision-guided weapons.



The PLA continues to add to its capabilities.


----------



## CougarKing

Google defies China over censorship:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100113/ap_on_hi_te/as_china_google 




> By JOE McDONALD, AP Business Writer Joe Mcdonald, Ap Business Writer – 2 hrs 10 mins ago
> BEIJING – *Google's threat to pull out of China over censorship is a rare display of defiance in a system where foreign companies have long accepted intrusive controls to gain access to a huge and growing market.*
> Dismayed by the prospect of a China without Google, visitors left flowers at its Beijing headquarters Wednesday as Web sites buzzed with words of support and appeals to stay.
> 
> "I felt it's a pity and hope it will not withdraw from the Chinese market," said a man who left flowers at the building in the high-tech Haidian district and would give only his surname, Chang. "Google played a key role in the growth of our generation. The control (of the Internet) is excessive."
> 
> *In industries from automaking to fast food, companies have been forced to allow communist authorities to influence — and sometimes dictate — their choice of local partners, where to operate and what products to sell.
> 
> Web companies have endured criticism for cooperating with a communist system that tightly controls information. Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others have acceded to pressure to block access to politically sensitive material.
> 
> "The Internet is like media, and the media are under tight government control, so that poses additional challenges for foreign Internet companies compared with, say, manufacturers of TV sets, mobile phones or autos," said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing.
> 
> Google's decision even to talk publicly was rare in a system where Chinese officials react angrily to criticism. Officials have wide regulatory discretion and companies avoid saying anything that might prompt retaliation.*China's foreign ministry and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment but the state Xinhua News Agency cited an unidentified official as saying the government was seeking more information from Google. Phone calls to Google spokespeople in Beijing and Hong Kong were not answered.
> 
> Comments left on Chinese Internet bulletin boards praised Google's stance and appealed to the Mountain View, California-based search giant not to leave.
> 
> "Google is a great soldier of freedom. You don't bend to the devils," said a note on the site Tianya.cn.
> 
> A posting on http://www.mop.com pleaded, "Google please don't go. We can't let you go. Real man, we support you."
> 
> A photo on a Chinese Web site showed a visitor outside the Google building bowing in a traditional gesture of respect.
> 
> China's growing consumer market is especially important to many companies at a time when global demand has plunged. The government is forecasting 8.3 percent economic growth for 2009 and China is on track to overtake Japan as the second-largest economy.
> 
> China has the world's most-populous Internet market, with 338 million people online as of June, and foreign Internet companies eager for a share of that.
> 
> *But despite risking damage to their reputations by cooperating with the government, they have struggled to make headway against intense competition from Chinese rivals. Yahoo, eBay Inc. and others have given up and turned over control of their China operations to local partners. Google is the last global Internet company to manage its own China arm.
> 
> Google trails local competitor Baidu Inc. but has gained market share at the expense of smaller competitors. Google had 31.8 percent of search revenues in 2009, versus 60.9 percent for Baidu, according to Analysys.
> 
> Baidu.com's U.S. shares rose 14 percent in trading Wednesday morning, while Google stock dipped 2.5 percent.
> 
> Google created its China-based Google.cn site in 2006, agreeing to censor results by excluding sites to which access was blocked by government filters, popularly known as the Great Firewall of China.
> 
> Despite that cooperation, Beijing accused Google last year of spreading pornography and access to the site was temporarily blocked. The company's video site, YouTube.com, is unavailable to users in China.
> 
> Google said Tuesday it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. That would allow users to find politically sensitive photos and Web sites abroad, though downloading them might still be barred by government filters. It also said it had discovered that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.
> 
> On Wednesday, Google.cn said its top search term of the day was "Tiananmen," possibly due to Web surfers looking for material on the government's violent crackdown on 1989 pro-democracy protests. The No. 2 search topic was "Google leaving China."
> 
> Google.cn appeared to be still censoring results. A search for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement returned a message saying the browser could not open the page. A notice on the site says some results were deleted in line with regulations.
> 
> Google managers told employees to go home and they did not know whether to come back Thursday, said an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to reporters. Google is a sought-after employer and has long had its pick of China's brightest university graduates.
> 
> Ran Yunfei, a magazine editor and blogger in Sichuan province in China's southwest who is known for his liberal views, likened Google's threatened departure to that of a dissident leaving China for freedom. *  "I don't support the departure of all dissidents. Only those obedient to the officials would remain. That would too well suit the taste of the dictatorial regime," Ran wrote on his blog, which is hosted outside China.
> 
> ____
> 
> Associated Press Writers Alexa Olesen, Chi-chi Zhang, Vincent Thian and Charles Hutzler and AP researchers Yu Bing and Bonnie Cao contributed to this report.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Strategypage:
> 
> Ghost Net
> March 30, 2009: Nearly a year ago, the Dali Lama asked computer security experts to examine whether his computers, and those of organizations that support freedom for Tibet (which the Dali Lama is the exiled spiritual leader of). Soon, more experts at the University of Toronto were also called in, and after ten months of carefully examining thousands of PCs, it was discovered that 1,200 computers belonging to anti-Chinese Tibet groups, and other governments they were in communication with, had been infected with a hidden computer program (a virus inserted by hackers) that gave control of the computers to someone, or some group, in China. The security experts dubbed the clandestine hackers effort, Ghost Net. The University of Toronto team did not accuse the Chinese government of being behind this Cyber War operation, although they did find evidence of the Chinese government taking advantage of information gathered by Ghost Net. Some at the University of Toronto speculated this might actually be a CIA operation, to try and discredit China.
> 
> When confronted with all this evidence, the Chinese government denied any knowledge of it. Computer security researchers at Cambridge University in Britain, who participated in the investigation, do accuse China of being responsible for Ghost Net.




Further to this, see: The Ghost Net Report and these two stories, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/google-china-spat-shines-light-on-cyberspying/article1429835/


> Google-China spat shines light on cyberspying
> *‘Attacks like this are very hard to block and very hard to filter'*
> 
> Georgina Prodhan and Melanie Lee
> 
> London and Shanghai — Reuters
> 
> Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
> 
> Cyberattacks disclosed by Google Inc. (GOOG-Q587.09-3.39-0.57%)and Adobe Systems Inc. that may lead Google to quit China highlight a sophisticated type of bespoke cyberspying that could be more widespread than previously thought.
> 
> Google, the world's top search engine , said Tuesday it might shut down its Chinese site, Google.cn, after an attack on its infrastructure it believed was primarily aimed at accessing the Google mail accounts of Chinese human rights  activists.
> 
> Unlike ordinary viruses that are released into cyberspace and quickly spread from computer to computer, the type of attack launched against Google and at least 20 other companies was likely handcrafted uniquely for each targeted organisation.
> 
> Such attacks, most often delivered using Adobe PDF documents sent by e-mail, secretly deposit a software file on a user's hard drive allowing the computer to be remotely accessed. Typically, top personnel with access to high-level information are targeted with such software, known as malware.
> 
> Since each organization is hit with a malware that looks different from malware delivered to others, companies cannot detect samples spreading around the globe and protect themselves as they normally would, security experts say.
> 
> “Attacks like this are very hard to block and very hard to filter,” says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security software  maker F-Secure, who has been monitoring such attacks against Chinese human-rights activists since 2005.
> 
> The fact that this kind of malware can easily sit in computers undetected, potentially forever, also means the true number of such hacking attempts is hard to estimate.
> 
> “I don't think they're very unusual at all. I think they're very usual -- that's the problem,” says John Walker, a professor in cyber-crime at the Britain's Nottingham Trent University and chief technology officer of security software adviser Secure-Bastion.
> 
> Google said it had found that at least 20 other companies had been targeted in attacks originating from China, and that it was in the process of notifying them.
> 
> Adobe, which makes the popular Acrobat, Flash and Photoshop software including the PDF format often used by hackers, said Wednesday its computer-network systems had been attacked, but no sensitive information was stolen.
> 
> Mr. Hypponen said the logical explanation was that hackers wanted to gain access to Adobe's development systems to better exploit PDF vulnerabilities.
> 
> Cyber security firm iDefense said that according to its sources, the attack on Google bore similarities to a July 2009 attack in which about 100 information technology-focused companies were targeted with e-mail campaigns using PDF files.
> 
> “It is possible that the two attacks are one and the same, and that the organisations targeted in the Silicon Valley attacks have been compromised since July,” it said.
> 
> In September, a coordinated cyberattack on the Chinese assistants of foreign news agencies contained malware that also exploited an Adobe Acrobat vulnerability.
> 
> Other companies targeted in the latest attacks did not immediately come forward.
> 
> Microsoft Corp., which has recently launched a Chinese version of its much-hyped new search enging Bing, said in a statement: “We have no indication that any of our mail properties have been compromised.”
> 
> Defence contractors are other likely targets.
> 
> Last year, cyberspies that appeared to be based in China were reported to have breached the Pentagon's $300-billion (U.S.) Joint Strike Fighter project, using vulnerabilities in the networks of contractors involved in building the fighter jet.
> 
> The Pentagon and top supplier Lockheed Martin later said they were not aware of any specific concerns, when asked about the Wall Street Journal report.
> 
> Defence companies, facing shrinking conventional defence budgets, are expanding into the development of ways to wage and protect themselves against cyber warfare, as the borders between consumer and defence electronics blur.



AND​
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/china-tells-web-companies-to-obey-controls/article1430640/


> China tells Web companies to obey controls
> *In first official response to Google threat to leave country, Beijing gives no hint of compromise*
> 
> Joe McDonald
> 
> Beijing — Associated Press
> 
> Published on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010
> 
> In China's first official response to Google's threat to leave the country, the government Thursday said foreign Internet companies  are welcome but must obey the law and gave no hint of a possible compromise over Web censorship.
> 
> Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, without mentioning Google by name, said Beijing prohibits e-mail hacking, another issue cited by the company. She was responding to questions about Google at a regular ministry briefing.
> 
> “China's Internet is open,” Ms. Jiang said. “China welcomes international Internet enterprises to conduct business in China according to law.”
> 
> Google said Tuesday it would stop censoring search results in China and might shut down its China-based Google.cn site, citing attempts to break into accounts on its Gmail service used by human rights  activists.
> 
> Ms. Jiang gave no indication whether the government had talked with Google. The state Xinhua News Agency said earlier officials were seeking more information about its announcement.
> 
> The main Communist Party newspaper warned companies to obey government controls as Web users visited Google's Beijing offices for a second day to leave flowers and notes expressing support for the company.
> 
> Peoples Daily, citing a cabinet official's comments in November, said companies must help the government keep the Internet safe and fight online pornography and cyber attacks.
> 
> Web companies must abide by “propaganda discipline,” the official, Wang Chen, was quoted as saying. “Companies have to concretely increase the ability of Internet media to guide public opinion in order to uphold Internet safety.”
> 
> Also Thursday, a law professor and human rights lawyer, Teng Biao, wrote on his blog that someone broke into his Gmail account and forwarded e-mail to another account. Mr. Teng said he did not know whether he was one of two Chinese activists mentioned by Google as hacking targets.
> 
> “Google leaving China makes people sad, but accepting censorship to stay in China and abandoning its ‘Don't Be Evil' principles is more than just sad,” Mr. Teng wrote.
> 
> Outside the Google offices, some visitors poured small glasses of liquor, a Chinese funeral ritual.
> 
> One man left a copy of Peoples Daily, which he said represented the tightly controlled state media that China's public would be left with if Google pulls out and censorship continues.
> 
> “Google is the true hero in this silent city,” said a note left outside the building in the capital's Haidian technology district. Referring to the government Web filter, popularly known as the “Great Firewall,” another note said, “The tallest walls cannot divide people's sentiments. Google: Bye, let's meet on the other side of the wall.”
> 
> Employees entered and left the building but declined to talk to reporters.
> 
> Google's main U.S. site has a Chinese-language section but Beijing's filters make that slow and difficult to access from China.
> 
> Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but operates extensive filters to block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic, including websites run by dissidents and human rights groups. Its market of 338 million Internet users is the world's most populous.
> 
> The Global Times, published by Peoples Daily and known for a fiercely nationalistic tone, took an unusually conciliatory stance Thursday, warning that Google's departure would be a “lose-lose situation” for China.
> 
> “Google is taking extreme measures but it is reminding us that we should pay attention to the issue of the free flow of information,” the newspaper said. It said China's national influence and competitiveness depend on access to information and added, “We have to advance with the times.”
> 
> The White House said Wednesday it was briefed by Google on its plans in China but refused to give details. Spokesman Robert Gibbs saidPresident Barack Obama  made his stance on Internet freedom clear during his trip to China in November, when he told students an open exchange of information makes all countries stronger.
> 
> Mr. Gibbs said the White House is awaiting China's response to Google's announcement. Asked whether the incident could cause a U.S.-China chill, Mr. Gibbs said: “We stood in China when we gave the answer about a free Internet. So, the president and this administration have beliefs about the freedom of the Internet.”
> 
> It appeared unlikely other companies might follow Google's lead and try to change how business is done in China.
> 
> “As long as you aren't involved in politics, the media or pornography, the government will leave you alone,” said Siva Yam, president of the United States of America-China Chamber of Commerce , which primarily represents U.S. companies in China.




There must be little doubt that Chinese cyber-warfare is real, aggressive and all pervasive – they (the _leadership_ in Beijing) want to know what we (all of us, Americans, Chinese, Zimbabweans for heaven’s sake) know and what we think and they want to influence what we think, say and do.

China can be pressured and influenced – slowly and quietly but, I suspect, never publicly. It is likely that China – the government, anyway – cannot back down on this matter without losing ‘face.’ And ‘face’ matters – more than many (most?) Westerners understand.


----------



## a_majoor

Google's official response:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html



> *A new approach to China*
> 
> 1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM
> Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.
> 
> First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
> 
> Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
> 
> Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
> 
> We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this Report to Congress (PDF) by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see p. 163-), as well as a related analysis (PDF) prepared for the Commission, Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.
> 
> We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
> 
> We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."
> 
> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
> 
> The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.


----------



## a_majoor

Looking ahead to the demographic future of China and the implications of the one child policy:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1566#more-1566



> *Twenty Four Million New Socialist Men = War*
> A silly webzine posts some serious news:
> 
> A new study released Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age are likely to find themselves unable to find women to marry come 2020. The reason? There just aren’t enough females to go around, because Chinese mothers often abort their baby girls.
> 
> This raises a question what do you do with 24 million excess New Socialist Men?
> 
> I was going to suggest that Democratic party should import ‘em all as a last-ditch effort to avoid getting clobbered in the 2010 midterms, but even that might not work — these poor bastards have probably already had more Marxism and central economic planning than they’d be willing to vote for.
> 
> Unfortunately, the most likely end for these millions of surplus males is as fodder in a war. It’s the traditional way for totalitarian thugocracies to deal with this sort of problem, and China’s got no shortage of targets. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 did not actually resolve the disputes over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, the ensuing diplomacy has been inconclusive and tensions are increasing. The Ussuri River dispute with the Russians has been resolved, on paper, but it is unlikely the Chinese have forgotten that they have historical claims to oil-rich Sakhalin Island. And then of course there is always Taiwan.
> 
> The effects of the Great Recession we’re now undergoing amplify the likelihood of war. The export-led Chinese economy is vulnerable to demand fluctuations in its major trade partners, especially the U.S., and is already being pretty seriously hammered by the collapse in world trade volumes. It’s hard to tell just how seriously because Chinese statistics are notoriously opaque and subject to political manipulation, but you know the numbers can’t be good when Chinese government spokesmen start muttering that Peking may stop buying Treasury bonds.
> 
> If the U.S. slides into a double-dip recession, it is entirely possible the Chinese economy could crash with it, creating a pressing need for just the sort of distraction a war of conquest provides. Under that scenario, the war could begin as soon as 2011. Even if the U.S. recovers, it’s hard to see how the war can be delayed beyond 2020 or so without creating an unacceptable risk to internal stability. The longer Peking waits, the more likely it is that those excess males will start some serious aggro inside Chinese borders.
> 
> The only good news is that the Chinese military is basically incapable of operating anywhere it can’t walk to. They have negligible airlift capability. All their sealift capability is short-range, designed for a surge invasion of Taiwan and probably not adequate even for that. The Chinese Navy’s survival odds against American air and submarine assets would be grim. And the roads crossing China’s borders are inadequate for large troop movements (one reason the Sino-Indian war fizzled out is that it was a logistical nightmare for both sides).
> 
> Nevertheless, some major war within the next ten years seems almost certain. Because even if the Chinese government were composed of angels, I don”t think there’s any historical instance of coping with an excess of unmarriageable males that large without a war.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the implications if Google pulls out of China:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4342408.html



> *Why China Needs Google More Than Google Needs China*
> 
> Cyber attacks targeting Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists have led to a decision by Google to relax self-censorship for China. This may be the first step in a much larger pullout from China by tech giant Google. This bold business move is a good thing, according to Popular Mechanics's senior technology editor, Glenn Derene. Here, Derene argues that China needs Google's innovation and creativity much more than Google needs Chinese business.
> 
> By Glenn Derene
> Published on: January 13, 2010
> 
> Much has been made of Google's moral compass since the "Don't be evil" company started censoring search results at the request of the Chinese government. Then yesterday Google announced that Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents had been hacked as part of a broad spying operation apparently tied to the Chinese government, and the company decided that it would no longer censor its search results, even if that meant pulling out of the Chinese market altogether.
> 
> It's tempting to see Google's move as a moral objection, but to me it seems highly strategic. The truth is, Google's operations in China have been troubled from the start, and the Gmail hacking incident is part of a far greater threat to Google—and, indeed, American technology businesses operating in China in general—and Google needs to push back now, or withdraw altogether.
> 
> Google has had operations in China since 2006, but it has never been the dominant search player there—that dubious honor goes to Baidu, a company with close ties to the Chinese government. The hacking incident wasn't narrowly aimed at the dissidents, according to The New York Times, but part of a broader attack on source code at multiple technology companies. This is the great big problem for American tech businesses—it's widely known that Chinese hackers (either at the behest of their government or with its tacit approval; it's never been entirely clear) routinely attempt to steal the intellectual property of American companies. The military has been focused on this problem for some time when it comes to defense contractors, but these potential thefts are equally problematic for tech companies.
> 
> Google had previously made the bet that its search engine product could be profitable and socially beneficial even with the restrictions of the Chinese government, but a product such as Gmail loses tremendous value when privacy is compromised. Now the e-mail service will be forever associated in China with surveillance, tainting the product for the foreseeable future.
> 
> The standoff will only get more interesting from here. Currently, it is a case of who needs whom more. It seems unlikely that China will loosen its restrictions for the second most popular search engine in the country. But having Google pull out its business may prove too much of an embarrassment and an acknowledgement of systemic repression, two things the Chinese government would like to avoid. Google could end up losing out on a potentially huge market, but if it doesn't stand up for its IP, the Chinese will most certainly take such steps again in the future.
> 
> In fact, the tough part is that even if Google, and, for that matter, other tech companies, pull operations out of China, they will still face hacker thefts of IP from afar—Internet larceny knows no boundaries. But China may be taking the bigger risk here. Part of the reason the U.S. has proved so technologically creative is that we have a free and open information economy—and China has, thus far, benefited from advances born here. If U.S. tech companies are forced to take a defensive stance toward China, that country will find itself isolated from the creativity of the West. And try as they might, it's doubtful that China can completely steal its way to technological creativity. China has done a great job of developing its manufacturing base, but that country still lags when it comes to technological innovation. And I'd argue that China won't develop along those lines until it allows for the free exchange of ideas and the protection of intellectual property. Hacking e-mail and driving the greatest information discovery service ever invented out of your country certainly won't help those goals.


----------



## CougarKing

Quite a development considering that investment had mostly only gone the other way before:



> *Taiwan to allow Chinese investment in bourse *
> Updated January 16, 2010 10:02 PM
> 
> TAIPEI (AP) - *Taiwan will allow China's institutional investors to invest up to $500 million in the island's stock market, the government said Saturday, in its latest step to relax control on trade and investment with its rival.
> 
> Taiwan had for decades barred Chinese capital, fearing it could give Beijing control of the local economy, but opened selected industries to Chinese investment for the first time last year.
> 
> Starting Monday, Chinese institutional investors can buy shares in Taiwan's stock market, with purchases by any single investor limited to $80 million, the Financial Supervisory Commission said.*
> The current investment cap would amount to less than 5 percent of the total capitalization of the Chinese institutional investors approved by mainland authorities, short of the 10 percent analysts had expected.
> 
> In an effort to stabilize local financial markets, Taiwanese authorities have in recent weeks tried to halt an influx of foreign capital that has driven up local shares prices and currency.
> 
> The combined Chinese ownership will be limited to 10 percent in financial, natural gas and other government-controlled firms, and 8 percent in shipping firms, the commission said.
> 
> Buying shares in local airlines, telecom, real estate and broadcasting firms will be barred, the regulator said in a statement posted on its Web site.
> 
> The announcement came as a memorandum of understanding signed between the sides took effect, allowing the establishment of banking, securities and insurance firms in each other's territory.
> 
> Also on Saturday, the Bank of China, the country's largest foreign exchange lender, said in Beijing it will submit an application to open its first branch in Taiwan, with an initial management team of 20 to 30 staff, according to a statement on the bank's Web site.
> 
> *Since Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou took office 20 months ago, he has relaxed control on bilateral investment and launched direct air and shipping links between the two rivals, hoping closer trade ties could help boost the island's sluggish economy.*
> 
> The attempts to strengthen economic ties between Taiwan and China are complicated by the two sides' split after a civil war in 1949. China still considers the island a part of its territory.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Quite a development considering that investment had mostly only gone the other way before:




The Chinese are awash in cash and all those US dollars have to go somewhere. Africa - loans and investments rather than old style aid - must be balanced by _safe_ investments: Taiwan; Singapore; Canada; South Korea; Australia; <gasp> India and so on.


----------



## Antoine

Sorry for the  :highjack: but I read the following news story about China becoming a leader in R&D. What is the proportion of Chinese technological breakthrough that comes from their Intelligence activities is still unclear in my mind, I might be an eternal paranoiac.

China Ascendant by Sophie L. Rovner in _Chemical & Engineering News_, January 11, 2010, Volume 88, Number 2, pp. 35-37

No matter how you slice it, China is on a scientific roll.

This past year, China became the world leader in terms of the number of chemistry patents published on an annual basis, according to Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society. And growth in publication of scholarly papers by the country's researchers far outpaces that of other nations, reports Thomson Reuters, a news and information company based in New York City.

"If China's research growth remains this rapid and substantial, European and North American institutions will want to be part of it," says Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. "China no longer depends on links to traditional G-8 partners [Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.] to help its knowledge development. When Europe and the U.S. visit China they can only do so as equal partners."

More at http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/88/8802sci1.html

P.S. Sorry to not copy all of the story herein but I am unsure about the Copyright rights from this paper.

Regards,


----------



## tsokman

I always thought PRC was the real target of this war along with the Russian Federation...


----------



## Antoine

Is the tip of a big icebreg ?

China: act on scientific fraud by Ned Stafford/Hamburg, Germany, _Chemistry World_, 15 January 2010: 

The Chinese government is being called on to do more to ensure the scientific integrity of its researchers after UK-based journal Acta Crystallographica Section E  was forced to retract dozens of papers describing over 70 crystal structures found to have been fabricated by Chinese researchers.

In response to the discovery, the UK medical journal The Lancet  last week published a damning editorial under the headline 'Scientific fraud: action needed in China', explicitly calling for the country's government to act to prevent future cases of scientific fraud. 

More at:

http://rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/January/15011003.asp


----------



## CougarKing

Quite a story:

Associated Press link



> BEIJING – *When Li Shiming was stabbed through the heart by a hired assassin, few of his fellow villagers mourned the local Communist Party official many say made their lives hell by seizing land, extorting money and bullying people for years.
> 
> Instead, villagers in the northern town of Xiashuixi have made Li's teenage killer something of a local hero.* More than 20,000 people from the coal-mining area petitioned a court for a lenient sentence.
> 
> "I didn't feel surprised at all when I heard Li Shiming was killed, because people wanted to kill him a long time ago," said villager Xin Xiaomei, who says her husband was harassed for years by Li after the two men had a personal dispute. "I wanted to kill Li myself, but I was too weak."
> 
> The murder trial has again cast a harsh light on abuses of power by communist cadres and the frustration many ordinary Chinese feel with a one-party system that sometimes allows officials to run their districts like personal fiefdoms.
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Multilanguage promo video for Hong Kong Disneyland's opening back in 2008

The fact that this promo is in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog/Filipino and Thai shows that the theme park is trying to attract visitors from a bigger market. 
 :boring:


----------



## CougarKing

The Chinese government slams US Sec.of State Clinton for calling for greater internet freedom in China in the wake of the Google China controversy:



> BEIJING -- *China's Foreign Ministry sharply criticized Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's Thursday call for broad Internet freedom, saying that the United States should "cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China."
> 
> Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on the ministry's Web site that "the U.S. has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom. We are firmly against the words and deeds contrary to the facts and harmful to China-U.S. relations."
> 
> A Chinese newspaper also joined the criticism of Clinton, who gave her speech in the wake of Google's declaration that it would stop censoring results on its Chinese-based search engine even if that meant losing its license after a cyberattack on its computers. *
> 
> The Global Times said that the U.S. "campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its value on other cultures in the name of democracy."
> 
> Clinton said that freedom on the Internet is closely linked to other basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, worship and assembly. And she said the U.S. government would help fund and foster individuals and companies that help those in countries with restricted access find ways to circumvent obstacles.
> 
> .......







Washington Post link


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing beginning to become wary of its so-called ally?

Reuters link



> RUILI, China (Reuters) - The giant red poster staring over China's Wanding border crossing with Myanmar proclaims that their "brotherly feelings will last forever."
> 
> World  |  China
> 
> A few kilometers (miles) away, just outside the dusty frontier town of Ruli, a border village proudly tells its few visitors that Myanmar chickens cross over the rickety bamboo fence to lay their eggs in China.
> 
> *But behind the bonhomie and poems of friendship, China's relationship with its impoverished southeastern neighbor and erstwhile ally formerly known as Burma is deeply troubled.*
> 
> This was bought sharply into relief last August when Myanmar's military overwhelmed and disarmed the Kokang rebel group, triggering an exodus of more than 37,000 refugees into China, prompting an unusual outburst of anger from Beijing.
> 
> "I wouldn't characterize them as friends, in the way Britain and America or Australia and New Zealand could be regarded as friends. It's often a tense and difficult relationship," said Ian Storey, a fellow at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
> 
> *"It's basically a marriage of convenience. The Burmese rely on China for money and armaments, and China uses its position at the U.N. Security Council to protect Burma to some extent, in return for which China gets access to the country's natural resources, and it gets a voice in ASEAN," he added.*
> 
> In 1997, despite fervent U.S. and EU opposition, Myanmar joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, set up in 1967 as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in the region.
> 
> Logic may dictate that Myanmar and the generals who have run it for the last five decades or so would give unquestioning support to China.
> 
> *China backed Myanmar following the bloody suppression of pro-democracy protests in then-capital Yangon, once called Rangoon, in 1988, and has continued to stand by the junta and sell them arms in the face of sweeping international sanctions.*
> In 2006, during a visit to China's southwest Yunnan province which shares a long border with Myanmar, Myanmar's Commerce Minister Tin Naing Thein thanked Beijing for being a "good neighbor" and offering "vigorous support" after the 1988 events.
> 
> Yet profound suspicion of China in Myanmar, which dates back to before independence from the British in 1948, has not changed despite Beijing's overt support in the past 20 years or so.
> 
> *For years, China backed the Communist Party of Burma's armed struggle against the Myanmar government.
> 
> "Chinese soldiers wore Burmese Communist military uniform and they participated in actual battles against the Burmese armed forces," said Maung Zarni, a Myanmar expert at the London School of Economic's Center for the Study of Global Governance.*
> "The current leadership is made up of people who cut their teeth in the anti-communist/anti-Beijing operations in the 1950s and 1960s. It's difficult to conceive of change of heart on behalf of the Burmese generals toward Beijing."
> 
> FEAR OF UNREST
> 
> *China's fear is that the kind of unrest seen last August in Kokang will be repeated with any one of a number of different ethnic rebel militias, and spill into its territory again.
> 
> The threat is especially acute as the generals gear up for an election sometime this year -- a ballot rights groups call a sham -- by trying to get rebel groups along the border to cooperate, by force if necessary.*
> The problem for China is most acute in Yunnan, where the long and in places remote frontier is porous, and ethnic minorities on both sides share close blood ties.
> 
> Activists say that Myanmar's army is preparing for another offensive against these rebels, including the 30,000-strong ethnic Chinese United Wa State Army (UWSA), denounced as a narcotics cartel by the United States.
> 
> That worries China, not only because of the potential for more refugees, but because, simply stated, instability on the border is bad for business.
> 
> "Anything that causes the border to shut we of course do not welcome," said Chinese jade trader Lin Mingqi, sitting in his shop stuffed full of jade bracelets, Buddhas and charms made from Burmese jade and overlooking Ruli's border post.
> 
> "We're here to do business. We don't want to have to worry about politics."
> 
> *Already drugs flow easily from Myanmar into China, fuelling an AIDS epidemic in Yunnan driven by the sharing of dirty needles, as well as prostitution.
> 
> Yet Myanmar is very good at hedging its bets, playing off friend and foe alike to ensure the survival of the regime.*
> 
> Luo Shengrong and Wang Aiping, two academics at Yunnan University, wrote in last month's Chinese journal Contemporary International Relations that the Kokang attack was deliberately designed to tell Beijing not to take relations for granted.
> 
> "It was done to show the West that Myanmar's military government is adjusting its foreign policy, from just facing China to starting to have frequent contact with the United States, India and other large nations, to have a balanced foreign policy," they wrote.
> 
> "(The attack) also seemed to be showing that they were reducing their reliance on China."
> 
> They noted that the operation could be construed as Myanmar trying to curry favor with the United States, by showing Washington what a useful ally Myanmar could be against China, a country viewed with mistrust by many on Capitol Hill.
> 
> The academics noted that as a "reward" for the Kokang operation, Washington lifted a visa ban on Myanmar officials to let Prime Minister Thein Sein address the United Nations in New York.
> 
> While it is hard to pinpoint exactly what Myanmar's secretive government hoped to achieve more broadly with the Kokang move, the academics' comments are a reflection of Chinese suspicion as to what their supposed friend is up to.
> 
> The neighbors have significant business ties. Bilateral trade grew more than one-quarter in 2008 to about $2.63 billion.
> 
> In late October, China's CNPC started building a crude oil port in Myanmar, part of a pipeline project aimed at cutting out the long detour oil cargoes take through the congested and strategically vulnerable Malacca Strait.
> 
> RIVALRY
> 
> *For China, any discomfort at its friendship with Myanmar may also be outweighed by another strategic consideration -- India.
> 
> While relations may have improved considerably with New Delhi since the brief border war in 1962 that poisoned ties for decades, China is a strong supporter of India's traditional enemy Pakistan.
> 
> "From China's perspective, having a close relationship with Burma gives it an additional pressure point on India because it has good relations with Pakistan and increasingly with Nepal and also with Bangladesh," said Singapore-based Storey.
> 
> "If you were sitting in New Delhi, you may see that as a policy of encircling India with friends of China."
> 
> Myanmar's wily generals realize this, and see being friends with India as an import foil to China.*
> "If you look at the patterns of their foreign relations, they're constantly playing one off the other. If it's not China and the U.S., it's China and India. It's a very simple but effective strategy, to keep everyone coming after you," said David Mathieson, Myanmar researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
> 
> "You always see things balanced out. Say the Chinese come one month, and then the Indians comes the next, or a senior Burmese official goes to Delhi. It's just them being prudent, saying 'we don't have friends, we just have partners'."
> 
> (Editing by Megan Goldin)


----------



## CougarKing

A planned UAV bomber for the PLAAF:












link

Although this is just in the development stage, "Dark sword" is expected to be in service in 2018.


----------



## CougarKing

Would it be safe to say that it's doubtful the Chinese care what Clinton says? As said, they need Iran as part of supplying their oil needs.

Associated Press link



> PARIS – *U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned China on Friday it risks diplomatic isolation and disruption to its energy supplies unless it helps keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.s*
> 
> Speaking in Paris, Clinton said she and others who support additional sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program are lobbying China to back new U.N. penalties on the Iranian government.
> 
> *She said she understood China's reluctance to impose new penalties on Iran, its third-largest supplier of oil. But she stressed that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Persian Gulf and imperil oil shipments China gets from other Arab states in the region.
> 
> There is a new push for sanctions at the U.N. because of Iran's continued refusal to engage on the matter with the five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and Germany*.
> 
> (...)
> 
> China has traditionally resisted U.N. Security Council sanctions, saying they are counterproductive and harm efforts to persuade Iran to prove its claim that the nuclear program is peaceful.
> 
> Clinton met Thursday in London with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi to make the case to move ahead with sanctions at the United Nations. U.S. officials said Yang's response was noncommittal.
> 
> (...)
> 
> The United States risked tension with China on a different matter, with formal word Friday that an arms sale to Taiwan will go ahead. The deal would provide more than $6 billion in weapons sales to the self-governing island the Chinese claim as their own.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Would it be safe to say that it's doubtful the Chinese care what Clinton says? As said, they need Iran as part of supplying their oil needs.
> 
> Associated Press link



No, they 'care' about what she says.

But, Clinton has blundered. The Chinese expect demand to be treated for what they are: a great power with global interests and reach. One does not lecture or hector great powers, nor does one warn them of 'consequences' that one cannot impose. Clinton is, _de facto_, highlighting America's _*relative*_ decline in importance _vis a vis_ China.

Further: China wants more than needs Iran's oil. China also wants to discomfit the USA whenever and wherever it can and failing to go along with US/Western sanctions against Iran does that: it lowers the _value_ of US leadership and gives the Iranians a 'friend' they never had before - helping to offset the sting of US disapproval.

China is much more favoured (and feared) in the _Second and Third Worlds_ than is the USA; China is growing in stature and 'affection' in the _First World_, too. All this serves to lower America's *relative* power.

Foreign leaders should say nice, polite, diplomatic _nothings_ to and about China in public; hectoring should be reserved for private, off the record, discussions. _Face_* matters.

-----
* The concept of 'face' roughly translates as 'honour', 'good reputation' or 'respect'.

There are several types of 'face,' including:

1. Diu mianzi - is when one's actions or deeds have been exposed to people;
2. Shi mianzi 失面子 - is when one loses face;
3. Gei mianzii 給面子 - involves the giving of face to others through showing respect;
4.  Liu mianzi 留面子 - is developed by avoiding mistakes and showing wisdom in action; and
5. Jiang mianzi  - is when face is increased through others, i.e. someone complementing you to an associate.

It is critical one avoids losing face or causing the loss of face at all times.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is China’s counterpoint:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-raps-us-over-planned-arms-sales-to-taiwan/article1450430/


> China raps U.S. over planned arms sales to Taiwan
> *Beijing threatens sanctions against American defence companies and suspends military exchanges after Washington announces $6.4-billion weapons deal with Taiwan*
> 
> Cara Anna
> 
> Beijing — The Associated Press
> 
> Published on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010
> China suspended military exchanges with the United States and threatened sanctions against American defence companies Saturday, just hours after Washington announced $6.4-billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.
> 
> The development has further strained the complex relations between the two powers, which are increasingly linked by security and economic issues.
> 
> China's Defence Ministry said the sales to self-governing Taiwan, which the mainland claims as its own, cause “severe harm” to overall U.S.-China co-operation, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The Foreign Ministry threatened sanctions against U.S. companies involved in the arms sales.
> 
> A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, Susan Stevenson, had no comment on China's actions Saturday.
> 
> Taiwan is the most sensitive topic in U.S.-China relations, and the sales announced Friday could complicate co-operation between the two sides on issues ranging from Iran's nuclear program to the loosening of Internet controls, including a Google-China standoff over censorship.
> 
> China's Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei warned U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman that the sales of Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles and other weapons to Taiwan would “cause consequences that both sides are unwilling to see,” a ministry statement said Saturday.
> 
> The United States is Taiwan's most important ally and largest arms supplier, and it's bound by law to ensure the island is able to respond to Chinese threats.
> 
> China responds angrily to any proposed arms sale, however, and it also cut off military ties with the U.S. in 2008 after the former Bush administration announced a multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan.
> 
> Washington has tried to use military visits to build trust with Beijing and learn more about the aims of its massive military buildup.
> 
> Overall ties have been tense as President Barack Obama plans to meet with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, this year. It's not known whether the Taiwan arms sale will affect President Hu Jintao's expected visit to the U.S. this year.
> 
> Experts on China warned Beijing could take further steps to punish the United States to show its newfound power and confidence in world affairs.
> 
> Jin Canrong, a professor of international studies at China's Renmin University, said the sale would give Beijing a “fair and proper reason” to accelerate weapons testing. China test-fired rockets in recent weeks for an anti-missile defence system in what security experts said was a display of anger at the pending arms sale.
> 
> “The U.S. will pay a price for this. Starting now, China will make some substantial retaliation, such as reducing co-operation on the North Korea and Iran nuclear issues and anti-terrorism work,” Prof. Jin added.
> 
> The latest suspension of military ties should affect planned visits to China by U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. A visit to the U.S. by the Chinese military's chief of the general staff, General Chen Bingde, could also be called off.
> 
> The U.S. Congress has 30 days to comment on the newest arms sales before the plan goes forward. Lawmakers traditionally have supported such sales.
> 
> Though Taiwan's ties with China have warmed considerably since Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou took office 20 months ago, Beijing has threatened to invade if the island ever formalizes its de facto independence. China has more than 1,000 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan.
> 
> Mr. Obama's national security adviser, Jim Jones, said in a speech Friday that both Washington and Beijing do things “periodically that may not make everybody completely happy” but that the United States is “bent toward a new relationship with China as a rising power in the world.”
> 
> The arms package dodges a thorny issue: more advanced F-16 fighter jets that Taiwan covets are not included.
> 
> The Pentagon's decision not to include the fighters and a design plan for diesel submarines – two items Taiwan wants most – “shows that the Obama administration is deeply concerned about China's response,” said Wang Kao-cheng, a defence expert at Taipei's Tamkang University.
> 
> Taiwan's Mr. Ma told reporters Saturday that the deal should not anger the mainland because the weapons are defensive, not offensive.
> 
> “The weapons sale decision will ... allow us to have more confidence and sense of security in developing cross-Strait relations,” he said.



Although China does not really want the USA to stop arms transfers to Taiwan, everything there falls into Chinese hands sooner or later, this is, in some respects, China saying, “I see your shirty comment and raise you a threat and a diplomatic action. Your bet.”

My bet: If Obama does not cancel his meeting with the Dalai Lama then Hu Jintao will pay an extended visit to Canada and will snub Obama by not visiting the USA. Obama will be required to come to Beijing to meet Hu one-on-one.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> -----
> * The concept of 'face' roughly translates as 'honour', 'good reputation' or 'respect'.
> 
> There are several types of 'face,' including:
> 
> 1. Diu mianzi - is when one's actions or deeds have been exposed to people;



You forgot the characters for "Diu Mian Zi"  : 丟面子

From what I observed, more people say "Diu Mian Zi" for "lose face" instead of "Shi Mian Zi". "Diu" on its own also means something was lost or had fallen down- thus the common expression: "Diu le!" ( 丟了!) But then again this seems to be when one simultaneously loses face and is also exposed to one's superiors and peers.

Plus, another result of continued US arms sales to Taiwan:

*Take note that this is not the first time these military exchanges have been suspended. It happened after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and also after the 1999 Chinese Embassy bombing in Belgrade, but they were later resumed after a few years after each incident, IIRC.



> *China suspends military exchanges with US
> 
> BEIJING – China suspended military exchanges with the United States and threatened sanctions against American defense companies Saturday, just hours after Washington announced $6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.*
> The development has further strained the complex relations between the two powers, which are increasingly linked by security and economic issues.
> 
> China's Defense Ministry said the sales to self-governing Taiwan, which the mainland claims as its own, cause "severe harm" to overall U.S.-China cooperation, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The Foreign Ministry threatened sanctions against U.S. companies involved in the arms sales.
> 
> A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, Susan Stevenson, had no comment on China's actions Saturday.
> 
> Taiwan is the most sensitive topic in U.S.-China relations, and the sales announced Friday could complicate cooperation between the two sides on issues ranging from Iran's nuclear program to the loosening of Internet controls, including a Google-China standoff over censorship.
> 
> China's Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei warned U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman that the sales of Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles and other weapons to Taiwan would "cause consequences that both sides are unwilling to see," a ministry statement said Saturday.
> 
> The United States is Taiwan's most important ally and largest arms supplier, and it's bound by law to ensure the island is able to respond to Chinese threats.
> 
> China responds angrily to any proposed arms sale, however, and it also cut off military ties with the U.S. in 2008 after the former Bush administration announced a multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan.
> 
> Washington has tried to use military visits to build trust with Beijing and learn more about the aims of its massive military buildup.
> 
> Overall ties have been tense as President Barack Obama plans to meet with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, this year. It's not known whether the Taiwan arms sale will affect President Hu Jintao's expected visit to the U.S. this year.
> 
> Experts on China warned Beijing could take further steps to punish the United States to show its newfound power and confidence in world affairs.
> 
> Jin Canrong, a professor of international studies at China's Renmin University, said the sale would give Beijing a "fair and proper reason" to accelerate weapons testing. China test-fired rockets in recent weeks for an anti-missile defense system in what security experts said was a display of anger at the pending arms sale.
> 
> "The U.S. will pay a price for this. Starting now, China will make some substantial retaliation, such as reducing cooperation on the North Korea and Iran nuclear issues and anti-terrorism work," Jin added.
> 
> The latest suspension of military ties should affect planned visits to China by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. A visit to the U.S. by the Chinese military's chief of the general staff, Gen. Chen Bingde, could also be called off.
> 
> The U.S. Congress has 30 days to comment on the newest arms sales before the plan goes forward. Lawmakers traditionally have supported such sales.
> 
> Though Taiwan's ties with China have warmed considerably since Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou took office 20 months ago, Beijing has threatened to invade if the island ever formalizes its de facto independence. China has more than 1,000 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan.
> 
> Obama's national security adviser, Jim Jones, said in a speech Friday that both Washington and Beijing do things "periodically that may not make everybody completely happy" but that the United States is "bent toward a new relationship with China as a rising power in the world."
> 
> *The arms package dodges a thorny issue: more advanced F-16 fighter jets that Taiwan covets are not included.
> 
> The Pentagon's decision not to include the fighters and a design plan for diesel submarines — two items Taiwan wants most — "shows that the Obama administration is deeply concerned about China's response," said Wang Kao-cheng, a defense expert at Taipei's Tamkang University.
> 
> Taiwan's Ma told reporters Saturday that the deal should not anger the mainland because the weapons are defensive, not offensive.
> 
> "The weapons sale decision will ... allow us to have more confidence and sense of security in developing cross-Strait relations," he said. *
> 
> Associated Press link


----------



## a_majoor

A trial baloon of sorts. Obviously this is an upsetting idea for India:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/China-mulls-setting-up-military-base-in-Pakistan/articleshow/5510235.cms



> *China mulls setting up military base in Pakistan*
> Saibal Dasgupta, TNN, 28 January 2010, 07:58pm ISTT
> 
> BEIJING: China has signaled it wants to go the US way and set up military bases in overseas locations that would possibly include Pakistan. The obvious purpose would be to exert pressure on India as well as counter US influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. ( Watch Video )
> 
> "(So) it is baseless to say that we will not set up any military bases in future because we have never sent troops abroad," an article published on Thursday at a Chinese government website said. "It is our right," the article said and went on to suggest that it would be done in the neighborhood, possibly Pakistan.
> 
> "As for the military aspect, we should be able to conduct the retaliatory attack within the country or at the neighboring area of our potential enemies. We should also be able to put pressure on the potential enemies' overseas interests," it said.
> 
> A military base in Pakistan will also help China keep a check on Muslim Uighur separatists fighting for an independent nation in its western region of Xingjian, which borders the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Beijing recently signed an agreement with the local government of NWFP in order to keep a close watch on the movement of Uighur ultras.
> 
> "I have personally felt for sometime that China might one day build a military base in India's neighborhood. China built the Gadwar port in Pakistan and is now broadening the Karokoram highway. These facilities can always be put to military use when the need arises," Ramesh V Phadke, former Air Commodore and advisor to the Institute of Defense Studies told TNN.
> 
> Phadke said the article in very significant. "The purpose may be to see how the international community reacts to it," he said.
> 
> China, which has no military bases outside its territory, has often criticized the United States for operating such overseas bases. It has not just changed its standpoint but also wants to enter the lucrative protection business.
> 
> "With further development, China will be in great demand of the military protection," the article said. Pakistan, which buys 70% of its military hardware from China, is likely to be an eager buyer for such protection. Beijing may also be able to pressurize Islamabad to accept its diktat using the threat of withholding military supplies.
> 
> A Pakistani expert on China-Pakistan relationship has a different view on the subject. "The Americans had a base in the past and it caused a political stink. I don’t think it would be politically possible for the Pakistani government to openly allow China to set up a military base," he said while requesting anonymity. Pakistan might allow use of its military facilities without publicly announcing it, he said.
> 
> A Chinese military base can tackle several international relations issues, it said. One of them is "the relationship between the base troops and the countries neighboring to the host country." This is another indication that Beijing is considering Pakistan as a possible base. China’s argument is that a foreign base would actually help regional stability.
> 
> "If the base troops can maintain the regional stability, it will be probably welcomed by all the countries in the region," the article said. Beijing is conscious that the move might result in opposition from the US, UK and France which has overseas military bases.
> 
> “Thirdly, the relationship between the big countries in the world. The establishment of the troop bases is sensitive to those big countries which have already set up the bases abroad," the article said.


----------



## Edward Campbell

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> You forgot the characters for "Diu Mian Zi"  : 丟面子
> 
> From what I observed, more people say "Diu Mian Zi" for "lose face" instead of "Shi Mian Zi". "Diu" on its own also means something was lost or had fallen down- thus the common expression: "Diu le!" ( 丟了!) But then again this seems to be when one simultaneously loses face and is also exposed to one's superiors and peers.
> 
> Plus, another result of continued US arms sales to Taiwan:
> 
> *Take note that this is not the first time these military exchanges have been suspended. It happened after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and also after the 1999 Chinese Embassy bombing in Belgrade, but they were later resumed after a few years after each incident, IIRC.



Thanks for those explanations. I didn't 'forget' the characters: I didn't know how to write them. I also didn't understand the distinction between _diu mian zi_ a _she mian zi_.


----------



## CougarKing

Take note that in spite of this, China is still also a major polluter (all those coal plants) and has been so even before its rush to develop right after Deng Xiaoping opened up China from the 80s onward:



> *China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy*
> 
> New York Times link
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
> 
> China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
> ... These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.
> 
> ... Multinational corporations are responding to the rapid growth of China’s market by building big, state-of-the-art factories in China. Vestas of Denmark has just erected the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing complex here in northeastern China, and transferred the technology to build the latest electronic controls and generators.
> 
> ... China’s top leaders are intensely focused on energy policy: on Wednesday, the government announced the creation of a National Energy Commission composed of cabinet ministers as a “superministry” led by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao himself.
> 
> ... President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_ is another report on China’s current feud with the USA:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-warns-obama-not-to-meet-dalai-lama/article1452742/


> China warns Obama not to meet Dalai Lama
> *Beijing says a possible meeting with president during Dalai Lama's U.S. visit would further hurt relations*
> 
> Chris Buckley and Ben Blanchard
> 
> Beijing — Reuters
> 
> Published on Tuesday, Feb. 02, 2010
> 
> China said a possible meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama would further hurt Sino-U.S. relations, and vowed to go ahead with sanctions against U.S. companies selling arms to Taiwan.
> China has become increasingly assertive in opposing meetings between the Dalai Lama and foreign leaders, and a meeting between the exiled Tibetan leader and Mr. Obama would add to the litany of troubles between the world's biggest and third biggest economies.
> 
> Relations between the United States and China have soured over a range of issues from trade and currency policies to control of the Internet.
> 
> There has been widespread speculation that Mr. Obama will meet the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan Buddhist monk visits the United States in coming months. The White House has not publicly confirmed any such meeting.
> 
> Zhu Weiqun, a Vice-Minister of the United Front Work Department of China's ruling Communist Party, said his government would vehemently oppose any meeting between Mr. Obama and the Dalai Lama, who Beijing deems a dangerous separatist.
> 
> “If that comes to pass, then China will be strongly opposed as always,” Mr. Zhu, who's department steers Party policy over religious and ethnic issues, said of the possible meeting.
> 
> A meeting “would be totally at odds with international accepted practices and would seriously undermine the political basis of Sino-U.S. relations”, added Mr. Zhu.
> 
> “If the U.S. leader chooses this time to meet the Dalai Lama, that would damage trust and co-operation between our two countries, and how would that help the United States surmount the current economic crisis?” said Mr. Zhu.
> 
> China routinely opposes meetings between the Dalai Lama and foreign leaders, especially after violent unrest spread across Tibetan areas in March 2008. Previous U.S. presidents have met him.
> 
> The Dalai Lama has said he wants a high level of genuine autonomy for his homeland, which he fled in 1959. China says that his demands amount to pressing for outright independence.
> 
> China recently hosted talks with envoys of the Dalai Lama, but those talks achieved little.
> 
> Even a brief symbolic encounter between the U.S. leader and the Dalai Lama would stoke ire in Beijing, already angered by U.S. proposals last week to sell $6.4-billion of weapons to Taiwan, the disputed island that China treats as an illegitimate breakaway province.
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, on Tuesday repeated Beijing's threat to impose sanctions against U.S. companies which sell arms to Taiwan.
> 
> “The concerned U.S. companies have ignored China's opposition and insisted on selling weapons to Taiwan. China will impose corresponding sanctions on companies that sell weapons to Taiwan,” Mr. Ma said told a news conference.
> 
> “The United States actions will seriously hurt China's core interests and seriously hurt China-U.S. interests,” he said. “This will unavoidably affect China-U.S. co-operation on important international and regional issues.”
> 
> On Friday, the Obama administration said it would sell a package of $6.4-billion of missiles, helicopters and other military hardware to Taiwan.
> 
> China then said U.S. companies involved in selling the arms to Taiwan would face “corresponding sanctions”.
> 
> Companies that could be affected include Sikorsky Aircraft Corp, a unit of United Technologies Corp; Lockheed Martin Corp; Raytheon Co; and McDonnell Douglas, a unit of Boeing Co.
> 
> China says the dispute will damage co-operation with the United States over international issues. Washington has sought stronger Chinese support over several hot spots, chiefly the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.
> 
> The United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, recognizing “one China”. But it remains Taiwan's biggest backer and is obliged by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to help in the island's defence.



I said _”China’s *current* feud with the USA,”_ because it’s not the first and it will not be the last.

Mr. Zhu and his colleagues in the Government of China are being just a wee tad hypocritical, however; what ever happened to the doctrine of “non interference in the affairs of sovereign nations?” If China can criticize the US administration for something it _might_ do then why can it not criticize, say, North Korea, Iran or Sudan for things they _are_ doing?

But, the point, correctly noted by the authors, is that China is being increasingly assertive on a range of issues that it sees as touching on its own interests. The question is how will or, perhaps how can retaliate if Obama meets the Dalai Lama?


----------



## CougarKing

China's foreign policy at work in an unexpected place.

Reuters link



> By Olesya Dmitracova
> 
> BARONCEA, Moldova (Reuters) - Small, poor nations without significant mineral deposits are unlikely candidates for investment by the world's third-largest economy.
> 
> 
> *Yet China is taking a growing interest in Moldova, a former Soviet state that is poorer than many countries in Africa.
> 
> 
> Here, horse-drawn carts loaded with hay trundle on battered roads alongside top-end Mercedes and Lexus cars, and villagers get water from daily trips to wells.
> 
> 
> China last July signed a memorandum of understanding to lend Moldova $1 billion -- equal to a tenth of the east European country's gross domestic product, and easily the biggest loan it will have received from anywhere.*
> 
> 
> Asked why, experts have to stop and think.
> 
> 
> "It is true that Chinese exporters are looking to diversify their export base," said Duncan Innes-Ker, Beijing-based China analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
> 
> 
> "I would imagine that they would go to the much more traditional places because Moldova really doesn't have the infrastructure.
> 
> 
> "It doesn't have, well, very much of anything," he added with a laugh.
> 
> 
> *Economic crisis has pummeled Moldova, which depends on money earned abroad for about one-third of its gross domestic product -- the third-highest ratio globally. Moldovan workers sent home about a third less cash last year than in 2008, according to the National Bank.*
> 
> 
> People like Mariana Liulceac are feeling the impact: in better days, she got enough money from her husband's work as a builder in Russia to send her son to a $1,200-a-year boarding school for children with learning difficulties. For the past six months, her husband hasn't been paid. Her son quit school.
> 
> 
> Living in a two-room house with three children, no kitchen, bathroom or running water, Liulceac now depends on a British charity.
> 
> 
> So Moldova needs the money.
> 
> 
> How dim its prospects are is summarized in the CIA Handbook: "Likely to have a modest recovery in 2010, but remains vulnerable to political uncertainty, weak administrative capacity, vested bureaucratic interests, higher fuel prices, poor agricultural weather, and the skepticism of foreign investors as well as the presence of an illegal separatist regime in Moldova's Transdniestria region."
> 
> 
> SKILLS
> 
> 
> What, besides diversifying some of its $2.4 trillion foreign exchange reserves, is China after?
> 
> 
> Travel around Moldova and you see and hear some possible targets. Although the only official language is Moldovan, most people can speak Russian and thousands travel to the country's former Soviet master to work.
> 
> 
> Agriculture makes up a fifth of Moldova's economy, yet with the legacy of a Soviet-era education system, Moldova's literacy level is a fraction higher than in the United States.
> 
> The capital Chisinau is full of Internet cafes, and Moldova sits comfortably in the top half of 134 countries ranked for information technology potential by the World Economic Forum.
> 
> Funds from the promised loan, still being negotiated after it was agreed with a previous government, will go toward construction and infrastructure projects. Part is intended to create high-tech industries, Moldova's current government says.
> 
> INFLUENCE
> 
> More significant, though, is the influence the loan can buy.
> 
> *"China is exercising its new-found foreign policy," said IHS Global Insight analyst Lilit Gevorgyan. She added that it is eyeing "advantages of being a rising superpower."
> 
> While China is becoming increasingly assertive with the United States, in eastern Europe it is moving gently into poor spots, gradually building financial ties with Russia's neighbors.
> 
> Last June, it agreed to invest more than $1 billion to build power plants and roads in Tajikistan, an impoverished ex-Soviet state with limited natural resources. In March, China's central bank agreed a three-year currency swap worth 20 billion yuan ($2.93 billion) with another former Soviet republic, Belarus.
> 
> "By strengthening its hand in Russia's backyard, as it were, China gives itself more leverage in overall negotiations with Moscow," EIU's Innes-Ker said.
> 
> Gevorgyan agreed China wants to earn a "political dividend."*Moldova is in Russia's backyard in more than one sense: Russia has kept troops in the breakaway region of Transdniestria since 1992, and negotiations to withdraw them have so far failed. Transdniestria wants independence or integration with Russia, but Moldova is willing to give it only autonomy.
> 
> China will increasingly need leverage with Russia as its dealings with its oil- and gas-rich neighbor expand. Russia provides nearly 8 percent of China's total crude oil imports, and Gazprom is in advanced talks on a deal to supply gas.
> 
> "For decades Russia has had rocky relations with its powerful eastern neighbor, but now Russian strongman (Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin has decided to set these aside and embrace closer economic co-operation," IHS Global Insight analysts wrote in a note in October.
> 
> But, they added, there remains mistrust between the two.
> 
> EUROPE'S BACKYARD
> 
> For China, the loan is also not devoid of commercial potential, and it could be a way to establish a clientele in the European Union's backyard as well as Russia's.
> 
> "There are synergies between China's export interests and concerns and Moldova's specific manufacturing base," said Franklin Steves, political counselor at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
> 
> *China would likely focus on Moldova's agriculture, wine and textiles sectors, he said. Exporting goods to the European Union via Moldova could cut Chinese transport costs significantly.
> 
> "The textiles sector ... is an area in which Moldova remains competitive on European and regional markets and is, of course, a sector in which Chinese investors are major players on the global stage," said Steves.
> 
> Moldova's comparatively low wages have already attracted a number of European textile manufacturers, he noted. Some have relocated from places like Romania, where wages have increased.
> 
> Moldova's poverty, weak governance and the Transdniestria dispute -- which means the government doesn't control part of its territory -- make its chances of joining the European Union remote. It is a member of the EU's Eastern Partnership and was entitled to 210 million euros in EU assistance for 2007-2010, tied to projects to promote democracy and reform.*The Chinese loan would dwarf any money coming from Brussels, or from anywhere.
> 
> To put it into context: before he became prime minister in Moldova's current pro-Western coalition, Vlad Filat said it expected to receive $2 billion from the West -- $1.5 billion in loans from international financial institutions and $500 million in U.S. grants.
> 
> It has received about $93 million out of a promised $574 million from the IMF in a program agreed last month. Russia promised the former communist government a $500 million loan. Nothing has been disbursed so far.
> 
> Of course, no money has yet been received from China, either. But the promise is pretty powerful.
> 
> "In some ways, in a small country like Moldova you can get more bang for your buck," said Steves.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor; Editing by Sara Ledwith)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Foreign Affairs_ web site, is an interesting report on China’s most pressing problem:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65947/the-end-of-the-beijing-consensus?page=2


> The End of the Beijing Consensus
> *Can China's Model of Authoritarian Growth Survive?*
> 
> Yang Yao
> 
> February 2, 2010
> 
> *Summary*:
> 
> Beijing's ongoing efforts to promote growth are infringing on people's economic and political rights. In order to survive, the Chinese government will have to start allowing ordinary citizens to take part in the political process.
> 
> _YANG YAO is Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University._
> 
> Since China began undertaking economic reforms in 1978, its economy has grown at a rate of nearly ten percent a year, and its per-capita GDP is now twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. Many analysts attribute the country's economic success to its unconventional approach to economic policy -- a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. Time magazine's former foreign editor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, has even given it a name: the Beijing consensus.
> 
> But, in fact, over the last 30 years, the Chinese economy has moved unmistakably toward the market doctrines of neoclassical economics, with an emphasis on prudent fiscal policy, economic openness, privatization, market liberalization, and the protection of private property. Beijing has been extremely cautious in maintaining a balanced budget and keeping inflation down. Purely redistributive programs have been kept to a minimum, and central government transfers have been primarily limited to infrastructure spending. The overall tax burden (measured by the ratio of tax revenue to GDP) is in the range of 20 to 25 percent. The country is the world's second-largest recipient of foreign direct investment, and domestically, more than 80 percent of its state-owned enterprises have been released to private hands or transformed into publicly listed companies. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lacks legitimacy in the classic democratic sense, it has been forced to seek performance-based legitimacy instead, by continuously improving the living standards of Chinese citizens. So far, this strategy has succeeded, but there are signs that it will not last because of the growing income inequality and the internal and external imbalances it has created.
> 
> The CCP's free-market policies have, predictably, led to major income disparities in China. The overall Gini coefficient -- a measure of economic inequality in which zero equals perfect equality and one absolute inequality -- reached 0.47 in 2008, the same level as in the United States. More disturbing, Chinese city dwellers are now earning three and a half times as much as their fellow citizens in the countryside, the highest urban-rural income gap in the world.
> 
> How, then, has the Chinese government been able to adopt the principles of neoclassical economics while still claiming Marxism as its ideological anchor? The answer is that China has for three decades been ruled by a disinterested government -- a detached, unbiased regime that takes a neutral stance when conflicts of interest arise among different social and political groups. This does not mean that Beijing has been devoid of self-interest. On the contrary, the state is often predatory toward citizens, but its predation is "identity-blind" in the sense that Beijing does not generally care about the social and political status of its chosen prey -- unlike many governments elsewhere that act to protect and enrich specific social or political groups. As a consequence, the Chinese government has been more likely than other authoritarian regimes to adopt growth-enhancing policies.
> 
> For the last 30 years, the CCP has intentionally adopted policies favoring specific groups or regions to promote reform and economic growth. It has helped that the disinterested CCP government was not permanently beholden to certain groups or regions. China's integration into the world economy is a case in point. At the end of the 1970s, the United States was eager to bring China into its camp as a buffer against Soviet hegemony, and China quickly grasped the opportunity. Yet that early adoption of an "open-door" policy gave rise to domestic resistance: special economic zones, such as Shenzhen, enjoyed an abundance of preferential treatments that other parts of the country envied. Moreover, the CCP's export-led growth model required that Beijing embrace an unbalanced development strategy that encouraged rapid growth on the country's east coast while neglecting the interior; today, nearly 90 percent of China's exports still come from the nine coastal provinces.
> 
> China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 was also a calculated move. Before accession, it was widely believed that China would have to endure painful structural adjustment policies in many sectors in order to join the WTO. Even so, the central government actually accelerated negotiations with the organization's members. Despite the burdens it placed on the agriculture and retailing sectors, accession boosted China's exports, proving wrong those who worried about its effects. Between 2002 and 2007, Chinese exports grew by an annual rate of 29 percent, double the average rate during the 1990s.
> 
> China's astronomic growth has left it in a precarious situation, however. Other developing countries have suffered from the so-called middle-income trap -- a situation that often arises when a country's per-capita GDP reaches the range of $3,000 to $8,000, the economy stops growing, income inequality increases, and social conflicts erupt. China has entered this range, and the warning signs of a trap loom large.
> 
> In the last several years, government involvement in the economy has increased -- most notably with the current four-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan. Government investment helped China reach a GDP growth rate of nearly nine percent in 2009, which many applaud; but in the long run, it could suffocate the Chinese economy by reducing efficiency and crowding out more vibrant private investment.
> 
> The economy currently depends heavily on external demand, creating friction among major trading partners. Savings account for 52 percent of GDP, and consumption has dropped to a historic low. Whereas governments in most advanced democracies spend less than eight percent of government revenue on capital investment, this figure is close to 50 percent in China. And residential income as a share of national income is declining, making the average citizen feel poorer while the economy expands.
> 
> As the Chinese people demand more than economic gains as their income increases, it will become increasingly difficult for the CCP to contain or discourage social discontent by administering the medicine of economic growth alone.
> 
> Despite its absolute power and recent track record of delivering economic growth, the CCP has still periodically faced resistance from citizens. The Tiananmen incident of April 5, 1976, the first spontaneous democratic movement in PRC history, the June 4 movement of 1989, and numerous subsequent protests proved that the Chinese people are quite willing to stage organized resistance when their needs are not met by the state. International monitoring of China's domestic affairs has also played an important role; now that it has emerged as a major global power, China is suddenly concerned about its legitimacy on the international stage.
> 
> The Chinese government generally tries to manage such popular discontent by providing various "pain relievers," including programs that quickly address early signs of unrest in the population, such as reemployment centers for unemployed workers, migration programs aimed at lowering regional disparities, and the recent "new countryside movement" to improve infrastructure, health care, and education in rural areas.
> 
> Those measures, however, may be too weak to discourage the emergence of powerful interest groups seeking to influence the government. Although private businesses have long recognized the importance of cultivating the government for larger profits, they are not alone. The government itself, its cronies, and state-controlled enterprises are quickly forming strong and exclusive interest groups. In a sense, local governments in China behave like corporations: unlike in advanced democracies, where one of the key mandates of the government is to redistribute income to improve the average citizen's welfare, local governments in China simply pursue economic gain.
> 
> More important, Beijing's ongoing efforts to promote GDP growth will inevitably result in infringements on people's economic and political rights. For example, arbitrary land acquisitions are still prevalent in some cities, the government closely monitors the Internet, labor unions are suppressed, and workers have to endure long hours and unsafe conditions. Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance. Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.
> 
> The reforms carried out over the last 30 years have mostly been responses to imminent crises. Popular resistance and economic imbalances are now moving China toward another major crisis. Strong and privileged interest groups and commercialized local governments are blocking equal distribution of the benefits of economic growth throughout society, thereby rendering futile the CCP's strategy of trading economic growth for people's consent to its absolute rule.
> 
> An open and inclusive political process has generally checked the power of interest groups in advanced democracies such as the United States. Indeed, this is precisely the mandate of a disinterested government -- to balance the demands of different social groups. A more open Chinese government could still remain disinterested if the right democratic institutions were put in place to keep the most powerful groups at bay. But ultimately, there is no alternative to greater democratization if the CCP wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social stability.



The author’s conclusion, _”there is no alternative to greater democratization if the CCP wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social stability”_ is quite correct. The problem is that as the middle class grows it gets past the first tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and it begins to become concerned with longer term socio-economic issues and it wants a _voice_ in the decision making process. Social stability, what I usually refer to as social harmony, is much more important in a deeply _conservative_* society like China than is the case in the _liberal_ (individualistic) West and those _conservative_ values can be used, for a while, to delay democratization but , eventually, self interest and family interest will win out.


----------
*  _Conservative_ in the correct sense of the word, not the way the word is commonly used, especially in the United States, to describe social, political and _ethical_ values that are anathema to real conservatives.


----------



## CougarKing

Keyword regarding these polls: State-run newspaper.  :

Remember that when there were public demonstrations against the US bombing of the PRC embassy of Belgrade in 1999, the "protestors" were bused to the protest venues outside the US embassy. Xinhua probably footed the bill for those buses.



> *MORE than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new “cold war”.*
> 
> The finding came after battles over Taiwan, Tibet, trade, climate change, internet freedom and human rights which have poisoned relations in the three months since President Barack Obama made a fruitless visit to Beijing.
> 
> According to diplomatic sources, a rancorous postmortem examination is under way inside the US government, led by officials who think the president was badly advised and was made to appear weak.
> 
> In China’s eyes, the American response — which includes a pledge by Obama to get tougher on trade — is a reaction against its rising power.
> 
> *Now almost 55% of those questioned for Global Times, a state-run newspaper, agree that “a cold war will break out between the US and China”.
> 
> An independent survey of Chinese-language media for The Sunday Times has found army and navy officers predicting a military showdown and political leaders calling for China to sell more arms to America’s foes. The trigger for their fury was Obama’s decision to sell $6.4 billion (£4 billion) worth of weapons to Taiwan, the thriving democratic island that has ruled itself since 1949.*
> 
> “We should retaliate with an eye for an eye and sell arms to Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela,” declared *Liu Menxiong, a member of the Chinese people’s political consultative conference.
> 
> He added: “We have nothing to be afraid of. The North Koreans have stood up to America and has anything happened to them? No. Iran stands up to America and does disaster befall it? No.”*Officially, China has reacted by threatening sanctions against American companies selling arms to Taiwan and cancelling military visits.
> 
> But Chinese analysts think the leadership, riding a wave of patriotism as the year of the tiger dawns, may go further.
> 
> *“This time China must punish the US,” said Major-General Yang Yi, a naval officer. “We must make them hurt.” A major-general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Yuan, told a television audience that more missiles would be deployed against Taiwan. And a PLA strategist, Colonel Meng Xianging, said China would “qualitatively upgrade” its military over the next 10 years to force a showdown “when we’re strong enough for a hand-to-hand fight with the US”.*
> 
> An internal publication at the elite Qinghua University last week predicted the strains would get worse because “core interests” were at risk. It said battles over exports, technology transfer, copyright piracy and the value of China’s currency, the yuan, would be fierce.
> 
> .......
> 
> In Beijing, some diplomats even claim to detect a condescending attitude towards Obama, noting that Yang Jiechi, the foreign minister, prides himself on knowing the Bush dynasty and others among America’s traditional white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.
> 
> But there are a few voices urging caution on Chinese public opinion. “China will look unreal if it behaves aggressively and competes for global leadership,” wrote Wang Yusheng, a retired diplomat, in the China Daily.
> 
> He warned that China was not as rich or as powerful as America or Japan and therefore such a move could be “hazardous”.



Times online


----------



## a_majoor

The long view. China, Obama...this too, shall pass:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/001408-americas-dubious-decline



> *America on the Rise*
> by Joel Kotkin 02/09/2010
> AmericaDecline.jpg
> 
> For much of the past decade, "declinism" – the notion that America is heading toward a deadly denouement – has largely been a philosophy of the left. But more recently, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's election, conservatives have begun joining the chorus, albeit singing a somewhat different variation on the same tune.
> 
> In a recent column in The Washington Post George Will illustrates this conservative change of heart. Looking over the next few decades Will sees an aging, obsolescent America in retreat to a young and aggressive China. "America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable," he suggests, pointing to predictions by Nobel Prize economist Robert Fogel that China's economy will be three times larger than that of the U.S. by 2040.
> 
> Will may be one of America's great columnists, but he – like his equally distinguished liberal counterpart Thomas Friedman – may be falling prey to a current fashion for sinophilia. It is a sign of the times that conservatives as well as liberals often underestimate the Middle Kingdom's problems – in addition to America's relative strengths.
> 
> Rarely mentioned in such analyses is China's own aging problem. The population of the People's Republic will be considerably older than the U.S.' by 2050. It also has far more boys than girls – a rather insidious problem. Among the younger generation there are already an estimated 24 million more men of marrying age than women. This is not going to end well – except perhaps for investors in prostitution and pornography.
> 
> In the longer term demographic trends actually place the U.S. in a relatively strong position. By the end of the first half of the 21st century, the American population aged 15 to 64 – essentially your economically active cohort – are projected to grow by 42%; China's will shrink by 10%. Comparisons with other competitors are even larger, with the E.U. shrinking by 25%, Korea by 30% and Japan by a remarkable 44%.
> 
> The Japanese experience best illustrates how wrong punditry can be. Back in the 1970s and 1980s it was commonplace for pundits – particularly on the left – to predict Japan's ascendance into world leadership. At the time distinguished commentators like George Lodge, Lester Thurow and Robert Reich all pointed to Europe and Japan as the nations slated to beat the U.S. on the economic battlefield. "Japan is replacing America as the world's strongest economic power," one prominent scholar told a Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1986. "It is in everyone's interest that the transition goes smoothly."
> 
> This was not unusual or even shocking at the time. It followed a grand tradition of declinism that over the past 70 years has declared America ill-suited to compete with everyone from fascist Germany and Italy to the Soviet Union. By the mid-1950s a majority were convinced that we were losing the Cold War. In the 1980s Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith thought the Soviet model successful enough that the two systems would eventually "converge."
> 
> We all know how that convergence worked out. Even the Chinese abandoned the Stalinist economic model so admired by many American intellectuals once Mao was safely a-moldering in his grave. Outside of the European and American academe, the only strong advocates of state socialism can be found in such economic basket cases as Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela.
> 
> So given this history, why the current rise in declinism? Certainly it's a view many in the wider public share. Most Americans fear their children will not be able to live as well as they have. A plurality think China will be the world's most powerful country in 20 years.
> 
> To be sure there are some good reasons for pessimism. The huge deficits, high unemployment, our leakage of industry not only to China but other developing countries are all worrisome trends. Yet if the negative case is easier to make, it does not stand historical scrutiny.
> 
> Let's just go back to what we learned during the "Japan is taking over the world" phase during the 1970s and 1980s. At the time Dai Nippon's rapid economic expansion was considered inexorable. Yet history is not a straight-line project. Most countries go through phases of expansion and decline. The factors driving success often include a well-conceived economic strategy, an expanding workforce and a sense of national élan.
> 
> In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s Japan – like China today – possessed all those things. Its bureaucratic state had targeted key industries like automobiles and electronics, and its large, well-educated baby boom population was hitting the workforce. There was an unmistakable sense of pride in the country's rapid achievements after the devastation of the Second World War.
> 
> Yet even then, as the Economist's Bill Emmot noted in his 1989 book The Sun Also Sets, things were not so pretty once you looked a little closer. In the mid-1980s I traveled extensively in Japan and, with the help of a young Japanese-American scholar, Yoriko Kishimoto, interviewed demographers and economists who predicted Japan's eventual decline.
> 
> By then, the rapid drop in Japan's birthrate and its rapid aging was already clearly predictable. But even more persuasive were hours spent with the new generation of Japanese – the equivalent of America's Xers – who seemed alienated from the self-abnegating, work-obsessed culture of their parents. By the late 1980s it was clear that the shinjinrui ("the new race") seemed more interested in design, culture and just having fun than their forebears. They seemed destined not to become another generation of economic samurai.
> 
> At the time though, the very strategies so critical to Japan's growth – particularly a focus on high-end manufacturing – proved highly susceptible to competitors from lower-cost countries: first Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, and later China, Vietnam and more recently India. Like America and Britain before it, Japan exported its unique genius abroad. Now many companies, including American ones, have narrowed the technological gap with Japan.
> 
> Today Japan, like the E.U., lacks the youthful population needed to recover its mojo. It likely will emerge as a kind of mega-Switzerland, Sweden or Denmark – renowned for its safety and precision. Its workforce will have to be ultra-productive to finance the robots it will need to care for its vast elderly population.
> 
> Will China follow a similar trajectory in the next few decades? Countries infrequently follow precisely the same script as another. Japan was always hemmed in by its position as a small island country with very minimal resources. Its demographic crisis will make things worse. In contrast, China, for the next few decades, certainly won't suffer a shortage of economically productive workers
> 
> But it could face greater problems. The kind of low-wage manufacturing strategy that has generated China's success – as occurred with Japan – is already leading to a backlash across much of the world. China's very girth projects a more terrifying prospect than little Japan. At some point China will either have to locate much of its industrial base closer to its customers, as Japan has done, or lose its markets.
> 
> More important still are massive internal problems. Japan, for all its many imperfections, was and remains a stable, functioning democracy, open to the free flow of information. China is a fundamentally unstable autocracy, led from above, and one that seeks to control information – as evidenced in its conflict with Google – in an age where the free flow of information constitutes an essential part of economic progress.
> 
> China's social problems will be further exacerbated by a huge, largely ill-educated restive peasant class still living in poverty. Of course America too has many problems – with stunted upward mobility, the skill levels of its workforce, its fiscal situation. But the U.S., as the Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya once noted, possesses sokojikara, a self-renewing capacity unmatched by any country.
> 
> As we enter the next few decades of the new millennium, I would bet on a more youthful, still resource-rich and democratic America to maintain its preeminence even in a world where economic power continues to shift from its historic home in Europe to Asia.
> 
> This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.
> 
> Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.


----------



## CougarKing

More on China's continued crackdown on political dissidents:

Time link



> When a string of Chinese dissidents were arrested or detained last year, the cause was often attributed to the large number of sensitive anniversaries that fell on the 2009 calendar. The first anniversary of the riots in Tibet, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic all contributed to a defensive official outlook and a cold climate for civil rights in China. But that bleak trend also offered the hope that in the coming year, with a calendar relatively free of delicate periods, China's grip on free speech and dissent might relax.
> 
> 
> So far that hasn't happened. *The Chinese government has cracked down on activists just as aggressively during the first few weeks of 2010 as it did last year. In the past week, a court in Sichuan sentenced an activist investigating the deaths of children in schools that collapsed in the 2008 earthquake, a court in Beijing confirmed a lengthy jail term for the author of a 2008 pro-democracy manifesto, and the family of a trailblazing defense lawyer marked the one-year anniversary of his disappearance, which was presumably at the hands of state security officers.* "This series of repression against dissent and activism ... I don't know if it's coincidence or reflective of a deeper meaning," says Joshua Rosenzweig, a Hong Kong–based researcher for the Dui Hua Foundation, a human-rights group. "Certainly looking at it from the outside, at case after case of heavy sentences being handed down for things that should be constitutionally protected rights, it's hard to come away from this and not see a hardening line."
> 
> 
> On Tuesday a Sichuan court sentenced *Tan Zuoren*, a 55-year-old environmentalist and literary editor, to a five-year jail term for subversion in connection with his writings on the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Tan was also active in documenting the lives of the schoolchildren who died in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which many parents blamed on school buildings that were built shoddily because of official corruption. While the subversion charges against Tan included his earthquake activism, he was convicted only for his commentary on the Tiananmen crackdown. Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer for Tan, says the issue of substandard schools was too sensitive for the Chengdu court. "A lot of government officials won't be safe if people start to ask questions about this, so the court only mentioned the least harmful reason in the ruling," says Pu. "They want to divert attention." Tan has appealed his conviction, writing simply, "I'm innocent; I object; I refuse to accept the verdict; I appeal."
> 
> 
> Tan's conviction preceded the ruling on Thursday by a Beijing court confirming the Christmas Day 2009 sentencing of *Liu Xiaobo*, a literary critic who was a chief author of Charter 08, a document that called for the Chinese government to uphold many of the values enshrined in the country's constitution. Like Tan, Liu was convicted of "inciting subversion of state power." Human-rights activists say Liu's 11-year sentence is exceptionally long, and the verdict has prompted an international outcry. U.S. Ambassador to China Jon M. Huntsman Jr. called on the government to release the 54-year-old scholar. "Mr. Liu has peacefully worked for the establishment of political openness and accountability in China," Huntsman said in a written statement. "Persecution of individuals for the peaceful expression of political views is inconsistent with internationally recognized norms of human rights." The European Union's delegation in China said Liu's conviction was "entirely incompatible with his right to freedom of expression" - one of the rights officially promised in the framework of the People's Republic.
> 
> 
> Perhaps the most disturbing recent case has been that of *Gao Zhisheng*, who hasn't been seen or heard from since he was detained by police in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2009. An uncompromising, self-taught lawyer, Gao once handled cases few others would touch - involving dispossessed villagers, members of underground Christian house churches and exploited factory workers. In 2001 the Ministry of Justice named him one of the country's top 10 lawyers. But his work on sensitive cases, most notably representing members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, led to his being seen as an enemy of the Chinese state. He was convicted of subversion in 2006 and given a three-year suspended sentence. In 2007 state security officers detained Gao after he wrote letters to the European Parliament and U.S. Congress complaining about human rights in China. During his 10-day detention he was subjected to grotesque and brutal torture, according to his written account. Gao said he was warned he would be killed if he ever spoke about the savagery he endured.
> 
> 
> In January 2009, after years of monitoring and harassment led Gao's teenage daughter to attempt suicide, his family decided to flee. Gao's wife Geng He took their daughter and infant son and slipped away from their official minders in Beijing. They traveled south, aided by a network of Falun Gong practitioners, and eventually crossed into Burma and then Thailand. Two months later they reached the U.S., where they were given political asylum. On the first anniversary of Gao's disappearance, Geng demanded that the Chinese government produce her husband. So far her cries have been met with disdain. A police officer told Gao's brother in January that he had gone missing while out on a walk, an improbable claim given the level of monitoring he had been subject to in recent years. On Jan. 21 a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Gao was "where he should be."
> 
> 
> *Gao's supporters suspect he is being held by state security officers and fear that he might be so badly abused that the authorities are afraid to have him be seen in public.* "We are determined not to rest until we know where Gao is and whether he's dead or alive," says Bob Fu, a U.S.-based Chinese Christian activist who helped Gao's family escape. *"He's a symbol of China's conscience, of the weak and vulnerable. The whole world should hold the Chinese government accountable for his disappearance."*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Does this mean our, Canadian, warship will report to a Chinese commodore?


_____________________________

First posted to http://jdw.janes.com - 05 February 2010 
*China enhances role in anti-piracy effort off Somali coast*

China is to become the next overall co-ordinator of the international anti-piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden, sending warships to permanently patrol a sector of the transit corridor off the Somali coast. The decision was taken in late January following a meeting of the Shared Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE) grouping in Bahrain and represents an expansion of the global effort to prevent Somalia-based pirates from interrupting the annual passage of some 25,000 ships through its territorial waters.
_____________________________


Is that (SHADE) the group in which we participate?


----------



## CougarKing

Discussed in the following piece is the view of how Taiwan should conduct itself toward the mainland as well as the US: Finlandization (fen lan hua: 芬蘭話). This view calls for Taiwan taking a "neutral stance" in the growing US-China rivalry, but also drifts closer to Beijing's orbit, but not enough to make it a "satellite" nation as what happened when Finland took a "neutral stance" in the rivalry between the East Bloc and the West during the Cold War.

Professor Bruce Gilley, the writer of this piece, has inferred that this view has apparently been adopted by both sides of the Taiwan Strait with the current "Second cross-strait detente" he mentions in the full article.

Foreign Affairs article link



> *Not So Dire Straits*
> 
> How the Finlandization of Taiwan Benefits U.S. Security
> 
> January/February 2010
> Bruce Gilley
> BRUCE GILLEY is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Portland State University's Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and the author of The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy.
> 
> *Since 2005, Taiwan and China have been moving into a closer economic and political embrace -- a process that accelerated with the election of the pro-détente politician Ma Ying-jeou as Taiwan's president in 2008. This strengthening of relations presents the United States with its greatest challenge in the Taiwan Strait since 1979, when Washington severed ties with Taipei and established diplomatic relations with Beijing.
> 
> In many ways, the current thaw serves Taipei's interests, but it also allows Beijing to assert increasing influence over Taiwan. *  As a consensus emerges in Taiwan on establishing closer relations with China, the thaw is calling into question the United States' deeply ambiguous policy, which is supposed to serve both Taiwan's interests (by allowing it to retain its autonomy) and the United States' own (by guarding against an expansionist China). Washington now faces a stark choice: continue pursuing a militarized realist approach -- using Taiwan to balance the power of a rising China -- or follow an alternative liberal logic that seeks to promote long-term peace through closer economic, social, and political ties between Taiwan and China.
> 
> A TALE OF TWO DÉTENTES
> 
> After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, Taiwan and mainland China became separate political entities, led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-shek's defeated nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), and Mao Zedong's victorious Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For nearly three decades, Chiang and Mao harbored rival claims to the whole territory of China. Gradually, most of the international community came to accept Beijing's claims to territorial sovereignty over Taiwan and a special role in its foreign relations. By 1972, when U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China, 69 percent of the United Nations' member states had already severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of relations with China.
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s _Globe and Mail_, is a short essay by Prof. Daniel Bell on yet another rise of Confucianism in China:

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-chinese-confucian-party/article1475141/


> The Chinese Confucian Party?
> *Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese people and the old master is an obvious replacement. But take heed, outsiders – Confucianism may also offer an alternative to Western political ways*
> 
> Daniel Bell
> 
> Beijing
> 
> Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010
> 
> Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius's grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism.
> 
> How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China's political future?Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution.
> 
> But perhaps it's just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote forConfucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history. In the Cultural Revolution, “Confucius” was often just a label used to attack political enemies. Today, Confucianism serves a more legitimate political function; it can help to provide a new moral foundation for political rule in China. Communism has lost the capacity to inspire the Chinese, and there is growing recognition that its replacement needs to be grounded at least partly in China's own traditions. As the dominant political tradition in China, Confucianism is the obvious alternative.
> 
> The party has yet to relabel itself the Chinese Confucian Party, but it has moved closer to an official embrace of Confucianism. The 2008 Olympics highlighted Confucian themes, quoting The Analects of Confucius at the opening ceremonies, and playing down any references to China's experiment with communism. Cadres at the newly built Communist Party school in Shanghai proudly tell visitors that the main building is modelled on a Confucian scholar's desk. Abroad, the government has been symbolically promoting Confucianism via branches of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese-language and cultural centre similar to the Alliance Française.
> 
> Of course, there is resistance as well. Elderly cadres, still influenced by Maoist antipathy to tradition, condemn efforts to promote ideologies outside a rigid Marxist framework. But the younger cadres in their 40s and 50s tend to support such efforts, and time is on their side. It's easy to forget that the 76-million-strong Chinese Communist Party is a large and diverse organization. The party itself is becoming more meritocratic – it now encourages high-performing students to join – and the increased emphasis on educated cadres is likely to generate more sympathy for Confucian values.
> 
> But the revival of Confucianism is not just government-sponsored. On the contrary, the government is also reacting to developments outside its control. There has been a resurgence of interest in Confucianism among academics and in the Chinese equivalent of civil society. The renewed interest is driven partly by normative concerns. Thousands of educational experiments around the country promote the teaching of Confucian classics to young children; the assumption is that better training in the humanities improves the virtue of the learner. More controversially – because it's still too sensitive to publicly discuss such questions in mainland China – Confucian thinkers put forward proposals for constitutional reform aiming to humanize China's political system.
> 
> *AN UPHILL STRUGGLE*
> 
> Yet, the problem is not just the Chinese government. It can be an uphill struggle to convince people in Western countries that Confucianism can offer a progressive and humane path to political reform in China. Why does the revival of Confucianism so often worry Westerners? One reason may be a form of self-love. For most of the 20th century, Chinese liberals and Marxists engaged in a totalizing critique of their own heritage and looked to the West for inspiration. It may have been flattering for Westerners – look, they want to be just like us! – but there is less sympathy now that Chinese are taking pride in their own traditions for thinking about social and political reform. But more understanding and a bit of open-mindedness can take care of that problem.
> 
> Another reason may be that the revival of Confucianism is thought to be associated with the revival of Islamic “fundamentalism” and its anti-Western tendencies. Perhaps the revival of closed-minded and intolerant Christian “fundamentalism” also comes to mind. But the revival of Confucianism in China is not so opposed to liberal social ways (other than extreme individualistic lifestyles, in which the good life is sought mainly outside social relationships). What it does propose is an alternative to Western political ways, and that may be the main worry. But this worry stems from an honest mistake: the assumption that less support for Western-style democracy means increased support for authoritarianism. In China, packaging the debate in terms of “democracy” versus “authoritarianism” crowds out possibilities that appeal to Confucian political reformers.
> 
> Confucian reformers generally favour more freedom of speech in China. What they question is democracy in the sense of Western-style competitive elections as the mechanism for choosing the country's most powerful rulers. One clear problem with “one person, one vote” is that equality ends at the boundaries of the political community; those outside are neglected. The national focus of the democratically elected political leaders is assumed; they are meant to serve only the community of voters. Even democracies that work well tend to focus on the interests of citizens and neglect the interests of foreigners. But political leaders, especially leaders of big countries such as China, make decisions that affect the rest of the world (consider global warming), and so they need to consider the interests of the rest of the world.
> 
> Hence, reformist Confucians put forward political ideals that are meant to work better than Western-style democracy in terms of securing the interests of all those affected by the policies of the government, including future generations and foreigners. Their ideal is not a world where everybody is treated as an equal but one where the interests of non-voters would be taken more seriously than in most nation-centred democracies. And the key value for realizing global political ideals is meritocracy, meaning equality of opportunity in education and government, with positions of leadership being distributed to the most virtuous and qualified members of the community. The idea is that everyone has the potential to become morally exemplary, but, in real life, the capacity to make competent and morally justifiable political judgments varies among people, and an important task of the political system is to identify those with above-average ability.
> 
> *CONFUCIAN VALUES IN PRACTICE*
> 
> What might such values mean in practice? In the past decade, Confucian intellectuals have put forward political proposals that aim to combine “Western” ideas of democracy with “Confucian” ideas of meritocracy. Rather than subordinating Confucian values and institutions to democracy as an a priori dictum, they contain a division of labour, with democracy having priority in some areas and meritocracy in others. If it's about land disputes in rural China, farmers should have a greater say. If it's about pay and safety disputes, workers should have a greater say. In practice, it means more freedom of speech and association and more representation for workers and farmers in some sort of democratic house.
> 
> But what about matters such as foreign policy and environmental protection? What the government does in such areas affects the interests of non-voters, and they need some form of representation as well. Hence, Confucian thinkers put forward proposals for a meritocratic house of government, with deputies selected by such mechanisms as free and fair competitive examinations, that would have the task of representing the interests of non-voters typically neglected by democratically selected decision-makers.
> 
> One obvious objection to examinations is that they cannot test for the kinds of virtues that concerned Confucius – flexibility, humility, compassion and public-spiritedness – and that, ideally, would also characterize political decision-makers in the modern world. It's true that examinations won't test perfectly for those virtues, but the question is whether deputies chosen by such examinations are more likely to be far-sighted than those chosen by elections.
> 
> There are reasons to believe so. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Bryan Caplan's book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies shows that voters are often irrational, and he suggests tests of voter competence as a remedy. So examinations would test for basic economic policy (and knowledge of international relations), but they would also cover knowledge of the Confucian classics, testing for memorization as well as interpretation. The leading Confucian political thinker, Jiang Qing, argues that examinations could set a framework and moral vocabulary for subsequent political actions, and successful candidates would also need to be evaluated in terms of how they perform in practice.
> 
> Far-fetched? It's no less so than scenarios that envision a transition to Western-style liberal democracy (because both scenarios assume a more open society). And it answers the key worry about the transition to democracy: that it translates into short-term, unduly nationalistic policy-making. It's also a matter of what standards we should use to evaluate China's political progress. Politically speaking, most people think China should look more like Canada. But one day, perhaps, we will hope that Canada looks more like China.
> 
> _Daniel A. Bell is professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the author of_ China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.




Prof. Bell is, intentionally, oversimplifying in order to meet the _Good Grey Globe_’s space limitations and to make any discussion of Confucianism accessible to Westerners. One of the things he fails to discuss is that Confucian _ideas_ and _ideals_ are deeply rooted in Chinese *culture* and, indeed, in many cases, can be seen as springing from already (2.500 years ago) deeply entrenched Chinese cultural values. Another thing he ignores is that Confucianism has changed over the millennia – this, 20th century _revision_ – follows from the _Neo-Confucian_ movement of the _Song Dynasty_ (about 1,000 years ago) which added, considerably, to the philosophical base by adding many new commentaries to the _Analects_ and the _Mencius_.

The deeply ingrained cultural values, whether they are based on Confucius or whether Confucius based his thinking on them is unimportant for this discussion, help to explain, for example, why many Chinese reject the kind of social safety net we prize in the West. Confucius made filial responsibility one of the main foundation stones of Chinese society. Many Chinese wonder why anyone would want the state to interfere in the care of one’s family. Consider this story I told to some Chinese acquaintances a few year ago:

_My mother, in her 90s, required nearly round the clock care at home. Several nurses, included in a team organized by her daughter-in-law, were hired to work 24/7. The bill was pretty high, hitting six figures in the last year of her life. At one stage of a longish (three or so year) process a nice lady from the regional care bureaucracy came to see me: “We will provide 14 hours per week of ‘home care’ she said, but you should put your mother in an institution then the government will pay most of the costs, saving you/her many tens of thousands of dollars.” I (politely) sent her packing, with my thanks, explaining that I could and would care for my mother as she and I thought best._

My Chinese acquaintances, all well educated professionals, most living in cities quite far from their aging parents, were horrified that we would *allow* much less *expect* the state to fill our _ordained_ roles and usurp our *rights* to do our filial duties. _”Why,”_ asked one fellow, an official in one of Beijing’s central agencies, _“do I work so hard and deny myself things except to be able to care for my parents when they are old?”_ He was shocked at the idea that the state should need to care for senior citizens to anything like the degree we take for granted in the West.

With regard to Caplan and Confucius and lessons for the West. I’m afraid I disagree with Prof. Bell. Our *liberal*, individualistic values are too deeply ingrained in our *cultural* superstructure to be much informed by Confucius and the idea of a governing meritocracy. Confucianism is very suitable as a secular belief for deeply *conservative* societies (or civilizations if you like Sam Huntington’s theories, as I do) like those of China and Japan but it is an uneasy fit with Anglo-Dutch-Nordic liberalism. In fairness, however, the traditionally *illiberal* French constantly flirt with it – and equally constantly fail to find the solutions to problems created by their *illiberal* cultural values. Irrationality is, I think one of the prices we pay for a *liberal democratic* tradition. If you want to see a Confucian democracy then go to Singapore – it works but many, many Westerners detest it.


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## MARS

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Does this mean our, Canadian, warship will report to a Chinese commodore?



No, not in any TACON/OPCON sense - that rests with the appropriate CCTF.



			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Is that (SHADE) the group in which we participate?



Yes we do.  It is constantly growing, to include industry representation as well as nations that either contribute military forces or have a vested interest in the IRTC - which is good.  I am the SHADE coordinator here in Bahrain so I can post some more background tomorrow when I am at work.

MARS


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## Edward Campbell

Thanks for that and, for members’ information, I found more here at the China Defense Blog:

THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 2010
China to lead SHADE's anti-piracy patrols off Somalia

In November 2009, China expressed interest in playing a “lead role” in the fight against Somali pirates. (here) They requested to co-chair SHADE (Shared Awareness and Deconfliction) jointly with the EU and US-led Combined Maritime Force, headquartered in Bahrain.

After receiving support from the EU delegation, China is now approved to lead SHADE's anti-piracy patrols off Somalia. This effort will also require Chinese warships to patrol a sector of the special transit corridor through the most dangerous part of the Gulf of Aden and it also means China will need to send more than the three ships currently deployed off the Horn of Africa. Naturally, there are political complications for such a development and they can be summarized as follows.

First, there are those who view any Chinese military development, especially in the Indian Ocean, with suspicion. By operating under an international framework China’s effort can be seen as a positive step in alleviating suspicion.

Second, others see China’s military growth as “natural.” Writing in the current edition of the Atlantic monthly, Robert Kaplan argues that “as a great continental nation’s economy grows, it begins to trade more with the outside world and develops interests it did not have previously” (here) and that the Chinese build up mirrors what the United States once did. In that light, China is following a natural growth path. This group is less concerned about a PLAN “misadventure” in the region as long as its posture is not overly aggressive.

Lastly, there is also a group of critics who charge that China has enjoyed a free-ride provided by the United States Navy in protecting international waters (here). With 2.4 Trillion dollars in the Bank, China should constitute a greater share of the MOOTW burden. Unlike the previous two groups, this group would welcome greater Chinese participation in protecting the "liberal trade" system that the world enjoys.

Political considerations aside, in order for the PLAN to support an expanded naval deployment, it would require a greater fleet reserve at home. As a general rule, to maintain a task force of three ships on-station, the PLAN would need to keep a total of 9 ships on reserve: three on training, three on crew rotation and maintenance, and three on-station. That requirement could provide the justification the PLAN seeks for naval build up at home and abroad (expect to see more Type 054A frigates on order). Second, the PLAN would need to increase their C2 assets in order to communicate with other members of SHADE. The current fleet PLAN is not equipped with the extensive communication gear that can deal with a 40-nation strong Maritime Force. A PLAN overseas naval base in Djibouti seems to be an ideal location to host such a C2 asset. (here)

All in all, China’s mission to fight pirates is becoming "historical" indeed.

----------

China to lead anti-piracy patrols
*PLA Navy officials agree to expanded role co-ordinating international efforts off Somalia*

Greg Torode Chief Asia correspondent in Singapore

Jan 28, 2010

http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2c913216495213d5df646910cba0a0a0/?vgnextoid=12aa9d9df9076210VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=teaser&ss=China&s=News

China has won approval to lead the co-ordination of international anti-piracy patrols off Somalia - an unprecedented expansion of its historic deployment of warships to the Indian Ocean.
The effort will also see China send its warships to permanently patrol a sector of the special transit corridor through the most dangerous part of the Gulf of Aden. The pledge means that China needs to send more than the three ships it keeps deployed off the Horn of Africa to protect vital trade routes linking Asia to Europe.

PLA Navy officials reached agreement last week over its expanded role with major international navies at a meeting of the so-called Shade grouping in Bahrain, officials at the meeting said.

Shade, or Shared Awareness and Deconfliction, has been jointly headed by European Union forces and the US-led Combined Maritime Forces.

More than two years old, Shade meets monthly to maximise co-ordination and communication among the 40-odd navies now protecting shipping off the Horn of Africa.

While some nations operate as part of international flotillas under the banner of Nato, the EU or the CMF, some operate independently, including China, India, Russia, Malaysia and Iran.

Currently only Nato, EU and CMF ships patrol inside the corridor.

By committing to provide an "enduring" presence in the corridor, China will be eligible to lead as part of a new rotating chairmanship, which will switch every three to four months. It is expected to take charge by the middle of the year.

The move is expected to force India and Russia to seek a greater role, as they try to match a growing Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean.

Captain Chris Chambers, director of operations for the CMF, confirmed China's new role yesterday at a shipping conference in Singapore.

"There has been major progress in communication and co-operation with navies that once didn't really speak to each other," Chambers, a US naval officer, said. "China will get a chance to chair the Shade ... it is a very positive development.

"It will open the door for other independent nations to come in."

Other officials at last week's Bahrain meeting said the PLA was reporting back to Beijing for political approval before a formal announcement could be made.

Both Western and Asian naval officials are backing the move, knowing they are struggling to deal with a worsening piracy situation off Somalia, a failed state where pirates operate with no fear of law enforcement or other government intervention.

While the Gulf of Aden situation has eased under naval pressure, pirates are now attacking ships off Somalia's east coast, travelling more than 1,000 nautical miles into the Indian Ocean to seize ships, putting a wider range of shipping at risk. "It is getting desperate and there is no solution in sight," one foreign naval official said. "Anything China can do to offer more practical help will be taken up at this point. This deal is a straight win-win."

While helping to tackle a worsening international crisis, fighting piracy allows China to quietly develop an Indian Ocean presence - something military analysts believe could be highly strategic to its ambitions to create a navy with wide global reach.

Typically, hijacked ships are taken to pirate lairs on Somalia's east coast. The ship and crew are kept under armed guard but are generally unharmed until the owners can arrange a ransom, which now range between US$2 million and US$7 million.

China began pushing for a broader role after the hijacking in October of mainland bulk carrier the De Xin Hai. The ship, steaming to India with a load of South African coal when it was captured northeast of the Seychelles islands, was released late last month after the payment of US$3.5 million in cash.

The De Xin Hai was the first mainland ship to be captured since Beijing's historic deployment of warships to the area in December 2008.

That deployment marked the first time the Chinese navy had ventured into potential conflict beyond its home waters in centuries.

The PLA warships never attempted to attack or intercept the pirates, with PLA officials later insisting they were too far away at the time.

The warships - two destroyers and an armed supply ship - run regular escorts from convoys of ships registered in Hong Kong, Taiwan and on the mainland. Ships of other nations can join the Chinese convoys.

When not involved with convoys, the Chinese vessels have also assisted other international efforts. China's convoys sail near the transit corridor, keep in contact with it but have not been part of it. Now it has agreed to keep a single ship in the corridor for a month at a time, China will be assigned a 60 nautical mile stretch of ocean to permanently patrol.

Chinese officials have repeatedly suggested that individual countries should be given set areas of ocean to take responsibility for - a concept already in operation inside the corridor.

----------

Principled consensus on escort missions reached between China, EU, NATO, CMF

(Source: Xinhua) 2010-01-30

BEIJING, Jan. 29 (Xinhua)

Principled consensus was reached between China, European Union Naval Force, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), China's Ministry of National Defense said on Friday.

The consensus, outlining the shipping escort cooperation based on "areas of responsibility" in the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), was approved Thursday at the the plenary meeting of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia in New York, said a statement from the ministry.

Previously, China had suggested cooperation be based on "areas of responsibility" under the UN Security Council resolutions while EU, NATO and CMF proposed coordination guidelines of the IRTC.

China and the three parties conducted rounds of consultations at the contact group meeting, international coordination meeting in Beijing and the Shared Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE) system meeting in Bahrain.

The final principled consensus absorbed components of "areas of responsibility" in escort missions cooperation and the coordination guidelines of IRTC, showcasing concerted effort by all parties.

China always takes a positive and open attitude towards international cooperation on shipping escorts, and would like to cooperate with countries and organizations in line with UN Security Council resolutions for peace and stability in the Gulf of Aden and Somalia waters, said the statement.

----------


Speaking broadly, this is a very good thing. As the late US President Lyndon B Johnson is reputed to have observed about potential opponents, _"it's better to have them in the tent pissin' out than outside pissin' in."_


----------



## CougarKing

More protests- this time by some artists in Beijing:

AFP link



> BEIJING (AFP) - *About 20 Chinese artists including outspoken activist Ai Weiwei protested in central Beijing over the demolition of an art zone in the east of the capital, state media and a rights group said Tuesday.*
> 
> The protest on Monday came amid simmering anger in China over land seizures, which have often involved corrupt officials keen to secure real estate profits as the country's property market booms.
> 
> 
> The artists marched on Chang'An Avenue, one of Beijing's main thoroughfares that passes by Tiananmen Square, scene of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that ended in a bloody crackdown, media reports and rights activists said.
> 
> *
> They carried posters reading "Civil Rights!" and "Capital Beijing, brutal demolition!", which were confiscated by police, the state Global Times newspaper reported.
> 
> 
> The protesters attempted to reach Tiananmen Square, the heart of political power in China, but were stopped by police about two kilometres (one mile) away, it said*
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

A report on the weaknesses of the ROCAF/Guo Min Kong Jun. Whether or not the US sells Taiwan more of the needed new fighters may give an indication whether they want Taiwan to remain a US "ally" or be "Finlandized" as mentioned in another article above.

Defense News link



> *U.S. Intel Report on Taiwan Air Power Released*
> By wendell minnick
> Published: 22 Feb 2010 05:31
> 
> TAIPEI - A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that points out weaknesses in Taiwan's air power and air defense capabilities seems to support Taiwan's case for new F-16s.
> 
> Delivered to the U.S. Congress on Feb. 16, the report, DIA-02-1001-028, says that while Taiwan has nearly 400 combat aircraft in service, "far fewer of these are operationally capable."
> 
> The report is mandated by Congress under the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act.
> 
> *Since 2006, Taiwan has had a standing request for 66 F-16C/D Block 50/52 fighters, but the United States has repeatedly rejected a letter of request for price and availability for the aircraft.* The most critical problem is aging F-5E/F Tiger squadrons now used for training. The F-5s have "reached the end of their operational service life," the report says.
> 
> *Taiwan claims it operates about 60 F-5s, but the report says "the number of operationally capable aircraft is likely much less, possibly in the low 30s."
> 
> The 126 Indigenous Defense Fighters (IDF) have "limited combat range and payload capacity restricts [the aircraft's] effectiveness in air-to-air combat," according to the report,* which acknowledges the Air Force is making some efforts to modernize a "portion" of its IDF fleet.
> 
> *The Air Force's 56 Mirage 2000-5 fighters suffer from high maintenance costs and lack required spare parts*. They are "technologically advanced, but they require frequent, expensive maintenance that adversely affects their operational readiness rate." There are also "chronic difficulties with the aircraft's turbine fan blades" that have "severely hampered the fighters' readiness rates."
> 
> The Air Force is considering mothballing the fighters and "focusing resources on a more sustainable aircraft," according to the report.
> 
> *Taiwan's 146 F-16A/B Block 20 fighters are in need of upgrades that improve avionics, survivability and combat effectiveness, the DIA report says*, but "the extent of the upgrades, and timing and quantity of affected aircraft is currently unknown. The F-16A/B can be armed with the AIM-120C [AMRAAM] active-radar air-to-air missile." Taiwan has 120 AIM-120C-5 and 218 AIM-120C-7 missiles in its F-16 inventory.
> 
> "Despite the operational capability of Taiwan's fighter force, these aircraft cannot be used effectively in conflict without adequate airfield protection, especially runways," the report says. "Taiwan's ability to protect its aircraft and airfields from missile attacks and rapidly repair damaged runways and taxiways are central issues to consider when examining Taiwan's air defense capability."
> 
> Though Taiwan's request for new F-16C/Ds is not mentioned in the DIA report, the conclusion of the assessment points to the need for new fighter aircraft.
> 
> One U.S. defense industry source cautioned that the option of selling F-16s to Taiwan has a de facto deadline.
> 
> "If Taiwan is to have some credible air deterrent, then they need new, replacement aircraft. There is really no alternative to the F-16C/D. At some point this year, the F-16 supply chain will begin to shut down as there are no new orders and the U.S. and its allies switch to the F-35," he said.
> 
> "Once this happens … it is cost-prohibitive to restart the line. This industrial time constraint will force the political decision either to sell the aircraft to Taiwan or not. If no, for all intents and purposes, the island will have no real means of defending its airspace."
> 
> *Taiwan legislators are pushing hard for the United States to release F-16s. In December, 24 legislators signed a letter addressed to four members of the U.S. Congress asking for the release of F-16s.*
> The letters were addressed to two members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., and ranking minority leader Richard Lugar, R-Ind.; and two members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., and ranking minority leader Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.
> 
> The bipartisan letter urged the follow-on procurement of F-16s to Taiwan, describing the issue as one of "utmost importance to our country."
> 
> *The Taiwan legislators wrote, "Our nation has attempted to purchase follow-on F-16s since 2006 to upgrade our national defense by replacing our aging F-5s … and thereby respond to the growing threat that the People's Republic of China (PRC)" poses to the "peace and security in the Taiwan Strait."
> 
> The letter acknowledges improved economic and diplomatic relations between China and Taiwan over the past year, but adds, "we face a significant threat from the People's Liberation Army Air Force." China has a "lethal fleet" of advanced fighters and is "developing a fifth generation fighter" that will be deployed in 2017.*
> 
> "Our air force is badly in need of replacement aircraft to maintain a viable deterrent fighting force to ensure a balance of power. Our military must be able to defend our airspace as a further deterioration in the air balance across the Strait will only encourage PRC aggression," the letter states.
> 
> It warns that "if America softens its support for our country at this critical time, we believe it will have an adverse effect on cross-Strait relations as Taiwan's negotiating position is weakened and the PRC may then seek to capitalize on our situation."


----------



## Edward Campbell

My guess is that both Taiwan and the USA are coming to the realization that Taiwan's _preferred_ future is is within a modernized China - initially as part of a "one country *three* systems" regime.

I sense an ever increasing 'connection' between China, proper, (that is Mainland China) and Taiwan and, by and large, the 'connection' is friendly.

Absorbing Taiwan will be a challenge for China. Taiwan will *require* at least as much real autonomy and democracy as it has now - which is more than Hong Kong has, thus 'three systems' will be required until, eventually, Chinese governance 'catches up' with Hong Kong and, later, Taiwan.

China needs Taiwan, in part, to provide a wholly Chinese impetus for legal/commercial reforms. The old pitch ( by Anson Chan _et al_) that Hong Kong would take over China did not come to pass because Hong Kong (and its legal/commercial system) remains too 'foreign' for China. Even those who know that reforms are necessary and urgent do not want to be seen to be adopting _alien_ Hong Kong style methods and institutions. Taiwan, however, will offer China different, but familiar and, above all, Chinese model for methods and institutions.

Let's face it: Taiwan IS Chinese and, logically and historically, it is part of China; Taiwan as a Chinese province autonomous region - but far, far more autonomous than, say, Tibet or Xinjiang will ever dream of being - is the 'natural' order of things. Taiwan as the catalyst for a Sino-American war doesn't make sense and I doubt that many American would see Taiwanese independence as an issue for which they would be willing to send hundreds of thousands of their children to an early grave.

None of this is to deny that there is a strong _independence_ movement in Taiwan or to minimize its importance. As I said reunification (because Taiwan was, for a long time, part of China) will not be easy or quick but I think it is inevitable.


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan as the setting of the latest Hollywood feature film:  :boring:

"Formosa Betrayed" movie site link

*note that the 2-28 date you see in the protest signs in the trailer refers to the infamous 2-28 massacre of 1947 which saw many Taiwanese civilians killed by _Guomindang_ troops.


----------



## CougarKing

A PLA officer urges that China take a more aggressive stance towards the US through his new book titled The China Dream (Zhong Guo Meng/ 中國夢)  :

Reuters link



> BEIJING (Reuters) - *China should build the world's strongest military and move swiftly to topple the United States as the global "champion," a senior Chinese PLA officer says in a new book reflecting swelling nationalist ambitions.*
> 
> China
> 
> The call for China to abandon modesty about its global goals and "sprint to become world number one" comes from a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Senior *Colonel, Liu Mingfu*, who warns that his nation's ascent will alarm Washington, risking war despite Beijing's hopes for a "peaceful rise."
> 
> "China's big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power," Liu writes in his newly published Chinese-language book, *"The China Dream."*
> "If China in the 21st century cannot become world number one, cannot become the top power, then inevitably it will become a straggler that is cast aside," writes Liu, a professor at the elite National Defense University, which trains rising officers.
> 
> *His 303-page book stands out for its boldness even in a recent chorus of strident Chinese voices demanding a hard shove back against Washington over trade, Tibet, human rights, and arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.*
> 
> "As long as China seeks to rise to become world number one ... then even if China is even more capitalist than the U.S., the U.S. will still be determined to contain it," writes Liu.
> 
> Rivalry between the two powers is a "competition to be the leading country, a conflict over who rises and falls to dominate the world," says Liu. "To save itself, to save the world, China must prepare to become the (world's) helmsman."
> 
> *"The China Dream" does not represent government policy, which has been far less strident about the nation's goals.*
> 
> Liu's book testifies to the homegrown pressures on China's Communist Party leadership to show the country's fast economic growth is translating into greater sway against the West, still mired in an economic slowdown.
> 
> *The next marker of how China's leaders are handling these swelling expectations may come later this week, when the government is likely to announce its defense budget for 2010, after a 14.9 percent rise last year on the one in 2008.*
> "This book represents my personal views, but I think it also reflects a tide of thought," Liu told Reuters in an interview. "We need a military rise as well as an economic rise."
> 
> *Another PLA officer has said this year's defense budget should send a defiant signal to Washington after the Obama administration went ahead in January with long-known plans to sell $6.4 billion worth of arms to Taiwan.*
> 
> "I think one part of 'public opinion' that the leadership pays attention to is elite opinion, and that includes the PLA," said Alan Romberg, an expert on China and Taiwan at the Henry L. Stimson Center, an institute in Washington D.C.
> 
> "I think the authorities are seeking to keep control of the reaction, even as they need to take (it) into account," Romberg said in an emailed response to questions.
> 
> Liu argues that China should use its growing revenues to become the world's biggest military power, so strong the United States "would not dare and would not be able to intervene in military conflict in the Taiwan Strait."
> 
> "If China's goal for military strength is not to pass the United States and Russia, then China is locking itself into being a third-rate military power," he writes. "Turn some money bags into bullet holders."
> 
> *China's leaders do not want to jeopardize ties with the United States, a key trade partner and still by far the world's biggest economy and military power.
> 
> Yet Chinese public ire, echoed on the Internet, means policy-makers have to tread more carefully when handling rival domestic and foreign demands, said Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
> 
> "Chinese society is changing, and you see that in all the domestic views now on what China should do about the United States," said Jin. "If society demands a stronger stance, ignoring that can bring a certain cost."*
> 
> Liu's book was officially published in January, but is only now being sold in Beijing bookstores.
> 
> LIGHTING A FIRE IN AMERICA'S BACKYARD
> 
> In recent months, strains have widened between Beijing and Washington over trade, Internet controls, climate change, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and President Barack Obama's meeting with Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, who China reviles.
> 
> *China has so far responded with angry words and a threat to sanction U.S. companies involved in the Taiwan arms sales. But it has not acted on that threat and has allowed a U.S. aircraft carrier to visit Hong Kong.
> 
> Over the weekend, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said he wanted trade friction with the United States to ease. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg is due to visit Beijing this week.
> 
> Liu and other PLA officers, however, say they see little chance of avoiding deepening rivalry with the United States, whether peaceful or warlike.
> 
> "I'm very pessimistic about the future," writes another PLA officer, Colonel Dai Xu, in another recently published book that claims China is largely surrounded by hostile or wary countries beholden to the United States.*
> 
> 
> "I believe that China cannot escape the calamity of war, and this calamity may come in the not-too-distant future, at most in 10 to 20 years," writes Dai.
> 
> "If the United States can light a fire in China's backyard, we can also light a fire in their backyard," warns Dai.
> 
> *Liu said he hoped China and the United States could manage their rivalry through peaceful competition.
> 
> "In his State of the Union speech, Obama said the United States would never accept coming second-place, but if he reads my book he'll know China does not want to always be a runner-up," said Liu in the interview.*
> 
> (Editing by Benjamin Kang Lim and Jeremy Laurence)


----------



## Edward Campbell

This from Jane's Naval Newsbrief:

-------------------------​[first posted to http://idr.janes.com - 25 February 2010]

*US believes China is poised to field ballistic anti-ship missile* 
This is a revised version of an article first published on 22 February. The US naval intelligence community believes that China is getting close to fielding the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), prompting concerns as to the survivability of United States Pacific Fleet carrier strike groups in the face of such a threat. Identified as the DF-21D - indicating its lineage in the DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile - the ASBM would be fired from mobile, land-based launchers and be capable of achieving a range in the order of 1,500 km 
-------------------------​


----------



## CougarKing

Another increase in defence spending by China, though reportedly smaller than in recent years:



> *China announces 7.5 pct jump in defense spending*
> By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN (AP) – 11 hours ago
> 
> BEIJING —* China on Thursday announced its smallest increase in defense spending in more than two decades, a likely result of both financial constraints and growing concern over perceptions of Beijing as a regional military threat.*
> 
> *The planned 7.5 percent boost in defense spending in 2010 follows at least 20 years of double-digit increases in the budget for the People's Liberation Army — the world's largest standing military with more than 2.3 million members.
> 
> Rapid military modernization and the acquisition of cutting-edge jet fighters, warships and submarines have aroused suspicions in Washington, Tokyo, New Delhi and elsewhere over China's intentions, further fueled by Beijing's growing diplomatic assertiveness and booming economic might.*
> The increase will be used to enhance China's ability "to meet various threats," said Li Zhaoxing, spokesman for China's parliament, the National People's Congress, at a news conference held on the eve of the opening of its annual legislative session.
> 
> "China is committed to peaceful development and a military posture that is defensive in nature," Li said.
> 
> He said this year's defense budget of 532.11 billion yuan ($77.9 billion) remained relatively low, particularly in relation to the country's vast territory and population. Li said Chinese defense spending has accounted for about 1.4 percent of gross domestic product in recent years, as opposed to more than 4 percent in the United States and more than 2 percent in Britain, France and Russia.
> 
> The increase over actual military spending in 2009 was 37.12 billion yuan, Li said. Defense expenditures account for 6.3 percent of China's total budget, a decline from previous years, he said.
> Officials say about one-third of China's spending goes to salaries and improving living conditions for soldiers, with the rest split between replacing equipment and military research and development.
> 
> However, many overseas analysts believe the official figure accounts for only a part of actual military spending, with estimates on the total amount ranging up to twice or more what Beijing claims.


----------



## CougarKing

China's "Tea Party"?

 ;D



> *Police harassment backfires as China's troublemakers bond over 'drinking tea' tales*
> Wed Mar 10, 8:04 PM
> 
> 
> By Cara Anna, The Associated Press
> 
> BEIJING - *Like the United States, China is having its own tea party movement, but this one has a very different agenda.
> 
> 
> Police have long tried to shush and isolate potential activists, usually starting with a low-key warning, perhaps over a meal or a cup of tea. Now, the country's troublemakers are openly blogging and tweeting their stories about "drinking tea" with the police, allowing the targeted citizens to bond and diluting the intimidation they feel. *
> 
> 
> The movement is an embarrassment for officials, who are suspicious of anything that looks like an organized challenge to their authority. And it can't help that "drinking tea" stories seem to be spreading among ordinary Chinese, including ones who signed a recent online call for political reform.
> 
> 
> The country's top political event of the year, the National People's Congress, has given the stories another bump. More than 200 people say they've been invited by police to "drink tea" since last Friday, when the congress began, said independent political blogger Ran Yunfei.
> 
> 
> "That's according to what I gathered from the Internet," he said Wednesday. "And that doesn't include the people who didn't identify themselves." There was no way to independently verify the number.
> 
> 
> Twitter is blocked in China, but that hasn't stopped people from getting around Internet controls and posting sometimes hour-by-hour diaries of their police encounters on the social networking Web site. Some give advice to nervous newcomers facing their first invitation to "chat." Some, tongue in cheek, suggest restaurants for the usually uncomfortable meal.
> 
> 
> Writer Yu Jie tweeted last week about going to the movies with police, who drove him there and followed him inside. "They bought tickets, but maybe they get reimbursed," he wrote.
> 
> 
> Yu spoke by phone Wednesday while shopping at a branch of the French supermarket Carrefour, with two officers following him a few steps away.
> 
> 
> "More and more people have conquered their fears and written about what happened to them," Yu said.
> 
> 
> *Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley, is excited about the potential of the "drinking tea" movement. He used to translate people's stories, but now there are too many. *
> 
> "The way to control dissidents' activities is by creating fear and isolation. Other people don't dare to become your friends. You feel threatened," he said. "But the Internet countered that effort by connecting those people. They have a sense of community, which makes them bolder and stronger."
> 
> 
> A new Web site, the* "Drinking Tea Chronicles," *  appeared in China on Feb. 27, a few days before the political meetings began in Beijing. It encourages people to share their own stories by emailing them to the site.
> 
> 
> The "Drinking Tea Chronicles" and a similar blog, "Invited to Drink Tea Chronicles," remained unblocked Wednesday.
> 
> 
> *The "Tea Party" movement in the United States, an entirely different phenomenon, emerged as anti-tax protests partly in response to the government's stimulus package of early 2009. It takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 when activists in the then-British colony of Massachusetts dumped shipments of tea into Boston Harbor to protest a new tea tax.
> 
> 
> In China, the "drinking tea" stories started appearing in 2008 but took off in recent months as authorities cracked down on the signers of Charter 08, a daring call for political reform in China that was signed by hundreds of people, including some of the country's top intellectuals. Co-author Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
> 
> 
> "Many of the people who signed are students, lawyers, businesspeople," Xiao said. For some, signing the petition brought their first visit from police. Their stories, some startled, some angry, have appeared on "drinking tea" sites and other blogs.*
> 
> 
> Xiao has a name for the newcomers, who had no political background until now: "They're what I call the conversions," he said.
> 
> But some Chinese don't need to sign petitions to get attention.
> 
> On Wednesday, a factory worker in the southern city of Shenzhen put out an alert on his Twitter feed, saying police wanted a meeting. He worried it would mess up his first day in a new job.
> 
> In a phone call, Fang Zhixiong told The Associated Press that he must have drawn attention by discussing human rights and constitutional issues online.
> 
> "I tweeted so if I miss work tomorrow, people will know I ended up in the police station," he said.
> 
> Within a couple hours of his alert, Fang was thanking worried readers - with the proper lingo.
> 
> "I haven't had tea yet," he tweeted. "Thank you for your concern."


----------



## CougarKing

A look at China's National People's Congress:

link



> BEIJING (AFP) - China's lawmakers may have scant political powers, but they are not lacking in ideas. They offered a pile of drafts -- some serious, others far-fetched -- at this year's session of parliament.
> 
> *
> The winner for most original proposal to the National People's Congress -- which wrapped up its 10-day meeting on Sunday -- came from the elegant Zhang Xiaomei, the editor-in-chief of China Beauty magazine.
> 
> 
> Zhang suggested that all husbands pay their wives for doing the housework, raising the children and taking care of older relatives, an idea that has captured a fair bit of media attention.*
> 
> 
> "If a couple gets a divorce, the housewife usually has trouble getting compensation for the work she had done," Zhang said, adding she had been inspired by examples from overseas.
> 
> 
> Other delegates shocked at the high divorce rate in China -- 1.71 million couples ended their marriages in 2009, a 10.3 percent increase over 2008 -- have called for laws making it more difficult to untie the proverbial knot.
> 
> *
> They proposed a return to the practices of the 1960s and 1970s, when couples needed the approval of the "danwei" (work unit) to separate.*
> 
> 
> Businesswoman Yan Qi learned the hard way that lawmaking has its drawbacks.
> 
> 
> When she proposed a ban on banning private Internet cafes in an effort to curb pornography and video game addiction, the country's massive online community retaliated, hacking the website of her restaurant chain.
> 
> 
> Sports made the list of topics considered, with one delegate suggesting China should end its practise of judging sports officials by the number of Olympic gold medals won by the country's athletes.
> 
> 
> In a nation that hosted its first Olympic Games less than two years ago, Zhao Long's proposal took many by surprise.
> 
> 
> Zhao said there was nothing wrong with winning gold medals, but that the quest for gold had driven local officials to illegal means, such as doping and age fraud, to bring home the medals.
> 
> 
> Some complained that proposals like the one made by Zhao were nothing but a blatant attempt at self-promotion, and failed to take into consideration the issues vital to China's future.
> 
> 
> "Where are the important topics that affect people's lives such as housing prices, social equality, education, the fight against corruption and the household registration system?" wrote Beijing News journalist Pan Caifu.
> 
> 
> "Have you delegates forgotten your mission? And you journalists who have chased after interviews with famous (delegates) -- do you have the courage to face your readers?"
> 
> 
> *The NPC, with up to 3,000 delegates, is regarded as the world's biggest parliament but is also widely seen as a body that merely rubber-stamps the decisions of China's ruling Communist Party elite.
> 
> 
> But some observers say dissenting voices do get heard -- behind closed doors -- in the process of shaping legislation.
> 
> 
> Most of the most outlandish proposals came from delegates to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which meets at the same time as the parliament, but only has the power to advise the government.
> 
> 
> Although the members of the NPC are less active than the CPPCC delegates, they are more serious, often tackling major social issues that stir heated debates, like whether to abolish China's "one-child" family planning policy.
> 
> Other proposals called for an end to "re-education-through-labour," a penal system that authorities have long used to jail political opponents, as well as people who repeatedly petition Beijing over injustices committed by local officials.*
> The system allows the authorities to jail offenders without trial for up to four years, according to the last major reform in 2004 -- a situation that has long drawn criticism from international human rights groups.


----------



## a_majoor

Thinking big. I wonder if there are enough resources (capital, physical, political) available to actually do this:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/china-considers-high-speed-rail-line.html



> *China Considers High Speed Rail Line Connections to Europe*
> 
> EU Observer - China is exploring the possibility of extending its high-speed train network as far as Europe, potentially cutting rail travel time between London and Beijing to as little as two days. Officials hope to see the project completed over the next ten years, enabling passengers to travel the roughly 8,000 kilometre journey at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour. China is currently in the middle of a vast railway expansion project that aims to build nearly 30,500 kilometres of new railways in the next five years, connecting all its major cities with high-speed lines. China's internal high speed rail plans were reported here along with a comparison of the US high speed rail plans
> 
> NY Times reports China will spend $88 billion constructing intercity rail lines, the highest priority in the plan. It spent $44 billion last year and just $12 billion as recently as 2004.
> 
> The government has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion — almost equal to the price of the entire Three Gorges hydroelectric dam project on the Yangtze River. The authorities recently disclosed that they had 110,000 workers laboring to finish the route as quickly as possible.
> 
> Two lines to Europe are reportedly being considered under the proposals, one passing through India, Pakistan, and the Middle East, while a second would head to Germany via Russia. Exact routes are currently undecided however. A third line would extend south from China to connect Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.
> 
> Financing the project appears to be the main question, with China offering to bankroll the Burmese line in exchange for the country's rich reserves of lithium, a metal used in batteries.
> 
> "We will use government money and bank loans, but the railways may also raise financing from the private sector and also from the host countries," said Mr Wang, indicating the new lines would also be used to carry freight.
> 
> European experts say the current low maritime transport costs make it harder to justify an EU-China rail line on commercial grounds however.
> 
> 
> FURTHER READING
> Network Rail has proposed a new £34bn ($55bn) high-speed railway line linking Scotland and London by 2030.
> 
> High speed rail is displacing short haul (less than 3 hour) plane routes
> 
> High-speed railways will connect all of China’s provincial capitals and cities with more than 500,000 citizens by 2020, serving more than 90 percent of the population, the Ministry of Railways said.
> 
> 
> China's high speed rail present and future
> 
> Times Online UK: Continental Europe now has 3,600 miles of high-speed line in operation, with a further 2,000 under construction. China will have 6,000 miles open by 2012.
> 
> NY Times: China is investing $292.9 billion (2 trillion RMB) in a nationwide high-speed, energy efficient rail network.
> 
> China accelerated its high-speed-rail development plan last year in the wake of the global financial crisis, saying it would increase the passenger network by a third to 16,000 kilometers, or about 10,000 miles, by 2020. The centerpiece of the service is a 1,318-kilometer line with 16 kilometers of tunnels that will cut the trip between Beijing and Shanghai to five hours from 10. The Beijing / Shanghai high speed line is set to open 2012.
> 
> The Chinese Railway Ministry says that the new system makes economic sense: A two-track bullet train can transport 160 million people a year, compared with 80 million for a four-lane highway.


----------



## a_majoor

Why China will not become a superpower (or even a regional hegemon). If and when the Chinese demand for commodities collapse, our own economy will suffer (and the downstream effects on the US economy will also have serious effects on Canada):

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0316/China-the-coming-costs-of-a-superbubble



> *China: the coming costs of a superbubble*
> 
> China may seem to have defied the recession and the laws of economics. It hasn't. When China's bubble bursts, the global impact will be severe, spiking US interest rates.
> 
> By Vitaliy N. Katsenelson
> posted March 16, 2010 at 2:34 pm EDT
> Denver —
> 
> The world looks at China with envy. China’s economy grew 8.7 percent last year, while the world economy contracted by 2.2 percent. It seems that Chinese “Confucian capitalism” – a market economy powered by 1.3 billion people and guided by an authoritarian regime that can pull levers at will – is superior to our touchy-feely democracy and capitalism. But the grass on China’s side of the fence is not as green as it appears.
> 
> In fact, China’s defiance of the global recession is not a miracle – it’s a superbubble. When it deflates, it will spell big trouble for all of us.
> 
> To understand the Chinese economy, consider three distinct periods: “Late-stage growth obesity” (the decade prior to 2008); “You lie!” (the time of the financial crisis); and finally,  “Steroids ’R’ Us” (from the end of the financial crisis to today).
> 
> Late-stage growth obesity
> 
> About a decade ago, the Chinese government chose a policy of growth at any cost. China’s leaders see strong gross domestic product (GDP) growth not just as bragging rights, but as essential for political survival and national stability.
> 
> Because China lacks the social safety net of the developed world, unemployed people aren’t just inconvenienced by the loss of their jobs, they starve; and hungry people don’t complain, they riot and cause political unrest.
> 
> Remember the 1994 movie “Speed”? A young cop (Keanu Reeves) had to save passengers on a bus that would explode if its speed dropped below 50 m.p.h. Well, China is like that bus with 1.3 billion people aboard. If the Communist Party can’t keep the economy growing at a fast clip, the result will be catastrophic.
> 
> To achieve high growth, China kept its currency, the renminbi, at artificially low levels against the dollar. This helped already cheap Chinese-made goods become even cheaper. China turned into a significant exporter to the developed economies.
> 
> Normally, if free-market economic forces were at work, the renminbi would have appreciated and the US dollar would have declined. However, had China let this occur, demand for its products would have declined, and its economy wouldn’t have grown at roughly 10 percent a year, which it did during the past decade.
> 
> The more China sold to the United States, the more dollars it accumulated, and thus the more US Treasuries it bought, driving our interest rates down. US consumers responded to these cheap goods and cheap home loans by going on a buying binge.
> 
> However, companies and countries that grow at very high rates for a long time will inevitably suffer from late-stage growth obesity. Consider Starbucks: In 1999, it had 2,000 stores and was adding 1.8 stores a day. In 2007, when it had 10,000 stores, it had to open 5.5 stores a day in a desperate bid to keep growth rates up. This resulted in poor decisions and poor quality – a recipe for disaster.
> 
> In China, political pressure for full employment has led to similar late-stage growth obesity. In 2005, China built the largest shopping mall in the world, the New South China Mall: Today it’s 99 percent vacant. China also built up a lavish district in a city called Ordos: Today, it’s a ghost town.
> 
> You lie!
> 
> All good things come to an end, and great things come to an end with a bang. When the financial meltdown erupted in 2008, US and global banks started dropping like flies. Countries everywhere suffered contraction.
> 
> Even China.
> 
> During the crisis, Chinese exports were down more than 25 percent, tonnage of goods shipped through railroads was down by double digits, and electricity use plummeted.
> 
> Yet Beijing insisted that China had magically sustained 6 to 8 percent growth.
> 
> China lies. It goes to great lengths to maintain appearances, including censoring media and jailing those who write antigovernment articles. That’s why we have to rely on hard data instead.
> 
> Steroids ‘R’ Us
> 
> Today the global economy is stabilizing, thanks to Uncle Sam and other “uncles” around the world. But the consumers of Chinese-made goods are still in debt, unemployment is high, and banks aren’t lending. You might think the Chinese economy would be growing at a lower rate. But no, it is growing again at nearly 10 percent, as though the financial crisis never occurred.
> 
> Though this growth appears to be authentic – electricity consumption is back up – it is not sustainable growth, because it is based on an unprecedented stimulus package and extraordinary government involvement in the economy.
> 
> In the midst of the financial crisis, in late 2008, Beijing fire-hosed a $568 billion stimulus into the Chinese economy. That’s enormous! As a percentage of GDP, it would be like a $2 trillion stimulus in America, nearly triple the size of the one Congress passed last year.
> 
> It gets even more interesting. Unlike Western democracies, whose central banks can pump a lot of money into the financial system but can’t force banks to lend or consumers and corporations to spend, China can achieve both at lightning speed.
> 
> The government controls the banks, so it can make them lend, and it can force state-owned enterprises (one-third of the economy) to borrow and to spend. Also, because the rule of law and human and property rights are still underdeveloped, China can spend infrastructure project money very fast – if a school is in the way of a road the government wants to build, it becomes a casualty for the greater good.
> 
> Government is horrible at allocating large amounts of capital, especially at the speed it is done in China. Political decisions (driven by the goal of full employment) are often uneconomical, and corruption and cronyism result in projects that destroy value.
> 
> To maintain high employment, China has poured money into infrastructure and real estate projects. This explains why, in 2009, new floor space doubled and residential real estate prices surged 25 percent. This also explains why the Chinese keep building new skyscrapers even though existing ones are still vacant.
> 
> The enormous stimulus has exacerbated problems that already existed, threatening to turn China into a less shiny but more drastic version of debt-riddled Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
> 
> What happens in China doesn’t stay in China. A meltdown there – or even a slowdown – would have severe consequences for the rest of the world.
> 
> It will tank the commodity markets. Demand for industrial goods will fall off the cliff. Finally, Chinese appetite for our fine currency will diminish, driving the dollar lower against the renminbi and boosting our interest rates higher. No more 5 percent mortgages and 6 percent car loans.
> 
> No shortcuts to greatness
> 
> We look at China and are mesmerized by its 1.3 billion people, its achievements of the past decade, its recent economic resiliency, and its ability to achieve spectacular results on the fly. But we have to remember that economic bubbles are usually just a good thing taken too far. The Chinese economy is no exception. Its long-term future may be bright, but in the short run we’ve got a bubble on our hands.
> 
> Everyone wants a shortcut to greatness, but there isn’t one. China has been trying to bend the laws of economics for a while, and with the control it exerts over its economy it may seem that it’s succeeded.
> 
> But this is only a temporary mirage, which must be followed by a painful reality. No, there is no shortcut to greatness – not in personal life, not in politics, and not in economics.
> 
> Vitaliy N. Katsenelson is a portfolio manager/director of research at Investment Management Associates in Denver. He is the author of “Active Value Investing: Making Money in Range-Bound Markets.”


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a peculiarly American _need_ to create false expectations so that the normal course of events can be made to appear as a catastrophe.

I don't think that any of the sane, responsible _China watchers_ are forecasting a steady, problem free, uninterrupted climb to superpower status for China. It took Britain, arguably, 200 years to grow to _great power_ status (_circa_ 1585 to 1785) and it took America less than 100 years (1865 to 1945) to do the same. It is reasonable to expect China to need 50 years (1990 to 2040_ish_) to do the same. There were stumbles and falls in both the American (great depression) and British (American revolution) ascensions. The same must be expected for China.

But the (inevitable?) problems do not, necessarily, foretell a Chinese _collapse_ and a return to the 1830s, 1920s or even the 1970s any more than the great depression, _Smoot-Hawley_ and all that foretold the collapse of America.


----------



## CougarKing

Why members of China's Gong An Bu/Public Security Bureau will have more headaches in the coming years.

 ;D



> MSNBC link
> (...)
> 
> 
> *It is the latest example of Chinese Internet users being targeted for their budding grass-roots activism — ordinary people spreading the word about grievances from every corner of the country with postings on Twitter, microblogs and other Web sites.
> 
> "Netizens are using the Internet to talk about injustice," said Liu Xiaoyuan, You's lawyer. "But local officials just use their public power to suppress them."
> 
> Dozens of bloggers showed up outside Mawei Distrist People's Court on Friday in Fuzhou city where the verdict was to be announced, tweeting constantly and posting photos from the scene online. They reportedly were met by more than 100 uniformed and plainclothes police. The case was indefinitely postponed.*
> China blocks online materials it deems to be harmful or pornographic, which frequently includes information that contradicts the views of the ruling Communist Party. Such restrictions prompted Internet giant Google to announce in January that it may close China-based Google.cn because it no longer wanted to cooperate with Beijing's Internet censorship.
> 
> *But there is a vibrant community of tech-savvy users who can easily hop over the "Great Firewall" that blocks access to sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They are a minority of the 384 million people online in China but among the most vocal: young, educated, liberal-minded and unafraid of questioning the Communist government.*Twitter in particular has been harnessed by Chinese users who revel in having a forum where they can speak freely about politically sensitive matters — in 140 characters or less, of course.
> 
> (...)
> 
> *But there have been a few victories, too.
> 
> Authorities dropped charges against a man in the eastern province of Shandong who was detained after accusing his local Communist Party secretary of corruption. An unpopular garbage incinerator project in the southern city of Guangzhou has been put on hold. A karaoke bar waitress went unpunished after fatally stabbing a drunk government official who cornered her and demanded sex. Each case got strong attention from Chinese citizens online as details spread through blogs and forums.*
> Guo Baofeng,  who works as a translator in the southern city of Xiamen, was among those taken away by police after posting a video interview of Lin on an overseas Web site. He became famous among Chinese netizens for sending Twitter updates while in police custody.
> 
> "Pls help me, I grasp the phone during police sleep," and "i have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS," he tweeted in English from his cell phone, avoiding Chinese characters that take longer to input. Guo was released from detention after about three weeks, though he is still under police monitoring.


----------



## tomahawk6

These photos have been released showing the aftermath of the terrorist attack on an unsuspecting police unit three years ago. The photos are graphic. China Defense Mashup is one of my favorite sites on the PLA. So if you would rather skip the gore follow the second link.

http://www.china-defense-mashup.com/?p=5648

Main site.

http://www.china-defense-mashup.com/


----------



## CougarKing

> *China Eyes Investment in Iceland *
> William Underhill
> By William Underhill
> 
> *China has become famous in recent years for its ask-no-questions checkbook diplomacy, especially toward resource-rich nations in the developing world. Now it seems Beijing may have a new target: Europe. The latest object of Chinese interest is Iceland, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to the excesses of its bankers. China's new embassy in Reykjavík will be the largest in the capital, and the Nordic country's official investment agency has noted a surge of inquiries from China.  *
> 
> As ever, Chinese investment reflects long-term thinking. At issue in this case? According to a report this month from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, *Beijing is interested in new trade routes across the Arctic as polar ice vanishes, slashing the journey time between the Middle Kingdom and its trading partners in Europe and North America. China already has an Arctic research station in Norway and plans to spend $300 million on a new icebreaker vessel. *
> 
> Once the Arctic is navigable by commercial traffic year-round, Iceland could serve as a friendly and well-equipped way station for China in the North Atlantic (the U.S. military left some handy facilities in place when it quit the country in 2006). The idea is appealing to Iceland, as well.* President Ólafur Ragnar Grimmson recently talked of his country's future as a logistics hub and cited Chinese interest. *This comes just as an ongoing fight over a $5 billion debt to Britain and the Netherlands has soured Iceland's relations with Europe. So why not some new friends from Asia?
> 
> Newsweek blog link


----------



## GAP

Chump change for China, but boy....the interest rate.... :


----------



## CougarKing

Reuters link



> *Geely signs $1.8 billion deal for Ford's Volvo car unit*
> 
> Sun Mar 28, 11:33 AM
> 
> 
> By Victoria Klesty
> 
> GOTHENBURG, Sweden (Reuters) - *Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, China's largest private-run car maker, agreed on Sunday to buy Ford Motor's Volvo car unit for $1.8 billion, the country's biggest overseas auto purchase.*
> 
> The takeover underscores China's arrival as a major force in the global auto industry and ends nearly two years of talks with Geely over Volvo -- the last sale from Ford's former premier group, which also held Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.
> 
> (...)


----------



## burnaby

I do not think China will use force to retake the island unless Taiwan does something outrages or out of the ordinary such as publicly declaring independence. The current Taiwanese government is so far unwilling to do that; they are preoccupied with internal matters such as the economy. 

China is more likely to use a soft power approach in dealing with Taiwan. Chinese government is a very patient government. It does not have to worry about elections or appeasing the common populaces. Consider China's rise in economic development; no other state in history have risen so fast in so short time. In around 60 years ever since Deng became the head of the Chinese government till now China have become truly a capitalist. China of course proclaim it is a Communist state, Deng once said Black or White cat it does not matter as long it catches the mice. It means it may have to sacrifice communist ideology to move China forward. China has now become the world largest producer of goods and have many important trade treaties with some of the world's largest consumers and these consumers are now dependent for cheap goods. China understand that and to continue this trend it had depressed the currency to insure exports are cheap. In most western countries banks are not controlled by the government, in China the Chinese Central Bank is. This made China a wielder of economic force.

In recent years China have signed economic treaties with Taiwan such are opening a direct air and sea corridor for commercial use. Also it had open its market to import Taiwanese goods such as fruits. China is slowly integrating Taiwanese dependent on the Chinese market. On the political scale China had made great strides in the international community to not recognize Taiwan's government as legitimate. In the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympic, the name Taiwan was not use by the IOC but instead replace with a more political neutral name of City of Taipei. 

China can wait it out; in the long run as distasteful as it maybe China will take over Taiwan in a couple of generations if current economic and political trend continues. Using force to take Taiwan is viable but politically and economically it will not benefit the Chinese government. However this prediction is not certain; China is facing a huge internal unrest. Due to state policy to develop it had made many to be angry at the government. Every month this is over 100 "mass incidents", riots as we coin it. Tibet and the western Muslim majority provinces continue to cause problems.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I agree with burnaby's appreciation of the situation. Most All of the Chinese I have met take for granted that Taiwan is, * and must be* a province of China. Absolute independence for Taiwan would be politically and _strategically_ impossible for any Chinese government, but waiting is possible and popular.

_One country/two systems_ works; _one country/three systems_ will work, too. The third system sees Taiwan with levels of _independence_ even greater than those enjoyed by Hong Kong.


----------



## CougarKing

Han Bao Da Xue/漢包大學? (A Hamburger University?)  ;D



> As McDonald's celebrated the opening of its *Hamburger University training center in Shanghai *  -- the first such facility in mainland China -- the company also shared growth plans for the region. According to Financial Post, McDonald's Corp. plans to have more than 2,000 stores in mainland China by the end of 2013, with the country the primary growth engine in the Asia Pacific market...



McDonald's plans aggressive China expansion


----------



## CougarKing

More S300s for China:

Business Week link



> By Anastasia Ustinova
> 
> April 2 (Bloomberg) --* Russia delivered anti-aircraft missiles to China under a contract that may be valued as high as $2 billion.
> 
> OAO Air Defense Concern Almaz-Antei, a state-run weapons manufacturer, sold 15 batteries of S-300 missiles in 2007-2009*, Zarina Gurieva, a company spokeswoman, said by phone today.
> 
> China, once the largest customer for Russian arms, has bought about *27 S-300 batteries from Russia beginning in the 1990s, the “bare minimum” for its arsenal*, Konstantin Makienko, a defense analyst at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, said by phone.
> 
> He valued the latest contract at about *$2 billion*. Gurieva declined to comment on the price.
> 
> Russia, the world’s second-biggest arms exporter to developing nations according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, is stepping up efforts to sell weapons to the Middle East, Latin America and Africa as orders from China decline. The country’s contract to supply S-300s to Iran has been delayed after the United States and Israel said Tehran could use the missiles to thwart attacks on its nuclear facilities.
> 
> *The missile, also known in the West as the SA-20, is able to destroy non-stealth aircraft as far as 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.*--Editors: Nathaniel Espino, Jeffrey Donovan
> 
> To contact the reporter on this story: Anastasia Ustinova in St. Petersburg at austinova@bloomberg.net.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Elsewhere I have alluded to the _weakness_ in the US that results in the Obama administration _kowtowing_ to e.g. China. If more proof is need, it is here, in a report reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, in which we can see that the USA, represented by Timothy Geithner in its latest faceoff with China, blinked:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/geithner-gives-china-room-to-move-on-yuan/article1522493/


> Geithner gives China room to move on yuan
> *U.S. Treasury Secretary delays delivery of key report on charges of currency manipulation over yuan*
> 
> Andy Hoffman
> 
> Asia-Pacific Reporter, Vancouver — Globe and Mail
> 
> Monday, Apr. 05, 2010
> 
> The White House has blinked in its escalating war of words with China , delaying a key report looking into whether the Asian economic superpower is a currency manipulator, and betting instead that diplomacy will convince Beijing officials to let the yuan rise.
> 
> U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner moved over the weekend to postpone a report scheduled to be delivered to Congress on April 15 investigating China's policy of keeping the yuan's value pegged to the U.S. dollar for almost two years. Experts say it will pave the way for China to allow its undervalued currency to begin strengthening sooner than anticipated.
> 
> “The move by Geithner suggests that an agreement is more than likely and that the Chinese yuan will start appreciating within a band somewhat earlier than had been thought,” said Sebastien Galy, senior currency strategist at BNP Paribas.
> 
> Many U.S. lawmakers charge that Beijing is keeping its currency artificially low, giving Chinese exporters an unfair advantage over international competitors, exacerbating a massive trade imbalance with the United States and hurting American factories and jobs. If it finds that China has been manipulating the value of its yuan, the report to Congress will allow the U.S. to impose duties on imports from China.
> 
> Yet instead of heavy-handed threats, Mr. Geithner and the Obama administration are now banking on a series of upcoming meetings with Chinese government officials, including the June G20 Summit in Toronto, to spur a revaluation of the yuan, which is also called the renminbi.
> 
> “China's inflexible exchange rate  has made it difficult for other emerging market economies to let their currencies appreciate,” Mr. Geithner said in a statement. “A move by China to a more market-oriented exchange rate will make an essential contribution to global rebalancing.”
> 
> The Treasury's softening stance follows a decision by China's President Hu Jintao to attend a summit on nuclear security in Washington slated for April 12 and 13. Mr. Geithner said a series of meetings with Chinese government officials over the next few months will be “critical” to bringing policy changes that lead to a “more balanced” global economy.
> 
> In response to the global financial crisis, China has kept its currency pegged at 6.83 yuan to the U.S. dollar for more than 20 months. Beijing keeps its currency tied to the U.S. dollar by using its yuan to buy U.S. government bonds and Treasury bills. But a recent recovery in Chinese exports has sparked debate, even within China, that the yuan should now be allowed to rise to levels more reflective of China's fast-growing economy.
> 
> Such a move would strengthen the buying power of Chinese consumers, a critical plank in Beijing's long-term goal of creating strong domestic demand for its goods. At the same time, China's massive export industry, whose key market is the United States, remains the dominant sector of China's economy, and officials are loath to create challenges for exporters.
> 
> Yang Yuanqing, the chief executive officer of Chinese computer making giant Lenovo Group Ltd., has said a stronger yuan would boost Chinese consumers' purchasing power. Chen Daifu, chairman of Hunan Lengshuijian Iron & Steel Group Co., has suggested a higher currency would reduce China's import costs. Chinese central bank officials have also called for measures to let the yuan rise.
> 
> But Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has taken a hard line against the rising calls from the West and within China to let the yuan appreciate. “The Chinese currency is not undervalued,” Mr. Wen said last month at the close of the National People's Congress in Beijing. “We oppose all countries engaging in mutual finger-pointing or taking strong measures to force other nations to appreciate their currencies.”
> 
> Mr. Geithner's new tack will give Chinese officials breathing room to relax currency controls “without looking like they're kowtowing to U.S. pressure,” David Gilmore, a partner at Foreign Exchange Analytics in Essex, Conn., told Bloomberg News.
> 
> Still, with the U.S. unemployment rate near its highest level in more than a quarter century, many U.S. lawmakers and manufacturing industry representatives were unhappy with the White House's decision to back away from immediate threats against China.
> 
> “We are disappointed, but not surprised, by the administration's decision,” Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat said in an e-mailed statement. “After five years of stonewalling, punctuated by occasional but halting action by the Chinese, we have lost faith in bilateral negotiations on this issue.”
> 
> China's international relations have also been strained lately by Google's threats to pull out of China because of censorship restrictions imposed by the government on the internet search company's Chinese website. A guilty verdict and stiff jail terms imposed by a Chinese court against four Rio Tinto employees charged with bribery and stealing commercial secrets has also hurt China's relations with foreign business interests.
> 
> _With files from Bloomberg_



It is not that the USA, _per se_, is _weak_ but, rather, a very large minority of American appear to have taken counsel of their fears and, _de facto_, have *surrendered* their accustomed position as the greatest of the great powers. (The brief _interregnum_ of America as a _hyper-power_ could not be sustained beyond a decade.)  

It is neither simple nor easy for the USA to _deal with_ China on economic/fiscal and monetary matters; the Chinese are *strong* and they are demanding their due in respect from America, Europe and Japan. Amerca cannot push China too hard. But _kowtowing_, again, is not the answer.


----------



## CougarKing

China to build high-speed rail lines...in California?

New York Times link



> BEIJING — Nearly 150 years after American railroads brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to build rail lines across the West,* China is poised once again to play a role in American rail construction. But this time, it would be an entirely different role: supplying the technology, equipment and engineers to build high-speed rail lines.
> 
> Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build such lines.* The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.
> 
> “We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States,” Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high-speed rail at China’s railway ministry, said.
> 
> Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has closely followed progress in the discussions with China and hopes to come here later this year for talks with rail ministry officials, said David Crane, the governor’s special adviser for jobs and economic growth, and a board member of the California High Speed Rail Authority.
> 
> China is offering not just to build a railroad in California but also to help finance its construction, and Chinese officials have already been shuttling between Beijing and Sacramento to make presentations, Mr. Crane said in a telephone interview.
> 
> China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California’s High Speed Rail Authority.
> 
> The agency has made no decisions on whose technology to choose. But Mr. Crane said that there were no apparent weaknesses in the Chinese offer, and that Governor Schwarzenegger particularly wanted to visit China this year for high-speed rail discussions.
> 
> Even if an agreement is reached for China to build and help bankroll a high-speed rail system in California, considerable obstacles would remain.
> 
> China’s rail ministry would face independent labor unions and democratically elected politicians, neither of which it has to deal with at home. The United States also has labor and immigration laws stricter than those in China.
> 
> In a nearly two-hour interview at the rail ministry’s monolithic headquarters here, Mr. Zheng said repeatedly that any Chinese bid would comply with all American laws and regulations.
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

The RoCN/the Taiwan Navy/Guo Min Hai Jun have unveiled a new planned missile corvette:

Defense News link



> *Taiwan Displays Plans For Missile-Carrying Corvette*
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 12 Apr 2010 07:03
> 
> TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan has unveiled the first images of a high-tech missile corvette specifically designed to counter the threat of China acquiring an aircraft carrier, officials and media said April 12.
> 
> *A computerized graphic of the 1,000-ton "carrier killer," which has so far been kept secret from the public, has gone on display at Taipei's military museum, run by the defense ministry.*
> 
> The vessel will be capable of cruising at speeds of up to 34 miles (55 kilometers) per hour and boast technologies helping it to evade radar detection, the Taipei-based Apple Daily reported, citing military officials.
> 
> The Taiwanese Navy hopes to arm the corvette with Taiwan's home-grown Hsiungfeng III supersonic ship-to-ship missile, according to the report.
> 
> The military museum did not provide any details, while the defense ministry declined to comment on the report.
> 
> *The report came after the head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau, Tsai Teh-sheng, told parliament in November that China has started building its first aircraft carrier.
> 
> Taiwanese military analysts expect China to need at least 10 years to build its first operating carrier group complete with carrier-based fighters and other warships.*
> 
> But they warn that once the Chinese arms build-up is completed, it will have a far-reaching strategic impact on the region.
> 
> *Ties between China and Taiwan have improved markedly since China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou became the island's president in 2008, vowing to adopt a non-confrontational policy toward the mainland. But China still regards Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.*


----------



## a_majoor

Maybe the real reason Google decided to pull up stakes in China:

http://thesecretsofvancouver.com/wordpress/so-what-would-happen-if-china-cracked-google/tech-goodies?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoveringTheSecretsOfVancouver+%28Discovering+The+Secrets+Of+Vancouver%29



> *So What Would Happen If China Cracked Google?*
> April 19th, 2010 Posted in Tech Goodies
> 
> Wondering just how badly Google has been compromised? And if I should be worried as a user of a ton of Google apps.
> 
> Always more to the story …
> 
> … losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s web services, including e-mail and business applications.
> 
> The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.
> 
> The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions. But the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not even be aware of, independent computer experts said.
> 
> The new details seem likely to increase the debate about the security and privacy of vast computing systems such as Google’s that now centralize the personal information of millions of individuals and businesses. Because vast amounts of digital information are stored in one place, a single breach can lead to disastrous losses.
> 
> The theft began with a single instant message sent to a Google employee in China, according to the person with knowledge of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.
> 
> The details surrounding the theft of the software have been a closely guarded secret by the company. Google first publicly disclosed the theft in a Jan. 12 posting on the company’s Web site, which stated that the company was changing its policy toward China in the wake of the theft of unidentified “intellectual property” and the apparent compromise of the e-mail accounts of two human rights activists.
> 
> Rest here.
> 
> What’s interesting is that this morning there were a rash of stories on US web security. Here’s a sample of the warning.


----------



## CougarKing

> *China Prepares for CIDEX 2010*
> By WENDELL MINNICK
> Published: 23 Apr 2010 08:23
> 
> *The China International Defence Electronics Exhibition (CIDEX 2010) is set for May 12-14 at the Beijing Exhibition Center.*
> 
> Organized by the China National Electronics Import and Export Corp. (CEIEC), CETC International Co., and Beijing Xinlong Electronics Technology Co., CIDEX is the "most professional and authoritative defense electronics exhibition in China, covering both military and civilian applications," show organizers said.
> 
> Sponsored by the General Equipment Headquarters of the People's Liberation Army, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and China Electronics Corp., CIDEX 2010 is expected to break previous records in attendance with more than 300 exhibitors from 13 countries and 20,000 visitors expected this year.
> 
> *"Promoting informationization of China's army will be the core task of the construction of Chinese army in the next five years," show officials said. Therefore investments in equipment for China's military have been rising steadily each year*.
> 
> "In this context, foreign manufactures and companies specialized in defense electronics are planning to enter the Chinese market and enhance … influence in China through certain channels."
> 
> The 3rd International Forum on Applications of Testing and Instruments will also be held during the exhibition, with several sessions touching on the latest advancements in equipment and systems. The forum will be held at the Beijing Hotel, and is organized and sponsored by CEIEC and Electronics World magazine.
> 
> Speakers will include Lin Jinghan, product manager, Measurement and Automation Business Unit, Taiwan-based ADLINK Technology; Wei Dong, product engineer German-based Rohde and Schwarz China; Ji Weidong, global marketing director, Beijing Rigol Electronic Technology Co.; Li Hailong, New York-based LeCroy Corp.; Su Jin, senior customer support manager, U.S.-based Tektronix Technology (China) Co.; Xu Yun, technical marketing engineer, Texas-based National Instruments; and Gao Ning, director, Information Products Division, Beijing Aerospace Control Technology Development Co.
> 
> Wei will talk about microwave signal analysis and measurement technology, Lin will give a paper on ADLINK's high performance PXI platform for military testing, and Li will discuss high-speed signal receiver jitter tolerance test solutions.


----------



## CougarKing

> *China's Navy Gets Its Act Together, and Gets Aggressive*
> 
> Abe Denmark directs the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. This is his first post for Danger Room.
> 
> China's decades-long military modernization effort is paying off. After assembling a revamped arsenal of new ships, subs, planes, and missiles, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is showing that they can use all those assets together, in an operation far from its shores. This display of improved military capabilities have occurred in conjunction with messages to the U.S. indicating a more aggressive approach from Beijing on China's claims over disputed waters of the South China Seas. The United States must respond to this emerging challenge with a responsible approach that keeps tensions low while sending a clear message to Beijing that the U.S. will not accept China's efforts to unilaterally control Southeast Asia's maritime commons.
> 
> *The South China Morning Post recently reported that destroyers, frigates, and auxiliary ships from the North Sea Fleet (based in Qingdao) passed through the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan to conduct a major confrontation exercise in the South China Sea. A few days later, Sovremenny guided missile destroyers, frigates, and submarines from the East Sea Fleet (based in Ningbo) passed through Japan's Miyako Strait without warning Tokyo and conducted anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Pacific waters southeast of Japan.* There have also been reports of naval aviators from several bases in the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions conducting long-range exercises that incorporated radar jamming, night flying, mid-air refueling, and simulated bombing runs in the South China Sea.
> 
> While provocative in their own right, these exercises are a sign that China's Navy has taken a major step forward. The SCMP article quotes an unnamed Asian defense attach¨ We've never seen anything on this scale before - they are finally showing us they can put it all together.
> 
> The implications of putting it all together are significant. The U.S. military's ability to dominate the skies over any battlefield is not just due to its technological superiority, but its ability to incorporate capabilities together to support one another. Anti-submarine warfare and mid-air refueling are very difficult and complex operations to undertake, requiring good technology, effective command and control, and highly skilled operators. China's ability to conduct these operations demonstrates a significantly increased prowess in complex military operations.
> 
> 
> These exercises are also notable for their location and their timing. *By transiting the Miyako Strait and operating in highly contested waters, China is sending a signal to the region that it is developing the ability to back up its territorial sea claims with more than just rhetoric*. These exercises were conducted a few weeks after Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and NSC Senior Director for Asia Jeff Bader visited Beijing. As reported by the New York Times, they were told that the South China Sea is a core interest for the PRC. This is an important phrase for Beijing ¨C it raises the South China Sea to the same level of significance as Taiwan and Tibet ¨C and suggests a newly aggressive and provocative approach.
> 
> China has long claimed that the South China Sea is within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) forces foreign militaries to seek permission from Beijing before they can transit through. Of course, xix other countries in the region also claim all or part of the South China Seas. So the United States has long identified EEZs as international waters through which military vessels can freely pass. We do not favor one claim, or one claimant country, over another. We urged then, as we do today, the maintenance of a calm and non-assertive environment in which contending claims may be discussed and, if possible, resolved, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in a 2008 speech, All of us in Asia must ensure that our actions are not seen as pressure tactics, even when they coexist beside outward displays of cooperation.
> 
> *By labeling the South China Sea as a core interest and conducting these exercises just days later, China has issued its reply: China will aggressively back its claims with a robust military capability.
> 
> The other, more implicit, message from Beijing could not be more stark: China's military is growing more capable, and the PLA Navy is now at the vanguard of China's military modernization effort. By acquiring advanced military technologies and developing the ability to conduct complex operations far from shore, China is changing military balances throughout the region with implications far beyond a Taiwan-related scenario.*
> 
> The U.S. and China have been in a similar position before. The 2001 collision between a Chinese jet and an American EP-3E in international airspace over the South China Sea caused a significant downturn in U.S.-China relations. Disturbingly, aggressive Chinese behavior toward American naval assets in the South China Seas in recent years, as happened in 2009 with the USS Impeccable, suggest that a naval EP-3 incident is a distinct possibility in the future.
> 
> *While the U.S. has been adjusting its posture in the Asia-Pacific region to account for China's military modernization, it must recognize that there is a political dynamic at play that should not be ignored. The South China Sea and the adjacent littoral waters off the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore will be the most strategically significant waterways of the 21st century. Already, 80 percent of China's oil imports flow through the Strait of Malacca, and Japan and Korea are similarly dependent on access to those waters.*
> The United States should continue to pursue the calm and non-assertive approach described by Secretary Gates at Shangri-La, and has been doing so through the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) dialogue with China. Yet there are two other avenues for the U.S. to ensure those important waterways remain open.
> *First, the U.S. should ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which defines Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) as international waterways through which warships may make innocent passage.* While the U.S. has long operated within its dictates, ratifying UNCLOS would add the weight of international law to American objections to claims of sovereignty over international waters.
> 
> *Second, the U.S. should adhere to the Law of Gross Tonnage, and regularly conduct freedom of navigation exercises through the South China Sea to ensure its continued openness. *  Continuing to treat the South China Seas as international waters will prevent habits of deference to Chinese claims from forming. This is not a bellicose or an aggressive approach, but is rather a continuation of long-standing American and international policies towards international waterways.
> 
> China's claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea, if left unchallenged, would make Beijing the arbiter of all international maritime traffic that passes through, which the U.S. cannot allow. As we can see from the U.S. Defense Department¡¯s annual reports to Congress on the Chinese military (pdf), China has been developing these capabilities for some time, and there is no sign that its ambitions have yet been satisfied.
> 
> Bottom line: this is just the beginning



Read More:
link

Plus a Japanese report detailng the recent transit by several Chinese warships through the Miyako Strait off Okinawa, without informing Japan:

video link


----------



## karl28

Should be interesting to see how the Chinese navy continues to develop .  On another note I have always been amazed on how some countries can develop really large armed forces and others can't or won't what ever there their government decides .


----------



## 2010newbie

On one of the CCTV (China Central Television) channels, I've noticed a lot of military related shows demonstrating China's new technologies and capabilities to the population. During the credits of one of the shows, it was set-up like a low-budget '80's music video - flashing between black and white to colour to sepia to flourescent highlights on pictures of ships, tanks, aircraft, field exercises, and even politicians in suits. There was even a loud '80's electronic soundtrack to go with it. Another show is a game show that takes different military personnel to compete against each other in different exercises - on the range, driving armoured vehicles through obstacle courses, etc. I asked someone at work and they said it was only for bragging rights and the participants didn't actually win anything on the show. They mentioned they have seen more and more of these types of shows lately also.


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan continues to prepare for this scenario even if cross-strait relations have been more conciliatory under Taiwan's current President Ma Ying Jieou.

link



> *Taiwan Exercise Focuses on Possible China Assault*
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 27 Apr 2010 05:49
> HUALIEN, Taiwan - Taiwan's military has lifted the veil on how it would respond to a massive Chinese air attack, showing that the island still takes the risk of war very seriously despite improving ties.
> 
> *On April 27, journalists were invited for the first time to a drill simulating aerial assaults on Taiwan's major air bases and testing the military's ability to recover quickly from such a shock.
> 
> The maneuvers, staged at a military air base near Hualien city in eastern Taiwan, played out a scenario in which runways were bombed by waves of bombers or missiles from the mainland.*
> "The drill is aimed to test our ability to repair runways as soon as possible so that fighter jets can take off should the air base be attacked," Taiwanese air force spokesman Lt. Gen. Pan Kung-hsiao said.
> 
> The exercise involved hundreds of troops, some operating heavy engineering equipment such as bulldozers, hydraulic shovels and bomb disposal engines.
> 
> *Pilots and logistic supply staff also demonstrated emergency procedures for four French-made Mirage fighter jets, which were ready for take-off six minutes after being scrambled.
> 
> Military analysts say any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be preceded by saturation air bombardment meant to wipe out civilian and military airports and key government facilities, and paralyze transportation systems*.
> 
> The exercise came after a Chinese flotilla, including two submarines and eight other ships, conducted drills in the East China Sea near Okinawa and then moved to the Pacific Ocean, according to Japanese media.
> The appearance of the Chinese fleet - the largest assembly of Chinese warships ever spotted in the region, according to Japan's defence ministry - has triggered alarms in Taiwan.
> 
> Taiwan's Deputy Defense Minister Chao Shih-chang warned in parliament April 26 the operation indicated China was now able to bypass the island's fortified west and attack the island from the east.
> 
> Ties between Taipei and Beijing have improved markedly since Ma Ying-jeou of the China-friendly Kuomintang party came to power in 2008, pledging to boost trade links and allowing in more Chinese tourists. But Beijing still maintains it could use force against the island.


----------



## CougarKing

A major scandal emerges, revolving around Taiwan's purchase of the 6 _Lafayette_-derived _Kang Ding_ Class Frigates back in 1991, IIRC.

Defense Industry Daily website



> *Taiwan’s Frigate Corruption Investigation: Full Steam Ahead*
> 05-May-2010 19:47 EDT
> 
> In 1991, Taiwan’s $2.8 billion buy of 6 Kang Ding Class multi-role stealth frigates from France, purchased the navy’s current high-end surface combatants. These ships are derivative of the Lafayette Class, which has been used as the base platform for several nations’ frigate designs – but they have *critical weaknesses *due to technologies not transferred to Taiwan.
> 
> *That’s not the only weakness associated with this purchase. A major bribery scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars has percolated for several years – and is also associated with a murder. It’s now associated with a court ruling that could reach $861 million, including almost $240 million in repayments from Thales itself…*
> 
> (...)



Business Week link




> *Taiwan Seeks $861 Million From Thales Warship Dispute (Update1)*
> May 05, 2010, 4:06 AM EDT
> By Yu-huay Sun
> 
> May 5 (Bloomberg) --* Taiwan is seeking $861 million from Thales SA, after an international arbitration court ruled in favor of the island in a dispute over a warship purchase, Martin Yu, a defense ministry spokesman, said by phone today.
> 
> Thales, a French defense contractor, said May 3 it has been told to pay 630 million euros ($818 million) over an “alleged breach of the terms pertaining to the use of intermediaries” relating to a contract to supply six frigates to Taiwan. Yu said Taiwan added related costs to the arbitration court’s award.*
> Thales will “initiate all available proceedings and actions against this award,” the company said. In a May 3 statement Thales said it “disputes the very grounds of this decision.”
> 
> Taiwan’s government signed a contract with Thomson-CSF SA, now called Thales, in 1991 for the frigates, according to the Web site of the Ministry of National Defense in Taipei. The agreement banned payments of commissions to intermediaries, which Thales violated, according to the ministry.
> 
> --Editors: Dirk Beveridge, Stan James


----------



## CougarKing

> Reuters link
> 
> CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - *Penn West Energy Trust will sell a 45 percent stake in a planned oil sands project to China Investment Corp for C$817 million ($805 million), the latest in a series of Canadian companies turning to China for cash to develop the massive resource.
> 
> 
> Canada's No. 2 energy trust, said on Thursday it will contribute oil sands properties near Peace River, Alberta, valued at C$1.8 billion, into a partnership, while China Investment will provide C$312 million in up-front cash and then pay C$505 million in development costs for the project.*
> 
> CIC will also take a 5 percent stake in Penn West, agreeing to acquire 23.5 million units at C$18.18 each, raising C$435 million for the trust.
> 
> 
> The agreement is the latest Chinese foray into Canada's oil sands, the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East, as the world's third largest economy looks to lock up energy sources to power its booming growth.
> 
> 
> Just last month, Sinopec Group agreed to pay $4.65 billion for a 9.03 percent stake in Canada's largest oil sands project, Syncrude Canada Ltd.
> 
> 
> For Penn West, the deal gives it the financial heft to build an oil sands project that it wouldn't otherwise have developed.
> 
> 
> "As an income trust, there's no way, when you pay out half you cash to investors, that you could get that thing up and running," said Jason Fleury, a spokesman for Penn West. "We viewed these assets as having huge potential but had great capital requirements."
> 
> 
> *Penn West's oil sands asset range over 237,000 acres. The company did not say how much bitumen, a tarry form of oil, the properties contain, saying only that the resource holds significant resources.*
> 
> 
> "They were looking for options for their oil sands properties but didn't have any immediate development plans," said Kyle Preston, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity. "But I don't think they had the capital or capacity to focus on it themselves."
> 
> 
> Preston added: "Overall this is a brilliant transaction. They get a ton of cash up front and get to move forward with development."
> 
> 
> The properties are currently producing 2,700 barrels of oil equivalent a day but Fleury said they will need a large-scale commercial pilot project.
> 
> 
> The development will use thermal technology to produce the reserves, where steam is pumped into the ground to liquefy the bitumen so it can flow to the surface.
> 
> 
> Penn West had been talking to CIC for about 11 months before announcing the agreement.
> 
> 
> The deal is the state-owned sovereign wealth fund's second big investment in Canada. Last year it took a 17.2 percent stake in mining firm Teck Resources .
> 
> 
> The closing of the financing and formation of the joint venture is expected by June 1.
> 
> 
> Units of Calgary, Alberta-based Penn West rose 83 Canadian cents, or 4.3 percent, to C$20.28 by midday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
> 
> 
> ($1=$1.01 Canadian)


----------



## CougarKing

Hong Kong voters push for more democracy in their current "one-country, two systems" arrangement:

Canadian Press link



> 1 hour, 12 minutes ago
> 
> 
> By Min Lee, The Associated Press
> 
> HONG KONG -* Hong Kongers voted Sunday in territory-wide special elections triggered by five opposition legislators who resigned in the hopes of pressuring Beijing to implement full democracy in this former British colony.*
> 
> 
> The five former lawmakers, who represent each of Hong Kong's five major electoral districts, quit in January with the intention of setting up a showdown against pro-Beijing candidates that will serve as a de facto referendum on democracy.
> 
> 
> *While Hong Kong has continued to enjoy Western-style civil liberties under Chinese rule, its top leader is picked by a committee stacked with Beijing loyalists and its 60-member legislature is half-elected, half chosen by interest groups.*
> 
> 
> Beijing has condemned the democracy activists' campaign and Hong Kong's leading pro-China political parties announced a boycott.
> 
> 
> With the five ex-legislators likely to win re-election overwhelmingly against a smattering of unknown candidates, political analysts question if the campaign will influence the Chinese government. Still, the democracy activists have pressed ahead, arguing that a strong turnout on Sunday will pressure Beijing.
> 
> 
> The five candidates made a last-minute appeal for votes on Sunday, canvassing restaurants where locals were enjoying...
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

All totalitarian governments face two related problems:

1. The 'people' want to participate in _validating_ their government. Even in very _conservative_ democracies, like Japan and Singapore, where a change in "ruling party" is extraordinarily rare* the electoral process provides a social _safety valve_ that allows people to reaffirm their 'consent' to be governed; and

2. It is hard to determine what people are thinking or wanting - the larger and more diverse the country the worse the problem. Thus, in Singapore, which is a fairly homogeneous, small city state with a very free press, etc, it is fairly easy to "take the pulse" of the nation. In China, which is huge and diverse (there are, really, about five or six "Chinas" - the rich, sophisticated east Coast, the coexisting poor, struggling East Coast, the developing central provinces, Xinjiang and Tibet and so on) , the problem of "taking the pulse" is frighteningly complex.

Elections help with both problems and the Chinese are allowing encouraging what appear to be free and fair elections in villages, rural areas and small towns. Hong Kong and Singapore are much envied by many people in e.g. Shanghai - not for their wealth or sophistication any more, Shanghai is just as rich, sophisticated and modern - but for the lack of corruption, which puts real, measurable money in almost everyone's pockets and for the 'openness' of the society and the government. The old men in Beijing are having to listen; it's not clear that they "hear" yet but I think they are listening.

Is China likely to become a democracy any time soon? No. Is Hong Kong likely to become more and more democratic? Yes.


----------
* Note that Taiwan is the exception that proves the rule, a very _conservative_ society with hihgly polarized politics


----------



## a_majoor

I have seen speculation about this over the years, but I can't say that this definitively proves the story or not:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7720461/USSR-planned-nuclear-attack-on-China-in-1969.html



> *USSR planned nuclear attack on China in 1969*
> 
> The Soviet Union was on the brink of launching a nuclear attack against China in 1969 and only backed down after the US told Moscow such a move would start World War Three, according to a Chinese historian.
> 
> Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Peter Foster in Beijing
> Published: 6:09PM BST 13 May 2010
> 
> USSR planned nuclear attack on China in 1969
> 
> The extraordinary assertion, made in a publication sanctioned by China's ruling Communist Party, suggests that the world came perilously close to nuclear war just seven years after the Cuban missile crisis.
> 
> Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides.
> 
> He said Soviet diplomats warned Washington of Moscow's plans "to wipe out the Chinese threat and get rid of this modern adventurer," with a nuclear strike, asking the US to remain neutral.
> 
> But, he says, Washington told Moscow the United States would not stand idly by but launch its own nuclear attack against the Soviet Union if it attacked China, loosing nuclear missiles at 130 Soviet cities. The threat worked, he added, and made Moscow think twice, while forcing the two countries to regulate their border dispute at the negotiating table.
> 
> He quotes Soviet ministers and diplomats at the time to bolster his claim.
> 
> On 15 October 1969, he quotes Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin as telling Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev that Washington has drawn up "detailed plans" for a nuclear war against the USSR if it attacked China.
> 
> "[The United States] has clearly indicated that China's interests are closely related to theirs and they have mapped out detailed plans for nuclear war against us," Kosygin is said to have told Brezhnev.
> 
> That same day he says Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, told Brezhnev something similar after consultations with US diplomats. "If China suffers a nuclear attack, they (the Americans) will deem it as the start of the third world war," Dobrynin said. "The Americans have betrayed us."
> 
> The historian claims that Washington saw the USSR as a greater threat than China and wanted a strong China to counter-balance Soviet power. Then US President Richard Nixon was also apparently fearful of the effect of a nuclear war on 250,000 US troops stationed in the Asia-Pacific region and still smarting from a Soviet refusal five years earlier to stage a joint attack on China's nascent nuclear programme.
> 
> The claims are likely to stir debate about a period of modern history that remains mired in controversy.
> 
> Mr Liu, the author, admits his version of history is likely to be contested by rival scholars. It is unclear whether he had access to special state archives but the fact that his articles appeared in such an official publication in a country where the media is so tightly controlled is being interpreted by some as a sign that he did have special access.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There are "underground cities" in Beijing, Shanghai and other major Chinese cities, dug, mainly by hand, throughout the late sixties and seventies and even into the eighties. University, high school and even elementary school students all took 'shifts' digging the tunnels, along with workers and senior citizens. I have no idea how well grounded the fear was, but it, the fear, was real.

The Chinese believed, then, that they could survive a Russian nuclear attack and then rise up from the smouldering ruins and meet and defeat the Russian _barbarians_. They feel the same about the American _barbarians_ today.


----------



## CougarKing

> Manufacturing.Net - May 17, 2010
> 
> BEIJING (Kyodo) -- *China's Air Force has refused to accept 16 J-11B fighters manufactured by a domestic aircraft maker due to technical problems, the Kanwa Defense Review magazine said in its June issue, quoting a Western intelligence source in Beijing.*
> 
> China is believed to have developed the new fighter based on technology from the Russian fighter Sukhoi Su-27, sparking speculation that the maker, Shenyang Aircraft Corp., may have failed to employ Russian technology accurately.
> 
> Shenyang Aircraft, based in Liaoning Province, manufactured 16 J-11B fighters in 2009.
> 
> *"When the Air Force was checking them up for delivery, J-11B had abnormal vibration after taking off," the magazine quoted the source as saying. "As a result, the Air Force refused to accept the aircraft." *
> 
> A Chinese military source said the J-11B was not chosen for exhibition at the National Day military parade in October last year due to doubts over technical feature of the fighter, according to the magazine.



Manufacturing.net link 

Plus:

Taiwan inagurates a "stealth" missile patrol boat squadron:

Channel News Asia link


----------



## jollyjacktar

CougarDaddy said:
			
		

> Manufacturing.net link
> 
> Plus:
> 
> Taiwan inagurates a "stealth" missile patrol boat squadron:
> 
> Channel News Asia link



Even they know some of their stuff is shite.


----------



## CougarKing

CNN link



> *American made ... Chinese owned*
> 
> By Sheridan Prasso, contributing editor
> 
> May 7, 2010: 9:35 AM ET
> 
> 
> (Fortune) -- About a mile past the Bountiful Blessings Church on the outskirts of Spartanburg, S.C., make a right turn. There, tucked into an industrial court behind a row of sapling cherry trees not much taller than I am, past a company that makes rubber stamps and another that stitches logos onto caps and bags, is a brand-new factory: the state-of-the-art American Yuncheng Gravure Cylinder plant. Due to open any day now, it will make cylinders used to print labels like the ones around plastic soda bottles. But unlike its neighbors in Spartanburg, Yuncheng is a Chinese company. It has come to South Carolina because by Chinese standards, America is darn cheap.
> 
> Yes, you read that right. The land Yuncheng purchased in Spartanburg, at $350,000 for 6.5 acres, cost one-fourth the price of land back in Shanghai or Dongguan, a gritty city near Hong Kong where the company already runs three plants. Electricity is cheaper too: Yungcheng pays up to 14¢ per kilowatt-hour in China at peak usage, and just 4¢ in South Carolina. And no brownouts either, a sporadic problem in China. It's true that American workers are much more expensive, of course, and the overall cost of making a widget in China remains lower, and perhaps always will.
> 
> 
> *But for hundreds of Chinese companies like Yuncheng, the U.S. has become a better, less expensive place to set up shop. It could be the biggest role reversal since, well ... when Nixon went to China. "The gap between manufacturing costs in the U.S. and China is shrinking," explains John Ling, a naturalized American from China who runs the South Carolina Department of Commerce's business recruitment office in Shanghai. Ling recruited Yuncheng to Spartanburg, and others too: Chinese companies have invested $280 million and created more than 1,200 jobs in South Carolina alone.
> 
> Today some 33 American states, ports, and municipalities have sent representatives like Ling to China to lure jobs once lost to China back to the U.S.*: Besides affordable land and reliable power, states and cities are offering tax credits and other incentives to woo Chinese manufacturers. Beijing, meanwhile, which has mandated that Chinese companies globalize by expanding to key markets around the world, is chipping in by offering to finance up to 30% of the initial investment costs, according to Chinese business sources.
> 
> What would Henry Luce think?
> 
> *The enticements are working. Chinese companies announced new direct investments in the U.S. of close to $5 billion in 2009 alone, according to New York City-based economic consultancy the Rhodium Group, which tallied the numbers for Fortune. That's well below Japanese investment in the U.S., which peaked at $148 billion in 1991, but a big jump from China's previous investments, which had been averaging around $500 million a year. Chinese firms last year acquired or announced they were starting more than 50 U.S. companies. And when China finally allows the value of its currency, the yuan, to appreciate -- and it's just a question of when -- Americans can expect to see Chinese projects, small today, really take off and have an impact on the U.S. economy. This could be a good thing for relations between the two countries. "It will take many years to balance out the flow of U.S. investment into China," says Dan Rosen, a principal at the Rhodium Group. But, he says, China's aggressive interest in U.S. investment suddenly gives Washington some leverage as it seeks to negotiate with Beijing on tariffs, trade issues, and economic policy.*
> None of that matters much in Spartanburg. Skilled workers at American Yuncheng will earn $25 to $30 an hour, line operators $10 to $12. That's a lot more than the $2 an hour that unskilled labor costs in China, but the company can qualify for a state payroll tax credit of $1,500 per worker (for any company creating more than 10 jobs). And by being closer to companies like Coca-Cola, Yuncheng can respond more quickly when they need new labels designed to show that a product has reduced its fat content or added more flavor. If business goes well, company president Li Wenchun expects to double the size of his operation, maybe in five to 10 years, and employ up to 120 Americans. "I'd like it to be next month, but it depends on how fast we develop the market here," he tells me through a Mandarin interpreter.
> 
> So far there's little sign of anti-Chinese sentiment among South Carolinians, who watched their state lose its cotton-based textile-manufacturing industry to low-cost countries like China. Fortune asked Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican torchbearer for conservative causes, what he thinks of communists creating work in his home state. "South Carolina is one of the best places in the world to do business, and that's why so many international companies are moving jobs into our state" is his only reply.
> 
> Brenda Missouri, a 43-year-old leaks tester who works for appliance maker Haier, speaks about her employer in glowing terms. Haier was the first Chinese company to build a factory in the U.S. -- a refrigerator plant in Camden, S.C., in 2000. "They're good business folks; they get the job done," she says. As for communism? "Doesn't matter," she shrugs. "It's money that makes the difference."
> 
> Chinese companies, American workers
> 
> Last December the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations dispatched me to Corpus Christi to give a speech about the Chinese and their economy. Why? Because, they told me, the region is about to become home to the largest-ever Chinese-built factory in the U.S., a $1 billion plant by Tianjin Pipe Group to manufacture seamless pipe for oil drilling. If everything proceeds as planned -- the company received its air-quality permit on April 14 and hopes to break ground by fall -- Tianjin Pipe expects to employ 600 Texans by 2012 and to provide an estimated $2.7 billion to the local economy over the next decade. Corpus Christians, it turned out, wanted to know more about their new neighbors who are expected to relocate 40 to 50 families to Texas.
> 
> *Upon arrival, I find it impossible not to notice the resemblance of Corpus Christi's long, curving coastline on the Gulf of Mexico to the one near Tianjin on the Bohai Sea between northern China and Korea. Some 75 U.S. locales competed for the factory, but when Chinese delegations from Tianjin Pipe visited Corpus Christi, the townspeople made them feel at home by welcoming the visitors to backyard barbecues. They even enlisted the Taiwan-born former owner of the local Chinese restaurant, Yalee Shih -- perhaps the only woman in town who could speak Mandarin -- to help them navigate cultural nuances. Shih, who also sits on the board of the Texas State Museum of Asian Cultures, delicately helped prevent a multimillion-dollar translation error over building costs that might have cost Corpus Christi the project, and also quashed what would have been an impolitic gift of clocks -- which to the Chinese symbolize death or the end of a relationship -- from a local retailer. She and others in the region's business community plan to help guide their new residents through life in America, like how to buy a car, how to rent a house, as well as where to go to buy fragrant rice instead of Uncle Ben's.*
> 
> In the end, while feeling at home helps, it does come down to business, says J.J. Johnston, executive vice president and chief business development officer of the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corp. "They like the strategic location of our region, the convenient access to materials coming in -- mostly scrap metal and pig iron -- and the ability to export to North and South America through the port of Corpus Christi," he says.
> 
> There are other incentives. *On April 9 the U.S. Commerce Department imposed import duties of up to 99% on the type of seamless pipe that is to be manufactured by Tianjin Pipe -- a reprisal prompted by the United Steelworkers union. The Chinese company, the world's largest maker of steel pipe, had said it could not afford to export to the U.S. if tariffs were over 20%. Now its pipe will be made in America. "It's just another reason they have to have a U.S.-based production facility," says Johnston.*
> Even without tariffs, Tianjin had been looking to expand -- as are many Chinese companies once they reach about $100 million in annual sales. "Chinese companies, as they get bigger, have to start thinking about their global positioning," says Clarence Kwan, who runs the Chinese Services Group at Deloitte, which advises Chinese companies on doing business in the U.S. Officially the Chinese government has given approval to over 1,200 Chinese investments in the U.S., but that number is considered low because it doesn't count those made via Hong Kong -- where many Chinese companies earn equity capital from being publicly traded -- or tax havens like the Virgin Islands, where Chinese investment may stop first before flowing to the U.S. Plus, investments below $100 million don't need Beijing's nod and may be approved at the local level.
> 
> Chinese companies see America as more than a manufacturing center. So far this year they have announced plans to build a wind-energy turbine plant and wind farm in Nevada that will create 1,000 American jobs; purchased the 400-employee Los Angeles Marriott Downtown out of foreclosure; and acquired a shuttered shopping center in Milwaukee, with plans to turn it into a mega-mall for 200 Chinese retailers. In some cases Chinese companies are resuscitating American outfits that had been left for dead. About 70 miles west of Spartanburg, near the Georgia border, past signs reading "24-hour fried chicken," another Chinese company is hiring engineers -- metallurgical and mechanical, some from nearby Clemson University. In June 2009, Top-Eastern Group, a tool manufacturer based in China's coastal city of Dalian, acquired a factory here along with three other facilities from Kennametal, one of America's largest machine-tool makers, after the U.S. company, based in Latrobe, Pa., reported a $137 million loss (citing a slowdown in industrial activity) in the quarter before the sale.
> 
> 
> *China: scapegoat or threat*
> This plant, in Seneca, S.C., makes drill bits. And in the months since his purchase of it for $29 million, Top-Eastern founder Jeff Chee has invested another $10 million to upgrade machinery, built a $3 million logistics center, brought back Kennametal's furloughed workers, hired 120 more, and now has his 260-employee plant working overtime filling orders for the Cleveland Twist Drills, Chicago Latrobe, Putnam, and Bassett brands he acquired. He brought back the company's old name, which was Greenfield Industries before Kennametal acquired it in 1997, and emblazoned it on a sign out front.
> 
> General Electric's former CEO , Jack Welch, he volunteers, is his inspiration. "I've read a lot of books, and I learned a lot from him," Chee says in broken English amid the sharp smell of grinding steel. "One person can change a lot." As one of China's self-made entrepreneurs, who started Top-Eastern in 1994 with just $500, Chee now has worldwide sales of more than $120 million, 4,000 employees, and factories in Germany and Brazil. He visits the South Carolina plant monthly to make sure all is proceeding as planned, and employs American managers to run it in his absence rather than bring over Chinese. "There's good, experienced people and good know-how already here," he says.
> 
> How can he make a drill bit factory profitable where Kennametal had struggled? By increasing productivity with new equipment and cutting costs, he says. Plus, Chee forges his own steel, and he owns the mines back in China for two of its more expensive components, tungsten and molybdenum. The fact that he can source from himself means he keeps the margins -- and now his tools are officially made in the U.S. The cost of making those products is much higher than in China, he says, "but the problem is customers just accept 'made in U.S.A.' products, so I have no choice. Lots of customers here have government contracts that have 'made in U.S.A.' requirements."
> 
> And how do the employees feel about having a Chinese entrepreneur come to their rescue? "Just because it's a Chinese owner, they don't really care," says Scott Henderson, a 47-year-old manufacturing manager who had been furloughed one week a month along with his workers before Chee bought the factory. "They're all happy to be working 40 hours a week." They also have the opportunity for overtime, and a third, graveyard shift has been added to serve a nearly 40% rise in orders. "I feel great about it," says Sam Marcengill, a 24-year-old technician at the plant. Last year he was laid off for six months before Chee's purchase gave him his job back. Now he's on overtime, 48 hours a week. "The work's a lot more steady. It's better. Personally I'm a lot better off. It's a great thing."
> 
> *Never mind the hiccups Chinese companies experienced when they tried to enter the U.S. before. In 2005, Washington famously blocked China's National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOO C) from buying Unocal, and Chinese appliance maker Haier failed to acquire Maytag. Now, like the Japanese in the 1980s -- when U.S. trade frictions combined with Japan's boom blossomed into Honda and Toyota manufacturing plants -- the Chinese are here to stay. Their presence initially made some folks uneasy. A few years ago a caller to The Rush Limbaugh Show complained that as he was driving past the Haier plant in Camden, the Chinese flag was flying higher than the American flag and the South Carolina state flag out front. It was an easy mistake to make by anyone looking at the three equal-height flagpoles from an angle.
> 
> Conservative media joined in and called for protests, and the public rang the factory to complain. The Chinese executives at Haier had no idea flags were such a big deal, and it became their bugaboo. The complaints continued until about a year and a half ago when Haier America factory president Joseph Sexton, who was new to the job, decided to fix it. He had two of the poles lowered so that the U.S. flag looks highest from all angles.*
> 
> It took Haier some time to work through the issues of being a Chinese employer in a small, historic Southern town (pop. 6,682) lined with stately antebellum houses and home to two Revolutionary War battlefields. "Having a Chinese manager didn't work. That's why they took all the Chinese managers out of here," says Haier's human resources director, Gerald Reeves, who was one of the first hired by Haier and guided the Chinese through the realities of American-style personnel management -- including convincing them that they needed to offer health insurance. He once even asked John Ling, South Carolina's man in Shanghai, to fly home from China to talk to a manager who was arousing employee resentment by publicly embarrassing the workers, Chinese-style, for their mistakes.
> 
> Now the only way to know you're in a Chinese factory is by looking up at the large Chinese flag hanging from the rafters -- alongside an American one, of course -- and by the very Chinese motivational slogans on the walls: "Spirit of entrepreneurship -- strive for a clearly defined objective and make the impossible possible without an excuse" reads the banner over the refrigerator testing line. And if you come in February, Sexton organizes a Chinese New Year party with food and outdoor firecrackers.
> 
> What is perhaps most startling about the Haier factory is that it is actually shipping goods back to China. Best known for its mini-fridges for dorm rooms and studio apartments, Haier's U.S. plant also makes large units, good for supersized American McMansions but too large for a typical Chinese household. Now a growing number of wealthy people in China want to supersize too, so Haier has realized it can ship a small number, maybe 4,000 a year, of its highest-end refrigerators home and sell them for $2,600 apiece -- more than China's average annual income of around $2,000. (Haier also ships U.S.-made refrigerators to India, Australia, Mexico, and Canada.) There aren't enough wealthy customers yet to make it worthwhile retooling any of the 29 Haier factories in China, but the nearby deepwater port in Charleston, S.C., makes export easy enough. "There are folks in China who want high-end products," says Haier America factory president Joseph Sexton. "China is a much different place than people think."
> 
> Chinese newcomers would do well to learn from Haier's missteps as well as its great strides. "They're coming with little experience into a highly sophisticated market, and they are bound to make mistakes," says Karl Sauvant, executive director of the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment at Columbia University and a law lecturer there, who in February published an edited volume titled Investing in the United States: Is the U.S. Ready for FDI From China?
> 
> "This is the thing the Japanese did fairly successfully: You have to be a good corporate citizen, source locally, contribute to causes and charities in the local community, and be familiar with how to navigate the corridors of Washington," says Sauvant. "And in key managerial positions you should have Americans." Legal questions, such as whether Chinese companies operating in America would be subject in U.S. courts to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for business practices in, say, India or elsewhere have yet to be tested, he says. And then there's the issue of the local sensitivities exhibited in the Haier flag-flying incident.
> 
> *Unlike Japan, China is no U.S. military ally -- despite President Obama's naming China a "strategic partner," instead of the "strategic competitor" label it had under the Bush administration. Politically it remains a communist country, despite its capitalist economy. There's obviously more to overcome.
> 
> Chinese investors say they don't care too much about politics, but hope their entry into the U.S. can be a positive force. "This will definitely help U.S.-China relations," remarks Li, the manager of the print-cylinder factory Yuncheng, as he guides me on a tour. "Increasing communication makes the two sides closer." Even if it doesn't, business is business. "Good products are borderless," he notes. And there's always a Chinese proverb to cite: "It takes 10 years to make a sword," says Li. In other words, keep at it till you get it right, and the outcome will be strong and lasting. And perhaps transform into the plowshare that sows a mutually beneficial harvest for America and China both. *


----------



## Edward Campbell

Nothing surprising in the last post, except that I've been to _"gritty"_ cities, in America, Asia and Europe and I've been to Dongguan and Dongguan is not _"gritty"_.


----------



## a_majoor

Another speculative look at the relationship between Russia, China and the United States based on the reported thwarting of a Soviet nuclear attack against China in the 1960's:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/05/china-soviet-and-american-relations.html#more



> *China Soviet and American Relations During the 1960s and Proposed and Blocked Nuclear Attacks*
> 
> The UK Telegraph published an article which repeats an assertion that the Soviet Union was on the brink of launching a nuclear attack against China in 1969 and only backed down after the US told Moscow such a move would start World War Three, according to a Chinese historian, Liu Chenshan.
> 
> Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides. Liu Chenshan writing was in a publication sanctioned by China's ruling Communist Party
> 
> Note: Getting a true understanding of the geopolitical events and relationships is important for understanding how relations between Russia, China and the United States are likely to develop in the future. It is also important to understand the actual level of risks for wars of the nuclear and non-nuclear variety.
> 
> The Foreign Policy Journal indicates that this is old news and that they believe the memoirs of Richard Nixon’s aide John Haldeman who seems to have first broken the nuclear attack story in his memoirs in 1978.
> 
> Haldeman stated that for years the USSR had been trying to warn the USA not to allow China to become a nuclear power. This claim by Haldeman seems to directly contradict the claim by Liu that Nixon, when responding to the 1969 Soviet request for neutrality, did so not only because he regarded China as a means of containing Russia, but also because he was still “smarting from a Soviet refusal five years earlier to stage a joint attack on China’s nascent nuclear programme.”
> 
> If we place this all into context, I believe that the 1978 Haldeman version is more likely than that of Liu’s present contention. If the USA had asked for support from the USSR to bomb China’s nuclear programme in 1964, this was a year following Sino-Russian border conflicts amounting to 4000 dead. In 1960, there had been 400 clashes; in 1962, 5000. The USSR would have no sentimental, comradely, ideological, diplomatic, or geo-political reasons to oppose such a US proposal and then change her mind five years later and make a similar suggestion to the USA.
> 
> The relationship between China, the USA, and the USSR is quite contrary to how it is generally perceived. A more accurate scenario is that the USA backed Mao and the USSR backed Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin, prior to Mao’s assumption to power, regarded him as a Trotskyite. While Stalin had previously backed Mao as a counter to a Trotskyite coterie in China headed by Prof. Chen Tu-hsiu, Mao’s onetime mentor, by 1938, Mao was being denounced in the USSR as a Trotskyite.
> 
> During World War II, while the USA was pushing Chiang to make an alliance with Mao against the Japanese, Stalin was counselling Chiang against this. Gen. George Marshall warned Chiang in 1946 at a crucial time that if he persisted in pursuing the beleaguered Red Army into Northern Manchuria, U.S. aid would stop. This provided Mao with a base from which to recuperate and finally defeat Chiang. On the other hand, Stalin’s aid to Mao was granted according to Russian interests as distinct from communist fraternity, one particularly dramatic example of which was the demand for repayment in food that resulted in 10,000 peasants dying of starvation in Yenan. This was a prelude to the debilitating Sino-Soviet Treaty that was to result in the “Great Famine” for the same reason.
> 
> For now, the two giant neighbours have been thrust together by their shared suspicion of America and they cooperate as tactical allies, working in the United Nations Security Council to contain Washington’s power. But this affinity is based on little more than having the same rival. The empty lands of the Russian Far East, far closer to Beijing than Moscow, contain major sources of tension between the two powers.
> 
> …The quest for raw materials is the central goal of the country’s foreign policy. And virtually every natural resource imaginable is found just over the border. Here, beneath steppe and tundra, are large reserves of natural gas, oil, diamonds and gold, while millions of square miles of birch and pine provide immense supplies of timber. All this amounts to an astonishing combination: a densely packed country trying to keep its economy roaring ahead by laying its hands on natural resources, living alongside a largely empty region with huge mineral wealth and fewer inhabitants year on year. Russia and China might operate a tactical alliance, but there is already tension between them over the Far East. Moscow is wary of large numbers of Chinese settlers moving into this region, bringing timber and mining companies in their wake.
> 
> The most compelling reason that confrontation between the USA and China is unlikely is that the economies of the two are symbiotic, which cannot be said in regard to the relationship between China and Russia or Russia and the USA.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Nothing surprising in the last post, except that I've been to _"gritty"_ cities, in America, Asia and Europe and I've been to Dongguan and Dongguan is not _"gritty"_.




I forgot I had this picture; it is Dongguan city centre. Now, of course, Dongguan has an industrial area that looks a lot like the industrial area of most other Chinese cities - which is to say rather like the industrial areas of American, other Asian and European cities. But Dongguan, like many other Chinese cities, is aiming for better _value added_ industries because other countries are already able and willing to undercut China on low skill industrial jobs.


PS: the lady is my friend's cousin.


----------



## CougarKing

The earlier posts about China and Russia nearly coming to war during the 1960s and 70s  aren't really that surprising, since a sort of schism between Moscow and Beijing had developed during the Cold War from the 50s onwards, which partially had to do with who led the Communist world; this explains why Chinese and Soviet forces actually came to a number of border clashes in the late 1960s. If you go to the Chinese People's Military Museum (Jun Shi Bo Wu Guan/军事博物馆) in Beijing, you will see a captured Soviet T-55 tank from one of those skirmishes.  

At times, Beijing and Moscow used proxies to fight each other, such as when Vietnam (which was pro-Moscow at the time) occupied Cambodia in 1978 and forced the pro-China, Khmer Rouge government away from power; this provoked the ire of China, driving them to invade Vietnam in the costly 1979 invasion which saw China withdraw. And didn't the Vietnamese also allow the Soviets to base some of their ships at Cam Ranh Bay for a while in the late 70s and 80s? One can infer that the Soviet naval presence was another signal to China to back off. Thus it is probably not surprising that Beijing and Moscow nearly came to nuclear blows during this point of the Cold War. 

Perhaps one can infer that the Chinese historians intended to portray the then USSR as another foreign power trying to victimize China to add to the theme of a "China being victimized" which seems to be recurring all throughout their recent history since the Qing Dynasty.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, from last week:

(Contrast this to another earlier article which stated that the PLAAF was reluctant to accept "made-in-China fighters" like the J-11B/indigenously-produced Su27)



> Reuters link
> 
> 26 minutes ago
> 
> By Jim Wolf
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China is building an advanced combat jet that may rival within eight years Lockheed Martin Corp's F-22 Raptor, the premier U.S. fighter, a U.S. intelligence official said.
> 
> 
> The date cited for the expected deployment is years ahead of previous Pentagon public forecasts and may be a sign that China's rapid military buildup is topping many experts' expectations.
> 
> 
> *"We're anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter ... operational right around 2018," Wayne Ulman of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center testified on Thursday to a congressionally mandated group that studies national security implications of U.S.-China economic ties.*
> 
> 
> "Fifth-generation" fighters feature cutting-edge capabilities, including shapes, materials and propulsion systems designed to make them look as small as a swallow on enemy radar screens.
> 
> 
> Defense Secretary Robert Gates had said last year that China "is projected to have no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020" and only a "handful" by 2025.
> 
> 
> He made the comments on July 16 to the Economic Club of Chicago while pushing Congress to cap F-22 production at 187 planes in an effort to save billions of dollars in the next decade.
> 
> 
> *Ulman is China "issues manager" at the center that is the U.S. military's prime intelligence producer on foreign air and space forces, weapons and systems. He said China's military was eyeing options for possible use of force against Taiwan, which Beijing deems a rogue province.
> 
> 
> The People's Liberation Army, as part of its Taiwan planning, also is preparing to counter "expected U.S. intervention in support of Taiwan," he told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
> 
> 
> He said the PLA's strategy included weakening U.S. air power by striking air bases, aircraft carrier strike groups and support elements if the U.S. stepped in.
> 
> 
> Attacks against U.S. "basing infrastructure" in the western Pacific would be carried out by China's air force along with an artillery corps' conventional cruise missile and ballistic missile forces, he said outlining what he described as a likely scenario.
> 
> 
> He described China as a "hard target" for intelligence-gathering and said there were a lot of unknowns about its next fighter, a follow-on to nearly 500 4th generation fighters "that can be considered at a technical parity" with older U.S. fighters.
> 
> 
> "It's yet to be seen exactly how (the next generation) will compare one on one with say an F-22," Ulman told the commission. "But it'll certainly be in that ballpark."*
> 
> 
> Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, is in the early stages of producing another fifth-generation fighter, the F-35. Developed with eight partner countries in three models with an eye to achieving economies of scale and export sales, it will not fly as fast nor as high as the F-22.
> 
> 
> Gates has argued that the United States enjoys a lopsided advantage in fighters, warships and other big-ticket military hardware. Some U.S. congressional decisions on arms programs amount to overkill, out of touch with "real-world" threats and today's economic strains, he said in two speeches on the issue this month.
> 
> 
> "For example, should we really be up in arms over a temporary projected shortfall of about 100 Navy and Marine strike fighters relative to the number of carrier wings, when America's military possesses more than 3,200 tactical combat aircraft of all kinds?" Gates said on May 8.
> 
> 
> "Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?" he added at the Eisenhower presidential library in Abilene, Kansas.
> 
> 
> Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, discounted the gap between the timelines cited by Gates and Ulman. He declined to comment on whether China had made enough progress since last July to change intelligence on the next fighter's debut.
> 
> Richard Fisher, an expert on the Chinese military at the private International Assessment and Strategy Center, said Gates' decision to end F-22 production is proving to be "potentially very wrong."
> 
> "We will need more F-22s if we are going to adequately defend our interests," he said in an interview on Thursday at the hearing.
> 
> *Bruce Lemkin, a U.S. Air Force deputy undersecretary for ties to foreign air forces, told the commission he had visited Taiwan twice in his official capacity and that the capabilities of Taiwan's aging F-16s, also built by Lockheed, were not "keeping up."
> 
> Whether to meet Taiwan's request for advanced F-16 fighters or upgrade the old ones was still under review by the Obama administration, he said before Ulman spoke.*


----------



## a_majoor

A short not from FT, which hints at a potentially huge problem lurking below the radar. China's government will take steps to intervene in the market, producing many unintended consequences (Community Reinvestment Act; Freddie Mac and Fannie May anyone?) and probably end up with a far more serious problem on their hands as multiple crisis link up into a cascade failure. Even China is not immune from the Local Knowledge Problem. 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d6b8f8d8-6ce2-11df-91c8-00144feab49a,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fd6b8f8d8-6ce2-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fpajamasmedia.com%2Finstapundit%2F



> *China property risk is worse than in US*
> By Geoff Dyer in Beijing
> 
> Published: May 31 2010 20:08 | Last updated: May 31 2010 20:08
> 
> The problems in China’s housing market are more severe than those in the US before the financial crisis because they combine a potential bubble with the risk of social discontent, according to an adviser to the Chinese central bank.
> 
> Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua University and a member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee, said recent government measures to cool the property market needed to be part of a long-term push to bring high housing prices under control.


----------



## CougarKing

> *China boasts world's second-fastest supercomputer*
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 23:07:00 06/01/2010
> 
> BEIJING – China's ambitions to become a major global power in the world of supercomputing were given a boost when one of its machines was ranked second-fastest in a survey.
> 
> *The Nebulae machine at the National Supercomputing Center in the southern city of Shenzhen can perform at 1.271 petaflops per second, according to the Top 500 survey (http://www.top500.org), which ranks supercomputers.
> 
> A petaflop is equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations.
> 
> The United States still dominates the list, holding top spot with its Jaguar supercomputer at a government facility in Tennessee, and more than half of the systems on the list, released at a supercomputing conference in Germany.*
> 
> But China has a total of 24 systems on the list, and two in the top ten, with the Tianhe-1 supercomputer in Tianjin ranking number seven.
> 
> And the Nebulae, built by Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd., has a theoretical speed of 2.98 petaflops per second, which would make it the fastest in the world.
> 
> The machine's uses include scientific computing and gene sequencing, according to Chinese state media.
> 
> Calls to the company for further comment went unanswered.
> 
> The supercomputers on the Top 500 list are rated based on speed of performance in a benchmark test. Submissions are voluntary, so it does not include all machines.
> 
> The survey is produced twice-yearly.


----------



## CougarKing

Predictably, Xinhua and CCTV didn't report this:   :

NY Times link



> *The strike that has crippled production at Honda Motor’s factories in China has come as a wake-up call to Japan’s flagship exporters as they seek to remain competitive and push into China’s burgeoning market with the help of low-wage workers.
> 
> The strike by Chinese workers to protest pay and working conditions has cost Honda, Japan’s second-largest carmaker after Toyota, thousands of units in lost production in the world’s biggest auto market. The walkout began on May 17 at a Honda transmission factory in Foshan, in the southeast, and has shut down all four of Honda’s factories on the mainland. *
> 
> “Honda takes the situation very seriously,” said Yasuko Matsuura, a spokeswoman for Honda in Tokyo. The company “is working toward reaching a resolution as soon as possible.” On Tuesday, there were conflicting accounts by the company and Chinese employees about how soon workers might return to their jobs.
> 
> In Tokyo, the strike has driven home a salient point: *as Chinese incomes and expectations rise in line with the country’s rapid growth, while Japan’s own economy falters, the two countries face a realignment that could permanently alter the way their economies interact.
> 
> To complicate the picture, Japanese companies see the Chinese as crucial consumers of their goods to make up for a shrinking and aging market at home. Some of the most profitable Japanese companies, like Fast Retailing, which runs the budget clothing line Uniqlo, have relied on production in China since the 1990s to keep prices low.
> 
> “Japan is starting to realize that the age of cheap wages in China is coming to an end, and companies that looked to China only for lower costs need to change course,*” said Tomoo Marukawa, a specialist on the Chinese economy at Tokyo University.
> 
> Despite the consequences for production costs, a rise in wages and standards of living in China would be welcomed by many Japanese exporters. The same companies that produce in China have also moved to sell their wares there, moving factories to the mainland to reduce costs further and meet the needs of local customers.
> 
> In Uniqlo’s case, as incomes in China rose, it followed up with local stores in 2002; the company has opened 64 outlets in China and aims to open 1,000 stores there in the next decade.
> 
> And yet, for Honda, prices of its cars in China may have to drop considerably before the company can truly tap into the market.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is more about the continuously and, I think, accelerating socio-economic _reformation_ of China:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/change-finally-afoot-for-chinas-workers/article1590744/


> Change finally afoot for China’s workers
> *The years of an endless supply of cheap labour are coming to an end*
> 
> David Pilling
> 
> London — FT.com
> Published on Thursday, Jun. 03, 2010
> 
> Listen to the following statements about the strike at Honda’s transmission plant in Guangdong province, one that has brought the Japanese company’s car production throughout China  to a juddering halt. The first goes like this: “The strike reflects the low wages the bosses are paying the workers. The system does not provide a legal base for collective bargaining.” The second, like this: “In the three decades of opening-up, ordinary workers are among those who have received the smallest share of economic prosperity. The temporary stoppage of production lines in the four Honda factories highlights the necessity of organised labour protection in Chinese factories.”
> 
> The first speaker is Han Dongfang, a former railway electrician who, in 1989, tried to unite workers and students during the Tiananmen Square protests. He was jailed for his troubles, contracted tuberculosis in prison and had a lung surgically removed. Now living in exile in Hong Kong , he works as a trade union activist, monitoring workers’ rights in mainland China.
> So why are a leading dissident from Tiananmen Square and a newspaper with close ties to the Communist party speaking with one voice on such a delicate issue?
> 
> First, government authorities, through the media, are simply acknowledging reality. The years of an endless supply of cheap labour, on which the first three decades of China’s economic lift-off was built, are coming to an end. That is partly demographic. Because of China’s one-child policy, the supply of workers under 40 has dwindled by as much as a fifth. Fewer workers mean more bargaining power. Honda staff are demanding no less than a 50 per cent rise. Foxconn, a China-based Taiwanese contract manufacturer plagued by a recent spate of worker suicides, has just granted a 30 per cent wage increase.
> 
> Unlike the first wave of migrants who came to the cities in the 1980s and 1990s, the current batch has more options and higher aspirations. Many are not content to save money for a few years before returning home. They want to settle in the booming cities. That means they need higher wages. If they can’t get them, there are opportunities at home. Under cost pressure, some factories have shifted inland, away from the factory towns on the east coast and the Pearl River Delta, and closer to the provinces from which most migrants come.
> 
> The second reason for the cautious sanction of industrial action is that the Communist party has a stake in better working conditions. Providing cheap Chinese labour to multinationals from Japan, the US and Europe was a means, not an end. Deng Xiaoping said it was glorious to get rich, not to make foreign-invested capital rich. As elsewhere, the share of labour in corporate profits has been falling. That runs contrary to the emphasis placed by China’s leadership on a “harmonious society”. Chinese media coverage of the Honda strike, as well as of the Foxconn suicides, has been heavy with analysis of the widening income gap.
> 
> There are other signs that the scales may be tipping labour’s way. In 2008, Beijing enacted the labour contract law, stipulating that workers be given written contracts. Coupled with growing wage pressure, this changed atmosphere has obvious implications for foreign investors grown accustomed to a low-wage, strike-free, hire-and-fire environment.
> 
> Yet few are likely to pull out. That is because China has ceased to be merely a low-cost production centre. For many companies, it is also becoming an important market and an integral part of their global supply chain. Walmart sources $30bn worth of goods from China each year. Japanese car manufacturers, such as Honda, have brought with them a network of components makers, and built ties with Chinese parts suppliers. What goes for cars goes for iPads, mobile phones, digital cameras and colour photocopiers. Such a clustering effect makes it almost impossible for manufacturers to pick up sticks and start afresh elsewhere.
> 
> For all these reasons, Beijing may continue to offer cautious support to an emboldened workforce, though it will keep a watchful eye on wage inflation. But on no account will it tolerate any hint of organised labour evolving into a political force. Even Mr Han, whose political activities in 1989 landed him in jail and exile, has reached the pragmatic conclusion that labour rights and political rights must be separate. “I’m trying my best to depoliticise the labour movement in China,” he says. When a Chinese labour activist wants to take the politics out of collective bargaining and official China is cheering on strikers, change is clearly afoot.




There are, at least, three “Chinas:” the newly prosperous East coast, the middle provinces which are just starting to reap some of the benefits of modernization and industrialization and the poor, agrarian far Western provinces. This story, like much of what we hear about China, is a bout the sophisticated, relatively rich, “modern,” indeed almost _Western_ East coast. It takes a long time for change to happen in all of China, especially in the poor West.


----------



## CougarKing

Moscow News link



> *Russian military: China's J-15 fighter jets not up to par  *
> Source Alyona Topolyanskaya at 07/06/2010
> 
> China's J-15 carrier-based fighter will not be able to compete with Russia's SU- 33 fighter on global markets because it is inferior to the Russian aircraft, said  Russian military analyst .
> 
> *China since 2001 has been developing the J-15 naval fighter, which is believed to be a clone of Russia's Su-33 Falcon-D. China bought an SU-33 prototype earlier from Ukraine, and used it to develop its new aircraft*.
> 
> "The Chinese J-15 clone is unlikely to achieve the same performance characteristics of the Russian SU-33 carrier-based fighter, and I won’t rule out the possibility that China could return to negotiations with Russia on the purchase of a substantial batch of SU-33s," said Col. Igor Korotchenko, a member of the Defense Ministry's Public Council.
> 
> *The J-15 is expected to be stationed initially onboard the Chinese Varyag aircraft carrier, which is currently being fitted in the port of Dalian*. China purchased  the unfinished Admiral Kuznetsov class aircraft carrier from Ukraine back in 1998.
> 
> The SU-33 is a carrier-based multi-role fighter, which can perform a variety of air tasks such as fleet defense, air support and reconnaissance missions. The aircraft entered service with the Russian Navy in 1995 and are currently deployed on board the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.
> 
> Korotchenko said that China was unlikely to solve technical problems related to the design of the folding wings and to develop a reliable engine for the aircraft, although the first J-15 prototype reportedly made its maiden flight on August 31, 2009, powered by Chinese WS-10 turbofan engines.


----------



## tomahawk6

From Strategypage.



> China Steals The Abandoned Su-33
> June 7, 2010: For over five years, China has been developing a carrier version of the Russian Su-27, calling it the J-15. There is already a Russian version of this, called the Su-33. Russia refused to sell Su-33s to China, when it was noted that China was making illegal copies of the Su-27 (as the J-11), and did not want to place a big order for Su-33s, but only wanted two, for "evaluation." China eventually got a Su-33 from Ukraine, which inherited some when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The first prototypes of the J-15 have been under construction for two years, and the aircraft is believed to have taken its first flight in the last few months. The Russians are not happy with this development. Russian aviation experts have openly derided the J-15, casting doubt on the ability of Chinese engineers to replicate key features of the Su-33. That remains to be seen, as the Chinese have screwed up copying Russian military tech in the past. But the Chinese have a lot of experience stealing foreign tech, so the J-15 may well turn out to be at least as good as the Su-33. Meanwhile. Russia itself has stopped using the Su-33.
> Late last year, the Russian Navy ordered 24 MiG-29Ks (for about $42 million each) to replace the Su-33s currently operating from the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov. It was two years ago that the carrier version of the Russian MiG-29, the MiG-29K, made its first flight, about fifteen years later than originally planned. India is buying 30-40 of these for use on at least two aircraft carriers. The Indians are already receiving the first sixteen. The reason for dropping the Su-33 is the order from India. It's cheaper to build 64 (or more, for planned Russian carriers) MiG-29Ks, than just 16 more Su-33s to replace the ones already on the Kuznetsov (and wearing out). The MiG-29Ks are lighter and cheaper than the Su-33s.
> 
> In the early 1990s, work began on creating a variant of the MiG-29 for carrier use. These were to be used on the Kuznetsov class carriers, originally conceived of as 90,000 ton, nuclear powered ships, similar to American carriers (complete with steam catapults). Instead, because of the cost, and the complexity of modern (American style) carriers, the Russians were forced to scale back their goals, and ended up with the 65,000 ton (full load) ships that lacked steam catapults, and used a ski jump type flight deck instead. Nuclear power was dropped, but the Kuznetsov class was still a formidable design. The thousand foot (322 meter) long carrier ended up carryings a dozen Su-33s, 14 Ka-27PL anti-submarine helicopters, two electronic warfare helicopters and two search and rescue helicopters. The ship was designed to carry up to 36 Su-33s and sixteen helicopters.
> 
> The 33 ton Su-33 is larger than the 21 ton MiG-29K, and both types of aircraft were to operate from the three 65,000 ton Kuznetsovs. But when the Cold War ended, only the Kuznetsov was near completion. The second ship in the class, the Varyag, was sold to China. The smaller Gorshkov is being rebuilt and sold to India (who believed the smaller MiG-29K was more suitable for this carrier.).
> 
> The MiG-29K modifications included arrestor gear and stronger landing gear for carrier landings, folding wings and rust proofing to reduce corrosion from all that salt water. Anti-radar paint is also used, to reduce the radar signature. Fuel capacity was increased 50 percent and more modern electronics installed. A more powerful engine is used, which enabled the aircraft to carry over five tons of weapons (air-to-air and anti-ship missiles, smart bombs).


----------



## CougarKing

> *Keep U.S. Aircraft Carrier Out of Our Backyard, China Warns*
> 
> *A state-run Chinese newspaper on Tuesday criticized the South Korean government for allowing the 97,000-ton aircraft carrier George Washington of the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet to join South Korea-U.S. military training scheduled late this month.*
> 
> In an editorial, Global News wrote the West Sea "is in proximity to China's political hub of Beijing and Tianjin. If a U.S. aircraft carrier comes into the West Sea, mainland China falls under the military strategic influence of U.S. military forces. The people of China will not accept South Korea having military demonstration involving a U.S. aircraft carrier."
> 
> *It added U.S. forces appear to regard China "as their largest potential enemy, exposing a lack of strategic mutual trust between the U.S. and China. If South Korea wants to develop trust with China, it will have to consider the sentiments of the people of China."*
> 
> The paper warned Seoul "will have difficulty taking any kind of step forward on issues concerning the whole Korean Peninsula without China's understanding and cooperation." What South Korea needs to do now is not to put pressure on China by frequently involving the U.S. and escalating tensions in Northeast Asia but seek ways to alleviate tensions in the peninsula, it added.
> 
> link


----------



## a_majoor

Taking a few moments out from "OP EPIC ****" (where generals decide which way rifles are to be slung while we scrounge for CLP and cleaning supplies...), I read this unsettling piece of news:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/china%e2%80%99s-military-threatens-america-we-will-hurt-you/?singlepage=true



> *China’s Military Threatens America: ‘We Will Hurt You’*
> The Pentagon finally takes the hint from China’s openly hostile flag officers.
> 
> June 14, 2010- by Gordon G. Chang
> 
> “Every nation has a right to defend itself and to spend as it sees fit for that purpose, but a gap as wide as what seems to be forming between China’s stated intent and its military programs leaves me more than curious about the end result,” said Admiral Mike Mullen this Wednesday. “Indeed, I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned.”
> 
> It’s about time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in public, expressed disquiet about the Chinese military buildup. For decades, American flag officers, many of them from the Navy, have remained optimistic about America’s military relations with China. And after every Chinese hostile act — even those constituting direct attacks on the United States, such as the March 2009 attempt to interfere with the Impeccable in the South China Sea — American admirals have either remained silent or said they were “perplexed” or “befuddled” by Beijing’s intentions.
> 
> Why the befuddlement? The assumption in Washington has been that America was so powerful that we could integrate hardline Chinese leaders into a liberal international system they had no hand in creating. To this end, successive administrations sought, among other things, to foster ties between the American and Chinese militaries.
> 
> The Pentagon, therefore, pushed for port calls, reciprocal visits of officers, a hot line, and an incidents-at-sea agreement, with varying degrees of success. Admiral Timothy Keating even went so far as to offer to help China build aircraft carriers.
> 
> Keating’s offer, made in May 2007 when he was commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, may have been extended with the knowledge the Chinese would reject it, but the apparent generosity was nonetheless in keeping with the general approach of the Navy during the Bush administration, an approach that President Obama has also adopted. So if there is any significance to Mullen’s recent comment, it is that the American military, at the highest levels, is beginning to voice in open forums its doubts about Beijing’s ultimate intentions. At this point, however, the expressions of “genuine concern” remain muted.
> 
> Senior Chinese officers, on the other hand, have no trouble telling us how they really feel.
> 
> In February, Colonel Meng Xianging promised a “hand-to-hand fight with the U.S.” sometime within the next 10 years “when we’re strong enough.” “We must make them hurt,” said Major-General Yang Yi this year, referring to the United States.
> 
> And last month, at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing, a Chinese flag officer launched a three-minute rant that stunned the 65 or so American officials in the audience. Everything that is right with U.S. relations with China is due to China, said Rear Admiral Guan Youfei. Everything that is wrong is Washington’s fault. According to Guan, the United States sees China as an enemy.
> 
> A senior American official traveling on Secretary of State Clinton’s plane back to the United States said the admiral’s comments were “out of step” with the views of China’s civilian leaders. U.S. officials at the time also predicted that Beijing would soon welcome Robert Gates on his long-planned trip to China.
> 
> They were wrong. On June 3 the Chinese foreign ministry announced that the Defense secretary was in fact not welcome. Gates, who also thought he would travel to Beijing this month, said the turndown was just the military’s fault. “Nearly all of the aspects of the relationship between the United States and China are moving forward in a positive direction, with the sole exception of the military-to-military relationship,” he said on his way to Singapore. “The PLA is significantly less interested in developing this relationship than the political leadership of the country.”
> 
> Is that true? “Admiral Guan was representing what all of us think about the United States in our hearts,” a senior Chinese official told the Washington Post. “It may not have been politically correct, but it wasn’t an accident.” Chinese flag officers do not launch into polemical speeches at tightly scripted events, such as the once-a-year Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and it was reckless for American officials to assume, despite everything, that Admiral Guan was speaking only for himself.
> 
> Gates perhaps knows better now. After having his visit rejected at the last moment, he had to endure a series of hostile comments from Chinese flag officers at a security conference in Singapore at the beginning of this month. And that is just more evidence our officials and diplomats, even after more than three decades of close relations with their counterparts in Beijing, still do not understand China.
> 
> That, of course, is another “genuine concern.” So what, exactly, is the consequence of our miscomprehending the Chinese, refusing to hear what they openly say? It’s worse than the rejection of official visits to Beijing by overly eager Defense secretaries. Listen to former State Department analyst Robert Sutter: “China is the only large power in the world preparing to shoot Americans.”
> 
> Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World and The Coming Collapse of China.


----------



## CougarKing

Associated Press link



> *China now pressuring Tibetans outside politics *
> 1 hour, 29 minutes ago
> 
> By Cara Anna, The Associated Press
> 
> 
> BEIJING, China - Karma Samdrup was always the kind of Tibetan the Chinese government liked.
> 
> 
> The antiques dealer's cultural and environmental preservation efforts won national awards and praise, and he stayed out of the region's highly charged politics. But next week he'll stand trial on what rights groups say is a trumped-up charge of grave-robbing amid the largest crackdown on Tibetan intellectuals since the Cultural Revolution.
> 
> 
> *China's government has grown increasingly sensitive about Tibet in the two years since rioting in the regional capital of Lhasa left 22 people dead and led to the most sustained Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in decades. Violent clashes and demonstrations swept Tibetan towns throughout western China, where occasional protests still continue, and security remains extremely tight.
> 
> 
> Now, activist groups say a growing number of Tibetan intellectuals are coming under pressure from authorities determined to squelch all forms of dissent.*
> 
> 
> The government has always sought to silence critics of China's policies in Tibet, where a debate rages over how much autonomy, from religious freedom to outright independence, the Himalayan region deserves. *But now officials appear to be expanding their reach and targeting even those previously considered allies or at least innocuous.
> 
> 
> Karma Samdrup used to be in the latter group.* State-run China Central Television named the stocky 42-year-old the country's philanthropist of the year in 2006 for "creating harmony between men and nature" with his environmental efforts in Tibetan areas. The same year, China's most prominent weekly newspaper, Southern Weekend, hailed him as the "Tibetan bead king" for his large collection of amulet beads.
> 
> 
> The trouble began last year.
> 
> 
> Karma Samdrup's two brothers, fellow environmentalists, were detained in August after accusing local officials in eastern Tibet of poaching endangered animals. They were accused of running an illegal environmental group and stirring up local protests, and they have not been released. Human Rights Watch says one brother, Rinchen Samdrup, is serving a 21-month sentence of re-education through labour for "harming national security."
> 
> 
> On January 3, plainclothes police detained Karma Samdrup as well. Officials later said he was being charged in the neighbouring region of Xinjiang with "excavating ancient cultural relics and tombs" — a complaint that dates to 1998, when he was accused of dealing in items allegedly looted from archaeological sites. At the time, he was released on bail and police never pursued the charge.
> 
> 
> *"There's something unusual and disturbing about this case," said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University. "China has often been accused of using aggressive laws to silence critics, particularly in Tibet, but there's no record of this family of Tibetan environmentalists criticizing China's policies. In fact they've been widely written about in China as model citizens."
> 
> 
> Barnett said the case could be a sign that the wide latitude public security officials in Tibet have been given to deal with suspected separatists is leading to abuses of power.*
> 
> 
> Karma Samdrup's supporters say the 1998 charge has been revived to punish him for trying to defend his two brothers.
> 
> 
> "Absolutely fabricated," said a Chinese writer who closely follows Tibetan issues, Wang Lixiong.
> 
> 
> But the case does have some worrying recent precedent.
> 
> 
> *Last month, the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet published a report saying 31 Tibetans are now in prison "after reporting or expressing views, writing poetry or prose, or simply sharing information about Chinese government policies and their impact in Tibet today."
> 
> 
> The report said it was the first time since the end of China's chaotic Cultural Revolution in 1976 that there has been such a targeted campaign against Tibetan singers, artists and writers who peacefully express their views.*
> 
> 
> In another recent case, a writer named Tagyal — who was seen by fellow Tibetans as an "official intellectual" for usually toeing the Communist Party's line — was detained in April after signing an open letter critical of the Chinese government's earthquake relief efforts in a Tibetan region of Qinghai province.
> 
> Karma Samdrup's trial begins Tuesday in the Yanqi county court in Xinjiang. Theft of cultural relics in China carries a maximum penalty of life in prison or death, but his lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said Friday he was not expecting such a harsh sentence.
> 
> Still, Pu is concerned. He said he's only been able to meet Karma Samdrup twice, most recently for about 40 minutes, while police watched and videotaped. The court would not let him photocopy the case file on Karma Samdrup.
> 
> "He was noticeably thinner — 20 to 30 kilograms (44 to 66 pounds) thinner," Pu said. "I could hardly recognize him. Before that, he looked like Genghis Khan. But he was in good spirits."
> 
> Karma Samdrup will plead not guilty, Pu said.
> 
> Calls to the court rang unanswered Friday.


----------



## CougarKing

And thousands of native Taiwanese/_ben sheng ren _ protest the latest trade deal between Taiwan and China:

Reuters link



> TAIPEI (Reuters) -* Tens of thousands of Taiwanese decried a landmark trade deal with rival China in a protest on Saturday that will not stop their government from signing the agreement to boost around $100 million in annual two-way trade.
> 
> 
> Braving thunderstorms and rain, the demonstrators lambasted Taiwan's pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou, whom they pledged to vote out of office if he sticks by the deal, set to be signed on Tuesday.*
> 
> Presidential spokesman Lo Chih-chiang scoffed at the protest, saying the strongest tie-up ever between the political foes of 60 years did not mean Taiwan was selling out to China.
> 
> 
> "They don't dare to oppose ECFA," Lo said, referring to the economic cooperation framework agreement with China. "Their opposition is to a one-China market... A one-China market would be like a European Union, but we don't have that with China."
> 
> The crowds that converged on Ma's office included opposition leaders raising their profile ahead of an expected parliamentary challenge next month to ECFA, which may delay the implementation of the deal.
> 
> 
> *The protest was organized by the anti-China opposition Democratic Progressive Party, whose leaders hope to position the ECFA as a key issue in November 27 local elections seen as a bellwether for the 2012 presidential race, analysts say.
> 
> 
> "Ma Ying-jeou won't listen, but he'll lose in the elections," said demonstrator Chen Chih-wu, 48, a self-employed merchant, as air horns blasted through the packed streets. "I came out to remind him how arrogant he is."
> 
> 
> The deal, full of sweeteners for Taiwan with less in return for China, has been described as Beijing's gambit to charm Taiwan as an economic benefactor, part of its long-term goal of reunifying with the island over which it claims sovereignty*.
> 
> 
> Dilution of the trade pact, which includes import tariff cuts on about 800 items, would cool Taiwan's $390 billion export-led economy. The government is pushing the deal, fearing Taipei will lose out to rivals in the booming Chinese market.
> 
> 
> But some protesters said the ECFA will hurt small businesses by letting in cheaper Chinese goods, and put Beijing a step closer to a reunifying politically with self-ruled Taiwan.
> 
> 
> "Ma Ying-jeou is depending too much on mainland China for everything, but Taiwan is Taiwan and China is China," said protester and Taipei retiree Lu Chun-tsun, 78. "If this were Japan he would have stepped down by now."
> 
> 
> The Democratic Progressive Party said 100,000 people took part in the protest, but the police said, at its peak, the protest included 32,000 people, with the numbers falling as thunderstorms crackled in the skies above Taipei.
> 
> 
> The ECFA will be signed on June 29 in Chongqing, once briefly the capital of China under the rule of the Nationalists, who are now Taiwan's ruling party after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong's Communists in 1949 and retreating to the island


----------



## CougarKing

> *China’s PLA Navy Sends Largest Surface Combatant to Gulf of Aden*
> 
> 
> China is sending its largest surface combatant, the amphibious landing ship Kunlun Shan, to the Gulf of Aden to serve as a command ship for a PLA Navy anti-piracy task force, according to China Defense Blog. This marks the first deployment of the 071 LPD, launched in 2006, the largest naval ship of its own design China has built to date with an estimated displacement of around 20,000 tons.
> 
> China is scheduled to command the multinational task force operating off the coast of piracy haven Somalia.* Accompanying the Kunlun Shan is the destroyer Lanzhou and the supply ship Weishanhu. Available specs on the Kunlun Shan say it has a lift capacity equivalent to the U.S. Navy Austin class LPD; it has a large helicopter flight deck and a floodable bay that could fit up to 4 air cushion landing crafts (LCAC).*
> 
> There was a lot of discussion about the challenges China’s PLA Navy faces in operating at long distances at a National Defense University conference on Chinese naval modernization I attended earlier this month. These range from difficulties in maintaining and repairing ships to providing medical care and fresh produce to personnel.
> 
> 
> *A shortage of underway replenishment ships and the obvious lack of overseas bases places an upper limit on the number of ships China can deploy and how long they can remain on station in distant waters.*
> 
> The PLA Navy has been increasing their “out of area” naval operations incrementally in recent years. They are very methodical about it, using a small number of their most modern ships. These deployments have a noticeable political “soft power” component to them. Expect more of that soft power naval diplomacy when China soon deploys its purpose built hospital ship.
> 
> Check out this really cool cutaway diagram of the Kunlun Shan provided by Hobby Shanghai.
> 
> – Greg Grant


----------



## a_majoor

The not so subtle way China deals with the military aspects of social networking and Web 2.0:





> *Loveless Chinese troops banned from online dating*
> 
> By Associated Press
> 
> Wednesday, June 30, 2010
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- What will the lonely hearts of the People's Liberation Army do now?
> 
> Rigid restrictions on Internet usage imposed this month on the 2.3 million-strong Chinese armed services are sure to cramp the already lackluster social lives of the predominantly young, male force. Online dating was given the boot, along with blogs, personal websites and visits to Internet cafes.
> 
> It may seem harsh and out of touch, particularly for troops posted in remote regions of China who have little contact with the civilian world. But military experts said restraints are necessary to avoid compromising security for a Chinese military that prizes secrecy.
> 
> "Some soldiers leaked military secrets when chatting online, for instance, giving away troop locations. Certainly a large amount of secrets were revealed this way and the regulation has just blocked the hole," said Ni Lexiong, a military expert at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.
> 
> Plus, Ni said, "matchmaking for soldiers can be conducted in more serious ways, such as through introductions from families, friends, or their work units."
> 
> China is just the latest country to wrestle with the sticky issue of Internet freedoms for its military, trying to find a balance between the demands of Web-savvy troops, who as civilians were used to sharing personal details online, and the need to maintain security.
> 
> After years of back and forth, the U.S. Department of Defense now promotes use of social media by everyone from privates on the front line to generals at the Pentagon as a way of spreading its message. For example, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has 20,000 followers on Twitter.
> 
> Most other countries fall somewhere in between.
> 
> "Cyberspace has been a gray area. This is a tricky issue because it straddles both personal and professional space," said Ho Shu Huang, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
> 
> "The military is a reflection of society and how it responds will be a result of that. So in more closed societies, it's easier for the military to say, 'Don't do anything. Don't talk online. That's that,'" he said.
> 
> Countries such as Britain and Israel allow troops to post personal information online, as long as it does not compromise military operations. The open approach has not always worked for Israel.
> 
> The Israeli military scrapped a raid on a West Bank village earlier this year after a soldier revealed the time and location of the operation on his Facebook page. In 2008, a soldier attached to an elite Israeli intelligence unit was sentenced to 19 days in jail after uploading a photograph taken on his base to Facebook.
> 
> The Chinese Internet prohibitions are a brief part of lengthy internal affairs regulations issued by the Communist Party's Central Military Affairs Commission.
> 
> "Seeking marriage partners, jobs or making friends through the public media is not permitted. Going online in local Internet cafes is not permitted," the regulation states. "Opening websites, home pages, blogs and message forums on the Internet is not permitted."
> 
> It was not clear if troops would be completely cut off from social networking sites. The regulations do not apply to civilians serving in military research and training academies.
> 
> It's also not known how authorities in China plan to enforce the restrictions. The regulations, posted on the Ministry of National Defense's website, did not say how troops would be punished for transgressions. Phones rang unanswered at the ministry's information office and questions submitted by fax were not answered.
> 
> Yet the prohibitions seem out of step in a wired society with 400 million overwhelmingly young Internet users in a country hurtling toward prosperity and global power.
> 
> "(The policy) is regressive in its understanding of technology, regressive in generational attitudes and regressive in transparency and attitudes we have of leading powers in the 21st century," said Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
> 
> Chinese social networking sites and instant messaging programs are wildly popular. Young Chinese office workers chat online with friends throughout the work day. Internet cafes in small towns are packed with youngsters playing games. Ni, the Chinese military affairs expert, said in the past soldiers had been allowed to visit Internet cafes in plainclothes and some had become addicted to the pastime.
> 
> The stipulation that troops cannot "make friends through the public media" is likely to be unpopular. In recent decades, rank-and-file soldiers often drawn from poorer rural families and until recent years paid miserably have found it hard to find spouses.
> 
> A blog apparently written by a paramilitary soldier which has not been updated since the new rules took effect on June 15 features a poem titled "We Are Still Single."
> 
> The Internet has been a boon, with a proliferation of unregulated online dating sites targeting military men.
> 
> The Chinese military now plans to attack that problem the way it did decades ago, when it arranged socials between military units and civilian work outfits with heavily female work forces such as textile factories. A report on a military news website said the Xigaze Military District in central Tibet is working with the local government and women's federation to help troops find partners.
> 
> Ho, the researcher in Singapore, said the restrictions are meant to prevent people from getting an inside look at the military. He said security lapses don't usually involve highly classified information, but rather small details that intelligence agents can use to piece together a larger picture about an operation or a unit.
> 
> "Most intelligence is based on really, really mundane stuff. History is replete with examples: the color of the sand, the types of uniforms they're wearing, the kinds of vehicles being deployed, the number of people and what they're wearing, whether they have facial hair, stuff like that," he said. "That's what militaries are concerned about, people piecing bits and pieces together."
> 
> ___
> 
> Online:
> 
> Dating site for Chinese troops: http://8181.com.cn/
> 
> Paramilitary soldier's blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/articlelist_1562068555(unde sco re)0(underscore)1.html
> 
> Text of regulation: http://www.mod.gov.cn/policy/2010-06/07/content_41629 1(u nderscore)5.htm
> 
> Adm. Mike Mullen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/THEJOINTSTAFF


----------



## CougarKing

> Asia Times link
> 
> *China focuses on 'far sea defense'*
> 
> By Joseph Y Lin
> 
> Recent discourse concerning the Chinese People's Liberation Army's (PLA) modernization has principally focused on technological advances and less on the human dimension of PLA force transformation. In particular, a review of these discussions revealed the absence of a publicly available database of Chinese military leaders with the rank of full general (shangjiang).
> 
> Against the backdrop of the PLA's stated intention to reorient the armed forces as part of its modernization efforts, an analysis of promotion patterns of the 118 PLA generals (1981-2009) may yield important insights into the foci of PLA force transformation.
> 
> *PLA to build up navy and air force*
> A string of recent statements by senior Chinese military officials alluding to the realignment of the PLA indicates that significant changes in the composition of the armed forces may be in the offing.
> 
> In April, the Chinese Defense Ministry's spokesperson Senior Colonel Huang Xueping stated during an interview, "It's quite natural that we want to build up a streamlined [emphasis added] military force which has more focus on technologies rather than man power." Huang's statement, taken in the context of increasing Chinese naval assertiveness in international waters near Japan and in the South China Sea in recent years, has raised questions over the PLA's intentions and capabilities.
> 
> *To be sure, the Chinese military leadership seems to be signaling its intention to depart from its long-held emphasis on the army for the air force and navy. By enhancing the role of the navy and air force, the goal of its effort appears aimed at extending China's military power projection capability into the Pacific while reducing the size of its total military force. *
> 
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> 
> *'Far sea defense' strategy *
> The advent of the People's Liberation Army Navy's (PLAN's) "far sea defense" (yuanyang fangyu) strategy calling for the development of China's long-range naval capabilities, appears to be one of the major drivers behind the push to transform the composition of the Chinese armed forces.
> 
> Yin Zhuo, a retired PLAN rear admiral who is now a senior researcher at the navy's Equipment Research Center, stated in an interview with People's Daily Online that the PLAN is tasked with two primary missions: preservation of China's maritime security (including territorial integrity) and the protection of China's burgeoning and far-flung maritime economic interests.
> 
> And while the former is still the PLAN's chief concern, the PLAN is beginning to prioritize more attention to the latter. Rear-Admiral Zhang Huachen, deputy commander of the PLAN's East Sea Fleet argues, "With the expansion of the country's economic interests, the navy wants to protect the country's transportation routes and the safety of our major sea lanes." The rear-admirals' statements present a legitimate rationale behind the PLAN's new strategy.
> 
> 
> 
> *The far sea defense strategy is significant for two reasons. First, it declares that China's naval ambitions extend beyond its traditional coastal area or "near sea" (jinyang). Secondly, it expands the PLAN's defense responsibilities to include the protection of China's maritime economic interests - which China's latest defense whitepaper did not explicitly address* [2].
> 
> It stands to reason then that a possible key motivation behind the reorientation of China's armed forces stems from China's perceived need to project power beyond its coastal area to where the PLAN is required to carry out the newly expanded far sea defense duties.
> 
> CMC as China's highest military commanding body
> As the highest military policy and commanding body in China, the CMC supervises and commands five service branches of China's armed forces: the PLA ground forces, PLAN, People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), Second Artillery Corps (SAC) and the People's Armed Police (PAP) (which falls under the joint leadership of the CMC and the State Council).
> 
> Since the restoration of military rank (junxian) in 1988, the CMC has promoted 118 military leaders to generals: 17 under Deng Xiaoping (1981-1989), 79 under Jiang Zemin (1989-2004) and 22 to date under Hu Jintao (2004-present)
> 
> The Chinese military has traditionally been influenced by its ground forces because of China's historical status as a land power. Additionally, the PLA ground forces can trace their roots to the 1920s, predating the founding of the People's Republic of China and all other service branches.
> 
> Therefore, ground forces generals not surprisingly represent a lion's share or 71% of the total.*Yet, Hu has promoted substantially more "non-ground forces" (PLAN, PLAAF, SAC and PAP) generals than his predecessors. In percentage terms, 45% of Hu's generals are non-ground forces, compared to 25% and 24% for Jiang's and Deng's, respectively. *
> 
> *
> Strategic Second Artillery Corps  *
> The CMC directly supervises and commands the SAC, which controls China's nuclear arsenal and conventional missiles. Its small manpower (estimated at 100,000 or 3% of Chinese military manpower) notwithstanding, the SAC has produced a disproportionately large number of generals.
> 
> Of the 118 military leaders promoted to generals, six (or 5% of the total) were SAC generals - which may be an indication of the SAC's special status in China's armed forces. Hu has promoted the most SAC generals in percentage terms (9%), compared to Deng (6%) and Jiang (4%). Hu's relative overweight in his SAC generals is a reflection of the strategic emphasis he places on the SAC.
> *
> Internally oriented People's Armed Police*
> While other service branches are externally oriented, the internally oriented PAP is charged with "the fundamental task of safeguarding national security, maintaining social stability and ensuring that the people live in peace and contentment" [3].
> 
> Jiang successfully incorporated the PAP into the CMC's command structure by promoting the first PAP general in 1998. Altogether, he promoted five PAP generals, representing 6% of his total. Continuing the emphasis on PAP generals, Hu has promoted two PAP generals, representing 9% of his total*. Since domestic stability remains among Hu's and the CCP's highest governing priorities, one can expect Hu to continue promoting PAP generals.*
> 
> *
> Hu to promote more admirals*
> Excluding the strategic SAC and the internally oriented PAP to determine the relative proportions among the army, navy and air force generals, one finds that 33% of Hu's generals are non-ground forces (PLAN an PLAAF), compared to 17% and 19% for Jiang's and Deng's, respectively.
> 
> In other words, *Hu's generals are 67% army, 11% navy and 22% air force. Jiang's generals were 83% army, 7% navy and 10% air force, whereas Deng's generals were 81% army, 13% navy and 6% air force.
> 
> Hu appears to have begun the process of reorienting his generals by emphasizing the promotions of military leaders in the navy and air force. Given China's naval ambitions and the relative under-representation of PLAN admirals (when benchmarked against Xu's stated target proportion at 25%), one can therefore expect Hu to emphasize the promotions of PLAN admirals.*
> As CMC chairman, Deng promoted 17 generals in a single "class" in 1988. Jiang on average promoted generals once every two years between 1989 and 2004, with the average "class size" at about 10 generals. Hu on average has promoted generals once every year between 2004 and 2009 with the average class size at four generals. Where Jiang appears to have institutionalized the promotion process, Hu appears to have regularized the promotion process.
> 
> Implications
> If Hu continues to promote generals at roughly the same pace as he has in the past, he could reasonably promote another 10 generals by the end of his tenure as CMC chairman in 2012 (although he may hold on to CMC chairmanship beyond 2012 following Jiang's example). Given the reorientation of China's armed forces as a PLA priority, one should expect to see an overweighting in the promotions of non-ground forces generals in Hu's remaining tenure.
> 
> Of the additional 10 Hu generals, assuming one slot is set aside for each of the SAC and PAP, one may find it reasonably likely that the other eight could comprise three army, three navy and two air force generals.
> 
> This combination will result in a final relative weighting of 58% army, 19% navy and 23% air force for Hu's generals - a directionally consistent outcome when compared with Xu's stated goal of 50% army, 25% navy and 25% air force.
> 
> *The number of PLA Navy admirals is not likely to leapfrog as Hu is expected to continue his gradualist and balanced approach in promoting his generals in the future, taking into consideration each service branch's interests and representation as in the past. This also reflects Hu's rather cautious approach to the military given his lack of a military background. Yet the goals are clear. This is only the beginning of a long-term trend.*
> 
> 
> 
> Notes
> 1. Todd Harrison, Analysis of the 2010FY Defense Budget Request (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, August 12, 2009): 38. When the "defense-wide" item is excluded from the US military budget, the relative budgetary ratio among the army, navy (including the Marine Corps) and air force has been approximately 40:30:30 in recent years.
> 2. Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, "China's National Defense 2008", January 2009, Section V: 7.
> 3. Ibid, Section VIII: 10.
> 
> _Joseph Y Lin currently studies at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies of Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan. He has held executive positions in multinational corporations and investment companies in the US, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Lin's most recent article "The Changing Face of Chinese Military Generals: Evolving Promotion Practices Between 1981 and 2009" was published in The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis in March 2010._


----------



## CougarKing

Two articles of interest:

From Reuters via thestar.com link



> *Democracy no cure for corruption, China paper says*
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Multi-party democracy is no panacea for overcoming graft, which is instead best tackled by getting ordinary people to report corrupt officials, the mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party said on Monday.
> 
> Beijing fears official malfeasance and graft is undermining its authority and sparking protests by disgruntled workers and farmers.
> 
> *Despite public campaigns and high-profile crackdowns, corruption remains a serious problem. Critics say the graft fight is hampered by lack of an independent judicial system and officials not held accountable to an electorate.*
> 
> Not so, said the official People's Daily, in a lengthy editorial about tackling corruption.
> 
> "Looking back on the political development of the West, corruption has gone hand-in-hand with the establishment of the multi-party system," the newspaper wrote.
> 
> *"In the 1990s, the main governing parties of many Western countries had corruption scandals," it added, in a part of the editorial called "Answering a question from web users".
> 
> Italy and the United States had serious corruption scandals over that period, it said.
> 
> "Some developing nations, after promoting multi-party systems, found that not only was the problem of corruption not resolved, it actually got more serious in some cases," the newspaper added.*
> 
> In a 2008 list of the world's 10 most corrupt countries, nine had multi-party systems, it said.
> 
> "The facts prove that the Western multi-party system ... cannot prevent or solve the issue of corruption, and is not a panacea."
> 
> *The Communist Party allows carefully controlled ballots for some low-ranking posts in villages and local assemblies. But calls to expand popular votes made little headway, while leaders say they have expanded discussion and voting within the Party.
> 
> China does have other political parties, but they have no power and answer to the Communist Party.*
> In China, "the masses are the main force to rely on to fight corruption and promote good government", the editorial said.
> 
> More than 70 percent of graft investigations came from tip-offs from ordinary people over the past few years, it added.
> 
> More efforts should be made to encourage people to report graft via the Internet, the newspaper said.
> 
> *Last year, the head of China's Communist Party-run parliament, Wu Bangguo, struck an uncompromising stance against political liberalisation, ruling out Western-style democratic reforms.*
> 
> (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Alex Richardson)
> 
> (For more news on Reuters India, click http://in.reuters.com)
> 
> Copyright © 2010 Reuters




And again on the naval front:

Defense Tech.org link



> *State Push or Commercial Pull Driving China’s Naval Modernization?*
> 
> When analyzing China’s naval modernization one of the most difficult aspects to discern is: What’s behind it all? China is clearly intent on becoming a real maritime power; but is that a strategic choice made out of necessity or out of a desire to challenge other nations on the high seas.
> 
> Two China watchers, Gabriel Collins and Michael Grubb, in China Goes to Sea, argue that China is embarking on a different development path than other nations that sought to become maritime powers.
> 
> “The Soviet Union, Meiji Japan, and Wilhelmian Germany built their navies first and then promoted merchant marine development. Thus the relationship was based on a “push” from the state, rather than a “pull” in which commercial interests led the way and then the state stepped in to create the capacity to protect these new commercial maritime interests.
> 
> *China is following a different path marked by an emphasis on commercial maritime development, with naval development trailing.
> 
> If China continues to expand its naval forces, the drivers will include a mix of a desire for status in the international community and a perceived need to defend economic interests, but the single most prominent element will be that Beijing’s policymakers are struggling to keep up with China’s dynamic commercial mariners.”
> 
> How strong is that “pull” from China’s dynamic commercial mariners? In 1980, China built 220,000 tons of commercial shipping; China is on pace to exceed 20 million tons in 2010. *As the authors point out, the push for that huge expansion in commercial shipbuilding came in the late 1970s with Deng Xiaoping’s reform and “opening up” to the world; which included a process of “defense conversion,” transforming inefficient defense industries into viable commercial enterprises.
> 
> The interesting thing to watch will be whether China moves to put in place some of the key missing elements – such as overseas bases and a large logistical support fleet – it needs if it intends to provide true global security coverage for its far reaching mariners.
> 
> – Greg Grant


----------



## CougarKing

In spite of warming relations between Taipei and Beijing in recent years since Pres. Ma Ying Jieou became Taiwan's leader, China has not reduced the amount of firepower pointed at the island:

Reuters link



> *China on track to aim 2,000 missiles at Taiwan: report*
> Mon Jul 19, 2010 9:39am EDT
> TAIPEI (Reuters) - China will have 2,000 missiles aimed at its rival Taiwan by the end of the year, several hundred more than the current number, despite fast-warming trade ties between the two sides, an island defense study said.
> *Beijing's preparations setting Taiwan further back in the military power balance against its political adversary could destroy 90 percent of the island's infrastructure, the report published in the defense ministry's naval studies periodical said.
> 
> The increase from today's estimate of 1,000 to 1,400 missiles could raise tensions after two years of upbeat dialogue between the rivals that has cleared the way for direct civilian flights and a free trade-style deal in June.*
> 
> "Even though we've signed the trade deal, there won't be any progress on military issues," Hsu Yung-ming, political science professor at Soochow University.
> 
> China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and has not renounced the use of force to bring the island into its fold.
> 
> A new threat to detente between tech-reliant Taiwan and economic powerhouse China, already the island's top export destination, would likely chill financial markets as investors hope to see relations gain momentum.
> 
> *The 2,000 short-range and mid-range missiles aimed at the island just 160 km (99 miles) away at its nearest point would follow from Beijing's broader plans to modernize its military, said Taiwan Deputy Defence Minister Andrew Yang*.
> 
> "In the process of improving air missile capabilities, that could be the number by the end of the year," Yang told Reuters. "We always show our concern, because we see China still has this intention. They are not reducing missiles."
> 
> Taiwan officials have said that China, though keen to unify peacefully with the island by offering economic incentives, must remove missiles aimed at the island before the two sides can discuss a peace accord after six decades of hostilities.
> 
> (Reporting by Ralph Jennings; Editing by Ken Wills)


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese are not "threatening" Taiwan; as far as 99.99% of the Chinese leadership and 99% of the Chinese people are concerned, the issue is settled: Taiwan *will* rejoin China as a province, under some sort of "one country _three_ systems" administration - China (1st "system") + Hong Kong (2nd "system") + Taiwan (3rd "system"). There is no room for debate, indeed there is no issue to be debated. No one in China gives a tinker's dam about opinions or 'strategies' in the USA or the UN or the entire world, less China. The opinions of all others are worthless and cannot, will not be considered.

Could that mean war with the USA? Yes, and most Chinese, while frightened of the prospect, are convinced that it would be a just war and that, eventually, after much suffering, China would emerge victorious. *You* may have a different opinion but *I* wouldn't bet the farm on it.

China's continuing military build up is part of a long term "grand strategy" to emerge (around 2050?) as a global superpower, at least as powerful - soft and hard power, globally, as the USA and Europe, combined. "The East is Red" is more than an old slogan; it is living, breathing Chinese policy: the East includes Japan and Vietnam, Cambodia, etc and even Malaysia; the East also includes the _"Stans"_ in Central Asia and it may, implicitly, include Eastern Siberia. The East can, may well have to be shared with India but there is no room in the Chinese (or Indo-Chinese) East for the USA.

_Spheres of influence_, anyone? Welcome back to the 19th century; it was such fun and it ended (_circa_ 1914) so well, didn't it?


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Chinese are not "threatening" Taiwan; as far as 99.99% of the Chinese leadership and 99% of the Chinese people are concerned, the issue is settled: Taiwan *will* rejoin China as a province, under some sort of "one country _three_ systems" administration - China (1st "system") + Hong Kong (2nd "system") + Taiwan (3rd "system"). *There is no room for debate, indeed there is no issue to be debated. No one in China gives a tinker's dam about opinions or 'strategies' in the USA or the UN or the entire world, less China.* The opinions of all others are worthless and cannot, will not be considered.
> 
> Could that mean war with the USA? Yes, and most Chinese, while frightened of the prospect, are convinced that it would be a just war and that, eventually, after much suffering, China would emerge victorious. *You* may have a different opinion but *I* wouldn't bet the farm on it.
> 
> China's continuing military build up is part of a long term "grand strategy" to emerge (around 2050?) as a global superpower, at least as powerful - soft and hard power, globally, as the USA and Europe, combined. "The East is Red" is more than an old slogan; it is living, breathing Chinese policy: the East includes Japan and Vietnam, Cambodia, etc and even Malaysia; the East also includes the _"Stans"_ in Central Asia and it may, implicitly, include Eastern Siberia. The East can, may well have to be shared with India but there is no room in the Chinese (or Indo-Chinese) East for the USA.
> 
> _Spheres of influence_, anyone? Welcome back to the 19th century; it was such fun and it ended (_circa_ 1914) so well, didn't it?



Just a couple of things. So you're just going to summarily dismiss the pro-Taiwan independence sentiment (with the latest instance cited at the top of this page as well as on previous pages of this thread) on the part of the island's mostly _Ben Sheng Ren_/Native Taiwanese population, as inconsequential? 

Those who favour unification dismiss this sentiment as an exaggeration created by labor unions and opposition parties such as the Democratic Progressive Party/DPP which was recently voted out of office. These groups supposedly are the ones who make a big show through those anti-mainlander_/da lu ren_ demonstrations.

I remember when I was still doing my undergrad studies in the US, and I had returned to Taipei in 2004 to visit my folks (we're not from there, but we had lived there as expatriates from another Southeast Asian country). This was before we had immigrated to Canada. My father was one of the foreign managers in the company; he had been tasked back then with closing a factory in Taichung since the company was moving its production to mainland China. When the announcement was made at the factory, many of the workers made such emotionally-charged protests and even wailed, that extra security had to be brought in since it threatend to turn violent. Who could blame them?  They were losing their jobs in spite of the fact they were being compensated handsomely; most of the workers were _ben sheng ren_ rather than the _wai sheng ren*_ who held many of the white collar jobs. 

My point in relating this is that there is still some anti-mainland sentiment on the island, and it is driven partially by protectionist unions that resent having to see their workers lose employment just because mainland workers have lower wages. 


From what I noticed in the past, in spite of the fact that _ben sheng ren_/native Taiwanese compose much of the island's population, most of them are pragmatic and the independence sentiment is losing its appeal. Chen Shui-Bian, the former DPP leader, and ex-Taiwan President who ran on a platform that favoured greater steps toward independence, was actually voted out due to a worsening economy and the corruption scandal that involved his wife and his brother-in-law, if I can recall correctly. Chen was also eventually imprisoned as well. His successor, Pres. Ma Ying Jieou of the conservative Guo Min dang party, as said before, actually oversaw the improvement of relations with the mainland and even further economic intergration, such as the opening of greater trade and air/transportation links between Taiwan and the mainland.


Secondly, as stated before, the Taiwanese are also Han Chinese (the Taiwanese dialect is just a derivative of Hokien or Fukiense, the dialect spoken on the adjacent mainland province of Fujian) although their rocky history on the island with their _wai sheng ren* _ compatriots is not easily dismissed. Over 50 years of Japanese occupation from 1895-1945 insulated them from key events of Chinese history such as the 1911 revolution against Qing Dynasty, Chiang-Kai Shek's Northern Expedition, the on-again, off again Civil War betwen the Guo min dang/Nationalists and the Communists through the 1930s and 40s. Then you have the 2-28 massacre of 1947 when some Guo Min Dang troops massacred a number of local Taiwanese. And all those years of being treated like second-class citizens when Chiang Kai-Shek fortified his island against a mainland invasion during the height of the Cold War, when few, if any local Taiwanese, were allowed into Guomindang official posts.

Yes, it is true that many Taiwanese of the generations who were alive during the above events compose less and less of the voter base. But the history of such events is not censored in Taiwan schools and the memory is kept alive through the younger generations. However, the dominating culture is still Han Chinese, perpetuated by over 60 years with the_
wai sheng ren_ at the helm. 

However, most younger Taiwanese/_ben sheng ren_ will care more about the latest fads in Chinese pop culture, such as Mandopop singers like A-mei or Jolin Tsai and about how to earn a living (or about reaching their MBA if they're educated) and less and less about their Taiwan ancestors' history. It is to these younger Taiwanese that China is trying to present a sense of "a cosmopolitan, greater China" that they might want to be a part of.

My point is that while China seems to be gaining influence on the island, there is still some protectionist/pro-independence sentiment that China cannot completely ignore if they want a  peaceful unification and continued stability within a "greater China". 
I agree that re-unification between Taiwan and China is probably inevitable in spite of what I stated above, but wouldn't it be more pragmatic for Taiwan to wait and see if China gradually became less politcally oppressive first before moving on toward unification? Observing how Hong Kong (and Macao) fares under mainland rule is a must for Taiwan.

As for the "2nd system" you pointed out with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region/SAR, isn't it a bit too early to judge it? If I can recall correctly, the "one-country two systems" arrangement made before the 1997 handover called for China to respect the democratic freedoms of Hong Kong residents until 2047, when Hong Kong ceases to be an SAR and is further integrated into China. 

*wai sheng ren/外省人= Taiwanese of mainland Chinese descent who fled to the island after the Chinese Civil War which ended in 1949; many are also the descendants of Chinese Nationalists/Guo Min Dang supporters.


----------



## CougarKing

Also note another exercise that occurred last month:



> *China naval drill in South China Sea: state media*
> 
> AFP
> 
> by Allison Jackson Allison Jackson – 7 mins ago
> 
> BEIJING (AFP) –* China this week staged a large naval and air exercise on its southeast coast, as South Korea and the United States conducted their own naval drill opposed by Beijing, state media said Friday.
> 
> News of Monday's live-fire exercises in the South China Sea came as a defence ministry spokesman reiterated that China's territorial claims in the contentious waters were "indisputable" and should not be "internationalised"*.
> 
> Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the resolution of territorial disputes was "pivotal" for regional stability and that Washington had a "national interest" in seeing international law respected in the area.
> 
> During the South China Sea exercise, *a large group of submarines and warships from the People's Liberation Army Navy fired guided missiles and tested anti-missile air defence systems, the official Xinhua news agency said.
> 
> Navy aircraft also conducted "air control operations", Xinhua said.
> 
> Artillery forces also staged an exercise on China's east coast this week*, earlier reports said.
> 
> *It was not immediately clear if the two Chinese exercises were pre-planned or a response to the four-day joint naval and air drill by the United States and South Korea, which ended Wednesday.*
> The US-South Korean exercise was conducted as a warning to North Korea -- China's ally -- following the sinking of a South Korean warship blamed by Seoul and its allies on a North Korean submarine.
> 
> China is North Korea's closest ally and trade partner and has refused to join in international condemnation of Pyongyang for the incident.
> 
> *Beijing had expressed concern about the July 25-28 drill, which was initially supposed to be held in the Yellow Sea separating China and the Korean peninsula but was later relocated to the Sea of Japan after Beijing's protests.*
> 
> China has warned against further actions that it says could raise tensions in the region.
> 
> Last week, Clinton told an Asia-Pacific security forum in Vietnam thatthe United States had an interest in "freedom of navigation, open access to Asia's maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea".
> 
> "We oppose the use or threat of force by any claimant," she said.
> 
> AFP link


----------



## CougarKing

China conducts a major air defense exercise over two provinces:

Associated Press link



> *China military launches major air exercises*
> By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN (AP) – 15 hours ago
> 
> BEIJING — China's military launched major air defense exercises Tuesday, highlighting rising capabilities that are seen as tipping the balance of power in east Asia.
> 
> *The drills involve more than 10,000 service members, including those from naval and army aviation units and land-based air defense forces, according to the official China News Service.*
> 
> CNS said the war games would run for five days over parts of the provinces of Shandong and Henan south of the capital Beijing. They will include three simulated attacks and one live-firing exercise designed around the scenario of defending the capital from an air assault.
> 
> No rehearsals were held for the exercises, which will emphasize real-time responses to unplanned events and the integration of units under separate commands, CNS said.* About 100 aircraft of seven different types will take part, along with air defense missiles and artillery units.*
> 
> Amid a boom in defense spending, China has lavished funds on its air force, navy and missile forces in recent years as part of a gradual shift away from ground units. The widely respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates total expenditures on the 2.3 million-member People's Liberation Army, including funding for arms imports and defense research and development, reached nearly $100 billion last year.
> 
> *New additions to its air forces include SU-27 fighter-bombers purchased from Russia and produced under license by China, along with the homebuilt latest-generation J-10 fighter that Beijing touts as a breakthrough for its sprawling defense industry.*
> 
> Such hardware and China's adoption of more effective training and tactics is widely seen as strengthening China's ability to assert its territorial claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Military planners from New Delhi to Washington have taken note, fueling calls for more attention to Chinese developments and increased regional cooperation with the U.S. military.
> 
> While tensions with Taiwan have declined under the island's relatively pro-Beijing administration, China has grown increasingly vocal in protesting U.S. naval operations off its coast.
> 
> Beijing repeatedly criticized last month's joint U.S.-South Korean exercises in the Yellow Sea and recently elevated the South China Sea — over which it claims complete sovereignty — to its list of high priority territorial claims.
> 
> Such moves coincides with a willingness to send its navy further from shore, including the unprecedented dispatch of Chinese ships to join an anti-piracy flotilla off the coast of Somalia.
> 
> *As troops readied for Tuesday's exercises, two of those ships, the destroyer Guangzhou and frigate Chaohu, docked in Italy as part of a three-nation goodwill cruise, the government's Xinhua News Agency reported.*
> 
> Overseas visits and more realistic exercises are both aimed at boosting the PLA's ability to project power and improve cooperation between its different branches, said Russell Smith, an analyst with Jane's and former Australian defense attache in Beijing.
> 
> "These are opportunities to practice conducting joint operations. I think you're going to be more reorganizing and restructuring in the PLA to emphasize this," Smith said.


----------



## CougarKing

> *Chinese missile could shift Pacific power balance*
> AP
> 
> By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer Eric Talmadge, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 4 mins ago
> 
> ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON – Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas.
> 
> China may soon put an end to that.
> 
> U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — *an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).*
> ___
> 
> EDITOR'S NOTE — The USS George Washington supercarrier recently deployed off North Korea in a high-profile show of U.S. sea power. AP Tokyo News Editor Eric Talmadge was aboard the carrier, and filed this report.
> 
> ___
> 
> Analysts say final testing of the missile could come as soon as the end of this year, though questions remain about how fast China will be able to perfect its accuracy to the level needed to threaten a moving carrier at sea.
> 
> The weapon, a version of which was displayed last year in a Chinese military parade, could revolutionize China's role in the Pacific balance of power, seriously weakening Washington's ability to intervene in any potential conflict over Taiwan or North Korea. *It could also deny U.S. ships safe access to international waters near China's 11,200-mile (18,000-kilometer) -long coastline.*While a nuclear bomb could theoretically sink a carrier, assuming its user was willing to raise the stakes to atomic levels, the conventionally-armed Dong Feng 21D's uniqueness is in its *ability to hit a powerfully defended moving target with pin-point precision.*
> The Chinese Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to the AP's request for a comment.
> 
> Funded by annual double-digit increases in the defense budget for almost every year of the past two decades, the Chinese navy has become Asia's largest and has expanded beyond its traditional mission of retaking Taiwan to push its sphere of influence deeper into the Pacific and protect vital maritime trade routes.
> 
> "The Navy has long had to fear carrier-killing capabilities," said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the nonpartisan, Washington-based Center for a New American Security. "The emerging Chinese antiship missile capability, and in particular the DF 21D, represents the first post-Cold War capability that is both potentially capable of stopping our naval power projection and deliberately designed for that purpose."
> 
> Setting the stage for a possible conflict, Beijing has grown increasingly vocal in its demands for the U.S. to stay away from the wide swaths of ocean — covering much of the Yellow, East and South China seas — where it claims exclusivity.
> 
> It strongly opposed plans to hold U.S.-South Korean war games in the Yellow Sea off the northeastern Chinese coast, saying the participation of the USS George Washington supercarrier, with its 1,092-foot (333-meter) flight deck and 6,250 personnel, would be a provocation because it put Beijing within striking range of U.S. F-18 warplanes.
> 
> The carrier instead took part in maneuvers held farther away in the Sea of Japan.
> 
> U.S. officials deny Chinese pressure kept it away, and say they will not be told by Beijing where they can operate.
> 
> "We reserve the right to exercise in international waters anywhere in the world," Rear Adm. Daniel Cloyd, who headed the U.S. side of the exercises, said aboard the carrier during the maneuvers, which ended last week.
> 
> But the new missile could undermine that policy.
> 
> "China can reach out and hit the U.S. well before the U.S. can get close enough to the mainland to hit back," said Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He said U.S. ships have only twice been that vulnerable — against Japan in World War II and against Soviet bombers in the Cold War.
> 
> Carrier-killing missiles "could have an enduring psychological effect on U.S. policymakers," he e-mailed to The AP. *"It underscores more broadly that the U.S. Navy no longer rules the waves as it has since the end of World War II. The stark reality is that sea control cannot be taken for granted anymore."*
> 
> Yoshihara said the weapon is causing considerable consternation in Washington, though — with attention focused on land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — its implications haven't been widely discussed in public.
> 
> Analysts note that while much has been made of China's efforts to ready a carrier fleet of its own, it would likely take decades to catch U.S. carrier crews' level of expertise, training and experience.
> 
> But Beijing does not need to match the U.S. carrier for carrier. *The Dong Feng 21D, smarter, and vastly cheaper, could successfully attack a U.S. carrier, or at least deter it from getting too close.*
> 
> U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned of the threat in a speech last September at the Air Force Association Convention.
> 
> "When considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the U.S. symmetrically — fighter to fighter or ship to ship — and more with their ability to disrupt our freedom of movement and narrow our strategic options," he said.
> 
> Gates said China's investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, along with ballistic missiles, "could threaten America's primary way to project power" through its forward air bases and carrier strike groups.
> 
> The Pentagon has been worried for years about China getting an anti-ship ballistic missile. The Pentagon considers such a missile an "anti-access," weapon, meaning that it could deny others access to certain areas.
> 
> The Air Force's top surveillance and intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, told reporters this week that China's effort to increase anti-access capability is part of a worrisome trend.
> 
> He did not single out the DF 21D, but said: "While we might not fight the Chinese, we may end up in situations where we'll certainly be opposing the equipment that they build and sell around the world."
> 
> Questions remain over when — and if — China will perfect the technology; hitting a moving carrier is no mean feat, requiring state-of-the-art guidance systems, and some experts believe it will take China a decade or so to field a reliable threat. Others, however, say final tests of the missile could come in the next year or two.
> 
> Former Navy commander James Kraska, a professor of international law and sea power at the U.S. Naval War College, recently wrote a controversial article in the magazine Orbis outlining a hypothetical scenario set just five years from now in which a Deng Feng 21D missile with a penetrator warhead sinks the USS George Washington.
> 
> That would usher in a "new epoch of international order in which Beijing emerges to displace the United States."
> 
> While China's Defense Ministry never comments on new weapons before they become operational, the DF 21D — which would travel at 10 times the speed of sound and carry conventional payloads — has been much discussed by military buffs online.
> 
> *A pseudonymous article posted on Xinhuanet, website of China's official news agency, imagines the U.S. dispatching the George Washington to aid Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
> 
> The Chinese would respond with three salvos of DF 21D, the first of which would pierce the hull, start fires and shut down flight operations, the article says. The second would knock out its engines and be accompanied by air attacks. The third wave, the article says, would "send the George Washington to the bottom of the ocean."*
> 
> Associated Press link


----------



## a_majoor

The coming of war may not be wanted or even sought after, but we do not seem to be understanding the motivations of the Chinese, or at least not well enough to avoid dangerous conflicts from emerging:

http://unambig.com/the-dragon-vs-the-eagle/



> *The Dragon vs. the Eagle?*August 8, 2010 — MarkOttawa
> Interesting piece in the Wall St. Journal, but attitudes in the West about war have changed drastically in the last century–though less in the US than elsewhere:
> 
> China’s Rise and the Road to War
> As with Germany a century ago, an emerging power is overestimating its capabilities.
> 
> Four years before World War I, British author and politician Norman Angell published “The Great Illusion,” arguing that military conquests had become obsolete between modern economies. Many policy makers use the same logic today to predict that China and the United States can avoid war. Like their forebears, they may be wrong.
> 
> That’s the implicit argument of University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, who delivered the annual Michael Hintze Lecture at Sydney University this week [text here, more on Prof. Mearsheimer here, here, and here]. Politics, rather than economics, will decisively shape the future of Asia just as it did Europe in the previous century, he believes. China’s ascent is likely to spark an intense security competition with the U.S., leading to the strong possibility of war between the world’s two biggest economies.
> 
> This argument runs counter to today’s conventional wisdom, which sees a benign future for U.S.-China relations. This view, still popular in Washington, is based on the idea that the U.S. can manage China by offering Beijing incentives to rise as a “responsible stakeholder” within the current U.S.-led global order. Like the educated and well-heeled elites in Europe whom Angell chronicled and who a century ago exhibited extreme reluctance to imagine the outbreak of major war, today’s policy makers can’t fathom war in the Pacific.
> 
> Yet history suggests that Mr. Mearsheimer’s warnings should be heeded. Prior to World War I, Angell’s logic—that the disruption to the international credit and trading system would mean that everyone loses in the event of war—was irrefutable. Prior to 1914, annual trade volumes of Britain, Germany and France was 52%, 38% and 54% of GDP respectively, with much of the trade being between these great powers. By 1913, Britain had become the leading market for German exports, with both countries largely benefitting from the economic relationship. In the decade leading to the Great War, trade and capital flows between these great powers increased by an estimated 65% and 84%, respectively. Yet, economic interdependence was not enough to prevent the tragic escalation of events that followed the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
> 
> Today, China’s self-proclaimed and widely accepted “peaceful development” similarly appears to be based on solid economic ground. China has re-emerged as a great trading nation but remains a poor country in terms of GDP per capita. China’s export sector is responsible for the creation of hundreds of millions of jobs, and the country still remains deeply dependent on outside technology and know-how. To continue the country’s rapid economic development, the Chinese Communist Party needs a peaceful and stable environment in Asia…
> 
> …as history reaffirms, a peace built on continued political skill, dexterity and restraint rather than a harmony of strategic interest is inherently precarious. Without personal experience of China’s recent traumatic history, future generations of leaders will be more confident and assertive. Even now, emerging Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army leaders argue that China is moving too slowly on securing its foreign-policy goals. The danger is that, just as Germany did in Europe a century ago, China’s overestimation of its own capabilities, and underestimation of American strengths and resolve—combined with strategic dissatisfaction and impatience—is the fast way toward disastrous miscalculation and error…
> 
> Mr. Lee is a foreign-policy fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the author of “Will China Fail?” (CIS, 2007).


----------



## Edward Campbell

I would not argue with Professor Mearsheimer's analysis because it rests on one incontravertible foundation: _”The United States is also likely to behave in aggressive ways_ [p. 2] ... _It is crystal clear from the historical record that the United States does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated over the course of the twentieth century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the United States can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer a threat to rule the roost in Asia. In essence, the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”_ [p. 8]

Equally, as Professor Mearsheimer says [p. 8], _”Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States has over the course of its history? Are they more principled than Americans are? More ethical? Are they less nationalistic than Americans? Less concerned about their survival? They are none of these things, of course, which is why China is likely to imitate the United States and attempt to become a regional hegemon.”_

What Prof. Mearsheimer fails to mention is that during the 19th century the USA struggled to regional hegemony *without* (often) resorting to force – especially not with the dominant global sea power – Great Britain. Wars with Spain and Mexico happened, to be sure, but they might be seen as being akin to a war, in the 21st century, between, say, China and Indonesia – if the Chinese can, as the Americans did in 1898, manufacture a suitable “cover story” that will whitewash its aggression.

Professor Mearsheimer's analysis is thoughtful and needs to be taken seiously but it assumes that the Chinese will not learn from history. I'm not sure that's a good basis upon which to formulate a grand strategy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

See, also, this, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from he _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/an-eloquent-reminder-of-how-crisis-spurs-innovation/article1664762/
(My *emphasis* added)



> An eloquent reminder of how crisis spurs innovation
> 
> Michael Valpy
> 
> Friday, August 6, 2010
> 
> ORILLIA, ONT. – For 79 summers, Canadians have been coming to Geneva Park on Lake Couchiching to listen to the country’s wise people talk about national and international affairs. They lucked out Thursday with Margaret MacMillan.
> 
> The historian, warden of Oxford’s St. Antony’s College and former provost of University of Toronto’s Trinity College has a command of language, ideas and intelligence that has few equals in the Canadian academic world.
> 
> She delivered a state of the world message to open the annual Couchiching Conference on public affairs that had her audience captivated. “You listen to her speak and you want to engage with her for the whole day,” said Julie Dzerowicz, executive director of Toronto’s Empire Club.
> 
> This year’s conference 140 kilometres northeast of Toronto in cottage country is titled “Watershed Moment or Wasted Opportunity,” an exploration of the global financial crisis and its aftermath.
> 
> Prof. MacMillan presented a historical tapestry stretching back 400 years to illustrate how humans have used crises – wars, pandemics and financial catastrophes – to innovate, create new institutions, invent previously unachievable drugs, machines, domestic policies and international rules to better the world.
> 
> She continuously reminded her listeners of how close the planet had come to economic collapse following the summer of 2007 – a total meltdown that was weeks, days away, and is still far from being remedied.
> 
> The focus on the financial crisis has left three other crises untended – the growing gap between rich and poor that is eroding social cohesion and leaving too many people without hope, as U.S. polls increasingly indicate; the huge environmental threat that is not going away and leading people to throw up their hands and say, “What can I do?” and the international political stage that shows the United States clearly in decline with no one certain about how power is shifting but concerns growing about how the narrative will unfold.
> 
> *She referred to a recent article in the Beijing People’s Daily that asked with a new and unfamiliar belligerence, “Is the U.S. ready for China’s rise?” and predicted a collision if the United States “doesn’t give way.” She spoke of fears among international scholars that Washington either will try to use power in circumstances where it shouldn’t or turn its back on the world and become isolationist.*
> 
> She listed the issues the global community has failed to adequately address: failed states like Somalia, terrorism and cyber-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bottoming out of European unity, the questioning of whether the world has the right leaders, the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-weapons states.
> 
> “Do we try to deal with them all at once?” Prof. MacMillan asked. “Certainly they won’t go away if we’re focussed only on the financial crisis.”
> 
> She questioned whether there has been a financial recovery.
> 
> “Confidence has been shaken. Trust has been removed. We’ve paid the price of bailing out the financial institutions. There is now a moral hazard: if banks are too big to fail [and thus will have a public bail-out] does that take away prudence?’
> 
> Frayed social safety nets and persisting pools of unemployment have led to a loss of hope and unfocussed anger against the state and authority. “People without something to do will be unhappy.”
> 
> Increasingly, she said, academic and political discourse on the economy begins with commentary on technology and ends with questions of morality and an exploration of what is society for.
> 
> “The crisis is forcing us to ask fundamental questions” – the questions Prof. MacMillan asked.




Excerpts of Prof. MacMillan's keynote address are here.

_Innovation_ in policy is, I think, an exciting idea. I suspect her formulation that US power is *declining* is wrong; my guess is that US _hyperpuissance_ is gone – and that may or may not be good thing – and the US, and the whole world, indeed, mus learn to adapt, to _innovate_ in other words, to the notion that there are or soon will be more than one *global* super-power. How we, the US and the rest, _innovate_ may well decide the peace or war question.

My guess is that China is discussing _innovation_ - searching for ways to achieve its strategic aims without going to war: a very, very traditional Chinese idea, by the way - see Confucius, Mencius and Sun Tzu. As far as I can see the ongoing debate in the USA and the West, in general, including Prof. Mearsheimer's contribution, is not terribly innovative.


----------



## CougarKing

Defense News link



> *China Builds First Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Base?*
> By WENDELL MINNICK
> Published: 5 Aug 2010 07:51
> 
> TAIPEI - *China's new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) will be deployed at the Second Artillery Corps' new missile base in Guangdong Province in southeastern China, if a new report issued by Washington-based Project 2049 Institute is correct.*
> On July 28, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported the visit of local government officials to a new missile base in the northern Guangdong municipality of Shaoguan. The media report is the first to acknowledge the existence of the new missile base.
> 
> The new 96166 Unit will be outfitted with Dong Feng 21C medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) and possibly the DF-21D ASBM, said Mark Stokes and Tiffany Ma in a new report "Second Artillery Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Brigade Facilities Under Construction in Guangdong?" posted on Project 2049's website.
> 
> The DF-21C was introduced into active inventory in 2005 and is designed for land targets. Though the DF-21D ASBM is nearing the stage of low rate initial production, expected in 2011 or soon after, it is not likely to be deployed into active service until after lengthy testing of the prototype.
> 
> Though the province is already home to a Second Artillery short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) base in Meizhou (96169 Unit), the new base could "have unique capabilities that could complicate the strategic calculus in Asia, and the South China Sea in particular."
> 
> *The ASBM has been dubbed the aircraft "carrier killer" by observers and is part of China's larger anti-access/area denial strategy designed to discourage the U.S. Navy from coming to the aid of Taiwan during a war. Now it appears China is using the same strategy to deter U.S. and other regional navies from operating in the South China Sea. *
> 
> Though U.S. aircraft carrier groups have significant air defense capabilities, including SM-3 missiles, the threat ASBMs pose is a new one, said Stokes. No country has yet developed a reliable ASBM system and therefore there is reluctance among some analysts to dismiss the possibility China has developed the capability of locating and destroying a moving target at sea with a ballistic missile.
> 
> However, U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard told members of the U.S. House and Senate Armed Services Committee in March that China was nearing a test phase for an ASBM.
> 
> China has recently announced that the South China Sea is a "core interest" and now state-controlled media outlets are claiming the entire South China Sea as Chinese territory.
> 
> "Seems to me they are staying on policy by asserting their ownership of the South 'CHINA' Sea," said a former U.S. intelligence officer now based in Singapore. "They aren't going to deviate from that policy. They've got the patience until they own it."
> 
> The deployment of ASBMs near the South China Sea adds a new dimension to the problem regional powers and the U.S. are facing as China begins enforcing maritime claims.
> 
> The 1,700 km range DF-21C MRBM can hit most land targets in Vietnam as well as the northern Philippines, including Subic Bay, with little difficulty.
> 
> The 1,500-2,000 km range DF-21D ASBM should be able to cover the Spratly Islands at 1,800 km. This would include roughly seventy percent of the South China Sea, if the maximum range of 2,000 km is confirmed.
> 
> Additionally, the DF-21C and D will easily handle land targets on Taiwan and naval targets beyond the island with no difficulty. The eastern coast of Taiwan is roughly 800 km from the base. China already has 1,300 DF-11/15 SRBMs aimed at Taiwan and an unknown number of cruise missiles.
> 
> During China's 60th anniversary parade in Beijing in October 2009, the military displayed a variety of mobile missile systems, including the DF-11A and DF15B SRBM, DF-21C MRBM and DF31A intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). The parade also displayed the DH-10 land-attack cruise missile.
> 
> The DF-31A is China's first road mobile ICBM capable of hitting Washington. Before this missile, China relied on aging silo-based DF-5 ICBMs for use as nuclear counterstrikes on the U.S.
> 
> As mobile missile systems, they will be difficult to locate and destroy during a war with the U.S. To add more difficulties for the U.S., the Shaoguan area is near tunneling projects through the Nanling Mountains that divide Guangdong and Hunan provinces.
> 
> "A Second Artillery engineering unit known to be responsible for tunneling work under the so-called 'Great Wall Project' has been in Shaoguan since as early as 2008," said the Project 2049 report.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Dragon as mole
http://unambig.com/dragon-as-mole/



> Just in case you thought CSIS Director Dick Fadden was just another fire-breather blowing smoke...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

Another step towards greater economic integration with mainland China. Though political integration is another matter entirely, especially with such vocal opponents as the protestors and the DPP politicians mentioned in the article.

Agence-France-Presse link



> *Taiwan parliament passes historic China trade pact*
> 
> 29 minutes ago
> 
> 
> TAIPEI (AFP) - Taiwan's parliament Tuesday approved a historic but controversial trade deal with China which is expected to bring the two former rivals closer than ever before.
> 
> Getting the Taiwanese legislature's approval was seen as crucial in terms of securing legitimacy for the *Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) *-- by far the island's most wide-ranging accord yet with China.
> 
> 
> "The ECFA is extremely important to Taiwan if it hopes to avoid being marginalised economically amid an increasing number of trade blocs," said Cheng Ching-ling, a legislator with the pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) party.
> 
> 
> China is Taiwan's largest trading partner, its largest investment destination, and now also home to a growing number of Taiwanese people.
> 
> 
> *The ECFA was passed with 68 votes for and none against. Members of the anti-China opposition refused to take part in the vote, instead voicing protests, according to an AFP photographer on the scene.
> 
> 
> Taiwan's opposition had voiced vehement opposition to ECFA since it was signed in June, but in the end it allowed the deal to pass through the 112-seat parliament after just a day of debate.*
> 
> 
> "The situation right now is pretty much like a dog barking at a train, and we actually can do nothing about it," said Tsai Huang-lang, a legislator for the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
> 
> 
> "Once the agreement becomes effective, which is inevitable now, Taiwan will lose its sovereignty and become like Hong Kong and Macau."
> 
> 
> The ECFA has been a major priority for Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT, who swept to power in 2008 on a vow to improve the island's economy through better ties with China.
> 
> 
> Approval was never in doubt given the KMT's absolute majority in parliament, but the legislative green light was nevertheless seen as important in order to legitimise the pact.
> 
> 
> While seeking domestic backing for the ECFA in the months prior to its signing in June, President Ma repeatedly said that he would seek parliamentary approval for the agreement.
> 
> 
> The ECFA does not explicitly call on Taiwan and China to get the support of their parliaments, saying simply that they must complete "due process" and then notify each other.
> 
> 
> When China and Taiwan signed the agreement in June, they said it would take effect "within six months", but they have released no detailed timetable.
> 
> 
> *"Ma Ying-jeou is selling out Taiwan" and "ECFA means more unemployment," were among the slogans chanted by the protesters outside parliament, reflecting common worries among supporters of the opposition.
> 
> 
> A group of protesters stripped down to their underwear, saying their protest symbolised Taiwan losing everything to China.*
> 
> 
> The ECFA has been widely characterised as the boldest step yet towards reconciliation between the former rivals, who split after the end of a civil war in 1949.
> 
> 
> *KMT politicians have hailed the pact, saying it will bolster the island's economy, but the DPP and its allies claim that it will undermine Taiwan's de facto independence.*
> 
> 
> Although Taiwan and China have been governed separately for more than six decades, Beijing considers the island part of its territory and has vowed to get it back, by force if necessary.
> 
> Tung Chen-yuan, a China expert at Taipei's National Chengchi University, said the pact will benefit Taiwan rather than China, even though it may not help the island in the short term by as much as the government claims.
> 
> "It will bolster the confidence of investors -- both from here and abroad -- as they believe lots of business opportunities will emerge from the closer links between the two sides," he said.


----------



## CougarKing

We'll see how far this goes and if this is just more rhetoric. 

To think that the memoirs of one of the last major political reformers- Premier Zhao Ziyang, who sympathized with the ill-fated Tiananmen Square student movement and was later ousted and placed under house arrest- were recently published and released for sale throughout North America and the West:

Agence-France-Presse link



> *China's Wen calls for political reform: state media*
> 
> 18 minutes ago
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AFP) - *China's Premier Wen Jiabao has said reform of the political system is necessary to sustain the nation's breakneck economic growth, state media reported.*
> "We not only have to push forward reform of the economic system, but we also have to push forward reform of the political system," Wen was quoted as saying by the Xinhua state news agency on a trip to the southern boomtown of Shenzhen.
> 
> 
> "If there is no guarantee of reform of the political system, then results obtained from the reform of the economic system may be lost and the goal of modernisation cannot be achieved," he said, according to the report Saturday.
> 
> 
> *Wen added it was important to "guarantee the people's democratic rights and legitimate rights and interests".
> 
> 
> "We must resolve the problem of excessive concentration of power, create conditions that allow people to criticise and supervise the government and firmly punish corruption," he was quoted as saying.*
> 
> *Wen did not elaborate but his comments reflect wider concerns among the leadership that corruption and abuses of power are becoming the biggest threat to the ruling Communist Party.*
> 
> The soft-spoken Premier is also widely seen as the populist and progressive face of the nation's leadership.
> 
> 
> *He came to prominence when he appeared with then-party head Zhao Ziyang in Beijing's Tiananmen Square during the 1989 pro-democracy protests that were brutally crushed by the military only days later.
> 
> 
> But whereas Zhao was ousted, Wen rose to prominence to be named prime minister in 2003.*


----------



## tomahawk6

Annual report on Chinese military capability now called Military and Security Developments
Involving the People’s Republic of China 2010.

http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2010_CMPR_Final.pdf

Some highlights.

1. Limited command and control of not only its submarine force but also their ballistic missile forces.

2.Julang-2 ballistic missile has failed several flight tests.The missile is intended for the new Jin class ballistic missile subs.

3.problems with the type 093 class have seen a shift in resources to a new attack sub the Type 095


----------



## Edward Campbell

Key point, from the last paragraph of the Executive Summary: _"President Obama has said, “[the U.S.-China] relationship has not been without disagreement and difficulty. But the notion that we must be adversaries is not pre-destined.”"_

If, and it is a BIG IF enough people in Washington, especially in the Pentagon actually believe their elected president then they will neither:

1. Waste too much money countering a _chimera_; or

2. Screw up the whole bloody world.

On the other hand, it IS Washington and it IS the Pentagon so we probably need an even *BIGGER IF*.


----------



## tomahawk6

The people in the Pentagon definitely dont believe or believe in President Obama.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I understand that; I was being a bit facetious.

But in that particular case they should. It *may* be possible to shove China into the enemy column but it will unnecessary and and strategic mistake. If they (the Chinese) move themselves there then that is a different matter but, in my opinion, some (and some is too many) influential Americans want and need China for an enemy. America has enough enemies now, it doesn't need more.

It will have a very, very hard time dragging most of its _traditional_ allies with it if it decides to make China into a new enemy in East Asia.


----------



## tomahawk6

I dont know of anyone that wants to make the PRC an enemy. However,their aspirations may end up causing a conflict on some level. I would hope that our economic ties would help avoid conflict. But we cannot be afraid to stand up to the Chinese if necessary. Recently Obama has warmed relations with Hanoi probably to support Vietnam's claim to the Spratley's. I see that area as being a flash point. I would like to see greater support from China in the war on terror and with regard to Iran. However,its clear that China's economic interests come first even if they could prevent a nuclear war in the middle east which would be bad for everyone in an economic sense.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The odd thing about China's _interests_ is that they are not just, maybe not even mainly economic.

China's primary immediate, medium and long term _interest_ is *social harmony* at home - the survival of the current regime and system depend on that, above all else. Economic prosperity is one major component of social harmony but so is Chinese prestige.

China has _"celebrated"_, if I can use that word, 150 years of *humiliation* and a mere 25 years of success. The current message is: "We were humiliated for 150 years by the Great Powers; now we are a Great Power and THE Great Power in Asia." China made Britain "pay" by surrendering Hong Kong, proper, when the Kowloon lease expired; ditto Portugal, and through it, Europe. Only America still rubs China's nose in its _second class_ status by e.g. sending a CVN to the South China Sea over China's fairly strenuous objection. The Chinese - people, media and government - want that sort of ongoing, 21st century, _humiliation_ to cease and the government's long term aim is to get America *out* of East Asia. I have no sense of what they might have in mind for a time-line but it cannot be accomplished, I think, much before 2050, if at all - but that's just a generation away.

One of the reasons Africa matters is that China wants and needs 'friends,' even poor, backwards ones - that's why Iran matters, too. But Iran is a bit more complicated; it is causing serious problems for America right now and that serves China's immediate and short term interests. In the mid to long term Chin's interests, in avoiding nuclear war, for example, certainly coincide with America's but it is hard for politicians - which is what the Chinese leaders are - to sacrifice an immediate advantage for a longer term gain.

As to _no one "wants to make the PRC an enemy,"_ I'm not so sure that's how I read the Pentagon. I think many admirals and generals need a Chinese threat to justify their programs; they can only call the Chinese a "threat" so often before they have declared China to be an enemy. That would be a strategic mistake.


----------



## CougarKing

Mr. Campbell,

Dambisa Moyo discusses China's interests in Africa quite extensively in pages 98-113 of her book "Dead Aid" where she points out how FDI (foreign direct investment) and all the infrastructure China is building is doing much more to help Africa than billions of dollars in foreign aid (ODA= overseas development aid) from the West has ever done.


And it's not just natural resources, such as the oil in Angola, that China is looking into. 

She states that China has "diversified" into "sectors such as textiles, agro-processing, power generation, road construction, tourism and telecommunicatons". (Moyo, p. 106)

She also emphasizes how China's influence in Africa is seemingly "endless...All but five African countries have relations with Beijing." (Moyo, 106)

--------------------------------------
Btw, here's an article with a Cold War-era story.

To think that I remember seeing the badly bent, captured wreckage of a U2 with _Guo Min Kong Jun_/ROCAF markings on it, at this courtyard area where all these vintage aircraft and tanks were kept, the last time I visited the People's Military Museum in Beijing in 2003 (_Jun Shi Bo Wu Guan_).

Agence-France-Press link




> *Taiwan's Cold War spy pilots reveal secret missions*
> 
> HSINCHU, Taiwan (AFP) - For weeks after narrowly escaping two Chinese missiles, Chuang Jen-liang would wake up at night bathed in sweat, but the Taiwanese spy pilot could talk to no one about his missions.
> *Only now, more than four decades later, is 73-year-old Chuang able to speak out about his harrowing experiences, as Taiwan is lifting the veil on one of its most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.*
> 
> 
> This brings credit to Chuang and other veterans of the *35th "Black Cats" Squadron *who flew at altitudes of more than 20,000 metres (65,000 feet) to gather intelligence about the Chinese, risking their lives each time.
> 
> 
> "I doubt if I'd be so lucky if I had to go through all this again," said Chuang, who now lives in an apartment in north Taiwan's Hsinchu city.
> 
> 
> The elite Black Cats, who were operational from 1961 until 1974, flew the legendary U-2 airplane, dubbed "Dragon Lady" and a crucial intelligence tool at the time.
> 
> 
> That made the squadron a key element in the intelligence relationship between the US government and Taiwan's Nationalist rulers, who had fled the mainland in 1949 after losing a civil war to the communists.
> 
> 
> "The information they gathered was crucial for understanding the Chinese communists' military deployment, especially since spy satellites weren't available," said Taiwan's Air Force Lieutenant General Wang Mu-jung.
> 
> 
> But the information came at a steep cost. At the height of the Cold War, flying the U-2 was one of the most dangerous jobs any military man could perform.
> 
> 
> *Of the 28-member Black Cat squadron, four were shot down and killed over China, while two were taken prisoner and kept incarcerated for nearly 20 years. Six lost their lives during training missions.*
> 
> 
> One of the Black Cats' key areas of interest during the 1960s was China's speedily evolving nuclear programme, a source of great concern after the communist power detonated its first atomic bomb in October 1964.
> 
> 
> Fears that China was now developing a hydrogen bomb formed the backdrop to Chuang's most complicated and daring mission, codenamed "Tabasco", on May 7, 1967, over a test site at Lop Nor in the northwest.
> 
> 
> Since the area was too far away from Taiwan, Chuang took off from a US base in northern Thailand, and once over the target zone he dropped a pair of two-metre (10-foot) sensors onto the desert floor.
> 
> 
> Six weeks later, the two sensors transmitted signals to Taipei confirming that China had tested its first hydrogen bomb.
> 
> 
> *In all their missions, the Black Cats were flying at altitudes too high for China's Soviet-designed MiG planes, but instead they faced the lethal menace of its surface-to-air missiles.*
> 
> Chiu Sung-chow, a former Black Cat, remembered steering frantically to evade missiles fired against him in the skies over northeast China's Dalian city in 1973, with split-second decisions making the difference between life and death.
> 
> 
> "If I had turned my plane either a little bit earlier or later after the missile alert went on inside my cockpit, I would have been hit," he said.
> 
> 
> Chiu's sortie over Dalian was one of the last carried out by a Black Cat over China. The year after, the United States terminated the programme in the spirit of new detente with Beijing.
> 
> 
> With tensions across the Taiwan Straits greatly reduced, and documents about the US-Taiwan cooperation in intelligence declassified, the public can finally learn more about the Black Cats.
> 
> Two schools on Taiwan are named after pilots who died in the line of duty, and the defence ministry is scheduled to hold a special exhibition in October to honour the pilots.
> This is in recognition of their contribution not only in the field of military intelligence, but also to relations with the United States.
> 
> "No doubt, the secretive missions of the Black Cat Squadron have helped promote military ties with Washington," Taiwanese aviation historian Clarence J. Fu argued.
> 
> "The United States was rather reliant on Taiwan when it comes to spying on the mainland," said Fu, co-author of a book on the subject.


----------



## Edward Campbell

In the interests of leaving no nit unpicked,    it's _Dambisa_ Moyo.


----------



## CougarKing

Aside from Africa, here's excerpts regarding China's energy/oil interests overseas: (Quotes from one of the textbooks I was told to read before grad school starts.)

From Dr. Michael Howard's (Simon Fraser University) Transnational Societies:


> The largest of the PRC's foreign oil projects have been in Kazakhstan and Sudan, where the only projects that produce more than 100,000 bpd are located. Since Kazakhstan is located immediately to the West of the PRC and Kazakhstan is the world's third largest producer, the motivation for investment is quite obvious. In addition to investing in oil production in Kazakstan, CNPC* in conjunction with Kazakhstan's KazmunyaGas also built a pipeline linking the two countries. Investments in countires like Kazakhstan and Mongolia are essentially in the PRC's backyard and take place in countries where the PRC has long-standing political and cultural relations...
> 
> (...)
> 
> While a substantial amount of the PRC's oil imports still come from the Middle East (mainly Saudi Arabia, Iran and Oman), Sudan and Angola are now its other top suppliers and the PRC is now the second main importer of Africa oil in the world with Angola as its number one source...
> 
> 
> (...)
> Between 1990s and 2000s, CNPC invested around $10 billion in Sudan, while Sinopec has built a pipeline to Port Sudan where the Petroleum Engineering Construction group has built a $215 million tanker terminal....
> 
> Unlike COSCO, which employs a large number of locals in its foreign operations, oil companies from the PRC rely almost entirely on employees imported from home.
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> But the Chinese laborers are protected, they work under the vigilant gaze of Sudanese troops armed mostly with Chinese weapons.
> 
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> "In an interview in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, Energy and Mining Minister Awad Ahmed Jaz priased his Chinese partners for sticking to trade issues. ' The Chinese are very nice,' he said. ' they don't have anything to do with politics or problems.Things move smoothly, successfully. They hare are very har workers looking for business, not politics' "




*CNPC= China National Petroleum Corporation


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, back in the South China Sea...

DoD Buzz link



> *China Hits Bottom, Plants Flag*
> 
> 
> By Colin Clark Thursday, August 26th, 2010 2:53 pm
> Posted in International, Naval, Policy
> *The People’s Republic of China has joined an elect group of four countries that have taken men as deep as 3,500 meters below the surface of the ocean. And in keeping with Chinese claims to huge amounts of the ocean surface and its depths, the crew planted a flag on the bottom in the South China Sea, much as Russia recently did in Arctic waters.*
> 
> The story was reported on Chinese TV news and by the official Xinhua news service, making it almost certain that the event had policy repercussions, in addition to the nicely nationalistic side of the submersible crew and the craft’s designer having done something physically and technically challenging.
> 
> *The flag planting was done with a submersible, not a submarine. Subs are independent and can go pretty much wherever they like. Submersibles, which are usually designed to go deeper and possess grappling arms of some type, usually are deployed from a mother ship and possess limited range. The Chinese submersible, Jiaolong, executed 17 dives in the South China Sea from May 31 to July 18. The deepest dive took them to 3,759 meters.
> 
> 
> The flag planting, “highlights (again!) that China has laid claim to the South China Sea,” said Dean Cheng, the top Chinese defense expert at the Heritage Foundation here in Washington. *Islands and reefs in the South China Sea are claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. My personal favorite clump of islands is those known as the Spratlys, where people have died over tiny lumps of coral so small it’s impossible to build permanent structures on them. The Spratlys may lie atop oil and gas deposits and they describe rich fishing areas.
> 
> At the end of last month a Defense Ministry spokesman said “China has indisputable sovereignty” of the South China Sea, though he allowed that the PRC would allow ship and aircraft passage “from relevant countries” if they comply with China’s interpretation of international law.
> 
> *Cheng pointed to the fact that the Jiaolong was manned, saying China’s ability to operate at such depths will have economic and military repercussions as they undertake operations such as deep sea oil drilling and labor to supplement Chinese research into oceanography, a key discipline for submarine operations.*


----------



## CougarKing

2 notable updates:

*By the way, the words "Bei Hai" (北海) in the fleet's name below means "North Sea". 

From the AFP via Singapore's Channel News Asia



> *China to stage war games in Yellow Sea*
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 16:37:00 08/29/2010
> 
> Filed Under: Military, Government
> 
> BEIJING- - China will hold live-fire naval exercises in the Yellow Sea this week, state media reported Sunday, after voicing opposition to similar war games to be staged there by the United States and South Korea.
> 
> The *Beihai fleet* of the navy of the People's Liberation Army will conduct a "live ammunition drill" from Wednesday to Saturday off the coast of eastern China's Qingdao city, Xinhua news agency reported.
> 
> "This is an annual routine training, mainly involving the shooting of shipboard artillery," said the report, citing China's defence ministry.
> 
> The United States and South Korea are planning a new round of joint drills in the Yellow Sea in September in another show of force against North Korea following the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.
> 
> Any military drills involving the United States in the Yellow Sea are a sensitive issue because of the area's proximity to China and the disputed maritime boundary between South and North Korea.
> 
> China has bristled at the idea of a US aircraft carrier group patrolling waters near its coast, although the US military has said the planned anti-submarine exercise in September would not involve a carrier.



Defense News link



> *U.S. Concerned About Taiwan Ex-Generals' China Visits: Report*
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 30 Aug 2010 10:50
> 
> TAIPEI - Closer contacts between retired Taiwanese generals and the Chinese authorities have sparked concerns in Washington, the island's major arms supplier, media and an official said Aug. 30.
> 
> The former generals started visiting China years ago, but with Taiwan's mainland ties improving rapidly since 2008, the trips have become so frequent that they have drawn U.S. attention, the Taipei-based China Times said.
> 
> "The United States has voiced its concerns to (Taiwan's de facto ambassador) Jason Yuan and voiced the hope that Taiwan can come up with an explanation," the paper said, without naming the source.
> 
> It said Washington was especially concerned if such contacts may endanger long-standing military cooperation projects with Taiwan.
> 
> Washington is also wondering if the visits mark the beginning of discussion about military exchanges and the establishment of confidence-building measures between the two former cross-Strait rivals, it said.
> 
> "It would be understandable if the United States voices such concerns, given the fast improving ties between Taipei and Beijing," said Chen Wen-yi, deputy chief of the foreign ministry's North American Affairs Department.
> 
> But he said the concerns were unnecessary as the visits were not authorized by the government.
> 
> Beijing still regards Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, although the island has ruled itself since the end of a civil war in 1949.
> 
> Despite the underlying tension, relations have improved markedly since 2008 when Ma Ying-jeou of the China-friendly Kuomintang party became president, pledging to boost trade links and allowing in more Chinese tourists.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is interesting but it fails, in the final bits, to address China's overwhelming 'interest' – forcing the USA off the Korean peninsula and, indeed, off the Asian mainland:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-china-korea-puzzle/article1694254/


> The China-Korea puzzle
> *Beijing’s economic and political support of Pyongyang is a drain on China and counter to its aspiration to be a respected great power. A stable North Korea would be of great benefit to all*
> 
> Charles Burton
> 
> From Friday's Globe and Mail
> 
> On Monday, the Chinese government confirmed that President Hu Jintao had met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il last Friday in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun. The official Xinhua news agency reported that Mr. Hu had told Mr. Kim that “the Chinese respect and support the active measures [North Korea] has taken to maintain stability, develop its economy and improve the livelihood of its people.”
> 
> The same day that statement was released, the United States announced new sanctions against North Korea aimed at cutting off sources of income that finance Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Washington said it was freezing the assets of four North Korean citizens, three companies and five government agencies suspected of drug trafficking, money laundering and currency counterfeiting.
> 
> While Beijing’s references to North Korean stability and economic development may be the stuff of fantasy, the fact is that Washington’s latest sanctions indicate how impotent it is in responding to North Korea and its challenge to regional security.
> 
> Despite China’s public words about North Korea’s measures to “improve the livelihood of its people,” the truth is that most North Koreans don’t get enough to eat because of severely inadequate grain production. The nation has been highly reliant on food from China and United Nations agencies for almost 20 years, since North Korea’s economy began a rapid downward spiral. Most worrying is the impact of pervasive malnutrition and stunted growth on children there.
> 
> As for stability or economic development, the recent execution by firing squad of a former top negotiator with South Korea and two senior economic officials doesn’t bode well.
> 
> Regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapon programs, the Chinese press release, perhaps optimistically, indicated that Kim Jong-il said he “hopes to maintain close communication and co-ordination with China to promote an early resumption of the six-party talks and ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.”
> 
> But it seems Washington realizes the ineffective six-party talks are a charade by Beijing to manipulate U.S. compliance in maintaining the dismal North Korean regime. Since these talks produced no net progress after five rounds since 2003, it’s hard to imagine they’re anything more than a tactic by China and North Korea to stave off outside challenges to their status quo. As an editorial in the state-run Global Times, published while Mr. Kim was in China, makes plain, “Maintaining and stabilizing the current relationship between China and North Korea is of maximum benefit to China.”
> 
> When it comes to addressing the threat posed by North Korea, the bottom line is that positive change will only come when more forward-looking and less conservative elements of China’s leadership prevail over the cautious “do nothing” thinking that dominates current Chinese-Korean policy. But there are signs that China could become more pro-active in resolving the Korea crisis.
> 
> Kim Jong-il is in poor health and wants to see his 28-year-old son installed as his successor at a party congress in a few weeks. But the young man – referred to in the North Korean press as Beloved Comrade Kim Jong-un – has no military or party credentials. Becoming supreme leader is evidently to be his first real job. “This kid may have his finger on the button before we know it,” said one U.S. diplomat. The sinking of a South Korean warship in March could well be the consequence of Beloved Comrade’s trying out his newly acquired authority.
> 
> Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, is regarded as a pale reflection of his father, Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader. In fact, it has been widely reported that China’s leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, was appalled when Kim Il-sung told him that Kim Jong-il would be his successor.
> 
> In the case of Kim Jong-un, then, the Chinese response must have been even more disparaging. It also will be a very hard sell in North Korea. Indeed, when Kim Jong-un went with his ailing father to meet China’s President, his name was left off the list of Korean officials reported in the Dear Leader’s entourage by the Chinese media.
> 
> Beijing would do well to take action to stop this Kim family dynastic succession in the interests of North Korea’s political stability.
> 
> Even though South Korea, with a per capita income 37 times that of its northern neighbour, recently proposed a “unification tax” to cover the anticipated cost of eventual reunification, the key player in resolving the Korean crisis has to be China.
> 
> The Korean nation has been separated for 65 years already, and only China has the ability to inspire a military coup in Pyongyang and install a pro-China regime that will implement a Chinese-style program of “opening and economic reform.” Only China has the resources to make the high levels of investment necessary to reconstruct North Korea’s economic infrastructure.
> 
> Beijing’s current economic and political support of Pyongyang is a drain on China and counter to its aspiration to be a respected great power. But a stable North Korea, with a market economic system, would be of great benefit to China, and would likely, eventually, lead to a China-oriented reunified Korea. While this places doubt over the future role of the United States in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, it could be the way to a prosperous and stable East Asia.
> 
> _Charles Burton is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont._




At the risk of repeating myself, we, including 'analysts like Prof. Burton, need to stop thinking (and analyzing) in our familiar, even comfortable 'short term' framework. The Chinese, who do not need to pay too much attention to immediate and short term political factors, think in and make policy for the *long term*. If we fail to recognize and take account of China's long term interests and goals then we will fail to protect our own long mid and term vital interests.


----------



## a_majoor

If we don't learn from history...

http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2010/09/20/maos-great-leap-forward-and-the-power-of-history/?singlepage=true



> *Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the Power of History*
> September 20, 2010 - by Ron Radosh
> 
> We have known for some time that Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, was one of the last century’s most brutal and vicious mass murderers.  In 2005, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s biography of Mao was published in this country to wide acclaim, and for the first time, many of the myths surrounding his rise to power and the nature of his rule after 1949 were brought to light. The authors estimated that Mao “was responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.” My own discussion of their findings can be read here.
> 
> One period they covered was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” his attempt to rapidly industrialize China in the five years between 1958 and 1962. Chang and Halliday had argued that not only did the program fail; it produced mass starvation, with areas of China resorting to cannibalism. Peasants and city dwellers alike were forced to build home steel furnaces, and all metal implements — including pots and pans used for cooking — were to be smelt, turning each home into a mini local steel producing factory. Mao also ordered that all sparrows be killed, since they ate grain. The “bourgeois” bird was condemned; the result was the upsetting of nature’s ecological balance, as pests and other birds once killed by sparrows began to attack crops. Before long, Mao was asking the Soviet Union to send them 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Far East.
> 
> Mao had said: “Half of China may well have to die,” and he was prepared for such an outcome. It almost came true. Thirty-eight million people died of starvation and overwork during the Leap and the subsequent famine, which lasted for four long years. This greatest of 20th century manmade famines exceeded the deaths caused by Stalin’s collectivization of the Ukraine. As Mao told his staff, “50 million (might have to) die … you can’t blame me when people die.”
> 
> Now Frank Dikötter, a historian who lives in Hong Kong, has written the first major book about these disastrous years, which Dikötter calls “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known.” It is titled Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Using regional archives in rural areas, he has unearthed many gruesome details. A British newspaper covered the author’s recent book talk, noting that Dikötter “compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.”
> 
> Calling the period a virtual war between the peasant and the State, Dikötter said: “It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three grimmest events of the 20th century. … It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over.” It is not only a period that official China has conveniently forgot — wiped out of the historical memory of China’s newly prosperous populace — but of course it is one also forgot by those legions of American leftists who in those years maintained that Mao and the Chinese Communists were successfully creating a new world.
> 
> The records Dikötter found revealed:
> 
> State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.
> 
> All of this raises the question of what this means for the people of today’s China, whose real history is carefully hidden from them by the Party’s leaders. As we read of the great progress China has made in the past few decades, it is tempting to think that China is no longer what anyone would call a Communist state — since it is so far removed from these horrible events of Mao’s day.
> 
> Yet an important essay by journalist Ian Johnson, in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, makes the point that “today, the Party is arguably stronger than ever but few outsiders are aware of its enduring reach.”  It is at the center of events as varied as shifts in global currency markets, New York stock market listings, and clashes over North Korea.
> 
> While China’s economy may be a market communism and many of its policies cannot be called anything resembling traditional Communism, “the Party is still Leninist in structure and organization, resulting in institutions and behavior patterns that would be recognizable to the leaders of the Russian Revolution.” Johnson provides a particularly striking example showing how powerful the Party is. China’s new thriving giant corporations are not actually run by its board of directors, but by the Party:
> 
> All have Party secretaries who manage them in conjunction with the CEO. In big questions, such as leadership or overseas acquisitions, Party meetings precede board meetings, which largely give routine approval to Party decisions. The Party’s overarching control was driven home a few years ago when China’s large telecom companies had their CEOs shuffled like a pack of cards because of a decision by the Party’s Organization Department. It would have been like the US Department of Commerce ordering the heads of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to play musical chairs. For the Organization Department, which acts as the Party’s personnel department, it was normal; it often shifts senior Party officials every few years to prevent empire building and corruption.
> 
> A similar structure guides the political decisions that are made. The National Congress is nothing but a rubber stamp institution for the Party, which runs the government through what Johnson calls a “parallel structure of behind-the-scenes control.” Even in a high school, it is the Party leader, not the principal, who decides how the school is to be run.  The Party has 78 million members, which are led by the nine-man Standing Committee of the Party’s Politburo. In other words, it is not incorrect to call the regime one of “market Leninism.”
> 
> Rather than declining in power as the economy grows, the Party seemingly has perfected a mechanism to maintain control while it presides over a controlled capitalism. Those brave enough to demand real democratization, a multi-party system, and a weakening of control from above, face years in brutal prisons.
> 
> The Party presides over economic growth, and so far, the results of a better life for some — especially in the cities — have worked to curb mass demands for democracy. Johnson thinks the Party is not threatened at present, but that it “lacks the impetus to reform.” Thus he concludes, “With China on top of the world, the Party’s perch atop the country seems impregnable and yet more vulnerable than ever.”
> 
> Knowing this, it is not really surprising that China’s current rulers prefer that its people not learn the real history of the Party and the Maoist years, since its own legitimacy stems from the Revolution Mao and his comrades made. That is why getting this history to the people of China is so important. At times, true history itself can play a revolutionary role.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Party is, indeed much, much stronger than it was in Mao's day - when a revolution was revolutions, formented by Mao's own associates, were a very real possibility.

But the Communist Party of China _circa_ 2010 is nothing like he CPC in 1960 (Geat Leap Forward) or, worse, _circa_ 1970 - at the peak (depth) of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Attempts to equate Hu Jintao to Mao are, simply, the ludicrous ramblings of ill informed fools - of which the _blogosphere_ has an apparently endless supply.

The Party is , earnestly - almost desperately, looking for ways to hang on to power by finding some new way to earn the 'consent' or 'mandate' of the people to govern. In this they resemble Canadian Conservatives and Liberals more than Maoists.


----------



## GAP

A Thousand Grains Of Pain
Article Link
September 20, 2010

American counter-intelligence efforts are snagging more Chinese spies. This may be more because of increased spying effort by China, than more success by the FBI and CIA. For example, recently, a former U.S. Army analyst (26 year old Liangtian Yang) was arrested as he was boarding an airliner headed for China. He had a one-way ticket. Yang had in his possession electronic versions of classified army manuals. Another recent development was the indictment of Chinese born Kexue Huang for stealing $300 million worth of trade secrets (how to manufacture new organic insecticides) for use in China.

Incidents like this are just another example of China's use of industrial espionage to turn their country into the mightiest industrial and military power on the planet. For over two decades, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished; steal Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries found in the West (most founded and run by entrepreneurs), and was never able to get all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable and less powerful. Same with their jet fighters, tanks and warships.

China gets around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time. China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the "thousand grains of sand" approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.

This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort. Backing it all up is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas, and what they could, or should, be to trying to grab for the motherland. It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examining who is going overseas, and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot leave the country, legally, without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They are being alerted in case they want to have a talk with students, tourists or business people before they leave the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.
More on link


----------



## Edward Campbell

GAP said:
			
		

> A Thousand Grains Of Pain
> Article Link
> September 20, 2010
> ...
> China gets around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time. China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the "thousand grains of sand" approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.
> 
> This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort. Backing it all up is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas, and what they could, or should, be to trying to grab for the motherland. It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examining who is going overseas, and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot leave the country, legally, without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They are being alerted in case they want to have a talk with students, tourists or business people before they leave the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.
> More on link




This is a vital point which we ignore at our peril. As one who has sponsored/helped Chinese _visiting scholars_, and who may do so again, I am very conscious of the fact that some, probably many, are, to one deree or another, manipulated by one or another arm of the Chinese national government.

One thing that is changing: more and more students are returning to China; only a tiny handful stay in Europe; more, but now a minority, I think, stay in Australia and Canada and a few more stay in America. But China is now the land of opportunity and foreign degrees are very valuable for securing better jobs and big money *there*.


----------



## a_majoor

Rising power is creating rising discontent as well:

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/23/china_has_a_longer_learning_curve_than_i_had_anticipated



> *China has a longer learning curve than I had anticipated*
> Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Thursday, September 23, 2010 - 10:21 AM Share
> 
> There's been a lot of oh-my-God-China-is-eating-America's-lunch-have-you-seen-how-pretty-their-infrastructure-is?-kind of blather among the commentariat. And, to be sure, China has had a good Great Recession. But one of the points I've been making on this blog repeatedly is that, for all of China's supposed deftness, "China's continued rise seems to be occurring in spite of strategic miscalculations, not because of them."
> 
> Now, I had also assumed that China's leadership would quickly move down the learning curve and practice a more subtle form of statecraft. After reading Keith Bradsher in the New York Times today, however, I guess I was wrong:
> 
> Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, win turbines and guided missiles.
> 
> Chinese customs officials are halting shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, preventing them from being loaded aboard ships this week at Chinese ports, three industry officials said Thursday.
> 
> On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao personally called for Japan’s release of the captain, who was detained after his vessel collided with two Japanese Coast Guard ships about 40 minutes apart as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China. Mr. Wen threatened unspecified further actions if Japan did not comply.
> 
> Is this effort at economic statecraft going to accomplish Beijing's objectives? In a word, no. True, according to Bradsher, "China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths."
> 
> It's also true, however, that Japan has been stockpiling supplies of rare earths. Furthermore, this kind of action is just going to lead to massive subsidies to produce rare earths elsewherein the world (including the United States) and/or develop rare earth substitutes. Oh, and one other thing -- given the spate of flare-ups between Japan and China as of late, the last thing Tokyo will want to do is back down in the face of Chinese economic coercion.
> 
> Don't get me wrong -- if China persists in this ban, there will be come economic costs to the rest of the world. Those costs just won't translate into any political concessions. [UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an excellent follow-up story suggesting that China is not imposing a ban.]
> 
> It is hardly surprising that (reported) actions like these are leading the entire Pacific Rim right to Washington's door:
> 
> [R]ising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself — one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.
> 
> Washington is leaping into the middle of heated territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian nations despite stern Chinese warnings that it mind its own business. The United States is carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in order to help Seoul rebuff threats from North Korea even though China is denouncing those exercises, saying that they intrude on areas where the Chinese military operates.
> 
> Meanwhile, China’s increasingly tense standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler captured by Japanese ships in disputed waters is pushing Japan back under the American security umbrella....
> 
> “The U.S. has been smart,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy who studies security issues in Asia. “It has done well by coming to the assistance of countries in the region.”
> 
> “All across the board, China is seeing the atmospherics change tremendously,” he added. “The idea of the China threat, thanks to its own efforts, is being revived.”
> 
> Asserting Chinese sovereignty over borderlands in contention — everywhere from Tibet to Taiwan to the South China Sea — has long been the top priority for Chinese nationalists, an obsession that overrides all other concerns. But this complicates China’s attempts to present the country’s rise as a boon for the whole region and creates wedges between China and its neighbors.
> 
> This latest rare earth ban is just going to accelerate this trend. The ironic thing about this is that it's not like U.S. grand strategy has been especially brilliant. The U.S., however, has two big advantages at the moment. First, it's further away from these countries than China. Second, Washington's actions and rhetoric have been far more innocuous than Beijing's.
> 
> In yet another New York Times story, David Sanger provides a small clue as to whether Beijing either knows or cares about the blowback from its recent actions:
> 
> Early this month Mr. Obama quietly sent to Beijing Thomas E. Donilon, his deputy national security adviser and by many accounts the White House official with the greatest influence on the day-to-day workings of national security policy, and Lawrence H. Summers, who announced Tuesday that he would leave by the end of the year as the director of the National Economic Council....
> 
> [O]fficials familiar with the meetings said they were intended to try to get the two countries focused on some common long-term goals. The Chinese sounded more cooperative themes than in the spring, when two other administration officials were told, as one senior official put it, that “it was the Obama administration that caused this mess, and it’s the Obama administration that has to clean it up.”
> 
> Well, that is learning, but it's of a very modest kind.
> 
> Now, it is possible that Beijing has simply decided that its internal growth is so big that it can afford the friction that comes with a rising power. My assessment, however, is that they're vastly overestimating their current power vis-a-vis the United States, and they're significantly undererstimating the effect of pushing the rest of the Pacific Rim into closer ties with the United States (and India).
> 
> More significantly, and to repeat a theme, China is overestimating its ability to translate the economic interdependence of the Asia/Pacific economy into political leverage. With these misperceptions, however, China is risking some serious conflicts down the road.
> 
> Am I missing anything? I'm serious -- this problem ain't going away anytime soon.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I usually tell people that the Chinese are subtle and, _traditionally_, prefer to do their business quietly and even in the shadows. But it's not always that way as this story, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, makes clear:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/the-chinese-fishing-boat-captain-who-humbled-the-japanese/article1725025/



> The Chinese fishing boat captain who humbled the Japanese
> 
> Mark MacKinnon
> 
> Beijing— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> 
> If Japan’s powers-that-be had just put Zhan Qixiong on the next vessel back to China the day he rammed his fishing trawler into two Japanese coast guard boats, neighbours wouldn't be whispering about Tokyo’s diplomatic humbling at the hands of Beijing.
> 
> Japan on Saturday morning released the Chinese fishing boat captain following intense pressure from China. In a region where honour matters, Japan lost face.
> 
> As it turned out Japanese authorities didn't have the foresight to rid themselves of the diplomatic time bomb they seized Sept. 7 in disputed waters south of Okinawa. And they didn't have the stomach for what came next.
> 
> Beijing, anxious to show Japan and the region that they now set the rules in East Asia, came out swinging.
> 
> The Japanese ambassador to Beijing was called on the carpet five times, government-to-government links were severed and Chinese tourists were encouraged to avoid visiting their neighbour. A visit by 1,000 Japanese schoolchildren to Shanghai Expo was cancelled and a Japanese boy band was told to stay away.
> 
> As the dispute passed the two-week mark, China's leaders got serious. First, a rumour was allowed to spread that Beijing had halted the export to Japan of rare earths minerals that are critical in the production of everything from mobile phones to Toyota’s prized Prius hybrid automobile. Then, on Thursday, four Japanese nationals were arrested on transparently trumped-up charges.
> 
> At the UN in New York, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ominously warned “the Japanese side shall bear all the consequences that arise” if Mr. Zhan were not immediately released.
> 
> Throughout the diplomatic offensive, Japan – the dominant power in East Asia as long as China’s rulers were tearing their own country to shreds – stood unmoving in its corner, a stunned prizefighter that hadn’t heard the opening bell. After 17 days of insisting it had the right to try Mr. Zhan in its domestic courts, Tokyo threw in the towel on Friday, surrendering unconditionally to bring an end to the worst dispute between the two Asian giants in years.
> 
> China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that a chartered plane had been sent to Japan to bring Mr. Zhan home. He is already being treated as a national hero in China, the fishing boat captain who took on the hated Japanese and won.
> 
> It was unclear whether Mr. Zhan’s release would affect the fates of the four Japanese, employees of the construction firm Fujita Corporation, who were detained in Hebei province on suspicion of filming in a restricted military area.
> 
> What Beijing gained in the showdown – de facto Japanese recognition of its claim to the Japanese-controlled chain of uninhabited islands that are known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan – was in some ways less significant than what Tokyo lost. (Japan had previously insisted there was no dispute over who owned the atoll, the waters around which are believed to contain as much as seven trillion cubic feet of natural gas and upward of 100 billion barrels of oil.)
> 
> Where China is a country triumphantly on the rise – recently leapfrogging Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy – Tokyo is in a two-decade tumble. As the dispute spread, Beijing held most of the best cards: Tokyo could ill-afford a spreading conflict with its largest trading partner.
> 
> Still, it was a weak hand poorly played. “I admit that Japan has to come to terms with China’s ever-growing clout some way or another,” said Yuki Asaba, associate professor of international relations at Yamaguchi Prefectural University in western Japan. “[But] the decision today sent a wrong, wrong and wrong message both domestically and internationally ... ”
> 
> Prof. Asaba said Japan’s climbdown would affect its claims in other territorial squabbles with China, South Korea and Russia. Just as easily, Beijing’s victory over Tokyo could make China’s smaller neighbours, such as Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, more nervous about standing up to China in their own disputes with Beijing over their competing claims to the resource-rich South China Sea.
> 
> In a region where honour matters, China’s other neighbours are wondering when it might be their turn to make the same bow toward Beijing.




Now, there is a _special relationship_ between China and Japan based on a long and often bitter history. The Rape of Nanjing, which was an atrocity, an act of barbarism, of the same _order_ as the Holocaust of the Jews, albeit of a different _scale_ (far fewer people were slaughtered, but they were murdered in a few weeks rather than a few years), still colours Chinese perceptions but the Chinese also admire the Japanese for their rapid development, devotion to quality and strong cultural values which appear to allow the Japanese to reap the rewards of modern, Western business and technology without sacrificing their Japanese _natures_.

But it is clear than when truly *vital interests* are at stake the diplomatic gloves are off and Chinese muscle will be applied. China's other neighbours have certainly taken note.


----------



## tomahawk6

Malware that infected Iran's nuclear industry has now infected Chinese industry as well.



> Stuxnet 'cyber superweapon' moves to China
> (AFP) – 15 hours ago
> 
> BEIJING — A computer virus dubbed the world's "first cyber superweapon" by experts and which may have been designed to attack Iran's nuclear facilities has found a new target -- China.
> 
> The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.
> 
> Stuxnet is feared by experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.
> 
> It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.
> 
> The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.
> 
> "This malware is specially designed to sabotage plants and damage industrial systems, instead of stealing personal data," an engineer surnamed Wang at antivirus service provider Rising International Software told the Global Times.
> 
> "Once Stuxnet successfully penetrates factory computers in China, those industries may collapse, which would damage China's national security," he added.
> 
> Another unnamed expert at Rising International said the attacks had so far infected more than six million individual accounts and nearly 1,000 corporate accounts around the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
> 
> The Stuxnet computer worm -- a piece of malicious software (malware) which copies itself and sends itself on to other computers in a network -- was first publicly identified in June.
> 
> It was found lurking on Siemens systems in India, Indonesia, Pakistan and elsewhere, but the heaviest infiltration appears to be in Iran, according to software security researchers.
> 
> A Beijing-based spokesman for Siemens declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Thursday.
> 
> Yu Xiaoqiu, an analyst with the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Centre, downplayed the malware threat.
> 
> "So far we don't see any severe damage done by the virus," Yu was quoted by the Global Times as saying.
> 
> "New viruses are common nowadays. Both personal Internet surfers and Chinese pillar companies don't need to worry about it at all. They should be alert but not too afraid of it."
> 
> A top US cybersecurity official said last week that the country was analysing the computer worm but did not know who was behind it or its purpose.
> 
> "One of our hardest jobs is attribution and intent," Sean McGurk, director of the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), told reporters in Washington.
> 
> "It's very difficult to say 'This is what it was targeted to do,'" he said of Stuxnet, which some computer security experts have said may be intended to sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran.
> 
> A cyber superweapon is a term used by experts to describe a piece of malware designed specifically to hit computer networks that run industrial plants.
> 
> "The Stuxnet worm is a wake-up call to governments around the world," Derek Reveron, a cyber expert at the US Naval War School, was quoted as saying Thursday by the South China Morning Post.
> 
> "It is the first known worm to target industrial control systems."
> 
> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...ad9aa7b8d3.651


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a law of unintended consequences, as this article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, illustrates:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/how-china-trade-stance-may-aid-japan/article1742334/
My emphasis added.



> How China trade stance may aid Japan
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
> Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010
> 
> At the height of the diplomatic fracas between China  and Japan over a disputed island chain, Beijing threw one punch that arguably did more to convince its neighbour to cave in than any other: It quietly slowed exports to Japan of an obscure but increasingly precious commodity known as rare earth metals.
> 
> 
> By stepping up customs checks at its ports on rare earths headed to Japan – thereby slowing exports to a trickle – Beijing instigated a brief but telling panic among the many Japanese technology firms who need rare earths to produce everything from smart phones toToyota Motor Corp.’s prized hybrid automobile, the Prius. One day after the new customs procedures were introduced, Japan – which depends on China for nearly all of its rare earths – caved in to Beijing’s key demand in the fight, releasing the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that rammed two Japanese coastguard  vessels last month near the uninhabited islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
> 
> But China also communicated a message to its neighbour besides the one it intended. While the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan was shocked at how far and how fast Beijing proved willing to escalate the quarrel over the islands, Tokyo also got a potentially valuable lesson on the dangers of relying so heavily on China for rare earths and other natural resources.
> 
> The tactic may have helped Beijing win the release of the fishing captain, but it may also result in a loosening of its stranglehold on the international market for rare earth metals. While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was making a show of refusing to meet with Japan’s Prime Minister at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Mr. Kan met with Mongolian Prime Minister Sukhbaatar Batbold on the sidelines of the assembly to discuss Japanese support for more mining of rare earths in Mongolia. That resulted in a deal announced Sunday in which Japanese firms and technology will assist the search for and production of Mongolian rare earths.
> 
> Last week, Japan’s Industry Minister travelled to another of China’s mineral-rich neighbours, Kazakhstan, and announced that Japan would subsidize the mining of rare earth metals there, too.
> 
> “This is not a coincidence. This is part of Japan’s diplomatic strategy” following the islands dispute, said Yuki Asaba, associate professor of international relations at Yamaguchi Prefectural University. “But Mongolia is not a substitute for China. It’s just a step for Japan to expand its supply.”
> 
> China currently mines more than 95 per cent of the world’s rare earth metals, which is the collective term for 17 chemical elements that are particularly abundant in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (adjacent to the independent state of Mongolia). Following a strategy laid out by the country’s late leader Deng Xiaoping – who prophesied that rare earths would eventually be as important to China as oil is to the Middle East – part of the reason for Beijing’s dominance is that Chinese producers sell the elements so cheaply as to make it uneconomic for competitors.
> 
> State-run Chinese firms sharply expanded production and slashed prices of rare earths in the 1990s, forcing producers in the United States (previously the world’s leading producer and exporter) and elsewhere out of the market. Several Chinese firms involved in the rare earths industry refused to be interviewed for this article, and even Chinese academics who specialize in the topic said it was too politically sensitive to discuss with a foreign journalist.
> 
> Now that China has shown its willingness to use its control of the rare-earths market as a political weapon – something some Beijing-watchers have long feared – buyers are scrambling to react. But nowhere is the nervousness more closely felt than Japan, which is the world’s biggest buyer of rare earths and accounts for 65 per cent of Chinese rare earths exports. Even before the tighter customs procedures were slapped on rare earths heading to Japan, China had slashed its exports of rare earths to 7,976 tons in the second half of this year from 22,283 tons in the first half and 28,417 tons a year earlier, Japan’s Trade Ministry said.
> 
> Last week the influential Japan Business Federation demanded that the government take steps to ensure a reliable supply, and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported Sunday that the government wanted to reduce as quickly as possible its reliance on China, which currently supplies more than 90 per cent of Japan’s rare earths, by dropping that proportion to 70 per cent.
> 
> Even before the island’s dispute flared into a near-trade war, some Japanese companies were already uneasy about their heavy reliance on China. Electronics maker Toshiba Corp. – which uses rare earth elements in motor magnets – signed a deal in June with Kazakhstan’s state nuclear power company, Kaztomprom, to produce the necessary elements at mines in the Central Asian country in which Toshiba has a stake. The massive Sumitomo Group trading house signed a similar deal with Kaztomprom earlier this year to produce 3,000 tons of rare earth minerals annually from the residue of uranium mining.
> 
> Other Japanese companies are known to be aiding the nascent mining of rare earths in countries as far flung as South Africa and Vietnam, and executives from Sumitomo and Mitsubishi Corp. were among those in attendance when the Japan-Mongolia deal was announced Sunday. Rare earths are critical in producing everything from wind turbines to guided missile systems.
> 
> Canadian miners could also stand to benefit as Japan and other countries look for non-Chinese suppliers of rare earths. Great Western Minerals Group, Rare Element Resources, Avalon Rare Metals and Neo Material Technologies are among the top non-Chinese producers of rare earths.
> 
> Some Japanese firms, meanwhile, are looking for ways to reduce – or eliminate altogether – their need for the commodities. In particular, auto makers are investigating whether it’s possible to build hybrid cars without using rare earths. They may already have an answer: Last week, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, a government research agency, and Hokkaido University announced they had jointly developed a new motor that doesn’t require rare earth metals.
> 
> “We have been conducting research and development to find alternatives for the rare earths,” Honda Motor Corp. spokeswoman Kumiko Hashimoto told the Japan Times newspaper. Toyota, which called its suppliers in the middle of the islands crisis to check on stores of rare earths, has reportedly set up an internal task force to investigate the company’s options.




I don’t know enough about rare earth metals – except that China is a huge but now unreliable supplier. Neither Kazakhstan nor Mongolia are free from heavy Chinese influence so I would assess them as unreliable suppliers, too. Both need China more than they need Japan’s money.

Does Canada have enough rare earth metals to make a difference?


----------



## GAP

the article mentions that the US used to be the main suppliers, either with sources in the US, Canada, or whereever......Canada may not be able to supply the total sum, but it's a niche that some ambitious company will exploit.....


----------



## Edward Campbell

This looks like a fairly _authoritative_ - for _Wikipedia_, anyaway - explanation, while this suggests that:

1. China produces (has in reserve?) 97% of the world's rare earth metals; and

2. Plans to restrict exports of them.

Hmmmm.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Dragon watch: Should a Chinese company get a substantial holding in Potash Corp. (and other matters)? (Afstan angle at end)
http://unambig.com/dragon-watch-should-a-chinese-company-get-a-substantial-holding-in-potash-corp-and-other-matters/



> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

Potash matters hugely to China. China can, right now, pretty much feed itself. But the emerging middle class in Eastern China is growing and changing its habits: it wants to eat meat - more protein.

Many (maybe even most) Chinese are semi-vegetarians. They may eat some meat or fish once a day - maybe less often. Meat is, was for that emerging middle class, an expensive luxury that requires huge amounts of feed-grain (corn) to produce - and fertilizer to grow the corn. But, now, the middle class can afford meat with almost every meal and many of them want it, too.

The Chinese have a vested interest in keeping the production of Potash high and the price low. But, in the end, the market, not the vendor, sets the price.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US virtually stopped production of rare earths because of environmental concerns and the low cost of Chinese rare earths. A US company Molycorp is reopening a California mine with an annual production goal of 20,000 tons. An Australian company has gotten into the rare earth biz its called Lynas Corp. Its share price has doubled in the last three months.


----------



## MarkOttawa

E. R. Campbell: Mass meat-eating is quite recent in most of Europe.  I remember reading (no link immediately at hand) of a typical working class family in Hamburg that, before WW I, ate meat once a week; not sure if _Wurst_ included.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is an article by Frank Ching,* 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/in-china-a-tortuous-road-to-the-rule-of-law/article1744303/


> In China, a tortuous road to the rule of law
> 
> FRANK CHING
> 
> From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> 
> In late June, China issued new regulations to make confessions obtained through torture inadmissible in court. They seemed a major step forward in the country’s long and tortuous road to a system of rule of law.
> 
> Weeks after the new regulations went into effect, horrific details emerged of how a suspect was tortured in the southwestern city of Chongqing, amid a massive crackdown on organized crime. Zhu Mingyong, the lawyer who defended Fan Qihang, a businessman in the construction industry, made public a video in which his client described how he was tortured daily for six months, along with the scars to prove it. During his trial for murder and other crimes, Mr. Fan had tried unsuccessfully to retract his confession.
> 
> Mr. Fan was given the death penalty and, after his appeal was rejected by a Chongqing court, the case went to the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing for review. It was the first test case of the new regulations.
> 
> Mr. Fan wrote to the top court describing how he was tortured until he confessed, and a group of lawyers, scholars and writers published an open letter asking the court to investigate allegations of torture in Chongqing. So all eyes were on the Supreme People’s Court to see what difference, if any, the new regulations would make in practice. The answer came Sept. 26 when Mr. Fan was executed.
> 
> According to the court, “the facts were clear, the evidence was reliable and adequate, the conviction was accurate, the sentence was appropriate and the proceedings were legal.” This was a major blow to everyone who thought that China was actually changing and that the new legal provisions were more than just window dressing.
> 
> Increasingly, it seems, China wants to be seen as a country that respects human rights. New laws and regulations have been put on the books, including an amendment to the constitution in 2003 that says, “The state respects and preserves human rights.” Only last week, the government issued a white paper detailing the progress it’s made on human rights in the past year. Within the United Nations system, China has joined 25 international conventions on human rights.
> 
> But it’s instructive to see what Beijing says while observing what it does.
> 
> Thus, for example, the white paper says: “Leading officials of all levels of the party and government are required to read and reply to letters from the masses, open their offices to complaints from visitors on a regular basis, take responsibility for the cases they handle and be held responsible for any dereliction of duty, so as to guarantee the people’s legitimate rights and interests.” It goes on to say, “In 2009, the number of letters from and visits of the people for petition dropped by 2.7 per cent over the previous year, a decrease for the fifth consecutive year,” implying there’s growing satisfaction with the government.
> 
> It doesn’t mention, however, that would-be petitioners are often prevented from travelling to the capital by local governments. And those who do get to Beijing are often abducted by goons who beat them and detain them in “black jails” before sending them back home.
> 
> The day before the white paper was issued, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported on a “security service company” in Beijing that had earned commissions for helping liaison offices of local governments in the capital intercept and lock up petitioners. No doubt, the activities of such companies contributed to the drop in petitioners.
> 
> _Frank Ching is author of_ China: The Truth About Its Human Rights Record.




While Frank Ching has the facts right, I think he misunderstands the _nature_ of China.

Many of you are already bored with my constant attention to _liberal_ versus _illiberal_ democracy and at the risk of driving more of you even farther away I need to explain my views on _liberal_ (e.g. Amglo-American) versus _conservative_ (East Asian) socio-cultural ‘systems.’

We, Anglo-Americans – which includes _most_ Canadians, are _liberals_ and my definition of _liberal_ is pretty much in the mainstream. A liberal is a person who values _individual_ rights above _collective_ rights but who recognizes that there is some room for the latter. Indeed a _liberal_ society is grounded in _conservative_ values. The _conservative_ values _community_ (usually based on the family) over the so-called ‘sovereign individual’ and all communities are based on the fundamental idea that we individuals willingly, even necessarily, sacrifice some of our individuality in order to gain security and _civility_. Those who are _*absolute* liberals_ would, of course, abandon the community and strike out on their own and our mythology is full of examples.

China is a highly _conservative_ society; in fact if you want a good grounding in conservatism then Confucius and Mencius are your best guides – that’s right, the ‘best’ guides to modern, 21st century China are older than Christianity itself but, far more than Christianity, they still ‘shape’ their societies. (Confucian values spread well beyond China.)

Thus, the Chinese, being _conservatives_ can, without upsetting their core, cultural values, say, as their highest court did, that “the facts were clear, the evidence was reliable and adequate, the conviction was accurate, the sentence was appropriate and the proceedings were legal.” The fact that the outcome, being based on torture, would be inadmissible here is neither here nor there – the needs of the _community_ were served despite the violation of one _individual_’s rights; conservative values in a conservative society triumphed – _quelle surprise!_ It is not that the Chinese do not value individual rights – especially property rights – it is just that they are, for culturally necessary reasons, easily and often subordinated to community or _collective_ rights.

Conservative societies are *not* the *opposite* of _liberal_ societies – the two are, in fact, something akin to two sides of the same coin and both are the opposite of _illiberal_ societies. See: here if you have any interest in even more of this dry, dusty stuff.

We need to understand China if we are going to confront China and deal with it to our advantage.


__________
*Frank Ching received a bachelor's degree in English from Fordham University, a master's degree in philosophy from New York University and a Certificate in Advanced International Reporting from Columbia University as a Ford Foundation Fellow. 

He is a journalist who has reported and commented on events in Asia, particularly China, for several decades. He worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, another Dow Jones publication. He opened The Wall Street Journal's bureau in China in 1979, after the normalization of U.S.-China relations, thus becoming one of the first four American newspaper reporters to be based in Beijing since 1949.

After leaving Beijing, Mr. Ching spent several years working on a book, "ANCESTORS: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family," (Morrow, N.Y. 1988). Using his own family as a vehicle, he presented a history of China from the Sung dynasty to the present. He belongs to a small handful of prominent families that can trace their origin in China for more than 30 generations.

In 1992, he joined the Far Eastern Economic Review. Until spring 2001, he wrote a weekly column, "Eye On Asia," in FEER in which he commented on political developments around the region, in particular China.

He left the Review in 2001 and now writes a weekly column on China, which is syndicated across Asia as well as in North America. For the last eight years, Mr. Ching has also hosted a weekly current affairs TV program in Hong Kong, "Newsline," which appears every Sunday evening on ATV World.
[Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Library of Congress, 2003]
Source: http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/49853


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is more, related to this:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/currencies/pressure-mounts-on-china-to-stop-currency-war/article1745532/


> Pressure mounts on China to stop currency war
> 
> KEVIN CARMICHAEL
> 
> WASHINGTON
> 
> Published Thursday, Oct. 07, 2010
> 
> The United States and other members of the global economic establishment are taking a harder line on China’s practice of tightly managing its exchange rate, saying the country’s policies risk fomenting a currency war that would destabilize the global economy.
> 
> U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the International Monetary Fund said separately Wednesday that many emerging-market countries are under pressure to weaken their currencies to keep their economies competitive. Neither Mr. Geithner nor the IMF explicitly mentioned China, but the chief culprit was clear.
> 
> China maintains strict controls on international capital, which help it keep the yuan from rising. Investors then divert the money they would have invested in China to other fast-growing nations, putting upward pressure on the foreign-exchange rates of those countries. That forces them to similarly manage their exchange rates or risk making their exports too expensive. It also makes it more difficult for slow-growing developed countries such as the United States and Japan to stimulate their own economies through exports.
> 
> The risk, Mr. Geithner said, is that the race to drive down currencies will unleash a “damaging dynamic” that stokes inflation in developing economies such as Brazil and causes the price of housing, consumer goods and other assets there to jump at an unsustainable rate. A higher exchange rate in those countries would relieve some of that pressure; it would cool the factory economy while making imports cheaper.
> 
> The United States has been pressing China to relax its exchange rate policies for years. But in a shift toward hardball diplomacy, the Treasury Secretary said the desire of China and other emerging markets to play a greater role at the IMF could be tied to a commitment to allow their currencies to appreciate – “policies that will reduce [their] reliance on exports and strengthen domestic demand,” he said.
> 
> Finance Minister Jim Flaherty expressed support for driving a harder bargain with China, telling reporters in Ottawa that he and Mr. Geithner had already discussed the issue. “I think Mr. Geithner has a point,” Mr. Flaherty said. “We don’t want these kinds of distortions in currency values or distortions in trading relationships, so it’s a very important topic.”
> 
> It's a high-stakes diplomatic gambit, given China's well-known aversion to the appearance of being bullied into action by its trading partners.
> 
> In Brussels Wednesday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a business conference that “Europe shouldn’t join the choir” of nations demanding a higher yuan, warning of social instability in the world’s second largest economy because a rapid increase of the currency would lead to mass factory closures. “If the yuan isn’t stable, it will bring disaster to China and the world,” Mr. Wen said.
> 
> Mr. Geithner’s remarks represent a new approach by the established economic powers in the Group of Seven to get China to buy into their view that exchange rates should be allowed to float freely. By emphasizing that China is putting at risk its fellow emerging market countries, Mr. Geithner is making a bilateral spat between the world’s largest economies a collective problem. The threat of blocking China’s ascent at the IMF is meant to bring China to the table, something the country has little reason to do as long as its economy powers ahead.
> 
> “It’s a very savvy approach,” said Eswar Prasad, a former head of the IMF’s China division. “China is spinning this narrative that the U.S. is acting in its own interest, Japan is acting in its own interest, so why shouldn’t we act in our interest?”
> 
> The shift in negotiating tactics comes as economic officials converge on Washington over the next few days for a series of meetings that will be dominated by rising tensions over what Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega last week called a “currency war.”
> 
> IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn acknowledged in the Financial Times Wednesday that “there is clearly the idea beginning to circulate that currencies can be used as policy weapons,” an approach that “would represent a very serious risk to the global recovery.”
> 
> The yuan has risen about 2 per cent against the U.S. dollar since the People’s Bank of China in June pledged greater flexibility. Mr. Geithner last month called that pace “too slow,” and the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow the U.S. Trade Representative to enact import tariffs to retaliate for exchange rates deemed to be artificially low.
> 
> Japan intervened in foreign-exchange markets for the first time in six years in September to weaken the yen. The Federal Reserve appears set to create dollars to buy Treasuries, a prospect that is putting downward pressure on the dollar. South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and India have either intervened in currency markets or have indicated they are prepared to do so.
> 
> All the chaos in currency markets is being driven by the imbalanced nature of the global economic recovery.
> 
> The IMF said Wednesday that advanced economies will grow 2.2 per cent in 2011, while the gross domestic product of emerging market and developing nations will increase 6.4 per cent. Investors are chasing the growth, plowing massive amounts of money into countries such as Brazil and India, forcing the currencies of these nations higher. Governments and central banks are reacting to try to stem the rise, worried that stronger currencies will undermine their export-dependent economies.
> 
> Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, said he thinks countries at this time are mostly trying to slow the ascent of their exchange rates, rather than actively undermine their neighbours. Still, there’s a risk the rhetoric could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said. “If you think it’s a currency war, you’ll act like it’s a currency war – it leads to a downward spiral,” Mr. Chandler said.
> 
> Mr. Prasad, who is now professor of trade policy at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, called a true currency war a “fairly serious risk.”
> 
> _With reports from Bill Curry in Ottawa, Joanna Slater in New York and Bloomberg News_




I think Geithner and Flaherty are playing a very dangerous game. As the article points out, China is a notoriously ‘prickly’ country and does not take kindly to being lectured – especially not by small-fry like Canada and irresponsible spendthrifts like the USA.

It is important to remember that one of China’s medium term goals is to strip the US dollar of its ‘global reserve currency’ status, with the many (currently unearned) benefits that confers on the US economy. The Chinese do not want their yuan (or RMB) to replace the dollar – their economy is not strong enough for that and it would be bad for their near term ‘soft power’ campaign – instead they want to make the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs – created by the IMF to facilitate loan settlements) into a new, _official_ global reserve currency. They probably have a lot of quiet support for this.

A currency war – which _could_ occur – benefits no one, not China, not America and certainly not Canada.

The Americans are desperate to make economic gains – if their growth remains _stalled_ at around 2% then, according to some analysis, unemployed will grow to 12%± by 2020. China, equally desperately, needs to maintain social cohesion and, according to most Chinese, that means keeping the economy growing at 5%±, year after year, for a few decades. That appears to demand a strong export economy which is facilitated by a weak currency – as Canada demonstrated during the ‘80s and ‘90s when we played the same weak dollar game. But, there is one good argument for floating the Chinese ¥: to stimulate domestic demand. A stronger currency will make imports – from America, Europe and Japan – more expensive causing a ‘Buy China!’ effect, especially for manufactured goods. Most Chinese analysts appear to think that is not sufficient, in the near to mid term, to keep the Chinese people happy. What the world does not need, above all, is an unhappy and, therefore, unstable China. The consequences, for the whole world, including the USA, of instability in China are incalculable but, without a doubt: bad, Bad, BAD!


----------



## a_majoor

China's human rights record is thrust back into the spotlight:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-08/nobel-peace-prize-chinas-threats-backfire/?cid=blogunit



> *Beijing is a growing power, but blocking news of jailed rights activist Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize projects weakness—and warning that the honor would be seen as “an unfriendly act” may have helped him win*.
> 
> The colorful Chinese expression “killing a chicken to scare the monkeys,” which means to warn a large group by harshly punishing one, has been Chinese government policy in recent years, especially in the case of Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to more than a decade in prison last December for his human-rights advocacy.
> 
> On Friday, Beijing’s “killing chickens” strategy failed when Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Chinese government has tried to block word of the award from state-run media and the Web, but look for the news to quickly jump the “great firewall” on China’s Internet and reach many of the nearly 400 million Chinese online.
> 
> Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for “incitement to subvert state power,” a charge the Chinese government uses to silence critics. Liu’s “crime,” as a key figure in the release of the Charter 08 manifesto was chiefly to demand greater respect for human rights in China. Modeled on the famous Charter 77 signed by Vaclav Havel that helped undermine the Soviet Union’s iron rule in Czechoslovakia, Charter 08 makes the apparently radical claim that “freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind.”
> 
> China is seen as a growing power in the world. Yet Beijing’s reaction to Liu’s Nobel Prize is not that of a confident and stable government. Instead, top Chinese officials warned Norway and the Nobel Committee itself not to honor Liu. China’s deputy foreign minister said awarding the Peace Prize to Liu “would pull the wrong strings in relations between Norway and China” and be seen as an “unfriendly act.” In no small irony, it is likely that those threats helped tip the Nobel scales in Liu’s favor.
> 
> Liu is a 54-year-old former professor of literature at Beijing Normal University who has long been a relentless advocate for reform and the rule of law in China. He was jailed for 21 months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and branded a “Black Hand” for his support of students seeking peaceful reform. In 1996, he was sentenced to another three years of “re-education through labor” as a result of further human-rights activism.
> 
> After Charter 08 was released on December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Chinese government wasted no time harassing and detaining many of the 303 Chinese signers of this document—rights defenders, lawyers, and academics, but also ordinary Chinese citizens. An instant viral hit on the Internet in China, the charter quickly gained thousands of signatures before government censors blocked access to it.
> 
> The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize puts China’s human rights record squarely back in the spotlight.
> 
> Liu’s modest writings and reform efforts pose a danger to the government, as he represents a growing community of people inside China who are convinced the country must reform in order to progress. In the years since 1989, the most important trend has been the rise of a generation of committed civil-society leaders: journalists, artists, lawyers, women’s rights activists, religious freedom advocates, and a diverse set of people who organize through the Internet.
> 
> Much attention has focused on how the Nobel news is playing outside China. But for Chinese leaders, the biggest challenge is surely how it will play inside. China’s government is not monolithic. Reformers vie endlessly with hard-liners on Politburo policy and the best way to govern China’s vast territory and 1.2 billion people. But since the period leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hard-liners and security forces have had the upper hand. As a consequence, much of the last decade’s progress has been set back, with those on the front lines of reform in China paying the highest price.
> 
> The Chinese government made an example of Liu with a harsh prison sentence, aiming to sideline his activities but also to send the message that public pressure for reform is not welcome. Indeed, Liu is one of many leading human-rights activists who have been harassed, detained, beaten, forced out of their jobs, and jailed in recent years. However, no degree of censorship will prevent countless ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, and students from wanting to know more about who Liu Xiaobo is, why he was sentenced to prison, and what is so dangerous about Charter 08. They are probably going to discover the modest manifesto, which could spread uncontrollably.
> 
> The implications for China’s rulers are also interesting. Perhaps within the Chinese leadership there will even be an accounting of how counterproductive jailing Liu and dozens of rights advocates has been. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, said, “As the [Nobel] Committee recognized, China’s new status in the world comes with increased responsibility. China should embrace this responsibility, have pride in his selection, and release him from prison.”
> 
> The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize puts China’s human-rights record squarely back in the spotlight. Best of all, it tells those in China who struggle every day to make their government more accountable that their fight matters.
> 
> As director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, Minky Worden works with journalists to help them cover crises, wars, human-rights abuses, and political developments. She also has worked in Hong Kong and at the Department of Justice as a speechwriter for the U.S. attorney general and in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Overseas Press Club's Board of Governors, and editor of China's Great Leap and co-editor of Torture.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Changes in the Chinese leadership, according to this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Los Angeles Times_:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-xi-20101019,0,604801.story


> Xi Jinping on track to become China's next president
> 
> The Communist Party official is named to a post that is considered a steppingstone for assuming the leadership. He has a reputation for being tough on corruption and friendly toward business, even foreign companies.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Xi Jinping is named China's vice chairman of the central military commission, a position overseeing the People's Liberation Army. (Kazuhiro Nogi, AFP/Getty Images)
> 
> By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times
> 
> October 18, 2010
> 
> Unless something goes badly wrong for Xi Jinping over the next two years, it looks like afait accompli that the 57-year-old Communist Party official, who has been groomed his entire career for leadership, will be China's next president.
> 
> At the end of a four-day meeting of the party's central committee on Monday, Xi was named vice chairman of the central military commission, a position overseeing the People's Liberation Army that is considered a steppingstone for assuming the leadership. Hu Jintao was given the same post in 1999, three years before he became secretary-general of the Communist Party. Hu became president in 2003.
> 
> "It looks like the case is closed. Based on today's announcement, he'll be the next leader," said Jin Zhong, editor of Hong Kong-based Open Magazine and an analyst of the Communist Party.
> 
> Like many in the younger generation of Chinese leaders, Xi is a "princeling'' – the son of a pro-reform official, Xi Zhongzun, who was purged in the early 1960s after a falling-out with Mao Tse-tung. At the age of 15, Xi Jinping was sent off to the countryside, assigned to a rural commune in Shaanxi province where people lived in caves and did hard manual labor, in his case, farming wheat. Following the Cultural Revolution, Xi was permitted to resume his education, studying chemical engineering at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. He later received a law degree.
> 
> Xi rose through the party, serving in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces and in Shanghai, where he was party chief. He earned a reputation for being tough on corruption and friendly toward business, even foreign businesses. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., former head of investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc., once called Xi "a guy who really knows how to get over the goal line.''
> 
> Others have described Xi, a large man who has at times struggled with his weight, as unusually personable. "He's extremely warm. He has none of the airs of an official who's impressed with himself,'' said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who interviewed Xi for a book about the Chinese leadership, "How Chinese Leaders Think." Xi is married to a famous Chinese folk singer, Peng Liyuan.
> 
> The party's internal deliberations about the leadership are secret, although it has been widely reported that Xi won a straw poll among party officials in 2007 as the favored candidate of the so-called fifth generation of Chinese leaders.
> 
> "He is a safe choice. The party didn't want uncertainty," said Liu Junning, a political scientist based in Beijing. Liu said that Xi's views on sensitive issues — such as whether China should open up for political reform — remain largely unknown since he had not tended to put himself on the line. "I would be surprised though over time to see him become a reformer.''
> 
> Hu Jintao is due to retire as party secretary in 2012. Xi, if selected to replace him, would likely assume the presidency the following year.
> 
> barbara.demick@latimes.com
> Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times




My guess is that Xi is not Hu’s first choice as successor. I think that Xi is from the ‘right,’ pro-business wing of the Party, sometimes called the _Shanghai Gang_ which was led by Jiang Zemin. Hu is from the ‘new left’ wing and he ousted Jiang _et al_ around the year 2000.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is another view of Xi Jinping:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/xi-jinping-a-princeling-and-future-king/article1762993/


> Xi Jinping: A princeling and future king
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Beijing— From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
> Published Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010
> 
> As Xi Jinping rose through the ranks of the Communist Party of China, he has often been defined – and sometimes derided – as a “princeling,” one of a clutch of rising party stars who owe at least some of their success to the fact they are children of revolutionary heroes.
> 
> Mr. Xi is the princeling who will soon be king. Already a vice-president and a high-ranking Politburo member, on Monday he was named the vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission, a promotion most observers view as the final prerequisite before a stage-managed handover of power when President Hu Jintao steps aside in two years time.
> 
> But don't confuse Mr. Xi with Kim Jong-un, the 27-year-old tabbed inherit power from his ailing father in neighbouring North Korea. Unlike the Kim family, it wasn't always a political asset to be the son of Xi Zhongxun.
> 
> Mr. Xi was 10 years old when his father, a former comrade-in-arms of Mao Zedong's and a hero of the fabled Long March who rose to be a vice-premier, was suddenly denounced and jailed as an enemy of the revolution. As a teenager, Mr. Xi himself was sent to a rural commune in Shaanxi province to work as a labourer, deemed a “reactionary student” largely because of who his father was. He was jailed four times and publicly humiliated. “I ate a lot more bitterness than most people” during the Cultural Revolution, he once told an interviewer.
> 
> After Mao died and Deng Xiaoping rose to replace him, Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated and entrusted with the key post of governor of the southeastern province of Guangdong during the early 1980s, a time when the region was a laboratory for China's early experiments with market reforms and economic interaction with the rest of the world.
> 
> But a decade later, Xi Zhongxun was again a political pariah after speaking out publicly against Mr. Deng's decision to use the army to crush pro-democracy demonstrations on Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. Whether Mr. Xi, now 57, shares his father's beliefs about economic and political matters is unclear, but he does seem to have learned one lesson from his father's repeated downfalls: Shut your mouth and keep your politics to yourself.
> 
> Astonishingly little is known about what the man who will soon lead the world's emerging superpower actually believes. “We don't know very much about [Mr. Xi] at all. He's probably smart enough politically to know that you don't show your hand too much if you want to a get the position,” said David Zweig, director of the Centre for China's Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
> 
> The Beijing-born Mr. Xi, who studied both chemical engineering and law at Tsinghua University, is in many ways a blank slate whom the various factions within the Communist Party all appear comfortable with, even as he belongs firmly to none of them. He won the top job largely because he was one of the few acceptable to both the supporters of outgoing President Hu Jintao and the loyalists of his predecessor and rival, Jiang Zemin.
> 
> “Xi Jinping was a compromise candidate, a princeling who could be sure to defend the regime's interests,” said Victor Shih, a professor of Chinese politics at Northwestern University. “He hasn't announced much of his own agenda yet. We haven't seen, in terms of policies, what he's going to propose.”
> 
> During his time as a party secretary in Zhejiang province, Mr. Xi was known as a corruption-fighter, as well as being a supporter of private enterprise, but his record is clean of the controversy that brought down his father.
> 
> The most outspoken Mr. Xi has been on anything to date was perhaps an address he gave in May to the Party School, which trains China's future leaders and bureaucrats. Lose the long speeches and the political jargon, he implored the class of 900 new cadres. Say what you mean and come up with some new ideas.
> 
> But it has largely been through saying little that Mr. Xi has risen so meteorically. He was plucked in 2007 to become the Shanghai Party chief after his predecessor was fired for corruption. Months later, he was named to the Politburo, where he is now the highest-ranked member who isn't retiring in 2012. By the end of 2007, he had gone from relative unknown to being anointed as the likely successor to Mr. Hu.
> 
> To boost his profile, Mr. Xi was given the task of overseeing the successful 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He was then given a crash course in China's foreign affairs policy, visiting rivals such as the United States and Japan and allies like North Korea and Myanmar. He was also placed in charge of an internal Communist Party organization that has led a clampdown on dissidents and non-governmental organizations, as well as on Internet content.
> 
> But all of that may say more about what his current superiors want him to learn, rather than what he personally believes or might pursue as leader.
> 
> Before his rapid ascension, Mr. Xi was best known as the husband of Peng Liyuan, one of China's best-known folk singers and a long-time staple on the televised galas that ring in the Chinese New Year. It's Mr. Xi's second marriage and the couple have a daughter together.
> 
> It seems, Ms. Peng, too, was initially unsure what to make of Mr. Xi. “The moment she saw him, she was disappointed. Not only did he look rustic, but he also looked old. However, the first word that he spoke attracted her,” the chinanews.com website reported in 2007. Quoting Ms. Peng, the website reported that Mr. Xi asked her an intelligent question about different vocal techniques.
> 
> “I was moved at that time,” Ms. Peng said. “He has a simple heart but is thoughtful.”
> 
> And, she might add now, he is also someone who is easily underestimated.




A couple of points:

1. Tsinghua University (best known as a science and engineering school) and its sister institution Peking University (best known for its arts/humanities programmes) are China’s version of Oxford and Cambridge or Harvard and Yale. Tsinghua is also President Hu Jintao’s _alma mater_. Entrance to Tsinghua is highly competitive and university entrance is one of the very few relatively corruption free _administrative_ matters in China – thus Tsinghua and Peking Universities get China’s best and brightest and, not too surprisingly, produce a disproportionate share of China’s leaders; and

2. I, personally, find it hard to believe that Xi got to be party boss in Shanghai without being philosophically _loyal_ to Hu Jintao’s old arch rival Jiang Zemin. But, perhaps, he is the most _moderate_ of the ‘new right’ wing of the Party and, therefore, least problematical for Hu’s ‘new left’ faction.


----------



## Edward Campbell

More important new from China, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/china-raises-interest-rate/article1763100/


> China raises interest rate
> 
> BEIJING— Reuters
> 
> Published Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010
> 
> China  will raise its benchmark one-year lending and deposit rate by 25 basis points effective from Oct. 20, the central bank said on Tuesday.
> 
> The announcement came as Beijing tries to cool rising inflation. China rebounded quickly from the global downturn on the strength of massive stimulus spending and bank lending. Analysts had been expecting China's government to raise rates at about this time to cool inflation and control rapid growth.
> 
> Here is what some analysts are saying about the move:
> 
> BEN SIMPFENDORFER, CHIEF CHINA ECONOMIST AT *RBS*
> 
> “A surprise, but welcome, hike. It suggests strong inflation and GDP figures on Thursday, but also some concern about property.”
> 
> RUPA REGE NITSURE, CHIEF ECONOMIST, *BANK OF BARODA, MUMBAI*
> 
> “One thing is sure, that if they have raised interest rates  now, then it creates ground for the yuan to appreciate. So it will be difficult for them to keep away the appreciation pressure on their currency”.
> 
> KIT JUCKES, CURRENCY STRATEGIST, *SOCIETE GENERALE, LONDON*
> 
> “This means China is concerned that bank lending and domestic asset price inflation are too strong and they will have to accept a stronger currency.
> 
> “The gut reaction of the market is to sell commodity block and emerging market currencies. But it’s not a game changer and there will probably be a queue of people looking to buy EM currencies on dips.”
> 
> PARK TAE-GEUN, BOND ANALYST, *HANWHA SECURITIES IN SEOUL*
> 
> “The decision caught markets off guard. Raising lending rates is more than a liquidity control and can be taken as a tightening signal.”
> 
> SIMON DERRICK, HEAD OF FX RESEARCH AT *BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON*
> 
> “The PBOC move follows a clear need by the Chinese authorities to take out some of the heat from the economy. Whether this move will lead to a broader move on its currency is open to debate. It certainly leads to speculation that the U.S. and China are in some sort of a deal which will perhaps see the U.S. taking a more gradualist approach to QE. The dollar has already moved higher after this news.”
> 
> HITENDRA DAVE, HEAD OF GLOBAL MARKETS, *HSBC INDIA, MUMBAI*
> 
> “China hasn’t raised so far and (they) have only been raising the reserve requirements. With all the asset price speculation, they had to raise rates to normalise policy. It is the local factors that led them to take this decision.”
> 
> KORNELIUS PURPS, FIXED INCOME STRATEGIST WITH *UNICREDIT IN MUNICH*
> 
> “The authorities are eager to moderate the housing sector without dampening the overall economy’s growth. This should not be interpreted as an impediment to global growth.”
> 
> CHRIS TURNER, HEAD OF FX STRATEGY AT *ING*
> 
> “This is part of the moderate tightening cycle that we are seeing from Chinese authorities to balance their economy. It is part of the normalisation of interest rates in an economy which is growing at a modestly fast clip. The market is reacting like there is an increased risk of hard landing with the commodity currencies like the Aussie being sold off, but I don’t think that is the case.”
> 
> _- With files from the Associated Press_




The so called _currency war_ IS a real problem. Most of the _problem_ (and blame) lies in the USA but most of the _solution_ must rest with Asia and, especially, China. China must find ways to:

1.	Contain inflation – because inflation destroys the value of ordinary people’s savings;

2.	Sustain economic growth – because the Chinese people need jobs and manufacturing jobs in the private sector are the easiest to _creat_ and sustain in the near to mid term; and

3.	Shift the economy away from a too heavy reliance on exports and towards satisfying domestic demand with domestic products and providing services.


All three are aimed, primarily, at maintaining _social harmony_ in China. All three also help with a unique Chinese problem: China is sitting on a mountain of US dollars which need to be spent, before their value declines too much, on modernizing the Chinese economy and securing a resource base to sustain economic growth and satisfy a fast growing domestic demand.  But all three are also aimed at reducing Niall Ferguson’s _Chimerica_ effect which will, perversely, strengthen China and further weaken the USA – exactly what keeps Tim Geithner awake at night. The USA wants its markets to buy less from China – and China is not terribly opposed to that because, quite simply, the US cannot afford to buy as much – and America wants its vendors to sell more to that HUGE and rich Chinese market. But if the Chinese manage well then they, not the Americans, not even Americans with a sadly debased currency, will meet that growing domestic demand.

Oh, yeah, and the RMB *will* appreciate slowly and slightly, but not anywhere near as fast (months) or as much (25%±) and the USA wants needs.


----------



## MarkOttawa

"Socialism" with Dragon characteristics at work in Africa (with a jab at the Liberals)
http://unambig.com/socialism-with-dragon-characteristics-at-work-in-africa/



> Imagine the outrage amongst the usual suspects if a Western company acted like this...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Vincent Chenjela was injured when managers fired randomly at the workers protesting against poor working conditions..._



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

I guess there isnt room for flexibility in China if there were the power plants would be generating some heat. Sounds like if every apartment had a thermostat the government might be able to control costs.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20020269-503543.html



> Since the Communists came to power, November 15 has been circled in red on many Beijing calendars. It's not Mao Zedong's birthday. November 15 is the day when city officials dutifully flick the switch to turn on the capital's centrally-controlled heating system, supplying warmth to most of Beijing's 22 million residents.
> 
> In one of the last vestiges of collective living, Beijing's coal plants pump heat to city apartments on a strict schedule, from November 15 to March 15, every year. Since the 1950s, the schedule has rarely changed, even if temperatures plummet before the appointed day.
> 
> After enduring record heat-waves this summer, with the mercury soaring to its highest mark in 60 years, and thick pollution in the fall (which the government blamed on "fog"), Beijingers are now suffering through the early onset of bitter cold. China's state-run media reported October 18 as the city's coldest autumn day since 1986, with temperatures peaking at 48 degrees and then dropping to 44.
> 
> Many residents of the capital city are counting down the days to November 15 hunched over their computer keyboards, commiserating about the frigid weather and lack of government-provided relief.
> 
> "I can't function in Beijing's October without a hot-water bottle and an electric blanket," complains one Chinese internet user. Others employ greater creativity to stay toasty.
> 
> "I highly recommend doing slow-motion exercises while surfing the internet in order to stay warm," suggests one energetic web chatter. Most local apartments don't have thermostats, so residents have no idea whether it's warmer inside than outside. Many use electric space heaters and turn their air conditioners to the "warm" setting to thaw their icy homes.
> There is one silver -- or green -- lining to weeks of goose bumps. Beijing's power plants burn through 41,000 tons of coal every day to keep the city's residents warm in winter. That energy is saved each day the government keeps the radiators turned off. Beijing officials grumble that last year, the heating was turned on a few days early but then the weather warmed up again, wasting precious resources.
> 
> Until the grim mid-November countdown is over, Beijingers have little to do but sit, shiver and, ironically, pray for extremely cold weather. Local officials have promised to turn on the heat if the mercury dips below 40 degrees for five days in a row, or if the city is blanketed in snow.
> 
> And those wishes may be answered soon; a cold front is expected to hit Beijing on October 23. Miserable meteorologists warn, however, the capital won't likely be blanketed in snowflakes... but sheets of cold rain instead. That probably won't get the heat turned on.


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting look at Chinese investment patterns and the expected goals. I follow the "Austrian" school of economics, and will stand with the prediction that this hyperinvestment is generating a "bubble" economy which will eventually take it's toll. I'm also of the opinion that the form of the Chinese bubble popping will resemble the Japanese "lost decades" rather than a short, sharp crash. Like the Japanese, the Chinese will seek to protect the reputation of the banks and financial institutions and refuse to clear the decks of nonperforming loans and investments (TARP in the United States seems to have unintentionally done something similar).

The only reason they have "gotten away" with this so far is they are starting from a very small base and laying out basic infrastructure is a positive investment. However, once you have built your highway, building another one nearby is much less of an investment; soon the laws of diminishing returns comes into play. Massive overbuilding in some regions sees unbelievable vacancy rates while the rural West is still underserviced.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/escape-velocity-infrastructure-spending.html#more



> *Escape Velocity Infrastructure spending in China and AI is one of three things in IT that China sets out as Strategic*
> 
> Raghav Bahl is the Rupert Mudoch of India. He owns several TV Stations.
> Recently he has written a book 'Super Power?' which compares the two developing country China and India.
> 
> Raghav writes in Forbes
> 
> China today is investing nearly half its GDP, something that is simply unprecedented. Over 200 years of economic experience tells us that hyper-investment creates a bubble and ends in a dreadful collapse. But China has consistently defied all such prophesies of doom.
> 
> The time has come to acknowledge a truth: either conventional economic theory will have to be rewritten, or China will eventually collapse. The two cannot coexist.
> 
> I would venture a 50 per cent wager on China actually trumping conventional theory. Why do I say that? Because by investing on a scale hitherto unknown and untested, China may have defined a new "escape velocity" of capital spending. By putting so much capital, not in factories, but in infrastructure, China may have escaped the "gravitational pull of low thresholds."
> 
> Big factories create waste, while big infrastructure, especially life-enhancing social assets, empowers people. The sheer scale of your activities could end up swelling the tide in which everybody and everything rises together; a new model of "tidal wave investing" could buoy the whole ocean to a much higher watermark.
> 
> China has identified 7 strategic sectors that they want to be major GDP contributors. IT is one of the seven and AI (artificial intelligence is one of three things mentioned as important in the IT goal.
> 
> China's most recent five year plan is summarized in a different article.
> 
> Some new goals listed in the five-year plan include:
> 
> 1. Improving the social welfare and livelihood of the people
> 
> 2. Boosting domestic consumption to accelerate economic restructuring away from its traditional export-oriented focus
> 
> 3. Narrowing the differences between the western and coastal parts of China.
> 
> 4. Improving energy efficiency and environmental protection
> 
> 5. Developing seven strategic key industries, with the aim of increasing their GDP contributions from the 2 per cent of GDP now to 8 per cent by 2015 and 15 per cent by 2020
> 
> 7 STRATEGIC SECTORS
> 
> China is also shifting its focus and resources to seven strategic industries that have been identified to tackle unfavourable demographics, raise productivity, develop home-grown technology and move its industries up the value chain. They are:
> 
> 1. New energy: Developing clean or alternative energy from nuclear, wind, solar and bio-fuel sources
> 
> 2. Energy conservation and environmental protection
> 
> 3. New materials: Rare earth, alloys, membranes, high-end semiconductors
> 
> 4. Biotechnology: Drug and vaccine development, advanced medical equipment, biomedical research and development
> 
> 5. New IT generation: Broadband and mobile communication networks, Internet security infrastructure and artificial intelligence
> 
> 6. High-end equipment manufacturing: Aerospace, telecom and railway equipment and marine equipment
> 
> 7. New Energy vehicles: Electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars


----------



## MarkOttawa

The Dragon and developing _ententes cordiales_?
http://unambig.com/the-dragon-and-a-developing-entente-cordiale/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

China develops a wide array of military UAV's:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/11/25-different-chinese-models-of-unmanned.html#more



> 25 different Chinese models of the unmanned aircraft at air show
> 
> WJ600 jet powered drone
> 
> Wall Street Journal - China is ramping up production of unmanned aerial vehicles in an apparent bid to catch up with the U.S. and Israel in developing technology that is considered the future of military aviation. Western defense officials and experts were surprised to see more than 25 different Chinese models of the unmanned aircraft, known as UAVs, on display at this week's Zhuhai air show in this southern Chinese city. It was a record number for a country that unveiled its first concept UAVs at the same air show only four years ago, and put a handful on display at the last one in 2008
> 
> This year's models in Zhuhai included several designed to fire missiles, and one powered by a jet engine, meaning it could—in theory—fly faster than the propeller-powered Predator and Reaper drones that the U.S. has used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
> U.S. anxiety about China's UAVs were highlighted in a report released Wednesday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was formed by Congress in 2000 to assess the national security implications of trade and economic relations with China. 12 page U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2010 Annual Report Exec Summary to Congress Links to the full annual report is here
> 
> "The PLA Air Force has deployed several types of unmanned aerial vehicles for both reconnaissance and combat purposes," the report said. "In addition, China is developing a variety of medium- and high-altitude long-endurance unmanned vehicles, which when deployed, will expand the PLA Air Force's 'options for long-range reconnaissance and strike,' " it said, citing an earlier Pentagon report.
> 
> The Chinese drone of greatest potential concern to the U.S. is the one with several missiles and a jet engine—called the WJ600—which was displayed by China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp., or Casic, one of China's top weapons makers.
> 
> Casic officials declined to comment, but a video and a two-dimensional display by the company showed Chinese forces using the WJ600 to help attack what appeared to be a U.S. aircraft carrier steaming toward an island off China's coast that many visitors assumed to be Taiwan.
> 
> Drone in Space? China Aerospace Science & Technology Corp., one of the main contractors in China's space program, displayed an attack drone, complete with air-to-ground missiles.
> 
> Largest Drone:ASN Technology's ASN-229A Reconnaissance and Precise Attack UAV, the largest drone at the show, carries air-to ground missiles and uses a satellite link to find targets over a radius of 2,000 kilometers 1,250 miles.
> 
> Avian Drone:The ASN-211, a model under development, is about the size of a large duck and has flapping wings. It is designed for reconnaissance behind enemy lines.


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese credit bubble?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8182605/Chinas-credit-bubble-on-borrowed-time-as-inflation-bites.html



> *China's credit bubble on borrowed time as inflation bites*
> The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to take out protection against the risk of a sovereign default by China as one of its top trade trades for 2011. This is a new twist.
> 
> Officially, inflation was 4.4pc in October but not many in China believes it is that low. Photo: EPA
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 6:43PM GMT 05 Dec 2010
> 
> It warns that the Communist Party will have to puncture the credit bubble before inflation reaches levels that threaten social stability. This in turn may open a can of worms.
> 
> "Many see China’s monetary tightening as a pre-emptive tap on the brakes, a warning shot across the proverbial economic bows. We see it as a potentially more malevolent reactive day of reckoning," said Tim Ash, the bank’s emerging markets chief.
> 
> Officially, inflation was 4.4pc in October, and may reach 5pc in November, but it is to hard find anybody in China who believes it is that low. Vegetables have risen 20pc in a month.
> 
> The Communist Party learned from Tiananmen in 1989 how surging prices can seed dissent. "Inflation is a redistributive mechanism in favour of the few that can protect living standards, against the large majority who cannot. The political leadership cannot, will not, take risks in that regard," said Mr Ash.
> 
> RBS recommends credit default swaps on China’s five-year debt. This is not a forecast that China will default. It is insurance against the "fat tail risk" of a hard landing, with ramifications across Asia.
> 
> The Politburo said on Friday that China would move from "relatively loose" money to a "prudent" policy next year, a recognition that credit rationing, price controls, and other forms of Medieval restraint are not enough. The question is whether Beijing has already left it too late.
> 
> Diana Choyleva from Lombard Street Research said the money supply rose at a 40pc rate in 2009 and the first half of 2010 as Beijing stoked an epic credit boom to keep uber-growth alive, but the costs of this policy now outweigh the benefits.
> 
> The economy is entering the ugly quadrant of cycle – stagflation – where credit-pumping leaks into speculation and price spirals, even as growth slows. Citigroup’s Minggao Shen said it now takes a rise of ¥1.84 in the M2 money supply to generate just one yuan of GDP growth, up from ¥1.30 earlier this decade.
> 
> The froth is going into property. Experts argue heatedly over whether or not China has managed to outdo America’s subprime bubble, or even match the Tokyo frenzy of late 1980s. The IMF straddles the two.
> 
> It concluded in a report last week that there was no nationwide bubble but that home prices in Shenzen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing seem "increasingly disconnected from fundamentals".
> 
> Prices are 22 times disposable income in Beijing, and 18 times in Shenzen, compared to eight in Tokyo. The US bubble peaked at 6.4 and has since dropped 4.7. The price-to-rent ratio in China’s eastern cities has risen by over 200pc since 2004
> 
> The IMF said land sales make up 30pc of local government revenue in Beijing. This has echoes of Ireland where "fair weather" property taxes disguised the erosion of state finances.
> 
> Ms Choyleva said China drew a false conclusion from the global credit crisis that their top-down economy trumps the free market, failing to see that the events of 2008-2009 did equally great damage to them – though of a different kind. It closed the door on mercantilist export strategies that depend on cheap loans, a cheap currency, and the willingness of the West to tolerate predatory trade.
> 
> China is trying to keep the game going as if nothing has changed, but cannot do so. It dares not raise rates fast enough to let air out of the bubble because this would expose the bad debts of the banking system. The regime is stymied.
> 
> "The Chinese growth machine is likely to continue to function in the minds of people long after it has no visible means of support. China’s potential growth rate could well halve to 5pc in this decade," she said.
> 
> As it happens, Fitch Ratings has just done a study with Oxford Economics on what would happen if China does indeed slow to under 5pc next year, tantamount to a recession for China. The risk is clearly there. Fitch said private credit has grown to 148pc of GDP, compared to a median of 41pc for emerging markets. It said the true scale of loans to local governments and state entities has been disguised.
> 
> The result of such a hard landing would be a 20pc fall in global commodity prices, a 100 basis point widening of spreads on emerging market debt, a 25pc fall in Asian bourses, a fall in the growth in emerging Asia by 2.6 percentage points, with a risk that toxic politics could make matters much worse.
> It is sobering that even a slight cooling of China’s credit growth led to economic contraction in Malaysia and Thailand in the third quarter, and sharp slowdowns across Asia. Japan’s economy will almost certainly contract this quarter.
> 
> Albert Edwards from Societe General said the OECD’s leading indicators are signalling a "downturn" for Asia’s big five (Japan, Korea, China, India, and Indonesia). The China indicator composed by Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics has fallen almost as far as it did at the onset of the 2008 crash.
> "I remain convinced we are witnessing a bubble of epic proportions which will burst – catching investors as unawares as the bursting of the Asian bubbles of the mid-1990s. Ignore these indicators at your peril," he said
> 
> In a sense, inflation is a crude way of curbing China’s export surpluses and therefore of resolving a key trade imbalance that lay behind the global credit crisis.
> 
> If China continues to stoke inflation – and blaming the US Federal Reserve for its own errors help – there will no longer be any need for a yuan revaluation against the dollar, and the US Congress can shelve its sanctions law.
> 
> On a recent visit to a chemical plant in Suzhou, I was told by the English manager that wage bonuses for staff will average nine months pay this year. This is what it costs to keep skilled workers. His own contract is fixed in sterling, which has crashed against the yuan over the last two years. "It is a sobering experience," he said.
> 
> China may have hit the "Lewis turning point", named after the Nobel economist Arthur Lewis from St Lucia. It is the moment for each catch-up economy when the supply of cheap labour from the countryside dries up, leading to a surge in industrial wages. That reserve army of 120m Chinese migrants everybody was so worried about four years ago has already dwindled to 25m.
> 
> China’s problem is that this is happening just as the aging crisis starts to bite. The number of workers will decline in absolute terms within four years. The society will then tip into precipitous demographic decline. Unlike Japan, it will become old before it is has built a cushion of wealth.
> 
> If there is a hard-landing in 2011, China’s reserves of $2.6 trillion – or over $3 trillion if counted fully – will not help much. Professor Michael Pettis from Beijing University says the money cannot be used internally in the economy.
> 
> While this fund does offer China external protection, Mr Pettis notes wryly that the only other times in the last century when one country accumulated reserves equal to 5pc to 6pc of global GDP was US in the 1920s, and Japan in the 1980s. We know how both episodes ended.
> 
> The sons of Mao insist that they have studied the Japanese debacle closely and will not repeat the error. And I can sell you an ocean-front property in Chengdu.


----------



## a_majoor

Pushback from Japan. I'm sure this isn't the ordered tributary state system China was looking forward to...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/asia/13japan.html?_r=3&src=twt&twt=nytimes



> *Japan Plans Military Shift to Focus More on China*
> By MARTIN FACKLER
> Published: December 12, 2010
> 
> TOKYO — In what would be a sweeping overhaul of its cold war-era defense strategy, Japan is about to release new military guidelines that would reduce its heavy armored and artillery forces pointed north toward Russia in favor of creating more mobile units that could respond to China’s growing presence near its southernmost islands, Japanese newspapers reported Sunday.
> 
> The realignment comes as the United States is making new calls for Japan to increase its military role in eastern Asia in response to recent provocations by North Korea as well as China’s more assertive stance in the region.
> 
> The new defense strategy, likely to be released this week, will call for greater integration of Japan’s armed forces with the United States military, the reports said. The reports did not give a source, but the fact that major newspapers carried the same information suggested they were based on a background briefing by government officials.
> 
> The new guidelines also call for acquiring new submarines and fighter jets, the reports said, and creating ground units that can be moved quickly by air in order to defend the southern islands, including disputed islands in the East China Sea that are also claimed by China and Taiwan. These disputed islands are known as the Senkakus in Japanese and the Diaoyu in Chinese.
> 
> Details of the realignment, which was delayed a year by the change of government in September 2009, have been leaking out since large joint military drills this month between Japan and the United States that included the American aircraft carrier George Washington.
> 
> Since initially clashing with the Obama administration over an American air base on Okinawa, Japan’s new Democratic Party government has been pulling closer to Washington, spurred by a bruising diplomatic clash three months ago with China over the disputed islands and fears about North Korea’s nuclear program.
> 
> The United States has used Japan’s concerns as an opportunity to strengthen ties with the country, its largest and most important Asian ally, and to nudge Japan toward a more active role in the region. In particular, Washington has proposed stronger three-way military ties that would also include its other key regional ally, South Korea.
> 
> During a visit to the region last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Japan to join American military exercises with South Korea. In a meeting with Japan’s defense minister, Toshimi Kitazawa, Admiral Mullen said the two nations needed to support South Korea after North Korea’s deadly shelling last month of a South Korean island.
> 
> The proposal of three-nation drills has already met resistance in Japan, whose military is severely constrained by its pacifist, postwar Constitution, and also in South Korea, where bitter memories of Japan’s brutal early-20th century march through Asia still run deep. However, Japan has slowly begun to shed some of the postwar phobias against a larger Asian role for its military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, one of the largest and most technologically advanced in the region.
> 
> In recent days, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has raised the possibility of changing laws to allow Japanese forces to be sent to the Korean Peninsula to rescue Japanese expatriates in the event of a crisis, and also to search for Japanese known to have been abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
> 
> “We need to slowly move forward with consultations with South Korea about whether they would allow in transport aircraft from the Self-Defense Forces,” he told reporters on Saturday.
> 
> In another sign of growing coordination, South Korea’s vice minister of defense, Lee Yong-gul, visited Tokyo late last week for talks with his Japanese counterpart, Kimito Nakae, on increasing bilateral cooperation.
> 
> Newspaper descriptions of the new Japanese defense strategy did not mention joint drills with South Korea. They did, however, make it clear that Tokyo views North Korea and particularly China as its biggest threats.
> 
> The revised guidelines call for shifting some ground forces from the northern island of Hokkaido, where they were originally intended to fend off a Soviet invasion, to its southern islands to fill a “gap” there, the reports said. This gap was exposed by recent Chinese naval maneuvers near islands in the Okinawa chain that raised alarm in Japan.
> 
> Under the reported revision, Ground forces would be maintained near their current level of about 150,000 personnel, the reports said.


----------



## a_majoor

Some history. This is probably the biggest attempt to break traditional Chinese civilization ever attempted, with disasterous results. What the Maoists had in mind to replace the traditional civilization is almost unimaginable, and memories of this are probably part of the reason social harmony is such an overriding concern among the Chinese elites:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/opinion/16iht-eddikotter16.html?_r=2



> *Mao's Great Leap to Famine*
> By FRANK DIKÖTTER
> Published: December 15, 2010
> 
> HONG KONG — The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.
> 
> To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives.
> 
> Access to these files would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago, but a quiet revolution has been taking place over the past few years as vast troves of documents have gradually been declassified. While the most sensitive information still remains locked up, researchers are being allowed for the first time to rummage through the dark night of the Maoist era.
> 
> From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China, traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia.
> 
> The party records were usually housed on the local party committee premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty, yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.
> 
> Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.
> 
> But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.
> 
> In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.
> 
> In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
> 
> Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
> 
> One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
> 
> When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
> 
> Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
> 
> As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
> 
> One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.”
> 
> The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
> 
> Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.
> 
> At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
> 
> Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.
> 
> To this day, there is little public information inside China about this dark past. Historians who are allowed to work in the party archives tend to publish their findings across the border in Hong Kong.
> 
> There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of millions of victims. Survivors, most of them in the countryside, are rarely given a voice, all too often taking their memories with them to their graves.
> 
> Frank Dikötter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong, on leave from the University of London. His books include “Mao’s Great Famine.”


----------



## a_majoor

Back to the present. The general Chinese real estate bubble sounds pretty familiar (Japan at the end of the 1980's had a massive real estate bubble which the government tried to keep from popping, and the United States today...), and building "ghost cities" is diverting billions of dollars of resources from productive uses (empty buildings are dead capital). People who are expecting the Chinese to pull the global economy out of the fire might be in for a very unpleasant surprise:

http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/12244-Is-China-the-Next-Bubble-Cont.....html



> *Is China the Next Bubble? (Cont.)...*
> Ten days ago, we linked to a piece by the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that noted:
> 
> "The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to take out protection against the risk of a sovereign default by China as one of its top trade trades for 2011. This is a new twist."
> 
> Now we have Business Insider's Chandni Rathod and Gus Lubin reporting on the possibilities of a bubble in China's real estate market:
> 
> One red flag is the vast number of vacant homes spread through China, by some estimates up to 64 million vacant homes.
> 
> We've tracked down satellite photos of these unnerving places, based on a report from Forensic Asia Limited. They call it a clear sign of a bubble: "There's city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. It is the modern equivalent of building pyramids. With 20 new cities being built every year, we hope to be able to expand our list going forward."
> 
> See the photos here.


----------



## tomahawk6

China is flexing its muscle. The ROK wont back down. Its only a matter of time before someone overreacts.Video at the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE1MHtTUTbU&feature

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12026765

Fishermen and officers are seen fighting in footage filmed by the coast guard.

The crew of a Chinese trawler and a South Korean patrol ship have clashed, leaving one fisherman dead and two missing, South Korean officials say.

The clash reportedly happened as the coast guards tried to prevent Chinese boats from fishing illegally off South Korea's west coast.

Video filmed by the coast guard shows officers fighting with fishermen wielding metal bars.

Four coast guard officers were injured, reports say.

About 50 Chinese fishing boats were in waters off the South Korean city of Gunsan at the time of the clash, coast guard spokesman Ji Kwan-tae said, according to the Associated Press.

Mr Ji said one of the boats intentionally struck the patrol ship to try to allow the others to sail back into their waters - but the boat sank after the impact.

At least eight men were rescued from the sea, but one later died.

SeaFood Demand

More guard boats and helicopters were dispatched to try to locate two missing fishermen. China has also reportedly sent a rescue boat to the area.

Scores of Chinese fishing boats are captured for illegal fishing every year, the South Korean coast guard says.

Chinese vessels appear to be going further afield to feed growing domestic demand for seafood. 

In September, a confrontation between two Japanese patrol boats and a Chinese trawler in the East China Sea provoked a bitter diplomatic spat.

The latest clash comes amid heightened tension on the Korean peninsula and in the waters around it.

Last month North Korea - incensed by live-fire military exercises conducted close to its coast by the US and South Korea - shelled a South Korean island.

It has threatened fresh action if a planned new drill takes place.


----------



## a_majoor

More information about the Chinese housing bubble. Given the fact a command economy can allocate resources based on the desires of the rulers rather than according to market signals, this bubble has the potential to grow far larger than the corresponding Japanese and US housing bubbles did before it pops:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/238912-how-big-is-the-chinese-property-bubble



> *How Big Is the Chinese Property Bubble?*
> 20 comments  |  November 28, 2010  | about: TAO
> 
> 
> In times of crisis alternative economic models become more appealing. Since the USA, the beacon of capitalism was the epicentre for the current crisis and the Chinese economy escaped relatively unharmed, there is a certain logic in asserting that the central planners in China have the right economic prescription.
> 
> But as James Chanos and others have pointed out, centrally planned economies lead to malinvestment and nowhere is that malinvestment more manifest than in China’s Property market. Consider John Mauldin’s November 24th, Outside the box interview with Vitaliy Katsenelson. Katsenelson compares Japan’s property bubble of the late 1980′s to modern day China and the results aren’t pretty, from the article:
> 
> VK:In the same way that everyone in the United States decided they “must” own a house, this belief was reinforced by continuously rising house prices. You can see how big a problem this became in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai where the affordability ratio is horrible, so the property-value-to-income ratio in Beijing is pushing 15. In Shanghai it is over 12. If you look at the national average, it is over eight times.
> 
> TCR: Can you explain that ratio to our readers?
> 
> VK: You get the ratio by taking the property value and dividing it by annual disposable income.
> 
> Basically, if you spent all your money, after you paid your taxes, just to pay off the mortgage, it would take you 14 years – which means you didn’t pay for food, electricity, etc.
> 
> This ratio is important because it helps put the scale of the Chinese real estate bubble in its proper context. In Tokyo, at the peak of the massive Japanese bubble, the ratio stood at nine times. In Beijing it’s already 14 times. In Shanghai it’s over 12 times. The national average for China is pushing 8.2 times right now. So housing affordability is very, very low, and the housing prices are extremely high.
> 
> Here is another interesting piece of data: property investment in China in 2009 was 10% of GDP, up from 8% in 2007. In Japan, at the peak of its bubble, it did not exceed 9%; in the U.S. it never exceeded 6%.
> 
> A recent study found that 64.5 million apartments basically don’t use electricity because they are empty. Chinese people buy those condos, and they don’t rent them. Similar to new cars in the U.S. when taken off the lot, in China an apartment is worth less once rented out. So they just keep them unoccupied with the hope to flip them, and you know how that story ends.
> 
> If those numbers don’t scare you at least a bit I don’t know what would. As usual, the identifcation of the bubble is not the hardest part, it’s the timing of the pop. Bubbles have a habit of going on a lot longer than most think they can and given the political pressure to keep it going and the financial resources available to the central planners, this bubble may have a way to go yet.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start and end of a piece in _Small Wars Journal_:

Is China’s military a paper tiger or a real tiger?
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/12/is-chinas-military-a-paper-tig/



> Contradictory stories on China’s military capabilities arrived this week. China’s long-awaited DF-21D medium-range anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) is now assumed to be operational, according to Admiral Robert Willard, commander of United States Pacific Command. And _Aviation Week and Space Technology_ reported (with photographs) that China’s new J-20 fifth-generation stealthy fighter has begun flight testing.
> http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a1a18ec63-5bf5-471c-9997-9f0bd783d131&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
> Are the United States and its allies losing an arms race in Asia? Not so fast, says the Washington Post: China’s military struggles to perform the most basic peacetime tasks and has gone over 30 years without any combat experience.
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/24/AR2010122402788.html
> By the Post’s account, China’s military is a paper tiger and is years away from operational competence. But this assessment also implies that time, diligence, and money - all of which China possesses - will fix its operational problems.
> 
> In an interview with the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Willard asserted that China’s DF-21D ASBM has achieved “initial operational capability” although he expects that China will continue to test the missile for several more years...
> http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012270241.html
> 
> With enough time, diligence, and money, China can fix its problems with training, equipment maintenance, and engine manufacturing. None of the input factors, especially money, are limiting in China’s case, a marked contrast with most other countries and, increasingly, the United States. U.S. policymakers will need to make clever and agile adjustments to a Chinese military modernization program that seems to be advancing faster than forecast and that has the resources needed to fix its backlog of operational problems.



More J-20 photos:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3aa3fbcaf7-a35d-4351-a848-95ddfa7bbb72&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest






Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is probably a fair assessment:



> With enough time, diligence, and money, China can fix its problems with training, equipment maintenance, and engine manufacturing. None of the input factors, especially money, are limiting in China’s case, a marked contrast with most other countries and, increasingly, the United States. U.S. policymakers will need to make clever and agile adjustments to a Chinese military modernization program that seems to be advancing faster than forecast and that has the resources needed to fix its backlog of operational problems.



In my opinion China is *not* gearing up to face a US threat or to threaten the USA. The Chinese need to be able to:

1. Defeat Taiwan, quickly, while, simultaneously, facing down US threats of interference. This is China's worst case scenario: it plans to absorb Taiwan into China, as a province, under a previously porposed "One Country Three Systems" approach with US support but, and it's a big BUT, if Taiwan does something to distance itself from eventual reunification then China may, for internal purposes - because most Chinese people believe, firmly, that Taiwan is a Chinese province, need to force the issue *no matter what the USA or, indeed, the rest of the world, says or does*.

2. Assert Chinese hegemony in and around East Asia, including Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

3. Face down India and Russia and India and Russia with allies in all of Asia.

4. Earn "face' from all nations.

The PLA has a major role in all these plans. It must be a credible, _respected_ force that gives China the hard power it needs to use its fast growing soft power.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Interesting Russian article:

The future of China's fifth-generation stealth fighter
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20101229/161986565.html



> ...
> Experts call it a combination of the Russian and U.S. fifth-generation fighters, but that greatly simplifies matters. In the last 20 years, China has been working closely with Russia to develop a modern fighter jet. But the J-20 is not simply a copy of a Russian design. Rather China has tried to build a completely new aircraft based on the technology and knowledge it has gained during its years of cooperation with Russia.
> 
> The future of the new Chinese fighter will depend on several factors.
> 
> Engine
> 
> It is not clear what kind of engine the plane will have. Some say it will use the prospective Chinese-made WS-15 engine with a maximum thrust exceeding 18,000 kg, but the engine is still in the pipeline.
> 
> China has been unable to reproduce Russia's highly efficient high-temperature turbofan AL-31F engine, designed in the early 1980s and currently mounted on the Su-27 fighter and its modifications. The engines for Sukhoi planes manufactured in China are made in Russia and then assembled and adjusted in China.
> 
> The AL-31F engine is also mounted on China's J-10 fighter planes. The engine's Chinese analogue, the WS-10, is less efficient than the Russian prototype.
> 
> Materials
> 
> A fifth-generation stealth fighter must be able to evade radar, and so it must be made from modern composite materials. However, China does not produce such materials in commercial amounts, and experts doubt that it can develop and produce them for its Air Force...
> 
> Electronic equipment, primarily radar, in China stands at approximately the same level as its engines. Chinese designs fall short of the capabilities of their Russian, European and American counterparts...
> 
> Weapons
> 
> The guided weapons used in the Chinese Air Force were mostly copied from U.S., Israeli and Russian prototypes made in the 1960s through 1980s. China will have to spend a great deal of time and effort to develop its own weapons...
> 
> If the J-20 is accepted as the prototype for a new series, China will be able to produce a fifth-generation fighter plane within 10 years. If not, it will begin batch production no sooner than 15 or 20 years from now.
> 
> No one knows for sure what will happen, but it's certainly not too early to make predictions about the future of the new plane.
> 
> Given its traditional policy of aircraft manufacturing, China will most likely create a functional analogue of foreign-made 5G planes that will cost 50% to 80% less than Russian and U.S. models. China will most likely sell the plane in Central Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, as well as to the richest African countries...
> 
> ...in the next 20 to 30 years China will have to continue to import modern aircraft technology. Despite the strides made by China's aircraft designers in the last 20 years, China has only slightly narrowed the technological gap dividing it from the global leaders.



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## GAP

> Despite the strides made by China's aircraft designers in the last 20 years, China has only slightly narrowed the technological gap dividing it from the global leaders.



With all the technology transfers made to China, compliments of Industrial Espionage, I would have thought they would be a little further along....


----------



## PuckChaser

Batch production in 15-20 years.... won't we be looking at starting designs for a 6th gen aircraft around then? They seem like they're behind the 8-Ball to get something out to counter the JSF.


----------



## Journeyman

In a potentially-related issue, the Chinese Deputy Premier, Li, is visiting Spain, Germany and the UK over the next week or so. Most of the media speculation is that China is considering buying up some of Europe's outstanding debt in 2011. 

The other issue, not mentioned so much, is European protectionism: a couple of weeks ago the Italian EU commissioner said that he would like to see the EU set up something similar to the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investments to review whether certain assets should be sold to foreign bidders, specifically citing Chinese purchases of European technology. 

Tied in with these discussions could also be China campaigning to have the EU rescind its embargo on arms trades with Beijing. I suspect the protectionism and arms embargo would be much more 'flexible' if China owned a significant portion of Euro-debt.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Further, China, which is already building a high speed (300 km/h) rail link from Nanning (Yunnan) to Rangoon (Burma) has just announced (so far only in the Chinese language media) that it will build a high speed line to Singapore through Laos, Thailand and Malaysia. Now that's _soft power_ in action.


----------



## CougarKing

An article from just this past Christmas:



> *Military strength eludes China, which looks overseas for arms*
> 
> (*Demystifying China's Military 101*)
> 
> 
> Washington Post, December 25, 2010
> 
> MOSCOW - The Moscow Machine-Building Enterprise Salyut on the east side of town has put up a massive Soviet-style poster advertising its need for skilled workers. The New Year's party at the Chernyshev plant in a northwest suburb featured ballet dancers twirling on the stage of its Soviet-era Palace of Culture.
> 
> *The reason for the economic and seasonal cheer is that these factories produce fighter-jet engines for a wealthy and voracious customer: China. After years of trying, Chinese engineers still can't make a reliable engine for a military plane.*
> 
> The country's demands for weapons systems go much further. Chinese officials last month told Russian Defense Minister Anatoly E. Serdyukov that they may resume buying major Russian weapons systems after a several-year break. *On their wish list are the Su-35 fighter, for a planned Chinese aircraft carrier; IL-476 military transport planes; IL-478 air refueling tankers and the S-400 air defense system, according to Russian news reports and weapons experts.*
> 
> *This persistent dependence on Russian arms suppliers demonstrates a central truth about the Chinese military: The bluster about the emergence of a superpower is undermined by national defense industries that can't produce what China needs.* Although the United States is making changes in response to China's growing military power, experts and officials believe it will be years, if not decades, before China will be able to produce a much-feared ballistic missile capable of striking a warship or overcome weaknesses that keep it from projecting power far from its shores.
> 
> "They've made remarkable progress in the development of their arms industry, but this progress shouldn't be overstated," said Vasily Kashin, a Beijing-based expert on China's defense industry. "They have a long tradition of overestimating their capabilities."
> 
> Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategic Technologies and an adviser to Russia's ministry of defense, predicted that China would need a decade to perfect a jet engine, among other key weapons technologies. "China is still dependent on us and will stay that way for some time to come," he said.
> 
> *Indeed, China has ordered scores of engines from the Salyut and Chernyshev factories for three of its new fighters - the J11B, a Chinese knock-off of the Russian Su-27; the J10, which China is believed to have developed with Israeli help; and the FC1, which China modeled on an aborted Soviet design. It also told Russia that it wants a third engine from another factory for the Su-35.*
> 
> How China's military is modernizing is important for the United States and the world. Apart from the conflict with radical Islamism, the United States views China's growing military strength as the most serious potential threat to U.S. interests around the world.
> 
> Speaking in 2009, Liang Guanglie, China's minister of defense, laid out a hugely ambitious plan to modernize the People's Liberation Army, committing China to forging a navy that would push past the islands that ring China's coasts, an air force capable of "a combination of offensive and defensive operations," and rocket forces of both "nuclear and conventional striking power."
> 
> The Pentagon, in a report to Congress this year, said that that the pace and scale of China's military reform "are broad and sweeping." But, the report noted, "the PLA remains untested in modern combat," thus making transformation difficult to assess.
> 
> *'Could be sitting ducks'*
> One area in which China is thought to have made the greatest advances is in its submarines, part of what is now the largest fleet of naval vessels in Asia. In October 2006, a Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine reportedly shadowed the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier and surfaced undetected four miles from the ship. Although the Pentagon never confirmed the report, it sparked concern that China could threaten the carriers that are at the heart of the U.S. Navy's ability to project power.
> 
> China tried to buy Russian nuclear submarines but was rebuffed, so it launched a program to make its own. Over the past two years, it has deployed at least one of a new type of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine called the Jin class and it may deploy as many as five more.
> 
> The Office of Naval Intelligence said the Jin gives China's navy its first credible second-strike nuclear capability; its missiles have a range of 4,000 miles. But in a report last year, the ONI also noted that the Jin is noisier than nuclear submarines built by the Soviets 30 years ago, leading experts to conclude that it would be detected as soon as it left port.
> 
> "There's a tendency to talk about China as a great new military threat that's coming," said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. But, when it comes to Chinese submarines carrying ballistic missiles, he said, "they could be sitting ducks."
> *
> Another problem is that China's submariners don't train very much.
> 
> China's entire fleet of 63 subs conducted only a dozen patrols in 2009, according to U.S. Navy data Kristensen obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, about a tenth of the U.S. Navy's pace. In addition, Kristensen said there is no record of a Chinese ballistic-missile sub going out on patrol. "You learn how to use your systems on patrol," he said. "If you don't patrol, how can you fight?"*
> 
> *Anti-ship capabilities*
> 
> China's missile technology has always been the pointy edge of its spear, ever since Qian Xuesen, the gifted rocket scientist who was kicked out of the United States during the McCarthy period in the 1950s, returned to China.
> 
> U.S. government scientists have been impressed by China's capabilities. On Jan. 11, 2007, a Chinese missile traveling at more than four miles a second hit a satellite that was basically a box with three-foot sides, one U.S. government weapons expert said. Over the past several years, China has put into orbit 11 of what are believed to be its first military-only satellites, called Yaogan, which could provide China with the ability to track targets for its rockets.
> 
> China is also trying to fashion an anti-ship ballistic missile by taking a short-range rocket, the DF-21, and turning it into what could become an aircraft-carrier killing weapon.
> 
> Even though it has yet to be deployed, the system has already sparked changes in the United States. In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said China's "investments in anti-ship weaponry and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific - particularly our forward bases and carrier strike groups." The U.S. Navy in 2008 cut the DDG-1000 destroyer program from eight ships to three because the vessels lack a missile-defense capability.
> 
> But the challenge for China is that an anti-ship ballistic missile is extremely hard to make. The Russians worked on one for decades and failed. The United States never tried, preferring to rely on cruise missiles and attack submarines to do the job of threatening an opposing navy.
> 
> U.S. satellites would detect an ASBM as soon as it was launched, providing a carrier enough warning to move several miles before the missile could reach its target. To hit a moving carrier, a U.S. government weapons specialist said, China's targeting systems would have to be "better than world-class."
> 
> Wu Riqiang, who worked for six years at the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation as a missile designer, said that while he could not confirm that such a missile existed, he believed weapons such as these were essentially "political chips," the mere mention of which had already achieved the goal of making U.S. warships think twice about operating near China's shores.
> 
> "It's an open question how these missiles will do in a conflict situation," said Wu, who is now studying in the United States. "But the threat - that's what's most important about them."
> 
> *Morale trouble*
> 
> The deployment of a naval task force to the Gulf of Aden last year as part of the international operation against pirates was seen as a huge step forward for China. The implication was that China's military doctrine had shifted from defending China's borders to protecting China's interests, which span the globe. But the expeditionary force has also provided a window into weaknesses of the People's Liberation Army, according to a new report by Christopher Yung, a former Pentagon official now at the National Defense University.
> 
> China's lack of foreign military bases - it has insisted that it won't station troops abroad - limits its capacity to maintain its ships on long-term missions. A shortage of helicopters - the workhorses of a naval expeditionary force - makes it hard for the ships to operate with one another. China's tiny fleet of replenishment ships - it has only three - doesn't give it enough capacity to do more than one such operation at a time.
> 
> China's navy, according to Yung, also has difficulty maintaining a fresh water supply for its sailors. And poor refrigeration on its ships makes it hard to preserve fruit and vegetables, something that makes for griping on board.
> 
> "The sailors during the first deployment had a real morale problem," Yung said, adding that following their mission, they were taken on a beach vacation "to get morale back up."
> 
> Empowering local commanders, considered key to a successful fighting force, is something that Beijing clearly has yet to embrace. British Royal Navy Commodore Tim Lowe, who commanded the Gulf of Aden operation for the U.S. 5th Fleet up until May, noted that while other navies would send operations officers to multinational meetings to discuss how to fight pirates, China would dispatch a political officer who often lacked expertise. The concept of sharing intelligence among partner countries was also tough for the Chinese to fathom. To the Chinese, he said, "that was an unusual point."
> 
> *Tension with the Kremlin*
> 
> China's military relations with Russia reveal further weaknesses. Between 1992 and 2006, the total value of Russia's arms exports to China was $26 billion - almost half of all the weapons Russia sold abroad.
> 
> But tensions arose in 2004 over two issues, Russian experts said. Russia was outraged when it discovered that China, which had licensed to produce the Su-27 fighter jet from Russian kits, had actually copied the plane. China was furious that after it signed a contract for a batch of IL-76 military transport planes it discovered that Russia had no way to make them. After receiving 105 out of a contracted 200 Su-27s, China canceled the deal and weapons negotiations were not held for several years.
> 
> Purchases of some items continued - S-300 air defense systems and billions of dollars worth of jet engines. An engine China made for its Su-27 knock-off would routinely conk out after 30 hours whereas the Russian engines would need refurbishing after 400, Russian and Chinese experts said.
> 
> "Engine systems are the heart disease of our whole military industry," a Chinese defense publication quoted Wang Tianmin, a military engine designer, as saying in its March issue. "From aircraft production to shipbuilding and the armored vehicles industry, there are no exceptions."
> 
> When weapons talks resumed with Russia in 2008, China found the Russians were driving a harder bargain. For one, it wasn't offering to let China produce Russian fighters in China. And in November, the Russians said they would only provide the Su-35 for China's aircraft carrier program if China bought 48 - enough to ensure Russian firms a handsome profit before China's engineers attempted to copy the technology. Russia also announced that the Russian military would buy the S-400 air defense system first and that China could get in line.
> 
> "We, too, have learned a few things," said Vladimir Portyakov, a former Russian diplomat twice posted to Beijing.


----------



## CougarKing

The US response to the emergence of the J20 mentioned above in Mark Ottawa's post. 

Reuters link



> *U.S. downplays Chinese stealth fighter status*
> 
> Wed, Jan 05 17:22 PM EST
> 
> By Phil Stewart
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, Pentagon officials said on Wednesday.
> 
> *The images have been posted on a number of websites and were published on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The Pentagon said they appeared to show a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter prototype making a high-speed taxi test.*
> 
> The disclosure of the photographs comes just days before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to travel to Beijing on Sunday, and analysts could only speculate about the motives for their sudden appearance.
> 
> "This might be just a way of demonstrating that whatever obstacles there might have been (to China developing these technologies), they've overcome them," said Randy Schriver, a China expert and former State Department official for Asia.
> 
> The pictures are likely to heighten concerns about China's military buildup, including possible deployment in 2011 of its first aircraft carrier and a new anti-ship ballistic missile seen as a threat to U.S. aircraft carriers.
> 
> *Some analysts say that the J-20 photos, if authentic, are a strong indicator that China is making faster-than-expected progress in developing a rival to Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor, the world's only operational stealth fighter designed to evade detection by enemy radar.
> 
> But U.S. Vice Admiral David Dorsett, director of naval intelligence, said deployment of the J-20 was years away.
> 
> "It's still not clear to me when it's going to become operational," he said. "Developing a stealth capability with a prototype and then integrating that into a combat environment is going to take some time."
> 
> He dismissed any suggestions that the Pentagon had underestimated China's stealth capability.*
> 
> Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said China was still having problems with the engines for its previous generation of fighter jets.
> 
> "Our assessment of when China might have an operational fifth generation fighter puts it at some point in the future, close to the end of this decade," Lapan said.
> 
> PREMIER U.S. FIGHTER
> 
> *A U.S. intelligence official estimated in May that the J-20 could rival the F-22 Raptor within eight years.*
> 
> The Raptor is the premier U.S. fighter, with cutting-edge "fifth-generation" features, including shapes, materials and propulsion systems designed to make it appear as small as a swallow on enemy radar screens.
> 
> The United States hopes to field a successor to the F-22, known as the F-35, in the coming years, and news of faster-than-expected Chinese stealth technology could add pressure on Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon to speed development.
> 
> *The revelation comes on the heels of warnings from the head of U.S. forces in the Pacific about China's new anti-ship ballistic missile, which could target U.S. aircraft carriers.
> 
> U.S. officials acknowledge China has moved faster than expected in developing the missile and is now in a position to start deploying it.*
> 
> Dorsett said it would be a mistake to underestimate China's military advances, fueled by its fast-growing economy. At the same time, their military capabilities were only a shadow of the U.S. armed forces, he said.
> 
> "We see them progressing rather dramatically across a variety of areas, but no, I don't view them as 10-feet tall," he said.
> 
> (Additional reporting by David Alexander; editing by Anthony Boadle)




Plus more pictures of China's supposed J20 prototype, courtesy of _Aviation Week_ and other sites:


----------



## CougarKing

And it seems even the Chinese government has gotten tired of NINE-DAY traffic jams like one from last year.


link



> *Want a new car in Beijing? Sorry, there's just too much traffic.*
> 
> China banned all car sales in Beijing from Dec. 24 until its new lottery system comes up with the names of the 20,000 applicants who will have the right to buy license plates this month.
> 
> By By Peter Ford | The Christian Science Monitor – Wed, 5 Jan 9:41 AM EST.Beijing to Eliminate Gridlock by Cutting …
> INHABITAT - Thu, 30 Dec 2:54 PM EST
> ....Li Wen’s Citroen car showroom was silent and deserted Wednesday, save for clumps of bored salesmen in red and blue anoraks with nothing to do.
> 
> Two weeks earlier, Mr. Li recalls, “it was packed. We were open till 3 in the morning, there were 200 people in here, and all customers could do was say whether they wanted a car or not. It took 10 minutes to sell a car that night. There was no bargaining.”
> 
> Since then, Li has not sold a single vehicle at any of the four dealerships he runs. Like every other automobile dealer in Beijing, he knows he won’t see another client for another three weeks, thanks to drastic new government rules designed to get a grip on the city’s increasingly appalling traffic.
> 
> *
> In 2009, China overtook the US to become the world's largest consumer of cars and it's still growing rapidly. The number of cars on Beijing’s roads has nearly doubled in the past five years, making driving in the city center at almost any hour a nightmare.*
> 
> *The government banned all car sales in the capital from Dec. 24 until its new lottery system comes up with the names of the 20,000 lucky applicants who will have the right to buy license plates this month.
> 
> One hundred thousand wannabe car owners have so far put their names in the drawing, to be announced on Jan. 26.
> 
> The lottery system will authorize the purchase of 240,000 cars this year. Another 160,000 are expected to be bought by customers who have their existing cars destroyed, or who sell their vehicles to used car dealers – they will be allowed to keep their plates and will be exempt from the lottery.*
> “All in all we expect car sales in Beijing to drop this year by 50 percent from 2010,” when sales totaled about 850,000, says Li.
> 
> Announcing the new rules last month, the deputy head of Beijing’s municipal government, Zhou Zhengyu, acknowledged that “traffic management has not been able to keep pace” with the rising number of private cars on the roads, and that “rush hour traffic jams have become a major problem in certain areas.”
> 
> Even some would-be car buyers with only a slim chance of winning the lottery say they agree with the restrictions.
> 
> “The government should have done this 10 years ago,” says Wang Xinyan, a sales clerk, as her husband filled out the form to enter this month’s lottery at a government office. “It’s a bit late now, and it’s hard to say what the impact will be.”
> 
> Li, who accepts that his dealerships have contributed to there being “way too many cars in Beijing”, hopes that the new license plate limitations “will give the government two or three years to improve public transport.” The discomfort of traveling on Beijing’s slow and overcrowded buses, and its still skeletal metro network, has encouraged many to drive their cars to work despite the congestion they contribute to and suffer from.
> 
> The new regulations also increase parking fees in Beijing, and ban cars with out-of-city plates from driving in the city at rush hours. That rule is not aimed at visiting drivers, who are scarcely a problem; it is designed to stop Beijingers trying to get around the restrictions by buying their cars and plates in neighboring provinces, where there are no limits on vehicle sales.
> ...


----------



## CougarKing

> *China Has Plans For Five Carriers*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is assembling the production and basing capacity to make its aircraft carrier program one of Asia’s largest military endeavors.
> 
> *A plausible near-term projection for China’s aircraft carrier ambitions was revealed in two 2009 articles in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which featured rare access to Chinese military and shipbuilding sources. The sources noted that China would first build two non-nuclear medium-sized carriers similar to the 50,000-ton ex-Soviet/Ukrainian Project 1143.5 carrier Varyag being rebuilt in Dalian Harbor. These carriers would start initial construction in 2009. Beginning in 2020 or soon after, two 60,000-plus-ton nuclear-powered carriers would follow, based on plans for the Soviet-designed but never built Project 1143.7 Ulyanovsk class.
> 
> This would mean a likely fleet of five carriers by the 2020s, including Varyag, which entered a phase of accelerated reconstruction in 2009. Work surrounding this carrier is also serving to create the development and production infrastructure for future carriers. Since mid-2005, Varyag’s reconstruction has been documented by images from Chinese military fans on dozens of web pages.*
> 
> In April 2009, Varyag was moved from its Dalian berth to a nearby drydock. Surrounding the drydock are large ship-component construction hangars, from which the next carriers may emerge. By April 2010, the ship was berthed outside the drydock. Since the move the hull has undergone degaussing, likely in preparation for the now-visible outfitting of a new naval electronics suite. This suite will include four arrays for Chinese-developed naval phased-array radar and new rotating-array radar. Emplacements for the electronic warfare suite are visible.
> 
> *A “Sinicized” model of a Varyag-like carrier, built in 2003 by students at Harbin Technology Institute, which does carrier development work, indicated it would carry a heavy fixed armament of YJ-63 long-range antiship cruise missiles, vertically launched medium-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and Type 730 30-mm. close-in weapon systems (CIWS). Last November, however, Internet imagery indicated it might carry a lighter weapons suite. It will be the lead platform for the short-range FL-3000N SAM, similar to Raytheon’s SeaRAM, though it carries 24 missiles. The imagery shows that Varyag will carry four FL-3000N launchers and at least two Type-730 30-mm. CIWS.*
> 
> Varyag’s air wing is becoming visible. Chinese Internet sources reported that the first flight of the Shenyang Aircraft Corp.’s copy of the Sukhoi Su-33 was in August 2009, and by early 2010 Internet imagery and a video confirmed Shenyang had copied the Su-33. Since 2005 Russian sourceshave insisted to this writer that China could not copy the Su-33, as it was a radical modification of the Su-27SK design. By 2009, these sources anticipated China would purchase an upgraded Su-33 as it developed its own version with a Chinese-designed WS-10A turbofan. In 2010, an Asian source said the PLA might not be pleased with its Su-33 copy, and would consider buying the Sukhoi-built version. Since 2005, negotiations have been held up over Russia’s insistence that China buy a profitable number, around 40.
> 
> It is now expected that Shenyang will perfect its Su-33 copy, which will feature the latest Chinese-designed active phased-array radar, and new 5th-generation air-to-air missiles and long-range antiship missiles, such as an air-launched version of the YJ-63, with a range of 600-plus km. (373 mi.). Varyag may start its service with a multirole fighter more capable in some respects than the Boeing F/A-18E/F.
> 
> In 2010, Internet images appeared of a new airborne early-warning and control radar array of the size needed for a carrier aircraft. This followed a 2005 partial image of a turboprop-powered AEW&C. In October 2009, Internet images emerged of possibly retractable AEW&C radar on a Chinese Z-8 helicopter, which may form part of the initial air wing.
> 
> The PLA is also building escort ships for its carrier fleet. In the autumn of 2009 it appeared that two Chinese shipyards were building two new destroyer classes, but their configurations and equipment are not apparent. The PLA is expected to build up to 18 modern Type-065A air-defense frigates. Two new Type-093 nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) have been built, and a more capable Type-095 SSN is expected.
> 
> When it enters service around 2015, the Varyag and its sisters, plus escorts, may be located at a recently constructed naval base near Sanya on Hainan Island.


----------



## CougarKing

A break from previous Chinese nuclear weapons policy?



> Defense News link
> 
> TOKYO - *The Chinese military would consider a pre-emptive nuclear strike if it had no other way to defend itself in a war against another nuclear-armed state, Kyodo News said Jan. 5, citing Chinese documents.
> 
> The policy, called "Lowering the threshold of nuclear threats" may indicate a shift from China's pledge not to first fire nuclear weapons under any circumstances, the report said.*
> 
> It may also fan concern in the United States, Japan and other regional powers, according to the Japanese news agency which obtained the internal documents.
> 
> The Chinese military's strategic missile forces,* the Second Artillery Corps*, would "adjust" its policy if another nuclear state conducts air strikes against Chinese targets "with absolutely superior conventional weapons," the document says, according to Kyodo.
> 
> *China would first warn an adversary about a nuclear strike, but if the enemy attacks China with conventional forces, the Chinese military "must carefully consider" a pre-emptive nuclear strike, Kyodo said.*
> 
> The documents suggest that the Second Artillery Corps educate its personnel in worst-case scenarios, Kyodo said, adding that it is rare for information on China's nuclear policy to come to light.
> 
> *U.S. military experts have argued since around 2007 that Beijing may have shown signs of altering its pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons, Kyodo said.*
> 
> But in a sign of warming ties as the region contends with the threat of a nuclear-armed North Korea, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is scheduled to arrive in China on Jan. 9, the Pentagon announced in December.
> 
> The Pentagon said Gates will travel to China on the invitation of his Chinese counterpart, one year after Beijing broke off military relations with Washington in protest against a multibillion-dollar U.S. arms package for rival Taiwan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This _Reuters_ report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is not too surprising:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/france-probes-china-link-in-renault-spy-scandal/article1861034/


> France probes China link in Renault spy scandal
> 
> HELEN MASSY-BERESFORD
> PARIS— Reuters
> 
> Published Friday, Jan. 07, 2011
> 
> French intelligence services are looking into China’s possible role in an industrial espionage scandal at car maker Renault that a senior minister has said involved “economic warfare,“ a government source told Reuters.
> 
> Three Renault executives, including one member of its management committee, were suspended on Monday in the case, which has prompted the French government to warn of an “overall risk” to French industry.
> 
> The executives are suspected of leaking information related to the high-profile electric vehicle program, a key plank of the carmaker’s strategy in which, together with its Japanese partner Nissan, it is investing billions of euros.
> 
> The government source said French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office had ordered the investigation. Renault, which declined to comment, is 15-per-cent owned by the French state.
> 
> “The Elysee has charged the DCRI (intelligence services) with an investigation. It is following a Chinese lead,” the source said.
> 
> Relations between France and China hit a low roughly two years ago when Mr. Sarkozy criticized Beijing’s policy on Tibet, prompting Chinese citizens to call for boycotts of French products.
> 
> But a recent visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Paris helped forge closer ties, as France seeks to secure Chinese support for its ambitious G20 agenda to explore reforms of the global monetary system.
> 
> Bernard Carayon, a legislator for the ruling UMP party, told Reuters that France needed tougher laws against industrial espionage to defend itself in a “war” against fast-growing emerging economies hungry for new technology,
> 
> “This is a war which does not stop worsening and which has intensified even more with the emergence of industrial powers like China,” said Mr. Carayon, who is drafting a law on the protection of economic information.
> 
> He said the industries most at risk from spying in France were those with long development times like cars, pharmaceuticals and defence.
> 
> “There is a big temptation to cheat to win the race when you are behind,” he said. “That seems to be what has happened.”
> 
> This is not the first time France’s car industry has been hit by information leaks.
> 
> In 2007, a Chinese student doing a work placement at car parts maker Valeo was given a prison sentence for obtaining confidential documents from the auto maker.
> 
> A French tribunal stopped short of an industrial espionage verdict, instead finding she had “abused trust“.
> 
> China has been known since the 1980s for commercial espionage, particularly in industries where it believes it is lagging behind the West.
> 
> But one former senior British defence official, who requested anonymity, noted that France also had a reputation for pursuing industrial secrets and needed to tread carefully.
> 
> “It’s actually quite rich for France to be accusing any other country of commercial espionage given the French state’s own long and less than edifying efforts in this regard,” the official said.
> 
> “Of the major European powers, France is the only one which historically has devoted significant intelligence resources to collection against foreign commercial corporations.”
> 
> China, where auto exhaust emissions account for around 70 per cent of air pollution in major cities, is pushing green vehicles heavily as part of the development of its auto industry.
> 
> China’s output of electric vehicles is expected to reach one million units by 2020, the official Xinhua news agency said late last year.
> Beijing launched a pilot program in June to hand out rebates to electric and hybrid car buyers as its stepped up its efforts to cut emissions, and it is due to present a draft plan setting out billions of yuans of investment in the sector.
> 
> Worldwide, mass-market electric vehicle production is still in its infancy. Major car makers including Nissan, Mitsubishi and PSA Peugeot Citroen have launched electric vehicles in recent months, but the numbers on the roads remain in the thousands.
> 
> The European Union’s industry chief called on Thursday for an EU body to be set up to vet foreign investment in the bloc, and possibly block deals that aim to secure valuable technologies.
> 
> French Industry Minister Eric Besson said the expression “economic warfare” was appropriate in describing what was involved in the Renault case.
> 
> The car maker has said it is examining all legal options in the case and expects to take action at some point in the future.




I suspect the French are right and the Chinese are peeking into their (and our) secret folders. But if 'turnabout is fair play' and '_karma_ is a bitch,' and if it’s going to happen to anyone, then France is a great target. Back in the 1980s our (Canadian) security services sent strong warnings to Canadian technology companies re: industrial espionage, specifically *French* industrial espionage.

Anyway, to the Chinese guy who reads Army.ca every day (probably a university student) and reports to someone in the Third Department of the General Staff (or wherever): tell your bosses to be less clumsy in the future, or organize protests outside a _Le Carrefour_ hypermarket and boycott cheese again to distract attention.


----------



## CougarKing

An update about US SecDef. Gates' visit to China:

(Plus a related story: "Gates urges firmer military ties with China" )



> By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 1/10/2011
> 
> *Gates in China to shore up uneasy military ties
> 
> US Defense Secretary Robert Gates launched a series of meetings with top Chinese generals Monday in a bid to shore up rocky military ties with Beijing, amid US concern over China's advanced weaponry.*
> 
> 
> Gates in China to shore up uneasy military ties
> 
> The trip to China by Gates, his first since 2007, comes just days ahead of a crucial visit to Washington by Chinese President Hu Jintao, and both sides are keen to show some progress in defence ties.
> 
> The Pentagon chief sat down early Monday with China's defence minister, General Liang Guanglie, China's Xinhua news agency reported.
> 
> Beijing broke off military relations with the United States a year ago over Washington's sale of more than $6 billion in arms to rival Taiwan, and tentative plans for an earlier visit by Gates were called off.
> 
> US officials, including Gates, have for years appealed to China to embrace a permanent dialogue between military leaders regardless of political disputes, but the Chinese have tended to view defence relations as a bargaining chip.
> 
> China is riding an economic boom and flexing its military might, with ambitious plans to invest in sophisticated aircraft, missiles, ships and submarines.
> 
> *Two weeks ago, Liang vowed to keep up investments in new weapons, saying China would "push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction".*
> 
> The United States, however, is under mounting fiscal strain, forced to cut back some weapons programmes even as it fights a grinding war in Afghanistan and still has tens of thousands of troops in Iraq.
> 
> *Before arriving late Sunday for three days of talks, Gates said he would appeal for a reliable security dialogue with China to avoid possible miscalculations, but expressed concern over the Asian power's anti-ship missiles and a new stealth fighter jet.*
> 
> "They clearly have the potential to put some of our capabilities at risk. And we have to pay attention to them, we have to respond appropriately with our own programmes," Gates told reporters travelling on his plane.
> 
> "My hope is that, through the strategic dialogue that I'm talking about, that maybe the need for some of these capabilities is reduced," he said.
> 
> *Photos surfaced in recent days of what appears to be China's first stealth fighter jet -- a development that has highlighted China's military modernisation, as well as concerns in the region over its intentions.
> 
> Japan last month labelled Beijing's military build-up a global "concern", citing its increased assertiveness in the East and South China seas.
> 
> China has repeatedly insisted its military growth does not pose any threat.
> 
> Experts say the J-20 fighter will eventually rival the US Air Force's F-22, the world's only fully operational next-generation stealth fighter jet -- and Gates admitted Beijing had made more progress than previously thought.*
> 
> "What we've seen is they may be somewhat further along in the development of that aircraft than our intelligence had predicted," he said.
> 
> Western military analysts say China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile -- a new version of its Dongfeng 21 missile -- that could pierce the defences of even the most sturdy US naval ships and has a range far beyond Chinese waters.
> 
> *The talks were also expected to cover recent tensions on the Korean peninsula, including China's role in helping to ease a recent crisis that began after Pyongyang's deadly shelling of a South Korean island in November.
> 
> After his talks in China, Gates heads to Tokyo on Wednesday and Seoul on Friday for meetings focused on the Korean crisis.*


----------



## CougarKing

Another update: the prototype mentioned in the above posts now reportedly makes its first flight.



> *Chinese stealth fighter makes first test flight*
> AP
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In this Friday Jan. 7, 2011, photo, a prototype of the Chinese J-20 stealth plane is seen during a runway test in Chengdu, southwest China. State media are reporting on the appearance online of photos that appear to show a prototype Chinese stealth fighter undergoing testing. (AP Photo/Kyodo News)
> 
> – 39 mins ago
> 
> BEIJING – A leading expert on the Chinese military says the country's prototype stealth fighter has made its first-known test flight.
> 
> Kanwa Asian Defense magazine editor Andrei Chang said the *J-20* flew for about 15 minutes  over an airfield in the southwestern city of Chengdu where it was spotted carrying out runway tests last week. Photos of the plane in flight were also posted on unofficial Chinese military websites.
> 
> The test flight comes on the second day of a visit to China by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Chang and other analysts say the test's timing is apparently intended to send the message that Beijing is responding to calls from the U.S. and others to be more transparent about its defense modernization and future intentions.
> 
> Associated Press link


----------



## CougarKing

supposed video link of J20's test flight, though one portion only shows it running to take off...

link 


-----------------

Plus another update related to the border region of China and India:



> By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 1/10/2011
> 
> *Chinese troops 'threaten' Indians in disputed area*
> 
> India on Monday said Chinese troops had threatened Indian workers in an area of the Himalayas claimed by both countries, in the latest sign of long-standing cross-border friction.
> 
> 
> Chinese troops 'threaten' Indians in disputed area
> 
> *Indian army chief General V.K. Singh told reporters that the workers were illegally building a shelter at Demchok in the Ladakh region of Indian Kashmir when the Chinese military patrol threatened them in September or October.*
> 
> The borders between India and China have been the subject of 14 rounds of fruitless talks since 1962, when the two nations fought a brief but a brutal war over the issue.
> 
> The Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency said the Chinese troops told the builders to stop work and shouted at them.
> 
> "Unfortunately, some people for various local gains have pushed construction activity in that area," Singh said, dismissing PTI reports that the building was a transport shelter officially sanctioned by India.
> 
> India says China is illegally occupying 38,000 square kilometres (15,000 square miles) of its northwestern territory, while Beijing claims a 90,000-square-kilometre chunk of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India.
> 
> *Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao met his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh in New Delhi last month and reaffirmed a 1993 pledge to maintain peace in border areas and continue talks.
> 
> The Indian foreign ministry in a statement said it did not view it as an incursion by Chinese troops into Indian territory because the area is disputed.*
> 
> "It will be recollected that there are differences in perception, between India and China, on the Line of Actual Control in this (disputed) area," the statement said.
> 
> "They are, therefore, not a cause for concern," it added.
> 
> Officials at the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing were not immediately available for comment.


----------



## MarkOttawa

_AW&ST _on J-20:

What China's Stealth Fighter Means
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/awst/2011/01/10/AW_01_10_2011_p26-280386.xml



> With the surprise rollout and high-speed taxi tests of China’s newest J-20 fighter, a stealth prototype, the U.S. Navy’s top intelligence official admits that the Pentagon has erred in its estimates of the speed with which Beijing is introducing new military technology.
> 
> The aircraft’s existence was not a surprise to the intelligence community, but “one of the things that is . . . true is that we have been pretty consistent in underestimating the delivery and initial operational capability of Chinese technology weapons systems,” says Vice Admiral David J. Dorsett, deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance and director of naval intelligence. Two recent examples of misanalyses have been the J-20 fighter and the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (AW&ST Jan. 3, p. 18). Moreover, there is evidence that China’s advances include high-performance engines and missiles that display a new level of technical maturity and performance.
> 
> “In terms of the [J-20] stealth photos, it’s not clear to me when it’s going to become operational,” Dorsett says. “Do we need to refine our assessments better? I think so.”
> 
> Other Washington-based intelligence officials say they are watching the J-20’s testing with interest. “They have done several high-speed taxis with the nosewheel off the ground,” says another veteran analyst. “They could still be working out some kinks before they try an actual first flight.”
> 
> There also are a lot of unknowns about the aircraft’s real importance.
> 
> “Operational impact is a tough call to make at this point, given that this plane, even if it flies, is not going to be a full-up fifth-gen [aircraft],” the analyst says. “In essence, this is going to be a novelty for the next decade before it starts to roll off the series production lines and gets to the line units in any numbers that would impact any of our mission planning. A lot of things can happen, good and bad, between now and then to either speed this up or severely put the brakes on things.
> 
> “As far as radar cross section goes, this is not [a Lockheed Martin] F-22, nor should we be thinking that they are going for low RCS right out of the chute,” he says. “We have to keep in mind that this is the first attempt and it’s also the very first prototype of that first attempt. There’s a lot of tweaking . . . before they get to the final version. I see too many people . . . making sweeping assessments. That has always been a mistake.”
> 
> Engines have been an Achilles’ heel for Chinese high-performance aircraft...
> 
> Dorsett downplays the immediate impact of the new fighter and new anti-ship missile.
> 
> “I’m more worried about Chinese game-changing capabilities in nonkinetic [areas such as information dominance, network invasion and electronic warfare],” he says. “I am most concerned about China’s focus on trying to develop [the ability] to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum, to counter space capabilities and to conduct cyberactivities.
> 
> “The other concern I have is China’s ability to become operationally efficient in a sophisticated, complex, joint war-fighting environment,” Dorsett says. “I don’t see China with those capabilities now. I do see them delivering individual components and weapon systems [such as the J-20 and DF-21D], but until they acquire proficiency [with them], how competent are they really going to be?” The Chinese military’s self-proclaimed timeline is mid-century, Dorsett notes. In that context, he denies that the Pentagon is overestimating its threat...
> 
> ...the evidence of the design’s sophistication is mounting. The J-20 is supposed to carry new weaponry with some of it tucked away internally. China is continuing an effort to expand the military’s air-to-air missile inventory. Although Avic officials have not discussed what comes after the PL-12A radar-guided medium-range missile, new information suggests that work is progressing on several enhanced versions. These include a combined solid-motor, ramjet-powered PL-21. The missile, with a single inlet for the ramjet, may have undergone ground tests last year.
> 
> Work may be slightly more advanced on the PL-12D, a ramjet upgrade of the basic PL-12 with more modest changes to the airframe and less endgame maneuverability than the PL-21 would feature. ­Chinese industry also appears to be working on the PL-12C with smaller aft control fins for internal carriage on the J-20. The mid-body fins are believed to be similar to the basic PL-12 and PL-12B with improved electronic counter-countermeasures.
> 
> The close-in battle would use the PL-10, whose design may resemble South Africa’s Denel A-Darter. China’s ability to increasingly use standoff weapons, also in air-to-ground and anti-ship missile roles, is already affecting planning among potential adversaries. Japanese military officials are ­showing interest in missiles with greater ranges to be able to engage Chinese threats earlier, and there are discussions in the U.S. about the need for weapons with greater engagement ­capability...



J-20 - The Dragon Gets Airborne, by Bill Sweetman
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3aada92122-076e-4e2f-894c-ccec75133760&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest



> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What's fascinating is that, faced with the same kind of information gap that we dealt with in the Cold War, the debate has fallen into the same mold, pitting the hawks against the skeptics. This time around, however, a lot of the people arguing that the J-20 is a propaganda exercise, a preliminary prototype at best, are on the inside of the Pentagon.
> 
> If you wanted to be really, really cynical about this, you would note that a certain white-haired gentleman in the Pentagon is on record as saying that China won't have an operational stealth aircraft before 2020, and that public disagreement with said gentleman has (on occasion) turned out to be sub-optimal from a career-development standpoint.
> 
> However, belief that the J-20 is a long way off is also based on comparison with recent US program performance - and although this may produce the right answer, it will do so for the wrong reasons.
> 
> When it comes to timing, the right answer for now starts with admitting that we don't know the answer. We have no good track record for the pace of development in China because it is not that long since China's economy started to take off, and not that long since the Maoist doctrine of the PLA - favoring numbers and politics over technology - gave way to a major program of modernization. One generation of Chinese development - represented by the J-10/10B, JF-17 and J-11B - doth not a trend make.
> 
> The key pointers to the timing at this point are mostly out of sight from the West, because they are items that can be simulated or tested on the ground. They include progress with active electronically scanned array radar, passive electronic surveillance systems and (as often mentioned) propulsion. Blog photos do not tell us very much about that kind of hardware.
> 
> Still less do they say much about the other essential element of a stealth aircraft, the complex sensor fusion and threat avoidance software that allows it to track targets with minimal transmissions while flying a precise path around planned and pop-up threats.
> 
> It is probably a safe assessment that the J-20 is the first Chinese stealth aircraft (unless it has been preceded by another, covert demonstrator), so it will be a learning tool as well as a prototype in its own right. Almost regardless of the date at which it first enters service, its capabilities will evolve as the threat does.
> 
> And do not forget the other X-factor: China's unprecedented access to foreign technical data via cyberespionage, data that can be widely disseminated without putting the intelligence system itself at risk.
> 
> As for the aircraft itself: start with the size. Capability has been favored over low unit cost. And even with the in-development 33,000-pound-thrust WS-15 it may have a lower thrust-to-weight ratio than many of its contemporaries. Relative to Typhoon or Rafale, the wing appears more highly loaded and more sharply swept, favoring speed rather than ultimate agility...
> 
> What this suggests is that the Chinese expect to use this aircraft in circumstances where it can disengage, turn and run - maintaining engagement control, in short.
> 
> This isn't surprising. While the J-20's proportions may be reminiscent of the F-111, it is unlikely to have the same mission (penetrating strike). The PLA, from the antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) through air-launched cruise missiles on the 1950s-technology H-6 bomber to its Type 022 missile boats, seems happy to leave the last run to the target to the missile. Also, for the time being, the PLA is not looking at having to fight through an integrated air defense system and fight its way out again.
> 
> What the J-20 should do best is go fast, at high altitude, over a decent range - which leads to my guess is that this aircraft is primarily air-to-air, designed to cause the US really big problems with non-survivable air assets - tankers and ISR. Defending them against a rapidly developing attack by aircraft with a reduced frontal RCS would not be easy.
> 
> Range, relative positioning and initiative are the key. With a long unrefueled range and useful sustained supersonic flight (just how good it will be depends on engine data we don't have), the J-20 could hold high-value air assets too far from China to be of much use. It doesn't have to be able to mix it one-for-one with the F-22:  there are not enough F-22s to defend everything at Pacific distances...
> 
> Another longer-term possibility for the J-20 is a "baby Backfire" to threaten Aegis ships, another vital and limited asset, with an air launched, supersonic sea-skimmer missile - and you don't have to sink them, just use dispersed kinetic weapons or an EMP warhead to put the antennas out of service.
> 
> Both these missions fit with the anti-access/area denial (A2AD) theme that runs through a lot of PLA planning, including medium-range missile development. US freedom of operation inside the "second island chain" around China - running from Japan south to Guam and West Papua and encompassing the Philippine and China seas - depends on bases such as Andersen in Guam and Kadena in Japan, on tankers, airborne ISR and on carrier air power, and those assets increasingly support one another...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile...back in Central Asia...

BBC link



> 13 January 2011 Last updated at 08:06 ET
> 
> *Tajikistan cedes land to China  *
> 
> The Pamir mountains lie on the Tajik border with China and Afghanistan
> 
> *China and Tajikistan say that they have settled a century-old border dispute, after the Central Asian nation agreed to cede land to China.
> 
> The Tajik parliament voted on Wednesday to ratify a 1999 deal handing over 386 square miles (1,000 sq km) of land in the remote Pamir mountain range. *
> 
> The Tajik foreign minister said that this represented 5.5% of the land that Beijing had sought.
> 
> *China said the move thoroughly resolved the border dispute. *
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei gave no details on the treaty.
> 
> But he said the dispute was solved "according to universally recognised norms of international law through equal consultations".
> 
> *An opposition leader described the deal as a defeat for Tajik diplomacy and a violation of the constitution. *
> 
> The Pamir mountain range stretches along the Tajik border with China and Afghanistan.
> 
> It is not clear where exactly the land to be ceded is or how many people live there.
> 
> *China is the biggest investor in the Tajik economy, particularly in the energy and infrastructure sectors.*


----------



## MarkOttawa

My, my, my:

From JAST To J-20
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a5c50cb01-bdd0-41cc-b216-fdc89354eb19&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest



> Sometimes the analysis of a new design is one of those areas where you get a whack-on-the-side-of-the-head moment.
> 
> This one was induced by the discussion here of the origins of the F-35 design, wherein I suddenly realized what the J-20 reminded me of - Lockheed's immediate pre-JAST/JSF design, tested in the form of a large powered mock-up.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The similarity is quite close in terms of wing/canard relationship, sweep angles, and body shaping, although the Chengdu engineers decided to align the trailing edges of the canards (and rudders) with the trailing edges of the opposite wings, giving them more sweep at the quarter-chord line.
> 
> I remember talking this over with Paul Bevilaqua at the 1993 Powered Lift Conference in Palo Alto. If I remember correctly, one reason for the canard delta was that it was good for the cross-sectional area distribution (area ruling) and hence transonic drag.
> 
> The challenge was that the shaft-driven lift fan design inevitably had a big cross-section peak well forward, where the inlets wrapped around the fan bay (it needed a large-diameter fan and lots of airflow to work). A canard delta compensated for that by moving the thickest part of the wing as far back as possible.
> 
> Somehow I don't think we're going to see a J-20 with a lift fan. However, don't be surprised if the weapons bays turn out to be more capacious (and versatile) than on other designs. It looks like the idea of the canard configuration is to get a large-volume mid-body section through the transonic zone and into supersonic flight with minimal fuss, bother and expenditure of fuel...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

More on China’s naval ambitions in this article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinas-naval-coming-of-age/article1871223/singlepage/#articlecontent


> China’s naval coming-of-age
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> Beijing— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Friday, Jan. 14, 2011
> 
> When the Soviet Union began building the aircraft carrier Varyag more than a quarter of a century ago, the 300-metre ship was expected to one day sail provocatively into the Mediterranean Sea, a Cold War challenge to American naval dominance in that part of the globe.
> 
> When it finally sets to sea under its own power some time this year or next, the Varyag will have a very different master and mission. Today, the construction project that began in 1985 in what is now the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv is being completed in the Chinese hub of Dalian.
> 
> A world and an era away from its original intended purpose, the Varyag will instead feed fears and suspicions between the United States and China, its latest military rival.
> 
> The Varyag is far from the pinnacle of China's naval ambitions. In fact, it's not clear that the ship will ever be anything but a floating test runway for the pilots and planes that will eventually be transferred to a larger and indigenously developed aircraft carrier that China hints could be mission-ready by 2015. As many as six aircraft carriers are believed to be either planned or under construction by the People's Liberation Army Navy.
> 
> The status of the Varyag (a Cold War relic that once appeared fated to become a floating casino in Macao) is now of major concern in Washington, and among neighbours such as Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. This fact speaks to a lingering truth about international relations: Even in a world of satellite weaponry and cyberwars, naval power remains as relevant in 2011 as it was in centuries past.
> 
> Despite all the advances in diplomacy, communications and military hardware, the way a superpower expresses its displeasure hasn't changed much since 1841, when an iron-sided British warship appropriately named the Nemesis sailed up the Yangtze River during the First Opium War, helping force the Chinese to cede Hong Kong Island to Queen Victoria's empire.
> 
> Gunboats still matter. Part of it is national pride, with aircraft carriers – the successor to the man-of-wars, ironclads and battleships of centuries past – bestowing an aura of power. But in a globalized era, where key resources and export markets are often halfway around the world, they are also vital to securing trade routes. And in disputes between nations, there remain few more effective methods of backing up an argument.
> 
> Take the recent flare-up of tensions of the Korean Peninsula. After North Korean artillery shelled a South Korean island late last year, the U.S. demanded that China rein in its ally. When Beijing didn't act, the U.S. dispatched one of its 11 aircraft carriers – the 98,000-tonne USS George Washington – to the Yellow Sea, carrying out joint exercises with the South Korean navy that were not only close to the disputed sea border with the North, but on the edge of waters that China considers within its exclusive economic zone.
> 
> *America sends in the big guns*
> 
> As that crisis simmers on – and with tensions between Beijing and Washington still on the rise – the U.S. is stepping up its gunboat diplomacy, simultaneously deploying three carrier battle groups (each of which also consists of a guided-missile cruiser, destroyers and smaller craft, plus a standard complement of 90 warplanes) in the western Pacific Ocean for the first time since shortly after the end of the Second World War.
> 
> The U.S. has also in recent years transferred most of its nuclear-powered submarine fleet to the Pacific, a shift driven in large part by China's efforts to upgrade and expand its naval capability. “I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned,” Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year of China's military modernizations.
> 
> For now, the U.S. still rules the Pacific. But while China's own surface fleet may not be able to challenge that for several years, if not decades, it has already developed a weapon that could at least force the carrier fleet to give the country's coast a wider berth: advanced surface-to-sea missiles, dubbed “carrier-busters” because of their supposed ability to sink the giant ships. And after years of focusing on defending its coast and preparing for a potential war over Taiwan, China's navy now talks of “far-sea defence.”
> 
> Chinese strategists see aircraft carriers as crucial to a deep-sea navy that would finally allow China to push beyond the ring of American bases in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. As the world's largest exporter, and a major importer of oil and other resources from Africa and the Middle East, it is no longer willing to trust the U.S. and other foreign navies to protect its ships.
> 
> “We have our interests and duties all over the world and need a naval force [to protect them]. It's not a challenge to anyone, we would just like to join the carrier club,” said Xu Guangyu, a retired PLA general. “It is a natural for the Chinese navy to go beyond the first island chain, to go to the far Pacific and other oceans. No one can stop China from doing this.”
> 
> *For China, it's all about the oil*
> 
> Others see a simpler explanation for China's naval buildup in recent years.
> 
> “It's about oil, oil, oil. Everything they're preparing, the stealth fighter, aircraft carriers, is to protect their oil resources,” said Andrei Chang, chief editor of Kanwa Defense Review, a magazine that reports on China's military.
> 
> He pointed to the long route that tankers carrying oil from the Middle East and Africa have to take to reach Chinese ports, and the multitude of vulnerable points along the way, particularly the Strait of Malacca. Eighty per cent of China's oil imports flow through the narrow sea corridor between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, an artery that could quickly be closed by the U.S. Navy in the event of a conflict.
> 
> “The sea chain is very long for them. That's why they say they need a huge navy,” Mr. Chang said.
> 
> Last year, a Chinese frigate and supply ship docked in Abu Dhabi, the first modern visit by warships from the Middle Kingdom to the oil-rich Middle East. Chinese vessels have taken part in anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia, and a Chinese admiral proposed building a naval base in the Gulf of Aden to support those operations. China already has warships based in Myanmar and is building a deepwater port on the south coast of Sri Lanka that could be put to similar use.
> 
> By some counts, the PLA Navy already possesses more “principal combat ships” – submarines, destroyers, frigates, etc. – than the U.S. Navy, though the American craft are considered to be technologically far superior to the Chinese ships.
> 
> “The U.S. seems to take as granted its right to exert absolute control over the world’s skies and oceans. However, the world we live in is not only vast but also changing fast. The U.S., however powerful it may be, cannot rule alone,” the Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper wrote this week after a visit to Beijing by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
> 
> That trip – which came after China suspended military-to-military ties for a year to protest against U.S. arms sales to Taiwan – was marked by the test flight of China’s first stealth fighter, the J-20. That the J-20 prototype is so far along came as a surprise to U.S. officials, who had previously speculated that such a test flight was years away.
> 
> If the simmering tensions in the region ever develop into anything more than that, it will probably be over the resource-rich waters of the South China Sea.
> 
> Every country in the region has its own map of the sea, which ranks high among the world's busiest shipping lanes. China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines all lay claim to the tiny island groups there, and more important, a share of the natural wealth (eight billion to 28 billion barrels of oil) believed to lie beneath the surrounding waters.
> 
> China's claim is by far the most expansive, encompassing islands hundreds of kilometres from its shores and thus nearly the entire South China Sea. The decades-old claim, and the disputes with its neighbours that it has fed, took on greater urgency last year when Chinese officials reportedly told their U.S. counterparts that the entire sea was now considered a “core national interest” – language previously reserved for red-line territorial issues such as Taiwan and Tibet, over which Beijing has expressed a willingness to go to war.
> 
> The statement provoked a hasty response from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who flew to Hanoi to deliver the message that the U.S. considered freedom of navigation in these waters to be a “national interest” of its own.
> 
> The hub of China's rapid naval buildup is Yalong Bay, a deepwater port on the south coast of Hainan, a tropical island in the South China Sea better known for drawing holidaymakers from colder parts of the country. A 900-kilometre stretch of coast has been converted into China's most advanced naval base, the primary launching point for its fleet of submarines, which has been growing at a pace of three a year since 1995. Hainan is also the hub of China's aircraft-carrier building activity.
> 
> Though China's leaders speak of the need for “harmonious” oceans and of using their new naval capabilities for fighting piracy and providing humanitarian assistance, its neighbours are clearly anxious. Over the next five years, regional navies will invest about $60-billion – more than the combined spending of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, excluding the U.S. – on upgrading their own surface forces and submarine fleets.
> 
> No country is more concerned about China's rapid naval buildup than the region's former dominant sea power, Japan. Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have yet to recover from a September showdown sparked by the collision of a Chinese fishing trawler and a Japanese coast guard boat. After China revealed the lengths it was willing to go to in the dispute, tightening exports of a key resource crucial to the Japanese high-tech industry, Japan was forced into a humiliating retreat that hasn't been forgotten.
> 
> Last month, Japan's Self-Defence Forces released a new white paper outlining a major shift in policy. The army will slash its spending on battle tanks and invest instead in new submarines and warships. The military's sharp edge will now point south and west, toward the waters between it and China.
> 
> “Rising China generally, and its naval modernization specifically, is posing an uncommon and unprecedented challenge for the region and beyond,” said Yuki Asaba, associate professor of international relations at Yamaguchi Prefectural University in Japan. “Japan needs to make it clear that further provocations will not be tolerated.”
> 
> The fishing-boat incident occurred near an uninhabited island chain in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, controlled by Japan but claimed by China. And it was far from an isolated event. The most dramatic statement of China's growing naval reach came last April, when a flotilla of two submarines and eight destroyers cruised between Japanese islands on their way to the deeper Pacific. When two Japanese destroyers were assigned to shadow them, a Chinese helicopter buzzed within 100 metres of them.
> 
> Gen. Xu, the ex-PLA officer, warned that Japan and others needed to get used to the new pecking order in the region. “When a country gets more powerful, it takes on more responsibility in the world. As China gets more powerful, its troops and ships will go out farther,” he said.
> 
> “The neighbours, especially those who bullied us in history, should calm down and adapt better to China's rise.”
> 
> _Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's China correspondent._




I think is about more than just “oil, oil, oil.” China does, indeed, want to press its case for territory in the South China Seas but it also wants to project some “hard power,” globally, so that it can reinforce its extensive “soft power” offensives – which are also global.


----------



## CougarKing

This latest article reminds me of a similar arrangement I read about, that China had with Vietnam during the Vietnam War, whereby up to several thousand Chinese antiaircraft and support troops were stationed in Northern Vietnam. 

From the link above:


> Chinese accounts record that some 320,000 PLA soldiers served in North Vietnam, of whom 1,100 were killed and 4,300 wounded. Liberation Army antiaircraft units claimed to have shot down 1,707 U.S. planes and damaged an additional 1,608, while capturing 42 American pilots



This was of course long before the 1979 punitive Chinese invasion of Vietnam in retaliation for the occupation of Chinese ally Cambodia the year before, IIRC.

Perhaps these Chinese troops might be pivotal in a future power struggle within North Korea if the Kim Jong Il regime collapses?



> *China to station troops in N. Korea—report*
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> First Posted 15:37:00 01/15/2011
> 
> link
> 
> SEOUL—*China is in discussions with North Korea about stationing its troops in the isolated state for the first time since 1994, a South Korean newspaper reported Saturday.*
> 
> The Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted an anonymous official at the presidential Blue House as saying that Beijing and Pyongyang recently discussed details of stationing Chinese soldiers in the North's northeastern city of Rason.
> 
> *The official said the soldiers would protect Chinese port facilities, but the location also gives access to the Sea of Japan (East Sea), while a senior security official was quoted as saying it would allow China to intervene in case of North Korean instability.*
> 
> A spokeswoman for the Blue House said she had no information.
> 
> *"North Korea and China have discussed the issue of stationing a small number of Chinese troops to protect China-invested port facilities" in the Rason special economic zone, the unnamed official was quoted as saying.
> 
> "The presence of Chinese troops is apparently to guard facilities and protect Chinese nationals."*
> 
> China reportedly gained rights in 2008 to use a pier at Rason, securing access to the Sea of Japan, as North Korea's dependence on Beijing continues to grow amid a nuclear stand-off with the United States and its allies.
> 
> *The last Chinese troops left the North in 1994, when China withdrew from the Military Armistice Commission that supervises the truce that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
> 
> Seoul's International Security Ambassador Nam Joo-Hong told the Chosun Ilbo that China could now send a large number of troops into the North in case of instability in the impoverished communist state.*
> 
> "The worst scenario China wants to avoid is a possibly chaotic situation in its northeastern provinces which might be created by massive inflows of North Korean refugees," Nam was quoted as saying."Its troops stationed in Rason would facilitate China's intervention in case of contingencies in the North," he said.


----------



## omuerte

Infanteer said:
			
		

> I think comparing de facto and de jure notions of independance shoots that analogy down.
> 
> 
> I think this scenario goes to pot once the US decides to revoke China‘s trading privledges (WTO, MFN, etc).  They‘ve worked too hard to bring their economy to where it is to waste it away for that island.
> 
> As for the insignia, I think it is too clutered and cheezey.  The coolest cap brass ever has to be the Lancers



Basing my assessment and observations on how French intelligence functions in Quebec an d outlying parks, I find that these moles are emboldened to carry on their missions. Why? Because France is a nuclear power. But Frence cannot have the gall to invade us in Quebec? Why? We have a defense treaty with USA and the Queen is the head of State. I wish Military intelligence and civillian spy agencies be more vigilant in stomping the activities of these emboldened moles who can easily assassinate those who can go across their way and escape to France with whom we have no extradition treatay...Provocative measures have been implemented on poets, writers, etc. who are hostile to separatism such that when we react there is a probability that we end in the morgue..

PS. I might have clicked the wrong quoted statement..which mentions Quebec..sorry


----------



## a_majoor

Another view (although how much of this is true and how much is wishful thinking is debatable):

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-iron-fist-control-china’s-central-government-coming-unhinged



> *Guest Post: Is The Iron Fist Control Of China’s Central Government Coming Unhinged?*
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/17/2011 15:16 -0500
> 
> First, what is China’s Central government trying to do? Second, is it working?
> 
> The PBOC is worried about asset priced inflation so they’ve attempted to reign in the credit tsunami they initiated in response to the 2008 economic crises. The outside perception is that if the Chinese government orders banks to lend, they lend. So if that’s the case, if the PBOC orders banks to reign in lending out of fear of overheating and future non performing loans, the banks should stop lending. For the past few years, the PBOC has established official loan quotas on banks, but the banks have exceeded the official thresholds each year. Unofficially, the problem is much worse, as banks have hidden another 30% or so of their loans in off balance sheet transactions, according to Fitch. Recently, the PBOC officially dropped the loan quota and decided to focus on the reserve ratio. The loan quotas failed and were not being obeyed, so issuing guidelines that are inevitably violated would merely highlight PBOC weakness.
> 
> Last week, immediately before President Hsu’s visit to the US, photos of a Chinese Stealth fighter were released. The timing was viewed as a way for China to flex its muscles and set the tone for the Obama meeting. That may have been the case, but on whose orders? Secretary of Defense Gates spoke with Hsu, who said he knew nothing of the photos. This sparked alarm from the administration that the leaders of the Chinese central government do not have control over the military. This is not the first allegation of lack of oversight. It also shows the hostility of China’s military leadership towards the US.
> 
> Food costs account for 40% of disposable income in China. To control prices, the central government has placed limits on the number of purchases on such things as cooking oil. There are rumors the central government is releasing stockpiles, yet prices continue to rise. China has 20% of the world’s population, but just 6% of the farmable land. If the central government begins to implement price controls, shortages are inevitable. A recent reported from World Economic Forum warned that shortages could “cause social and political instability, geopolitical conflict, and irreparable environmental damage.” The central government seems to have few options to control food inflation without causing a major disruption in the rest of the economy.
> 
> Chinese soldiers and their families are mostly from rural China, the majority of whom have not benefited from China’s rising economy, with 600 million still earning less than $6 a day. Indeed, in many aspects, quality of life has deteriorated for those without connections, a prerequisite for wealth in the eyes of most Chinese according to polls. Many do not view competition for material goods as healthy, pollution and waste have worsened exponentially, housing prices have skyrocketed, and now food prices surging. Businessweek reported that ordinary Chinese are increasingly yearning for a return to Mao style communism – “a more equal” society, with Conqing Party Boss Bo Xilia gaining support and pushing for membership to the inner circle.
> 
> To summarize, banks have ignored PBOC orders, the military is doing their own thing, and food prices are surging with few solutions available to the central government. They have a fixed asset bubble, a likely onslaught of bad loans in the offing, and millions of jobs tied to construction. Many Chinese are worse off and the military is more sympathetic to ordinary Chinese than the noveau riche. Inflation is nearing levels associated with social unrest. The situation is a powderkeg.


----------



## Edward Campbell

*Mutual respect* is the key phrase in the (government controlled/official) English language media here in China.

The Chinese only really wanted one thing: a public acknowledgement of the *fact* that China is a major, global power – they wanted the full scale “pomp and circumstance” that signifies their *respected* status and, again publicly, repudiates former President George W. Bush's earlier _snub_ – non-state visit, etc. They got that. They actually got more than that; Obama not only rolled out the red carpet, he laid off most of the wholly legitimate criticisms of China's policies.

What will Obama get in return? Nothing much, I'm afraid. China has no incentives to help the USA with Korea, Central/West/South-West Asia, Iran or Africa. It already has the *respect* it wants and, in most other matters, the USA is overextended and China is in the “catbird seat.” Why should it do the USA any favours?

Of course, China's highly favourable position is why it _might_ be in China's better interests to offer the USA a helping hand, here or there, but I can see little support for that in the media here, in China. But, the Chinese famously take the "long view," and, in my opinion their long term, global, interests might be best served by offering the USA some "charity" in areas where China's interests are minor.

One thing I found interesting was the front page picture on today's semi-official _China Daily_:





Source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-01/21/content_11892224.htm
Note the positioning: Michelle Obama, who is a _celebrity_ in China is at the centre, with Hu, seemingly looking at him in a friendly, even an admiring manner. President Obama appears to be “on the edge” and, maybe even bowing, ever so slightly. I'm sure the editors had dozens of pictures from which to choose – this one is full of subtle messages for foreigners in China and Chinese people, alike.


----------



## 57Chevy

I had a long gaze at the attached picture this morning and wonder of its suggestions also.


Video:
U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao in a major step to stabilize the relationship between the two countries. Global National's Eric Sorensen reports.


Story:
U.S.-Chinese tensions visible as Obama, Hu meet:
NEW YORK — U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday he believes China's emergence as a major power was good for the United States economically, but revealed Washington's doubts about the long-term political goals of the world's most populous country, which remains under Communist party rule.

"We welcome China's rise," Obama said at a news conference in Washington with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

"We just want to make sure that that rise is done in a way that reinforces international norms and international rules, and enhances security and peace — as opposed to it being a source of conflict within in the region around the world."

The comment reflected difficulties Washington has had in convincing China to be in sync with Washington on a series of international issues, not least with efforts to contain the threats posed by the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.

article continues at link...

Photo:
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and first lady Michelle Obama (L) pose for the official photo with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Grand Staircase of the White House January 19, 2011 in Washington, D.C. Obama is hosting a state dinner for Hu this evening.
Photograph by: Alex Wong, Getty Images
                                       (Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act)


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting analysis of conditions in China, although I do take issue with the use of the word Fascist (a correctly political definition is having the State dictate the outcomes through taxation and regulation, but leaving the costs and responsibilities of notional ownership in the hands of the private sector). As Edward points out, China is an Imperial system ruled currently by the "Red Dynasty", using updated versions of the tools used by previous Empires and Dynasties in Chinese history:

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/01/20/china-the-first-mature-fascist-state/



> *China: The First Mature Fascist State*
> Posted By Michael Ledeen On January 20, 2011 @ 7:34 am In Uncategorized | 60 Comments
> 
> For nearly ten years, I have been arguing that China may well be the first example of a mature fascism in power.  The highest praise imaginable has been bestowed on this theory, by the People’s Republic itself.  When I published an updated version of my theory (first published in the Wall Street Journal in  2002 and reprised in different form in NRO thereafter) in the Far East Economic Review in May, 2008, the entire issue was banned in China.
> 
> On the occasion of Mr. Hu’s visit to Washington, it seems appropriate to revisit this theme, which seems to me to have been abundantly confirmed by events.
> 
> May 2008
> Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism
> 
> by Michael Ledeen
> 
> Posted May 2, 2008
> 
> In 2002, I speculated that China may be something we have never seen before: a mature fascist state. Recent events there, especially the mass rage in response to Western criticism, seem to confirm that theory. More significantly, over the intervening six years China’s leaders have consolidated their hold on the organs of control—political, economic and cultural. Instead of gradually embracing pluralism as many expected, China’s corporatist elite has become even more entrenched.
> 
> Even though they still call themselves communists, and the Communist Party rules the country, classical fascism should be the starting point for our efforts to understand the People’s Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the fascist revolution. Mussolini would be dead and buried, the corporate state would be largely intact, the party would be firmly in control, and Italy would be governed by professional politicians, part of a corrupt elite, rather than the true believers who had marched on Rome. It would no longer be a system based on charisma, but would instead rest almost entirely on political repression, the leaders would be businesslike and cynical, not idealistic, and they would constantly invoke formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the “great Italian people,” “endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors.”
> 
> Substitute in the “great Chinese people” and it all sounds familiar. We are certainly not dealing with a Communist regime, either politically or economically, nor do Chinese leaders, even those who followed the radical reformer Deng Xiaoping, seem to be at all interested in treading the dangerous and uneven path from Stalinism to democracy. They know that Mikhail Gorbachev fell when he tried to control the economy while giving political freedom. They are attempting the opposite, keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise. Their political methods are quite like those used by the European fascists 80 years ago.
> 
> Unlike traditional communist dictators—Mao, for example—who extirpated traditional culture and replaced it with a sterile Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese now enthusiastically, even compulsively, embrace the glories of China’s long history. Their passionate reassertion of the greatness of past dynasties has both entranced and baffled Western observers, because it does not fit the model of an “evolving communist system.”
> 
> Yet the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 1930s used exactly the same device. Mussolini rebuilt Rome to provide a dramatic visual reminder of ancient glories, and he used ancient history to justify the conquest of Libya and Ethiopia. Hitler’s favorite architect built neoclassical buildings throughout the Third Reich, and his favorite operatic composer organized festivals to celebrate the country’s mythic past.
> 
> Like their European predecessors, the Chinese claim a major role in the world because of their history and culture, not just on the basis of their current power, or scientific or cultural accomplishments. China even toys with some of the more bizarre notions of the earlier fascisms, such as the program to make the country self-sufficient in wheat production—the same quest for autarky that obsessed both Hitler and Mussolini.
> 
> To be sure, the world is much changed since the first half of the last century. It’s much harder (and sometimes impossible) to go it alone. Passions for total independence from the outside world are tempered by the realities of today’s global economy, and China’s appetite for oil and other raw materials is properly legendary. But the Chinese, like the European fascists, are intensely xenophobic, and obviously worry that their people may turn against them if they learn too much about the rest of the world. They consequently work very hard to dominate the flow of information. Just ask Google, forced to cooperate with the censors in order to work in China.
> 
> Some scholars of contemporary China see the Beijing regime as very nervous, and perhaps even unstable, and they are encouraged in this belief when they see recent events such as the eruption of popular sentiment against the Tibetan monks’ modest protests. That view is further reinforced by similar outcries against most any criticism of Chinese performance, from human rights to air pollution, and from preparations for the Olympic Games to the failure of Chinese quality control in food production and children’s toys.
> 
> In all these cases, it is tempting to conclude that the regime is worried about its own survival, and, in order to rally nationalist passions, feels compelled to portray the country as a global victim. Perhaps they are right. The strongest evidence to support the theory of insecurity at the highest levels of Chinese society is the practice of the “princelings” (wealthy children of the ruling elites) to buy homes in places such as the United States, Canada and Australia. These are not luxury homes of the sort favored by wealthy businessman and officials from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Rather they are typically “normal” homes of the sort a potential émigré might want to have in reserve in case things went bad back home.
> 
> On the other hand, the cult of victimhood was always part of fascist culture. Just like Germany and Italy in the interwar period, China feels betrayed and humiliated, and seeks to avenge her many historic wounds. This is not necessarily a true sign of anxiety; it’s an integral part of the sort of hypernationalism that has always been at the heart of all fascist movements and regimes. We cannot look into the souls of the Chinese tyrants, but I doubt that China is an intensely unstable system, riven by the democratic impulses of capitalism on the one hand, and the repressive practices of the regime on the other. This is a mature fascism, not a frenzied mass movement, and the current regime is not composed of revolutionary fanatics. Today’s Chinese leaders are the heirs of two very different revolutions, Mao’s and Deng’s. The first was a failed communist experiment; the second is a fascist transformation whose future is up for grabs.
> 
> If the fascist model is correct, we should not be at all surprised by the recent rhetoric or mass demonstrations. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were every bit as sensitive to any sign of foreign criticism as the Chinese today, both because victimhood is always part of the definition of such states, and because it’s an essential technique of mass control. The violent denunciations of Westerners who criticize Chinese repression may not be a sign of internal anxiety or weakness. They may instead be a sign of strength, a demonstration of the regime’s popularity. Remember that European fascism did not fall as the result of internal crisis—it took a bloody world war to bring it down. Fascism was so alarmingly popular neither Italians nor Germans produced more than token resistance until the war began to be lost. It may well be that the mass condemnation of Western calls for greater political tolerance is in fact a sign of political success.
> 
> Since classical fascism had such a brief life span, it is hard to know whether or not a stable, durable fascist state is possible. Economically, the corporate state, of which the current Chinese system is a textbook example, may prove more flexible and adaptable than the rigid central planning that doomed communism in the Soviet Empire and elsewhere. … Our brief experience with fascism makes it difficult to evaluate the possibilities of political evolution, and the People’s Republic is full of secrets. But prudent strategists would do well to assume that the regime will be around for a while longer—perhaps a lot longer.
> 
> If it is a popular, fascist regime, should the world prepare for some difficult and dangerous confrontations with the People’s Republic? Twentieth-century fascist states were very aggressive. Is it not likely that China will similarly seek to enlarge its domain?
> 
> I believe the answer is “yes, but.” Many Chinese leaders might like to see their sway extend throughout the region, and beyond. China’s military is not so subtly preparing the capability to defeat U.S. forces in Asia in order to prevent intervention in any conflict on its periphery. No serious student of China doubts the enormous ambitions of both the leadership and the masses. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Chinese tyrants do not urgently need quick geographical expansion to demonstrate the glory of their country and the truth of their vision. For the moment, at least, success at home and global recognition of Chinese accomplishments seem to be enough. Since Chinese fascism is less ideological than its European predecessors, Chinese leaders are far more flexible than Hitler and Mussolini.
> 
> Nonetheless, the short history of classical fascism suggests that it is only a matter of time before China will pursue confrontation with the West. That is built into the dna of all such regimes. Sooner or later, Chinese leaders will feel compelled to demonstrate the superiority of their system. Superiority means others have to bend their knees, and cater to the wishes of the dominant nation.
> 
> How, then, should the democracies deal with China? The first step is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that wealth is the surest guarantor of peace. The West traded with the Soviet Union, and gave them credits as well, but it did not prevent the Kremlin from expanding into the Horn of Africa, or sponsoring terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East. A wealthy China will not automatically be less inclined to go to war over Taiwan, or, for that matter, to wage or threaten war with Japan.
> 
> Indeed, the opposite may be true—the richer and stronger China becomes, the more they build up their military might, the more likely such wars may be. It follows that the West must prepare for war with China, hoping thereby to deter it. A great Roman once said that if you want peace, prepare for war. This is sound advice with regard to a fascist Chinese state that wants to play a global role.
> 
> Meanwhile, we should do what we can to convince the people of China that their long-term interests are best served by greater political freedom, no matter how annoying and chaotic that may sometimes be. I think we can trust the Chinese leaders on this one. Any regime as palpably concerned about the free flow of information knows well that ideas about freedom might be very popular. Let’s test that hypothesis, by talking directly to “the billion.” In today’s world, we can surely find ways to reach them.
> 
> If we do not take such steps, our risk will surely increase, and explosions of rage, manipulated or spontaneous, will recur. Eventually they will take the form of real actions.
> 
> 
> Article printed from Faster, Please!: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen


----------



## MarkOttawa

Playing Politics: Afstan, USA, Canada and China
Conference of Defence Associations' media round-up, Jan. 21
http://www.cdaforumcad.ca/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1295636566/0#0

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> An interesting analysis of conditions in China, although I do take issue with the use of the word Fascist (a correctly political definition is having the State dictate the outcomes through taxation and regulation, but leaving the costs and responsibilities of notional ownership in the hands of the private sector). As Edward points out, China is an Imperial system ruled currently by the "Red Dynasty", using updated versions of the tools used by previous Empires and Dynasties in Chinese history:
> 
> URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/01/20/china-the-first-mature-fascist-state/




Michael Ledeen is at least two of:

1. profoundly ignorant about China; and/or

2. profoundly ignorant about Fascism; an/or

3. just plain profoundly silly.

That _analysis_ is about the biggest load of codswallop I've seen in years.

Despite his education (a PhD, from a solid university, an accomplishment for which I have the greatest respect) and credentials (he's held some pretty impressive _official_ jobs) I think Ledeen has drunk _waaaaay_ too much of the American neo-con Kool-Aid; it's rotted his brain.


----------



## Edward Campbell

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Playing Politics: Afstan, USA, Canada and China
> Conference of Defence Associations' media round-up, Jan. 21
> http://www.cdaforumcad.ca/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1295636566/0#0
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa




The CDA missed the only important Canada/China story: the one about oil and, more broadly, resources from the former to the latter. We need to build a new trans-mountain pipeline and a modern oil port on the Pacific coast to export *processed* oil sands petroleum to Asia - not only China. This will give us 'clout' with both China and the USA.

----------
P.S. The NAFTA does *NOT* give the USA any sort of control over Canadian oil. A handful of scaremongers convince an ignorant media to repeat that lie on a semi-annual basis but it remains a lie. See here


----------



## Rifleman62

ERC:





> We need to build a new trans-mountain pipeline and a modern oil port on the Pacific coast to export _*processed*_ oil sands petroleum to Asia - not only China. This will give us 'clout' with both China and the USA.



An earlier post suggested that your write policy for the CPC. May be that should be Canada no matter who is the government.

The key here is processed oil exports. I believe Canada and/or Liberal BC is bragging about increased lumber exports to China, but my understanding is we are exporting logs (a lot cheaper, less jobs for Canada) to be processed in China, vice lumber. 

Additionally the Liberals and the NDP want to ban all oil tankers from the West coast (but not the east coast).

Where will the money come from if Obama puts pressure on US oil companys?

If it is Chinese money, what %?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Hardline view in _Wall St. Journal_:

Shore Up America's Air Superiority
China's military modernization means the U.S. and its allies need to take countermeasures.
http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Regaining+American+air+superiority+in+East+Asia+is+absolutely+essential%22+site:wsj.com



> ...
> For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies face a competitor that can call into question what has been the American military's ace-in-the-hole—its supremacy in the skies. The test of a fifth generation fighter is not the only reason for this change in the regional balance of power. There are numerous contributing factors.
> 
> First, over the past 20 years, China has continually upgraded its air defense system. It has done in good measure by buying Russian-made S-300s. This family of surface-to-air radars and missiles is regarded as being among the world's most effective regional air defence systems, comparable and in certain respects superior in performance to the U.S.-made Patriot. With S-300s deployed across from Taiwan, the Chinese can put at risk any non-stealthy, U.S. aircraft flying in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait. Since the vast bulk of American fighters and all U.S. tankers and transport aircraft are not stealthy, this is a serious problem.
> 
> The second problem is China's expansive deployment of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles...
> 
> So what's to be done? Perhaps the worst thing the U.S. can do is implicitly concede this advantage to the Chinese military by implementing strategies that would stage and deploy most American military assets from bases outside the region. Creating a Fortress Guam in response, for example, will undermine the credibility of American security ties with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. It will be next to impossible to assure our partners that "we have their backs" when we are 1,500 miles away.
> 
> At a minimum, the U.S. needs to work with its partners and allies to begin hardening existing bases and establish new bases throughout the region to complicate China's military plans. Next, given the growing threat posed by Chinese submarine developments, the U.S. will need to expand its own submarine fleet, increase resources for the Navy's anti-submarine warfare program, and move ahead with developing a new generation of airborne electronic warfare platforms that can foul and confuse enemy radars and sensor systems.
> 
> Equally urgent is getting allies like Japan and South Korea to upgrade their air fleets with stealthy aircraft. No one knows just how stealthy the new Chinese plane is or exactly when full-scale production might occur. That said, the plane will almost surely be equal to or better than the vast majority of fighters now in U.S. allies' air forces.
> 
> Accordingly, the Pentagon should be working with the Japanese and South Koreans for them to procure the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber. [US is working on this with Japanese:
> http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/39415/post-1010374.html#msg1010374 ]
> And precisely because of the threat to air bases posed by China's ballistic and cruise missiles, it is even more incumbent that the VSTOL version of the F-35 go forward, despite current problems in the program. Having a capacity to take off and land vertically and on short runways will become even more essential in the years ahead.
> 
> Finally, Congress needs to reverse the administration's decision on ending production of the F-22 at 187. Not only is the stealthy "Raptor" far and away the finest fighter in the world—and will remain so for many years to come—it is the only plane available for more than a decade that can operate night and day in an independent fashion in a hostile Chinese air defense environment...
> 
> _Mr. Schmitt is director of the American Enterprise Institute's Program on Advanced Strategic Studies and Mr. Donnelly is director of its Center for Defense Studies._



For a more realistic view of likely US military budgeting see this _AW&ST_ editorial:

Get Real on National Security
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/awst/2011/01/17/AW_01_17_2011_p50-281941.xml

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

I wonder if the USAF needs to leap past incremental improvements, since unless they can start producing fighters at the Willow run factory at the rate of one every 24hr (and the pilots and aircrew to man them), they will be on the wrong end of the numbers curve.

How they can sidestep the Chinese advantages in position and numbers is an interesting question, and I am sure there are any number of defense contractors willing to step up with an answer.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Realism from Robert J. Samuelson:

China's new world order demands stronger U.S. response
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/23/AR2011012302895_pf.html



> By all appearances, Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington last week changed little in the lopsided American-Chinese relationship. What we have is a system that methodically transfers American jobs, technology and financial power to China in return for only modest Chinese support for important U.S. geopolitical goals: the suppression of Iran's and North Korea's nuclear weapons programs. American officials act as though there's not much they can do to change this.
> 
> It's true that the United States and China have huge common interests in peace and prosperity. Two-way trade (now about $500 billion annually) can provide low-cost consumer goods to Americans and foodstuffs and advanced manufactured products to the Chinese. But China's and America's goals differ radically. The United States wants to broaden the post-World War II international order based on mutually advantageous trade. By contrast, China pursues a new global order in which its needs come first - one in which it subsidizes exports, controls essential imports (oil, food, minerals) and compels the transfer of advanced technology.
> 
> Naturally, the United States opposes this sort of system, but that's where we're headed. Clashing goals have trumped shared interests...
> 
> ...consider technology transfer. Big multinational firms want to be in China, but the cost of doing so is often the loss of important technology through required licensing agreements, mandatory joint ventures, reverse engineering or outright theft. American software companies estimate that 85 to 90 percent of their products in China are pirated.
> 
> Writing in the Harvard Business Review,
> http://hbr.org/2010/12/china-vs-the-world/ar/1#
> Thomas Hout and Pankaj Ghemawat cite China's high-speed-rail projects. Initially, foreign firms such as Germany's Siemens got most contracts; in 2009, the government began requiring foreign firms to enter into minority joint ventures with Chinese companies. Having mastered the "core technologies," Chinese companies have captured 80 percent or more of the local market and compete with foreign firms for exports. The same thing is occurring in commercial aircraft. China is building a competitor to the Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320; General Electric has entered into a joint venture that will supply the avionics, the electronics that guide the aircraft...
> 
> It's important to make several qualifications. First, Americans shouldn't blame China for all our economic problems, which are mostly homegrown. Indeed, the ferocity of the financial crisis discredited U.S. economic leadership and emboldened China to pursue its narrow interests more aggressively than ever. Second, the point should not be (as the Chinese allege) to "contain" China's growth; the point should be to modify its economic strategy, which is predatory. It comes at others' expense.
> 
> The U.S. response has been mostly carrots - to pretend that sweet reason will persuade China to alter its policies. Last week, President Obama and Hu exchanged largely meaningless pledges of "cooperation." Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a group of manufacturers, says U.S. policy verges on "appeasement." We need sticks. The practical difficulty is being tougher without triggering a trade war that weakens the global recovery. Still, it's possible to do something. The Treasury could brand China a currency manipulator, which it clearly is. The administration could move more forcefully against Chinese subsidies. America's present passivity encourages China's new world order, with fateful consequences for the United States and everyone else.



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The CDA missed the only important Canada/China story: the one about oil and, more broadly, resources from the former to the latter. We need to build a new trans-mountain pipeline and a modern oil port on the Pacific coast to export *processed* oil sands petroleum to Asia - not only China. This will give us 'clout' with both China and the USA.
> 
> ----------
> P.S. The NAFTA does *NOT* give the USA any sort of control over Canadian oil. A handful of scaremongers convince an ignorant media to repeat that lie on a semi-annual basis but it remains a lie. See here




There is new competition for the pipeline/petro-port proposals from CN Rail. It, competition, is all good, but the more processing we can do here, in Canada, using Canadian labour, the better. The Chinese, of course, would like to do as much processing as possible - costs being equal - in China, using Chinese labour.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the Chinese Stealth prototype:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/was-chinas-stealth-tech-made-in-america/



> *Was China’s Stealth Tech Made in America?*
> By David Axe   January 24, 2011  |  12:01 am  |  Categories: China
> 
> On March 27, 1999, during the height of NATO’s air war on Serbia, a very smart and very lucky Serbian air-defense commander achieved the seemingly impossible. Firing three 1960s-vintage SA-3 missiles, Col. Zoltan Dani managed to shoot down an attacking U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighter-bomber piloted by Lt. Col. Dale Zelko. NATO commanders had been sending the alliance’s planes, including the stealth attackers, into Serbia along predictable routes, allowing Dani to carefully plan his missile ambush.
> 
> A fast-acting team of Air Force A-10 attack planes and helicopters retrieved Zelko intact, but not so the wreckage of the colonel’s top-secret jet, one of the technological stars of the 1991 Gulf War. The destroyed F-117’s left wing, canopy and ejection seat — plus Zelko’s helmet — wound up in a Belgrade aviation museum, but most of the rest of the 15-ton jet was gathered up by farmers living around the crash site.
> 
> Twelve years later, some of those components may have finally surfaced — in the design of China’s new J-20 stealth fighter.
> 
> If true, and that’s a huge “if,” the partly American origin of China’s first radar-evading warplane could be both a damning indictment of the Pentagon’s reliance on easily copied high technology, and a potential comfort to U.S. military planners desperately trying to assess the J-20’s impact on Pacific war plans.
> 
> The J-20 appeared without warning in late December and flew for the first time this month. For weeks, observers from all over the world have debated the J-20’s significance. Some are calling it the death-knell for 50 years of U.S. air dominance. Others dismiss it as a visually impressive but militarily useless piece of showmanship.
> 
> The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes, especially if the J-20 has F-117 DNA.
> 
> Back in March 1999, the F-117’s wreckage was possibly still cooling when foreign agents sprang into action. “At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,” Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, then the top Croatian officer, told the Associated Press.
> 
> “The destroyed F-117 topped that wishlist for both the Russians and Chinese,” added Zoran Kusovac, a military consultant based in Rome.
> 
> Although both are optimized for bombing, the sleek J-20 doesn’t even remotely resemble the ungainly F-117. In overall shape, the J-20 is most similar to the mid-1990s-vintage Russian MiG 1.44 prototype and Lockheed Martin’s Joint Advanced Strike Technology concept from roughly the same period.
> 
> Even so, the J-20 doesn’t necessarily mimic the MiG 1.44, JAST or any other plane, either. Granted, Beijing does have a reputation for copying foreign weapons, often badly. But China also has a growing number of its own weapons designs. And besides, the principles of aerodynamics and radar-deflection know no political borders.
> 
> As long as Chinese engineers understand the basics of what makes a plane fly and hides it from radar, it should come as no surprise that the J-20 looks a lot like other stealthy jets.
> 
> That said, when it comes to aerial stealthiness, shaping is just part of the equation. A plane’s materials — particularly any skin coatings — are equally important. That’s where China might have really benefited from studying the crashed F-117.
> 
> It’s possible the U.S. defense establishment knew that China had cracked the F-117’s secrets. Perhaps accepting that the cat was out of the bag, the Americans reportedly made no effort to retrieve the stealth artifacts from that Belgrade museum. “A lot of delegations visited us in the past, including the Chinese, Russians and Americans … but no one showed any interest in taking any part of the jet,” Zoran Milicevic, deputy director of the museum, told the AP.
> 
> And in a move that surprised many observers, in 2008 the Air Force formally retired the entire F-117 fleet, then roughly 40 strong. (A few F-117s are secretly still flying, apparently for tests.) Officially, the F-117 was obsolete. “I mean it’s a 30-year-old concept now,” F-117 pilot Lt. Col. Chris Knehans said, ignoring the fact that almost all U.S. combat aircraft designs are at least that old.
> 
> It could be that the F-117 had to go because every potential rival knew its secrets.
> 
> It’s almost certainly true that the more recent B-2 bomber, F-22 and F-35 fighters and a whole host of known and rumored stealthy drones are made of newer, better materials than the F-117 and are therefore less visible to radar. If the J-20 is based on the F-117 in any way, then the J-20 probably has stealth qualities a full generation behind current American designs — to say nothing of the next generation, including the forthcoming “B-3 bomber.”
> 
> Still, it should be discouraging to U.S. war planners that the loss of a single high-tech fighter can possibly render useless that fighter’s entire design.
> What happens when the first B-2, F-22 or F-35 crashes in enemy territory?


----------



## tingbudong

Rifleman62 said:
			
		

> ERC:
> An earlier post suggested that your write policy for the CPC. May be that should be Canada no matter who is the government.
> 
> The key here is processed oil exports. I believe Canada and/or Liberal BC is bragging about increased lumber exports to China, but my understanding is we are exporting logs (a lot cheaper, less jobs for Canada) to be processed in China, vice lumber.
> 
> Additionally the Liberals and the NDP want to ban all oil tankers from the West coast (but not the east coast).
> 
> Where will the money come from if Obama puts pressure on US oil companys?
> 
> If it is Chinese money, what %?



I have some past experience in the BC forest industry and still latently follow the industry. 

BC, and the North (in particular) are  blindingly drunk on China right now.  Almost every B and C list politician has made multiple trips (with more always in the pipeline) to the Mainland in search of 'opportunities' and the increase in lumber and resource exports is touted as the solution to just about every problem faced in Northern British Columbia.  Apparently they like it over there.  I recall a few months ago the head of CSIS got quite the lashing when he hinted that numerous Canadian municipal and provincial politicians were under the influence of Chinese intelligence.  I just chucked to myself.   

Like Rifleman noted, not only is exported lumber low grade, but the government often places a dollar figure on the exports rather than break down the gains by forest product.  This conveniently hides the dirty secret that much of the export increase is raw logs.

China is keenly interested in Canadian logs given that the Russian forest industry has a rather hefty (80%, apparently) tariff on timber and lumber exports.  The Russians are using the tariff to buy time to retool, and reinvest in their aging mill infrastructure.  Much of venture capital being used is from China.  I haven't read anything (or have heard through conversation) indicating that BC forest companies have any strategies in place to combat the pending rebooted Russian forest industry.     

The CCP enjoys the ability to be able to think long term.  BC politicians are are not likely to think further than four years ahead (in a good term).


----------



## a_majoor

Talk about urban sprawl:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/china-to-create-largest-mega-city-in.html



> *China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people by 2017*
> 
> UK Telegraph - China is planning to create the world's biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.
> 
> The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales. The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
> 
> Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (US$310 billion). A high speed rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
> 
> Megacities at wikipedia Greater Tokyo has about 35 million people.
> 
> 1 Tokyo Japan                34,200,000  incl. Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama
> 2 Guangzhou China       24,900,000  Northern Pearl River Delta incl. Dongguan, Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan (4% annual growth)
> 3 Seoul Korea (South)   24,500,000  incl. Bucheon, Goyang, Incheon, Seongnam, Suweon
> 4 Delhi India                  23,900,000  incl. Faridabad, Ghaziabad (4.6% annual growth)
> 5 Mumbai India             23,300,000  incl. Bhiwandi, Kalyan, Thane, Ulhasnagar (2.90% annual growth)
> 6 Mexico City                 22,800,000  incl. Nezahualcóyotl, Ecatepec, Naucalpan (2.00% annual growth)
> 7 New York USA            22,200,000  incl. Newark, Paterson
> 8 São Paulo Brazil         20,800,000  incl. Guarulhos
> 9 Manila Philippines      20,100,000  incl. Kalookan, Quezon City
> 10 Shanghai China       18,800,000
> 
> 
> Residents would be able to use universal rail cards and buy annual tickets to allow them to commute around the mega-city.
> 
> Twenty-nine rail lines, totaling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.
> 
> By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.
> 
> In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China's most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.
> 
> The process of merging the Bohai region has already begun with the connection of Beijing to Tianjing by a high speed railway that completes the 75 mile journey in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities.
> 
> As the process gathers pace, total investment in urban infrastructure over the next five years is expected to hit £685 billion, according to an estimate by the British Chamber of Commerce, with an additional £300 billion spend on high speed rail and £70 billion on urban transport.
> 
> There is no name for the city. Mega-City One (from Judge Dredd) seems appropriate
> 
> Several more supermegacities seem likely to be formed.


----------



## CougarKing

tingbudong said:
			
		

> I have some past experience in the BC forest industry and still latently follow the industry.
> 
> BC, and the North (in particular) are  blindingly drunk on China right now.  Almost every B and C list politician has made multiple trips (with more always in the pipeline) to the Mainland in search of 'opportunities' and the increase in lumber and resource exports is touted as the solution to just about every problem faced in Northern British Columbia.  Apparently they like it over there.  I recall a few months ago the head of CSIS got quite the lashing when he hinted that numerous Canadian municipal and provincial politicians were under the influence of Chinese intelligence.  I just chucked to myself.



Tingbudong/聽不懂!!! welcome back. Ni hai ting bu dong ma? Ni yi jing ting DE/得 dong ma?  ;D


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile...in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China...

link



> *Tiananmen activist accuses HK of bowing to China*
> 
> A leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests Wednesday accused Hong Kong of bowing to pressure from China after he was barred from entering the city to attend the memorial of a pro-democracy icon.
> 
> Activist *Wang Dan*, who now lives in Taiwan, had applied to enter Hong Kong following the death earlier this month of Szeto Wah, who died of cancer at the age of 79. His memorial service this weekend is expected to draw thousands.
> 
> The one-time Hong Kong legislator had helped many dissidents flee China after the bloody crackdown on Beijing pro-democracy protests which saw hundreds, if not thousands, killed.
> Hong Kong, a former British colony, has maintained a semi-autonomous status since its return to China in 1997 with a separate legal system and civil liberties not seen in mainland China.
> 
> *But on Wednesday, Wang joined a growing chorus of criticism which has accused Hong Kong of keeping out visitors deemed unwelcome by Beijing.*
> "The Hong Kong government has given up the rights to self-rule," Wang said in a statement posted on his website.
> 
> *"This incident proves that the 'One Country, Two systems' is a lie,"  he added, referring to a post-colonial agreement to let Hong Kong run its own affairs.*
> "One cannot rely on authorities to protect Hong Kong's freedom and democracy".
> 
> In a telephone interview with AFP, Wang said: "I am angry and upset that my visa was refused and this shows the Beijing government's lack of confidence in itself".
> 
> He is scheduled to hold a news conference in Taipei on Thursday along with *Wu'er Kaixi*, another former student leader now in Taiwan, who had also asked Hong Kong immigration to let him attend Szeto's memorial.
> 
> Wu'er told AFP that he "still holds out hope to be able to pay last respects to Uncle Wah".
> 
> Szeto was best known for founding the *Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China*, which routinely criticised Beijing for human-rights abuses and pushed for political reforms in Hong Kong.
> 
> Earlier this month, Wang posted entries on his Facebook and Twitter pages, promising not to hold news conferences or participate in any public events if he was allowed to enter Hong Kong, adding that the government would be "inhumane" to refuse his bid.
> 
> "We sincerely hope they can make a last effort (to allow him to come)," union legislator Lee Cheuk-yan told local television Wednesday.
> 
> "Him coming would be a good thing."
> ...


----------



## a_majoor

More "Smart Diplomacy". It seems clear the administration (and several past ones) have no idea what they are dealing with:

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/january/a-state-insult-with-chinese-characteristics



> *A State Insult with Chinese Characteristics*
> By Nicholas Eberstadt
> Wednesday, January 26, 2011
> 
> Filed under: World Watch, Culture, Government & Politics, Public Square
> 
> A state banquet was scene to a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy.
> 
> How to evaluate the results of last week’s China-U.S. summit in Washington? Improbably, the key for the entire event may lie in what is usually the least memorable portion of these carefully choreographed occasions: the cultural program at the concluding state banquet.
> 
> During the dinner’s musical interlude and following a duet with American jazz musician Herbie Hancock, Chinese pianist Lang Lang treated the assembled dignitaries to a solo of what he described as “a Chinese song: ‘My Motherland.’” (You can watch this on YouTube.)
> 
> The Chinese delegation was clearly delighted: Chinese President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao, stone-faced for many of his other photo ops in Washington, beamed with pleasure upon hearing the melody and embraced Lang Lang at the song’s conclusion (see it on YouTube too). President Obama, for his part, amiably praised Lang Lang for his performance and described the event as "an extraordinary evening."
> 
> ‘My Motherland’ is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day.But what, exactly, is this “gorgeous” and “beautiful” (Hu’s words) tune that so entranced China’s visiting leadership?
> 
> “My Motherland” is not a “Chinese song” in any ordinary meaning of the term. Instead, it is a Mao-era propaganda classic: the theme from "Triangle Hill" (Shangganling), a film in which heroic Chinese forces fight, kill, and eventually beat Americans in pitched battle during the Korean War.
> 
> “My Motherland” epitomizes the “Resist America, Aid [North] Korea” campaign that Beijing embraced during and after the Korean War. It celebrates Sino-American enmity. The gist of the tune can be seen in its lyrics (see the Wikipedia translation):
> 
> When friends are here, there is fine wine
> But if the wolves come
> What greets it is the hunting gun.
> 
> (Two guesses who “the wolves” are.)
> 
> “My Motherland” is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day. Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently unknown to the many members of the administration’s China team—the secretary and deputy secretary of State, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, and the National Security Council’s top two Asia experts—who were on hand at the state dinner and heard this serenade. Clueless about the nature of the insult, they did not know to warn the president that he would embarrass himself and his country by not only sitting through the song, but by congratulating Lang Lang for it afterward.
> 
> Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently completely unknown to the many members of the Obama administration’s China team.Although Americans are often tone-deaf to cadences of symbolism in international relations, the Chinese are not. And for Chinese audiences, the symbolism of performing “My Motherland” to a host of uncomprehending barbarians in the White House itself hardly required explanation. This was a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy. The episode has reportedly already gone viral over the Chinese Internet, where the buzz on this crude and deliberate snub is overwhelmingly and enthusiastically positive. Hu can thus return home confident his visit to America will widely be regarded as a success domestically— for reasons his American counterparts do not yet seem to comprehend.
> 
> The “My Motherland” incident, for its part, may only be a foretaste of what lies ahead in U.S.-China relations. Note, for example, this week’s New York Times front-page story “China Grooming Deft Politician as Next Leader,” announcing Xi Jinping, the Chinese vice president and politburo member, as heir presumptive to Hu Jintao. Xi is lauded as “a brilliant politician” who “came to hate ideological struggles” and is known for “his conciliatory leadership style.” This is the same urbane pragmatist who delivered a speech in Beijing last October commemorating China’s role in the Korean War, a war Xi described as “imposed by the imperialist aggressors,” while Chinese and North Korean troops were waging “a war of justice to defend peace.” Xi even trotted out the long-discredited Communist lie that Americans used germ warfare in the Korean conflict.
> 
> This Orwellian rendition of the origins and conduct of the Korean War augurs ill for U.S.-China relations on many counts (not the least of these being the prospect of cooperation on denuclearization in North Korea—in Xi’s telling, the supposed victim of a U.S. surprise attack in 1950). Xi's diatribe reveals a lingering and deep-seated animosity toward the United States, and suggests that China’s rising generation of rulers will be less shy about advertising (and perhaps acting upon) such sentiments than their predecessors.
> 
> If American policy makers are to avoid unpleasant surprises in their dealings with China in the years ahead, they must pay far more attention to official Chinese pronouncements, commentary, and doctrine. All too often, American security specialists—and even China watchers—are inclined to disregard official Chinese speechifying as so much boring palaver. The problem is that in a controlled society, official words matter. Sometimes, even songs do.
> 
> Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
> 
> FURTHER READING: Michael Mazza notes Chinese expansionism in “China and the Lost Pearls,” while Eberstadt discusses “A Poverty of Statistics.” Eberstadt also considers “Global Poverty and Its Sad Persistence,” says it is “Time for Demographic ‘Stress Tests,’” and outlines “Asia-Pacific Demographics in 2010-2040.”


----------



## a_majoor

How solid is the foundation of China's economic and military might?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41343440



> *Inflation Slowing China's Export Engine*
> 
> Published: Sunday, 30 Jan 2011 | 10:46 PM ET
> By: Keith Bradsher
> 
> Inflation is starting to slow China’s mighty export machine, as buyers from Western multinational companies balk at higher prices and have cut back their planned spring shipments across the Pacific.
> 
> Markups of 20 to 50 percent on products like leather shoes and polo shirts have sent Western buyers scrambling for alternate suppliers. But from Vietnam to India, few low-wage developing countries can match China’s manufacturing might — and no country offers refuge from high global commodity prices.
> 
> Already, the slowdown in American orders has forced some container shipping lines to cancel up to a quarter of their trips to the United States this spring from Hong Kong and other Chinese ports.
> 
> The trend, if continued, could ease tensions by beginning to limit America’s huge trade deficit with China. Those tensions were an undercurrent during Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent Washington talks with President Obama.
> 
> Manufacturers and distributors across a range of industries say the likely result of the export slowdown is higher prices for American shoppers in the coming months, and possibly brief shortages of some products if Western retailers delay purchases too long while haggling over prices.
> 
> China exports more than $4 of goods to the United States for each $1 it imports from America, creating a trade surplus of about $275 billion. The higher Chinese prices will tend to show up mainly in products like inexpensive clothing and other commodity goods in which labor and raw materials represent a bigger part of the final value — rather than in sophisticated electronics like Apple iPads, in which Chinese assembly is only a small fraction of the cost.
> 
> Of course, the slowdown in the volume of imports could also prove temporary, if American consumers accept higher prices and Western corporate buyers end up renewing contracts at much higher cost. In the meantime, if the average price for each imported product rises faster than the volume of shipments falls, China’s surplus with the United States could continue increasing temporarily.
> 
> But whatever the eventual impact on trade, Chinese inflation might also reduce Washington’s pressure on Beijing over its currency, the renminbi. For more than a year, the Obama administration has been pushing China to let the renminbi rise in value against the dollar.
> 
> China’s intervention in the currency market has kept its currency artificially low. But that flood of money has also driven inflation, giving Beijing an incentive to let the renminbi move higher. Indeed, the renminbi has increased 3.6 percent against the dollar since last June.
> 
> The Obama administration is starting to suggest that the currency problem could gradually solve itself if Chinese prices rise so fast that American goods become more competitive.
> 
> The first signs of a potential slowdown in Chinese exports have shown up in shipping. As factories closed on Friday across much of China in preparation for weeklong Chinese New Year celebrations, ports in Hong Kong and elsewhere along the coast were working long hours to meet last-minute shipments.
> 
> But the annual pre-New Year rush has been nothing like that of recent years, causing shipping lines to reverse rate increases and cancel sailings they introduced last summer as the American economy improved. This winter, the scurrying started only two weeks before the holidays, instead of the usual four weeks, according to shipping executives. That is because many Chinese factories simply cut back production this month as their Western customers began resisting steep price increases.
> 
> China’s inflation is running 5 percent at the consumer level, according to official measures. But Chinese and Western economists describe these measures as based on flawed, outdated techniques and say the real figure may be up to twice as high.
> 
> In contrast, the annual inflation rate in the United States is low by historical standards — about 1.5 percent currently.
> 
> China imposed price controls on food in mid-November to limit inflation. But Chinese state media began warning the public on Wednesday that those controls might be ineffective, as a drought in northern China has damaged the winter wheat crop and frost has spoiled part of the vegetable harvest in the south.
> 
> China’s $6 trillion economy used to be heavily dependent on exports for growth. Exports still account for about one-fifth of the economy, after excluding goods that are merely imported to China for final assembly and then re-exported. But China’s economy has grown powerfully for the last two years mainly on the strength of investment-led domestic demand. That demand, partly fed by low-interest lending by state-owned banks, is another factor in China’s inflation.
> 
> Cities and provinces across China have tried to cushion inflation’s effect on consumers by sharply raising minimum wages. Guangdong Province, the export heartland of light industry next to Hong Kong, announced two weeks ago that its cities were raising their minimum wages by an average of 18.6 percent, effective March 1.
> 
> That follows a similar increase that took effect in Guangdong around eight months ago. Many other provinces and cities have also sharply raised minimum wages recently.
> 
> The wage increases are also driven by a growing scarcity of factory workers. The number of Chinese in their 20s and early 30s, the traditional age bracket for factory labor, is slowly shrinking because of the introduction of the “one child system” a generation ago. And a rapidly expanding university system has produced waves of graduates with no interest in factory work.
> 
> Some companies have responded by moving factories deeper into China’s interior, said Stanley Lau, the deputy chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, which represents exporters employing 10 million mainland Chinese workers. But inland wages are starting to catch up with coastal pay rates, Mr. Lau said, while higher transportation costs frequently offset the wage savings from moving to the interior.
> 
> Coach, the American company that is one of the largest marketers of luxury handbags and other accessories, announced on Tuesday that it planned to reduce its reliance on China to less than half of its products, from more than 80 percent now. It will shift output to Vietnam and India, particularly for smaller, more labor-intensive leather goods.
> 
> But Mike Devine, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, said that it would take four years to carry out the shift.
> 
> Trying to move production elsewhere, some retailers are finding many factories are already fully booked: Vietnam and Thailand each have populations smaller than some Chinese provinces, while Cambodia and Laos have smaller populations than some Chinese cities.
> 
> Many manufacturers foresee further labor shortages looming in China that will push wages even higher. They are responding with plans to upgrade their factory equipment and product designs, which could turn them into more direct competitors with high-end manufacturers in Europe and the United States.
> 
> - Hilda Wang contributed reporting.
> This story originally appeared in the The New York Times


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the ex-Russian/Ukrainian carrier VARYAG (soon to be renamed SHI LANG/施琅) is closer to completion:









> *
> Report: Aircraft carrier nearly restored*
> 
> link
> 
> China has completed the major steps required to fully restore a partially built aircraft carrier purchased from Ukraine in 1998, the Hong Kong-based Kanwa Asian Defense magazine said in a report Wednesday.
> 
> *The aircraft carrier, Varyag, is being worked on at a shipyard in Dalian, Liaoning Province. All the living and work compartments, engines, navigation systems and power-generating equipment were restored, the report said.*
> 
> Military sources said that many foreign media reports about China's plan to build an aircraft carrier are based on satellite images, and those reports may not be completely wrong.
> 
> Li Jie, a researcher at the Naval Research Institute in the PLA navy, told the Global Times that the visible parts of the aircraft carrier, such as the radar system and the communication equipment, could be seen by a satellite.
> 
> "The construction of an aircraft carrier always follows a certain procedure, so the completion time could be deduced from the visible parts on the deck," Li added.
> 
> "In 2009, China put forward a plan and a program for building an aircraft carrier," according to China's Ocean Development Report (2010), a book published in May by the State Oceanic Administration, which is under the Ministry of Land and Resources.
> 
> "This shows that China has started entering a new historic era of comprehensively building itself into a great naval power," the report said.
> 
> China apparently purchased Russian SU-33 carrier-based fighters and has modified domestic J-11 jets for carrier landings and takeoffs, according to the Associated Press.
> 
> Reuters reported last month, citing an anonymous source, that *China could put the carrier into use around July 1 this year*, when it plans to celebrate the CPC's 90th birthday. It would be one year ahead of US analysts' expectations.



Jeff Head link: please scroll down at this link for the latest pics of the VARYAG/SHI LANG superstructure

2011 picture from above link, with superstructure returned to hull:


----------



## a_majoor

The conflict between science and the "narrative". In North America, the "Kennewick Man" is persona non grata since he also represents a Caucasian group who apparently settled in North America before the ancestors of the current Aborigional peoples arrived, upending the narrative of who was here first. Outside of the political dust-up, the movement of ancient peoples is a very interesting subject:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mystery-of-the-mummys-chinese-travel-ban-2205033.html#



> *Mystery of the mummy's Chinese travel ban*
> By Clifford Coonan in Beijing
> 
> Saturday, 5 February 2011
> 
> The 'Beauty of Xiaohe', which China has pulled out of an exhibition in the US
> 
> For her advanced years, she looks remarkable. Despite nearing the ripe old age of 4,000, long eyelashes still frame her half-open eyes and hair tumbles down to her remarkably well-preserved shoulders.
> 
> But the opportunity for new audiences in the United States to view the "Beauty of Xiaohe" – a near perfectly preserved mummy from an inhospitable part of western China – has been dealt a blow after it was pulled from an exhibition following a sudden call from the Chinese authorities on the eve of opening. The reason for pulling the mummy and other artefacts from the show remained unclear yesterday (Chinese officials were on New Year holiday) but there were suggestions that the realities of modern Chinese politics may have had a part to play.
> 
> The mummy was recovered from China's Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang province. But her Caucasian features raised the prospect that the region's inhabitants were European settlers.
> 
> It raises the question about who first settled in Xinjiang and for how long the oil-rich region has been part of China. The questions are important – most notably for the Chinese authorities who face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
> 
> The government-approved story of China's first contact with the West dates back to 200BC when China's emperor Wu Di wanted to establish an alliance with the West against the marauding Huns, then based in Mongolia. However, the discovery of the mummies suggests that Caucasians were settled in a part of China thousands of years before Wu Di: the notion that they arrived in Xinjiang before the first East Asians is truly explosive.
> 
> Xinjiang is dominated by the Uighurs, who resent what they see as intrusion by the Han Chinese. The tensions which have spilled over into violent clashes in recent years.
> 
> Whatever the reason for the Chinese decision, it has caused great disappointment at the Pennsylvania museum where the "Secrets of the Silk Road" were due to go on show after successful exhibitions in California and Texas without major reproductions.
> 
> "It's going to be the rebirth of this museum," Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature, told the Associated Press last month. "It's going to put it back on the map."
> 
> Professor Mair declined to comment on the current controversy.


----------



## tingbudong

It will be interesting to see what direction the PLAN and the CCP go with the Shi Lang and it's successors.  I've always been of the opinion that the rush to get this duck in the tub was largely done to placate PLAN morale and middle class nationalism rather than push around folks in the South China Sea.  Such platforms are often viewed as offensive power projection which doesn't help the image of the much vaunted soft power initiatives of the past 15 years.  They'll drive it up and down the coast, show it off to a proud nation, anchor it in Hainan.      

On the other hand, 2010 turned out to be a rather unflattering year for China in relations with its neighbours.  Expanding a minor fishing boat incident  into a unofficial trade war (I was seriously surprised there wasn't a repeat of the 2005 anti-Japan riots), continuing indifference regarding North Korea and quite a few embarrassing faux pas and amateurish lectures by it's diplomatic corp nudged Asia back a bit closer to the US.  China isn't as popular as it once was.  

It could be that soft power isn't going to cut it anymore (be it their own fault, or maybe it was calculated this way) and they need this bad boy (and it's siblings) out in the park batting for the home team. 

It used to be very common to read in most available articles and media regarding the PLA the line that China's military build-up was for peaceful purposes only.  Pretty standard fare.  One still sees this, but not nearly as often as five or six years ago.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Please remember that Joseph Nye, the preeminent "soft power" thinker, teaches that you cannot have soft power with concomitant "hard power" - something that way too many Canadians ignore.


----------



## a_majoor

A push for greater efficiency at Chinese Universities. We could learn something from that:

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_world_view/de_bureaucratization_within_china_s_universities



> *De-bureaucratization within China’s Universities*
> By Kai Jiang February 12, 2011 1:45 pm EST
> 
> Since the draft of Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) released in February 2010 by the Ministry of Education for public discussion, de-bureaucratization within institutions of higher education (gaoxiao qu xingzhenghua) has been a hot issue of debate. Colleges and universities have been objects of fierce public criticism from scholars, students, government, and other stakeholders. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao opposed bureaucratization within higher education institutions. As he indicated, "Universities had better abolish so many complicated administrative levels."
> 
> In China, public colleges and universities are associated with different levels of political administration. For example, thirty-nine top universities ("985 project") are approved as units at the deputy ministry level of the central government; undergraduate institutions are generally affiliated as units at the department level; and tertiary vocational colleges are recognized as units at a lower administrative level. Accordingly, presidents, party secretaries, heads of administrative affairs, and deans of schools at higher education institutions are appointed by their respective administrative authorities. Their salary and treatment also reflect the corresponding stature of the administrative level that supervises them.
> 
> Presidents and party secretaries (representatives of the Community Party who usually have considerable administrative authority) of public institutions are appointed by central or provincial governments; deans of schools are nominated by their universities. More importantly, substantive academic authority is in the hands of control of presidents, party secretaries, office heads, and deans; resources are distributed by these groups. University senators and professors, especially lower status faculty members have limited impact on university governance. Their voices are barely audible. Although public opinion is critical of colleges and universities the political bureaucracy more than the academic organization hold the authority to respond. According to public opinion, bureaucratization has inhibited China's universities from educating excellent talent and achieving landmark research during the past decades. If bureaucratization within academic institutions continues, it is impossible for China to construct word-class universities and build a strong higher education system.
> 
> Of course, there are different understandings of de-bureaucratization within institutions of higher education. Zhou Qifeng, President of Peking University agrees in principle with the idea of de-bureaucratizing universities. Yet, he argues that in China's current context if the administrative levels of universities and their cadre are removed, higher education institutions will face even greater problems and challenges. He stated that at his university many academic powers, including faculty appointments are already left to the schools and university senate.
> 
> According to the final text of Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020), colleges and universities need to seek administrative systems more compatible with the characteristics of academic institutions, overcome the tendency of over-administration, and abolish the existing multi-level governance model; governments should improve governance and legally ensure that academic institutions make full use of autonomy but also “tow the mark”. It will take China time to achieve these objectives and the project will proceed step by step.
> 
> It is unfair for colleges and universities to be accused of bureaucracy. In China the all-powerful state exercises a tight rein over academic institutions—public institutions are government-affiliated and therefore have limited autonomy. The root cause of bureaucratization within colleges and universities is a result of the strong influence of an external actor—the government. As Chen Xuefei, a distinguished professor of higher education at Peking University has insightfully pointed out, "The key to de-bureaucratization within higher education institutions is in government's hand."
> 
> Note: There are different translations for "qu xingzhenghua" of "gaoxiao qu xingzhenghua" in China, including non-administration, de-administration, and de- bureaucratization et al. In fact, what the universities need to reduce is bureaucratization, while administration is a necessary activity of running a university. Therefore, de-bureaucratization is the best suitable expression for translation of "qu xingzhenghua".
> 
> (Kai Jiang is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University. E-mail: kjiang@pku.edu.cn.)



And a footnote from Instapundit:



> In the United States, meanwhile, most of the explosive growth in higher education costs has come from administrative bloat, much of it driven by the need to comply with federal regulations.


----------



## CougarKing

A Chinatown in Northern Iraq...not surprising that another would pop up in the Middle East since you can find Chinatowns all over including as far as Africa (even in the island countries of Mauritius and Madagascar) and Latin America as well. While some previous waves of immigration occurred during the Western colonial era, or during the mass migrations after up to and after 1949, these most recent migrations from China might be more of a result of the emergent "floating population" of rural-urban migrants who were encouraged to go overseas, or those laid off from a large number of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) privatized in preceding years.

link



> *Northern Iraq's budding Chinatown   *
> As foreign investment increases in Iraqi Kurdistan, cultural boundaries are being broken.
> Rhodri Davies Last Modified: 14 Feb 2011 14:38 GMT
> 
> There are several hundred Chinese in Sulaimaniyah, where traditional Kurdish life is still the norm [Rhodri Davies]
> 
> While Ling Ling stacks hot and spicy prawn crackers and dried black beans with ginger onto the shelves of, to her, a familiar looking Chinese market, her wider surroundings of northern Iraq are more foreign.
> 
> Ling, from Anhui province in eastern China, has been managing the shop there for about six months after responding to a newspaper advertisement by a Chinese firm.
> 
> She plans to stay for a few more years to take a share of what she sees as the nascent economic potential of the northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.
> 
> "I came to do business here. I think people are not very clever here. They need people to come with good idea to sell things here," Ling, 34, said.
> 
> "So I can help people here and they can help me."
> 
> *The Chinese market is in the newly opened Kawa Mall in Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan's second city. Chinese people, outlets and a restaurant dominate the top two floors, which are reserved for firms from the world's second biggest economy, of the Kurdish-owned shopping centre.*
> 
> With her husband, mother and sister also in the city, Ling has felt comfortable enough to move from living among the Chinese community to living within a Kurdish one.
> 
> 
> 
> "I want some touch with Kurdi people. They have some good idea. They know what job is good, what business is good. We want to know that," she said.
> 
> *The majority of the approximately 500 Chinese in Sulaimaniyah, which has a municipal population of about 750,000, work in the mall. Chinese flags, lucky cats and paper lanterns make for an incongruous sight as locals in the widely pleated trousers, flayed suit jackets and turbans of Iraqi Kurdistan pass by.*
> 
> Statues of two dragons have been placed at the main entrance looking out towards the neighbouring mosque, traditional souq and street sellers.
> 
> Foreign investment is increasing in Iraqi Kurdistan. More than half of the 1,170 foreign firms investing there are Turkish, working in areas such as construction. Multinational firms are monitoring development of the area's 43.7 billion barrels of proven oil and 25.5 billion barrels of potential reserves.
> 
> Funds from abroad are also making their way into retail in an attempt to exploit the consumer potential of the 4.7 million strong local population, of which more than half are under the age of 20.
> 
> International investment surpassed $14bn from mid-2006 to September 2010, unconfirmed official sources have said.
> 
> Iraqi Kurdistan has had limited autonomy since 1991, due to a no-fly zone placed over it by international powers after attacks by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime.
> 
> The region was also relatively unscathed by the subsequent war with the US that decimated the centre and south of the county. However, the proximity to Saddam's Iraq and the recent conflict has left it poor, lacking in infrastructure and skills.
> 
> The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is hoping the estimated 250,000 to 300,000 foreigners it has so far attracted to the region will help to enervate some of those deficiencies.
> 
> Legal aid
> 
> The passing of new immigration and investment legislation in the KRG and federally has encouraged foreign investment.
> 
> There is no initial visa requirement for visitors and businesspeople in the KRG and foreign businesses are permitted the same rights as their domestic counterparts, permitting them full ownership of properties and activities. This is in addition to entitlements to 10-year tax breaks and the freedom to repatriate all capital.
> 
> Fryad Rwandzi, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and a former representative in the national parliament in the capital Baghdad, said: "The local parliament adopted a law called the investment law [in July 2006] and this is attracting a lot of companies and countries to come to Kurdistan and invest.
> 
> "The law is protecting investors very well and is giving opportunities to them to invest.
> 
> "From Turkey and Iran, the Emirates, Lebanon, Egypt. Now many companies from Italy, Germany, Korea, have come to Kurdistan to invest."
> 
> Commercial air links have also proliferated to the Middle East and Europe, where many Iraqi Kurds have emigrated.
> 
> These changes have been a big move forward for Iraq which has previously known little immigration or foreign investment, not only during 21 years of Saddam's rule but previously under the country's monarchy.
> 
> Rwandzi said: "When we adopted the immigration law many politicians could not understand what is going on or why we should adopt this law.
> 
> "We said that globalisation is going on and many people come to Baghdad or other parts of Iraq and they might stay. Therefore we have to create a good ground for them to stay."
> 
> Difficult early trading
> 
> Yet, life with regular electricity blackouts and military checkpoints between towns in the KRG is not easy. Unemployment is at 14 per cent.
> 
> "People like nice things here, but they don't want to pay too much money. That is the problem," Ling said.
> 
> "Business has been okay," she added. "I think that I will stay maybe two more years."
> 
> However, other shop managers in Kawa Mall did not have such a positive take on trade there.
> 
> Andy Liu, a 31-year-old from Hunan province, said the lack of wealth in the local economy was putting his business under strain.
> 
> "Maybe after six months I will quit. Business is very bad. In one day I pay $150 for everything but I only sell $100 to $200 worth."
> 
> Additionally, working hours can be long and integration into a country without any precedent for immigration is difficult.
> 
> "We work in the morning 9.30am to 10pm. After we go home. We don't spend time with Kurdi people. Only go home, cooking, playing computer, watching TV. Very boring," Liu said.
> 
> Ling also finds little time to mix with locals.
> 
> "In China I have a lot of free time. I can do what I want. I have very nice food and shopping. But here nothing. Just work," she said, laughing.
> 
> Of those locals she interacts with, Ling said: "Some people are very good, very friendly. But some are very bad. They cheat people and steal. But I think that a lot of people are nice and very friendly. They agree with people from other countries."
> 
> Embryonic integration
> 
> 
> There has been little immigration to northern
> Iraq in the past [Rhodri Davies]
> There is no office to aid legal or illegal immigrants and no government programmes to help integrate locals and foreigners.
> 
> Sareng Aziz, a lecturer in sociology at Sulaimaniyah University, said that foreigners can help to strengthen the region in the areas where it is weak, such as corruption and employee rights. She also believes they will help to promote harmonious living among different ethnicities.
> 
> "The Iraqi or Kurdish people have to learn to live in a multi-cultural society and accept other norms and values. There are many other people living with other habits, traditions, norms and values and this is very important.
> 
> "Because most people can't travel outside of the country so this is very important for them to see other cultures."
> 
> Aziz also asserts that the initiative has political implications during this period of change for the country.
> 
> "This is the first time that the doors are opening for the foreigners. Sometimes we hear about some cultural shock but I think that this is a very great opportunity for us to accept others. This is the beginning of living in a democracy. To accept the other and the difference."
> 
> In fact, northern Iraq has traditionally been home to numerous religious and cultural groups - different sects of Sunni and Shia Islam, Yazidis, Armenians, Jews and Christian Assyrians and Chaldeans - although tensions have also been present historically.
> 
> Iraqi testbed
> 
> Rwandzi said that the KRG's culture is open and lacks "the hardline parts of Islamic society".
> 
> "People in Kurdistan deal with immigrants with a very open mind and that they are part of society. Therefore, I don't think that they have any problem coming to Kurdistan and mixing," he said.
> 
> "In [the KRG capital] Erbil as well, we have restaurants, nightclubs, singers and many people."
> 
> The KRG is seen as a testbed for Iraq as a whole. Businesses are looking at options for the country's mineral wealth, abundant agricultural and construction potential, enterprising human capital and tourism.
> 
> The International Monetary Fund predicts GDP growth in Iraq to be 11.5 per cent for 2011, although at present conditions are generally considered too unsafe for widespread outlays.
> 
> Ling hopes that the investments made in the KRG will mean that her move there will be an economic success, and has enough faith in the region to give the process time.
> 
> "After maybe a few years here it will be a very strong country, it is a very nice country," she said.
> 
> "Now we need more people to come here. I think more people are coming here from China all the time.
> 
> "But I think business is better here than in China. It is good for me."


----------



## a_majoor

Edward's discussions of how the "Red Dynasty" needs to maintain legitimacy seems to be coming to fruition here. If the current government cannot satisfy the underlying demands, the protests will continue to grow in size and intensity, and either the government will have to exert greater efforts to keep the lid on or be overwhelmed....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110220/ap_on_re_as/as_china_jasmine_revolution



> *China tries to stamp out 'Jasmine Revolution'*
> 
> By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Anita Chang, Associated Press – 2 hrs 21 mins ago
> 
> BEIJING – Jittery Chinese authorities wary of any domestic dissent staged a show of force Sunday to squelch a mysterious online call for a "Jasmine Revolution," with only a handful of people joining protests apparently modeled on the pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East.
> 
> Authorities detained activists, increased the number of police on the streets, disconnected some cell phone text messaging services and censored Internet postings about the call to stage protests in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other major cities.
> 
> Police took at least three people away in Beijing, one of whom tried to place white jasmine flowers on a planter while hundreds of people milled about the protest gathering spot, outside a McDonald's on the capital's busiest shopping street. In Shanghai, police led away three people near the planned protest spot after they scuffled in an apparent bid to grab the attention of passers-by.
> 
> Many activists said they didn't know who was behind the campaign and weren't sure what to make of the call to protest, which first circulated Saturday on the U.S.-based Chinese-language news website Boxun.com.
> 
> The unsigned notice called for a "Jasmine Revolution" — the name given to the Tunisian protest movement — and urged people "to take responsibility for the future." Participants were urged to shout, "We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness" — a slogan that highlights common complaints among Chinese.
> 
> The call is likely to fuel anxiety in China's authoritarian government, which is ever alert for domestic discontent and has appeared unnerved by protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and Libya. It has limited media reports about them, stressing the instability caused by the protests, and restricted Internet searches to keep Chinese uninformed about Middle Easterners' grievances against their autocratic rulers.
> 
> Though there are many similarities between the complaints voiced by Middle East citizens and the everyday troubles of Chinese, Beijing's tight grip on the country's media, Internet and other communication forums poses difficulties for anyone trying to organize mass demonstrations.
> 
> Extensive Internet filtering and monitoring meant that most Chinese were unlikely to know about the call to protest Sunday. Boxun.com is blocked, as are Twitter and Facebook, which were instrumental in Egypt's protest movement. Tech-savvy Chinese can circumvent controls, but few of the country's Internet users seek out politically subversive content.
> 
> Anti-government gatherings in China are routinely stamped out by its pervasive security forces, which are well-funded and well-equipped. A pro-democracy movement in 1989 that directly challenged the Communist government was crushed by the military and hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed.
> 
> On Saturday, President Hu Jintao ordered national and provincial officials to "solve prominent problems which might harm the harmony and stability of the society."
> 
> One person sitting in the McDonald's after the brief protest in Beijing said he saw Sunday's gathering as a dry run.
> 
> "Lots of people in here are Twitter users and came to watch like me," said 42-year-old Hu Di. "Actually this didn't have much organization, but it's a chance to meet each other. It's like preparing for the future."
> 
> With foot traffic always heavy at the Wangfujing pedestrian mall, it was difficult to discern who showed up to protest, who came to watch and who was out shopping. Many wondered if there was a celebrity in the area because of the heavy police presence and dozens of foreign reporters and news cameras.
> 
> As the crowd swelled and police urged people to move on, 25-year-old Liu Xiaobai placed a white jasmine flower on a planter in front of the McDonald's and took some photos with his cell phone.
> 
> "I'm quite scared because they took away my phone. I just put down some white flowers, what's wrong with that?" Liu said afterward. "I'm just a normal citizen and I just want peace."
> 
> Security agents tried to take away Liu, but he was swarmed by journalists and eventually was seen walking away with a friend.
> 
> Two other people were taken away by police, including a shabbily dressed old man who was cursing and shouting, though it wasn't clear if he was there because of the online call to protest.
> 
> In Shanghai, three young men were taken away from outside a Starbucks coffee shop in People's Square by police, who refused to answer reporters' questions about why they were detained. They trio had been shouting complaints about the government and that food prices are too high.
> 
> A couple dozen older people were drawn to the commotion and started voicing their own complaints and saying they wanted democracy and the right to vote. One woman jumped up on a roadside cement block to shout, "The government are all hooligans," then ran off, only to return a bit later and shout again at the police and others crowded in the area before once again scampering away.
> 
> Security officials were relaxed toward the retirees and the crowd eventually drifted away.
> 
> There were no reports of protests in other cities where people were urged to gather, such as Guangzhou, Tianjin, Wuhan and Chengdu.
> 
> Ahead of the planned protests, human rights groups estimated that anywhere from several dozen to more than 100 activists in cities across China were detained by police, confined to their homes or were missing. Families and friends reported the detention or harassment of several dissidents, and some activists said they were warned not to participate.
> 
> On Sunday, searches for "jasmine" were blocked on China's largest Twitter-like microblog, and status updates with the word on popular Chinese social networking site Renren.com were met with an error message and a warning to refrain from postings with "political, sensitive ... or other inappropriate content."
> 
> A text messaging service from China Mobile was unavailable in Beijing on Sunday due to an upgrade, according to a customer service operator for the leading service provider, who did not know how long the suspension would last. In the past, Chinese authorities have suspended text messaging in politically tense areas to prevent organizing.
> 
> Boxun.com said its website was attacked Saturday after it posted the call to protest. A temporary site, on which users were reporting heavy police presence in several cities, was up and running Sunday. The site said in a statement it had no way of verifying the origins of the campaign.
> 
> ___
> 
> Associated Press writers Cara Anna and Charles Hutzler in Beijing and Elaine Kurtenbach in Shanghai contributed to this report.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile across the East China Sea:

Battling US for huge deal, Eurofighter woos Japan
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=1522287&lang=eng_news



> In a deal that could be worth billions of dollars and determine one of the primary fighter jets in Asia for decades to come, European aircraft makers are trying to convince Japan to do something it has never done before _ snub America.
> 
> U.S. planes have long been Tokyo's overwhelming favorite, but Japan appears to be wobbling under a strong sales pitch for the Eurofighter Typhoon, coupled with problems and restrictions that have made the American alternatives less attractive.
> 
> The stakes are high.
> 
> The contract is expected to be worth upward of $10 billion, and the chosen plane will be the showcase aircraft for Washington's chief ally in the region at a time when both China and Russia are modernizing their air forces. Going European, some analysts say, also could complicate future U.S.-Japan air defense cooperation.
> 
> Lobbying has intensified as Japan nears a long-delayed decision on what will be its next generation of fighters, or "F-X" fighters, after it retires much of its current fleet. The deal is expected to involve 40 or 50 new planes.
> 
> Because of Japan's close military ties with Washington, options such as the Lockheed F-35 and Boeing F/A-18 have long been the top contenders, and analysts say the U.S. advantage remains strong.
> 
> But the four-country consortium that builds the Eurofighter is benefiting from a tail wind created by the U.S. decision not to sell Japan what it really wanted _ the stealthy F-22 "Raptor" _ and by production delays and cost overruns that have shadowed the F-35.
> 
> "Eurofighter Typhoon is the most capable aircraft available to Japan. It is the world's leading multi-role platform with outstanding air-to-air capability," Jon Bonnick, a spokesman for the British BAE Systems division spearheading the Eurofighter deal, told The Associated Press in an e-mail.
> 
> The plane is built by a consortium of European military manufacturers led by BAE Systems PLC, the German-French EADS NV and Italy's Finmeccanica SpA.
> 
> Planners in Tokyo have been alarmed by the rapidly advancing capabilities of neighboring China, which recently rolled out its next-generation stealth fighter, the much-touted Chengdu J-20. Though that fighter may be years away from actual operations, it is seen as a rival to the F-22 and far superior to what Japan now has.
> 
> Even without the J-20 shock, Japan was under increasing pressure to replace its aging F-4EJ and F-15 fighters. It had initially planned to make a decision in 2007, but has repeatedly pushed back its deadline amid budget and bureaucratic battles...
> 
> ...Now, *delays suggest the F-35, another stealthy, state-of-the-art option, will not be available until 2020* [emphasis added], which could leave a longer-than-acceptable gap for Japan.
> 
> Enter the Eurofighter, which is not as advanced as the F-22 or F-35 _ known as fifth-generation fighters_ but is already in service...
> 
> A big part of the Eurofighter sales pitch is that it will not tightly restrict the transfer of technology, which means some of it could eventually be built in Japan _ a significant plus for Japanese planners concerned with domestic industry. The U.S. options may not be as generous...
> 
> Boeing said it remains confident it has the best plane.
> 
> "We believe the F/A-18EF Super Hornet Block II is the most realistic option for Japan's F-X," said Jim Armington, a vice president at Boeing Defense Systems.
> 
> Choosing the Typhoon could lead to some bumps ahead for Japan, [Michael] Auslin [analyst with the American Enterprise Institute] said
> 
> "Not to have what we assume will be the most capable fighter available to allies, the F-35, I think would cause difficulties down the road," he said. "Especially as Chinese and Russian air forces modernize, Japan would not be operating at the level of other U.S. allies, like Great Britain, Australia, and even South Korea."..



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

>






link



> *Portrait of a femme fatale who brought down China's elite*
> By Clifford Coonan In Beijing
> 
> Saturday, 19 February 2011
> Li Wei's story of seducing businessmen is detailed in 'Caijing' magazine
> 
> A respected magazine has provided the most detailed picture yet of the complex life of a billionaire businesswoman responsible for the downfall of some China's most powerful figures in a sex-and-corruption saga that has gripped the nation.
> 
> 
> *Li Wei slept with up to 15 top business and party figures before turning on some of them in a series of corruption cases to save herself from a long prison sentence, according to Caijing business magazine*. Her contacts book contained some of the most powerful men in the land, as she used her beauty to break into the secretive bastion of powerful men that tightly control China, according to the magazine.
> 
> *Ms Li was jailed on tax fraud charges in 2006 but was released early this year and now lives in Hong Kong. *  The magazine alleges that she was released early because her diary contains fresh allegations of "immoral relationships" with "high-ranking officials", which is code for officials at the most senior levels in the land.
> 
> *Ms Li reportedly created a vast network of protection and favour in the provinces in Yunnan, Guangdong, Beijing and Qingdao to build a multibillion-pound business empire in return for sexual favours. As her corrupt protectors went to jail, she turned herself in and was given a lenient jail term.*
> 
> "You cannot invest all your resources and opportunities into one person, you have to construct a huge relationship net, like an umbrella," Ms Li was quoted as saying by Chinese media. Her empire at its peak consisted of more than 20 companies in Beijing, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and overseas, in industries including tobacco, real estate and advertising. She owned 183 petrol stations in Beijing.
> 
> A great friend of Wang Yi, vice-chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, her shares and bonds did very well. Her assets were at one point worth about £1bn.
> 
> Born in Vietnam in 1963 of mixed French-Vietnamese parentage, she moved at the age of seven with her father to Yunnan province in search of a better life. She sold tobacco as a youngster, but her ability to manipulate the arcane system of building connections, combined with her considerable allure, transformed her into a formidable power broker.
> 
> Zheng Shaodong, the former chief investigations officer at the Ministry of Public Security in Guangdong province, got her a residence permit. After earning legitimate resident status, she married a top official at the local tobacco bureau.
> 
> Through her husband, Ms Li managed to gain access to former Yunnan governor Li Jiating, who became her lover. She helped him get resident status for his son in Hong Kong in exchange for tobacco export quotas. The governor narrowly escaped the death sentence in 2003 for taking more than £19m in bribes.
> 
> Ms Li became involved with Du Shicheng, the former party secretary of the rich city of Qingdao in Shandong province. Through her relationship with Mr Du, she secured top-notch real estate in Qingdao, a coastal city that was once a German protectorate, and soon became one of the city's biggest property developers.
> 
> Mr Du introduced her to his good friend, Chen Tonghai, the chairman of Sinopec, China's oil and gas giant. He too became Ms Li's lover, and he gave her gifts of millions of shares in companies owned by Sinopec.
> 
> Mr Du's revelations about his friend's corrupt activities precipitated Mr Chen's downfall. He was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Ms Li's testimony was central to the conviction of many of the officials she entertained in her boudoir.
> 
> Some of her former lovers are serving time in Beijing's Qincheng high-security prison, which primarily houses political prisoners but has been used for corrupt cadres.
> 
> Aware that corruption could undermine the rule of the Communist Party, the leadership has organised several high-profile campaigns in the last few years to try to stamp out graft.
> 
> According to a survey by state prosecutors, more than 90 per cent of the country's senior officials punished on serious graft charges in the past five years have kept mistresses.
> 
> *The victims
> 
> *Chen Tonghai
> 
> Ex-chairman of China's second-largest oil company, Sinopec, given a suspended death penalty in 2009 for taking 196m yuan (£17.5m) in bribes.
> 
> *Li Jiating
> 
> Ex-governor of Yunnan province, sentenced to death for corruption in 2003. Thought to be in Qincheng Prison, Beijing.
> 
> *Liu Zhihua
> 
> The ex-vice-mayor of Beijing, who supervised preparations for the 2008 Olympics, was sentenced to death in 2008 for taking $1.45m in bribes. His sentence may be commuted to life imprisonment.
> 
> *Zheng Shaodong
> 
> Ex-head of China's Economic Criminal Investigation Bureau received a suspended death sentence for corruption.
> 
> *Huang Songyou
> 
> The ex-deputy head of the Supreme Court is currently serving a life sentence for embezzlement and receiving bribes worth £500,000.*


----------



## a_majoor

Small street revolts in China get big attention:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110227/D9LL35H00.html



> *China uses whistles, water, police on protests*
> 
> Feb 27, 6:17 AM (ET)
> 
> By ELAINE KURTENBACH
> 
> SHANGHAI (AP) - Large numbers of police - and new tactics like shrill whistles and street cleaning trucks - squelched overt protests in China for a second Sunday in a row after more calls for peaceful gatherings modeled on recent democratic movements in the Middle East.
> 
> Near Shanghai's People's Square, uniformed police blew whistles nonstop and shouted at people to keep moving, though about 200 people - a combination of onlookers and quiet sympathizers who formed a larger crowd than a week ago - braved the shrill noise. In Beijing, trucks normally used to water the streets drove repeatedly up the busy commercial shopping district spraying water and keeping crowds pressed to the edges.
> 
> Foreign journalists met with tighter police controls. In Shanghai, authorities called foreign reporters Sunday indirectly warning them to stay away from the protest sites, while police in Beijing followed some reporters and blocked those with cameras from entering the Wangfujing shopping street where protests were called. Plainclothes police struck a Bloomberg News television reporter, who was then taken away for questioning.
> 
> Police also detained several Chinese, at least two in Beijing and four in Shanghai, putting them into vans and driving them away, though it was not clear if they had tried to protest.
> 
> While it isn't clear how many people - if any at all - came to protest, the outsized response compared with last week shows how the mysterious calls for protest have left the authoritarian government on edge. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia where popular frustrations with economic malaise added fuel to popular protests to oust autocratic leaders, China has a booming economy and rising living standards. Still, the leadership is battling inflation and worries that democratic movements could take root if unchallenged.
> 
> "Rapid inflation affects people's livelihoods and may affect social stability," Premier Wen Jiabao said in an online chat Sunday. While he did not mention the Middle East, he later added: "I know the impact that prices can cause a country and am deeply aware of its extreme importance."
> Online posts of unknown origin that first circulated on an overseas Chinese news website 10 days ago have called for Chinese to gather peacefully at sites every Sunday in a show of people power meant to promote fairness and democracy. A renewed call this week expanded the target cities to 27, from 13.
> 
> People reached by phone at businesses in the cities of Tianjin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang and Harbin said no demonstrations occurred.
> Beyond the several Web postings, the calls lack a clear leader or organization and a well-defined agenda - ingredients experts say are crucial to the success of protest movements. China's extensive Internet filtering and monitoring mean that most Chinese are unaware of the appeals, effectively limiting the audience.
> 
> Police have questioned, placed under house arrest and detained more than 100 people, according to rights groups. At least five have been detained on subversion or national security charges, in some cases for passing on information about the protest calls.
> 
> Pressure to tamp down protest is higher in Beijing. Senior politicians from around the country converge on the capital this week for the legislature's annual session and a simultaneous meeting of a top advisory body - events that always bring high security.
> 
> Police seemed to outnumber pedestrians at Wangfujing. Groups of men with earpieces crowded the seats near the window of a KFC outlet scanning the street outside.
> 
> After blocking entrance to Wangfujing, police took away foreign news photographers, camera crews and reporters from The Associated Press, the BBC, Voice of America, German state broadcasters ARD and ZDF, and others. They were taken to an office where they were told special permission was needed to report from Wangfujing. In doing so, the government appears to be extending a ban on reporting at Tiananmen Square and reinterpreting more relaxed rules put in place ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.


----------



## a_majoor

And more on the Jasmine Revolution (long article, full edition on link):

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/first-hand-report-from-a-jasmine-rally-in-shanghai/?print=1



> *A First-Hand Report from a ‘Jasmine Rally’ in Shanghai*
> Posted By John Parker On February 27, 2011 @ 3:33 pm In Asia,China,World News | 1 Comment
> 
> In mid-February, as the anti-authoritarian wave sweeping the Middle East continued to gather momentum, a Twitter user using the account name of Shudong posted a tweet announcing that “Jasmine Revolution” rallies would be held on February 20th in every large city in China, and announced that the details would be posted later elsewhere. This information was indeed posted as promised, apparently on the U.S.-based website Boxun.com; it called for rallies to be held on the 20th in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, and other major cities around the country, and repeated every seven days thereafter, until such time as the organizers’ concerns were met.
> 
> According to a translation posted on the China Digital Times website, which often reports on dissident and other pro-democracy activities, the Jasmine organizers cited a number of grievances as the reason for their action, including:
> 
> corruption (“a government that grows more corrupt by the day…”)
> high inequality (“Why is it that in just the last few decades China has gone from being a country with the smallest gap between the rich and the poor to one with the largest?”)
> high inflation (“The excessive printing of currency is recklessly diluting the value of the people’s wealth.”)
> lack of judicial independence (“we are resolute in asking the government and the officials to accept the supervision of ordinary Chinese people, and we must have an independent judiciary.”)
> the one-party system itself (“China belongs to every Chinese person, not to any political party…. The Chinese people’s thirst for freedom and democracy is unstoppable”.)
> Interestingly, the “freedom and democracy” language was a direct quote from China’s current premier, Wen Jiabao, and acknowledged as such. Premier Wen spoke those words during a remarkable CNN interview last year, where he appeared to support the idea of political reform, triggering speculation of a rift within China’s top leadership over fundamental political issues. On the morning of February 26th, in an action that seemed clearly timed to pre-empt the second weekly Jasmine Rally (scheduled for the afternoon of the 27th), Wen conducted a highly unusual web chat with Chinese citizens, in which he promised to address a number of the grievances raised by the Jasmine Rally organizers, including taming inflation, runaway property prices, and environmental damage. This chat was heavily covered by Xinhua, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled news service, but tellingly, no mention was made of political reform.
> 
> It was unclear whether this extraordinary chat was instigated by Wen himself, or by China’s top leaders as a whole. Regardless of which is the case, the lack of any similar action by President Hu Jintao was very conspicuous. This was consistent with Hu’s reputation: his unwillingness to consider even the most timid political reforms has been duly noted by China’s people, who have begun referring to him in sardonic Internet postings as “Hu-barak” or (more recently) “Hu-ammar Qaddafi.” These appellations are partly a response to the Chinese regime’s pervasive Internet censorship, which has cracked down heavily on postings that mention the fallen Arab dictators by name.
> 
> Unfortunately, the Wen chat was only the nice-guy public face of Beijing’s response to the Jasmine Rallies — the mere suggestion that its top leaders could end up like Hosni Mubarak appears to have given the CCP a serious case of the vapors, and its response was strikingly disproportionate to the actual act which triggered the rallies. Within hours of the first postings, according to Chinese sources cited by CDT, police were requesting server logs to hunt down “Shudong,” who had posted anonymously. Detentions of several top dissidents soon followed, while others were put under house arrest. CCP goons even threatened to rape the wife of one dissident, according to technology blogger Jason Ng. Ng also cited claims on some websites that the army had been issued live ammunition to deal with the protests.
> 
> In addition, the regime directed a number of employees (the so called “fifty cent party,” named for the amount of money they receive for each pro-regime Internet posting) to register with Twitter; these individuals immediately began cranking out posts denouncing the “Jasmine Revolution” as illegal and claiming it was a secret plot by the United States. Search terms related to the “Jasmine Rallies,” including the word “Jasmine” itself, were rapidly banned from Chinese websites. Ironically, “Jasmine” is the name of a Chinese folk song that was a favorite of Jiang Zemin, and was publicly sung by Hu Jintao, meaning that censorship of the word also wiped out “patriotic” posts meant to praise CCP leaders.
> 
> All this, and many other repressive measures both in cyberspace and the real world, took place before the first actual rallies. When the initial Jasmine Rallies finally did occur on the 20th, most observers found them to be somewhat anticlimactic. In the capital, the appointed site was in front of a McDonald’s in the Wangfujing neighborhood; hundreds of people appeared, but it was impossible to know how many were demonstrators and how many were accidental passersby or simply gawkers (according to Ng, some people thought that a Chinese movie star was in the area). However, there were at least three arrests, according to the Los Angeles Times, and one attendee was questioned after he attempted to photograph jasmine flowers with his mobile phone. Police presence in the area was heavy, with hundreds of officers guarding both ends of the streets and physically pushing away foreign journalists with cameras, according to an AFP report. In Shanghai, at least three people were detained, and staff at a popular Starbucks next to the appointed rally site were apparently directed to remove chairs and tables from the sidewalk outside the store.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/first-hand-report-from-a-jasmine-rally-in-shanghai/?print=1



> Visiting a Shanghai “Jasmine Rally”
> 
> In light of all these events, this writer, who happened to be in Shanghai on business on February 27th (the appointed day for the second Shanghai “Jasmine Rally”), decided to visit the rally site, a plaza in front of the “Peace Cinema” in the People’s Square neighborhood, and see what, if anything, was happening there.
> 
> People’s Square, the site of Shanghai’s horse racing track in pre-revolutionary days, has become a symbolic center of gravity in Shanghai, not unlike Times Square in New York. This, and the fact that it is at the intersection of three metro lines, making it easily accessible to millions of residents, is undoubtedly the reason why it was chosen as the rally site. As I approached the area, I noticed that the metro exit closest to Peace Cinema was blocked, with a sign saying (in Chinese) “This area is closed for maintenance. Please use another exit. Thank you for your cooperation.” I therefore used another exit, leading to a large shopping mall, Raffles City, which directly joins onto the Peace Cinema and contains the Starbucks immediately adjacent to the rally site. The Starbucks looked normal from within the mall except that the outdoor tables had been moved inside the mall. Quite strangely for a pleasant Sunday afternoon, the entrance to Peace Cinema was blocked, and the theater itself was completely closed. Entering Starbucks from the mall, I found the door to the outside was also blocked, with a sign saying, obviously falsely, “This door is out of order. Please use the back door.”
> 
> There was nothing else to do except go outside, using the mall’s main entrance. As I reached the sidewalk, I had no idea what to expect, and would not have been surprised to find nothing, or find the entire area fenced off. Instead, to my amazement, it was immediately very obvious that something unusual was going on. A crowd of perhaps three to four hundred had gathered in the rally area. It was clear that most of them were not just pedestrians, because they were just standing around, as if they were waiting for something to happen. In fact, this was more or less what the Jasmine organizers had requested — for people to simply show up at the appointed place and time, without saying or doing anything in particular. There were also hundreds of pedestrians just passing by coincidentally, some of whom, as in Beijing last week, were attracted by the crowd and stopped to gawk (an instinct to join crowds, rather than avoid them, is one noticeable characteristic of Chinese culture which differentiates it from American culture).
> 
> Several people had cameras and were very conspicuously videotaping the rally. The obvious question is whether these people were demonstrators or working for the government; my guess would be mostly the latter, although it’s impossible to be sure. The police presence was indeed heavy, just as it had been at the first Jasmine rally last week, according to reports. There seemed to be several different kinds of police; some wore standard police uniforms, while others had private security badges, and there seemed to be some rough-looking individuals on the periphery of the crowd without any uniform at all observing everything. It is certainly possible that the latter were plainclothes policemen. I also saw a few foreigners.
> 
> The mood at this event was odd, difficult to describe, and very different from the last major political gathering I witnessed in China, which was the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, held in Hong Kong in 1999. At the Shanghai Jasmine Rally, the people who looked like demonstrators were mostly older Chinese; their facial expressions were a peculiar combination of determination, curiosity, and cynicism. The cops seemed slightly jumpy but also bored, because at least during the short time I was there, it was apparent that nothing very dramatic was happening.
> 
> Oddly, a small street sweeper was moving down the sidewalk, apropos of nothing. I later learned that last week, the same faintly ludicrous tactic was used in Beijing to clear the rally area there. After lingering in the mall for a while, I checked the area again before leaving. The only change was that a police officer was walking up and down repeating a Chinese phrase into a megaphone; I was unable to get this phrase translated before filing this article, but it is likely that he was ordering the area to be cleared, aided by the street sweeper.
> 
> Significance
> 
> Few would dispute that the PRC is a vastly better-governed country than Libya, and probably much better than Egypt as well. But similarities nevertheless exist. China’s ruling party took power by force, with Stalin’s help, and has never once dared to test its legitimacy at the ballot box. The party constantly asserts that it has invented a new “Confucian” model of government which is superior to “Western democracy,” even though, as the democratic revolutions sweeping the Arab world have so forcefully demonstrated, the appeal of democratic governance obviously extends beyond the limits of Western civilization; indeed, in today’s world, most people living under democratic governments are not “Western,” as the term has been traditionally understood.
> 
> The CCP and its defenders also claim that it has wide public support, although if this is really the case, why does the party need to hire tens of thousands of low-paid drones to defend its record on public Internet sites? Why, indeed, does the CCP feel the need to undertake its massive Internet censorship program — by far the most aggressive, intrusive and expensive in the world — which focuses special attention on any site where individual people can give uncensored opinions? (Youtube, Blogspot, WordPress, IMDb, Twitter, and Facebook are among the most prominent targets of the “Great Firewall.”) The CCP’s own actions demonstrate beyond doubt, to any thinking person, that the Party knows it is losing popular support, and therefore seeks to muzzle anyone who cannot be bought off or intimidated (the roster of foreign companies and even governments who fit in one of the latter two categories is depressingly long).
> 
> The basic problem with the Chinese system, whether one calls it neo-Confucianism, market-Leninism, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or any other label, is actually quite simple. Compared to the Western-democratic model, it lacks two basic features: freedom of speech, and public accountability.
> 
> Without freedom of speech, problems invariably fester until they become so serious that they result in mob violence. This is the basic reason why China now has serious incidents of public disorder nearly 100,000 times every year, even by the government’s own reckoning — and the number has been steadily rising. China actually has many excellent journalists who would be happy to expose local problems, as they do in other countries; instead, these reports are usually suppressed. Even in the rare cases where they become so well known that the official media are forced to discuss them, the Party line is always that disasters, such as plastic baby formula, or shoddily built schools killing thousands of children in an earthquake, are the fault of a few inexplicably depraved local scapegoats, not the inevitable result of the system itself, or (God forbid) the ultimate responsibility of China’s unelected Politburo. The intent of the Party’s death grip over the media is to protect the CCP’s reputation, but this cannot work in the long run, because a failure to deal with the underlying causes of problems simply guarantees their repetition in the future, and a lack of credible media causes exaggerated rumors and conspiracy theories to be accepted as fact by the population.
> 
> Without public accountability, government officials will invariably do the rational thing, which is to ignore what the public wants and curry favor with their superiors instead. This is why Hu Jintao, the former governor of Tibet, became China’s leader even though he was hated by most Tibetans: it made no difference what his subjects thought of his performance — only the opinion of the CCP higher-ups carried any weight. And this is also why corruption has exploded out of control: as long as government officials make enough money to keep their superiors and other officials happy, it makes no difference if ordinary people think that their taxes and bank deposits are being wasted. It is no coincidence that one key demand of the Jasmine organizers is this: “the details of tax collection [must] be published, and that taxes [should be] genuinely ‘collected from the people, and used for the people.’”
> 
> Perhaps the most fundamental problem with dictatorship, as a form of government, is that dictators, for the reasons just mentioned, always end up surrounded by fawning lackeys who tell them whatever they want to hear, and insulate them from the real concerns of the population. The result is that eventually, the dictator begins to lose touch with the reality in his country, and is especially prone to believe a claim that has never been true — indeed, cannot be true — in any human society: that the dictator, or his political organization, are indispensable to the nation. Events in Libya over the last few days have provided a very clear example of where this phenomenon can lead.
> 
> Unfortunately for the Communist Party of China, it shows every indication of falling victim to all these syndromes. Hu Jintao delivers condescending lectures to the Chinese people about the need to “solve prominent problems which might harm the harmony and stability of the society,” as though they are children who could not possibly be aware that Hu himself, as the leader of the CCP, is the single individual most directly and personally responsible for the “problems which are harming the harmony and stability of the society.”At the same time, China’s prosperity and integration with the global economy have created a huge middle class which has no patience for, and no interest in, the patronizing lessons of a self-appointed philosopher-king.
> 
> As for the myth of indispensability, this is practically the foundation stone of the CCP regime, which constantly, and ridiculously, refers to itself as “China,” an arrogant inanity reminiscent of precisely the feudal system Marx sought to overthrow (e.g., the alleged claim of Louis XIV that “L’État, c’est moi”). For example, the CCP defends Mao Zedong’s monstrous democide with this shibboleth: “Without Chairman Mao, there would be no New China.” But the term “New China,” when it was originally used, meant nothing except China ruled by the CCP, headed by Chairman Mao — so the statement is logically equivalent to the moronically circular “Without Chairman Mao, there would be no China ruled by Chairman Mao.” Even after years living in China, it remains unclear to me how the country was improved by forcing people to regurgitate this kind of idiocy.
> 
> Furthermore, the CCP was never “chosen” by the Chinese people but rather imposed on China by the defunct Soviet Union; does not represent “Chinese” ideas, but rather a totally discredited and colossally destructive detour in Western philosophy; has never included more than a tiny fraction of Chinese people as members; is directly responsible for catastrophic policies which killed at least fifty million Chinese citizens; and delayed China’s economic modernization by at least three decades, among countless other crimes. (The regime’s foreign policy misdeeds, such as propping up Kim Il-Sung and Pol Pot, are simply too extensive to discuss here.) For such an organization to claim identity with the 5000-year-old Chinese civilization, to say nothing of the 1.2 billion Chinese people now living, who have never once endorsed its leadership in a free vote, is more than just false — it is, in fact, profoundly insulting to the intelligence of any patriotic Chinese person, and ought to make them livid with rage.
> 
> In reality, the CCP not only is not now, but never was, indispensable to China. The historical record shows clearly that China would have been much better off under almost any conceivable alternative government, starting with the rival Kuomintang, which managed to develop Taiwan 25 years faster than the mainland and without any government-manufactured famines or mass political psychosis. The Qing dynasty was backward and corrupt, but certainly lacked the creativity or murderous ruthlessness to produce a “Great Leap Forward” catastrophe. And putting the British in charge would have created an environment far more amenable to prosperity for the ordinary Wang on the street, as Hong Kong’s gold-plated success has irrefutably proved. In fact, so extreme was the murderous incompetence of Mao and his vile cronies, like Kang Sheng and Lin Biao, that the Shanghai Green Gang probably could have run China better than they did.
> 
> The Beijing regime’s Qaddafi-like disconnect with reality was very apparent in the recent statements of CCP officials like Chen Jiping, deputy secretary general of the party’s Political and Legal Affairs Committee, who told a journalist: “the schemes of some hostile Western forces attempting to Western[ize] and split us are intensifying, and they are waving the banner of defending rights to meddle in domestic conflicts and maliciously create all kinds of incidents.” In actuality, leaving aside the obviously indigenous origins of the Jasmine Rallies and the many other anti-regime movements of recent years, there is no Western government that could possibly hope to damage China as much as depraved CCP officials like Lin Jiaxiang [1], who attempted to molest an 11-year-old girl in a restaurant in late 2008, then threatened bystanders when he was caught, screaming, “Do you know who I am? I was sent here by the Beijing Ministry of Transportation, my level is the same as your mayor. … You dare f**k with me? Just watch how I am going to deal with you!”
> 
> Although the Lin case is extreme, basically similar incidents are not rare; this writer has lived in several countries and visited many more, but has never seen one where government officials, at every level, are as despised by ordinary people as they are in mainland China. There are tens of millions of Chinese, maybe hundreds of millions, who silently bear a deep, bitter hostility towards the CCP that, if it is ever unleashed, could create a convulsion that would make Libya’s pale into insignificance.
> 
> One noteworthy manifestation of these sentiments was a rapidly banned poem called “You, Us [2]” that appeared online sometime in 2009 (the following is a translated excerpt):
> 
> You needn’t struggle to find work, nor live under high real estate prices,
> 
> You needn’t pay for your medical expenses, nor piteously rush about.
> 
> You eat at banquets, live in villas, drive nice cars, receive plush benefits, and travel abroad.
> 
> 
> You spend our money and monopolize our dreams with power,
> 
> Daily you curse us uncultured, implacable commoners.
> 
> You have cannons and bayonets, but develop our waters with others,
> 
> And you use them [weapons] only against your own people who give birth to and raise you.
> 
> You have high walls and iron fences, yet evil-doers remain far outside the law,
> 
> Those who speak loudly in the name of justice are put in prison.
> 
> 
> …
> 
> 
> Our housing resembles that of slaves,
> 
> Our cars must yield to yours,
> 
> We are busier and busier at work,
> 
> Our pay is unchanging year after year.
> 
> Our doctor’s fees are more and more expensive,
> 
> Our food is filthier and filthier,
> 
> Our taxes are heavier and heavier,
> 
> Our days pass tenser and tenser.
> 
> Our injustices have already nowhere to appeal,
> 
> Our power has already been forgotten.
> 
> 
> …
> 
> 
> Your policies pay our assertions no mind,
> 
> Your lives are unlike ours!
> 
> Can a party that evokes such bone-deep loathing really remain in power forever? Perhaps CCP leaders, as they tremble in their fortified compounds, are fortunate that the Jasmine Rally movement has repeatedly stressed nonviolence, saying, for example, “We do not support violent revolution; we continue to support non-violent non-cooperation.” As the Jasmine Rallies are suppressed, and the CCP sinks ever deeper into political quicksand of its own making, will every future opposition group be so generous?
> 
> Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
> 
> URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/first-hand-report-from-a-jasmine-rally-in-shanghai/
> 
> URLs in this post:
> 
> [1] Lin Jiaxiang: http://www.chinasmack.com/2008/videos/government-official-attacks-11-year-old-girl.html
> [2] You, Us: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/online-poem-you-us/


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is a sampling of some _expert_ opinion:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/unrest-in-china-six-experts-weigh-in/article1921713/singlepage/#articlecontent


> Unrest in China? Six experts weigh in
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Globe and Mail Update
> Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011 2:32PM EST
> 
> 
> *Jin Canrong, deputy director of the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China*
> 
> What are the chances of the wave of antiauthoritarian unrest spreading from the Middle East to China? It is impossible, says Prof. Jin. “The call [last weekend for a Tunisia-inspired Jasmine Revolution in China] on boxun.com is evidence that there are no social conditions that compare to the Middle East.”
> 
> But why, then, does the government expend so much energy suppressing any hint of dissent?
> 
> “Chinese politicians are always very nervous. That’s their problem. But as an observer, I consider China’s situation very different from that of the Middle East.”
> 
> Prof. Jin said there are several reasons that China would not see a popular uprising in the near future. China is successful economically, he said, and its power structure more diverse and less corrupt than the regimes of Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Gadhafi. China’s population is also much older than the young and anxious nations of the Middle East. And while there is widespread popular consensus in the Arab world about the need to throw off dictatorship, there is heated debate even among China’s 450 million Internet users about the merits of one-party rule, he said.
> 
> *Daniel Bell, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing*
> 
> Prof. Bell says a pro-democracy uprising in China is not only unlikely, it may also be undesirable from the West’s point of view. “I think it’s important to cheer for some things: more freedom of speech, more social justice – but multiparty democracy might not be what we should be cheering for, at least not now.”
> 
> He said he worried that if a popular revolution took place in the China of 2011, it could quickly deteriorate into “chaos, followed by a populist strongman (coming to power). It could be something like Vladimir Putin in Russia, it could be something worse.”
> 
> The Montreal-born Prof. Bell added that while the Chinese have many of the same grievances as the Egyptians did (a lack of political freedoms, corruption, a widening gap between rich and poor, as well as rising food prices), China’s power structure, with its nine-man Politburo atop many smaller, localized centres of authority, is also very different from the strictly top-down dictatorships of the Middle East. It is thus more flexible in its ability to respond to and manage unrest.
> 
> *Zhang Yajun, 29-year-old Beijing-based blogger (from her post this week “A Chinese Perspective on the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ ” on granitestudio.org):*
> 
> “The chances of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ – never mind anything on the scale of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests – are quite small, at least for the foreseeable future. The main reason being that discontent towards the government in China hasn’t translated into meaningful opposition.
> 
> “Yet.
> 
> “China today is different from 1989. Over the last 20 years, rapid economic growth has raised the standard of living to an unprecedentedly high level. Most families enjoy a lifestyle that previous generations couldn’t have even imagined. For example, my mom could only afford a small piece of sugar for lunch during the Great Famine in 1960, but her daughter travelled in three continents before she turned 25. Few urban Chinese seem eager to trade their chance at prosperity for dreams of revolution. …
> 
> “[But] with so many people in China having access to televisions, cellphones, and the Internet, information is more available than ever before in our history. Ordinary people can learn about their rights. If their rights are violated by officials or government, they want to fight to protect them. If the government doesn’t find solutions, and fails to reform a political system that is the root cause of many of these problems, then eventually these smaller, local issues will link together and trigger national discontent, or even revolution.”
> 
> *Gordon Chang, author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China:*
> 
> “In the middle of December, no one thought that protesters could mass in the streets of any Arab nation. Now, two autocrats have been toppled and more are on the way out.  Pundits can give you dozens of reasons why the Communist Party looks invulnerable, but they are the same folks who missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the toppling of governments in the colour revolutions (in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan), and the recent uprisings in the Arab world.
> 
> “All the conditions that existed in the Arab states are present in China. Keep an eye on inflation, which brought people out in the streets in 1989. People think that an economy has to turn down for revolution to occur. In China, all you need is the mismanagement of growth.
> 
> “The essential problem for the Communist Party is that almost everyone believes the country needs a new political system.  That thought has seeped into people’s consciousness and is shared across society.  So China can ‘tip,’ to use the phrase popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, because enough people think the same way. …
> 
> “The only precondition for mass demonstrations is that people lose their fear.  If some event crystallizes emotions, like the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in the middle of December, then China’s people will take to the streets.”
> 
> *Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers:*
> 
> “I think it is quite unlikely.  If you add up the portions of the population that are a) part of the [Chinese Communist Party] vested-interest group, b) bought off, c) intimidated, and d) perhaps mad as hell but unorganized – because the CCP decapitates any organization before it gets far – then you’ve got, by far, most of the population.
> 
> “The key [to an uprising] – but I don't know how it would happen – would be to have the elite-dissident level hook up with the mass discontent over things like corruption, bullying, land seizures, environmental stew, etc.  If that happened, the regime could flip. I think the regime knows this, which is why they are so nervous, and so assiduous about repressing things like Charter 08 [the pro-democracy manifesto penned by jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and others], news from North Africa, and the like.”
> 
> *Wang Dan, student leader during the 1989 protests on Tiananmen Square, now living in exile in Taiwan and the United States*
> 
> Wang Dan has been in prison or exile for nearly all of the 22 years that have passed since pro-democracy demonstrations were crushed by the People’s Liberation Army on June 4, 1989. Nonetheless, the 41-year-old was one of the first to jump on board when a mysterious group called for the Chinese to stage a “Jasmine Revolution” inspired by recent events in the Middle East.
> 
> On his Facebook page, Mr. Wang posted the call for Chinese citizens to gather at designated locations in 13 cities and call for change.
> 
> “I think it was quite successful, because this was an experiment and a beginning, and we all saw how nervous the government was. I never expected that there will be huge number of people [who] went to those locations, but I believe that his kind of event can be a model for further potential revolution.”
> 
> Mr. Wang said the surest sign that new unrest in China was plausible was the government’s overreaction to the small “Jasmine” gatherings last weekend. Key dissidents were detained ahead of time, and hundreds of police officers were deployed to the designated protest sites.
> 
> “Nobody knows exactly under what conditions there will be a revolution, that’s the reason the government [is] worried.”
> 
> Asked what he thought it would take for people to take to the streets again as they did in 1989, Mr. Wang pointed to the same thing that triggered much of the recent unrest in the Middle East – food prices, which have risen sharply in recent months in China.
> 
> “If the inflation situation gets worse, there must be social disorder,” he said.




My own _guesstimate_ is that Profs. Bell and Link are closest to the truth.

My own observations – I recently had a chance to meet with/talk to people in some small towns and villages in (central) Anhui province – is that people are _most_ concerned with getting ahead: renovating their home (apartment); buying new furniture; buying a scooter or a car; and so on. Yes there is unhappiness about inept and corrupt officialdom but, as nearly as I could tell, that unhappiness was more about practical _performance_ issues than about (relative) abstractions like _liberty_. In my estimation and as Prof. Jin says, _“there are no social conditions that compare to the Middle East.”_ That is not to suggest that China has few problems and that all is sweetness and light – that’s clearly not the case but, as I see it anyway, “ordinary” people still have confidence that they, through their own efforts, can improve their families’ lots in life.


----------



## a_majoor

More financial news that will give some people the jitters:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Chinas-holdings-of-US-debt-apf-3118302220.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=



> *China's holdings of US debt jump 30 percent*
> Treasury: China's holdings of US debt jump 30 percent based on annual revision of data
> Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer, On Monday February 28, 2011, 5:13 pm EST
> 
> WASHINGTON (AP) -- China, the biggest buyer of U.S. Treasury securities, owns a lot more than previously estimated.
> In an annual revision of the figures, the Treasury Department said Monday that China's holdings totaled $1.16 trillion at the end of December.
> That was an increase of 30 percent from an estimate the government made two weeks ago.
> 
> The government made the change to its monthly report based on more accurate information it obtains in an annual survey. That survey more
> does a better job of determining the actual owners of Treasury securities.
> 
> China was firmly in the top spot as the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt even before the revisions. But the big increase in Chinese
> holdings could ease fears that Chinese investors might begin dumping their U.S. holdings. Such a development could send U.S. interest rates
> rising. That would slow America's economic recovery and increase Washington's costs for financing the $14.3 trillion national debt.
> China and Britain were the countries with the biggest revisions in the new report.
> 
> The amount of U.S. Treasury securities held by Britain fell to $272.1 billion in the new report. That's a drop of $269.2 billion from the last
> monthly report which put the Britain's holdings of U.S. debt at $541.3 billion. The holdings of the two countries often show big revisions
> when the annual report is released.
> 
> The reason for the change is that Chinese investors who purchase their Treasury securities in London are often counted as British investors.
> The more detailed annual report does a better job of tracking the countries in which investors reside as opposed to the location where
> investors make their purchases.
> 
> Even with the revision, Britain remained the third largest holder of U.S. Treasurys.
> Japan had the second highest foreign holdings, totaling $882.3 billion at the end of December. The revision was only slightly below the
> original estimate.
> 
> The total foreign holdings of Treasury debt stood at $4.44 trillion at the end of December, according to the new report. That's up 1.5 percent
> from the estimate made two weeks ago. About two-thirds of U.S. Treasurys owned overseas are held by foreign governments and central
> banks.
> 
> The U.S. government is selling huge amounts of debt to finance record-high budget deficits. The Obama administration in its new budget
> released on Feb. 14 projected that this year's deficit will reach a record $1.65 trillion. It would be the third consecutive year the federal deficit
> has exceeded $1 trillion.


----------



## PanaEng

big budget increase: 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/04/china-defense.html



> The increase to just over $91.5 billion Cdn would go toward "appropriate" hardware spending and salary increases for the 2.3 million members of the People's Liberation Army, spokesman Li Zhaoxing told a news conference in Beijing.
> 
> Chinese media reports said members of the PLA, the world's largest standing military, will receive raises of up to 40 per cent his year, their third pay increase in six years.



Are they having retention issues?

Although new fighter planes and aircraft carrier may make the Taiwanese more nervous, do the Chinese military have the capability to actually assault and land troops in Taiwan, successfully?
Additionally, although unification with Taiwan still being their ultimate goal, I think they are focusing more on projecting their influence in Africa and Middle East - with the AC - than taking steps to actually invade Taiwan.

cheers,
Frank


----------



## Edward Campbell

My impressions, from talks with Chinese people and a couple of recent visits:




			
				PanaEng said:
			
		

> big budget increase:
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/04/china-defense.html
> 
> Are they having retention issues? Yes; and recruiting issues, too. The PLA must compete with a (still) hot economy for the sorts of people it wants. The PLA, especially the land forces, are much smaller and much better equipped than, say, 25 years ago; they need concomitantly "better" people to use and maintain that equipment.
> 
> Although new fighter planes and aircraft carrier may make the Taiwanese more nervous, do the Chinese military have the capability to actually assault and land troops in Taiwan, successfully? No, not yet; but they plan to have that capability. Taiwan matters - even to "ordinary" Chinese people, but the Chinese plan is to become a *great global* power - and to have enough "hard power" to magnify their growing (and in their eyes more important) "soft power."
> 
> Additionally, although unification with Taiwan still being their ultimate goal, I think they are focusing more on projecting their influence in Africa and Middle East - with the AC - than taking steps to actually invade Taiwan.
> I agree with you, but you must remember that, in the Chinese minds, Taiwan is not an independent country; it is a province, _comme les autres_ that *will* rejoin the Motherland. that's not something any Chinese government can _negotiate_ - not if it wants to survive.
> 
> cheers,
> Frank


----------



## tingbudong

PanaEng said:
			
		

> big budget increase:
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/04/china-defense.html
> 
> Are they having retention issues?
> 
> Although new fighter planes and aircraft carrier may make the Taiwanese more nervous, do the Chinese military have the capability to actually assault and land troops in Taiwan, successfully?
> Additionally, although unification with Taiwan still being their ultimate goal, I think they are focusing more on projecting their influence in Africa and Middle East - with the AC - than taking steps to actually invade Taiwan.
> 
> cheers,
> Frank




I believe it is more of a loyalty payment (possibly with the majority going to the officer corps) than a retention bonus.  Keep in mind that the P.L.A is not like their western counterparts.  Their primary mandate is to defend the Communist Party of China.  They need to be kept happy

I've read pieces (can't remember the sources) where there there were rumblings regarding difficulties acquiring high level research talent, and attrition in highly valued commercial trades (aircraft maintenance and pilots, for example) but for the most part a military profession is a fairly highly regarded profession in China with all members being awarded considerable fringe benefits (easy access to rail tickets being a _major_ perk and ample real estate opportunities for the higher ranks).  I've spoken to the odd soldier when I was living there and retention doesn't really seem to be a problem and military academies are apparently very exclusive.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It is true that the (current defined) missions of the PLA are:

•	Consolidate the ruling status of the Communist Party
•	Help ensure China's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and domestic security in order to continue national development
•	Safeguard China's expanding national interests
•	Help maintain world peace*

But the first “mission” is, _de facto_, political window dressing.

The second third and fourth missions look remarkably like the missions of most national armed forces, including the CF.

Indeed, the PLA is rather like most other national armed forces: it faces similar challenges and it approaches them in ways that we might find familiar.

In my outsider’s opinion the biggest problem facing the PLA is the same as the biggest problem facing China as a whole: institutional corruption. I believe that the PLA has been more active than many sectors of the Chinese _establishment_ in dealing with corruption – it is no longer possible for a below average officer to rise to the top and to achieve great wealth just by being a politically loyal toady. A series of recent appointments (which have been discussed here on Army.ca, I think) illustrate that technical and professional competence are overtaking institutional loyalty as a main prerequisite for promotion to and within the most senior ranks. All is not perfect and there are, for all the steps forward, too many missteps, sidesteps and steps back, but the progress is, I believe real, measurable and, above all, irreversible. This brings with it a _disincentive_ for some bright, ambitious young Chinese: you cannot get rich in the PLA.

Modernizing and professionalizing a force as large as the PLA and, especially, one with its unique _political_ history is a daunting process. We must all hope that the PLA leadership succeeds because China does not need a highly politicized (unprofessional) military and the world doesn’t need China without a professional military.

__________
* See: http://www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/2009/RAND_CT332.pdf page 3


----------



## tomahawk6

I thought the PLA still used the draft .


----------



## Edward Campbell

The draft is still on the books but, as far as I know, it hasn't been used for, maybe, ten years.

They used to require university students to do a two or three week "indoctrination" course - mostly some physical training and a bit of "Mr. Dress-up."



Edit: typo


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese rocket science:

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-03/04/content_22051663.htm



> Massive rocket base to be built The world's largest design, production and testing base for rockets is being built in Tianjin, Liang Xiaohong, deputy head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, said Thursday.
> 
> The first phase of the rocket industrial base in Tianjin's Binhai New Area will be completed within the year. Rocket parts will be designed, manufactured, assembled and tested at the base, Liang told the Xinhua News Agency.
> 
> Twenty of the 22 plants have been completed, and some of them are ready for operation. The base is designed to meet China's growing demand in space technology research and development for the next 30 to 50 years, he added.
> 
> By integrating the industrial chain, the base will be able to produce a whole spectrum of rockets of different sizes and types for China's lunar probe project, space station and other projects, he said.
> 
> China's new rockets, including Long March IV, will be designed and manufactured in the 200-hectare base, he said.
> 
> Liang also said the research and development of China's new generation of carrier rockets, Long March V, were going according to plan, and expected to catch up with the US Delta-4H rockets in payload capacity.
> 
> With a maximum low Earth-orbit payload capacity of 25 tons and high Earth-orbit payload capacity of 14 tons, Long March V rockets would reach the world top level in payload capacity, said Liang.
> 
> Long March V rockets are designed for missions following the country's manned space program and lunar exploration program, said Liang, also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
> 
> Meanwhile, the unmanned space module Tiangong-1 that China plans to launch this year will be sent into space by a modified Long March II-F carrier rocket, Liang said.
> 
> The 8.5-ton Tiangong-1 is expected to be launched in the second half of this year to perform the nation's first space docking.
> 
> It will dock with the unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft, which will be launched two months after Tiangong-1.
> 
> "Both Tiangong-1 and Shenzhou-8 will be launched by a Long March II-F carrier rocket," said Liang.
> 
> Researchers have made nearly 170 technological modifications to the original Long March II-F model, Liang said.
> 
> The Long-March II-F rocket has successfully sent seven spaceships into space.


----------



## CougarKing

> Publication: China Brief Volume: 11 Issue: 4 March 10, 2011 06:55 PM Age: 2 days By: Jyh-Perng Wang
> 
> *Is Russia Helping Taiwan Build Submarines?*
> 
> Taiwan Submarine
> 
> On January 27, a Taiwanese weekly, Next Magazine, reported that the Republic of China (Taiwan) Navy had plans to introduce Russian Kilo-class submarine technology. According to the report, a task force was organized by Taiwan’s National Security Council (NSC) and the Taiwan Navy, *which contacted Russian government authorities back in October 2010 and reached a consensus on technical cooperation to construct pressure hulls for submarines. Russia reportedly will send a technical team to Taiwan for evaluation before signing a memorandum of cooperation (Next Magazine [Taiwan], January 27). The Taiwan Navy denied the report and stated that, “The [Taiwan] navy has no plans to acquire submarines from sources other than the United States,” and that, "there has been no change of such policy and position" *  (Taipei Times, December 9, 2010; Taiwan's MND, January 26).
> 
> The Taiwan Navy appears to be approaching a crossroads in its 40-year quest for a fleet of modern diesel electric submarines. As the Obama administration evaluates the former George W. Bush administration's approval of eight diesel-electric submarines for Taiwan in April 2001, senior ROC political and military leaders are weighing three options: First, continue to lobby the Obama administration to notify Congress of its intent to implement the program as authorized by the former Bush administration; second, give up the 40 year quest for conventional submarines that former defense minister and president, Chiang Ching-kuo, began in 1969; or direct the ROC's domestic industry to take the lead, with United States and other foreign assistanc, in designing, developing and manufacturing diesel electric submarines (The Taiwan Link, October 30, 2008). Since President Barack Obama has not yet agreed to sell submarines to Taiwan, such reports suggest that the Ma administration may be leaning toward option 3.
> 
> Background
> 
> Against the backdrop of China’s growing naval power, one of the most effective assets for deterrence available to the Taiwan Navy is arguably the submarine. Many defense planners in Taiwan believe that additional submarines are essential for preventing an occupation of Taiwan proper, since the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) does not currently have sufficient amphibious landing capability. Yet, since former U.S. President George W. Bush authorized the release of eight diesel-electric submarines to Taiwan in April 2001, this military sale has not yet materialized.
> 
> *During the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration under Chen Shui-bian from 2000 to 2008, the Kuomingtang (KMT), which had a majority in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, blocked the procurement of submarines on grounds that the acquisition was too expensive.* After President Ma Ying-jeou took office on May 20, 2008, however, the NSC, formerly headed by Secretary General Su Chi, revealed that since August 2008 a series of closed-door meetings were held on submarine procurement. No conclusions from those meetings have been released to the public in the past two years.
> 
> In February 2010, after Su Chi resigned from his post as secretary general of the NSC, he indicated that, "[He] had learned on private occasions that both civilian and military U.S. officials hold reservations on the sale of submarines to Taiwan, including former director of national intelligence and former commander of the Pacific Command, Admiral Dennis Blair. According to Su, there appear to be two major reasons against the sale. First, at least four deep-water harbors would be required, and the fact that the expansion projects of Kaohsiung and Tsoying sea ports are still not completed indicate that Taiwan does not have enough harbors for additional submarines. Second, Taiwan does not have the ability to maintain submarines. The United States believes that Taiwan has no logistic capability even once submarines are acquired (China Times [Taiwan], February 12, 2010). While the validity of such arguments is debatable, the current administration in Taipei may be shifting its position on submarines.
> 
> Russian Cooperation?
> 
> In another article published on December 8, 2010, Next Magazine reported that the Taiwan Navy organized a delegation visit with Taiwan Shipbuilding Corporation (CSBC) to Russia from October 10-18, 2010, to seek Moscow's cooperation in developing submarines (Next Magazine, December 9, 2010). Taiwan's Navy Command Headquarters held a press conference to respond to that report and stated, "the procurement of diesel-electric submarine procurement in process through the source of U.S. arms sale. There has been no change of such policy and position, nor has the Navy sent any personnel to Russia" (Taiwan's MND, December 8, 2010). Assistant Manager Yin Tzu-hsiang of CSBS explained that he led colleagues from the company's Design Department and Business Department to Russia for business purposes. The visit was to explore business opportunities, find new customers, buy cheaper raw materials and cooperate with Russians in building icebreakers and fishing vessels. Yin specifically pointed out that there were no Navy personnel whom accompanied his team (Taiwan's Navy, December 9, 2010).
> 
> It is interesting to note that in the same month, KMT Legislator Shuai Hua-ming responded to a media interview about Mr. William Stanton, director of the Taipei Office, American Institute in Taiwan, stating that there have been hidden changes in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, and that Taiwan's national defense needs deliberate thinking and self-reflection, and that it can not always rely on the United States (China Times, October 29, 2010). This statement from a senior lawmaker from the ruling party suggests that Taiwan needs to shore up its own indigenous capabilities and may need to look elsewhere for assistance for its defense needs.
> 
> Furthermore, when President Ma met the Chairman of American Institute in Taiwan, Mr. Raymond Burghardt, on January 25, Ma stated that, "With the growing cross-strait military imbalance, it is expected the United States could agree to sell F-16C/D jet fighters and diesel-electric submarines as soon as possible. It is emphasized that cross-Strait military imbalance is not considered a positive factor of the development of cross-strait relations and regional stability. Taiwan does not intend to expand its military capability but only hope to replace outdated equipment. The new asset will be used for defensive purposes" (Office of the President, Republic of China [Taiwan], January 25). This is President Ma Ying-jeou's first public pronouncement to the United States that Taiwan needs submarines.
> 
> Coincidentally, during his recent visit to the United States, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-Pyng told the House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on January 26 that Taiwan need not only F-16C/D fighters but also 8 to 12 new diesel-electric submarines.* According to Wang: In light of the growing military imbalance, cross-Strait political negotiations would not be on equal footing, which would be detrimental to both Taiwan and the United States* (Liberty Times, January 28).
> 
> Conclusion
> *
> Whether the reports from Next Magazine are true remains to be seen. It should be noted, however, that the Taiwan Navy denied these reports, which is also consistent with the Ma administration’s policy in recent years. Nevertheless, Ma's calls upon the Obama administration to release the submarines seem to indicate that the administration has shifted its defense policy in favor of submarines.*
> 
> *
> If the Taiwan Navy had indeed secretly sent personnel to Russia with President Ma's approval, then the underlying meaning and implications are manifold. First, it would mark a reversal in the current administration's position that submarines are offensive weapons. Second, the report that Taiwan and Russia will cooperate in reverse engineering technology to solve the hull problem of two 70 year-old GuppyⅡ-class submarines was false. The true intention appears to be to acquire new submarine hull from Russia or the ability to build submarines in Taiwan. Third, under the circumstances that the United State cannot obtain a submarine hull blue print from a third country or is not willing to allow Taiwan’s acquisition of submarines, with or without Russia’s assistance—Taiwan is demonstrating its determination of self-resilience defense policy to the United States. Fourth, both Next Magazine’s reports and President Ma’s emphasis on replacing outdated submarines could help in reducing the possibility of retaliation from the PRC through taking an indirect route. Finally, if a submarine production line could be established in Taiwan, in addition to upgrading Taiwan’s technological capability and increasing employment opportunity in southern Taiwan, it could help Ma win support from the people. Whether the Taiwan Navy is willing to stand behind this "development" remains to be further observed.*
> 
> 
> link


----------



## a_majoor

Note the use by Arab dictators as well:

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/37074/?p1=A3



> *How China and Others Are Altering Web Traffic*
> "Invisible" servers let governments quietly intercept and modify their citizens' online communications.
> 
> THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 2011BY ROBERT LEMOS E-mail|Audio »|Print
> 
> Google leveled new charges against China this week, claiming that the country has interfered with some citizens' access to the Internet giant's Gmail service, disguising the interference as technical glitches.
> 
> Security experts say that China is most likely using invisible intermediary servers, or "transparent proxies," to intercept and relay network messages while rapidly modifying the contents of those communications. This makes it possible to block e-mail messages while making it appear as if Gmail is malfunctioning.
> 
> Companies regularly use transparent proxies to filter employees' Web access. Some ISPs have also used the technique to replace regular Web advertisements with those of their own. But it's becoming increasingly common for governments to use transparent proxies to censor and track dissidents and protestors. All traffic from a certain network is forced through the proxy, allowing communications to be monitored and modified on the fly. Intercepting and relaying traffic is known as a "man in the middle" attack.
> 
> "What you are doing is rewriting the content as it is delivered back to the user," says Nicholas J. Percoco, the head of SpiderLabs, which is part of the security firm Trustwave. Percoco said China's ISP could track everyone who uses Gmail. To do this, it would "inject a JavaScript keystroke logger, which would record every keystroke they typed on the service."
> 
> Defenses against the attack are few, especially if the Internet service provider has a valid cryptographic certificate, which all major national ISPs should have. Using a protocol known as HTTPS can prevent a man-in-the-middle attack, because it encrypts information in transit. However,, Microsoft revealed in a security advisory issued today that it had detected nine fraudulent certificates for popular Web sites, including Google Mail, Microsoft's Live service, and Yahoo's services. These fake certificates could also be used to intercept encrypted communications.
> 
> The Chinese government is thought to have tightened communications in response to political unrest in the Middle East. Google discovered that problems with Gmail from within China came in the form of an attack that caused the Web application to freeze when a user took certain actions, such as clicking the "send" button.
> 
> "There is no technical issue on our side—we have checked extensively," a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail statement. "This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."
> 
> The attack appears to block the site only sporadically, halting access to the Web application for a few minutes and then allowing the user to again connect to Gmail, Google says.
> 
> Other nations have used man-in-the-middle tactics to interfere with Web traffic. Tunisia took a similar approach to grabbing Facebook logins in order to perform surveillance on its citizens after widespread protests of the reign of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The protests followed massive unrest in other countries such as Yemen and Tunisia's next door neighbor, Libya.
> 
> Facebook has become a major communications hub for protestors in many countries. The Tunisian government was "using the transparent proxy to hijack the sessions of the users' accounts and post positive things about the government to the people's Facebook accounts," says Percoco.


----------



## CougarKing

Nan Zhongguo Hai/南中国海 (the South China Sea) in the news again:

New York Times link



> *China Hedges Over Whether South China Sea is a ‘Core Interest’ Worth War*
> 
> By EDWARD WONG
> Published: March 30, 2011
> 
> BEIJING — *When President Hu Jintao of China dropped in on Washington this winter, one hot-button topic was notably absent from the agenda: the South China Sea. Nor will Chinese officials be keen to discuss it during a summit meeting between the countries planned for May in Washington.
> 
> In the past year, it has been one of the most delicate diplomatic issues between China and the United States. Perhaps no other point of tension has been as revealing of the difficulties American officials have reading and responding to Chinese foreign policy. But in recent months, Chinese leaders have apparently been happy to let the issue quiet down, perhaps for the sake of smoothing over relations with the Obama administration. *
> 
> China, Taiwan and four Southeast Asian nations have been wrangling for years over territorial claims to the South China Sea. Then last July, amid heightening tensions in the waters, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rallied with Southeast Asian nations to speak out against China. She bluntly said in Hanoi that the United States had a “national interest” in the area, and that China and other countries should abide by a 2002 agreement guaranteeing a resolution of the sovereignty disputes by “peaceful means.”
> 
> Chinese officials were shocked that the United States was getting involved, analysts say. A public debate erupted in China over this question: Should China officially upgrade the South China Sea to a “core interest,” placing it on par with other sovereignty issues like Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang that could justify military intervention?
> 
> Some Chinese officials appeared to have floated that idea in early 2010 in private conversations with their American counterparts. Several American officials told reporters in Beijing and Washington last year that one or more Chinese officials had labeled the South China Sea a “core interest.” But despite those remarks and the public debate that came later, Chinese leaders have not explicitly come out with a policy statement describing the South China Sea as such — nor have they denied it.
> 
> *“It’s not Chinese policy to declare the South China Sea as a core interest,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of politics and international relations at Peking University. “But the problem is that a public denial will be some sort of chicken action on the part of Chinese leaders. So the government also doesn’t want to inflame the Chinese people.” *
> 
> The Foreign Ministry and the State Council, China’s cabinet, did not answer questions on the issue, despite repeated requests.
> 
> Michael Swaine, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, has published a paper with the China Leadership Monitor looking at China’s growing use of the term “core interest.” Since 2004, Chinese officials, scholars and news organizations have increasingly used the term to refer to sovereignty issues. Initial references were to Taiwan, but the term now also encompasses Tibet and Xinjiang, the restive western region. After examining numerous Chinese print sources, Mr. Swaine concluded that China had not officially identified the South China Sea as a “core interest.” Some “unofficial differences in viewpoint, along with the likely dilemma involved in confirming whether the South China Sea is a core interest, together suggest the possibility of disagreement among the Chinese leadership on this matter,” Mr. Swaine wrote.
> 
> That is not to say that China has refrained from asserting its sovereignty claims. On March 24, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news conference that China held “indisputable sovereignty” over the Spratly Islands.
> 
> *By spring 2010, it seemed to some American officials that Chinese officials were pushing beyond the standard sovereignty claims, calling the South China Sea a “core interest.” In a November interview with The Australian, Mrs. Clinton said Dai Bingguo, the senior foreign policy official in the Chinese government, told her that at a summit meeting in May 2010. *
> 
> “I immediately responded and said, ‘We don’t agree with that,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said, though some scholars in the United States and China question whether Mr. Dai made the remark. Then in July 2010, at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Hanoi, Mrs. Clinton made the statements that enraged the Chinese. M. Taylor Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies China’s territorial issues, said Mrs. Clinton’s move was in reaction to a long series of episodes in the South China Sea that American officials believed reflected greater assertiveness by China.
> 
> After Mrs. Clinton’s statements, the English-language edition of Global Times, a populist Chinese newspaper, published an angry editorial that linked the South China Sea to China’s core interests —* “China will never waive its right to protect its core interest with military means,” *  it said. Senior military officers weighed in on both sides. Han Xudong, an army colonel and a professor at National Defense University, wrote in Outlook, a policy magazine, that “China’s comprehensive national strength, especially in military capabilities, is not yet enough to safeguard all of the core national interests. In this case, it’s not a good idea to reveal the core national interests.”
> 
> The Web site of People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, posted a survey asking readers whether it was now necessary to label the South China Sea a “core interest.” As of January, 97 percent of nearly 4,300 respondents had said yes.
> 
> Muddying the whole issue has been the parallel use of “core interests” advanced by Mr. Dai. In 2009, he broadened the definition of the term by saying *China had three core interests: maintaining its political system, defending its sovereignty claims and promoting its economic development. Some Chinese officials might now see the South China Sea and all other sovereignty disputes as falling under “core interests.” *
> 
> The debate in the Chinese news media seemed to reflect a divide among Chinese officials. Then in the fall, news organizations were ordered to stop writing about it.
> 
> *“Now I think they are backing away and downplaying the question because of the trouble it is causing with the U.S. and the ASEANs,” said Joseph Nye Jr., a professor of international relations at Harvard and a former Pentagon official. *
> 
> Li Bibo contributed research.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 3

 Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_ is an interesting article by Prof. Wang Jisi about China’s foreign policy:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67470/wang-jisi/chinas-search-for-a-grand-strategy?page=show


> China's Search for a Grand Strategy
> * A Rising Great Power Finds Its Way*
> 
> By Wang Jisi
> March/April 2011
> 
> Any country's grand strategy must answer at least three questions: What are the nation's core interests? What external forces threaten them? And what can the national leadership do to safeguard them? Whether China has any such strategy today is open to debate. On the one hand, over the last three decades or so, its foreign and defense policies have been remarkably consistent and reasonably well coordinated with the country's domestic priorities. On the other hand, the Chinese government has yet to disclose any document that comprehensively expounds the country's strategic goals and the ways to achieve them. For both policy analysts in China and China watchers abroad, China's grand strategy is a field still to be plowed.
> 
> In recent years, China's power and influence relative to those of other great states have outgrown the expectations of even its own leaders. Based on the country's enhanced position, China's international behavior has become increasingly assertive, as was shown by its strong reactions to a chain of events in 2010: for example, Washington's decision to sell arms to Taiwan, U.S.-South Korean military exercises in the Yellow Sea, and Japan's detention of a Chinese sailor found in disputed waters. It has become imperative for the international community to understand China's strategic thinking and try to forecast how it might evolve according to China's interests and its leaders' vision.
> 
> *THE ENEMY WITHIN AND WITHOUT*
> 
> A unique feature of Chinese leaders' understanding of their country's history is their persistent sensitivity to domestic disorder caused by foreign threats. From ancient times, the ruling regime of the day has often been brought down by a combination of internal uprising and external invasion. The Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644 after rebelling peasants took the capital city of Beijing and the Manchu, with the collusion of Ming generals, invaded from the north. Some three centuries later, the Manchu's own Qing dynasty collapsed after a series of internal revolts coincided with invasions by Western and Japanese forces. The end of the Kuomintang's rule and the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 was caused by an indigenous revolution inspired and then bolstered by the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.
> 
> Since then, apprehensions about internal turbulences have lingered. Under Mao Zedong's leadership, from 1949 to 1976, the Chinese government never formally applied the concept of "national interest" to delineate its strategic aims, but its international strategies were clearly dominated by political and military security interests -- themselves often framed by ideological principles such as "proletarian internationalism." Strategic thinking at the time followed the Leninist tradition of dividing the world into political camps: archenemies, secondary enemies, potential allies, revolutionary forces. Mao's "three worlds theory" pointed to the Soviet Union and the United States as China's main external threats, with corresponding internal threats coming from pro-Soviet "revisionists" and pro-American "class enemies." China's political life in those years was characterized by recurrent struggles against international and domestic schemes to topple the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership or change its political coloring. Still, since Mao's foreign policy supposedly represented the interests of the "international proletariat" rather than China's own, and since China was economically and socially isolated from much of the world, Beijing had no comprehensive grand strategy to speak of.
> 
> Then came the 1980s and Deng Xiaoping. As China embarked on reform and opened up, the CCP made economic development its top priority. Deng's foreign policy thinking departed appreciably from that of Mao. A major war with either the Soviet Union or the United States was no longer deemed inevitable. China made great efforts to develop friendly and cooperative relations with countries all over the world, regardless of their political or ideological orientation; it reasoned that a nonconfrontational posture would attract foreign investment to China and boost trade. A peaceful international environment, an enhanced position for China in the global arena, and China's steady integration into the existing economic order would also help consolidate the CCP's power at home.
> 
> But even as economic interests became a major driver of China's behavior on the international scene, traditional security concerns and the need to guard against Western political interference remained important. Most saliently, the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 and, in its wake, the West's sanctions against Beijing served as an alarming reminder to China's leaders that internal and external troubles could easily intertwine. Over the next decade, Beijing responded to Western censure by contending that the state's sovereign rights trumped human rights. It resolutely refused to consider adopting Western-type democratic institutions. And it insisted that it would never give up the option of using force if Taiwan tried to secede.
> 
> Despite those concerns, however, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, China's strategic thinkers were depicting a generally favorable international situation. In his 2002 report to the CCP National Congress, General Secretary Jiang Zemin foresaw a "20 years' period of strategic opportunity," during which China could continue to concentrate on domestic tasks. Unrest has erupted at times -- such as the violent riots in Tibet in March 2008 and in Xinjiang in July 2009, which the central government blamed on "foreign hostile forces" and responded to with harsh reprisals. And Beijing claims that the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a political activist it deems to be a "criminal trying to sabotage the socialist system," has proved once again Westerners' "ill intentions." Still, the Chinese government has been perturbed by such episodes only occasionally, which has allowed it to focus on redressing domestic imbalances and the unsustainability of its development.
> 
> Under President Hu Jintao, Beijing has in recent years formulated a new development and social policy geared toward continuing to promote fast economic growth while emphasizing good governance, improving the social safety net, protecting the environment, encouraging independent innovation, lessening social tensions, perfecting the financial system, and stimulating domestic consumption. As Chinese exports have suffered from the global economic crisis since 2008, the need for such economic and social transformations has become more urgent.
> 
> With that in mind, the Chinese leadership has redefined the purpose of China's foreign policy. As Hu announced in July 2009, China's diplomacy must "safeguard the interests of sovereignty, security, and development." Dai Bingguo, the state councilor for external relations, further defined those core interests in an article last December: first, China's political stability, namely, the stability of the CCP leadership and of the socialist system; second, sovereign security, territorial integrity, and national unification; and third, China's sustainable economic and social development.
> 
> Apart from the issue of Taiwan, which Beijing considers to be an integral part of China's territory, the Chinese government has never officially identified any single foreign policy issue as one of the country's core interests. Last year, some Chinese commentators reportedly referred to the South China Sea and North Korea as such, but these reckless statements, made with no official authorization, created a great deal of confusion. In fact, for the central government, sovereignty, security, and development all continue to be China's main goals. As long as no grave danger -- for example, Taiwan's formal secession -- threatens the CCP leadership or China's unity, Beijing will remain preoccupied with the country's economic and social development, including in its foreign policy.



End of Part 1


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2



> *THE PRINCIPLE'S PRINCIPLE*
> 
> The need to identify an organizing principle to guide Chinese foreign policy is widely recognized today in China's policy circles and scholarly community, as well as among international analysts. However, defining China's core interests according to the three prongs of sovereignty, security, and development, which sometimes are in tension, means that it is almost impossible to devise a straightforward organizing principle. And the variety of views among Chinese political elites complicates efforts to devise any such grand strategy based on political consensus.
> 
> One popular proposal has been to focus on the United States as a major threat to China. Proponents of this view cite the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, who said, "A state without an enemy or external peril is absolutely doomed." Or they reverse the political scientist Samuel Huntington's argument that "the ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security" and cast the United States as an ideal enemy for China. This notion is based on the long-held conviction that the United States, along with other Western powers and Japan, is hostile to China's political values and wants to contain its rise by supporting Taiwan's separation from the mainland. Its proponents also point to U.S. politicians' sympathy for the Dalai Lama and Uighur separatists, continued U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, U.S. military alliances and arrangements supposedly designed to encircle the Chinese mainland, the currency and trade wars waged by U.S. businesses and the U.S. Congress, and the West's argument that China should slow down its economic growth in order to help stem climate change.
> 
> This view is reflected in many newspapers and on many Web sites in China (particularly those about military affairs and political security). Its proponents argue that China's current approach to foreign relations is far too soft; Mao's tit-for-tat manner is touted as a better model. As a corollary, it is said that China should try to find strategic allies among countries that seem defiant toward the West, such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some also recommend that Beijing use its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds as a policy instrument, standing ready to sell them if U.S. government actions undermine China's interests.
> 
> This proposal is essentially misguided, for even though the United States does pose some strategic and security challenges to China, it would be impractical and risky to construct a grand strategy based on the view that the United States is China's main adversary. Few countries, if any, would want to join China in an anti-U.S. alliance. And it would seriously hold back China's economic development to antagonize the country's largest trading partner and the world's strongest economic and military power. Fortunately, the Chinese leadership is not about to carry out such a strategy. Premier Wen Jiabao was not just being diplomatic last year when he said of China and the United States that "our common interests far outweigh our differences."
> 
> Well aware of this, an alternative school of thought favors Deng's teaching of tao guang yang hui, or keeping a low profile in international affairs. Members of this group, including prominent political figures, such as Tang Jiaxuan, former foreign minister, and General Xiong Guangkai, former deputy chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army, argue that since China remains a developing country, it should concentrate on economic development. Without necessarily rebuffing the notion that the West, particularly the United States, is a long-term threat to China, they contend that China is not capable of challenging Western primacy for the time being -- and some even caution against hastily concluding that the West is in decline. Meanwhile, they argue, keeping a low profile in the coming decades will allow China to concentrate on domestic priorities.
> 
> Although this view appears to be better received internationally than the other, it, too, elicits some concerns. Its adherents have had to take great pains to explain that tao guang yang hui, which is sometimes mistranslated as "hiding one's capabilities and biding one's time," is not a calculated call for temporary moderation until China has enough material power and confidence to promote its hidden agenda. Domestically, the low-profile approach is vulnerable to the charge that it is too soft, especially when security issues become acute. As nationalist feelings surge in China, some Chinese are pressing for a more can-do foreign policy. Opponents also contend that this notion, which Deng put forward more than 20 years ago, may no longer be appropriate now that China is far more powerful.
> 
> Some thoughtful strategists appreciate that even if keeping a low profile could serve China's political and security relations with the United States well, it might not apply to China's relations with many other countries or to economic issues and those nontraditional security issues that have become essential in recent years, such as climate change, public health, and energy security. (Beijing can hardly keep a low profile when it actively participates in mechanisms such as BRIC, the informal group formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the new member South Africa.) A foreign policy that insists merely on keeping China's profile low cannot cope effectively with the multifaceted challenges facing the country today.
> 
> *HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS*
> 
> A more sophisticated grand strategy is needed to serve China's domestic priorities. The government has issued no official written statement outlining such a vision, but some direction can be gleaned from the concepts of a "scientific outlook on development" and "building a harmonious society," which have been enunciated by Hu and have been recorded in all important CCP documents since 2003. In 2006, the Central Committee of the CCP announced that China's foreign policy "must maintain economic construction as its centerpiece, be closely integrated into domestic work, and be advanced by coordinating domestic and international situations." Moreover, four ongoing changes in China's strategic thinking may suggest the foundations for a new grand strategy.
> 
> The first transformation is the Chinese government's adoption of a comprehensive understanding of security, which incorporates economic and nontraditional concerns with traditional military and political interests. Chinese military planners have begun to take into consideration transnational problems such as terrorism and piracy, as well as cooperative activities such as participation in UN peacekeeping operations. Similarly, it is now clear that China must join other countries in stabilizing the global financial market in order to protect its own economic security. All this means that it is virtually impossible to distinguish China's friends from its foes. The United States might pose political and military threats, and Japan, a staunch U.S. ally, could be a geopolitical competitor of China's, but these two countries also happen to be two of China's greatest economic partners. Even though political difficulties appear to be on the rise with the European Union, it remains China's top economic partner. Russia, which some Chinese see as a potential security ally, is far less important economically and socially to China than is South Korea, another U.S. military ally. It will take painstaking efforts on Beijing's part to limit tensions between China's traditional political-military perspectives and its broadening socioeconomic interests -- efforts that effectively amount to reconciling the diverging legacies of Mao and Deng. The best Beijing can do is to strengthen its economic ties with great powers while minimizing the likelihood of a military and political confrontation with them.
> 
> A second transformation is unfolding in Chinese diplomacy: it is becoming less country-oriented and more multilateral and issue-oriented. This shift toward functional focuses -- counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, environmental protection, energy security, food safety, post-disaster reconstruction -- has complicated China's bilateral relationships, regardless of how friendly other states are toward it. For example, diverging geostrategic interests and territorial disputes have long come between China and India, but the two countries' common interest in fending off the West's pressure to reduce carbon emissions has drawn them closer. And now that Iran has become a key supplier of oil to China, its problems with the West over its nuclear program are testing China's stated commitment to the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
> 
> Changes in the mode of China's economic development account for a third transformation in the country's strategic thinking. Beijing's preoccupation with GDP growth is slowly giving way to concerns about economic efficiency, product quality, environmental protection, the creation of a social safety net, and technological innovation. Beijing's understanding of the core interest of development is expanding to include social dimensions. Correspondingly, China's leaders have decided to try to sustain the country's high growth rate by propping up domestic consumption and reducing over the long term the country's dependence on exports and foreign investment. They are now more concerned with global economic imbalances and financial fluctuations, even as international economic frictions are becoming more intense because of the global financial crisis. China's long-term interests will require some incremental appreciation of the yuan, but its desire to increase its exports in the short term will prevent its decision-makers from taking the quick measures urged by the United States and many other countries. Only the enhancement of China's domestic consumption and a steady opening of its capital markets will help it shake off these international pressures.
> 
> The fourth transformation has to do with China's values. So far, China's officials have said that although China has a distinctive political system and ideology, it can cooperate with other countries based on shared interests -- although not, the suggestion seems to be, on shared values. But now that they strongly wish to enhance what they call the "cultural soft power of the nation" and improve China's international image, it appears necessary to also seek common values in the global arena, such as good governance and transparency. Continuing trials and tribulations at home, such as pervasive corruption and ethnic and social unrest in some regions, could also reinforce a shift in values among China's political elite by demonstrating that their hold on power and the country's continued resurgence depend on greater transparency and accountability, as well as on a firmer commitment to the rule of law, democracy, and human rights, all values that are widely shared throughout the world today.



End of Part 2


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 3



> All four of these developments are unfolding haltingly and are by no means irreversible. Nonetheless, they do reveal fundamental trends that will likely shape China's grand strategy in the foreseeable future. When Hu and other leaders call for "coordinating domestic and international situations," they mean that efforts to meet international challenges must not undermine domestic reforms. And with external challenges now coming not only from foreign powers -- especially the United States and Japan -- but also, and increasingly, from functional issues, coping with them effectively will require engaging foreign countries cooperatively and emphasizing compatible values.
> 
> Thus, it would be imprudent of Beijing to identify any one country as a major threat and invoke the need to keep it at bay as an organizing principle of Chinese foreign policy -- unless the United States, or another great power, truly did regard China as its main adversary and so forced China to respond in kind. On the other hand, if keeping a low profile is a necessary component of Beijing's foreign policy, it is also insufficient. A grand strategy needs to consider other long-term objectives as well. One that appeals to some Chinese is the notion of building China into the most powerful state in the world: Liu Mingfu, a senior colonel who teaches at the People's Liberation Army's National Defense University, has declared that replacing the United States as the world's top military power should be China's goal. Another idea is to cast China as an alternative model of development (the "Beijing consensus") that can challenge Western systems, values, and leadership. But the Chinese leadership does not dream of turning China into a hegemon or a standard-bearer. Faced with mounting pressures on both the domestic and the international fronts, it is sober in its objectives, be they short- or long-term ones. Its main concern is how best to protect China's core interests -- sovereignty, security, and development -- against the messy cluster of threats that the country faces today. If an organizing principle must be established to guide China's grand strategy, it should be the improvement of the Chinese people's living standards, welfare, and happiness through social justice.
> 
> *THE BIRTH OF A GREAT NATION*
> 
> Having identified China's core interests and the external pressures that threaten them, the remaining question is, how can China's leadership safeguard the country's interests against those threats? China's continued success in modernizing its economy and lifting its people's standards of living depends heavily on global stability. Thus, it is in China's interest to contribute to a peaceful international environment. China should seek peaceful solutions to residual sovereignty and security issues, including the thorny territorial disputes between it and its neighbors. With the current leadership in Taiwan refraining from seeking formal independence from the mainland, Beijing is more confident that peace can be maintained across the Taiwan Strait. But it has yet to reach a political agreement with Taipei that would prevent renewed tensions in the future. The Chinese government also needs to find effective means to pacify Tibet and Xinjiang, as more unrest in those regions would likely elicit reactions from other countries.
> 
> Although the vast majority of people in China support a stronger Chinese military to defend the country's major interests, they should also recognize the dilemma that poses. As China builds its defense capabilities, especially its navy, it will have to convince others, including the United States and China's neighbors in Asia, that it is taking their concerns into consideration. It will have to make the plans of the People's Liberation Army more transparent and show a willingness to join efforts to establish security structures in the Asia-Pacific region and safeguard existing global security regimes, especially the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It must also continue to work with other states to prevent Iran and North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons. China's national security will be well served if it makes more contributions to other countries' efforts to strengthen security in cyberspace and outer space. Of course, none of this excludes the possibility that China might have to use force to protect its sovereignty or its security in some special circumstances, such as in the event of a terrorist attack.
> 
> China has been committed to almost all existing global economic regimes. But it will have to do much more before it is recognized as a full-fledged market economy. It has already gained an increasingly larger say in global economic mechanisms, such as the G-20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Now, it needs to make specific policy proposals and adjustments to help rebalance the global economy and facilitate its plans to change its development pattern at home. Setting a good example by building a low-carbon economy is one major step that would benefit both China and the world.
> 
> A grand strategy requires defining a geostrategic focus, and China's geostrategic focus is Asia. When communication lines in Central Asia and South Asia were poor, China's development strategy and economic interests tilted toward its east coast and the Pacific Ocean. Today, East Asia is still of vital importance, but China should and will begin to pay more strategic attention to the west. The central government has been conducting the Grand Western Development Program in many western provinces and regions, notably Tibet and Xinjiang, for more than a decade. It is now more actively initiating and participating in new development projects in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Central Asia, and throughout the Caspian Sea region, all the way to Europe. This new western outlook may reshape China's geostrategic vision as well as the Eurasian landscape.
> 
> Still, relationships with great powers remain crucial to defending China's core interests. Notwithstanding the unprecedented economic interdependence of China, Japan, and the United States, strategic trust is still lacking between China and the United States and China and Japan. It is imperative that the Chinese-Japanese-U.S. trilateral interaction be stable and constructive, and a trilateral strategic dialogue is desirable. More generally, too, China will have to invest tremendous resources to promote a more benign image on the world stage. A China with good governance will be a likeable China. Even more important, it will have to learn that soft power cannot be artificially created: such influence originates more from a society than from a state.
> 
> Two daunting tasks lie ahead before a better-designed Chinese grand strategy can take shape and be implemented. The first is to improve policy coordination among Chinese government agencies. Almost all institutions in the central leadership and local governments are involved in foreign relations to varying degrees, and it is virtually impossible for them to see China's national interest the same way or to speak with one voice. These differences confuse outsiders as well as the Chinese people.
> 
> The second challenge will be to manage the diversity of views among China's political elite and the general public, at a time when the value system in China is changing rapidly. Mobilizing public support for government policies is expected to strengthen Beijing's diplomatic bargaining power while also helping consolidate its domestic popularity. But excessive nationalism could breed more public frustration and create more pressure on the government if its policies fail to deliver immediately, which could hurt China's political order, as well as its foreign relations. Even as it allows different voices to be heard on foreign affairs, the central leadership should more vigorously inform the population of its own view, which is consistently more moderate and prudent than the inflammatory remarks found in the media and on Web sites.
> 
> No major power's interests can conform exactly to those of the international community; China is no exception. And with one-fifth of the world's population, it is more like a continent than a country. Yet despite the complexity of developing a grand strategy for China, the effort is at once consistent with China's internal priorities and generally positive for the international community. China will serve its interests better if it can provide more common goods to the international community and share more values with other states.
> 
> How other countries respond to the emergence of China as a global power will also have a great impact on China's internal development and external behavior. If the international community appears not to understand China's aspirations, its anxieties, and its difficulties in feeding itself and modernizing, the Chinese people may ask themselves why China should be bound by rules that were essentially established by the Western powers. China can rightfully be expected to take on more international responsibilities. But then the international community should take on the responsibility of helping the world's largest member support itself.




I am reluctant to disagree with the great _Mencius_ but I cannot subscribe to the doctrine of “a great nation needs enemies.” But I believe I am on fairly safe ground because, while I am sure Prof. Wang is accurately reflecting what Mencius said, Mencius also, and very often, said _“There is a way to win the world win the people and you will win the world. There is a way to win the people; win their hearts and you will win the people,.”_ and _”A war not justified by human benefit will only lead to more conflict,”_ and similar things. As with Confucius, his master, one can, and many do, read many things into what Mencius said. The idea that “a great nation needs a great enemy” is more alive and healthier in Washington than in Beijing, I think

I think Prof. Wang is correct on three major points:

1.	“A more sophisticated grand strategy is needed to serve China's domestic priorities;” 

2.	“ If an organizing principle must be established to guide China's grand strategy, it should be the improvement of the Chinese people's living standards, welfare, and happiness through social justice;” and

3.	“A grand strategy requires defining a geostrategic focus, and China's geostrategic focus is Asia.”


As Prof. Wang points out, this does not mean that China does not intend to compete with the USA; quite the contrary, in fact, I believe that China intends to displace the USA as the dominant power in all of Asia – from Siberia to the bottom tip of Indonesia and it intends to drive the US military off the Asian mainland.

But, as Prof. Wang also notes, there are many challenges – internal and external – facing China and I suspect Prof. Wang may underestimate the power of some of the internal challenges, like those emanating from people like Col Liu Mingfu and his confreres in the military intelligentsia at the People's Liberation Army's National Defense University.


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## a_majoor

I have just started Robert Kaplan's [url-http://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Indian-Ocean-Future-American/dp/1400067464]"Monsoon"[/url], which should cover much of this ground as well. Should be an interesting book.


----------



## CougarKing

link



> *Grading China’s Military Plans*
> 
> By Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson
> 
> Following is a guest entry from Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson, co-founders of China Sign Post.
> 
> China’s National Defense in 2010 continues the tradition of offering additional bits of information each year, but still refrains from delving into the concrete discussion of China’s military capabilities that foreign defence analysts hope for. To its credit, the 2010 White Paper is a carefully-written document that offers insight into China’s defence policy and some general trends in its military development. Beijing’s ongoing moves toward defence transparency are positive even if they fall short of foreign expectations.
> 
> We recognize that China’s Defense White Papers to date have shied away from discussing specific systems and capabilities, but believe that even discussions that might not be as fact-rich as documents published by the United States or other foreign militaries would still help China build strategic trust with other regional powers. In addition, a rapidly modernizing military like China’s that performs an increasing range of activities in its home region has much to gain from greater transparency about capabilities and intentions, as such disclosure could help reduce its neighbours’ incentives to create new negatively-focused security arrangements aimed at counteracting the rising power.
> 
> 
> With regard to higher transparency regarding equipment and capabilities among militaries outside of China, the United States military’s Quadrennial Defense Review and Nuclear Posture Review are excellent examples of documents that combine discussion of strategic intentions with more detailed and concrete discourse on hardware and acquisition plans. In addition, other militaries tend to publish a regular flow of official policy statement and documents discussing procurement and other activities. The biannual China Defense White Paper, on the other hand, has covered insufficiently or overlooked entirely key developments in a rapidly changing country where two years of change can be far more momentous than would be the case in the United States, Japan, or the EU.
> 
> A number of specific military developments cause significant concern to China’s Asian neighbours, as well as the United States. If the Chinese leadership were to permit a more detailed discussion of these types of matters in future White Papers, it would likely help assuage foreign concerns about China’s military modernization in Asia and beyond.
> 
> *To help quantify the importance of the systems and developments that are not discussed, but in our opinion should be, we assign them an importance ranking of between 1.0 and 10.0, with a higher number suggesting that an issue is of more pressing concern to foreign analysts of China’s military development.*
> 
> *China’s anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) development (9.0)*
> 
> The report contains no mention of China’s ASBM programme, which, according to the US Navy, reached the equivalent of initial operational capability (IOC) in late 2010. The timing of this particular announcement might be a bit late for inclusion in the report, especially with Beijing’s official silence on the matter, but for the programme to reach the equivalent of IOC in late 2010, it had been in development for a number of years prior. From the perspective of the United States and regional militaries, an operational Chinese ASBM system with a range that is likely at least 1,500 kilometres is a major event, since it may prompt a re-think of carrier operations within a threat envelope that now potentially extends far into the South China Sea, Northern Indian Ocean, and Western Pacific.
> 
> In turn, any restrictions on carrier operations would have two key effects: (1) they could cause US allies in the region to question Washington’s true security commitment during a confrontation with China, since the United States might be perceived as confronting a choice as to whether to expose carriers to serious risk of damage, for example; and (2), the ASBM reinforces the importance of submarines for regional navies, since large capital surface ships may not be nearly as survivable as before, particularly  for  countries other than the United States and Japan that lack advanced ship-based anti-ballistic missile systems.
> 
> *China rapidly growing space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities (7.0)*
> 
> In 2010, China’s number of space launches equalled the US launch figure for the first time. More importantly, a significant portion of China’s launches involved satellites that are helping to build up a persistent and survivable ISR capability along China’s maritime periphery and beyond. China has launched 7 Yaogan surveillance satellites since December 2009, suggesting that a more robust spaced-based reconnaissance capability is a high priority for China. Yaogan satellites 9 A, B, C  are particularly interesting because they fly in a formation, which suggests that they function as some form of naval ocean surveillance system (NOSS). Jane’s says these satellites carry infrared sensors to help them locate ships, meaning they could probably provide accurately positional locations for ASBM targeting. China is also reportedly preparing to launch a second Tianlian data link satellite in June 2011, which in conjunction with the existing Tianlian-1, could provide coverage over as much as 75 percent of the earth’s surface. Improved data linking capabilities would help strengthen China’s ASBM “kill chain” by further linking sensors with shooters.
> 
> *ABM/ASAT test in January 2010 (6.5)*
> 
> In January 2010, China successfully tested a midcourse intercept anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system likely based on the same SC-19 booster system that powered the direct ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) system the PLA used to destroy an aging weather satellite in January 2007. China’s multiple successful tests indicate that the PLA is becoming proficient at using hit to kill kinetic intercept vehicles that could be launched from Chinese soil and hold valuable U.S. reconnaissance and other military satellites at risk during a conflict.
> 
> *The J-20 advanced fighter test flight (5.5)*
> 
> China’s first test of a 4+ generation fighter comes 20 years behind that of the United States (the F-22 Raptor first flew in 1990), but could become an aircraft that makes Washington rue its decision to cap F-22 Raptor production at 187 aircraft. Analysis from Airpower Australia’s Dr. Carlo Kopp strongly suggests that a J-20 with 5th generation characteristics could outperform the F-35 Lightning II at virtually all levels, potentially leaving the United States and allies operating the F-35 at a disadvantage to a PLA Air Force armed with super cruising, stealthy, and manoeuvrable J-20s. Of course, there are a wide variety of other ways to target and mitigate attacks from opposing aircraft.
> 
> *China’s aircraft carrier development (5.0)*
> 
> The 2010 China Defense White Paper also contained no mention of China’s aircraft carrier programme. The New York Times has reported that one of the paper’s presenters, Sr. Col. Geng Yansheng, sidestepped questions about the carrier programme during the March 31 news conference at which the paper was unveiled.
> 
> China appears to be rapidly refurbishing the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag; the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) projects that it will be operational by 2012. According to the Asahi Shimbun, China has decided to embark on a national carrier programme in which it would build domestically a 50,000-60,000 tonne conventional carrier by 2014 (ONI projects that it will be completed after 2015) and a nuclear-powered carrier by 2020. China certainly faces substantial challenges in equipping a carrier, training pilots in carrier operations, and building a carrier group. That said, the country’s rising defence budget (officially $91.5 billion in 2011) and the experience of domestic shipyards in building increasingly complex large commercial ships make it likely that physical construction barriers can be overcome in a reasonable amount of time.
> 
> Mastering the intricacies of carrier operations will take longer and a Chinese carrier group would likely not survive very long in a direct confrontation with the US Navy. Still, a carrier group would offer immense diplomatic benefits in providing a visible Chinese naval presence in the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, along key sea lanes in the Indian Ocean, and for humanitarian missions such as the response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Several carrier groups would be necessary for persistent presence in these areas, however, to allow for periodic maintenance.
> 
> *The PLA’s growing access to and use of foreign ports and airfields (4.0)*
> 
> The February/March 2011 Libya evacuation operation involved a forward-deployed PLAN missile frigate, Xuzhou, which had recently replenished in Oman, as well as the use of the Khartoum, Sudan airport to refuel IL-76 transports headed to and from Libya to evacuate Chinese nationals trapped there.
> 
> For any future military deployments for non-combatant evacuation operations (NEOs) or other such expeditionary military activities, port and airfield access in the region concerned is crucial for supporting and sustaining platforms involved in the mission. Areas for potential deepening of PLA logistical support and access during times of crisis that merit close watch in coming years include: Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar, Djibouti, Salalah (Oman), Aden (Yemen), Gwadar and Karachi (Pakistan), Chittagong (Bangladesh), Hambantota (Sri Lanka), Mauritius (where Port Louis has sufficient draft to accommodate a large warship), Sittwe (Burma), and Singapore.
> 
> *China’s use of military assets to support Libya rescue & evacuation operation (2.0)*
> 
> The 2010 Defense White Paper makes no mention of the deployment of PLAN and PLAAF forces to help secure the evacuation of Chinese citizens from Libya, an historical first. It will be interesting to see how Beijing evaluates and portrays such efforts in the future. They are positive and understandable, but may raise expectations among Chinese about what their government can do to address subsequent threats to the security of Chinese citizens overseas. China’s 2008 Defense White Paper didn’t include discussion of the PLA Navy’s precedent-setting Gulf of Aden counter-piracy mission, which began at the very end of 2008, but the deployment made it into the 2010 White Paper. We strongly suspect the 2012 Defense White Paper will include meaningful discussion of the Libya evacuation operation and the PLAN and PLAAF roles in the historic mission.
> 
> Andrew Erickson is an associate professor at the US Naval War College and fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Programme. Gabe Collins is a commodity and security specialist focused on China and Russia. This is an edited and abridged version of the commentary on the white paper. The full version can be read here.


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## CougarKing

An update on the ROCAF:

link



> *Taiwan air force drill highlights US dilemma over long-pending F-16 fighter sale to Taipei*
> 
> TAINAN COUNTY, Taiwan - *Taiwan's equipment-challenged air force demonstrated its improvisational skills Tuesday, landing six war planes on a normally busy highway to simulate a response to a Chinese attack on its air fields.
> 
> The early morning exercise came amid persistent warnings that the Taiwanese air force — long considered the key to the island's defences against China — is losing its qualitative edge because of U.S. reluctance to supply it with modern warplanes and avionics.*
> 
> Earlier this month, Sen. Richard Lugar told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that unless Washington supplied Taipei with relatively advanced F-16 jet fighters and upgraded Taiwan's existing F-16 fleet, the island could be left "with no credible air-to-air deterrent."
> 
> The comments by Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, followed last year's publication of a Pentagon report saying that Taiwan's aging fleet of combat aircraft was falling far behind the potential of the modern jet fighters China has at its disposal.
> 
> *Taiwanese requests for the F-16 hardware have been pending since the administration of President George W. Bush. The Obama administration has refused to make a decision, caught between its strong desire not to anger China — with which it maintains a complex and wide-ranging relationship — and its equally strong commitment to provide Taiwan the means to defend itself from possible Chinese attack.*
> Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949. The mainland still claims the island as part of its territory and sees foreign military sales there as interference in its internal affairs. While relations between Taipei and Beijing have improved substantially since Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou came to power three years ago, China's Communist leaders still threaten to invade across the 100-mile-wide (160-kilometre-wide) Taiwan Strait if democratic Taiwan moves to make its de facto independence permanent.
> 
> In Tuesday's air force exercise, streaking pairs of F-16s, French-built Mirages and Taiwanese-made Indigenous Defence Fighters swooped down to land on the Madou Highway in the southern county of Tainan, as a single OH-58D helicopter hovered overhead to provide security.
> 
> Under the conditions of the exercise, the highway landing was made necessary because a simulated Chinese attack had already taken out nearby Taiwanese air fields.
> 
> Within minutes, AH1W and CH-47 helicopters joined the waiting fighters, and resupplied them with Harpoon and other missiles so they could continue their missions against the attacking Chinese.
> 
> Even though the exercise went off without a hitch, a real combat situation might not be bring such impressive results, said military expert Wang Kun-yi of Taipei's Tamkang University.
> 
> "While today's exercise was smooth, our fighter jets are much older than those in the Chinese inventory," Wang said. "If you look at the Pentagon report, you see the gap is wide and getting even wider."
> 
> *Despite its improving relations with China, Ma's government has continued to press for 66 American-made F-16 C/Ds — considered far more advanced than the 145 F-16 A/Bs currently in its inventory. It also has pushed for a $4.5 billion program to upgrade the A/Bs.
> 
> But the U.S. has not responded, mindful that a "yes" would infuriate China, while a "no" could be construed as undermining its commitment to provide Taiwan the means to defend itself under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act, passed by Congress in 1979 when the U.S. transferred its relations from Taipei to Beijing.
> 
> Complicating arms sales to Taiwan for the Obama administration is the recent emergence of a powerful American lobby calling for their end.* The lobby, which includes a number of retired senior military officers, prominent academics and former State Department officials, believes that China's growing economic and strategic clout has turned Taiwan into a political liability it can ill afford to indulge over the long term.


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## CougarKing

> DATE:29/03/11
> 
> SOURCE:Flight International
> 
> *Chinese air force bomber blitzes river ice *
> By Craig Hoyle
> 
> Images have emerged showing a Chinese air force bomber performing an unusual strike mission earlier this month.
> 
> *After being loaded with unguided glide bombs, the venerable H-6 bomber is shown dropping three as part of a military effort to clear a 2km (1.2 miles)-long build-up of ice on the Yellow river near Ordos, Inner Mongolia.*
> 
> Three of the twin-engined aircraft were used to release 24 of the 500kg (1,100lb) weapons during the activity, according to a report by the Strategy Page website.
> 
> China's air force has an active fleet of around 120 of the Xian-built bombers, says Flightglobal's MiliCAS database, with around 30 also in use with the nation's naval aviation wing. The type is a locally built version of the Soviet-era Tupolev Tu-16, which was first flown in the early 1950s.



link


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## CougarKing

While all the mainland's recent conciliatory gestures toward Taiwan are a needed step toward better economic (and political) integration, some _Guo Min Dang _ officials and the _Guo Min Jun_'s officers are not taking their chances...



> *Taiwan To Build New 'Stealth' Warship*
> TAIPEI - Taiwan plans to build a new 'stealth' warship armed with guided-missiles next year in response to China's naval build-up, a top military officer and a lawmaker said Monday.
> 
> *Construction of the prototype of the 500-ton corvette is due to start in 2012 for completion in 2014, deputy defense minister Lin Yu-pao said in answer to a question by Kuomintang party legislator Lin Yu-fang at parliament.*
> 
> The warship, which the navy says is harder to detect on radar, is expected to emerge after China puts into service its first battle carrier group, the legislator said.
> 
> The twin-hulled boat will be armed with up to eight home-grown Hsiung-feng II ship-to-ship missiles and eight other more lethal Hsiung-feng III anti-ship supersonic missiles.



more:

link

This coincides with the entry into service of a new unit of smaller warships. (from: Singapore's _Straits Times_ link)


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## CougarKing

The new Chinese carrier SHI LANG/施琅 inches closer to completion:



> *Chinese Carrier Defenses Installed*
> 
> April 18, 2011: *The new Chinese aircraft carrier, the Shi Lang (formerly Varyag) has had its first weapons installed.* These were easily identified as *FL-3000N anti-missile systems.* These are similar to the American RAM anti-missile missile system, except that they come in a 24 missile launcher and are less accurate. FL-3000N was only introduced three years ago, and uses smaller missiles than RAM. The two meter long FL-3000N missiles have a max range of nine kilometers (about half that for very fast incoming missiles). The 120mm, two meter long missiles now use a similar guidance system to RAM, but are not as agile in flight.
> 
> Over the last decade, the U.S. Navy Phalanx 20mm autocannon anti-missile system has been more frequently replaced by SeaRAM. What's interesting about this is that SeaRAM is basically the Phalanx system, with the 20mm gun replaced with a box of eleven RAM (RIM-116 "Rolling Air Frame") missiles. The Phalanx was developed in the 1970s, and entered service in 1977. RAM was developed in the 1980s, and didn't enter service until 1993. RAM has a longer range (7.5 kilometers) than the Phalanx (two kilometers) and was originally designed to be aimed using the ships fire control systems. Phalanx, on the other hand, has its own radar and fire control system and, once turned on, will automatically fire at any incoming missiles. This was necessary, as some anti-ship missiles travel at over a 500 meters a second. With SeaRAM, you've got a little more time, and can knock down the incoming missile farther from the ship. This is important, because it was feared that a large, very fast anti-ship missile (which the Russians prefer, and sell to foreigners), even when shot up by Phalanx, might still end up having parts of it slam into the target ship. Since SeaRAM has eleven missiles ready to fire, it can also engage several targets at once, something the Phalanx could not do.
> 
> The RAM missiles are 127mm in diameter, three meters (9.3 feet) long and weigh 73.6 kg (162 pounds) each. The terminal guidance system is heat seeking. Basically, it uses the rocket motor and warhead from the Sidewinder air-to-air missile, and the guidance system from the Stinger shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile. SeaRAM missiles cost about $450,000 each, which is probably at least 50 percent more than the FL-3000N missiles. SeaRAM is meant to provide combat support ships that normally have no defenses, or at least no combat radars and fire control system. The new LCS will use the SeaRAM as well.
> 
> The Shi Lang/Varyag is one of the Kuznetsov class carriers that Russia began building in the 1980s. Originally the Kuznetsovs were to be 90,000 ton, nuclear powered ships, similar to American carriers (complete with steam catapults). Instead, because of the high cost, and the complexity of modern (American style) carriers, the Russians were forced to scale back their plans, and ended up with the 65,000 ton (full load ) ships that lacked steam catapults, and used a ski jump type flight deck instead. Nuclear power was dropped, but the Kuznetsov class was still a formidable design. The 323 meter (thousand foot) long ship normally carries a dozen navalized Su-27s (called Su-33s), 14 Ka-27PL anti-submarine helicopters, two electronic warfare helicopters and two search and rescue helicopters. But the ship was meant to regularly carry 36 Su-33s and sixteen helicopters. The ship carries 2,500 tons of aviation fuel, allowing it to generate 500-1,000 aircraft and helicopter sorties. Crew size is 2,500 (or 3,000 with a full aircraft load.) Only two ships of this class exist; the original Kuznetsov, which is in Russian service, and the Varyag. Like most modern carriers, the only weapons carried are anti-missile systems like Phalanx and FL-3000N, plus some heavy machine-guns (which are often kept inside the ship, and mounted outside only when needed.)
> 
> link


----------



## a_majoor

Looking ahead:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/04/chinas-military-now-to-2020.html



> *China's Military now to 2020*
> 
> Rand - Shaking the Heavens and Splitting the Earth (308 pages)
> 
> By 2015 or so, the weapon systems and platforms China is acquiring will potentially enable it to effectively implement the four types of air force campaigns described in the next section. The significant numbers of modern fighter aircraft and SAMs, as well as the long range early warning radars and secure data and voice communication links China is likely to have by 2015, for example, coupled with the hardening and camouflage measures China has already taken, would make a Chinese air defense campaign, if conducted according to the principles described in Chinese military publications, highly challenging for U.S. air forces. Similarly, those same modern fighters, along with ground-launched conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, cruise missile–carrying medium bombers, and aerial refueling aircraft, will enable China to conduct offensive operations far into the western Pacific. Whether China will actually be able to fully exploit its air force doctrine and capabilities, however, is less clear. Much will depend on the quality of the training and leadership of China’s air force, and it should be pointed out that the PLAAF last engaged in major combat operations in the Jinmen campaign of 1958, more than 50 years ago.
> 
> Types of Air Campaigns
> 
> Air defense campaigns are said to entail three types of operations: resistance, counterattack, and close protection.
> 
> * Resistance operations are actions to intercept, disrupt, and destroy attacking aircraft.
> * Counterattack operations are attacks on enemy air bases (including aircraft carriers).
> * Close protection operations are passive defense measures, such as fortification, concealment, camouflage, and mobility. China’s overall approach to air defense is to combine the early interception of enemy attacks with full-depth, layered resistance to protect targets and forces while gradually increasing the tempo of
> counter attacks on enemy bases
> * Air blockade campaigns are operations to prevent an adversary from conducting air operations and to cut off its economic and military links with the outside world. Some Chinese sources describe them as simply a special variety of air offensive campaign, but most authoritative sources regard them as a distinct type of campaign
> 
> Although any of these four types of air force campaigns can be conducted as an independent single-service campaign, they are more likely to be conducted as part of a broader joint campaign, such as an island-landing campaign or a joint blockade campaign.
> 
> Rand recommends - The United States should nonetheless deploy active missile defenses, construct aircraft shelters, harden runways and facilities, and increase rapid runway repair capabilities at these bases. In either case, the USAF will need to continue to invest in fighter aircraft technology and pilot skill to ensure that it maintains its advantage in the face of rapid Chinese improvements in these areas
> 
> China Today and to 2020
> 
> As of 2010, the PLAAF has retired many of its older aircraft and is operating more than 300 modern fighter aircraft, with more in production. These include Russian-designed Su-27s and Su-30s but also China’s own domestically developed J-10, which is assessed to be comparable in capability to the U.S. F-16. Many PLAAF fighters now carry beyond–visual range air-to-air missiles and PGMs, and the PLAAF possesses a first generation air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), carried on the H-6 medium bomber. Chinese pilots now average well over 100 hours of flight time per year, and the pilots of the most-advanced fighters are believed to receive close to 200 hours per year. China is experimenting with domestically produced airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft, and PLAAF aircraft now routinely operate at low level, over water, in bad weather, and at night (sometimes all at once).
> 
> Meanwhile, the PLAAF’s SAM forces have purchased the modern S-300 series of SAMs (North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] designators SA-10 and SA-20) from Russia and have fielded a domestic system (the HQ-9) of comparable capability.
> 
> Based on recent trends, these changes are likely to accelerate in the future, so that, within another decade, the capabilities of China’s air force could begin to approach those of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) today. USAF capabilities will continue to improve as well, of course, so that it will still enjoy a significant qualitative advantage, but a conflict with China might not be the lopsided contest it likely would have been in the late 1990s. And, even today, the emerging capabilities of the PLAAF are such that, combined with the geographic and other advantages China would enjoy in the most likely conflict scenario—a war over Taiwan—the USAF could find itself challenged in its ability to achieve air dominance over its adversary, a prospect that the USAF has not had to seriously consider for nearly two decades
> 
> Aviation Week - Sizing Up China's military
> 
> The elements of China's military capability include:
> 
> •Information exploitation. Digital connectivity, now available from troops to top command levels, has helped implement and refine new joint force operations, especially between the second artillery missile force, the PLA air force and the PLA navy (PLAN). Networks of optical, radar and electronic surveillance satellites, new over-the-horizon (OTH) radar, AWACS and electronic intelligence aircraft plus new passive counter-stealth radar and soon, a 30-plus navigation satellite constellation, enable precision targeting at increasing distances.
> 
> •Information attack. In the mid-2000s, U.S. intelligence agencies identified the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), a pattern of cyberespionage largely traceable to China and aimed mainly at the U.S. defense industry and armed forces.
> 
> •Precision air and missile attack. China is developing (and offering for export) an expanding range of guided rockets conforming to the range limits of the Missile Technology Control Regime, while domestically producing guided air-launched weapons—bombs and cruise missiles—and ballistic missiles capable of threatening U.S. bases and naval forces.
> 
> •Growing sea denial. PLAN has Asia’s most formidable sea-denial capability built around a growing force of 50-80 conventional submarines (SSKs). Soviet-era boats are being replaced by the Song and Yuan classes and imported Russian Kilos. A yet-undesignated new SSK similar in shape to the Kilo was revealed in September. The Songs and Kilos carry sub-launched YJ-82 antiship cruise missiles and the Kilos carry the formidable Novator 3M-54 Club cruise missile family.
> 
> If it is indeed the case that China’s technology is advancing more quickly than the West expects, there is a chance of technological surprise.
> 
> Chinese sources have referred to future DF-25/26/27 missiles: One may be the new 4,000-km missile. Future PLA medium- and short-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles will be faster and more maneuverable to counter defenses. A new air- and missile-defense interceptor family, sometimes called the HQ-19 (HHQ-26 for the naval version), reportedly has performance goals similar to the 400-km Russian S-400.
> 
> By the 2020s the U.S. hopes to resolve technology challenges for deployment of energy weapons. Indicators point to the possibility that the PLA is not far behind in development of tactical lasers, high-power microwave weapons and rail guns. There is also heavy Chinese investment in research centers for electromagnetic launch technology, the basis for rail guns, electromagnetic aircraft catapults and spacecraft launchers.
> 
> China is working on counter-stealth and counter-network technology. At IDEX in February, China released details of the meter-wave (VHF) HK-JM and HK-JM2 radars, both mobile and with detection ranges of 330 and 500 km, respectively. The radars could cue more accurate tracking systems. China also unveiled the DWL002 ground-based electronic surveillance measure system, which could be deployed as a passive coherent-location radar, using long-range broadcast signals to detect non-emitting targets.
> 
> But these newer trends in Chinese power are not sufficiently reflected in U.S. government documents—like the annual China Military Power report—that influence debate over strategy and spending priorities. One possible result is that U.S. weapons timelines will increasingly trail rather than lead PLA developments.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Looking ahead:
> 
> http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/04/chinas-military-now-to-2020.html




Looking at the "Implications" section of the RAND Report (p. 235 and following) I conclude that the report aims to justify the USAF's various programmes. The report suggests that the USA must intervene to defend Taiwan - something that I doubt any US administration that is not led by a complete, blithering idiot would ever contemplate.

There is only one reason for China to attack Taiwan: a declaration of independence. The Chines response will be swift and overwhelming - everyone in Beijing, Taipei and Washington know that. The USA cannot win a war with China; it is probably true that China cannot defeat the USA, either but the USA cannot win. Only an idiot - and I'm prepared to agree that Washington is full of 'em, in and out of the corridors of power - would want such a war.

The USAF doesn't want the war but it does want the budget appropriations and this long bit of nonsense is designed to facilitate more and more airplanes and more and more air force generals - neither of which the US can afford.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Looking at the "Implications" section of the RAND Report (p. 235 and following) I conclude that the report aims to justify the USAF's various programmes. *The report suggests that the USA must intervene to defend Taiwan - something that I doubt any US administration that is not led by a complete, blithering idiot would ever contemplate.*



even with the Taiwan Relations Act?!

quote from the TRA:



> The act stipulates that the United States will *"consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States".*


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> even with the Taiwan Relations Act?!
> 
> quote from the TRA:




Yep; for the _strategic_ reasons I stated. America cannot afford to lose not win yet another war. (And, by the way, I do not count Iraq as a "win," not yet, anyway.) It will start to look like a habit.


----------



## a_majoor

More on Chinese military upgrades:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/04/pictures-of-chinas-new-submarines-tanks.html



> *Pictures of China's new submarines, tanks, stealth planes and railgun development*
> 
> Previously we had reviewed the RAND and aviation week analysis of China's current military and projections that China would mostly catch up to the current level of the United States military by about 2020.
> 
> China rumored to be working on Railguns
> A picture of a chinese railgun facility is apparently a fake
> 
> The United States has been working to develop railguns for Navy ships in the 2020s and there is an image that claims to show a similar railgun development program in China
> 
> China's Tanks
> 
> The Type 99 tank, also known as ZTZ-99 and WZ-123, developed from the Type 98G (in turn, a development of the Type 98), is a third generation main battle tank (MBT) fielded by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. It is made to compete with other modern tanks. China has about 500. The US has over 9000 M1 Abrams tanks. China has about 3000 T96 tanks. The Type 99 costs about US$2.5 million and the M1 Abrams about US$8 million.
> 
> Type 99A2
> 
> The much-improved Type 99 variant, with many major upgrades and improvements. Some of the improvement and upgrades include a reaction improved aiming system, a digital battlefield information terminal, a newly designed arrow-shaped armor, a larger turret, an expanded tail chamber, an Active Protection System mounted on the turret with millimeter-wave radar, a new commander's periscope and an Integrated Propulsion System.
> 
> Type 99KM
> 
> The newest and much-improved variant, with newer modular active protection system, JD-4 active laser defense system, more powerful 2100-hp engine, and more. It is also equipped with a 155 mm gun capable of firing missiles and next-generation kinetic rounds. (_interpolation. sounds a bit like the mythical Russian T-95, especially the gun..._)
> 
> The Type 99 is powered by a liquid cooled, turbocharged 1,500 hp diesel derived from the German MB871ka501 diesel technology. At its current battle weight of 54 tons, this gives a power-to-weight ratio of about 27.78 hp/ton. The maximum speed on road is 80 km/h and 65 km/h cross country. Acceleration from 0 to 32 km/h only takes 12 seconds. The transmission provides seven forward and one reverse gears.
> 
> China also has a new tank under development called the CSU 152. There is not much known about it but would likely have improvements over the Type 99KM. It would probably have an autoloader and a lower profile. It is expected that the baseline chassis will be of all-welded steel armor to which an advanced armor package will be fitted over the frontal arc for a higher level of survivability. This could include depleted uranium (as fitted to some late production US General Dynamics Land Systems M1A1/M1A2 MBT), ceramic armor and/or various types of combination armor.
> 
> M1 Abrams -
> The M1 Abrams entered U.S. service in 1980 and has been upgraded over time. The M1A3 is currently under development. The Army aims to build prototypes by 2014 and to begin to field the first combat-ready M1A3s by 2017.
> 67.6 short tons
> Road: 45 mph (72 km/h) (Governed)
> Off-road: 33 mph (52.8 km/h)
> 120 mm L44 M256 smooth bore cannon (M1A1, M1A2, M1A2SEP)42 rounds
> 24.5 hp/metric ton
> 
> China newest Diesel and nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers
> 
> China has a growing force of 50-80 conventional submarines (SSKs).
> 
> The Type 094 is a new class of ballistic missile submarine developed by the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy. The first-of-class was constructed at Huludao Shipyard in Huludao, Liaoning Province and launched in July 2004. At least two are confirmed to have been launched and China could have about five as of 2010. The Type 094 submarine is capable of carrying 12 of the more modern JL-2s with a range of approximately 8,000 km, and is capable of targeting some of the Western Hemisphere from close to the Chinese coast.
> 
> The Type 096 submarine is a new class of SSBN rumored to be in development for the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Little information exits about the project. Some sources suggests that the new submarine will carry 24 SLBMs.
> 
> In late 2008, and through early 2009, there have been foreign reports that China will start building two 50,000-60,000 ton aircraft carriers that may be finished early 2012 (other reports say 2015). Whether the two ships will be similar to the Varyag (ski jump) or American carriers (catapult) is not yet known. Since sea trials of the Shi Lang (Varyag) will probably start in 2011, it seems likely that they are similar.
> 
> Since 1985, China has acquired four retired aircraft carriers for study: the Australian HMAS Melbourne and the ex-Soviet carriers Minsk, Kiev and Varyag. Reports state that two 50,000-60,000 ton Type 089 aircraft carriers based on the Varyag, are due to be finished by 2015. Sukhoi Su-33s (navalized Flankers) are the aircraft most likely to be flown from these carriers, but China is also developing its own version of the Sukhoi 33, the J-15 Flying Shark.
> 
> It is reported that China will likely have five 60,000 ton nuclear powered aircraft carriers by 2020.
> 
> The US has 11 aircraft carrier groups and will have 13 in 2023. The US will start deploying the new Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Unlike the USA, China can afford to enhance its military. Our Americans friends can thank themselves, individual by individual, for their current financial predicament and for its _strategic_ consequences.

The Chinese goal, as I understand it, is to _project_ its power, mainly _soft_ power, which requires a _hard_ power base (iron fist in a velvet glove sort of thing), on a global basis and to displace the USA and the only significant military power in East Asia.


----------



## a_majoor

High speed trains fall off the rails:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chinas-train-wreck/2011/04/21/AFqjRWRE_story.html



> Opinions
> *China’s train wreck*
> 
> Video: Is China’s high-speed rail a model for U.S. transportation? Based on his travels in China, Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane thinks not.
> 
> By CHARLES LANE, Friday, April 22, 8:05 PM
> For the past eight years, Liu Zhijun was one of the most influential people in China. As minister of railways, Liu ran China’s $300 billion high-speed rail project. U.S., European and Japanese contractors jostled for a piece of the business while foreign journalists gushed over China’s latest high-tech marvel.
> 
> Today, Liu Zhijun is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. On Feb. 25, he was fired for “severe violations of discipline” — code for embezzling tens of millions of dollars. Seems his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.
> 
> Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.
> 
> Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.
> 
> Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.
> 
> The fact is that China’s train wreck was eminently foreseeable. High-speed rail is a capital-intensive undertaking that requires huge borrowing upfront to finance tracks, locomotives and cars, followed by years in which ticket revenue covers debt service — if all goes well. “Any . . . shortfall in ridership or yield, can quickly create financial stress,” warns a 2010 World Bank staff report.
> 
> Such “shortfalls” are all too common. Japan’s bullet trains needed a bailout in 1987. Taiwan’s line opened in 2007 and needed a government rescue in 2009. In France, only the Paris-Lyon high-speed line is in the black.
> 
> This history counseled caution about introducing bullet trains in China, where the typical passenger was still a migrant worker, not a businessman rushing to a meeting. To be sure, there was an economic case to be made for upgrading China’s lumbering rail system: It would free up limited rail capacity for freight trains, thus reducing truck traffic on congested roads. Beijing’s initial feasibility studies envisioned the gradual introduction of trains that would move at a maximum 125 mph, according to Caixin, the Chinese economic magazine.
> 
> But Liu Zhijun — part Cornelius Vanderbilt, part Sammy Glick — took over the rail ministry in March 2003 and urged officials to aim for speeds above 200 mph. “Seize the opportunity, build more railways, and build them fast,” he wrote.


----------



## a_majoor

The censors release what they don't want the press to talk about (circular logic):

http://volokh.com/2011/04/24/all-the-news-thats-not-fit-to-print-in-china/



> *All the News That’s Not Fit to Print, in China*
> 
> Stewart Baker • April 24, 2011 8:25 am
> 
> The press guidance provided by China’s censors is so voluminous and detailed that leaked copies of the guidance are now available on a regular basis.  China Digital Times publishes a weekly list of what China’s censors tell their journalists not to report or hype. It’s a remarkable glimpse into the dark soul of Chinese bureaucracy, a guide to what really scares China’s rulers.  But there’s irony there as well.  I mean, why read Chinese papers when we can get all the juiciest bits from the censors themselves?
> 
> And juicy they are.  The censors’ guidance is a kind of Drudge Report for China.  Take the story about the music student who was out driving his Cruze one night and hit a mother bicycling home from her job?  Fearing that she’d gotten his license plate and would make him pay for her broken leg, he stabbed her to death in the street.  Now he too is facing the death penalty.  It’s an irresistible tale of wealth, entitlement and tragedy in modern China.
> 
> How did I find the story? Thanks to China’s State Council Information Office, which instructed Chinese websites to cover it only by reprinting copy from the Xinhua News Agency.  “Do not conduct follow-up reports,” the censors warned, “and do not repost stories related to this case.”
> 
> But my favorite in recent weeks is the guidance issued by the Central Propaganda Bureau about Liu Zhijun, 58, the recently disgraced transportation minister who ran up nearly $300 billion in debt creating China’s bullet train bubb...er...network.  The propaganda bureau has issued this frustratingly brief guidance:  “All media are not to report or hype the news that Liu Zhijun had 18 mistresses.”
> 
> Really?  How can you not hype that news?  He’s the same age as George Tenet, for God’s sake.  I want to know what he was eating.
> 
> Heck, you could fill an entire week speculating just on the logistics of the thing. Is it any wonder the guy needed to travel between cities at 200 mph?


----------



## sean m

http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures#p/u

Here is a documentary about the chinese government building these cities yet barely any people are there to live. This leads to very very little currency returning to the government. Even though the chinese have a very strong economy does anyone think that if this ridiculous building campaign continues that it could translate into what happened to the U.S. on a smaller scale?


----------



## CougarKing

link



> ..WASHINGTON -* A top Chinese general says his country has no intention of trying to match U.S. military power.*
> 
> Speaking Wednesday at the National Defence University, *Gen. Chen Bingde *said the U.S. is far more advanced militarily. He cited a "gaping gap" in American and Chinese capabilities. He said it is at least a 20-year gap.
> 
> Chen is chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army. He is on a weeklong visit to the United States.
> 
> Chen said his visit has made even clearer to him that China's navy, for example, is relatively underdeveloped and must keep building more ships.
> ...



link



> *Taiwan to hold elections in January 2012*
> THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
> Published: May 17, 2011 10:36 p.m.
> Last modified: May 17, 2011 10:43 p.m.
> 
> TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan's Central Election Commission says the island will hold legislative and presidential elections together on January 14, 2012, the first time the polls have coincided since direct presidential elections began in 1996.
> 
> In a statement released late Tuesday the commission said it was combining the ballots to be more efficient.
> 
> Taiwan's presidential elections usually fall in March, while legislative elections are held either in December or January.
> 
> *In the upcoming presidential poll, ruling Nationalist Ma Ying-jeou will face Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen.* Tsai has criticized Ma's signature policy of engaging China economically as undermining Taiwan's sovereignty.
> 
> The island and the mainland split amid civil war in 1949.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is in the China thread because Singapore and the PAP have been a model for how the Chinese want to develop; _Minister Mentor_ Lee Kuan Yew makes regular (twice yearly?) visits to Bejing where he usually spends a full day closeted with Hu Jintao (consider that Obama spends 40 to 90 minutes with a visiting Israeli PM – Hu is just as busy running China as Obama is running America). The  most senior Chinese officials and leadership aspirants are also regular visitors to Singapore - to meet with the _Mentor_.






    
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



Chinese President Hu Jintao meets with visiting Singaporean                     2011 年 5 16, Lee Kuan Yew (right) and China's Defence Minister Liang Guanglie (left)
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in Beijing Nov. 16, 2007. (Xinhua Photo)     Tang Zhi Wei photo

The article is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is big news from Asia:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/singapores-minister-mentor-steps-down-but-not-out/article2030582/ 


> Singapore’s Minister Mentor steps down but not out
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> SINGAPORE— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Friday, May. 20, 2011
> 
> After five decades as the unrivalled centre of Singapore’s tiny political universe, Lee Kuan Yew tried to cast his decision to step out of the limelight as another one of his characteristically forward-thinking manoeuvres.
> 
> A “younger team of ministers [should] connect to, and engage with, this younger generation in shaping the future of Singapore,” he said last week as he stepped down from his omnipotent-sounding post of Minister Mentor.
> 
> But it would be closer to the truth to say that – for one of few times since he pulled Singapore out of its brief union with Malaysia in 1965 – Mr. Lee wasn’t in full control of events. It was Singapore, the city-state he helped turn into one of the most affluent societies in the world, that had left Mr. Lee behind, not the other way around.
> 
> The 87-year-old’s resignation came on the heels of an election result that – although it returned the governing People’s Action Party with another massive majority – marked a watershed in Singapore’s history. While the PAP still won a convincing 60 per cent of the vote, that was down from 67 per cent in the 2006 election and 75 per cent in 2001. Mr. Lee personally helped turn voters away from the PAP by warning they would “have five years to live and repent” if they elected opposition members to parliament.
> 
> Singaporeans responded to that threat by turning to opposition parties in unprecedented numbers. Though the campaign period (the only time when political demonstrations are allowed) was just nine days long, rallies by the Workers’ Party and Singapore Democratic Party attracted enthusiastic crowds of thousands, while the PAP gatherings were far smaller and quieter affairs.
> 
> Now that opposition groups such as the Workers’ Party and the Singapore Democratic Party have finally established themselves as viable alternatives in the minds of voters, many expect an even more hotly contested vote the next time out.
> 
> “Politics in Singapore tends to change incrementally. But since the elections on May 7, politics will never be the same again,” said Eugene Tan, an assistant law professor at Singapore Management University. “One issue that arose was the question of what style of political system we should have. Behind the figures was a strong unhappiness. As the Prime Minister said, Singaporeans felt the PAP – the only government they’ve ever had – was out of touch.”
> 
> The “Singapore model” that Mr. Lee designed – an authoritarian government presiding over one of the most open economies on Earth – seems to have come to the crossroads that many predicted it must eventually reach. In pushing globalization, Mr. Lee encouraged Singaporeans to be innovative and to interact as much as possible with the outside world. The young people who followed his advice often returned to Singapore wondering why their government tried too hard to control what they said and thought.
> 
> “Lee Kuan Yew, I won’t say lost touch, but did not fully appreciate the things that came with globalization, the democratic ideas that would infuse the young,” said Allan Chong, an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Prof. Chong said he could see the change happening among his graduating students, who once sought positions in the PAP but more and more often started their own businesses and openly supported opposition parties.
> 
> It was youths – mobilizing themselves online, largely over Twitter – who played the biggest part in Singapore’s tiny electoral uprising. “I voted for the first time today. I am also proud to be Singaporean for the very first time,” Melody Chia, a 23-year-old Singaporean living in Beijing, wrote on her blog after casting her ballot at the embassy there.
> 
> Globalization also brought with it a flood of foreign workers, following Mr. Lee’s assertion that Singapore needed to attract as much outside talent as possible to remain competitive. But the sight of outsiders snapping up desirable jobs and university placements – in addition to rising living costs and a widening gap between rich and poor– turned into a wellspring of support for the opposition.
> 
> The opposition charge was led by the centre-left Workers’ Party, which won 12 per cent of the vote, and six of 87 parliament seats. It campaigned on the slogan “towards a First World parliament,” a deliberate play on the greatest achievement of Mr. Lee and the PAP, who are credited with lifting Singapore’s economy from the Third World to the First World.
> 
> While he will no longer be in cabinet, Mr. Lee retained his seat in parliament and will likely continue to have the ear of his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, even as the latter seeks to stand fully outside his father’s shadow for the first time. The elder Mr. Lee will also remain a senior adviser to the Government Investment Corporation, a role that gives him wide influence over the economic side of Singapore’s development, where his greatest achievements lie.
> 
> But it will now be the younger Mr. Lee who will be the new face of Singapore, along with an almost completely new cabinet that he will swear in on Saturday. The Minister Mentor’s retirement from cabinet was matched by that of his successor as prime minister, Goh Chok Tong (who like Mr. Lee had lingered in his own ill-defined post of “Senior Minister”). Three other veteran cabinet ministers were left out of the new cabinet.
> 
> Suddenly, the average age of Singapore’s cabinet has dropped to 53 from 59. The 59-year-old Lee Hsien Loong has gone from the fresh face surrounded by elders, to the oldest and most experienced person at the table.
> 
> But many Singaporeans doubt whether the retiring Minister Mentor will really be able to stay away from the politics of a state he has spent his life constructing.
> 
> “Everybody says [Lee Kuan Yew] is still going to be the power behind the throne. He’s still going to have that clout, that influence,” said Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party, who has been repeatedly jailed for his outspoken opposition to the ruling party and was barred from standing as a candidate in the election because he declared bankruptcy after being convicted of libeling Mr. Lee and his son in a magazine interview. “Nobody expects he’s really going to go away.”
> 
> But to the other 60 per cent of Singaporeans, that’s likely fine for now. On the streets, in cafés and on subways, there’s a bit of swagger to the citizens of this tiny country that long lived in an atmosphere of silent fear and compliance. In Mr. Lee’s sterile and orderly Singapore, you couldn’t spit on the streets, let alone speak your mind.
> 
> The $300 fine for spitting remains in place, but most here have lost their worries about saying what they think. “We still prefer the ruling party, but in a true democracy you need some opposition,” said Patrick Lee, a retired communications consultant. “Lee Kuan Yew did a very good job in the past. But there comes a time when everybody outlives their usefulness.”




Singapore is a complex society: it is about 85% ethnic Chinese which helps explain the extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit that is coupled with deeply ingrained Confucian (very conservative0 social values. It has the political and legal system to which many educated Chinese aspire and which those same Chinese believe must come in lock-step – increased protection for fundamental rights (life, liberty, property) must come with increased respect for an defernce to elders and governors.

The precipitous decline in PAP support will not, in itself, worry the Chinese leaders – what frightens them is the very sight of effective political opposition parties. There is still much for the Chinese to learn in Singapore.


----------



## Edward Campbell

More on this, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/the-little-article-that-rocked-singapore/article2030575/


> The little article that rocked Singapore
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> SINGAPORE— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> Published Friday, May 20, 201
> 
> Catherine Lim still can’t believe the fuss she caused. The idea that she helped provoke a quiet revolution in this city-state – one that 17 years later has shaken the ruling People’s Action Party to its foundations – reduces the pixyish 68-year-old to shoulder-shaking giggles.
> 
> “Who says that?” she says in her breathlessly rapid-fire English when she stops laughing. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Even today, I’m still trying to absorb the impact of that little article.”
> 
> That little article was published in the fall of 1994 in Singapore’s Straits-Times newspaper. In it, Ms. Lim – until then best known as a novelist – committed the shocking act of pointing out that while the long-ruling PAP had done a good job running Singapore’s economy, it had done little to endear itself to those it governed. “There is very little in the way of affectionate regard,” she wrote.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Catherine Lim, one of Singapore's most
> outspoken novelists, poses in front of
> a traditionalChinese painting in her home.
> Luis D'Orey/Reuters
> 
> It was a truth the government didn’t want to hear. In the weeks that followed (and particularly after she wrote an equally blunt follow-up column), Ms. Lim was attacked in print and in person by the government of then-prime minister Goh Chok Tong, who accused her of “demolishing the respect for and standing of the Prime Minister and his government by systematic contempt and denigration in the media” – a serious accusation in a country where government critics often wound up defending themselves in court on charges of libel, or worse.
> 
> Suddenly, Ms. Lim’s columns weren’t welcomed by the Straits Times any more. She was told that she had angered the country’s paramount political figure, Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s authoritarian founder who once said “if you are a trouble maker … it’s our job to politically destroy you.”
> 
> “I understand [why the government was angry]. I knew that what I had done – which seemed innocuous to Western eyes – was to them a gross violation of the Confucianist ethos” of respecting your seniors and superiors, Ms. Lim explained in an interview Friday.
> 
> Flash forward to 2011, and Ms. Lim has reason for her good humour. The recent elections – which saw a best-ever result for the opposition – saw criticism of the government become commonplace on the Internet and particularly on social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. During the campaign, Ms. Lim, who now blogs on her own website (catherinelim.sg), saw her writing “go viral, I think that’s the word,” she says with another giggle. Political scientists credit her with helping get out the youth vote, which swung heavily behind the opposition.
> 
> In the aftermath of the election, Ms. Lim’s one-time nemesis, Mr. Lee, resigned from cabinet after more than five decades near the top of Singaporean politics.
> 
> Ms. Lim insists she has a lot of respect for the man credited as the founder of modern Singapore. In the days after the election, she wrote a one-person play based on Mr. Lee, thinly disguised as the character “Supremo.”
> 
> In the play, Supremo has gone into self-imposed isolation, disgusted at what has become of the country he once ruled. But Ms. Lim says it’s a sympathetic portrayal of a man who gave everything he had to Singapore. “Any extreme view of Lee Kuan Yew would be inaccurate. … [His record] is so nuanced, so ambiguous.”
> 
> But Supremo realized something Ms. Lim says Singaporeans are just discovering in the wake of the May 7 vote. “There is no way to go back to the Lee Kuan Yew period. It’s over, over, over.”




I'm not sure Ms. Lim is correct in saying things are "over, over, over," but they have, irrevocably, changed.

In many respects she is also describing the Chinese Communist Party: it has the respect and gratitude of the Chinese people for 60 years of radical, mostly beneficial change but _“There is very little in the way of affectionate regard."_ People in China no longer dream of being Party members, in fact I know a lady (about 70 years old) who just recently declined a Party membership because she did not believe it would benefit her family - not as much as some other courses that were open to her. It is not just Singapore that is changing, albeit at a glacial pace. Changes in Singapore will resonate around East Asia, including in China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is an interesting opinion piece by a skilled observer:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/indias-and-chinas-uncomfortable-dance/article2046877/ 


> India's and China’s uncomfortable dance
> 
> DAVID MALONE
> 
> From Monday's Globe and Mail
> Published Monday, Jun. 06, 2011
> 
> Asia’s weight in the global economy is rising fast and military capabilities in the region are increasing too.
> 
> A poll of Canadians conducted in February of this year, on which The Globe and Mail reported extensively reveals most Canadians seemingly both disengaged from and cool toward much of Asia.
> 
> China, Japan and India are the heavy hitters. Indonesia and South Korea are also significant, as is, in the Pacific area, Australia. But given Japan’s economic stagnation over the past two decades and its unpromising demographic trends, most Asians see China and India as the principal rivals for influence in the region. The United States, through its unique geo-strategic reach, also remains a major actor in Asia.
> 
> India’s emergence from decades of disappointing economic performance following its independence, and the acceleration of its growth after liberalizing reforms in the early 1990s, adds an important new factor to the Asian equation.
> 
> Relevant also to all of Asia is India’s historic significance, imprinted across the continent through the spread of Buddhism, Hinduism, Indian trading communities and wider cultural influences, most evident in the dynamism of Bollywood. Its rambunctious democracy is widely admired, although questioning of the probity of some of its politicians is too frequently in the spotlight.
> 
> Its current demographics, with a population of 1.2 billion, most of it young, add to its potential. In spite of continuing widespread poverty, India, like China, had attained sufficient economic momentum and resiliency to breeze through the recent global economic crisis.
> 
> They are not equals: China launched economic reforms in the late 1970s following the death of Mao Zedong, more than a decade before India followed suit. It occupies territory three times the size of India’s and its economic wealth is over three times greater, both in absolute terms and per capita. But demographic factors and others may slow China somewhat in decades ahead while India could speed ahead.
> 
> China has been a much greater preoccupation for New Delhi than has any partner in the West, including the U.S., with which India has recently much improved its relationship through an agreement on nuclear co-operation. Although independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, cultivated the new Communist leadership of China in the early 1950s, the relationship soon soured. A brief border war in 1962, which India decisively lost, left New Delhi anxious about the future of its ties with a China then as now allied to India’s most constant regional antagonist, Pakistan.
> 
> Tibet overhangs the relationship just as it overhangs the map of India. New Delhi acquiesced in China’s military takeover of Tibet in 1950, but offered refuge to the Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet in 1959 and still does today. A previous Dalai Lama in 1913 returned to Lhasa from India after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, which had defeated him several years earlier. Beijing clearly does not discount the support the Dalai Lama still enjoys among Tibetans.
> 
> Although China provided strong military and economic support to Pakistan from the mid-1950s onwards, Pakistani adventurism (in triggering a controlled but dangerous border war at Kargil in 1999), and the presence of terrorists operating internationally out of its territory, have inspired a more prudent stance by Beijing that encourages negotiated solutions to the tensions between India and Pakistan.
> 
> Nevertheless, Indian unease about Chinese designs in its neighbourhood, fuelled by minor mutual provocations generally dispelled by the passage of time and by quiet diplomacy, remains strong in spite of rapidly expanding trade links, with China today India’s largest trading partner. China’s close ties with the Burmese junta and with resurgent Sri Lanka, its improving relations with Nepal and Bangladesh and its continuing close links with Pakistan create in India a sense of “encirclement.”
> 
> China, a much larger country with more neighbours, does not experience as much anxiety about India. But the regional influence and growing weight of India, together with the strong regional role of India’s new friend, the United States, could combine to create in Beijing a sense of vulnerability. Both China and India are investing heavily in their navies.
> 
> Thus, India and China are engaged in an uncomfortable dance with each other. Their economic interests, the strongest driver of the foreign policy of each, encourage co-operation, but a degree of competition is inevitable. Meanwhile, nervous countries in Southeast Asia, dismayed by China’s strong-arm tactics during a brief clash with Japan last year, are only too happy to see the rise of another Asian power that China cannot cow.
> 
> Both China and India have given priority to their struggle for economic development. Each has been a prudent regional actor over the past several decades, and a degree of strategic restraint by each seems likely, even though China’s recent sharper tone has disconcerted neighbours. The continent and the rest of the globe are large enough to accommodate the peaceful rise of both. And the military capacity of each, including nuclear weapons, diminishes the likelihood of serious aggression by the other.
> 
> What happens over coming decades in Asia, as its geopolitics undergo tectonic shifts, could affect us all, not least by either enhancing or disrupting international trade and hence our prosperity. And war in Asia, among nuclear-weapons states, would be catastrophic globally, for Canadians as for others. The continent will require close study and will reward serious engagement in decades to come.
> 
> _David M. Malone, a former Canadian envoy to the UN and to India, is president of Canada’s International Development Research Centre. His book_ Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy[/i] appears in Canada this month.[/i]




I agree, broadly, with David Malone. Asia, and therefore the outcome of the Chinese-Indian _dance_, matters to us. It matters infinitely more than anything and everything happening in Libya and Afghanistan, combined. The _Arab Spring_ and, indeed, the Afro-Arab-Asian (except Indonesian) _Islamic Crescent_ is a significant _irritant_ but *not* of any real strategic significance. Yes, there will be more and more _Islamic_ nukes, and yes, _Islamists_ (religious terrorists) will use nukes against Israel and at least one Western country – possibly the USA – and yes, that will be a shame, but it will not be of any real _*historic*_ importance. Asia, on the other, will write much of the world's history for the next 500 years, just as the Anglo-Americans did for the last 500 – we would do well to be ready for the change.


----------



## FoverF

> The continent... will reward serious engagement in decades to come.



If you back the right horse.


----------



## a_majoor

This could be either a desire to build profile or trouble making, even if you believe in the message of this rating company:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/china-ratings-house-says-us-defaulting-report-054309883.html



> China ratings house says US defaulting: report
> 
> AFP – Fri, 10 Jun, 2011
> 
> A Chinese ratings house has accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt, state media said Friday, a day after Beijing urged Washington to put its fiscal house in order.
> 
> "In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting," Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings, was quoted by the Global Times saying.
> 
> Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies -- eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Guan said.
> 
> Guan did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.
> 
> The US government will run out of room to spend more on August 2 unless Congress bumps up the borrowing limit beyond $14.29 trillion -- but Republicans are refusing to support such a move until a deficit cutting deal is reached.
> 
> Ratings agency Fitch on Wednesday joined Moody's and Standard & Poor's to warn the United States could lose its first-class credit rating if it fails to raise its debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on loans.
> 
> A downgrade could sharply raise US borrowing costs, worsening the country's already dire fiscal position, and send shock waves through the financial world, which has long considered US debt a benchmark among safe-haven investments.
> 
> China is by far the top holder of US debt and has in the past raised worries that the massive US stimulus effort launched to revive the economy would lead to mushrooming debt that erodes the value of the dollar and its Treasury holdings.
> 
> Beijing cut its holdings of US Treasury securities for the fifth month in a row to $1.145 trillion in March, down $9.2 billion from February and 2.6 percent less than October's peak of $1.175 trillion, US data showed last month.
> 
> Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei on Thursday urged the United States to adopt "effective measures to improve its fiscal situation".
> Dagong has made a name for itself by hitting out at its three Western rivals, saying they caused the financial crisis by failing to properly disclose risk.
> 
> The Chinese agency, which is trying to build an international profile, has given the United States and several other nations lower marks than they received from the the big three.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The USA is, _de facto_, already a _deadbeat_ country - on a par with Greece. The US Treasury has used some procedural slight of hand to fed of _de jure_ default until August.

This _de facto_ default need not be a disaster, it *may* even make Americans, maybe a few tens of millions of Americans, wake up their own follies and, in 2012, elect responsible legislators - president, senators and representatives - to replace the current crop of clowns, Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers alike.


----------



## CougarKing

Not surprising considering that of those who emigrated to Canada on investor's immigrant visas, 70% came from Taiwan, the mainland or Hong Kong, IIRC.



> link
> 
> *China's 'Wealth Drain': New Signs That Rich Chinese Are Set on Emigrating*
> 
> By Xin Haiguang / Economic Observer / WorldCrunch Saturday, June 11, 2011
> 
> This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global—news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Economic Observer.
> 
> BEIJING — Is China facing a "Wealth Drain"? Do too many of the best and brightest — and above all, richest — Chinese dream of packing up their accumulated capital, and going to live abroad?
> 
> According to a new study, a majority of Chinese who have more than 10 million Yuan ($1.53 million) worth of individual assets find the idea of real—estate investment a lot less tempting than so—called "investment emigration." Nearly 60% of people interviewed claim they are either considering emigration through investment overseas, or have already completed the process, according to the 2011 Private Wealth Report on China published by China Merchants Bank and a business consulting firm Bain & Company. The richer you are, the study suggests, the likelier it is that you resort to emigration. And among those who possess more than 100 million yuan, 27 % have already emigrated while 47% are considering leaving.
> (See: "On the Cutting Edge - China's Extraordinary Buildings")
> *The fact that more and more rich Chinese are seeking to emigrate is turning into a hot topic in China, and statistics prove that the trend is a real one. According to Caixin online, a Chinese website specialized in finance, the compound annual growth rate of overseas investment by Chinese individuals approached 100% between 2008 and 2010. The compound growth rate of the Chinese who used investments to emigrate to the United States in the past five years is 73%.*
> 
> So why are wealthy Chinese so eager to leave their country? The simplest answer is that there are a lot of things in China that even the richest cannot buy (emigration is obviously not one of them). China's rich are fond of saying that nothing "is a problem if money can solve it." Among the irresolvable problems that spark emigration, there are material ones, and emotional ones.
> The former includes issues like laws and regulations, the education system, social welfare, inheritance tax, quality of air, investing atmosphere, food safety, ability to travel, and so on. In short, these are the material factors that any State must provide to its people in order to ensure their happiness. In emerging countries such as China, these factors are still often found wanting.
> Emotional reasons behind rich people's immigration are generally linked to the lack of a sense of personal safety, including safety of personal wealth, as well as fear about an uncertain future.
> (See: "China Stamps Out Democracy Protests")
> It thus appears that it is a certain "lack of well—being" that is pushing wealthy Chinese to emigrate. The results of the Private Wealth Report are very much in line with other studies. A recent Gallop Wellbeing Survey showed that most Chinese people feel depressed, even as China has sky—high economic growth rates that Europe and America can only dream of. According to the survey, which asked respondents to choose between "thriving," "struggling," and "suffering" to describe their situation, only 12% think themselves as "thriving," while 17% describe themselves as "suffering," and 71% "struggling." The number of Chinese who feel that their life is improving is comparable to the number of Afghans and Yemeni who feel the same way, while the number of persons feeling they are "struggling" is approximately the same as in Haiti, Azerbaijan and Nepal.
> It is a paradox that, in a country where more and more people are getting richer by the day — albeit to the detriment of the poor, who have benefitted very little from the country's new wealth — the general feeling of well—being should remain at rock—bottom. The poor grumble while the rich flee.
> The truth is that, unless they emigrate, the wealthy have to suffer from the same causes of unhappiness as the poor. Take food safety. Last year, when a Chinese woman living in Canada was asked by the International Herald Tribune why she had left her country, she said it was because of the Sanlu (toxic baby milk) case, and also because of the "hatred against the rich." Her answer highlights the fact that, as the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider, and the poor are complaining more and more, the rich are also getting more nervous. Some rich people even worry that the "redistribution of wealth might start all over again."
> (See: "Fellow Dissident on Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize ")
> Although the danger seems overblown for now, people are starting to wonder where the public hatred of the rich might lead. The wealthy also know that they bear some of the responsibility for the unequal distribution of wealth. The so—called "original sin of wealth" is not totally without foundation, and it is often difficult for the rich to stop enriching themselves. Fluctuating market conditions bring out a survival instinct that sometimes makes them commit illegal or immoral acts. Once they realize this, they often chose to avoid the trap by emigrating and starting afresh.
> The situation would not be as serious, of course, if the number of people deciding to leave were low. But once a few personal choices take the shape of a massive drain, the consequences of their departure on the economy and on society, through the example they set, can be dire.
> An even bigger cause of concern is that, when rich people pack their money and leave, not only are they no longer identifying with their country, but they are also avoiding their social obligations. While the reason behind these people's decision matters little, the undeniable fact is that they make money from this society, but they refuse to give anything back.
> Rich people who decide to move to a foreign country should know that, by doing so, they are stoking the dissatisfaction among those who stay behind. The poor get angrier because they cannot leave, and their hatred towards the remaining rich grows even bigger. This is the most corrosive thing that can happen to a society.


----------



## CougarKing

The Chinese carrier SHI LANG//施琅 is reportedly armed:

link



> *Shi Lang Is Official And Armed*
> 
> June 9, 2011: In the last few months, the new Chinese aircraft carrier, the Shi Lang (formerly Varyag) has apparently had all of its weapons installed. The government has also officially admitted that the Shi Lang actually exists. *Meanwhile, numerous unofficial photos have appeared showing the two main weapon systems that have been installed. Along each side of the ship are, first (near the bow, or front of the vessel) an 18 cell launcher for FL-3000N anti-missile missiles. Aft (rear of the ship), there is another FL-3000N. Right behind that is an AK-1030 automatic cannon. This gives the Shi Lang four FL-3000N and two AK-1030 systems. There may also be four more gun or missile systems amidships (in the middle), two on each side. But no one has gotten a clear photo of these yet. These might be the smaller AK-630.*
> 
> The AK-1030 is an upgraded (to ten barrels) model of the older AK-730 (seven barrel) and AK-630 (six barrel), close-in anti-missile automatic cannon. All fire 30mm shells at incoming anti-ship missiles. The FL-3000N is similar to the American RAM anti-missile missile system, except that they come in a 24 missile and 18 missile launchers and are less accurate.
> 
> FL-3000N was only introduced three years ago, and uses smaller missiles than RAM. The FL-3000N missiles have a max range of nine kilometers (about half that for very fast incoming missiles). The 120mm, two meter long missiles use a similar guidance system to RAM, but are not as agile in flight.
> 
> Missiles are increasingly preferred over cannon for short range anti-missile defense. Thus over the last decade, the U.S. Navy Phalanx 20mm autocannon anti-missile system has been more frequently replaced by SeaRAM. What's interesting about this is that SeaRAM is basically the Phalanx system, with the 20mm gun replaced with a box of eleven RAM (RIM-116 "Rolling Air Frame") missiles. The Phalanx was developed in the 1970s, and entered service in 1977 (about the same time as the original Russian AK-630).
> 
> RAM was developed in the 1980s, and didn't enter service until 1993. RAM has a longer range (7.5 kilometers) than the Phalanx (2-3 kilometers) and was originally designed to be aimed using the ship's fire control systems. Phalanx, on the other hand, has its own radar and fire control system and, once turned on, will automatically fire at any incoming missiles. The latest AK-630/730/1030 operate the same way. This is necessary, as some anti-ship missiles travel at over a 500 meters a second. With SeaRAM, you've got a little more time, and can knock down the incoming missile farther from the ship. This is important, because it was feared that a large, very fast anti-ship missile (which the Russians prefer, and sell to foreigners), even when shot up by Phalanx, might still end up having parts of it slam into the target ship. Since SeaRAM has eleven missiles ready to fire, it can also engage several targets at once, something the Phalanx could not do. The ten barrel Type 1030 is more powerful than Phalanx, with its 30mm shells having a range of four or more kilometers.
> 
> The RAM missiles are 127mm in diameter, three meters (9.3 feet) long and weigh 73.6 kg (162 pounds) each. The terminal guidance system is heat seeking. Basically, it uses the rocket motor and warhead from the Sidewinder air-to-air missile, and the guidance system from the Stinger shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile. SeaRAM missiles cost about $450,000 each, which is probably at least 50 percent more than the FL-3000N missiles. SeaRAM is meant to provide protection for combat support ships that normally have no defenses, or at least no combat radars and fire control system. The new LCS will use the SeaRAM as well.
> 
> The Shi Lang/Varyag is one of the Kuznetsov class carriers that Russia began building in the 1980s. Originally the Kuznetsovs were to be 90,000 ton, nuclear powered ships, similar to American carriers (complete with steam catapults). Instead, because of the high cost, and the complexity of modern (American style) carriers, the Russians were forced to scale back their plans, and ended up with 65,000 ton (full load) ships that lacked steam catapults, and used a ski jump type flight deck instead. Nuclear power was dropped, but the Kuznetsov class was still a formidable design. The 323 meter (thousand foot) long ship normally carries a dozen navalized Su-27s (called Su-33s), 14 Ka-27PL anti-submarine helicopters, two electronic warfare helicopters and two search and rescue helicopters. But the ship was meant to regularly carry 36 Su-33s and sixteen helicopters. The ship carries 2,500 tons of aviation fuel, allowing it to generate 500-1,000 aircraft and helicopter sorties. Crew size is 2,500 (or 3,000 with a full aircraft load.) Only two ships of this class exist; the original Kuznetsov, which is in Russian service, and the Varyag.
> 
> Like most modern carriers, the only weapons carried are anti-missile systems like AK-1030 and FL-3000N, plus some heavy machine-guns (which are often kept inside the ship, and mounted outside only when needed.) However, Russian practice was been to sometimes install long range anti-ship missiles as well. China may also do this with Shi Lang.



Plus another article from last month from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13692558



> *The head of China's General Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has confirmed that China's first aircraft carrier is under construction.
> 
> Gen Chen Bingde refused to say when the carrier - a remodelled Soviet-era vessel, the Varyag - would be ready.*
> 
> A member of his staff said the carrier would pose no threat to other nations.
> 
> The 300m (990ft) carrier, which is being built in the north-east port of Dalian, has been one of China's worst-kept secrets, analysts say.
> 
> Gen Chen made his comments to the Chinese-language Hong Kong Commercial Daily newspaper.
> 
> Symbol of power
> The PLA - the largest army in the world - is hugely secretive about its defence programme.
> 
> The carrier was constructed in the 1980s for the Soviet navy but was never completed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the rusting hull of the Varyag sat in dockyards in Ukraine.
> 
> “
> Start Quote
> 
> The giant, grey hulk of China's newest warship, 60,000 tonnes of steel, sits at a dockside in the port of Dalian, almost ready to set sail”
> 
> Read Damian Grammaticas' report from Dalian
> A Chinese company with links to the PLA bought the Varyag claiming it wanted to turn it into a floating casino in Macau.
> 
> The carrier is thought to be nearly finished, and is expected to begin sea trials later this year.
> 
> But the BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing says that does not mean it will then be ready to undertake operational duties.
> 
> Learning how to operate it - and fly planes off it - will take a few more years to master, our correspondent says.
> 
> Lt Gen Qi Jianguo, assistant chief of the general staff, told the Hong Kong Commercial Daily that even after the aircraft carrier was deployed, it would "definitely not sail to other countries' territorial waters".
> 
> "All of the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers - they are symbols of a great nation," he was quoted as saying.
> 
> Lt Gen Qi said China had always followed a "defensive" principle for its military strategy.
> 
> 
> "It would have been better for us if we acted sooner in understanding the oceans and mapping out our blue-water capabilities earlier.
> 
> "We are now facing heavy pressure in the oceans whether in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea or the Taiwan Straits," he said.
> 
> China is engaged in maritime border disputes with several countries - including Vietnam and the Philippines.
> 
> The US, which has 11 fully-capable carrier strike groups, has also expressed concern about its rising naval ambitions.
> 
> *The PLA has invested heavily in submarines. It is believed to be close to deploying the world's first "carrier-killer" ballistic missile designed to sink aircraft carriers while they are manoeuvring at sea up to 1,500km offshore, and it is building its own stealth fighter aircraft along with advanced carrier-based aircraft built from Russian designs.
> 
> All of these can target US bases, US ships and US carriers in Asia.
> 
> India is another emerging power pursuing a similar path - with an ex-Soviet carrier being modified for the Indian Navy, and work already under way on a first home-built vessel as well.*
> 
> Over time, these developments will affect the maritime balance of power in Asia, says the BBC's defence and security correspondent Nick Childs.
> 
> China says other countries have nothing to fear, but its recent assertive diplomatic and military muscle-flexing has created waves in the region, he says.



Sorry to nitpick, but didn't they forget Spain in the list of nations with carriers above (with Janes as a source)? And I don't recall the Dutch having had carriers in recent years.


----------



## a_majoor

Many more nations have "carriers", but I believe most of them are actually helicopter carriers (like the new Japanese Hyūga class). A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that most nations owning aircraft carriers only have one or two, which leaves a big question about sustainability of operations. To have the ability to project power over sustained perriods of time usually requires three ships; one on station, one at sea (coming or going) and one in port undergoing replenishment and refitting. Another ship as insurance would be nice as well.

In this regard the Chinese PLAN is well served by its large fleet of submarines, the aircraft carrier would be more the visible symbol of power and presteige that can be paraded on visits and exercises.


----------



## CougarKing

The carrier is slated to have its first sea trials next week:



> *First China aircraft carrier sea trial ‘next week’*
> Agence France-Presse
> 6:01 pm | Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _China's first aircraft carrier is under restoration in a shipyard in Dalian in northeastern China's Liaoning province. AP File Photo_
> 
> 
> 
> 
> HONG KONG—China’s first aircraft carrier—a remodelled Soviet-era vessel—will go on sea trials next week, a report said Tuesday, amid escalating tensions in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
> 
> China’s top military official reportedly confirmed earlier this month that Beijing is building a huge aircraft carrier, the first acknowledgement of the ship’s existence from China’s secretive defense program.
> 
> *On Tuesday, the Hong Kong Commercial Daily, which broke the story of the vessel’s confirmation, quoted unnamed military sources saying the carrier will go on sea trials on July 1 but will not be officially launched until October.
> 
> The sources said the test has been expedited in view of rising tensions in the South China Sea—home to two potentially oil-rich archipelagos, the Paracels and Spratlys—in recent weeks.
> 
> China’s military “hopes it will show the strength of the Chinese maritime forces to deter other nations which are eyeing the South China Sea in order to calm tensions,” the sources said.
> 
> They added that the sea trial date was also picked to mark the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, but noted that factors such as weather could affect the planned test run.*
> 
> China’s military did not immediately respond to an Agence France-Presse request for comment.
> 
> Tensions between Beijing and other rival claimants to the strategically vital West Philippine Sea have heightened recently.
> 
> The Philippines and Vietnam in particular have expressed alarm at what they say are increasingly aggressive actions by China in the disputed waters, but Beijing has insisted it is committed to resolving the issue peacefully.
> 
> Chinese officials have previously said its first aircraft carrier would not pose a threat to other nations, in accordance with Beijing’s defensive military strategy.
> 
> The Chinese aircraft carrier plan was confirmed when the chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, Chen Bingde confirmed the ship’s existence in an interview with the Hong Kong paper.
> 
> He said the 300 meter (990-foot) former Soviet carrier, originally called the Varyag, was being overhauled. The ship is currently based in the northeast port of Dalian.
> 
> An expert on China’s military has reportedly said the carrier would be used for training and as a model for a future indigenously-built ship.
> 
> The Varyag was originally built for the Soviet navy but construction was interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
> 
> The PLA—the largest army in the world—is hugely secretive about its defense programs, which benefit from a large military budget boosted by the nation’s runaway economic growth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Plus tensions have been rising between China, Vietnam and the Philippines over the Spratleys since early this month:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *The Philippines is sending its biggest warship to the Scarborough shoal in the West Philippine Sea after China sent its biggest civilian patrol ship to the disputed waters. *
> 
> Radio Australia's reporter in Manila, Shirley Escalante, says the BRP Rajah Humabon will be sent to the Philippines' southwestern border, near the disputed Spratly Islands.
> 
> Navy chief Vice Admiral Alexander Pama says the warship will guard against intrusions in Philippine waters and "poaching".
> 
> link 1
> 
> while in Vietnam...
> 
> link 2
> 
> 
> HANOI, Vietnam - *Hundreds of people in Vietnam launched a third week of protests against China on Sunday amid escalating tensions in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, where both countries recently conducted live-fire military drills.*
> About 300 people gathered near the Chinese Embassy in the capital, Hanoi, and marched through the streets, yelling "Down With China!" and demanding that their powerful northern neighbour stay out of Vietnam's territory. Crowds also gathered in southern Ho Chi Minh City.
> 
> "We will fight for our country if the nation needs us," said student Nguyen Manh Ha, 20. "Not only me, but all Vietnamese people will die to protect our territory."
> 
> Protests are extremely rare in Vietnam and are typically quashed quickly by security forces, but Hanoi has allowed the demonstrations to go on for the past three Sundays.
> 
> "I'm here today to protect my country from an invading China," said Nguyen Long, 82, who fought in a short, bloody land border war with China in 1979. "I'm sure those in the embassy are listening to us shouting 'Down With China!'"
> 
> Relations between the communist countries hit a low point after two incidents in the past month involving clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese boats in the South China Sea.
> 
> Vietnam accuses Chinese vessels of hindering oil exploration surveys in an area 200 nautical miles off its central coast that it claims as its economic exclusive zone. China says Vietnam illegally entered its waters near the disputed Spratly islands and endangered Chinese fishermen.
> 
> The two sides have a long history of exchanging diplomatic jabs over maritime incidents, mainly involving areas around the believed resource-rich Spratly and Paracel islands, which are claimed all or in part by Vietnam, China and several other Asian countries. But the current spat has become much more hostile.
> 
> Vietnam held live-fire naval exercises off its central coast last Monday — the same day the government issued an order outlining who would be exempt from a military draft. On Friday, China announced it had also recently held three days and nights of drills in the South China Sea, though it did not give exact dates.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Click to expand...
Click to expand...


----------



## FoverF

> the BRP Rajah Humabon will be sent to the Philippines' southwestern border, near the disputed Spratly Islands.



The BRP Rajah Humabon is a 68-year-old destroyer escort, with (according to wikipedia) no missile armament embarked. 

Better hope nobody calls your bluff.


----------



## CougarKing

> *Chinese UAV spotted by MSDF Aircraft*
> 
> By
> 
> 
> James Simpson
> – June 23, 2011
> 
> New Pacific Institute link
> 
> Lots of news today regarding Japanese confirmation of an operational UAV in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy. Blogger @JS_Susumu, from Surveillance to Go Nowhere, passed along this Sankei report from earlier in the day (June 23rd):
> 
> *Confirmation of China’s UAV: Chinese Navy Training in the Pacific*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese naval UAV (top-right) spotted by the MSDF (Source: MoD)
> 
> Passing between Miyakojima and the main island of Okinawa, *a Chinese naval fleet was sailing in the East Philippine Sea on a recent training operation when a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force aircraft spotted a unmanned aerial vehicle in the air, it was announced today. This is the first confirmed sighting of a Chinese UAV. *  The Chinese fleet has been on a two-week long voyage in the Pacific Ocean to practice its gunnery and other skills. Between the evening of the 22nd and early dawn of the 23rd, the fleet passed between Okinawa and Miyakojima sailing northwest believed on its return to base.
> 
> According to the Ministry of Defense, on June 8th and 9th, the Chinese fleet set sail into the East China Sea in a southeastern direction, split into three groups including missile destroyers and frigates. While heading towards the East Philippine Sea after its training, an MSDF aircraft on patrol at the time spotted a UAV flying in the vicinity of the fleet and took photographs for further confirmation. The UAV is believed to have taken off and landed on the deck of one of the vessels.
> 
> The Ministry of Defense released the photograph of the UAV, as shown above, with an accompanying statement:
> 
> On the Chinese Naval Fleet Movements
> From June 22nd (Wed) to the 23rd (Thurs), the TAKANAMI, CHOUKAI, and KURUMA from MSDF Escort Flotilla 2 (based at Sasebo), *sighted an 11-ship  Chinese naval fleet consisting of three Sovremenny-class destroyers, one Jiangkai II-class frigate, one Jiang-wei II frigate, two Jiang-wei I frigates, a Fuqing-class oiler, a Dajiang-class auxiliary submarine rescue vessel, a Tuzhong-class fleet tug, a Dongdiao-class electronic intelligence ship, in an area of sea approximately 110 km northeast of Miyakojima, heading northwest from the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea*.
> 
> In addition, from June 8th (Wed) to the 9th (Thurs), the fleet was spotted in an area of sea approximately 100 km northeast of Miyakojima, heading southeast from the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea, after which it was confirmed to have engaged in gunnery practise in an area of sea approximately 450 km southwest of Okinotorishima as well as unmanned aerial vehicle and onboard helicopter flight training and seaborne replenishment.
> 
> Kyle Mizokami is following up on these translations with some further analysis and speculation: read more here.
> 
> [Special thanks and H/T to @JS_Susumu for all his translation help]


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting consequenses if true....

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2011/07/02/how-china-kills-creativity/



> *How China Kills Creativity By Jiang Xueqin*
> July 2, 2011
> 
> Nowadays people may admire China’s economy, but not Chinese creativity. Chinese architecture and art, music and movies are derivative, and many a Chinese enterprise is merely a carbon copy of an American one. China’s best schools may produce the world’s best test-takers, but the United States’ best schools produce the world’s most creative talent.
> 
> In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks outlines the four-step learning process that teaches students to be creative: knowledge acquisition (research), internalization (familiarity with material), self-questioning and examination (review and discussion), and the ordering and mastery of this knowledge (thesis formulation and essay writing).
> 
> However, this isn’t a linear process, Brooks points out, which means that the learner ‘(surfs) in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together – first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then wilfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product.’
> 
> ‘The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step,’ David Brooks continues. ‘By the end, (the learner) was seeing the world around him in a new way.’
> 
> But what permits our brains to turn a chaotic sea of random facts and knowledge into an island of calm understanding? Believe it or not, it’s our emotions that permit us ultimately to become creative thinkers. In his book The Accidental Mind, the neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how emotions organize our memories:
> 
> ‘In our lives, we have a lot of experiences and many of these we will remember until we die. We have many mechanisms for determining which experiences are stored (where were you on 9/11?) and which are discarded (what did you have for dinner exactly 1 month ago?). Some memories will fade with time and some will be distorted by generalization (can you distinctly remember your seventeenth haircut?). We need a signal to say, “This is an important memory. Write this down and underline it.” That signal is emotion. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningful…These are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for.’
> 
> What this means is that memories are ultimately emotional experiences, and that effectively learning must involve the learner emotionally. The very best US schools are seen as such because they inspire their students to be curious, interested, and excited; China’s very best schools gain their reputation by doing the opposite.
> 
> Thinking is the conscious effort of applying our memories to understand a new external stimulus, and creativity is asserting individual control over this process to create a synthesis between memory and stimuli. In other words, thinking is really about applying previous emotional experiences to understand a new emotional experience, whilst creativity is the mixing of old and new emotional experiences to a create an entirely new and original emotional experience.
> 
> The best US education institutions endow students with creativity by providing a relaxed and secure learning environment in which students share in the refined emotional experiences of humanity by reading books and developing the logic necessary to share in collective emotional experiences through debate and essay writing. A dynamic learning environment allows students at many US schools to feel joy and despair, frustration and triumph, and it’s these ups and downs that encode the creative learning process into our neural infrastructure and make it so transformative.
> 
> A Chinese school is both a stressful and stale place, forcing students to remember facts in order to excel in tests. Neuroscientists know that stress hampers the ability of the brain to convert experience into memory, and psychologists know that rewarding students solely for test performance leads to stress, cheating, and disinterest in learning. But ultimately, the most harmful thing that a Chinese school does, from a creativity perspective, is the way in which it separates emotion from memory by making learning an unemotional experience.
> 
> Whatever individual emotions Chinese students try to bring into the classroom, they are quickly stamped out. As I have previously written, from the first day of school, students who ask questions are silenced and those who try to exert any individuality are punished. What they learn is irrelevant and de-personalized, abstract and distant, further removing emotion from learning.  If any emotion is involved, it’s pain. But the pain is so constant and monotonous (scolding teachers, demanding parents, mindless memorization, long hours of sitting in a cramped classroom) that it eventually ceases to be an emotion.
> 
> To understand the consequences of Chinese pedagogy, consider the example of ‘Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything,’ whom David Brooks writes about in The Social Animal:
> 
> ‘In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly…Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distil. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.’
> 
> Shereshevskii had a neural defect that prohibited his brain from prioritizing, synthesizing, and controlling his memories to permit him to formulate an understanding of self and the world. Like many a Chinese student today, he could experience, but he could not feel.
> 
> Chinese schools are producing a nation of Shereshevskiis, students with photographic memory and instant recall, but who can never be creative.


----------



## vhaust

After several years of non-Chinese education in the maths and sciences (post-secondary studies),
I find that when a student doesn't memorize certain shortcuts, 
the exam cannot be completed on time,
and when a student tells a teacher that the time allocation wasn't enough, 
he/she will tell the student that's how it is and it is not a problem
because some students still manage to get A's.
Teachers also have to maintain a certain grade distribution and time constraint
is very effective in this regard since students have different thinking and writing speed.
To be an A student, one must memorize certain shortcuts.


----------



## a_majoor

Worrying news on the financial front:

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/06/30/could-china-be-the-next-greece/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29



> *Could China Be the Next Greece?*
> 
> Posted by Roya Wolverson Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 2:00 pm
> 
> There's a lot of finger wagging going on in the world about America's profligate ways. And a lot of comparisons between the budget troubles of the U.S. and the horrors facing Greece. The West, the story goes, stupidly spent  beyond its means while emerging markets wisely saved their pennies for rainy days like these. But the West isn't the only part of the world grappling with fiscal troubles. Growth darling China has its own debt problems, and some analysts think those could wreak far more havoc on the global economy than what's going on Greece.
> 
> *The Chinese government, which just produced its first national audit of local finances, announced this week that local governments could owe as much as 30% of China's GDP. That's a good deal more than the government's official debt load of less than 20% of GDP. And some analysts are putting China's real debt levels at three to four times those levels.*
> (Read: Dear Greece, Why Not Just Default?)
> 
> The Financial Times reports:
> 
> "If you take a very broad view of the Chinese government's contingent liabilities rather than explicit debt on the books then the number comes to well over 150 per cent of China's GDP in 2010," according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University in the US.
> 
> If the China bears turn out to be right, just how bad could things get? London hedge fund manager David Yarrow said in a recent investor's letter that Europe's debt crisis is far less worrisome because people have adjusted to the idea, and so markets know what's coming. But whether China can handle its debt troubles is still up for debate. And a debt implosion in China would wreak far more damage, partly because it's not something markets have priced in.
> (Read: Hard of Soft Landing for China? How About No Landing)
> 
> One reason for that is that no one knows how indebted China really is, since its government is prone to fuzzy math (even fuzzier, perhaps, that the government of Greece). The Economist's Ryan Avent chalked up a good graph to estimate China's total debts in light of the local debt announcement, including what China owes for splashing out on things like high speed rail and bad bank loans. He has some upbeat conclusions to offset the scary new estimates about local debts:
> 
> [China's debts are] not much higher than they have been across a period in which the Chinese economy grew extremely rapidly. Yes, local government borrowing soared behind efforts to keep the economy humming through the global crisis. But that rise has been offset by falling national and bank-restructuring bills.
> 
> All told, Avent estimates China's debt-to-GDP ratio is roughly 80%, which, if coupled with China's expected 5% and 9% over the next few years and fairly conservative spending, would put China back in the black in no time. That's a lot different than the situation in Greece, where debt levels are equally high, but growth is nowhere in sight and lenders are pulling away. There's also the fact that, unlike in the U.S. and in Greece, China is toting around some $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, which makes it easy to raise money in a flash when times get tough.
> 
> But here's where things get tricky. For China to keep up its growth rate, its consumers must continue to spend. That's a tough bet if inflation continues to rise. Of course, Avent argues just the opposite. Inflation, combined with China's "repressed" financial system (it's not easy for the average Joe in China to get a good loan or find places other than housing to invest), allows the government to easily pay back creditors by siphoning off the savings of its people, he says. An interview I did last year with Princeton University's JC de Swaan explains how this works:
> 
> The government has historically focused on favoring the corporate sector, particularly on its exporters. A good example is the government controls on deposit yields and lending rates. Historically, China has had low deposit yields, which have predominantly hurt households because they're the savers. And they've had low lending rates, which have predominantly helped the corporate sector, and particularly many factories and exporters.
> 
> That may help out the government's balance sheet in a pinch, but it also leaves Chinese consumers struggling to spend more than they already do, which is the key component to China's growth. Meanwhile, China's biggest consumers, Europe and the U.S., are headed down the drain. A sharper slowdown in the West, combined with China's tricky leadership handover next year, could knock down China's growth rates a good deal lower than many expect. And if there's anything to be learned from Greece and the U.S., it's that growing your way out of debt doesn't always go as planned. China isn't Greece yet, but it isn't out of the clear either.
> 
> Read more: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/06/30/could-china-be-the-next-greece/#ixzz1R6CwWibF


----------



## CougarKing

Is it just me or the tail looks like it came from China's J7 fighter though from nose to wing, it looks like it got inspiration from the American F4 Phantom?








> *China’s Carrier Jet Trainer*
> 
> In case ya’ll didn’t see this earlier, it’s a snapshot of China’s new carrier jet trainer dubbed the* JT-9* that China Defense Blog spotted on the PLA Daily website. *Yup, building this trainer is a serious step toward qualifying pilots to fly off China’s soon-to-be complete aircraft carrier Shi Lang. The *  PLAN intends to use that ship to figure out how to operate an aircraft carrier — one of the world’s most complex and powerful weapon systems — successfully.
> 
> Here’s a great broken English translation of what the little jet is designed to do from the Chinese site:
> 
> “This type of fighter trainer will be mainly used by the pilots of the ship-based fighters to conduct simulated take-off and landing training on carrier deck.”
> 
> These simulated take-offs and landings are probably being done at several mock-ups of the Shi Lang’s flight deck — complete with arrestor cables and a ski jump ramp — reported to exist in China. Once pilots learn the basics of flying off a carrier, they’ll likely move on to the J-15 — an upgraded Chinese version of Russia’s Sukhoi Su-33 naval fighter.
> 
> 
> 
> Read more: Defense Tech link


----------



## CougarKing

link



> *Ocean floor muddies China's grip on '21st-century gold'*
> By Richard Ingham | AFP – Sun, 3 Jul, 2011
> 
> 
> *China's monopoly over rare-earth metals could be challenged by the discovery of massive deposits of these hi-tech minerals in mud on the Pacific floor, a study on Sunday suggests.
> 
> China accounts for 97 percent of the world's production of 17 rare-earth elements, which are essential for electric cars, flat-screen TVs, iPods, superconducting magnets, lasers, missiles, night-vision goggles, wind turbines and many other advanced products.*
> 
> These elements carry exotic names such as *neodymium, promethium and yttrium *but in spite of their "rare-earth" tag are in fact abundant in the planet's crust.
> 
> The problem, though, is that land deposits of them are thin and scattered around, so sites which are commercially exploitable or not subject to tough environment restrictions are few.
> 
> As a result, the 17 elements have sometimes been dubbed "21st-century gold" for their rarity and value.
> 
> Production of them is almost entirely centred on China, which also has a third of the world's reserves. Another third is held together by former Soviet republics, the United States and Australia.
> 
> But a new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, points to an extraordinary concentration of rare-earth elements in thick mud at great depths on the Pacific floor.
> 
> Japanese geologists studied samples from 78 sites covering a major portion of the centre-eastern Pacific between 120 and 180 degrees longitude.
> 
> Drills extracted sedimentary cores to depths that in place were more than 50 metres (165 feet) below the sea bed.
> 
> More than 2,000 of these cores were chemically tested for content in rare-earth elements.
> 
> The scientists found rich deposits in samples taken more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the Pacific's mid-ocean ridges.
> 
> The material had taken hundreds of millions of years to accumulate, depositing at the rate of less than half a centimetre (0.2 of an inch) per thousand years. They were probably snared by action with a hydrothermal mineral called phillipsite.
> 
> At one site in the central North Pacific, an area of just one square kilometre (0.4 of a square mile) could meet a fifth of the world's annual consumption of rare metals and yttrium, says the paper.
> 
> Lab tests show the deposits can be simply removed by rinsing the mud with diluted acids, a process that takes only a couple of hours and, say the authors, would not have any environmental impact so long as the acids are not dumped in the ocean.
> 
> A bigger question is whether the technology exists for recovering the mud at such great depths -- 4,000 to 5,000 metres (13,000 to 16,250 feet) -- and, if so, whether this would be commercially viable.
> 
> In an email exchange with AFP, lead author Yasuhiro Kato, a professor of economic geology and geochemistry at the University of Tokyo, said the response from mining companies was as yet unknown, "because nobody knows the presence of the (rare-earth) -rich mud that we have discovered."
> 
> "I am not an engineer, just a geoscientist," Kato said. "But about 30 years ago, a German mining company succeeded in recovering deep-sea mud from the Red Sea. So I believe positively that our deep-sea mud is technologically developable as a mineral resource."
> 
> *The market for rare-earth elements has tightened considerably over the last couple of years.
> 
> China has slashed export quotas, consolidated the industry and announced plans to build national reserves, citing environmental concerns and domestic demand.
> 
> These moves led to a fall of 9.3 percent in China's exports of rare-earth metals last year, triggering complaints abroad of strategic hoarding and price-gouging.*
> 
> Japanese industry sources also said China temporarily cut off exports last year during a territorial row between Asia's two largest economies.
> ...


----------



## Pieman

^^ I know where I am going to be directing my investments. Any company trying to suck mud off the bottom the ocean...trying to think of a way to do that too...


----------



## a_majoor

Deep sea mining was conceptually demonstrated as far back as the 1960's, (although the actual resource of interest turned out to be a Soviet Ballistic Missile submarine...), so Chinese manipulation of these resources will drive investment towards reviving these abilities.

Happy hunting.


----------



## CougarKing

Not sure what to make of this projection: (note: for those unaware, the BRICs acronym stands for emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, China)





Source: Business Insider link


----------



## Antoine

Interesting debate on CPAC

www.cpac.ca/forms/index.asp?dsp=template&act=view3&pagetype=vod&hl=e&clipID=5823



> MUNK DEBATE ON CHINA
> 
> On June 17th, 2011, the Aurea Foundation held the seventh semi-annual Munk Debate in Toronto. The participants debated the question "Does the 21st century belong to China?" Historian and author Niall Fergusson and David Daokui Li from Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing argued for the resolution. Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, and Fareed Zakaria, CNN Host and Editor-at-Large of TIME Magazine, spoke against the resolution.


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the proteges of the pro-central planning twits such as Chen Yun and Li Xiannan, who opposed a pro-market reformists like Premier Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s, are getting their way, again:

link



> By staff reporter Yu Hairong 07.05.2011 13:38
> 
> *Economist: China's Market-Oriented Reforms in Retreat*
> 
> Wu Jinglian, researcher at the Development and Research Center at the State Council, said reforms to the state economy have undergone a reversal of momentum since the start of the 2000s
> 
> (Beijing) - *China's "market forces have regressed" as government agencies have started to play a more obstructive role in resource allocation, Wu Jinglian, one of China's foremost economists, said on July 4.
> 
> 
> Although the state economy no longer contributes a major portion to gross domestic product, it maintains a monopoly in sectors like petroleum, telecoms, railways and finance, Wu said in a keynote speech in the opening ceremony of a global conference sponsored by the International Economic Association.*
> Governments at various levels also have a huge hold over major economic resources such as land and capital, said Wu, who serves as a researcher of the Development and Research Center at the State Council.
> 
> *China still lacks a legal foundation that is indispensable for a modern market economy. Government officials intervene in the market at their will through administrative means, said Wu.*
> 
> China's market forces gained vigor when the pricing of goods was liberalized in the early 1990s and millions of township enterprises were privatized at the turn of the last century, said Wu.
> 
> Entering the 2000s, however, the reform of state-owned enterprises suffered a setback, and SOEs have inhabited an increasingly assertive role in the market at the expense of private businesses. "The government has acted more intrusively in the name of macro-economic regulation," said Wu.
> 
> In China, there have been two distinct views over the origins of China's rapid economic growth.
> 
> One view attributes the achievement to the "China model" marked by the domination of the state economy and the forceful regulation over the economy by the government.
> 
> The other view holds that the high-speed growth was the result of market-based reforms and the liberation of the entrepreneurial spirit of the people.
> 
> For this question, Wu noted the current growth model is unsustainable and has been built on investment that exploits resources and damages the environment.
> 
> Another consequence of strengthened government control over the distribution of resources and active intervention in economic activity is more corruption and a larger wealth gap, said Wu.


----------



## a_majoor

Not everything is coming up roses for China; internal stresses could derail much of the gains the Chinese have made. As Edward has pointed out in the past, the "Red Dynasty" needs to continue to keep economic expectations met in order to retain the "Mandate of Heaven". A destabilized China would be a huge hole in the global economic system, so we should keep a cautious eye on what is happening in China in the future:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303544604576430103921843770.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook



> *China's Bumpy Road Ahead*
> Unrest, inflation and an aging populace stand in the way of the Middle Kingdom's touted domination
> By IAN BREMMER
> 
> When exactly will China take over the world?
> 
> The moment of truth seems to be coming closer by the minute. China will become the world's largest economy by 2050, according to HSBC. No, it's 2040, say analysts at Deutsche Bank. Try 2030, the World Bank tells us. Goldman Sachs points to 2020 as the year of reckoning, and the IMF declared several weeks ago that China's economy will push past America's in 2016. There's probably someone out there who thinks China became the world's largest economy five years ago.
> 
> 
> In an interview with WSJ's John Bussey, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer insists that for China to become the economic powerhouse it is predicted to become in this century, the Chinese must fundamentally restructure their economy.
> 
> But let's not get carried away. There's a good deal of turmoil simmering beneath the surface of China's miracle. Consider these recent snapshots:
> 
> • In Hunan, farmers pushed off their land by aggressive property developers discover that local authorities are not on their side. A farmer sets himself on fire, and protests spread quickly from town to town.
> 
> • A chemical spill into a Chinese river cuts off water supplies to Harbin, a city of four million people, sparking public fury.
> 
> • In Inner Mongolia, a Han Chinese truck driver kills a local herdsman in a hit-and-run accident, and ethnic unrest flares for days.
> 
> • Rioting in Xinjiang province spins out of control, forcing a state Internet shutdown across an area three times the size of California.
> 
> • In the coastal city of Xintang, security guards sent to break up a protest by migrant workers push a pregnant woman to the ground, igniting a firestorm that only paramilitary forces in armored personnel carriers can handle.
> 
> 
> Reuters
> A boy rides a cart carrying his grandparents outside Beijing. As more Chinese reach retirement age, the need to provide pensions and health care will lead to unprecedented costs.
> 
> China's security services are the world's best at containing large-scale riots, and these protests do not represent any form of coherent opposition to Communist Party control. Most of the protests are directed at local officials and are fueled by local grievances, and three decades of double-digit growth has earned the Chinese leadership deep reserves of public patience.
> 
> But this is a country that measures its annual supply of large-scale protests in the tens of thousands. For 2006, China's Academy of Social Sciences reported the eruption of about 60,000 "mass group incidents," an official euphemism for demonstrations of public anger involving at least 50 people. In 2007, the number jumped to 80,000. Though such figures are no longer published, a leak put the number for 2008 at 127,000. Today, it is almost certainly higher.
> 
> There is certainly no credible evidence that China is on the brink of an unforeseen crisis, but all that public anger points to enormous challenges on the road ahead. Emerging powers like India, Brazil and Turkey can continue to grow for the next 10 years with the same basic formula that sparked growth over the past 10. China, on the other hand, must undertake enormously complex and ambitious reforms to continue its drive to become a modern power, and the country's leadership knows it.
> 
> The financial crisis made clear that China's dependence for growth on the purchasing power of consumers in America, Europe and Japan creates a dangerous vulnerability. Those who insist that it's possible to map the precise arc of China's rise seem to assume that China's leaders can steadily shift the country's growth model toward greater domestic consumption, by transferring enormous reserves of wealth from China's powerful state-owned companies to hundreds of millions of new consumers.
> 
> That's quite an assumption. Despite the best efforts of policy architects in Beijing, the share of household consumption in China's economic growth last year actually moved in the other direction, in part because there are political powerbrokers within the elite who have made too much money from the old model to fully embrace a new one.
> 
> 
> Getty Images
> Overturned police cars line the street after a riot in Xintang in June. China has tens of thousands of large-scale protests a year.
> 
> Moreover, as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, social unrest will almost certainly force tighter state restrictions on free expression and free assembly. That could promote a violent backlash if rising expectations for material success aren't met. Most dangerous of all for the ruling party's future, factions within the government might not agree on how the state should respond to a sudden convulsion of organized unrest.
> 
> China's demographics will provide another serious challenge. The country's labor force is becoming more expensive as China urbanizes and moves up the value chain for manufacturing. The population is also getting older, as the one-child policy and other factors leave fewer young people to join the labor force. As more Chinese reach retirement age, the need to expand and reinforce a formal social safety net to provide pensions and health care for hundreds of millions of people will add unprecedented costs.
> 
> Given that so much of China's growth is still coming from infrastructure projects and other state-directed investments, the impact on an already overtaxed environment could shock the system. Land degradation, air quality and water shortages are urgent and growing problems. China's capacity to tolerate a deteriorating environment is higher than in most developing markets (to say nothing of the developed world), but the chances for an environmental incident to provoke a dangerously destabilizing event are growing by the day.
> 
> Then there's inflation, which hit a 34-month high in May, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics. Food prices surged 11.7%. An over-expansionary monetary policy, higher transportation costs related to urbanization, and large-scale wage hikes are just a few of the variables that ensure the government will have a harder time containing inflation in the years ahead.
> 
> Finally, as popular demand, expressed online and in China's blogosphere, plays a larger role in how Chinese policy-makers make decisions, unhappy citizens will check the state's ability to implement strategic policies. That, too, could limit China's longer-term economic growth.
> 
> Even if China's leadership makes major progress on domestic reform, it will find that the international environment is becoming less conducive to easy economic expansion. Higher prices for the oil, gas, metals and minerals that China needs to power its economy will weigh on growth. The exertions of all those other emerging market players will add to the upward pressure on food and other commodity prices, suppressing growth rates and undermining consumer confidence, which have been the most important sources of social and political stability in China.
> 
> What about China's relationship with the United States? Strong growth in China, coupled with America's unsustainable fiscal policies, high unemployment and weakened consumer demand, will generate friction between the world's two largest economies—in particular, by significantly increasing the likelihood of protectionism on both sides. That's a problem for American companies looking for access to Chinese consumers, but it's far more troublesome for the Chinese, who rely more on U.S. fiscal stability, investment, technology and consumption.
> 
> If nothing else, the colossal challenges that lie ahead for China provide an abundance of good reasons to doubt long-term projections of the country's economic supremacy and global dominance. As Yogi Berra once said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
> 
> —Mr. Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, a consulting firm that specializes in political risk assessment. His most recent book is "The End of the Free Market."


----------



## a_majoor

A happier topic; China's long term plans for space exploration:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/china-space-station-lunar-rovers-and.html



> *China space station, lunar rovers, and Mars mission*
> 
> Photo of the Tiangong 1 module undergoing testing earlier in 2011. Credit: China Manned Space Engineering Office
> 
> China's second moon orbiter Chang'e-2 on June 9, 2011 set off from its moon orbit for outer space about 1.5 million km away from the earth.
> 
> * Scientists decided to let it carry out additional exploratory tasks as the orbiter still had fuel in reserve.
> 
> * Scientists hope the satellite can continue operations until the end of 2012.
> 
> * Besides the current operations, China's ambitious three-stage moon mission will include a moon landing and launch of a moon rover around 2012 in the second phase. In the third phase, another rover will land on the moon and return to earth with lunar soil and stone samples for scientific research around 2017.
> 
> Tiangong 1 (English: Heavenly Palace) is a Chinese orbital laboratory module intended to form part of a space station complex. The launch of this module is planned for October 2011.
> 
> * The 8.5-tonne Tiangong-1 will be put into preset orbit in 2011
> 
> The space module is expected to carry out China's first space docking, with the Shenzhou-8 spacecraft, which will be launched in the second half of 2011 after Tiangong-1.
> 
> The source said experts are currently building the Shenzhou-8 and testing the Long March II-F carrier rocket on which the Tiangong-1 is expected to be launched.
> 
> Two other spacecraft, the Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 spaceships, will be launched in 2012 and will also dock with Tiangong-1
> 
> The third phase of the lunar exploration program is planned for 2017, entailing the use of the CZ-5/E heavy launch vehicle. On the basis of the lander mission, a lunar sample return mission will be undertaken, with up to two kilograms of lunar samples being returned to Earth.
> 
> After that, a manned lunar landing might be possible in 2025–2030.
> 
> China-Russian Mars Exploration
> 
> Yinghuo-1 is a joint Chinese-Russian Mars-exploration space probe scheduled for launch in 2013.
> 
> The probe will be 750cm long, 750 cm wide and 600 mm high. Weighing 115 kg, it is designed for a two-year mission, according to Chen Changya, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering.
> 
> China Mars Plans
> 
> The China Academy of Space Technology, designers of the Shenzhou spacecraft and lunar probes, is trying to draft a technical plan for Mars exploration.
> 
> The Mars probe will be "intelligent" enough to detect faults and correct them by itself, and able to navigate without relying on commands sent from Earth.
> 
> Another obstacle to be overcome involves establishing a monitoring network for deep space, consisting of large-caliber antennas and communication facilities, which China is currently constructing.
> 
> Qian Weiping, chief designer of the lunar probe Chang'e-2 mission's tracking and control system, said in January that the network will be completed in 2016.
> 
> The network's partial completion in 2012 will provide enough support for a Mars probe.


----------



## CougarKing

> Wednesday, July 13, 2011
> 
> *China building indigenous aircraft carrier*
> 
> Written by defenceWeb Wednesday, 13 July 2011 12:34
> 
> Defence Web link
> 
> China has already started work on its first completely indigenous aircraft carrier, at the same time as it prepares to put the refurbished Soviet-era Varyag to sea. China is steadily modernising its armed forces and is seeking to build up a carrier force over the coming decades.
> 
> *Japan’s The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported that an officer in the Chinese military said China is constructing a fully indigenous carrier, and that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) will soon have two operational carriers: the Varyag and the new vessel.*
> 
> The newspaper quoted military sources close to developments in the Chinese Navy as saying that the domestically made carrier is being built in a shipyard on Changxing Island in Shanghai.
> 
> Security around the shipyard on Changxing Island has been significantly beefed up since the beginning of the year, which military sources attributed to the start of construction of the carrier.
> 
> *The sources said the new carrier would most likely be a medium sized vessel, similar to the Varyag, and carry Jian-15 jet fighters, which China has developed from the Sukhoi Su-33. The fighters will likely take off from a ski jump-style flight deck as is done on the Varyag.
> 
> Although the new aircraft carrier is said to be modelled after the Varyag, military sources said China has acquired the technology to construct an aircraft carrier on its own. China has long studied foreign aircraft carriers and bought the blueprints for the Varyag along with the rest of the ship in 1998. Since 1985 China has acquired four retired aircraft carriers for study, including the Australian HMAS Melbourne and the ex-Soviet Minsk and Kiev.*
> 
> Meanwhile, the US Defence Department’s 2010 report, "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China," said China would be able to operate two or more aircraft carriers in the coming decade.
> 
> The experts quoted by The Yomiuri Shimbun said that China is also constructing destroyers with air-defence missiles to defend the carriers.
> 
> At the moment the Varyag is being readied for its maiden voyage, which will take place next month, according to the Hong Kong Commercial Daily. The launch was delayed for a month due to mechanical problems.
> 
> *The Varyag, which a Chinese firm bought from the Ukraine in 1998 for US$20 million, is currently being refurbished by the Chinese navy in the port city of Dalian in northeast China and will be officially launched around October next year. It will most likely be followed by two completely indigenously built aircraft carriers. The cost of building a medium-sized conventionally powered, 60,000-tonne carrier similar to the Russian Kuznetsov class could exceed US$2 billion.
> 
> The US Office of Naval Intelligence has estimated the vessel would be launched as a training platform by 2012 and be fully operational after 2015. China would be the third Asian country to have a carrier after India and Thailand, something that has caused unease in the region.*
> 
> 
> The carrier will likely raise concerns in neighbouring countries, including Japan, whose ties with China have been strained over the Senkaku Islands; and Vietnam and the Philippines, which have territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea.
> 
> At the beginning of last month, China's defence minister sought to reassure Asia Pacific neighbours that his country's growing economic and military power was not a threat.
> 
> General Liang Guanglie told the annual Shangri-La security conference in Singapore that the modernization of the People's Liberation Army was in line with the country's economic growth and to meet its security requirements.
> 
> "We do not intend to threaten any country with the modernization of our military force. I know many people tend to believe that with the wealth of China's economy, China will be a military threat," he said, speaking dressed in full military uniform.
> 
> "I would like to say that it is not our option. We didn't seek to, we are not seeking to and we will not seek hegemony and we will not threaten any country."
> 
> But Liang said the situation in the South China Sea where a territorial dispute with Vietnam and the Philippines heated up last month was now stable.
> 
> "China is committed to maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea," he said adding it stood by a 2002 code of conduct signed with members of the Association of South East Asian Nations to resolve peacefully the rival claims over the resource-rich region.
> 
> China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all claim territories in the sea, which covers an important shipping route and is thought to hold untapped oil and gas reserves.
> 
> China's claim is by far the largest, forming a vast U-shape over most of the sea's 648,000 square miles (1.7 million square km), including the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos.
> 
> Tension also increased with Vietnam last month after Hanoi said a Vietnamese oil and gas exploration ship had its surveying cables cut by Chinese boats.
> 
> The modernization of China's navy will also shake up stability in the Asia-Pacific region, which has been primarily maintained by the United States' overwhelming military power.
> 
> China is also working on a ballistic missile that could pose a serious threat to US aircraft carriers, which Washington could deploy to seas around Taiwan in the event of a crisis with the self-ruled island, which China claims as its own territory.
> 
> China’s carrier ambitions and maritime force projection will have implications for the Gulf of Aden region, as the PLAN currently has a task force of ships on station there to escort merchant ships through the pirate-infested waters.
> 
> The ninth naval escort group left China for the Gulf of Aden earlier this month. The task force comprises the Type 052B destroyer Wuhan, and the Type 054A frigate Yulin, as well as the supply ship Qinghaihu. The ninth task force group carries a total of 878 seamen and officers on board, including dozens of Marines.
> 
> China sent its inaugural convoy escort group to the Gulf of Aden in December 2008 in what that nation's first operational deployment outside its own waters since the Fifteenth Century. To date, Chinese navy fleets have escorted 3 968 ships from countries all over the world and rescued 40 ships attacked by pirates.


----------



## CougarKing

> *China building electromagnetic pulse weapons for use against U.S. carriers*
> 
> China's military is developing electromagnetic pulse weapons that Beijing plans to use against U.S. aircraft carriers in any future conflict over Taiwan, according to an intelligence report made public on Thursday.
> 
> *Portions of a National Ground Intelligence Centerstudy on the lethal effects of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons revealed that the arms are part of China’s so-called “assassin’s mace” arsenal - weapons that allow a technologically inferior China to defeat U.S. military forces.*
> 
> EMP weapons mimic the gamma-ray pulse caused by a nuclear blast that knocks out all electronics, including computers and automobiles, over wide areas. The phenomenon was discovered in 1962 after an aboveground nuclear test in the Pacific disabled electronics in Hawaii.
> 
> *“The DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile has been mentioned as a platform for the EMP attack against Taiwan,” the report said.*


----------



## CougarKing

From last month:

link



> *Did Taiwan Rescue a U.S. Spy Plane?*
> 
> By WENDELL MINNICK
> Published: 26 Jul 2011 13:14
> TAIPEI - *Two Chinese Su-27 fighters penetrated Taiwan's airspace June 29 and were turned back by Taiwan Air Force fighters. The incident is believed to be the first serious Chinese fighter incursion into Taiwan airspace since 1999.*
> The U.S. Pacific Command did not respond to inquiries about the incident.
> 
> An MND source said it is not Taiwan's duty to protect U.S. surveillance aircraft and the incident is not considered serious.
> 
> "There is a line between the two sides, and if any Chinese aircraft flies too close, we will respond," he said. "If they cross the line, we treat it as a hostile act, but occasionally they fly close to the line, and to be honest, this happens all the time and is not a real problem."
> 
> *The June 29 incident was an "unintentional" and "inadvertent" incursion by Chinese fighter aircraft, he said. "The Chinese military has no intention of antagonizing Taiwan" because relations across the Strait are "calm" and there is "no reason for trouble."
> 
> The news comes as Taipei pushes the U.S. to release 66 F-16C/D fighters. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last week that Washington would make a final decision on the fighters by Oct. 1.
> 
> Local media reports said the Su-27s were trying to catch a U-2 spy plane conducting a surveillance mission out of Osan Air Base, South Korea. The reports said the U-2 diverted to Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, to avoid the Chinese fighters.*
> But surveillance aircraft specialist Chris Pocock was skeptical. There are only three U-2s based in East Asia, all at Osan, to watch North Korea, Pocock said.
> 
> "They may also fly southwards along the China coast as far as Taiwan, but not on a routine basis," he said.
> 
> *The aircraft might have been a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries or U.S. Air Force RC-135, which operate at lower altitudes and have been harassed by Chinese fighters in the past.
> 
> In 2000, two Chinese J-8 fighters intercepted a U.S. Air Force RC-135 in international airspace above the East China Sea. A year later, a J-8 fighter collided with a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries near Hainan Island in the South China Sea.*
> 
> Despite Chinese complaints, the U.S. surveillance aircraft flies regular missions along China's coastline. They stay in international airspace because straying into Chinese territory would make them easy targets for S-300PMU-1/2 and Hongqi-10 surface-to-air missiles.
> 
> During the Cold War, Taiwan's Black Bat 34th Squadron flew similar missions with three P-3A Orion signals intelligence aircraft. As well, China shot down five U-2 spy planes operated by Taiwan's Black Cat 35th Squadron over Chinese territory. Both programs were handled by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
> 
> Taiwan will soon take delivery of 12 P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft for anti-submarine patrols. The aircraft will replace aging Grumman S-2T Tracker anti-submarine aircraft. Taiwan technically has two squadrons of the S-2T, but sources say that only a handful are still operational.
> 
> Taiwan has attempted to procure signals intelligence aircraft in the past from the U.S., but procurement problems and budget delays have hampered the acquisition. Taiwan has one EC-130 for surveillance operations, but it is limited in mission scope.


----------



## CougarKing

To the naval personnel here, would the 3 carrier requirement fit the need to constantly maintain one carrier on station? Isn't this the normal cycle? -one on station, on en route while doing workup/training while a 3rd is usually in drydock or doing refit? Isn't that the way the USN or other navies have done it?

link




> *Chinese General: Country Needs 3 Carriers*
> 
> AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Published: 30 Jul 2011 09:10
> BEIJING - *China needs at least three aircraft carriers to defend its interests, a general said, days after the state media broadcast footage of its first carrier in a rare public mention of the project."If we consider our neighbors - India will have three aircraft carriers by 2014 and Japan will have three carriers by 2014," Gen. Luo Yuan, a senior researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences, was quoted as saying by Beijing News.*
> 
> "So I think the number [for China] should not be less than three so we can defend our rights and our maritime interests effectively."
> 
> *His comments, published July 29, came after China sought to downplay the capability of its first aircraft carrier, saying July 27 the vessel would be used for training and "research."
> 
> Beijing believes that the three Japanese carriers it referred to, built for helicopter operations, could eventually be converted into full aircraft carriers.*
> 
> China recently confirmed it was revamping an old Soviet ship to be its first carrier, a project that has added to regional worries over the country's fast military expansion and growing assertiveness on territorial issues.
> 
> "We are currently refitting the body of an old aircraft carrier, and will use it for scientific research, experiments and training," defense ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng told a news briefing.
> 
> Asked whether the carrier's addition to China's military arsenal would significantly raise the country's military capability, Geng said only that to "overrate or underrate the carrier's role are both incorrect."
> 
> The United States has welcomed China's mention of the carrier, calling it a step toward better transparency between the Pacific powers.
> 
> China's People's Liberation Army - the largest armed force in the world - is extremely secretive about its defense programs, which benefit from a huge and expanding military budget boosted by the nation's runaway economic growth. The PLA also operates the country's navy.


----------



## CougarKing

The potential captain of the soon-to-be-comissioned Chinese carrier _SHI LANG_/ex-_Varyag_?

link



> *Meet the (potential) captain of PLAN carrier
> 
> Warship chief tipped to captain aircraft carrier
> 
> Major general serving with PLA's South China Sea fleet is favourite for prestigious post on the Varyag *
> Teddy Ng
> Aug 03, 2011 SCMP.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> With his extensive experience in the disputed South China Sea and his knowledge of warship operations, *Major General Li Xiaoyan* has shown himself to be a strong candidate for the position of captain of the nation's first aircraft carrier, the Varyag.
> *Li, 50, who started his military career in the air force*, is widely tipped by mainland media to fill the post.
> Currently serving with the People's Liberation Army's South China Sea fleet, Li has long voiced his support for the nation's aircraft carrier development programme.
> He said in 2002 it was necessary for China to build its own aircraft carrier when he visited the Minsk, a Soviet aircraft carrier that was turned into a military theme park in Shenzhen after being retired from service in 1995.
> 
> During the visit, he inspected the cockpit of the Minsk, familiarising himself with the components of the retired aircraft carrier, according to a report in Oriental Outlook, a magazine published under Xinhua.
> On Monday, the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post, citing unnamed sources, reported that Li was expected to be the captain of the Varyag and would be helped by three vice-captains.
> Li and seven other officers were trained at the Guangzhou Naval Academy, starting in 2008, before moving to Dalian in December of last year to work on tasks related to the new aircraft carrier, the newspaper said. Macau-based International Military Association president Antony Wong Dong said: "Li is comparatively more suitable for the top job on the Varyag because he has been the captain of some large military vessels over the past year. He is more familiar with the operation of warships."
> Li, born in 1961 in Changchun , Jilin province , entered the preparatory school for the air force in 1979. In 1987, he was among 10 pilots admitted to attend a warship captaincy class in Guangzhou for three-and-a-half years.
> Li was appointed in 1991 as a probationary vice-captain of a destroyer called the Nanning, and was later named vice-captain of the Nanchang destroyer.
> He was appointed captain of the Jiangmen frigate in 1995 and went on to earn a master's degree at the N.G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy in Russia in 1999.
> A year later, he became captain of the destroyer Shenzhen, aboard which he carried out diplomatic naval visits to overseas ports in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.
> "Li helped promote the image of the PLA during his overseas visits," Wong said. "This adds credibility to his profile."
> Li became leader of a team under the South China Sea fleet in 2004.
> *Some analysts said the South China Sea experience was one of Li's biggest advantages, because the Varyag may be deployed to the disputed waters. *



Note the error that has been underlined; the word "cockpit" was used instead of a ship's "bridge."


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The potential captain of the soon-to-be-comissioned Chinese carrier _SHI LANG_/ex-_Varyag_?
> 
> link
> 
> Note the error that has been underlined; the word "cockpit" was used instead of a ship's "bridge."




Is cockpit < 座舱 > similar enough to bridge < 船桥 > to cause that confusion? Or did the author understand some form of "control centre" for each?


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Is cockpit < 座舱 > similar enough to bridge < 船桥 > to cause that confusion? Or did the author understand some form of "control centre" for each?



No, they're not. The character "桥" (qiao, 2nd tone rising) on its own just means the structure that spans over water. So the author just meant control centre.


----------



## CougarKing

What about the SCO?



> link
> 
> *Chen Bingde, chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China, stressed in Moscow on Sunday that China is willing to further promote military cooperation with neighboring Russia.*
> 
> Chen, who visited Russian military units from Friday to Sunday, said that China's army would like to work with the Russian forces to further advance their military ties, exchange their beneficial experience on building forces, and share with each other the achievements of military reforms.
> 
> China wants to step up its cooperation with Russia to mutually promote the army building in both countries, said Chen.
> 
> During his stay, Chen has visited several Russian units, including the 5th Guards Independent Motorized Infantry Brigade of Russia's West Command, which was seen as a representative troop in the Russian military reform.
> 
> *The Chinese officer also visited the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier and the Akula-class K-317 Pantera nuclear attack submarine of 971 project in the northern Russian city of Murmansk.*
> 
> Earlier, the Chinese Defense Ministry said that Chen's visit is aimed at enhancing understanding, friendship and cooperation between the armies of China and Russia.
> 
> Chen made the visit at the invitation of Russian Chief of the General Staff and First Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Makarov.
> 
> Russia is the first leg of Chen's three-nation tour, which will also take him to Ukraine and Israel.


----------



## CougarKing

She is finally out on sea trials. 



> *China's first aircraft carrier makes maiden sea trial*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China's first aircraft carrier held its first sea trial on Wednesday morning, in a step likely to stoke patriotic pride at home and jitters abroad about Beijing's naval ambitions.
> 
> The long-awaited debut of the carrier, refitted from a former Soviet craft, marked an initial step toward China's plans to build a carrier force that can project power into the Asian region, where seas are spanned by busy shipping lanes and thorny territorial disputes.
> 
> *The carrier "left its shipyard in Dalian Port in northeast Liaoning province on Wednesday morning to start its first sea trial," said Xinhua, describing the trip as only a tentative trial run for the unfinished ship.*
> 
> "Military sources said that the first sea trial was in line with the schedule of the carrier refitting project and would not take a long time," said the report.
> 
> The aircraft carrier, which is about 300 metres long, plowed through fog and sounded its horn three times as it left the dock, Xinhua said on its military news microblog.
> 
> *In an interview published this week, Chinese navy rear admiral Yin Zhuo said his country intended to build an air carrier group, but that task would be long and difficult.*
> 
> "The aircraft carriers will form a very strong battle group," Yin told the China Economic Weekly. "But the construction and functional demands of an aircraft carrier are extremely complex," he told the magazine.
> 
> Training crew and, eventually, pilots for carriers was a big challenge, said Yin.
> 
> "An aircraft carrier requires the concerted action of a team of thousands. That's far from easy," he said.
> 
> Last month, China's defense ministry China confirmed the government was refitting the old, unfinished Soviet vessel bought from the Ukraine government, and sources told Reuters it was also building two of its own carriers.
> 
> Earlier, a Pentagon spokesman downplayed the likelihood of any immediate leaps from China's nascent carrier program.
> 
> But the carrier plan is just one part of China's naval modernization program, which has forged ahead while other powers tighten their military budgets to cope with debt The growing Chinese naval reach is triggering regional jitters that have fed into longstanding territorial disputes, and could speed up military expansion across Asia.
> 
> *In the past year, China has had run-ins at sea with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. The incidents -- boat crashes and charges of territorial incursions -- have been minor, but the diplomatic reaction often heated.
> 
> Last week, Japan warned that China's naval forces were likely to increase activities around its waters, prompting Beijing to accuse Tokyo of deliberately exaggerating the Chinese military threat.
> 
> China's defense budget has shot up nearly 70 percent over five years, while Japan -- tied by a public debt twice the size of its $5 trillion economy -- has cut military outlays by 3 percent over the same period, a Japanese government report said.
> 
> A senior U.S. Navy intelligence officer earlier this year said he believed China wanted to start fielding multiple aircraft carriers over the next decade, with the goal of becoming a global naval power capable of projecting power around the world by mid-century.*
> The U.S. navy official said it would take years for China's navy to learn how to integrate flight deck operations and attain the sophistication needed to use them effectively.
> 
> (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Sanjeev Miglani)



China.org link
China.com link (Mandarin)


----------



## The Bread Guy

Speaking of aircraft carriers...


> *The United States said Wednesday it would like China to explain why it needs an aircraft carrier amid broader US concerns about Beijing's lack of transparency over its military aims.
> 
> "We would welcome any kind of explanation that China would like to give for needing this kind of equipment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters when asked whether the carrier would raise regional tensions.
> *
> "This is part of our larger concern that China is not as transparent as other countries. It's not as transparent as the United States about its military acquisitions, about its military budget," she said.
> 
> "And we'd like to have the kind of open, transparent relationship in military-to-military affairs," Nuland said.
> 
> "In our military-to-military relations with many countries around the world, we have the kind of bilateral dialogue where we can get quite specific about the equipment that we have and its intended purposes and its intended movements," she said.
> 
> But China and the United States are "not at that level of transparency" to which the two nations aspire, Nuland added ....


Source:  AFP, 10 Aug 11

I wonder what the U.S.'s answer would be if China asked the same thing?


----------



## CougarKing

> link
> 
> 
> *Rumors are spreading quickly that radioactive materials were accidentally leaked from a state-of-the-art Chinese nuclear submarine moored in Dalian Port in Liaoning Province in the northeastern part of China. *
> 
> The rumor was first reported on Saturday by Boxun.com, a website for overseas Chinese, before it was picked up by Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to Twitter.
> 
> Citing People's Liberation Army sources in Dalian, Boxun.com reported that there was an accidental leakage of radiation when engineers from a Chinese electronics company were installing equipment on the submarine.
> 
> Boxun reported that the accident happened suddenly, and that Chinese authorities had sealed off the area while an investigation was under way, while taking steps to ensure news of the accident did not spread.
> 
> The Chinese media and government have so far refrained from commenting on the rumors, which have stoked fears among netizens.
> 
> *China possesses around 70 submarines. Six of them are nuclear-powered and five are part of the North Sea Fleet deployed around Bohai Bay. Only two Chinese nuclear submarine ports in the North Sea Fleet have been identified by outsiders. One is in Dalian and the other is in Qingdao.
> 
> In 2007, a U.S. spy satellite captured photos of a Chinese Jin-class nuclear submarine moored in Xiaopingdao, an island near Dalian. The submarine at the center of the latest rumor is a Jin-class nuclear sub, which measures 133 m in length and has a displacement of 8,000 tons. It is also equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of 8,000 km. Two nuclear submarines have been commissioned so far, but three or four more are being made, according to military sources. *
> 
> Chinese authorities earlier denied news reports that an oil leak had occurred on an offshore drilling platform in Bohai Bay in June, only admitting the leak one month later after netizens had already learned of the accident.
> 
> Boxun.com has often carried articles that are critical of Beijing, citing sources in China, as well as covering some sensitive issues that the Chinese media have been reluctant to handle. But it has also been known to make mistakes, with the latest being an erroneous report that former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin had died.


----------



## a_majoor

This sounds very much like some of the speculative technology explored by the United States in the early 1980's during the MX missile debates. The problem then was the preceived vulnerability of land based missiles to a decapitating first strike. Other ideas floated at the time included mobile basing on roads and railways, and "dense packs" of superhardened silos, as well as the Strategic Defense Initiative:

http://the-diplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2011/08/20/chinas-underground-great-wall/



> *China’s Underground Great Wall*
> August 20, 2011By James R. Holmes
> 
> Chinese reports that the country has a vast network of tunnels for its nuclear missiles have been oddly overlooked.
> Image credit:Flickr / Chinaoffseason
> The impending sea trials of China’s first aircraft carrier set commentators abuzz in the West and Asia over the past couple of months. I weighed in myself. And for good reason. The cruise of the yet-to-be-officially-named flattop, which finally took place last week, heralded a decisive break with the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s Maoist past as a coastal defence force. This is a development worth exploring in detail. As it happened, the Naval War College also convened its first Asian Strategic Studies Conference in Newport last week, in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute and the Journal of Strategic Studies. My assigned topic was to determine whether there exists a common Asian culture of sea power (no, say I) and how influential the Western canon of maritime theory is among seafaring Asian nations (very, mainly by default).
> 
> To me, though, the most provocative presentation delivered at our conference related not to the sea but to the future of China’s land-based nuclear arsenal. In March 2008, China’s state-run CCTV network broke the news about a 5,000-kilometre-long network of hardened tunnels built to house the Chinese Second Artillery Corps’s increasingly modern force of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Tunnelling evidently commenced in 1995. Located in, or rather under, mountainous districts of Hebei Province, in northern China, the facility is reportedly hundreds of meters deep. That makes it an exceptionally hard target against conventional or nuclear counterstrikes.China Defense Daily, a publication of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), confirmed the CCTV account in December 2009.
> 
> What should have been a blockbuster story occasioned barely a peep in the Western press, and elicited little response even in Asia. For lack of a catchier metaphor, call it the dragon that never roared. The most prominent outlet to report on what Chinese pundits dubbed the ‘underground Great Wall’ was Chosun Ilbo, in South Korea. The Washington-based Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief covered the story shortly afterward. That was basically it for original reporting. The story isn’t so much that Beijing has constructed hardened sites to safeguard its missile force. An invulnerable second-strike capability has been the gold standard of nuclear deterrence since the early Cold War. In theory, a military able to ride out an enemy first strike with a substantial portion of its missile force intact can deter such an attack. No sane adversary would launch a first strike if it knew its actions would summon forth a cataclysmic reply.
> 
> A more survivable nuclear deterrent, then, should bolster strategic stability between China and the United States. China has long contented itself with a ‘minimalist’ deterrent posture, fielding a small, rudimentary force of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The logic of minimalism—sound in my view—is that so long as even a single missile survives to retaliate against an enemy’s homeland, that adversary will desist from actions China deems unacceptable. Estimates of the total number of Chinese warheads even today, well into Beijing’s nuclear modernization effort, generally range from 150 to 400 devices. Even in this age of renewed US-Russian arms control, this remains a modest force. But minimal deterrence could employ a more robust force than the People’s Liberation Army fielded in past decades. ‘Minimal’ is a squishy term. Furthermore, Chinese officials and pundits have taken to debating adopting a ‘limited deterrent’ strategy. ‘Limited’ too remains hazily defined.
> 
> The very scale of the underground network opens up new vistas for Chinese nuclear strategy. The presenter at our conference reported piecing together various bits of data, and concluding that China may have constructed a far larger warhead inventory than most estimates hold. He projected an upper limit of 3,600 doomsday devices and delivery platforms, namely ballistic missiles of various types. The underground Great Wall could presumably accommodate such a force with ease. At a minimum, it presents Beijing new options. Think about it. The ‘New START’ accord inked by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last year limits US and Russian nuclear forces to 1,550 deployed warheads apiece. Because of the fudge factor often built into international treaties, notes the Federation of American Scientists, the actual numbers permitted under New START come to over 2,000 warheads for each side.
> 
> Even so, if the PLA has covertly departed from minimal deterrence—secreting hundreds of new weapons in the Hebei tunnel complex—then it could upend the strategic balance overnight, achieving parity or near-parity with the United States and Russia in deployed weaponry. I’m not sure how much of this to credit, and the presenter freely admitted that there was a significant guesswork quotient in his figures. But then there was a significant guesswork quotient to the long-running speculation surrounding the Chinese aircraft carrier project, a project of far smaller consequence than a clandestine Chinese nuclear build-up. At a minimum it would be worthwhile to inquire into the veracity of Chinese reporting on the underground Great Wall, and to ponder the implications if reports are accurate. Let the debate begin—at last.
> 
> James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College and co-author of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.
> 
> http://the-diplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2011/08/20/chinas-underground-great-wall/


----------



## a_majoor

The idea of the Sinosphere of cultural and racial ties across the planet is very similar to the idea of the Anglosphere of cultural and linguistic ties....

Lots of maps and charts; follow link:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002397-inside-the-sinosphere



> *Inside The Sinosphere*
> 
> Avis Tang, a cool, well-dressed software company executive, lives on the glossy frontier of China’s global expansion. From his perch amid tower blocks of Tianfu Software Park on the outskirts of the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, the 48-year-old graduate of Taiwan’s National Institute of the Arts directs a team of Chinese software engineers who are developing computer games  for his Beijing company, Perfect World Network Technology, for  the  Asian and world market.
> 
> A glossy software office in Chengdu seems a long way from the images of centrally directed, belching factories seeking to dominate the global economy. But a close examination of the emerging Sinosphere–or Chinese sphere of influence–shows an economy that is globally dispersed, multinational and increasingly focused on the high-tech and service sectors.
> 
> Yet if Tang came to China to work for Interserv, a Taiwan game developer, he would see that the future of his industry–including its creative side–lies not only in the coastal cities but, increasingly, in those stretching across the vast Chinese interior. “In ten years perhaps all these cities will follow the path of Shanghai,” says Tang, as technology allows businesses that once had to situate themselves in coastal megacities to expand into the interior.
> 
> Widely considered one of the most “livable” of China’s big cities, Chengdu seems to Tang something of an incipient Silicon Valley. The area’s software revenues increased more than tenfold over the past decade, while an estimated 200,000 people are expected to be working in the city’s software industry by 2012.
> 
> Like many of his fellow managers at the sprawling park, home to over 800 foreign-owned companies, Tang is not a citizen of China.  He’s from Taiwan and never set foot in the People’s Republic before 2001.  His wife remains in Taiwan (Tang flies there every month or two to see her).
> 
> Chinese capitalism has relied on diaspora entrepreneurs like Tang. In this sense, the rise of China represents the triumph of a race and a culture. Indeed for most of its history China’s most important export was not silk or porcelain but people. To measure the rise of the Sinosphere, one has to consider not just China itself but what historian Lynn Pan has described as the “sons of the Yellow Emperor.”
> 
> The Sinosphere’s roots lie with the Han expansion into southern China during the Tang dynasty (618-907). By the 12th century, the newly Sinofied southern Chinese had started moving south. There they created trade-oriented colonies like Vietnam, Burma, Malaya and the island of Java. In the 1600s Chinese settlers overcame the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan, creating another powerful base in the South China Sea.
> 
> At its height, during the expeditions of the legendary eunuch Admiral Zheng Hein in the early 15th century, China’s maritime “sphere of influence” extended all the way to the Indian Ocean and beyond.
> 
> Although ensuing Chinese regimes pulled back from expansion and all but abandoned their scattered children, the colonies, particularly in Southeast Asia, survived.  They developed business and industries suitable to their new homes, but also maintained their cultural heritage and language. After the Chinese Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949, the diaspora colonies retained their capitalist orientation. Many established trading operations and sent their children to the United States, Canada and Australia, where they enjoyed remarkable success.
> 
> Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Rangoon, Bangkok and Jakarta can be seen as the original testing grounds for Chinese capitalism. In the past few decades North American regions such as Silicon Valley, Southern California, Toronto, Vancouver and New York-New Jersey have been added to the mix. Overall the entire overseas Chinese population has risen to nearly 40 million. Taiwan, which is de facto independent, is home to an additional 23 million, and Hong Kong and Macau, officially part of China but governed under different laws, boasts some 7.5 million.
> 
> Even today the ties between overseas Chinese and their home country remain close. The original diaspora countries—including Hong Kong–remain principal sources of investment into China. Among the ten largest sources for inbound investment to the PRC are Hong Kong, by far the largest investor, fourth-ranked Singapore and ninth-ranked Taiwan. Each brings more investments into China than such major powers as Germany, France, India and Russia. The United States, home to the largest overseas Chinese population outside Asia, ranks fifth.
> 
> Other investments come from places like British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Samoa, which often act as conduits for investors who do not want to be too closely monitored. This seems to include many Chinese investors, particularly in Taiwan, who may not want too much scrutiny of their outlays into the PRC. This includes even Chinese government -owned firms such as China Mobile Communication Corp., which has established an investment HUB in the far away British Virgin Islands.
> 
> As China itself has become wealthier, financial flows from the diaspora have continued to increase. Hong Kong’s investment into China grew from $18 billion in 2005 to $45 billion four years later. Singapore’s investment surged from $2.2 billion to $4.1 billion in the same years. This has occurred while new investment from such powerhouses as the United States, Japan, Korea and Germany has stagnated or even dropped.
> 
> The second phase of the Sinosphere has been dominated largely by industrial projects, many of them financed or helped technologically by the diaspora. Much of trade, initially, was targeted to the rich consumer markets of North America, Europe and Japan.  Between just 2007 and 2009 China’s share of world exports expanded from 7% to 9%.
> 
> But today the Sinosphere’s trade flow is shifting. An analysis of trade growth between 2005 and 2009 shows a significant change in focus away from advanced countries to the developing world. In the second half of the last decade, for example, trade with the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and the Netherlands grew by less than 50%. In contrast, commerce with key developing countries–including Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Mauretania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia Turkmenistan, Iraq and Laos–grew ten times. Trade with large emerging economies, notably Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, increased five times during the same period.
> 
> China’s thirst for resources is a big driver of this shift. Now the world’s largest car market and consumer of energy, China is in great need of oil, gas, and other natural resources. It also requires vast amounts of foodstuffs, notably corn and soybeans, for its increasingly urbanized population.
> 
> Two of China’s new trade thrusts follow historic patterns of expansion, the first being growing investment in the Mekong Delta and Southeast Asia (Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia). For 2010, Chinese invested $7.15 billion in energy projects alone in Myanmar. On the military side, this also includes moves by China to secure offshore islands for energy development, which is a potential source of conflict with Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.
> 
> The second big expansion is along the old “silk road” connecting eastern China to the energy and mineral rich “ stans” of Central Asia. This shift enhances the importance of inland Chinese cities, such as Xi’an, Chengdu and Chongqing, which are natural entrepots for central Asian trade. Perhaps even more important may prove the role of Kashgar, which was designated last year as the Special Economic Zone. Sitting on the western edge of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Zone near the border of Tajikistan, the Chinese envision Kashgar as the main rail and air link to the stans. Recent disturbances by the local Muslim majority, however, could threaten these ambitious plans.
> 
> As China’s economy and wealth has grown, it has moved from being merely a recipient of inbound investment into a major exporter of capital. China’s outbound investment is growing much faster, rising 21% in just the past year; its overseas investment overall has grown from 53.3 billion in 2005 to 224.4 billion in 2009.
> 
> Although still the largest destination for foreign investment, the country has vaulted into the top four in terms of outbound outlays just  behind the U.S., Japan and the U.K. It is not inconceivable that China could challenge the U.S. as the world’s top foreign investor.
> 
> The country’s investment strategy seems to be following two powerful trends.  One has to do with the acquisition of resources to feed the Chinese industrial machine and its growing consumer market. This explains the rapid growth of investment into the Middle East, South America and Africa. Four of the five fastest-growing investment areas for large scale investments–South Africa, Canada, Nigeria and Australia–are all major commodity exporters. Chinese investment in these countries has been growing from three to five times as quickly as those in the U.S. or Western Europe.
> 
> The second, less obvious, trend relates to the idea that these countries, with generally faster growing populations, represent the most lucrative future markets for Chinese exporters.  This may be best seen in the rapid growth of Chinese government grants as well as the provision of interest-free and concessional bank loans, such as those provided by the government’s Exim bank, primarily to Chinese companies seeking to invest in developing nations, especially Africa, over the past decade. PRC financial backing for companies and projects in countries such as Angola, India, Equatorial Africa, Turkey, Egypt, the Congo and Algeria have grown over 100 times since 2005. Other key developing countries such as South Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia and Ghana all saw increases of tenfold or more.
> 
> These developments tell us something of the future of the Sinosphere. It will be largely funded by the Chinese and their diaspora, less focused on the West and more on developing countries, including increasingly those outside the traditional stomping grounds of Chinese entrepreneurs.  The emerging Sinosphere is also likely to be somewhat less focused on manufacturing and more on services like real estate, finance and high-technology exports. This is partially due to the appeal, for manufacturers, of less expensive, more youthful countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Myanmar.  Wages for manufacturing workers in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia are now less than half of those in China.
> 
> These shifts are already evident by looking at recent trends in inbound investment to China, much of it from the diaspora and tax havens. Between 2005 and 2009, for example, industrial investment fell from 70% to barely 50% in 2009. The total investment in industry has remained stagnant while dollars into scientific research have grown almost five-fold. We can expect more of this as China prepares to challenge America, Japan and other advanced countries in basic research. At the same time investment into real estate has tripled, while both software and financial flows have more than doubled.
> 
> All this explains the importance Chinese officials place on expatriates like the Taiwan-born Tang. In the 1980s and 1990s Taiwanese and Hong Kong firms spearheaded the development of China’s manufacturing prowess. Now the mainland leadership hopes that high-tech executives such as Tang will nurture and direct China’s leap into the first ranks of the global digital economy, with Perfect World’s Chengdu engineers epitomizing the future imagined by China’s aggressive regional officials. The fact that the company’s games are based largely on Chinese mythology makes the effort an even more natural fit. But Perfect World is not just looking at the Chinese or diaspora markets; it is also marketing aggressively to young gamesters in Europe and North America.
> 
> All this can be seen as a direct challenge to the long dominant software and entertainment industries of the West, heretofore largely unchallenged by China. In a world increasingly  ’SINOFIED’  there may be huge potential for Sinosphere companies to move beyond exporting tangible goods, and increase their trade in ideas and culture to the rest of the world.
> 
> “We are well on our way,” Tang explains from his perch in Chengdu. “China’s move into this kind of business is just beginning.”
> 
> This research was conducted with support from the Legatum Foundation.
> 
> This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.
> 
> Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The ity: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.
> 
> Sim Hee Juat is currently a research associate with the Centre for Governance and Leadership at the Civil Service College of Singapore. The maps were created by Ali Modarres, Chairman of the Geography Department at California State University, Los Angeles.
> 
> Photo by avlxyz.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, will provide fuel for the fire:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/chinese-state-tv-shows-military-cyber-hacking-clip/article2141196/


> Chinese state TV shows military cyber hacking clip
> 
> MELANIE LEE
> Shanghai— Reuters
> 
> Published Thursday, Aug. 25, 2011
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: _Globe and Mail_
> 
> A six-second clip on Chinese state television has provided a rare glimpse into purported cyber hacking attacks launched by the country’s military, despite long-standing official denials that the government engages in such activity.
> 
> In an episode titled “The Internet Storm is Here”, CCTV-7, China’s official military channel, had experts discussing the different methods of cyberattacks and U.S. cyber operations. About halfway through the 20-minute episode, a user is seen operating a cursor on a screen that displays two options, a “www denial-of-service attack” and “distributed denial-of-service attack”. A denial-of-service attack is a basic hacking attack that brings down a website by spamming it with data.
> 
> Youtube video clip here
> 
> The screen then changes, showing a box with the words “select attack target” and “input target IP address”. A scrolling marquee at the top of the box reads “China’s People’s Liberation Army Electronic Engineering Academy”.
> 
> The user then selects Minghui.org, a website of the banned spiritual sect Falun Gong, from a dropdown menu containing a list of other Falun Gong sites and clicks the “attack” button.
> 
> It is unclear if the program on the screen shown is a mock-up, or when the clip was filmed. But China has consistently – sometimes angrily – denied having anything to do with hacking attacks.
> 
> The existence of the piece, which appears to have been shown in July, was reported on Wednesday by China SignPost website which noted it was “visual evidence” to undermine China’s official denials of involvement in hacking.
> 
> As of midday on Thursday, the page with the clip on Chinese state television’s website was no longer accessible. However, the clip was reposted on other video sharing websites, including YouTube. The United States says that many hacking attacks appear to come from China, often targeting human rights groups as well as U.S. companies.
> 
> In its annual report to the U.S. Congress on China’s military on Wednesday, the Pentagon warned that hacking attacks from China could one day be used for overt military means, rather than just trying to access data.
> 
> “The accesses and skills required for those intrusions are similar to those necessary to conduct computer network attacks,” the report said. “Developing capabilities for cyberwarfare is consistent with authoritative PLA military writings.”
> 
> Google , the world’s largest search engine, partially pulled out of China last year after concerns of censorship and a serious hacking episode.
> 
> Google, who said the attacks originated from China, was one of the dozens of high profile companies targeted in an ultra-sophisticated cyberattack named “Operation Aurora” that took place in the second half of 2009. Yahoo, Adobe and Dow Chemical were also reportedly among the targets.
> 
> In June this year, Google said its Gmail product had suffered a cyberattack originating from China that was aimed at stealing passwords and information from high level U.S. government officials and Chinese activists.
> 
> China also says it is a victim of hacking.
> 
> The cyberattacks add to the long list of tensions between the United States and China that span trade issues, human rights, the value of the yuan and Taiwan.




Just in case anyone ever doubted that China will always try a variant of the _indirect approach_ before it does anything overt.


----------



## The Bread Guy

For all you Sino-philes out there, "ANNUAL REPORT TO CONGRESS:  Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2011" (~3MB PDF) - the executive summary....


> China’s rise as a major international actor is likely to stand out as a defining feature of the strategic landscape of the early 21st century. Sustained economic development has raised the standard of living for China’s citizens and elevated China’s international profile. This development, coupled with an expanding science and technology base, has also facilitated a comprehensive and ongoing military modernization program. The United States welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that reinforces international rules and norms and enhances security and peace both regionally and globally.
> 
> China is steadily assuming new roles and responsibilities in the international community. In 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao articulated new guidance for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), including missions extending beyond China’s immediate territorial interests. This catalyzed China’s growing involvement in international peacekeeping efforts, counter-piracy operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and the evacuation of Chinese citizens from overseas trouble spots. China’s 2010 Defense White Paper asserts that China’s ―future and destiny have never been more closely connected with those of the international community.‖ Nonetheless, China’s modernized military could be put to use in ways that increase China’s ability to gain diplomatic advantage or resolve disputes in its favor.
> 
> Although the PLA is contending with a growing array of missions, Taiwan remains its ―main strategic direction.‖ China continued modernizing its military in 2010, with a focus on Taiwan contingencies, even as cross-Strait relations improved. The PLA seeks the capability to deter Taiwan independence and influence Taiwan to settle the dispute on Beijing’s terms. In pursuit of this objective, Beijing is developing capabilities intended to deter, delay, or deny possible U.S. support for the island in the event of conflict. The balance of cross-Strait military forces and capabilities continues to shift in the mainland’s favor.
> 
> Over the past decade, China’s military has benefitted from robust investment in modern hardware and technology. Many modern systems have reached maturity and others will become operational in the next few years. Following this period of ambitious acquisition, the decade from 2011 through 2020 will prove critical to the PLA as it attempts to integrate many new and complex platforms, and to adopt modern operational concepts, including joint operations and network-centric warfare.
> China has made modest, but incremental, improvements in the transparency of its military and security affairs. However, there remains uncertainty about how China will use its growing capabilities.
> 
> The United States recognizes and welcomes PRC contributions that support a safe and secure global environment. China’s steady integration into the global economy creates new incentives for partnership and cooperation, particularly in the maritime domain. Although China’s expanding military capabilities can facilitate cooperation in pursuit of shared objectives, they can also increase the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation. Strengthening our military-to-military relationship is a critical part of our strategy to shape China’s choices as we seek to capitalize on opportunities for cooperation while mitigating risks. To support this strategy, the United States must continue monitoring PRC force development and strategy. In concert with our friends and Allies, the United States will also continue adapting our forces, posture, and operational concepts to maintain a stable and secure East Asian environment.


.... and some more details from the Pentagon Info-Machine here.


----------



## CougarKing

Relevant to China as well:

Economist link



> *The decline of Asian marriage
> Asia's lonely hearts
> Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious*
> 
> Aug 20th 2011 | from the print edition
> 
> TWENTY years ago a debate erupted about whether there were specific “Asian values”. Most attention focused on dubious claims by autocrats that democracy was not among them. But a more intriguing, if less noticed, argument was that traditional family values were stronger in Asia than in America and Europe, and that this partly accounted for Asia’s economic success. In the words of Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore and a keen advocate of Asian values, the Chinese family encouraged “scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment of present enjoyment for future gain”.
> 
> On the face of it his claim appears persuasive still. In most of Asia, marriage is widespread and illegitimacy almost unknown. In contrast, half of marriages in some Western countries end in divorce, and half of all children are born outside wedlock. The recent riots across Britain, whose origins many believe lie in an absence of either parental guidance or filial respect, seem to underline a profound difference between East and West.
> 
> Yet marriage is changing fast in East, South-East and South Asia, even though each region has different traditions. The changes are different from those that took place in the West in the second half of the 20th century. Divorce, though rising in some countries, remains comparatively rare. What’s happening in Asia is a flight from marriage (see article).
> 
> Marriage rates are falling partly because people are postponing getting hitched. Marriage ages have risen all over the world, but the increase is particularly marked in Asia. People there now marry even later than they do in the West. The mean age of marriage in the richest places—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—has risen sharply in the past few decades, to reach 29-30 for women and 31-33 for men.
> 
> *A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all.* Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. *Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry*. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%. *So far, the trend has not affected Asia’s two giants, China and India. But it is likely to, as the economic factors that have driven it elsewhere in Asia sweep through those two countries as well; and its consequences will be exacerbated by the sex-selective abortion practised for a generation there. By 2050, there will be 60m more men of marriageable age than women in China and India.*
> 
> The joy of staying single
> 
> Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That’s partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy. Japanese women, who typically work 40 hours a week in the office, then do, on average, another 30 hours of housework. Their husbands, on average, do three hours. And Asian women who give up work to look after children find it hard to return when the offspring are grown. Not surprisingly, Asian women have an unusually pessimistic view of marriage. According to a survey carried out this year, many fewer Japanese women felt positive about their marriage than did Japanese men, or American women or men.
> 
> At the same time as employment makes marriage tougher for women, it offers them an alternative. More women are financially independent, so more of them can pursue a single life that may appeal more than the drudgery of a traditional marriage. More education has also contributed to the decline of marriage, because Asian women with the most education have always been the most reluctant to wed—and there are now many more highly educated women.
> 
> *No marriage, no babies
> 
> The flight from marriage in Asia is thus the result of the greater freedom that women enjoy these days, which is to be celebrated. But it is also creating social problems. Compared with the West, Asian countries have invested less in pensions and other forms of social protection, on the assumption that the family will look after ageing or ill relatives. That can no longer be taken for granted. The decline of marriage is also contributing to the collapse in the birth rate. Fertility in East Asia has fallen from 5.3 children per woman in the late 1960s to 1.6 now. In countries with the lowest marriage rates, the fertility rate is nearer 1.0. That is beginning to cause huge demographic problems, as populations age with startling speed. And there are other, less obvious issues. Marriage socialises men: it is associated with lower levels of testosterone and less criminal behaviour. Less marriage might mean more crime.*
> 
> Can marriage be revived in Asia? Maybe, if expectations of those roles of both sexes change; but shifting traditional attitudes is hard. Governments cannot legislate away popular prejudices. They can, though, encourage change. Relaxing divorce laws might, paradoxically, boost marriage. Women who now steer clear of wedlock might be more willing to tie the knot if they know it can be untied—not just because they can get out of the marriage if it doesn’t work, but also because their freedom to leave might keep their husbands on their toes. Family law should give divorced women a more generous share of the couple’s assets. Governments should also legislate to get employers to offer both maternal and paternal leave, and provide or subsidise child care. If taking on such expenses helped promote family life, it might reduce the burden on the state of looking after the old.
> 
> Asian governments have long taken the view that the superiority of their family life was one of their big advantages over the West. That confidence is no longer warranted. They need to wake up to the huge social changes happening in their countries and think about how to cope with the consequences.


----------



## CougarKing

From this past July:



> Defense News link
> 
> 
> HANOI, Vietnam - *A Chinese warship confronted an Indian naval vessel in waters off Vietnam and demanded its identity, the Financial Times said on Sept. 1, amid regional concern over Beijing's maritime assertiveness.*
> 
> The London-based newspaper reported that five people familiar with the incident said it occurred in international waters shortly after India's *amphibious assault ship INS Airavat* completed a scheduled port call in Vietnam.
> 
> Delhi confirmed contact was made with its ship but rejected the suggestion of a "confrontation."
> 
> *On July 22 after sailing 45 nautical miles off Nha Trang, the INS Airavat was called on an open radio channel by someone identifying himself as the "Chinese Navy," the Indian government said in a statement.
> 
> "You are entering Chinese waters," the radio caller said, according to the statement. It added that no ship or aircraft was visible from the Indian vessel, which proceeded as scheduled.
> 
> "India supports freedom of navigation in international waters, including in the South China Sea, and the right of passage in accordance with accepted principles of international law. These principles should be respected by all," Delhi said.*
> 
> *A series of Chinese actions in the South China Sea have caused nervousness among regional neighbors - particularly Vietnam and the Philippines.
> 
> China says it has sovereignty over essentially all of the South China Sea, a key global trading route, where its professed ownership of the potentially oil-rich Spratly archipelago overlaps with claims by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia.*
> Vietnam and China have a separate long-standing dispute over the more northerly Paracels archipelago.
> 
> *The INS Airavat visited Nha Trang in south-central Vietnam and the northern port of Haiphong in the second half of July.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## Northalbertan

No surprises here.  You don't aquire aircraft carriers to patrol your own shores.


----------



## a_majoor

A bit of a grab bag. Notice the Chinese were running arms to Quaddafi's forces, and the discussions about China's "cyber militias":

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/china/articles/20110903.aspx



> *If The Government Doesn't Like It, It Must Be Good*
> 
> September 3, 2011: The U.S. recently released its annual report on Chinese military power, and the main point was that growing Chinese military capabilities were being used to coerce or covertly attack other countries. Chinese neighbors agreed with this, as did more distant targets (of Chinese Cyber War attacks). China promptly denounced the American analysis as “baseless.” But the reality is otherwise. The growing Chinese navy is increasingly showing up to enforce Chinese claims over disputed islands, and large areas of (according to the rest of the world) international waters. China’s neighbors are increasing their naval capabilities (more ships, aircraft and weapons) and getting cozy with the United States (which has the largest fleet on the planet.)
> 
> During the recent fighting in Libya, the rebels complained of encountering government troops armed with new Chinese weapons. Accusations were made that China was selling weapons to the Kaddafi dictatorship despite a UN embargo. A little investigating found that this was indeed the case, and that Chinese arms merchants had approached the Libyan government earlier in the year, offering to sneak the weapons in via Algeria and South Africa. The last shipments appear to have arrived in July. Back then, there were reports of smugglers moving truckloads of weapons across the Algerian border into Libya.
> 
> In response to Chinese spy ships operating in the area, India is increasing its military forces in its Andaman (off the Burmese coast), Nicobar (near Indonesia) and Lakshadweep (off the southwest Indian coast) Islands. This means increasing maritime and electronic surveillance capabilities on the islands, as Chinese naval forces are expected to be a more frequent sight around these islands. Indian politicians are complaining about the expense of all these security measures (including creating and deploying new units on the Chinese border). But popular fear of growing Chinese military power forces the politicians to come up with the money.
> 
> The Chinese government has apparently leaned on some of the most prominent hacker groups to advise their members and followers to avoid hacking Chinese targets, and to be more discreet (don’t get caught) when attacking foreign targets. Those who are not skilled enough to avoid getting caught, are advised to not attack foreign corporations and governments at all. China has long maintained remarkable control over its own hackers, organizing many of them into a semi-official cyber-militia and permitting, and even encouraging, a lot of illegal hacking against foreign targets. The hacker organizations also served as a recruiting pool for government and military Cyber War organizations. But despite all the precautions, a lot of the subsequent Cyber War and espionage operations were traced back to China. This has caused a growing crescendo of accusations and threats from foreign nations. While China denies everything, it has now told its hackers to cool it, or else. That means something in China, where “enemies of the state” are still sent to labor camps or executed. Unfortunately, given the size and nature of the hacker underground (even in China), the cease and desist orders could not be given in secret.
> 
> It’s also recently been revealed (via wikileaks) that Apple Corporation set up a major anti-counterfeiting effort operation three years ago. One of the main targets was China, where corrupt officials tolerate massive counterfeiting, despite government promises to stamp out the practice. The Apple investigation resulted in considerable detail about counterfeiting operations in China, and the extent of official and unofficial government involvement. The U.S. government used these details to put more pressure on China to shut down the rampant counterfeiting and government approved hacking.
> 
> While the Chinese government is making a big deal about investing in North Korea, via new “free trade zones,” Chinese government controlled business publications are putting out articles detailing why such efforts have little chance of success. North Korea is still considered, even by the Chinese, as too unstable an area for any major investments. This is known from the experience of Chinese traders and businessmen who have been operating (at great risk) in North Korea for decades.
> 
> Several years of growing inflation in China is causing more unrest. Government efforts to curb the rising prices, like by restricting credit to companies, is being undermined by corruption, which makes it possible for companies to get loans from overseas lenders. This demonstrates that the widespread corruption not only creates popular unrest, but limits the ability of the government to govern.
> 
> August 29, 2011:  A court sentenced a senior Buddhist monk to 11 years in jail for his role in allowing another monk to kill himself last March. The dead monk burned himself to death as a protest against Chinese persecutions of Tibetan Buddhists. Last month, another monk burned himself to death in protest.
> 
> August 26, 2011: Chinese web portal Sina.com, following government orders, announced that it had suspended several microblogs (the local equivalent of Twitter, which is banned in China) that had spread “misinformation.” What microblogs more frequently do is spread news the government wants to control (which is why Twitter cannot operate in China.) The Sina.com move generated a lot of protest by many other microbloggers. The government seeks to control Internet use to avoid stirring up unrest. But these censorship efforts often do just that.  The government is also increasing its use of blacklists of popular culture items, like foreign (especially American) songs that cannot be available on the Chinese Internet. Recent hits by Lady Gaga and Beyonce are typical of the forbidden sounds. The stuff gets through anyway, aided by increased demand because of blacklist status. If the government doesn’t like it, it must be good.
> 
> August 25, 2011: State run TV removed a video from its web site that showed (apparently by accident) a Cyber War tool (that can launch a DDOS attack on another site and shut it down temporarily.) The government denied that the Cyber War program was government property, but refused to comment further. The video first appeared on TV in July.
> 
> August 24, 2011:  The U.S. Department of Defense released its annual review of Chinese military power. Over the next week, China denounced the implications (that all this new Chinese military capabilities might be a problem.)
> 
> August 18, 2011: For the first time, Chinese PC shipments (18.5 million for this past April-June) exceeded those of the U.S. (17.7 million) for a three month period.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Relevant to China as well:
> 
> Economist link



You will note in Vancouver and elsewhere a trend of Asian women marrying Western men, but not the other way around. I think you will see more of an influx of this. 10  years ago, older East indians spat at my wife and me for being together, now I see many Western males with East indian mates. The number of mixed marriages is increasing quickly. Quite interesting i find.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Colin P said:
			
		

> You will note in Vancouver and elsewhere a trend of Asian women marrying Western men, but not the other way around. I think you will see more of an influx of this. 10  years ago, older East indians spat at my wife and me for being together, now I see many Western males with East indian mates. The number of mixed marriages is increasing quickly. Quite interesting i find.




Anecdotal _evidence_ only, but while I too see many Caucasian male/Asian female pairs, I, personally, know a few - a very few I hasten to add - that go the other way: Asian male/Caucasian female. In one case the Chinese man is considerably older (by 20_ish_ years) and it is a second marriage for him, in another both are in their 50s or 60s and it is a second marriage for both. In each and every case the Asian male is prosperous. I have hear little comment amongst Caucasian mutual acquaintances. Similarly, amongst Asian friends and acquaintances there is little to no objection to Asian/Caucasian marriages but the _resistance_ grows to marriages between Asians and other races and, especially between Chinese and non Chinese/non Caucasians.

Xenophobia and even racism are omnipresent in the Chinese culture.

But, the "excess males" _bubble_ that is now passing through the Chinese population, because the first wave of the "one child" policy is now in adulthood (the policy came into full effect _circa_ 1980), coupled with the growing tendency of Chinese women to eschew marriage is causing Chines men to look to e.g. Vietnam and even as far afield as Philippines to find wives. Another tendency is the influx of Han Chinese men into Xinjiang province to find Uyghur wives ~ many (most?) of whom appear to abandon their religion (Islam) and, thereby, contribute to the rapid Sinification of Xinjiang. (I heard a middle rank Chinese official rather crudely refer to China's policy towards Xinjiang as, roughly, "We will f__k them out of existence.")


----------



## FoverF

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> "We will f__k them out of existence."



It takes a long time, but no longer than many other plans for societal integration/normalization. 

And it _works_. You could fill a library with successful examples.


----------



## a_majoor

Disturbing economic news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/business/chinas-flawed-inflation-figures.html?_r=1&src=recg



> *China’s Flawed Inflation Figures*
> Associated Press
> 
> Volatile prices on items like pork greatly affect China's inflation number.
> By JOHN FOLEY and MARTIN HUTCHINSON
> Published: September 8, 2011
> 
> When China reports this week that the consumer price index rose at an annualized rate of about 6 percent in August, economists may say inflation has peaked. They said the same last year, when the C.P.I. was running half as fast. The problem isn’t bad forecasting: China’s headline inflation measure is flawed.
> 
> Headline inflation is easily bent by volatile prices. Take pork, which rose 57 percent year on year in July. Vegetable prices are increasing more than 5 percent a week, and the effect is magnified because food composes a third of the C.P.I. basket. Conversely, some prices are artificially low, like energy and transport. A ticket on Beijing’s subway has cost a flat 2 renminbi for three years.
> 
> China’s size creates another problem. While Shanghai urbanites lament the price of their lattes, farmers in the hinterland have different concerns. Perhaps it would be better to have one C.P.I. for the city and one for the country. New tailored bank rules for low-income Xinjiang Province make that not so far-fetched.
> 
> Finding the genuine inflation number isn’t easy. One insight comes with the difference between nominal and real reported gross domestic product, the so-called G.D.P. deflator. By that measure, 2010’s inflation was around twice the C.P.I.’s reported 3.3 percent rise. If that’s a guide, today’s inflation could be in double digits.
> 
> Savers, who are robbed by rising prices, are giving a strong signal. They have flocked to real estate and high-yielding wealth products to beat the measly 3.5 percent mandated one-year deposit rate. That makes inflation harder to fight, since money pushed into informal lending channels isn’t affected by monetary policy tools like bank credit quotas. Allowing deposits to be set by the market would draw more back into the banks. But the fear of eroding banks’ margins seems to stand in the way of what would be a potent inflation-fighting tool.
> 
> And then there are the dog whistles from politicians. Premier Wen Jiabao wrote in a state magazine on Sept. 1 that price stability was his priority, and warned of “unstable” conditions. Whatever the numbers say, when savers and politicians worry, investors should, too.
> 
> Proximity Blues
> 
> Canada’s economic comfort is suffering at the hands of its troubled southern neighbor. The Bank of Canada on Wednesday stopped raising interest rates at 1 percent, largely because of deteriorating conditions in the United States. That’s a pity — Canada would benefit from rates above inflation. But sluggishness and policy-wrangling south of the border sap growth and make its currency less competitive.
> 
> That makes the central bank’s decision understandable. Canadian short-term rates are already 1 percentage point higher than America’s zero rates, while the Canadian dollar has strengthened 5 percent against the greenback in the last year. The prevailing near parity between the two currencies hurts Canadian exports, slows growth and hampers job creation, even though the country’s resources sectors remain competitive.
> 
> A pick-up in growth in the United States would help Canada’s exports, while higher interest rates in the United States would reduce the upward pressure on the Canadian dollar. But neither of those things is likely in the short term, and the Federal Reserve’s commitment to a zero-rate policy through 2013 could even at some point put pressure on the Bank of Canada to reduce rates.
> 
> Yet Canadian inflation approached 3 percent in the year to July, and the nation’s savings rate, at 4.1 percent in the second quarter, is uncomfortably low and has fallen by 2.7 percentage points in the last year. Higher rates could help on both counts. Increased savings could also help the government as it chips away at the budget deficit and tries to balance its books.
> 
> Not that inflation, let alone growth, can be said to be overheating. But that, like the Bank of Canada’s rates policy, has a lot to do with the cold wind from the south. The United States represented 73 percent of exports in 2010 and the hobbled European Union and Japan a further 11 percent.
> 
> A push to build closer ties with faster-growing developing countries could help long term. Location makes that diversification challenging and, if a United States diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks is to be believed, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign travel — for instance, to Brazil last month — isn’t especially to his liking. But it’s a worthy goal. In the meantime, Canada’s erstwhile geographical advantage is, for now, its millstone.
> 
> For more independent financial commentary and analysis, visit www.breakingviews.com.


----------



## a_majoor

It will be bad enough when the Chinese "bubble" deflates. What happens if it pops?





> *Out Of The "Hard Landing" Pan And Into The "Crash" Fire - Are Things About To Get Even Worse For China?*
> 
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/02/2011 13:51 -0400
> 
> Over the past week one of the more hotly debated and market moving topics was the resurgence of speculation that China may be on the verge of a "hard landing." To a large extent this was driven by renewed concerns that the country's debt load, especially at the local government level, will be a substantially greater hindrance to growth and hence, concern than previously thought. This was paralleled by concerns that Chinese growth will likely slow down substantially more than previously expected, even as inflation remains stubbornly high. The result: a move wider in Chinese CDS in the past week whose severity was matched only by a similar move around the time of Lehman, when the world was widely seen as ending. Concerns that delusions about decoupling are precisely that (courtesy of 3 out of 4 BRICs printing a contractionary sub-50 ISM also led to the biggest drop in the Hang Seng index since 2001, after it tumbled 22% in Q3 as fears that a Chinese slow down would impact all developing economies with an emphasis on East Asia. Yet if a Hard Landing is all it took to disturb the precarious balance in which China always somehow always ride off into the sunset having rescued the entire world, we wonder what would happen if the market started expressing concerns that a Hard Landing is the optimistic case, and nothing short of a Crash Landing may be the baseline. Because according to the Economist, which informs us of a very troubling development out of China in which foreigners may be about to face a new entitlement funding tax for all domestic workers beginning October 15, and hence a surge in overall labor costs, then a "Crash Landing" may well be in the cards for the world's biggest marginal economy.
> 
> In "The Coming Squeeze", the Economist writes that the "cost of expatriate labor in China may be about to soar." The reason - a new tax levied on foreigners to fund the perpetually weakest link of Chinese society: its entitlement programs. "Officials have now unveiled some detailed rules which seem to require foreigners as of October 15th, to pay into China's public scheme that provides pensions, health care and unemployment benefits. The likely costs of the new measures are unknown. It is possible, but not certain, that foreigners will face stiffer taxes than locals. All that is clear, says KPMG, a tax consultancy, is that the law will squeeze both expats and their employers."
> 
> By this point a major red flag should have gone off: with international employers sourcing a key portion of the labor demand pool in China, a tax provision such as the one envisioned, which sees both foreign workers and foreign multinationals, would result in a surge in labor equivalent costs for what was once the cheapest labor market in the world (yet one which as Zero Hedge discussed several months ago may be poised to hit parity with the US in a few short years). Yet while natural labor supply/demand imbalances would have taken a long time to fully materialize, a government tax levy would have an immediate impact, and hit MNC bottom lines very hard. The net result would be a crunch in corporate bottom lines. The logical consequences would be scaled layoffs to preserve profitability, and a shift to a US-style labor relationship in which corporations extract a pound of productive efficiency flesh from their workers in exchange for the "privilege' of having a job. It is only logical that employees of domestic companies will demand comparable treatment and a prefunding of their own social safety net as the push for another Welfare State goes into high gear. One need only look what happened to Chinese auto companies two years ago when the domino effect of rising salaries forced most to increase their employee wages substantially or else face a disruptive (to put it mildly) work climate.
> 
> Needless to say, foreign workers met with a much more restrictive tax regime will also flee the country in droves, relocating to more tax-friendly havens, especially since as The Economist writes, "foreigners are unlikely to benefit from unemployment insurance, because it fhtey lose their jobs they typically lose the right to live in China. The rules suggest that pensions may be portable, but do not say how exactly this will work - and it is difficult for retired foreigners to obtain permanent residency in China.
> 
> Two other big red flags result from the implications of this move, which fundamentally is nothing short of a government-induced push to stick foreigners with the check for the country's non existent safety net:
> 
> 1). China is very actively starting to consider having a safety net, which implies that even the government no longer has much faith in the export-driven mercantilist model (aka the symbiotic, or stated-better, Mutual Assured Destruction with the US model). Whether this is due to ongoing economic turbulence in which China can no longer rely as much on the US and global consumer is unclear, but we are fairly confident it is a significant factor.
> 
> 2). China is now taking a much more hardline approach vis-a-vis international corporations, and foreign labor in general. Without doubt this is driven by the push to promote domestic corporate interests which China is seeing as not benefiting proportionately. The Economist agrees with this:
> 
> The climate for foreign firms in China is starting to feel frosty. Costs are rising, regulations are growing more burdensome. Local competitors are playing rough. Some, like Cosco, a shipping giant, have brazenly tried to renege on contracts. Others have used their political allies to squeeze out foreign partners. One Westerner reveals that two foreign firms on whose boards he serves have recently been forced to leave the country shedding their assets in fire sales. China is much too big and booming for foreign firms to ignore, and plenty of multinationals are doing splendidly there. But this latest turn of the screw may not be the last.
> 
> Some would say that it would be economic and political suicide for China to proceed with this plan. But when things start to turn ugly, as they have in the past several months, centrally-planned (not to mention hard line communist) economies have been known to make less than rational decisions. China would not be the first, nor, judging by rising expectations that our own Fed Chairman may soon resume exporting outright inflation to China yet again via yet another monetary stimulus, last.


----------



## a_majoor

Oh snap....

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-fires-back-us-senate-which-may-have-just-started-sino-us-currency-wars



> *China Fires Back At US Senate Which May Have Just Started The Sino-US Currency Wars*Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/03/2011 21:55 -0400
> 
> A few hours ago, the maniac simians at the Senate finally did it and fired the first round in the great US-China currency war, after they took aim at one of China's core economic policies, voting to move forward with a bill designed to press Beijing to let its currency rise in value in the hope of creating U.S. jobs. As Reuters reports, "Senators voted 79-19 to open a week of Senate debate on the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011, which would allow the U.S. government to slap countervailing duties on products from countries found to be subsidizing their exports by undervaluing their currencies. Monday's strong green light for debate on the bill bolsters prospects it will clear the Democrat-run Senate later this week, but prospects for action in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives are murky. If the bill did clear both chambers, it would present President Barack Obama with a tough decision on whether to sign the popular legislation into law and risk a trade war with Beijing, or veto it to pursue a more diplomatic approach." The response has been quick and severe: "China's foreign ministry said it "adamantly opposes" a bill pushed by the U.S. Senate that will allow the United States to impose duties on countries that undervalue their currencies." And just because China is now certain that the US will continue with its provocative posture, most recently demonstrated by the vocal response in the latest US-Taiwan military escalation, we would not be surprised at all to find China Daily report that China has accidentally sold a few billions in US government bonds... just because.
> 
> Reuters explains why this is one issue in which the Senate and Congress may actually agree:
> 
> Passage of the bill by the Democratic-controlled Senate would send it to the House, which is run by traditionally free-trade-friendly Republicans.
> 
> 
> A China currency bill passed the House last year with 99 Republican votes, but lapsed because the Senate took no action. This year, the bill already has more than 200 House co-sponsors and this week supporters expect to reach 218, the number needed to pass it.
> 
> 
> However, House Republican leaders have not shown a great appetite to pursue currency legislation, and it is unclear if the bill would ever face a vote in that chamber.
> 
> 
> House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a key player in deciding whether the chamber will take up the bill, did not tip his hand on Monday, telling reporters he was watching the Senate debate and "curious, really, where the White House is on that."
> 
> 
> Cantor, who voted against similar legislation a year ago, said he was "really interested to hear what impact that move will have and if there are any unintended consequences that may result."
> 
> 
> Critics of the bill, including U.S. business groups, warn that the legislation, if enacted, would risk a trade war with China -- one of the fastest-growing markets for U.S. goods -- at a time when a sputtering global economy can least afford it.
> 
> The trade war may have already started:
> 
> The Emergency Committee for American Trade called the bill "a highly damaging unilateral approach that will undermine broader efforts to address China's currency undervaluation."
> 
> 
> It also said the bill was unlikely to pass muster at the World Trade Organization and would open the door to Chinese retaliation "to the detriment of U.S. exports and jobs."
> 
> And if there is one thing China hates more than anything, it is being presented with no diplomatic choice, and appearing to bend to the will of D.C.
> 
> China rejects outside criticism of its yuan policies as interference in a sovereign decision and note that the currency has appreciated about 30 percent since 2005.
> 
> 
> While similar bills have foundered in the past, jobs are such a hot topic heading into next year's U.S. elections that prospects may have shifted.
> 
> 
> "On issue after issue, China is mercantilist, plain and simple," Democratic Senator Charles Schumer told the Senate.
> 
> Alas, when dysfunctional scapegoat politics enter into the equation, the worst possible outcome is guaranteed. Sure enough, China already responded:
> 
> In a statement posted on China's official government website (www.gov.cn) on Tuesday, foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu warned the United States not to "politicise" currency issues.
> 
> 
> He said the United States was using currency as an excuse to adopt protectionist trade measures that violated global trading rules.
> 
> 
> "By using the excuse of a so-called 'currency imbalance', this will escalate the exchange rate issue, adopting a protectionist measure that gravely violates WTO rules and seriously upsets Sino-U.S. trade and economic relations," he said. "China expresses its adamant opposition to this."
> 
> 
> Ma Zhaoxu repeated Beijing's position that it will continue to gradually reform its currency policy, "strengthening the flexibility of the renminbi exchange rate."
> 
> 
> He urged U.S. legislators to "proceed from the broader picture of Sino-U.S. trade and economic cooperation" and "forsake protectionism".
> 
> However this ends, one thing is certain: it's all downhill from here, as both sides now push their luck to see just how far either one can go in the increasingly more tenuous Nash Equilibrium without the other one defecting, or being perceived as having done so.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Oh snap....
> 
> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-fires-back-us-senate-which-may-have-just-started-sino-us-currency-wars
> ...
> ...  if there is one thing China hates more than anything, it is being presented with no diplomatic choice, and appearing to bend to the will of D.C.
> ...




My, personal, assessment is that China will not accept any _diktats_ from Washington. If this bill goes anywhere, which I doubt it will - because not everyone in Washington is suicidal, then it will start a trade and currency war with Beijing ... and Beijing will win.

No one, much, fears the USA any more, but China? ... that's a horse of another colour, people are less inclined to mess with China. If (when?) the trade/currency war starts Washington will have too few friends.


----------



## a_majoor

Censorship and control of free speech. I remember a time when it was thought that personal computers and FAX machines would bring down the USSR. Do the Chinese authorities have the same belief?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/china-moves-to-rein-in-microblogs/2011/10/03/gIQAXLLsKL_print.html



> *China moves to rein in microblogs*
> By Keith B. Richburg, Published: October 4
> 
> BEIJING — Chinese authorities have stepped up efforts in recent weeks to rein in the hugely popular microblogging sites that have become an alternative source of real-time news for millions while challenging the Communist Party’s traditional grip on information.
> 
> Journalists, bloggers, media analysts and others said the moves are part of an intensifying control of the media landscape ahead of next year’s crucial Communist Party Congress, which will bring the broadest leadership change in China in a decade. Although leadership shuffles here are routinely decided behind the scenes and carefully choreographed for the public, they are still often fraught with uncertainty — and jittery authorities typically want to take no chances.
> 
> The 2012 leadership change will be the first since the explosion here of Weibo, the microblogging sites that are like a Chinese version of Twitter with some of the visual elements of Facebook tossed in. Weibo has more than 200 million users, and the number is growing.
> 
> Although the traditional media here remain largely controlled by government censors, Weibo has emerged as a freewheeling forum for breaking news, exposés and edgy opinion — often to the chagrin of censors. For example, Weibo users first broke the news of the July 23 high-speed train collision in Wenzhou that killed 40 people — even using cellphones to post photos directly from the crash site — well before traditional government-controlled media reported the accident.
> 
> Also, although newspapers, television and radio are typically owned by the government or the Communist Party, the Weibo sites are run by private companies, meaning the censors’ control had to be more indirect.
> 
> But that seems to have changed.
> 
> Last Friday, a spokesman for the State Council Internet Office, which is under China’s State Council, or cabinet, issued a statement warning Internet users to “show self discipline and refrain from spreading rumors.” The statement was carried by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
> 
> A day before, Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Internet Office, told a conference here that social networking sites posed a problem for the government.
> 
> “Many people are considering how to prevent the abuse of these networks following violent crimes that took place in some parts of the world this year,” Wang said, referring to rioting in Britain that was fueled in part by youths using BlackBerry messaging and cellphones. “The Internet should not be used to jeopardize the national or public interest,” he said.
> 
> Intensifying pressure
> 
> The companies that run the most popular microblogging sites seem to have gotten the message. Sina, whose Weibo site is the most commonly used, has stepped up efforts to remove what it calls unsubstantiated rumors from its site and to indefinitely freeze the accounts of users who spread rumors.
> 
> Sina’s move came after Beijing Party Secretary Liu Qi, who is also a member of the party’s Politburo, visited its head office in Beijing in August. Afterward, Sina said in a statement that it would “put more effort into attacking all kinds of rumors.”
> 
> Sina also said it would monitor more closely the content of users with more than 50,000 followers.
> 
> But it seems that not only rumormongers are having their Weibo accounts suspended. In Shanghai, a Weibo microblogger using the online name “General Secretary of the Flower and Fruit Mountain” gained 20,000 followers by taking published photographs of government officials, zooming in on their luxury wristwatches and identifying their make and cost. Starting in July, General Secretary posted dozens of photos of officials and their watches.
> 
> The point was clear: Officials on low government salaries were publicly sporting pricy Rolexes, Omegas and Piagets — just the kind of potential corruption the party has said it wants to stamp out. But for his trouble, General Secretary received a call from Sina last month telling him that his account was being shut down and that all his posts were being deleted.
> 
> “I think the pressure on social media in China is intensifying, particularly given the strong role platforms such as Sina microblog have played on recent news stories,” said David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project Web site at the University of Hong Kong. He said the moves to rein in Weibo were part of the “cyclical nature” of media control in China.
> 
> Sina did not respond to questions about how many user accounts it has suspended since the new government edict came down. According to media reports, Sina has a large team, led by 10 editors, combing through the millions of daily Weibo posts trying to confirm whether news circulating online is true.
> 
> Murky situation
> 
> The efforts to control the microblogs come as authorities have made other recent moves against traditional media.
> 
> In September, two papers, the Beijing News — known for its aggressive reporting and investigations — and the Beijing Times, were placed under the control of the Beijing municipal propaganda department. Newspapers in China must have a “supervising authority,” and the two papers had been indirectly under the control of the central government.
> 
> Some journalists and media advocates said the situation was murky and unpredictable because competing power centers are vying for position before next year’s leadership changes.
> 
> “Each official is worrying that the media will be the tool of their enemies to attack them at this moment, which will be harmful to their political life,” said one Chinese investigative reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymously for fear of facing reprisals. “For example, if a newspaper of Hubei province reported a scandal out of Henan province, then the Henan officials will be really embarrassed.”
> 
> Investigative reporters and columnists have also been targets of the media tightening; many of them have lost their jobs.
> 
> Deng Fei, an investigative reporter for Phoenix Weekly, said, “The circle of Chinese investigative reporters is shrinking now. Many of them want to change jobs.”
> 
> He added, “This is really discouraging. I have been working in this field for 10 years. I also switched to working for a charity organization this year. I can’t see a future on this road.”
> 
> Staff researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.


----------



## Nemo888

I am beyond contempt. This is the new superpower?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo7BDbH17qA&feature=player_embedded#!


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

The story for the above video.
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/18/hit-and-run-in-china-sparks-soul-searching


----------



## SupersonicMax

Nemo888 said:
			
		

> I am beyond contempt. This is the new superpower?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo7BDbH17qA&feature=player_embedded#!



It's not like stuff similar to that never happened in Canada or the US...


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

I don't know,....what if had been a young BOY laying there?


----------



## mariomike

Very disturbing story.
From last September,
"Guidelines warn against hasty help: BEIJING - A just-released guideline on how to help elderly people who have fallen down is not connected with a series of recent cases where people have gone unassisted, said a Ministry of Health official.":
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-09/08/content_13645436.htm


----------



## Edward Campbell

Nemo888 said:
			
		

> I am beyond contempt. This is the new superpower?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo7BDbH17qA&feature=player_embedded#!




This is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/leaders-admit-chinas-cultural-development-is-lagging/article2205465/


> Leaders admit China’s ‘cultural development’ is lagging
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> BEIJING— From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011
> 
> China’s rapid economic development over the past two decades is something to celebrate. But after the display of horrifying indifference that some Chinese showed toward a bleeding two-year-old girl – in a video watched by millions around the world – the country’s leaders acknowledged Tuesday that the country’s “cultural development” lags behind its other accomplishments.
> 
> The official report released by the Xinhua news agency at the end of the annual gathering of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party made no mention of Wang Yue, the toddler who was run over twice and ignored by 18 passersby as she lay in a pool of her own blood in a Guangdong market last week. But it was hard not to see a connection between the jarring incident – which has provoked widespread soul-searching among Chinese Internet users – and the Central Committee’s call for a shift in focus from the country’s booming economy to addressing the voids that success has created.
> 
> After a four-day closed-door meeting, the 200-plus member Central Committee issued a communiqué calling for the country to build a “powerful socialist culture” that would involve “significantly improving the nation’s ideological and moral qualities.” Earlier, senior Politburo member Li Changchun was quoted as saying “venality, lack of integrity and moral anomalies” were on the rise in Chinese society.
> 
> Little Yueyue, as the girl is known here, remained in intensive care in a Guangzhou hospital yesterday, clinging to life, breathing with the help of a respirator. Local media quoted the hospital’s head of neurosurgery as saying the girl will likely remain in a vegetative state if she survives.
> 
> The Central Committee decided on cultural development as its main theme for this year’s plenum (last year’s focused on the five-year economic plan) well before the shocking video started an emotional discussion on the Chinese Internet about why people seem to have so little compassion for each other. Yueyue’s case was just the latest scandal in a country that has become increasingly accustomed to astonishing stories of wanton corruption, Internet scams, tainted baby food, and even child abductions with official involvement.
> 
> Many see the Communist Party as having created the vacuum it now seeks to fill. Religion was crushed following the country’s 1949 Revolution, and the ideology that was supposed to replace it – Maoism – went out the window when the country undertook its economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.
> 
> “The Central Committee knows there’s something very, very seriously wrong with the Chinese value system. Officially, they say that they do have a socialist value system, but no one knows what that means,” said Bo Zhiyue, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore. “No one believes in Marxism any more, Confucianism is not being revived, and the so-called Western universal values are not being accepted.”
> 
> What the government can do about it is unclear. A statue of Confucius was briefly erected on the edge of Tiananmen Square early this year, signalling what some saw as a campaign to resurrect the great scholar’s values as something of a moral code for the country. However the statue’s placement raised the ire of Maoists, and it was later moved to a less prominent spot inside the nearby National Museum.
> 
> The communiqué issued by the Central Committee suggested the Ministry of Culture and the Propaganda Department will lead the push to create a more ethical “socialist” culture, following the long-standing Communist tradition of trying to lead the masses through media and propaganda campaigns. But many Chinese believe that little can change unless the country’s widely distrusted legal system is overhauled.(Many Internet commentators admitted they understood the reaction of those who walked by injured Yueyue, since getting involved in another’s business can often have unpredictable consequences.)
> 
> With President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao set to retire next year, the debate over the country’s direction will almost certainly fall to the next generation of China’s leaders to resolve. Not mentioned in the communiqué was the behind-the-scenes jockeying for posts in the next Standing Committee of the Politburo, the Party’s top decision-making body.
> 
> While Vice-President Xi Jinping and Vice-Premier Li Keqiang are seen as virtual locks to succeed Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen next year, there could be as many as seven other spots available on the nine-person Politburo.
> 
> A taste of the campaigning taking place behind the sealed doors of the Great Hall of the People drifted onto the pages of the People’s Daily newspaper, which on the eve of the Central Committee meeting devoted a 3,000-word front-page article to the accomplishments of Bo Xilai, the charismatic boss of the megacity of Chongqing.
> 
> Mr. Bo has made himself the hero of the Party’s “new left” through his campaigns in Chongqing – which have included a harsh crackdown on crime and an effort to restore “Red culture” by encouraging the singing of Mao-era songs – and the prominent article was seen as a sign that he and the leftists might be in ascendance.
> 
> But on Monday, the Party’s liberals – often seen as the weaker grouping – got their moment in the People’s Daily, which devoted only slightly less prominent front-page coverage to Wang Yang, the reformist Party boss of coastal Guangdong province.
> 
> Mr. Wang recently launched a campaign known as “Happy Guangdong,” arguing that the region’s development needs to be measured by factors other than the pace of economic development. Citizens need to be “both rich of pocket and rich of brain,” the People’s Daily quoted him as saying.




The disconnect between Chines _ideals_ and Chinese actions has been a problem for 2,500 years. Venality does not coexist easily with altruism - not in China and not in Canada, either.

Dr. Bo Zhiyue has it about right: _“No one believes in Marxism any more, Confucianism is not being revived, and the so-called Western universal values are not being accepted.”_ The Chinese need to find a way to restore their traditional, very conservative, social values to a level which is commensurate with their fast growing wealth. Deng Xiaoping may have said that it is "glorious" to be rich, but he also understood that, in Confucius' words, _"Wealth and high station are what men desire,"_ and for 25 years that has been the main, almost only focus of the Chinese leadership.

The Chinese leadership is fond of using the media - especially TV and TV historical dramas, that are hugely popular in China - to "teach" lessons. Now is the time for some moral lessons using that powerfully persuasive medium.


----------



## Kalatzi

China Wants Bases  an Endless War in Pakistan


http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/china-pakistan-bases/

"Washington just got a golden opportunity to end its decade-long excursion into central Asia and deplete the power of its Pacific rival/banker, all in one fell swoop. The Chinese are seeking bases in the tribal regions of Pakistan, precisely where the U.S. fights its drone war."

"Think about it. The Chinese entangle themselves in a region where the U.S. found itself exhausted in an inconclusive effort. Since it’s China’s backyard, the domestic and internal military pressures to keep fighting there will likely be great. China can batter the residual terrorist presence in tribal Pakistan — its brutal Army will kill U.S. enemies as well as its own, if history is any indication — and also experience the pleasures of dealing with Islamabad, selling it weapons, and being responsible for Pakistani security. Surely Beijing will enjoy an intransigent ally that rejects its advice while keeping its money. And if China really wants a larger role in global affairs, tribal Pakistan is the most advantageous place for the U.S. to pass the baton."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Any significant, marked Chinese presence in the region would constrain US action: it is one thing to bomb your suspect, albeit putative ally Pakistan; it is another to bomb, again, your major creditor, China.


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## Nemo888

The classic blunder,...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LUUk6wVNrY


----------



## a_majoor

Retaining the "Mandate of Heaven" is becoming more difficult in the digital age:

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Operation+Free+Chen+example+speed+power+netizens+that+scares+China/5626454/story.html



> *Operation Free Chen is an example of the speed and power of 'netizens' that scares China's leaders*
> 
> AFP, Getty Images
> Plainclothes policemen patrol outside Chen's house, where he has lived since his release from jail.
> 
> Peter Foster, The Daily Telegraph · Oct. 29, 2011 | Last Updated: Oct. 29, 2011 4:08 AM ET
> 
> The policeman's hand slapped the woman's face with an audible crack.
> 
> Standing only five feet tall in her sneakers, barely the height of her assailant's epaulettes, she took the blow without a cry.
> 
> The scene was witnessed by The Daily Telegraph this week in a small police station near a village in Shandong province, northeast China, that has become a magnet for activists of all stripes protesting against a dark corner of the Chinese state that operates beyond the law.
> 
> The woman who took the slap, Wang Xuezhen, 30, is one of a stream of people who have come together over the Internet and travelled to Dongshigu to support a man they believe is being persecuted, a blind lawyer named Chen Guangcheng.
> 
> Stumbling out of the police station and holding her stinging face, Ms. Wang bitterly observed a truth about contemporary China: the country's lawlessness begins with the law itself.
> 
> Then she turned on her cellphone and asked a friend to post a message on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, relaying the news of the assault to the world.
> 
> Almost immediately, her supporters began passing on the message and posting their own messages of support. By the evening the slap had been picked up by an Asian television channel.
> 
> "These animals, they lack all humanity, I hate them so much. I wish I could go and join your fight!" wrote one of her followers.
> 
> The power and speed of China's social networks have alarmed the government, which announced plans Wednesday to police the buzz of messages more tightly, in the name of maintaining what it calls "social stability."
> 
> In the two years since it was launched, the Weibo platform has attracted more than 200 million users, weighing in with a chorus of commentary on the failings of an authoritarian state that often questions and contradicts the output of the tightly controlled state media.
> 
> Even though the Weibo microblogs are carefully policed - censors block and delete content deemed seditious - the controls are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outpourings by netizens.
> 
> Operation Free Chen Guangcheng is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what frightens the Communist party. It began this year when activists began suggesting online people should go as "tourists" to visit the 39year-old, who has been under illegal house arrest for more than a year.
> 
> What started as a trickle of visitors has become a steady river, with more than 30 people arriving last weekend alone, despite the almost certain prospect of being greeted by violence.
> 
> Mr. Chen upset local Communist party officials by exposing a gruesome program of forced abortions and sterilizations as part of China's one-child policy.
> 
> Using his skills as a self-taught lawyer - he was blinded at a young age and was illiterate until he was in his early 20s - he filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of numerous women who had suffered brutal and illegal enforcement of China's onechild policy, embarrassing local officials and forcing national authorities to investigate.
> 
> The suit was rejected and only one official was punished, but Mr. Chen - nicknamed the "barefoot lawyer" - refused to give up, becoming more outspoken despite beatings and intimidation.
> 
> By September 2005, Mr. Chen was placed under house arrest and on Aug. 24, 2006, after a two-hour trial, which his lawyers were unable to attend, he was jailed for four years and three months for "damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic."
> 
> Since his release in September last year - the same year he was nominated, along with the eventual winner Liu Xiaobo, for the Nobel Peace Prize - he and his family have been locked into their home with steel shutters covering the windows.
> 
> In addition, his phones and Internet lines were cut and 200 thugs were hired - by whom no one is quite sure - to patrol the perimeters of his village night and day.
> 
> Although several activists trying to visit him have been beaten, the flow of people has not stopped, with one activist saying they are "like mosquitoes settling on the hide of an elephant."
> 
> All sorts of people have been drawn to Dongshigu - a strange mixture of brave activists, principled citizen journalists and a few thrillseekers.
> 
> One, a young man, who prefers not to be interviewed because he is "politically connected," is driving an Audi and wears designer jeans; he also visibly relishes the daily game of cat-and-mouse with the local secret police.
> 
> He is part of a five-man team that recently infiltrated the fringes of the village at night to set off a cannonade of fireworks, sending a message "to tell Blind Chen the people care."
> 
> A video of the fireworks was posted online, attracting 6,000 hits before it was removed by the censors.
> 
> Ironically, Ms. Wang and two others were visiting the police station to ask for protection from the thugs who - just like the officer who struck her and removed the Velcro patch with his police number - operate above the law, but apparently with its tacit support.
> 
> Their request was met with scorn.
> 
> "You are citizens of China, of course you are free to visit the village," said the senior officer, who would not give his name, but did wear his ID number, 076970.
> 
> "If there are problems we will protect you, but we cannot protect you against imaginary difficulties."
> 
> It was then Ms. Wang started to argue, retorting the last time she came to Dongshigu, on Sept. 21, a bag was put over her head before she was beaten and robbed, and yet the police offered her no protection and refused to investigate her case.
> 
> It was after she fired a particularly strong insult at the officer that the slap suddenly rang out. But what would be grounds for an assault charge in the West was brushed off as just another unavoidable knock.
> 
> Earlier, tailed by a black car whose occupants also watched her eat lunch, Ms. Wang stopped to buy pens, pencils and pencil-sharpeners for Mr. Chen's six-year-old daughter Chen Kesi, who has only this month been released from her father's "prison" and allowed to attend the nearby elementary school.
> 
> Online, people had donated 5,000 yuan ($780) for the little girl, who is regularly trailed by the thugs as she goes to school.
> 
> "This is the way that the common people show their feelings for what is happening to Chen," said Ms. Wang, describing her purchases.
> 
> At the school gates she waited until the bell rang for the end of class, before trying to hand over the art materials for Chen Kesi and her classmates. She was rebuffed by men in leather jackets who said "no child of that name attends this school."
> 
> Seeing the activists at the gates, the children were shooed indoors. Ms. Wang was left to tie the bag of goodies and toss it into the courtyard of one of Mr. Chen's older brothers with a note asking him to pass it on.
> 
> The netizens were seeking justice for Mr. Chen by a thousand cuts, explained Li Jianjun, a prominent investigative journalist, who was fired from China's mainstream media for refusing to accept the censorship, and also witnessed Ms. Wang being slapped.
> 
> He believes the activism is working, citing the decision to allow Mr. Chen's daughter to go to school and a recent editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper warning the local government was mishandling the situation.
> 
> "The central government wanted to cover up Chen's case, but so many netizens and citizen journalists came and told about what happening, that it was no longer possible," he said.
> 
> "So then they turned to a different method - robbing and beating the netizens - but, unexpectedly, the people were not frightened. More came and more people are now talking about it. This is such a strong expression of public opposition, it is a great achievement."


----------



## GAP

There's been an Asian Spring slowly building momentum......it may take decades to achieve, but I think the old ways are cracking ......and only the people can do it.


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## leroi

I think you are right GAP. Those children and youth who are products of the one child policy won't tolerate a repressive system as they grow and age. They want an open country and they've been raised with much more freedom than their ancestors.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A bit of (revealing) news about the PLA in this article which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/a-bit-chunky-with-a-tattoo-chinas-military-will-take-you/article2222313/


> A bit chunky with a tattoo? China’s military will take you
> 
> CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
> BEIJING— The Associated Press
> 
> Published Wednesday, Nov. 02, 2011
> 
> China's military is accepting recruits who are heavier and have more visible tattoos, conceding to rising prosperity and individuality among the nation's young.
> 
> In keeping with a drive for better-educated recruits, the military is also opening up to university students willing to take time off to serve, offering them an additional 6,000 yuan ($944) annually to subsidize their educational costs and guaranteeing that their university places will be there for them when they return to campus.
> 
> The changes announced by the Defence Ministry on Wednesday took effect during the People's Liberation Army's current winter recruitment drive. The People's Liberation Army is the world's largest, with 2.3 million people in uniform.
> 
> The ministry said would-be recruits will no longer be rejected for having face or neck tattoos as long as the body art doesn't exceed 2 centimetres.
> 
> The changes also allow for body weight up to 25 per cent greater or 15 per cent lower than the military's standard, in contrast to the former limits of 20 per cent greater and 10 per cent lower.
> 
> Prohibitions on ear piercings will also be eliminated, as long as the holes are not too obvious.
> 
> The reforms reflect how China's educated youths are becoming increasingly selective about jobs at the same time as the military rapidly modernizes. As in the West, increased food consumption and more sedentary lifestyles are producing recruits who are less fit and more choosy about the physical activities they engage in.
> 
> With China's enormous population and huge amounts of excess rural labour, the army in the past could afford to be highly selective in whom it admitted, requiring recruits to meet strict standards for height and weight and automatically tossing out those with less than perfect vision or other slight physical defects.
> 
> While China's growing economy offers numerous alternatives, military pay and benefits have been improving in line with double-digit annual percentage increases in the defence budget. The armed forces also retain a privileged position in communist society, and a military background can lead to careers in security, local government, and other areas, so serving remains a relatively attractive choice.
> 
> While China maintains a draft, the army has been essentially all-voluntary for many years as so many young men sought to join. Rejection rates among those taking the basic physical exams have run at about 70 per cent in past years.
> 
> The U.S. military changed its policy for recruits in 2006 to ban any tattoos above the collar, including on the neck, head, or face, as well as those anywhere on the body of an extremist, sexist, racist, or indecent nature. The rules set no limits on piercings, but forbid earrings and other such body decorations except in some cases for female soldiers.
> 
> Chinese soldiers are required to be slightly taller than U.S. recruits, with a minimum height of 5 feet, 3 inches for men, as opposed to 5 feet for Americans.
> 
> While American male soldiers can weigh between 97 and 259 pounds, depending on age and height, the People's Liberation Army calculates its standard weights only by height, starting at 115 pounds.




My impression, based on reading, a small handful of conversations and a tiny bit of observation, is that the current PLA is much, much smaller but *qualitatively much more powerful* than the 1981 version.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Likely not a _huge_ surprise to veteran China watchers around here.....


> *Nearly half of China's wealthiest citizens are considering emigrating, with the United States
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> and Canada  the most popular destinations*, according to a new report from the authors of China's rich list.
> 
> The survey by the Bank of China and the Hurun Report, which publishes luxury magazines and runs a research institute, found that 46 percent of Chinese with assets worth more than 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) were considering moving abroad.
> 
> Another 14 percent had already begun the process, it said. Many said they were seeking a better education for their children and cited concerns about the security of their assets in China.
> 
> Nearly a third of the respondents said they already had investments overseas, in many cases to enable them to emigrate. Some countries offer residency to foreign citizens who are prepared to invest large sums.
> 
> High inflation and the difficulty of investing overseas were also cited in the survey, which took in 980 people in 18 Chinese cities ....


Agence France-Presse, 1 Nov 11


----------



## a_majoor

China's space program:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/news/chinas-space-docking-what-does-it-mean



> *China’s Space Docking: What Does It Mean?*
> This week China launched a capsule that joined with its prototype space station already in orbit. It’s a small step in space, but what does it say about China’s larger intentions?
> By Rand Simberg
> 
> November 4, 2011 3:00 PM
> On Tuesday, Nov. 1., China launched the Shenzhou-8 space capsule into the same orbital plane as its Tiangong-1 prototype space station. Over the course of several Earth orbits, the capsule performed a rendezvous maneuver and slowly caught up to the space station. Eventually, when it got close enough, Shenzhou-8 made some final burns to precisely match its velocity and location with the Tiangong-1, and the two spacecraft docked, temporarily becoming one. It was the first successful space docking in China’s history.
> 
> As milestones go, this could be seen as a small one. After all, China merely performed a feat that Americans achieved more than 45 years earlier (and its space station is about the size of the Salyut 1 Russia flew about 40 years ago). There was a key difference, though: While the first American docking was with a manned Gemini capsule and an unmanned Agena upper stage, the Chinese performed the entire operation with unmanned spacecraft—a feat that the U.S. had never actually performed until recently, and a tribute to the intervening decades of technological development. The question now is: What does China’s recent success say about its goals in space?
> 
> When NASA achieved its first orbital docking in 1966, it was a key demonstration needed to develop the confidence to later go to the moon. That’s because the Apollo mission required a similar rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit between the ascending lunar module and the orbiting command module in order to get the astronauts back home to earth.
> 
> Chinese leaders openly want to have a manned space station by the end of the decade, and this demonstration is crucial to that goal for two reasons. First, assembling a space station during multiple missions (as the U.S. and other nations did with the International Space Station) requires the capability to mate two pieces in orbit. And even if the station could be launched in a single piece (as Skylab was in the 1970s), every visit to a space station requires a rendezvous and docking. With this mission a success, expect manned flights on Shenzhou missions in the next couple years.
> 
> But how about beyond low Earth orbit (LEO)? Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who for years has warned that China could go to the moon before the U.S. could break out its holding pattern in LEO, testified before Congress on this subject just a few weeks ago. In this telling exchange, he outlines how China—taking advantage of the docking sophistication it displayed this week—could mount a mission to the moon without even building a heavy-lift rocket:
> 
> I know the Chinese Long March 5 rocket is in development. I wondered if you could compare that to anything we have in the American inventory. When it’s built will it really be larger than anything we have? And why do you think that the Chinese are building such a large rocket?
> 
> Griffin: Well, the Long March 5 is comparable in scale to today’s Delta IV Heavy or to the Ares I crew vehicle—which we were going to build and which was cancelled. So it’s on the order of, and of course until it flies regularly we won’t actually know, but it’s on the order of 25 tons of payload to LEO. So it’s not in the class of, say, the Saturn V or the new SLS [Space Launch System].
> 
> But it’s a very significant capability and in fact by launching and rendezvousing four of those in LEO it would be possible for the Chinese to construct a manned lunar mission with no more than that rocket and no more than Apollo technology. And I have in the past written up on how that mission would work from an engineering perspective. So with the Long March 5 the Chinese inherently possess the capability to return to the moon should they wish to do so.
> 
> And you are saying that we do not have anything comparable to that other than what had been talked about?
> 
> We do not. Well, we have nice view graphs (laughter in the background).
> 
> Actually, contrary to Griffin’s implication, the Delta IV Heavy has flown, so it’s more than "view graphs." And the Long March 5 isn’t scheduled to fly until 2014. But even in that timeline, China could be thinking about a moon visit relatively soon. In the U.S., by comparison, the Space Launch System NASA is now mandated to build couldn’t return Americans to the moon until at least the late 2020s (and would add tens of billions to the cost), according to a recently leaked NASA internal document.
> 
> China has yet to make any specific commitments to manned lunar missions, though the Chang’e series of unmanned lander missions, which are planned to culminate in a sample return rocket in 2020, could be a precursor to such missions. The nation’s nonmilitary space program (though it’s somewhat hard to separate military from nonmilitary, as China doesn’t have a civil space agency like NASA and its "taikonauts" are military personnel) seems aimed primarily at national prestige and cementing relations with the developing world through cooperative activities. It’s not clear how a lunar program will fit into that.
> 
> However, some aerospace bigwigs see aggressive lunar goals in China’s future. A couple weeks ago, at a space conference in Las Cruces, N.M., space real-estate developer and Bigelow aerospace founder Bob Bigelow made a second major speech in 2011, warning that, in his view, the Chinese plan not only to visit, but also to claim the moon, casting aside the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbids nations from claiming sovereignty of off-planet property. "China already has a grand national vision," he said then. "Their vision is that China wants to be indisputably No. 1 in the world, measured any way you want to measure."
> 
> And Washington certainly isn’t doing anything to diminish the idea of a second space race based on national pride. The same day China achieved its space docking, Virginia Congressman Frank Wolfe, chairman of the appropriations committee for NASA, called a hearing to find out why administrator Charles Bolden and presidential science adviser John Holdren had been meeting with Chinese space officials, when the NASA budget expressly forbids any cooperation with China. (The dispute is over $3,500 spent to host the meeting, so this is simply a symbolic squabble.)
> 
> But Congress should perhaps be careful what they wish for in excluding China from cooperative space activities. In the 1970s, the French were upset by what they considered unreasonable demands for American control over the use of satellites that they were going to launch in the Space Shuttle, then in development. The result was the European Ariane rocket, which has taken a lot of launch business not just from the Shuttle, but also from American commercial launch providers over the past decades.
> 
> Besides, there’s one other point to consider in how much of a threat the Chinese are. China’s space industry has expressed concerns that it won’t be able to compete with the SpaceX Falcon on cost, even with Chinese government subsidies. So as long as we don’t regulate our own competitive private industry out of business, we may not need to be so restrictive.
> 
> 
> Read more: China’s Space Docking: What Does It Mean? - Shenzhou-8 - Popular Mechanics


----------



## a_majoor

The last housing bubble that popped in 2008 caused a real mess.....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2011/11/06/property-prices-collapse-in-china-is-this-a-crash/



> *Property Prices Collapse in China. Is This a Crash?*
> 
> Residential property prices are in freefall in China as developers race to meet revenue targets for the year in a quickly deteriorating market.  The country’s largest builders began discounting homes in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen in recent weeks, and the trend has now spread to second- and third-tier cities such as Hangzhou, Hefei, and Chongqing.  In Chongqing, for instance, Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa cut asking prices 32% at its Cape Coral project.  “The price war has begun,” said Alan Chiang Sheung-lai of property consultant DTZ to the South China Morning Post.
> 
> What started slowly in September turned into a rout by the middle of last month—normally a good period for sales—when Shanghai developers started to slash asking prices.  Analysts then expected falling property values to move Premier Wen Jiabao to relax tightening measures, such as increases in mortgage rates and prohibitions on second-home purchases, intended to cool the market.
> 
> They were wrong.  After a State Council meeting on October 29, Mr. Wen affirmed his policy, stating that local authorities should continue to “strictly implement the central government’s real estate policies in the coming months to let citizens see the results of the curbs.”  Then, the selling began in earnest as “desperate” developers competed among themselves to unload inventory.  One builder—Excellence Group—even said it would sell flats in Huizhou at its development cost.
> 
> Citi’s Oscar Choi believes prices will decline another 10% next year, but that’s a conservative estimate.  Even state-funded experts are more pessimistic.  For example, Cao Jianhai of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sees price cuts of 50% on homes if the government continues its cooling measures.
> 
> When Beijing’s pet analysts are saying prices could halve in a few months, we can be sure they are thinking the eventual sell-off will be worse.  In any event, the markets are bracing for trouble.  Investors are dumping both the bonds and the shares of Chinese developers, and legendary bear Jim Chanos, citing the property market, late last month said he is still not covering his short positions on China.
> 
> One does not have to agree that China will be “Dubai times 1,000—or worse”—Chanos’s memorable phrase—to understand that the unwinding of “the biggest housing bubble ever created” will be especially painful.  Analysts have great confidence in Beijing’s technocrats because they managed to continue to manufacture growth through the global downturn, but most of us seem to forget that the Chinese, through massive stimulus, created even bigger challenges for themselves.  At the moment, Beijing has yet to resolve two intractable problems: persistent inflation and artificially high property prices.T
> 
> he dominant narrative at the moment is that China’s economic managers will skillfully deflate the property bubble and land the economy softly.  As Time observes, “Many observers say a sharp economic decline won’t be permitted to happen before the change of leadership in 2012.”
> 
> Won’t be permitted?  It is true that Beijing’s technocrats have had the advantage of working in a semi-closed system that has allowed them to use the considerable resources of the state to achieve outcomes not possible in freer economies.  Nonetheless, they can continue to do so—in other words, defy economic principles—only as long as market participants—in this case builders, local officials, and homeowners—cooperate.
> 
> The last four weeks, however, must have been a sobering period for Premier Wen, and not only because developers began to lose their nerve.  For one thing, recent purchasers have taken to the streets because they had suffered losses even before taking possession of their homes.  A crowd of about 300 people in Shanghai smashed windows at the sales office of Longfor Properties on October 22, two days after the builder had ended a sales promotion on a project.  The protestors had bought properties in earlier phases of the same project at prices as much as 30% higher than the discounted ones.
> 
> And then, on the 23rd, a smaller crowd—on the same street—demonstrated against another developer, Greenland Group.  Protesters were injured in Shanghai at another demonstration, this time against a unit of China Overseas Holdings.  There were also protests against builders in Beijing and in other cities, Hangzhou and Nanjing.
> The cities of Hangzhou and Hefei have reportedly told developers to limit discounts to 20% to avoid unrest, but the attempt to establish fiat prices will not work for long because many builders face insolvency.
> 
> Moreover, Premier Wen has to be concerned that sometimes he cannot control his own cities, which have flouted his decrees by removing curbs on property ownership.  Nanjing defied Beijing and relaxed mortgage rules, as did Anhui province.  At least in Foshan, a city in Guangdong, central authorities apparently convinced local leaders to rescind their earlier decision to scrap centrally mandated curbs.
> 
> The overriding reality is that, because of Beijing’s stimulus spending, there are too many properties and not enough buyers at this time.  The market will have to arrive at equilibrium at some point, but what is surprising is the rapidity at which this is now happening.  In common parlance, it’s called a crash.
> The cities of Hangzhou and Hefei have reportedly told developers to limit discounts to 20% to avoid unrest, but the attempt to establish fiat prices will not work for long because many builders face insolvency.
> 
> Moreover, Premier Wen has to be concerned that sometimes he cannot control his own cities, which have flouted his decrees by removing curbs on property ownership.  Nanjing defied Beijing and relaxed mortgage rules, as did Anhui province.  At least in Foshan, a city in Guangdong, central authorities apparently convinced local leaders to rescind their earlier decision to scrap centrally mandated curbs.
> 
> The overriding reality is that, because of Beijing’s stimulus spending, there are too many properties and not enough buyers at this time.  The market will have to arrive at equilibrium at some point, but what is surprising is the rapidity at which this is now happening.  In common parlance, it’s called a crash.
> The cities of Hangzhou and Hefei have reportedly told developers to limit discounts to 20% to avoid unrest, but the attempt to establish fiat prices will not work for long because many builders face insolvency.
> 
> Moreover, Premier Wen has to be concerned that sometimes he cannot control his own cities, which have flouted his decrees by removing curbs on property ownership.  Nanjing defied Beijing and relaxed mortgage rules, as did Anhui province.  At least in Foshan, a city in Guangdong, central authorities apparently convinced local leaders to rescind their earlier decision to scrap centrally mandated curbs.
> 
> The overriding reality is that, because of Beijing’s stimulus spending, there are too many properties and not enough buyers at this time.  The market will have to arrive at equilibrium at some point, but what is surprising is the rapidity at which this is now happening.  In common parlance, it’s called a crash.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Take a look at these videos. It's an hour out of your life but It's a pretty informative hour. This documentary is good on several levels: it's about China, it's about children and parents and it's about the practice of democracy ~ there is not, it appears to me a whole lot of difference between that classroom and the US Congress, or our Parliament. Dirty tricks and vote buying work.


*Vote For Me* 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYb_KzlXk4A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7cvoVRDjo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePiLfle5We4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt0U1f_z4XE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZA6Rg2pTSg&feature=related


----------



## a_majoor

More bad news from China:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/11/08/the-most-important-story-of-the-day/



> *The Most Important Story of the Day*
> 
> Hold on to your seats; according to The Conference Board, perhaps the most important business oriented forecasting group in the world, revolution is coming to China.
> 
> That’s not what the group’s latest global forecast says literally, but this or something like it is the clear meaning of the forecast that China’s growth is likely to slow to 8.7 percent next year, 6.6 percent in each of the four years after that, and then average 3.5 percent per year between 2017 and 2025. It has long been an article of faith inside China and among most China watchers that the country needs 9 percent growth per year to avoid widespread instability.
> 
> If China’s growth decelerates that fast, that far, the biggest question in world politics won’t be how the rest of us will accommodate China’s rise.  The question will shift to whether China can last.
> 
> The report, well covered in the Wall Street Journal, is a sober read.  Overall, world growth is expected to decline, with both China and India leading the decline.  The advanced countries are expected to recover from the current slump, but growth will remain anemic for years to come.  In other parts of the developing world, growth could slow to a crawl, presumably reflecting poor demand for basic commodities in a slow growth world.
> 
> Forecasts almost never come true, and economic forecasts at this point are much less reliable than weather reports.  But the main story here is that some of the best trained, and best connected economic minds in the business are changing their tune about China and India.  The inexorable rise of the supergiants has been the dominant meme in the fashionable chit-chat about global economic and geopolitical trends for some time.  The Conference Board report gives respectability and visibility to a more textured and, in Via Meadia’s view, more realistic view of what lies ahead.
> 
> The Conference Board could still be understating the problem.  If growth deceleration results in serious instability, blows out the financial system (a distinct possibility), or simply ties the hands of China’s policy makers so that they can’t respond in a timely fashion to changing circumstances, deceleration could turn into something much more dramatic very fast.
> 
> The next ten years will be full of surprises; this report offers a welcome if occasionally grim peek under the curtain to see what some of those surprises might be.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, on China's expansion into Brazil, especially into its energy sector:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/latin-american/chinas-sinopec-buys-52-billion-stake-in-galps-brazil-assets/article2233217/


> China’s Sinopec buys $5.2-billion stake in Galp’s Brazil assets
> 
> LESLIE HOOK
> Beijing— Financial Times
> 
> Published Friday, Nov. 11, 2011
> 
> Sinopec, China’s biggest oil refiner by amount of oil refined, has signed a $5.2-billion (U.S.) deal that will give it a 30-per-cent stake in the Brazilian assets of Galp Energia, the Portuguese energy company.
> 
> The deal is the latest in a string of Chinese oil investments in Brazil, where rich oil resources lie offshore in deepwater areas that require a lot of capital to develop.
> 
> Galp Energia, which has a market cap of $11-billion, started a bidding process earlier this year looking for a partner to help finance its Brazilian projects, which include four offshore blocks in the pre-salt Santos Basin.
> 
> State-owned Sinopec on Friday said it would pay $3.5-billion for the 30-per-cent stake in Petrogal Brasil and Galp Brazil Services, which are both subsidiaries of Galp, in addition to $1.6-billion in capital expenditure, bringing the cash transaction to a total of $5.2-billion.
> 
> “The acquisition has further expanded Sinopec’s overseas oil and gas business operations, which will make major contributions to the company’s oil and gas output growth in the 12th and 13th five-year plan periods,” the Chinese group said in a statement.
> 
> Galp shares fell 11 per cent in Lisbon on Friday morning on the news, their biggest decline for three years.
> 
> Chinese companies have been major investors in Brazil’s offshore oil fields, with recent deals including Sinopec’s $7.1-billion purchase of a stake in the Brazilian assets of Repsol YPF last year. Sinochem, the Chinese chemicals company, bought a $3.1-billion stake in the Peregrino oil field from Statoil last year.
> 
> Sinopec and other oil groups were also in talks over BG’s Brazilian assets in recent months, although those talks have since collapsed, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
> 
> In 2009, the Chinese government inked a $10-billion oil-for-loan deal with Brazil, under which Sinopec is guaranteed a certain amount of crude supplies over a decade.
> 
> Chinese state-owned oil companies have done more than $20-billion in deals this year, making China one of the world’s top acquirers in the oil and gas sector, alongside the US and the U.K.
> 
> China is the world’s biggest energy consumer and second-biggest consumer of crude oil. Beijing has long viewed the country’s reliance on imported crude - which supplies about half of China’s total oil consumption - as a strategic weakness.
> 
> Galp’s Brazilian assets account for some 90 per cent of its total reserves, and include more than 20 exploration and production projects. Eni of Italy holds a 33 per cent stake in Galp which it tried to sell to Petrobras of Brazil earlier this year, but the deal fell through. The Portuguese government also has a stake in Galp.




It is important to understand that Chinese ownership, even 100% ownership of a resource does not give it _control_ over where that resource goes - the country in which the resource is found still has sovereign rights until such time as that resource leaves its borders. Oil is a classic case in point. The "owner" of the oil is not sure where the oil is going until it actually arrives at some refinery - there are so many brokers and middlemen that oil often changes hands and even, but much less often, destinations while it is at sea in a tanker.

What the Chinese are after is _protection_ from _potential_ embargoes. Think back to the summer of 1941: the US, then Japan's biggest oil supplier, halted oil shipments to Japan to retaliate for further Japanese advances into French Indo-China. China wants to have enough "say" in the oil policies of enough countries to prevent a global embargo.

Canada is also a _target_ of China's oil ambitions. China especially likes Canada because, "dirty" or not, our oil is produced and exported under a rule of law that prevents or, at the very least, delays precipitous political actions like embargoes.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And the Chinese are, quietly, smiling at the latest setback for the _Keystone_ pipeline. Every setback for _Keystone_ is a step forward for _Northern Gateway_ which _might_ direct more and more "safe" Canadian oil towards Asia and away from America - giving China better access to "well governed" Canadian oil and leaving America reliant on e.g. Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.


----------



## a_majoor

If this is the 21rst century counterpart to AirLand Battle, then the interesting question is how exactly is this going to be done, given the shrinkage of US military assets over the past decades?

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/11/10/tales-of-the-western-pacific/?print=1



> *Tales of the Western Pacific*
> 
> Posted By Richard Fernandez On November 10, 2011 @ 1:52 pm In Uncategorized | 75 Comments
> 
> The Pentagon [1] has released a few details of the mysterious “air sea battle” concept which is widely understood to be directed primarily at  China. The Chinese threat is described as consisting of “anti-access, area denial weapons”, a euphemism for preparations to sink US carrier battle groups at sea. Yet despite the portentous  description of the “air sea” concept there were few details available:
> 
> “Air Sea Battle is to China what the maritime strategy was to the Soviet Union,” the official said.
> 
> During the Cold War, U.S. naval forces around the world used a strategy of global presence and shows of force to deter Moscow’s advances.
> 
> “It is a very forward-deployed, assertive strategy that says we will not sit back and be punished,” the senior official said. “We will initiate.”
> 
> The Wall Street Journal [2] says that despite the veil of mystery over what it really amounts to fears are already being expressed about it being overly aggressive towards Beijing.
> 
> At its foundation AirSea Battle is a roadmap to combining Air Force and Navy assets to overwhelm attempts to limit the U.S. military’s global reach. In the Pacific theater this would serve as the counter-punch to China’s “anti-access” capabilities, which include a nascent anti-ship ballistic missile that could hold the U.S. Navy at bay during a regional conflict.
> 
> But AirSea Battle could be excessively provocative. Many analysts fear that the plan is the next step in a cycle of military escalation that could taint broader diplomatic relations between the two countries. The Pentagon has delayed implementing and discussing AirSea Battle several times, partly because of concerns over the Chinese reaction.
> 
> The Chinese are guaranteed not to like it. That suggests that the official version of the doctrine will be crafted not to provoke China. But whether there will be an unofficial and politically incorrect version of the plan and what it will consist of is not publicly known. AOL Defense [3] describes a briefing at which one of its correspondents managed to learn nearly nothing:
> 
> We learned it is a not a strategy, not a concept of operations, not an assault on the services’ authorities and is not directed at any particular country.
> 
> So a gaggle of the nation’s top defense journalists got together after the discussion and tried to figure out what the hell it all really meant. I’d like to say we achieved great clarity. We didn’t. We were all left groping for a clear and coherent explanation we could offer readers for Air-Sea Battle.
> 
> After discussions with several defense civilians and uniformed types, I think the best way to describe this effort is to say that the defense leadership is worried that after a decade of counterinsurgency operations the U.S. military has lost its focus on conventional warfare, especially the strike and counterstrike that drives much of a military operation.
> 
> Clue number 1: the “air sea battle” concept involves classic conventional warfighting.  AOL sensed that the Army was worried and bustled around looking for a way into the “air sea battle” concept before all the funding went to the Air Force and Navy, leaving the Army to fight terrorists in distant muddy places.
> 
> But as the Wall Street Journal says, the Chinese have guessed they are the object of the strategy — whatever it is — and are not standing still.
> 
> No matter what shape AirSea Battle finally takes, China may already have a counter to the counter-response. Mark Stokes of the Project 2049 Institute says that China has already anticipated some of AirSea Battle’s components in its long-term plans for modernization. “The PLA has invested considerably in counter-stealth systems and tunneling to protect critical infrastructure.”
> 
> That implies, if anything that the Chinese believe the US is going to hold their capabilities at risk. The USAF and USN are acquiring the hardware to take out their area-denial and precision strike capabilities first. That would explain why the Air Force and the Navy are looking to get [1]:
> 
> a new long-range bomber.
> joint submarine and stealth aircraft assets.
> jointly operated, long-range unmanned strike aircraft with up to 1,000-mile ranges.
> 
> In that light it is interesting to note that President Obama is slated to announce an agreement with Australia [4] that will give American troops and ships “permanent and constant” access to Australian facilities. This would appear to be a complementary strategy to the “air sea battle” strategy, not part of it. It would allow US submarines to choke off any sea traffic originating from the Indian ocean bound for the Chinese ports. This would give the USN and USAF the option to perform a distant blockade on China in addition to the close in interdiction based on Japan and Korea.
> 
> The move could help the U.S. military, now concentrated in Japan and South Korea in Northeast Asia, to spread its influence west and south across the region, including the strategically and economically important South China Sea, which China considers as its sovereign territory.
> 
> It will be recalled that one prong of the US submarine campaign against Japan, whose land mass is roughly opposite the Chinese ports, was based in Fremantle, Australia. More than 120 US subs [5] used Fremantle at one time or another during World War 2. The map below shows COMSUBWESPAC’s area of operations. It includes the South China Sea. Although 70 years have passed since World War 2, geography has changed but little. Thus the new agreement with Australia clearly raises the possibility that China might be strangled from Australia just as Japan once was.
> [6]
> 
> Somewhere in the South Pacific
> 
> But the Diplomat [7] explains why control of the littoral sea is so important: China intends to deploy its sea-based nuclear deterrent and by implication, much of its attack submarine force there:
> 
> Possessing a credible sea-based nuclear deterrent is a priority for China’s military strategy. China’s single Type 092, or Xia-class, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, equipped with short-range JL-1 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), has never conducted a deterrent patrol from the Bohai Sea since its introduction in the 1980s. However, China is on the verge of acquiring credible second-strike capabilities with the anticipated introduction of JL-2 SLBMs (with an estimated range of 8,000 kilometres) coupled with DF-31 and DF-31A road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In addition, China plans to introduce up to five Type 094, or Jin-class, SSBNs outfitted with the JL-2 missiles, while constructing an underwater submarine base on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. It’s clear, then, that China is making every effort to keep the South China Sea off limits, just as the Soviet Union did in the Sea of Okhotsk during the Cold War. …
> 
> This strategy dates back almost two decades, to a time when China began encircling the South China Sea to fill the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of US forces from the Philippines in 1991. China reasserted ‘historical’ claims over all the islets, including the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos, and 80 percent of the 3.5 million km2 body of water along the nine-dotted U-shaped line, despite having no international legal ground to do so. Those islets can be used as air and sea bases for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities, and as base points for claiming the deeper part of the South China Sea for PLAN ballistic missile submarines and other vessels. China also interprets the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in an arbitrary manner and doesn’t accept military activities by foreign vessels and overflight in its waters.
> 
> Therefore China is likely to have forward and aggressive ideas of its own.
> 
> Geography has condemned Vietnam and the Philippines to sooner or later become part of Chinese strategic calculations. Relative distances ensure that the more things change, the more they remain the same. If the “air sea battle” returns to the Pacific it will involve all the old familiar names.
> 
> Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99 [8]
> No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99 [9]
> Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5 [10]
> (Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Shutterstock.com [11].)
> 
> Article printed from Belmont Club: http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez
> 
> URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/11/10/tales-of-the-western-pacific/
> 
> URLs in this post:
> 
> [1] Pentagon: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/9/pentagon-battle-concept-signals-cold-war-posture-o/
> 
> [2] Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/11/10/battle-plans-tempt-chill-in-u-s-china-relations/?mod=google_news_blog
> 
> [3] AOL Defense: http://defense.aol.com/2011/11/10/air-sea-battle-whats-it-all-about-or-not/
> 
> [4] slated to announce an agreement with Australia: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203537304577028490161890480.html
> 
> [5] More than 120 US subs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/4309910001/
> 
> [6] Image: http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/files/2011/11/comsubwespac.jpg
> 
> [7] Diplomat: http://the-diplomat.com/2011/07/18/why-china-wants-the-south-china-sea/
> 
> [8] Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MH19XI/wwwfallbackbe-20
> 
> [9] No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1453892818/wwwfallbackbe-20
> 
> [10] Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5: http://wretchard.com/tipjar.html
> 
> [11] Shutterstock.com: http://www.shutterstock.com/



Geography does not favor the Chinese; they are hemmed in by the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert and Siberia on land, and Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia hem the sea approaches. American Dominates the Pacific, and India will soon dominate the Indian Ocean. If America can forge some sort of alliance with its Anglosphere partners Australia and India, as well as Japan and Korea, then instead of "AirSea Battle", we may see a period of containment instead.

We _will_ live in interesting times.


----------



## a_majoor

Check out the photos on this link. The Chinese are building huge structures in the desert (measuring kilometers long and wide), but for what purpose?

http://gizmodo.com/5859081/why-is-china-building-these-gigantic-structures-in-the-middle-of-the-desert


----------



## a_majoor

The rest of Asia does not seem interested in the return of the Middle Kingdom:

http://news.investors.com/Article/591952/201111161902/Asia-Tigers-Pick-US-Over-China.htm



> *Asia Rediscovers Its Love For America*
> 
> Posted 11/16/2011 07:02 PM ET
> 
> Global Power: Much is being made of China's unease at President Obama's initiative this week to raise the U.S. presence in the Pacific Rim. The real story is Asia's unease with China's expansionism. It wants America back.
> 
> Beijing was taken by surprise at the U.S. president's newfound interest in making America a presence again in the Pacific.
> 
> But in reality it was a sign that Asian states prefer a U.S.-centric Pacific over a China-centric one.
> 
> On his visit to Hawaii, Bali and Australia, Obama announced that 2,500 U.S. troops would be stationed in northern Australia, a move welcomed with open arms not just by Australia but across the Pacific.
> 
> Obama also announced that the "broad outlines" of the Trans-Pacific Partnership eight-nation free trade zone were advancing, with major new nations — Japan, Canada and Mexico seeking entry — a big vote of confidence in America from a region that accounts for 60% of world trade. The State Department, meanwhile, announced a big, generous aid package for flood-ravaged Thailand.
> 
> Coming on the heels of Obama's signature on the U.S.-South Korea free trade treaty, the signal is unmistakable: America's back after a long period of neglect, and "We're here to stay," as Obama said.
> 
> No wonder Australia's prime minister, Julia Gillard, couldn't conceal her delight.
> 
> Up until now, the only message being sent by this White House was of kowtowing, isolationism and weakness in the face of a supposedly inevitably rising China.
> 
> The media made much of Beijing's discomfort at the new American assertiveness, as if there was something unnatural about it. "China uneasy over U.S. troop deal in Australia," blared the headline in the U.K. Guardian.
> 
> But Beijing's discomfort is irrelevant — it's a tyranny and Asia's neighborhood bully. It's not the model of economic development many believe, as its growing imbalances show. Nor is it a particularly peaceful presence.
> 
> China is building a deepwater navy patrolling sea lanes, intimidating Asian nations with territorial claims up and down the Pacific. It's aiming satellite surveillance on Asian states and has launched cyberattacks.
> 
> Beijing's neighbors — the tiger states of Southeast Asia, the allies of northeast Asia, such as Japan, Taiwan and Korea, along with Australia and New Zealand, are all uncomfortable with China's rising assertiveness.
> 
> Like it or not, the U.S. has a historic 60-year role as the most important player in Asia.
> 
> The U.S.'s Great White Fleet patrolling Pacific sea lanes has been the foundation that enabled the Southeast Asian nations to peacefully rise out of poverty in the fastest economic transformation of a region within just a generation, and preserved peace in the north, too. They all know where that came from.
> 
> The reality is, Obama's newfound interest in Asia is in response to a region that has seen what a world without America looks like after China's rise to prominence.
> 
> Despite the claims of pundits like the New York Times' Thomas Friedman — who claim that China's system is superior to our own — the fact is, Asia prefers a return to the U.S. way of peace and growth.


----------



## a_majoor

Follow up to the mysterious objects in the Gobi Desert:

http://www.livescience.com/17052-mysterious-symbols-china-desert-spy-satellite-targets-expert.html



> *Mysterious Symbols in China Desert Are Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says*
> Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
> Date: 15 November 2011 Time: 05:41 PM ET
> 
> A strange zigzag pattern in the Gobi Desert in China. Coordinates: 40.452107,93.742118. Credit: Copyright 2011 Google - Imagery copyright Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye
> A strange zigzag pattern in the Gobi Desert in China. Coordinates: 40.452107,93.742118.
> CREDIT: Copyright 2011 Google - Imagery copyright Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye
> View full size image
> 
> Newfound Google Maps images have revealed an array of mysterious structures and patterns etched into the surface of China's Gobi Desert. The media — from mainstream to fringe — has wildly speculated that they might be Chinese weapons-testing sites, satellite calibration targets, street maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, or even messages to (or from) aliens.
> 
> It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites.
> 
> So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA's Mars missions. Hill works with images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments.
> 
> The grids of zigzagging white lines seen in two of the images — the strangest of the various desert structures — are spy satellite calibration targets. Satellite cameras focus on the grids, which measure approximately 0.65 miles wide by 1.15 miles long, and use them to orient themselves in space. [Gallery: Mysterious Structures In China's Gobi Desert]
> 
> The existence of these calibration targets may seem suspicious or revelatory, but Hill said it really isn't; China was already known to operate spy satellites, and many other countries (including the United States) do so as well. In fact, the U.S. also uses calibration targets. "An example I found just now is a calibration target for the Corona spy satellites, built back in the 1960s, down in Casa Grande, Ariz., [at coordinates] 32° 48' 24.74" N, 111° 43' 21.30" W," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
> 
> The 65-foot-wide white lines that make up China's grids are not made of reflective metal as many news sites have suggested. "They have gaps in them where they cross little natural drainage channels and the lines themselves are not perfectly filled in, with lots of little streaks and uneven coverage. I think it's safe to say these are some kind of paint," Hill said, noting that if they were made of white dust or chalk, the wind would have caused them to streak visibly.
> 
> The calibration targets are larger than might have been expected, he said, suggesting that the satellite cameras they are being used to calibrate have surprisingly poor ground resolution.
> 
> Another strange image taken not far away shows a Stonehenge-like arrangement of objects radiating outward, with fighter jets parked at its center. "This is almost certainly a calibration/test target for orbital radar instruments," Hill said. "Since a significant amount of radar return is due to differences in surface roughness, they're probably testing ways of making the areas around planes 'bumpy' enough that the planes are partially masked."
> 
> In other words, the Chinese military probably uses radar instruments to send signals down at the target from above, and determine how much radar bounces back to the instruments from the fighter jets, and how much gets scattered by the Stonehenge-like arrangement of bumps surrounding them. From this, the country's radar experts can learn how best to hide China's military operations from other countries' satellites, and possibly get clues for how to find carefully hidden objects in other countries. However, the fact that the planes are made out of metal will increase their radar return and make it very hard to completely mask them, Hill said.
> 
> Since the initial reports of these structures became widespread, industrious readers of the gadget blog Gizmodo have spotted a few more interesting structures in China. One, Hill said, appears to be a weapons testing zone, perhaps for evaluating explosives. Elsewhere, a giant grid resembles a Yagi antenna array. Instruments like this can be used for any number of things, such as weather tracking, space weather tracking and high-altitude atmospheric research.
> 
> Hill noted that most of these structures are quite closer to each other. "I think we're seeing some sort of military zone/test range, which explains the large amount of equipment and technology in an otherwise remote area," he said. "Sometimes the truth can be just as interesting, if not more so, than the conspiracies that people come up with."
> 
> This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow us on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.


----------



## a_majoor

Perhaps the most nightmarish part of the article s how China could be derailed by unanticipated events in small, far off places. People counting on China to power the global economy might get a rude shock due to some tiny African backwater derailing the global logistics train set up by the Chinese:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/11/17/chinas-global-nightmare/



> *China’s Global Nightmare*
> 
> Brazil is of course happy to let foreign companies invest in its vast but difficult to access offshore oil reserves. China is interested in that oil — perhaps too interested. The FT recently reported this story:
> 
> China’s second largest state-controlled oil major Sinopec has signed a $5.2bn deal to buy 30 per cent of the Brazilian assets of Galp Energia, which include operations in the pre-salt fields, so-called because they lie under two kilometres of the stuff.
> The deal is Sinopec’s second acquisition in the area after its $7.1bn investment in the Brazilian assets of Repsol YPF last year. Sinopec has also signed a $10bn oil-for-loan deal with Brazil. Elsewhere, Sinopec’s peer, Sinochem, has a $3.1bn stake in an offshore oil field in Brazil run by Norway’s Statoil…
> But it is a partnership that will be fraught with difficulties with Brazil already growing suspicious of its increasingly close relationship with Beijing. China is now Brazil’s largest trading partner and last year was its biggest investor.
> 
> If Chinese state-owned companies are involved at every level of the pre-salt programme, Brazil may start to wonder whether it is ceding too much influence to a foreign government over what is considered a highly strategic asset.
> 
> So strategic, in fact, that former president Luiz Lula da Silva changed the law to give Petrobras the status of sole operator of the area. In one of his other last acts as leader, Lula da Silva also changed the land law to prohibit foreigners from acquiring large tracts of farmland, a measure seen as aimed at China.
> 
> The real importance of this story does not, however, have much to do with Brazil’s jittery nerves about Chinese investment.  It is to remind us about a key Chinese vulnerability that is often overlooked by pundits: China’s growing dependence on natural resources located far from its frontiers.
> Beijing’s chosen national strategy — to achieve great power status by becoming the industrial workshop of the world — locks it into a complex and difficult set of dependencies and relationships with countries and markets all over the world. Access to those resources traps China in complicated geopolitical tradeoffs that can blow up in unexpected ways — as when China had to scramble to protect its citizens in Libya.  Chinese companies become the object of public anger if they are seen to be economically exploitative, unwelcoming to local labor, or environmentally destructive.  And, of course, in the event of a confrontation with the United States, China’s entire supply chain and overseas investments are helpless hostages.
> 
> Strategically, the only way out of this trap would be to build a blue water navy and air force that could threaten US command of the seas.  But a build up of that kind would not only trigger a massive US response; other countries like Japan, India and Australia would join together to ensure that China did not overturn a maritime status quo that is well trusted by other world powers.
> We live in an interesting world.


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC hard at work stealing the resources of their neighbors.








A picture taken from a South Korean helicopter shows Chinese boats banded together with ropes, chased by a coastguard helicopter and rubber boats pacted with commandoes, after alleged illegal fishing in South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea off the southwestern coast county of Buan. South Korea's coastguard mobilised 12 ships, four helicopters and commandoes for a special three-day crackdown on illegal fishing by Chinese boats this week.






   

A picture taken on November 16, 2011 from a South Korean helicopter shows Chinese fishermen wielding sticks to stop an attack by South Korean coastguard commandoes armed with clubs aboard rubber boats during a crackdown on alleged illegal fishing in South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea off the southwestern coast county of Buan. South Korea's coastguard mobilised 12 ships, four helicopters and commandoes for a special three-day crackdown on illegal fishing by Chinese boats this week.


----------



## chanman

Hmm, I didn't realize the SK Coast Guard flew Kamovs


----------



## tomahawk6

The ROK's have a number of Ka-32A4's for SAR missions.


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese must be wondering how things unravelled, and everyone is wondering what the response will be:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/11/19/softly-softly-beijing-turns-other-cheek-for-now/



> *Softly, Softly: Beijing Turns Other Cheek — For Now*
> WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
> 
> The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever.  The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.
> 
> Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted.  Rarely have so many red lines been crossed.  Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast.  It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud.
> 
> The timing turned out to be brilliant.  China is in the midst of a leadership transition, when it is harder for important decisions to be taken quickly.  The economy is looking shaky, with house prices falling across much of the country.  The diplomatic blitzkrieg moved so fast and on so many fronts, with the strokes falling so hard and in such rapid succession, that China was unable to develop an organized and coherent response.  And because Wen Jiabao’s appearance at the East Asia Summit, planned long before China had any inkling of the firestorm about to be unleashed, could not be canceled or changed, premier Wen Jiabao was trapped: he had to respond in public to all this while China was off balance and before the consultation, reflection and discussion that might have created an effective response.
> 
> Xi Jinping, expected to be the next chairman of the Communist Party in China
> 
> In this position, he acted prudently, which is to say he did as little as possible.  His public remarks were mild.  He did not pound his fist (or, like former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, his shoe) on the table.  He did not rage against and upbraid his neighbors.  He did not launch tirades about American arrogance and aggression.  He uttered no threats but renounced no claims; he even participated in a quick unscheduled meeting with President Obama.
> 
> The effect of this passive and low key response (the only thing really, he could have done) is to reinforce the sense in Asia that the US has reasserted its primacy in a convincing way.  The US acted, received strikingly widespread support, and China backed down.
> That is in fact what happened, and it was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see.  Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.
> 
> It will not change the fundamental dynamics of a re-election race shaped so far by voter concern about poor economic performance, but the effects of the President’s re-assertion of American primacy in the Pacific will reinforce the public perception that he has grown into the foreign policy side of his job.  He looked very presidential in Asia; those things count.
> 
> But a successful opening is not the same thing as a final win.  The opening American gambit in the new great game was brilliant, but China also gets a move.  On the one hand, the sweep, the scope and the success of the American moves make it hard for China to respond in kind; on the other hand, the humiliation and frustration (and, in some quarters, the fear) both inside the government and in society at large over these setbacks will compel some kind of response.
> 
> China, mindless conventional “decline” wisdom to the contrary, is much weaker and poorer than the United States, yet it is Chinese power rather than American supremacy that China’s neighbors most fear.  China’s diplomacy faces an infuriating paradox: If it accepts the renewal of a US-based order in Asia it looks weak and is forced into an inferior political position; if it openly fights that order it alarms its neighbors into clinging more closely to Uncle Sam.
> 
> This reality constrains China’s response in many ways, but China cannot remain passive.  China must now think carefully about its choices and to work to use all the factors of its power to inflict some kind of counterblow against the United States.  Look for China to reach out much more intensively to Russia to find ways in which the two powers can frustrate the US and hand it some kind of public setback.  Pakistan?  Iran?  Afghanistan? Palestine?
> 
> Regionally, China may try to detach one or more countries from the American system by some combination of economic influence and political ties.  It will take advantage of the fact that the other Asian powers do not want the United States to be too dominant; they may fear China more than they fear us, but their aim is to maximize their own independence, not to strengthen US power.
> 
> Longer term, the conviction in the military and among hard liners in the civilian establishment that the US is China’s enemy and seeks to block China’s natural rise will not only become more entrenched and more powerful; it will have consequences.  Very experienced and well informed foreign diplomats and observers already warn that the military is in many respects becoming independent of political authorities and some believe that like the Japanese military in the 1930s, China’s military or factions within it could begin to take steps on critical issues that the political authorities could not reverse.  Islands could be occupied, flags raised and shots fired.
> 
> Certainly any Chinese arguments against massive military build ups will be difficult to win.  The evident weakness of China’s position will make it impossible to resist calls for more military spending and an acceleration of the development of China’s maritime capacity.
> 
> Many people in China (and elsewhere for that matter) believe that China’s massive holdings of US debt give China great power in the international system.  Via Meadia thinks that those ideas are largely wrong and that any efforts to treat those reserves as a political instrument would be more likely to harm China than the United States.  After all, a mass sell-off of China’s reserves would drive down the dollar — meaning in the first instance that China would take a massive hit on the value of the securities it was selling, and then that China’s markets in the US and likely also Europe would collapse in the ensuing global economic firestorm.  The US would likely emerge from this faster and in better shape than China.
> 
> Nevertheless, the belief that China’s foreign reserves are an asset that can somehow be played to win political points is a strong one in China, and there will be great pressure in Beijing to play this card at the first available opportunity.  What that might mean in practice is hard to predict, but US diplomats, bankers and strategists will need to keep in mind that China will be looking to weaponize its dollar hoard.
> 
> An intense debate in China will now turn even more pointed.  There will be some who counsel patience, saying that China cannot win an open contest with the US and that its only hope is to stick with the concept of “peaceful rise”: eschewing all conflict with the US and its neighbors, behaving as a “responsible stakeholder” in the US-built international system, and growing richer and more powerful until such a time as alternative strategies can be considered.  That in my opinion is China’s wisest course.
> 
> Others will argue that the international system as it now exists, and American power in it, are weapons in the hands of a country which is deeply hostile to China and its government and that the US will not rest until China, like Russia, has been reduced to impotence.  They think (they really do) that our aim is to overthrow the Communist government, replace it with something weak and ineffective — as in Yeltsin’s Russia — and then break up its territory the way the Soviet Union broke up.  Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, perhaps more will be split off until China is left as a weak and helpless member of an ever more ruthless American order.  To act like a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system would be to tie the knot in the noose intended to hang you; China must resist now, and ally itself with everyone willing to fight this power: Iran, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Pakistan, perhaps even Al-Qaeda. And rather than trying to prop up the international capitalist system, China should do what it can to deepen crises and aggravate tensions.
> 
> I think this course leads to a strategic dead end for China and China’s diplomats are much too experienced and knowledgeable to be taken in by it.  The military and nationalist public opinion may be more vulnerable to arguments of this kind.  These forces are too strong to be completely excluded from China’s policy making; expect some provocative push back.
> 
> The US has won the first round, but the game has just begun.  The Obama administration and its successors will now have to deal with a long term contest against the world’s most populous country and the world’s most rapidly developing economy.  The Obama administration may not have fully counted the costs of the new Asian hard line; for one thing, it is hard to see significant cuts coming in defense spending after we have challenged China to a contest over the future of Asia.  It’s possible that less drama now might have made America’s point as effectively while reducing the chance of Chinese push back, but there is not a lot of point in debating that now.
> 
> Given where things now stand, follow through will be as important as the first steps; the US must now try to make it as easy as possible for China to accept a situation that, in the short to medium term at least, it cannot change.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Much as I admire Mead, especially on America, I think he is being just a bit hyperbolic.

Yes, the laundry list of _woes_ in his opening paragraph are 'real' but they are not shocks.

Mead is right, the Americans have orchestrated a series of events during a time when China is focused on its own internal matters - much as the US will be next (election) year.

Where I think Mead goes off the rails is when he says, _"China cannot remain passive."_ In fact China can and most likely will remain "passive" for quite some time, almost an eternity in our frenetic, Western terms. China need do nothing. Australia, despite its firm commitment to the USA and the West is _dependent_ on the Chinese market; it is trying to sell more and more to other Asians but the Chinese remain key to Australia's financial security. Ditto Japan. "Losing" Burma (Myanmar) is rather like "losing" North Korea: something the Chinese are trying to do.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Interesting approach.....


> Much like the U.S., China is aiming to address a problematic demographic that has recently emerged: a generation of jobless graduates. China’s solution to that problem, however, has some in the country scratching their heads.
> 
> China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.
> 
> The move is meant to solve a problem that has surfaced as the number of China’s university educated have jumped to 8,930 people per every 100,000 in 2010, up nearly 150% from 2000, according to China’s 2010 Census. The surge of collge grads, while an accomplishment for the country, has contributed to an overflow of workers whose skillsets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy .....


----------



## FoverF

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Interesting approach.....



Yes, please.


----------



## MedCorps

This is a good read.  

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Signals Intelligence and Cyber Reconnaissance Infrastructure

http://project2049.net/documents/pla_third_department_sigint_cyber_stokes_lin_hsiao.pdf

Someone is spending a few Renminbi on this little set up.  The General Staff Department - Third Department will take care of all of your needs. 

MC 

(China - Second Bureau - members of the 61398 Unit - when you are reading this post please update my file to note that I am not a SIGINT dude and stumbled across by accident when looking for how to re-program my garage door code).


----------



## a_majoor

The Red Dynasty may end up deligitimizing itself:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904491704576572552793150470.html?mod=lifestyle_newsreel



> *Children of the Revolution*
> China's 'princelings,' the offspring of the communist party elite, are embracing the trappings of wealth and privilege—raising uncomfortable questions for their elders.
> 
> By JEREMY PAGE
> 
> One evening early this year, a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China's top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo.
> 
> Bo Guagua, 23, was expected. He had a dinner appointment with a daughter of the then-ambassador, Jon Huntsman.
> 
> The car, though, was a surprise. The driver's father, Bo Xilai, was in the midst of a controversial campaign to revive the spirit of Mao Zedong through mass renditions of old revolutionary anthems, known as "red singing." He had ordered students and officials to work stints on farms to reconnect with the countryside. His son, meanwhile, was driving a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and as red as the Chinese flag, in a country where the average household income last year was about $3,300.
> 
> The episode, related by several people familiar with it, is symptomatic of a challenge facing the Chinese Communist Party as it tries to maintain its legitimacy in an increasingly diverse, well-informed and demanding society. The offspring of party leaders, often called "princelings," are becoming more conspicuous, through both their expanding business interests and their evident appetite for luxury, at a time when public anger is rising over reports of official corruption and abuse of power.
> 
> State-controlled media portray China's leaders as living by the austere Communist values they publicly espouse. But as scions of the political aristocracy carve out lucrative roles in business and embrace the trappings of wealth, their increasingly high profile is raising uncomfortable questions for a party that justifies its monopoly on power by pointing to its origins as a movement of workers and peasants.
> 
> Their visibility has particular resonance as the country approaches a once-a-decade leadership change next year, when several older princelings are expected to take the Communist Party's top positions. That prospect has led some in Chinese business and political circles to wonder whether the party will be dominated for the next decade by a group of elite families who already control large chunks of the world's second-biggest economy and wield considerable influence in the military.
> 
> "There's no ambiguity—the trend has become so clear," said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese elite politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Princelings were never popular, but now they've become so politically powerful, there's some serious concern about the legitimacy of the 'Red Nobility.' The Chinese public is particularly resentful about the princelings' control of both political power and economic wealth."
> 
> The current leadership includes some princelings, but they are counterbalanced by a rival nonhereditary group that includes President Hu Jintao, also the party chief, and Premier Wen Jiabao. Mr. Hu's successor, however, is expected to be Xi Jinping, the current vice president, who is the son of a revolutionary hero and would be the first princeling to take the country's top jobs. Many experts on Chinese politics believe that he has forged an informal alliance with several other princelings who are candidates for promotion.
> 
> Among them is the senior Mr. Bo, who is also the son of a revolutionary leader. He often speaks of his close ties to the Xi family, according to two people who regularly meet him. Mr. Xi's daughter is currently an undergraduate at Harvard, where Mr. Bo's son is a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government.
> 
> “Princelings were never popular, but now ... there's some serious concern about the legitimacy of the "Red Nobility." ”
> 
> Already in the 25-member Politburo, Bo Xilai is a front-runner for promotion to its top decision-making body, the Standing Committee. He didn't respond to a request for comment through his office, and his son didn't respond to requests via email and friends.
> 
> The antics of some officials' children have become a hot topic on the Internet in China, especially among users of Twitter-like micro-blogs, which are harder for Web censors to monitor and block because they move so fast. In September, Internet users revealed that the 15-year-old son of a general was one of two young men who crashed a BMW into another car in Beijing and then beat up its occupants, warning onlookers not to call police.
> 
> An uproar ensued, and the general's son has now been sent to a police correctional facility for a year, state media report.
> 
> Top Chinese leaders aren't supposed to have either inherited wealth or business careers to supplement their modest salaries, thought to be around 140,000 yuan ($22,000) a year for a minister. Their relatives are allowed to conduct business as long as they don't profit from their political connections. In practice, the origins of the families' riches are often impossible to trace.
> 
> Last year, Chinese learned via the Internet that the son of a former vice president of the country—and the grandson of a former Red Army commander—had purchased a $32.4 million harbor-front mansion in Australia. He applied for a permit to tear down the century-old mansion and to build a new villa, featuring two swimming pools connected by a waterfall. (See the article below.)
> 
> Many princelings engage in legitimate business, but there is a widespread perception in China that they have an unfair advantage in an economic system that, despite the country's embrace of capitalism, is still dominated by the state and allows no meaningful public scrutiny of decision making.
> 
> The state owns all urban land and strategic industries, as well as banks, which dole out loans overwhelmingly to state-run companies. The big spoils thus go to political insiders who can leverage personal connections and family prestige to secure resources, and then mobilize the same networks to protect them.
> 
> The People's Daily, the party mouthpiece, acknowledged the issue last year, with a poll showing that 91% of respondents believed all rich families in China had political backgrounds. A former Chinese auditor general, Li Jinhua, wrote in an online forum that the wealth of officials' family members "is what the public is most dissatisfied about."
> 
> One princeling disputes the notion that she and her peers benefit from their "red" backgrounds. "Being from a famous government family doesn't get me cheaper rent or special bank financing or any government contracts," Ye Mingzi, a 32-year-old fashion designer and granddaughter of a Red Army founder, said in an email. "In reality," she said, "the children of major government families get very high scrutiny. Most are very careful to avoid even the appearance of improper favoritism."
> 
> For the first few decades after Mao's 1949 revolution, the children of Communist chieftains were largely out of sight, growing up in walled compounds and attending elite schools such as the Beijing No. 4 Boys' High School, where the elder Mr. Bo and several other current leaders studied.
> 
> In the 1980s and '90s, many princelings went abroad for postgraduate studies, then often joined Chinese state companies, government bodies or foreign investment banks. But they mostly maintained a very low profile.
> 
> Now, families of China's leaders send their offspring overseas ever younger, often to top private schools in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland, to make sure they can later enter the best Western universities. Princelings in their 20s, 30s and 40s increasingly take prominent positions in commerce, especially in private equity, which allows them to maximize their profits and also brings them into regular contact with the Chinese and international business elite.
> 
> In 2008, Bo Guagua invited Jackie Chan to lecture at Oxford—and sang with him on stage at one point.
> 
> Younger princelings are often seen among the models, actors and sports stars who gather at a strip of nightclubs by the Workers' Stadium in Beijing to show off Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maseratis. Others have been spotted talking business over cigars and vintage Chinese liquor in exclusive venues such as the Maotai Club, in a historic house near the Forbidden City.
> 
> On a recent afternoon at a new polo club on Beijing's outskirts, opened by a grandson of a former vice premier, Argentine players on imported ponies put on an exhibition match for prospective members.
> 
> "We're bringing polo to the public. Well, not exactly the public," said one staff member. "That man over there is the son of an army general. That one's grandfather was mayor of Beijing."
> 
> Princelings also are becoming increasingly visible abroad. Ms. Ye, the fashion designer, was featured in a recent edition of Vogue magazine alongside Wan Baobao, a jewelry designer who is the granddaughter of a former vice premier.
> 
> But it is Bo Guagua who stands out among the younger princelings. No other child of a serving Politburo member has ever had such a high profile, both at home and abroad.
> 
> His family's status dates back to Bo Yibo, who helped lead Mao's forces to victory, only to be purged in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Bo Yibo was eventually rehabilitated, and his son, Bo Xilai, was a rising star in the party by 1987, when Bo Guagua was born.
> 
> The boy grew up in a rarefied environment—closeted in guarded compounds, ferried around in chauffeur-driven cars, schooled partly by tutors and partly at the prestigious Jingshan school in Beijing, according to friends.
> 
> In 2000, his father, by then mayor of the northeastern city of Dalian, sent his 12-year-old son to a British prep school called Papplewick, which according to its website currently charges £22,425 (about $35,000) a year.
> 
> About a year later, the boy became the first person from mainland China to attend Harrow, one of Britain's most exclusive private schools, which according to its website currently charges £30,930 annually.
> 
> In 2006, by which time his father was China's commerce minister, Mr. Bo went to Oxford University to study philosophy, politics and economics. The current cost of that is about £26,000 a year. His current studies at Harvard's Kennedy School cost about $70,000 a year.
> 
> “'The children of major government families get very high scrutiny,' says the granddaughter of a Red Army founder.”
> 
> A question raised by this prestigious overseas education, worth a total of almost $600,000 at today's prices, is how it was paid for. Friends said that they didn't know, though one suggested that Mr. Bo's mother paid with the earnings of her legal career. Her law firm declined to comment.
> 
> Bo Guagua has been quoted in the Chinese media as saying that he won full scholarships from age 16 onward. Harrow, Oxford and the Kennedy School said that they couldn't comment on an individual student.
> 
> The cost of education is a particularly hot topic among members of China's middle class, many of whom are unhappy with the quality of schooling in China. But only the relatively rich can send their children abroad to study.
> 
> For others, it is Bo Guagua's freewheeling lifestyle that is controversial. Photos of him at Oxford social events—in one case bare-chested, other times in a tuxedo or fancy dress—have been widely circulated online.
> 
> In 2008, Mr. Bo helped to organize something called the Silk Road Ball, which included a performance by martial-arts monks from China's Shaolin temple, according to friends. He also invited Jackie Chan, the Chinese kung fu movie star, to lecture at Oxford, singing with him on stage at one point.
> 
> The following year, Mr. Bo was honored in London by a group called the British Chinese Youth Federation as one of "Ten Outstanding Young Chinese Persons." He was also an adviser to Oxford Emerging Markets, a firm set up by Oxford undergraduates to explore "investment and career prospects in emerging markets," according to its website.
> 
> This year, photos circulated online of Mr. Bo on a holiday in Tibet with another princeling, Chen Xiaodan, a young woman whose father heads the China Development Bank and whose grandfather was a renowned revolutionary. The result was a flurry of gossip, as well as criticism on the Internet of the two for evidently traveling with a police escort. Ms. Chen didn't respond to requests for comment via email and Facebook.
> 
> Asked about his son's apparent romance at a news conference during this year's parliament meeting, Bo Xilai replied, enigmatically, "I think the business of the third generation—aren't we talking about democracy now?"
> 
> Friends say that the younger Mr. Bo recently considered, but finally decided against, leaving Harvard to work on an Internet start-up called guagua.com. The domain is registered to an address in Beijing. Staff members there declined to reveal anything about the business. "It's a secret," said a young man who answered the door.
> 
> It is unclear what Mr. Bo will do after graduating and whether he will be able to maintain such a high profile if his father is promoted, according to friends. He said during a speech at Peking University in 2009 that he wanted to "serve the people" in culture and education, according to a Chinese newspaper, Southern Weekend.
> 
> He ruled out a political career but showed some of his father's charisma and contradictions in answering students' questions, according to the newspaper. Asked about the pictures of him partying at Oxford, he quoted Chairman Mao as saying "you should have a serious side and a lively side," and went on to discuss what it meant to be one of China's new nobility.
> 
> "Things like driving a sports car, I know British aristocrats are not that arrogant," he said. "Real aristocrats absolutely don't do that, but are relatively low-key."
> —Dinny McMahon contributed to this article.


----------



## cupper

Interesting article. Even if the estimates in the report are only half as purported, it raises some serious concerns.

*Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/georgetown-students-shed-light-on-chinas-tunnel-system-for-nuclear-weapons/2011/11/16/gIQA6AmKAO_story.html

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their three-year effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study has not yet been released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.


----------



## tomahawk6

Students have uncovered China's nuclear weapons tunnels.Quite a find. I was trying to cut the images but got the page instead. 







http://tinyurl.com/cscrf6c

Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.

Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.

“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.

Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

For students, an obsession 

The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was his early work in defense that cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, who was then the national security adviser, to probe the weaknesses of Soviet forces.


----------



## a_majoor

Another sort of Cyberwar:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27357/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-11-23



> *Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army*
> 
> An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites.
> 
> In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to 'flood' the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army's services.
> 
> This is an insidious tide. Positive recommendations can make a huge difference to a product's sales but can equally drive a competitor out of the market. When companies spend millions launching new goods and services, it's easy to understand why they might want to use every tool at their disposal to achieve success.
> 
> The loser in all this is the consumer who is conned into making a purchase decision based on false premises. And for the moment, consumers have little legal redress or even ways to spot the practice.
> 
> Today, Cheng Chen at the University of Victoria in Canada and a few pals describe how Cheng worked undercover as a paid poster on Chinese websites to understand how the Internet Water Army works. He and his friends then used what he learnt to create software that can spot paid posters automatically.
> 
> Paid posting is a well-managed activity involving thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of different online IDs. The posters are usually given a task to register on a website and then to start generating content in the form of posts, articles, links to websites and videos, even carrying out Q&A sessions.
> 
> Often, this content is pre-prepared or the posters receive detailed instructions on the type of things they can say. And there is even a quality control team who check that the posts meet a certain 'quality' threshold. A post would not be validated if it is deleted by the host or was composed of garbled words, for example.
> 
> Having worked undercover to find out how the system worked, Cheng and co then studied the pattern of posts that appeared on a couple of big Chinese websites: Sina.com and Sohu.com. In particular, they studied the comments on several news stories about two companies that they suspected of paying posters and who were involved in a public spat over each other's services.
> 
> The Sina dataset consisted of over 500 users making more than 20,000 comments; the Sohu dataset involved over 200 users and more than 1000 comments.
> 
> Cheng and co went through all the posts manually identifying those they believed were from paid posters and then set about looking for patterns in their behaviour that can differentiate them from legitimate users. (Just how accurate were there initial impressions is a potential problem, they admit, but the same one that spam filters also have to deal with.)
> 
> They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again.
> 
> What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team.
> 
> So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviours they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters. "Our test results with real-world datasets show a very
> promising performance," they say.
> 
> That's an impressive piece of work and a good first step towards combating this problem, although they'll need to test it on a much wider range of datasets. Nevertheless, these guys have the basis of a software package that will weed out a significant fraction of paid posters, provided these people conform to the stereotype that Cheng and co have measured.
> 
> And therein lies the rub. As soon as the first version of the software hits the market, paid posters will learn to modify their behaviour in a way that games the system. What Cheng and co have started is a cat and mouse game just like those that plague the antivirus and spam filtering industries.
> 
> And that means, the battle ahead with the Internet Water Army will be long and hard.
> 
> Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1111.4297: Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting bit of _informed speculation_ in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/john-ibbitson/are-chinese-golf-plans-in-iceland-a-water-hazard-for-canada/article2259653/


> Are Chinese golf plans in Iceland a water hazard for Canada?
> 
> JOHN IBBITSON
> 
> From Monday's Globe and Mail
> Published Sunday, Dec. 04, 2011
> 
> Over at National Defence Headquarters, there’s considerable interest in some real estate that a Chinese tycoon tried to buy in Iceland. Senior figures in Canada’s military believe this is why Canada needs more ice breakers, ships and submarines.
> 
> Huang Nubo is a billionaire property developer who recently offered to purchase a vast tract of land in northeastern Iceland equal to 0.3 per cent of that country’s land mass.
> 
> Mr. Huang said he wanted to build a hotel and golf course. The Icelandic government turned down his offer last week, saying its laws don’t permit foreigners to own that much land. Some officials in Reykjavik also suspect Mr. Huang wanted the land for more than a golf course. Canadian military planners agree.
> 
> While most of us wonder whether the Arctic ice will melt sufficiently to make the Northwest Passage commercially navigable, one senior military official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on this matter, dismissed the passage as “a twisty, rural backwoods road” compared to the real northern passage that a warming planet will eventually open up: over the Pole.
> 
> And some people believe that China thinks the same thing. That country is ravenous for oil and gas, and the Far North has plenty. Its economy depends on importing natural resources and exporting finished goods. Navigable Arctic sea lanes would make both much cheaper.
> 
> The country is investing heavily in a polar research institute. It has one icebreaker and is building another. It maintains a permanent Arctic research station. China has asked for (but not been granted) observer status on the Arctic Council. And it proclaims that the Arctic, its oil and gas resources and any future navigable sea lanes, should be considered a “shared heritage of humankind.” (Which is not quite how it views the South China Sea.)
> 
> Acquiring Icelandic real estate, military officials suspect, is part of a Chinese plan to position strategic assets that could be converted to ports and staging facilities in pursuit of oil and gas exploration, and to ease the passage of vessels through a future trans-polar shipping route.
> 
> This analysis, not coincidentally, comes as DND struggles to find ways to meet the budget cuts that the Conservative government is demanding of every department. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been asking sharp questions about whether the problem-plagued Victoria-class submarines purchased from Britain more than a decade ago will ever put to sea.
> 
> The Navy promises that HMCS Victoria will be fully operational and patrolling off the West Coast by this time next year, and the Windsor will be doing the same in the Atlantic.
> 
> In this new Great Game that is emerging in the Arctic, the military insists Canada must be able to assert sovereignty in the air, on land, on the sea and beneath the sea.
> 
> Rob Huebert agrees. Prof. Huebert is a political scientist at the University of Calgary who specializes in Arctic geopolitics. “Any time you reorient your trade [as Canada is doing toward Asia] you inevitably become a player in the geopolitics of that region,” he said in an interview. When conflicts emerge, as they inevitably will, “you’re going to get drawn in one way or another,” which means “you need to have forces to defend your interests.”
> 
> But in a time of slow economic growth, high unemployment and worrying deficits, how much can the Canadian government afford to spend defending those interests?
> 
> While we debate that question, a disappointed Mr. Huang says he is looking at other Nordic sites for his golf course.




Just for interest, here are the "available" sea routes through the Arctic:


----------



## a_majoor

The bubble is finally deflating in China as well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/8957289/Chinas-epic-hangover-begins.html



> *China's epic hangover begins*
> 
> China's credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC's dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.
> 
> Chinese stocks are flashing warning signs. The Shanghai index has fallen 30pc since May. It is off 60pc from its peak in 2008, as much in real terms as Wall Street from 1929 to 1933.
> 
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International business editor
> 
> 10:20PM GMT 14 Dec 2011
> 
> Comments317 Comments
> 
> It is hard to obtain good data in China, but something is wrong when the country's Homelink property website can report that new home prices in Beijing fell 35pc in November from the month before. If this is remotely true, the calibrated soft-landing intended by Chinese authorities has gone badly wrong and risks spinning out of control.
> 
> The growth of the M2 money supply slumped to 12.7pc in November, the lowest in 10 years. New lending fell 5pc on a month-to-month basis. The central bank has begun to reverse its tightening policy as inflation subsides, cutting the reserve requirement for lenders for the first time since 2008 to ease liquidity strains.
> 
> The question is whether the People's Bank can do any better than the US Federal Reserve or Bank of Japan at deflating a credit bubble.
> 
> Chinese stocks are flashing warning signs. The Shanghai index has fallen 30pc since May. It is off 60pc from its peak in 2008, almost as much in real terms as Wall Street from 1929 to 1933.
> 
> "Investors are massively underestimating the risk of a hard-landing in China, and indeed other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China)... a 'Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept' in my view," said Albert Edwards at Societe Generale.
> 
> "The BRICs are falling like bricks and the crises are home-blown, caused by their own boom-bust credit cycles. Industrial production is already falling in India, and Brazil will soon follow."
> 
> "There is so much spare capacity that they will start dumping goods, risking a deflation shock for the rest of the world. It no surpise that China has just imposed tariffs on imports of GM cars. I think it is highly likely that China will devalue the yuan next year, risking a trade war," he said.
> 
> China's $3.2 trillion foreign reserves have been falling for three months despite the trade surplus. Hot money is flowing out of the country. "One-way capital inflow or one-way bets on a yuan rise have become history. Our foreign reserves are basically falling every day," said Li Yang, a former central bank rate-setter.
> 
> The reserve loss acts as a form of monetary tightening, exactly the opposite of the effect during the boom. The reserves cannot be tapped to prop up China's internal banking system. To do so would mean repatriating the money – now in US Treasuries and European bonds – pushing up the yuan at the worst moment.
> 
> The economy is badly out of kilter. Consumption has fallen from 48pc to 36pc of GDP since the late 1990s. Investment has risen to 50pc of GDP. This is off the charts, even by the standards of Japan, Korea or Tawian during their catch-up spurts. Nothing like it has been seen before in modern times.
> 
> Fitch Ratings said China is hooked on credit, but deriving ever less punch from each dose. An extra dollar in loans increased GDP by $0.77 in 2007. It is $0.44 in 2011. "The reality is that China's economy today requires significantly more financing to achieve the same level of growth as in the past," said China analyst Charlene Chu.
> 
> Ms Chu warned that there had been a "massive build-up in leverage" and fears a "fundamental, structural erosion" in the banking system that differs from past downturns. "For the first time, a large number of Chinese banks are beginning to face cash pressures. The forthcoming wave of asset quality issues has the potential to become uglier than in previous episodes".
> 
> Investors had thought China was immune to a property crash because mortgage finance is just 19pc of GDP. Wealthy Chinese often buy two, three or more flats with cash to park money because they cannot invest overseas and bank deposit rates have been minus 3pc in real terms this year.
> 
> But with price to income levels reaching nosebleed levels of 18 in East coast cities, it is clear that appartments – often left empty – have themselves become a momentum trade.
> 
> Professor Patrick Chovanec from Beijing's Tsinghua School of Economics said China's property downturn began in earnest in August when construction firms reported that unsold inventories had reached $50bn. It has now turned into "a spiral of downward expectations".
> 
> A fire-sale is under way in coastal cities, with Shanghai developers slashing prices 25pc in November – much to the fury of earlier buyers, who expect refunds. This is spreading. Property sales have fallen 70pc in the inland city of Changsa. Prices have reportedly dropped 70pc in the "ghost city" of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. China Real Estate Index reports that prices dropped by just 0.3pc in the top 100 cities last month, but this looks like a lagging indicator. Meanwhile, the slowdown is creeping into core industries. Steel output has buckled.
> 
> Beijing was able to counter the global crunch in 2008-2009 by unleashing credit, acting as a shock absorber for the whole world. It is doubtful that Beijing can pull off this trick a second time.
> 
> "If investors go for growth at all costs again they are likely to find that it works even less than before and inflation returns quickly with a vengeance," said Diana Choyleva from Lombard Streeet Research.
> 
> The International Monetary Fund's Zhu Min says loans have doubled to almost 200pc of GDP over the last five years, including off-books lending.
> 
> This is roughly twice the intensity of credit growth in the five years preceeding Japan's Nikkei bubble in the late 1980s or the US housing bubble from 2002 to 2007. Each of these booms saw loan growth of near 50 percentage points of GDP. (_interpolation: F.A. Hayek will not be denied_)
> 
> The IMF said in November that lenders face a "steady build-up of financial sector vulnerabilities", warning if hit with multiple shocks, "the banking system could be severely impacted".
> 
> Mark Williams from Capital Economics said the great hope was that China would use is credit spree after 2008 to buy time, switching from chronic over-investment to consumer-led growth. "It hasn't work out as planned. The next few weeks are likely to reveal how little progress has been made. China may ride out the storm over the next few months, but the dangers of over-capacity and bad debt will only intensify".
> 
> In truth, China faces an epic deleveraging hangover, like the rest of us.



And more on ghost cities:

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/12/14/china%E2%80%99s-deserted-fake-disneyland/



> *China’s Deserted Fake Disneyland*
> December 14, 2011 - 4:32 pm - by Ed Driscoll
> 
> Ah, the joys of central planning. Back in 2009, we linked to this item on China’s ghost city. As John Derbyshire wrote at the time, “If You Build It, They May Not Come:”
> 
> You want reckless property speculation? China’s got it. And they don’t just throw up the occasional condo on spec: They build entire cities.
> 
> It’s a five-minute video but well worth watching. Note especially that masses of those empty apartments in this empty city have been bought “as investments” by Chinese speculators. Lots of luck there, guys.
> 
> This Australian clip from 2011 notes that New Ordos isn’t China’s only ghost city:
> 
> And even if you build amusement parks, they may not come, as Reuters notes this week:
> 
> Along the road to one of China’s most famous tourist landmarks – the Great Wall of China – sits what could potentially have been another such tourist destination, but now stands as an example of modern-day China and the problems facing it.Situated on an area of around 100 acres, and 45 minutes drive from the center of Beijing, are the ruins of ‘Wonderland’. Construction stopped more than a decade ago, with developers promoting it as ‘the largest amusement park in Asia’. Funds were withdrawn due to disagreements over property prices with the local government and farmers. So what is left are the skeletal remains of a palace, a castle, and the steel beams of what could have been an indoor playground in the middle of a corn field.
> 
> Click over for the photos.
> 
> I’m sure building these ghost cities gooses China’s economic stats, gives its workers something to do (see also: FDR and the WPA), and as the Australian item hints, allows the Chi-Coms to generate plenty of PR to entice useful idiots such as Thomas Friedman. But how many of these ghost cities does China have?


----------



## Edward Campbell

There are more than a few "ghost" projects in China but they fall int two broad categories:

1. Those that fell apart (like the _Disneyesque_ theme park) because of bad financing; and

2. Those which are awaiting completion.

The latter are especially common - as of 10 months ago, anyway - in the central provinces. There appear to be new super-highways to nowhere, there are new, seriously underutilized, airports and excellent farmland near small_ish_ cities has been expropriated and lies (officially) fallow - but famers are still working it, illegally. What's happened? They're waiting for one or two things - a new power station, perhaps, or a new water pipeline. Then, IF the Chinese plan works, relatively low tech and "dirty" production will move from the crowded, high wage East coast to the low wage interior (rather than to Indonesia or Philippines). That's the "plan," anyway - it has been working in some areas. In one town, in Hunan province, I was told, about five years ago, that the big industrial park was all ready, including highways, but needed more water. It took three years more to get the water supply connected but now, according to sources I think are reliable, the small city is booming - thousands of new jobs and people have moved back from the East coast.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the "String of Pearls" idea.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/14/great-game-smart-india/



> *Strangled by a String Of Pearls?*
> 
> “There’s nothing wrong with China setting up a base in the Seychelles”. This is apparently what the Indian defense minister had to say when asked if China’s plans to build a naval port on the Indian ocean island chain was of concern to India. The Hindustan Times puts it this way:
> The Defence [sic] Ministry on Tuesday said it did not see anything “wrong” in China setting up a military base in Seychelles since this appeared to be part of Beijing’s efforts to combat piracy in the Indian ocean region. “The world has mutual concerns about piracy going on in that region. They are also trying to play a major role in that. I think they are augmenting their anti-piracy efforts. I don’t see anything wrong in this,” minister of state for defence MM Pallam Raju said.
> 
> Others weren’t quite so sanguine. One analyst said, “This is a serious development…China seems to have got a toehold in the country, despite the presence there of both the US and India. The question now is, will the toehold turn into a foothold?”
> 
> Probably not right away; the news that a US drone fell from the sky near the Seychelles airport is a reminder that Beijing will not have the islands to itself. The low key Indian reaction also reflects the multinational nature of the anti piracy effort.  The growing scourge of piracy in the waters off East Africa is a threat to Indian as well as to other interests; ships from many countries are patrolling these waters in the attempt to protect commerce, and the invitation to China makes some sense.
> 
> Though not an overtly antagonistic military maneuver, China’s move to the Seychelles is indeed a quiet step forward in the competition with India. Indians have viewed Chinese arrangements with countries like Sri Lanka and Pakistan as part of an effort to put together a “string of pearls” — Chinese bases in countries surrounding India.  Previously, India thought of the Seychelles as part of its own network of regional allies; now that status seems a little less secure, and some of India’s defense bureaucrats will likely be putting in some unusually long hours as they figure out how to respond.
> 
> Posted in Asia, China, India, Quick Take


----------



## a_majoor

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There are more than a few "ghost" projects in China but they fall int two broad categories:
> 
> 1. Those that fell apart (like the _Disneyesque_ theme park) because of bad financing; and
> 
> 2. Those which are awaiting completion.
> 
> The latter are especially common - as of 10 months ago, anyway - in the central provinces. There appear to be new super-highways to nowhere, there are new, seriously underutilized, airports and excellent farmland near small_ish_ cities has been expropriated and lies (officially) fallow - but famers are still working it, illegally. What's happened? They're waiting for one or two things - a new power station, perhaps, or a new water pipeline. Then, IF the Chinese plan works, relatively low tech and "dirty" production will move from the crowded, high wage East coast to the low wage interior (rather than to Indonesia or Philippines). That's the "plan," anyway - it has been working in some areas. In one town, in Hunan province, I was told, about five years ago, that the big industrial park was all ready, including highways, but needed more water. It took three years more to get the water supply connected but now, according to sources I think are reliable, the small city is booming - thousands of new jobs and people have moved back from the East coast.



While you certainly have far more first hand knowledge on the subject, I havn't found any other suggestions these cities are "just awaiting completion", or even that they are soon to be manufacturing hubs in Western China. Are there some other sources that you can point to?


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think you will find examples in Robyn Meredith"s _The Elephant And The Dragon_ (Norton, 2008). In Chapter 3 Meredith outlines this process as it was working in 2006/07, about the time I saw it in Yiyang, a relatively small (only 4 million people), second tier city in Hunan province. See also: http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e20035/p70.htm (but _China Today_ is a government agency so take what it says with that in mind.)


----------



## tomahawk6

A couple of interesting tidbits leaked out of the PRC this week. The second sea trials of their refurbished carrier and an uprising at a coastal town against local party officials.






http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_19550533

BEIJING -- A long-running dispute between farmers and local officials in southern China exploded into open rebellion this week after villagers chased away government leaders, set up roadblocks and began arming themselves with homemade weapons, residents said. 

The conflict in Wukan, a coastal settlement near the country's booming industrial heartland in Guangdong province, escalated Monday after residents learned that one of the representatives they had selected to negotiate with the local Communist Party had died in police custody. The authorities say a heart attack killed the 42-year-old man, but relatives say his body bore signs of torture. 

Spasms of social unrest in China have become increasingly common, a reflection of the widening income gap and deepening unhappiness with official corruption and an unresponsive justice system. 

But the clashes in Wukan, which first erupted in September, appear to be unusual for their longevity -- and for the brazenness of the participants. 

Reached by phone Wednesday, residents said throngs of people were staging noisy rallies by day outside Wukan's village hall, while young men with walkie-talkies employed tree limbs to obstruct roads leading to the town. Not far away, heavily armed riot police were maintaining their own roadblocks. The siege has prevented deliveries from reaching the town of 20,000, but residents said they had no problem receiving food from adjoining villages. 

Communist Party officials in Shanwei, the jurisdiction that includes Wukan, declined to comment Wednesday evening saying they would hold a news conference Thursday. 


The unrest began in September, when thousands of people took to the streets to protest the seizure of agricultural land they said was illegally taken by government officials. The land was sold to developers, they said, but the farmers ended up with little or no compensation. After two days of protests, during which police vehicles were destroyed and government buildings ransacked, riot police moved in with what residents described as excessive brutality. 

With order restored, local officials vowed to investigate the villager's land-grab claims. Two village party officials were fired and the authorities made an offer that is rare in China's top-down political system: County party officials would negotiate with a group of village representatives chosen by popular consensus. 

A butcher named Xue Jinbo was among the 13 people chosen. 

It is unclear what happened next, but villagers say the goodwill evaporated earlier this month after a Lufeng County government spokesman condemned the earlier protests as illegal and accused Wukan's ad hoc leaders of abetting "overseas forces that want to sow divisions between the government and villagers." A few days later, residents took to the streets again and staged a sit-in. Last Friday, the authorities responded by sending in a group of plainclothes policemen who grabbed five of the representatives, including Xue. 

Two days later, he was dead. 

According to a 24-year-old villager who described himself as Xue's son-in-law, his knees were bruised, his nostrils were caked with blood and his thumbs appeared to be broken. The man, who spoke by phone and gave his surname as Gao, declined to fully identify himself. 

"We've been to the funeral home a couple of times but the police won't release his body," he said. 

Although government censors blocked news of the latest unrest, the state-run Xinhua News Agency weighed in on the "rumors" about Xue's death, saying he had died of cardiac arrest a day after confessing to his role in the riots of in September. 

The account, published Tuesday, cited public security officials who said Xue had a history of asthma and heart disease, and it referred to a report by forensic investigators who found no evidence of abuse. 

"We assume the handcuffs left the marks on his wrists, and his knees were bruised slightly when he knelt," Luo Bin, deputy chief of the Zhongshan University forensics medical center told Xinhua. 

The top party official in Shanwei, Zheng Yanxiong, said Xue's death would nonetheless be investigated, but he warned residents against using their suspicions to fuel unrest. 

"The government will strive to settle all related problems and hopes the village will not be instigated into staging further riots," Zheng said.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the riots:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/16/china-land-grab-undermining-democracy/print



> *China's land grab is undermining grassroots democracy*
> 
> The standoff in Wukan exemplifies the growing tensions between state and society in a rapidly urbanising country
> 
> Tao Ran
> guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 December 2011 14.30 GMT
> 
> 
> After continuous confrontation between villagers and local officials for almost four months, the land grab in the fishing village of Wukan, in Guandong province, China, has now led to the death of one of the elected village leaders in police custody, and further escalated into a violent "mass incident" with tens of thousands of farmers protesting against local officials.
> 
> The Wukan case is just one of many mass incidents China has experienced in recent years. In fact, the number keeps rising every year; journalists often cite a figure of 87,000 for 2005, estimates by the China Academy of Social Sciences give a figure of "over 90,000" mass incidents in 2006, and further unspecified increases in 2007 and 2008.
> 
> In China, a mass incident is defined as "any kind of planned or impromptu gathering that forms because of internal contradictions", including mass public speeches, physical conflicts, airing of grievances, or other forms of group behaviour that may disrupt social stability. Among China's mass incidents, more than 60% have been related to land disputes when local governments in China worked closely with manufacturers and real-estate developers to grab land from farmers at low prices.
> 
> In a drive to industrialise and urbanise, thousands of industrial parks and many thousands of real estate development projects have been, or are being, built at the costs of dispossessed farmers. The land requisition system deprives three to four million farmers of their land every year, and around 40-50 million are now dispossessed.
> 
> The Wukan case says a lot about the serious tension between state and society in the fast urbanising China. It is difficult to play the land requisition game fairly under the current system, since farmers are neither allowed to negotiate directly on the compensation package, nor are they allowed to develop their own land for non-agricultural purposes. They have to sell their land to local government first, which defines the price then leases the land to industrial and commercial/residential users for a profit. As land prices keep rising in China, it is not surprising that farmers with rising expectations are becoming increasingly unhappy. As a result, mass incidents, sometimes as violent as in Wukan, are inevitable.
> 
> Local authorities in China, in their pursuit of revenue via aggressive urbanisation and industrialisation, are also undermining the country's grassroots democracy. It was usually local officials who would carry out difficult negotiations with village collectives, or who were in charge of coercing defiant farmers to accept government terms. Having village cadres who shared their interests would not only lower the selling price but also determine whether or not the transaction could take place at all. Therefore, township and county officials in localities that experienced greater land requisition had a stronger incentive to manipulate village democracies to make sure that more co-operative cadres were elected.
> 
> One township party secretary I interviewed in Fujian province said: "If election rules are followed strictly, [we] will lose control of the rural society. Village cadres will be afraid of villagers, not the township government. They can put off assignments from the township government and compromise the tasks during implementation. Therefore … local officials are willing to introduce rules that subvert the true meaning of village democracy. This is also the case in Wukan in which farmers are protesting not only against local governments, but also against villager cadres who worked with the authorities in abusive land requisition.
> 
> As China is urbanising fast, land requisition takes place in more Chinese villages, in particular those closest to the cities. Farmers with rising expectations on the one hand, and local officials with financial stakes in keeping the compensation low on the other, are bound to lead to increasingly violent mass incidents. Local governments in China needs to spend more not only on compensating farmers, but also on maintaining social stability. Wukan should be a signal for China to reform its land requisition system in order to keep local governments away from the financial gains of abusive land taking.
> 
> © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It is interesting: the figures of 90,000 _mass incidents_ is well below what I was told by a mid to high ranked official who suggested that there were at least 1,000 _incidents_ (demonstrations, protests, etc) every single day in China.

Most are, he told me, relatively, peaceful and, as far as I know, all are aimed at local officials - but they are not all in remote regions. One, of which I can speak from personal knowledge, took place in Beijing a few years ago and it involved thousands of pensioners who protested a change in public park access fees - they got their way: public park fees remained high (by our standards) for everyone under 55 (or whatever age) and those over 70 (I think that's the magic number) get a free pass.

When you don't have some form of participatory democracy protests, large and small, peaceful and violent, are the only way the _vox populi_ can be heard. This is one of the reasons the Chinese Communist Party is experimenting with local, direct elections in a few villages and small towns.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the economic bubble. 

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/19/bad-news-gets-worse-for-china-2/



> *Bad News Gets Worse For China*
> 
> Europe and China have this much in common: the bad economic news just keeps getting worse.  The latest headaches for Beijing: Growing numbers of analysts fear that a combination of slumping exports and overexposed loans could spell real trouble for the increasingly vulnerable Chinese economy.
> First, the export problem. As Reuters reports:
> 
> The first quarter [of 2012] is shaping up to be especially tough because of slow European and U.S. demand, coupled with the normal spike in imports that comes with the celebration of Chinese New Year, which this year starts in late January.
> 
> Zhiwei Zhang, a Nomura economist based in Hong Kong, expects China to import $28.8 billion more than it exports during the first three months of 2012, dwarfing the $1 billion deficit posted over the same period this year. That quarterly deficit was the first since 2004, and China has not recorded a full-year shortfall in two decades.
> 
> Chinese Commerce Ministry officials have been warning for weeks that the trade outlook is “very severe.”
> Perhaps even more troubling than falling exports are the conclusions drawn from this Bloomberg investigation into China’s real versus publicly acknowledged borrowing levels:
> 
> Bloomberg News tallied the debt disclosed by all 231 local government financing companies that sold bonds, notes or commercial paper through Dec. 10 this year. The total amounted to 3.96 trillion yuan ($622 billion), mostly in bank loans, more than the current size of the European bailout fund.
> There are 6,576 of such entities across China, according to a June count by the National Audit Office, which put their total debt at 4.97 trillion yuan. That means the 231 borrowers studied by Bloomberg have alone amassed more than three-quarters of the overall debt…
> 
> The findings suggest China is failing to curb borrowing that one central bank official has said will slow growth in the world’s second-largest economy if not controlled. With prices dropping in China’s real estate market, economists warn that local authorities won’t be able to repay their debt because of poor cash flow and falling revenue from land sales they rely on for much of their income.
> 
> It is unlikely that anybody in China has any idea just how much of a mess they have on their hands.  Local governments have every incentive to hide the full scope of their borrowing from central authorities — and local banks and businesses often have excellent reasons for helping the local authorities to hide their tracks and borrow and spend still more.
> 
> Every growing economy must pass through the fire of a major financial crisis and economic crash — usually more than once.  China’s new economy has not been tested by a truly wrenching crisis and downturn yet, but especially if the euro implodes, that could change.  With the political system already under stress, an economic meltdown would lead to, um, interesting times.
> 
> I hasten to add that China’s financial authorities are both talented and hardworking, but that is not the point.  Nobody dodges all the bullets, and sooner or later it will be China’s turn to take a big hit.


----------



## a_majoor

Without comment (part 1):

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html



> *The Xinjiang Procedure*
> Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
> Ethan Gutmann
> December 5, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12
> 
> To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.
> 
> One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.
> 
> Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.
> 
> With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.
> 
> Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.
> 
> Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.
> 
> Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.
> 
> Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so would remind international medical authorities of an issue they would rather avoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.
> 
> Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity.
> 
> Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the end of this century.
> 
> To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur detainees.
> 
> While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle.
> 
> So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands.
> 
> Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’s largest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero.
> 
> In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.
> 
> Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.
> 
> “Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?”
> 
> “Like from hell.”
> 
> Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.
> 
> A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”
> 
> Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”
> 
> The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”
> 
> “Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”
> 
> “What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”
> 
> “Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”
> 
> “Yes. Do you?”
> 
> “It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”
> 
> I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing. But Enver had a secret.
> 
> His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he was a general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an unusual conversation with his immediate superior, the chief surgeon: “Enver, we are going to do something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in the field?”
> 
> “Not really. What do you want me to do?”
> 
> “Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.”
> 
> On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’s car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver: “When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.”
> 
> “Can you tell us why we are here?”
> 
> “Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
> 
> “I want to know.”
> 
> “No. You don’t want to know.”
> 
> The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and drove around to the execution field.
> 
> Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.
> 
> “This one. It’s this one.”
> 
> Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair.
> 
> “That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”
> 
> “Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”
> 
> Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.”
> 
> “Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!”
> 
> Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “No anaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.”
> 
> The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—like some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Why don’t you do something?”
> 
> “What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious. If you cut, he’s not going to respond.”
> 
> But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in should I cut?”
> 
> “You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working against time.”
> 
> Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man was still alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim.
> 
> The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.
> 
> On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So. Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?”
> 
> Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happened that Wednesday.
> 
> As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together.
> 
> It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detention compound’s administrative office with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the place was haunted.
> 
> “Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?”
> 
> “Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.”
> 
> Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.
> 
> “Nijat, we really are going to hell.”
> 
> Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother to smile.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html



> On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder.
> 
> For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—a traditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state.
> 
> In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire Ghulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered to surrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told.
> 
> “When will you fix the problem?”
> 
> The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem.
> 
> Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.
> 
> Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail “to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’s ambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.”
> 
> In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treat someone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.
> 
> Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’s body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son. The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester.
> 
> In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—was pursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after.
> 
> One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that five Chinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all you have to do.”
> 
> “What about tissue matching?”
> 
> “Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handle that later. Just map out the blood types.”
> 
> Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began.
> 
> “You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?”
> 
> “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.”
> 
> At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howled and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard.
> 
> “It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenly aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure that Murat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said again and again as he drew blood.
> 
> When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor, “Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?”
> 
> “That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’t ask any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.”
> 
> But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.
> 
> Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja, five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals are leading the way.
> 
> By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.
> 
> Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.
> 
> By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’s be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environment is not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect that eventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.
> 
> In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.
> 
> Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number.
> 
> The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.
> 
> Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.


----------



## a_majoor

Rail woes:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/26/china-rail-fail-42-spending-cut-in-bullet-train-meltdown/



> *China Rail Fail: 42% Spending Cut in Bullet Train Meltdown*
> 
> The Panda Lobby, the pundits and policy wonks who want the US to imitate China’s state capitalism, has long celebrated what it claims to be China’s far sighted and effective approach to industrial policy.  China, the Panda pundits tell us, will own the future because of its courageous subsidies to green technology and high speed rail.  The meltdown of the Chinese solar industry has been widely reported; now comes word that the rail program is also in trouble.
> 
> From the Wall Street Journal:
> 
> The railway ministry had a rough 2011: Top ministry officials were ousted on corruption charges; technical snafus marred the opening of its signature Beijing-Shangai bullet line; and July’s grisly train collision crushed government confidence its technology was the new global standard.
> 
> Spending on rail will fall 42 percent from projected levels, and the priority looks to shift from gee-whiz high speed bullet trains to the expansion of China’s overstretched freight network.
> 
> Those of us who remember the short lived but intense Sushi Lobby, the Americans who thought the US needed to imitate the brilliant success of Japanese state capitalism back in those halcyon days of the 1980s when the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were estimated to cost more than the entire state of California, will be waiting to hear how the Panda pundits explain the high speed rail meltdown.
> 
> A stern and dignified silence, followed by a swift change of subject, is what the secret pundit manual recommends for situations like this one.  We shall see.


 
And ever increasing indebtedness:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-insolvency-wave-begins-nations-biggest-provincal-borrowers-defer-loan-payments



> *China Insolvency Wave Begins As Nation's Biggest Provincial Borrowers "Defer" Loan Payments*
> 
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/26/2011 00:07 -0500
> 
> Remember, back in the day, when a bankruptcy was simply called a bankruptcy? Naturally, this was well before ISDA came on the scene and footnoted the living feces out of everything by claiming that a bankruptcy is never a bankruptcy, as long as the creditors agree to 99.999% losses at gunpoint, with electrodes strapped to their testicles, submerged in a tank full of rabid piranhas, it they just sign a piece of paper (preferably in their own blood) saying the vaseline-free gang abuse was consensual. Well, now we learn that as the global insolvency wave finally moves to China, a bankruptcy is now called something even less scary: "deferred loan payments" (and also explains why suddenly Japan is going to have to bail China out and buy its bonds, because somehow when China fails, it is the turn of the country that started the whole deflationary collapse to step to the plate). After all, who in their right mind would want to scare the public that the entire world is now broke. Certainly not SWIFT. And certainly not that paragon of 8%+ annual growth, where no matter how many layers of lipstick are applied, the piggyness of it all is shining through ever more acutely. Because here are the facts, from China Daily, and they speaks for themselves: "China's biggest provincial borrowers are deferring payment on their loans just two months after the country's regulator said some local government companies would be allowed to do so....Hunan Provincial Expressway Construction Group is delaying payment on 3.11 billion yuan in interest, documents governing the securities show this month. Guangdong Provincial Communications Group Co, the second-largest debtor, is following suit. So are two others among the biggest 11 debtors, for a total of 30.16 billion yuan, according to bond prospectuses from 55 local authorities that have raised money in capital markets since the beginning of November." So not even two months in and companies are already becoming serial defaulters, pardon, "loan payment deferrers?" And China is supposed to bail out the world? Ironically, in a world in which can kicking is now an art form, China will show everyone just how it is done, by effectively upturning the capital structure and saying that paying interest is, well, optional. In the immortal words of the comrade from Georgia, "no coupon, no problem."
> 
> Our advice: go long Teva, which recently acquired Cephalon, and its wonderful drug Provigil, which is basically legalized cocaine, speed, meth and heroin all in one perfectly legal pill, as the newsflow, up until now only picking up with the idiot headlines out of Europe at 3 am Eastern is about to become one constant 24/7 flashing red rumor/disinformation mill. Also, next time someone wants to make THE drug cocktail of choice for the headline reacting speed trading junkie, please name it appropriately. Jeffrey will suffice.
> 
> More on China's piglipsticking:
> 
> As local governments delay payments for projects commissioned as part of the stimulus to ward off recession in 2009, less money is available for bank lending even as China is taking steps to inject more into the economy. The central bank has held interest rates at 6.56 percent since July to boost the economy, while the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan have kept benchmark rates near zero since 2008.
> 
> "When companies start to roll over debt they're not retiring debt, and banks aren't retrieving their capital, so you're crowding out new lending," Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in a Dec 13 interview. "This is a problem that's going to start to bite next year."
> 
> Local governments had 10.7 trillion yuan in debt at the end of last year, 79 percent due to banks, according to the country's first audit released in June. So-called local financing vehicles that meet collateral requirements can have a one-time extension on their loans, Zhou Mubing, vice-chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said at a conference on Oct 24 organized by the Internet portal Sina.com.cn, according to a transcript of his comments on the website.
> 
> Guangdong Provincial Communications Group, Hunan Provincial Expressway Construction Group, Gansu Provincial Highway Aviation Tourism Investment Group Co and Sichuan Railway Investment Group Co owe more than 200 billion yuan to banks, the data show. They plan to defer 34.4 billion yuan in interest payments, according to their bond prospectuses.
> 
> Yes, that's a lot, and it's going to get much worse. But not if you listen to Beijing Bob: yes, even communist countries have a department of propaganda:
> 
> Lei Wanming, Gansu Highway's deputy Communist Party secretary, said the company's interest payment deferrals do not raise any concerns. "Our company can pay our interest and our principal payments with no problem," he said in a Dec 5 interview. "You can't just consider this issue by looking at a bond prospectus."
> 
> Said otherwise, all is good, and China's 'relatively fast' growth is still on the agenda:
> 
> National leaders set a goal of "relatively fast" economic growth for 2012 at a major conference in Beijing that ended on Dec 14, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The global outlook "remains very grim", Xinhua cited the leaders as saying.
> 
> What is most ironic is that Meredith Whitney will be right... just wrong about the country.
> 
> The extra yield required to hold Hunan Provincial Expressway's 900 million yuan in 2012 bonds has increased to 308 basis points from 151 basis points on June 21, when they were issued. That compares with a current spread of 11 basis points on Shenzhen's five-year direct municipal bonds.
> 
> Yields on local government financing company bonds will remain high next year as selling debt becomes a main channel for raising funds, China International Capital Corp analysts led by the fixed-income analyst Xu Xiaoqing wrote in a Dec 16 research note. Most of the bonds are sold at yields of 8 percent, or 144 basis points more than the benchmark bank lending rate, according to the report. Five-year top-rated corporate bonds yield 4.98 percent, according to Chinabond, the nation's bond clearing house.
> 
> "Although the China Banking Regulatory Commission has recently eased loan restrictions to help liquidity, recent supply has been increasing, causing the secondary market to pay attention to systemic risks," they wrote. "The credit quality of recent financing vehicle bonds continues to get weaker."
> 
> For those who refuse to swallow China's lies, there is one way around it:
> 
> Five-year credit-default swaps insuring against default on China's sovereign debt rose 3.2 basis points recently to 149.66 basis points, according to data provider CMA...
> 
> As more and more scratch their heads, the math is clearly not your friend:
> 
> Even after the reduction in interest payments, Gansu Provincial Highway said that interest and principal payments in 2011 will amount to 3.33 billion yuan, more than its 2010 cash flow of 3.04 billion yuan, according to bond-marketing materials.
> 
> "This prospectus is telling us that banks can expect to only receive roughly half of what would have been expected in interest payments," Charlene Chu, a Beijing-based banking analyst with Fitch Ratings, said of the Gansu disclosure.
> 
> And as for what happens when an entire continent is stuck fighting simple math and failing, we refer you all to the case study that is Europe.


----------



## a_majoor

A little too much preening in this article, but yes, we should put the PLAN's aircraft carrier into perspective:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/relax-chinas-first-aircraft-carrier-is-a-piece-of-junk/all/1



> Relax: China’s First Aircraft Carrier is a Piece of Junk
> 
> By David Axe
> 
> June 1, 2011 |
> 11:14 am |
> 
> Her new guns are installed. Her light-gray paint job has dried. Her airplanes are flying and her engines are turning. Thirteen years after she was purchased from Ukraine half-complete and lacking engines, the Chinese navy’s very first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail from Dalian shipyard in northeast China. The former Soviet carrier Varyag, renamed Shi Lang in Chinese service, could begin sea trials this summer.
> 
> Just how worried should the world be?
> 
> The answer depends on who you ask. To China’s closest neighbors, the prospect of a carrier speeding heavily-armed Chinese jet fighters across the world’s oceans is an alarming one. But the U.S. Navy, the world’s leading carrier power and arguably the Chinese navy’s biggest rival, seems oddly unaffected.
> 
> There are good reasons for the Pentagon’s calm. For starters, Shi Lang, pictured above, could be strictly a training carrier, meant to pave the way for bigger, more capable carriers years or decades in the future.
> 
> But even if she is meant for combat, there’s probably little reason to fear Shi Lang. A close study of the 990-foot-long vessel — plus the warships and airplanes she’ll sail with — reveals a modestly-sized carrier lacking many of the elements that make U.S. flattops so powerful.
> 
> When Shi Lang finally gets underway in coming months, she will boost the ability of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to patrol airspace over contested sea zones, provided they’re not too far from the Chinese mainland. And more to the point, she’ll look good doing it. “I think the change in perception by the region will be significant,” Adm. Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific forces, told the Senate in April.
> 
> Willard said he is “not concerned” about the ship’s military impact.
> 
> Carrier Census
> 
> Shi Lang will sail into a Pacific Ocean teeming with carriers. First, there are the American carriers: five nuclear-powered supercarriers home-ported in California, Washington and Japan, plus six assault ships in California and Japan. Between them, the American carriers displace no less than 700,000 tons and can carry 600 aircraft. “Our Navy can carry twice as many aircraft at sea as all the rest of the world combined,” outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out last year.
> 
> (In comparison, the Chinese flattop displaces just 60,000 tons and carries no more than 40 planes and choppers.)
> 
> Japan’s got two 18,000-ton assault ships, plus another on the way. Today they carry just a few helicopters, but it’s possible the ships will eventually embark vertical-landing F-35B stealth fighters. The same applies to South Korea’s four planned 14,000-ton carriers and the two 30,000-ton Australian flattops still under construction.
> 
> Thailand’s 12,000-ton Chari Naruebet is an outlier: too small for more than a handful of aircraft, but nevertheless capable of carrying the country’s ancient, vertical-landing Harrier jets.
> 
> India and Russia both operate full-fledged carriers with jet fighters aboard. Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov is actually Shi Lang‘s older sister. Her dozen Su-33 fighters are just rustier versions of the Chinese J-15. Lately, Kuznetsov has spent most of her time in the Mediterranean. India’s 30,000-ton Viraat and her 30 Harriers and choppers tend to stick to the Indian Ocean.
> 
> Of the 22 flattops already plying the Pacific or coming soon, none belongs to a country that China can consider a close ally. Today it’s not uncommon to see American carriers sailing in mixed formations with carriers from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and India. Beijing can only dream of assembling that kind of international sea power, with or without Shi Lang.
> 
> Empty Nest
> 
> A carrier is only as potent as her air wing, a fact the Pentagon appreciates. That’s why the U.S. Navy spends an average of $15 billion a year on new airplanes — about the same as the Air Force. Today, a Navy supercarrier sails with a 70-strong air wing. F/A-18 fighters, EA-6B or EA-18G radar-jamming planes, E-2 radar planes, C-2 cargo-haulers and H-60 helicopters are all part of the mix. The aircraft work as a team, patrolling, tracking and attacking targets below, on and above the surface and moving people and supplies to and from the carrier.
> 
> Shi Lang will not possess anything close to that mix of aircraft and capabilities. China’s J-15 naval fighter, pictured above, is a rough analogue of the F-18, but with a shorter range, less sophisticated sensors and fewer weapons options. The Ka-28 helicopter hunts submarines like the H-60 does.
> 
> But that’s it. The PLAN doesn’t have radar-jamming jets, carrier-based airlifters or fixed-wing radar planes. Rumors of a Chinese copy of the E-2 seem unfounded, for an E-2 would require a steam-powered catapult to boost it into the air, and Shi Lang lacks even that basic equipment. To fill that huge gap in Shi Lang‘s air wing, China is testing a Z-8 helicopter fitted with a radar. But such a set-up offers only a fraction of the E-2′s range and endurance.
> 
> The disparity will only increase in the next decade, as the U.S. Navy finally deploys jet-powered killer drones, early versions of which are already undergoing testing in the California desert.
> 
> Defenseless
> 
> The same limitations apply to Shi Lang‘s escorts.
> 
> To protect its $10 billion carriers and their air wings from aerial attack, the U.S. Navy assigns several of its 83 destroyers and cruisers to sail alongside each flattop. The escorting warships boast super-sophisticated Aegis radars and carry 100 or more Surface-to-Air Missiles per ship. An American carrier battle group possesses more high-powered radars and at-sea missiles than most other countries’ entire naval fleets.
> 
> The Chinese navy has just two destroyers that come close to matching America’s Aegis warships, although more are under construction. The Type 052C destroyer, pictured above, carries half as many missiles as a U.S. destroyer, and its radar is unlikely to match the Aegis’ ability to closely track scores of targets simultaneously. On the surface, Shi Lang will be all but defenseless, by U.S. standards.
> 
> Underwater, the situation is even worse. American carriers travel with an unseen companion: at least one nuclear-powered attack submarine. The sub’s job is to patrol ahead of the carrier, screening for hostile warships — especially other submarines. After all, submarines are the world’s most lethal ship-killers.
> 
> The PLAN has two Type 093 submarines capable of long-range patrols. Again, that’s too few for carrier-escort duty in addition to the other missions likely assigned to the Chinese attack-submarine force. But the bigger problem is communications. To coordinate surface ships and submarines, the Americans and other advanced navies rely on a mix of Very Low Frequency radios installed aboard special aircraft, plus higher-frequency radios for talking from ship to sub.
> 
> China hasn’t perfected that system. “Due to the limitations of submarine communications technology, the PLAN currently can only exercise relatively limited tactical control over its submarines,” Garth Heckler, Ed Francis and James Mulvenon wrote in the 2007 book China’s Future Nuclear Submarine Force.
> 
> For that reason, Shi Lang probably cannot rely on Chinese submarines for protection from other submarines. That realization evoked a rather pointed comment from National War College professor Bernard Cole. “As a former Navy man, I’d love to see them [the Chinese] build a fleet of aircraft carriers which, increasingly, are just good sub targets,” Cole said.
> 
> Potemkin Carrier
> 
> Leaving aside her modest size compared to American carriers, her incomplete air wing and escort force and the fact that she’ll sail without the company of allied flattops, Shi Lang could be even less of a threat than her striking appearance implies. Shi Lang‘s greatest potential weakness could be under her skin, in her Ukrainian-supplied engines.
> 
> Powerplants — that is, jet engines for airplanes, turbines for ships — are some of the most complex, expensive and potentially troublesome components of any weapon system. Just ask the designers of the Pentagon’s F-35 stealth fighter and the U.S. Navy’s San Antonio-class amphibious ships. Both have been nearly sidelined by engine woes.
> 
> China has struggled for years to design and build adequate powerplants for its ships and aircraft. Although Chinese aerospace firms are increasingly adept at manufacturing airframes, they still have not mastered motors. That’s why the new WZ-10 attack helicopter was delayed nearly a decade, and why there appear to be two different prototypes for the J-20 stealth fighter. One flies with reliable Russian-made AL-31F engines; the other apparently uses a less trustworthy Chinese design, the WS-10A.
> 
> For Shi Lang, China reportedly purchased turbines from Ukraine. Though surely superior to any ship engines China could have produced on its own, the Ukrainian models might still be unreliable by Western standards. Russia’s Kuznetsov, also fitted with Ukrainian turbines, has long suffered propulsion problems that have forced her to spend most of her 30-year career tied to a pier for maintenance. When she does sail, a large tugboat usually tags along, just in case the carrier breaks down.
> 
> If Shi Lang is anything like her sister, she could turn out to be a naval version of the mythical “Potemkin village” — an impressive facade over a rickety interior.
> 
> “As China’s interests expand globally, the Chinese navy needs to go further outbound, and an aircraft carrier is needed,” said Arthur Ding, from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. If so, China might have to wait for the carrier after the potentially hollow Shi Lang.


----------



## The Bread Guy

I'd love to hear from the more experienced China hands on this interpretation of events/trade issues:


> .... All you need to know about Ottawa’s disgracefully servile relations with the degenerate police state in Beijing is that along with all the computers, toys, games, television sets and plastics that have caused our trade deficit with China to balloon to more than $30 billion in recent years, we can now add cement. You’ll want to think about that for a moment.
> 
> Cement, the heaviest thing you’re likely to encounter during a walk around any Canadian city, is not what would be going into the holds of ships to be shunted all the way across the Pacific Ocean if capitalism’s genius efficiency in allocating scarce resources had anything to do with it. But that’s not what our coziness with Beijing, our new best friend and trading partner, is about.
> 
> It’s a rigged game. Canada is an open society, with an open economy. China is neither.
> 
> In the case of cement, British Columbian cement producers are obliged to pay a stiff carbon tax. Chinese cement comes into Canada tax-free, produced by workers who are forbidden to form their own unions, and heaven help them if they get cranky about working 12-hour shifts seven days a week. But cement is just where it starts.
> 
> Ten years after Beijing insinuated itself into the World Trade Organization, Chinese corporate monopolies and crony-capitalist empires still enjoy protectionist tariffs and anti-competition laws that have rendered the whole idea of liberalized global trade a sick joke. The racket has engorged Chinese industrial barons with the booty of a six-fold increase in Chinese exports that have cost millions of North American workers their jobs and transformed what was an already fraudulent “socialism with Chinese characteristics” into an increasingly vile regime.
> 
> Fully half of China’s billion citizens subsist on sub-Saharan incomes of less than $2 a day, and they’re growing increasingly impatient with the corruption, oppression and persecution that has accompanied the stuffing of Beijing’s foreign-reserves treasury.
> 
> But the dozens of unelected billionaires who now dominate the People’s Congress that pretends to be a parliament have decided they will not put up with backchat from Chinese patriots and essayists or with “mass incidents” of the kind that broke out in Wukan and Haimen. Over the past five years, Congress deputies have doubled military spending, adding to a vast and growing security, surveillance and prison-complex apparatus with an annual budget that now hovers in the neighbourhood of $200 billion ....


Terry Glavin column, _Ottawa Citizen_, 29 Dec 11


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's nothing incorrect with what Terry Glavin says, but neither does it present an accurate picture, in my opinion.

There were, most people seem to agree over 200,000 "mass incidents" in 2011 in China - that's 6,000 riots, demonstrations, strikes or _whatevers_ (things requiring police _intervention_). Now China's population is 40 times as big as ours - do we have 150 such incidents a day in Canada?

China is in the throes of a massive change - begun by Deng Xiaoping and ongoing today - that is transforming the lives of 1.3 Billion people. Much as been accomplished - mostly on the Eastern seaboard; much, much more needs to be done and many, hundreds of millons of Chinese are growing impatient because they can see what's happening on the East Coast and they can see what is not happening to them in the Central and Western provinces.

We need to be careful with comparisons. Yes, many Chinese live on $2.00 per day - but I spent some time, early last year in a large village (or very small town) in rural Anhui province and $2.00 (more like $5.00 or $10.00) pr day goes a long way in the countryside. China is not Africa or even Indonesia or Philippines.

I don't know how China will turn out, I don't know how long this new "dynasty" can last - but the interregnum between the fall of the _Qing_ (1911) and the rise of this one (the Red dynasty?) in 1991 was long enough. China needs some peace and stability, what Hu Jintao refers to as the "harmonious society" to gather and spread the rewards of the past 20 years. What I do know is that China's problems and possible futures cannot be summarized in 500 words ... or 500,000.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The US has more worries about China's military "threat," according to this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/pentagons-new-defence-strategy-eyes-china/article2292485/


> Pentagon’s new defence strategy eyes China
> 
> AFFAN CHOWDHRY
> 
> Globe and Mail Update
> Published Thursday, Jan. 05, 2012
> 
> The Pentagon’s strategic review of the U.S. military comes in the age of austerity.
> 
> Defence budget cuts are on the way, the only question is: how deep will they be? Estimates range from at least $450-billion to $1-trillion over the next decade.
> 
> But one of the key aspects of President Barack Obama’s comments this morning at the Pentagon is the shift in strategy to bolster the air force and navy, and to build the U.S. military’s capacity in the Pacific region to counter China’s growing military presence.
> 
> “We’ll be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of this critical region,” Mr. Obama said in the Pentagon’s briefing room on Thursday.
> 
> This isn’t the first time the U.S. has addressed military spending in the Asia-Pacific region. The Pentagon has been warning about China’s military spending for years.
> 
> Last August, it warned in a report that China’s military was on course to build a modern military by 2020, and in a year when the Chinese military tested a stealth aircraft and conducted trials of a new aircraft carrier, the Pentagon's concern was unmistakable.
> 
> China’s defence spending and military growth “are potentially destabilizing to regional military balances, increase the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation and may contribute to regional tensions and anxieties,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for East Asia Michael Schiffer said in August of last year around the release of the report on China’s military.
> 
> China’s sea disputes with neighbours such as the Philippines and Vietnam over competing claims of sovereignty on islands is nothing new. And Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent message to its navy – ”make extended preparations for warfare” – will no doubt make U.S. allies nervous.
> 
> But how fast is the Chinese military growing? And is there any expectation that defence spending will one day surpass the U.S. military?
> 
> Reality check: the size of the U.S. military and the scale of U.S. defence spending will continue to dwarf China’s military growth for years to come. Mr. Obama will be careful to point out in an election year that, whatever reductions in defence, the U.S. defence spending will continue to grow but just not at the pace it has in the past.
> 
> But there will come a point when, theoretically, China can surpass the Unites States on defence spending.
> 
> This bubble graph by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament, illustrates the story of defence spending from 2001 to 2010: the United States is spending more than any other country, with China a distant second.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
> 
> 
> A trend line graph by the same institute compares military spending regionally. North American spending (dominated obviously by the United States) rose dramatically from 2001 to 2010 compared to total military spending in the Asia and Oceania region (dominated obviously by China).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
> 
> So when will China overtake the United States in defence spending?
> 
> China has witnessed incredible economic growth, and it has invested its wealth with consecutive double-digit increases in military spending. In March of 2011, it announced that it will increase its military spending in 2011 by 12.7 per cent.
> 
> But how long can China sustain such phenomenal economic growth? Military spending will depend on that growth.
> 
> This handy interactive graph by The Economist magazine allows readers to adjust GDP growth rates, inflation and Yuan appreciation to arrive at their own date for when China will surpass the United States in real GDP growth.
> 
> The Economist assumes a GDP growth rate over the next decade of 7.75 per cent in China and 2.5 per cent in the U.S., compared to the GDP growth rate over the last decade of 10.5 per cent a year in China and 1.6 per cent in the U.S.
> 
> And following on from the growth figures, the magazine concludes that China will surpass U.S. defence spending in 2025.
> 
> There is no telling what the Chinese military would look like after all that spending.
> 
> Its navy is small compared to the United States, and there are all kinds of factors worth considering: what if Chinese economic growth slows dramatically? And even though China is closing the technological gap with the United States, a recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded that factories involved in arms manufacturing “often possess outdated manufacturing and research attributes.”




Without wishing to make the Chinese appear too smart, this _may_ be just what they want. A strong US presence in the region serves to "keep the peace," which is in China's best interests and relieves China of that responsibility. But the US will have to cut somewhere and that may leave China with openings to advance its own interests elsewhere.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Just out ....

"China's evolving nuclear posture: Part 1-Background and benchmark"


> This paper is the first part of a larger study the goal of which is to determine the trajectory of China’s nuclear weapons policy, strategy, capability and doctrine. It discusses the origins, scope and methodology of the proposed study, and provides an overview of the evolution of US nuclear strategy in order to establish a baseline for discussing why, and to what extent, China’s nuclear evolution has differed from US nuclear thinking. In doing so it sets the stage for further papers examining the evolution of China’s nuclear strategy; the status of its strategic nuclear forces; and the drivers of China’s declaratory policy, nuclear strategy, and nuclear doctrine. The study will terminate with a comprehensive report discussing the apparent trajectory of Chinese nuclear strategy and capability and the implications thereof for Canada and its allies, and will suggest directions for future research.



"China's evolving nuclear posture: Part II- The evolution of China's Nuclear Strategy"


> This paper is the second part of a larger study the principal purpose of which is to determine the trajectory of China’s nuclear weapons policy, strategy, capability and doctrine. Building on the first paper, which provided a benchmark for comparative analysis in the form of an overview of the evolution of US nuclear strategy since the end of the Second World War, this paper discusses the origins of China’s nuclear strategy; its view of deterrence; what certain elements of its declaratory policy reveal about Beijing’s nuclear strategy; and where that strategy appears to stand at present. The paper concludes that while the evolution of China’s nuclear strategy bear some resemblance to Western patterns of nuclear evolution, the process has been largely unique; and that although Beijing will probably maintain an official commitment to minimal deterrence, China’s nuclear strategy has progressed well beyond its declaratory policy, and is continuing to change rapidly. Further papers in this study will examine China’s strategic nuclear forces, and investigate the principal drivers of China’s declaratory policy, nuclear strategy, and nuclear doctrine. The study will conclude with a comprehensive report discussing the apparent trajectory of China’s nuclear posture and the implications thereof for Canada and its allies, and suggesting directions for future research.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good news in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, at least it is good news for those of us who think that the _reunification_ of China and Taiwan is both inevitable and desirable and can be accomplished without too much fuss or disorder:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/taiwanese-voters-choose-to-maintain-chinese-ties-by-reelecting-president/article2302748/


> Taiwanese voters choose to maintain Chinese ties by reelecting president
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Taipei— Globe and Mail Update
> Published Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012
> 
> Taiwanese voters signaled a desire for continued rapprochement with mainland China on Saturday, reelecting President Ma Ying-jeou, whose first term saw a rapid warming of ties with Beijing.
> 
> Mr. Ma declared victory less than four hours after polls closed, as televised results showed him building a seemingly insurmountable lead over rival Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. With over 90 percent of the vote counted, the official Central Election Commission said Mr. Ma was ahead with 51.6 per cent to 45.7 percent for Ms. Tsai.
> 
> “This is not my personal victory, the victory belongs to all Taiwanese,” Mr. Ma told throngs of elated supporters at the Taipei headquarters of his Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party. “They told us that we are on the right track.”
> 
> Mr. Ma’s re-election is likely to be greeted with cheers in Beijing – where President Hu Jintao has made warmer ties with Taipei a central plank of his foreign policy – and sighs of relief in Washington, where some feared a return to confrontation between China and Taiwan if Ms. Tsai and the DPP won the vote.
> 
> Taiwanese were “voting for consistency or continuity versus uncertainty,” said Alexander Huang, a professor of political science at Tamkang Univeristy in Taipei. He said the win was “a confirmation of Ma Ying-jeou’s policy towards the mainland.”
> 
> Mr. Ma’s Kuomintang Party also looked set to win at least a plurality of seats in legislative elections that were simultaneously held, although it the KMT was on pace to win fewer seats than it held going into the vote.
> 
> Mr. Ma’s margin of victory in the presidential race was also smaller than four years ago when he captured 58 per cent of the vote. Many saw the drop as signalling that some Taiwanese were uncomfortable with the idea of getting too close too fast to their giant cousin across the Strait of Taiwan.
> 
> “Ma’s hands will be even more tightened, given the close race and the [reduced number of] seats for KMT in the parliament,” Prof. Huang said.
> 
> After eight years of strained relations while the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian was president, Taiwan and China rapidly signed a series of pacts after Mr. Ma, a former Taipei mayor, came to office in 2008. The two sides established direct air, shipping and postal links for the first time since the Communists troops routed the KMT army in 1949, forcing them to retreat to island, which has existed in political limbo ever since.
> 
> The new ties clearing the way for a surge in cross-Strait trade and allowed millions of mainland Chinese tourists to visit the island. More controversially, the two sides inked the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement in 2010, a trade deal that saw each side eliminate tariffs on hundreds of goods but which Mr. Ma’s critics say pulled Taiwan into Beijing’s economic orbit.
> 
> “All of our trade is going to China now, which means our economy will soon be governed by China and we will not have control of it ourselves. It’s another way for Taiwan to be governed by China,” said Stanley Chen, a 30-year-old industrial engineer who said he voted for Mr. Ma four years ago but cast his ballot for Ms. Tsai on Saturday.
> 
> Mr. Ma’s once-comfortable lead evaporated early in the campaign when he mused out loud about the possibility of signing a full-on peace deal with China’s Communist leadership sometime in the next decade, a position the 61-year-old was forced to quickly backpedal away from, promising to hold a referendum before entering into any such negotiations. But his poll numbers plunged and the race was considered too close to call heading into the final days of the campaign.
> 
> Nonetheless, the mild-mannered Mr. Ma overcame a challenge from not only from Ms. Tsai – who was seeking to become Taiwan’s first female president – but also veteran KMT figure James Soong, whose independent candidacy was expected to draw voters away from the incumbent. However, support for Mr. Soong – who once looked set to win around 10 per cent of the vote – seemed to bleed away in the final days as KMT strategists raised the fear that he would split the vote and help elect Ms. Tsai. Official results showed Mr. Soong set to take just under 3 per cent of the vote.
> 
> “A lot of voters, when the final decision came, they probably went back to vote for Ma, instead of voting for Soong, worried about splitting the vote and delivering the presidency to Tsai Ing-wen,” said Yen Chen-shen, research fellow in the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University.
> 
> Mr. Ma was also boosted by an estimated 200,000 Taiwanese living and working in mainland China who returned to cast their ballots, some at the encouragement of their employers. Most were expected to support Mr. Ma and a continuation of his Beijing-friendly policies.
> 
> “My family told me I had to come back and vote. They said if you don’t come back, Ma Ying-jeou could lose by one ballot,” said Sherry Yen, a 23-year-old trader who lives in Hong Kong but returned to cast her ballot in central Taipei yesterday. Her mother works in the neighbouring Chinese city of Shenzhen, and also returned to vote for Mr. Ma.
> 
> The result was a disappointment for the 55-year-old Ms. Tsai and the DPP, who until the last minute held out hope for an upset win. Nonetheless, the party could claim to have recovered from the depths of four years ago, when the corruption associated with Mr. Chen ‘s government handed Mr. Ma an easy victory. Mr. Chen is now in prison, serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted after leaving office of corruption and abuse of authority.
> 
> Ms. Tsai told supporters Saturday night that she would resign as party leader. “I will shoulder full responsibility,” she said shortly after conceding defeat and congratulating Mr. Ma.




Now Taiwan is, like Israel, an estimable country, much "better," qualitatively, than its neighbours but, at the same time, one that poses an existential threat to peace. Taiwan, simply by being an _independent_ country is a problem. The problem can be solved in one of two ways:

1. China can recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation and deal with it on that basis; or

2. Taiwan can rejoin China, as a province, under a "one country, three systems" basis.

In my opinion China will not, indeed *cannot* recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country - there is too much history and too much emotion in the issue and Taiwan *is*, essentially, Chinese, it makes sense for Taiwan to be part of China. (And, yes, I recognize that a similar argument could be used to suggest that Canada ought to be _united_ with the USA ~ something I do wish to see happen.)

But for the sake of peace and prosperity - everyone's peace and prosperity, the _reunification_ must be accomplished peacefully, with the consent of the peoples involved.

The _reunification_ of Hong Kong with China demonstrates that "one country, two systems" works - to the advantage of both China and Hong Kong;* there is no reason why "one country, three systems" cannot work for China and Taiwan - or, perhaps, Hong Kong could move towards an even more independent status, à la Taiwan.

__________
* But it is amusing to watch China and Hong Kong in some international fora where Hong Kong retains a quasi-independent status and then votes against China.


----------



## Brad Sallows

Austria ought to be united with Germany.

The underlying problem is the cultural and racial chauvinism of many Chinese people.  It is so bad that it extends to their attitudes toward territories occupied by people who are manifestly not Chinese.  I have no interest in going along with that for the sake of their "face", irrespective of the political advantages.  In point of fact, I believe that the more peoples and lands the Chinese try to keep pinned under their thumb, the greater the threat to peace - the Chinese have a long history of formation and dissolution of empire, and it is never very attractive or humane.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The main, almost the only discernable strategic _thread_ in 3,000 years of recorded Chinese history is *defence*. the Chinese are manifestly _isolationist_. Look at the _Great Wall_ for heaven's sake: nowhere on god's green earth, in all of recorded history, is there such a _monument_ to a defensive, isolationist mindset - it was built, rebuilt, maintained and manned for over 2,000 years, from 500 BCE until the 1700s CE. That qualifies as a long standing strategic principle. Even the expansions, into Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang in the 19th century were, essentially, defensive in nature.

And no, I am not a Chinese apologist. I dislike the current dictatorship as much as anyone else - but, like almost everyone else, I see no immediate alternative to it.


----------



## Brad Sallows

Is the Great Wall inside or on a border of China?

The Chinese are not defensive, except in the way the Soviet Union was defensive.  You annex a buffer of former neighbours, and defend your new territory.  Perhaps you acquire a large buffer of other clients on your new borders, and then you defend them.  You acquire a bunch of overseas or otherwise non-continguous clients with resources you need, and you defend those.  Yes, the Chinese are very defensive.  Not an offensive move to been seen.

It is a strange isolationism to subjugate other peoples and force them to pretend to be of your own race.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Brad Sallows said:
			
		

> Is the Great Wall inside or on a border of China?
> 
> When it was built - over a period of about 1,000 years - it was, mostly, on China's Northern border. The goal was to defend China from the marauding Northern plains peoples.
> 
> The Chinese are not defensive, except in the way the Soviet Union was defensive.  You annex a buffer of former neighbours, and defend your new territory.  Perhaps you acquire a large buffer of other clients on your new borders, and then you defend them.  You acquire a bunch of overseas or otherwise non-continguous clients with resources you need, and you defend those.  Yes, the Chinese are very defensive.  Not an offensive move to been seen.
> 
> The Chinese are just as defensive as, and arguably much more so over the past 3,000 years, than the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Huns, Mongols, Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Germans and Americans.
> 
> It is a strange isolationism to subjugate other peoples and force them to pretend to be of your own race.
> 
> Race? How racially different are the Manchu, Zhuang or Uyghur peoples from the (majority) Han Chinese? For that matter, how different are the Mongols or Vietnamese from the Chinese? Are the Italians and Germans of the different races? How about the Americans and the Cubans? I'm sorry, Brad, you usually make good sense, but not with this silly, facile, racial argument; it's nonsense. The Zhuang  Uyghur peoples are to the Chinese as Finns and Latvians are to Russians.


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## Brad Sallows

My point is that the Great Wall was built a long time ago, and mostly I measure Chinese political aspirations by their behaviour of the past century.

Saying the Chinese are more defensive than a partial list of expansionists doesn't make them defensive - it makes them a member of a club of expansionists.  I don't think there is anything remarkable about the tendency of powerful nations to become expansionist or imperialistic; I just will not suffer the foolishness of the excuses and rationalizations offered when base and discreditable notions grounded in power-seeking and chauvinism will do nicely.

I'm not the one who brings race or culture or tradition or historical precedent or flavours of manifest destiny to the discussion; the Chinese do that all by themselves.  Try telling a Tibetan or Korean or Uighur that he is really just Chinese and therefore should be happy if he does or could live in greater China.   I'm not willfully blind or deaf to their excuses for subjugating their neighbours.  My point is that we would greet with derision a suggestion that Finns, for example, could possibly find any sort of acceptable excuse founded on race or culture or heritage or anything else for absorbing Latvia.  I grant the Chinese no exception to that standard.


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## a_majoor

Instead of a Great Wall, there is now a "Green Wall". Some positive geoengineering from China:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wall_of_China



> The Green Wall of China, also known as the Green Great Wall or Great Green Wall (simplified Chinese: 三北防护林; traditional Chinese: 三北防護林; pinyin: Sānběi Fánghùlín), will be a series of human-planted forest strips in the People's Republic of China, designed to hold back the expansion of the Gobi Desert.[1] It is planned to be completed around 2050,[2] at which point it is planned to be 2,800 miles (4,500 km) long.
> 
> Effects of the Gobi Desert
> 
> China has seen 3,600 km2 (1,390 miles2) of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert.[3] Each year dust storms blow off as much as 900 square miles (2,000 km2) of topsoil, and the storms are increasing in severity each year. These storms also have serious agricultural effects for other nearby countries, such as Japan, North Korea, and South Korea.[4] The Green Wall project was begun in 1978 with the proposed end result of raising northern China’s forest cover from 5 to 15 percent [5] and thereby reducing desertification.
> [edit]Methodology and progress
> 
> The 4th and most recent phase of the project, started in 2003, has two parts: the use of aerial seeding to cover wide swaths of land where the soil is less arid, and the offering of cash incentives to farmers to plant trees and shrubs in areas that are more arid. [6] A $1.2 billion oversight system (including mapping and surveillance databases) is also to be implemented.[6] The “wall” will have a belt with sand-tolerant vegetation arranged in checkerboard patterns in order to stabilize the sand dunes. A gravel platform will be next to the vegetation to hold down sand and encourage a soil crust to form.[6] The trees should also serve as a wind break from dust-storms.
> [edit]Measuring success
> 
> As of 2009 China’s planted forest covered more than 500,000 square kilometers (increasing tree cover from 12% to 18%) – the largest artificial forest in the world.[7] However, of the 53,000 hectares planted that year, a quarter died and of the remaining many are dwarf trees, which lack the capacity to protect the soil.[5] In 2008 winter storms destroyed 10% of the new forest stock, causing the World Bank to advise China to focus more on quality rather than quantity in its stock species.[7]
> [edit]Problems
> 
> There is still debate on the effectiveness of the project. If the trees succeed in taking root they could soak up large amounts of groundwater, which would be extremely problematic for arid regions like northern China.[6] For example, in Minqin, an area in north-western China, studies showed that groundwater levels dropped by 12-19 metres since the advent of the project.[5]
> Land erosion and overfarming have halted planting in many areas of the project. China's booming pollution rate has also weakened the soil, causing it to be unusable in many areas.[3]
> Furthermore, planting blocks of fast-growing trees reduces the biodiversity of forested areas, creating areas that are not suitable to plants and animals normally found in forests. "China plants more trees than the rest of the world combined," says John McKinnon, the head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme. "But the trouble is they tend to be monoculture plantations. They are not places where birds want to live." The lack of diversity also makes the trees more susceptible to disease, as in 2000 where one billion poplar trees were lost to disease, setting back 20 years of planting efforts.[5]
> Liu Tuo, head of the desertification control office in the state forestry administration, is of the opinion that there are huge gaps in the country's efforts to reclaim the land that has become desert and that it would take around 300 years to do so.[8] At present there are around 1.73 m sq kilometers of land that has become desert in China. Out of which 530,000 sq km is treatable but, at the present rate of treating 1,717 sq km a year, it would take 300 years to reclaim the land that has become desert. [9]
> [edit]Relations to climate change
> 
> Recently[when?] the Great Green Wall has been used as defense against critics who accuse China of climate change irresponsibility[citation needed].
> China’s forest scientists argue that monoculture tree plantations are more effective at absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than slow-growth forests.[7] So while diversity may be lower, the trees purportedly help to offset China’s carbon emissions.
> [edit]Criticism
> 
> There are many who do not believe the Green Wall is an appropriate solution to China’s desertification problems. Gao Yuchuan, the Forest Bureau head of Jingbian County, Shanxi, stated that “planting for 10 years is not as good as enclosure for one year,” referring to the alternative non-invasive restoration technique that fences off (encloses) a degraded area for two years to allow the land to restore itself.[5] Jiang Gaoming, an ecologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and proponent of enclosure, says that “planting trees in arid and semi-arid land violates [ecological] principles”.[5] The worry is that the fragile land cannot support such massive, forced growth. Others worry that China is not doing enough on the social level. In order to succeed many believe the government should encourage farmers financially to reduce livestock numbers or relocate away from arid areas.[6]


----------



## a_majoor

Numbers not adding up. These numbers would be indicitive of economic contraction, not growth, yet China continues to report growth. Something is not adding up, and eventually there will be a correction:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100014380/china’s-very-mysterious-data/



> *China’s very mysterious data*
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics Last updated: January 26th, 2012
> 
> A quick observation.
> 
> I could not help noticing that China’s imports from Japan fell 16.2pc in December. Imports from Taiwan fell 6.2pc.
> 
> The Shanghai Container Freight Index fell 1.4pc to a record low of 919.44 in November, after sliding relentlessly for several months. It has picked up slightly since.
> 
> The Baltic Dry Index measuring freight rates for ores, grains, and bulk goods, has fallen 44pc over the last year. Kasper Moller from Maersk in Beijing said weak Chinese demand for iron ore was the key culprit.
> 
> Cautionary warning. The BDI index also reflects the shipping glut, so it is not a pure indicator.
> However, rail, road, river and air freight volume for the whole of China fell to 31780m tons in November (latest data), from 32340m tons in October. Not a big fall, but still negative. (National Bureau of Statistics of China.)
> Chinese electricity use was flat in over the Autumn, with a sharp fall in the (year-on-year) growth rates from 8.9pc in September, to 8pc in October, and 7.7pc in December.
> 
> Residential investment has been contracting on a monthly basis, and of course property prices are now falling in all but two of China’s 70 largest cities.
> So how did China pull off an economic growth rate of 8.9pc in the fourth quarter?
> Beats me.
> 
> I strongly suspect that the trade and power data reveal the true state of China’s economy.
> There clearly was a pick up in early January but I stick to my view that China has inflated its credit bubble beyond the limits of safety – an increase of 100pc of GDP in five years, or twice US credit growth from 2002-2007 – and that Beijing cannot continue to gain much traction with this sort of artificial stimulus.
> 
> Indeed, the extra boost to GDP from each extra yuan of credit has collapsed, according to Fitch Ratings.
> 
> A final point. There is a widespread misunderstanding that China’s households can easily come to the rescue by cranking up spending because they have the world’s highest savings rate, and consumption is just 36pc of GDP.
> 
> Prof Michael Pettis from Beijing University puts that one to rest. The Chinese do not have a much higher personal savings rate than other East Asians. The reason why consumption is so low is that wages are low, the worker share of GDP is low, and the whole economy is massively deformed and tilted towards excess investment.
> 
> This is deeply structural. It cannot be changed with a flick of the fingers, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.
> China is a marvellous country. I wish them the best. But they have not found the secret formula for perpetual uber-growth.
> No such formula exists.


----------



## sean m

http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/measuring-02-01-2012

hello,

this is an interesting article since it refers to the prime ministers efforts for exporting oil to. China. Does anyone else on this forum feel that our prime minister is over keen on doing business with china. Without a doubt China is very strong economy and there are advantages with making business deals with them. Yet they always seem to smile when you are looking straight at them and stab you in the back when you are not. Considering it is public knowledge that they are spying on us, should we really being so much effort on building a relationship with us. It seems that there are other economically strong nations who are continuing to grow and who maybe it would be more benficial for us to build more of an economic relationship with


----------



## sean m

Interesting interview with Charlie Rose interviewing David Barboza, from the New York Times, who talks about working conditions in China and the current social, political and economic conditions there.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12116


----------



## Brad Sallows

A pipeline to a Pacific port - especially a port further north - is close to a great number of Asian destinations other than Chinese.


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## sean m

That is true, but it seems that with the meeting's our prime minister will be having with the Chinese Head of State. I believe he publicly acknowledged that he desired to do more business with China. So considering those facts, maybe, it could be possible to guess that China is the main country he is directing his attention towards


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## a_majoor

Ideally, Canada would be vigerously persuing all kinds of avenues, but as a practical matter our time and resources are limited. The PM is going after the biggest payoff he can get out of his limited time and resources, if this works then many secondary markets will also open for Canada in the region.

If I were _Imperator_ I would probably be more focused on India, as I feel there are more political and cultural similarities as a fellow member of the Anglosphere, but that's just a personal preference on my part. Japan and Korea will probably follow China's lead in the sense that if Canada gets a good deal with China they will want to get a piece of the action as well.


----------



## sean m

That is a good point you make. His policies seem to be based upon economics which  as you. Mr. thucydides, wisely pointed out due to our own resources and time. You also make an interesting point regarding Korea and Japan, yet I am sorry for the trouble but can you please specify on who the Japanese and Koreans would want to do business, us or the Chinese. India could be a good partner for us, another good point you make, maybe the fact with have so many people of Indian descent could work to our advantage again. It seems that many people are forgetting about the rising power of Brazil and other Latin American nations, and focusing on Asia. If I remember correctly the Canadian and Brazilian governments met yet there was no final outcome which would have been to our benefit.  Perhaps since we do not seem to have any problems with them we can focus on building a better relationship.


----------



## a_majoor

Since Canadian interests are involved, the ideal would be we market our value added products to China, Korea, Japan etc. The facts, though, are we are pretty weak in the value added sector, but Chine, Japan and Korea (etc.) are quite happy to buy our raw materials. If China gets a good deal on Canadian oil, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine the Japanese and Koreans will also want to get in on the deal; since the investment to build a pipeline and tanker port are already made (for China) the deal is even better for them as they benefit from pre existing infrastructure. Inexpensive resources for Japan and Korea allow them to supply both the Chinese and Canadian markets.

Brazil is sort of a Canada south, but they generally are competitors and also quite adept at the use of state subsidies to undercut our marketing in international markets (especially in high tech things like aircraft). Of course their political stability is less certain than ours, and as Edward Campbel points out, they are pretty good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Given the general instability of South America, it is probably better for Canada to stay focused on places where we can make a difference (such as our free trade partner Chile) and expand from that beachhead when the time is right.


----------



## a_majoor

More mysterious indicators. The metrics that the Chinese release and independent data like this and the shipping data upthread are not adding up. The true danger would be the Chinese bubble pops suddenly, undercutting everyone's assumptions that China is becoming the lender and economic power of last resort and causing a global crash. More probably there will be a deflation of the Chinese bubble, causing long term recession as various markets tied to the Chinese economy go down with it, or make frantic attempts to cut ties and swim out on their own.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2012/01/29/why-are-the-chinese-buying-record-quantities-of-gold/print/



> *Why Are the Chinese Buying Record Quantities of Gold?*
> 
> This month, the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department reported that China imported 102,779 kilograms of gold from Hong Kong in November, an increase from October’s 86,299 kilograms.  Beijing does not release gold trade figures, so for this and other reasons the Hong Kong numbers are considered the best indication of China’s gold imports.
> 
> Analysts believe China bought as much as 490 tons of gold in 2011, double the estimated 245 tons in 2010.  “The thing that’s caught people’s minds is the massive increase in Chinese buying,” remarked Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley, a London gold brokerage, this month.
> 
> So who in China is buying all this gold?
> 
> The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing.  “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month.  “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency—gold.”  He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips.  Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof that China, the world’s fifth-largest holder of the metal, is in the market for more.
> 
> There are a few problems with this conclusion.  First, the Chinese government rarely benefits others—and hurts itself—by telegraphing its short-term investment strategies.
> 
> Second, the central bank has less purchasing power these days.  China’s foreign reserves declined in Q4 2011, falling $20.6 billion from Q3.  The first quarterly outflow since 1998 was not large, but the trend was troubling.  The reserves declined a stunning $92.7 billion in November and December.
> 
> Third, the purchase of gold would be especially risky for the central bank, which is already insolvent from a balance sheet point of view.  The PBOC needs income-producing assets in order to meet its obligations on the debt incurred to buy foreign exchange, so the holding of gold only complicates its funding operations.  This is not to say the bank never buys gold—it obviously does—but there are real constraints on its ability to purchase assets that do not provide current income.
> 
> Apart from China’s central bank, there is not much demand from the country’s institutional investors for gold.  There are industrial users, of course, but their demand is filled from domestic production—China is the world’s largest gold producer.  Most of China’s gold demand from foreign sources, therefore, is from individuals.
> 
> So why are individuals now buying gold?  The easy answer is that the demand is only seasonal, as Jeff Wright of Global Hunter Securities believes.  The Chinese traditionally buy gold presents in the run-up to the Lunar New Year, which started a week ago.  Yet gift-giving does not begin to explain the surge in gold purchases that started as far back as July.  November was the fifth-consecutive month of China’s record gold purchases from Hong Kong.
> 
> A better explanation for the gold-buying binge of Chinese citizens is that they are using the shiny commodity as an inflation hedge, as the Financial Times recently suggested.  Yet the buying of gold has increased while inflation has eased.  And that means there must be another explanation.  The best explanation is that individuals in China are using gold as a substitute for capital flight.
> 
> Although indicators showed the Chinese economy faltered only at the end of September, there had been a growing sense of pessimism inside the country for months before then.  Beijing, after all, could build only so many “ghost cities” before citizens began to notice.  As Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal Asia said on the John Batchelor Show last Wednesday, “people inside China seem to be losing faith in the Chinese growth story that we’ve been hearing so much about for the past few years.”  Estimates of capital flight are sketchy, but it appears there was $34 billion of it in the third quarter of last year and a $100 billion in the fourth.
> 
> Not every Chinese citizen is in the position to export cash, so the next best tactic for the nervous is to buy gold, a refuge from plunging property prices and declining stock markets as well as an anticipated depreciation of their currency.  “Within China,” notes Michael Pettis of Peking University, “many are going to argue that the rapid decline in the trade surplus, coupled with unmistakable evidence of flight capital, means that the PBOC should devalue the RMB.”  And the fact that China’s leaders in public are talking about the adverse impact of the European crisis on China weighs heavily on sentiment.
> 
> The worst thing about capital flight and gold purchases is that they drain liquidity out of the Chinese economy just when it is needed most.  Beijing can continue to work its magic as long as strict capital controls keep money inside the country.  Once they fail to do so, however, all bets are off.  The purchasing of gold, of course, results in the exporting of cash.
> 
> Chinese asset values have not yet crashed across the board, but the buying of gold—a leading indicator of panic—is an especially troubling sign that they will.  Therefore, it is not surprising that gold purchases by Chinese citizens and investors are frightening Beijing’s technocrats.  At the end of last month, they shut all of the countries gold exchanges other than two of them in Shanghai.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A look at the _agenda_ for Prim Minister Harper's forthcoming trip to China, in this article reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-remaking-of-harpers-china-gambit/article2326481/singlepage/#articlecontent


> The remaking of Harper’s China gambit
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> BEIJING— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> Published Friday, Feb. 03, 2012
> 
> Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrives Tuesday in China for a trip that will see him sit down with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to talk about shipping Canadian oil to China, as well as a possible pact to protect Canadian investors doing business in the Middle Kingdom. But arguably even more important to the future of bilateral ties will be the rest of Mr. Harper’s schedule, which will see him meet at least three senior Communist Party figures who are expected to take on more prominent roles after a once-in-a-decade power transfer that begins this fall.
> 
> If Mr. Harper can forge lasting links with the incoming Chinese leadership, it will cement one of the most dramatic foreign policy reversals in recent memory. The Prime Minister had stern words for the Chinese in 2006, saying he placed Canadian “values” like human rights over trade. In a statement last month, however, the emphasis was decidedly on economic ties.
> 
> Now the Prime Minister may emerge with closer ties to China’s Communist leaders than any of his predecessors. Getting to know China’s next leaders – and how they think – would bolster a relationship that has staggered at times. Gordon Houlden, a former director-general of the East Asian Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, said he was “certain” that reaching out to the next generation was a primary goal of Mr. Harper’s trip.
> 
> “To me, it has to be an objective: the need to renew the relationship at the highest level,” said Mr. Houlden, now director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta. “I think it shows a comfort with the China file that might not have been there before.”
> 
> In addition to the meetings with Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen, Mr. Harper’s itinerary in Beijing includes a sit-down with Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, the man expected to succeed Mr. Wen next year. Mr. Li is a Politburo veteran and protégé of Mr. Hu – a leader who took a steady-as-she-goes approach during his decade as president.
> 
> (The Canadian side also sought a meeting with Vice-President Xi Jinping, the man expected to succeed Mr. Hu as paramount leader later this year. However, no such meeting is currently planned.)
> 
> After three days in Beijing comes a rapid but carefully crafted two-city jaunt into southern China. Mr. Harper will split the last two days of his trip between the manufacturing hubs of Guangzhou, where he will give a speech to the Canadian business community, and Chongqing, where he is expected to announce that two Chinese pandas are headed for the Toronto Zoo.
> 
> Mr. Harper’s trip is primarily about trade, but his meetings in Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing could give his government unique insight into the coming changes in China. The biggest benefit from the southern tour, however, will be his face-to-face meetings with local Communist Party bosses Wang Yang and Bo Xilai, who represent extremes along China’s narrow political spectrum and are the faces of a next generation of leaders.
> 
> Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo are not only leading contenders to be promoted to join Mr. Xi and Mr. Li on the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo this fall, when seven of its nine members are set to retire. The two men are often held up as rivals who offer starkly different visions for China’s future.
> 
> Mr. Wang presides over a liberalizing Guangdong province, where media and civil society are freer than anywhere else in the country. He also impressed observers recently with the tolerant way he handled protesters who overthrew the Party leadership in the village of Wukan, leading to one of the freest local elections China has ever seen.
> 
> Mr. Bo, meanwhile, has become popular for his crackdown on organized crime in Chongqing and his calls to redistribute the country’s growing wealth. At the same time, he has unsettled some with his Mao-style propaganda campaigns that recall of darker periods in the country’s recent past.
> 
> Mr. Harper is believed to be the first foreign leader to meet Mr. Li, Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo on the same official visit.
> 
> Even former critics of Mr. Harper’s China policy applaud his strategy on this trip. Howard Balloch, a former Canadian ambassador to China who now heads a Beijing-based investment bank, said that getting to know the incoming leadership early would be a “very smart” move, if that is indeed what Mr. Harper is coming to China to do. “I’m pleased that our China policy is on track right now,” Mr. Balloch said.
> 
> “For a leader like Harper to know the future leadership early would certainly have some advantages,” said Liu Jun, a Canada expert at the government-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. However, Mr. Liu said China’s one-party system means the policy changes from one generation of leaders to the next are rarely as dramatic as those that follow changes of power in multiparty democracies.
> 
> Indeed, the handover of power in China is expected to take years. If Mr. Hu follows precedent, he will remain as head of the military until 2014, and likely retain substantial influence long after that. His own predecessor, Jiang Zemin, is believed to still hold sway over key decisions, including the selections of Mr. Xi and Mr. Li.
> 
> Still, the effort itself is remarkable from a Prime Minister who once rankled Beijing by proudly bestowing honorary citizenship on the Dalai Lama and famously staying away from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Human rights groups say China has gone backward since then in terms of how it treats dissidents and ethnic minorities, but little of the old criticism is expected to make it onto the agenda while Mr. Harper builds ties.
> 
> “China is being treated with a softness and reverence on some issues that would have been a surprise to Liberal and even Conservative governments in the past,” said Paul Evans, director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. “The period of treating China as a godless authoritarian country with nuclear weapons – it’s as if it never happened.”
> 
> The arrival of the two pandas – a centuries-old goodwill gesture known in China as “panda diplomacy” – will symbolize the new warmth between the Communist and Conservative governments.
> 
> Canadian leaders have sought pandas since Pierre Trudeau went to China on his inaugural trip in 1973. Mr. Trudeau went so far as to offer four beavers to then-Chinese-premier Zhou Enlai in hopes of provoking an exchange of national symbols that never happened. Until now.




See, also, this; despite our reservations about China's global intentions (wholly and completely self serving) and it governance (totalitarian) we need better, more profitable (for us) trade with China and with its neighbours. Improved relations with China does not mean we need or want to have less than excellent relations with the USA, quite the contrary, it is to be hoped that we can be positioned to act as a buffer when, inevitably, the anti-China sentiments in the USA rise.


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## Brad Sallows

"We are, after all, a trading nation..."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Brad Sallows said:
			
		

> "We are, after all, a trading nation..."




Indeed, and I am, philosophically, a "free trader." I believe in unilaterally reducing and even eliminating tariffs (and other impediments) against foreign goods and services, even as I understand that the political consequences of such actions can be deadly ... but I also favour the use of export subsidies, *so long as they are used by others*. Although we subscribe to a whole ost of measures aimed at eliminating measures that distory global trade and commerce there are some measures that we can, legally, take to promote and protect our own industries - taken broadly - when we invoke a "national security" and "national defence" exemption that allows us to subsidize, directly, industries and sectors that are vital to our national security and defence. So long as our trading partners and competitors use (and abuse) the rules we can and should, too. I am conscious that the argument can be taken too far, and, inevitably, will be taken too far by the Americans and Chinese and by those on the political left who, too often and only sometimes accidentally, favour a sort of "national socialism."


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## a_majoor

Canada's trade mission to China as seen by the Financial Post. While I am not entirely sure that the power relationship is quite as the writer sees, it is a measure of how far Canada has changed in a few short years that we can even contemplate speaking in such terms. (To be blunt, we are indeed more powerful and in a much stronger postion than we were in the 1990's "Team Canada" era, but China is far more powerful as well):

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/02/03/lawrence-solomon-harpers-mission/



> *Harper’s mission*
> Lawrence Solomon  Feb 3, 2012 – 6:47 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 3, 2012 7:01 PM ET
> 
> When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets China’s President Hu Jintao in Beijing next week, it will be a meeting between a growing, newly confident power and one that is unsure of itself and its place in the world. Harper heads the confident power. Hu stands atop a vast chaos, a seething, heaving economy of plunderers that keeps the plundered at bay through an army of spies and thugs, of thieves that pirate the West’s designs and innovations, and of military adventurers who threaten to seize property and resources from nearly all its neighbours.
> 
> In aid of its territorial claims against its neighbours, China’s military – the world’s largest after the U.S.— has been growing rapidly and, most believe, surreptitiously — some estimates, such as from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, have had China underreporting military spending by a factor of five. Under this onslaught, Vietnam fears for its Spratly Islands, Japan for the Senkaku Islands, Taiwan for itself.
> 
> As remarkably, China’s official accounts show it to spend even more keeping its citizens in check — it calls this “social stability maintenance” — than on its military. Spending on social stability, which includes police, jails, and an elaborate domestic surveillance system that tracks citizens, has been increasing at a blistering rate – almost 14% in the current year. As with military spending, many believe the Chinese government is understating these expenses, too, to hide the shame of needing to crack down on a populace that holds it in contempt, that increasingly mocks its ham-handed stupidity, and that increasingly confronts it.
> 
> The number of protests against injustices has been steadily climbing. In 1993, according to the Chinese Police Academy, China experienced 8,700 “mass incidents.” By 2006, that figure had soared to more than 90,000 and in 2010, according to an estimate from Tsinghua University, it doubled to 180,000. The great majority of the protests are not political but economic, typically by communities protesting against the confiscation of their land by developers in league with corrupt government officials.
> 
> To defuse this powder keg, the government sometimes attacks, sometimes appeases, sometimes both. In one high profile protest last September, thousands of villagers in the southern community of Wukan demonstrated against the seizure of their farmland, leading to attacks by riot police, a counterattack by villagers, and a government siege of the village designed to starve the village into submission. After withering foreign coverage (but almost none in China’s official media), the government finally caved, agreeing to fire the corrupt officials and suspend the land seizures pending an investigation. The village of Wukan this week even conducted fair and free local elections, thought to be a first in today’s China.
> 
> But the appeasement of Wukan is very much the exception. China is today more repressive than at any time since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Critics are being increasingly detained, beaten, or jailed for crimes such as “inciting subversion of state power” after writing essays on constitutional democracy.
> 
> “Disappearances” of dissidents are not only on the rise in China, the government’s draft criminal code is effectively legalizing them, raising fears that disappearances will become a common feature in the China of tomorrow. Chinese government caseworkers, in an odd mix of bureaucracy and brutality, advise their dissident “clients” on the liberties they may exercise (such as speaking to the press or writing an article), when they may exercise their liberties, and the merits of leaving their homes for extended periods of time, for either an exile in the countryside or outside China altogether.
> 
> What does Harper want with this government, about which he cannot have any illusions — he is, after all, the only Canadian prime minister in memory who has shown spine in his dealings with China. Harper travels not as a supplicant, as did former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Team Canada of businessmen, but from a position of power, the leader of a country whose resources China, among others, covets. The itinerary for the Harper trip mostly reads like a goodwill foray — signing of “co-operation agreements,” a visit to the panda zoo, sealskin attire to promote Newfoundland jobs and other made-for-photo-op occasions. Harper hopes the Chinese will formally agree not to plunder Canadians who invest in China but he must know that China signs such agreements easily, and then fails to enforce them.
> 
> The takeaways from Harper’s trip to China — apart from the pandas that will soon visit Canada — have little to do with China proper. By promoting seal products, Harper will show Newfoundlanders he is standing up for their culture. By being respectful to China, Harper will please the large and chauvinistic Chinese-Canadian community. Mostly, however, Harper is going to China to impress upon the U.S. the danger of taking Canada for granted.
> 
> The Keystone pipeline, which President Obama has refused to permit in deference to his environmental funders, will be one of the major election issues in the U.S. presidential campaign. The prospect that Canada will ship its oil thousands of kilometres west across an ocean to China, instead of directly south to its ally and friend, offends Democrats and Republicans alike, particularly when doing so also costs U.S. jobs and makes the U.S. more reliant on unfriendly oil suppliers. The more the Obama Administration can be pressured, the better the chance of an early acceptance of Keystone, the more the Americans will understand where their interests lie. Harper wants this pipeline and he’s willing to go to China to help secure it.
> 
> Financial Post
> LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com


----------



## GAP

Harper’s mission
Article Link
Lawrence Solomon  Feb 3, 2012 

He is the only PM in memory who has shown any spine in his dealings with China’s brutal plunderers

When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets China’s President Hu Jintao in Beijing next week, it will be a meeting between a growing, newly confident power and one that is unsure of itself and its place in the world. Harper heads the confident power. Hu stands atop a vast chaos, a seething, heaving economy of plunderers that keeps the plundered at bay through an army of spies and thugs, of thieves that pirate the West’s designs and innovations, and of military adventurers who threaten to seize property and resources from nearly all its neighbours.

In aid of its territorial claims against its neighbours, China’s military – the world’s largest after the U.S.— has been growing rapidly and, most believe, surreptitiously — some estimates, such as from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, have had China underreporting military spending by a factor of five. Under this onslaught, Vietnam fears for its Spratly Islands, Japan for the Senkaku Islands, Taiwan for itself.

As remarkably, China’s official accounts show it to spend even more keeping its citizens in check — it calls this “social stability maintenance” — than on its military. Spending on social stability, which includes police, jails, and an elaborate domestic surveillance system that tracks citizens, has been increasing at a blistering rate – almost 14% in the current year. As with military spending, many believe the Chinese government is understating these expenses, too, to hide the shame of needing to crack down on a populace that holds it in contempt, that increasingly mocks its ham-handed stupidity, and that increasingly confronts it.

The number of protests against injustices has been steadily climbing. In 1993, according to the Chinese Police Academy, China experienced 8,700 “mass incidents.” By 2006, that figure had soared to more than 90,000 and in 2010, according to an estimate from Tsinghua University, it doubled to 180,000. The great majority of the protests are not political but economic, typically by communities protesting against the confiscation of their land by developers in league with corrupt government officials.
To defuse this powder keg, the government sometimes attacks, sometimes appeases, sometimes both. In one high profile protest last September, thousands of villagers in the southern community of Wukan demonstrated against the seizure of their farmland, leading to attacks by riot police, a counterattack by villagers, and a government siege of the village designed to starve the village into submission. After withering foreign coverage (but almost none in China’s official media), the government finally caved, agreeing to fire the corrupt officials and suspend the land seizures pending an investigation. The village of Wukan this week even conducted fair and free local elections, thought to be a first in today’s China.

But the appeasement of Wukan is very much the exception. China is today more repressive than at any time since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Critics are being increasingly detained, beaten, or jailed for crimes such as “inciting subversion of state power” after writing essays on constitutional democracy.

“Disappearances” of dissidents are not only on the rise in China, the government’s draft criminal code is effectively legalizing them, raising fears that disappearances will become a common feature in the China of tomorrow. Chinese government caseworkers, in an odd mix of bureaucracy and brutality, advise their dissident “clients” on the liberties they may exercise (such as speaking to the press or writing an article), when they may exercise their liberties, and the merits of leaving their homes for extended periods of time, for either an exile in the countryside or outside China altogether.

What does Harper want with this government, about which he cannot have any illusions — he is, after all, the only Canadian prime minister in memory who has shown spine in his dealings with China. Harper travels not as a supplicant, as did former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Team Canada of businessmen, but from a position of power, the leader of a country whose resources China, among others, covets. The itinerary for the Harper trip mostly reads like a goodwill foray — signing of “co-operation agreements,” a visit to the panda zoo, sealskin attire to promote Newfoundland jobs and other made-for-photo-op occasions. Harper hopes the Chinese will formally agree not to plunder Canadians who invest in China but he must know that China signs such agreements easily, and then fails to enforce them.

The takeaways from Harper’s trip to China — apart from the pandas that will soon visit Canada — have little to do with China proper. By promoting seal products, Harper will show Newfoundlanders he is standing up for their culture. By being respectful to China, Harper will please the large and chauvinistic Chinese-Canadian community. Mostly, however, Harper is going to China to impress upon the U.S. the danger of taking Canada for granted.
More on link

That last highlighted sentence says far more than all the statistics in the world.....Harper can play the game just as well an any out there..................


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a whole lot more than just _impressing upon the U.S. the danger of taking Canada for granted_.

Even as we put the finishing touches on a free trade deal with the EU, Prime Minister Harper is steering us, as The Ruxted Group advocated, in a new direction: extending our (stronger) right hand towards Asia. It is an appropriate 21st century policy.

China is not the only target ~ we need to extend that right hand of friendship and trade all of Asia, including Islamic Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia especially, in order to offset the baleful influence of the Arabs.


----------



## a_majoor

Of course plan "C" is to continue building the PLA and PLAN to the point they _can_ do force projection:

http://the-diplomat.com/2012/02/08/china%E2%80%99s-achilles%E2%80%99-heel/?all=true



> *China’s Achilles’ Heel*
> February 08, 2012
> By Minxin Pei
> 
> With little in the way of force projection, China’s dependence on natural resources in unstable parts of the world could undercut its economic ambitions. There are limits to freeriding.
> 
> The seizure of 29 Chinese workers by Sudanese rebels in the southern part of Sudan last week exposed one of the most vulnerable links in China’s ambitious plan for extending its economic influence abroad. To be sure, this isn’t the first time workers sent by China to dangerous regions were kidnapped or harmed. Five years ago, three Chinese engineers were murdered by a militant group in Pakistan. When civil war broke out in Libya nearly a year ago, Beijing had to dispatch a fleet of ships and airplanes to evacuate more than 30,000 Chinese workers from the country.
> 
> Despite the release of the workers this week, such incidents – and there will be many similar ones in the future – raise several important questions about China’s strategy of “going out” in general, and its quest for natural resources in particular.
> 
> The motivations for Beijing to expand its economic reach across the globe are easy to understand. The Chinese economy is resource-intensive and depends on secure access to energy, minerals, and other commodities to sustain its growth.  Unfortunately, the geopolitics and economics of natural resources are tricky. Most of them are located in unstable or war-torn countries, with poor infrastructure, corrupt governments, and intractable ethnic conflict. The global markets for natural resources are notoriously volatile and frequently go through boom-bust cycles. Worse still, as a late-comer to the scene, the low-hanging fruits have already been picked by entrenched and powerful Western multinationals, such as Exxon, Shell, BP, Rio Tinto, BHP, and the likes, which have established seemingly unchallengeable advantages in technology, capital, and risk management.
> 
> Faced with such a strategic landscape in the competition for natural resources, China has long concluded that it will risk letting its economic security held hostage by the vagaries of the market and the entrenched Western giants if it doesn’t make a concerted all-out effort to gain direct access to strategic natural resources. The policy and actions flowing from this strategic assessment in the past decade are easy to see: China has become the world’s most aggressive player in competing for access to natural resources. It has tied its foreign aid program to gaining concessions on exploiting natural resources. Its state-owned companies, supported by access to cheap (if not free) credit from Chinese banks, often outbid foreign competitors in securing contracts and exploration rights. It is willing to take excessive financial and security risks and encourages its companies to venture into areas, such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Congo, where their Western rivals don’t dare to tread.
> 
> But in executing this strategy, the Chinese have found themselves facing a fundamental dilemma: it’s a rising power with global economic interests, but no global power projection capabilities to protect these interests.
> 
> On most occasions, to be sure, China can free-ride on the security provided by the West, especially the United States. For example, with the U.S. Navy patrolling the sea lanes and keeping a close watch on conflict-prone areas, China gains free protection. One of the most illustrative cases is China’s $3 billion investment in an Afghan copper mine, which is protected by the U.S. Army.
> 
> Yet, free-riding has its limits. There are areas where conditions are so unstable that even Uncle Sam doesn’t want to risk the lives of its soldiers. Sudan is one such country.
> 
> If China insists on going it alone in its quest for resource security, its only option for protecting its sprawling interests is to develop commensurate power projection capabilities. This will be both costly and, more worryingly, cause anxieties among its neighbors and Western countries since it will entail sustained and massive increases in China’s military spending. This option, which will take years, if not decades, to implement, won’t meet the more immediate needs of providing security for Chinese economic interests in dangerous places anyway.
> 
> Without its own power projection capabilities, China will have to do one of two things.
> 
> First, it can simply do nothing and let itself be literally held hostage by the geopolitical and security risks prevalent in the regions where it has made valuable investments. This is hardly an attractive option because China risks losing its investments and its government, which has been subject to fierce criticisms in the Chinese cyberspace after the kidnapping of Chinese workers in Sudan, will appear weak, incompetent, and helpless.
> 
> Second, China can alter its existing go-alone strategy and join the West in ensuring collective resource security. This requires a fundamental change in Beijing’s mindset. (And obviously, similar adjustments are needed in the West as well.) Instead of viewing the quest for resources as a zero-sum game, China will see that its interests are closely linked with those of the West, and that it can make its investments and operations in far-flung regions more secure by pooling its efforts with those of the West.
> 
> Such a cooperative strategy will likely yield more benefits than China’s cut-throat competitive strategy. On the financial front, China won’t be wasting money trying to outbid its Western rivals (who will be partners). Its development aid will be more aligned with the goals of seeking conflict resolution and improving governance, rather than with obtaining competitive advantages in securing contracts. By partnering with the West in making resource-rich developing countries more stable, China will in fact reduce the risks of its investments and economic interests there. Even in crises such as the ongoing hostage drama in Sudan, a China in close cooperation with the West may seek direct assistance from its partners that have the requisite military capabilities in these areas. So for China, shifting its current strategy will be truly win-win.
> 
> To a Chinese leadership steeped in realpolitik and paranoia about the West, this proposal may sound naïve. But the alternatives are far worse. If Beijing stays on its present course of seeking resource security at any cost, it will run into crises far worse than the one they have just encountered in southern Sudan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is a reminder of how obscure Chinese politics can be:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/brewing-scandal-in-china-could-be-a-reality-check-for-harper/article2334141/



> Brewing scandal in China could be a reality check for Harper
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Guangzhou, China— Globe and Mail Update
> Published Friday, Feb. 10, 2012
> 
> It’s the biggest political scandal to hit China in years, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is about to land in the middle of it.
> 
> Bo Xilai, the charismatic and controversial Communist Party boss of Chongqing – the last stop Mr. Harper’s five-day, three-city visit to China – was until this week seen as a rising political star, all but certain to be promoted to the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo during a once-in-a-decade transfer of power that begins this fall.
> 
> Then came the disappearance of his right-hand man, the former police chief and deputy mayor of Chongqing, Wang Liqun, in a cloak-and-dagger mystery worthy of a Cold War thriller. The swirling intrigue may dash Mr. Bo’s hopes of reaching the pinnacle of power, while providing a grim reminder of the opaque and sometimes-dangerous ways power works in this authoritarian state.
> 
> His whereabouts unknown, Mr. Wang is under police investigation and on what state media have called “vacation-style treatment.” The forced hiatus comes after he made a mysterious, unsanctioned visit on Monday to the United States consulate in Chengdu, several hours’ drive west of Chongqing.
> 
> The reasons why Mr. Wang went into the consulate – and what he said to the diplomats stationed there – has not been revealed. The consulate was surrounded by dozens of police vehicles who set up roadblocks until Mr. Wang emerged and gave himself up. “He did visit the consulate and he later left the consulate of his own volition,” a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department confirmed.
> 
> Mr. Harper and Mr. Bo are still expected to meet on Saturday, but getting to know the man behind the Chongqing model may be less relevant than before the caper at the U.S. consulate.
> 
> The Chinese Internet is alive with rumours about what materials Mr. Wang might have given the Americans relating to Mr. Bo. Unlike most sensitive topics, online discussion of the case has not been thoroughly censored. Mr. Wang’s disappearance has also been given prominent coverage in the state-controlled media.
> 
> Wu Jiaxiang, a former researcher for the Central Committee of the Communist Party who is now an independent academic, said the lack of censorship means that some in Beijing are happy to leave the controversial Mr. Bo twisting in the wind. “Wang is just a pawn,” he said.
> 
> After Mr. Wang’s arrest, a letter attributed to him was posted online; it warned that if Mr. Bo rises to power in Beijing, “it will lead to calamity for China and disaster for our nation.”
> 
> “When everyone sees this letter, I’ll either be dead or have lost my freedom,” reads the letter, dated three days before Mr. Wang entered the U.S. consulate.
> 
> Mr. Wang’s political career is almost certainly now over, and questions are swirling around Mr. Bo as well. The two made headlines first for smashing Chongqing’s crime syndicates and introducing “red culture” campaigns that were imbued with nostalgia for the supposedly purer days of Mao Zedong.
> 
> It became known as the “Chongqing model,” and Mr. Bo was the darling of the country’s political left. Whispers abounded that parts of the Chongqing model would be implemented at the national level if Mr. Bo were promoted to the Standing Committee.
> 
> Now, some believe Mr. Bo’s path to power is far less clear. “It’s basically impossible for him to join the Standing Committee of Politburo” following this incident, said Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing. “[Wang Liqun] is a symbol of Chongqing Model. He was the core member of Bo’s team. The Chongqing Model with its Maoist symbols is now basically bankrupt.”
> 
> The Prime Minister met Friday with Wang Yang, the Communist Party boss in coastal Guangdong province and another rising political star who is considered a contender to join the Standing Committee of the Politburo this fall, when seven of its current nine members are due to retire.
> 
> Canadian officials said Mr. Harper and Mr. Wang discussed political reforms in the province, including the recent unrest in the village of Wukan, a rare instance of people power in China that saw villagers take to the streets to oust leaders they saw as corrupt and then hold their own elections. Mr. Wang has won plaudits for siding with the villagers in the dispute.
> 
> The episode in Chongqing may provide a reality check for the Prime Minister about the system and people he’s making deals with as he seeks to deepen Canada’s economic with China by lifting barriers to trade and investment.
> 
> In a speech Friday to an audience of Canadian and Chinese businesspeople in Guangzhou, Mr. Harper said that Canada would continue to press for greater rights and freedoms here as the economic relationship deepened.
> 
> “Canadians believe, and have always believed, that the kind of mutually beneficial economic relationship we seek is also compatible with a good and frank dialogue on fundamental principles such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of belief and worship,” he said.
> 
> “And they demand that their government – and their businesses – uphold these national characteristics in all our dealings.”




The Chinese Communits party is not monolithic; there is a "hard left" wing, represented by Bo Xilai's _red culture_ movement, there is a "hard right" wing represented by former leaders Jiang Zemin's _Shanghai gang_ and a centre left movement represented by Hu Jintoa's current administration. Neither Jiang nor Hu was ever able to build a strong enough coalition in the Standing Committee to select their own successors.

The party aims for a sort of meritocracy but we have no way of measuring its success because the processes by which the members of the all powerful political _centre_ are chosen remains very private.


----------



## a_majoor

And more on the Prime Minister's visit to China. Tweaking both the Americans, the environmental movement and the Chinese in his speech is probably going to lead to "interesting" consequences in the long run ("Interesting" in the Cinese sense of "living in interesting times").

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/10/stephen-harper-pushes-for-responsible-oil-and-gas-trade-in-china-speech/



> *Harper in China: PM attacks ‘foreign money’ behind oil sands protest, refuses to trade human rights*
> Postmedia News  Feb 10, 2012 – 9:43 AM ET | Last Updated: Feb 10, 2012 12:24 PM ET
> 
> By Jason Fekete
> 
> GUANGZHOU, China — Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a pointed message Friday directly to the People’s Republic of China from the people back home: Canada wants to sell you its oil and gas, but won’t trade its principles along with it.
> 
> He also targeted groups opposed to Canada’s energy development, saying his government will put the country’s economic interests ahead of “foreign money and influence” trying to obstruct petroleum production.
> 
> Harper used a keynote speech to nearly 600 Chinese and Canadian business leaders gathered in Guangzhou — one of the largest cities in the world’s most populous country — to champion what he said is a new era in a strategic Canada-China energy partnership.
> 
> However, he also used the 21-minute speech to tell the Chinese, on their turf but in his terms, that Canada will not sever its trading relationships from national values such as human rights, and expects China to be a responsible global citizen.
> 
> And with major U.S. media outlets covering his speech, Harper also delivered a not-so-subtle reminder to the United States: if you don’t want Canadian oilsands crude, China is a waiting customer with a growing energy appetite.
> 
> Indeed, it wasn’t just what Harper had to say on Friday, but where he was delivering it.
> 
> In the first speech by a Canadian prime minister in Guangzhou, he reinforced the message that Canada wants to take its bilateral relationship to the “next level,” and that boosting trade is the way to achieve it.
> 
> Canada has an abundance of petroleum and is looking to “profoundly diversify” its trade relationships, Harper said, as well as deepen its economic cooperation with a booming China that needs resources to fuel its growth.
> 
> “We are an emerging energy superpower,” Harper told corporate leaders at the Canada-China business dinner in the city of 13 million people.
> 
> “We have abundant supplies of virtually every form of energy. And you know, we want to sell our energy to people who want to buy our energy. It’s that simple,” he said, to applause from the crowd.
> 
> Harper said it’s the government’s responsibility to ensure the resources are produced in an environmentally sustainable manner.
> 
> But the federal government must also put the interests of Canadians ahead of “foreign money and influence” that are deliberately trying to obstruct oil-and-gas development in Canada — such as the Northern Gateway oilsands pipeline — “in favour of energy imported from other, less stable parts of the world,” he said.
> 
> Harper noted that virtually all of Canada’s energy exports currently go to the U.S. and that it’s increasingly clear the country’s commercial interests are best served by diversifying its energy markets.
> 
> However, he argued Canada’s relative wealth and prosperity has come not only from resources and hard work, but also democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
> 
> Canadians believe in a frank dialogue on fundamental principles they cherish — such as freedom of speech, assembly and religion — and want their business dealings to follow those same values, he said.
> 
> He also told the Chinese that economic, social and political development are inseparable.
> 
> “Canada does not — and cannot — disconnect our trading relationship from fundamental national values,” Harper said.
> 
> “Therefore, in relations between China and Canada, you should expect us to continue to raise issues of fundamental freedoms and human rights and to be a vocal advocate for these, just as we will be an effective partner in our growing and mutually beneficial economic relationship.”
> 
> In the same vein, Harper called on China to be a responsible citizen on global security.
> 
> The federal government has expressed its extreme disappointment with China’s decision, along with Russia, to veto the United Nations Security Council’s resolution calling on Syrian President Bashar Assad to quit and help end the bloodshed in that country.
> 
> “Canadians also demand that their government be a responsible global citizen in dealing with the peace and security challenges that confront the world,” the prime minister added.
> 
> “And, wherever we can, urge other governments, including global actors like China, to do the same.”
> 
> Worth noting, though, is that Harper’s message on human rights and security was far more direct on Friday to business leaders than what he said publicly on the issue during two days of bilateral meetings in Beijing with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
> 
> Human rights groups in Canada urged Harper on the eve of his trip to raise, both privately and publicly, the “deeply troubling” rights abuses in China.
> 
> “The human rights situation in China has worsened recently and simply cannot be ignored,” argued Alex Neve with Amnesty International Canada.
> 
> But it is energy security, as much as global security and human rights, that Harper is promoting to China, and the message — at least on the petroleum possibilities — is being well received by the Chinese leadership.
> 
> Guangdong Province Governor Zhu Xiaodan, who attended the dinner with Harper, said his southern area of the country consumes an enormous amount of energy and needs additional supply.
> 
> “It’s our hope in the future we can import more high-quality energy and resource products from Canada,” Zhu said.
> 
> The Canadian government and energy sector are increasingly eyeing new pipeline projects that would send oilsands crude and liquefied natural gas to the West Coast for shipment by tanker to Asia.
> 
> Enbridge’s $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline, which would ship oilsands bitumen from northern Alberta to a marine facility in Kitimat, B.C. is currently under review by the National Energy Board (NEB) and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.
> 
> The pipeline could be operational by 2017, but faces mounting opposition from environmental groups and First Nations communities worried about the ecological footprint that could go with it.
> 
> Last fall, the NEB granted British Columbia’s Kitimat LNG terminal a 20-year export licence that will allow liquefied natural gas to be shipped to Asian markets.
> 
> Building additional pipeline capacity is even more critical if Canada is to get its resources to market, given the White House’s recent decision to reject, for now, the Keystone XL oilsands pipeline that would ship crude from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
> 
> Harper’s four-day trade mission wraps up Saturday with a visit to a zoo in Chongqing to announce details of China loaning a pair of giant pandas to zoos in Toronto and Calgary for five years each.
> 
> The prime minister’s visit and interest in a stronger energy partnership with China has certainly drawn the attention of American politicians and media.
> 
> Major U.S. news agencies such as the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal covered the speech Friday from Guangzhou, according to the Prime Minister’s Office. Back in the U.S., Republican members of Congress are voicing their concerns about delays on the Keystone XL and Canada looking to ship its oil to China instead of stateside.
> 
> “I hope the American people fully understand exactly what’s going on here, because it’s time to act. Right now, Prime Minister Harper is talking to President Hu Jintao, the president of China, and believe me, China wants the oil,” Republican Sen. John Hoeven, from North Dakota, said this week on the floor of the Senate.
> 
> Meanwhile, Harper also trumpeted the growing educational ties between Canada and China, and earlier in the day visited the Huamei Bond International School, which teaches a Canadian curriculum.
> 
> Hundreds of kids, wearing red and white track suits and holding Chinese and Canadian flags, lined the walkway waiting for Harper on a cold and damp day.
> 
> Harper and wife Laureen stopped to speak to kids inside a classroom and library, before the prime minister joined in a brief game of ping-pong.
> 
> With files from Sheldon Alberts, Postmedia News



Edward's post just upthread illustrates the uncertainty that will surround our China venture; we really don't understand the politcs and culture as well as we should, and there may be many fundimental things that simply cannot be glossed over. Different ideas about Human Rights or intellectual property laws (among other things) are at the "civilizational" level that Samuel Huntington was speaking about in "The Clash of Civilizations"; the very ideas have different meanings to the different parties. Still, this is a high risk/high reward situation, so if *we* can make it work it will be a huge boon to Canada and Canadians.


----------



## a_majoor

Without comment:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/10/this-is-the-poem-that-got-a-chinese-activist-seven-years-in-jail/



> *This is the poem that got a Chinese activist seven years in jail*
> National Post Staff  Feb 10, 2012 – 2:44 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 10, 2012 4:41 PM ET
> 
> Veteran Chinese activist Zhu Yufu has been jailed for seven years after being accused of “subversion of state power” by writing a poem.
> 
> This is his poem.
> 
> _IT’S TIME
> 
> By Zhu Yufu, translated by A. E. Clark and reprinted with permission
> 
> It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
> The Square belongs to everyone.
> With your own two feet
> It’s time to head to the Square and make your choice.
> 
> It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
> A song belongs to everyone.
> From your own throat
> It’s time to voice the song in your heart.
> 
> It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
> China belongs to everyone.
> Of your own will
> It’s time to choose what China shall be.
> _
> References to a “square” might evoke memories among many Chinese people of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the epicentre of pro-democracy protests in 1989 that were quelled by armed troops, according to Reuters. But the poem did not mention that.
> 
> The harsh sentence has already led to calls for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to condemn the verdict. The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy urged Mr. Harper to speak out on Mr. Zhu’s behalf.
> 
> Amnesty International also hit out at the assault on Mr. Zhu’s “basic human right to freedom of expression.”
> 
> “We believe this is a sign that the Chinese leadership is afraid,” said Sarah Schafer, Amnesty International’s China researcher in a statement. “Why else would they sentence someone to seven years in prison for writing a poem? The Chinese government has seen the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. It has seen the people coming out in the tens of thousands to protest a repressive regime in Russia. And it has seen the Chinese people themselves grow stronger in their demands for more freedoms and a say over their country’s future. And now the leaders at the very top have clearly given out orders that any hint of dissent must be crushed.”
> 
> Mr. Zhu has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government for more than a decade.
> 
> Between 1999 and 2006, he was jailed for founding a controversial political magazine and served another two years from 2007 after he confronted a policeman who questioned his son, said Agence France-Presse.
> 
> Mr. Zhu was detained last year as part of a widespread crackdown on dissent. As evidence of the “subversion of power” charge, prosecutors cited the poem as well as messages he sent on the Internet.
> 
> “The court verdict said this was a serious crime that deserved stern punishment,” said Mr. Zhu’s son, Zhu Ang, quoted by Reuters.
> 
> In December last year dissident Chen Wei was jailed for nine years for subversion after writing four online essays. Another activist Chen Xi was jailed for ten years for writing online.
> 
> The sentences were some of the heaviest since Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed for 11 years on Christmas Day 2009.
> 
> National Post, with files from news services


----------



## Edward Campbell

Get used to seeing Xi Jinping; he will replace Hu Jintao as the Chinese leader later this year. His position on the Chinese political spectrum remains obscure but, for better or worse, he will be here for many years, possibly ten.


----------



## sean m

China's Nouveau Riche:

http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures?ob=4&feature=results_main.

One thing that seems to be known about the Chinese is that they are go getters, this video seems to demonstrate their commitment to achieving further financial success.. either immediately or in the future. They seem to want success immediately but are willing to wait if it is necessary.  They seem to be also willing to have the chance of making large sums of capital not just for themselves but also the future generations of their families.


----------



## GAP

China faces conflict of law, business in iPad row
By Joe McDonald Associated Press Friday, February 17, 2012 
Article Link

BEIJING — Chinese officials face a choice in Apple’s dispute with a local company over the iPad trademark — side with a struggling entity that a court says owns the name or with a global brand that has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in China. Experts say that means Beijing’s political priorities rather than the courts will settle the dispute if it escalates.

Shenzhen Proview Technology has asked regulators to seize iPads in China in a possible prelude to pressing Apple Inc. for a payout. There have been seizures in some cities but no sign of action by national-level authorities.

Proview has a strong case under Chinese trademark law, but that could quickly change if Beijing decides to intervene to avoid disrupting iPad sales or exports from factories in southern China where the popular tablet computers are made, legal experts say.

“If this becomes political — and it’s very easy to see this becoming political — then I think Apple’s chances look pretty good,” said Stan Abrams, an American lawyer who teaches intellectual property law at Beijing's Central University of Finance and Economics.

The dispute centers on whether Apple acquired the iPad name in China when it bought rights in various countries from a Proview affiliate in Taiwan in 2009 for 35,000 British pounds ($55,000).

Apple insists it did. But Proview, which registered the iPad trademark in China in 2001, won a ruling from a mainland Chinese court in December that it was not bound by that sale. Apple appealed and a hearing is scheduled for Feb. 29.

“My gut reaction is that many of these activities really could be seen as pre-settlement brinksmanship,” said David Wolf, a technology marketing consultant in Beijing. “Proview’s motive is money, not to shut down Apple.”

Shenzhen Proview Technology is a subsidiary of LCD screen maker Proview International Holdings Ltd., headquartered in Hong Kong.

Chinese news reports say Proview is deeply in debt, increasing the pressure for it to demand a substantial payout from Apple. Proview International, meanwhile, has been suspended from trading on the Hong Kong stock market since August 2010 and will be removed in June if it cannot show it has sufficient assets, business operations and working capital.
More on link


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## a_majoor

Very nice assessment by Walter Russel Mead, we should be more focused on Asia as a whole rather than just China:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/17/the-game-of-thrones-goes-dc/



> *The Game of Thrones Goes DC*
> Walter Russell Mead
> 
> Earlier this week I was in Washington, teaching a class and attending some events connected to the visit of China’s vice president.  It was an instructive time; in meetings with U.S. officials, with experts who follow China closely, and at the “state lunch” when Vice President Xi was the guest of honor at a State Department luncheon hosted by Secretary Clinton and Vice President Biden, I was able to get a close up view of some of the factors at work in shaping what just about everybody on the planet considers—in a hackneyed phrase — the most important bilateral relationship on planet Earth.
> 
> Via Meadia readers know that we try to organize our coverage here around the big stories that we think are shaping the world, and that the “game of thrones” in Asia is one of those. Obviously, an official visit to the United States by the man widely expected to become the president of China is an important move in that game; watching this event from a ringside seat helped me understand just what is and is not going on.
> 
> There was a lot to digest; the world is still processing the U.S. initiatives in Asia last fall, and partly because press coverage of the policy “pivot” was so weak and poorly thought through, the debate about our new Asia policy still hasn’t fully engaged the public.  Watching Xi, Biden and Clinton, and listening to some of the experts and officials who shaped and executed last fall’s dramatic U.S. shift, I came back north with a few new thoughts about where we stand and where we are headed.
> 
> First, I come away thinking that far too many people in Washington (and, as I’ve seen in the past) also in Beijing and in Europe, look at this relationship through the wrong lens.  They think and write and act as if the U.S. and China were the only significant players in the game, and that everything that happens in Asia boils down to U.S. and China relations.
> 
> This is wrong. The United States and China are not two gunmen staring each other down in main street at high noon while the timorous townsfolk cower in the saloon. The bilateral U.S.-China relationship has to be seen and evaluated in the context of the evolving geopolitical and economic structure of the Asia-Pacific world.
> 
> This matters a lot: failing to grasp the context is the root cause of some very consequential and widespread errors about U.S.-China relations. To look only at the bilateral relationship leads people to overstate both the likelihood of conflict between the two powers and to overestimate China’s strength. In China, those who think of the relationship out of context often push for a more aggressive Chinese foreign policy than the facts justify or China’s real interests warrant. In the United States, it leads people to divide into two camps: the declinists, who think the U.S. must try to appease a rising China, and the containers, who think we must work to contain China before it’s too late.
> 
> The Via Meadia view is a bit different. China isn’t rising in a vacuum; the rise of China, while significant, is less threatening to U.S. interests than either the appeasers or the containers think.  If you think about the question regionally, the option of a middle course emerges with greater plausibility: we can promote a regional environment that makes a Chinese bid for regional hegemony impossible without embracing a policy of containment. Especially given India’s rise, but also taking account of the growing power and capabilities of countries like Vietnam, Asia is just too big and too complicated for China to hope to dominate its hood the way that other powers have tried to dominate strategic geopolitical theaters.
> 
> From that perspective, America’s job is less to thwart China in a head-to-head confrontation than to promote the rise of an Asian system that provides for the prosperity and security of all the states in the region, including China. And ideologically, while the U.S. has no love for China’s one-party system, we do not perceive China as an aggressive ideological competitor like the Soviet Union; Chinese Communism isn’t trying to impose its tyranny on the whole world—and has little ideological appeal inside China, much less beyond its frontiers. While the U.S. can and should stand up for its own values, and while China’s embrace of state capitalism creates some disturbing economic dissonances that need to be dealt with, we are not in a cage match with an aggressive, expansionist communist ideology that is out to conquer and revolutionize the world.
> 
> The Washington tendency to focus on the bilateral relationship rather than the broader regional context was a little disturbing, and it has produced a more polarized debate than we need. I think this “bipolar bias” is partly due to the American practice of training and promoting China specialists rather than Asianists; there is a kind of instinctive bilateral fixation among people who know every twist and turn of U.S. and China policies and politics, but often know and think much less about the context.
> 
> It’s also about the relative marginalization of India in the American foreign policy world.  South Asia has been walled off from East Asia in the minds of foreign policy types for a long time; that is a problem when the integration of the two regions has become a central goal of American foreign policy.  The reality, as Via Meadia readers know, is that commercial and security ties between countries like Japan and India are growing rapidly, and as India’s horizons expand it is asserting its interests in Southeast and even East Asia much more forcefully than before.
> 
> The second big takeaway I brought home from Washington to New York is that although the plot line of American foreign policy in Asia looks pretty good, the soundtrack is too loud and too sharp. America is shooting from the lip. Vice President Biden’s “toast” (really, it was more of a roast) at the Xi luncheon was a classic example. Biden strung together a laundry list of complaints and criticisms as Xi stood there, smiling.
> 
> It is an election year, and China policy will be an issue, but the Vice President sounded tinny rather than strong, whiny rather than confident, and rude rather than frank. Constantly yapping at the leaders of foreign countries about policies that we know they will not change and that we have no power to get them to change is low rent, and it projects weakness just when we would want to be strong.
> 
> Beyond the occasional infelicities of tone, the U.S. hasn’t in my view done enough to emphasize the differences between a policy of supporting the rise of all Asia and a policy of containing China. The Chinese have always been suspicious that the U.S. was embarked on a project of containment (often translated as “throttling” in Chinese, I’ve been told) and encirclement; the events associated with last fall’s “pivot to Asia” plus some of the rhetoric this time around will strengthen the hands of those Chinese leaders who see us this way. Already, there are some signs of China pushing back against what many there perceive as a hostile and aggressive U.S. policy.
> 
> It’s time for people like the President, the Secretary of State and the Vice President to talk positively and publicly about a vision for Asia that looks to the security, independence, dignity and prosperity of everyone in the region and that suggests new and deeper forms of cooperation between the two biggest Pacific powers. Deepening American relations with China even as we deepen our relations with its neighbors is the best way to promote the kind of peace and prosperity we want in the Pacific.  Right now, we aren’t doing that quite as effectively as we should.
> 
> A third takeaway: the administration’s military budget doesn’t seem to track well with its foreign policy. This is partly about Asia and partly about the Middle East. In Asia, the administration proposes a robust policy on issues like the South China Sea that presuppose a high degree of military readiness. And in the Middle East, it cannot have escaped the administration’s notice that we remain quite deeply engaged and will need to preserve the capacity to act decisively and effectively as far ahead as the eye can see. Overall, the administration’s plans for significant defense cutbacks will be hostage to China’s plans for military modernization. Allies in Asia are wondering nervously whether the U.S. pivot is real or just talk. Making this policy work is going to involve a willingness to spend money. Perhaps the President is waiting until after the election to look this particular problem in the eye; perhaps the Office of Wishful Thinking has taken charge of the Pentagon budget process. But the administration has committed itself to ambitious and far reaching goals in Asia, and the world will be watching to see if it has enough money in the bank to cover the checks it has written.
> 
> A mix of forward deployment, aggressive anti-China rhetoric and declining military spending is close to the worst possible Asia policy.  A mix of forward deployment, deep engagement with both China and its neighbors and steady as you go spending is close to the best. My impression after my time in Washington is that a lot of people inside the government understand this; it remains to be seen whether the politicians can orchestrate the policy to keep us on the right track.


----------



## Kirkhill

Reposting this in the correct thread because I screwed up previously. :-[

We may not see the "discussion" between China and the West as a struggle, much less a conflict but not everybody necessary sees the situation in the same light:

China unwavering on Syria in new UN vote 



> China voted against a draft resolution on Syria at the UN General Assembly Thursday, days after it vetoed a UN Security Council draft resolution pressing for regime change in Damascus.
> 
> The country's courage to truly express itself and to calmly stand its ground is worthy of merit. Some Western media ridiculed certain nations, including China and Russia, for these choices. The trajectory of China's influence on world politics is rising. The West should be advised to reduce its expectations on abstention votes by China. Like it or not, China's stance must be taken into more serious consideration.
> 
> Politics serve to secure national interests on the global stage. Western powers are privileged to interpret interests and ethics at their own will due to their obvious dominance of public opinion. They label the 12 countries who voted differently to them at the UN as being "unethical." China should never be fooled by this hypocrisy.
> 
> The US and Israel were the only two nations that were against a draft resolution on Cuba at the UN Assembly in November. The US appeared to be more isolated than the current 12 nations. Washington acted against public global opinion despite its monopoly of the world's richest resources and leverage in directing the world's development.
> 
> China must act confidently and proactively in implementing its diplomatic strategy. China's vote, representing one-fifth of the entire world population, deserves its due respect.
> 
> It is wrong to blindly come down on the side of the West in each vote. Calls for China to vote in along with "universal values" can frequently be heard online. But that is a mere reflection of diverse and vibrant public voices.
> 
> Western values that contradict China's rise would eventually infiltrate global affairs and consequently seek to weaken China in various ways. As China rises, so will the pressure it faces. China appears to be an easy target for some Western media.
> 
> A lack of confidence is the root cause for the unease of some Chinese when faced with Western accusations. Confidence comes from looking at facts from a historical perspective.
> 
> We have to halt the stereotyped view of China, which is a player more willing to make concessions to avoid trouble. They should be advised to look at China as a country that does not bring unnecessary trouble, but also never shuns away from dealing with trouble head-on.
> 
> We are a peace-loving nation, which has not been involved in any military conflict for more than two decades. In sharp contrast, countries such as the US and Britain have engaged in numerous wars during the same period. Now, they think to lecture us on justice. Surely, they cannot ignore the irony.





The Link




> Russia, China, And India Should Not Let The West Have Its Way In Syria
> 
> No matter how India looks at it, the end result is that for its own interests and for the interests of the whole world, India should join Russia and China to stand up against the western aggression against Syria and Iran. India should not let Syria become another Libya. If Syria falls, then the West is going to go after Iran. India has very crucial economic relations with Iran. The two countries have a long history of friendly relations. India cannot let the West dictate its relations with Iran. It is the western domino game plan. Libya, Syria, and then Iran. Can India guess who is next? Do not exclude yourself. Look what happened to the Indian friends: Iraq, Libya, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia!
> 
> By Dr. Sawraj Singh
> 
> Russia, China, and India should realize that Syria is the last battle for maintaining the western domination and the American era. If Russia, China, and India can join their forces and block the west in Syria, then the western domination of the last two centuries will end, and the unipolar world order, under the western domination and the American leadership, will be replaced by the multipolar world order. The most important thing for Russia, China, and India to understand is that they are not fighting Syria’s battle, but are fighting their own battle. None of the three countries can have a respectable status in the current unipolar world, and they need a multipolar world to get a proper and fitting status. Therefore, they are fighting their own battle.
> 
> Russia and China vetoed the resolution on Syria in the Security Council in the UN. This has drawn an unprecedented response from the western countries. The western media is blaming them for the situation in Syria. However, the truth is that the western countries are using their agents and terrorists to incite violence in Syria, so that they can use the violence as an excuse to attack Syria, just like they did in Libya. The West is using the UN and human rights as a cover for their aggression. Navi Pillai is trying to become an accomplice to this aggression by criticizing Syria for human rights violations. Obviously, she wants to make Syria another Libya. The whole world can see the West’s true face as far as human rights are concerned, in Libya. The most brutal and barbarian acts have been committed in Libya by the West and its agents and lackeys. The West wants to repeat this performance in Syria.
> 
> If the West succeeds in Syria, then the western domination may last for another half century. The West was defeated in Vietnam, and that was supposed to be the end of the western domination. However, by exploiting the difference between Russia and China, the West extended its domination for a half century. Now, by not letting Russia, China, and India unite, it may extend its survival for another half century.
> 
> Russia and China seem to understand the western designs better than India. Being a Hindu majority country, the West’s propaganda against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism throws India off balance. India does not realize that almost all the so-called Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist groups have been created by the CIA. Can India not see that all the secular regimes in the Islamic countries have been toppled by these groups in collaboration with the West? Iraq and Libya went through that, and now the same thing is happening in Syria. What more proof does India want? The truth is that not only the so-called Islamic fundamentalists, but almost all extremists, fundamentalists, and fanatics in every religion are blessed by the CIA. The west can incite any kind of fundamentalism, extremism, and fanaticism to advance its cause. India should have no illusion that being a secular state, it has already been targeted by the CIA for balkanization and disintegration after the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
> 
> If India wants to remain a secular and neutral country, then it has no other choice but to join Russia and China to expose and counter the western designs. Syria and Iran are very good opportunities for India to revive its credentials of secularism and neutrality. This is also the best time to revive the traditional friendship with Russia.
> 
> India should realize that Russia and China are going to stand firm against the western hooliganism, arrogance, double standards, and hypocrisy, whether India joins them or not. However, if India joins them, then it will be in the best interests of not only the Indian people, but of the whole world, including the American and the European people. Without India, the West may not fight a Third World war with Russia and China, because it may find it difficult to match China’s manpower. Therefore, with India joining Russia and China, the chances of a peaceful transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order increase. This is in the best interests of the people of the world: to preserve peace and harmony in the world. India can play a crucial role.
> 
> No matter how India looks at it, the end result is that for its own interests and for the interests of the whole world, India should join Russia and China to stand up against the western aggression against Syria and Iran. India should not let Syria become another Libya. If Syria falls, then the West is going to go after Iran. India has very crucial economic relations with Iran. The two countries have a long history of friendly relations. India cannot let the West dictate its relations with Iran. It is the western domino game plan.
> 
> Libya, Syria, and then Iran. Can India guess who is next? Do not exclude yourself. Look what happened to the Indian friends: Iraq, Libya, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.
> 
> Dr. Sawraj Singh, MD F.I.C.S. is the Chairman of the Washington State Network for Human Rights and Chairman of the Central Washington Coalition for Social Justice. He can be reached at sawrajsingh@hotmail.com.


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## tomahawk6

China’s Falkland Islands Lesson

http://the-diplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2012/02/21/china’s-falkland-islands-lesson/

We’re rapidly approaching the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War (April to June 1982), which saw the British military reclaim the United Kingdom’s remote South Atlantic island possessions from Argentine invaders.

Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, a former British Army chief of staff, recently made headlines when he proclaimed that defense cuts make it “just about impossible” for British naval forces to wrest back the Falklands should Argentina occupy them again. The Royal Navy retired aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal last year, leaving the navy with zero capacity to project fixed-wing air power by sea until the troubled Queen Elizabeth-class flattops enter service, presumably around the end of this decade. London also sold the nation’s entire inventory of Harrier jump jets to the U.S. Marine Corps for spare parts, leaving the navy with zero air power to project until the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter enters service, also around the end of the decade.

Like nature, power politics abhors a vacuum. It’s probably no coincidence that Buenos Aires is ramping up its demands for the islands as Britain’s capacity to re-conquer them dwindles. Economically stagnant Argentina desperately wants to tap the natural resources found in the waters and seabed adjacent to the Falklands. A recent series of oil discoveries – most recently in the “Sea Lion” field eighty miles north of the islands – has spurred talk of a “black gold rush” in the South Atlantic. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has reproached London for exhausting “Argentinean natural resources” while vowing to “get [the islands] back.” Meanwhile, Britain’s shrinking expeditionary capability has reduced officials like Brig. Bill Aldridge, commander of British forces in the South Atlantic, to insisting that it matters little whether the British military can recover the Falklands; it will never lose them in the first place. Declares Aldridge, “I am not expecting to hand the islands over to anybody and therefore put us in a position to have to retake the islands.”


Maybe hope really is a strategy!

The latest kerfuffle has caught some attention beyond Argentina and the British Isles. You can bet strategists in China are monitoring events in the South Atlantic closely. These are people who do their homework. They afforded the 1982 conflict close scrutiny, finding much to commend and condemn on both sides, and many lessons to learn. A few years ago, my colleague Lyle Goldstein read their commentary on the Falklands and wrote an article documenting their findings. It only makes sense that Beijing would regard the campaign as a source of guidance for contemporary strategy. Just look at the map – a Western sea power fought a short war to reverse a weaker regional power’s seizure of islands it considered sovereign territory. Geography compelled the extra-regional power to stage military operations across thousands of miles of ocean, where the local power enjoyed such advantages as proximity to the combat theater, abundant manpower and resources, and intimate familiarity with the surroundings.

Sound familiar?

What lessons about strategy, tactics, and force structure is Beijing likely to derive from the British experiences then and now? Lyle’s article is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s the bumper sticker for the guidance China takes from the conflict: a local power can overcome a stronger outside power if it is more willing than its antagonist to bear the costs and hazards of war, makes good use of its “home field advantage,” and acquires certain specialized weaponry in adequate numbers.

For example, Chinese commentators highlight the battle damage inflicted by Argentine Super Étendard fighter jets firing Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles. When I taught firefighting and damage control in the 1990s, we started off each new class by showing a film from the Falklands. My favorite part was when the skipper of the sunken HMS Sheffield recalled thinking it was “slightly bad news” when he heard an explosion and turned to see one of the ship’s gun mounts spinning around in the air high over the ship. Monty Python humor aside, the death of the Sheffield confirmed that sea-skimming missiles could evade modern shipboard air defenses and wreak lethal damage. Whether this inspired the People’s Liberation Army Navy to premise its anti-ship tactics on “saturation attacks” that overwhelm a fleet’s defenses is an open question. More likely, such encounters reaffirmed tacticians’ preexisting preference for cruise missiles as an implement of war. Had Argentine aviators possessed more than a few Exocets, conclude Chinese observers, the outcome of the conflict could have been far different.

Or, there’s undersea warfare. Both navies put submarines to effective use as an offensive weapon; both performed miserably at finding and sinking enemy submarines. A Royal Navy nuclear-powered attack submarine made short work of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, prompting the Argentine surface fleet to stay safely out of range for the rest of the war. For their part, Royal Navy anti-submarine crews were unable to reliably classify sonar or magnetic contacts, so they “classified targets with ordnance.” That’s a fancy way of saying they dropped anti-submarine munitions on anything with a signature remotely resembling that of an Argentine boat. This ham-fisted approach had a perverse strategic effect: it virtually exhausted the Royal Navy’s war stock of antisubmarine weaponry at a time of surging tension in the Cold War. The division of labor among NATO fleets assigned British mariners the task of policing North Atlantic waters for Soviet craft. That was hard to do once the Falklands campaign emptied Royal Navy warships’ weapons magazines. Lesson: antisubmarine warfare is hard even for the world’s most advanced navies.

How will the PLA Navy and the shore-based arms of Chinese sea power put such lessons to work in future conflicts? Savvy commanders might strike at U.S. Navy reinforcements steaming westward across the Pacific far from Asian coasts, wearing them down during their long voyage. Argentina missed several opportunities to make things tough on the oncoming British task force before it reached the theater. That China would repeat this mistake is doubtful. Targeting logistics vessels carrying supplies to U.S. carrier or amphibious groups, for instance, would be a convenient way to disrupt any relief operation off Taiwan or some other hotspot. These lumbering ships are few in number, carry token defensive armament, and often cruise without protective escorts. They would be easy pickings for Chinese submarines, let alone multidirectional cruise-missile strikes of the kind Chinese rocketeers envision. Take out the oilers, refrigeration ships, and ammunition ships, and the fleet withers on the vine.

In short, as they consider how to pierce Chinese “anti-access” defenses, U.S. strategists could do worse than investigate what pundits from the “red team” are saying about the Falklands dispute – then and now.

James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and co-editor of the forthcoming ‘Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age’ (Georgetown University Press). The views voiced here are his alone.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Although this, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is a Canadian business story, I suspect it is a common problem for acciunting/audit firms from many countries and I also guess the problem is not limited to China:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/canadian-audits-of-chinese-based-companies-under-fire/article2344920/


> Canadian audits of Chinese-based companies under fire
> 
> JANET MCFARLAND
> 
> Globe and Mail Update
> Published Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012
> 
> Canadian accounting firms are doing “disappointing” work when they audit the financial statements of Chinese-based companies that list their shares on Canadian stock exchanges, according to a new review by Canada’s audit regulator.
> 
> The Canadian Public Accountability Board released results Tuesday of a three-month review examining the work of Canadian audit firms who have Chinese clients, and said it found major gaps in the audit work. One unidentified audit firm has been restricted from taking any more Chinese clients, while others were required to do additional work on 12 of the audit files that were reviewed.
> 
> “The disappointment we had was a lot of things that we felt were fundamental auditing processes and procedures were just not applied,” CPAB chief executive officer Brian Hunt said in an interview Tuesday.
> 
> “It’s just a disappointment on our part that things we would consider fundamental here in Canada just were not done, and I’m at somewhat of a loss to explain it.”
> 
> The report does not identify the audit firms whose work was reviewed, but Mr. Hunt said they include the major national audit firms as well as a number of smaller firms that offer auditing of Chinese companies.
> 
> CPAB said nine of the 12 files that required additional work after CPAB’s review involved smaller regional or local audit firms, but it also noted that it could not review all the documentation for six of the audits involving major national firms because the work was performed by affiliated firms in foreign countries and the paperwork was not available.
> 
> “It was therefore impossible to fully evaluated the quality of work performed by the affiliated firms,” the review states.
> 
> Mr. Hunt said he also could not identify the 24 public companies whose audits were reviewed, and would not comment on whether Sino-Forest Corp. was one of the audits scrutinized.
> 
> The Chinese-based forestry saw its shares suspended last summer on the Toronto Stock Exchange after the board of directors launched a review of its business practices following accusations from a short seller that the firm was operating as a “Ponzi scheme.” The Ontario Securities Commission is still examining the company’s operations.
> 
> Mr. Hunt said he does not believe the problems identified are unique to audits of Chinese companies, and said CPAB plans to expand its review this year to audits of other companies based in developing countries whose shares trade in Canada. He said the further reviews will look at companies based in Russia, India, Brazil and other locations.
> 
> Auditors must understand that business practices vary in many other countries, and they have to be more alert to possible problems, Mr. Hunt said. For example, he said audit firms must be more careful when getting confirmations of bank balances or accounts receivable in other countries, and in confirming ownership of assets held by the company.
> 
> Indeed, CPAB found some auditors were not even applying typical Canadian standards when seeking confirmations. For example, the regulator said it found cases where management controlled the gathering of external confirmations – instead of the auditors themselves contacting the banks or third-party creditors.
> 
> Despite the concerns, Mr. Hunt said he believes there is no reason for CPAB to suggest Canadian audit firms should not audit the books of foreign-based companies.
> 
> “I think the audit firms do have the capabilities and the talent to do it. There are language barriers, but that’s not typically a show-stopper,” he said.
> 
> “The real issue is understanding the unique business practices, and that’s where our disappointment is that a lot of the firms that went over to do these audits just did not recognize that there are differences.”




"Disappointment" is a pretty strong word for auditors to use about colleagues - it means, I think, that Canadian auditors were helping their Chinese clients to "cook the books, to fool the Canadian securities regulators.

But, I repeat: I suspect there are similar _irregularities_ to be found in US, Japanese and European audits of Chinese companies and of Western audits of other Asian firms.


----------



## a_majoor

While much of the evidence is circumstancial, it is interesting to see who benefits from the demise of Nortel:

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/25/nortel-hacked-to-pieces/



> *Nortel hacked to pieces*
> Jameson Berkow  Feb 25, 2012 – 9:30 AM ET | Last Updated: Feb 25, 2012 11:19 AM ET
> 
> Sara D. Davis for National Post
> 
> Under mounting pressure to prove China-based hackers had infiltrated the vast global computer network of Nortel Networks Corp. all the way to the chief executive’s terminal, Brian Shields felt he had no choice but to go rogue.
> 
> Armed with nearly two decades doing security for the now-defunct Canadian company whose technology still powers telecommunications networks around the world, he had spent a day just before Christmas 2008 digging through the Web browsing history of then CEO Mike Zafirovski, known to colleagues as ‘Mike Z’. Mr. Shields was convinced there were criminals working on behalf of China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. accessing the CEO’s files, but his hunch hadn’t been enough for his immediate bosses to grant him direct access to the top man’s PC.
> 
> “I went on my own then and pulled the Web logs from Mike Z. since I had access to those kinds of logs back then,” the 53-year-old Nortel veteran recalled. It was there he finally found the digital smoking gun he had spent years trying to find.
> 
> “I went through about two months and, sure enough, I found that right in the middle of a Yahoo session he had some activity go over to Beijing that didn’t fit in with any of the other URL information that was showing up. It didn’t belong there, it just didn’t. This was rotten.”
> 
> As reported by the Wall Street Journal this month, hackers had free reign inside Nortel’s network for more than a decade before the company went bankrupt in 2009. Now, in lengthy interviews with the Financial Post, Mr. Shields and a third-party digital forensics expert who worked on the investigation shed more light on the cyber criminals they were pursuing, their intentions and the inexplicable lack of response from Nortel’s senior staff.
> 
> The revelations serve as a wake up call not only to the companies who purchased Nortel’s infected hardware, but to the global technology industry at large.
> 
> The attackers were “clearly recent graduates of a Chinese polytechnic” who were “heavily in debt,” yet by 2009 seemed to have “more money than they ever imagined,” according to the third-party expert who works for a leading U.S. computer security tool vendor who requested anonymity.
> 
> Although never formally contracted by Nortel to aid the investigation, the expert had been sought out by Mr. Shields in the summer of 2008 for his advice and assistance in analyzing some of the machines he believed were infected. Nortel’s own anti-malware specialist had been unable to find any evidence of foul play, but Mr. Shields refused to let the matter drop.
> 
> “I thought [helping Brian] might land me some work down the line,” the expert said. “Nortel was, after all, still a very big company at the time.”
> 
> Not only did the expert’s analysis confirm that rootkits (malicious software designed to make certain processes running on a device invisible to basic inspection) existed on the machines identified by Mr. Shields, but that it was professionals who had put them there.
> 
> “Brian would wipe the hard drive of one of the machines and re-image it, then we did a second memory image within five minutes,” the expert said. “It was a lot cleaner but I still found a couple of artifacts that told me the rootkit was still there. So it was something sophisticated that was able to survive a reformat of the system.”
> 
> Once the hidden processes were discovered, the expert was able to trace the perpetrators to Chinese IP addresses, some of which also had accounts on a Mandarin-language bulletin board hosted just outside of Beijing. It was there the expert was able to glean personal details about the hackers and what they were doing in Nortel’s system.
> 
> “They were doing surveillance, intelligence gathering,” he said.
> 
> “They were watching what [programs] people were using, what they were doing, what emails they were reading and that is exactly what we would expect to see from someone who was basically engaged in espionage.”
> 
> Still, neither the expert nor Mr. Shields was able to establish a direct link between the hackers and their mysterious benefactors. Mr. Shields’ conviction that the Chinese government was involved on behalf of Huawei remains circumstantial at best: the Shenzhen-based company had surpassed US$100-million in annual sales to international markets in 2000, the year many Nortel historians mark as the start of the former Canadian corporate champion’s fall from grace. Huawei enjoyed rapid global growth from that point onward.
> 
> Today, many former Nortel customers — including BCE Inc., Canada’s largest telecommunications firm — have moved to Huawei. Analysts expect the privately held company will overtake Ericsson as the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor when it reports annual figures this spring, giving Huawei the crown once worn by Nortel.
> 
> China’s embassy in Washington issued a statement to the WSJ specifically denying any involvement in the Nortel hacking, saying “cyber attacks were transnational and anonymous” and shouldn’t be assumed to originate in China “without thorough investigation and hard evidence.”
> 
> Finger pointing aside, Mr. Shields believed he did have hard evidence of somebody hacking Nortel’s systems, even if he couldn’t prove who was paying them. Once he found proof of hackers breaching the chief executive’s own computer in late 2008, he presented his findings to Pat Cottrell, Nortel’s IT security manager at the time. Surely now, he thought, he would get the approvals and the attention needed to more thoroughly inspect Mike Z’s computer.
> 
> Instead, her response according to Mr. Shields was “Mike Z is a very busy man, he is trying to sell business units and we can’t be slowing him down and trying to interrupt him with memory dumps of his computer.” Ms. Cottrell declined to comment on this story, citing a confidentiality agreement with her current employer.
> 
> “I hit myself in the head,” Mr. Shields said. “[Mr. Zafirovski] wouldn’t have even known [the memory dump] had happened. It would have slowed his machine down for maybe 10 minutes.”
> 
> Mr. Shields says he struggled for resources ever since the breach was discovered by a Nortel employee based in the United Kingdom in 2004. He even spent several hours in November of 2007 explaining his concerns in a meeting he said was attended by several Nortel executives including Jack Reyes, vice-president of corporate security, and Randy Calhoun, Nortel’s director of corporate and systems security.
> 
> They told him to prepare an audit report, which Mr. Shields said he filed in early 2008 but that was never passed along to upper management.
> 
> Mr. Reyes could not be reached and Mr. Calhoun, now an independent security consultant based in Dallas, declined to comment. Mr. Shields had a reputation as someone who would “cry wolf,” Mr. Zafirovski told the WSJ.
> 
> “I may have been crying wolf,” said Mr. Shields. “That is what my boss was thinking, but the problem was, there was a wolf.”
> 
> The digital forensics expert who helped with the investigation “can understand, once [Nortel] started to sell off the company, why they wouldn’t want something like this to come to light.”
> 
> “I’m sure some of the people who bought Nortel assets out of the bankruptcy sale wouldn’t have paid as much if they knew they were getting a bunch of computers that were deeply infected with malware.
> 
> “Particularly the way Brian got fired [in early 2009] just when he was about to succeed made me and some of my friends really suspicious,” the expert said, adding “in the face of this evidence [Nortel] didn’t really take any action, which was odd.”
> 
> Last week, after reading about his report in the WSJ, someone working in the IT department at a buyer of one of the sold Nortel divisions — he declined to say which one; Nortel’s various assets were purchased by several different firms — got in touch with Mr. Shields.
> 
> “Can you please help me?” the employee said, according to Mr. Shields.
> 
> After learning the employee was the only one handling computer security at his company in addition to several other IT-related responsibilities, Mr. Shields had to decline.
> 
> “I said ‘Oh geez, oh man, you’ve already told me more than I needed to know’. They just don’t have people focused on this problem and that is part of the problem,” he said.
> 
> Despite an acceleration of high-profile cyber attacks against major global networks in recent years, many executives fail to recognize the potentially devastating nature of such cyber threats, said Gene McLean, vice-president and chief security officer at Telus Corp. from 2001 until 2008.
> 
> There is data to support this growing lack of awareness. Last October, security software giant Symantec Corp. released a study that found operators of telecommunications networks, power grids, water systems and other services of vital importance had grown “less concerned about threats and less ready” than they were a year prior even as attacks have grown more frequent and sophisticated.
> 
> “If it was a widespread infection — and [Nortel] was a global, well-known, respected organization at that time — you’d have a half-dozen people on that easily to find out what is happening and stop it. Once you’ve done that you certainly need to inform the corner suite; the CEO has to be aware,” Mr. McLean said.
> 
> “A good corporate citizen like Telus would certainly jump right on something like that. Others, hard to say.”


----------



## a_majoor

Another potential Black Swan. If the Chinese government is unwilling to give up control (or perhaps the social and cultural model of Chinese Civilization requires central control) then China may not be able to transition out of the current economic model, and be stuck in the "middle". I wonder if these sorts of social stresses being caught in the middle (rising expectations by the population, rising population pressure but a now fixed resource base to meet these needs) were the cause of previous breakdowns in Chinese history?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/9109683/China-risks-middle-income-trap-without-free-market-revolution.html



> *China risks 'middle income trap' without free market revolution*
> China’s spectacular catch-up growth is nearing its limits, leaving the country prey to the "middle income trap" over coming years unless Beijing embraces the free market and relaxes its suffocating grip over the economy.
> 
> China clearly needs to hack away a thicket of impediments, starting with the semi-feudal Hukou system that denies rural migrants rights to urban registration, or access to healthcare, education and housing in the cities Photo: EPA
> 
> A joint report by the World Bank and China’s Development Research Centre has warned that the low-hanging fruit of state-driven industrialization is largely exhausted.
> 
> "As China’s leaders know, the country’s current growth model is unsustainable," said Robert Zoellick, the World Bank’s president. "This is not the time just for muddling through. It’s time to get ahead of events."
> 
> Countries across Latin America and the Middle East saw catch-up growth in the 1960s and 1970s but then they hit an invisible ceiling and have mostly languished in the "middle income trap" ever since, with per capita incomes far behind the rare "break-out" states such as Japan and Korea. "If countries cannot increase productivity through innovation, they find themselves trapped. China does not have to endure this fate," it said.
> 
> There is no doubt that the existing model has hit the buffers on every front and risks "unbearable friction" with trading partners unless the trade surplus is brought under control.
> 
> China is running out of cheap labour from the countryside and faces a "wrenching demographic change" as the old-aged dependency ratio doubles to North European levels within 20 years, and is fast depleting aquifers in the North China plains.
> 
> It can no longer rely on imported technology to keep up blistering growth averaging 9.9pc since Deng Xiaoping began to throw open the economy in 1978 and unleashed the nation’s pent-up commercial energy. "China has reached another turning point in its development path when a second strategic, and no less fundamental, shift is called for," it said.
> 
> The report has been seized upon by Politburo reformers battling hardliners and vested interests. Li Keqiang, groomed to take over as premier this year, offered his "unwavering support" for the findings.
> 
> He faces tenacious resistance from factions within the party, who insist that the country’s resilience through the global capitalist heart attack of 2008-2009 has vindicated state control of key industries and banks.
> 
> The report said China’s growth will slow to 7pc later this decade and 5pc by the late 2020s even if China embraces deep reform. Stagnation lies in wait if it clings to the dirigiste model.
> 
> "The forces supporting China’s continued rapid progress are gradually fading. The government’s dominance in key sectors, while earlier an advantage, is in the future likely to act as a constraint on creativity," it said.
> 
> "The role of the private sector is critical because innovation at the technology frontier is quite different in nature from catching up technologically. It is not something that can be achieved through government planning."
> 
> The picture is complex. China already lets local leaders embark on bold experiments under its strategy of "crossing the river by feeling the stones", permitting a mosaic of different policies that marks it out from other catch-up economies.
> 
> However, the country clearly needs to hack away a thicket of impediments, starting with the semi-feudal Hukou system that denies rural migrants rights to urban registration, or access to healthcare, education and housing in the cities.
> 
> The report said a quarter of China’s state companies are loss-making and have a productivity growth rate two-thirds lower than private firms, yet they gobble up available credit. Those private companies that resort to the parallel market for credit face grave risks, and one leading tycoon faces the death penalty.
> 
> Restructuring these state behemoths cost 20pc of GDP in the early 1990s, and it will be worse this time since the investment bubble has been much larger. "Potential costs of reforming state enterprises may have climbed significantly because opaque accounting practices mean that some state enterprises have accumulated large contingent liabilities that will need to be revealed," it said.
> 
> If all goes well, China will be a "high-income" economy by 2030 and perhaps as dominant as Britain in 1870 or the United States in 1945, or indeed as flourishing as the Qing Empire itself in 1820 before the onset of catastrophic decline. Politics will decide.


----------



## sean m

Here is an interesting article from STRATFOR,

The State of the World: Assessing China's Strategy

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/state-world-assessing-chinas-strategy?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20120306&utm_term=gweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=37f52ff891d14a67be453d549665bfe3

Taken from their website;

Simply put, China has three core strategic interests.

Paramount among them is the maintenance of domestic security. Historically, when China involves itself in global trade, as it did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the coastal region prospers, while the interior of China -- which begins about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the coast and runs about 1,600 kilometers to the west -- languishes. Roughly 80 percent of all Chinese citizens currently have household incomes lower than the average household income in Bolivia. Most of China's poor are located west of the richer coastal region. This disparity of wealth time and again has exposed tensions between the interests of the coast and those of the interior. After a failed rising in Shanghai in 1927, Mao Zedong exploited these tensions by undertaking the Long March into the interior, raising a peasant army and ultimately conquering the coastal region. He shut China off from the international trading system, leaving China more united and equal, but extremely poor.

The current government has sought a more wealth-friendly means of achieving stability: buying popular loyalty with mass employment. Plans for industrial expansion are implemented with little thought to markets or margins; instead, maximum employment is the driving goal. Private savings are harnessed to finance the industrial effort, leaving little domestic capital to purchase the output. China must export accordingly.

China's second strategic concern derives from the first. China's industrial base by design produces more than its domestic economy can consume, so China must export goods to the rest of the world while importing raw materials. The Chinese therefore must do everything possible to ensure international demand for their exports. This includes a range of activities, from investing money in the economies of consumer countries to establishing unfettered access to global sea-lanes.

The third strategic interest is in maintaining control over buffer states. The population of the historical Han Chinese heartland is clustered in the eastern third of the country, where ample precipitation distinguishes it from the much more dry and arid central and western thirds. China's physical security therefore depends on controlling the four non-Han Chinese buffer states that surround it: Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. Securing these regions means China can insulate itself from Russia to the north, any attack from the western steppes, and any attack from India or Southeast Asia.

Controlling the buffer states provides China geographical barriers -- jungles, mountains, steppes and the Siberian wasteland -- that are difficult to surmount and creates a defense in depth that puts any attacker at a grave disadvantage.

Challenged Interests
Today, China faces challenges to all three of these interests. 

The economic downturn in Europe and the United States, China's two main customers, has exposed Chinese exports to increased competition and decreased appetite. Meanwhile, China has been unable to appropriately increase domestic demand and guarantee access to global sea-lanes independent of what the U.S. Navy is willing to allow.

Those same economic stresses also challenge China domestically. The wealthier coast depends on trade that is now faltering, and the impoverished interior requires subsidies that are difficult to provide when economic growth is slowing substantially.

In addition, two of China's buffer regions are in flux. Elements within Tibet and Xinjiang adamantly resist Han Chinese occupation. China understands that the loss of these regions could pose severe threats to China's security, particularly if such losses would draw India north of the Himalayas or create a radical Islamic regime in Xinjiang.

The situation in Tibet is potentially the most troubling. Outright war between India and China -- anything beyond minor skirmishes -- is impossible so long as both are separated by the Himalayas. Neither side could logistically sustain large-scale multi-divisional warfare in that terrain. But China and India could threaten one another if they were to cross the Himalayas and establish a military presence on the either side of the mountain chain. For India, the threat would emerge if Chinese forces entered Pakistan in large numbers. For China, the threat would occur if large numbers of Indian troops entered Tibet.

China therefore constantly postures as if it were going to send large numbers of forces into Pakistan, but in the end, the Pakistanis have no interest in de facto Chinese occupation -- even if the occupation were directed against India. Likewise, the Chinese are not interested in undertaking security operations in Pakistan. The Indians have little interest in sending forces into Tibet in the event of a Tibetan revolution. For India, an independent Tibet without Chinese forces would be interesting, but a Tibet where the Indians would have to commit significant forces would not be. As much as the Tibetans represent a problem for China, the problem is manageable. Tibetan insurgents might receive some minimal encouragement and support from India, but not to a degree that would threaten Chinese control.

So long as the internal problems in Han China are manageable, so is Chinese domination of the buffer states, albeit with some effort and some damage to China's reputation abroad.

The key for China is maintaining interior stability. If this portion of Han China destabilizes, control of the buffers becomes impossible. Maintaining interior stability requires the transfer of resources, which in turn requires the continued robust growth of the Chinese coastal economy to generate the capital to transfer inland. Should exports stop flowing out and raw materials in, incomes in the interior would quickly fall to politically explosive levels. (China today is far from revolution, but social tensions are increasing, and China must use its security apparatus and the People's Liberation Army to control these tensions.)

Maintaining those flows is a considerable challenge. The very model of employment and market share over profitability misallocates scores of resources and breaks the normally self-regulating link between supply and demand. One of the more disruptive results is inflation, which alternatively raises the costs of subsidizing the interior while eroding China's competitiveness with other low-cost global exporters.

For the Chinese, this represents a strategic challenge, a challenge that can only be countered by increasing the profitability on Chinese economic activity. This is nearly impossible for low value-added producers. The solution is to begin manufacturing higher value-added products (fewer shoes, more cars), but this necessitates a different sort of work force, one with years more education and training than the average Chinese coastal inhabitant, much less someone from the interior. It also requires direct competition with the well-established economies of Japan, Germany and the United States. This is the strategic battleground that China must attack if it is to maintain its stability.

A Military Component
Besides the issues with its economic model, China also faces a primarily military problem. China depends on the high seas to survive. The configuration of the South China Sea and the East China Sea render China relatively easy to blockade. The East China Sea is enclosed on a line from Korea to Japan to Taiwan, with a string of islands between Japan and Taiwan. The South China Sea is even more enclosed on a line from Taiwan to the Philippines, and from Indonesia to Singapore. Beijing's single greatest strategic concern is that the United States would impose a blockade on China, not by positioning its 7th Fleet inside the two island barriers but outside them. From there, the United States could compel China to send its naval forces far away from the mainland to force an opening -- and encounter U.S. warships -- and still be able to close off China's exits.

That China does not have a navy capable of challenging the United States compounds the problem. China is still in the process of completing its first aircraft carrier; indeed, its navy is insufficient in size and quality to challenge the United States. But naval hardware is not China's greatest challenge. The United States commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 1922 and has been refining both carrier aviation and battle group tactics ever since. Developing admirals and staffs capable of commanding carrier battle groups takes generations. Since the Chinese have never had a carrier battle group in the first place, they have never had an admiral commanding a carrier battle group.

China understands this problem and has chosen a different strategy to deter a U.S. naval blockade: anti-ship missiles capable of engaging and perhaps penetrating U.S. carrier defensive systems, along with a substantial submarine presence. The United States has no desire to engage the Chinese at all, but were this to change, the Chinese response would be fraught with difficulty.

While China has a robust land-based missile system, a land-based missile system is inherently vulnerable to strikes by cruise missiles, aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles currently in development and other types of attack. China's ability to fight a sustained battle is limited. Moreover, a missile strategy works only with an effective reconnaissance capability. You cannot destroy a ship if you do not know where it is. This in turn necessitates space-based systems able to identify U.S. ships and a tightly integrated fire-control system. That raises the question of whether the United States has an anti-satellite capability. We would assume that it does, and if the United States used it, it would leave China blind.

China is therefore supplementing this strategy by acquiring port access in countries in the Indian Ocean and outside the South China Sea box. Beijing has plans to build ports in Myanmar, which is flirting with ending its international isolation, and Pakistan. Beijing already has financed and developed port access to Gwadar in Pakistan, Colombo and Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chittagong in Bangladesh, and it has hopes for a deepwater port at Sittwe, Myanmar. In order for this strategy to work, China needs transportation infrastructure linking China to the ports. This means extensive rail and road systems. The difficulty of building this in Myanmar, for example, should not be underestimated.

But more important, China needs to maintain political relationships that will allow it to access the ports. Pakistan and Myanmar, for example, have a degree of instability, and China cannot assume that cooperative governments will always be in place in such countries. In Myanmar's case, recent political openings could result in Naypyidaw's falling out of China's sphere of influence. Building a port and roads and finding that a coup or an election has created an anti-Chinese government is a possibility. Given that this is one of China's fundamental strategic interests, Beijing cannot simply assume that building a port will give it unrestricted access to the port. Add to this that roads and rail lines are easily sabotaged by guerrilla forces or destroyed by air or missile attacks.

In order for the ports on the Indian Ocean to prove useful, Beijing must be confident in its ability to control the political situation in the host country for a long time. That sort of extended control can only be guaranteed by having overwhelming power available to force access to the ports and the transportation system. It is important to bear in mind that since the Communists took power, China has undertaken offensive military operations infrequently -- and to undesirable results. Its invasion of Tibet was successful, but it was met with minimal effective resistance. Its intervention in Korea did achieve a stalemate but at horrendous cost to the Chinese, who endured the losses but became very cautious in the future. In 1979, China attacked Vietnam but suffered a significant defeat. China has managed to project an image of itself as a competent military force, but in reality it has had little experience in force projection, and that experience has not been pleasant.

Internal Security vs. Power Projection
The reason for this inexperience stems from internal security. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is primarily configured as a domestic security force -- a necessity because of China's history of internal tensions. It is not a question of whether China is currently experiencing such tensions; it is a question of possibility. Prudent strategic planning requires building forces to deal with worst-case situations. Having been designed for internal security, the PLA is doctrinally and logistically disinclined toward offensive operations. Using a force trained for security as a force for offensive operations leads either to defeat or very painful stalemates. And given the size of China's potential internal issues and the challenge of occupying a country like Myanmar, let alone Pakistan, building a secondary force of sufficient capability might not outstrip China's available manpower but would certainly outstrip its command and logistical capabilities. The PLA was built to control China, not to project power outward, and strategies built around the potential need for power projection are risky at best.

It should be noted that since the 1980s the Chinese have been attempting to transfer internal security responsibilities to the People's Armed Police, the border forces and other internal security forces that have been expanded and trained to deal with social instability. But despite this restructuring, there remain enormous limitations on China's ability to project military power on a scale sufficient to challenge the United States directly.

There is a disjuncture between the perception of China as a regional power and the reality. China can control its interior, but its ability to control its neighbors through military force is limited. Indeed, the fear of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unfounded. It cannot mount an amphibious assault at that distance, let alone sustain extended combat logistically. One option China does have is surrogate guerrilla warfare in places like the Philippines or Indonesia. The problem with such warfare is that China needs to open sea-lanes, and guerrillas -- even guerrillas armed with anti-ship missiles or mines -- can at best close them.

Political Solution
China therefore faces a significant strategic problem. China must base its national security strategy on what the United States is capable of doing, not on what Beijing seems to want at the moment. China cannot counter the United States at sea, and its strategy of building ports in the Indian Ocean suffers from the fact that its costs are huge and the political conditions for access uncertain. The demands of creating a force capable of guaranteeing access runs counter to the security requirements inside China itself.

As long as the United States is the world's dominant naval power, China's strategy must be the political neutralization of the United States. But Beijing must make certain that Washington does not feel so pressured that it chooses blockade as an option. Therefore, China must present itself as an essential part of U.S. economic life. But the United States does not necessarily see China's economic activity as beneficial, and it is unclear whether China can maintain its unique position with the United States indefinitely. Other, cheaper alternatives are available. China's official rhetoric and hard-line stances, designed to generate nationalist support inside the country, might be useful politically, but they strain relations with the United States. They do not strain relations to the point of risking military conflict, but given China's weakness, any strain is dangerous. The Chinese feel they know how to walk the line between rhetoric and real danger with the United States. It is still a delicate balance.

There is a perception that China is a rising regional and even global power. It may be rising, but it is still far from solving its fundamental strategic problems and further yet from challenging the United States. The tensions within China's strategy are certainly debilitating, if not fatal. All of its options have serious weaknesses. China's real strategy must be to avoid having to make risky strategic choices. China has been fortunate for the past 30 years being able to avoid such decisions, but Beijing utterly lacks the tools required to reshape that environment. Considering how much of China's world is in play right now -- Sudanese energy disputes and Myanmar's political experimentation leap to mind -- this is essentially a policy of blind hope.


----------



## Edward Campbell

While the three factor at the beginning are fine, if a little sketchy, I think that STRATFOR author is grasping at straws with the Pakistan/Tibet scenarios: as (s)he correctly points out neither China nor India is interested.

As to Xinjiang ~ a couple of years ago a mid level Chinese official put it to me that they, the (mostly) Han Chinese, plan to "f__k Xinjiang into submission." He meant that young men are encouraged to go to Xinjiang and marry a mostly relatively poor, attractive Uyghur girl and raise a totally secular, modern _Chinese_ family. It may be the work of a few generations but my acquaintance was confident of the strategy.


----------



## sean m

@ Mr. Campbell,

Yes, as you say the author does point out that fact in regards to Tibet. Yet do you or anyone else think that this weakness in Tibet or Xinjiang could turn into an opportunity for someone to attack China if they desired to? "For India, an independent Tibet without Chinese forces would be interesting", can anyone speculate how an independent Tibet would be interesting for India? In regards to Xinjiang, do you or anyone feel that what you contact is saying is accurate that the Uyghur people are really going to allow this to happen to their people? Maybe since  the Uyghurs are ethnically Turkic, and  they seem to mostly be of the islamic faith. Maybe a community whose is ethnically and religiously different from the Han or any other ethnic group in China, would be less inklind (maybe) to marry into a people they view as opressors. This quote "China's second strategic concern derives from the first. China's industrial base by design produces more than its domestic economy can consume, so China must export goods to the rest of the world while importing raw materials. The Chinese therefore must do everything possible to ensure international demand for their exports. This includes a range of activities, from investing money in the economies of consumer countries to establishing unfettered access to global sea-lanes", is interesting since someone could possible develop the notion that, China is as desperate for trade with us as we are for them. It seems like there are individuals in the business world who seems to state that we are in more need for trade with China than visa versa, just an opinion. Maybe the divide between inner and the coastal region of China could get worse if both sides receive what they want or need, perhaps? "The key for China is maintaining interior stability. If this portion of Han China destabilizes, control of the buffers becomes impossible. Maintaining interior stability requires the transfer of resources, which in turn requires the continued robust growth of the Chinese coastal economy to generate the capital to transfer inland. Should exports stop flowing out and raw materials in, incomes in the interior would quickly fall to politically explosive levels. (China today is far from revolution, but social tensions are increasing, and China must use its security apparatus and the People's Liberation Army to control these tensions.)" from what the author is saying it seems that China has a lot of tensions which could spiral out of control and become started in a short period of time, do you or anyone concur with this statement? "For the Chinese, this represents a strategic challenge, a challenge that can only be countered by increasing the profitability on Chinese economic activity. This is nearly impossible for low value-added producers. The solution is to begin manufacturing higher value-added products (fewer shoes, more cars), but this necessitates a different sort of work force, one with years more education and training than the average Chinese coastal inhabitant, much less someone from the interior." This statement seems to infer that China needs to educate it's population a lot more in order to be more productive in the production of more quality goods and services, does anyone believe that since China relies more on foreign investment and purchasing of quality goods- services and businesses, that it could put them in a more precarious situation due to their domestic issues in this regard? Maybe this could be an advantage for us since they require quality goods and services from us and it seems that we what is keeping the coastal and mainland regions of China from spiralling out of control. In regards to the military portion of the article do you or anyone agree with the author?


----------



## GAP

Sean m you may have had a point in that last post, but I defy anyone to try and follow it......it's just a block of words, little punctuation, sentence and paragraph structure.....couldn't be bothered trying...........


----------



## Edward Campbell

Let me see if I can find or make any sense of your post:



			
				sean m said:
			
		

> @ Mr. Campbell,
> 
> Yes, as you say the author does point out that fact in regards to Tibet. Yet do you or anyone else think that this weakness in Tibet or Xinjiang could turn into an opportunity for someone to attack China if they desired to?
> 
> Have you looked at the geograrphy of China and its neighbours? The LoCs are pretty tough.
> 
> "For India, an independent Tibet without Chinese forces would be interesting", can anyone speculate how an independent Tibet would be interesting for India?
> 
> It would pose a potential problem re: the large Tibetan Buddhist minority in India and it _might_ destabilize China, itself, thus creating unnecessary risk for India.
> 
> In regards to Xinjiang, do you or anyone feel that what you contact is saying is accurate that the Uyghur people are really going to allow this to happen to their people? Maybe since  the Uyghurs are ethnically Turkic, and  they seem to mostly be of the islamic faith. Maybe a community whose is ethnically and religiously different from the Han or any other ethnic group in China, would be less inklind (maybe) to marry into a people they view as opressors.
> 
> Maybe, indeed, my contact was, I suspect, counting on greed, especially amongst poor Uyghur women, to help the project along. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest (notice how indefinite I am being) that many Uyghur women are quite willing to marry Chinese men and to renounce their faith to get a better life.
> 
> This quote "China's second strategic concern derives from the first. China's industrial base by design produces more than its domestic economy can consume, so China must export goods to the rest of the world while importing raw materials. The Chinese therefore must do everything possible to ensure international demand for their exports. This includes a range of activities, from investing money in the economies of consumer countries to establishing unfettered access to global sea-lanes", is interesting since someone could possible develop the notion that, China is as desperate for trade with us as we are for them. It seems like there are individuals in the business world who seems to state that we are in more need for trade with China than visa versa, just an opinion.
> 
> There is no question, it is a symbiotic relationship ~ as are all successful trading relationships. What is interesting, in the strategic calculus is that America is burdened with, _inter alai_, providing "freedom of the seas" for China because America has other, pressing strategic interests that require it to provide that 'service' for all.
> 
> Maybe the divide between inner and the coastal region of China could get worse if both sides receive what they want or need, perhaps? "The key for China is maintaining interior stability. If this portion of Han China destabilizes, control of the buffers becomes impossible. Maintaining interior stability requires the transfer of resources, which in turn requires the continued robust growth of the Chinese coastal economy to generate the capital to transfer inland. Should exports stop flowing out and raw materials in, incomes in the interior would quickly fall to politically explosive levels. (China today is far from revolution, but social tensions are increasing, and China must use its security apparatus and the People's Liberation Army to control these tensions.)" from what the author is saying it seems that China has a lot of tensions which could spiral out of control and become started in a short period of time, do you or anyone concur with this statement?
> 
> Yes, China, like France, for example, has a lot of internal tensions which can, quickly, flare up into civil unrest. The spread of TV, it is ubiquitous in China, allows everyone to see what live is supposed to be like in the prosperous East coast provinces - everyone wants the same, rather like poor black kids in American ghettoes want what they see on TV. The social problems in China should not be minimized, nor should the capacity of the Chinese _system_ to respond to the popular will. The problem all oligarchies have is keeping a "finger on the pulse" of public opinion.
> 
> "For the Chinese, this represents a strategic challenge, a challenge that can only be countered by increasing the profitability on Chinese economic activity. This is nearly impossible for low value-added producers. The solution is to begin manufacturing higher value-added products (fewer shoes, more cars), but this necessitates a different sort of work force, one with years more education and training than the average Chinese coastal inhabitant, much less someone from the interior." This statement seems to infer that China needs to educate it's population a lot more in order to be more productive in the production of more quality goods and services, does anyone believe that since China relies more on foreign investment and purchasing of quality goods- services and businesses, that it could put them in a more precarious situation due to their domestic issues in this regard? Maybe this could be an advantage for us since they require quality goods and services from us and it seems that we what is keeping the coastal and mainland regions of China from spiralling out of control. In regards to the military portion of the article do you or anyone agree with the author?
> 
> There is a always a market for new, innovative goods and services in China ~ just as there is in *A*merica, *B*razil, *C*anada, etc, etc ... The Chinese education system is still evolving, as is our (I hope); the Chinese appear happy with their relative mastery of technical learning but they want to introduce greater _creativity_ without sacrificing what they already do well. Their perception is that America squandered its global lead on technical skills and knowledge in pursuit of "self actualization" and so on.




See how easy paragraphs are, Sean? Just a simple "RETURN" at the end of each idea makes your post comprehensible - something it was not in its original form.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is a reminder of how obscure Chinese politics can be:
> 
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/brewing-scandal-in-china-could-be-a-reality-check-for-harper/article2334141/
> 
> 
> 
> Brewing scandal in China could be a reality check for Harper
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Guangzhou, China— Globe and Mail Update
> Published Friday, Feb. 10, 2012
> 
> It’s the biggest political scandal to hit China in years, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is about to land in the middle of it.
> 
> Bo Xilai, the charismatic and controversial Communist Party boss of Chongqing – the last stop Mr. Harper’s five-day, three-city visit to China – was until this week seen as a rising political star, all but certain to be promoted to the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo during a once-in-a-decade transfer of power that begins this fall ... more in the original
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Chinese Communits party is not monolithic; there is a "hard left" wing, represented by Bo Xilai's _red culture_ movement, there is a "hard right" wing represented by former leaders Jiang Zemin's _Shanghai gang_ and a centre left movement represented by Hu Jintoa's current administration. Neither Jiang nor Hu was ever able to build a strong enough coalition in the Standing Committee to select their own successors.
> 
> The party aims for a sort of meritocracy but we have no way of measuring its success because the processes by which the members of the all powerful political _centre_ are chosen remains very private.
Click to expand...



Bo Xilai is for the high jump according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-removes-top-leadership-contender-from-chongqing-post/article2369764/


> China removes top leadership contender from Chongqing post
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> BEIJING— Globe and Mail Update
> Published Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2012
> 
> 
> China’s usually staid political scene was rocked by an earthquake Thursday as a leading contender for a post in the next Politburo was sacked from his job amid an ongoing police investigation.
> 
> For the past five years, Bo Xilai has used his post as Communist Party boss of the southwestern city Chongqing to promote his vision of a throwback China that focused on social justice and promoted Maoist ideals. In the process he became one of the most visible and popular politicians in a country ruled by grey technocrats. It was considered almost certain that he would be elevated to the country’s all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo during a leadership shuffle this fall.
> 
> Mr. Bo’s future rise was seen as so certain that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a special point of meeting him on his recent trip to China.
> 
> But a terse announcement Thursday on the official Xinhua newswire likely put an end to such ambitions. The bulletin simply declared “Comrade Bo Xilai no longer serves as Party Secretary for Chongqing” and announced that Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang had replaced him.
> 
> Mr. Bo’s sudden and spectacular downfall started last month when Wang Lijun, who had served as Mr. Bo’s right-hand man and police chief in Chongqing, took refuge inside the United States consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu. Mr. Wang emerged after spending a night in the consulate on the condition that he would surrender only to the central leadership in Beijing, not the local police.
> 
> The scandal surrounding Mr. Wang broke just days before Mr. Harper arrived in Chongqing, though Mr. Bo went through with the meeting as though everything was normal.
> 
> Mr. Wang has since disappeared – official reports say he is receiving “vacation-style treatment” – and rumours have swirled ever since about what information he gave to American diplomats, and what he had to say to the Communist Party chiefs in Beijing.
> 
> It’s not yet clear if the scandal will have a wider impact on the Communist Party’s sensitive power transfer. Seven of the nine current members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo are expected stand aside this fall for a new generation headed by current Vice-President Xi Jinping. Mr. Bo was often portrayed as the face of the conservative wing of the Communist Party, jockeying for power and influence on the next Politburo against a liberal wing headed by Guangdong secretary Wang Yang.
> 
> Making the announcement more shocking inside China is Mr. Bo’s heritage. As the son of Bo Yibo, who is considered a hero of the 1949 revolution and one of the “eight immortals” of the Communist Party, the 62-year-old Mr. Bo was thus seen as a “princeling,” a second-generation Communist leader (like Mr. Xi) whose family name put him on a fast track to power.
> 
> Mr. Bo’s eye-catching policies in Chongqing raised his profile further. He initially made waves through an anti-mafia crackdown that broke the city’s powerful triads, while simultaneously drawing criticisms for the lack of due process while obtaining convictions.
> 
> He later emerged as the vanguard of a resurgent Maoist movement in China, instructing Chongqing citizens to learn Mao-era songs and bombarding them with text messages of his favourite quotes from the Chairman. The campaigns made him the hero of the country’s leftists, who feel China has strayed too far from socialist ideology, but also raised concerns that Chongqing was flirting with the passions that sparked the bloody Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
> 
> Gossip about Mr. Bo’s fate dominated the recent meeting of China’s rubberstamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, which finished its annual session on Wednesday. Mr. Bo seemed confident when addressing the media, but was also noticeably absent at key moments.
> 
> “I feel like I put my trust in the wrong person,” Mr. Bo said when asked about Mr. Wang’s disappearance.
> 
> Premier Wen Jiabao seemed to target Mr. Bo for unusual criticism during his annual press conference on Wednesday, telling reporters that the police investigation into what had taken place in Chongqing “will respect the truth and the law, and the public will be informed of the result.”
> 
> In what was interpreted as a jab at Mr. Bo’s policies in Chongqing, he then referenced the danger of another Cultural Revolution while speaking of the need for political reforms both in China in general and inside the Communist Party in particular.
> 
> “We have entered a critical point in the need for reforms. Without successful political reform, vital economic reforms cannot be carried out. The results of what we have achieved may be lost. A historical tragedy like the Cultural Revolution could be repeated. Each party member and cadre should feel a sense of urgency,” Mr. Wen said.




The CCP does have mechanisms for finding and dealing with corruption and _deviation_ from the approved (Deng Xiaoping) _party line_ ~ there are, probably, elements of anti-corruption in this decisions, but my sense is that it is mostly a _party line_ issue: Hu Jintao has taken the party as far "left" (towards a "welfare state") as it is inclined to go.

Corruption remains a problem; in many respects modern China reminds me of late medieval England: no matter what the expressed wishes of the _centre_ the provinces have a lot of autonomy - through the modern day equivalent of castellans and sheriffs - and ways must be found to pay off supporters while still sending the _monarch_, The General Secretary of the Central Committee in Beijing, his due. It is a system that breeds and needs corruption and it is a system the Chinese must, finally, after 2,500 years, put aside. The CCP understands this, I believe, but they have yet to find a way ... Western style democracy, even of the _conservative_ Singapore style, is thought to be too inefficient and potentially chaotic.


----------



## tomahawk6

Bo Xilai’s Sacking Signals Showdown In China’s Communist Party 

Premier Wen Jiabao’s shocking press conference and the ouster of party chief Bo Xilai signals a big showdown by pols who want a more liberal China.

by Rosemary Righter | March 15, 2012 12:00 PM EDT 

Today’s unceremonious dismissal of Bo Xilai, the powerful and charismatic Party Secretary of China’s giant southwestern megalopolis of Chongqing, is a political earthquake that will send shockwaves across China. 

Bo was bigger even than his big job: the most powerful and persuasive advocate in China for leftists and neo-Maoists who believe, as Bo pointedly observed in a Beijing press conference just last week, that if “only a few people are rich” at the end of a decade of breakneck economic growth, “then we are capitalists, we’ve failed.” 

Bo touted his “Chongqing model” as a happy marriage of communist morality, social equality and economic efficiency, breaking growth records through booming state-owned corporations while spreading some of that wealth to workers in progressive socialist housing, education and health programs. He reveled in Maoist-style slogans. His “Sing Red and Strike Black” campaign, an odd juxtaposition of Maoist revivalism with ruthless crime-busting, struck a chord with many Chinese angered both by corruption and by the enormous gulf between rich and poor that many blame on economic liberalisation. 

Bo also carried the clout that comes from being one of the “princelings”—sons of the big heroes of the 1949 revolution, considered until very recently to be untouchable. He was strongly placed for the ultimate political elevation this October, expected to secure one of the nine seats on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee—a committee his detractors (who call him a “little Mao”) feared Bo would come to dominate. And indeed, there is a whiff of the 1976 fall of the Gang of Four in Bo’s abrupt defenestration. 



China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai attends the closing session of the National Peoples Congress (NPC) at The Great Hall Of The People on March 14, 2012 in Beijing, China. , Lintao Zhang / Getty Images 

It is a measure of the difficulty Bo Xilai’s ideological challenge posed to the Beijing leadership that it clearly felt compelled, the day before the axe fell, to make the case against him to the nation, under the authority of no less a figure than Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. In a broadcast press conference, Wen deliberately studded his speech with clues that Bo’s political fate was sealed. 

Party press conferences in China are not supposed to be exciting events—certainly not mere months before the leadership hands over power to the next generation, and all cadres must stage impressive displays of party unity. So Wen Jiabao’s three-hour encounter with foreign and national journalists at the end of the National People’s Congress on Wednesday would, at any time, have been nothing short of extraordinary. Here was China’s Prime Minister conjuring up the horrors of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, declaring the Arabs’ desire for democracy to be an undeniable force, challenging the Chinese to see the urgency of political reform and delivering a barely veiled attack on the “Red Princeling” Bo Xilai. Wen’s speech made it was plain to every person watching that, as far as he and his fellow modernizers were concerned, there is no going back; China is on the road to a future very different from its Maoist past. 

Wen Jiabao described the Cultural Revolution as a “tragedy”—and one that, without urgent political reforms, “may happen again” 

Wen’s rebuke was as dramatic as Chinese politics gets--and he is correct that China’s future hinges on the outcome of the battle within the Party itself. Live on national television (and therefore ruling out any subsequent gloss or watering down for public consumption), Wen chose—evidently, as it emerged the following day, in joint decision within the top leadership—to use his prime-time, once-a-year press conference to take direct aim at Bo Xilai, and signal his opposition to Bo’s promotion to the Politburo standing committee. 

With a bluntness almost unheard of in China’s stiff official discourse, Wen used this most public of platforms to describe the Cultural Revolution as a “tragedy”—and one that, without urgent political reforms, “may happen again”. In contrast, Bo has made the idea of a “Red Culture” revival central to his philosophy. 

Wen was vague about what political reform would look like in China—with only a year left of his decade in office, specifics were not the point. Wen’s purpose was to use all the considerable influence remaining to him to support the cause of liberal reform against the leftist wing of the party championed by Bo. 

That, and to tell the nation: “Watch out: this man is dangerous.” Wen responded strongly in the broadcast to questions about the dramatic tale that has riveted China since the news broke last month—the flight to a US consulate and subsequent detention in Beijing of Wang Lijun, the flamboyant Chongqing police chief and famous crimebuster who was for years Bo’s strong right arm. Discussion of that drama has crackled in almost uncensored form across the Chinese blogosphere. Wen sternly intoned that the Chongqing Party Committee (headed by Bo) must reflect seriously on the “incident” and that the government was investigating the case with utmost gravity. He added: “an answer must be given to the people and the result of the investigation should be able to stand the test of law and history.” 

What Wen did not add is that Beijing has in fact been investigating Chongqing for nearly a year now, long before Wang was suddenly purged by his boss and fled Chongqing in fear for his life. Beijing has accumulated evidence that Bo and Wang’s “strike black” campaign, officially against organised crime, has also served as cover for nabbing thousands of extremely rich businessman. Purportedly held in secret prisons and interrogated under torture, many were given long prison terms or executed. Many had their assets confiscated—a neat way, critics say, to finance Bo’s vaunted housing for the poor and leave enough over to pay for his son’s red Ferrari and to buy allegiance. 

The “smash black” campaign also served as a way to smear the stigma of corruption on Wang Yang, the liberal Guangzhou party boss who is also in line for a Politburo standing committee slot, by allowing people to come to the conclusion that Wang must have allowed these businessmen to flourish when he held Bo’s Chonqing job. In his press conference,Wen pointedly praised Wang Yang’s tenure. 

Professor Tong Zhiwei, who conducted Beijing’s investigation, is by far the leading Chinese authority on law, administration and constitution, posted at the prestigious Jiaotong University in Shanghai. His report, submitted to the leadership last autumn and also discussed by him on television, is damning. The primary goal of “strike black”, he concluded, was to “weaken and eliminate” private enterprise, “thereby strengthening state-owned enterprises or local government finances”. Its main impact, he wrote, was not on the Chongqing mafia, the ostensible target, but on the wealthy elite stripped of their money, their power and even their families--many of whom were also hauled off to detention. One of these millionaires, the businessman Li Jun who is now a penniless exile, has described in detail the torture he says he suffered under the “new red terror”, presided over by Bo and the police chief whom Bo so hurriedly demoted last month. Another mogul, Zhang Mingyu, who claims to possess incriminating tapes on the methods used against detainees, was seized by Chongqing police in Beijing last week. 

If Bo had hoped to make Wang Lijung the fall guy as the net began to close around him, that move spectacularly backfired. Beijing may now decide to throw the book at Wang--and to publish the grisly facts about the alleged torture, extortion and other unlawful methods used in Chongqing, as premier Wen hinted in his promise to make public Beijing’s investigation of the Wang affair. Such revelations, if true, would destroy both Chongqing men. Bo may well be in line for worse punishment than merely losing his job. To break the grip of the left, Bo must be discredited. This struggle is more than a battle between two ambitious contenders for leadership roles. The sacking of Bo Xilai is a pre-emptive move to ensure that the liberal line prevails in China, not the statist model. By dramatically invoking the dark decade of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has further put pressure on the hitherto reticent Xi Jinping, China’s heir presumptive, to line up, unequivocally and here and now, with the forces of modernisation. 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/15/bo-xilai-s-sacking-signals-showdown-in-china-s-communist-party.html


----------



## a_majoor

We have seen the changes in the PLA and PLAN; now the Air Force's modernization plans come into focus:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2012/03/19/AW_03_19_2012_p61-431709.xml&headline=China%27s%20Air%20Force%20Modernizes%20On%20Dual%20Tracks



> *China's Air Force Modernizes On Dual Tracks*
> 
> By Richard D. Fisher, Jr.
> Washington
> 
> As China starts to put together a modern, integrated air force, which could reach 1,000 fighters by 2020, it is developing the components of a future force of stealthier combat aircraft, new bombers and unmanned, hypersonic and possibly space-based combat platforms. These could emerge as soon as the early 2020s.
> 
> This dual track was illustrated in late 2010 by two events. One was the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s (Plaaf) first foreign demonstration of its modern capabilities: a combined-force mission of Xian Aircraft Co. H-6 bombers supported by Chengdu Aircraft Co. J-10 multi-role fighters, KJ-2000 airborne early warning and control aircraft. and H-6U tankers for an exercise in Kazakhstan. The other was the unveiling four months later of the Chengdu stealth fighter prototype, widely known as the J-20, followed in early 2011 by its first official flight.
> 
> The modernization drive relies on a comprehensive aerospace technology development program that started in the early 1990s. The first underlying doctrine was guided by “access denial” strategies that gelled in the late 1990s and focused on conflict over Taiwan. They were followed after 2005 by “New Historic Mission” strategies, propelling the PLA to dominate at greater distances and to build new, farther-reaching expeditionary capabilities.
> 
> To speed development of new weapons, the PLA has encouraged defense- sector competition since major logistics reforms in 1998, at the price of subsidizing greater redundancy. Though less prevalent in aerospace than in other defense fields, there is significant redundancy in combat aircraft, unmanned aircraft, electronics and weapons development and production.
> 
> Chengdu and the Shenyang Aircraft Co., China’s main fighter concerns, manage both stealthy and conventional fighter programs. China purchased 176 Sukhoi Su-27SK/UBK/Su-30MKK/MK2 twin-engine fighters, and co-produced over 100 more as the J-11 under license from Russia. In 2008, Shenyang started delivering the unlicensed J-11B with indigenous engines, radar and weapons, and today it is China’s most capable domestic production fighter. More than 120 J-11B and twin-seat J-11BSs serve in the air force, and are expected to be upgraded with better engines and an active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radar as they become available. A dedicated attack version of the J-11BS dubbed the “J-16” may also include these upgrades. Though it lost to Chengdu for the heavy stealth-fighter program, there is a persistent buzz that Shenyang is self-funding a medium-weight stealth warplane, perhaps called “J-60.”
> 
> Shenyang’s J-15, a near-facsimile of the Sukhoi Su-33 carrier-based fighter, is leading a new era of growth for the PLA navy’s air force. Having undergone land-based testing over the last year with the short-takeoff but arrested-recovery (Stobar) system to be used by China’s first aircraft carrier, the refurbished Russian Varyag, the J-15 could begin carrier-based testing later this year and when fully developed could prove as potent as the Boeing F/A-18E/F. An initial carrier air wing will include Changhe Z-8 airborne early warning and control helicopters with airborne early warning radar, and perhaps Russian Kamov Ka-32 anti-submarine and Ka-31 AEW helicopters.
> 
> A twin-turboprop E-2 class airborne early warning/antisubmarine warfare (AEW/ASW) aircraft is under development, perhaps for conventional-takeoff-and-landing (CTOL) on two nuclear carriers that may follow two more non-nuclear Stobar carriers. In November 2011, images emerged of a long-awaited ASW version of the Shaanxi Y-8 “New High” medium transport, which will finally give the navy an oceanic ASW and maritime surveillance platform.
> 
> Since 2003, more than 200 of Chengdu’s “low end” canard-configuration single-engine J-10A and twin-seat J-10S fighters have entered service—forming the low end of a high-low mix with the larger J-11B. Production may soon switch to the upgraded J-10B equipped with an AESA radar, infrared search and track sensor, radar cross-section reduction measures and improved electronic warfare system. One J-10B prototype has been tested with a version of the Shenyang-Liming WS-10A turbofan. This fighter may be the basis for the “FC-20” version expected to be purchased by Pakistan.
> 
> Just before the service’s 60th anniversary in October 2009, a Chinese air force general stated that their next-generation fighter would enter service between 2017 and 2019, though a late- 2010 report of PLA interest in purchasing the Russian AL-41 turbofan for this fighter might accelerate that timeline. Since its emergence on the Internet in late 2010, Chengdu’s stealthy twin-engine canard J-20 has been photographed and videoed extensively undergoing testing at Chengdu. Expected to be fitted with 15-ton-class thrust-vectored turbofans in its production form, this aircraft is expected to be capable of supercruise and extreme post-stall maneuvering, and will be equipped with an AESA radar and distributed infrared warning sensors.
> 
> In 2005 a Chinese official said that an “F-35”-class program was being considered by Chengdu. China also has long been interested in short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) fighters, and long-standing Russian and Chinese reports point to a possible Chengdu program based on technology from the Yakovlev Yak-141, a supersonic Stovl prototype tested in the late 1980s.
> 
> A potential development of medium-weight stealth fighters by 2020 would cap an expected decade of more intensive export offerings. While the export effort is led by Chengdu’s FC-1/JF‑17 cooperative program with Pakistan (which could acquire up to 300 fighters) and the fighter could yet be purchased by the air force, greater international appeal may follow its being equipped with a Chinese engine—a likely near-term prospect.
> 
> But China is already laying the foundation for sales of the FC-1, and perhaps the J-10B and J-11B, by aggressively marketing low-cost trainers like the Hongdu K-8 and the supersonic L-15, with generous financing credits and production technology transfers. This “food chain” strategy has worked in Pakistan, and could be repeated in Egypt and as far away as Latin America. Venezuela and Bolivia are customers for light attack versions of the K-8 and Venezuelan officials reportedly visited the Chengdu factory in late 2011.
> 
> The Chinese air force and navy have taken delivery of about 170 of the twin-engine Xian JH-7/JH-7A strike fighters, with indications that Xian may be developing a reduced-signature variant. Approaching the longevity and mission evolution of the Boeing B-52, Xian’s latest version H-6K bomber entered low-rate production in 2010, equipped with more powerful and efficient Progress D-30KP turbofans and a redesigned nose with modern radar and optics. The bomber is armed with more than six land-attack cruise missiles. Little is known about Xian’s follow-on bomber program, except that it could emerge this decade. In late 2009 an “official” model of a large, stealthy delta-wing bomber was revealed, though its provenance is unknown. In early 2010 Chinese academics from the prestigious Institute of Mechanics, a leading hypersonics research center, produced a paper on an apparent large aircraft with a Mach 3 cruise speed, with illustrations and wind tunnel models indicating it could be an optionally manned platform.
> 
> This year or next, Xian is expected to unveil a new 50-60-ton payload Y-20 four-engine strategic transport. While the Comac C919 twin-turbofan regional airliner is an established, well-known program, Chinese officials are far more reticent about a Boeing 767-sized widebody four-turbofan airliner program at Xian. Though its business case may be unclear, this platform could serve multiple military missions.
> 
> To power its aerospace transformation, China has purchased about 1,000 Russian Saturn AL-31 turbofans for its Su-27/J-11 and J-10A fleets, which are receiving Chinese-developed service-life extensions. But after 25 years of intensive investments, new Chinese fighter and large high-bypass turbofan engines are emerging. In 2008 the Shenyang-Liming WS-10A was good enough to enter service with the J-11B, perhaps slightly below thrust goals at 12.7 tons, but it now powers the J-11BS and prototypes of the J-15 and J-10B. Shenyang-Liming may also be working toward a 15-ton variant of this engine. The Gas Turbine Research Institute has put a new 8-9.5-ton-thrust turbofan on one FC-1 and has advanced the development of a 15-ton engine for J-20. Shenyang-Liming, Xian and the Avic Commercial Aircraft Engine Co. have 13+-ton-thrust high-bypass turbofan engine programs to power military and commercial transports, and perhaps a new bomber.
> 
> Prototypes of the J-10B use China’s first fighter-sized AESA radar by the Nanjing Research Institute of Engineering Technology (NRIET) and future versions of the J-11 and J-15 fighters are expected to have AESA. NRIET’s mechanically scanned array radar on the J-10A and FC-1 can manage two simultaneous air-to-air missile (AAM) engagements at over 100 km (62 mi.). The Luoyang PL-12 actively guided AAM may have a range of 100 km, while the helmet-sighted PL-8 and PL-9 short-range AAMs may be replaced with a helmet-display sighted PL-10. Two companies produce families of satellite and laser-guided munitions, down to 50-kg (110-lb.) weapons for unmanned combat air vehicles.
> 
> China has developed a plethora of AEW platforms. The Plaaf itself uses the “high end” KJ-2000, based on the Beriev A-50, and the smaller KJ-2000 based on the Xian Y-8 turboprop transport, with a “balance beam” AESA antenna like that of the Saab Erieye. China has also exported the Y-8-based ZDK-03 with a “saucer” radar array to Pakistan. These will be joined soon by the Chengdu/Guizhou Soar Dragon box-wing strategic UAV.
> 
> Leadership for space warfare is being sought by the air force, and its leaders clearly enunciated new strategies calling for space warfare capabilities in late 2009. But today China’s manned and unmanned space program is controlled by the General Armaments Department of the Central Military Commission. The air force’s case, however, could be advanced by Chengdu’s small Shenlong spaceplane—which may have undertaken initial sub-orbital tests by late 2010—and could be developed into an X-37B-like craft. In 2006, engineers from the China Academy of Space Launch Technology outlined plans to build a 100-ton+ space shuttle-like spaceplane, perhaps by 2020, or a more efficient sub-orbital hypersonic vehicle that would launch attached payloads. “Flying” platforms could fall under air force control, while “dual use” missions of PLA-controlled satellites and manned space platforms could remain under GAD control.
> 
> But a clash could also occur over the future ballistic missile defense mission, which Asian military sources suggest could be realized by the mid-2020s. The successful warhead interception of January 2010 was likely a GAD program, but the air force’s expected development of very-long-range anti-aircraft missiles with anti-ballistic missile capabilities might also justify its potential claim on mission leadership.


----------



## tomahawk6

There are unconfirmed reports of a coup in China. Probably just a drill,but who knows for sure.

http://m.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/coup-in-beijing-says-chinese-internet-rumor-mill-207993.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting report about Hong Kong's problems with China:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/video/video-bitter-political-rivalry-in-hong-kong/article2376264/
From _Reuters_ via the _Globe and Mail_


Essentially, a lot of Hong Kong people think they are getting less than a fair shake from Beijing. Beijing is not unalterably opposed to some form of representative democracy but it wants to start slowly and from the village level, only getting to big cities and provinces after a generation or two; Hong Kong wants more representative democracy now. How Beijing manages Hong Kong's ambitions will be watched very carefully in Taipei.



Edit: format


----------



## Edward Campbell

And more of China's economic dilemma, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, reprinted in the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/global-exchange/financial-times/how-to-blow-away-chinas-gathering-storm-clouds/article2376240/singlepage/#articlecontent


> How to blow away China’s gathering storm clouds
> 
> MARTIN WOLF
> 
> Financial Times
> Posted on Wednesday, March 21, 2012
> 
> China is entering upon a difficult transition to both lower growth and a different pattern of growth. This is the conclusion I drew from this year’s China Development Forum in Beijing. Moreover, it is likely to be a political as well as an economic transition. These two transitions will also interact with one another in complex ways. The past record of economic success, under Communist party rule, does not guarantee a comparably successful future.
> 
> 
> Readers do not need to take my word. They can take those of the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, who said on March 14: “The reform in China has come to a critical stage. Without the success of political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform. The gains we have made in reform and development may be lost, new problems that have cropped up in China’s society cannot be fundamentally resolved and such historical tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”
> 
> These political questions are of great importance. But the economic transition, in itself, will be hard enough. China is coming to the end of what economists call “extensive growth” - driven by rising inputs of labour and capital. It must now move to “intensive growth” - driven by improving skills and technology. Among other consequences, China’s rate of growth will slow sharply from its average annual rate of close to 10 per cent of the past three decades. Making this transition harder is the nature of China’s extensive growth, particularly the extraordinary rate of investment and heavy reliance on investment as a source of demand.
> 
> China is ceasing to be a labour surplus country, in terms of the development model of the late West Indian Nobel laureate, Sir Arthur Lewis. Lewis argued that the subsistence income of surplus labour in agriculture set a low ceiling for wages in the modern sector. This made the latter extremely profitable. Provided the high profits were reinvested, as in China, the rate of growth of the modern sector and so of the economy would be very high. But, at some point, labour would become scarcer in agriculture, so raising the price of labour to the modern sector. Profits would be squeezed and savings and investment would fall as the economy matured.
> 
> The China of 35 years ago was a surplus labour economy. Today that is true no longer, partly because growth and urbanization have been so rapid: since the beginning of reform the Chinese economy has grown more than 20-fold, in real terms, and half of China’s population is now urban. In addition, China’s low birth rate means that the working age population (15-64) will reach a peak of 996 million in 2015. A paper by Cai Fang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences states that “labour shortage has become rampant throughout the country since it broke out in coastal areas in 2004. In 2011, manufacturing enterprises came across unprecedented and universal difficulties in recruiting labour”. Mr Fang’s paper gives compelling evidence of the consequent rise in real wages and shrinking profits.
> 
> China is now at the Lewis turning point. One consequence is that, at a given investment rate, the ratio of capital to labour will rise faster and returns also fall faster. Indeed, strong evidence of such rising capital intensity emerged even before the Lewis turning point. According to Louis Kuijs, a former World Bank economist, the contribution to higher labour productivity of the rising ratio of capital to labour (as opposed to the contribution of a higher “total factor productivity” (TFP), or overall productivity) rose from 45 per cent between 1978 and 1994 to 64 per cent between 1995 and 2009.
> 
> This has to change. China’s growth must be driven by rising TFP, which will sustain profits, rather than rising ratios of capital to labour, which will lead to declining profits, particularly now that real wages are rising fast. Some decline in profits is desirable, given the maldistribution of income. Taken too far, it would damage potential growth.
> 
> The difficulty of making the transition to growth driven by technical progress is one reason why so many countries have fallen into what has come to be called the “middle-income trap”. China, now a middle-income country, is determined to become a high-income country by 2030. That will take deep reforms, which are laid out in a remarkable recent joint report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council. Those reforms will adversely affect vested interests, particularly in local government and state-owned enterprises. That is surely a big reason why Mr. Wen thinks political reforms matter.
> 
> The need to make difficult reforms, to sustain growth in the next two decades, is China’s longer-term challenge. In trying to get there, it confronts the short-term risks of a hard landing, as Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business at New York University pointed out at the conference. China’s government is targeting annual growth of 7.5 per cent this year and of 7 per cent in the current five-year plan period. Some such slowdown seems inevitable. As growth slows, the need for extraordinary investment rates will also decline.
> 
> Yet getting from an investment rate of 50 per cent of gross domestic product to one of 35 per cent, without a deep recession on the way, requires an offsetting surge in consumption. China has no easy way to engineer such a surge, which is why its response to the crisis has been still higher investment. In addition, China has come to rely heavily on investment in property construction: over the past 13 years investment in housing has grown at an average annual rate of 26 per cent. Such growth will not continue.
> 
> China may indeed manage the transition to a very different kind of economic growth. The country still has vast potential to catch up. But the challenges of adjusting to the new pattern will be huge. Plenty of middle-income countries have failed. It is difficult to argue against China, given past successes. The best reason for confidence is that top policy makers lack such complacency.




I agree with Martin Wolf; despite the complexities of the problems facing China I, too, am confident that the leadership can _manage_ the transitions to a more properly productive economy and to a more _responsible_ political and bureaucratic system.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> There are unconfirmed reports of a coup in China. Probably just a drill,but who knows for sure.
> 
> http://m.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/coup-in-beijing-says-chinese-internet-rumor-mill-207993.html




A report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, on why we don't get immediate, accurate reports about the Chinese leadership:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/why-the-coup-rumours-in-china-arent-going-away/article2376711/


> Why the coup rumours in China aren’t going away
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> Beijing— Globe and Mail Update
> Posted on Wednesday, March 21, 2012
> 
> One of the truths of reporting on China is that few journalists, maybe none, can honestly claim to know what’s going on inside the upper echelons of power.
> 
> In other countries, you might see reporters offhandedly refer to their unnamed contacts inside the Prime Minister’s Office, or the White House, or whatever institution they’re covering. Even when I worked in famously enigmatic Russia, I had a few “Kremlin sources” I could occasionally turn to.
> 
> Not in China. I know many of the foreign journalists based here, and more than a few of the Chinese ones. None have ever claimed to me, or their readers, that they have a contact inside, or even close to, the decision-making Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
> 
> Which, often, is to the credit of those who run this country. This is not a place where trial balloons get floated by cabinet ministers trying to build public support and win funding for their pet project, nor are China’s leaders crippled by the constant and public infighting that brought down Canada’s Liberal Party or Britain’s Labour, to name two prominent examples.
> 
> But the wall of secrecy that Communist Party leadership has built around itself also prevents the development of trust between the government, media and public. It leaves the media with no one to talk to and get real information from when there’s a wild rumour floating about, like the continuing – and so far unfounded – talk that some kind of coup d’état was attempted Monday night in Beijing. And it leaves the public unsure of what to believe in such situations.
> 
> The coup rumour began with Chinese bloggers noting some unusual security around the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in the centre of Beijing on Monday night. The speculation grew more excited when some residents reported hearing gunshots in the area.
> 
> The whispers gained a wider audience a day later when websites like the Falun Gong-linked Epoch Times (“Coup in Beijing says Chinese Internet rumour mill”) and the Taiwan-based Want China Times (“Shots Fired in Beijing – but what kind?”) quoted unnamed “sources” suggesting a coup attempt had been launched against the government of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
> 
> The mutiny was supposedly led by a leftist faction inside the Politburo headed by Zhou Yongkang, the chief of China’s massive internal security apparatus, and the recently ousted leadership contender Bo Xilai.
> 
> In another country, reporters would have been on the phone to people in the offices of Mr. Hu, Mr. Wen, Mr. Zhou and Mr. Bo, in all likelihood getting a quick denial that there was anything like a coup happening.
> 
> (I should add here that if there is a serious conflict inside Zhongnanhai, it seems odd that security in the rest of Beijing remains normal, without even the extra police presence regularly seen during national holidays and major political events. Chinese official media have said there was a meeting between senior government leaders and a North Korean delegation at Zhongnanhai on Monday night, something that could explain the extra security, if not the reported gunshots.)
> 
> But no one has the rock-solid contacts who can irrefutably confirm or deny such a sensitive tale, especially not now, with the Chinese political scene in uncommon turmoil following the dramatic firing of Mr. Bo last week.
> 
> So the rumour has continued to snowball all week, to the point where some believe it had an effect on the foreign exchange markets. The esteemed Financial Times finally felt compelled to report on Thursday that “the Chinese capital is awash with speculation, innuendo and rumours of a coup.”
> 
> And now I’m passing on the scuttlebutt too. Why? Because no one in Zhongnanhai is taking my calls. They’re not taking anyone’s calls – which leaves the outside world in the dark at a crucial moment in Chinese history (by which I mean the once-in-a-decade leadership transition that begins this fall, not the rumoured coup effort).
> 
> Try it: Google “according to a source inside the Prime Minister’s Office” and you get 85,600 results.
> 
> Searching “according to a White House source” gets you 131,000. “According to an al-Qaeda source” brings 19,900.
> 
> But “according to a source in the Chinese Politburo”? None. When this story gets posted online, it will go right to the top of the charts as the first use of that phrase in all of Googledom.
> 
> Maybe that distinction will convince someone in Zhongnanhai to ring me up – an off-the-record conversation is fine – to let me know what all the fuss was about on Monday night.




Things are different in China - if there was a coup in almost any country we would expect to see the new "leaders" on the palace balcony, saluting the happy throngs with raised fists, etc ... in China those who have real power do not believe that the people, all 1.5 billion of them, have any particular right or even need to know who rules them and they certainly don't give a damn what the media, domestic or foreign might think.


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese government is intervening in the housing market in a large way. This attempt to gradually deflate the housing bubble is well intentioned, but markets have a way of reacting in unanticipated ways (the popping of the US housing bubble and current attempts to keep the US housing market "inflated" should be fair warning to the dangers of market intervention):

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/19680?type=bloomberg



> *China Home Prices Fall in 70 Cities Tracked*
> By Bloomberg News on March 17, 2012
> 
> China’s February home prices fell in more than half of the 70 cities monitored by the government with only three cities recording gains as the country maintained curbs on the property market.
> 
> Prices fell in 45 cities last month as compared with January, while 22 cities were unchanged, the National Statistics Bureau said in a statement on its website today. That compares with 47 cities recording a decline in January. New home prices in the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou dropped for a fifth month.
> 
> Premier Wen Jiabao said last week China’s home prices remain far from a reasonable level and called on the government not to slacken efforts to regulate the housing sector. Relaxing the curbs could cause “chaos” in the market, Wen said. China’s two-year campaign to rein in home prices has included measures such as higher down payments and mortgage rates, and home purchase restrictions in 40 cities.
> 
> “With more supply coming in spring, prices will fall further,” said Lan Shen, a Shanghai-based economist at Standard Chartered Plc. “There will not be a total reversal of the government’s tightening policies this year and any sort of policy fine-tuning will have a limited impact of the market.”
> 
> Only the northern city of Baotou, the eastern city of Jinan and northwestern city of Xining posted gains of 0.1 percent in home prices. In January, no city posted gains for the first time since the government began releasing data at the start of 2011 for 70 cities instead of a national average.
> 
> Beijing, Shanghai Prices
> Among major cities, February new home prices in Beijing fell 0.1 percent from January, while prices dropped by 0.2 percent in Shanghai. The southern business hubs of Guangzhou and Shenzhen both declined by 0.2 percent.
> 
> The eastern city of Wenzhou posted the biggest drop for the fourth month, with home prices declining by 0.5 percent from January and 8 percent from last year, according to the statistics bureau. A credit squeeze on smaller businesses in the city prompted Premier Wen to visit in October and pledge financial aid.
> 
> Today’s figures came after private data also showed the home market continued to cool. China’s February home prices posted the biggest decline in 19 months, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd. (SFUN), the nation’s biggest real estate website owner.
> 
> New home prices fell in 27 out of 70 cities in February from a year earlier, the government data showed today.
> 
> China Vanke Co. (000002), the country’s largest publicly traded developer, said contracted sales in the first two months fell 27 percent from a year earlier, while they slumped 31 percent at Poly Real Estate Co. (6000048), the second-biggest developer traded on Chinese exchanges.
> 
> Existing Homes
> Existing home prices in Beijing and Shanghai both dropped 0.2 percent from January, according to the statistics bureau.
> 
> “The current administration will not relax the overall tightening stance on the housing market,” wrote Barclays Capital Asia Ltd. economists led by Jian Chang in a note to clients on March 14. “We expect a further decline in property prices, especially in major and coastal cities.”
> 
> The country’s home sales declined 25 percent in January and February, according to data from the statistics bureau on March 16. The value of homes sold fell 25 percent after surging 26 percent in the first two months of 2011.
> 
> Home prices may post a “single-digit” decline this year, billionaire developer Vincent Lo, chairman of Shui On Land Ltd. (272), said in an interview in Beijing on March 8. Home prices will not see a crash, he said.
> 
> To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Bonnie Cao in Shanghai at bcao4@bloomberg.net
> 
> To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andreea Papuc at apapuc1@bloomberg.net


----------



## a_majoor

Hmmmm:

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/21/chinese_coup_watching



> *Chinese coup watching*
> Posted By Isaac Stone Fish Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - 4:16 PM Share
> 
> Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his post as Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in the air.
> 
> Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets." The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to light, we can only speculate on what happened.
> 
> Reading official Chinese media response about Bo makes it easy to forget how much Chinese care about politics. The one sentence mention in Xinhua, China's official news agency, merely says that Bo is gone and another official, Zhang Dejiang, is replacing him.  But the Chinese-language Internet is aflame with debate over what happened to Bo and what it means for Chinese political stability.
> 
> Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup.
> 
> Speculation is rife: A Canadian Chinese news portal quoted Deutsche Welle quoting the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily quoting a netizen that a group of citizens unfurled a banner in a main square in Chongqing that said "Party Secretary Bo, We Love and Esteem You," and were subsequently taken away by plain-clothes security forces. A controversial Peking University professor Kong Qingdong, a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius, said on his television show that removing Bo Xilai is similar to  "a counter-revolutionary coup;" one news site reported his show has since been suspended.
> 
> The Wall Street Journal reports that searching for Bo Xilai's name on Baidu, China's most popular search engine, lacks the standard censorship boilerplate ("according to relevant rules and regulations, a portion of the search results cannot be revealed") that accompanies searching for top leaders like Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. A recent search for other Politburo members like Bo rival Wang Yang and People's Liberation Army top general Xu Caihou were similarly uncensored. Conversely, searching for Bo's name on Sina's popular Weibo micro-blogging service now doesn't return any relevant results. A censored fatal Ferrari crash on Sunday  night has raised suspicions of elite foul play, possibly realted to Bo. The bannedbook.org reports that Hu and Zhou "are currently fighting for control of China Central Television, Xinhua News (the official Communist Party wire service), and other ‘mouthpieces,'" which have been eerily but unsurprisingly taciturn about Bo Xilai.
> 
> What we do know, as one message that bounced around Sina Weibo said, is that "something big happened in Beijing."



All that we can say for certain is that "something is happening".


----------



## a_majoor

More in the real of Kremlinology. So long as the numbers are not adding up (this graph shows a huge drop in energy demand in China), we need to take other information about economic growth and the health of the Chinese economy with a certain degree of scepticism. How can China's economy grow at 7% if energy demand (or shipping demand, another metric discussed upthead) is actually declining? IF this is the Chinese government trying to keep their "bubble" inflated, there will be an even bigger crash than the one we saw in 2008. Stay tuned:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/no-it-not-just-chinese-new-year



> *No, It Is Not Just The Chinese New Year*
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/29/2012 19:33 -0400
> 
> The one indicator which the Chinese Politburo can not fudge: power production and hence: demand, speaks volumes about the true state of China's economy.


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese companies carrying on in this fashion will quickly gain a reputation of being scam artists and be unwelcome wherever they go. The ability to get contracts and bid on foreign work is a valuable addition to your foreign trade, so fouling the nest like this is stupid policy all around:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/category/diane-francis/



> *China must improve its construction record*
> Diane Francis  Mar 31, 2012 – 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Mar 30, 2012 2:54 PM ET
> 
> Chinese companies should be banned from construction work in Canada because of their questionable track record here and around the world.
> 
> It was shocking that Enbridge Inc.’s Pat Daniel said his company was willing to allow a Chinese company to buy a stake in and to bid for the construction of the proposed Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline.
> 
> Not only should Chinese companies be banned from construction or bidding but Investment Canada should ban them from buying resource companies or related assets.
> 
> China’s strategy is to buy resources around the world, then low-ball to get construction contracts by using Chinese laborers and materials. This is not only damaging to the domestic economy, and unnecessary, but in some cases laws and obligations have been flouted.
> 
> Just for the record, my husband heads Canada’s largest infrastructure and construction public company in Canada.
> 
> In 2007, Sinopec Shanghai Engineering Company brought in 132 Chinese workers to an Alberta oil sands site to assemble their storage tanks and do other work. Two workers were killed and several injured. The remaining Chinese workforce was moved out of Alberta and work stopped.
> 
> The Alberta government charged Sinopec, its subsidiary and their oil sands client with 53 safety charges. Sinopec and its branch plant have refused to appear in court. They say they have not been served papers because they are in China where they cannot be served papers to appear in court. Instead of acceding to Canadian law, they have not appeared.
> 
> In November, an Alberta Court of Appeal ruled the company must stand trial on these serious charges. In February, Sinopec said it wants the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn this ruling because it should be exempt.
> 
> The 132 Chinese workers were not paid an estimated $3.17 million by their Chinese employer even though they worked four months before the accident. Alberta employment standards spokesman Barrie Harrison said that the prime contractor, the Canadian oil sands project client, put the $3.17 million in wages and benefits in trust even though it had no obligation to do so.
> 
> In an interview last year, Harrison said: “We are still trying to determine the best, most secure method of returning these funds to the workers, who are now either back in China or working at other sites around the world. We’ve had nothing new to report on this file for quite some time.”
> 
> The Canadian embassy in Beijing has been involved in trying to right this wrong, at taxpayer expense.
> 
> This outrageous behavior by China and its companies should be reason enough to ban Chinese companies from bidding on construction work or having workforces in Canada. After all, a major corporation has no respect for the rule of law here; has damaged Chinese workers; damaged its Canadian client; cost the taxpayers of Alberta a great deal of money to try and clean up the mess and prosecute wrongdoing and has cost the taxpayers of Canada, Canada’s immigration department and Canada’s justice system as well.
> 
> This behavior is not unique to Canada.
> 
> Shoddy work and broken promises have occurred elsewhere. In Angola, in July 2010, more than 150 patients had to be evacuated from a new Chinese-built hospital in Luanda, after its walls began cracking and bricks began disintegrating. China Overseas Engineering Group Co. (COVEC) built the hospital for $8 million. Reports began to come out in the local media that many roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure completed by the Chinese were sub-standard or unsafe and promises to employ Angolans were not kept.
> 
> Another example was reported in 2010. The Chinese were finally able to penetrate the European Union when COVEC won a bid to build a major highway in Poland by bidding less than half the price of domestic contractors. This caused consternation across the EU because of Chinese tactics around the world. The pattern is well worn: Chinese firms low ball to beat out local competition then bring in substandard materials and workers from China.
> 
> The Poles were committed to tender bidding for the contracts, and were stuck with accepting COVEC’s basement bid but were wise to the tactics. So they stipulated that the company could not import Chinese materials, supplies or labour.
> 
> But COVEC reportedly flouted this requirement and started to bring in Chinese workers anyway, claiming that Polish workers were not cooperative and would not take pay cuts.
> 
> Then they began sourcing supplies from China, claiming Polish suppliers refused to match Chinese prices.
> 
> In June 2011, COVEC stopped work. Poland sued COVEC for $271 million in damages for breach of contract. And the country has had to spend huge amounts to complete the highway in time for the 2012 European Football Championships in Poland this summer. COVEC told China Daily it was asking for compensation.
> 
> For these reasons and more, Canada must ban any bidding or work permits to Chinese workforces. They simply are not acceptable. They are also not the only buyers for oil sands production. A pipeline can deliver oil to the west coast and then to Asian and South American markets by sea.


----------



## a_majoor

A report on weapons development in China. This is what the PLA and PLAN are working on today: http://www.uscc.gov/researchpapers/2012/China-Indigenous-Military-Developments-Final-Draft-03-April2012.pdf


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

As much as the carrot has been offered, the stick is still augmenting.
For folks such as me &  mine on Taiwan. 

We all well know we are a Rock unto both the forces of the U.S.A. and of  Nippon.
We just had our Patriots upgraded, but by far the most worrying is the doubling of range of many of the recent upgrades in observable PLA missile launch sites.


Good article here:


> NO MATTER how often China has emphasised the idea of a peaceful rise, the pace and nature of its military modernisation inevitably cause alarm. As America and the big European powers reduce their defence spending, China looks likely to maintain the past decade’s increases of about 12% a year. Even though its defence budget is less than a quarter the size of America’s today, China’s generals are ambitious. The country is on course to become the world’s largest military spender in just 20 years or so (see article).
> 
> Much of its effort is aimed at deterring America from intervening in a future crisis over Taiwan. China is investing heavily in “asymmetric capabilities” designed to blunt America’s once-overwhelming capacity to project power in the region. This “anti-access/area denial” approach includes thousands of accurate land-based ballistic and cruise missiles, modern jets with anti-ship missiles, a fleet of submarines (both conventionally and nuclear-powered), long-range radars and surveillance satellites, and cyber and space weapons intended to “blind” American forces. Most talked about is a new ballistic missile said to be able to put a manoeuvrable warhead onto the deck of an aircraft-carrier 2,700km (1,700 miles) out at sea.
> http://www.economist.com/node/21552212


----------



## a_majoor

The axe falls on Bo Xilai and his wife. The ultimate fallout is hard to gauge, how many supporters did Bo Xilai have and how well are they positioned? While a coup may be unlikely, a vicious behind the scenes power struggle is not:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/04/bo-china-party-posts-murder.html



> *Ex-Chongqing leader Bo stripped of party posts, wife detained*
> April 10, 2012 | 10:01am
> 
> Bo Xilai, the charismatic former Communist Party chief in the Chinese city of Chongqing, has been stripped of his remaining leadership roles for "violations of party discipline" and his wife has been detained on suspicion of murdering a British businessman, state-run media reported Tuesday.
> 
> Bo's ouster last month as party secretary for Chongqing unleashed one of the most high-profile political shakeups in China since the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
> 
> China's CCTV reported that Bo has been suspended from his posts on the party Central Committee and the 25-member Politburo and that his case has been handed over to a disciplinary inspection commission for investigation.
> 
> In a separate dispatch from the official New China News Agency, it was announced that Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, has been "highly suspected" in the Nov. 15 death of British businessman Neil Heywood.
> 
> The news agency reported that Bo's wife and their housekeeper, Zhang Xiaojun, had been taken into  custody after a reinvestigation of Heywood's death led authorities to suspect them of "intentional homicide." The report gave no further details of the case or how investigators came to suspect Bo's wife.
> 
> Bo, the son of Communist Party founder Bo Yibo, had been considered a contender for the top leadership in China for his revolutionary zeal and inspirational powers in his populous southwest municipality. He was sacked as Chongqing party leader on March 15. The move was seen as censure after a longtime ally and former police chief, Wang Lijun, sought temporary refuge at a U.S. consulate in February.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Bo had the same sort of constituency that Putin cultivates: people who are not faring as well as they hoped in the _new China_ and who crave a return to Mao, with all that implies, just as many Russians 'miss' Stalin, or what they thought Stalin brought to Russia.

But Bo crossed Hu Jintao and the centre ... and he did so from a position of weakness. Hu is about as far "left" as the Chinese are prepared to go, Bo was way "out there," too far beyond the consensus limits.


----------



## GAP

Wow.....China's getting greedy.....

Philippines 'withdraws warship' amid China stand-off
Article Link
 12 April 2012 

The Philippines says it has withdrawn its largest warship from a continuing stand-off with Chinese boats in the disputed South China Sea.

Earlier on Thursday a Philippine coastguard vessel arrived in the area, known as the Scarborough Shoal.

The Philippines also says China has sent a third ship to the scene.

The Philippine foreign minister said negotiations with China would continue. Both claim the shoal off the Philippines' north-west coast.

The Philippines said its warship found eight Chinese fishing vessels at the shoal when it was patrolling the area on Sunday.

It did not say why the warship had been pulled back. "That is an operational undertaking I can't discuss with you," Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.

"We are pursuing the diplomatic track in terms of coming to a resolution on the issue," Mr Del Rosario said.
Differing views

In a statement, the Philippines said that its navy boarded the Chinese fishing vessels on Tuesday and found a large amount of illegally-caught fish and coral.

Two Chinese surveillance ships then apparently arrived in the area, placing themselves between the warship and the fishing vessels, preventing the navy from making arrests.

The Philippines summoned Chinese ambassador Ma Keqing on Wednesday to lodge a protest over the incident. However, China maintained it had sovereign rights over the area and asked that the Philippine warship leave the waters.

China's state-run newspaper China Daily claimed in an editorial that the Chinese fishermen were "harassed" by the Philippine ship.

"China should take more measures to safeguard its maritime territory," the newspaper stated.

"The latest moves by China's two neighbours are beyond tolerance," it added, also referring to Vietnam. "They are blatant challenges to China's territorial integrity."

However, the Global Times newspaper added that China "has the patience to work out solutions with the countries concerned through negotiation".

The stand-off comes as the Philippines prepares for joint naval exercises with the United States from the 16 to 27 April near the disputed area. 
More on link


----------



## Kalatzi

Rotting From Within

Investigating the massive corruption of the Chinese military. 

An article from FP  - Foreign Policy - exerpt reproduced under dealing provision of the copyright act


full link here 
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/16/rotting_from_within?page=0,0


"True, the world underestimated how quickly a four-fold jump in Chinese military spending in the past decade would deliver an array of new weaponry to prevent the United States from interfering in a regional military conflict. Top American generals have worried publicly about "carrier-killer" ballistic missiles designed to destroy U.S. battle groups as far afield as the Philippines, Japan, and beyond. Last year, China tested a prototype stealth fighter and launched its maiden aircraft carrier, to augment new destroyers and nuclear submarines. What is unknown, however, is whether the Chinese military, an intensely secretive organisation only nominally accountable to civilian leaders, can develop the human software to effectively operate and integrate its new hardware.

Judging from a recent series of scathing speeches by one of the PLA's top generals, details of which were obtained by Foreign Policy, it can't: The institution is riddled with corruption and professional decay, compromised by ties of patronage, and asphyxiated by the ever-greater effort required to impose political control. The speeches, one in late December and the other in mid-February, were given by Gen. Liu Yuan, the son of a former president of China and one of the PLA's rising stars; the speeches and Liu's actions suggest that the PLA might be the site of the next major struggle for control of the Communist Party, of the type that recently brought down former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai. Liu is the political commissar and the most powerful official of the PLA's General Logistics Department, which handles enormous contracts in land, housing, food, finance, and services for China's 2.3 million-strong military.

"No country can defeat China," Liu told about 600 officers in his department in unscripted comments to an enlarged party meeting on the afternoon of Dec. 29, according to sources who have verified notes of his speech. "Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting." This searing indictment of the state of China's armed forces, coming from an acting full three-star general inside the PLA, has no known modern precedent."

Another example of the challenges they face.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is an interesting article about the political divisions _within_ the CCP:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/bo-xilais-fall-signals-victory-for-chinas-reformers/article2409711/singlepage/#articlecontent


> Bo Xilai’s fall signals victory for China’s reformers
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> BEIJING— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> Published Friday, Apr. 20, 2012
> 
> The fall of Bo Xilai, once the rising star of China’s Communist Party, has been spectacular to watch. Initially purged last month because his superiors feared he might launch a “new Cultural Revolution,” the ouster was shocking enough to spark rumours that Mr. Bo and his allies were planning to seize power in Beijing via a coup d’état.
> 
> Then came stories of a British businessman, a fixer for Mr. Bo’s family, turning up dead in a hotel room in Chongqing, the Yangtze River metropolis governed by Mr. Bo.
> 
> Chinese investigators have since connected Mr. Bo’s high-profile wife, Gu Kailai, to the killing. State media have suggested she had Neil Heywood poisoned after a falling out over “economic matters” – a reported attempt to move the Bo family’s billions out of the country – with other sources hinting at an extramarital affair gone awry. Astonishing stuff from the Communist Party, which usually excels at presenting a façade of unity.
> 
> Adding to the screen-worthiness of the tale, Mr. Bo’s playboy son, Bo Guagua – who drove a red Ferrari around Beijing and hung out with movie star Jackie Chan – has now disappeared from his classes at Harvard University. The richest businessman in the eastern Chinese city of Dalian, where Mr. Bo was previously mayor, has also vanished, presumably into police custody. Oh, and lest we forget, Mr. Bo’s flamboyant top policeman started the fireworks back in February by entering a U.S. consulate and trying to defect.
> 
> But beyond the headlines of murder, lust and corruption in southwest China, the fallout from the scandal has also tilted the world’s most populous country away from the throwback leftist politics Mr. Bo embraced. Once-embattled economic liberals within the ruling Communist Party are suddenly on the rise, using the affair to bludgeon their political rivals.
> 
> The very public humiliation of Mr. Bo – now stripped of all party posts after previously being seen as a shoo-in to be named to the Standing Committee – has brought to the surface the decades-old split that pits a group of liberal-minded reformers like Premier Wen Jiabao against a hard-line wing of the party that believes it is time for China, after 20 years of unprecedented economic growth accompanied by widening inequality, to increase state control and turn back toward its socialist roots.
> 
> It’s the biggest rupture inside China’s ruling elite since 1989, when Zhao Ziyang was ousted as Communist Party chairman after he sided with the pro-democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square. The shift comes at a critical juncture, just months before the Communist Party will unveil its new leadership lineup, with seven of the nine current members of the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo set to retire this fall. The new Politburo lineup will set the direction for the world’s rising superpower for the coming decade.
> 
> After years of being the lone voice at the top advocating greater economic and political openness within China’s one-party system, the scandal in Chongqing has, at last, given Premier Wen the upper hand.
> 
> It was Mr. Wen himself who launched the move against Bo Xilai, declaring on March 15 that “without the success of political reforms, historical tragedies like the Cultural Revolution could possibly happen again.” It was a clear reference to Mr. Bo, who encouraged Chongqing residents to sing “red” songs associated with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and’70s, a time of deadly class warfare around the country.
> 
> At his fateful press conference, Mr. Wen said Chongqing administrators needed to “reflect” on their errors. Within 24 hours, Mr. Bo was ousted and the tales of murder and corruption started coming to light.
> 
> There are reports on overseas Chinese websites that another ally of Mr. Bo’s, senior Politburo member Zhou Yongkang, is himself now the subject of an internal Communist Party probe. Both Mr. Zhou, who heads the country’s massive security apparatuses, and Mr. Bo are seen as protégés of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who at 85 still wields substantial influence and is seen as a rival of current President Hu Jintao.
> 
> (All that’s known for sure about the next Politburo is that Xi Jinping, the current vice-president, will head it. Little is known about the political views of Mr. Xi, who is believed to have been selected as a compromise between the two factions.)
> 
> With Mr. Bo out of the picture, the liberal wing of the party is advancing proposals to privatize state-owned assets and open China’s financial sector to foreign competition. Meanwhile, Mr. Bo’s statist ideas are being sidelined. Many popular leftist and nationalist websites have been blocked on Chinese servers since shortly after Mr. Bo’s troubles began last month.
> 
> “There’s no need to decide which side to stand on, because everybody knows they need to stand opposite to Bo,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing. A series of editorials in the state-controlled media have urged China’s people, and particularly the military (where Mr. Bo is believed to still have allies), to “firmly support” the decision to oust Mr. Bo.
> 
> Some worry that useful ideas are being purged along with the man. While Mr. Bo gained fame for his use of Maoist propaganda in Chongqing – as well as a no-holds-barred campaign against the city’s crime syndicates – the “Chongqing Model,” as the experiment came to be known, also included efforts to address China’s yawning urban-rural income gap through a trial reform of the country’s hated household registration system, one that finally allowed rural-born residents to claim the same rights as those born in the city. Mr. Bo also oversaw a massive expansion of social housing in Chongqing, as well as a push to improve the local ecology by replacing billboard advertisements with millions of newly planted trees.
> 
> The Chongqing Model, and its emphasis on greater state involvement in the economy, was often held up as one possible road China’s next generation of leaders could follow. The contrasting approach – the “Guangdong Model” – was on display in coastal Guangdong province, where local Communist Party boss Wang Yang focused his efforts on opening the economy and even allowing some non-government organizations to take root. Now, many expect the Guangdong Model will prevail simply because no one will dare express support for the Chongqing Model, lest it be interpreted as support for Mr. Bo.
> 
> “I have no idea what’s happening with Bo Xilai. The real issue is that public discussion and debate has been wiped out. And that’s a real danger,” said Wang Hui, a Tsinghua University professor seen as one of the intellectual leaders of the “new left” movement with which Mr. Bo was affiliated.
> 
> Leftists and liberals alike find common ground on one point: that Mr. Bo’s case needs to be heard in public so that China can finally break the cycle of justice carried out behind the curtain. “This country has no rule of law because the leaders don’t follow the law,” said Tie Liu, a veteran Communist Party journalist who has backed Mr. Wen in his reform push. “This is why history keeps repeating itself in China.”




My personal perception is that there is a vibrant political debate going on in China - with extremes that are about the same as Stephen Harper's Conservatives vs Thomas Mulcair's NDP here in Canada - but it, the debate, is not held during public elections, rather, it takes place _within_ the Chinese Communist Party and, oddly enough, in the pages of the foreign language press.

The CCP is Deng Xiaoping's party,not Mao's; the CCP is not a communist party except in name. Mao's party was communist because Zhou Enlai was a committed communist - something I have always found hard to fathom because Zhou was a very, very smart man and, in my opinion, communism makes neither social nor economic sense, but he was also, like his mentor Sun Yat-sen, enamoured of the Russian (USSR) model. Deng was not a communist; he saw, clearly, the inherent internal contradictions in Marxist communism and, equally, the the social nonsense inherent in the Leninist model. Post Deng the CCP has 'tested' two extremes: first through a nearly 'free market' group, called the _Shanghai Gang_, led by Jiang Zemin, which probably went a bit too far, being more 'free market' than e.g. Mitt Romney - in any event Jiang 's favoured successor was rejected by the Party's council and, instead, they (s)elected Hu Jintao to lead China and he would be very comfortable leading a provincial NDP government in Canada.

Bo Xilai wanted to go father _left_ that Hu - too far, I think for the Party leaders who, like Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair, are searching for the elusive political _centre_.


----------



## a_majoor

More on Bo Xilai and what the effect will be on China (long article, follow link):

http://www.nbr.org/research/activity.aspx?id=236



> *The Bo Xilai Crisis: A Curse or a Blessing for China?*
> 
> An Interview with Cheng Li
> By Anton Wishik
> April 18, 2012
> 
> China currently faces a daunting political crisis, due to the ongoing scandal riveting the country as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prepares for its upcoming leadership transition. Bo Xilai—formerly party chief of Chongqing and a member of China’s Politburo—has been stripped of his posts due to an investigation stemming from Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun’s February 2012 visit to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. During his conversations with U.S. officials, it is believed that Wang revealed damaging information about Bo and sought refuge due to his fear of persecution. After spending a night at the consulate, Wang was taken into custody by Chinese officials, a fate later shared by Bo and his wife Gu Kailai. Wang is currently being investigated, while Bo has been accused of various transgressions and Gu is suspected of involvement in the death of British citizen Neil Heywood in late 2011.
> 
> Bo, the son of a famous Chinese revolutionary, came to national prominence during his time as party chief of Chongqing due to his charisma, his ruthless crackdown against organized crime, and his promotion of Maoist songs and imagery. Before being assigned to lead Chongqing, Bo served as minister of commerce and mayor of Dalian in Liaoning province. In the months prior to this scandal, Bo was viewed as a rising star and a candidate for promotion to the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee.
> 
> NBR spoke with Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese elite politics and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the significance of these events, what they mean for China’s upcoming leadership transition, and their implications for future Chinese political reforms.
> 
> 
> How significant is this crisis for China?
> 
> My overall assessment is that the dismissal of Bo Xilai is a very positive event in China’s political development. While it has already constituted the most serious political crisis since the 1989 Tiananmen incident (and perhaps since the 1971 Lin Biao incident), the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao administration may have successfully avoided an even bigger crisis. In stark contrast with the 1989 Tiananmen incident, China’s economy and society have hardly been disrupted, at least up until now. This reflects the maturity of Chinese society and the strength of the country as a whole. To a great extent, this crisis has been a good thing for China. It not only reveals major flaws in the Chinese political system, but may also help the Chinese leadership, intellectual communities, and the general public reach a new consensus, thus contributing to bold and genuine political reforms. However, if the leadership fails to seize this great opportunity, the CCP will be in greater jeopardy in the years to come.
> 
> 
> What is the Bo Xilai case really about: factional infighting, Bo’s notorious egotism, or ideological conflict?
> 
> To a certain extent all of the above, though none of these explanations, nor any combination of them, adequately tells the whole story. Something far greater is at stake.
> 
> Bo Xilai’s story is certainly linked to China’s present-day factional politics, which I characterize as “one party, two coalitions.” One coalition is led by former president Jiang Zemin’s protégés. While the core of this coalition used to be the so-called Shanghai Gang, “princelings” (leaders who come from high-ranking family backgrounds) have become more central since the fall of Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu on corruption charges in 2006. Bo Xilai is a princeling, as his father Bo Yibo was a revolutionary veteran who served as vice premier. The other coalition primarily consists of former officials from the Chinese Communist Youth League and is led by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. These two coalitions fight with each other over power, influence, and policy initiatives. Bo Xilai’s career advancement can certainly be attributed to his princeling background and his patron-client ties with Jiang Zemin.
> 
> Bo’s downfall is also related to his own egotistical personality and notorious ambition. While his ambitions were most recently focused on achieving a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, it would have not stopped there. In the months preceding the crisis, members of Bo’s staff spread the rumor that he could become China’s next premier. In addition, Su Wei, a scholar close to Bo at the Chongqing Party School, compared Bo Xilai and Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan to former leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in comments circulated in both the Chongqing and national media.
> 
> The Bo episode is also related to ideological conflict, as he was associated with China’s “new left” thinking—especially through his Mao-style campaigns, such as the “smash the black” anti–organized crime campaign—and advocated an ultra-egalitarian and ultra-nationalist development model for China, known as the “Chongqing model.”
> 
> But this episode is really more than the sum of these factors. Most importantly, it involves Wang Lijun’s attempted defection to the United States and the charges against Bo’s wife related to the murder or assassination of British citizen Neil Heywood. The Chinese public has been shocked by both incidents, since this is a very unusual set of events in CCP history. How is it possible that national hero Wang Lijun and one of China’s top leaders are capable of such actions? When these kinds of charges are involved, all Chinese leaders—regardless of which faction they belong to—will not support Bo Xilai any longer, because the current crisis poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the CCP itself. The stakes are very high, and the challenge facing the CCP leadership is intimidating.


----------



## a_majoor

Long article about the new(ish) American policy in the Pacifc. Many of the outlines were laid out in the "Project for a new American Century" http://www.newamericancentury.org/ . This may well be the center of gravity for American policy, and with our own links growing in the Pacific region (through bilateral agreements, free trade and eventual inclusion in the Trans Pacific Partnership) we are going to be heavily involved as well:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/30/high-noon-in-beijing/



> *High Noon in Beijing*
> Walter Russell Mead
> 
> Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be arriving in Beijing at perhaps the diciest moment in US-China relations since Richard Nixon reached out to shake Chou Enlai’s hand on his historic visit to what American conservatives then still called Red China.
> 
> Last fall, the Obama administration pulled off a diplomatic revolution in maritime Asia — the coastal and trading states on and around the Asian mainland that stretch in an arc from Korea and Japan, down to Australia and Indonesia, and sweep around through southeast Asia to India and Sri Lanka. Via Meadia has been following this story closely; it is the biggest geopolitical event since 9/11 and, while it builds on a set of US policies that go back at least as far as the Clinton administration and were further developed in the Bush years, the administration’s mix of policies represent a decisive turning point in 21st century Asian history.
> 
> The legacy press, still befuddled from drinking too much of the ‘US in decline’ Koolaid so widely peddled in recent years, has still not grasped just how audacious,  risky and above all successful the new strategy is: the United States is building a Pacific entente to counter — though not to contain — the consequences of China’s economic growth and military posture in the region. The US is lending its unequivocal support to the smaller Asian states who have boundary disputes with China in the resource-rich, strategically vital South China Sea. It has announced new deployments of troops and new military agreements as it extends its military network from northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, the Pacific islands) south and east to Australia, Singapore and beyond. It continues to deepen its strategic relation with India — Asia’s other nuclear superpower with a billion plus citizens and a country which openly states that the purpose of its (growing) nuclear arsenal is to balance China.
> 
> Additionally, the US has launched a new round of trade talks, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP that will open markets dramatically among a group of Asia-Pacific countries. China has not been invited to join.
> 
> These are bold moves. Many China specialists were unnerved as the administration rolled the new policy out last fall, fearing that the US push back would strengthen hardliners in Beijing to commit to a full-on anti-US policy.
> 
> That hasn’t happened yet, largely because in spite of all the misguided hype about China’s inexorable rise there isn’t actually much Beijing can do about Washington’s new activism. The more it pushes its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the more tightly the other countries will cling to Washington’s skirts. Dumping its dollar hoard would wreck the Chinese economy. Taking a super hard line on Syria and Iran will annoy the Gulf Arabs whose oil keeps China’s factories running. Naval exercises with Russia don’t even impress North Korea, much less cow Washington.
> 
> While a formidable power in many respects, and one potentially with a great future, China is simply not a peer competitor of Washington in Asia at this point, and its illusions and pretensions left China uncomfortably exposed when the real world power decided to raise its game in the Pacific Basin.
> 
> Fine tuning diplomacy is a difficult thing, especially when adjusting the relations of great powers. Since the administration began to roll out its maritime initiatives last fall, a number of things have happened — some by coincidence, some as unforeseen consequences of steps the US took — that have actually made our China policy much stronger and more effective than planned.
> 
> It is these follow-ons and the coincidences more than our actual Asia policies that make Clinton’s Beijing trip so fraught. Look at what has happened since the new US Asia policy launched last year:
> 
> Myanmar, one of China’s only two regional allies, has switched sides, and is working increasingly closely with America’s partners in the Pacific Entente.
> The Philippines have taken a highly visible, confrontational posture toward Chinese ‘interlopers’ in waters Manila claims, and have attempted to engage direct US support.
> China’s economic growth has slowed and its exporters are experiencing shrinking demand even as labor unrest at home puts new pressure on manufacturers.
> The Bo Xilai fiasco has exposed the fissures in China’s leadership, destroyed hopes of a smooth power transition and shone a spotlight on entrenched corruption and the conflict and rivalries at the heart of China’s ruling elite.
> Now, the daring night time escape of Chen Guangcheng and his race across 500 kilometers to the shelter of the US embassy has both enraged and humiliated China’s government — hours before Secretary Clinton’s scheduled arrival.
> 
> It is a safe bet that some Chinese nationalists, including people high up in various state and military organizations, are shaking with rage and frustration as they contemplate these events. Conspiracy theories popular in some circles associate the US with the Bo Xilai scandal — after all, it was to the US consulate in Chengdu that Wang Lijun fled and where he spilled the beans about the reign of Bo in Chongqing. Chen’s flight to the embassy will further deepen the angry paranoia in some circles; it will seem obvious to some that he could not have made this escape without more help than a handful of dissidents could provide, and the timing is so spectacular that it must be part of some secret, long prepared American scheme. Put these ‘facts’ together with the new American assertiveness in the region, and many serious people in China will draw the conclusion that the US is trying to do to China what it did to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, they will think we are perilously close to success — so close, that any further concessions and retreats must be resisted as a matter of life and death.
> 
> (That within a few months a leading Chinese official and a leading dissident should both have turned in extremis to American diplomats should, by the way, make Americans everywhere stand a little taller. We have somehow managed to acquire a reputation for honest dealing and political courage in China; it should be our goal to preserve that. There are times when it is appropriate to be proud of your country, and this is one of them.)
> 
> These events tap into some deep wounds in Chinese historical memory, and fears of being ignored, humiliated and pushed around by a self-righteous and imperial West, never far beneath the surface in modern China, are flaring up. It’s worse because so recently China seemed to be riding so high; many people inside China believed all the hype about China’s rise and America’s decline as thoroughly as any group of European intellectuals, and the shock of realizing how wrong they were is severe.
> 
> Meanwhile, the strategy of China’s current leadership had been to use both the Bo Xilai affair and the painful blow back from China’s South China Sea adventure to deepen their hold on power and strengthen the country’s adherence to the path of reform at home, “peaceful rise” abroad. Wen Jiabao was using Bo’s fall as an opportunity to target the entire left-nationalist-populist bloc in Chinese politics and cement the power of the more modernizing, reformist wing of the ruling party. Bo’s fall allowed the political leadership to reassert its leadership over the military as well, as military leaders fell in line to fight against those in the army who favored Bo’s nostalgic, left-tinged nationalism.
> 
> From a US perspective, that looked like a pretty good outcome. The Obama administration was ready to approach China with open hands, offering its newly strengthened reformist leadership an opportunity to move forward even as it applied some discreet pressure on issues like Iran and Syria where it hopes for more Chinese help.
> 
> The Chen escape seriously complicates that strategy. From the standpoint of China’s leadership, the flight points to a degree of incompetence and laxity that is deeply humiliating to all concerned. How can a single blind man in poor health outwit the security establishment of the most powerful one party state on earth? How can a dissident under house arrest pop up in American hands on the eve of vital talks with the American Secretary of State?
> 
> And finally there is another shadow that will hang over Secretary Clinton in Beijing. Japan’s Prime Minister Noda will be meeting President Obama while Secretary Clinton is meeting the Chinese, and the Japanese and American leaders are expected to discuss enhanced security cooperation that would see Japanese troops training on US bases even as the island nation expands military ties, arms shipments and “strategic” aid throughout Asia. High on both President Obama’s and Prime Minister Noda’s to-do list: developing strategies to rein in China’s last remaining regional ally North Korea.
> 
> None of this suggests easy bargaining over the fate of Mr. Chen, nor does it make it any easier for the Chinese leadership to cooperate right now on other issues of mutual concern. The Obama administration cannot force Mr. Chen to walk out into Chinese custody without a serious loss of prestige and moral capital; the Chinese authorities cannot let him go without paying a high price.
> 
> When the Obama administration set out to check China last year, it did not intend to corner or contain it. But America is a bit stronger and China somewhat weaker and more fragile than most people thought, and our policies have succeeded perhaps a bit more than we might have liked.
> 
> Kurt Campbell, Clinton’s chief Asia deputy, flew quietly to Beijing to try to prevent the Chen question from spoiling the summit; no doubt he and Secretary Clinton will have to talk fast and talk well to provide their hosts with some reassurance that the US genuinely does want reasonable and respectful relations with Beijing.
> 
> What we all seem to be learning in Asia is that events have a logic and a pace of their own. America can set a policy in motion, but we can’t control or fine tune the consequences of our policies as they ripple out across the world. Many conversations with US officials in this and in prior administrations have left me convinced that the US is not trying to contain China the way we once contained the Soviet Union. While virtually all Americans at senior levels believe that over time economic progress will lead to political change in China, this is because most Americans are hardwired to think in those terms and this whiggish faith in the historical process is not a statement of policy or intent.
> 
> Leading Americans in both parties generally hope for a peaceful and gradual reform process rather than violent conflict in China; they do not want to dismember or impoverish China and they would not welcome its disintegration. Nor do Americans see the evolution of a future Asian security order in zero-sum terms. The United States wants to prevent Chinese domination of Asia but we do not want to dominate the region ourselves.
> 
> Many Chinese, I have found on my visits there, have a much darker view of our intentions, and see the US and China entangled in a zero sum battle for dominance which only one side can win. For now, it appears that the US, surprisingly to some Chinese analysts, is winning that contest. We should not expect Chinese hard liners to accept that situation with calm and resignation, even if their present options are limited.
> 
> Secretary Clinton will be flying from China on to India by way of Bangladesh. With Japan’ Noda in Washington and Clinton in New Delhi, the view from Beijing is likely to remain dark. Additional irritating events are sure to occur. It is in the interest of smaller powers like Vietnam and the Philippines to exploit their new support from Washington for what they can; this will make them more assertive in the South China Sea and new incidents will likely occur that confront the Chinese government with an unpalatable choice between looking weak or enduring a crisis. The question of US arms sales to Taiwan will no doubt come up. North Korea can be expected to misbehave. More actions by more dissidents at home will agitate domestic opinion and affect China’s standing abroad. The global economic uncertainties will force China’s hand on economic policy in ways that may complicate its relations with trading partners, including the US. During the interminable US election campaign now already under way, the two candidates and their surrogates will compete to sound tough about China on trade, security and humanitarian issues.
> 
> America’s new stance in Asia is real and it won’t be changing soon. The consequences of that shift for Asian politics and for US-China relations are complex and won’t be fully understood for some time. But this is a murky and even a dangerous time; we wish Secretary Clinton every possible success as she attempts to build bridges between two very different political cultures and world views.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Too many people are reading both too much and too little into what Mead calls "the Bo Lixai fiasco." Too much because it wasn't a _fiasco_ at all, it was, rather, a well executed and quite brutal 'takedown' of a very powerful political figure - I say well executed because, despite the excitement in the _twitterverse_ there was no public disorder, in fact there was damn little public anything; Bo is gone, so are his ideas, China carries on. Too little because Bo's 'takedown' signals that major reforms in governance will happen: I don't know what shape they will take and, despite the rumours being floated in the media about Wen Jiabao's plans for big changes right now, I don't know when they will happen.

My guess is that we will see more open and fair elections for officials in small centres - villages, neighbourhoods and so on; more important, I suspect we will see major reforms in how Party members are recruited, selected, retained, developed and promoted: the goal, I think, is to return to centuries, even millennia of Chinese tradition and have a government of _mandarins_ who are selected based on talent and promoted based on merit.

The Chines economy and the body politic will have ups and downs over the next few decades - maybe patches as rough as those in America, but maybe not because the Chinese political system might be better suited to weathering storms. But there is no turning back: Bo was wrong, Mao is dead, the aim is to produce generations of Zhou Enlais. That may be the form of government best suited to China's culture and history.


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## GAP

The economic diversity within the country, coupled with a massive shift in communication technology has to be giving the government huge nightmares.....no longer can they easily divide & conquer, or even divide. 

The influx into the cities and the high wages compared to rural areas is getting around and the people will be demanding a level playing field.....I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to solve that riddle....


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## a_majoor

While these events may be quite significant either individually or collectively, I am a bit unclear if these are really the shocke the author thinks. Since much of the current Chinese government's ability to paper over the cracks comes from sustained economic growth, I'd suggest the mismatch in various economic indicators (some of which are upthread) paint a different picture than the "official" measurements. If the facade comes crashing down, either by accident or design (my guess would be the popping of the construction bubble), then we will see real revolution in the streets. The long term issue not mentioned here is demographics, which will exacerbate existing problems as Chinese society accomodates new social strains caused by the one child policy.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/04/29/four-shocks-that-could-change-china/print/



> *Four Shocks That Could Change China*
> The Chinese flag flutters in Tiananmen Square,...
> 
> (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
> 
> In the past four months, the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) has experienced four shocks that could materially affect, if not eventually end, its “leading role” in Chinese society.
> 
> First, on December 13 of last year, a mob of villagers forced out local party leaders and the police and took control of the town of Wukan. Enraged by illegal land grabs and police brutality, the villagers installed their own representatives after gaining concessions from national authorities. The Wukan uprising is symbolic of the two hundred thousand mass protests reported for 2010.
> 
> Second, on February 27, a key government think tank issued its China 2030 report in conjunction with the World Bank. Rapid growth could only be sustained, the report argued, by giving free rein to the private sector and ending the preferential treatment of the state economy: The role of the government “needs to change fundamentally” from running the state sector to creating a rule of law and the other accoutrements of a market economy. A month later (on March 28), the state council approved a financial reform pilot experiment to legalize private financial institutions and allow private citizens to invest abroad.
> 
> China 2030 is an open warning that China’s vaunted state capitalism model cannot sustain growth and usher China to the next level. A faltering economy would pose an imminent threat to the CPC’s claim to its leading role.
> 
> Third, on April 10, charismatic regional party leader, Bo Xilai, was fired as party boss of Chongqing and expelled from the Politburo. Bo Xilai embodied the party faction favoring state-led economic development and Maoist ideology. Bo’s status as the son of one of China’s “Eight Immortals” did not save him from charges of political deviation and corruption. Bo’s influential wife was arrested under suspicion of murder of an English business associate.
> 
> Fourth, on April 27, blind dissident and noted civil rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, evaded the security guards guarding his house in his home village and made it to Beijing, where he gained refuge in the U.S. embassy. Guangcheng’s escape shows the sophistication, dedication, and coordination abilities of the dissident community and is an embarrassment to the CPC and its security forces.
> 
> From the relative safety of the U.S. Embassy, Guangcheng can inform the Chinese people of their constitutional rights and the world community of the beatings and torture he and his family suffered on orders from the CPC. The U.S. Embassy can express its concerns over his charges of human rights abuse without directly involving itself in internal Chinese politics.
> 
> These four shocks took place against the backdrop of the looming Eighteenth Party Congress. The Congress of 2270 delegates will elect the Central Committee and appoint the coveted standing committee of the Politburo and the party General Secretary, who also holds the title of President.
> 
> Party Congresses do not take place until their orchestration is complete. There is no exact date set for the Congress, other than late 2012. In the USSR, Stalin waited to hold party congresses until all his ducks were lined up in a row. The CPC apparently has some more finishing touches to complete.
> 
> USSR power struggles occurred when an aged leader died. Deng Xiaoping insisted on mandatory term limits to spare China geriatric and unstable leaders, bereft of new ideas and prone to irrationalities (such as Mao and his Cultural Revolution). Two of the four shocks show that regular turnover breeds regular power struggles. China 2030 and the Bo Xilai case are manifestations of the ongoing power struggle that is taking place amidst a background of civil unrest.
> 
> Public acceptance of the party’s leading role requires belief in the image of party harmony and unity. Why give all power to a monopoly party torn apart by competing factions?  Perhaps Bo Xilai has the answers, not Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao? Stalin and his successors went to extraordinary lengths to conceal factional disputes. Bo Xilai’s public humiliation serves as a warning to his sympathizers but at the price of revealing the party’s confusion and disunity.
> 
> Bo Xilai’s demotion was not supposed to happen in this way. Bo Xilai’s assignment to the backwater Chongqing was intended to put him out to a quiet pasture. Term-limited leaders feared his ambition, his  “leftist Chongqing model.” Bo Xilai’s enforcer’s spectacular flight to the U.S. Consulate and Bo’s wife’s arrest on murder charges lent drama, but other excuses would have been found to get rid of him.
> 
> Bo Xilai’s removal on the eve of a party congress is nothing new. The party boss of Shanghai was sentenced to eighteen years in prison on charges of financial fraud and corruption to clear the way for the current leadership prior to the Seventeenth Party Congress. A similar fate awaits Bo Xilai and many of his followers – a worse fate perhaps awaits his wife.
> 
> The CPC’s social compact calls for the party to orchestrate rapid growth and rising living standards in return for public acceptance of its political monopoly and repression of doubters and dissidents. China 2030 and the Bo Xilai case make clear that the party’s factions disagree on how to fulfill this compact. Bo Xilai’s sinking forces stand for the “state advance, private sector retreat” policy of a close alliance between state enterprises and banks and the party. China 2030 and its “liberal” supporters propose to privatize or otherwise rationalize state enterprise, break the state banking monopoly, and place the private sector on an equal footing.
> 
> Dismantling or weakening China’s national “Chongqing model” is more easily said than done, as the expression goes. In an understated tone, China 2030 warns that it will “require strong leadership and commitment, steady implementation with a determined will… that will ensure public support…and oversight of the reform process.” In more direct language: Any attack on China’s state-party alliance will be met with the stiffest of resistance by vested-interest groups.
> 
> China 2030 requires a delicate balancing act by its “liberal” supporters. They, like their “conservative” opponents, have freely fed at the trough of China’s state capitalism. Even the most conscientious, such as the revered premier “Grandpa” Wen, have not restrained their children, friends, and relatives from amassing huge fortunes. Those less sensitive collect their tributes directly. Party connections have made poor China a land of 115 billionaires.
> 
> That the liberals are prepared to break with the state capitalism model so admired in the West suggests they know something we do not.
> 
> Few Western observers understand that China’s growth comes from the private sector, not from the national champions run by party-affiliated state capitalists.  Starting from virtually zero in 1980, private enterprise has grown to at least half of GDP. The private sector has grown at least three times faster than the state sector. Studies show that private enterprises are at least twice as productive as state enterprises despite enormous handicaps from Chinese officialdom.
> 
> The Wukan uprising helps explain why CPC liberals, who themselves have financially benefited from state capitalism,  embrace China 2030. They fear the backlash of ordinary people who experience the demands for bribes, arbitrary treatment, illegal land grabs, denials of licenses, and other demeaning harassment inflicted on them by indifferent officials, who appear to be immune from punishment.
> 
> Public outrage and a new inspiring voice speaking from the U.S. embassy create a tinderbox that a spark could ignite. For the CPC, dissident Guangcheng’s escape could not have come at a worse time.
> 
> The public revelations of the Bo Xilai case add fuel to China’s tinderbox. Earlier, ordinary Chinese believed that corruption was a local affair. Their mayor or police chief may be corrupt but at least the stalwart party leaders in Beijing want the best for the country. Just as the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror appealed to Stalin to save them, the villagers of Wukan placed their trust in higher party officials. Now they learn through the internet and even Politburo members are as crooked as the local officials who just shook them down.
> 
> The CPC leaders may simply be paying lip service to China 2030 to cement their power base.  But if they are serious, how in the world can they implement this “radical” change in course?
> 
> Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR of 1987 commends itself as a historical parallel with the same ingredients. Gorbachev had warnings that the planning system had failed. He was pestered by dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov. He was aware of official corruption, albeit at a much lower scale than today’s China. His KGB brutally suppressed the occasional riot, but Gorbachev knew that higher bread prices could bring people to the street. As a reformer, he was opposed by conservative party heavy weights who wanted the system continued. Gorbachev succeeded in destroying state planning and inadvertently the party, but his economic reform failed and the USSR collapsed.
> 
> Clearly CPC leaders are not fighting for power to preside over collapse. They intend to strengthen their power by elevating the more-productive private sector while somehow convincing the party elite to sacrifice wealth “for the good of the country.” Such appeals usually fall flat.
> 
> We are inept at foreseeing big changes, such as the Soviet collapse or the Arab Spring.  Major changes often fail by narrow margins. China might be democratic today if Tiananmen Square had played out differently. Vladimir Putin might not be president of Russia today if the December weather had been warmer or if his police had killed demonstrators at Bolotnaya Square.
> 
> The leaders of the CPC are trying to avoid a constellation of events that increase the likelihood of dramatic change. The CPC leadership understands that it could happen, and they are afraid.
> 
> Paul Roderick Gregory’s latest book,  ”Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina, ” can be found at amazon.com.


----------



## Edward Campbell

People forget that there are three 'Chinas:'

1. The modern, rich, fully capitalist and almost exclusively (more than, say, Canada) private sector China which is on the East coast;

2. The growing, emerging middle income, _'mixed'_ public/private  China which is in the central provinces; and

3. The poor, still backwards and almost exclusivelt public sector China in the West.

In some respects China parallels our own development which had a great deal of public sector involvment - think the railways, which although "private" were publicly funded and the equally important Trans Canada microwave system which was build by a public/provate mix. The difference is that we did these things sequentially and China is doing them all at once, albeit on a geographic basis.

I think some of the conflicting data is a result of:

1. The three coexisting levels of development; and

2. The nature of the Chinese federation that gives a lot of autonomy to the provinces.


----------



## a_majoor

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think some of the conflicting data is a result of:
> 
> 1. The three coexisting levels of development; and
> 
> 2. The nature of the Chinese federation that gives a lot of autonomy to the provinces.



Frankly, I really hope so, since a burst Chinese bubble will have unpredictable consequences throughout the world (most of them not good for us).


----------



## a_majoor

The most difficult thing about this story is the ever changing narrative. What the hell actually happened here?

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/china/225369-chinese-dissident-become-political-headache-for-obama



> *Chinese dissident becomes political headache for Obama*
> By Julian Pecquet and Amie Parnes - 05/03/12 05:45 PM ET
> 
> Chen Guangcheng’s daring escape to the U.S. embassy turned into a major political headache for President Obama on Thursday as Republicans accused the administration of naively handing the blind human rights activist back to Chinese authorities.
> 
> The administration as early as Wednesday hoped to have scored a diplomatic coup with a deal that appeared to salvage high-stakes negotiations with China on Syria and global trade.
> 
> By Thursday, however, the political storyline had flipped 180 degrees, with the administration desperately pushing back against the impression that it had abandoned the blind dissident to Chinese authorities and betrayed American values in the process.
> 
> Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said it was apparent “our embassy failed to put in place the kind of verifiable measures that would have assured the safety of Mr. Chen and his family.”
> 
> “If these reports are true, this is a dark day for freedom and it’s a day of shame for the Obama Administration,” Romney said.
> 
> House Republicans vowed to get answers from the Obama administration.
> 
> “Next week,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said during an emergency hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, “I will look to convene another hearing of this commission on Chen in order to take testimony from the Obama administration witnesses and to get some answers.”
> 
> Chen arrived at the embassy last week, just days before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were to meet with Chinese officials for the U.S.-China Economic and Strategic Dialogue that started Thursday.
> 
> Embassy officials say Chen left the embassy of his own volition to be reunited with his family and get treated for injuries sustained during his escape from house arrest. He now says U.S. diplomats pressured him to leave and that Chinese officials threatened his family.
> 
> White House press secretary Jay Carney pushed back at that suggestion on Thursday, insisting U.S. officials put no pressure on the dissident and that Chen did not ask for asylum while at the U.S. embassy.
> 
> “All of our actions have been aimed at putting Mr. Chen in the best possible position to achieve his goals,” Carney said.
> 
> He noted that Chen has now changed his view on where he wants to be, and Carney said the U.S. is looking to take the next steps based on Chen’s goals.
> 
> The situation on the ground in China is far from clear.
> 
> U.S. diplomats have not been able to see Chen since dropping him off at a Chinese hospital on Wednesday, Chen told the executive committee via telephone. In that surprise call, Chen again expressed his wish for a face-to-face meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
> 
> China's foreign ministry has responded with outrage, demanding that the U.S. apologize for harboring Chen.
> 
> Observers said the U.S. and China will both be looking for a way out of the diplomatic fight that allows both sides to save face.
> 
> “It's hard to play them in a way that makes you look heroic,” said Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. “You want to resolve it in a way that reflects American values of human rights but you don't want it to be a cause celebre because it washes away your ability to deal with other issues. And since China will be the principal bilateral relationship with the United States, it has to be handled carefully.”
> 
> Jillson said he expected the situation to quickly be resolved given the two nations' mutual dependence.
> 
> The two countries are tied at the hip economically – China is America's second-largest trading partner and is the largest single holder of U.S. government debt – and China's support is needed to get anything done in the UN.
> 
> “While human rights are critical interest to the U.S. and we want to see the government treat all its citizens well,” he said, “the administration knows that it's a decades-long work in progress and they have economic issues and other pressing issues that are the first priority.”
> 
> Chen's own history is another complicating factor.
> 
> The self-taught lawyer was somewhat of a folk hero a decade ago when he fought on behalf of people with disabilities and farmers whose land was confiscated for big developments.
> 
> But he incured the government's wrath when he filed a class-action lawsuit against officials who perform involuntary abortions and sterilizations in the name of the country's single-child policy, eventually serving a 51-month prison sentence for disrupting public order.
> 
> The policy is a central tenet of the Chinese government, Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers testified at Thursday's hearing, and is completely incompatible with U.S. notions of human rights.
> 
> Obama and Clinton have so far declined to address the issue while U.S. diplomats in Beijing seek a resolution. The president is under tremendous pressure however to strike a deal with the Chinese to allow Chen to come to the U.S. now that the activist has asked for asylum for him and his family.
> 
> Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) - a potential running mate for Romney – promised to introduce a resolution next week “expressing support for Chen and calling on the Chinese government to end the persecution of human rights activists and their families.”
> 
> And some conservative Republicans made it clear Thursday that they relish a fight with China.
> 
> “America missed an opportunity with Tiananmen (in 1989),” Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) said during Thursday's hearing. “Will this administration too fail to seize the historic moment?”
> 
> Democrats insisted the controversy was unlikely to hurt Obama in the fall.
> 
> Steve Elmendorf, a veteran presidential campaign aide, said he doesn't see the Chen situation having any “real impact” in November.
> 
> “I don't see regular voters paying much attention,” he said. “For people who are in Washington, it's an interesting story and says something about our tension with the Chinese. But I don't think that plays out in Ohio and Michigan and Nevada.”



and

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/298930/chen-debacle-michael-auslin#



> *The Chen Debacle*
> By Michael Auslin
> May 3, 2012 6:27 P.M.
> 
> The Chen Guangcheng saga gets stranger and stranger, but also is becoming a major diplomatic embarrassment for the Obama administration. What was already a confusing tale of “he said, she said” moved into the realm of near-parody this afternoon, when Chen himself called his U.S. supporter and activist Bob Fu during a congressional hearing, was put on speaker phone, and directly asked to be let out of China. What has particularly spun the case out of control is the growing assertion by many that U.S. officials relayed threats by Beijing toward Chen’s wife to the blind activist, thereby forcing him to accept a deal to leave the U.S. Embassy and remain in China. Within 48 hours of a supposed deal to ensure Chen’s safety in the country, the lawyer’s friends began spreading the word that he had feared for his wife’s life and agreed to leave the embassy, but now wanted to flee the country.
> 
> What seemed like a coup by U.S. diplomats has instead become the biggest circus sideshow in Sino-American relations since 1989, when the Chinese massacred hundreds (possibly thousands) of college students demonstrating for freedom in Tiananmen Square, and famed dissident Fang Lizhi took refuge in the U.S. Embassy. Back then, Ambassador James R. Lilley succored Fang for a year before Chinese authorities agreed to let him live in exile in the United States. Given the doubts about who said what to whom, it is imperative that the Obama administration dispel rumors that it may have, even unknowingly, passed official threats to Chen, thereby causing him to take the path of least resistance for both governments (though not, it seems, for himself). Knowing personally some of the diplomats involved in the case, I can only say that they are extraordinarily hard-working public servants who truly desire to do the right thing. But it seems that this is a classic case of Cool Hand Luke syndrome, where “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
> 
> This raises serious questions about how close U.S. and Chinese officials are to creating a working relationship that can deal effectively with crisis. Daily Sino-American ties seem to work fairly smoothly, even if there is serious dissatisfaction on both sides over issues such as currency, general human rights, and of course security. But the test of a relationship is how well it puts into place mechanisms to effectively deal with disagreements and crises. Given the areas on which Washington and Beijing significantly disagree, and the large number of small confrontations in the past, we do not seem to be maturing this most vital of relationships. Unlike during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States ultmately came to a basic understanding of how to manage crises so that they did not spiral out of control, the U.S. and China are light-years away from reaching that level of stability.
> 
> This should be of great concern to those who see the United States and China on increasingly divergent courses, which, perhaps paradoxically, increases the chance for misunderstanding and mano-a-mano stand-offs like the one now occuring over Chen. Those who think that Chen’s saga is a one-time event that was unforeseen are likely to be unpleasantly surprised.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Chinese "dissidents" and "democracy activists" are a dime a dozen, and publicizing them and their causes is becoming a growth industry.

Over the years I have made fun of the late Pierre Trudeau for making his "name" by opposing Maurice Duplessis; I have suggested that my late Aunt Anges' pet cat could have penned a credible critique of Duplessis, so far from our mainstrem Canadian values was he. It is the same for human rights in China; China is not the worst place in the world for rights, it's not even in the bottom dozen, but it's somewhere in the bottom 25%: rights are neither respected nor protected - not "liberal" rights, certainly, and not even "conservative" rights. The government, writ large, at all levels, is capricious; it does as it pleases and citizens, like the devil, take the hindmost.

Chen is a legitimate "activist" but he is also a normal, provincial man who is unskilled in the ways of diplomacy. He appears to believe the last and loudest voice he hears. He is, with some good reason, I am certain, afraid for live and limb - his own and his family's. He has wavered with each passing breeze, and who is to blame him for being unsure of himself and his future?

The Chinese want him gone; they will, happily "sell" him to America; he has, however made real problems fo the Americans: neither Clinton nor Geithner got to make the points they wanted in Beijing - points for American TV in an election year, Chen "sucked all the oxygen out of the room." While he will be welcomed in a US university as a visiting scholar, he must not expect any official help in his campaign for "liberty" in China because he is, now, an embarrassment.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm just watching the 6:00AM world news from here in Asia (Kuala Lumpur), flicking back and forth between CNN International, BBC and the local English language service ~ this thing could not have worked out better for China and Mitt Romney if the Chinese and the Romney campaign had engineered it themselves. The eitire story is Chen, *Chen*, CHEN! The partisan political "messages" that Clinton wanted to deliver to America from Beijing were not heard at all ~ the US media would not ask the 'right' questions. I'm sure she said some of what she wanted to say in her prepared statement but it was all overshadowed by the Chen fiasco (and this time I agree "fiasco" is the right word). I doubt the Chinese did engineer this ... but it was sure convenient for them. I think, given the tone and tenor of the comments here, in KL, and in HK, that Obama's _Asia strategy_ is not getting off to a good, strong, public start.


----------



## FlyingDutchman

Shared with the usual...

http://kotaku.com/5908143/idiot-calls-in-bomb-threat-to-imitate-video-game



> Idiot Calls in Bomb Threat to Imitate Video Game
> Bomb threats are never fun; they scare the living daylights out of people and create massive delays at airports. One Chinese gamer, thought it would be fun to imitate the plot of a video game and decided to issue a false bomb threat against Shanghai's Pudong International Airport.
> 
> 
> On the evening of April 27, the suspect called in the bomb threat demanding 1 million RMB ($158,541 USD). According to the police reports, the suspect had told the airport that he had planted bombs on the Shanghai to Chengdu China Airlines flight. The flight had not yet departed and was still at the gate.
> 
> According to the airport recording, the suspect enjoyed toying with authorities saying things such as: "As long as the touch of a button of my remote control, this aircraft is finished" and "Do you want my account, I will not give you the account, how do you give me money then?"
> 
> The airport immediately re-screened the passengers and luggage, reassigning the plane and designation. The whole process took over 5 hours, leaving many travelers upset and irate.
> 
> After the suspect was apprehended by the police, it was reported that his motivation for the hoax was to imitate a dialogue he heard in a video game. News reports did not disclose which game inspired him.
> 
> The suspect is now in detention awaiting trial for disseminating false information and making a terrorist threat.



 :facepalm:


----------



## The Bread Guy

For the China watchers who lurk, here's a recent U.S. Congressional Research report (PDF) giving what a "China's Political System 101" - this from the executive summary:





> .... The report opens with a brief overview of China’s leading political institutions. They include the Communist Party and its military, the People’s Liberation Army; the State, led by the State Council, to which the Party delegates day-to-day administration of the country; and the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s unicameral legislature. The NPC is meant to oversee the State Presidency, the State Council, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (China’s public prosecutor’s office), and the military. In practice, the legislature is controlled by the Communist Party and is able to exercise little oversight over any of those institutions.
> 
> Following the overview, the report introduces a number of distinct features of China’s formal political culture and discusses some of their implications for U.S.-China relations. Those features include the fact that China is led not by one leader, but by a committee of nine; that provincial leaders are powerful players in the system; that the system treats statements by individual leaders as less authoritative than documents approved by committee; and that ideology continues to matter in China, with the Communist Party facing vocal criticism from its left flank each time it moves further away from its Marxist roots. Other themes include the importance of meritocracy as a form of legitimization for one-party rule, and ways in which meritocracy is being undermined; the introduction of an element of predictability into elite Chinese politics through the enforcement of term and age limits for holders of public office; the Chinese system’s penchant for long-term planning; and the system’s heavy emphasis on maintaining political stability. The next section of the report discusses governance challenges in the Chinese political system, from “stove-piping” and bureaucratic competition, to the distorting influence of bureaucratic rank, to factionalism, corruption, and weak rule of law, as highlighted by the case of
> the blind legal advocate Chen Guangcheng ....


I learned quite a bit just from the summary - worth the read if you're interested in more (but accessible) detail than just "the Communist Party runs everything".


----------



## The Bread Guy

Thucydides said:
			
		

> While much of the evidence is circumstancial, it is interesting to see who benefits from the demise of Nortel:
> 
> http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/25/nortel-hacked-to-pieces/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Nortel hacked to pieces
> Jameson Berkow  Feb 25, 2012 – 9:30 AM ET | Last Updated: Feb 25, 2012 11:19 AM ET
> 
> Sara D. Davis for National Post
> 
> Under mounting pressure to prove China-based hackers had infiltrated the vast global computer network of Nortel Networks Corp. all the way to the chief executive’s terminal, Brian Shields felt he had no choice but to go rogue.
> 
> Armed with nearly two decades doing security for the now-defunct Canadian company whose technology still powers telecommunications networks around the world, he had spent a day just before Christmas 2008 digging through the Web browsing history of then CEO Mike Zafirovski, known to colleagues as ‘Mike Z’. *Mr. Shields was convinced there were criminals working on behalf of China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. accessing the CEO’s files, but his hunch hadn’t been enough for his immediate bosses to grant him direct access to the top man’s PC* ....
Click to expand...

The highlighted company's name is coming up again, this time dealing with Canada....





> The former head of U.S. counter-espionage says the Harper government is putting North American security at risk by allowing a giant Chinese technology company to participate in major Canadian telecommunications projects.
> 
> In an exclusive interview in Washington, Michelle K. Van Cleave told CBC News the involvement of Huawei Technologies in Canadian telecom networks risks turning the information highway into a freeway for Chinese espionage against both the U.S. and Canada.
> 
> Huawei has long argued there is no evidence linking the company to the growing tidal wave of international computer hacking and other forms of espionage originating in China.
> 
> Nonetheless, the U.S. and Australia have already blocked Huawei from major telecom projects in those countries, and otherwise made it clear they regard China's largest telecommunications company as a potential security threat.
> 
> Van Cleave, who served as top spy-catcher for the Bush administration until 2006, describes Huawei as a potential "stalking horse" for Chinese military and intelligence objectives.
> 
> Even Canada's own intelligence agencies have warned the Harper government of the risks of throwing open the door to Chinese telecom companies.
> 
> Despite all the warnings, the federal and Ontario governments have rolled out the red carpet to Huawei, officially praising the Chinese company's partnerships in Canadian telecom projects with Telus, Bell, SaskTel and WIND Mobile ....


CBC.ca, 15 May 12

More on the Aussies' concerns here and here, with a U.S. Open Source Centre report on the company (shared by the Federation of American Scientists via their Secrecy News blog) from a while back attached.


----------



## Edward Campbell

We are "putting out the welcome mat" for _Huawei_ and other international telecom companies because:

a. It is good trade/economic policy; and

b. We have signed on to many trade agreements that make our (and US) restrictions on ivestments suspect, at the very least. Unlike the USA we, generally (not always), obey the rules after we sign an agreement - even when it is inconvenient.

Is _Huawei_ likely to be used as a "stalking horse" by Chinese inteligence services? Yes, I guess so. Are e.g. _Intel_ or _GM_ used as a stalking horse by US Intelligence? I suspect the answer is "yes" to that one, too.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a large segment of the US military, the US intelligence community and the US _militaryt-industrial complex_ that *needs* China as a big, scary, malevolent, potential enemy: it is their (the military/intelligence/industrial complex) "rice bowl."

The Chinese are happy to play along. The US Navy, for example, guarantess the freedom of the seas for commerce for everyone, including China. The US leads the "war on terror" which distracts e.g. the Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang Province from their grievances with Beijing and deprives them, the sepratists, of support from other Muslims. It's all good for the Chinese ... so long as the "hawks" in Washington are kept on a tight leash. The Chinese are happy to see a huge, bloated US defence budget - it's money that cannot be spent more productively and, not surprisingly, a lot of it ends up being spent in China!


----------



## Brad Sallows

People who do not treat the software which operates, monitors, and controls their telecommunications and other  infrastructure - energy delivery, water, sewer, etc - as a vital national security interest are fools.  It is stupidity of the first order to allow corporations answerable to the government of a country which manifestly indulges in industrial and other espionage and occasional sabotage to participate in the creation of such software.


----------



## a_majoor

"Nice country you have there; it would be a shame if something happened to it" is a pretty crude instrument for politics, nevertheless this is the suggestion put out there for Australia. I doubt the Australians will be very impressed by this.

http://news.investors.com/article/612687/201205241856/china-muscles-australia-over-defense-and-trade.htm



> *China Tries To Make Australia An Offer It Can't Refuse*
> 
> Posted 05/24/2012 06:56 PM ET
> 
> The Far East: If there were ever any doubts about China's aggressive military intentions in the Pacific, its warning to Australia last week to choose itself a U.S. or Chinese "godfather" ought to remove all of them.
> 
> In what can only be construed as a direct threat to a top U.S. ally, Song Xiaojun, a "retired" Chinese general, told the Sydney Morning Herald that "Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later."
> 
> "Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the U.S. or 'son' of China," Song said, adding that Australia had best choose China because it all "depends on who is more powerful and based on the strategic environment."
> 
> The Chinese statement — which implied Australia is so weak it can't make its own decisions — is false, arrogant and insulting. But above all, it's an effort to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Australia. And it isn't the first time.
> 
> Just as Song was implying that China's trading relationship with Australia would now be used as leverage, China's foreign minister told Australia's foreign minister in Beijing that "the time for Cold War alliances has ended."
> 
> At the heart of this crude threat is China's fury over the 61-year-old U.S.-Australia alliance and a renewed U.S. effort to focus its naval strength on the Asia-Pacific region to counter a Chinese military buildup that is unsettling the nations of the Pacific Rim.
> 
> Two weeks ago, 200 U.S. Marines, the first of a "Fox Company" contingent numbering 2,500, arrived for stationing in Darwin, Australia. U.S. military officials say it's part of a new forward operating base to ensure peace, help out in natural disasters and keep sea lanes open.
> 
> China has complained about this, and in recent days made harsh criticisms of the Pentagon's May 18 annual report on "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic Of China" as an "obstacle" to good relations with China.
> 
> The U.S. must "respect facts, change its mindset and stop wrongdoing in issuing similar reports year after year," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman stated.
> 
> But the new Marine presence in Australia has been warmly welcomed by Australia's neighbors and is having a soothing psychological effect across the region.
> 
> A U.S. naval presence has historically been the springboard that allows Asian tiger states to rise through trade in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
> 
> Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines have found themselves targeted and bullied by China, ostensibly over old territorial disputes.
> 
> In reality, though, the belligerence is due to a Chinese military buildup and intent to throw its weight around in the region.
> 
> The one obstacle keeping China from completely taking over has been the U.S. presence in Australia. That presence may expand to stationing aircraft carriers, establishing long-range listening posts and deploying nuclear-powered attack submarines.
> 
> This explains China's new effort to slap around and intimidate the Australians, forcing them to choose between its alliance with the U.S. and its trade with China.
> 
> Australia is an interesting target because, in one sense, China needs Australia far more than Australia needs China.
> 
> As John Daly of Oilprice.com points out, Australia is one of the few countries that enjoys a trade surplus with China. The $15 billion difference in trade is due to exports of iron and coal, two commodities China cannot live without.
> 
> To intimidate a trading partner of such vital supplies seems foolhardy. But it may be that China sees Australia's left-leaning government as unpopular, politically weak and lacking in resolve.
> 
> The Chinese may also see President Obama and his administration the same way and therefore responsive to pressure.
> 
> That may or may not be true, but it lays to rest all those statements about China having peaceful intentions in the Pacific.
> 
> Crudely attempting to make Australia choose between allies and trading partners is not a sign of peaceful intentions, but a warning of worse to come.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

Eerily reminiscent of proponents of that ill-conceived "Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".


----------



## The Bread Guy

A bit more tea leaf reading to a Parliament Hill audience....





> Canadian Members of Parliament, Senators, and political staffers packed a lunch forum on Parliament Hill to hear about seismic shifts taking place in China, where senior cadres have been purged and leaked documents describe an agreement to dissolve the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> “A hole has been pierced in the black veil that obscures the inner workings of the Chinese leadership,” said democracy activist Sheng Xue, “making political wrangling within the Party visible to the outside world for the first time in the regime’s 60-year rule.”
> 
> What has been revealed, noted each of Xue’s three co-panellists, is how a second centre of power created within the regime has become the focal point of contending forces.
> 
> PLAC Challenge
> 
> That second centre of power is the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (PLAC), formerly headed by China’s security czar Zhou Yongkang. The PLAC presides over Chinese courts, police, domestic surveillance, and paramilitary police, with a budget that exceeds that of the Chinese military.
> 
> Xue, an awarding-winning journalist, was joined at the forum by human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee David Matas, a member of the Order of Canada.
> 
> Matas noted how the PLAC rose in power with the persecution of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese spiritual practice that became widely popular among China’s Han ethnic majority ....


Epoch Times, 31 May 12


----------



## Edward Campbell

It's important to note that _Epoch Times_ is the "mouthpiece" of _Falun Gong_ and David Matas' nomination for the Nobel prize was for his work as co-author of "BLOODY HARVEST - Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China." Matas is a highly regarded lawyer and scholar but the report of _allegations_ of organ harvesting was just that: a report that said there were allegations but which offered no proof and some scholars said that the report did not bring forth new or independently-obtained testimony and the credibility of much of the key evidence was questionable. Falun Gong is not, in my opinion a _cult_, as the CCP suggests, nor is it, right now, serious threat to the CCP; but I also do not believe that it is a simple "health club." It is something more than old folks doing _Tai Chi_ in the park; it has a _political_ purpose and it is well funded.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Some interesting rumour mongering, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Ottawa Citizen_:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Ottawa+inching+closer+free+trade+talks+with+China/6717173/story.html


> Ottawa inching closer to free trade talks with China
> 
> By Lee Berthiaume, Postmedia News
> 
> June 1, 2012
> 
> OTTAWA — The Conservative government is expected to announce in the coming days that it has cleared the first hurdle towards free trade talks with China.
> 
> Canada and China launched a joint study during Prime Minister Stephen Harper's trip to China in February that is aimed at determining ways to enhance trade and economic activity between the two countries.
> 
> The study was to be completed by the end of May, and industry representatives say they have been told the high-level assessment went better than expected.
> 
> China has emerged as Canada's second-largest trading partner after the United States and a major source of foreign investment — including $10 billion into Alberta's oilsands and B.C.'s shale gas deposits.
> 
> Kathleen Sullivan, executive director of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, said members of her association had expected the results of the study to be released last week, but the government seems to be waiting for the right moment.
> 
> Whenever the results are released, however, the key question will be what comes next.
> 
> "What we're wondering is, based on the results, what then will China and Canada do in terms of next steps?" said Sullivan. "If there's a positive result coming out of this study, and I would assume that there will be, will they then take the next step?"
> 
> That next step would be another, more in-depth and comprehensive study assessing whether free trade negotiations are the way to go — or whether another route is more likely to produce economic benefits.
> 
> "We understand this study looks at what Canada and China can offer each other, and sets the stage for holding further discussions on how to further grow trade between the two countries," said Jean-Michel Laurin, vice-president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters trade association.
> 
> The interest is there from both sides, said trade consultant Peter Clark.
> 
> "The Chinese want our resources and are interested in investment, and we want into the Chinese market," he said.
> 
> Canada is already engaged in trade talks with the European Union, India and a number of other smaller countries. It also is seeking entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership trading bloc and is looking to start trade negotiations with Japan and Thailand.
> 
> But China is seen as an extremely complicated trading partner — and there is a sense that an all-encompassing free trade agreement may not be the best way to go.
> 
> "If your goal is to increase trade with China, how do you even go about doing that? Is a free-trade agreement the vehicle?" asked Sullivan. "I think Canada and industry need to put a lot of thought into what happens next."
> 
> _lberthiaume@postmedia.com
> 
> Twitter.com/leeberthiaume_
> 
> © Copyright (c) Postmedia News




History teaches us that in the medium to long term free trade is better, for all partners, than _managed_ trade so, despite the very real reservations that "little Canada" will have - and make no mistake here will be Canadian losers as well as winners - this is a good move ... IF it is real.


----------



## GAP

I keep getting the impression that China would love a free trade deal with Canada, if only to have a back door to the US market. The resources available are a bonus, if not  a driving force. That's going to have to be managed very carefully as the Chinese will promise the world and end up doing what they want....


----------



## a_majoor

Some ulterior motives are in play as well.

The Obama Administration is trying to shut Canada out of the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade area, so Canada has been reaching out to the various putative member states of the TPP and seeking bilateral agreements to do an end run around the Administration. If enough of the various bilateral agreements are reached, then at some future date it will be a simple matter to enter the TPP as a full partner.

From China's side, encouraging Canadian Free Trade opens up Canada's vast natural resource treasure box for Chinese exploitation (and make no mistake, if they can get away with it they will flood "their" Canadian projects with Chinese workers and work to Chinese standards). As a secondary objective, it encourages a wedge between Canada and the United States, and makes another, low risk/low cost way to thumb their noses at American power and weaken the Western alliance structure. I can envision Chinese "suggestions" and special offers every time something like the softwood lumber dispute or Keystone XL comes up in the future to weaken American bargaining positions and stroke the latent anti Americanism in Canada with some shot term "wins" for Canadian companies and industries.

So long as we keep the potential drawbacks in mind, and work carefully around them, a Chinese free trade deal would provide a huge new market for our industries, and operate to our mutual benefit.


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese activists vs the censors:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/06/06/numbers-conspire-to-mark-tiananmen-massacre-and-outwit-chinas-censors/



> *Numbers conspire to mark Tiananmen massacre — and outwit China’s censors*
> Araminta Wordsworth  Jun 6, 2012 – 9:33 AM ET | Last Updated: Jun 5, 2012 2:34 PM ET
> 
> Today: There’s never a dull moment for Chinese censors, always standing on guard to protect citizens from the wrong information.
> 
> They never know where their next crisis will come from.
> 
> Last year, they were blindsided by Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, part of the Arab Spring, which led to the word “jasmine” being blocked in Internet searches. Also caught up in the ban: video of Premier Hun Jintao singing a popular folksong about the fragrant white flower, while jasmine sellers in Beijing found their livelihood threatened.
> 
> Despite their best efforts, the censors can be caught napping — even when the date is a predictable flashpoint, like the 23rd anniversary of Tiananmen Square. In this case, the unlikely culprit was the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which seemed to mark the day by going into a nosedive.
> 
> Reporting for The Associated Press, Elaine Kurtenbach explains what happened.
> 
> In an unlikely coincidence certainly unwelcome to China’s communist rulers, the stock benchmark fell 64.89 points Monday, matching the numbers of the June 4, 1989 crackdown in the heart of Beijing.
> 
> In China’s lively microblog world, “Shanghai Composite Index” soon joined the many words blocked by censors.
> In another odd twist, the index opened Monday at 2,346.98. That is being interpreted as 23rd anniversary of the June 4, 1989 crackdown when read from right to left.
> 
> Public discussion of the Tiananmen crackdown, which the Communist Party branded a “counterrevolutionary riot,” remains taboo. Analysts refused to comment on the numbers.
> 
> Peter Ford at the Christian Science Monitor says the official blanket denial of the date has worked to a large extent.
> 
> Few ordinary Chinese citizens under the age of 30 are aware of the Tiananmen demonstrations or their tragic end. But censors remain determined to foil any attempt by people who do know what happened to say anything about it. Anything at all. Censors at Sina Weibo, the popular Twitter-like social media platform, were working overtime to block searches for – or references to – “6.4” or other obvious signifiers such as “tank,” “crush,” “never forget,” and “square.”
> 
> “535” was a forbidden term, too, because Internet users have taken to referring to May 35,  instead of June 4. Classically minded censors wouldn’t let you post anything with VIIIIXVIIV in it either, in case readers familiar with Roman numerals could decipher 89.6.4. And by late afternoon, even the word “today” had been banned.
> Chinese culture puts a strong, sometimes superstitious emphasis on numbers and dates. The number “four” (si in Mandarin) is considered unlucky because it is similar to the word for “death” (si, but with a different tone). Eight on the other hand is propitious because it sounds like the word for “wealth.” As Keith Bradsher of The New York Times observes,
> 
> The Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, a time and date chosen for the many “eights” — considered an auspicious number.
> 
> Even 23 years later, the use of tanks and gunfire to disperse unarmed students and other in Tiananmen Square protesters remains a point of considerable acrimony in China and around the world.
> 
> Security measures are tightened in China each year for the anniversary while dissidents and former Chinese officials periodically give their versions of what happened.
> 
> The suspension of a populist leader, Bo Xilai, from the Politburo this spring and a subsequent series of reports of factional infighting and military manoeuvres to prevent any attempt at a coup has underlined this year how tightly held power still is in China.
> 
> Sometimes though the censors are overruled, as seems to have been the case with an editorial in the Global Times — the Fox News of China — that argues for a “proper” level of corruption, says The Atlantic magazine’s Helen Gao.
> 
> In the airtight Chinese print media world, where officials wield the power to splash the same headline across many newspaper front pages or to keep a taboo subject out of even obscure one-line advertisements, editorials are usually painless scratches over petty social occurrences. One would not expect them to engage their millions of readers on a controversial subject. But that’s exactly what Global Times, circulation two million, did when it addressed Chinese government corruption. With one unsigned editorial, the paper sparked a heated, if apparently unintended, debate on a sensitive topic that is usually a no-go zone for such large, public discussions.
> 
> The tabloid newspaper, owned and published by party mouthpiece People’s Daily, dropped a bomb with its editorial last week titled “Fighting Corruption Is a Strenuous Battle in China’s Social Development.”
> It argues that corruption exists in all countries, including China, which will not be able to eliminate it any more than can any other country. Rather, it says, the key is to contain corruption to a level that citizens will accept.
> compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
> awordsworth@nationalpost.com


----------



## Sythen

> the Fox News of China



What does that even mean?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is some news about China's space programme from the _Globe and Mail_, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-announces-plan-for-manned-space-launch-this-month/article4244417/


> China announces plan for manned space launch this month
> 
> The Associated Press
> Published Saturday, Jun. 09 2012
> 
> China will launch astronauts this month to dock for the first time with an orbiting experimental module, the country’s space program announced Saturday.
> 
> A rocket carrying the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft was moved to a launch pad in China’s desert northwest in preparation for the mid-June flight, according to an unidentified space program spokesman cited by the official Xinhua News Agency.
> 
> Xinhua said earlier the flight will carry three astronauts who will dock with and live in the Tiangong 1 orbital module.
> 
> China’s space program has made steady progress since a 2003 launch that made it only the third nation to put a man in space on its own. Two more manned missions have followed, one including a space walk.
> 
> China completed its first space rendezvous last year when the unmanned Shenzhou 8 docked with the Tiangong 1 by remote control.
> 
> China has scheduled two space docking missions for this year and plans to complete a manned space station around 2020 to replace Tiangong 1. At about 60 tons, the Chinese station will be considerably smaller than the 16-nation International Space Station.
> 
> Beijing launched its independent space station program after being turned away from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections. Washington is wary of the Chinese program’s military links and of sharing technology with an economic and political rival.




In fairness, in 1993, when the ISS was announced as a major international, including Canada, project, the Chinese space program was still taking "baby steps," the first of the _Shenzhou_ series of spacecraft - designed for manned space flight - was not launched until 1999, after assembly of the ISS had begun. China had, _de facto_, too little to offer the ISS partners. But in March of this year the five ISS partners (Canada, European Space Agency, Japan, Russia and USA) did open the door for cooperation with China and India.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's an interesting article in the _Globe and Mail_, by its Beijing correspondent Mark MacKinnon, entitled *A 21st-century checklist of the new autocrats*. MacKinnon groups a batch of current (and just recenly passed) regimes in four categories:

1. False Democrats - people/regimes like Puntin's Russia and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas;

2. Mad Egotists like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov;

3. Violent Populists - Zimbabwe's Mugabe and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; and

4. Callous Capitalists - in which he includes the Communist Party of China (Deng Xiaoping era to present) and the House of Saud.

I like his catchy phrases but I think he, like most people, gets China wrong.

The Chinese are capitalists, of a sort and they certainly appear calous, but I think MacKinnon (and most Westerners) are looking "through a glass, darkly." Our problem is that 2,500 years of Western/Greco-Roman/Anglo-Saxon-Scandanavian/Anglo-American culture makes us see both _capitalism_ and _callousness_ in a very specific way, a way that is focused on the individual and his (her) "inalienable rights." The Chinese however have just as long a cultural tradition (Confucian ethics) that is quite differently focused: on filial responsibility, 'family values' (but not of the sort imagined by the modern Christian right) and virtue. Thus, I doubt that Deng or Hu would describe themselves or the Chinese _system_ as "capitalist" ~ entrepreneurial, perhaps, market based, certainly, but not capitalist as you and I, and Mark MacKinnon understand it. Equally, Hu Jintao, almost certainly, does not regard himself, his immediate predecessors or his colleagues as being "callous." They might, now and again, have to use all the "tools of power" at their disposal to keep their _system_ operating in a "harmonious" manner but that is, in their minds, more like a father or elder brother correcting a wayward youngster - teaching him or her the values of the family, the community and, indeed, China.

The Chinese practice a form of _conservatism_ that is as deeply rooted in their culture and our _liberalism_ is in ours.


----------



## GAP

> might, now and again, have to use all the "tools of power" at their disposal to keep their system operating in a "harmonious" manner but that is, in their minds, more like a father or elder brother correcting a wayward youngster - teaching him or her the values of the family, the community and, indeed, China.



And they are not wimps about using it, unlike our western leaders. They are not in the race to be liked, only to have and exercise the power......


----------



## Edward Campbell

GAP said:
			
		

> And they are not wimps about using it, unlike our western leaders. They are not in the race to be liked, only to have and exercise the power......




They are trying to restore a system of government that is, itself, far older than modern, liberal democracy: government by a *meritocracy*. This was/is part of the Confucian _ideal_ and it was attempted in many, arguably in most, of the 20 or dynasties that followed the _Spring and Autumn_ Period (771-476 BC) when Confucius wrote his _four books & Five Classics_. The fact that no one ever succeeded in developing (or, at least, sustaining) a self-replicating _meritocracy_ doesn't mean the current Chinese leadership doesn't think it is a good idea, indeed, even a noble goal.


----------



## Kalatzi

China not focus of Asis Pacific rebalancing spokesman says

link here http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/06/06/george-orwell-call-your-office/

Honest to god - I'm not making this up. 
Department of Truth anyone?


----------



## sean m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQkmVbf2k4&feature=plcp

Similar to 18th century Britain's coaling stations, as Mr. Kaplan points out. What are your Thoughts?


----------



## sean m

China's race for resources and what it means

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fT0M9n2QJU&feature=plcp

Interesting indeed.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

sean m said:
			
		

> China's race for resources and what it means
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fT0M9n2QJU&feature=plcp


Quite a lot of simple sociology wrapped up in grandiose terms that were droned on and on.
Any might well do well to read the classics: Sun Tzu being one.
Sure, it was overlooked for quite some time, and has had a recent resurgence, but the fact remains the indirect approach prevails above all else.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ignatius J. Reilly said:
			
		

> Quite a lot of simple sociology wrapped up in grandiose terms that were droned on and on.
> Any might well do well to read the classics: Sun Tzu being one.
> Sure, it was overlooked for quite some time, and has had a recent resurgence, but the fact remains the indirect approach prevails above all else.



:goodpost:

Dambisa Moyo is a good economist and she has some good insights but t is important, indeed vital to understand what China is doing, how and, above all, why. The Chinese are, as Moyo advocated (a couple of years ago) that they should, *investing* in the third world: it's not charity, it's not aid, neither of which have helped Africa, it's an *investment*. And what do we (and they, the Chinese) expect from our investments? A *return on investment*, that's what. The Chinese are in this for the mid to long term; they will forgo immediate/near term profits in order secure a good medium and long term ROI. It (investment rather than "aid") is, in my opinion what Africa and Latin America need in order to get (largely crooked and almost always inept) governments out and greedy capitalists - especially small, local capitalists - in.

But: the Chinese are doing what they are doing for China, not for Sudan or Brazil.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a very interesting article in the _Globe and Mail_ headlined Democracies should not be fooled by the oligarchies. The article reports on a speech that Michael Ignatieff gave, earlier this month, in Riga, Latvia. Ignatieff told his audience: _"... that “history has no libretto.”_ It isn’t marching toward any particular destination, including liberal democracy ... _“It is a cliché of optimistic Western discourse on Russia and China that they must evolve toward democratic liberty ..."_ [and] _“The simple point is that we thought they were coming toward us. What if they are not?”_

I think:

1. Prof. Ignatieff's warning is well taken - neither China nor Russia are "coming toward us;"

2. Russia and China are not "marching" in the same direction ~ they cannot because they have distinctly different histories and cultures, different from each other and very different from us; and

3. China _wants_ to "march" towards a self-sustaining meritocratic government, it will, eventually and if necessary, adopt some, maybe even many of the trappings of _conservative_ democracies like Singapore. 

Western, _liberal_ democracy is as foreign to China and Taoism is to us ... China is a _Confucian_ culture ~ very _conservative_, there are few _liberal_ impulses.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think:
> 
> 1. Prof. Ignatieff's warning is well taken - neither China nor Russia are "coming toward us;"
> 
> 2. Russia and China are not "marching" in the same direction ~ they cannot because they have distinctly different histories and cultures, different from each other and very different from us; and
> 
> 3. China _wants_ to "march" towards a self-sustaining meritocratic government, it will, eventually and if necessary, adopt some, maybe even many of the trappings of _conservative_ democracies like Singapore.
> 
> Western, _liberal_ democracy is as foreign to China as Taoism is to us ... China is a _Confucian_ culture ~ very _conservative_, there are few _liberal_ impulses.


I agree with all three of your points, and the conclusion even more so. 
It has been quite difficult, I would argue, to maintain such few &  fleeting liberal impulses in a country that historically has comprised several very populous nations long at odds with each other, coupled with the ever present threat of foreign incursions. Not even to mention the bloated population.
Democracy? I think in perhaps the next generation this will happen. The mandarins in Beijing (pun intended) are no doubt acutely aware of the recent episodes in the only truly functioning democracy in Chinese history.  Namely, that of the Republic of Taiwan. Sorry, I meant "Chinese Taipei", or better yet, "The Renegade Province". The trickle on down of not only the right to vote, but the right to choose a product to consume.


----------



## a_majoor

If China is having this much difficulty pulling Hong Kong into the orbit, imagine how much more difficult it will be to absorb Taiwan (or to apply Influence Activity to ethnic Chinese abroad)?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/hong-kongers-resist-pressure-to-identify-with-motherland/2012/06/28/gJQATAge8V_print.html



> *Hong Kongers resist pressure to identify with ‘motherland’*
> By Andrew Higgins, Published: June 28
> 
> hong kong — As Hong Kong prepares to mark the 15th anniversary of its return to Chinese rule with celebratory fireworks and also angry street protests, Cheung Kwok-wah, a senior education bureau official, is grappling with a particularly sensitive task: how to teach students in this former British colony to identify more with China.
> 
> “It is not an easy issue,” acknowledged Cheung, whose efforts to develop a new school curriculum to promote greater awareness of and identification with the “motherland” have stirred howls of protest from educators, the Roman Catholic Church and pro-democracy activists fearful of Communist Party “brainwashing.”
> 
> Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997, under a formula known as “one country, two systems” and has retained wide-ranging liberties that make it China’s freest city by far. While few here mourn the end of British colonialism, Hong Kong and Beijing have starkly different views of what it means to be part of China.
> 
> The gulf will be on display beginning on Friday when Communist Party leader Hu Jintao is due to make a tightly choreographed and heavily policed visit to attend anniversary festivities and the swearing in on Sunday of Leung Chun-ying, a prosperous land surveyor, as Hong Kong’s new leader, or chief executive — and tens of thousands of locals are expected to take to the street in protest.
> 
> Though increasingly intertwined economically with the rest of China, Hong Kong, according to a recent opinion poll, now has less trust in the central government in Beijing than at any time since the 1997 handover. Suspicion runs so deep that when Chinese military vehicles were sighted earlier this month on busy streets during a routine rotation of forces, local newspapers and Internet sites responded with warnings that Beijing is moving in extra muscle to confront protesters in the event of trouble during Hu’s visit. A spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army dismissed this as “rubbish.” Hong Kong’s head of security assured residents that local police are responsible for law and order and do not need help from the PLA.
> 
> Mood of mistrust
> 
> This mood of mistrust has also engulfed plans by the education bureau to introduce mandatory courses in schools on “moral and national education.” First proposed in 2010 and due to include lessons on Chinese government bodies and the correct etiquette for raising the national flag, the program ran into a storm of criticism during public consultations and was recently revised to give teachers more leeway on what topics they cover. Originally due to start in some schools later this year, the courses have now been put off for a year.
> 
> “The Communist Party puts an equal sign between itself and China,” said Fung Wai Wah, president of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, which opposes “national education” teaching. Fung said he identifies with China but not its ruling Communist Party, whose rule his parents — like many other residents here — fled to Hong Kong to escape. “We suspect they are trying to brainwash our students,” he said, noting that the Party frequently deploys nationalism to silence critics.
> 
> Identity has become one of the most sensitive issues in Hong Kong, a largely autonomous “special administrative region” where around 95 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese and feels great pride in Chinese culture and history but also prizes the liberties and rule of law that separate their city from the rest of the country.
> 
> A public opinion survey released this week by Hong Kong University showed that Hong Kong residents increasingly identify themselves as “Hong Kongers” rather than “Chinese,” with only 18 percent of those surveyed choosing “Chinese” as their primary identity. More than 45 percent of those polled said they see themselves as “Hong Kongers,” up from 34 percent in a poll conducted in August 1997 just after Britain pulled out. Identification with Hong Kong rather than China is particularly strong among young people, the survey showed.
> 
> The results will disappoint Beijing, whose representative office in Hong Kong responded with fury early this year to an earlier round of polling that first drew attention to shrinking attachment to the People’s Republic of China. Party-controlled media outlets launched a vitriolic campaign of denunciation against Robert Chung, the head of Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion Programme, accusing him of seeking to split Hong Kong from the rest of China and even foment a separatist movement akin to those in Tibet and the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang. Chung denied any such intention.
> 
> Frictions between Hong Kong residents and mainlanders have risen sharply as millions have flocked into Hong Kong from the rest of China for short visits, mostly for shopping and tourism but sometimes to give birth and thus obtain Hong Kong residency rights for their children. Last year, about 28 million mainlanders visited Hong Kong, a city of just 7 million. Fearful of being swamped, anti-mainland campaigners took out newspaper advertisements earlier this year denouncing their compatriots from across the border as “locusts.” A Peking University professor also stoked passions by reviling Hong Kong residents as “dogs” in thrall to British co­lo­ni­al­ism.
> 
> ‘A lonely island’
> 
> Cheung, the education official, said frictions don’t reflect a deep divide but are the natural result of decades of separation from and ignorance of the rest of China. Under colonial rule, he said, Hong Kong was presented in schools as “a lonely island” disconnected from China. “National education” doesn’t aim to diminish Hong Kong’s own identity, he added, but only to teach students about the country to which they belong: “We are now part of China so we need to know about China.”
> 
> Under British rule, which began in 1841 at the end of the First Opium War, Hong Kong schools mostly avoided teaching about contemporary China, confining the study of Chinese history to periods before the 1949 communist revolution and downplaying topics that might stir Chinese nationalism. Mainland schools, in contrast, have for years put nationalism at the center of education, presenting the Party as the only true vehicle for China’s national aspirations.
> 
> Beijing officials have no formal say in Hong Kong education but have cheered its “national education” plans, expressing hope that greater knowledge of China, particularly of the suffering it endured at the hands of Britain and other colonial powers in the 19th century, will reduce Hong Kongers’ wariness of China’s current system. “If you don’t have such knowledge, you will find it difficult to understand why China chose the way of socialism in 1949,” Wang Guangya, the head of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said during a visit here last summer.
> 
> The Party’s critics also believe Hong Kong needs to learn more about China, but they focus not on the humiliations of colonialism but on Hong Kong’s long tradition as an incubator for ideas banned on the mainland. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty, used Hong Kong to rally support and funding for his revolutionary cause, as did early Communist Party leaders such as Zhou Enlai, who took refuge here in the 1920s. Today, Hong Kong remains a center for dissent, publishing books and magazines that are banned elsewhere in China and providing a haven for dissidents.
> 
> “If we don’t speak out on what is bad in China we will be sacrificing the long role of Hong Kong in China’s democratic development,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a local legislator and head of a group that organizes an annual candle-light vigil to commemorate those who died during the People Liberation Army’s 1989 assault on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. This year’s vigil drew roughly 180,000 people, the biggest turnout yet, according to organizers.
> 
> Lee said he has no problem with “national education” in principle but “it depends on who is teaching and what.”
> 
> Born across the border, Lee came to Hong Kong as a small child when his family fled the Communists. “We are not anti-Communist because we don’t know about China. . . . We have first-hand experience,” he said.
> 
> Lee worries that Hong Kong authorities, under pressure from Beijing, now want to “brainwash people to identify with the successes of China but not with its problems. They want to brainwash student into supporting the Party.”
> 
> Cheung of the Education Bureau strongly denied any such intent, saying “national education” does not aim to promote loyalty but “critical thinking and moral values.” Curriculum guidelines, he said, call for discussion of controversial topics, not just feel-good stories about China. “There are no taboo issues,” Cheung said.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A very smart lady, named Anson Chan, who used to be the head civil servant in British colonial Hong Kong, quipped, about 15 years ago, that, eventually, China would have to join Hong Kong, not _vice versa_. What she meant is that it is China, not Hong Kong, that needs to change in order to survive in the 21st century. She talks about China's Achilles heels: corruption and nepotism; until those are tackled China will be a feeble giant while Hong Kong will still be an aggressive tiger.


----------



## a_majoor

More signs to be worried about Chinese economic figures. The various metrics are not adding up (economic growth even as raw materials are piling up and coastal shipping is displaced looking for cargos?), and on other sites there are equally disjointed figures for electrical consumption and material outputs. The disturbing implications are two fold: many people are "betting" on China to continue its rapid economic growth and drive the global economy; and, the population of China may experience massive economic dislocations leading to unrest:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/07/09/deflation-coming-to-china-brace-yourself-america/



> *Deflation Coming to China? Brace Yourself, America*
> 
> The Chinese economy can’t seem to catch a break these days. Two years ago, analysts—along with the Chinese government—were concerned about overheating and runaway inflation. For the past couple years, there’s been an equal but opposite worry that China has reached the beginning of the end of the long period of rapid growth.
> 
> Via Meadia is less concerned about a temporary Chinese slowdown, whether the landing is “hard” or “soft” than we are about the prospect for a phase change in Chinese growth — a secular slowdown in growth as the Japan-style export led strategy reaches natural limits. But the short term fate of China’s economy has a lot of influence over what happens in the rest of the world given our shaky circumstances right now. And China watcher Evan Osnos offers some sobering observations in the New Yorker:
> 
> Already, Nike says that its Chinese stockrooms are piling up with inventory. Similar complaints are coming in from McDonald’s, Caterpillar, and Procter & Gamble Co. Within China, the stakes of a slowdown are high as well: for half a century, political scientists have recognized that political unrest does not tend to erupt in places that are most deprived; it hits when a pattern of rising growth and expectations abruptly stops. And that is Beijing’s worst fear. [...]
> 
> There is a slowdown in steel and copper production, the first layoffs in a decade by manufacturers of construction equipment, and electricity production, which usually grows faster than the economy, grew by just 0.7 per cent in April, suggesting to those inclined to see it that growth may have flatlined. There are physical signs, too: coal and iron ore and other commodities are piling up at Chinese ports, and the huge fleet of coastal ships that usually move them around have been forced to venture beyond the Chinese seaboard, sailing out to look for new business—the freight equivalent of deer wandering out of the woods in search of food. Because it materialized out of the shadows, shipping people have it named the “ghost” fleet.
> 
> On top of all this comes today’s news that China may actually be headed for a period of deflation. According to the New York Times, consumer prices dropped 0.6 percent last month, one of the largest such drops in years. Coming on the heels of months of anemic growth, this has many worried:
> 
> Producer prices, measured at the factory gate, were down 2.1 percent in June compared to a year earlier, and down 0.7 percent in June compared with May. Those prices had started to weaken late last summer, about six months before consumer prices began eroding. [...]
> 
> A few economists are starting to ask whether China could face deflation, a sometimes intractable condition of falling prices that can become self-reinforcing, as Japan has found over the past two decades.
> 
> This deflation has not yet reached alarming proportions, but the alarm bells will be going off in Beijing if it continues much longer. Look for China to fight any signs of deflation with vigorous stimulus measures; short term, at least, that could be good for the rest of the world.


----------



## a_majoor

Odd social issue. With China's population demographically skewed towards males due to the "one child" policy, it is hard to understand why the available women are not being snapped up right away:

http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-unwanted-single-women-feel-pressure-061239813.html



> *China's 'unwanted' single women feel the pressure*
> AFPBy Virginie Mangin | AFP – Thu, Jul 19, 2012
> 
> 
> Women are seen talking at a singles club in Beijing. A 2010 survey showed that there were 180 million single men and women in China -- out of a population of 1.3 billion people -- and that 92 percent of men questioned believed that a woman should be married before the age of 27
> 
> 
> Xu, a pretty woman in her 30s, warily walked into a Beijing singles club in a bid to shed her status as one of China's "Unwanted".
> 
> Xu had not been to the "Garden of Joy" for more than a year but, with time and societal judgement weighing heavily on her, she returned with cautious hopes.
> 
> "I hope to find a husband," she said, as she sat in front of a Mahjong table and awaited her date for the evening, who had been hand-picked for her by the club based on their profiles.
> 
> "I just want someone with whom I share things in common, but who is also in a better financial situation than me."
> 
> Xu, who did not want to be identified, is one of China's so-called "Sheng Nu".
> 
> The term, which translates to the "Unwanted", is derived from a phenomenon in Chinese society which affects hundreds of thousands of women, particularly the urban, educated and financially independent.
> 
> The term, which is unique to China and which only applies to women, appears in China's official dictionary and refers to "all single woman above the age of 27".
> 
> Twenty-six-year-old Summer was at the Garden of Joy for the first time, desperate to meet a man before she hit the dreaded cut-off age.
> 
> "Nothing in the world will allow me to become a Sheng Nu," she said, lamenting that for many men in China youthful looks count for a lot.
> 
> "Men don't want a woman over 30. It's important for them that she's still pretty."
> 
> A widely publicised survey in 2010 by the government-backed All China Women's Federation proved the new social phenomenon beyond doubt.
> 
> The survey showed that there were 180 million single men and women in China -- out of a population of 1.3 billion people -- and that 92 percent of men questioned believed that a woman should be married before the age of 27.
> 
> Since then, books and films on the subject have flourished and women's magazines have sought to decipher why so many are single.
> 
> "On one hand young people today work very hard and have few places to meet outside of their work, which wasn't the case earlier," Wu Di, a sociologist who has just published a book on the subject, told AFP.
> 
> "On the other hand, traditionally the Chinese say one should 'make do' when marrying. Marriage has never been synonymous with happiness.
> 
> "The new generation of women don't want to 'make do'. Many live quite well alone and don't see the point in lowering their standard or life in order to marry."
> 
> Still, the pressure on women is huge.
> 
> Part of this is due to China's one-child population control policy, which adds to the desperation of parents for their only offspring to marry and produce a grandson or granddaughter.
> 
> "The real reason for coming to this club is that I don't want to disappoint my parents. I want to make them happy," admitted Xu.
> 
> The Garden of Joy's own slogan plays on this emotion in order to attract members. "Are you single? Think about the feelings of your father/mother. Don't cause them more worry," read a sign on the entrance.
> 
> And business is booming.
> 
> The club, which opened in 2003, has two premises in Beijing and more than 12,000 members.
> 
> But, after using fear to lure the women in, the Garden of Joy offers a friendly atmosphere in the basement of a high-end business centre where women can meet prospective husbands with more than 80 different activities.
> 
> These include table tennis, billiards, board games, movies and speed dating, or outdoor ventures such as organised hiking trips.
> 
> There are also small booths where couples can sit down in a more private setting to get to know each other.
> 
> Shelly, 34, a highly educated public relations consultant who had just returned from living in the United States, was among the new members.
> 
> Since her return to China, she had avoided her relatives and even some of her close friends because of their insistence in trying to arrange dates for her.
> 
> "I'm under pressure from all sides. I feel my mother is disappointed and sad when she sees the grandchildren of her friends," she said.
> 
> But with no potential partner on the horizon, Shelly is preparing to return to the United States to do a second Masters degree -- a decision partly motivated by her desire to escape her colleagues, parents and friends.
> 
> "I think I will return to China when I am 40. I want right now to be so old, so broken that they will leave me in peace," she said.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually, the 'too many men' is relativelt small and its impact is nothing even remotely like that of te change in wealth in China. Simply put, Chinese women can afford to stay single.  Chinese women are, themselves, just imitating their Japanese sisters who, for the same reason, started doing this - staying single to work - 15 or so year ago. The next step for Chinese women is to go the 'cougar' route.

Chinese men, apparently, are flocking to e.g. Malaysia and Philippines looking for wives.

Further, the 'too many men' bubble disappeard because Chinese families realized that now girls are just as 'valuable' as boys.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Based on China's claim shown on this map ....





.... it appears to be beefing up its presence (military and otherwise) on one of the islands - this from a Chinese media outlet ....





> Maritime management has begun in the newly established city of Sansha in the South China Sea, as local Chinese authorities hope to enhance maritime safety there and protect the environment.
> 
> The State Council, or China's cabinet, approved the establishment of Sansha, a prefectural-level city in south China's Hainan province, to administer the Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha islands and their surrounding waters in the South China Sea on June 21.
> 
> "We began maritime management there soon after the State Council's decision was made," a spokesman with the Hainan Maritime Safety Administration said Thursday.
> 
> Maritime personnel are working to build infrastructure, buoy tenders, supply bases, light stations and radio stations in order to enhance maritime supervision and rescue capabilities, the spokesman said.
> 
> Maritime authorities are also studying sea travel routes in the area and considering introducing new laws to regulate traffic, as Sansha will develop its own tourism industry in the future and receive more ships, he said.


.... and this from media from one of the neighbours....





> Despite Vietnamese protests, Chinese citizens Saturday began voting for the legislature in Sansha, a prefectural level city that will administer Vietnam’s Truong Sa (Spratly) and Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelagos.
> 
> China National Radio reported that more than 1,100 people cast their ballots at 15 voting booths in Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagoes and Trung Sa (Macclesfield Bank) for delegates to the 1st people’s congress of so-called Sansha City.
> 
> The congress will have 60 members who will serve five-year terms.
> 
> The State Council, China’s cabinet, approved in June the establishment of a city to administer the Truong Sa, Hoang Sa, and Trung Sa and their surrounding waters.
> 
> This was opposed by authorities in Vietnam’s Khanh Hoa Province and Da Nang city since Truong Sa and Hoang Sa belong to them.
> 
> Vietnam News Agency quoted Da Nang and Khanh Hoa leaders as saying that China has “seriously violated Vietnam’s sovereignty” and that the city has “no legal legitimacy.” ....


.... and what the mainstream media (at least one wire service) sees/writes about:





> Beijing will establish a military garrison on a group of disputed islands in the South China Sea, China's defence ministry said Monday, a move likely to provoke further tensions with its neighbours.
> 
> The troops will operate from Sansha in the Paracel Islands, one of two archipelagos in the South China Sea that are claimed by both China and Vietnam.
> 
> The garrison, approved by the Central Military Commission, "will be responsible for the Sansha area national defence mobilisation and reserve forces activities", the defence ministry said on its website.
> 
> The ministry did not say when the garrison would be established, but the move to station troops on the Paracels is likely to provoke Hanoi's ire.
> 
> Beijing's move last month to designate Sansha as its administrative centre for the Paracels and the Spratly Islands prompted a rare demonstration Sunday in the Vietnamese capital against China's territorial assertions.
> 
> China and South Vietnam once administered different parts of the Paracels but after a brief conflict in 1974 Beijing took control of the entire group of islands. Vietnam holds several of the larger Spratly Islands.
> 
> China says it owns much of the South China Sea, while the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia each claim portions ....


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have commented, several times, on the China/Russia border issue and on China's near insatiable appetite for resources - many of which are found nearby, in Russia.

In this article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Ottawa Citizen_, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warns about the issues:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Russian+issues+warning+Chinese+threat+East/7068335/story.html


> Russian PM issues warning of Chinese threat to Far East
> *Kremlin suspicious steady immigration could affect resource-rich area*
> 
> By Thomas Grove, Reuters
> 
> August 10, 2012
> 
> Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday issued a veiled warning about China's rising influence in Russia's resource-rich Far East, saying it was essential to defend the area against "excessive expansion by bordering states."
> 
> Speaking days after Russia's first deputy defence minister said two new nuclear submarines would be sent to the Pacific Fleet, Medvedev also said it was "important not to al-low negative manifestations ... including the formation of enclaves made up of foreign citizens."
> 
> His comments, some of the strongest on the subject yet, underlined the Kremlin's suspicions that a steady influx of Chinese migrants may ultimately pose a threat to Russian hegemony in the remote and sparsely populated territories of Siberia and the Far East.
> 
> Russia and China enjoy strong diplomatic and trade relations and have joined forces in the United Nations Security Council to block proposed sanctions on President Bashar Assad of Syria. But growing Chinese influence in Russia's Far East - where street signs are often in both Russian and Chinese - has long been a source of tension.
> 
> Resource-rich Russia is the world's largest country by territory, but has seen its population of 143 million people fall in recent years, while re-source-hungry China, situated immediately to the south, has a rising population of over 1.3 billion people.
> 
> Medvedev, who was president from 2008 until May, raised the sensitive subject at a government meeting during a broader discussion of migration.
> 
> "Not many people live there, unfortunately, and the task of protecting our Far Eastern territories from excessive expansion by bordering states remains in place," he said.
> 
> Russia has tried to counter-balance China's growing influence in its Far East by boosting its own political and military presence in the region, where it has seen its own influence weaken.
> 
> Medvedev's new government, formed in May, included for the first time a Ministry of the Far East to underpin other state programs al-ready in place. One such program has brought 400 families from other former Soviet republics to the area to reinforce its Russian-speaking population.
> 
> Medvedev said new migration policies had been drawn up by President Vladimir Putin and told ministers to draft an action plan aimed at turning the policies into reality.
> 
> © Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen




The main problem facing Prime Minister Medvedev is _Russian_: the Russian people in the North-East (Siberia) are abandoning their jobs there and returning to the European region. The Chinese are, as far as I know, moving in, but in a very transient manner. They want, indeed need the resources but they want to buy them; they are trying to keep production and distribution lines (distribution lines to Chinese border crossings, anyway) open.

I have seen only one border place and there the Chinese hospital was serving both sides of the border and the Chinese fire department was prepared to respond to, indeed had responded to, fires on the Russian side. The Russian border post was not manned but the Chinese border police refused to allow me to pass into Russia as I did not have a visa. I am told that similar situations exist in many border places.

The Russia-China border is long and, in most places, only lightly fenced and patrolled - parts of it are on rivers which makes control a bit easier.

While I am pretty sure that there have been some (unauthorized?) Chinese _incursions_ into Russia I seriously doubt that it is anything like the _invasion_ about which Medvedev warns.


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting view of China, not as an emerging superpower but as a nation that has already reached its "best before" date. A very contrarian view, but Walter Russel Mead is a very careful observer and his observations should be noted with interest:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/08/11/peak-oil-how-about-peak-china/



> *Peak Oil? How about Peak China?*
> 
> It may be hard to believe, but it’s been a full four years since China hosted the Olympics. At the time, Beijing 2008 appeared to herald China’s return, after a 500 year hiatus, to great power status. Commentators were falling over themselves to pronounce the inevitability of China’s rise and its implications for American influence in Asia.
> 
> But is it possible we will look back on those Olympic Games as the peak of Chinese power, rather than the beginning of its rise? That’s the provocative argument espoused by The Diplomat:
> 
> Everything began to go downhill afterwards.  Caught up in the global economic crisis, the Chinese economy has never fully recovered its momentum.  To be sure, Beijing’s stimulus package of 2008-2009, fueled by deficit spending and a proliferation of credit, managed to avoid a recession and produce one more year of double-digit growth in 2010.  For awhile, Beijing’s ability to keep its economic growth high was lauded around the world as a sign of its strong leadership and resilience.  Little did we know that China paid a huge price for a misguided and wasteful stimulus program.
> 
> The bill for that massive spending is now coming due:
> 
> Today, Chinese economic policy-makers are hamstrung in trying to revive economic growth.  The combination of local government indebtedness, massive bad loans hidden in the banking system, anemic external demand, and diminishing returns from investments has made it all but impossible for Beijing to use the same old economic playbook to fire up the economy.
> 
> According to The Diplomat, the long term outlook is even more depressing. China will have to confront a series of structural challenges if it is to continue to achieve the kind of dynamic growth that lifted the country from economic backwater to emerging great power in just three decades.
> 
> The most obvious challenge is demographics. A RAND study observed that the proportion of the Chinese population of working age peaked in 2011 and began slowing this year. The share of the elderly population is rising. Healthcare and pension costs will soar as a result. So will labor costs. Investment and savings will diminish. In short, China may face the prospect, unknown in human history, of growing old before it gets rich.
> 
> The environment presents another dilemma. Like many rapidly industrializing economies, China sacrificed environmental protection at the altar of economic growth. But the effects of this approach have taken a toll: already, argues The Diplomat, ”Water and air pollution today cause 750,000 premature deaths and around 8 percent of GDP.” And as Via Meadia recently pointed out, the political costs of this approach are starting to mount as well. An outbreak of NIMBYism has forced many local officials to cancel major industrial projects as ordinary Chinese citizens demand an end to environmentally unsound development.
> 
> Of greater concern is that China has backed away from market reforms in the last decade and embraced a version of “state capitalism” that emphasizes the state far more than it does capitalism. But as state-run entities have become more powerful, their political backers—and financial beneficiaries—have an even greater stake in blocking attempts at reform.
> 
> And despite its best efforts at censorship, Chinese officials now concede that the internet has become too hard to regulate completely. For the first time, government policies “are being challenged for their reasonableness and legitimacy”, while at the elite level the Bo Xilai affair lifted the facade of unity to reveal a deeply fractured leadership.
> 
> Externally, too, China faces a more complex strategic environment than it has for decades. The U.S., which had been distracted and bogged down in the Middle East and West Asia since 2001, has begun to refocus on Asia, much to the delight of most of China’s neighbors. At the same time, as Beijing tries to assert itself, particularly in regards to the South China Sea, smaller powers such as Vietnam and the Philippines are pushing back, emboldened by Washington’s renewed commitment to the region.
> 
> It’s a grim analysis, not just for China but for the rest of the world as well. It is not in anyone’s interests to see China flounder. A rich China, secure in its legitimacy at home and abroad, is also a stable China, capable of powering the growth of her neighbors as well as offering a huge market for U.S. products.
> 
> The upcoming leadership transition, to be held later in the fall, offers a chance of renewal.  Whether Beijing can rise to meet the challenges of the first decades of the 21st century as it did the last decades of the 20th remains to be seen. The challenges are not insurmountable, but they will require enormous political courage in the face of powerful vested interests.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I respect Mead, far  more than I respect most American who comment on China, but I take issue with a few points:

1. China, in my opinion, doesn't intend to maintain the kind of growth that it sustained for 20 years - growth will have to slow and people will have to adapt. But: the Chinese now have a middle class which will produce steady domestic demand;

2. Far from the environment being a 'problem,' many observers see China as being the new world leader is useful environmental technologies;

3. I think Mead is misreading what he perceives to be a return to "state capitalism." In fact Hu Jintao has not reintroduced "state capitalism," but he has established an embryonic welfare syatem - one that, given China's strong Confucian cultural traditions, is unlikely to expand, any time soon, into something like our culture of entitlement; and

4. The jury is out on American strategy - President Obama says a lot, let's see what he actually does.


----------



## a_majoor

While in many ways I hope you are correct (a Chinese crash or China as a nation past its best before date would skew so many different economic and political balances and invalidate a great deal of political, social and economic capital world wide), there are many disturbing out of balance metrics, which indicate that something isn't adding up. I share one article which forecasts the Chinese economy from the Austrian perspective, which should cause some cold sweats since this is the same sort of behaviours [chasing government sanctioned incentives] that led to the housing bubble and 2008 crash in the United States. There are links to a fairly long articles which are from a long time foreign resident of China who is pulling the plug, and a response posted on Instapundit. While their accounts are annecdotal, they do track with various other negative indicators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/two-ways-to-see-chinas-problems-economic-view.html?_r=2



> *Two Prisms for Looking at China’s Problems*
> 
> By TYLER COWEN
> 
> Published: August 11, 2012
> 
> CHINA is confronting some serious economic problems, and how Beijing does — or doesn’t — respond to them could bend the course of the global economy.
> 
> First, China’s real estate bubble is deflating. But its economy also seems to be suffering from what we economists call excess capacity — an overinvestment in capital goods, whether in factories, retail stores or infrastructure.
> 
> So what now? The answer depends in part on your school of economic thinking.
> 
> Keynesian economics holds that aggregate demand — the sum of all consumption, investment,  government spending and  net exports — drives stability, and that government can and should help in difficult times. But the Austrian perspective, developed by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, and championed today by many libertarians and conservatives, emphasizes how government policy often makes things worse, not better.
> 
> Economists of all stripes agree that China may be in for a spill. John Maynard Keynes emphasized back in the 1930s the dangers of speculative bubbles, and China certainly seems to have had one in its property market.
> 
> Keynesians would argue that Beijing has the tools to stoke aggregate demand. It could, for example, adjust interest rates and bank reserve requirements, instruct state-owned banks to maintain lending, or deploy some of its $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. The government also appears to have many shovel-ready construction and infrastructure projects that could help the economy glide to a soft landing and then bounce back.
> 
> The Austrian perspective introduces some scarier considerations. China has been investing 40 percent to 50 percent of its national income. But it is hard to invest so much money wisely, particularly in an environment of economic favoritism. And this rate of investment is artificially high to begin with.
> 
> Beijing is often accused of manipulating the value of its currency, the renminbi, to subsidize its manufacturing. The government also funnels domestic savings into the national banking system and grants subsidies to politically favored businesses, and it seems obsessed with building infrastructure. All of this tips the economy in very particular directions.
> 
> The Austrian approach raises the possibility that there is no way for China to make good on enough of its oversubsidized investments. At first, they create lots of jobs and revenue, but as the business cycle proceeds, new marginal investments become less valuable and more prone to allocation by corruption. The giddy booms of earlier times wear off, and suddenly not every decision seems wise. The combination can lead to an economic crackup — not because aggregate demand is too low, but because the economy has been producing the wrong mix of goods and services.
> 
> TO keep its investments in business, the Chinese government will almost certainly continue to use political means, like propping up ailing companies with credit from state-owned banks. But whether or not those companies survive, the investments themselves have been wasteful, and that will eventually damage the economy. In the Austrian perspective, the government has less ability to set things right than in Keynesian theories.
> 
> Furthermore, it is becoming harder to stimulate the Chinese economy effectively. The flow of funds out of China has accelerated recently, and the trend may continue as the government liberalizes capital markets and as Chinese businesses become more international and learn how to game the system. Again, reflecting a core theme of Austrian economics, market forces are overturning or refusing to validate the state-preferred pattern of investments.
> 
> For Western economies, the Keynesian view is much more popular than the Austrian view among mainstream economists. The Austrian view has a hard time explaining how so many investors can be fooled into so much malinvestment, especially given the traditional Austrian perspective that markets are fairly effective in allocating resources. But China has had such an extreme and pronounced artificial subsidization of investment that the Austrian perspective may apply there to a greater degree. (_Interpolation: The traditional Austrian view does follow that logic, but more modern perspectives include the effects of following incentives, and of course state loans, artificially controlled exchange rates and other manipulations by the State are incentives that literally cannot be beaten, since the State can control, extend and withhold them at will_)
> 
> The optimistic view is that Chinese excess capacity and overbuilding are manageable — that the current overextensions of investment will be propped up, but they won’t have to be propped up for long. In this view, the Chinese economy will fairly soon grow rather naturally into supporting its current capital structure, and its downturns will be mere hiccups, not busts.
> 
> The pessimistic view is that the problems are so large that the government’s attempts to prop up its investments with further subsidies could so limit consumption, and so distort resource allocation, that the Chinese economy will stagnate. In this view, the political means for allocating investment would grow to dominate market forces, the proposed “economic rebalancing” of the Chinese economy toward domestic consumption would become a distant memory, and China would have an even tougher time opening its capital markets and liberalizing its economy. Given that China already faces competition from nations where wages are lower, and that its population is aging, the country might not return to its previous growth track.
> 
> THE jury is out. But to my eye, we may well find a significant and lasting disruption, closer to what the Austrian theory would predict. Consider a broader historical perspective: How often in world history have countries enjoyed 30-plus years of extremely rapid growth without a major economic tumble somewhere along the way? One can be optimistic about China for the long term and still be fearful for the next turn in its business cycle.
> 
> In any case, China has surprised the world many times before — and is likely to surprise it again.
> 
> Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.



http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/



> *BEARISH ON CHINA: In response to my earlier post, reader Tom Wheatley writes:*
> 
> After 10 years in China, I am also leaving and taking my wonderful Chinese wife with me back to the US, for many of the reasons described in this article. I simply can’t in good conscience remain in China any longer. This article absolutely nails what is going on in China.
> 
> The whole system here is rotten to the core and can’t be sustained. The real estate bubble here is real and insane beyond belief, and when it pops all hell is going to break loose. Municipal governments are drowning in so much debt they make California look like a model of fiscal responsibility. The environment is filthy. Private enterprise is being choked. Corruption is rampant. The legal system is a joke. Property rights are non-existent. Chinese people are getting fed up and can actually connect using social media.
> 
> Chinese people like to brag that if they all jumped at the same time the whole world would feel it. Well, we’ll also feel it if they all fall down at the same time. I really hope that our leaders in Washington are preparing for when China implodes, because it’s going to cause an unimaginable amount of human suffering and misery when it does.
> 
> Get used to seeing articles like this. Many of my fellow long-term expat friends are planning to leave in the next year to 18 months. Chinese with money are getting dual citizenship and transferring billions abroad. The writing is on the wall.


----------



## Nemo888

I heard someone call them the Red Chinese today. WTF? Aren't they more capitalist than us now? All the things I buy come from there.

Totalitarian,  corporatist, fascist even but definitely NOT communist by any stretch of the imagination.

Do we even have a name for their system?


----------



## a_majoor

Crony Capitalism


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting analysis of President Obama's _“Priorities for 21st Century Defence”_ in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/in-frenemy-territory-obamas-decision-to-police-the-pacific/article4498096/


> In frenemy territory: Obama’s decision to police the Pacific
> 
> PAUL KORING
> The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Saturday, Aug. 25 2012
> 
> U.S. Marines are packing for Australia. The navy is sending its stealthy new gunboats to Singapore. And the hottest American F-22 warplanes deployed in Guam.
> 
> Barack Obama is done with the nation-building in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of “boots-on-the-ground” slogged for years in unpopular, perhaps unwinnable, wars. Instead, America is making a Pacific pivot to face China, and gearing up for a new challenge – managing a rival world power that is neither enemy nor ally.
> 
> Mr. Obama’s focus on the Asia-Pacific – outlined in his landmark “Priorities for 21st Century Defence” – comes amid the evident rise of China’s power and influence, and growing tension in the region.
> 
> Earlier this week, there were huge demonstrations in China following provocative “landings” by Japanese nationalists on disputed islands in the East China Sea. So far, confrontations in the hotly contested South and East China Seas have been limited the occasional ramming of ships, firing of fire hoses and some arrests. But as tiny protruding rocks and reefs, and the oil and gas riches beneath disputed territorial seas, become military outposts, America’s response to China’s confrontations with Japan and other U.S. allies is likely to be tested.
> 
> When Washington called for all sides to talk about the recent island dispute, for example, an undiplomatic shouting match ensued. “We can completely shout to the U.S.: ‘Shut up,’” warned the semi-official Peoples Daily, newspaper of the Communist party.
> 
> Only slightly less rudely, a pair of senior U.S. diplomats in Beijing were called in by the Chinese Foreign ministry, and told Washington must “respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
> 
> Mr. Obama’s pivot encompasses far more than dealing with China. The U.S. already counts South Korea, Japan, Australia and Taiwan as close allies; now, its Hawaii-born, Indonesian-raised, California-educated president is building closer ties with Indonesia and India.
> 
> More than a military doctrine, Mr. Obama’s “pivot” is a multi-faceted strategy by the first occupant of the Oval Office to call himself a “Pacific president.” It’s a wide-ranging attempt to shape the entire region into a vast, vibrant, interconnected “pacific” half of the planet.
> 
> “We are here to stay,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the East-West Center in Honolulu shortly before Mr. Obama unveiled the pivot earlier this year. “What will happen in Asia in the years ahead will have an enormous impact on our nation’s future. We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and leave it to others to determine our future for us.”
> 
> It’s an intricate dance, however, requiring far more subtlety than the post-Second-World-War era, which pitted America and its allies, including Canada, against clearly-defined enemies.
> 
> For a half-century, it was were the Soviet Union, which had the potential to unleash nuclear Armageddon. Since 2001, the disparate evil of Islamic jihadists justified – more or less – the so-called global “war on terror.” Mr. Obama has dropped that phrase and wants to dramatically shift strategic focus. But this time he doesn’t have a clear threat or obvious justification for the costs.
> 
> The vast sums required to project power across the Pacific may face tough opposition in Congress, where protecting local bases often trumps the needs of expeditionary forces. And while China remains a single-party state run by communists, it is also a vital engine of international enterprise, a behemoth of manufacturing with a seemingly inexhaustible demand for oil and commodities.
> 
> It also has its own, rapidly growing military power. Last year, China’s navy began sea trials of its first, relatively small and so-far plane-less, aircraft carrier. More ominously for the roving U.S. navy, China has also been testing huge new shore-based anti-ship missiles (called “area-denial” missiles).
> 
> The task ahead, then, is to bulk up without antagonizing China, which has sparred with the U.S. before over arms sales to Taiwan and a nasty collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter.
> 
> “At the end of the day, the purpose of U.S. strategy is to win the peace, is to have a co-operative relationship with China,” says Michael Green, a senior analyst at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. “But you can’t do that without forward presence, and you can’t do it unless you have credibility on the deterrence side.”
> 
> Unfortunately, from Beijing deterrence can look like encirclement.
> 
> They see tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea, American spy planes lurking off China’s coasts, 21st-century versions of the gunboats that humiliated Chinese dynasties 150 years ago in Singapore – plus a carrier battle group forward-deployed in Japan (the only one with a home port outside the U.S.) and a vow from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to shift 60 per cent of the navy’s ships and submarines to the Pacific.
> 
> They can certainly expect more of America’s 11 carrier battle groups cruising in the Pacific. Soon, new long-range, pilotless reconnaissance drones will fly from those carriers. Bomber versions will follow. U.S. war planners have also been leaking a new concept called “Air-Sea Battle” – a vague doctrine of combining the Air Force’s long-range, deep-strike bombers with the naval cruise missiles and warplanes from aircraft carriers. No “enemy” is specified, but the doctrine seems tailor-made for taking out industrial and military targets deep inside China.
> 
> Clearly, projecting power to reassure allies without seeming aggressive will require considerable strategic finesse.
> 
> “We talk about ‘Air-Sea Battle,’” James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Staff, told the Joint Warfighting Conference hosted by the US Naval Institute last spring as the full scope of the Pacific pivot was emerging. “It’s neither a doctrine nor a scenario … worst of all, Air-Sea Battle is demonizing China [and] that’s not in anybody’s interest.”
> 
> That’s definitely true for Canada. Indeed, the Obama pivot adds a new complication to a Canadian defence policy still rooted in the Cold War and an already-modest military facing savage cuts. Canada’s army has long looked – and deployed – East and our navy has been focused on the Atlantic. But as America turns to the Pacific, it may need to follow, if only to maintain some ongoing relevance to our biggest ally.
> 
> For now, the impact of the Pacific pivot depends on Mr. Obama winning four more years in the White House, that second term when presidents traditionally focus on foreign affairs – and their place in history.




Paul Koring gets one thing very, very right: *"... from Beijing deterrence can look like encirclement."* Threatening Beijing - and encirclement looks like a threat - is a _strategic_ mistake until and unless America is prepared to turn that threat into action. America is not ready, wiling or able to fight a major land war on the Asian continent, so threatening China is silly, sophomoric and toothless sabre rattling which, almost certainly, will provoke an unforeseen and unpleasant reaction.

Koring is also correct when he says: _"It’s_ [the new Asia policy]_ an intricate dance, however, requiring far more subtlety than the post-Second-World-War era, which pitted America and its allies, including Canada, against clearly-defined enemies."_ I'm not sure Washington - the White House, State Department and the Pentagon understand _intricacy_ and _subtlety_; that's a bit unfair: of course they "understand" them but they seem, when faced with domestic political *imperatives*, unable to practice them.

Finally, I doubt that Washington (White House, Congress, State and Defence) has any coherent vision of America's place in the world and, even less, about how to accomplish their aims, even if they are understood.


----------



## a_majoor

Perhaps the incoming Secretary of State and Administration team should take the time to read Robert Kaplan's book "Monsoon", which lays out many of the strategic challenges facing India and China in the Indian Ocean. Given the US is an Oceanic power, the "string of pearls" approach of China is a more natural fit for the United States, allowing them to have lots of facilities potentially available without a huge investment in manpower and deployed military forces, while "investing" in relationship building instead...


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Perhaps the incoming Secretary of State and Administration team should take the time to read Robert Kaplan's book "Monsoon", which lays out many of the strategic challenges facing India and China in the Indian Ocean. Given the US is an Oceanic power, the "string of pearls" approach of China is a more natural fit for the United States, allowing them to have lots of facilities potentially available without a huge investment in manpower and deployed military forces, while "investing" in relationship building instead...


I agree.  Far better to have U.S. allies in Asia serve as a bulwark, as they have vested interest in a multi-tiered approach to China.
Thanks for the heads up on that book.


----------



## Edward Campbell

More "inside the red wall"* news from China in this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ferrari-crash-scandal-leads-to-demotion-of-top-chinese-official/article4517178/


> Ferrari crash scandal leads to demotion of top Chinese official
> 
> ALEXA OLESEN
> BEIJING — The Associated Press
> 
> Published Monday, Sep. 03 2012
> 
> China's hopes for a smooth, once-a-decade political transition have been shaken by a lurid new scandal involving the death of a senior official's son who crashed during what may have been sex games in a speeding Ferrari.
> 
> Details of the March accident in Beijing, which allegedly also left two young women injured, have stayed under wraps in China but are leaking out via media in Hong Kong. The media blackout underscores official fears that the public will be outraged by another instance of excess and recklessness among China's power elites.
> 
> The embarrassing new wrinkle follows revelations that the wife of a top leader poisoned her British business associate last year. Both scandals have become bargaining chips in the jockeying for power ahead of a major leadership reshuffle this fall.
> 
> The South China Morning Post on Monday cited an unnamed official in Beijing as confirming that Ling Gu, the son of a loyal aide to President Hu Jintao, was the person killed in a March 18 Ferrari accident which initially garnered only minimal coverage in China's state media.
> 
> The report said Mr. Ling was half-naked when the crash occurred and his two passengers were naked or half-dressed, suggesting they had been involved in some kind of high-speed sex game.
> 
> Several other news outlets later cited additional unnamed officials as corroborating details of the incident. However, efforts to get officials to publicly confirm the report were unsuccessful. Faxed requests for information to the Public Security Bureau and China's Cabinet were not immediately answered.
> 
> The Post's story came just days after the Chinese government announced Ling Gu's father had been transferred to a new position, a move that analysts say ended his ambitions for a post in the upper ranks of the top leadership. Observers said the shift appeared linked to his son's scandalous death.
> 
> On Saturday, Ling Jihua was named as the new head of the United Front Work Department and his old job as director of the general office of the Communist Party's central committee was given to Li Zhanshu — thought to be a close ally of Xi Jinping, the man tapped to the China's next president.
> 
> As head of the executive office, Mr. Li will be responsible for personnel arrangements for the party's top leaders. A comparable position in U.S. politics is the president's chief of staff.
> 
> The appointment of Mr. Li ahead of a party congress, which should happen in the coming weeks or months, shows Xi is already gaining power. Such personnel changes usually occur during or after the party congress.
> 
> China politics expert Bo Zhiyue of the National University of Singapore called the personnel change "a very important signal that a power transition is taking place."
> 
> In Communist Party politics, the outgoing leader — who has built a support base while in office — typically attempts to retain power after leaving office, a check on the new administration.
> 
> Bo said he thought the shift was being accelerated, creating an arrangement "more in favor of the new leadership than the old one."
> 
> Joseph Cheng, a professor political science at the City University of Hong Kong, said that although Mr. Ling's new post was not a "serious demotion," it clearly removes him from the center of power.
> 
> China's political process is opaque, with jockeying for power happening behind closed doors, so it's difficult to say how big a role the Ferrari crash had in sidelining Ling though most analysts agree it played a part.
> 
> "This Ferrari accident certainly caused (Ling's) stepping down," Mr. Cheng said. "This means that instead of going further up, he has to go to the second line."
> 
> Some feel though that the scandal could be limited to Mr. Ling himself and has not significantly eroded Mr. Hu's power or tarnished his reputation.
> 
> Yang Dali, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, said Mr. Ling's departure reflects well on Mr. Hu by showing he is "very scrupulous in disciplining his own people" and "willing to penalize his own underlings."
> 
> Earlier this year, another top leader, Bo Xilai was ousted as the party chief of the megacity of Chongqing after his wife was declared a suspect in the murder of a British citizen.
> 
> Although Mr. Bo was a member of the party's 25-member Politburo, which is just below the nine-member Standing Committee in power, he had alienated other leaders with a high-profile crackdown on corruption that even by China's standards trampled on civil liberties. Many observers believe Mr. Bo's wife's criminal case was used by his opponents as an opportunity to purge him.
> 
> Regardless of the resulting power shifts, it's clear that the government is very anxious about how the public will respond to another case of elites behaving badly and has imposed a strict ban on news and Internet posts related to the Ferrari crash. Such incidents have increasingly sparked public outrage in China.
> 
> "There's no doubt the authorities have been very concerned about the revolt, the backlash against the flaunting of privileges, whether its cars or expensive watches, those trappings of power and corruption," said Mr. Yang.
> 
> He said authorities are very careful to control the spread of such information so it "doesn't stimulate more public anger against the elites."
> 
> Cheng noted that few Chinese know about the Ferrari incident and that, if they did, they might see at as too removed from their lives to worry about.
> 
> "If there's a Ferrari (crash) case with naked girls in Beijing, well, this is juicy stuff. You get cynical, you feel resentment but you don't do much. You don't protest because it's too far away."




I think the first paragraph is quite wrong. Far from shaking China's hope for a smooth handover, I suspect that this story tell us that the _transition_ from Hi Jintao to Xi Jinping will be more smooth than that between Hu and Jiang Zemin seven years ago and smoother still than the ransition from Deng Xiaping to Jiang in 1990. he notion that the outgoing leader had to keep some grip on the levers of power is unproductive. It appears, to me that Xi and Hu have managed to arrange the handover so that Hu and his followers leave gracefully, to become _"elder statesmen"_ à la Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Tony Blair and Paul Martin: they may have roles on the public stage, even partisan political roles, but their power base will be gone.

It is important to remember that there are "parties" within the CPC - three of them seem, to me to correspond to something akin to US Republicans (pretty tooth and claw capitalists), something like our Conservatives (_moderated_ free marketeers wanting a weak welfare state) and something akin to the NDP (reluctant capitalists, _statists_ wanting a strong welfare state). My guess is that Jiang Zemin fell into the first group and Hu Jintao was in the second. I guess, again  that now deposed Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai was in the third, or maybe in a group to the left of it. I have no idea where Xi Jinping fits.






Xi Jinping ~ get used to seeing is face





Peng Liyuan ` wife of Xi Jinping,
a famous Chinese folk singer,
and, in her own right - based
 on her status as an
entertainer - a MGen in the PLA


__________
* Zhongnanhai is a large walled compound in the centre of Beijing, right next to the _Forbidden City_ and it is the headquarters of the Communist Party of China and the State Council (Central government) of the PRC. The compound is quite large, it contains two lakes and many buildings, and it is very well guarded.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Broadly and generally: Good news!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/harper-meets-chinese-president-on-last-day-of-apec-summit/article4529916/




Harper meets Chinese president on last day of APEC summit

VLADIVOSTOCK, RUSSIA
The Canadian Press

Published Saturday, Sep. 08 2012


----------



## a_majoor

With the good news of the previous post I hate to return to the "cue ominous music" theme, but never the less:

http://thediplomat.com/2012/09/07/are-chinese-banks-hiding-the-mother-of-all-debt-bombs/



> *Are Chinese Banks Hiding “The Mother of All Debt Bombs”?*
> September 07, 2012
> By Minxin Pei
> 
> China's massive bank financed stimulus was intended to keep the economy moving. It may instead lead to economic disaster.
> 
> Financial collapses may have different immediate triggers, but they all originate from the same cause: an explosion of credit.  This iron law of financial calamity should make us very worried about the consequences of easy credit in China in recent years.  From the beginning of 2009 to the end of June this year, Chinese banks have issued roughly 35 trillion yuan ($5.4 trillion) in new loans, equal to 73 percent of China's GDP in 2011. About two-thirds of these loans were made in 2009 and 2010, as part of Beijing's stimulus package.  Unlike deficit-financed stimulus packages in the West, China's colossal stimulus package of 2009 was funded mainly by bank credit (at least 60 percent, to be exact), not government borrowing.
> 
> Flooding the economy with trillions of yuan in new loans did accomplish the principal objective of the Chinese government — maintaining high economic growth in the midst of a global recession.  While Beijing earned plaudits around the world for its decisiveness and economic success, excessive loose credit was fueling a property bubble, funding the profligacy of state-owned enterprises, and underwriting ill-conceived infrastructure investments by local governments.  The result was predictable: years of painstaking efforts to strengthen the Chinese banking system were undone by a spate of careless lending as new bad loans began to build up inside the financial sector.
> 
> When the Chinese Central Bank (the People's Bank of China) and banking regulators sounded the alarm in late 2010, it was already too late.  By that time, local governments had taken advantage of loose credit to amass a mountain of debt, most of it squandered on prestige projects or economically wasteful investments.  The National Audit Office of China acknowledged in June 2011 that local government debt totaled 10.7 trillion yuan (U.S. $1.7 trillion) at the end of 2010.  However, Professor Victor Shih of Northwestern University has estimated that the real amount of local government debt was between 15.4 and 20.1 trillion yuan, or between 40 and 50% of China’s GDP.  Of this amount, he further estimated, the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are financial entities established by local governments to invest in infrastructure and other projects, owed between 9.7 and 14.4 trillion yuan at the end of 2010.
> 
> Anybody with some knowledge of the state of health of LGFVs would shudder at these numbers.  If anything, Chinese LGFVs are known mainly for their unique ability to sink perfectly good money into bottomless holes in the ground.  So taking on such a huge mountain of debt can mean only one thing — a future wave of default when the projects into which LGFVs have piled funds fail to yield viable returns to service the debt.  If 10 percent of these loans turn bad, a very conservative estimate, we are talking about total bad loans in the range of 1 to 1.4 trillion yuan.  If the share of dud loans should reach 20 percent, a far more likely scenario, Chinese banks would have to write down 2 to 2.8 trillion yuan, a move sure to destroy their balance sheets.
> 
> The Chinese government, to its credit, was also aware of the danger of this ticking debt bomb.  Unfortunately, it used a solution that merely delayed the inevitable.  In the first half of this year, Beijing announced a policy of mandating banks to extend by one more year the deadline for local governments to repay their bank loans that were about to mature.This move was taken, in all likelihood, to conceal the festering problem in the financial sector during the year of leadership transition.  But it did nothing to defuse the debt bomb.
> 
> If debt taken on by LGFVs was the one shoe that has dropped, what about the other shoe?
> 
> Obviously local governments were not the only culprits during China's credit bubble in 2009-2010.  There were other participants in this frenzy of borrowing and spending.  With the slowdown of the Chinese economy, these participants are, like the proverbial naked swimmers exposed by falling tides, coming out of the woodworks.
> 
> Over-leveraged real estate developers, for example, are struggling to stay a step ahead of bankruptcy.  The Chinese media has reported several instances of suicides of bankrupt real estate developers.  Some bankrupt businessmen simply vanished.  According to a story in the South China Morning Post in May this year, 47 business owners disappeared in 2011 to avoid repaying billions in bank loans.
> 
> Chinese manufacturing companies, state-owned and private alike, could be next in line.  Their profit margins are notoriously thin.  With excess capacity a systemic problem in the Chinese economy, a slowdown in economic growth will result in a rapid build-up of inventory and a glut of unsold goods in all industries.  Getting rid of their inventories at a discount will wipe out their slim profits and incur financial losses.  Some of the loans extended to them in good times will surely go bad.
> 
> But the potential risk for a financial tsunami is greatest in China's shadow banking system.  Because of very low-yield for savings by Chinese banks (since deposit rates are regulated) and competition among banks for deposits and new fee-generating businesses, a complex, unregulated shadow banking system has emerged and grown significantly in China in the last few years.  Typically, the shadow banking system pushes something called "wealth management products," which are short-term financial products yielding a much higher rate than bank deposits for investors.  To evade regulatory oversight, these products do not appear on a bank's balance sheet.  According to Charlene Chu, a highly respected banking analyst for Fitch ratings, China had about 10.4 trillion yuan in wealth management products, about 11.5 percent of the total bank deposits, at the end of June this year.
> 
> Since borrowers that use funds provided by wealth management products tend to be private entrepreneurs and real estate developers denied access to the official banking system, they have to promise a higher rate of return.  Obviously, higher return also means higher risks.  Although it is impossible to estimate the percentage of non-performing loans extended through wealth management products, using a conservative 10 percent baseline would mean another 1 trillion yuan in potential bank losses.
> 
> The shadow banking system has another function: channeling funds to borrowers or activities explicitly banned by government regulation.  In the last two years, the Chinese State Council has tried to deflate the real estate bubble by limiting bank loans to real estate developers.  But banks can skirt such restrictions by ostensibly lending to each other, with the funds ultimately going to financially stretched real estate developers.  Chinese banks do this out of their own survival instinct.  If they do not lend to effectively delinquent real estate developers who have borrowed large amounts, they would have to declare these loans non-performing and suffer losses.  On the balance sheets of Chinese banks, such loans are technically classified as claims on other financial institutions.  According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, inter-bank loans today account for 43 percent of total outstanding loans, 70 percent higher than at the end of 2009.
> 
> Disturbingly, none of these huge risks are reflected in the financial statements of Chinese banks.  The largest state-owned banks have all recently reported solid earnings, high capital ratios, and negligible non-performing loans.  For the banking sector as a whole, non-performing loans amount to only 1 percent of total outstanding credit.
> 
> One things is evident here.  Either we should not believe our "lying eyes" or Chinese banks are trying to hide the mother of all debt bombs.


----------



## tomahawk6

Canada might want to consider a Swiss style military. Large numbers of reserves that can be called up to roundout the standing force. The reserve ground force should include everyone 18-40 and could be accomplished with a draft. Canada is too large geographically to be defended by the size of the current force. Not depending on the US for security requires a price to be paid.


----------



## Sythen

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Canada might want to consider a Swiss style military. Large numbers of reserves that can be called up to roundout the standing force. The reserve ground force should include everyone 18-40 and could be accomplished with a draft. Canada is too large geographically to be defended by the size of the current force. Not depending on the US for security requires a price to be paid.



erm was this posted in the right thread?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Canada cannot move closer to Asia, especially to China, without annoying the USA ~ not in the short term, anyway.

Does that (improved Canada-China ties) mean that the US would withdraw its implicit security guarantee? *No*, not even close. Geography alone, *requires* America to defend Canada against any hostile (to America) takeover or even threat. America, the lower 48, has four borders: two oceans and two land borders. Both Canada and Mexico are _buffers_, vital, *essential*, strategically imperative buffers for the USA - space age or not. Going beyond that, Americans, as a people, are, in my opinion, culturally unable to watch a close friend and neighbour, a "cousin" even, being attacked by a foreign power.

But: Canada ought not to rely too heavily on that implicit US guarantee; we should welcome it as a backstop but we should rely upon our own ability to hit any balls directed at us, to defend our own wicket, in cricket speak. Our foreign and defence policy should, explicitly, accept the requirement to, and guarantee to our good friend and neighbours that, we will do a full and fair share in defending out own territory and the approaches to theirs.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good news, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Guardian_:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/10/hong-kong-elections-pro-democracy


> Hong Kong pro-democracy camp takes early election lead
> *Votes also high for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong in areas where pro-China groups are well funded*
> 
> Vaudine England in Hong Kong
> 
> guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 September 2012
> 
> Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement has taken a narrow lead in the legislative elections which took place against a backdrop of rising concern about China's influence over the former British colony.
> 
> But while the pro-democracy candidates have a slight majority so far in the directly elected seats, in districts where pro-China groups have set up well-funded, extensive neighbourhood networks, votes for the Beijing-backed Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) have been high.
> 
> The first district to announce results, Kowloon West, a sprawling and diverse electorate, saw a high vote for the DAB alongside victory for more pan-democrats, including the feisty journalist Claudia Mo of the Civic Party.
> 
> Some big names from the pan-democratic camp have yet to hear their fate.
> 
> The chairman of the Democratic Party, Albert Ho Chun-yan, was not hopeful: "My situation has been worsening. This is beyond my expectations," he said of what he called the most competitive elections yet.
> 
> Even before hearing about his won bid for a seat, he announced his resignation as party leader following what he called his party's "serious failure" to garner more votes.
> 
> He had lead his party into a compromise with the government over constitutional reforms during the last legislature's term, a move which has spurred support for the more radical People Power Party whose Wong Yuk-man has kept his seat.
> 
> While the pan-democratic camp has suffered from its internal divisions, so has the pro-China establishment. Close behind the DAB has been the Federation of Trade Unions, members of which have suggested their poorer than expected showing could be traced back to competition with its allies.
> 
> Leader of the pro-business Liberal Party, Miriam Lau Kin-yee, has lost her seat and is resigning her leadership role, mirroring her predecessors at previous elections.
> 
> More people voted than ever before, but the 53% turnout was less than the 55% of the 2004 elections when the pool of registered voters was smaller, which also took place amid strong feelings about China's role in the free-wheeling territory.
> 
> Counting is continuing, particularly for five new "super-seats", for which people could vote across geographical lines.
> 
> Hong Kong's legislature has 70 seats, 40 of which can be voted for directly in geographical constitutencies, with the balance made up of what are called functional constituencies in which, for example, approved doctors' groups can vote for a medical sector representative, or bankers choose a banking representative.
> 
> This system guarantees a pro-government majority as the pan-democrats face well-financed and organised opposition in the free seats from the pro-China group, and most functional seats go to establishment figures.
> 
> The pan-democrats have now secured the one third of all seats they desire in order to exercise a veto over future legislation which must, during the next four years, include measure to implement China's vision of constitutional change.




For China this city election is probably at least, maybe more important than the forthcoming one in the USA.


----------



## Sythen

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/18/us-africa-china-pushback-idUSBRE88H0CR20120918



> Insight: In Africa's warm heart, a cold welcome for Chinese
> 
> 
> (Reuters) - Malawians bill their country as the "Warm Heart of Africa" and pride themselves on a reputation for friendliness. But Jaffa Shaibu, a burly 32-year-old merchant in a clothes market in Salima, a dusty town near the shores of Lake Malawi, feels less than welcoming to the Chinese traders who have moved in over the past four years.
> 
> "The way it looks, one day there will be a big fight with them," Shaibu said. "One day there will be blood."
> 
> Echoing a grievance heard across Africa, Shaibu and his colleagues in this town of 40,000 complain of Chinese businessmen with better access to cheap imports of clothes, shoes and electronics, and deeper pockets that allow them to reduce their margins.
> 
> That sentiment is part of a grass-roots backlash against Beijing's increasing diplomatic and commercial clout in Africa.
> 
> In many ways, the relationship between the two has never been stronger. Bilateral trade has almost doubled over the past three years, to $166 billion in 2011 from $91 billion in 2009. In July, Chinese President Hu Jintao offered Africa $20 billion in cheap loans over the next three years. China, he said, would forever be a "good friend, a good partner and a good brother" to Africa.
> 
> But a growing number of Africa's billion people are less enthusiastic.



More on link.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

The RT website is reporting that China has another, smaller, twin-engine in the works. 



> Two models of Chinese 5th-Gen fighter in works (PHOTOS)
> 
> Published: 18 September, 2012, 14:05
> 
> F-60 fifth generation fighter jet. (Image from http://bbs.tiexue.net)
> 
> The Chinese military has leaked first photos of a brand new lightweight fighter with external characteristics that allow the jet fifth-generation attribution. Some pictures suggest it could be used on future Chinese aircraft carriers.
> 
> Shenyang Aircraft Industry Group (SAC), one of the leading aircraft design and manufacturing corporations of China’s aviation industry, has rolled out a prototype that might eventually become Chinese analogue to America’s F-35.
> 
> The aircraft bears a certain resemblance to Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II, and even reportedly has the codename F-60. Though absolutely no characteristics of the prototype have been unveiled, one major difference is obvious: unlike its American relative, China’s F-60 has two engines.
> The pictures of the Chinese technology demonstrator suggest that the engines the aircraft is currently equipped with do not have thrust vectoring nozzles which might suggest the prototype is at too early a stage of testing to get more sophisticated and powerful propulsion package.
> 
> Inclined twin vertical tail and wide-spaced ram air inlets are reminiscent of Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor Joint Strike Fighter.
> 
> A blurred photo from China Military Report website is the only proof that SAC’s F 60 aircraft has successfully been airborne.
> 
> The suspected photo of China's SAC F 60 fighter test flight. (Image from http://wuxinghongqi.blogspot.com)
> 
> Now it has become obvious that in the race for possession of fifth generation aircraft the Chinese military placed its bets on two horses: Chengdu Aircraft Corporation, which is heavily testing its J-20 “Mighty Dragon” fifth generation heavy fighter-bomber, and Shenyang Aircraft Industry Group with its F-60 lightweight fighter.
> 
> The F-60 prototype jet bears the side number 31001, which may be a reference to Chengdu’s J-20 heavy fighter jet. The first two J-20 prototypes have “2001” and “2002” side numbers respectively. Yet, the F-60 and J-20 are not likely to be regarded as competitors because it appears the aircraft will have different specializations.
> 
> China’s future sea-based fighter jet
> 
> China’s first aircraft carrier, dubbed Shi Lang, laid down by the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and almost finished now by Chinese engineers, is expected to be put into service by the end of 2012. Still, Beijing has informed the warship will be not ready for action till 2017.
> 
> The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) already has fighter jets to form the aircraft wing for Shi Lang. China produces J-15, a copycat of the Soviet-made Su-33. The J-15 copycat has been made by Shenyang Aircraft Industry Group. But the Su-33 was designed in the 1980s and cannot be regarded a proper sea-based aircraft in the 2010s. Probably since SAC already proved it can make a sea-based aircraft, Beijing commissioned a great challenge of creating a fifth generation fighter jet for naval use to this corporation.
> 
> Chinese Military Review website has published computer-generated images of the F-60 fifth generation fighter jet in action with a whole range of various air to air missiles. On at least two pictures the aircraft is depicted with an extended arrest hook that the sea-based aircraft use to stop after landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
> 
> The two-wheeled front rack chassis of the real F-60 prototype also suggests the aircraft is being engineered for naval use, like sea-based versions of Dassault’s Rafale in France, Lockheed Martin’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet and the Soviet-made Su-33. At the same time there are no signs the prototype is capable of short take off and vertical landing, which the F-35B STOVL version has.
> 
> A brief look at the computer-generated images also exposes another feature the F-60 has in common with Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II: an extremely limited space in the internal weapon bays. A stealth aircraft must have all of its weapons hidden inside the hull to decrease the aircraft’s visibility to enemy radars. The Chinese F-60, just like the American F-35, can only carry small-sized short range missiles in true stealth mode.
> 
> To get seriously armed the F-60 would have to carry long-range missiles externally, which would nullify its stealth capabilities. If so, the F-60 will have limited capabilities.
> 
> Probably the biggest problem of the modern Chinese aviation industry is the deadlock with military jet engines it currently finds itself in. For both Chengdu’s J-20 and Shenyang’s F-60 there are no reliable Chinese-made jet engines with technical characteristics appropriate for a fifth generation fighter. Still, Chinese engineers are known not only for copycat efforts, but for outstanding persistence in achieving their objectives.
> 
> It cannot be altogether excluded that by 2017, when the Shi Lang aircraft carrier will be commissioned and more warships of the kind be under construction, Chinese engineers will probably decrease or eliminate the dependence on Russian jet engines and spare parts and put the F-60 on a proper flight.



 Article Link (with photos).


----------



## a_majoor

More "cue ominous music". 

Chinese statistics have been fairly sketchy at best, and we have seen results which are at variance to the narrative of Chinese success (poorly constructed infrastructure, massive overbuilding of real estate [and not just "ghost cities"] and inputs and outputs that simply do not match up. If this story is accurate, then far more trouble is looming, and the people who are invested in the idea that China's economic growth will save the day will have their illusions shattered. One can only wonder at what the chaos predicted within China as markets unravel will unveil; economic and political chaos generally has very poor end results for the rest of us as "the man on the white horse" makes his appearance:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/how-chinas-rehypothecated-ghost-steel-just-vaporized-and-what-means-world-economy



> *How China's Rehypothecated "Ghost" Steel Just Vaporized, And What This Means For The World Economy*
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/17/2012 17:20 -0400
> 
> One of the key stories of 2011 was the revelation, courtesy of MF Global, that no asset in the financial system is "as is", and instead is merely a copy of a copy of a copy- rehypothecated up to an infinite number of times (if domiciled in the UK) for one simple reason: there are not enough money-good, credible assets in existence, even if there are more than enough 'secured' liabilities that claim said assets as collateral. And while the status quo is marching on, the Ponzi is rising, and new liabilities are created, all is well; however, the second the system experiences a violent deleveraging and the liabilities have to be matched to their respective assets as they are unwound, all hell breaks loose once the reality sets in that each asset has been diluted exponentially.
> 
> Naturally, among such assets are not only paper representations of securities, mostly stock and bond certificates held by the DTC's Cede & Co., but physical assets, such as bars of gold held by paper ETFs such as GLD and SLV. In fact, the speculation that the physical precious metals in circulation have been massively diluted has been a major topic of debate among the precious metal communities, and is the reason for the success of such physical-based gold and silver investment vehicles as those of Eric Sprott. Of course, the "other side" has been quite adamant that this is in no way realistic and every ounce of precious metals is accounted for. While that remains to be disproven in the next, and final, central-planner driven market crash, we now know that it is not only precious metals that are on the vaporization chopping block: when it comes to China, such simple assets as simple steel held in inventories, apparently do not exist.
> 
> From Reuters:
> 
> Chinese banks and companies looking to seize steel pledged as collateral by firms that have defaulted on loans are making an uncomfortable discovery: the metal was never in the warehouses in the first place.
> 
> This means that in an economy in which the creation of liabilities, and pledging of assets took place at a furious pace in the past 5 years, nobody really knows just what the real state of credit creation truly was. What is 100% certain is that as a result of this revelation, the GDP number of the country, which is and always has been a derivative of credit formation and expansion (and heaven forbid contraction), is massively overrepresenting what it is in reality, and that the Chinese economy has been expanding at a far slower pace if defined not only by the creation of liabilities, but by matched assets. Most importantly, it means that every single Renminbi in circulation is impaired as a country-wide liquidation event would see huge losses by every creditor class. It also would mean, naturally, zero residual value left for the equity.
> 
> And just like that the Chinese growth "miracle" goes poof... as does its steel first, and soon all other commodities (coughcoppercough) that served as the basis of "secured" liability creation.
> 
> Reuters continues, even if the punchline is already known:
> 
> China's demand has faltered with the slowing economy, pushing steel prices to a three-year low and making it tough for mills and traders to keep up with payments on the $400 billion of debt they racked up during years of double-digit growth.
> 
> As defaults have risen in the world's largest steel consumer, lenders have found that warehouse receipts for metal pledged as collateral do not always lead them to stacks of stored metal. Chinese authorities are investigating a number of cases in which steel documented in receipts was either not there, belonged to another company or had been pledged as collateral to multiple lenders, industry sources said.
> 
> Ghost inventories are exacerbating the wider ailments of the sector in China, which produces around 45 percent of the world's steel and has over 200 million metric tons (220.5 million tons) of excess production capacity. Steel is another drag on a financial system struggling with bad loans from the property sector and local governments.
> 
> "What we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg," said a trader from a steel firm in Shanghai who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media. "The situation will get worse as poor demand, slumping prices and tight credit from banks create a domino effect on the industry."
> 
> Ultra-rehypothecation 101:
> 
> Police have arrested an employee from Baoyang Warehouse in Shanghai and are investigating documentation for steel stocks that the employee issued to a trading firm, said an official with the surname Ou at Baoyang. Baoyang is owned by China Railway Materials Shanghai Company Limited.
> 
> The trade firm used the stocks more than once as collateral to obtain loans, said an executive at Shanghai Minlurin, another trading firm that had steel stocks in the warehouse. The receipts used were for steel worth around 380 million yuan ($59.96 million), the executive said.
> 
> Similar cases have prompted some trading houses to temporarily halt transactions related to warehouse receipts, disrupting China's steel business, traders said.
> 
> If the above makes readers queasy, it should: after all rehypothecation of questionable assets is precisely what serves as the backbone of that critical component of the shadow banking system: the repo market, where anything goes, and where those who want, can create money virtually out of thin air with impunity as long as nobody checks if the assets used for liability creation are actually in the system (and with JPM as the core private sector tri-party repo entity, secondary only to the Fed, one can see why this question has never actually arisen).
> 
> In the meantime, the entire Chinese economy is unraveling:
> 
> Banks, too, are giving less credit against warehouse receipts.
> 
> "Fake warehouse receipts have become a problem for some banks and because of this, many banks have boosted monitoring of existing stocks at warehouses and temporarily stopped accepting steel stocks as collateral for loans," said a Shanghai-based branch manager from a Chinese bank who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media.
> 
> Steel mills and end users rely heavily on trading firms to keep steel flowing from producers to consumers. Steel traders often buy consignments with full payment, ensuring cash flow to the mills. End users can buy small volumes from the traders, more convenient for them than the big volumes the mills sell.
> 
> Industry sources estimated cases that have already come to light account for about 5 billion yuan ($787.50 million) of bad debt in Shanghai, one of China's biggest steel trading centers.
> 
> At another warehouse, a logistics unit of giant steelmaker Baosteel rented a small office to a company called Shanghai Yiye Steel Trade Market Management Co Ltd. Documents were forged stating Yiye was the owner of some of the steel stored in the warehouse, said Wang Xueying, the spokeswoman for the unit called Shanghai Baosteel Logistics Co Ltd.
> 
> Yiye used the documents in dealings with two companies, China Railway Harbin Logistics and Wuhan Iron Yitong, the spokeswoman said.
> 
> The two companies came to the warehouse to collect the stocks only to find that Yiye did not own the materials, she said. The case is still under investigation, she added.
> 
> Nobody answered telephone calls to Yiye made by Reuters to request comment for this story. Both China Railway Harbin Logistics and Wuhan Iron Yitong declined to comment when contacted.
> 
> In conclusion we can only add that we hope none of this comes as a surprise to our regular readers: we have been warning for years that i) the inventory of the world's credible assets is literally evaporating in absence of technological efficiency and CapEx spending (which is also the reason for the ECB's endless lowering of collateral requirements) and ii) illegal rehypothecation of assets, which infinitely dilutes claims on real assets, can and will lead to total losses even for investors who thought they had strong collateral backing.
> 
> We now know that this has been happening in China with the most critical component of its economic growth miracle: steel. We will soon discover that all other assets: stocks, bonds, commodities (including gold and silver) and finally cash (think deposits) have been comparably rehypothecated and criminally commingled. The end result will be the most epic bank run in world history, which incidentally is precisely what the central banks are attempting desperately to delay as much as possible by generating excess inflation to "inflate" away the debt, leading to rematching of finite assets and virtually infinite liabilities. Alas, in a world in which credit-money liabilities are in the quadrillions, and in which the real assets are in the tens of trillions, only hyperinflation can seal the deal.
> 
> Or, in other words, lose-lose.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> An interesting analysis of President Obama's _“Priorities for 21st Century Defence”_ in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:
> 
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/in-frenemy-territory-obamas-decision-to-police-the-pacific/article4498096/
> 
> Paul Koring gets one thing very, very right: *"... from Beijing deterrence can look like encirclement."* Threatening Beijing - and encirclement looks like a threat - is a _strategic_ mistake until and unless America is prepared to turn that threat into action. America is not ready, wiling or able to fight a major land war on the Asian continent, so threatening China is silly, sophomoric and toothless sabre rattling which, almost certainly, will provoke an unforeseen and unpleasant reaction.
> 
> Koring is also correct when he says: _"It’s_ [the new Asia policy]_ an intricate dance, however, requiring far more subtlety than the post-Second-World-War era, which pitted America and its allies, including Canada, against clearly-defined enemies."_ I'm not sure Washington - the White House, State Department and the Pentagon understand _intricacy_ and _subtlety_; that's a bit unfair: of course they "understand" them but they seem, when faced with domestic political *imperatives*, unable to practice them.
> 
> Finally, I doubt that Washington (White House, Congress, State and Defence) has any coherent vision of America's place in the world and, even less, about how to accomplish their aims, even if they are understood.




The headline in the story I cited above said: 


> In frenemy territory: Obama’s decision to police the Pacific



Now the Chinese tell the Americans to butt out according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1040225/defence-chief-liang-guanglie-tells-us-counterpart-stay-out-islands-row


> Defence chief Liang Guanglie tells US counterpart to stay out of islands row
> *China's defence chief warns his US counterpart over American claim to a stake in the conflict*
> 
> Wednesday, 19 September, 2012
> 
> Teddy Ng in Beijing and Minnie Chan
> 
> In a meeting with his US counterpart yesterday, Defence Minister General Liang Guanglie voiced "strong opposition" to Washington's claim that disputed East China Sea islands fall under its security pact with Tokyo.
> 
> Liang also warned US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta - in China for the first time since assuming his post last year - that Beijing was ready to respond militarily to assert its sovereignty over the Diaoyus, which Japan controls and calls the Senkakus.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Leon Panetta stands with Liang Guanglie in Beijing. Photo: AFP
> 
> He called on Washington to "concretely" demonstrate it would not take sides in the spat over the five uninhabited islands, which sit near potential supplies of oil and natural gas.
> 
> "We reserve the right to take further action," Liang said after the talks. "Of course, that being said, we still hope for a peaceful and negotiated solution."
> 
> Tensions remained high yesterday, as Tokyo reported 10 Chinese surveillance ships and a fisheries patrol boat in waters near the islands. Two Japanese activists landed on one island amid fresh protests in Chinese cities to mark the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident.
> 
> Thousands gathered outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing. Heavier security was visible in some cities, such as Shenzhen, in what appeared to be a greater effort to keep a lid on protests.
> 
> Washington's claim that the islands fall under its post-war defence treaty with Tokyo has irked Beijing.
> 
> "I want to make it clear that the Diaoyu Islands are China's inherent territory, which is evidenced by history and law," Liang said.
> 
> For his part, Panetta called for calm on both sides of the East China Sea. He said Washington wanted expanded ties with the PLA, and invited China to take part in the 2014 Rimpac international military exercise in Hawaii.
> 
> "The key is to have senior-level actions like we are engaging in, that reduce the potential for miscalculation, that foster greater understanding and that expand trust between our two countries," Panetta said.
> 
> Panetta will next meet Vice-President Xi Jinping.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Reuters_




That's pretty direct diplomacy.

Over to you, President Obama.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is a report on a wide ranging interviews with China's ambassador to Canada:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/china-calls-for-free-trade-deal-with-canada-within-a-decade/article4561149/


> China calls for free-trade deal with Canada within a decade
> 
> CAMPBELL CLARK
> OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Saturday, Sep. 22 2012
> 
> Canada and China should move quickly toward a free-trade agreement, Beijing’s ambassador has urged, insisting it would provide a longer-term solution to questions about two-way investment sparked by the $15-billion Chinese takeover bid for Alberta oil firm Nexen Inc.
> 
> “Business is business,” Ambassador Zhang Junsai said on Friday, adding that Ottawa should decide whether to approve the takeover of Nexen by China’s state-owned oil giant CNOOC Ltd. based on its business benefits alone, not criticisms of China’s rights record, or domestic politics.
> 
> In an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail at his Ottawa residence, Mr. Zhang, speaking in a forthright manner rare for a Chinese envoy, said that if Canada wants new broad, investment rules and guarantees that its companies will get greater access to investment and markets in China, it should strike a wide-ranging, “overall” free-trade agreement with Beijing.
> 
> “That’s why we need to talk with the Canadian side about an FTA. It’s time to open each other’s markets,” Mr. Zhang said. “It’s high time to do the exploratory work on the possibility of a free-trade agreement. Under a free-trade agreement, there will be more and more trade and investment.”
> 
> The idea has been floated as an eventual possibility by some business leaders and whispered lately within Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
> 
> But for the first time, China’s representative is signalling a deal should be a near-term goal, covering investment, agriculture, manufacturing, and other areas – and work should start soon. Negotiations might take a few years, but less than a decade, Mr. Zhang said: “When we reach a common consensus, it’s easy.”
> 
> A full free-trade agreement with China would be a potential breakthrough in efforts to expand lagging trade with Asia, which is seen as crucial to Canada’s future economic growth. Some question whether real free trade is possible with China’s state-controlled economy. But for Mr. Harper, who has made economic ties with Asia and China a priority, it is a tantalizing offer.
> 
> The timing is no coincidence. The CNOOC bid for Nexen, which would be the first outright takeover of a substantial player in the energy sector, is a test of Canada-China relations. Rejecting it could cause the chill of earlier years to return. But Mr. Harper also must deal with domestic political qualms as some Canadians raise concerns about China’s rights record, its intentions, and questions from the business community about whether it would have equal access to China’s economy.
> 
> By suggesting a free-trade agreement, China is also offering the prospect of negotiated rules for future dealings, and expanded overall trade.
> 
> But Mr. Zhang warned against letting domestic politics dictate the Nexen decision: “Business is business. It should not be politicized,” he said. “If we politicize all this, then we can’t do business.”
> 
> And although the ambassador declined to comment explicitly on how Beijing would respond if the government rejects the Nexen bid, he said relations with Canada have warmed in the past three years, and that’s why Chinese companies want to do business. He said the relationship has developed rapidly since Mr. Harper made his first visit to China in 2009 and agreed with Chinese President Hu Jintao to start a “strategic partnership.”
> 
> “We should have solid ground for this development,” he said.
> 
> Mr. Zhang came to Canada less than a year ago from a posting as ambassador to Australia, where Chinese companies have invested heavily, sparking similar controversy. In the extensive interview, he made it clear his main mandate is to expand trade and investment – and it was apparent he is a new type of envoy.
> 
> Partly educated at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and previously posted mostly in Australia and New Zealand, Mr. Zhang, 59, speaks English without interpreters or dense diplomatic metaphors. He’s pithy, even direct, and at ease with controversial topics and Western journalists.
> 
> He argued that Canadians’ suspicions are misguided.
> 
> “We are not coming to control your resources,” he declared, unprompted. China’s investment amounts to only 2 per cent of the foreign investment in Canada, he noted. And he also dismissed the allegation that Beijing plans to reserve Canadian oil and gas for shipment to Chinese customers – noting there are no pipelines to the West Coast yet capable of carrying enough to Asia.
> 
> But the Nexen bid has raised other objections, including the fact that Canadian companies cannot launch similar takeovers in China.
> 
> Mr. Zhang, however, cited a long list of Canadian companies doing business in China – Manulife, Scotiabank, Bombardier, Bank of Montreal, and Eldorado Gold Corp. – noting that some went to China in the early 1980s, long before Chinese companies came here. He said 12,000 Canadian companies are in China now. If Canada wants new rules for investment, they should be negotiated in a free-trade agreement, he added.
> 
> That would likely cause political controversy, in part because some argue China’s human rights record is an obstacle, and should prevent approval of takeovers like CNOOC’s bid for Nexen. Mr. Zhang’s response: that China is trying to improve rights, but also has 1.3 billion people, and faces challenges on a massive scale to educate people and free hundreds of millons from poverty.
> 
> “It’s different countries,” he said. “Give us a break. You know? Let us develop. We’ve done no harm to your country. We see all this improvement. You should recognize improvement and development.”
> 
> Nexen, and business, should not be overwhelmed by such issues, he argued: “Be practical. It’s really the benefits that matter. But I stress: two-way benefits. Not one-way to China.”




Short term, for China, is 10 years, that's two election cycles for Canada ... nearly an eternity.

It is pretty clear, to me, that Ambassador Zhang is right: a comprehensive free trade deal is the best course open, but I believe in free trade as a matter of principle. The advantages of free trade are a lot less clear to a majority of Canadians, however, but, assuming Prime Minister Harper and his most senior officials share my views (and I think they do, especially the very senior civil servants) then now is the time to start laying the foundations: in talks with China and, more importantly, in propagating the advantages of free trade to Canadians.

The main Chinese focus is on the _Nexen_ deal because it is shaping up to be a major China/US flashpoint. Most opposition to the _Nexen_ deal is organized and funded by US interests, including official US interests.


----------



## a_majoor

All the more reason to get aboard the TPP; then we have a pre existing framework for free trade with China, India, Korea (South and in the future unified) and to revise any existing free trade deals we currently have.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually the TPP may be a dead end.

China is trying ~ I'm not sure if it will succeed ~ to separate Japan and South Korea from the TPP, which China sees as having too much America, and enticing them into a tripartite free trade area. Rumours in some parts of the Asian media are that both Japan and SK are very interested. The TPP will still go ahead and I agree that Canada should join (and I agree our joining will mean the end of "supply management" for some agricultural sectors which I think is a *very good thing* for 99.9% of Canadians) but we ought not to expect miracles.

Perhaps the Chinese are also trying to entice us (and Australia? and New Zealand?) into their free trade area and, _de facto_ lessen America's "hold" on us all.


----------



## GAP

With China and Japan at loggerheads lately, how likely is that?


----------



## Edward Campbell

GAP said:
			
		

> With China and Japan at loggerheads lately, how likely is that?




China is allowing all these demonstrations and so on to distract public attention from slower growth ~ down to a _guesstimated_ 7% this year, which is below the 8% level which some Chinese officials told me is the level required to pretty much guarantee the all important *social harmony* on which the Party depends for popular support.

I repeat: the Chinese, unlike us, think in the mid and long terms ~ the main long term goal is economic prosperity which provides power (hard and soft) and social harmony. A China-Japan-South Korea free trade area will go a long way towards guaranteeing the kind of stable economic prosperity the Chinese want. They also want those islands but they are willing to buy the output rather than fight for it. If they can stare down the Japanese, Malaysians and Filipinos and get ownership then so much the better but if, as with Australian, Canadian and Siberian resources, they have to pay for them then that will be OK ~ just so long as they get them.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And now that the "heavy lifting" is done the Chinese move, gingerly, towards commercial opportunities in Afghanistan according to this an article in the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-official-makes-low-key-afghan-visit-as-beijing-jockeys-for-influence-in-region/article4561784/


> Beijing has stepped up diplomacy with Afghanistan in recent months as the 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops approaches.
> 
> China, which shares a 76-kilometre border with Afghanistan’s far northeast, has already secured major oil and copper mining concessions in Afghanistan, which is believed to have more than $1-trillion worth of minerals.



But it is not all commercial, as the article says, _"Mr. Zhou, ranked ninth in China’s ruling Communist Party hierarchy, is China’s top security official and oversees a crackdown on religious extremism, terrorism and separatism in his nation’s Muslim-populated Xinjiang region, which borders Central Asia and Afghanistan."_ It is Xinjiang, not copper which preoccupies China.

China has some commercial history in post Taliban Afghanistan; Chinese companies were (amongst) the first to install and operate large scale fibre optic services there and Chinese tech companies, like Huawei, are major players in Afghanistan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Reports are surfacing (South China Morning Post) that senior Chinese officials are heading to Japan for talks aimed at defusing the current tensions.

My guess: the public anger and demonstrations have done what the Chinese wanted and now they want people off the streets. Good relations with Japan are far, far more important than some little islands ~ *BUT* we must understand that the always chauvinistic Chinese people do feel strongly about their historic territorial claims; these demonstrations are not 'staged,' even though they are 'facilitated' by the government; the anger is *real*. Plus, I think, the men in _Zhongnanhai_ (the walled compound next to the _Forbidden City_ in which China's 'State Council works') are getting a bit nervous about people expressing their anger in public; it's all well and good to express anger at Japan, it is always a convenient whipping buy, but what if they get angry at their own Government?


----------



## Edward Campbell

But there is also this from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/as-tensions-grow-over-island-dispute-chinese-navy-receives-first-aircraft-carrier/article4561868/?cmpid=rss1&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter


> As tensions grow over island dispute, Chinese navy receives first aircraft carrier
> 
> TOKYO — The Associated Press
> 
> Published Sunday, Sep. 23 2012
> 
> China’s first aircraft carrier was handed over Sunday to the navy of the People’s Liberation Army, state press said, amid rising tensions over disputed waters in the East and South China Seas.
> 
> The handover ceremony of the 300-metre ship, a former Soviet carrier called the Varyag, took place in northeast China’s port of Dalian after a lengthy refitting by a Chinese shipbuilder, the Global Times reported.
> ...
> But numerous sea trials of the aircraft carrier - currently only known as “Number 16” - since August, 2011 were met with concern from regional powers including Japan and the United States, which called on Beijing to explain why it needed an aircraft carrier.
> ...




So, the Chinese have yet another lever ...


----------



## Edward Campbell

The 'new' Chinese carrier:






China's first aircraft carrier, which was renovated from an old aircraft carrier
that China bought from Ukraine in 1998, is seen docked at Dalian Port, in
Dalian, Liaoning province Sept 22, 2012.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Photo courtesy _The Sunday Straits Times_


----------



## Edward Campbell

And, according to a report in the _Globe and Mail_ we will be helping to power those shipyards: Canada gears up for China uranium exports

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/asian-pacific-business/canada-gears-up-for-china-uranium-exports/article4560206/


> Canada’s vision to ship large quantities of oil and natural gas to China will be preceded by another key energy export: uranium.
> 
> Shipments of Canadian uranium concentrate are expected to arrive on Chinese shores within a year under a new agreement, once Parliament ratifies a new protocol for trade, says Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall.
> 
> “I just don’t see a lot of roadblocks” to an arrangement that is expected to open the door to some $3-billion in sales over the next decade, possibly starting as soon as six months from now, Mr. Wall said in an interview in Beijing this week. “It’s very significant.”
> 
> Saskatchewan-based uranium miner Cameco Corp. joined a major Canadian trade delegation here this month, encouraged by a supplementary protocol to the Canada-China Nuclear Co-operation Agreement negotiated earlier this year by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and signed by Foreign Minister John Baird this summer. The agreement will govern exports of uranium, used to fuel nuclear reactors.
> 
> China has 14 reactors now on line, 26 more under construction and several dozen more believed to be in the planning stages, part of its drive to move away from polluting fossil fuels in supplying its energy-hungry industries and population of 1.3 billion.
> 
> The country now imports most of its uranium from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Namibia and Australia, and has faced difficulties in securing supply, making the Canadian market that much more important.
> ...



More on link


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Actually the TPP may be a dead end.
> 
> China is trying ~ I'm not sure if it will succeed ~ to separate Japan and South Korea from the TPP, which China sees as having too much America, and enticing them into a tripartite free trade area. Rumours in some parts of the Asian media are that both Japan and SK are very interested. The TPP will still go ahead and I agree that Canada should join (and I agree our joining will mean the end of "supply management" for some agricultural sectors which I think is a *very good thing* for 99.9% of Canadians) but we ought not to expect miracles.
> 
> Perhaps the Chinese are also trying to entice us (and Australia? and New Zealand?) into their free trade area and, _de facto_ lessen America's "hold" on us all.




More, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Economist_, on why the TPP has problems:

My emphasis added.
http://www.economist.com/node/21563292?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/partnersandrivals


> *Banyan*
> Partners and rivals
> *Another ambitious trade agreement gets bogged down*
> 
> Sep 22nd 2012
> 
> DEADLINES are to trade negotiators what chastity and continence were to St Augustine: distant aspirations rather than binding obligations. No surprise then that the target of completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) this year will be missed. The 14th round of talks among nine states negotiating this “21st-century” regional trade agreement ended on September 15th. The next, to be held in New Zealand in December, and joined by two new members, Mexico and Canada, will not be the last.
> 
> This is a shame. The world economy could do with the boost that a big trade agreement would bring. A global deal, under the Doha round, is not in prospect. The TPP is a regional one that the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor and took on with gusto—though it has not yet sought “fast-track” negotiating authority from Congress. American business vests great hope in it, partly as a way of fighting Chinese competition. Barack Obama this week responded to the widespread American perception of Chinese trade cheating by announcing a WTO case over alleged subsidies in the car-parts industry.
> 
> Many other Asian regional agreements are mooted but none has reached the TPP’s nitty-gritty stage, where hundreds of officials plough through 29 dense chapters while anti-globalisation protesters harangue them for plotting a “secret corporate coup”. It is the only trade show of any size still on the road.
> 
> The TPP groups some of the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, which held its annual summit in Vladivostok earlier this month. In two decades APEC has not made much progress towards its goal of a free-trade area covering half of global commerce. This year the leaders reached agreement to cut tariffs on 54 categories of goods, such as solar cells, that are seen as environmentally friendly. This is more than the WTO has managed in a decade, but hardly seems a huge breakthrough, and is unenforceable. APEC is an exercise in “concerted unilateralism”, not a strand in the tangled noodle-bowl of bilateral and regional free-trade agreements.
> 
> Launched by Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, the TPP is now led by America, and faces intense suspicion as a security alliance disguised as a trade negotiation. On this analysis, the TPP is part of the Obama administration’s “rebalancing” towards Asia, to counter the rise of China. China Daily, an official newspaper, carried a commentary noting the view that America “is driving the TPP with the strategic objective of marginalising China.” American officials insist that, on the contrary, they would welcome China into the partnership. But provisions intended to prevent state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from having unfair advantages would make its membership difficult.
> 
> Measures directed at SOEs are among the “high-quality” aspects of the TPP that make it both so ambitious and hence so hard to achieve. Vietnam, for example, is in the TPP talks, but also has a huge state sector, which is in some trouble. Optimists recall China in the 1990s, when membership of the WTO was seen by some as a way of pushing through domestic reform, and hope Vietnam will take a similar view. But this seems wildly optimistic.
> 
> Other TPP provisions covering labour, the environment, the protection of intellectual property, IT services and even rules preventing governments from blocking websites for arbitrary reasons, would be difficult for a number of countries. So are good old-fashioned protectionist provisions such as one of the rules of origin in the apparel trade designed to ensure that, to avoid punitive American tariffs, low-cost garment-makers have to buy American yarn rather than non-TPP Chinese stuff.
> 
> For a poor country such as Vietnam, or a tiny one such as Brunei, TPP negotiations place a huge strain on government capacity. With Canada and Mexico joining, and Australia already in, the group can no longer be portrayed as an American shark stalking a hapless shoal of minnows. But it would look far more imposing if Japan—Asia’s second-largest economy—were to sign on. Japanese politics precludes that for now. Nor has East Asia’s next-biggest economy, South Korea, yet joined up. Indonesia is more interested in pursuing another incipient trade pact, involving China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
> 
> Rivalry from this “Asian” group is more sand in the TPP’s gears. It would bring together all ten members of ASEAN, plus South Korea, Japan and China (which are discussing a tripartite pact of their own), as well as, perhaps, Australia, India and New Zealand. Being “lower-quality”, it presents governments with fewer political problems at home. But the global economic benefits could be even greater, since many of the countries involved have high trade barriers, whereas much TPP trade is already covered by “high-quality” agreements (such as NAFTA).
> 
> The planned ASEAN-centred block is not, strictly speaking, in competition with the TPP, as their membership overlaps (Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc). Its prospects look dim at the moment, if only because the three big North-East Asian economies—China, Japan and South Korea—seem more likely to go to war with each other than to make historic trade breakthroughs.
> 
> *Dreamland*
> 
> However, the two routes to Asian trade liberalisation are ever more widely seen as yet another facet of Sino-American rivalry. In the unlikely scenario where both succeeded, the dream is that America and China, the world’s two biggest economies, finding themselves at a disadvantage in the other’s market, would have to reach a consolidated agreement—on, hope the TPP’s promoters, their 21st-century terms.
> 
> This ideal outcome is far beyond today’s horizons. In the shorter term, China will continue to fear that one motive behind the TPP is America’s desire to contain it. And, looking at the difficulties the TPP faces, China’s leaders may hope that, if a superpower is going to end up marginalised, it will not be theirs.
> 
> Economist.com/blogs/banyan




The TPP is, broadly, a good thing, with or without China, Japan and South Korea; an ASEAN-China deal is a good thing, too; TPP + ASEAN-China + China, Japan and South Korea is an even better thing, but don't hold your breath while waiting for any of them.


----------



## Sadukar09

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China is allowing all these demonstrations and so on to distract public attention from slower growth ~ down to a _guesstimated_ 7% this year, which is below the 8% level which some Chinese officials told me is the level required to pretty much guarantee the all important *social harmony* on which the Party depends for popular support.
> 
> I repeat: the Chinese, unlike us, think in the mid and long terms ~ the main long term goal is economic prosperity which provides power (hard and soft) and social harmony. A China-Japan-South Korea free trade area will go a long way towards guaranteeing the kind of stable economic prosperity the Chinese want. They also want those islands but they are willing to buy the output rather than fight for it. If they can stare down the Japanese, Malaysians and Filipinos and get ownership then so much the better but if, as with Australian, Canadian and Siberian resources, they have to pay for them then that will be OK ~ just so long as they get them.



Good call on the distracting the public, but my Asian studies professor has a different cause for it.

The Chinese government is using Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute to divert attention not from slower growth, but the internal power change.
My professor (Dr. Jacob Kovalio if you need to know) believes power is being handed over from PresidentParamount Leader Hu Jintao to Vice President Xi Jinping (which is why Xi disappeared for 2 weeks.). 

Of course, the easy way to create a diversion is to berate Japan.

The dispute might go away after Xi Jinping takes over completely.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Sadukar09 said:
			
		

> Good call on the distracting the public, but my Asian studies professor has a different cause for it.
> 
> The Chinese government is using Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute to divert attention not from slower growth, but the internal power change.
> My professor (Dr. Jacob Kovalio if you need to know) believes power is being handed over from PresidentParamount Leader Hu Jintao to Vice President Xi Jinping (which is why Xi disappeared for 2 weeks.).
> 
> Of course, the easy way to create a diversion is to berate Japan.
> 
> The dispute might go away after Xi Jinping takes over completely.




It's no secret that Xi Jinping is taking over ~ we've been talking about that here, on Army.ca, for over two years now. The transitions of high officials are reasonably transparent in China.

With all possible respect for your professor, I disagree: Xi _disappeared_ because the Chinese are still less than expert at media relations. One of the HUGE advantages that Prime Minister Harper _et al_ have over Hu and Xi is that our open, democratic and _inquisitive_ system tells those in power what we want and forces them, Western, democratic leaders, to tell people (some of) what's going on ~ it, taking the "public pulse" or even the "temperature of the room" inside the Party, is very difficult for the Chinese. They are learning but it, _consultation_, is not an Asian *political* tradition. My guess is that Xi was busy _"cabinet making"_ and ignored the fact that the media is both everywhere and insatiable. Occam's razor and all that: don't look for a conspiracy when simple bureaucratic ineptitude explains it all.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is an interesting _factoid_ in the _Wall Street Journal_: *"One in five people who took the GMAT last year was from China, according to a new report from the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the business-school entrance exam globally. The number of tests taken by Chinese citizens rose 45% from last year, to 58,196.*"

The reason it's interesting is that China's biggest single problem is corruption and MBA graduates, even those just studying for the GMAT, are going to conclude that corruption is bad for business. Assuming that most of these tens of thousands of would be MBAs are young people we might also assume that as they move up in the business and political systems they will continue to oppose and, even, actively work against corruption. Less corruption ≈ greater prosperity ≈ greater power, soft and hard.


----------



## Canadian.Trucker

China's First Aircraft Carrier Commissioned. 
Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act defense-aerospace.com
More at link
http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/138728/china%27s-first-aircraft-carrier-enters-service.html



> China's first aircraft carrier "Liaoning" was officially delivered to and has fallen in the array of the Navy of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the morning of September 25, 2012.
> 
> It is of great significance for the PLA Navy to improve its modernization level of the comprehensive combat power and enhance its defensive operation capability, develop its capabilities of carrying out open-sea cooperation and dealing with non-traditional security threats, effectively safeguard state sovereignty, security and development interests, and promote world peace and common development.



Looks like China has just increased their ability to project power.  This definitely comes at a time where tensions over natural resources in the South China Sea are being claimed by many different nations.  Since an Aircraft Carrier is primarily an offensive weapon and by its very nature projects power and authority, I wonder how they are going to use it.  Time will tell.


----------



## tomahawk6

Canadian.Trucker said:
			
		

> China's First Aircraft Carrier Commissioned.
> Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act defense-aerospace.com
> More at link
> http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/138728/china%27s-first-aircraft-carrier-enters-service.html
> 
> Looks like China has just increased their ability to project power.  This definitely comes at a time where tensions over natural resources in the South China Sea are being claimed by many different nations.  Since an Aircraft Carrier is primarily an offensive weapon and by its very nature projects power and authority, I wonder how they are going to use it.  Time will tell.



The carrier as yet doesnt have aircraft that can operate from the carrier. In addition to strike aircraft it will require tanker and ASW aircraft. Then of course it will take quite awhile for the Chinese to practice carrier operations. Of course they could just load the carrier with troops and helicopters and make it a floating base. Another area the Chinese will need to perfect is at sea sustainment. Not a problem though if you operate in coastal waters.


----------



## Journeyman

Interesting that its hull number is 16; two-digit identifiers are habitually assigned to training ships -- combatants have three numbers.

   :dunno:


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Journeyman said:
			
		

> Interesting that its hull number is 16; two-digit identifiers are habitually assigned to training ships -- combatants have three numbers.



I don't know where you got this "convention" from.

First of all, Hull numbers on warships are not an internationally agreed matters. Each nation has its own system (and in fact, there isn't even any rule that imposes the use of hull numbers).

If one was to follow your logic, then every aircraft carrier ever owned and operated by the USA, the UK, France, Canada etc. would have been a training ship because they all have one or two-digit identifiers.

And what of four-digits hull numbers then? Yes, they do exist in many nations, usually for smaller combatants - either in the FAC's, PB's and MCM's.


----------



## Canadian.Trucker

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> I don't know where you got this "convention" from.
> 
> First of all, Hull numbers on warships are not an internationally agreed matters. Each nation has its own system (and in fact, there isn't even any rule that imposes the use of hull numbers).
> 
> If one was to follow your logic, then every aircraft carrier ever owned and operated by the USA, the UK, France, Canada etc. would have been a training ship because they all have one or two-digit identifiers.
> 
> And what of four-digits hull numbers then? Yes, they do exist in many nations, usually for smaller combatants - either in the FAC's, PB's and MCM's.


*phew, I was worried there for a second since I'm usually issued with the number 00 for some reason.  Thought it meant I was only good for training purposes.  ;D


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The carrier as yet doesnt have aircraft that can operate from the carrier. In addition to strike aircraft it will require tanker and ASW aircraft. Then of course it will take quite awhile for the Chinese to practice carrier operations. Of course they could just load the carrier with troops and helicopters and make it a floating base. Another area the Chinese will need to perfect is at sea sustainment. Not a problem though if you operate in coastal waters.



Not necessarily. The next closest thing in the world to a US carrier is the French carrier Charles-de-Gaulle. Yet, it does not carry any tanker and, for ASW, employs only helicopters.

And it just goes downhill from there for the capabilities of other nations' carriers.

There is just nothing out there with the capabilities of the US aircraft carriers and it is not likely that there will be anything for a while - not even the QUEEN ELIZABETH or PRINCE OF WHALES when they enter service - and the only nation in the running, China, has decades of naval developments and learning before they can get there.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Canadian.Trucker said:
			
		

> *phew, I was worried there for a second since I'm usually issued with the number 00 for some reason.  Thought it meant I was only good for training purposes.  ;D



Doesn't that mean your a kick returner who may also be used as a ball carrier from the backfield?


----------



## Canadian.Trucker

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> Doesn't that mean your a kick returner who may also be used as a ball carrier from the backfield?


Not sure, but I make one heck of a tackle dummy.


----------



## Journeyman

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> First of all, Hull numbers on warships are not an internationally agreed matters. Each nation has its own system (and in fact, there isn't even any rule that imposes the use of hull numbers).


Yes. I was referring to the the *Chinese* Naval practice. 

It seemed like a logical move given the discussion of a *Chinese* vessel in a *Chinese* thread. 

But thanks for playing along.   :


----------



## Edward Campbell

Journeyman said:
			
		

> Interesting that its hull number is 16; two-digit identifiers are habitually assigned to training ships -- combatants have three numbers.
> 
> :dunno:




I think it is a training ship; the Chinese have, as others have mentioned, a lot of learning to do. This old ship will, I suspect, be used to train both aviators and ship handlers while the Chinese decide what sort (sorts?) of carriers they need.


----------



## Journeyman

The original article also mentioned employment for scientific research. ??  

Either way, the old Soviet Varyag has come a long way since purchased by a Hong Kong travel agency at a Ukrainian auction.


----------



## dapaterson

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The 'new' Chinese carrier:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's first aircraft carrier, which was renovated from an old aircraft carrier
> that China bought from Ukraine in 1998, is seen docked at Dalian Port, in
> Dalian, Liaoning province Sept 22, 2012.
> PHOTO: REUTERS
> Photo courtesy _The Sunday Straits Times_



But... but... the buyers promised they were going to convert it into a floating casino off Macau.  Don't tell me that a government intelligence agency would lie to procure military materiel.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Last year China _leaked_ the news that it is building (at least) two new carriers in a Shanghai yard.

I have found two picture which look, to my old soldier's eyes, like quite different types of ships:






   
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



Source: China Military Report                                                          Source: Arab News

Are the two picture of the same ship? Maybe I just cannot see the "ski jump" on the first image, or did the two news thread just recycle "stock" images?


----------



## Journeyman

Not remotely the same. The top picture has the lines of a USN Kittyhawk-class CV, and the bottom one is most definitely the Varyag/Liaoning. I'd vote for "stock images"


----------



## Edward Campbell

Guy St Jacques is a good choice to be Ambassador in Beijing: experienced, speaks Mandarin, known as a superb diplomat, etc. The Chinese will be (only very slightly) disappointed, I suspect; they might have preferred a political appointee signalling more direct access to the PMO. But St Jacques will serve us well - and China, too - in trade negotiations by keeping the message clear and consistent.


----------



## tomahawk6

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/world/asia/china-shows-off-an-aircraft-carrier-but-experts-are-skeptical.html?_r=0

China Launches Carrier, but Experts Doubt Its Worth
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: September 25, 2012

BEIJING — In a ceremony attended by the country’s top leaders, China put its first aircraft carrier into service on Tuesday, a move intended to signal its growing military might as tensions escalate between Beijing and its neighbors over islands in nearby seas.

Officials said the carrier, a discarded vessel bought from Ukraine in 1998 and refurbished by China, would protect national sovereignty, an issue that has become a touchstone of the government’s dispute with Japan over ownership of islands in the East China Sea. 

 But despite the triumphant tone of the launching, which was watched by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and despite rousing assessments by Chinese military experts about the importance of the carrier, the vessel will be used only for training and testing for the foreseeable future. 

 The mark “16” on the carrier’s side indicates that it is limited to training, Chinese and other military experts said. China does not have planes capable of landing on the carrier and so far training for such landings has been carried out on land, they said. 

 Even so, the public appearance of the carrier at the northeastern port of Dalian was used as an occasion to stir patriotic feelings, which have run at fever pitch in the last 10 days over the dispute between China and Japan over the East China Sea islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. 

 The carrier will “raise the overall operational strength of the Chinese Navy” and help China “to effectively protect national sovereignty, security and development interests,” the Ministry of Defense said. 

 The Communist Party congress that will begin the country’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition is expected to be held next month, and the public unveiling of the carrier appeared to be part of an effort to forge national unity ahead of the event. 

 For international purposes, the public unveiling of the carrier seemed intended to signal to smaller nations in the South China Sea, including the Philippines, an American ally, that China has an increasing number of impressive assets to deploy. 

 American military planners have played down the significance of the commissioning of the carrier. Some Navy officials have even said they would encourage China to move ahead with building its own aircraft carrier and the ships to accompany it, because it would be a waste of money. 

 Other military experts outside China have agreed with that assessment. 

 “The fact is the aircraft carrier is useless for the Chinese Navy,” You Ji, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, said in an interview. “If it is used against America, it has no survivability. If it is used against China’s neighbors, it’s a sign of bullying.” 

 Vietnam, a neighbor with whom China has fought wars, operates land-based Russian Su-30 aircraft that could pose a threat to the aircraft carrier, Mr. You said. “In the South China Sea, if the carrier is damaged by the Vietnamese, it’s a huge loss of face,” he said. “It’s not worth it.” 

 Up to now, Chinese pilots have been limited to practicing simulated carrier landings on concrete strips on land in Chinese J-8 aircraft based on Soviet-made MIG-23s produced about 25 years ago, Mr. You said. The pilots could not undertake the difficult maneuver of landing on a moving carrier because China does not yet have suitable aircraft, Mr. You said. 

 The question of whether China will move ahead and build its own carrier depends in large part, he said, on whether China can develop aircraft to land on one. “It’s a long, long process for constructing such aircraft,” he said. 

 In contrast to some of the skepticism expressed by military experts outside China, Li Jie, a researcher at the Chinese Naval Research Institute, said in an interview in the state-run People’s Daily that the carrier would change the Chinese Navy’s traditional mind-set and bring qualitative changes to its operational style and structure, he said. 

 Although the Chinese military does not publish a breakdown of its military spending, foreign military experts say the navy is less well financed than the army and air force.


----------



## tomahawk6

Some images.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is an interesting article about the political divisions _within_ the CCP:
> 
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/bo-xilais-fall-signals-victory-for-chinas-reformers/article2409711/singlepage/#articlecontent
> 
> 
> 
> Bo Xilai’s fall signals victory for China’s reformers
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> 
> BEIJING— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
> Published Friday, Apr. 20, 2012
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> My personal perception is that there is a vibrant political debate going on in China - with extremes that are about the same as Stephen Harper's Conservatives vs Thomas Mulcair's NDP here in Canada - but it, the debate, is not held during public elections, rather, it takes place _within_ the Chinese Communist Party and, oddly enough, in the pages of the foreign language press.
> 
> The CCP is Deng Xiaoping's party,not Mao's; the CCP is not a communist party except in name. Mao's party was communist because Zhou Enlai was a committed communist - something I have always found hard to fathom because Zhou was a very, very smart man and, in my opinion, communism makes neither social nor economic sense, but he was also, like his mentor Sun Yat-sen, enamoured of the Russian (USSR) model. Deng was not a communist; he saw, clearly, the inherent internal contradictions in Marxist communism and, equally, the the social nonsense inherent in the Leninist model. Post Deng the CCP has 'tested' two extremes: first through a nearly 'free market' group, called the _Shanghai Gang_, led by Jiang Zemin, which probably went a bit too far, being more 'free market' than e.g. Mitt Romney - in any event Jiang 's favoured successor was rejected by the Party's council and, instead, they (s)elected Hu Jintao to lead China and he would be very comfortable leading a provincial NDP government in Canada.
> 
> Bo Xilai wanted to go father _left_ that Hu - too far, I think for the Party leaders who, like Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair, are searching for the elusive political _centre_.
Click to expand...



The real target has, finally, been hit according to a report in the _Globe and Mail_ which says that _"*China politician Bo Xilai expelled from Communist Party, to face charges* ... China’s ruling Communist Party accused disgraced former senior politician Bo Xilai of abusing his power, taking huge bribes and other crimes on Friday, opening a new phase in a scandal of murder and cover-ups that has shaken a leadership succession due at a congress to start on Nov. 8 ... Mr. Bo’s wife Gu Kailai and his former police chief Wang Lijun have both been jailed over the scandal stemming from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Mr.  Bo was Communist Party chief."_


----------



## Edward Campbell

A guess ...

Bo Xilai was a _neo-Maoist_; that was his *crime*; the Chinese leadership is done with Mao Zedong. Mao's portrait will continue to dominate Tienanmen Square for many, many years but, soon, while I am still alive,  professors and graduate students in China's premier universities will begin to debate the idea that Mao was just another warlord, albeit a hugely successful one, in a 70 year long _interregnum_ that lasted from 1912, when the Qing Dynasty fell, to 1982 when Deng Xiaoping took over and established a new Dynasty.






Eventually that idea will be taught in high school, then elementary school and it will be featured in popular entertainment. (The Chinese get a lot of _information_ through long, semi-fictional, historical TV dramas - some of which have 50+ hour long episodes - which aim to establish a "common cultural norm.") Sun Yat Sen and Zhou Enlai will be treated a bit better: remembered as great social reformers with strange, muddled economic ideas. But it is Deng Xiaoping who will, eventually, be seen as the founder of the new (Republican) Dynasty.

__________
By the way, pretty girls in Tienanmen Square are pretty common ... (that's me, below, with a few in 2010)  


Edit: typo


----------



## GAP

Tories quietly table Canada-China investment treaty
BILL CURRY and SHAWN MCCARTHY OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Sep. 27 2012
Article Link

The Conservative government is poised to adopt a sweeping new investment treaty between Canada and China without a single Parliamentary vote or debate.

The text of the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement was released for the first time this week and members of Parliament are just starting to work their way through the legal document.

Canada and China first announced a draft deal in February during a visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The final version was signed Sept. 9 in Vladivokstok, Russia, on the sidelines of the 2012 APEC leaders summit.

The treaty promises to set clear investment rules for Canadians in China and Chinese investors in Canada, but questions are already being raised over the treaty’s provisions for resolving disputes.

It allows companies to file claims for financial damages against other firms or against Canadian or Chinese governments for failing to abide by the agreement.

The claims would be resolved by a tribunal, but the hearings would only be open to the public if both sides agree that it is “in the public interest.”

Such dispute provisions are common in agreements of this type, but opposition MPs warned Thursday that the treaty merits much closer debate and scrutiny given the fact that many Chinese investments come in the form of companies that are directly controlled by China’s communist government.

“I think we should have a full debate about this,” said NDP trade critic Don Davies.

“Surely we can take the time to make sure the agreements we sign are sound and good for Canadians.”

The proposed $15.1-billion takeover of Canada’s Nexen Inc. by China’s CNOOC Ltd., a state-owned energy firm, has triggered a debate across the country and inside government over how Canada should respond to China’s huge appetite for investment opportunities.

Yet there is no government-sanctioned debate planned on the new treaty that will govern investment between the two countries for at least the next 15 years.

The Conservative government is of the view that adopting the treaty does not require it to introduce legislation in Parliament.
More on link


----------



## jollyjacktar

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> __________
> By the way, pretty girls in Tienanmen Square are pretty common ... (that's me, below, with a few in 2010)
> 
> 
> Edit: typo


Are you sure you weren't a Sailor?  Cuz all the nice girls love a Sailor...


----------



## Nemo888

I don't think a free trade deal is a good idea. China has no friends only interests.

http://news.techeye.net/security/chinese-hackers-have-control-of-us-power-grid_
________________________________________________________________________________

Chinese hackers _(attempt to)_ have control of US power grid

28 Sep 2012 09:07 | by Nick Farrell in Rome | Filed in Security Dell China

Chinese hackers have control of US power grid -

The company whose software and services remotely administers and monitor large sections of the US energy industry began warning customers about a sophisticated hacker attack.

Telvent Canada said that digital fingerprints left behind by attackers point to a Chinese hacking group tied to repeated cyber-espionage campaigns against key Western interests.

It looks like the hackers managed to get past the company firewall and security systems.

In letters sent to customers last week, Telvent Canada said the attack happened on September the 10th.

The attackers installed malicious software and stole project files related to one of its core offerings — OASyS SCADA — a product that helps energy firms mesh older IT assets with more advanced “smart grid” technologies.

The company said it was disconnecting the usual data links between clients and affected portions of its internal networks.

Meanwhile it is looking for virus or malware files.

According to KrebsOnSecurity.com,  the company does not think that the intruders got any information that would enable them to gain access to a customer system or that any of the compromised computers have been connected to a customer system.

Telvent said it was working with law enforcement and a task force of representatives from its parent firm, Schneider Electric.

Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks said the Web site and malware names cited in the Telvent report map back to a Chinese hacking team known as the “Comment Group.”

Comment Group has been involved in sophisticated attacks to harvest intellectual property and trade secrets from energy companies, patent law firms and investment banks.

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/security/chinese-hackers-have-control-of-us-power-grid#ixzz27qnw00Vc


----------



## Edward Campbell

Nemo888 said:
			
		

> I don't think a free trade deal is a good idea. China has no friends only interests.



*We have no permanent allies,
we have no permanent enemies,
we only have permanent interests.*

Attributed to Henry John Temple Viscount Lord Palmerston 1784-1865,
Foreign Secretary and two-time Prime Minister under Queen Victoria.
What he actually said was [concerning apparent British apathy regarding
Polish struggles against Russian hegemony, which Palmerston did not
believe that it met the threshold of justifiable war] _“He concluded with
the famous peroration that Britain had no eternal allies and
no perpetual enemies, only interest that were eternal and perpetual . . .”_
quoted in David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy,
1846-1855 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 82-83.


----------



## sean m

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/03/chinas_afghan_moment

The article is stating that China is taking more interest in the affairs of Afghanistan, with coalition troops leaving in 2014. Perhaps this could be a good thing for the development of the country, since the Chinese seem to have good relations with the Pakistanis. Is any one worried about the Chinese in Afghanistan?

Here is an article from the Asian Times about Russia efforts to have better relations with the Central Asian countries, also in expectation of the 2014 pull out. Is anyone worried about Russia gaining too much influence in this area of the world. Should the West do more to have more influence in the Central Asian Region

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NI19Df01.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese have been active, commercially, in Afghanistan for years; it shares a (small) border with Afghanistan and has major security concerns of its own, in Xinjiang province, which more or less requires it to concern itself with Afghanistan.

As to the broader Central Asia question: we, the American led West, have little influence there. It is, right now, a Sino-Rusian _battleground_ (see e.g. the _Shanghai Six_ (SCO) within which China and Russia try to make nice while they bicker over Central Asia's (potentially large) resource base. Given China's (especially) strong interests and _position_ in the region I'm not sure we, the American led West, should bother too much because I suspect the certain risks are greater than the potential rewards. We can only stretch ourselves so far, after all.

Mods: can this be moved into the Chinese superthread, please? *Thanks*  


Edit: to thank Mods


----------



## a_majoor

When the Soviet Union collapsed, America did try to extend its interests into Central Asia, but as an Oceanic Power, has real limits to what she can achieve. Georgia and the 'Stans are at the far limits of American military, political and economic power, regardless of what Americans might desire.

Since (so far as I can tell) US foreign policy seems to rest on the world view of Halford Mackinder:



> "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
> who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
> who rules the World-Island controls the world."
> (Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 106)



only substituting the Middle East for Eastern Europe as the true "Heartland", then the logical extension of this idea is that affairs should be arranged so that no Power can dominate the Heartland and thus threaten the United States.

Interesting aside, Robert Kaplan's new book rests on a similar set of assumptions, although in HIS book, the Heartland is defined as the Iranian plateau. Obviously the idea of the Heartland isn't as fixed as Mackinder believed.

WRT this thread, the Americans would be delighted to see the Chinese sucked into some sort of cesspool of a long war with Islamic radicals in the Chinese "West" and beyond (and perhaps throwing in conflict with Russia and the Maritime powers of East Asia as well). It seems unlikely to happen in that fashion, as Edward regularly teaches, the Chinese play the long game and their strategic calculations are made on a different time frame and from a different base of values and interests than ours.


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting and only slightly provocative proposal to provide a "soft landing" for China by Prof Zhang Weiying of Guanghua School of Management at Peking University (the Chinese equivalent of Stanford or Harvard) which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _China Daily_:

http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2012-10/05/content_15797044.htm


> 'Reduce the role of the State'
> 
> Updated: 2012-10-05 07:17
> 
> By Andrew Moody and Lu Chang (China Daily)
> 
> *Economist believes China can avoid hard landing if economy is more market-driven*
> 
> There is a parallel between the Chinese economy over the past 30 years and a lazy student who suddenly has decided to open his books, says Zhang Weiying, one of China's leading economists.
> 
> The 53-year-old professor of economics at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University argues that such an individual would expect to improve his or her marks.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Economist Zhang Weiying is concerned that the Chinese economy is over-reliant on investment-led growth.
> Zou Hong / China Daily
> 
> "In the past three decades, China has grown so fast. That is natural. It is just like you are a student who never studied very hard. You never passed 60 percent. Then you begin to study and it is very easy to improve to 70 and 80 percent but when you come to 90, it becomes very difficult to improve even one mark."
> 
> Zhang, who was speaking in the Hui Cong Shu Yuan, an ancient courtyard complex that was once a Confucian temple in Haidian district of Beijing, believes China can only go beyond small incremental improvements by making substantial market reforms in its economy.
> 
> This is one of the main arguments in his new book, What is Changing China, which sets out an agenda for change, including wholesale privatization of State-owned enterprises, which still dominate the China economy.
> "If the State sector is so dominant there will be no possibility to have what we call a level playing field. So we need to privatize the big State-owned sector. Technically, it wouldn't be very difficult because most State-owned firms are already listed on the stock exchange," he says.
> 
> Zhang, who has an open charm, suggests the Chinese government could take a lead from the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who embarked on a privatization program of Britain's nationalized industries in the 1980s.
> 
> "We can learn from Mrs Thatcher's privatization program to reduce State shares gradually. If State control was brought down from 70 or 80 to 40 or 50 percent, it would still hold the biggest share but it would be an important signal about which direction the country was going," he says.
> 
> With China's growth rate slowing, Zhang's views are now much sought after. He recently took part in a panel discussion on Bloomberg TV with another former British prime minister Gordon Brown at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin.
> 
> He says his views on economics derive from the Austrian school, one of whose prominent members was the Austrian-born Friedrich Hayek, also a big influence on Thatcher.
> 
> Hayek, a free-market thinker who was based at the London School of Economics, waged an ideas war with the Cambridge University economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s and 1940s that defined the economics debate for most of the 20th century.
> 
> "The Austrian school sets out that we as human beings are very ignorant and know little. As a result, decisions about the economy cannot be made centrally with centralized information. Decisions need to be decentralized and made by individuals," he says.
> 
> "If you let governments intervene in the market that must reduce human beings' freedom."
> 
> Zhang, who is currently on a sabbatical but will return to teaching next year and who was dean at the Guanghua School of Management until 2010, comes from humble origins.
> 
> His parents were farmers in Wubu county in the southeastern corner of Yulin, Shaanxi province, and neither could read or write.
> 
> He believes this gave him an advantage over the children from more middle class backgrounds.
> 
> "They did not know what I did. They never made suggestions, either to do this or that. They never knew in any of the books or articles I published what I was talking about. I was totally free," he says.
> 
> Often short of food at home during difficult times in the 1960s, his academic brilliance earned him things to eat when at middle school.
> 
> "Some of the pupils didn't study very hard and found it difficult to pass exams and so I helped them in exchange for food," he recalls.
> 
> Zhang was among the first-year intake to go to university after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) when he went to Northwestern University in Xi'an to study economics in 1978.
> 
> He then worked for a government economics research institute before studying at Oxford University in the early 1990s.
> 
> "It was my second trip abroad. I had been to Japan before. It wasn't, however, as big a culture shock as going to university for the first time. Before I went to Xi'an I had never seen a train or used a telephone," he says.
> 
> After Oxford, he went on to co-found the influential China Center for Economic Research at Peking University with Justin Yifu Lin, who became chief economist of the World Bank, and Yi Gang, now deputy governor of the People's Bank of China. He then combined his role as a leading China economist with becoming an academic reformer at the Guanghua School of Management.
> 
> During his current sabbatical, he is frequently in demand for opinion pieces from such leading international publications as the Wall Street Journal, and on the international lecture circuit.
> 
> Zhang is concerned the Chinese economy is currently over-reliant on investment-led growth, and he fears a repeat of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. "If you look at the current situation, the government uses too many resources but they produce relatively little," he says.
> 
> "If you look at Chinese industry, the percentage of capital owned by the State sector is 12 percent higher than (the proportion) of State industry output. Fiscal investment is being used to support this growth. This cannot be sustainable."
> 
> He believes measures need to be introduced to bolster the private sector and create a more entrepreneur-friendly economy.
> 
> "I think this is not very difficult. First you need to create a more confident environment for private firms. You need a good legal system to protect both physical and intellectual property. This will encourage people to innovate and invest for the long term. Too many entrepreneurs look for short-term returns at present, rather than over a 10 or 20-year period."
> 
> Zhang says he believes China can avoid a hard landing if certain reforms are put in place and the economy moves in a more market-driven direction. "Will China have a hard landing? I don't necessarily think so, but it depends on how China will change. I think growth will go down to 7 or even 6 percent but that would be good if we could sustain it for another 20 or 30 years," he says.
> 
> The economist is concerned that governments across the world made a wrong move in printing money and flooding their economies with liquidity as a response to the financial crisis.
> 
> "You just delay rather than solve the problem. One most important principle of economics is that there is no free lunch," he says.
> 
> "In Europe, particularly in countries like Spain, there is a welfare problem and people have no incentive to work hard. Even in the US, Obama thinks if we tax the rich more, we can solve our problem. We have a leadership crisis all over the world, in the US, in Europe and Asia."
> 
> One of the major preoccupations of his hero Hayek was hyper inflation and Zhang fears the risk of a more inflationary future with the current obsession with quantitative easing as a policy instrument.
> 
> "You cannot let a second mistake solve the first mistake. With the Obama administration the fact that you need a second and third round of QE means the first failed. When you take drugs, a small dose will make you excited but eventually you need bigger and bigger doses," he says.




Zhang was, pretty unceremoniously, fired as Dean of the Guanghua School of Management (in 2010) for having too many radical ideas. It is not 'normal' to read about Hayek and Thatcher in the Chinese media. I wonder if this little "talk" is timed to coincide with the imminent "change of command" in Beijing.


----------



## GAP

For China, he's a big change, if they are starting to listen to him...


----------



## Edward Campbell

GAP said:
			
		

> For China, he's a big change, if they are starting to listen to him...




He's part of a "second wave;" the "first wave" was led by Jiang Zemin, who was _"paramount leader"_ from 1992 until 2004; he represented the so called _Shanghai Gang_ of tooth and claw capitalists ~ the problem was that they were more talk than action. Despite the best efforts of Premier Zhu Rongji, who really is a _capitalist_, the muddled Deng Xiaoping recipe of rapid growth led by state owned enterprises remained in place.

A lot of people are listening; there is, I think, a general recognition that too much capital is idle, locked up inside state owned 'enterprises,' but some of those state own enterprises are major employers (and more unemployment is the last thing China needs right now ~ remember that *social harmony* trumps all other policy issues, every time) and have their own, internal power bases (often the People's Liberation Army which is a major force in industry).


----------



## a_majoor

Throwing your weight around isn't the best way to make friends and influence people:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/10/06/china-hands-us-another-big-asia-win/



> *China Hands US Another Big Asia Win*
> 
> China isn’t very good at foreign policy; that is the only way to make sense of the apparent decision by a number of large Chinese banks to boycott the annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF scheduled for Tokyo next week.
> 
> As the WSJ tells us, the decision comes as a result of the latest flare in the long running Japan-China territorial dispute over what Japan calls the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. High profile banks with strong links to China’s government and its galaxy of state-owned enterprises have pulled out of both the Tokyo conference and another banking event scheduled for Osaka.
> 
> Like a lot of recent Chinese diplomacy, the bank pull out will anger and alarm China’s neighbors without actually changing their policy. Japan and others in the region will have their growing perception of China as a regional bully reinforced. They will fear China and they will mistrust China — but they won’t obey China. Instead, Japan and its neighbors will have even more reason to deepen their defense and economic cooperation with the United States — exactly the outcome that China is hoping to avoid.
> 
> What the move really telegraphs is weakness, not strength. China’s diplomats are actually very good at what they do, and few people understand the dynamics of Asia better than Beijing’s best. By allowing such a clumsy and crude maneuver to go forward, the Chinese government is admitting to the world that it doesn’t have the political assurance to ignore counterproductive nationalist agitation at home.
> 
> This should be taken as further evidence that China’s technocrats are less and less able to deliver the kind of pragmatic, effective governance that China needs. The justification for China’s form of government is that a kind of neo-Confucian elite of intelligent elders can make the wisest decisions for the good of the country without having to pander to populist passion. The Communist Party proposes itself to the nation as that kind of quasi-Confucian meritocracy, and points to the country’s rapid economic growth as proof that this system works.
> 
> That benign picture is undercut both by events like the Bo Xilai affair, which show corruption and skullduggery rather than wisdom and virtue at the peak of China’s system, and by the clear evidence that the technocrats are running scared when it comes to issues like China’s territorial disputes. Many China watchers increasingly believe that the technocrats are also bowing to pressure from powerful special interests when it comes to economic governance as well — that the system is less and less able to focus on abstract policy questions and more and more subject to lobbying and special pleading.
> 
> If true, these are signs that the Chinese system is becoming decadent and ineffective even as the pressures within China are rising. China’s neighbors are smart enough to understand this, and the perception of a crisis inside the Chinese governance system is yet another reason why so much of Asia is turning in America’s direction these days.


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting and insightful take on China's ruling elite in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_, a journal specializing in Asian affairs:

http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/01/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/?all=true


> Is China’s Communist Party Doomed?
> *Could Beijing's ruling elite succumb to the same fate as those in the former Soviet Union? Perhaps.*
> 
> October 01, 2012
> 
> Last Friday's announcement in Beijing that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will convene its 18th congress on November 8 has brought much relief to those concerned that political scandals and power struggle at the very top of the Chinese government have derailed the once-in-a-decade leadership transition.  Finally, the party's top leaders seemed to have agreed on what to do with the disgraced former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai (likely off to jail) and on whom to promote to the Politburo and its more powerful standing committee.
> 
> For all the obvious reasons, China's ruling elites will do their best in the next few months to project an image of unity and self-confidence, and to convince the rest of the world that the next generation of leaders is capable of maintaining the party's political monopoly.
> 
> That is, unfortunately, a tough sell.  Confidence in the party's internal cohesion and leadership has already been shaken by the Bo affair, endemic corruption, stagnation of reform in the last decade, a slowing economy, deteriorating relations with neighbors and the United States, and growing social unrest.  The questions on many people's minds these days are how long the party can hold on to its power and whether the party can manage a democratic transition to save itself.
> 
> These questions are by no means the products of idle minds.  By many measures, the party's rule is about to enter a decade of systemic crisis.  Having governed China for 63 years, the party is approaching, within a decade, the recorded longevity of the world's most durable one-party regimes — the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union (74 years), the Kuomintang (73), and the Revolutionary Institutional Party of Mexico (71).   Like a human being, an organization such as the CCP also ages.
> 
> In addition, China's rapid economic development has thrust the country past what is commonly known as the "democratic transition zone" — a range of per capita income between $1000 and $6000 (in purchasing power parity, PPP).  Political scientists have observed that autocratic regimes face increasing odds of regime change as income rises.  Chances of maintaining autocracy decrease further once a country's per capita income exceeds $6000 (PPP).  China's has already reached $8500 (PPP).  And nearly all the autocracies in the world with a higher per capita income are petro-states.  So China is in an socioeconomic environment in which autocratic governance becomes increasingly illegitimate and untenable.  Anyone who is unconvinced of this point should take a look at Chinese Weibo (or microblogs) to get a sense of what ordinary Chinese think of their government.
> 
> Thus, the answer to the question of the durability of one-party rule in China is clear: its prospects are doomed.
> 
> The answer to the question of how a one-party regime can manage its own political transformation to save itself is more interesting and complicated.
> 
> Essentially, there are two paths for such regimes: the Soviet route to certain self-destruction, and the Taiwan-Mexican route to self-renewal and transformation.
> 
> Since the fall of the Soviet Union, top CCP leaders have resolved not to repeat the Soviet tragedy.  Their policy has been, therefore, resisting all forms of political reform.  The result is, unfortunately, an increasingly sclerotic party, captured by special interests, and corrupt and decadent opportunists like Bo.  It may have over 80 million members, but most of them join the party to exploit the pecuniary benefits it provides.  They themselves have become a special interest group disconnected with Chinese society.  If the fall of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) offered any real lessons, they are definitely not the official Chinese narrative that Gorbachev's political reforms brought down the party.  The sad truth is: the Soviet regime was too sick to be revived by the mid-1980s because it had resisted reforms for two decades during the rule of Brezhnev.  More importantly, the CCP should know that, like the millions of the members of the CPSU, its rank and file are almost certain to defect in times of a regime crisis.  When the CPSU fell, there was not a single instance of loyal party members coming to the defense of the regime.  Such a fate awaits the CCP.
> 
> That leaves the CCP with only one viable option: the Taiwan-Mexican path of self-renewal and transformation.  The one-party regimes in Taiwan and Mexico are, without doubt, the most successful ones in transforming themselves into multi-party democracies in the last quarter century.  Although the stories of their transition to democracy are different and complex, we can glean four key insights into their successes.
> 
> First, leaders in Taiwan and Mexico confronted a legitimacy crisis in the 1980s and realized that one-party regimes were doomed.  They did not deceive themselves with illusions or lies.
> 
> Second, both acted while their regimes were stronger than the opposition and before they were thoroughly discredited, thus giving them the ability to manage a gradual transition.
> 
> Third, their leaders centralized power and practiced inner-party dictatorship, not inner-party democracy, in order to overcome the opposition of the conservatives within the regime.  In one-party regimes, inner-party democracy will surely lead to an open split among the ruling elites, thus fatally weakening the a reformist regime's ability to manage the transition.  Additionally, making the entire political system more democratic, mainly through competitive elections in cities and states, will provide the ruling elites an opportunity to learn a critical skill: seeking support from voters and winning elections.  Such skills cannot be learned through the dubious exercise of inner-party democracy, which is simply another name for elite bargaining and manipulation.
> 
> Fourth, a moderate democratic opposition is the best friend and greatest asset a reformist one-party regime has.  Such an opposition is a negotiating partner and can help the regime maintain transitional stability.  It can also offer much better terms protecting the interests of the ruling elites and even helping them avoid jail.
> 
> When we look at the rewards reaped by the KMT and the PRI, they included not only favorable terms for exiting power (except for President Salinas, who was forced into exile because of corruption), none of the senior leaders faced criminal prosecution.  Most importantly, both the KMT and PRI managed to recapture the presidency, the seat of political power in both countries, after spending two terms in opposition.
> 
> But can the CCP actually learn from the KMT or the PRI?
> 
> Its willingness aside, the CCP faces an additional hurdle.  It is still a totalitarian party, not an authoritarian party.  The difference between a totalitarian party and an authoritarian party is that the former is far more deeply and extensively embedded in the state and the economy.  The CCP controls the military, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the economy to a far greater extent that the KMT or the PRI.  Extricating a totalitarian party from a state is far more difficult.  In fact, such a feat has never been tried successfully.  In the former Soviet Union, it led to regime collapse.  In Eastern Europe, democratic revolutions did not give such regimes a chance to try.
> 
> So the task for China's new rulers is truly daunting.  Their first order of business is actually not to plunge into a Gorbachev-style political perestroika, but the de-totalitarianization of the Chinese state and the transformation of the CCP into another KMT or PRI.  Without taking this intermediate step immediately, the CCP may find that a Soviet-style collapse is its only future.




I think, based on what a couple of officials, a few academics and some CCP members have told me, that the "de-totalitarianization" of the CCP, itself, is under way, albeit in the sort of _"Chinese fire drill"_ sort of what that seems to characterize almost anything in that HUGE, cumbersome, layered organization. The goal, for the party, is, I think, to make entrance more merit based and then to make advancement more democratic ~ the theory is that if you have the "right" people at the base they can be trusted to select the best leaders from amongst themselves. This is no easy thing: party membership still matters, as a route for the corrupt to advance without too much effort, *but*, at the same time as party membership remains attractive to those who the party would rather not have in its ranks it is, increasingly, less and less attractive - precisely because it is too closely associated with lazy, corrupt officials - to the very people the leadership wants to recruit.

At the nation-state level some democracy is beginning to appear at the bottom. Many (possibly even hundreds of) free and fair elections are held in villages (many tens of thousands of which exist in China) and even in a few very small towns, every year. They are normally held when the local and provincial (party) officials have made such a mess of things that the provincial leadership concludes that the local people cannot possibly do worse. Results have, I'm told, been mixed: sometimes the new, local, elected government "gets a grip" and sorts things out - in which case the regional and provincial people stand back, embarrassed, and provide little if any support; in other cases things just keep going from bad to worse and more drastic actions are taken. I know, as a fact, that one village (population a few hundred) was totally demolished, the people were forcibly relocated (many to Xinjiang province, I think!) and the land was sold to other people, from other regions, who moved in and established a new community, without elections. I have heard that there is no stomach for democracy above village/small town level.


----------



## a_majoor

More sabre rattling (I hope):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9609112/Chinese-paratroopers-storm-island-during-mass-exercise.html



> *Chinese paratroopers storm island during mass exercise*
> 
> A recent joint exercise by the Chinese People's Liberation Army is caught on camera, as the world's largest military force mounts a show of strength in response to mounting tension with Japan over disputed islands.
> 
> 3:05PM BST 15 Oct 2012
> 
> One of China's seven military command groups held a joint military drill involving infantry, artillery and air forces to improve the ability of paratroops to land on and capture an island.
> 
> The exercise by the Nanjing Military Command is thought to be part of a show of strength by the Chinese military as tensions rise in a three-way dispute between China, Japan and Taiwan over disputed islands in the East China Sea.
> 
> The islands are controlled by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing and Taipei, and tensions peaked after the Japanese government recently bought three of them from their private owners.


----------



## a_majoor

A prediction from World Affairs that the regimes in Russia and China may be far more fragile than most people guess. (This is a riff from the usual trope that authoritarian regimes are brittle and prone to collapse when the correct weak spot is struck. Another explanation is the "preference cascade", an interesting topic to Google). The implications are quite profound for all of us, one simple example being the strange faith that many economists and politicians have in the idea of China being able to bail out the global economy. Russia's posturing as a revived Great Power is also based on many flawed assumptions (and in demographic terms, the end game may already be in motion as Russia is expected to lose up to half its population by 2035.

Since this is a long article, it will be broken into 2 parts:

Part 1

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/coming-collapse-authoritarians-china-and-russia-face-endgame



> *The Coming Collapse: Authoritarians in China and Russia Face an Endgame*
> 
> Jackson Diehl
> 
> Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China and Russia have been constants in the world. They have been autocratic, resistant to the spread of freedom, occasionally belligerent toward their neighbors, and increasingly prosperous. They have consistently joined together in order to block Western initiatives in the UN Security Council and to defend dictatorships like Iran, North Korea, and Syria.
> 
> The two countries have created the illusion of durability. Vladimir Putin has just begun a six-year presidential term, with an option for another. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are planning to hand over power in October to a new tandem, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who are expected to serve for ten years. Yet the evidence is growing that the apparent stability in Russia and China is untenable. For similar reasons, the two states have exhausted their current political and economic systems. Their rulers have grown rigid and are mired in corruption. Both their political elites and their average citizens are growing visibly restless. In the next decade, it is likely that one or both of these global powers will undergo an economic crisis and a dramatic political transformation. When and how it will happen is the most important “known unknown” that Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will face during the next US presidential term.
> 
> The predictions that systemic change is inevitable, and that it might be tumultuous, are coming not just from lonely dissidents or hostile Western observers but from stalwarts of the establishments in Moscow and Beijing. In February, a report prepared by experts from China’s Finance Ministry and the Development Research Center of the State Council, in cooperation with the World Bank, concluded that “China has reached a turning point in its development” and that a “strategic” and “fundamental shift is called for,” comparable to Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of the market economy three decades ago. “China 2030” warns:
> 
> Related Essay
> 
> 
> Assad’s Sectarian Card
> Jackson Diehl | ESSAY
> Today’s major world conflicts—autocracy versus democracy; the West versus the China-Russia axis; Iran and its allies versus the US, Israel, and “moderate” Arab states—intersect and collide in Syria, where sectarianism’s ancient hatreds may well tip their outcomes.
> There is a broad consensus that China’s growth is likely to slow, but when and at what pace is uncertain and there is no saying whether this slowdown will be smooth or not. Any sudden slowdown could unmask inefficiencies and contingent liabilities in banks, enterprises and different levels of government—heretofore hidden under the veil of rapid growth—and could precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis. The implications for social stability would be hard to predict in such a scenario.
> 
> Similarly, in late May a group of experts convened by Aleksei Kudrin, a mainstay of the Putin government for more than a decade until his resignation last year, issued a report declaring that “research shows that the crisis” in the Russian economy and political system “has become irreversible, regardless of the scenarios of its further development. Maintaining political stability, let alone a return to the pre-crisis status quo, is no longer possible.” In a press conference, Kudrin said there was a fifty-percent chance that Russia was headed for a recession that would produce a political breakdown and a change of government.
> 
> Despite such auguries, the Obama administration continues to pursue a policy toward both Russia and China that assumes that the existing power structures will continue indefinitely. Its primary aim is to “engage” the top leaders on a transactional basis—a strategy that, for Obama, has become a quasi-ideology in foreign policy. Thus did he welcome Xi to Washington in February with talks that focused on economic issues and geopolitical cooperation—and ignored the incipient domestic political turmoil in China that had prompted a senior police official from the city of Chongqing to seek asylum in a US consulate days earlier, in a development that would soon become a full-blown leadership crisis.
> 
> After Putin’s controversial election as president in March, Obama, overlooking the growing street protests in Moscow, invited him to an early meeting at Camp David (which Putin later cancelled) and dispatched National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon to Putin’s dacha outside Moscow to deliver what a Russian official described as “a multi-page detailed document, whose main message is that Obama is ready to cooperate with Putin.”
> 
> While critiquing these advances, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign also appeared unprepared for the possibility of upheaval in Russia or China. The GOP candidate described both countries not as unstable autocracies but as dangerous powers to be contained. He claimed that Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe,” and promised to designate China as a currency manipulator, subject to trade sanctions, on his first day in office.
> 
> In short, it appears that neither Obama nor Romney is contemplating the possibility that Russia or China could become destabilized in the next several years, with all of the opportunities and dangers that would pose for the United States. Such shortsightedness is hardly unprecedented: George H. W. Bush denied the possibility of revolutionary change in the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia until it occurred, and Obama himself was blindsided by the Arab revolutions of 2011. Yet by now, after witnessing the successive collapses of dictatorships over a quarter century in Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, US policymakers should know better than to assume that the autocracies of Russia and China are invulnerable. The next administration ought to be prepared for, and encouraging of, changes in both these countries.
> 
> 
> 
> Revolutions are, of course, unpredictable. Some regimes fall sooner than seemed possible until the event occurs; some linger long after their demise has become inevitable. But the recent history of unfree countries has shown that while breaking points are hard to anticipate, there is a common set of conditions that sets the stage for change. Perhaps most important is the emergence of a middle class with growing non-material expectations, along with the exhaustion of the economic model that produced that class. There is the deterioration of the old elite, which is weighed down by corruption and paralyzed by power struggles. There are factors that can accelerate change, ranging from failure in war and environmental degradation to demographic implosion and the proliferation of technologies that allow citizens to communicate and to organize in spite of official repression.
> 
> From a distance, Russia and China may seem immune to these conditions. For now, both economies appear to be relatively prosperous compared to sickly neighbors like the European Union and Japan. Both have large foreign reserves: $500 billion in Russia and $3 trillion in China. Though there have been regular street protests in Russia since late last year, and a visible power struggle has been under way within the Chinese leadership, neither regime appears to be in imminent danger of collapse. In foreign affairs, the two governments exude confidence, even arrogance: at mid-year, China was bullying neighbors like the Philippines in the South China Sea, while Russia was propping up the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in defiance of the United States, Europe, and the Arab League.
> 
> Upon closer examination, however, both governments are saddled with economies that have lost their most dynamic means of growth. They are facing the imperative of far-reaching restructuring in order to avoid stagnation or recession in the coming years; but it’s questionable whether either regime has the strength to push through the changes necessary to hold off crisis. Meanwhile, by the summer of 2012 each faced the possibility that a recession in Europe would spread eastward, inducing a “hard landing” for their economies at a sensitive political moment.
> 
> For Russia, the dilemma is summed up in the prices of oil and gas, and the role those two commodities have come to play during the Putin era. When Putin first took office in 1999, oil and gas earned less than half of Russia’s export revenue. Now that share is more than two-thirds. In part this increase is due to rising prices and production, but Russia has also deindustrialized under Putin. According to a report in Business New Europe, this year the country gave up the effort to maintain its own auto industry, and stopped producing the Lada sedan. The company that manufactures the iconic AK-47 rifle went bankrupt, largely because of its failure to develop a more modern version of the Kalashnikov. And a new civilian passenger jet promoted by Putin as an answer to Boeing and Airbus flew into a mountainside during one of its first demonstration flights, killing the deputy transport minister of Indonesia and forty-four others and throwing its future into question.
> 
> Now the energy industry itself is declining. From 2000 to 2004, Russian oil and gas production grew by an average of 7.5 percent per year as private companies flourished and foreign investors bought in. But following Putin’s political crusade against magnates like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and mistreatment of Western oil firms, the average increase dropped to 1.4 percent between 2005 and 2011. Foreign capital needed to increase production will be difficult to attract, given Putin’s record, and the development of large new oil and gas reserves in Europe and the United States has further dimmed the prospect for export revenues in the next few years.
> 
> At the same time, the Russian government budget has become more dependent than ever on oil and gas. Energy revenue pays for more than half of government spending—and that spending has mushroomed from fifteen percent of GDP four years ago to nearly a quarter this year. Putin has compounded the problem by promising vast new outlays: a doubling of the wages of doctors, police, and teachers; higher payments to families; and $790 billion in new defense spending.
> 
> Russians now commonly measure the state of the economy by calculating the price of oil needed to balance the state budget. In 2008 it was $55 a barrel; in 2011 it was $100. Now experts guess that it would take an average price of $117 to cover this year’s planned spending, and somewhere between $130 and $150 a barrel to meet Putin’s promises for the next several years.
> 
> Within weeks of beginning his new mandate, with oil prices well under $100, Putin was already hinting that the budget would be scaled back. The question was whether he could avoid the swelling of public unrest that austerity might provoke. Two major polls, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and the Associated Press, released in May and July, showed that while Putin remained relatively popular among the general population, support for him in Moscow and other big cities had plummeted—and the demand for political freedom, and support for ongoing popular protests, had expanded.
> 
> Backed by eighty percent of the population as recently as 2008, Putin now attracts overall support of fifty-eight percent, reported the AP—and only thirty-eight percent in Moscow. Since 2002, according to Pew, “five of the six measures of democratic freedom tested by the Global Attitudes Project have witnessed double-digit increases in terms of the percentage of Russians describing them as ‘very important.’” Only thirty-one percent say they are satisfied with the state of democracy in the country—and sixty-four percent describe the economic situation as bad. A solid majority of fifty-eight percent said they supported the post-election opposition street demonstrations.
> 
> At midyear, Putin still looked relatively strong, because the largely middle-class freedom protesters gathering in Moscow had not been joined by blue-collar workers, and rural areas were not as restless as the cities. But with the Internet’s stream of uncensored information rapidly growing, that seemed unlikely to last. According to the AP, the percentage of Russians using the Internet daily has grown from twenty-two to thirty-eight percent in just two years.
> 
> Kudrin’s report outlined several scenarios for the future, chief among them “modernization through dialogue between the government and opposition,” stagnation, and a “chaotic radical transformation of power.” The director of the study, Mikhail Dmitriev, of the Center for Strategic Research, was quoted by the news agency RIA Novosti as saying that “the most likely scenario is mounting pressure on protests” by the regime, “eventually resulting in public backlash and sudden transformation of power.”


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/coming-collapse-authoritarians-china-and-russia-face-endgame



> Few in Beijing are predicting such a political explosion, and the economy there is far stronger. But China suffers from the same fundamental problem of declining economic returns and rising demands for personal and political freedom. The country’s vaunted export-oriented growth model, which brought five hundred million people out of poverty in just thirty years, seems to have run its course. Having peaked in 2007 at ten percent of GDP, the current-account surplus, the broadest measure of trade, was just 2.8 percent of GDP in 2011, or $201 billion, according to a recent report in the Economist magazine—less than that of Germany. This year, exports are not contributing to GDP growth.
> 
> In the last five years, the Hu regime has managed to sustain that growth only by launching one of the largest government stimulus programs in world history. According to the Economist, investment as a share of GDP increased by six points between 2007 and 2010; lending rose from one hundred and twenty-two percent of GDP to one hundred and seventy-one percent between 2008 and 2010. State-run enterprises controlled most of the money flow, pouring borrowed cash into housing construction and other speculative investments. In 2011, spending on plant, machinery, buildings, and infrastructure made up an amazing forty-eight percent of China’s GDP.
> 
> Beijing launched another stimulus in the spring of 2012, when the economy showed signs of a sharp slowdown. But few economists in or outside the government believe the policy is sustainable. Some think the forests of apartment towers rising around dozens of Chinese cities reflect a real estate bubble that will eventually pop, bringing with it the “hard landing” and social destabilization that the authors of “China 2030” warned of. Even if that does not happen, the lending and investment binge will have to slow—and some new formula for growth will replace it.
> 
> There is little disagreement among economists about what is needed. China will have to shift its growth engine from exports and domestic investment to consumer spending. There is plenty of room for this; household consumption currently makes up only a third of GDP, compared to seventy percent in the United States. Vast sums could be spent on upgrading Chinese health care, especially for skyrocketing numbers of seniors; on a social safety net for the poor and unemployed; and on education. Financial markets must be liberalized and average Chinese allowed to purchase shares and bonds, including in foreign markets. Both wages and interest rates on savings need to rise.
> As “China 2030” puts it:
> 
> It is imperative that China adjusts its development strategy as it embarks on its next phase of economic growth. At its core, this adjustment requires changing the role of government and its relations with the market, the private sector, and society at large . . . . The government will need to transform itself into a lean, clean, transparent and highly efficient modern government that operates under the rule of law.
> 
> The problem with implementing such an agenda is that it will require a dramatic change in the orientation of government, which is now heavily bound up with state-owned enterprises, big manufacturing exporters dependent on cheap labor, a huge bureaucracy, and other status quo interests.
> 
> Even the party’s planners don’t believe it will be possible for the Chinese Communist Party to push through such a transformation without political reform that, as the report puts it, makes the emerging middle class “a major force in promotion of harmonious development.” As the authors of “China 2030” explain:
> 
> If the experiences of other countries is any guide [sic], the rising ranks of the middle class and higher education levels will inevitably increase the demand for better social governance and greater opportunity for participation in public policy debate and implementation. Unmet, these demands could raise social tensions; but if the government finds ways to improve consultation and tap the knowledge and social capital of individuals and nongovernment agencies, these demands can be transformed into a positive force.
> 
> So far, China’s middle class has not followed Russia’s into the streets. But its Internet burns with restlessness; more than two hundred and fifty million Chinese now have accounts on microblogging sites such as Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Even a vast state censorship operation has been unable to prevent outpourings of critical commentary on events like a high-speed train crash, a food safety scandal, or the treatment of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng after he sought refuge in the US Embassy in May. The purge of Chongqing governor Bo Xilai in March prompted months of feverish online commentary and speculation—including outbursts from angry supporters of the disgraced populist.
> 
> During a reporting trip to Beijing, Shanghai, and the interior city of Changsha in May, I was struck by the openness with which Chinese intellectuals, journalists, and even government officials spoke about the need for political as well as economic change. Their hope was that a destabilization of the regime could be headed off by a top-down reform process that would begin with greater press freedom and acceptance of a grassroots civil society independent of the Communist Party. “This is the time to do something, and to do it incrementally,” said Shen Dingli, the dean of the Institute for International Studies at Fudan University, whom I met in Shanghai. “If you reform, you have immediate challenges. But if you don’t reform, you will have even bigger challenges. The top leaders all know this.”
> 
> 
> 
> In fact, the top leaders of both Russia and China have repeatedly and publicly acknowledged the trouble they are facing. In one of his last major speeches in March, outgoing premier Wen Jiabao told the National People’s Congress that China “has come to a critical stage” in which “without successful political structural reform . . . new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved.”
> 
> For his part, Vladimir Putin published an op-ed in the Washington Post last February in which he declared: “Our society is completely different from what it was at the turn of the 20th century. People are becoming more affluent, educated and demanding. The results of our efforts are new demands on the government and the advance of the middle class above the narrow objective of guaranteeing their own prosperity.”
> 
> Putin and his deputy, Dmitri Medvedev, and Wen as well, have been making such speeches for years—and still have taken no significant action to liberalize the political order. On the contrary, Putin launched an offensive against his opposition after his election, pushing through new laws to punish protesters with heavy fines and to curtail the activity of nongovernmental groups. Though it allowed Chen to leave the US Embassy for the United States in May, China has been stepping up prosecutions of dissidents and trying to tighten control over the Internet ever since the Arab Spring revolutions began in early 2011.
> 
> Putin conceded a primary reason for these reactionary approaches during a June speech on the economy. After calling the dependence of the budget on oil prices “the Achilles’ heel of our economy,” and conceding the desperate need to attract foreign investment into the energy industry, he added: “Unfortunately corruption is without exaggeration the biggest threat to our development. The risks are even worse than the fluctuation of oil prices.”
> 
> In fact, corruption paralyzes the Kremlin. The political system cannot be opened up without exposing the criminal networks that have infected every part of the bureaucracy, siphoning off billions of dollars in what should be public revenues. By many accounts Putin and his inner circle have participated robustly in the looting; but even midlevel officials have stolen hundreds of millions with impunity. More than a dozen prominent journalists and human rights activists have been murdered in the last decade—including one on Putin’s birthday in 2006. A more open system would inevitably lead to demands for accountability that would imperil Putin and most of those around him.
> 
> China’s leadership has similar vulnerabilities. After the purge of Bo—one of the rising party “princelings,” or heirs of past Communist leaders—Western news accounts chronicled how his wife and other relations had built up a vast business empire, and allegedly murdered a British businessman in order to protect it. An investigation by Bloomberg News in April found that Bo’s family had accumulated $136 million in assets. In June, Bloomberg reported finding an even larger fortune controlled by the extended family of incoming leader Xi Jinping—prompting a paroxysm of censorship of such reporting on the Chinese Internet. If China liberalizes its media, Xi surely will be asked to explain how his family came to own, for example, seven properties in Hong Kong, reported by Bloomberg to be worth $55 million.
> 
> A forward-looking US policy would aim at putting pressure on these obstacles to change. A good model is the bipartisan Magnitsky Bill, which has been moving through the US Congress this year. It mandates visa revocations and an asset freeze for Russian officials who are guilty of killing or persecuting people fighting corruption or abuses of human rights. It is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered a $230 million embezzlement scheme by tax and Interior Ministry officials and then was imprisoned by those same officials and subjected to mistreatment that caused his death in 2009.
> 
> Tellingly, the prospect of such sanctions has shaken Moscow to its core. Putin issued a directive in May that listed stopping the bill as a top priority in relations with the United States. Equally remarkable, the Obama administration chose to take Putin’s side, and lobbied heavily on Capitol Hill to block the legislation.
> 
> Obama clearly still hopes that in a second term he will be able to strike deals with Putin, starting with a new treaty to reduce nuclear arms. He will seek to forge an early partnership with Xi as well, focused on reducing trade frictions and stopping the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran. Rhetorically, Romney promises a harder line. But neither is prepared for the hard landing many Russians and Chinese see in their near future.
> 
> Jackson Diehl is the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, where the column from which this article was expanded originally appeared.


----------



## Edward Campbell

While China's 3rd quarter GDP *growth* has slowed to 7.4%, the morning news says that industrial output is up by 10%, year on year, from Jan to Sep 2012, _suggesting_, to some analysts, that the worst of the slump is over.

The key indicator, I have been told by a Chinese official, is GDP growth of or above 8% until about 2020 ~ when the _middle class_ is expected to be secure in Eastern China and in a majority position in the central provinces ~ _Social Harmony_ is all important to the Chinese leadership and it, the leadership, recognizes that its hold on power is tenuous and rests only on its perceived capacity to make things "better."


----------



## Edward Campbell

More on Canada, China and the CNOOC/_Nexen_ deal, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_, a journal specializing in Asia-Pacific affairs:

http://thediplomat.com/china-power/canada-punts-on-cnooc-nexen-decison/


> China, Canada and Oil Sands
> 
> By Hugh L. Stephens
> 
> October 17, 2012
> 
> Last week the Government of Canada kicked the CNOOC-Nexen can down the road for another 30 days, delaying the decision for up to a month after the statutory 45 day review period for the friendly takeover had elapsed. The government can make a decision within this 30 day extension or announce a further 30 day delay with CNOOC’s agreement. Meanwhile, Nexen shareholders overwhelmingly approved the deal, which is not surprising given the premium that state owned CNOOC is willing to pay. If this is such a good deal for Nexen’s shareholders, and will allow CNOOC to further bring its deep pockets to the Canadian oil patch, then why the delay?
> 
> CNOOC’s bid poses a bit of a conundrum for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. It is busy developing a closer relationship with China and Asia generally, and wants to make the point that Canada is open for business, especially after BHP was actively discouraged from pursuing its bid for Canada’s largest potash enterprise. At the same time, there has been a lot of negative commentary focusing on the fact that CNOOC is not just a state owned enterprise (SOE) but is a Chinese SOE. Supporters of the deal have pointed out that other SOEs are active in the Canadian oil industry, such as Norway’s StatOil, which is 67% owned by the Government of Norway, but Norway and China trigger very different reactions from Canadians. A survey earlier this year by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada found that a majority of Canadians would oppose deals in which state controlled companies attempted to buy a controlling stake in a Canadian company (unless it was a UK SOE, where only 39% disapproved). That number reaches 75% where companies controlled by the Chinese government are concerned.
> 
> This sensitivity about the activities of Chinese companies was highlighted by the recent report of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee accusing Huawei Technologies of being a security threat because of its close ties to the Chinese government. Almost certainly not coincidentally, a few days later the Canadian government, without naming Huawei, announced that a “national security exemption” would be applied to firms seeking to bid on a secure communications network for Canada.
> 
> The Official Opposition party, the New Democrats, have come out squarely against the CNOOC-Nexen deal, but even some of Mr. Harper’s Conservative MPs have expressed reservations. As for Harper himself, he has conceded that the review raises tough policy issues, but has maintained that the decision will be made on the basis of “net benefit” to Canada. The net benefit test is one of the reasons there is so much uncertainty over the case, since it is at best subjective. As the term suggests, under the Investment Canada Act net benefit is determined by “measuring the aggregate net effect after offsetting the negative effects, if any, against the positive ones.” Factors that are taken into account include whether the non-Canadian SOE adheres to Canadian standards of corporate governance (including, commitments to transparency and disclosure, independent members of the board of directors, independent audit committees and equitable treatment of shareholders), and to Canadian laws and practices, as well as factors such as whether a Canadian business to be acquired by a non-Canadian SOE will continue to have the ability to operate on a commercial basis regarding where to export; where to process; the participation of Canadians in its operations in Canada and elsewhere; support of ongoing innovation, research and development; and the appropriate level of capital expenditures to maintain the Canadian business in a globally competitive position.
> 
> There is no doubt that some hard bargaining is going on with CNOOC, and conditions will certainly be imposed. It is unlikely that the deal will be blocked but the real test will be how onerous the conditions are, and whether CNOOC will be prepared to swallow them. Ultimately China badly wants increased access to the oil sands (it already has a minority stake in the Long Lake oil sands project in partnership with Nexen), but not at any cost. However, it is prepared to make a number of concessions to secure approval, and potentially pave the way for future investments.
> 
> For its part, Canada will have to impose conditions that show it has given public concerns about Chinese investment serious consideration, but not make them so onerous that they will force the Chinese to lose face and scare them off. Canada needs huge amount of new investment to continue to develop its oil sands fields, just as it needs new investment to move the product to new markets in the face of a growing glut in North America.
> 
> While allowing the deal to proceed makes sense from an economic standpoint for both China and Canada, navigating the political minefields will be tricky. For both parties the stakes are high and the decision now hangs in the balance. I believe it will be approved and both sides will declare victory. We should know for sure in about a month.
> 
> _Hugh L. Stephens is Executive-in-Residence at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada Home | Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and Principal of TransPacific Connections (TPC Consulting ) |tpconnections.com. He is based in Victoria, BC, Canada._




The whole Canada/China relationship is both complex and evolving and, as Hugh Stephens says, politically and economically tricky.

I happen to favour the _Nexen_ deal, but I am, generally, favourable to any and all _freer trade_ deals; my reading of history (not economics) persuades me that freer trade produces greater prosperity and, albeit more tenuously, greater prosperity is more likely produce peace.


----------



## GAP

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I happen to favour the _Nexen_ deal, but I am, generally, favourable to any and all _freer trade_ deals; my reading of history (not economics) persuades me that freer trade produces greater prosperity and, albeit more tenuously, greater prosperity is more likely produce peace.



There was an article yesterday in, I think, the Vancouver Sun, that was pointing out that there were Chinese mining companies in northern BC that was advertising for only  Mandarin speaking applicants. There are plenty of skilled mining folks out there, few speak Mandarin.

This focus does not bode well for future Chinese investments in Canada if little if any effort is going to be made in operating in the English language. That becomes problematic.


----------



## The Bread Guy

GAP said:
			
		

> There was an article yesterday in, I think, the Vancouver Sun, that was pointing out that there were Chinese mining companies in northern BC that was advertising for only  Mandarin speaking applicants. There are plenty of skilled mining folks out there, few speak Mandarin.


The mining media is covering this angle as well....


> In unveiling Canada’s British Columbia’s job-creation strategy last year, Premier Christy Clark said the government planned to capitalize on high demand for minerals, especially in Asia, by opening up eight new mines in the next four years and expanding nine more by 2015.
> 
> What Clark didn’t specify was who would be employed on those mines, said labour lawyer Sarbjit (Bobby) Deepak in a letter to the Vancouver Sun last February.
> 
> The answer to his question became clearer last week, as reports unveiled that an initial group of 200 Chinese citizens will begin to arrive in coming weeks to work at new mines in the western Canadian province.
> 
> The full time workers – whose number could grow to as many as 2,000 eventually – follow $1.4 billion in Chinese funding for two of four coal projects in the northeast of the province announced last year.
> 
> The Asian coal mining companies that are staring business in B.C. have been accused of favouring Chinese applicants to fill available positions. Questioned by a local journalist who writes for The Province, the firms claimed it was a mistake that some of their local want ads demanded Mandarin language skills for jobs at their mines.
> 
> “The companies say they tried — and failed — to find Canadians to work at the mines, so the federal government is allowing them to bring in the ‘temporary’ Chinese miners as a result,” writes Michael Smyth.
> 
> He reveals that some of the ads clearly stated the companies were looking for workers who speak Mandarin, a requisite that would clearly leave the majority of Canadian applicants out.
> 
> _"This single reference to Mandarin was an isolated and unanticipated case," Jody Shimkus, a spokesperson for HD Mining International, told me in a statement.
> 
> "This ad was never meant to suggest there was a language requirement for Mandarin."
> 
> But the "isolated" error was repeated in at least four ads..... _


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_, is interesting:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1063786/beijing-cancelled-visa-former-us-ambassador


> Beijing cancels visa of former US ambassador Jon Huntsman
> *Beijing cancels the visa of former US ambassador Jon Huntsman, who was set to speak in Shanghai last month, according to an interview by Foreign Policy on Wednesday.*
> 
> SCMP Staff
> 
> Thursday, 18 October, 2012
> 
> Beijing cancelled the visa for former US ambassador Jon Huntsman, who was set to speak in Shanghai last month, according to an interview by Foreign Policy published on Wednesday.
> 
> Huntsman, a former governor in the US and Republican presidential candidate, was invited to speak at the World Money Show convention in Shanghai. The government intervened and pressured the organisers to disinvite him, said the interview.
> 
> Huntsman believed his tendency to criticise the Chinese government on human rights and other issues was too risky for the Chinese Communist Party, especially amid a sensitive time ahead of its leadership transition.
> 
> “And at a time of leadership realignment, the biggest deal in 10 years for them, they didn’t want the former U.S. ambassador saying stuff that might create a narrative that they would have to fight,” he told Foreign Policy.
> 
> The Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress is scheduled to start in Beijing on November 8. A new generation of leaders, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, are expected to be placed in the Party’s top positions, replacing the current leadership headed by Hu Jintao. It’s seen as the most significant leadership transition for China in decades.




I think Gov Hunstman is giving himself too much credit. The Chinese understand that, even though they don't like, the incessant _China bashing_ is a fixture of US elections ~ China has replaced the USSR in US rhetoric. I think that denying Hunstman a platform in Shanghai was directed at Japan and South Korea.


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## tomahawk6

A slight detour into the military realm for a moment. The addition to the PLAN fleet of a carrier is a milestone for sure. An expensive one. Other carriers are either in the works or are in the planning stage [no pun intended]. China is in the process of transitioning from a coastal fleet to one that can provide an intervention capability. The PRC has a long way to go to catch up to US seapower.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Staying with military news, the _Financial Times_ reports that: Beijing launches military exercises.

The report says, _"The Chinese navy started a joint exercise with civilian maritime agencies in the East China Sea on Friday simulating a clash with rival claimants of disputed waters ... The drill is being read as a warning signal to Tokyo, with which Beijing is embroiled in a dispute over the nearby Senkaku, or Diaoyu Islands, which are controlled by Japan but also claimed by China and Taiwan ... According to the statement, the simulated scenario includes a collision in which the Chinese ships are damaged and some patrol staff are hurt and fall into the water. The East Sea Fleet then “sends a frigate, a hospital ship, a tugboat, advanced fighters and helicopters for support, cover and emergency rescue” ... China regularly holds maritime drills at this time of year. But the announcement comes after a long-running dispute between Beijing and Tokyo over the tiny archipelago off the Eastern coast of Taiwan escalated when Japan agreed a deal to buy some of the islands from their private owner last month."_


----------



## Edward Campbell

Inside China, there is a move to strengthen the Coast Guard according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the semi-official _China Daily_:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2012-10/19/content_15829994.htm


> Need for unified coast guard
> 
> Updated: 2012-10-19
> 
> By Gong Jianhua ( China Daily)
> 
> The Diaoyu Islands dispute between China and Japan has been grabbing the headlines. But beyond the top news, some neighboring countries have encroached on China's islands and reefs, harassed and detained Chinese fishermen, and are exploiting China's oil and gas resources in the South China Sea. Disputes between China, and the Republic of Korea and other countries have also been reported.
> 
> These developments make it extremely important for China to strengthen its maritime law enforcement forces and conduct regular cruise surveillance in its waters.
> 
> It is becoming increasingly difficult for China to safeguard its maritime rights. Some of its neighbors have triggered sovereignty disputes over islands and reefs, maritime boundaries and exclusive economic zones. The interference of major external powers in these disputes have complicated matters further for China.
> 
> Though the use of naval and air forces to deal with the disputes is not advisable, maritime law enforcement forces can help defuse the crises and prevent potential conflicts. But China's maritime law enforcement agencies are not strong enough to safeguard the country's maritime rights.
> 
> The United States has the world's most powerful coast guard., Japan's coast guard is strong, well-equipped and experienced; The ROK coast guard, too, is considerably powerful.
> 
> China, however, has five maritime law enforcement agencies: the Coast Guard of the Public Security Ministry, the Maritime Safety Administration of the Transport Ministry, the Marine Surveillance of the State Oceanic Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command of the Agriculture Ministry, and the State and General Administration of Customs. They are often referred to as the "Five Dragons".
> 
> Though the "Five Dragons" have been playing an important role in safeguarding China's maritime rights, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to handle unexpected crises. Also, they are not under a unified management of the State, which could be hampering their functions.
> 
> Japan dared to arrest Chinese fishermen and "purchase" the Diaoyu Islands, and thus inflame the dispute with China, not only because it controls the islands but also because it has a strong, well-equipped coast guard.
> 
> In contrast, the "Five Dragons" are not capable and experienced enough to handle large-scale emergencies at sea independently. Given its long coastline and huge maritime area, China has put itself in a passive and disadvantageous position by not strengthening its maritime law enforcement agencies. If China does not take immediate remedial measures, it is likely to be caught on the wrong foot in case a large-scale maritime conflict breaks out.
> 
> On the face of it, the "Five Dragons" appear to have a clear-cut division of responsibilities and each performs its own functions. The fact is otherwise, their responsibilities overlap and they have difficulty in communicating and coordinating with each other. The cost of law enforcement is high and efficiency is low. The "Five Dragons" also face difficulty in communicating and cooperating with their foreign counterparts. Therefore, it is imperative for the government to establish a reasonably structured "China Coast Guard" with clear-cut functions and full authority.
> 
> But at present, the top priority for China is to establish a foolproof information-sharing system for the existing maritime law enforcement departments in order to strengthen their cooperation and ensure cohesion during emergencies as well as normal times. In this way we can first exploit the advantages of each department to the full and then achieve functional integration step by step.
> 
> For example, we can give full play to the China Marine Surveillance and the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, which have comparatively more patrol vessels, to conduct routine cruises and maintain order in the waters under China's jurisdiction. The Fisheries Law Enforcement Command could be asked to maintain fishing rights, protect Chinese fishermen and deal with fisheries disputes.
> 
> At present, the Coast Guard of the Public Security Ministry is the only armed law enforcement agency among the "Five Dragons", which makes it the most important force safeguarding the country's maritime rights and interests. Since it is mainly responsible for fighting crime at sea, including piracy and terrorism, it needs more funds to modernize and build itself into a strong force.
> 
> Of course, the formation of a unified "China Coast Guard" is a huge project, for which the central leadership has to break down departmental barriers, eliminate sectoral interests and promote a top-to-bottom formation.
> 
> But before that, the government could give the green light to system planning, structural design and function reconstruction. Maritime law enforcement functions should be put under a unified command, and the operations, powers and responsibilities of the "Five Dragons" should be specifically spelt out. Only by properly implementing and streamlining the process can we take the first step toward building a unified, powerful "China Coast Guard".
> 
> But to do that, the government has to integrate the "Five Dragons", train and cultivate more law enforcement personnel, and improve the weaponry and equipment. This will not only narrow the forces' gap with developed countries but also make it strong enough to deter marauding countries.
> 
> And after the establishment of a unified and strong "China Coast Guard", the government should ensure its personnel train, whenever possible, in conjunction with the navy and set up a seamless intelligence network and an information-sharing mechanism. The establishment of a unified "China Coast Guard" is a real need, and the earlier it is done the better it will be for the country.
> 
> _The author is a professor at the School of Politics and Public Administration, Guangdong Ocean University._




It should be noted that professors, like Gong Jianhua, are often used as stalking horses by different factions within the Party. They write articles in both the Chinese and foreign language media advocating this, that or the other policy proposal. This proposal, to unite the "Five Dragons" into a stronger, para-military Coast Guard is likely to attract some public and political support.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _Global Times_ is a subsidiary of the semi-official _China Daily_; it publishes both Chinese and English editions; it differentiates itself from its parent by being _populist_ and _bellicose_; it is *not* reflective of _official China_ nor, as far as I know, is it used as a public sounding board for internal to the CCP debates. But: it does, maybe fairly accurately, reflect one part of the Chinese _street_ which is chauvinistic and bellicose.

That being said, here is a pretty forceful opinion piece, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Global Times_:

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/739456.shtml


> Japan must adapt to China’s navy moves
> 
> Global Times
> 2012-10-20
> 
> By Global Times
> 
> The joint exercise involving the PLA Navy and civilian law enforcement ships conducted Friday in the East China Sea came as a surprise for Japanese media, which believe the move is due to the deteriorating situation between the two countries over Japan's "nationalization" of the Diaoyu Islands.
> 
> There is no need to object to the speculation by Japanese media. The exercise has sent a clear message to the outside world, that China is ready to use naval force in maritime conflicts.
> 
> The country lacks experience in law enforcement on the sea, however, the odds of friction during maritime law enforcement incidents has been on the increase.
> 
> China is not interested in flexing its muscles on the sea while it is preoccupied with economic development. For years, it has been, and still will be, showing restraint during frictions on its borders. But this does not mean China "fears" Japan, Vietnam or the Philippines.
> 
> This time the drill involved the navy. Next time it may well expand to missile forces in a bid to increase the level of deterrence and the range.
> 
> The frequent territorial conflicts in recent years have disrupted China's previous policy that insisted on "putting aside disputes for the time being." The government has learned to launch "counter measures" one after another.
> 
> The outside world, as well as ourselves, have been adapting to a "tougher" China that has become more resolute in safeguarding its sovereignty and interests. Some predicted this change would ruin the hard-won international situation after China's reform and opening-up process over the past few decades. The prediction did not come true.
> 
> The country will only become more skillful in dealing with more provocations. What's more, the Chinese people have increasingly begun to think that some countries have been underestimating the consequences of angering China, and China needs to teach them a lesson. This growing public sentiment may pressure the government to change its diplomatic policies.
> 
> Chinese people believe there is unlikely to be any major war in the Asia-Pacific region, because China has no intention of starting one, nor will the US, we believe. A conflict in this area would be a brief brawl, in which the weaker country is more likely to suffer.
> 
> China, the most powerful country in this region, has in the past been the strongest voice urging parties to "set aside disputes." The Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, on the contrary, were more bellicose. This is not normal.
> 
> Japan has to realize the fact that it has always been a small country compared to China, and in the future it will still only be another Vietnam or Philippines. It is better for Japan to show some respect, or it is asking for trouble.




While one should not, I guess, read anything _official_ into this, I also guess that a goodly segment of the Chinese people feel this way. Those anti-Japanese demonstrations, which sometimes get violent, are _arranged_ and _authorized_ and even supported by the government but the people are not forced to participate: they come out, in large numbers, voluntarily because anti-Japanese sentiments run very deeply amongst the Chines people - with some very good reasons.





Just one of tens of thousands of authentic photos of Japanes
barbarism in Nanjing in 1937

It is also reported in the Japanese media that this is different from the 'normal' anti-Chinese sentiments. Japanese Ambassador to Beijing Uichiro Niwa says that _“Now, Chinese TV programs constantly show the Japanese flag and a photo of my face ... and the TV says in simple language that Japan is a thief who stole Chinese territory. Even elementary school children can connect the flag, theft and my photo. In China, I am feeling like I'm the ring leader.”_ He warns that the two sides must resolve this or risk 40 years of progress in normalizing Sino-Japanese relations.

While I remain firmly convinced that the Chinese *government* is not interested in anything like a war, or even a small armed _spat_, with Japan, it risks letting this escalate out of control on the _street_, and media, like _Global Times_ are making things worse.

China does not have a "free press" but nor does the government have anything like full control over the media.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Just to emphasize the point that the Chinese government, neither national nor provincial, orchestrates everything, the Taiwan newspaper _China Times_ (which is moderately pro-unification) reports large (10,000 civilians vs 3,000 police) demonstrations in Hainan province (an island province in the South China Sea) over a proposed, by the government, coal fired power plant. The people don't always get their way, but such spontaneous, anti-government demonstrations are actually quite common in China - an official told me that there were thousands, most likely tens of thousands, each year, maybe hundreds on most days across the country.


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## 57Chevy

An interesting article from Hang the Bankers and shared with fair use provisions of The Copyright Act
on the Senkaku Islands dispute with maps showing the claimed boundarys.

The real reason China and Japan are disputing the islands: Oil and Gas !!
http://www.hangthebankers.com/the-real-reason-china-and-japan-are-disputing-the-islands-oil-and-gas/


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## Ignatius J. Reilly

With regards to the Senkaku/Tiaoyutai islands, it is interesting how the Chinese government actually views the islands as part of Taiwan, and how it's claim to the islands is based upon it's claim to Taiwan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_ is a warning about Law of the Sea and Sino-American relations:

http://thediplomat.com/2012/05/28/the-folly-of-unclos/


> The Folly of UNCLOS
> *The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea is as much as anything else about fundamental disagreements between the U.S. and China. The U.S. shouldn’t sign up.*
> 
> By Paul S. Giarra
> 
> May 28, 2012
> 
> UNCLOS is deeply flawed. The U.S. Senate should be deeply skeptical of claims that, because it’s an international agreement, we should therefore accede as a matter of course. One can be all for the rule of law, yet conclude that United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas has complicated rather than simplified maritime law and security.
> 
> UNCLOS enshrined customary maritime law, but it also contradicted it by extending national claims far to sea, well beyond traditional claims, in the form of sui generis Exclusive Economic Zones. By fiat, this creation of EEZs established new claims and conflicts that never before existed.  This strikes me not as smart lawyering, but rather as quite a bad idea.
> 
> Somewhere along the line, proponents of UNCLOS have adopted the argument that accession itself is the standard of behavior, and that having a seat at the table is of paramount importance.  This becomes particularly problematic where the United Nations is concerned.
> 
> Further, China has espoused the doctrine of strict enforcement of its self-perceived UNCLOS rights through military and political intimidation. Moreover, China has, based upon its unitary interpretation of UNCLOS, assumed rights in the EEZs that not only weren’t intended by the framers, but which are troubling in their implications. These rights would extend security as well as economic rights to the limits of the EEZ, and in so doing preclude even routine military surveillance. The widespread recognition of these fabricated rights would be the death knell of freedom of the seas, not its enablement. Furthermore, raising the ante of EEZ rights isn’t just problematic, but threatening in the old-fashioned sense – especially because, while the Chinese have prudently toned down their rhetoric in international fora, their aggressive operations in the maritime commons belie any notions that Beijing has moderated its opinions or policies regarding Chinese rights.
> 
> The particular issue of China within the UNCLOS accession debate has emerged only lately. I would suggest that earlier American endorsements of UNCLOS – every Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), for instance – are obsolete, and have been negated by new circumstances unimagined at the time of the convention's framing.
> 
> The trouble is that bad law drives out good law. My bottom line is first, that law is not always the answer; and second, that this isn’t the time to call for UNCLOS accession. It is time, instead, for a clear-eyed debate on the merits and demerits of UNCLOS, in the wider perspective of the rise of China, where we are headed with Beijing, and the role of international law in affecting the ambitions of rising powers.
> 
> Standing for the rule of law doesn’t mean signing up for every proposition tabled in debate. Nor does it mean passing every bill proposed in a legislature. That’s the whole point of politics.
> 
> Besides, this isn’t a rule-of-law issue: this is a contract issue. There are good contracts, and there are bad contracts. UNCLOS is a bad contract, and getting worse because the environment to which it pertains has changed dramatically since it was drafted. Fundamentally, its merits are debatable, and whether or not we sign up to it is an option, and should not be perceived as an obligation. Perhaps one way to express this is to say that what is acceptable with regard to UNCLOS is not new, and what is new isn’t acceptable.
> 
> Whether or not you think that the contract analogy works, there are good laws and bad laws. Our legal system, domestic as well as international, isn’t meant to be a suicide pact, and there are procedures for demurring and for opting out.  UNCLOS becomes a rule-of-law issue when we sign up to it.
> 
> Besides, we are adhering to UNCLOS. It’s the Chinese that are trying to redefine UNCLOS according to their own purposes, without re-negotiating the contract, and in so doing undermining customary law – the latter being not immutable, but one had better have a darn good reason for changing it.
> 
> At the tactical level, I don’t believe for a moment that acceding to UNCLOS is going to improve our negotiating position with the Chinese, or change minds in Beijing. The differences at issue are far too substantial for that.
> 
> Finally, I also don’t for one moment believe that adherents of accession to UNCLOS are prepared for, or even intend to join, the furor that would ensue if joining were followed by a strenuous defense of and insistence upon customary, and never more necessary, rights of free passage.
> 
> In the final analysis, the UNCLOS issue is as much as anything else, and more than most, the manifestation of the fundamental and systemic disagreement and contest now in place between the United States and China. We need to join that contest at times and places of our own choosing.
> 
> _Paul S. Giarra is the president of Global Strategies & Transformation, a national defense and strategic planning consultancy._




Now, I happen to think that Giarra is wrong on almost every point - but I do agree that UNCLOS opens 'new' claims - but that doesn't mean that his opinion is not as, maybe more, valid as/than mine. We should also note that our Arctic claims are based on UNCLOS.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not sure what this means, BUT:

1. Xinhua is as close as there is to an _official_ news agency;

2. The CCP doesn't make announcements just to get its name in print; and

3. The Chinese Constitution empowers the Party in ways that are quite foreign to us, with our _liberal_, Anglo-Saxon cultural foundations.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-10/22/c_131922626.htm


> CPC to amend Party Constitution
> 
> English.news.cn
> 
> 2012-10-22
> 
> STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> 
> • CPC is going to amend Party Constitution at the 18th National Congress scheduled for Nov. 8.
> • The 18th CPC National Congress is a very important conference to be held at a critical time.
> • The whole Party should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
> 
> BEIJING, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) is going to amend the Party Constitution at its upcoming 18th National Congress scheduled for Nov. 8, according to a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on Monday.
> 
> The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee decided to submit a draft amendment to the CPC Constitution to the 7th Plenum of the 17th CPC Central Committee for further discussion on Nov. 1, before it is tabled with the national congress.
> 
> Monday's meeting, presided over by Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, also discussed a draft report to the 18th CPC National Congress, and decided to table it with the 7th Plenum of the 17th CPC Central Committee for further review.
> 
> The meeting heard two reports, respectively on the suggestions collected from CPC members to the draft amendment to the CPC Constitution and the suggestions solicited from CPC members and non-Party personages to the draft report to the 18th CPC National Congress.
> 
> The meeting will modify the two draft amendments based on Monday's discussion before submitting these documents to the 7th Plenum of the 17th CPC Central Committee for deliberation.
> 
> The Party will make a draft report to the 18th CPC national congress that complies with the common aspirations of the CPC and people of all ethnic backgrounds, meets the development needs of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and adapts to "new situations" and "new tasks," according to an official statement issued after Monday's meeting.
> 
> The meeting stressed the importance of making a draft amendment to the CPC Constitution that conforms to the needs of the CPC's theoretic innovation, practice and development and will also promote the CPC's work and strengthen its construction, the statement said.
> 
> The 18th CPC National Congress is a very important conference to be held at a critical time when China is building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way, deepening reform and opening up and accelerating the transformation of economic development pattern in difficult areas, it said.
> 
> The congress carries high significance in inspiring CPC members and people of all ethnic groups to continue to forge ahead with the building of a moderately prosperous society, the modernization drive, as well as the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
> 
> The whole Party should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, be guided by Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thoughts of the "Three Represents," and thoroughly carry out the Scientific Outlook on Development, according to the statement.
> 
> "(The Party should) emancipate the mind, continue reform and opening up, gather strength, overcome difficulties, forge ahead along the socialist path of Chinese characteristics unswervingly and strive for the full establishment of a moderately prosperous society," reads the statement.
> 
> The Party should thoroughly examine the general situation concerning the development of the world and contemporary China and fully understand the new requirements for the country's development and new expectations from the people.
> 
> It should deeply summarize the lively experiences the Party has gained in leading the people to advance reform, opening up and the socialist modernization drive, the statement said.
> 
> The Party should make best use of the key period of strategic opportunities facing China's development, advance innovation in theoretical terms, among others, and draw out the guidelines and policies that respond to the call of the times and the people, it said.
> 
> The congress will make strategic plans for China's reform and development, with focuses on the outstanding problems that are emerging during the country's development at its current stage and the issues that concern people's interests in the most immediate and realistic manner.
> 
> The congress will further socialist development in economic, political, culture, and social terms as well as in conservation culture, according to the statement.
> 
> It will carry forward Party building, scientific development and promote social harmony, and continue to improve people's livelihood and well-being, it said.




It's all typical Chinese bureaucratic gobbledygook - and Chinese gobbledygook is even less transparent than the Western variety - BUT I think it must mean something and I'm guessing that incoming _Paramount Leader_ Xi Jinping wants to change direction; but I cannot guess in which direction, except that the reference to _"The whole Party should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, be guided by Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thoughts of the "Three Represents," and thoroughly carry out the Scientific Outlook on Development, according to the statement"_ *might* indicate a swing back to the right - free marketeer Deng overturned communist Mao's ideology and the "three Represents" is a Jiang Zemin idea and Jiang led the tooth and claw capitalist wing of the CCP.


Edit: spelling   :-[


----------



## GAP

More of the Chinese long view....

China inks 10-year potash supply deal with tiny American miner
Article Link
 By Ernest Scheyder NEW YORK | Mon Oct 22, 2012

(Reuters) - A state-owned Chinese fertilizer company has signed a 10-year potash supply agreement with Prospect Global Resources Inc (PGRX.O), guaranteeing China a steady flow of the crucial fertilizer and helping it partially sidestep multinational suppliers like Potash Corp (POT.N).

The deal with Sichuan Chemical Industry Holding (Group) Co SICHAD.UL, worth more than $2 billion, is part of a Chinese trend to partner with small mining companies hungry for capital to develop their land.

Potash is one of the most-important fertilizers for farmers to apply, after nitrogen and phosphate.

"In China we've got a key customer who is really motivated by national food-security issues," said Devon Archer, the Prospect director who helped negotiate the deal. "And securing our first customer was really a breakthrough moment for Prospect."

Prospect's mine in Holbrook, Arizona, is estimated to have the largest potash reserves in the United States with nearly 40 years of supply, but the company has yet to obtain financing or regulatory permits to develop it. The mine is not expected to open until at least 2015.

The Denver-based company, which launched an initial public offering in July and has a market cap of roughly $160 million, can now use the agreement to secure financing to develop the mine. Archer declined to discuss funding amounts or potential financiers, but similar-sized projects have cost more than $1 billion to develop.

China has inked similar contracts with rare earth and uranium miners around the world. With the Prospect deal, the world's largest consumer of potash locks in some of its supply needs ahead of the once-in-a-decade change in Chinese leadership next month.

China has been aggressively negotiating for lower potash prices with Canpotex Ltd, the marketing agency that sells Canadian potash. Canpotex, owned by Potash Corp, Mosaic Co (MOS.N), and Agrium Inc (AGU.TO) (AGU.N), is one of the world's largest potash exporters.

So far neither Canpotex nor China has been able to agree on a price, and a deal isn't expected until the end of 2012 or early 2013. The Prospect deal gives China some leverage in negotiations as it will be less reliant on Canpotex for supply.

China buys potash through contracts that are generally renewed annually at prices used as a benchmark for spot sales. The country consumes more than 9 million tonnes of potash per year.

At current market prices, the Prospect deal is worth roughly $2.4 billion.

Archer, the Prospect director, declined to discuss the specific price per tonne in the China contract, though he said it was "very competitive and based off the world price."

North American prices at the Port of Vancouver, the main Canadian port for potash exports, hovered under $500 per tonne in September, according to market data released by Potash Corp last week.

China paid $470 per tonne under previous contracts with Canpotex and wants to pay less in future contracts, according to Lazard Capital Markets analyst Edlain Rodriguez.

MINE DEVELOPMENT

The Holbrook mine is expected to produce 2 million tonnes of potash annually when online, and China will take at least 500,000 tonnes of potash each year for ten years.

China, which produces some potash domestically but not enough to meet demand, has been buying more than 1 million tonnes of potash each year from Canpotex. It has signed supply deals in the past with producers in Belarus for roughly 500,000 tonnes.

In the contract with Prospect, China has the option to buy more potash, and the company is negotiating with other potential buyers for the remaining potash that will be produced, Archer said.

Prospect plans to hire roughly 700 workers to run the 90,000 acre site in eastern Arizona.

Unlike most potash mines, Prospect's Holbrook mine is relatively close to the surface with reserves roughly 800 feet to 2,000 feet deep.

The mine also is located in the warm Arizona climate, whereas most other potash reserves are in cooler climates in Canada or Russia. Given that Prospect has yet to open the mine, it's not clear what its cost per tonne to produce will be, though the company will have to do less digging.

For instance, Mosaic's Esterhazy mine in Saskatchewan, the world's largest potash mine, is roughly 3,700 feet deep.

Mosaic had to freeze an underground lake and drill through the ice just to reach its potash reserves.

"What we do have at Prospect, which is most important, is the geology," said Archer.
end


----------



## Edward Campbell

Mike Bobbitt said:
			
		

> Sorry folks, had a hiccup this morning and may have lost some posts from the wee hours of the morning.




Amongst the lost posts was one (for which I could not find the original source report) in which I noted that just as Mitt Romney promised to "call out" China as a "currency manipulator" for keeping the RMB too low, the RMB rose to a new high (6.2 : 1) against the US dollar.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...
> 
> Eventually that idea will be taught in high school, then elementary school and it will be featured in popular entertainment. (The Chinese get a lot of _information_ through long, semi-fictional, historical TV dramas - some of which have 50+ hour long episodes - which aim to establish a "common cultural norm.") Sun Yat Sen and Zhou Enlai will be treated a bit better: remembered as great social reformers with strange, muddled economic ideas. But it is Deng Xiaoping who will, eventually, be seen as the founder of the new (Republican) Dynasty ...





			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I'm not sure what this means, BUT:
> 
> 1. Xinhua is as close as there is to an _official_ news agency;
> 
> 2. The CCP doesn't make announcements just to get its name in print; and
> 
> 3. The Chinese Constitution empowers the Party in ways that are quite foreign to us, with our _liberal_, Anglo-Saxon cultural foundations.
> 
> Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_.
> 
> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-10/22/c_131922626.htm
> 
> It's all typical Chinese bureaucratic gobbledygook - and Chinese gobbledygook is even less transparent than the Western variety - BUT I think it must mean something and I'm guessing that incoming _Paramount Leader_ Xi Jinping wants to change direction; but I cannot guess in which direction, except that the reference to _"The whole Party should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, be guided by Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thoughts of the "Three Represents," and thoroughly carry out the Scientific Outlook on Development, according to the statement"_ *might* indicate a swing back to the right - free marketeer Deng overturned communist Mao's ideology and the "three Represents" is a Jiang Zemin idea and Jiang led the tooth and claw capitalist wing of the CCP.
> 
> 
> Edit: spelling   :-[




This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, deals with something I missed ~ the lack of the customary reference to Chairman Mao:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-hints-at-reform-by-dropping-mao-wording-from-recent-statements/article4630711/


> China hints at reform by dropping Mao wording from recent statements
> 
> SUI-LEE WEE BEIJING
> Reuters
> 
> Published Tuesday, Oct. 23 2012
> 
> The subtle dropping of references to late Chinese leader Mao Zedong from two policy statements over the last few weeks serves as one of the most intriguing hints yet that the ruling Communist Party is planning to move in the direction of reform.
> 
> Mao has always been held up as an ideological great in party communiques, his name mentioned almost by default in homage to his role in founding modern China and leading the Communist Party, whose rule from the 1949 revolution remains unbroken.
> 
> Which is why the dropping of the words “Mao Zedong thought” from two recent statements by the party’s elite Politburo ahead of a landmark congress, at which a new generation of leaders will take the top party posts, has attracted so much attention.
> 
> Also absent were normally standard references to Marxism-Leninism.
> 
> The omission in the latest such statement by the powerful decision-making body, after a Monday announcement that the congress next month would discuss amending the party’s constitution, is seen by some as sending a signal about its intent on reform. One of the constitution’s key platforms is Mao thought.
> 
> “It’s very significant,” Zheng Yongnian, the director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said of the removal of a reference to Mao Zedong Thought and the implications of that for the direction leaders were taking.
> 
> The wording has in the past talked about “holding high the banner of Mao Zedong thought and Marxism-Leninism” in carrying out the party’s work, and is often included at the end of statements almost as a mantra.
> 
> But the latest two statements mentioned only that the party should follow “Deng Xiaoping theory”, the “three represents” and the “scientific development concept”.
> 
> Late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the idea that China can be both communist and have market-based reforms, while the “three represents” refers to former President Jiang Zemin’s policy which formally allowed capitalists to join the party.
> 
> The last idea is current President Hu Jintao’s thinking of promoting more rounded economic development.
> 
> Mao Zedong Thought adapted the original theories of Marxism that grew out of industrial Europe to the conditions of largely rural China when Mao took over in 1949.
> 
> “Before the fall of Bo Xilai, that direction was not so clear. But now it’s become quite clear. I mean, less Maoism, but more Dengism,” Mr. Zheng said.
> 
> Mr. Bo, a former high-flying politician supported by leftists, was ousted this year in China’s biggest political scandal in two decades.
> 
> By removing Mao Zedong Thought, the top leaders were signalling a push for reforms, Mr. Zheng said, in the same way Mr. Deng introduced landmark market reforms in the late 1970s that turned China from a backwater into an economic powerhouse.
> 
> There was also no reference made to Mao thought in a previous announcement on the date of the party congress.
> 
> Doctrinal differences between reformist and leftist factions reflect an internal debate about the direction of the new leadership whose taking up of the reins of power starts at the congress opening in Beijing on Nov. 8.
> 
> The debate has been under the spotlight since the rise and subsequent fall of Mr. Bo, who, as party boss of the southwestern city of Chongqing, drew support from leftists critical of aspects of the market-based reform agenda.
> 
> China heads into the congress with the economy heading for its slowest annual growth rate in at least 13 years, while social stresses, such as anger over corruption, land grabs and unmet welfare demands, stir protests.
> 
> The country named a new air force chief and reshuffled other top military positions ahead of next month's appointment of new Communist Party leaders.
> 
> State media, as well as experts close to the government, have made increasingly strident calls for bold reform to avoid a crisis, though nobody seriously expects a move towards full democracy.
> 
> This week, for example, the Study Times, a newspaper published by the Central Party School which trains rising officials, lauded Singapore’s form of closely managed democracy and its long-ruling main party for having genuine popular support.
> 
> “If you want to win people’s hearts and their support, you have to have a government that serves the people,” it wrote.
> 
> Despite his ruthless political campaigns in which tens of millions died, Mao, whose portrait looms large on Tiananmen Square, has always been largely revered as a charismatic ruler who stood up to foreigners and unified the country.
> 
> Mao’s legacy in China remains tightly guarded by a Communist leadership bent on preserving his memory to shore up their own legitimacy, which, unlike his, was not forged in war.
> 
> In 2003, on the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth, Mr. Hu declared that “the banner of Mao Zedong Thought will always be held high, at all times and in all circumstances”.
> 
> An enormous slogan outside the central leadership compound in central Beijing, boldly states: “Long live invincible Mao Zedong thought!”
> 
> Some cautioned that it may be too soon to write off Mao.
> 
> “This is just not possible,” said Wang Zhengxu, a senior research fellow at University of Nottingham’s School of Contemporary Chinese Studies in Britain, on speculation that Mao thought and Marxism-Leninism would be removed from the party’s constitution.
> 
> Despite China’s all-pervasive Internet censorship – “Mao Zedong” and “Mao Zedong Thought” are both blocked on microblog searches – some users were able to discuss the issue, with opinions split on the possible removal of Mao thought.
> 
> “Mao Zedong Thought is the soul of the People’s Republic of China ... and it is a light leading people towards justice,” wrote one user.
> 
> Still, Singapore’s Zheng said Mao’s vision had become irrelevant as many Chinese were apathetic about him. The doctrine could be de-emphasised in the amendment to China’s constitution during the congress, he said.
> 
> “Only the left side cares about it,” he said. “For most people, for the young generation, they don’t care about it. The memory is gone.”
> 
> _With a report from The Associated Press_




Perhaps Bo Xilai's promotion of "neo-Maoism" has been enough to force the CCP leadership to move more quickly than Chinese politicians normally do to distance the country from Mao.

(Anecdote: A few years ago a friend too me to a _Maoist_ restaurant in Beijing. It is situated on an important street between the _Forbidden City_ and _Zhongnanhai_, the CCP HQ. It is a wildly popular place - popular with younger Chinese people. Originally the restaurant was opened by a fellow who had been one of Mao's personal chefs; he wanted to open a tourist trap - with ordinary food at high prices aimed at exploiting foreigners' desire to see something about the late 'monster' Mao. He was shocked when his restaurant became popular with younger Chinese who appeared to yearn for the "good old days." Now, a few years and a couple of moves later it is a very good Hunan style restaurant, but it still features some of Mao's favourite dishes (Mao was from Hunan province) and the servers wear old style "Mao suits." But it no longer caters to foreigners, none of the menus are in English nor do they have pictures; the food is wonderful - good Hunan cooks in the kitchen working with very fresh ingredients. Reservations are hard to come by; my friend was a university classmate of the original owner's granddaughter so we got in with only three day's notice. But China is, in some ways, like Russia; people who, generally, don't know better, wish for a return to the "good old days." In Russia you see posters of Stalin etc. < shudder > In Beijing it's more muted but still there.)


----------



## The Bread Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Amongst the lost posts was one (for which I could not find the original source report) in which I noted that just as Mitt Romney promised to "call out" China as a "currency manipulator" for keeping the RMB too low, the RMB rose to a new high (6.2 : 1) against the US dollar.


Something like this?


> Mitt Romney renewed his pledge to label China a currency manipulator "on day one" in the final presidential debate, arguing that the US was losing a silent trade war with the world's second largest economy.
> 
> Experts have warned that such a measure could backfire by provoking retaliatory action.
> 
> Overall, the Republican candidate took a milder stance towards Beijing, telling viewers on Tuesdaynight: "We can be a partner with China; we don't have to be an adversary in any way, shape or form."
> 
> But asked if he was formally accusing China of manipulating the renminbi and sparking a trade war, he replied: "There's one going on right now, which we don't know about it. It's a silent one. And they're winning."
> 
> "We have to say to our friend in China … you can't keep on holding down the value of your currency, stealing our intellectual property, counterfeiting our products, selling them around the world, even to the United States."
> 
> The US has not labelled China a currency manipulator since 1994, though successive administrations have considered doing so. Some observers doubt whether Romney would actually follow through ....


----------



## Edward Campbell

That Premier Wen Jiabao and his family became obscenely rich as he worked his way to the top of the CCP hierarchy should not come as a surprise. "Working or _milking_ the system" is as old as the system itself in China. Further, as I keep saying, the _Confucian_ nature of Chinese culture imposes an obligation on a man to find ways to advance his whole family's status and, especially, prosperity.

Even in Singapore, which is almost frighteningly law abiding, people respect Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, for using her talents to gain great wealth by advancing from being a lowly engineer in the Ministry of Defence to CEO of Temasek Holdings, a $150+ Billion sovereign wealth fund even as they worry about the propriety of it all.

But we should also note that US politicians, thanks, in some part to the campaign financing laws, may begin their political careers as (relatively) poor men but very, very few end up that way - many, perhaps even most, retire as multi-millionaires because they are allowed to keep money donated to their campaigns.


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting _factoid_ culled from an _Economist_ report about Mexico: _"In 2001 Mexican manufacturing wages were four times those in China; now the difference is trivial."_

In fact Mexican wages have risen, quite dramatically, since NAFTA (1994) but Chinese wages have, quite literally soared. The Chinese are now facing wage pressures from Indonesia and the Philippines.

But readers must understand that there are "three Chinas:"

1. A modern, industrial, sophisticated, high wage China on the East Coast which has a burgeoning middle class and a relatively large upper class, too;

2. A _developing_ or _industrializing_ belt in the middle provinces where opportunities for moderate wage enterprises are still available - the jobs are moving here (and to Indonesia and Philippines) from the East Coast and from Japan and South Korea, too; and

3. A very large, very poor, undeveloped, still largely agrarian Western region which is, still, very much unchanged, in economic terms, from the 1970s. These poor people still flock to the rich East Coast, looking for jobs that are no longer available, and then settle in the cities and town of the central Chinese provinces.

One interesting feature of Chinese life: while _mobility_ is now relatively free people still have internal passports which show the province in which they are _entitled_ to work. The minimum wage laws - and all provinces have them - apply only to people from that province, thus the tens of millions of Chinese _migrant workers_ in China are rarely paid the minimum wage in, say, Shanghai because they came from another province.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Get used to seeing Xi Jinping; he will replace Hu Jintao as the Chinese leader later this year. His position on the Chinese political spectrum remains obscure but, for better or worse, he will be here for many years, possibly ten.




I'm not the only one who finds Xi Jinping _obscure_ as this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_, makes clear:

http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/29/just-who-is-xi-jinping/


> Just Who is Xi Jinping?
> 
> October 29, 2012
> 
> By A. Greer Meisels
> 
> It is hard to know what a politician really thinks. Even in a country like the United States, which likes to bombard its electorate with an endless stream of campaign ads, when you scrape off their polished veneers, peel back the layers from their stump speeches, turn off their mics, and get right down to it, one would be hard pressed to find too many people who actually know what a politician thinks and feels. Sure people may claim to have deep insight into Candidate X or Candidate Y – the former schoolmates, teachers, employers, and drinking buddies like to come out of the woodwork to pontificate – but at the end of the day, it is hard to know what really makes the man or woman tick.
> 
> Multiply this phenomenon by a hundred or a thousand.
> 
> Now you are probably at the starting point when it comes to what we really know about the “would be” next generation leaders in China. In fact, aside from Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, it is hard to say with absolute certainty who will even be handed the reins of power in the upcoming 18th Party Congress.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Defense (Flickr)
> 
> Granted, few should be surprised by this – opacity and obfuscation seem, at times, to be part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) DNA. Lest we forget, it was just last month that the entire world played a collective game of “Where in the World is Xi Jinping” because the heir apparent cancelled a string of meetings (including one with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) and disappeared from the public eye. Should it then come as any surprise that we aren’t entirely clear about his policy leanings?
> 
> Yet understanding this does little to alleviate the frustration and sheer exhaustion felt by many a China-watcher who has undoubtedly been asked, on multiple occasions, to provide his or her opinion on “Just who is Xi Jinping?”
> 
> So what do we, as China-watchers, do? First, we try to draw conclusions based on what occurred in the leader’s past. This certainly has its merits. Not only does it provide some insight into how people like Xi might react in certain situations, but it also helps us begin to construct a map of potential patronage ties and factional allegiances. In China it is not just who you know, but how you know them.
> 
> For example, many believe that because Xi was the secretary to Defense Minister Geng Biao, he might have closer ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) than his predecessor, Hu Jintao. This could be important for a variety of reasons because the paramount leader’s relationship with the PLA can ultimately determine to what extent he can rely on the PLA to support policy initiatives, as well as the degree to which the military could exert leverage over the leader and influence the administration. But of course, the past is not a mirror to the future.
> 
> Another now common refrain about Xi is that he is more statesmanlike than his soon-to-be predecessor, Hu Jintao. For example, words like “confident,” “assured,” and “strategic” have been often used to describe the future leader. But what does that in turn tell us? It could mean that President Xi may be more difficult to work with, at least from an American perspective, because he may feel as if the U.S. should be more deferential to China and its core interests. On the other hand, he could be easier to deal with because he may have the confidence to make bolder moves on the foreign policy, political, and economic reform fronts.
> 
> Therefore, rather than simply theorizing about what a Xi Jinping administration may or may not do or what different personality traits might mean in terms of future policy shifts; perhaps, the best thing is to take a more “wait and see” approach. After all, it is important to understand that a leadership transition in China is a protracted process.
> 
> Further, the upcoming 18th Party Congress is only part of the overall transition. Throughout the process, a large number of Chinese officials and party members will shuffle positions both within and between bureaucracies as well as provinces. And though it is still quite important to understand who is at the top of the pecking order, it is equally important to understand that China still makes decisions by collective leadership. Therefore, it will be critically important to understand the overall mix of people on the Standing Committee – when the time comes.
> 
> Though let’s be honest, it will probably take a good 18 to 24 months before Xi is even able to shore up his position and has enough political capital to really begin to deal with the myriad tasks that confront China.
> 
> Xi has some very serious work ahead of him. He is inheriting slowing growth rates which will bring about new and potentially more dangerous social stresses, not to mention political challenges; relations with China’s neighbors are extremely strained; unequal growth and development within China’s borders has made significant segments of its population restive; and there are signs that the entire Chinese political and bureaucratic system have become increasingly ossified and sclerotic.
> 
> Actually after looking at that laundry list, perhaps the most important traits Xi could possess would be tenacity, the ability to multi-task, and a really good sense of humor.
> 
> But whether he has these traits or not… well, your guess is as good as mine.
> 
> _A. Greer Meisels is the associate director and research fellow for China and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest._




I have been reading everything I can find about Xi Jinping for the past eight months; I am more in the dark than Ms. Meisels admits to being. It is astonishing how little we know - or about which we can even make educated guesses - when it comes to the Chinese leadership. It's also dangerous because people who know as little as Ms. Meisels and I - like those surrounding the US President - must guess about his views and intentions.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My guess is that we are about to see another crackdown, of some sort, on the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, based on a report from the _Straits Times_' Beijing Bureau which says "Chinese Muslims fighting in Syria." The report says that _"Chinese Muslim separatists from the far northwestern region of Xinjiang are fighting alongside Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups opposed to Syria's government."_

Muslim separatism in Xinjiang is a festering sore which the Chinese seem to pick at in a haphazard manner - moving from carrot to stick at, apparently, random.

The Uyghurs are a Turkik people, even less _Chinese_ than the Tibetans and they have not _integrated_ very well. 1200 years the Uyghur Khaganate was a mighty steppe empire; over the centuries it was broken up and gobbled up by its neighbours, but Xinjiang has only been a Chinese province for 250 years. Islam and the modern, sophisticated and very, very secular Chinese culture do not coexist easily. 

See, also, this from about nine months ago:



			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...
> As to Xinjiang ~ a couple of years ago a mid level Chinese official put it to me that they, the (mostly) Han Chinese, plan to "f__k Xinjiang into submission." He meant that young men are encouraged to go to Xinjiang and marry a mostly relatively poor, attractive Uyghur girl and raise a totally secular, modern _Chinese_ family. It may be the work of a few generations but my acquaintance was confident of the strategy.



(Parenthetically: the spelling of Uyghur, or Uighur or whatever remains unsettled between various style books.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's a bit of an interesting media battle going on in East Asia. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is trying to promote the use of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) as a forum to mediate the various South China Sea disputes. Friendly media outlets (e.g. _Straits Times_, _channelnewsAsia_, etc) are going all out to publicize his efforts. Meanwhile, Beijing, without ever saying anything _officially_, is using mainland English language media, including CCTV-9, to pour cold water on the idea. It is interesting because:

1. It shows ASEAN trying to develop some common, reginal foreign policy muscle; and

2. It illustrates that the _foreign_ language media* has a role in diplomacy.

_____
* But English is an official and the most commonly spoken language in Singapore - even if the local variant is tough for a newcomer to comprehend.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is a long and fairly technical report from the respected _Conference Board_ - it's too long to post here - but the message is *"Economic activity may pick up a bit in short term, but downward trend in growth appears intact."*

No one, no on in their right mind, anyway, ever thought that China could sustain 10%+ growth year after year and, indeed, decade after decade, but the questions are:

1. In the longer term ~ how low can Chinese growth go without losing the all important, for government, _social harmony_ and, consequently risking a revolt? and

2. In the short term ~ hard or soft landing?

My guesses:

1. With better governance China can survive like most developed countries with modest growth (3-4%) in good years, punctuated by occasional recessions, but the "better governance" is a lot more complex and difficult than it looks; and

2. Soft landing ... this time.

BUT: if either of my guesses is wrong, and there is a very good chance that either or both will be, then revolution and civil war is the most likely outcome.


----------



## Edward Campbell

_CIPS_ (Centre for International Policy Studies) at _uOttawa_ runs an excellent public lecture series. This one, which at 35 minutes before the questions is not too long, is worth your attention.

It doesn't matter whether you or I agree with Prof Mearsheimer, he is a distinguished scholar and he has given this topic a lot of thought, and his views merit consideration.

Consider, if nothing else, his point at, about 19:00, that there cannot be a global hegemon - not even the USA _circa_ the years 1950 - 2000 - 2050.

His point about the Chinese remembering the consequences of being weak is very important. China does want, in fairness needs to be the regional hegemon in East Asia. Plus, he's right that the Chinese want to have - *will have* - their own Monroe Doctrine; they want America out of Asia.

I think he's wrong about Singapore joining any form of coalition, however loose, against China. The Japanese and Indians will try to form such a loose coaliton but Singapore and maybe South Korea and even Taiwan, too, dislike and mistrust Japan (and, to a lesser degree, India) more than they fear China.

I agree with him on "tragedy of great power politics." (35:30)

A few of the questions are excellent, most are obvious, a few others are simply stupid, but, hey, it's a public forum.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting _Infographic_ from the _Pew Research Centre_:





Source: http://pewresearch.org/


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is a very useful primer on the Chinese _elite_.

A note: Beijng and Tsinghua Universities are, roughly, the Harvard and Yale of China or, more accurately, the Harvard and MIT since Beijing University is best known for its Arts and Social Sciences programmes while Tsinghua University is renowned for its Science and Engineering departments. University entrance is one of the few (relatively) corruption free official processes in China - merit is, pretty well, the only deciding factor ~ in some respects it is more "fair" than in the West where race/ethnicity, financial need and non-academic attributes are very often used to achieve _diversity_. The Chinese system does, in fact, favour the _nouveau riche_ and the children of party members, especially senior ones, who have easier access to the best high schools, middle and elementary schools and even the best kindergartens.

Second note: the CYL (Communist Youth League (共青团)) has been, for nearly 100 years a stepping stone to success in the Party. In recent decades the CYL has been, broadly, associated with the _reform_ or _moderate_ wing of the CCP led, right now, by HU Jintao.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/handicapping-the-leadership-race-in-china/article4898839/?page=all


> Handicapping the leadership race in China
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Last updated Saturday, Nov. 03 2012
> 
> It has been hailed by China’s state media as “the most important meeting in the world in terms of its impact on the future,” and not without reason. Yet the rest of us will find out what happens at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China only when it’s over.
> 
> On Thursday, about 2,270 delegates from across China will enter the colonnaded Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square. After a secretive week (or more) of deliberation, a group of men in dark suits (although there could be one woman) will emerge and walk in a phalanx down a red carpet. Only then – by analyzing who stands where in the official photograph of the occasion – will the world find out who is to run this emerging superpower for the coming decade.
> 
> Not all the winners will come as a surprise: The man in the middle of the photo will be Xi Jinping, the current Vice-President, who has been chosen to succeed Hu Jintao as China’s paramount leader. Unless there’s a catastrophe, Mr. Xi will be made secretary-general of the Communist Party. He is then expected to become president next spring, and head of the Central Military Commission some time after that.
> 
> To his right will almost certainly be Li Keqiang. Tapped to succeed Premier Wen Jiabao as head of the country’s government, he is the only other member of the nine-man Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s supreme decision-making body, not scheduled to retire this year.
> 
> But who else will be there? At least nine others are clearly in the running. However, with the congress just days away, even senior government officials profess not to know whether the Standing Committee will stay the same size – it may shrink to seven members – let alone who will get the nod.
> 
> As for what the candidates would do if chosen, more is known about their allegiances than the policies they advocate. Chief among the various factions are the “princelings” (sons and daughters of Communist heroes who feel entitled to rule), political reformers (many of whom came up through the Communist Youth League under Mr. Hu), and those loyal to previous paramount leader Jiang Zemin.
> 
> Which faction, and which ideas, gain the upper hand may have a remarkable impact on the affairs of the nation and, given China’s growing clout, the rest of the world.
> 
> *THE INCUMBENTS
> 
> XI JINPING, 59
> 
> Background*: Considered a princeling as the son of revered revolutionary Xi Zhongxun, joined the CYL at 18 and studied chemical engineering at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Served as governor of coastal Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, and briefly as Communist Party chief in Shanghai before being promoted to the Standing Committee in 2007.
> 
> *Current posts*: First secretary of the Communist Party, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, vice-president of the People’s Republic of China
> 
> *Politics*: Considered close to both Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang, he appears to have risen by being a bridge between the rival factions. But China-watchers wonder whether he also embraces the politics of his father, a reformer who played a leading role in China’s economic transformation in the early 1980s (and one of few senior leaders to condemn the use of force against pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989).
> 
> *LI KEQIANG, 57
> 
> Background*: Born in Anhui province, rose through the CYL, studied law at Beijing University and has been tabbed for a leading role since 1998 when, at 43, he landed the top job in Henan to become China’s youngest provincial governor. As well, he has served as Communist Party chief in northeastern Liaoning province.
> 
> *Current post*: First-vice premier
> 
> *Politics*: A protégé of Mr. Hu, he was his fellow Anhui native’s chosen successor until Mr. Hu reportedly was forced to compromise with Mr. Jiang’s conservatives and accept Mr. Xi. He has repeatedly called the current system “unbalanced” and spoken forcefully about the need for further economic reform.
> 
> *THE SHOO-INS
> 
> WANG QISHAN, 63
> 
> Background*: Best known as Beijing’s mayor, during the 2003 SARS crisis and then the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games.
> 
> *Current posts*: Vice-premier and representative to the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue
> 
> *Politics*: Seen as a princeling because his father-in-law, Yao Yilin, was vice-premier, he is considered a success as Beijing’s mayor because the Olympics were, but city residents have mixed feelings – Mr. Yao was in office during the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
> 
> *LI YUANCHAO, 61
> 
> Background*: Powerful figure within the Communist Party; has a PhD in economics from Beijing University; is a former party boss in his native Jiangsu province.
> 
> *Current position*: Head of the Organization Department, which controls appointments large and small within the Communist Party, from provincial governors to newspaper editors
> 
> *Politics*: Seen as close to Mr. Hu, he helped the President expand the influence of the CYL but has princeling ties (his father was vice-mayor of Shanghai in the 1960s) that make him a potential a bridge between factions on the next Standing Committee.
> 
> *YU ZHENGSHENG, 67
> 
> Background*: A graduate of the Military Engineering Institute in the northeastern city of Harbin, rose through the party ranks in the coastal city of Qingdao, served as construction minister in Beijing, and then party secretary in Hubei province.
> 
> *Current post*: Since 2007, Communist Party chief in Shanghai
> 
> *Politics*: Another princeling, he is seen as close to Mr. Jiang (also a former Shanghai party boss), but will serve just one term (the party’s unofficial retirement age is 68). His rise was slowed by the 1985 defection of his older brother, a senior intelligence officer, to the United States.
> 
> *ZHANG DEJIANG, 66
> 
> Background*: New standard-bearer for the left wing, studied economics at Kim Il-sung university in North Korea, often takes on difficult assignments requiring a firm hand (being the party’s “iron-fisted enforcer” according to the South China Morning Post).
> 
> *Current post*: Vice-premier and party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing since the murder-and-corruption scandal that felled predecessor Bo Xilai (once a near certainty to make the committee) this year.
> 
> *Politics*: Another one-term appointment, he is considered a princeling (his father was a general in the People’s Liberation Army) and is particularly close to Mr. Jiang. Criticized while governor of Guangdong in 2003 for trying to suppress news of the SARS crisis, he also made waves in Chongqing by forcing civil servants who had served Mr. Bo pledge loyalty to him.
> 
> *THE MAYBES
> 
> LIU YUNSHAN, 65
> 
> Background*: Former teacher from Shanxi province; built his career in Inner Mongolia and spent seven years as a reporter at the official Xinhua news agency before rising to the Propaganda Department. Recently, he has overseen the international expansion of CCTV television and the China Daily newspaper.
> 
> *Current post*: Director of the Propaganda Department
> 
> *Politics*: Having risen through the CYL, he is seen as an ally of Mr. Hu, but also was close to Mr. Bo, the fallen leftist, and, as an opponent of political reform, has led government efforts to control conversations on the Internet.
> 
> *WANG YANG, 57
> 
> Background*: Like Mr. Hu, a native of Anhui who came up in the CYL; studied political economics and was Chongqing party boss ahead of Mr. Bo before moving to Guangdong.
> 
> *Current post*: Communist Party chief for Guangdong province
> 
> *Politics*: Mr. Wang is considered the leading reform candidate – the ideological heir to Premier Wen Jiabao. Under his rule, Guangdong has developed the freest media in China and even some independent (if closely monitored) non-governmental organizations. He surprised many with his laissez-faire handling of last year’s village uprising in Wukan, which saw protesters demand – and get – the right to elect local leaders. Given his age, he could still be a contender in five years if passed over this time.
> 
> *ZHANG GAOLI, 66
> 
> Background*: Trained economist born in coastal Fujian province; former party secretary for the southern city of Shenzhen and northeastern Shandong province.
> 
> *Current position*: Communist Party chief for Tianjin (a metropolis near Beijing)
> 
> *Politics*: He rarely says anything in public, so Mr. Zhang is hard to decipher. Considered close to the incoming leader (he frequently consulted Mr. Xi’s father while in Shenzhen), he is thought to be backed by the Jiang faction, keen to block the rise of Wang Yang.
> 
> *LIU YANDONG, 66
> 
> Background*: The only woman among the 25 members of the Politburo; former chemistry major from Beijing’s Tsinghua University who once headed the United Front Work Department, which strives to improve the party’s image abroad.
> 
> *Current post*: State councillor
> 
> *Politics*: A close ally of Mr. Hu, she has focused on building China’s ramshackle public health and education systems while in the Politburo. If elevated, she would end a Standing Committee tradition as an exclusive boys club that began with the creation of the Communist Party of China.
> 
> *HU CHUNHUA, 49
> 
> Background*: A native of Hubei and perhaps the party’s fastest-rising star; at 16, finished first in the national university-entrance exam and, in 2008, became China’s youngest provincial governor in Hubei. Has also spent significant time in Tibet.
> 
> *Current post*: Communist Party chief for Inner Mongolia
> 
> *Politics*: Dubbed “Little Hu” for his link to the President, he is an extreme long shot for the Standing Committee,but will likely join the Politburo, and be on track for promotion in 2017 and maybe even the presidency in 2022.
> 
> _Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail’s Beijing correspondent._


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Central Military Commission exercises _political *command*_ and _strategic_ direction over the PLA. It is, in a way, analogous to to one of our cabinet committees: you rarely hear about it or them but it and they execrcise great power behind the scenes. Bloomberg reports that two new Vice-Chairmen have been named:

*Gen Fan Changlong*




Gen Fan is commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s Military Command in Jinan

*Gen Xu Qiliang*




Gen Xu is commander of the PLA’s air force.


----------



## PPCLI Guy

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Washington Post, is David Ignatius' take on things.



> In China, a guessing game
> 
> By David Ignatius, Published: November 2
> 
> As Election Day approaches, it’s useful to look at the murky political transition taking place in China this month. It’s a reminder of the benefits of America’s sometimes chaotic democracy.
> 
> The Chinese are facing a once-in-a-decade political shift as President Hu Jintao prepares to transfer power to Xi Jinping, his long-designated successor. But beneath this pre-cooked surface, many key issues are still bubbling, with a decisive Communist Party congress scheduled to start Thursday.
> 
> Imagine if the United States were deciding Tuesday not just on a president and members of Congress — but on the size and scope of the executive branch, oversight of the military and new constitutional rules. China’s leaders are still thought to be haggling over all these issues on the eve of the party congress and behind a curtain of secrecy that feeds rumors and gossip.
> 
> The coming political transition will replace most members of the country’s two key executive bodies — the standing committee of the party’s Politburo and the Central Military Commission. What’s amazing is how little even the best-informed U.S. experts know about how these personnel decisions will be made.
> 
> Given China’s lack of transparency, this arcane subject is left mostly to China-watchers in and out of government. But the political stakes in Beijing this month may be as important for the world as are those in the U.S. election. Here are some of the big “ifs” that experts are following:
> 
> ●How big will the Politburo’s standing committee be? The rumor is that membership will be reduced from nine to seven — and that the two portfolios to be removed are propaganda and law enforcement. “The decision to eliminate those two positions and reduce the membership from nine to seven is closely linked to political reform,” argues Cheng Li, a leading China scholar at the Brookings Institution.
> 
> China will remain a police state, even if propaganda and law enforcement are less visible in the Politburo. And it may be a more decisive dictatorship, with a streamlined group that can reach consensus more easily on thorny topics. But the pressures for change are building. And this will be a group of new faces — with five or seven new members, depending on its size.
> 
> ●Will the retiring president, Hu, keep his seat on the Central Military Commission? His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, kept his hand in military matters in the same way, and Hu may want this token of status and patronage, too — modestly reducing the power of the incoming president, Xi. But the story here is also of change. A large majority of the 12 members of the military commission are likely to be new. This represents a big turnover for a Chinese military that has been increasingly assertive on such issues as the South China Sea.
> 
> ●Will the problems of corruption and patronage that exploded in the Bo Xilai scandal last February be manageable? So far, the Chinese have done a good job of containing the fallout from the purge of Bo, the charismatic former Chongqing party chief. But Li at the Brookings Institution sees a deep factional split between Hu (whose followers have roots in the Communist Youth League) and Jiang (whose elite supporters are often described as “princelings”). Jiang’s cosmopolitan supporters are said to favor continued rapid development, while the Hu group stresses party organization and domestic security to check the unrest that accompanies fast growth.
> 
> Xi’s challenge will be to bridge this gap, and so far he seems to be pretty deft. He’s certainly a princeling himself (his father was one of Mao Zedong’s close advisers), but he has also built bridges to the Hu camp.
> 
> ●Will the party consider changes in its constitution, perhaps asserting that the party is subordinate to the state? Li predicts there may be edicts that “the party should be under the law rather than above the law.”
> 
> The volatility beneath the placid surface of Chinese politics was evident in recent exposés about the fabulous wealth party leaders have accumulated: Bloomberg News reported in June that Xi’s extended family has nearly $1 billion in assets; last month, the New York Times documented that the family of Wen Jiabao, the outgoing prime minister, secretly owns assets of $2.7 billion. Similar tales could surely be told about most of the top leaders.
> 
> Somehow, over the next two weeks, this corrupt, secretive leadership will have to chart the course of the world’s second biggest economy. Their challenge makes electoral democracy seem easy, by comparison.



It will be interesting to see if Hu Jintao holds on to the CMC.


----------



## Edward Campbell

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Washington Post, is David Ignatius' take on things.
> 
> It will be interesting to see if Hu Jintao holds on to the CMC.




He will for about a year, if the past is precedent: long enough to both a) ensure that Xi Jinping, the next _Paramlunt Leader_, who is, currently, the third vice chairman of the commission, actually has the _confidence_ of the Central Committee of the Party, and b) that Hu's _faction_ is protected after the transition. All things being equal; Xi Jinping will take control of the Central Military Commission and, with it, absolute power, sometime next year.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This BBC Radio 4 report provides a good and, I think, _fair and balanced_ biography of Xi Jinping.

It doesn't tell us much about his policy positions; the media is full of speculation about that but in my *opinion* that's all it is ~ speculation.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Wall Street Journal_, is an article that I think sums up the _challenges_ facing Xi Jinping _et al_ over the next decade:

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/11/05/so-much-for-stability-reality-catching-up-to-the-communist-party/


> So Much for Stability: Reality Catching Up With the Communist Party
> 
> By Russell Leigh Moses
> 
> November 5, 2012
> 
> There’s an onrushing political reality facing the Chinese leadership when the 18th Communist Party Congress finally convenes this week – one far more important and complex than the backroom battle to determine which senior Party leader gets what portfolio in the Politburo.
> 
> The list of issues likely to land on the agenda during this Party Congress is long. If recent official media coverage is anything to go by, delegates can expect to argue over everything from how to handle the country’s aging population and growing urban-rural divide to how to define national culture and the role of law in the political system.
> 
> But the most pressing issue—and the one that could well play havoc with consensus among policy-makers at the Congress and beyond—is how to handle signs of creeping gloom in Chinese society and the sense among some cadres that shortfalls in Party governance are bringing it about.
> 
> For all the economic success and justified celebrations about national development, every senior leader looking for further promotion surely recognizes the shortcomings of Beijing’s efforts to construct a “moderately well-off society”—the one promised at the last Party Congress in 2007. Perceptions of malfeasance and misconduct across the system is such a concern now that even mainstream Party media is unafraid to talk about the defects in governance and oversight, as with the recent bizarre disappearance of farmer’s deposits from a mutual fund program in Jiangsu. As one essay put it recently, “sustained economic growth” is crucial, but “we must step up efforts to protect funds, spending them more wisely, and protect fairness and justice…to maintain social stability.”
> 
> Many cadres now see this securing of social stability as a far more complex problem —- especially where migrants are concerned — than they did at the last Party congress and in the years since. In 2007, social stability appeared as a crucial priority for the Party. As Chinese leader Hu Jintao noted in his work report at that year’s big meeting, social stability was an “important prerequisite” for reform and continued economic development — a signal to cadres that policies and promotions would rest on showing strength and keeping dissent off the streets. The truncheon-swingers soon had their way, and the budgets for social control soared.
> 
> But those policies of “stability maintenance” have been receding in recent months. Now, there’s an emphasis on “social management”—a multifaceted attempt to provide better help instead of better handcuffs from a newly-attentive government. There’s less blame being cast at residents from officials, and more critiques of cadres who aren’t supervising the society all that well. Some commentators think that the solution is recruiting and retaining more talented cadres. Others seem convinced that greater transparency is the key.
> 
> Whatever the case, there are strong voices in the Party that think that listening to the public satisfies the discontented in a crisis (as it did in with NIMBY protesters in Ningbo recently). Regular, genuine dialogue with residents is also gaining traction as a means of developing social happiness in the long term. Instead of hoisting shields when protests threaten, many in the Party are urging officials to talk softly, and carry a big notebook.
> 
> This leaning towards the softer side of state power isn’t just another tactical adjustment. Indeed, it has the makings of a deep-thinking discussion that will resonate at the Party Congress, in large part because heir-apparent Xi Jinping, while side-stepping talk of political reform, has been calling loudly for a focus on Party-building.
> 
> Cadres are already raising questions and seeking support. What sort of Communist Party does China need? Something stronger—a super-sized Singapore, say—run by elites and more of the same technocrats who think that engineering society is very much like managing irrigation projects? Or does this new China need a smarter, sharper Party — one that slides further away from economic development as the silver bullet to solve all social conflict and tilts towards genuine dialogue with the newly-discouraged?
> 
> The problem is that change in China is getting tougher: Too many economic interests are at stake, and there’s been a slew of self-congratulation about previous accomplishments that seems. Moreover, shortening the distance between state power and the public doesn’t really suit Party hardliners, who have built their political legacy on keeping advocates for social change at bay.
> 
> New leaders still matter in China, but new hopes matter just as much. The central struggle at the Party Congress will not be over who runs what within the Party, but what sort of direction the Party ends up adopting.
> 
> _Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system._




The big questuion, it seems to me, the questions which must be answered if China is to avoid another revolution is: _*"What sort of Communist Party does China need?"*_ My guess is that the current leadership favours _"Something stronger—a super-sized Singapore, say—run by elites and more of the same technocrats who think that engineering society is very much like managing irrigation projects,"_ but *I have no idea* what Xi Jinping and his subordinates think. Whatever sort they pick it will have to address a key issue: how to determine what the people want. The 19th century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin gave us a wonderful political axiom when he (maybe) said _"There go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them."_ In most Western democracies this is easy, thanks to freedom of speech, a free and aggressive media, lobbying, social media and, above all, elections. In China it is very difficult but it is a problem which must be solved.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Washington Post_, is an informative article about _post change of leader politics in China:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-hu-seeks-to-exert-influence-long-after-he-leaves-power/2012/11/05/4df5c190-1c24-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_story.html?hpid=z4



China’s Hu seeks to exert influence long after he leaves power

By William Wan

Published: November 5

BEIJING — After a decade in power, President Hu Jintao has been using his final weeks on the job to shore up his reputation, maneuver allies into key positions and elevate his interpretation of communist ideology — all in an attempt to preserve his influence over Chinese politics.

Hu’s recent moves fit a familiar pattern in China, where top leaders don’t simply retire. They linger behind the scenes, exerting powerful but often unseen leverage until death. How successful Hu and his supporters are in these remaining days could affect the direction of the country’s leadership for years to come.

Hu, 69, is battling strong head winds. He has long been seen as having a weak grip on power. And rampant criticism has bubbled up within the Communist Party about problems that have festered under his watch — including the increasing divide between rich and poor, widespread corruption and the growing need for economic reform.

But Hu’s biggest challenge is the same one he has faced throughout his tenure: his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, 86, who continues to be the dominant force in Chinese politics.

According to several current and former officials, party intellectuals, advisers and analysts — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of heightened party sensitivities ahead of the once-a-decade leadership transition — Jiang is trying to secure key spots for his allies during the upcoming transition and, by many accounts, is succeeding. The most important appointments, to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, will be announced during the party congress, which begins Thursday.

To help Hu make his case, the propaganda machine in Beijing has been in overdrive for months. Front-page stories have exalted “the golden decade” he has overseen, and state TV has reported pointedly on how incredibly happy the populace is these days. Last month, the government unveiled at least 20 books, eight brochures and nine documentaries chronicling “the brilliant achievements” made possible by Hu’s vague ideology of systematic progress through “scientific development.”

The furious competition between the two senior statesmen — and their large role in the patronage system that undergirds Chinese politics — only adds to the pressure on Xi Jinping, who is expected to take over the top job, becoming the first party leader in China’s history forced to contend with two former chiefs hovering over him.

“Hu is trying to do with his successor what Jiang did to Hu and what even earlier Deng Xiaoping did to Jiang,” said an editor of a party publication. “Each generation tries to hold sway over the next.”

*‘A battle over personnel’*

Some analysts caution against viewing China’s politics solely through the prism of Jiang vs. Hu. “It’s not always so clear-cut to say who is in which group,” one retired party official said.

There are also other players: the military, powerful state-owned enterprises and the rising class of “princelings” to which Xi belongs — leaders descended from former senior officials.

But there is widespread agreement that the two biggest centers of power in China today are Jiang and Hu.

Both were plucked from relative obscurity by Deng after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Deng hoped a clearer succession plan would add stability to the system; he appointed Jiang as his immediate successor and elevated Hu so that he could later take Jiang’s place.

Jiang built his camp of allies — called the “Shanghai gang” — drawing from his old base as the city’s party chief. He was known for a showman’s flair that remains rare among the party’s mostly wooden personalities.

Hu is more subdued. People who have met him describe a bland bookworm with a photographic memory, a stiff smile and an overriding sense of caution. His faction is often referred to as “tuanpai,” for the Communist Youth League he once led and mined for allies.

As the party congress has neared, Jiang has emerged from relative seclusion, making his presence felt with several highly public appearances. One of the first came in April, with reports of a meeting between Jiang and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, just a week after the party began its purge of former Chongqing communist chief Bo Xilai, for whom Jiang was considered a patron. That outing was seen as an early signal that Jiang intended to play a large role in the transition.

But one person with access to senior Chinese leaders warned that it is “not entirely fair to say this is a fight between two men.”

“It would also be a mistake to interpret the competition as personal hostility or disagreement,” the person said. “This is primarily a battle over personnel.”

A former party official agreed. Although Hu and Jiang had different focuses during their tenures, past leaders tend not to meddle directly in policy once retired, the former official said. “That’s why the appointments of their allies matter so much; it becomes their primary way of exerting any influence and protecting their interests.”

Hu has lost at least one major fight, failing to see his protege Li Keqiang named as his successor. Instead, Xi, a compromise candidate with Jiang’s approval, was chosen for the job in 2007, party experts say, and Li was positioned for the lower job of premier.

And if lists being circulated among party officials and experts are to be believed, Jiang has been similarly successful in elevating his allies over Hu’s into many of the next Standing Committee’s seats.

But some political watchers caution that Hu may be playing a deeper game, bargaining away slots on the Standing Committee for seats on the less powerful but more plentiful Politburo or perhaps preserving a seat for himself or Li on the commission that oversees the military.

A few also theorize that Hu is looking at this period in his presidency differently than Jiang — that he may want to leave the incoming leadership less vulnerable to the machinations of elders.

“You could argue that Hu sees himself as a selfless representation of the party, its integrity and institutionalization. He wields power but doesn’t play the game quite the same way Jiang does,” said Chris Johnson, a former top CIA analyst for China who is at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

*A consensus-driven style*

Much of Hu’s perceived weakness is a result of the difficult hand he was dealt when he took over as the top leader in 2002.

Jiang was so successful at consolidating power during his last days in office that at least five of the nine members of the Standing Committee were thought to be his strong allies. Jiang refused to give up his chairmanship of China’s military until Hu and others forced him out two years into Hu’s presidency.

“The best way to describe Jiang’s style is like a gangster,” said one party intellectual with close ties to senior officials from Jiang’s era. “He believed in an eye for an eye, but also in the flip side as well, returning favor for favor. That’s how he accumulated so much influence.”

By comparison, Hu rose quickly within the Communist Party bureaucracy in part by cultivating a reputation as studious and noncombative. At 39, he became the youngest at the time to enter the Central Committee, and at 43, the youngest provincial party secretary.

Surrounded by Jiang loyalists throughout his presidency, Hu adopted a consensus-driven leadership style, acting more to get folks on the same page than as a visionary, party analysts said.

“He is a manager who likes to tweak the machine. It is not in his nature to overhaul the whole thing,” said one former official, pointing to Hu’s training as a hydrology engineer.

Hu’s cautious approach, some experts say, has hindered his influence. Asked for his accomplishments, party members point almost reflexively to the unbridled economic growth of the past decade. A few mention better relations with Taiwan and the military’s expansion. When asked about the problems Hu leaves behind, the responses grow longer and more explicit.

“Ten years ago, when he took power, everybody was wondering what kind of leader Hu would be,” said David Shambaugh, an expert on Chinese affairs at George Washington University. “Now we know the answer. He is an arch-conservative, cautious, risk-averse, stability-obsessed apparatchik.”

*Xi Jinping’s role*

In many ways, the biggest factors in the future influence of Hu and Jiang will be Xi and his ability to quickly establish his own base of power.

Xi, though a princeling and someone Jiang supported, does not easily fit into any political camp. But many believe he will start his tenure with advantages that neither of his predecessors possessed — deep party connections nurtured through family and a growing sense that the country is in desperate need of reform.

“You have so many situations that now require proactive decision-making, and you have all the recent scandals and crises making many in the party eager to turn the page,” said Robert Kuhn, a businessman with ties to senior Chinese leaders.

“Ironically, because of that, Xi may actually be able to consolidate authority to get things done much faster than either Hu or Jiang in their first days.”

Others, however, say that if the past is any indication, Xi’s predecessors will not give up their influence easily.

“It is a natural thing when you have been the one in charge all along,” one party intellectual said. “It’s a hard habit to give up, especially in Chinese politics.”

Liu Liu and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Click to expand...



I have written a few times about the divisions within the CCP's leadership with Jiang Zemin and his Shanghai Gang being on the right (capitalist/conservative) wing of the party and Hu Jintao and his Communist Youth League faction being closer to the left, but it's more complex than that and the above article provides a good explanation of who, what and why._


----------



## sean m

http://intelnews.org/2012/11/07/01-1126/#more-9582

Murdered British businessman ‘was MI6 operative’

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has concluded that Neil Heywood, the British businessman who was murdered in China last November, was an active informant for British intelligence at the time of his death. The news appears to confirm intelNews’ assessment of April 2012 that Heywood was in fact connected with British intelligence. A highly successful financial consultant and fluent Chinese speaker who had lived in China for over a decade, Heywood was found dead on November 14, 2011, in his room at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel in Chongqing. His death led to the dramatic downfall of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, a husband-and-wife team of political celebrities who were found guilty in a Chinese court of killing the British businessman. Immediately after Heywood’s death, there was widespread speculation that he may have been a spy for MI6, Britain’s external intelligence service. On April 27, 2012, I argued that I was not aware of anyone “with serious knowledge of intelligence issues who was not completely certain, or did not deeply suspect, that Heywood had indeed collaborated with British intelligence at some stage during the past decade”. I wrote this in the face of an official denial by British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who had said earlier in the week that “Heywood was not an employee of the British government in any capacity”. Now an extensive investigation by The Wall Street Journal has concluded that the dead British businessman had been an MI6 operative “for more than a year” prior to his death. The paper said it concluded that based on several interviews with unnamed “current and former British officials” as well as with close friends of the murdered man. One source told The Journal that Heywood had been willingly and consciously recruited by an MI6 officer, who met with him on a regular basis in China. Heywood allegedly provided the MI6 officer with inside information on Xilai and other senior Chinese government officials. The article quotes an unnamed British official as saying that Heywood’s MI6 handler once described him as “useful” to a former colleague. According to the paper, Heywood’s MI6 work does not technically contradict the British Foreign secretary’s statement that the late businessman had not been “an employee of the British government”. This is because, according to sources close to Heywood, he was not paid for his services, nor was he ever tasked with specific intelligence operations. Rather he acted as an all-purpose informant, providing general background information on a voluntary basis. The Journal contacted the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which said simply that no British officials had been in contact with Haywood in the 48 hours prior to his death.

Hello,

To anyone who has been monitoring this case, this is a suprising revelation. I guess the most important question is how did they Chinese find out he was working for British intelligence. Does anyone have an idea as to why the British are using espionage against the Chinese. Is it a tit for tat issue?


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Brits, like the Americans, Brazilians, Canadians, Danes, etc, etc ... nearly _ad infinitum_, spy on the Chinese for as many reasons as you can imagine and many, many more. 

The Chinese, like the Australians and Belgians and Chileans spy upon the Americans, Brits and Canadians for similar reasons.

Tit-for-tat killing, which is unlikely in itself, I think, is even more unlikely to have involved the wife of (then) a rising Chinese political star.

But it's a good story.


Edit: grammar  :-[


----------



## Edward Campbell

Some sympathetic and sensible advice for China in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _New York Times_:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/opinion/china-changes-leaders-deng-xiaopings-china.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0


> Deng’s China
> 
> By EZRA F. VOGEL
> 
> Published: November 7, 2012
> 
> After months of political turmoil, China’s leadership is gathering this week for its once-in-a-decade conclave to transfer power to the next generation. In charting a course for China’s future, the new leaders would do well to master the lessons from Deng Xiaoping, the bold reformer who set China on its path to success after the tumult of the Mao years.
> 
> Deng took power in 1978, when China was in dire poverty. By the time he stepped down 14 years later, over 200 million people had been lifted out of poverty, and the policies he introduced set China on the path to become an economic powerhouse.
> 
> But in recent years China has lost its way. The public has become fed up with rampant corruption, the extravagant lifestyle of party leaders, the lack of full freedom and the inadequate procedures for correcting leadership abuses. Economic growth is slowing down while over a 100 million people still remain below the poverty line.
> 
> China badly needs political and social reform. To Deng, reform was a continuing process, and he would have moved boldly forward. Among the lessons from Deng:
> 
> In introducing bold reforms, experiment first. Deng thought it wise to try new ideas in areas where leaders supported reforms and conditions were favorable. When new programs worked, Deng brought in leaders to observe the successes and sent those who led the experiments around the country to explain how they succeeded. In Guangdong Province — including Shenzhen and other “special economic zones” — businessmen from Hong Kong flowed in to establish new enterprises and set new standards for efficient management. When they worked, lessons were extended elsewhere.
> 
> *Support meritocracy.* Deng believed only the best students should be asked to join the Communist Party. To reach the higher levels of the party, cadres had to prove themselves at the lower levels. Leaders were retired at a certain age.
> 
> *Avoid polarization.* In 1978, many officials opposed ending rural communes, even though the system had proven inadequate at feeding the population. Instead of confronting the opponents of change head on by abolishing communes, Deng told local leaders that if peasants were starving farmers should be allowed to adapt. Some villages then permitted farmers to provide for their own families after meeting production targets. Farms flourished. Surplus food was sold on the market. Deng invited journalists to report on the successes and within a year most of the country had chosen to end communes.
> 
> *Establish good relations with all major countries.* Deng had pleasant discussions with foreign leaders but was honest about differences. He believed the Soviet Union made a grave mistake by making enemies. He was the first leader in Chinese history to go to Japan, where he met the Japanese emperor. He negotiated and signed a treaty of peace and friendship with Japan, promoted people-to-people exchanges, and expanded imports of Japanese movies, TV programs and novels. He completed the normalization of relations with the United States. He made a triumphant visit to America, where he donned a cowboy hat, demonstrating that it was all right for the Chinese to imbibe American culture. In 1989, he welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing to show the world that Sino-Soviet relations, broken since 1963, were back on track.
> 
> Deng presided over a far different China than the one the new leaders are inheriting, and it is not likely they will ever match his prestige and authority. He was part of the original generation of Communist revolutionary leaders who fought together, and a close comrade of Mao and Zhou Enlai. In many ways, today’s Communist Party is still working out the complex consequences of the prosperity and power that Deng brought to the country.
> 
> Where the next generations of leaders can draw a lesson is in Deng’s openness to risk and change, in his rejection of xenophobia, in his pragmatic view of the world, and in his support for meritocracy over privilege.
> 
> _*Ezra F. Vogel* is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard and the author of “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.”_




China is an enormous and enormously complex country but many of its problems are, relatively, simple, and Prof Vogel is correct is reminding Chinese leaders that Deng Xiaoping was a wise and accomplished _Supreme Leader_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I'm not sure what this means, BUT:
> 
> 1. Xinhua is as close as there is to an _official_ news agency;
> 
> 2. The CCP doesn't make announcements just to get its name in print; and
> 
> 3. The Chinese Constitution empowers the Party in ways that are quite foreign to us, with our _liberal_, Anglo-Saxon cultural foundations.
> 
> Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_.
> 
> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-10/22/c_131922626.htm
> 
> It's all typical Chinese bureaucratic gobbledygook - and Chinese gobbledygook is even less transparent than the Western variety - BUT I think it must mean something and I'm guessing that incoming _Paramount Leader_ Xi Jinping wants to change direction; but I cannot guess in which direction, except that the reference to _"The whole Party should hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, be guided by Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thoughts of the "Three Represents," and thoroughly carry out the Scientific Outlook on Development, according to the statement"_ *might* indicate a swing back to the right - free marketeer Deng overturned communist Mao's ideology and the "three Represents" is a Jiang Zemin idea and Jiang led the tooth and claw capitalist wing of the CCP.
> 
> 
> Edit: spelling   :-[




More, this time reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_ (the authoritative and "free" of government interference Hong Kong daily), about the revised Chinese Constitution:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1077395/hu-jintaos-scientific-development-live-revised-constitution


> Hu Jintao's 'scientific development' to live on in revised constitution
> *Party to slot in more on scientific development, reflecting outgoing general secretary's thought*
> 
> Cary Huang and Teddy Ng in Beijing
> 
> Thursday, 08 November, 2012
> 
> The Communist Party will incorporate more of general secretary Hu Jintao's pet theory into its revised constitution at its week-long national congress, opening today, in a move to further cement the retiring leader's political legacy.
> 
> Congress spokesman Cai Mingzhao told a press conference in Beijing yesterday it would "make further elaborations on the scientific concept of development" in an amendment to the party constitution. Hu's theory was enshrined in the party's constitution at its previous congress five years ago.
> 
> "The party congress will put forth fresh suggestions on deepening study and implementation of the scientific concept of development," Cai said.
> 
> He also announced that the congress, which will herald a once-a-decade leadership transition, would close next Wednesday. The newly selected Central Committee will hold its first meeting the next day, when the party's supreme Politburo Standing Committee will be ushered in to meet the media.
> 
> A string of recent of omissions of the term "Mao Zedong thought" from several party documents had stirred up speculation that the party might be about to remove it from the party constitution, but Cai made reference to it yesterday, alongside Marxism, as the party's guiding principles in an apparent effort to dismiss such speculation.
> 
> Gu Su , a Nanjing University law professor who is familiar with Chinese politics, said the party might elaborate on the "scientific concept of development" by stressing its goals of social harmony and even income distribution - both things strongly advocated by Hu over the past decade.
> 
> The elaboration of Hu's theory has parallels with the party's handling of his predecessor Jiang Zemin , who extended his legacy by adding his "theory of the three represents" to the party constitution.
> 
> "The elaboration is an attempt by Hu to give the impression that he has accomplished his political task," Gu said.
> 
> Gu said Cai's remark indicated that "Mao Zedong thought" would not be removed from the party constitution, although its new leaders were likely to put less focus on the late leader.
> 
> Hu is expected to deliver a report lasting more than two hours at today's opening ceremony. How he addresses the thorny question of political reform will be closely watched.
> 
> Cai gave a few clues about the future direction of political reform yesterday.
> 
> While insisting that it had always been a crucial part of China's reform plan, Cai ruled out any possibility of a Western-style democratic or pluralistic political system in the near future.
> 
> He said the overall direction of political reform was to "stick to political development with Chinese characteristics" and "stick to one-party rule".
> 
> While saying that greater efforts would be made to promote "intra-party democracy" and allow more consultation from outside the party, Cai said the current system of one-party rule was not up for debate in the coming decade.
> 
> "The Communist Party's leading position in China is a choice made by history and by its people," he said.
> 
> "Reform of the political system must suit China's national reality. And China's great achievements since the founding of the republic, and particularly since reform and opening up, prove that China's political-party system suits China's reality.
> 
> "We have to unswervingly stick to the right path blazed by the party."
> 
> A preparatory meeting yesterday appointed Xi Jinping , Hu's heir, as secretary general of the five-yearly congress. The meeting has also appointed a presidium including current leaders, Jiang and former premiers Li Peng and Zhu Rongji .
> 
> About 2,300 delegates, representing 82 million party members, will attend this year's congress.




The Chinese amend the Constitution, gradually, to reflect the current thinking and, eventually, to write _socialism_, _Marxism_ and _Maoism_, in other words, _communism_, out of the Chinese Communist Party.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There are two informative articles in today's list, one by Timothy Garton Ash from the _Guardian_ talking about what to expect or for which to hope from Xi Jinping and the other by Damien Ma from _Foreign Affairs_ looking back at Hu Jintao's legacy. Since neither is behind a _paywall_, yet, I will not reproduce them.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Hu Jintao appears to be leaving the Chinese Communist Party Congress with two major warnings:

1. *Corruption* is public enemy number one and it is a grave danger to the _legitimacy_ of the CCP; and

2. *Inequality*, especially between party officials and _ordinary_ people is corrosive and threatens both social harmony and political legitimacy. He seems to be saying, as Deng Xiaoping did, that "wealth is glorious," but stressing that material wealth must be earned by one's own skill, talent and labour, not _inherited_ or taken from the people through graft and corruption. 

To bad he didn't say that more loudly, more clearly and more often over the past ten years - although, to be fair, he did do some things to attack corruption and he did warn, publicly, about inequality over the past several years.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is more tea leaf reading, better informed than mine, in an article by Mark MacKinnon, the _Good Grey Globe's_ Beijing based China correspondent, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/hus-final-speech-as-leader-signals-rift-among-chinas-ruling-elite/article5147217/


> Hu’s final speech as leader signals rift among China’s ruling elite
> 
> MARK MACKINNON
> BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Thursday, Nov. 08 2012
> 
> There was the speech Hu Jintao gave, and the one he wanted to give.
> 
> The outgoing leader of China’s ruling Communist Party gave a straight-up defence of his record – mixed with warnings about the dangers posed by official corruption – during a 101-minute speech at the Great Hall of the People on Thursday. Though Mr. Hu was obviously looking to cement his legacy as someone who led China through a period of astonishing economic growth, there were also rare signs of a behind-the-scenes rift with his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who was prominent on stage during Mr. Hu’s speech.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese President Hu Jintao, left, and former president Jiang Zemin at the opening session of the
> 18th Communist Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Nov. 8, 2012.
> (Ng Han Guan /AP)
> 
> Mr. Hu’s speech had some notable omissions from the longer, written version that was handed out afterward, leading to questions about who was able to censor what he said, from the podium, and why. There were concerns that Mr. Hu’s inability to deliver his full remarks may mean the party’s more liberal wing has lost a behind-the-scenes power struggle.
> 
> China is in the middle of a once-in-a-decade shift in power. The week’s events – and Mr. Hu’s speech – are being closely watched for signs the country is undergoing a change in direction, and how the balance between the reformers and hard-liners is playing out.
> 
> Left off the speech were comments calling for more internal party democracy – rather than the opaque process the Communists currently use to select new leaders – as well as criticism of how families of senior party members have accumulated vast wealth.
> 
> Taken together, the unprecedented omissions suggest Mr. Hu may have lost a power struggle to Mr. Jiang, who came on stage immediately after Mr. Hu at Thursday’s opening of a key Communist Party congress, to a swell of applause from the 2,270 assembled delegates. The two men sat alone before a backdrop of red flags, leaving the impression the 86-year-old Mr. Jiang, though theoretically retired, remains Mr. Hu’s equal when it comes to clout within the party.
> 
> Among the remarks Mr. Hu left unsaid was a blunt call for Communist Party leaders to be chosen based on their “merit” and “popular support,” words that could be interpreted as a last-ditch appeal by Mr. Hu to have the membership of the next Standing Committee of the Politburo – the most powerful body in China’s one-party system – selected by internal vote, rather than backroom manoeuvres.
> 
> It’s possible that it was Mr. Hu, 69, who chose to leave the potentially controversial remarks unspoken. He said at the outset of his address that he would not read the report in full, but would only “focus on some highlights.”
> 
> But Willy Lam, an expert in Communist Party politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said it was unprecedented to have two different versions of the general secretary’s work report, as the address to the party congress is known. In another break from tradition, the written version of the speech was made available to journalists only after Mr. Hu had finished speaking, making it difficult for anyone listening to notice what was being omitted.
> 
> The next Standing Committee, which is expected to be reduced to seven members from its current nine, will be introduced at the end of the week-long party congress. A pitched behind-the-scenes battle over membership of this all-important committee has exacerbated an old divide between Mr. Hu’s loyalists and those who owe their careers to Mr. Jiang.
> 
> The latter faction is comprised largely of party “princelings,” the offspring of famous Communist revolutionaries who believe it’s their turn to rule the country.
> 
> “We should improve the system of intraparty election, and standards governing multi-candidate nomination and election, and create procedures and a climate that fully embody the will of voters,” reads the written version of Mr. Hu’s report to the party congress.
> 
> “We should appoint officials on their merits, without regard to their origins,” Mr. Hu wrote, in a remark that could be seen as a shot at the party’s princelings. “[We should] promote officials who are outstanding in performance and enjoy popular support.”
> 
> The latter is seen as a reference to an internal party poll that was reportedly conducted in May, according to the South China Morning Post. Some 370 senior party members were asked who they would like to see on the next Standing Committee, as well as on the wider 25-person Politburo.
> 
> Two of Mr. Hu’s liberal-minded protégés, Guangdong governor Wang Yang and Li Yuanchao, the head of the party’s Organization Department, are rumoured to have done well in the poll. Some believe Mr. Hu’s unspoken plea may mean he has lost the internal party struggle with Mr. Jiang, and that Mr. Wang and Mr. Li have been left off the new Standing Committee list.
> 
> No one outside the upper echelons of the Communist Party knows how the next Standing Committee will be chosen, or whether the final list has already been set. The only certainty is that Xi Jinping, who is considered a princeling because his father was a famous revolutionary commander, will succeed Mr. Hu as general secretary at the end of the week-long congress. Mr. Xi, now vice-president, will also take over from Mr. Hu as president next year.
> 
> “Two of [Mr. Hu’s] protégés, Li Yuanchao and Wang Yang, are certain to now be outside of the seven [on the Standing Committee]. Hu wanted to put this at least in written form, just to tell the world he actually favours a more equitable and transparent system for picking leaders,” Mr. Lam said. “It could be a sign of his displeasure at his black box operation in which he was outfoxed by Jiang Zemin.”
> 
> If Mr. Hu was indeed signalling defeat, it could jar foreign investors, who are watching to see if Mr. Wang and Mr. Li are promoted, considering it a sign of whether China will press ahead with economic and political reforms. It’s believed that a Standing Committee dominated by princelings and Jiang loyalists would be more likely to slow or reverse economic reforms and perhaps even take as step back toward the country’s socialist past in an effort to address an income gap that has widened dramatically during Mr. Hu’s tenure.
> 
> Some of the most poignant remarks Mr. Hu did deliver involved corruption inside the Communist Party – something he warned delegates could “even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state.”
> 
> Those remarks were sharp enough, coming in a year that has already seen one-time party star Bo Xilai charged with corruption and abuse of power. Mr. Xi, the heir apparent, and Premier Wen Jiabao have also seen their reputations damaged by foreign media reports detailing the vast wealth accumulated by their relatives. The Bloomberg news service traced upwards of $750-million (U.S.) in assets to Mr. Xi’s family, while the New York Times found Mr. Wen’s relatives were worth a combined $2.7-billion.
> 
> Mr. Hu seemed prepared to address the problem in public, but again left key written remarks unsaid. “Leading officials … should both exercise strict self-discipline and strengthen education and supervision over their families and their staff; and they should never seek any privilege,” reads the report. “We should ensure that strict procedures are followed in the exercise of power, and tighten oversight over the exercise of power by leading officials, especially principle leading officials.”
> 
> Mr. Lam said the comments about leading officials and their families were likely left out of the speech to avoid publicly humiliating Mr. Xi and Mr. Wen. Mr. Lam said Mr. Hu likely insisted on including the remarks in the printed report to protect his own legacy. “That’s for the record. He has to be seen saying something, even if he hasn’t done anything about it.”




I have mentioned the divisions within the CCP several times; they are well known but, normally, less than visible to ordinary Chinese as they go about their daily lives. The search for "democracy" within the Party is - seems to me, anyway - to be a little more public: part of the CCP's recruiting problem is that the "best and brightest," the people Deng Xiaoping believed must be recruited, are less than enthusiastic about joining a party where advancement may owe more to accident of birth or, more likely, corruption than to real, demonstrated merit. 

In some respects the divisions within the Party are analogous to the left-right split which, still, bedevils the Liberal Party of Canada. That split opened, initially, in the 1920s when King shifted farther left - along with the rest of the world - than Laurier would even have gone. St Laurent shifted the party, economically, back towards the fiscally conservative right; Pearson followed St Laurent, but less diligently; Trudeau lurched, massively, left; Turner wanted to move right; Jean Chrétien campaigned from the left but governed from the right and so on. It is important to remember that both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jinta were handpicked by Deng Xiaoping and put in place to contest for the leadership. Deng understood the political, factional dynamics and proposed to let each faction try its model ... I think. Xi Jinping, the new _Paramount Leader_ is the first of a new generation that does not owe its _preference_ to either Zhou Eblai or Deng Xiaoping. His position on the factional spectrum remains to be seen.

This, murky as it is, all matters because China (and India) will soon be a globally dominant economy and we need to try to understand how the leadership works and thinks.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Walter Russell Mead's blog _ViaMeadia_, is his take on a bit of Hu Jintao's speech that I missed:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/11/09/china-makes-it-official-game-of-thrones-is-on/


> China Makes It Official: Game of Thrones Is On
> 
> November 9, 2012
> 
> China’s response to the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia is now enshrined in Communist party documents as official policy, the FT reports:
> 
> Hu Jintao, China’s outgoing president, has called for China to become a “maritime power” in language that will fuel concerns among its neighbours and in the US
> over how it deals with a host of territorial disputes.
> 
> Mr Hu told the opening session of the Communist party’s 18th Congress yesterday that it “should [. . . ] resolutely safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests,
> and build China into a maritime power.” [. . .]
> 
> Much of the funding from double-digit defence spending increases over more than a decade has been used to modernise China’s weak navy.
> 
> Non-military departments such as fisheries and maritime surveillance have also seen their fleets expanded and modernised.
> 
> China is going to become a more powerful and aggressive maritime state, building up its naval power to assert and protect its interests—especially in its territorial disputes with Japan and other neighbors like Taiwan and Vietnam.
> 
> We will have to see what this means in practice, but a major military build up in East Asian waters now looks inevitable. U.S. defense planning and expenditure will have to reflect this.




This will make cuts to the US defence budget even more difficult ... which may be what China has in mind.

Few nations benefit as much from US guaranteed freedom of the seas as does China.


----------



## a_majoor

Looks like Alfred Thayer Mahan has won another convert....


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Changes in the Chinese leadership, according to this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Los Angeles Times_:
> 
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-xi-20101019,0,604801.story
> 
> My guess is that Xi is not Hu’s first choice as successor. I think that Xi is from the ‘right,’ pro-business wing of the Party, sometimes called the _Shanghai Gang_ which was led by Jiang Zemin. Hu is from the ‘new left’ wing and he ousted Jiang _et al_ around the year 2000.




It's been two years since we learned that Xi Jinping would ascend to the _Parmount Leader's_ position and we, Westerners, have been (relatively) in the dark about him. The _Wall Street Journal_, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of Copyright Act, gives us a good, accessible introduction:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578106860600724862.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet


> China's New Boss
> *Xi Jinping has charisma, a common touch and a beloved pop-star wife. But can he reform a Communist elite accustomed to the fruits of corruption?*
> 
> THE SATURDAY ESSAY By JEREMY PAGE, BOB DAVIS and TOM ORLIK
> 
> November 9, 2012
> 
> Where is a new leader of China to turn for advice? Xi Jinping, who takes the country's top post on Thursday, knows better than to look to Mao, the revered founder of the Communist regime who vowed never to take "the capitalist road." Tell that to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who, in the past three decades, have risen from poverty thanks to market-oriented reforms.
> 
> Mr. Xi might instead dig deeper into Chinese history, to the austere ancient wisdom of Mencius, the Confucian scholar who advocated the "mandate of heaven" principle that an unjust Emperor could be overthrown. "Why talk of profit?" Mencius asks a ruler in his most famous work. If a king seeks profit over humanity and duty, so will his lords and common people, he says. "Then everyone high and low will be scrambling for profit, and the nation will be in danger."
> 
> And there indeed is the rub for Mr. Xi and the rest of China's new leadership. China as a whole has benefited enormously from the "scrambling for profit" of the great masses of Chinese, but the lords on high have been unable to resist doing the same, taking advantage of their privileged positions in a system that is far from being a true market.
> 
> Mr. Xi, who is 59, takes the helm in a year of extraordinary revelations about corruption and abuse of power in the Party—most notably the murder last November of a British businessman and MI6 informant by the wife of Bo Xilai, a rising star in the Party.
> 
> Even Hu Jintao, who has led China since 2002, acknowledged the scale of the corruption problem in a speech Thursday on the opening day of the 18th Communist Party Congress—a gathering of almost 3,000 Party delegates that will anoint the new generation of leaders. "If we fail to handle this issue well, it could prove fatal to the party and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state," said Mr. Hu in his final speech as Party chief.
> 
> It now falls to Mr. Xi, as figurehead of the "fifth generation" of Chinese leaders since 1949, to find a way to adapt a Leninist system of government to 21st-century economic problems and the political dynamics of the social media age. Mr. Xi, currently vice president, has several apparent advantages over Mr. Hu, whose relatively weak leadership is blamed by many in the Party for the lack of economic and political reform since 2002.
> 
> Mr. Xi's father was a revolutionary hero who fought alongside Chairman Mao Zedong, only to be purged in the 1960s then reappointed to senior Party posts in the 1980s, when he was a key architect of early market reforms. That furnished the younger Mr. Xi with a network of allies who are fellow "princelings"—as the offspring of Party leaders are known—and now occupy senior posts in the civilian and military leadership. Mr. Hu's father ran a tea shop.
> 
> While Mr. Hu spent his early career in inland provinces with little private business or foreign investment, Mr. Xi has spent most of the past 30 years problem-solving and supporting business in eastern provinces that are the engine of China's economic growth. He has a far greater affinity than Mr. Hu for the West, especially the U.S., which he visited first in 1985 when he stayed with a family in the small city of Muscatine, Iowa. His daughter is an undergraduate at Harvard.
> 
> A fan of soccer and Hollywood war movies, Mr. Xi also cuts a more likable figure than Mr. Hu among many Chinese people, thanks in part to his burly frame, his deep, sonorous voice and a glamorous wife who is a hugely popular folk singer, although she has adopted a somewhat lower profile in recent years.
> 
> "Xi is confident of his party background, his administrative background, his PLA [military] background and his father's political pedigree," said Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who also served as a diplomat in Beijing and has met Mr. Xi several times. "Therefore he is a man at ease with himself. I also believe he fully grasps the dimensions of the challenge before him."
> 
> The question is whether Mr. Xi can use his revolutionary heritage, his elite contacts, his personal charisma and his extensive administrative experience to take on the vested interests within the Party and set China on a new path of development.
> 
> Economists inside and outside China warn that to continue growing, the country needs to rely more on private enterprise and consumer spending. That means clipping the power of state-owned firms, curbing land grabs by corrupt local officials and creating tens of millions of new consumers in the cities by giving migrant families better access to welfare.
> 
> China is also confronting mounting tensions with its neighbors over disputed territory, even as the U.S. shores up defense and trade ties in the region.
> 
> Such is the sense of crisis in the Party elite, according to some insiders, that top leaders recently held study sessions on the ideas of the 19th-century political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that the French Revolution ultimately replicated the "ancien regime" that it sought to replace.
> 
> Still, the new leadership is unlikely to try pushing through big changes overnight. China's central bank head, Zhou Xiaochuan, a financial liberalizer, warned a former U.S. official recently not to expect a big reform push until at least next October, the official said. Mr. Xi also will be hobbled by a collective decision-making process that values compromise over decisive action and requires new leaders to consult retired ones on key policy changes.
> 
> In an interview with a Chinese magazine in 2000, Mr. Xi warned against being too ambitious when taking a new Party post. "You always want to do something new in the first year," he said. "But it must be on the foundations of your predecessor. It is a relay race. You have to receive the baton properly, then run well with it yourself." He also quoted Guanzi, an ancient Chinese philosopher, who said "Don't try to do the impossible. Don't try to obtain the unobtainable."
> 
> Family friends say that Mr. Xi's most likely source of inspiration will be his father. The elder Mr. Xi was an economic reformer and a relative political liberal, speaking out in defense of the purged reformist Party leader Hu Yaobang in 1987 and condemning the violent 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, according to Party insiders. Xi Jinping has never spoken about his father in public, but friends say that he is both proud of his family legacy and wary of the risks of moving too fast, without the support of other Party leaders.
> 
> "One man cannot change China," said one old family friend of Mr. Xi. "If he tries to tackle the interest groups around him too quickly, he will meet the same fate as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang." Mr. Zhao was another reformist Party leader, purged in 1989.
> 
> Mr. Xi learned about the cutthroat nature of elite Chinese politics at an early age. He grew up in relative luxury in Beijing in the 1950s, when the families of senior leaders lived in large courtyard houses with nannies and cooks and were driven around in Soviet-made cars. They went to elite schools and had access to foreign books and films. Those privileges ended suddenly in 1962, when his father was accused of supporting a book deemed critical of Chairman Mao and placed under house arrest, where he remained for 16 years.
> 
> Mr. Xi is also part of the generation that bore the brunt of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao closed schools and ordered students to join groups of ultraradical "Red Guards" and then sent them to be "re-educated" by working in the countryside.
> 
> Mr. Xi was too young to join the Red Guards, and in his interview in 2000, he recalls being captured by a group of them when he was 14. They threatened to execute him and sent him to a "youth prison," but he narrowly escaped when Chairman Mao sent students to the countryside in 1968.
> 
> Mr. Xi was dispatched in a group of 20 to 30 teenagers to Liangjiahe in northern Shaanxi province, where his father was renowned for helping to establish a partisan base in the 1930s. The younger Mr. Xi stayed there for seven years, most of it spent living in a spartan cave dwelling and working with villagers to dig ditches and extract methane from pig waste. He struggled to adapt at first, burying himself in the books he had brought from Beijing, but he later embraced village life, according to his own accounts in state media.
> 
> Eventually, local officials helped him to gain party membership and a place at Beijing's Tsinghua University, where he studied organic chemistry in the late 1970s. His first job after university was as a personal secretary to one of his father's old comrades in arms, Geng Biao, a vice premier and defense minister.
> 
> But in 1982, Mr. Xi made a strategic decision to shed his uniform and return to the countryside, taking a job as deputy Party chief of Zhengding county, a pig-farming region in the northern province of Hebei. That soon led to a job as deputy mayor of the eastern port of Xiamen, working for another protégé of his father, and to other posts in the surrounding province of Fujian.
> 
> In Fujian, Mr. Xi developed his business acumen and honed his political skills by tackling the sensitive question of relations with Taiwan—the island Beijing regards as a rebel province. Fujian lagged behind other coastal provinces economically, in large part because Beijing viewed it as a military frontier, just 85 miles from Taiwan, and focused on improving military installations there rather than roads and ports.
> 
> Mr. Xi ingratiated himself locally, playing ping pong at local sporting events, though he was only "so-so" with a paddle, said a former Fujian colleague of Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi's father had overseen the first foreign investment in Guangdong province, near Hong Kong, in the 1980s. To try to replicate his father's success, Mr. Xi turned to Taiwan and its thriving export-led economy. Many business executives there had family roots in Fujian and were attracted by the province's low labor costs.
> 
> But political relations were fraught: Beijing feared that Taiwan was moving toward independence and fired missiles into the sea near the island in 1995 and 1996 as a warning. Some Taiwanese real estate developers headed home. But Mr. Xi met regularly with Taiwanese groups to try to prevent a larger exodus. In 1999, Mr. Xi publicly endorsed a free-trade pact between China and Taiwan, with lower tariffs and other incentives to Taiwanese business.
> 
> Mr. Xi had a similarly positive reputation among business leaders in the province of Zhejiang—another hub of private enterprise—when he was Party chief there from 2002 to 2007.
> 
> A U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks suggested that Mr. Xi helped FedEx, Motorola and Citibank establish operations in the province. The three companies all expanded in Zhejiang, but they declined to comment on their dealings with Mr. Xi.
> 
> Mr. Xi also helped McDonald's  overcome obstacles to its expansion in the region, according to Gregory Gilligan, who was a senior manager with McDonald's at the time but now heads APCO's Beijing office. Party officials "take limited risks as they ascend," said Mr. Gilligan. "Xi is different because of his family background. He has a sense of confidence that the steps he took would be acceptable to others."
> 
> Since his promotion in 2007 to the Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top governing body, Mr. Xi has been more guarded in his public and private comments. Former U.S. officials who have met him say he can appear responsive to questions, but on closer examination, his answers are often ambiguous.
> 
> He has at times sounded a nationalistic note in public, notably during a speech in Mexico in 2009. "Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us," he said. He also delivered a stern message on a territorial dispute with Japan to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Beijing in September.
> 
> But during his first visit to the U.S. as vice president in January, Mr. Xi succeeded in charming his hosts in a way that Mr. Hu never could. China's departing leader was renowned for being awkward on overseas visits.
> 
> In addition to visiting the family that he had stayed with in Muscatine in 1985, Mr. Xi became the first Chinese leader to attend a National Basketball Association game in the U.S. and met with sports stars, including David Beckham and Magic Johnson.
> 
> Many analysts saw the trip as a conscious attempt to emulate Deng Xiaoping, who donned a Stetson at a rodeo on his visit to the U.S. in 1979. But Mr. Xi was also following in the footsteps of his father, who visited Iowa, Los Angeles and other parts of the U.S. in 1980.
> 
> At a dinner in Washington in January, Mr. Xi was presented with an album of photographs taken during his father's U.S. trip. One showed the elder Mr. Xi wearing a flower garland in Hawaii. Another showed him next to Mickey Mouse in Disneyland. Mr. Xi opened the album, smiled broadly, and leafed through each page, naming every Chinese official accompanying his father. Two minutes had been allocated to present the gift. Mr. Xi lingered over it for 10.
> 
> "It was a very animated, very lively, very human response," said Steve Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, who presented the album. "His father was a very charismatic figure and greatly affected by his time in the U.S. We all hope the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."




There is an informative _Infographic_ here.


----------



## Edward Campbell

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Washington Post, is David Ignatius' take on things.
> 
> It will be interesting to see if Hu Jintao holds on to the CMC.




_Bloomberg_ speculates that: "Xi Jinping may have to wait two years to gain control of the world’s largest army after he takes the Communist Party’s top job this week, a delay that may weaken China’s ability to address tensions with Japan and the U.S." The article suggests that Hu Jintao's faction may work to keep him as Chair of the Military Commission for two years, as long as he, Hu, had to wait for Jiang Zemin to hand over the reigns of power and for as long as Jiang had to wait for Deng Xiaoping to vacate the Military Commission back in 1989.

I had guessed, earlier, that Hu would hang on for a year but this suggests I was being optimistic.


----------



## tomahawk6

An interesting wild card is Xi's wife,famous folk singer Peng Liyuan.






http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinas-next-first-lady-a-folk-singer-who-threatens-to-shake-up-political-life-8305020.html

One prominent figure missing from the crucial 18th Communist Party congress, which continues this week, is China's first lady-in-waiting.

Known to hundreds of millions of Chinese for her career as a singer of stirring folk tunes, Peng Liyuan's fame has long eclipsed that of her husband, China's next president, Xi Jinping – which may be one reason the pop star has been keeping a low profile.

Ms Peng, 49, a civilian member of the army's musical troupe and charity worker, is not China's typical first lady, as anyone who has seen her sing during the annual Chinese New Year special on state television can attest. This is one of the world's most-watched TV programmes.

"If this were the West, one would say [Ms Peng] has the perfect requirements for being a leader's wife: beauty, stage presence, public approval," one party intellectual told The Washington Post. "But things are different in China."

While a Western spin doctor might be chomping at the bit to get Ms Peng on to the world stage, her fame presents the leadership with the challenge of how to marshal her skills and fame, without allowing her to gain more public influence than is comfortable for China's political elite.

As the country's leaders worked behind closed doors over the weekend to come up with the final details of the leadership transition – which is expected to be announced this week, with Mr Xi named as President on Thursday – the international community has been quick to note that very few members of China's political elite are women. Liu Yandong is the only female member of China's current Politburo, but is not a member of the powerful Standing Committee.

Some have suggested that Ms Peng, who was appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador for Tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, and took part in an anti-smoking campaign with the Microsoft founder Bill Gates earlier this year, may be the woman to change the precedent.

Lin Chong-pin, a professor of international affairs at Tamkang University in Taiwan, told the Focus Taiwan news channel that having a "bright and beautiful" wife gives Mr Xi an advantage over previous leaders, describing her as "a PLA [People's Liberation Army] major-general and a singer whose appearance on the international arena will dim the lights for all her previous counterparts."

Ms Peng has certainly been forthcoming in her praise for her husband, discussing their relationship in an unusually candid style. "When we first met, I felt in my heart that this is the ideal husband of my dreams – straightforward and honest and thoughtful," she told People.com in February.

However, if Ms Peng does try to change the role of the first lady, it will not be easy.

Since the excesses of the Mao Tse-tung era, when the Great Helmsman let loose a Cultural Revolution (1966-76) that destroyed millions of lives and left wounds that are still raw, the Communist Party has sought to distance itself from cults of personality. Solid, dull technocrats have run the show, with the focus instead placed on the Party as a unified entity.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> An interesting wild card is Xi's wife,famous folks singer Peng Liyuan.
> ...
> Ms Peng, 49, a civilian member of the army's musical troupe and charity worker, is not China's typical first lady, as anyone who has seen her sing during the annual Chinese New Year special on state television can attest. This is one of the world's most-watched TV programmes.
> 
> "If this were the West, one would say [Ms Peng] has the perfect requirements for being a leader's wife: beauty, stage presence, public approval," one party intellectual told The Washington Post. "But things are different in China."
> 
> While a Western spin doctor might be chomping at the bit to get Ms Peng on to the world stage, her fame presents the leadership with the challenge of how to marshal her skills and fame, without allowing her to gain more public influence than is comfortable for China's political elite ...




She's certainly not "typical:"






   
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




   
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



Deng Xiaoping and his wife Zhuo Lin             Jiang Zemin and his wife Wang Yeping                                                                                                                                              Hu Jintao and his wife Liu Yongqing in 2005    
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.




Peng Liyuan, wife of Xi Jinping


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Atlantic_, on an "up and comer" in the Chinese Communist Party:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/12/11/the-chinese-party-congress-for-new-ideas-look-to-the-younger-guys/265084/


> The Chinese Party Congress: For New Ideas, Look to the Younger Guys
> *Hu Jintao's opening address revealed just how closely the Communist Party is still wedded to Mao Zedong's legacy. But the party's next generation after Hu may have different ideas.*
> 
> Damien Ma
> _Damien Ma is a China analyst at Eurasia Group.  He writes on Chinese energy policies and climate change, politics, innovation, U.S.-China relations, social policies, and Internet policies, among other topics. He has written for Slate, The New Republic, and Forbes._
> 
> Nov 12, 2012
> 
> The conclusion of the party congress' opening ceremony and Hu Jintao's keynote speech is followed by days of breakout sessions among the provincial congresses and their delegates. Theoretically, it is a period during which every provincial delegate is supposed to studiously review Hu's speech and learn the key concepts. But in reality, these are occasions for schmoozing and to take stock of several rising stars in the Communist Party firmament, some of whom will soon earn the rarified status of a Politburo or standing committee member.
> 
> First, pre-congress speculation that the Communist Party is prepared to throw Mao Zedong under the bus seems to be just that -- speculation. Not only did Hu's speech invoke the Great Helmsman again, a high-level official at the influential state think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences did not mince words when he publicly stated that "Mao Zedong thought will always be the ideological guidance of the party. His place in history is firmly enshrined in the party's constitution."
> 
> Mao may live on existentially, but the Chinese are more lost than ever on the path forward. Even Hu himself seems rather puzzled -- spouting the line, "we will neither walk down the close, rigid old path, nor will we change banners and walk down a crooked path" -- that either left many mocking it or scratching their heads. Call it triangulation Chinese style, which recalls Deng Xiaoping's formulation that the party can't move too far left or too far right, and must find its own middle way. It seemed a spirited defense of Deng's defining pragmatism that called for "crossing the river by grasping for stones," a reference that many Chinese Web users picked up. In short, Hu's position is that he has no position. After a decade in power, Hu merely repackages the ideas of the last century for a country that no longer resembles its former self. No wonder many Chinese bemoan the dearth of visionaries in China's political class -- Deng was China's Steve Jobs and Hu is his Tim Cook.
> 
> Beyond the art of wringing meaning out of indecipherable political language, the Guangdong provincial congress received more attention than others from Hong Kong and Western media. That's because everyone wanted to get impressions of Wang Yang, the party secretary of Guangdong who may or may not get the promotion into the standing committee. The secretary has captured unusual attention.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Does the subtle and skillful Wang Yang represent the next generation of Communist Party leadership?
> 
> Wang is viewed as the newest torchbearer in a long list of Chinese reformers that includes Zhao Ziyang and Zhu Rongji -- both of whom governed crucial coastal provinces. And Wang himself is reputed to be more "Western" in his political personality, not least because he has let his hair grey naturally rather than suppress age with CCP-certified hair dye. Perhaps going grey is the preferred signal from one reformer to another on where they stand. Here is former Premier Zhu Rongji at the congress, evidently not shy about his silver locks:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Even Wang's style is reportedly straight-forward and frank. According to Malcolm Moore of Britain's The Telegraph, who had been live-tweeting the Guangdong delegate meeting, Wang had a sarcastic wit about him. When one effusive delegate proclaimed that he was so excited to be at the party congress, Wang quipped that perhaps it would help if he sat down. At times, Moore described Wang as outright bored as delegates droned on. Wang even effectively parried tough questions with a practiced fluency that suggests he's not the robotic automaton when it comes to press conferences. For instance, when a reporter from Japan's NHK asked him about Sino-Japan relations, he first dodged a direct answer by saying the foreign ministry has issued formal statements nearly every single day, and that should be referred to as the official position. Then he followed up with this:
> 
> The Chinese and Japanese people have a long history of friendship [...] for instance, Japan was influenced by Han culture and many friendly Japanese visitors came to China. And Sun Yat-sen, who is from Guangdong, received a lot of support from his
> Japanese friends during the most challenging times of his revolution. I believe, if the Japanese government can approach the Sino-Japan dispute in the right way, a return to Sino-Japan friendliness is well worth it.
> 
> This is a man who clearly understands that his province depends overwhelmingly on foreign investment, including Japanese auto manufacturing plants. His response was measured, while still subtly put the blame on the Japanese government to align with what the Beijing mandarins want to hear.
> 
> Wang represents a younger generation of Chinese politicians who are perhaps more comfortable in their own skin and less concerned about political orthodoxy and ideological rigidity. For Wang, it may simply be the Guangdong influence, which always seemed to have tilted closer to the "Hong Kong way" than the "Beijing way." Yet most of the younger cohort, including Wang, will likely have to wait their turn to reach the top of the political hierarchy.




It is early to speculate about Xi Jinping's successor but he, almost certainly a he, will come from the "inner circle" that is being selected this week in Beijing.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This should come as no surprise to those who follow my posts about China, but, this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _China Daily_, makes it clear that China does not intend to adopt Western style liberal democracy:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012cpc/2012-11/12/content_15919157.htm


> China never to copy Western political system
> 
> (Xinhua)
> 
> Updated: 2012-11-12
> 
> BEIJING - Anyone trying to keep track of the development of China's political system must have got an unequivocal answer at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
> 
> Hu Jintao solemnly declared in his report at the opening of the congress that "we will never copy a Western political system."
> 
> "We should place high importance on systemic building, give full play to the strength of the socialist political system and draw on the political achievements of other societies," Hu said in the report.
> 
> He pointed out that the reform of the political structure is an important part of China's overall reform. The CPC must continue to make both active and prudent efforts to carry out reform of the political structure, and make people's democracy more extensive, fuller in scope and sounder in practice.
> 
> In the report, Hu elaborated on the importance of "keeping to the socialist path of making political advance with Chinese characteristics" and said that the CPC will promote reform of the political structure in seven respects:
> 
> -- support and ensure the exercise of state power by the people through people's congresses;
> 
> -- improve the system of socialist consultative democracy;
> 
> -- improve community-level democracy;
> 
> -- promote law-based governance of the country in an all-around way;
> 
> -- deepen reform of the administrative system;
> 
> -- establish a sound mechanism for conducting checks and oversight over the exercise of power;
> 
> -- consolidate and develop the broadest possible patriotic united front.
> 
> Liu Xuejun, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said the multiple arrangements clearly show that the CPC highlights and upholds the principal status of the people's democracy in political realm.
> 
> Since China initiated reform and opening up, it has made continuous progress in democracy.
> 
> In Southwest China's Guizhou province, the CPC committee and village committee of Xinshi village spend three days every month consulting with local residents over village affairs. It was through consultation that the village decided to build more roads and determine the amount of compensation to be paid for land.
> 
> In Yuanbao village in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, the CPC committee has a morning meeting every day to address people's complaints and demands. Depending on importance, all village affairs have to be decided in meetings of the CPC committee, CPC members and villager representatives, or through a big gathering of all villagers.
> 
> Zhi Fen, delegate to the 18th CPC National Congress and also secretary of the CPC committee of Gaobeidian village in Beijing, won the secretary post in a direct election by grabbing all 316 votes.
> 
> On the sidelines of the congress, Zhi told Xinhua, "I was thrilled to tears at the time (when being elected). Their ballots were affirmation of my work and brought me greater sense of duty and pressure."
> 
> Zhi said it's essential in obtaining people's trust and support at the grassroots. It requires Zhi and her colleagues to be impartial in obeying rules, put people's interests first, and consult with people on important matters in resident representative or CPC member meetings.
> 
> Dai Yanjun, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told Xinhua that democratic consultation will be the inevitable way for various parties of interests to find common ground as the development of the socialist market economy is bringing about a society of increasingly diverse aspirations.
> 
> Wang Huan, another congress delegate from Beijing, was impressed by the section of improving the system of socialist consultative democracy in Hu's report.
> 
> Wang, also a member of the Beijing municipal committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said socialist consultative democracy is an important form of people's democracy in the country. The report gives a clear roadmap on how to improve the system of socialist consultative democracy.
> 
> "The report makes clear that political consultation must be incorporated into decision-making. This requirement will reinforce the effectiveness of democratic consultation and help take in more advice from different sectors of the society. All of this bears testimony to the vitality of socialist democracy," said Wang.
> 
> Xie Chuntao, a history professor with the CPC Central Committee Party School, said the momentum of democracy in China is unstoppable but must proceed with emphasis on stability and order.
> 
> Li Junru, former vice president of the CPC Central Committee Party School and a member of the CPPCC National Committee, held that the combination of electoral democracy and consultative democracy is a significant feature of the democratic development in the country over the past decade.
> 
> Democracy is always pursued within the CPC. As of July this year, the leadership reshuffle of Party committees at the provincial, city, county, and village levels had been completed. Promoting democracy and ensuring Party members' rights have featured the process of the reshuffle.
> 
> In April 2011, the secretaries of CPC committees of Wuxi, Nantong and Suqian cities of Jiangsu province were elected through multi-candidate competitive elections.
> 
> Electoral democracy is recognized in the electoral system of lawmakers, or deputies to people's congresses, as well.
> 
> In March 2010, the National People's Congress (NPC), China's parliament, adopted an amendment to the Electoral Law with landslide votes, which grants equal representation in legislative bodies to rural and urban people.
> 
> It requires "both rural and urban areas adopt the same ratio of deputies to the represented population in elections of people's congress deputies."
> 
> In Hu's report to the CPC congress, He stressed the rule of law, saying that no organization or individual has the privilege of overstepping the Constitution and laws, and no one in a position of power is allowed in any way to take one's own words as the law, place one's own authority above the law or abuse the law.
> 
> He also asked the CPC to tighten intra-Party, democratic and legal oversight as well as oversight through public opinion to ensure that the people oversee the exercise of power and that power is exercised in a transparent manner.
> 
> "Intra-Party democracy is the life of the Party. We should adhere to democratic centralism, improve institutions for intra-Party democracy, and promote people's democracy with intra-Party democracy," Hu said.
> 
> For China's late leader Deng Xiaoping, there are three important criteria for judging the soundness of a country's political system or structure and of its policies.
> 
> First, whether the country is politically stable; second, whether the system and policies help to strengthen unity among the people and to raise their living standards; and third, whether the productive forces keep developing.
> 
> The path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the system of theories of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the socialist system with Chinese characteristics are the fundamental accomplishments made by the Party and people in the course of arduous struggle over the past 90-plus years. These accomplishments should be upheld all the time and enriched continuously, Li Junru said.
> 
> China should draw on the political achievements of other societies during the process of promoting reform of the political structure, but it will never copy a Western political system, Li said.




China does not have a _liberal_ culture so a _liberal_ democracy would, most likely, fail. It is a very _conservative_, Confucian society so look to Singapore as a model: it's a democracy, just not one with e.g. freedom of speech or assembly.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Actually the TPP may be a dead end.
> 
> China is trying ~ I'm not sure if it will succeed ~ to separate Japan and South Korea from the TPP, which China sees as having too much America, and enticing them into a tripartite free trade area. Rumours in some parts of the Asian media are that both Japan and SK are very interested. The TPP will still go ahead and I agree that Canada should join (and I agree our joining will mean the end of "supply management" for some agricultural sectors which I think is a *very good thing* for 99.9% of Canadians) but we ought not to expect miracles.
> 
> Perhaps the Chinese are also trying to entice us (and Australia? and New Zealand?) into their free trade area and, _de facto_ lessen America's "hold" on us all.




This report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the (South Korean) _Yonhap News Agency_, seems to suggest that all is not well on the China-Japan-South Korea front, *but* this is East Asia so the report might, equally, indicate exactly the opposite:

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2012/11/13/27/0301000000AEN20121113007900315F.HTML


> Trilateral summit with Beijing, Tokyo unlikely at ASEAN meeting: Seoul
> 
> 2012/11/13
> 
> SEOUL, Nov. 13 (Yonhap) -- South Korea is unlikely to hold a trilateral summit with China and Japan on the sidelines of an upcoming Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Cambodia next week, Seoul's foreign ministry said Tuesday.
> 
> It will be the first time the three nations have skipped a three-way summit at the annual ASEAN meeting since 1999, ministry spokesman Cho Tai-young said, as relations among three of Asia's largest economies remain under severe strain over territorial rows.
> 
> "No agreement has been reached among the three nations to hold a Korea-China-Japan summit on the sidelines of the upcoming ASEAN meeting," Cho said. "At this point, there is no plan to hold a summit."
> 
> A senior ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said China, which was due to have hosted the next trilateral summit, has not proposed such a summit at the Cambodia meeting.
> 
> Leaders from ASEAN and other Asian nations, as well as the United States, Russia and India will join the ASEAN meeting and the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh next week.
> 
> Relations between Seoul and Tokyo remain tense after Tokyo's renewed claims to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo. Tokyo and Beijing have separately been at odds over the ownership of a group of islets in the East China Sea, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
> 
> Cho also ruled out the possibility of holding a bilateral summit between President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda during the Cambodia meeting, saying South Korea has yet to receive an "official proposal" to hold such a meeting from Japan.




It is important to remember two things:

1. China is not the only player in the "game of islands," several countries have competing claims; and

2. As a general rule: money trumps flags in Asia and claims of _sovereignty_ can be _massaged_ to achieve greater prosperity. East Asians have, for millennia, been putting George Orwell's _Big Brother_ to shame in the fields of historical revisionism, _newspeak_ and memory holes.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This is in the China thread because Singapore and the PAP have been a model for how the Chinese want to develop; _Minister Mentor_ Lee Kuan Yew makes regular (twice yearly?) visits to Bejing where he usually spends a full day closeted with Hu Jintao (consider that Obama spends 40 to 90 minutes with a visiting Israeli PM – Hu is just as busy running China as Obama is running America). The  most senior Chinese officials and leadership aspirants are also regular visitors to Singapore - to meet with the _Mentor_.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese President Hu Jintao meets with visiting Singaporean                     2011 年 5 16, Lee Kuan Yew (right) and China's Defence Minister Liang Guanglie (left)
> Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in Beijing Nov. 16, 2007. (Xinhua Photo)     Tang Zhi Wei photo
> 
> The article is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is big news from Asia:
> 
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/singapores-minister-mentor-steps-down-but-not-out/article2030582/
> 
> Singapore is a complex society: it is about 85% ethnic Chinese which helps explain the extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit that is coupled with deeply ingrained Confucian (very conservative) social values. It has the political and legal system to which many educated Chinese aspire and which those same Chinese believe must come in lock-step – increased protection for fundamental rights (life, liberty, property) must come with increased respect for an deference to elders and governors.
> 
> The precipitous decline in PAP support will not, in itself, worry the Chinese leaders – what frightens them is the very sight of effective political opposition parties. There is still much for the Chinese to learn in Singapore.




More on China <> Singapore, this time, in an article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_ and deals with Singapore as a "model" for China:

http://thediplomat.com/pacific-money/2012/11/12/is-singapore-worth-emulating/


> Is Singapore Worth Emulating?
> 
> By Anthony Fensom
> 
> November 12, 2012
> 
> Singapore has attracted admirers for its success in transforming from one of Asia’s less developed countries into an international economic powerhouse. Now, with China seeking to do the same for itself and double per capita income by 2020, could the tightly controlled but economically vibrant city-state help show Beijing’s communist leaders how to maintain their grip on power?
> 
> According to an article in China’s Study Times, published by the Communist Party’s Central Party School, China’s incoming president Xi Jinping has for several years “led a team investigating the Singapore model and how it might be applied to China”.
> 
> '[Singapore’s] People's Action Party [PAP] has won consecutive elections and held state power for a long time, while ensuring that the party's high efficiency, incorruptibility and vitality leads Singapore in attaining an economic leap forward,'' wrote Song Xiongwei, a lecturer at the Chinese Academy of Governance.
> 
> Despite the differences between the two countries, not least including China’s 1.3 billion people, Singapore’s city-state of 5.3 million has much worth emulating.
> 
> The island nation already reportedly leads the world in GDP per capita, as well as boasting one of the most competitive international economies in global rankings.
> 
> A report released in August 2012 by Knight Frank and Citi Private Wealth estimated the country’s GDP per capita in purchasing power parity terms at U.S. $56,532 in 2010, ahead of Norway, the United States and Hong Kong. Singapore is expected to maintain its high ranking through 2050, followed by neighbors Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
> 
> Singapore’s wealth is undoubtedly inflated by the world’s highest concentration of millionaires, with the ultra-rich including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, part of a class which is expected to increase another 67 percent over the next four years.
> 
> The Southeast Asian trading center was rated this year as the easiest place in the world for small and medium-sized enterprises to do business, according to a World Bank and International Finance Corporation report.
> 
> Measuring such factors as the complexity of procedures needed in starting a business, enforcing contracts and registering property, Singapore came in first ahead of its neighbor Hong Kong, with the United States ranking fourth.
> 
> In addition, Singapore ranked second behind Switzerland in the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Index, which compared nearly 150 economies across a wide variety of criteria including infrastructure, education, innovation and efficiency.
> 
> Ruled by the PAP since attaining self-governance in 1959, the former British colony has earned plaudits from the IMF for its “prudent macroeconomic and financial policies,” including persistent fiscal surpluses and a large stock of public sector external assets, along with “political stability and an effective rule of law.”
> 
> In an email interview with The Diplomat, ANZ economist Aninda Mitra said Singapore had set a good example for other regional countries to follow.
> 
> "Singapore is often viewed as a role model for other multi-ethnic, post-colonial small or island states which have failed to live up to their full potential, such as Fiji or Sri Lanka,” Mitra said.
> 
> “It is also seen as a model for urban planning and bureaucratic efficiency by larger states across the region.”
> 
> ‘Middle income trap’
> 
> However, if Beijing’s policymakers see in Singapore a future path to follow, they may have to look carefully, according to a recent World Bank report.
> 
> Named “China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society,” the report by the World Bank and Beijing’s Development Research Center found that just 13 of 101 economies identified in 1960 as middle income made the transition to high-income economies.
> 
> Described as the “middle income trap,” countries are said to remain stuck when the factors that contributed to strong early growth, such as low-cost labor and early technology use, reach their limits and economic momentum slows.
> 
> Among those that broke free of the trap, including Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, less governmental intervention in both the economic and political spheres has been seen as a significant factor.
> 
> China’s outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao has argued in favor of political reform, warning his Communist Party comrades that “without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost. The new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved, and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”
> 
> The World Bank report called for structural reforms in a number of politically challenging areas, including “redefining the role of government, reforming and restructuring state enterprises and banks, developing the private sector, promoting competition, and deepening reforms in the land, labor and financial markets.”
> 
> While seemingly on track to supplant the United States as the world’s biggest economy, China faces the risk of growing old before it gets rich, with its working age population set to peak in 2015 as reported by The Diplomat.
> 
> Democracy flight?
> 
> Singapore’s exclusive residential enclaves, luxury boutiques and multi-million dollar properties along with low taxes have helped attract the super-rich.
> 
> According to the Wall Street Journal Asia, a survey of wealthy individuals ranking cities in terms of “economic activity, political power, quality of life, knowledge and influence” found Singapore was the fifth-most popular behind London, New York, Hong Kong and Paris.
> 
> Yet even respondents in Asia put Western cities ahead of Singapore and Hong Kong – “an indication that economic growth may not be the most important factor when a high-net worth individual chooses his city of residence.”
> 
> The report by Knight Frank and Citi noted that Chinese cities “performed significantly less well for freedom of expression and human rights – something that may hinder any future ascent to the top of the overall ranking”.
> 
> Singapore has efficiently addressed two of the key domestic development issues in East Asia, comprising an excellent education system to train future leaders as well as making corruption unattractive. But can it attract and retain top global talent?
> 
> According to one recent U.S. visitor, the country’s push to “convince the global elite that Singapore is the best place to live” may be a challenge.
> 
> “In Singapore and in other parts of Asia, I heard several anecdotes of people expressing frustration with Singapore’s tightly controlled society. For how long can elites put up with partial freedom?
> 
> “I heard several people saying that the best and brightest in Asia prefer to move to freer societies with the U.S. as the top destination, then Europe, and then Australia,” said Devin T. Stewart, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Council.
> 
> According to Peter Hartcher, the Sydney Morning Herald’s international editor, the political, media and housing controls implemented by Singapore have shown China “a potential halfway house between authoritarianism and liberal democracy”.
> 
> Economic challenges
> 
> Meanwhile, Singapore’s push to restructure itself toward a productivity-based economy less reliant on foreign workers is seen affecting its growth prospects.
> 
> Growing income inequality, rising living costs and house prices were prominent issues in the May 2011 general elections which saw the PAP secure its lowest ever share of the popular vote.
> 
> Non-resident foreign workers make up around a third of Singapore’s labor force – one of the highest proportions in the world, with the exception of some countries in the Middle East. The high number has been blamed for low productivity growth and strains on public infrastructure, fueling anti-foreigner sentiment.
> 
> “Singapore has taken on a tough task in trying to restructure itself toward a more innovation-driven model,” said ANZ’s Mitra.
> 
> “This will likely result in greater economic integration with its neighbours, and shifts in economic activity toward higher value-added sectors. But it also implies slower growth than in the past, with stronger efforts to enabling and equalizing opportunities for all its residents.”
> 
> While forecasting 4.5 percent GDP growth in 2013, ANZ’s economists note “growing downside risks” including weak labor productivity coupled with tight monetary policy, producing a “tough growth-inflation trade-off”.
> 
> Singapore narrowly avoided recession this year through a revision of its second-quarter GDP figures to growth of 0.2 percent. Its third-quarter GDP shrank an annualized 1.5 percent from the previous quarter, worse than economists’ forecasts of a 1 percent decline.
> 
> With trade amounting to four times its GDP, Singapore remains susceptible to any further weakening in global demand. Yet for China’s leaders, its success in escaping the middle income trap while maintaining political control is the real lesson to be studied.




The Chinese leadership has several _imperatives_:

1. Maintain itself in power ~ this involves creating and maintaining a self sustaining political _meritocracy_, *not* on building a Western style _liberal_ democracy in a HUGELY _conservative_ (Confucian) country;

2. Develop a better "one country _n_ systems" model that can accommodate Hong Kong and Taiwan and, possibly, I'm guessing, Tibet and maybe even Xinjiang, too;

3. Become a regional (East Asia) hegemon which involves replacing the USA as the _protector_ of Japan, Singapore, South Korea and ... and

4. Do all that while maintaining "social harmony" (which depends upon sustained economic growth ~ even if a couple of recessions are inevitable) until, say, 2060.

Singapore is a real democracy, even though certain rights that we take to be fundamental (freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, for example) are highly circumscribed. But it is a _conservative_ democracy, not a _liberal_ one. We, especially in the USA, are conceited enough to believe that only our _liberal_ model provides "real" democracy; we are wrong. The real fundamental rights (life, liberty, conscience, property) are all at least or better respected in Singapore than in Australia, Britain, Canada or the USA. IF China ever becomes somewhat, maybe even semi-democratic it will be by following Singapore's model.

(Hong Kong, by the way, is a somewhat more _liberal_ society than is Singapore ... much more like Japan or Taiwan than like China. The reintegration of Taiwan into China might drive China, itself, in a more _liberal_ direction.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Just two days ago, and a few posts above this, I posted a news item about "new ideas needing new leaders" which talked about Wang Yang; the article suggested he was a "might be" member of the Central Committee. According to this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _China.org.cn_, he, along with (no surprise) Xi Jinping and 10 other were "elected" to that Committee:

http://china.org.cn/china/18th_cpc_congress/2012-11/14/content_27108938.htm


> 10 top leaders elected into new CPC Central Committee
> 
> Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, Wang Qishan, Liu Yunshan, Liu Yandong, Li Yuanchao, Wang Yang, Zhang Gaoli, Zhang Dejiang and Yu Zhengsheng were elected into the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Wednesday morning at the closing of the 18th CPC National Congress.
> 
> Xi Jinping, 59, is member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, vice president and vice chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission.
> 
> Li Keqiang, 57, is member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and vice premier.
> 
> Wang Qishan, 64, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and vice premier.
> 
> Liu Yunshan, 65, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the 17th CPC Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee.
> 
> Liu Yandong, 67, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and state councilor.
> 
> Li Yuanchao, 62, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the 17th CPC Central Committee and head of the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee.
> 
> Wang Yang, 57, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the CPC.
> 
> Zhang Gaoli, 66, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and secretary of Tianjin Municipal Committee of the CPC.
> 
> Zhang Dejiang, 66, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, vice premier and secretary of Chongqing Municipal Committee of the CPC.
> 
> Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee and secretary of Shanghai Municipal Committee of the CPC.


----------



## Edward Campbell

While Wang Yang made it to the Central Committee he did not go the last step, to the (reduced to seven members in order to "make consensus easier") Standing Committee. Its members are:





China's new Politburo Standing Committee members: Leader of China Communist Party
Xi Jinping (centre), (clockwise from top left) Zhang Dejiang, Li Keqiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Liu Yunshan,
Wang Qishan, Zhang Gaoli
Photo: Reuters
Source: _The Telegraph_


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## Edward Campbell

Some concise wisdom from the _Twitterverse_:

*"China needs ro learn more about the world and the world needs to learn more about China."*
David Pilling, Asia Editor of the _Financial Times_


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## Edward Campbell

Just to show how _deep_ the tea leaf reading can become, consider this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1082612/hu-jintaos-place-communist-party-hierarchy


> Hu Jintao's place in the Communist Party hierarchy
> 
> Teddy Ng in Beijing
> 
> Thursday, 15 November, 2012
> 
> What rank will Hu Jintao hold in the Communist Party hierarchy after he stands down as its general secretary? The answer to that will most likely provide some hint about the extent of Hu's residual influence.
> 
> Will he rank No 3, after his successor Xi Jinping and predecessor Jiang Zemin? If so, it will be a conspicuous sign that Xi will be overshadowed by the two previous party chiefs, even though the party has hailed another smooth transition of power?
> 
> Since Jiang handed over the baton to Hu 10 years ago his name has always ranked second after Hu's in the party hierarchy. This follows a tradition of showing respect to former party chiefs, taking into account their impact and legacy.
> 
> Jiang is always given a prominent position in state events he attends - a sign that he is still an influential figure. At a military parade celebrating the nation's 60th anniversary in 2009, Jiang was on a stage together with Hu to review the troops. But analysts say Hu's legacy in the party is likely to fade fast and he will not place himself before Jiang, meaning that the best he could hope for is No3 in the hierarchy.
> 
> The names of retired leaders appear on occasions such as major party celebrations, or when party elders pay tribute at the funerals of party veterans.
> 
> The order of the names strictly follows the hierarchy of the party. In the past 10 years, Jiang's name has always come after Hu's, but before Wu Bangguo's . Wu ranked second in the Politburo Standing Committee during Hu's administration.
> 
> But if Hu wants to break the tradition, he could rank ninth after Xi, Jiang and the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee. That would most likely not go down well among his supporters.
> 
> Professor Gu Su from Nanjing University said that with the political future of Hu's protégé Ling Jihua (his former chief of staff) in question, Hu does not have a right-hand man capable of consolidating respect for him inside the party.
> 
> But Hu will not be totally out of the picture because party elders always have some say in party affairs.
> 
> Professor Wang Yukai of the Chinese Academy of Governance said: "Hu's views will still be very important when the new leaders consult the elders."




We used to have, in major Western capitals, a sort of "cottage industry" of well paid _Kremlin watchers_ who tried to analyze what obscure things meant in Churchill's _"riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."_ The Chinese are just as obscure, maybe even more so, than the Russians and it is probably true that whose name goes second or third on some list tells us something useful.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Despite some problematic historical references (the CCP now _"will have edged out the Soviet Union for the title of history’s longest-serving authoritarian regime"_ ~ really, the author has never heard of, say, the Byzantins, the Moghuls or the Manchus?) this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _New Yorker_, offer a look at Xi Jinping's _personality_ and, more importantly focuses on one of the Standing Committee's key challenges - determining the "will of the people:"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/11/chinas-new-chief-xi-jinping.html


> Letter from China: CHINA’S NEW CHIEF
> 
> POSTED BY EVAN OSNOS
> 
> November 15, 2012
> 
> The Great Hall of the People, which stretches the length of three football fields beside Tiananmen Square, was built, at Chairman Mao’s command, by the hands of volunteers. In recent years, it has lost quite a bit of its sacred populist sheen, because it has to pay for its own upkeep by renting itself out to paying customers. “Riverdance” had a run there, as did “Cats,” and it hosts a steady stampede of conventioneers, such as the two thousand restaurant managers from K.F.C. who came to talk chicken.
> 
> On Thursday, however, the Great Hall of the People returned to its full orthodox splendor, if only for a few hours, for a peculiar ritual to mark the arrival of the new Standing Committee of the Politburo, the group of seven men who will lead the People’s Republic for the next ten years. (If they succeed, China’s Communist Party will have edged out the Soviet Union for the title of history’s longest-serving authoritarian regime.) Their début is, by tradition, a kind of Communist catwalk—officially, a “meet the press” opportunity, though no questions are asked, and none are answered. It is a performance as retro and choreographed as “Cats,” but, in its details, it gave us a few intriguing hints about the men who will seek to project China’s Communist Party into the future.
> 
> I wedged myself into the crowd of photographers in the back to watch the show. The first member of the Politburo to emerge from behind a lacquered Chinese screen and take his place on the dais was, as expected, China’s new general secretary, Xi Jinping. He is the first among equals, and he will be the face of the country. By now, Xi’s bio is familiar to those with an interest in such things: the son of a Communist icon, he paid his dues in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and later showed enough free-market instincts during his soar up through the ranks for Hank Paulson to call him a “guy who really knows how to get over the goal line.” In person, Xi is a sharp contrast to the man he replaces, the robotic Hu Jintao, who spoke esoteric jargon about “harmonious society” and “a scientific outlook on development.” Hu leaves office unloved.
> 
> His successor is a ruddy-cheeked bear of a figure with a pomaded part to his hair, a rich radio voice, and a preference for the kind of roomy Western suits you expect on a regional sales rep. The full picture evokes Jackie Gleason more than Zhou Enlai. At rest, Xi wears a permanently placid half-smile that suggests confidence, even if his actual thoughts are unknowable at this point. Divining anything about Xi’s politics from his public persona is a mug’s game, but one thing is beyond doubt: he conveys an understanding of style that utterly eluded his predecessor, and an awareness that he will be judged more openly and mercilessly than any paramount Chinese leader before him. His citizens’ experience with technology, prosperity, and cynicism has forced him to confront a problem that is now more acute than his predecessors ever faced: he was never elected, but he must figure out a way to be liked.
> 
> “We are not complacent,” Xi said, in an acknowledgement that the Party has become complacent. “And we will never rest on our laurels.” He then ticked off a list so honest that he may come to regret it. “Under the new conditions, our Party faces many severe challenges, and there are also many pressing problems within the Party that need to be resolved, particularly corruption, bribe-taking, being removed from the people, and some Party officials’ reliance on formalities and bureaucracy.”
> 
> His speech was no barn burner, but it was refreshingly free of Party hymns. He never mentioned the harmonious society, or Jiang Zemin’s tortured locution, “the three represents.” Instead, he referred so often to “the people” that it seems destined to become a watchword of his tenure. “It is the people who have created history,” he said, “and it is the people who are true heroes. The people are the source of our strength.”
> 
> Those gestures of populist sensibility—the sense that, like it or not, the Party must figure out a way to be responsive—stand out especially because they are at odds with the credentials of the men that Xi will have by his side. Xi did not choose them exactly; they are a compromise between powerful families and factions. And when the members were unveiled, their composition confirmed what pundits had predicted: reform-minded candidates had been sidelined. Instead, the Party chose some of its most ardent conservatives. One is a seasoned propagandist. Another received his economics training in North Korea. They were so faithful to precedent that all but one wore a nearly identical dark suit and red tie. After months of secretive politicking over questions of reform and legitimacy, the Party seems to have sided with what one politics-watcher called the “unwritten party rule which favored seniority over competence.”
> 
> For Xi, it has the makings of a precarious assignment. When he vanished for a couple of weeks with a mysterious illness a few months ago, people in Beijing joked that maybe he took stock of the job he was being given—clean up the Party, maintain the economic miracle, restore public faith—and then took to his bed. But, sure enough, he reappeared, and, there he was this week, ready to play his role, with the chorus line assigned to him whether he likes it or not.
> 
> When it was all over this morning, and the seven men had returned once again to the secluded backstage of the Great Hall of the People, trailed by their security, and the stage where they had stood was suddenly empty. I walked up to the spot where Xi Jinping had stood to deliver his remarks. It was carpeted in a brilliant shade of red, and at his feet there was a small piece of tape in the shape of the number one, to indicate where the most powerful man in China should stand. He looked out over a line of poinsettias and ferns, to a wall of cameras, and a world of expectations from his people. It must have been terrifying.




Terrifying, indeed! The Chinese people rarely see their leaders in person, everything is carefully choreographed so _image_ and a _populist_ touch is important. He will be obeyed, even, almost, _revered_, but the fate of Deng Xiaoping's _dynasty_, which Xi now heads, rests on his ability to be "loved" and, through that "love" to cement the _dynasty's_ legitimacy in place ~ to secure the _mandate of heaven_.

Now, in old China, the _mandate of heaven_ depended upon the dynastic emperor's _virtues_: justice, fairness and competence. I think Xi must display similar virtues, and he appears to grasp that when, repeating Hu Jintao, he says that _'our Party faces many severe challenges, and there are also many pressing problems within the Party that need to be resolved, particularly corruption, bribe-taking, being removed from the people, and some Party officials’ reliance on formalities and bureaucracy.”_

Above, all Xi must find a way to convince China's billion plus people that he, and his government, which extends down through every province, city, district and into each village, understands where the people want to be led and that he is intent on taking them there. He doesn't have the advantages of a free press and regular, free and fair elections to "take the pulse" of his country, but Xi's China is vastly different from Mao's China and Mao's techniques will not work any more.


----------



## tomahawk6

China is looking for an airbase in the Azores. Not sure why unless they think there are off shore oil/gas reserves.

http://www.nationalreview.com/...ntic-gordon-g-chang#


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## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China is looking for an airbase in the Azores. Not sure why unless they think there are off shore oil/gas reserves.
> 
> http://www.nationalreview.com/...ntic-gordon-g-chang#




See somewhere earlier in this thread where someone (Thucydides?) talks about the "string of pearls" programme to build bases, primarily naval bases, stretching all the way from China to Suez and, I think, down towards Australia.


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## Edward Campbell

I just saw a note that says that there is no plan, neither international nor national, for a replacement for the _International Space Station_, nor for its maintenance beyond about 2025.

After that it is likely that China will have then only manned space station in earth orbit.






China's space station, as envisioned in 2011. Scheduled for
completion in 2020
Source: _China Daily_


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## a_majoor

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> See somewhere earlier in this thread where someone (Thucydides?) talks about the "string of pearls" program to build bases, primarily naval bases, stretching all the way from China to Suez and, I think, down towards Australia.



Guilty as charged, but I am only borrowing the term from Robert Kaplan, who uses the concept when discussing China in many of his books and articles (especially in the Atlantic Monthly). Perhaps the best single place to explore the concept is in one of his latest works: "Monsoon", but he is also discussing the US version of the concept in books like "Imperial Grunts".

Done by any power, the concept can be roughly paraphrased as creating areas of influence through the building but not owning of infrastructure (like seaports and airports), where relationships and deals bring access when needed rather than building and maintaining the Imperial infrastructure of forward bases. In this regard the Americans have the added flexibility of their fleet of aircraft carriers, which allow them to bring the base to the scene of the action (as it were) should relationships fail and access is denied.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Guilty as charged, but I am only borrowing the term from Robert Kaplan, who uses the concept when discussing China in many of his books and articles (especially in the Atlantic Monthly). Perhaps the best single place to explore the concept is in one of his latest works: "Monsoon", but he is also discussing the US version of the concept in books like "Imperial Grunts".
> 
> Done by any power, the concept can be roughly paraphrased as creating areas of influence through the building but not owning of infrastructure (like seaports and airports), where relationships and deals bring access when needed rather than building and maintaining the Imperial infrastructure of forward bases. In this regard the Americans have the added flexibility of their fleet of aircraft carriers, which allow them to bring the base to the scene of the action (as it were) should relationships fail and access is denied.


It should be noted that while the R.O.C. Navy bases may be lacking, that of the same's Air Force more than makes up for said American extension. Whether by intention and design, that fact of the matter remains that Taiwan is a vital hub for  extension unto China.


----------



## a_majoor

Kaplan's key example in the press and many of his books is the port in Gwadar, built as a deepwater container port for Pakistan. While it serves a civilian purpose, it is located near the Strait of Hormuz, and by virtue of its ability to dock large container ships can also by default handle most modern warships as well. By maintining friendly relations with Pakistan, the Chinese could gain access to the port facilities in a crisis, using container ships to carry supplies to deployed warships deploying out of Gwadar, for example. This could complicate things for the Indian Navy, the USN and even many of the smaller regional navies.

Many people feel this is actually the entire point of Gwadar, since it is not well connected to the rest of Pakistran's road and rail network and is isolated from Pakistan by being in the unstable region of Baluchistan. As a commercial shipping port it is not well situated in real terms, but as a potential military port...


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ever since Gen Matthew Ridgway warned President John F Kennedy that the US should not get involved in (direct) ground combat in Asia* there has been a general consensus among those involved with strategy, most recently by former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating in Aug 12, that a vast variety of reasons _"should lead the US to believe that war on the Asian mainland is unwinnable."_ Now two Canadian foreign policy experts, Derek Burney and Fen Hampson, who regularly provide joint commentary, chime in in this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _iPolitics_:

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/11/19/could-the-united-states-and-china-go-to-war/


> Could the United States and China go to war?
> 
> By Derek Burney and Fen Hampson
> 
> Nov 19, 2012
> 
> China selects its new leader much like the College of Cardinals chooses a new pope, albeit without white smoke (or mirrors). The Americans follow a different technique in choosing a president. The consequences of both processes this year, and the degree to which those selected are able to come to terms with one another, will be the most important determinant of global stability for the next four years.
> 
> The wraps were finally taken off China’s new leadership last week. China’s new leader, General Secretary Xi Jinping, is a “princeling,” the son of a prominent member of China’s old revolutionary guard. Though he is considered to be a pragmatist, the six other new members of the downsized Politburo Standing Committee are generally seen as conservative and non-reformers.
> 
> These are unsettling times for China’ new leaders. There is mounting social unrest against a regime that is widely seen to be corrupt, privileged and out of touch, even by its own admission. China has gone out of its way to bully its neighbors, notably Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, over its territorial claims in the South and East China Seas, where many say it has overplayed its hand.
> 
> China’s new leadership also has to come to grips with the fact that no matter what it does, it will not be able to replicate the astronomical, double-digit growth rates China enjoyed over the past decade. Markets in Europe and the U.S. are neither big enough nor growing fast enough to fuel the Chinese juggernaut.
> 
> A bigger question is whether China and the U.S. can live at peace with each other until China’s own internal political transformation is complete. U.S. mismanagement of domestic affairs, which has tarnished its lustre as a world leader, is feeding a mood of global uncertainty. China has no desire to replace the U.S. (yet), but it should not be blamed recklessly for indulgence by the U.S. Corruption, cronyism and the lack of political freedom will put more pressure on China in time than sermons from without.
> 
> Here are five reasons why there will be war between the U.S. and China — and five reasons why there won’t.
> 
> The first is the historical curse of great power transitions. Since the times of ancient Greece, great power transitions in world politics have had deeply unsettling consequences. As Thucydides wrote about the origins of the Peloponnesian wars, it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear that created in Sparta that led to war. Today, in an ironic twist, the United States is cast in the role of Sparta and China as Athens in what is the fastest rise of a new economic power in history.
> 
> The American strategic “pivot” toward Asia reflects some of the same fears about China’s rise that Sparta felt about Athens. Athens bullied its smaller Aegean Sea neighbors; China is doing the same in its own maritime neighborhood.
> 
> A second reason is public opinion. The overwhelming majority of Americans (60 per cent) see the rise of China as competition for the United States and they don’t like it. Never mind that China is underwriting much of the U.S. fiscal deficit (including the U.S. defence budget) and debt. America’s elites, who really ought to know better, feel that competition even more acutely.
> 
> The third reason is U.S. leadership and its own economic management. The prospect of a tit-for-tat trade war may be more likely and more ominous — especially if the U.S. drifts aimlessly down a sharp fiscal slope, even if it doesn’t immediately fall off “the cliff.”
> 
> Fourth, the United States is working actively to encircle if not contain China by reinvigorating its alliances in the region — notably with Japan and Australia, but also with other Southeast Asian nations, including former adversaries like Myanmar and Vietnam. The much-touted Trans-Pacific Partnership is also part of this containment strategy.
> 
> Fifth, China in turn has taken to blaming America for inflaming regional tensions and creating problems that are largely of its own making. Its claims in the South China Sea are legally dubious and its actions could draw in the U.S. in defense of its allies, like the Philippines.
> 
> On the other side of the ledger, here are five reasons why there won’t be war.
> 
> The first is that China and the U.S. are two of the most highly economically interdependent economies in the world.
> 
> China is heavily invested in the U.S. economy and U.S. Treasury Bills. The U.S., in turn, is heavily invested in China. Any kind of major disruption in relations or escalation of tensions would cost both countries dearly. Unlike the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War, or even the relationship between Germany and Britain prior to the First World War, China and the United States are joined at the hip by mutual trade and investment. They may be strategic rivals, but any kind of surgical separation would almost certainly kill off both of these Siamese twins.
> 
> Second, China is militarily in no position to challenge the U.S. Its military power and projection capabilities pale in comparison to that of the U.S., notwithstanding recent increases in Chinese defense spending and China’s acquisition of a blue-water navy. Nor is it at all clear that China wants to go head-to-head with the U.S. by challenging its global military supremacy.
> 
> Third, most countries of the Asia Pacific, including ASEAN, won’t join the States in a U.S.-led anti-China coalition. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why some countries are ambivalent about the security thrust of the TPP and go out of their way to pitch it as a trade deal.
> 
> Fourth, Americans have no stomach for opening up another military front. Beset by vast domestic challenges and still recovering from their bloody and inconclusive experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans in general will be disinclined to look for fresh conflicts. The Chinese have their own domestic worries to distract them; if hostilities open, expect to see them limited to trade disputes, or to bloodless (and publicly deniable) strikes in cyberspace.
> 
> The fifth is recent history. The record of Sino-American relations since the Kissinger-Nixon opening in the early 1970s has largely been one of cooperation. China and America cooperated on the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in the Paris Peace Accords of 1992. America was a strong supporter of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. American companies have invested hugely in China and now Chinese companies are trying to do the same in the U.S. (and Canada).
> 
> Although China and the U.S. have their differences on how to deal with the consequences of the Arab Spring, especially in Syria, they have shared interests in promoting stability in the Middle East and securing safe passage for the 20 per cent of the world’s oil supplies that pass through the straits of the Persian Gulf, much of it to China.
> 
> The U.S. and China simply have too much at stake to replay the war between Athens and Sparta. The rest of us also must ensure that history does not repeat itself. Canada, Australia, the U.S. and others, for example, might begin by adopting a common, not competitive, approach to investments by Chinese SOEs in their respective resource bases and to the shared threat from cyberspace, thereby making the “Asian pivot” more than a trendy pirouette.
> 
> © 2012 iPolitics Inc.




We should note that one of the reasons often cited for US failures in China is that political and local, tactical intelligence are so often wrong because Asians and Americans are so culturally different that they cannot understand one another. That's why a minor misunderstanding ~ something which is quite normal in international affairs amongst similar countries and is almost the norm between America and China ~ can, quickly, turn into a significant incident, a crisis, which could lead to war.

There is a war faction in both countries - politicians, industrialists, general and admirals and academics - who *need* to have an enemy, a "near peer" enemy, to justify e.g. continued growth in military expenditures.

In my opinion neither America nor China has anything to gain by a war; America *cannot*, in any way that I can imagine, including massive nuclear attacks, win a war against China because any war must be won in China, but China, for its part, *cannot* hope to defeat America except by making China itself a battleground and destroying all that the Chinese people have made for themselves ~ it is the very definition of a _Pyrrhic victory_.

____
* Jeffrey Record, _The Wrong War, Why we lost in Vietnam_, Naval Institute Press


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not sure what this report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Reuters_, means; maybe, as the article suggests, the new, _leaner and meaner_ Standing Committee does want to defang the internal security service but, also maybe, the leadership is simply less worried about internal threats from the vast majority of _Han_ Chinese and a reduced threat (mainly from the Western provinces/regions) simply allows for one less _senior_ Politburo member:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/19/china-politics-reshuffle-idUSL4N08Z26R20121119



> China downgrades powerful domestic security chief position
> 
> BEIJING | Mon Nov 19, 2012
> 
> Nov 19 (Reuters) - China confirmed on Monday that it had downgraded the position of domestic security chief as part of a move to a new and smaller top elite, an expected move that reflects fears the position had become too powerful.
> 
> The official Xinhua news agency said in a brief announcement that Zhou Yongkang's position as head of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, a sprawling body that oversees law-and-order policy, had been taken over by Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu.
> 
> The hulking, grim-faced 69-year-old Zhou had to retire along with most members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the inner council at the apex of power, at this month's 18th Party Congress, due to his age. He turns 70 in December.
> 
> Meng, however, is only a member of the new Politburo, the 25-member body which reports to the down-sized Standing Committee, putting him on a tighter leash and returning to a pattern the party kept to for much of the 1980s.
> 
> Reducing the party's Standing Committee from nine to seven members came as part of a once-in-a-decade leadership change announced last week, which saw Vice President Xi Jinping raised to head of the ruling Communist Party.
> 
> Reuters reported in August that Zhou's position was likely to be downgraded and Zhou replaced by Meng.
> 
> Zhou had been on the Standing Committee since 2007 while also heading the central Political and Legal Affairs Committee.
> 
> That double status allowed Zhou to dominate a domestic security budget of $110 billion a year, exceeding the defence budget.
> 
> Zhou was implicated in rumours that he hesitated in moving against the politician Bo Xilai, a former candidate for top office who fell in a divisive scandal after his wife was accused of murdering a British businessman.
> 
> Security forces also suffered a humiliating failure earlier in the year when they allowed blind rights advocate Chen Guangcheng to escape from 19 months of house arrest and flee to the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
> 
> Since the 1990s, China's efforts to stifle crime, unrest and dissent have allowed the domestic security apparatus -- including police, armed militia and state security officers -- to accumulate power.
> 
> In another announcement, Xinhua said that Zhao Leji had replaced Li Yuanchao as head of the party's organisation department that oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials.
> 
> Zhao had been party boss of the northern province of Shaanxi and is close to president-in-waiting Xi.
> 
> There was no announcement on where Li, a reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States, may go. He missed out on a spot on the Standing Committee despite being tipped to enter it.
> 
> Standing Committee positions will officially be released in March at the annual meeting of parliament, though there is no doubt Xi will become president and Li Keqiang will take over as premier from Wen Jiabao.
> 
> Over the next few days and weeks state media should announce the positions of the other members of the Politburo.




The Party's _organizational_ department is very powerful and Zhao Leji will have to contend with ways to _renew_ the Party - which has lost some of its lustre amongst the educated _elite_ in recent years.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have, in the past, commented upon the National Higher Education Entrance Examination (te _Gaokao_), the long, tough and generally fair process by which Chinese youngsters are _sorted_ for later life. The process is dreaded but many Chinese, at least the ones with whom I have discussed it, support the aims and processes. There is, also consideration of following Singapore's lead and making entrance to secondary school subject to competitive examination. In Singapore it is called the Primary School Leaving Examination (2012 results just released today) which are also notorious for the stress and rigour.

That rationale for both the _Gaokao_ and the PSLE is that:

1. People are a nation's most vital "natural resources" and the one of the few things that state can offer to help people make themselves "better" is education; but

2. Education is a finite resource and it must not be "wasted" on those who cannot use it to better themselves; and

3. Children, even as young as about age 12, are not too young to learn that you must work and even suffer to achieve your goals and you must compete with others.

Despite regular calls to reform (make easier) or abolish both systems, I have seen no signs that either will change - except, perhaps, to be even more rigorous. But can you imagine "failing" 2.4% of 6th graders in Canada?

Something to think about when you ponder why and how we are different from the Chinese.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_ is worrisome:

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1088629/fury-hong-kong-beijing-officials-claim-foreign-interference


> Fury in Hong Kong at Beijing official's claim of 'foreign interference'
> *Beijing official's allegation that 'external powers' help to co-ordinate campaigns for opposition parties in city called 'hollower than hollow'*
> 
> Friday, 23 November, 2012
> 
> Joshua But
> 
> A top mainland official in charge of Hong Kong affairs has lashed out at interference by "external powers" in Hong Kong elections, alleging for the first time that the unspecified powers were helping co-ordinate campaigns for opposition parties.
> 
> Zhang Xiaoming, a deputy director of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said "necessary measures" were needed to combat such interference and called for Hong Kong to pass the national security law required by Article 23 of the Basic Law.
> 
> His words, in an article published yesterday in the pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po, sparked alarm among pan-democrats, who said it could indicate a harder line by Beijing towards dissent in the city.
> 
> Zhang wrote that the "external powers" "even get deeply involved in local elections and help co-ordinating campaigns for opposition parties. We have to take necessary measures to prevent external interference."
> 
> Civic Party leader Alan Leong Kah-kit, describing the allegation as "hollower than hollow", said: "It is the most irresponsible way to make an allegation, because there is no evidence. We only have evidence of how the [central government] liaison office meddles with the elections."
> 
> Political commentator Johnny Lau Yui-siu said "external interference" had long referred to Britain and the US. But the definition had expanded in recent years to include Taiwan and Chinese dissidents in exile.
> 
> The 6,000-word article, "Enrich the implementation of One Country Two Systems" was a chapter in a study guide to the report of the 18th party congress in Beijing last week.
> 
> In it, Zhang said Hong Kong should complete the Article 23 legislation "in due course".
> 
> He added that any referendum campaigns and the Hong Kong City-State Autonomy Movement were in breach of the "one country" part of "one country, two systems".
> 
> He also insisted that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress had legitimate power to interpret the Basic Law, a view echoed by the former Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung Oi-sie. The committee should also take up its role to monitor Hong Kong's legislation, Zhang said.
> 
> Leong said the article shed light on the central government's changing policy in Hong Kong. "What Zhang said is not only unconstitutional but also immoral," she said. "If it had been said before 1997, I would bet Hong Kong's transition would not have been as smooth as it was."
> 
> Another pan-democrat, Lee Cheuk-yan, said he feared the central government had been ill-advised on Hong Kong affairs. "A hardline approach can now be expected," Lee said.
> 
> The Democratic Party's acting chairwoman, Emily Lau Wai-hing, said Zhang was twisting the facts. "Hong Kong people are furious at Beijing's interference in the city's internal affairs," she said.
> 
> Beijing-loyalist lawmaker Wong Kwok-kin said some recent developments in Hong Kong, such as protesters raising the colonial Hong Kong flag, might have struck a nerve in Beijing on the issue of sovereignty.
> 
> "Zhang's message could be a warning to some Hong Kong people," he said. "Overseas influences have long existed in the city. But the article shows Beijing is not going to tolerate any more."
> 
> Separately, former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang said Hong Kong was enduring the worst atmosphere since the handover. She said Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying had failed to maintain meritocracy in his appointments of senior officials and top advisers.
> 
> "I could only shake my head at what [Central Policy Unit head] Shiu Sin-por said," she said. "He seems to think he is a loyal servant of the Chief Executive and to forget he is employed as a civil servant."
> 
> The recruitment of Sophia Kao Ching-chi by the unit to co-ordinate appointments to government advisory and statutory bodies was also a bad move, she said. "I wonder whether the government wants to hear merely one voice, which is to support the administration," she said.




Hong Kong's political and socio-economic freedom is *essential* to the project to reunite Taiwan with China peacefully. This sort of heavy handed intrusion into Hong Kong's affairs by second rank Beijng officials will bring nothing but embarrassment to Xi Jinping's new administration. Xi and HK Chief Leung Chun-ying should both listen to Anson Chan.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

[quote author=E.R. Campbell]Hong Kong's political and socio-economic freedom is *essential* to the project to reunite Taiwan with China peacefully. [/quote]
I think I understand your premise, but  I also think "essential" is rather overstating the case. 
While I agree that any interference in Hong Kong might have ramifications for Taiwan in the future, it is also of import that in the the case of Taiwan, China's stick (missile sites) is more than equally balanced by economic factors. To say nothing of Japan and the U.S Seventh Fleet.
Hong Kong and Taiwan with regards to China are both fruit, but one is an apple and the other is an orange.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ignatius J. Reilly said:
			
		

> I think I understand your premise, but  I also think "essential" is rather overstating the case.
> While I agree that any interference in Hong Kong might have ramifications for Taiwan in the future, it is also of import that in the the case of Taiwan, China's stick (missile sites) is more than equally balanced by economic factors. To say nothing of Japan and the U.S Seventh Fleet.
> Hong Kong and Taiwan with regards to China are both fruit, but one is an apple and the other is an orange.




Fair enough, but I think Beijing is trying - at least has tried for a decade, we'll see what Xi wants to do - to de-emphasize the _"stick"_ and emphasize the socio-economic _"carrots"_. The biggest _carrot_ is Hong Kong's example ~ prosperous, politically and economically "independent," and, broadly, "free" from Beijing's rule.

I don't think Beijing can buy Taiwan and I think that, for the time being, Beijing will not risk trying to seize it by force ~ that leaves "voluntary" reunification which can happen only if Taiwan believes that Beijing can be trusted to respect *"one country, n systems."*


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Fair enough, but I think Beijing is trying - at least has tried for a decade, we'll see what Xi wants to do - to de-emphasize the _"stick"_ and emphasize the socio-economic _"carrots"_. The biggest _carrot_ is Hong Kong's example ~ prosperous, politically and economically "independent," and, broadly, "free" from Beijing's rule.


While I agree about the economic carrot, I would argue that said carrot has been in place for quite some time, given the amount of trade and factory trade-offs between Taiwan and China.
I'm just not sure that any political carrot in terms of Hong Kong will really send up any short term shivers up Taiwan's spine.



> I don't think Beijing can buy Taiwan and I think that, for the time being, Beijing will not risk trying to seize it by force ~ that leaves "voluntary" reunification which can happen only if Taiwan believes that Beijing can be trusted to respect *"one country, n systems."*


I agree that, for the time being, Beijing will not seize Taiwan by force. It would be far too costly for them, and Taipei. Beijing will hold that as a stick to be wielded when the moment is ripe, if it ever will be. But still it is understood that they will hold such a stick at the ready.
As for voluntary, within quote marks or without, I personally think that the vast majority of Taiwanese folks favour the status quo, and would only consider unification with China in the unlikely event of some outside interference, such as an invasion by Saudi Arabia.

I have lived in Taiwan (married 2 kids, pretty much entrenched) for  much  of the last 15 years, give or take a year or two here and there or  so on assignment. Local folks are willing to accept a new master, as long as it does not disrupt the status quo. Which, might take some doing, given the massive advances Taiwan has done on basic social structure, compared to that of China. This is the crux of the biscuit.

My point is that that the socio-economic in the minds of the Taiwanese will outweigh the political, and Beijing knows this. 
Quite apart from the fact of Hong Kong, which was a political matter from day one of the takeover from the lease unto Britain, and the economic factors sheer gravy after that fact.

But I think you are right stating prior that Xi is quite pragmatic. But being said he can always run a few horses at one time, right?
Despite his previous Taiwan connections in the business realm, I think he will do as those before, bulk up missile strength, and offer economic advantage.

Those of us in the short term can only keep on, keeping on.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/world/asia/china-shows-off-an-aircraft-carrier-but-experts-are-skeptical.html?_r=0
> 
> China Launches Carrier, but Experts Doubt Its Worth
> By JANE PERLEZ
> Published: September 25, 2012
> 
> BEIJING — In a ceremony attended by the country’s top leaders, China put its first aircraft carrier into service on Tuesday, a move intended to signal its growing military might as tensions escalate between Beijing and its neighbors over islands in nearby seas.
> 
> Officials said the carrier, a discarded vessel bought from Ukraine in 1998 and refurbished by China, would protect national sovereignty, an issue that has become a touchstone of the government’s dispute with Japan over ownership of islands in the East China Sea.
> 
> But despite the triumphant tone of the launching, which was watched by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and despite rousing assessments by Chinese military experts about the importance of the carrier, the vessel will be used only for training and testing for the foreseeable future.
> 
> The mark “16” on the carrier’s side indicates that it is limited to training, Chinese and other military experts said. China does not have planes capable of landing on the carrier and so far training for such landings has been carried out on land, they said.
> 
> Even so, the public appearance of the carrier at the northeastern port of Dalian was used as an occasion to stir patriotic feelings, which have run at fever pitch in the last 10 days over the dispute between China and Japan over the East China Sea islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
> 
> The carrier will “raise the overall operational strength of the Chinese Navy” and help China “to effectively protect national sovereignty, security and development interests,” the Ministry of Defense said.
> 
> The Communist Party congress that will begin the country’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition is expected to be held next month, and the public unveiling of the carrier appeared to be part of an effort to forge national unity ahead of the event.
> 
> For international purposes, the public unveiling of the carrier seemed intended to signal to smaller nations in the South China Sea, including the Philippines, an American ally, that China has an increasing number of impressive assets to deploy.
> 
> American military planners have played down the significance of the commissioning of the carrier. Some Navy officials have even said they would encourage China to move ahead with building its own aircraft carrier and the ships to accompany it, because it would be a waste of money.
> 
> Other military experts outside China have agreed with that assessment.
> 
> “The fact is the aircraft carrier is useless for the Chinese Navy,” You Ji, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, said in an interview. “If it is used against America, it has no survivability. If it is used against China’s neighbors, it’s a sign of bullying.”
> 
> Vietnam, a neighbor with whom China has fought wars, operates land-based Russian Su-30 aircraft that could pose a threat to the aircraft carrier, Mr. You said. “In the South China Sea, if the carrier is damaged by the Vietnamese, it’s a huge loss of face,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”
> 
> Up to now, Chinese pilots have been limited to practicing simulated carrier landings on concrete strips on land in Chinese J-8 aircraft based on Soviet-made MIG-23s produced about 25 years ago, Mr. You said. The pilots could not undertake the difficult maneuver of landing on a moving carrier because China does not yet have suitable aircraft, Mr. You said.
> 
> The question of whether China will move ahead and build its own carrier depends in large part, he said, on whether China can develop aircraft to land on one. “It’s a long, long process for constructing such aircraft,” he said.
> 
> In contrast to some of the skepticism expressed by military experts outside China, Li Jie, a researcher at the Chinese Naval Research Institute, said in an interview in the state-run People’s Daily that the carrier would change the Chinese Navy’s traditional mind-set and bring qualitative changes to its operational style and structure, he said.
> 
> Although the Chinese military does not publish a breakdown of its military spending, foreign military experts say the navy is less well financed than the army and air force.




It looks like flight training has begun according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-11/25/c_123998057.htm


> China conducts flight landing on aircraft carrier
> 
> English.news.cn
> 
> 2012-11-25
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This undated photo shows staff members checking a carrier-borne J-15 fighter jet on China's first aircraft
> carrier, the Liaoning. China has successfully conducted flight landing on its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning.
> After its delivery to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy on Sept. 25, the aircraft carrier has undergone
> a series of sailing and technological tests, including the flight of the carrier-borne J-15. Capabilities of the
> carrier platform and the J-15 have been tested, meeting all requirements and achieving good compatibility,
> the PLA Navy said. Designed by and made in China, the J-15 is able to carry multi-type anti-ship, air-to-air
> and air-to-ground missiles, as well as precision-guided bombs. The J-15 has comprehensive capabilities
> comparable to those of the Russian Su-33 jet and the U.S. F-18, military experts estimated.
> (Xinhua/Zha Chunming)
> 
> LIAONING AIRCRAFT CARRIER, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- China has successfully conducted flight landing on its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, naval sources said.
> 
> A new J-15 fighter jet was used as part of the landing exercise.
> 
> After its delivery to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy on Sept. 25, the aircraft carrier has undergone a series of sailing and technological tests, including the flight of the carrier-borne J-15.
> 
> Capabilities of the carrier platform and the J-15 have been tested, meeting all requirements and achieving good compatibility, the PLA Navy said.
> 
> Since the carrier entered service, the crew have completed more than 100 training and test programs.
> 
> The successful flight landing also marked the debut of the J-15 as China's first generation multi-purpose carrier-borne fighter jet, the PLA Navy said.
> 
> Designed by and made in China, the J-15 is able to carry multi-type anti-ship, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, as well as precision-guided bombs.
> 
> The J-15 has comprehensive capabilities comparable to those of the Russian Su-33 jet and the U.S. F-18, military experts estimated.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_ is an interesting bit of forecasting (speculating, if you like) by Gavyn Davies:

http://blogs.ft.com/gavyndavies/2012/11/25/the-decade-of-xi-jinping/#axzz2DGWjkVFb


> The decade of Xi Jinping
> 
> November 25, 2012
> 
> Gavyn Davies
> 
> The transfer of power in China from the outgoing regime led by Hu Jintao to the incoming leadership of Xi Jiping has occurred without a hitch. This is a mark of increased political maturity in China.
> In fact, the hand-over has been described by Citigroup economists as the first complete and orderly transition of power in the 91 year history of the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> During President Hu’s decade, China’s real GDP per capita rose at 9.9 per cent per annum. China accounted for 24 per cent of the entire growth in the global economy, and Chinese annual consumption of many basic commodities now stands at around half of the world total. Perhaps the most important question in the world economy today is whether China’s economic miracle can continue in the decade of Xi Jinping. The IMF forecasts shown in the graph above suggest that the miracle will persist, but many western economists disagree.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s re-emergence as a global economic powerhouse is by now fairly well understood. Following the Deng Xiaoping reforms after 1978, and the opening of the economy to domestic and international markets, China has engaged in a process of economic catch-up similar to that which Japan and Korea achieved in earlier decades.
> 
> The question for the next decade is whether this growth process will prove to be self-limiting. The experience of other Asian economies suggests that, one day, this will indeed happen. The supply of under-employed labour in rural areas will be drained, the growth of manufacturing will peak, and the ability to import superior technology from other economies will run out of rope. A slowdown in growth is therefore inevitable. The only questions are when, and by how much?
> 
> The recent pattern of growth in the economy has caused some economists to become very pessimistic about the answers to these questions. Although the Hu administration was able to maintain the growth rate of real GDP, it did so after 2008 only by boosting the ratio of fixed investment in the economy to compensate for the declining share of net trade and the sluggish performance of household consumption. Fixed investment is now around 50 per cent of GDP, with consumption standing at only 35 per cent.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> These are very unusual figures by any international standards, markedly exceeding the investment shares in countries like Japan and Korea during their economic miracles. There are certainly reasons for concern. In a recent paper for Lombard Street Research, Charles Dumas points out that the additional output achieved per unit of extra investment has been falling in recent years, suggesting that returns on capital are falling. He thinks that there has been substantial over-investment and estimates that the desirable share of fixed investment in GDP is only around 33-34 per cent.
> 
> http://blogs.r.ftdata.co.uk/gavyndavies/files/2012/11/ftblog343-590x514.gif[/imh]
> 
> If this downward adjustment in fixed investment happened too rapidly, it would certainly cause a deep recession. It would also cause recessions in some western economies which have become heavily dependent on exporting capital goods to China. As the accompanying graph from a recent IMF study shows, a drop of 2.5 per cent in the level of fixed investment in China would reduce global GDP growth by around 0.2 per cent, with German GDP being hit by 0.6 per cent. If Charles Dumas is right about the scale of the adjustment needed, the eventual impact on global GDP would be much larger than the graph shows.
> 
> Other economists, however, point out that China’s capital stock still remains extremely low relative to developed economies like the US (eg in terms of the housing stock per family, etc), and argue that it does not matter very much if this investment is brought forward relative to the growth of consumption. These economists argue that this sort of “pre-investment” will not create any problems, especially if funded by the government sector rather than by the creation of excessive private leverage and debt. The houses, railways and roads will still be there, and will be fully utilised in future years.
> 
> [img]http://blogs.r.ftdata.co.uk/gavyndavies/files/2012/11/ftblog3451-590x390.gif
> 
> What can we learn from the experience of other economies at similar stages in their growth process? The most informative research paper which I have been able to find on this question was written in 2011 by Barry Eichengreen and colleagues. This paper identifies all of the growth slowdowns which have occurred since 1957 in economies which have attained a middling level of GDP per capita (over $10,000 per annum in 2005 prices according to the Penn World tables).
> 
> The key result of this study is that major growth slowdowns are triggered, on average, when per capita GDP reaches $16,700 per annum, or on an alternative measure when it reaches 58 per cent of the per capita GDP of the lead economy (ie the US). When these levels of income are reached by a developing economy, it tends to experience a growth slowdown of at least 3.5 percentage points. Both Japan (in 1970 and 1992) and Korea (in 1997) suffered growth slowdowns larger than this when their income levels exceeded the critical levels.
> 
> China has not yet reached either of the key levels identified by Eichengreen. On my estimates, the level of per capita GDP will exceed $16,700 only in 2016, and the ratio of Chinese to US GDP will not approach the 58 per cent level before the 2020s.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Based on this analysis, the development process in China might still have a long way to go before a major slowdown becomes inevitable. This is presumably one key reason why the IMF’s medium term forecasts for China still show real GDP rising at a healthy rate of about 8.5 per cent per annum up to 2017.However, the Eichengreen study does add some specific warnings about the future for China. Apart from levels of GDP per capita, the study concludes that several other variables which impact the probability of a major growth slowdown are flashing warning signals in China, including the low share of consumption in GDP, the ageing of the population and the undervalued real exchange rate. Because of this, Eichengreen’s estimates show that, in the absence of corrective policy action, the probability of a major Chinese slowdown at some point in the next few years is already running at over 70 per cent.
> 
> The test for the decade of Xi Jinping is whether policy can head off all or some of the impending slowdown. The good news is that the incoming administration is extremely well aware of the challenge of excess investment, and will act to mitigate its worst effects. China has faced greater economic challenges in the past three decades, and has succeeded in overcoming them. It can do so again.




If Gavyn Davies is correct, and he is a pretty successful prognosticator, then the wort fears of some and fondest hopes of others, that China will collapse and a new revolution will break out, are unlikely to materialize.


----------



## jollyjacktar

More photos of the flight operations in this story.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238222/China-lands-fighter-jet-aircraft-carrier-takes-leap-Asian-naval-power.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

_Official_ China, for all that it is enamoured with _soft power_, has a cultural _tin ear_: the satirical magazine _The Onion_ named Kim Jong-Un its "sexiest man alive."* Good for a smirk, right? Not in Beijing, the *official* _People's Daily_ repeated the story ... *seriously*.  :

_____
Previous "winners" include: 2011: Bashar al-Assad; 2010: Bernie Madoff;  2009: Charles and David Koch (co-winners); and 2008: Ted Kaczynski


----------



## Snakedoc

Yeah I just saw this doing the rounds on facebook today.  Too funny.  It was apparently a 55 page photo spread too LOL  :rofl:


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2

Some folks, including some at the _Heritage Foundation_ think that we, the USA anyway, is already at war with China and they worry that China has a plan to win that war without firing a shot. In fairness, some Chinese think the same: they believe the war is on  and they believe they can win without firing a shot. Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Heritage Foundation_ website is an interesting article about that proposition:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/11/winning-without-fighting-chinese-public-opinion-warfare-and-the-need-for-a-robust-american-response


> Winning Without Fighting: Chinese Public Opinion Warfare and the Need for a Robust American Response
> 
> By Dean Cheng
> 
> November 26, 2012
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Abstract:* _Over the past decade, the People's Republic of China has exhibited a growing interest in waging asymmetrical warfare. The purpose of this interest is chilling: to enable the PRC to win a war against the U.S. without firing a shot. To this end, the PRC is expanding potential areas of conflict from the purely military (i.e., involving the direct or indirect use of military forces) to the more political. Such expansion will be fueled by manipulation of public opinion, legal systems, and enemy leadership. It is essential that the United States counter the PRC's new soft-power surge not only by rebutting political attacks, but also by taking the offensive and promoting America's positions to a global audience._
> 
> Over the past decade, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has exhibited a growing interest in waging asymmetrical warfare. To this end, the PRC released an initial set of regulations regarding political warfare in December 2003, before updating them in 2010. These "political work regulations" for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) address the importance of waging "the three warfares": public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare.
> 
> The "three warfares" represent the PRC's commitment to expanding potential areas of conflict from the purely military (i.e., involving the direct or indirect use of military forces) to the more political. Such expansion will be fueled by manipulation of public opinion, legal systems, and enemy leadership. But unlike more traditional military conflict, the foundation for political warfare must be established during peacetime so as to create beneficial conditions and context for the military conflict and, in turn, precipitate an early end to a conflict on terms favorable to the PRC. Indeed, if waged successfully, political warfare allows one side to win without fighting.
> 
> In hopes of being able to alter the strategic context of any future U.S.-PRC confrontation, the PRC is improving its ability to influence both global and Chinese public opinion. If the United States does not counter Chinese political warfare efforts, it may well find that its access to the Western Pacific is endangered by a lack of regional support—long before American forces even begin moving toward the area. In order to avoid being outmaneuvered by a PRC intent on winning without firing a shot, the U.S. must strengthen its strategic communications, public diplomacy, and media outreach capabilities.
> Comprehensive Power and Cultural Security
> 
> When the Chinese write about their conception of security, it is often couched in terms of "comprehensive national power [zonghe guojia liliang]." This concept argues that a nation should be judged not simply by its military, economic, or diplomatic power, but by a combination of all of three, as well as its scientific and technological base and its cultural influence.
> 
> Consequently, the PRC considers many seemingly unrelated activities essential to Chinese security. China's space capabilities, for example, contribute to Chinese comprehensive national power, not only by placing Chinese satellites and astronauts into space to obvious military and political effect, but also by fostering scientific and technical expertise and enhancing China's economy. Space capabilities also serve as evidence of China's growing technological prowess and scientific, industrial, and military capability and are therefore considered an important element of public diplomacy.
> 
> At the same time, however, China's growing interaction with the rest of the world has given rise to concerns about the PRC's "cultural security." In late 2011, Chinese leader Hu Jintao gave a speech in which he noted that on the international scene, one characteristic of the competition in comprehensive national power is the growing prominence of culture: "Many major nations have sought to expand their range of cultural soft-power as a means of increasing core national competitiveness.&#8221[1] As the speech goes on to note, this has meant that "international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.&#8221[2] The cultural competition is seen not simply as the proliferation of Western videos and entertainment, but as an aspect of ideological struggle.
> 
> This question of "cultural security" is fueled by two elements. The first issue is the residue of what the Chinese term "the Century of Humiliation," during which China was bullied and exploited by foreign powers. There is a concern that, despite its economic rise and growing military prowess, China remains subject to foreign influences that will undermine its culture. As one Chinese observer has noted, "as an importer of cultural products, ideas, and technologies since the 19th Century, China has every reason to worry about its cultural identity.&#8221[3] China has long demonstrated less confidence in its cultural security and identity than, for example, its Japanese neighbors.
> 
> The second issue driving these concerns about "cultural security" is the PRC's belief that Chinese cultural products are not given a "fair shake." For example, Chinese articles lamented that Zhang Yimou's "Flowers of War," starring Christian Bale and believed to be the most expensive movie yet made in China, was not even nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film[4] Some believe that this was because of pressure to deny China its due recognition. Conversely, awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is seen as using the award to criticize China.
> 
> *The Three Warfares: Winning Without Firing a Shot*
> 
> There is a military aspect to the PRC's focus on public opinion, embodied in the concept of "the three warfares." Chinese military writings emphasize the importance of influencing global public opinion so as to coerce opponents into compliance without having to go to war and to influence an enemy's leadership, domestic population, and military in the event of conflict, as well as to garner international support.
> Chinese writings suggest that Beijing has accorded ever greater importance to public opinion since the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, when NATO's aerial bombardment and public diplomacy combined to undermine Slobodan Milosevic—a combination that was equally as effective during the 2003 Iraq war. Indeed, the ability of coalition forces to undermine popular support for the Milosevic and Saddam Hussein regimes, influence global views, and preserve domestic support are seen by the PRC as key factors in the outcome of each conflict.
> 
> Such an ability to influence popular will and shape perceptions, according to PLA writings, constitutes political combat styles under informationalized conditions (xinxi tiaojian xia de zhengzhi xing zuozhan yangshi). These styles are codified for the PLA in the "People's Liberation Army Political Work Regulations" as the "three warfares": public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare[5] They employ the range of national resources, including military, civilian, and hard and soft power, guided by the overall military strategy, to secure the political initiative and psychological advantage over an opponent, debilitating one's opponent while strengthening one's own will and securing support from third parties[6]
> 
> *The "Three Warfares"*
> 
> As noted in a previous Heritage Foundation Backgrounder on legal warfare, public opinion warfare is one of the "three warfares" (san zhan), the third being psychological warfare[7] Chinese analyses almost always link these three types of combat together, as they are seen as interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Specifically, the "three warfares" seek to influence the public's understanding of a conflict by retaining support from one's own population, degrading it in an opponent, and influencing third parties. Public opinion/media warfare is the struggle to gain dominance over the venue for implementing psychological and legal warfare. It is seen as a form of warfare independent of armed confrontation or actual hostilities. Indeed, it is perhaps understood most accurately as a constant, ongoing activity aimed at long-term influence of perceptions and attitudes.
> One of the main tools of public opinion/media warfare is the news media, including both domestic and foreign entities. The focus of public opinion/media warfare is not limited to the press, however; it involves all of the instruments that inform and influence public opinion (e.g., movies, television programs, books). Psychological warfare seeks to disrupt an opponent's decision-making capacity by creating doubts, fomenting anti-leadership sentiments, and generally sapping an opponent's will. Legal warfare seeks to justify a nation's own actions legally while portraying an opponent's activities as illegal, thereby creating doubts, both among adversary and neutral military and civilian authorities and in the broader population, about the wisdom and justification of an opponent's actions. In essence, both psychological warfare and legal warfare require the use of public opinion warfare in order to have greatest effect. Public opinion warfare and legal warfare require psychological warfare guidance so that their targets and methods can be refined. Public opinion warfare and psychological warfare require legal warfare information in order to be their most effective[8]
> 
> *Public Opinion Warfare: Chinese Definitions*
> 
> Public opinion warfare (yulun zhan) refers to the use of various mass information channels, including the Internet, television, radio, newspapers, movies, and other forms of media, in accordance with an overall plan and defined objectives to transmit selected news and other materials to the intended audience. It is directed primarily at an opponent's military forces and is intended to complement national political, diplomatic, and military operations.
> 
> The purpose of public opinion warfare is to shift the overall balance of strength between a nation and that nation's opponents[9] Such an impact demands more than just securing exposure for a particular point of view or a set of facts. Rather, the goals are to preserve friendly morale, generate public support at home and abroad, weaken the enemy's will to fight, and alter the enemy's situational assessment. Public opinion warfare is both a national and a local responsibility, and it will be undertaken not only by the PLA, but also by the People's Armed Police.
> 
> *Pillars of Public Opinion Warfare*
> 
> Chinese writings on public opinion highlight certain themes that provide a conceptual starting point and framework that govern all related military operations. These themes include:
> 
> *Follow top-down guidance.* Public opinion warfare must support national political, diplomatic, and military objectives. Its actions must be consistent with the larger national strategy as laid out by the top levels of leadership (i.e., the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the Central Military Commission). Consequently, public opinion warfare measures must follow higher-level guidance on content and timing.
> 
> *Emphasize preemption.* In undertaking public opinion warfare, the side that plants its message first enjoys a significant advantage. Chinese analyses of public opinion warfare emphasize that the "the first to sound grabs people, the first to enter establishes dominance (xian sheng duoren, xianru weizhu)." Essentially, the objective is to establish the terms of the debate and define the parameters of coverage. By presenting its message first, the PLA expects to underscore the justice and necessity of its operations, accentuate national strength, and exhibit the superiority of its forces—all in an effort to undermine an opponent's will to resist[10]
> 
> *Be flexible and responsive to changing conditions.* Under the unified leadership structure and consistent with the requirements of unified, joint operations, commanders should implement public opinion warfare in a flexible manner, taking into account shifts in the political and military situation. At the same time, these commanders should also tailor their methods with respect to specific operations rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach. Thus, when engaging in public opinion warfare against what the PRC considers "secessionist elements," for example, it is important to use different propaganda activities, depending on the audience. "One must make distinctions between the more stubborn elements and the general populace.&#8221[11]
> 
> *Exploit all available resources.* Chinese military writings regularly invoke the ideals of combining peacetime and wartime operations, civil-military integration, and military and local unity (pingzhan jiehe, junmin jiehe, jundi yiti). This emphasis is especially pronounced in public opinion warfare, as civilian resources for public opinion warfare vastly outweigh military ones. Civilian and commercial assets—news organizations, broadcasting facilities, Internet users, etc.—are seen as an invaluable resource in getting China's message before both domestic and global audiences. Moreover, the use of civilian assets could uncover better techniques and information than might be available through purely military channels[12]
> 
> Within this construct, Chinese writings suggest that, like any other military operation, there are both offensive and defensive components of public opinion warfare. For instance, offensive public opinion warfare seeks to undermine the enemy's will and weaken any external support while garnering friends and allies. In the first Gulf War, the U.S. used its considerable advantage in information dissemination to bombard the Iraqi military and civilian population with various messages that undermined both Iraq's will to fight and the people's faith in Saddam Hussein. In the U.S. war with Afghanistan, Washington employed public opinion warfare mechanisms to create an anti-terrorism coalition, gain support from other major nations, and allay concerns in Arab and Muslim nations[13]
> 
> On the other hand, defensive public opinion warfare is waged to counter enemy public opinion warfare. It entails strong education and news management efforts designed to ensure that the domestic population is not exposed to enemy messages and that, even if they are, those messages will not take root. Defensive public opinion warfare requires prompt, credible responses to enemy criticisms and charges.
> 
> This latter aspect can be achieved only through careful preparation of the public opinion battleground in peacetime. That is, there must be extensive research into tactics and methods for undertaking public opinion warfare, understanding potential opponents' psychology and national moods, and the nurturing of public opinion warfare specialists. For this reason, PLA writings consistently invoke the saying, "Before the troops and horses move, public opinion is already underway (bingma weidong, yulun xianxing)," emphasizing that the preparation for public opinion warfare must begin far in advance of the actual outbreak of hostilities[14]
> 
> *Public Opinion Warfare in the Second Gulf War*
> 
> For PLA analysts, the second Gulf War provided a demonstration of public opinion warfare under informationized conditions[15]
> 
> According to Chinese analyses, Coalition public opinion warfare efforts began long before the outbreak of overt hostilities in March 2003. Indeed, one Chinese analysis suggests that the United States was waging public opinion warfare against Iraq at least from the time of 9/11, if not the end of the first Gulf War, constantly demonizing Saddam Hussein and Iraq[16] Such a protracted period of public opinion preparation acclimatized both the American and global audience to the idea that Iraq posed a threat to the world. Consequently, when President George W. Bush labeled Iraq part of the "Axis of Evil," the ground had been prepared for that characterization to take hold.
> 
> Once the decision to go to war had been made, the United States then sought to maintain this early advantage by exploiting its enormous media strength to shape national and global public opinion. According to Chinese writings, this advantage was heightened because Western media, especially American and British news organizations, were aligned with, if not actively subordinate to, the Anglo-American authorities. In an example of how a nation's own system shapes its perceptions of others, Chinese writings describe the U.S. government as employing CNN and NBC to influence both American and global public opinion in support of the war with Iraq[17] Other Chinese writings suggest that the American media were complicit in claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, because they were "under the control of the government and the military [meiguo meiti you zai zhengfu he junfang de caokong xia].&#8221[18]
> 
> From the Chinese perspective, the "embed" program for journalists was an especially effective means of influencing the global perception. By allowing reporters onto the front lines, it allowed the U.S. to broadcast its operations directly to a global audience, underscoring the power of American military forces. Moreover, Chinese analyses conclude that by incorporating foreign journalists into the program, including ones drawn from China and other nations skeptical of the U.S., American public opinion warriors were able to project an image of objectivity and transparency. If American journalists could be dismissed as being naturally pro-U.S., it would be harder to make the same accusation against journalists from non-Coalition countries[19]
> 
> Meanwhile, to further support its public opinion warfare campaign, in August 2002, with the help of Iraqi dissident groups and exiles, the U.S. created a satellite television station[20] Coupled with a military decision to leave Iraqi communications and broadcasting infrastructure intact (unlike in the Balkan conflicts), the U.S.—as perceived by the PRC—was able to transmit a range of false messages and inaccurate information to undermine Iraqi resistance, using both Iraqi and other frequencies.



End of Part 1


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> *American Strategic Communications and Public Diplomacy Policy*
> 
> The PRC's interpretation of basic press coverage reflects a fundamentally different view of the relationship between the media and the government. That the PRC would see the major news networks as adjuncts, never mind agents, of American policy suggests that an underlying Chinese assumption is that the press exists to influence rather than inform the audience. This is obviously a fundamental misreading of the role of the Fourth Estate.
> 
> Yet it is ironic that the PRC should express such concern about American public diplomacy, strategic communications, and media policy, given the restrictions and limitations imposed on the ability of the U.S. government to inform as well as influence global opinion.
> 
> *First*, the American strategic communications effort is declining amid a global information explosion. Despite the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors' (BBG) 2012-2016 Strategic Plan, which called for such programs as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia to be part of the "world's leading international news agency" by 2016, the BBG's offerings are shrinking. Efforts to reach audiences in Pashto and Dari (key languages in Pakistan), Tibet, and Bangladesh, among others, are being scaled back even as Chinese investment, broadcasts, and overall presence increases in each region.
> 
> This decrease in America's strategic communication channels, coupled with the spike in PRC broadcasts, has sparked bipartisan concerns. For example, Representative Zoe Lofgren's (R-CA) recent letter to the BBG questions the decision to consolidate Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, echoing concerns expressed by Representatives Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)[21]
> 
> *Second*, even these limited efforts are hampered by outdated restrictions, such as the Smith-Mundt Act. The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, first enacted in 1948, was intended to counter Communist propaganda. Specifically, it codified how the United States could engage in public diplomacy, authorizing international broadcasting efforts such as the Voice of America and promoting cultural and educational exchanges with the rest of the world through the State Department.
> 
> Concerned about the potential for governmental misuse of this set of powers, Smith-Mundt prohibited the domestic dissemination of any materials intended for foreign audiences; in short, U.S. public diplomacy was not to be employed where it might feed back to an American audience. While this was viable in an age of radio and TV broadcasts, the rise of the Internet and a global information system effectively stymies most forms of strategic communications and public diplomacy, at least in the context of Smith-Mundt.
> 
> Meanwhile, military psychological operations, or what is now termed military information support operations (MISO), are also facing possible budget cuts. In May of this year, for instance, Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) tabled an amendment to reduce MISO-related funding by nearly one-third[22] In the face of Chinese public opinion warfare efforts, such massive reductions cripple the U.S.'s ability to influence others.
> Chinese Lessons and Possible Approaches
> 
> As a result of their observations of the second Gulf War, as well as their own views of the principles of public opinion warfare, PLA analysts now advocate that such warfare must be considered within the larger context of the overall goals of a conflict.
> 
> An essential lesson that the PLA seems to have derived from the second Gulf War is that to truly rival the U.S., it must attempt to counter the American advantage in global access and coverage. As one Chinese article puts it, propaganda guidelines should seek to establish news dominance (xinwen quan) and information dominance (xinxi quan) on the path to obtaining psychological dominance (xinli quan)[23] In this regard, the Chinese seem to be committed to developing a much more efficient strategic communications infrastructure. Starting in September 2011, for example, the Chinese Foreign Ministry began to offer daily press briefings instead of the twice-weekly ones that were begun in 1995. Earlier that year, the Defense Ministry began holding monthly press conferences for the first time[24]
> 
> In this context, China's expansion of its global news coverage should be seen as part of the peacetime preparation for public opinion warfare. These developments include the creation of a 24-hour English-language global news service under the aegis of the government news agency Xinhua, as well as the expansion of state-owned China Central Television (CCTV) to a more global presence[25] Given the concern about shaping public opinion and the belief that such news organizations as CNN and Fox News are in the service of the U.S. government, it may well be that these new news entities are intended to counter Western news coverage by providing a Chinese view of global developments.
> 
> Similarly, although at a more subtle level, the expansion of the Confucius Institutes around the world may be seen as an attempt to alter the world's image of China[26] These institutes are often embedded within universities or secondary schools and are funded by the hosting institution and the Office of Chinese Language International, which is affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education. The Confucius Institutes promote Chinese language training but focus on "providing information about China's education, culture, economy, and society, as well as facilitating research on China."[27]
> Countering the PRC Soft-Power Surge
> 
> Chinese security planners are concerned that they are vulnerable to strategic communications and public diplomacy aimed at the general populace. Consequently, Chinese leaders warn about "cultural security" and are intent on building Chinese "soft power," both as a peacetime response to foreign pressure and as a potential tool in wartime.
> 
> America's response to this surge of Chinese "soft power," therefore, must take into account both peacetime and possible wartime applications. American efforts to shape and influence public opinion must be prepared not only to defend the United States by rebutting attacks, but also to take the offensive and promote America's positions to a global audience. Public diplomacy efforts will be essential in both cases[28]
> Like the PRC, then, the United States needs to influence foreign leaders and populations on a daily basis. This cannot be accomplished through momentary, ad hoc efforts; rather, the U.S. must present itself as a reliable source of information, available on a regular basis. The PRC, like other regimes, seeks to limit discussion and avoid the dissemination of information; the American interest is best served by the free flow of information, both in times of peace and in times of war.
> 
> In the event of a conflict, though, the U.S. needs to have available additional methods by which it can project American messages to an adversary's population and decision makers and rebut efforts to influence American allies and friends, as well as neutral states. In order to meet this requirement, current public diplomacy efforts should be overhauled and expanded. This reform should be a priority for the next Administration.
> In the meantime, there are steps that can and should be taken in the near term to show China and the world that the U.S. is serious about competing in the global marketplace of ideas. Specifically, the U.S. should:
> 
> *Demand visa parity for U.S. journalists and public access for U.S. broadcasters.* The PRC has several hundred journalists operating in the United States, most of whom work for state-owned media outlets. Yet Beijing is unwilling to grant reciprocal access to foreign journalists, including Americans. It should be American policy to demand comparable access for American journalists or else to reduce the size of the Chinese presence in the U.S.
> 
> *Fill public diplomacy leadership positions promptly.* The U.S. government needs officials who are accountable for carrying out a new public diplomacy strategy. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, for example, is currently operating with most of its members still serving on expired terms.
> 
> *Improve strategic communications and public diplomacy training for military public affairs officers.* The Chinese see public opinion as playing a key role in shaping the global and operational environment, and during any military conflict, they likely will strive to influence such sentiment. American military public affairs officers (PAOs) need to be cognizant of this and be suitably trained and prepared both to respond and, when possible, to seize the initiative.
> 
> *Sustain funding for MISO operations.* A review of Chinese assessments of American psychological warfare/MISO operations in recent conflicts indicates that the PLA and Chinese decision-makers in general are very concerned with the West's ability to propagate its message to both senior leaders and the broader populace in wartime as well as peacetime. For the United States to reduce spending in this area unilaterally, especially when total MISO-related spending is about $250 million (equivalent to the cost of two F-35 fighters), would seem to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
> 
> *Conclusion*
> 
> The information era provides unparalleled access to both a nation's leaders and its population. The PRC has made clear that, in the event of a conflict, it will exploit that access to try to influence an adversary in hopes of winning a war without firing a shot. Even today, during a time of peace, the PRC is laying the groundwork for such soft-power operations. It is therefore essential that the United States counter that influence now while preparing to use its own arsenal of political warfare weapons should a conflict ever arise.
> 
> — *Dean Cheng* _is Research Fellow in Chinese Political and Security Affairs in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation._




I agree, broadly, with Mr. Cheng's characterization of *how* the Chinese see both public opinion and propaganda and how they see the *permanent* mix of civilian and military aims and resources. I take no issue with his prescription for US action.

But we must remember that the Chinese _attack_ on public opinion is not confined to the USA or the US led West. I call the Chinese _attack_ the *"global charm offensive"*; so do some Chinese officials.


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## a_majoor

I am curious if the Heritage Foundation has done a similar analysis on Chinese _Soft Power_ offenses vs the Islamic world, Europe or Africa. If the Chinese really are effectively targeting other civilizations (in the Samuel Huntington sense) then perhaps the Heritage Foundation is on to something. Robert Kaplans writing on the _String of Pearls_ strategy may be an example of this.

OTOH, the Chinese have also pulled a lot of ham handed moves. People as varied as Diane Francis in the National Post and Kirkhill on Army.ca have commented on how predatory Chinese companies and policies alienate the very people they are working with.

Over all, I expect the Chinese to discover the world is far more varied and unpredictable than they would like, and the Chinese leadership will have their share of success, failure and just plain WTF moments as the future unfolds.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not sure about _Heritage Foundation_ scholars but there are several pretty good books out there including:

Generally, Soft Power: China's Emerging Strategy in International Politics, Li, (ed), Chen _et al_ (contributors); and, 

More to the point, Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World, Kurlantzick


----------



## Edward Campbell

channelnewsasia.com (a Singapore TV _superstation_ covering (by satellite) the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia and Australia) reports that China will participate in RIMPAC 2014. They quote US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who is visiting China, as saying that the US "welcomes" the Chinese decision to accept the US invitation ~ something the PLA Navy has yet to announce, formally ... in English, anyway.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ian Bremner speculated on a Sino-American *Cold War* is this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Time_:

http://world.time.com/2012/11/28/what-if-there-was-a-cold-war-between-the-u-s-and-china/


> What If There Was a Cold War Between the U.S. and China?
> 
> By World Economic Forum
> 
> Nov. 28, 2012
> 
> _This is a “what if” interview from the World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network. To view the rest of the series, click here._
> 
> We’re already seeing a return to Cold War era containment strategies as the relationship between the world’s two largest economies deteriorates, argues Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group and author of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with TIME, quizzed Bremmer on the nature of U.S.-Chinese tensions and what can be done to soften them.
> 
> *Why is the specter of U.S.-China confrontation so real?*
> 
> We’re in a situation where the world’s largest economy is not doing so well, the world’s second largest economy is still growing very strongly, albeit at a slower rate, and the two countries have totally incompatible economic and political systems. The relationship between China and America is only becoming more problematic. In the foreign policy debates ahead of the US presidential elections, Obama referred to China as an “adversary” for the first time. It’s not just about political posturing. China is the single biggest challenge to US foreign policy, in that Americans mostly see foreign policy in terms of how it impacts the American economy, and China is increasingly a market that many people believe is not playing by the rules, from intellectual property to state capitalism to cyber attacks.
> 
> Similarly, in Chinese state media, you’re seeing much more assertiveness, more talk of the Americans trying to contain China, the Americans “not wanting us to be world beaters”, “not wanting us to be number one”. There’s no question that the Americans and the Chinese at the highest level do understand that it’s dangerous for both countries to allow their relationship to be a disaster, so they’re trying to avoid unnecessary conflict. But the problem isn’t really unnecessary conflict—it’s that the necessary conflict over huge structural issues like currency and trade is building up.
> 
> *What warning signs have you seen?*
> 
> There’s the massive increase in tensions between China and Japan: in the last few weeks, there were anti-Japan demonstrations in about 100 cities in China, Japanese car sales in China were down 49% last month, and every CEO I spoke to at the recent IMF meeting in Tokyo said that this issue would dramatically change their view on doing business in China. This is significant because, ultimately, America is Japan’s defence policy: they have a strategic alliance, so if there is a problem between Japan and China, we know where the US is going to come down.
> 
> *How does China’s holding of U.S. government debt affect the relationship?*
> 
> The Japanese are actually on track to become the largest holder of US debt, externally, not China. China is trying to decouple from the dollar. If you look at what they’re doing in building domestic consumption and expanding South-South trade, then it’s clear they want to be in a position where there’s less mutual dependence with America. But that’s a long way off, and China is still very much America’s banker.
> 
> *What about China’s political succession?*
> 
> In China, you don’t have strong individual leaders, you have government by consensus, so as a consequence the actual composition of the leadership is not going to influence foreign policy too much. What you do have are a lot of moving pieces. There’s the Bo Xilai scandal, there’s the way Xi Jinping disappeared off the scene for a couple of weeks: these things cause all kinds of rumours, and then the government becomes more risk averse as a result. Both because of the political transition and the slowdown – globally and in China – Chinese government officials are less willing to take risks, and those risks include the transition of their economy and their  political system towards more structural reform. That’s what’s needed for China to have a better relationship with the US, and it’s absolutely not happening.
> 
> *If the relationship were to deteriorate further, how would this happen?*
> 
> It’s already becoming a new kind of cold war. What this means is that the Americans and the Chinese will be frenemies. They’re not going to become enemies, because that’s not possible, but they’re not friends any more, either. All of America’s allies are very much afraid of China’s rise, so they’re begging the US to play a more significant role in Asia. You can see what the Americans are doing in response: in South Korea, they sign a new ballistic missile deal, in Indonesia they send over fighter aircrafts, in Australia they send a whole bunch of marines to Darwin, and on and on. There have been lots of joint military exercises in Vietnam and the Philippines. Then there’s also the question of cyber attacks: China is America’s principle enemy in this area, and vice versa.
> 
> The big question is to what extent all this is going to bleed over directly into the economic relationship. It’s already starting to, in that a lot of American firms are saying “We don’t have the access we used to into China, and furthermore the Chinese are stealing all our stuff.” As the Chinese firms get larger, that will start to have a greater impact on trade. The Doha round of international trade talks was meant to include China, but that’s dead, and China isn’t part of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. On a big strategic level, all this is increasingly looking like cold war, like containment.
> 
> *What would be the next phase?*
> 
> You’d start to see more tit for tats on new trade tariffs, and new sanctions between the two countries. America would press its allies much harder to align their investment policies with the US. You’d start to see US corporate leaders publicly coming out and taking an anti-China perspective, while the Chinese would be more aggressive about the need to work away from the dollar as the reserve currency.
> 
> On a cultural level, in America you would see fewer Chinese students, fewer Chinese people buying properties there. And Lord knows, there is always the potential for xenophobia: you only have to think back to the Japanese internment camps. Anti-Chinese sentiment would be a dangerous and an ugly thing, especially if you continue to have this growing divide between the rich and poor. On the other side, it’s not unthinkable that a Chinese government under pressure domestically would push anti-American sentiment as a palliative.
> 
> *The original Cold War was a clash between two clearly opposed ideologies. Is that the case here?*
> 
> America’s ideology has not fundamentally changed, though it’s not as palatable or powerful as it used to be. It’s all about individual freedoms and liberties, democracy and free market enterprise. Over recent years, the U.S. has taken many hits on this, whether you look at the financial crisis, or human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, or the incredible power of corporate interests in its elections. But having said all that, you still can’t compare where the U.S. stands on these issues and where a country like China does.
> 
> China has no rule of law. It is an authoritarian political system and a state capitalist system. It’s not as if the Chinese are publicly promoting the notion that everyone should be authoritarian or that everyone should be state capitalist: Chinese ideology is about the Chinese state. It does not develop allies based on shared values; it develops allies based on shared interest. This is not true for the US: of course it has allies based on interest, but historical allies based on shared values play an oversized role, whether we’re talking about Britain and the US, or Israel and the US.
> 
> *In this context, what would be the equivalent of a Cuban missile crisis?*
> 
> Either a massive cyber attack, or the United States stepping in to defend the Japanese if they got into a conflict with China over contested territories. But there we’re talking about a cold war spilling over into a hot war, and I think the likelihood of that is very, very low, because national security today is driven much more by economics rather than geopolitics.
> 
> *How well prepared are we for the challenges of a new cold war?*
> 
> We’re not. The old, US-driven institutions like the G20 are no longer functioning adequately.
> 
> *What are the solutions?*
> 
> Don’t allow the great to be the enemy of the good. Allow more manageable, smaller organisations with more like-minded countries and more like-minded actors (like corporates, NGOs and individuals) to provide some form of leadership to respond to these issues. Ultimately, if the US is going to have a productive relationship with China, which is what everyone wants, you have to have strong baseline organisations that the Chinese want to join. When the WTO was created, nobody thought that China would ever be a member, but it became so strong and inclusive that the Chinese decided that the opportunities of joining outweighed the risks. We need institutions in place that will become attractive to the Chinese government, as their population gets wealthier and more people would support the rule of law. Ultimately, you need to create the kinds of clubs that the Chinese feel they need to join.




It must be remembered that China is *not ideologically driven*. It acts and reacts based on its own assessment of its own _interests_. We, the rest of the world, can engage with China based upon a _balance of interests_ ... or not.

It should also be remembered that there are factions in the USA - the famous _military-industrial complex_, for example - for whom a new cold war would be a good thing. The Chinese equivalent doesn't need external pressure; China is committed to _strategic_ power growth in its region and globally.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This is a long and fairly technical report from the respected _Conference Board_ - it's too long to post here - but the message is *"Economic activity may pick up a bit in short term, but downward trend in growth appears intact."*
> 
> No one, no on in their right mind, anyway, ever thought that China could sustain 10%+ growth year after year and, indeed, decade after decade, but the questions are:
> 
> 1. In the longer term ~ how low can Chinese growth go without losing the all important, for government, _social harmony_ and, consequently risking a revolt? and
> 
> 2. In the short term ~ hard or soft landing?
> 
> My guesses:
> 
> 1. With better governance China can survive like most developed countries with modest growth (3-4%) in good years, punctuated by occasional recessions, but the "better governance" is a lot more complex and difficult than it looks; and
> 
> 2. Soft landing ... this time.
> 
> BUT: if either of my guesses is wrong, and there is a very good chance that either or both will be, then revolution and civil war is the most likely outcome.




Maybe some near term good news: according to a report in the _Globe and Mail_ that _"two separate purchasing managers’ indices ticked up last month: an official state measure released over the weekend reached 50.6, a seven-month high, while a separate tally by HSBC hit a 13-month high, at 50.5."_

Over the years PMIs have proven to be pretty good indicators of economic performance and, despite the Chinese propensity to fudge data for domestic political purposes, these two are close enough to inspire a little bit of confidence in the notion hat China will, indeed, be able to manage the desired "soft landing."


----------



## The Bread Guy

CNOOC-Nexen deal OK'ed in late Friday afternoon announcement.....


> "The federal government is severely limiting any future investment by foreign state-owned enterprises in the Canadian energy sector despite approving two long-awaited takeovers Friday evening.
> 
> The Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, better known as CNOOC, will be allowed to buy Calgary-based Nexen after agreeing to a strict set of requirements demanded by Ottawa exclusively by this bid.
> 
> CNOOC, which offered to buy Nexen for $15.1 billion, will have to keep certain parts of its operations in Canada and agree to rules on employing Canadian.
> 
> The Chinese oil giant will swear to work by “free market principles” as well as file an annual compliance report to Industry Canada, the department responsible for handling foreign takeovers.
> 
> “Under existing guidelines, (CNOOC’s) proposed transaction to acquire control of Nexen is likely to be of net benefit to Canada,” said Industry Minister Christian Paradis in a statement issued Friday.
> 
> Petronas Carigali Canada Ltd, another petroleum behemoth but this time owned by the Malaysian government, will also be able to follow through on its purchase of Progress Energy Resources Corp, Paradis stated Friday.
> 
> Petronas has to agree to conditions similar to CNOOC’s – they include rules around governance, transparency and commercial orientation – but they will not have to file a report every year like the Chinese company ....



.... with some possible effects south of the border?


> China's biggest offshore oil and gas producer may have to give up control of drilling platforms 80 kilometres from a major US military base to win government approval for its US$15.1 billion purchase of Canada's Nexen.
> 
> A US panel reviewing the national security implications of the deal might be seeking to curb access by CNOOC to those Nexen platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, said Stewart Baker, a former Department of Homeland Security official.
> 
> "Typically, the national security concern is if the target company is within close proximity of a military installation where there is training or testing conducted," said Farhad Jalinous, a lawyer specialising in deals that are reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS).
> 
> In the past three years, the committee has blocked at least three transactions that would have resulted in Chinese companies gaining control of assets near military facilities.
> 
> CNOOC and Calgary-based Nexen said last month they had agreed to withdraw and resubmit their application to the committee on the US part of what is mostly a Canadian transaction.
> 
> Discussions with the interagency committee, headed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, were continuing, Nexen said ....



PM's 5:15pm statement (links to media advisory alerting media of statement time/place) on this attached - more from Google News here.


----------



## a_majoor

Given the prominence of Chinese State Owned enterprises in the news lately, here is a look at how nominally "private" Chinese companies operate. The fact that a Chinese company is investing in an American "State Owned Enterprise" is somewhat ironic, but the more interesting thing to me is the underlying structure of the Chinese company in question, and their relationship to the State:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/12/10/terence-corcoran-obamas-fisker-cliff/



> *Terence Corcoran: Obama’s Fisker cliff*
> 
> Terence Corcoran | Dec 10, 2012 8:19 PM ET | Last Updated: Dec 10, 2012 8:27 PM ET
> More from Terence Corcoran | @terencecorcoran
> 
> Battle of U.S. SOE vs. Chinese SOE
> 
> As Canada struggles with Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), U.S. President Barack Obama is looking at his own SOE problem: state-operated entrepreneurialism.
> 
> The perfect case-study for the battle of the SOE economic models may well be Fisker Automotive Inc., the California-based electric car maker that is now desperately searching for more cash to stay afloat. The maker of the flashy US$110,000 Karma sports car has received almost US$200-million through Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus program, but the company burned through that money long ago. Fisker was originally tagged to receive US$529-million in loans as part of the administration’s electric car push, but the government has cut funding.
> 
> So if Fisker needs money, could a Chinese buyer be the answer? It appears to be for a Fisker-related enterprise, lithium battery maker A123 Systems — another Obama-based enterprise — apparently sold over the weekend to Wanxiang Group, a Chinese conglomerate.
> 
> A123 received US$133-million of promised US$250-million in U.S. grants in part to help it build a battery plant that would supply Fisker with batteries. Once valued on the market at US$2-billion, A123 now is said to be worth less than Wanxiang is paying for it. It ran into numerous problems, including a recall of the lithium batteries it supplied to Fisker.
> 
> The recall was a blow to both companies, although it was not the only cause of their rapid decline. A Wall Street Journal story summarized Fisker’s numerous challenges, including suspension of production of the Karma and delays in starting up another electric vehicle. “If A123 doesn’t start shipping batteries, Fisker’s inventory of vehicles on dealer lots will disappear by spring.”
> 
> The Fisker and A123 corporate meltdowns are two in a growing list of failed Obama ventures into state-operated entrepreneurialism. Many are related to green energy and environmental enterprises that have proven to be uneconomic. Other U.S.-funded battery and solar technology firms, including high-profile ventures such as Solyndra, have lost billions.
> 
> The arrival of Wanxiang as A123’s buyer is ironic, to say the least, an rare international mating of enterprises that have depended on state backing. While not state-operated enterprises, they both grew out of dependence on government support and financing.
> 
> Wanxiang Group is headed by Lu Guanqui, a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who — according to official company history — began the business as a tractor-repair shop in rural China in the late 1960s. A PowerPoint on the corporate website shows a 1969 photo of a small building described as “A view of Ningwei People’s Commune Agricultural Machinery Repair Factory.”
> 
> Today, with Mr. Lu as chairman, the Wanxiang Group is China’s largest automotive parts supplier and counts Ford, General Motors and other major auto firms as customers.
> 
> Wanxiang’s expansion into the United States, with headquarters in Chicago, began in the 1980s, according to a Harvard Business School profile of the company, Wanxiang Group: A Chinese Company’s Global Strategy. Its first link to America was through Zeller Corp., but it now has several plants — including solar facilities that are dependent on U.S. government grants and aid.
> 
> Early this century, however, Wanxiang began to see its future in electric vehicles, a plan that dovetailed with the Obama administration’s state policy objectives.
> 
> Like A123 and Fisker, Wanxiang is also locked in as a state-backed enterprise, receiving low-rate loans from the Chinese government to help it expand abroad. But Mr. Lu is said to have realized that China’s state-owned enterprise system would be unproductive. He became a pioneer what the Harvard paper calls the “contract system.” According to the Harvard profile, Mr. Lu personally guaranteed to submit a fixed annual payment to the government of Ningwei village (with an annual incremental increase of 20%). In return he would have exclusive management rights over the factory for three years.
> 
> In the 1990s, Wanxiang embraced state influence. Wanxiang is a private giant conglomerate, with operations in many sectors of the Chinese economy. Here’s the Harvard paper’s description of what happened, under the subhead “Embracing State Influence.”
> 
> Wanxiang had become a private enterprise in 1994 after spinning off its automotive-parts division, Wanxiang Qianchao, through an initial public offering on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. But the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was still evident in all aspects of the company’s operations. First, Lu had become a member of the CCP in 1984. Lu’s only son, Lu Weiding, who later became president of the company in 1994, was first admitted to the party as one of the alternate members of the central committee of the Communist Youth League around 2000 and then gained full membership in 2007. Also, CCP officials occupied prominent positions within management, particularly in the areas of human resources and corporate administration. Yang Yanle, general manager of the Work Office of the Party Committee, explained how the CCP organization worked in a private enterprise: “Enterprises operating on Chinese soil are under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The party is an advanced organization and represents the excellent staff and citizens of the society. We will try to gather all the “advanced members” as the core of the sub-branch of the party and make them contribute to the success of the ­enterprise.
> 
> It’s hard to know exactly how this structure is deployed at Wanxiang. Did the company, China’s biggest state-supported auto-parts maker, have to get approval from Communist party headquarters before it bid US$260-million to buy A123 Systems, the U.S. state-supported battery maker?
> 
> What appears to be playing out in these and other transactions involving Chinese and U.S. companies is a battle of state-owned entrepreneurialism. Mr. Obama, through his fixation on green power and electric vehicles such as Fisker, has pushed the state into the same business as the Chinese are getting into.
> 
> So far, one would have to conclude that China is winning the contest — but only on the assumption that Chinese government agents are better at picking economic winners than American government officials. The long-run history of Chinese government planning and decision-making under Communist party rule suggests the game isn’t over yet. It may be a battle between two versions of a disastrous economic model.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_, is a somewhat dated (summer 2012) but still interesting article by A. Greer Meisels of the _Centre for the National Interest_:

http://thediplomat.com/2012/07/27/what-china-learned-from-the-soviet-unions-fall/


> What China Learned from the Soviet Union’s Fall
> 
> By A. Greer Meisels
> 
> *Why the process of assessing blame for the collapse of the USSR is still a hot topic in Beijing*
> 
> In a major speech on July 24, 2012 China’s President, Hu Jintao, called for the country to “unswervingly” carry out reform and opening up and to fight against rigidity and stagnation.  This follows on the heels of other calls (Premier Wen Jiabao’s being the most notable) to continue the reform process in China.
> 
> Why the increasing vociferousness?
> 
> China is gearing up for one of its historic leadership transitions which will culminate in the 18th National Party Congress some time this fall. This begs the question, how will the transition affect the future trajectory of China, its economy, and its people?
> 
> The ascendancy of China’s new “fifth generation” leaders has led me to ruminate on the topic of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) resiliency. In spite of everything, the CCP has managed to stay in control, and I might dare say flourish, though most of its communist brethren have ended up in the dustbin of history. In fact as of today, there are (not including the PRC) only four remaining communist regimes – North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba.
> 
> But all has not been “smooth sailing” for the CCP… far from it. One of the Party’s favorite mantras is that it values stability above all else and seeks to build a harmonious society, yet official and unofficial statistics continue to show an exponential increase in the number of protests within China’s borders. This keeps questions regarding what is in store for the CCP at the forefront of discussions about China’s future.
> 
> *What is China’s Secret?*
> 
> I am not an alchemist and therefore cannot turn hypotheses into fact. However, I would hazard a guess that the secret to China’s success is that there is no secret; rather the Chinese Communist Party has simply been much more adept and successful at tweaking the foundations on which its present day legitimacy is based. And China’s neighbor to the north provided it with some of its most valuable lessons. By this of course I mean the former Soviet Union.
> 
> The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century. Communism, as an ideology and as a form of government, and its manifestation in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its Soviet satellites (particularly in Eastern Europe), was an “evil” which the Western world, led by the United States in the Cold War, could rally against. It was also a “model” which other communist countries and governments, particularly the CCP could use to bolster and legitimize their own communist experiment.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when the USSR’s decay led to outright collapse, few countries were as concerned by these events as the PRC. After all, the Soviet Union was the birthplace of the world’s first, and to date, still longest socialist experiment, and as such, China’s own modern political history and development were deeply influenced by it. It was, and still is, critical to the survival of the CCP to determine how to avoid a similar fate.
> 
> Last year was the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse and so it seemed to be an appropriate time to step back to analyze some of the different schools of thought that emerged in China during, and soon after, these tumultuous years. However, after reviewing many of these new materials and determining that there is not one uniform or monolithic view in China about the reasons why the Soviet Union became undone, three major viewpoints do seem to dominate the Chinese discourse. What I call “The Three Blames”: “Blame the Man,” “Blame the System,” and “Blame the West.” And it seems that everyone loves to play the blame game.
> 
> *Blame the Man*
> 
> For many in China in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and even until today, assessing blame for the Soviet Union’s collapse begins and ends with a single individual, Mikhail Gorbachev. This view seems to resonate most strongly with China’s more conservative leftists. During the height of Gorbachev’s reform efforts, there were people who argued that “within the CCP and within China intense ‘ideological struggle’ would be waged against Gorbachev’s ‘revisionism.’” Of course, since the Communist Revolution of 1949 few, if any, labels are more dreaded than “revisionist.” Even as recently as last year, the “Blame the Man” school of thought was en vogue. On March 1, 2011, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) released a new book, Preparing for Danger in Times of Safety: Recollections on the 20-Year Anniversary of the Collapse of the Russian Communist Party (居安思危: 苏联亡党二十年的思考), which concludes that the root cause of the collapse of the CPSU was not the Russian socialist system itself, but rather the corruption of the Russian Communists led by then-President Gorbachev.
> 
> The debilitating affects of corruption are manifesting themselves in China today, so it’s no wonder that the CCP certainly in word, if not always in deed, seems desperate to wage war against this dreaded foe.
> 
> *Blame the System*
> 
> A second influential camp comprised of more liberal or reform-minded individuals saw the impetus of the collapse as being systemic – not a flaw in the socialist model itself, but rather in how it was executed in the Soviet Union. These people blamed domestic causes such as economic stagnation, mismanagement, excessive dogmatism and bureaucratic ossification for the Soviet Union’s collapse. These problems were certainly not solely the result of Gorbachev-era policies, but like a cancer that had been allowed to metastasize, spread over time throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
> 
> One could see why this “Blame the System” idea would gain traction with reform-minded Party members in China. After all, many of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were an effort to combat just this sort of stale, stagnant thinking. It is interesting that Hu’s latest speech also cautions against such perils.
> 
> *Blame the West*
> 
> The “Blame the West” camp differentiates itself from the other two because it seems particularly consumed by fear of the United States’ policies and influence in the region. In fact one of this camp’s overriding concerns is that Washington would use its power to step up pressure on China to initiate regime change. Articles appeared in places like the People’s Daily and Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po stating that the CCP was fearful of growing influence by “aggressive” Western powers as well as of outward signs of Party disunity. (No doubt an issue that is on the leadership’s minds today given the recent events surrounding the now disgraced Bo Xilai.) These sentiments are still echoed and diatribes against American hegemony often find their way onto many a Chinese Op-Ed page.
> 
> *“The Soviet Union’s Today will be Our Tomorrow”: Not if they can help it*
> 
> Yet more interesting than mere identification of these “Three Blames” is determining to what extent they influenced CCP policymakers and policy. At one level, one of the major outcomes within China’s elite politics circles is that Deng Xiaoping and the reformist agenda were declared the de facto winners over China’s more conservative forces led by Chen Yun, the Chairman of the CPC Central Advisory Commission at the time.
> 
> However, in addition to this “factional” win, there were some very real policy shifts, or at the very least, policy adjustments, that took place because of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Some of these include China’s replacement of the Soviet model of multinational state-building with its “one nation with diversity” policy, and its institution of the patriotic education campaign to try to shore up CCP legitimacy. Another area where policies may have been implemented to quiet critiques from the “Blame the West” camp is in China’s increased development of its social welfare policies. Pensions, the minimum livelihood guarantee, the “New Socialist Countryside,” and healthcare reform in the form of medical insurance, are all intended to strengthen the “socialist” claims of the PRC as an alternative model to the unbridled capitalism of the West.
> 
> Looking at CCP reactions to the collapse of the Soviet Union and attempting to understand how they chose to intuit these “lessons learned” seems to demonstrate that the CCP has been engaged in a continual learning process culminating in a type of policy-planning plasticity. Each of the “solutions” the CCP came up with to militate against Soviet-style collapse addresses some area where they found the Soviet Union to be lacking. Perhaps China’s most important lesson was how to become an adaptive authoritarian regime when so many people had lost faith in Marxism-Leninism, the socialist economy, and communist orthodoxy.
> 
> My question is: How long will this tree continue to bear fruit for the CCP?
> 
> _A. Greer Meisels is the associate director and research fellow for China and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest._




First: I tend to fall into the *Blame the* [Soviet] *System* camp and, therefore, my answer to her question is: the "tree" will "bear fruit" as long as the Chinese can keep, gradually, _reforming_ China in ways that directly benefit the Chinese people. That's what Deng Xiaoping did: he removed the obstacles that stood in the way of ordinary Chinese people's progress towards a better life for themselves and their children. To a greater oir lesser degree that's what Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao did, too. See William Easterly's (pessimistic) comments in this video (first 10 minutes) about what might happen when or if the Chinese leaders stop _reforming_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A good example of _soft power_ at work in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Pulitzer Center_:

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/uganda-chinese-government-doctors-medical-teams-aid


> Chinese Medical Teams Bring More Than Just Doctors to Uganda
> 
> Published December 21, 2012
> 
> KATHLEEN E. MCLAUGHLIN, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER
> 
> The acupuncture ward inside Kampala’s newest hospital does not have an open bed to spare.
> 
> A lone Chinese doctor busily scurries from bed to bed, inserting and turning the long acupuncture needles, checking placement and keeping a careful eye over her patients – most there for pain relief. With a wide grin creeping from behind her sanitary mask, Dr. Zhang Yu laughs when asked if she’s busy. She stops for about three minutes to remove her mask, pose for a photo, then hastens back to work.
> 
> The eight-member Chinese medical team sent to Kampala, Uganda's capital, a year ago by the Chinese government is booked solid, each routinely seeing 20 patients or more every day. They are specialists, led by urologist Cao Guihua, and their mission is more than medical. They are here to build goodwill among Ugandans for China.
> 
> “We are sent by the government,” says Cao. “It’s a kind of political mission by the Chinese government to African countries to build political friendship between the countries. Of course it’s working.”
> 
> “The Chinese teams started in 1963 – they started in Africa and Asia, several different countries,” explains Dr. Cao. “Africa is just one place China has doctors.”
> 
> There are 42 Chinese medical teams working in Africa today, and Cao’s is the 15th to work in Uganda.
> 
> “It’s a volunteer mission, some people enjoy the climate,” says Cao. “For me, the Chinese medical team sends different specialists and my specialty was needed here.”
> 
> “I like it,” he says simply. “So I came here. I like the country, I like my career.”
> 
> Cao and the other doctors are the foot soldiers in China’s soft power efforts in Africa. Their medical expertise, often more advanced than what can be found locally, is well-known and sought-after. For the doctors, working in Africa is a chance to see diseases they don’t normally deal with, but have only read about. Malaria, for example, has been all but eradicated in China but remains one of the top killers in Uganda. So the doctors make adjustments, hone their treatment skills, and as employees of the Chinese government offer treatment services for free.
> 
> The Chinese doctors at Naguru Hospital are part of China’s biggest yet medical donation to Uganda, a country sorely lacking in facilities and trained healthcare professionals. The hospital, built by China and donated to Uganda at an estimated cost of $10 million, remains largely understaffed and overcrowded since it opened earlier this year. Hospital administrators say one wing of the facility hasn’t opened yet, and they admit there were problems early on in making the equipment work with local electricity supplies.
> 
> As for the doctors, they may be bringing in more than just medical supplies. About an hour outside the Ugandan capital, in a city called Jinja, local radio advertises a private Chinese pharmacy that sells medications one can’t buy elsewhere. The original plan called for China to build a hospital in Jinja, but it was relocated to Kampala instead.
> 
> The building, tucked off of Jinja’s main road is basically a storeroom for medications carried in by Chinese medical workers and sold out the back door for profit, according to the pharmacy manager. He says associates of the Chinese medical team bring in potions, teas and full-strength pharmaceuticals for sale to the locals. Ugandan officials say it’s unclear whether the operation is actually legal, but it does add an element to the endeavor that goes beyond goodwill.




Ms. McLaughlin describes the Chinese medics as "foot soldiers in China’s soft power efforts in Africa." That's not completely accurate: they are one of the main forces along with teachers and film distributors. Soft power runs the whole gamut from images on TV of Shanghai skyscrapers to medical teams in rural areas. The AIM is to make the world see China as a leader, as a successful, sophisticated country that others admire and who "lesser" countries want as a friend, maybe even as a protector. Soft power is done best when, as with US sot power in the 1950s and early '60s, it is done unconsciously. US soft power after about 1965 and Chinese soft power today are not the "best" because they are contrived.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Yesterday, in a different thread (Grand Strategy for a Divided America) I posted an article from _Global Asia_ by Michael McDevitt, RAdm (ret'd), USN, who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in Alexandria, Virginia. That article assessed the US' _Asian pivot_ strategy with particular attention to China.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act, also from _Global Asia, is a rebuttal of sorts:

http://globalasia.org/V7N4_Winter_2012/Wu_Xinbo.html



Not Backing Down: China Responds to the US Rebalance to Asia

By Wu Xinbo

December, 2012

*Predictably, the last US presidential election campaign featured the usual competition between candidates over who would be “tougher” on China, a ritual political exercise that is almost always followed by even greater American engagement with China once the new presidential term begins. 

Chinese officials know this well. But with its rebalancing toward Asia, could the US be on a path to conflict with China? Fudan University Professor Wu Xinbo examines China’s response to the new US strategy.*

At the beginning of US President Barack Obama’s first term, China welcomed the US administration’s intention to pay more attention to Asia in the conduct of its foreign policy. China felt the policy adjustment signaled US recognition of Asia’s growing economic and political importance as well as Washington’s desire to develop closer relations with the region, particularly with China, given its growing economic power and international influence. This initial view in Beijing was confirmed during US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit in February 2009 when she stressed the need for more co-operation between the two countries. Beijing saw further positive signs at the first meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Obama in April 2009, when the two sides agreed to develop a “positive, co-operative and comprehensive” relationship. 

However, as the Obama administration’s Asia strategy unfolded over the past four years, Chinese perceptions changed. China began to see in the so-called US pivot, or rebalance, toward Asia a shift of focus from economic and diplomatic engagement to one more centered on security issues. Beijing also could not help noticing what seemed to be a strong element of counterbalancing against China’s growing power and influence in the region. The concern peaked in the fall of 2011, when the Obama administration said that it would push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a top priority of its trade agenda (China is not a member of the TPP), announced its rotating military deployment of US Marines in Australia and tried to insert a security agenda into the East Asia Summit (EAS). 

*Countering the Pivot *

While concerned, Beijing was not alarmed or fearful. Instead, given the comprehensive rise in its national power in recent years, China feels more confident in confronting the US rebalancing strategy. Since 2012, China has taken a series of measures to deepen its dialogue with the US, launch diplomatic and economic initiatives in the region and dilute US political and security pressure. 

When senior Obama administration officials — Clinton, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — visited Beijing, their Chinese counterparts pushed them to explain the new US strategy and clarify American intentions. To be sure, the Chinese officials certainly didn’t believe all they were told, but the American explanations may have helped Beijing better understand the rationale behind the strategy and assess its possible impact on China. 

At the same time, China has also tried to shape the future contours of Sino-US relations by proposing to build “a new type of relationship between major countries” based on “no confrontation, no antagonism, mutual respect, mutual benefit.” From Beijing’s perspective, if China and the US are going to avoid repeating the tragedy of destructive past major power politics, they need to adopt new thinking consistent with the changing international circumstances of the 21st century, as well as with the deep interdependence between the two countries. Beijing has also tried to convince Washington that China is serious in sticking to the path of peaceful development, a choice determined externally by a globalized and interdependent world, and internally by China’s culture, history and fundamental national interests. 

In the face of the US push to accelerate TPP negotiations, China has so far neither expressed a willingness to join nor ruled out doing so in the future. Instead, Beijing has moved to enhance its economic co-operation with South Korea and Japan by launching negotiations for a China-Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and a China-Japan-Korea FTA. Despite a flare-up of Sino-Japanese tensions over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and a cooling down of their bilateral relations since September, the three countries agreed in November to open negotiations for a trilateral FTA. Meanwhile, China has also joined hands with member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand to establish the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which promises to become the world’s largest FTA, covering an area with a population of about 3 billion and combined economic output of $20 trillion. 

*Asserting Control in the South China Sea *

Further irritating China-US relations, in the summer of 2010, the Obama administration took a hands-on approach to the maritime disputes in the South China Sea, citing its concern over freedom of navigation in these waters. China reacted by rejecting the involvement of non-claimants to the disputes, suggesting that would only further complicate the problem. Beijing also tried to reassure Washington that hindering freedom of navigation was not part of its agenda and stressed that freedom of commercial navigation had never been a problem, implying that US concerns were either groundless or disguised other intentions. 

As both the Philippines and Vietnam try to take advantage of the US pivot to push their respective claims in the South China Sea, Beijing is applying a tit-for-tat strategy. For instance, in the spring of 2012, when a Philippine Navy ship harassed Chinese fisherman around Huangyan Island, which is known outside China as Scarborough Shoal, China reacted by taking a series of diplomatic, economic, law-enforcement and military measures against the Philippines and ultimately brought the island under its control. In the summer of 2012, when Vietnam passed its maritime law that claimed sovereignty over the Xisha and Nansha Islands, China responded by announcing the creation of Sansha City on July 24, a prefecture within Hainan Province that will administer the island groups and their surrounding waters in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, China’s ocean surveillance ships carried out a regular cruise lasting more than 10 days in the South China Sea region, and 30 fishing boats from Hainan went to the Nansha Islands to fish and engage in other production activity. By standing firm against the Philippines and Vietnam, Beijing is sending a signal to Manila and Hanoi that they should not expect to push China around in the South China Sea with US assistance. Beijing is also alerting Washington that China won’t bow to US pressure, either direct or indirect, on the South China Sea issue. 

From Beijing’s perspective, the US is also endeavoring, directly or through the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore, to push ASEAN countries to form a united front against China on the South China Sea. China is applying a two-pronged tactic to rebuff such attempts. On the one hand, it has urged ASEAN not to turn the South China Sea issue into a dispute between China and ASEAN as a whole, arguing that this is an issue only between China and some ASEAN member states who claim sovereignty over parts of the sea. Beijing has also reminded ASEAN that economic co-operation rather than the South China Sea disputes should be the main focus of China-ASEAN relations. 

So far, ASEAN seems to be heeding China’s argument. For example, the Chair Statement issued at the ASEAN Summit held in Phnom Penh in November 2012 stated that “[W]e agreed to work together to enhance favorable conditions for a peaceful and durable solution of differences and disputes among the countries concerned,” suggesting that it is not interested in involving countries who are not parties to the disputes, such as the United States. In addition, Beijing has persuaded some ASEAN countries with which it has close economic and political relations, such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, to work within ASEAN to stop the bloc from tackling the South China Sea issue with a united front. The effort appears to be working. In July 2012, the foreign ministers from the 10 ASEAN member nations couldn’t issue a joint statement after their annual meeting — for the first time in the history of the organization — due to disagreements over inclusion of the South China Sea issue in a final joint communiqué. 

*Power, Influence and the Future *

In response to the US application of more diplomatic, security and economic resources to Southeast Asia, in part to undermine China’s growing influence, China has stepped up efforts to strengthen ties with ASEAN countries, especially Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Such efforts include offering economic assistance, engaging in economic, military and security co-operation, stepping up diplomatic contacts and promoting cultural exchanges. To some extent, it was the US pivot that caused China to give even higher priority and devote more resources to the region. 

To be sure, an important element of the US rebalance strategy is to strengthen its military presence in the Western Pacific in order to cope with China’s growing military power and expanded naval activities in the region. China has responded by continuing to develop its “area-denial” and “anti-access” capabilities, so as to maintain a reliable deterrent against US forces within the so-called first island chain, which stretches from the Kuril Islands in the north to the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, mostly as a contingency in the event of conflict over Taiwan. At the same time, the Chinese Navy is dispatching its ships more frequently in the area, extending the parameters of its operations and power projection capabilities. 

Obviously, the Obama administration’s Asia pivot has brought more geopolitical and security pressure on China and intensified the competition between Beijing and Washington in the region. It has also encouraged other countries to assert their claims in territorial and maritime disputes with China, leading to more tensions in the South China Sea and the East China Sea over the past several years. Should the Obama administration in its second term continue to pursue an Asia strategy aimed at counterbalancing China’s rising power and influence, a heightening of Sino-US competition and regional instability will be inevitable. 

Given the changing regional circumstances, a US Asia strategy focusing on countering a rising China is neither sustainable nor feasible. A wiser US strategy should be based on the following: First, as China continues to pursue a peaceful rise and becomes more interdependent with the rest of the region, including the US, Washington should not view China’s growing power and influence as a challenge or threat to its interests, but rather as a positive force for regional stability and prosperity. Second, almost all countries in the region prefer to live harmoniously with both China and the US; even though some may rely more on China economically and the US militarily, they don’t want to choose sides between the two giants. Finally, if the US can work with a rising China to develop a pattern of interactions in regional affairs marked by shared power and responsibility, it will help prevent their relations slipping into a zero-sum game, thus better serving US interests in Asia in the long run. 

*Wu Xinbo is Professor and Deputy Director, the Center for American Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai.*

Click to expand...



This is an interesting point of view which assesses America as being seriously weakened in the East Asia/Western Pacific region. I think it is, from the Chinese perspective, too optimistic by half and I doubt the leadership shares it ... now. But I suspect that this reflects the situation Xi Xinping wants to hand over to his successor in about 2022._


----------



## Edward Campbell

Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, pens a somewhat pessimistic appreciation of the situation in East Asia in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Sydney Morning Herald_:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/caught-in-a-bind-that-threatens-an-asian-war-nobody-wants-20121225-2bv38.html


> Caught in a bind that threatens an Asian war nobody wants
> 
> December 26, 2012
> 
> *Opinion*
> 
> Hugh White
> 
> Creative diplomacy is urgently needed for a face-saving solution.
> 
> THIS is how wars usually start: with a steadily escalating stand-off over something intrinsically worthless. So don't be too surprised if the US and Japan go to war with China next year over the uninhabited rocks that Japan calls the Senkakus and China calls the Diaoyu islands. And don't assume the war would be contained and short.
> 
> Of course we should all hope that common sense prevails.
> 
> It seems almost laughably unthinkable that the world's three richest countries - two of them nuclear-armed - would go to war over something so trivial. But that is to confuse what starts a war with what causes it. The Greek historian Thucydides first explained the difference almost 2500 years ago. He wrote that the catastrophic Peloponnesian War started from a spat between Athens and one of Sparta's allies over a relatively insignificant dispute. But what caused the war was something much graver: the growing wealth and power of Athens, and the fear this caused in Sparta.
> 
> The analogy with Asia today is uncomfortably close and not at all reassuring. No one in 431BC really wanted a war, but when Athens threatened one of Sparta's allies over a disputed colony, the Spartans felt they had to intervene. They feared that to step back in the face of Athens' growing power would fatally compromise Sparta's position in the Greek world, and concede supremacy to Athens.
> 
> The Senkakus issue is likewise a symptom of tensions whose cause lies elsewhere, in China's growing challenge to America's long-standing leadership in Asia, and America's response. In the past few years China has become both markedly stronger and notably more assertive. America has countered with the strategic pivot to Asia. Now, China is pushing back against President Barack Obama's pivot by targeting Japan in the Senkakus.
> 
> The Japanese themselves genuinely fear that China will become even more overbearing as its strength grows, and they depend on America to protect them. But they also worry whether they can rely on Washington as China becomes more formidable. China's ratcheting pressure over the Senkakus strikes at both these anxieties.
> 
> The push and shove over the islands has been escalating for months. Just before Japan's recent election, China flew surveillance aircraft over the islands for the first time, and since the election both sides have reiterated their tough talk.
> 
> Where will it end? The risk is that, without a clear circuit-breaker, the escalation will continue until at some point shots are exchanged, and a spiral to war begins that no one can stop. Neither side could win such a war, and it would be devastating not just for them but for the rest of us.
> 
> No one wants this, but the crisis will not stop by itself. One side or other, or both, will have to take positive steps to break the cycle of action and reaction. This will be difficult, because any concession by either side would so easily be seen as a backdown, with huge domestic political costs and international implications.
> 
> It would therefore need real political strength and skill, which is in short supply all round - especially in Tokyo and Beijing, which both have new and untested leaders. And each side apparently hopes that they will not have to face this test, because they expect the other side will back down first.
> 
> Beijing apparently believes that if it keeps pushing, Washington will persuade Tokyo to make concessions over the disputed islands in order to avoid being dragged into a war with China, which would be a big win for them. Tokyo on the other hand fervently hopes that, faced with firm US support for Japan, China will have no choice but to back down.
> 
> And in Washington, too, most people seem to think China will back off. They argue that China needs America more than America needs China, and that Beijing will back down rather than risk a break with the US which would devastate China's economy.
> 
> Unfortunately, the Chinese seem to see things differently. They believe America will not risk a break with China because America's economy would suffer so much.
> 
> These mutual misconceptions carry the seeds of a terrible miscalculation, as each side underestimates how much is at stake for the other. For Japan, bowing to Chinese pressure would feel like acknowledging China's right to push them around, and accepting that America can't help them. For Washington, not supporting Tokyo would not only fatally damage the alliance with Japan, it would amount to an acknowledgment America is no longer Asia's leading power, and that the ''pivot'' is just posturing. And for Beijing, a backdown would mean that instead of proving its growing power, its foray into the Senkakus would simply have demonstrated America's continued primacy. So for all of them, the largest issues of power and status are at stake. These are exactly the kind of issues that great powers have often gone to war over.
> 
> So how do we all get out of this bind? Perhaps creative diplomacy can find a face-saving formula that defuses the situation by allowing each side to claim that it has given way less than the other. That would be wonderful. But it would still leave the deeper causes of the problem - China's growing power and the need to find a peaceful way to accommodate it - unresolved. That remains the greatest challenge.
> 
> _Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at ANU and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute._




I share Prof. White's view that this is, in some large measure, Chinese "pushback" against President Obama's Asia pivot. 

As our own Thucydides keeps reminding us: America is, at its base, a great sea power with a large army and China is a land power with a growing navy ~ that's why Gen Matthew Ridgway warned President Lyndon Johnson against further involvement in a land war in Asia: America cannot stretch it's land power too far without mobilizing the whole country. America can _contain_ and even _defend_ against any China territorial ambitions against Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and the Philippines but it is not prepared (nor, possibly, can ever be prepared) to defeat China in a conventional land war in Asia ~ and the effort to defeat China with nuclear weapons would redefine _phyrrhic victory_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And Walter Russel Mead provides another _strategic_ wrinkle in this piece which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of his blog _Via Meadia_:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/12/25/checked-in-the-west-russia-and-gazprom-look-east/


> Checked in the West, Russia and Gazprom Look East
> 
> December 25, 2012
> 
> Russia’s plans to use its energy reserves and the financial assets of Gazprom to establish greater control of the energy distribution in the EU have largely been checked, but that doesn’t mean an end to Russian ambitions. The buy-up of the state-owned gas monopoly in Kyrgyzstan is a significant step forward in Russia’s attempts to re-establish its authority in Central Asia.
> 
> At the peak of the Afghan War, the US was asserting a strong interest in countries like Kyrgyzstan which provided important logistical support for the war. But if and as the US presence in Afghanistan winds down, American interest in Central Asia is likely to subside. This part of the world is very remote from us, and neither its energy resources nor its geography make it vital to our interests once the Afghan War is concluded. We share many interests with both Russia and China in this part of the world: we’d like to see an orderly and successful development of its energy wealth and the establishment of capable governments and prosperous societies as a way to block radicalism.
> 
> The big question is whether Russia and China see eye to eye in the region, and if so for how long. Russia’s attempt to increase its influence to the west has been checked, increasing the allure of the old Soviet zone. And China’s attempts to establish its hegemony in the South China Sea seem to have backfired. Both countries have historical claims to influence in this part of the world, and both have strong incentives to network its energy resources into their own systems. The emergence of new political patterns in Central Asia is one of the things to watch in the next stage of the Game of Thrones. Will China and Russia manage to reach an accommodation in this region, or will their competition set them at odds on other questions? It is much to soon to tell, but the gas deal in Kyrgyzstan looks like a point scored for the Kremlin.




Other than the Palestinians (about whom the quip was coined) no country, it seems to me, is so consistently able to "never miss and opportunity to miss an opportunity" than Russia. While the _Gazprom_ deal in Kyrgyzstan may be a "point" for Russia, I remain convinced that Russia will, sooner rather than later, manage to screw everything up and that Eastern, and maybe even Central Siberia will, by mid century, be _de facto_ Chinese colonies and that the _'Stans_ and their resources will be in China's _sphere of influence_.

(Note: China doesn't want any more people ~ above all it doesn't want *any* Muslims or non-Sinic people. Are they racists? Yes!)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2

Kevin Rudd, who has been Australia's foreign minister and prime minister, too, brings an interesting perspective to the Sino-American _strategic waltz_ in this speech, given to the Chinese National Defense University and reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Mr. Rudd's _blog_;

http://www.kevinruddmp.com/2012/12/its-time-for-new-shanghai-communique.html


> IT’S TIME FOR A NEW SHANGHAI COMMUNIQUE THE NEED FOR A NEW STRATEGIC ROADMAP FOR CHINA-US RELATIONS
> *Address to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army National Defense University*
> 
> Friday, 28 December 2012
> 
> It is a great honour to address the Chinese National Defense University.
> 
> I am aware of the deep historical connection between this university and the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).  As a student of Chinese history, I am also aware of the extraordinary history of the PLA since 1927.  In particular the military feats of the Red Army during the Long March and later the Eighth Route Army during the Japanese occupation.
> 
> My father also was a professional soldier who fought in the Pacific War against Japan.  As a child, he told me many stories from the war.  These were terrible times in China's history, in Asia's history and in Australia’s history.
> 
> China has changed remarkably since I began studying Chinese at the Australian National University in 1976.  Chairman Mao was still alive.  The Cultural Revolution had not concluded.  And our Chinese language text books also taught us to study Dazhai, to study Daqing and to study Lei Feng and Dong Cunrui.
> 
> Since then I have lived in China, worked in China and visited here about 100 times over the years.  As a scholar, a diplomat, a businessman, a Secretary-General of a provincial government, a Member of Parliament, as a Foreign Minister and as Prime Minister.  I have personally seen the changes unfold in this country.  I have also seen these changes from these many different perspectives.  And my conclusion is that these changes have been overwhelmingly good both for China and the world.
> 
> China has now become a middle income country with rising living standards and hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty.  China has just brought about a successful leadership transition.  And increasingly China is regarded as a great power both in the region and the world.  This has all happened over the last 35 years.
> 
> It has been made possible because of strategic decisions taken by Deng Xiaoping.  Also because of a peaceful, stable and generally prosperous regional and global environment.  Our core challenge is to do what is necessary to preserve this international environment for the future.
> 
> The purpose of my address today is twofold.  First to discuss the future of the regional and global order as seen from different capitals: from Beijing, from Washington and from the other capitals of Asia.  Second, based on these different perspectives, can we build a new strategic roadmap for China US relations under President Obama and President-elect Xi Jinping?
> 
> *The View from Beijing*
> 
> The world and the region as seen from China is often very different from that which is seen from other countries.  This is not just because of different interests.  This is not just because of different values.  It is also because of different historical experiences and perspectives.
> 
> The beginning of wisdom is to understand the different worldviews of others.  And as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore recently said in his address to the Central Party School, the world now carefully scrutinizes China’s every action as its foreign and domestic policies invariably affect other countries in the region and the world.  For the rest of the world, this is not just of theoretical interest.  It is of real, practical interest.
> 
> This is because China in the next decade is likely to become the world’s largest economy.  It is because China is now pursuing a more assertive bilateral and multilateral foreign policy.  And because China's military modernization (conventional, nuclear and cyber-space) is relatively rapid.  So, given the rapid change in Chinese capabilities over the last several decades, the region and the world have a legitimate interest in China's worldview.
> 
> I am often asked about this around the world.  The ten points I make here today are the same as the ones I make in conferences around the world.
> 
> First, I believe China's worldview is shaped by the continuing central role of the Party in a political system which explicitly rejects the western democratic model.
> 
> Second, within that system, the PLA answers to the Party, not the government or the state.
> 
> Third, the fundamental responsibility of the Party and the army is to maintain the territorial integrity of the country.  This means a strong approach to separatist movements in Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan.  It also means asserting China's territorial claims along its disputed borders.
> 
> Fourth, the core task for the Party and the government for the decade ahead is to transform China's economic growth model.  This new model is outlined in the last Five Year Plan and the 18th Party Congress Work Report.  China recognizes that its economic success so far has depended on the internationalization of its own economy and access to global markets.  But for this next economic transformation to occur, China still needs a stable strategic environment.
> 
> Fifth, China also continues to need secure long term access to long term supplies of energy and raw materials.
> 
> Sixth, despite these clear economic objectives, and despite China's desire for a stable strategic environment to serve those objectives, China in fact has a difficult relationship with many of its neighbours.  This is seen in North East, South East and South Asia.  China also sees this as part of a pattern of US alliances and strategic partnerships both in Asia and beyond.
> 
> Seventh, China sees US actions as part of a de facto policy of containment.  China believes the intention of this policy is to frustrate China's peaceful rise.  China does not accept the "China threat" thesis.  China emphasizes the historical record that even when China has been powerful in the past, it has no history of invading other countries.  Instead, China argues that it wants to build a harmonious world based on the principle of mutual advantage.
> 
> Eighth, China's worldview is also driven by its historical experience.  Including its hundred years of foreign humiliation.  And its natural desire to resume its proper role as a great power, as in the past.
> 
> Ninth, China resents the fact that the current global order was created by the Anglo Saxon victors after the last World War.  China does not accept multilateral criticism on human rights and climate change.  China does not accept criticism of its relationship with states like North Korea, Syria and Sudan.  China does not believe this criticism is fair because of its longstanding policy of mutual non-interference in one another’s internal affairs.  China argues that the principles of mutual non-interference and national sovereignty are core parts of the UN Charter.  China argues its voting pattern in the UN Security Council is driven by these longstanding principles.
> 
> Finally, despite these difficulties with the UN system, China is under pressure to contribute more to the UN as a "responsible global stakeholder."  China argues that it is still a developing country.  Nonetheless, China is now doing more in the world in areas such as peacekeeping and in development of what it calls south-south cooperation.
> 
> It is, of course, impossible for a foreigner to attempt to describe the region and the world as seen from Beijing.  And this list is undoubtedly flawed and incomplete.  But I believe it gives some sense of China's view of the opportunities and obstacles it sees today in the current regional and global order.
> 
> *US Perspectives on China's Rise*
> 
> You will not be surprised to learn that the world as seen from Washington is a little different.  The United States is also profoundly shaped by its historical experience.
> 
> America sees itself as the decisive power that determined the outcome of two World Wars in the last century.  The US sees itself as having paid a great price for this in "blood and treasure."  The US then built much of the post war order that has preserved the global peace.  And this strategic stability has underpinned the age of post-war economic prosperity.  The US then saw the collapse of the Soviet Union after a half century of Cold War.  For the last twenty years the US has seen itself, and been seen by the world, as the world’s only remaining superpower.  It may seem strange here in Beijing, but the US sees its global leadership role as both a privilege and a burden.
> 
> The US has been profoundly affected by the events of September 11.  The war against terrorism has dominated much of US domestic and foreign policy over the last decade.  The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq have had a deep impact on America’s perception of its future global role.
> 
> American economic self-confidence was badly affected by the Global Financial Crisis.  Five years later, the United States is still recovering from this crisis.  Many now debate whether the financial and economic model that created the crisis is appropriate for the future.  But despite this there is still an overwhelming sense of American economic self-confidence; that economic renewal and recovery will occur.  There is little sense in the United States that its days as either economic or military superpower are coming to an end.
> 
> This is the broad framework in which the United States sees the rise of China.  The United States is very conscious of China’s strengths.  It is also very much aware of China’s weaknesses.  The United States deeply respects China’s formidable economic achievements over the last third of a century.  It respects the formidable work ethic of the Chinese people.  It respects China’s strategy in laying out basic economic infrastructure across the entire country.  It also respects the pace of China’s military modernisation.
> 
> Like China, however, the US questions the sustainability of China’s current economic growth model.  It questions the environmental impact of this model.  It also challenges China’s adherence to intellectual property rights and whether China is always playing by the international trade rules.
> 
> The United States, together with the rest of the West, also believes democracy is a universal value.  In the case of the United States, this is underlined by what is called “American exceptionalism”.  This is well described in Henry Kissinger’s latest book “On China”.  American exceptionalism is their belief they have a moral responsibility to propagate democratic ideas into the world.  For this reason, democracy and human rights will continue to be areas of disagreement with China.
> 
> In Asia, the US believes that China is now competing for traditional US strategic dominance.  The US is aware that China is the major trading partner of most of the economies of Asia.  America is also aware that China has obviously extended its scope of political, cultural and economic diplomacy across Asia, Africa and Latin America.  America has also looked with concern at the level of regional tensions arising from border disputes, both in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
> 
> In my view, by far and above, America’s greatest regional concern is North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  No one should underestimate the political and strategic significance of North Korea’s most recent long-range ballistic missile test.  This has focussed the minds of the entire region, most particularly Washington, Tokyo and Seoul but also more widely in the region, including in Australia.  The US will continue to ask China to do more to restrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program because this program represents a fundamental challenge to long-standing regional stability.
> 
> The Obama administration has sought to redefine its strategic engagement in Asia in five different ways
> 
> First, the so-called “rebalance” of its military assets to Asia.
> 
> Second, the American decision to join the East Asia Summit.
> 
> Third, America’s support for the extension of the trans-Pacific partnership to include Japan and possibly China.
> 
> Fourth, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, engaging in active bilateral diplomacy in all the capitals of Asia.
> 
> Fifth, the continuation of the Bush Administration’s strategic engagement with India.
> 
> The goal of the Obama Administration is to demonstrate to the entire region that America intends to remain an Asia-Pacific power in the 21st century.
> 
> America recognises that the centre of global economic gravity has moved to Asia.  America also recognises that the centre of global strategic gravity will follow.  As the world’s remaining superpower, the US sees itself as responding naturally to these global shifts, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Europe to Asia.  The US also sees itself as having provided much of the underpinning strategic stability in both maritime and mainland Asia in the past.  This in turn is seen as fundamental to Asia’s great economic success story in recent decades.  The US also believes that its treaty relationships with Japan and Korea have prevented both from becoming nuclear weapon states in the face of the North Korean threat.
> 
> For these reasons, the United States sees itself as having a central role in underpinning the strategic stability of Asia for the future as well.  Importantly, the five measures I refer to above have been welcomed in practically all of the capitals of Asia.
> 
> *The rise of China as seen from the rest of Asia*
> 
> Asia’s economic and strategic future does not depend on China and the United States alone.  There are 18 member states of the East Asia Summit.  In South East Asia, China’s rise is seen as both an economic opportunity and a foreign policy challenge.
> 
> The economic opportunities speak for themselves.  The Chinese economy is now deeply integrated into most of the economies of East Asia.  If the Chinese economy was to stop tomorrow, economic growth across Asia would collapse the day after.  This is a simple statistical reality.
> 
> But on the foreign policy front, questions are asked in many Asian capitals about the foreign policy implications of the 18th Party Congress Work Report.  For example, will China seek to consolidate its broader influence in Asia? Also, does the protection of China’s interests in the maritime domain represent a new element in China’s foreign policy formulations?  Furthermore, does China intend to use its international influence to reform the current international order and if so in what direction? These are the questions asked in many Asian capitals today.
> 
> China’s foreign policy engagement across South East Asia had proceeded smoothly until about 2010.  From that time on, a number of South East Asian states have expressed concerns about China’s assertion of its territorial claims in the South China Seas.  For the record, Australia has always remained neutral on these questions.
> 
> North East Asia boundary questions have also emerged with both Korea and Japan.  This has also resulted in an increase in foreign policy tensions in the region.  Some have argued that the election of President Park and Prime Minister Abe provides a fresh opportunity for a fresh start.  Based on my understanding of Japanese domestic politics, the internal politics of the LDP and the stated positions of Shinzo Abe, I do not agree.
> 
> In fact, I am deeply concerned about a generational change in Japanese attitudes towards China and what that means for the future.  I’m also concerned about the possibility of Japan installing meteorological devices on the disputed islands.  I’m also concerned about the likely Chinese reaction to such a step.  Just as I am concerned about the temperature of public opinion in both countries.  I have studied the relationship between these countries for all of my professional life.  But I have never seen it as bad as this.
> 
> There is of course one major strategic bright spot in wider East Asia.  And that is the issue of Taiwan.  Decisions taken in both Beijing and Taipei over the last four years have contributed significantly to the stabilization of cross-strait relations.  In fact, cross-strait relations are in better shape now than at any time since 1949.  And this is excellent news for regional stability.
> 
> But despite the good news on Taiwan, what we tend to see as the general trend across Asia is two competing forces at work.  One is the force of globalisation.  The second is the force of nationalism.  The force of globalisation brings economies, peoples and countries closer together.  The forces of nationalism tend to tear economies, peoples and countries apart.  Globalisation is the force of the 21st century.  Nationalism is the leftover force of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Globalisation has become a positive force.   Nationalism has increasingly become a negative force.  And nationalism is spreading across Asia.
> 
> But if we in Asia want to have a different future to the European experience of the 19th and 20th centuries, then we will need to do things differently.



End of Part 1 of 2


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> *Future directions for the Asian hemisphere*
> 
> So what then is to be done?
> 
> What I have attempted to do in this address so far is to describe different perspectives on strategic reality from Beijing, Washington and the rest of Asia.  I have not tried to define who is right and who is wrong.  That does not help anybody.  Nor does it help solve common challenges.
> 
> So how could we craft a common future together as opposed to a future based on conflict?
> 
> The end of 2012 has seen three very different electoral processes take place for the world's three largest economies.  President Obama was re-elected in the United States and will hold office until early 2017.  Xi Jinping was appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission where he will remain until at least 2017.  He is also likely to retain those positions, as well as the Presidency of China, until 2023.  And then on 16 December in Japan, nationalist LDP leader Shinzo Abe was elected in a landslide as Prime Minister.  This will Japan’s eight Prime Minister since 2001.  But given the size of his super majority in the Japanese lower house, he now has a reasonable prospect of serving a full four-year term.
> 
> I argue that much of the future of East Asia will be determined by the decisions taken in Beijing, Tokyo and Washington over the next four years.  There are two broad strategic approaches available.
> 
> The first is what I call “strategic drift”.  Under the “strategic drift” scenario, Beijing, Washington and Tokyo will simply seek to “manage” each issue as it arises.  This is both a passive strategy and a reactive strategy.  Also, because the issues in these relationships are increasingly difficult, issue management will become increasingly difficult.  Issue management is also likely to increasingly overwhelm the strategic fundamentals of China-US relations in particular.
> 
> The alternative is an active strategy of strategic cooperation.  Some argue that the core problem in China-US relations is an absence of trust and that trust must be re-established before cooperation can occur.  I believe in the reverse logic.  The only way to build trust is by undertaking active projects of cooperation and concluding them successfully.  That way, trust is built on cooperation and success.
> 
> I believe there is some interest in Washington in using these next four years to develop a new strategic framework for the China-US relationship.  I have also noted very carefully what General Secretary Xi Jinping has said about the need for a “new type of great-power relationship”.  In particular with the United States.
> 
> This was emphasised by Xi Jinping during his visit to the United States in February this year.  Specifically, China has emphasised that this “new type of great-power relationship” should not be based on the old types of great-power relationships that we have seen in Europe in the past.  These old style great-power relationships were based on hegemonic relations which often ended in conflict and war.
> 
> Instead, Xi Jinping argued in the United States that a new relationship with the United States should include increased strategic trust, deepened mutually beneficial cooperation, and enhanced cooperation and coordination on global issues – as well as respecting one another’s core interests.  Furthermore, at a Tsinghua University forum in July this year, Xi Jinping noted that “a country must let others develop as it seeks its own development; must let others feel secure as it seeks its own security; must let others live better when it wants to live better itself”.
> 
> I would argue that these also represent useful concepts for the further development of China-US relations.  I therefore believe there is an opportunity to try and bring US and Chinese strategic thinking together on this subject.
> 
> I argue that President Obama and President Xi need to outline a five year US-China strategic roadmap.  In the absence of such a strategic roadmap, there is a real danger of strategic drift.  Such a strategic roadmap could provide both central organising principles as well as a practical work program within both administrations.
> 
> The Chinese often complain about United States’ policy being inconsistent both within and between administrations.  The United States often complains that the Chinese government does not always speak or act with the full engagement or compliance of the Chinese military.  A US-China Strategic Roadmap would assist in removing some of these uncertainties and ambiguities.
> 
> Further, I would recommend seven elements to such a roadmap for the future.  These are virtually the same as those I argued in Washington last week when I addressed the Brookings Institution.
> 
> *First*, President Xi and President Obama need to meet regularly with all the key members of their respective staff.  These individuals need to become highly familiar with each other. At present they are not. This should involve three to four sets of substantial engagements scheduled regularly throughout each calendar year.
> 
> Fortunately the G20, APEC, the UN General Assembly (and possibly the East Asia Summit) provide opportunities for regular engagement.  But these need to be substantive half or full day engagements around a long term structured agenda – that is a strategic roadmap – not just the protocol requirements of the day or, for that matter, the issue management of the day.  As these regular summits tend to occur in the second half of the year – there should also be agreement for a regular bilateral summit in one another’s capitals in the first half of the year.
> 
> *Second*, both President Xi and President Obama need to have an undisputed “point person” to be the ultimate “go to” person on the relationship.  At the United States end, this should mean the National Security Advisor or a senior official within the National Security Council (NSC) who can speak comfortably across the Administration, and with authority. At this critical juncture of US-China relations, America needs the next Henry Kissinger for all the back-channelling that is necessary, both behind and between official Presidential meetings.
> 
> Similarly China needs its own Henry Kissinger as well.  The Chinese system does not have a NSC. It needs one.  In the absence of an NSC, it needs a senior official who can speak across the political, security and economic agenda with authority.  Trust between these two individuals on the United States and China sides is critical.
> 
> *Third*, globally, the United States and China should embark on a realistic program to make the current global rules-based order work.  Increasingly it doesn’t. We are all familiar with the impasse over Syria which is not likely to be resolved in the near term.  But in other critical blockages in the UN System (e.g. the Doha Round, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation) both the United States and China have an interest in demonstrating that the rules-based order can work – and can deliver real results.
> 
> Furthermore, a new period of Sino-US strategic cooperation will also make the G20 work more effectively given the complex array of global financial and global macroeconomic challenges that lie before us.  As China becomes the world’s largest economy, a properly functioning G20 becomes even more important.  Both China and the United States should identify at least one of these areas of potential global cooperation which together they can drive to a successful global conclusion.  This would also demonstrate to one another and the world that they can in fact make the global rules-based order work.
> 
> *Fourth*, regionally, a new US-China Strategic Roadmap should embrace the principles of how to build a new rules-based security order for East Asia.  I outlined this in an address to the Asia Society in New York earlier this year and again in late September at the Singapore Global Dialogue.  The latter in particular details a range of specific measures of how we can create a new Pax Pacifica which is neither a new Pax Americana by another name, nor a Pax Sinica.  This involves working and agreeing on the strategic and conceptual language of such a regional rules-based order.
> 
> Language is particularly important so that strategic concepts are made comprehensible in both countries and the rest of the region.  For example, western concepts of collective, multilateral security cooperation can be made compatible with Chinese concepts of strategic harmony and balance.  Almost a foreign policy equivalent of the “The Golden Mean” (Zhong Yong).
> 
> Apart from language, however, a Pax Pacifica should also include basic principles of regional security cooperation.  As well as specific confidence and security building measures that help facilitate dispute resolution as well as prevent conflict through miscalculation.  The East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting +8 provides a readily available mechanism for doing this work.
> 
> *Fifth*, bilaterally, the US and Chinese militaries need a much closer working relationship.  At present, there is a formal strategic and security dialogue at Deputy Defence Minister, Deputy Chief of General Staff, Deputy Foreign Minister level.  This should be elevated to ministerial and Chief of General Staff level.  The purpose of this bilateral, security dialogue should be to develop confidence and security-building measures between these two important militaries.  This should focus on service-wide protocols for avoiding and managing incidents at sea and incidents in the air.
> 
> *Sixth*, beyond political and security cooperation, at the economic level a new US-China strategic roadmap should include a trans-Pacific partnership that should seek to include Japan, and in time, China and India.  A genuine free trade area in the Pacific would help harness all the positive forces of economic globalisation that has helped change much of the region for the better so far.
> 
> APEC has made extraordinary progress over the last 25 years.  Nonetheless APEC does not include India.  We now need to go to the next stage with regional economic integration.  Here the East Asia Summit may also be useful because it includes India and also has a political, security and economic agenda.  This would also provide a further, proactive positive agenda of work for the US-China relationship to focus on.
> 
> *Finally*, a new US-China strategic roadmap should also be consolidated into a new “Shanghai Communique” between China and the United States. It is now almost a third of a century since the last communique was produced.  This occurred at the very beginning on Deng Xiaoping’s program of reform and opening.  China’s economic and strategic circumstances have changed significantly since then.  The Cold War that underpinned US and Chinese strategic collaboration in the 1970s and 1980s is now over.  Therefore, the time has come to frame a new communique which deals with the new economic and strategic circumstances of the 21st century.
> 
> *Conclusion*
> 
> Foreign policy priorities are always a choice between the urgent and the important.  The challenge of China-US relations represents both.
> 
> I have recently been reading a book by Christopher Clark entitled The Sleepwalkers – How Europe Went to War in 1914.  It is a cautionary tale of how the Europeans drifted into a conflict that slaughtered millions, brought down empires and destroyed an entire civilisation.  The book chronicles how the leaders of Europe, “who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, in fact behaved like sleepwalkers, stumbling through crisis after crisis and finally convincing themselves that war was the only answer”.
> 
> I sometimes wonder whether we in Asia have properly reflected on the centuries of large-scale killing that Europe endured.  And on Europe’s conclusion 1945 that enough was enough and that it was time for a new European and global order.  I for one do not believe there is anything determinist about history.
> 
> What we now need is unprecedented foreign policy creativity.  The purpose of this foreign policy creativity is to place the China-US relationship in a new strategic framework.  We need to reconceptualise problems we face into opportunities which will benefit us all.  And then develop a concrete program of policy action to give these ideas practical effect.
> 
> The reengineering of strategic mindsets is arguably our core challenge.  If we and our friends in America just simply conclude that conflict is somehow inevitable in the long-term, then the prospects are grim indeed.  If, however, we are capable of engineering an alternative mindset which is neither utopian nor delusional, but instead seeks to maximise cooperation and minimise conflict, within the overall principles of an agreed strategic framework, then we are capable of changing the course of history.
> 
> Australia is a country whose most important economic partner is China and a country whose oldest continuing ally is the United States.  As former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia, my purpose today is to leave these proposals with you in the hope that the United States, China and Australia, in partnership with the other countries of our wider region, can in fact build a truly Pacific century together.
> 
> _Posted by Kevin Rudd_




First: I agree, wholly, with Mr. Rudd's ten point "view from Beijing." That is, as far as I understand it, how China *a)* operates and *b)* sees the world.

Second: while I agree, broadly, with his "view from Washington," when he says e.g. that "America's respects China's rise" what really means to say is that "America fears China's rise and its newfound power because both challenge American hegemony and because, in 2012/13, America is unable to move decisively to counter China." China is a challenge to America's strategic position in Asia and, perhaps more importantly, to America's own self perception. But, China is also an excuse for some factions in America to continue with a ruinously expensive defence procurement regime.

Third: I agree, again broadly with his "view from Asia."

Fourth: I agree that America and Japan are "drifting," passively, from crisis to crisis, in a reactive mode; *but* I don't think China is any of adrift, passive or reactive. 

I think his seven "prescription" points are fair enough but, in my opinion, based more on wishful thinking than reality.

All that being said: there's lots of food for though in Mr. Rudd's speech.


----------



## Nemo888

If you are a Sinophile this site is a great read IMO.

http://chinhdangvu.blogspot.ca/


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

Nemo888 said:
			
		

> If you are a Sinophile this site is a great read IMO.
> 
> http://chinhdangvu.blogspot.ca/


Seems rather harsh  and confrontational upon first glance, but thanks for the link. Definitely worth some perusing.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Xinhua reports that China will build a new, higher capacity, four lane bridge to North Korea in 2013/14.

My understanding, which my be wrong, is that the DPRK has held up construction for many, many years ~ fearing that a new bridge would make it too easy for China to invade.  :-\


----------



## tomahawk6

They might be right.


----------



## tomahawk6

Found by a former CIA analyst while using Google Earth in China's Kashgar Desert.

http://tinyurl.com/am4536y


----------



## a_majoor

Instapundit joked (?) it is the Chinese ORION project (the 1950's version of ORION, where nuclear bombs were detonated under massive steel pusher plates to propel a spacecraft into orbit and then on to Mars).

Weirdly, it reminded me of the Nazca Lines in Peru, although these are certainly not mythical or animal figures in the Chinese desert.


----------



## a_majoor

Long and interesting article on China's pension program(s). The effects of the "one child" policy and cultural factors will make China's experience through the age bust different in many ways than Europe and Canada's (the United States, despite its economic problems, still maintains a replacement level birthrate).

http://thediplomat.com/2013/01/11/has-china-become-an-entitlement-society-too/?all=true



> *What Happens When China Goes “Gray”?*
> 
> January 11, 2013
> By Mark W. Frazier
> 
> Developed economies are beginning to struggle with aging populations and more retirees. China may soon join them.
> 
> 
> As China's major trading partners try to control rising public pension and health care costs, they may not realize they also have an important stake in China's ongoing struggle to fashion a safety net for its own rapidly aging population. Many observers assume China has no pensions or healthcare insurance for the 185 million people over the age of 60 (13.7% of population), the highest official retirement age for most workers. They may well believe this explains why Chinese families save so much–more than 30% of household income–and therefore spend less on consumer goods, including imports from trading partners.
> 
> But this line of reasoning is faulty because China already has large and rapidly growing public pension and health insurance programs in the cities, and is in the process of extending them to rural areas. It's time that China's trading partners, especially the United States, understand what this means for China's economic future and, by extension, their own.
> 
> For all the criticism of outgoing President Hu Jintao for presiding over a “do-nothing” administration, he did manage to oversee a substantial increase spending on China's public support systems.As a result, pensions have now become the most expensive function of the Chinese government—which already spends a lot on infrastructure, housing and defense. In 2011, pension expenditures rose to 1.28 trillion renminbi (RMB, U.S.$205 billion), up from only 489 billion RMB in 2006. These and civil service pensions cover only about half of those over age 60, but at current rates of growth universal coverage—and vastly higher expenditures—are not far off. The number of urban workers (including migrants from rural areas who in theory are in the cities temporarily) contributing to the public pension system now exceeds 290 million, while rural pensions are also growing rapidly. With so many new people paying in, the government's future pension obligations are rising quickly. A recent report issued by the Bank of China and Deutsche Bank estimated that China’s pension system will have a U.S.$2.9 trillion gap between assets and liabilities by the end of 2013. By 2033 the gap is expected to reach U.S.$10.9 trillion, or 38.7% of GDP.
> 
> What happened in the past decade or so to cause China, with an annual per capita income of around $5,000 (adjusted for purchasing power), to begin to acquire pension burdens found in richer and heavily indebted industrial states? What will this mean for trading partners who keep urging the Chinese government to rebalance its economy toward greater consumption (and imports) and away from relying so heavily on exports?
> 
> Essentially what happened is that Beijing designed a pension system in the late 1990s that will leave households with much less to spend than many observers assume. Urged by World Bank economists and foreign pension experts, the Chinese government put in place a hybrid pension arrangement that relies on both traditional pay-as-you-go collections from employers and mandatory individual accounts, from which workers were to finance anywhere from one half to two-thirds of their retirement needs. (They also were expected to buy pension and annuity products from commercial providers). But that pension design has resulted in a double whammy: households consume less in order to save for retirement needs, while the government's long term pension debt is escalating rapidly because local governments raided the individual accounts to pay benefits to current retirees.
> 
> The central government has tried to prevent local governments from tapping current pension assets, but has done so only by allowing them to accumulate further debt. Moreover, many local administrations bristle under the requirement that pension assets must be invested in low-interest bonds and bank deposits. Don't be surprised if future pension scandals like the one that rocked Shanghai in 2006 are exposed as local administrations seek a higher, though riskier return on their pension assets.
> 
> As China's population ages, scholars and officials are seriously considering proposals to phase out the one-child policy that is beginning to curb the flow of new workers into the economy, as well as raise retirement ages (currently 60 for men, 5 or 10 years earlier for women). But such adjustments are just as politically difficult in China as in in Western democracies because, as it turns out, not wanting to work longer is a widely held preference. Many Chinese also view the relatively early retirement age as a way to make vacancies for the millions of young people who enter the labor market each year. If older workers continue working into their twilight years, young workers may encounter greater difficulty in trying to find employment. This would pose its own issues for the country.
> 
> What does all this mean for the Asian, European, and American economies that trade with China? First, they should understand that China's aging problem is a slow-motion fiscal crisis. China is not Greece, but local debt burdens are already enormous, and these calculations do not include the mounting pension obligations that local governments have incurred. Just as in America and Europe, the tendency in China is for local officials running state-level pension funds to ramp up current benefits and let future generations pay for them. China's National Social Security Fund is the largest in the world at $150 billion, but these assets (some of which are permitted to be invested in stocks) still fall well short of the liabilities racked up by provincial and city pension funds.
> 
> Second, we should realize that as China moves towards universal pension and medical coverage (a likely prospect under its 2010 Social Insurance Law), the effect on household savings will be limited. True, families may no longer need to save for the high costs of catastrophic illnesses. But it is quite plausible that any reduction in household savings arising from the new safety net will be offset by mandatory payments by both workers and employers into the new welfare programs. In other words, don't count on the new safety net to rebalance China's economy, because it won’t give discretionary income much of a lift. This means that countries that have large bilateral trade deficits with China should not expect a turnaround at some uncertain date when Chinese households suddenly have imagined new spending powers.
> 
> Finally, we must consider the larger implications aging has on China and major economies such as the United States, Europe, and Japan. Aging trends don’t make the decline of these economies inevitable, of course, but it is time to calibrate expectations. Aging will curb or even reduce household consumption, which is the primary driver of Chinese exports to industrialized economies and what many hope will fuel future exports to China. All these governments need to find ways to slow the growth of health care and pension costs. In the United States and China, for example, insurance and other financial services providers (state-owned in China) make large profits on fees and other administrative charges for handling the funds that pass through their accounts. Cutting these costs is essential. More broadly, all these societies will be compelled to rethink the outdated notion that work is over and retirement begins at some arbitrary age defined by law.
> 
> Aging and the policies to cope with a graying population are first and foremost domestic issues, but, as is so often the case, the consequences of Beijing’s pension policies will resonate far beyond its borders. Those who manage economic relations with China should focus less on trade deficits and exchange rates and spend more time thinking through the long-term implications of aging, and what it will mean for patterns of trade and investment among the world's largest economies.
> 
> Mark W. Frazier is Professor of Politics and Co-Academic Director of the India-China Institute at the New School.and the author of: Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (2010).


----------



## Nemo888

Are we really short sighted enough to sell controlling stakes in our strategic national resources to a country that has a massive military infrastructure for live harvesting organs of thousands of it's own citizens annually?


http://chinhdangvu.blogspot.ca/2013/01/organs-seized-from-uyghurs.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not sure how well document this story is, but it is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Business Insider_:

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-buys-tu-22m3-david-cenciotti-the-aviationist-2013-1


> China's Buying A Fleet Of Russian Bombers Perfect For Taking On The US Navy
> 
> David Cenciotti and Richard Clements, The Aviationist
> 
> Jan. 20, 2013
> 
> Chinese websites are again reporting that Russia has agreed to sell Beijing the production line for the Tupolev Tu-22M3 bomber at a cost of $1.5 billion.
> 
> Once in service with the Chinese Naval Air Forces the Tu-22M3 will be known as the “H-10″.
> 
> The deal struck with Russia includes 36 aircraft: a batch of 12 followed by a second batch of 24 additional bombers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _The Aviationist__
> 
> The Tu-22 will be employed in the maritime attack role and used to attack targets from low levels to avoid radar detection.
> 
> The Tu-22 is a Soviet supersonic, swing-wing, long-range strategic and maritime strike bomber. It was developed during the Cold War and is among the closest things to a modern stealth bomber. However, it will get updated with indigenous systems and an extended range making it a significant threat to many latest generations weapon systems.
> 
> That's even more true if the deal with Russia includes the Raduga Kh-22 (AS-4 ‘Kitchen’) long-range anti-ship missile, in which case this could be a significant change in the strategic balance of the region.
> 
> The Tu-22 bombers will give China another tool to pursue the area denial strategy in the South China Sea and the Pacific theatre; a fast platform to launch cruise missiles, conventional or nuclear weapons in various regional war scenarios.
> 
> In other words, a brand new threat to the U.S. Navy in the region._


_


More on the TU-22M3 Backfire C here.
_


----------



## larry Strong

Thats going to raise the stakes some.



Larry


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm beginning to think I am wrong about the Diaoyu Islands dispute: neither China nor Japan seems willing or able to back away from their hard line, frankly ridiculous, public positions and _settle_ on something akin to the eralier, sensible, Chinese proposal of joint _management_ (resource (oil) exploration and development) while (peacefully) debating sovereignty.

I think (fear actually) that soon ships will "bump" shots will be fired a ship will sink, some aircraft will be downed and all hell will be very close to breaking loose.

My guess (hope?) is that one _incident_ will be enough for the cooler heads in both Beijing and Tokyo to regain control of the agenda but there is a _joker_ in the deck: the USA which has a nasty habit of making mountains from molehills.


----------



## tomahawk6

Something has to give.The PRC cannot claim sovereignty over any island they please.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese are, in many instances, on the wrong side of the UNCLOS which they, unlike the US, have signed, so they are basing their claims on history. It's a stretch, but in the case of the Diaoyu Islands the argument against the US handing the islands over to Japan (1971) might have some merit.

But it is a murky situation: too many countries have overlapping claims in the region ~ no one has any friends.


----------



## cupper

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Something has to give.The PRC cannot claim sovereignty over any island they please.



They can have St. Pierre and Miquelon. :nod:


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting piece, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _China Digital Times_, a California based news aggregator, reflecting the Chinese leadership's concerns about their position:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/01/leaked-speech-shows-xi-jinpings-opposition-to-reform/


> Leaked Speech Shows Xi Jinping’s Opposition to Reform
> 
> January 27, 2013
> 
> While a recent crackdown on wrongdoing by officials has encouraged those who want to see an end to official corruption in China, hopes are diminishing over the prospects for more substantive political reform under incoming president Xi Jinping. A speech Xi gave in December has recently been distributed inside the Party and appears to indicate that Xi will not encourage any systematic reforms that will threaten the leadership of the Party. Seeing Red in China has translated an essay by veteran journalist Gao Yu, who spent time in prison after the 1989 protest movement, in which she analyzes Xi’s speech:
> 
> As if to clear up the political smog, Xi Jinping’s “new southern tour speech,” made in early December, began its circulation last week in the party. To my surprise, Xi’s speech reads like a perfect confirmation to MacFarquhar’s
> prediction. The new leadership’s “honeymoon” is hardly over, but it has already become clear that the Party and the people don’t share the same “China Dream,” as the Southern Weekend incident has abundantly indicated.
> 
> The most striking part of Xi Jinping’s “new southern tour speech” is his revisiting the topic of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He said, “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?
> An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. In the end, ‘the ruler’s flag over the city tower’ changed overnight. It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and
> the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.”
> 
> “Why must we stand firm on the Party’s leadership over the military?” Xi continued, “because that’s the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union where the military was depoliticized, separated
> from the Party and nationalized, the party was disarmed. A few people tried to save the Soviet Union; they seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the instruments to exert power.
> Yeltsin gave a speech standing on a tank, but the military made no response, keeping so-called ‘neutrality.’ Finally, Gorbachev announced the disbandment of the Soviet Communist Party in a blithe statement. A big Party
> was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”
> 
> [...] Xi Jinping didn’t mention “political reform” in the new southern tour speech. In fact, he has not made any reference to it since after the 18th Party’s Congress. Instead, in his southern tour speech,
> he laid out his ideological bedrocks: “Only socialism can save China. Only (economic) reform and opening-up can develop China, develop socialism, and develop Marxism.”
> 
> See also: “Xi Jinping’s opposition to political reforms laid out in leaked internal speech” by John Kennedy on the South China Morning Post blog. Gao Yu’s full essay, in Chinese, is available here.
> 
> [This post was edited to clarify that Xi's speech was released inside the Party but not publicly.]




The "MacFarquhar" referred to in the second paragraph is Harvard University professor, China watcher and former UK MP, Roderick MacFarquhar.


----------



## cupper

*China's Coal Usage is Blowing the Kyoto Protocol to Shreds*

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/china-s-obscene-addiction-to-coal.html



> Remember the Kyoto protocol? That treaty to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, negotiated back in the 1990s, exempted China and India on the grounds that they were developing countries.
> 
> Boy, does that idea look obsolete. From Scientific American, quoting the U.S. Energy Information Agency:
> 
> [T]he 325-million-ton increase in Chinese coal consumption in 2011 accounted for 87 percent of the entire world's growth for the year, which was estimated at 374 million tons. Since 2000, China has accounted for 82 percent of the world's coal demand growth, with a 2.3-billion-ton surge, the agency said.
> 
> "China now accounts for 47 percent of global coal consumption -- almost as much as the rest of the world combined," EIA said of the latest figures.



http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chinas-soaring-coal-consumption-poses-climate-challenge



> Chinese coal consumption surged for a 12th consecutive year in 2011, with the country burning 2.3 billion tons of the carbon-emitting mineral to run power plants, industrial boilers and other equipment to support its economic and population growth.
> 
> In a simple but striking chart published on its website, the U.S. Energy Information Administration plotted China's progress as the world's dominant coal-consuming country, shooting past rival economies like the United States, India and Russia as well as regional powers such as Japan and South Korea.
> 
> In fact, according to EIA, the 325-million-ton increase in Chinese coal consumption in 2011 accounted for 87 percent of the entire world's growth for the year, which was estimated at 374 million tons. Since 2000, China has accounted for 82 percent of the world's coal demand growth, with a 2.3-billion-ton surge, the agency said.
> 
> "China now accounts for 47 percent of global coal consumption -- almost as much as the rest of the world combined," EIA said of the latest figures.
> 
> The rising consumption numbers reflect a 200-plus percent increase in Chinese electricity generation since 2000, with most of the new power coming from coal-fired power plants. Chinese growth averaged 9 percent per year from 2000 to 2010, more than twice the 4 percent global growth rate for coal consumption. And when China is excluded from the tally, growth in coal use averaged only 1 percent for the rest of the world over the 2000-2010 period, according to EIA.
> 
> U.S. coal exports contribute
> Although Chinese coal is largely sourced from domestic mines, EIA figures show that U.S. coal shipments to China have dramatically risen in recent years, punctuated by a 107 percent jump from 2011 to 2012. Chinese imports of U.S. coal surged from 4 million tons in 2011 to 8.3 million tons last year, according to the agency. Only Argentina and Austria saw larger percentage increases in U.S. coal shipments, but on much smaller volumes.
> 
> The National Mining Association this week projected that overall U.S. coal exports should total roughly 111 million tons in 2013, down 10 percent from last year. But demand should remain strong in China, India and other fast-growing countries for thermal coal used in power generation and metallurgical coal for steelmaking, NMA said.
> 
> "It's really a global story, global in the sense that as we look across the world we see that developing economies are accounting for three-quarters of the economic growth," Hal Quinn, NMA's executive director, explained to a Monday meeting of industry observers and energy reporters in Washington, D.C.
> 
> In addition to coal, Quinn said U.S. iron ore production should benefit from new and ongoing construction projects and the stimulus of spending in China, the world's largest buyer of iron ore and the purchaser of 40 percent of the world's base metals.
> 
> The growth of U.S. coal exports to China and other Asian-Pacific countries will also depend in part on the planned construction of new and expanded Pacific Ocean coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest from Oregon and Washington to British Columbia (ClimateWire, Jan. 17).
> 
> Such efforts, considered vital to expanding the United States' global market share for coal, have been slowed by political and environmental opposition, including groups that argue China's voracious burning of coal will exacerbate climate change.
> 
> Growing world use 'not good news'
> According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, China's share in global coal consumption is more than twice that of the demand for oil in the United States. And last year China reigned as both the world's No. 1 coal producer (3.7 billion metric tons) and the world's top buyer of foreign coal, with an estimated 270 million tons of imports, according to the China Coal Transportation and Distribution Association.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Chinese are, in many instances, on the wrong side of the UNCLOS which they, unlike the US, have signed, so they are basing their claims on history. It's a stretch, but in the case of the Diaoyu Islands the argument against the US handing the islands over to Japan (1971) might have some merit.
> 
> But it is a murky situation: too many countries have overlapping claims in the region ~ no one has any friends.




Just watching the news on a Taiwan channel (I'm visiting friends who speak Mandarin): Japanese Coast Guard ships have just engaged Taiwanese civilian "patrol" vessels with smoke and water cannon. Taiwanese Navy patrol vessels stood by - crews shouted insults at Japanese but there was no contact or engagement between government vessels. The Taiwanese civilian vessels are part of a _Diaoyu Islands Sovereignty Force_ funded by some Taiwanese nationalists, they are unarmed.

Chinese patrol vessels are also in the area; the Japanese gave them a wide berth and both the other sides broke off/backed off when the Chinese vessels entered the disputed waters. 

Not a good situation.


----------



## 57Chevy

9/11 Irony ?

On 11 September 2012, the Japanese government nationalized its control over Minamikojima, Kitakojima, and Uotsuri islands
by purchasing them from the Kurihara family for ¥2.05 billion.

China's Foreign Ministry objected saying Beijing would not "sit back and watch its territorial sovereignty violated.

Small Islands = Big Problems
Why ?

 Why do Japan and China want the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands?   is shared with provisions of The Copyright Act
...
 According to Seokwoo Lee’s “Territorial Disputes among Japan, China and Taiwan Concerning the Senkaku Islands,” it was evidence of the existence of oil deposits under the East China Sea where the islands lie that prompted China and Taiwan’s interest in the islands. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says estimates range from 60-170 billion barrels of “undiscovered” oil by the Chinese to 60-100 million barrels of proven/ probable reserves by the EIA. Additionally, there are believed to be trillions of cubic feet of natural gas reserves under the East China Sea.
...


----------



## tomahawk6

Meanwhile China continues to have safety issues on the homefront.






   

In these photos provided by China's Xinhua News Agency the damage is seen on an expressway bridge which partially collapsed due to an truck laden with fireworks exploding in Mianchi County, Sanmenxia, central China's Henan Province, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2013. Fireworks for Lunar New Year celebrations exploded on a truck in central China, destroying part of an elevated highway Friday and sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters (about 100 feet) to the ground. The human toll from this explosion stands at 26 dead. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Xiao Meng)


----------



## Edward Campbell

What you are seeing in the above photos is the inevitable result of endemic corruption in almost every single aspect of Chinese life: construction standards, transportation permits ... it goes on and on and on at every level.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And the tensions in the East China Sea/Diaoyu Islands dispute continue to escalate according to this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _BBC_:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21337444


> Japan protest over China ship's radar action
> *A Chinese navy frigate has locked its weapon-targeting radar on a Japanese ship, Tokyo says, amid mounting tensions over a territorial row.*
> 
> 5 February 2013
> 
> Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera said the incident happened on 30 January near islands claimed by both nations in the East China Sea.
> 
> He said this had prompted Tokyo to lodge a formal protest with Beijing.
> 
> The row, over islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, has escalated in recent months.
> 
> Taiwan also claims the island chain (known as Diaoyutai in Taipei), which is controlled by Japan.
> 
> Last week, tensions between Tokyo and Beijing appeared to be easing after a Japanese delegation met senior Chinese leaders and both sides later expressed hopes that relations could improve, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo reports.
> 
> But on Monday China sent patrol ships back in to the disputed waters around the islands, our correspondent adds.
> 
> *'Dangerous situation'*
> 
> "On 30 January, something like fire-control radar was directed at a Japan Self-Defence Maritime escort ship in the East China Sea," Mr Onodera told reporters on Tuesday.
> 
> The minister said Japan's Yuudachi vessel and the Chinese frigate were about 3km (one mile) apart at the time, Japan's Kyodo News reports.
> 
> Asked about the delay in filing the protest, Mr Onodera said it took the ministry until Tuesday to determine that a fire-control radar had indeed locked on the Japanese ship.
> 
> He added that a Japanese military helicopter was also targeted with a similar type of radar by another Chinese frigate on 19 January.
> 
> "Directing such radar is very abnormal. We recognise it would create a very dangerous situation if a single misstep occurred," he said.
> 
> Radars use radio waves to detect the intended target and then guide missiles or other weapons.
> 
> *China's UN move*
> 
> Also on Tuesday, the Chinese ambassador to Japan rebuffed an earlier protest over continuing Chinese patrols off the disputed islands, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
> 
> Ambassador Cheng Yonghua said the islands and the surrounding waters were China's "inherent territory".
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The dispute over their ownership of the islands has continued for years, but it reignited in 2012 when the Japanese government purchased three of the islands from their private Japanese owner.
> 
> The move triggered diplomatic protests from Beijing and Taipei, and sparked small public protests in China, affecting some Japanese businesses operating in the country.
> 
> Chinese government ships have since sailed many times through what Japan says are its territorial waters around the islands.
> 
> Late last year, a Chinese government plane also flew over the islands in what Japan called a violation of its airspace.
> 
> In response, Tokyo has moved to increase military spending for the first time in a decade.
> 
> The eight uninhabited islands and rocks lie close to strategically important shipping lanes, offer rich fishing grounds and are thought to contain oil deposits.
> 
> In December, Beijing submitted to the UN a detailed explanation of its claims to the disputed islands.
> 
> A UN commission of geological experts will examine China's submission but does not have the authority to resolve conflicting claims.




Neither party has, yet, found a face saving way to back down; absent that tensions may rise until someone makes a fatal mistake.


----------



## a_majoor

Suspicion continues to grow over Chinese statistics, and analysts are using a multitude of techniques to try to tease out the truth. The really frightening part is if the numbers really are being cooked to the extent somepeople fear, then the global repercussions will be devastating.

A similar effort is underway in Argentina to discover the real statistics, which the government there is more crudely attempting to hide,and of course the BLS unemployment statistics released by the United States do not count various categories of people who are not working (and also make no mention of the labour participation rate). Reality is not to bemessed with,and the truth has strange ways of manifesting itself:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-economic-data-draw-sharp-scrutiny-from-experts-analyzing-global-trends/2013/02/04/f4de4b84-6ae0-11e2-af53-7b2b2a7510a8_print.html



> China’s economic data draw sharp scrutiny from experts analyzing global trends
> By William Wan, Published: February 4
> 
> BEIJING — When China announced better-than-expected trade numbers last month, the statistics were met with outright suspicion from international powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, Swiss financial firm UBS and Australian bank ANZ. The disbelieving scoffing only mounted days later, when the government unveiled numbers showing yet another positive trend — a narrowing income gap between China’s rich and poor.
> 
> Numbers in China have long faced suspicion, from optimistic recordings of visibly hazy air to the age of its Olympic gymnasts. But the credibility of its economic data is now coming under particular scrutiny, at a time when China’s growing global role weighs on investors, analysts and governments worldwide, even as the country’s economy is slowing after years of unbridled growth.
> 
> “The issue is less important when everything’s rosy,” said Patrick Chovanec, a business professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “It gets more sensitive when people are trying to assess just how deep this downturn is and whether China’s facing a hard landing.”
> 
> For foreign economists, suspicions about why such numbers are off — and by how much — often boil down to a Rorschach test of sorts for how they view the Chinese government: as a developing nation honestly struggling with statistical challenges or as a sinister actuarial force always prepared to stretch the truth to meet its goals.
> 
> Regardless of motivation, some experts say the biggest danger in all this inaccurate data may be domestic, especially if it leads to bad policy decisions by Chinese leaders wrestling with how to manage a complex, dynamic economy.
> 
> “It’s like driving a car on a road where the traffic lights don’t work,” said Wei Yao, an economist at Société Générale bank in Hong Kong. “How do you make monetary policy for example if you can’t accurately tell if inflation is too high or too low? It all relies on statistics.”
> 
> The latest round of accusations over trade data began in January after analysts compared China's reported December exports to other available information, including corresponding import numbers from surrounding countries. Little of it matched up. Analysts’ characterizations ranged from the gentle, noting “anomalies,” to insulting cries of “ridiculous” and “obvious errors.”
> 
> Amid such uncertainty, a booming cottage industry of analysis has sprung up, mostly produced and sold by by foreign analysts. They sift through obscure though often more reliable government data — looking at things such as electricity usage, rail freight traffic, air travel and the footage of floor space being built.
> 
> Even the man taking over China’s economy — incoming Chinese premier Li Keqiang – supposedly disparaged his government’s Gross Domestic Product figures, calling them “man-made,” according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2007, and saying he too relies on rail-cargo, bank-loan and power-consumption data.
> 
> But that information can also be manipulated. Once power consumption became a favored indicator, for example, news reports began circulating last year that tallies of coal usage and other elements of energy production were being tampered with.
> 
> Part of the reliability problem is the government’s near-total control over numbers, in some cases meaning an outright ban on all others collecting competing data, experts say.
> 
> “You take something as innocent as weather data,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of J Capital Research, a Beijing-based equities analysis firm. “It’s treated like a national security issue. . . . No one can collect or release numbers but the government.”
> 
> Another problem is the lack of transparency for statistics that are released. Methodology is never disclosed, and the underlying data used to arrive at the final numbers are equally rarely revealed.
> 
> For that reason, there are some who believe China’s leaders deliberately manipulate the numbers with firm goals in mind: They push the GDP up to meet pre-announced targets and keep unemployment and income gap numbers down to avoid embarrassment and public rage.
> 
> Question of interpretation
> 
> Others have a more charitable view — that China’s long-ridiculed National Bureau of Statistics is trying its best, in a chaotic market transitioning from a socialist economy dominated by monolithic state enterprises to a more modern and market-driven one, to provide numerical disclosures closer to international standards.
> 
> Take the GDP, for example – long a politically fraught number in China. For decades local leaders have sent unrealistically high figures to Beijing to look good and secure promotion. But the national GDP figure is always lower than the combined total of the provinces’ numbers.
> 
> Does that mean that someone in power is trying to get a more accurate reading by somehow adjusting for their exaggerations? Or does it simply prove the arbitrary nature of China’s GDP as it’s adjusted to follow prescribed targets?
> 
> Similarly open to interpretation is the latest rich-poor gap measurement. The mid-January release of the figure, called the Gini coefficient, came as a shock to many because it’s been more than a decade since authorities have posted new estimates. Many believe officials feared such data would provoke a populace already angry about inequality and the opulent lifestyles of government officials.
> 
> When China unveiled a new figure for last year showing improvement over the past few missing years, there was no shortage of skeptics. The government pegged China’s Gini coefficient at 0.474 on a scale of 0 (for a perfectly equal society) to 1 (for utter inequality). Critics quickly pointed to a study released just one month earlier by a Chinese university research center estimating the 2010 Gini at 0.61.
> 
> “I can’t say why their result was so much lower than ours since the national bureau didn’t make their sampling procedure public,” said Yin Zhichao, vice director of the research center at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.
> 
> Obstacles to accuracy
> 
> Even skeptics of the government, however, acknowledge the inherent difficulties that its statisticians face in China.
> 
> Determining the rich-poor gap, for example, requires knowing the real wealth of China’s uber-rich – a Sisyphean task given the large amount of “gray income” that goes unreported because it’s earned through shady or outright illicit means.
> 
> Between the black and white views of China’s numbers, however, is a popular middle-road assessment: that China’s statisticians are reforming over time, and they’re deliberately smoothing out the data to avoid jarring comparisons.
> 
> “Say they do calculate one year’s stats perfectly,” said Yukon Huang, former China director for the World Bank. “It might make last year’s look horribly wrong, completely incongruous, because to correct your calculation you’ve changed definitions, measurements. So what do they do? Adjust it gradually, smooth out the trends.”
> 
> For economists in this camp — the stats are bad, but getting better — all the attention on China’s numbers can only lead to good.
> 
> “I think they’re under a lot of heat right now,” Huang said. “But because of the scrutiny, the hope is you’re going to get better numbers as a result.”
> 
> Liu Liu contributed to this report.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a very interesting, and encouraging report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1144908/beijing-and-taipei-plan-exchange-government-officials


> Beijing and Taipei plan exchange of government officials
> *Representative offices on both sides of strait will house government officials, who may be granted privileges enjoyed by foreign diplomats*
> 
> Thursday, 07 February, 2013
> 
> Taipei and Beijing plan to exchange government officials and station them in representative offices in the near future, a unimaginable move not long ago for the political rivals, who are still technically at war.
> 
> The two sides would also not rule out the possibility of issuing travel permits and granting each other's representatives something similar to the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by foreign diplomats, a senior Taiwanese official said on Wednesday, but that would be the next step for discussion after the establishment of the offices.
> 
> Wang Yu-chi, chairman of the island's top mainland policy planning body, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), told a news conference in Taipei on Wednesday: "Under our initial plan, as soon as the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) sets up a representative office on the mainland, the Mainland Affairs Council will also post officials there at the same time."
> 
> That would be based on the principle of dignity and equality, he said, given that most mainland officials who dealt with Taiwan did so in a semi-official or non-official capacity. Some staff at the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (Arats) are also government officials at the mainland State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office.
> 
> Arats and SEF - nominally private - were set up in Beijing and Taipei respectively in the early 1990s to represent their governments in cross-strait matters in the absence of formal relations.
> 
> Cross-strait relations improved after Ma Ying-jeou became Taiwan's president in 2008 and adopted a policy of engaging Beijing.
> 
> The two sides have signed 18 non-political co-operation agreements since then and have also set up some lower-level tourism and trade representative offices on the other side of the strait. These officials, however, are non-government.
> 
> With the rapid increase in the number of non-political exchanges, the two sides found the need to set up more authoritative offices. They finally touched on the issue late last month, when Beijing sent senior Arats officials to Taipei to discuss the issue.
> 
> If the two sides needed to discuss the issuance of travel documents, that would be possible, Wang said, adding that he believed representative office officials would enjoy immunity status similar to foreign diplomats "in order to facilitate their work in each other's place".
> 
> He said he did not want to give a timetable, but early establishment of the offices would meet the hopes of at least 70 per cent of Taiwanese people.




This is part of a long term project to reunify China, peacefully.


----------



## Edward Campbell

News on the economic front in this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _The Telegraph_:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/9860518/China-trade-now-bigger-than-US.html


> China trade now bigger than US
> *China is now the largest trading nation in the world in terms of imports and exports, after overtaking the US last year.*
> 
> By Garry White
> 
> 10 Feb 2013
> 
> China has leapfrogged the US to become the world’s biggest trading nation, bringing an end to the US’s post-war dominance of global commerce.
> 
> The total value of US exports and imports in 2012 was $3.82 trillion (£2.4 trillion), the US Commerce Department has revealed. China’s customs administration has already announced that the country’s total trade last year was worth $3.87 trillion.
> 
> “It is remarkable that an economy that is only a fraction of the size of the US economy has a larger trading volume,” Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, told Bloomberg. “The surpassing of the US is not because of a substantially undervalued currency that has led to an export boom,” Mr Lardy said, pointing out that Chinese imports have grown at a faster rate than exports since 2007.
> 
> Not only has China managed to post a larger total trading figure, but the breakdown of imports compared with exports also makes for favourable reading in Beijing. China had a full-year trade surplus of $231.1bn with the US posting a total 2012 trade deficit of $727.9bn.
> 
> Indeed, the Asian powerhouse looks set to table an even better performance in 2013, as trade accelerated substantially last month. Exports jumped 25pc on a year-on-year basis and imports were up 29pc in January, beating analysts’ expectations. However, the data is distorted by the timing of the Chinese New Year festivities.
> 
> Last year's Lunar New Year shutdown began in January, leaving fewer work days and boosting this year's figures by comparison.
> 
> However, activity across the Chinese economy was impressive, with sales of passenger cars over the month soared to their highest ever. China's auto sales jumped 46.4pc compared with January 2012 to a record monthly high of 2.03m units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said. Vehicle output also hit a new monthly high, surging 51.17pc to 1.96m units.
> 
> The data is helping to ease fears that China could face a slump. These worries remain despite an acceleration of growth in the country.
> 
> French bank Société Générale said last month there still is a chance of a "hard landing," with growth dropping below 6pc, which would be dangerously low for China.
> 
> "A deceleration is likely by the end of the year if further stimulus measures are not forthcoming, which they probably won't because of latent inflation pressures," Alaistair Chan, an economist at Moody’s said last week. “Exports are expected to record moderate growth as the global economy recovers.”
> 
> However, the data has reassured some.
> 
> "Overall this says there is no need to worry about the strength of China's recovery," Sun Junwei, China economist at HSBC in Beijing, said.


----------



## a_majoor

This isn't good. Global inflation as everyone devalues their currency (or the flow of "hot" money into places that have not devalues their currency yet) will destabilize the global economy further:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2013/02/10/asian-currencies-tumble-yes-this-is-a-global-currency-war/



> *Asian Currencies Tumble. Yes, This Is A Global Currency War.
> *
> The renminbi fell slightly against the dollar in China on Friday.  The yuan, as the currency is informally known, began the day up over the greenback but weakened as trading progressed.
> 
> The reason for the afternoon decline?  Chinese enterprises entered the market and bought the American currency in large amounts late in the day.  “It just seems so odd that companies would choose this particular time to buy such big amounts of dollars,” an unnamed Shanghai trader in a local bank told the Wall Street Journal.
> 
> Who Will Win The Currency Wars? James Gruber James Gruber Contributor
> The Abe/Aso Government "Three Arrows" Agenda for Economic Revival Stephen Harner Stephen Harner Contributor
> 
> Market participants naturally suspect that the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, was behind the surprising accumulation of greenbacks.  Traders also believe that recent dollar purchases by China’s state banks are really on behalf of the central bank.
> 
> Since early December, the meddling of the People’s Bank in the currency market has been evident but not, in the words of Reuters, “overwhelming.”  Stephen Green, the well-known analyst from Standard Chartered, estimates that the intervention last quarter was “to the net tune of $34 billion.”
> 
> Central bank operations do not have to be large to be effective, however.  Traders, despite strong corporate demand for the renminbi, saw the signals from Beijing and have reined themselves in.
> 
> China’s dollar-buying is understandable in the context of the downward movement of the yen, which has fallen against every major currency in recent months.  It has, this year, lost 7.09% of its value against the dollar and fallen 8.57% against the euro.  Newly installed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made the depreciation of the currency one of the centerpieces of his controversial economic program, so there are expectations of aggressive tactics from the Bank of Japan, especially now that Masaaki Shirakawa announced on Tuesday his intention to step down early as its governor.
> 
> “I can’t recall a move in currencies that has been so deliberate and so linear without any apparent real change in fundamentals,” said ANZ’s Richard Yetsenga on CNBC Asia’s “Squawk Box.”  “The yen’s move has largely been on the basis of an apparent move in government policy and the market is front-running that.”
> 
> Of course, everyone has noticed Tokyo’s new currency policy.  Europe and South Korea in particular have complained, but China by and large has not.
> 
> Why complain when you can engineer the value of your currency?  Beijing has been manipulating the yuan downward, and Seoul has been fiddling with the won.  The South Korean currency is down 2.53% against the dollar since the end of December.  At the same time, the Taiwan dollar is off 2.37% against the greenback.  From all outward appearances, countries in Asia are now engaged in competitive devaluations.
> 
> So far, Beijing has escaped blame for starting the race to the bottom.  “Has China Quietly Joined the Currency War?” CNBC asked on Thursday.  That is not the right question because it is not possible for China to join the conflict.  China, unfortunately, started it, at least a decade ago in fact.
> 
> For years, policymakers thought it was not worth trying to get Beijing to stop manipulating the renminbi, yet that view was mistaken.  They ignored the fact that the Chinese were undermining the consensus that the market should determine currency values.
> 
> Now it seems it is too late to rescue the system of free-floating currencies.  Abe’s plan to cheapen the yen, otherwise inexcusable, is a defense against the fixed yuan and the falling greenback.  Ben Bernanke’s dollar-weakening moves, which hurt America, are in retaliation against Beijing.  Beijing will not relax its grip on the renminbi even though it claims the currency is “pretty much close to the equilibrium level.”  Of course the yuan is not, because the Chinese central bank is continuing to determine exchange rates.
> 
> We are, in fact, seeing the beginning of a currency war, which will not be confined to Asia.  Governments see short-term advantage in intervening in the market, but in the end everyone will be hurt.
> 
> Follow me on Twitter @GordonGChang


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting and slightly alarmist article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Sydney Morning Post_:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/day-will-come-when-we-must-choose-us-or-china-20130215-2eijr.html


> [size=14ptDay will come when we must choose US or China[/size]
> 
> February 16, 2013
> 
> John Garnaut
> _China correspondent for Fairfax Media_
> 
> BEIJING: Within two decades the US will be forced out of the western Pacific, says a high-ranking Chinese military officer, amid concerns that increasingly militarised great power rivalry could lead to war.
> 
> Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu, at the People's Liberation Army's National Defence University, told Fairfax Media this week that American strategic influence would be confined ''east of the Pacific midline'' as it is displaced by Chinese power throughout East Asia, including Australia.
> 
> Colonel Liu's interpretation of one facet of what the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, calls ''a new type of great power relationship'' adds to the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding China's strategic ambitions.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Senior Col Liu Mingfu - _supplied photo_
> 
> It clashes with comments days earlier by his university colleague General Zhu Chenghu. ''We have no intention of driving the US out of east Asia or the western Pacific,'' General Zhu told a conference in Atlanta. ''But I don't think most Americans believe what the Chinese are saying.''
> 
> On January 31 James Fanell, intelligence chief for the US Pacific Fleet, which commands six aircraft carrier groups, told a San Diego conference that China's ''expansion into blue waters is largely about countering the Pacific Fleet''.
> Even China's civilian maritime surveillance agency ''has no other mission but to harass other nations into submitting to China's expansive claims'', he said.
> 
> ''And I can tell you, as the Fleet Intelligence Officer, the PLA Navy is going to sea to learn how to do naval warfare,'' said Captain Fanell. ''Make no mistake, the PLA Navy is focused on war at sea and about sinking an opposing fleet.''
> 
> Anxieties about China's strategic ambitions have grown since it occupied islands administered by the Philippines in the South China Sea last year and, particularly, China's ongoing brinkmanship with Japan and its security guarantor, the US, in the East China Sea.
> 
> Japanese leaders have accused China of locking weapons-guiding radars on Japanese targets - which China denies - while Western military sources say Chinese planes, ships and submarines have challenged Japan-
> 
> controlled waters and airspace around the Senkaku Islands, known as Diaoyu in Chinese.
> 
> Some security analysts say Australian political leaders are in public denial about the stakes involved and invidious choices the nation may have to face.
> 
> ''It's the most dangerous strategic crisis that the US has faced, that the world has faced, since the end of the Cold War,'' said Hugh White, former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence, saying China and Japan were drifting closer to a war that could draw in the US.
> 
> ''This makes rather a nonsense of the mantra we hear both from Gillard and Abbott that 'we don't have to choose between the US and China','' he said.
> 
> An assertive, rising China has also triggered the formation of a regional latticework of security structures, partly pioneered by Australia and now championed by the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who proposes a ''democratic security diamond'' involving India, the US and Australia.
> 
> Ely Ratner, fresh from a stint at the China desk of the US State Department, said Australia should speak louder in favour of international laws, norms and institutions given its dependence on the flow of goods in east Asia.
> 
> As much as 57 per cent of Australian exports passes through sea lanes in the South China Sea, Australian government estimates show.
> 
> ''The overriding question is whether China is interested in a region based on rules and institutions that seek co-operative, non-coercive ways to deal with disagreements,'' said Mr Ratner, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security, which was founded by the State Department's recently retired assistant secretary for east Asia, Kurt Campbell.
> 
> ''Or is it going to deal with disagreements by using military, non-military and economic coercion, as we saw against the Philippines and Japan, and diplomatic coercion as we saw at the East Asia Summit?'' he said, referring to China's intervention to block discussion of maritime security issues.
> 
> Colonel Liu, who has warned Australia not to support the Japanese ''wolf'' or American ''tiger'' in a military showdown, does not hold the rank of general or act as an official spokesman.
> 
> But his views have been taken more seriously since his fiercely nationalistic book, The China Dream, was allowed back onto the shelves after Mr Xi's elevation in November, when Mr Xi began talking about his own nationalistic ''China Dream''.
> 
> And they reflect a common assertion in some quarters of Beijing, and particularly the army, that the Obama administration's ''pivot'' to Asia is an aberration in a long story that will see the US Pacific Fleet eventually give up on its allies in the region.




Senior Col Liu's views are well known and have been discussed at some length over the recent months.

It is important to understand that the Chinese government encourages robust public debates - often in the foreign language press - about contentious issues as a way of testing public opinion (something which is difficult in a totalitarian state) so _dueling papers_ by Sr Col Liu and General Zhu Chenghu quite possible represent two points of view within the Central Committee . But, by empowering Sr Col Liu to speak out in this way, and by allowing his book to be republished, the Chinese government is also trying to influence Asian public opinion. The preferred Chinese _narrative_ is that China will, peacefully, displace the USA as the East Asian/Western Pacific hegemon at some unspecified time in the foreseeable future. But there is always an iron fist under China's velvet glove.


----------



## GAP

> The preferred Chinese narrative is that China will, peacefully, displace the USA as the East Asian/Western Pacific hegemon at some unspecified time in the foreseeable future. But there is always an iron fist under China's velvet glove.



And the west's politicians, military, et al, have got their heads in the sand. They don't believe it and are make zero plans to thwart it.... because it does not fit into a 4 year election cycle....it's someone else's problem     :


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a pretty strong _lobby_ in the USA that advocates more and more and more defence spending based on the fact - and it is a fact - that China is rising towards _peer_ status. But that lobby is countered by a) those who believe that China's rise is, ultimately, benign and need not be countered militarily and b) those who say that, threat or no, the USA cannot afford to keep spending at current rates.

I understand the Chinese _strategic_ imperative to displace the USA in East Asia/the Western Pacific but I cannot find, on the Chinese part, any strategic rationale for conflict with the USA; that would seem to fly in the face of logic and history.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting talk (CTO Institute) about the inherent contradictions in the US "Asian Pivot" strategy.

It is important to remember that China has its own versions of the DC think tanks and institutes and smart guys there are giving similar lectures about "Shall we engage or contain America?" From China's perspective America is an *aggressor nation* that has projected its power into a region (East Aia) where it has no _proper_ business and China's legitimate concern is to push them back into their own back yard.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, etc ...


----------



## cupper

I for one would like to Welcome our New Chinese Overlords!


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting version of cause and effect. Some questions arise; do these workaholic men competing for women change their habits once they are successful? What happens to men who are still unsuccessful in getting a wife? Where will this pent up energy and ambition be channeled to?

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/15/china-gender-economy/



> How China's lonely bachelors are helping its economy grow
> By Nin-Hai Tseng, Writer February 15, 2013: 11:26 AM ET
> 
> China's gender imbalance may have contributed as much as 2% to its annual GDP growth. Can it continue?
> FORTUNE  -- They say a good man is hard to find, but that's not the case in China, where men overwhelmingly outnumber women. The ratio of men of marriageable/dating age (15-30 years old) to every woman is 1.15 -- an unusual imbalance that's created a rat race of bachelors vying for the affections of a limited pool of young women. Many may want to marry, but never will.
> 
> Oddly enough, China's lonely bachelors have actually helped the country experience extraordinary growth. And in the coming years, the trend will likely continue as the ratio gets progressively out of balance, said Columbia University professor Shang-Jin Wei recently at a symposium.
> 
> Because of the imbalance, many women can cherry-pick their life partners. There's of course an ugly side, too: The shortage of young women has also driven prostitution and human trafficking in some parts of the country. Nonetheless, since men started outnumbering women in 2002, it has become almost an unspoken prerequisite for bachelors to have enough for a down payment on a home before attracting a wife. Which, in turn, has bred fierce competition among the male population.
> 
> MORE: If you could put China's problems in a bottle - Maotai
> 
> "Acquiring wealth becomes far more important," says Wei, director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia. In fact, China's bachelors helped drive its growing housing market. Last year, Wei and other experts published a study that showed up to 48% or ($8 trillion worth) of the rise in property values across 35 major cities is linked to the country's gender imbalance.
> 
> Over the past 10 years, China's economy has grown about 10% annually. Wei estimates the gender imbalance, on average, contributed 2 percentage points annually during that period. Investors often speculate how long China can grow at such a fast pace, and whether it's in for a hard landing.
> 
> History suggests the growth has to slow. Typically when income per capita reaches about $17,000, growth on average starts declining about 2% a year. In China, income per capita in 2011 stood at $5,445. It will be some time before it reaches its peak, but growth has already started decelerating. In 2012, GDP growth slowed to 7.8% from 9.3% in 2011 and 10.4% in 2010.
> 
> Yet the country's demographic kink could offset future slowdown, Wein says. Over the next 10 years, the male-to-female ratio will rise to 1.2 men per woman, in part, one of the many unintended consequences of China's three-decade-old policy limiting couples to one child in a culture where parents overwhelmingly favor males over females.
> 
> To be sure, China has many other demographic challenges. It also has a rapidly aging population, which has contributed to the shortage of working-age people. And it remains to be seen how these obstacles will help or hurt its economy.


----------



## a_majoor

A very interesting question: "Why wasn't there a Chinese Spring?". This article may be a good starting point to think about the question, but I am not sure that this covers all the reasons the Chinese "Red Dynasty" has remained in power:

http://thediplomat.com/2013/02/22/why-wasnt-there-a-chinese-spring/?all=true



> *Why Wasn’t There a Chinese Spring?*
> 
> February 22, 2013
> By Steve Hess
> 
> Although sharing many of the same problems as Arab societies, the Arab Spring never arrived in Beijing. Why?
> 
> Related Features
> 
> China’s Arab Spring Cyber Lessons
> India’s Arab Spring Opportunity
> One Chinese City’s PR Nightmare
> Is Time Ripe for a Kazakh Spring?
> Not Rising, But Rejuvenating: The “Chinese Dream”
> 
> It has now been two years since the self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, provided the spark that set the Arab world aflame. A wave of protests spread throughout the region in quick succession and led to the overthrow of long ruling autocrats in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and possibly Syria.
> 
> The collapse of regimes like Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt, which many considered “an exemplar of…durable authoritarianism” was a salient reminder to many that such revolutions are “inherently unpredictable.” Before long some began to speculate that the protest movements might spread to authoritarian states outside the Arab world, including China. Indeed, the Chinese government was among those that feared the unrest would spread to China because, as one observer noted, China faced the same kind of “social and political tensions caused by rising inequality, injustice, and corruption” that plagued much of the Arab world on the eve of the uprisings.
> 
> Alas it was not to be as the Chinese government has proven far more durable than many of its counterparts in the Arab world. This inevitably raises the question of what factors differentiated the Chinese government from its Arab counterparts in places like Egypt?
> 
> Fortunately,in the more than two years since Mubarak fell, a number of theories have been advanced to explain the Arab Spring.
> 
> One set of explanations has centered on social and economic drivers. According to this reasoning, unrest in the region was driven by a highly discontented and mobilized society. Youth unemployment and official corruption enraged citizens throughout much of the Arab world and the diffusion of new communications technologies, particularly social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, enabled these individuals to channel these grievances into effective anti-regime collective action.
> 
> One shortcoming of this explanation is that the same sources of discontent and social media websites are available throughout the developing world, but successful revolutions are rare. In China, for example, official statistics suggest youth unemployment is low, but independent research has found that the problem may be large and growing, particularly among the type of young, urban and highly educated groups who have spearheaded many revolutions historically. Meanwhile, cross-national measures of corruption place China squarely between Tunisia and Egypt. Finally, Internet penetration rates also place China shoulder-to-shoulder with Tunisia and Egypt, and social media has increasingly appeared as a critical tool for mobilizing Chinese protestors in frequent “mass incidents,” and spreading news of sensitive topics, such as official corruption and public health threats posed by environmental pollution.
> 
> Many academics have made the case that the quality of authoritarian rule in Egypt, Tunisia and other toppled dictatorships has lagged behind that in China, causing a breakdown in the former but not the latter. Beijing has developed crack internal security forces for dispersing crowds and constructed its regime around a hegemonic, well-established political party. While these explanations have merit, researchers had identified similar authoritarian support in the Arab world immediately before the turbulent year of 2011. One key to the resilience of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt were their “robust” security forces, which were well-trained and armed – thanks in part to generous American support – and supposedly fiercely loyal to the regime.
> 
> Meanwhile, Mubarak and Ben Ali were carefully institutionalizing their regimes by constructing hegemonic political parties and skillfully using nominally democratic elections and legislatures to maintain regime cohesion and co-opt potential challengers. Meanwhile, in China, presumed to be bolstered by more effective institutions, public scandals surrounding high-ranking leaders, such as the wealth of Wen Jiabao’s family or the dramatic fall of Bo Xilai, and the malfeasance and corruption of middle and low-ranking officials, reveal that politics within the CCP may not be as orderly, managed and predictable as once imagined.
> 
> But, of course, the Chinese regime has not collapsed and does not seem to be in its death throes. This is puzzling in some respects, because the country experiences annual protests that reportedly topped 180,000 as recently as 2010. Clearly popular discontent is high and Chinese citizens participate in contentious politics in large numbers, but these remain mostly localized affairs targeted at local issues, such as corrupt, low-ranking officials who engage in land grabs. Aside from the June 4 incident of 1989, they have not transformed into protest movements coordinated on a national scale and positioned against the central government itself, as appeared rapidly in Tunis and Egypt’s Tahrir square.
> 
> So why have Chinese citizens trended towards localized protests rather than the national protest movements seen in the Arab spring? As discussed in an important body of research, one source of this difference is linked to the structure of the state itself. In China, unlike most autocracies – including Mubarak’s Egypt and Ben Ali’s Tunisia—the state is highly decentralized. Local governments are given a substantial level of autonomy over development policies as well as social management – decisions related to dealing with popular challengers through repression or alternatively, the extension of concessions.
> 
> Since local authorities make decisions over the carrots and sticks used to address the demands of citizens with a high degree of autonomy, these officials rather than the national leadership or the regime itself are the primary target of most protest actions. In fact, it is a common phenomenon in China that aggrieved locals will appeal to the Center for assistance against corrupt local officials, even making reference to local officials’ poor enforcement of central directives and policies.Thus, the struggles faced by everyday Chinese are often directed at particular local officials and local issues, limiting the desire of protestors to take the dangerous leap of coordinating their actions across local communities to challenge the regime itself.
> 
> As a consequence, much like the Middle East, the years 2011 and 2012 have been ones characterized by very high levels of protest activities in China. However, because of the decentralized nature of the Chinese state, these battles have been ones won and lost by claimants contesting local officials rather than challenging the regime itself.
> 
> Steve Hess is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and East Asian & Pacific Rim Studies at the University of Bridgeport’s College of Public and International Affairs. He is a specialist on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes with particular emphasis on China. He is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming article in the International Political Science Review, “From the Arab Spring to the Chinese Winter,” from which this piece was adapted.


----------



## Edward Campbell

One might begin to answer Steven Hess' question with another one: why are the Chinese so very, very different from Arabs and Americans and Australians, and, and, and ..?

China's history and culture give it unique characteristics and limitations. The Arabs have different histories and different cultures, ditto the Americans and Brazilians and Canadians. But: Why on earth would anyone have expected a "Chinese Spring?"

An "American Spring" is both more likely and, I would argue, more necessary.


----------



## a_majoor

More cue ominous music time. I have seen many different articles from many different sources which all suggest that the Chinese statistics are not adding up, and this is another piece of evidence. If this article is true, then it suggests that a huge credit bubble (the sort that F.A. Hayek warned us about) exists in the Chinese economy, fueling malinvestment and leading to a crash of epic proportions. The checksum of this proposition is the results of deflating or artificially inflated credit bubbles in Japan in the 1990's and the global meltdown of 2008 (which also suggests we are not out of the woods by a very long shot, given *we* collectively refuse to pay our debts and insist on governments trying to keep the bubble(s) inflated. What cannot go on will not, so we are going to either have a long psinful recession or a short sharp depression when the markets seek equilibrium). Since many people have an almost religious faith that China can pull us out of the current recession, they will be in for a huge shock if things go the other way:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324338604578325962705788582.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop



> *China Has Its Own Debt Bomb*
> Not unlike the U.S. in 2008, China is at the end of a credit binge that won't end well.
> Article
> 
> By RUCHIR SHARMA
> 
> Six years ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao cautioned that China's economy is "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable." China has since doubled down on the economic model that prompted his concern.
> 
> Mr. Wen spoke out in an attempt to change the course of an economy dangerously dependent on one lever to generate growth: heavy investment in the roads, factories and other infrastructure that have helped make China a manufacturing superpower. Then along came the 2008 global financial crisis. To keep China's economy growing, panicked officials launched a half-trillion-dollar stimulus and ordered banks to fund a new wave of investment. Investment has risen as a share of gross domestic product to 48%—a record for any large country—from 43%.
> 
> Even more staggering is the amount of credit that China unleashed to finance this investment boom. Since 2007, the amount of new credit generated annually has more than quadrupled to $2.75 trillion in the 12 months through January this year. Last year, roughly half of the new loans came from the "shadow banking system," private lenders and credit suppliers outside formal lending channels. These outfits lend to borrowers—often local governments pushing increasingly low-quality infrastructure projects—who have run into trouble paying their bank loans.
> 
> Since 2008, China's total public and private debt has exploded to more than 200% of GDP—an unprecedented level for any developing country. Yet the overwhelming consensus still sees little risk to the financial system or to economic growth in China.
> 
> That view ignores the strong evidence of studies launched since 2008 in a belated attempt by the major global financial institutions to understand the origin of financial crises. The key, more than the level of debt, is the rate of increase in debt—particularly private debt. (Private debt in China includes all kinds of quasi-state borrowers, such as local governments and state-owned corporations.)
> 
> On the most important measures of this rate, China is now in the flashing-red zone. The first measure comes from the Bank of International Settlements, which found that if private debt as a share of GDP accelerates to a level 6% higher than its trend over the previous decade, the acceleration is an early warning of serious financial distress. In China, private debt as a share of GDP is now 12% above its previous trend, and above the peak levels seen before credit crises hit Japan in 1989, Korea in 1997, the U.S. in 2007 and Spain in 2008.
> 
> The second measure comes from the International Monetary Fund, which found that if private credit grows faster than the economy for three to five years, the increasing ratio of private credit to GDP usually signals financial distress. In China, private credit has been growing much faster than the economy since 2008, and the ratio of private credit to GDP has risen by 50 percentage points to 180%, an increase similar to what the U.S. and Japan witnessed before their most recent financial woes.
> 
> The bullish consensus seems to think these laws of financial gravity don't apply to China. The bulls say that bank crises typically begin when foreign creditors start to demand their money, and China owes very little to foreigners. Yet in an August 2012 National Bureau of Economic Research paper titled "The Great Leveraging," University of Virginia economist Alan Taylor examined the 79 major financial crises in advanced economies over the past 140 years and found that they are just as likely in countries that rely on domestic savings and owe little to foreign creditors.
> 
> The bulls also argue that China can afford to write off bad debts because it sits on more than $3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves as well as huge domestic savings. However, while some other Asian nations with high savings and few foreign liabilities did avoid bank crises following credit booms, they nonetheless saw economic growth slow sharply.
> 
> Following credit booms in the early 1970s and the late 1980s, Japan used its vast financial resources to put troubled lenders on life support. Debt clogged the system and productivity declined. Once the increase in credit peaked, growth fell sharply over the next five years: to 3% from 8% in the 1970s and to 1% from 4% in the 1980s. In Taiwan, following a similar cycle in the early 1990s, the average annual growth rate fell to 6%.
> 
> Even if China dodges a financial crisis, then, it is not likely to dodge a slowdown in its increasingly debt-clogged economy. Through 2007, creating a dollar of economic growth in China required just over a dollar of debt. Since then it has taken three dollars of debt to generate a dollar of growth. This is what you normally see in the late stages of a credit binge, as more debt goes to increasingly less productive investments. In China, exports and manufacturing are slowing as more money flows into real-estate speculation. About a third of the bank loans in China are now for real estate, or are backed by real estate, roughly similar to U.S. levels in 2007.
> 
> For China to find a more stable growth model, most experts agree that the country needs to balance its investments by promoting greater consumption. The catch is that consumption has been growing at 8% a year for the past decade—faster than in previous miracle economies like Japan's and as fast as it can grow without triggering inflation. Yet consumption is still falling as a share of GDP because investment has been growing even faster.
> 
> So rebalancing requires China to cut back on investment and on the rate of increase in debt, which would mean accepting a rate of growth as low as 5% to 6%, well below the current official rate of 8%. In other investment-led, high-growth nations, from Brazil in the 1970s to Malaysia in the 1990s, economic growth typically fell by half in the decade after investment peaked. The alternative is that China tries to sustain an unrealistic growth target, by piling more debt on an already powerful debt bomb.
> 
> Mr. Sharma is head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and author of "Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles" (Norton, 2012).
> 
> A version of this article appeared February 26, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: China Has Its Own Debt Bomb.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Some Chinese think that the way they are going to both preserve the dominance of the CCP and maintain a prosperous economy is by adopting the _Singapore Model_. This article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_ explores that possibility:

http://thediplomat.com/pacific-money/2012/11/12/is-singapore-worth-emulating/


> Is Singapore Worth Emulating?
> 
> By Anthony Fensom
> 
> November 12, 2012
> 
> Singapore has attracted admirers for its success in transforming from one of Asia’s less developed countries into an international economic powerhouse. Now, with China seeking to do the same for itself and double per capita income by 2020, could the tightly controlled but economically vibrant city-state help show Beijing’s communist leaders how to maintain their grip on power?
> 
> According to an article in China’s Study Times, published by the Communist Party’s Central Party School, China’s incoming president Xi Jinping has for several years “led a team investigating the Singapore model and how it might be applied to China”.
> 
> '[Singapore’s] People’s Action Party [PAP] has won consecutive elections and held state power for a long time, while ensuring that the party's high efficiency, incorruptibility and vitality leads Singapore in attaining an economic leap forward,'' wrote Song Xiongwei, a lecturer at the Chinese Academy of Governance.
> 
> Despite the differences between the two countries, not least including China’s 1.3 billion people, Singapore’s city-state of 5.3 million has much worth emulating.
> 
> The island nation already reportedly leads the world in GDP per capita, as well as boasting one of the most competitive international economies in global rankings.
> 
> A report released in August 2012 by Knight Frank and Citi Private Wealth estimated the country’s GDP per capita in purchasing power parity terms at U.S. $56,532 in 2010, ahead of Norway, the United States and Hong Kong. Singapore is expected to maintain its high ranking through 2050, followed by neighbors Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
> 
> Singapore’s wealth is undoubtedly inflated by the world’s highest concentration of millionaires, with the ultra-rich including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, part of a class which is expected to increase another 67 percent over the next four years.
> 
> The Southeast Asian trading center was rated this year as the easiest place in the world for small and medium-sized enterprises to do business, according to a World Bank and International Finance Corporation report.
> 
> Measuring such factors as the complexity of procedures needed in starting a business, enforcing contracts and registering property, Singapore came in first ahead of its neighbor Hong Kong, with the United States ranking fourth.
> 
> In addition, Singapore ranked second behind Switzerland in the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Index, which compared nearly 150 economies across a wide variety of criteria including infrastructure, education, innovation and efficiency.
> 
> Ruled by the PAP since attaining self-governance in 1959, the former British colony has earned plaudits from the IMF for its “prudent macroeconomic and financial policies,” including persistent fiscal surpluses and a large stock of public sector external assets, along with “political stability and an effective rule of law.”
> 
> In an email interview with The Diplomat, ANZ economist Aninda Mitra said Singapore had set a good example for other regional countries to follow.
> 
> "Singapore is often viewed as a role model for other multi-ethnic, post-colonial small or island states which have failed to live up to their full potential, such as Fiji or Sri Lanka,” Mitra said.
> 
> “It is also seen as a model for urban planning and bureaucratic efficiency by larger states across the region.”
> 
> *‘Middle income trap’*
> 
> However, if Beijing’s policymakers see in Singapore a future path to follow, they may have to look carefully, according to a recent World Bank report.
> 
> Named “China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society,” the report by the World Bank and Beijing’s Development Research Center found that just 13 of 101 economies identified in 1960 as middle income made the transition to high-income economies.
> 
> Described as the “middle income trap,” countries are said to remain stuck when the factors that contributed to strong early growth, such as low-cost labor and early technology use, reach their limits and economic momentum slows.
> 
> Among those that broke free of the trap, including Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, less governmental intervention in both the economic and political spheres has been seen as a significant factor.
> 
> China’s outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao has argued in favor of political reform, warning his Communist Party comrades that “without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost. The new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved, and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”
> 
> The World Bank report called for structural reforms in a number of politically challenging areas, including “redefining the role of government, reforming and restructuring state enterprises and banks, developing the private sector, promoting competition, and deepening reforms in the land, labor and financial markets.”
> 
> While seemingly on track to supplant the United States as the world’s biggest economy, China faces the risk of growing old before it gets rich, with its working age population set to peak in 2015 as reported by The Diplomat.
> 
> *Democracy flight?*
> 
> Singapore’s exclusive residential enclaves, luxury boutiques and multi-million dollar properties along with low taxes have helped attract the super-rich.
> 
> According to the _Wall Street Journal Asia_, a survey of wealthy individuals ranking cities in terms of “economic activity, political power, quality of life, knowledge and influence” found Singapore was the fifth-most popular behind London, New York, Hong Kong and Paris.
> 
> Yet even respondents in Asia put Western cities ahead of Singapore and Hong Kong – “an indication that economic growth may not be the most important factor when a high-net worth individual chooses his city of residence.”
> 
> The report by Knight Frank and Citi noted that Chinese cities “performed significantly less well for freedom of expression and human rights – something that may hinder any future ascent to the top of the overall ranking”.
> 
> Singapore has efficiently addressed two of the key domestic development issues in East Asia, comprising an excellent education system to train future leaders as well as making corruption unattractive. But can it attract and retain top global talent?
> 
> According to one recent U.S. visitor, the country’s push to “convince the global elite that Singapore is the best place to live” may be a challenge.
> 
> “In Singapore and in other parts of Asia, I heard several anecdotes of people expressing frustration with Singapore’s tightly controlled society. For how long can elites put up with partial freedom?
> 
> “I heard several people saying that the best and brightest in Asia prefer to move to freer societies with the U.S. as the top destination, then Europe, and then Australia,” said Devin T. Stewart, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Council.
> 
> According to Peter Hartcher, the _Sydney Morning Herald’s_ international editor, the political, media and housing controls implemented by Singapore have shown China “a potential halfway house between authoritarianism and liberal democracy”.
> 
> *Economic challenges*
> 
> Meanwhile, Singapore’s push to restructure itself toward a productivity-based economy less reliant on foreign workers is seen affecting its growth prospects.
> 
> Growing income inequality, rising living costs and house prices were prominent issues in the May 2011 general elections which saw the PAP secure its lowest ever share of the popular vote.
> 
> Non-resident foreign workers make up around a third of Singapore’s labor force – one of the highest proportions in the world, with the exception of some countries in the Middle East. The high number has been blamed for low productivity growth and strains on public infrastructure, fueling anti-foreigner sentiment.
> 
> “Singapore has taken on a tough task in trying to restructure itself toward a more innovation-driven model,” said ANZ’s Mitra.
> 
> “This will likely result in greater economic integration with its neighbours, and shifts in economic activity toward higher value-added sectors. But it also implies slower growth than in the past, with stronger efforts to enabling and equalizing opportunities for all its residents.”
> 
> While forecasting 4.5 percent GDP growth in 2013, ANZ’s economists note “growing downside risks” including weak labor productivity coupled with tight monetary policy, producing a “tough growth-inflation trade-off”.
> 
> Singapore narrowly avoided recession this year through a revision of its second-quarter GDP figures to growth of 0.2 percent. Its third-quarter GDP shrank an annualized 1.5 percent from the previous quarter, worse than economists’ forecasts of a 1 percent decline.
> 
> With trade amounting to four times its GDP, Singapore remains susceptible to any further weakening in global demand. Yet for China’s leaders, its success in escaping the middle income trap while maintaining political control is the real lesson to be studied.




The Chinese intelligentia is not interested in Western _liberal_ democracy; most educated Chinese reject _liberalism_ as a social value ~ they are, in the main, Confucians and accept those very _conservative_ socio-political values as most acceptable.

The key problem with the _Singapore Model_ is that Singapore is one of the *least corrupt* nations on earth; far less corrupt than China or e.g. the USA or even Canada. China will need a cultural revolution to make the necessary changes. Zhou Enlai demonstrated that such _revolutions_ are possible, but they require real, popular leadership.


----------



## cupper

So...

Here is a question for the Sinophiles among us. 

How does the current Chinese political and economic system come to an end?

Does it gradually fade away and morph into a system more closely aligned to Capitalism?

Does it eventually collapse under it's own weight as it uses up it's available resources?

Does the extreme disparity between the small rich class and huge poor classes create conditions where the poor rise up knowing they have little to lose  and everything to gain?

Or does it ever come to an end?

(Seems I had way too much time to kill driving to Philadelphia last week, and was listening to a discussion on the shrinking US Economy, and the growing demand on world resources from China and India)


----------



## Edward Campbell

One might want to consider that for 2,000+ years, since the _Spring and Autumn_ period, Chinese governance has been remarkably consistent and resilient: a centralized, hereditary monarchy with strong provincial governments. Each dynasty lasts for decades or even centuries and the interregnums, between dynasties, are used to test the "mandate" of the next dynasty.

The _system_, such as it is, seems to work for the Chinese: some dynasties were stellar, others were failures; some were domestic, others were led by _Sinified_ foreigners, even barbarians; through it all China remained stable and, largely, united. At least three or perhaps four times, for periods of a century or more, in the past 2,500 years China accounted for more than 35% of the world's GDP, maybe, in one period (_Song_ Dynasty) it produced as much as 80% of the world's GDP! 

China has a consistent cultural history - unlike say the English, French, Greeks or Italians the Chinese read, write and speak the same language today as they did 2,000 years ago. Arguably, during a single century (6th BCE) there was more intelectual activity in China (including Confucius, Lao-tze and Sun Tzu) than anywhere else in the entire world in any comparable period, including the _Enlightenment_, and what they said and wrote 2,500 years ago is still accessible, in the original language, to modern Chinese students.

I don't know what's in China's future but, based on its past, more of the same seems like a safe bet. China's historical and cultural _*consistency*_ should not be taken lightly.


----------



## a_majoor

I largely agree with Edward, with the proviso that if the various stressors such as economic disparity, environmental degradation, credit bubbles, social disruptions due to corruption etc. become too much, modern China might "shed" some of the outlying regions such as Tibet or Xinjiang, reasoning the cost to keep them outweighs any benefits they might obtain. To the outside world, this would look like a nation disintegrating, but the "core" of China would remain, and that core will remain secure behind the Gobi Desert, the Himalaya Mountains and the sea. Like Ancient Egypt, China has few prctical approaches to its frontiers, which allows for the long term stability we see.


----------



## cupper

I fall in that same group as well. In the past I've thought that due to the shear size of the population that the only real form of government that would work is a strong centralized authoritarian system, be it hereditary monarchy or centrally planned socialist / communist system.


----------



## a_majoor

Let's hope the communicatin is clearly understood, or WRM's worst case scenario will be the one to pass. Sadly, Instapundit (where I discovered this post) seems to believe that, based on past performance, this Administration will indeed "unpivot", leave their (and our) allies hanging in the wind and generally destabilizing the region. This is quite bad for us, since as a trading nation, we depend a great deal for the US Navy to provide protection and "freedom of the seas" for both their and our benefit. While Pacific Rim nations may be able to band together and create an alternative fleet in being (with the Japanese fleet perhaps being the core element), there are plenty of reasosn this would be a marginal solution (the combined "Western" fleet of Japanese, Canadian and Australian ships would be far smaller than the US Pacific fleet, have far les capability, and have political issues with, for example, Korea).

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/02/28/the-unpivot-to-asia/



> *The Unpivot to Asia?*
> Walter Russell Mead
> 
> The Washington Post headline blares: “China is happy with John Kerry because it thinks he’ll drop the ‘pivot to Asia’”. The Post article itself gets its ammunition from this Liz Economy post over at CFR which rounds up some of the reactions to the new security team from around China. The mood is upbeat.
> 
> China Institute of International Studies’ Ruan Zongze: “Compared with Clinton’s tough diplomatic approach, Kerry as a moderate democrat is expected to stress the role of bilateral or multilateral dialogues”;
> 
> Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Ni Feng: Kerry’s “diplomatic measures” will “greatly embody Obama’s concepts.”
> In reviewing Secretary Kerry’s congressional voting record, Chinese observers also noted that he “generally voted in favor of bills conducive to promoting the development China-U.S. relations and generally voted against or expressed different opinions for bills not conducive to China-U.S. relations.” Overall, as People’s Daily observed, “Kerry stresses more on coordination rather than confrontation in foreign relations.”
> 
> What are the Chinese so happy about? One possible clue: during his confirmation hearings, John Kerry seemed to indicate that a further military buildup in Asia is not in the immediate future.
> 
> I’m not convinced that increased military ramp-up is critical yet. I’m not convinced of that. That’s something I’d want to look at very carefully when and if you folks confirm me and I can get in there and sort of dig into this a little deeper. But we have a lot more bases out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. We have a lot more forces out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. And we’ve just augmented the president’s announcement in Australia with additional Marines. You know, the Chinese take a look at that and say, what’s the United States doing? They trying to circle us? What’s going on? And so, you know, every action has its reaction. It’s the old — you know, it’s not just the law of physics; it’s the law of politics and diplomacy. I think we have to be thoughtful about, you know, sort of how we go forward.
> 
> Though the Chinese may be misunderstanding Secretary Kerry somewhat—he seems to have been been offering his assessment that our current force posture in the Pacific is adequate for the task at hand—there is an unmistakeable change of tone in his remarks.
> 
> Three possible things could be going on; one is excellent, one is OK but could bring trouble down the road, and one is catastrophic. Let’s start with the rosy scenario: the Obama administration hasn’t changed its Asia policy beyond changing the mood music and China, aware that it can’t change America’s basic approach to the region and lacks the strength to challenge us, has decided not to make a fuss about something it can’t change. It is taking the change in American tone as an opportunity to back down from a confrontation it can’t win without losing face.
> 
> That would be smart on China’s part: whining ineffectively about how much you hate something you can’t do anything about is an excellent way to look like a weakling and a fool (sort of like complaining about how much you hate Butcher Assad without doing anything about it).
> If that’s what’s happening, look for things to quiet down in Asia.
> 
> Another, less hopeful possibility is that while US policy hasn’t changed in Asia, China thinks that it has. It has mistaken Secretary Kerry’s softer tone for a softer policy and is being nice because it thinks it has won the showdown. Chinese resolve and America’s Middle East and budget troubles have convinced the Americans that they can’t sustain the pivot, China thinks. In that case, we should expect some problems down the road as Chinese assertiveness runs into American resistance.
> 
> The third and worst possibility is that the Chinese are right and the Obama administration is ratting out on its own pivot and getting ready to betray our Asian allies who trusted the promises the administration made in its first term. In that case we can expect a crescendo of instability and crises that could escalate to include military conflicts and could well see South Korea, Japan and Taiwan going nuclear as China bids to establish a sphere of influence in the region.
> 
> It would be a tragic mistake for the Obama administration to shortchange the pivot by failing to devote the adequate amount of resources to the region—an enormous folly that would permanently undermine American credibility around the world. If your goal was to weaken the United States and alienate Washington’s closest allies, announcing a pivot to Asia with great fanfare and boldness, lots of parades and marches, and then slink ingloriously away would be about the best possible way to do it.
> 
> That said, the Obama administration has a big problem. Last year it seems to have believed it was on a winning streak in the Middle East that would allow it to continue withdrawing and moving toward a low-cost approach to a high-maintenance region. But that fell apart as the Syrian civil war, the mess in Libya and beyond, and the rising disquietude about Egyptian stability darkened the horizon. (Oh, and there’s that unfinished bit of business with Iran.) The pivot to Asia came when the administration felt bullish on its prospects for Middle East disengagement; that hope turned out to be misguided, and now the administration has got to deal both with a chaotic Middle East and an aroused China—when all it really wants to do is cut the defense budget and spend the money at home.
> 
> Backing away from Asia might seem like the easiest solution, but we hope and believe that the White House is smart enough to understand that this would be a mistake of historic proportions, one that historians would be shaking their heads over 100 years from now. Backing off from Asia might temporarily soothe US-Chinese relations, but at the cost of increasing the propensity among some Chinese to think the US is in such rapid decline that it can be bullied and pushed aside.
> 
> The White House, like most Americans, wants a calm international environment so that the US can concentrate on its problems at home. As we’ve said before, there’s nothing wrong with that, but unfortunately a calm overseas still depends on foreign perceptions that the US is willing to do what it takes to maintain its geopolitical position. If that confidence is lost, the international scene will become very tumultuous very quickly as other powers begin to plot the Wars of the American Succession. The cheapest and least risky foreign policy in the long run involves doing what it takes in both the Middle East AND Asia.
> 
> This is not as hard as some in the White House appear to think. President Obama would gain political capital and stature, not lose it, by stepping up to the plate overseas, and by explaining the international situation and our interests in it to the American people.
> 
> - See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/02/28/the-unpivot-to-asia/#sthash.4YMMK1gQ.dpuf


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting article. The author is honest in his assessment that the differences between China and the United States is large enough to make the answer "who knows?", but students of history know that "bubbles" being deflated or popped always have a bad end:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2131402



> Is China's Housing Market Heading Toward a US-Style Crash?
> 
> Gregory M. Stein
> 
> University of Tennessee College of Law
> 
> 2012
> 
> Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2012
> University of Tennessee Legal Studies Research Paper No. 198
> 
> Abstract:
> This article aims to determine whether China is heading toward a U.S.-style market crash in its housing market. Rather than attempting to maintain any suspense, I will disclose here that my conclusion is, “Who knows?” China and the United States have dramatically different histories, cultures, governments, economies, and legal systems. Anyone who claims to have a definitive answer to this question is overly confident.
> 
> My more modest goals in this article are to examine the available evidence and see which way it seems to point. The article begins by listing and describing several different ways in which the American housing market failed. It then evaluates the consequences of these failures for the U.S. housing market. Next, the article demonstrates some of the key respects in which the Chinese market differs from the market in the United States. This central portion of the article emphasizes just how difficult it is to make predictions about what might happen in one nation’s housing market based on the experiences of another nation that differs in so many significant ways. Finally, the article provides a description of some of the worrisome similarities between the Chinese and American housing markets. To the extent the previous analysis may have comforted the reader into believing that the Chinese market is unlikely to experience a downturn anytime soon, this last discussion will create some apprehension by highlighting some of the ways in which China might, in fact, be heading down the same path as the United States.
> 
> Number of Pages in PDF File: 43
> 
> Keywords: real estate, property, mortgages, housing, Chinese real estate, market crash, US-China comparisons
> Accepted Paper Series


----------



## a_majoor

The strange state of Chinese matchmaking and marriage. How much of this is out of the ordinary even for China is not something that I know enogh to comment on; perhaps arranged marriages of this sort are part of the cultural pattern (although from the tone of the article I'm not so sure) Long article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/business/in-a-changing-china-new-matchmaking-markets.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&



> *The Price of Marriage in China*
> 
> By BROOK LARMER
> Published: March 9, 2013
> 
> FROM her stakeout near the entrance of an H & M store in Joy City, a Beijing shopping mall, Yang Jing seemed lost in thought, twirling a strand of her auburn-tinted hair, tapping her nails on an aquamarine iPhone 4S. But her eyes kept moving. They tracked the clusters of young women zigzagging from Zara to Calvin Klein Jeans. They lingered on a face, a gesture, and then moved on, darting across the atrium, searching.
> 
> “This is a good place to hunt,” she told me. “I always have good luck here.”
> 
> For Ms. Yang, Joy City is not so much a consumer mecca as an urban Serengeti that she prowls for potential wives for some of China’s richest bachelors. Ms. Yang, 28, is one of China’s premier love hunters, a new breed of matchmaker that has proliferated in the country’s economic boom. The company she works for, Diamond Love and Marriage, caters to China’s nouveaux riches: men, and occasionally women, willing to pay tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource the search for their ideal spouse.
> 
> In Joy City, Ms. Yang gave instructions to her eight-scout team, one of six squads the company was deploying in three cities for one Shanghai millionaire. This client had provided a list of requirements for his future wife, including her age (22 to 26), skin color (“white as porcelain”) and sexual history (yes, a virgin).
> 
> “These millionaires are very picky, you know?” Ms. Yang said. “Nobody can ever be perfect enough.” Still, the potential reward for Ms. Yang is huge: The love hunter who finds the client’s eventual choice will receive a bonus of more than $30,000, around five times the average annual salary in this line of work.
> 
> Suddenly, a signal came.
> 
> From across the atrium, a co-worker of Ms. Yang caught her eye and nodded at a woman in a blue dress, walking alone. Ms. Yang had shaken off her colleague’s suggestions several times that day, but this time she circled behind the woman in question.
> 
> “Perfect skin,” she whispered. “Elegant face.” When the woman walked into H & M, Ms. Yang intercepted her in the sweater aisle. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said with a honeyed smile. “I’m a love hunter. Are you looking for love?”
> 
> Three miles away, in a Beijing park near the Temple of Heaven, a woman named Yu Jia jostled for space under a grove of elms. A widowed 67-year-old pensioner, she was clearing a spot on the ground for a sign she had scrawled for her son. “Seeking Marriage,” read the wrinkled sheet of paper, which Ms. Yu held in place with a few fragments of brick and stone. “Male. Single. Born 1972. Height 172 cm. High school education. Job in Beijing.”
> 
> Ms. Yu is another kind of love hunter: a parent seeking a spouse for an adult child in the so-called marriage markets that have popped up in parks across the city. Long rows of graying men and women sat in front of signs listing their children’s qualifications. Hundreds of others trudged by, stopping occasionally to make an inquiry.
> 
> Ms. Yu’s crude sign had no flourishes: no photograph, no blood type, no zodiac sign, no line about income or assets. Unlike the millionaire’s wish list, the sign didn’t even specify what sort of wife her son wanted. “We don’t have much choice,” she explained. “At this point, we can’t rule anybody out.”
> 
> In the four years she has been seeking a wife for her son, Zhao Yong, there have been only a handful of prospects. Even so, when a woman in a green plastic visor paused to scan her sign that day, Ms. Yu put on a bright smile and told of her son’s fine character and good looks. The woman asked: “Does he own an apartment in Beijing?” Ms. Yu’s smile wilted, and the woman moved on.
> 
> The New Matchmaking
> 
> Three decades of combustive economic growth have reshaped the landscape of marriage in China. A generation ago, China was one of the world’s most equal nations, in both gender and wealth. Most people were poor, and tight controls over housing, employment, travel and family life simplified the search for a suitable match — what the Chinese call mendang hudui, meaning roughly “family doors of equal size.”
> 
> Like many Chinese who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Yu married a man from her factory work unit, with their local Communist Party boss as informal matchmaker. As recently as 1990, researchers found that a vast majority of residents in two of China’s largest cities dated just one person before marriage: their prospective spouse.
> 
> China’s transition to a market economy has swept away many restrictions in people’s lives. But of all the new freedoms the Chinese enjoy today — making money, owning a house, choosing a career — there is one that has become an unexpected burden: seeking a spouse. This may be a time of sexual and romantic liberation in China, but the solemn task of finding a husband or wife is proving to be a vexing proposition for rich and poor alike.
> 
> “The old family and social networks that people used to rely on for finding a husband or wife have fallen apart,” said James Farrer, an American sociologist whose book, “Opening Up,” looks at sex, dating and marriage in contemporary China. “There’s a huge sense of dislocation in China, and young people don’t know where to turn.”
> 
> The confusion surrounding marriage in China reflects a country in frenzied transition. Sharp inequalities of wealth have created new fault lines in society, while the largest rural-to-urban migration in history has blurred many of the old ones. As many as 300 million rural Chinese have moved to cities in the last three decades. Uprooted and without nearby relatives to help arrange meetings with potential partners, these migrants are often lost in the swell of the big city.
> 
> Demographic changes, too, are creating complications. Not only are many more Chinese women postponing marriage to pursue careers, but China’s gender gap — 118 boys are born for every 100 girls — has become one of the world’s widest, fueled in large part by the government’s restrictive one-child policy. By the end of this decade, Chinese researchers estimate, the country will have a surplus of 24 million unmarried men.
> 
> Without traditional family or social networks, many men and women have taken their searches online, where thousands of dating and marriage Web sites have sprung up in an industry that analysts predict will soon surpass $300 million annually. These sites cater mainly to China’s millions of white-collar workers. But intense competition, along with mistrust of potential mates’ online claims, has spurred a growing number of singles — rich and poor — to turn to more hands-on matchmaking services.
> 
> China’s matchmaking tradition stretches back more than 2,000 years, to the first imperial marriage broker in the late Zhou dynasty. The goal of matchmakers ever since has usually been to pair families of equal stature for the greater social good. Today, however, matchmaking has warped into a commercial free-for-all in which marriage is often viewed as an opportunity to leap up the social ladder or to proclaim one’s arrival at the top.
> 
> Single men have a hard time making the list if they don’t own a house or an apartment, which in cities like Beijing are extremely expensive. And despite the gender imbalance, Chinese women face intense pressure to be married before the age of 28, lest they be rejected and stigmatized as “leftover women.”
> 
> Dozens of high-end matchmaking services have sprung up in China in the last five years, charging big fees to find and to vet prospective spouses for wealthy clients. Their methods can turn into gaudy spectacle. One firm transported 200 would-be trophy wives to a resort town in southwestern China for the perusal of one powerful magnate. Another organized a caravan of BMWs for rich businessmen to find young wives in Sichuan Province. Diamond Love, among the largest love-hunting services, sponsored a matchmaking event in 2009 where 21 men each paid a $15,000 entrance fee.
> 
> Over the last year, I tracked the progress of two matchmaking efforts at the opposite extremes of wealth. Together, they help illuminate the forces reshaping marriage in China.
> 
> In one case, Ms. Yu’s migrant son reluctantly agreed to allow his aging mother to make the search for his future wife her all-consuming mission. In the other, Ms. Yang’s richest client at Diamond Love deployed dozens of love hunters to find the most exquisite fair-skinned beauty in the land, even as he fretted about being conned by a bai jin nu, or gold digger.
> 
> Between the two extremes is Ms. Yang herself, whose very success as a love hunter has made her the breadwinner in her own family. Despite her growing discomfort with the sexism that permeates the love-hunting business, she has sympathy for her superrich clients.
> 
> “These men are lost souls,” she said. “They worked hard, made a lot of money, and left their old world behind. Now they don’t have time to find a wife, and they don’t know whom to trust. So they come to us.”
> 
> A Very Particular Client
> 
> When I first visited the Beijing office of Diamond Love last year, Ms. Yang was fretting over a love-hunting campaign for a potential client: a divorced 42-year-old property mogul who was prepared to spend the equivalent of more than a half-million dollars.
> 
> This wouldn’t be the biggest case in company history; two years ago, a man paid $1.5 million for a successful 12-city hunt. But the pressure felt more intense this time. It wasn’t just that Ms. Yang would vie with hundreds of other love hunters for a possible winner’s bonus of $32,000. Her boss had entrusted her with a central role in this campaign — the firm’s biggest of the year — with a client who was known to be an imperious perfectionist. Failure was a real possibility.
> 
> Ms. Yang started part-time work as a love hunter while a university student eight years ago. After a brief stint as a hospital nurse, she joined Diamond Love full time and is now its most seasoned Beijing scout. Despite a recent promotion to a consulting job, in which she deals directly with clients and their delicate egos, she is often tapped to lead the highest-stakes campaigns.
> 
> Her hit rate is astonishing. In three large-scale campaigns over the last three years, the firm’s top clients ended up choosing candidates whom Ms. Yang personally discovered. Her success has earned her huge bonuses — in one case, $27,000 — and a reputation as one of China’s most accomplished love hunters.
> 
> Still, she told me that this new case was “nearly impossible.”
> 
> Mr. Big, as I’ll call him — he insisted that Diamond Love not reveal his name — is a member of China’s fuyidai, the “first-generation rich” who have leapt from poverty to extreme wealth in a single bound, often jettisoning their first wives in the process. Diamond Love’s clientele also includes many fuerdai, or “second-generation-rich,” men and women in their 20s and 30s whose search is often bankrolled by wealthy parents keen on exerting control over their marital choices as well as the family inheritance.
> 
> But fuyidai like Mr. Big are accustomed to being the boss and can be the most uncompromising clients.
> 
> Mr. Big had an excruciatingly specific requirement for his second wife. The ideal woman, he said, would look like a younger replica of Zhou Tao, a famous Chinese television host: slim with pure white skin, slightly pointed chin, perfect teeth, double eyelids and long silken hair. To ensure her good character and fortune, he insisted that her wuguan — a feng shui-like reading of the sense organs on the face — show perfect harmony.
> 
> “When clients start out, all they want is beauty — how tall, how white, how thin,” Ms. Yang said. “Sometimes the person they’re looking for doesn’t exist in nature. Even if we find her, these clients often have no idea whether that would make their hearts feel settled. It’s our job to try to move them from fantasy toward reality.”
> 
> Fantasy, of course, is precisely what Diamond Love sells. Ms. Yang’s boss, Fei Yang, is a smoky-voiced woman in a black leather jacket who used to trade in electronic goods. Inviting me to sit on a bright pink couch in her lushly carpeted office, she explained how the firm has “spread the culture of the relationship” since 2005, when it opened in Shanghai. It now has six branches, with 200 consultants, 200 full-time love hunters and hundreds more part-time scouts, virtually all of them women.
> 
> Teacher Fei, as her employees call her, runs a series of “how to be a better wife” workshops that coach women on the finer points of managing a wealthy household, reading their husbands’ moods and “understanding the importance of sexual relations.” The fee for two, 14-day courses is $16,000.
> 
> But Diamond Love’s chief target is men, the wealthier the better. The company’s four million members are mostly men who pay from a few dollars a month for basic searches to more than $15,000 for access to exclusive databases with customized assistance from a professional love consultant.
> 
> The company’s wealthiest, highest-paying clients — 90 percent of whom are men — show little interest in lectures or databases. They want exclusive access to what Ms. Fei coolly refers to as “fresh resources”: young women who haven’t yet been exposed to other suitors online. It’s the love hunters’ job to find them.
> 
> Besides giving clients a vastly expanded pool of marriage prospects, these campaigns offer a sense of security. Rigorous background checks screen out what Ms. Fei calls “gold diggers, liars and people of loose morals.” Depending on a campaign’s size, Diamond Love charges from $50,000 to more than $1 million. Ms. Fei makes no apologies for the high fees.
> 
> “Why shouldn’t they pay more to find the perfect wife?” she asked me. “This is the most important investment in their lives.”
> 
> Even before Mr. Big signed a contract, Ms. Yang sensed trouble brewing. She and a colleague culled the company’s exclusive databases to find women to serve as templates for the love hunters’ search. Together with Mr. Big, they looked at the files and pictures of their top 3,000 women. He rejected them all.
> 
> “Even if the girl’s eyebrow was just a half-millimeter too high, he would toss the photo out and say, ‘No good!’ ” Ms. Yang said. “He always found something to complain about.”
> 
> With more than a half-million dollars on the line, Ms. Yang was beginning to doubt her ability to deliver. And not just for Mr. Big. One afternoon when we met, the normally animated Ms. Yang slumped onto the sofa, exhausted. She had just spent an hour with a rich Chinese businesswoman in her late 30s. The woman proposed spending $100,000 on a campaign to find a husband who matched her status.
> 
> “I had to tell her we couldn’t take her case,” Ms. Yang said. “No wealthy Chinese man would ever marry her. They always want somebody younger, with less power.”
> 
> We sat in silence a minute before Ms. Yang spoke again. “It’s depressing to think about these ‘leftover women,’ ” she said. “Do you have them in America, too?”


----------



## a_majoor

2/2

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/business/in-a-changing-china-new-matchmaking-markets.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&



> A Mother’s Search
> 
> Yu Jia kept her search a secret at first. She didn’t want to risk upsetting her son so soon after a trying time for the family. Ms. Yu and her husband, who was sick with lung cancer, had left the northern city of Harbin in the hope of finding better treatment for his cancer in Beijing, where two of their sons already lived. The husband hung on for a year before he died in 2009 — not long, but long enough to wipe out the last of the family’s $25,000 in savings.
> 
> Devastated, Ms. Yu stayed in an apartment on the outskirts of Beijing with her sons — one married; the other, Zhao Yong, still single at 36. But one day, Ms. Yu came upon a crowd swarming under the elm trees near the Temple of Heaven.
> 
> Her life suddenly had a new purpose. “I decided that I will not go home until I find a wife for my son,” she told me. “It’s the only thing left unfinished in my life.”
> 
> Plunging into a crowd of strangers with her sign made Ms. Yu feel awkward at first. Her elder two sons had found wives in traditional ways, one through a matchmaker, the other through a friend. But Mr. Zhao, her youngest, had not. After losing his job in an electronics factory in Harbin, he followed his hometown sweetheart to Beijing. They were in love and planned to marry. But her family demanded a bride price — a sort of dowry used in rural China — of $15,000. His family could not afford it, and the relationship ended.
> 
> Mr. Zhao threw himself into his work as a driver and salesman. His former girlfriend married and had a baby. He told his mother he had little time to think about marriage.
> 
> The strangers in the park, uprooted from their traditional family and hometown networks, shared similar stories, and Ms. Yu found comfort there. Many other parents, she realized, were even more frantic; they had only one child because of China’s policy. (Ms. Yu, as a rural mother, was permitted to have multiple offspring.)
> 
> The marriage candidates on offer in the parks, she discovered, were often a mismatch of shengnu (“leftover women”) and shengnan (“leftover men”), two groups from opposite ends of the social scale. Shengnan, like her son, are mostly poor rural men left behind as female counterparts marry up in age and social status. The phenomenon is exacerbated by China’s warped demographics, as the bubble of excess men starts to reach marrying age.
> 
> Finding a Chinese spouse can be even more challenging for so-called leftover women, even if they often have precisely what the shengnan lack: money, education and social and professional standing. One day in the Temple of Heaven park, I met a 70-year-old pensioner from Anhui Province who was seeking a husband for his eldest daughter, a 36-year-old economics professor in Beijing.
> 
> “My daughter is an outstanding girl,” he said, pulling from his satchel an academic book she had published. “She’s been introduced to about 15 men over the past two years, but they all rejected her because her degree is too high.”
> 
> The failure compelled him to forbid his youngest daughter from going to graduate school. “No man will want you,” he told her. That daughter is now married in Anhui, with an infant son whom the pensioner, so busy seeking a spouse for her older sister in Beijing, rarely sees.
> 
> Ms. Yu’s son, Mr. Zhao, was angry when he found out that she had been searching for a wife for him. He didn’t want to rely on anybody else’s marketing, especially his mother’s. But he has since relented.
> 
> “I see how hard she works, so I can’t refuse,” he told me.
> 
> Ms. Yu doesn’t tell her son about the parents who scoff when they find out he has no property and no Beijing residency permit. But the handful of young women she’s persuaded to meet him never made it to a second date.
> 
> One afternoon last summer, however, there was a glimmer of hope. Ms. Yu traded information with a mother who didn’t dismiss her son out of hand. The woman’s daughter was 35, with a good education, a substantial income and a Beijing residency permit. She was, in some eyes, a leftover woman. Ms. Yu e-mailed Mr. Zhao’s picture to her that evening. The daughter declined to meet at first. A week later, she called back: “Yes, maybe.”
> 
> Ms. Yu was thrilled. It was her first solid lead in months.
> 
> High Fees and Secrecy
> 
> The second time I dropped by Diamond Love’s offices last year, Yang Jing took me by the arm and whispered: “We’ve had a spy!”
> 
> A few days earlier, just as Mr. Big was set to sign the contract and begin paying his $600,000 fee, a woman from a competing agency contacted him. Displaying inside knowledge of his contract with Diamond Love, she offered to carry out an even more comprehensive search. Mr. Big called Diamond Love in a rage that his confidential information had been leaked.
> 
> Within hours, according to Ms. Yang, the office’s management team ferreted out and dismissed the office mole — a secretary whom the competitor had recruited as a spy. But it took a full week of apologies and vows of enhanced security to coax Mr. Big to finally sign the contract. The terms stipulated that his file would be destroyed, “Mission Impossible”-style, once he had found a wife.
> 
> “We always sign confidentiality agreements,” Ms. Yang said, “but now we’re operating like a secret organization.”
> 
> The day Mr. Big signed, Ms. Yang took a flight to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, where she would kick-start the campaign. During her 20-day search there, she had recurring nightmares. “I always feel unsettled during a campaign,” she said, “but this time, the stress was crazy.”
> 
> Her team of 10 love hunters scoured university campuses and shopping malls for three weeks, trying to meet a daily quota of 20 high-quality women, or two per person. Ms. Yang offered a bonus, about $16, for every candidate above the quota and set a personal goal of finding 10 “Class A” women a day herself.
> 
> Ms. Yang wasn’t just haunted by a fear of letting the ideal candidate — and the bonus — slip out of her grasp. The office leak had also made her worry about security. One more false step and Mr. Big would bolt.
> 
> One afternoon in Chengdu, after slurping down a bowl of beef noodles at Master Kong’s Chef’s Table, Ms. Yang noticed a young woman sweeping past her into the restaurant, chatting on a cellphone. Long black hair hid most of the woman’s face, but there was something captivating about her laugh and easy gait.
> 
> “She seemed open, warm, happy,” Ms. Yang said. After a moment of indecision, Ms. Yang followed her inside, apologized for the intrusion and switched on her charm. Linking arms with the woman — one of her patented moves — Ms. Yang came away with her phone number, photograph and a few pertinent details: she was 24, a graduate student and a near-ringer for the TV hostess Zhou Tao.
> 
> A Proposal Rejected
> 
> One Friday last fall, I met with Yu Jia and her son Zhao Yong at a McDonald’s in western Beijing. Now 39, Mr. Zhao has a youthful, unlined face. Still, he worries that time is passing him by. To save money and to enhance his marriage prospects, he works two jobs simultaneously — one selling microwaves, the other cosmetics — crisscrossing the city on his electric bike. He earns about $1,000 a month, and sometimes adds $80 more by working weekends as a film extra.
> 
> It is a respectable income, but hardly enough to attract a bride in Beijing.  Even in the countryside, where men’s families pay bride prices, inflation is rampant. Ms. Yu’s family paid about $3,500 when Mr. Zhao’s older brother married 10 years ago in rural Heilongjiang. Today, she said, brides’ families ask for $30,000, even $50,000. An apartment, the urban equivalent of the bride price, is even further out of reach. At Mr. Zhao’s current income, it would take a decade or two before he could  afford a small Beijing apartment, which he said would start at about $100,000. “I’ll be an old man by then,” he said with a rueful smile.
> 
> Mr. Zhao has met several women on online dating sites, but he lost faith in the Internet when several women lied to him about their marital status and family backgrounds. His mother, however, had come through, arranging a meeting between him and the daughter of the woman she had met in the marriage market.
> 
> Not long after our conversation in McDonald’s, Mr. Zhao met the woman at a coffee shop. It was, he told me later, even more awkward than most first dates. A rural migrant and door-to-door salesman, he struggled to find a shared topic of interest with the woman, a 35-year-old entrepreneur and Beijing native who had arrived driving a BMW sedan.
> 
> The lack of chemistry didn’t seem to bother the woman, who told him about her profitable photo business and the three Beijing apartments she owned. Mr. Zhao didn’t find her unattractive, but how was he supposed to respond? Then, even before broaching the possibility of a second date, he said, the woman made a proposition: if they married, he wouldn’t have to work again.
> 
> “She said she made enough money for the two of us,” he said. “I could have anything I want.”
> 
> The marriage proposal stunned him. He had never heard a woman talk in such blunt, pragmatic terms. A life of wealth and leisure sounded tempting. Still, in the end, he couldn’t imagine being subordinate to a woman. “If I accepted that situation,” he asked me, “what kind of man would I be?”
> 
> It took Mr. Zhao several days before he worked up the nerve to tell his mother he had rejected the offer. He knew how hard she had worked, how much she had been counting on this. The news frustrated Ms. Yu. “Kids these days are way too picky,” she said.
> 
> Even with this setback, Ms. Yu has continued her daily pilgrimage to the marriage markets. When I last spoke to her early this month, she was arranging dates for her son with three new marriage candidates she had found. “I’m optimistic,” she said. After all these years, hope is what keeps her going.
> 
> Culling the Prospects
> 
> The love-hunting campaign for Mr. Big yielded more than 1,100 fresh prospects who met his general specifications, including 200 in Chengdu. “The cruel process of culling,” as Ms. Yang called it, whittled that number to 100, then 20, and finally to a list of eight. (For Diamond Love, a fringe benefit of love-hunting campaigns is that the hundreds of rejected potential mates can be cycled into its databases — a process of replenishment paid for by its richest clients.)
> 
> The firm subjected the finalists to another round of interviews and psychological evaluations. Barely two months after the search began, Mr. Big received thick dossiers on each of the eight, with detailed information about their families and finances, habits and hobbies, and physical and mental conditions.
> 
> Finally, a series of grainy videos landed in his e-mail in-box. The first showed the top three prospects from Chengdu, sitting and standing, walking and talking, smiling and laughing. One of them, a demure 24-year-old with long black hair and black hot pants who seemed poised in front of the camera, was the graduate student whom Ms. Yang had pursued on a hunch at Master Kong Chef’s Table.
> 
> Ms. Yang’s hunting skills and tenacity had paid off again, giving her two of the eight finalists, and a 25 percent chance of winning the bonus of $32,000. (For finding two of the top 20, she had already earned a share of a smaller bonus.) When I asked about the reward, Ms. Yang demurred at first. “My aim is just to find a match that makes both people happy,” she said, before adding: “Inside my heart, I want my girls to win.”
> 
> Ms. Yang has worked hard for the chance. She heads to her job early in the morning and returns after 8 p.m., leaving her 5-year-old son in her mother-in-law’s care. She is often gone for weeks at a time on love-hunting trips. Her husband, whom she married at 22, when he was 35, ran a trucking logistics company that folded in 2009. Since then, he hasn’t worked much. With one large bonus, Ms. Yang bought him a Mitsubishi car that he tinkers with. Her occupation has given her a rather jaded view of the prospects for career women like herself. Once she told me half-jokingly: “It’s a good thing I’m already married. I would never stand a chance.”
> 
> Mr. Big’s Choice
> 
> In June, Mr. Big flew to Chengdu for meetings with the three local finalists. Riding an elevator to the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel, he fidgeted nervously with the part in his moussed hair. He had invested more than a half-million dollars in the search, and was about to see if the money was well spent.
> 
> His final date in Chengdu was with the Zhou Tao look-alike whom Ms. Yang had approached at the noodle restaurant. At first, it seemed a mismatch, and not just because of the 18-year age gap. He knew nearly everything about her — her dating history, her recent acceptance to a graduate school, her father’s lofty government post — while she knew little more than his height and weight. She didn’t even know his name. Diamond Love had told her only that his net worth exceeded $800,000.
> 
> The young woman tried to keep things casual by taking him to a local Sichuanese restaurant. But Mr. Big insisted on bringing along a female consultant from Diamond Love and sitting awkwardly off to one side during the meal. According to the consultant, Li Minmin, he sat in this position “to better evaluate her profile, her skin, and her teeth.”
> 
> The two barely spoke without the consultant’s prodding. Still, Mr. Big seemed pleased by the woman’s sense of privacy when he inquired about her father’s job. “He’s a civil servant,” she said. What level? “Management.” It took several minutes — and a blunt question about his title — before she acknowledged that her father was, in fact, the boss of an influential government office. “From childhood,” she told him, “my father taught me to keep a low profile.”
> 
> Suddenly, this seemed like a suitable match in the Chinese tradition of family doors of equal size. Here were two discreet people of similar social status, a wealthy entrepreneur and the daughter of a high-ranking official.
> 
> After dinner, Mr. Big called off all other dates with finalists and dispatched his consultant to buy a Gucci handbag for the woman, as a token of affection. Barely a week later, in early July, he flew her to Hainan Island for a vacation at a luxury beachside resort. The two stayed in separate hotel rooms. When they returned, Ms. Li assured me that “the relationship is still pure.”
> 
> Ms. Yang was pleased that her love-hunting had hit the mark, but she wished that the courtship would move faster: a $32,000 bonus could make a big difference to her family. After texting and phoning, the couple met again in Beijing and then took a holiday in a mountainous area of western Sichuan Province. In Chengdu, though, he declined to meet the woman’s parents, and instead of joining her at a wedding of her friends, stayed in the hotel.
> 
> The couple has not yet decided to marry. But they are still dating exclusively, and Ms. Yang says Mr. Big is serious about marriage. Nobody pays a half-million dollars “just to play around,” she says. “He just needs a little more time.”


----------



## CougarKing

Just a couple of updates on China's newly commissioned aircraft carrier _Liaoning_ ( 瓦良格号航空母舰):



> *China’s “Liaoning” aircraft carrier to go “Blue Water”*
> ‎Yesterday, ‎March ‎07, ‎2013, ‏‎4:53:32 AM | admin
> 
> Sea Waves magazine link
> 
> 2013-03-07 — China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, would be deployed on preliminary trial on the high seas this year before acquiring full combat capability within two years time.
> 
> The 990ft Liaoning, named after the province where it was refitted, is likely to have its preliminary trial on the high seas this year, a necessary step before it possesses full combat capability, said ship commander-in-chief Zhang Yongyi.
> 
> “Before every aircraft carrier truly matures and becomes capable of fighting in a war, it must go through trials on the high seas,” Zhang, who is also a deputy to the legislature the National People’s Congress, told China Central Television.
> 
> The ship is currently anchored at its homeport in Qingdao, China’s eastern Shandong Province.
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> It is the first time for the aircraft carrier to anchor at its homeport, meaning that the base for aircraft carrier in Qingdao is operational after four years of construction, People’s Liberation Army Navy said in a statement.
> 
> *On Saturday, the carrier moved from China’s northern port of Dalian, where it was retrofitted and later commissioned, to the port of Qingdao.
> Prior to that, Liaoning had undergone 12 sea trials.*
> 
> Carrier-based fighters also completed take-off and landing tests on Liaoning late last year.
> 
> A trial on the high seas is much tougher than Liaoning’s previous tests, because it requires the carrier to be fully independent of on-shore protection, said Lan Yun, the editor of Modern Ships, a magazine run by a research institute related to the shipbuilding industry.
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> Liaoning had travelled hundreds of km away from China’s coast before. But this time, Lan said, it may have to reach waters near Japan’s Okinawa Islands and even Guam, both located more than 1,000 kilometres away from Qingdao.
> 
> Such trials often require a vessel to remain at sea for one to three months, he said.
> 
> If Liaoning’s first high seas trial is successful, many more will follow, Lan said.
> 
> *That means the vessel may take another two years before reaching its full fighting capacity, he said.*
> 
> < Edited >






> *China conducts flight landing on first aircraft carrier*
> 
> (check the link for photos..)
> Global Times link



Video link of Liaoning's flight deck trials with J15 fighters




> *J-15 jet pioneer dies on new aircraft carrier*
> 
> A high-ranking researcher of China's J-15 fighter jet died after suffering a heart attack on the country's aircraft carrier on Sunday, China Central Television reports.
> 
> Luo Yang, general director of the J-15 fighter jet research team and also board chairman of Aviation Industries of China Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, died at the noon after he suffered a cardiac arrest during a training mission aboard the ship in Dalian of Northeast China's Liaoning province. He was 51.
> 
> China Daily link
> 
> link from The Hindu


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## CougarKing

> *China's PLA to participate in US RIMPAC 2013*
> China Defense Mashup link
> 
> 
> 2013-03-24 - *China's Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has accepted an invitation to participate for the first time in a major US-hosted naval drill, but legal restrictions will limit its role to less sensitive exercises, like disaster relief, US officials say.*
> 
> Beijing's agreement to join the drills being held next year comes at a moment of heightened tensions between China and US ally Japan over disputed East China Sea islets, and unease in the US about China's rapid military buildup and its cybercapabilities.
> 
> The Rim of the Pacific exercise (RIMPAC) is billed as the world's largest international maritime exercise, with 22 nations and more than 40 ships and submarines participating the last time it was held off Hawaii last year.
> 
> Not all the participants are treaty allies with the US. Last years participants included Russia and India.
> 
> However, China has never participated in the event, although it did send observers to RIMPAC in 1998, the Pentagon said.
> 
> 
> <edited>
> 
> 
> At the time, Panetta said he asked China to send a ship to the exercises. Beijing said later it would give the offer positive consideration.
> 
> We seek to strengthen and grow our military-to-military relationship with China, which matches and follows our growing political and economic relationship, Carter said, according to prepared remarks on the defense departments Web site.
> 
> *US law prohibits the Pentagon from any military contacts with the PLA if it could create a national security risk due to an inappropriate exposure to activities, including joint combat operations.
> 
> There is an exemption for operations or exercises related to search-and-rescue and humanitarian relief, and China participated with the US last year in a counterpiracy drill.*
> 
> Lieutenant Colonel Catherine Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said China's participation in RIMPAC would adhere to US law and said that *precautions had been taken by the Navy in drills to avoid revealing sensitive information*.



Full Article


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## Edward Campbell

Just to remind members that the situation in the South China Seas remains tense, complex and multi-faceted, I note this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1200564/pla-navy-amphibious-task-force-reaches-james-shoal-near-malaysia


> PLA Navy amphibious task force reaches Malaysia 'to defend South China sea'
> *A Chinese amphibious task force sparks jitters around the region by reaching the southernmost waters of its claimed domain*
> 
> Greg Torode Chief Asia Correspondent
> 
> Wednesday, 27 March, 2013
> 
> A fully equipped PLA amphibious task force has reached China's southernmost claimed possession in the South China Sea in an unprecedented show of force that is raising eyebrows across the region.
> 
> The four-ship flotilla headed by the landing ship Jinggangshan visited James Shoal - some 80 kilometres from Malaysia, less than 200 kilometres from Brunei and 1,800 kilometres from the mainland coast - close to the outer limits of China's "nine-dash line", by which it lays claim to virtually the entire South China Sea.
> 
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> 
> Chinese Navy's amphibious landing ship Jinggangshan is seen during a training with a hovercraft     Chinese navy vessels at James Shoal yesterday. Photo: SCMP Pictures
> in waters near Hainan Province on March 20, 2013. Photo: Xinhua
> 
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> Area of operations
> 
> A Xinhua report yesterday described marines and crew gathering on the deck of the Jinggangshan - one of the PLA Navy's three 200-metre landing ships - to pledge to "defend the South China Sea, maintain national sovereignty and strive towards the dream of a strong China".
> 
> "It was a surprisingly strong message in sending out this task force, on such a new operational role from previous PLAN [PLA Navy] patrols in the region," said Gary Li, a senior analyst with IHS Fairplay in London.
> 
> "It is not just a few ships here and there, but a crack amphibious landing ship carrying marines and hovercraft and backed by some of the best escort ships in the PLAN fleet," he said, adding that jet fighters had also been used to cover the task force.
> 
> "We've never seen anything like this that far south in terms of quantity or quality ... it is hard to know whether it is just coincidence, but it does seem to reflect [President] Xi Jinping's desire for more practical operationally based exercises."
> 
> The landing ships are considered some of the most sophisticated vessels in the PLA and are thought to be key to any strategy to invade Taiwan. Their deployments are closely watched by regional rivals. The first of the landing ships, Kunlunshan, has been used in anti-piracy work off the Horn of Africa.
> 
> Photos circulating on mainland websites show marines storming beaches, backed by hovercrafts and helicopters dispatched from the Jinggangshan during several days of exercises that saw them visit all of China's holdings in the Spratly Islands.
> 
> The PLA took six Spratlys reefs and shoals from Vietnam in a sea battle 25 years ago this month.
> 
> The ships are due to head back north, crossing into the western Pacific for further drills via the Bashi channel between Taiwan and the Philippines, Xinhua said.
> 
> News of the Jinggangshan's appearance off James Shoal last night sparked chatter among military officials in the region.
> 
> "That is quite a show of sovereignty - an amphibious task force," said one military attaché monitoring developments. "It has got everyone talking.
> 
> "The Spratlys is one thing, but turning up at James Shoal is quite another. Once again, China is showing it is quite unafraid to send a message to the region - and in a year when Asean is chaired by Brunei, turning up down there in such a fashion is pretty strong symbolism."
> 
> PLA deployments into the South China Sea in 2009 and 2010 sparked fears across the region of a new assertiveness by Beijing. Those concerns in turn prompted fresh moves by several Southeast Asian nations to force the long-simmering South China Sea dispute back on to the regional agenda - and forge closer ties with the US.
> 
> _This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition on Mar 27, 2013 as Daring show of force by PLA Navy_




As the original print headline suggested, this is a "daring" show of force. As many members here will know amphibious task forces are big and complex - just mounting this operation was a HUGE risk for the PLA(N) and it suggests that China is making real, measurable progress in naval operations.


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## Edward Campbell

Some speculation, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Policy_, about what may be the catapult system design for China's next family of aircraft carriers:

http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/28/is_this_the_prototype_for_chinas_first_aircraft_carrier_catapult


> Is this the prototype for China's first aircraft carrier catapult?
> 
> Posted By John Reed
> 
> Thursday, March 28, 2013
> 
> Does this satellite image of a facility outside Shanghai provide evidence that China is trying to developing catapults for its next generation of aircraft carriers?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The image shows what may be a catapult test track similar to those used by the U.S. Navy at its Lakehurst New Jersey research site. Killer Apps spotted the picture above posted on numerous defense forums while researching a different story about old Soviet aircraft carriers.
> 
> (Click here to see the facility on Bing Maps. Click here to see the site compared to the U.S Navy's test catapults.)
> 
> Keep in mind that China is reported to be working on two to three new carriers that some speculate may be based on the design for what would have been the Soviet Union's first catapult-equipped carrier -- the Ulanovsk. (Others claim the new ships will be based on China's first carrier, the _Liaoning_, a ship that used to be the Soviet ship, _Varyag_.)
> 
> Remember the _Liaoning_ uses a ramp on its bow -- dubbed a ski jump -- to help fighters get airborne in a short amount of space. This design has obvious drawbacks since only a relatively small fraction of aircraft have the power-to-weight ratio necessary to perform such a take-off.
> 
> The _Ulanovsk_ was scrapped in 1992 when it was only 20 percent complete, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The _Ulanovsk's_ design called for two catapults that could launch heavily-laden fighters, attack planes, and larger aircraft such as prop-driven radar planes similar to the U.S Navy's E-2 Hawkeye.
> 
> These satellite images might be of a short version of a high-speed test track, however, similar to the ones the U.S. Air Force has in New Mexico and California, not a prototype catapult. Still, it would make some sense for China to develop a catapult system for its future carriers, especially because it appears to be developing its own version of the Hawkeye. Planes of that size require catapults to take off from carriers.
> 
> Rumors abound that China is working on developing both a traditional steam-powered catapult and an electromagnetic system -- similar to the one the United States is developing, called EMALS -- for its next generation of carriers. Electromagnetic catapults are supposed to be easier to maintain and take up far less space than steam powered catapults.


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## CougarKing

The head of Japanese Self-Defense Force, General Iwasaki, comments on the state of their relations with China: 

(From another article at the F35 superthread)



> <EDITED>
> 
> CHINA HOTLINE
> 
> *On Japan's tense ties with China, Iwasaki urged Beijing to agree to reopen talks with Tokyo on the establishment of a hotline and other maritime communication channels to avoid any unintended military clash between Asia's two biggest economies.*
> 
> Japan has been locked in a territorial dispute with China over a group of East China Sea islets, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
> 
> The island row has escalated in recent months to the point where both sides have scrambled fighter jets while patrol ships shadow each other in nearby seas, raising worries that an unintended collision or other incident could lead to a broader clash.
> 
> Talks between Japan and China aimed at establishing the so-called maritime communication mechanism have been halted since last fall, despite Japan's call for resumption, Iwasaki said.
> 
> "We need to set up a system to eliminate any misunderstanding at both the working level and at higher levels ... We have not heard from China but I believe the talks need to be restarted."
> 
> *Japan said last month that a Chinese frigate had locked its targeting radar on a Japanese destroyer on January 30 - a step that usually precedes the firing of weapons.
> 
> Iwasaki said the crew of the destroyer handled the situation well by not taking any retaliatory measures and that type of level-headedness should prevail in the future.*
> 
> Asked about media reports that the United States and Japan have begun talks on military plans to cope with armed conflict over the East China Sea islets, Iwasaki said that a meeting with Samuel Locklear, commander of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific, last week was a scheduled event.
> 
> "I cannot comment on details because it involves the other side, but it was a regular meeting," he said.
> 
> (Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)


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## a_majoor

More on the balancing act the rulers of the Red Dynasty need to do. Scrubbing history (Tiananmen Square), showing a human face without showing too many of the perques of leadership and maintaining a consistent message; a lot of work just to maintina the image of one person. Now extend that to the legion of "Red Princes" with their flashy cars and conspicuous consumption, and all the other issues that need to be dealt with without arousing the population too much...

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/03/29/tiananmen-photo-shows-chinas-first-lady-in-a-different-light/



> *Tiananmen photo shows China’s first lady in a different light*
> Republish Reprint
> 
> Araminta Wordsworth | 13/03/29 | Last Updated: 13/03/28 4:30 PM ET
> More from Araminta Wordsworth
> 
> Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of top-quality punditry from around the globe. Today: There’s an image Peng Liyuan, China’s new first lady, would probably prefer the world didn’t see.
> 
> In contrast to the soft power she supposedly exemplifies, it shows her in military uniform, her hair scraped back in a pony tail, serenading the troops who crushed the 1989 student revolt in Tiananmen Square.
> 
> The photograph, taken from the back cover of a People’s Liberation Army handbook, popped up briefly on the Internet this week. Predictably, it didn’t stay there long as China’s hyper-alert censors quickly scrubbed the offending image. After all, Ms. Peng is now the wife of Xi Jinping, the country’s paramount chief.
> 
> Nonetheless, the incident highlights her continuing military connections, a part of her life that has been generally ignored in the West. She remains, for example, leader of the Chinese Song & Dance Ensemble in the PLA’s general political department.
> 
> It also contrasts with the admiring coverage she’s enjoyed as she visited Russia and South Africa with her husband. She was hailed as “the new first lady in fashion” by The Daily Telegraph, while The New York Times pronounced her “glamorous, fashionable and one of her nation’s best-known singers, a startling contrast to her dour-looking predecessors.”
> 
> Reporting from Beijing for The Associated Press, Gillian Wong adds some shadow to this sunny picture.
> 
> [The 1989] image — seen and shared by outside observers — revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China.The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party’s top leaders.
> 
> Ms. Peng’s new prominence has also led to a uniquely Chinese response — tight control over such seemingly innocuous information as who designed her clothes.
> 
> Censors blocked searches for “Peng Liyuan” and “First lady” on microblogging site Sina Weibo, along with traditionally more sensitive searches such as “Huangpu River and dead pigs,” China Digital Times reported.
> 
> Similarly, at The Wall Street Journal Josh Chin and Yang Jie note,
> 
> [R]ather than capitalize on the excitement, Chinese websites are instead moving to contain it, highlighting the enormous sensitivity around discussion of the country’s ruling elite — and Ms. Peng in particular.
> 
> Most of the censorship has focused on the first lady’s wardrobe, noteworthy because she appears to have shunned the foreign luxury brands once preferred by China’s elite in favor domestic labels …
> 
> [As a result] the designers of Ms. Xi’s clothes have not been able to take advantage of the exposure the same way [Jason]. Wu has with [U.S. first lady Michele] Obama. Indeed, there has been some confusion as to who the designers even are, with Internet users arguing for days over whether the black jacket she wore on the tarmac in Moscow came from the Chinese label Exception or a different label, Useless, started by a former Exception co-founder.
> 
> At the International Business Times, Michelle FlorCruz says the information about Ms. Peng’s military past could play well at home.
> 
> Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based China-watcher isn’t surprised to see Peng in such a role — she is, after all, part of the military.
> 
> “Peng Liyuan was/is a soldier,” he said. “Soldiers follow orders. Why should we [be] surprised she did her assigned job in entertaining troops in 1989?
> 
> “Still, seeing Peng dressed in military garb in Tiananmen Square has conjured feelings of nostalgia among some of China’s older generation, despite the government’s attempts to downplay the event.  Indeed, Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, was responsible for a large part of the radical Cultural Revolution that had many political opponents and intellectuals ruthlessly persecuted. With this as a reminder, perhaps the Chinese should proceed with caution before completely adopting Peng as their version of a prominent and popular woman at home and abroad.”
> 
> Finally, Jane Perlez and Bree Feng at The New York Times flesh out the first lady’s biography.
> 
> 
> Ms. Peng became a household name in China well before her husband. She joined the People’s Liberation Army as a civilian when she was 18.
> 
> She soon emerged as a talented singer with a voice suited to folk tales and operatic scores that heralded the bravery of China’s soldiers. For several decades, she starred in the nation’s annual New Year’s television extravaganza, where she wore boldly hued gowns with well-fitted bodices and flouncy skirts.
> 
> In 2004, Ms. Peng took the role of Mulan, the heroine of a Chinese folk tale depicted in Mulan Psalm, an opera about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to take the place of her ailing father in the army.
> 
> compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
> awordsworth@nationalpost.com


----------



## CougarKing

Updates on China's clone of the C17 airlifter, the Y20:





The Y-20, of which China reportedly has an inventory of 200, can travel long distances and ferry the heaviest tank---features that state media touts can help secure "overseas interests" of the aggressive Asian giant. PHOTO FROM CHINESEMILITARYREVIEW.BLOGSPOT.COM



> *Aircraft on course for service after successful test flight, designer says*
> usa.chinadaily.com.cn
> <snipped>
> 
> The Ministry of Defense confirmed shortly after the successful test flight that the Yun-20, mainly developed by the Xi'an Aircraft Industry (Group) Co Ltd, has a *load-carrying capacity of 66 metric tons.*
> 
> It is 47 meters long, has a wingspan of 45 meters and *a maximum take-off weight of 200 tons*, Xinhua News Agency reported on March 3.
> 
> "We are still conducting test flights. They are going well, but more tests have to be carried out before it is put into use," Tang said.
> 
> Tang made the remarks on the sidelines of the annual session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body. The meeting concluded last Tuesday.
> 
> Even when it is in service, designers will be carrying out upgrades to improve its performance, he said.
> 
> Tang revealed that domestically designed and manufactured engines will be tested during test flights and once they have passed various tests they will power the jumbo airfreighter.
> 
> *The Chinese engines perform better in terms of fuel efficiency and thrust-weight ratio, he said.*



And not as recent:



> *CHINA MUSCLE | New military plane can travel far 'to safeguard overseas interests'*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> 
> BEIJING - China's new long-distance military transport aircraft *will "enhance its global power projection ability", *  state media said on Monday, after the plane's maiden flight at the weekend.
> 
> The Y-20, China's biggest home-produced military transport jet to date, had its first test flight on Saturday in the northwest of the country, just months after Beijing's first aircraft carrier entered service.
> 
> The state-run Global Times hailed the "significant milestone", saying China needed the planes,* which can carry a load of 66 tonnes over distances of up to 4,400 kilometers (2,700 miles), to "enhance its global power projection ability."*
> 
> The aircraft *will allow China's military to end its dependence on the Russian-made Il-76*, a mainstay of humanitarian and disaster relief around the world, the Global Times quoted a military expert as saying.
> 
> more here: link


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Atlantic_ is a somewhat maybe this/maybe that  :dunno:  article,  by old China hand James McGregor,* about what to expect over the next decade, with a special emphasis on China/US relations:

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/china-back-to-the-future/274471/


> China: Back to the Future
> *What the poet Lu Xun -- and other voices of China's past -- can tell us about the country's present challenges.*
> 
> JAMES MCGREGOR
> 
> MAR 28 2013
> 
> I just arrived back in Beijing after a month-long trip across the U.S. My trip started with discussions with mutual and hedge fund managers, corporate executives and Washington policymakers. It ended in Palo Alto where I talked to technology executives and then stumbled across the Chinese literary legend and social critic Lu Xun, who has been dead since 1936 but still dispenses great insights and wisdom.
> 
> I am writing this under winter camping conditions in my Beijing apartment, wearing long underwear and three layers of fleece. That is because the Beijing municipal government annually turns off the heat in all residential complexes on March 15th and then turns it back on November 15th, no matter what the weather. As I write this, the temperature is 34 degrees, and the air pollution level is 224, which is considered okay these days as it only qualifies for "health warnings of emergency conditions" and "protections recommended." After readings of more than 1,000 on New Year's Eve, today's murky atmosphere is a relative oxygen bar, though I have my newly installed air filter whirring behind me.
> 
> I return to China asking myself if the country is poised to move forward or if China is heading back to the future. For much of the trip, I was watching the National People's Congress and the Chinese leadership transition from afar. While doing so, I found that everybody I talked to -- from those who have hundreds of millions invested in Chinese stocks to those who are advising Obama on how to interact with China during his second term -- is simultaneously very negative about China and also very hopeful that the new leadership can turn the country around and revitalize reform and opening.
> 
> The new Communist Party chairman and China president Xi Jinping is in a similar situation to that of Obama after his first election. People at home and abroad are disenchanted and disappointed with Xi's predecessors, and expectations are so high about Xi bringing positive change that even if he does a decent job he is likely to disappoint. We are seeing some early hopeful signs in Xi's governing style, messaging and the people chosen by the Party and rubber-stamped by the NPC for important government posts. The new foreign minister, Wang Yi, is a fluent Japanese speaker, former ambassador to Japan and was China's front man for the Six-Party talks with North Korea. He has the experience and relationships to help wind down the very dangerous and volatile China-Japan territorial dispute over the Diaoyu islands and help China rejigger its outdated "close-as-lips-and-teeth" relationship with an increasingly whacko North Korea.
> 
> The new finance minister, Zhu Rongji protege Lou Jiwei, has the experience and relationships to find a face-saving solution to China's dispute with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission and US accounting regulators. Left unresolved, the dispute could lead to a wholesale delisting of Chinese companies from American exchanges if China doesn't allow U.S. inspectors to examine the auditors in China who are certifying the books of U.S.-listed Chinese companies as well as American companies with significant business in China. Lou is coming from the China Investment Corporation sovereign wealth fund that needs free access to overseas investments.
> 
> One discouraging sign is that speculation that Pan Yue would become Minister of Environmental Protection did not pan out, no pun intended. He had been sidelined years ago when as deputy director of the then State Environmental Protection Agency he had criticized the "growth at any cost" development model and tried to enforce environmental laws against powerful, high-polluting state-enterprises.
> 
> American government officials who deal with China who I met with in Washington are increasingly frustrated that China doesn't even bother to pretend to tell the truth when discussing contentious issues. Very solid evidence of state-directed cyber-hacking of just about any American multinational with valuable technology and industrial trade secrets is met with the admonishment that the U.S. must cease with these "groundless accusations" that result from "ulterior motives". The hedge funds and mutual funds that have been big investors in the China growth story and strong proponents of patience with China's reform process have run out of patience themselves. They figure that all Chinese companies are lying to their investors so they are now turning toward investing in American and European companies with significant China exposure or playing China stocks on pure speculation. In short, the American business community that has long been the stalwart supporter of China in the U.S. has basically lost trust in China as an entity while they still have great respect for the Chinese people and what they have accomplished.
> 
> All eyes are now on Xi Jinping and the new premier, Li Keqiang. So far there are many positive signs. Their atmospherics and rhetoric are mostly progressive and positive. In their speeches both leaders have emphasized that the Chinese government needs to loosen its grip and be more of a "service oriented" government. Xi has told Party cadres to "think a little more, learn a little more" and focus on fulfilling "the Chinese dream" of job stability, quality education, higher income, reliable social security and better medical care. Li Keqiang says that there needs to be a "division of power" between the government and enterprises, the government and investors and the government and civil society. As he exited his decade as premier, Wen Jiabao set the stage for Xi and Li by passionately calling for political and economic reforms -- which it seems he didn't have the power to carry out - while characterizing the economy as "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable."
> 
> If you get right down to it, Xi and Li have inherited a huge pile of unsustainability. The OECD is projecting that China will overtake the U.S. economy in size in 2016 in terms of purchasing power parity. To keep that engine humming, however, the growth model has to shift from investment-led to driven by consumption. As Economist Andy Xie put it in Caixin Magazine recently: "If China keeps pushing growth through fixed-asset investment and credit, a full-blown banking crisis is likely within five years. Kicking the can down the road is not a viable option for the new government. Reform is necessary for survival, not a choice."
> 
> During his "southern tour" in December, Xi paid homage to Deng  Xiaoping and his transformative market reforms. Xi said that the Party Congress that had just appointed him as Party chairman had issued "a new mobilization order" to deepen reform and opening up. An official speech from that tour is now circulating among Party officials. According to an analysis by independent Chinese journalist Gao Yu, Xi expands his vision for "the China Dream" to lay down firm lines against political reforms. He discusses the Soviet Union's collapse and complains that the Soviet Communist Party fell because "nobody was man enough to stand up and resist" when the military was no longer under the firm grip of the Party. The speech makes clear that Xi does not want to become China's Gorbachev and undertake risky reforms that could unravel the system. Instead, Xi emphasizes that "Only socialism can save China. Only reform and opening-up can develop China, develop socialism, and develop Marxism." An evolving early mantra employed by Xi is being called the "three confidences." They are: "confidence in direction, confidence in theoretical foundation, and confidence in system."
> 
> And this brings us to Lu Xun, who I ran into at Bell's Books, a wonderful used book bookstore in Palo Alto on my last U.S. stop. I stumbled upon a copy of "A Brief History of Chinese Fiction" that grew out of notes Lu Xun drafted for his lectures at Peking University between 1920 and 1924. Paging through this English translation from 1959, I found several passages that offer some ageless insight and wisdom about China that can explain the obstacles facing Xi and Li and how their efforts could play out.
> 
> As Lu Xun told his students 90 years ago: "When we look at the evolution of China we are struck by two peculiarities. One is that the old makes a comeback long after the new has appeared -- in other words, retrogression. The other is that the old remains long after the new has appeared -- in other words, amalgamation. This does not mean there is no evolution, however. Only it is comparatively slow, so that hotheads like myself feel that 'one day is like three autumns'."
> 
> As for Xi and Li's campaign to eradicate government corruption and extravagance with such efforts as limiting official banquets to "four dishes and a soup" and banishing traffic-choking official motorcades, Lu Xun cites the difficulties faced by reformers in the Qing, China's final dynasty. "They carry on as usual, concealing the true state of affairs from above and below, while the worst of them employ bad men to get them off by bribery. Thus the evil, instead of being checked, goes from bad to worse."
> 
> Xi and Li's pursuit of plain talk and less formalism brings to mind this advice from a Qing Dynasty novel "Exposure of the Official World" cited by Lu Xun. "The son of the Minister of Justice sought advice for how to handle his first audience with the emperor from a senior adviser to the emperor who his family had provided with "ten thousand taels of curios." He was told "Kowtow a lot and say little: that is the way to be promoted," later adding, "Even kowtowing when it isn't strictly necessary will do no harm."
> 
> In Deng Xiaoping's day, when nobody had nothing, nearly everybody in China supported reform and opening. Now that there are so many vested interests that profit handsomely from the current system, Xi and Li have their work cut out for them. The last leadership team in China seemed to be stuck in a reform pattern of taking one step forward and two steps back. Maybe the best Xi and Li can hope for is two steps forward and one step back.




In other words: hope, but not for too much.


_____
* James McGregor is author of two highly regarded books: _No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism_, published in October 2012, and _One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China_, published in 2005.  He was China bureau chief for _The Wall Street Journal_ in the early 1990s and the longtime CEO of Dow Jones China.

He was a Washington correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers during the Reagan administration, and Taiwan bureau chief for _The Wall Street Journal_ from 1987 to 1990. He was chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham) in 1996 and a board member for a decade. As a Senior Counselor for APCO Worldwide, he currently counsels US and European multinationals on their China business, political and communications strategies. As a senior advisor to China research firm Pacific Epoch, he advises mutual funds and hedge funds about the China macro outlook. McGregor is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, a Global Council member of the Asia Society, a board member of the U.S.-China Education Trust and a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He is a resident of Beijing and has lived in China for 25 years.


----------



## CougarKing

An article from 2010 that is applicable even today in North Korea's latest tantrum and the growing rift between Beijing and Pyongyang: 

link



> *Wikileaks cables reveal China 'ready to abandon North Korea'*
> 
> Leaked dispatches show Beijing is frustrated with military actions of 'spoiled child' and increasingly favours reunified Korea
> 
> *China has signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, according to leaked US embassy cables that reveal senior Beijing figures regard their official ally as a "spoiled child".*
> 
> News of the Chinese shift comes at a crucial juncture after the North's artillery bombardment of a South Korean island last week that killed four people and led both sides to threaten war. China has refused to condemn the North Korean action. But today Beijing appeared to bow to US pressure to help bring about a diplomatic solution, calling for "emergency consultations" and inviting a senior North Korean official to Beijing.
> 
> China is sharply critical of US pressure tactics towards North Korea and wants a resumption of the six-party nuclear disarmament talks. But the Guardian can reveal Beijing's frustration with Pyongyang has grown since its missile and nuclear tests last year, worries about the economic impact of regional instability, and fears that the death of the dictator, Kim Jong-il, could spark a succession struggle.
> 
> China's moves to distance itself from Kim are revealed in the latest tranche of leaked US embassy cables published by the Guardian and four international newspapers. Tonight, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the US "deeply regrets" the release of the material by WikiLeaks. They were an "attack on the international community", she said. "It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems," she told reporters at the state department.
> 
> The leaked North Korea dispatches detail how:
> 
> • *South Korea's vice-foreign minister said he was told by two named senior Chinese officials that they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control, and that this view was gaining ground with the leadership in Beijing.*
> 
> • China's vice-foreign minister told US officials that Pyongyang was behaving like a "spoiled child" to get Washington's attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.
> 
> • *A Chinese ambassador warned that North Korean nuclear activity was "a threat to the whole world's security".*
> 
> • Chinese officials assessed that it could cope with an influx of 300,000 North Koreans in the event of serious instability, according to a representative of an international agency, but might need to use the military to seal the border.
> 
> In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.
> 
> (...)
> 
> *"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state – a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. *  Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [demilitarised zone]. Again citing his conversations with [the officials], Chun said the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China. Tremendous trade and labour-export opportunities for Chinese companies, Chun said, would also help 'salve' PRC concerns about … a reunified Korea.
> 
> *"Chun dismissed the prospect of a possible PRC military intervention in the event of a DPRK collapse, noting that China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan and South Korea – not North Korea."*
> 
> Chun told Stephens China was unable to persuade Pyongyang to change its self-defeating policies – Beijing had "much less influence than most people believe" – and lacked the will to enforce its views.
> 
> *A senior Chinese official, speaking off the record, also said China's influence with the North was frequently overestimated. * But Chinese public opinion was increasingly critical of the North's behaviour, the official said, and that was reflected in changed government thinking.
> 
> Previously hidden tensions between Pyongyang and its only ally were also exposed by China's then vice-foreign minister in a meeting in April 2009 with a US embassy official after North Korea blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific. Pyongyang said its purpose was to send a satellite into orbit but the US, South Korea and Japan saw the launch as a test of long-range missile technology.
> 
> Discussing how to tackle the issue with the charge d'affaires at the Beijing embassy, He Yafei observed that *"North Korea wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a 'spoiled child' in order to get the attention of the 'adult'. * China encouraged the United States, 'after some time', to start to re-engage the DPRK," according to the diplomatic cable sent to Washington.
> 
> A second dispatch from September last year described He downplaying the Chinese premier's trip to Pyongyang, telling the US deputy secretary of state, James Steinberg: "We may not like them ... [but] they [the DPRK] are a neighbour."
> 
> (...)
> 
> Cheng said Beijing "hopes for peaceful reunification in the long term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short term", Hoagland reported. China's objectives were "to ensure they [North Korean leaders] honour their commitments on non-proliferation, maintain stability, and 'don't drive [Kim Jong-il] mad'."
> 
> While some Chinese officials are reported to have dismissed suggestions that North Korea would implode after Kim's death, another cable offers evidence that Beijing has considered the risk of instability.
> 
> *It quoted a representative from an international agency saying Chinese officials believed they could absorb 300,000 North Koreans without outside help. If they arrived "all at once" it might use the military to seal the border, create a holding area and meet humanitarian needs. It might also ask other countries for help.
> 
> The context of the discussions was not made explicit, although an influx of that scale would only be likely in the event of regime failure. The representative said he was not aware of any contingency planning to deal with large numbers of refugees.*
> 
> (...)



The ff. prediction of political collapse from the 2010 article above did not occur (or hasn't happened yet). So far, the regime seems to be maintaining the appearance that the son's succession was uncontested and holds the reins of power:



> *Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died,* despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.



And there's this update at the North Korea superthread:

Kim Jong Un's Aunt and Uncle: the real power couple behind North Korea


----------



## a_majoor

A retired US Admiral has a few suggestions to allow American Sea power to remain viable to keep the sea lanes open for international trade for a few more decades. The weakness in the suggestion is the lack of redundancy and robustness; there should be multiple sensors widely dispersed to prevent the system from being blinded for any reason. Railgun point defense is quite plausible (and there is another interesting article in the NBF blog that suggests there are now technical means to make more efficient electromagnetic weapons similar in concept to a railgun but using vastly less energy).

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/04/retired-us-admiral-suggest-railguns.html



> *Retired US Admiral suggest railguns with Mach 5 shotgun pellets for anti aircraft and anti-missile steel cloud*
> 
> China is about 30 years from catching up to US miltary spending and about 40-50 years from catching up with a comparable military capability. Even after catching up on budgets, China would lag in training and other factors that would take time to mature. China currently has developed some anti-ship missiles which pose a possible threat to US carriers and other navy ships.
> 
> Retired Adm. James A. Lyons was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations. Admiral Lyons is playing up China's military as justification for further modernization and buildup of US military capability. This is in spite of the fact that it seems virtually certain that China, USA, Europe and Russia are not getting into any kind of shooting war. (_interpolation: this was also a widely held position in the years leading up to the Great War of 1914-1918..._)
> 
> In a Feb. 11 Wall Street Journal article by Bret Stephens, Gen. Victor Esin, former chief of staff of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, highlighted the “stealthy” rise of China to a position of nuclear parity with the United States and Russia. He stated that China may have 850 warheads ready to launch, and he estimated China’s inventory of nuclear weapons at between 1,600 and 1,800 warheads, as compared with the current U.S. estimate of China having 200 to 400. Many reports note the administration wants to reduce U.S. warheads to 1,000 or fewer.Gen. Esin went on to state that he has solid evidence that China conducted a multiple-warhead test in July 2012, and a month later, launched a new, long-range multiple-warhead-capable missile from a submarine.
> 
> Lyons suggests
> 
> 1. putting anti-ship ballistic missiles on U.S. ships, submarines and aircraft. Such a capability could be accomplished in the near term as a relatively inexpensive option, while posing a risk to China’s ever-expanding surface navy.
> 
> 2. create an Asian regional long-range sensor network that would provide our allies real-time warning of broad Chinese military activity. Beyond the recent decision to install a second Forward Based X-Band Transportable (FBX-T) radar in southern Japan, he suggset placing a similar radar in the Philippines. We currently have an FBX-T radar in Shariki, Japan, with a 600-to-1,200-mile range. Installing an updated 3,700-mile-range SBX radar in the Philippines would permit continuous missile and aircraft coverage of all nations in the western Pacific littoral, including China.
> 
> 3. Continue to pursue the development of energy weapons. A railgun with “shotgun” pellets flying at Mach 5 has the potential to produce a “steel cloud,” which would shred most missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft flying through it. In tests, the railgun has fired artillery-size projectiles up to speeds of Mach 5 with a potential range of 62 miles. Such a system would be quite adaptable to a destroyer-sized ship.


----------



## CougarKing

Xinhua attempting to divert attention to the PLA Navy amphibious group that arrived in Malaysian waters recently...



> KUALA LUMPUR, April 5 (Xinhua) -- *Senior Chinese and Malaysian military officials reached consensus on Friday to further strengthen military cooperation between the two countries.*
> 
> Qi Jianguo, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), said the PLA hopes to bring the bilateral relations between the two armies to a higher level by strengthening high-level exchange, strategic consultations, joint training and other forms of cooperation.
> 
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> Abdul Latiff praised China's efforts to keep world peace and promote common development. He said Malaysia is willing to increase exchange and cooperation with China, in order to further promote the military relations between the two countries.
> 
> 
> Source: news.xinhuanet.com



Plus a repost of pics of the PLA Navy amphibious group in the South China Sea- pictures originally from the Indonesian defence forum "Kaskus" :



> *Chinese naval taskforce conducts live-ammunition fire drill*
> 
> The four warships of the combat-readiness patrol and high-sea training taskforce under the South China Sea Fleet of the Navy of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted live-ammunition fire drill in the waters of the west Pacific Ocean on March 31, 2013. (Chinamil.com.cn / Qian Xiaohu, Song Xin, Gan Jun and Gao Yi)
> 
> link


----------



## CougarKing

> *China to open 2 disputed isles to tourists*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> April 7, 2013 3:47 PM
> 
> Boao, China - China is to open disputed South China Sea islands up to tourism this month, state media reported Sunday, a move likely to inflame a long-running territorial row with its neighbors.
> 
> *The plans to allow tourists to visit the Paracel Islands before the May Day holiday is the latest stage in Beijing's development of the territory, which has previously angered Vietnam and caused concern in Washington.*
> 
> Vietnam and China have a longstanding territorial row over the Paracel Islands. Hanoi last month accused a Chinese vessel of firing on one of its fishing boats which had sailed in disputed waters in the area.
> 
> *The plan to allow cruise tours follows rapid development of infrastructure in a new city -- Sansha -- along with the establishment of an army garrison on one of the Paracels last year.*
> 
> Read more from the BBC


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China to open 2 disputed isles to tourists
> 
> By: Agence France-Presse
> April 7, 2013 3:47 PM



Cheeky buggers!


----------



## CougarKing

> *Cyber attacks hurt China's credibility, US official says*
> 
> By Terril Yue Jones, Reuters
> Posted at 04/09/2013 11:46 PM | Updated as of 04/09/2013 11:46 PM
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> BEIJING - Cyber attacks against the United States from China are eroding the country's credibility and scaring off potential foreign investors afraid of losing their intellectual property, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.
> 
> The sheer scale of hacking attacks from China bred mistrust in the U.S. government as well as the business community, said Robert Hormats, U.S. under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment.
> 
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> *"The cyber intrusions are particularly troubling because they've gotten so much visibility lately that the intensified visibility is really undermining a lot of business confidence of people who would otherwise invest here," Hormats told Reuters.
> 
> "So it's hurt Chinese interests," he said after speaking at a U.S.-China Internet industry forum. "The Chinese really need to take a look at this and decide if it's in their interest for these policies to continue."*
> 
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> "We shouldn't militarise cyberspace," he said. "Such attacks violate the rights of other countries and also moral standards."


----------



## cupper

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China to open 2 disputed isles to tourists





			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Cheeky buggers!



Betcha Carnival Cruises won't be high on the list though.


----------



## CougarKing

A consequence of North Korea's current round of brinksmanship: furthering the US "strategic pivot" towards Asia in spite of Beijing's wariness.

link



> *Analysis: In bitter irony for China, North Korea furthers U.S. strategic goals*
> 
> By Paul Eckert
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nobody but Kim Jong-un knows what he hopes to achieve with his saber-rattling campaign, but the young North Korean leader probably didn't set out to aid the United States, the sworn enemy of three generations of Kims, at the expense of his country's main ally, China.
> 
> In a boon for U.S. policy that can only add to China's frustration with Kim, North Korean bellicosity has helped reinforce an American strategy of rebalancing its security policies toward the Asia-Pacific region.
> 
> To a China that often sounds more wary of Washington than of Pyongyang, months of North Korean missile and nuclear tests followed by a daily stream of bloodthirsty war threats may be worrisome, but the U.S. reaction is even more troubling.
> 
> "We understand what kind of regime North Korea is, but we also understand that North Korea is playing games," said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S-China Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
> 
> "Most importantly, we are complaining that the United States is using military drills as an excuse to continue to do this (rebalancing), putting up B-2s and other advanced weapons systems," he said.
> 
> *
> B-2 and B-52 bombers, radar-evading F-22s and anti-missile system vessels like the USS John S. McCain represented the initial U.S. response to North Korea's repeated, explicit threats to launch nuclear strikes against the United States.
> 
> The U.S. also said it would shift THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System) to defend Guam from missile attack. And Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Japan would permanently deploy Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) anti-missile systems in Okinawa to counter North Korean missiles.*
> 
> CHINA LAMENTS CHAOS FOR 'SELFISH GAIN'
> 
> The U.S. deployments, although focused on North Korea and mostly temporary, could be adapted or expanded to counter the extensive array of anti-access military capabilities Beijing has built up to delay or prevent the arrival of American forces to areas near China in the event of conflict.
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping may have underscored Chinese ambivalence when he did not specifically name North Korea when he said no country "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain."
> 
> *Xi's remarks at the Davos-like Bo'ao Forum on the Chinese island of Hainan might have been targeting Washington as well as Pyongyang, reflecting Chinese unease at the U.S. "rebalancing" or "pivot" policy of winding down wars in Southwest Asia and paying renewed attention to the Asia-Pacific region.
> 
> "In China, it's widely believed that the pivot is a containment strategy of China. Almost everyone sees it as that," Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, a Beijing-based China analyst for the International Crisis Group.*
> 
> In a talk in Washington explaining the rebalancing policy and the Pentagon's response to North Korea, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter did not mince words in addressing Chinese complaints.
> 
> "North Korea's behavior is causing not just the United States, but others in the region to take action," he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
> 
> "If the Chinese find them the kinds of things they don't like to see, there's an easy way to address that, which is to talk to the North Koreans about stopping these provocations," said Carter.
> 
> DIPLOMATIC CHALLENGE FOR KERRY
> 
> Carter was forceful and unapologetic in presenting the rebalancing as a continuation of post-war U.S. policy that allowed allies Japan and South Korea, followed by Southeast Asia, China and India "to develop politically and economically in a climate that has been free from conflicts."
> 
> "It's good for us and it's good for everyone in the region. And it includes everyone in the region. It's not aimed at anyone, no individual country or group of countries," he said.
> 
> Carter said the coming drawdown of forces from Afghanistan would allow the U.S. Navy to shift to the Pacific region surface combatant ships, carriers and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance vessels.
> 
> Analysts who accept the rebalancing as based on sound geo-strategic principles nevertheless say Pentagon statements and force deployments should not be the most visible face of the Obama administration's core Asia policy.
> 
> "We've oversold the military and undersold the diplomatic and economic components of the integrated strategy of the rebalance," said Douglas Paal, a former U.S. official who heads Asian Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
> 
> "The reaction we're getting from China is 'they're coming to get us, we've got to respond, we've got to step up our military development,'" he said.
> 
> *When Secretary of State John Kerry visits China, Japan and South Korea later this week in his first trip to the region as the top U.S. diplomat, he will need to adjust his rebalancing sales pitch to China while he engages in Korea crisis diplomacy.
> 
> That will be a tall order in Beijing, where new President Xi is consolidating his rule with a political and military elite that is highly suspicious of U.S. motives.*
> 
> "When the economic, political and cultural elements were tacked on to the pivot, the Chinese said 'oh, so now we're being encircled economically, politically and culturally, too," said Kleine-Ahlbrandt.
> 
> *"The problem with trying to disabuse someone of a conspiracy theory is that any argument you make becomes part of the conspiracy, so I don't know if it's possible to convince the Chinese that it's not about encircling them," she said.*
> (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Warren Strobel, Mary Milliken and Todd Eastham)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2

From the Korea thread:



			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is a video of former Australian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd on North Korea and China. You don't have to agree with Mr Rudd, but he does have some (considerable) interest and knowledge about the region. I disagree, for example, with his assertion that China favours a divided Korea, but I do agree with him that Xi Jinping is off to a good start as Paramount Leader. His prescriptions for America and China are interesting.



And here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_ is Kevin Rudd's prescription for Sino-American relations:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138843/kevin-rudd/beyond-the-pivot?page=show


> Beyond the Pivot
> *A New Road Map for U.S.-Chinese Relations*
> 
> By Kevin Rudd
> 
> March/April 2013
> 
> The Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia made sense, because China was starting to doubt U.S. staying power. Now that Washington has sent Beijing a clear message it will be around for the long haul, however,
> the time has come for the two countries to deepen and institutionalize their relationship in order to secure Asia’s lasting peace and prosperity.
> 
> _KEVIN RUDD is a Member of the Australian Parliament. He served as Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010 and Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012._
> 
> Debate about the future of U.S.-Chinese relations is currently being driven by a more assertive Chinese foreign and security policy over the last decade, the region's reaction to this, and Washington's response -- the "pivot," or "rebalance," to Asia. The Obama administration's renewed focus on the strategic significance of Asia has been entirely appropriate. Without such a move, there was a danger that China, with its hard-line, realist view of international relations, would conclude that an economically exhausted United States was losing its staying power in the Pacific. But now that it is clear that the United States will remain in Asia for the long haul, the time has come for both Washington and Beijing to take stock, look ahead, and reach some long-term conclusions as to what sort of world they want to see beyond the barricades.
> 
> Asia's central tasks in the decades ahead are avoiding a major confrontation between the United States and China and preserving the strategic stability that has underpinned regional prosperity. These tasks are difficult but doable. They will require both parties to understand each other thoroughly, to act calmly despite multiple provocations, and to manage the domestic and regional forces that threaten to pull them apart. This, in turn, will require a deeper and more institutionalized relationship -- one anchored in a strategic framework that accepts the reality of competition, the importance of cooperation, and the fact that these are not mutually exclusive propositions. Such a new approach, furthermore, should be given practical effect through a structured agenda driven by regular direct meetings between the two countries' leaders.
> 
> *HIDDEN DRAGON NO LONGER*
> 
> The speed, scale, and reach of China's rise are without precedent in modern history. Within just 30 years, China's economy has grown from smaller than the Netherlands' to larger than those of all other countries except the United States. If China soon becomes the largest economy, as some predict, it will be the first time since George III that a non-English-speaking, non-Western, nondemocratic country has led the global economy. History teaches that where economic power goes, political and strategic power usually follow. China's rise will inevitably generate intersecting and sometimes conflicting interests, values, and worldviews. Preserving the peace will be critical not only for the three billion people who call Asia home but also for the future of the global order. Much of the history of the twenty-first century, for good or for ill, will be written in Asia, and this in turn will be shaped by whether China's rise can be managed peacefully and without any fundamental disruption to the order.
> 
> The postwar order in Asia has rested on the presence and predictability of U.S. power, anchored in a network of military alliances and partnerships. This was welcomed in most regional capitals, first to prevent the reemergence of Japanese militarism, then as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union, and then as a security guarantee to Tokyo and Seoul (to remove the need for local nuclear weapons programs) and as a damper on a number of other lesser regional tensions. In recent years, China's rise and the United States' fiscal and economic difficulties had begun to call the durability of this framework into question. A sense of strategic uncertainty and some degree of strategic hedging had begun to emerge in various capitals. The Obama administration's "rebalance" has served as a necessary corrective, reestablishing strategic fundamentals. But by itself, it will not be enough to preserve the peace -- a challenge that will be increasingly complex and urgent as great-power politics interact with a growing array of subregional conflicts and intersecting territorial claims in the East China and South China seas.
> 
> China views these developments through the prism of its own domestic and international priorities. The Standing Committee of the Politburo, which comprises the Communist Party's top leaders, sees its core responsibilities as keeping the Communist Party in power, maintaining the territorial integrity of the country (including countering separatist movements and defending offshore maritime claims), sustaining robust economic growth by transforming the country's growth model, ensuring China's energy security, preserving global and regional stability so as not to derail the economic growth agenda, modernizing China's military and more robustly asserting China's foreign policy interests, and enhancing China's status as a great power.
> 
> China's global and regional priorities are shaped primarily by its domestic economic and political imperatives. In an age when Marxism has lost its ideological relevance, the continuing legitimacy of the party depends on a combination of economic performance, political nationalism, and corruption control. China also sees its rise in the context of its national history, as the final repudiation of a century of foreign humiliation (beginning with the Opium Wars and ending with the Japanese occupation) and as the country's return to its proper status as a great civilization with a respected place among the world's leading states. China points out that it has little history of invading other countries and none of maritime colonialism (unlike European countries) and has itself been the target of multiple foreign invasions. In China's view, therefore, the West and others have no reason to fear China's rise. In fact, they benefit from it because of the growth of the Chinese economy. Any alternative view is castigated as part of the "China threat" thesis, which in turn is seen as a stalking-horse for a de facto U.S. policy of containment.
> 
> What China overlooks, however, is the difference between "threat" and "uncertainty" -- the reality of what international relations theorists call "the security dilemma" -- that is, the way that Beijing's pursuit of legitimate interests can raise concerns for other parties. This raises the broader question of whether China has developed a grand strategy for the longer term. Beijing's public statements -- insisting that China wants a "peaceful rise" or "peaceful development" and believes in "win-win" or a "harmonious world" -- have done little to clarify matters, nor has the invocation of Deng Xiaoping's axiom "Hide your strength, bide your time." For foreigners, the core question is whether China will continue to work cooperatively within the current rules-based global order once it has acquired great-power status or instead seek to reshape that order more in its own image. This remains an open question.



End of Part 1


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> *XI WHO MUST BE OBEYED*
> 
> Within the parameters of China's overall priorities, Xi Jinping, the newly appointed general secretary of the Communist Party and incoming president, will have a significant, and perhaps decisive, impact on national policy. Xi is comfortable with the mantle of leadership. He is confident of both his military and his reformist backgrounds, and having nothing to prove on these fronts gives him some freedom to maneuver. He is well read and has a historian's understanding of his responsibilities to his country. He is by instinct a leader and is unlikely to be satisfied with simply maintaining the policy status quo. Of all his predecessors, he is the most likely Chinese official since Deng to become more than primus inter pares, albeit still within the confines of collective leadership.
> 
> Xi has already set an unprecedented pace. He has bluntly stated that unless corruption is dealt with, China will suffer chaos reminiscent of the Arab Spring, and he has issued new, transparent conflict-of-interest rules for the leadership. He has set out Politburo guidelines designed to cut down on pointless meetings and political speechifying, supported taking action against some of the country's more politically outspoken publications and websites, and praised China's military modernizers. Most particularly, Xi has explicitly borrowed from Deng's political handbook, stating that China now needs more economic reform. On foreign and security policy, however, Xi has been relatively quiet. But as a high-ranking member of the Central Military Commission, which controls the country's armed forces (Xi served as vice chair from 2010 to 2012 and was recently named chair), Xi has played an important role in the commission's "leading groups" on policy for the East China and South China seas, and Beijing's recent actions in those waterways have caused some analysts to conclude that he is an unapologetic hard-liner on national security policy. Others point to the foreign policy formulations he used during his visit to the United States in February 2012, when he referred to the need for "a new type of great-power relationship" with Washington and was apparently puzzled when there was little substantive response from the American side.
> 
> It is incorrect at present to see Xi as a potential Gorbachev and his reforms as the beginning of a Chinese glasnost. China is not the Soviet Union, nor is it about to become the Russian Federation. However, over the next decade, Xi is likely to take China in a new direction. The country's new leaders are economic reformers by instinct or intellectual training. Executing the massive transformation they envisage will take most of their political capital and will require continued firm political control, even as the reforms generate strong forces for social and political change. There is as yet no agreed-on script for longer-term political reform; there is only the immediate task of widening the franchise within the 82-million-member party. When it comes to foreign policy, the centrality of the domestic economic task means that the leadership has an even stronger interest in maintaining strategic stability for at least the next decade. This may conflict occasionally with Chinese offshore territorial claims, but when it does, China will prefer to resolve the conflicts rather than have them derail that stability. On balance, Xi is a leader the United States should seek to do business with, not just on the management of the tactical issues of the day but also on broader, longer-term strategic questions.
> 
> *OBAMA'S TURN TO TAKE THE INITIATIVE*
> 
> More than just a military statement, the Obama administration's rebalancing is part of a broader regional diplomatic and economic strategy that also includes the decision to become a member of the East Asia Summit and plans to develop the Trans-Pacific Partnership, deepen the United States' strategic partnership with India, and open the door to Myanmar (also called Burma). Some have criticized Washington's renewed vigor as the cause of recent increased tensions across East Asia. But this does not stand up to scrutiny, given that the proliferation of significant regional security incidents began more than half a decade ago.
> 
> China, a nation of foreign and security policy realists where Clausewitz, Carr, and Morgenthau are mandatory reading in military academies, respects strategic strength and is contemptuous of vacillation and weakness. Beijing could not have been expected to welcome the pivot. But its opposition does not mean that the new U.S. policy is misguided. The rebalancing has been welcomed across the other capitals of Asia -- not because China is perceived as a threat but because governments in Asia are uncertain what a China-dominated region would mean. So now that the rebalance is being implemented, the question for U.S. policymakers is where to take the China relationship next.
> 
> One possibility would be for the United States to accelerate the level of strategic competition with China, demonstrating that Beijing has no chance of outspending or outmaneuvering Washington and its allies. But this would be financially unsustainable and thus not credible. A second possibility would be to maintain the status quo as the rebalancing takes effect, accepting that no fundamental improvement in bilateral relations is possible and perpetually concentrating on issue and crisis management. But this would be too passive and would run the risk of being overwhelmed by the number and complexity of the regional crises to be managed; strategic drift could result, settling on an increasingly negative trajectory.
> 
> A third possibility would be to change gears in the relationship altogether by introducing a new framework for cooperation with China that recognizes the reality of the two countries' strategic competition, defines key areas of shared interests to work and act on, and thereby begins to narrow the yawning trust gap between the two countries. Executed properly, such a strategy would do no harm, run few risks, and deliver real results. It could reduce the regional temperature by several degrees, focus both countries' national security establishments on common agendas sanctioned at the highest levels, and help reduce the risk of negative strategic drift.
> 
> A crucial element of such a policy would have to be the commitment to regular summitry. There are currently more informal initiatives under way between the United States and China than there are ships on the South China Sea. But none of these can have a major impact on the relationship, since in dealing with China, there is no substitute for direct leader-to-leader engagement. In Beijing, as in Washington, the president is the critical decision-maker. Absent Xi's personal engagement, the natural dynamic in the Chinese system is toward gradualism at best and stasis at worst. The United States therefore has a profound interest in engaging Xi personally, with a summit in each capital each year, together with other working meetings of reasonable duration, held in conjunction with meetings of the G-20, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the East Asia Summit.
> 
> Both governments also need authoritative point people working on behalf of the national leaders, managing the agenda between summits and handling issues as the need arises. In other words, the United States needs someone to play the role that Henry Kissinger did in the early 1970s, and so does China.
> 
> Globally, the two governments need to identify one or more issues currently bogged down in the international system and work together to bring them to successful conclusions. This could include the Doha Round of international trade talks (which remains stalled despite approaching a final settlement in 2008), climate-change negotiations (on which China has come a considerable way since the 2009 UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen), nuclear nonproliferation (the next review conference for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is coming up), or specific outstanding items on the G-20 agenda. Progress on any of these fronts would demonstrate that with sufficient political will all around, the existing global order can be made to work to everyone's advantage, including China's. Ensuring that China becomes an active stakeholder in the future of that order is crucial, and even modest successes would help.
> 
> Regionally, the two countries need to use the East Asia Summit and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Defense Ministers' Meeting-Plus forum to develop a series of confidence- and security-building measures among the region's 18 militaries. At present, these venues run the risk of becoming permanently polarized over territorial disputes in the East China and South China seas, so the first item to be negotiated should be a protocol for handling incidents at sea, with other agreements following rapidly to reduce the risk of conflict through miscalculation.
> 
> At the bilateral level, Washington and Beijing should upgrade their regular military-to-military dialogues to the level of principals such as, on the U.S. side, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This should be insulated from the ebbs and flows of the relationship, with meetings focusing on regional security challenges, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea, or major new challenges, such as cybersecurity. And on the economic front, finally, Washington should consider extending the Trans-Pacific Partnership to include both China and Japan, and eventually India as well.
> 
> *TOWARD A NEW SHANGHAI COMMUNIQUÉ*
> 
> Should such efforts begin to yield fruit and reduce some of the mistrust currently separating the parties, U.S. and Chinese officials should think hard about grounding their less conflictual, more cooperative relationship in a new Shanghai Communiqué. Such a suggestion usually generates a toxic response in Washington, because communiqués are seen as diplomatic dinosaurs and because such a process might threaten to reopen the contentious issue of Taiwan. The latter concern is legitimate, since Taiwan would have to be kept strictly off the table for such an exercise to succeed. But this should not be an insurmountable problem, because cross-strait relations are better now than at any time since 1949.
> 
> As for the charge that communiqués are of little current value, this may be less true for China than it is for the United States. In China, symbols carry important messages, including for the military, so there could be significant utility within the Chinese system in using a new communiqué to reflect and lock in a fresh, forward-looking, cooperative strategic mindset -- if one could be worked out. Such a move should follow the success of strategic cooperation, however, rather than be used to start a process that might promise much but deliver little.
> 
> Skeptics might argue that the United States and China must restore their trust in each other before any significant strategic cooperation can occur. In fact, the reverse logic applies: trust can be built only on the basis of real success in cooperative projects. Improving relations, moreover, is increasingly urgent, since the profound strategic changes unfolding across the region will only make life more complicated and throw up more potential flash points. Allowing events to take their own unguided course would mean running major risks, since across Asia, the jury is still out as to whether the positive forces of twenty-first-century globalization or the darker forces of more ancient nationalisms will ultimately prevail.
> 
> The start of Obama's second term and Xi's first presents a unique window of opportunity to put the U.S.-Chinese relationship on a better course. Doing that, however, will require sustained leadership from the highest levels of both governments and a common conceptual framework and institutional structure to guide the work of their respective bureaucracies, both civilian and military. History teaches that the rise of new great powers often triggers major global conflict. It lies within the power of Obama and Xi to prove that twenty-first-century Asia can be an exception to what has otherwise been a deeply depressing historical norm.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I agree with Kevin Rudd that China is not an _imperialist_ state - but, see Prof Andrew Basevich, here, who holds that the USA will not tolerate a "near peer."

China, as Xi Jinping knows only too well, must deal with serious domestic issues - especially endemic corruption. It is neither able nor inclined to challenge the USA in the Western Pacific, but it will not tolerate American interference in what it considers its "homelands:" Taiwan and Tibet above all.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Change of pace ...

I found this fascinating collection of pictures of very ordinary Chinese folks on trains.

Most are in "hard sleepers" (six bunks (2 tiers X 3 beds per compartment - no door) or "hard seats" (three abreast). (There are "soft sleepers" (four beds) and "soft seats" and even "special cabins with two beds and a private bathroom, but most ordinary Chinese cannot afford and will not pay for such luxuries. The advent of the new high speed (300+ km/h) trains connecting major centres has been met with mixed reviews - the costs are high and many Chinese prefer longer, less direct, slower and cheaper routes. In the rural regions the cheap, slow trains are the only option.

I traveled with some friends into a fairly remote rural area in one of the "hard sleeper" cars - the people were warm and friendly (just lie almost all people everywhere) and insatiably curious about a foreigner in such a quintessentially Chinese place as the "cheap seats." (There was no "soft" car on that train.) Some of the pictures bring back happy memories.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an informative article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _BBC News_:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22163599


> China 'reveals army structure' in defence white paper
> *China's increased military spend has worried many of its neighbours*
> 
> 16 April 2013
> 
> The army has a total of 850,000 officers, while the navy and air force have a strength of 235,000 and 398,000, China said in its defence white paper.
> 
> The paper also criticised the US's expanded military presence in the Asia Pacific, saying it had exacerbated regional tensions.
> 
> China's defence budget rose by 11.2% in 2012, exceeding $100bn (£65bn).
> 
> The defence white paper, which state media describe as China's 8th since 1998, emphasised China's "unshakable national commitment... to take the road of peaceful development".
> 
> However, it highlighted "multiple and complicated security threats" facing China, and China's need to protect its "national unification, territorial integrity and development interests".
> 
> *'Strategic deterrence'*
> 
> The white paper reveals details of China's military structure. According to state-run news agency Xinhua, this is the first time such information has been disclosed publicly.
> 
> Correspondents say this appears to be part of an effort, on the part of the Chinese military, to become more transparent.
> 
> The territorial army has 18 combined corps in seven military area commands: Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Lanzhou, and Jinan.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Military_Region ~ not included in the BBC article
> 
> The air force has 398,000 officers and an air command in the same seven military areas, while the navy commands three fleets: the Beihai Fleet, the Donghai Fleet and the Nanhai Fleet, the paper said.
> 
> The paper also describes the role of China's second artillery force, which contains China's nuclear and conventional missile forces.
> 
> The force is crucial to China's "strategic deterrence", and is "primarily responsible for deterring other countries from using nuclear weapons against China, and carrying out nuclear counterattacks and precision strikes with conventional missiles," the paper said.
> 
> *Maritime disputes*
> 
> The paper also criticised the US's increased presence in the region.
> 
> "The US is adjusting its Asia-Pacific security strategy," it said, adding later that "some country has strengthened its Asia-Pacific military alliances... and frequently makes the situation there tenser."
> 
> The US has increased its military presence in Asia in recent years, as part of President Barack Obama's "pivot to Asia".
> 
> The white paper also addresses "issues concerning China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights", criticising Japan for "making trouble over the issue of the Diaoyu Islands".
> 
> The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are controlled by Japan but claimed by both China and Taiwan.
> 
> Separately, the paper describes "'Taiwan independence' separatist forces" as the biggest threat to cross-Straits relations.
> 
> Taiwan is an island which has for all practical purposes been independent since 1950. However, China views the island as a rebel region that must be reunited with the mainland - by force if necessary.




Comparable figures for the USA are (active force only):

Army:   541,291 ) Land Forces
USMC: 195,338  ) 736, 700        (China: 850,000)
USN:    317,237                          (China: 235,000) 
USAF:  333,772                          (China: 398,000)

When you look at the two budgets ($680+ Billion vs. $100+ Billion) you get some idea of the changes the China has made over the past 25 years: the army is much, much smaller, the navy and air force have grown; equipment and training are much better but China is nowhere near being a military "peer."

A look at the map will tell you that those 1.35 million Chinese military personnel must be spread out across the regions to _concentrating_ a large force in Shenyang, near North Korea, is difficult.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is an informative article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _BBC News_:
> 
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22163599
> 
> Comparable figures for the USA are (active force only):
> 
> Army:   541,291 ) Land Forces
> USMC: 195,338  ) 736, 700        (China: 850,000)
> USN:    317,237                          (China: 235,000)
> USAF:  333,772                          (China: 398,000)
> 
> When you look at the two budgets ($680+ Billion vs. $100+ Billion) you get some idea of the changes the China has made over the past 25 years: the army is much, much smaller, the navy and air force have grown; equipment and training are much better but China is nowhere near being a military "peer."
> 
> A look at the map will tell you that those 1.35 million Chinese military personnel must be spread out across the regions to _concentrating_ a large force in Shenyang, near North Korea, is difficult.



The release of this information in the white paper shows a greater effort by the PLA towards transparency and shows continuing movement towards greater professionalism (and away from "People's War" ideology). 

Don't the "smaller" numbers of PLA ground forces  (compared to the armour and infantry corps-heavy early 1980s PLA) also mean a greater shift towards rapidly-deployable, lighter forces as stated before by such long-time China watchers as David Shambaugh in his Modernizing China's Military book? Rapidly deployable forces that can quickly respond such contingencies as internal dissent or any separatist challenges to the state.


----------



## CougarKing

I am still looking for other sources aside from this Indian article to confirm this incursion reported below. If this did happen, another question would be "why now?" considering growing trade and other exchanges between these 2 nations, in spite of being economic and regional rivals. Another source from November last year points that New Delhi is reluctant to repair its portion of the famed WW2-era Stilwell Road to boost regional trade, citing security concerns such as rebel groups on its side of the border. 



> *[size=18pt]Chinese troops intrude into Indian territory in Ladakh, erect a tented post[/size]*
> PTI Apr 19, 2013, 10.08PM IST
> 
> Times of India link
> 
> LEH/NEW DELHI: In a deep incursion, Chinese troops have entered the Indian territory in Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) sector in eastern Ladakh and erected a tented post, setting the stage for a face-off with Indian troops.
> 
> < Edited >



With regard to China's own saber rattling over its territorial claims on the South China Sea, other Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam recognize India's potential as a rival that could balance out China's influence on the region, as seen in this other article from last year:



> *
> Vietnam urges India to resolve South China Sea dispute*
> By Devirupa Mitra|ENS - HANOI ( VIETNAM ) 07th July 2012 08:50 AM
> 
> link
> 
> Even as China has escalated tensions by controversially inviting bids for oil blocks, *Vietnam is pushing India to increase its visibility and voice in the region as a supporting role to peacefully resolve the South China Sea dispute. It also wants India to continue exploring the oil and gas-rich region, approving a two-year extension for ONGC Videsh’s stay in South China Sea.*
> 
> “As a strong country in the region, India will have a stronger voice and should increase its larger role in helping Vietnam and other countries to resolve the problem (of South China Sea),” Vietnam’s Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Nguyen Van Thao told a group of visiting Indian journalists.
> 
> On June 26, the state-run China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) invited foreign companies to bid for nine blocks, all of which fall within Vietnam’s extended economic zone of 200 nautical miles from the shoreline. This immediately led to sharp response from Vietnam, terming it as an illegal move.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## CougarKing

;D Pics from signs during my time in China, of more inadvertent indicators that show China's market for English as a Second Language teachers (to correct their signs) is quite lucrative... 

(passed on to me by a friend with DFAIT stationed at our embassy in Beijing)





Taken by me in Chongqing's panda zoo:





Outside a museum in Beichuan, China:


----------



## CougarKing

From an Aussie source:

link



> *Chinese soldiers camp in Himalayan region claimed by India*
> From: AAP  April 21, 2013 4:07AM
> 
> DOZENS of Chinese soldiers have set up camp in a Himalayan region claimed by India, Indian government sources say, signalling a potential renewal of border tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
> 
> *Troops of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) entered Indian-claimed territory in eastern Ladakh and erected a camp on the night of April 15, the sources said.*
> 
> Meanwhile, troops from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police have set up a camp 300 metres opposite the tents pitched by the Chinese, the sources said.
> 
> New Delhi is confident it can settle the high-altitude territorial dispute "peacefully" through diplomatic channels, the government sources added.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## CougarKing

To think that it's recent incidents like this that saw Beijing send the elite Snow Leopard anti-terrorism unit( 雪豹突击队), which is part of the 500,000 strong People's Armed Police (PAP), to "unrest-plagued" Xinjiang province. That non-Chinese minorities such as the Uighurs would be involved in such unrest- in spite of special state privileges granted to them such as being exceptions to the one-child policy- are indications of deeper problems than the rosy picture painted by the Chinese media. This is the rosy picture which depicts the Han Chinese as "liberating" and peacefully coexisting with China's 55 or so ethnic minorities since 1949.  



> *"Terrorist" axe, knife and arson attack kills 21 in China's Xinjiang*
> BEIJING | Wed Apr 24, 2013 7:27am EDT
> 
> Reuters link
> 
> (Reuters) - A confrontation involving axes, knives, at least one gun and ending with the burning down of a house left 21 people dead in China's troubled far-west region of Xinjiang, a government spokeswoman said on Wednesday, calling it a "terrorist attack".
> 
> It was the deadliest violence in the region since July 2009, when Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, was rocked by clashes between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people.
> 
> Nine residents, six police and six ethnic Uighurs were killed in Tuesday's drama, said Hou Hanmin, spokeswoman for the Xinjiang government.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## Edward Campbell

My _*impression*_ (and I cannot overemphasize that word) is that _minorities_ in China fall into two broad groups:

     1. The willing, who are, largely, _Sinified_ - almost (except for some folk dancing groups) fully integrated into the _Han_ society; and

     2. The reluctant - especially the Tibetans and the Uyghurs (is there a preferred English spelling?).

It may be interesting to note that the reluctant groups a) have large, contiguous territories, b) have distinct languages and cultures, and c) are the last to be "assimilated" by China.

I think that the (Han) Chinese have brought both better governance and economic opportunity to Tibet and Xinjiang. (I know it is popular to describe the former Tibetan Buddhist _theocracy_ as benign and enlightened but I disagree; it appears, to me, to have been autocratic, obtuse and inept.)

I have observed that China is a fairly secular society; it barely tolerates religions other than: a) traditional Chinese folk beliefs, b) Daoism (Taoism, if you prefer), c) Chinese Buddhism (which is different from its Indian and Tibetan variations) and d)Confucianism (which is not even a religion in any sensible use of that term but which does have temples and "worshipers"). China appears to actively discourage Christianity and Islam: I have seen Muslims harassed for wearing e.g. too much "cover," and we are all aware of the Chinese insistence on consecrating Christian bishops despite the "rules" established by e.g. Rome and Canterbury. Many Han Chinese appear to me to be, essentially, irreligious, but "aware" of and sympathetic to the folk religions and Confucianism and, to a lesser degree, of the other major Sinic religions. I have met few Chinese, including Chinese Christians, who oppose China's policy of consecrating bishops.

Some years ago I met a Chinese official who explained to me that the long term strategy is to "breed" the Tibetans and Uyghurs into irrelevance: Han Chinese, especially young men, are encouraged to move to Tibet and Xinjiang and to marry local girls. It's a long term policy that, explicitly, recognizes that the existing large, well established and reluctant minorities are unlikely to become _Sinified_ any time soon.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> (I know it is popular to describe the former Tibetan Buddhist _theocracy_ as benign and enlightened but I disagree; it appears, to me, to have been autocratic, obtuse and inept.)



While there is a popular perception in the West of the Tibetans as the benign, pacifist victims of malignant Chinese occupiers, the Tibetans actually did put up a short fight in skirmishes like the Battle of Chamdo before they were occupied in 1949. Their inept theocracy was part of the reason behind the antiquated, poorly trained Tibetan rabble that they sent to fight a futile battle against PLA General Fan Ming's invasion forces.


----------



## Nemo888

The toppling of the feudal Theocracy in charge of most of Tibet at the time is not the issue. The wholesale murder of over a million Tibetans after the fact, destruction of one of the world's most unique cultures, disallowing Tibetans to own land, political persecution and torture of ethnic Tibetans, nuclear waste dumping, strip mining etc. 

There are now 7.5 million Chinese and only 6 million Tibetans in Tibet. They are  a propertyless and linguistically excluded minority in their own country. So much for the PLA's "liberation". Tibet is so over that it is not even worth talking about except perhaps by historians. You could learn infinitely more about old Tibet by visiting Nepal or Bhutan. Bhutan is actually a theocracy that runs nicely IMO. Much better than how the Chinese raped Tibet or even some Asian "democracies".

The Uyghurs have it worse than Tibetans. The stories of the PAP rounding up dissidents and selling their organs for transplantation are well documented. Now that they have run out of Falun Gong organs to sell Uyghurs are preferred.


----------



## CougarKing

This blog posting by MIT professor M. Taylor Fravel suggests that a recent Op-ed by nuke weapon export James Acton was reading too much into a certain omission in China's last defense white paper.



> *China Has Not (Yet) Changed Its Position on Nuclear Weapons*
> thediplomat.com
> _By M. Taylor Fravel_
> 
> In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, *nuclear expert James Acton suggests that China may be changing its nuclear doctrine.  The principal basis for his argument is the absence of a specific repetition of China’s “no first-use” policy in the latest edition of Beijing’s bi-annual white paper on defense.  Acton, however, misreads the recent white paper and draws the wrong conclusion about China’s approach to nuclear weapons.*
> 
> First, no first use has been a core feature of Chinese defense policy for decades, having been decided by Mao himself in 1964.  If China abandoned or altered this policy position, it would reflect a major change in China’s approach to nuclear weapons – and a major change in China’s international image. This would not be a casual decision by China’s top leaders but rather a radical change precipitated by a major shift in China’s security environment. Although China’s concerns about U.S. missile defense policies that Acton notes are real, these concerns have existed since the mid-1990s and shape China’s current efforts to reduce the vulnerability of its nuclear forces.
> 
> To date, China has focused on building a small but potent nuclear force with the ability to launch a secure second strike if attacked with nuclear weapons – what I call “assured retaliation.”  *The relatively small size of China’s nuclear arsenal and the doctrinal emphasis on survivability and reliability are consistent with a pledge to not use nuclear weapons first*.  Moreover, if China were to abandon or alter the no first-use policy, it would surely want to reap a clear deterrent effect from such an action and likely do so clearly and publicly, not indirectly and quietly through an omission in a report.
> 
> Continue reading...


----------



## CougarKing

A couple of updates on the South China Sea territorial disputes:

Perhaps the first update signals that Taipei intends to eventually send a more permanent naval presence there to deter both the mainland and other rival claimants?

Taipei Times link



> *The Ministry of National Defense will assess whether an offshore terminal for naval frigates should be set up on Itu Aba (Taiping Island, 太平島) in the South China Sea, Deputy Minister of National Defense Andrew Yang (楊念祖) said at a legislative hearing yesterday.*
> 
> Local media reported earlier this month that the Coast Guard Administration (CGA), which is responsible for the island’s security, is hoping to build an offshore terminal at the island to accommodate frigates of up to 2,000 tonnes.
> 
> *It also wants to extend the island’s airport runway, the reports said.*



Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Philippines, one of the rival claimants to the Spratleys islands and atolls scattered across the South China Sea:



> *Philippine Navy chief slams Chinese maneuvers in disputed sea*
> By Jose Katigbak, STAR Washington Bureau (The Philippine Star) | Updated April 27, 2013 - 12:00am
> 
> Philippine Star link
> 
> WASHINGTON – *Philippine Navy chief Vice Admiral Jose Luis Alano said Chinese naval maneuvers in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) and use of non-military maritime vessels way beyond its coastlines to advance sovereignty claims to most of the sea were both “aggressive and excessive.”*
> 
> Alano, who was appointed Flag Officer in Command of the Philippine Navy last December, met with Admiral Jonathan Greenert, chief of US Naval Operations, at the Pentagon on Thursday to discuss the security situation in the South China Sea and navy-to-navy issues.
> 
> *News reports from China said the PLA Navy dispatched a large contingent of ships to circumnavigate the South China Sea last month, a maneuver likened to marking Chinese territory.*
> 
> < Edited >



While the Philippines is one of the militarily weaker claimants because of its lack of modern multirole fighters in its air force as well as anti-ship missiles for its aging warships, it has a strong defense relationship with the United States. This relationship is affirmed annually through the annual "Balikatan" military exercises by forces of the two nations. Interestingly even Australia is considering joining these exercises since a recent defense treaty between Manila and Canberra was just ratified.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_, indicates that China really is playing hardball:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1224211/finance-talks-tokyo-seoul-axed?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer:%2Bfravel%2Bon%2Btwitter&buffer_share=846d8


> Beijing cancels finance talks with Tokyo, Seoul
> *Diaoyus tensions and Japanese MPs' visit to shrine honouring war criminals seen as behind scrapping of talks on sidelines of ADB meeting*
> 
> Saturday, 27 April, 2013, 5:29am
> 
> Teddy Ng
> teddy.ng@scmp.com
> 
> Beijing has cancelled an annual financial meeting with Japanese and South Korean officials set for next week, amid strained relations over the Diaoyu Islands sovereignty dispute.
> 
> The decision came shortly after Japan's Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Minister, Akihiro Ota, said his planned trip to China next week would not go ahead.
> 
> The cancellation highlights China's unwillingness to hold high- or ministerial-level dialogue with Japan, even as both sides attempt to maintain contact at lower levels. The chief of Japan's defence ministry policy bureau, Hideshi Tokuchi, in Beijing for talks on maritime affairs last night.
> 
> "The defence talks are only symbolic to show that both nations can still hold some kind of talks," said Professor Yang Bojiang from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.
> 
> Japan's Finance Ministry said yesterday that the meeting, which was to happen on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in New Delhi on Friday, had been called off by China, which was serving as chair of the trilateral meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors this year.
> 
> The meeting was scrapped because "there were no issues that needed to be discussed by the three countries", Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted a Japanese official as saying.
> 
> In another incident revealing tensions, Ota said yesterday that his three-day trip to China, due to start on Thursday, had been cancelled because of a "co-ordination" problem.
> 
> Sino-Japanese ties have been deteriorating since September, when the Japanese government announced it was buying three of the five uninhabited Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. The islands are known in Japan as the Senkakus. Tensions escalated further this week when almost 170 Japanese lawmakers visited Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which glorifies Japan's wartime past, and both nations sent ships to waters around the disputed islands.
> 
> Da Zhigang , a Japanese affairs expert at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, said the maritime communication mechanism could prevent military confrontation.
> 
> "But there won't be any significant outcome because neither side will concede much regarding territorial rights."




Deploying ships and aircraft and other forms of sabre rattling are all very interesting, but the tri-lateral economic ties between China and Japan and Korea are vital for all three states.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Jonathan Kay, who is Managing Editor for Comment at the _National Post_ and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, takes a dim, _realist_ view of China's policies in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _National Post_:



> China’s ruthless foreign policy is changing the world in dangerous ways
> 
> Jonathan Kay
> 
> 13/04/29
> 
> Are we witnessing the end of the “American age”? It depends whom you ask. But one thing is certain: Thanks to the near-bankruptcy of the American welfare state, Washington is losing both the means and desire to project power across the world. Inevitably, nations with deeper pockets — China, most notably — will fill the void.
> 
> This process already is underway in many parts of the world. That includes large swathes of Central Asia, where Beijing’s billions are beginning to revolutionize regional infrastructure and alliances — in dazzling but potentially dangerous ways.
> 
> Analyzing Beijing’s foreign policy is a relatively simple exercise. That’s because, unlike the United States and other Western nations, China doesn’t even pretend to operate on any other principle except naked self-interest.
> 
> On one hand, China has courted Israel as a partner in developing Mediterranean gas fields — but it also has been happy to do business with Israel’s arch-enemy, Iran, and has sold weapons that ended up in Hezbollah’s arsenal. In South Asia, meanwhile, China has cynically helped Pakistan check India’s regional role, even as China’s state-controlled press has warned Pakistan that Beijing may “intervene militarily” in South Asia if Pakistani-origin jihadis continue to infiltrate Muslim areas of Western China.
> 
> In the east, China’s policy has been to claim every square inch of the South China Sea, and intimidate every smaller country that dares to oppose its claims. China also props up North Korea, the most totalitarian nation on earth, for no other reason than that China’s leaders dislike the prospect of a U.S.-allied unified Korean peninsula on their doorstep. Even when Sudan’s government was butchering its own people in Darfur, Chinese energy companies were happy to do business in Khartoum.
> 
> China’s foreign policy ambitions are growing in unexpected directions. As John Hopkins University scholar Christina Lin argues: “Paradoxically, while the U.S. is pivoting eastward to contain China in the Asia Pacific, the resurgent Middle Kingdom is pivoting westward on its new Silk Road across the Greater Middle East.”
> 
> Unlike the United States and its NATO allies, China never had any desire to see its soldiers patrolling the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, or to sacrifice lives and money in furtherance of “nation-building.” As with Chinese operations in Africa, Beijing’s initiatives in Central Asia and the Middle East are ruthless cost-benefit enterprises aimed at extracting Afghan mineral riches, and otherwise enhancing China’s national interests.
> 
> Those interests, Lin, notes, include (1) securing safe and secure oil and gas routes, such that China can ensure its energy needs are met even in the event that its coastal supply routes are blockaded or otherwise disrupted; (2) creating a bulwark against the infiltration of Islamist terrorists into China’s Muslim regions from Pakistan and neighboring Muslim countries; and (3) stabilizing and integrating the Xianjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which occupies a sixth of China and is regularly beset by Islamist agitation.
> 
> At the center of China’s plan for Central Asia and the Middle East is a pipeline, road, rail and power network that could eventually extend from the Pearl River Delta, west through China into Central Asia, and eventually all the way to the Mediterranean. This scheme would greatly benefit landlocked nations such as Afghanistan, but it would also be a bonanza to Iran, which likely would end up being a full partner in any such megaproject. (Lin, for instance, has sketched out a scenario in which an Iranian railway line into the western Afghan city of Heart would be integrated with a Chinese network that extends south from Xianjiang into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif.)
> 
> Of course, this is a region that could desperately use more economic development. But the prospect of such development being done under joint Iranian stewardship is a disturbing one — not least because it would completely undercut any effect that Western sanctions would have on Iran’s nuclear program.
> 
> Most Americans (and Canadians) have supported the idea of leaving Afghanistan “to the Afghans.” But we’re not really doing that at all. In the new Great Game, as in all realpolitik arenas, no vacuum lasts for long. And soon, we likely will be dealing with a deep-pocketed China that seeks to turn the entire region into a logistical and energy-supply back-office for its coastal economic powerhouse. In the process — almost as an afterthought — it will be helping to prop up one of the most malign regimes on the face of the planet, Iran, just as it has done with Sudan and North Korea.
> 
> That is just the way China does business. In the long run, it is this amoral approach to global affairs — not the apocalyptic utopianism of militant Islam, which already show signs of extinguishing itself — that will be the greatest threat to the Western democratic ideal.
> 
> This article was originally published by _New Europe_.




Now, one may take issue with Jonathan Kay's suggestion that the Western democracies have operated in an altruistic manner (being willing to _"sacrifice lives and money in furtherance of “nation-building.”"_) but one should not dispute his contention that _"China doesn’t even pretend to operate on any other principle except naked self-interest."_

It may be that China's public diplomacy is not unappealing in much of the world precisely because it doesn't pretend to be altruistic.


----------



## CougarKing

A repost from the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada's facebook page, which emphasizes why cash persists as the preferred mode of transaction in mainland China:

New York Times full article: IN CASH WE TRUST



> *Chinese Way of Doing Business: In Cash We Trust*
> 
> SHANGHAI — Lin Lu remembers the day last December when a Chinese businessman showed up at the car dealership he works for in north China and paid for a new BMW 5 Series Gran Turismo — entirely in cash.
> 
> “He drove here with two friends in a beat-up Honda,” Mr. Lin recalled. “One of his friends carried about $60,000 in a big white bag, and the buyer had the rest in a heavy black backpack.”
> 
> Lugging nearly $130,000 in cash into a dealership might sound bizarre, but it’s not exactly uncommon in China, where hotel bills, jewelry purchases and even the lecture fees for visiting scholars are routinely settled with thick wads of renminbi, China’s currency.
> 
> *This is a country, after all, where home buyers make down payments with trunks filled with cash. And big-city law firms have been known to hire armored cars to deliver the cash needed to pay monthly salaries.
> 
> For all China’s modern trappings — the new superhighways, high-speed rail networks and soaring skyscrapers — analysts say this country still prefers to pay for things the old-fashioned way, with ledgers, bill-counting machines and cold, hard cash. *
> 
> Many experts say it is not a refusal to enter the 21st century as much as wariness, of the government toward its citizens and vice versa.
> 
> *Doing business in China takes a lot of cash because Chinese authorities refuse to print any bill larger than the 100-renminbi note. That’s equivalent to $16. Since 1988, the 100-renminbi note, graced by Mao Zedong’s visage, has been the largest note in circulation, even though the economy has grown fiftyfold. (The country’s national icon, Chairman Mao, appears on nearly every note: the 1-, 5-, 10-, 20, 50- and 100- renminbi note.)
> 
> Chinese economists and government officials often suggest that printing larger denomination notes might fuel inflation. But there is another reason.
> 
> “I’m convinced the government doesn’t want a larger bill because of corruption,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a leading authority on the Chinese economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, noting that it would help facilitate corrupt payments to officials. “Instead of trunks filled with cash bribes you’d have people using envelopes. And there’d be more cash leaving the country.”
> 
> All the buying, bribing and hoarding forces China to print a lot of paper money. China, which a millennium ago was the first government to print paper money, accounts for about 40 percent of all global paper currency output, according to a report published by the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation. Adjusting for the size of its economy, China has about five times as much cash in circulation as the United States. *
> 
> In the United States, the highest denomination printed is $100; in Japan, it is the 10,000-yen note, worth about $100; the 500 is the highest-denomination euro note, worth about $650. No major economy has limited itself to such a low denominated bill as China.
> 
> *By making the 100-renminbi note the largest bill, the nation’s citizens need more of it to buy a television or Swiss watch, never mind a car, home or a yacht, which China’s state-run media said was bought a few years ago by men bearing two suitcases filled with cash.
> 
> Following those paper bills as they course through this booming economy offers a fascinating glimpse into how China’s financial system works, and how parts of the country remain stuck in yesteryear. *
> 
> “In large parts of China, it still looks like the U.S. in the 1950s: most everything is in cash,” said Jeffrey R. Williams, executive director of the Harvard Center Shanghai and a former bank executive who has worked in China for more than 30 years. “In the U.S., you might have one bill-counting machine at a bank, but here every teller has one.”
> 
> Although China’s coastal cities have flourished during the 30 years of economic prosperity, economists say the country’s interior remains poor and disconnected from the more modern aspects of the financial grid. As a result, the poor prefer to do business in cash.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> My _*impression*_ (and I cannot overemphasize that word) is that _minorities_ in China fall into two broad groups:
> 
> 1. The willing, who are, largely, _Sinified_ - almost (except for some folk dancing groups) fully integrated into the _Han_ society; and
> 
> 2. The reluctant - especially the Tibetans and the Uyghurs (is there a preferred English spelling?).
> 
> It may be interesting to note that the reluctant groups a) have large, contiguous territories, b) have distinct languages and cultures, and c) are the last to be "assimilated" by China.
> 
> I think that the (Han) Chinese have brought both better governance and economic opportunity to Tibet and Xinjiang. (I know it is popular to describe the former Tibetan Buddhist _theocracy_ as benign and enlightened but I disagree; it appears, to me, to have been autocratic, obtuse and inept.)
> 
> I have observed that China is a fairly secular society; it barely tolerates religions other than: a) traditional Chinese folk beliefs, b) Daoism (Taoism, if you prefer), c) Chinese Buddhism (which is different from its Indian and Tibetan variations) and d)Confucianism (which is not even a religion in any sensible use of that term but which does have temples and "worshipers"). China appears to actively discourage Christianity and Islam: I have seen Muslims harassed for wearing e.g. too much "cover," and we are all aware of the Chinese insistence on consecrating Christian bishops despite the "rules" established by e.g. Rome and Canterbury. Many Han Chinese appear to me to be, essentially, irreligious, but "aware" of and sympathetic to the folk religions and Confucianism and, to a lesser degree, of the other major Sinic religions. I have met few Chinese, including Chinese Christians, who oppose China's policy of consecrating bishops.
> 
> Some years ago I met a Chinese official who explained to me that the long term strategy is to "breed" the Tibetans and Uyghurs into irrelevance: Han Chinese, especially young men, are encouraged to move to Tibet and Xinjiang and to marry local girls. It's a long term policy that, explicitly, recognizes that the existing large, well established and reluctant minorities are unlikely to become _Sinified_ any time soon.




There are many, many Buddhist _sects_, and Buddhists in Myanmar are not the same as Tibetan Buddhists, but let us put aside the notion that Buddhists are "benign and enlightened." They (Buddhists) are just as capable of sectarian violence as is any other socio-religious/ethnic group. And, as we saw in the Balkans, Muslims can be the victims, too.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, this report from Taipei shifts the focus back to China's sole operating carrier: perhaps China intends to send this carrier group around the world to "show the flag" in much the same way the US Navy's "Great White Fleet" circumnavigated the world around 1900, after America's victory in the Spanish-American War? Perhaps this new expedition is something the Chinese admiralty sees as heralding the advent of this century's next dominant naval power?



> *China's carrier group secretly assembling: reports*
> 
> Taipei, May 4 (CNA) Escort ships for China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, are quietly assembling at Qingdao Harbor and the carrier battle group is suspected to be sailing out soon, a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language newspaper said Saturday.
> 
> *Wen Wei Po said in its online version that the carrier battle group might comprise the Liaoning, four type 052C or 052D destroyers, two type 052B destroyers, two to four type 054A escort ships, one or two type 093 nuclear submarines and one supply ship.*
> 
> The reports also said the aircraft carrier could carry 22 J-15 fighter planes, four to six Z-18 early warning planes and around 12 Ka-27 anti-submarine helicopters.
> 
> Judging from the formation, the carrier group could form three lines of anti-air defenses, the first being formed by the Z-18s and J-15s and the second by the Hongqi-9 surface-to-air missiles aboard the 052C/D anti-air destroyers.
> 
> The third anti-air line will be formed by the SA-N-12 mid- and close-range anti-aircraft missiles aboard the 052B destroyers and Hongqi-16 mid-and close-range anti-aircraft missiles aboard the four 054A escort ships. The formation could handle 24 attacking targets simultaneously.
> 
> 
> more



Plus a slightly older article:



> *China's first aircraft carrier 'preparing for first long distance mission*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The 990ft Liaoning carrier – which was formally brought into service last September – is now preparing for its first major outing, CCTV reported.
> 
> "A big country cannot do without aircraft carriers," said Zhang Zheng, the carrier's captain, whose first encounter with an aircraft carrier came in Portsmouth, in 2002.
> 
> The Liaoning is a former Soviet carrier that was reportedly purchased from Ukraine in 1999 before being refitted at a naval base in northeast China.
> 
> In March, the vessel's commander, Zhang Yongyi, told state media its first major voyage could take between one and three months and see the Liaoning reach "waters near Japan's Okinawa islands and even Guam".
> 
> 
> 
> read more


----------



## CougarKing

I cannot help but agree with Homes' assessment below, especially with regard to how these recent actions jeopardized Beijing's "charm offensive" as highlighted in bold below:



> *China’s Great India Folly*
> By James R. Holmes
> May 7, 2013
> 
> 
> - One hopes China has genuinely reconsidered picking a fight with India, a great power with which it shares a long land frontier. Beijing has created headaches aplenty for itself through its conduct in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The last thing it should do is open another axis along which to disperse energy and resources.
> 
> - It's doubtful the intrusion was a mistake. The patrol set up camp 10-20 kilometers on the Indian side of the line, depending on the news source. That's a heckuva navigation error.
> 
> - By reopening its territorial quarrel with India, Beijing risks having to redirect resources from sea power back to land defense. Needlessly draining your national treasury is self-defeating behavior.
> 
> - If it keeps unsettling its surroundings, Beijing shouldn't be surprised in the future when nervous giggles — instead of admiration and amity — greet its efforts to court foreign audiences. *Why Beijing deliberately junked a promising charm offensive ranks as one of the wonders of the age.*
> 
> 
> 
> *Diplomat.com link*
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------
> 
> 
> *Bored with Japan and the Philippines, China Intensifies a Third Border Dispute with India*
> 
> by Julian Ku
> 
> Not content to push border disputes with only Japan and the Philippines, China apparently has decided that now is also a good time to create a border crisis with India.  Last week, Chinese troops apparently crossed over a disputed border to camp 20 km inside Indian-claimed territory in the remote region of the Himalayas (the Chinese deny the incursion has occurred and both sides appear to be climbing down a bit).
> 
> This rather hostile-to-China essay in the Japan Times provides a nice summary of how China has stepped up its activities on three different territorial fronts at the same time.  First, there is the ongoing dispute with the Philippines over the Scarborough Shoal/Huangyan Island in the South China Sea. Then, there is that dangerous dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkakus in the East China Sea.  Finally, China is provoking India.
> 
> Overall, *China’s strategy appears to be to put its interlocutors on the defensive and to exhaust them with low-intensity incursions. This is working.*  Japan is now repeatedly having to scramble its jets over the Senkakus at repeated Chinese incursions, and India is apparently rushing troops to the remote border region to confront the Chinese troops.  But, as the author of the essay notes, these are all reactive measures that allow China to keep the initiative.  China is not seeking a war, but it is seeking to push the envelope against its neighbors, with some success. India is trying to keep the dispute from escalating and Japan has been defensive about the Senkakus for the first time in decades.
> 
> *Only the Philippines seems to be able to push back and force China to react, albeit through the soft pressure of an Annex VII UNCLOS arbitral proceeding.*
> 
> It is impressive how China can keep three of its neighbors scrambling to respond while it slowly builds up its territorial claims.  In the long run, China v. India/Japan/Philippines/Vietnam/etc.  seems like bad odds, but so far it is working. *Will international arbitration play any role in resolving these disputes?  I doubt it, but we will soon get some empirical evidence if the Philippines is able to win a judgment that affects or shifts China’s behavior.*
> 
> *link*


----------



## Kirkhill

From the Telegraph



> China may not overtake America this century after all
> Doubts are growing about whether China can pass the US to become the world's biggest economy this century amid warnings that the country’s 30-year miracle is nearing exhaustion.
> 
> China's catch-up spurt has a few more years to run in the Western hinterlands perhaps, but when the full story comes out we may find that nationwide growth has already fallen below 7pc.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Photo: Getty
> 
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard3:21PM BST 08 May 2013968
> 
> The world's tallest tower should have been built by now. Officials said last year that the great edifice with 220 floors would be erected in three months flat in China's inland city of Changsha by March, snatching the crown from Dubai's Burj Khalifa.
> The deadline has come and gone, yet the wasteland sits untouched. It now looks as if the fin d'époque project – using prefab blocs – may never be approved. Even China knows its limits.
> 
> Prime minister Li Keqiang has asked the State Council to clamp down on the excesses of the regions. Not before time. A top regulator says local government finances are "out of control".
> 
> Mr Li aims to cut China's economic growth to a safe speed limit of 7pc next year and rein in rampant investment – still a world record 49pc of GDP – before it traps the country in a boom-bust dynamic of frightening scale.
> Vested interests are conspiring to stop him, launching a counter-attack from their power-base in the $6 trillion state industries. Even so, uber-growth is surely over.
> 
> China's catch-up spurt has a few more years to run in the Western hinterlands perhaps, but when the full story comes out we may find that nationwide growth has already fallen below 7pc.
> 
> Mr Li complained in a US diplomatic cable released on WikiLeaks that Chinese GDP statistics are "man-made", confiding to a US diplomat that he tracked electricity use, rail cargo, and bank loans to gauge growth. For a while, analysts use electricity data as a proxy for GDP but the commissars kept a step ahead by ordering power utilities to fiddle the figures.
> 
> The National Bureau of Statistics has since revealed that data collected by the regions overstates GDP by 10pc, though they have not acted on the insight. It is well-known why this goes on. The reward system of the Communist hierarchy has been geared to talking up growth, and officials gain kudos by lowering the stated "energy intensity" of their zone.
> 
> China's Development Research Council (DRC) expects growth to drop to 6pc by 2020. It could be much lower. The US Conference Board says it will average 3.7pc from 2019-2025 as the ageing crisis hits. Michael Pettis from Beijing University thinks it is likely to slow to 3pc to 4pc over the next decade, deeming this entirely desirable if it comes from taming the runaway state enterprises.
> If so, China's growth may not be much higher than the new consensus estimate of 3pc for a reborn America, powered by its energy boom and the revival of the chemical, steel, glass, and paper industries.
> 
> All those charts showing China's economy surging past the US by 2030, or 2025, or even 2017, will look very credulous. China may not surpass the US this century.
> 
> A Nation Losing Ground
> 
> As of last year US GDP was roughly $15.7 trillion, compared to $8 trillion for China on a nominal exchange rate basis, the measure that matters for gauging economic power.
> 
> China's output is 75pc of US levels on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis but even on this measure the Chinese `sorpasso' is looking less certain. Clyde Prestowitz, an arch US `declinist' who has just thrown in the towel, says China may "never" catch the US on any relevant measure. That is a stretch, but not impossible on a forecastable horizon.
> 
> "Keep in mind the next time you are in China and find yourself choking on the foul air that the things making the air foul are counted as positives for GDP. If you adjust Chinese GDP for environmental degradation and for over-investment in things that will never be used, it falls in size by 30-50 per cent. Much of this would show up as non-performing loans in most economies but since such loans are never recognised in China, it will show up as slower growth in future years," he said.
> 
> A new view is taking hold in elite circles that the banking crash in 2008 was a nasty shock for the US, but not a crippling blow to America's creative enterprise. US governing institutions rose to the challenge. It was however a crippling blow to Europe, and a more subtle blow to China in all kinds of ways.
> 
> Richard Haass, president of the US Council of Foreign Relations, says the world may already be in the "second decade of another American century" without realising it.
> 
> On almost every key measure, including the fertility rate and high science, there is no credible challenger. Core US defence spending is still greater than that of the next 10 countries combined. "The American qualitative military edge will be around for a long, long time," he said.
> 
> Mr Haass says America has managed its dominance in such a way that it has not brought about a containment alliance against it by threatened powers, and that is no small achievement. Like Wagner's music, US diplomacy is better than it seems.
> 
> Yes, the US faces a debt hangover, but so does China after the state banks let rip with private loans keep the boom going through the downturn. Fitch Ratings has just downgraded China's debt, warning that credit has jumped from 125pc to 200pc of GDP over the last four years, with mounting reliance on shadow banking that lets banks circumvent loan-to-deposit curbs. This is why George Soros has been warning that there could be a "run" on China's state banking system akin to the Lehman bust.
> 
> Total credit has jumped from $9 trillion to $23 trillion in four years, an increase equal to the entire US banking system.
> 
> America has moved in the opposite direction. Its banks now have loan-to-deposit ratio of around 0.7, and the biggest safety buffers in three decades. The Congressional Budget Office says US Treasury debt held by the public has jumped from 40pc to 73pc. This is the sort of damage normally seen in wars, but the US has recovered from bigger wars before, and from much higher debt levels. The CBO thinks the budget deficit will fall to 2.4pc by 2015. Growth will then whittle away the debt ratio for a few years.
> 
> China's premier Li is fighting a battle against those in the Politburo who delude themselves that the Lehman crisis validates China's top down control. He gave his "unwavering report" last year to a joint DRC and World Bank report on the dangers of the "middle income trap".
> 
> Dozens of states in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East have hit an invisible ceiling over the last fifty years, languishing in the trap with per capita incomes far behind the rare "breakout" stars, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The trap is the norm.
> 
> The report warned that China’s 30-year miracle is nearing exhaustion. The low-hanging fruit of state-driven industrialisation and reliance on cheap exports has already been picked. Stagnation looms unless Beijing embraces the free market and relaxes its suffocating grip over the economy. "Innovation at the technology frontier is quite different in nature from catching up technologically. It is not something that can be achieved through government planning," it said.
> 
> Even if Mr Li succeeds in pulling off this second economic revolution – and we should salute him for trying – China's growth rate is going to slow drastically. Demography will see to that.
> 
> The work force began to contract in absolute numbers last year, falling by 3.5 million. The International Monetary Fund says it will now go into "precipitous" decline, and much earlier than thought.
> 
> If you are wondering why police are still seizing pregnant women in Chinese cities and delivering them to clinics for forced abortions when they cannot pay the fine for breaching the one-child policy, you are not alone.
> 
> The IMF says the reserve army of peasants looking for work peaked at around 150m in 2010. The surplus will evaporate soon after 2020, the so-called Lewis Point. A decade later China will face a shortage of almost 140m workers. “This will have far-reaching implications for both China and the rest of the world."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's working age population: Source: IMF
> 
> China's ageing crisis is tracking Japan's tale with a 20-year delay. China can expect to see the same decline in "marginal productivity" that has afflicted every other facing a rise in the old-age dependency ratio.
> 
> The authorities can of course keep the game going if they wish with another burst of credit, but risks are rising and the potency of debt is wearing off. The extra output created by each yuan of lending has halved in four years. Mr Li knows the game is turning dangerous.
> 
> A 2010 book by People's Army Colonel Liu Mingfu - "China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era" - is still selling like hot cakes in China. Yet it already has a dated feel, a throwback to peak hubris.
> 
> China has everything to play for. With skill and a blast of freedom, it can take its rightful place at the forefront of world affairs. But nothing is foreordained.



Events.  If a week is a long time....what is a decade?


----------



## CougarKing

The latest installment (.pdf) of the Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military developments, released yesterday, highlights China's new and still obscure weapons:

http://www.defense.gov/pubs/2013_China_Report_FINAL.pdf


----------



## Edward Campbell

Don't worry, at all, about the military; don't sweat, too much, when (if at all) China will overtake America in GDP.

*Water*


Think about water: how much China needs, where it comes from, how it is used, how clean it is, etc, etc, etc.

Water is China's weak link.


----------



## a_majoor

Now that China is making provocative moves against Indian territory, the Indians might start thinking about how to respond.

Tibet is one of those places that vex Indian strategists, and is also the location of the headwaters for many of China's rivers.

Hmmmmm


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Now that China is making provocative moves against Indian territory, the Indians might start thinking about how to respond.
> 
> Tibet is one of those places that vex Indian strategists, and is also the location of the headwaters for many of China's rivers.
> 
> Hmmmmm




Without minimizing the importance of the Himalayan watershed, the Chinese water problem is characterized by a North/South divide. The Himalayan watershed feeds the already "wet" South which has over 80% of China's fresh water; it is the North, which has less than 20% of the available water, where the problems exist.






China's water resources. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389409017634





China's population distribution. Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/china.html

It is also not clear to me that Tibet is fertile ground for Indian interference. While the "Tibetan independence movement" is large and vocal, it is, as far as I can see, essentially "foreign:" based in India, amongst Tibetan exiles, and supported from abroad. My _sense_ - which may be seriously misinformed - is that most (just many? just some?) Tibetans are conscious of the fact that being Chinese has benefits.


----------



## a_majoor

While it seems unlikely the Tibetans can or will expel the Chinese on their own (or for that matter, might not even want to), I did find it intriguing that you mentioned water. Robert Kaplan made the point about the reason for the Chinese occupation of Tibet and to some extent the Xinjiang region has everything to do with control of the headwaters of their river systems. His book "The Revenge of Geography" goes on about this. 

If the Indians (or Russians or Islamists from the 'Stans, for that matter) are bent on making trouble for China, these are fertile grounds to start since they have restive non Chinese populations, and are vital ground for China as a whole due to the watershed issue.


----------



## Kirkhill

Do I detect the impact of all of those horse tribes in those maps ERC?

The horsemen could manage the cyclical droughts by moving to the water and maintaining a low population density.  But part of their secret to success was moving to the Yellow River or the Dniepr as the circumstances warranted.  Movement to the Yellow presented a degree of discomfort to the local Han.  

Consequently the Han seem to have set up a forward defence line on the passes across inhospitable land.  The western regions.

I think the Han now have the same problem with the horsemen that the Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians and Turks have with the Kurds.

They can't live with them and they can't live without them.

They need to control the zone and would be happier with the inhabitants gone but a few millenia of trying to eliminate them has been singularly unsuccessful.     

So now the Han are stuck trying to flood regions with settlers that are used to a river based, sedentary, high density, agrarian society into spaces that can't support that lifestyle.  Kind of like Las Vegas?

The Han settlers have to revise their lifestyle expectations to match the locals.  Do they want to do that?  

Regardless of the how the Han adapt will the locals ever accept them as anything other than intruders?

Tibet, Xingjiang and Mongolia would suggest not.

Perhaps a rational Han strategy would be to retire to the rivers and leave the hills and deserts to the neighbours and try to get along with them.

Your population density map suggests that most Han still "prefer" to live by the rivers.  They might find it easier to exploit resources in the west if they are not having to expend effort subduing local populations and protecting their lines of communication.


----------



## cupper

I was watching a short documentary on HBO's series Vice last night. It discussed the huge residential construction boom in China and how they calculate GDP based on construction, and not real estate transactions. 

As a result they have created hundreds of ghost towns of highrise residential developments and the supporting infrastructure, designed for millions of people, that are sparsely populated with only single digit occupancy rates. It's like a post apocalyptic world.

Due to the extreme disparity between supply of residential units and almost zero demand, the potential effect on the global economy when the bubble bursts will be even more devastating than the US housing bubble. At that time, residential construction was at 16% of GDP. Currently in China it is over 50% of GDP.

Current vacant residential square footage in China is at the point where they could provide a 5' x 5' cubical sized room for every man, woman and child in China.


----------



## Kirkhill

So let me get this straight.

The Chinese have just enough accomodation to put a family of four (an illegal family with one too many kids) into a 10'x10' area (a small bedroom in most houses I've lived in).  This suggests that China still doesn't have enough housing for the available population.

At the same time the housing they do have is sitting vacant.

What is preventing people living in those housing complexes?  Don't they want to be there?  Are they not permitted to be there?  Can't they afford them? Are the houses not where the people are?

Inquiring mind very confused.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> So let me get this straight.
> 
> The Chinese have just enough accomodation to put a family of four (an illegal family with one too many kids) into a 10'x10' area (a small bedroom in most houses I've lived in).  This suggests that China still doesn't have enough housing for the available population.
> 
> At the same time the housing they do have is sitting vacant.
> 
> What is preventing people living in those housing complexes?  Don't they want to be there?  Are they not permitted to be there?  Can't they afford them? Are the houses not where the people are?
> 
> Inquiring mind very confused.




The empty houses are real - I've seen them. I'm not sure of the scale of the problem but I know it exists in at least two provinces. The developments I saw were certainly above 10% occupancy - looked like maybe ⅓ full. As to the whys ... all of your points apply. I saw mostly empty homes in a "new" town in a fairly remote region where a) most people didn't want to go and b) those who had gone wanted to save their money so they lived like paupers. It wasn't so much that they couldn't afford the housing as they didn't want to pay that much. They had migrated from poor farms, they were used to doing without. They _economized_ - three people in one tiny room - and saved their money/sent it home to Mom.

It isn't just housing - I also saw mostly empty industrial estates - HUGE ones - built on the "if you build it they will come" principle. Well, in one case (Yiyang in Hunan Province) they did come, in another case, in Anhui Province, the industrial park sat empty - with supporting road and rail lines and electricity and so on - sat almost totally empty five years after it was completed.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Without minimizing the importance of the Himalayan watershed, the Chinese water problem is characterized by a North/South divide. The Himalayan watershed feeds the already "wet" South which has over 80% of China's fresh water; it is the North, which has less than 20% of the available water, where the problems exist.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's water resources. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389409017634
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's population distribution. Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/china.html
> .



*Perhaps this is the reason why the famed "Three Gorges Dam" was considered one the targets selected for retaliation by Taiwan/the ROCAF in the event of a PLA invasion of Taiwan? 

The "Three Gorges Dam" (_san xia da ba_) is on the mighty Yangtze River, which effectively cuts eastern China in half. The resulting material damage would not only affect China's hydroelectric capacity, but its water supply as well.

Here's an older article from the China Daily, where a PLA general tries dissuade any would-be attackers from hitting the dam:



> *PLA general: Attempt to destroy dam doomed*
> (chinadaily.com.cn/agencies)
> Updated: 2004-06-16 15:54
> 
> 
> A Chinese People's Liberation Army general denounced a US suggestion that Taiwan's military target the Three Gorges dam and said on Wednesday that any attempt to strike the world's biggest hydropower project would be doomed.
> 
> 
> In its annual report to Congress on China's military power,* the Pentagon suggested in May that Taiwan target the dam as a deterrent against any strike on the island from the mainland. *
> 
> *China will "be seriously on guard against threats from 'Taiwan independence terrorists,"' PLA Lieutenant General Liu Yuan * said in a commentary in China Youth Daily, warning against such a move.
> 
> "(It) will not be able to stop war...it will have the exact opposite of the desired effect," Liu said.
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I hear that the unintended consequences of Three Gorges keep growing and that there is considerable disappointment in some official circles about the planning and analysis ~ maybe a realization that we, humans, are pretty poor at understanding and forecasting the potential consequences of mega-projects.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My friend, SMA drew my attention to the design of the new _Peoples' Daily_ (newspaper) building in Beijing:





Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/may/10/beijing-peoples-daily-giant-penis

(My _guess_ is that it will look a bit less penile when the top is finished, but ...  : )

Beijing and Shanghai each have several new buildings with innovative architecture:





The Dutch designed CCTV Building in Beijing
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/apr/16/shenzhen-stock-exchange-building-miniskirt





Shenzhen Stock Exchange Building - also designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas
Source: http://afasiaarq.blogspot.com/2012/01/oma.html

Like them or not, one cannot fault the Chinese authorities for being timid.


----------



## CougarKing

A repost:



> This Chinese stealth drone was developed by Shenyang and Chengdu as a joint effort.
> 
> Wired.com link
> 
> Xinhua link


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Fair enough, but I think Beijing is trying - at least has tried for a decade, we'll see what Xi wants to do - to de-emphasize the _"stick"_ and emphasize the socio-economic _"carrots"_. The biggest _carrot_ is Hong Kong's example ~ prosperous, politically and economically "independent," and, broadly, "free" from Beijing's rule.
> 
> I don't think Beijing can buy Taiwan and I think that, for the time being, Beijing will not risk trying to seize it by force ~ that leaves "voluntary" reunification which can happen only if Taiwan believes that Beijing can be trusted to respect *"one country, n systems."*




I have banged on, pretty regularly, about my view that China will develop as "one country *n* systems," but a young Chinese friend, a CCP member and a PhD candidate in Beijing, takes issue with me.

"One country two systems" is, she says, both logical and easily justified but "one country *n* systems" appears to head towards chaos and that is 180o out of phase with the CCP's central policy.

So, I asked, how to incorporate Taiwan?

"One country, two systems," she replied: Taiwan will demand more political _freedom_ than Hong Kong has and Beijing will accept those demands and those _freedoms_ will be given to both Taiwan and Hong Kong. Eventually, she goes on, that "second system" will be extended to provinces like Tianjin (China's richest province, but small - only 13 million people, and fairly self contained) and other rich, sophisticated provinces, including even Guangdong (population 105 million). But ti will not, she suggests, extend, not for a very long time, to Xinjiang or Tibet: they are too poor, too "different," and too politicallt unstable to be allowed any substantial "freedom."

So she sees "one country, two systems" spreading from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the rich, sophisticated provinces on the Eastern seaboard and, eventually, to all of China - but not in my or even her lifetime.


----------



## George Wallace

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> So she sees "one country, two systems" spreading from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the rich, sophisticated provinces on the Eastern seaboard and, eventually, to all of China - but not in my or even her lifetime.



Don't you think that this is a more realistic look at a gradual transition being in the best interests of China, opposed to an instantaneous and possible catastrophic new "Cultural Revolution"?


----------



## Edward Campbell

George Wallace said:
			
		

> Don't you think that this is a more realistic look at a gradual transition being in the best interests of China, opposed to an instantaneous and possible catastrophic new "Cultural Revolution"?




Yes, I suppose I do. 

China needs to become:

     First, and as a mater of urgency, less corrupt; and

     Second, more "democratic," by which I mean - government with the consent of the governed (free and fair elections being one way, our way of doing that) and equality and and under the law, for both the governed and the governors, and,
     most important, respect for the rule of law.

My bright young friend's prescription - "one country, two systems" spreading, slowly but surely, from province to province until the "second system" is dominant - seems to promise both better than my "one country *n* systems" course of action.


----------



## tomahawk6

The United States of China has a nice ring to it.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> My bright young friend's prescription - "one country, two systems" spreading, slowly but surely, from province to province until the "second system" is dominant - seems to promise both better than my "one country *n* systems" course of action.



I am also interested in the question of how the Taiwan/ROC military or _Guo Min Jun_ (國民軍) will fit into the whole scheme of reunification under "one country, n systems" arrangement. Taiwan's military is the same institution that descended from Chiang-Kai Shek's Whampoa (黃埔) military academy whose graduates helped Chiang wrest most of the country from the warlords' rule during the Northern Expedition of the late 1920s.

Taiwan's military is also the same Republic of China military that eventually came to be strongly Germanized in the 1930s because of the influx of German advisers and equipment before the 1937 embargo on further weapons imports by Hitler to China, and Berlin's eventual alliance with Tokyo during World War II.

During World War II, the _Guo Min Jun_'s battles in Burma and Southwest China against Japanese forces saw it more Americanized due to the influx of American advisors and equipment during that war. 

Thus wouldn't this mix of German and American traditions make it harder for them to integrate with the PLA if reunification would come?

Or perhaps wouldn't they be retained as some sort of internal, regional Taiwan defence force? In much the same way the former Royal Hong Kong Police were retained in Hong Kong after the 1997 handover to China and maintain many of their British-style uniforms and customs (e.g. parade drill)? 


And speaking of Taiwan's military...

Is this update below an inevitable result of switching from a conscript military to a fully volunteer one?

A result which Taiwan, which has lived with the threat of invasion from the mainland for over 60 years, cannot afford if tensions rise again or even escalate later?



> *Taiwan's all-volunteer military lacks recruits*
> May 15, 2013
> 
> Associated Press
> 
> - *The military fell 4,000 short of its goal of 15,000 volunteers last year, and likewise was 2,000 short of its much smaller target of 4,000 in 2011.*  Recruitment is proving difficult in a prosperous society that offers young people alternatives and does not glorify military service. Unlike in the United States, political candidates here almost never mention military service when campaigning, almost as if it were a badge of shame.
> 
> "I pretty much agree with that old Chinese saying that good people don't go into the military," said Yen Shou-cheng, 28, who manages a food shop in downtown Taipei. "I myself did just a couple of weeks of training and it was a total waste of time. There are far more important things in life than serving your country in the army--earning good money to take care of your wife and kids, for example".
> 
> Some young people also question the need for a strong defense, because of Taiwan's rapidly improving relations and expanding trade with its once implacable foe on the Chinese mainland. Moreover, given China's growing military strength, some think resistance would be futile.
> 
> "I think Taiwan has no chance of winning in a fight against China," said Wang Yen-zhou, 19, a student at Taipei's Taiwan National University. "We are not strong enough. So fighting doesn't make sense".
> 
> Gone are the days when Taiwan could recruit soldiers with martial music and patriotic slogans about retaking the mainland. Today, hip depictions of soldiers dressed as funky cartoon characters are a dominant theme at the Keelung Street military recruiting center in Taipei, one of four such centers spread around this island of 23 million people.
> 
> (...)
> 
> link


----------



## George Wallace

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The United States of China has a nice ring to it.



Wouldn't that be a cause of confusion?  (USC also being the University of Southern California.)


----------



## CougarKing

In the wake of the recent sea spate where a Taiwanese fisherman was allegedly shot by the Philippine Coast Guard and the resulting tensions between China, Taiwan and the Philippines:

A PLA General then makes a bold statement...



> General Luo Yuan, known as one of the most outspoken senior officers in China's People's Liberation Army, *has said that the killing of Taiwanese fisherman Hung Shih-cheng by the Philippine coast guard has given China an opportunity to seize the eight islands currently held by Manila in the South China Sea*, according to the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po.
> 
> "Opening fire on a Taiwanese fishing boat is not only a provocation to Taiwan, but to the entire Chinese family," said Luo. "I don't know what law the Taiwanese fishing boat violated for fishing in the overlapping exclusive economic zones instead of the Philippines' territorial waters."
> 
> If the Philippines continues to harass Taiwanese fishing vessels,* Luo said the PLA will launch an attack to recover an island in the Spratlys held by the Philippines*. The general China gained experience in dealing with the Philippines in the standoff over Scarborough Shoal last year.
> 
> Want China Times link


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the US next month; if I can recall correctly, he was merely vice-president the last time he visited the US.

Diplomat link



> (...)
> 
> The highlight of the trip is undoubtedly the Sino-U.S. summit. According to Qin, the two leaders will “have an extensive and in-depth exchange of views on bilateral relations as well as international and regional issues of common interest. It is believed that this meeting is important to the long-term, sound and steady development of China-US relations as well as regional and international peace, stability and prosperity.” Qin also noted that National Security Advisor Tom Donilon will visit China from May 26 to 28, to prepare for the summit.
> 
> This news has been quite sudden, but it allows us to identify some characteristics of current Sino-US relations.
> 
> First, it was interesting to note how little coverage of the visit there was prior to the official announcement, even in the usually well-informed international media. In fact, the summit is to be held somewhat earlier than expected. That suggests both sides were careful in their preparations and attention.
> 
> *Second, the fact that planning for the visit involves the U.S. National Security Advisor and his counterparts in China indicates that security is an important objective of this visit*, rather than the usual focus on general political, economic and cultural issues that might be associated with a state visit.
> 
> *Third, Xi visited the U.S. in February 2012 when he was vice president.* The upcoming visit is coming only just over a year later and only two months after taking office. That’s quite unprecedented in the context of bilateral relations. Former President Hu Jintao took office in March 2003, but didn’t visit the U.S. until three years later in April 2006. Jiang Zemin became president in March 1993, and made his first U.S. visit four years later, in October 1997.
> 
> *Finally, this is not a state visit. Xi and Obama will meet at the Annenberg Retreat in Rancho Mirage, California. The arrangement suggests a degree of maturity in the Sino-U.S. relations,* and a chance to take the relationship to a new level.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Not really surprising. The Chinese J31 "Falcon Eagle" fighter prototype looks almost exactly like the US F35/JSF, save for the fact the Chinese copy has 2 engines while the JSF only has one.

link



> WASHINGTON/CANBERRA (Reuters) - *Chinese hackers have gained access to designs of more than two dozen major U.S. weapons systems, a U.S. report said on Monday, as Australian media said Chinese hackers had stolen the blueprints for Australia's new spy headquarters.*
> 
> Citing a report prepared for the Defence Department by the Defence Science Board, the Washington Post said the compromised U.S. designs included those for combat aircraft and ships, as well as missile defences vital for Europe, Asia and the Gulf.
> 
> Among the weapons listed in the report were the *advanced Patriot missile system, the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile Defence systems, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.*
> 
> The report did not specify the extent or time of the cyber-thefts or indicate if they involved computer networks of the U.S. government, contractors or subcontractors.
> 
> But the espionage would give China knowledge that could be exploited in a conflict, such as the ability to knock out communications and corrupting data, the Post said. It also could speed China's development of its Defence technology.
> 
> In a report to Congress this month, the Pentagon said China was using espionage to modernize its military and its hacking was a serious concern. It said the U.S. government had been the target of hacking that appeared to be "attributable directly to the Chinese government and military."
> 
> China dismissed the report as groundless.
> 
> China also dismissed as without foundation a February report by the U.S. computer security company Mandiant, which said a secretive Chinese military unit was probably behind a series of hacking attacks targeting the United States that had stolen data from 100 companies.
> 
> AUSTRALIAN "SECURITY BLUNDER"
> 
> *In Australia, a news report said hackers linked to China stole the floor plans of a A$630 million headquarters for the Australia Security Intelligence Organisation, the country's domestic spy agency.*
> 
> The attack through the computers of a construction contractor exposed not only building layouts, but also the location of communication and computer networks, it said.
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, asked about the Australian report, said China disapproved of hacking.
> 
> "China pays high attention to the cyber security issue and is firmly opposed to all forms of hacker attacks," Hong said at a daily briefing.
> 
> "Since it is very difficult to find out the origin of hacker attacks, it is very difficult to find out who carried out such attacks," Hong said. "I don't know what the evidence is for media to make such kinds of reports."
> 
> Repeating China's position that every country was susceptible to cyber attacks, Hong said nations should make joint efforts towards a secure and open Internet.
> 
> Australia security analyst Des Ball told the ABC that such information about the yet to be completed spy headquarters made it vulnerable to cyber attacks.
> 
> "You can start constructing your own wiring diagrams, where the linkages are through telephone connections, through wi-fi connections, which rooms are likely to be the ones that are used for sensitive conversations, how to surreptitiously put devices into the walls of those rooms," said Ball.
> 
> The building is designed to be part of an electronic intelligence gathering network that includes the United States and Britain. Its construction has been plagued by delays and cost over-runs with some builders blaming late design changes on cyber attacks.
> 
> *The ABC report said the Chinese hacking was part of a wave of cyber attacks against business and military targets in the close U.S. ally.*
> 
> It said the hackers also stole confidential information from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which houses the overseas spy agency, *the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and had targeted companies, including steel-manufacturer Bluescope Steel, and military and civilian communications manufacturer Codan Ltd.*
> 
> The influential Greens party said the hacking was a "security blunder of epic proportions" and called for an inquiry, but the government did not confirm the breach.
> 
> Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the reports were "inaccurate", but declined to say how.
> 
> Despite being one of Beijing's major trade partners, Australia is seen by China as the southern fulcrum of a U.S. military pivot to the Asia-Pacific. In 2011, it agreed to host thousands of U.S. Marines in near-permanent rotation.
> 
> Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei was last year barred from bidding for construction contracts on a new Australian high-speed broadband network amid fears of cyber espionage.
> 
> The Reserve Bank of Australia said in March that it had been targeted by cyber attacks, but no data had been lost or systems compromised amid reports the hackers had tried to access intelligence negotiations among a Group of 20 wealthy nations.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Terril Yue jones in BEIJING; riting by Bill Trott in WASHINGTON and Rob Taylor in CANBERRA; Editing by Michael Perry and Robert Birsel



The resemblance between the F35 and China's J31 "Falcon Eagle" ...


----------



## Edward Campbell

That China spies on other countries and steals technology is undeniable and, at least in my opinion, unremarkable because America, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Honduras and India and so on down to Zimbabwe do it too.

The Chinese are, perhaps, a bit more brazen.


----------



## GR66

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...
> The Chinese are, perhaps, a bit more brazen.



And unfortunately it seems a bit more effective.


----------



## Edward Campbell

GR66 said:
			
		

> And unfortunately it seems a bit more effective.




That's debatable, I think. I suspect others are also very effective but are reluctant to publicly exploit their successes.

But the Chinese _seem_ to not think that espionage is a "bad" thing; their approach seems, to me, to be that espionage is just part of the day-to-day _intercourse_ between nations - friends, competitors and enemies alike. Thus fielding an airplane that looks suspiciously like the F-35 is not a problem for them: we assume they stole the technology; they do not comment.


----------



## CougarKing

China and the middle-income trap:

link



> *Why China wants to be more like America*
> 7 hours ago
> 
> China’s Communist leaders like to point out that American-style democracy is chaotic, and that western capitalism causes manic booms and busts. *Yet they’re borrowing heavily from the American playbook as they remake China’s huge, state-dominated economy.*
> China recently announced a series of reforms meant to speed the transition from a fast-growing yet still-spottily developing nation to a wealthier and more mature economic powerhouse. Among other things, new policies are meant to scale back Beijing’s role in the economy, open state-run industries such as finance and energy to more private businesses, and provide more ways for foreign investors to participate in the Chinese economy. Eventually, market forces would set interest and exchange rates, which are now controlled by the government.
> 
> *Chinese companies--often owned or partially controlled by the government--have also been splurging on western firms lately.* Chinese meat processor Shuanghui International Holdings announced it is buying Smithfield (SFD), the big U.S. pork producer, for $4.7 billion. And the Chinese investment firm Fosun International is part of a group buying the French resort company Club Mediterranee (CU.PA), allowing the troubled travel firm to focus more on upbeat Asian travelers rather than Europeans besieged by recession.
> 
> China has tried before to liberalize its economy, with varying degrees of success. It has clearly become integral to the global supply chain, making it the world’s leading producer of many goods. Virtually every big multinational company has operations in China, with some of them earning impressive profits there.
> 
> But China still remains handicapped by shortcomings more typical of a banana republic. “There’s no guarantee China is truly going to become a developed economy along the lines of South Korea or Japan,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at forecasting firm IHS Global Insight. “For China to continue to evolve, they’ve got to make some major changes and become a freer, more market-based economy.”
> 
> *The government's role
> 
> The Chinese government’s role in the economy makes Washington look like a laissez-faire paradise. It controls banks, railroads, oil companies and many other conglomerates, using those companies to advance what it feels are national priorities. By managing a quasi-capitalist economy more closely than other governments, Communist party leaders are able to harness wealth creation for political purposes.
> 
> But state-run capitalism can also cause major disconnects between supply and demand, along with other distortions that undermine the whole economy. China, for instance, lacks many of the legal protections consumers and businesses have long demanded in the West. Theft of intellectual property is rampant, which makes many western companies reluctant to develop new technology or do proprietary research in China. That’s why the nation is considered far better at stealing other people’s ideas than generating its own.*
> 
> Corruption within the ruling Communist party is widespread, leading to deep distrust of the government. Choking industrial pollution is the dirty little secret of a muscular manufacturing sector. Wrenching poverty is common in the countryside, where pre-industrial subsistence farming still sustains millions.
> 
> An exaggerated 'might'
> 
> Few outsiders see those problems, however, which might explain why Americans have an exaggerated sense of China’s economic might. *In polling by Pew Research, 42 percent of Americans said China is the world’s leading economic power, compared with only 36 percent who said the United States is. Yet China’s GDP per capita is just $9,100, which ranks 122d in the world. U.S. GDP per capita is $49,800, tops among large countries (unless you include Norway and Switzerland). The size of China’s economy could eclipse that of the United States in a few years, yet even then China would be nowhere near as rich as America.*
> 
> China’s leaders realize that, which is why there’s an aggressive new push to embrace reforms Western experts have been advocating for years. *Some economists argue that China is heading for an economic phenomenon called the “middle-income trap,” in which fast-growing economies suddenly stagnate, unable to evolve beyond a seemingly fixed level of prosperity. China may be encountering that now. After several overheated years when China’s GDP grew by more than 10 percent per year, growth has fallen back to less than 8 percent. Some economists think it will fall further as efforts that worked economic miracles before – such as massive government-financed infrastructure projects — enter a phase of diminishing returns*.
> 
> Annual income growth, meanwhile, peaked at nearly 23 percent in 2008 but has since drifted down to about 17 percent, according to World Bank data. Even with several years of fast-rising incomes in China, American workers remain far better off. Income per capita is nearly $49,000 in the United States, compared with about $5,000 in China.
> 
> It’s well understood that to become more prosperous and evade the middle-income trap, China has to rely less on exports — consumption by other countries — and more on consumption by its own middle class. It must also unleash more entrepreneurs driven by the profit motive, while cracking down on cronyism and bureaucratic corruption. Yet a vast network of party mandarins will no doubt try to undercut reforms, since they profit handsomely from the status quo. In that regard, China already resembles America, where politicians often stand in the way of what’s best for the country.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Canada's Defence Minister chats up his Chinese counterpart - here's the joint statement....


> At the invitation of General Chang Wanquan, State Councillor and Minister of Defense of the People’s Republic of China, the Minister of National Defence of Canada, the Honourable Peter MacKay, visited China on June 3, 2013.
> 
> The two Ministers held frank and in-depth discussions on Canada-China military-to-military relations, the international and regional security situation, and other issues of mutual interest.  Both Ministers agreed that, as major countries in the Asia-Pacific region, China and Canada have a shared responsibility to ensure a peaceful, stable and prosperous Asia-Pacific.
> 
> Both ministers agreed that defence relations constitute an important component of the comprehensive bilateral relationship, which includes engagement on economic and political issues, and strong people-to-people ties.  They affirmed their commitment to promoting the further development of defence relations and agreed to maintain high-level contact. Accordingly, Minister MacKay invited the Minister of National Defense of China to visit Canada in 2013.
> 
> In order to strengthen defence and military cooperation, both Ministers agreed to establish a Defence Coordination Dialogue to exchange views on issues of common interest and discuss defence engagement plans.
> 
> Both Ministers also affirmed the intent to establish a Cooperation Plan Initiative between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Canadian Armed Forces which would guide joint activities, ensuring that they demonstrate reciprocal, modest and enduring value over the long term.
> 
> Both Ministers agreed to deepen the practical cooperation in different fields between the two militaries.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This could also go in the Grand Stratey for a Divided America thread which, in the second part of the opening article, said that America "ought to deepen its ties to emerging regional powers," including China, in order to "better influence their behavior so that it complements rather than hinders U.S. objectives." But, it also fits, equally well here, so, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Council on Foreign Relations_ is an article by the _CFR's_ Elizabeth C Economy, a Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies:

http://www.cfr.org/china/can-obama-xi-break-summit-stalemate/p30834?cid=soc-Facebook-in-can_obama_xi_break_summit_stalemate-060413


> Can Obama, Xi Break Summit Stalemate?
> 
> Author: Elizabeth C. Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies
> 
> June 4, 2013
> 
> Presidential summits between the United States and China have become disappointingly predictable. Before every summit there is a sense of anticipation. What issues will be at the top of the agenda? What new agreements might be reached? How will the two presidents get along? During the summit, news is scant. There are hints of common purpose, but mostly there are admissions of significant differences. And then, inevitably, there is the post-summit letdown. The issues were the same as always. The leaders didn't really get along (although no one quite says that). And new agreements were never in the cards.
> 
> It is possible for President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping to break this summit stalemate when they meet on June 7 to 8 at the Sunnylands estate in California. To do so, however, will require flipping the summit process on its head. Rather than working toward agreement across all the areas of conflict before them – which after all will take years not days of negotiation – the two presidents need to begin by headlining what in the U.S.-China relationship actually works and then delivering that message to the American and Chinese publics.
> 
> It won't be easy. The record of shared success is slim. Nonetheless, Presidents Xi and Obama could begin by reviewing the thirty years of growing trade and investment that has made the two countries each other's second largest trading partners. People in the United States have benefited from China's investment in U.S. treasuries, from low-cost Chinese consumer goods (often for U.S. brands, thereby benefiting U.S. companies and shareholders), and increasingly, albeit slowly, from Chinese investment in the United States and rising U.S. exports to China.
> 
> The Chinese people, in turn, have gained enormously from U.S. investment in their country, as well as the transfer of technology and management know-how. From there, the two presidents should lay out a path forward for growing the economic relationship, including concrete steps toward a bilateral investment treaty and free trade agreement. Of course, there are serious problems and legitimate gripes on both sides, but the trade and investment story is nonetheless a compelling one, and the best the two presidents have.
> 
> There are a few other areas where consensus may be emerging, and if real, Xi and Obama should highlight them during their time at Sunnylands: China's stance on North Korea has inched closer to that of the United States, Japan, and South Korea; the Chinese have indicated an interest in joining the Transpacific Partnership negotiations, an agreement some Chinese analysts previously described as designed deliberately to exclude Beijing; and there has been a preliminary announcement that China will adopt a hard target for CO2 emissions reduction, something it has refused to consider for more than twenty years.
> 
> But there is no sweeping under the carpet all the problems in the U.S.-China relationship – they far outnumber any potential list of wins that could be mustered. Moreover, new areas of friction emerge daily as China asserts its economic and strategic interests in ways that upend the international norms and institutions that have prevailed since World War II. Attempts to promote ideas about a G-2 or "new relationship among the major powers" are therefore premature and should wait until the effort to develop a win-win story becomes more effortless.
> 
> Still, if the United States and China are to begin to address the trust deficit that so many commentators in both countries have noted, the two presidents will have to tell their people not only why the relationship matters but also, more importantly, why it works.
> 
> _This article appears in full on CFR.org by permission of its original publisher. It was originally available here._


_


The "trust deficit" is, in my opinion, all too real - and it is firmly in place on both sides, and with some good reason *on both sides*.

China is neither blameless nor the victim; it is both an aggressor ~ doing whatever it can to, at least, discomfit America, and the subject of both overt and covert American aggression, including a massive 9and, in my opinion) government coordinated propaganda campaign that is waged through the independent media.*

But both America and China have a vital interest in establishing and maintaining peaceful and if not friendly at least correct relations which are based on some solid measures of trust ~ mutual trust.

_____
* A couple of years ago I helped a Chinese graduate student comb through hundreds and hundreds of randomly selected US media reports about China. I was expecting all lot of duff gen - very few people, and even fewer journalists bother to try to understand China, but even I was astounded at how often the same bits of misinformation and a few outright lies reappeared, in many different media outlets. My question was: are they journalistic "common knowledge" and just assumed to be fact or are they "planted" in the media by a third party?_


----------



## CougarKing

This is from "The World According to China," a TIME article from this month that's another good read. As said before, encouraging ardent nationalism is one way that China's party leaders continue to legitimize their power, and a way to distract China's masses from problems at home, such as rampant corruption and the environmental problems that come with continuing economic prosperity and industrialization. 

Time link




> Liu mingfu likes to think he is the oracle of a new era. A retired colonel with the ramrod bearing of a career soldier, he has never been to the U.S. but is a self-proclaimed expert on Sino-American relations: he lectured on the subject at the National Defense University in Beijing, the training ground for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Three years ago, Liu wrote a best-selling book called China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age. In his hawkish tome, Liu explained that China needed a strong, martial leader and offered advice for his...
> 
> ....
> 
> The USS Freedom pulled into Singapore's harbor on April 18, its hull decorated in gray camouflage as if no one might notice *the first of four American littoral combat-ships hosted by the Southeast Asian city state*...
> 
> ....
> 
> With mounting unease on the home front, Xi is relying on flag-waving to unite the masses against a common foe, be it the US, Japan or even the Philippines...
> 
> ....
> 
> In April- even as state newspapers heralded Xi's anti-graft efforts, which include a much hyped crackdown on extravagant banquets and expensive cars for government officials- activists in Beijing were detained after holding a banner that read: *"UNLESS WE PUT AN END TO CORRUPT OFFICIALS, THE CHINA DREAM WILL REMAIN A DAYDREAM..."*
> 
> ]









(I assume the number of opposing troops at the graphic below on China and the US "sides" of the Pacific actually refers to just naval personnel, since the whole PLA is obviously much bigger than the mere 230,000 stated below.)


----------



## CougarKing

An interesting commentary by Mark Kitto, former expat who lived the "China Dream" then left China...

...and who hits the mark on the reiterated theme of China's "lost glory" and "past humiliations" suffered since the Opium War that is taught on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Somehow, while Kitto balks at attempts by other Westerners to assimilate into Chinese culture, it makes me wonder if he ever heard of Mark Roswell, a Canadian who became famous in China after being featured at a local television series; Roswell, aka "Da Shan/大山" (big mountain), not only speaks Chinese very fluently and has a Chinese wife, but has at times served as a bridge for Canadian-Chinese relations. He even served as Canada's commissioner general at the Shanghai 2010 expo and as a cultural attaché for our embassy there. The average Chinese "Zhou Blow" ( ;D) on the street on Shanghai would recognize Mark Roswell; my point is he has woven himself into Chinese popular culture and thus farther into Chinese society than most expats. 



> *You'll never be Chinese!*
> 
> 
> Prospect Magazine, June 11, 2013
> 
> Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. *I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once*. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving.
> 
> I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream. “But China is an economic miracle: record number of people lifted out of poverty in record time… year on year ten per cent growth… exports… imports… infrastructure… investment…saved the world during the 2008 financial crisis…” The superlatives roll on. We all know them, roughly.
> 
> *Don’t you think, with all the growth and infrastructure, the material wealth, let alone saving the world like some kind of financial whizz James Bond, that China would be a happier and healthier country?* At least better than the country emerging from decades of stultifying state control that I met and fell in love with in 1986 when I first came here as a student? I don’t think it is.
> 
> ...
> 
> If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come. Underscoring the optimism was a sense of social obligation for which communism was at least in part responsible, generating either the fantasy that one really could be a selfless socialist, or unity in the face of the reality that there was no such thing.
> 
> In 1949 Mao had declared from the top of Tiananmen gate in Beijing: “The Chinese people have stood up.” In the mid-1980s, at long last, they were learning to walk and talk.
> 
> One night in January 1987 I watched them, chanting and singing as they marched along snow-covered streets from the university quarter towards Tiananmen Square. It was the first of many student demonstrations that would lead to the infamous “incident” in June 1989.
> 
> ...
> 
> *When I returned to China in 1996, to begin the life and career I had long dreamed about, I found the familiar air of optimism, but there was a subtle difference: a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community. The excitement was more like the  eager anticipation I felt once I had signed a deal (I began my China career as a metals trader), sure that I was going to bank a profit, rather than the thrill that something truly big was about to happen.
> 
> A deal had been struck. Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”
> 
> Twenty years later, everything is not all right.*
> 
> ...
> 
> *Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof. The politically correct term in China is “economic benefit.” The country and its people, on average, are far wealthier than they were 25 years ago. Traditional family culture, thanks to 60 years of self-serving socialism followed by another 30 of the “one child policy,” has become a “me” culture. Except where there is economic benefit to be had, communities do not act together, and when they do it is only to ensure equal financial compensation for the pollution, or the government-sponsored illegal land grab, or the poisoned children.* Social status, so important in Chinese culture and more so thanks to those 60 years of communism, is defined by the display of wealth. Cars, apartments, personal jewellery, clothing, pets: all must be new and shiny, and carry a famous foreign brand name. In the small rural village where we live I am not asked about my health or that of my family, I am asked how much money our small business is making, how much our car cost, our dog.
> 
> ...
> 
> In rural China, village level decisions that require higher authorisation are passed up the chain of command, sometimes all the way to Beijing, and returned with the note attached: “You decide.” The Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat. The country is ruled from behind closed doors, a building without an address or a telephone number. The people in that building do not allow the leaders they appoint to actually lead. *Witness Grandpa Wen, the nickname for the current, soon to be outgoing, prime minister. He is either a puppet and a clever bluff, or a man who genuinely wants to do the right thing. His proposals for reform (aired in a 2010 interview on CNN, censored within China) are good, but he will never be able to enact them, and he knows it.*
> 
> *To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible*. As a publisher I used to deal with officials who listened to the people in one of the wings of that building. They always spoke as if there was a monster in the next room, one that cannot be named. It was “them” or “our leaders.” Once or twice they called it the “China Publishing Group.” No such thing exists. I searched hard for it. It is a chimera.
> 
> In that building are the people who, according to pundits, will be in charge of what they call the Chinese Century. “China is the next superpower,” we’re told. “Accept it. Deal with it.” How do you deal with a faceless leader, who when called upon to adjudicate in an international dispute sends the message: “You decide”?
> 
> *It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear. As the Chinese like to say, they only want to “regain their rightful position.” *  While there is no dispute that China was once the major world superpower, there are two fundamental problems with the idea that it should therefore regain that “rightful position.”
> 
> *A key reason China achieved primacy was its size. As it is today, China was, and always will be, big. (China loves “big.” “Big” is good. If a Chinese person ever asks you what you think of China, just say “It’s big,” and they will be delighted.)* If you are the biggest, and physical size matters as it did in the days before microchips, you tend to dominate. Once in charge the Chinese sat back and accepted tribute from their suzerain and vassal states, such as Tibet. If trouble was brewing beyond its borders that might threaten the security or interests of China itself, the troublemakers were set against each other or paid off.
> 
> *The second reason the rightful position idea is misguided is that the world in which China was the superpower did not include the Americas, an enlightened Europe or a modern Africa. The world does not want to live in a Chinese century, just as much of it doesn’t like living in an American one. China, politically, culturally and as a society, is inward looking.* It does not welcome intruders—unless they happen to be militarily superior and invade from the north, as did two imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911), who became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien.* All non-Chinese are, to the Chinese, aliens, in a mildly derogatory sense. The polite word is “Outsider.” The Chinese are on “The Inside.” Like anyone who does not like what is going on outside—the weather, a loud argument, a natural disaster—the Chinese can shut the door on it. Maybe they’ll stick up a note: “Knock when you’ve decided how to deal with it.”*
> 
> *Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise.* Controlled by people with conflicting interests, China’s government struggles to be decisive in domestic issues, let alone foreign ones. Witness the postponement of the leadership handover thanks to the Bo Xilai scandal. And the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken. (I know that sounds crazy. It is meant to. It is true.)
> 
> A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe.
> 
> *A China that leads the world will not offer the chance to be Chinese, because it is impossible to become Chinese. Nor is the Chinese Communist Party entirely averse to condoning slavery. It has encouraged its own people to work like slaves to produce goods for western companies, to earn the foreign currency that has fed its economic boom. (How ironic that the Party manifesto promised to kick the slave-driving foreigners out of China.) And the Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose.* (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed.) As for resources extracted from Africa, they go to China.
> 
> There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. *The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones. The Party’s propaganda arm created the term “one hundred years of humiliation” to define the period from the Opium Wars to the Liberation, when foreign powers did indeed abuse and coerce a weak imperial Qing government. The second world war is called the War of Resistance Against Japan. To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.*
> 
> The alternative scenario to a world dominated by an aggrieved China is hardly less bleak and illustrates how China already dominates the world and its economy. That is the increasing likelihood that there will be upheaval in China within the next few years, sparked by that property crash. When it happens it will be sudden, like all such events. Sun Yat Sen’s 1911 revolution began when someone set off a bomb by accident. Some commentators say it will lead to revolution, or a collapse of the state. There are good grounds. Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again. Take the recent cut in interest rates, which was done to boost domestic consumption, which won’t boost itself until the Party sorts out the healthcare system, which it hasn’t the money for because it has been invested in American debt, which it can’t sell without hurting the dollar, which would raise the value of the yuan and harm exports, which will shut factories and put people out of work and threaten social stability.
> 
> I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines. Whatever form it takes, it will bring to an end China’s record-breaking run of economic growth that has supposedly driven the world’s economy and today is seen as our only hope of salvation from recession.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Fear of violent revolution or domestic upheaval, with a significant proportion of that violence sure to be directed at foreigners, is not the main reason I am leaving China, though I shan’t deny it is one of them.
> 
> Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.
> 
> *The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre.* The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
> 
> There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
> 
> *And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” *  Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.
> 
> *The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished.* Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.
> 
> An option is to move back to a major Chinese city and send our children to an expensive international school—none of which offer boarding—but I would be worried about pollution, and have to get a proper job, most likely something to do with foreign business to China, which my conscience would find hard.
> 
> I pity the youth of China that cannot attend the international schools in the cities (which have to set limits on how many Chinese children they accept) and whose parents cannot afford to send them to school overseas, or do not have access to the special schools for the Party privileged. China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention.* The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible.
> 
> The Party does include millions of enlightened officials who understand that something must be done to avert a crisis. I have met some of them. If China is to avoid upheaval then it is up to them to change the Party from within* , but they face a long uphill struggle, and time is short.
> 
> I have also encountered hundreds of well-rounded, wise Chinese people with a modern world view, people who could, and would willingly, help their motherland face the issues that are growing into state-shaking problems. It is unlikely they will be given the chance. I fear for some of them who might ask for it, just as my classmates and I feared for our Chinese friends while we took our final exams at SOAS in 1989.
> 
> I read about Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangchen and Liu Xiaobo on Weibo, the closely monitored Chinese equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, where a post only has to be up for a few minutes to go viral. My wife had never heard of them until she started using the site. The censors will never completely master it. (The day my wife began reading Weibo was also the day she told me she had overcome her concerns about leaving China for the UK.) There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese who “follow” such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail. That’ll be a good time to become Chinese. It might even be possible.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> An interesting commentary by Mark Kitto, former expat who lived the "China Dream" then left China...
> 
> ...and who hits the mark on the reiterated theme of China's "lost glory" and "past humiliations" suffered since the Opium War that is taught on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
> 
> Somehow, while Kitto balks at attempts by other Westerners to assimilate into Chinese culture, it makes me wonder if he ever heard of Mark Roswell, a Canadian who became famous in China after being featured at a local television series; Roswell, aka "Da Shan/大山" (big mountain), not only speaks Chinese very fluently and has a Chinese wife, but has at times served as a bridge for Canadian-Chinese relations. He even served as Canada's commissioner general at the Shanghai 2010 expo and as a cultural attaché for our embassy there. The average Chinese "Zhou Blow" ( ;D) on the street on Shanghai would recognize Mark Roswell; my point is he has woven himself into Chinese popular culture and thus farther into Chinese society than most expats.




And the same magazine offered a "counterpoint:" Why I’m sticking with China by Marjorie Perry, a Program Associate with the China Program.

Mark Kitto's concerns are all valid and one can understand that, at some point, frustration and fear will overcome opportunity and optimism ~ as they appear to have for Mr. Kitto. Everything he says  rings true, but so does what Ms. Perry says, too.

Your point about _Da Shan_ is very well taken. I met him in 2010, in Shanghai: he struck me as a happy man who managed to be both Canadian and Chinese, but he's a _celebrity_ and he's in a very different circumstance than an entrepreneur like Mr. Kitto.


----------



## CougarKing

Including 2 nuclear carriers? 



> Source: China Daily Mail link
> 
> Excerpt:
> Elite Reference magazine says,* “There has been analysis that China will carry out its plan for aircraft carrier construction by stages. At the first stage, four conventional carriers will be built; while at the second stage, at least two nuclear carriers will be built. They are expected to be delivered to Chinese navy around 2020.”*


----------



## UnwiseCritic

I wonder how bold China's claims will become by then. Or if they are ever going to ever build those submarine aircraft carriers. As cool as it sounds, it's been done.


----------



## CougarKing

UnwiseCritic said:
			
		

> Or if they are ever going to ever build those submarine aircraft carriers. As cool as it sounds, it's been done.



You mean like those I-400/_Sen-Toku_ class submarines the Japanese had from World War II? 

----------------------------------------------------------


Anyways, here's another article about China's ambitions for Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean region:



> *Is Sri Lanka Becoming A Key Player In China’s String Of Pearls?*
> 
> China has offered Sri Lanka new loans for infrastructure projects, worth US$ 2.2 billion dollars. In a reply to a question, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mr. Hong Lei told the news media that in addition to infrastructure loans, both countries agreed to further deepen defence cooperation and maintain exchanges between two defence ministries, whilst they continue to carry out in cooperating defence technology, personal training and other fields. Yet, the spokesperson did not reveal further details regarding the nature of the new strategic cooperation.
> 
> more


----------



## Edward Campbell

Google "Kra Canal" or "Thai Canal" or Kra Isthmus." The Chinese are preparing to spend 25+ Billion on this project which will, _inter alia_, do serious harm to Singapore's status as East Asia's entrepôt.


----------



## UnwiseCritic

Yea those are the ones. I remember reading about it back in the day. I think they surrenderred near Panama in the middle of sneaky mission. I can only imagine Americans freaking out tring to find a ghost aircraft carrier if they were ever used. What a brilliant idea and way ahead of its time. Anyways the Americans were astonished at this technology, they recorded it and destroyed the subs so that Russia couldn't get it's hands on the technology. I'm surprised no one has tried to recreate this. I remember reading an article on china building a modern one or at least they had plans too. Might come in handy if you wanted to support someone with air power and not have the rest of the world no about it.

I think they are preparing for a Cold war, that will be a little warmer. Back to a bi-polar world we go. With the Warsaw pact being Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.


----------



## a_majoor

I don't think a "submarine aircraft carrier" resembling WWII era Imperial Japanese Navy subs will be built.

Look instead to Soviet era Cruise Missile Submarines (Подводная Лодка Атомная Ракетная Крылатая [_Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya Raketnaya Krylataya_]) like the OSCAR class or the USS OHIO class SSGN with 154 cruise missiles on board as the models for underwater strike vessels. Even late model Los Angeles class SSN's carrying Harpoons and Tomahawks in torpedo tubes and VL cells can be considered as fully developed examples of this sort of warship.

Replacing some of the cruise missiles with UAV or UCAVs is a possibility, especially if the UAVs are used to identify targets and can follow up to do BDAs. These UAV or UCAVs will be evolved from current cruise missiles, with sophisticated sensors and communications replacing the warheads. Farther in the future, hypersonic cruise missiles or boost glide weapons will be carried to reduce the "flash to bang" times.

I'm not sure how far along the Chinese are in these developments.


----------



## MilEME09

Another possibility is attack helicopters, pop up with a few anti-ship missiles, fire, fly away land and the sub disappears. Though same could be done with drones, it all depends the direction china wants to go.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think Hong Kong is the canary in China's coal mine and, according to this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Bloomberg News_, Hong Kong's confidence in China, specifically in "one country, two systems," has fallen to a record low level:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-20/hong-kong-faith-in-china-falls-to-20-year-low-as-snowden-arrives.html


> Hong Kong Faith in China Falls to 20-Year Low as Snowden Arrives
> 
> By Bloomberg News - Jun 20, 2013
> 
> Hong Kong residents’ disapproval of the “one country, two systems” system that gives their city autonomy from China rose to the highest level since before the territory reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, a poll showed.
> 
> Some 47.2 percent of people participating in the poll said they weren’t confident in the arrangement, compared to 47.1 percent who said they were, the highest level of dissatisfaction since 1994, according to today’s survey by the Public Opinion Program at Hong Kong University.
> 
> The survey was carried out June 10-13, around the time news broke that former National Security contractor Edward Snowden had fled to Hong Kong and revealed a secret U.S. surveillance program. While Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said the city will handle any U.S. extradition request according to the law, the case has raised concern that China will dictate Snowden’s fate.
> 
> Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted the Hong Kong government, down 12 percentage points from a March survey, while 25 percent trusted the central government in Beijing, also a 12 percentage point decline.
> 
> Hong Kong’s residents enjoy civil liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly that people in the mainland don’t have. They were guaranteed those rights for 50 years from the 1997 handover from U.K. control.
> 
> The telephone survey of 1,055 people had a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.




Snowden is, in my opinion, a red herring ~ my guess (and that's all it is) is that the Hong Kong people see him as just another symptom of Beijing's tendency to interfere.

This matters because China's _soft power campaign for Taiwan rests, mainly, on Taiwan believing that China can be trusted and Hong Kong's "liberties" are the test. If the central government in Beijing cannot manage "one country. two systems" with the limited autonomy Hong Kong has then how will it possibly manage "one country, two systems" when Taiwan (and Hong Kong) will have been guaranteed much, much more autonomy?

_


----------



## CougarKing

Xinjiang: a powder keg for further, more violent unrest since this latest incident?

Riots in China's Xinjiang-Uighur region 



> Quote:
> *"Seventeen people had been killed -- including nine policemen or security guards and eight civilians -- before police opened fire and shot dead 10 rioters," *  Xinhua said, quoting the officials.
> 
> Quote:
> China maintains foreign Uighur groups linked to the East Turkistan Islamic Movement are to blame for the trouble in the region. Chinese authorities have said the movement trains in neighboring Pakistan but the World Uighur Congress, based in Stockholm, Sweden, disputes the allegations.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Xinjiang: a powder keg for further, more violent unrest since this latest incident?
> 
> Riots in China's Xinjiang-Uighur region




No question Xinjiang is, as you say, a "powder keg." In this case I believe the Chinese government; I think there is a _separatist_ movement in Xinjiang that is financed and _provoked_ (think _"agent provocateur"_) from outside. My guess is that Gulf (probably Saudi) money and West Asian - Turkic - people are behind all this. Not to suggest that the Uyghurs are not, themselves, sufficiently discontented, but I suspect outside support and influence, too.

Thus far the Chinese approach to this _insurgency_ has focused on economic development and police actions. As far as I understand it, and I am anything but well informed about the Chinese military, the Lanzhou military region (one of seven in China), the region that includes Xinjiang province, has two (of 18) corps in it (21st and 47th) both of which are _*a)*_ stationed in the East of the region - rather far from the major Uyghur cities - and _*b)*_ "training" formations - undermanned and poorly equipped. The Chinese military, as I understand it, does not think _COIN_ - at least not the way we do. But they do think _internal security_ and _development_/nation building.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> No question Xinjiang is, as you say, a "powder keg." In this case I believe the Chinese government; I think there is a _separatist_ movement in Xinjiang that is financed and _provoked_ (think _"agent provocateur"_) from outside. My guess is that Gulf (probably Saudi) money and West Asian - Turkic - people are behind all this. Not to suggest that the Uyghurs are not, themselves, sufficiently discontented, but I suspect outside support and influence, too.
> 
> Thus far the Chinese approach to this _insurgency_ has focused on economic development and police actions. As far as I understand it, and I am anything but well informed about the Chinese military, the Lanzhou military region (one of seven in China), the region that includes Xinjiang province, has two (of 18) corps in it (21st and 47th) both of which are _*a)*_ stationed in the East of the region - rather far from the major Uyghur cities - and _*b)*_ "training" formations - undermanned and poorly equipped. The Chinese military, as I understand it, does not think _COIN_ - at least not the way we do. But they do think _internal security_ and _development_/nation building.



What about the 1.5 million strong People's Armed Police/PAP, which is essentially a dissent-crushing, internal security army? If I can recall correctly, they recently sent the "Snow Leopard commando unit," which specializes in counterterrorism and riot control, to Xinjiang.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> What about the 1.5 million strong People's Armed Police/PAP, which essentially a dissent-crushing, internal security army? If I can recall correctly, they recently sent the "Snow Leopard commando unit," which specializes in counterterrorism and riot control, to Xinjiang.




Yes, but I liken it to the French _Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale_ - they are more "police" than military, but more than sufficient, in my opinion, for how I think Chinese COIN should be done - quickly, ruthlessly and highly visibly to the locals (albeit all but invisible to outsiders).


----------



## CougarKing

And it appears that the death toll was higher than originally stated. Given the state media's propensity to downplay such events, the fact they've come out with this at all when it first came out suggests the situation was worse than originally thought and the higher death toll is one indication of that... 




> link
> 
> *China calls Xinjiang unrest a 'terrorist attack', ups death toll to 35*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China's state media has raised to 35 the death toll from unrest this week in far western Xinjiang region, and denounced the clashes, the deadliest in four years, as a "terrorist attack".
> 
> Xinjiang is home to a large Muslim Uighur community and violence focusing on its discontent had been confined recently to southern districts. The altercations in Shanshan county on Wednesday marked a return of unrest to Xinjiang's north.
> 
> *Many Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language, chafe at what they call Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion. China says it grants Uighurs wide-ranging freedoms and accuses extremists of separatism.*
> 
> On Wednesday, gangs with knives attacked a police station and a government building and set fire to police cars. Twenty-four people died in clashes with police, including 16 Uighurs, state news agency Xinhua said.
> 
> According to Xinhua's latest dispatch on Thursday night, eight more died in the police response. It called the incident a "violent terrorist attack" and said the overall situation was now "on the whole, stable".
> 
> An officer at Shanshan county's public security, or police, bureau told Reuters by telephone that the cause of the riots and the ethnic origin of the attackers remained unclear.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> And it appears that the death toll was higher than originally stated. Given the state media's propensity to downplay such events, the fact they've come out with this at all when it first came out suggests the situation was worse than originally thought and the higher death toll is one indication of that...



This, suggesting a foreign, terrorist element, is smart domestic politics - the Chinese are notable xenophobic. It also fires a shot across the bows of the _'Stans_ who are members of the Shnaghai Cooperation Organization.

But they are being cautious; note the foreign ministry statement from the article:

     "Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying condemned the incident, though she stopped short of saying who was behind it.

      This is a violent terrorist surprise attack. There is no doubt about that," she said at a daily ministry briefing. "But with regard to who they are, or whether foreign forces were involved ... local public security is
      vigorously investigating."


----------



## CougarKing

> *Did Chinese Steal The Blueprints For Russia's First Stealth Fighter?*
> asitimes.blogspot.com
> June 28, 2013
> 
> Quote:
> 
> Project 1.44 was meant to be the Soviet Union (and later Russia's) super-fast, super-maneuverable answer to the United States' premier fighter, the F-22 Raptor. However, the jet was underfunded in the days following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the plane finally took its maiden flight in 2000, its designers found multiple flaws with the aircraft and the project was abandoned.
> 
> The 1.44 was designed with stealth-like angles, an internal weapons bay and supposedly used electronic countermeasures and special coatings to help reduce its radar signature. It also featured digital flight controls along with thrust vectoring engines and canards (little wings) on the front of the fuselage aimed at making the jet incredibly maneuverable.
> 
> But, in 2001, Russian officials shelved Project 1.44 in favor of a more modern design from MiG's rival Sukhoi -- the T-50 PAK FA. The 1.44 supposedly disappeared into storage after that. A quick Google Images search reveals recent-looking photos of the jet in storage -- some of which claim they are from 2009 and taken near Moscow. (Google Maps also shows grainy satellite imagery the plane sitting on the ramp at Zhukovsky airfield.)
> 
> (...)



Full Article >>


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Diplomat_, could, equally well, fit in the North Korea (Superthread) but it's about China so it belongs here:

http://thediplomat.com/china-power/china-and-the-denuclearization-of-the-korean-peninsula/


> China and the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
> 
> By  Scott A. Synder
> 
> June 30, 2013
> 
> People’s Republic of China president Xi Jinping has taken a noticeably stronger rhetorical stand against North Korea’s nuclear program since he came to office in March on the heels of North Korea’s third nuclear test on February 12, 2013. China backed a new UN Security Council resolution condemning North Korea’s test and clearly distanced itself from North Korea, in contrast to its decision to embrace and defend North Korea as a strategic asset following North Korea’s second nuclear test in 2009. There has been a slowdown in high-level contacts with Kim Jong-un and a striking chilliness to Sino-DPRK interaction following meetings in July and November 2012 between Kim Jong-un and high-level Chinese officials in Pyongyang. Last week DPRK Vice Minister held a “strategic dialogue” with his PRC foreign ministry counterpart Zhang Yesui that was devoid of the party-to-party interaction that has long made China-DPRK interactions “special” rather than “normal.”
> 
> The rhetorical shift has emerged clearly since President Xi first stated at the Boao Forum in March that “no one should be allowed to throw a region and even the world into chaos for selfish gains.” Moreover, Xi delivered a harsh message to North Korea’s top military figure Choe Ryong-hae during Choe’s late May visit to Beijing days prior to the Xi-Obama Sunnylands summit. During that meeting, Xi emphasized that “all the parties involved should stick to the objective of denuclearization, safeguard peace and stability on the peninsula, and resolve disputes through dialogue and consultation.”
> 
> President Xi reiterated China’s commitment to the unacceptability of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state in his summit discussions with President Obama in Sunnylands in June, aligning China’s policy priority on denuclearization with the respective positions of the United States and South Korea. The clarity of this statement bolstered the confidence of the Obama administration that the United States and China might actually be able to cooperate in achieving a denuclearized Korean peninsula, and it has become the major concrete hope for better U.S.-China relations that is most directly associated with the idea that the United States and China can forge a “new type of great power relationship,” in which both powers can cooperate to achieve “win-win” results. But North Korea has emerged near the top of the U.S.-China agenda not so much because of a convergence of interests, but because it is the least difficult of an array of regional security challenges facing the United States and China.
> 
> The Xi-Obama commitment to build a “new type of great power relationship” provided a big boost to South Korea’s Park Geun-hye, who has come into office with a vision of cooperation in Northeast Asia that involves development of an improved South Korean relationship with China, but not at the expense of the U.S.-ROK alliance. A positive framework for U.S.-China relations provides South Korea with an opportunity to establish much more comprehensive cooperation with China without feeling that it has to choose between China and the United States. It also created hopes that South Korea could finally achieve a strategic breakthrough in its relations with China, at least to the extent that Seoul might be able to win recognition from Beijing that it is likely to be the dominant and most beneficial partner for China on the peninsula. South Koreans have consistently held the yet unrealized hopes for China-South Korea strategic cooperation ever since Roh Tae-woo pursued China-South Korea normalization over two decades ago.
> 
> Although South Korea and China may look to build more comprehensive cooperation through a joint statement that expands the scope of Sino-ROK cooperation, and Xi has repeated that it seeks North Korea’s denuclearization, it is still the case that the respective parties have conflicting secondary priorities regarding the end state of the Korean peninsula that are likely to inhibit cooperation. In this respect, it is notable that Xi emphasized to Park that “China resolutely safeguards the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the region, opposes any party that disrupts peace and stability and adheres to resolving problems through dialogue and negotiations.” Following North Korea’s third nuclear test, China’s declaratory policies regarding North Korea have swung into alignment with those of the United States and South Korea, but China has not sacrificed its priority on stability and there is no indication as of yet that North Korea will return to the path of denuclearization. Park’s outreach to Xi and the joint China-South Korean effort to improve the relationship therefore represent not a breakthrough, but the beginning of an effort that will require considerably more investment before it sees real results.
> 
> _Scott A. Synder is Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy. He blogs at Asia Unbound where this piece originally appeared._




My _sense_ of Chinese policy remains unchanged. The Korean Peninsula can be reunified, peacefully, under a democratic, capitalist, South Korean government as soon as the US withdraws its armed forces - and see this slightly cheeky proposal to do just that.

South Korea is an important trading partner with and investor in China; North Korea is a drain on China and its only "plus" is that, now and again, it discomfits the USA.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Thus far the Chinese approach to this _insurgency_ has focused on economic development and police actions. As far as I understand it, and I am anything but well informed about the Chinese military, the Lanzhou military region (one of seven in China), the region that includes Xinjiang province, has two (of 18) corps in it (21st and 47th) both of which are _*a)*_ stationed in the East of the region - rather far from the major Uyghur cities - and _*b)*_ "training" formations - undermanned and poorly equipped. The Chinese military, as I understand it, does not think _COIN_ - at least not the way we do. But they do think _internal security_ and _development_/nation building.



Speaking of Lanzhou military region units in Xinjiang, here are some photos of the stepped security presence that comes with an update below:





























> *China says 'religious extremists' behind Xinjiang attack*
> Reuters
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - The deadliest unrest in years in China's western region of Xinjiang was carried out by a gang engaged in "religious extremist activities", state media reported, saying the group had been busy buying weapons and raising money.
> 
> Beijing initially called last week's incident in which 35 people were killed a "terrorist attack".
> 
> Xinjiang is home to the mainly Muslim Uighur people who speak a Turkic language. Many deeply resent what they call Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion. Beijing accuses extremists of separatism.
> 
> The animosity between the majority Han Chinese and the Uighurs poses a major challenge for China's Communist Party leaders. President Xi Jinping, who took office in March, has called for the unity of all ethnic groups in China.
> 
> According to reports on the government website of Xinjiang and the state news agency Xinhua, last week's attacks occurred after police arrested a member of the gang.
> 
> The next day the same gang went on a rampage in the remote township of Lukqun, about 200 km (120 miles) southeast of Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi.
> 
> The group attacked a police station, shops and a construction site. Twenty-four civilians, both Uighur and Han Chinese, and police were killed, along with 11 gang members.
> 
> "Since February, Ahmatniyaz Siddiq and others were engaged in religious extremist activities, listening to violent terrorist recordings," said the reports.
> 
> "They formed a violent terrorist group of 17 members, and since mid-June were raising money, and buying knives, gasoline and other tools for crime."
> 
> Last week's killings marked the deadliest unrest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots pitting Uighurs against ethnic Chinese in the region's capital Urumqi.
> 
> "Terrorist organizations should be aware that the Chinese nation and its people are determined to safeguard the country's territorial integrity and national unity against all enemies," Xinhua said in a separate commentary on Sunday.
> 
> "Any attempt to sabotage will eventually fail."
> 
> Two days after the deadly attack, more than a hundred people, riding motorbikes and wielding knives, attacked a police station in Xinjiang, state media reported.
> 
> (Reporting by Li Hui and Terril Yue Jones; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Are those Army or para-military police units?


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Are those Army or para-military police units?



Both. The column of APCs on the third picture from the top are clearly in PLA markings though. The ones in white in subsequent pics are PAP.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Both. The column of APCs on the third picture from the top are clearly in PLA markings though. The ones in white in subsequent pics are PAP.




Thanks, beyond a couple of visits to the National Defence University and a serendipitous connection to the Whampoa Military Academy which resulted in an informative visit to the adjacent naval (amphibious) base, I know very little about the PLA. I still have trouble differentiating the Army, proper, from the PAP.


----------



## CougarKing

One of those times when the Chinese state media sounds like North Korea's KCNA in blaming the US. Typical.  :



> *China's State Media: Syria, US To Blame For Xinjiang Violence*
> By Zachary Keck
> July 2, 2013
> 
> China's state media is alternatively blaming opposition forces in Syria and Turkey for the burst of violence in its Western Xinjiang Province that killed 35 people. A commentary piece in the People’s Daily has said that the U.S. encouraging the violence because it "fears a lack of chaos in China."  Interestingly, this commentary piece doesn't appear on the English-language website.
> 
> link: The Diplomat


----------



## CougarKing

> *China, Russia to Hold Largest-Ever Naval Drills*
> By J. Michael Cole
> July 2, 2013
> 
> 
> The Chinese and Russian will hold their largest-ever joint naval exercise from July 5-12 in the Sea of Japan, a Chinese official announced on July 1.
> 
> Zhang Junshe, deputy director of China’s Naval Military Studies Research Institute, told Chinese media that a *total of 19 surface ships of various types — seven from China and 12 from Russia — will take part in the exercise, along with one submarine, three fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and special warfare units*. According to Zhang, this will also be the first time that a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M Fencer bomber take part in joint exercises with China.
> 
> Based on various pictures posted on the Internet, the PLA Navy vessels involved in Joint Sea-2013 are the Type 052C (Luyang II class) Lanzhou (170); Type 052B (Guangzhou class) Wuhan (169); the Type 051C (Luzhou class) Shenyang (115) and Shijiazhuang (116); the Type 054A (Jiangkai II class) Yancheng (546) and Yantai (538) and the Hongze Lake comprehensive supply ship (881). At least three ship-based helicopters will take part in the exercise.
> 
> The Diplomat link


----------



## CougarKing

> Defense News link
> 
> *China's New Jet, Radar Complicate US Posture
> 
> Russian-made Gear Extends Beijing's Punch*
> 
> 
> TAIPEI — China’s increasing military musculature continues to crush the margins of how far the US military can conduct operations near the mainland, experts say. Through the purchase of Russian-made equipment, China is attempting to break beyond the current air defense range of 250 kilometers in what US experts refer to as China’s anti-access/area-denial strategy.
> 
> China plans to procure two new Russian weapon systems that will extend the range of its air defense strike capability to 400 kilometers. This would place all of Taiwan within the scope of China’s air defense network and endanger the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.
> 
> The first is the much-reported negotiation for the 400-kilometer range* S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system* with a possible deal after 2017, when the Russian manufacturer, Almaz-Antey, fulfills Russian military orders.
> 
> The second is the *Sukhoi Su-35S multirole fighter jet*. These fighters will not be outfitted with the older Zhuk radar, but with the IRBIS-E radar, said Vasiliy Kashin, a researcher at the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
> 
> Built by Tikhomirov NIIP, the 400-kilometer range IRBIS-E multimode X-Band passive electronically scanned array radar can detect and track up to 30 airborne targets and attack up to eight at the same time, according to the company’s website. In addition, in the air-to-ground mode, it can track up to four ground targets, and can track one ground target while preserving air sector surveillance.
> 
> *The S-400 and Su-35S with the IRBIS-E radar might become “a psychological deterrent to politicians in Washington when they contemplate a Taiwan contingency,” said Alexander Huang, a military specialist at Tamkang University, here*.
> 
> Kashin said the tactical situation is “bad news for Taiwan,” as the Su-35S will be able to spot Taiwan’s F-16 fighters at 400 kilometers with its new radar. “That means Chinese Su-35s patrolling on the mainland side of the border will be able to see the targets all over Taiwan.”
> 
> If anything, these systems will “inspire determination to expedite production, procurement and deployment of the [Lockheed Martin] F-35 fighter by the US and its Asian allies,” Huang said.
> 
> The latest information on the Su-35S deal was revealed on June 10, when the director general of Russian Technologies Co., Sergey Chemezov, said the final commercial contract on the fighter sale could be expected by the end of this year.
> 
> Kashin said the “contract likely will be signed at the next meeting of the Sino-Russian intergovernmental commission on military technical cooperation, which can be expected to take place in November in Moscow.”
> 
> The first procurement contract is expected to include *24 Su-35S fighters, with an option for an additional 24 as things progress*. Though 24 to 48 fighters are not a significant threat to US forces, they pose a problem for Taiwan as it retires 56 Mirage 2000 fighters and roughly 50 F-5s. Taiwan is upgrading 126 indigenous defense fighters and 145 F-16A/B fighters, but there has been a significant push by Taiwan to procure 66 F-16C/D fighters to counter reductions. Effective lobbying by China within the US government has blocked new F-16 sales to Taiwan.
> 
> With projected reductions in fighters, Taiwan’s military has begun fielding its first land-attack cruise missile, the Hsiung Feng 2E, and is working on a variety of new anti-ship cruise missiles.
> 
> However, Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, said Taiwan’s growing interest in land-attack cruise missiles could be countered by the Su-35’s “potential ability to detect small low-flying targets at ranges suitable to support an engagement.”
> 
> *The IRBIS system’s 400-kilometer range “could provide a useful gap filler” to support the Chinese air force’s limited number of airborne warning and control system aircraft (AWACS), Barrie said.* “It remains to become clear what, if any, long-range air-to-air missile might be supplied with the Su-35.”
> 
> Both the S-400 and Su-35S with IRBIS-E radar are “impressive steps in increasing capability,” said Lance Gatling of Nexial Research, a defense consulting firm in Tokyo. However, there are technical challenges to integrating China’s AWACS capability with the S-400 and IRBIS-E. “SAM radars, ground-based, have the radar horizon issue, so they can’t see planes at very low altitude over Taipei.”
> 
> *Taiwan could use the jamming capabilities of its new early warning radar at Leshan Mountain, near Hsinchu, to play havoc with China’s various radar systems*, said a Taiwan defense industry source. The Leshan facility is considered one of the most powerful radars in the world, and unconfirmed sources here indicate it relays data directly to the US military to allow for the monitoring of aircraft and missile activity within China.
> 
> Gatling said the ultimate question on China’s procurement of the IRBIS and S-400 systems is: “How advanced is the integrated air defense system, data management and data links” in China? At present, this is difficult to define, as much of China’s military capabilities remain opaque to outsiders.


----------



## Edward Campbell

If you want to know why Hong Kong and China don't get along very well, consider this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1277645/shanghais-free-trade-zone-puts-hong-kongs-future-spotlight


> Shanghai's free-trade zone puts Hong Kong's future in the spotlight
> *Hong Kong needs to assess what strengths can help maintain its financial hub status, as the rival mainland city bids to usurp it with its latest deal*
> 
> George Chen
> 
> Monday, 08 July, 2013 although I'm posting this on Sun, 7 Jul, it is alread Mon, 8 Jul in HK)
> 
> Will the new Shanghai free-trade zone be a game changer?
> 
> This question popped up in my mind when I read the breaking news on Wednesday evening about Beijing’s landmark approval to set up a free-trade zone in Shanghai.
> 
> To my surprise, when I looked for related reports the following day, the news about Shanghai’s latest victory in winning policy support from the central government had not made it to the front pages of any major Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong.
> 
> “Is Hong Kong too self-confident or too self-centred?” I asked my colleagues.
> 
> For Shanghai, things moved quickly after Premier Li Keqiang visited the Pudong New Area and trade and port facilities in the city in late March. By the end of June, Li had made his decision, and on July 3, state broadcaster CCTV said the State Council had issued an announcement after a meeting chaired by Li that the free-trade zone in Shanghai would be a snapshot of an “upgraded Chinese economy”.
> 
> Shanghai’s ambitions to become the nation’s economic engine, leapfrogging Hong Kong as the dominant financial hub in the region, are already an open secret. Shanghai mayor Yang Xiong said after the announcement that the city’s future hinged on the free-trade zone, which could give it a leg up over rivals.
> 
> Rivals? Who? Yang did not name any.
> 
> To be more realistic, the new free-trade deal for Shanghai, which the cabinet wants to be run on a trial basis in the first phase and then see if such a special zone model can be expanded or copied to other mainland cities, would not immediately threaten Hong Kong’s leading position as one of the world’s most important financial centre cities and also one of the busiest ports.
> 
> But in the long run, the Hong Kong government must ask itself what competitive strengths and advantages are unique to the city; and whether these can be kept for the next decade or two. If not, then how can Hong Kong stay competitive, rather than becoming just another mainland city, lagging behind top-tier cities like Shanghai.
> 
> The central government is keen to use the free-trade zone in Shanghai as a testing ground for more financial liberalisation, as it supports the city’s ambition to grow into one of the world’s three most important financial centres – on a par with New York and London – by 2020.
> 
> Qianhai, just an hour’s drive from Hong Kong, has already been picked by Beijing to explore the possibilities of full convertibility of the yuan, which the government wants to turn into a global currency. Purely from an economic perspective, the time left for Hong Kong to rethink its future is obviously quite limited.
> 
> On Wednesday evening, before the news about Shanghai came out, I was watching television at home. I saw Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor talking again about budget issues for the West Kowloon arts project.
> 
> Time is money, and we spend way too much time just talking about things like West Kowloon when other cities are already taking action and know with crystal clarity what they want to achieve.




The threat is real but not imminent. Shanghai will siphon money away from Hong Kong but it will be _dodgy_ money and HK will not miss it ~ the issue of corruption is still a paramount problem for China's paramount leader, and little "clean" money is likely to move from HK to Shanghai ... yet.

But consider, also, the issue of the Kra Isthmus Canal across Thailand which China is considering building at a cost of $(US)25 Billion or more and which could do real serious damage to Singapore's position as East Asia's favourite entrepôt.


----------



## CougarKing

The Senkakus/Diaoyus "saga" continues:



> *China's East China Sea Gas Exploration Latest Flare-Up In Japan-China Senkaku/Diaoyu Island Dispute*
> 
> 
> The serious and increasingly dangerous rupture with China gained a new dimension–and regained the headlines–on July 5 when Abe, appearing on a Fuji Television program, expressed “deep regret” that China was moving undersea gas field exploration equipment into an area of the East China Sea “in violation of a bilateral agreement.”   “I must ask China to honor our agreement,” said Abe.Abe’s criticism produced a brief flutter of comment in the Japanese media, but was quickly passed over.
> 
> In Beijing, however, there was a multi-day thunderstorm.
> 
> Forbes link


----------



## Flaker

New U.S. weapons have China worried

When the United States carried out a successful test recently of an advanced high-speed, long-range weapon ostensibly designed to reduce U.S. reliance on nuclear arms in a crisis, it set alarm bells ringing in China. Far from reassuring Beijing, the May 1 test of the sleek hypersonic unmanned aircraft, known as the X-51A WaveRider, has added to China’s concerns that U.S. superiority in conventional weapons may make nuclear conflict more, not less, likely.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/05/30/commentary/new-u-s-weapons-have-china-worried/#.Ud9VKqRraUk


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China, Russia to Hold Largest-Ever Naval Drills
> By J. Michael Cole
> July 2, 2013
> 
> The Chinese and Russian will hold their largest-ever joint naval exercise from July 5-12 in the Sea of Japan, a Chinese official announced on July 1.
> 
> Zhang Junshe, deputy director of China’s Naval Military Studies Research Institute, told Chinese media that a total of 19 surface ships of various types — seven from China and 12 from Russia — will take part in the exercise, along with one submarine, three fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and special warfare units. According to Zhang, this will also be the first time that a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M Fencer bomber take part in joint exercises with China.
> 
> Based on various pictures posted on the Internet, the PLA Navy vessels involved in Joint Sea-2013 are the Type 052C (Luyang II class) Lanzhou (170); Type 052B (Guangzhou class) Wuhan (169); the Type 051C (Luzhou class) Shenyang (115) and Shijiazhuang (116); the Type 054A (Jiangkai II class) Yancheng (546) and Yantai (538) and the Hongze Lake comprehensive supply ship (881). At least three ship-based helicopters will take part in the exercise.
> 
> The Diplomat link
Click to expand...



The _New York Times_ puts these exercises, and Sino-Russian relations, in general, into the correct perspective in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/opinion/global/the-wary-chinese-russian-partnership.html?_r=0


> The Wary Chinese-Russian Partnership
> 
> By JEFFREY MANKOFF
> 
> Published: July 11, 2013
> 
> Russia and China wrapped up joint military exercises on Wednesday in the Sea of Japan, the largest naval drills China has ever conducted with a foreign partner. The exercises took place amid mounting U.S. frustration over Russian and Chinese efforts to block United Nations Security Council action against the Assad regime in Syria and fuel U.S. concern about an anti-American axis between the two authoritarian great powers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese warships heading to naval drills with Russia.                    Color China Photo, via Associated Press
> 
> Although Chinese-Russian relations have improved in recent years as trade has expanded, old border disputes have been resolved, and the tempo of meetings between top leaders has increased, their collaboration masks serious differences. Only major missteps by the United States could make American fears a reality.
> 
> Moscow and Beijing characterize their relationship as a comprehensive strategic partnership, but their cooperation is mostly tactical. The two countries approach the world from quite different vantage points. China is a rising power, with a fast-growing, export-driven economy eager to benefit from globalization. Russia is a stagnating petro-state seeking to insulate itself from the forces of change.
> 
> Moscow touts its partnership with Beijing mostly to prove to the rest of the world that Russia still matters, while China views it as a low-cost way of placating Russia. Lacking much of a common agenda, cooperation is limited to areas where their interests already overlap, like bolstering trade.
> 
> In the parts of the world that matter most to them, Russia and China are more rivals than allies. Take Southeast Asia. Beijing’s assertive claims to maritime boundaries in the South China Sea have rattled America’s regional partners and led Washington to deepen its security cooperation with Vietnam, the Philippines and other states whose territorial claims China disputes. But to Beijing’s frustration, Moscow has remained silent on the territorial disputes, even as Russian energy companies have signed deals with Vietnam to develop oil and gas resources in the South China Sea — in waters claimed by China. Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry is expanding its weapons sales throughout Southeast Asia, including selling advanced attack submarines to the Vietnamese Navy.
> 
> In Central Asia, Chinese economic power is rapidly pushing Russia aside. Chinese capital is paying for new roads, railroads and pipelines that lock the Central Asian states ever tighter into the Chinese embrace. Last year, all the Central Asian nations save Uzbekistan traded more with China than with Russia. Thanks to the opening of a gas pipeline from Central Asia to China in late 2009, Beijing has been able to take a hard line with Moscow on negotiations to build a new Russia-China pipeline. Russia’s push to bring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan into its customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, along with Vladimir Putin’s call to establish an Eurasian Union by 2015, are based heavily on a desire to limit the reorientation of the Central Asian states’ economies toward China.
> 
> Nor does sporadic cooperation between the Russian and Chinese militaries alter the fact that China’s assertiveness worries Russia at least as much as it worries the United States. Russian military commanders acknowledge that they see China as a potential foe, even as official statements continue to focus on the alleged threat from the United States and NATO. In July 2010, Russia conducted one of its largest ever military exercises, which aimed at defending the sparsely populated Russian Far East from an unnamed opponent with characteristics much like those of the People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> The only sense in which Russia and China are truly aligned is in their shared belief that the post-Cold War international order, designed by and for the United States, denies them their rightful place at the table, while allowing Washington to throw its weight around without regard for the interests of others.
> 
> This sense of exclusion underpins their support for new institutional mechanisms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the so-called BRICS countries and the Group of 20, as well as their portrayal of the U.N. Security Council as the sole legitimate arbiter of war and peace.
> 
> Much Chinese-Russian cooperation, especially at the U.N., is based on defending the right of states to be fully sovereign within their own borders and opposing intervention in internal affairs without Security Council approval. Even this stand is less about high principle than about protecting concrete interests. Moscow ignored Georgia’s sovereignty to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 — to which China objected less from principle than because of the potential precedent for Taiwan.
> 
> Beijing and Moscow also abstained when the Security Council authorized a no-flight zone in Libya, a country of little strategic significance for either of them. Their harder line on Syria is a reflection of Russia’s political stakes in that country, with China happy to hide behind Russian objections to prevent another instance of U.S. intervention.
> 
> The lesson for the United States is that the more it dismisses Russian and Chinese demands that their concerns be taken into account, the more its fears about a Chinese-Russian axis become self-fulfilling. Where Moscow or Beijing have real interests at stake — as Russia does in Syria — Washington should be prepared to listen, and to engage in a real give-and-take before acting.
> 
> Washington also should take seriously the argument that institutions designed for the post-Cold War world do not reflect the real distribution of power today. It should also be open to new formats, such as the G-20, that place Russia and China on equal footing with traditional U.S. partners. This is especially relevant in Asia, where a new security architecture is still being designed.
> 
> Giving Beijing and Moscow more of a stake in the running of the world might be uncomfortable, but the alternative is bringing the Chinese-Russian axis that U.S. policy makers fear closer to reality.
> 
> _*Jeffrey Mankoff* is a fellow and deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington._




One point where I disagree with Jeffrey Mankoff is that I think America can and should _marginalize_ Moscow even as it agrees to give Beijing "more of a stake in the running of the world." The Chinese are exploiting Russian weakness - mostly governmental ineptitude - to acquire technology (the Russians still have some) and to try to counterbalance the USA, but the Chinese _despise_ the Russians as _barbarians_. (It is fair to say that the many Chinese (too often) use the term _barbarian_ to describe all non-Chinese but, when challenged, most will conceded that not all foreigners are _barbarians_, but Russians are.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I normally take the _Good Grey Globe's_ Doug Saunders with a big grain of salt, but this article, and the linked paper, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, does raise a good question:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/us-and-china-smile-for-cameras-prepare-for-war/article13196146/#dashboard/follows/


> U.S. and China smile for cameras, prepare for war
> 
> DOUG SAUNDERS
> The Globe and Mail
> 
> Last updated Saturday, Jul. 13 2013
> 
> Rarely have relations between China and the United States been so cordial. On Wednesday, the superpowers agreed to an impressive slate of measures to fight climate change by cutting emissions. Last month’s summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping saw the leaders finally agree on an approach to North Korea. China is allowing its currency to rise in value, reducing the danger of global imbalances. And while spying and dirty tricks are rife, recent revelations about U.S. Internet surveillance have placed the countries on a level playing field. It’s a period of peaceful cohabitation.
> 
> So why are the two countries’ militaries preparing to do battle with each other?
> 
> Both the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army are arming for an all-out war and pursuing enormously expensive master strategies that assume that such a war will occur.
> 
> In the case of the United States, this appears to be taking place without any authorization or approval from the White House or Congress. The Pentagon is now basing its global strategy on a detailed plan known as the AirSea Battle concept, in which the U.S. Army and Air Force defend the presence of 320,000 U.S. troops in the area by readying themselves for a full-scale land and air assault on China in the event of a threat in the South China Sea or its surroundings.
> 
> In a detailed analysis paper in this summer’s issue of the Yale Journal of International Affairs, the famed sociologist and military-policy expert Amitai Etzioni asks, “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” His answer is stark: Mr. Obama has spoken of a “pivot to Asia,” but there has been no political intent or desire to have such an active military confrontation with China – in fact, the politics and diplomacy have been moving in the opposite direction.
> 
> “The United States is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress,” Prof. Etzioni writes. “In the public sphere there was no debate – led by either think tanks or public intellectuals – like that which is ongoing over whether or not to use the military option against Iran’s nuclear program, or the debate surrounding the 2009 surge of troops in Afghanistan.”
> 
> But the AirSea Battle plan has far more expensive and dangerous implications. “The imagined result of ASB is the ability to end a conflict with China in much the same way the United States ended WWII: The U.S. military defeats China and dictates the surrender terms.” This is a drastic change from Cold War approaches, where nuclear-scale conflict was carefully avoided.
> 
> The plan scares the heck out of many military figures. “AirSea Battle is demonizing China,” James Cartwright, the former vice-chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last year. “That’s not in anybody’s interest.” A Marine Corps assessment warned that the concept is “preposterously expensive to build in peace time” and, if used as intended, would “cause incalculable human and economic destruction,” in good part because it makes escalation to nuclear war far more likely.
> 
> And the Chinese have responded in kind: “If the U.S. military develops AirSea Battle to deal with the [People’s Liberation Army],” Col. Gauyue Fan warned, “the PLA will be forced to develop anti-AirSea Battle.”
> 
> And that is now taking place. Soon after assuming power last year, Mr. Xi abandoned his predecessor’s commitment to “peaceful rise,” took direct command of the Central Military Commission and commanded the military to focus on “real combat” and “fighting and winning wars.”
> 
> As Jeremy Page of The Wall Street Journal noted recently, Mr. Xi has rehabilitated a group of ultra-hawkish generals and military advisers who have advocated a military strategy based on preparing for direct confrontation with the United States. He has particularly embraced Col. Liu Mingfu, whose calls for direct China-U.S. military competition had led his books to be banned, but are now back on the bookstore shelves in droves. Also widely published now is air force Col. Dai Xu, who wrote last year, according to Reuters, that China’s neighbours are “running dogs of the United States in Asia” and “we only need to kill one, and it will immediately bring the others to heel.”
> 
> So we are in the absurd position of having the two superpowers at peace with one another while their armies prepare for total war. It is a dangerous state of affairs – something we ought to remember as we approach the centenary of 1914, when just such a mismatch led the world to war.




Oh, and the good question ...

... who the hell is in charge in Washington? Is it Obama or the admirals?


More on _AirSea Battle_ here and here.


----------



## Flaker

Not sure how legitimate this may be

http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/is-nazi-china-emerging/4/

Is a Nazi China Emerging?

"Only by using special means to “clean up” America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there. This is the only choice left for us. This is not a matter of whether we are willing to do it or not. What kind of special means is there available for us to “clean up” America? Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves. There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio weapons have been invented one after another."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Flaker said:
			
		

> Not sure how legitimate this may be
> 
> http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/is-nazi-china-emerging/4/
> 
> Is a Nazi China Emerging?
> 
> "Only by using special means to “clean up” America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there. This is the only choice left for us. This is not a matter of whether we are willing to do it or not. What kind of special means is there available for us to “clean up” America? Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves. There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio weapons have been invented one after another."




The last paragraph of Rajinder Puri's piece is the key:

     "The question is: Is this speech authentic? If not, why does not Beijing forcefully repudiate it? There is no doubt at all about the authenticity of the nuclear threat issued by General Zhu Chenghu. He was even mildly
       reprimanded by the Chinese government. So what does Beijing have to say about Chi Haotian? President Hu Jintao may be titular Chairman of China’s powerful Central Military Commission. But he never served in
       the army. Chi Haotian is a former army general."

Opinion on the authenticity of Chi Haotian's "speech" are mixed. Some people suggest it is, indeed, consistent with 2,500 years of Chinese strategic thinking while others suggest that it is crude US disinformation. The problem, for me, is that I cannot find - using my native Chinese friends as searchers - find one, single reliable source for the speech. The most common original "source" cited is the _Epoch Times_ which is affiliated with the _Falun Gong_ movement and which I do not regard as credible.


----------



## CougarKing

Another source to meet China's natural gas needs as well as another bone of contention with Japan...

link



> *Exclusive: China in $5 billion drive to develop disputed East China Sea gas*
> Reuters
> 
> By Chen Aizhu
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese state-run oil companies hope to develop seven new gas fields in the East China Sea, possibly siphoning gas from the seabed beneath waters claimed by Japan, a move that could further inflame tensions with Tokyo over the disputed area.
> 
> Beijing had slowed exploration in the energy-rich East China Sea, one of Asia's biggest security risks due to competing territorial claims, but is now rapidly expanding its hunt for gas, a cheaper and cleaner energy to coal and oil imports.
> 
> *State-run Chinese oil and gas firm CNOOC Ltd will soon submit for state approval a plan to develop Huangyan phase II and Pingbei, totaling seven new fields*, two industry officials with direct knowledge of the projects told Reuters.
> 
> The approval would bring the total number of fields in what is called the Huangyan project to nine.
> 
> China is already working on Huangyan I which has two fields approved. The Huangyan project is expected to cost more than 30 billion yuan ($4.9 billion), including 11 production platforms now under construction at Chinese shipyards.
> 
> *If approved, the seven new gas fields would not see a big jump in China's total gas output, supplying only a fraction of last year's 106 billion cubic meters (bcm) and dwarfed by operations in the disputed South China Sea and Bohai Bay off north China. Chinese geologists said gas deposits in the East China Sea region were much smaller and more scattered.*
> 
> The greater issue is the political risk if Beijing approves the new gas fields. Tensions over the East China Sea have escalated this year, with Beijing and Tokyo scrambling fighter jets and ordering patrol ships to shadow each other, raising the fear that a miscalculation could lead to a broader clash.
> 
> "It's a sign of impatience on the side of the Chinese, stemming from a lack of movement on the Japanese side on the gas fields issue," said Koichi Nakano, associate professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.
> 
> China and Japan in 2008 agreed to jointly develop hydrocarbons in the area, but Tokyo wishes to settle the issue of maritime boundaries before developing the gas fields.
> 
> "The question is what will be Japan's response and whether they would be able to talk China out of a unilateral move," said Nakano. "But escalation of tensions leading to a war? I don't think so. The Americans will be watching this situation with grave concern and may play a role of a mediator here."
> 
> A spokesman for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said: "Our understanding is that Japan and China should continue to have dialogue on the issue of joint exploitation of this area, so any unilateral action should not be accepted".
> 
> Even if the National Development Reform Commission gives approval for the new gas fields, the pace of the development could be determined by China's Foreign Ministry which requests oil companies to seek its approval before every drilling. Such permission may be influenced by tensions with Japan at the time.
> 
> MAJOR EAST CHINA SEA EXPANSION
> 
> *China and Japan disagree on where the maritime boundary between them lies in the East China Sea. Beijing says its activities are in the Chinese territories, while Tokyo is worried the Chinese drilling near the disputed median line would tap into geological structures in its waters.*
> 
> Japan lodged a protest early this month after detecting well construction works at Huangyan I about 26 kms (16 miles) west of the disputed median line. China's foreign ministry rejected the protest as a baseless, saying Beijing had the right to drill in its sovereign waters.
> 
> U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in 2012 that the East China Sea has* between 1 and 2 trillion cubic feet (28-57 bcm) of proven and probable natural gas reserves*, a modest gauge versus estimates by Chinese sources at up to 250 tcf in undiscovered gas resource.
> 
> *If approved, the new gas fields would supply China's manufacturing hub of Zhejiang province*, about 400 km (249 miles) away on the east coast, with production slated to start in the fourth quarter of 2015, said the officials.
> 
> The fields would have a combined annual production capacity of nearly 4 bcm, up from the region's current output of less than 1 bcm, and would account for about 2 percent of China's estimated gas output by the end of 2016.
> 
> CNOOC and partner Sinopec Corp are already developing Huangyan I, which was officially approved by the National Development & Reform Commission in June 2012 and is due to start producing gas in September next year. Also on the planning board is Pingbei II, expected to come on line in 2016.
> 
> CNOOC media officials declined to comment on the new developments and industry sources quoted for the story declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
> 
> CHINA FAST-TRACKING HUNT FOR GAS
> 
> *China, the world's top energy user, is on a fast track to boost the use of natural gas, with demand for gas forecast to grow more than four fold by 2030 from the 147 bcm last year. China is the world's fourth biggest gas consumer.
> 
> China first started pumping gas in early 2006 from the Chunxiao field, part of the massive Xihu trough, but territorial disputes have hindered an industry keen to explore and develop the region, Chinese industry experts said.*
> 
> "China has made compromise, having slowed down the works quite a few years," said a state oil official, "The cards are in the hands of Chinese, as companies are capable of developing (this area) after all the explorations done over the years."
> 
> China's plan to expand East China Sea operations comes after a near six-year lull in investment in the area, since the 2008 agreement to jointly develop hydrocarbons in the area.
> 
> *"Since 2008 when the two nations reached a consensus for joint development, Japan has barely made any sincere diplomatic moves towards that direction...It seems that Japan wants to settle the boundaries first before moving to cooperations, which is totally unrealistic," said Liu Junhong, research fellow at China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.*
> 
> Under the proposed expansion plan, Huangyan II, which is adjacent to the disputed maritime border, would consist of two gas fields. Huangyan I has two fields.
> 
> Pingbei, an uncontested area located in the western side of the Xihu trough, would have three fields under phase I and another two under phase II.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Economist Dambisa Moyo takes a look at how China is shaping emerging markets and at the growing “schism” that is developing between developed and emerging markets in this article which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _CFA Institute_:

http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/cfm.v24.n4.12


> New Frontiers
> *Investors ignore key trends in frontier markets "at their peril," says economist Dambisa Moyo*
> 
> By Jonathan Barnes
> 
> CFA Institute Magazine July/August 2013
> 
> Chinese commodity investment and trade are reshaping frontier markets and emerging economies, but many investors are overlooking an even bigger story, according to Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo, author of _Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World_. Although China is a major theme in the story, its contribution is less significant than the growth of domestic demand in these markets. Investors who focus only on the commodity aspect stand to miss out on opportunities for alpha generation. Moreover, a structural “schism” is forming between developed and emerging markets, with profound implications for investors.
> 
> In this interview with CFA Institute Magazine, Moyo, who recently spoke at the 66th CFA Institute Annual Conference in May, discusses key developments and trends in frontier markets. As she explains, common misconceptions can lead investors into trouble, including the tendency to “conflate the idea of risk and uncertainty when they talk about emerging economies” and the misinformed notion that developing markets are highly illiquid. Moyo also highlights the danger of escalating conflicts over natural resources.
> 
> *What story are you seeing in developing markets?*
> 
> A lot of people are quite focused on private equity when thinking about emerging or frontier markets. But the most interesting story is really the public markets, because I think that’s where there is a blind spot for most investors. That’s where I think there is significant opportunity, and we’ve already started to see that some of the savviest investors are really putting money to work in these markets. There is a lot of opportunity to invest and generate superior, uncorrelated returns in a broader global portfolio.
> 
> Many frontier markets—just looking at the macroeconomic theme—have a solid capital base in terms of debt and deficits, strong labor dynamics (in terms of a young population), and a really compelling story around productivity. Those are three key ingredients that drive economic growth: capital, labor, and productivity.
> 
> What I’m suggesting is that in the public markets, trading of equities and fixed income is rapidly increasing. I think the returns in the macro story are reasonably well known, but where I see real change in the thinking is around risk management and liquidity. Those are the two key things.
> 
> *What is changing in regard to risk management?*
> 
> I think people traditionally conflate the idea of risk and uncertainty when they talk about emerging economies and frontier economies in particular. What we’re seeing with savvy investors is that there is a much clearer delineation between risk (which is measurable, which you can manage and hedge against) and uncertainty (which is obviously what is immeasurable—the whole idea of tail risk, of not being able to measure these outcomes). What has happened is that there has been a move away from this idea of uncertainty and toward the idea of there being significant opportunities in risk management and, therefore, the ability to put
> money to work in these markets.
> 
> *And with regard to liquidity?*
> 
> In regard to liquidity, people have tended to think these are highly illiquid markets, where there is really no opportunity to write big checks or the opportunity to go both long and short.
> 
> Actually, we’ve seen a significant increase in the ability to trade large-ticket items. So, for example, it is not unheard of to be able to put US$10 million or US$20 million to work in a single name, in places like Nigeria or Kenya or the Philippines or Sri Lanka. Also, you can go short as well as long in these markets. There’s not much in terms of a developed knowledge base [of these areas]. It’s just something that people who are in the know are doing much more.
> 
> *Are investors using new techniques to measure risk?*
> 
> It’s actually age-old techniques being applied more thoroughly. If you’re going to invest in these markets, you need to have very good underground contacts—a network that can help you understand some of the evolutionary challenges these countries face as they go from largely state-owned countries to market-driven economies that are more democratic.
> 
> Investors who have the underground contacts—which is just good business in terms of risk management—will do better than those who don’t. You could ask, “Is that the new risk management?” No, it’s not. That’s how people do risk. They want to touch and feel, to look into the eyes of the people they’re doing business with. That is really where I think there have been leaps and bounds.
> 
> People now feel comfortable to travel to these places and spend time with the business owners and the business managers and get a better handle on what is going on. That traditionally was not the case, because these countries and these places were viewed as far too risky, far too uncertain, a “we don’t go there” kind of thing because “it’s too worrisome.” That story has changed quite considerably.
> 
> Also, to the extent that you’re getting much more market data, much more information and pricing information, then traditional model analysis, technical analysis, and fundamental analysis also become much more applicable.
> 
> *How has Chinese investment impacted developing regions?*
> 
> There are few countries that have not benefitted from China’s campaign—everyone from the United States to countries across Africa and South America have all benefitted from the Chinese campaign, whether it’s through investment in debt (as in the case of the U.S.) or investment in infrastructure. But there’s an impact also in some of the tradable markets. For instance, China’s Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) bought 20% of South Africa’s Standard Bank, one of the largest banks in Africa, in 2007. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with a country that has not benefitted from China.
> 
> *Are there other examples?*
> 
> My book _Winner Take All_ is littered with examples of Chinese investment in commodities. I talk about the purchase of Mount Toromocho in Peru, which is basically a copper investment that the Chinese made in 2007. I talk about the deals that have been struck in Brazil, with the Chinese investing in agriculture there, and in places like Africa. I also talk about swaps that the Chinese put on in Russia and Pakistan in return for access to oil and uranium, respectively, which are very specific investments that could be very helpful.
> 
> *Having said that, is China a key piece of the story?*
> 
> Yes, it is. Is it the only piece? No, it’s not, because many of these economies are also very quickly seeing an increase in domestic demand. Their own local populations are actually now getting a foothold on the economic ladder. A lot of the change we’re seeing is due to China, but more significant is the domestic-demand theme.
> 
> *How compelling are uncorrelated returns in frontier markets?*
> 
> One of the main stories is this whole idea of superior, uncorrelated returns that you can garner by investing in the emerging markets. If you were to characterize the situation in developed markets right now—using the lens of capital and productivity—we know that they are struggling under significant debts and deficits. They’ve got serious aging-population concerns, not just in terms of the quantity of labor but also the quality of labor. If you look at the OECD statistics, you can see that the quality of labor is deteriorating in many developed markets. Then there’s the issue of productivity. You have countries like Britain, where in the past decade they’ve seen a decline in productivity in every single sector.
> 
> If you look at the emerging market or frontier economy, the story is quite different. You see strong, solid dynamics, a very credible, positive upswing in labor, both in quality and quantity and in productivity. The democratic processes are including more transparency, less corruption, and countries are importing technology that can help them. So that in and of itself is a schism.
> 
> The correlation between the developed markets returns and the bigger emerging market returns is around 0.9 by some measures. The return correlation between developed markets and frontier markets is closer to 0.7, which obviously is still significant but it’s relatively small and obviously makes a compelling story from the diversification of a portfolio point of view.
> 
> *Has China set an example in how to engage frontier economies?*
> 
> Of the world’s population, 90% live in the emerging market. In many of these countries, up to 70% of the population is under the age of 25. It’s a very young population, and very, very impoverished. These countries need trade, they need investment, and they need job creation. The Chinese mode of engagement—where they are interested in forging a relationship of investment and trade, creating jobs, and building out infrastructure—is much more beneficial for longer-term development than an attitude or an approach that focuses much more on supporting these countries in the short-term through aid.
> 
> I don’t think it is rocket science. There is not a single country in the history of the world that has achieved economic growth and reduced poverty in a meaningful way by relying on aid to the extent that many emerging countries rely on aid today. So it is not a mystery to me that good trade and engagement, solid foreign direct investment, capital markets development, and so forth are key pillars of a strategy to create economic growth. That is really what many people are describing as China’s approach for engagement.
> 
> *Do you see Western countries following China’s lead?*
> 
> Yes, absolutely but obviously to a much lesser degree, because one key aspect of China’s approach is that it’s got deep pockets. But if you go across the emerging world, it is pretty clear that India, Turkey, and others have adopted the approach to some degree. Across Africa, you see a lot of Turkish, Lebanese, and Russian investment—what you would call South–South investment. It is a big piece of the economic development story that’s going on across the emerging world.
> 
> It is worth pointing out that the ongoing financial crisis in the U.S. and Europe means that many of the developed markets have been back-footed. But the hope is that if they were to remedy their problems, then they also would be part of this investment and trade story.
> 
> *What’s the likelihood of China becoming a monopsony in commodities markets?*
> 
> The idea of a monopsony is about China’s market power in publicly traded markets. It’s not necessarily about their impact on a frontier economy. Are they able to influence (inadvertently, I would say) the market price of different commodities? The answer is yes for both copper and coal, for example. Many market traders would argue that, even today, the Chinese influence on the ability to be price setters is quite significant.I think that the ability to be a price setter and to have pricing power in the broader markets is a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think it has to do with China’s engagement with frontier economies per se. Australia is the largest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment. And as we speak today, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is about to close its largest transaction ever in the commodity space with a US$15.1 billion dollar purchase of Canadian oil producer Nexen. Those are both nonfrontier economies, but the activity obviously will have significant implications for the markets.
> 
> *What does the evolution of the BrIC markets tell us about the path for frontier markets?*
> 
> One of the case studies I love is the story of Turkey. Turkey has quickly changed from what was arguably a frontier economy into a much more developed market economy. Within 7–10 years, Turkey went from an economy where the cost of funding to do a trade would be about 8% and the maximum size you could do in a transaction for one stock would be about US$5 million to one where the funding cost is about 0.5% or 1% and you can very easily write a ticket of up to US$200 million dollars to buy or sell into a particular stock in Turkey. That shows how much liquidity has become available.
> 
> To me, that transition (from being a relatively niche market, quite small, to becoming a market where you can actually put on massive trades for reasonably aggressive funding) is exactly the sort of path that I expect we will see amongst the frontier economies in the years to come.
> 
> *What about specific investments in frontier markets?*
> 
> One of the big misunderstandings about many emerging economies, particularly in Africa, is that people think it is a big commodity trade. That is completely wrong. Over 85% of the stocks that trade in Africa (there are about 20 stock exchanges and over 1000 stocks) are non-commodities.
> 
> There are stocks in banking, logistics, telecommunication, the retail sector, and consumer goods that have really captured the growth theme that we’ve talked about already. That’s my big point—you miss out if you think it’s just a commodity story.
> 
> The second point is I believe very strongly that you don’t want to just be going long in these markets. You also want to be able to short. Some of the worst performers last year were Mongolia and the Ukraine (on the back of the difficulties that they both had in their political environment). The markets are now mature enough to be able to put on positions that reflect those negative outcomes. Fortunately, you now are able to short the market for many but not all of the frontier economies.
> 
> I don’t like to be a stock picker, but I will say that in virtually all of these frontier economies there are two sectors that I like in particular. One of them is banks, which are the foundation of economic development. There is real significant upside around banking and insurance. If you think about some of the Nigerian banks, you can see the theme
> being put to work as a practical example. The other area that I really like a lot is construction.
> 
> *How prevalent are resource conflicts in these regions?*
> 
> In the U.S., the National Security Agency (NSA) put out a report in February 2012, basically articulating concerns and real risks around commodity-based wars, particularly emanating from water scarcity. In _Winner Take All_, I have a couple of tables at the back [of the book] that look very specifically at which region and what countries are already engaged in skirmishes, civil wars, and so on around commodity scarcity.
> 
> Since 1990, there have been over 20 wars around commodity scarcity. If you look at some of the work by Michael Klare [professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of _The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources_, there is a lot being done right now in forecasting where some of the big wars could come from in the years to come, borne out of scarcity of natural resources.
> 
> Am I worried about this being a big piece of the puzzle? Yes, I am worried about increased conflicts. It is already happening today, and it could escalate. Demand pressures, such as population, increases in wealth, and urbanization, are just not matching with the supply of water, arable land, minerals, and energy. This type of concern around natural-resource conflicts is one thing that we need to be concerned about. The other things emanating from this demand-and-supply imbalance are increases in prices and also in price volatility. Finally, an under-discussed concern is the real risk of resource nationalization in a world where commodities have become scarcer.
> 
> *What form would resource nationalization take?*
> 
> It could be a whole range. In Australia, they’ve increased the tax on mining and iron companies by over 30%. Nationalization could also be much more aggressive, as with expropriation, which you’ve seen in places like Argentina and Venezuela, where the government just takes full ownership of some assets. The discussion around natural-resource nationalization has become a big deal, everywhere from Mongolia to South Africa.
> 
> *How do you see price volatility extrapolating in the future?*
> 
> Weather concerns, political volatility, and political actions also exacerbate commodity price pressure, but I think the real driver is going to be the structural fundamental demand-and-supply challenges that I’ve already outlined.
> 
> If you look at the IMF forecast or the forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration [EIA], you can see that this concern about commodity price increases (and therefore the impact on our living standards) is very real. Both these agencies forecast, for example, that oil prices could be as high as US$200 dollars a barrel over the next decade.
> 
> *What else would you want investors to know about the frontier?*
> 
> Mainly two things. In terms of equities we’re talking about more than US$1 trillion in market cap, with 8,000 stocks that trade in that frontier market space. About US$200 billion of it is a free float, and I really believe that in terms of diversification, there is a real story for investors going back to basics of picking stocks based on micro fundamentals instead of this whole risk-on/risk-off phase, which is what we’ve been in for the past three years.
> 
> The fixed-income side is another place of real opportunity. Take Africa, for example. Today we’ve got almost 20 countries that have credit ratings. Just in the past eight months, we have seen at least four countries come to the market—Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, and Morocco. They’ve done big bond issues in the market, ranging from US$600 to US$750 million. We’re talking about bond issues that were 10 or 15 times oversubscribed in some cases and very aggressively priced. They are pricing more aggressively than Spain, Portugal, or Italy. So it is a real solid story. These countries now have credit ratings, which they are using to
> issue debts, and the market loves that.
> 
> For people who are interested in opportunities for alpha generation, who want to get off their benchmark hugging, I think these markets are ignored at their own peril.
> 
> _Jonathan Barnes is a financial journalist in the San Francisco Bay area_




The techniques for doing business in emerging markets that Dr Moyo mentions early on in the article are the _traditional_ Chinese ways of doing business so there is some comfort level for them in Africa, especially.

The danger of commodity based conflicts might merit a whole new thread, if one doesn't already exist.


----------



## CougarKing

Oh well. It's this type of model soldier that a state-run newspaper would typically go out of its way to emphasize... among dozens of other patriotic anecdotes.



> *A graduate's dream to defend the country*
> 
> People's Daily Online, July 19, 2013
> 
> Chu Kewei, a college graduate-turned-commander, cherishes the dream to defend his country.
> 
> Chu gave up opportunities to work inside the higher-level offices of the army and Beijing scientific research institutions when he graduated in 2007 from the national defense class of Tsinghua University.
> 
> Instead, he joined the grassroots of the army as he believed it was the only road to take for a true soldier. *Chu then went on to join China's prominent "Iron Army," the 54th Group Army of the 127th Light Mechanized Infantry Division under the Jinan Military Command of the People's Liberation Army.*
> 
> Chu has been learning, practicing and undergoing tough training sessions with the regiment whose predecessor was the famous Ye Ting Independent Regiment, a pioneer in the Northern Expedition military campaign launched in 1926 to overthrow the rule of the Northern warlords.
> 
> Chu rapidly matured and the green hand's fast growth deeply impressed the veterans who had originally questioned his abilities.
> 
> He became his company's commander in 2010. He has won two second-class merits and one third-class merit *and was a delegate to the 18th CPC National Congress*.
> 
> (...)



Note the last line: political officer in training?

This rosy picture of that exemplary soldier above is a stark contrast from a negative image cast by the 'little emperors' in their ranks as stated by the articles below...

China's one-child policy creates wimpy military recruits, deserters

PLA thinned by sparse pickings of one-child 'royalty'


----------



## Edward Campbell

Notwithstanding the Party's propaganda, military service has not been "honoured" in China since the _Spring and Autumn period_ (about 2,500 years ago). Lao Tzu barely mentions soldiers, * and the Confucian gentleman, his "superior man," is a scholar, not a soldier.** 

_____
* He says, notably, “A skillful soldier is not violent, an able fighter does not rage, a mighty conqueror does not give battle, a great commander is a humble man,” and "Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death."

** Confucius, famously, says, "Good iron is not used for nails, good men are not used for soldiers." ( 好铁不打定，好汉不当兵 )


----------



## CougarKing

Not sure what to make of this since there's few details so far...

link



> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A loud explosion was heard in Beijing airport's Terminal 3 on Saturday evening, China's official Xinhua news agency reported, citing witnesses.
> 
> *The Sina Weibo microblog of state broadcaster China Central Television said a man detonated a package of black gunpowder used to make firecrackers just outside the international arrivals exit.*
> 
> (Reporting by John Ruwitch; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)



EDITED TO ADD:

It appears this was more related to an individual case and not related to any political dissident or ethnic separatist movements.

link




> BEIJING (Reuters) - *A man in a wheelchair detonated a home-made explosive in Beijing airport on Saturday, injuring himself and sending smoke billowing through the exit area of the international arrivals section of Terminal 3.*
> There were *no other injuries* and operations were normal after the blast, the airport said on its microblog.
> 
> *China's official Xinhua news agency said the man, 34-year-old Ji Zhongxing from the eastern province of Shandong, had detonated the loud device after being prevented from handing out leaflets that drew attention to unspecified complaints.
> 
> Some Chinese activists and rights lawyers later posted online what they said was a letter of complaint that Ji had filed regarding a 2005 incident in which he claims to have been partially paralyzed after being beaten by police in Guangdong province's manufacturing hub of Dongguan.*
> 
> It was not possible to independently verify the letter.
> 
> *Individual Chinese unable to win redress for grievances have in the past resorted to extreme measures, including bombings, but such incidents are rare amid the tight security of airports.
> 
> The explosion took place just meters (feet) outside the door from which arriving international passengers depart after picking up their luggage.*
> 
> An airport spokeswoman declined to speculate about the man's specific motive, saying airport police were still investigating. Police declined to comment. Officials said the bomber was being treated for his injuries.
> 
> A Reuters witness said business had returned to normal about 90 minutes after the blast and there were no signs of extra security.
> 
> *Explosives are relatively easy to obtain in China, home to the world's largest mining and fireworks industries.*
> (Reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and John Ruwitch in SHANGHAI; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Gareth Jones)


----------



## tomahawk6

http://news.yahoo.com/japan-scrambles-jets-china-plane-flies-southern-islands-110905491.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan scrambled fighter jets on Wednesday after a Chinese military aircraft flew for the first time through international airspace near its southern islands out over the Pacific, in a move seen by Japan as underlining China's maritime expansion.

 Ties between China and Japan have been strained by a territorial dispute over uninhabited East China Sea islets and hawkish Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a decisive victory in upper house elections on Sunday.

 Japan's Defense Ministry said a Chinese Y-8 airborne early warning plane flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan out over the Pacific at around noon and later took the same route back over the East China Sea.

 "I believe this indicates China's move toward further maritime expansion," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters, in comments carried on public broadcaster NHK.

 Chinese government spokesmen were not immediately available for comment.

 The waters around the disputed islands, called the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, and which are to the west of Okinawa's main island, are rich fishing grounds and the sea floor around them could hold big oil and gas reserves.

 Tension between China and Japan escalated last September when Japan bought three of the disputed islands from a private Japanese owner.

 Since then, patrol ships and aircraft from both countries have been shadowing each other in the sea and skies around the islets.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> http://news.yahoo.com/japan-scrambles-jets-china-plane-flies-southern-islands-110905491.html
> 
> TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan scrambled fighter jets on Wednesday after a Chinese military aircraft flew for the first time through international airspace near its southern islands out over the Pacific, in a move seen by Japan as underlining China's maritime expansion.
> 
> Ties between China and Japan have been strained by a territorial dispute over uninhabited East China Sea islets and hawkish Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a decisive victory in upper house elections on Sunday.
> 
> Japan's Defense Ministry said a Chinese Y-8 airborne early warning plane flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan out over the Pacific at around noon and later took the same route back over the East China Sea.
> 
> "I believe this indicates China's move toward further maritime expansion," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters, in comments carried on public broadcaster NHK.
> 
> Chinese government spokesmen were not immediately available for comment.
> 
> The waters around the disputed islands, called the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, and which are to the west of Okinawa's main island, are rich fishing grounds and the sea floor around them could hold big oil and gas reserves.
> 
> Tension between China and Japan escalated last September when Japan bought three of the disputed islands from a private Japanese owner.
> 
> Since then, patrol ships and aircraft from both countries have been shadowing each other in the sea and skies around the islets.




It's as if the Chinese *want* Shinzo Abe to return to his ulta-nationalist position, isn't it?

And maybe they do ...

The Chinese love to hate the Japanese, and with good reason, by the way, so whipping up Chinese nationalist fervor is always good politics. The Chinese are, already, chauvinistic and never more so than when the Japanese are concerned.

It may be that the Chinese are willing, even eager to _engage_ Japan over the islands. A few shots, maybe even a downed aircraft or lost patrol boat, would certainly focus Chinese attention away from ongoing economic difficulties.


----------



## GAP

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> It's as if the Chinese *want* Shinzo Abe to return to his ulta-nationalist position, isn't it?
> 
> And maybe they do ...
> 
> The Chinese love to hate the Japanese, and with good reason, by the way, so whipping up Chinese nationalist fervor is always good politics. The Chinese are, already, chauvinistic and never more so than when the Japanese are concerned.
> 
> It may be that the Chinese are willing, even eager to _engage_ Japan over the islands. A few shots, maybe even a downed aircraft or lost patrol boat, would certainly focus Chinese attention away from ongoing economic and other social difficulties.



TFTFY

They are like Iran...everytime the populous get itchy, the government creates another crisis, usually involving some outrageous claim against the west...In this case different pile same poo....


----------



## CougarKing

The credit bubble in the news again...



> *China Hard Landing: Potential Catalysts for a Complete Collapse*
> 
> ValueWalk, July 24, 2013
> 
> *China’s policymakers are aggressively clamping down on what some experts are calling a credit bubble*. This comes as China’s economy slows and incoming data continues to disappoint.
> 
> All of this has economists upping their odds of a hard economic landing, a scenario where growth slows to a point that causes unemployment to spike.
> 
> [edited]


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Cheeky buggers!



Speaking of Chinese tourists now being allowed to visit the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea...

...and the propensity for the Chinese to eat almost everything...

 ;D  op:

(Photos courtesy of a Chinese forum)



> *Outrage over China divers' antics in disputed islands*
> 
> BEIJING (AFP) -* Chinese tourists diving off disputed islands in the South China Sea were pictured manhandling fish and other sea creatures, and described eating endangered giant clams, provoking online outrage Friday*.
> 
> Photos posted on a Chinese internet forum showed the divers, said to be visiting the Paracel Islands, which China has occupied since 1974 but which are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
> 
> Members of the group scooped sea urchins from the bottom and one picture showed a spiky fish held between two hands - practices generally considered taboo by divers.
> 
> Several of the group held up blue starfish on their boat, and sea urchins were shown being cooked.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> (photos courtesy of a Chinese forum)
> 
> Straits Times link


----------



## CougarKing

An issue that has finally provoked an outcry on Weibo (Chinese twitter) and took it by storm for a while before the usual censors on Weibo took effect...

The issue is China's violent Chengguan (城管) who are more thugs than law enforcement officials.

Also please note prominent microblogger Li Chengpeng's social commentary in the rest of the _Telegraph_ article.



> Quote
> 
> Li Chengpeng, an author and social critic with over seven million followers on Sina Weibo, China’s leading micro-blogging site, was among several prominent opinion makers who spoke out this week over the sudden and shocking death of an impoverished 56-year-old watermelon salesman from Hunan province.
> 
> *Deng Zhengjia died on Wednesday, after allegedly being severely beaten by government law enforcement officials known as “chengguan”.
> Officials in Hunan’s Linwu county claimed Mr Deng died “suddenly” and inexplicably after falling to the ground during “quarrels with the chengguan”. *  But in interviews with Chinese media witnesses described an horrific assault during which one of the officers allegedly slammed a measuring weight into Mr Deng’s skull.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Quote:
> 
> “Letting a watermelon farmer die a violent death on the street shows a lack of respect to all the normal and sane people of this country,” wrote Yao Bo,



more from these articles:

Deng Zhengjia death

Meet the 'Chengguan': China's Violent, Hated Local Cops

Chengguan abuses from 2012


----------



## CougarKing

Take note that the China Marine Surveillance fleet (CMS) was one of the four Chinese civilian maritime agencies merged into the new unified Chinese Coast Guard, whose ships confronted Japanese vessels near the disputed Senkakus/Diaoyus last week, as reported below.

The CMS was the civilian agency whose ships had been showing the Chinese flag in the South China Sea until recently.

Globe and Mail



> *Chinese coast guard confronts Japanese vessels near disputed islands*
> 
> China says ships from its newly formed coast guard confronted Japanese patrol vessels in waters surrounding disputed East China Sea islands on Friday.
> 
> The State Oceanic Administration that oversees the service says four of its ships “sternly declared” China’s sovereignty over the islands called Senkaku by Japan and Diaoyu by China, and demanded they leave the area. The uninhabited archipelago is controlled by Tokyo but also claimed by Beijing.
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> It was not clear if any action resulted from the Chinese declaration. Such sovereignty declarations are usually made by hailing Japanese boats by radio and loudspeaker, as well as flashing shipboard signs.
> 
> *Ships from Chinese civilian agencies have maintained a steady presence in the area since tensions spiked in September following Japan’s purchase of some of the islands from their private owners.
> 
> Those vessels are being replaced by ships from the coast guard, which was formally inaugurated on Monday and merges the resources of four former agencies.* China says the move was intended to boost its ability to enforce its maritime claims, upping the stakes in an increasingly tense competition for marine territory and resources in waters off its eastern and southeastern coasts.
> 
> Chinese coast guard ships have also been spotted this week at Mischief Reef off the western Philippine coast, according to a confidential Philippine government report obtained by The Associated Press. China occupied the vast reef in 1995, sparking protests from rival claimant Manila.
> 
> China says virtually the entire South China Sea and its islands belong to it, a claim based on alleged historical precedents that are strongly contested by the Philippines, Vietnam and others.
> 
> While Beijing has mainly used civilian agencies to patrol its claims, *the new coast guard gives it greater latitude to do so by centralizing operations in a single body. The body is nominally under civilian control, but closely co-ordinates with the increasingly formidable Chinese navy that recently added an aircraft carrier to its fleet.*
> (...)


----------



## a_majoor

China's "shadow banking" system. Like the author, I cannot fathom how this system is supposed to work, and looking at historical analogies I really can't find anything that seems comparable. The closest I'm getting is the collapse of credit bubbles (as per F.A Hayek) like the devolution of the South Sea bubble or the 1929 Crash that led to the Great Depression (or the 2008 crash), but while regulatory failure is the proximate cause of inflating the bubble, the growth and eventual "popping" of the bubble is due to market forces; the State is not on both sides of the equation in the manner deceived in the article.

We will have to see what happens:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/black-holes-at-china-s-shadow-banks.html



> *Black Holes at China's Shadow Banks*
> By Megan McArdle Jul 30, 2013 3:49 PM ET
> 
> When I speak of cracks in China’s institutional foundation, I’m thinking in large part of China’s banking system -- which as far as I can tell, isn’t really a banking system the way that we think of it.
> Banks are controlled by the government, with interest rates for both deposits and loans set by fiat. The government also feels free to tell banks how much to lend, and to mandate that they buy government bonds at particular prices. When I went to China in 2010, one of the bankers there told us that a huge chunk of their Tier One capital consisted of special government bonds that couldn’t be sold and paid about 5 percent interest -- at a time when inflation was, according to most of the experts I talked to, well above that.
> 
> In a Western banking system, you’d expect this to lead to a crisis. But what would that even mean in China? Its currency isn’t convertible, and financial links to the outside world are tenuous. Maybe the government can just keep ordering banks to keep making loans at low interest rates, and declare by fiat that the loans are performing. That seems like a crazy thing to say, but it’s also hard to describe how a crisis would happen.
> In the years since I visited China, I’ve asked various experts to explain its banking system to me in a way that makes sense. No one has been able to so far.
> 
> The fact that the mechanics of a crisis are hard to sketch out doesn’t mean that the system works well. You know those Chinese ghost cities, the eerie forests of apartment buildings and commercial complexes equipped with everything except people? Those homes are a major store of value for Chinese families. With bank account interest rates fixed, a fledgling stock market full of speculative issues, and few financial connections to the outside world, the Chinese have been forced to look into nonfinancial stores of value for their massive savings rate. Like us, they often choose real estate. But not to rent, because that would devalue the property; the Chinese place a high value on new. No, they buy the houses and keep them empty, as stores of value rather than places to live.
> 
> In recent years, China has moved to liberalize things slightly, since obviously it makes no sense to plunge so much of the nation’s investment capital into empty houses and similar “assets.” But this, too, creates issues, as a recent New York Times article on China’s shadow banking system illustrates:
> "China’s regulators -- and a fair number of economists, policy makers and investors -- worry that legitimate banks are using lightly regulated wealth management products to repackage old loans and prop up risky companies and projects that might not otherwise be able to borrow money.
> 
> Analysts warn that shadow banking is helping drive the rapid growth of credit in a weakening economy, which could lead to -- in the worst situation -- a series of bank failures. “This is the biggest uncertainty I’ve seen in my 18 years following the China market,” Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse, said of shadow banking. “You don’t know how banks are deploying capital. And you don’t know the credit risks.”
> 
> What banks are doing, analysts say, is pressing customers to shift money from the old, regulated part of their operations — savings deposits — into the new, less regulated part consisting of high-yielding wealth management products that can circumvent government interest rate controls and be used to finance high-interest loans to desperate customers."
> 
> The old system worked, in the sense that it was probably quite stable, but it caused wildly inefficient capital allocation. The new system may ease some of the inefficiencies, but at the price of instability. Apparently, shadow banking has created a credit boom that the government would like to choke off. But when they try, the resulting squeeze threatens the growth they need to maintain political peace.
> 
> If China wants to make the transition to an advanced economy, it will eventually need to regularize its banking system, dismantling a lot of its current controls and mandates and replacing them with a comprehensive regulatory and monetary regime. But can it do this before an economic slowdown creates a crisis?
> 
> We’ve never watched a transition like China’s before. What we can say is that there are a lot of institutional problems that will need to be fixed — and it would be better to fix them before the fixes are truly and desperately necessary.


----------



## CougarKing

While the aforementioned formation of the new Chinese Coast Guard may allow China to centralize their civilian maritime operations, as the piece below states, it also means that China will also increase enforcement actions over disputed areas such as the Diaoyus/Senkakus and the Nanshas/Spratleys... 



> *No, China's Coast Guard Won't Reduce Tensions*
> By James R. Holmes
> July 29, 2013
> 
> 
> An international conference on marine safety descended on Beijing to mark the event. The organizer of the gathering, former deputy assistant secretary of state Susan Shirk, hailed the debut of a unified coast guard as a "positive development." Why? "It's good for China's neighbors and the United States," she opined, "because we know who is responsible and who we can hold responsible."
> 
> 
> With admirable frankness the new agency's purpose is to "show the international community that China has undisputable jurisdiction over the waters." Repeating the standard line that China holds "indisputable sovereignty" over all sea areas and geographic features it claims. And sovereignty means a monopoly of force if it means anything. The coast guard will help impose that monopoly.
> 
> *So in reality, the advent of the China Coast Guard furnishes little cause for cheer among Asian sea powers. In all likelihood the new agency will step up enforcement actions. If so, it will generate new frictions rather than smooth them out.* It will prosecute Beijing's territorial claims more efficiently and effectively than the previous, motley crew of maritime enforcement services ever could.
> 
> (...)
> 
> The Diplomat link


----------



## Edward Campbell

But James Holmes seems to be suggesting (just hoping?) that the new Chinese Coast Guard should have some role other than to _"prosecute Beijing's territorial claims more efficiently and effectively than the previous, motley crew of maritime enforcement services ever could."_ But why would it? Does the US Coast Guard do something other than to advance America's interests? (Yes, yes, yes, I know about SAR and all that - but that's not the topic of this article.)

I find his whole article to be off the mark.


----------



## CougarKing

Another development for Chinese naval aviation?








> *J-20 may be redesigned as carrier-based stealth fighter*
> 
> link
> 
> 
> After the J-15 fighter completed landing and take-off exercises from the deck of the aircraft carrier Liaoning, the PLA Navy reportedly felt this third-generation fighter would be unable to compete with US stealth fighters such as the F-35 and that the J-20, still in development, may become the model for the country's first stealth carrier-based fighter.
> 
> A source within the Chinese aviation industry said* the J-20 may be modified into a carrier-based fighter with swept-forward wings like the Russian-built Su-47*. If this suggestion is accepted by the PLA, the Linglong will probably become the first carrier-based fighter with such a design.
> 
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

A PLA officer actually suggests that Taiwan buy mainland-made weapons in order to deter neighbours like Japan and the Philippines, who have conflicting claims with areas that both Taiwan and China also claim.

Unless Taiwan goes further into Beijing's orbit under a "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement like Hong Kong or Macau, I doubt the _Guo Min Jun_/Taiwan military will acquire weapons used by the PLA...



> *Inside China: PLA on Taiwan’s weapons*
> ANALYSIS/OPINION:
> 
> *A People’s Liberation Army major general said recently that Taiwan should abandon the U.S. as its main weapons supplier and buy arms from Beijing instead.*
> 
> Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan, China’s most outspoken anti-U.S. military official, made the remarks at a defense forum in the city of Guangzhou that was attended by defense analysts from China and Taiwan.
> 
> Taiwan is the primary target of China’s short-range ballistic missiles, deployed 100 miles from Taiwan’s west coast. China has never given up the option to “liberate” or “reunite” Taiwan by force.
> 
> For decades, the U.S. has been Taiwan’s major weapons supplier, mainly through the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which calls for guarantees that Taiwan’s defenses match Chinese offensive capabilities.
> 
> However, Beijing has protested weapons sales to Taiwan, and successive U.S. administrations have limited arms transfers to the island democracy.
> 
> Gen. Luo failed to mention what country Taiwan would target with Chinese-made weapons.
> 
> 
> *The implicit message seems to suggest that Taiwan should use Chinese-made weapons to fight Japan or the Philippines, which are disputing, along with China and Taiwan, ownership of a few tiny islands in the East Sea/Sea of Japan and the South China Sea.*
> 
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> Washington Times link




And here's other news from the same link: China's Vice President Li Yuanchao visits Pyongyang.



> *VICE PRESIDENT IN PYONGYANG*
> 
> Vice President Li Yuanchao, the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit North Korea since Kim Jong-un assumed power, led a large delegation to Pyongyang to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended fighting in the Korean War.
> 
> *Mr. Li, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, is believed to be a protege of President Xi Jinping*. He carried with him a special message to Mr. Kim that stressed the “unbreakable friendship and camaraderie forged by our older generation of revolutionary leaders.” China sent more than 1 million soldiers into the Korean War.
> 
> Mr. Li was the most prominent foreign comrade to appear in photos alongside the internationally isolated Mr. Kim on the reviewing stand during a military parade in the North Korean capital.
> 
> China and North Korea have encountered a few troubled moments recently because of Mr. Kim’s banned missile and nuclear tests.
> 
> China warned North Korea not to proceed with its most recent nuclear test and later joined the U.N. Security Council in condemning February’s underground test blast.
> 
> The visit by Mr. Li’s delegation was widely seen as an effort to temporarily mollify North Korea’s leader. It also appeared to send a signal to the world that, no matter how Pyongyang behaves, the bond between the two communist nations remains strong...
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Earlier this year, the US signed into law the right to a first nuclear strike option against China. 

Whether this will provoke a change in Beijing's own "no nuclear first strike policy" remains to be seen.



> Published on Jan 14, 2013
> 
> *The right to a preemptive nuclear strike against China is now part of US law - thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act.* The Pentagon's also ordered a thorough review of when, and how, America could strike at the network of tunnels believed to hold Beijing's atomic arsenals.
> 
> Editor of a Japan-based news website James Corbett suggests ulterior motives in this decision of US government.
> 
> *YouTube: *Russia Today video link


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Earlier this year, the US signed into law the right to a first nuclear strike option against China.
> 
> Whether this will provoke a change in Beijing's own "no nuclear first strike policy" remains to be seen.




The Chinese have, already, reaped what little propaganda value there is in the 2013 NDAA, but, see this, for a better explanation of what the bill actually says.

The NDAA is important because it provides ~ in an omnibus sort of fashion ~ congressional authorization for the US defence budget. It also provides a platform for the congress to intrude into the conduct of US foreign policy.

Reports like the one on Moscow's RT are useful to China; they sensationalize a pretty mundane little _blip_ injected by an inconsequential US legislator.

The Chinese, for their part, say that there will be no change to its own "no first use" nuclear policy.

On a strategic note: why on earth would any sane American plan a preemptive nuclear attack on China? Does anyone think that China plans a nuclear attack on America or on American bases in Asia? Why would China do that? What possible _strategic_ objective might that accomplish? But, suppose an insane American is in charge: how could America follow up on a preemptive strike? With what? Can you imagine a US invasion of China? Just ponder the logistics of it all ...


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> On a strategic note: why on earth would any sane American plan a preemptive nuclear attack on China? Does anyone think that China plans a nuclear attack on America or on American bases in Asia? Why would China do that? What possible _strategic_ objective might that accomplish? But, suppose an insane American is in charge: how could America follow up on a preemptive strike? With what? Can you imagine a US invasion of China? Just ponder the logistics of it all ...



There was at least one American political commentator who did so.

In the 1960s, soon after China developed the atomic bomb and announced it to the world, American author and political commentator William F. Buckley strongly advocated that the US should indeed launch that first strike against China's nuclear arsenal because of the potential threat it posed to US interests in East Asia. Fortunately, what he advocated didn't come to pass.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> There was at least one American political commentator who did so.
> 
> In the 1960s, soon after China developed the atomic bomb and announced it to the world, American author and political commentator William F. Buckley strongly advocated that the US should indeed launch that first strike against China's nuclear arsenal because of the potential threat it posed to US interests in East Asia. Fortunately, what he advocated didn't come to pass.




Ah, yes, William F Buckley ~ I have expressed my disdain for Buckley a couple of times in the past. I suggested, and I still believe, he was an intellectually shallow extremist.


----------



## a_majoor

Actually the USSR had similar ideas during the same time period, but the United States objected strongly to that since the radioactive fallout would have drifted into the Pacific (especially American allies like the RoK, Japan, Tiawan etc.). Indeed, this may have been the "wedge" that allowed the US to get in and recognize China, split the communist world and finish the containment of the USSR.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of China's missile arsenal/Second Artillery Corps...



> *China’s Second Artillery Has a New Missile*
> thediplomat.com
> By  J. Michael Cole
> August 7, 2013
> 
> 
> Quote:
> 
> According to online reports and photographs (which includes official Chinese publications), *the DF-12 is a re-designation of the M20 tactical SRBM, which China first unveiled at the International Defense Exhibition (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi in February 2011*. The re-designation would confirm that the M20 is now fielded with the Second Artillery Corps, which operates China’s strategic nuclear forces and missile arsenal.
> 
> Analysts in 2011 pointed out that *the M20 bore a striking resemblance to the Russian-made 9K720 Iskander (SS-26 Stone).* While contemporary sources said they were unaware of China purchasing the Iskander directly from Russia, they pointed to the high likelihood that the technology was acquired via Ukraine or Belarus.
> 
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> Quote:
> 
> Like the Iskander, *the M20/DF-12 reportedly has built-in countermeasures, including terminal maneuverability, against theatre missile defense systems such as the U.S.’ Patriot PAC-2/3, which is deployed in Taiwan to protect major urban centers, and Taiwan’s indigenous Tien Kung II. It is said to be very accurate and reportedly relies on inertial navigation and global positioning system guidance, presumably China’s Beidou.*
> 
> The missile carries an 880lb warhead and *can deliver cluster, high explosive fragmentation, penetration and high explosive incendiary warheads. *  The transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) vehicle carries two missiles.


----------



## Edward Campbell

China moves again, big time, into the international petroleum business according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/#dashboard/follows/
My _emphasis_ added


> PetroChina to join Exxon in giant Iraqi oilfield venture: sources
> 
> CHEN AIZHU AND VLADIMIR SOLDATKIN
> BEIJING AND MOSCOW — Reuters
> 
> Published Friday, Aug. 09 201
> 
> China’s biggest energy firm PetroChina Co. Ltd. will join Exxon Mobil Corp. in developing Iraq’s giant West Qurna oilfield and is in talks with Russia’s Lukoil to buy into a second project at the field, industry sources said.
> 
> _China is already the top foreign player in Iraq’s oilfields. A deal at West Qurna, which is around 50 kilometres northwest of the southern oil hub of Basra, would boost its dominance and could make PetroChina the biggest single foreign investor in Iraqi oil._
> 
> West Qurna is central to Iraq’s oil expansion plans, with enough reserves to pump more than 5 million barrels a day, and it could rival the world’s biggest producer, Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, when its two phases are running fully.
> 
> “PetroChina will participate in developing the field,” an industry source with direct knowledge of the deal with Exxon said on Friday.
> 
> The agreement would be announced in weeks, the source said, but declined to give further details on how the world’s two most valuable listed energy firms would work together in Iraq. Both PetroChina and Exxon declined to comment.
> 
> PetroChina already partners BP PLC at Rumaila, now Iraq’s largest producer, and operates the Halfaya and al-Ahdab fields. The company was the first foreign firm to sign an oil service deal in Iraq after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein.
> 
> Baghdad signed a series of service contracts in 2009 that committed international oil companies to raising Iraq’s oil output by 2017 beyond 12 million b/d – more than Saudi Arabia produces now.
> 
> Infrastructure and security problems have since forced the government to cut the target to 9 million b/d by 2020. The issues are so acute Iraq could report a year-on-year output fall for 2013, its first after two years of robust gains.
> 
> Despite the frustrations, Exxon, which holds a 60 per cent stake in West Qurna-1, has made steady progress with minority partner Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the field, a $50-billion (U.S.) investment project, is pumping around 480,000 b/d.
> 
> In March, PetroChina’s ex-chairman Jiang Jiemin told Reuters the Chinese energy major was willing to team up with Exxon at West Qurna.
> 
> PetroChina is also in talks with Lukoil for a stake in another development project at the field, West Qurna-2, a Lukoil source said. The source declined to reveal the size of the stake under discussion.
> 
> “Lukoil bosses have already said they would prefer an Asian partner, a Chinese partner, in the project to secure a guaranteed market for oil sales,” the source said.
> 
> Lukoil’s chief executive Vagit Alekperov has said that the company wanted a Chinese firm to replace Norway’s Statoil ASA at the project. Statoil agreed last year to sell its 18.75 per cent stake.
> 
> _China is the world’s second-largest oil importer after the United States, and its growth in fuel consumption has driven global oil demand expansion for a decade._
> 
> Faced with falling demand for imported oil in the U.S. and Europe, producers from the Middle East, Russia, Africa and Latin America are all competing for a bigger share of China’s growing market.
> 
> West Qurna-2 is expected to start up this year, produce 500,000 b/d in 2014, and need total investment of $30-billion. Lukoil plans to invest $5-billion in the project in 2013 alone.
> 
> Last year, Exxon offered to sell its West Qurna-1 stake after a dispute with Baghdad over contracts it signed with autonomous Kurdistan in the north, deals the central government rejects as illegal.
> 
> A source familiar with PetroChina’s operations in Iraq said in March the two companies were discussing a deal that would enable Exxon to retain operator status at the oilfield, where Royal Dutch Shell is minority partner with 15 per cent.
> 
> Some industry sources said it was unlikely that PetroChina would buy stakes in both projects, due to their sheer size.
> 
> But _Iraq’s oilfields are the largest in the Middle East open to foreign investment, making them hard to resist as China’s dependency on imports rises.
> 
> “PetroChina is under big pressure to add output and reserves for its size,” said a second industry official, who has direct knowledge of PetroChina’s investment strategy abroad._
> 
> “Iraq, given its attractive contract terms, was among the brightest spots for PetroChina’s international operations over the past three years, working shoulder by shoulder with global oil majors.”
> 
> In a separate deal, Exxon and PetroChina agreed in late July to jointly study the 3,830 square-km Changdong block in northern China’s Ordos basin, the companies said, which industry officials described as containing gas that is hard to access.




So that's why America fought a war in Iraq ... to make it safe for Chinese investments. "American blood for Chinese oil" ... is that the new slogan?


----------



## Edward Campbell

This video, linked under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _al Jazeera_, suggests that Hollywood is bowing to Beijing.

As Mr Rosen says, the Chinese film industry is a tool in China's ongoing _soft power_ campaign ~ _charm offensive_, if you like ~ which aims to use popular entertainment to spread China's "message" as, many people agree, Hollywood spread America's message to the world in the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s. Some people argue that only jazz music was more influential, all around the world, than were Hollywood films.


----------



## Inquisitor

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> This video, linked under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _al Jazeera_, suggests that Hollywood is bowing to Beijing.
> 
> Some people argue that only jazz music was more influential, all around the world, than were Hollywood films.



I suggest that American Hard Diplomacy in the 40's   was somewhat effective as well. 

How many films out on Korea on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Inquisitor said:
			
		

> I suggest that American Hard Diplomacy in the 40's   was somewhat effective as well ...




Indeed!  :nod: And _soft power_, as Joseph Nye always points out, is only effective when it is backed up by commensurate _hard power_. That was the major mistake Pierre Trudeau and Pink Lloyd Axworthy always made: they understood, perhaps intuitively, that _soft power_ works and that it is both cheap and effective, but they failed to grasp the simple truth that, in order to get your _soft power_ message across people must be willing to listen to your "voice" and they will only do that if you are respected, which means, being, just a bit, feared. Or, as John Wayne (might have) said:






But I would still argue that Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Louis B Meyer were more effective at spreading America's "message" all over the world and for a much longer time than was George Patton.


----------



## CougarKing

Xinjiang and China's justice system again in the news:

link



> *Two people get death sentence for violence in China's Xinjiang*
> Reuters
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - A court in China's Xinjiang has sentenced two people to death and another to life imprisonment over deadly violence in the far western region where the government often blames what it calls Muslim separatists for causing unrest.
> 
> Twenty-one people were killed in a confrontation between police and residents in April that involved axes, knives and at least one gun and culminated in a house being burned down, in what authorities called a "terrorist attack".
> 
> In July 2009, Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, was the scene of clashes between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people. In late June, 35 people died in another outbreak of violence.
> 
> Many Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language, complain of restrictions on their culture, language and religion. China says it grants them wide-ranging freedoms.
> 
> *A court in the southern city of Kashgar found the five defendants, all of whom appeared to be Uighurs judging by their names, to be guilty of crimes including involvement in terrorism and intentional homicide, the Xinjiang government said in a statement on its news site (www.tianshannet.com).
> 
> Two defendants were given nine-year jail sentences.*
> 
> The Xinjiang government did not name any group responsible for the violence, but China has blamed previous incidents in energy-rich Xinjiang - on the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India - on Islamic separatists who want to establish an independent East Turkestan.
> 
> Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress, said previously that the violence was sparked by the shooting and killing of a young Uighur by "Chinese armed personnel", prompting the Uighurs to retaliate.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _Reuters_ report says, "...  the [Chinese] government often blames what it calls Muslim separatists for causing unrest."

In fairness to the Chinese government if the article is correct then they, being Uighurs, almost certainly are Muslim and they are almost as certainly _separatists_. From what I have read something like 98%+ of all Uighurs are Muslim and 90%+ of them, the men, anyway, are avowed _separatists_.

The Chinese are trying to win them over, to reconcile them to being Chinese, but it is a haphazard process. One effective way to reconcile _minorities_ to their status is by providing jobs, and there are plenty of good jobs in the energy/mining sector in Xinjiang, but:

     1. The Uighurs _seem_, by education, training and socialization, unprepared to move to mining camps and oil exploration sites and do the necessary work; and

     2. The companies, many government owned and controlled, would rather _import_ Han Chinese workers than to deal with the locals.

Another way to pacify _minorities_ is by recognizing, even celebrating, their unique, minority culture, but the Chinese are unwilling to do very much to accommodate Islam.


----------



## CougarKing

A reposting of a segment of the Armed Forces Journal article "Purge the Generals" by US Army Lt. Col. Davis, which has been discussed at another thread of the same name.

The segment in question focuses on the PLA and is thus relevant to this thread; the greater professionalization and streamlining of the PLA mentioned below has already been going on for sometime, according to books by such as notable watchers such as the book Modernizing China's Military by David Shambaugh. In that book, Shambaugh mentions the growing professionalization of the PLA through the increasing separation of the Party from the PLA as well as the focus on the new doctrine of "People's War under Modern Conditions" which also stressed technological modernization.



> (...)
> 
> I do not advocate armed conflict with the People’s Republic of China, nor do I hold that such conflict is inevitable. To the contrary, I strongly suggest that we engage Beijing in the diplomatic and economic spheres to foster mutual understanding and the common good of our nations and those of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Any sort of war would be destructive for all involved. Based on China’s recent declarations of their military intentions, however, it is wholly appropriate to ensure that our country is prepared for reasonable contingencies.
> 
> In April, the Chinese government laid out the focus of its military reformation in a white paper titled *“The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces.” *  “The Asia-Pacific region has become an increasingly significant stage for world economic development and strategic interaction between major powers,” the document said. “The U.S. is adjusting its Asia-Pacific security strategy, and the regional landscape is undergoing profound changes.”
> 
> To meet these changes, the paper says,* the People’s Liberation Army “is engaged in the building of new types of combat forces. It optimizes the size and structure of the various services and arms, reforms the organization of the troops so as to make operational forces lean, joint, multi-functional and efficient. The PLA works to improve the training mechanism for military personnel of a new type … and strengthens the development of new- and high-technology weaponry and equipment to build a modern military force structure with Chinese characteristics.”*
> 
> Over the past decade, the Chinese leadership has taken concrete steps toward these aspirations. In “Chinese Lessons from Other People’s Wars” (Strategic Studies Institute, 2011), *Martin Andrew explained that the PLA no longer relies on large-scale artillery fires and masses of infantrymen. Since 2000, he notes, the Chinese have been “in the midst of a transformation from essentially an infantry-based force into one designed around combined arms mechanized operations. A decade into the new century, the PLA is redesigning its forces into battle groups, using modular force structures and logistics to support operations in high-altitude and complex terrains, conduct out of area operations, and develop the core for its vision of a hardened and network-centric army.”*
> 
> Recent articles in Chinese professional journals confirm that the *PLA conducts combined-arms joint field exercises that in some cases involve two mechanized divisions, air force and naval assets. These exercises combine computer simulation, field units equipped with laser gear (as the U.S. uses in its maneuver training centers) and live-fire ranges. Some of these exercises have taken place over hundreds of kilometers, akin to the Reforger exercises U.S. forces once conducted in Germany.
> 
> In short, during a decade in which the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have been focused almost exclusively on counterinsurgency and small-unit warfare, a new generation of Chinese military leaders has deepened its understanding and application of conventional warfare*.


----------



## CougarKing

*China Prepares for Psychological Warfare*
thediplomat.com
By  Aaron Jensen
August 14, 2013



> *The recent unveiling of China’s new PSYOP (Psychological Operations) aircraft, the Gaoxin-7(高新七号)*, marks an important step forward for People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) psychological warfare capabilities.
> 
> *Based on a Y-8 airframe (similar to the U.S. Military’s C-130)*, the Gaoxin-7’s primary mission is to conduct PSYOP missions against enemy forces. Although specific details are few and far between, People’s Republic of China (PRC) media has compared the Gaoxin-7 to the U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) EC-130J “Commando Solo” in terms of its mission and capability. The EC-130J Commando Solo is essentially a flying broadcast station which can transmit media in AM, FM, HF, TV and military communication frequencies to enemy positions. Its transmission capability is so powerful that it is required to operate at least 200 miles off the coast of the United States during training missions so as to avoid interfering with civil communications.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

One of the more phenomenal stories in the "Rise of China" domain is: Shanghai.

This webpage has some amazing photos showing the changes to the Pudong district.


----------



## Inquisitor

Here is a rather grim laundry list 
Reproduced under the fair dealing provision of the copyright act from blacklistednews


Meet Your New Boss: Buying Large Employers Will Enable China To Dominate 1000s Of U.S. Communities


June 8, 2013

Source: Michael Snyder, Guest Post


Are you ready for a future where China will employ millions of American workers and dominate thousands of small communities all over the United States?  Such a future would be unimaginable to many Americans, but the truth is that it is already starting to happen.  Chinese acquisition of U.S. businesses set a new all-time record last year, and it is on pace to absolutely shatter that record this year.  Meanwhile, China is voraciously gobbling up real estate and is establishing economic beachheads all over America.  If China continues to build economic power inside the United States, it will eventually become the dominant economic force in thousands of small communities all over the nation.  Just think about what the Smithfield Foods acquisition alone will mean.  Smithfield Foods is the largest pork producer and processor in the world.  It has facilities in 26 U.S. states and it employs tens of thousands of Americans.  It directly owns 460 farms and has contracts with approximately 2,100 others.  But now a Chinese company has bought it for $4.7 billion, and that means that the Chinese will now be the most important employer in dozens of rural communities all over America.  If you don’t think that this is important, you haven’t been paying much attention to what has been going on in the world.  Thanks in part to our massively bloated trade deficit with China, the Chinese have trillions of dollars to spend.  They are only just starting to exercise their economic muscles. 

And it is important to keep in mind that there is often not much of a difference between “the Chinese government” and “Chinese corporations”.  In 2011, 43 percent of all profits in China were produced by companies that the Chinese government had a controlling interest in.  Americans are accustomed to thinking of “government” and “business” as being separate things, but in China they are often one and the same.  Even when there is a separation in ownership, the reality is that no major Chinese corporation is going to go against the authority and guidance of the Chinese government.  The relationship between government and business in China is much different than it is in the United States.

Over the past several years, Chinese companies have become increasingly aggressive.  Last year a Chinese company spent $2.6 billion to purchase AMC entertainment – one of the largest movie theater chains in the United States.  Now that Chinese company controls more movie ticket sales than anyone else in the world.  At the time, that was the largest acquisition of a U.S. firm by a Chinese company, but now the Smithfield Foods deal has greatly surpassed that.

But China is not just relying on acquisitions to expand its economic power.  The truth is that “economic beachheads” are being established all over America.  For example, Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group, Inc. recently broke ground on a $100 million plant in Thomasville, Alabama.  I am sure that many of the residents of Thomasville, Alabama will be glad to have jobs, but it will also become yet another community that will now be heavily dependent on communist China.

And guess where else Chinese companies are putting down roots?

Detroit.

Yes, the poster child for the deindustrialization of America is being invaded by the Chinese.  The following comes from a recent CNBC article…


Dozens of companies from China are putting down roots in Detroit, part of the country’s steady push into the American auto industry.

Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers.

If you recently purchased an “American-made vehicle”, there is a really good chance that it has Chinese parts in it.

In fact, it is becoming harder and harder to get auto parts that are actually made in America by American companies.  A lot of those companies are dying off.  One example of this is a battery maker that had received $132 million from the federal government that was recently gobbled up by a huge Chinese corporation…


Industry analysts are hard-pressed to put a number on the Chinese suppliers operating in the United States. “We simply don’t know how many there are,” said David Andrea, an official with the Original Equipment Suppliers Association, a trade organization for auto parts makers.

In one of the more prominent deals, the Wanxiang Group bought most of the assets of the battery maker A123 Systems, which filed for bankruptcy last year despite receiving $132 million of $249 million in federal grants to build two factories in Michigan.

Congressional Republicans criticized the deal, saying A123′s technology could support military applications in China. Still, the buyout was approved this year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal government panel.

China seems particularly interested in acquiring energy resources in the United States.  For example, did you know that China is actually mining for coal in the mountains of Tennessee?

Guizhou Gouchuang Energy Holdings Group spent 616 million dollars to acquire Triple H Coal Co. in Jacksboro, Tennessee.  At the time, that acquisition really didn’t make much news, but now a group of conservatives in Tennessee is trying to stop the Chinese from blowing up their mountains and taking their coal.  The following is from a Wall Street Journal article back in March…


The Tennessee Conservative Union began airing an ad Tuesday that says lawmakers have failed to protect the state’s scenic mountains and are allowing the “Chinese to destroy our mountains and take our coal…the same folks who hold our debt.”

But when it comes to our energy resources, China has been most interested in our oil and natural gas.  It is a complete and total mystery why the federal government would allow China to buy up our precious domestic sources of energy, but it is happening.  The following is a list of some of the oil and natural gas deals that China has been involved in during the last few years that was compiled by the Wall Street Journal…


Colorado: Cnooc gained a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming in a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Louisiana: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 265,000 acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale after a broader $2.5-billion deal with Devon Energy.

Michigan: Sinopec gained a one-third interest in 350,000 acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Ohio: Sinopec acquired a one-third stake in Devon Energy’s 235,000 Utica Shale acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Oklahoma: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 215,000 acres in a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Texas: Cnooc acquired a one-third interest in Chesapeake Energy’s 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in a $2.16-billion deal.

Wyoming: Cnooc has a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming after a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy. Sinopec gained a one-third interest in Devon Energy’s 320,000 acres as part of a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Gulf of Mexico: Cnooc Ltd. separately acquired minority stakes in some of Statoil ASA’s leases as well as six of Nexen Inc.’s deep-water wells.

How could we be so stupid?

Sadly, as our politicians endlessly bicker China just continues to aggressively push ahead.

And pretty soon China may want to build entire cities in the United States just like they have been doing in other countries.  According toBloomberg, right now China is actually building a city larger than Manhattan just outside of the capital of Belarus…


China is building an entire city in the forests near the Belarusian capital Minsk to create a manufacturing springboard between the European Union andRussia.

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenkoallotted an area 40 percent larger than Manhattanaround Minsk’s international airport for the $5 billion development, which will include enough housing to accommodate 155,000 people, according to Chinese and Belarusian officials.

And this is actually already happening on a much smaller scale in this country.  For example, as I have written about previously, a Chinese company known as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has purchased 200 acres of land near the little town of Milan, Michigan.  Their stated goal is to construct a “China City” that has artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.

In other cases, large chunks of real estate in the middle of major U.S. cities are being gobbled up by Chinese “investors”.  Just check out what a Fortune article from a while back says has been happening in Toledo, Ohio…


In March 2011, Chinese investors paid $2.15 million cash for a restaurant complex on the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. Soon they put down another $3.8 million on 69 acres of newly decontaminated land in the city’s Marina District, promising to invest $200 million in a new residential-commercial development. That September, another Chinese firm spent $3 million for an aging hotel across a nearby bridge with a view of the minor league ballpark.

Are you starting to get the picture?

China is on the rise and America is in decline.  If you doubt this, just read the following list of facts which comes from one of my previous articles entitled “40 Ways That China Is Beating America“…

#1 As I mentioned above, when you total up all imports and exports of goods, China is now the number one trading nation on the entire planet.

#2 During 2012, we sold about 110 billion dollars worth of stuff to the Chinese, but they sold about 425 billion dollars worth of stuff to us.  That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.

#3 Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit with China over the past decade that comes to more than 2.3 trillion dollars.

#4 China now has the largest new car market in the entire world.

#5 China has more foreign currency reserves than anyone else on the planet.

#6 China is the number one gold producer in the world.

#7 China is also the number one gold importer in the world.

#8 The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team were made in China.

#9 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

#10 The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

#11 The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

#12 One of the reasons it is so hard to export stuff to China is because of their tariffs.  According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

#13 The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.

#14 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

#15 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#16 Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#17 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

#18 China now produces more than twice as many automobiles as the United States does.

#19 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

#20 After being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, General Motors is currently involved in 11 joint ventures with companies owned by the Chinese government.  The price for entering into many of these “joint ventures” was a transfer of “state of the art technology” from General Motors to the communist Chinese.

#21 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.

#22 The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

#23 China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment, but the number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash”.

#24 The U.S. trade deficit with China is now more than 30 times larger than it was back in 1990.

#25 China now consumes more energy than the United States does.

#26 China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.

#27 China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.

#28 China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.

#29 There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.

#30 Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

#31 Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

#33 China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.

#34 China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earth elements.

#35 China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.

#36 A recent investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.

#37 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles.  But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.

#38 China now awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.

#39 The average household debt load in the United States is 136% of average household income.  In China, the average household debt loadis 17% of average household income.

#40 The Chinese have begun to buy up huge amounts of U.S. real estate.  In fact, Chinese citizens purchased one out of every ten homes that were sold in the state of California in 2011.

And what we have seen so far may just be the tip of the iceberg as far as Chinese “investment” in U.S. real estate is concerned.  The following is a brief excerpt from a Bloomberg article that was posted just last week…


China is studying the possibility of investing a portion of its $3.4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves in U.S. real estate, said two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The State Administration of Foreign Exchange began the study after seeing signs of a recovery in the U.S. property market, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. China may acquire properties, invest in real estate funds or buy stakes in property companies, they said. The safety of the investments will be the top priority, said the people, who didn’t elaborate on a timetable or other details.

So what can we do about all of this?

Unfortunately, not a whole lot.  Both major political parties seem to be fully convinced that merging our economy with the economy of communist China is a great idea.  I would not expect major changes in our policies regarding China any time soon.

For now, I will just leave you with one piece of advice…

Learn to speak Chinese.  You might need it someday.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Inquisitor said:
			
		

> Here is a rather grim laundry list
> Reproduced under the fair dealing provision of the copyright act from blacklistednews
> 
> 
> Meet Your New Boss: Buying Large Employers Will Enable China To Dominate 1000s Of U.S. Communities
> 
> 
> June 8, 2013
> 
> Source: Michael Snyder, Guest Post
> 
> 
> Are you ready for a future where China will employ millions of American workers and dominate thousands of small communities all over the United States?  Such a future would be unimaginable to many Americans, but the truth is that it is already starting to happen.  Chinese acquisition of U.S. businesses set a new all-time record last year, and it is on pace to absolutely shatter that record this year.  Meanwhile, China is voraciously gobbling up real estate and is establishing economic beachheads all over America.  If China continues to build economic power inside the United States, it will eventually become the dominant economic force in thousands of small communities all over the nation.  Just think about what the Smithfield Foods acquisition alone will mean.  Smithfield Foods is the largest pork producer and processor in the world.  It has facilities in 26 U.S. states and it employs tens of thousands of Americans.  It directly owns 460 farms and has contracts with approximately 2,100 others.  But now a Chinese company has bought it for $4.7 billion, and that means that the Chinese will now be the most important employer in dozens of rural communities all over America.  If you don’t think that this is important, you haven’t been paying much attention to what has been going on in the world.  Thanks in part to our massively bloated trade deficit with China, the Chinese have trillions of dollars to spend.  They are only just starting to exercise their economic muscles.
> 
> And it is important to keep in mind that there is often not much of a difference between “the Chinese government” and “Chinese corporations”.  In 2011, 43 percent of all profits in China were produced by companies that the Chinese government had a controlling interest in.  Americans are accustomed to thinking of “government” and “business” as being separate things, but in China they are often one and the same.  Even when there is a separation in ownership, the reality is that no major Chinese corporation is going to go against the authority and guidance of the Chinese government.  The relationship between government and business in China is much different than it is in the United States.
> 
> Over the past several years, Chinese companies have become increasingly aggressive.  Last year a Chinese company spent $2.6 billion to purchase AMC entertainment – one of the largest movie theater chains in the United States.  Now that Chinese company controls more movie ticket sales than anyone else in the world.  At the time, that was the largest acquisition of a U.S. firm by a Chinese company, but now the Smithfield Foods deal has greatly surpassed that.
> 
> But China is not just relying on acquisitions to expand its economic power.  The truth is that “economic beachheads” are being established all over America.  For example, Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group, Inc. recently broke ground on a $100 million plant in Thomasville, Alabama.  I am sure that many of the residents of Thomasville, Alabama will be glad to have jobs, but it will also become yet another community that will now be heavily dependent on communist China.
> 
> And guess where else Chinese companies are putting down roots?
> 
> Detroit.
> 
> Yes, the poster child for the deindustrialization of America is being invaded by the Chinese.  The following comes from a recent CNBC article…
> 
> 
> Dozens of companies from China are putting down roots in Detroit, part of the country’s steady push into the American auto industry.
> 
> Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers.
> 
> If you recently purchased an “American-made vehicle”, there is a really good chance that it has Chinese parts in it.
> 
> In fact, it is becoming harder and harder to get auto parts that are actually made in America by American companies.  A lot of those companies are dying off.  One example of this is a battery maker that had received $132 million from the federal government that was recently gobbled up by a huge Chinese corporation…
> 
> 
> Industry analysts are hard-pressed to put a number on the Chinese suppliers operating in the United States. “We simply don’t know how many there are,” said David Andrea, an official with the Original Equipment Suppliers Association, a trade organization for auto parts makers.
> 
> In one of the more prominent deals, the Wanxiang Group bought most of the assets of the battery maker A123 Systems, which filed for bankruptcy last year despite receiving $132 million of $249 million in federal grants to build two factories in Michigan.
> 
> Congressional Republicans criticized the deal, saying A123′s technology could support military applications in China. Still, the buyout was approved this year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal government panel.
> 
> China seems particularly interested in acquiring energy resources in the United States.  For example, did you know that China is actually mining for coal in the mountains of Tennessee?
> 
> Guizhou Gouchuang Energy Holdings Group spent 616 million dollars to acquire Triple H Coal Co. in Jacksboro, Tennessee.  At the time, that acquisition really didn’t make much news, but now a group of conservatives in Tennessee is trying to stop the Chinese from blowing up their mountains and taking their coal.  The following is from a Wall Street Journal article back in March…
> 
> 
> The Tennessee Conservative Union began airing an ad Tuesday that says lawmakers have failed to protect the state’s scenic mountains and are allowing the “Chinese to destroy our mountains and take our coal…the same folks who hold our debt.”
> 
> But when it comes to our energy resources, China has been most interested in our oil and natural gas.  It is a complete and total mystery why the federal government would allow China to buy up our precious domestic sources of energy, but it is happening.  The following is a list of some of the oil and natural gas deals that China has been involved in during the last few years that was compiled by the Wall Street Journal…
> 
> 
> Colorado: Cnooc gained a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming in a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy Corp.
> 
> Louisiana: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 265,000 acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale after a broader $2.5-billion deal with Devon Energy.
> 
> Michigan: Sinopec gained a one-third interest in 350,000 acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.
> 
> Ohio: Sinopec acquired a one-third stake in Devon Energy’s 235,000 Utica Shale acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal.
> 
> Oklahoma: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 215,000 acres in a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.
> 
> Texas: Cnooc acquired a one-third interest in Chesapeake Energy’s 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in a $2.16-billion deal.
> 
> Wyoming: Cnooc has a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming after a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy. Sinopec gained a one-third interest in Devon Energy’s 320,000 acres as part of a larger $2.5 billion deal.
> 
> Gulf of Mexico: Cnooc Ltd. separately acquired minority stakes in some of Statoil ASA’s leases as well as six of Nexen Inc.’s deep-water wells.
> 
> How could we be so stupid?
> 
> Sadly, as our politicians endlessly bicker China just continues to aggressively push ahead.
> 
> And pretty soon China may want to build entire cities in the United States just like they have been doing in other countries.  According toBloomberg, right now China is actually building a city larger than Manhattan just outside of the capital of Belarus…
> 
> 
> China is building an entire city in the forests near the Belarusian capital Minsk to create a manufacturing springboard between the European Union andRussia.
> 
> Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenkoallotted an area 40 percent larger than Manhattanaround Minsk’s international airport for the $5 billion development, which will include enough housing to accommodate 155,000 people, according to Chinese and Belarusian officials.
> 
> And this is actually already happening on a much smaller scale in this country.  For example, as I have written about previously, a Chinese company known as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has purchased 200 acres of land near the little town of Milan, Michigan.  Their stated goal is to construct a “China City” that has artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.
> 
> In other cases, large chunks of real estate in the middle of major U.S. cities are being gobbled up by Chinese “investors”.  Just check out what a Fortune article from a while back says has been happening in Toledo, Ohio…
> 
> 
> In March 2011, Chinese investors paid $2.15 million cash for a restaurant complex on the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. Soon they put down another $3.8 million on 69 acres of newly decontaminated land in the city’s Marina District, promising to invest $200 million in a new residential-commercial development. That September, another Chinese firm spent $3 million for an aging hotel across a nearby bridge with a view of the minor league ballpark.
> 
> Are you starting to get the picture?
> 
> China is on the rise and America is in decline.  If you doubt this, just read the following list of facts which comes from one of my previous articles entitled “40 Ways That China Is Beating America“…
> 
> #1 As I mentioned above, when you total up all imports and exports of goods, China is now the number one trading nation on the entire planet.
> 
> #2 During 2012, we sold about 110 billion dollars worth of stuff to the Chinese, but they sold about 425 billion dollars worth of stuff to us.  That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
> 
> #3 Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit with China over the past decade that comes to more than 2.3 trillion dollars.
> 
> #4 China now has the largest new car market in the entire world.
> 
> #5 China has more foreign currency reserves than anyone else on the planet.
> 
> #6 China is the number one gold producer in the world.
> 
> #7 China is also the number one gold importer in the world.
> 
> #8 The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team were made in China.
> 
> #9 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.
> 
> #10 The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.
> 
> #11 The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.
> 
> #12 One of the reasons it is so hard to export stuff to China is because of their tariffs.  According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
> 
> #13 The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.
> 
> #14 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
> 
> #15 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
> 
> #16 Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000manufacturing facilities since 2001.
> 
> #17 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
> 
> #18 China now produces more than twice as many automobiles as the United States does.
> 
> #19 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.
> 
> #20 After being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, General Motors is currently involved in 11 joint ventures with companies owned by the Chinese government.  The price for entering into many of these “joint ventures” was a transfer of “state of the art technology” from General Motors to the communist Chinese.
> 
> #21 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
> 
> #22 The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.
> 
> #23 China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment, but the number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash”.
> 
> #24 The U.S. trade deficit with China is now more than 30 times larger than it was back in 1990.
> 
> #25 China now consumes more energy than the United States does.
> 
> #26 China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.
> 
> #27 China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.
> 
> #28 China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.
> 
> #29 There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.
> 
> #30 Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.
> 
> #31 Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.
> 
> #33 China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.
> 
> #34 China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earth elements.
> 
> #35 China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.
> 
> #36 A recent investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.
> 
> #37 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles.  But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.
> 
> #38 China now awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.
> 
> #39 The average household debt load in the United States is 136% of average household income.  In China, the average household debt loadis 17% of average household income.
> 
> #40 The Chinese have begun to buy up huge amounts of U.S. real estate.  In fact, Chinese citizens purchased one out of every ten homes that were sold in the state of California in 2011.
> 
> And what we have seen so far may just be the tip of the iceberg as far as Chinese “investment” in U.S. real estate is concerned.  The following is a brief excerpt from a Bloomberg article that was posted just last week…
> 
> 
> China is studying the possibility of investing a portion of its $3.4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves in U.S. real estate, said two people with direct knowledge of the situation.
> 
> The State Administration of Foreign Exchange began the study after seeing signs of a recovery in the U.S. property market, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. China may acquire properties, invest in real estate funds or buy stakes in property companies, they said. The safety of the investments will be the top priority, said the people, who didn’t elaborate on a timetable or other details.
> 
> So what can we do about all of this?
> 
> Unfortunately, not a whole lot.  Both major political parties seem to be fully convinced that merging our economy with the economy of communist China is a great idea.  I would not expect major changes in our policies regarding China any time soon.
> 
> For now, I will just leave you with one piece of advice…
> 
> Learn to speak Chinese.  You might need it someday.




Notwithstanding anything else in the article, that's good excellent advice all on its own, and it needs no economic justification.


----------



## GAP

And before the Chinese there was the Japanese......


----------



## Inquisitor

Precisely and the Koreans  both of which have done, in my opinion, an excellent job of taking advantage of the West's and your countries lack of acumen in several areas, trade being one of the more important. 

Having had your pockets picked by the previous two, one would hope that one would be a bit more wary of the Chinese. 

While all three profess true allegiance to free trade the reality is that many of their markets are heavily protected, officially and otherwise.  

Example. The west doesn't produce cars that the japenese want to own, right? Wrong there is a quota in place allowing the west only 15% of the Japanese market. 

An example of the later, Korea, buy a western car and your chances of a tax audit go up dramatically. 

Disclaimer, source is "In the Jaws of the Dragon" so that last two  might be a little out of date. BTW is is an excellent read.


----------



## Inquisitor

and now for something a bit lighter check out the video in the following link

Hint a swarm of drones playing the James Bond Theme

Air Force's New Idea for Spying on China: Swarms of Tiny Bug Drones
http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/13/the_air_forces_new_idea_to_spy_on_countries_like_china_swarms_of_tiny_bug_drones


----------



## Inquisitor

I hope you enjoyed the musical interlude ;D

Now for something a bit more serious link here http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/14/pacific_standard?page=0,1

Pacific Standard

America needs to learn from Asia or get used to following it.  

I will produce a few snippets under the fair dealing of the copyright act from Foreign Policy though I don't think I will do the article justice. 

"There is nothing like a trip to Asia to put Washington's lack of perspective on the great global issues of our time into perspective. I'm not saying this in that typical snarky self-hating American abroad tone often found in media commentaries. I say it because every place I've visited on this trip still actively and respectfully looks to the U.S. government for leadership

...

But this trip has made it clear to me that pervasive ignorance of the great realities of our time is only one of the problems we face. 

It is just as striking to see how America's policymakers are falling behind in terms of creativity and vision compared to their counterparts. Our gaze is too firmly locked on our political navels and our energies too devoted to impeding our domestic political opponents' success for us to thoughtfully consider the challenges ahead. In Washington, it seems, "tomorrow" is the day that will never come, a place to which problems are punted and where we assume solutions will magically present themselves. Here however there is a daily sense that "tomorrow" has already arrived. It's a mindset that has even the blandest of bureaucrats thinking ahead. "Say what you will about the Chinese," said one senior official from a close U.S. ally in the region, "they are always grappling with the implications of tomorrow, of growth, of demographic change. They have yet to undertake many reforms that are needed. But they are at least having an ongoing conversation about strategy. You don't get that sense from the U.S." A senior Southeast Asian diplomat offered this: "The concern isn't about a shifting balance of power at the moment.  The U.S. remains militarily strong.  It is about a shifting balance of influence." 

...

It's not that other countries don't have political distractions or dysfunction. In Australia, last Sunday's political debate between party leaders seemed dedicated to the proposition that what their country needs now is a robot prime minister.  Nonetheless, there was plentiful evidence at a conference I attended that, in their day-to-day work, political leaders from both parties recognized Australia was at a turning point and that greater open-mindedness and creativity were called for.

...

(Mandarin is already the second most widely spoken language in Australia.) 

... 

Singapore, while earning brickbats over the years for the authoritarian dimensions of its evolution as an independent city-state, has always led the region in terms of policy creativity. As a small island economy it feels the constant need to reassess and reinvent itself in ways that more self-sufficient economies do not. And some of its recent innovations are particularly striking. For example, the country has just concluded an unprecedented "national conversation," a series of some 6,000 local meetings in which politicians did something very uncharacteristic for their professional counterparts in the United States -- they listened 

...

How many Americans know or care enough about core issues of public policy to come together to tackle the big questions we face? How many politicians and executive branch officials would take the time to really hear what they were saying? We often talk about participatory democracy, but can we really envision such innovative participatory policymaking happening in America  today? 

...

Now, at the critical moment that the United States must manage the tapering process it has its "weakest international economic team in years" and that consequently it is suffering from a "leadership vacuum." (China was cited as being sui generis because it -- unlike some of the other big emerging economies -- was actually enjoying growth fueled by genuine and consistent productivity gains. That said, and as noted earlier, the country is also widely seen as in need of major reform.) 

But leading the world in the failure to make the reforms that circumstances require is not exactly what people were hoping for from the United States. So we face a choice. Either look to Asia (and wherever else we might find it) to discover inspiration for the kind of creativity and open-mindedness our own policy process needs for us to lead again ... or learn to look to this part of the world for the leadership we once provided."


----------



## The Bread Guy

> China will start phasing out its decades-long practice of using the organs of executed prisoners for transplant operations from November, a senior official said on Thursday, as it pushes to mandate the use of organs from ethical sources in hospitals.
> 
> China remains the only country in the world that still systematically uses organs extracted from executed prisoners in transplant operations, a practice that has drawn widespread international criticism. Many Chinese view the practice as a way for criminals to redeem themselves.
> 
> But officials have recently spoken out against the practice of harvesting organs from dead inmates, saying it "tarnishes the image of China".
> 
> The health ministry will begin enforcing the use of organs from voluntary donors allocated through a fledging national program at a meeting set to be held in November, former deputy health minister Huang Jiefu, who still heads the ministry's organ transplant office, told Reuters.
> 
> "I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs," Huang said.
> 
> The first batch of all 165 Chinese hospitals licensed for transplants will promise to stop using organs harvested from death row inmates at the November meeting, he added. Huang did not specify the exact number ....


Reuters, 15 Aug 13


----------



## Edward Campbell

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> China will start phasing out its decades-long practice of using the organs of executed prisoners for transplant operations from November, a senior official said on Thursday, as it pushes to mandate the use of organs from ethical sources in hospitals.
> 
> China remains the only country in the world that still systematically uses organs extracted from executed prisoners in transplant operations, a practice that has drawn widespread international criticism. Many Chinese view the practice as a way for criminals to redeem themselves.
> 
> But officials have recently spoken out against the practice of harvesting organs from dead inmates, saying it "tarnishes the image of China".
> 
> 
> 
> Reuters, 15 Aug 13
Click to expand...



This speaks to the HUGE power of Western culture and of our cultural _values_.

Harvesting organs from prisoners in order that they may "redeem themselves" is a very _Confucian_ notion ~ in fact, I suspect, it likely predates Confucius. The _notion_ of this sort of redemption seems, to me, to be deeply rooted in China's cultural history, going all the way back to the  Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC) - there are two concepts: redemption for legal guilt and redemption for "excesses" or accidents. But both, crimes and accidents, have, traditionally, required some form of redemption. This was one bit of traditional Chinese culture that was very popular with the hard line communists; they, too, believed that everyone needed to redeem themselves for mistakes they made.

In a way I will be sad to see the custom end ~ I find much of value in China's traditions.


----------



## CougarKing

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Reuters, 15 Aug 13



Somehow, I doubt this is ever truly going to stop in China considering the lucractive black market in organs that's already established there...


----------



## The Bread Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Harvesting organs from prisoners in order that they may "redeem themselves" is a very _Confucian_ notion ~ in fact, I suspect, it likely predates Confucius. The _notion_ of this sort of redemption seems, to me, to be deeply rooted in China's cultural history, going all the way back to the  Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC) - there are two concepts: redemption for legal guilt and redemption for "excesses" or accidents. But both, crimes and accidents, have, traditionally, required some form of redemption. This was one bit of traditional Chinese culture that was very popular with the hard line communists; they, too, believed that everyone needed to redeem themselves for mistakes they made.


Interesting that in light of this, the Chinese government was so reluctant in the past to admit this was happening to this extent.


			
				S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Somehow, I doubt this is ever truly going to stop in China considering the lucractive black market in organs that's already established there...


We'll see, indeed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is going to sound terribly _illiberal_, especially coming from a self proclaimed _classical liberal_ like me, but I think it ~ harvesting organs ~ is a good custom, under certain very constrained circumstances.

When prisoners are executed, as they are in China, then I believe their organs should be harvested. Since I *believe* that there is nothing after death, I can find no moral justification for not harvesting the organs of those who are executed. (It obviously doesn't apply in Canada, but it does in China.)

I also believe that healthy and sane prisoners should be allowed to sell selected organs, for money, or to donate them and then receive considerations, e.g. earlier parole, in return.


----------



## The Bread Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I also believe that healthy and sane prisoners should be allowed to sell selected organs, for money, or to donate them and then receive considerations, e.g. earlier parole, in return.


At first blush, I'm actually reasonably ok with that (notwithstanding the issue of "how truly consentual can a prisoner's decision really be in such a situation?"), too, but I believe the Western value of consent was in question in cases that led to complaints by medical bodies outside China.

Then again, as you and others have said before, one man's/culture's values is another's WTF.


----------



## CougarKing

Reminds me of the time the US Navy's Admiral Mullen visited a PLA-N _Yuan_ class sub, if I can recall correctly...

Military.com link



> *China's Defense Minister to Visit NORAD*
> 
> Aug 16, 2013
> 
> 
> China's defense minister, *Gen. Chang Wanquan*, arrived in Hawaii Friday for a series of high-level meetings with U.S. military officials that will include the first-ever visit by a major Beijing official to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
> 
> The overall theme of Chang's first trip to the U.S. as defense minister was improving military-to-military contacts from the junior officer level on up, a senior U.S. Defense official said. The visit will conclude with a joint press conference with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon on Monday.
> 
> Chang's visit will also afford him an opportunity "to maintain what we see as a very positive momentum" in relations between the two militaries, the senior Defense official said at a background briefing.
> 
> *Hagel and senior U.S. commanders were also expected to "have a robust exchange of views" with Chang on a range of issues including cybersecurity, the U.S. rebalance to Asia, the arms buildup in nations neighboring China and the ongoing dispute with Japan over uninhabited islets off China's coast, the official said.
> 
> In Hawaii, Chang was meeting with Adm. Samuel Locklear, head of the Pacific Command. At a Pentagon briefing last month , Locklear said the rapid growth of the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese navy as an opportunity or a grave threat to the U.S. "and I look at them as an opportunity*.  "
> 
> "If the opportunity is not realized, then, as it would be with any other growing military, it potentially, you know, could become a threat.  But I certainly view it and approach it as an opportunity," Locklear said.
> 
> 
> *Locklear also noted that China has accepted the U.S. invitation to attend next year's Rim of the Pacific Exercise*,  the world's largest international naval exercise, which will take place in waters off Hawaii.
> 
> Over the weekend, Chang will visit the NORAD near Colorado Springs for talks with Air Force Gen. Chuck Jacoby, head of the Northern Command. Chang will also get the tour of the nuclear bunker at Alternative Command Center under Cheyenne Mountain.
> 
> *China has never permitted a U.S. visit to its own version of NORAD, but the senior official said that having Beijing's military leader at the heart of U.S. homeland defense would allow the two nations "to better understand each other*.  It's an opportunity for the defense minister to see a different part of the U.S. military," the senior Defense Department official said.
> 
> At the Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the U.S. and China in Washington last month, the U.S. sought to minimize China's concerns about President Obama's plan to rebalance U.S. forces to the Pacific, which is viewed by Beijing as a move to counter to its influence in the region.
> 
> At the Dialogue, the two nations agreed to "actively explore a notification mechanism for major military activities and to continue discussions on the rules of behavior for military air and maritime activities."
> 
> However, China's official press said the dialogue agreement raised more questions than it answered: "Does that include the U.S. deployment of troops or weapons systems on China's periphery as part of its rebalancing to Asia? Does it include anti-satellite missile tests?"
> 
> The China Daily commentary also asked: "On the rules of behavior for military air and maritime activities, does this include U.S. reconnaissance in China's exclusive economic zone and the Chinese naval flotilla's unannounced but legitimate passage through the Straits of Japan?"
> 
> *At the Pentagon briefing, the senior Defense Department official played down China's concerns about the arms buildup by China's neighbors, but the official media in Beijing railed against the launchings last week of an aircraft carrier by India and a destroyer that looked more like a helicopter attack ship by Japan.*
> 
> The launching by India of the carrier Vikrant, which was expected to be operational in 2018 "reminds us that the strategic significance of developing aircraft carriers in Asia is not declining," the Global Times, China's Communist party newspaper, said in an editorial.
> 
> "The earlier China establishes its own aircraft carrier capabilities," the editorial said, "the earlier it will gain the strategic initiative."
> 
> China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, an upgraded version of the Soviet carrier the Varyag, went on sea trials last year, but the Vikrant was built in Indian shipyards.
> 
> China reserved its harshest criticism for Japan's launch of the $1.1 billion Izumo, an 813-foot ship that Japan called a "helicopter carrier-type escort/destroyer."
> 
> The Izumo, expected to join Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force in 2015, can accommodate 14 helicopters on its flight deck and can be adapted to take on the F-35B version of the Joint Strike Fighter that Japan is seeking to buy from the U.S.
> 
> Chinese media noted that Izumo, Japan's largest warship since World War II, was the name of the cruiser that led Imperial Japan's navy in attacks on Shanghai in 1937.
> 
> Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at the People's Liberation Army Naval Military Studies Research Institute, told the state-run China Daily that "It is an aircraft carrier, and Japan just called it a helicopter destroyer to downplay its aggressive nature."


----------



## CougarKing

And China finally submits a formal claim on a part of the East China Sea to the UN:

Yonhap News link



> *China submits claim on East China Sea shelf to U.N.*
> 
> BEIJING, Aug. 17 (Yonhap) -- *China has submitted a claim to a U.N. commission stating that its naturally extended continental shelf stretches to the Okinawa Trough in the East China Sea, state media reported Saturday, a move that could rekindle territorial spats with South Korea and Japan.*
> 
> South Korea, China and Japan have separately claimed the Okinawa Trough, with part of Seoul's recent claim overlapping with China's. Seoul and Beijing, however, share a largely similar stance on defining the limits while being in discord with Japan, according to Seoul officials.


----------



## tomahawk6

China Finds Gold In The Northeast Passage

August 19, 2013: China recently sent a 19,000 ton cargo ship through the ice free Northeast Passage (along the north coast of Russia) to confirm what satellite images have shown, that there is an ice free route for four months a year from Alaska to Norway. Research has shown that this route has been ice free in the past, but this is the first time in the modern period when that has happened. Russia is encouraging the use of the Northeast Passage, as it cuts the time it takes to get from East Asia to Europe by a third (from six weeks to four). Time is money in the shipping business and this is a big deal for China which is a major exporter of goods to Europe. If the Northeast Passage remains open dependably China could end up sending 15 percent of its foreign trade along that route, making the increased Russian military presence up there welcome. 

For the last two years Russia has been regularly patrolling (usually from the air) large portions of its 5,600 kilometer northern border (from Murmansk, near Norway, to the Bering Strait, near Alaska.) The increased patrolling is to protect the growing number of oil and natural gas fields being developed near these coastal areas. Naval patrols will begin by 2015. With this coast is ice free in warm weather Russia sees a need for surface ships patrolling the area. Nuclear subs continue to run underwater patrols during Winter, when the coastline is iced in.  

The appearance of the Northeast Passage is a boon to Russia as well, which can more cheaply supply the oil and gas fields along the north coast as well as the few people who live up there. The Chinese are not the only ships using the passage. Last year 46 ships used it, up from only four in 2010. If the China trade moves to the Northeast Passage in a big way it could mean thousands of transits a year. This is bad news for Egypt, which will lose hundreds of million dollars a year in Suez Canal transit fees. 

The U.S. Navy noted the increased Russian activity in the arctic and became publicly alarmed at the fact that the U.S. Navy was no longer prepared to operate in the Arctic. Actually, the U.S. Navy was never big on operating in the Arctic. The navy used to have seven Wind class icebreakers, built near the end of World War II. But these were mainly to maintain access to polar shipping lanes that were only needed in wartime. These icebreakers were turned over to the U.S. Coast Guard after World War II and all were retired by the 1980s. The navy saw no compelling reason to maintain a fleet of icebreakers. The U.S. Coast Guard currently has three icebreakers but one is being decommissioned and the other is out of action for maintenance. The more recent one (entered service in 1999) is on call to rush to Antarctica to help keep a passage open to research facilities there. 

But now all the other arctic nations (especially Russia and Canada, which have the largest claims because of their long Arctic coastlines) are increasing their military presence in the arctic. This is mainly to back claims to gas, oil, and mineral deposits believed to be present in shallow arctic waters. The U.S. Navy is using this potential for conflict over these arctic resources to get back into arctic operations. 

In reality, the U.S. Coast Guard has far more experience in the arctic and is the force that is called on for any emergencies up there (there are very few). Navy interest in the arctic may disappear if Congress agrees that the navy should be involved, but preparations will have to be paid for out of the current (shrinking) navy budget. In the last fifty years the only navy ships that regularly operated in the arctic were SSNs (nuclear attack submarines) that usually move about under the ice and occasionally surface where the ice is thin or, in the Summer when there is no ice at all. This is as much for PR as it is to make sure no potential foe is sneaking about under the ice. The U.S. Navy intends to operate some ships up there during warmer, ice-free, months, just to show the flag. Canada, however, is intent on developing its increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage as a shorter route from the Pacific coast of North America to Europe.


----------



## CougarKing

T6's posting about the Northeast passage above, as well as ongoing discussions about the Northwest Passage and Arctic Sovereignty here, brought this article below in mind.

Aside from China, maritime archipelago nations such as Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia would also be vulnerable if a blockade would threaten adjacent their SLOCs (Sea Lines of Communication), which are vital to maintaining maritime trade.

Still I question whether commerce raiding would work in a modern context (other than the case of Somali piracy of course...), given the role of maritime patrol aircraft, UAVs and other technology in locating would-be-raiders? 

While the German Kriegsmarine example from World War II is one example of commerce raiding, wouldn't the 1980s Iran-Iraq tanker war also count? Thoughts, anyone?



> *Shipping as a Repository of Strategic Vulnerability*
> Michael Haas
> August 16, 2013
> 
> _In a global system marked above all by its complexity and interconnectedness, dependence on international shipping is universal. Yet some nations are far more vulnerable than others. As students of naval history well know, such vulnerability is often turned into a source of strategic leverage. To what extent can this leverage actually be exploited under 21st century conditions?_
> 
> 
> *Targeting Shipping for Strategic Effect*
> 
> Two main methods of waging war on commercial shipping can be distinguished, at least at an analytical level: *(1)* the blockade, and *(2)* _guerre de course_, or commerce raiding. The blockade relies on concentration and persistence to choke off the flow of sea-borne goods into enemy harbors, and as such will usually require some form of command of the sea. Commerce raiding, *on the other hand, relies on dispersed, attritional attacks by individual vessels (or small groups of vessels), which makes it an attractive option for navies that find themselves in a position of inferiority.* Both methods leverage the disruption of shipping to impose a cumulative toll on the adversary's economy, which is expected to have a significant indirect impact on the war effort and/or erode the opponent's will to resist.
> 
> 
> *Execute against China?*
> 
> Considerably greater attention has been attracted, however, by the possibility that the People's Republic might itself become the target of offensive military action against the sea-borne commerce on which the integrity of its economic model stamds. After all, 90 percent of China's exports and 90 percent of its liquid fuel imports - which, as *Sean Mirski* observes are _"functionally irreplaceable"_ - are transported by sea. The oft-cited _"Malacca dilemma"_ is but one expression of a suspicion that now unites an increasing number of strategic thinkers, both Chinese and foreign: namely, that *its dependence on maritime transportation may prove to be China's Achilles' heel on its way to greatness.*[/font]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Stranglehold: The Context, Conduct and Consequences of an American Naval Blockade of China*
> *Sean Mirski*
> 
> *Abstract*
> The mounting challenge posed by China's military modernization has highlighted the need for the United States to analyze its ability to execute a naval blockade. A blockade strategy is viable, but it would be limited to a narrow context: the United States would have to be engaged in a protracted conflict over vital interests, and it would need the support of key regional powers. The United States would also need to implement a mix between a close and distant blockade in order to avoid imperiling the conflict's strategic context. If enacted, a blockade could exact a ruinous cost on the Chinese economy and state.
> 
> *source link*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Conclusion: Return of the commerce raiders?*
> 
> If nothing else, the current debate about a U.S. naval blockade of China reveals that - much like their predecessors in past centuries - *strategists in a globalized era see shipping as a repository of strategic vulnerability, particularly in cases of high-intensity conflict between great or medium-size powers.* But while the potential leverage to be gained from nations' dependence on international shipping is perhaps greater than ever before, the actual leverage might not correspond to planners' expectations. The sources of this disconnect lie primarily in the political and economic context in which any concerted military action against sea-borne trade would be embedded. Given the U.S. Navy's determined stewardship of freedom of navigation, the U.S. in particular would find itself on the wrong side of the norms it has been upholding for the past 60 years. And while the economic fall-out of any great power war is likely to be significant, the willful disruption of trade flows for strategic effect would only serve to accentuate the costs to regional allies and global trading partners.
> 
> As a result, unrestricted commerce warfare of the type pursued by the U.S. Navy against Japan in 1941-45 is just not in the cards. On the other hand, anything short of a strategically counterproductive _"sink-on-sight"_ policy might not produce sufficient strategic impact to justify the cost of embarking on such a risky course of action in the first place. *Finally, once we move beyond the context of open interstate warfare, multilateral economic sanctions offer the possibility of causing many of the same effects at markedly lower cost to the attacker's international standing.*
> 
> Overall, the recent surge of interest in economic warfare strategies does little to encourage faith in the potential decisiveness of military actions against globalized trade, and serves to underline the practical and political challenges presented by any attempt at leveraging the vulnerabilities of a major trading power under 21st-century conditions. *While the dependence on international shipping poses many risks, the strategic leverage it provides as a direct result of its crucial contribution to the prosperity of nations is now more apparent than real.*
Click to expand...


----------



## CougarKing

Another reason why I think Taiwan's reunification with mainland China will not happen anytime soon (at least not peacefully) even if Beijing may try to lure Taipei into a "one country, two systems" arrangement similar to Hong Kong and Macau:

Defence News link



> *President: Taiwan To Continue Buying Arms From US*
> 
> Aug. 23, 2013 - 07:43AM
> By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> Asia & Pacific Rim
> 
> 
> TAIPEI — Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said Friday the island will continue to acquire arms from the United States, dismissing reports that the US and China could discuss ending such sales.
> 
> Ma spoke after local and Chinese media on Thursday quoted a Chinese defense official who said Washington had reacted positively when China’s defense minister, Chang Wanquan, proposed setting up a joint working group to discuss arms sales to Taipei.
> 
> Chang made the proposal during a visit to the US that started last week, according to Guan Youfei, who accompanied him on the trip.
> 
> Guan reportedly also said that, during a meeting with his US counterpart, Chuck Hagel, Chang offered to adjust Chinese military deployment in exchange for the US ending its weapons sales to Taiwan.
> 
> Guan’s remarks raised concerns in Taiwan, where the US is the leading arms supplier.
> 
> “To acquire necessary weapons that we can’t manufacture ourselves, we will keep buying arms from the United States,” Ma said during a visit to the offshore island of Kinmen to mark the 55th anniversary of a bombardment by the Chinese army that killed 618 servicemen and civilians.
> 
> *“The US made ‘Six Assurances’ to our country back in 1982, including not to set a date to end arms sales to Taiwan nor to hold prior consultations with China on arms sales,” he said, referring to the promise made by the Ronald Reagan administration.*
> 
> Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but at the same time Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires Washington to provide the island with means to defend itself.
> 
> *In 2001, then-President George W. Bush approved the sale of eight conventional submarines as part of Washington’s most comprehensive arms package for the island since 1992.
> 
> President Barack Obama’s administration has approved more than $12 billion in sales and equipment upgrades but has held off on Taiwan’s requests to buy new F-16 fighter jets, a step against which China has repeatedly warned.*
> 
> Tensions between Taiwan and China have eased markedly since Ma came to power on a Beijing-friendly platform in 2008. He was re-elected in January 2012.
> 
> *But Ma has stressed that Taiwan needs to maintain sufficient self-defense, as China still regards the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.*


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Another reason why I think Taiwan's reunification with mainland China will not happen anytime soon (at least not peacefully) even if Beijing may try to lure Taipei into a "one country, two systems" arrangement similar to Hong Kong and Macau:
> 
> Defence News link




I don't know about "soon," but I would not be surprised to see reunification in my lifetime ... and I don't expect to be around for much more than the next 25 years.

I can _imagine_ a "forced" reunification if a Taiwanese government does something incredibly stupid. America will not, because it cannot, intervene militarily to save Taiwan. But there are some things that China cannot accept, as matters of domestic policy and pride self respect. If Taiwan crosses one of those few, but very clear lines China will take it by force of arms.

But, I *expect* a peaceful reunification when the economic situation makes it mutually advantageous ~ the Chinese people, it has always seemed to me, were born with a few extra _capitalist_ genes and I expect them all, eventually, to vote with their wallets. But I actually expect them to vote *for* unification with both heads and hearts because my reading is that the Taiwanese want to be Chinese, again, too - just under their own terms.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> America will not, because it cannot, intervene militarily to save Taiwan.



Are we not forgetting the US Taiwan Relations Act? As well as the "Six Assurances" mentioned the article above?


----------



## Edward Campbell

My reading of both the US Taiwan Relations Act and the Six Assurances is that neither requires America to go to war.

The US Taiwan Relations Act requires the USA to "provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character; and ... maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan." It is a long way from "maintaining the capacity to resist" to "go to war to defend Taiwan," and I'm not sure the US is honouring provision 6; with what will the USA defend Taiwan?

The Six Assurances are even weaker.

I repeat, "America will not, because it cannot, intervene militarily to save Taiwan."


----------



## tomahawk6

Taiwan's best defense is its armed forces and their defensive moat.The PRC has enough problems without having a war over Taiwan.


----------



## CougarKing

Former CCP posterboy and Chongqing's former party secretary Bo Xilai in the news again. 

Interestingly, Bo Xilai's notorious playboy son Bo Guagua reportedly once drove the daughter of former US Ambassador Gary Locke to a dinner date, where he made unwanted sexual advances on her. In spite of this "Red Ferrari" scandal that almost caused a diplomatic mess between the US and China, Bo Guagua got to attend grad. school at Harvard's Kennedy School for government and will be attending Columbia Law School soon. 

From the Australian




> *Bo Xilai trial reveals lavish lifestyles of China's rich and infamous   *
> 
> From:  AFP
> August 27, 2013 2:34PM
> 
> THE family's safes held more cash than an average Chinese might see in a lifetime. Their French villa was held through shell companies designed to avoid taxes and publicity. The son gallivanted around the world at huge expense.
> 
> *The sensational corruption trial of Bo Xilai exposed the lavish lifestyle of one of China's most powerful politicians, gripping the Communist-run country where mounting inequality has stoked public discontent.
> 
> The bribery and embezzlement charges against Bo, until last year the head of the megacity of Chongqing and one of China's top-25 leaders, amount to 26.8 million yuan ($4.87 million).*
> 
> And that only touches on a few business dealings in the early part of the 64-year-old's career.
> 
> *Bo defended himself against allegations from his wife Gu Kailai that she once saw $US80,000 in bribe money by revealing the amount of ready cash they kept at home.
> 
> "In the shared safe there were hundreds of thousands of yuan, so how could she know the money she took out was from me?" he said, according to court accounts.
> 
> The ruling party mounted an apparently unusually open trial following its most explosive political scandal in decades*.
> 
> The court in the eastern city of Jinan posted lengthy transcripts on its Twitter-like Weibo account each day - although their completeness and accuracy could not be verified.
> 
> *Bo was charged with bribery amounting to 21.8 million yuan ($3.9 million), embezzlement of 5 million yuan ($900,000) and abuse of power, all of which he vehemently denied during the five-day trial.
> 
> He is accused of accepting 20.7 million yuan ($3.7 million) in bribes from businessman Xu Ming, who testified for the prosecution.
> 
> The court heard that Xu paid for a $US3.2 million villa in the French Riviera resort of Cannes after Gu said she wanted to buy it.*
> 
> The six-bedroom mansion with a pool, shaded terrace and colonnaded balconies sits in an exclusive neighbourhood overlooking the Mediterranean.
> 
> It was allegedly funded by Xu through three different companies and managed by others, so that neither Bo nor his family appeared on records as owners of the property.
> 
> The complex setup was "to avoid tax" and because "I didn't want to bring any bad influence on [Bo]", according to Gu's testimony.
> 
> Tang Xiaolin, another businessman, allegedly gave Bo 1.1 million yuan including the $US80,000 seen by Gu after profiting from a land deal the politician helped facilitate.
> 
> *Gu would grab thick wads of yuan and US dollars from safes in the couple's homes during three trips back to China a year from England, where she lived with their only son, Bo Guagua.
> 
> Both bribery accusations stemmed from Bo's years overseeing Dalian city and its northeastern province Liaoning in the 1990s and early 2000s. He became national commerce minister in 2004 and Chongqing's leader in 2007.*
> 
> *Their son meanwhile attended top-notch schools and universities with hefty tuition fees, including Harrow in Britain, Oxford, Harvard and, from this autumn, Columbia law school in New York.*
> 
> Xu paid for Guagua to travel to Germany for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, as well as Italy, Latin America and Africa, and for toys such as an 80,000-yuan Segway scooter, the court heard.
> 
> *Guagua charged $US50,000 to his credit card - paid off by Xu - brought back a month's worth of exotic meat from Africa and in 2011 treated 40 Harvard classmates to an expenses-paid trip to China.*
> 
> At the same time in Chongqing, *Bo - who during the trial admitted to having had extramarital affairs - mounted Maoist revivalist rallies chanting "Serve the People*".
> 
> Some Chinese would be surprised if a politician of Bo's stature had not obtained even more wealth, said Steve Tsang, a China politics expert at the University of Nottingham in Britain.
> 
> "I think for a lot of people, the question would be, 'Could this be it?' " he said. "Surely someone in Bo's position could and would have enjoyed much more than what was revealed in court."
> 
> Many Chinese have come to expect ill-gotten riches of their leaders and Bo's supporters may be willing to overlook his actions, said David Goodman, of the University of Sydney.
> 
> "Given that they're all at it, why shouldn't you support people you think have views that you think are acceptable?" he said.
> 
> "They don't make a complicated calculus about, well, he's corrupt but he's for us - but that's what it comes down to."
> 
> *Official corruption is rampant across China, as the leadership has acknowledged this year while vowing to crack down.
> 
> Multiple examples of excess have been revealed over recent months, even among low-level civil servants.
> 
> A county official in the southern province of Guangdong was found to own 22 properties worth as much as 40 million yuan ($7.2 million), at a time when homes are becoming increasingly unaffordable for many.*
> 
> But far greater wealth at the highest levels was exposed by Western media last year - and proved so sensitive that the outlets' websites have since remained blocked inside China.
> 
> *President Xi Jinping's family was reported by Bloomberg to have investments worth $US376 million, and the New York Times said former premier Wen Jiabao's relatives had controlled assets worth $US2.7 billion.*


----------



## CougarKing

China's "non-interference" policy resurfaces again now that a conflict between Western powers and Syria seems imminent...

*China Couldn't Intervene In Syria Even If It Wanted To*
www.businessinsider.com



> BEIJING (Reuters) - The worsening Syria conflict has exposed an uncomfortable truth behind China's cherished policy of non-interference: Beijing cannot do much to influence events even if it wanted to.
> 
> With weak and untested military forces unable to project power in the Middle East, China can only play a low-key role in a region that is crucial for its energy security.
> 
> As the United States and its allies gear up for a probable military strike on Syria, raising fears of a regional conflagration, China remains firmly on the sidelines, despite it having much more at stake than some other big powers.


<snipped>



> *China has few economic interests in Syria itself but believes it has a strategic and diplomatic imperative to ensure Middle East stability and to protect a vital energy source.*
> Retired Major General Luo Yuan, one of China's most outspoken military figures, told the official People's Daily last year that with so much oil at stake "we cannot think that the issues of Syria and Iran have nothing to do with us".


----------



## CougarKing

It's ironic that the Chinese are using an American invention- the idea of maritime sovereignty- to justify their "historical claims" to the South China Sea.

From The Diplomat site



> *History the Weak Link in Beijing’s Maritime Claims*
> 
> East Asia
> August 30, 2013
> 
> By Mohan Malik
> 
> If the idea of national sovereignty goes back to seventeenth-century Europe and the system that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia,* the idea of maritime sovereignty is largely a mid-twentieth-century American concoction that China and others have seized upon to extend their maritime frontiers. As Jacques notes, “The idea of maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent invention, dating from 1945 when the United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its territorial waters.” *In fact, the UN’s Law of the Sea agreement represented the most prominent international effort to apply the land-based notion of sovereignty to the maritime domain worldwide—although, importantly, it rejects the idea of justification by historical right. *Thus although Beijing claims around eighty percent of the South China Sea as its “historic waters” (and is now seeking to elevate this claim to a “core interest” akin with its claims on Taiwan and Tibet), China has, historically speaking, about as much right to claim the South China Sea as Mexico has to claim the Gulf of Mexico for its exclusive use*, or Iran the Persian Gulf, or India the Indian Ocean. In other words, none at all. From a legal standpoint, “the prolific usage of the nomenclature ‘South China Sea’ does not confer historic Chinese sovereignty.” Countries that have used history to claim sovereignty over islands have had the consent of others and a mutually agreeable interpretation of history—both elements missing in the SCS.
> 
> Ancient empires either won control over territories through aggression, annexation, or assimilation or lost them to rivals who possessed superior firepower or statecraft. Territorial expansion and contraction was the norm, determined by the strength or weakness of a kingdom or empire. *The very idea of “sacred lands” is ahistorical because control of territory was based on who grabbed or stole what last from whom. The frontiers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties waxed and waned throughout history*.  A strong and powerful imperial China, much like czarist Russia, was expansionist in Inner Asia and Indochina as opportunity arose and strength allowed. The gradual expansion over the centuries under the non-Chinese Mongol and Manchu dynasties extended imperial China’s control over Tibet and parts of Central Asia (now Xinjiang), Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Modern China is, in fact, an “empire-state” masquerading as a nation-state.
> 
> Even if one were to accept Beijing’s “historical claims” argument for a moment, the problem is that the Chinese empire was not the only empire in pre-modern Asia and the world. There were other empires and kingdoms too. Many countries can make equally valid “historical claims” to lands that are currently not a part of their territory but under Chinese control (e.g., the Gando region in China’s Jilin province that belongs to Korea). Before the twentieth century, there were no sovereign nation-states in Asia with clear, legally defined boundaries of jurisdiction and control. If China’s claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories. *Students of Asian history know, for instance, that Malay peoples related to today’s Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. Taiwan was originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent—ancestors of the present-day aborigine groups—who populated the low-lying coastal plains*. Noted Asia-watcher Philip Bowring argues that “[t]he fact that China has a long record of written history does not invalidate other nations’ histories as illustrated by artifacts, language, lineage and genetic affinities, the evidence of trade and travel.”
> 
> *Unless one subscribes to the notion of Chinese exceptionalism, imperial China’s “historical claims” are as valid as those of other kingdoms and empires in Southeast and South Asia.* The problem with history is where and when to draw the line, why, and more importantly, whose version of history is accurate. *China laying claim to the Mongol and Manchu empires’ colonial possessions would be equivalent to India laying claim to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka on the grounds that they were all parts of either the Ashoka, Maurya, Chola, or the Moghul and the British Indian empires*. From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, several of the Pallava and Chola kings in southern India assembled large navies and armies to overthrow neighboring kingdoms and to undertake punitive attacks on the states in the Bay of Bengal region. They also took to the sea to conquer parts of what are now Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia. In his study of India’s strategic culture, George Tanham observed: “In what was really a battle over the trade between China and India and Europe, the Cholas were quite successful in both naval and land engagements and briefly ruled portions of Southeast Asia.”
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

By having an open trial for the sake of "setting an example", perhaps Bo's opponents may be unconsciously setting him up for a political comeback in the same way that the late Deng Xiaoping was "rehabilitated" after a purge and eventually rose to lead the CCP...

South China Morning Post link



> *Why Bo Xilai won't go quietly*
> Minxin Pei says the relative openness of Bo Xilai's trial could have been the work of allies wishing to aid his fight for a political comeback. Indeed, such hopes may have inspired his feisty performance
> 
> Friday, 30 August, 2013, 3:11am
> 
> Minxin Pei
> 
> As show trials go, the drama featuring Bo Xilai , the once-swaggering, media-savvy former Communist Party chief of Chongqing , veered anomalously into improvisation. Before the proceedings began, the conventional wisdom was that Bo's trial had been carefully scripted and rehearsed to portray a forlorn and penitent sinner confessing his crimes and apologising to the party.
> 
> But the historic five-day trial dispelled any notion that Bo would go quietly to his cell in Beijing's infamous Qincheng Prison, where China's fallen top leaders are incarcerated.
> 
> *By appearing dignified, defiant and forceful, Bo sought to preserve his image among his allies*
> 
> He challenged the prosecution vigorously, defending himself with a feistiness that surprised nearly all who read the transcripts released by the court in real time on the trial's first day.
> 
> Bo dismissed one of his accusers as having "sold his soul". He characterised testimony given by *his wife, Gu Kailai , now serving a suspended death sentence for murdering the British businessman Neil Heywood in 2011, as "comical" and "fictional", and he called her "crazy".*
> Throughout the trial, Bo flatly denied most of the corruption charges, often professed ignorance of the facts, and claimed to be unable to recall any details of the matters in question.
> 
> *He even retracted his confession to the party's anti-graft agency, blaming mental stress for his admission that he accepted bribes from a man he called "soulless" in court. In his closing statement, he dropped a bombshell: he claimed that Wang Lijun , his former police chief and henchman (and a "vile character"), was secretly in love with his wife.*
> 
> *The trial transcripts create an impression of a man who, had he not gone into politics, would have excelled as a trial lawyer. Bo made the prosecution look sloppy and incompetent.*
> 
> However, anyone who believes that the courtroom drama in the provincial capital of Jinan will determine the trial's outcome (the verdict and sentence will be announced next month) is seriously mistaken. Party leaders have already decided that Bo is guilty and must spend years in jail.
> 
> *A logical question to ask, then, is why the party allowed an unprecedented degree of openness at the trial. The two most recently purged Politburo members were tried in secret, as were Bo's wife and his former police chief.*
> 
> The optimistic view is that China's new leadership wants to demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law and fairness. But that is a naive interpretation. While the trial proceedings on the first day were refreshingly open by Chinese standards, that quickly changed. Transcripts were not released in real time on subsequent days, and they omitted some crucial details (for example, Bo claimed that the party's representatives threatened to execute his wife and prosecute his son if he refused to co-operate).
> 
> *Perhaps worried that Bo's defiant behaviour was winning the public-relations battle, the official media also launched a blitz, savaging Bo's character and all but pronouncing him guilty.*
> 
> Even more disturbing, on the first day of the trial, the Chinese police formally arrested Xu Zhiyong , a human-rights lawyer who was leading a campaign to force mandatory disclosure of the wealth of senior officials and their family members. The Chinese government has also begun a ferocious crackdown on social media, arresting prominent activists on dubious charges.
> 
> So there must be a different - and more political - interpretation of the Chinese government's handling of Bo's trial. It is worth recalling that purging him was a deeply divisive affair at the party's highest levels. *His patrons and allies could not save him, but they were well positioned to demand that his trial be conducted as openly as possible.
> 
> Given Bo's gift for dazzling an audience, his allies must have felt confident that a spirited defence would serve him well, both legally and politically.*
> 
> Bo certainly did not disappoint. He could have grovelled his way through the trial, like other senior party officials brought down by corruption scandals, and as most defendants have done in the long, grim history of communist show trials beginning with Stalin.
> 
> *But Bo apparently is not accepting his political demise as a final act - in his closing statement, he told the court that he wanted to keep his party membership (he was expelled anyway) - and a comeback calculus may well have motivated his spirited performance. Bo understands that he should not be perceived as a pitiful loser who gutlessly besmirches his honour.
> 
> By appearing dignified, defiant and forceful, Bo evidently sought to preserve his image among his allies and supporters as a strong leader.*  Denouncing himself in order to gain leniency - in a case that he portrayed as a grievous miscarriage of justice - would have made him look like a coward.
> 
> Bo may be heading to jail, but he retains some chance of political rehabilitation should things change dramatically in China. His botched - but riveting - trial may be over, but the Bo Xilai show will go on.
> 
> Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Yes, I suppose I do.
> 
> China needs to become:
> 
> First, and as a mater of urgency, less corrupt; and
> 
> Second, more "democratic," by which I mean - government with the consent of the governed (free and fair elections being one way, our way of doing that) and equality and and under the law, for both the governed and the governors, and,
> most important, respect for the rule of law.
> 
> My bright young friend's prescription - "one country, two systems" spreading, slowly but surely, from province to province until the "second system" is dominant - seems to promise both better than my "one country *n* systems" course of action.




I have banged on and on and on about corruption being China's single most significant problem and I have suggested that Hong Kong provides a good model for China, proper. Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _SouthChina Morning Post_ is a good article that says I'm wrong:

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1302736/hong-kongs-anti-corruption-model-wont-work-mainland-china


> Hong Kong's anti-corruption model won't work on mainland China
> *Sonny Lo says the advocates of a Hong-Kong-style fight against corruption on the mainland misunderstand the nature of the scourge across the border, and the tools available to fight it*
> 
> Sonny Lo
> 
> Wednesday, 04 September, 2013
> 
> Mainland China's anti-corruption campaign has been gathering pace since Xi Jinping became president in March. Members of the Politburo's Standing Committee reportedly voted against a proposal this summer to adopt a Hong-Kong-style amnesty of corrupt officials.
> 
> Despite the fact that some China watchers believe the mainland has much to learn from the Hong Kong model of fighting corruption, the reality is that Beijing's approach will remain a far cry from that of Hong Kong.
> 
> First and foremost, the amnesty of corrupt Hong Kong police officers, introduced by then governor Murray MacLehose in 1977 soon after a police mutiny in that year, cannot be replicated across the border. Doing so would be tantamount to a slap in the face for the anti-corruption campaign and a contradiction of China's criminal law, according to hardliners in the Politburo.
> 
> Second, Hong Kong's anti-corruption fight is led by the powerful Independent Commission Against Corruption, but the mainland situation is complicated by the unique institutional design of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. At the provincial and city levels, the anti-corruption fight is constrained by the need to be accountable to the top levels, and most importantly to be answerable to the local party secretary. If the party secretary is somehow involved in corruption, he or she becomes a "protective umbrella" obstructing anti-corruption efforts. The ICAC does not have this problem.
> 
> Third, the "protective umbrella" on the mainland is vast, with complex personal networks involving party cadres, officials, businesspeople, land developers and professionals. The recent anti-corruption campaign targeting club memberships, for example, is testimony to the extensive networks of bribery. Unless a Maoist-style education campaign is launched, to teach all citizens the importance of clean government and ethics, it will be difficult to instil these values into the minds of all party cadres and government officials, not to mention ordinary citizens.
> 
> In Hong Kong, the ICAC can employ legal measures against any "protective umbrella", which won't be tolerated by the elite or the people.
> 
> Fourth, defying conventional wisdom that assumes severe penalties would be imposed on those found guilty of corruption, the reality is that, on the mainland, suspended death sentences often provide an opportunity for offenders to have their sentences reduced later, especially if they show good behaviour in the early stages of imprisonment. At best, some "small tigers" have been executed, as an example. In Hong Kong, those committing corrupt acts face the very real risk of severe punishment; this isn't really the case on the mainland.
> 
> Fifth, China is a huge country where central-local relations are extremely complex. While the central government is keen to fight corruption, local officials often bend the rules somewhat and deviate from Beijing's directives. Hong Kong, by contrast, is relatively small; its 18 districts are comparatively easy for the ICAC to monitor. Hence, to argue that the ICAC model could be implanted into the mainland is to ignore the complex central-local relations.
> 
> So what can Xi's anti-corruption campaign learn from Hong Kong? The lessons include the need for Beijing to use extensive education as a means to inculcate the values of good and clean government into the psyche of all Chinese people, especially Communist Party officials and cadres.
> 
> Moreover, it is imperative for Beijing to review whether court judgments are consistent in all provinces and localities, and whether standardised and tougher measures should be introduced to penalise those found guilty of corruption. If not, the anti-corruption crusade will not achieve a significant breakthrough.
> 
> After all, corruption has been the hallmark of dynasties throughout China's history. The crux of the matter is not about eliminating corruption, but containing its further spread and minimising its impact on the legitimacy of the party and government.
> 
> Mainland businesspeople and officials working in Hong Kong must learn the importance of ethical behaviour to help further development of the rule of law on the mainland. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection should work closely with the ICAC and its Macau counterpart to educate mainland executives and officials working in the two special administrative regions and instil clean government and administrative ethics into their behaviour.
> 
> This could contribute immensely to the development and consolidation of clean government all over China.
> 
> *Sonny Lo is professor and head of the department of social sciences at the Hong Kong Institute of Education*




Prof Lo makes one very good point, _"corruption has been the hallmark of dynasties throughout China's history. The crux of the matter is not about eliminating corruption, but containing its further spread and minimising its impact on the legitimacy of the party and government."_ Corruption has not been, cannot be, in my opinion, eliminated from America, Britain, Canada or Denmark ... and so on and so forth ... so why should we expect it to be eliminated from China?

But, as Porf Lo says, mainland Chinese should learn from Hong Kong that a mostly honesty _system_ enhances profits. Look at the least corrupt countries - note that Hong Kong and Singapore, both _Sinic_ societies with all that baggage, are both honest and rich. There is a link between honesty, which includes government respecting the *right* to property, and prosperity, and Hong Kong and Singapore show China that simple truth.


----------



## CougarKing

> *The Navy is seeking ways to bolster ties with the Chinese Navy, including exchanging officers and conducting fleet operations.*
> 
> Chief of Naval Operations *Adm. Jon Greenert * said these possibilities would be discussed when he hosts his counterpart, Adm. Wu Shengli, next week for a visit that starts in San Diego and then heads to Washington, D.C.
> 
> *The US and Chinese navies have seen some recent cooperation, including when the US destroyer Mason and a Chinese destroyer landed each other’s helicopters as part of an anti-piracy exercise. Greenert wants to build on that by planning more exercises and operations and creating command and control rules, much as the Navy has when operating with other foreign navies.*
> 
> “It takes too much time to get one simple operation going,” Greenert said Thursday in a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. “I want to move ahead in that so that our folks, when they get out there, they can do more.”
> 
> Greenert’s sitdown will be his first with the head of the People’s Liberation Army Navy since he took over as CNO two years ago. Greenert said he’s looking for “areas of overlap” between the navies, such as counter-piracy and humanitarian assistance.
> 
> It’s particularly important that the navies began exchanging mid-grade officers and senior enlisted so that people in both services had useful contacts and knew how each others’ fleets train and operate, Greenert said.
> 
> *One Chinese ship is set to participate in next year’s Rim of the Pacific exercise for the first time and Greenert said another opportunity is a joint humanitarian mission, perhaps using both services’ hospital ships.*
> 
> ......
> 
> Defense News


----------



## CougarKing

Hyperlink at article title below:



> *Chinese Navy Ships Visit Hawaii*
> September 6, 2013
> PEARL HARBOR - Three People's Liberation Army-Navy [PLA(N)] ships pulled into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Sept. 6, for a routine port visit.
> 
> The crewmembers of the *Luhu-class destroyer Qingdao (DDG 113), Jiangkai-class frigate Linyi (FFG-547) and Fuqing-class fleet oiler Hongzehu (AOR 881)* are scheduled to participate in receptions and sporting events with their American counterparts.
> <snipped>
> The visit will be topped-off with a *one-day search-and-rescue drill on Monday, Sept. 9.*
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Adm. Cecil D. Haney, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, shakes hands with Rear Adm. Wei Gang, chief of staff, North Sea Fleet, following an an arrival ceremony for the visiting ships. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Nardel Gervacio)_
> ---
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _The Chinese People's Liberation Army-Navy Jiangkai-class frigate Linyi (FFG 547) moors alongside the Luhu-class destroyer Qingdao (DDG 113) following the ships' arrival. (U.S. Navy photo by MC1 Daniel Barker)_
> 
> source: cpf.navy.mil


----------



## Kirkhill

Our E.R. Campbell, Burke, China, Confucius
and Ambrose Evans Pritchard

Convergence.



> China embraces 'British Model', ditching Mao for Edmund Burke
> 
> David Cameron might be reassured to know that China's Communist leadership is studying the long arc of British history with intense interest, even if Russia's Vladimir Putin deems our small island to be of no account.
> 
> David Cameron might be reassured to know that China's Communist leadership is studying the long arc of British history with intense interest, even if Russia's Vladimir Putin deems our small island to be of no account.
> Professor Li said the 18th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke is now all the rage in Chinese universities, studied for his critique of violent revolution, and esteemed as the prophet of stability through timely but controlled change.
> 
> "We want to learn from the British model," said Daokui Li, a member China's upper chamber or `House of Lords' (CPPCC) and a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
> 
> "Today's leaders in China are looking carefully at the British style of political change over the last 400 years, analysing the difference with France," he told me at the annual Ambrosetti gathering of world policy-makers at Villa d'Este on Lake Como.
> 
> "England went through incredible changes: a war against the US; wars against France; wars against Germany twice, the rise and decline of empire; and universal suffrage. Yet society remained stable through all this turmoil, with the same institutions and political structure. We think the reason is respect for tradition, yet willingness to make changes when needed."
> 
> "It is a contrast with France. We know from De Toqueville's study of the Ancien Regime that if you don't do reforms, you will end up with a revolution, and that is what will happen in China if we don't reform in time,"
> 
> Professor Li said the 18th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke is now all the rage in Chinese universities, studied for his critique of violent revolution, and esteemed as the prophet of stability through timely but controlled change. They are enamoured by his theories of inheritance, the "living contract" through the generations, the limits of liberty, and -- a harder sell -- his small battalions.
> 
> Hobbes too is sweeping China's intelligentsia, and so is Hannah Arendt, the philosopher of the twin totalitarian movements Left and Right. It is a ferment of ideas. Mao is out, even if the Communist Party is still coy about saying this too publicly.
> 
> "We went through the Revolution of 1911 when we overthrew the emperor, then the May 4th Revolution of 1919, then the Communist Revolution of 1949, and then the Cultural Revolution. We're looking back at our history, and we are tired of this."
> 
> "This is why Bo Xilai scares people. He was embracing Mao's practice of continuous revolution, and it brings back bad memories."
> I was aware that Burke is making a much-deserved come-back in Britain, propelled by Jesse Norman's splendid book "Edmund Burke:The First Conservative". But China's enthusiasm for his work has more global "gearing", as traders say.
> 
> The Nobel peace laureate -- and dissident -- Liu Xiaobo is a Burkean, as were many of those who signed the 2008 human rights charter.
> Needless to say, Burke has much in common with Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher of order, tradition, and harmony, now enjoying a revival in China as a post-Maoist source of authority. Jiang Qing cites Burke extensively in his classic work on the rise of a new Confucian political order published in 2008: "China: Democracy, or Confucianism?"
> 
> You will recognise the words and style if you have read Burke's masterful Reflections on the French Revolution, the book that unmasked the squalid character of the Paris Putsch, and shattered the illusions of Jacobin fellow-travellers across Europe.
> ''Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.’’
> 
> “To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.
> 
> By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitutions and renovate their father’s life.”
> 
> To hack that aged parent to pieces. How resonant that must seem to survivors of the Cultural Revolution.
> 
> Prof Li said the new team of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang -- both singing from the same hymn sheet according to him, though not others -- will start reforming the one-child policy, the hukuo code of rural `serfdom', and much else, before the end of the year. The last team coasted complacently, he said, relying on post-Lehman stimulus to keep growth going as the old system festered.
> 
> Whether China can really pull it off in an orderly way after letting rip with the biggest credit bubble in modern market history is a very open question.
> But let us wish them the best of British luck, and celebrate our new Special Relationship with China.


----------



## CougarKing

An exercise aimed at sending a message toward India?

Defense News link



> *China and Pakistan Begin Biannual Air Exercise Shaheen 2*
> 
> Sep. 9, 2013 - 07:18PM   |
> By USMAN ANSARI
> 
> 
> ISLAMABAD — *China and Pakistan last week began a three-week air exercise titled Shaheen 2 (Falcon 2) in Hetian Prefecture of China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
> 
> The exercise, which lasts until Sept. 22, is the second in a series of such exercises, the first of which was held in Pakistan in March 2011.
> 
> Shaheen 2 will be the first time an air force of another country will be participating in such an exercise in Chinese airspace.*
> 
> The Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) first reported the exercise was to take place, citing the Chinese Defense Ministry.
> 
> The Air Force here did not reveal any further details, such as participating aircraft, or if there had been any changes to the size, scope or format of the exercise since 2011.
> 
> However, an APP report last week stated* Chengdu F-7PG and Mirage aircraft* had traveled to China to participate in Shaheen 2.
> 
> It also stated: “The prime objective of the exercise is to excel in the air combat capability with focus on air power employment in any future conflict.”
> 
> *Pakistan’s latest fighter type, the Sino-Pakistani JF-17 Thunder, is operational with two Pakistani Air Force (PAF) squadrons, but has not been sent to participate on this occasion*.
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Prof Lo makes one very good point, _"corruption has been the hallmark of dynasties throughout China's history. The crux of the matter is not about eliminating corruption, but containing its further spread and minimising its impact on the legitimacy of the party and government."_ Corruption has not been, cannot be, in my opinion, eliminated from America, Britain, Canada or Denmark ... and so on and so forth ... so why should we expect it to be eliminated from China?
> 
> But, as Porf Lo says, mainland Chinese should learn from Hong Kong that a mostly honesty _system_ enhances profits. Look at the least corrupt countries - note that Hong Kong and Singapore, both _Sinic_ societies with all that baggage, are both honest and rich. There is a link between honesty, which includes government respecting the *right* to property, and prosperity, and Hong Kong and Singapore show China that simple truth.



To go with what was mentioned much earlier in this thread when I posted about Dr. Pan Wei and his "rule of law regime" template he suggested adopting from Singapore for reforming China, take note that Singapore has an effective anticorruption agency, similar to Hong Kong's ICAC mentioned below, called the CPIB.

Plus more on Singapore's anti-corruption strategy from an article last year:



> *Why China Should Study Singapore's Anti-Corruption Strategy*
> Joshua Berlinger
> Dec. 6, 2012, 8:00 PM
> Singapore
> 
> Yesterday, Singapore was named fifth-least corrupt country according to Transparency International's 2012 Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The index — which include 176 countries around the world — is ranked based on how corrupt their administrative and political institutions are perceived to be on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) and a 100 (very clean).
> 
> *Singapore scored 87, placing only three points behind the three states which tied for first place.
> 
> China and many of the Asian tigers have a notorious reputation for their rampant graft, scandal, and illicit activity in the public sector . But in recent decades, Singapore has stood out in comparison to its peers for its lack of perceived corruption.
> 
> "Corruption [in Singapore] is fact of life rather than a way of life. Put differently, corruption exists in Singapore, but Singapore is not a corrupt society," Professor John S.T. Quah— one of the world's foremost experts on corruption and governance in Asia — noted in 1987.*
> 
> Singapore hasn't always been graft free. Corruption was prominent from Singapore's colonial era until the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945. Quah posits that the following three factors lead to were the crucial elements that led to corruption in Singapore: "[low] salaries, opportunities (which depend on the extent of involvement of civil servants in the administration or control of lucrative activities), and policing (i.e., the probability of detection and punishment)."
> 
> So why has Singapore been so successful in stamping out crooked behavior, despite its history? And could its solution be a model for China, which has dealt with a plethora of embarrassing scandals in the last year?
> 
> *Tough laws
> 
> Many point to the country's incredibly stringent, almost draconian penal code. Jaywalking, littering, and spitting can get you arrested, failing to flush a public toilet or chewing gum in the open can each lead to a fine, and vandalism is punished by caning.*
> 
> Laws against corruption are tough as well. The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau works directly with the Prime Minister's office and wields significant power; the Bureau can arrest individuals without a warrant and execute search and seizure orders carte blanche if there are "reasonable grounds to believe that any delay in obtaining the search warrant is likely to frustrate the object of the search."
> 
> Those accused of corruption usually face a 5-year jail term and up to S$100,000 ($80,000) fine, and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wants to add even more penalties as a form of deterrence, according to the Associated Press.
> 
> Lee made it clear that "it's far better to suffer the embarrassment and keep the system clean for the long-term, than to pretend that nothing has gone wrong and to let the rot spread," after a rare corruption scandal surfaced this year.
> 
> *Some argue that Singapore's tough legal code have created a society that resembles an Orwellian dystopia, in which stringent laws keep the population in line and society sparkly clean.
> 
> But the results are noticeable, as Singapore has one of the lowest crime and corruption rates in the world. *
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *It's a two-part plan
> 
> Tough laws and sentences can scare the populace into submission and make for a good read, but Singapore's anti-corruption laws are part of a two part plan. Punishment only alters the risk level of graft, not the reward factor.*
> 
> The Singapore government keeps the salaries of politicians and civil servants high in order prevent talented, honest Singaporeans from leaving and to stifle the economic incentive to engage in corrupt activity. By tackling both the policing and financial factors of corruption, the payoff of corrupt activity is shifted from a low risk, high reward to high risk, low reward.
> 
> During Singapore's rule by the British and early independence, the state did not have the wealth it does today, and therefore could not afford to raise the salaries of politicians and civil servants. The shift came in the 1980s, when then Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew enacted salary raises for senior level government officials and politicians.
> 
> *"He concluded that best way of dealing with corruption was `moving with the market [to incentive good behavior]," Quah explains, "which is 'an honest, open, defensible and workable system' instead of hypocrisy, which results in duplicity and corruption."*
> 
> *Punishment, incarceration, and deterrence
> 
> Quah contends that there are four 'lessons' that can be learned by other Asian countries from Singapore's example:
> 1.Political will is the key ingredient for success
> 2.The anti-corruption agency must be independent from the police and political control
> 3.The anti-corruption agency must be incorruptible
> 4.Minimize corruption by tackling its major sources: low salaries, ample opportunities, and poor policing*
> 
> But Quah stresses that political will is the most crucial factor: "The principal people who can change a culture of corruption if they wish to do so are politicians. This is because they make the laws and allocate the funds that enable the laws to be enforced."
> 
> At the end of his life, famed criminologist Cesare Lombroso concluded that there is no solution to the problem of crime, except punishment, incarceration, and deterrence. His assertion can be seen in Singapore's anti-corruption strategy.
> 
> So the question remains — would similar harsh laws and salary increases effectively shift the risk/reward payoffs of corruption in China?
> 
> By Lombroso's logic and Quah's policy prescriptions, it's possible. But one cannot discount the cultural, historical and geographical differences between Singapore and China (and within China) that shape government and public attitudes towards corruption.
> 
> *Singapore's tough law code is reflective of its relatively conservative culture. While parts of China might share these social attitudes, others do not. And monitoring a government running a country of 5 million people living in 274 square miles is nothing compared to another with 1.3 billion people living in 3.7 million square miles.
> 
> Further, the Communist party structure poses a different set of challenges. It would be easy for the Chinese Communist Party to pass similar stringent anti-corruption laws, as unelected officials have a much easier time passing legislation.*
> 
> But corruption has historically had a direct correlation to economic growth in China. Andrew Wedeman, author of Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China, notes that corruption actually feeds of rapid growth: "China is different because the Communist Party does not depend on injections of cash from the private sector."
> 
> *If China's new leader, Xi Jinping, follows up on his promises to tackle corruption, Singapore's model and a revived political could signal a significant shift in the battle against corruption. But continuing economic expansion, including a plan revealed by Xinhua today to further open the Chinese economy, could hinder anti-corruption efforts, in the same manner that Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms fueled the Chinese corruption machine.*
> 
> 
> Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-china-should-study-singapores-anti-corruption-strategy-2012-12#ixzz2eYVvUkIR


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting, and, I think, insightful look, by the ]_Globe and Mail's_ Africa correspondent Geoffrey York, at how (and why) China aims to push its _soft power_ agenda in Africa, in this srticle which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/media-agenda-china-buys-newsrooms-influence-in-africa/article14269323/#dashboard/follows/


> Why China is making a big play to control Africa's media
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> NAIROBI — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Last updated Thursday, Sep. 12 2013
> 
> When one of South Africa’s biggest newspaper chains was sold last month, an odd name was buried in the list of new owners: China International Television Corp.
> 
> A major stake in a South African newspaper group might seem an unusual acquisition for Chinese state television, but it was no mystery to anyone who has watched the rapid expansion of China’s media empire across Africa.
> 
> From newspapers and magazines to satellite television and radio stations, China is investing heavily in African media. It’s part of a long-term campaign to bolster Beijing’s “soft power” – not just through diplomacy, but also through foreign aid, business links, scholarships, training programs, academic institutes and the media.
> 
> Its investments have allowed China to promote its own media agenda in Africa, using a formula of upbeat business and cultural stories and a deferential pro-government tone, while ignoring human-rights issues and the backlash against China’s own growing power.
> 
> The formula is a familiar one used widely in China’s domestic media. It leads to a tightly controlled pro-China message, according to journalists and ex-journalists at the Africa branch of CCTV, the Chinese state television monopoly that owns China International Television and launched a new headquarters in Nairobi last year.
> 
> “It was ‘our way or the highway,’” recalls a journalist who worked in Ethiopia for CCTV. He said he was ordered to focus primarily on diplomatic negotiations over Sudan, with his bosses citing “China’s interest in the region” – a reference to China’s state oil companies and their heavy investments in Sudan.
> 
> Other CCTV Africa journalists say they were told to provide positive news on China, to omit negative words such as “regime,” and to ignore countries such as Swaziland that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Chinese demand for ivory could not be mentioned in stories about Africa’s poaching crisis, one journalist said. Another recalled how human-rights questions had to be avoided in an interview with an authoritarian African leader. “I knew it would be cut out of my story, so I self-censored,” he said.
> 
> The journalists asked not to be named for fear of repercussions.
> 
> If there is an “information war” between China and the United States on an African battleground, as former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested at a Congressional committee hearing in 2011, it appears that China is beginning to win the war.
> 
> In South Africa, Chinese investors have teamed up with allies of the ruling African National Congress to purchase Independent News and Media, one of the most powerful media groups in the country, which owns daily newspapers in all of the major cities.
> 
> The deal was spearheaded by Iqbal Surve, a businessman with close African National Congress connections who says he wants the media to report more “positive aspects” of the country. Financing was provided by state investment groups from China and South Africa, along with Mr. Surve’s consortium. Top leaders of the ANC helped put together the Chinese investors with Mr. Surve’s group, analysts said.
> 
> Under the deal, China International Television and the China-Africa Development Fund, both controlled by Beijing, will end up with 20 per cent of the newspaper chain – a stake that will allow them to materially influence the company, according to South Africa’s Competition Commission.
> 
> Even though South Africa’s feisty journalists will push back against any attempt to censor them, China is still likely to end up with more power to shape the media in Africa’s wealthiest country.
> 
> “I do not think the Chinese authorities will crudely impose their views on our media, as they do on much of their own, but I do think that they are likely to try and influence it for a more sympathetic view of themselves and the ANC government,” said Anton Harber, a journalism professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, who has reported extensively on the Chinese investments.
> 
> “It is my view that the ANC is working with their Chinese allies – ruling party to ruling party, in the way the Chinese government so often works – to increase their influence in our local media and counter what they view as a hostile media sector.”
> 
> Meanwhile, other Chinese media investors are gaining a bigger foothold across Africa. A Chinese company, StarTimes, purchased a controlling stake in South African satellite television provider TopTV this year, adding to its presence in 13 other African countries. The state-run radio broadcaster, China Radio International, has FM stations in three East African cities, while its AM channel covers all of Kenya.
> 
> China’s leading English-language state newspaper, China Daily, created an Africa edition last December, published in Nairobi and distributed on Kenya Airways flights and other venues. China has also launched a monthly magazine, ChinAfrica, based in Johannesburg.
> 
> China’s state news agency, Xinhua, has nearly 30 bureaus in Africa, along with its own television channel. It provides news bulletins for 17-million Kenyan cellphones, while CCTV provides a mobile TV service called I Love Africa. African journalists and press officers are often invited on all-expenses-paid “training” sessions in Beijing, as part of Chinese aid programs that give short-term training to 30,000 Africans and full university scholarships to another 18,000.
> 
> In Zimbabwe, CCTV provided new equipment for the state television monopoly, allowing it to broadcast President Robert Mugabe’s campaign rallies for many hours during the July election campaign. China also supplied giant television screens for Zimbabwe’s main cities, so that government information could be broadcast on the streets.
> 
> The centrepiece of China’s media empire is its new CCTV hub in Nairobi and its flagship show, Africa Live. With its staff of about 100 people (about 40 of whom are Chinese), and correspondents in 14 bureaus, the show is intended to compete with BBC and CNN.
> 
> Top executives of CCTV in Nairobi declined requests for an interview. But speaking on condition of anonymity, their journalists said the Africa headquarters is extremely well-financed, with state-of-the-art equipment and salaries double the Kenyan norm.
> 
> Its content, however, is often simplistic and condescending. It produced a documentary, for example, called Glamorous Kenya that portrayed the country as “a land of mystery” and “kingdom of animals.” It gives consistently glowing coverage of Chinese trade and aid in Africa, including frequent stories about the two dozen Confucius Institutes that provide Chinese language training across Africa.
> 
> News scripts are carefully vetted by Chinese editors, the journalists say, and there are instructions to avoid any negative coverage of Chinese leaders at summits. Some journalists are docked pay if their reports are considered “poor.”
> 
> When a CCTV reporter quoted Zambian mine workers who were angry at their Chinese employer, his story was shelved. And when Muslims protested against the Ethiopian government, the CCTV correspondent wondered whether to cover the street protests. His bosses swiftly vetoed it. “No religion,” they said.




I see an interesting _potential_ problem for China: its journalists must, in greater and greater numbers, learn how to function in freer and freer media markets - consider the "dust up" between _People's Daily_ reporter Li Xue Jiang and Prime Minister Harper's media staff on the recent Northern tour - they will bring those habits back to China, into a system where the media are not expected to _compete_ or to "dig" for information.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of China's fight against corruption...

The man described below is the one leading the fight against it in China and thus in the right position as the head of the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

The 2nd most powerful man in China next to Xi Jinping...

Perhaps the party may yet adapt (by stamping out corruption and adopting a system closer to Singapore) with men like him at the helm?

link



> *Mr Clean catches China's graft tigers by the tail*
> Reuters
> By John Ruwitch
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Behind China's aggressive drive to root out corruption is *Wang Qishan*, a historian-turned-economist who once felt so bad about getting free parking that he reportedly sent a colleague back to pay the fee.
> 
> President Xi Jinping launched the anti-corruption campaign after becoming Communist Party chief in November.
> 
> *So far the party has announced the investigation or arrest of eight senior officials, including three from the 376-member elite Central Committee. Among them, former executives from oil giant PetroChina are being investigated in what appears to be the biggest graft probe into a state-run firm in years.
> 
> Wang, 65, heads the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and ranks sixth in the party hierarchy.* His power far exceeds this, said Cheng Li, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and an expert on Chinese politics.
> 
> *"I would say that Wang Qishan is the second most powerful person next only to Xi Jinping," he said.
> 
> Given the secretive nature of China's Communist Party, there are few details on what Wang has done as its top graft-buster, a role he assumed when Xi became party chief.*
> 
> Wang keeps a low profile and his public appearances and comments, like those of all top Chinese leaders, are usually scripted. He rarely gives interviews.
> 
> But observers said the fingerprints of the urbane former banker were visible in the anti-corruption campaign and in related efforts to force officials to behave less extravagantly.
> 
> "He is the lead actor in this," said Zhang Ming, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
> 
> *IMMUNITY FOR ELITE REMOVED
> 
> For example, it was Wang who proposed the party scrap a decades-old unwritten rule that exempted incumbent and retired members of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, of which he belongs, from investigation for corruption, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.*
> 
> That landmark move was approved earlier this year by the Standing Committee, China's top political decision-making body, sources who have ties to the leadership or direct knowledge of the matter have told Reuters.
> 
> *Wang has also reorganised parts of the discipline inspection commission and added two offices so the body can deepen its investigations into provincial leaders.*
> 
> And one of the earliest initiatives Xi unveiled was a set of guidelines for officials that aimed to cut bureaucracy and formality.
> 
> "This came from the discipline commission," said Li of the Brookings Institution.
> 
> "He and Xi Jinping have a very, very good partnership."
> 
> To be sure, China has announced corruption crackdowns before that have met with little success. Experts say only deep and difficult political reforms will move the needle.
> 
> *"If the anti-graft campaign is sustained and expanded, it could begin to challenge the party's systemic problems with corruption, but it's far too early to say that the government is committed to that," said Duncan Innes-Ker, senior China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.*
> 
> Like his predecessors, Xi says corruption threatens the party's very survival. He has said he wants to show he is serious by going after "tigers", or political heavyweights, not just "flies".
> 
> *Some questioned the wisdom of moving Wang away from his role as a leading economic policymaker. A protege of former premier and economic reformer Zhu Rongji, he was even viewed as a dark-horse candidate for premier before the new leadership lineup was announced in November.*
> 
> Now that the Chinese economy is showing signs of stability, the decision to deploy a man widely known as "the chief firefighter" to the corruption front might be a good call.
> 
> "They needed a person to deal with corruption who was strong and whose image and reputation were good, and he was that person. There was no one else they could have picked," said Jin Zhong, editor of Hong Kong's Open magazine, which follows elite Chinese politics.
> 
> Wang is under no illusions as to task ahead. Graft oils the wheels of government at almost every level in China, which ranked 80th out of 176 countries and territories on Transparency International's corruption perceptions index, where a higher ranking means a cleaner public sector.
> 
> "The war against corruption needs to be resolute and long-lasting, and it must be a battle to the death," the Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying in March.
> 
> *Not everything has gone according to plan.
> 
> State media reported last week that Yu Qiyi, a 42-year-old engineer in the eastern city of Wenzhou, drowned after being repeatedly dunked in cold water while being interrogated by corruption investigators. *  Six officials will soon stand trial.
> 
> NO TIME FOR NONSENSE
> 
> Wang made a name for himself in the late 1990s when he sorted out a debt crisis in booming southern Guangdong province.
> 
> He then ran the island province of Hainan as governor before moving to Beijing where he tackled the deadly SARS pandemic in 2003 as mayor after his predecessor was sacked for covering it up.
> 
> His most recent job was vice premier with responsibility for the economy.
> 
> As an undergraduate in the mid-1970s he studied history in Shaanxi province, where he had worked on a farm at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s Wang moved to Beijing and focused on rural policy, the forefront of China's market reforms. He later transitioned into banking.
> 
> *Wang is a straight shooter, sources say. When being briefed by officials he has a habit of stopping them from reading from prepared statements and asking them questions.
> 
> "He does not have time for nonsense and demands direct answers," a source with ties to the leadership told Reuters.
> 
> The new administration has taken steps to introduce more transparency and adhere more closely to the rule of law in anti-corruption work, said Zhu Jiangnan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who has researched corruption in China.*
> 
> The discipline commission held its first news conference ever in January and launched a new website at the start of this month.
> 
> "I suspect some of those ideas are coming from Wang Qishan," Zhu said.
> 
> In May, *Wang ordered disciplinary and supervisory cadres to give up club membership and VIP cards, apparently common gifts for officials, calling them "small objects (that) reflect a big problem in working style".
> 
> The son-in-law of late vice premier Yao Yilin, Wang has a reputation for modesty and honesty*.
> 
> In a late August cover story, the influential state-run magazine, Southern People Weekly, recounted an incident in which a parking attendant insisted on letting Wang, then mayor of Beijing, park for free.
> 
> "The car behind started to get impatient and honk so Wang had to drive away," it said. Wang later sent a staffer to pay the fee.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard in BEIJING. Editing by Dean Yates)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Wang Qishan is a pretty impressive politician. He came to real prominence as mayor of Beijing during the 2008 Olympics but his fame wasn't, really, about that ~ it was based on how, in a frank and honest way, he related to the people. I have mentioned before the (apparently) small incident of raising the entry fees on pretty much all "attractions" in Beijing: almost everyone agreed it was necessary to use "price" to control (over)use (the stone steps in some temples were being visibly word away by millions and millions of Chinese visitors) but the new fees were applied to even the small public parks that pensioners - almost only pensioners - use every day (because they have no backyards). That part provoked public outrage and even a really spontaneous, unapproved public demonstration. Wang Qishan apologized to the pensioners and removed the fees for them. He did so publicly, on TV and it was something of a watershed in Chinese politics. He later served as Vice premier for economic affairs ~ finance minister ~ for Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao and was a bit of a "star" in global economic circles. He is 65 years old.





http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-08/wang-qishan/4360836


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## CougarKing

??? And I thought the proposed undersea tunnel between Pusan, South Korea and Japan was crazy enough...

While there are already many trade links between Taiwan and the mainland- (e.g. direct flights between Taipei and Shanghai, if I can recall correctly, without having to reroute through Hong Kong or Macau anymore as was in the past)- perhaps Beijing's planners are bit too optimistic if they're planning this type of infrastructure already??? 



> *China's Hopes for Bridging the Taiwan Strait*
> 
> More than six decades after Taiwan's estrangement from mainland China, the Taiwan Strait still represents the most physically formidable and symbolically inaccessible barrier to Beijing's objective of eventual reunification with the island. Over the course of its history, Taiwan switched hands from colonial occupiers including the Europeans and Japanese before becoming the prospective battleground between China and Taiwan in the second half of the 20th century. In recent years, military tensions between China and Taiwan have eased, and Beijing hopes that enhanced economic integration and the physical infrastructure it wants to build one day across the Taiwan Strait could bring the country a step closer to fulfilling a core geopolitical imperative by reuniting with the island.
> 
> The South China Morning Post reported Aug. 5 that in its recently approved National Highway Network Plan for 2013-2030, the State Council included two highway projects linking Taiwan to the mainland. One involves the long-proposed Beijing-Taipei Expressway, which would start in Beijing and pass through Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang and Fujian's Fuzhou before crossing the strait and reaching Taipei. Another inland route would start in Chengdu and pass through Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi and Fujian's Xiamen, and cross the Taipei-administered Kinmen archipelago before eventually ending at Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan.
> 
> The plan does not specify what kind of infrastructure -- a bridge or a tunnel, for example -- would be used to connect the mainland to Taiwan over the 180-kilometer (111-mile) strait, but since 1996, if not earlier, Beijing has publicly called for such infrastructure to be built.* One proposal involved a 122-kilometer undersea tunnel, which was deemed preferable because of its relative seismic stability and its location in shallower water. This tunnel would connect Fujian province's Pingtan Island to Hsinchu in northern Taiwan -- a distance nearly three times that of Channel Tunnel, which connects the United Kingdom and France -- and would cost an estimated 400 billion-500 billion yuan ($65 billion-$81 billion) to build*. Another proposal involves linking Taiwan's southern Chiayi county to the outlying island of Kinmen via tunnel or bridge, where it would connect with envisaged infrastructure that would eventually link it to Xiamen, Fujian province.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Besides the massive economic costs associated with building a bridge or tunnel across the Taiwan Strait, security concerns, geologic vulnerabilities (due to earthquakes) and the sheer width of the strait present technical challenges to its construction. Even if the infrastructure were built, it is not clear that they would be economically justifiable given that airliners and ships are now allowed to travel across the strait frequently.
> 
> Full article:  Stratfor link


----------



## tomahawk6

Not happening IMO.Too much concern for a PRC invasion.


----------



## 57Chevy

Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

China 'Grabs' Control from U.S. of Massive TAPI Gas Pipeline(ABC.AZ, Azerbaijan) 

 "By gaining control over gas from the Galkynysh field, China has in fact grabbed control over TAPI, a development that the U.S. appears to have been ready for and doesn't mind. To some extent, as it was with the USSR in its day, it will be more convenient for Washington to have China mired in Afghanistan's mayhem."

From  WorldMeets.US 

September 11, 2013
Baku, Fineko: With a subtle "gesture of its hand" yesterday, China grabbed control over the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline project [TAPI] from the United States, becoming the chief overseer of Central and South Asian gas resources. 

 By means of a contract for the sale of 25 billion cubic meters of gas per year concluded between state-owned Turkmengas and China National Petroleum Corporation, the ideas and plans of others have been expropriated. The deal will increase the volume of gas Turkmengas supplies to China by up to 65 billion cubic meters. At the same time, the agreement highlights Turkmenistan's plan for boosting exports through new export routes, in this case, through a branch of the TAPI pipeline referred to as "Line D," which will run through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan on its way to China. 

Article continues at link.

info; 
 Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
*(History make for a good read)


----------



## CougarKing

Related update for PLA carrier aviation:

The Diplomat



> *China’s Carrier-Based J-15 Likely Enters Mass Production*
> By Zachary Keck
> September 14, 2013
> 
> 
> A number of recent reports in Chinese state-run media indicate that the country’s carrier-based J-15 multirole fighter jets have entered mass production.
> 
> *The Shenyang J-15 (also called Flying Shark) is China’s carrier-based fighter aircraft. It was reversed engineered from a Russian Sukhoi Su-33*  that China acquired from Ukraine, although it reportedly is equipped with some indigenous weapons, avionics and other features that Beijing claims greatly enhances its capabilities. The J-15 is also powered by the Chinese-built Taihang (WS-10) turbofan engine.
> 
> A J-15 prototype conducted its first flight test in August 2009. In November last year it was announced that a PLA Air Force (PLAAF) pilot conducted the first take-off and landing from China’s aircraft carrier, Liaoning, using one of the J-15 tester jets. Throughout 2013 the PLAAF has continued holding take-off and landing exercises using the J-15 aircraft.
> 
> The People’s Daily Online carried a couple of reports this week on the J-15. Most of them begin by noting that “many keen military observers” have noted that the J-15s that have appeared on CCTV as of late have been painted gray with a People’s Republic of China flag on them, in contrast to the initial five J-15s that were painted yellow and were therefore marked as being intended solely for testing and development. The reports then note that the new paint job has led these “keen military observers” to speculate that the J-15 fighters have entered mass production.
> 
> One of the reports then asks Yin Zhuo, which it identifies only as a military analyst but who is also a former Rear Admiral in the PLA Navy (PLAN), to comment on this speculation. Admiral Yin begins by affirming that there has not been an official announcement yet on whether the J-15s have entered mass production, but nonetheless judges that the “navy paint finish on the J-15 indicates that it is now in formal service.”
> 
> *He is then quoted as that online speculation about whether the aircraft has entered into mass production is “logical based on the facts that J-15 is already in service, and its technology is mature enough for mass production.” The rest of the article is devoted to Admiral Yin discussing what the implications will be if the J-15s have entered mass production, including the aircraft’s service life, which he estimates at 25-30 years.*
> 
> “Once mass production is under way,” the People’s Daily paraphrases Admiral Yin as saying, “the aircraft design will be fixed other than in terms of possible changes to radar and electronic communication systems, or modernization of the engine after 10 to 15 years of service. However, the profile, basic finish, and performance standards of the aircraft have been established.”
> 
> Although hardly conclusive, the reports strongly suggest that mass production of the J-15 has begun, or at least that the Communist Party wants to create that impression.
> 
> Notably, the reports coincide with the Commander of PLAN, Admiral Wu Shengli, visiting the United States. The commander of the Liaoning carrier and the pilot who first landed on the carrier last November are accompanying Admiral Wu on the trip, according to Reuters.
> 
> “We have around 36 airplanes operating on board our ship,” Captain Zhang Zheng, the Liaoning commander told reporters in Washington this week, referring to aircraft carrier. “And we are still practicing and doing tests and experiments for the equipment and systems.”
> 
> Admiral Wu, on the other hand, told reporters that the Liaoning is just for training and experimentation and after a “final evaluation” the PLAN will decide on the development of a new aircraft carrier for the service.
> 
> *Meanwhile, one of the other J-15 articles that appeared on the People’s Daily website compared it favorably relative to other countries’ carrier-based aircraft. Indeed, Admiral Yin, who was also quoted in that article, is paraphrased as saying that the J-15 “reaches a similar level to the U.S. F/A-18C/D Super Hornet” and is superior in terms of its air combat capability.*
> 
> However, Want China Times flags a Xinhua report that quotes Sun Cong, the J-15s designer, noting that currently the aircraft cannot launch attacks against ships and ground targets when taking off from the Liaoning. That is because the aircraft carrier utilizes a ski-jump ramp and the J-15 would be too heavy to take off if it was carrying air-to-surface missiles and bombs. Thus, until the Navy acquires a Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested-Recovery (CATOBAR) carrier, the J-15, which is a multirole fighter, will be limited primarily to air superiority operations (and ship defense).
> 
> Notably, one of the People’s Daily reports observed that the J-15’s “front wheel is suitable for catapult launch similar to the carrier-based fighter of the U.S. Navy. The catapult launch was taken into consideration at the beginning of its design.”


----------



## CougarKing

I am guessing that Gen. Carlisle's comment- "We may not necessarily fight China, (but) we will fight their stuff"- refers to possible exports of newer Chinese aircraft to North Korea and Myanmar or other possible adversaries outside the Asia region who might use Chinese aircraft in the future. 

Defense Tech



> *China On Pace to Challenge U.S. Airpower Edge: General*
> 
> by Bryant Jordan on September 18, 2013
> 
> NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — As China continues to enhance its military’s technology and equipment, the U.S. Air Forces Pacific Command needs to be able to respond – even if it’s not against China, the commander of PacAF said Wednesday.
> 
> *“We may not necessarily fight China, we will fight their stuff,” Gen. Herbert Carlisle said during a presentation at the Air Force Association’s annual conference here.*
> 
> Carlisle, who took over the Pacific theater command just over a year ago, said enemies and potential enemies have seen what American airpower can do “and their objective in many cases is to keep us as far as away as they possibly can.”
> 
> Carlisle was not alone in raising the specter of an emerging and growing China as a key challenge to the U.S.
> 
> On Tuesday, *Gen. Mike Hostage, commander of Air Combat Command, told reporters that China is forging ahead with fifth generation fighters that will challenge American airpower in the region in about five years unless the U.S. is able to field the F-35 Lightning II as scheduled.
> 
> The Air Force is slated to buy 1,763 F-35s — barring budget cuts that reduce the number. *The plane was already behind schedule before the economy crashed in 2008 and began taking a toll on the Defense Department.
> 
> “If we keep slowing the ramp, we’ll never get to 1,763 because I’ll be ‘bone yarding’ the first ones before I get the last ones. It’s critical we get to that number,” Hostage said.
> 
> PacAF spelled out a year ago its need for the F-35, emphasizing in its annual strategic plan that it remained a priority for the theater.
> 
> “New threats and investment needs are not theoretical possibilities for the future; they are here now,” the plan stated.
> 
> *Carlisle on Wednesday called China “the pacing threat” because it’s the most capable in the region. He also noted that Russia is developing more sophisticated capabilities and exporting them to other countries.*
> 
> “These advance capabilities will be ubiquitous throughout the world just because they go to the highest bidder,” he said.
> 
> They’re using electronic attack systems able to operate in a spectrum that can wreak havoc on GPS and radar systems, Carlisle said. Potential adversaries wanting to keep the U.S. at a distance look to do that with advanced surface-to-air missiles land and anti-ship missiles.
> 
> *Integrated air and missile defense will be one of the biggest challenges, he said, requiring continued capability in strike ops, active defense – including Patriot missiles, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles – and passive defense capabilities such as flexible basing of launch and fuel assets, concealment and camouflage, and agile command and control capability.*
> 
> The military’s emphasis on the Pacific region – dubbed *the Pacific Pivot* – is a response to the U.S. determination that national security strategy requires a more robust presence.
> 
> “This administration has said that by necessity we will refocus and rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region just because of [its] importance,” he said. “Thirty-six countries [and] 55 percent of gross domestic product of the world is in this region, and clearly the health and security and stability of the Asian-Pacific region is key to not only our country, but pretty much every country in the world.”


----------



## a_majoor

While "quantity has a quality all of its own", we also need to consider the training, logistics and even tactics and doctrine of the gaining air forces. It is quite possible that the ROK, Japanese, Taiwanese and other air forces equipped with smaller numbers of Western jet fighters will still have the qualitative edge due to superior pilot training or the other factors listed, and of course the USAF still has a large lead over the other air forces because of the ability to integrate a much larger package of logistical and support capabilities into her Air Force.

I detect a bit of special pleading and political posturing for domestic and budgetary reasons in Gen. Carlisle's comment.


----------



## CougarKing

China has not had to fight against an opponent rich with Electronic Warfare capabilities. Clearly they are working hard to close that gap.  

Freebeacon



> *The disclosure that China has the capability of jamming the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, or JTIDS, was revealed in a Chinese military technical article published in July.*
> 
> *JTIDS is part of a group of military communications systems called Link 16 that gives U.S. military forces jam-resistant communications*, a key strategic advantage used in joint warfighting, a specialty of the American military.
> 
> 
> (...)


----------



## tomahawk6

Its an evolving system.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/the-wonders-of-link-16-for-less-midslvts-updated-02471/


----------



## CougarKing

Mongolia? As if the PRC province of Inner Mongolia wasn't enough that they have to bring the rest of the Mongolians under their control...



> *How China Could Conquer Asia with Six Wars Without Violating the U.N. Charter*
> Julian Ku
> 
> One possible silver lining in Russia and China's invocation of the UN Charter to block U.S. action in Syria is that both nations have bound themselves (at least in part) to the same norm.  But at least with respect to China, it is probably not bothered by the UN Charter's limitations on the use of force because any of the wars it is likely to contemplate would be (at least arguably) consistent with Article II's self defense obligations.
> 
> For instance, this astonishingly fierce article in Chinese, (translation here)  from a nationalistic website in China and republished in HK, lays out
> _"Six Wars China Must Fight in the Next Fifty Years."_  Those wars would involve invasions of the following places in the next half-century:
> 
> 1) Taiwan
> 2) The Spratly Islands and the South China Sea (kicking out Vietnam and the Philippines)
> 3) Southern Tibet (along the border with India)
> 4) Diaoyu Islands and Okinawa (kicking out Japan)
> 5) Mongolia
> 6) Siberia (Russia)
> 
> 
> For every single one of these proposed wars, China would raise the banner of self-defense under Article 51 since it claims sovereignty over each of the territories it would be invading.  Sure, some of their territorial sovereignty claims are complete bunk (Siberia?!?).  But there are certainly plausible legal arguments behind the rest of them.
> 
> Now, this list of _"six wars"_ is the stuff of Chinese nationalistic fantasies, although any of the first four conflicts could really happen in the next few years.  But from China's perspective, the UN Charter places almost no restraints on it since it does not restrict China from recovering territory lost to foreign powers in its past.  So China can talk as much as it likes about the sanctity of the U.N. Charter, because it will never feel serious constrained by it.
> 
> As a bonus for those readers intrigued by the New Chinese Imperialism, I highly recommend viewing this CG animation video of a joint China-Taiwan military campaign to invade and occupy the Diaoyu Islands, kicking out the Japanese as they do so.  It is like a video game, complete with a last scene with a disturbing depiction of a Chinese nuke used against Tokyo.  No wonder Japan is beefing up its military.
> 
> The larger point is that I have never understood why everyone thinks the UN Charter will constrain military action since almost all conceivable large-scale inter-state wars will involve territorial disputes where sovereignty is contested. That is certainly the case with China and it would be the case between Nicaragua and Colombia, or Chile and Bolivia, etc.  Perhaps the UN Charter constrains some countries, but I doubt it will constrain China if it ever embarks on these insane but not inconceivable plans for Asian domination.
> 
> 
> *Opinio Juris*


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don't think China needs, much less wants, to fight any of those wars.

Taiwan is non-negotiable. It IS part of China. Reunificatuon will happen; China knows that, Taiwan knows that America knows that. No one wants anything except a peaceful reunification. It doesn't matter what anyone, other than Taiwan and China thinks about the matter or says about the matter. Japan, India, Russia and even America are all irrelevant. In my opinion that chance of a an accidental war due to political miscalculation, is slight, the chance of a Chinese war of aggression is even more slight.

The Spratly Islands and the South China Sea, Southern Tibet, the Diaoyu Islands, Mongolia and Siberia can be, and I suspect will be bought. China would rather _share_ resources than fight anyone.

I have speculated, several times, about the _potential_ for a Sino-Russian war over Eastern Siberia, noting that China regards everything East of the Yenisei River as being _Asian_ and, therefore, within China's, not Russia's, domain, but I am 100% convinced that neither Russia nor China wants to fight over it. China wants the resources in all five areas and can and will pay for them.


----------



## a_majoor

The Russio Chinese "wars" happened in the 1960's, but petered out for various reasons, including a pretty horrible force to space correlation on either side, the inability to project power into Eastern Siberia by either side (the Russians essentially had a single rail line linking Siberia to the metropole west of the Urals, and the Chinese simply did not have the capabilities at that time) and the threat of American intervention on the side of the Chinese should things go nuclear (Nixon putting China under the American nuclear umbrella).

Edward points out that the Chinese are quite happy to buy what the want and need for the foreseeable future, and several recent books and articles by Robert Kaplan also expand on the theme of China as well as America moving to establishing _relationships_ rather than _bases_ as a means to project power in the future. The Chinese approach may be more of a hybrid one, since building deep water commercial ports in Siri Lanka and Pakistan as part of the "String of Pearls" does have obvious military implications.

An interesting chapter in "Imperial Grunts" follows the exploits of an American officer who seems intent on training and coopting the Mongolian military as a sort of "Gurka" force to assist the US in protecting or advancing their interests in Asia (tellingly far beyond the reach of the US Navy). The few Mongolian officers I have actually met have all been trained by the PLA, which suggests the American exercise in relationship building and coopting has probably run its course.


----------



## CougarKing

The notorious Bo Xilai's trial is now over and he has just been handed a life sentence. Perhaps the CCP is setting him up for an eventual return the same way Deng Xiaoping returned after being purged? 

link




> *China's disgraced Bo Xilai given life term for corruption*
> Reuters
> 
> By Megha Rajagopalan
> 
> JINAN, China (Reuters) - A Chinese court sentenced ousted senior politician Bo Xilai to life in jail on Sunday after finding him guilty of corruption and abuse of power, a tough term that gives him little chance of staging any political comeback.
> 
> *Bo was a rising star in China's leadership circles and cultivated a loyal following through his charisma and populist, quasi-Maoist policies, especially among those left out in the cold by China's anything-for-growth economic policies.
> 
> But his career was stopped short last year by a murder scandal in which his wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted of poisoning a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who had been a family friend.
> 
> While Bo has the right to appeal within 10 days from Monday, the sentence effectively puts an end to his political ambitions and the glamorous lifestyle he enjoyed as a member of China's ruling elite.*
> 
> The court in the eastern city of Jinan, where Bo was tried, ordered that all his personal assets be seized, and deprived him of his political rights for life, according to a transcript released by the court's official microblog.
> 
> (...)


----------



## tomahawk6

Bo thought he was above the Party.His wife was a murderer.I don't see him making a comeback.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My sense is that Bo is too old. He's 64, Xi Jinping is only 60 and he has just taken office. The next "slice" of leaders will be about that age when they assume power - that means they are, now, in their early 50s.

Even if his friends in high places decide, at some point in the next decade, to pardon him ~ and he does have powerful friends ~ it will be too late. He's lost too much; younger men are building even greater power bases. He's done and so, too, in my _opinion_, is the _Maoist_ claptrap he spouted. Xi Jinping, like Hu Jintao before him, is an engineer, the next generation are likely to be _managers_ with backgrounds in engineering and accounting and, shades of Stephen Harper, economics. Men (and women) who studied history (like Bo) or the Chinese classics (like a friend of mine who is also a low level Party leader) are less and less evident in the top tiers of the Party.


----------



## a_majoor

Rather curious about the business of leaders who are engineers and managers rather than historians or classical scholars.

In other posts you point out that the strength of Chinese culture has been due to the adherence to Confucian values over many thousands of years, and that the "One Child" policy had weakened these values. Now the top leadership and much of the high ranking members of the party apparatus (and presumably a lot of their technocratic power base) is also seemingly divorced from the cultural roots. While no one can argue against the importance of being skilled and knowledgable managers and technocrats to shape and run an industrial nation-state, I am starting to wonder if the Chinese have not set themselves up for a version of the "culture wars" like we did starting in the 1960's as our traditional values and "culture" was weakened and marginalized from within?


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not so sure it's really all that odd.

The top leadership is suspicious of the Taoists and Confucians, they, and the scholars who study and, too often, worship them are _competing_ with the Party for the peoples' _hearts and minds_.

Jiang Zemin was the first of the "new style" leaders - Sun Yat-sen was both a traditional Chinese classical scholar and a trained medical doctor, Mao was, at best, a qualified elementary school teacher, Zhou Enlei, on the other hand, had a mix of a traditional gentleman's education and, after becoming a committed communist, hands on experience on the factory floor, but he was, at base, a classical Chinese intellectual. Deng Xiaoping was a true worker. (Henry Kissinger said of Mao and Zhou: "Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao's passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou's intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents.") But, after Deng, it has been all engineers, all the time.

Mao, although he fancied himself some sort of intellectual - real scholars scoffed at his pretensions, but only in private - disliked and distrusted Chinese philosophers, like Zhou, because he understood, viscerally, that the sort of communism he advocated could not withstand real intellectual scrutiny.

(I have always found it odd that Zhou, whose abilities are hard to overestimate, could be a convinced communist. The generally accepted explanation is that he saw communism as the best, or, at least quickest way to "reboot" China from the Manchu _Qing_ backwardness into something resembling the modernity, and equality, he had seen in Japan and Europe.)

But Zhou appears to have seen no conflict between either Taoism or Confucian values, and nor, as far as I can tell, did Deng. Deng allowed, even encouraged, _traditional_ thought and values to be taught again, formally, in both mainstream universities and in more traditional temple schools and monasteries. Jiang and Hu continued to allow it all, but, I think, with less enthusiasm than Deng. It's too soon to see what Xi thinks.


----------



## CougarKing

A picture of the J20's new mystery missile is at the link. Doesn't the fact that the missile is carried externally instead of internally like the F-35 mean that the J20's RCS is greater then, negating any stealth advantage?  ???

Defense News blog



> *China’s J-20 Spotted With New Missile*
> 
> Sep 23, 2013
> 
> By Wendell Minnickin
> 
> Ok, who can tell me what this is? Any educated guess welcome. For me, *it looks like the Russian R-77 (AA-12 Adder)*, but it could be a variant of the SD-10 (particularly the surface-to-air variant).
> 
> (...)
> 
> 
> “A new mysterious type of missile has been spotted on the second prototype of the J-20 — China’s first stealth fighter — with a serial number of 2002, reports the state run People’s Daily, citing a video clip released on Chinese military websites.
> 
> According to video clip, the missile is white in color and unlike the F-22 Raptor fighter of the United States Air Force, which holds its missile racks inside the internal weapons bays, *the J-20 carries this mysterious missile outside of its fuselage.
> 
> Experts claim that after the J-20 fighter takes off, the missile will remain outside the fuselage even after the missile bays are closed. * Song Xinzhi, a Chinese military analyst, said that two missiles were seen outside the missile bays during the flight. One is a regular medium-range air-to-air missile with wings, the other is a new missile without any wings.
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Seems not every developing nation in Africa is as quick to welcome Chinese investment:



> *China Finds Resistance to Oil Deals in Africa*
> By ADAM NOSSITER
> September 17, 2013
> 
> 
> NIAMEY, Niger - In Niger, government officials have fought a Chinese oil giant step by step, painfully undoing parts of a contract they call ruinous. In neighboring Chad, they have been even more forceful, shutting down the Chinese and accusing them of gross environmental negligence. In Gabon, they have seized major oil tracts from China, handing them over to the state company.
> 
> China wants Africa's oil as much as ever. But instead of accepting the old terms, which many African officials call unconditional surrender, some cash-starved African states are pushing back, showing an assertiveness unthinkable until recently and suggesting that the days of unbridled influence by the African continent's mega-investor may be waning.
> 
> For years, China has found eager partners across the continent, where governments of every ilk have welcomed the nation's deep pockets and hands-off approach to local politics as an alternative to the West.
> 
> Now China's major state oil companies are being challenged by African governments that have learned decades of hard lessons about heedless resource-grabs by outsiders and are looking anew at the deals they or their predecessors have signed. Where the Chinese companies are seen as gouging, polluting or hogging valuable tracts, African officials have started resisting, often at the risk of angering one of their most important trading partners.
> 
> _"This is all we've got. If our natural resources are given away, we'll never get out of this. We've got to fight to get full value for these resources. If they are valued correctly, we can hope to bring something to our people. In the context of this fight, we are revisiting these contracts to correct them. In the future, we will pay closer attention, to not make the same mistakes."_ - Foumakoye Gado. Niger oil minister
> 
> A private auditor hired by Niger recently found bloated costs and unfair charges by the China National Petroleum Corporation, providing Niger with ammunition for its next round of tense negotiations in Beijing, Mr. Gado suggested. Tens of millions of dollars have already been scored off the Chinese through such painstaking revisions.
> 
> Across the border in Chad, officials have taken a harder line with China National Petroleum. The country's oil minister shut down the Chinese operations in mid-August after discovering that they were dumping excess crude oil in ditches south of the capital, N'Djamena, then making Chadian workers remove it with no protection.
> 
> _"Just dumped in the open. This is a serious case, the first of its kind. You can't just shut your eyes in the face of it. It's a responsible reaction. Are we going to continue to ignore what the Chinese companies are doing? I think this is the beginning of a change between African states and the Chinese. It's a consciousness-raising, so they won't be guilty in the face of history."_ - Antoine Doudjidingao, economist
> 
> Last month Chad's oil minister refused to allow the Chinese to resume operations, even expelling the company's local director-general and his assistant. There would be no resumption, the government said, until the Chinese built remediation and treatment facilities.
> 
> In Gabon, the government has surprised the oil industry by withdrawing a permit for a significant oil field from a subsidiary of another Chinese state-owned company, Sinopec, turning it over to a newly created national oil company. Officials were quoted last month as threatening to cancel permits to other fields as well, accusing the Chinese of environmental missteps, as in Chad, and mismanagement.
> 
> For a time, oil at the refinery was piling up because the high price kept buyers away. The Chinese wanted to charge for piping the crude from the oil fields to the refinery; Niger is refusing. The Chinese wanted to charge export-level prices for the crude oil at the refinery; again, Niger is balking. The Chinese maintain a substantial benefits-freighted payroll at the refinery, another cost Niger is expected to carry; it is rejecting that, too.
> 
> _"This is a lesson we are giving to the Chinese: we are keeping a close lookout on them."_- Mahaman Gaya, Oil Ministry's secretary general
> 
> Niger's lesson is being applied elsewhere as well: African governments, grateful as they are for Chinese-built roads and ministry buildings, are no longer passive partners.
> 
> 
> *NY Times*


----------



## a_majoor

Another interesting Chinese deal; leasing farmland in the Ukraine. How long this deal lasts could be interesting in light of how African nations are reacting to Chinese investment. What could happen if the Ukraine decides they did not get full andn fair value from the deal?

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/09/china-leases-9-of-ukraines-arable.html



> *China leases 9% of Ukraine's arable farmland for 50 years*
> 
> China is to lease 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of Ukrainian farmland. China’s official Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps has signed an agreement with Ukrainian agricultural firm KSG Agro, which would see Ukraine provide 100,000 hectares to China. That would eventually rise to 3 million hectares.
> 
> This would be 11,583 square miles of Ukrainian land over the span of 50 years—which means the eastern European country will give up about 5% of its total land, or 9% of its arable farmland to feed China’s burgeoning population.
> 
> The 50-year plan was mainly aimed at growing crops and raising pigs.
> 
> In 2009, China had a total of just over 2 million hectares of farming land abroad.
> 
> The 3 million hectares is about equal the land area of Massachusetts. It is also about the size of Belgium.
> As part of the deal, China’s Export-Import bank has given Ukraine a $3 billion loan for agricultural development. In exchange for its produce, Ukraine will receive seeds, equipment, a fertilizer plant (Ukraine imports about $1 billion worth of fertilizer every year), and a plant to produce a crop protection agent. XPCC also says it will help build a highway in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea as well as bridge across the Strait of Kerch, a transport and industrial center for the country.
> 
> There have been smaller deals between Egypt and countries in Africa.


----------



## CougarKing

A major update: one can infer from this that the J31 will probably the more likely adversary that the F35 will face among China's two known stealth fighter prototypes. 

Or this could be an attempt of deliberate misinformation to potential enemies by the admiral. 



> *J-31 stealth fighter designed for export, says PLA admiral*
> 
> 
> *The J-31, China's second prototype fifth-generation stealth fighter, designed by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, will be produced for the export market instead of for China's air force and navy, according to Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong* of the PLA Navy in a People's Daily report.
> <snipped>
> Like the FC-1/JF-17 Xiaolong or Thunder multirole fighter designed jointly by China and Pakistan, the J-31 will be most likely be a model intended for export to China's allies and strategic partners, which may include countries like North Korea and Iran. Chinese fighters are a much cheaper alternative to US fighters for developing countries, even those which are able to buy military hardware from the United States.
> 
> source: wantchinatimes.com



J-31 /F-60 Shen Fei (Falcon eagle)


----------



## CougarKing

Defense News blog



> *Chinese UAV Contest Practices Simulated Carrier Landings*
> 
> Sep 26, 2013
> By Wendell Minnick
> in Intercepts
> 
> 
> Chinese media reports indicate that the winner of the* 2nd AVIC-Cup International UAV Innovation Grand Prix (UAVGP)* in the fixed-wing category this week was fielded by a group of students representing Shenyang Aerospace University in Liaoning Province. The AVIC-Cup competition was held at Miyun Airport in northeast Beijing. According to media reports, the fixed-wing UAV attempted to land on a mock aircraft carrier in the center of the airfield. It successfully snagged the second hook. It is unclear how well other competitors performed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is an interesting item in _Defence News_ reporting that Chinese Firm Wins Big Turkish Air-Defense Deal.

The article says that, "In a multibillion-dollar deal, Turkey agreed Thursday to buy a Chinese-made long-range air- and missile-defense system — a move that could prevent the system from being integrated with Turkey’s existing NATO architecture. A contract valued at a reported $3 billion was awarded to the China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp. CPMEIC, maker of the HQ-9 long-range air-defense and anti-missile system ... [and] ... Other contenders for the contract were a US partnership of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, offering the Patriot air defense system; Russia’s Rosoboronexport, marketing the S-300; and the Italian-French consortium Eurosam, maker of the SAMP/T Aster 30."


----------



## Edward Campbell

At first glance, this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Policy_, belongs in the Grand Strategy for a Divided America thread but, really, it is a warning to the world that the era of a unipolar world, on in which America's _hyperpuissance_ no longer guarantees peace and security for many. The article poses a challenge for the world, how to adapt to America's return to a _Jeffersonian_ view of foreign policy (see Walter Russell Mead's _Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World_, 2001, for more on the four _threads_ that run through American policy). This poses a special challenge for China because, as president Obama suggests, America is "creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill."

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/24/obama_to_world_bad_news_the_american_empire_is_dead


> Obama to World: Bad News. The American Empire Is Dead.
> 
> Posted By Colum Lynch, Ty McCormick
> 
> Tuesday, September 24, 2013
> 
> U.S. President Barack Obama presented world leaders at the United Nations with an image of America as a reluctant superpower, ready to confront Iran's nukes and kill its enemies with targeted drone strikes, but unprepared to embark on open-ended military missions in Syria and other troubled countries. That, he hinted, should give the world cause for anxiety.
> 
> "The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries," he said in his address before the 193-member General Assembly. "The notion of American empire may be useful propaganda, but it isn't borne out by America's current policy or public opinion."
> 
> Obama said that "the recent debate within the United States over Syria clearly showed the danger for the world is not an America that is eager to immerse itself in the affairs of other countries or take on every problem in the region as its own. The danger for the world is that the United States, after a decade of war -- rightly concerned about issues back home, aware of the hostility that our engagement in the region has engendered throughout the Muslim world -- may disengage, creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill."
> 
> Obama said that for the time being, American foreign-policy priorities in the Middle East will focus primarily on two key priorities: "Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Arab-Israeli conflict. While these issues are not the cause of all the region's problems, they have been a major source of instability for far too long, and resolving them can help serve as a foundation for a broader peace."
> 
> In addressing the conflict in Syria, Obama said U.S. aims were largely humanitarian.
> 
> "There's no 'great game' to be won, nor does America have any interest in Syria beyond the well-being of its people, the stability of its neighbors, the elimination of chemical weapons, and ensuring it does not become a safe haven for terrorists," he said.
> 
> Obama affirmed his commitment to the U.S.-Russian plan to place the Assad regime's chemical weapons under international control, acknowledging that the Syrian president had taken a positive initial step by declaring his stockpiles.
> 
> "My preference has always been a diplomatic resolution to this issue," he said, stressing the importance of a Security Council resolution that will hold Assad to his commitments. "There must be consequences if they fail to do so," he said. "If we cannot agree even on this, then it will show that the U.N. is incapable of enforcing the most basic of international laws."
> 
> The president presented the U.S.-Russian plan as a catalyst for a broader international effort to bring the conflict to an end, but emphasized that America should not determine who will eventually lead in Syria. In keeping with his characteristically small-bore approach, he announced an additional $340 million in U.S. humanitarian assistance but shied away from any mention of toppling Bashar al-Assad.
> 
> The United States and Russia remain sharply divided over how to implement their chemical weapons agreement; the U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the pact has been delayed several times. The United States insists that Syria face the threat of unspecified "consequences" if it fails to comply with its obligation to disarm, while Russia prefers a more consensual approach that includes no explicit or implicit threat of force.
> 
> Speaking before Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the U.N. Security Council to hold the Syrian government to "fully and quickly honor[ing]" the obligations it has undertaken to destroy its chemical weapons, and he pleaded with the Security Council to move forward with an "enforceable" resolution ensuring that Syria complies.
> 
> But Ban added that removing unconventional arms can't be the international community's only goal in Syria. "We can hardly be satisfied with destroying chemical weapons while the wider war is still destroying Syria. The vast majority of the killing and atrocities have been carried out with conventional weapons," he said.
> 
> Ban urged Syria's combatants and their foreign backers to "stop fueling the bloodshed in Syria" and halt all arms shipments to the fighters. "Military victory is an illusion," he said. "The only answer is a political settlement." Ban also raised the possibility of sending U.N. human rights monitors to Syria, where they "could play a useful role in reporting and deterring further violations."
> 
> Obama, meanwhile, laid out a rather modest account of American "core interests" in the Middle East and North Africa: countering military aggression against U.S. partners in the region, protecting global energy reserves, and confronting the dual threats of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
> 
> "The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure these core interests in the region," he said. "But I also believe that we can rarely achieve these objectives through unilateral American action -- particularly with military action. Iraq shows us that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Rather, these objectives are best achieved when we partner with the international community and with the countries and people of the region."
> 
> Accordingly, he defended the U.S. decision to work with Egypt's new military regime, which came to power through a July 3 military coup and launched a bloody crackdown on its political opposition. "Our approach to Egypt reflects a larger point: The United States will at times work with governments that do not meet the highest international expectations, but who work with us on our core interests," Obama said.
> 
> Obama added that he is willing to work even with America's traditional rivals, singling out Iran, to achieve his goals. Speaking several hours before Iranian President Hasan Rouhani was due to address the U.N. General Assembly, Obama offered assurances that "we are not seeking regime change, and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy. Instead, we insist that the Iranian government meet its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and U.N. Security Council resolutions."
> 
> "We should be able to achieve a resolution that respects the rights of the Iranian people, while giving the world confidence that the Iranian program is peaceful. To succeed, conciliatory words will have to be matched by actions that are transparent and verifiable."
> 
> Earlier in the day, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff took to the U.N. podium to blast the massive electronic spying program that Obama has overseen in office. The surveillance, she claimed, constitutes a breach of international law and an affront to America's allies. Obama sought to assure leaders like her that he is listening. "We have begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so as to properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share," Obama said. But he went on to defend the controversial eavesdropping effort, saying it was a just approach to combating terrorism by a superpower that is "shifting away from a perpetual war-footing."




China has become quite comfortably reliant upon America's willingness and ability to e.g. maintain the freedom of the seas for all of us. China is also comfortable with American _interventionism_ because, the Chinese believe, it actually strengthens the effects of China's ongoing _soft power_ offensive.

It is, first, important to understand that China regards itself as a friend, indeed a good friend, to America. In 2008 there is little doubt that *a)* China could have brought the US economy to its knees (or even to ruin) by joining Russia in a big bond sell off,* and *b)*China has continued to underwrite the debt the US needs to do _quantitative easing_ and it does so despite very serious reservation from within the senior levels of the Chinese bureaucracy.

Second, we must understand that while China has _global_ power ambitions, some Chinese would say 'requirements,' it has, now, neither the will nor the ways to exercise such power ... not even within their own region.

A third and final point is that China sees the same "enemies" as do many Westerners: radical, militant Islam and disaffected people in the third world, especially in Africa and South West Asia.

China and America are reluctant allies ~ indeed many (senior but actually quite stupid) people want them to be enemies ~ but they are unable to work together at this time because, despite their common causes, there are some important divisions: especially China's desire to see America "off" the Asian mainland.

China may find itself pressed into service to take up some of the _slack_ which will (not may) result from an American return to _Jeffersonianism_. This will be difficult for a country which is unprepared and it will be a test of the _judgement_ of Chinese officials and military leaders. The Chinese will not do as well as we might hope - "new recruits" rarely do - but their inevitable failures must not become a cause to promote enmity between _natural_, albeit reluctant allies.

_____
*There are persistent, albeit unconfirmed reports, that, _circa_ 2008/09, China rejected a Russian proposal to destroy the US economy by a coordinated bond sell off. There is some serious doubt about whether or not the US could have survived such an "attack."


----------



## CougarKing

[sarcasm]Now that's a first...the Chinese state media actually criticizing something acquired by the Chinese government. [/sarcasm]

Somehow I am a little skeptical that a network like the SMN would do this unless someone higher up wanted it to be known. Perhaps they want the West to continue to underestimate the fledgling PLANAF Fleet Air Arm? 

Defense News



> *Chinese Media Takes Aim at J-15 Fighter*
> Sep. 28, 2013 - 01:49PM   |
> By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI —* In an unusual departure for mainland Chinese-language media, the Beijing-based Sina Military Network (SMN) criticized the capabilities of the carrier-borne J-15 Flying Shark as nothing more than a “flopping fish.”*
> 
> On Sept. 22, the state-controlled China Daily Times reported the new aircraft carrier Liaoning had just finished a three-month voyage and conducted over 100 sorties of “various aircraft,” of which the J-15 “took off and landed on the carrier with maximum load and various weapons.” This report was also carried on the official Liberation Army Daily.
> 
> Contradicting any report by official military or government media is unusual in China given state control of the media.
> 
> *What sounded more like a rant than analysis, SMN, on Sept. 23, reported the new J-15 was incapable of flying from the Liaoning with heavy weapons, “effectively crippling its attack range and firepower.”*
> 
> The fighter can take off and land on the carrier with two YJ-83K anti-ship missiles, two PL-8 air-to-air missiles, and four 500-kilogram bombs. But a weapons “load exceeding 12 tons will not get it off the carrier’s ski jump ramp.” This might prohibit it from carrying heavier munitions such as PL-12 medium-range air-to-air missiles.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

The landmark FTZ opens in Shanghai, which could potentially herald a new era in economic and financial reforms. To think the article failed to mention how Hong Kong will stand to lose if the FTZ becomes successful, because the Shanghai will be a more effective conduit for foreign investment than Hong Kong or other city SEZs opened up during Deng Xiaoping's time. 

This FTZ is the brainchild of Premier Li Keqiang, who majored in economics during his university years. He is trying to destroy the monopoly of state-owned enterprises. His hoped for results from the FTZ include a more liberalized economy, which would thus bring more innovations to a number of key industries such as energy. 

link



> *China opens new trade zone in Shanghai, reform plans unveiled*
> 
> Reuters
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - *China opened a new free trade zone in Shanghai on Sunday in what has been hailed as potentially the boldest reform move in decades, and gave fresh details on plans to liberalize regulations governing finance, investment and trade in the zone.*
> 
> The Shanghai FTZ, which covers an area of nearly 29 sq km on the eastern outskirts of the commercial hub, was approved by China's State Council, or cabinet, in July.
> 
> State-run Xinhua news agency quoted Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng as saying that the creation of the FTZ was a crucial decision for China's next wave of reform and opening-up.
> 
> "It follows the tendency of global economic developments and reflects a more active strategy of opening-up," Gao said at the launch ceremony.
> 
> *The State Council said on Friday it would open up its largely sheltered services sector to foreign competition in the zone and use it as a test bed for bold financial reforms, including a convertible yuan and liberalized interest rates.*
> 
> Economists consider both areas key levers for restructuring the world's second-largest economy and putting it on a more sustainable growth path.
> 
> *Some Chinese and foreign firms have already moved to set up subsidiaries in the zone. A total of 25 companies so far have been approved to set up operations in a variety of sectors, alongside 11 financial institutions, most of which are domestic banks but including the mainland subsidiaries of Citibank and DBS.*
> 
> Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president of Microsoft Corp, speaking on the sidelines of the opening ceremony, said Microsoft was excited about the zone's potential.
> 
> "Details and sizes of business are hard to predict at this stage. But business is continuously growing and the entertainment business is very important for us at Microsoft."
> 
> HIGH HOPES, OR NOT?
> 
> *Some have trumpeted the FTZ, which integrates three existing zones, as comparable to Deng Xiaoping's creation of a similar zone in Shenzhen in 1978. Many credited that move as being crucial to China's economy opening up to foreign trade and investment.*
> 
> Optimism among mainland investors that the zone will at very least attract fresh investment and engender a wave of fresh infrastructure spending has sent property prices and FTZ-related stocks soaring in recent weeks.
> 
> *Skeptics, however, point to a similar scheme launched near Shenzhen, in Qianhai, last year, but that has so far failed to live up to expectations. Qianhai was presented as place for radical experimentation with China's capital account.*
> 
> Analysts and economists say that the plans for Shanghai, at least, are more specific and ambitious.
> 
> For example, one major planned change officials described on Sunday will be in the regulations governing how foreign and Chinese individuals can invest across borders.
> 
> *Previously foreign and Chinese investors were only allowed to invest across the border by buying into funds regulated through either the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) program or the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) program, both of which are restricted by quotas.
> 
> But Dai Haibo, deputy director of the zone administrative committee, said on Sunday that this requirement would be waived for foreign and Chinese individuals within the zone, who will be allowed to invest funds directly for the first time. He did not say whether they would also be subject to a quota
> He also said that foreign banks in the zone would be allowed to issue bonds in the domestic market.
> 
> Officials also said that China would develop an international oil futures trading platform in the zone and encourage foreign participation, part of attempts to upgrade commodities markets and hedge risk in the world's largest energy consumer..*
> 
> 
> The insurance regulator added on Sunday that it would support allowing foreign health insurance providers to operate in the zone and would also back the development of yuan-denominated cross-border reinsurance, among other reforms.
> 
> REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS FOR FOREIGN BANKS
> 
> *Regulations of Chinese and foreign banks will also be eased, said Liao Min, head of the Shanghai branch of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), adding the CBRC will adjust loan-to-deposit ratios and other regulatory requirements for banks in the zone.
> 
> He said that the government would consider easing regulatory requirements for foreign banks when they apply to upgrade representative offices to full-fledged branches in the zone, and it would accelerate the application process for foreign banks applying for yuan settlement licenses.*
> 
> Both functions are key for foreign banks seeking to do business in China, and the slow pace of approval has been a subject of frequent complaints from foreign bankers.
> 
> Given the mixed history of other capital account reform projects and the current speculative environment, regulators have been signaling caution in recent weeks.
> 
> For example, while the project is widely considered to be a pet program of *Premier Li Keqiang*, Li did not attend the opening ceremony, nor did the heads of the central bank or the foreign exchange regulator. The highest ranking official from the central government was Commerce Minister Gao.
> 
> State media have run commentaries warning against undue property speculation, and have said that the most dramatic reforms were unlikely to be enacted this year.
> 
> "All reforms to interest rate and exchange rate systems will be based on the premise of risk control," Zhang Xin, head of the Shanghai branch of the People's Bank of China, told a press conference on Sunday.
> 
> *There is also significant skepticism that Beijing will be able to implement profound financial adjustments within the zone without letting them spill out into the rest of the country, and numerous high profile academics and officials have argued publicly against implementing them in this way.
> 
> In addition, there have been reports of bureaucratic turf wars over which agency will drive financial reform.* The zone proposes to test new policy environments for 18 different industries, ordinarily regulated by different bureaucracies, some with overlapping mandates and conflicting agendas.
> 
> Liao Qun, China chief economist at Citic Bank International, said the tone of the master planning document remains cautious given the challenges.
> 
> *"Liberalization may not be realized all at once."*


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The landmark FTZ opens in Shanghai, which could potentially herald a new era in economic and financial reforms. To think the article failed to mention how Hong Kong will stand to lose if the FTZ becomes successful, because the Shanghai will be a more effective conduit for foreign investment than Hong Kong or other city SEZs opened up during Deng Xiaoping's time.
> 
> This FTZ is the brainchild of Premier Li Keqiang, who majored in economics during his university years. He is trying to destroy the monopoly of state-owned enterprises. His hoped for results from the FTZ include a more liberalized economy, which would thus bring more innovations to a number of key industries such as energy.
> 
> link




In time, yes, but only after China gets a very severe grip on corruption. Shanghai will, almost immediately, compete with both Hong Kong and Singapre as South China's biggest _entrepôt_, but no one in their right mind wants to do their "big banking" in China when both Hong Kong and Singapore offer so much better services, real, strict adherence to the rule of law and highly sophisticated investment managers.

My *guess* is that China is a generation or two away from challenging either HK or Singapore on those advantages.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> In time, yes, but only after China gets a very severe grip on corruption. Shanghai will, almost immediately, compete with both Hong Kong and Singapre as South China's biggest _entrepôt_, but no one in their right mind wants to do their "big banking" in China when both Hong Kong and Singapore offer so much better services, real, strict adherence to the rule of law and highly sophisticated investment managers.
> 
> My *guess* is that China is a generation or two away from challenging either HK or Singapore on those advantages.



PM inbound.


----------



## Edward Campbell

We have discussed Chinese maritime strategy in terms of the Kra Canala, the String of Paerls and the Nicaraguan Canal, but we have ignored China's interests in the far North, _our_ (or Russia's) Arctic, but China hasn't, as this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, tells us:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/81d100de-73fb-11df-87f5-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2gMjhFwp8


> Iceland secures China currency swap deal
> 
> By Andrew Ward in Stockholm
> 
> June 9, 2010
> 
> As an emerging superpower with 1.3bn people, it may not be immediately obvious why China would want closer relations with Iceland, a crisis-hit country of 320,000 people on the other side of the world.
> Yet, Beijing on Wednesday signalled support for Iceland’s economic recovery with a currency swap deal, worth more than $500m (€415m, £343m), that will increase the country’s access to foreign currency and promote bilateral trade ties.
> 
> The agreement fitted a pattern of Chinese engagement with Iceland that has stoked speculation that Beijing has strategic interest in the north Atlantic island nation as the Arctic region becomes more important to global trade and energy.
> 
> Linda Jakobson, China specialist at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said Iceland could provide a valuable staging post for Chinese exports to the US and Europe if global warming opened the Arctic to shipping. “Iceland is looked upon in China as one of the few important countries that will have an important role to play once the ice in the Arctic melts.”
> 
> Mar Gudmundsson, governor of the Icelandic central bank, said the deal, which will allow Iceland to pay for Chinese imports in its own currency, the kronur, would promote economic ties. “It is another signal that the world is starting to look more favourably on us,” he told the Financial Times.
> 
> Mr Gudmundsson said China had been in talks with Iceland about ways it could assist recovery since the Icelandic banking sector collapsed in 2008 – a fact likely to be contrasted by Icelanders with the perceived bullying by the UK and other European countries over Icelandic debts.
> 
> Iceland, a Nato founding member, held talks with Russia over aid until its western allies stepped in with a multi-billion dollar bail-out through the International Monetary Fund.
> 
> Mr Gudmundsson said Iceland was keen to exploit the advantages of its location on the edge of the mineral-rich Arctic circle but said China’s more immediate interest was in Icelandic expertise in geothermal and hydro-electric energy.
> 
> The three-year currency swap, worth 3.5bn renminbi or 66bn Icelandic kronur, is the latest in a series of similar deals struck by Beijing as it seeks to increase international exposure to its currency and potentially move towards convertability.
> 
> Since 2008, China has agreed currency swaps totalling more than 650bn renminbi ($95bn, €79bn, £65.3bn) with South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Belarus and Argentina. These deals were seen as a way to promote trade. But with a tiny population and an economy mired in recession, Iceland is unlikely to provide much business for Chinese exporters.
> 
> Marc Chandler, currency analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman, said the deal was “symbolic” but added: “It’s easy to see how it could leveraged by China in future.”




This deal was brokered over three years ago; now _Reuters_ reports that the deal has been renewed for a further three years.


----------



## CougarKing

Whether one believes in eventual reunification with the mainland on its terms or not, Taipei still wants US weapons for now.

Defense News



> *Taiwan Says It Wants US Weapons Despite Warmer China Ties*
> 
> TAIPEI — A senior Taiwanese official has renewed a call for the United States to sell the island submarines and advanced fighters to bolster defenses against China, local media reported Tuesday.
> 
> The call came despite a marked improvement in relations since Ma Ying-jeou of the China-friendly Kuomintang came to power in 2008. Ma was re-elected in January 2012.
> 
> Despite warming ties, Beijing still refuses to rule out the use of force to reunify with Taiwan and has been strengthening its own forces.
> 
> “The Chinese mainland’s military might keeps growing at a fast pace in the past few years, posing a grave threat to Taiwan,” deputy defense minister Yen Teh-fa told reporters on the sidelines of the US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Annapolis, Md., from Sept. 29-Oct 1.
> 
> 
> (...)
> 
> Germany and Spain have reportedly declined to offer their own designs for fear of offending China.
> 
> *The Taiwanese navy currently operates a fleet of four submarines, but only two of them could be deployed in the event of war. The other two were built by the United States in the 1940s.
> 
> Taiwan is also looking for fighter aircraft more advanced than the current F-16s, Yen said.*


----------



## tomahawk6

China's space warfare capability just got alot more interesting.They launched a satellite with a grabbing arm.

http://freebeacon.com/china-testing-new-space-weapons/

China last week conducted a test of a maneuvering satellite that captured another satellite in space during what Pentagon officials say was a significant step forward for Beijing’s space warfare program.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> They launched a satellite with a grabbing arm.



Please tell me it doesn't look like the Canadarm...  :facepalm:


----------



## cavalryman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Please tell me it doesn't look like the Canadarm...  :facepalm:


You think they only bugged the former Nortel/future NDHQ Complex?  Why should the Canadian Space Agency be immune? ;D


----------



## CougarKing

Looks like the controversy over Turkey's acquisition of a Chinese air defence system won't die down soon:

Defense News



> *Controversy Deepens Over Chinese Air Defenses For Turkey*
> By BURAK EGE BEKDIL
> Oct. 3, 2013 - 02:10PM
> 
> ANKARA — An international controversy over NATO member Turkey’s choice of a Chinese long-range air and anti-missile defense system is deepening, with puzzling remarks from the US, NATO and Turkish officials.
> 
> *Turkey announced on Sept. 26 that it selected China Precision Machinery Import-Export Corp. (CPMIEC) to build the country’s first long-range air defense architecture, sparking a major dispute over whether the Chinese-built system could be integrated with the NATO air defense assets stationed in Turkey.
> 
> Since the announcement, officials from the US, Turkey and NATO have given contradictory statements over whether — and to what extent — the system can be integrated with NATO.*
> 
> The Chinese contender defeated a US partnership of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, offering the Patriot air defense system; Russia’s Rosoboronexport, marketing the S-300; and the Italian-French consortium Eurosam, maker of the Aster 30.
> 
> Washington is also concerned about the involvement of the Chinese winner of a recent Turkish defense contract in nuclear technology, US Ambassador to Ankara Francis J. Ricciardone has said, noting that the United States was conducting talks with Ankara on the issue.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

More on China's army of censors. In spite of facebook and google being banned in China, foreigners/expats in China are still able to access these sites via illegal VPNs and the practice has spread to the point that many locals are using it. If I can recall correctly, China has started to crack down on VPNs. 

Diplomats are probably the only exceptions to the Chinese firewall; in the case of DFAIT, our diplomats can access these banned sites at work computers because all DFAIT network computers (part of its intranet system called SIGNET) across all its missions across the world are routed through a server in Ottawa. 

A story went around DFAIT's China network that one Chinese local staff person downloaded so much porn over SIGNET that he was caught and was fired. No surprise there.  ;D



> *China employs TWO MILLION workers to keep an eye on internet use by its citizens*
> 
> * Workers are hired as 'internet opinion analysts' by the Chinese government
> * By performing simple keyword searches, they are able to monitor tens of millions of online posts every day
> * Their main targets are social media and blogging sites, such as Weibo
> * Supported by technology which can analyse millions of posts an hour<snipped>
> 
> Quote:
> Many websites freely available in the west, such as Google Maps and Facebook, have been banned by the Chinese government, which insists on vetting any sites that wish to operate in the country.
> 
> Developers from all over the world have tried to liberate the country's online policy - known as 'the great firewall of China' - by creating tools which allow users inside the country to bypass 'the wall' and see content they would be able to in the outside world.
> 
> 
> <snipped>source: dailymail.co.uk


----------



## CougarKing

The need to stabilize its Xinjiang province becomes more imperative with China's growing interests in its Central Asian neighbours and SCO partners:

The Diplomat


*China Courts Central Asia*

October 04, 2013

By Steve Finch

_key excerpts:_



> *A new deal signed on the same day will see Turkmenistan deliver 65 billion cubic meters of natural gas through the world’s longest pipeline by 2016, an increase of 25 billion cubic meters.*
> 
> The Galkynysh field is “another fine example of bilateral energy cooperation for mutual benefits,” Xi was quoted as saying in the state-run China Daily.
> 
> *In an unprecedented tour also locking in energy deals with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, Xi has consolidated Chinese power in Central Asia as Beijing looks to reconfigure its economy based on cleaner, more diversified energy sources amid rising overall demand for fuels.* But the impacts are expected to reach much farther and wider than simple economics or within China’s borders.
> 
> (...)





> *China is starting to trump Russia when it comes to energy deals in Central Asia by offering better prices and related infrastructure paid for with low-interest loans.* But that doesn’t necessarily mean the region is turning away from Moscow, or that the Kremlin and the Communist Party in Beijing don’t have mutual interests when it comes to these former Soviet states, says Idan of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.
> 
> “In terms of competition, this is really in the area of energy,” he says. “They share the same interests to see this region stable.”
> 
> 
> In the past few weeks in Central Asian capitals and at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Bishkek ending Xi’s regional tour, the Chinese president has talked about security nearly as much as he has oil and gas.
> 
> *On September 11, Kyrgyzstan became the last of the Central Asian states to upgrade its economic and security ties with China to the “strategic” level.* But then Kyrgyzstan has been a unique case, a bastion of democracy among the authoritarian regimes entrenched elsewhere in the region.
> 
> (...)






> Troubled Xinjiang
> 
> What this means for neighboring Xinjiang, China’s largest province and among its most socially unstable, are even less clear.
> 
> *With governments more compliant towards Beijing, there is every reason to expect compliance in dealing with Xinjiang separatism and “transnational crime.”*
> 
> In 2006, Uzbek police arrested and eventually extradited to China a man who reportedly goes by many names but most commonly* Huseyincan Celil*,  a Uyghur imam accused of attacking Chinese officials from Xinjiang in 2002. A Canadian citizen, China declined to recognize his dual nationality and sentenced him to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges. Family members alleged the use of torture by Xinjiang police.
> 
> While China’s increasing friendliness with Central Asia is expected to tighten cooperation in such cases, NATO’s pullout from Afghanistan next year has less clear-cut security implications for its neighbors, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I repeat, "America will not, because it cannot, intervene militarily to save Taiwan."



Mr. Campbell,
In spite of your saying that the US "cannot do anything militarily to save Taiwan," in at least two of the past few Taiwan/ROC presidential elections since 1996, the US has moved carrier groups into or near the Taiwan Strait to essentially signal Beijing to "back off". The first time, during the 1996 election of Lee-Tung Hui, the island's first native Taiwanese/_ben sheng ren_ president, was in response to the PLA holding a series of unprecedented wargames; China had also lobbed a few missiles over Taiwan which crashed into the sea the year before that. The second time, at least one CVBG was moved during Pres. Ma Ying Jieou's election, if I can recall correctly.

There was even a precedent before these two recent examples. In 1950, not long after Chiang's Guomindang forces fled to Taiwan, just as the PLA attempted to capture the Guomindang stronghold of Kinmen (pronounced Jinmen) just off the mainland coast, the US 7th fleet entered the Taiwan Strait to deter any mainland invasion of Taiwan proper. This would soon become a regular occurrence from the 1950s onward until the US switched its "One-China" recognition from Taiwan to the mainland in 1979, if I can recall correctly.

Also, as this headline shows, Taiwan isn't holding its breath on peaceful reunification in spite of recent peaceful overtures from the mainland...

Defense News


Key excerpt:


> (...)
> *"With the continued arms buildup, the Chinese communists will be able to take Taiwan by force before the end of 2020," it said.*
> 
> The report also cited China's growing military capability to deter foreign intervention, in contrast to the US Pacific pivot policy which it said had been "stifled" due to budget constraints.
> 
> *The United States is Taiwan's main ally. In 1996 it sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to waters near the island after China lobbed missiles into the sea to try to deter Taiwanese from voting for President Lee Teng-hui.*
> 
> The report said China's military, known as the People's Liberation Army, has a total strength of 2.27 million of which the army accounts for 1.25 million. About one-third of its army is deployed directly opposite Taiwan.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Taking Taiwan by force is counterproductive.

Taiwan is Chinese. The Kuomintang, like the Chinese Communist Party, has, consistently, argued that there is only one China: the only question is which of two _systems_, Beijing's or Taiwan's, is the _legitimate_ government of that one China.

Carrier battle groups are very useful and they are a legitimate deterrent ~ or, at least, they would be if China had any intention of attacking. But it doesn't, so carrier battle groups are useless.

But: Could China be provoked into attacking? Yes ... a ROC unilateral declaration of _independence_, essentially saying that it is not and never will be part of China, would force the PRC's hand. An invasion, even against US active combat, would be quick and bloody. China would not go nuclear, not preemptively, anyway; but it would use chemical weapons, I think.

But again: China is patient. It will continue its "charm offensive" and it will offer more and more _concessions_ to convince the Taiwanese that reunification is in their best interests.

The fly in the ointment is in Beijing. There is a faction, currently weak but still vocal and influential, that doesn't like "one country, two systems," and wants to see both Hong Kong and, eventually, Taiwan as ordinary provinces, "comme les autres," in Canadian terms. Every time this faction succeeds in upsetting Hong Kong it sets back the reunification process.


----------



## CougarKing

China's media outlets such as Xinhua and CCTV taking advantage of the current US shutdown to comment on what they see as the inevitable American superpower decline:

from the AFP via the Jakarta Globe



> *‘De-Americanized’ World Needed After US Shutdown: China Media  *
> 
> By Agence France-Presse on 5:28 pm October 13, 2013.
> 
> *Beijing. While US politicians grapple with how to reopen their shuttered government and avoid a potentially disastrous default on their debt, the world should consider “de-Americanizing,” a commentary on China’s official news agency said Sunday.*
> 
> “As US politicians of both political parties [fail to find a] viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world,” the commentary on state news agency Xinhua said.
> 
> *In a lengthy polemic against American hegemony since World War two, it added: “Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.*
> 
> “A new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing.”
> 
> Negotiations over how to end the budgetary impasse have shifted to the US Senate after House Representatives failed to strike a deal with President Obama on extending borrowing authority ahead of an October 17 deadline.
> 
> *Beijing has in recent days issued warnings as well as appeals for a deal, all the while emphasizing the inseparable economic ties that bind the world’s two biggest economies.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_ is the artcle to which S.M.A.'s post referred:



> Commentary: U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world
> 
> English.news.cn   2013-10-13
> 
> By Xinhua writer Liu Chang
> 
> BEIJING, Oct. 13 (Xinhua) -- As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.
> 
> Emerging from the bloodshed of the Second World War as the world's most powerful nation, the United States has since then been trying to build a global empire by imposing a postwar world order, fueling recovery in Europe, and encouraging regime-change in nations that it deems hardly Washington-friendly.
> 
> With its seemingly unrivaled economic and military might, the United States has declared that it has vital national interests to protect in nearly every corner of the globe, and been habituated to meddling in the business of other countries and regions far away from its shores.
> 
> Meanwhile, the U.S. government has gone to all lengths to appear before the world as the one that claims the moral high ground, yet covertly doing things that are as audacious as torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks, and spying on world leaders.
> 
> Under what is known as the Pax-Americana, we fail to see a world where the United States is helping to defuse violence and conflicts, reduce poor and displaced population, and bring about real, lasting peace.
> 
> Moreover, instead of honoring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.
> 
> As a result, the world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites, while bombings and killings have become virtually daily routines in Iraq years after Washington claimed it has liberated its people from tyrannical rule.
> 
> Most recently, the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized.
> 
> Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated, and a new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing.
> 
> To that end, several corner stones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanized world.
> 
> For starters, all nations need to hew to the basic principles of the international law, including respect for sovereignty, and keeping hands off domestic affairs of others.
> 
> Furthermore, the authority of the United Nations in handling global hotspot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate.
> 
> Apart from that, the world's financial system also has to embrace some substantial reforms.
> 
> The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape.
> 
> What may also be included as a key part of an effective reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.
> 
> Of course, the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.
> 
> And among all options, it is suggested that the beltway politicians first begin with ending the pernicious impasse.



Although the last line attempts to come to the rescue, the _commentary_ is in poor taste and it is premature.

China has good reason to be concerned with US fiscal irresponsibility; as a Trillion Dollar creditor it is entitled to make a bit of noise. _Traditionally_ China has spoken softly and (relatively) privately. This is too much, it is too loud and it is too soon.


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting piece fron "The American Interest". Although the idea of rapid "de industrialization" and the failure of developing nations to develop something analogous to the "Blue Model" is a global issue, China will be one of the hardest hit nations, so this seemed to be the best fit for the article. The implications are pretty staggering, and we already see some of the potential outcomes with the "Arab Spring", as a demographic surge puts millions of youths into the job market in small and stagnent economies (coupled with fairly rigid social structures) where they don't have the opportunity to become employed:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/10/11/are-developing-countries-missing-out-on-the-blue-model/



> *Are Developing Countries Missing Out on the Blue Model?*
> 
> Developing countries may be transitioning to service economies too quickly, says Dani Rodrik in an excellent new piece for Project Syndicate. Most western economies got where they are by industrializing and then shifting to a service economy over the course of two centuries. Many developing countries today, by contrast, are skipping straight to services. Even purported manufacturing behemoths like China have only a small percentage of their workforce in manufacturing—the bulk of new growth is actually in services. Rodrik thinks it a disconcerting trend:
> 
> An immediate consequence is that developing countries are turning into service economies at substantially lower levels of income. When the US, Britain, Germany, and Sweden began to deindustrialize, their per capita incomes had reached $9,000-11,000 (at 1990 prices). In developing countries, by contrast, manufacturing has begun to shrink while per capita incomes have been a fraction of that level: Brazil’s deindustrialization began at $5,000, China’s at $3,000, and India’s at $2,000.
> 
> The economic, social, and political consequences of premature deindustrialization have yet to be analyzed in full. On the economic front, it is clear that early deindustrialization impedes growth and delays convergence with the advanced economies. Manufacturing industries are what I have called “escalator industries”: labor productivity in manufacturing has a tendency to converge to the frontier, even in economies where policies, institutions, and geography conspire to retard progress in other sectors of the economy….
> 
> The social and political consequences are less fathomable, but could be equally momentous. Some of the building blocks of durable democracy have been byproducts of sustained industrialization: an organized labor movement, disciplined political parties, and political competition organized around a right-left axis.
> 
> So, while developed countries are worrying about the breakdown of the blue social model based on mass manufacturing jobs and lifetime employment, the real story is that developing countries may never get to the blue model. Automation and global competition mean than manufacturing jobs and their wages aren’t going to grow enough to support a middle class in China and other countries as they did in the US, Europe and Japan.
> If this is true, the implications are enormous: social stability in countries like China could be much more tenuous than many think, and developing countries may have a much harder time reaching the levels of affluence found in the advanced world. Since we’ve never seen a global industrial revolution before, much less one that is taking place at the same time as a global information revolution, nobody really knows how it will all shake out. But it is trends like this, not budget fights in Washington, that will shape the future of the human race.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have a _hunch_ that both Dani Rodrik and Walter Russell Mead are misinterpreting the data or, equally possible, that the data is inconsistent in how it defines the _manufacturing_ vs. _service_ sectors. The question is: where do you put functions like distribution? Is it part of manufacturing or is it a service. I *think* that, fifty years ago, we put e.g. distribution in the manufacturing process or, rather, we defined _services_ very narrowly. I recall learning that the _service_ sector was restricted to a very few elements: banking, insurance, and so on. Even the HUGE records management field was, largely, considered to be a subset of the sector it served: manufacturing, transportation or services, now, as far as I know, we can and do count management support as a _service_ even when it is within e.g. the manufacturing or transport sectors.


----------



## CougarKing

Apparently, Shanghai is still a lot more prudish than Hong Kong...   ;D

As reported by Canada's National Post:



> *Chinese police hunting mysterious female streaker posing nude at Shanghai tourist traps*
> 
> Chinese police are hunting a female streaker who has ruffled feathers in Shanghai by using the cover of darkness to pose nude at some of the city’s best-known tourist spots.
> 
> Online photographs of the unrobed and so far unidentified woman have been circulating for at least a week, causing a mixture of disgust and amusement among Chinese Internet users.
> 
> City officials appear to be unimpressed. The state-run Global Times announced that police were investigating the nocturnal antics of the woman, whom it labelled the “Bum on the Bund” – a reference to Shanghai’s historic waterfront district.
> 
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

China tries to silence an outspoken economics professor from "Bei Da/北大" (Chinese acronym for Peking University):

Yahoo News



> *Chinese university fires outspoken economist amid crackdown on dissent*
> By Michael Martina
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - A liberal Chinese economist who had been an outspoken critic of China's ruling Communist Party has been expelled from the elite Peking University, amid a broader crackdown on dissent.
> 
> Professor *Xia Yeliang,* 53, had drawn the ire of school officials for his blog posts calling for democratic reforms and rule of law in China. Xia said he was told on Friday that professors and school leaders had voted to end his contract.
> 
> *Chinese liberals and intellectuals had hoped the new government under President Xi Jinping that took over in March would be more tolerant of calls for reform but it appears authorities won't tolerate any challenge to their rule.
> 
> Journalists, lawyers and rights activists have been detained and arrested in recent months.*
> 
> "They insisted that it was not a political decision, but I believe it is," Xia told Reuters by telephone. "They told me if I keep telling people it is a political issue, then my situation will get worse. They think I have damaged the image of the school of economics and Peking University."
> 
> Xia said he is allowed to teach until the end of January.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It is important for outsiders to understand that Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He _rules_ as the head of a team, but a divided team. Xi _may_ me a liberal moderate but there are several hardliners in the Politburo Standing Committee, the Central Military Committee and the Secretariat ~ all of which _govern_ China. What Xi does, or doesn't do, and in which direction(s) he may _nudge_ China is, always, a compromise between his views and the competing views of his leadership _team_.

There are (relative) liberals in China but they are exceptions that prove a deeply, deeply conservative (Confucian) social rule.

Dissent is _tolerated_ and considered but it must be made in the _proper_ way. In my opinion taking one's arguments out of China, into foreign media, including the Internet, especially, is always a mistake. China provides fora for dissenting opinions - often in the English language Chinese newspapers, which are closely followed by the staffs in the Secretariat. But one may not express public dissent about the Party, _per se_. It is fine to criticize _policies_, but not the Party. Xia crossed a line ~ one I'm sure he understood.


----------



## CougarKing

While the Chinese proverb "Don't waste good iron for nails or good men for soldiers ('好铁不打定，好汉不当兵')" is sometimes quoted by pacifists, anyone would be fool to think that China has always been a "peace-loving nation" as Meng Xiangqing portrays his country. While Parker already points out instances where the PRC attacked Tibet, India and Vietnam in the past, one need not look far enough in China's history to look for an example. 

The Dutch once had a small colony and fort in what is now Danshui in northern Taiwan. When China's Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus/Qing Dynasty in the 1600s, some of these Ming Chinese loyalist forces led by Zheng Chenggong (aka Koxinga) retreated to Taiwan and took Danshui away from the Dutch. This was probably the only time in pre-20th century history when a western country's forces was defeated by a Chinese force. 



> *William J. Parker III: Meng Xiangqing's Chinese Dream Eludes Reality*
> October 17, 2013
> 
> 
> _"The truth is, China has always been a peace-loving country and it firmly pursues the path of peaceful development and will never seek hegemony and expansion... the West has nothing to worry about the modernization of China's military. Unlike former colonial powers, China has never invaded another country. On the contrary, it has always advocated (and still does advocate) harmonious coexistence, seeking common ground and shelving differences."_
> 
> 
> This statement is factually inaccurate and makes several bad assumptions.
> 
> *Has China always been "peace-loving"?* For Meng to state that China has always been "peaceful" fails to take into account the Sino-Indian War of 1962 when China attacked India in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. Similarly, it does not account for the 1969 PLA attack on Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island or the PLA's 1979 invasion of Vietnam. Additionally, China's Sui and Tang dynasties attacked Korea. And as we continue back through history, it becomes clear that Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia were also invaded by China. And in fact, the Qin dynasty (221 BC to 207 BC) invaded significant territories and neighboring states to establish the first dynastic leaders of this vast nation under Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
> 
> 
> *Will China "never seek hegemony and expansion?"* This assumption by Meng has several pitfalls:
> 
> - First, and as explicated above, China has sought and asserted its interests in other nations in the past.
> - Second, to state that China will never take a certain action is unfounded and unreasonable.
> - Third, a threat, hegemonic or otherwise, has two fundamental factors for consideration:
> 
> a) The first factor is the potential enemy's capability.
> b) The second is the potential enemy's intent.
> 
> China's intent is unclear; and articles like the one written by Meng Xiangqing do nothing more than muddy the waters. But even Meng agrees that it is the intent of the Chinese to build a military that continues to grow alongside its economy.
> 
> _"In 11 of 15 cases since 1500 where a rising power emerged to challenge a ruling power, war occurred."_
> 
> *"Thucydides's Trap has been sprung in the Pacific" -* * by Graham Allison*
> 
> These were all cases where capability potentially shaped intent. Based on past history, there is a good chance that a challenging power, like China, may eventually use its growing military might.
> 
> 
> *Do nations with the most powerful militaries have the strongest economies?* Meng states that China must build a military that is at the same level as its economic standing in the world. The nations with the largest militaries have the largest economies; but not currently the strongest.
> 
> 
> *The Chinese Dream includes building China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, powerful, democratic, and harmonious.*  It entails the goal of national reunification and requires China to help maintain world peace and facilitate the development of the human race. The "one China" policy is as flawed as China, a hegemon seeks domination through power. In one case, the PRC would like to regain control over Taiwan. Taiwan and China, through the "one China" policy, do not recognize each other's governments (PRC or ROC). Neither world peace, human rights, nor the development of the human race can result from the actions Meng Xiangqing suggests.
> 
> The United States, and the rest of the world, cannot prevent China's march towards military modernization, but it can take actions to ensure the PRC unambiguously understands the United States' and her friends and allies capability to deter war. And if deterrence fails, to fight and win.
> 
> 
> *Council on Foreign Relations*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a a link to the complete article.


----------



## CougarKing

China escalates its "media war" against its neighbours over its territorial disputes:

From Kyodo News



> *All Chinese journalists to be taught not to write in favor of Japan*
> 
> China's Communist Party has begun ordering all Chinese journalists not to be supportive of Japan when writing about territorial and historical issues between the two countries, participants of an ongoing mandatory training program said Saturday.
> 
> *About 250,000 journalists who work for Chinese media organizations need to attend the nationwide training program to learn about such topics as the Marxist view on journalism, laws and regulations and norms in news gathering and editing.*
> 
> The unified program started in mid-October and will run through the end of this year.
> 
> *In addition to Japan, instructors of the program taught them that the United States is "trying to undermine our country" and criticized the Philippines and Vietnam, which have territorial disputes with China, the participants said.*
> 
> They were also told to reject the ideas of democracy and human rights, saying that these values claimed by "the West as universal are targeting China's Communist Party."




This second headline is directly aimed at the Philippines' recent deal to get 12 of the new F/A 50 Golden Eagle fighter jets made in South Korea:

Chosun news



> *China Asked Korea Not to Sell Jets to Philippines *
> 
> China asked Korea not to sell FA-50 fighter jets to the Philippines, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Saturday. The daily said Beijing made the request ahead of a summit in Seoul between President Park Geun-hye and Philippines President Benigno Aquino on Oct. 17.
> 
> Korea declined, saying it cannot accept "interference" in arms exports, an issue of its national interest, according to the daily.



Furthermore, here's a Chinese defence-oriented magazine cover that depicts one of its _Jiangkai II_ class frigates firing at one of the Philippines' two recently acquired ex-USCG _Hamilton_ class cutters.


----------



## Ignatius J. Reilly

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The Dutch once had a small colony and fort in what is now Danshui in northern Taiwan. When China's Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus/Qing Dynasty in the 1600s, some of these Ming Chinese loyalist forces led by Zheng Chenggong (aka Koxinga) retreated to Taiwan and took Danshui away from the Dutch. This was probably the only time in pre-20th century history when a western country's forces was defeated by a Chinese force.


In point of fact, Zheng defeated the Dutch at Fort Zeelandia, in present day Tainan, in southern Taiwan. Here the Dutch presence was far greater than it had ever been at Danshui, where the fort had indeed first been established by the Spanish.


----------



## CougarKing

More on the "ghost cities" mentioned earlier in the thread:



> *China's Ghost Cities... Are Multiplying*
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/21/2013 20:16 -0400
> 
> Zero Hedge link
> 
> The fact that China has an unprecedented excess capacity glut, also known as an epic overinvestment/construction bubble, is by now well-known and acknowledged by even the most ardent Chinaphiles. Perhaps nowhere is China's outlier nature in this regard more obvious than in the following chart showing per capita cement consumption vs GDP.
> 
> *Yet nowhere is China's historic misallocation of capital (resulting from a pace of credit creation that makes even the most fervent Keynesian western central banker green with envy) more evident and tangible, than in videos showing the tumbleweeds floating down the main streets of its ghost cities. We did that first in 2009, then followed up two years later only to find nothing has changed. Today, on yet another "two years later" anniversary, we go back to the scene of the excess capacity crime, to find out if thing may have finally normalized.* For that we follow SBS' Adrian Brown who back in 2011 did an extensive report on what were some of the then unknown ghost cities dispersed across the mainland.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## CougarKing

Even if there was radiation at this site, I doubt that would deter Sinopec...


Reuters



> *Soviets conducted nuclear blasts at oilfield to be tapped with China*
> By Vladimir Soldatkin
> 
> MOSCOW (Reuters) -* A Siberian oilfield that Russia and China plan to develop together was the site of Soviet nuclear blasts in the 1970s and 1980s, Russian officials said on Friday.*
> 
> The government and state oil firm Rosneft said the field was safe, rejecting environmentalists' concerns that oil extracted from it could be contaminated with radiation.
> 
> But the revelation raises questions for a strategic joint venture announced a week ago in which Russia, the world's top energy producer, ceded a share of its oil wealth to China, the leading consumer.
> 
> At least seven "peaceful" nuclear detonations were performed at the Srednebotuobinskoye oilfield, according to a report published by the environment ministry of the Republic of Sakha, a remote region in Eastern Siberia also known as Yakutia.
> 
> *"Yes, indeed, there were nuclear explosions performed at the site," a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters from the city of Yakutsk. No radiation leaks were reported, she said.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## George Wallace

Talk about Fracking.


----------



## observor 69

From the New York Times a very well done article, with some photos, of the Chinese military and the South China Sea.

" A Game of Shark and Minnow

By JEFF HIMMELMAN

The shell of a forsaken ship has become a battleground in a struggle that could shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world."

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/


----------



## a_majoor

A look at how a currency transition might happen. I think that the situation is not quite so clear cut, since we are dealing with several "known unknowns" and one "unknown unknown". The known unknowns include China's credit bubble, as experessed in such things as ghost cities and the frankly unknown quantity of non performing assets (such as State owned companies) that are still on the books. We might stop to think of how Japan's credit bubble deflated in the early 1990's when the government rushed to prop up its financial sector from the real estate melot down. Non performing loans were not allowed to be written off in order to prevent a panic or crash, but the economy began contracting and Japan underwent a lost decade and is still suffering from a persistent deflation.

The other known unknown is the effects of a US financial crisis or default. China could simply be caught in the undertow if that happens. A similar issue could arise from similar problems in the EUZone.

The unknown unknown is the arrival of alternative financial systems. Digital currency is one example, and I predict it will take off the same way Napster and P2P networking did; because it empowers individuals. Alternatives to banks like PayPal to disintermediate financial transactions will also become popular for the same reasons. This will make the use and nature of reserve currencies much different than today, probably the same way the economy in the "Free Banking" era was much different from the one domonated by central banks today.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/10/transition-to-renmembi-as-worlds.html



> *Transition to Renmembi as the world’s reserve currency on track for sometime in the 2020s*
> 
> In Arvind Subramanian book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, Arvind Subramanian argued that the renminbi could overtake the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency sometime during the next decade. His prediction was based on an econometric analysis of the fundamental economic determinants of a reserve currency (chapter 3) and applying the lessons from the sterling-dollar transition.
> 
> At the time, his prediction elicited three criticisms:
> 
> 1) It took nearly 60 years after the US economy overtook the UK economy for the sterling-dollar transition to occur. This was said to imply that even if the fundamentals were moving in China’s favor, the renminbi’s ascendancy was some long way off.
> 
> 2) deep and liquid financial markets, and especially an open capital account were essential for maintaining a reserve currency, and China did not fulfill these requirements.
> 
> 3) Perhaps most important, even if China fulfilled them, reserve currency status for the renminbi was nowhere close to imminence because that status is fundamentally based on trust—and not just any trust, but the trust of foreign investors and traders that China would not misbehave, especially in hard times, by expropriating or defaulting on its obligations to foreigners
> 
> The sterling-dollar transition was effectively only 10 to 15 years even without the United Kingdom inflicting demonstrably self-destructive costs as the United States is today. Moreover, in the last three years, the renminbi has displaced the dollar as the dominant reference currency in Asia.
> 
> China today looks more likely to fulfill the requirements for running a reserve currency. The creation of Shanghai as a free trade zone with full renminbi convertibility and the designation of London as an offshore renminbi center attest to China’s intentions to gradually open the capital account. While the financial system is still neither liberalized nor developed, policies to move in that direction may well be announced at the Third Plenary Session of the Communist Party later this year.
> 
> China needs to make the necessary changes not immediately but over the next five years or so to create the conditions for a reserve currency.
> 
> A reserve currency does not need an American-style, turbo-charged and sophisticated financial sector. It needs a reasonably open, reasonably transparent, reasonably liquid, and reasonably well-regulated financial system. China can also achieve that over the next decade.
> 
> The Simon Johnson critique that the United States has unusual trust among investors has been turned on its head. Can investors now trust the United States not to default on its obligations (and thereby on the very instrument that provides the financial plumbing for the depth and liquidity important for a reserve currency)? Will this new distrust persist beyond the bad times, even in normal times?
> 
> Making matters worse, the US problem leading to investor uncertainty and mistrust is not a one-off breakdown but a structural problem of ongoing dysfunctional politics.
> 
> As Michael Clasey, arguing for a downgrade of the US credit rating, put it: “Triple-A credits do not behave like this.” Only a change in the underlying politics can restore the attribute that China does not currently have but that the United States is squandering away.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is a pretty good look at the rise and fall of Bo Xilai with some Canadian context, too:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-inglorious-exit-of-bo-xilai-canadas-closest-ally-in-chinas-power-structure/article15097314/#dashboard/follows/


> The inglorious exit of Bo Xilai, Canada’s closest ally in China’s power structure
> 
> MARK MACKINNON AND NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
> CANNES, FRANCE AND BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Friday, Oct. 25 2013
> 
> As China’s biggest political scandal in decades came to its unsurprising conclusion – with a court dismissing Bo Xilai’s final appeal and upholding the former Communist Party star’s sentence of life in prison – the red-roofed villa that was central to his downfall sat empty, wasting its idyllic view of the Mediterranean coast.
> 
> The silence hanging over No. 7 Boulevard des Pins on the French Riviera speaks to the gutted ambitions of a man whose plummet from power mesmerized China for the past year and embarrassed the ruling elite as never before. Mr. Bo, who was convicted of three charges, including bribe-taking related to the ownership of the villa, went to jail China’s most charismatic and controversial politician, factors many believe turned the Communist Party apparatus against him. He was also admired abroad, openly courted by corporate Canada and successive Canadian governments.
> 
> Until his downfall last year – sparked by his wife’s admission that she murdered British businessman Neil Heywood – Mr. Bo was counted as a friend by Montreal’s powerful Desmarais family, which cultivated the Bo family for decades and saw its businesses in China grow as Mr. Bo rose in power. Canadian politicians also sought him out: Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former prime minister Jean Chrétien were among the last high-profile foreign visitors to Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese city Mr. Bo governed until his arrest on corruption charges.
> 
> Mr. Bo was seen as Canada’s closest ally in China’s power structure, a relationship that was expected to bear even more fruit if – as many had expected – he rose to the very top, the seven-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. With his pro-business policies and command of English, he looked to some like a reformer to whom Canada could attach its China policy.
> 
> “We sort of hunger for a Chinese leader who is open and easy to communicate with,” said David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China who said he’d met Mr. Bo repeatedly over the past two decades and was one of those “who believed in him as a reformer.”
> 
> “Over his career, [Mr. Bo] met a lot of Canadians – he was the most Canadian-friendly of all [the senior Communist Party leadership],” Mr. Mulroney said.
> 
> Sergio Marchi, who was a minister of international trade under Mr. Chrétien before serving as president of the Canada China Business Council, personally met with Mr. Bo eight or nine times. He defended Mr. Bo as “a friend of Canada.” Many in the Canadian business and political establishment “were genuinely cheering” for Mr. Bo to achieve high political office in China, he said.
> 
> That seems impossible now. Mr. Bo’s appeal of his September conviction was dismissed by the Shandong Provincial Higher People’s Court in just an hour on Friday. State television showed images of Mr. Bo standing in court, hands cuffed before him, bearing a wry smile.
> 
> Ties between Mr. Bo and corporate Canada are rooted in the long friendship between the Bo and Desmarais clans, which stretches back to the 1970s, when Mr. Bo’s father, vice-premier Bo Yibo, visited family scion Paul Desmarais Sr. on his way to Washington to help prepare for Richard Nixon’s breakthrough trip to China.
> 
> There’s no evidence that the Desmarais family or Power Corporation, the massive holding firm they control, profited directly from their friendship with the Bo family, although it clearly gave them high-level access to decision-makers.
> 
> But the relationship appears to have been a fruitful one. A 1996 Team Canada trade mission to the coastal city of Dalian while Mr. Bo was mayor there yielded no local deals for Canadian companies, but the following year France’s massive Total SA oil major – in which the Desmarais family is the largest known shareholder – signed a deal to up its stake in China’s largest oil refinery, West Pacific Petrochemical Corp., to 22.4 per cent. The refinery is located on an island just off Dalian.
> 
> When Mr. Bo was promoted to Beijing in February of 2004 as commerce minister for the central government, the Desmarais fortunes also gained, with Power Financial winning coveted status eight months later as one of the first foreign companies designated a Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor, allowing them to buy and sell yuan-denominated shares on Chinese stock exchanges.
> 
> The activities of the Bo and Desmarais clans have at times intersected. Power Corporation channels most of its investments in China through Hong Kong-listed CITIC Pacific Ltd., where André Desmarais has been a non-executive director since 1997. Mr. Bo’s younger brother, Bo Xicheng, served as an independent director of the CITIC Group’s investment banking arm, CITIC Securities, from 2003 to 2006.
> 
> “André [Desmarais] himself made a huge effort to court as many senior people as he could – he’s very good at that – and Bo Xilai, when he was mayor of Dalian, began a close relationship with André that André never dropped when [Mr. Bo] was [provincial governor of] Liaoning, when he was minister of commerce, when he was in Chongqing,” said Howard Balloch, another former Canadian ambassador to China who is now an investment banker based in Beijing.
> 
> The Desmarais’ courting of Mr. Bo carried on right up until his spectacular fall. Eight days after Mr. Heywood was found murdered in a Chongqing hotel, André Desmarais and his father-in-law, Mr. Chrétien, arrived in the same Yangtze River metropolis as the head of a delegation from the Canada China Business Council, an organization founded by Paul Desmarais Sr. André Desmarais and Mr. Chrétien were greeted by Mr. Bo like old friends.
> 
> In photos still posted on the website of the Chongqing government, Mr. Bo is smiling widely as he clasps hands with Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Desmarais. However, the same pictures, and all mention of the visit to Chongqing, have been belatedly scrubbed from the website of the Canada-China Business Council.
> 
> Observers say it is clear Mr. Bo’s trial was less about taking bribes or meddling with the investigation into the death of Mr. Heywood – whose murder earned his wife, Gu Kailai, a suspended death sentence – and more about a consolidation of power by China’s new President, Xi Jinping, as he asserts leadership over the country.
> 
> “The denial of Bo’s appeal serves notice to both sides of the political spectrum in China,” said Russell Leigh Moses, dean of the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. To those on the left, “their cause needs to be larger than just one man. And to those who want reform, it holds out the hope that changes in the system will continue to proceed in an orderly fashion, but driven from the top – with the law firmly in the hands of the Communist Party.”
> 
> The case against Mr. Bo centred heavily on the villa on Boulevard des Pins, though only a rusting metal sign on the door reading, “Residences Fontaine St. Georges” provides any hint of the mystery surrounding the place, which also has a Canadian connection.
> 
> Residences Fontaine St. Georges was managed for several years by Mr. Heywood, the man whose murder at the hands of Mr. Bo’s wife, Ms. Gu, set in motion the entire scandal.
> 
> At Mr. Bo’s initial trial on charges of abuse of power, billionaire Xu Ming, who is also in custody, testified that he purchased the villa via intermediary companies and gave it to Ms. Gu with Mr. Bo’s knowledge. The transaction was central to the most serious charge that Mr. Bo was convicted of: corruption. In dismissing his appeal Friday, the Shandong Provincial Higher People’s Court referred again to the “complicated plan” to buy the $3.5-million villa via middlemen while putting it under the “real control and ownership” of Ms. Gu.
> 
> Part of that plan involved Investissements Custodian, a tiny firm controlled by Jean-Marie and Joanne Bergman of Montreal.
> 
> French records show that Investissements Custodian established Residences Fontaine St. Georges in 2001 for the specific purpose of managing the 4,000-square-metre Cannes villa. Investissements Custodian held shares in the villa until 2006, when its shares were transferred to Russel International Resorts, a company Chinese courts found was controlled by Ms. Gu.
> 
> Mr. and Ms. Bergman have said little about how their company ended up as part of China’s trial of the decade. Ms. Bergman told an interviewer this summer that they held shares of the villa in trust after being approached by what she called a “reputable intermediary” that she refused to name. She said they never knew who the real owner of the villa was.
> 
> In an e-mail exchange with The Globe and Mail this week, Ms. Bergman declined to explain how her company ended up purchasing property on behalf of Mr. Bo’s family. ”We have nothing further to help you in your research,” she wrote.
> 
> Even if Mr. Bo himself vanishes from view – a prospect that is not at all clear, given the strong likelihood his sentence will be reduced for medical or other reasons – there may be reason for the ruling elite to fear the shadow he leaves behind, Mr. Moses warned. “We should not ignore the possibility that the end of Bo’s legal options could be the beginning of him being seen as a martyr to those who are dismayed at the inequalities they see as still dominant in China,” he said.
> 
> Indeed, some of China’s legal leaders noted that Mr. Bo should have been afforded the chance to make his case publicly at appeal. But his provocative defence at his first trial made official China “very embarrassed,” said human rights lawyer Li Fangping. He was subsequently muted so he could not “take advantage of the chance to win back influence and gain more support, which would run counter to [Communist Party] expectations.”
> 
> Pu Zhiqiang, another prominent civil rights lawyer, added: “Anyone who says Bo’s case was tried independently knows nothing about China.”
> 
> Still, Mr. Bo’s own fate is unlikely to be one of pain and suffering. His sentence is likely to be served at Qincheng, a secretive prison for the political elite north of Beijing. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, it was likened to a “five-star hotel” by Bao Tong, a former policy secretary who served seven years there after standing against the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Beijing media have described conditions at Qincheng that include luxuries rarely afforded inmates, such as milk at breakfast, regular freedom to walk the grounds alone and the ability to wear clothing provided by family.
> 
> Mr. Bo serving time there also has a discomfiting historical ring to it. It’s the same prison where his father was sent for a time during the Cultural Revolution.




I think a little context might help.

From 1949 until 1976 China had a real left wing government. I don't know how to classify Mao Zedong other than as a charismatic revolutionary, but Zhou Enlai was a committed, even principled communist.
<





From 1978 to 1989 China had a slightly right of centre, in economic terms, government under Deng Xiaoping. Deng was a staunch supporter of Zhou Enlai, especially of his social programmes (universal education and health care, etc) but he saw that communism is not a sound economic system and Zhou's _vision_ needed money and that meant a free market economy.
                                                                                         <



>

From 1989 to 2002 it had a hard right wing (again in economic terms) government under Jiang Zemin. Jiang's _Shanghai Gang_ (as they are still called) is a real tooth and claw capitalist _movement_ - they make George W Bush, Jamie Dimon  and Alan Greenspan look a bit like European social democrats.  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	


>

Then, from 2002 until 2012 it had a slightly left of centre government under Hu Jintao. Hu did not dispute the market's role in the economy but he introduced some )only a few) "welfare state" artifacts. Under HU the minimum wage rose in ever single state, more than once in several of them. 
                                                  <





I expect the pendulum to swing back to wards the economic centre, maybe to a bit right of  centre under Xi Jinping.
                                                                                                                                 <



>

This all reflects internal divisions within the Chinese Communist Party which is not an ideological monolith. In fact, I would argue, the CCP is not ideological at all and Bo Xolai's _sin_ was being more ideological than is tolerated by the leadership.


----------



## CougarKing

Mr. Campbell,

Having worked in at DFAIT's Chongqing consulate during Harper's visit there in Feb. 2012, I am well aware of Bo Xilai's former importance to Canadian relations. And I met Mark Mackinnon there since he was part of Harper's press gallery which travelled with the PM's staff aboard CF One.

However, in the above article Mackinnon seems to have omitted the fact that during the PM's state visit to China, Harper visited TWO rising party secretaries in two cities after meeting the CCP's national leadership in Beijing.

After Harper's 2012 Beijing visit, but before going to Chongqing, Harper visited Guangzhou, which as you well know is a manufacturing and industrial hub and, like Shenzhen, is just across the Chinese border from Hong Kong. 

Guangzhou is important to Canada not only because of Guangzhou's economic importance in relation to other parts of China, but also because much of the Cantonese-speaking segment of the Chinese-Canadian diaspora also traces their roots to Guangdong province, where Guangzhou is located. And as you know, the Cantonese-speaking diaspora across the world outnumbers even the current population of France!

When Harper visited both Chongqing and Guangzhou, his aim was to secure Canada's relations with TWO of China's future leaders. One was Bo Xilai.

The other was Wang Yang(汪洋), the party secretary of Guangzhou and now one of China's Vice-Premiers. 

Wang Yang is still active, and has REFORMIST credentials. 

His Guangzhou model of development emphasizes free market principles in contrast to Bo Xilai's Chongqing model, which emphasized more state intervention, if I can recall correctly. 

Clearly, Wang is not yet among the Politburo Standing Committee's 7 current members, but he is still a Vice-Premier on the Central Committee and thus in a influential position. Wang Yang, only or 58-59 years old now, might be within the next generation of standing committee members in the next leadership transition a decade from now.   

Thus, the fact that Harper cultivated Wang Yang as well with a direct visit to his city means Canada has another possible "ally" within China's top leadership. 

Anyways, here's more about Wang Yang from Reuters, via the Huffington Post from earlier this year:



> *Wang Yang, China Reformer, Set To Become Vice Premier  *
> Reuters  |  Posted: 03/15/2013 2:10 am EDT
> 
> By David Stanway and Benjamin Kang Lim
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> BEIJING, March 15 (Reuters) - Wang Yang, one of China's best-known reformers who was passed over for promotion last year, is set to become one of four vice premiers, sources said, a role that will see his credentials for change tested to the full.
> 
> The largely rubber-stamp National People's Congress, or parliament, will name the four vice premiers and cabinet ministers in a tightly scripted ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Saturday.
> 
> *Wang made his name as the party boss of the export powerhouse of Guangdong province in south China, where he pushed for social and political reform. Despite later toning down his reformist agenda, he missed out on a seat on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, at the party congress in November amid concerns of elders that he was too liberal.
> 
> At 58, Wang will be the youngest of the vice premiers, who assist Premier Li Keqiang run the world's second biggest economy, four independent sources said. Wang will be the third-ranked vice premier.*
> 
> Zhang Gaoli, 66, who eked into the standing committee, will become No. 1 vice premier and help oversee the financial sector, said the sources, two of whom have ties to the leadership.
> 
> Liu Yandong, 67, will be the second-ranked vice premier and be responsible for culture, education, health and sports, the sources said, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for discussing secretive elite politics with foreign media.
> 
> Ma Kai, 66, one-time state planner, will be the fourth- ranked vice premier, the sources said.
> 
> Liu, Wang and Ma are members of the party's 25-member Politburo, one notch below the standing committee.
> 
> The sources were divided over whether the country's agriculture ministry, which reports to a vice premier, will be overseen by Wang or Ma. The other portfolios up for grabs will be industry, transport, production safety, state assets, telecommunications and railways.
> 
> Whoever gets the agriculture portfolio will have to try to steer through policies aimed at transforming China's sprawling agricultural sector and improving long-term food security.
> 
> *China plans to spend 40 trillion yuan ($6.4 trillion) to bring 400 million people to cities over the next decade to turn the country into a wealthy world power with economic growth generated by affluent urban consumers.
> 
> "Li Keqiang is pushing for urbanisation. The countryside will be the main battlefield," one source with leadership ties told Reuters.*
> 
> China needs to bring in the commercial and technological wherewithal that will allow its farms to feed an increasingly rich and urban population, even in the face of declining water supplies, land and rural labour.
> 
> But the vice premier overseeing agriculture will also need to ensure that the central government treads carefully, encouraging the transfer of land and the creation of advanced agribusinesses while addressing a widening urban-rural wage gap and protecting the interests of millions of small, subsistence farmers throughout the country.
> 
> Wang has experience dealing with rural protests against land grabs, winning praise for deftly handling a crisis in the coastal village of Wukan in Guangdong in 2011, but observers have said his instinct for reform has usually been frustrated.
> 
> Zheng Fengtian, a professor with the school of agricultural economics and rural development at Renmin University in Beijing, said the leader responsible for agriculture would likely have his hands tied.
> 
> "I think the new leader will continue the current agricultural policy mapped out by the (party's) previous Central Committee and the State Council (cabinet), which have clearly outlined ideas on agriculture development," he said.
> 
> "The key issue is urbanisation and I hardly expect any breakthrough beyond what has already been talked about."
> 
> Saturday's parliamentary session will also decide who will take over a number of key government ministries.
> 
> The sources said two front runners have emerged to take over as chairman of China's powerful state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, including current vice-chairman Xie Zhenhua, also the country's chief climate change official, and Xu Shaoshi, the minister of land and resources.
> 
> Current vice-minister Pan Yue remains the main candidate to take over as minister of environmental protection, but incumbent Zhou Shengxian might stay on, the sources said. (Additional reporting by Niu Shuping; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> In the wake of the recent sea spate where a Taiwanese fisherman was allegedly shot by the Philippine Coast Guard and the resulting tensions between China, Taiwan and the Philippines:
> 
> A PLA General then makes a bold statement...




Here is a link to an excellent _New York Times Magazine_ multi-media presentation on the Spratleys from a Philippines perspective.

The Philippines would dearly love some tangible US support but it appears that President Obama's _Asian Pivot_ is designed to avoid offending China.


----------



## tomahawk6

The population demands of current urban dwellers has strained the infrastructure.The lack of water and pollution will make life in China's urban centers a less than pleasant experience and could foster a future revolution against the Party.Which is why they have tried to keep the bulk of the population on the farm.


----------



## George Wallace

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The population demands of current urban dwellers has strained the infrastructure.The lack of water and pollution will make life in China's urban centers a less than pleasant experience and could foster a future revolution against the Party.Which is why they have tried to keep the bulk of the population on the farm.



Just witness their "season of smog" that is affecting some of their major metropolitan areas.  Smog ten times, or more, than found anywhere else on the planet crippling whole cities and forcing whole populations to stay indoors.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is a link to an excellent _New York Times Magazine_ multi-media presentation on the Spratleys from a Philippines perspective.
> 
> The Philippines would dearly love some tangible US support but it appears that President Obama's _Asian Pivot_ is designed to avoid offending China.




And here is a link to another interactive briefing, this one from the _Council  on Foreign Relations_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The population demands of current urban dwellers has strained the infrastructure.The lack of water and pollution will make life in China's urban centers a less than pleasant experience and could foster a future revolution against the Party.Which is why they have tried to keep the bulk of the population on the farm.




It is also why China is spending a fortune on green projects and pollution abatement.

It, the pollution, is the price that China paid for rapid, unconstrained industrialization.

But, a problem is that China, like America, is rich in coal and coal fired electricity is, still, crucial. The Chinese people may be upset about pollution but they would be even more upset if their TV screens went dark or the lights went out.


----------



## tomahawk6

The people in the rural areas are missing out on China's economic boom.The idea of bringing more people into the cities is really stupid.


----------



## observor 69

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is a link to an excellent _New York Times Magazine_ multi-media presentation on the Spratleys from a Philippines perspective.
> 
> The Philippines would dearly love some tangible US support but it appears that President Obama's _Asian Pivot_ is designed to avoid offending China.



Yes so excellent that I had a link at: « Reply #2236 on: October 25, 2013, 13:46:25 »


----------



## Edward Campbell

:cdnsalute:  Yes, you did, and I forgot it was there.  :-[


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is a link to an excellent _New York Times Magazine_ multi-media presentation on the Spratleys from a Philippines perspective.
> 
> The Philippines would dearly love some tangible US support but it appears that President Obama's _Asian Pivot_ is designed to avoid offending China.



*The grounded ship mentioned in the article is the former Philippine Navy ship BRP _Sierra Madre_, an ex-US Navy World War II LST. The Philippines has stationed a contingent of Marines on the ship's hulk to deter the Chinese from taking the area known as Ayungin Shoal or 2nd Thomas Shoal, which is claimed by both countries. Apparently a lot of local fishermen from the nearby inhabited Pagasa Island/Kalayaan Island group tend to visit the hulk regularly, as one can see from the pics...

Pictures from the New York Times and another forum:


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Philippines' tactic is, I think, very effective. It's a classic, old 1950s _tripwire_. Of course a corporal's guard of marines on a rusting hulk cannot actually "do" anything to or about the Chinese, but they take away one big Chinese option. Clever ...


Edit: format


----------



## observor 69

I found this part of the article interesting, use of the "cabbage" strategy. Thoughts comments?

"“Since [the standoff], we have begun to take measures to seal and control the areas around the Huangyan Island,” Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong, of China’s People’s Liberation Army, said in a television interview in May, using the Chinese term for Scarborough. (That there are three different names for the same set of uninhabitable rocks tells you much of what you need to know about the region.) He described a “cabbage strategy,” which entails surrounding a contested area with so many boats — fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships — that “the island is thus wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage.”


----------



## Edward Campbell

Baden  Guy said:
			
		

> I found this part of the article interesting, use of the "cabbage" strategy. Thoughts comments?
> 
> "“Since [the standoff], we have begun to take measures to seal and control the areas around the Huangyan Island,” Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong, of China’s People’s Liberation Army, said in a television interview in May, using the Chinese term for Scarborough. (That there are three different names for the same set of uninhabitable rocks tells you much of what you need to know about the region.) He described a “cabbage strategy,” which entails surrounding a contested area with so many boats — fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships — that “the island is thus wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage.”




It's a way ... and the Chinese need to find a way that does not involve the use of force. Force must be available, and no one should doubt they, the Chinese, _can_ use force, but any actual use of force would be a _strategic_ failure on China's part.


----------



## CougarKing

Xinjiang/Uighur separatists in the news again?

While many things reported in China's media is subject to question, one should wonder whether the police there are just trying to find a scapegoat for an incident which they may or may not have been able to prevent...

Asia News



> » 10/29/2013 10:31
> CHINA
> 
> *Police: Uyghur suspects behind Tiananmen accident*
> 
> by Wang Zhicheng
> Search is on for two men from Xinjiang and four cars with the license plates from the region. It could have been a suicide terrorist attack . Uyghur intellectual calls for more caution. AsiaNews sources: Not only the Uyghurs , but entire Chinese population is tired and dissatisfied with the leadership. Strong censorship on information.
> 
> Beijing ( AsiaNews ) - *Beijing police suspect that yesterday's incident - where a car drove into some tourists in Tiananmen Square , and then exploded , killing all passengers - was carried out by Uyghurs suicide terrorists. *  The incident occurred almost under the large portrait of Mao Zedong that dominates the front of the Imperial Palace , a few dozen meters from Zhongnanhai, home to many leaders.
> 
> *The incident took place yesterday at noon and in addition to the three people in the car (an SUV ) , killed a further two people, a Chinese man and a Filipino national, leaving 38 injured. Police and firefighters have cordoned off the area from public view.*
> 
> Today, the English edition of the Global Times, part of the People's Daily , said that the police have linked the incident with the Xinjiang and some Uyghur suspects . But the Chinese edition does not mention anything about Xinjiang .
> 
> Yesterday, all day censors removed any news or comments about the incident from the web, allowing only the official version of Xinhua.
> 
> *Last night and today the police launched a manhunt to gather information on two Uyghur men and four cars with the Xinjiang license plate. Ilham Tohti , a Uyghur intellectual , writing on the website Uighurbiz.net , pleaded for caution because it is easy to blame the Uyghurs and increase control over the ethnic minority.*
> 
> The western region of Xinjiang has been shaken by Islamic Uyghur nationalist movements for decades. For the most part they seek greater autonomy from the cultural and commercial dictatorship of the central government that has colonized the region with millions of Han immigrants and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
> 
> The settlement also involves religion: Islam is strongly controlled in Uyghur schools, mosques, and society.
> 
> In the past there have been incidents and clashes between Uyghurs and Han in Xinjiang, as well as attacks that the government in Beijing has branded as "terrorist" , though often conducted with makeshift equipment ( petrol bombs , knives , plastic , etc. ... ) .
> 
> The Chinese edition of the Global Times today warns against "politicizing " the incident in Tiananmen too. Tiananmen Square, site of the infamous massacre on June 4, 1989 , is subject to a heavy security cordon to prevent even the slightest protest .
> 
> In China, large-scale corruption d throughout the Party has led to over 180 thousand "mass incidents" a year, in which different groups - farmers, workers , retirees, ex-military , ... - Clashed with police , often violently.
> 
> A source for AsiaNews in Beijing said: "The party is seeking to water down this incident, but it reveals the profound dissatisfaction and fatigue of the whole population , not only of the Uyghurs".


----------



## Edward Campbell

I know I'm repeating myself, but ...

China does have a violent _separatist_ movement in Xinjiang province (officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). There are analogs to the Canadian FLQ movement which turned violent in the 1960s. But, unlike the FLQ: the Uyghurs are well funded, from Saudi Arabia and some Gulf principalities, I _think_, and they are incited by an established, also well funded, _Islamist_ radical movement. While I think prosperity will help to defuse some of the Uyghur anger it is unlikely to do much to eradicate the _separatist movement_. The Uyghurs are a Turkic, Central Asian people, not just another _Sinic_ minority; their _separatist_ impulses are ethnic, linguistic and religious.

I will also repeat something a Chinese official told me: they (the government in Beijing) are encouraging more and more young Chinese, especially young men, to move to Xinjiang with promises of good, state funded, jobs; once there those young men are encouraged to marry Uyghur girls ~ who appear to be happy to leave Islam and become _Chinese secular_ ~ and settle there. *"We'll f___k them into submission,"* said my acquaintance.


----------



## a_majoor

Reporting on a rather strange article published in Hong Kong. The thread started with NextBigFuture, which also mentioned a second article in a different periodical predicting 50 years of wars as the Chinese State sought to expand, but there is even less reasoning behind this, and since it is not an "official" news organ, I doubt it reflects the thinking of the leadership. Translation  here: 

The trends publicised in the first article are real, and do pose a threat to the financial stability and order of the "Red Dynasty", but unless they are tapping into some information not known to the rest of us, the problems could lead to instability and disorder, but collapse would need these "bubbles" popping along with a more general crash in the outside world as the US or EUZone's debts pull them down (and at which point the nature of China's government will not be a pressing issue for us here at home).

http://intellihub.com/2013/08/07/major-publication-in-china-predicts-that-the-communist-regime-will-collapse-by-2016/



> *Major Publication in China Predicts That The Communist Regime Will Collapse by 2016*
> 
> Despite the praise of China’s development in the global media there are many indications that the current regime is on its way out
> 
> By JG Vibes
> Intellihub.com
> August 7, 2013
> 
> According to the Hong Kong magazine Frontline, a Chinese political news source, the Chinese Communist Party will collapse entirely by 2016.  According to the report, this collapse will be triggered by the reverse in cash flow that is currently taking place in the country, with large sums of money actually now moving out of China.
> 
> If this truly is the case it could be entirely possible that China is just the next stop on the central banking looting spree.  Regardless of the background politics at play, there are many indications that China will be going down with the US Dollar, the Euro and the rest of the world economy.
> 
> Of all the challenges facing China the most dangerous three are the real estate bubble, shadow banking, and local government debts, because of how pervasive and large-scale they are, says Dr. Frank Tian Xie, a business professor at the University of South Carolina Aiken.
> 
> It is important to remember that a collapse isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes this is just what the people need in order to topple an authoritarian regime.  This situation gives the general population an upper hand that they wouldn’t usually have. Also many times the population needs to see a regime fail, in order to cut through the propaganda so they can understand that they are are being oppressed.  The report also mentions that corruption will play a vital role in this collapse, which again ties in with the idea that maybe the people will be better off without the current power structure.
> 
> Although it has been unreported in the media China has been experiencing large strings of protests, riots and revolts.  China may have a reputation for being the home of some extremely obedient people, but many westerners would be surprised to believe that there is far more defiance and resistance in a place like China than there is in the United States.
> 
> Earlier this year thousands of people revolted in China smashing police cars and overturning police vans, after a checkpoint caused an accident and the ambulance took over an hour to arrive.
> 
> From all accounts it seems that the local police had some sort of racket going on, and were stopping citizens to make sure all of their papers were up to code.
> 
> It has even been suggested that these police were forcing fake registrations on the people to collect extra loot on top of their already astronomical pay from the state.
> 
> When a car tried to run away from one of these checkpoints to protect themselves from the police, they were chased until a crash occurred.
> 
> After the crash onlookers gathered and many called for an ambulance, but for over an hour there was no response.
> 
> What has obviously happened here is that the onlookers saw that one of their neighbors was being attacked by the state, and they rushed to that neighbors defense.
> 
> In areas as repressive as China the tempers of the people are always just below the boiling point, waiting for something like this to happen at any moment.
> 
> Last year in China one family actually refused to leave their house when they were told to move so a road could be built through their property.  In response the government surrounded their house with a highway and threatened to tear it down until they eventually gave in.  Now many residents living in areas that face similar problems are beginning to fight back against this land theft, and share their stories with the world.
> 
> There have been many other circumstances where villagers have fought back against having their land seized through imminent domain.
> 
> According to the Epoch Times:
> 
> A mass protest by villagers in the south-central province of Hunan is the latest of several similar incidents drawing attention to land acquisitions for development projects being exploited by communist officials.
> 
> More than a thousand Hui Muslims from Pingfeng Village, Shaoyang City, protested in front of the municipal government building on Feb. 25, demanding that authorities hold the relevant officials accountable for a recent land acquisition during which villagers were attacked with batons.
> 
> One of the villagers, Mrs. Ma, told The Epoch Times that the protesters held up banners and photos taken of the villagers being beaten. “We waited for over an hour and no officials came out to meet us, so we went into the office building and were met by at least a hundred police. Then finally an official came out to meet us.”
> 
> The protestors stated that the land was forcibly taken, and more than a dozen people were injured. Supported by the villagers, the families of the victims demanded that the municipal government investigate the local law enforcement department and punish the perpetrators. However, they were told to wait for the outcome of the government’s investigation.
> 
> According to Mrs. Ma, the beatings occurred on the morning of Jan. 10, when over a hundred Shuangqing District government staff members, policemen, and urban management officers arrived in police vehicles, and commenced a hostile land acquisition. “They came to the village and beat whoever spoke up with police batons, injuring 14 people; seven were even hospitalized,” she said.
> 
> In addition to the political and economic concerns that come along with communism, there are also issues with the massive amounts of pollution,censorship and many other issues surrounding the ever present police state.  All these factors and more could play a role in the demise of the current Chinese regime, and this is actually a possibility that is more realistic than most people think.
> 
> Sources:
> 
> ^http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/232752-china-and-party-will-collapse-by-2016-says-hong-kong-media/
> 
> ^http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57551700/thousands-of-chinese-protest-smash-police-cars/
> 
> ^http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/chinese-villagers-fight-land-grab-by-officials-working-with-developers-354183.html



Thread starter in NextBigFuture: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/10/weird-speculation-about-chinas-future.html.

The fact this is published in NBF is also strange, since the blog is very pro China and quite Sinophillic.


----------



## CougarKing

> *Deep-pocketed Chinese energy firms have started to flex their muscles. They are snapping up foreign oil and gas companies at an increasing clip.*
> 
> Of the 10 biggest foreign mergers or acquisitions by Chinese companies this year, seven have been in the energy sector, according to data from Dealogic.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> Analysts say the emphasis on the energy sector can be attributed to China's shift away from coal and a domestic shortfall in energy production. Companies need to look beyond China's borders for resources.
> 
> The move abroad has not always been smooth. The state-owned CNOOC, for example, was forced to abandon an $18 billion bid for California-based Unocal in 2005 amid heavy political pressure in the United States. Since then, Chinese firms have largely shied away from wholesale purchases of U.S. companies.
> 
> *Yet Chinese firms have also benefited from large-scale changes in the oil industry. In recent years, American companies have focused more on the shale gas boom in North America, opening the door for Chinese firms in countries like Iraq, Mozambique and Egypt.*
> 
> source: cnn.com


----------



## a_majoor

A way to bypass the Great Firewall of China?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029415.500-get-round-internet-censors-using-a-friends-connection.html



> *Get round internet censors using a friend's connection*
> 30 October 2013 by Hal Hodson
> Magazine issue 2941.
> 
> People living under repressive regimes will soon be able to access the web using the internet connection of friends in censorship-free countries
> 
> FOR people living under repressive regimes censorship is an everyday reality, and browsing the internet freely is impossible without some serious technical know-how. This week Google threw its weight behind an idea that lets people circumvent censorship by using the internet connection of a friend in a non-censored country.
> 
> A collaboration between the University of Washington in Seattle and non-profit firm Brave New Software, uProxy lets users share their internet connection with friends on social networks through a browser extension.
> 
> When both parties have the uProxy extension installed, one can forge an encrypted link through the other person's browser and out onto the internet via their social network connection. As well as giving people access to censored content, it could allow people in the UK to watch the US version of Netflix via a US friend's connection, for example, or those in the US to log in to the BBC iPlayer to catch the latest episode of Sherlock.
> 
> So far it has only been tested in a closed trial for selected users, but its developers promise to open up the code to curious security researchers. This will also ease fears that any back door may have been left open for authorities such as the US National Security Agency to access and spy on users' browsing habits. Censors can't stop uProxy simply by blocking social networking websites either because, instead of the standard web, it accesses the contact lists via background, hard-to-block online processes.
> 
> UProxy was funded by Google's charitable arm, Google Ideas, and the firm is also helping in its development. And it isn't the only anti-censorship tool that uses our friends to get online. Lantern – another Brave New Software project – also relies on your social network to find a trusted computer to connect to the wider internet. Unlike uProxy, it can use friends of friends, widening the pool of potential proxies. Like anonymising software Tor, it is funded by the US Department of State.
> 
> Adam Fisk, CEO of Brave New Software, says there are advantages to using a person's social network in this way. For one, censors will have trouble finding and blocking the IP addresses of all your peers. With Lantern and uProxy, the more people that use the service, the harder it is to censor, as more and more trusted proxies become available.
> 
> "We're capitalising on the emergence of social networks," says Raymond Chang, a graduate student at the University of Washington who is working on uProxy.
> 
> Many anonymising tools still require a high degree of computer literacy to use, although there are some apps that allow people to make encrypted calls and send emails. Google makes its money through easy-to-use web applications, so it's reasonable to expect that uProxy will exhibit some of the same characteristics.
> 
> Lantern may also be easy to use, as the plan is to build Gmail encryption right into the system, with all the complicated key exchanges hidden from the user.
> 
> Dan Staples of the Open Technology Institute in Washington DC says letting users place trust in people they know for access to the internet is unique. "No matter what, I have to place my trust in someone when I use digital technology," says Staples. "I think the uProxy and Lantern projects are taking a positive approach."


----------



## tomahawk6

NYT article/video of the Filipino toe hold in the Spratleys.

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> NYT article/video of the Filipino toe hold in the Spratleys.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/



T6,

If you look at the previous page, you'll see that's the third time that NYT article has been posted at this thread.

I reposted some pics from the article at this post below:

http://forums.navy.ca/forums/threads/2941/post-1265949.html#msg1265949


----------



## tomahawk6

Thanks for the gentle scolding  :camo:


----------



## CougarKing

This update from the Washington Times below is more related to the PLA-N's SSBN capability, which has expanded since its _Jin_ class submarines entered service. 

It should be emphasized though that since China first got a nuclear weapons capability in the 1960s, their government has always preferred a "no-first strike/no first-use" policy. That doesn't seem to have changed with the more recent generations of leaders.

Washington Times



> *Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time this week that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific.*
> 
> On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People's Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force.
> 
> “This is the first time in 42 years since the establishment of our navy’s strategic submarine force that we reveal on such a large scale the secrets of our first-generation underwater nuclear force,” the Global Times said in a lengthy article titled “China for the First Time Possesses Effective Underwater Nuclear Deterrence against the United States.”
> 
> *The article features 30 photos and graphics detailing, among other things, damage projections for Seattle and Los Angeles after being hit by Chinese nuclear warheads and the deadly radiation that would spread all the way to Chicago.*


----------



## a_majoor

Made a rather surprising discovery today: picked up a copy of the "Epoch Times" at the CANEX in Kingston today (there were cute cuddly Panda bears above the fold. Who doesn't love cuddly Panda bears?  )

It is claimed the Epoch Times is owned or controlled by the Falun Gong, and the blurb under the masthead claims it eas established to "fill the need for truthful, uncensored reporting on China". This would suggest that this is certainly aimed against the Chinese government (and articles like "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party" and a ticker announcing that 149,124,634 people had quit the Chinese Communist Party as of 7:00PM 10/30/13 would seem to reinforce that idea).

Of course everyone has the right to speak and even publish a newspaper (or broadcast on radio and TV, which they also do: New Tang Dynasty TV and the radio station Sound of Hope), I had not been expecting to see anything like that here. Downtown Kingston, maybe... :nod:


----------



## CougarKing

More unrest, but in a different, unexpected part of China. Take note that Taiyuan is actually known for mining, so anyone planting bombs in this instance might have had access to explosives in the mining industry.

BBC link



> *Blasts at China regional Communist Party office injure one*
> 
> Explosions have been reported outside a provincial office of the ruling Communist Party in northern China.
> 
> 
> *The blasts in Taiyuan in Shanxi province were caused by a series of small devices*, the official news agency Xinhua said.
> 
> It said one person had been injured and two cars damaged.
> 
> Photos posted on social media showed smoke and several fire engines at the scene. Police appeared to have sealed off the scene.
> 
> Shanxi police said that Wednesday's incident took place at around 07:40 local time (23:40 GMT).
> 
> *"Several small explosive devices went off at Taiyuan's Yingze Street near the provincial party office,"* police said in a post on their verified microblog.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

Wonder how much of the technology of Taiwan's recently acquired AH64E helicopters and other US weapons systems will also be shared later on with the mainland if other Taiwanese officers decide that reunification under Beijing's terms is inevitable...



> *Taiwanese Major Sells Military Secrets to China*
> By Lu Chen, Epoch Times | October 28, 2013
> 
> 
> Quote
> The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense released news on Oct. 26 saying that a military major sold secrets about American aircraft to mainland China. The major is now under investigation, along with over a dozen others suspected of involvement, Taiwanese authorities said.
> 
> According to initial investigations, the suspected officer is surnamed Hao, and is based at an electronic warfare brigade in the Air Force stationed in Pingtung County, in the south of Taiwan, Taiwan media NextTV reported. *Major Hao is suspected of selling secret information about the E-2K, a modernized early warning aircraft sold by the United States. *
> 
> 
> Epoch Times


----------



## CougarKing

A coming "Cool War" with China? More about what this Harvard law professor (a Middle-east specialist-turned-China specialist) says about Canada's role is further down the article.

National Post



> *Professor warns of ‘cool’ war with China*
> 
> *After years studying Islamic thought and the Middle East — and helping to form the then-nascent Iraqi government — Harvard law professor Noah Feldman realized he had made a mistake — he had spent too little time examining the real power rising, China. Despite their deep economic interdependence, China and the U.S. are going to be increasingly at odds, he suggests.* In advance of his appearance at the National Post-sponsored Teatro Speakers’ Series Thursday, he discusses his new book, Cool War, the Future of Global Competition with the Post’s Jen Gerson. This is an edited version of their conversation.
> 
> *Q. Why did you switch to China?*
> A. The West spent close to a decade focused almost exclusively on the Middle East, when the far more important subject is the rise of China and how that changes the world. In the course of researching this question, I realized I had made that mistake, just like my country had, and I ought to learn as much as I could about the U.S.-China relationship and try to form my own views.
> 
> *Q. Are we spending too much time focusing on the Middle East and its issues?*
> A. Yes. Although the issues there are difficult and important, the Middle East is a tinderbox and what the West can do [in terms of intervention] is quite limited. If we didn’t know that a decade ago, we should certainly realize that now.
> 
> *By contrast, China’s rising economy and military are going to have transformative effects on global politics and the global economy, [and] deserve our serious and sustained attention.*
> 
> (...)
> 
> *Q. What does this mean for Canada?*
> 
> A. Canada is in an interesting position. This is not like a Cold War where you have to choose sides and never deviate. In a Cool War structure, you can be militarily and strategically tied to one side — the U.S. — but economically dependent on the other side — China.
> 
> *Q. Seen through a Cool War prism, Canada is in a unique position to play both sides.*
> 
> A. Yes, it really is. You can use some of that leverage against the U.S.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> A coming "Cool War" with China? More about what this Harvard law professor (a Middle-east specialist-turned-China specialist) says about Canada's role is further down the article.
> 
> National Post




It's a good article and, broadly and generally, I agree with Noah Feldman, especially with the four points you have highlighted: too much focus on the Middle East/too little on China (on East Asia in general) and Canada can play both ends against the middle.


----------



## CougarKing

Somehow I suspected his supporters were setting Bo Xilai up for a comeback, much like Deng Xiaoping had a comeback from a purge as well before rising to lead China during the 1980s...

Agence-France Presse



> *New party formed in rare challenge to Communist Party of China*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> November 10, 2013 7:24 PM
> 
> BEIJING - *Supporters of jailed Chinese politician Bo Xilai have established a new political party, a founder said Sunday, in a rare challenge to the ruling Communist Party.*
> 
> Scholar Wang Zheng said the party was set up on Wednesday, just days before a key Communist Party meeting, to support the former high-ranking official who was handed a life sentence for corruption in September.
> 
> Wang said the* Zhi Xian Party*,  which means "supreme constitution," has named Bo as its life-long chairman, though it was unclear if he had actually agreed to have ties with the group.
> 
> Attempts by the party to contact Bo through one of his lawyers failed.
> 
> *Chinese authorities view organizations set up without express authorization as illegal and have cracked down on similar groups in the past.
> 
> But Wang, an associate professor at the Beijing Institute of Economics and Management said: "I don't worry about being arrested.*
> 
> "At first, my school tried to stop me from doing this, but I ignored them."
> 
> *Bo, the former Communist Party chief of the city of Chongqing and a member of the elite politburo, lost an appeal to overturn his convictions for bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power last month.
> 
> His downfall followed his wife's murder of a British businessman, details of which were allegedly leaked when Chongqing's police chief fled to the safety of a US diplomatic mission in China.
> 
> Bo won admirers among China's so-called "New Left" for revival of "red" culture, sending officials to work in the countryside and pushing workers to sing revolutionary songs, hearkening back to the country's rule under leader Mao Zedong.*
> 
> Wang said Bo's trial was not carried out according to the law.
> 
> She declined to give the number of members and their affiliations, but said the new party hoped to hold a "national meeting" in half a year.
> 
> Several supposed members of the party, according to a list circulating on the Internet, claimed not to belong or could not be reached.
> 
> "The tenet of our party is to protect the authority of the constitution," Wang said.
> 
> China's constitution guarantees freedom of speech and assembly but legal scholars say the document is considered subordinate to the Communist Party.
> 
> In April, authorities detained several members of a loose grouping of activists calling for reforms to China's legal system, who took the name "new citizens movement," according to US-based rights group Human Rights Watch.


----------



## GAP

Farmers move from mountains to townhomes in China urbanization drive, but where are the jobs?
Published November 10, 2013 Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/10/farmers-move-from-mountains-to-townhomes-in-china-urbanization-drive-but-where/

QIYAN COMMUNITY, China –  After her husband started making good money as an electrician here in central China, Cao Qin ended years of working as a migrant laborer hundreds of kilometers (miles) away and came back home to better care for their school-age boy.

But Cao, 30, didn't return to the family's rugged adobe home in the hills. Instead, they all moved into a new third-floor apartment in this planned community of Qiyan that has been going up in a valley in southern Shaanxi province over the past couple of years as a new home for villagers scattered throughout nearby mountains.

Shops, markets, health clinics, the boy's school and government offices are all within walking distance or a short motorcycle ride — a stark contrast from before for Cao.

"It always felt far away. I think it took me two hours on foot to come to the nearest town," said Cao, one of the newest residents among the neat rows of white-and-gray townhomes and apartment blocks of Qiyan Community. "We are very satisfied."

Originally started as a disaster resettlement in 2010, the newly minted community has since been swept into China's massive push to move millions of country folk into more urban settings to improve access to services and to shift from a factory-based economy to a consumer-driven, service-oriented one.

But there is one big problem: For most families there is no work here, meaning that most of the region's working-age people, as before, travel elsewhere for jobs. Some families are still holding out in the mountains because they can't afford the new apartments and don't have enough flexibility in how to use — let alone sell — the land they would leave behind.

China has no private land ownership, and rural lands are owned by village collectives. Mountain villager Huang Tianbing is locked into a farm collective deal arranged by local officials that involves subleasing his land for a tea tree business and caring after the trees. He said he only makes about $350 a year from the arrangement.

"We can hardly make a living and have no means to move out," Huang said, sitting near the door to his adobe home up on a hill, a vegetable garden behind him.

Scholars argue that successful urbanization requires a reform of China's rural collectives and land laws to give farmers like Huang more opportunities for success.

China's Communist Party leaders huddled in a high-level plenum in Beijing are expected to discuss these kinds of reform during consultations through Tuesday, with more comprehensive plans to be rolled out by year's end.

Beijing sees urbanization as China's next biggest engine for economic growth, with plans to turn 300 million rural folks into urban dwellers by 2030 — equivalent to relocating nearly the entire population of the United States.

"Imagine their demands as they become urbanized. That's unprecedented in human history," said Hu Angang, a professor at the School of Public Policy & Management at Tsinghua University. "We are turning urbanization from the biggest potential for consumption into the biggest drive for consumption."

China's urbanization first picked up pace with market reforms in the early 1980s. By 2011, half the country's population had moved into cities, but a rigid, decades-old household registration system that assigns either urban or rural status under the old planned economy created a new class of second-class people: rural laborers working in cities.

A recent study by Tsinghua University shows that only 27.6 percent of the country's people have urban status with full claims to public urban services, while hundreds of millions of city dwellers with the rural status have limited education, health and pension benefits.

China's second wave of relocation must be more equitable to avoid the kind of social instability that the country's leaders loathe, and Premier Li Keqiang has vowed a "new type" of urbanization, with plans to close the gap between rural and urban residents.

"The key this time is to integrate the countryside with cities and to equalize basic public services," said Hu of Tsinghua University.
more on link


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Somehow I suspected his supporters were setting Bo Xilai up for a comeback, much like Deng Xiaoping had a comeback from a purge as well before rising to lead China during the 1980s...
> 
> Agence-France Presse




I'm not sure the Deng analog can be stretched very far.

Even in exile, Deng had a major power base within the CPC, he was far stronger than the "gang of four" because he had the unwavering loyalty of both the PLA (he was, after all, a real "hero" of the long march and his rise to power was, mainly, based on his military achievements) and the Zhou Enlai faction. I doubt Bo has, or ever had, that sort of support and I suspect that Prof Wang and her friends are more dreamers and possessors of anything like power.


----------



## CougarKing

I would have thought that they would have done this decades ago, considering they've been operating the XIA class SSBN for decades now.

Defense News




> *US Report: 1st Sub-launched Nuke Missile Among China's Recent Strides*
> 
> TAIPEI — For the first time in the country’s history, China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent nears initial operational capability (IOC), according to a forthcoming report by a US congressional commission on China.
> 
> *China’s JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile could reach IOC later this year, according to an early draft of the report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.*
> 
> With *a range of 4,000 nautical miles*, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) will have its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent against the US mainland, mated with the Type 094 Jin-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN). China has deployed *three Jin-class SSBN and “probably will field two additional units by 2020.”*
> 
> The report also states that China is pursuing two new classes of nuclear submarines — the Type 095 guided-missile attack submarine (SSGN) and the Type 096 SSBN. The Type 096 will likely “improve the range, mobility, stealth, and lethality” of the PLAN’s nuclear deterrent.
> 
> *US military facilities on Guam are coming into conventional missile range for China, according to the report.*
> 
> Though China does not have the ability to strike land targets with sea-based cruise missiles, the report states China’s navy is developing a land-attack cruise missile capability, most likely with the Type-095 SSGN and Luyang-III (Type 052D) guided-missile destroyer. This will enhance China’s “flexibility for attacking land targets throughout the Western Pacific, including US facilities in Guam.”
> 
> In June, according to the report, *the People’s Liberation Army Air Force accepted 15 new H-6K bomber aircraft*.  An improved variant of the H-6, the K variant has extended range and can carry China’s new long-range, land-attack cruise missile (LACM). “The bomber/LACM weapon system provides the PLA Air Force with the ability to conduct conventional strikes against regional targets throughout the Western Pacific,” including Guam.
> 
> The report states* China is working on extending the range of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile*.  With its current range of 810 nautical miles, it can already threaten US naval vessels throughout the Western Pacific. At 1,600 nautical miles from China, Guam falls outside the DF-21D’s range.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

100,000 USD in relief aid is a pretty modest amount for China when compared to other nations such as the Vatican, who actually donated 150,000. Even China's own state media said that China would only stand to gain more by offering more aid, but the modest amount is probably sending a message to Manila, that Beijing won't just set the Spratlys dispute aside. 

CNBC



> China yet to deploy 'substantial' navy to aid Philippines
> 
> As international relief efforts get underway in the Philippines following the devastation caused by typhoon Haiyan, superpower China's contribution has been disproportionately low.
> 
> *Beijing yesterday offered $100,000 in cash, a figure that seems modest compared with its other recent contributions for humanitarian relief abroad, the New York Times reported.
> 
> Asked if the donation was scaled according to the current chill in relations between China and the Philippines, Qin Gang, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to answer, the New York Times said. *
> 
> (Read more: Storm surge in Philippines: 'It was like a tsunami')
> 
> Ties between China and the Philippines have been rocky, strained by disputes over the resource-rich South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its maritime territory.
> 
> PHILIPPE LOPEZ | AFP | Getty Images
> 
> A general view from the damaged control tower of the airport shows a C-130 aircraft (L) taking part in evacuation operations in Tacloban.Although the world's second-largest economy has beefed up its 'blue-water' navy enabling it to deliver humanitarian assistance to disaster-hit areas in Asia, China hasn't signaled that it will commit this formidable sea-borne platform to support aid operations after typhoon Haiyan killed an estimated 10,000 people when it swept through central Philippines on Friday.
> 
> 
> *The People's Liberation Army (PLA) - the world's largest military – does have a lot of assets to offer, according to Rory Medcalf, Director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Australia, not least of all a fully-equipped navy hospital ship called the 'Peace Ark' launched in 2007.
> 
> The ship has 300 hospital beds, eight operating rooms and 107 medical workers, including doctors and nurses.*
> 
> 
> "The PLA now has substantial maritime assets that can be turned towards disaster relief," Medcalf said in blog post on Monday entitled 'Typhoon Haiyan and the geopolitics of disaster relief'.
> 
> 
> 
> How Philippine firms are helping relief efforts
> Roel Refran, COO of the Philippine Stock Exchange describes how private firms are pledging help to communities damaged from Typhoon Haiyan.The vessel is "now used as a major platform for Chinese diplomacy, in ways the U.S. Navy would recognize from its own long tradition," said Medcalf, a former senior strategic analyst in Australia's Office of National Assessments intelligence agency.
> 
> 
> 'Outside support'
> 
> The hospital ship visited at least six Asian countries including Brunei, Maldives, Pakistan and Myanmar earlier this year during humanitarian assistance and disaster relief joint exercises before returning to eastern China on October 12.
> 
> *Manila has appealed for international assistance to back up its own military who are stretched thin and whose bases were hit.
> 
> "We need outside support," Lt. Col. Ramon Zagala told CNBC on Monday. "Our troops were also affected. We have to integrate international efforts within our own efforts."
> 
> If Beijing does ultimately decide to deploy Chinese military expertise and hardware to help the Philippines, it may signal a pragmatic step forward in its regional policy and could be seen as an attempt to diffuse tensions.*
> 
> *Philippines crisis grows by the day*
> 
> In the Philippines, rescue workers continue to look for survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan. NBC's Harry Smith reports."What Beijing does next will be an important sign of how sensible, capable and magnanimous a power Xi Jinping's China is going to be when it comes to regional diplomacy," explained Medcalf, who has studied the geopolitical ramifications of disaster relief and how the projection of so-called 'soft-power' has changed.
> 
> What form any Chinese support may take, the conditionality attached to any aid and whether Manila consents are just a few of the complex questions that diplomats must tackle before help can be shipped out, he said.
> 
> *China does have the potential to be a highly important "future donor and actor in the humanitarian aid field," Mathias Eick, the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) Regional Information Officer for East and Southeast Asia, Pacific Region told CNBC.
> 
> The English-language edition of the Global Times, a paper run by state-run People's Daily, called for China to set aside lingering political differences with the Philippines and assist the disaster-stricken neighboring country like a "responsible power".*
> 
> "China shouldn't be absent in the international relief efforts," the newspaper said in a front page op-ed published on its website on Tuesday entitled 'Islands spat shouldn't block typhoon aid'.
> 
> "Aid to the typhoon victims…is totally different from foreign aid in the past made out of geopolitical concerns," it continued. "Overseas Chinese in the Philippines played an active part to mobilize relief efforts when the mainland was in disaster. It's legitimate that we provide assistance when they suffer."
> 
> In the meantime, it is the search and rescue teams of the U.S. military who are the 'first responders', strengthening Washington's pivot towards Asia.
> 
> "At a time when American power and purpose in Asia are being questioned, it will also be noticed as a reminder that the forward-deployed American military is still the first and fastest responder to contingencies of any kind," said the Lowy Institute's Medcalf.
> 
> The aircraft carrier USS George Washington, currently in Hong Kong, is scheduled to sail to the Philippines with a support group of six additional ships to boost the relief effort on orders from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
> 
> 
> The group is expected to reach the Philippines "in 2 to 3 days depending on sea states and speed," CDR Steven Curry, a Hawaii-based spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet told CNBC.
> 
> — By CNBC's Sri Jegarajah. Follow him on Twitter: @cnbcSri




And in an ironic turn of events regarding the disputed Spratlys and the grounded Philippine ship, used as a tripwire against Chinese encroachment, mentioned earlier in this thread...

Interaksyon (Philippine News site)



> *'Yolanda' kicks out Chinese from Ayungin Reef, Philippine Marines on grounded ship safe*
> 
> 
> MANILA - *Super typhoon Yolanda has sent home Chinese maritime and Navy vessels at the Ayungin Reef in Palawan, while the half a dozen Philippine Marines on board a rusting and grounded World War II-era ship are safe, a source told InterAksyon.com.*
> 
> This effectively ends the standoff between the two countries some 100 nautical miles from the island of Palawan.
> 
> Ayungin is part of the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) in the West Philippine Sea (WPS). China claims the reef is part of its territory, more than a thousand nautical miles from its nearest 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
> 
> “They’re safe,” said a senior officer of the Philippine Marines guarding the reef on board the shipwreck BRP Sierra Madre (Landing Ship Tank 57). The Philippine Marine official requested that he not be named because he is not authorized to give any statement regarding operational activities in the West Philippine Sea.
> 
> “Hindi naman sila naanod (They were not washed away),” the source added.
> 
> *The source said the Chinese Navy ship, maritime ships, and fishing vessels left Ayungin two or three days before Yolanda struck the country.*
> “As of now, we’ve no report that the Chinese ships have returned to Ayungin. Dahil siguro may paparating na naman na isa pang bagyo (Maybe because another storm is approaching the country),” he said.
> 
> In June this year, Chinese vessels entered Ayungin and had maintained a presence in the area, as what they did in Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal located in Masinloc, Zambales in April 2012.
> 
> The territorial dispute between the two countries is being heard by an international arbitration court in Hamburg.


----------



## Nemo888

"Ship" is a bit of a stretch for that rusted wreck on the Ayungin Reef. I am surprised the marines on it survived.


----------



## MilEME09

*Chinese aircraft carrier fails to make a splash with Canadian military officials*

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Chinese+aircraft+carrier+fails+make+splash+with+Canadian+military/9161349/story.html

I would agree with the assessment that while their carrier is a game changer in the grand scheme, in the short term it has no strategic impact on the pacific.


----------



## a_majoor

China's move to insulate its oil sources from the US Navy. This expands the point made (i believe by Robert Kaplan) that China and the US are like a Dragon and a Whale: both are totally at home in their natural elements, but neither can get at the other:

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/chinas-changing-oil-calculus-9385?page=show



> *China's Changing Oil Calculus*
> 
> Rosemary A. Kelanic | November 12, 2013
> 
> Last month, China and Russia announced an $85 billion equity deal to jointly develop Russia’s east Siberian oil resources for export to China in an unprecedented agreement between the two countries.
> 
> This comes on the heels of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s tour of Central Asia to forge closer trade ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. Promoting a “New Silk Road” of regional commerce, he spoke illustriously of “camel bells echoing in the mountains” and “wisps of smoke rising in the desert” as in the days of yore.
> 
> Although much less romantic, “Hydrocarbon Highway” more aptly describes Xi’s vision. In recent weeks, China has signed nearly $100 billion in energy contracts to increase Chinese access to the abundant petroleum resources of Central Asia. A major advantage of obtaining oil from Siberia and Central Asia is that it could travel to China overland—and thus beyond the reach of U.S. naval power.
> 
> Xi’s efforts are not limited to terra firma. He has also pressed for closer military and economic ties with Indonesia and Malaysia, the two countries which sit astride the Strait of Malacca, a crucial maritime “choke point.” Roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports pass through this waterway, which is just two miles wide at its narrowest passage. By comparison, the oft-threatened Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has periodically promised to close to deny Persian Gulf oil to the global market, is twenty miles wide at its narrowest point.
> 
> An American naval blockade, most likely stemming from a conflict over Taiwan, is a nightmare scenario the Chinese regime clearly wishes to avoid. A new report I wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations casts this danger in a new light.
> 
> Most observers believe China’s investment reflects the importance of petroleum access for sustaining the nation’s extraordinary economic growth—which according to the World Bank, has averaged 10 percent annual GDP growth over the past twenty-five years. Soaring economic expansion has been accompanied by a doubling of Chinese oil consumption from five to ten million barrels per day over the past decade alone. Access to oil may also play a special role in buttressing the regime. Western experts commonly argue that the primary reason the regime has maintained power despite waning ideological relevance is the palliative effect of prosperity.
> 
> No doubt oil plays an important role in the Chinese economy, and by extension, the stability of its political regime. Yet this explanation overlooks a factor that is at least as important as prosperity: the crucial nature of oil for fighting modern wars.
> 
> In the past, military fuel shortages had disastrous effects on the battlefield, undermining both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan’s military efforts in World War II. Today’s conventional wisdom holds that such shortages are no longer a danger, based on the assumption that military oil consumption comprises only a tiny portion of a country’s overall petroleum demand. Nothing could be further from the truth.
> 
> I find that Chinese military fuel demand in a conventional conflict would be staggering—large enough, in fact, to strain its overall supplies. According to my estimates, in an air war against Taiwan alone, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) would guzzle nearly half of China’s indigenous jet fuel production. If a U.S. blockade cutting off oil imports coincided with a war against Taiwan, leaving China to fuel the war from domestic sources alone, China would eventually have to slash civilian aviation consumption by 75 percent to maintain a full military effort.
> 
> Such a scenario is not far-fetched. Historically, the majority of blockades have been imposed during ongoing wars. And of the rare peacetime blockades, several were immediate precursors to conflict. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine the United States blockading China for any other reason than to retaliate for an attack on Taiwan. Although a U.S.-China confrontation is unlikely, the possibility of its occurrence nevertheless influences the behavior of political and military leaders, who must prepare for worst-case scenarios.
> 
> If Chinese leaders are preparing for the contingency of a U.S. blockade, they are likely also preparing for an overlapping, simultaneous contingency of war with Taiwan. Thus President Xi’s efforts to build a Hydrocarbon Highway in Asia may be motivated as much or more by military readiness imperatives, not just prosperity concerns.
> 
> Rosemary A. Kelanic is associate director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies and a research instructor in international affairs at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University.


----------



## CougarKing

After the deliveries of the Orions and Apaches, Taiwan wants more US-made weapons. Will the next US administration give Taipei diesel subs and AEGIS ships when they know this will bring Beijing's condemnation?

Defense News



> *Taiwan Still Hungry for More US Arms*
> Nov. 13, 2013 - 03:41PM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — After nearly a decade of waiting, wrangling with budgets, writing proposals and whistling past the graveyard, new aircraft deliveries have begun arriving in Taiwan.
> 
> Over the past 60 days, deliveries of 12 P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and 30 AH-64E Apache Longbow attack helicopters have begun arriving in Taiwan. *Sixty UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters are expected to begin arriving in 2014.*
> 
> Despite struggles to pay for new equipment with dwindling defense budgets and improved relations with China, planners in Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) are sketching out proposals for new arms procurements from the US.
> 
> *Sources in both Taiwan and the US indicate the top priority is acquiring diesel-powered attack submarines.* In 2001, the US offered Taiwan eight submarines, but made no explanation on how it would fulfill the order. The US does not build diesel submarines, and many countries refuse to provide them to Taiwan due to political pressure from China.
> 
> Taiwan still has two Dutch-built diesel subs acquired during the 1980s and, at least on paper, still operates two World War II-era Guppy submarines for training.
> *
> Defense Minister Yen Ming and President Ma Ying-jeou have made clear in recent weeks the importance of the submarine acquisition.*
> 
> “Senior level ROC [Republic of China] authorities have been adamant about their priorities, first and foremost being additional diesel-electric submarines,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute and a former Taiwan desk officer in the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense.
> 
> “Submarines offer not only a credible, survivable deterrent, but also are critical for anti-submarine warfare training,” he said. “Senior US officials committed to assisting Taiwan in its acquisition of diesel-electric submarines more than a decade ago should move forward with a cooperative design feasibility study.”
> 
> Another Navy priority for Taiwan is the replacement of eight Vietnam War-era Knox-class frigates. Two Knox-class frigates are scheduled to be replaced next year with two refurbished Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates from the US Navy. Taiwan has the option of procuring a total of four retired Perry-class frigates from the US.
> 
> *Taiwan’s Navy also is considering replacing some of the Knox-class frigates with a new Sea Swift catamaran corvette to be built by the China Shipbuilding Corp.*
> 
> *An MND source indicated the Navy would like to build indigenous minehunters loosely based on US-built Osprey-class vessels.* Taiwan faces threats of blockade by China’s navy and the potential mining of port facilities during a conflict.
> 
> York Chen, a former member of Taiwan’s National Security Council, said Taiwan’s Navy still wants an “Aegis-equipped frigate,” though the Pentagon has ignored past requests.
> 
> Taiwan originally requested four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis combat system, but finally settled for four Kidd-class destroyers.
> 
> The Taiwan Marine Corps has stated publicly *it wishes to procure additional AAV-7A1 amphibious assault vehicles*.  In 2006, Taiwan procured 54 of those vehicles to replace aging LVTP-5A1 vehicles acquired in the 1970s. The MND source indicated the marines want an additional 48 AAV-7s to completely replace the remaining LVTP-5s.
> 
> Although the US has denied Taiwan’s request for 66 F-16C/D fighter jets, the decision has not affected *Taiwan Air Force plans to acquire the F-35 stealth fighter. Some Taiwan officials believe the next White House administration will be Republican and more willing to support Taiwan’s defense needs*.
> 
> *The Taiwan Air Force also plans to replace its AT-3 “Tzu Chung” trainer jets with the South Korean-built T-50 Golden Eagle.* Taiwan had planned to build a replacement, dubbed the AT-5, but the program was canceled due to funding and development problems.
> 
> *What Taiwan’s Air Force needs is “precision strike weapons,” such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)* and UAVs, said Arthur Ding, a cross-strait military affairs expert at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University. Given China’s tight air defense network, it would be “completely impossible to fly deep into China” for Taiwan’s fighters, Ding said.
> 
> In 2011, Taiwan secured the US release of an upgrade package for its older F-16A/B fighters that included the GBU-31, GBU-38 and GBU-54 laser-guided JDAMs. Though they were released, due to budgetary reasons, the Air Force has delayed the purchase of JDAMs until 2014 or later.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> After the deliveries of the Orions and Apaches, Taiwan wants more US-made weapons. Will the next US administration give Taipei diesel subs and AEGIS ships when they know this will bring Beijing's condemnation?
> 
> Defense News




While China will, ritually, condemn America for arming Taiwan, I continue to maintain that China does not intend to fight for Taiwan; it plans, and confidently expects, to regain sovereignty over Taiwan by peaceful means - American weapons and all.

Now, that does not mean that China will not fight.

There are very specific circumstances that will trigger a sudden and overwhelming Chinese attack - and China will not fear American intervention. Taiwan knows exactly what those circumstances are and it is very, very unlikely to ever break the current "rules of the game" with China. Both China and Taiwan *want* reunification (although it is true that the ethnic Formosan minority is not keen on it), they do not, yet, agree on the rules of that game.


----------



## CougarKing

With all the negative press about their stinginess on giving typhoon relief, was their initial meager donation due to their resentment over the Spratlys dispute a major miscalculation by China's leaders?

From the _Christian Science Monitor_:



> *Slammed for being stingy, China boosts aid to Philippines*
> 
> 
> *China's initial offer of $100,000 struck many as politically motivated by tensions in the South China Sea between the two countries.*




Even Ikea's donation has been bigger.


As reported by Yahoo News:


> *In Philippine relief efforts, China beat by Ikea*
> 
> *Amid territorial spat with Manila, China's paltry offer of typhoon aid threatens global image*
> By Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press
> 7 hours ago
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- The outpouring of international aid to the Philippines makes China's contribution for typhoon relief look like a trickle: Several countries and even _*Swedish furniture chain Ikea have done more than the world's second-largest economy*. That won't help Beijing's campaign to win over neighbors with its soft power_.
> 
> China has pledged less than $2 million in cash and materials, compared to $20 million provided by the United States, which also launched a massive military-driven rescue operation that includes an aircraft carrier.
> 
> *Another Chinese rival, Japan, has pledged $10 million and offered to send troops, ships and planes. Australia is giving $28 million, and Ikea has offered $2.7 million through its charitable foundation*.
> 
> China's reluctance to give more - driven by a bitter feud with Manila over overlapping claims in the South China Sea - dents its global image at a time when it is vying with Washington for regional influence.
> 
> _"China has missed an excellent opportunity to show itself as a responsible power and to generate goodwill,"_ said Zheng Yongnian, a China politics expert at the National University of Singapore. _"They still lack strategic thinking."_
> 
> Yet, China lags far behind the U.S. in the sphere of soft power - the winning of hearts and minds through culture, education, and other non-traditional forms of diplomacy, of which emergency assistance is a major component.
> 
> Despite Chinese academics' frequent promotion of soft power, *Chinese leaders don't really get it*, said Zheng. Instead, they continue to rely on the levers of old-fashioned major-nation diplomacy based on economic and military might. _"They still think they can get their way through coercion,"_ Zheng said.
> 
> That contrasts starkly with the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, which is helping despite strong public outrage over Manila's handling of a 2010 hostage crisis that killed Hong Kong residents. From Hong Kong, aid teams were dispatched and private charities pledged millions in donations.
> 
> _Ultimately, the damage to China will be "remarkably small," but only because countries have little real love for Beijing and were expecting little from it_, said University of Nottingham China expert Steve Tsang.
> 
> _*"It's an expression of China's petty-mindedness,"*_ Tsang said. _*"China already demands respect so other countries fear but don't love it."*_


----------



## CougarKing

> *China to relax one-child policy*
> 
> BEIJING - China is to loosen its controversial one-child policy, abolish some of its labor camps and seek closer policy ties to the United States, state media reported Friday.
> 
> The policy shift is one of several key decisions approved by the Communist Party of China (CPC) at its historic and secretive Third Plenary Session earlier this week.
> 
> The CPC said the change in family planning policy was intended to promote "long-term balanced development of the population in China," according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
> 
> More at...
> 
> NBC News


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is also "old news." The policy - for families where both parents are only children - has been in effect in some regions, in Beijing anyway, for a while. It was in effect early enough to allow parents to try for a "dragon baby" in the year of the dragon, 2012-01-23 to 2013-02-09.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> With all the negative press about their stinginess on giving typhoon relief, was their initial meager donation due to their resentment over the Spratlys dispute a major miscalculation by China's leaders?
> 
> From the _Christian Science Monitor_:
> 
> 
> Even Ikea's donation has been bigger.
> 
> 
> As reported by Yahoo News:




I think the adverse reaction to China's stinginess is, largely, from overseas Chinese and foreigners, in general.

As far as I can tell it is playing well in China amongst "ordinary" Chinese. The government line seems to be that the Philippines is spending scarce money on defending little rocks in the ocean that China claims for its own, so, if they can afford that then can afford to rescue their own people.

I'm not suggesting it's "right," but it seems to be a popular (or, at least, not unpopular) policy.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think the adverse reaction to China's stinginess is, largely, from overseas Chinese and foreigners, in general.
> 
> As far as I can tell it is playing well in China amongst "ordinary" Chinese.



I think the average "Zhou Blow" on the street in China is pretty much unaware and/or indifferent to what's happening to the Philippines. Those fortunate enough to have internet access would more likely be searching for something to buy on _Taobao_ (a Chinese version of Ebay) or sorting through tweets of Sinopop celebrities on _Weibo_ (the Chinese version of Twitter) rather than watching their state media. There a few instances where political dissidents may provoke a popular backlash against the government on certain issues on Weibo, but the censors will quickly wipe those clean within hours.

I remember during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, in a foreign news network's coverage that saw ordinary mainland Chinese bystanders interviewed on a Beijing street, every one of them interviewed was unaware that China was even conducting wargames in the Taiwan Strait.


----------



## CougarKing

I find it disappointing that another China/PLA expert, David Shambaugh, isn't among this latest gathering of foreign experts on the PLA.

Defense News



> *Taipei Conference Examines Evolving Chinese Strategic Doctrine*
> Nov. 15, 2013 - 05:54PM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — Evaluating changes in Chinese strategic thinking in terms of threat perceptions, doctrine and concepts for employing military power was the theme of an academic conference held here Nov. 14-15.
> 
> *The Chinese Council on Advanced Policy Studies (CAPS), US National Defense University (NDU), and Rand Corp*.  sponsored the International Conference on People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Affairs.
> 
> Of note, Andrew Yang has returned to CAPS as the secretary general after serving several years as the vice minister of defense on policy for the Ministry of National Defense (MND).
> 
> *The conference is considered one of the top forums on promoting the study of Chinese military affairs.*  The official theme was, “The PLA ‘Prepares for Military Struggle’ in the Information Age: Threats, Doctrine, and Combat Capabilities.”
> 
> Speakers included Alexander Huang of Tamkang University, John Schurtz and Dan Taylor of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Andrew Erickson of the Naval War College and Phillip Saunders of NDU, Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, Andrew Scobell  of Rand, and Joe McReynolds of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis under Defense Group Inc.
> 
> Attendees included officials from the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the de facto US Embassy. These included Michael Burgoyne, US Army programs officer; Donald Chu, senior adviser; Michelle Jean, AIT Liaison Affairs Section; William Klein, political section chief; Christian Ogrosky and Michael Paluba, US Air Force programs officers; and Matthew Schwab, chief, security cooperation office.
> 
> Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Georgetown University professor of security studies, presented her paper, “Historical Patterns in Chinese Conflict Termination Behavior.” Mastro provided a hypothetical Taiwan scenario using *three tendencies exhibited by Chinese leaders during war*.
> 
> *First, China tends to be much more willing to open communication channels in wars with smaller countries* than it would be in a conflict with peers or greater powers.
> 
> *Second, Chinese leaders historically overestimate the degree to which the threat or implementation of escalation will effectively compel the adversary to capitulate –* “a belief that undermines crisis stability.”
> 
> *Third, Chinese leaders tend to misjudge the influence of external parties*; “specifically Beijing overly relies on international pressure to convince adversaries to de-escalate and compromise to end the conflict.
> 
> Mastro suggests that in the case of a Taiwan contingency, *China’s position on talking while fighting will depend on the US role in the conflict*.  If the conflict is localized between China and Taiwan, then Chinese leaders are likely to offer talks during the conflict. However, “China’s willingness to talk does not equate to willingness to compromise,” she said.
> 
> In cases where Chinese leaders believe they have the upper hand militarily, they offer talks not as a means to compromise, but to create a channel for the opponent to capitulate to Chinese demands.* If the US is involved militarily, China will be unwilling to offer talks for fear of projecting weakness.*
> 
> China’s reluctance to talk while fighting, therefore, could create problems in managing escalation and resolving the situation in a timely manner.
> 
> China is also likely to engage influential countries to pressure Taiwan into wartime talks, Mastro said. Chinese leaders, concerned about China’s image during war, will believe that publicly expressing the desire to open diplomatic channels will make them look reasonable and their use of force defensive. China is also less likely to engage with multilateral institutions in which the US may have disproportionate influence unless they believe that institutional pressure will restrain the US response.
> 
> During the conference, Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College and Phillip Saunders of NDU provided a side lecture summarizing their findings on Chinese cruise missiles, which will appear in their forthcoming book, “A Low Visibility Force Multiplier: Assessing China’s Cruise Missile Ambitions,” in late December.
> 
> Erickson said *China is now capable of deploying anti-ship cruise missiles from air, land and sea platforms. * These will challenge US Navy ships, particularly in an effort to overwhelm the Aegis Combat System on US destroyers.
> 
> “China views large-scale saturation attacks as the best way to overwhelm missile defense systems, such as Aegis.”
> 
> *Cruise missiles are also very difficult to detect by US satellites and this has led to a US dependence on regional long-range radars, such as Taiwan’s early warning radar on Leshan Mountain*, and other long-range radars in Japan and along the arc of the Ryukyu Islands, said a former AIT official.


----------



## dapaterson

If you want to retain access to mainland Chinese sources, it's best to not speak at such a conference in Taipei.


----------



## a_majoor

WRT examining Chinese strategic doctrine, I suggest you look up the term "Unrestricted Warfare" (URW)

The Chinese government is also undertaking economic reforms, although how well they will follow through and how well this will work  are open questions:

http://business.time.com/2013/11/15/china-unveils-major-economic-reforms/



> *China’s Economic Reforms Are More Sweeping Than Anybody Realized*
> But it remains unclear if change will go deep enough to solidify the country’s economic miracle.
> 
> By Michael Schuman @MichaelSchumanNov. 15, 20135 Comments
> 
> After an important Communist Party plenum wrapped up on Tuesday, many observers (including myself) feared that the results showed President Xi Jinping was unwilling to launch the drastic reforms necessary to fix the economy. On Friday, more details emerged on what exactly Beijing’s top leaders approved during their conference, and the pledged reforms are much meatier and potentially more powerful than anything previously suggested, and tackle some of the worst ills of the economy.
> 
> Most notably, there is finally talk about reforming China’s dominant state-owned enterprises, or SOEs. These behemoths suck up the nation’s resources and crowd out the private sector, though they are bloated, inefficient and hamper the development of the economy. Now Xi is planning to do something about that. Beijing pledged to end some monopolies, improve SOE management and allow the private sector to invest in projects with SOEs. Such steps could make SOEs more competitive and allow greater scope for more productive private enterprise. Xi also plans to liberalize prices on commodities like water and natural gas, as well as in transport and telecom; speed deregulation of interest rates and capital flows; reduce curbs on foreign investment; and allow private investors to set up small banks. All of this will expand the role of the private sector in the economy and permit resources to be allocated more intelligently.
> 
> The concern earlier in the week was that Xi and his team seemed to dodge the reforms that were most pressing, either because they were unwilling to take on the special interests that would get hurt as a result, or they didn’t see the need or urgency. Now it is clear the Xi does appreciate the weaknesses of the Chinese economy – excess capacity, rising debt, a distorted financial sector, a lack of competition – and appears willing to confront them head on. However, what remains to be seen is how quickly these announced reforms will become reality, and how far they will really go. Some of this stuff has been talked about for a while – such as financial deregulation and market opening – but the pace of actual change has been glacial. In other areas, such as SOE reform, it is uncertain right now how much power the state is really willing to cede to the market and private enterprise.
> 
> How you see Xi’s reform efforts depends very much on how you see the health of China. If you believe that the Chinese economy is generally sound and requires no more than an extension of previous reform efforts to propel the economy forward, then you’ll believe Xi is on the right track. If you believe (like I do) that the Chinese state-led development model is fundamentally broken and a drastic break with past practices is necessary to move forward, then you’d believe Xi is not doing enough. Hopefully for China’s economic future, Xi will move beyond his promises and introduce some real change.


----------



## Edward Campbell

In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, we have a repeat of my warning that, while neither China nor Japan wants a war some local miscalculation, which could lead to combat, albeit *not*, in my _opinion_, a real war, is almost inevitable:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/be1c23b4-4f96-11e3-b06e-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2l5hBFxPh


> China and Japan are heading for a collision
> *It is hard to believe either side wants war – but posturing could spark accidental conflict*
> 
> By Gideon Rachman
> 
> November 18, 2013
> 
> Amid all the noise about the economic reforms launched last week by China, it was easy to overlook another important change. The Chinese government is setting up a National Security Council, co-ordinating its military, intelligence and domestic security structures. The model is said to be America’s NSC. But China’s move also parallels developments in Japan, where Shinzo Abe’s government is also setting up a National Security Council.
> 
> Under ordinary circumstances, this modernisation of military and security structures would not be cause for concern. But these are not ordinary times. For the past year, China and Japan have been engaged in dangerous military jostling, as they push their rival territorial claims to some uninhabited islands, known as the Senkaku to the Japanese and the Diaoyu to the Chinese. In one recent week, Japan scrambled fighter jets three times in response to Chinese overflights. China, meanwhile, complains that Japanese ships came provocatively close to a recent live-fire exercise carried out by its navy. With tensions high, the revamping of the two countries’ security structures takes on a more ominous tone.
> 
> It is hard to believe that either China or Japan actually wants a war. The bigger risk is that military posturing around the islands will lead to an accidental clash – and that the governments of both nations would then be trapped by their own nationalist rhetoric, making it very hard to climb down.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Both sides now routinely accuse each other of irresponsible behaviour and out-of-control nationalism. Both insist that, if pushed, they are willing to use military force to defend their claims to the uninhabited rocks that they are disputing.
> 
> In Beijing recently, I listened to a top general from the People’s Liberation Army insist that China would never make the mistakes of Japan in the 1930s by taking the path of militarism. Just weeks earlier in Tokyo, I had heard a Japanese official drawing a different conclusion from the same history: “The Chinese are making exactly the mistakes we made in the 1930s,” he asserted. “They are allowing the military to break free from civilian control. And they are challenging American power in the Pacific.”
> 
> A conflict between China and Japan – the second and third-largest economies in the world – would obviously be disastrous. It could also easily become a global conflict. The US is pledged to defend Japan through the US-Japan Security Treaty. And, although the Americans say that they take no formal position on who has sovereignty over the islands, they do recognise that they are under the administrative control of Japan – which means they are covered by the security treaty.
> 
> The whole dispute is shaped by the continuing growth in the economic might of China. Current projections suggest it is likely to be the largest economy in the world by 2020 – claiming a title that has been held by America since the 1880s. And although the US military has a size and sophistication that China is not yet close to matching, Chinese military spending is growing fast – at a time when the Pentagon is retrenching. Japan has just announced a small increase in its own military budget. But the country is drowning in debt, and knows it cannot keep pace with Chinese military spending.
> 
> These shifts in economic and military weight have created uncertainty about the future balance of power. And uncertainty tempts powerful nations to test each other’s limits and capabilities. An extra layer of danger is added by the bitter legacy of history. In China, President Xi Jinping argues that one of the main tasks of the Communist party is to overcome the historic humiliations his country has suffered – foremost among which was invasion by Japan. But in Tokyo, the Abe government has adopted a more nationalistic and less apologetic rhetoric about the past. The dispute is deeply personal for both men. Mr Abe’s grandfather and mentor administered Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, at a time when President Xi’s father was part of the Chinese Communist forces, fighting the Japanese.
> 
> If China and Japan are to avoid a mutually destructive collision, both sides need to change course. The establishment of a crisis hotline between Tokyo and Beijing, a move resisted by China, would be very helpful. But something bigger is also needed on both sides – an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of each other’s fears and resentments.
> 
> Amid all its complaints about Chinese nationalism, the Abe government has failed to address Japan’s own failings. It is not only the Chinese who are offended by Japan’s attitude to history. Many other Asian nations are similarly appalled. At a time when Japan’s relative power is inexorably declining in Asia, the country cannot afford nationalist posturing.
> 
> But precisely because Japan is frightened by China’s rise, it is afraid to take any step that could be seen as weakness. By contrast, China can afford to be magnanimous. It is the rising power. So it should make it absolutely explicit that – whatever the disputes between the two nations – China accepts that Japan has a secure and honourable place in the emerging political order in Asia. Such a step would provide vital reassurance to the government in Tokyo – and it would also be massively in Beijing’s interests. For, as long as peace prevails, China’s rise can continue uninterrupted.




I agree with Gideon Rachman:

     1. "The bigger risk is that military posturing around the islands will lead to an accidental clash – and that the governments of both nations would then be trapped by their own nationalist rhetoric, making it very hard to climb down;"

     2.  "Both sides need to change course. The establishment of a crisis hotline between Tokyo and Beijing, a move resisted by China, would be very helpful. But something bigger is also needed on both sides – an acknowledgment of
           the legitimacy of each other’s fears and resentments;"

     3.  "The Abe government has failed to address Japan’s own failings;" and

     4. "China can afford to be magnanimous. It is the rising power. So it should make it absolutely explicit that – whatever the disputes between the two nations – China accepts that Japan has a secure and honourable place in the emerging
          political order in Asia."


Edit: format


----------



## Journeyman

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...... the governments of both nations would then be trapped by their own nationalist rhetoric, making it very hard to climb down


Vaguely reminiscent of almost 100 years ago when a war was inevitable "because of the railway timetables"  (to steal from AJP Taylor).

While I dislike the term "inevitable" when talking about _anything_ to do with International Relations, as noted the "fears and resentments," coupled with national honour/face, make some degree of conflict inescapable -- the questions being: what form; how to minimize.


----------



## tomahawk6

If anyone is on the verge of overreach its the PRC.Their aggressive posture in the region with regard to island chains well beyond their borders,will cause a clash.


----------



## CougarKing

Didn't a Spanish court order a similar arrest of former Chilean leader Alberto Pinochet a couple of years ago as well?

Agence-France-Presse



> *Spain court orders arrest of China ex-president Jiang Zemin*
> 
> MADRID - A Spanish court on Tuesday issued an international arrest warrant for China's ex-president Jiang Zemin in a case brought by activists alleging that Chinese forces committed genocide in Tibet.
> 
> Tibetan rights groups brought the case against Jiang, former prime minister Li Peng and three other Chinese officials, alleging they were responsible for "genocide, crimes against humanity, torture and terrorism" against Tibetans in the 1980s and 1990s.
> 
> Spain's National Court issued the arrest warrant under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allows courts to try certain cases of human rights abuses committed in other countries.
> 
> *It accepted the case because one of the plaintiffs, Tibetan exile Thubten Wangchen, has Spanish nationality, and the Chinese courts have not investigated the allegations.*
> 
> The National Court wrote in a ruling released on Tuesday that there were "indications of participation" by the accused in the alleged crimes "given the political or military responsibility" they held at the time.
> 
> On those grounds the court said it "considered it necessary to approve the issuing of international arrest warrants" against the five.
> *
> The three other defendants are China's former state security chief Qiao Shi; the Chinese Communist party's leader in Tibet at the time, Chen Kuiyan; and Peng Pelyun, minister for family planning in the 1980s.
> 
> The Spanish court has also agreed to investigate a charge of repression in Tibet brought against China's latest ex-president Hu Jintao, who left office last year.*
> 
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Didn't a Spanish court a similar arrest of former Chilean leader Alberto Pinochet a couple of years ago as well?
> 
> Agence-France-Presse




Oh, good ... because Spain doesn't have any economic or social problems of its own to worry about, right?  :


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> 2.  "Both sides need to change course. The establishment of a crisis hotline between Tokyo and Beijing, a move resisted by China, would be very helpful. But something bigger is also needed on both sides – an acknowledgment of
> the legitimacy of each other’s fears and resentments;"
> 
> 
> Edit: format



Did you note the incident back in the late 1990s where a flotilla of protestors holding both PRC and Taiwan flags evaded a Japanese coast guard blockade in order to plant their flags on one of the Diayus/Senkaku Islands? From that, it can be surmised that their shared enmity towards Japan would be one of the things that Taipei and Beijing do agree upon.

However, whenever Taiwan gets into an international dispute, such as when those Philippine Coast Guardsmen shot a Taiwanese fisherman earlier this year, China will always claim to speak for Taiwan (by condemning the Philippines in that incident) even if Taiwan's own foreign affairs ministry releases their own statement. 

With those precedents above in mind, would it be reasonable to conclude that such a Tokyo-Beijing hotline would result in Taipei wanting their own hotline with Tokyo as well? (but this would of course irk Beijing)

If such a hotline is established, Japan, being the former colonial power that ruled over Taiwan for 50 years from 1895-1945, might then seek a more direct, but still unofficial link with the Taiwan leadership, other than through the trade office they already have there. This would simultaneously keep Japan's "One-China" policy intact.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Did you note the incident back in the late 1990s where a flotilla of protestors holding both PRC and Taiwan flags evaded a Japanese coast guard blockade in order to plant their flags on one of the Diayus/Senkaku Islands? From that, it can be surmised that their shared enmity towards Japan would be one of the things that Taipei and Beijing do agree upon.
> 
> However, whenever Taiwan gets into an international dispute, such as when those Philippine Coast Guardsmen shot a Taiwanese fisherman earlier this year, China will always claim to speak for Taiwan (by condemning the Philippines in that incident) even if Taiwan's own foreign affairs ministry releases their own statement.
> 
> With those precedents above in mind, would it be reasonable to conclude that such a Tokyo-Beijing hotline would result in Taipei wanting their own hotline with Tokyo as well? (but this would of course irk Beijing)
> 
> If such a hotline is established, Japan, being the former colonial power that ruled over Taiwan for 50 years from 1895-1945, might then seek a more direct, but still unofficial link with the Taiwan leadership, other than through the trade office they already have there. This would simultaneously keep Japan's "One-China" policy intact.




Wheels within wheels, within wheels ... it's part of what makes foreign policy, including foreigners' foreign policies, so fascinating.


----------



## tomahawk6

I imagine GW Bush is on their arrest on sight list as well.


----------



## CougarKing

US Senator wants Taiwan to participate in RIMPAC...

Let's see how far this goes...

Defense News blog



> *Are Things About To Get Awkward At Major Pacific Military Exercise?*
> 
> Could war ships from China and Taiwan soon simultaneously participate in a major Pacific military exercise? If one US senator has his way, it might happen.
> 
> *Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., has introduced an amendment to the upper chamber’s version of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that, if approved, would put the entire Senate on record as supporting Taiwan’s participation in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in 2014.*
> 
> Coats’ measure explicitly states Taiwan’s participation would enhance its navy’s humanitarian assistance and disaster relief expertise. To that end, the amendment points to “earthquakes and typhoons that frequently strike its own homeland.” Given China’s, well, complicated relationship with and policy toward Taiwan, Beijing likely will be, shall we say, skeptical…
> 
> The amendment would make this statement the official opinion of the full United States Senate: “The United States welcomes the opportunity to work with Taiwan in creating a more interactive naval relationship between our two countries as it is in best security interests of both countries.”
> 
> *Again, one can sense China’s skepticism already.
> 
> And speaking of China, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in March announced the PLA Navy would be sending a ship to participate in RIMPAC 2014.*
> 
> Are things about to get awkward on the high seas? Perhaps.


----------



## a_majoor

How the Chinese deal with this may be the most important issue of the day. A deflating credit bubble will make life tough for us, but a bubble "pop" will be a global disaster. The deflation of the Japanese credit bubble in the early 1990's, and their lost decade should be instructive for students of history:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-11-18/credit-driven-china-glut-threatens-to-turn-into-bank-debt-crisis



> *Credit-Driven China Glut Threatens Surge Into Bank Crisis*
> By Bloomberg News November 19, 2013
> 
> In China’s “Shipping Valley,” where the Yangtze River empties into the sea north of Shanghai, the once-bustling home of the nation’s biggest private shipbuilder is deadly quiet on a recent morning.
> 
> Rows of dilapidated five-story dormitories in the city of Nantong, previously housing China Rongsheng Heavy Industries Group Holdings Ltd.’s 38,000 employees, were abandoned after the shipbuilder teetering on collapse cut almost 80 percent of its workers over the past two years. Most video arcades, restaurants and shops serving them have closed.
> 
> A $6.6 trillion credit binge during the past five years, encouraged by Beijing policy makers as stimulus to combat a global economic slowdown, now threatens to stoke a debt crisis. At stake are trillions of yuan in bank loans that companies producing everything from ships to steel to solar power are struggling to repay as the world’s second-largest economy heads for the weakest annual expansion since 1999.
> 
> Rongsheng, which is seeking a government bailout after accumulating 25 billion yuan ($4.1 billion) in unpaid loans as of June, including to Bank of China Ltd., is a casualty of over-investment gone bust. In Nantong, the only remaining market is selling past-its-shelf-life bread, woolly shoe pads and other dusty items at a discount as shopkeeper Qiu Aibing prepares to wind down before winter. There’s no sign of a single customer.
> 
> “After I’m done selling all this stuff, I’ll be gone,” said Qiu, briefly lifting his eyes from a TV and casting a careless look at the half-empty shelves. “The workers didn’t have money to spend anyway because there’s no work to be done, and many of them haven’t been paid for months.”
> 
> Bad Loans
> China’s biggest banks are already affected, tripling the amount of bad loans they wrote off in the first half of this year and cleaning up their books ahead of what may be a fresh wave of defaults. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and its four largest competitors expunged 22.1 billion yuan of debt that couldn’t be collected through June, up from 7.65 billion yuan a year earlier, regulatory filings show.
> 
> “In the next three to four years, industries with excess capacity will be the main source of credit loss for banks and their nonperforming loans as China cleans up the legacy,” said Liao Qiang, a Beijing-based director at Standard & Poor’s. “The speed of the process will depend on the government’s determination and whether they are willing to incur short-term pain for long-term gain.”
> 
> ‘Very Painful’
> Premier Li Keqiang, who took office in March, pledged to open the economy to market forces and strip power from the government in a process he described as “very painful and even feels like cutting one’s wrist.” In July, he vowed to curb overcapacity, which the government blames for driving down prices, eroding profits and generating pollution. Policy makers meeting in Beijing last week said they would elevate the role of markets in the nation’s economy.
> 
> China’s economy probably will expand 7.6 percent in 2013, the weakest pace since 1999, even as growth rebounded in the third quarter, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
> 
> Shang Fulin, China’s top banking regulator, this month urged lenders to “seek channels to clean up bad loans by industries with overcapacity to prevent new risks from brewing” and refrain from dragging their feet in dealing with the issue.
> 
> Credit Deterioration
> China’s credit quality started to deteriorate in late 2011 as borrowers took on more debt to serve their obligations amid a slowing economy and weaker income. Interest owed by borrowers rose to an estimated 12.5 percent of China’s economy from 7 percent in 2008, Fitch Ratings estimated in September. By the end of 2017, it may climb to as much as 22 percent and “ultimately overwhelm borrowers.”
> 
> Meanwhile, China’s total credit will be pushed to almost 250 percent of gross domestic product by then, almost double the 130 percent of 2008, according to Fitch.
> 
> The nation might face credit losses of as much as $3 trillion as defaults ensue from the expansion of the past four years, particularly by non-bank lenders such as trusts, exceeding that seen prior to other credit crises, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated in August.
> 
> Rongsheng, whose assets jumped sevenfold between 2007 and 2012 when government-directed lending led to a shipbuilding boom, also has loans outstanding to Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank Corp., state-owned policy banks set up to provide financial support at a cheaper cost to companies and industries endorsed by the government. Rongsheng may post a second consecutive loss of 2 billion yuan this year and a 1.1 billion yuan loss in 2014, according to a median estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
> 
> Delayed Salaries
> Rongsheng now relies on its remaining 8,000 workers to build the world’s biggest cargo ships for Brazil’s iron-ore producer Vale SA and Oman Shipping Co., as well as smaller vessels and oil tankers. Workers in its shipyards, mostly from other parts of China, and local staff in its Shanghai office have had their salaries delayed, sometimes by two months, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
> 
> “I can still manage to survive by cutting expenses here and there, but many migrant workers can’t -- not with only 20 yuan in their pockets and not knowing their next payday,” said Liu Guojun, a blue-uniformed dormitory maintenance and security worker who earns 2,000 yuan a month. “There’s a surge in theft and other petty crimes around here as a result.”
> 
> Rongsheng declined in an e-mail to answer questions about its operations. Spokesmen for ICBC and China Construction Bank Corp. declined to comment on the prospect of rising bad loans, while those at Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. and China Development Bank didn’t respond to requests.
> 
> Shipyard Shutdowns
> The pain is being experienced by Rongsheng’s peers nationwide. A third of the country’s 1,600 shipyards may shut down within five years amid a global vessel glut, Wang Jinlian, secretary general of the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry, said in July.
> 
> To Ji Fenghua, chairman of Nantong Mingde Heavy Industry Group Co., another struggling “Shipping Valley” builder specializing in high-end vessels, that’s an understatement.
> 
> “I won’t be surprised if half of the shipbuilders fail, given the excess capacity,” said Ji, recounting the day in July 2012 that hundreds of his workers who hadn’t been paid in three months besieged his office building.
> 
> Repaying Banks
> The company was strapped for cash as state-backed banks recalled their loans after the banking regulator ordered that new financing be stopped for shipbuilders and some other businesses. Deprived of new credit to pay off old debts, Ji and his fellow founders emptied their own bank accounts, collateralized their homes to banks and hit up relatives and acquaintances for cash.
> 
> “Every cent of the money we earned and borrowed was used to repay banks, leaving us nothing to pay workers or the suppliers,” Li said. “We have banks to thank for our boom, and we have them to blame for our doom.”
> 
> Mingde Heavy eventually survived the crisis with government help. Its cash shortage continues even as the company continues to take orders for stainless-steel chemical tankers.
> 
> The central government pledged 4 trillion yuan in economic stimulus during the global financial crisis starting in 2008. In 2009, Export-Import Bank of China committed to 160 billion yuan of credit to the nation’s two largest state-run shipbuilders, while Bank of China agreed to help smaller and private companies, according to statements from banks.
> 
> Easy access to credit helped Chinese banks churn out record profits and reduce bad-loan ratios to less than 1 percent as of June 30 from 2.8 percent at the end of 2008.
> 
> ‘Industrial Glut’
> “The 2008 stimulus exacerbated an industrial glut that has been in existence since 2003,” S&P’s Liao said. “We expect the government to take measured steps in a crackdown on overcapacity because they need to weigh the impact on financial stability.”
> 
> Nonperforming loans at Chinese banks increased for an eighth consecutive quarter in the three months ended Sept. 30 to 563.6 billion yuan, extending the longest streak in at least nine years. Still, they account for just 0.97 percent of the nation’s outstanding loans, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission.
> 
> The bad-loan ratio could climb to as high as 1.5 percent in the next few quarters, according to Lian Ping, chief economist at Shanghai-based Bank of Communications Co. Most of the increase, he said, will come from the provinces of Jiangsu, where Nantong is located, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, where small businesses have been hit hard by the slowdown.
> 
> Turning Tide
> In the first six months of this year, soured loans increased by 18 billion yuan in Jiangsu, more than any other Chinese province, followed by Zhejiang and Shanghai, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
> 
> “There are many capital-and-labor-intensive industries that have relied on bank loans and policy support for their past success,” Lian of the Bank of Communications said. “But now the tide is turning against them.”
> 
> Shipbuilding isn’t the only industry affected by overcapacity. Also in Jiangsu, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of Nantong, Wuxi Suntech Power Co., the main unit of the industry’s once-biggest supplier (STP:US), went bankrupt with 9 billion yuan of debt to China’s largest banks, according to a Nov. 12 report by Communist Party-owned Legal Daily. Suntech Power Holdings Co. (STPFQ:US), the parent firm, defaulted on $541 million of offshore bonds to Wall Street investors.
> 
> Solar Panels
> About 1 gigawatt of solar-panel production, more than 40 percent of the company’s 2011 module manufacturing capacity, was idled at one of two factories, according to a statement issued by Shunfeng Photovoltaic International Ltd., which agreed to buy Wuxi Suntech on Nov. 1 for 3 billion yuan. A gigawatt is about as much as what a new nuclear reactor can supply.
> 
> Government and banks’ support for the solar industry since late 2008 has resulted in at least one factory producing sun-powered products in half of China’s 600 cities, according to the China Renewable Energy Society in Beijing. China Development Bank, the world’s largest policy lender, alone lent more than 50 billion yuan to solar-panel makers as of August 2012, data from the China Banking Association showed.
> 
> China accounts for seven of every 10 solar panels produced worldwide. If they ran at full speed, the factories could produce 49 gigawatts of solar panels a year, 10 times more than in 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Overcapacity has driven down prices to about 84 cents a watt, compared with $2 at the end of 2010. The slump forced dozens of producers like Wuxi Suntech into bankruptcy.
> 
> ‘Much Worse’
> An unidentified local bank reported a 33 percent nonperforming-loan ratio for the solar-panel industry, compared with 2 percent at the beginning of the year, with the increase due to Wuxi Suntech, China Business News reported in September.
> 
> “The real situation is much worse than the data showed” after talking to chief financial officers at industrial manufacturers, said Wendy Tang, a Shanghai-based analyst at Northeast Securities Co., who estimates the actual nonperforming-loan ratio to be as high as 3 percent. “It will take at least one year or longer for these NPLs to appear on banks’ books, and I haven’t seen the bottom of deterioration in Jiangsu and Zhejiang yet.”
> 
> The Wuxi government in 2007 planned to build a 2.2-square-kilometer solar-panel park with projected sales of 100 billion yuan by 2012. The area is now covered with weeds and construction waste, left undeveloped because of overcapacity.
> 
> Steel, Cement
> The same is true in industries such as steel and cement, which were named by the State Council as facing a “serious” glut. China’s economic planners have sought to rein in the steel industry since at least 2004, when work on a 10.6 billion yuan project in Jiangsu was halted. Even so, annual capacity has risen to 970 million metric tons, according to the steel association, exceeding the industry’s output by 35 percent in 2012. China produces seven times more than No. 2 Japan.
> 
> About 10 million tons of aluminum production capacity is being built at a time when the industry incurred combined losses of 670 million yuan in the first half, with some producers in central and eastern China facing severe losses, the Ministry of Industry of Information Technology said in July.
> 
> That month the ministry ordered more than 1,400 companies in 19 industries including steel, ferro alloys and cement to cut excess production capacity this year, an indication that the government is pursuing pledges to fix fundamental issues in the economy even as growth slows. Excess capacity was supposed to be idled by September and eliminated by year-end.
> 
> China’s land ministry yesterday told local authorities to ban allocations for any new production projects by overcapacity industries including steel and shipbuilding, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
> 
> Hawkish Tone
> “The central government is hawkish in its tone, but when it comes to execution by local governments, the enforcement will be much softer,” Bank of Communications’ Lian said. “Many of these firms are major job providers and taxpayers, so the local government will try all means to save them and help them repay bank loans.”
> 
> When hundreds of unpaid Mingde Heavy workers took to the streets for a second time last November, the local government stepped in by lining up other firms to vouch for Mingde so banks would renew its loans. Mingde Heavy avoided failure by entering into an alliance with a shipping unit of government-controlled Jiangsu Sainty Corp., which also imports and exports apparel.
> 
> Mother-in-Law
> “I have everything I need to become a top-tier shipbuilder but the money,” said Ji, Mingde’s chairman. “I used to be proud that we are an independent, private company without government interference. Not anymore. The pressure is much less when you have a rich mother-in-law.”
> 
> Under President Xi Jinping’s reforms laid out last week, the private sector will be boosted by looser state controls, while local government officials will be evaluated not only on increases in GDP but also on indicators such as energy consumption, overcapacity and new debt.
> 
> China’s lending spree has created a debt burden similar in magnitude to the one that pushed Asian nations into crisis in the late 1990s, according to Fitch Ratings.
> 
> As companies take on more debt, the efficiency of credit use has deteriorated. Since 2009, for every yuan of credit issued, China’s GDP grew by an average 0.4 yuan, while the pre-2009 average was 0.8 yuan, according to Mike Werner, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
> 
> Credit Cycle
> “If credit allocation in China improves, the ultimate credit cycle and economy downturn will be mitigated,” Werner wrote in an Oct. 21 note to investors. “However, if China continues to rely on debt to fund its economic growth, the country’s ultimate credit cycle will be more severe.”
> 
> Based on current valuations, investors are pricing in a scenario where nonperforming loans at the largest Chinese banks will make up more than 15 percent of their loan books, according to Werner, who forecasts a 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent bad-loan ratio by the end of 2015. A further decline in GDP growth would lead to more soured loans and weaker earnings, he said.
> 
> Lenders so far haven’t reported significant deterioration in loan quality. Bank of China said it had 251.3 billion yuan of loans to industries suffering from overcapacity as of the end of June, accounting for 3 percent of the total. Its nonperforming-loan ratio for those businesses stood at 0.93 percent, the same level reported for the entire bank.
> 
> At China Construction Bank, loans to industries with overcapacity fell about 8 billion yuan in the first half of the year to 180.8 billion yuan, while at Bank of Communications, the amount was 72 billion yuan or 2.3 percent of the total, the banks reported.
> 
> Dividends Curbed
> Credit growth may slow over the next year and a half from the 20 percent to 25 percent gains in recent years to about 15 percent, Josh Klaczek, head of Asia financial services for JPMorgan Chase & Co., said in July. The expansion of nonperforming loans will depress profits and curb the ability of banks to increase dividends, and if more loans sour, lenders may need to raise capital, he said.
> 
> “Banks currently have the ability to absorb a decent amount of bad loans, and local government involvement will slow the speed of NPL increases,” S&P’s Liao said.
> 
> While China’s cabinet in July urged mergers and curbs in the shipbuilding industry, it called for continued financial support to help “quality companies” maintain their operations.
> 
> In Nantong, handmade-noodle-shop owner Ma Shuntian said he’s still a believer, even after losing 50,000 yuan this year. Ma and his wife pumped almost 1 million yuan into the restaurant five years ago after selling everything they had in Qinghai province and moving to the area where Rongsheng’s workers reside. In a good year, selling noodles brought in more than 100,000 yuan in profit.
> 
> “I hope Rongsheng can come through this crisis and the town comes back to life,” said Ma, a father of three. “If they earn big money, I can earn small.”
> 
> To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Jun Luo in Shanghai at jluo6@bloomberg.net; Jasmine Wang in Hong Kong at jwang513@bloomberg.net; Aipeng Soo in Beijing at asoo4@bloomberg.net
> 
> To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chitra Somayaji at csomayaji@bloomberg.net


----------



## Edward Campbell

I understand a few of the _policy_ implications and one or two of the _technical_ aspects of this, but ... any help on assessing the significance of this report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_ would be appreciated:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-11/23/c_132912145.htm


> China Exclusive: Defense Ministry spokesman responds to air defense identification zone questions
> 
> English.news.cn
> 
> 2013-11-23
> 
> BEIJING, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun on Saturday answered questions from the media on the establishment of the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone.
> 
> *1. Why did the Chinese government set up the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone? Was it related to the current regional situation?*
> 
> An air defense identification zone is established by a maritime nation to guard against potential air threats. This airspace, demarcated outside the territorial airspace, allows a country to identify, monitor, control and dispose of entering aircraft. It sets aside time for early warning and helps defend the country's airspace.
> 
> The Chinese government has followed common international practices in the establishment of the zone, with aims of protecting its state sovereignty and territorial and airspace security, and maintaining flying orders. It is a necessary measure in China's exercise of self-defense rights. It has no particular target and will not affect the freedom of flight in relevant airspace.
> 
> *2. On what grounds did China establish the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone?*
> 
> The establishment of the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone has a sound legal basis and accords with common international practices.
> 
> Since the 1950s, over 20 countries, including some big powers and China's neighboring countries, have set up air defense identification zones.
> 
> China's measures conform to the Charter of the United Nations and international laws and practices. China's domestic laws and regulations, including the Law on National Defense, the Law on Civil Aviation and the Basic Rules on Flight, have clear stipulations on protecting territorial and airspace security and maintaining flying orders.
> 
> *3. How was the domain of the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone determined? Why is the zone located as close as 130 kilometers from some countries?*
> 
> The domain of the zone is based on the needs of China's national air defense and maintaining flying orders.
> 
> The east end of the zone is still closest to China (compared with other countries), from which combat aircraft can reach China's airspace within a short time. It is necessary for China to identify an aircraft from that point to ascertain its purpose and attributes, so as to set aside early warning time to adopt measures to protect air defense security.
> 
> Moveover, a relevant country established its air defense identification zone as early as 1969, which is also about 130 kilometers from the Chinese mainland at its closest distance.
> 
> *4. After foreign aircraft enter the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone, what measures will China adopt?*
> 
> The Announcement of the Aircraft Identification Rules for the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone of the People's Republic of China has made explicit stipulations on the identification of the aircraft in relevant airspace, and that is in line with international practices.
> 
> China will take timely measures to deal with air threats and unidentified flying objects from the sea, including identification, monitoring, control and disposition, and it hopes all relevant sides positively cooperate and jointly maintain flying safety.
> 
> It is worth mentioning that China has always respected other countries' rights of free flight in accordance with international laws, and the establishment of the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone will not change the legal nature of relevant airspace. The normal flight of international flights in the zone will not be affected.
> 
> *5. Will China establish other air defense identification zones?*
> 
> China will establish other air defense identification zones at an appropriate time after completing preparations.
> 
> ----------
> 
> *Related:*
> 
> *Statement by the Government of the People's Republic of China on Establishing the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone*
> 
> BEIJING, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of National Defense of the People's Republic of China issued a statement on establishing the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone.
> 
> Following is the full text:
> 
> Statement by the Government of the People's Republic of China on Establishing the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone
> 
> Issued by the Ministry of National Defense on November 23
> 
> The government of the People's Republic of China announces the establishment of the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone in accordance with the Law of the People's Republic of China on National Defense (March 14, 1997),
> the Law of the People's Republic of China on Civil Aviation (October 30, 1995) and the Basic Rules on Flight of the People's Republic of China (July 27, 2001). The zone includes the airspace within the area enclosed by China's outer limit
> of the territorial sea and the following six points: 33º11'N (North Latitude) and 121º47'E (East Longitude), 33º11'N and 125º00'E, 31º00'N and 128º20'E, 25º38'N and 125º00'E, 24º45'N and 123º00'E, 26º44'N and 120º58'E.







The six points listed in the MND press release are visible onthe map


----------



## a_majoor

More on China's aggressive posture. While this may make American foreign policy increasingly difficult, China may discover that they are building their own walls as well. Contrast this with the long running American Grand Strategy of creating an international order that benefits both friends and foes (See ERC's post in  "A Grand Strategy for a Divided America").

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Chinese-Aggressiveness-in-Asia



> *Chinese Aggressiveness in Asia*
> Paul A. Rahe · 13 hours ago
> There is trouble on the horizon, and before long it may turn into very big trouble.
> 
> In late August, I wrote at length about China's resolute turn back to despotism; about its vehement public repudiation of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and freedom of the press; and about the manner in which Chinese communist cadres are now expected to read Alexis de Tocqueville's classic The Ancien Regime and the Revolution as a warning against a relaxation of party discipline.
> 
> There is another dimension to what is going on in China, and it dovetails neatly with the first. In and for a long time after the time of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese talked softly while carrying a big stick. Deng and his immediate successors understood that the rise of China would elicit anxiety on the part of the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Taiwanese, and the Filipinos, and they did what they could to allay that anxiety by refraining from doing anything that would suggest on their part aggressive intent.
> 
> In the last couple of years,  however, all of that has changed; and everywhere where one goes in Asia, an old friend who travels in high circles told me earlier this week, one senses hostility -- not towards the United States but towards one's neighbors. The anger underlying all of this has been stirred by the Chinese, who have been throwing their weight around with ever greater force.
> 
> This weekend the Chinese upped the ante. In the South China Sea, between Korea and Taiwan, there are some uninhabited islands, which are called the Senkaku isles by the Japanese and the Diayu isles by the Chinese. Although there are other claimants, these have been controlled for many decades by the Japanese. This weekend, however, China extended its air-defence zone to include the islands:
> 
> Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said Saturday that the establishment of the zone, which China said entered into force as of 10 a.m. Saturday, was aimed at “safeguarding state sovereignty, territorial land and air security, and maintaining flight order.”
> 
> “It is a necessary measure in China’s exercise of self-defense rights. It has no particular target and will not affect the freedom of flight in relevant airspace,” Yang said in a statement on the ministry’s website.
> 
> “China will take timely measures to deal with air threats and unidentified flying objects from the sea, including identification, monitoring, control and disposition, and it hopes all relevant sides positively cooperate and jointly maintain flying safety,” he said.
> 
> Along with the new zone, the Chinese ministry released a set of aircraft identification rules that it says must be followed by all aircraft entering the area, under penalty of intervention by China’s military.
> 
> Aircraft are now expected to provide their flight path, clearly mark their nationality and maintain two-way radio communication in order to “respond in a timely and accurate manner to identification inquiries” from Chinese authorities.
> 
> Shen Jinke, spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, reported late Saturday that it had conducted a sweep of the area using early warning aircraft and fighter jets. “The patrol is in line with international common practices, and the normal flight of international flights will not be affected,” Shen said.
> 
> Four Chinese Coast Guard boats briefly entered Japan’s territorial waters around the Senkakus on Friday, after multiple incursions at the end of October and the beginning of this month further aggravated tensions between Beijing and Tokyo.
> 
> The Japanese are understandably perturbed:
> 
> Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera in late October said the repeated incursions are a threat to peace and fall in a “gray zone (between) peacetime and an emergency situation.”
> 
> A few days earlier, his Chinese counterpart had threatened Japan that any bid to shoot down China’s drones would constitute “an act of war.” That move came after a report said Japan had drafted plans to destroy foreign drones that encroach on its airspace if warnings to leave are ignored.
> 
> Not surprisingly, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry have expressed concern. They ought to be concerned. This is a deliberate provocation, and it is clearly meant as a challenge to Japan. In that neck of the woods, the Chinese evidently intend to have their way, and those who do not acquiesce will be made to pay dearly. What we are witnessing is an attempt by the Chinese to assert and establish their hegemony over the entire region. What they aim at is something like what, in the years prior to World War II, the Japanese called the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
> 
> Intimately connected with this development is another fact. In recent years, since the economic downturn that began in 2007, prominent Chinese have repeatedly expressed contempt for the United States. We are on the decline, they say. Decadence has set in, and China's time has come.
> 
> There is good reason to think that the Chinese leadership believes that this is true, and there is this to be said in defense of their posture. Their ability to project power in the Pacific has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, and we have done nothing to counter their preparations to take out our bases and ships.
> 
> If the Chinese leadership really believes what its members sometimes say, the final years of the second term of Barack Obama and those of his successor are going to be more unpleasant than anyone has yet imagined. Statesmen who broadcast weakness and who cut military budgets to the bone, are asking for trouble. Those who sow the wind are bound to reap the whirlwind.


----------



## tomahawk6

Collision course perhaps or the first move in a diplomatic chess match ?

http://www.france24.com/en/20131123-china-creates-air-defence-zone-over-japan-controlled-islands

AFP - Beijing on Saturday announced it was setting up an "air defence identification zone" over an area that includes islands controlled by Japan but claimed by China, in a move that could inflame the bitter territorial row.

Along with the creation of the zone in the East China Sea, the defence ministry released a set of aircraft identification rules that must be followed by all planes entering the area, under penalty of intervention by the military.........


http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/11/23/national/china-sets-up-air-defense-id-zone-above-senkakus/#.UpKua0CSZOd

Ihara was quoted as telling Han that Japan can “never accept the zone set up by China,” as it includes the Senkakus. He further said the new zone will “escalate” already fraught bilateral ties over the uninhabited but potentially resource-rich islet chain, branding China’s move “very dangerous,” the statement said.


----------



## CougarKing

More about the controversial East China Sea ADIZ:



> *Asian airlines to give flight plans to China after airspace zone created*
> BY BEN BLANCHARD AND TIM KELLY
> BEIJING/TOKYO
> Mon Nov 25, 2013 7:44am EST
> 
> 
> 
> (Reuters) - Asian airlines will inform China of their flight plans before entering airspace over waters disputed with Japan, regional aviation officials said on Monday, effectively acknowledging Beijing's authority over a newly declared _"Air Defense Identification Zone"_.
> 
> Civil aviation officials from *Hong Kong* and *Taiwan* said their carriers entering the zone must send flight plans to Chinese aviation authorities. A transport ministry official in Seoul said *South Korean planes* would do the same.
> 
> An official at the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau said *Japanese airlines* flying through the region to non-mainland Chinese destinations would likely need to inform China of their plans. _"Airlines have been advised to take greater care in the area,"_ said another bureau official.
> 
> *Singapore Airlines* and *Qantas Airways* Ltd said they would keep Chinese authorities informed of their flights through the area.
> 
> Korean Air said its flight plans would be delivered to Chinese authorities but the routes its pilots took would not be affected. Japan Airlines and ANA Holdings also said the zone had not affected their flights.
> 
> 
> 
> *Asian and Western diplomats said the zone was a problem* for Japan, the United States and other countries that may be wary of any acknowledgement of China's claims over the area.
> 
> 
> _"No one wants to be in a position where by following Chinese instructions you are giving tacit acknowledgement of their sovereignty over a disputed area. And there is a fear that is precisely the game that is being played - it seems no accident that the disputed Senkaku islands are now in the heart of overlapping zones."_ - one Asian diplomat said.
> 
> 
> 
> *Japan has its own Air Defence Identification Zone*  but officials said Tokyo only required aircraft seen to be approaching Japanese territorial airspace to identify themselves.
> 
> 
> In its announcement on Saturday, *China's Defence Ministry said it would set up other such zones when preparations were finalized.* It gave no further details and the ministry's news department declined to elaborate when contacted by Reuters.
> 
> 
> 
> *REUTERS*


----------



## CougarKing

China's carrier heads for the South China Sea.



> *China sends carrier to South China Sea for training amid maritime disputes*
> 
> Reuters
> 
> (Reuters) - China sent its sole aircraft carrier on a training mission into the South China Sea on Tuesday amid maritime disputes with some neighbors and tension over its plan to set up an airspace defense zone in waters disputed with Japan.
> 
> *The Liaoning, bought used from Ukraine and refurbished in China, has conducted more than 100 exercises and experiments since it was commissioned last year but this is the first time it has been sent to the South China Sea.*
> 
> Though considered decades behind U.S. technology, the Liaoning represents the Chinese navy's blue-water ambitions and has been the focus of a campaign to stir patriotism.
> 
> *The Liaoning left port from the northern city of Qingdao accompanied by two destroyers and two frigates, the Chinese navy said on an official news website (navy.81.cn/).*
> 
> While there, it will carry out "scientific research, tests and military drills", the report said.
> 
> "This is the first time since the Liaoning entered service that it has carried out long-term drills on the high seas," it added.
> 
> It did not specify exactly what training would be done, only noting that previous exercises involving aircraft landing and taking off had gone well and laid a firm foundation for future tests.
> 
> Previously reported training exercises have mostly been in the Yellow Sea.
> 
> *China's Defense Ministry said on Monday that it had lodged formal protests with the U.S. and Japanese embassies after both countries criticized a Chinese plan to impose new rules on airspace over disputed waters in the East China Sea.
> 
> China also claims almost the entire oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, overlapping claims from Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam.*
> 
> That dispute is one of the region's biggest flashpoints amid China's military build-up and the U.S. strategic "pivot" back to Asia signaled by the Obama administration in 2011.
> 
> China's navy said the mission was routine, adding that the Liaoning was still in a testing phase.
> 
> "This test visit to the South China Sea is part of normal arrangements for testing and training for the Liaoning," it added.
> 
> **********************************


----------



## CougarKing

Both Japan and South Korea defy China as well over the ADIZ, following the instance whenUS bombers' challenged it earlier this week...

Reuters



> *Japan, South Korean military planes defy China's new defense zone*
> 
> TOKYO/SEOUL (Reuters) - Japanese and South Korean military aircraft flew through disputed air space over the East China Sea without informing China, officials said on Thursday, challenging a new Chinese air defense zone that has increased regional tensions and sparked concerns of an unintended clash.
> 
> BEIJING REJECTS SEOUL'S DEMAND
> 
> A South Korean official also said a navy reconnaissance plane had flown over a submerged rock in the area claimed by both Beijing and Seoul, and that the flights would continue.
> 
> The rock, called Ieodo in Korea and Suyan Rock in China, is controlled by South Korea, which maintains a maritime research station built on it.
> 
> In the ongoing war of words, the policy panel of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party approved a resolution on Thursday demanding China rescind the new air defense zone, saying the unilateral move reflected "unreasonable expansionism".
> Link: Reuters





Commercial airliners are also starting to defy it; I hope this doesn't lead to an incident like that of Korean Air Flight 007 in 1983, when a Soviet Su15 fighter shot down that airliner for supposedly violating Russian airspace.




> *Two Japanese airlines to disregard China air zone rules*
> BBC - Nov 27
> 
> Two of Japan's biggest airlines have agreed to abide by a government request not to implement China's new air defence zone rules, officials say.
> All Nippon Airlines and Japan Airlines say that they will stop filing flight plans demanded by China on routes through the zone, set up on Saturday.
> Japan says that China's new air defence identification zone are "not valid at all" and should be disregarded.
> 
> Singapore Airlines and Qantas have said that they will abide by the new rules.
> 
> 
> *News On Japan*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Readers need to remember that all this is taking place in East Asia and the concept of "face" ~ reputation, self-respect, prestige, honor, dignity ~ is very important. Face is not well understood in the West but trust me, please, it matters HUGELY in China.

The Chinese may have made a strategic blunder here but they will find it very, very hard to back away ~ the loss of "face" would be great, maybe too great.

I'm sure the Japanese understand this and I'm guessing that some _Sinophiles_ in Washington do, too; but I'll bet that none of Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, Susan Rice or Barack Obama do ... OK, maybe Rice, she's actually very well informed, but she's not an Asian _specialist_.

The risk in losing face is domestic, internal to China, because the CCP's legitimacy rests, in large part,on its reputation for maintaining China's prestige in the world.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of China trying to save face in the face of US, Japanese and ROK/South Korean air incursions into its so-called E. China Sea ADIZ...



> *China Sends Warplanes Into Air Defense Zone*
> 
> Quote:
> China said it sent warplanes into its newly declared maritime air defense zone Thursday, days after the U.S., South Korea and Japan all sent flights through the airspace in defiance of rules Beijing says it has imposed in the East China Sea.
> 
> *China's air force sent several fighter jets and an early warning aircraft on normal air patrols in the zone*, the Xinhua agency reported, citing air force spokesman Shen Jinke.
> 
> *The report did not specify exactly when the flights were sent or whether they had encountered foreign aircraft.* The United States, Japan and South Korea have said they have sent flights through the zone without encountering any Chinese response since Beijing announced the creation of the zone last week.
> 
> Shen described Thursday's flights as "a defensive measure and in line with international common practices." He said China's air force would remain on high alert and will take measures to protect the country's airspace.
> 
> Quote:
> *South Korea's military said Thursday its planes flew through the zone this week without informing China and with no apparent interference. Japan also said its planes have been continuing to fly through it after the Chinese announcement*, while the Philippines, locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with Beijing over South China Sea islands, said it also was rejecting China's declaration.
> 
> ABC News


----------



## a_majoor

A fairly simplified wargame of what might happen from Popular Mechanics. Note the emphasis on AA/AD (Anti Access/Area Denial), and the current situation WRT how to defeat AA/AD measures:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/heres-what-a-shooting-war-in-the-east-china-sea-might-look-like-16205950?click=pm_news



> *Here's What a Shooting War in the East China Sea Might Look Like*
> Tensions are escalating as China tries to claim a new zone of airspace authority—which the U.S. promptly ignores. Here's what to expect if this cold war involving Japan, China, the U.S., and other East Asian nations heats up.
> By Joe Pappalardo
> 
> November 27, 2013 1:30
> 
> This past weekend China escalated tensions in the East China Sea by unilaterally establishing what it calls an Air Defense Identification Zone that includes islands claimed by other nations. China released a map and coordinates of this zone, demanding that any aircraft report to China before entering the airspace, declaring that its armed forces "will adopt defensive emergency measures to respond to aircraft that do not cooperate in the identification or refuse to follow the instructions."
> 
> This posturing got an early test on Monday when the United States flew two B-52s straight through the zone China has claimed, with no response from China. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said the flight, which took off from Guam, was part of a prescheduled exercise. But it seems clear that the U.S. is also sending a message that it won't respect such a claim. "We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said this weekend. "This unilateral action increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations."
> 
> Tensions were high already in this part of the East China Sea, as Japan and Taiwan both claim ownership of islands inside the Chinese zone (and South Korea is not thrilled that some of its airspace overlaps with the Air Defense ID Zone). The islands—called the Senkaku by the Japanese and the Diaoyudao by the Chinese—are valuable as fishing grounds and oil and natural gas fields. Recent incidents have seen Chinese fishermen arrested by the Japanese Coast Guard, and Japanese jets scrambling in response to impending Chinese incursions. (The Japanese have also rejected the Chinese zone.)
> 
> The war of words and maritime move–countermove has been under way for years, but this latest escalation could be the fuse to ignite a war that can't easily be stopped. Here's how a hypothetical scenario might unfold.
> 
> One: Drone Incursion
> 
> Drones are great tools of escalation. National leaders will fly them in areas where it might be too dangerous for a pilot. Other national leaders are not as hesitant to attack them. After all, it's only a robot.
> 
> Our hypothetical incident starts in the air, at 45,000 feet. An unarmed Chinese W-50 drone is dispatched to keep an eye on the waterways and airspace of the Air Defense ID Zone. In September 2012 the Xinhua news agency reported that China's State Oceanic Administration would step up the use of drones to "strengthen marine surveillance" in disputed areas of the South China Sea, and a string of bases have appeared on the shoreline in 2013.
> 
> The Japanese Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) operates Boeing E-767s, 160-foot airplanes stuffed with radar and electronics that enable them to detect aircraft from 200 miles away. They confirm that the Chinese drone is wheeling above the Senkakus, and Japan dispatches F-15Js to intercept it—and shoot it down—obviously ignoring China's Air Defense ID Zone. Chinese long-range, back-scatter radar spots the F-15Js in the air, and China dispatches quad-prop Y-8X maritime patrol for a better-resolution look. They also alert their best fighters—Sukhoi Flankers (Su 30) and Chengdu J-10s—to prepare to take off. Everyone will later say that these flights were meant for "verification and monitoring." But the F-15Js and Chinese jets are both armed.
> 
> Japanese pilots, trying to stay hidden, approach without radar on, instead using the data from the E-767s to get close to the Chinese forces. But the electronically steered array radar of the J-10s spot them. When the F-15Js' radar-warning receiver goes off, even though the chime indicates that it's not the guidance radar of an inbound missile, the Japanese pilot panics.
> 
> Action in the air is fast-paced. Snap judgments with lethal consequences come with the territory. When the Chinese fighters arrive to hem in the F-15Js, a Japanese pilot's evasive maneuvers cause a midair collision with a J-10. Then the air-to-air missiles fly—Japanese-built AAM-3s versus Chinese PL-11s. At the end of several minutes of fighting, pilots on both sides have died, but the skirmish ends there—for now. The battle started with enough ambiguity that both sides claim to be victims.
> 
> Two: Quiet Escalation
> 
> Don't let the name fool you—Japan's Self Defense Forces are pretty advanced war fighters. Over the decades the island nation has built up the most formidable military in Asia. China has been pouring money into its military to match some of Japan's U.S.-made equipment, but the Japanese have better ships and airplanes. The United States is bound by treaty to protect Japan if it is attacked, but pundits debate whether the events in the East China Sea meet that standard. And both Japan and the U.S. are already war-weary and hoping the situation cools down.
> 
> The lull after the air battle is deceptive. While China is itching to prove itself as a regional hegemon, its military does not want to launch headlong into a fight for airspace it will lose. So it turns to other tactics, even as diplomats discuss ways to ease tensions. Chinese submarines—quiet diesel–electric models that are hard to spot in the shallows—begin to lay mines. This would be easier to do by air, but the Chinese don't have air superiority, and want to block Japanese ships from nearing the contested islands. This move will keep Japanese and American warships from getting close to the islands, a necessary condition in case China wants to land troops. It also hampers Japanese and American air operations by keeping naval radar out of the area. (Not to mention the inability to rescue pilots downed in any future air battle. And the pilots would become diplomatic bargaining chips upon capture.)
> 
> China has no shortage of mines. A 2012 paper by the U.S. Naval War College cited a Chinese article claiming the nation has more than 50,000 mines, including "over 30 varieties of contact, magnetic, acoustic, water pressure and mixed reaction sea mines, remote control sea mines, rocket-rising and mobile mines." The smartest mines in the inventory would be the most useful to the Chinese. They can be programmed to rise and strike ships with particular acoustic and magnetic signatures. The mines can also be remotely activated. China could lace the sea lanes with these and wait for the order to be given—a public warning to all in the East China Sea to keep out.
> 
> The United States is good at sniffing out submarines. When Americans find Chinese subs deploying mines in areas where U.S. carrier groups will be operating, they try to force them to the surface. Under the water, U.S. submarines outgun the Chinese. They try to run, try to hide, and ultimately scuttle their ships with all hands lost.
> 
> China activates the mines in anger and to save face—a retreat right now would humiliate the army and central government. A death spiral of war ensues. Ships explode. Sailors burn to death and drown. There is a call from Taiwan and Japan to degrade the Chinese navy, to strip them of their assets with air strikes and cruise missiles. Leaks in Washington, D.C., hint at a forceful plan. Knowing what the U.S. and Japanese militaries can do if given time to prepare, and knowing they are underdogs in the fight, the Chinese military have good reason to consider a preemptive strike.
> 
> Three: Missiles
> 
> The crux of the war is still centered on these virtually uninhabited islands, but the fighting is spreading. And missiles, not airplanes, will determine who dominates the airspace over the disputed islands.
> 
> It starts with a wave of unmanned aerial vehicle attacks from the Chinese mainland. The Harpy drones take off from trucks and boats, fly as far as 300 miles, and hone in on radar emissions of surface-to-air defenses. The Harpy, made in Israel and sold to China in 2004, ends its flight with a death dive into the radar, detonating 4.5 pounds of explosives on impact.
> 
> The American/Japanese alliance is ready to own the air over the Sendakus. The attack on Chinese radar and air-defense installations comes shortly thereafter. Submarine-launched Tomahawks, B-2 stealth bomber runs, and long-range "standoff" missiles fired from B-52s hit targets. The Chinese have moved mobile radar systems and switched them off to keep them hidden. F-22s take to the sky, ready to fight and win dogfights. But these never happen.
> 
> Instead, China deals its last card—a barrage of theater missiles. These are conventional ballistic and cruise missiles fired from land, as far as 3500 miles away. These target fixed locations—Japanese air bases, naval stations, and American Air Force and Marine Corps bases. Hundreds of warheads drop on targets, beating missile defense systems, wrecking runways, and blasting barracks. At sea the Navy is also targeted. Hypersonic missiles fired from land or submarines target U.S. warships and Japanese vessels. The lesson is clear: The closer to the Chinese coast U.S. forces operate, the more trouble Chinese forces can bring to bear.
> 
> The U.S. naval forces back off and use more standoff weapons. Our scenario ends with a stalemated game of barrage and counterbarrage. But the central claim—who owns the islands—has been answered. They are no longer safe for anyone.


----------



## tomahawk6

Update on China's air defense zones.The PRC is busily trying to save face,but there is a dichotomy between the civilian leadership and the military.It wouldnt be the first time that the military pursued its own policy.Perhaps the Defense Minister will be retiring soon ?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304017204579226031095207724

The conflicting signals from Beijing highlight the challenge the Chinese leadership faces as it tries to contain the international fallout from its surprise decision to establish the zone, without appearing weak in front of an increasingly nationalistic domestic audience.

China's apparent easing of its original warning suggests its fighters will monitor and escort rather than repel U.S., Japanese and South Korean aircraft that violate the rules of the zone, which covers islands claimed by Beijing and Tokyo, said Chinese and foreign analysts. The spat over the uninhabited islands in the East China Sea—known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China—has escalated over the past year. 

To maintain its credibility internationally and domestically, China is likely to increase such escorts, a move that in such a tense political climate greatly increases the risk of an aerial incident that could spiral into a military clash, analysts and diplomats said.

A defense ministry spokesman said China had "identified" all foreign aircraft entering the Air Defense Identification Zone over an area covering islands at the center of a fierce territorial dispute between Tokyo and Beijing.


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan's President Ma Ying Jieou, whose _Guomindang_/GMD party (_Kuomintang_/KMT in old Wade-Giles romanization), has been sued and vilified by opposition politicians for abetting "foreign aggression" in the recent East China Sea ADIZ controversy. Take note that in spite of the fact that China's CCP and Taiwan's GMD are old enemies from the 1945-49 Chinese Civil War, many in both camps, including Ma, support reunification.  



> *Opposition party sues president over Taiwan's stance on China ADIZ*
> Liu Shih-i and James Lee
> 2013/11/29
> 
> 
> Taipei, Nov. 29 (CNA) *A minor opposition party filed charges against President Ma Ying-jeou Friday for allegedly compromising national security through apparent inaction after China claimed a broad air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea.*
> 
> Taiwan Solidarity Union Chairman Huang Kun-huei and Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia brought the charges to the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office, accusing Ma of the crime of abetting _"foreign aggression."_
> 
> Huang argued the Ma administration's lack of response to China's ADIZ, which encompasses waters and islets claimed by Taiwan, indicates a lack of loyalty on the Ma's part, contrasting the government's muted response with strong protests and bold actions by the United States, Japan and South Korea.
> 
> Following China's sudden proclamation of the ADIZ Nov. 23,* Ma said that the establishment of the zone does not affect Taiwan as it is not related to either territorial sovereignty or air space rights*,  but said that his government would express _"serious concerns"_ to China "and other parties" without giving more specifics.
> 
> Huang's suit against Ma follows respective dismissals of China's demands over the ADIZ by the United States, Japan and South Korea. Each of those countries has separately announced that they have flown military aircraft through the zone without informing China.
> 
> The major opposition Democratic Progressive Party has criticized Ma for being soft on China, calling for the government to _"toughen up."_
> 
> The 1992 Consensus refers to the outcome of talks in Hong Kong which left Taipei and Beijing agreeing that there is only one country called China, but disagreeing on whether that refers to the Republic of China in Taipei or the People's Republic in Beijing.
> 
> 
> *Focus Taiwan*



Plus more on Taiwan's dilemma in this ADIZ controversy:



> *China's ADIZ: Taiwan's Dilemma*
> *If Taiwan ever wants to be an equal participant in regional security, it must stand up to China over the new ADIZ*.
> By J. Michael Cole
> November 28, 2013
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Like other countries in Northeast Asia, Taiwan reacted with alarm to Beijing's November 23 announcement that it had established, and would enforce, an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that extends into the East China Sea and incorporates the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets. However, Taipei's precarious situation vis-a-vis China, with which it is seeking to improve relations, seems to have constrained the administration's ability to react appropriately to China's unexpected move.
> 
> But Taipei's reaction has been surprisingly mild. President Ma Ying-jeou has stated that China's ADIZ has nothing to do with Taiwan's territory or airspace, and seems more concerned about the impact of Beijing's gambit on his legacy as the mind behind the East China Sea peace initiative. For its part, the Presidential Office has stated reservations in a subdued manner, with vague claims of its intent to _"defend its sovereignty."_
> 
> Although the ADIZ controversy has little to do with Taiwan, the crisis forces Taipei to walk a tightrope, if not to choose which camp it belongs in. *By immediately acquiescing to Beijing's ADIZ regulations*,  Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration legitimized China's move, which is understandable from the standpoint of ensuring air safety. However, if it doesn't want to be seen as siding with China, Taipei will have to do something - and vague platitudes are insufficient.
> 
> *President Ma, who has invested substantial political capital in his East China Sea peace initiative, ostensibly wants Taiwan to be treated as an equal participant in regional security.* If it wants to achieve this goal, Taiwan will have to develop enough backbone to stand up to China when the latter adopts policies that increase tensions in the region. Conversely, inaction risks being perceived as tacit approval of China's gradual efforts to create facts on the ground.
> 
> 
> 
> *The Diplomat*





Furthermore, in spite of what was said earlier in this thread about reunification being inevitable, it seems unlikely for now, as this 2011 article stated:



> *Taiwan unlikely to move to reunify with China, despite Ma Ying-jeou’s reelection*
> 
> Reunification unpopular
> 
> In a 2011 poll, only 1.4 percent of respondents said that they wanted swift unification, and 60 percent favored keeping the status quo indefinitely or until some undecided future date. Only 8.7 percent said they preferred the status quo with eventual unification, compared with 23 percent who want either immediate independence or the status quo with moves toward independence.
> 
> *Washington Post*
> 
> *http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/11/02/2003575969
> 
> http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/07/21/taiwans-pro-china-policies-under-ma-have-benefitted-neither-its-economy-nor-its-people/*


----------



## CougarKing

Would it be too far-fetched to expect to see one over a greater area of the South China Sea in the future?

(map at the link)

Defense News



> *More Chinese Air ID Zones Predicted*
> Dec. 1, 2013 - 11:26AM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK, JUNG SUNG-KI and PAUL KALLENDER-UMEZU
> 
> TAIPEI, SEOUL AND TOKYO — China’s establishment of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) last week over the East China Sea has given the US an unexpected challenge as Vice President Joseph Biden prepares for a trip to China, Japan and South Korea beginning this week.
> 
> The trip was scheduled to address economic issues, but the Nov. 23 ADIZ announcement raised a troubling new issue for the US and allies in the region. China’s ADIZ overlaps the zones of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
> 
> *Sources indicate China’s ADIZ could be part of its larger anti-access/area-denial strategy designed to force the US military to operate farther from China’s shorelines.*
> 
> China might also be planning additional identification zones in the South China Sea and near contested areas along India’s border, US and local sources say.
> 
> *China’s ADIZ might be an attempt by Beijing to improve its claim to disputed islands in the East China Sea also claimed by Japan, sources said. These islands — known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China — are under the administrative control of Japan.*
> 
> Mike Green, senior vice president for Asia and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said this is part of a larger Chinese strategy beyond disputes over islands.
> 
> “This should be viewed as a part of a Chinese effort to assert greater denial capacity and eventual pre-eminence over the First Island Chain” off the coast, he said.
> 
> *Green, who served on the US National Security Council from 2001 to 2005, said China’s Central Military Commission in 2008 “promulgated the ‘Near Sea Doctrine,’ and is following it to the letter, testing the US, Japan, Philippines and others to see how far they can push.”
> 
> June Teufel Dreyer, a veteran China watcher at the University of Miami, Fla., said “salami slicing” is a large part of China’s strategic policy. “The salami tactic has been stunningly successful, so incremental that it’s hard to decide what Japan, or any other country, should respond forcefully to. No clear ‘red line’ seems to have been established,” Dreyer said.*
> 
> The Chinese refer to it as “ling chi” or “death from a thousand cuts.”
> 
> For example, China’s new ADIZ overlaps not only Japan’s zone to encompass disputed islands, but South Korea’s zone by 20 kilometers in width and 115 kilometers in length to cover the Socotra Rock (Ieodo or Parangdo). Socotra is under South Korean control but claimed by China as the Suyan Rock.
> 
> *Seoul decided to expand its ADIZ after China refused to redraw its declared zone covering the islands. Seoul’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) and related government agencies are consulting on how to expand the South Korean ADIZ, drawn in 1951 by the US military, officials said.*
> 
> “We’re considering ways of expanding [South] Korea’s air defense identification zone to include Ieodo,” said Wi Yong-seop, vice spokesman for the MND.
> 
> During annual high-level defense talks between Seoul and Beijing on Nov. 28, South Korean Vice Defense Minister Baek Seung-joo demanded that Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Chinese Army, modify China’s ADIZ.
> 
> “We expressed regret over China’s air defense identification zone that overlaps our zone and even includes Ieodo,” Wi said after the bilateral meeting. “We made it clear that we can’t recognize China’s move and jurisdiction over Ieodo waters.”
> 
> Amid these growing tensions, South Korea’s arms procurement agency announced Nov. 27 it would push forward on procurement of four aerial refueling planes. Currently, South Korea’s F-15 fighter jets are limited to flying missions over Ieodo for 20 minutes. New tankers will extend that time to 80 minutes.
> 
> “With midair refueling, the operational range and flight hours of our fighter jets will be extended to a greater extent, and we will be able to respond to potential territorial disputes with neighboring countries,” a spokesman for South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said.
> 
> *In the southern part of China’s ADIZ, which overlaps Taiwan’s ADIZ, Beijing was careful not to cover Taiwan’s Pengjia Island, which is manned by a Taiwan Coast Guard unit.*
> 
> (...)


----------



## tomahawk6

We can play that game as well.ADZ over Guam.Japan could set up an ADZ over Okinawa.The PI ADZ.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A friend suggested to me that China doesn't really care about enforcing _their_ ADIZ, and not about losing face, either.

But they will expect reciprocity: if US and Japanese warplanes can penetrate Chinese ADIZs without "checking in" then Chinese warplanes will require exactly the same _courtesy_ in US, Korean and Japanese zones.  :dunno:


----------



## Edward Campbell

More on the Chinese ADIZ by Michael J Green* in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Foreign Affairs:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140307/michael-j-green/safeguarding-the-seas#cid=soc-twitter-at-snapshot-safeguarding_the_seas-000000


> Safeguarding the Seas
> *How to Defend Against China's New Air Defense Zone*
> 
> By Michael J Green
> 
> December 2, 2013
> 
> Much of the coverage of China’s November 23 announcement of a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over waters claimed by Japan and South Korea has focused on the reactive and blundering nature of Chinese diplomacy. China’s sudden insistence on its right to take defensive action against foreign aircraft in this zone, the argument goes, was either an attempt to play to domestic nationalism or else to respond to Japan’s own increasing assertiveness in the region. Either way, the coverage concludes, China underestimated how quickly and vigorously other countries in the region would respond, including with flights directly into that airspace.
> 
> The implication of this analysis, which may be tempting to the overstretched Obama administration, is that Beijing made a hasty move that the region will now correct with a little help from Washington. Unfortunately for the administration, however, this was not just an ill-conceived slap by Beijing against a testy Japan. The reality is that the new ADIZ is part of a longer-term attempt by Beijing to chip away at the regional status quo and assert greater control over the East and South China Seas.
> 
> To understand this reality, one must begin the story of the ADIZ before Japan’s nationalization of three of the eight disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands in 2012, which is where most assessments start. Over three decades ago, China and Japan agreed to set aside their disagreement over the islands and focus on a common problem: the Soviet Union. It was China that first nullified the understanding by staking claim to the islands in 1992. It was also China that, in 2008, began significantly expanding its maritime patrols in and around those waters. In recent years, the Chinese maritime services have conducted patrols at least once a day near the islands and have crossed Japan’s 12-nautical-mile border around the islands on hundreds of occasions. Meanwhile, Chinese navy units have circumnavigated Japan and conducted major military exercises on all sides of the Japanese archipelago. In other words, by the time Tokyo purchased some of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands from private landowners in 2012, Chinese pressure had reached alarming levels for Tokyo.
> 
> Both Japanese and Chinese diplomacy on the issue have been inept at times, of course, but the difference is that Japan -- which has effective administrative control of the islands -- is trying to preserve the status quo, whereas China is bent on using coercive pressure to try to change it. And Japan is not China’s only target. Beijing has also been pressing Manila over the Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island) in the South China Sea. China has increased its maritime and air presence around the contested area and imposed export bans on key products from the Philippines. (This strategy smacks of the same mercantilism China showed when it halted rare earth exports to Japan because of those two countries’ island disputes.)
> 
> Unlike the ongoing dispute with Japan, the Scarborough Shoal confrontation going badly for Manila. In 2012, Chinese maritime patrol ships finally overwhelmed the tiny Philippine navy and took de facto control of the shoals. Filipinos whose families have fished those waters for a millennium are now barred from entering.
> 
> Japan’s air force and navy are too strong for China to attempt a similar grab of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands anytime soon. But Hanoi, Manila, Taipei, and Tokyo all sense that, in the Scarborough Shoal, Beijing “killed the chicken to scare the monkey,” as officials from those governments say. Most observers would agree that China has every intention of following the same strategy against Japan, just in slow motion. Although the smaller powers have remained quiet about the announcement of a new Chinese defense zone, most are privately urging Japan not to back down.
> 
> Japan, South Korea, and the United States have stated that they will not let the Chinese ADIZ announcement change their military operations in the area. To prove the point, the Pentagon sent two B-52 bombers out of Guam to fly through the new defense zone. Japan and South Korea quickly followed suit with their own patrols. The administration’s opening move certainly demonstrated by word and deed that Beijing went too far. But if the Chinese announcement comes from a deeper strategy of coercing smaller states and establish greater control in the Western Pacific -- as many governments in the region rightly suspect -- then Washington had better be prepared for a longer-term test of wills with Beijing.
> 
> The administration needs to consider the larger context that the rest of the region sees. Some of the policies included in the so-called rebalance to Asia will help, including the announcement in October that Washington and Tokyo will revise their bilateral defense guidelines to deal with new contingencies, including from China. Other moves have been less helpful. It was not lost on China or Japan, for example, that U.S. service chiefs testified in front of Congress that planned defense budget cuts would leave the armed forces unable to fulfill their current missions or security commitments; that U.S. President Barack Obama threw the decision about honoring his redline in Syria to Congress; or that senior U.S. officers in the Pacific continue trying to calm the waters by speaking of a new strategic partnership with China and naming climate change as their greatest security concern in the region.
> 
> More immediately, the disconnect between Washington and Tokyo this week over whether commercial flights should recognize the ADIZ and file flight plans with Beijing (Tokyo says no and Washington says yes) was a poor case of alliance management and an embarrassment for Tokyo during a serious security problem. Whatever the merits of each side’s respective policies in terms of strategic signals and airline safety, the two will have to work as one in the future.
> 
> The Obama administration needs to stick to a disciplined message of resolve and reassurance. And that would mean accurately assessing Beijing’s strategic intent. Confrontation with China is far from inevitable, and the potential areas for productive U.S.-Chinese cooperation remain vast. Vice President Joe Biden will no doubt emphasize the positive in U.S.-Chinese relations when he travels to Beijing this week. And that makes sense. But he should also leave no doubt that the United States is prepared to work with regional allies and partners to ensure Beijing understands that its attempts at coercion will not work. Then, when he is in Tokyo and Seoul, he should take time to listen carefully to what those allies think is at stake in the troubled East and South China Seas. Their problem is our problem, not just because we are allies but also because this moment could determine how China uses its growing power.




I'm still perplexed by this whole issue. I think Prof Green is correct that China is pursuing a longer-term strategy "to chip away at the regional status quo and assert greater control over the East and South China Seas." I'm less sure that this is doing to Tokyo, in slow motion, what has, already been done to the Philippines. In fact I'm not sure China has actually "won" the Scarborough Shoal dispute. I wonder if this is not a unilateral, uncoordinated act by the Ministry of Defence that actually complicates China's strategy.

_____
* MICHAEL J. GREEN is Senior Vice President for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He served as Director and then Senior Director for Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2005.


----------



## CougarKing

US-China spy games in the storm-ravaged areas of the Philippines.  



> He was wearing tattered clothes but, suspiciously, had a brand-new camera. And he was using it to snap photos not of the evacuees he was with, but of the US military aircraft on the runway.
> 
> Source: Alaska Dispatch


----------



## CougarKing

Seoul's response to Beijing's E.China Sea ADIZ:

Defense News



> *South Korea To Expand Air Defense Zone*
> 
> SEOUL — *South Korea is announcing next week that it will extend its air defense identification zone in response to China’s declaration of a new air defense zone overlapping the country’s southern islands and underwater rock.*
> 
> President Park Geun-hye held talks Dec. 6 with US Vice President Joe Biden here to discuss the matter.
> 
> *According to the presidential office, Biden, who had received no concession from China on its new air defense zone, appreciates Seoul’s plan to expand its air defense zone, drawn in 1951 by the UN Command in the middle of the Korean War.*
> 
> “The two sides agreed to continue to discuss the matter,” Foreign Minister Yoon Byung-se said after the meeting.
> 
> In a speech at Yonsei University here, Biden reiterated the US government doesn’t recognize China’s unilateral move announced Nov. 23.
> 
> (...)


----------



## a_majoor

What could _possibly_ go wrong?


----------



## CougarKing

Huawei in the news again.

Source: AP News



> *Chinese firm paid US gov't intelligence adviser*
> 
> *A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage threat*, The Associated Press has learned.
> 
> *Theodore H. Moran, a respected expert on China's international investment and professor at Georgetown University, had served since 2007 as adviser to the intelligence director's advisory panel on foreign investment in the United States.* Moran also was an adviser to the National Intelligence Council, a group of 18 senior analysts and policy experts who provide U.S. spy agencies with judgments on important international issues.
> 
> *The case highlights the ongoing fractious relationship between the U.S. government and Huawei, China's leading developer of telephone and Internet infrastructure, which has been condemned in the U.S. as a potential national security threat.* Huawei has aggressively disputed this, and its chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, has said the company has decided to abandon the U.S. market.
> 
> The House Intelligence Committee last year said Huawei and another firm, ZTE, posed a threat that could enable Chinese intelligence services to tamper with American communications networks. The committee said it could not prove wrongdoing but recommended that the companies be barred from doing business in the country.


----------



## CougarKing

I am surprised the SCMP carried this story from the state-sponsored mouthpiece it originally came from.  :facepalm: 



> Smog? It bolsters military defence, says Chinese nationalist newspaper
> 
> South China Morning Post


----------



## a_majoor

This is interesting from multiple perspectives. It forecasts some profound changes in the Chinese economy, it alters the financial "balance of power" between China and the United States, it has implications with American fiscal policy, and can potentially be read in terms of "Unrestricted Warfare" as a positioning move to gain advantage in global financial markets or pull the rug out from under the United States at the time and place of their choosing:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-20/pboc-says-no-longer-in-china-s-favor-to-boost-record-reserves.html



> *PBOC Says No Longer in China’s Interest to Increase Reserves*
> By Bloomberg News  Nov 20, 2013 10:03 PM ET  38 Comments  Email  Print
> 
> The People’s Bank of China said the country does not benefit any more from increases in its foreign-currency holdings, adding to signs policy makers will rein in dollar purchases that limit the yuan’s appreciation.
> 
> “It’s no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves,” Yi Gang, a deputy governor at the central bank, said in a speech organized by China Economists 50 Forum at Tsinghua University yesterday. The monetary authority will “basically” end normal intervention in the currency market and broaden the yuan’s daily trading range, Governor Zhou Xiaochuan wrote in an article in a guidebook explaining reforms outlined last week following a Communist Party meeting. Neither Yi nor Zhou gave a timeframe for any changes.
> 
> China’s foreign-exchange reserves surged $166 billion in the third quarter to a record $3.66 trillion, more than triple those of any other country and bigger than the gross domestic product of Germany, Europe’s largest economy. The increase suggested money poured into the nation’s assets even as developing nations from Brazil to India saw an exit of capital because of concern the Federal Reserve will taper stimulus.
> 
> Yi, who is also head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said in the speech that the yuan’s appreciation benefits more people in China than it hurts.
> 
> ‘Less Interventionist’
> 
> His comments are “consistent with the plans to increase the renminbi’s flexibility so they become less interventionist,” Sacha Tihanyi, senior currency strategist at Scotiabank in Hong Kong, said by phone today. The central bank may widen the yuan’s trading band in “the coming few months,” he added.
> 
> The yuan’s spot rate is allowed to diverge a maximum 1 percent on either side of a daily reference rate set by the People’s Bank of China. The trading range was doubled in April 2012, after being expanded from 0.3 percent in May 2007. The band could be widened to 2 percent, Hong Kong Apple Daily reported today, citing an interview with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s former chief executive Joseph Yam.
> 
> Capital inflows into China accelerated in October, official data suggest. Yuan positions at the nation’s financial institutions accumulated from foreign-exchange purchases, a gauge of capital flows, climbed 441.6 billion yuan ($72 billion), the most since January.
> 
> About half of October’s increase in the positions was attributable to surpluses in trade and foreign direct investment, with the rest accounted for by inflows of “hot money,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Hong Kong-based analysts MK Tang and Li Cui wrote in a Nov. 18 note.
> 
> Stronger Yuan
> 
> The yuan has appreciated 2.3 percent against the greenback this year, the best-performance of 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg. Non-deliverable 12-month forwards rose 0.2 percent this week and reached 6.1430 per dollar on Nov. 20, matching an all-time high recorded on Oct. 16. The currency was little changed at 6.0932 as of 10:33 a.m. in Shanghai today.
> 
> “It appears that many in the People’s Bank think the time is about right to scale back currency interventions,” Mark Williams, London-based chief Asia economist at Capital Economics Ltd., wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “But China has got itself into a situation where stopping intervention will be very hard to do” and comments such as Yi’s will spur speculative inflows, he added.
> 
> Less intervention and smaller gains in foreign-exchange reserves may damp China’s appetite for U.S. government debt. The nation is the largest foreign creditor to the U.S. and its holdings of Treasuries increased by $25.7 billion, or 2 percent, to $1.294 trillion in September, the biggest gain since February. U.S. government securities lost 2.6 percent this year, according to the Bloomberg U.S. Treasury Bond Index. (BUSY)
> 
> Yi’s comments didn’t imply China will be cutting its holdings of U.S. government debt, said Scotiabank’s Tihanyi. “They are probably going to keep their allocations reasonably stable unless there’s a big policy shift, but it means they will possibly be buying less at the margin,” he said.
> 
> To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Xin Zhou in Beijing at xzhou68@bloomberg.net; Fion Li in Hong Kong at fli59@bloomberg.net
> 
> To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Regan at jregan19@bloomberg.net; Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net



and:

http://www.metal.com/newscontent/55523_chinas-yuan-vaults-to-record-as-c.bank-signals-policy-shift



> *China's yuan vaults to record as c.bank signals policy shift*
> Dec 09, 2013 09:26 GMT   Source: Reuters
> 
> Summary:China's yuan jumped to a record high against the dollar on Monday lifting some Asian currencies in its wake after the central bank relaxed its grip on the currency following strong trade data.
> 
> Mon, 9 Dec 05:12:00 GMT
> 
> By Saikat Chatterjee
> 
> HONG KONG, Dec 9 (Reuters) - China's yuan jumped to a record high against the dollar on Monday lifting some Asian currencies in its wake after the central bank relaxed its grip on the currency following strong trade data, suggesting a noticeable shift in policy.
> 
> The People's Bank of China appears to have flagged a new round of appreciation for its tightly-managed currency at the year-end after it aggressively fixed the daily midpoint at a record high for a second consecutive day.
> 
> The yuan, also known as the renminbi, is allowed to trade on the mainland within a range of one percent on each side of the fixing which has repeatedly hit fresh highs in past weeks.
> 
> Underlining market optimism about the upward trend of the Chinese currency, the spot market has also become disconnected to the daily fixing, consistently trading at the stronger end of the range.
> 
> The continued gains in the yuan has confounded bank models and triggered a washout of long dollar bets in the spot market.
> 
> "Authorities appear to be comfortable with the yuan's rise and we expect a moderate pace of gains in the near term," said Sacha Tihanyi, senior currency strategist at Scotia Bank in Hong Kong who expects the yuan to rise to 6.07 per dollar by the end of March and to 6.01 by end 2014.
> 
> "With stronger downside fixings on days like today, it is suggestive that policymakers may be allowing already the degree of flexibility that was hinted at in recent statements," he said. [ID:nL3N0JO04J]
> 
> In opening trades on Monday, the yuan barrelled to a record of 6.0715 per dollar before retreating, compared with 6.0817 at the previous close after the People's Bank of China set the daily fixing at 6.1130 – its highest since a 2005 revaluation.
> 
> The sharp gains for yuan come after it spent November crawling in a tiny band, despite volatile fixings as state-run banks, likely acting on behalf of the central bank, capped moves. The Australian dollar , which has a strong correlation to the yuan due to Australia's large trade in commodities with China, briefly perked higher after the strong fixing.
> 
> Heavy dollar purchases by Beijing until last Thursday in its currency markets comes at a time when growth has rebounded and investors have regained confidence in the economy's outlook after an ambitious reform roadmap released last month. [ID:nL4N0JK1UB]
> 
> In contrast with the relative calm in the onshore currency markets, the Chinese yuan traded in Hong Kong has outperformed its counterpart onshore and Chinese stocks listed offshore are seeing heavy demand from global money managers. [ID:nL4N0JB19S]
> 
> But as more data has became available, the authorities have begun to change their stance towards the yuan by asking state-run banks to loosen their grip on the market and by fixing the daily midpoint higher.
> 
> On the weekend, data showed China's export growth in November blowing past estimates while import growth was broadly in line with estimates resulting in a gigantic trade surplus – its highest since 2009.
> 
> While some of the trade data may be amplified, with capital flows being disguised as trade, it is likely to provide further impetus to the currency's outlook in the near term, though some analysts warn on betting on aggressive gains. There are signs that China's trade figures are again being distorted by speculative capital inflows disguised as exports of goods and services, with the State Administration of Foreign Exchange
> 
> (SAFE) announcing over the weekend it will clamp down on the usage of foreign currency for trade finance. [ID:nL4N0JM081]
> 
> "We expect the Chinese government to be more cautious this time and will prevent the yuan from appreciating too much," said Bank of America Merrill Lynch strategists in a note.
> 
> Another factor boosting the yuan has been the widening interest rate differentials between onshore and the offshore markets. Over the last two months, the spread between one-year debt in the Hong Kong and onshore markets has nearly doubled to 340 basis points, according to Thomson Reuters data.
> 
> The central bank has controlled the pace of yuan rises since the currency's landmark revaluation in July 2005. It has let the currency appreciate mainly for major political events, such as Chinese leaders' visits to the United States or participation in global forums, while maintaining stability at other times.
> 
> Despite this gradualism, the yuan has strengthened 36 percent since the revaluation, signalling that the government is determined to move towards a fully convertible currency over time, starting with pilot zones around the country. [ID:nL4N0JJ0RU]
> 
> The currency has risen 2.6 percent so far this year and is heading for a 3 percent appreciation for 2013 assuming it lands somewhere around 6.05 per dollar by year-end, tripling a 1-percent rise in 2012 and exceeding traders' expectations for a 2-percent gain. [ID:nL3N0F71YS]
> 
> The onshore spot yuan market at a glance:
> 
> 
> 
> Item Current Previous Change
> 
> PBOC midpoint 6.113 6.1232 0.17%
> 
> Spot yuan 6.0725 6.0817 0.15%
> 
> Divergence from midpoint* -0.66%
> 
> Spot change ytd 2.60%
> 
> Spot change since 2005 revaluation 36.29%
> 
> 
> *Divergence of the dollar/yuan exchange rate. Negative number indicates that spot yuan is trading stronger than the midpoint. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) allows the exchange rate to rise or fall 1 percent from official midpoint rate it sets each morning.
> 
> OFFSHORE CNH MARKET
> 
> Text
> 
> The offshore yuan market at a glance:
> 
> 
> Instrument Current Difference from onshore
> 
> Offshore spot yuan 6.0650 0.12%
> 
> Offshore non-deliverable 6.12 -0.11%
> 
> forwards
> 
> *Premium for offshore spot over onshore
> **Figure reflects difference from PBOC's official midpoint, since non-deliverable forwards are settled against the midpoint. .
> 
> KEY DATA POINTS
> 
> - Gap between PBOC midpoint and spot rate is narrowing. GRAPHIC: http://link.reuters.com/qyx74t
> 
> - China's trade surpluses mainly driven by weak imports rather than strong exports. GRAPHIC: http://link.reuters.com/qav68s
> 
> - Corporate FX purchases in May show reduction in yuan appreciation expectations. GRAPHIC: http://link.reuters.com/tyx74t
> 
> - Hot money inflows turn to outflows in May GRAPHIC: http://link.reuters.com/saz74t
> 
> - Despite relatively stable dollar/yuan exchange rate, the yuan is appreciating on a trade-weighted basis. GRAPHIC: http://link.reuters.com/sed74t


----------



## CougarKing

The "rabbit" has landed. 



> *China successfully soft-lands probe on the moon*
> Dec 14, 10:08 AM EST
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AP) -- *China on Saturday successfully carried out the world's first soft landing of a space probe on the moon in nearly four decades, state media said, the next stage in an ambitious space program that aims to eventually put a Chinese astronaut on the moon.*
> 
> The unmanned Chang'e 3 lander, named after a mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, touched down on Earth's nearest neighbor following a 12-minute landing process.
> 
> *The probe carried a six-wheeled moon rover called "Yutu," or "Jade Rabbit," the goddess' pet.* After landing Saturday evening on a fairly flat, Earth-facing part of the moon, the rover was slated to separate from the Chang'e eight hours later and embark on a three-month scientific exploration.
> 
> ...



Associated Press


----------



## GAP

Good on them.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> A friend suggested to me that China doesn't really care about enforcing _their_ ADIZ, and not about losing face, either.
> 
> But they will expect reciprocity: if US and Japanese warplanes can penetrate Chinese ADIZs without "checking in" then Chinese warplanes will require exactly the same _courtesy_ in US, Korean and Japanese zones.  :dunno:



Speaking of "not checking in" ... Seoul and Tokyo thumb their noses at Beijing...



> *
> Japan and South Korea hold joint exercise in China’s air defence zone*
> 
> Rescue exercise near Suyan Rock is seen as sending out a strong signal to Beijing, but two nations are at odds over commercial flights
> 
> South China Morning Post link
> 
> Both countries said that while they didn't inform the Chinese authorities, the joint maritime rescue drill was planned long before Beijing announced the controversial zone over the East China Sea. Under Chinese rules, all aircraft are required to report flight plans in advance.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

More on the illicit Chinese acquisition of sensitive US technology:



> *Special Report: How China's weapon snatchers are penetrating U.S. defenses*
> Reuters
> By John Shiffman and Duff Wilson 13 hours ago
> 
> 
> OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - Agents from Homeland Security sneaked into a tiny office in Oakland's Chinatown before sunrise on December 4, 2011. They tread carefully, quickly snapping digital pictures so they could put everything back in place. They didn't want Philip Chaohui He, the businessman who rented the space, to learn they had been there.
> 
> Seven months had passed since they'd launched an undercover operation against a suspected Chinese arms-trafficking network - one of scores operating in support of Beijing's ambitious military expansion into outer space.
> 
> *The agents had allowed a Colorado manufacturer to ship He a type of technology that China covets but cannot replicate: radiation-hardened microchips. Known as rad-chips, the dime-sized devices are critical for operating satellites, for guiding ballistic missiles, and for protecting military hardware from nuclear and solar radiation.*
> 
> It was a gamble. This was a chance to take down an entire Chinese smuggling ring. But if He succeeded in trafficking the rad-chips to China, the devices might someday be turned against U.S. sailors, soldiers or pilots, deployed on satellites providing the battlefield eyes and ears for the People's Liberation Army.
> 
> ------------------------
> 
> China's efforts to obtain U.S. technology have tracked its accelerated defense buildup. The Chinese military budget - second only to America's - has soared to close to $200 billion.
> 
> President Xi Jinping is championing a renaissance aimed at China's asserting its dominance in the region and beyond. In recent weeks, Beijing has declared control over air space in the contested East China Sea and launched China's first rover mission to the moon.
> 
> IMMEDIATE THREAT
> 
> As China rises to challenge the United States as a power in the Pacific, American officials say Beijing is penetrating the U.S. defense industry in ways that not only compromise weapons systems but also enable it to secure some of the best and most dangerous technology. A classified Pentagon advisory-board report this year, for instance, asserted that Chinese hackers had gained access to plans for two dozen U.S. weapons systems, according to the Washington Post.
> 
> But the smuggling of technology such as radiation-hardened microchips out of America may present a more immediate challenge to the U.S. military, Reuters has found. If China hacks into a sensitive blueprint, years might pass before a weapon can be manufactured. Ready-made components and weapons systems can be - and are - used immediately.
> 
> 
> ------------------
> Quite often, sensitive U.S. technology is legally shipped to friendly nations and then immediately and illegally reshipped to China.
> 
> 
> 
> A MAN NAMED "HOPE"
> 
> The Oakland investigation began in spring 2011. The manufacturer, Aeroflex of Colorado Springs, Colorado, received an email from a man who called himself Philip Hope of Oakland. The man wanted to buy two kinds of rad-chips - 112 of one type and 200 of the other.
> 
> The suspicious Aeroflex employees contacted Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which keeps a special counter-proliferation office in the space technology hub of Colorado Springs.
> 
> Based on quick record checks, the HSI agents drew a portrait of "Philip Hope." The man was a Chinese immigrant and legal permanent resident, Philip Chaohui He, an engineer for the state of California assigned to a Bay Bridge renovation project. Sierra Electronic Instruments was a start-up run from the one-room office in Chinatown.
> 
> The HSI agents concluded that He was buying the rad-chips on behalf of someone else. Someone rich. Someone who couldn't legally acquire them. Probably someone in China - likely the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, a state-run entity that operates nearly all of China's military and civilian space projects.
> 
> China Aerospace officials did not respond to requests for comment. An official at a Shanghai subsidiary said he was unaware of the He purchases.
> 
> The rad-chips He ordered from Aeroflex are not the most powerful on the market, and could not operate a sophisticated military satellite on their own. But experts say they have few uses other than as one of the many components of a sophisticated satellite.
> 
> 
> "You wouldn't spend that kind of money on those microchips unless you intended to use them in much bigger satellites," said Alvar Saenz-Otero, associate director of the Space Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They fit the design of a satellite that you'd want to stay in space for a reasonably long time, and therefore are likely small parts of a bigger satellite."
> 
> 
> THE AGENTS' DILEMMA
> 
> The agents faced the key question that comes in almost every counter-proliferation case: Could they lure the suspect into a sting? If so, would it be worth the trouble?
> 
> Undercover operations are time-consuming, expensive and risky. If agents dangled rad-chips in front of the suspect and he got away, the components would probably end up on Chinese satellites. If they delivered the chips and watched him closely, he might lead them to a network traceable to Beijing.
> 
> The agents in the case faced another complication: At the time, Aeroflex - the very manufacturer enlisted to help with the sting - was itself under civil investigation for sending rad-chips to China.
> 
> Although that investigation was still under way, Aeroflex had already admitted that it sent more than 14,500 rad-chips to China between 2003 and 2008. Aeroflex exported more than half of those chips even after U.S. officials had directed it to stop doing so.
> 
> The company declined to comment. But documents show two mitigating factors - Aeroflex voluntarily disclosed the transgressions, and it blamed them in part on misreading complex and sometimes competing Commerce Department and State Department regulations.
> 
> Even so, State Department regulators would ultimately conclude: "The exports directly supported Chinese satellites and military aircraft, and caused harm to U.S. national security."
> 
> -----------------
> 
> The L.A. agents followed the cell-tracker to a Best Western hotel south of the city. In the early evening, they located He's Honda sedan in the hotel parking lot. They confirmed that He had checked in, and they settled in for surveillance.
> 
> At about 8:45 a.m. on December 11, 2011, He left his hotel room with an unidentified traveling companion and pulled the Honda onto Interstate 110, driving south. Tijuana was two hours away. The HSI agents planned to stop him at the Mexico border.
> 
> But after just 3 miles, He pulled into the Port of Long Beach. Then, he used a Transportation Safety Administration pass - a badge he carried for his Bay Bridge repair assignment - to swiftly get through port security.
> 
> 
> THE MISSING CHIPS
> 
> 
> *The fate of the first shipment of 112 radiation-hardened chips - the ones that got away - is unknown. U.S. officials strongly suspect they are either in China or orbiting the Earth aboard one of Beijing's satellites.*
> 
> Yahoo News


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _China Business Review_, is an open source guesstimate of the scope and scale of Chinese investment in Africa in 2012:






The key point, I think, is to note the distribution: about 70% of it is _investment_ in resources (oil, iron ore, copper and uranium) and the railroads and seaports needed to move those resources to global markets. Less than 2% is _aid_. That ratio is, I believe, good for both Africa and China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

While most people have been focused on China's military escapades in the South China Sea, the Middle Kingdom has been, relentlessly, pursuing its _soft power_ agenda around the world, including inside America, according to this old but still pertinent article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Guardian_:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/china-state-television-global-expansion


> Chinese state TV unveils global expansion plan
> *CCTV to increase overseas staff tenfold by 2016 as English-language services spearhead Beijing's soft power push*
> 
> Tania Branigan in Beijing
> The Guardian
> 
> Thursday 8 December 2011
> 
> China's state broadcaster is launching a major expansion in pursuit of an international audience, increasing its overseas staff fivefold by the end of next year and almost tenfold by 2016.
> 
> China Central Television hopes to win millions of viewers in the US and Africa with English-language services produced in Washington and Nairobi. It is the latest in a multibillion-pound soft power push, as Beijing searches for a "cultural aircraft carrier" to extend its global influence.
> 
> "Global competition nowadays is not just political and economic, but cultural … Countries that take the dominant position in cultural development and own strong cultural soft power are the ones that gain the initiative in fierce international competition," argued an essay in Chinese journal Leadership Decision-Making Information last month.
> 
> Beijing has created almost 300 Confucius institutes around the world, teaching Chinese language and culture, and spent a reported £4bn on expanding state media. It has created a new English language newspaper, Russian and Arabic TV channels and a 24-hour English news station run by the Xinhua state news agency.
> 
> In a sign of how far the Chinese media reaches, you can buy the European edition of the English-language China Daily in a Sheffield and read Xinhua's Kenyan "mobile newspaper" on your phone in Nairobi.
> 
> In Boston, China Radio International has claimed the frequency previously owned by WILD-AM – "home for classic soul and R&B" – to the surprise of listeners.
> 
> Beijing has also attempted to harness the credibility of established western media, distributing 2.5m copies of China Daily's China Watch supplement in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Daily Telegraph.
> 
> The China Central Television (CCTV) expansion is arguably the most ambitious, although the broadcaster declined to answer queries about the plans. According to its website, it had 49 staff posted abroad in November 2010 – with 10 more in Hong Kong and Macau – and wants overseas staff to increase to 280 by 2012. That number should rise to 500 by 2016, across 80 bureaus.
> 
> At the heart of operations will be six hubs: two probably in London and Dubai and others in South America and the Asia Pacific region.
> 
> It is understood to have hired some 150 people, with Washington gaining 60 staff. Most will be working for the English- and other foreign-language channels. Zhong Xin, a journalism professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said Chinese media had long wanted to expand and that incidents in 2008 and 2009 – such as protests during the Olympic torch relay and riots in Xinjiang – persuaded the government of the need, because it wanted China's voice to be heard.
> 
> Dong Tiance, a journalism professor at Jinan University in southern China, said: "Official bodies, media organisations and academia have agreed that our previous external publicity has had problems. These overseas initiatives are improving this, for example, by hiring senior local journalists and experts."
> 
> CCTV has hired Jim Laurie, a former ABC and NBC broadcaster turned consultant, to advise it and has offered generous salaries for local staff.
> 
> According to his website, CCTV will broadcast at least an hour of programming daily by early 2012, and four hours by June, from its new studios. It has leased 3,300 sq m (36,000 sq ft) at a central Washington address for a reported $1.5m (£953,000).
> 
> In Nairobi, the Kenyan vice-president has said Chinese officials plan to increase CCTV's staff from 12 to 150. It has poached high-profile anchors from local networks for CCTV Africa.
> 
> Whether these efforts will be repaid in viewing figures remains to be seen. One challenge has been delivery: Xinhua's CNC World news channel was originally available only online, although it can now be watched via Sky in the UK and Time Warner Cable in the US.
> 
> CCTV services are now available via non-profit broadcaster MHz Networks in Washington and it hopes adding unconventional means of delivery – perhaps showing programmes in shops – could extend its audience.
> 
> The second challenge has been persuading people to watch. Even at home, commercial rivals often trounce state offerings and there is widespread cynicism about news content.
> 
> Chinese internet-users last week reacted angrily to remarks by CCTV's new boss, who said journalists' primary responsibility was to be a "mouthpiece". Hu Zhanfan, who gave the speech earlier this year as editor-in-chief of the official Guangming Daily, said "news workers" who defined themselves as journalism professionals instead of in terms of Communist party propaganda work were making a fundamental error.
> 
> While foreign-language state media are allowed to go further than those intended for a domestic audience, there are still tight constraints on their work.
> 
> "In general people are perhaps still suspicious about the quality of some of the news programmes," acknowledged Dong Guanpeng, a former CCTV anchor who teaches journalism at Tsinghua University in Beijing and has advised officials on media policy. But he said CCTV could reach an audience of opinion-formers on China to begin with and that non-news programming, such as cultural shows, would increase its appeal.
> 
> Arnold Zeitlin, a veteran correspondent turned consultant who teaches journalism at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, said numerous countries had attempted similar media pushes unsuccessfully. He questioned the point of spending "huge gobs of money" on the media expansion without addressing issues such as China's human rights record.
> 
> "I would be surprised, if not disappointed, if most people buy it," he said. "To change China's image it is necessary to alter Chinese policy and outlook."
> 
> _Additional research by Han Cheng_




There is more about WILD AM (Boston) here.


----------



## a_majoor

Questions about the accuracy of Chinese economic figures have been going on for years, this groups believes they have the "right" figures and that China has overstated economic growth (and future projections). Since the effects of compounding are quite reliant on the initial ROI as well as the length of time the projections are being made for, this could suggest that the ideas that China will rapidly overtake the US economy, or Chinese economic growth will "save the world" are misguided at best.

Without more transparency, the real killer of long term Chinese economic growth will be the gradual drying up of foreign investment, as people stop believing "official" figures and can no longer make accurate forecasts or plans because of this.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/12/18/how-real-is-chinas-growth-gdp-alternatives-shed-light/



> *How Real Is China’s Growth?*
> 
> By BOB DAVIS
> 
> Perhaps the most common question about China’s phenomenal record of growthis:  Is it real?
> 
> Even China’s premier, Li Keqiang, has expressed doubts about China’s GDP results. In a 2007 discussion with the U.S. ambassador to China, which both thought was private, Mr. Li called GDP a “man-made and therefore unreliable” statistic.
> 
> Mr. Li, at the time the Communist Party chief of Liaoning province, said he looked at stats on electricity, rail cargo and loans to get a better gauge of economic activity, according to a copy of the ambassador’s memo, which was made public by WikiLeaks.
> 
> Economists have tried to put together alternative indices. One of the most thorough is produced by Capital Economics, which releases what it calls the China Activity Proxy. The data series started in 2009, so it has a track record. It’s published monthly — unlike GDP data, which is released quarterly.
> 
> The London-based research group uses one of Mr. Li’s favorite indicators, electricity output, as a proxy for industrial activity.  It adds four others – freight shipment (a broad measure of economic activity), floor space under construction (real estate); passenger travel (service sector); and cargo volume (international trade).
> 
> “They are relatively low profile (statistics), so should be subject to fewer questions about data manipulation,” Capital Economics explained.
> 
> For the most part, Capital Economics finds that its CAP index generally jibes with China’s GDP numbers, especially in 2009 and 2010. But in the last two years, its CAP index suggests growth may have been 1 to 2 percentage points below the official GDP numbers.
> 
> What’s up? Mark Williams, a China economist at the firm, says official GDP numbers reflect output data and are “skewed toward what is going on in industry.”
> 
> CAP data, he says, also capture “harder to measure” parts of the economy.
> 
> Over the past two years, he says, big firms have benefited disproportionately from a surge in lending. CAP data suggests that service-sector firms may be hurting more than the official GDP numbers would suggest.
> 
> As for 2014, Mr. Williams is at the low end of estimates for GDP growth: He forecasts 7% growth, down from an expected 7.6% this year. Some others are forecasting growth of 8% or so, figuring that the rebound in global growth will help Chinese exports and that the Chinese government will do what’s needed to keep the economy from slowing too quickly — whatever officials say about their commitment to reform.


----------



## Edward Campbell

An interesting _Infographic_ reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Amazing Maps_:






The important past is in orange ... and the orange would be much, much bigger is the stats showed the EU as a single trading block, because it too, along with Canada and the USA, would be orange. EU members are yellow because they trade more amongst themselves, being a common market, than with outsiders.


----------



## CougarKing

The escalation of a carrier "arms race" in East Asia? This new class of ship will be a larger version of China's current aircraft carrier _Liaoning_.

Aside from China's lone carrier _Liaoning_, Japan has its ambiguously-named "helicopter destroyers" of the _Hyuga_ and _Izumo_ classes, that are carriers in all but name. Meanwhile South Korea has its _Dokdo_ class assault ships that are similar to American LHAs. Last, but not least, Thailand currently operates its Spanish-built carrier _Chakri Naruebet_. 



> *Chinese media reports of plans to build a 110,000 ton 'super aircraft carrier' to rival US naval power*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> CHINA has declared it is building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of a size to rival the biggest in United States naval service in the first move of a major new arms race.
> 
> *Chinese website qianzhan.com cites "top People's Liberation Army" sources as saying the 110,000-ton aircraft carrier should be launched by 2020.*
> 
> "By that time, China will be able to confront the most advanced US carrier-based fighter jets in high sea," the Chinese-language article reads.
> 
> The news follows rising tensions in the South and East China Seas where the most recent incident involved a near-collision with a US cruiser shadowing China's first aircraft carrier, the refurbished Liaoning which was purchased from Ukraine.
> 
> …….
> 
> *China's first homegrown* aircraft carrier will be a larger version of Liaoning.  *The first of two such vessels is due to hit the water in 2015.*
> 
> The design is reportedly based on drawings from the former Soviet Union of a nuclear-powered, 80,000 ton vessel capable of carrying 60 aircraft.
> 
> ……
> 
> Source: heraldsun.com.au


----------



## tomahawk6

Evidently the PLAN wants amphibious assault ships  like the US LPH. I don't see the PRC economy being robust enough to support all this military spending.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/lha-newcon.htm


----------



## Rifleman62

Unlike the US economy!


----------



## CougarKing

China just came out with their own home-built Blackhawk copy, dubbed the Z20 "Copyhawk", which is externally similar to the 24 or so H60 Blackhawks sold to China in the 1980s. 



> Aviation Week
> 
> *Chinese Military Utility Helo Makes First Flight*
> 
> 
> By Bradley Perrett perrett@aviationweek.com
> Source: AWIN First
> December 24, 2013
> 
> A Chinese military utility helicopter roughly
> equivalent to the Sikorsky H-60 made its first
> flight on Dec. 23, state media report.
> 
> The helicopter, with the unconfirmed
> designation Z-20, is a 10-metric-ton (22,000
> lb.) aircraft suitable for operation from high-
> altitude fields, China Central Television says.
> *For almost three decades, China has relied on
> 24 UH-60 Black Hawks bought in the 1980s
> for such operations.*
> 
> 
> *The Z-20 is externally similar to the Sikorsky
> helicopter.* The body is low relative to its
> height, and the undercarriage has a tailwheel
> arrangement.
> 
> It can be taken for granted that Chinese
> engineers, tasked with building an aircraft
> similar to the H-60 and having samples
> available, will have referred closely to the
> U.S. design as they drew up their own.
> Further, the Chinese military may simply
> regard the H-60 configuration as highly
> suitable for the military utility mission.
> A notable difference is the five-blade rotor;
> the H-60’s rotor has four blades.
> 
> The first flight took place at in northeastern
> China, the television network says. That
> strongly suggests that the aircraft is a
> product of Harbin Aircraft, part of Avic rotary
> wing division Avicopter.
> 
> A 10-ton military helicopter should have
> much the same potential applications as the
> H-60 and NH Industries NH90 offer to
> Western users, including battlefield transport
> and antisubmarine warfare. Depending on
> how far the design is compromised by its
> primarily military functions, it may also be
> useful for Chinese civil operators, but cannot
> have airworthiness certification recognized by
> Western aviation authorities, limiting its
> salability abroad.
> 
> The 10-ton category has been a notable gap
> in Avicopter’s increasingly complete range of
> helicopters, which runs from 1 to 13 tons
> gross weight, including several types in
> development.
> 
> (posted in its entirety as it is quite short)


----------



## tomahawk6

The Blackhawk helo has been a successful design for the US military.Copying the design is the ultimate flattery.


----------



## CougarKing

While China easing its one-child policy is old news, one should also note the other big change in this article below.

Will the end of these labor camps, known to be outside the formal prison system, means China is edging closer towards a system where rule of law prevails more?

CNN



> *China eases one-child policy, ends re-education through labor camps*
> 
> Hong Kong (CNN) -- China's top legislature approved resolutions to officially amend its controversial one-child policy and end re-education through labor camps.
> 
> (...)- SNIPPED
> 
> Re-education camps abolished
> 
> China had hinted as early as January that it would terminate the controversial re-education through labor camps.
> 
> The notorious camps date back to the 1950s when the new Communist regime sought to silence its enemies to consolidate its power.
> 
> Critics say the camps, which fall outside of the formal prison system, are often misused to persecute government dissidents, including intellectuals, human rights activists and followers of banned spiritual groups like the Falun Gong.
> 
> China's forced labor camps: One woman's fight for justice
> 
> The abolition of labor camps called "laojiao" goes into effect Saturday. Xinhua reported that the people still serving in re-education through labor camps will be set free.
> 
> Human rights organizations say the changes to the labor camps may just be cosmetic. Amnesty International told CNN earlier this month that the labor camps are being replaced by other types of facilities such as "legal education camps" or renamed as drug rehabilitation camps.


----------



## CougarKing

The latest bold challengers against China's police state: the Southern Street movement.  

Agence-France Presse via Yahoo News



> *China activists push limit with demands to end 'dictatorship'*
> 
> By:  Carol Huang, Agence France-Presse
> December 30, 2013 11:46 AM
> 
> 
> GUANGZHOU - Their banners have urged an end to China's "dictatorship," scorned the regime as "rogue" and dared leaders to disclose their assets as a step against graft -- all dangerous calls under Communist Party rule.
> 
> *The Southern Street Movement, a loose network of laymen-activists in Guangdong province, is testing China's limits with overtly political demands and ambitions to inspire placard-waving protests nationwide.*
> 
> The province has a tradition of defiance -- a trade hub long exposed to the outside world, it was the birthplace of Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who ended millennia of imperial rule in China in 1911.
> 
> Yet the dissent-wary government has mounted a growing crackdown on activists this year and a smattering of participants have been detained.
> 
> *Protesters must overcome their fear, says Xie Wenfei, a 37-year-old from central China whose business card declares him a "Southern Street Movement activist" and proclaims: "If you see injustice and remain silent, you have sided with evil."
> 
> He raised a sign calling for an end to "one-party dictatorship" in the provincial capital Guangzhou in September, earning himself a month in detention.*
> 
> "Lots of friends called me to say if you pull out this banner then for sure you'll be arrested," he said. "But I had to do the right thing. I told them someone has to do this.
> 
> "First I wanted to tell my like-minded friends to break through the fear.
> 
> "Second I wanted to tell the Communist Party that the way they are doing things cannot last. They have lost their legitimacy in the eyes of the people and the law."
> 
> The movement started in 2011 with monthly protests at a park, said Wang Aizhong, a closely involved 37-year-old businessman, and they organized mini-rallies perhaps dozens of times this year.
> 
> Many have called for officials to reveal their assets, for detained activists to be released, and for an end to one-party rule.
> 
> "We see the Southern Street Movement as a resistance movement having no organization, no leader, and no formal program," Wang said, adding that they wanted to "inspire the rest of the country."
> 
> "There is no one single or set demand, but a lot of the political demands are aimed at one goal, which is to end this dictatorship."
> 
> The movement has mostly attracted the migrant workers who have flocked to Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse and China's most prosperous province.
> 
> More people were drawn in following January protests supporting the liberal Guangzhou-based newspaper, Southern Weekly, after its new year editorial was censored.
> 
> 'I have never done anything wrong'
> 
> *Guangzhou has long been considered less strictly controlled than much of China.
> 
> It has had greater contact with the rest of the world as one of the first Chinese cities opened in recent centuries to foreigners -- who knew it as Canton -- and Guangdong neighbors the former British colony of Hong Kong.*
> 
> "There is a perception that protest is just slightly more possible in the south," said Eva Pils, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
> 
> "More people in the south are willing to take that one further step and actually put up a banner that directly targets 'one-party dictatorship,' that directly calls for constitutional government, freedom, human rights, democracy."
> 
> But the consequences of activism in China can be severe. In neighboring Jiangxi province three members of the similarly loose, decentralized New Citizens Movement face up to to five years' jail for demanding officials disclose their assets.
> 
> Such grassroots groups are at the opposite end of the activist spectrum from internationally high-profile figures such as Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, artist Ai Weiwei or blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng.
> 
> They are among a number of Chinese looking to have their voices heard, including online. But the groups' numbers remain tiny and it is impossible to judge their support in a heavily controlled society.
> 
> Southern Street member Jia Ping, 24, lost his factory job after posting political messages online, and was detained for 20 days after displaying signs at a train station including one proclaiming "the Communist party does not represent the people."
> 
> "We will definitely keep going, as far as we can," he said.
> 
> In August officials detained respected Guangzhou activist Yang Maodong, known by his pen name Guo Feixiong.
> 
> He finished a five-year sentence in 2011 and now faces public order charges carrying a similar maximum penalty.
> 
> Authorities see him as a ringleader, said his lawyer Sui Muqing, citing an editorial in the party-run Global Times criticizing Guo and another activist, a rare reference to such figures.
> 
> "They pose a danger to the current social governance system and long-term social stability," the paper warned. "Confronting the authorities has become their way of life."
> 
> Migrant Xie said his parents want him to stop his activities.
> 
> "Of course they are afraid," he said. "I just ask them to trust me. I'm over 30 years old and have never done anything wrong."


----------



## Edward Campbell

In my _opinion_, what really matters in China is the anti-crruption campaign. Corruption remains the most significant impediment to growth and development. No one can say, with authority, how much of China';s productivity is sacrificed to corruption but I would not be surprised if it totals two percent of GDP growth each year, at a minimum.

Traditionally, in modern China, the third plenum of the Central Committee of the CCP is the one which sets the agenda for the _reign_ of a supreme leader. This one, held in November 2013, is being critiqued mostly for its impact on business but, to my mind, the real news is on two fronts:

     1. Xi Jinping, himself, will take the lead in the latest anti-corruption drive; and

     2. President Xi is taking a leaf from President Barack Obama's book and playing the "man of the people" card by joining the masses in a steamed bun shop.

Now, where a president chooses to propagandize by eating a hamburger or a steamed bun may seem like a small thing but, in the case of Xi Jinping, it is sending shock waves through the bureaucracy, I'm told by a source I consider to be reliable, because it signals that he is building a popular base of support in order to cut the props out from under many, many senior party members who are awash in corruption.


----------



## CougarKing

ERC,

Didn't you mention earlier in the thread about the MRs being re-organized?



> *China mulls revamping military regions to boost superiority in South and East China Seas: report*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> January 1, 2014 6:54 PM
> 
> TOKYO - *China is considering reorganizing its seven military regions into five in a bid to respond more swiftly to a crisis,* the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Wednesday.
> 
> The news comes amid rising tensions over Beijing's territorial claims in the region, with China and Japan squaring off over a chain of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
> 
> Each of the new military regions will create a joint operations command that controls the army, navy and air force as well as a strategic missile unit, the major daily said citing senior Chinese military officials and other sources.
> 
> *The planned revamp would mark a shift from the current defence-oriented military that relies mainly on the army to one that ensures more mobile and integrated management of the army, navy, air force and strategic missile units, Yomiuri said.*
> 
> "It is a proactive measure with eyes on counteracting the Japan-US alliance," the daily quoted one of the officials as saying.
> 
> (...)
> 
> *Agence-France Presse via Yahoo News*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Remember when Japanese cars were on the rise?

At first the Japanese produced junk but two things happened:

    1. W. Edwards Deming went to Japan, in the late 1940s, and preached his mantra of quality control.* The Japanese listened and learned; and

    2. The American automakers, beginning in the 1950s, paid less and less attention to (eventually ignored) quality and worked on planned obsolescence, or whatever it was called.

The result was a near-death experience for the US auto industry, a globally dominant position for Japan and lower and lower (relative) car costs for consumers. But the big change was that Honda and Toyota are now as common as Chevy and Ford.

In the Christmas issue of the _The Economist_ we find an interesting article which suggests that the same phenomenon is occurring now with Chinese heavy construction equipment, a field currently dominated by a handful of American, European and Korean manufacturers. The article says that _"a range of Chinese-made diggers,"_ which independent tests _"found ... to be sturdy and high-performing ..._ [and which] _also have the advantage of being cheap, will soon be invading building sites across the globe."_

That is, I suggest, at least as important as Chinese military reorganizations.

____
* Denning's _philosophy_ can be described as:

When people and organizations focus primarily on quality, defined by the following ratio,
                    Results of work efforts
     Quality = -------------------------
                            Total costs
quality tends to increase and costs fall over time.


----------



## CougarKing

While your point about emphasis on improving quality is well-taken, doesn't a smaller number of MRs only mean that their command structure has become more centralized? 

While eliminating redundancies- such as in higher level headquarter units, etc.- does indeed cut costs as seen in a number of US examples (e.g. the US Air National Guard-USAF Reserves merger thread), wouldn't losing these redundancies make the PLA less capable in a future war where an adversary with air superiority would target such command structures?  Since air strikes with precision-guided munitions also seek to decapitate the leadership structure, so therefore wouldn't redundancy be needed especially if some command units are hit?


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> While your point about emphasis on improving quality is well-taken, doesn't a smaller number of MRs only mean that their command structure has become more centralized?
> 
> While eliminating redundancies- such as in higher level headquarter units, etc.- does indeed cut costs as seen in a number of US examples (e.g. the US Air National Guard-USAF Reserves merger thread), wouldn't losing these redundancies make the PLA less capable in a future war where an adversary with air superiority would target such command structures?  Since air strikes with precision-guided munitions also seek to decapitate the leadership structure, so therefore wouldn't redundancy be needed especially if some command units are hit?




Sorry, I don't see the machinations of the Chinese (or US or Canadian) militaries as being very important.

While a war between China and the USA is certainly possible it would represent a massive, monumental _strategic *failure*_ for both countries.

No one with there brains the gods gave to green peppers is going to attack China ~ OK, I admit that several hundred, maybe even a few thousand US legislators, admirals, generals and pundits fall into that category. Equally, no one is going to attack America unless they are, seriously and deeply, mentally ill ~ and several thousand "leaders," many of them Arab and West Asian and so on, and a few of them Chinese, too, fall into that category.

China is aiming to win its "place in the sun" through _soft power_. I'm still _guessing_ that it will manage that. It isn't that the US is declining a whole lot, although it is, from its pinnacle _circa_ the 1950s, it is just that China is, inexorably, gaining ground.


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> While your point about emphasis on improving quality is well-taken, doesn't a smaller number of MRs only mean that their command structure has become more centralized?
> 
> While eliminating redundancies- such as in higher level headquarter units, etc.- does indeed cut costs as seen in a number of US examples (e.g. the US Air National Guard-USAF Reserves merger thread), wouldn't losing these redundancies make the PLA less capable in a future war where an adversary with air superiority would target such command structures?  Since air strikes with precision-guided munitions also seek to decapitate the leadership structure, so therefore wouldn't redundancy be needed especially if some command units are hit?



There are arguments to support either side, but in general, reducing "overhead" is the more desirable course of action, since the flow of information is quicker and less "static" gets into the information flow, not to mention the resource budget can be reallocated or reduced with lower overhead. Of course, the counter argument is that increasing centralization creates a single massive bottleneck, and organizations which move in that direction become brittle and inflexible, as well as falling prey to the "Local Knowledge Problem". F.A.Hayek noted that the person "on the ground" could note and react to elusive changing local conditions immediately, while these conditions would change by the time the information was relayed up the chain of command, a decision made and orders dispatched back down the line. (This is why command economies fail, and provides a reason that "Manouevre warfare" is theoretically far more powerful and effective than directive command).

I might argue that the real way to go in the 21rst century would be to minimize the numbers of headquarters (and internal layers inside headquarters) and evolve towards "Scale Free" network organizations. The Internet, your immune system and many other complex, non linear systems are organized along these lines (in general, they are fractal and similar in layout at any scale). Organizations and networks designed or evolved around these principles are quite robust and can function even when large portions are damaged.

The work around the Chinese seem to have chosen is "Unrestricted Warfare", which expands the modalities, spatial and temporal dimensions of warfare. As Edward notes above, the Chinese are working to project influence with "soft power", but are also expanding with economic engagement around the world, the "String of Pearls" dual purpose harbour facilities across the Indian Ocean, vastly expanded cyberwar capabilities and various forms of currency manipulation, any or all fo which can be harnessed to unsettle or disrupt potential opponents, perhaps without them even realizing they are "under attack" at first.

The fact that most militaries are not trained or equipped to recognize these sorts of challenges makes this potentially more dangerous (is the crippling bank crash that causes our forces to be deployed in a DOMOP a local event or a means by an enemy to distract and pin down our forces while they do something else?). Unrestricted warfare is an unsettling thing to think about.


----------



## CougarKing

Those Uighurs who were in GITMO- as well as the issue of rendition to Eastern European nations- again in the news:

Military.com



> *China Slams US Sending Uighur Ex-Inmates to Europe*
> 
> Associated Press | Jan 02, 2014
> 
> 
> BEIJING - *The Chinese government on Thursday criticized a U.S. decision to release three members of an ethnic minority from China who had been held at Guantanamo Bay to the Central European country of Slovakia.*
> 
> Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China had sought the repatriation of the Uighur men, who are considered by Chinese authorities to be terrorist suspects. The U.S. said earlier this week it had released the men to Slovakia.
> 
> "They pose threats not only to China's state security, but also to the security of the country which receives them," Qin said. "China hopes the relevant countries can earnestly perform their international obligations, refrain from offering asylum to terrorists, and transfer them to China at an early date."
> 
> The men were among about two dozen Uighurs captured in 2001 after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and kept at the U.S. base in Cuba. U.S. authorities did not turn them over to Beijing on fear they could be tortured.
> 
> The other Uighurs had been released to different parts of the world, but the last three men - *Yusef Abbas, Saidullah Khalik and Hajiakbar Abdul Ghuper *- had insisted they be sent to places where they could be closer to Uighur communities, according to Rushan Abbas, a Uighur-American translator who worked on the case.
> 
> Their release is a step toward the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison.


----------



## a_majoor

A revolution of rising expectations? This has been commented upon in the past, especially ERC's suggestion that the current "Red Dynasty" can only maintain the "Mandate of Heaven" if they continue to provide rising living standards to most Chinese people.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/china-may-face-a-revolution-of-rising-expectations/article/2541371



> *China may face a revolution of rising expectations*
> BY MICHAEL BARONE | JANUARY 1, 2014 AT 7:48 PM
> 
> In 1793 the envoy Lord Macartney appeared before the Qianlong emperor in Beijing and asked for British trading rights in China. “Our ways have no resemblance to yours, and even were your envoy competent to acquire some rudiments of them, he could not transport them to your barbarous land,” the long-reigning (1736-96) emperor replied in a letter to King George III.
> 
> “We possess all things,” he went on. “I set no value on strange objects and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
> 
> The emperor had a point. China at that time, according to economic historian Angus Maddison, had about one-third of world population and accounted for about one-third of world economic production.
> 
> Today’s China of course has a different attitude toward trade. Since Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms started in 1978, it has had enormous growth based on manufacturing exports.
> 
> In between Qianlong and Deng, China went through tough times. The Taiping rebellion (1849-64), decades of Western domination, the Chinese revolution (1911-27), the War with Japan (1931-45) and Mao Zedong's Communist policies (1949-76) each resulted in the deaths of millions.
> 
> The Chinese ruling party and, apparently, the Chinese people see the economic growth of the last 35 years as a restoration of China’s rightful central place in the world. And note that that period is longer than the 27 years of Mao’s rule.
> 
> American supporters of engagement with China, including the architect of the policy, Henry Kissinger, agree and have expressed the hope that an increasingly prosperous China will move toward democracy and peaceful coexistence.
> 
> Those hopes, as James Mann argued in his 2007 book The China Fantasy, have not been and seem unlikely to be realized.
> 
> Other China scholars like Arthur Waldron and Gordon Chang have predicted that China’s Communist party rulers will be swept from power.
> 
> That nearly happened, many say, in June 1989, when protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, the universally recognized center of the nation. But Deng sharply overruled those who urged propitiation and ordered the massacre of unknown numbers.
> 
> Repression seems to have worked. The Tianamen massacre came only 11 years after the beginning of Deng’s reforms. Since then another 24 years have passed, with the regime still in power.
> 
> But perhaps not secure in that power. In 2013 leading members of the Politburo recommended that underlings read Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution.
> 
> It’s an intriguing choice. Tocqueville, reflecting on the revolution that killed his fellow aristocrats and family members, argued that the uprising came only when the old regime undertook reform and conditions improved — the revolution of rising expectations.
> 
> And he argued that the revolution was largely destructive, increasing the centralization of the royalist regime. “The old order provided the Revolution with many of its methods; all the Revolution added to these was a savagery peculiar to itself.”
> 
> The relevance to China seems obvious. Regime members, like French aristocrats, no longer believe in their own ideology but cling to power. The Chinese people have come to expect rapidly rising living standards, and may abandon the regime if it doesn’t produce.
> 
> Regime elites must be careful, like Deng in 1989, or the rulers will lose everything and chaos will be unleashed on China.
> 
> China’s rulers have also been circulating a six-part TV documentary blaming the collapse of the Soviet Union on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and softness. Message: Avoid democracy or political freedom.
> 
> All this, writes the Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Page, is “part of an ideological campaign launched by China's new leader, Xi Jinping, to re-energize the party and enforce discipline among its members.”
> 
> Another part of that campaign was the prosecution of Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai and his wife for corruption and murder. China’s party leaders and crony capitalists have become ostentatiously and unpopularly rich. The prosecution was a warning to lie low.
> 
> If China’s leaders seem determined to block democracy internally, they have also been moving to rally nationalist feeling by aggressive moves against China’s neighbors.
> 
> The latest, last month, was the declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone covering islands claimed by China but held by Japan and South Korea.
> 
> China’s assertive stance has got its neighbors seeking closer ties and protection from the United States. Armed clashes — even war — seem possible.
> 
> China continues to grow. But democracy and peaceful coexistence may be farther away than ever.


----------



## CougarKing

The PLA-N carrier _Liaoning_ returns to China after a period of trials and working up in the South China Sea:



> *China's aircraft carrier returns from S China Sea voyage*
> Xinhua  2014-1-1 23:13:27
> By Agencies
> 
> 
> China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, returned to its homeport in north China Wednesday after completing a series of scientific tests and training programs in the South China Sea.
> 
> According to a source with the Navy of China's People's Liberation Army, the aircraft carrier underwent a comprehensive test of its combat system and conducted a formation practice during its 37-day voyage.
> 
> Such tests have _"attained the anticipated objectives"_, the source says.
> 
> Liaoning's combat and power system and its seagoing capability have been further tested during the trip. _"All tests and training programs went well as scheduled"_, according to the source.
> 
> The Chinese Navy dispatched aircraft, naval vessels and submarines to participate in the tests.
> 
> The Liaoning is China's only aircraft carrier in operation. It was refitted based on an unfinished carrier of the former Soviet Union. The refitted carrier was delivered to the navy on September 25, 2012.
> 
> 
> *Global Times*









Plus more on the J15s embarked:



> *Roar of J-15 fighter is melody for operator on the Liaoning*
> People's Daily Online
> 11:02, January 01, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> As one of the two takeoff assistants, Zhang Naigang has to make a crucial, split-second decision on whether a J-15 can take off, based on information from the pilot and crew. The crews face dangers as the state-of-the-art weaponry flashed by, just a few meters from where they stood.
> 
> The Liaoning's runway is about one-fifteenth the length of a conventional land-based one, and a jet's flame trail can reach a temperature of 2,000 degrees Celsius. If a jet strays slightly from the runway, the flame can blow the nearby takeoff assistants into the sea or simply roast them alive.
> 
> Dozens of gestures were designed to facilitate the J-15's maneuvers. Further refinement of the gestures is ongoing. For example, to signal that it's safe for the jet to take off, the assistants originally gestured in the direction of the deck with two fingers. Safety concerns saw the gesture abandoned and replaced by a horizontally raised arm.
> 
> The Liaoning, China's first aircraft carrier, has served for a whole year in the People's Liberation Army, since it was commissioned into the Chinese navy on Sept 25, 2012, after being completely rebuilt and undergoing sea trials. It made China the 10th country in the world to have an aircraft carrier in active service.
> 
> The aircraft carrier provides three different ways of take-off: the ejection takeoff, the ski-jump takeoff, and the vertical takeoff. The Liaoning can carry fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters as designed. The fixed-wing aircraft adopts the way of ski-jump takeoff.[/font]
> 
> 
> 
> *People's Daily*


----------



## CougarKing

For those unaware, the Professor "Zod" mentioned in the article below refers to a fictional, ruthless villain named General Zod, in the Superman comics/movie: 



> Why China Can’t Rise Quietly
> 
> China wants to achieve its goals short of war while reaping the propaganda harvest it would get from war.
> 
> James-R-Holmes_q
> By James R. Holmes
> January 02, 2014
> 
> Diplomat.com
> 
> There’s a hidden dialogue between Clausewitz and Sun Tzu that may help clarify the lordly attitude China takes in quarrels with Asian neighbors that defy its will. It’s all about the narrative spun for target audiences, the Chinese populace most of all. Think about it. Negotiating with ‘furriners’ entails more tedium than glory. Diplomacy is dull and drawn-out and produces gradual, amorphous results. It fires few passions among those who matter. Combat is brief and exciting and, when done right, yields immediate, concrete results. It’s a focal point for national pride. China thus appears conflicted. It wants to achieve its goals short of war while reaping the propaganda harvest it would get from war.
> 
> *It’s not enough, then, for Beijing to get its way quietly in international controversies. It wants to be seen compelling others to do its bidding. For dramatic value, that’s the best substitute for victory.*
> 
> It’s also a slipshod way to get to yes. Going out of your way to embarrass others is bass-ackwards from normal diplomatic practice, where the Golden Rule is never to humiliate your opposite number. Corollaries include keeping things private and non-confrontational. Following these rules, though, demands a modicum of empathy. *CCP leaders either don’t grasp, or don’t care, that putting foreign officials on the spot before their constituents is a tactic sure to backfire. Unfortunately, Professor Zod seems to have been teaching Negotiations 101 when Xi Jinping & Co. took the class.* Neither empathy nor tact are hallmarks of Chinese foreign relations.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## CougarKing

"Tiger Mom" in the news again, and she doesn't disappoint in creating an uproar:

National Post



> *
> Tiger Mom sparks uproar with new theory on which cultures are destined for success
> 
> Tiger Mom’s claim that cultures blessed with ‘triple package’ get ahead in America sparks uproar*
> 
> Amy Chua, the self-professed Tiger Mom who courted controversy with her bestselling book touting the superiority of Chinese mothers, is stirring a much bigger pot this time: Her new book claims that a short list of cultural groups outperform others in America.
> 
> *In the book, Ms. Chua and co-author/husband Jed Rubenfeld — both law professors at Yale — name eight groups whose members have risen to the ranks of the rich and smart and powerful.
> 
> Mormons, they write, have recently experienced “astonishing business success.” Cubans in Miami, they say, have “climbed from poverty to prosperity in a generation.” They point to the stunningly high number of Nigerians who earn doctorate degrees, and to the extraordinarily high incomes of Jewish Americans. Also making the list: Indian-, Chinese-, Iranian- and Lebanese-Americans.
> 
> 
> In the book, Ms. Chua and co-author/husband Jed Rubenfeld — both law professors at Yale — name eight groups whose members have risen to the ranks of the rich and smart and powerful.
> 
> These groups boast the ‘‘triple package’’: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.
> 
> “That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores, and so on — is difficult to talk about,” they write. “In large part this is because the topic feels racially charged.”
> 
> The inference that all other groups are somehow lesser — and the sweeping categorization of ‘‘groups’’ by cultural background or immigrant status — has rankled critics, who dismiss the book and its arguments as shock bait, an irresponsible festival of stereotypes that doesn’t account for fundamental inequalities that date back generations.*
> 
> “The message of Chua’s book is based on a fairytale, an ahistorical view of the world where the playing field is even,” wrote ChangeLab blogger Soya Jung. “It asks us to forget that the present is built upon the past, that the real and brutal terrain of American enterprise is rife with racial bluffs and potholes forged over centuries.”
> 
> Both authors happen to belong to the superior groups, New York Post reviewer Maureen Callaghan wryly pointed out.
> 
> Asked about the controversy on Monday, sociologists and anthropologists said that despite its merits, the discussion of cultural difference inevitably becomes a minefield of assumptions, stereotypes and political correctness, especially when considered in the Western context.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

For the past thousand years or so European Jews were the victims of discrimination ~ they were, amongst other things, not allowed to own land and so they turned to other occupations, most of which required a strong mind rather than a strong back. By the late 18th century European Jews, still victims of large scale, systemic discrimination, were entering and soon dominating Europe's intellectual elites, especially in finance, the sciences, medicine and politics.

That discrimination was not confined to Europe. In my lifetime there were Jewish quotas in Canadian universities and many private clubs, centres for business _networking_ in the 20th century, specifically excluded Jews.

I'm sure there are sites that will tell you about Jewish _domination_ of various fields but there is not doubt that Easter European Jews who came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries created the myth of the American dream. Think of Samuel Goldwyn, Irving Berlin, Jack Warner and so on. Look as Jews in science: Einstein, of course, but also Edward Teller, Murray Gell-Mann and so on. Think of Freud and Sidney Farber, the father of chemotherapy, too. Why did Jews, such a small part of the population, contribute so much? In some part because they were a despised minority, because they were denied opportunities in the mainstream, Jews did two things:

     1. They turned inwards, establishing tight knit communities which provided mutual support; and, more importantly

     2. They turned to education and made it a mainstay of their social system.

Jews are not smarter than anyone else ~ nor are Chinese or Koreans ~ but their parents made them study longer and harder and they had strong "family values' so they worked harder than their confreres in university and they got a disproportionate number of places in the best graduate programmes and then they went to work.

Many Asians in Canada and the USA feel that they are the modern, 21st century "Jews." There are several respected American commentators who argue against the (real, I _think_) discrimination against Asian students in America's top universities. Asian kids are not smarter than white kids, but they, very often, have strong "family values" and, here in North America, many recent Asian immigrants have good educations and they want even better educations for their kids. It is never surprising to me when I see Asian kids winning academic prizes in numbers out of all proportion to their share of the population. They aren't smarter, but they work harder ... not because their parents push them, but because, every night, the parents are at the kitchen table making sure the kids do their homework and understand it. These kids live in homes that are full of books but devoid of video game consoles.

My  :2c:


----------



## a_majoor

I'm always interested in the question of culture and its influences. To me, it seems like the "Tiger Mom" has identified a process of cultural fusion, grafting some of the best parts fo Chinese/Asian cultures to the liberal culture of the West and leveraging it. After all, immigrants have every reason to want to succeed, and for the most part nations like America give them every opportunity to do so. That people from similar cultures and bacxkgrounds would tend to cluster together and follow the path forged by the early adopters (i.e. people who came to the country a few years to a decade before) is hardly astonishing, and that fact that most of the cultures that Tiger Mom has identified have strong family values means these traits can be passed on within a supportive family structure as well.


----------



## CougarKing

China unveils yet another new fighter prototype:

*China's newest fighter jet J-16 revealed online* 
2014-01-05 (wantchinatimes.com)






_J-16 fighter jet. (Photo Courtesy of Xinhuanet)_



> An image of the J-16, *a 3.5-generation multi-role twin-seat fighter jet*, was posted on the China-based Dingsheng military website Friday along with other types of Chinese fighter jets, such as the J-11 and J-15.
> 
> The J-16 jet shown online was believed to be a prototype of the jet fighter because it carries the serial number "1601."
> 
> It marked the first time that the warplane was shown in flying mode.
> 
> Military analysts speculated that the plane should still be in the test-flight stage.
> 
> Some Chinese netizens said the plane is undergoing tests at a People's Liberation Army (PLA) flight test and training base in Hebei Province in northern China.
> 
> The plane was developed by Shenyang Aircraft Corp. for the use of the PLA Navy's aviation corps.
> 
> A Shengyang Aircraft Corp. executive was quoted by Chinese media as saying recently *that the J-16 could rival Russia's Su-35 fighter jet*.


----------



## Journeyman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> A Shengyang Aircraft Corp. executive was quoted by Chinese media as saying recently that the J-16 could rival Russia's Su-35 fighter jet


What looks like a photocopy of an Su-27 is to rival an Su-35?        op:  Watch and shoot


----------



## Dissident

Is that landing gear sturdy enough? Not an expert, just thought it looked a bit smaller than what's on an F18.


----------



## CougarKing

NinerSix said:
			
		

> Is that landing gear sturdy enough? Not an expert, just thought it looked a bit smaller than what's on an F18.



Not sure. You can find the subject being discussed at length at aviation-themed forums.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In other news, China continues to tighten its grip on the Spratlys in the South China Sea:




> *China Orders Foreign Fishing Vessels Out of Most of the South China Sea*
> 
> January 7, 2014 (freebeacon.com)
> 
> 
> *New rules issued prior to near collision between U.S. warship and Chinese naval vessel*
> 
> The new orders went into effect Jan. 1 after they were issued late November by Hainan island provincial government authorities.
> 
> *Under the new regulations*, all foreign fishing boats that transit into a new Hainan’s administrative zone in the sea—an area covering two-thirds of the 1.5 million square mile South China Sea—must be approved by Chinese authorities.
> 
> The new measures were imposed Nov. 29 and announced Dec. 3 in state media as part of a policy of enforcing Chinese fisheries law.
> 
> Chinese law states that any ships that violate the fishing regulations will be forced out of the zone, have their catch confiscated, and face fines of up to $82,600. In some cases, fishing boats could be confiscated and their crew prosecuted under Chinese law.


----------



## a_majoor

J-16 is Gen 3.5

The West and Russia are fielding Gen 5 fighters like the F-35 and the T-50, so the Chinese have a way to go yet...


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is an article about what I believe is the *real battle* between America and China (hint aircraft and carriers are only window dressing, they're there to keep the militaries occupied while the grownups do battle in the real world):

http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2014/01/10/china-and-us-battle-for-trade-leadership/


> China and US battle for trade leadership
> 
> January 10, 2014
> 
> By Valentina Romei
> 
> Chinese exports increased by 4.3 per cent in December compared to the same month last year, while imports rose by 8.3 per cent. That gave China a total of $4.16tn in combined exports and imports in 2013, a figure that the US will find difficult to match. This leaves no doubt that China, the world’s second-biggest economy, is now the world’s biggest trading nation on an annual basis.
> 
> Chinese and US trade values were similar in 2012, slightly larger for China according to their respective national data but slightly bigger for the US according to the World Trade Organisation and the International and Monetary Fund.
> 
> On a rolling-12 month basis, China began to build up a clear lead in 2013, with both national and international data showing that the combined value of Chinese imports and exports exceeded that of the US.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s ascendency as a world trade power has been rapid since its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The country accounted for little more than 20 per cent of the total US trade value at the start of last decade.
> 
> This means that global trade –and global economic growth – are increasingly intertwined with the performance of the Chinese economy. China’s share of global trade went from 3 per cent at the start of the year 2000 to reach over 10 per cent in 2013. Over the same period the international weight of the US shrank: its imports went from a 17 per cent global share to just 12 per cent, while its exports fell from a 12 per cent global share to just above 8 per cent.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China had become the world’s largest merchandise exporter already back in 2008. Its lead over the US increased as US exports contracted sharply in 2009 and recovered more slowly than Chinese exports in the following years.
> 
> But the size of its imports allowed the US to retain the crown of global trade champion until last year. In 2007 the US value of exports was more than double that of China. That, however, changed dramatically after the shale gas revolution led to a big fall in US oil imports. US import growth has slowed and Chinese imports are catching up.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Countries around the world have become increasingly reliant on China as a trade partner, across a wide range of goods. On the import side, this is especially true of commodities: according to the international trade centre, China accounted for one-third to half of global imports of ores, oil seeds and grains, wood and copper in 2012. For exports, its strength is manufacturing: about half the global exports of silk, apparel, leather products and footwear originate in China.
> 
> However, according to the international trade data, the US still dominates trade in services. The value of its total services trade is about double that of China. The US is particularly strong in exporting services (the US exports about three times the value of Chinese services exports). Adding commercial services to merchandise trade should actually put the US back the first place in global trade (services trade data is reported later than that for the trade in goods, so we still need to wait to confirm this).
> 
> But there are reasons to think that the US will soon lose this leadership as well. Despite its strength, the US services trade dominance is fading quickly. In 2006, the US exported more than five-times the value of China’s service exports, but that fell to three-times last year. Similar reductions were seen in the imports of services.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> When adding commercial services to the value of merchandise trade, the US still has a lead of about $400mn in the four quarters ending in the second quarter of 2013. That might seem large, but it is very small compared to the $1.7tn gap at the end of 2006.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .




From 1940 until 2012 the US was, always and without fail, the undisputed *greatest* trading nation in the world ... maybe the greatest trading nation ever. It's hard to compare the years 150, 750, 1450 and 1850 with 1950 and harder to compare Rome, Byzantium, China, Spain and Britain, in their _global_ spheres, with America in this global era, but if America wasn't the greatest trading nation ever, it was amongst the top two or three. Now China has surpassed it ... we will see, a year from now, and the year after that, f China can maintain its lead in merchandise trade and improve its position in services.

This is a real _war_ and the stakes are enormous.


----------



## CougarKing

From the mainland Chinese media: Beijing reveals its intentions to forcefully "retake" or seize Pagasa Island in the South China Sea (known as Zhong Ye island/中業島 to China) from the Philippines. 

Pagasa island has a Philippine Marine garrison, an airstrip capable of supporting C130s as well as a year-round population of civilians. 

China Daily Mail



> *
> Chinese troops to seize Zhongye Island back from the Philippines in 2014*
> 
> Posted by chankaiyee2 ⋅ January 11, 2014
> 
> _The following report is a translation from Chinese media. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily Mail._
> 
> Relying on US support, the Philippines is so arrogant as to announce in the New Year that it will increase its navy and air force deployment at Zhongye Island, a Chinese island that it has illegally occupied for years.
> 
> It will be an intolerable insult to China
> 
> *According to experts, the Chinese navy has drawn a detailed combat plan to seize the island and the battle will be restricted within the South China Sea.
> 
> The battle is aimed at recovery of the island stolen by the Philippines from China.*
> 
> There will be no invasion into Filipino territories.
> 
> A report in the Philippines Star confirmed the Philippines military buildup on the island.
> 
> Source: qianzhan.com “Sudden major move of Chinese troops this year to recover Zhongye Island by force” (summary by Chan Kai Yee based on the report in Chinese)





Plus more about Pagasa Island from an older LA Times article:



> *Squatters in paradise say it's job from hell*
> 
> Staking a claim on isolated Pagasa Island for the Philippine government, inhabitants eventually 'go crazy.'
> July 26, 2009|John M. Glionna
> 
> (...)
> 
> Pagasa may be a 75-acre speck of sand and rock, but that hasn't stopped a swarm of countries from battling over the hundreds of specks of sand and rock that make up the Spratlys, which may be the most disputed island chain on Earth.
> 
> *So, in 2002, the Philippines decided to establish a small colony of hardy civilian settlers on the island, augmenting the two dozen military workers who earn special "loneliness pay" to live on the far-off spot -- and bolstering its claim that possession is nine-tenths of the law.*
> 
> The result is sort of "Cast Away" meets Plymouth Rock.
> 
> In a nation where half the 90 million residents endure grinding poverty, Pagasa volunteers get free food and housing and guaranteed work. But there's also guaranteed boredom. Many who inhabit Pagasa consider the calendar their worst enemy. Others mark off time on the wall like stir-crazy convicts.
> 
> (...)
> 
> It's a sun-bleached settlement of 20 houses, a community center and a clinic run by a resident midwife. There are no stores and no roads, but a military landing strip knifes through the island's heart.
> 
> *The population rises and falls. At its height, 300 lived there. Nowadays the total is 55 civilians, fewer than half a dozen of them women.
> 
> Pagasa even has its own mayor.* Of course, gray-haired and garrulous Rosendo Mantis doesn't actually live on Pagasa; he keeps an office on the mainland and travels out to press the flesh and check on his constituency. Mantis is the island's chief promoter, but even he acknowledges that Pagasa is an acquired taste.
> 
> (...)


----------



## tomahawk6

Quite a technological feat for the PRC,that poses a significant threat that may be difficult to counter.

http://freebeacon.com/china-conducts-first-test-of-new-ultra-high-speed-missile-vehicle/

China’s military last week conducted the first flight test of a new ultra-high speed missile vehicle aimed at delivering warheads through U.S. missile defenses, Pentagon officials said.

The test of the new hypersonic glide vehicle was carried out Jan. 9 and the experimental weapon is being dubbed the WU-14 by the Pentagon, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.


----------



## CougarKing

When I used to work/intern at one of the Canadian Consulates in China, the local Chinese staff/LES staff would often use the one computer work station designated for public use in order to scour Taobao's site, which is sort of like Ebay, for bargains on clothes and other products. They even got our Canadian vice-consul hooked that she spent a lot of time on that site after regular work hours, earning her the name "Taobao Queen".  ;D

But renting boyfriends? What'll they think of next? Rent-a-wife to show to your boss for career advancement?  :

And speaking of the cultural stigma behind the "sheng nu (剩女)/leftover women" mentioned in the article, here's an interesting foreign policy article on it.

National Post



> *China’s biggest online retailer Taobao has a ‘rent a boyfriend’ section*
> 
> China has some interesting matchmaking and dating practices. There are love hunters who track down potential wives for China’s richest bachelors and there are “leftover women”, who are criticized for being over 27 and unmarried.
> 
> In some cases, when a male dies too young, families have “ghost marriages”, exhuming female corpses and marrying the pair.
> 
> *So, it’s natural for many young Chinese to want to allay their parents’ anxiety over their single-dom. And now they can take to Alibaba-owned online retailer Taobao, tweets George Chen at South China Morning Post. That’s the equivalent of shopping for a date on Amazon or eBay.*
> 
> People’s Daily reported that use of these services picks up around Single’s Day and Chinese New Year which is expected to fall around Jan. 30 this year. So we thought we’d have a look at just how Taobao’s rent a boyfriend feature works.
> 
> If you look to rent a boyfriend, 301 listings pop up and rates vary from 300 yuan a day to 8.80 yuan, though that gentleman hasn’t said if it’s an hourly rate:
> 
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Last year, at about this time, there were lots of articles about young women "renting boyfriends" to take home to Mom during Spring Festival.

(Note for those not familiar with China: Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is the biggest travel season in the world ~ by comparison American Thanksgiving is child's play. Children, even those in their 30s, are expected to go home to visit their parents and grandparents ~ and, by god, tens, even hundreds of millions of them try.)

Anyway, as S.M.A. suggested many parents are having some difficulty understanding that their university educated daughters are more interested in their careers in the cities than in marrying a country bumpkin and having kids. And, as in North America, all the really suitable men in the big city are either taken or gay. So some women, to avoid arguments at home during Spring Festival, have taken to renting a boyfriend for a week or so ... telling Mom and Grandma that he's the boyfriend. Many (most) families do not encourage sleeping together before marriage so that works out well, for the young lady, although I did read a couple of stories last year where a gal offset part of the rental fee by offering sex in lieu of cash.

In some cities, parents who are dismayed at the sad state of their unmarried daughters have resorted to putting ads in local newspapers and even taking pictures to local parks, on Sundays, where young men gather and examine the girls on (unknowing) offer.

(I have a friend, an attractive young lady, in her early 30s, who is doing her PhD in Beijing and whose parents are quite upset that she has yet to find a "suitable" mate (i.e. not a foreigner and under 50) while she is holding out for someone "more like her" in attitude and education ~ and that someone is hard  to find. See again my remarks about all the good ones being taken or gay (or foreign).)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> (I have a friend, an attractive young lady, in her early 30s, who is doing her PhD in Beijing and whose parents are quite upset that she has yet to find a "suitable" mate



Did she ever happen to be one of Dr. Pan Wei's graduate students at one time at Bei Da? Or perhaps one of Dr. Chu Shulong's grad students at Qinghua University?     ;D


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Did she ever happen to be one of Dr. Pan Wei's graduate students at one time at Bei Da? Or perhaps one of Dr. Chu Shulong's grad students at Qinghua University?




Nope, her tutor, whose name escapes me at the moment, is a septuagenarian‎ lady.


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing's announced plan to seize Philippine-held Pagasa Island in the Spratlys has only added to the plethora of China military expansionism paranoia in both the media of China's neighbours and Western media.

While I agree to an extent with ERC's earlier conclusion that trade is where the "real show" happens and the military dimension is just window dressing, hawks in Pacific nations from Japan to the Philippines to the US DC beltway would disagree.

Diplomat.com



> *How plausible is the Qianzhan‘s scenario?*
> 
> China could easily achieve strategic surprise and seize Pag-asa Island. China could disguise an invasion force as a flotilla engaged in routine naval exercises in the South China Sea. In March-April last year, for example, China assembled a small flotilla to conduct combat training exercises in the South China Sea.
> 
> The flotilla comprised the modern amphibious assault ship Jinggangshan, two guided missile frigates and a guided missile destroyer. When the flotilla reached the waters surrounding Mischief Reef, Chinese state television showed pictures of People’s Liberation Army marines in hovercraft storming the beach of a Chinese-occupied islet supported by armed helicopters.
> 
> ....
> 
> *China’s seizure of Pag-asa Island would be an act of war. Currently, the Armed Forces of the Philippines would be unable to mount any meaningful response. Chinese destroyers and frigates would provide air defense if the Philippines scrambled jet fighters from the nearest air base on Palawan Island, over 480 km distant. The Philippine Navy would be woefully outgunned.*
> 
> The Philippines would immediately seek consultations with the United States under their Mutual Defense Treaty to work out a response.
> 
> *The political fallout from seizing Pag-asa would be a huge set back for Chinese diplomacy. ASEAN would likely adopt an uncompromising political position and demand the immediate withdrawal of Chinese forces. ASEAN would receive political backing from the international community. Chinese aggression could even be raised at the United Nation,; but China would veto any discussion by the Security Council.*
> 
> (...)



As for this scenario, one can say it's too optimistic, since ASEAN's inability to come together as a Bloc was clearly shown when Cambodia and to a certain extent, Thailand, proved to be the tiebreakers resulting in a failure to collectively condemn China's conduct in the last few years. Thailand even buys Chinese equipment such as armour and some warships.


----------



## CougarKing

Corruption within the PLA...

Defense News



> BEIJING — *A top Chinese military officer has been exposed as owning dozens of homes, gold statues and crates of luxury liquor, reports said Thursday, in rare revelations of corruption in the country’s armed forces.*
> 
> The revelations about *Gu Junshan*, a former lieutenant general and deputy logistics chief for the People’s Liberation Army believed to be under investigation, came as China’s leaders ramp up a much-publicized crackdown on official corruption.
> 
> “There is grave corruption in the military especially in the logistics sector, but revelations on the military’s graft fight is always kept off the radar for the sake of the military’s image,” said the Global Times newspaper, citing an “anti-graft expert” who did not want to be named.
> 
> *Gu owned dozens of apartments in central Beijing, and his mansion in Puyang in the central province of Henan housed several gold art pieces, the magazine Caixin reported on Wednesday after a two-year investigation.
> 
> The home was modeled on the Forbidden City, the former imperial palace in Beijing, covered one hectare (2.5 acres) and was dubbed the “General’s Mansion” by locals, it said.*
> 
> Officials seized “a gold boat, a gold wash basin and a gold statue of Mao Zedong” along with “crates of expensive liquor” on the premises, it added.
> 
> *Gu, who joined the military in 1971 after finishing junior high school, began handling military business operations in Puyang in 1985 and rose over the next decade to oversee logistics in the area.
> 
> His career trajectory saw him become deputy chief of the PLA General Logistics department in 2009, and he “profited from the projects and land deals” in which he was involved, Caixin said.
> *
> Gu’s name disappeared from an official list of his logistics department in early 2012 and eventually the entire defense ministry website, and he left his post that year, it said.
> 
> A corruption probe has not been officially acknowledged, and was only obliquely referred to when National Defence University professor Gong Fangbin referred to corruption by Gu and his predecessor in an interview last August.
> 
> But widespread coverage of this week’s revelations in China’s strictly controlled media indicated that authorities were willing to have news of Gu’s alleged misdeeds publicized.
> *
> His brother — whose home was next to Gu’s in Puyang, with the two sharing a long basement “filled with expensive liquor” — was arrested in August for bribery.
> 
> The account follows extensive Chinese media reports about government officials who have come under investigation, and repeated pledges by President Xi Jinping to fight corruption high and low.*
> 
> The leadership has issued a raft of bans over the past year ranging from fancy banquets to expensive gifts, in an effort to deter endemic graft — which causes widespread public anger — and impose frugality.
> 
> This week the military was required to purchase only domestic-brand vehicles as a way to save money, the official news agency Xinhua reported.
> 
> The Global Times cited analysts as saying that “2014 will see an even harsher clampdown.”
> 
> But critics say the anti-graft campaign does not include any system-wide measures, such as requiring public officials to declare their assets.
> 
> *Since taking power as party chief and top military commander in November 2012, Xi has taken steps to ensure control of the PLA and stressed the need for PLA loyalty.
> 
> The son of a revered revolutionary, Xi is said to have closer links to the military than his predecessor Hu Jintao.
> *


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Beijing's announced plan to seize Philippine-held Pagasa Island in the Spratlys has only added to the plethora of China military expansionism paranoia in both the media of China's neighbours and Western media.
> 
> While I agree to an extent with ERC's earlier conclusion that trade is where the "real show" happens and the military dimension is just window dressing, hawks in Pacific nations from Japan to the Philippines to the US DC beltway would disagree.
> 
> Diplomat.com
> 
> As for this scenario, one can say it's too optimistic, since ASEAN's inability to come together as a Bloc was clearly shown when Cambodia and to a certain extent, Thailand, proved to be the tiebreakers resulting in a failure to collectively condemn China's conduct in the last few years. Thailand even buys Chinese equipment such as armour and some warships.



I would suggest this is more of Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" in action, exploiting existing divides between nations in the region as well as throwing Washington off stride (although given the erratic performance of theis administration and "Smart Diplomacy"tm it is hard to tell). They offer trade as a carrot, make threats and bluster as a stick, leaving potential adversaries confused as to what is actually going on and unable or unwilling to respond in an effective and forceful manner.


----------



## CougarKing

"Window dressing" or not, only certain nations can afford to build, maintain and operate carriers.

A larger version of a _Liaoning_ class currently being built? 



> *China starts building second aircraft carrier: media*
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> Posted at 01/18/2014 9:54 PM | Updated as of 01/18/2014 9:54 PM
> 
> 
> BEIJING - China has started constructing the second of four planned aircraft carriers, a top government official said according to media reports on Saturday.
> 
> The ship is under construction in the northeastern port of Dalian and will take six years to build, the reports said quoting Wang Min, Communist Party chief for Dalian's Liaoning province.
> 
> The country's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was completed in September 2012 in a symbolic milestone for the country's increasingly muscular military.
> *
> Another two are in the pipeline, according to Wang, in a projection of power that could be seen as contradicting Beijing's long-stated policy of arming itself strictly for self-defence.*
> 
> When the Liaoning went into service, Beijing and Tokyo were locked in a territorial row over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea which China also claims and calls the Diaoyus.
> 
> The row continues to simmer, along with other sovereignty disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam.
> 
> Early this month a Japanese newspaper said China was overhauling its military structure in order to strengthen its attack capability and secure air and naval superiority in the South China and East China seas.
> 
> The Liaoning carrier conducted its maiden mission in the South China Sea in January.
> 
> It followed an incident in December in which a US warship was forced to avoid a collision with a Chinese naval vessel, prompting Washington to accuse China of being the aggressor.
> 
> © 1994-2014 Agence France-Presse


----------



## a_majoor

Something to ponder:

On the one hand we hear horror stories of Chinese AA/AD weapons like ballistic missiles designed to target carrier battle groups, new generations of attack submarines, hypersonic missiles etc. all with the primary purpose of neutralizing American Carrier Battle Groups.

Yet they are building a fleet of carriers of their own (which would presumably be even more vulnerable to US submarines, hypersonic weapons and so on, having far fewer carriers and less experience operating them).

And of course their various regional rivals are also building aircraft carriers, India has just received a full sized one from Russia, and the Japanese are building two more "Helicopter Destroyers" of their own. Apparently the ROK is also considering small aircraft carriers as well.


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Apparently the ROK is also considering small aircraft carriers as well.



You have heard of South Korea's Dokdo class, have you not? They already have "carriers", albeit LHDs. 

And before Japan's _Hyuga_ and _Izumo_ class ships were even built, Japan was operating its Osumi class assault ships/LHDs.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A.: don't get me wrong, the Chinese military in important. It was, for generations, the only "check and balance" on Mao Zedong and even now it is one of only two, the other being a growing but still weak _capitalist class_, that "checks and balances" Xi Jinping. 

The military is also vital as a sword aimed outwards at any who would threaten China's vital interests, beginning with the reunification of China and Taiwan. It also helps to _persuade_ the region that China, not America, is its best guarantor of peace and stability.

The aircraft carriers and new jets do matter, but they are *not*, in my opinion, the "main effort." That is the "soft power" or charm offensive. The Chinese want it all ... they just don't want to fight for it.

For at least 2,500 years China has been preoccupied with the notion of winning without fighting. It's an important cultural artifact ~ even in the staff colleges.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The aircraft carriers and new jets do matter




Speaking of which...


Below is a repost of another forum which discusses the 2nd Chinese carrier being built. 

Construction just began on this carrier, which should be 90,000-110,000 tonnes (according to a different source than the article), but whose design is based on the cancelled Soviet _Ulyanosk_ design and thus derivative of the smaller _Kuznetsov_ class. At the very bottom is a 3 modeller's rendering of the 2nd Chinese carrier.



> *Section of aircraft carrier built last year to attract aircraft carrier contract*
> 
> The 2nd session of the 12th Liaoning Provincial People’s Congress is now being held in Shenyang. Wang Min, Liaoning Party secretary and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Congress disclosed in the morning group discussion today that construction of China’s second homegrown aircraft carrier has started at Dalian Shipyard and is expected to be completed in 6 years. In the future,* China will at least have 4 aircraft carriers*. In addition, the shipyard is responsible for building two new-version 052D Aegis missile destroyers.
> 
> That has been the first official disclosure ever of the construction of a China-made aircraft carrier.
> 
> *However, Wang has given no information about the carrier: whether it is conventional or nuclear powered and whether there will be catapult to help taking off.
> 
> Chinese military expert Li Jie believes that the new aircraft carrier will be bigger than the Liaoning with a displacement of 70,000 to 90,000 tons. It will be a conventional one without catapult so that it will be easier to build.*
> 
> He believes that China’s third aircraft carrier will be bigger to carry more aircrafts and allow the installation of a catapult.
> 
> Another expert Du Wenlong also believes that China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier will be a conventional one.
> 
> Previously CSIC (China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation) said in December 2013 that it had received two super shipbuilding contracts.
> 
> Source: news.ifeng.com “Liaoning Provincial Party Secretary confirms China’s homegrown aircraft carrier is being built in Liaoning to be completed in 6 years”


----------



## CougarKing

This article reports on only part of the trend: it doesn't mention the waves of foreign-born Chinese from other developed Western nations such as Canada and Australia and affluent overseas Chinese/_Hua Qiao_(华侨) from other Southeast Asian nations such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

While the Fujianese/Hokien speakers are featured in this article, there are also waves that go to other Chinese regions. The return waves from the Cantonese diaspora across the world back to Hong Kong, Macau or the southern parts of Guangdong might even be larger than the ones in Fujian.  

Christian Science Monitor



> *
> A test for one Chinese province: How to educate an influx of US-born children*
> 
> At least 10,000 children born in the US to Chinese parents have been sent back to Fujian to be raised. But because they maintain US citizenship, they're ineligible for China's public schools
> 
> (...)- SNIPPED
> 
> *The children are sent back to China because their parents, mostly illegal immigrants in restaurant and shopkeeping jobs in the United States, work long hours and can’t afford day care. The children often don’t see their parents until they’re old enough to return to the country of their birth in order to start grade school. *
> 
> In a single district that encompasses Houyu and 200 other villages, there are 5,000 such children. In the provincial capital of Fuzhou, they number between 10,000 and 20,000, according to estimates made by officials in 2012.
> 
> *For this village and others like it in southern Fujian Province, the “left-behind foreign kids” represent a challenge and an opportunity for educators. Because China does not allow dual citizenship, the US-born children are not eligible for local public schools. Instead, they attend private schools set up by villagers especially for them.
> *
> VILLAGE-RUN SCHOOLS
> 
> A 2012 report from Fuzhou city and district officials says many of the kindergartens run by villagers for the left-behind foreign children are not up to the standards widely followed by government schools. For instance, village-run schools often do not require teachers to be licensed.
> 
> Teachers also struggle with educating children whose parents aren’t always vested in readying their children for the transition to a foreign land.
> 
> “What the parents care about the most is livelihood,” says Lu Fabin, a principal at Houyu Primary School and Kindergarten. “There is very little they can do about their children’s education. And some don’t care that much anyways.”
> 
> One of his students is four-year-old Zeng Huliu, all bundled up in pink against the unseasonal chill in this southern coastal province. After lunch, Huliu paced around in the playground outside her kindergarten before taking her nap. She last saw her parents in central Florida two days ago – over Skype.
> 
> “Sometimes, when she’s unhappy, she doesn’t say much,” says her grandmother Lu Ying, stuffing a peeled grape into her palm. “But then her parents can’t tell because they aren’t around.”
> 
> Grueling restaurant jobs leave Huliu’s parents little time to call home, let alone take care of her. So as soon as she was weaned off her mother's milk at 10 months old, Huliu was sent back to the village. Her parents plan on bringing her to Florida next year.
> 
> Like many who left the village, Huliu’s parents entered the US illegally; they cannot travel abroad freely. Her father left home in 1998 at age 20 to work at a Chinese restaurant run by close relatives in the US, and her mother waits tables at another Chinese restaurant.
> 
> EMIGRATION TRADITION
> 
> Among the Chinese, the coastal Fujianese are famous for their wanderlust.* Many prominent ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia trace their roots here. Beginning in the 1970s, boatloads of Fujianese were smuggled across the Pacific to toil in Chinatowns in the US, mostly on the Eastern seaboard. Even after China’s socialist economy was transformed by private capital, Fujianese still looked overseas for opportunities.
> *
> The tradition of emigration runs so deep that many Fujianese villages have set up friendship clubs in the US to pool money for the benefit of fellow villagers. The club’s name is emblazoned on many of the marble plaques in Houyu, which has at least 3,000 locals in the US, three times the size of the village’s current population.
> 
> Jiang Huizhen, who has 20 years' experience in preschool teaching, expanded her kindergarten two years ago in a refurbished school building on donated land in the nearby Guantou township.
> 
> Now, out of her 200 students, nearly 4 in 5 are born overseas, mostly in the US. She has worked hard to engage the absentee parents in school life. They can see their child through a live feed from the school’s playground and can chat with the teachers on microblog sites.
> 
> The teachers often find out a child is being pulled from school on short notice. Five-year-old Ou Binqian is to go by the end of this month, before the Chinese New Year’s. “I’ve been to the US before,” says Binqian. “My dad took me to the amusement park. I had classes to learn English.”
> 
> Ms. Jiang says teaching English isn’t her teachers’ strong suit, but it is more important to inculcate in the children a sense of independence and responsibility. For midday nap, every child is taught to fold their blanket and put away their clothes.
> 
> “No matter where they go, inevitably there’ll be a sense of strangeness,” Jiang says. “What all kids need is a sense of security.”


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps it was inevitable, but somehow it might be too early to see this as the beginning of the Chinese economic crash that George Soros predicted.  :

The Diplomat



> *China’s Economy Loses Steam
> 
> China’s economy grew 7.7% in 2013, and is expected to continue slowing in 2014.*
> 
> By Zachary Keck
> 
> January 20, 2014
> 
> China’s economy grew by 7.7 percent in 2013, the same rate as last year, which was the slowest since 1999, according to new data released by the government.
> 
> On Monday the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released fourth quarter economic figures, which showed the economy growing by an annualized rate of 7.7 percent from October to December, down from the 7.8 growth recorded during the third quarter when the government ordered an investment-heavy mini-stimulus to revive falling numbers.
> 
> The annual GDP growth was also 7.7 percent, slightly higher than the 7.5 percent that Chinese government officials indicated would be the floor rate that they would accept. The 4Q growth was also slightly higher than the 7.6 percent economists expected.
> 
> *Most economists, however, expect growth to continue to slow in 2014 as China tries to transition to an economic model less reliant on investment. The Financial Times estimates that China will grow 7.4 percent in 2014, which would be the slowest growth since 1990 in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square.
> 
> China’s post-financial crisis credit boom has fueled growth over the past few years but also created unsustainable imbalances in the economy that Chinese policymakers are seeking to correct. So far Xi Jinping’s administration has only marginally reined in credit expansion.*
> 
> “”I don’t see any evidence of an (economic) rebalancing last year. It doesn’t look like there’s any reduction in the current account surplus and the savings and investment gap probably didn’t change,” Tim Condon of ING in Singapore told Reuters.
> 
> Fixed asset investment did slow to a 19.6 percent annual growth rate, down from 19.9 percent in the first 11 months of 2013 and 1.1 percent lower than in 2012. Aggregate financing was also down in December from the year before but held steady when compared with November.
> 
> Growth in retail sales in December was also 13.6 percent, down from 13.7 percent in November and industrial production slowed to 9.7 percent, from 10 percent the month before. China also missed its export target of 8 percent in 2013.
> 
> Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JPMorgan, told the Financial Times ““The headline GDP growth figure for 2013 is strong, but momentum is clearly slowing, with infrastructure investment in December coming in quite weak. We expect investment to slow further this year, particularly in real estate and infrastructure.”
> 
> Both the Wall Street Journal and the Global Times note that property sales helped propel economic growth in 2013. “Total property sales rose 26.3% to 8.14 trillion yuan ($1.34 trillion) in 2013, up from the 10% gain recorded in 2012,” the Wall Street Journal remarked. Property sales and pricing varied widely from city to city. The Chinese government has sought to cool the property market, particularly in cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai where housing costs are often out of the reach of ordinary Chinese. Investment in property development also rose 19.8 percent in 2003, nearly 4 percent above the growth rate in 2012. Meanwhile, the People’s Daily reported on Monday that Beijing expects revenue from land sales in January to hit a new monthly high.
> 
> *There appears to be growing concern abroad over the health of China’s financial system amid rapidly rising debt accumulation. The International Monetary Fund released a report last week that said China’s debt is higher than official figures and, while still at manageable levels, China is now “more vulnerable to a macroeconomic shock” because of fiscal imbalances. Newsweek also featured a story in its weekly magazine this week titled “Beijing’s Bubble.”*
> 
> Meanwhile, Chinese officials reportedly took steps to begin better regulating the shadow banking system earlier this month, and there are signs that lending is slowing.


----------



## CougarKing

The issue of the local Chinese abuse of foreign maids/domestic workers (mostly Filipino and Indonesian) in Hong Kong, which I already pointed out in another post about the similar situation in Singapore, comes to the surface again when a Hong Kong employer almost kills an Indonesian maid.



> *Hong Kong's domestic worker abuse*
> 
> Indonesian maid tells her story of violence, while Amnesty says thousands live in similar conditions.
> 
> 
> Erwiana was recruited in Indonesia by PT Graha Ayukarsa, with whom she said she agreed to have HK$2,543 ($328) deducted from her HK$3,920 ($505) monthly wage, until a HK$18,000 ($2,320) recruitment fee was paid off. Hong Kong's minimum wage is HK$4,010 ($517) and it is illegal to impose recruitment fees of more than 10 percent on the first month's wage.
> 
> According to Erwiana the beatings were sporadic at first, but slowly became a daily ordeal. Sometimes she was told it was because she'd failed to hear an instruction, sometimes apparently for no reason at all.
> 
> "She would beat me with a lot of different implements, most usually with the handle of my mop. She would hit me all over, but mostly on my head," she said. "I had to work for 21 hours a day. I didn't have my own room so whenever I could sleep I would sleep on the floor.
> 
> "If [one of her two teenage] children found me sleeping when I wasn't supposed to be they'd tell her and she'd beat me again."
> 
> *In the final weeks of her ordeal, Erwiana said blood and puss ran from her wounds prompting her employer to complain that it was staining the carpet. She said her boss wrapped her wounds in bandages and plastic bags, but it still seeped out. Erwiana said a few days later she was driven to the airport*.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Al Jazeera


----------



## a_majoor

Another article that makes you pause. Since so many of the metrics are opaque to Western investors and analysts, something like this lurking in the background would be a terrible surprise for a great many people and governments:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/is-chinas-historic-credit-bubble-about-to-pop/283174/



> *Is China's Historic Credit Bubble About to Pop?*
> In five years, China's shadow banks have increased credit from 120 to 190 percent of GDP—a bigger run-up than the U.S. housing bubble.
> MATTHEW O'BRIENJAN 19 2014, 9:00 AM ET
> 
> A historic credit boom. Unregulated lenders promising high, "risk-free" returns. And surging property prices making it all go.
> 
> Is this the U.S. in 2004, or China in 2014?
> 
> When you think about China's economy, you probably think about manufacturing. The past 30 years, cheap labor and a cheap currency have turned it into the world's workshop. That is, China has gotten rich—or at least richer—by making things and selling them to rich countries.
> 
> Then Lehman happened. Foreign demand disappeared, and China had to find something to replace it. But more than that, it had to find something to replace its old export-led growth model. Even without a once-in-three-generations financial crisis, that model would have run out, because China's reservoir of cheap labor is running out. Its urbanization rate has already peaked—fewer people are moving to the cities than before—and its working-age population has too, in part due to its one-child policy. That means there aren't as many people competing for jobs—so wages will rise. They already have. But if they rise too much, Chinese goods won't be as competitive with the new low-wage factories in, say, Vietnam. Or even the medium-wage ones in Mexico.
> 
> Meet the New Model (Actually Different from the Old Model)
> 
> The term of art is that China needs to "rebalance."
> 
> It needs to move from export-led to consumption-led growth. Which means it needs to scrap its system of subsidies that transfer money from households to companies—everything from caps on the interest rates banks can offer customers to its artificially-weak currency. But these aren't easy things to do. It's not just that the big exporters are politically powerful. It's that the government is worried about doing anything that would hurt growth short-term, even if it would help long-term.
> 
> China is getting rich by building the things it needs to be rich.
> 
> So there haven't been any big reforms. There's been a big credit bubble instead. Local governments and developers have gone on a borrowing binge the past five years to build new infrastructure and new cities, including ghost ones. In other words, China is getting rich now by building the things it needs to be rich, and putting it all on the credit card. The result, as the ratings agency Fitch points out, has been a bigger credit increase relative to GDP than just about anywhere else in history. As you can see in the chart below from Credit Suisse, total credit shot up from around 120 percent of GDP in 2008 to 190 percent today—most of it from so-called "shadow banks" that aren't regulated. In comparison, U.S. credit "only" went up 40 percentage points of GDP in the five years before the housing bubble popped.
> 
> Nobody knows how much we should worry about China's shadow banks, because nobody knows much about them. Not even the people buying their bonds. Reuters, for example, looked into one shadow bank product called "Golden Elephant No. 38" that promises a 7.2 percent return, but doesn't say what's backing the security. After some digging, Reuters found out it was an almost-abandoned housing project in a rural province. This might sound like a scare story, but it's actually a fairly typical one. They looked at 50 other products, and didn't find much better—or any—disclosure.
> 
> But it's hard to generalize too much, because China's shadow banks are so diverse. To name a few, there are trusts, wealth management products (WMPs), local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), guarantors, and pawn shops. Some of them are actually pretty sober lenders who fill the credit void for small companies that can't get any from big, state-owned banks—for a high enough interest rate, of course. Some of them are just credit conduits for local governments that are barred from borrowing directly from banks. And some of them sure look like semi-glorified Ponzi schemes. But all of them promise better returns than people can get from traditional banks, which are required to offer meager interest rates so exporters can borrow more cheaply.
> 
> Is This Time Different?
> 
> What happens if the shadow-bank boom turns to bust? Bad, bad things.
> 
> The Chinese government would presumably bail out any state-owned banks and companies that got into trouble, but not the shadow banks. It would leave them to die. In fact, the central bank has been trying to kill—or at least rein in—the riskiest of these underground lenders by engineering three credit crunches the past half-year (along with looking for ways to regulate them under control).
> 
> But it's a case of careful what you wish for. If too many shadow lenders go under, China's credit-dependent economy might slow down too much. Of course, this might happen no matter what the government does. Shadow banks have made so many loans the past five years that it's hard to believe a lot of them won't go bad. They can borrow more money to try to hide any losses, but that wouldn't be easy if inflation and interest rates rise. The worst of the worst would go bust, and people might panic once they discover that their guaranteed returns were neither. They might already be. China's biggest bank just announced that it won't make investors whole after it sold them a trust product called "Credit Equals Gold #1"—yes, that's really what it's called—that looks likely to lose money. It's China's version of Wall Street selling people crappy CDOs it told them were risk-free.
> 
> The good news is the rest of the world isn't exposed to China's financial system the way they were to ours. But the bad news is the rest of the world is exposed to China's economy. A "hard landing" there would also mean a hard landing in the countries that sell China the raw materials it needs for its construction boom. It wouldn't be a 2008-style crash, but it would knee-cap global growth just when things look like they might be taking off.
> 
> Maybe capitalism with Chinese characteristics isn't so different from our own.


----------



## CougarKing

Two updates: Beijing's "soft power" campaign won't work if it is always perceived to be a bully, especially by smaller neighbours. 



> *China's bullying economic diplomacy may backfire: experts *
> 
> By Felicia Sonmez | AFP News – 4 hours ago
> 
> Mountains of Norwegian salmon left rotting at port. A beachfront resort in Palau abandoned before completion. A sluggish response to a devastating Philippine typhoon: crossing China's "red lines" can have painful economic consequences.
> 
> *Beijing is looking to build up its political and diplomatic status as a "major responsible country" commensurate with its global economic position, and improve its cultural reach worldwide.
> 
> But experts say Beijing's tactical moves towards smaller countries risk backfiring against its broader strategy.*
> 
> Beijing has sought to punish Norway since the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to jailed dissident and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo -- despite Oslo having no control over the prize committee's decisions.
> 
> Strict new import controls left Norwegian salmon wasting away in Chinese warehouses, and its market share in the country, once 92 percent, plummeted to 29 percent last year.
> 
> musical starring Norwegian 2009 Eurovision winner Alexander Rybak had its tour cancelled, and Norwegians are excluded from China's 72-hour transit visa schemes.
> 
> "The 'bully boy' tactics China has adopted, especially with regard to small nations such as Norway... are typical of a passive-aggressive kind of personality," Phil Mead, a British businessman who helps small Chinese companies in the European market, told AFP.
> 
> Such behaviour makes Beijing "look petty and spiteful in the eyes of the world", Mead said in a blog post.
> 
> Yahoo News




And another update on the aviation front:





> *China developing world's largest amphibious plane*
> 2014-01-19 (wantchinatimes.com)
> 
> *The Jiaolong-600 is designed to have a cruise speed of 555 kilometers per hour and a maximum range of 5,300 kilometers, and can draw 20 metric tonnes of water in just 12 seconds, CNS said, adding that the plane can carry up to 50 people during rescue missions.
> *
> China began developing the Jiaolong-600 in 2009 as the last generation of amphibious aircraft in the Harbin SH-5 range — which entered into service during the 1980s — no longer meets the demand for rescue missions.
> <snipped>
> *Demand in China for the Jiaolong-600 is estimated to be 60 units, while a different model for the overseas market is also expected to be announced, according to CNS.*


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the PLA's 2nd artillery/ICBM force:

Defense News



> *Military: China Conducts Long-Range Nuclear Missile Drill*
> Jan. 23, 2014 - 03:28PM   |   By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> 
> BEIJING — *China’s military has released images of an intercontinental ballistic missile with enough range to reach the United States, as Beijing is involved in a series of rows threatening to embroil Washington.
> 
> The pictures of Chinese soldiers test-firing a Dongfeng-31 missile, which is said by experts to be able to carry nuclear warheads 8,000 kilometers (4,960 miles), appeared in the People’s Liberation Army Daily newspaper on Tuesday.*
> 
> Further images showing soldiers dressed in protective suits, suggesting that the drill was simulating the launch of an armed warhead, were also posted on the sohu.com news portal, attributed to the newspaper.
> 
> Sohu.com said it was the first time that images of such an exercise had been released.
> 
> The images could not be found on the PLA Daily’s website when checked by AFP on Thursday.
> 
> China is embroiled in a series of territorial disputes with its neighbors in the South China Sea, and is locked in a row with Japan in the East China Sea over islands administered by Tokyo and claimed by Beijing.
> 
> The US has a security alliance with Japan and Vice President Joe Biden said last month that a strategic shift to Asia would continue.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, we have a repeat of my warning that, while neither China nor Japan wants a war some local miscalculation, which could lead to combat, albeit *not*, in my _opinion_, a real war, is almost inevitable:




Speaking of a future war between China and Japan being almost inevitable...

Parallels between 1914 and 2014? But with China and Japan going to war this year instead of the Allied vs. Central Powers back in 1914?



> *Roubini doom scenario: It looks like 1914 again*
> 
> quote:
> 
> With many parts of the world gearing up to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War, Nouriel Roubini has solidified his hold on the title "Dr. Doom" by suggesting parallels between 2014 and 1914.
> 
> There may be no Austro-Hungarian empire or Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but Roubini tweeted this from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos today:
> 
> 
> _#wef14 many speakers compare 2014 to 1914 when WWI broke out & no one expected it. *A black swan in the form of a war between China & Japan?
> *
> 
> 1:42 AM - 23 Jan 2014 _
> 
> (...)
> 
> Yahoo Finance link


----------



## CougarKing

A Chinese nuclear umbrella for her allies?




> *China’s Nuclear Parasol*
> 
> 
> (thediplomat.com)
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> *The initial reporting of the pact by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, did not use the phrase “nuclear umbrella,” but instead said that through the pact, China is providing Ukraine with a “security guarantee.”* According to Wu Dahui, a professor at the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the agreement signed in December does not represent a departure from China’s 1994 pledge that it would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. According to Wu, the parallels Western commentators are drawing between the wording of the agreement and the “nuclear umbrella” the U.S. extends to its allies in the Asia-Pacific represents a misunderstanding. The security guarantee of the new pact is simply a manifestation of Beijing’s global nonproliferation responsibilities enshrined under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
> 
> There is no question that China recognizes value in the concept of a nuclear umbrella. According to Major General Zhu Chenghu, a professor at China’s National Defense University in *Beijing, by extending a nuclear umbrella to Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, Myanmar and other countries, China can promote norms of international nonproliferation while simultaneously increasing regional stability.* From Beijing’s perspective, a nuclear umbrella could potentially stave off a potentially destabilizing regime collapse in Pyongyang, guarantee a strategic buffer between China and U.S. forces in South Korea, and demonstrate Chinese independence on the global stage. China’s state-run People’s Daily argued that a Chinese nuclear umbrella over Ukraine will allow China to further resist U.S. efforts at nuclear blackmail and coercion, a fundamental component of China’s stated nuclear doctrine.


----------



## a_majoor

One always has to wonder if this is some sort of "one off" by a disgruntled person feeling the wine, but if this represents the veiws of the Chinese government or a large number of influential Chinese people then there is trouble in the air:

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-japan-conflict-could-lead-to-war-2014-1



> *Someone Just Said Something About The Japan-China Conflict That Scared The Crap Out Of Everyone*
> HENRY BLODGET
> JAN. 22, 2014, 9:51 AM	 65,171 149
> 
> I went to one of those fancy private dinners last night in Davos, Switzerland.
> Like most of the events here at the 2014 World Economic Forum, the dinner was conducted under what are known as "Chatham House Rules," which means that I can't tell you who was there.
> 
> I can tell you what was said, though. And one thing that was said rattled a lot of people at the table.
> 
> During the dinner, the hosts passed a microphone around the table and asked guests to speak briefly about something that they thought would interest the group.
> 
> One of the guests, an influential Chinese professional, talked about the simmering conflict between China and Japan over a group of tiny islands in the Pacific.
> 
> China and Japan, you may recall, each claim ownership of these islands, which are little more than a handful of uninhabited rocks between Japan and Taiwan. Recently, the Japan-China tension around the islands has increased, and has led many analysts, including Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, to worry aloud about the potential for a military conflict.
> 
> The Chinese professional at dinner last night did not seem so much worried about a military conflict as convinced that one was inevitable. And not because of any strategic value of the islands themselves (they're basically worthless), but because China and Japan increasingly hate each other.
> 
> The Chinese professional mentioned the islands in the context of the recent visit by Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The Yasukuni Shrine is a Shinto shrine where Japanese killed in Japan's many military conflicts over the centuries are memorialized — including the Japanese leaders responsible for the attacks and atrocities Japan perpetrated in World War 2. A modern-day Japanese leader visiting the Yasukuni Shrine is highly controversial, because it is viewed by Japan's former (and current) enemies as an act of honoring war criminals.
> 
> That's certainly the way the Chinese professional at the dinner viewed it.
> 
> He used the words "honoring war criminals," to describe Abe's visit to the shrine. And, with contained but obvious anger, he declared this decision "crazy."
> 
> He then explained that the general sense in China is that China and Japan have never really settled their World War 2 conflict. Japan and America settled their conflict, he explained, and as a result, the fighting stopped. But China and Japan have never really put the war behind them.
> 
> The Chinese professional acknowledged that if China asserted control over the disputed islands by attacking Japan, America would have to stand with Japan. And he acknowledged that China did not want to provoke America.
> 
> But then he said that many in China believe that China can accomplish its goals — smacking down Japan, demonstrating its military superiority in the region, and establishing full control over the symbolic islands — with a surgical invasion.
> 
> In other words, by sending troops onto the islands and planting the flag.
> 
> The Chinese professional suggested that this limited strike could be effected without provoking a broader conflict. The strike would have great symbolic value, demonstrating to China, Japan, and the rest of the world who was boss. But it would not be so egregious a move that it would force America and Japan to respond militarily and thus lead to a major war.
> 
> Well, when the Chinese professional finished speaking, there was stunned silence around the table.
> 
> The assembled CEOs, investors, executives, and journalists stared quietly at the Chinese professional. Then one of them, a businessman, reached for the microphone.
> 
> "Do you realize that this is absolutely crazy?" the businessman asked.
> 
> "Do you realize that this is how wars start?"
> 
> "Do you realize that those islands are worthless pieces of rock... and you're seriously suggesting that they're worth provoking a global military conflict over?"
> 
> The Chinese professional said that, yes, he realized that. But then, with conviction that further startled everyone, he said that the islands' value was symbolic and that their symbolism was extremely important.
> 
> Challenged again, the Chinese professional distanced himself from his earlier remarks, saying that he might be "sensationalizing" the issue and that he, personally, was not in favor of a war with Japan. But he still seemed certain that one was deserved.
> 
> I'm far from an expert on the Japan-China conflict, and I'll leave the analyses of this situation to those who are. All I can tell you is that a respected, smart, and influential Chinese professional suggested at dinner last night that a surgical invasion by China of the disputed islands is justified and would finally settle the Japan-China conflict without triggering a broader war. And that suggestion freaked out everyone in the room.
> 
> UPDATE: Around the time I published this post, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times tweeted the following about an interview with Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan. In case you've forgotten, 1914 is when World War 1 started.
> 
> Just interviewed Shinzo Abe @Davos. He said China and Japan now are in a "similar situation" to UK and Germany before 1914.
> 
> — Gideon Rachman (@gideonrachman) January 22, 2014


----------



## CougarKing

"Bei jing, wo men you wen ti le" (Mandarin for "Beijing, we have a problem")  

South China Morning Post




> *Beijing, we have a problem: China's first moon rover Jade Rabbit breaks down
> 
> China's first lunar rover, the Jade Rabbit, appears to have broken down halfway through its three-month mission to the moon.*
> 
> Jade Rabbit experienced a "mechanical control abnormality" and scientists were examining the best ways to carry out repairs, Xinhua reported.
> 
> The problem was the result of a "complicated lunar surface environment", Xinhua cited the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence as saying.
> 
> The solar-powered Jade Rabbit, or Yutu, was supposed to carry out geological surveys and astronomical observations for three months after the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre announced its soft landing on the moon on December 14.
> 
> (...)


----------



## a_majoor

Considering spraying water from skyscrapers to control pollution in Chinese cities. The issues of getting enough clean water, the energy to pump it and the handling of the contaminated water as it flows through the sewage system do not seem to have been addressed (at least not in this article). Living in a Chinese city and being sujected to a constant shower of dirty water from these systems is probably better than breathing smog, but cleaning the pollution at the source is still the best solution:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/01/more-details-about-skyscraper-water.html#more



> *More details about Skyscraper water spraying to mitigate air pollution*
> 
> Nextbigfuture covered the concept of spraying water from skyscrapers to reduce air pollution in cities in China.
> 
> Spraying water from skyscrapers could help to reduce the concentration of PM2.5 pollution - tiny particles in the air which are especially hazardous to health - efficiently to a safer level of 35 micrograms per cubic metre, and in as quick as 30 minutes. Air pollution is a big problem in China and this is approach to pollution mitigation is being developed there.
> 
> In addition, the process is natural, technologically feasible, efficient and low cost. All the necessary technologies and materials required to make it work are already available, Yu says, from high buildings, towers and aircraft, to weather modification technology and automatic sprinkler heads.
> 
> Tests will be performed at Zhejiang University campus first and then Hangzhou city if everything goes well. If we are successful, our work can be followed by the other cities in China and around the world."
> 
> Air pollution in China has progressively worsened over the past 30 years, particularly in its megacities, due to rapid economic growth and expansion of industrial activity. According to a Greenpeace report released last week, in 2013, 92 per cent of Chinese cities failed to reach the national standard of a PM2.5 density of no greater than 35 micrograms per cubic metre. Thirty-two cities were double the standard, while the top 10 cities were three times the standard.
> 
> The six most polluted cities are in Hebei province, led by the industrial cities of Xingtai and Shijiazhuang. Among China's international business centres, Beijing was the worst at No 13, with an average PM2.5 index of 89.5 micrograms per cubic metre, followed by Qingdao (No 47) and Shanghai (No 48).
> 
> Natural precipitation is effective at cleaning air pollution - just think how much clearer the Hong Kong skyline is after a rainy day. In Beijing, an urban atmospheric environmental monitoring station showed that PM2.5 concentrations decreased from about 220 to 30 micrograms per cubic metre on September 26, 2011 because of heavy rain. Precipitation can also efficiently reduce gaseous air pollutants such and nitric acid and sulphur dioxide.
> 
> Yu's system is designed to spray raindrops of specific sizes and rain intensity, and at different heights, for the most efficient pollution reduction depending on the conditions.
> 
> Water should be sprayed into the atmosphere from at least 100 metres high, he says, because most air pollution is below this height. For areas with no tall buildings, towers of 100 to 200 metres high can be built.
> 
> The spraying would need to be done daily to avoid the accumulation of air pollution. Ideally, the water will be obtained from rivers and lakes to keep costs low, he says, and can be collected and reused, thereby preventing any exacerbation of existing water shortages. Although there are potential problems - such as flooding, humidification of the low atmosphere, and slippery grounds - Yu says these are outweighed by the benefits.
> 
> Dr Chan Chak-keung, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's division of environment, says Yu's proposal is "interesting" but is concerned about the scheme's water usage.
> 
> "Where will we find that much water? You could recycle the water, but that itself is a challenging task," says Chan. "If I spray water from the roof, what about pollution above the roof? Assuming his team can find a system that works, and they've done enough economic analysis and considered the handling of water resources, this could be a viable option.
> 
> "I would also recommend he considers spraying water right at the street level, especially along heavy traffic roads."
> 
> SOURCE - South China Morning Post


----------



## tomahawk6

With the unhealthy living conditions in the towns/cities what has prevented so far an epidemic such as the Black Plague,that decimated Europe ?


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Chinese are on the horns of a dilemma: they need clean air, the people want demand clean air; they desperately need more and more reliable electricity, everywhere.

China has abundant coal and coal fired power plants are cheap and easy to build.

There is no such thing as "clean coal." Anyone who says there is is either a fool or a liar.

There are mitigation measures to make coal less of a problem, and China is employing some of them but the costs of refurbishing the older, dirtier plants is HUGE.

China desperately needs more and more reliable electricity.

After the fallout from the _Three Gorges_ project ~ relearning the law of unintended consequences, and all that, China is wary of massive hydro-electric projects. Nuclear projects take time and money to build plus China needs a secure, reliable, friendly source of uranium; Namibia isn't it, Canada _might_ be.

As to tomahawk6's question: China has an adequate, even good enough, public health system ... far from "first class," but sufficient for most purposes. Probably on a par with a few European countries and even one or, maybe, two American states.

There is a pressing need for cleaner clean air in China ... as soon as the overwhelming demand for reliable electricity is largely met.


----------



## a_majoor

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> With the unhealthy living conditions in the towns/cities what has prevented so far an epidemic such as the Black Plague,that decimated Europe ?



Given the rather opaque reporting of issues from China, there is every possibility that diseases like SARS or some form of Avian or Swine flue are active in China, but as ERC says upthread, the Chinese have the ability to contain outbreaks quickly and quietly, and general public health is good enough to keep other diseases like cholera, the Plague and other diseases spread by contaminated water or pests at bay. The filthy air probably sickens countless people, but these sorts of illnesses are not communicable like the plague.

One rather simple solution that occured to me after re reading the piece is why not simply have the sprayers installed inside the smokestacks of coal plants? The flood of dirty water is contained "in place" and the emissions that cause the smog in the first place are drastically reduced. This won't help with the emissions of vehicles and the homeowner's use of coal for heating and cooking in many places, but it should make a considerable start.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Calgary Herald_, was intended to be a commentary on Neil Young, but, despite being several years old, it addresses a point made, right now, in this thread:





Source: The Calgary Herald

China is spewing deadly, harmful pollution out all over its own people. Forget about global climate change ~ the coal fumes are noxious, worse than the _killer fog_ in London in the early 1950s.





Source: About.com 12,000 died in the London and area in the 1952 "killer fog."

Coal is not clean ... but the worst effects can be remediated.


----------



## CougarKing

The latest example of China expanding its footprint in Africa through arms sales: a Chinese shipyard completes an offshore patrol vessel for the Nigerian Navy.



> *FIRST OF TWO INCOMING P18N (ENLARGED TYPE 056 DESIGN) 1,800 TON STEALTH OFFSHORE PATROL VESSELS OF THE NIGERIAN NAVY LAUNCHED IN CHINA ; ASSIGNED THE PENNANT NUMBER ‘F91′* (From Beegeagle's blog.)
> 
> Based on the PLAN Type 056 corvette.  Jane's article on the P18N and Nigerian naval modernization plans.


----------



## CougarKing

As if the East China Sea wasn't enough...somehow I knew it was only a matter of time before Beijing set its sights on creating an ADIZ over the South China Sea as well...

Agence-France Presse via Rappler



> *China drafts plans air defense zone in West PH Sea - Japanese news report*
> By:  Agence France-Presse
> January 31, 2014 12:46 PM
> 
> TOKYO -- *China is considering declaring a new Air Defense Identification Zone over the South China Sea, which Manila calls the West Philippine Sea*, according to a Japanese report Friday, a move likely to fan tensions in an area riven by territorial disputes.
> 
> The report comes months after Beijing caused consternation with the sudden declaration of an ADIZ above the East China Sea, covering islands at the center of a sovereignty row with Tokyo.
> 
> It also comes as countries in the region grow increasingly concerned about what they see as China's aggressive territorial claims.
> 
> Working level officials in the Chinese air force have drafted proposals for the new zone, which could set the Paracel islands at its core and spread over much of the sea, the Asahi Shimbun said, citing unnamed sources, including from the Chinese government.
> 
> *The draft was submitted to senior Chinese military officials by May last year, the respected daily said.
> 
> Beijing claims the South China Sea almost in its entirety, even areas a long way from its shoreline.
> 
> The countries surrounding the sea, among these the Philippines, have competing and overlapping claims to the area and are in dispute with Beijing, including over the ownership of islands.*
> 
> Many countries, including the US and Japan, use ADIZs as a form of early warning, allowing them to track aircraft approaching their airspace.
> 
> Planes entering the area are frequently asked to identify themselves and to maintain radio contact with local authorities.
> 
> *Any aircraft causing concern can trigger the launch of fighter jets, which are scrambled to intercept it.*
> 
> The draft says the zone would at a minimum cover the Paracels, and could go as wide as the majority of South China Sea, the Asahi said.
> 
> (...)


----------



## tomahawk6

The PI may be forced to invite the US to once again use its bases.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The PI may be forced to invite the US to once again use its bases.



Or maybe not ...

Look at the Philippines' trade. Trade with China has grown exponentially and continues to how. It now approaches the level of trade with the USA. (Apologies for the graphic, but you can see USA, PRC, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong clearly, I hope.)


>
Click to expand...

Source:  Foreign Trade Statistics of the Philippines: 2012


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC is laying claim to air space far from their shores.It is a threat to the PI.They lack the naval and air resources to counter the threat,hence a likely a permanent return to Subic for the USN.


----------



## CougarKing

The PLA's many apparent weaknesses are pointed out in this article below. Writer Ian Easton still concludes the PLA is still very much a "party army" rather than a professional military, which seems to contradict what other experts like David Shambaugh said about the PLA's move toward professionalism starting in Deng's time, and political officers/commissars de-emphasizing their political work and focusing on other troops' practical needs such as the provision of housing, IIRC. 

And Easton should at least get more of his facts straight. The last time the PLA saw combat was during the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, which saw 42,000 casualties. on the Chinese side and 26,000 casualties on the Vietnamese side.

The Diplomat



> *China’s Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military*
> By Ian Easton
> 
> In many ways, the PLA is weaker than it looks – and more dangerous.
> 
> *In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a large group of its best submarine talent on the same boat as part of an experiment to synergize its naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving port, the Type 035 Ming III class submarine sank with all hands lost. *Never having fully recovered from this maritime disaster, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.
> 
> China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. *While it launched a refurbished Ukrainian built carrier amidst much fanfare in September 2012 – then-President Hu Jintao and all the top brass showed up – soon afterward the big ship had to return to the docks for extensive overhauls because of suspected engine failure*; not the most auspicious of starts for China’s fledgling “blue water” navy, and not the least example of a modernizing military that has yet to master last century’s technology.
> 
> Indeed, today the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still conducts long-distance maneuver training at speeds measured by how fast the next available cargo train can transport its tanks and guns forward. And if mobilizing and moving armies around on railway tracks sounds a bit antiquated in an era of global airlift, it should – that was how it was done in the First World War.
> 
> *Not to be outdone by the conventional army, China’s powerful strategic rocket troops, the Second Artillery Force, still uses cavalry units to patrol its sprawling missile bases deep within China’s vast interior. Why? Because it doesn’t have any helicopters. *Equally scarce in China are modern fixed-wing military aircraft. So the Air Force continues to use a 1950s Soviet designed airframe, the Tupolev Tu-16, as a bomber (its original intended mission), a battlefield reconnaissance aircraft, an electronic warfare aircraft, a target spotting aircraft, and an aerial refueling tanker. Likewise, the PLA uses the Soviet designed Antonov An-12 military cargo aircraft for ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions, ASW (anti-submarine warfare) missions, geological survey missions, and airborne early warning missions. It also has an An-12 variant specially modified for transporting livestock, allowing sheep and goats access to remote seasonal pastures.
> *
> But if China’s lack of decent hardware is somewhat surprising given all the hype surrounding Beijing’s massive military modernization program, the state of “software” (military training and readiness) is truly astounding. *At one military exercise in the summer of 2012, a strategic PLA unit, stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an underground bunker complex, actually had to take time out of a 15-day wartime simulation for movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “cultural performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls) had to be brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the homesick soldiers.
> 
> *Apparently becoming suspicious that men might not have the emotional fortitude to hack it in high-pressure situations, an experimental all-female unit was then brought in for the 2013 iteration of the war games, held in May, for an abbreviated 72-hour trial run. Unfortunately for the PLA, the results were even worse.* By the end of the second day of the exercise, the hardened tunnel facility’s psychological counseling office was overrun with patients, many reportedly too upset to eat and one even suffering with severe nausea because of the unpleasant conditions.
> 
> While recent years have witnessed a tremendous Chinese propaganda effort aimed at convincing the world that the PRC is a serious military player that is owed respect, outsiders often forget that China does not even have a professional military.* The PLA, unlike the armed forces of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other regional heavyweights, is by definition not a professional fighting force. Rather, it is a “party army,” the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, all career officers in the PLA are members of the CCP and all units at the company level and above have political officers assigned to enforce party control. *Likewise, all important decisions in the PLA are made by Communist Party committees that are dominated by political officers, not by operators. This system ensures that the interests of the party’s civilian and military leaders are merged, and for this reason new Chinese soldiers entering into the PLA swear their allegiance to the CCP, not to the PRC constitution or the people of China.
> 
> This may be one reason why China’s marines (or “naval infantry” in PLA parlance) and other  amphibious warfare units train by landing on big white sandy beaches that look nothing like the west coast of Taiwan (or for that matter anyplace else they could conceivably be sent in the East China Sea or South China Sea).* It could also be why PLA Air Force pilots still typically get less than ten hours of flight time a month (well below regional standards), and only in 2012 began to have the ability to submit their own flight plans (previously, overbearing staff officers assigned pilots their flight plans and would not even allow them to taxi and take-off on the runways by themselves).
> *
> Intense and realistic training is dangerous business, and the American maxim that the more you bleed during training the less you bleed during combat doesn’t translate well in a Leninist military system. Just the opposite. China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination. Beijing’s worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its number one mission is protecting the Communist Party’s civilian leaders against all its enemies – especially when the CCP’s “enemies” are domestic student or religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989 and 1999, respectively.
> 
> *For that reason, the PLA has to engage in constant “political work” at the expense of training for combat*. This means that 30 to 40 percent of an officer’s career (or roughly 15 hours per 40-hour work week) is wasted studying CCP propaganda, singing patriotic songs, and conducting small group discussions on Marxist-Leninist theory. And when PLA officers do train, it is almost always a cautious affair that rarely involves risky (i.e., realistic) training scenarios.
> 
> Abraham Lincoln once observed that if he had six hours to chop down a tree he would spend the first four hours sharpening his axe. Clearly the PLA is not sharpening its proverbial axe. Nor can it. Rather, it has opted to invest in a bigger axe, albeit one that is still dull. Ironically, this undermines Beijing’s own aspirations for building a truly powerful 21st century military.
> 
> *Yet none of this should be comforting to China’s potential military adversaries. It is precisely China’s military weakness that makes it so dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A few minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the Korean War. This appears to be a major factor leading it to act so brazenly in the East and South China Seas*. Indeed, China’s navy now appears to be itching for a fight anywhere it can find one. Experienced combat veterans almost never act this way. Indeed, history shows that military commanders that have gone to war are significantly less hawkish than their inexperienced counterparts. Lacking the somber wisdom that comes from combat experience, today’s PLA is all hawk and no dove.
> 
> The Chinese military is dangerous in another way as well. *Recognizing that it will never be able to compete with the U.S. and its allies using traditional methods of war fighting, the PLA has turned to unconventional “asymmetric” first-strike weapons and capabilities to make up for its lack of conventional firepower, professionalism and experience*. These weapons include more than 1,600 offensive ballistic and cruise missiles, whose very nature is so strategically destabilizing that the U.S. and Russia decided to outlaw them with the INF Treaty some 25 years ago.
> 
> *In concert with its strategic missile forces, China has also developed a broad array of space weapons designed to destroy satellites used to verify arms control treaties, provide military communications, and warn of enemy attacks*. China has also built the world’s largest army of cyber warriors, and the planet’s second largest fleet of drones, to exploit areas where the U.S. and its allies are under-defended. All of these capabilities make it more likely that China could one day be tempted to start a war, and none come with any built in escalation control.
> 
> Yet while there is ample and growing evidence to suggest China could, through malice or mistake, start a devastating war in the Pacific, it is highly improbable that the PLA’s strategy could actually win a war. Take a Taiwan invasion scenario, which is the PLA’s top operational planning priority. While much hand-wringing has been done in recent years about the shifting military balance in the Taiwan Strait, so far no one has been able to explain how any invading PLA force would be able to cross over 100 nautical miles of exceedingly rough water and successfully land on the world’s most inhospitable beaches, let alone capture the capital and pacify the rest of the rugged island.
> 
> *The PLA simply does not have enough transport ships to make the crossing, and those it does have are remarkably vulnerable to Taiwanese anti-ship cruise missiles, guided rockets, smart cluster munitions, mobile artillery and advanced sea mines – not to mention its elite corps of American-trained fighter and helicopter pilots*. Even if some lucky PLA units could survive the trip (not at all a safe assumption), they would be rapidly overwhelmed by a small but professional Taiwan military that has been thinking about and preparing for this fight for decades.
> 
> Going forward it will be important for the U.S. and its allies to recognize that China’s military is in many ways much weaker than it looks. However, it is also growing more capable of inflicting destruction on its enemies through the use of first-strike weapons. To mitigate the destabilizing effects of the PLA’s strategy, the U.S. and its allies should try harder to maintain their current (if eroding) leads in military hardware. But more importantly, they must continue investing in the training that makes them true professionals. While manpower numbers are likely to come down in the years ahead due to defense budget cuts, regional democracies will have less to fear from China’s weak but dangerous military if their axes stay sharp.
> 
> Ian Easton is a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, VA. He was also a recent visiting fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo. Previously, he was a China analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think the PLA is trying to move from a _party army_ to a professional one, but, as with almost anything in China, it is a slow, cumbersome process because the bureaucracies ~ party, military, governmental ~ are all opaque and are often at odds one with the others. I think the naval, air and _strategic_ missile arms took the lead while the army, _per se_ is following along.

That's an outsider's perspective.


----------



## CougarKing

Not surprising considering past forays by the PLA-N to the Somalia coast for antipiracy patrols and past port calls to Pakistan, etc.

AP via Yahoo News



> *China's navy holds Indian Ocean drills*
> 
> 
> BEIJING (AP) — *A three-ship Chinese navy squadron has concluded exercises in the Indian Ocean and sailed on to the western Pacific, showing off the growing reach of the country's seagoing forces at a time of sharpening territorial disputes in regional waters.*
> 
> State broadcaster CCTV said Tuesday that the squadron includes China's largest amphibious landing ship, the Changbaishan, along with a pair of destroyers. It said they reached the Indian Ocean on Jan. 29 and carried out a series of drills on the themes of counter-piracy, search and rescue, and damage control.
> 
> *Although not directly targeted at India, the exercises underscore China's competition with the other Asian giant. India and China have clashed over their disputed Himalayan border and Beijing is a close ally of New Delhi's arch-rival Pakistan.*
> 
> CCTV said the squadron passed through the Lombok Strait near the Indonesian island of Bali before heading north toward the Philippines. It is expected to return home through the South China Sea where Beijing is in a heated dispute with the Philippines and others over tiny islands, rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of oil and other resources. China is also in a separate dispute with Japan over tiny uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that Tokyo controls but Beijing claims.
> 
> (...)


----------



## Edward Campbell

First: I think the Asia Defence Spending topic deserves to stand alone, but it does provide a lead in to the China thread.



			
				MCG said:
			
		

> The title suggests China may be taking a lead in global military spending, but that conclusion requires one to not consider the US.Supporting charts and graphics with the article here:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26054545




I think China is making a _strategic_ blunder.

Defence spending on this order, at the rates at which China's defence budget continues to grow, in a _shrinking_ economy cannot and should not be sustained.

Some will argue that, as a percentage of GDP, China is still on safe ground at 2%. I would argue that:

     1. China's _official_ GDP is overstated; and

     2. China's defence budget is, almost certainly, understated.

My guess is that China's GDP is still growing, but it is growing at a slower and slower rate ~ maybe, just a *wild arsed guess*, at about 5%. I doubt it will ever see 8% growth again.

Why not?

Because China is moving from being a _developing_ economy to being a _mature_, balanced, economy. It's not there yet but that is its trajectory. Mature economies grow at 4% in the very good years, 3% in the average years and, like Canada and the USA, at 1-2% in the not so good years.  

China can - as Canada could - afford to spend 2% of its real, honestly stated GDP on defence. But 3% or 4% is too much, I think, when that money could be spent *productively* (remember, please, that I believe that all defence spending is unproductive, at best, sometimes it is even counterproductive) on programmes that aim to stimulate domestic consumer demand.

What about defence spending of 4.5% of GDP in a shrinking economy? Well, that discussion belongs in another thread.


----------



## CougarKing

When it comes to China-Taiwan relations, it now seems _waishengren_, pro-reunification President Ma has lost his charm among the pre-dominantly _benshengren_ population of Taiwan...

Yahoo News



> *China, Taiwan meet for highest-level talks, as Taiwanese swing away from pro-China president
> *
> 
> By Christopher Bodeen And Peter Enav, The Associated Press
> 
> NANJING, China - Taiwan and China are holding their highest-level talks since splitting amid a civil war 65 years ago, hoping to further boost contacts and ease lingering tensions, even as political developments on the self-governing island swing away from Beijing's goal of eventual unification.
> 
> Tuesday's discussions in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing constitute the highest-level interaction between government officials of the two sides since the 1949 division — apparently a concession from Beijing which otherwise refuses to formally acknowledge Taiwan's government.
> 
> No official agenda has been released, but *Taiwan's lead negotiator Wang Yu-chi says he hopes to discuss setting up of permanent representative offices on each other's territory and will push for greater Taiwanese representation in international organizations.*
> 
> China is adamant that Taiwan is part of its territory and must accept its political authority, threatening to attack the island if it declares formal independence or delays unification indefinitely. It's backed up that caveat with a military buildup aimed at fending off any intervention by the U.S., which is legally bound to ensure the island's security.
> 
> Despite that threat, the talks are an outgrowth of China's less-confrontational approach toward Taiwan embraced a decade ago by former president and ruling Communist Party leader Hu Jintao. Previous efforts to intimidate the island democracy — with missile firings and military exercises in 1995-1996 — or to influence its internal politics succeeded only in further alienating the electorate.
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have embraced Hu's approach, although there are indications he is eager to see progress on the political front, in addition to grappling with economic and cultural issues already largely dealt with.
> 
> "We cannot hand these problems down from generation to generation," Xi told a top Taiwanese envoy at an international gathering in Indonesia last year.
> 
> *China may feel some urgency because of local elections in Taiwan this year that could swing momentum away from the Nationalist Party of deeply unpopular pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou ahead of the next presidential election in 2016.*
> 
> *Beijing is also seen as frustrated that generous economic incentives offered to the island have failed to sway the public there in a more pro-unification direction.
> 
> Trade between the sides has doubled since 2008 — the year Ma was elected — to $197.2 billion last year. Taiwan also enjoys a $116 billion trade surplus with China, one of the few countries or regions that can boast that. Taiwanese companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the mainland, with companies such as Foxconn employing millions of workers making iPhones, Playstations and other popular goods.*
> 
> Taiwan has also benefited heavily from an opening to Chinese tourists.
> 
> *Yet, Taiwanese opposition to unification has only seemed to harden, with about 80 per cent supporting the status-quo of de-facto independence and just a sliver backing unification outright.*
> 
> China now seems to hope that it can draw Taipei further into its orbit by taking on political issues, albeit in a non-threatening way.
> 
> One practical step toward that would be the exchange of offices of Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation and China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait. These nominally private groups would act like de-facto consulates-general, facilitating communications and offering services to visitors.
> 
> *Beijing wants Taiwan to ratify a trade services agreement — stuck in Taiwan's legislature — to open a wide range of businesses across the Taiwan Strait*.
> 
> The talks will be chaired by official representatives, rather than the quasi-governmental envoys normally involved in the negotiations. That appears to represent a modest Chinese concession on the sensitive sovereignty issue to help shore up Ma's standing with the Taiwanese public.
> 
> Talks will be headed by Wang, head of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, and his counterpart, Zhang Zhijun, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office.
> 
> *Rand Corp. China analyst Scott Harold believes China will try to make as much Taiwan headway as it can while Ma remains in office, while also taking steps to improve ties with potential successors.*
> 
> "I would expect that China will want to make steps toward further locking in Taiwan this year before the island gets swept up in election fever and Ma becomes even more of a lame duck next year," Harold said.
> 
> __
> 
> Enav reported from Taipei.


----------



## CougarKing

A maritime Silk Road?



> *China’s vision for a maritime silk road updates and clarifies its interest in the “string of pearls.”*
> 
> 
> Quote
> 
> *The “maritime silk road” is an attempt at re-branding for China. Now that the concept has been officially extended as far west as Sri Lanka, its connection to the “string of pearls” is obvious.* China has never officially used the term “string of pearls,” which originated in a 2005 U.S. study by defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Accordingly, China has somewhat lost control of the messaging. The “string of pearls” concept is often viewed a military initiative, with the aim of providing China’s navy access to a series of ports stretching from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea. This has caused some consternation, particularly in India, which sees itself as being encircled.
> 
> *The new terminology of a “maritime silk road” allows China to discuss its strategy of investing in maritime infrastructure in ASEAN and further west. *Even more interesting, the extension of the “maritime silk road” admits the existence of such a strategy, and gives China a way of clarifying its strategic goals.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> Of course, in a way this is exactly what worries observers about the “string of pearls.” China’s idea of mitigating security concerns over territorial disputes in the South China Sea might be different than what its rivals, including Vietnam and the Philippines, have in mind. Even if the “maritime silk road” is an exclusively economic strategy, it still would have obvious strategic implications. For one thing, China has proven it’s not shy about using economic coercion to pursue its interests, making any economic investment a potential weapon. For another, as many have pointed out, China largely relies on paramilitary or civilian vessels to stake its claim to disputed maritime regions. Under this strategy, China doesn’t need to send its navy to the newly constructed ports to exert increased control over the regional shipping lanes. A blurred distinction between civilian and military vessels also smudges the line between a military-based “string of pearls” and a trade-based “maritime silk road.”
> 
> 
> source: thediplomat.com


----------



## CougarKing

Seems it was only matter of time before the PLA increased its presence in Hong Kong with developments like this...

But in Central? I would have expected them to further develop the former site of the British Royal Navy base at HMS _Tamar_. 

Hopefully PLA off-duty personnel won't get into scuffles with the foreign expats who frequent Lan Kwai Fong or Causeway Bay.  

Defense News



> *Report: China Military Port Gets Key Hong Kong Go-Ahead*
> Feb. 16, 2014 - 11:12AM
> 
> BEIJING — Hong Kong has taken a key step towards approving the construction of a Chinese military port along its waterfront, China’s state media reported Saturday, despite fierce public opposition to the move.
> 
> In a unanimous decision, *Hong Kong’s Town Planning Board Friday gave the green light for the construction of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military port in the city’s Central District*, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.
> 
> (...)


----------



## CougarKing

More anti-Japanese sentiment rises to the surface in China as the trade numbers say another part of the story...



> *The Chinese And Japanese Economies Are Delinking: Prelude To Conflict?*
> 
> 2/16/2014
> 
> Observers used to say that deep-seated disagreements in the region did not matter, that there could be “cold politics and hot economics.”  Today, analysts are not so sure.  Jitters are now accompanying—and undoubtedly contributing to—a delinking of Asia’s two largest economies, China’s and Japan’s.
> 
> *In 2013, trade volume between China and Japan dropped 5.1% from the year before.  That followed a 3.9% fall in 2012.*  To put these figures into context, China’s total trade was up 6.2% in 2012 and 7.6% last year while Japan’s volume increased 1.0% in 2012 but was down 7.8% in 2013.
> 
> Japanese sources attributed the drop in China-Japan trade to “the lingering effects of the Senkaku Islands territorial row”—Japan administers those barren outcroppings as its own while Beijing claims them as well—and a Chinese consumer boycott of Japanese goods.  Chinese state media agrees that trade has been adversely affected by geopolitical disagreements and blames Shinzo Abe.  *Anti-Japan riots in Chinese cities, discriminatory official treatment of Japanese multinationals, and detention of Japanese businessmen in China have not helped.*
> 
> (...)- SNIPPED-
> 
> Forbes


----------



## bouncer2004

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Seems it was only matter of time before the PLA increased its presence in Hong Kong with developments like this...
> 
> But in Central? I would have expected them to further develop the former site of the British Royal Navy base at HMS _Tamar_.
> 
> Hopefully PLA off-duty personnel won't get into scuffles with the foreign expats who frequent Lan Kwai Fong or Causeway Bay.
> 
> Defense News



Actually, if you could see where Tamar is in relation to Central, it's like a few blocks away...as a matter of fact, across the street...and I think PLA stationed in HK cannot leave the base even when off duty...they are allowed like 1 or 2 days prior to posting out to sightsee, but other wise Cb'ed for their 2 or 3 year posting.


----------



## CougarKing

A trend described below which will start to decline in Canada when our own investor immigrant visa program was just ended by the current government. 

Take note that this trend is not only present with immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, but also from upper classes of other Asian nations, namely Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

While I disagree with the ending of this policy because this was how my family immigrated here 7 years ago, the policymakers in Ottawa probably ended it more because of the relatively low taxes paid by many in the investor immigrant category. This is partially due to the fact that many of these investor immigrant parents simply came to buy houses at certain neighborhoods, such as in Richmond, BC and Mississagua, ON, deposit their children here to eventually become citizens, and left to continue their own businesses/work in their home country. 

However, a similar program was instituted in the US which should increase this trend described below. I believe the UK, Australia and NZ have similar programs. 

*article links embedded in underscored key words. 

Defense Industry Daily



> *What Migration Says About China*
> 
> For the last few years China’s millionaires have been increasingly voting with their feet to flee pollution and corruption, boosting real estate prices from the US and Canada’s west coasts to Australia and beyond. Some Chinese are also voting with their wombs by electing to give birth in the US so their children have American citizenship, which turns quite controversial in the case of Chai Jing, a popular anchor on state-owned CCTV.
> 
> When many of the people who can do so seem to be setting up a plan B in Western countries, something has got to give. Chinese authorities recently announced they would reform by 2020 the hukou household registration system which restricts free relocation within the country. Yet that will be a tall order short of recognizing proper private property rights.


----------



## Edward Campbell

h\Here is some more speculation, this time reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, about Chinese preparations for  “'short, sharp war' against Japan in the East China Sea:"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/687e31a2-99e4-11e3-91cd-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl


> China training for ‘short, sharp war’, says senior US naval officer
> 
> By Geoff Dyer in Washington
> 
> February 20, 2014
> 
> China has been training for a “short, sharp war” against Japan in the East China Sea, a senior US military officer has claimed, in comments that underline the growing military tensions in the western Pacific.
> 
> Captain James Fanell, director of intelligence for the US Pacific Fleet, said that a large-scale Chinese military exercise conducted in 2013 was designed to prepare forces for an operation to seize disputed islands in the East China Sea, which Japan calls the Senkaku and China the Diaoyu islands.
> 
> “We witnessed the massive amphibious and cross military region enterprise – Mission Action 2013,” Capt Fanell said at a navy conference last week in San Diego.
> 
> “We concluded that the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] has been given the new task of being able to conduct a short sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea following with what can only be an expected seizure of the Senkakus,” he added.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Conducting a training exercise is very different from having an actual plan to seize the islands. For years, the Chinese military has staged exercises designed to mimic a possible invasion of Taiwan.
> 
> However, the comments about China’s military training plans come at a time of considerable tension surrounding the contested islands. The regular presence of both Chinese and Japanese vessels and aircraft in the region has raised the risk of an accident that could spark a wider confrontation.
> 
> In December, China declared an air defence zone for the East China Sea, which the US and many other countries in the region interpreted as an attempt to cement its sovereignty claim over the disputed islands.
> Although Capt Fanell’s remarks were unusually blunt in their assessment of China’s intentions, they represent a growing tide of anxiety from senior US officials about Beijing’s ambitions in both the East China Sea and South China Sea.
> 
> Earlier in February, Danny Russel, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asia, warned “there are growing concerns that this pattern of behaviour in the South China Sea reflects incremental effort by China to assert control over the area”. He said that China’s recent actions had “created uncertainty, insecurity and instability in the region”.
> 
> Capt Fanell said that Chinese maritime training had shifted in character in the second half of 2013 to prepare for “realistic maritime combat” that its navy might encounter. Last year, it conducted nine operations in the western Pacific that were designed to “practise striking naval targets”.
> 
> “I do not know how Chinese intentions could be more transparent,” he said. When Beijing described its activities as the “protection of maritime rights”, this was really “a Chinese euphemism for the coerced seizure of coastal rights of China’s neighbours”, Capt Fanell said.
> 
> At the same conference last year, Capt Fanell issued another sharp assessment of China’s naval ambitions. The country’s “expansion into the blue waters are largely about countering the US Pacific fleet”, he said. “The PLA Navy is going to sea to learn how to do naval warfare . . . Make no mistake: the PRC navy is focused on war at sea, and sinking an opposing fleet.”
> 
> Although there is growing concern among US military officers and diplomats about what they believe to be China’s increasingly assertive behaviour, the US Navy is also placing considerable emphasis on trying to forge a better working relationship with China’s navy.
> 
> “We have got to find the common ground and figure out how we are going to operate in this big ocean of the western Pacific together without incident or miscalculation,” Rear Admiral James Foggo, assistant deputy chief of naval operations, told the same conference. He described his interactions with Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, as “the greatest and most challenging chess match of my career”.




I have been worried, mostly, about an accidental short, sharp war ~ a battle, really, in which one antagonist fires on the the other without authorization from the political high command; but this 'short, sharp war' scenario also makes some sense. It can be disguised and explained away, with appropriate apologies and payments, as an 'accident' but, at the end of the affair, China still has the islands.  :dunno:


----------



## CougarKing

Japan courting its former territory of Taiwan...

To think that any native Taiwanese/_benshengren_ who is 80 years old or older, such as former Taiwanese President Lee-Tung Hui, can actually speak Japanese since they grew up in a time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895-1945.



> *Rumors of a Japanese Taiwan Relations Act hint at a possible strategy to court Taipei at Beijing’s expense.*
> 
> (thediplomat.com)
> February 20, 2014
> 
> Quote:
> 
> *The 2014 vision for Japan’s own “Taiwan Relations Act” is more focused on economics, which accords with the domestic political needs of both Shinzo Abe and Ma Ying-jeou to shake off sluggish economic growth.* According to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan is Japan’s fifth-largest trading partner, and Japan is second only to China as Taiwan’s largest trading partner. Deepening economic cooperation would be beneficial for both—and could also have political benefits. Highlighting Japan-Taiwan cooperation serves as a pointed counter-narrative to worsening China-Japan ties.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> Notably, Japan and Taiwan have also worked together to lessen tensions over the disputed Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands. Like mainland China, Taiwan’s government claims sovereignty over the islands. *In April of last year, Taiwan and Japan came to a compromise in the form of a fisheries agreement that will allow Taiwanese fishing boats access to waters near the disputed islands*. Under the agreement, both sides shelved the territorial dispute and will cooperate to access fishing resources in the area—exactly the same sort of solution some experts have recommended for handling China and Japan’s dispute.


----------



## CougarKing

The controversy of China possibly setting up an ADIZ over the South China continues. 

This controversy may heat up further as the Philippines, one of China's weaker neighbours, finally acquires new jet fighters with the acquisition of 12 F/A-50 fighters from South Korea.



> Excerpts:
> *PLA Officer: China Must Establish South China Sea ADIZ *
> 
> 
> China’s People’s Liberation Army said that establishing an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is essential to China’s national interest.
> 
> “The establishment of another ADIZ over the South China Sea is necessary for China’s long-term national interest,” Senior Colonel Li Jie, a researcher at the PLA Navy’s Military Academy and frequent media commentator, said on Friday, according to a report in Reuters.
> 
> (...)-EDITED
> 
> Link: The Diplomat


----------



## CougarKing

Again with the South China Sea...

Even though the Philippines is getting 12 new fighters from South Korea and its 2 "new" frigates which are rejuvenated ex-USCG _Hamilton_ class cutters, I'm not sure if these forces will be enough to counter what the PLA can throw at them...

From the STRAITS TIMES:



> *Manila says it will respond militarily if China uses force against Filipinos around disputed island*
> 
> By Raul Dancel, Philippines Correspondent In Manila
> 
> The Philippines said on Monday it would respond militarily if China uses force to drive away Filipinos fishing in waters around a disputed island in the South China Sea.
> 
> General Emmanuel Bautista, head of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), issued this warning as a response to reports that ships from China's Coast Guard drove away Filipinos fishing in areas around Scarborough Shoal using water cannons on Jan 27.
> 
> (EDITED)
> 
> More on Straits Times


----------



## CougarKing

China "taunts" outgoing US Ambassador Gary Locke. Ironically, Locke is also an American of Chinese descent. 

NY TIMES Sinosphere blogs




> *A Parting Shot at U.S. Ambassador, Inspired by Mao*
> 
> By MICHAEL FORSYTHE
> 
> (EDITED)
> 
> “Farewell, Gary Locke’’ departs from the almost wonkish critique of United States foreign policy offered up by Mao, opting instead for an extended comparison of Mr. Locke, a Chinese-American, to a banana.
> 
> 
> “Gary Locke is a U.S.-born, third-generation Chinese-American, and his being a banana — ‘yellow skin and white heart’ — became an advantage for Obama’s foreign policy,’’ opened the commentary, written by a person identified as Wang Ping. (Many Asian-Americans consider “banana” an offensive term.)
> 
> “However,” the commentary continued, “after a while, a banana will inevitably start to rot.’’
> 
> *Wang Ping also took aim at Mr. Locke’s portrayal as a humble person who carried his own bag and flew economy class. Such gestures, which the commentary cast as insincere, were broadcast widely on China’s social media when Mr. Locke first arrived in Beijing in 2011 and won him admiration from many Chinese, who couldn’t imagine their own officials abandoning their privileges.
> 
> “When Gary Locke arrived, the skies in Beijing became hazy,’’ the commentary said. “When he left, the skies suddenly became blue.’*




(These blue skies?)

The Guardian



> (EDITED)
> 
> *Chinese scientists have warned that the country's toxic air pollution is now so bad that it resembles a nuclear winter, slowing photosynthesis in plants – and potentially wreaking havoc on the country's food supply.*
> 
> Beijing and broad swaths of six northern provinces have spent the past week blanketed in a dense pea-soup smog that is not expected to abate until Thursday. Beijing's concentration of PM 2.5 particles – those small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream – hit 505 micrograms per cubic metre on Tuesday night. The World Health Organisation recommends a safe level of 25.


----------



## Edward Campbell

A terrorist attack in Kunmng according to his article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/knife-wielding-men-attack-train-station-in-southwest-china/article17185631/#dashboard/follows/


> At least 28 dead in 'terror' attack at Chinese train station
> 
> BEN BLANCHARD
> BEIJING — Reuters
> 
> Published Saturday, Mar. 01 2014
> 
> At least 28 people were killed by knife-wielding attackers in a “violent terrorist attack” at a train station in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, and police shot dead five of the assailants, state media said on Sunday.
> 
> Another 113 people were wounded, the official Xinhua news agency said, revising down an earlier higher figure. It said the attack had taken place late on Saturday evening.
> 
> “It was an organised, premeditated violent terrorist attack,” Xinhua said.
> 
> Police shot dead five of the unidentified attackers and were searching for around five others, it said.
> 
> Kunming resident Yang Haifei told Xinhua that he was buying a ticket when he saw a group of people, mostly wearing black, rush into the station and start attacking bystanders.
> 
> “I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he said, adding that the attackers caught those who were slower. “They just fell on the ground.”
> 
> Graphic pictures on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo showed bodies covered in blood lying on the ground at the station.
> 
> There was no immediate word on who was responsible.
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered no effort be spared to track down those behind the attack.
> 
> “Severely punish in accordance with the law the violent terrorists and resolutely crack down on those who have been swollen with arrogance,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.
> 
> “Understand the serious and complex nation of combating terrorism,” Xi said. “Go all out to maintain social stability.”
> 
> Domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu was on his way to the scene, Xinhua said.
> 
> Weibo users took to the service to describe details of what happened, though many of those posts were quickly deleted by government censors, especially those that described the attackers, two of whom were identified by some as women.
> 
> Others condemned the attack.
> 
> “No matter who, for whatever reason, or of what race, chose somewhere so crowded as a train station, and made innocent people their target - they are evil and they should go to hell,” wrote one user.
> 
> The attack comes at a sensitive time as China gears up for the annual meeting of parliament, which opens in Beijing on Wednesday and is normally accompanied by a tightening of security across the country.
> 
> China has blamed similar incidents in the past on Islamist militants operating in the restive far western region of Xinjiang, though such attacks have generally been limited to Xinjiang itself.
> 
> China says its first major suicide attack, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in October, involved militants from Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur people, many of whom chafe at Chinese restrictions on their culture and religion.
> 
> Hu Xijin, editor of the influential Global Times newspaper, published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, wrote on his Weibo feed that the government should say who it suspected of the attack as soon as possible.
> 
> “If it was Xinjiang separatists, it needs to be announced promptly, as hearsay should not be allowed to fill the vacuum,” Hu wrote.




I assume the _Globe's_ headline writers put 'terror' in quotes because the exact source of the attack is undetermined. Or maybe they just believe that terrorist don't exist in big, bad China. But, in my very, very limited experience nobody but terrorists attack in packs of ten or so and kill people by the dozen. It it walks like a duck, etc.


----------



## CougarKing

I am a little skeptical that Uighur separatists did conduct yesterday's mass attack in a place as far away as Kunming in Yunnan province/Southwest China, in spite of what the Chinese media says. 

After all, we never heard of any foreign media independently verifying that it was Uighur separatists who made the other attacks attributed to them in Beijing, if I can recall correctly.

As for more genuine dissent in China...Hong Kong takes centre stage again.

From Agence France Presse via Singapore's Channel News Asia



> *Thousands rally in HK vs threats to press freedom after brutal attack on editor*
> By:  Agence France-Presse
> March 2, 2014 6:20 PM
> 
> HONG KONG -* Thousands took to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday to protest against threats to press freedom in the city, days after a former newspaper editor was attacked with a cleaver in broad daylight.*
> 
> 
> *Kevin Lau, former editor of the investigative Ming Pao newspaper*, was left in a critical condition after Wednesday's brutal attack, seen as highlighting warnings from international watchdogs that the city's media independence is in jeopardy as Beijing seeks tighter control.
> 
> 
> *Organisers said that 13,000 people including journalists, activists and lawmakers marched in the swiftly organised rally, although police put the turnout lower at 8,600.*
> 
> Protesters dressed in black waved banners declaring "They can't kill us all" as they condemned the vicious assault on Lau, urging police to solve the case quickly and saying journalists would not be swayed by violence.
> 
> "We need to tell the evil power that your knife is not going to deter us," Sham Yee-lan, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association told reporters outside the government headquarters, before marching to the city's police department to deliver a petition with 30,000 signatures.
> 
> Ronan Chan, a 21-year-old journalism student, told AFP: "I still want to be a journalist. I won't be affected by the incident... A place without freedom of speech is not a civilized society."
> 
> (...)- EDITED


----------



## CougarKing

A think tank for the DPP (an anti-mainland China party/pro-_de jure_ independence party) weighs in on the threat calculus from the mainland again. They now suggest that Taiwan should reverse-engineer their Dutch-made submarines in service to address one of the 3 areas of focus mentioned in the article.

Defense News



> *Analysis: Taiwan Think Tank Issues Blue Paper on China's Ambitions*
> 
> TAIPEI — In a marked departure from past efforts, the opposition party’s think tank, New Frontier Foundation, released a remarkable report on China’s military ambitions against Taiwan.
> 
> (...)- EDITED
> 
> *The report states that Taiwan must raise its defense budget “to the level of 3% of GDP” and build an effective “national defense with Taiwanese characteristics.”* Taiwanese characteristics emphasizes relying more on domestic defense industry sources for military arms and equipment.
> 
> The paper outlines three priorities: *cyber defense, indigenous submarine production and improving air defense capabilities.*
> 
> On cyber defense, the paper wants to raise the status of MINDEF’s Information and Electronic Warfare Command in the organization chart. It also wants to attract more information warfare personnel, develop asymmetrical cyber operational concepts and equipment, and strengthen its cyber “front lines.”
> 
> *On the indigenous submarine issue, the paper recommends an immediate two-stage build program that allows for “conserving the integrity of the Navy’s current submarine force” but also “activating a long-term development cycle of ship design and research and development, critical equipment acquisition, testing and operation, and upgrade.”*
> 
> *York said the best way to proceed was to reverse-engineer the two Dutch-built Zwaardvis-class submarines sold to Taiwan in the 1980s.* The US offered to sell Taiwan eight diesel-powered attack submarines in 2001, but the US has been unable to develop the infrastructure needed to manufacturer diesel-submarines.
> 
> (...)
> *
> China’s air warfare capabilities continue to expand with the production of more advanced fourth-generation fighters*, the roll-out of two types of fifth-generation stealthy fighters, the replacement of aging ballistic missiles with more precise missiles, and the fielding of more advanced land-attack cruise missiles.
> 
> 
> *For this reason, the paper suggests Taiwan procure unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV), go forward on fighter aircraft upgrades, refine precision strike munitions, and develop next-generation fighters, including the procurement of “vertical and/or short take-off and landing” (V/STOL) fighters.
> *
> 
> In the past, Taiwan has expressed interest in buying refurbished AV-8 Harrier V/STOL jump-jets and has received US government briefings on the F-35B short-takeoff vertical-landing (STOVL) fighter.
> 
> On UCAV technologies, Taiwan’s military-run Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has produced a variety of UAVs, including designs for a stealthy UCAV, but has long suffered budgeting problems and a lack of support from the Taiwan military, which has pushed for the procurement of US-made UAVs.
> 
> Despite the report’s recommendations, the overall conclusions of the report are dire.
> 
> The PLA attained the operational capability to respond to a Taiwan contingency in 2007, surpassed Taiwan’s forces in quantity and quality in 2010, and continues working to secure decisive capabilities for a large-scale operation against Taiwan by 2020.
> 
> *“The expansive range of the PLA’s air defense missiles has already embraced Taiwan within a de facto air defense identification zone, and when the 5th generation fighters enter into service by 2020, the PRC [China] will achieve clear airpower superiority over Taiwan,” *said the report.
> 
> (...)- EDITED


----------



## a_majoor

As an interesting aside, the ROK has developed their own advanced weaponry, including a home built version of the "OCIW" combined rifle/grenade launcher (cancelled by the United States), the very advanced K2 Black Panther tank and the K-21 ICV made largely from composite materials. Perhaps Taiwan might consider shopping closer to home? 

As well, given the scale and scope of the threat (800+ ballistic missiles for AA/AD, for example), they might consider looking at different technologies such as the Aegis cruiser (which is also operated by the Japanese), ABM weapons ranging from the long range interceptors deployed in Alaska to the Israeli "Iron Dome" close in defense system. Participating in advanced technology developments like rail guns and high energy lasers, such as the ones now in advanced prototype development by the USN would also go a long way to protecting the island without being unduly provocative (you can't use the lasers to shoot back at China, for example).


----------



## MilEME09

Thucydides said:
			
		

> As an interesting aside, the ROK has developed their own advanced weaponry, including a home built version of the "OCIW" combined rifle/grenade launcher (cancelled by the United States), the very advanced K2 Black Panther tank and the K-21 ICV made largely from composite materials. Perhaps Taiwan might consider shopping closer to home?
> 
> As well, given the scale and scope of the threat (800+ ballistic missiles for AA/AD, for example), they might consider looking at different technologies such as the Aegis cruiser (which is also operated by the Japanese), ABM weapons ranging from the long range interceptors deployed in Alaska to the Israeli "Iron Dome" close in defense system. Participating in advanced technology developments like rail guns and high energy lasers, such as the ones now in advanced prototype development by the USN would also go a long way to protecting the island without being unduly provocative (you can't use the lasers to shoot back at China, for example).



Problem is many are afraid to sell to Taiwan as to not harm relations with China, not that Japan has much more to loose these days


----------



## a_majoor

True enough, but as China alienates her neighbours attitudes will start to change. The other possible wild card is Israel, since she has a high tech defense industry and a desire to tap new markets. Israel has the elements of a fully layered ABM system which Taiwan could consider as a way of neutralizing Chinese AA/AD weapons (everything from long range "Arrow" interceptors to "David's Sling" and "Iron Dome" for mid to short range interception).


----------



## CougarKing

A glimpse at China's WZ-10 attack helicopter...

*Military helicopter crashes in Shaanxi, both pilots suffer light injuries* 

(globaltimes.cn)
2014-3-4 


> The helicopter, a WZ-10, fell on farmland in Gushi town in Weinan around 2 pm. At 2:36 pm, the Weinan branch under the general team of the Shaanxi provincial public security firefighters received the call for help and sent about 10 firefighters to the scene, an official surnamed Wang from the branch's publicity department told the Global Times on Tuesday.
> 
> "When our fighters came to the scene, the two pilots had been saved by local residents and were sent to a nearby hospital," Wang said, adding that she did not have further details.
> <snipped>
> The news portal deduced that the pilots had conducted an emergency landing, and its special design helped ensure the survival of the crew members, sina.com said.


=====
*Chinese WZ-10 attack helo crashes* (janes.com)






attack helicopter that crashed in Shaanxi province on 4 March. (Xinhua News Agency)


----------



## CougarKing

China conducts an amphibious exercise including all its Type 71 LPDs: a preparations for a future amphibious assault on the Philippine island of Pagasa in the Spratlys?



> *China conducts full-scale island assault exercise with massive amphibious transport vessels*
> 
> http://eastasiaintel.com/china-conducts-full-scale-island-assault-exercise-with-massive-amphibious-transport-vessels/
> 
> For the first time, all of the PLA Navy’s three gigantic Type 071 Amphibious Transport Dock vessels were deployed last week in a large naval exercise in the tense South China Sea, simulating in full an island-taking assault.
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> =====
> 
> http://nosint.blogspot.com/2014/03/china-conducts-full-scale-island.html


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting _infographic_ from the _Wall Street Journal_ which shows China's reported spending in 2012 and 2013 and the estimates for 2014:






The article says:



> A quick glance tells you a few important things about China’s budget priorities:
> [o]The military, already a beneficiary of Beijing’s largesse, will get even more love this year.
> [o]Social spending isn’t far behind, in a nod to the rising expectations of China’s increasingly wealthy and educated population.
> [o]Affordable housing and the environment – two stated priorities of the Chinese government – saw spending fall last year. Beijing appears to want to change that.
> One big caveat to these numbers: China has changed the way it presents its spending on public security, one of the country’s biggest priorities amid rising public frustration over everything from pollution to the wealth gap to ethnic tension. In past years the number was even higher than defense spending. It isn’t clear exactly how the figure has changed.[/quote


----------



## FAL

I can't help but wonder if the spending on China's "defence" is to "defend" itself against a popular uprising. When enough poor people have had their noses rubbed in the fecal matter of the rich and told to like it, they tend to acquire an "I have nothing to lose, and you have everything to lose" mentality as happened in Cambodia. I used to wonder what would motivate a populace to murder every single educated person in a country that they could get their hands on.

Then I saw a recent documentary about the obnoxiously ostentatious behavior of Cambodia's rich people today, and I wondered if they would never learn from the lessons of the past. Even in Vietnam it made the news recently when one of the rich people's obnoxious law-flouting sons actually had to do some jail time or suffer some punishment for his dangerous driving of his expensive exotic car. It made the news because it was so unusual for the rich to ever have to be accountable.

In China, the ratio of increasingly discontented "little people" to privileged commie party members and their cronies is far greater than it was in Cambodia, I would imagine, by dint of sheer population.

While China rattles the saber over Taiwan, it is not paradise at home.


----------



## Journeyman

FAL said:
			
		

> ...... it made the news recently when one of the rich people's obnoxious law-flouting sons actually had to do some jail time or suffer some punishment for his dangerous driving of his expensive exotic car.


That was Bieber.


----------



## FAL

Nah, not Bieber. But, I think that "recently" may be more elastic for me than some. It was a few years back.


----------



## Edward Campbell

FAL said:
			
		

> Nah, not Bieber. But, I think that "recently" may be more elastic for me than some. It was a few years back.




I think you're thinking of Bo Guagua, Bo Xilai's _wastrel_ son. His quite conspicuous _lifestyle_, and that of others red princes and (and princesses) is a cause of some resentment. But I don't think that resentment translates into much _political_ dissatisfaction ~ no more, anyway, than what we detect in resentment towards the children of rich and powerful people in the West.

Some politicians, like _Supreme Leader_ Xi Jinping, have children who maintain low profiles and, when they do appear in public, are doing volunteer, disaster relief work ~ which, of course, does no go unnoticed.   

But, if I recall, Bo Guagua was tooling around Beijing in an expensive red sports car, squiring the daughter of the US Ambassador around to exclusive and very expensive clubs.


----------



## Hisoyaki

FAL said:
			
		

> I can't help but wonder if the spending on China's "defence" is to "defend" itself against a popular uprising. When enough poor people have had their noses rubbed in the fecal matter of the rich and told to like it, they tend to acquire an "I have nothing to lose, and you have everything to lose" mentality as happened in Cambodia. I used to wonder what would motivate a populace to murder every single educated person in a country that they could get their hands on.
> 
> Then I saw a recent documentary about the obnoxiously ostentatious behavior of Cambodia's rich people today, and I wondered if they would never learn from the lessons of the past. Even in Vietnam it made the news recently when one of the rich people's obnoxious law-flouting sons actually had to do some jail time or suffer some punishment for his dangerous driving of his expensive exotic car. It made the news because it was so unusual for the rich to ever have to be accountable.



The problem with this thesis is Norodom Sihanouk...Prior to the  coup in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouges never numbered more then 2000 fighters. It was only after he joined as figurehead that the movement gained in importance. 

Until then,the Left was ironically gathered under someone who was known for corruption and to use public funds for huge (and fairly useless) public displays. 

By comparaison, Son Ngoc Thanh's Khmer Serai had 8000 troops under his command in 1968.

 Inconspicuous display of wealth has been the norm throughout history. In Cambodia in particular, the tradition is that of god kings.  It's only in North America that we have an egalitarian culture. 

 There are polls in China that unlike the West, the Chinese are convinced that their country is on the rise economically speaking.If anything, the internet has given rise to nationalists. 

If the Cultural revolution could not end capitalist tendencies, then pretty much nothing will.

 I am certain that most people's instincts (both east and west) lie in following a hierarchy without thinking.Isn't God after all the ultimate expression of perfect government?  Most aren't interested in the details in politics and will bend the way of the winning party. As Mao once said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. 

For all these reasons,  I don't believe that the Chinese government is going to fall anytime soon.


----------



## Nemo888

The irony in this was so delicious, the last actual commies in China and how the regime is dealing with them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/world/asia/communism-is-the-goal-at-a-commune-but-chinese-officials-are-not-impressed.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

LINCANG, China — Members of this idyllic utopian commune tucked away in the mountains of southwest China share an agrarian life that would probably have delighted Chairman Mao: Every day they volunteer six hours to work the fields, feed their jointly owned chickens and prepare enough food to fill every belly in the community. The bounty of their harvest is divided equally and apparently without strife, part of a philosophy that emphasizes selflessness and egalitarian living over money and materialism.

“What we’re doing here is basically communism,” said Xue Feng, 57, the soft-spoken founder of Shengmin Chanyuan, or New Oasis for Life, whose 150 members include illiterate peasants and big-city corporate refugees. “People do what they can and get what they need.”

But Marxism doesn’t often look like that in modern-day China, and New Oasis has unnerved local officials in Yunnan, a lush semitropical province that borders Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar.

Months of official intimidation and acts of sabotage have destroyed New Oasis’s water and electrical supply and driven many residents away, emptying two of the group’s three communes in the province.


----------



## CougarKing

CCP princeling brats aside...

Isn't anyone surprised the PLA's own home-made Predator UAV copies haven't been used to take these guys out just yet?

Reuters



> *From his Pakistan hideout, Uighur leader vows revenge on China*
> 
> Reuters
> 
> DERA ISMAIL KHAN/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) -* Entrenched in secret mountain bases on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, Uighur fighters are gearing up for retribution against China to avenge the deaths of comrades in Beijing's crackdown on a separatist movement, their leader told Reuters.*
> 
> China, Pakistan's only major ally in the region, has long urged Islamabad to weed out what it says are militants from its western region of Xinjiang, who are holed up in a lawless tribal belt, home to a lethal mix of militant groups, including the Taliban and al Qaeda.
> 
> A mass stabbing at a train station in the Chinese city of Kunming two weeks ago, in which at least 29 people were killed, has put a new spotlight on the largely Muslim Uighur ethnic minority from Xinjiang, where Beijing says armed groups seek to establish an independent state called East Turkestan.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> CCP princeling brats aside...
> 
> Isn't anyone surprised the PLA's own home-made Predator UAV copies haven't been used to take these guys out just yet?
> 
> Reuters




I can think of a number of reasons why China might eschew drone strikes:

     1. Their drones are as capable as we might think;

     2. They are allowing their _soft power_ offensive in Pakistan (and elsewhere) to dictate policy and it is useful propaganda to say, "See!?! We don't kill innocent civilians with drones."

     3. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' they, the Chinese, are happy to execute a few Uighurs every now and again, but they cannot be bothered chasing them down in some remote mountain hideaways; or

     4. They want to give the Uighurs time and space to plan and launch a real, dirty _offensive_ which China can, then, _punish_ brutally and massively.

Remember the old _insurgent_ manual that said that they would try to provoke the "forces of order" into more and more brutal acts of repression? The aim was, still is, to shift poplar opinion away from the "forces of order" and towards the insurgents because the latter are more sympathetic. The Chinese helped write that book. It may be that they _*want*_ the Uighurs to commit more and more and worse and worse atrocities because that will, eventually, _excuse_ a Chinese campaign that will kill tens of thousands of young Uighur men and drive the others out of China.


----------



## Rifleman62

Sideline:

Macau....!!!! China
                                    
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=uI2kO4qTi80&vq=medium


----------



## CougarKing

Rifleman62 said:
			
		

> Sideline:
> 
> Macau....!!!! China
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=uI2kO4qTi80&vq=medium



Chinese people call Macau "Ao Men" (澳门) in Mandarin. 

A couple of great places to visit there are the Macau Grand Prix museum and the Macau maritime museum, not to mention the former Portuguese forts.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I n Macau you rally, really have to see this: the stroll in the Lisboa Hotel complex. It goes on, day and night, with, as far as I can tell, the active consent and support of the hotel. (Which is in contrast to others like Wynne, MGM Grand, etc.) Some, a few, speak English but most a girls from mainland China who speak only one or two Chinese languages/dialects.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This report, from BCS News indicates that the US is trying some _soft power_/diplomacy of its own.

Mrs Obama is a bit more of a _rock star_ than were either Mrs Clinton or Mrs Bush and I expect the Chinese to "like" her.


----------



## CougarKing

China's interest in the Ukraine:



> *Inside China: Why Putin’s intervention in Ukraine is bad news for China*
> Thursday, March 13, 2014
> 
> Washington Times
> 
> On March 1, two tugboats hurriedly towed a nearly completed behemoth out of Ukraine’s Feodosiya shipyard on the Crimean Peninsula. It was loaded quickly onto a huge cargo ship that set sail to China.
> 
> The behemoth was the second of four Zubr-class air-cushioned landing craft, or LCAC, ordered by the Chinese navy from former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych's government. The vessel is the world’s largest hovercraft, and is essential for amphibious assault landings along beaches and coastlines.
> 
> *The Ukrainian interim government’s rapid delivery of the unfinished LCAC, without conducting sea trials, was aimed at avoiding a potential freeze on arms transfers to China if Russian or pro-Russian forces took over Crimea.*
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> There are two reasons why China wants so many weapons from Ukraine. First, the arms are cheap, often costing Beijing a fraction of what it would have to pay for similar systems from Russia, China’s other main source of arms imports.
> 
> Second, and more important, China can get Soviet- or Russian-designed advanced weapons without Moscow complaining that Beijing is violating Russian intellectual property rights.
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> In recent years, Russia has become increasingly perturbed by Beijing’s possession of its military technologies obtained through Ukraine. In 2011, Ukrainian journalist Anna Babinets wrote that “Russia’s prime goal is to get rid of Ukraine as an arms dealer so that she can increase the price of her own military equipment and keep supplying it to Asia and Africa, without fear of competition from Ukraine.”
> 
> *That is why Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine, especially the defense industry-heavy Crimea, is bad news for China.
> 
> For Beijing, a loophole in the low-cost, easy-access arms market may soon be sealed by the Russians.
> *
> ====


----------



## CougarKing

Dambisa Moyo's recent book Winner Take all: China's Race for Resources and what it means for the World, which is also about China's thirst for resources to feed its growing economy and energy needs, also comes to mind with this article below.

National Post



> *Is China’s hunger for the globe’s natural resources benign or nefarious?*
> 
> Excerpt:
> 
> Q The book’s title ‘By All Means Necessary’ gives the impression that China will employ all necessary tools to secure resources. Is that the implication?
> 
> A *It’s not ‘by all means possible,’ but ‘by all means necessary,’ which is different. The title is a nod to the fact this is not just about trade or investment or political relation or military deployment. It is about different tools China uses to secure its economy. *The United States, by the same logic, has used all means necessary to secure its natural resources.
> 
> Q What are the key takeaways from the book?
> 
> A Three big takeaways. *First, China’s resource quest is far less coordinated and controlled then people believe. One side says ‘it is nefarious, and therefore bad.’ Others say, ‘the Chinese are not scheming, therefore it is fine.’ *The reality is that it’s not nefarious, but it can still be consequential in good and bad ways.
> *
> The second is that China at home sets the terms for China abroad. When Chinese companies aren’t required to meet high environmental standards at home, they are not going to be raising the bar when they operate abroad.*
> 
> *The third big takeaway is the counterpoint to the second [point]. The international systems can be very powerful in shaping, and even altering, Chinese behaviour. The international oil trading system has weathered any Chinese desire for bilateral trade.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

The newest addition to China's surface fleet:

*China commissions new guided missile destroyer* 








> Chinese Navy officers and soldiers participate in the hand-over ceremony of warship "Kunming" at the port of Jiangnan Shipyard (Group) CO., Ltd in Shanghai, east China, March 21, 2014. Guided missile destroyer "Kunming", with hull number 172, was officially delivered and commissioned to the People's Liberation Army Navy on Friday. (Xinhua/Zha Chunming)


source: xinhuanet.com



> *The new DDG is the successor to China’s Type 052C DDGs*. It displaces between 6,000 and 7,000 tons, and is equipped with a new 130 mm main gun. The Type 052D also boasts Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar system. It is often compared, perhaps inappropriately, to the much heavier Arleigh Burke-class DDGs and the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers.


source: thediplomat.com



> *Type 052D destroyer is an improved version of the Type 052C* with 64 Cell Vertical Missile Launch Systems (VLS) for surface to air missiles.


source: navyrecognition.com

_Here’s a short YouTube video of the new DDG:_

YouTube: China's MOST ADVANCED 052D Destroyer rival to US Navy Arleigh Burke Destroyer


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese President Xi in Europe:

Defense News



> *France, China Make Deals, Diplomacy During Xi Visit*
> 
> Mar. 27, 2014 - 12:02PM   |   By PIERRE TRAN
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> French leaders hope the visit will help boost business ties with China, while Beijing sees Paris as an “acceptable friend” in international political crises such as Syria and Ukraine, website latribune.fr reported.
> 
> China’s abstaining from a US motion in the UN against Russia because of the Ukraine crisis was a distancing by Beijing from its ally Moscow, latribune said.
> 
> *Western nations are banned from selling arms to China but France eagerly seeks commercial contracts.* President François Hollande said March 26 he wishes to see a re-balancing of trade relations with the Asian nation, Agence France-Presse reported.
> 
> *The state visit has boosted business for Airbus, with announcements of a commitment for 70 airliners, comprising 43 narrow-body A320s and 27 wide-body A330s.* Chinese authorities had previously ordered the A330s but suspended the deal in retaliation against a European plan to tax airlines on carbon dioxide emissions in an anti-pollution effort.
> 
> *China will also extend for 10 years the local assembly of A320s at the Tianjin plant, while the Airbus Helicopter unit received a pledge for 1,000 of the EC175s built in a Chinese joint venture with the AVIC company.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Unrest in Hong Kong yet again. 



> *Hong Kong democracy activists go on hunger strike for universal suffrage*
> 
> By: Agence France-Presse
> 
> HONG KONG -- More than a dozen Hong Kong democracy activists, including five lawmakers, said they were starting a hunger strike Friday as they step up their campaign for universal suffrage.
> 
> *Some 15 protesters began the action as fears grow that Beijing will renege on promises to implement genuine political reform in the semi-autonomous southern Chinese city.*
> 
> "True universal suffrage! We will fight to the end!" chanted participants, who had pitched tents to hold their protest in the financial district of Central.
> 
> "We believe that the people of Hong Kong have to come out loud and clear in terms of public opinion and social movement to fight for universal suffrage," lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan, and organizer of the hunger strike, told AFP.
> 
> *China has promised that the city, whose current chief executive is appointed by a pro-Beijing committee, will see a transition to universal suffrage by 2017.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

China's biggest political scandal since the downfall of Bo Xilai:

From Reuters



> *FIGHTING CORRUPTION IN CHINA | Beijing seizes $14.5-billion from ex-security exec's circle - report*
> By:  Reuters
> March 30, 2014 3:11 PM
> 
> BEIJING - Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar *Zhou Yongkang*, who is at the center of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said.
> 
> *More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who have been briefed on the investigation, told Reuters.*
> 
> The sheer size of the asset seizures and the scale of the investigations into the people around Zhou - both unreported until now - make the corruption probe unprecedented in modern China and would appear to show that President Xi Jinping is tackling graft at the highest levels.
> 
> *But it may also be driven partly by political payback after Zhou angered leaders such as Xi by opposing the ouster of former high-flying politician Bo Xilai, who was jailed for life in September for corruption and abuse of power.*
> 
> Zhou, 71, has been under virtual house arrest since authorities began formally investigating him late last year. He is the most senior Chinese politician to be ensnared in a corruption investigation since the Communist Party swept to power in 1949.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China's biggest political scandal since the downfall of Bo Xilai:
> 
> From Reuters




And it may be bigger. It is, I am about 99% sure, quite unprecedented to go after retired Politburo Standing Committee members. They have been, until now, "bomb proof." That Xi is doing so seems to me to require more than just a 'hate' because Zhou supported Bo. If it is part of a larger campaign to actually address corruption then I expect "interesting times," ahead, as an old saying suggests.


----------



## CougarKing

The latest incident in the South China Sea involving the Philippines and China, as reported last week:



> *Philippine supply ship evades Chinese blockade*
> quote:
> 
> SECOND THOMAS SHOAL (AP) — A Philippine government ship slipped past a Chinese coast guard blockade Saturday and brought food and fresh troops to a marooned navy ship used as a base by Filipino troops to bolster the country's territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Associated Press



(Photos below courtesy of the _BBC_ and the _Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper_)

Philippine Marines on the grounded transport taunt a Chinese Coast Guard vessel trying to blockade their supply ship:







_The Chinese crew instructed the Filipinos to turn away_











_Philippine crew members flashed peace signs at the Chinese vessel_






_The Philippine supply ship slipped past the Chinese and reached their troops on a rusty beached vessel_






_These Philippine marines have been stationed aboard the BRP Sierra Madre for the last five months_

*China-Philippines navy spat captured on camera (BBC link)*


----------



## a_majoor

Evidently no everyone is enthraled by the idea of free trade or more links with China:

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/print/404107.htm



> *500,000 rally at Presidential Office: protesters*
> Monday, March 31, 2014
> By Lauly Li ,The China Post
> 
> TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Hundreds of thousands of student-led protesters dressed in black gathered along Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office in a protest over President Ma Ying-jeou and the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement.
> Student activist Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) claimed over 500,000 people attended the rally, while protesters outside of the Legislative Yuan claimed that they numbered over 700,000 people. The National Police Agency (NPA), however, estimated the number of protesters to be 116,000.
> 
> During the rally, thousands of people shouted “reject the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement, defend democracy,” and “legislate the bill first then deliberate the agreement.”
> 
> The Rally is a Start: Linv
> 
> While addressing the crowds at Ketagalan Boulevard, Lin said the demonstration yesterday was not an end but a start, noting that people should exchange contact information with the person standing next to them and arrange working rosters so people can take turn to go to the Legislative Yuan.
> 
> Lin said the reason why the protesters occupied the Legislative Yuan was because the administration has lost its legitimacy.
> 
> Lin reiterated the protesters' four demands of the Ma administration, which are rejection of the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement, introduction of the Bill on Pacts between Taiwan and China — a draft bill proposed to supervise the signing of agreements with China — urging the government to hold a “public constitutional meeting,” and demanding all lawmakers listen and stand by people's side.
> 
> The rally has been seen as a protest of Ma's press conference on Saturday, where Ma made remarks that protesters described as an “off-the-point” response to their demands.
> 
> On Saturday, Ma said that the government cannot retract the agreement. He said, however, that the ruling party is willing to review the agreement article-by-article in cross-committee deliberations at the Legislative Yuan.
> 
> The student activists said Ma failed to understand their demands despite their almost two weeks of protests.
> 
> Around 4:20 p.m., Lin's co-leader Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷) arrived at the Presidential Office from the Legislative Yuan. Chen said that Ma has not responded to the protester's “core” demands at all.
> 
> Not Refusing Interactions with China: Chen
> 
> “We are not saying that we refuse to interact with China, but we demand ... that all Taiwanese can participate in the decision-making process on how to interact with China,” Chen said.
> 
> “The demonstration today is not just about being against the service trade pact, it is a process in which people strengthen the value of democracy,” Chen stressed.
> 
> Lin said that too many people have been focusing on him and Chen, noting that the demonstration does not “belong” to either of them, but to all the students and people participating in the protest. “People are the leader of this demonstration, and the Ma administration needed to be led,” Lin said.
> 
> Lin urged President Ma to face the protesters, offer a direct response and make specific promises to people.
> 
> The mass rally ended at 7:45 p.m., and most of the protesters had left the area by 8 p.m.
> 
> Hundreds of student activists have been occupying the Assembly Hall of the Legislative Yuan since March 18 in protest of Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Chang Ching-chung's (張慶忠) March 17 decision to cut short the deliberation of the service trade pact, sending it straight to the Yuan Sitting.
> 
> Over 2,000 protesters attempted to occupy the Executive Yuan on March 23, but were evicted by riot police on the premier's orders.
> 
> The Taipei City Police Department Zhongzheng First Precinct said it received intelligence regarding threats to Lin and Chen, noting that it immediately dispatched police officers to protect Chen and Lin.


----------



## CougarKing

PLA General Gu Junshan's corruption scandal in the news again...

From REUTERS:



> *Disgraced China military officer sold ‘hundreds’ of posts
> -sources*
> By BENJAMIN KANG LIM and BEN BLANCHARD, Reuters
> 
> April 2, 2014 3:47am
> 
> BEIJING - A disgraced senior Chinese army officer is accused of selling hundreds of military positions, raking in millions of dollars, sources with ties to the leadership or military told Reuters, in what is likely China's biggest military scandal in two decades.
> 
> In a renewed campaign on graft, Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to go after both powerful "tigers" and lowly "flies", warning that the issue is so severe it threatens the ruling Communist Party's survival.
> 
> *Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, 57, who was sacked as deputy logistics chief of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 2012, has been charged with corruption, taking bribes, misuse of public funds and abuse of power, state news agency Xinhua said late on Monday in a brief report without giving details. He will be tried by a military court, it added.*
> 
> The charges signal the determination of Xi, who has repeatedly reminded the PLA to be loyal to the Party, to pursue wrongdoing in the upper ranks of the military, which wields considerable influence in leadership circles.
> 
> The case could overshadow what had been China's most dramatic military scandal, a vast smuggling ring uncovered in the late 1990s in the coastal city of Xiamen involving both the military and government officials. The ringleader, Lai Changxing, was extradited from Canada and jailed for life in 2012.
> 
> *
> Three sources with ties to the leadership or military, speaking on condition of anonymity, said one of the key crimes Gu is suspected of is selling promotions.
> 
> "Gu sold hundreds of positions," one source with leadership and military ties told Reuters.*
> 
> Not all officers of the 2.3 million-strong PLA promoted in recent years paid bribes.
> 
> (...EDITED)



And more about widespread corruption in the PLA:

Military.com



> *Chinese Military Inspectors Find Irregularities*
> 
> BEIJING -- Inspectors have uncovered widespread irregularities and suspected corruption among military units based around Beijing, Chinas Defense Ministry said Tuesday, a sign that a widening anti-graft campaign that is turning to the sprawling 2.3 million-member Peoples Liberation Army.
> 
> *The ministry said in a statement that the inspections in the Beijing and Jinan Military Regions were carried out directly under the authority of the Central Military Commission, headed by president and ruling Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
> 
> It said multiple leads were obtained concerning problems with the handling of promotions, discipline among officers, land transfers, the construction and allocation of buildings and military medical services.*
> 
> The ministry said those cases would be further investigated and publicized for their deterrent effect," raising the likelihood that offenders would be brought before military courts.
> 
> The announcement said the inspections were carried out between Dec. 10 and March 13, with the initial results presented at a meeting last Thursday.
> 
> The PLA has long been dogged by a culture of bribery, corruption and power abuse. Promotions and plum assignments are sometimes secured by providing payments or favors to higher ranking officers and military assets, especially land, used for private economic benefit.
> 
> Officers enjoy official vehicles, housing and generous benefits in return for pledging their loyal to the ruling party, rather than to the Chinese state.
> 
> The son of a leading Chinese general, Xi is seen as commanding greater authority with the armed forces than either of his two predecessors, although he risks losing some of that support if he comes down too hard on military privileges.
> 
> *On Monday, the military said it was charging Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan with embezzlement, bribery, misuse of state funds and abuse of power. Gu had been deputy head of the Peoples Liberation Armys General Logistics Department, a position offering him powers over procurement and contracts with which to allegedly amass a vast fortune.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Whats the penalty if these crimes are proven ?


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Whats the penalty if these crimes are proven ?



Past corrupt officials have been sentenced to harsh prison terms, with some executions occurring as well.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the update below, the PRC's president Xi Jinping made it clear that he still stands for a one party system for China.

I would beg to differ with him because Taiwan has a flourishing multiparty system and is a microcosm for what the rest of China might look like one day if they introduced democratic reforms.

Reuters



> *Xi says multi-party system didn't work for China*
> 
> quote:
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - *China experimented in the past with various political systems, including multi-party democracy, but it did not work, President Xi Jinping said during a visit to Europe, warning that copying foreign political or development models could be catastrophic.*
> 
> China's constitution enshrines the Communist Party's long-term "leading" role in government, though it allows the existence of various other political parties under what is calls a "multi-party cooperation system". But all are subservient to the Communist Party.
> 
> Activists who call for pluralism are regularly jailed and criticism of China's one-party, authoritarian system silenced.
> 
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *
> Because of its unique historical and social conditions, China could not copy a political system or development model from other countries "because it would not fit us and it might even lead to catastrophic consequences", Xi added.
> 
> "The fruit may look the same, but the taste is quite different," he said.*
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Xi's ascendancy in a once-in-a-decade generational leadership transition had given many Chinese hope for political reform, mainly due to his folksy style and the legacy of his father, Xi Zhongxun, a former reformist vice-premier.
> 
> *But since he assumed office, the party has detained or jailed dozens of dissidents, including anti-corruption activist Xu Zhiyong and ethnic Uighur professor Ilham Tohti.
> 
> Reinforcing the message that there will be no liberalization under Xi, the ruling Communist Party's influential weekly journal Qiushi (Seeking Truth)* wrote in its latest issue that there was no such thing as "universal values", adding that China's political system should not be underestimated.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Neither Beijing nor Tokyo really want war, but yet both sides continue to push the Senkakus/Diaoyus sovereignty issue. 

South China Morning Post



> *Chances of war between China and Japan increasing, says ex-PLA officer Luo Yuan*
> 
> Retired PLA general says China is ready and rejects claims of Japanese combat superiority, although some analysts are not convinced
> 
> A retired People's Liberation Army senior officer says a war with Japan over territorial disputes is becoming increasingly likely and that China is more than capable of defending itself.
> 
> *Other military experts are not convinced the PLA would win any future conflict, despite China's military build-up and modernisation.*
> 
> Some cite the PLA's lack of battle experience as well as technological weaknesses in certain areas, aircraft engines for example, that could hinder the PLA's fighting capability.
> 
> China and Japan moved closer to armed conflict after Beijing established its first air defence identification zone last November in the East China Sea to include the disputed Diaoyu islands, known as the Senkakus in Japan, Major General Luo Yuan said.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

For information ... reproduced, without comment, under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _China Business Watch_:

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-new-spaceport-is-about-to-launch-its-biggest-rocket-yet-2014-4


> China's New Spaceport Is About To Launch Its Biggest Rocket Yet
> 
> LEONARD DAVID, SPACE.COM
> 
> China's huge new rocket is headed toward its maiden flight from the country's soon-to-be-complete, brand-new launch center on Hainan Island, at the southern tip of China, far from the nation's mainland.
> The combination of the planned rocket, called the Long March 5 — and its derivatives — matched with the Wenchang Launch Center, China's new sprawling spaceport, underscores the country's shifting space gears. It enables China's space station ambitions, while also boosting the nation's plans for interplanetary exploration, as well as accomplishing human treks to the moon.
> 
> The new launch facility is extremely important to the future of China's space program, said Gregory Kulacki, senior analyst and China project manager for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), based in Cambridge, Mass. [See photos of China's planned space station]
> 
> "Not only because of the significantly increased capacity of the new series of wider-bodied rockets that will be launched from there, but because of the changes in Chinese space culture the new facility represents," Kulacki told Space.com.
> 
> Kulacki has lived and worked in China for the better part of the last 25 years, facilitating exchanges between academic, governmental and professional organizations in both countries.
> 
> Blue water spaceport
> 
> In a post last year on the UCS's "All Things Nuclear — Insights on Science and Security" website, Kulacki took a hard look at China’s new blue water spaceport. He said that China's existing spaceports were constructed during a more defensive era when outer space was perceived as the ultimate high ground of the Cold War.
> 
> "While some observers may continue to see space as an arena for great power competition, many Chinese space professionals hope to expand international cooperation and collaboration," Kulacki wrote.
> 
> "Diverse civil, scientific and commercial space aspirations occupy the imaginations of China's young and rapidly growing space community," Kulacki added. "Military competition remains important, but it may no longer be paramount. Plans for the new spaceport in Hainan embody this change."
> 
> China's space center
> 
> Kulacki wrote that the island, occasionally referred to as "China’s Hawaii," is well-suited for a space port.
> 
> "The facility is being built on the relatively undeveloped northeastern corner of the island in the municipality of Wenchang," Kulacki said. "But instead of preserving or reinforcing the launch site's relative isolation, the city planners are working hard to integrate the space port into the island's tourist infrastructure."
> 
> In addition to the island's launch facilities, the spaceport will be surrounded by 37 different development projects, Kulacki said, including a space-related theme park.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "Roads and other supporting infrastructure are being designed to accommodate two populations," Kulacki said. "The space professionals who will be living and working at what appears to be China's equivalent of the Kennedy Space Center, and affluent Chinese looking to take in a space launch while enjoying a vacation at the beach."
> 
> Final piece of the puzzle
> 
> China's preparations for the Long March 5's first flight spotlights the difficulty of space engineering as evidenced by its numerous delays, said Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
> 
> “Their willingness to keep at it is also indicative of China’s persistence and will to be an enduring space power,” Johnson-Freese told Space.com. "Having an operational heavy lift launch vehicle is perhaps the most important final piece of the puzzle of hardware requirements necessary to achieve their three-part human spaceflight program laid out in 1993 … as without it they are unable to launch the large space station that has always been the ultimate programmatic goal.”
> 
> Johnson-Freese added that it also then gives China options for the future, such as interplanetary space travel, and a human mission to the moon.
> 
> Pushing up against deadlines
> 
> "The launch of the Long March 5 series will open new possibilities for China's space program," said Dean Cheng, a research fellow on Chinese political and security affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. "In the first place, it will allow for the orbiting of the Tiangong-2 spacelab, which is slated to go up in 2015." [Read more about China's space program]
> 
> The booster is also going to be an essential vehicle for the eventual Chinese space station, sometimes referred to as Tiangong-3, Cheng told Space.com. It will also be necessary for the next generation of Chinese all-weather, high-resolution observation satellites, which are believed to be much larger than the Ziyuan series, he said.
> 
> Cheng noted that, given the projected launch in 2015 of the Tiangong-2 and China's 2020 space station, the Long March 5 development timeframe is pushing up against deadlines.
> 
> Long March 5 is the largest rocket that China has ever built, with a 5.2-meter diameter. "That poses significant challenges to China’s manufacturing capability, especially as this is being built at a new production site," Cheng said.
> 
> "Roads and other supporting infrastructure are being designed to accommodate two populations," Kulacki said. "The space professionals who will be living and working at what appears to be China's equivalent of the Kennedy Space Center, and affluent Chinese looking to take in a space launch while enjoying a vacation at the beach."
> 
> Tyranny of their railroads
> 
> Regarding China's new launch site, Cheng said it frees China's space program from the tyranny of their railroads: "Now, launch vehicles will no longer be limited by the curvature of rail lines and width of train tunnels."
> Cheng added that the launch complex being located on Hainan Island is another reason for China’s focus on the South China Sea.
> 
> Hainan is beginning to look like the Soviet Kola Peninsula during the Cold War, Cheng said, given major naval facilities, including submarine pens dug into cliff sides, as well as a carrier facility and air bases, and now a space launch facility.
> 
> "China's intention of dominating the South China Sea, the source of so much recent tension, is likely driven in part by the desire to keep foreign militaries far away from this densely militarized territory," Cheng said.
> 
> _Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's new book "Mission to Mars – My Vision for Space Exploration" published by National Geographic. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article onSpace.com._


----------



## a_majoor

Stepping up the fight against corruption is something we should applauded as well, since a more transparent and open China is one we can deal with more easily as well:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-02/the-real-end-of-china-s-one-child-policy



> *The Real End of China's One-Child Policy*
> 
> Adam Minter
> Apr 2, 2014 10:01 AM EDT
> 
> In January, superstar Chinese film director Zhang Yimou was fined the equivalent of $1.24 million for having three children in excess of the country’s strict, so-called “one-child” family planning standards. It was a significant, possibly record fine, meant in theory to compensate the state for the social and material costs associated with those pesky, extra three lives.
> 
> This raises an interesting question: What happens to Zhang Yimou’s $1.24 million? Or more importantly, what's happened to the estimated 2 trillion yuan ($320 billion) in social maintenance fees that millions of other Chinese parents have paid since 1980, according to one study? On Thursday, a court in Guangzhou ruled that the Family Planning Commission of Guangdong Province -- China’s most populous -- must disclose the specifics of its own data within 15 days.
> 
> This isn't the kind of information such bodies are eager to reveal, and Guangdong's commission strongly fought the lawsuit demanding that they come clean. They have good reason to resist greater transparency. Last year, for example, Guangdong’s Family Planning Commission claimed to have collected 1.456 billion yuan ($235 million) in “social compensation fees." The province’s Department of Finance, on the other hand, reported that collections amounted to 2.613 billion yuan ($421 million).
> 
> What accounts for the difference? Specifics will have to wait until the Family Planning Commission gets around to disclosing details. But the issues are already well-known in China, where such bodies employ more than 500,000 people, and often serve as critical revenue generators for cash-strapped poorer provinces.(Local governments enjoy wide latitude in assessing fines, and generally do so on the basis of income.)
> 
> The problem, according to Chinese media reports, is that quite a bit of that revenue doesn't seem to land in government treasuries. In rural Yunnan Province, for example, audits suggest that in one county as little as 10.18% of social compensation fees flowed into government coffers. In Chongqing, 68 million yuan ($11 million) worth of social planning fees failed to find their way to the treasury.
> 
> Needless to say, the stench of corruption hangs heavy over such discrepancies. In Yunnan, officials were found to be using social maintenance fees to pay for personal expenses, including medical bills. In some regions, local authorities allow officials who collect the fees to keep a certain percentage of them. The situation -- whereby officials are incentivized to hunt down children for their revenue-generating potential -- is both untenable and perverse.
> 
> It is also entirely contrary to China’s family planning goals under President Xi Jinping who has transformed the “one child” policy to allow Chinese parents to have second children under certain circumstances. The need is pressing: Three decades of population control has left China with a rapidly aging population and not enough young workers to support them. Under such circumstances, it’s counter-productive (as well as deeply unpopular) to allow thousands of bureaucrats to roam China in search of family planning violations.
> 
> Indeed, as early as March 2013 -- just a few months into Xi’s term -- he began to undermine the power of China’s national Family Planning and Population Commission by merging it with the Health Ministry and stripping it of several traditional responsibilities. Still, in contemporary China, nothing signals the end of a government career -- even a powerful one -- quite like a full public accounting of one’s finances. After operating for decades in the darkness, China's family-planning agencies are about to learn how much harder it is to work out in the open.
> 
> (Adam Minter is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View based in Shanghai and the author of "Junkyard Planet," a book on the global recycling industry. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamMinter.)
> 
> To contact the writer of this article:
> Adam Minter at shanghaiscrap@gmail.com
> 
> To contact the editor responsible for this article:
> Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net


----------



## Edward Campbell

We are, generally, aware of the fact that California (population 38 million), for example, has the 8th largest economy in the world ~ on a par with Canada (pop 35 million) and Italy (pop 60 million). What about China, the third largest economy in the world?

_The Economist_ has produced this informative _inforgraphic_ showing how China's individual provinces compare, in GDP, to various countries:





Source: _The Economist_ Intelligence Unit


----------



## CougarKing

China's plans to create a world-class shipbuilding industry hit a snag.

Reuters



> *Deadbeat Chinese shipyards stick banks with default bill*
> Reuters
> By Pete Sweeney
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese banks are stuck in a lose-lose legal battle between domestic shipyards and foreign buyers over billions of dollars in refund guarantees that are supposed to be paid out if shipbuilders fail to deliver on time.
> 
> *One in three ships ordered from Chinese builders was behind schedule in 2013, according to data from Clarksons Research, a UK-based shipping intelligence firm. Although that was an improvement from 36 percent a year earlier, it was well behind rival South Korea, where shipyards routinely delivered ahead of schedule the same year.*
> 
> That means Chinese banks may be on the hook to pay large sums to buyers if the yards can't come through per contract, with little hope of recouping the cash from the yards. China is the world's biggest shipbuilder, with $37 billion in new orders received last year alone. Buyers pay as much as 80 percent of the purchase price upfront.
> 
> *Chinese bankers rushed to finance shipbuilding after the 2008 global financial crisis as Beijing pushed easy credit and tax incentives to lift the industry and sustain industrial employment levels in the face of collapsing exports.*
> 
> *Fees generated by offering such guarantees looked like easy money until massive oversupply and falling demand started taking a toll on the yards around 2010. *Shipyards fell behind schedule and buyers demanded their money back. But behind or not, the builders, keen to keep orders on the books and prepaid money in their pockets, have submitted injunctions against banks in Chinese courts to prevent them from paying out.
> 
> *"China's ambitions to take over South Korea as the top major shipbuilder meant that all the banks were encouraged to open up their wallets and lend money to the shipbuilders without making thorough due diligence,"* said AKM Ismail, former finance director for Dongfang Shipyard, the first Chinese shipyard to be listed on London's AIM Stock Exchange in 2011.
> 
> Since ships cost millions of dollars and can take years to deliver, a shipbuilder generally asks for part of the purchase price upfront to cover material and labor costs. Buyers normally obtain a refund guarantee from a bank to assure their money is returned if the yard defaults, and the yard pays the bank's fee for the service.
> 
> (....EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Stepping up the fight against corruption is something we should applauded as well, since a more transparent and open China is one we can deal with more easily as well:



Speaking of which: Pres. Xi does a little "house-cleaning" ...

From the New Yorker



> April 2, 2014
> 
> *China’s Fifteen-Billion-Dollar Purge*
> Posted by Evan Osnos
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> This is, in effect, what we’re seeing in China today, and the question is what kind of political culture the purge will leave behind.
> 
> 
> *In less than two years, the Chinese government has brought low one of its most powerful figures: the former oilman and security hawk Zhou Yongkang.* Zhou was not the Vice-President, but, as recently as the beginning of 2012, he was “arguably the most powerful man in China,” as the Financial Times put it. Born in a village of beet farmers, he rose through the ranks of the China National Petroleum Corporation and reached the highest levels of the Communist Party: the Standing Committee of the Politburo, where he gained control of domestic security. He was responsible for a vast apparatus dedicated to spying on China’s citizens and putting down protests, and he enjoyed a larger budget than that of the military. (As a result, in the words of the F.T., “his trove of compromising secret files on influential people drew comparisons to another American: J. Edgar Hoover.”)
> 
> But today Zhou is poised to become the most senior official to be removed on corruption charges since the birth of the People’s Republic, in 1949. After months of rumors, the purported details of Zhou’s collapsing empire have been widely published in recent days, a sign that the government is preparing to make his arrest public. According to various reports, at least ten of Zhou’s relatives have been detained, included his brother, his wife, and his son. His son’s wife, a Chinese-American named Fiona Huang Wan, who once co-produced a Chinese television series called “Police Story,” has been unreachable since October, her mother told a reporter.
> 
> *The purge has extended to offices that were once out of the reach of ordinary anti-corruption campaigns, reportedly encompassing Jiang Jiemin, formerly the chairman of both the state energy giant PetroChina and its parent, China National Petroleum Corporation, and Li Dongsheng, a propagandist turned vice-minister of public security. *Li was a senior official in the state television system, where, the F.T. noted, his duties reportedly included introducing senior Party leaders “to attractive young female reporters and anchors from the station.” (Zhou is married to a former television host.)
> 
> *In all, more than three hundred relatives, allies, and associates have been detained in the past four months, according to Reuters. *Investigators have frozen bank accounts; seized securities, jewels, and gold bullion; and “confiscated about three hundred apartments and villas, antiques and contemporary paintings and more than sixty vehicles.” Even by the standards of Chinese-élite politics, the haul is impressive; Reuters reports that the seized assets have a combined value of at least ninety billion yuan—fifteen billion U.S. dollars. There is much that we still don’t know about these assets—how many of them are held by businesses, for instance, and which are tied directly to the Zhou family—but it’s worth pausing on the fact that a group of Chinese civil servants and their associates seem to have accrued a nest egg that is somewhat larger than the gross national product of Albania.
> 
> Now on to the questions: Why take Zhou down now? *For President Xi Jinping, Zhou’s downfall serves both practical and strategic purposes. *The Zhou network runs powerful entities, including oil, gas, and security, and Xi’s maneuver means that he can shore up his authority by replacing Zhou’s allies with his own loyalists, as well as scare low-ranking fence-sitters into something closer to coöperation.
> 
> On Monday, in a parallel case,* Xi’s government charged Lieutenant General Gu Junshan with bribery, embezzlement, misuse of state funds, and abuse of power in what Jonathan Ansfield, of the Times, says “may be the biggest corruption scandal to engulf the Chinese military.”* In recent years, it has become an open secret that the People’s Liberation Army is riddled with bribery, corruption, and for-sale jobs. General Gu, who was the deputy chief of the Army’s logistics department—a position that gave him sweeping control over procurement in the world’s largest army—was said to be *one of the most diligent practitioners of the buying and selling of rank*. When investigators raided his home village, they needed four trucks to cart off his baubles, which reportedly included a gold statue of Chairman Mao. For a President who has vowed repeatedly to give China a more powerful military presence in the world, an army racked by corruption was another practical problem that needed to be solved.
> 
> Strategically, *Zhou and Gu are among the largest targets on the block; if Xi is going to take down anyone in his anti-corruption drive, he gains the most authority by going after the biggest names.* By confronting high-ranking “tigers,” as he calls them, he hopes to put a symbolic face on a campaign that has also resulted in the detention of tens of thousands of low-ranking “flies.”
> 
> Will this work? By highlighting spectacular acts of kleptocracy, doesn’t the Chinese President run the risk of outraging the public more than satisfying it?* The answer, of course, is yes, which underscores the radical gamble at the heart of Xi’s bid to restore the credibility of the Communist Party in the eyes of Chinese citizens.
> *
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Isn't the writer of this article pretty much just reiterating Gordon Chang's The Coming Collapse of China?



> *The China Superpower Hoax*
> 
> Huffington Post
> 
> China must have the best public relations maestros in the world. How else would a country with a lower per capita income than Iran, Mexico and Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation, endemic corruption, jails stuffed with dissenters, and a dictatorship, besides, be hailed by so many as the next global superpower?
> 
> Certainly China is big -- 1.3 billion people big, a fifth of the global population. As Forbes' columnist John Lee has written, China has long been the place for the world's biggest anything: the Great Wall, the 2008 Olympics, Tiananmen Square, the South China Mall in Dongguan, dams, consumption of cement and production of automobiles; most recently, China even had the world's biggest traffic jam -- an incredible 60 miles long -- which lasted a month and during which drivers were stuck in their cars for days at a time.
> 
> (...SNIPPED/EDITED)
> 
> *
> Unfortunately, the hype ignores a starker reality -- that China is barely holding it together.* Contrarian voices like Hu Ping, the chief editor of Beijing Spring, a pro-human rights and democracy journal, try to humanize the conventional wisdom of economic statistics and facts that obscure reality. "With China portrayed in the news every day as an economic and political powerhouse, the rest of the world, at least those parts that treasure freedom and peace, should pay attention to the real China," says Hu
> 
> (...SNIPPED/EDITED)
> 
> *Because of China's climate of corruption and authoritarian secrecy, even the volume of industrial output has been questioned.* Some doubt China's numbers and official reports. Investment guru James Chanos, who rose to prominence when he predicted the Enron meltdown (and pocketed a billion dollars shorting Enron stock), is shorting China now.
> 
> *Says Chanos, "China is cooking its books. State-run companies are buying fleets of cars and storing them in parking lots and warehouses" to pump up state-mandated production figures.* As evidence of this, experts point out that while car sales have been rising by a huge 20 percent per month, auto fuel usage seems to be rising by only 3-5 percent per month. Chanos also says China is plagued by an ominously growing real estate bubble in high-rise buildings, offices and condos. Much of China's high growth originally came from decades-long heavy investment in infrastructure, but increasingly it has been coming from construction. Chanos estimates that 50 percent to 60 percent of China's GDP now comes from alarming levels of overbuilding, virtually none of which is affordable to the average Chinese. "This is not affordable housing for the middle class; this is high-end condos in major urban areas and high-end office buildings, which no one is buying," says Chanos.
> 
> *China is on this "treadmill to hell," he says, because so much of its GDP growth comes from construction which can't be sustained. If China were to slow down the construction industry, its GDP growth would go negative very quickly.*


----------



## CougarKing

Gordon Chang again...



> *China Property Collapse Has Begun*
> Gordon G. Chang
> 
> 
> Nothing is going right for Hangzhou at this moment.  Walmart will be closing its Zhaohui store in that city on April 23 as a part of its overall plan to dump marginal locations - about 9% of the total - in China.
> 
> Thanks to the world’s largest retailer, another large block of space in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, will go on the market at a time when there is generally too much supply.
> 
> The real weakness, however, is Hangzhou’s residential sector.  *The cause is simple: massive overbuilding.* The real estate market in Hangzhou looks like it has just passed an inflection point.  It is not so much that fundamentals have deteriorated - they have been weak for some time - as that people’s mentality has changed.
> 
> *Official statistics do not seem consistent with the general trend of reports, but in any event severe problems are evidently ahead.*  The secondary property market has tumbled, with sales falling by more than half in Q1 2014 from the same quarter in 2013.  Speculators have either left the domestic market or have sold off holdings.  Rich Chinese, now interested in foreign holdings, are also shunning their home market.  Foreigners, who own only an infinitesimal portion of China’s property but who are a bellwether nonetheless, are investing at the slowest pace in at least a decade.  Middle class Chinese are also largely out of the market.
> 
> *China is at the point where problems are feeding on themselves.*  Pessimism about property, which accounts for about 15% of China’s gross domestic product, is beginning to affect the broader economy.  Declining property values look scary, despite cheery statements from government officials who assure us the property bubble is “not big” or analysts who say that the problems are not “systemic.”  But the Chinese don’t look like they are buying either of those views.  “If this continues, it will have immense impact on the whole Chinese economy,” says an unidentified Hangzhou real estate salesman on Economic 30 Minutes.  “Without question, everyone thinks there is a bubble.”
> 
> Premier Li Keqiang has a few tools at his disposal, but they look insufficient to stop a general collapse of property prices across the country.  The problems, deferred from late 2008 with massive state spending, have simply become too large.  And we must remember that he works inside a complex, collective political system that is generally unable to meet challenges swiftly.
> 
> But that does not matter.  *There is little any leader can do.  Collapses occur when people lose confidence.  That is now happening in China.*
> 
> 
> *Forbes*


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps an economic downturn may dampen the sabre-rattling over the Senkakus/Diaoyus?

The Diplomat.com



> *China Slows – Will Asia Follow?*
> 
> (thediplomat.com)
> April 18, 2014
> 
> As the region’s largest economy slows, what impact will it have on the rest of Asia?
> 
> Quote
> China’s slowdown has been confirmed, with the world’s second-biggest economy reporting its weakest expansion in more than a year on slumping property construction. But the rest of Asia won’t be following its lead just yet, according to the world’s bankers.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> While the gross domestic product (GDP) data buoyed financial markets, ANZ economist Liu Ligang was not alone among economists in questioning the high number.
> 
> “If you look at monthly indicators then I think growth was really around 7.2 percent, given retail sales and fixed asset investment have been weak,” the bank’s chief China economist told the Australian Financial Review.
> 
> *He pointed to the “significant slowdown” in housing construction, which plunged by more than 27 percent during the January-March quarter, compared to the same period last year. New home sales also dropped 7.7 percent, while there was a 23 percent rise in new dwellings yet to be sold.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## a_majoor

This is interesting with respect to culture. Large numbers of Christianizing Chinese in a "conservative", Confucian society may certainly make the Party nervous, but what are the real changes that are going to happen? I have been looking at a similar situation happening in the ROK, evangelical Christianity is apparently growing by leaps and bounds there, but I haven't seen much evidence of societal change based on my readings (OK, maybe I am reading the wrong things...).

In a similar vein, I have also seen articles describing the growth of Pentecostalism in Europe and even the growth of conservative Christianity in America (churchgoers considering that their American pastors are too "Liberal" and applying to come under the Archdiocese of Manilla, for example). On the surface, this seems rather odd (aggressive growth of fundamentalist or conservative Christian denominations in a secular or unwelcomoing environment), but I haven yet to see any great societal changes emerging from these trends:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10776023/China-on-course-to-become-worlds-most-Christian-nation-within-15-years.html



> *China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years*
> The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America
> 
> By Tom Phillips, Liushi, Zhejiang province2:00PM BST 19 Apr 2014 Comments1823 Comments
> 
> It is said to be China's biggest church and on Easter Sunday thousands of worshippers will flock to this Asian mega-temple to pledge their allegiance – not to the Communist Party, but to the Cross.
> 
> The 5,000-capacity Liushi church, which boasts more than twice as many seats as Westminster Abbey and a 206ft crucifix that can be seen for miles around, opened last year with one theologian declaring it a "miracle that such a small town was able to build such a grand church".
> The £8 million building is also one of the most visible symbols of Communist China's breakneck conversion as it evolves into one of the largest Christian congregations on earth.
> 
> "It is a wonderful thing to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It gives us great confidence," beamed Jin Hongxin, a 40-year-old visitor who was admiring the golden cross above Liushi's altar in the lead up to Holy Week.
> 
> "If everyone in China believed in Jesus then we would have no more need for police stations. There would be no more bad people and therefore no more crime," she added.
> 
> Related Articles
> Christians form human shield around church in 'China's Jerusalem' after demolition threat 04 Apr 2014
> David Cameron says Christians should be 'more evangelical' 16 Apr 2014
> 
> Officially, the People's Republic of China is an atheist country but that is changing fast as many of its 1.3 billion citizens seek meaning and spiritual comfort that neither communism nor capitalism seem to have supplied.
> 
> Christian congregations in particular have skyrocketed since churches began reopening when Chairman Mao's death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution.
> 
> Less than four decades later, some believe China is now poised to become not just the world's number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.
> 
> "By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon," said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.
> "It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change."
> 
> China's Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life.
> 
> Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.
> 
> By 2030, China's total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.
> 
> "Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this," Prof Yang said. "It's ironic – they didn't. They actually failed completely."
> 
> Like many Chinese churches, the church in the town of Liushi, 200 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, has had a turbulent history.
> It was founded in 1886 after William Edward Soothill, a Yorkshire-born missionary and future Oxford University professor, began evangelising local communities.
> 
> But by the late 1950s, as the region was engulfed by Mao's violent anti-Christian campaigns, it was forced to close.
> Liushi remained shut throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, as places of worship were destroyed across the country.
> Since it reopened in 1978 its congregation has gone from strength to strength as part of China's officially sanctioned Christian church – along with thousands of others that have accepted Communist Party oversight in return for being allowed to worship.
> 
> Today it has 2,600 regular churchgoers and holds up to 70 baptisms each year, according to Shi Xiaoli, its 27-year-old preacher. The parish's revival reached a crescendo last year with the opening of its new 1,500ft mega-church, reputedly the biggest in mainland China.
> "Our old church was small and hard to find," said Ms Shi. "There wasn't room in the old building for all the followers, especially at Christmas and at Easter. The new one is big and eye-catching."
> 
> The Liushi church is not alone. From Yunnan province in China's balmy southwest to Liaoning in its industrial northeast, congregations are booming and more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.
> A recent study found that online searches for the words "Christian Congregation" and "Jesus" far outnumbered those for "The Communist Party" and "Xi Jinping", China's president.
> 
> Among China's Protestants are also many millions who worship at illegal underground "house churches", which hold unsupervised services – often in people's homes – in an attempt to evade the prying eyes of the Communist Party.
> 
> Such churches are mostly behind China's embryonic missionary movement – a reversal of roles after the country was for centuries the target of foreign missionaries. Now it is starting to send its own missionaries abroad, notably into North Korea, in search of souls.
> 
> "We want to help and it is easier for us than for British, South Korean or American missionaries," said one underground church leader in north China who asked not to be named.
> 
> The new spread of Christianity has the Communist Party scratching its head.
> "The child suddenly grew up and the parents don't know how to deal with the adult," the preacher, who is from China's illegal house-church movement, said.
> 
> Some officials argue that religious groups can provide social services the government cannot, while simultaneously helping reverse a growing moral crisis in a land where cash, not Communism, has now become king.
> 
> They appear to agree with David Cameron, the British prime minister, who said last week that Christianity could help boost Britain's "spiritual, physical and moral" state.
> 
> Ms Shi, Liushi's preacher, who is careful to describe her church as "patriotic", said: "We have two motivations: one is our gospel mission and the other is serving society. Christianity can also play a role in maintaining peace and stability in society. Without God, people can do as they please."
> Yet others within China's leadership worry about how the religious landscape might shape its political future, and its possible impact on the Communist Party's grip on power, despite the clause in the country's 1982 constitution that guarantees citizens the right to engage in "normal religious activities".
> As a result, a close watch is still kept on churchgoers, and preachers are routinely monitored to ensure their sermons do not diverge from what the Party considers acceptable.
> 
> In Liushi church a closed circuit television camera hangs from the ceiling, directly in front of the lectern.
> 
> "They want the pastor to preach in a Communist way. They want to train people to practice in a Communist way," said the house-church preacher, who said state churches often shunned potentially subversive sections of the Bible. The Old Testament book in which the exiled Daniel refuses to obey orders to worship the king rather than his own god is seen as "very dangerous", the preacher added.
> 
> Such fears may not be entirely unwarranted. Christians' growing power was on show earlier this month when thousands flocked to defend a church in Wenzhou, a city known as the "Jerusalem of the East", after government threats to demolish it. Faced with the congregation's very public show of resistance, officials appear to have backed away from their plans, negotiating a compromise with church leaders.
> 
> "They do not trust the church, but they have to tolerate or accept it because the growth is there," said the church leader. "The number of Christians is growing – they cannot fight it. They do not want the 70 million Christians to be their enemy."
> The underground leader church leader said many government officials viewed religion as "a sickness" that needed curing, and Prof Yang agreed there was a potential threat.
> 
> The Communist Party was "still not sure if Christianity would become an opposition political force" and feared it could be used by "Western forces to overthrow the Communist political system", he said.
> 
> Churches were likely to face an increasingly "intense" struggle over coming decade as the Communist Party sought to stifle Christianity's rise, he predicted.
> 
> "There are people in the government who are trying to control the church. I think they are making the last attempt to do that."


----------



## dimsum

Thucydides said:
			
		

> This is interesting with respect to culture. Large numbers of Christianizing Chinese in a "conservative", Confucian society may certainly make the Party nervous, but what are the real changes that are going to happen? I have been looking at a similar situation happening in the ROK, evangelical Christianity is apparently growing by leaps and bounds there, but I haven't seen much evidence of societal change based on my readings (OK, maybe I am reading the wrong things).



I don't think many cultural changes will happen at all in China in the short term, and *perhaps* a few in the long term.  Religion, especially in the recent past, is not ingrained into the culture to the same extent that it is in, say, the US and even if it was, historically Chinese culture has generally been religiously tolerant.  

I would speculate that part of the reason why East Asian cultures, for example, can separate religion from culture more easily is due to the fact that strictly speaking, Confucianism isn't _really_ a religion but a code of practices/expectations that slowly built up a religious aspect around it.  Also, East Asian societies are more homogenous than most Western societies, therefore requiring one less thing (in this case religion) that's needed to form a cultural identity.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I agree with Dimsum: China has many religions and _quasi-religions_, like Confucianism which, while not a religion, _per se_ has temples, etc, (even Taoism is divided into _religious_ and _ethical_ streams and many professed Taoists have separate _pantheons_ of the traditional Chinese gods.

But Christians, like Muslims, are, already, in some _trouble_ because of their refusal to "render unto Caesar" the loyalty that the CCP requires, despite the biblical injunction to do so. Additionally, Christianity, like Islam, (and even some Buddhist sects) is a proselytizing religion and my _impression_ is that this practice, while evidently successful, grates on both ordinary Chinese people and, especially, on the government which remains, on principle, committed to "freedom *from* religion."

Christians may become a large force in society but I expect it to be a half quarter mile wide (relative to China's population) and a quarter inch deep (relative to China's culture).


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides and all,

All of you do realize that there's a difference between the Christian churches allowed to practice openly in mainland China and the underground churches?

For example, the officially state-sanctioned Catholic church in China, who hold masses in places such as Beijing's South Cathedral, are allowed to practice openly because its clergy are supposed to ensure that their folk don't put God above the state when it comes to final loyalty.

This practice openly conflicts with the Vatican, so thus these PRC-regulated clergy are not recognized or have a connection with the Vatican/Rome.

In contrast, there is an underground Catholic church compose of clergy who do have ties with the Vatican/Rome and the Catholics in the rest of the world. When I did an exchange semester one of the universities in China nearly a decade ago, some of our professors were Jesuit priests who did not come in their official capacity. Some had a business background or an economics background, and thus were registered by the state as professors in this field. However, this did not prevent them from practicing in secret among the Catholics in the program. 

I also recall that this bone of contention between Beijing and the Vatican also meant that the Vatican recognize the regime in Taipei, Taiwan as the "One China" as opposed to the mainland. 

I assume this practice extends to other Christian (Protestant) sects as well, such as Baptists and the Eastern Orthodox church, etc. 


---------------------------------------------------------

Anyways, here's another update about Japan's wartime past in China coming back to haunt Tokyo:



> *Japan warns over China ship seizure*
> By Kyoko Hasegawa
> AFP News - 43 minutes ago
> 
> Tokyo warned Monday that the seizure of a Japanese ship in Shanghai over pre-war debts threatened ties with China and could undermine the very basis of their diplomatic relationship.
> 
> Authorities in Shanghai seized the large freight vessel in a dispute over what the Chinese side says are unpaid bills relating to the 1930s, when Japan occupied large swathes of China.
> 
> Reports said that in 1936, Mitsui's predecessor Daido Shipping Co. rented two ships on a one-year contract from Zhongwei Shipping Co.
> 
> However, the ships were commandeered by the Imperial Japanese Navy and were sunk during World War II, reports said.
> A compensation suit was brought against Mitsui by the descendants of the founder of Zhongwei Shipping, and in 2007 a Shanghai court ordered Mitsui to pay about 2.9 billion yen in compensation.
> 
> Mitsui appealed against the decision but in December 2010 the Supreme People's Court turned down their petition for the case to be retried.
> 
> Mitsui has argued that it is not liable to pay compensation given that the ships which Daido rented were requisitioned by the Japanese military during the war, according to Japan's Kyodo News.
> 
> On Monday Japan's chief government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the seizure undermined the 1972 joint communique that normalised ties between Japan and China, in which Beijing agreed to renounce _"its demand for war reparation from Japan"_.
> 
> _"It could also intimidate Japanese companies doing business in China as a whole and hence Japan is deeply worried and strongly expects China to take appropriate measures,"_ he said.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> 
> *AFP / Yahoo*


----------



## a_majoor

The discussion about religion is illuminating, and I will certainly keep an eye on this story to see how it develops.

WRT official and unofficial churches, the article is pretty clear on this, especially Protestant "House Churches" which move from place to place to escape State surveillance. This is probably where the issue lies for the Party, since they are not conforming to the rules established by the Party and are potential nexus for dissent and opposition (although in real terms I don't really see that from the Christian churches. OTOH since the Islamic peoples in Xīnjiāng and Buddhists in Tibet do form an active opposition to Chinese rule there is no reason for the Party to think the Christians will be any different...).


----------



## dimsum

Thucydides said:
			
		

> The discussion about religion is illuminating, and I will certainly keep an eye on this story to see how it develops.
> 
> WRT official and unofficial churches, the article is pretty clear on this, especially Protestant "House Churches" which move from place to place to escape State surveillance. This is probably where the issue lies for the Party, since they are not conforming to the rules established by the Party and are potential nexus for dissent and opposition (although in real terms I don't really see that from the Christian churches. *OTOH since the Islamic peoples in Xīnjiāng and Buddhists in Tibet do form an active opposition to Chinese rule there is no reason for the Party to think the Christians will be any different...*).



I think you may be misreading/confusing the issue there.  The Tibetans, Uyghurs, etc. in Xinjiang are not ethnically Han Chinese, which are the vast majority of the Chinese population and are what one usually refers to when they speak of Chinese people, but more closely related to Turkic/SW Asian groups such as Uzbeks, Tajiks and northern Afghans.  Officially, there are 56 or so "minority groups" aside from the Hans in China.

So, the active opposition from those groups isn't really based on religion but more due to culture (the CCP oppressing the minority culture, that is) and the politically-led migration of Han Chinese into those areas.  Once the Han Chinese population there becomes a majority, they take power with predictable results.


----------



## CougarKing

Dear China, brace yourself.... 



> 'China's Warren Buffett' Selling Off His China Assets
> 
> Quote:
> 
> On the 8th of this month, Pacific Century Premium Developments and PCCW announced they had signed an agreement to sell Pacific Century Place. The disposal of a landmark project in the center of Beijing - two office buildings, two blocks of serviced apartments, and a mall—confirmed that Li Ka-shing and son Richard have turned bearish on Chinese real estate.
> 
> Li, reputed to be the richest man in Asia, and his family have been on a selling spree in Mainland China since last August. During that time, "Superman," his nickname because of an almost-infallible sense of market timing, has unloaded Guangzhou's Metropolitan Plaza, Shanghai's Oriental Financial Center, and Nanjing's International Financial Center. With Richard's disposal of Beijing's Pacific Century Place, the Li family has reportedly sold about $2.9 billion of Chinese property in less than a year.
> 
> (....EDITED/SNIPPED)
> 
> *Yet Li, No. 20 on last month's Forbes rich list with a fortune of $31.0 billion, is selling in China and not buying. And it looks like he is leaving not a moment too soon.*  Dongfang Daily, a Chinese paper, quotes an unnamed "industry insider" who tells us Superman "will always sell his assets two to three years ahead of crises."
> 
> (....EDITED/SNIPPED)
> 
> *Now that Li is moving out of major China developments, others will probably take the hint. "Why would you buy anything when Li Ka-shing is selling?" asks Euromoney. * The magazine posed the question in connection with Li dumping assets in his home base, Hong Kong. There, he has gone on another "de-risking" binge, with among other things, an initial public offering of Power Assets Holdings , a sale of a 24.95% interest in retailer AS Watson, and a disposal of a 60% stake in Terminal 8 West in the Kwai Tsing container port, all this year. Li also tried to offload supermarket chain ParknShop last year, but the effort failed.
> 
> ....
> *
> That's why Simon Black, an investor and entrepreneur, looks correct. "Li wants out of China," he writes. "All of it." Superman's sudden move out of Chinese property has been termed an "evacuation," and it looks like he hopes to get out of the rest of his Chinese investments too.* Li, for instance, has been progressively selling"his stock in ChangYuan Group, a Shanghai-listed electronics manufacturer based in Guangdong province. When viewed in connection with his Mainland China and Hong Kong disposals, this move looks part of a relentless trend.
> 
> The Chinese themselves see special significance in Superman's sales. Wang Shi, chairman of China Vanke , China's largest home builder, says the sell-off of "the smart Mr. Li" is a warning. Critic Luo Zhiyuan said the sales imply "the coming of a crisis."
> 
> We should probably take our cue from the man called "the Warren Buffett of China." After all, the Chinese Buffett is unloading his China assets.



the source for the above article:

Forbes


----------



## Edward Campbell

China has manifold problems, some serious, some _normal_ for any national economy, but of them all I would put one at the very top of the list: *water*.

Look at this graphic:






Source: http://greenleapforward.com/2010/01/06/charting-chinas-water-future/

Now, look at this article.

Not only does China have a _supply_ problem, the water is does have is of poor quality.

Several billions of US dollars can and will improve the latter situation but _supply_ will remain problematical.

There is _new_, fresh water is Est Asia without significant _demand_ ... but it is all North of China.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of offshore bases or friendly ports, Pakistan's Gwadar port, where China was already given special status, if I can recall correctly, comes to mind.

Reuters



> *Search for MH370 reveals a military vulnerability for China*
> 
> By Greg Torode and Michael Martina
> 
> HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - When Chinese naval supply vessel Qiandaohu entered Australia's Albany Port this month to replenish Chinese warships helping search for a missing Malaysian airliner, it highlighted a strategic headache for Beijing - its lack of offshore bases and friendly ports to call on.
> 
> *China's deployment for the search - 18 warships, smaller coastguard vessels, a civilian cargo ship and an Antarctic icebreaker - has stretched the supply lines and logistics of its rapidly expanding navy, Chinese analysts and regional military attaches say.
> 
> China's naval planners know they will have to fill this strategic gap to meet Beijing's desire for a fully operational blue-water navy by 2050 - especially if access around Southeast Asia or beyond is needed in times of tension.*
> 
> China is determined to eventually challenge Washington's traditional naval dominance across the Asia Pacific and is keen to be able to protect its own strategic interests across the Indian Ocean and Middle East.
> 
> "As China's military presence and projection increases, it will want to have these kind of (port) arrangements in place, just as the U.S. does," said Ian Storey, a regional security expert at Singapore's Institute of South East Asian Studies.
> 
> *"I am a bit surprised that there is no sign that they even started discussions about long-term access. If visits happen now they happen on an ad-hoc commercial basis. It is a glaring hole."*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the situation with an earlier post about that Japanese freighter seized by Chinese authorities over wartime reparations from the WW2 era:



> *Japan's Mitsui pays China to release seized ship-court*
> Reuters
> April 24, 2014 12:53 AM
> 
> 
> BEIJING/TOKYO (Reuters) - *Japan's Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd paid about $29 million for the release of a ship seized by China over a dispute that dates back to the 1930s war between the countries*, China's Supreme Court said on Thursday.
> 
> The Chinese government has described the case as a simple business dispute unrelated to wartime compensation claims, but it has become a cause célèbre for activists in China seeking redress from Japan.
> 
> Mitsui paid about 2.92 billion yen *($28.5 million)* in leasing fees, including interest and damages, China's Supreme Court said, in a statement on its official microblog. Mitsui also paid 2.4 million yuan *($385,000)* in legal fees, the court said.
> 
> Japanese media had earlier reported Mitsui paid about 4 billion yen ($39 million) to free the "Baosteel Emotion", a 226,434 deadweight-tonne ore carrier.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *Reuters / Yahoo*


----------



## CougarKing

Clearly the threat posed by mainland China's new aircraft carrier is always on the minds of Taipei's government leaders:



> *Taiwan to Simulate Chinese Carrier Attack in Upcoming Training Exercise*
> 
> By: Sam LaGrone
> April 25, 2014
> 
> *The Taiwanese military will train to repel an attack from China's Liaoning aircraft carrier and its battle group* as part of a planned May exercise, according to local press reports.
> 
> The simulated sea assault from the Liaoning battle group will be part of Taiwan's large scale *Han Kuang military exercise* which will simulate a full scale war against the island country.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *The exercise is also set to feature Taiwan’s recently acquired U.S.-built AH-64E Apache, P-3C Orion anti-submarine aircraft and the indigenous Thunderbolt-2000 rocket artillery platform.*
> 
> source: US Naval Institute


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Amazing Maps_ is an interesting _infographic_ that illustrates how tightly China is tied into the global trading system and why it has no interest in upsetting the apple cart:





Source: https://twitter.com/Amazing_Maps


----------



## Edward Campbell

According to _Xinhua_, Paramount Leader Xi Jinping is taking a new, harder line on _terrorism_ and _separatism_, which will, I suspect mean more severe crackdowns on the Uyghurs and, probably, on the Tibetans, too. Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Xinhua_ is the story:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-04/26/c_133292245.htm


> President Xi vows intense pressure on terrorism
> 
> English.news.cn
> 
> 2014-04-26
> 
> Editor: An
> 
> BEIJING, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to resolutely crack down on terrorism and secessionism with high intensity to safeguard national security.
> 
> Xi made the remarks on Friday at the 14th group study session on national security and social stability by the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.
> 
> Calling terrorism the common enemy of the people, Xi urged improving counter-terrorism systems and abilities and the public to build a "wall of bronze and iron" to fight against terrorism.
> 
> "(We must) make terrorists become like rats scurrying across a street, with everybody shouting 'beat them!'" Xi said.
> 
> Resolute and decisive measures must be taken and high pressure must be maintained to crack down on violent terrorists who have been swollen with arrogance, he said.
> 
> Violent terrorists ignore basic human rights, trample humanism and justice and challenge the bottom-line of human civilization, Xi said.
> 
> It is neither an issue of nationality nor one of religion, but the common enemy of people of all nationalities, he said.
> 
> Xi also emphasized the fight against secessionism and promotion of ethnic unity and common prosperity.
> 
> He called on a resolute strike on secession, infiltration and sabotage by hostile forces within and outside China.
> 
> Xi urged all regions and departments to shoulder responsibilities and cooperate to maintain national security and social stability which are "extremely urgent" for deepening reforms and realizing the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.
> 
> While China has managed to remain stable in providing a sound environment for reforms and opening-up, threats and challenges to the country's national security and social stability are increasing and reinforcing each other, he warned.
> 
> We must keep a clear mind and effectively prevent, manage and settle these security risks, he said.
> 
> To implement the overall national security outlook, China must attach importance to both external and internal security, homeland security and the safety of its people as well as traditional and non-traditional security, he said.
> 
> China must pay attention to both development and security, as well as its own security and common security, he added.
> 
> To safeguard national security, China must promote development in a more comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable way and improve people's livelihood so as to eliminate sources of social conflicts, Xi said.
> 
> He also called on perfecting systems to protect people's legal rights and the rule of law so that social conflicts can be settled through legal means effectively.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_ is an analysis by Prasenjit Basu* with which I, broadly, agree:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f627e162-cc96-11e3-ab99-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3073VOHKJ


> China’s crisis is coming – the only question is how big it will be
> *The longer the economy stays unbalanced, the worse the outcome will be*
> 
> By Prasenjit Basu
> 
> April 27, 2014
> 
> A financial crisis in China has become inevitable. If it happens soon, its effects can be contained. But, if policy makers use further doses of stimulus to postpone the day of reckoning, a severe collapse will become unavoidable within a few years.
> 
> The country is in the middle of by far the largest monetary expansion in history. On one widely used measure, M2, its money supply has tripled in the past six years, an expansion four times as large as that of the US over the same period.
> 
> This unprecedented expansion is at least partly responsible for China’s extraordinary growth rate, which is now running up against a demographic constraint. Last year, for the first time, the working-age population declined, a trend set to continue for the next two decades. Unless the country can keep lifting the labour force participation rate (for example by getting more women into the workforce or persuading older people not to retire), China will struggle to expand its labour force by even 1 per cent per year. To sustain economic growth of more than 7 per cent, productivity would need to grow by 6-7 per cent a year across the entire economy. This would be a tall order in any country. In China, where the labour-intensive services and agriculture sectors make up half the economy, it is well-nigh impossible.
> 
> The country suffers from excess capacity in most industrial sectors. Yet investment in fixed assets continues to grow at double-digit rates. The steel sector is a case in point. China has about 1bn tonnes of annual steel-production capacity; about a third of it sits idle. Consequently, the growth statistics present a misleading figure. Output is being produced, sometimes even in the absence of any demand. A continuing burst of credit is needed to help fuel new capital spending to keep the factories busy – but that only adds to the stock of unused capital. It is a similar story with property investment. China is brimming with high-quality housing that is unaffordable. Sharp price declines are needed to clear the market. That will involve severe pain for banks that participated in the monetary expansion.
> 
> Observers often cite China’s closed capital account as a blessing that will stave off capital flight. But one consequence is a huge and persistent balance of payments surplus. Foreign money flows into the country to pay for exported goods and investment, and much less flows back out since there are few legal avenues for exit. China’s surplus over the past 10 years has been far larger than Japan’s was in the 1980s – the years when its disastrous asset price bubble was being inflated. This should have caused the currency to rise rapidly. But the renminbi has been pegged to the dollar for most of that period, accumulating a big pile of foreign reserves.
> 
> Compounding it all, Chinese investors believe that none of the country’s banks or financial products will go bust because the government stands behind them all. This is partly the legacy of the banking rescue mounted a decade ago, when about 40 per cent of loans belonging to four big government-owned banks were transferred (at face value) to asset-management companies. But the broader problem is the tendency of the party leadership to provide a policy stimulus every time growth dips.
> 
> Financial controls are gradually being relaxed. But the offshore market on which the renminbi is now allowed to trade is tiny – less than 5 per cent of the value of China’s foreign reserves. Opening the capital account fully is impossible; it would result in large flows of funds and a loss of control that policy makers cannot countenance.
> 
> In a country that already accounts for half of all capital-intensive production globally, and nearly a fifth of all US imports, the growth of manufacturing will inevitably slow. A thriving service sector could pick up some of the slack. But building more houses and railways is not the way to encourage it.
> 
> China’s economy is in an unbalanced state. It can stay that way for some time – but the longer it does, the worse the eventual outcome will be. The industrial sector is already plagued by falling prices. To avert a wider deflationary spiral, the country needs to wean itself off the false cure of perpetual policy stimulus.
> 
> _The writer is founder of RealEconomics.com, an independent economic research firm_




It is impossible for any economy to sustain the rates of growth that China has achieved since about 1985 ...






... China has, already, defied conventional economic wisdom in part by authoritarian _management_ but, in the main, by the effect of _unleashing_ China's inherent entrepreneurial potential after the death of Mao and the purge of the _Gang of Four_. But it cannot be sustained. Dr. Basu is right, allowing the corrections to occur sooner, rather than later, is the best policy ... even the social disruptions, which will happen, will be _easier_ now than in five or ten years.

_____
* Dr. Prasenjit K. Basu, PK served as the the Regional Head of Research and Economics at Maybank Kim Eng Holdings Limited, Research Division since April 2012. Previously, Dr. Basu served as the Managing Director and Chief Economist of Asia Ex-Japan at Daiwa Securities Capital Markets Co. Ltd., Research Division. Dr. Basu served as the Head Economist at Khazanah Nasional Berhad. He served as a Chief Economist for Southeast Asia and India at Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division. Dr. Basu previously worked as an Asian economist at Wharton Econometrics and UBS Securities.


----------



## CougarKing

The "other China" conducts exercises in the South China Sea:

Defense News



> *Legislator: Taiwan Stages Largest Drill Since 2000 in Spratlys*
> Apr. 28, 2014 - 02:58PM   |   By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> 
> TAIPEI — Taiwan this month mobilized hundreds of marines for its largest military exercise since 2000 near disputed islands in the South China Sea, a legislator said Monday.
> 
> *Lin Yu-fang said the landing drill was held on the Taiwan-administered island of Taiping, part of the Spratlys — a chain which is also claimed in whole or in part by China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei.
> 
> Lin, a member of parliament’s defense and diplomacy committee, said the task force from two marine companies, armed with mortars and anti-tank rockets, boarded some 20 amphibious assault vehicles for the landing on Taiping on April 10.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Thucydides and all,
> 
> All of you do realize that there's a difference between the Christian churches allowed to practice openly in mainland China and the underground churches?
> 
> For example, the officially state-sanctioned Catholic church in China, who hold masses in places such as Beijing's South Cathedral, are allowed to practice openly because its clergy are supposed to ensure that their folk don't put God above the state when it comes to final loyalty.
> 
> This practice openly conflicts with the Vatican, so thus these PRC-regulated clergy are not recognized or have a connection with the Vatican/Rome.
> 
> In contrast, there is an underground Catholic church compose of clergy who do have ties with the Vatican/Rome and the Catholics in the rest of the world. When I did an exchange semester one of the universities in China nearly a decade ago, some of our professors were Jesuit priests who did not come in their official capacity. Some had a business background or an economics background, and thus were registered by the state as professors in this field. However, this did not prevent them from practicing in secret among the Catholics in the program.
> 
> I also recall that this bone of contention between Beijing and the Vatican also meant that the Vatican recognize the regime in Taipei, Taiwan as the "One China" as opposed to the mainland.
> 
> I assume this practice extends to other Christian (Protestant) sects as well, such as Baptists and the Eastern Orthodox church, etc.
> 
> ...




But some churches in some provinces one church in one province appears to be having a problem according to this article which is reproduced from _China Digital Times_:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/04/china-accused-anti-christian-campaign/


> Officials: Church Demolition Not Attack on Christianity
> 
> Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou was demolished on Monday night after intense resistance from Chinese Christians. Authorities say that parts of the building were illegal, and that the church had been given the opportunity to remove them, but critics have accused them of engaging in a campaign against Christianity. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips reports:
> 
> The Sanjiang church in Wenzhou, a wealthy coastal city in Zhejiang province with one of China’s largest Christian populations, was reduced to rubble on Monday night after excavators spent the day tearing parts of the building down.
> 
> Congregants accused the provincial government, which is controlled by Xia Baolong, an ally of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, of promoting an orchestrated anti-church campaign in order to slow Christianity’s rapid growth.
> 
> China could be set to become the world’s largest Christian congregation by 2030, a leading expert told The Telegraph earlier this month.
> 
> Officials denied the demolition was an attack on Christianity on Tuesday and vowed to “aggressively push on” with a campaign against illegal buildings. [Source]
> 
> Phillips posted a series of updates about the demolition on Twitter:



_China Digital Times_ is a news aggregator run out of the University of California at Berkley. The story originated in _The Telegraph_


----------



## CougarKing

More food for thought at this National Post article below:

*China’s lending bubble could threaten U.S. and global economies if not defused*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Using new data _The Economist_ has revised its forecast of when China will overtake America as the world's largest economy.





Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/04/daily-chart-19?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/dailychartppp

The article explains that:

"UNTIL 1890 China was the world’s largest economy, before America surpassed it. By the end of 2014 China is on track to reclaim its crown. Comparing economic output is tricky: exchange rates get in the way. Simply converting GDP from renminbi to dollars at market rates may not reflect the true cost of living. Bread and beer may be cheaper in one country than another, for example. To account for these differences, economists make adjustments based on a comparable basket of goods and services across the globe, so-called purchasing-power parity (PPP). New data released on April 30th from the International Comparison Programme, a part of the UN, calculated the cost of living in 199 countries in 2011. On this basis, China’s PPP exchange rate is now higher than economists had previously estimated using data from the previous survey in 2005: a whopping 20% higher. So China, which was had been forecast to overtake America in 2019 by the IMF, will be crowned the world's pre-eminent country by the end of this year according to _The Economist’s_ calculations. The American Century ends, and the Pacific Century begins."


----------



## CougarKing

Uighur separatists again?



> *Explosion Rocks Train Station in Xinjiang's Capital*
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> April 30, 2014
> 
> 
> Chinese state media are reporting that there has been an explosion at a railroad station in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The explosion reportedly took place around 7 p.m. local time at Urumqi’s south railroad station, the largest train station in Xinjiang. *According to witnesses cited in Chinese media, the explosion seemed to originate from luggage that had been left on the ground near the station exit. In response, Xinhua reported that all entrances to the station were closed and armed police are on the scene*. Train service was suspended.
> 
> As of this writing, the number of casualties was unclear.
> 
> The timing of the explosion is doubly sensitive as it comes just before the May 1 Labor Day holiday. During this mini-holiday, travel picks up across China, meaning the train station would be especially busy.
> 
> 
> 
> *The Diplomat*


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _Financial Times_ reports that a crackdown is coming, according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealin provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/75f3489e-d0cc-11e3-9a81-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz30OzXFxII


> Xi vows to ‘suppress’ violence after Xinjiang attack
> 
> By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
> 
> Last updated: May 1, 2014
> 
> China’s President Xi Jinping has vowed to “resolutely suppress” violence in the Muslim-dominated far western province of Xinjiang after a knife and bomb attack at a railway station killed three people and injured 79 others.
> 
> The attack outside the station in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, occurred on Wednesday evening as Mr Xi was wrapping up a four-day tour during which he emphasised Chinese rule over the region.
> 
> “The battle to combat violence and terrorism will not allow even a moment of slackness, and decisive actions must be taken to resolutely suppress the terrorists’ rampant momentum,” Mr Xi said in response to the attack, according to state media.
> 
> He also said China would pursue a “strike-first” strategy in Xinjiang “to deter enemies and inspire people”.
> 
> The vast barren region borders Pakistan and other central Asian countries and is home to the predominantly Muslim, ethnically distinct, Uighur people, many of whom chafe under Chinese rule that imposes strict limits on their religion, language and freedom of movement.
> 
> In the past year, more than 100 people have been killed in violent incidents in Xinjiang that the authorities blame on Uighur separatists and extremists.
> 
> More recently attacks have become much bolder and have spilled outside the region’s borders.
> 
> In October, a car allegedly driven by Uighur separatists crashed into a group of tourists and caught fire in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing three occupants and two bystanders.
> 
> In March, a group of sword-wielding Uighurs hacked to death 29 people and injured hundreds more in a train station in southwest China.
> 
> Wednesday’s attack appeared to be timed for the end of Mr Xi’s visit to the region and came after four days of intense national propaganda surrounding his trip.
> 
> Two blasts went off soon after 7pm at the Urumqi south station and “knife-wielding mobs” slashed people at the exit to the train station, according to state media accounts.
> Along with the three dead, four people were seriously injured but in a stable condition on Thursday morning.
> 
> The train station was briefly locked down but reopened by 9pm. In a sign of the government’s fear that the attack would overshadow the official propaganda surrounding Mr Xi’s visit, Chinese television had not even mentioned the incident by 11pm on Wednesday.
> 
> The first 20 minutes of state-controlled China Central Television’s 10pm broadcast was instead dedicated to footage of Mr Xi in Xinjiang meeting “model workers” and Uighur schoolchildren and awkwardly hugging elderly Uighur women.
> 
> It also lingered on pictures of him visiting police and paramilitary units and upbraiding them to crush all “terrorism and separatism” in the region.
> 
> “The long-term stability of Xinjiang is vital to the whole country’s reform, development and stability; to the country’s unity, ethnic harmony and national security as well as to the great revival of the Chinese nation,” Mr Xi said while meeting with local Communist party and government officials.




I suspect - I have no proof at all - that the recent upsurge in violence is _inspired_ by foreign, Central or West Asian, _Islamist_ leadership. My guess is that they have seen that terrorism works against the Arabs and the US led West ... *but* the Chinese are neither. My personal sense is that this will end badly, bloodily for the Uyghurs.


----------



## CougarKing

Don't some Chinese frigates and destroyers also use a variant of the French-made Crotale SAM?



> *EU firms help power China's military rise*
> Tom Hancock
> AFP News - 9 hours ago
> 
> China's air force relies on French-designed helicopters, while submarines and frigates involved in Beijing's physical assertion of its claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea are powered by German and French engines
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping announced stepped-up production of the Airbus EC175 helicopter in China during his visit to France this month -- a deal analysts said could result in technology transfers to the military.
> 
> _"European exports are very important for the Chinese military. Without European technology, the Chinese navy would not be able to move."_
> 
> - Andrei Chang, Kanwa Asian Defense Review
> 
> 
> EU arms makers received licences to export equipment worth three billion euros ($4.1 billion) to China in the decade to 2012.
> 
> Other EU licences included:
> - almost three million euros' worth of "smooth-bore weapons" and accessories - approved for export by Britain.
> - nearly 18 million euros' worth of "vessels of war" or their accessories and components - authorised by the Netherlands.
> 
> *Most of Beijing's military imports last year came from Russia while France, Britain and Germany supplied 18 percent.*
> 
> When a _Jiangwei_-class Chinese frigate was accused of locking fire-control radar on a JMSDF destroyer and a helicopter near disputed islands, military experts believe the ship relies on diesel engines produced by German firm MTU.
> 
> Another accused ship, a _Jiangkai_-class vessel, uses engines made by SEMT Pielstick, a French diesel engine manufacturer owned by German firm MAN Diesel and Turbo.
> 
> MAN told AFP that its Chinese licensees have supplied about 250 engines to China's navy.
> 
> *German-designed engines chosen for their quietness power virtually all non-nuclear Chinese submarines and several classes of Chinese frigates deployed in the South China Sea.*
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *AFP / Yahoo*


----------



## CougarKing

From fake Apple stores and fake Ikea stores to fake government offices...  :



> *Fake government busted in China *
> 
> quote:
> *State media recently reported that a “People’s Government of Dengzhou” set up in central Henan province was toppled after it was found, in fact, to be a fraud.
> 
> According to reports, the government was set up late last year by three residents who had gone so far as to counterfeit fake government seals and issue papers in the bogus government’s name.* They also tried to build up their own “civil service,” sending out recruitment ads that attracted more than 10 applicants before the real government shut it down.
> 
> Apparently the trio wanted to independently annul their existing government on the basis of its “nonperformance.” They located the headquarters of their faux government adjacent to the real one.
> 
> This isn't the first time Dengzhou has made headlines for unusual political news. Four years ago, government mouthpiece China Daily wrote a story about the city titled “Democracy takes root in rural areas.” It chronicled Dengzhou’s measures to involve more residents in the vetting of proposals relating to villages in the region, in what the publication called an “innovative experiment” that was also hailed at the time by then-Vice President Xi Jinping.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Yahoo Finance


----------



## CougarKing

I wonder if words will remain civil once the discussion in the room turns to the subject of the Diaoyus/Senkakus...

Agence-France-Presse



> *Japanese delegation flies to Beijing on mission to mend fences with China*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> May 4, 2014 2:40 PM
> 
> TOKYO - A delegation of senior Japanese lawmakers left for Beijing Sunday on a mission to mend ties between the two neighbors amid a territorial dispute, which has prevented a leaders' summit
> 
> The bipartisan delegation, led by Masahiko Komura, former foreign minister and vice president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, departed from Tokyo's Haneda airport Sunday morning on a three-day visit to China, officials said.
> 
> The mission consisted of nine lawmakers of both ruling and opposition parties belonging to the Japan-China Friendship Parliamentarians' Union.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> I wonder if words will remain civil once the discussion in the room turns to the subject of the Diaoyus/Senkakus...
> 
> Agence-France-Presse




One hopes so ... the obvious 'right' answer, for all these boundary disputes, is some sort of _joint_ management of island or the sea bed. There is nothing to be gained, by either China or Japan, in a dispute that threatens their long term peace and prosperity.

The Japanese, infamously, proclaimed a _Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere_ back around 1940. It is possible that some combination of ASEAN, China and Japan can, 75+ years later deliver on that notion ... without a destructive regional war.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> One hopes so ... the obvious 'right' answer, for all these boundary disputes,



Speaking of the boundary disputes, here's an update on another one in the South China Sea:

From the AP via the Philippine Star:



> *China begins drilling for oil in disputed sea*
> 
> By Chris Brummitt (Associated Press) | Updated May 5, 2014 - 2:26pm
> 
> HANOI, Vietnam — *Vietnam protested a Chinese decision to begin drilling for oil in disputed Southeast Asian waters, calling the move illegal Monday and demanding that Beijing pull back from the area.
> 
> Beijing's deployment of its first deep sea rig was the latest in a series of provocative actions aimed at asserting its sovereignty in the South China that have raised tensions with Vietnam, the Philippines and other claimants.*
> 
> The United States shares many of the regional concerns about China's actions in the seas, which are potentially rich in gas and oil. Last week, President Barack Obama signed a new defense pact with the Philippines aimed at reassuring allies in the region of American backing as they wrangle with Beijing's growing economic and military might.
> 
> The China Maritime Safety Administration posted a navigational warning on its website advising that the CNOOC 981 rig would be drilling in the South China Sea from May 4 to Aug. 15, in an area close to the Paracel Islands, which are controlled by China but Vietnam claims as their own.
> 
> It said ships entering a 3-mile (4.8-kilometers) radius around the area are prohibited.
> 
> Vietnam's foreign ministry said the area where the rig was stationed lay within Vietnam's exclusive economic zone and continental shelf as defined by the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *Many analysts believe China is embarking on a strategy of gradually pressing its claims in the water by seeing what it can get away with, believing that its much smaller neighbors will be unable or unwilling to stop them. Vietnam has accused Chinese ships of cutting cables to its exploration vessels and harassing fishermen, as has the Philippines.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

There goes one source of intelligence within the PLA... 



> *China Says It Unearthed a Military Spy Ring Involving 40 People*
> 
> quote:
> China sentenced a man to 10 years in prison for providing military secrets to overseas spy organizations as part of an espionage ring that involved 40 people in China, state media said.
> 
> *A man surnamed Li became a tool for providing secret information to intelligence agencies under the guidance of a foreign spy given the name “Feige,” or Flying Brother in Chinese*, the China News Service reported yesterday, citing the Guangdong provincial department of state security.
> 
> The sentencing comes two weeks after President Xi Jinping and the Central Military Commission he heads issued a document calling for better protection of military secrets. The state media report did not identify the countries involved in Li’s case or the nationality of the spy.
> 
> *For “a long time” Li provided internal military publications, observation of military bases at specific times, as well as photos of equipment, China News Service said. This was a “serious threat” to national security, the report said.*
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Bloomberg


----------



## CougarKing

China strengthening its position in the South China Sea:



> From *WantChinaTimes*
> 
> *PLA may build airfield on disputed South China Sea island*
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *
> Citing military experts, Duowei said that China may soon construct a new airfield on Johnson South Reef to increase its force projection ability over the South China Sea region.*
> 
> According to the report, China has learned valuable lessons from the Johnson South Reef Skirmish with Vietnam in 1988, when Beijing found that it would be close to impossible to drive Vietnam out of the Spratlys without a strong air force.
> 
> *After its victory in the 1988 skirmish, China occupied six reefs and atolls in the Spratly islands, including John South Reef. However, Vietnam still controls 29 islands in the Spratly chain.* China will now look to build an airfield for the PLA Navy, Duowei said, while it will be necessary to send warships to complete the project amid the territorial tensions.


----------



## CougarKing

China sending a message to the US to back off its disputes with its neighbours in the South China Sea?



> *USS Blue Ridge Encounters Chinese Ships Near Disputed Scarborough Shoal*
> 
> Stripes.com
> 
> By Erik Slavin
> 
> Stars and Stripes
> Published: May 9, 2014
> 
> YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — A USS Blue Ridge-embarked helicopter photographed two Chinese navy ships May 5 near the site of a heavily contested shoal that has sparked a months-long standoff between China and the Philippines in 2012.The Navys photo release of two Chinese Navy ships near Scarborough Shoal sparked some online news outlets to label the encounter a confrontation, which 7th Fleet officials disputed Friday.USS Blue Ridge, the Japan based 7th Fleets flagship, transited without incident near the two ships, Navy officials said.All parties acted professionally, said 7th Fleet spokesman Cmdr. William Marks, who is embarked aboard Blue Ridge.
> 
> There wasn’t any communication [with the Chinese] due to both Blue Ridge and its helicopter being a safe distance away,* Marks said.Hull numbers in the Navy photos indicate the Chinese ships were the destroyer Lanzhou and the frigate Hengshui*.The visit near Scarborough was not a freedom of navigation operation, Marks said in response to a Stars and Stripes question.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another reason why China is so sensitive about maintaining that ADIZ over the East China Sea?

Defense News



> *China's Achilles' Heel: Air Defense Gap*
> May. 10, 2014 - 03:19PM | By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — Only days after China declared an air defense identification zone on Nov. 23 over the East China Sea, the US Air Force flew two B-52 bombers over the area in what appeared to be a challenge to China’s claim.
> 
> A former US Air Force official is suggesting this was a message of deterrence to Beijing that the US is aware of China’s weak links along its air defense network.
> 
> *Two separate groups control the coastal radar perimeter along China’s coast: the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), said Mark Stokes, a China military specialist at the Project 2049 Institute.
> 
> The weakest link in China’s air defense network is where these two meet — PLAN’s Second Radar Brigade in Zhejiang province’s Cangnan City, and PLAAF’s Fourth Radar Brigade in Fujian province’s Fuding City, along the border of Zhejiang province.
> *
> This gap runs along the southern line of the East China Sea air identification zone.
> 
> China’s new zone is both “figuratively and literally a military ‘line in the sand,’ ” said Paul Giarra, president of Global Strategies and Transformation.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Their real weakness is the lack of an anti-ballistic missile defense.On the other hand they may have the edge in space based weapons.


----------



## CougarKing

Another part of China's "Silent Army"?



> *Resort opponents: Chinese invade Mexico coast*
> Associated Press
> MARK STEVENSON May 10, 2014
> 
> MEXICO CITY (AP) — Environmentalists say the only living hard coral reef in the Gulf of California is once again under threat, just two years after activists persuaded the government to block construction of a huge 30,000-room resort nearby.
> 
> But environmentalists are alarmed by renewed plans for a 22,000-room resort, *this time led by Chinese investors.* Jeering and arguments erupted at a public comment session this week on the proposal, which is at the earliest stage in the approval process.
> 
> The developers, in one of their few public statements about the Cabo Dorado resort, say they have eliminated about one-third of the hotel and condo rooms proposed in the earlier project, and abandoned plans for a marina and a desalinization plant that caused controversy. *They offer to treat, and re-use water from existing aquifers.*
> 
> But opponents say there isn't enough fresh water available on the bone-dry peninsula to support even the reduced plan, and that the *project gives little consideration to how the reef could be affected by resort wastes and runoff from golf courses.*
> 
> Critics of Cabo Dorado say just as worrisome is what they don't know about their deep-pocketed opponents: Chinese companies whose relationship with that country's government is unclear.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *AP / Yahoo*


----------



## CougarKing

Another interesting tidbit from Bloomberg, that was mentioned in another thread:



> Bloomberg
> 
> China’s demography is a disaster. About 2015, the seemingly boundless labor pool will begin to shrink. *One reason is rapid aging, which presages that China will become old before it becomes rich. By 2050, China will have lost one-third of its working-age population.* Meanwhile, the U.S. will bestride the earth as the youngest industrialized nation after India.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

China "not giving an inch" over the South China Sea despite tension with Vietnam and other neighbours...



> *Pentagon Press Conference Turns Into Heated Debate Between Top Generals From US And China *
> 
> A top Chinese general Thursday strongly defended Beijing's territorial claims over disputed islands in the South and East China Seas and charged that the U.S. rebalance of forces to the Pacific was encouraging unrest in the region.
> 
> *Gen. Fang Fenghui, chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army, said "the rebalancing strategy of the U.S. has stirred up some of the problems which make the South China Sea and the East China Sea not so calm as before."
> 
> Fang warned that China would respond to any attempts by Vietnam, Japan or other neighbors to assert their own claims over the disputed islands and reefs.*
> 
> "We do not create trouble but we are not afraid of trouble," Fang said at a Pentagon news conference after meetings with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
> 
> *Dempsey appeared to be slightly irritated as he waited to comment while listening to a long-winded response by Fang on the current dispute with Vietnam over offshore oil drilling rights.*
> 
> "Thank you for giving me the time to formulate my answer," Dempsey told Fang.
> 
> When his turn finally came, Dempsey dismissed Fang's objections to the so-called "Pacific pivot" and said the U.S. was committed to the policy.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Business Insider






> China blames Vietnam for deadly riots, will not cede inch of disputed territory
> By: Phil Stewart and David Alexander, Reuters
> 
> WASHINGTON -- China’s top general on Thursday defended the deployment of an oil rig that has inflamed tensions in the disputed South China Sea and triggered deadly protests in Vietnam, blaming Hanoi and saying China cannot afford to "lose an inch" of territory.
> 
> General Fang Fenghui also pointed blame at US President Barack Obama's strategic "pivot" to Asia as Vietnam and China grapple with one of the worst breakdowns in relations since the neighbors fought a brief border war in 1979.
> 
> Anti-China riots in Vietnam erupted after China's towing of an oilrig into waters claimed by both countries. Up to 21 people have been killed and a huge foreign steel project has been set ablaze.
> 
> Fang said some Asian nations had seized on Obama's vows to rebalance military and diplomatic assets to Asia as an opportunity to create trouble in the South and East China Seas.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Reuters


----------



## CougarKing

Again with the looming property downturn...

Agence-France-Presse



> *China goes local to soften hit from property downturn*
> BY KEVIN YAO
> 
> (Reuters) - *China will increasingly manage its troubled property sector at a local level as it seeks to avoid sparking either an abrupt slowdown that undermines the economy or another surge in prices, according to government economists involved in policy discussions.*
> 
> After increasing at double-digit rates through most of last year, home prices started cooling in late 2013 as a sustained campaign to clamp down on speculative investment and easy credit gained traction.
> 
> Annual growth in average new home prices slowed to an 11-month low in April, official data showed on Sunday. Existing home prices dropped from a month earlier in 22 of 70 cities in April, compared with 14 in March.
> 
> Data last week showed property sales dropped 6.9 percent in the January-April period from a year earlier in terms of floor space, and fell 7.8 percent in terms of value.
> 
> *Authorities know a severe property crunch could worsen a build-up of debt, but also that a blanket easing of restrictions could set off another round of credit-fuelled house price rises.
> 
> "There is no sign that the central government will relax property controls on a nationwide scale even though the economy is slowing,"* said Zhao Xijun, deputy head of the Finance and Securities Institute at Renmin University in Beijing.
> 
> "The pressure is mainly on local governments, because some of their debts are maturing and they need to repay."
> 
> Local governments rely heavily on revenues from land sales to fund debts that official data show total 17.9 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion), so price falls and slowing sales have sparked concerns about their ability to service their debts.
> 
> (...EDITED- FULL ARTICLE AT AFP MAIN SITE)


----------



## CougarKing

Another aspect of foreign espionage: industrial/corporate spying.

From REUTERS:



> (Reuters) - *A U.S. grand jury has indicted five Chinese individuals with cyber espionage charges for allegedly targeting six American companies and stealing trade secrets*, the U.S. Justice Department said, publicly accusing China of cyber spying for the first time.
> 
> The hackers targeted U.S. companies in the nuclear power, metals and solar products industries to steal information useful to competitors in China, the department said on Monday.
> 
> *The companies targeted include Alcoa Inc, United States Steel Corp, Allegheny Technologies Inc, Westinghouse Electric Co and U.S. subsidiaries of SolarWorld AG, U.S. officials said.
> 
> The hackers also targeted United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied-Industrial and Service Workers International Union (USW)*, officials said.
> 
> The hackers targeted U.S. companies in the nuclear power, metals and solar products industries to steal information useful to competitors in China, the department said.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

While Washington officials were aware these 5 PLA officers would *never* have been turned over by China, some say the US did this more to bring public attention/awareness to the issue, as well as make Beijing officials aware that the MSS/PLA may have reached too far.

Reuters



> *China confronts U.S. envoy over cyber-spying accusations*
> BY SUI-LEE WEE
> BEIJING Tue May 20, 2014 9:19am EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - China summoned the U.S. ambassador after the United States accused five Chinese military officers of hacking into American companies to steal trade secrets, warning Washington it could take further action, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
> 
> The U.S. Ambassador to China, Max Baucus, met with Zheng Zeguang, assistant foreign minister, on Monday shortly after the United States charged the five Chinese, accusing them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> According to the indictment, *all five defendants worked with Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army ", which had been "hired" by Chinese state-owned companies to provide information technology services"* including assembling a database of corporate intelligence. The Chinese companies were not named.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _Financial Times_ is reporting that there has been another bomb attack in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous region. The reports says 30+ are dead. This follows hard on the heels of an announcement by Xi Jinping that he would crack down on _domestic terrorists_ ... it will be even tougher to be a Uyghur from now on.


----------



## CougarKing

On the economic front:

Al Jazeera



> *RUSSIA, CHINA SIGN DEAL TO BYPASS U.S. DOLLAR*
> 
> In a symbolic blow to U.S. global financial hegemony, Russia and China took a small step toward undercutting the domination of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency on Tuesday when Russia’s second biggest financial institution, VTB,* signed a deal with the Bank of China to bypass the dollar and pay each other in domestic currencies.*
> 
> The so-called Agreement on Cooperation — signed in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is on a visit to Shanghai — was followed by the long-awaited announcement on Wednesday of a massive natural gas deal 10 years in the making.
> 
> “Our countries have done a huge job to reach a new historic landmark,” Putin said on Tuesday, making note of the $100 billion in annual trade that has been achieved between the two countries.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

To think there was a time when defections across the Taiwan Strait were more expected to go the other way...

Taiwan News



> *Taiwanese remote sensing scientist defects to China*
> 
> Taipei, May 23 (CNA) Taiwanese *Chen Kun-shan, a leading expert on remote sensing technology*, has secretly defected to China, the Ministry of Education confirmed Friday. The ministry is expected to hold a meeting soon to approve a decision by National Central University (NCU) to dismiss Chen from his position as a professor, according to Wang Tso-tai, chief secretary of the ministry.
> 
> 
> (...EDITED/SNIPPED)
> 
> In a front-page story, the Liberty Times cited an intelligence source as saying that Chen's case posed a "serious threat" to Taiwan's national security.* As head of the Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, Chen had access to satellite images covering Taiwan and China's military deployments and was in a category of government employees privy to state secrets and restricted from visiting China, the report said.*


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC has launched an anti-terror operation in Xinjiang region after a bomb killed 43 people at a market.The area is home to the Muslim Uighurs.I guess they dont like the Han Chinese assimilation.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Uyghurs are, now, actually a minority in Xinjiang Province Autonomous Region (it's status is slightly different from other provinces, it has, like Tibet, some extra _attributes_). Han Chinese constitute a majority - the _Sinification_ programme has been going on for several years and it aims to, eventually, nullify the Uyghurs.


----------



## tomahawk6

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Uyghurs are, now, actually a minority in Xinjiang Province Autonomous Region (it's status is slightly different from other provinces, it has, like Tibet, some extra _attributes_). Han Chinese constitute a majority - the _Sinification_ programme has been going on for several years and it aims to, eventually, nullify the Uyghurs.



The Uyghurs won't go quietly.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The Uyghurs won't go quietly.



You're right. This is, pretty much, the first time in about 3,000 years that the Chinese have met _barbarians_ (in their minds) who cannot be absorbed, bought with the delights of towns and culture, and, and, and ... Islam poses direct challenges to both the Chinese idea of China's own cultural superiority and to the CCP's idea of its _mandate_ to rule China. My _guess_ is that China wins, but it will not be pretty.


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan's outpost of Itu Aba/Taiping dao in the South China Sea will never fly a mainland Chinese flag as long as Taiwan opposition parties such as the DPP have something to say about it...

Reuters



> *As Taiwan beefs up prized South China Sea outpost, barely a peep from China*
> BY MICHAEL GOLD AND GREG TORODE
> TAIPEI/HONG KONG Sun May 25, 2014 5:56pm EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - Taiwan is building a $100 million port next to an airstrip on the lone island it occupies in the disputed South China Sea, a move that is drawing hardly any flak from the most assertive player in the bitterly contested waters - China.
> 
> *The reason, say military strategists, is that Itu Aba could one day be in China's hands should it ever take over Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province.*
> 
> While Itu Aba, also called Tai Ping, is small, no other disputed island has such sophisticated facilities. Its runway is the biggest of only two in the Spratly archipelago that straddles the South China Sea, and the island has its own fresh water source.
> 
> "Taipei knows it is the only claimant that (China) will not bother, so it is free to upgrade its facilities on Tai Ping without fear of criticism from China," said Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the Hawaii-based East-West Center think tank.
> 
> *"China would protect Taiwan's garrisons if necessary."
> *
> 
> The upgraded facilities on Itu Aba should be finished late next year or earlier, officials from Taiwan's defense and transport ministries said, replacing an existing wharf that can only handle small vessels.
> 
> *That would give Taiwan a port able to accommodate 3,000-tonne naval frigates and coastguard cutters while improvements are being made to the 1,200-metre (3,940-foot) long runway for its Hercules C-130 transport planes, they told Reuters.*
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a report (breaking news) that "At 4 pm May 26, about 40 Chinese fishing boats surrounded a group of Vietnamese fishing ships in an area about 17 nautical miles south-southwest from the location where China’s oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 has been placed illegally since May 1 ... Suddenly, Chinese fishing boat #11209 crashed into Vietnamese fishing ship DNa 90152 with 10 fishermen on board ... The hard hit sank the local ship and some Vietnamese fishing boats operating nearby managed to save all the 10 crew members."


----------



## Kirkhill

So now we have Non-Chinese sailors acting against Vietnamese in disputed waters ......

Previously it was Non-Russians ....

I wonder how many more "renegades" we are going to see cropping up.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There is a report (breaking news) that "At 4 pm May 26, about 40 Chinese fishing boats surrounded a group of Vietnamese fishing ships in an area about 17 nautical miles south-southwest from the location where China’s oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 has been placed illegally since May 1 ... Suddenly, Chinese fishing boat #11209 crashed into Vietnamese fishing ship DNa 90152 with 10 fishermen on board ... The hard hit sank the local ship and some Vietnamese fishing boats operating nearby managed to save all the 10 crew members."



ERC,
Don't you think this post and Kirkhill's post above better belongs in the China vs. Vietnam: territorial disputes, etc. thread?

Anyways, another rival claimant enters the fray for the South China Sea. If China implements this crazy ADIZ over the South China Sea, it will only serve to further unite her neighbours against her.

National Interest



> *The Next South China Sea Crisis: China vs. Indonesia?*
> Jack Greig
> May 23, 2014
> 
> *The seabed around the Natuna Islands is gas-rich and falls partly within the boundaries of China’s so-called nine-dash line in the South China Sea. But it’s also a part of Indonesia's maritime Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). *Indonesia has asserted on a number occasions that there's no dispute with China around the EEZ because China’s audacious claim has no basis in international law. But Beijing has simply refused to respond consistently or clearly to Jakarta's multiple requests for clarification.
> 
> At the least, there's a conflict over the interpretation of the 1982 UNCLOS - and the legal concept that 'land dominates the seas' - between China and Indonesia.
> 
> *Speaking in February after the implementation of China's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa warned, "we have firmly told China we will not accept a similar zone if it is adopted in the South China Sea".*
> 
> Even though both China and Indonesia currently enjoy a remarkable stint of amicable relations, tensions in the South China Sea are continuing to simmer. So Jakarta should maintain its push for clarity with an official agreement that excises the Natuna Islands EEZ from all iterations of the nine-dash line map.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## tomahawk6

It could breathe new life into SEATO.


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> It could breathe new life into SEATO.



Sorry for the off-topic, but...

Wouldn't this current Thailand coup business complicate things though? Thailand was one of the 8 original members of SEATO; did any of Thailand's past 10 coups (besides this current one and the last one in 2006) occur when SEATO was still around?

-----------------------------------------

It also says at the thread link above that the US will be withdrawing military support for Thailand due to the coup. 

Furthermore, while the Thai military uses mostly US-made military equipment, Thailand has also bought military equipment from China such as those four Chinese-built Type 53 Frigates the Royal Thai Navy operates. Wouldn't suspending military aid may cause Thailand to look to China for military support?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Does anyone have a map showing how all the various national ADIZs overlap?

One acquaintance suggested to me that China's (problematic) ADIZ was, in fact, designed to overlap the others because they all _intrude_ into China's _area of influence_.


----------



## CougarKing

Here's what the next PLA base in the South China Sea will look like; it seems to be almost as large as the massive Chep Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong.   



> *[size=18pt]Design of China's Military Base to Be Built on Reef in South China Sea*
> Posted: May 25, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The No. 9 Design & Research Institute of China State Shipbuilding Corporation recently displayed on its official website its proposed design of an artificial island to be built on a reef in the South China Sea. It aims at providing a reserve of designs for an artificial island China may build there.
> 
> 
> 
> *Source*


----------



## CougarKing

To think I was just getting used to WeChat as a way to keep in better touch with former work contacts back in China...  

CTV News




> *China cracks down on instant messaging services*
> By Louise Watt (Associated Press) | Updated May 29, 2014 - 3:13am
> 
> BEIJING —* China is targeting popular smartphone-based instant messaging services in a monthlong campaign to crack down on the spreading of rumors and what it calls infiltration of hostile forces, in the latest move restricting online freedom of expression.*
> 
> Such services incorporate social media functions that allow users to post photos and updates to their friends, or follow the feeds of companies, social groups or celebrities, and — more worryingly for the government — intellectuals, journalists and activists who comment on politics, law and society. They also post news reports shunned by mainstream media.
> 
> Some accounts attract hundreds of thousands of followers.
> 
> The official Xinhua News Agency said the crackdown on people spreading rumors and information related to violence, terrorism and pornography started Tuesday and *would target public accounts on services including WeChat, run by Tencent Holdings Ltd, which has surged in popularity in the last two years.*
> 
> People can subscribe to feeds from public accounts without first exchanging greeting messages, as must be done with private ones, which typically link friends and acquaintances.
> 
> Tencent and other companies did not answer calls or immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

2 academics weigh in that conflict over the South China Sea is still likely despite trade links between China and her neighbours:



> *Deeper trade relations cannot stop war over South China Sea -expert*
> By Camille Diola (philstar.com)
> May 28, 2014
> 
> MANILA, Philippines - An armed conflict between China and the United States' regional partners including the Philippines, over the South China Sea is not unlikely despite the countries' deep economic ties, an Australian security expert said.
> 
> Alan Dupont, professor of International Security at University of New South Wales, said in a statement that China may choose to risk financially as it seeks to dominate the strategic waterway claimed by its neighbors and challenges the US' pre-eminence in the region.
> 
> 
> _"It should not be forgotten that Britain and Germany's extensive trade ties in the early 20th century did not prevent them going to war in 1914. It would be wrong to conclude that deepening levels of trade interdependence are a guarantee or peace. Resource insecurity is another important driver of China's muscular unilateralism. In a little more than two decades the country has moved from a net exporter to importing more than 55 per cent of its oil. Even China's enormous ­reserves of coal are insufficient to meet domestic demand. This resource vulnerability weighs heavily on the minds of Chinese leaders who, in addition to worrying about terrorism, piracy and environmental disruptions to their energy supplies, are acutely aware that their main competitor, the US." _
> 
> *- Alan Dupont, professor of International Security *
> 
> For Dupont, China has more to gain than lose once it establishes itself in the potentially oil-rich disputed waters.
> 
> He also cited a recent Georgetown University study suggesting that East Asian countries such as China and Japan may choose to lose economically than lose maritime and territorial sovereignty.
> 
> Micah Zenko, a fellow at the New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations, said in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that war between the US and China is "not preordained" but tensions may lead to it.
> 
> 
> _"The United States could be drawn into a conflict over a territorial dispute involving China, especially since the United States has bilateral defense treaties with Japan and the Philippines. Involved states can avoid war only if they establish clear interpretations of actions within exclusive economic zones."_
> 
> *- Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations*
> 
> 
> *Philippine Star (Philippine newspaper site)*


----------



## CougarKing

More on China's extensive internal security apparatus such as its Public Security Bureau... 

When I worked in China, I had to have my cellphone registered with the local police since all foreigners with local numbers have to register them. You also have to check in your passport at every hotel or inn you stay at, or if you settle in a different town for a extended period, you have to register your passport with the local authorities as well.

Certain sites like Facebook are inaccessible there because of the "Great Firewall" that prevents locals from accessing banned sites, though if you're resourceful you can get a VPN (virtual private network, which are illegal there) that allows you to covertly access them; many of the long-term foreign expats there have their own VPNs.

Military.com



> *Security Matrix Prevents another Tiananmen*
> 
> BEIJING -- When visiting friends in China's capital, environmental activist Wu Lihong must slip away from his rural home before sunrise, before the police officers watching his home awaken. He rides a bus to an adjacent province and jumps aboard a train just minutes before departure to avoid being spotted.
> 
> In a neighboring province, *veteran dissident Yin Weihong finds himself hauled into a police station merely for keeping in touch with old friends from the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. *While he's technically a free man, the treatment makes it virtually impossible to keep a job or have a normal home life.
> 
> *A quarter century after the movement's suppression, China's communist authorities oversee a raft of measures for muzzling dissent and preventing protests. They range from the sophisticated - extensive monitoring of online debate and control over media - to the relatively simple - routine harassment of government critics and maintenance of a massive domestic security force.*
> 
> The system has proven hugely successful: No major opposition movement has gotten even a hint of traction in the 25 years since Tiananmen. President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping seems intent on ensuring things stay that way.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> And while religious activity is permitted under the auspices of party-controlled bodies, crackdowns have escalated against independent groups such as Protestant "house churches." In Zhejiang province alone, 64 churches were demolished, had their crosses removed or were threatened, according to Bob Fu, a former dissident and underground church pastor now based in Texas.
> 
> Meanwhile, the state has developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance and censorship, taking advantage of technological improvements and a huge boost in domestic security spending. An army of young, computer-savvy censors checks social media and websites and removes content on sensitive topics.
> 
> *Users of social media such as the hugely popular microblogging and instant messaging applications Weibo and QQ must be registered and identified.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Kirkhill

The first time I believed that people screwed dogs for fun and profit was when I discovered that God/Moses had made a law condemning it.

With the Chinese Communist Party consumed with trying to stop people believing, organizing, communicating.... after 65 years of trying ..... I have great faith in  the durability of a Chinese sense of liberty and the ultimate demise/morphing of the Party and its Oligarchs.  Confucian liberty may not be Jeffersonian liberty but it is unlikely to be Marxist.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I don't think there ever were many _Marxists_ in China. 

Mao, and Jiang Qing, for example, were certainly revolutionaries, but, in my _opinion_ closer to the Bakunin wing than to Marx-Lenin. Zhoe Enlai was a communist, he was close to many Russians, but his communism was strongly influenced by his time with the French socialists.

Marx and Confucius are not a good fit. But, then, neither are Confucius and Mises or Hayek. The Chinese have a very, very long tradition of trade and commerce based on e.g. uniform weights and measures and a sound currency, but _economics_, of whatever sort, was never a preoccupation of the upper class - they were rich, to be sure, but the aim was to become rich enough to be a _gentleman_ who, by definition, did not think about money.  : 

Marxist notions, like "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs" do not fit well into China's culture, ancient or modern; nor do ideas on _individualism_ such as we find in the Austrian or Chicago _schools_. The Chinese culture is familial, not individualistic or collectivist; because it is familial it is also somewhat hierarchical. 

Zhou Enlai performed some radical surgery on Chinese society in the 1950s and 60s, large parts of which were, still are, welcomed by most (at least many) Chinese today; some of the ideas he used were Russian and communist, others were European/socialist and still others were, essentially, English/liberal. Zhou was, I think, a communist for non-economic reasons: I think he did believe in _equality_ but I think he believed even more in the power of _communist_ (Leninist, not Marxist) political _structures_ to effect social change and I think that, the social change, was more important to him than socialist/communist economics.

We have seen some left-right-left _swings_ in what is , really, _Capitalist China_ in post the Mao, modern era: Deng and Zhao Ziyang were capitalists in action, socialists in name, but, largely centrists; then came Jiang Zemin who shifted China pretty far towards a 'tooth and claw' capitalism; he was followed by Hu Jintao who _moderated_ almost everything and introduced some _left wing_ social policies and now Xi Jinping who seems to be be quite _centrist_, to date, anyway.

I think you need to look at the whole period of 1912 to 1962, the era of Sun, the warlords and Mao, as another _interregnum_, this one between the Qing Dynasty and this new, CCP Dynasty.


Edited to add: See also this review of a fairly new book, "The History of Ancient Chinese Economic Thought," Cheng Lin, Terry Peach and Wang Fang (eds.)  2014


----------



## CougarKing

If this deal pushes through, the S-400s mentioned below will also spell VERY bad news for Taiwan:

Defense News



> *Russian Fighters for China Still On Hold*
> May. 31, 2014 - 06:21PM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — Russian industry officials are denying media reports that Beijing and Moscow are finalizing a deal on the sale of advanced Russian fighters and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to China.
> 
> Widely reported by other media outlets, Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV announced that the head of Sukhoi, Mikhail Pogosyan, *confirmed that a deal with China to procure Su-35S fighters and S-400 SAMs was close to concluding.*
> 
> But Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) denies that Pogosyan discussed anything beyond the sale of commercial aircraft during his visit to China.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Whether the sale goes forward today or next year, it will spell trouble for Taiwan and Japan’s efforts to defend the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. *The 400-kilometer range S-400 will allow China to strike any aircraft over Taiwan. This will give China effective control of Taiwan’s airspace during a war.* At present, China’s 300-kilometer range S-300s can hit aircraft only in a small section of Taiwan’s northwest coastal area.
> 
> *The S-400 will make it difficult for Tokyo to control the Senkaku’s airspace. *The disputed islands are controlled by Japan, but also claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands are within 350 kilometers of China’s coast.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is China's response (supported y some Russian mischief making) to recent statements by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and American Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6f902368-e95a-11e3-bbc1-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz33JiFvESh


> China accuses US and Japan of ‘provocative actions’
> 
> By Demetri Sevastopulo in Singapore
> 
> June 1, 2014
> 
> A top Chinese general on Sunday accused the US and Japan of teaming up to stage “provocative actions” against China, as escalating maritime tensions spilled into an Asian regional defence forum.
> 
> Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of the Chinese general staff, lambasted Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and Chuck Hagel, US defence secretary, for telling the forum of Asian defence ministers that China was using intimidation to assert its territorial claims.
> 
> “The speeches by Mr Abe and Mr Hagel gave me the impression that they co-ordinated with each other, they supported each other, they encouraged each other and they took the advantage of speaking first . . . and staged provocative actions and challenges against China,” said Gen Wang.
> 
> Mr Hagel on Saturday said China was undermining​ its claims that the South China Sea was a “sea of peace, friendship and co-operation” by using coercive tactics, adding the US would “not look the other way when fundamental principles of the international order are being challenged”.
> 
> On Friday, Mr Abe said Japan would give more support to southeast Asian nations that are facing Chinese pressure.
> 
> In the face of mounting efforts by the US and Japan to shore up or build new security relationships in Asia, Gen Wang said China opposed both the practice of building military alliances and “attempts by any country to dominate regional affairs”. In a jab at Japan’s wartime history, Gen Wang said China would “never allow fascism . . . to stake a comeback”.
> 
> The Shangri-La Dialogue has become one of the key defence events in Asia, particularly as China becomes more willing to voice its views at the forum. Gen Wang said he had not intended to deliver a critical speech, but felt compelled to respond to Mr Hagel whose speech was “full of hegemony”.
> 
> This year’s event became more heated because of the escalating disputes in the South China Sea and East China Sea. China is embroiled in maritime disputes around the region, including with Manila and Tokyo.
> Scores of Chinese and Vietnamese ships are also involved in a stand-off near the disputed Paracel Islands after China started drilling for oil there in early May.
> 
> China’s neighbours are concerned about the “nine-dash line”, a demarcation on Chinese maps that encloses much of the South China Sea, suggesting that Beijing lays claim to most of the resource-rich waters.
> 
> Asked to clarify the “nine-dash line”, Gen Wang said that while China respected the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), the law did not apply retroactively – a view that is not commonly accepted. He stressed that China discovered many of the islands in the Paracels and Spratly Islands, another disputed group closer to the Philippines, more than 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty.
> 
> Gen Wang said China did not take provocative actions, but was being forced to respond to such actions from other countries. But when asked what Vietnam had done to trigger the decision to move the oil rig to disputed waters, sparking the worst crisis in China-Vietnam relations in years, the general did not respond.
> 
> While Shangri-La is designed to tackle a range of Asia-Pacific security issues, the focus has, in recent years, shifted squarely to China, with most of the participants this year asking China to explain its policies and actions.
> 
> Some experts questioned whether a new cold war was emerging in Asia. Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s deputy defence secretary, took exception to comments by Mr Hagel that the US was the only power that could lead in the Asia-Pacific region. “Why does the US have to lead? To lead what?”




The Shangri-la Dialogue is a three or four day conference, run by the Singapore Branch of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. It is named after the (very elegant) hotel in which it is held.


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing's fixation against the USN 7th Fleet's CVBG/CSG forward deployed in Japan continues...  

Defense News



> *Report: Chinese Cruise Missiles Could Pose Biggest Threat to US Carriers*
> 
> TAIPEI — Saturation strikes from Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles could become the biggest threat to US Navy carrier strike groups (CSG), according to a paper issued by the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University.
> 
> The paper, “A Low-Visibility Force Multiplier: Assessing China’s Cruise Missile Ambitions,” draws from both Western and Chinese-language open source documents and concludes, “experienced Aegis warriors will respect China’s emerging capabilities.”
> 
> Written by cruise missile specialist Dennis Gormley, and China military specialists Andrew Erickson and Jingdong Yuan, the paper states that, due to the low cost of developing, deploying and maintaining cruise missiles, the Chinese believe that cruise missiles possess a 9:1 cost advantage over the expense of defending against them. China assumes that “quantity can defeat quality” by simply saturating a CSG with a variety of high-speed, low-altitude, cruise missiles.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> The possibility, according to the paper, cannot be ruled out. Quoting retired US Navy Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt, China is “likely already ‘arm[ing] nuclear attack submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.’” The paper’s authors could find no evidence of “substrategic nuclear weapons,” but the “Soviet Navy has clearly influenced” the thinking of the Chinese Navy.
> 
> The paper looks at the publications of Senior Capt. Liu Yang, a Chinese naval officer at the Wuhan Office of the Naval Armaments Department. Liu’s writings suggest that “all options are on the table” for the “special anti-aircraft carrier mission.”
> 
> *Liu outlines three courses of actions, such as a cruise missile armed with a low-weight nuclear burst warhead, a fuel-air explosive warhead, and an undefined “special type of warhead with even greater power to inflict casualties.”*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## tomahawk6

An attack on a US carrier by the PRC would be an act of war.Such an act would require massive retaliation using conventional weapons against PLAN,Air Force and PLA targets.Those oil drilling rigs the PRC is putting in place would be destroyed.


----------



## MilEME09

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> An attack on a US carrier by the PRC would be an act of war.Such an act would require massive retaliation using conventional weapons against PLAN,Air Force and PLA targets.Those oil drilling rigs the PRC is putting in place would be destroyed.



Yes but the loss of a Carrier would be a huge tactical and Strategic loss for the United States, not as big as say us sinking the lone Chinese Carrier though (though Taiwan is already working on anti-ship missiles, and a missile boat for that exact purpose)


----------



## CougarKing

I wonder how Chinese state media will respond to this...



> *China's Uighurs claim cultural 'genocide'*
> 
> [aljazeera]
> 2 Jun 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Uighur protesters in Tokyo shout slogans during a rally against Chinese government's policy in Xinjiang [EPA]_
> 
> Full Article >>>


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2



			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I don't think there ever were many _Marxists_ in China.
> 
> Mao, and Jiang Qing, for example, were certainly revolutionaries, but, in my _opinion_ closer to the Bakunin wing than to Marx-Lenin. Zhoe Enlai was a communist, he was close to many Russians, but his communism was strongly influenced by his time with the French socialists.
> 
> Marx and Confucius are not a good fit. But, then, neither are Confucius and Mises or Hayek. The Chinese have a very, very long tradition of trade and commerce based on e.g. uniform weights and measures and a sound currency, but _economics_, of whatever sort, was never a preoccupation of the upper class - they were rich, to be sure, but the aim was to become rich enough to be a _gentleman_ who, by definition, did not think about money.  :
> 
> Marxist notions, like "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs" do not fit well into China's culture, ancient or modern; nor do ideas on _individualism_ such as we find in the Austrian or Chicago _schools_. The Chinese culture is familial, not individualistic or collectivist; because it is familial it is also somewhat hierarchical.
> 
> Zhou Enlai performed some radical surgery on Chinese society in the 1950s and 60s, large parts of which were, still are, welcomed by most (at least many) Chinese today; some of the ideas he used were Russian and communist, others were European/socialist and still others were, essentially, English/liberal. Zhou was, I think, a communist for non-economic reasons: I think he did believe in _equality_ but I think he believed even more in the power of _communist_ (Leninist, not Marxist) political _structures_ to effect social change and I think that, the social change, was more important to him than socialist/communist economics.
> 
> We have seen some left-right-left _swings_ in what is , really, _Capitalist China_ in post the Mao, modern era: Deng and Zhao Ziyang were capitalists in action, socialists in name, but, largely centrists; then came Jiang Zemin who shifted China pretty far towards a 'tooth and claw' capitalism; he was followed by Hu Jintao who _moderated_ almost everything and introduced some _left wing_ social policies and now Xi Jinping who seems to be be quite _centrist_, to date, anyway.
> 
> I think you need to look at the whole period of 1912 to 1962, the era of Sun, the warlords and Mao, as another _interregnum_, this one between the Qing Dynasty and this new, CCP Dynasty.
> 
> 
> Edited to add: See also this review of a fairly new book, "The History of Ancient Chinese Economic Thought," Cheng Lin, Terry Peach and Wang Fang (eds.)  2014




I'm not the only one who is having some trouble pigeon holing Xi Jinping as this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, makes clear:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141515/peter-martin-and-david-cohen/mao-and-forever


> Mao and Forever
> *Xi Jinping’s Authoritarian Reforms*
> 
> By Peter Martin and David Cohen
> 
> June 3, 2014
> 
> A year and a half into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule, who he is and what he wants remains something of a mystery. At times, he has appeared to be a reformer in the mold of Deng Xiaoping; one of Xi’s first acts in office was to reenact the great reformer’s “Southern Tour,” which kicked off market reforms after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. At other times, he has appeared nostalgic for the revolutionary socialism of Mao Zedong. A few months after his trip to the south, Xi made a high-profile visit to Xibaibo, the last headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War and a sacred site for left-wing devotees of Mao.
> 
> Xi’s policies have been as contradictory as his image. He has launched high-profile drives to encourage private enterprise and stem corruption. But he has coupled them with a pledge to maintain the state as the “core” of the economy and a broad crackdown on political dissent. So does Xi intend to inaugurate a new era of reform that will bring China fully into the modern world, or does he intend to double down on statist authoritarian rule and revive Mao’s populist Marxism?
> 
> In short, all of the above. Xi’s economic reforms and his Maoist political tendencies are both tactics in a strategy meant to preserve the one-party system by reforming it. His methods attest to his recognition of contemporary China’s biggest problems: rampant corruption, a sclerotic political system, and an economic model that is rapidly running out of steam. To address those without dismantling the system that brought him to power, Xi promises to reconcile Mao, state-owned companies, and Chinese Communist Party dominance with a dynamic and open economy. He will do so by making what he calls the “two hands,” the state and the market, work together and inspiring the party to believe in itself and in its mission to serve the Chinese people.
> 
> *THE HAND OF XI*
> 
> Over the last decade, Xi has participated in an intense debate over the role of the state and the market at the very top of the party. On one side are those who argue that the reformist spirit established under Deng and Jiang Zemin, the party’s general secretary between 1989 and 2002, had been lost to political gridlock and powerful vested interests opposed to further reform. On the other side are those who argue that the headlong pursuit of marketization has seen the party lose its sense of purpose and created unsustainable levels of inequality and corruption.
> 
> Xi found a way to split the difference. He argued that the state and the market do not have to compete. The “invisible hand” of the market and the “visible hand” of the state, he said, can reinforce each other. As he explained in his regular column in the Zhejiang Daily, the hand of the market should “adjust” the economy, promote efficiency, and lead urban development, whereas the state should focus on social management, public services, fairness, and rural development. This theory allowed him to position himself as both a champion of the state sector and a student of Adam Smith: “This concept of marketization is very clearly explained in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where he introduces the theory of two hands,” Xi told CCTV, China’s main television station, in 2006.
> 
> Xi put his model to work in Zhejiang, where he was party secretary between 2002 and 2007. In that province, he aimed to support private enterprise, including through a massive reduction in bureaucratic red tape (the list of items requiring government approval fell from a total of 3,000 to just 800). At the same time, he worked hard to reassure the public and officials that the state would still be important. He defended state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are seen by economic liberals as the worst offenders in China’s unsustainable model of state-led overinvestment. He explained that greater government support for private companies could improve the state sector by making it compete. SOEs could also then benefit from more private investment, and the government would get more tax revenue.
> 
> Xi’s experience in Zhejiang seemed to vindicate his model. Xi boasted that, from 1978 to 2004, 71.4 percent of Zhejiang's GDP growth had come from private enterprises, even as the total size of its state-owned assets had increased 42 times over.
> 
> Xi’s model also worked for Xi. During his stint as party secretary in Zhejiang, Xi distilled his work on economics into two books, published in December 2006 and August 2007: Work on Real Things, Walk at the Forefront and New Thoughts from the Yangtze. Both were crafted to help him win one of the world’s most mysterious elections -- the first-ever selection of a head of government by China’s “collective leadership” in the years leading up to the 2012 handover. His predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang, had been hand-picked by Deng. Before his gradual retirement and eventual death in 1997, Deng set up a system -- opaque and little-understood outside of the party -- for party elites to agree on a top leader without the guidance of the original revolutionary generation. That system meant that Xi had to win over a broad constituency of party elites to be selected. To some extent, his family ties, political patrons, deals, alliances, and favors helped do that job. But Xi also had to prove that he could be trusted with the one goal that everyone agreed on: keeping the party in power. And there, his theories proved persuasive.
> 
> Having won national power, Xi was given a mandate to implement the “two hands” strategy on a larger scale. As president of China, he has tried to support the market by abolishing government approvals for many kinds of economic and business activity; reforming the financial sector, including by allowing private banking; making it easier to set up new companies; and opening up more economic sectors to competition. He has also attempted to impose financial discipline on SOEs by exposing them to greater competition and encouraging private investment in the state sector. As Xi said at the National People’s Congress in March, he expects these reforms to “not only not weaken, but to strengthen” SOEs. Two hands has thus become a central way that the Xi administration summarizes its approach to the economy. On May 27, Xi presided over a “collective study session” of the Politburo, which specified that the “two hands” should work together in a “unified, mutually complementary and coordinated” manner. The party mouthpiece, The People’s Daily, has event referred to two hands as “the core proposition of the reform process.”
> 
> Xi has also taken his economic theories to the social sphere; just as markets can support a statist economy, he has argued, civil society can work with a repressive state to support social order. In Xi’s China, citizens can contribute as “positive social forces.” Xi has pushed for new rules that make it easier to register NGOs and for NGOs to work with local governments to provide social services. He has also curbed or abolished overtly abusive practices, such as re-education through labor. But, at the same time, his government has strengthened repression. He has given no ground on freedom of expression or assembly, and he has introduced new laws against such vague crimes as “spreading rumors.”
> 
> *BACK TO MAO’S FUTURE*
> 
> In the years ahead, Xi will have to face what he and his predecessors have described as a potentially fatal threat to party legitimacy: corruption. He will have to find a way to control the everyday abuses of power that fuel popular outrage and protest -- bribery, forced demolitions, and wanton indifference to public health and safety. Campaigns launched by Xi’s predecessors tried and failed to solve these problems, as local officials simply refused to change their practices, trusting that “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” This time, though, Xi has looked to Mao for an answer.
> 
> Mao knew how to get people’s attention: ideological mobilization and terror. He was able to inspire millions of Chinese to fight for change, even when change meant schemes that made sense only to him and resulted in mass death and suffering. Now, faced with millions of officials reluctant to accept reform, Xi hopes to harness this kind of power to clean up the party.
> 
> Since becoming president, Xi has required officials to study Maoist theory, particularly Mao’s “mass line,” which says that the party should be both a part of the people and capable of leading them. In turn, Xi has put limits on official banquets, gift giving, and the use of official cars, and has encouraged officials to interact with the public. He has put in appearances at Beijing restaurants and on busy shopping streets and has also mandated -- and, along with his colleagues in the leadership, led -- numerous “self-criticism” sessions, in which party cadres publicly evaluate their own success in connecting with the people.
> 
> Xi has effectively asked officials under him to give up many of the perks of office. The stakes, he says, are the very survival of the party. An educational campaign based on the famous “Document Number Nine” has promoted what party theory calls a “sense of danger” about the threat of the party’s collapse due to internal subversion and foreign attempts to undermine it. For many officials, that has been enough: Local officials complain about the drastic drop off in official gift-giving across the country, and the luxury sector has taken a big hit as a result.
> 
> For those who refuse to buy into Xi’s project, though, he has launched the biggest purge in decades. His weapon of choice is the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, the party’s anti-graft organization, which Xi has greatly strengthened under the leadership of long-term friend and ally Wang Qishan. Wang has presided over the detention of hundreds of officials across the party, government, industry, and academia. Those investigated effectively disappear from the face of the earth and are subjected to horrors one survivor recently described to the Associated Press as “a living hell.”
> 
> Xi’s use of Maoist politics has limits, though. Unlike Mao, Xi has made efforts to keep political campaigns and crackdowns under control. Mao asked the public to participate in purges, setting off the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. By contrast, Xi’s political campaigns and purges have been organized by central party bodies and led by him and his Politburo colleagues. They are intended to strengthen party institutions rather than to dismantle them -- both to make the “visible hand’s” power honest enough to be accepted, and to enlist lower-level officials in implementing the economic changes Xi has called for.



End of Part 1 of 2


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> *TUNNEL VISION?*
> 
> Even as Xi tackles corruption, he must also find ways to end political deadlock. Over the years, checks and balances introduced by Deng to prevent the re-emergence of Maoist dictatorship have ended up creating indecisive rule by committee. At the same time, beneficiaries of previous reforms have stood against further change. To start to fix politics, Xi has overhauled the party’s decision-making apparatus, empowering it to break through the gridlock. Not surprisingly, he has also given himself plenty of room to lead in the front.
> 
> For more than a decade, Xi has argued that China needs a strong, visionary leader. In Zhejiang in 2003, he wrote at length about the role of a “number one” in a system of collective leadership. He said that the party secretary should be “the personification of the Party Committee and the government” and that his role would be to take different voices among the leadership and “turn them into a song.” In turn, other leaders must always “pay attention to upholding the authority of the Party Secretary.”
> 
> Trying to rise in a system deeply suspicious of centralized power, Xi had to be careful discussing these ideas. He avoided talking directly about national leadership, using essays on provincial government to explain his plans. He has also taken pains to emphasize his commitment to the basic principle of collective leadership. The number one should be “no more than a finger, at most a thumb” in the fist of the leadership, he has written.
> 
> Even so, since entering office, Xi has centralized authority under top party leaders, especially himself. Most notably, he has created a series of small leading groups and committees on economic reform, national security, cyber security, and military reform, which are independent of the government and chaired by Xi. These groups place him at the center of most policymaking and provide him with a platform to issue decisions that cannot be stymied by vested interests in the Chinese bureaucracy.
> 
> Xi has also deployed a weapon that, ever since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the dismantling of Mao’s cult of personality, has made Chinese leaders uneasy: vision. Days after assuming office, he took the new Standing Committee to the “Road to Revival” exhibition at China’s National Museum. Standing in the exhibition hall, he asked, “What is the Chinese dream?” and then provided an answer: “I believe that realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, is the greatest dream of the contemporary nation.” Further, unlike his predecessors, whose jargon-laden speeches were intelligible only to party insiders, Xi has used his appearances to speak to the people, tapping into popular nationalism and presenting his reforms as the key to China’s rise. His rhetoric implicitly paints his opponents as unpatriotic.
> 
> The elites who chose Xi appear to have endorsed his ideas about strong leadership. He was certainly given sharper tools to promote his program than his predecessors ever were. He inherited a streamlined Politburo Standing Committee -- the top tier of party decision-making -- which was reduced to seven members just before he took over. He was also almost immediately handed the top party, military, and government positions, which his predecessors had to wait years to enjoy. However, the actual balance of power inside these secretive institutions is unclear from the outside. What is certain is that, in order to use two hands to rebalance the economy, Xi has amassed a great deal of power. Meddling with the balance of power in autocratic systems is always dangerous, so he must find ways to do so without alienating party elders and his own colleagues.
> 
> *RAISE AND RAZE*
> 
> Xi believes that the great debate about China’s political system is over. As he told a European audience in March, China has “experimented with constitutional monarchy, imperial restoration, parliamentarism, a multi-party system and presidential government, yet nothing really worked. Finally, China took on the path of socialism.” Despite some missteps along the way, “The uniqueness of China’s cultural traditions, history, and circumstances determines that China needs to follow a development path that suits its own reality. In fact, we have found such a path and achieved success along this path.”
> 
> Xi has convinced the Chinese Communist Party that he knows the next steps. He has been given broad powers to implement “two hands” economics and neo-Maoist politics, united by strong leadership and potent nationalism. To make party rule last, his government has promised to fix it. This means delivering real improvements to people’s lives by reforming the economy and stopping petty officials from looting it. But a strong state sector and a powerful repressive apparatus are also central to his vision.
> 
> Xi’s “all of the above” approach is held together by a simple idea: keeping the party in power. But to do so he is imposing painful reforms, exposing state industries to competition, attacking many of the privileges of party membership, and changing the balance of power at the top. If this project loses the confidence of China’s elites, it may upset the balance of power that holds the system together and provoke a crisis. In the history of the Soviet Union, two leaders attempted to undertake such broad reforms to revitalize a stagnant system. The first, Nikita Khruschev, set off a wave of uprisings across Eastern Europe and nearly started a nuclear war. The second, Mikhail Gorbachev, brought about the dissolution of the Soviet party-state. Reforming an authoritarian system is a high-stakes gamble. This project is designed to ensure the survival of China’s political system in the 21st century -- but if it fails, it may fatally undermine it.




First: in talking about the "visible hand of the state" regulating the "invisible hand of the market" Xi sounds an awful lot like Barack Obama or Stephen Harper or even Lee Hsien Loong, the PM of resolutely capitalist Singapore. We can go all the way back to Adam Smith to find the notion that _unregulated_ capitalism was counter to the best interests of society at large.

Second: there was, and still is, some wisdom in Deng's "checks and balances," and to the "school of hard knocks" philosophy within the Chinese Communist Party. It is, indeed, a cumbersome system ~ but so is Westminster style parliamentary democracy and so, too is US style representative government. It is important to understand that, for the better part of 2,500 years the Chinese have been chasing an elusive model of governance: a meritocracy. They have never found it; but we Britain, Canada and the USA, have never managed to make _liberal_ democracy (or _conservative_ democracy, for that matter) have not found what we are seeking, either.

Third, and finally: it is not always useful to compare China to any other country or culture. China *IS* different, very different and while we can see similarities in how China does things versus, say, 19th century Britain and 20th century America and, yes indeed, Russia, the Chinese outcomes are not always the same. There are so many _constants_ in China ~ a scholar told me, and I agree, that while a 21st century American would have trouble discussing politics with an 18th century 'founding father," and while a 21st century Brit would find life incredible in, say, 1066, a 21st century Chinese person could talk with an ancestor from, say, the year 1 AD, and many of their cultural ideas and even, for people from villages, experiences would be similar.


----------



## CougarKing

Somehow I don't picture any Tiananmen-era political dissidents as ever being supporters of this kind of terrorism...

From Agence-France Presse via Interaksyon



> *Hong Kong airlines on alert following attack warning*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> June 6, 2014 8:36 PM
> 
> HONG KONG - Two Hong Kong airlines said Friday that they *received a warning from Taiwan about a possible bomb attack targeting a flight to the southern Chinese city.*
> 
> Details on the nature of the threat were scant but the alert comes at a time of heightened tension on the Chinese mainland as Beijing responds to a spate of suicide bombings and stabbings by suspected Uighur separatists.
> 
> The warning also came the same week tens of thousands of people rallied in Hong Kong to remember the dead on* the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown*, the only major commemoration that takes place in China.
> 
> The South China Morning Post, quoting an unnamed Taiwanese law enforcement officer, said *a female carrying a bomb planned to fly from mainland China to Hong Kong on either Friday or Saturday, through a flight operated by Cathay Pacific or its Dragonair unit.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

> *Company says Tibetan filmmaker released from Chinese prison after 6-year separatism sentence*
> 
> By The Associated Press
> 
> BEIJING, China - *Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen, who made a 2008 documentary about Tibetan nomads expressing discontent over China's rule, has been released from a Chinese prison after serving a 6-year sentence for separatism,* his production company said.
> 
> Wangchen, 40, was freed Thursday in the western city of Xining, capital of Qinghai province, Switzerland-based Filming for Tibet said in a statement on its website. It said he was then driven by police to his sister's home about two hours away.
> 
> Wangchen was arrested in March 2008 and sentenced to six years in prison in late 2009 on charges of trying to split the country.
> 
> (...EDITED)



Yahoo Celebrity news


----------



## CougarKing

Makes one wonder what will happen to the freedoms Hong Kongers enjoy when the "one country 2 systems" arrangement expires in HK on 2047...  



> *Tens of thousands join Hong Kong Tiananmen rally*
> 
> [Yahoo! News]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> (AP Photo/Cyrus Wong)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Makes one wonder what will happen to the freedoms Hong Kongers enjoy when the "one country 2 systems" arrangement expires in HK on 2047...




My guess is that by 2047 HK has more not less freedoms: I think Beijing will have to offer HK more for two reasons:

     1. As part of a _'package'_ set up to entice Taiwan into a voluntary (re)union; and

     2. Because, even without adding Taiwan to the equation, Beijing needs HK as a safety valve, as an example of what _might_ happen in China.


Edited at add:

Mine is a minority view and here are links to two articles in _The Economist_ which take a dimmer view: Murky Business: _Prospects for agreement on Hong Kong’s political future do not look bright_, March 8, 2014 and Marking the Past, Fearing the Future: _Amid poignant commemorations of June 4th, there are growing concerns about democratic rights in the territory_, June 7, 2014.

Obviously I believe I'm closer to be being correct, but ...  :dunno:


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the local brands like Chang An aren't that attractive to China's noveau rich and reportedly growing middle class in the prosperous coastal areas...

Yahoo Finance



> *Mobius: Everybody wants a BMW in China*
> 
> Orders for foreign cars have surged in China, so much so that the likes of luxury German car maker BMW (XETRA:BMW-DE) *are struggling to keep up with demand from the region's growing middle class*, according to Franklin Templeton's Mark Mobius.
> 
> The executive chairman of the Templeton's emerging markets group said BMW was doing an "incredible job" in China. The firm's Chinese production arm Brilliance China Automotive (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 1114-HK) is the largest holding in his $3.3 billlion emerging market investment trust, with 8 percent of the fund's assets invested in the car maker.
> 
> (..EDITED)
> 
> *"They can't make these fast enough and they are tripling production,"* said Mobius, speaking at a Franklin Templeton event in central London.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Now here's a group from which you don't hear much from these days: PLA veterans of the botched 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam.



> *China's Vietnam veterans fighting new battle*
> By Tom Hancock
> AFP - 9 hours ago
> 
> Yiyang (China) (AFP) - Marginalised and misunderstood, *Chinese Vietnam veterans -- who fought in a little-celebrated war against their southern neighbours --* risk beatings and prison in a new battle with government officials.
> 
> Teng Xingqiu is one of thousands of retired Chinese soldiers staging an increasing number of protests *over unpaid benefits and unnerving Communist authorities.*
> 
> "The police told me they hoped I'd die in jail," said Teng, whose activism resulted in him being sentenced to three years in prison in 2009.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> 
> *AFP*


----------



## CougarKing

An update that may have an influence on Canadian Arctic Sovereignty policy:

Beijing sets its sights north:

Defense News



> *China's Arctic Ambitions Fuel Yuan Diplomacy*
> Jun. 10, 2014 - 12:29PM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> n a report released in March by the Center for a New American Security, China’s maritime strategy was dubbed “tailored coercion.” The method described a pattern of “dialing up and dialing down coercive diplomacy” or “forceful persuasion,” and blending it with positive engagement, such as trade and investment. The strategy spans legal, economic and military realms.
> 
> Yet China is not a littoral state of the Arctic. However, *Russia has been working on promoting joint development projects with China in the Arctic*, said Dustin Kuan-Hsiung Wang, an Arctic specialist at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei.
> 
> China has also been in discussions with Russia to allow Beijing to invest in Arctic resource development. China also needs Russia’s navigation experience in Arctic waters as the ice begins to clear for cargo transport.
> 
> China only has one icebreaker, the MV Snow Dragon, and is expecting delivery of its second icebreaker from Aker Arctic Technology of Finland in 2016.
> 
> *Beijing is expected to begin an indigenous build program for icebreakers in the near future*, said Dean Cheng, a China military specialist at the Heritage Foundation. China’s approach to the Arctic “will parallel their approach to the East and South China Seas — establish a constant, large-scale presence, and then argue that, by dint of their very existence, they have a right to be at the table in any administrative effort.”
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I keep harping on the theme that China is different: so different in so many ways that it is very, very hard for us to understand the Chinese and that makes it hard to understand how they make decisions and, even more important, how they _value_ things and ideas.

One of the profound cultural differences is the way the Chinese approach education, especially university entrance.

I was struck by two concurrent things in recent days one in America and one in China.

In America, in New York, efforts, including legislation, are being made to "broaden the diversity" of elite high schools. The problem is that entrance, now, into e.g. New York City's world famous _Stuyversant High School_ is based solely on academic achievement ~ the smartest, hardest working kids get in, kids with lower marks, who did less well in math and science and English exams don't get in. The result is a disproportionately high number of Asia kids (Chinese, Vietnamese and Indians predominate) and too few Hispanic and, especially, Black kids. The solution: change the rules, make academics count for less.

In China, last week, 10 million kids wrote the brutal tough National College Entrance Exam, called the _gaokao_.

_Business Insider_ has a photo-array of 24 pictures and a few words about the exams. It's worth a look.

I have often said that corruption is one of China's major problems. The _gaokao_, itself, and university admission in general, is one of the (few) bright spots. Cheating is difficult, policing is rigid and favouritism, even for the most powerful, is difficult to apply in univresity entrance. One of the reasons that there are so many rich Chinese kids studying in America is that the rich and powerful can now afford to send their children to Harvard and Yale if they don't do well enough in the _gaokao_. (In fact Xi Jinping's daughter, Xi Mingze, is at Harvard after spending a year at Zhejiang University. Now, Zhejiang University is a first class school, but it is not in the very top tier - Xi Jinping, himself, studied at Tsinghua University, one of the top two in China. My guess is that had his daughter qualified, in the _gaokoa_ for either Tsinghua or Peking University or even, perhaps, Fudan, she might have stayed in China. Zhejiang is one of the top 10 in China but it's not at the very top.)

I can think of few things that more starkly differentiate China from America (and Canada) than their and our approaches to advanced education.


----------



## CougarKing

:facepalm: 



> *China's army eases curbs to draw more educated recruits: paper*
> Reuters
> June 16, 2014
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The People's Liberation Army has lowered the minimum height requirement for recruits, raised the maximum weight limit, reduced eyesight standards and even begun taking on recruits with once-taboo tattoos.
> 
> *The PLA has also removed mental illnesses* including *schizophrenia*, *depression* and *bipolar disorder*, *as barriers to recruitment*, it said.
> 
> (...EDITED)




*Reuters/ Yahoo*


----------



## Edward Campbell

There are several references, today, to Xi Jinping encouraging his family to divest themselves of some of their assets as he prepares to unleash the promised, and long overdue, attack on official corruption.


----------



## CougarKing

Official design model pics at the link below:

China Defense blogspot



> Sunday, June 15, 2014
> *Chinese Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier (CVN): Design Finalized*
> 
> China-Defense Forum members were somewhat astounded today when pictures were released on Chinese internet forums of what is certainly a model of the first Chinese nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN) on display at an official event in Zhongshan.
> 
> While it being just a model might not seem that significant to many, there are telltales about the model in these pics that indicate it's genuine.  In fact, it represents a final design for the new CVN *has been approved by PLAN for production. *
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> The *hull number 18 falls in line with previous expectations that the first "all-indigenous" Chinese carrier design would be nuclear-powered and is expected to be the "002 Class".*  As the currently in-service CV LIAONING is hull number 16, this seems to imply hull number 17 will be the 001A class, a Chinese-built KUZNETSOV-class CV.


----------



## CougarKing

More headaches for the CCP:

Canadian Press



> *Hong Kong votes in unofficial democracy referendum, alarming communist leaders in Beijing*
> The Canadian Press
> 
> HONG KONG - Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers voted Friday in an unofficial referendum on democratic reform that has alarmed Beijing and sets the stage for a possible showdown with the government, with mass protests aimed at shutting down the Chinese capitalist enclave's financial district.
> 
> Tensions are boiling over in Hong Kong, which came back under Chinese control in 1997, over how to choose the city's next leader.
> 
> Since the end of British colonial rule, Hong Kong's leaders have been picked by an elite pro-Beijing committee. Beijing has pledged to allow Hong Kongers to choose their own chief executive starting in 2017.
> 
> Organizers of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement said that in the first six hours, about 165,000 ballots were cast on proposals for electoral reform. They hope at least 300,000 people will take part...
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

A result of the unofficial poll in Hong Kong noted above:



> *Next on China’s 'My Way' List: Hong Kong*
> The Fiscal Times
> 
> By Patrick Smith
> 21 hours ago
> 
> Push is rapidly coming to shove between China and Hong Kong, which bills itself as the “World City.” If the world doesn’t sit up and take notice soon, the political future of the autonomous territory could be imperiled and things could end badly all around.
> 
> Beijing’s paper has provoked a firestorm in the territory. Advisedly or otherwise, it was published in response to one event and in anticipation of another:
> 
> • It followed by a week the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre and Beijing’s declaration of martial law in 1989. Hong Kongers always mark the occasion; this year up to 150,000 peaceably poured into the streets.
> 
> • It arrived 10 days before Occupy Central (the liveliest of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy groups, named for the territory’s business and financial district) opened an online referendum on the question of a directly elected chief executive, as the post-colonial governor is titled.
> 
> *Beijing and the Hong Kong government both condemned the unofficial poll as illegal.* When the online mechanism immediately suffered an apparent cyber-attack, Occupy Central did not hesitate to accuse the mainland of sabotage. In response, the group opened 15 polling stations around the territory and extended the vote by a week.
> 
> *At the same time, the paper reflects a genuine assumption that to be Chinese is to love the motherland.* In this, it is a measure of Beijing’s disconnect; it cannot see that an affection for China that is prevalent among Hong Kong people does not mean they want to be mainland citizens.
> 
> 
> *The Fiscal Times / Yahoo*


----------



## CougarKing

The charm offensive to lure Taiwan into the fold continues:

Reuters



> *Chinese official looks to charm Taiwan during landmark visit*
> BY BEN BLANCHARD AND MICHAEL GOLD
> BEIJING/TAIPEI Tue Jun 24, 2014 10:13pm EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - China's top official in charge of Taiwan ties will make a landmark visit to the island this week to try to woo Taiwanese who remain suspicious about a pending trade pact as well as meet a senior figure from the pro-independence opposition.
> 
> *Zhang Zhijun,* director of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, will be the first head of the body to visit the self-ruled and democratic island, where defeated Nationalist forces fled after losing a civil war to China's Communists in 1949.
> 
> His trip from Wednesday to Saturday will focus not on the affluent capital Taipei but on the poorer middle and south, which have benefited less from trade with China and where pro-independence sentiment can run deep.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another Chinese mega-project:



> *World's next tallest tower: Super green, very pink*
> 
> [cnn] - June 24, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Less than a year after construction was halted on a world-beating 838-meter tower in Changsa in central China (just days after it began) architects have revealed plans to build something even bigger.
> 
> At one kilometer (0.6 miles) high, the largest of the two Phoenix Towers planned for Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China, will be the tallest in the world if completed on schedule in 2017/2018.
> 
> The towers will also be crazily futuristic and super environmentally friendly.
> 
> And pink
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

> *China accuses Japan of endangering warships with destroyer, submarine hunter*
> 
> Ridzwan Rahmat, Singapore
> IHS Jane's Navy International
> 25 June 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _PLAN ships last transited the Osumi strait in April 2012. (IHS/David Playford)_
> 
> 
> China has accused the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) of endangering its vessels on 22 June as they sailed from the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea.
> 
> A People's Liberation Army (PLA)-sponsored media outlet said that the Hatsuyuki-class guided missile destroyer _Asayuki_ (DD 132) and a P-3C anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft "tailed" its convoy of three vessels as they sailed through the 30 km-wide Osumi strait.
> 
> The PLAN convoy consisted of two Jiangwei II (Type 053H3)-class guided missile frigates, _Mianyang_ (528) and _Sanya_ (565), and one Fuqing-class replenishment vessel, _Hongzhu_ (881).
> 
> _"The Japanese side has been tracking, monitoring and interfering with the Chinese ships and planes at close range for a long time, which has endangered the Chinese ships and planes and is the root cause of sea and air security problems between China and Japan"_, the media report said.
> 
> 
> *The Chinese Ministry of National Defence admonished the JMSDF manoeuvres as interference in routine Chinese military activities* and called on their Japanese counterparts to ensure that there would be no repeat of such incidents in the future.
> 
> *The Ministry has also warned that China reserves the right to take further action should it happen again* but it has stopped short of elaborating about what such measures would entail.
> 
> 
> 
> *IHS Jane's 360*


----------



## Edward Campbell

And Beijing, using the "big four" global accounting firms* as a stalking horse take aim, squarely, at HK's major vulnerability: it's status as one of the globe's few** significant financial centres, according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/574791ee-fdc1-11e3-acf8-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz35vermjvQ


> Big four accounting firms warn Hong Kong over democracy push
> 
> By Josh Noble in Hong Kong and Robin Kwong and John Aglionby in London
> 
> June 27, 2014
> 
> The big four global accounting companies have taken out press advertisements in Hong Kong stating they are “opposed” to the territory’s democracy movement, warning that their multinational clients may quit the city if activists carry out threats to disrupt business with street protests.
> 
> In an unusual joint statement published in three Chinese-language newspapers on Friday, the Hong Kong entities of EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC said the Occupy Central movement, which is calling for electoral reform in the former British colony, posed a threat to the territory’s rule of law.
> 
> The group of pro-democracy activists is calling for 10,000 people to block traffic in the central business district as part of a campaign to put pressure on the Hong Kong government, although if and when this will happen is still under discussion.
> 
> In the advert, the big four firms warned that protests would disrupt the Hong Kong stock exchange, banks and the headquarters of financial and professional services firms causing “inestimable losses in the economy”.
> 
> It added that clients of the four firms had reflected further concerns about the wider impact of the protests: “We are worried that multinational companies and investors would consider moving their regional headquarters from Hong Kong, or indeed leave the city entirely. This would have a long-term impact on Hong Kong’s status as a global financial centre,” the joint statement said.
> 
> Written in traditional Chinese characters clearly aimed at the local population, the advertisement is undersigned by the big four accountancy firms. It repeatedly calls for “negotiation and dialogue” to resolve the political stand-off.
> 
> The practice of multinationals taking out political advertisements in Hong Kong local-language media is extremely rare.
> 
> Hong Kong-based spokespeople for all four firms confirmed that the statement was authentic, but were unable to comment any further and did not have an English translation available.
> 
> Stella Fearnley, accounting professor at Bournemouth University, said the companies were “off their trolleys” for placing the advertisements.
> 
> “Speaking on behalf of your clients as an oligopoly is demonstrating a power that you think you have,” she said. “They’re harming their own reputations. Are they competing with each other or holding each others’ hands?”
> 
> When the Financial Times approached the big four’s global headquarters for comment, it emerged that they had only learned of the advertisement through press reports.
> 
> A person close to PwC said it was a local initiative in Hong Kong and not something that the firm’s global network had been involved in. The person added that senior individuals did not appear to have been pre-notified of the advertisement by the Hong Kong office. PwC declined to comment.
> 
> Prem Sikka, accountancy professor at the University of Essex, said the advertisements “showed the big four’s true colours”. “It’s utterly unwise and outrageous. People have a right to protest,” he said.
> 
> The Asia Pacific region contributes around one sixth of the big four’s combined global revenues, according to their latest annual reports, totalling $16.6bn. However, none of the big four split out how much revenue is attributable to their Chinese operations.
> 
> Of the four, Deloitte has the biggest Asian business, recording revenues of $4.9bn last year. Its Chinese business employs 13,500 people in 22 offices. It has had a presence in China since 1917 when it first opened an office in Shanghai.
> 
> Hong Kong faces a potential showdown over how it implements universal suffrage, a promise enshrined in the agreement between Beijing and the UK, in the former British colony after it was handed over to China in 1997.
> 
> Tensions have been raised further this month by an unofficial poll asking Hong Kong residents how they would like to see their electoral system reformed, which has drawn more than 750,000 votes and provoked anger in China.
> 
> The unofficial referendum is set to end on Sunday night, with results due out on Monday. By Friday afternoon, more than one in 10 of the city’s residents had participated in the poll organised by a group of academics, who had only been expecting half as many to vote. Of Hong Kong’s 7.2m inhabitants, about 3.5m are registered voters.
> 
> The referendum has rattled Beijing, which describes the vote as “illegal”, while Global Times, a state-run newspaper, has called it “ludicrous”.
> 
> Organisers said that Chinese customs had blocked the export of ballot boxes and voting booths to Hong Kong, the latest disruption to the unofficial poll. Calls to Chinese customs officials in Shenzhen went unanswered on Friday.
> 
> The poll’s online voting system also fell victim to a cyber attack the day after it went live on June 20, while anti-Beijing newspaper Apple Daily claims that Chinese officials have put pressure on companies to pull advertising.
> 
> Those taking part in the vote can choose between three options for a new nomination process for the city’s chief executive, Hong Kong’s top political post. All three options give residents and their local elected officials the power to put forward candidates for the job.
> 
> Hong Kong’s system allows just 1,200 people drawn from the city’s elite to vote for their preferred candidate from a shortlist of names managed by Beijing. The city was promised universal suffrage by 2017 under the “Basic Law”, effectively a mini-constitution that came into effect following the handover of Hong Kong to China.
> 
> While the government is in the process of drafting its own plans for a new election process, many suspect nominations will still be limited to a list of candidates vetted by the Chinese leadership.
> 
> The Financial Times has made a full translation of the advertisement taken out by the big Four, published below:
> 
> _*In Opposition to the Occupy Central Movement*
> 
> With regards to some individuals proposing an ‘occupy central’ movement, we hereby announce that we are opposed to this movement, and are concerned that ‘occupy central’ would have negative and long-lasting impact on the rule of law,
> the society, and the economy of Hong Kong. We hope that the disagreements could be resolved through negotiation and dialogue instead.
> 
> The rule of law is a core value of Hong Kong and has been the last bastion in Hong Kong’s good business environment and its ability to attract foreign investment. Acting lawfully and respecting the rights of others is the responsibility of every citizen.
> 
> The Central district is the heart of Hong Kong’s financial and business activity. Multinational and Hong Kong companies alike have always established their headquarters and main offices there. In addition, the Hong Kong stock exchange,
> the headquarters of financial and professional services companies conduct key large transactions and commercial activities there daily. We believe that once ‘Occupy Central’ happens, the above-mentioned commercial groups
> such as banks, exchanges, and the stock market will inevitably be affected. All types of transactions, contracts and other commercial activities will be delayed. In addition, regulatory bodies could also be unable to function as usual and
> this would increase the instability and confusion on the market and cause inestimable losses in the economy.
> 
> In fact, many clients have reflected such concerns to us recently. We are worried that multinational companies and investor would consider moving their regional headquarters from Hong Kong, or indeed leave the city entirely.
> This would have a long-term impact on Hong Kong’s status as a global financial centre. In recent years, many international studies have pointed out that Hong Kong’s competitiveness is under increasing challenge. When a law-based
> society and the business environment continually comes under attack, Hong Kong’s competitiveness will be further lessened and this would lead to the next generation of our society facing an even tougher environment.
> 
> Therefore, we once again call on the relevant parties to keep Hong Kong’s overall and long term interests in mind, to follow the law and resolve their differences through negotiation and dialogue.
> 
> *EY KPMG Deloitte PwC*_




The important feature of this story is that the corporate head offices, in New York and London, only learned of it when they read about it in the newspapers. It was a local, Hong Kong, initiative. All four of the "big four" have their _China_ head offices ion HK. They are protecting their fast growing China markets, where their earnings are still growing faster and faster. They are, in my opinion, taking a stand because the CCP's central leadership, the (currently seven member) Standing Committee of the_ Politburo_ of the CCP who work in the _Zhongnanha_ palace complex in Beijing, want them to. While I think the _Standing Committee_ is looking, hard, for ways to tap into the _public will_, they do not believe that Western style mass democracy is the right way for China.

_____
*   EY (Ernst & Young), KPMG, Deloitte and PwC (Price-Waterhouse Coopers)
** Along with Singapore, Frankfurt, London and New York (in ascending order)


Edited to add:

Ian Bremmer, founder and President of The Eurasia Group, quips, online, that:

     *China Problem*
          The State Controlling Corporations

     *US Problem*
          Corporations Controlling the State


----------



## Edward Campbell

More, from the _Financial Times_, on one part of China's "soft power" offensive, this time, domestic, with newer, bigger, better museums to explain China's long, rich culture to the world and, more important, to the Chinese themselves, in this article, which is reproduced under the Faiur Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act that newspaper:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5002360a-f632-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0.html#axzz35vermjvQ


> China’s wealthy building new museums to display the country’s treasures
> 
> By Dalya Alberge
> 
> June 27, 12014
> 
> It is barely five decades since museums in China were being set alight and paintings destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Today, though, a very different kind of cultural revolution is occurring. Like Feng Huang, the mythical phoenix consumed by fire and reborn from the flames, dozens of museums are emerging from the ashes, their walls filled with paintings.
> 
> Although there are no official figures, some reports suggest 100 new museums are being built each year, and so far about 3,800 museums are estimated to have mushroomed across mainland China. It is a far cry from the couple of dozen museums that existed in 1949 when the Communists came to power.
> 
> Spectacular art treasures in the Summer Palace in Beijing’s Forbidden City were once the preserve of the emperor. Today’s plutocrats are investing millions of yuan in their own palaces of art, alongside world-class state museums, such as those in Nanjing and Shanghai.
> 
> The Chinese have grown wealthy on the back of the country’s huge export trade and property. The mainland is home to 152 dollar billionaires, second only to the US, according to Forbes. The number of millionaires is predicted to rise to 2.2m by 2017 from some 1.4m in 2012, according to WealthInsight, the research company.
> 
> But, while private museums in the west are the ultimate vanity project, those in China – with its culture of modesty and the communist influence – are viewed as centres for the greater good of the people.
> 
> Philip Dodd, chairman of Made in China, a cultural consultancy that forges links between China and the UK, speaks of an “explosion” of museums. How times have changed, he says, remembering his first visit to China in 1998 when, as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, he was asked by then UK prime minister Tony Blair to stage an exhibition.
> 
> “I told him this was a waste of time because there was only one gallery,” Dodd recalls. “I said I would do it in shopping malls in Beijing and Shanghai. Rather to my amazement, he agreed. Fourteen years later, there are gallery [quarters] all over and very many interesting museums beginning to develop.”
> 
> Drawing parallels between China’s global domination today and the UK’s heyday as an empire, he says: “Most of the major museum institutions in London – the Tate, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery – were built in the 19th century when Britain was a dominant power that wanted to understand itself and sell itself to the world. There are some correspondences here.”
> 
> Some of the Chinese museums are completely new, while others are being renovated or extended, but establishing firm facts and figures is complex because there are so many municipalities, Dodd says. To his astonishment, though, 200 owners of private museums turned up when he lectured in Shanghai. He took some Chinese collectors in London to see an artist whose dealer “got down there faster than I could strike a match”, he jokes.
> 
> Dodd notes that increasing numbers of collectors are looking beyond homegrown art: “My Chinese friends say they spent 10 years buying their own history in order to be able to exhibit it. Now, given globalisation, they want to integrate their own history with the west’s.”
> 
> With so much wall space to fill, Chinese collectors have been buying art and antiques from auctioneers and dealers worldwide at an unprecedented rate, as if they are a commodity. When Hauser & Wirth, a London gallery, staged an exhibition devoted to Zhang Enli, whose semi-figurative paintings reportedly sell for up to six-figure sums, 11 were snapped up by owners of Chinese private museums.
> 
> Neil Wenman, senior director at the gallery, says: “What is really interesting is that the collectors I work with take things very seriously in terms of research. They travel a lot to art fairs. They visit galleries. I have taken them to artist studios in Los Angeles, New York and London. It is quite a phenomenon that so many are wanting to open private museums all at the same time.
> 
> “There is an assumption they buy in bulk and don’t know what they are doing. That is all completely untrue. They are very aware of what they are doing. They are very well researched. Many have children at universities in New York or London and they are travelling all the time. They are very global in their knowledge.”
> 
> The newest museums include The Yuz, Shanghai’s equivalent to London’s South Bank. It was opened in May by Budi Tek, a Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur listed by Art & Auction magazine as one of the world’s top 10 art collectors by money spent. His museum, which is in a former aircraft hangar, is full of Chinese and international art.
> 
> He was among Chinese collectors who descended on London in February for the Art14 fair. Tek exudes an infectious passion for art, singling out purchases such as “Untitled (Tree of Light)”, a sculptural installation of a real tree, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. “Many artists touch my heart. One of them is Cattelan,” Tek says. Another is the British sculptor Sir Antony Gormley.
> 
> Another collector at Art14 was Wang Wei, who, with her billionaire financier husband, Liu Yiqian, has amassed one of China’s largest private collections, ranging from antiquities to contemporary art. Liu, born to a working-class family in Shanghai, left school aged 14 to make handbags sold by his mother from a street stall, undercutting rivals and investing the profits in a wide range of companies.
> 
> In March, the couple opened a second private museum in Shanghai, this time on an abandoned airfield, to display a wide-ranging collection of Chinese contemporary artists, including Fang Lijun and Zhou Chunya, and ancient artefacts. The unveiling came barely 16 months after the couple opened their first museum in the city, on which they are said to have spent Rmb271m ($43m).
> 
> The Chinese Museums Association Guide (CMAG), which has just been reprinted, reflects the sheer range of China’s treasure houses, from art and archaeology, including a unique Eastern Zhou dynasty six-horse chariot in Luoyang, Henan, to science and technology.
> 
> Art historian Cathy Giangrande, co-author of CMAG, says that beyond China’s most famous attractions – notably the Forbidden City, where much more of the site and the Palace Museum are expected to be opened up – she has been particularly struck by the imaginative approach of other new museums.
> 
> That is exemplified by the Museum Cluster Jianchuan in Anren, Sichuan, described by CMAG as “one of the most impressive museum experiences you will ever have”. The cluster is series of museums devoted to different themes and was opened by Fan Jianchuan, a wealthy property developer and, according to CMAG, a “charismatic powerhouse of a man… not a materialist gone mad”.
> 
> His collection of an astonishing 8m artefacts deals primarily with the Cultural Revolution and the war against Japan, and his museums are “an expression of his wish to expose man’s inhumanity to man, and to show that although the Japanese behaved savagely to the Chinese during the war, the Chinese did the same to their own people during the Cultural Revolution”, CMAG observes. “The fact that this museum even exists in China is reason enough to visit.” Giangrande describes Fan Jianchuan as “a fascinating man” and his museum complex as “one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been”.
> 
> The Jianchuan cluster grounds are set around a lake, and the museums are reached either on foot down tree-shaded lanes, or by golf cart. The themes are certainly unusual. There is even a museum devoted to foot binding, The Museum of Shoes for Bounded Feet, that recalls the extreme mutilation young girls were forced to suffer in an ancient practice that lasted until the early 20th century. Giangrande says: “Inside, [Fan Jianchuan] made the levels uneven, so as you walk around… you have the feeling of being uncomfortable and the painfulness of bound [and broken] feet. Incredible! The interior was pink, like a brothel, because it was all about using women. He really had thought about it.” Another museum is devoted to the Japanese war and is built like a prison – “so grim and cold”, Giangrande says. “He was trying to get people to think about the past.”
> 
> Part of the imperial collection is split between the Forbidden City Palace Museum and the Nanjing Museum, which opened a huge new wing last November. Many of the treasures surfaced in recent excavations and some will be coming to the British Museum in London in September for a blockbuster exhibition, Ming: 50 Years That Changed China.
> 
> The show will present jewels of China’s museums – exquisite porcelain, gold, furniture, paintings, sculptures and textiles – to explore the first half of the 15th century, when China was a global superpower run by one family, the Ming dynasty, which established Beijing as the capital and built the Forbidden City. The parallels with today cannot be ignored. This was a time of great exploration for China, which had a multicultural imperial court and artists absorbing outside influences in creating artworks of supreme beauty.
> 
> Ambitious plans for Beijing include turning part of the 2008 Olympic park into a cultural centre with several new museums, notably a new building, set to open in 2017, for the lavish National Art Museum of China, for which French architect Jean Nouvel has won the commission.
> 
> Nouvel is among numerous western architects who have secured high-profile commissions in China. Others include the Edinburgh-based firm Sutherland Hussey, which won an international competition to design the new Chengdu city museum, and New York-based Steven Holl, which designed the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum. Part of a $164m development in a national park outside the city, this opened last November with an exhibition that included Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who creates installations using light, water, fire and wind. Property developer Lu Jun and his son Lu Xun commissioned Steven Holl to create a museum inspired by “shifting viewpoints, layers of space, expanses of mist and water, which characterise the deep alternating spatial mysteries of the composition of Chinese painting”.
> 
> Foreign tourism is not yet sufficiently widespread to fill so many museums, but such is the Chinese public’s interest in them that the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art alone – a not-for-profit centre in Beijing – attracts half a million visitors a year. Its director, Philip Tinari, says of the boom: “It’s a really interesting moment right now.”




I _think_ that if you change all the Chinese names to ones like Carnegie, Eastman, Getty, Mellon and Rockefeller, you can see the parallel with the "golden age" of American philanthropy (19th and early 20th century) which set the stage for the vast American "soft power" offensive of the mid 20th century.


----------



## CougarKing

Anti-Chinese mainlander sentiment remains strong despite recent overtures by Beijing toward Taipei...



> *China official cancels events in Taiwan amid violent protests*
> By Faith Hung
> Reuters - 5 hours ago
> 
> 
> TAIPEI (Reuters) - China's top official in charge of relations with Taiwan has returned to Beijing,* hailing his visit to the self-ruled island as "historic"*, *despite violent protests that forced him to cancel several meetings.*
> 
> Throughout his four-day tour of the island, Zhang was greeted by protesters, including at the high-speed train station in the pro-independence southern port of Kaohsiung on Friday. There hundreds of demonstrators gathered, some waving placards reading _"Communist Zhang Zhijun, get the hell back to China"_.
> 
> Protesters in the city became violent and at one point attempted to pour white paint on Zhang, but missed him and instead splashed security staff. Some protesters were bloodied after scuffles with police.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Security personnel protect Zhang Zhijun (in white shirt), director of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, with bullet-proof suitcases
> after anti-China protesters attempted to pour white paint on him,
> in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, June 27, 2014._ - REUTERS/Donald Ol
> 
> 
> An official at Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council told Reuters by phone that three of Zhang's public appearances had been called off on Saturday following the protests. Hundreds of pro-independence banner-toting demonstrators were at the Taoyuan International Airport near Taipei on Saturday as Zhang prepared to depart for the mainland.
> 
> Speaking to state media after arriving back in Beijing on Saturday, Zhang glossed over the protests and hailed the trip a success.
> 
> _"This visit received an enthusiastic welcome from all circles and peoples in Taiwan. Despite differing voices, the popular will is extremely clear. Everyone universally believes that peaceful development of cross-strait relations is the correct path and brings real benefits to people on both sides. Everyone believes we should continue down this path."_
> 
> *- Zhang Zhijun, director of China's Taiwan Affairs Office*
> 
> Zhang did not meet with Taiwan's China-friendly president, Ma Ying-jeou, who has never held talks with senior Chinese officials since taking office in 2008.
> 
> 
> *Reuters / Yahoo*


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think China, _official China_, the big men in the _Zhongnanhai_, understand that they must 'court' Taiwan, but the whole notion grates on them, like rubbing sandpaper on a sunburn. The Chinese, broadly and generally, are very nationalistic and most, in my _understanding_ of them, think that the Taiwanese, being Chinese, ought to want to join China now, on Beijing's terms ... like an estranged child wants, eventually, to return to her/his family.

The route to reunification lies, in fact, through Hong Kong, and _official China_ has the same problem there: they cannot understand, emotionally, I _suppose_, that Hong Kong wants all of its rights and privileges, and more, and that it doesn't want to be just another a 'city-province' like, say, Tianjin. Equally, Taiwan will not join to be just another province. It will want everything HK has and a whole lot more, and HK will want whatever Taiwan gets.

I think the leaders in _Zhongnanhai_ understand that, intellectually, and, most likely they accept it, too, intellectually ... but they don't like it.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_ (HK's premier English language daily paper) is a _local_ view from financial journalist Peter Guy:

http://www.scmp.com/business/article/1543163/occupy-central-hong-kongs-mad-hell-moment


> Occupy Central is Hong Kong's 'mad as hell' moment
> *Self-serving arguments from property tycoons and government officials are demeaning to an educated population who support the local democratic process*
> 
> Peter Guy
> 
> PUBLISHED : Monday, 30 June, 2014
> 
> "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" asked punk rock icon Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. He directed that leering remark at disenchanted English youth in the 1970s, but he could just have easily been describing the emotional undercurrent of disenfranchisement that feeds the Occupy Central movement.
> 
> The movement has been vilified with the kind of fear-mongering reserved for medieval witch-hunts. Doomsayers are warning about the kind of chaos and turmoil that resembles a zombie apocalypse rather than civil protest.
> 
> Brusque declarations and a blunt white paper from Beijing are predictable, but the arguments from Hong Kong's business establishment have been disappointing because they are unsophisticated and out of touch with events in the rest of the world.
> 
> A protest and show of support of this magnitude for local democratic process will actually be a healthy event for Hong Kong's development as a financial and business centre. International investors welcome political dissent and positive change towards a more civil society rather than outright insurrection. Similar protests regularly come and go in London and New York without invoking the apocalyptic scenarios. Hong Kong has experienced large-scale marches and protests before with little trouble so there is no reason to believe Occupy will cause chaos.
> 
> Terse warnings by property tycoons and Hong Kong's former central banker Joseph Yam Chi-kwong proclaim that protests will be bad for business and social stability. They have predictably backfired as more than 700,000 people participated in an Occupy plebiscite. Between the greater social good and political expediency, our business leaders chose the latter. Between the truth of history and their own business, they chose their own business.
> 
> These self-serving arguments are demeaning to an educated population. Describing how Occupy will hurt businesses only draws the cynical response that what is good for the tycoons' business is not necessarily good for Hong Kong. It also shows that most of our tycoons and government officials lack international perspectives. Almost all of them have never lived or worked extensively in a democratic and developed country. Their views are shaped through yesterday's Hong Kong. They cannot envision the future.
> 
> For someone who once served the people, Yam surprisingly says Occupy creates political risk that endangers Hong Kong's status as a financial centre. But, he forgets that five years ago, global financial markets endured the worst implosion in history. Most major financial institutions and central banks barely survived an event far worse than a protest.
> 
> Yam's opinions are a parochial contrast to remarks made earlier this month by Bank of England governor Mark Carney. The former governor of the Bank of Canada spoke at the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism. He expressed the view that business leaders and policymakers needed to restore "social capital" to capitalism. While Carney recognised capitalism's virtues, he also called for "a sense of vocation and responsibility". While the rest of the world's central bankers comprehend the need for change, Yam demands blind obedience to the old system.
> 
> Rule of law, which is most important to investors, is stronger in Hong Kong than on the mainland. That will not be easily replaced overnight, no matter how many free-trade zones are opened in Shanghai.
> 
> Any attempt to achieve a more democratic society through free elections is good for any financial centre. Ultimately, financial markets and international investors want to see strong, publicly accountable institutions in Hong Kong and on the mainland.
> 
> Today's Hongkonger cannot be fooled or cajoled into specious arguments. Everyone has unrestricted internet access and can seek their version of the truth. Hong Kong's economic oligarchs and an unrepresentative and unresponsive government are seen to be the very source of instability in the lives of average people, making Hong Kong an almost impossibly expensive place to live and raise a family.
> 
> Occupy is Hong Kong's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" moment drawn from the Oscar-winning movie Network. In the movie Howard Beale, a TV anchor, exhorts American viewers to overcome their collective malaise and sense of helplessness. "First you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being. My life has value." And that is what participants in the Occupy poll are actually saying with their ballots.
> 
> _Peter Guy is a financial writer and former international banker_




Here, in my _opinion_ is the key element: *"Rule of law, which is most important to investors, is stronger in Hong Kong than on the mainland. That will not be easily replaced overnight, no matter how many free-trade zones are opened in Shanghai."*

Basically, China needs HK more than HK needs China. At a _guess_ HK (pop. 10 Million) is more _productive_, more _valuable_ than any two, maybe even any three of Chongqing (pop. 30 Million), Shanghai (pop. 25 Million), Beijing (pop. 20 Million), Guangzhou (pop. 20 Million) and Tianjin (pop. 10 Million). HK is too important to China's economic welfare to be treated as many high and most mid-level bureaucrats and even some leaders in Beijing might wish. China's biggest companies, energy giants like _Sinopec_ and banks like _ICBC_ rely upon the HK stock exchange for their access to global capital. They may be listed on the Shanghai, London and New York exchanges but their _home_ is HK and HK is where their _market value_ is determined. 

Anson Chan used to quip that the immediate, adminstrative matter was that HK had (re)joined China but the long term, _strategic_ matter was that China needed to 'grow up' and join HK ~ she meant that China had to overcome its very traditional, ingrained, culture of corruption and learn the advantages of the rule of law. Liberal democracy is not, in my _opinion_, the key issue; it, the key, is _institutions_, large and official and small and unofficial: the central bank and the street level merchants' association (there are hundreds (thousands?) of them) alike. They all, together, bind HK in a tight web of (reasonably) fair, (generally) effective and (broadly) accepted rules and regulations that aim to smooth the very rough edges of capitalism and make healthy, productive competition a reality. That doesn't exist, yet, in China ...

There are a lot of people in Beijing, important people, who _believe_ that if they can _reign in_ HK then Shanghai will reap the advantages. They are wrong. If they _reign in_ HK then the economic and commercial advantages will flow, nearly 100% to Singapore.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a link to some photos of today's pro-democracy demonstrations in HK ... my favourite is:





She could be right here in Canada, couldn't she? :nod:


Edit: typo


----------



## CougarKing

The fall of former PLA General Xu...

Defense News



> *Experts: China General's Ousting Tightens Xi's Grip on Military*
> Jul. 1, 2014 - 07:29PM   |   By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> 
> BEIJING — The Chinese Communist Party’s dramatic expulsion of a former top general — the most senior figure to fall in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign — is an assertion of political control over the powerful and wealthy military, analysts say.
> 
> *Xu Caihou, former vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission and until two years ago a member of the ruling party’s elite 25-strong Politburo, was stripped of his party membership on Monday and his case was handed over to prosecutors.
> 
> The 71-year-old is the highest-ranking Chinese military officer to face trial in decades.
> *
> The authorities’ move to pursue charges against him — despite reports that he is dying of bladder cancer — is intended to send the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) a clear message, analysts said.
> 
> The PLA’s influence in domestic affairs has waned since the days of Communist China’s founding father Mao Zedong, but it remains a political force to be reckoned with and has at the same time built up a vast network of business interests.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Considering that China has other religious minorities, wouldn't this be a rather extreme measure that will only fan ethnic tension?



> *China bans Ramadan fasting in Xinjiang*
> 
> Agence France-Presse1:55 pm |
> 
> Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014
> 
> China has banned civil servants, students and teachers in its mainly Muslim Xinjiang region from taking part in Ramadan fasting, government websites said, prompting condemnation from an exile group on Wednesday.
> 
> China’s ruling Communist party is officially atheist, and for years has restricted fasting in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.
> Xinjiang sees regular and often deadly clashes between Uighurs and state security forces, and Beijing has blamed recent deadly attacks elsewhere in China on militants seeking independence for the resource-rich region.
> 
> Rights groups blame tensions on religious and cultural restrictions placed on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the vast area, which abuts Central Asia.
> 
> Several government departments posted notices on their websites in recent days banning fasting during Ramadan, which began this weekend. During the holy month, the faithful fast from dawn to dusk and strive to be more pious.
> The commercial affairs bureau of Turfan City said on its website Monday that “civil servants and students cannot take part in fasting and other religious activities.”
> 
> The state-run Bozhou Radio and TV university said on its website that it would “enforce the ban on party members, teachers, and young people from taking part in Ramadan activities.”
> 
> “We remind everyone that they are not permitted to observe a Ramadan fast,” it added.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Considering that China has other religious minorities, wouldn't this be a rather extreme measure that will only fan ethnic tension?




And here, from the _Geopolitics in the 21st Century_ thread is, I suspect, your answer:



			
				Colin P said:
			
		

> I don't think anything that happens with China's foreign policy is done without a stern eye on the domestic situation. A notable number of Chinese have tasted the good life and want more, a large number can see the good life from afar and know they will never have it. Some dream of the days where everything was controlled. I can imagine the internal forces pulling and pushing within China must give her leaders constant indigestion.



My _sense_ is that the mainstream, _Han_ Chinese want the Muslims (and Tibetans) to be like other _minorities_: 'happy' (if that's the right word) with a few folk festivals and subsidies for shrines. That requires some _suppression_ of Muslim (and Tibetan) _national_ identity. There is, also, I _think_, an immediate desire for some revenge against Uyghur terrorists. Finally, I _guess_ that the _official Chinese_ are still coming to grips with the notion that Islam _might_ be perceived to offer an alternative to CCP rule ... and that's not a comfortable thought for them.


----------



## CougarKing

Looks like someone's spooks have been busy...   :Tin-Foil-Hat: 

Reuters



> *China military bases threatened by luxury villas, fake tourists*
> 
> Reuters
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - *The security of Chinese military bases is being threatened by illegally built high-rise buildings, and in one case villas built inside a base, and fake tourists seeking access to sensitive sites to spy, state media said on Wednesday.*
> 
> Only a tiny fraction of the 4,800 local government and military bodies which are supposed to protect such facilities are currently doing their jobs properly, the official China Daily cited senior military officers as saying.
> 
> *"Fake companies or sight-seeing tours are often used as pretexts by outside entities to approach sensitive Chinese facilities for the purpose of gathering military secrets,"* officer Song Xinfei told the newspaper.
> 
> One government on the southern resort island of Hainan, a province which has responsibility for the disputed South China Sea, allowed villas to be built by a foreign firm inside a base, it added, quoting the military's People's Liberation Army Daily.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Retired AF Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here is a link to some photos of today's pro-democracy demonstrations in HK ... my favourite is:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> She could be right here in Canada, couldn't she? :nod:
> 
> 
> Edit: typo



Except here in Canada the Children Aide's Society would get involved because, obvisously her parents aren't doing a proper job and the girl would be kidnapped removed from her parents for her own protection.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm sorry that this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Ac t from the _Financial Times_, is boring but, unlike young women complaining about being fucked by the giovernment, any government, anywhere, it actually matters:

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/07/02/guest-post-china-rebalancing-is-a-dangerous-obsession/


> Guest post: China rebalancing is a dangerous obsession
> 
> By Qu Hongbin, Co-Head of Asian Economic Research, HSBC
> 
> Jul 2, 2014
> 
> For many, China’s growth model, which has delivered average annual GDP growth of 10 per cent over the past three decades, simply looks wrong: a national savings rate of around 50 per cent is unheard of in a large, modern economy.
> 
> A typical diagnosis states that China invests too much and consumes too little. The prescription is “rebalancing” – moving the economy away from investment towards consumption-led growth. However, a consumption-led growth model has little in theory or evidence to support it.
> 
> For developing economies (which China still is in per capita terms), the theory is quite clear: they should invest in building up their capital stock per worker. A higher savings rate will mean less consumption, but it funds greater investment too. That ultimately allows poorer countries to catch up to higher per-capital GDP levels faster.
> 
> Economists generally agree that sustained economic growth depends on supply-side fundamentals such as the stock of capital and technological innovation. Ultimately, it is productivity growth that drives GDP growth in the long run. There is little in the academic literature that suggests a causal link between higher consumption and higher growth rates.
> 
> Consumption-led growth models have also performed poorly in practice. In the 1970s and before economic reforms, China’s household consumption share of GDP was over 60% – higher than that of the US at the time. However, growth during the decade was significantly slower than what came after, when investment as share of GDP rose steadily.
> 
> Furthermore, a credit-driven consumption model is not only unsustainable, but the debilitating effects of consumers deleveraging from high levels of debt in a deflationary environment will make the recovery much more difficult. Of course, no country consumes nothing and saves everything for investment; it would be a bad idea even if it could as the investment would eventually run into diminishing returns.
> 
> The key debate then, is whether China has already reached the point where extra investment becomes over-investment. On a macro level, we think China’s capital stock per worker is still low and less likely to be subject to diminishing returns. China’s development into a modern economy is far from finished. Much more infrastructure investment is still needed to cope with the rapid pace of urbanisation and industrialisation.
> 
> While the recent infrastructure boom has boosted the country’s transport capacity, China’s railway network is still shorter than that of the US in the 19th century. There are no doubt plenty of examples of over-investment in certain sectors. But it does not mean one can draw a simple with the economy as a whole. There are still more useful infrastructure projects to be built before China is overrun by bridges to nowhere.
> 
> Critics would point to data showing the incremental capital-output ratio in China coming down substantially since the global financial crisis. But this mainly reflects a shift in the focus of investment away from say, toy factories, and toward subways, which are more capital-intensive and generate less of a boost to short-term output.
> 
> That would indeed pull down the short-term return on capital (which still remains high). However, it does not imply diminishing returns have set in because infrastructure investments generate significant spill-over effects through lifting the whole economy’s efficiency and labour productivity, which will boost return on capital in the future.
> 
> China’s problem is not that investment is too high, but that underdeveloped capital markets have meant investment has been funded through the wrong financing model. Too much has been funded by short-term bank lending, sometimes through non-transparent local government vehicles or other parts of the shadow banking system.
> 
> This creates a duration mismatch, as many of these projects have returns that accrue over a long period of time. The real rebalancing challenge is therefore more subtle. It involves changing the way investment is funded by improving credit supply through a more developed credit market, improving access for small and medium-sized enterprises, and expanding the local government bond market to fund long-term infrastructure investment.
> 
> This would be more efficient than having the government introduce further distortions by micro-managing the demand side. In the long term it is inevitable that the savings rate will fall due to demographics, but that makes it even more important for China to invest now. Otherwise, once the savings rate begins is natural decline, it becomes more difficult to fund investment.
> 
> Rebalancing through deliberately forcing down the savings rate would be more difficult and dangerous. Say the authorities tried to reduce the real interest rate to discourage saving. Without all manner of reforms to boost the social safety net, that could lead to even greater precautionary savings.
> 
> Consumption would fall, as would firms’ profits and government tax revenues, making it more difficult to finance the required safety net. Far better, we would argue, to target the distortions at source with structural reforms. The obsession with rebalancing China’s economy is instead leading to misguided policy recommendations that are too blunt, and which may carry unintended consequences.
> 
> _This piece was written jointly by Qu Hongbin and John Zhu, HSBC’s Greater China Economist._




The key, it seems to me, is this: "China’s development into a modern economy is far from finished. Much more infrastructure investment is still needed to cope with the rapid pace of urbanisation and industrialisation." But, you might well say, what about the empty blocks of apartments and roads to nowhere? All very real, I reply, and living proof of why an anti-corruption campaign is urgent. The Chinese are neither bad economist nor bad planners; what they are is hamstrung by corruption, at all levels, which, in my _guesstimation_,* costs them 1 to 2% of GDP *growth* every year.


____
* I made my _guesstimate_ a couple of years ago when I was very fortunate to be allowed to visit a small cluster of villages in a remote part of (underdeveloped) Anhui Province and where the village captain (senior official) was very open in letting me track his work and how he disposed of each transaction. I watched the corruption, close up, and I saw the distribution, up and down, of the proceeds. I made a rough numerical calculation (_nnn_ RMB per person, per year multiplied by 450 Million (adult workers) then factored as a % of GDP and then as a % of growth) and arrived at 1+% of GDP growth per year. Not rigorous, at all, but illustrative of what I believe to be the scope of the problem.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> * I made my _guesstimate_ a couple of years ago when I was very fortunate to be allowed to visit a small cluster of villages in a remote part of (underdeveloped) Anhui Province and where the village captain (senior official) was very open in letting me track his work and how he disposed of each transaction. I watched the corruption, close up, and I saw the distribution, up and down, of the proceeds. I made a rough numerical calculation (_nnn_ RMB per person, per year multiplied by 450 Million (adult workers) then factored as a % of GDP and then as a % of growth) and arrived at 1+% of GDP growth per year. Not rigorous, at all, but illustrative of what I believe to be the scope of the problem.



Just curious.  Did you share your observations on corruption with village captain and if so what was his reaction?  Did he see the lost opportunity, passively accept the inevitability of the corruption or angrily reject the entire notion of endemic corruption?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Just curious.  Did you share your observations on corruption with village captain and if so what was his reaction?  Did he see the lost opportunity, passively accept the inevitability of the corruption or angrily reject the entire notion of endemic corruption?




I did share, and, in fact, we discussed it - he and I and a small handful of students home on summer vacation - and he agreed, generally, that: *a)* corruption is a problem and ought to be stamped out; and *b)* it doesn't benefit him, for example, any more than a proper, decent salary would - in line with low level civil service salaries in HK, for example.

But: he explained that the system is deeply, deeply entrenched, and we went to the district and, later, the provincial capital, where I observed the village captain pay off the district chief - and receive a very small share of the district _slush fund_, too, and then I saw the district chief pay off provincial officials ... but only from a distance, demonstrating the all pervasive nature of the problem.

The _two way_ nature of the system - the village captain collects from locals then goes to the district and pays but he comes back with some money, too, and he shares that out (repeat at each level) - is very crafty, it makes people 'forget' how much they are paying because, a bit later, they 'get something for nothing.' (Think high taxes and social programmes and it's not an entirely _foreign_ system, is it?)

I think it needs firm direction - positive, exemplary direction from the very top.


----------



## Kirkhill

Don't we call that system "Income Redistribution" here in Canada?

Thanks for the grist ERC. Still milling and mulling.


----------



## CougarKing

Another thing to "mill and mull" over:

Reuters



> With one eye on Washington, China plots its own Asia 'pivot'
> By: Ben Blanchard, Reuters
> July 4, 2014 9:08 AM
> 
> BEIJING --* The Silk Road, an obscure Kazakh-inspired security forum and a $50-billion Asian infrastructure bank* are just some of the disparate elements in an evolving Chinese strategy to try to counter Washington's "pivot" to the region.
> 
> *While Chinese leaders have not given the government's growing list of initiatives a label or said they had an overall purpose, Chinese experts and diplomats said Beijing appeared set on shaping Asia's security and financial architecture more to its liking.
> 
> "China is trying to work out its own counterbalance strategy," said Sun Zhe, director of the Centre for US-China Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University and who has advised China's government on its foreign policy.*
> 
> Added one Beijing-based Western diplomat who follows China's international relations: "This is all clearly aimed at the United States."
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> *Rival bank?
> 
> Another Chinese initiative is the $50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which Xi first proposed in October during a visit to Southeast Asia.*
> 
> Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said this week Beijing would likely have a 50 percent stake in the bank, which *diplomats see as a possible rival to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank*, though China says its role is a complementary one, not competitive.
> 
> Washington and Tokyo have the biggest voting rights in both the decades-old institutions.
> 
> *China sees the infrastructure bank as a way to spread the message of its benign intentions in Asia, where developing countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam accuse Beijing of being the aggressor over territorial claims.*
> 
> "China upholds a basic guiding principle in regional diplomacy -- being friends and partners with our neighbors," Lou said.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## economicsaboteur

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Another thing to "mill and mull" over:
> 
> Reuters



There are thousands of ways and means the Chinese or Chinese intelligence apply, to quote a relative of mine, "to take over the whole world or 'rule the world'. One is findings ways and means to bankrupt a competitor in USA or Canada through unfair competition. The competing Chinese company lowers it prices too a low level that competitor will end up in a losing end and turns away buyers. Another is manipulating the stocks through their agents of influence in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Of course, trade unions are also infiltrated by Chinese agents to effect illegal strikes and slowdowns to bankrupt the factory. You also cannot set up a company in China if you are not a bonafide Chinese agent in USA or Canada or Australia. Your company end up sabotaged if not. Just like my ex co-worker Theodore Butler who admittedly told me "I'm Chinese", you cannot end up owning almost all of the stocks in Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce if you are not a Chinese spy. We are being sc***d big time. We need CSIS in this trying times. So if you have that patriotic streak, apply in CSIS.. ;D ;D


----------



## George Wallace

economicsaboteur is a BANNED entity who keeps recreating themself with new profiles and spamming this site with a common theme.


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## incorrigiblelawyer

Do you also notice that despite of their common knowledge of suppression of Islam as evidenced by underground mosques and severe punishment of fasting, no Arab terrorist has criticized China but turn to USA and Canada instead as "oppressors"? Even the Communist Party of Canada despite of their promise to retain the Charter of Rights' freedom of religion has never criticized China's underground churches and mosques? Anything that will hurt the American and Canadian government these citizens whom CSIS has labelled as 'terrorists', these commies and Arab terrorists will do in cahoots with the Political Left, Cuban sympathizers and journalists of CBC. We're being sc***d big time. We need CSIS and RCMP in these trying times. So if you have that patriotic streak, join CSIS and RCMP. ;D ;D


----------



## GAP

George Wallace said:
			
		

> economicsaboteur is a BANNED entity who keeps recreating themself with new profiles and spamming this site with a common theme.



Hmmm....a reincarnation? 	incorrigiblelawyer


----------



## brihard

Even with reduced Sunday schedules, surely there must be a bus needing conducting somewhere...


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have suggested, a few times, that there is a huge potential for a crisis between China and Russia over Siberia. In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _New York Times_, Frank Jacobs (author of _Strange Maps_) suggests how it might happen:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-borders-need-to-be-redrawn/why-china-will-reclaim-siberia?smid=tw-share


> Why China Will Reclaim Siberia
> 
> Frank Jacobs, the author of "_Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities_," blogs at _Big Think_.
> 
> UPDATED JULY 4, 2014
> 
> “A land without people for a people without land.” At the turn of the 20th century, that slogan promoted Jewish migration to Palestine. It could be recycled today, justifying a Chinese takeover of Siberia. Of course, Russia's Asian hinterland isn't really empty (and neither was Palestine). But Siberia is as resource-rich and people-poor as China is the opposite. The weight of that logic scares the Kremlin.
> 
> Moscow recently restored the Imperial Arch in the Far Eastern frontier town of Blagoveshchensk, declaring: “The earth along the Amur was, is and always will be Russian.” But Russia's title to all of the land is only about 150 years old. And the sprawl of highrises in Heihe, the Chinese boomtown on the south bank of the Amur, right across from Blagoveshchensk, casts doubt on the “always will be” part of the old czarist slogan.
> 
> Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia's land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. It's hard to imagine such a vast area changing hands. But like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering.
> 
> The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.)
> 
> The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia's 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese. With intermarriage, trade and investment across that border, Siberians have realized that, for better or for worse, Beijing is a lot closer than Moscow.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Joe Burgess/_The New York Times_
> 
> The vast expanses of Siberia would provide not just room for China's huddled masses, now squeezed into the coastal half of their country by the mountains and deserts of western China. The land is already providing China, “the factory of the world,” with much of its raw materials, especially oil, gas and timber. Increasingly, Chinese-owned factories in Siberia churn out finished goods, as if the region already were a part of the Middle Kingdom's economy.
> 
> One day, China might want the globe to match the reality. In fact, Beijing could use Russia's own strategy: hand out passports to sympathizers in contested areas, then move in militarily to "protect its citizens." The Kremlin has tried that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and most recently the Crimea, all formally part of other post-Soviet states, but controlled by Moscow. And if Beijing chose to take Siberia by force, the only way Moscow could stop would be using nuclear weapons.
> 
> There is another path: Under Vladimir Putin, Russia is increasingly looking east for its future – building a Eurasian Union even wider than the one inaugurated recently in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, a staunch Moscow ally. Perhaps two existing blocs – the Eurasian one encompassing Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – could unite China, Russia and most of the 'stans. Putin's critics fear that this economic integration would reduce Russia, especially Siberia, to a raw materials exporter beholden to Greater China. And as the Chinese learned from the humiliation of 1860, facts on the ground can become lines on the map.


----------



## CougarKing

China unveils its largest- and the world's largest- diesel submarine:



> *China Displays World’s Largest Conventional Submarine*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s state-run media is reporting that Beijing publicly displayed what is believed to be the largest conventional submarine in the world last week.
> 
> According to Want China Times, which cited a Chinese-language report in the state-run Guangming Daily, *China’s new Type 032 Qing-class test submarine* was on display last week at the Sixth Shipping Expo held in Guangdong province in southern China from June 6 to June 8. IHS Jane’s also noted the report was carried in China’s state media outlets.
> 
> The Type 032 submarine first came to foreign analysts’ attention in 2010 when pictures emerged on the Chinese internet of the vessel in a Wuhan-based shipyard (at that time, some began calling it a Type 043 submarine, causing some confusion).
> 
> According to Global Security, development of the submarine began in early 2005 followed by construction in 2008. Construction was completed in 2010, and sea trials ended in the fall of 2012. It entered PLA service in October of that same year, and testing commenced in 2013.
> 
> For some time now, defense analysts have believed that the Type 032 has a surfaced displacement of 3,797 tonnes and a submerged displacement of 6,628 tonnes. The new reports in China’s state media confirm this. According to IHS Jane’s, the new reports say that the Type 032 is “a 3,797 tonne vessel that can carry a crew of 200 sailors and researchers. It is said to be 92.6 m long with a height of 17.2 m.” This displacement makes it the world’s largest diesel-electric submarine.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> The Diplomat


----------



## tomahawk6

Retired Gen Xu Caihou has been arrested and expelled from the CP.The corruption purge continues.

http://www.china-defense-mashup.com/former-pla-general-xu-caihou-to-face-court-martial.html

Former PLA General Xu Caihou to face court martial

2014-06-30 — A former top general was expelled from the Communist Party for alleged corruption and his case handed to prosecutors for investigation, the Politburo announced yesterday.

Xu Caihou , a former vice-chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, is the latest senior military figure implicated in President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign.


----------



## tomahawk6

Model of Type 032.Double hull with max dive depth of 200m.


----------



## CougarKing

Merkel meets Xi:

Yahoo News



> *German Chancellor meets Chinese Premier in Beijing*
> 
> German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in Beijing as she continues a visit to China aimed at boosting ties between the two countries.



And one of the results:

A purchase of 100+ civilian helicopters that may have military implications later on...

While the article says "Chinese companies", take note that many of the larger domestic companies (e.g. Huawei, NORINCO, COSCO shipping)in China are actually state-owned, or at least have key board and management staff members that are party members.

Reuters



> *China signs deal to purchase 100 Airbus helicopters*
> BEIJING Sun Jul 6, 2014 11:03pm EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - Airbus Group NV's helicopter division signed agreements on Monday to sell 100 helicopters to Chinese companies.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Major update: China deploys its _Jin_ class SSBNs to the South China Sea.

Interaksyon (Philippine news site)



> *China deploys missile-armed nuclear subs to South China Sea*
> By: DJ Sta. Ana, News5
> July 8, 2014 8:21 PM
> MANILA - China has deployed three nuclear powered ballistic missile-capable submarines to its South China Sea fleet to further stamp its power and influence in the region, where it is embroiled in territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
> 
> Chinese media released a photo, apparently taken last May, of *three Type 094 missile submarines docked at a Yulin naval base on Hainan Island*.
> 
> The submarines' presence at Hainan Island, which is China's main base covering the South China Sea, is seen as a major development as this the first time Beijing deployed its ballistic missile submarines to a forward base.
> 
> Meanwhile, the Philippine Navy marked two milestones in this year's CARAT (Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training) naval exercises with the US Navy.
> 
> One: The Philippine Navy carried out ship borne helicopter operations using its new Augusta / Westland AW109E helicopters from BRP Ramon Alcaraz and BRP Gregorio del Pilar.
> 
> (...EDITED)



Plus a photo from last May of the 3 Chinese boomers at the PLA-N South Sea Fleet's base at Hainan Island: (photo c/o Free Beacon site)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _New York Times_, is an interesting look at the complexities and costs of corruption in China:

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/battle-between-2-state-giants-cctv-and-bank-of-china-unravels/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=World&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=2&


> Battle Between 2 State Giants, CCTV and Bank of China, Unravels
> 
> By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
> 
> JULY 10, 2014
> 
> Morale is low at the state broadcaster China Central Television, after about half a dozen senior personnel there were detained on suspicion of corruption or involvement in major political scandals. Other staffers are said to be too worried about the investigations to work properly or are hampered by a lack of direction from the top, according to employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
> 
> But a CCTV report accusing the Bank of China of illegal practices has jolted viewers nationwide and has revealed deep cynicism among Chinese citizens about two pillars of their society: the powerful broadcaster and the behemoth bank, reportedly the world’s eighth largest in terms of assets.
> 
> The report on Wednesday accused the state-run bank of money laundering, through its Youhuitong service, which enables wealthy Chinese to convert large amounts of renminbi into foreign currency to emigrate overseas under investment visa programs.
> 
> 
> By law, the Chinese may take the equivalent of $50,000 out of the country per year, leaving it something of a mystery as to how so many emigrate through visa programs that may require millions of renminbi converted into foreign currency.
> 
> Emigration is an attractive choice for wealthy Chinese, because of concerns over environmental pollution, education, health care, food safety and legal protection in a country without an independent judiciary.
> 
> The Bank of China denied CCTV’s allegations, saying that its service is legal.
> 
> ‘‘Reports of ‘underground money farms’ and ‘money laundering’ have no basis in fact,’’ the bank said in a statement late Wednesday that was amended shortly after publication to remove the name of the source of the allegations and other details.
> 
> On Thursday, the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post reported that another state lender, China Citic Bank, was offering a similar service. The paper quoted unnamed experts as saying that the programs were “not an illegal business.”
> 
> One Bank of China branch alone, in Guangdong Province, has sent about 6 billion renminbi, or about $1 billion, out of the country this year, the South China Morning Post wrote, citing the CCTV report.
> 
> The sums transferred are “gigantic,” commented Li Youhuan, whose Sina Weibo account identified him as an economics professor in Guangdong and the head of the magazine Enterprise Social Responsibility. Exposing them would shame the nation, he wrote.
> 
> “About the BoC incident, there’s something I’d like to remind people about,” Mr. Li wrote on the financial website Yicai. “Most banks have such business, and BoC is absolutely not the only one.” Supervisory authorities had “not dared” to investigate, he wrote, apparently hinting at official involvement or other powerful backing.
> 
> Guangdong, the reported epicenter of the Bank of China’s controversial service, has been shaken by the arrest of the Communist Party secretary of Guangzhou, the provincial capital, and an investigation into hundreds of “naked officials,” so-called because they send their families and much of their assets abroad while remaining in China.
> 
> Online reactions to the CCTV report came swiftly, including from one person quoted in the television program who said his words were taken out of context.
> 
> It “improperly quoted my comments which were made at a different time about a different subject,” Liu Weiming, a financial analyst, said on his Sina Weibo account.
> 
> One online commenter said Mr. Liu’s post showed how frightened he was.
> 
> “This person is terrified,” wrote Li Songjie99. “Corruption in the finance industry is a disaster. This person is very clear about the scope of its power.”
> 
> Jessica, another commenter, wrote: “I don’t trust either of them. One is the state bank, the other is the state television station. I don’t trust them.”
> 
> A person called Suddenly Thinking Dao Ideals commented: “I believe CCTV. They wouldn’t have published this without the approval of the top-level management, so they wouldn’t just publish naïvely. The Big Four banks have too much power. They are harming the name of China by doing this kind of thing.”
> 
> By Thursday afternoon, both the original CCTV report and related coverage by state-run media were disappearing from the Internet, possibly reflecting sensitivity over a report of large-scale corruption by a state enterprise during a rigorous campaign President Xi Jinping has been waging against official corruption.
> 
> CCTV itself is falling foul of that campaign. Several senior employees, including the director general of the CCTV-2 channel, who was also its advertising director, Guo Zhenxi, have been detained on suspicion of corruption.
> 
> An anchorwoman, Ye Yingchun, is also reportedly in detention in connection with criminal charges said to be building against China’s former security czar, Zhou Yongkang, her former lover who has also been detained, according to insiders who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions.
> 
> This year, CCTV did not reveal the extent of its revenue for its advertising slots for 2014, according to the newspaper Global Times, the first time it did not release such figures. Last year, the paper wrote, the station earned a record 15.88 billion renminbi from such slots.




I know I'm repeating myself, but we, in the West, must understand just how much corruption, which is endemic in China, top to bottom, saps its strength.

If, and it's a big *IF*, China can manage this HUGE problem then it will be like a major boost in productivity, giving it more and more wealth and power.


----------



## Edward Campbell

China is famous, infamous, for failed mega-projects, see: this article about the infamous _New South China Mall_ in Dongguan, in South China, which was the largest shopping mall in the world but now lies as an empty ruin.

This is another megaproject ...






They, literally, chopped the top off a mountain in Guangxi Province (which is in South China, bordering Vietnam) to build an airport.

The Chinese can build big, the Nicaragua canal and, even, the Kra Isthmus canal can happen ... but the fact that something can be done done doesn't mean it should be done or is even necessary.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I've mentioned before that pollution is a serious problem for China, not because of _global warming_, which the govermnet _appears_ to see as an international political (rather than _environmental_) issue, but because the people, the masses of ordinary Chinese, don't like it. Even dictatorships must listen to the people, and, according to _China Daily_, a pretty reliable, demi-official, source, Beijing will impose low sulfur coal burning rules next month.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Some good news for China (and for Australia and Canada, by extension, because both are resource based economies that are sensitive to Chinese _demand_), and, maybe, bad news who those who fear China's _rise_ as a military power, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/53fafa48-0cb8-11e4-90fa-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz37crPcU1r


> China GDP shows progress on rebalancing
> 
> By Gabriel Wildau in Shanghai
> 
> July 16, 2014
> 
> China’s economy grew by 7.5 per cent in the second quarter, topping expectations and suggesting stimulus efforts to stabilise growth have succeeded in offsetting the impact of a weak property market.
> 
> Jitters over slowing growth and faultlines in the world’s second-biggest economy have been percolating through markets, but the second-quarter figure came bang on the level Beijing is targeting for annual growth this year.
> 
> China has sought to stimulate growth through a series of measures, including infrastructure spending, and lifting bank lending. Economists in favour of more structural reform had warned that aggressive efforts to boost short-term growth risked exacerbating distortions in the economy, including near-record-high house prices and heavy reliance on fixed-asset investment to drive growth.
> 
> Yet data released on Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics suggest that policy makers have successfully calibrated their stimulus to shore up growth without significantly setting back the cause of structural reform.
> 
> Moreover, the lion’s share of economic growth came from shoppers rather than government, suggesting Beijing is making progress on its longstanding bid to rebalance the economy towards domestic consumption and away from fixed investment.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “It’s not hard to loosen monetary policy. It’s not hard to throw money at infrastructure. The real test is, can they walk and chew gum at the same time?” asked Stephen Green, head of greater China research at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong. “Now that the data has stabilised, can they double down on rolling out some of the reforms?”
> 
> Lu Ting, chief China economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, noted that Beijing’s stimulus was focused on raising spending on railway and social housing, using its own financing and thus limiting any negative impact on the financial system.
> 
> Fiscal spending rose 26 per cent year-on-year in June, according to government data. Analysts say direct fiscal spending by the central government, whose overall debt remains low, is a healthier form of stimulus than projects funded by local governments borrowing through opaque financing vehicles.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The ramp-up in infrastructure spending also helped drive a 17.3 per cent year-on-year rise in fixed asset investment in the first half of the year, even as property investment slowed to its weakest level since 2009.
> 
> The 3.6 percentage points of overall growth generated by investment in the first half, however, was less than consumption, which contributed 4.1 percentage points. (Net exports contracted 0.2 per cent.)
> 
> Yet while economists applauded the data many remain cautious given faultlines in the economy, particularly the property market and spiralling debt levels. The flagging property market is expected to drag on growth in the second half: inventories of unsold flats was up 30 per cent year-on-year by end-May, according to a report by E-house China.
> 
> Increased inventories forces developers to delay new housing starts and slow down existing ones, reducing construction activity and in turn denting demand for basic commodities like steel, cement and non-ferrous metals. That means the government is likely to introduce further “mini stimulus” measures to support growth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “We believe that further monetary policy easing across the board will be needed to reduce the downside risks facing the economy and help the Chinese authorities to deliver the 7.5 per cent growth target,” Liu Ligang, chief greater China economist at ANZ Bank in Hong Kong, said in a note.
> 
> Chinese bank loans and other forms of credit grew at their fastest pace for three months in June, according to data released on Tuesday, in a sign that authorities have opened the credit taps in a bid to stabilise a slowing economy, while potentially backsliding on efforts to curb excessive debt.
> 
> But some analysts say the June credit data are likely to prove an outlier and doesn’t signal a comprehensive loosening of monetary policy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> State media on Tuesday quoted a senior central bank official predicting that total social financing, a broad measure of debt and equity fundraising from various sources, is likely to hit Rmb18.5tn ($3tn) for the year.
> 
> The unusually detailed forecast by Song Shengcheng, head of the research and statistics department at People’s Bank of China, implies 16.2 per cent growth in China’s outstanding credit, according to Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JPMorgan.
> 
> Such growth would represent a slowdown in credit growth from previous years, but it would still exceed nominal GDP, which economist forecast will grow by around 9.6 per cent. That means China’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to climb, albeit at a slower pace.




I have mentioned before that, a few years ago, a middle ranked Chinese official told me that 8% was the _target_ for growth because that was the rate the leadership saw as necessary to maintain social harmony. The _social harmony_ thing is critical to the CCP, it is the equivalent of the ancient (and well established) notion of the _mandate of heaven_ ~ it's what gives the CCP the _right_, even duty to govern.

I have also mentioned that I think that the best way to help long term, steady GDP growth (and to survive the inevitable recessions) is to tackle the endemic *coruption* that pervades almost every aspect of Chinese economic life at every level.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China has manifold problems, some serious, some _normal_ for any national economy, but of them all I would put one at the very top of the list: *water*.
> 
> Look at this graphic:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: http://greenleapforward.com/2010/01/06/charting-chinas-water-future/
> 
> Now, look at this article.
> 
> Not only does China have a _supply_ problem, the water is does have is of poor quality.
> 
> Several billions of US dollars can and will improve the latter situation but _supply_ will remain problematical.
> 
> There is _new_, fresh water is Est Asia without significant _demand_ ... but it is all North of China.




Further to this issue, which I regard as more serious than oil, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, is an interesting analysis, with some prescriptions, about the problem:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141643/sulmaan-khan/suicide-by-drought


> Suicide By Drought
> *How China is Destroying Its Own Water Supply*
> 
> By Sulmaan Khan
> 
> JULY 18, 2014
> 
> On the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, one sometimes hears a strange chattering -- an excited buzz that seems to emanate from the earth itself. Anyone who stops to look for the source will quickly realize that the ground is marked by a series of holes, from which small, shy creatures are likely to be watching.
> 
> The labyrinthine burrows made by these mammals, called pikas, provide them security. But they provide China and much of Asia security as well. By digging holes in the ground, pikas allow rainwater to percolate into the earth and replenish the water table. Without the humble pika, the water simply runs along the surface, triggering floods and soil erosion. So it is no coincidence that, when the pikas became the target of a state-led poisoning campaign beginning in the mid-twentieth century, waters began, slowly, to dry up across the country. The pika was accused of being a pest that destroyed grasslands. Scientists have pointed out that the pika prefers long grass and that its visibility is a symptom, not a cause, of grassland degradation. But policy is slow to catch up with science; pika killings continue today.
> 
> The pikas’ plight illustrates China's difficulties in confronting its water crisis. The economic development on which Beijing depends to keep the population in check poses a dire threat to the fragile ecosystems that the country and the continent depend on for water. It might thus seem politically impossible for China to enact any of the far-reaching environmental reforms that it needs. In the long term, though, absent any policy changes, China is likely on the path to serious civil strife, and perhaps even civil war.
> 
> *THE WILD WEST*
> 
> Most of China’s most important rivers originate in the plateaus of Tibet and the surrounding mountain ranges, an area known by scholars as the Third Pole because of its plentiful ice. The rivers flowing from the Third Pole -- among them, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow River -- traditionally satisfied the majority of China’s water needs. But those waters, along with China’s other supplies, have been steadily disappearing. Since the 1950s, 27,000 rivers have vanished from China. China has only seven percent of the world’s freshwater to meet the needs of about one-fifth of the world’s population. Of that water, only 23 percent is located in northern China, which, as home to most of the country's major industries, uses much more water than China’s south. Meanwhile, much of the country's available water supply has been rendered unusable by pollution.
> 
> The rapid economic development of western China in the last decade and a half has put even more pressure on China’s water supply. Beijing has supported this economic development in spite of its pernicious ecological consequences, though, because it believes that economic growth is the key to calming the restive minorities in the west. (If Kazakhs, Tibetans, and Uighurs have plenty of employment opportunities, the theory holds, they will be less likely to rebel against Communist Party rule.) But Beijing’s control over what goes on in western China is limited. Grand engineering projects designed in Beijing and implemented in distant provinces do exist: think of the railway to Tibet or the Three Gorges Dam. But lately, the process of development in western China has mostly been ground-up -- cities have mushroomed out of nowhere, almost entirely unnoticed by the central government.
> 
> These cities are a byproduct of increasing unemployment in the country’s east, sharpened in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Out of work even in the larger cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, many young Chinese moved to existing cities in western China, such as Lanzhou, Xining, and Urumqi. When those cities grew too crowded, they ventured into what had once been virtually untouched land. Some of them went in search of caterpillar fungus, which serves as an aphrodisiac in Chinese medicine; those who were adept at finding the fungus in the wilds of western China could afford to live in small towns by working only a few weeks a year. Others believed that they would be part of a new tourism industry; wealthy tour groups from eastern China pay considerable money to see the snowy peaks of Tibet, even if the tourism infrastructure that has been built to accommodate them considerably diminishes their beauty.
> 
> With these new residents has come haphazard new infrastructure. In Qinghai province, the government is building a barrage of new roadways from the capital of Xining to the southern city of Yushu. In the Tibet Autonomous Region, Beijing is planning to build additional railways linking Lhasa and Shigatse, and extending to the border of Nepal.
> 
> The problem is that this development is taking place in ecosystems that hold the headwaters for China’s water supply. And the pressures that urbanization puts on the headwaters -- through overuse, grassland degradation, pollution, and threats to species that have a role to play in maintaining the health of the river ecosystem -- is already having consequences downstream. On the Tibetan plateau, streambeds are dry and glaciers have melted into dead rock.
> 
> Similar threats confront China’s other water sources. The Pearl River in Southern China is drying. In China’s northeast, burgeoning construction projects are swallowing the wetlands that replenish the region's groundwater. As a result, water shortages have plagued the country in recent years, and experts predict that water demand will exceed supply by 2030. Given the unreliability of Chinese statistics and how swiftly ecosystems can shift course, that crunch could arrive even sooner than anticipated.
> 
> *THE CHAIRMAN’S DELUSIONS*
> 
> Rather than trying to conserve water, the Chinese government has endorsed a massive project inspired by China’s first communist leader, Mao Zedong. The south had plentiful water, Mao reasoned in 1952, whereas the north did not; therefore, water should be diverted from the south to the north. In 2002, the Communist Party initiated a massive engineering project in order to realize this vision: a series of canals that will draw approximately 45 billion cubic meters of water from the south to the north. The first canal has already opened in eastern China. Two more -- including a western route that will cut across the Himalayas -- are underway.
> 
> It is true that water resources are distributed unevenly, with the south home to 77 percent of the country’s total water resources. Of the total water resources available in northern China, about 45 percent get used; the south needs to use only about 20 percent of its water resources. It is also true that as the north continues to grow, so will its demand for water. But there are several problems with Beijing’s water diversion policy. *First*, the ecological risks are immense. It is quite possible that the project will disrupt the river systems and exacerbate water shortages, rather than solve them, by triggering soil erosion and eliminating species responsible for maintaining a healthy river. The Three Gorges Dam provides a cautionary tale about tampering with natural forces: research shows that the dam caused an increase in seismic activity and landslides. Downstream of the infamous project, water shortages disrupted irrigation.
> 
> *Second* -- and more important -- the project solves nothing in the long term. If northern China’s inefficient water use continues unchecked, the 45 billion cubic meters piped in from the south will eventually be too little -- especially with the rivers’ sources drying out. As Beijing diverts more and more water to the north, it will expose a long-standing political rift. In its long history, China has often split along north-south lines. Already, in southern places like Chongqing and Yunnan, one hears a growing complaint: Why should we southerners go thirsty so that the northerners can grow rich? As southern crops fail and people there feel the burden of water shortages, such complaints will only increase.
> 
> More generally, Beijing has yet to confront the many historical examples that suggest that water shortages can be a grave threat to national security. Persistent drought led to the collapse of Mayan civilization between 760 and 930 AD. In China, the Ming dynasty collapsed in the seventeenth century largely due to years of successive droughts. More recently, in the Middle East and South Asia, water shortages have led to political unrest. The recent swell of environmental protests in China indicates that it will not be immune to the trend.
> 
> A historian looking back in 2040 might well tell a story in which Beijing, unable to curb the state’s relentless water use, condemned it to growing water shortages. As the south grew parched, political grievances flared into violent opposition, which became increasingly difficult to put down as angered military commanders joined in and residents of the desiccated third pole -- Tibetans, Uighurs, Kazakhs -- went into revolt. Like the Ming dynasty before it, the historian would conclude, China had collapsed because thirst spawns violence.
> 
> *WAR ON DROUGHT*
> 
> To avoid serious ecological and political calamity, China’s central government will have to curtail its economic goals. Fortunately, Beijing’s recent climate change policies suggest that it may be prepared to make such a compromise. Ahead of the United Nations climate change talks to be held in Paris in 2015, the Chinese government has talked of initiating a “war on pollution” and reducing its carbon emissions. There are plenty of signs, from the investment in renewable energy to discussing emissions with the US in the Strategic Economic Dialogue, that at least some in the Chinese government are serious.
> 
> But cutting carbon emissions without a plan to address water issues -- and other problems like soil contaminated with toxins -- is futile. Beijing needs to develop a plan that addresses the entirety of its environmental woes. For one, it has to mandate sustainable development, which will require strengthening the central government against the local governments. Cities can no longer be allowed to spring up in western China without Beijing’s knowledge -- the effects on water supply are simply too great. The government will also have to bring locally administered industries, which emit more pollutants and use more water than they report, under control. To aid these efforts, the Chinese government should also try to rally popular support around sustainable development. The Chinese public is tired of the water shortages, unsafe drinking water, and soil contamination caused by haphazard urban development. Xi Jinping could present environmental reform as the next chapter of China’s glorious history and as part of the new model of great power relations that he has touted.
> 
> Once it has popular support in place, China could make other major changes. *First*, it would be worth putting a halt to the south-to-north water diversion project -- perhaps even going so far as to undo the existing canal in eastern China -- and insisting on water and energy efficiency in the north instead. As experts have pointed out, simple measures like water recycling and water price increases could help immensely. This would likely lead to vociferous complaints from provincial officials and industrial barons, but that should be preferable to steadily alienating the southern swath of the country and allowing the root causes of the problem to persist.
> 
> *Second* -- and this too would lead to some political backlash -- Beijing should move to curb, and perhaps even stop, development in the country's most ecologically sensitive areas. The Chinese government needs to treat the protection of the Tibetan plateau as a key to national security, not an impediment to economic growth, even if that means finding other ways of easing social tensions in western China. One possibility would be to stanch the flow of Han migrants, which feeds the resentment that ethnic minorities often feel.
> 
> Beijing should also consult the platoon of conservation biologists, both Chinese and foreign, who have long been warning of looming ecological catastrophe. China’s water security depends on a complex and subtle balance -- the forests that enrich the watersheds, the alpine grasslands that limit soil erosion, the relationships between myriad organisms which maintain healthy waterways -- that is extremely difficult to understand. The Chinese state may need to swallow its pride in reaching out to foreign experts, but that shouldn't be an impediment. China desperately needs to comprehend its environment in all its intricacy, and the country’s officials should be open to reaching out to anyone who might be able to help. Even the diminutive pika, after all, has a critical role to play.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Some good news for China (and for Australia and Canada, by extension, because both are resource based economies that are sensitive to Chinese _demand_), and, maybe, bad news who those who fear China's _rise_ as a military power, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:
> 
> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/53fafa48-0cb8-11e4-90fa-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz37crPcU1r
> 
> I have mentioned before that, a few years ago, a middle ranked Chinese official told me that 8% was the _target_ for growth because that was the rate the leadership saw as necessary to maintain social harmony. The _social harmony_ thing is critical to the CCP, it is the equivalent of the ancient (and well established) notion of the _mandate of heaven_ ~ it's what gives the CCP the _right_, even duty to govern.
> 
> I have also mentioned that I think that the best way to help long term, steady GDP growth (and to survive the inevitable recessions) is to tackle the endemic *coruption* that pervades almost every aspect of Chinese economic life at every level.




But, there is a contrary opinion which is in this article, in the _Financial Post_.

There is, as I have discussed elsewhere, a HUGE problem in the _clarity_ of China's national accounts. I believe there is a _clean_ set of books somewhere in Beijing; the leadership in the _Zhongnanhai_ and a few dozen, not a hundred, senior bureaucrats know and understand the true state of the economy ... but I don't know, you don't know, and neither William Pesek at _Bloomberg_ nor Gabriel Wildau, that authors of, respectively, the pessimistic and optimistic analyses, know, either.


----------



## CougarKing

Isn't it rather redundant for the PLA-N to be doing this considering they already have 4 other warships, including the destroyer _Haikou_, directly participating in the RIMPAC exercises?

Yahoo Finance/Business Insider



> *China Deploys Spy Ship Off The Coast Of Hawaii*
> Business Insider
> By Paul Szoldra – 11 hours ago
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> China sent an electronic surveillance ship to keep an eye on the multinational Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercise, Sam LaGrone at the U.S. Naval Institute reported Friday.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> China's uninvited fifth ship — a Type 815 Dongdiao-class intelligence vessel named Beijixing — is operating a safe distance away from the Hawaiian coast and the other 50 ships taking part in the exercise "in accordance with international law," James told the Advertiser.
> 
> (...END EXCERPT)


----------



## a_majoor

Some more details on China's water crisis. Overdrawing the water resources is a big problem everywhere (the Aral sea dried up because of the amount of water being diverted from the Amu Darya), but the scale and scope of China's water issues are extreme:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/3/4175514/china-rivers-disappear-from-the-map-water-supply-crisis



> The Fringe
> *Why did 28,000 rivers in China suddenly disappear?*
> 
> Startling government survey sheds new light on Chinese water crisis
> 
> By Amar Tooron April 3, 2013 09:09 amEmail@amartoo216Comments
> 
> For years, China claimed to hold an estimated 50,000 rivers within its borders. Now, more than half of them have abruptly vanished.
> 
> Last week, China's Ministry of Water Resources announced the results of a three-year survey of the country’s waterways, revealing startling declines in water supply. According to the census, there were 22,909 rivers in China as of 2011, each covering an area of at least 100 square kilometers. That marks a decrease of about 28,000 from the government's previous estimates, raising fears among environmentalists and putting Beijing on the defensive.
> 
> China's longest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, have each seen declining water levels in recent years, but the government's survey — its most comprehensive to date — may shed new light on the breadth and gravity of the country's crisis.
> 
> According to the South China Morning Post, officials attributed the decline to global warming and outdated mapping techniques, saying previous estimates were based on incomplete topographical maps from the 1950s. Experts, meanwhile, say there are more direct factors at play — namely, explosive economic development and poor environmental stewardship.
> 
> Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, acknowledges that updated mapping techniques could explain some discrepancies in river estimates, though he notes that the government's findings corroborate those from independent studies.
> 
> "Our research has shown that in some areas, especially in north China, rivers are drying up or turning into seasonal rivers," Ma said in a phone interview with The Verge. There are several explanations for this phenomenon, including deforestation and, to a less certain extent, climate change, though Ma says the two primary catalysts are pollution and overpopulation.
> 
> Together, they form a potentially disastrous combination. China's mushrooming population has added extra strain to its limited water supply, while the country's rampant industrialization has left many rivers contaminated.
> 
> "At the moment, pollution discharge is destroying the limited clean resources we have," Ma said.
> 
> The extent of China's pollution problem was laid bare in grisly fashion last month, when more than 12,000 dumped pig carcasses washed ashore in Shanghai and Jiaxing. Agricultural and industrial waste has had a pronounced human impact, as well, contaminating water supplies in so-called "cancer villages" — a moniker for areas with particularly high cancer rates.
> 
> Dead pigs and cancer villages
> 
> These incidents have drawn greater attention to China's water crisis, while reviving concerns over the environmental costs of unfettered economic development. Chinese lawmakers, however, have been grappling with these issues for decades.
> 
> China's modern water management system dates back to the 1960s, when a series of devastating floods forced Mao Zedong to commission an array of dams, reservoirs, and spillways. Mao's infrastructure helped prevent floods, but it also created ecological imbalances by blocking rivers that once flowed into the North China Plain. As a result, lakes and rivers in the region began drying up, and farmers began depleting well supplies.
> 
> Population growth has only compounded China’s supply issues. According to a 2006 study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China's water use has increased more than fivefold since 1949, forcing the government to take even more drastic measures.
> 
> In 2008, China unveiled the Three Gorges Dam — a massive hydropower project that the country heralded as a marvel of engineering. Today, it's the largest hydropower structure in the world, though it has had disastrous ecological and social effects, resulting in deadly landslides and the displacement of an estimated 1.4 million people.
> 
> The government openly acknowledged these pitfalls in 2011, but it remains intent on building the South-North Water Transfer Project — an even grander undertaking that the New York Times described as "China's most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature." When completed, the $62 billion initiative will divert water from China's already drought-ravaged southern region to the northern Yellow and Hai rivers.
> 
> "An emergency relief effort"
> 
> Ma describes the Water Transfer Project as "an emergency relief effort," citing the dire situation in China's northeast region, though he doesn't see it as a viable long-term solution.
> 
> "They could run out of water without this project," he said, "but even the current volume of redirected water likely won't be enough to keep up with demand."
> 
> Instead, Ma and others say China should focus on controlling demand and regulating pollution, rather than re-allocating its water supply.
> 
> Xavier Leflaive, head of the water team at the OECD's Environment Directorate, says China should implement market-based reforms to encourage more responsible water usage, while phasing out fertilizer subsidies to mitigate agricultural runoff.
> 
> He acknowledges that China isn't the only country facing these issues; global water demand is expected to increase 55 percent over the next three decades, and rapidly developing countries like India have faced similar crises. But Beijing's unique economic and social developments add an extra layer of urgency. "This global trend is exacerbated in China by the speed and scale of urbanization and economic development, and by a lack of strong monitoring, inspection and enforcement capabilities," Leflaive said in an email to The Verge. "This lack is limiting the effectiveness of otherwise sound policies, laws and regulations."
> 
> China has implemented tougher regulations on water usage and pollutants — the so-called "three red lines" — though it remains to be seen whether they can be enforced across an expansive, and fast-growing economy.
> 
> The good news is that the Chinese government seems willing to take a harder stance on environmental stewardship. In the past, Beijing has scoffed at calls to control its greenhouse emissions, arguing that it shouldn't be punished for its own economic prosperity. But Premier Li Keqiang has adopted a more environmentally conscious tone in recent weeks, vowing to be more transparent about his country's ecological issues.
> 
> "We must take the steps in advance," Li said last month, "rather than hurry to handle these issues when they have caused a disturbance in society."
> 
> The premier has also promised to enforce current regulations on pollution, as he explained at his debut press conference in March.
> 
> "This government will show even greater resolve and take more vigorous efforts to clean up such pollution," Li said. "We need to face the situation and punish offenders with no mercy and enforce the law with an iron fist."


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Bloomberg News_, might be a bit funny, except that it points to a real problem for China:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-22/ethiopia-becomes-china-s-china-in-search-for-cheap-labor.html?utm_content=buffercbe7f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer


> Ethiopia Becomes China’s China in Global Search for Cheap Labor
> 
> By Kevin Hamlin, Ilya Gridneff and William Davison
> 
> Jul 22, 2014
> 
> Ethiopian workers strolling through the parking lot of Huajian Shoes’ factory outside Addis Ababa last month chose the wrong day to leave their shirts untucked.
> 
> Company President Zhang Huarong, just arrived on a visit from China, spotted them through the window, sprang up and ran outside. The former People’s Liberation Army soldier harangued them loudly in Chinese, tugging at one man’s aqua polo shirt and forcing another’s shirt into his pants. Nonplussed, the workers stood silently until the eruption subsided.
> 
> Shaping up a handful of employees is one small part of Zhang’s quest to profit from Huajian’s factory wages of about $40 a month -– less than 10 percent the level in China.
> 
> “Ethiopia is exactly like China 30 years ago,” said Zhang, 55, who quit the military in 1982 to make shoes from his home in Jiangxi province with three sewing machines and now supplies such brands as Nine West and Guess?. “The poor transportation infrastructure, lots of jobless people.”
> 
> Almost three years after Zhang began his Ethiopian adventure at the invitation of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he says he’s unhappy with profits at the Dongguan Huajian Shoes Industry Co. unit, frustrated by “widespread inefficiency” in the local bureaucracy and struggling to raise factory productivity from a level he says is about a third of China’s.
> 
> *Four Tongues*
> 
> Transportation and logistics that cost as much as four times those in China are prompting Huajian to set up its own trucking company. And the use of four languages in the plant -- Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic; the local tongue, Oromo; English and Chinese -- further complicates operations, Zhang says.
> 
> It takes two hours to drive 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the Huajian factory from the capital along the country’s main artery, illustrating the challenges. Oil tankers and trucks scream along the bumpy, potholed and, at times, unpaved road. Goats, donkeys and cows wander along the roadside and occasionally into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Minibuses and dented taxis, mostly blue Ladas from the country’s past as a Soviet ally, weave through oncoming traffic coughing a smoggy exhaust.
> 
> Huajian is nonetheless becoming a case study of Ethiopia’s emerging potential as a production center for labor-intensive products from shoes to T-shirts to handbags. In a country where 80 percent of the labor force is in agriculture, manufacturers don’t have to worry about finding new workers. Its population of about 96 million is Africa’s second-largest after Nigeria’s.
> 
> *Seeking Investment*
> 
> A combination of cheap labor and electricity and a government striving to attract foreign investment makes Ethiopia more attractive than many other African nations, said Deborah Brautigam, author of “The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa” and a professor of international development and comparative politics at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
> 
> “They are trying to establish conditions for transformation,” Brautigam said in a telephone interview. “It could become the China of Africa.”
> 
> Huajian’s 3,500 workers in Ethiopia produced 2 million pairs of shoes last year. Located in one of the country’s first government-supported industrial zones, the factory began operating in January 2012, only three months after Zhang decided to invest. It became profitable in its first year and now earns $100,000 to $200,000 a month, he said, calling it an insufficient return that will rise as workers become better trained.
> 
> *Fleeing China*
> 
> Under bright fluorescent lights, amid the drone of machines, workers cut, glue, stitch and sew Marc Fisher brown leather boots bound for the U.S. Meanwhile, supervisors monitor quotas on whiteboards, giving small cash rewards to winning teams and criticism to those falling short.
> 
> China, Africa and global retailers all have stakes in whether Ethiopia and such countries as Tanzania, Rwanda and Senegal become viable production bases for labor-intensive products. Promoting trade, boosting employment and spurring investment are among the topics that will be discussed on August 4-6 at the first White House U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington.
> 
> African nations have a compelling opportunity to seize a share of the about 80 million jobs that China will export as its manufacturers lose competitiveness, according to Justin Lin, a former World Bank chief economist who now is a professor of economics at Peking University.
> 
> *‘Manufacturing Powerhouse’*
> 
> Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, who met on May 4, backed the move of Chinese industries to Ethiopia. China is “supporting Ethiopia’s great vision to become Africa’s manufacturing powerhouse,” Hailemariam told reporters at a joint press conference in Addis Ababa.
> 
> Weaker consumer spending in the U.S. and Europe after the financial crisis prompted global retailers to hasten their search for lower-cost producers, said Helen Hai, head of China Africa Consulting Ltd. in Addis Ababa. She ran Huajian’s Ethiopia factory until July of last year.
> 
> While China’s inland regions offered manufacturers a cheaper alternative to the export-linked coastal areas, rising costs and a limited pool of available workers now are undermining that appeal.
> 
> Average factory pay in Henan, about 800 kilometers from the coast, rose 103 percent in the five years ended in September and 80 percent in Chongqing, 1,700 kilometers up the Yangtze River. In the same period, salaries rose 82.5 percent in Guangdong, where Huajian has its base in the city of Dongguan.
> 
> *‘Great Potential’*
> 
> Cost inflation in countries including China has prompted Hennes & Mauritz AB, Europe’s second-biggest clothing retailer, to work with three suppliers in Ethiopia. The nation has “great potential” for production, H&M head of sustainability Helma Helmersson said in an April interview.
> 
> China’s average manufacturing wage is 3,469 yuan ($560) per month. Pay at the Huajian factory ranges from the basic after-tax minimum of $30 a month to about twice that for supervisors. By contrast, average manufacturing wages in South Africa, Africa’s biggest manufacturer, are about $1,200.
> 
> The duty-free and quota-free access that Sub-Saharan Africa enjoys for the U.S. and EU markets gives additional savings thanks to the African Growth and Opportunity Act for the U.S. and the EU’s Everything But Arms accord for the poorest countries. Import tariffs on shoes made in China range from 6 percent to as much as 36 percent, Zhang said.
> 
> *Past-Future Business*
> 
> A spokeswoman for Guess? confirmed that a licensee has done business with the Huajian Ethiopia factory in the past and may do so in the future.
> 
> A spokesman for Sycamore Partners, which owns Nine West, declined to comment on its business relationships and whether it has a relationship with Dongguan Huajian Shoes Industry Co. Marc Fisher Footwear is making shoes in the Ethiopia factory, Jaclyn Weissman, a spokeswoman for the company, wrote in an e-mail.
> 
> Signs of Ethiopia’s allure include factories outside Addis Ababa set up by leather goods maker Pittards Plc of the U.K. and Turkish textile manufacturer Ayka Tekstil. Foreign direct investment in the nation surged almost 250 percent to $953 million last year from the year before, according to estimates by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
> 
> Zhang spends about half his time in Ethiopia, he says. During the visit last month, he spoke to about 200 uniformed Huajian supervisors, a mix of Ethiopians and Chinese, gathered in the parking lot. A giant plasma screen mirrored the crowd as Zhang hurried onto the stage.
> 
> *Chant, March*
> 
> He berated those assembled for a lack of efficiency, then praised them for their loyalty to Huajian, his words translated into Amharic and Oromo. He ordered them to march on the spot, to turn left and to turn right, all chanting together in Chinese.
> 
> “One two one,” they chanted. “One two three four,” as they marched in step. Slogans followed: “Unite as one.” “Improvement together.” “Civilized and efficient.”
> 
> They sang the “Song of Huajian,” whose words urged “We Huajian people” to bravely move forward, to hold the banner of Huajian high and to “keep our business forever.” Chinese supervisors led the song, their Ethiopian colleagues stumbling over some words and struggling to keep up.
> 
> Later, Zhang explained that he can’t be as tough on the staff as he would like.
> 
> “Here the management cannot be too strong as there will be a problem with the culture,” he said via a translator. “In China you can be strong, but not here. The conditions here mean we have to show respect. On one hand we have to have strict requirements; on the other hand we have to take care of them. They have their own dignity. They may be poor but we have to respect their dignity.”
> 
> Labor Demands
> 
> About 200 of the workers rebelled in early 2013, going on strike for two days after demanding a share of profits following a period in which Huajian’s orders surged, said Hai. The incident was resolved with the help of Ethiopian labor officials, she said.
> 
> Five workers interviewed at the factory on July 10 described a workplace of strict standards, with rewards for good results and penalties such as docked pay for ruined shoes.
> 
> Taddelech Teshome, 24, said her day starts at 7:20 a.m. after her Chinese employers provide employees with a breakfast of bread and tea. When her morning shift ferrying shoes from the factory floor to the warehouse is over, she gets fed the national staple, sour bread, for lunch. After work, a Huajian bus takes her to nearby Debre Zeit, a town where she rents a room with her sister for $18 a month.
> 
> *Following Sister*
> 
> She came to Huajian just over a year ago from her home 165 kilometers away in Arsi region after her sister started at the factory.
> 
> “The work is good because I pay my rent and I can look after myself,” she said, wearing an aqua Huajian polo shirt. “It’s transformed my life.” Taddelech said she wants to work for two more years at the plant and become a supervisor. She eventually aspires to build her own house.
> 
> With inflation at 8 percent -- down from 40 percent in July 2011 -– saving cash is tough. Mohammed al-Jaber, who earns $30 a month for gluing shoe linings eight hours a day six days a week, said he can add to his pay with perfect attendance each month -- a $7.50 bonus -- and overtime. Any extra gets sent home to his family in the Arsi region.
> 
> Once famine-plagued Ethiopia, run by former rebels since they overthrew a socialist military junta in 1991, is seeking investment to support a growth rate that’s expected to fall to 7.5 percent this year from 9.7 percent in 2013. The population is expanding annually by 2.9 percent, at a time when the urban unemployment rate is 17.5 percent.
> 
> *Economic Transformation*
> 
> Ethiopia aims “to transform the economy” via industrialization by attracting foreign investors to zones where key public services will be concentrated, State Minister Of Finance Ahmed Shide said in an interview in Addis Ababa.
> 
> One appeal for China: Ethiopia follows a similar tightly controlled, state-heavy economic model. Opposition parties won only one out of 547 parliamentary seats at the last election in 2010.
> 
> Ties are strong between the Communist Party of China and the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front: On July 10, Central Committee Political Bureau member Guo Jinlong visited Ethiopia and met with Prime Minister Hailemariam. The two pledged to enhance cooperation, the official Xinhua news agency said.
> 
> *Key Bottlenecks*
> 
> Ethiopia’s heavy public investment in infrastructure using credit from Chinese state banks promises to relieve some key bottlenecks. The Export-Import Bank of China is funding a railway from Addis Ababa to landlocked Ethiopia’s main port in neighboring Djibouti. Ethiopia lost its coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993.
> 
> The Chinese and Ethiopian governments also are investing in hydroelectric plants -- including what will be Africa’s largest, the domestically funded Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile -- that should increase Ethiopia’s power supply five-fold by 2020.
> 
> That may help overcome obstacles including the supply of electricity and cumbersome customs and tax procedures. In May, a World Bank team went to visit a textile factory in the Eastern Industrial Zone, where the Huajian plant is located, and found they are faced with daily power outages lasting for hours, Ethiopia country director Guang Zhe Chen said.
> 
> *Sustainable Power*
> 
> “There’s a big issue if you can’t ensure sustainable power supply for industrial zones,” he said.
> 
> While countries like Ethiopia have the potential to host Asian manufacturers, a “surge” hasn’t occurred, in part because of trade logistics constraints. “Getting things in and out of Ethiopia is very expensive and time consuming.”
> 
> Ethiopia slipped one place to 125th in the World Bank’s 2014 Doing Business rankings for 189 economies. It was behind China, at 96th, and ahead of competitor Bangladesh, which ranked 130th, the Washington-based lender said on its website.
> 
> It’s easy to forget that China’s infrastructure also was rudimentary at a similar stage of development, said Lin. He recalls that the first time he made the 96-mile trip between Shenzhen and Guangzhou in southern China in the early 1980s it took more than 12 hours, including long waits for ferries to cross rivers. The same trip now can be done in two hours.
> 
> “There were no bridges,” Lin said in an interview.
> 
> Nor were workers accustomed to modern production techniques. When auto-parts maker Asimco Technologies Ltd. began manufacturing in China in the 1990s, workers weren’t responsive to training, said Tim Clissold, former president of the Beijing-based company and author of a memoir, “Mr. China.”
> 
> *Smiling Politely*
> 
> “It was very difficult to deliver improvements at individual factories,” he said. “You could do training, and everyone smiles politely and then continues doing what they were doing before.”
> 
> Now, rising Chinese wages that Zhang calls “an inevitable trend” are pushing Huajian to try to increase its workforce in Ethiopia to as many as 50,000 within eight years.
> 
> A model of a planned new plant at the edge of Addis Ababa is displayed at the factory. The 126-hectare (341-acre) complex, partly financed by more than $300 million from Huajian, will include apartments for workers, a “forest resort” district and a technical university.
> 
> At the gathering in the parking lot, after supervisors sang Huajian’s company song, Zhang dismissed the Ethiopian contingent. Then he continued haranguing the Chinese managers. To make his point that structure was needed to keep employees in focus, he thrust a broomstick toward them repeatedly, then toward the remote camera that was feeding to the plasma screen, the image blurring with each prod.
> 
> Then he left the stage, laughing and raising a triumphant fist.




Here's the problem: there are, rally three Chinas ~

     1. The rich, sophisticated, high wage East coast;

     2. The growing middle region; and

     3. The poor West. 

Those jobs in Ethiopia, making shoes, are *needed* in the poor West of China, but wages, for all Chinese, and expectations are set in the rich East coast cities. It's like when industrial, 'metal bending' jobs moved from America to Korea. Those jobs were *needed* in e.g. Appalachia, Mississippi and Louisiana but wages and expectations were set in New York and Texas and California and so the Koreans got the jobs, and the middle class lifestyle. Ditto for China, today.


Edit to add:

Here is a useful graphic to illustrate China's problem:





Source: _World Economic Forum_


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another sign of the gradual changes China is implementing in the territory in preparation for 2047?

Source: Janes' Defense Weekly



> *China builds listening station in Hong Kong*
> 
> Ian Cameron, Hong Kong - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
> 24 July 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The existence of a People's Liberation Army (PLA) communications installation atop Hong Kong's tallest mountain - the 957 m-high peak of Tai Mo Shan - recently came to light.
> 
> Construction began around 2010, with a geodesic dome first appearing in satellite imagery in 2011. The facility has been operational for approximately three years.
> 
> The installation sits inside a fenced compound that also includes a Civil Aviation Department terminal area radar and Hong Kong Observatory weather radar. The Hong Kong government has admitted giving the PLA a plot of land measuring 9,300 m² on which the army has constructed a geodesic dome, antenna mast, two large buildings, and a basketball court for use by the resident garrison.
> 
> The PLA has installed security cameras and also tinted building windows to reduce observation. On two occasions IHS Jane's has observed PLA vehicles ascending Tai Mo Shan to deliver supplies or replacement staff. Personnel wearing PLA Navy-style uniforms have been observed inside the compound.
> 
> The PLA has refused to explain the facility's purpose, claiming that "military secrecy" means it is "not appropriate for disclosure", although it is extremely likely that it is an electronic and signals intelligence (ELINT/SIGINT) facility. If so, the facility will be similar in purpose to a British radar station based on Tai Mo Shan and used to monitor mainland China until the colony was returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
> 
> The PLA occupies 18 military sites in Hong Kong covering 2,700 hectares that were transferred from the British Army as Military Installations Closed Areas (MICA) in 1997. The Tai Mo Shan radar site does not appear on official lists of PLA installations.
> 
> A 19th site is a controversial new military berth set aside for PLA warships on prime Hong Kong Island waterfront.
> 
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## YZT580

Perhaps the water issue is what is causing Chinese interest in the Arctic.  There has been considerable speculation regarding the harvesting of ice burgs for the arid lands of the middle east but maybe it will be China that starts to infringe on the lands of the north in an effort to obtain potable water at a reasonable cost.  Water is the one staple that people WILL go do war to obtain.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

Water is incredibly expensive to transport.

It would be far cheaper to buy natural gas, ship it China and power desalinization plants, than to harvest icebergs.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Think three rivers: Yenisei and Lena and Amur.





Yenisei River Watershed





Lena River Watershed





 Amur River Watershed


Edit: typo


----------



## a_majoor

The former Soviet Union actually had made detailed plans for diverting these rivers for their use (watering the Steppe and turning it into something like the American praries and the breadbasket of Asia, and giant shipping canals). Of course the astronomical costs put those plans in the recycle bin. In many ways these water diversion megaprojects fall under a category of Fantasy literature which might be called engineering porn:

NAWPA (North American Water and Power Alliance: divert the arctic watershed and reverse the flow of the rivers. Use central BC as the water reservoir. It would only take about 30 years to fill...)

Atlantropa. German idea to dam Straights of Gibralter, lover the  Mediterranean Sea by 200m and colonize the newly exposed sea floor. 

Willy Ley, whose book Engineers' Dreams outlined a project to dam the Congo river and create an inland sea in Africa. Given the events in the Congo since the 1960's, this might not have been a bad idea after all....

Belo Monte Dam. An actual megaproject under way in Brazil, oddly the designers and backers did not seem to understand the water flow is seasonal and erratic, leaving the project only capable of producing about 40% of the projected energy output. Building huge dams in the Amazon rainforest also excites conservationists, who have much more influence in Brazil than in China (see the Three Gorges Dam project...)

James Bay project. One of the few projects which has actually gotten built, although certainly not all the projected dams were completed (and some ideas like building a dam across the mouth of James Bay didn't pass the sniff test).

And this interesting link has a list of many proposals to divert Canadian rivers either to create an east-west waterway or export water to the US (or both):
http://environment.probeinternational.org/1997/08/18/sale-canadian-water-united-states-review-proposals-agreements-and-policies/


----------



## CougarKing

President Xi's anti-corruption crackdown continues:

Reuters



> *China says investigating powerful former security chief for graft*
> BY BENJAMIN KANG LIM AND BEN BLANCHARD
> 
> (Reuters) - China's Communist Party said on Tuesday it had launched a corruption investigation into former domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang, one of the country's most influential politicians of the last decade, in a case that has its origins in a party power struggle.
> 
> Zhou, 71, is by far the highest-profile figure caught up in President Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption. Indeed, Zhou is the most senior Chinese official to be ensnared in a graft scandal since the party swept to power in 1949.
> 
> He was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee - China's apex of power - and held the post of security tsar until he retired in 2012.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Martin111

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Taiwan continues to prepare for this scenario even if cross-strait relations have been more conciliatory under Taiwan's current President Ma Ying Jieou.
> 
> link



The military communication radios industrial develop fast today.
Like the military communication radios and  its accessories need.
As i know Sonetronics in US and Power-Time in China are manufacturer of the accessories.Harries in US is the radio supplier. What anyone else ?


----------



## RADOPSIGOPACCISOP

Martin111 said:
			
		

> The military communication radios industrial develop fast today.
> Like the military communication radios and  its accessories need.
> As i know Sonetronics in US and Power-Time in China are manufacturer of the accessories.Harries in US is the radio supplier. What anyone else ?



Most respected Sir,

Please let me know personally forthwith and I will tell you the secrets of military communications radios industrial commercial and the accessories.


----------



## Brasidas

RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:
			
		

> Most respected Sir,
> 
> Please let me know personally forthwith and I will tell you the secrets of military communications radios industrial commercial and the accessories.



Somebody set us up the bomb. Make your time. All your base are belong to us.

In other news, I'm curious about the shakeup in China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good news, from my perspective, anyway, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/world-insider/zhous-fall-has-china-cheering-but-xi-gets-the-last-laugh/article19842170/#dashboard/follows/


> Zhou’s fall has China cheering, but Xi gets the last laugh
> 
> SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
> 
> NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
> BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Wednesday, Jul. 30 2014
> 
> There was glee in the wake of China’s official confirmation of an investigation into Zhou Yongkang, once one of the country’s most powerful men. On the Internet, where discussion of his downfall was heavily censored until the investigation was confirmed by state media Tuesday evening, a flood of giddy talk came rushing forward.
> 
> “Great job, Xi Jinping!!!” wrote one user on Weibo, one of the most popular Chinese social media sites. “A serious penalty against corruption! What good fortune for the country!” wrote another. (The coincidence with World Wildlife Fund’s International Tiger Day Tuesday added to the fun, as China’s leadership has called its biggest corruption quarry, like Mr. Zhou, “tigers.”)
> 
> More cheering came from the country’s state press, with the Xinhua news agency, in a self-congratulatory commentary, saying the investigation “has revealed the courage and resolution of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to purify itself and run itself with strict discipline.” It said 40 high-ranking officials have been dragged down on corruption and other serious charges since November, 2012, when President Xi Jinping took the reins of the Communist Party.
> 
> “Before the Party discipline, all members are equal and nobody will be made an exception,” Xinhua boasted.
> 
> Even though the specific charges against Mr. Zhou are not yet public – he has been the target of a longstanding corruption probe, but officially he is under investigation for “serious disciplinary violation” – the online commentary underscored the mastery President Xi Jinping has shown in manipulating public opinion.
> 
> There is a danger implicit in China’s Communist Party unmasking the wrongdoing of one of its most senior members, since it is an acknowledgment that there is rot throughout the ranks of the party’s 86 million members.
> 
> But Mr. Xi has sought – in part through calibrated public appearances that have seen him dine at a low-brow restaurant and walk about in bad smog without a mask – to cast himself as a man on the side of the people. That skill that has again come through in the campaign against Mr. Zhou, who is believed to have overseen a corrupt network of friends, family and proteges that amassed billions of dollars worth of illicit gains.
> 
> “The message that no one is above the law, not even top Party elites, is designed to assuage some of the anger that regular people feel” toward official corruption, said Jonathan Sullivan, deputy director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. Mr. Xi still holds tight control of information on the Internet, which will allow the party to keep the most salacious details far from public view.
> 
> That will allow Mr. Zhou’s fall to “be spun to the Party’s advantage and the propaganda function,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Although Mr. Xi’s pursuit of Mr. Zhou is partly politically motivated, bringing down this behemoth and nearly 500 of his associates is an incredible play for public approval.”
> 
> That’s not to say that Mr. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign hasn’t exposed him to certain risks, particularly inside his own party. Alienate too many party members by cutting off their access to luxury goods and the lucrative perks of membership, and there is a chance they will gang up against you.
> 
> “Those people involved in corruption are threatened by this kind of action from the top leaders, and they may form some kind of force to fight back,” said Li Xigen, an associate professor of media and communication at City University of Hong Kong.
> 
> The stakes flashed into public view this spring, when former presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin both reportedly warned Mr. Xi not to take his anti-corruption campaign too far, for fear of destabilizing the party. Internal disagreements may also explain the length of time it took for the investigation against Mr. Zhou to be announced, nearly 10 months after he was placed under virtual house arrest.
> 
> But Mr. Xi seems to be betting that he can outrun internal opposition by getting the public on his side, even if the fight against corruption is often a simple mask for a bid to weed out political rivals – a distinction that is often lost on the public, or merely disregarded. As rumours swirled about even bigger figures in the corruption crosshairs, with talk about Mr. Zemin censored on social media Wednesday amid speculation he too faces scrutiny, The Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, suggested the tiger hunt was not over.
> 
> “The campaign will definitely be deepened with no limit in levels or numbers, especially in fields including energy, land, major construction and civil affairs,” the paper cited a source close to the anti-graft campaign as saying.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I've mentioned Jiang Zemin and the 'tooth and claw' capitalism of his so called _Shanghai Gang_ political wing, but it now appears, according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, that Shanghai politicians are squarely in Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign's sights:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0fbd483e-17dc-11e4-b842-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz38sJO8wag


> Shanghai to feel full force of Xi’s anti-corruption onslaught
> 
> By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
> 
> July 30, 2014
> 
> The most extensive anti-corruption campaign in modern Chinese history is about to be unleashed on Shanghai, the country’s commercial capital and the stronghold of former president Jiang Zemin.
> 
> Until now, China’s most populous city has been left largely unscathed in a campaign that has been the centrepiece policy of President Xi Jinping’s 20-month-old administration and has placed hundreds of thousands of officials under investigation.
> 
> However, a large task force from the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the body investigating allegations of crimes or wrongdoing committed by party members, has arrived in Shanghai and will remain there until the end of September.
> 
> The news comes one day after the party formally launched a corruption investigation into Zhou Yongkang, former head of the secret police and the most senior figure to be accused of corruption in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
> 
> Many political analysts believe the investigation into Mr Zhou, who has been in detention since the end of last year, will be a high water mark in Mr Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. They argue that further escalation targeting more senior retired party officials would destabilise the authoritarian state.
> 
> But by turning the anti-corruption campaign on Shanghai, Mr Xi is directly threatening the legacy of Mr Jiang, 87, who retains enormous influence in the Party despite not having held an official title since he retired from the presidency in 2003.
> 
> Of the seven members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, the body that in effect rules China, four or five of are considered close to Mr Jiang, who appeared in public in Shanghai in late May with visiting Russian president Vladimir Putin, an unusual breach of protocol.
> 
> Before he was made president in 1989, Mr Jiang was Communist Party boss of Shanghai and his still-powerful faction is known as the “Shanghai Gang”.
> 
> Political insiders say Mr Xi is incensed by Mr Jiang’s pervasive lingering influence in both the party and the military.
> 
> Anti-corruption investigations have already targeted several people with close ties to the former president, including Xu Caihou, a former Military Commission vice-chairman and close ally of Mr Jiang. Mr Xu is almost certain to go on trial, making him the most senior military officer to face public charges in China in at least three decades.
> 
> The most recent example is Wang Zongnan, an acolyte of Mr Jiang and former chairman of Bright Food Co, which owns Weetabix breakfast cereal in the UK.
> 
> A corruption investigation was opened on Monday into Mr Wang, 59, who is suspected of accepting bribes and embezzling public funds, according to state media reports.
> 
> Although the allegations revealed so far relate to Mr Wang’s role as head of two other state-owned retail companies and not his leadership of Bright Food, the investigation is being interpreted as a clear warning to Mr Jiang. The former president worked at Bright Food’s predecessor company during the Korean war in the early 1950s and has maintained a close personal connection with it ever since.
> 
> On its website, Bright Food boasts that Mr Jiang is the “founder” of the company’s brand.
> 
> One Shanghai-based party member with knowledge of the matter said the head of the CCDI task force in the city was a Beijing native and his team was sent directly from the capital, an indication of the seriousness of their mission.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Lucy Hornby_




The _right_ in China is still strong, so is the political _left_, but Xi Jinping believes (hopes?) that the _centre_ is bigger and stronger and, above all, is tired of the corruption.


----------



## CougarKing

Considering how political dissidents exposed corruption in the shoddy construction that led to the collapse of many buildings in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, if I can recall correctly, I wonder how much will be exposed this time from Yunnan:

CBC



> Updated: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 15:19:02 GMT | By The Associated Press, cbc.ca
> *China earthquake kills 367 in Yunnan province*
> 
> A strong earthquake in southern China's Yunnan province toppled thousands of homes on Sunday, killing at least 367 people and injuring more than 1,800.
> 
> About 12,000 homes collapsed in Ludian, a densely populated county located around 366 kilometres northeast of Yunnan's capital, Kunming, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported.
> 
> The magnitude-6.1 quake struck at 4:30 p.m. at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Its epicenter was in Longtoushan township, 23 kilometres southwest of the city of Zhaotong, the Ludian county seat.
> 
> Ma Liya, a resident of Zhaotong, told Xinhua that the streets there were like a "battlefield after bombardment." She added that her neighbour's house, a new two-story building, had toppled, and said the quake was far worse than one that struck the area in 2012 and killed 81 people.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

One rather hates to capitalize on a human tragedy ... BUT this is pure GOLD for Xi Jinping: he can, and I expect will, lay blame on provincial, regional and local officials - party members - and heads will roll, or, more literally, heads will do whatever they do when bullets enter them from the back.


----------



## CougarKing

And speaking of heads rolling from gunfire...

While world news focuses on the earthquake in Yunnan province, across the country in restive Xinjiang, the unrest continues and seems to be escalating...

Wall Street Journal



> *China Says Violent Xinjiang Uprising Left Almost 100 Dead*
> In Addition to 59 Suspected Terrorists Killed by Police, 37 Civilians Died in Clashes
> 
> SHANGHAI—Chinese police gunned down 59 people and arrested 215 during a violent uprising last week in the Xinjiang region, the government said Sunday, in a statement that shed fresh light on what dissident groups had earlier described as a major clash in the area.
> 
> In coordinated predawn actions on July 28, unnamed assailants attacked civilians, state buildings and vehicles in two Xinjiang towns, including Elixhu, according to police descriptions reported by the government-run Xinhua news agency.
> 
> The agency said 37 civilians were among the 96 people who were killed during the attack. Sunday's statement called the assailants terrorists and said the attack had foreign support.
> 
> The new figures, which emerged from a high-level meeting of the Communist Party over the weekend in Xinjiang, according to Xinhua, illustrate the seriousness of continued violence in China's largely Muslim province of Xinjiang. The area abuts Central Asia and has seen minor clashes reported weekly.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

According to what I'm hearing/reading here (Hong Kong) the Chinese are using different language about this event; they are talking about foreign controlled "terrorist groups" and so on. Apparently, according to the _South China Morning Post_, which is a pretty reputable source, _jihadist_ flags were captured when the terrorists were killed.


----------



## CougarKing

ASAT weapons in the news again:

Defense News



> *China Developing Capability To Kill Satellites, Experts Say*
> Aug. 4, 2014 - 08:09AM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — US defense experts and the US State Department are describing China’s successful July 23 so-called “anti-missile test” as another anti-satellite test (ASAT). It is the third such kinetic strike ASAT launch by China and raises fears the US will be unable to protect its spy, navigation and communications satellites.
> 
> “This latest space interceptor test demonstrates a potential PLA [People’s Liberation Army] aspiration to restrict freedom of space flight over China,” said Mark Stokes, a China missile specialist at the Project 2049 Institute.
> 
> China’s first two anti-satellite tests, 2007 and 2010, involved the SC-19 (DF-21 ballistic missile variant) armed with a kinetic kill vehicle. Though the first two involved the SC-19, only the 2007 ASAT actually destroyed a space-based platform. The 2010 and July 23 test successfully struck a ballistic missile.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Retaliation for Canada's accusations of Chinese state-supported hackers infiltrating Canadian federal computer networks?

CBC



> Updated: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 20:40:28 GMT | By The Canadian Press, cbc.ca
> 
> *Canadians investigated in China for stealing state secrets, Chinese state media report*
> 
> Chinese media say two Canadian nationals are being investigated for suspected theft of state secrets.
> 
> The allegations relate to China's military and defence research, but the reports gave no other details.
> 
> The suspects are identified in Chinese state media as *Kevin Garratt and Julia Dawn Garratt*.
> 
> Canada's Foreign Affairs Department said it's aware of reports two Canadians have been detained in China and is trying get more information. The department said consular officials are ready to provide assistance.
> 
> Last week, Canada blamed Chinese hackers for infiltrating computers at the National Research Council of Canada, something the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa denied.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

What a co-incidence?


> China is investigating a Canadian couple who ran a coffee shop on the Chinese border with North Korea for the suspected theft of military and intelligence information and for threatening national security, China's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
> 
> The official Xinhua news agency identified the two as Kevin Garratt and Julia Dawn Garratt. In a brief report, Xinhua said the State Security Bureau of Dandong city in northeast Liaoning province was investigating the case, adding it involved the stealing of state secrets.
> 
> Neither the Foreign Ministry nor Xinhua said if the couple had been detained, although the ministry said the Canadian embassy in Beijing was notified on Monday and that the couple's "various rights have been fully guaranteed" ....


More here and here.


----------



## Dissident

This article from Jane's reporting on recommendations that China should plan on purchasing 400 Y-20 Heavy Transport planes (65t cargo).

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out what these planes could be used for.

http://www.janes.com/article/41251/china-s-ndu-recommends-400-strong-y-20-fleet


----------



## CougarKing

More on China's response to unrest in Xinjiang:

From Agence-France-Presse via Yahoo News Australia



> *PROFILING | China city bans 'large beards,' Muslim clothes from buses*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> August 6, 2014 10:52 AM
> 
> BEIJING -- A city in China's mainly Muslim Xinjiang region has banned people with large beards or Islamic clothing from traveling on public buses, state media said, prompting outrage from an overseas rights group Wednesday.
> 
> Authorities in Karamay banned people wearing hijabs, niqabs, burkas, or clothing with the Islamic star and crescent symbol from taking local buses, the Karamay Daily reported.
> 
> The ban also covers "large beards," the paper said, adding: "Those who do not cooperate with inspection teams will be handled by police."
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

2 updates on the 2 Canadians investigated for spying in China:

Yahoo News



> *Simeon Garratt, son of Canadians accused of spying in China, shocked by allegations*
> By Steve Mertl | Daily Brew – 2 hours 36 minutes ago
> 
> Bewilderment. That's Simeon Garratt's central reaction to the arrest of his parents in China as alleged spies.
> Kevin and Julia Dawn Garratt are being held in detention in the city of Dandong, on China's border with North Korea, accused of "suspected theft of state secrets about China's military and national defence research," according to a statement released through the Xinhua news service.
> China's famously opaque justice system has released no details about how the longtime residents of China, who run a popular coffee shop that overlooks the main bridge between China and North Korea, could have led a secret life as spies.
> 
> (...EDITED)



Canadian Press via Yahoo News



> *Arrest of Canadians grabs the attention of China-watchers in U.S.*
> 
> WASHINGTON - To Americans who watch China closely, the arrest of a coffee-shop-owning Canadian couple this week fits a familiar pattern.
> They point to domestic Chinese politics to explain the openly Christian family's arrest on espionage charges.
> 
> China's new leaders have adopted a broad two-fold strategy for maintaining public support for the ruling party, they say: tighten discipline internally, and play the nationalist card against outside forces.
> 
> The detention of Kevin Garratt, 54, and Julia Dawn Garratt, 53, might serve both general objectives, they say. The case has received ample media attention in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> 2 updates on the 2 Canadians investigated for spying in China:
> 
> Yahoo News
> 
> Canadian Press via Yahoo News


With a touch of back-story from April of last year here.


----------



## CougarKing

NinerSix said:
			
		

> This article from Jane's reporting on recommendations that China should plan on purchasing 400 Y-20 Heavy Transport planes (65t cargo).
> 
> It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out what these planes could be used for.
> 
> http://www.janes.com/article/41251/china-s-ndu-recommends-400-strong-y-20-fleet



Speaking of the Y-20s mentioned above:

*Second flying Y-20 heavy transport sporting CFTE prototype number of 783*

 [China Defense Blog]


----------



## a_majoor

Building a web of railways and relationships. This is similar to Robert Kaplan's observation of the "String of Pearls" port facilities across the Indian Ocean; China seeks to get a large foot in the door, but not with an overt presence like forward military bases. Of course, a string of deep water ports that have been engineered and built with Chinese capital and a web of high speed rail lines *could* be used for other purposes as well...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/08/chinas-offers-southeast-asian-countries.html#more



> *China's offers southeast asian countries Canada and Mexico deal with the USA - an economic boost in exchange for economic, cultural and political domination *
> 
> China wants to build thousands of miles of high speed rail and cargo rail track that will loop through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia and head south to Singapore as part of a grand trans-Asian rail accord signed by nearly 20 Asian countries in 2006.
> 
> When the people of the mainland [southeast asian] countries soon find through the convenience of high-speed rail that Kunming is their closest neighbor but a few hours away, the Yunnan capital will eventually become, in effect, the capital of mainland Southeast Asia,” said Geoff Wade, a visiting fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.
> 
> The gravitational pull of Southeast Asia toward China through its well-developed and relatively inexpensive high-speed rail technology was almost inevitable, despite opposition in some places, Mr. Wade said.
> 
> The fear of Chinese domination [in Myanmar] is pervasive. “The China railway project is a national security issue,” said U Than Htut Aung, the chief executive of Eleven Media, a group that publishes newspapers that have campaigned against the project. “Through the Sino-Myanmar railway, China can easily access the Indian Ocean, and Myanmar’s security would be threatened. Because of the rail, Myanmar could become a second Crimea.”
> 
> Japan, concerned about the economic strength of its archrival, China, across Southeast Asia, is presenting itself as an alternative benefactor. It has increased its investment in the region and targeted Myanmar with its largess, particularly in the rail projects that are so dear to China.
> 
> 
> 
> So confident is China that Myanmar will eventually sign up for the project, plans are going ahead to gouge an 18-mile rail tunnel out of the rugged Gaoligong Mountains that straddle the border with Myanmar and serve as the entry point to Yunnan Province and Kunming.
> 
> The engineering challenge of constructing the tunnel through the mountain range is similar to building on the permafrost in Tibet, said Wang Mengshu, a tunnel expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
> 
> Conduit for low cost chinese goods, Chinese tourists and for China buying Commodities
> 
> Myanmar will inevitably come to its senses and agree to the Chinese railway, said Zhu Zhenming, a professor at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, and an expert on Southeast Asia, for the simple reason that it will serve as a conduit for even more Chinese goods on the Myanmar market.
> 
> “Poorer people cannot buy American goods, or Japanese goods,” he said. “Chinese goods are cheaper.”
> 
> CLSA, Asia’s leading and longest-running independent brokerage and investment group estimates that by 2020 outbound mainland tourist numbers will reach 200 million, double the 100 million who left China in 2013, and tourist spend will triple.
> 
> Fuelled by a fast-growing monied middle class eager to experience new destinations, travel is one of the top aspirations for China’s Billion Boomer* generation. The key driver is US$8,000 per-capita GDP as well as more annual leave, visa relaxation, worsening mainland pollution, and an increasingly overloaded domestic tourism infrastructure.
> 
> Hong Kong and Macau should continue to be the top international travel destinations but visitor numbers are estimated to decline from 62% to 45% of total outbound Chinese tourists as holidaymakers seek more exotic destinations.
> 
> The USA and France received 1.5 and 1.3 million mainland Chinese visitors respectively in 2012, the largest number on record. Survey respondents site both countries as their dream destinations and CLSA expects travel numbers to reach 5.7 million to the US and 3.9 million to France by 2020.
> 
> The cost of long-haul travel and limited annual leave will ensure Asian countries continue to benefit the most from mainland tourism growth. Survey respondents who plan to travel stated, in order of preference, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore as their top destinations in the next three years.
> 
> While sightseeing, experiencing different cultures and relaxing are the top three reasons to travel; shopping remains an important component of the travel itinerary. Local specialties, skincare/makeup/perfume and apparel are the most purchased items with 80% of tourists buying from local specialty shops and close to 60% at downtown or airport duty free stores.


----------



## a_majoor

The FP on China's corruption crackdown. There will be some fallout here, since Canada is one of the destinations of this cash:

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/08/08/chinas-anti-corruption-crackdown-threatens-to-spill-over-into-canada/



> *China’s anti-corruption crackdown threatens to spill over into Canada*
> 
> Diane Francis | August 8, 2014 | Last Updated: Aug 8 7:41 PM ET
> More from Diane Francis
> 
> Robber barons built America, but were brought to heel following scandals and evidence of corruption and abuses. If muckrakers and gutsy leaders hadn’t taken them on a century ago, the place might have become another banana republic without the bananas.
> 
> Fortunately the lessons of history have not been forgotten. In 2012, China’s President Xi Jinping launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign to clean up the country’s culture of graft.
> 
> The man in the middle, as head of the Central Commission for Discipline and Inspection, is China’s sixth most powerful man, Wang Qishan, who happens to be a historian. His favorite television show is House of Cards, the Netflix series about Machiavellian tactics in Washington, and two years ago Wang suggested to his colleagues that they read Ancien Regime and the French Revolution to underscore that only reforms can derail insurrections.
> 
> Without reform, China will, and should, be a no-go zone for businesses. Without reform, the Chinese will suffer too, their wealth concentrated in a few undeserving hands and their economy looted by officials on the take who hide billions abroad.
> 
> According to Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit group that traces illicit flows of capital, US$1.06-trillion left China between 2002 and 2011 despite tough currency controls. This is equivalent to China’s GDP in 2002 and roughly US$10-billion a month.
> 
> Recently, a leaked report from China’s central bank estimated 18,000 officials and employees of state-owned enterprises pilfered US$123-billion and fled to the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Recouping these assets will be on the agenda, but efforts must focus on removing the culprits at home to create a meritocracy and deploy the nation’s capital to build wealth, not to build political buildings or bridges that line politicians’ pockets.
> 
> “Our current task is to alleviate the symptoms [of corruption] in order to give us time to eventually cure the underlying disease,” said Wang in a speech late last year.
> 
> The anti-corruption crackdown began in 2012 following the high-profile arrest, then conviction, of Wang and President Xi’s colleague, Bo Xilai, for bribery and corruption and Bo’s wife for murder.
> 
> In 18 months, nearly 250,000 officials and others in governments and state-owned enterprises have been held for detention or charged. Some 70 have died or committed suicide while in custody.
> 
> In recent weeks, investigators have shocked the world with the detention of Zhou Yongkang, former head of PetroChina and the secret service; oil executives (with Canadian connections); the country’s most popular TV anchor (taken into custody just before the evening’s broadcast) and with money laundering allegations about the Bank of China itself.
> 
> Investigators are unraveling schemes that embezzle, launder and export bribes, kickbacks or the proceeds of crime.
> 
> Some involve bribing a bank officer to take a deposit then wire funds offshore.
> 
> Another option is to drive truckloads of cash into the backdoor of friendly casinos in Macao where the cash is blended then paid out, minus a fee, as gambling winnings in another currency.
> 
> Macao and Hong Kong are semi-independent jurisdictions called Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China. Macao’s casinos enjoy six times’ the gaming revenue of the Las Vegas Strip and Hong Kong has obliging banks. A more appropriate label for the two would be the Special Laundering Regions of China.
> 
> In China, crooks don’t have to go to the casino because intermediaries called “junkets” will swap Yuan for gambling chips that can be cashed into Hong Kong or Macao currency at the casino then wired by Hong Kong banks to tax havens or accomplices offshore.
> 
> The goal is to buy a condo or luxury goods with funds from a trust managed by a shell company in Grand Cayman, owned by another trust in Guernsey with an account in Luxemburg managed by a Swiss banker who doesn’t know who the owner is.
> 
> More devious schemes by big shots have moved tens of billions offshore without handling cash or involving banks. For instance, money managers are paid inflated fees to invest Chinese corporate funds abroad. The catch is that half of the fees are paid out to shell companies owned secretly by Chinese officials or paid out to buy them condos or art.
> 
> Other tactics involve bribing officials or executives by selling assets at a loss so they can pocket immediate profits; overpaying for offshore assets in return for kickbacks or wiring cash to “fronts” owned by officials or their children who wash the bribes as though they were legitimate income.
> 
> China isn’t the only country with capital flight problems. Russia is in second place with US$880-billion in illicit capital flows between 2002 and 2011. But whatever the source, Canada must stop being naïve and aiding and abetting such crimes.
> 
> Australia got smart years ago, and requires foreign buyers of real estate or companies to fully disclose their identities and obtain permission from the federal government. In Canada, there are no restrictions or disclosure requirements with the result that Toronto and Vancouver housing costs have been driven up artificially due to frenzied buying by anonymous foreigners. This is why Toronto has 130 high-rise residential projects or as many as New York City with dramatically more people and immigrant arrivals.
> 
> The China crackdown has just started and will reach into Canada and other “host” countries.
> 
> dfrancis@nationalpost.com


----------



## a_majoor

Trifecta of China articles today. This looks at the pattern of Chinese history, and is very much in accord with how Edward reports China's "world view" and her position within it:

http://www.hoover.org/research/cycles-or-stages-chinese-history



> *The Cycles—or Stages—of Chinese History*
> by Edward N. Luttwak
> Saturday, February 1, 2014
> 
> The logic of strategy and all that comes from it, including the idea of the “balance of power,” for example, is inherently universal, transcendental, and timeless, but each clan, tribe, nation, and state has its own peculiar political constructs—that is why seemingly homogeneous systems, for example parliamentary democracy, function in ways so radically different from country to country.
> 
> Equally, the elemental sense of the centrality of any polity takes very different forms, ranging from the quiet certitudes of the Kingdom of Denmark to that well-known Chinese construct, the Tianxia (whose logographs 天下 have been much seen in the Japanese press of late, their Kanji versions being identical). Literally “under heaven,” short for “all under heaven” or more meaningfully, “the rule of all humans,” it defines an ideal national and international system of ever-expanding concentric circles centered on a globally benevolent emperor, now Xi Jinping or more correctly perhaps, the seven-headed standing committee of the Politburo.
> 
> The innermost circle of the Tianxia is formed by the rest of the Politburo and top Beijing officialdom, while its outermost circle comprises the Solomon Islands along with the twenty or so other utterly benighted “outer barbarian” countries that still do not recognize Beijing, preferring Taipei. In between, all other Chinese from officials and tycoons to ordinary subjects and overseas Chinese fit in their own circles, further and further from the imperial coreas do foreign states both large and small, both near and far, both already respectful (too few) and those still arrogantly vainglorious. It is the long-range task of China’s external policy to bring each and every state into a proper relationship with the emperor—that is, a tributary relationship, in which they deliver goods and services if only as tokens of fealty, in exchange for security and prosperity, but even more for the privilege of proximity to the globally benevolent emperor1. All this is of course nothing more than an exceptionally elaborate rendition of universal ambitions that are merely grander for the greater—the Byzantine ranking of foreign potentates by their proximity to the emperor was only slightly less elaborate.
> 
> Nor is there anything peculiarly Chinese about the desire to bring other states into a tributary relationship—often better than a full incorporation, which may be unwanted for any number of reasons, and obviously superior to an alliance however close and secure but between equals, whereby there must be reciprocity, a quid for every quo, usually costly or irksome in some way. Hence from time immemorial, stronger clans, tribes, potentates, and entire nations have done their best to impose tributary relations on weaker clans, tribes, potentates and nations, obtaining goods and services for their forbearance and perhaps protection, or at least tokens of respectful subordination. Chinese emperors wanted no more than that, and unlike most recipients, not infrequently gave gifts more valuable than the tribute they received (as did many Byzantine emperors, by the way).
> 
> What is peculiar to China’s political culture, and of very great contemporary relevance is the centrality within it of a very specific doctrine on how to bring powerful foreigners—indeed foreigners initially more powerful than the empire—into a tributary relationship. Specialists concur that this doctrine emerged from the very protracted (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE) but ultimately successful struggle with the Xiongnú (匈奴) horse-nomad state,2 just possibly remote ancestors of Attila’s Huns, but definitely the inventors of the Steppe State political system that would be replicated by all their successors, and more adapted than replaced even by the Mongols3.
> 
> Formidable mounted archers and capable of sustained campaigning (a primary objective of the Steppe State), the Xiongnú ravaged and savaged and extorted tribute from the perpetually less martial, and certainly cavalry-poor Han until the latter finally felt able to resist again. Even then, 147 years of intermittent warfare ensued until Huhanye (呼韓邪), the paramount Chanyu (Qagan, Khan) of the Xiongnú, personally and formally submitted to the emperor Han Xuandi in 51 BCE, undertaking to pay homage, to leave a son at court as a hostage, and to deliver tribute, as befitted a vassal. That was a very great downfall from the familial status of earlier Chanyus of the epoch of Xiongnú predominance, who were themselves recognized as emperors, whose sons and heirs could have imperial daughters in marriage, and who from 200 BCE had received tribute from the Han, instead of the other way around.
> 
> It is this successful transformation of a once superior power first into an equal (signified by imperial marriages) and then into a subservient client-state that seems to have left an indelible residue in China’s tradition of statecraft. It was achieved with a specific “barbarian-handling” tool box first described by its early practitioner, the scholar and imperial advisor Lou Jing (婁敬) 199 BCE. His method was first applied when the Xiongnú were still very strong and the Han were not only tactically inferior (their chariots were totally obsolete for fighting mounted archers) but also beset by political divisions, so much so that a 198 BCE4 treaty required the payment of an annual tribute in kind (silk, grain, etc.), and the formal attestation of equality for the Chanyu embodied in a marriage alliance, formalized by imperial letters that make the equality fully explicit.
> 
> The first barbarian-handling tool is normally translated as “corruption” in English translations, but perhaps “addiction,” or more fully “induced economic dependence” are more accurate: the originally self-sufficient Xiongnú were to be made economically dependent on Han-produced goods, starting with silk and woolen cloths instead of their own rude furs and felt. At first supplied free as unrequited tribute, these goods could still be supplied later on when the Han were stronger, but only in exchange for services rendered.
> 
> The second tool of barbarian handling, is normally translated as “indoctrination”: the Xiongnú were to be persuaded to accept the authoritarian Confucian value system and the collectivistic behavioral norms of the Han, as opposed to the steppe value system, based on voluntary allegiance to a heroic (and successful in looting) fighting and migration leader. One immediate benefit was that once the Chanyu’s son and heir married an imperial daughter, he would be ethically subordinated to the emperor as his father-in-law—remaining so when he became Chanyu in turn.
> 
> The much larger, longer-term benefit of the second tool was to undermine the entire political culture of the Xiongnú, and make them psychologically well as economically dependent on the imperial radiance, which was willingly extended in brotherly fashion when the Han were weak, and then contemptuously withdrawn when the Xiongnú were reduced to vassalage. What happened between the Han and the Xiongnú from the equal treaty of 198 BCE to the vassalage treaty of 51 BCE, remained thereafter, and still remains today the most hopeful precedent for Han dealings with powerful and violent states—evidently the assigned role of the United States in the present Beijing world-view.
> 
> The method forms a logical sequence:
> Stage One: start by conceding all that must be conceded to the superior power including tribute, in order to avoid damage and obtain whatever forbearance is offered. But this in itself entangles the ruling class of the still-superior power in webs of material dependence that reduce its independent vitality and strength.
> Stage Two: offer equality in a privileged bipolarity that excludes all lesser powers, or “G-2” in current parlance. That neutralizes the still powerful Other party, and isolates the manipulated soon-to-be former equal from all its potential allies, preventing from balancing China with a coalition.
> Stage Three: finally, when the formerly superior power has been weakened enough, withdraw all tokens of equality and impose subordination.
> 
> Until the Chinese government decided—very prematurely I believe—to awaken the world to its classically imperial territorial ambitions by demanding the cession of lands, reefs, rocks, and sea waters from India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam (demands that disturb and damage the concurrent Tianxia narrative of an alternative and more harmonious state system, disseminated even within the confines of Stanford University 5), it was making much progress towards Stage Two, the stage of equality preparatory to the final stage of subordination.
> 
> Of this progress—now interrupted, one may hope—one example suffices, though Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Zoellick among many others have expressed similar notions: at the end Dr. Henry Kissinger’s very widely read On China, after 526 pages of historical retrospectives and personal reminiscences, definite prescriptions are offered, summarized in the heading “Toward a Pacific Community,” i.e. a harmonious US-Chinese “G-2” that logically proceed from his relentlessly benign assessment of Chinese intentions. Dr. Kissinger’s G-2 is identical to that relationship very persistently advocated by Chinese officials high and low, and by senior advisors such as Zhen Bijian (郑必坚) of “Peaceful Rise” fame.
> 
> That Stage Two could be achieved only by persuading the still-powerful Other party to accept equality and its limitations, most notably the isolation of the soon-to-be former equal from all its potential allies, preventing it from balancing China with a coalition. Indeed, Dr. Kissinger calls for the creation of a Chinese-American “commonwealth”: one “which would enable [sic] other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint rather than polarized between ‘Chinese’ and ‘American’ blocs.” But Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Australia are hardly likely to share Dr. Kissinger's optimism. Deprived of American support in facing Chinese demands, forced to become the objects of a Chinese-American entente, today’s actual and potential allies would have to make their own accommodations, eliminating the one and only potential long-term counterweight to China, the coalescence of all lesser powers menaced by its expansionism. As the man said, history need not be remembered but must still be lived.
> 
> 1. It was thus at Mao’s lying in state, which I attended: diplomats accredited to Beijing were brought in to view the body in clusters, each forming a circle of the Tianxia—the innermost and the first to join us, most privileged guests, were the ambassadors of Romania, the Khmer Rouge, North Vietnam (soon to be demoted), and North Korea, with the Russian only coming in at the very end, in the outermost circle at that time.
> 
> 2. Described in a military report in Book 88 of the Hòu hànshu (Book of the Later Han) attributed to Fan Ye (John E. Hill, tr.) http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html.
> 
> 3. See Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 206 ff.
> 
> 4. In the Shiji (史记), the Records of the Grand Historian (or Grand Scribe) of Sima Qian, 司馬遷, Vol. 99, Cols. 2144 and 2179. Increasingly available in English translations.
> 
> 5. Stanford University Tianxia Workshop: Culture, International Relations, and World History May 6-11, 2011. The workshop will gather together a small group of distinguished scholars to engage in sustained conversations on the theoretical implications and practical values of the traditional Chinese vision of world order, or tianxia (all under heaven). Varied discourses indebted to tianxia have resurfaced in modern China in quest of moral and cultural ways of relating to and articulating an international society. We believe that the Chinese vision may prove productive in exploring possibilities of world culture and literature in the tension-ridden yet interconnected world. [author’s emphasis] http://www.stanford.edu/dept/asianlang/cgi-bin/about/tianxia_workshop.php


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese warships visit the CONUS after the end of RIMPAC 2014...



> *Chinese Ships Drop Anchor in San Diego*
> By Christina London
> 
> For the first time in nearly a decade, Chinese ships docked at Naval Base San Diego on Sunday.
> 
> The three warships –- destroyer Haikou, frigate Yueyang and supply ship Qiandaohu –- recently participated in RIMPAC, the world’s largest naval exercise. Twenty-two countries took part in training off the coasts of Hawaii and San Diego.
> 
> Colorful Chinese lion dancers and drummers performed on the pier during Sunday’s celebration. Visitors were invited to tour the destroyer Haikou.
> 
> Officials from the U.S. Navy and the People's Liberation Army of China said they hope the port visit will strengthen ties between the two countries.
> 
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> Source: NBC San Diego


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another instance of a government so paranoid for its own survival that it now wants to crack down on rumours that may lead to potential unrest...

From Agence France Presse via's the China Post (Taiwan news source)



> *Arrests as China cracks down on Internet rumors*
> Agence France-Presse · Saturday, August 9, 2014 · 10:58 pm
> 
> BEIJING — *Police in China have arrested four people and detained or warned another 81 as authorities crack down on alleged Internet rumour-mongering, state media reported Saturday.*
> 
> Police did not give details on the timing of the actions, Xinhua news agency said, adding that 16 websites were punished for “weak safety management”.
> 
> Citing police, Xinhua said that the alleged rumour-mongers “used social network services to fabricate and spread rumours, or forward rumours published on foreign websites”.
> 
> It added that among the rumours were “predictions of an earthquake in Beijing within two to six days and gunshots having been heard in the west of the Chinese capital”.
> 
> *The latest moves come amid a crackdown on the spread of online rumours, which rights groups have criticised as an excuse to punish people who publish information critical of the ruling Communist Party.*
> 
> Hundreds have been detained in the campaign, while several bloggers have been handed lengthy jail sentences, resulting in a decline in use of microblogs.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

With the recent closure of the business class/investor class visa as reported in this other thread, Canada certainly won't be a destination for the newest members of this exodus who want to make a permanent stay here (who have no previous family ties) unless they opt to take the arduous longer route that goes from student visa to work permit to permanent residency to citizenship.

Wall Street Journal



> *The Great Chinese Exodus*
> Many Chinese are leaving for cleaner air, better schools and more opportunity. But Beijing is keeping its eye on them.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Today, China's borders are wide open. Almost anybody who wants a passport can get one. And Chinese nationals are leaving in vast waves: Last year, more than 100 million outbound travelers crossed the frontiers.
> 
> Most are tourists who come home. But rapidly growing numbers are college students and the wealthy, and many of them stay away for good. A survey by the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich—defined as those with assets of more than $1.6 million—are either emigrating or planning to.
> 
> To be sure, the departure of China's brightest and best for study and work isn't a fresh phenomenon. China's communist revolution was led, after all, by intellectuals schooled in Europe. What's new is that they are planning to leave the country in its ascendancy. More and more talented Chinese are looking at the upward trajectory of this emerging superpower and deciding, nevertheless, that they're better off elsewhere.
> 
> The decision to go is often a mix of push and pull. The elite are discovering that they can buy a comfortable lifestyle at surprisingly affordable prices in places such as California and the Australian Gold Coast, while no amount of money can purchase an escape in China from the immense problems afflicting its urban society: pollution, food safety, a broken education system. The new political era of President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has created as much anxiety as hope.
> 
> Another aspect of this massive population outflow hasn't yet drawn much attention. Whatever their motives and wherever they go,* those who depart will be shadowed by the organs of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy—the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council—exists to ensure that distance from the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty to the Communist Party.*
> 
> This often sets up an awkward dynamic between Chinese arrivals and the societies that take them in. While the newcomers try to fit in, Beijing makes every effort to use them in its campaign to project its political values, enhance its global image, harass its opponents and promote the use of standard Mandarin Chinese over the dialects spoken in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

How China's fishing fleet serves as a proxy navy that secures their maritime claims without using the negative global image emitted if it sent warships instead:

Defense News



> *Fishing Vessels in China Serve as Proxy Enforcers*
> Aug. 17, 2014 - 02:46PM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — China’s use of swarming tactics with fishing vessels to project and protect Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea appears unstoppable, experts say.
> 
> The latest example in May was the placement of a Chinese oil rig within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, which was pro­tected by more than 70 maritime security and fishing vessels.
> 
> “Fishing vessels are wonderful tools for autocratic governments where business and industry are under their control,” said Sam Tangredi, author of the book, “Anti-Access Warfare.”
> 
> Sending them in swarms to circle a disputed area of contention or create a barrier to prevent access by other navy or coast guard vessels does not create negative media images like harassment by warships, he said. “It may be made to appear like a spontaneous peaceful protest caused by popular nationalist fervor … almost like ‘nonviolent resistance,’ as if Gandhi was a fisherman.”
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Fears of a possible conflict between the 2 regional giants return:

Defense News



> *Sources: China Troops Enter Disputed India Territory*
> Aug. 19, 2014 - 02:28PM   |   By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> 
> SRINAGAR, INDIA — Chinese troops have advanced in recent days into disputed territory claimed by India, echoing a similar incursion last year that raised tensions between the two rival giants, official sources said Tuesday.
> 
> Chinese troops twice crossed over the border into a remote area of the western Himalayas, with some unfurling a banner that read “this is Chinese territory, go back,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
> 
> Indian border police noticed the troops on Sunday in an unpopulated area of Ladakh during a patrol of the informal border that separates India and China.
> 
> “It was a temporary peaceful face-off with PLA well inside Indian territory,” the official told AFP referring to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Are any of North Korea's antiquated tanks (such as the Soviet copy T-62 they use called the Chonma-ho) even capable of taking on more modern Chinese MBTs like the Type 96 or Type 98/99?  :facepalm:



> *North Korea reportedly moves tanks to Chinese border over 'betrayal' fears*
> 
> North Korea has reportedly moved tanks as well as armored vehicles to its border with China.
> 
> The vehicles are reportedly being sent to an army corps near the border, The Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea's largest newspapers, reports. North Korea's 12th Corps is in charge of "responding to movements of Chinese troops in an emergency."
> 
> There is some cause for skepticism, however, as the report came from a single, unnamed source, and nothing has been confirmed by China or North Korea. The source claimed that the tanks and armored vehicles were moved to the border because North Korea fears China could "betray" it over its nuclear program.
> 
> If true, though, it would be the latest example of China and North Korea's fraying relationship. While China is by far North Korea's most important ally — and the main provider of its fuel, arms, and food — *Beijing is reportedly growing tired of Pyongyang's behavior, especially the renewal of its nuclear program. It was even said that China recently cut off North Korea's fuel supply.*
> 
> So the question is: Is this North Korea's way of telling China it won't be easily bullied?
> 
> The Week


----------



## CougarKing

China's neighbours will probably want to upgrade their air forces accordingly as the J20 develops:



> Source:Business Insider
> 
> *China's Fifth-Generation Fighter Could Be A Game Changer In An Increasingly Tense East Asia*
> Business Insider
> By Jeremy Bender – 1 hour 19 minutes ago
> 
> China is in the process of developing its own native fifth-generation fighter to compete with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and Russia's T-50.
> 
> Although China has been secretive about the exact specifications of the aircraft, experts are warning that the plane could be a game-changer in East Asia'spotentially fragile security environment.
> 
> China's Chengdu J-20 is currently in its fourth round of prototypes. On July 26, the most recent version of the fighter flew for two hours before successfully landing.
> Information about the J-20 is limited, but an unnamed Asian government source told IHS Jane's that upwards of 20 J-20s could be deployed by within the decade.
> 
> The J-20 has evolved rapidly from its first documented prototype in 2011. Each successive prototype has shown a number of design advancements that help the plane evade enemy radar detection. These changes include modifying the plane's wing size and adjusting the air intakes to maximize stealth.
> 
> *It's likely that China is also outfitting the J-20 with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar in the plane's nose.*
> 
> AESAs are incredibly powerful radar systems broadcast at a range of frequencies, allowing a plane to remain stealthy in the process. And the use of the AESA in the J-20's nose marks a striking similarity to the design of the U.S.'s F-35 fifth-generation fighter.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is an interesting and informative essay in this week's edition of _The Economist_ entitled "What China Wants." It is too long and complex to reproduce here but I think everyone should be able to see it without a subscription.


----------



## Edward Campbell

According to this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, Xi Jinping is going to try to revise the internal _narrative_ of the _Red Dynasty_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dd77c90a-2918-11e4-8b81-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3B7DvO9DY


> Deng anniversary eclipses Mao’s as Xi builds reformist credentials
> 
> By Tom Mitchell in Beijing
> 
> August 22, 2014
> 
> So effusive is the propaganda campaign launched to mark the 110th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s birth that a casual visitor might think it is his body embalmed in Tiananmen Square, rather than that of Mao Zedong.
> 
> The pageantry for Deng, China’s late paramount leader who disdained the cult of personality that surrounded his predecessor Mao and elected to have his own ashes scattered over the ocean, has included the broadcast of a 48-part biopic on state television and seminars attended by the Chinese Communist party’s top leadership. The fanfare far exceeds the official remembrance of the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth last December.
> 
> Underlying this lionisation of Deng, who faded from China’s political scene 20 years ago and died in 1997, is a very modern agenda. Analysts say Xi Jinping, China’s president, party general secretary and head of the country’s “fifth generation” of leaders, is using the campaign to burnish his own credentials as – like Deng – a transformative figure.
> 
> Deng was the principal architect of China’s move to a more market-oriented economy in the 1980s – a project that was almost derailed by his decision to order the army to crush the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, leading to a massacre in which hundreds if not thousands of people died.
> 
> Deng rekindled the reform drive, which his rivals had impeded after Tiananmen, with his now famous “southern tour” of 1992, in which he urged provinces to forge ahead with economic liberalisation. By the end of the decade China would emerge as a global manufacturing and trading powerhouse.
> 
> Speaking at a seminar on Wednesday, Mr Xi hailed the political courage of the man credited with launching China’s economic rise, putting it on a trajectory that will soon make it the world’s largest economy. “We should dare to break old rules and make new rules,” he said, “so that reform and opening can proceed without hesitation.”
> 
> “Xi’s spin-doctors are trying to project the image that he carries the mantel of Deng and is a worthy successor,” says Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The message is that Xi’s own reforms will be even more wide-ranging.”
> 
> As it has been less than two years since Mr Xi assumed power, his case for greatness is a work in progress and is thus far based on two pillars: an ambitious party reform document, notable mainly for its pledge to let market forces play a “decisive role” in the economy, and the unprecedented speed with which he has consolidated power.
> 
> He has taken control of portfolios – economic management, national security and cyber security – that his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin either delegated to others or managed by consensus.
> 
> While Mr Xi’s power grab has fuelled flattering comparisons of his strongman status with Deng and even Mao, it also belies a rise to power that could not have been more different from the two founding fathers of modern China.
> 
> Mr Xi was the privileged “princeling” son of a senior party official who rose through provincial positions, a path that gave him neither the natural authority nor the national reputation that Deng enjoyed after his decades at the centre of Mao’s revolution.
> 
> “Xi’s power base is much weaker than Deng’s, so he has been using ideological campaigns and new media to increase his personal authority,” says Wu Qiang, a political-science professor at Tsinghua University.
> 
> Delivering on the reform document, issued at the end of an annual party plenum last November, could entail the erosion of privileges enjoyed by the state-owned enterprises that control the commanding heights of China’s economy, from energy to telecommunications.
> 
> “If he really can achieve these reforms and let the market determine the allocation of resources, then his accomplishment will be as significant as Deng’s,” says Zhang Ming, professor at Renmin University’s School of International Studies.
> 
> According to one person involved in regional trade talks ahead of this November’s Apec summit in Beijing, Mr Xi’s reform drive is already having an impact. “The whole tenor of Chinese trade diplomacy has changed over the past 18 months,” he says. “I have never seen the Chinese in a more liberal mode than they are in right now.”
> 
> The person adds that one notable exception to this trend has been Beijing’s bilateral talks with the US over the stalled Information Technology Agreement, reflecting the marked deterioration in relations between the two powers after their disputes over the South China Sea, cyber spying and human rights.
> 
> Some analysts also argue that Mr Xi’s own consolidation of power threatens the very reform process unleashed by his idol Deng. “Does Xi really have any concrete reforms to his credit?” asks Zhao Chu, a political analyst and columnist. “Deng spread real power to lower levels, but all we have seen in Xi’s tenure is the recentralisation of power and the beginnings of his own personality cult.”
> 
> _Additional reporting by Wan Li and Gu Yu_




If one accepts, as I do, that the period between the last Qing emperor (1912) and the rise of Deng Xiaoping (1981) was just another _interregnum_ and that Mao was an aberration, not in any way analogous to, say, Sun Yat-sen or Deng Xiaoping, then what Xi Jinping is doing makes sense and _when_ he is doing it - in his third year in office - is equally sensible. But it is not clear, at least not me, that Xi has a comprehensive reform platform. I can see the anti-corruption campaign and some fiddling with e.g. executive compensation but I *believe* that the Chinese people want (and have a right to expect) more: more economic development in the central and Western provinces; action on water and air pollution; pension reforms ... and the list goes on and on and on.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Prof Danny Quah opf the London School of Economics is a very bright guy and he offers some insights, with which I broadly agree, and a conclusion, with which I disagree, in this article which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Global Policy_:

http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/20/08/2014/economics-democracy-and-new-world-order#.U_XxhAABHew.twitter


> Economics, Democracy, and the New World Order
> *Danny Quah argues that beyond ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘free markets’ there are multiple pathways to prosperity and legitimate governance.*
> 
> Danny Quah
> 
> 20th August 2014
> 
> Some of us wake up every morning to find ourselves living in a society where economic opportunity is unfairly distributed, where a narrow social elite is given everything while many others endure harsh deprivation. If we live in such a society, every morning our soul yearns for a system better than that we’re in.
> 
> We might live in a society where discrimination is rife, where government cronies are handed plum benefits, where extractive elites plunder national wealth.
> 
> We say we want out of that system. We ask only for a level playing field, for a system that is fair, open, and transparent, a system that practices meritocracy.
> 
> *The Way the World Went*
> 
> If what I’ve just described resonates with you, the good news is the world has your back. The world wants for you what you want for yourself, and indeed more and more of the world has been on that delivery run for a quarter of a century now. Twenty five years ago the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing on what some observers announced as The End of History. The wisdom that emerged was that only liberal democracy and free-market economics remained viable as ways successfully to organize society. What could be fairer, more open, and more transparent than a political system that declared all people equal in the process of selecting a leader – one person, one vote? What could be more meritocratic than a system where whether you succeed or fail is decided by a free market blind to social status, not some prejudiced official checking out your family connections?
> 
> Liberal democracy and free-market economics are both structures that appeal to technologists and designers. In theory they have an apparent emergent intelligence that will seem magical to some: You install rules in the system; you turn on the system; you stand back, and you watch it execute to the best outcome possible for the system. If a disturbance perturbs the system, the rules in place allow innovation, flexibility, and adaption, and the system self-stabilizes to a new best outcome.
> 
> The US, the UK, and other economies on both sides of the Atlantic to varying degree practice these principles. Indeed, many observers consider that TransAtlantic Axis to be where such principles are held safe, to be passed on to others. Thus, even though membership in the club of successful economies would be open to all, it was there, the TransAtlantic Axis, from which success would unfurl. And, indeed, that happened big-time: while, by one reckoning, world democracies numbered only 45 in 1970, their number ballooned to 115 by 2010.
> 
> *Then the World Changed Again*
> 
> But then history decided it wasn’t quite finished with humanity. First, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis struck: from exactly the TransAtlantic Axis, waves of financial collapse lashed outwards until 12 months afterwards, in the wreckage, world financial markets had fallen by US$26tn (half of annual world GDP), an estimated additional 34mn had been thrown into unemployment, and it looked like the world financial system was on the brink still of collapse. Free-market economic orthodoxy transformed into a witch-hunt for those who dared still to suggest that market competition might produce anything other than banks too big to fail (and therefore just too big) or grotesquely unfair distributions of well-being across citizens.  All the good things that free-market economics brings with it – the rich variety of consumer goods, competition that lowers prices, innovation that improves the lives of people – seem to have been forgotten or are in danger of being unjustly dismissed.
> 
> But then, for the purposes of this narrative, something even worse happened:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China, the world’s largest one-party autocracy, far outside the orbit of the TransAtlantic Axis, will imminently become the world’s largest economy almost surely, overtaking the US which had held that position for over 140 years. Not only that but over the last three decades China had lifted over 600mn people out of extreme poverty, while inequality in the West had gotten so bad, the income share of the population’s top 1% has recently reached heights not seen for almost a century.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Top 10 contributions to world growth: 2007-2012. GDP evaluated at market exchange rates (Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2012)
> 
> Over the course of the Global Financial Crisis many observers had remarked how in their view China grew only because the West imported and therefore when the West underwent austerity the effect on China would be devastating. Yet between 2007 and 2012 it was China that added most to the resuscitation of the global economy, more than 3 times the contribution of the US.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> German exports to the rest of the world (Source: IMF Direction of Trade Statistics, 2011)
> 
> Germany, Europe’s most successful economy in this time, continued to grow — even with the collapse of its exports to its European neighbours and to the US, historically its largest export market outside of
> Europe — precisely by selling to China and the rest of Developing Asia.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Great Shift East, 1980-2050. Source: Quah, Danny. 2011. “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity.” Global Policy 2 (1) (January): 3–9
> 
> In the last 30 years the rise of the East, not just China, has pulled the world’s economic centre of gravity 5000km out of its 1980s TransAtlantic moorings, into the Persian Gulf. If growth trajectories continue in the 700 points on Earth used for this calculation then the world’s economic centre will soon come to rest on the boundary between India and China, 10 timezones east of the world’s traditional pole of economic power.
> 
> None of this was supposed to happen. Twenty years ago this year, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s most influential economist wrote:
> 
> “From the perspective of year 2010, current projections of Asian supremacy extrapolated from recent trends may well look almost as silly as 1960s-vintage forecasts of Soviet industrial supremacy did from the perspective of the Brezhnev years.”
> 
> Yes, by 2010 those economic trends were indeed found to have given inaccurate extrapolation, not from their having been too optimistic, but instead the opposite.  They have been too modest.
> 
> China and the rest of East Asia of course rely on markets, after a fashion. What they did not do was buy whole-heartedly into the notion that you get economic prosperity only through ballot-box driven electoral democracy. Hugh White, the former senior official in Australia’s Department of Defense, said what many thought when in September 2013 he considered varied foreign policy stances that might be taken by his then-incoming Prime Minister:
> 
> “Abbott’s conservatism also inclines him to be uneasy about modern China. Like many people in the West—and not just conservatives—he finds it uncomfortable that China could grow so quickly and become so powerful despite its authoritarian one-party political system. That challenges his deeply held ideas about the ascendency of democratic principles, which had seemed so decisively validated by the collapse of communism elsewhere in the world.”
> 
> *What Happened?*
> 
> Wasn’t national success only guaranteed by a mix of liberal democracy and free-market economics? Have both planks of the end of history just fallen away? How have Chinese and other Asian systems been able to innovate and to adapt when others, those arguably the more likely to succeed, instead failed to be as robust?
> 
> Make no more mistake, China’s system has been truly flexible and adaptive. As Eric Li reminds us, China is a country that has taken on a dramatic range of innovation: radical land collectivization, the Great Leap Forward; the Cultural Revolution; privatization of farmlands; Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, modernisation, and urbanisation; Jiang Zemin’s opening up Chinese Communist Party membership to private businesspeople. High-level official and party leadership posts previously for life have been replaced by those with term limits and mandatory retirement by 70, a sensibility that not even university professors keep, despite the academic profession’s insistence on ideas always having to be fresh and innovative.
> 
> *Lessons*
> 
> Obviously, any serious study on such large issues I’ve described will demand great rigour and considerable detail. Moreover, history from here on out might decide to lurch once again in an unexpected direction. Either way, however, I would shy away from concluding that one system or another is necessarily better than the other. My own hunch is there are multiple pathways to prosperity and success: the evidence, it seems to me, indicates that. Trying to say once and for all that one system is best (or even the least bad) is almost surely foolish. And while it sounds authoritative to pronounce one system or another “not sustainable”, it should be apparent to everyone that, simply as a matter of logic, such a statement can never be proven wrong. No system in history has yet been shown to be indefinitely sustainable.
> 
> Where this discussion gets somewhere more concrete is instead the following. Too often, “liberal democracy” and “free markets” become simply code and catch-phrase to stand for all the bright shiny things someone wishes to have but does not.
> 
> Democracy has, ultimately, meaning far more noble and important than simply, say, access to the ballot box. Instead, what it should stand for is this: Every government, every ruler must be daily insecure. Every government, every ruler must every day understand their power to be built on the shifting sands of the will of their people. And they must daily strive to advance the well-being of those people.
> 
> By this measure the state in China and other officially autocratic economies throughout Asia are already more democratic than many observers might think.  By this same measure many ballot-box electoral democracies fail.  Every time we read yet another account of how China’s leaders desperately need the economy to grow at more than 7% a year, so enough jobs can be generated for their hundreds of millions of new workers, that’s not a creaking oligarchy desperately hanging on to power. Well, of course, it might be. But it might also be simply what’s called advancing the well-being of one’s people.
> 
> This does not change how Europe will continue to be the liberal anchor of the world, even as the economic centre shifts East.  But it does say alternative internally self-consistent forms of liberalism might emerge in response to different circumstances.
> 
> In contrast, however, parts of our current global system carry hypocritical and damaging inconsistencies.  While the TransAtlantic Axis seeks to disseminate democratic ideals throughout the world, today’s system of global governance built on US benevolent hegemony is itself deeply undemocratic. For the last 50 years our world has chosen as its leader from only among the richest and most powerful of nation states. That leader has not only status and wealth beyond those of all others, it wields unrivalled political influence and military superiority beyond imagination. As leader, it operates with effectively no counterbalance on the international stage.
> 
> In brief our current world order is built on the leadership by military and economic power; that world order pays no mind to how well that the global leader serves humanity. US hegemony in the current world order is a system of leadership that is truly and deeply undemocratic.
> 
> This is why a simple graph of China’s economic overtaking of the US or the world’s economic centre of gravity hurtling to ten timezones east of Washington DC might seem so disconcerting to the TransAtlantic political elite. If US hegemony in the current world order will soon have neither economic nor political legitimacy, does that hegemony simply become despotism? Why should it remain?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If the world were a democracy this is where it would make decisions of global significance. From an idea due to Ken Myers.
> 
> From a point in the South China Sea, roughly in the same timezone as the world’s economic centre of gravity, draw a circle 4000km in radius. This is a tiny circle, comprising only 25mn sq km of land, only one-sixth of the planet’s land area. Yet, this circle contains more than half of humanity. If we want to construct a new world order with democratic legitimacy and economic strength, let’s begin here, with fresh ideas, and see where that takes us.




The point with which I take issue is in the last paragraph. The Indians, about half the people in that circle, have a working, functioning, albeit somewhat ramshackle democracy. The Chinese, the other 'half' of the people in that circle, don't and, in my opinion will not have democracy. I do not believe that Western, liberal democracy is either "natural" for all mankind or, even, necessary, neither does Xi Jinping.


----------



## CougarKing

A snip from a longer essay that's a worthwhile read:

Lawfare blog



> *The Foreign Policy Essay: China’s ADIZ in the East China Sea*
> By Eric Heginbotham
> Sunday, August 24, 2014 at 10:00 AM
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> However, other new activities have been repeated: in July 2013, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Y-8 surveillance aircraft flew through the East China Sea, through the Miyako Strait, and into the Western Pacific—marking the first time that a Chinese military aircraft had flown through the Ryukyu Islands to the Pacific. In September 2013, two Chinese H-6 bombers took the same path to the Western Pacific, as did mixed groups of three to four H-6 bombers and Y-8 surveillance aircraft on four subsequent occasions through the end of April 2014 (the last Japanese reporting date). Because the Miyako Strait is 300 km wide, Chinese aircraft do not have to traverse Japanese airspace; however, these operations show the Chinese military’s increasing reach.
> 
> Of greater relevance to the ADIZ are China’s intercept activities, though it should be noted that these predate the establishment of the ADIZ itself. In January 2013, Chinese J-7 and J-10 fighters reportedly tailed U.S. P-3C and C-130s over the mid-point line in the East China Sea. Another incident, also in January 2013, saw the first reported episode involving fighters from both Japan and China. In the incident, a Chinese Y-8 surveillance aircraft was intercepted by two Japanese F-15s, and China responded to Japan’s intercept with two J-10 fighters of its own.
> 
> The nearest Chinese airbases to the contested areas of the East China Sea originally held third-generation J-7 fighters, but modern J-10s have been deployed over the last several years. Since the ADIZ was declared in November 2013, China has begun using longer-range and more capable twin-engine J-11s in East China Sea intercepts. At least some of these have been from bases in Chongqing, some 1,500 km distant, suggesting that they staged from forward bases in Fujian before flying missions and indicating a considerable degree of operational flexibility.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

The air group of China's carrier is revealed: 24 J-15 fighters, aside from the embarked helos, or so they say.



> *Lineup of 36 aircraft on China's Liaoning carrier revealed*
> Staff Reporter
> 2014-08-28
> 
> 
> China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, can carry *four* Z-18J airborne early warning (AEW) helicopters, *six* Z-18F anti-submarine helicopters, *two* Z-9C rescue helicopters, and *24* J-15 shipborne fighter jets, the Chinese-language Shanghai Morning Post reported on Aug. 28.
> 
> Cao Dongwei, senior colonel and researcher at the People's Liberation Army Naval Research Institute, said the aircraft carrier could gain the upper hand in any potential battle for air or sea supremacy. The lineup may differ for various missions, however. The full lineup of 36 aircraft shows that the "PLA Navy's era of aircraft" has arrived, the report said.
> 
> China is faced with a grave threat from the US, which owns the most advanced nuclear submarines, as well as Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force, the report said. Countries operating in the South China Sea, particularly those engaged in territorial disputes with China, have also been strengthening their naval forces, putting pressure on China, said the report.
> 
> 
> *Want China Times*


----------



## CougarKing

Massive protests in Hong Kong after Beijing only approves so-called "patriotic candidates" in running for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's government.

Why even bother with the 50-year transition period where Hong Kong officially becomes just another Chinese city in 2047 and not a special region under the "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement, when Beijing is effectively ALREADY in direct control? 

The "Occupy Central" movement in Hong Kong has evolved from just another "Occupy Wall Street" group to one calling for true democracy in the territory. 

CBC



> *China rejects open nominations for Hong Kong leadership*
> Democracy activists say nominating committee that will choose leader is beholden to China
> 
> The Associated Press Posted: Aug 31, 2014 6:19 AM ET Last Updated: Aug 31, 2014 6:21 AM ET
> 
> China's legislature on Sunday ruled against allowing open nominations in elections for Hong Kong's leader, a decision that promises to ignite political tensions in the Asian financial hub.
> 
> The legislature's powerful Standing Committee ruled that all candidates for chief executive must receive more than half of the votes from a special nominating body before going before voters. Hong Kong democracy activists have held massive protests calling for genuine democracy in the Chinese territory, over concerns that candidates would continue to be screened to assess their loyalty to Beijing.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I think what we`re seeing, in China, at and near the very top of the Chinese government, is a struggle between two factions: I'll call one the _Lee_ faction (named after former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew) and the other the _Li_ faction (also pronounced as Lee   ) (after Chinese Premier Li Peng who was almost the ultimate hard liner).

The _prize_ for both factions is reunification ~ bringing Taiwan back into China.

The two approaches are quite different:

     The Lee faction believes that Taiwan must want to rejoin China because it will see that reunification makes both political and economic sense. The Lee faction holds up its own political dynasty, the People's Action Party,
      as the model for China: an apparently permanent ruling dynasty that allows opposition but _manages_ so well that it can, apparently always, secure at least 60% popular support. The Lee faction proposes that
     "one country/two systems" needs to be enhanced os that, eventually, Hong Kong will be at least as democratic as Taiwan and Taiwan will be confident that it can rejoin China without giving up its political liberties.
     The Lee faction also favour further and further economic freedom and a massive anti-corruption campaign.

     The Li faction opposes corruption, but it is, in every other aspect 180o out of phase the the Lee faction.

We know where Xi Jinping stands on corruption, but we don't know where he stands on political liberty.

----------

Just for fun, we can add a "face" to the _Li_ faction: Li Fei, deputy secretary general of China's National People's Congress, is the man responsible for legislative matters:





Li Fei, deputy secretary general of China's National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee
(far right), addresses a briefing session on constitutional development in Hong Kong at AsiaWorld-Expo,
Hong Kong International Airport, Sept 1, 2014.                                        (Edmond Tang / China Daily)


----------



## Edward Campbell

See, also, this in relation to China : Russia : Ukraine : America.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The Lee faction believes that Taiwan must want to rejoin China because it will see that reunification makes both political and economic sense. The Lee faction holds up its own political dynasty, the People's Action Party,
> as the model for China: an apparently permanent ruling dynasty that allows opposition but _manages_ so well that it can, apparently always, secure at least 60% popular support.



Sure enough, Taiwan's president Ma Ying Jieou weighs in:

Agence France Presse



> *Taiwan leader says he backs democracy for Hong Kong*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> September 2, 2014 10:27 PM
> 
> TAIPEI - Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou, who initiated detente with China, on Tuesday threw his support behind Hong Kong's push for democracy -- calling it a core value shared by Taiwanese people.
> 
> His support comes after pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong vowed a new "era of civil disobedience" in front of thousands of supporters at a Sunday rally after Beijing crushed hopes for full democracy.
> 
> *"Democracy and rule of law is also the core value of people in Taiwan and the long-term goal of our pursuit,*" Ma, also chairman of the ruling Kuomintang party, said during a party meeting.
> 
> "While keeping our concerns about the development in Hong Kong, we'd also like to voice our support for the pursuit of democracy and rule of law by the people in Hong Kong."
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Zimbabwe's leader Mugabe must be aware that being so dependent on China for all these benefits would come at a price...



> *Mugabe Goes to China*
> 
> China has agreed to help Zimbabwe avoid a total economic meltdown. Without the promise of assistance from Beijing, Zimbabwe could not even begin to pay its civil servants, police, and soldiers their monthly wages. *Nor, without China’s support, could Zimbabwe continue to import oil and gas, and crucial foodstuffs with which to feed its people.*
> 
> Ever since President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) unexpectedly won a possibly rigged parliamentary and presidential election last year, defeating the reformist Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe’s economy has been in free fall. A number of banks have failed, hundreds of businesses have collapsed, and 80 percent of all adults of working age are unemployed.
> 
> *ZANU-PF’s victory in mid-2013 meant that Mugabe, now 90, would continue to govern Zimbabwe with a heavy hand. His administration’s attempt to control 51 percent of all foreign-owned large, medium, and small businesses would continue. So would his decade-long assault on the country’s handful of remaining white farmers.* With official Chinese assistance, Mugabe’s reelection also meant that he and his associates would continue to control the country’s massive diamond fields near Marange in eastern Zimbabwe.
> 
> These policies precipitated capital flight, a resultant loss of liquidity within the commercial and banking sectors, and relatively rapid and pronounced deflation. Since legal tender in Zimbabwe since 2009 has been the US dollar and the South African rand, and more recently the Chinese yuan, Mugabe’s government cannot just print money to give itself working capital. Hence a series of visit to Beijing by Mugabe and his senior ministers throughout this year, culminating with a full state visit in late August, a generous welcome by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the signing of a nine-part agreement to pump funds into Zimbabwe’s heroically called Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation.
> 
> *Under its terms, Chinese firms will receive preference over all others, even local ones, when construction contracts are put out to bid. Zimbabwe and China will also work together to promote visits by Chinese tourists, *an influx that could prove substantial. Last year, China invested heavily in the agricultural sector. President Xi Jinping also promised Mugabe massive short-term food with which to feed hungry Zimbabweans.
> 
> But the key use of Chinese funds will be devoted to helping to restore Zimbabwe’s crumbling infrastructure. Zimbabwe’s electrical and water systems are in shambles, especially in Harare, the capital. Chinese money will be used to revive the economy by rehabilitating, upgrading, and building key physical as well social facilities.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> China Focus


----------



## Edward Campbell

Mugabe doesn't care; he and his cronies run a _kleptocracy_ and China will be happy to let them continue to rob their own people. China will be content to have an (eventually) productive _colony_.


----------



## CougarKing

Oh well.  But then again, an extended layover at Hong Kong's Chep Lap Kok airport isn't a bad thing... got to love Cathay Pacific or Eva Air's airline lounges.  ;D



> *CAAC making name over flight delays
> Frustrated travellers call the mainland aviation regulator Chinese Airlines Always Cancel*
> George Chen
> george.chen@scmp.com
> 
> South China Morning Post
> 
> Did you know the mainland's aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), has a nickname given by frustrated travellers? To them, CAAC stands for "Chinese Airlines Always Cancel". How ironic.
> 
> *The massive flight delays across major airports, caused mainly by mysterious People's Liberation Army's military exercises, have become international news headlines.*
> 
> Delays are understandable if caused by bad weather or technical problems, but more travellers are getting fed up with the *PLA's self-important attitude towards how it wants to control the skies with little public explanation.*
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> The PLA has effectively controlled mainland airspace since 1949, allocating as little as 20 per cent of it to civil aviation. That compares with nearly 90 per cent in the United States, where the air force controls only narrow corridors or airspace remote from airport hubs.
> 
> Last week alone, travellers in the mainland's eastern provinces were affected by massive flight delays, with airport capacity cut by up to two-thirds because of military exercises.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## CougarKing

Something worth mentioning from the "WTF News files" thread:

A man becomes Australia's version of "Da Shan" after coma


----------



## CougarKing

In the wake of recent anniversary ceremonies that commemorated China's part in the victory against Japan in World War II...

Tokyo and Beijing are again wary of each other over competing claims to territory. How long till an incident similar to the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge clash will see these two regional powers at each others' throats again?



> *More than half of Chinese see war with Japan: poll*
> 
> More than half of Chinese people think their country could go to war with Japan in the future, a new poll revealed Wednesday, after two years of intense diplomatic squabbles.
> 
> *A survey conducted in both nations found that 53.4 percent of Chinese envisage a future conflict, with more than a fifth of those saying it would happen "within a few years"*, while 29 percent of Japanese view military confrontation as a possibility.
> 
> The findings come ahead of the second anniversary Thursday of Japan's nationalisation of disputed islands in the East China Sea that have formed the focus of tensions between the Asian giants.
> 
> *Underlining the lingering row over the Tokyo-controlled Senkaku Islands, four Chinese coast guard vessels sailed into their territorial waters on Wednesday morning.
> 
> China regards them as its territory and calls them the Diaoyu Islands.*
> 
> The survey was conducted by Japanese non-governmental organisation the Genron NPO and the China Daily, a Chinese state-run newspaper, in July and August.
> 
> It questioned 1,000 Japanese aged 18 or older and 1,539 Chinese of the same age range in five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenyang and Xian.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *MSN news*


----------



## CougarKing

I could see Hong Kong as a future city-state like Singapore considering they have the economic capacity to do so, not to mention their own HKD currency which is still being used, but I doubt Beijing would be willing to let them go so easily.

Last time I visited Hong Kong in 2012, a money changer said that Hong Kong dollars were better even though some say _Ren Min Bi/Yuan_ is starting to be used. When I tried to use _Ren Min Bi_ in Hong Kong, the stores I went to didn't take them.

Reuters



> *Hong Kong lawyers take stand for independence from Beijing*
> 
> By: Adam Rose and Greg Torode, Reuters
> 
> August 16, 2014 2:43 AM
> 
> ONG KONG - Hong Kong's Law Society has passed an historic vote of no-confidence in its president over pro-Beijing comments, revealing a determination by the traditionally conservative lawyers to confront perceived threats from China to the legal independence in the free-wheeling, global financial hub.
> 
> President Ambrose Lam has angered many of the society's 8,000 members with his support of controversial statements from Beijing that Hong Kong judges needed to be patriotic, and his open support for the Communist Party of China.
> 
> The vote late on Thursday night surprised even those behind the no-confidence motion such as lawyer Kevin Yam, who said some lawyers faced intense pressure from mainland-linked firms to back Lam and he was not confident of success ahead of the poll.
> 
> "I'm very pleased that people have shown that they will stand up and be counted, despite considerable pressure in some cases," Yam said. "Solicitors, in everything they do, have got to exercise independent professional judgment yet if we are cowed over an internal matter of the Law Society, what sort of message does that send? ... Our political neutrality is everything."
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

A few shops will take RMB, most think it's too much bother ... there are automatic teller machines that accept RMB all over the place, now.

HK has a _strategic_ problem: water. Most water is provided by pipeline from Guangdong province.There is not enough 'domestic' water in Kowloon and the New Territories to supply the whole Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; it's China's "ace in the hole."

I reiterate: I _think_ we are seeing a political struggle, in Beijing, between (at least) two factions of the Communist Party hierarchy: my _guess_ (maybe only a hope?) is that the leadership inside the Zhongnanhai can see that suppressing democracy in HK is counterproductive when the prize is Taiwan, but they will let the hard liners win a few rounds before they make a final decision ... that, it seems to me, is the Chinese way.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> HK has a _strategic_ problem: water. Most water is provided by pipeline from Guangdong province.There is not enough 'domestic' water in Kowloon and the New Territories to supply the whole Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; it's China's "ace in the hole."



I remember hiking by the massive reservoir and dam in Tai Tam in the southeastern part of Hong Kong island; I never realized that it and the other reservoirs on Kowloon weren't enough to supply the water needs of the territory.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Every few months the idea of building a HUGE desalinization plant, after expanding one of HK's remaining rocks into another island,* gets raised ~ usually as a way of "freeing" HK from China's grip.

_____
* E.g:


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Every few months the idea of building a HUGE desalinization plant, after expanding one of HK's remaining rocks into another island,* gets raised ~ usually as a way of "freeing" HK from China's grip.



How did Singapore manage independence from the Malaysian Federation? I don't suppose they have a water supply problem?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually, Singapore does have a water supply problem, too. It buys some of its water from Malaysia, but there is an official plan to be water independent when the currently remaining agreement expires in 2061.

Hong Kong's problem is that it gets over ⅔ of its water from China, proper.

Now, as to Singapore's independence: it was, actually, expelled from the original Malaysia federation. There were serious, deadly, race riots in 1964 ~ the tensions, which still exist between the majority (60%) ethnic Malays, who enjoy special "affirmative action" privileges that are enshrined in the constitution, and the minority (<25%) Chinese who do not ~ were too strong in Singapore and the _consensus_ that the Brits had brokered between the ethnic Malays and the ethnic Chinese broke down. (The problem, today, is that the minority Chinese account for nearly half of Malaysia's GDP.)

Modern Singapore is about 85% Chinese (Hong Kong, by contrast, is 95% Chinese) but the only racial tensions I have seen _appear_ to involve Indonesian housemaids who become less and less _observant_ of Muslim cultural norms when they are in Singapore, something that appears to really annoy the (fairly large number) of Indonesian male, Muslim migrant workers (someone has to do all the manual labour).


----------



## CougarKing

The protests in Hong Kong continue:

Reuters



> *Thousands of activists stage 'black cloth' march in Hong Kong*
> By: Donny Kwok and Diana Chan, Reuters
> September 14, 2014 8:20 PM
> 
> HONG KONG - *Thousands of pro-democracy activists clad in black marched silently through Hong Kong on Sunday, holding banners saying they felt betrayed and angry at Beijing's refusal to allow fully-democratic elections for the city's next chief executive in 2017.
> *
> The protesters, who carried enormous black cloth ribbons through the streets, also held up signs calling for further civil disobedience and cheering on students planning to boycott classes.
> 
> *"Occupy Central with Love and Peace!" and "Support students boycotting classes!" read some of the signs. "Beijing has breached our trust! Universal suffrage is hopeless!" read another.
> 
> Dozens of pro-establishment protesters gathered nearby waving banners and cursing the democracy activists and students.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Replying to myself, but here is a very detailed and informative (and official) report about HK's new desalinization plant at Tseung Kwan O.

HK plans to get 50 million cubic metres (m3)/year (eventually be expanded to 90 million m3/year) from the TKO plant but bear in mind, please that HK imports 820 million m3 from the Dongjiang river basin in Quandong province.

Singapore already has two (larger) plants, now, and has plans for more.


Edit: corrected figures to show 820 *million* m3


----------



## a_majoor

From The American Interest, a disturbing report that suggests the Chinese see conflict as being "inevitable". Perception is reality, so if this actually is a common attitude in China, then we have much to worry about:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/09/12/chinese-see-war-with-japan-as-inevitable/



> *Chinese See War With Japan as Inevitable*
> 
> More than half of Chinese respondents to a recent Genron/China Daily poll expect China and Japan to go to war. A smaller but not insignificant number (29 percent) of Japanese respondents said the same. The poll, which was conducted before a UN-backed move to nationalize more contested East China Sea Islands, asked many questions about Sino-Japanese relations, and found that relations between the two historical enemies are at a record low. The FT reports on the results:
> 
> Relations between Japan and China have soured since Japan bought three of the tiny islands – which China claims and calls the Diaoyu – in 2012. Japan defended the move as an effort to thwart a plan by the anti-China governor of Tokyo to buy them, but China accused it of breaching an unwritten deal to keep the status quo.
> 
> According to the poll, 38 per cent of Japanese think war will be avoided, but that marked a nine point drop from 2013. It also found that a record 93 per cent of Japanese have an unfavourable view of their Chinese neighbours, while the number of Chinese who view Japanese unfavourably fell 6 points to 87 per cent.
> 
> It has become a standard refrain in the commentary on Japanese maritime territorial aggression that the island chains—the Senkakus, the Spratlys, the Paracels—are just some rocks, although perhaps rocks with oil and gas underneath them. China may want to follow through on its irredentist territorial claims for matters of national pride, or it might want to secure the resources in the East and South China Seas. But with regional opponents allying against Beijing’s provocations and America making at least a nominal “pivot to Asia”, hopefully the leadership’s cooler heads prevail, and China will prove its citizens wrong about an impending war. Emotions are high, but everybody would do well to remember that great power conflict in the Pacific would be a disaster for all.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Chinese antipathy towards Japan has a long, sad history, going back to at least the 1st century when the Chinese began to extract tribute from Japan. True, enduring enmity began after Kublai Khan's unsuccessful attempts at invasion, but the events of the 1930s, especially the _Rape of Nanjing_, which, at least, rivals anything done by Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, and so on, created a level of hatred which runs strong, today.

What grates on the Chinese, especially, is that successive Japanese leaders insist on visiting the _Yasukuni Shrine_ where, especially, _Iwane Matsui_, who was (very properly) hanged as a war criminal for overseeing the _Rape of Nanjing_ was 'enshrined' as a hero. (Can you imagine our reaction if a German Chancellor visited a shrine to Adolf Eichmann? (not that one exists ... I hope.))

The Japanese have refused to properly and publicly acknowledge that they committed the gravest crimes against humanity, acts of barbarism that are unsurpassed in history, in China, especially in Nanjing; in fact, several times, as recently as 2012, very senior Japanese officials have denied that the _Rap of Nanjing_ even occurred. That ordinary Chinese people, especially educated Chinese who have read and traveled, hate the Japanese, does not surprise me.


----------



## Edward Campbell

China's _soft power_ campaign is in the spotlight in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21616988-decade-ago-china-began-opening-centres-abroad-promote-its-culture-some-people-are-pushing


> Confucius says
> *A decade ago China began opening centres abroad to promote its culture. Some people are pushing back*
> 
> Sep 13th 2014 | BEIJING AND EUGENE, OREGON | From the print edition
> 
> “HARMONY is the most valuable of all things,” said the Chinese philosopher Confucius two and a half millennia ago. There is little of it in evidence in the frosty relationship between the woman who was the founding director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon, Bryna Goodman, and her fellow historian, Glenn May. Their offices are separated by a ten-second walk, but the scholars do not exchange visits. Their palpable ill feeling reflects growing discord among Western scholars about a decade-old push by China to open government-funded cultural centres in schools and universities abroad. Intended to boost China’s “soft power”, the centres take the name of the peace-espousing sage. They tap into growing global demand for Chinese-language teaching. But they are also fuelling anxiety about academic freedom.
> 
> In America the Confucius programme has been widely welcomed by universities and school districts, which often do not have enough money to provide Chinese-language teachers for all who need them. But critics like Mr May believe China’s funding comes at a price: that Confucius Institutes (as those established on university campuses are known) and school-based Confucius Classrooms restrain freedom of speech by steering discussion of China away from sensitive subjects.
> 
> In June the American Association of University Professors called for universities to end or revise their contracts with Confucius Institutes (America has 100 of them) because they “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom”. Mr May has been asking the University of Oregon to close its institute, to no avail. Ms Goodman (who is no longer the institute’s director) says that in funding its interests China is like any other donor to American universities. She says that the institutes have become lodestones of what she calls a “China fear”.
> 
> When China opened its first Confucius Institute in 2004 in Seoul, it hoped the new effort would prove as uncontroversial as cultural-outreach programmes sponsored by Western governments, such as the British Council, the Alliance Française and Germany’s Goethe-Institut. The idea was to counter fears of China’s rise by raising awareness of a culture that is often described by Chinese as steeped in traditions of peace.
> 
> Through the Hanban, a government entity, China provides the centres with paid-for instructors and sponsors cultural events at them. Its spending is considerable, and growing rapidly. In 2013 it was $278m, more than six times as much as in 2006. China’s funding for Confucius Institutes amounts to about $100,000-200,000 a year on many campuses, and sometimes more (Oregon received nearly $188,000 in the last academic year). By the end of 2013 China had established 440 institutes and 646 classrooms serving 850,000 registered students. They are scattered across more than 100 countries, with America hosting more than 40% of the combined total. There are plans for another 60 institutes and 350 classrooms to be opened worldwide by the end of 2015.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese officials express satisfaction. In June Liu Yunshan, who is in charge of the Communist Party’s vast propaganda apparatus, said Confucius Institutes had “emerged at the right moment”. He described them as a “spiritual high-speed rail”, promoting friendship by connecting Chinese dreams with those of the rest of the world.
> 
> Others are less sanguine, however. In America criticism has recently grown stronger. Earlier this year more than 100 members of the faculty at the University of Chicago complained that Confucius Institutes were compromising academic integrity. In an article published in 2013 by Nation magazine, one of the university’s academics, Marshall Sahlins, listed cases in several countries involving what appeared to be deference to the political sensitivities of Confucius Institutes. These included a couple of occasions when universities had invited the Dalai Lama to speak and then either cancelled the invitation or received him off-campus.
> 
> In one case, at North Carolina State University in 2009, the provost said after the cancellation of a Dalai Lama visit that the Confucius Institute had indicated the exiled Tibetan’s presence could cause problems with China. This year Steven Levine, an honorary professor at the University of Montana, wrote to hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world asking them to mark the 25th anniversary in June of the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. None of them agreed. Global Times, a Beijing newspaper, recently called the protests of foreign academics “a continuation of McCarthyism”.
> 
> Ms Goodman argues that the study of China needs all the funding it can get, even if that means taking money from countries with vital interests at stake—whether China, Taiwan, or the United States. She says that if China were ever to meddle politically in Oregon’s institute, the Confucius programme would be quickly shut down.
> 
> Such assurances do not address a big concern of critics—that the political influence of Confucius programmes is often subtle and slow-acting. If the critics are right, it is very subtle indeed. Surveys suggest that in many countries China’s image has not markedly improved over the past decade. The Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, says 42% of Americans viewed China favourably in 2007. Last year only 37% did. The political dividends of China’s soft-power spending are far from obvious.




     _Caveat lector:_ I have a good friend who is on the board of the Confucius Institute at the University of Texas in Dallas and I have attended events sponsored by the Institute.

As the article notes, such _soft power_ tools, often under the guise of language learning/promotion, are fairly common. In America's case the spread of "American Universities," beginning in Beirut, were, originally _Christian missionary_ tools but, more recently  have become more overtly political.

Is the _Confucius Institute_ trying to _whitewash_ China in the eyes of gullible, idealistic young Americans? YES. Is that what e.g. _l'Alliance Française_ does, too? YES. Is it part of a Chinese government funded _soft power_ campaign aimed at changing foreigners' perceptions of China? YES. Should they be banned? NO ... unless you believe that young American, British and Canadian men and women are terminally bloody stupid, unable to think for themselves ...
.
.
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----------



## CougarKing

In spite of what this article says, Canada just lost the opportunity to benefit from the next wave of wealthy Chinese immigrants by closing the investor-class immigrant visa recently:

Business Insider



> *Chinese millionaires plan to leave in droves: Poll*
> By Robert Frank | CNBC – 9 hours ago
> 
> Nearly half of Chinese millionaires plan to move out of the country in the next five years-a flight that could add to worries over the country's economy, as more money moves offshore rather than being invested or spent in China.
> 
> According to a study from Barclays and Ledbury Research, which polled more than 2,000 people worth $1.5 million or more from 17 countries, 47 percent of Chinese millionaires plan to emigrate, while another 20 percent said they don't know if they will move.
> 
> That's the highest rate of planned millionaire flight in the world, topping Qatar at 36 percent and Latin America at 34 percent.
> 
> The study supports a finding from Hurun Report earlier this year, which said 64 percent of Chinese millionaires have either emigrated or plan to emigrate.
> 
> *When asked why they are leaving China, 78 percent of respondents in the Barclays and Ledbury study said they were seeking "better educational/employment opportunities" for their kids. Seventy-three percent said they were looking for "economic security" and 72 percent said they wanted a "desirable climate." Their top destinations are Hong Kong, Canada and the U.S.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ian Bremmer, a fellow with some good insights into Chinese policy, explains the apparent contradictions between Xi Jinping's broad, general policies and his government's treatment of HK in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Reuters_:

http://blogs.reuters.com/ian-bremmer/2014/09/08/chinese-leaders-reforms-are-bad-news-for-hong-kong/


> Chinese leader’s reforms are bad news for Hong Kong
> 
> By Ian Bremmer
> 
> SEPTEMBER 8, 2014
> 
> In 1997, Britain returned Hong Kong to China after some 150 years of colonial rule. In exchange, China agreed to a set of principles: Hong Kong would maintain its capitalist system for half a century, by which point its chief executive and members of the legislature would be elected by universal suffrage. As the thinking went, “one country, two systems” would suffice in the interim; Hong Kong and the Mainland would surely converge on democracy in the half-century to come.
> 
> Not so fast. Recently, Beijing has been systematically moving in the other direction. The decision on August 31 to rule out democratic elections for Hong Kong in 2017 was just the latest example. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s transformational reform agenda is driving this shift—and it does not bode well for Hong Kong.
> 
> Xi’s reform agenda has two parts: the first is economic liberalization. The Chinese leadership recognizes that it cannot rely on state-driven investment and cheap labor to provide growth indefinitely. Xi wants to make China’s economy more sophisticated and competitive. He is overhauling inefficient state-owned enterprises and focusing on changes in the financial sector in particular. It’s a top priority of the new leadership, and a requirement for a sustainable and dynamic Chinese economy going forward.
> 
> But a prosperous economy is simply a means to an end-goal. Xi is opening up the economy because, above all else, he wants to ensure the long-term survival and stability of the Communist Party leadership. He thinks economic reforms are a good bet despite the risks they will usher in. Over time, reform will require an enormous transfer of wealth from large domestic companies to demanding citizens and it will threaten the vested interests of many powerful elites who have prospered off the status quo. It will inject necessary competition into the economy, which could put jobs, companies, and sectors at risk.
> 
> So as Xi opens the economy and the Pandora’s Box that comes along with it, he is simultaneously clamping down on political dissent and consolidating power. Some Chinese citizens may think (or hope) that economic reform will usher in moves toward democracy. Make no mistake: Xi is engaged in political reform…it just doesn’t resemble our Western notion of what that entails. Xi has absolutely no interest in domestic political competition; in a time of economic change, political unity needs to be at its absolute strongest. This is the basis for his anti-corruption campaign, which has already led to some 40 powerful officials with the rank of vice minister or above being detained or investigated. Xi wants to scare China’s political and commercial elite into falling in line with his economic reforms, all while building popular support for his initiatives by attacking perceived corruption.
> 
> Hong Kong finds itself on the wrong end of Xi’s reform plan: Hong Kong used to matter to Beijing economically, now it matters politically. That’s absolutely the wrong way around. To the extent that economic liberalization bears fruit, Hong Kong will no longer serve such a useful role as the Western face and gateway into China. As China pushes forward with a Free Trade Zone in Shanghai, it will cannibalize many of Hong Kong’s unique offerings for foreigners looking to do business. And Hong Kong is no longer as integral to the Chinese economy: in 1997, it accounted for 15.6 percent of China’s national GDP. Last year, it fell below 3 percent.
> 
> Of even greater importance, Hong Kong matters more to Beijing politically—for all the wrong reasons. In the context of Xi’s sweeping reforms where he needs all hands on the same deck politically, dissent in Hong Kong is more salient, dangerous, and intolerable. Xi will push back against a pro-democratic movement in Hong Kong for two main reasons.
> 
> First, Hong Kong’s Westernized nature makes it a threat. Xi is very concerned with the dangers of Western values and mores undermining his country’s political system, something he shares in common — and regularly discusses — with Vladimir Putin. Hong Kong’s citizens are globally connected, politically savvy, and have the ability to mobilize. They are geared for diversity of political opinion. Beijing will clamp down on that, with a willingness to use its surveillance capacities (and even the legal system or force as necessary).
> 
> Second, taking a hard line on Hong Kong meshes with both of Xi’s political consolidation goals. Like the politicians he has targeted in his anti-corruption campaign, Xi can make an example out of Hong Kong, demonstrating the consequences for voicing opposing views. And that hard line will be largely popular: Many Chinese mainlanders view Hong Kong citizens as widely discriminatory against them and actively campaigning to keep them out of Hong Kong. Xi has support for teaching Hong Kong a lesson.
> 
> What we are witnessing in Hong Kong will prove problematic for China as Xi’s reforms really begin to shake up the system. The risk is not as much that protests in Hong Kong could be contagious and spread to the Mainland (given the mainlanders’ general dislike for the citizens of Hong Kong). Rather, Beijing’s heavy-handed response is significant because it reveals just how far the leadership will go to root out any domestic instability that arises on the Mainland.
> 
> In the context of Britain’s 50-year bet on Chinese democracy, this is precisely the wrong moment for a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong to flourish. The 50-year dream for “one country, one system” has not been entirely shattered, but it feels awfully remote. If reforms succeed over the long run, it will put all of China — Hong Kong included — in a great position. It would bring newfound prosperity and economic sustainability to China. But only then might the Chinese leadership even consider opening up the political system.
> 
> As with so many things in China, the situation will get worse before it could get better.




But: remember Taiwan; Taiwan is watching. Beijing wants to bring Taiwan back into the fold and it wants to do it peacefully; Taiwan is watching how China manages "one country - two systems" with HK ... or not.


----------



## Edward Campbell

_The Economist_ cover and lead story, both of which are reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper, feature Xi Jinping and his concentration of power to himself:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21618780-most-powerful-and-popular-leader-china-has-had-decades-must-use-these-assets-wisely-xi







> The rise and rise of Xi Jinping
> Xi who must be obeyed
> *The most powerful and popular leader China has had for decades must use these assets wisely*
> 
> Sep 20th 2014 | From the print edition
> 
> THE madness unleashed by the rule of a charismatic despot, Mao Zedong, left China so traumatised that the late chairman’s successors vowed never to let a single person hold such sway again. Deng Xiaoping, who rose to power in the late 1970s, extolled the notion of “collective leadership”. Responsibilities would be shared out among leaders by the Communist Party’s general secretary; big decisions would be made by consensus. This has sometimes been ignored: Deng himself acted the despot in times of crisis. But the collective approach helped restore stability to China after Mao’s turbulent dictatorship.
> 
> Xi Jinping, China’s current leader, is now dismantling it. He has become the most powerful Chinese ruler certainly since Deng, and possibly since Mao. Whether this is good or bad for China depends on how Mr Xi uses his power. Mao pushed China to the brink of social and economic collapse, and Deng steered it on the right economic path but squandered a chance to reform it politically. If Mr Xi used his power to reform the way power works in China, he could do his country great good. So far, the signs are mixed.
> 
> *Taking on the party*
> 
> It may well be that the decision to promote Mr Xi as a single personality at the expense of the group was itself a collective one. Some in China have been hankering for a strongman; a politician who would stamp out corruption, reverse growing inequalities and make the country stand tall abroad (a task Mr Xi has been taking up with relish—see article). So have many foreign businessfolk, who want a leader who would smash the monopolies of a bloated state sector and end years of dithering over economic reforms.
> 
> However the decision came about, Mr Xi has grabbed it and run with it. He has taken charge of secretive committees responsible for reforming government, overhauling the armed forces, finance and cyber-security. His campaign against corruption is the most sweeping in decades. It has snared the former second-in-command of the People’s Liberation Army and targeted the retired chief of China’s massive security apparatus—the highest-ranking official to be investigated for corruption since Mao came to power. The generals, wisely, bow to him: earlier this year state newspapers published pages of expressions of loyalty to him by military commanders.
> 
> He is the first leader to employ a big team to build his public profile. But he also has a flair for it—thanks to his stature (in a height-obsessed country he would tower over all his predecessors except Mao), his toughness and his common touch. One moment he is dumpling-eating with the masses, the next riding in a minibus instead of the presidential limousine. He is now more popular than any leader since Mao (see article).
> 
> All of this helps Mr Xi in his twofold mission. His first aim is to keep the economy growing fast enough to stave off unrest, while weaning it off an over-dependence on investment in property and infrastructure that threatens to mire it in debt. Mr Xi made a promising start last November, when he declared that market forces would play a decisive role (not even Deng had the courage to say that). There have since been encouraging moves, such as giving private companies bigger stakes in sectors that were once the exclusive preserve of state-owned enterprises, and selling shares in firms owned by local governments to private investors. Mr Xi has also started to overhaul the household-registration system, a legacy of the Mao era that makes it difficult for migrants from the countryside to settle permanently in cities. He has relaxed the one-child-per-couple policy, a Deng-era legacy that has led to widespread abuses.
> 
> *More muscle needed*
> 
> It is still far from clear whether Mr Xi’s economic policies will succeed in preventing a sharp slowdown in growth. The latest data suggest the economy is cooling more rapidly than the government had hoped (see article). Much will depend on how far he gets with the second, harder, part of his mission: establishing the rule of law. This will be a central theme of the annual meeting next month of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The question is whether Mr Xi is prepared for the law to apply to everyone, without fear or favour.
> 
> His drive against corruption suggests that the answer is a qualified no. The campaign is characterised by a Maoist neglect of institutions. It has succeeded in instilling fear among officials, but has done little to deal with the causes of graft: an investigative mechanism that is controlled entirely by the party itself, a secret system of appointments to official positions in which loyalty often trumps honesty and controls on free speech that allow the crooked to silence their critics.
> 
> Mr Xi needs to set up an independent body to fight corruption, instead of leaving the job to party investigators and the feuding factions they serve. He should also require officials to declare all sources of income, property and other assets. Instead, he has been rounding up activists calling for such changes almost as vigorously as he has been confronting corruption. In the absence of legal reform, he risks becoming a leader of the old stripe, who pursues vendettas in the name of fighting wrongdoers. That will have two consequences: there will be a new wave of corruption, and resentments among the party elite will, at some point, erupt.
> 
> Mr Xi is making some of the right noises. He says he wants courts to help him “lock power in a cage”. Reforms are being tinkered with to make local courts less beholden to local governments. But he needs to go further by abolishing the party’s shadowy “political-legal committees”, which decide sensitive cases. The party should stop meddling in the appointment of judges (and, indeed, of legislators).
> 
> The effect of such reforms would be huge. They would signal a willingness by the party to begin loosening its monopoly of power and accepting checks and balances. Deng once said that economic reform would fail without political reform. Mr Xi last month urged foot-dragging officials to “dare to break through and try” reform. China’s leader should heed his own words and those of Deng. He should use his enormous power for the greatest good, and change the system.




I don't agree with all of _The Economist's_ prescriptions but I do agree that Xi Jinping does have an unprecedented opportunity to effect real change, change which can be for the greater good of China and the region and, indeed, the whole world.


----------



## CougarKing

I find it surprising that there's actually some sentiment in Hong Kong for returning to UK rule...but they should realize that it's TOO LATE. 

Hong Kongers who still wanted to have some allegiance to the UK should have applied for their BDTC (British Dependent Territory Citizen) passports before the 1997 Hong Kong handover. Oh well. 

Here's their facebook page:

 本版，跟貼行動：https://www.facebook.com/HongKongandUK

EDITED TO ADD: Seems the facebook page above was taken down.


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## CougarKing

Here's more to add to what I said earlier about Canada missing out on the next wave of wealthy Chinese immigrants by ending the investor class immigrant visa category recently:

New York Times



> *In Suburban Seattle, New Nests for China’s Rich*
> 
> As wealthy Chinese stash more of their fortunes overseas, they’re bidding up the value of everything from Bitcoins and Burgundy to Picassos and pink diamonds.
> 
> And, increasingly,* China’s rich are also offshoring their families along with their cash. That’s created a real estate boom in an unlikely corner of the United States: suburban Seattle.*
> 
> Wealthy Chinese have become far and away the biggest foreign buyers of real estate in Seattle in recent years, accounting for up to one-third of $1-million-plus homes sold in certain areas, brokers say. *Seattle real estate agents are hiring Mandarin speakers and even opening offices in Beijing. Builders are designing much of their new construction for Chinese buyers.*
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

The US, and Australia and Canada, too, want to be very careful about admitting these rich Chinese. Some, maybe even many, are already or are going to be targets of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign which will go after many of the super wealthy ... as it should.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Some, maybe even many, are already or are going to be targets of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign which will go after many of the super wealthy ... as it should.



Some, but not all, might have gotten their wealth through illicit means. 

Still, our own restricting of this category of immigrants has more to do with the government of the day pandering to the xenophobic, isolationist fringe of its base.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is, I _think_, a growing _backlash_ against the super-rich amongst "ordinary Chinese" and I _suspect_ that Xi Jinping, who is running a big league popularity campaign, is going to play to that sense of 'blame someone" by attacking the rich, including the honest ones - and I agree with you: there are some, not all rich Chinese are crooks. But, my _guess_ is that the Supreme Leader's broom will sweep hard and wide in his cleanup campaign ... and it will be very popular with the working and middle classes.


----------



## a_majoor

Meanwhile, out west, China's campaign against Islamic "radicals" may be backfiring, and ignite the very radicalism they are tying to suppress. I am a bit surprised considering the relative sophistication of the Unrestricted Warfare doctrine, and how smoothly they have been able to manipulate the West. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-war-on-terror-becomes-all-out-attack-on-islam-in-xinjiang/2014/09/19/5c5840a4-1aa7-4bb6-bc63-69f6bfba07e9_story.html



> *China's war on terror becomes all-out attack on Islam in Xinjiang*
> 
> Ethnic violence in Western China targets Uighurs
> 
> The government says ethnic violence that has killed dozens is terrorism. Uighurs claim government oppression.
> July 27, 2014 Uighurs (WEE-gurs) wait at a bus stop in old Kashgar in the Xinjiang province of western China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
> By Simon Denyer September 19 at 7:50 PM
> 
> SHACHE COUNTY, China – The month of Ramadan should have been a time of fasting, charity and prayer in China’s Muslim west. But here, in many of the towns and villages of southern Xinjiang, it was a time of fear, repression, and violence.
> 
> China’s campaign against separatism and terrorism in its mainly Muslim west has now become an all-out war on conservative Islam, residents here say.
> 
> Throughout Ramadan,police intensified a campaign of house-to-house searches, looking for books or clothing that betray “conservative” religious belief among the region’s ethnic Uighurs: women wearing veils were widely detained, and many young men arrested on the slightest pretext, residents say. Students and civil servants were forced to eat instead of fasting, and work or attend classes instead of attending Friday prayers.
> 
> The religious repression has bred resentment, and, at times, deadly protests. Reports have emerged of police firing on angry crowds in recent weeks in the towns of Elishku, and Alaqagha; since then, Chinese authorities have imposed a complete blackout on reporting from both locations, even more intense than that already in place across most of Xinjiang.
> 
> Chinese police have cracked down on the wearing of beards and veils, in observance of Ramadan, in Muslim-majority Xinjiang province.
> A Washington Post team was turned away at the one of several checkpoints around Elishku, as army trucks rumbled past, and was subsequently detained for several hours by informers, police and Communist Party officials for reporting from villages in the surrounding district of Shache county; the following day, the team was again detained in Alaqagha in Kuqa county, and ultimately deported from the region from the nearest airport.
> 
> Across Shache county, the Internet has been cut, and text messaging services disabled, while foreigners have been barred. But in snatched conversations, in person and on the telephone, with the few people in the region brave enough to talk, a picture of constant harassment across Xinjiang emerges.
> 
> “The police are everywhere,” said one Uighur resident. Another said it was like “living in prison.” Another said his identity card had been checked so many times, “the magnetic strip is not working any more.”
> 
> On July 18, hundreds of people gathered outside a government building in the town of Alaqagha, angry about the arrest of two dozen girls and women who had refused to remove their headscarves, according to a report on Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA).
> 
> Protesters threw stones, bottles and bricks at the building; the police opened fire, killing at least two people, and wounding several more.
> 
> Then, on July 28, the last day of Ramadan, a protest in Elishku was met with an even more violent response, RFA reported. Hundreds of Uighurs attacked a police station with knives, axes and sticks; again, the police opened fire, mowing down scores of people.
> 
> China's official Xinhua news agency said police killed 59 Uighur “terrorists" in the incident, although other reports suggest the death toll could have been significantly higher.
> 
> A veiled Muslim Uyghur woman walks past a statue of Mao Zedong in Kashgar in Xinjiang province. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
> According to the Chinese government's version, the angry crowd subsequently went on a rampage in nearby towns and villages, killing 37 civilians — mostly ethnic Han Chinese. The region has been in lockdown ever since, with police and SWAT teams arresting more than 200 people and drones scanning for suspects from the air.
> 
> Xinjiang is a land of deserts, oases and mountains, flanked by the Muslim lands of Central Asia. Its Uighur people are culturally more inclined towards Turkey than the rest of China.
> 
> China says foreign religious ideas — often propagated over the Internet— have corrupted the people of Xinjiang, promoting fundamentalist Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and turning some of them towards terrorism in pursuit of separatist goals. It also blames a radical Islamist Uighur group — said to be based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas and to have links to al-Qaeda — for a recent upsurge in violence. In March, a gruesome knife attack at a train station in the city of Kunming left 33 people dead, while in May, a bomb attack on a street market in Urumqi killed 43 others.
> 
> In response, President Xi Jinping has vowed to catch the terrorists “with nets spreading from the earth to the sky,” and to chase them “like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them.’ ”
> 
> But the nets appear to be also catching many innocent people, residents complain. “You should arrest the bad guys,” said one Uighur professional in Urumqi, “not just anyone who looks suspicious.”
> 
> Some 200,000 Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to listen to people’s concerns. Yet those officials, who often shelter behind compound walls fortified with alarms and barbed wire, appear to be more interested in ever-more intrusive surveillance of Uighur life, locals say.
> 
> In Shache, known in Uighur as Yarkand, an official document boasts of spending more than $2 million to establish a network of informers and surveillance cameras. House-to-house inspections, it says, will identify separatists, terrorists and religious extremists – including women who cover their faces with veils or burqas, and young men with long beards.
> 
> In the city of Kashgar, checkpoints enforce what the authorities call “Project Beauty” — beauty, in this case, being an exposed face. A large billboard close to the main mosque carries pictures of women wearing headscarves that pass muster, and those — covering the face or even just the neck — which are banned.
> 
> Anyone caught breaking the rules faces the daunting prospect of “regular and irregular inspections,” “educational lectures” and having party cadres assigned as “buddies” to prevent backsliding, the billboard announced. In the city of Karamay, women wearing veils and men with long beards have been banned from public buses.
> 
> Terrorism — in the sense of attacks on civilians — is a new phenomenon in Xinjiang, but the unrest here has a much longer history, with many Uighurs chafing under Chinese repression since the Communist Party takeover of the country in 1949, and resentful of the subsequent flood of immigrants from China’s majority Han community into the region.
> 
> What has changed is the growth in conservative Islam, and the increasing desperation of Uighurs determined to resist Chinese rule.
> 
> Until a decade or two ago, Xinjiang’s Uighurs wore their religion lightly, known more for their singing, dancing and drinking than their observation of the pieties of their faith. But in the past two decades a stricter form of the religion has slowly gained a foothold, as China opened up to the outside world.
> 
> While worship was allowed at officially sanctioned — and closely supervised — mosques, a network of underground mosques sprang up. Village elders returning from the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, brought back more conservative ideas; high levels of unemployment among Uighur youth, and widespread discrimination against them, left many searching for new ideas and new directions in life. The rise of Islam was, in part, a reaction against social inequality and modernity.
> 
> But Joanne Smith Finley of Britain’s Newcastle University, an expert on Uighur identities and Islam, says religion has become a “symbolic form of resistance” to Chinese rule in a region where other resistance is impossible.
> 
> When hopes for independence were cruelly dashed by mass executions and arrests in the city of Ghulja — or Yining in Chinese — in 1997, Uighurs had nowhere else to turn, she said.
> 
> “People lost faith in the dream of independence,” she said, “and started looking to Islam instead.”
> 
> Not every Uighur in Xinjiang is happy with the rising tide of conservatism: one academic lamented the dramatic decline in Uighur establishments serving alcohol in the city of Hotan, while insisting that many young girls wear veils only out of compulsion.
> 
> But China’s clumsy attempts to “liberate” Uighurs from the oppression of conservative Islam are only driving more people into the hands of the fundamentalists, experts say.
> 
> “If the government continues to exaggerate extremism in this way, and take inappropriate measures to fix it, it will only force people towards extremism” a prominent Uighur scholar, Ilham Tohti, wrote, before being jailed in January on a charge of inciting separatism.
> 
> Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I can almost repeat my reply to S.M.A. just above: there are domestic political considerations in China, too. I'm not smart enough to comprehend Xi Jinping's long term plan, but I am sure he's got one and I'm equally sure that he needs to know - and he needs everyone else in the upper echelons of the CCP to know, too - that he has the "people' on his side.

(This, 21st century China, is, in a way, remarkably like England _circa_ 1560 when Elizabeth I came to the throne. The first thing she had to do, above and before all else, was to secure broad popular support. Amongst her first acts were to restore the value of the currency, a very risky but, ultimately immensely popular action, and to broker a religious accommodation which made England Protestant, but without the a mirror of her sister Mary's excesses. Both acts were of the "high wire, no net" variety but they both paid off in both the near and long terms.)

Anyway, as I understand it - and maybe that's not well enough, the Han Chinese are fully and thoroughly fed up with the Uighurs, and, as with the anti-corruption campaign, Xi Jinping is going to try to do something he wants to do anyway and gain more popular support.

Maybe he's wrong; time will tell; but he's a pretty astute guy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Many years ago the Chinese PLA was a largely conscripted force but, in the 1990s, if memory serves, the PLA switched to an essentially _volunteer_/professional force. In the old days a term of service - some months, at least, was required before young men (but not women) could attend university. That's gone, too, but the first two or three weeks of the university years are devoted to military type training. The Pictures linked below are taken from the _chinanews.com_ webiste and they show students from Tsinghua University, one of the top two in China, demonstrating their new skills. The website says:

          September 19, 2014, Beijing, Tsinghua University graduation ceremony on a military training carried out on terror siege and suffering biochemical attacks and other tactical exercises, this is the
          first comprehensive Tsinghua added content in military training and tactical exercises, the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of the school armed king and that the addition of these new content is to
          consider the current situation, cultivate the anti-terrorism awareness. Queue performances, students under the guidance of instructors, lists the word "China Dream." Blue sky photo
          Source: CFP Vision China

Here is a link to the (10) pictures. Just click on the picture to go to the next one.


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing trying to snuff out Hong Kong dissenters by pressuring the tycoons who are their bosses; looks like the mansions on the Peak in Hong Kong will be quiet today.



> *Trouble in Hong Kong? Beijing summons tycoons*
> 
> HONG KONG (AP) — As trouble brews in Hong Kong, who's Beijing going to call? The billionaires.
> 
> With political tension in the southern Chinese financial hub at its highest in years, China's leaders summoned dozens of the city's tycoons earlier this week for talks.
> 
> *The rare trip by the large contingent of business leaders to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing highlighted the unlikely role that Hong Kong's capitalists have played as longstanding supporters of China's communist rulers.
> 
> Beijing has long courted the tycoons, who employ hundreds of thousands of people, for the influence they have in the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong.*
> 
> The meeting coincided with the start of a protest involving thousands of Hong Kong college students against Beijing's refusal to grant democratic reforms that would let Hong Kong's people have a genuine say in electing their own leader. It also came ahead of a planned rally by pro-democracy activists to "occupy" the Asian financial hub's central business district as early as next week, which has raised the hackles of business leaders.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> 
> Source: Yahoo Finance/Business Insider


----------



## Edward Campbell

It's important understand that, above all else, the PBoC (People's Bank of China, the central bank equivalent to our Bank of Canada or the US Federal Reserve Bank) is not independent; monetary policy is a political matter. But, that being said, the bank's governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, is an important official and there are now rumours, cited in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, that he is on his way out:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/09/new-central-banker-china


> *A new central banker for China?*
> Say it ain't so, Zhou
> 
> Sep 25th 2014, by S.R | SHANGHAI
> 
> IN THE world of rumours, Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s central bank chief, has lost his job multiple times. First there was a 2007 reshuffle  when he was pushed aside early in his tenure, sidelined to an academic role. Then came his most dramatic exit of all, in 2010, when he defected to America  after squandering billions of dollars from China’s foreign exchange reserves. Finally, in late 2012, he published a collection of essays, signalling to the world that he was set to retire  – he was, after all, about to turn 65, the official retirement age.
> 
> Yet through it all, Mr Zhou has remained exactly where he has been since 2002: in the governor’s chair at the People’s Bank of China. So long-time PBoC watchers can be forgiven for casting a slightly wary eye over the latest report  of Mr Zhou’s departure, carried by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Rumours that he is again on his way out have spread in recent weeks in Beijing. Your correspondent has heard the scuttlebutt from diplomats and bankers, and word of it has spread on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Personnel changes at the apex of the Chinese government are closely guarded secrets and discussions of possible changes often take on an echo-chamber quality. But the Journal article appears to be well sourced and it includes a fresh revelation – that Guo Shuqing, a former securities regulator and Mr Zhou’s putative successor, attended a recent meeting convened by the central bank’s monetary policy committee. Bloomberg felt emboldened enough to conduct a snap poll  of economists to see whom they thought likely to replace Mr Zhou. Six of 13 respondents predicted it would be Mr Guo, now serving as governor of the eastern province of Shandong. Five picked Yi Gang, a PBoC deputy governor who is also in charge of managing China’s $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves.
> 
> What does Mr Zhou’s potential departure mean for the Chinese economy? Until the deed is done and his replacement is actually known, it would be premature to pass much in the way of judgment. But one of the interpretations that has gained most traction – that Mr Zhou’s ouster would be a blow to the pro-reform camp in Beijing – looks wide of the mark. In this view, Mr Zhou has been too staunch an advocate for market reform such as interest-rate liberalisation, and the recent growth slowdown has given his opponents leverage to topple him. Such palace intrigue would make for a good story. However, the transition to a new central bank governor in China is likely to feature far more continuity than drama.
> 
> First, going back to the basics, the most salient fact about the PBoC is that it lacks independence. Although more powerful than other financial regulators in the Chinese system, it is subordinate to the State Council, or cabinet, which in turn answers to the Communist Party leadership. The decision in recent weeks to refrain from large-scale monetary stimulus even as growth slows ultimately comes from Li Keqiang, the prime minister, and perhaps even Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. The Communist Party pledged last year to give markets a “decisive” role in the nation’s economy. The central bank is an essential actor in implementing that strategy but not its architect.
> 
> Second, Mr Zhou, though a liberal in the Chinese context, is not the arch-reformer that he is sometimes made out to be. There is no doubt that he has overseen important changes in his decade-plus in charge of the PBoC. The most notable was the move to lift the yuan from a fixed dollar peg in 2005 and shift it to what has in effect been a crawling peg. But he has not set the currency free: even as the central bank has widened the yuan’s trading band, it has continued to keep a close grip on it by setting the exchange rate’s starting point every day. Similarly, the central bank has moved to liberalise interest rates, but progress has been slow, with deposit rates still capped. The real action has taken place beyond the regulated realm with shadow-bank products that are ushering in de facto liberalisation. Over the past year the central bank has even made some regressive moves, using special, undisclosed loans to big state-owned banks to create money when liquidity has been tight. This ‘pledged supplementary lending’ has been a throwback to relending tools used by the PBoC in the 1990s when it took a more hands-on approach to directing credit flows.
> 
> Finally, the man in the frame as Mr Zhou’s probable successor is cut from the same cloth. Guo Shuqing’s career path has many parallels to Mr Zhou’s. Both were governors of China Construction Bank, a major commercial lender. Mr Guo worked alongside Mr Zhou in the central bank for a few years as director of the agency that manages China’s foreign exchange reserves. The two men have co-authored a book about China’s economy and talk much the same talk when it comes to financial reforms. When Mr Guo served as China’s top securities regulator from 2011-13, virtually every week brought new rules that were meant to reduce government influence and make the stock market more of a market. One local banker expressed mock alarm to your correspondent that a PBoC under Mr Guo would be too reformist, liable to disrupt weekends and dinners with a constant stream of announcements. If the Chinese government had suddenly gotten cold feet about financial reform, Mr Guo would be an odd choice as Mr Zhou’s replacement.
> 
> Mr Zhou is nearly 67, two years beyond the official retirement age. The rumours of his departure are, at some point, bound to be correct. It would not be a surprise to see his exit before March, when the country's rubber-stamp parliament next gathers. But China’s steady, if slow, approach to economic reform will outlast him.




We must all hope that the last sentence is true.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, the violence in Xinjiang continues:

BBC



> *Xinjiang unrest: China raises death toll to 50*
> 
> Fifty people died in violence on Sunday in Xinjiang, Chinese state media said, in what police called a "serious terrorist attack".
> 
> Earlier this week state media reported the incident in Luntai county but gave the death toll as two.
> 
> On Thursday a state news portal said 40 "rioters", six civilians and four police officers were killed. No reason was given for the delay in reporting.
> 
> Violence has been escalating in Xinjiang in recent months.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another effect of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign.

 :blotto:

Straits Times



> BEIJING -* More than 100,000 "phantom employees" of provincial governments in China who were paid but did no work have been removed in Hebei, Sichuan, Henan and Jilin provinces.*
> 
> This comes after a national campaign was launched last year requiring stricter measures to keep government teams clean and efficient, experts said.
> 
> In Hebei province, more than 55,000 officials in government units and staff members of public institutes were removed as part of the Mass Line Campaign that has targeted corruption and bureaucracy...
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

I hope this doesn't result in the PLA garrison intervening as what happened in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989...

Reuters



> *Hong Kong students storm government HQ to demand full democracy*
> HONG KONG Fri Sep 26, 2014 11:33am EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - Hundreds of pro-democracy activists stormed government headquarters late on Friday after student leaders demanding greater democracy urged them to charge into the compound.
> 
> Police used pepper spray as the protesters smashed barriers and climbed over fences in chaotic scenes in the heart of the Asian financial center, following Beijing's decision to rule out free elections for the city's leader in 2017.
> 
> One student leader, Joshua Wong, a thin 17-year-old with dark-rimmed glasses and bowl-cut hair, was dragged away by police kicking and screaming as protesters chanted and struggled to free him.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps one of her successor carriers might even be launched when she is "combat ready" and all their experimenting with carrier aviation has a foundation.

Military.com



> *China: New Carrier Needs Time to Be Combat Ready*
> 
> China Daily | Sep 26, 2014
> 
> The People's Liberation Army navy marked the second anniversary of the commissioning of the aircraft carrier CNS Liaoning on Thursday, but experts said more time is needed to hone its combat readiness.
> 
> The CNS Liaoning, a refitted Soviet-era carrier, was commissioned in Dalian, Liaoning province, on Sept 25, 2012.
> 
> The ship has engaged in research and training missions, and it continues to sail the oceans, PLA Daily said on its micro blog.
> "We must be able to protect our territorial waters and win possible conflicts," Senior Captain Mei Wen, political commissar of the carrier, told the newspaper.
> "While in the open seas, we must make sure that we are able to sail as far as we want and can safeguard our turf.
> "We must be strong enough to maintain the nation's overseas economic interests and strategic channels."
> 
> *The vessel has just completed its first maintenance stop at a Dalian shipyard, a process that lasted five months from mid-April, according to an earlier report.
> 
> The crew and pilots of the carrier-based J-15 fighter jets have been put through a succession of rigorous training programs and tests over the past two years*.
> 
> The vessel's largest mission took place in December in the South China Sea. During a 37-day exercise, the carrier conducted more than 100 drills and training procedures designed to test the stress resistance of its structures, its sailing speed in deep water, its navigational capabilities and the reliability of its weapons and equipment.
> 
> It also took part in a formation drill with other Chinese ships and submarines, a move many observers believe indicates that a carrier battle group has taken shape.
> 
> However, it will take years for the CNS Liaoning to achieve full combat capability, said Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher from the PLA Naval Military Studies Research Institute.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

It will not look good to foreign investors, and more importantly, to Taiwan, if the planned blockade sees PLA/PAP troops on Hong Kong streets simply because the successor to the Royal Hong Kong Police force can't keep student protestors from storming a government building.

Reuters



> *Hong Kong clashes, arrests kick-start plans to blockade city*
> BY JAMES POMFRET AND YIMOU LEE
> HONG KONG Sat Sep 27, 2014 5:35pm EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - Violent clashes between Hong Kong riot police and students galvanized tens of thousands of supporters for the city's pro-democracy movement *and kick-started a plan to lock down the heart of the Asian financial center early on Sunday*.
> 
> Leaders and supporters of Occupy Central with Love and Peace rallied to support students who were doused with pepper spray early on Saturday after they broke through police barriers and stormed the city's government headquarters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Roads in a square block around the city's government headquarters, located in the Admiralty district adjacent to Central, were filled with people and blocked with metal barricades erected by protesters to defend against a possible police crackdown.
> 
> *
> Some of Hong Kong's most powerful tycoons have spoken out against the Occupy movement, warning it could threaten the city's business and economic stability.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Police arrested more than 60 people, including Joshua Wong, the 17-year-old leader of student group Scholarism, who was dragged away after he called on the protesters to charge the government premises. He was still being detained early on Sunday, along with fellow student leaders Alex Chow and Lester Shum.*
> 
> His parents said in a statement the decision to detain him was an act of "political persecution".
> 
> Wong has already won one major victory against Beijing. In 2012, he forced the Hong Kong government to shelve plans to roll out a pro-China national education scheme in the city's schools when the then 15-year-old rallied 120,000 protesters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> It will not look good to foreign investors, and more importantly, to Taiwan, if the planned blockade sees PLA/PAP troops on Hong Kong streets simply because the successor to the Royal Hong Kong Police force can't keep student protestors from storming a government building ...




You're right, it will look bad and there may be economic repercussions, but this is part of what I _suspect_ is a bigger power struggle in Beijing. There are, I have suggested, at least two factions in Beijing, which I have named, only a bit tongue in cheek, the Lee faction and the Li faction.

Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, has, consistently, advised the Chinese to 'clean up' their endemic corruption problems and he suggests that a _conservative_ democracy can have a self perpetuating political dynasty ... so long as that political party (movement) provides "peace, order and good government." Li Peng, on the other hand, was a hard line ideological communist who favoured absolute state control of everything. Those are the two extremes, as well as I understand them, and I'm sure there are others, but mu _guess_ is that those two form the bases of the debate that I _think_ is raging inside the seven member Politburo Standing Committee of the CPC in Beijing. I am informed, (reliably) I think, that the debate is current amongst party members, including in university graduate schools.


Edited to add:

This report in _The Straits Times_, Singapore's daily English language newspaper, illustrates part of the problem: China, 30 years after Deng Xiaoping, still doesn't 'get' economic liberty. Free Trade Zones are easy, just ask any Hong Kong or Singapore trader, all that needs to happen is that the _officials_ "get out of the way." Chinese officialdom, which is very much attuned to Li Peng, not to Lee Kuan Yew, wants to _regulate_ free trade, and, in a way very like Canadian, especially Quebec bureaucrats, wants to 'pick winners,' too.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> It will not look good to foreign investors, and more importantly, to Taiwan, if the planned blockade sees PLA/PAP troops on Hong Kong streets simply because the successor to the Royal Hong Kong Police force can't keep student protestors from storming a government building.




And it looks like that's happening ...






... I think that's a PLA vehicle. My memory suggests that the HK Police APCs are painted blue with white letters.


Edited to add:

This is, I think, the HK Police's only 'armoured' vehicle, a _Unimog_ U5000.






(The HK Police used to have _Saxon_ APC, the same type used, formerly, by the British Army. They were taken out of HK Police service in 2009, but they are the ones I remember. I don't recall every seeing one of the _Unimogs_.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Faced with this HK Police warning, which says, "Leave or we will fire" ... 






... _Scholarism_, the Hong Kong student activist group formed in 2011 to oppose the _Moral and National Education_ scheme, is urging people at Tamar Garden, an urban park in the downtown Admiralty district, to leave in groups because the situation have become too dangerous.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Trust me on this. People in HK are not used to seeing this on their TV screens ...






... they are watching, from their homes, transfixed and afraid.

Most of the HK people I know are, mainly, _indifferent_ towards liberal democracy, they are not fond of Beijing, but they* are* Chinese, and they are proud of that. The idea of political rule from Beijing is OK, the idea of political interference from Beijing, in what they see as HK's legitimate, internal, domestic business bothers them. But rioting on the streets - the whole _Occupy Central_ thing - bothers them too, maybe more.

HK is a very _conservative_ place ... in everything except economics in which its _liberty_ far exceeds anything the semi-socialistic USA could ever possibly imagine; HK's _economic liberty_ harkens back to Britain 150 years ago. HK's basic _conservatism_ extends towards students staging unruly protests. There is, or was, a "gentlemen's agreement" in HK: pro-democracy _activists_ could protest and demonstrate, more freely than they can in Singapore, for example, but they couldn't interfere with commerce and they had to disperse (and tidy the streets, too) after a police order. _Occupy Central_ is breaking the rules. My _sense_ is that most Hong Kong people are in general support of the AIM - local autonomy - but they oppose the method, and fear the consequences.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This picture was, the person who posted it says, taken at about 2:00AM HK time. The 'author' says "In normal times this street would be one of the busiest in Hong Kong in 4-5 hours. Tear gas approach not working." In fact, in _"normal times,"_ this would be one of the busiest streets in the world - and one of the richest, too.






My _guess_ is that Leung Chun-ying, the Chief Executive of HK, and Tsang Wai-hung, the Police Commissioner, are, for the moment, unwilling to take any action more forceful than tear gas, and, for the same, brief moment, anyway, Beijing agrees.








                          Leung Chun-ying                         and                     Tsang Wai-hung

But, the business of Hong Kong is business and Central - the beating heart of the city's business, cannot be tied up by student demonstrators for very long before everyone will demand stronger measures. According to what I can hear/read the student leaders are, now, asking the demonstrators to leave because they fear the police will resort to harsher measures. Much as I support what the students want, I agree with the leaders ... this is getting dangerous.


----------



## dimsum

I'm fairly certain that this will resolve itself peacefully.  As you've said, the HK population is generally indifferent to "how" they're being governed, as long as the money flows.  

The next few hours will be very important as, from what I'm reading/seeing at least, the crowds are still massive and blocking traffic in/out of the financial district.  Forget the police/government; I don't think most HKers will stand by while the financial sector is crippled.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This photo is said to be from 3:00 AM ...






... it's near the City Gov't HQ in Central.

Clearly the student leaders' call to disperse fell on deaf ears.


----------



## Edward Campbell

They're still there ...








                                                        ... in Causeway Bay                                                             and                                         in Mong Kok (over on Kowloon side)


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is becoming more complex and more 'deeply seated:' media outlets that, normally, focus on pop music and food are publishing highly critical opinion pieces and in high schools in the suburbs (Tung Chug, near the airport to be specific) the students have left their classes to hold day long "teach ins" (who else remembers the 1960s?  :nod: ) in support of the kids - they're mostly kids - downtown at _Occupy_.

There are, of course, comparisons of kids with umbrellas and kids facing down tanks ...










... it's too early to make that comparison, but the _memory_ is strong and Beijing knows it.

CY Leung is bearing the brunt of the criticism, still, but I _think_ that's a little unfair. Li Fei, deputy secretary general of China's National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee in Beijing is the man responsible for this current mess. It is a pig headed insistence on "one country-one system" amongst the _Li faction_ in Beijing, the hardliners, that has caused all this. Now, in fairmness, most people want "one country-one system" but they really want China's system to _evolve_ to look, first, more like HK's and then more like Taiwan's and then, eventually, like Singapore's: democratic, albeit very _conservatively_ (Confucian) democratic, honest, responsive and efficient; that's the _Lee factions'_ aim. The _Li faction_, the hardliners, on the other hand, are often doctrinaire Maoists who (honestly) _believe_ that they, the old, powerful men in the political centre, in and around the Zhongnanhai, must know best.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Just an aside ...

This is, I'm fairly certain, the crowds around the HK Cenotaph, in Central:






... can you imagine young Americans or Brits or Canadians obeying the "(Please) Keep Off the Grass" signs?  :not-again:


----------



## Edward Campbell

I apologize to have  :highjack:  but I actually think that, in terms of global security, what happens in, around and to China is a damned site more important that whatever happens in, around or to Ukraine and/or to Iraq and Syria, combined. As this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, suggests, this is a threat to China's political _system_:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/hong-kong-protests?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/toughtestchinaleader


> *Hong Kong protests*
> A tough test for China's leaders
> 
> Sep 29th 2014, 12:17 by G.E. | HONG KONG
> 
> IT IS a most unusual sight on Chinese soil, and most unsettling for leaders in Beijing. On September 28th and 29th tens of thousands of demonstrators surrounded government offices and filled major thoroughfares around Hong Kong, braving rounds of tear gas from riot police to call for democracy and demand the resignation of Leung Chun-ying, the territory's Beijing-backed chief executive. One image broadcast and shared around the world, of a lone protester holding his umbrella aloft in a cloud of tear gas (pictured above), has given the non-violent protests a poetic echo of “tank man” from the crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
> 
> It also captures precisely what Communist Party leaders in Beijing fear from Hong Kong and its special status under the “one country, two systems” arrangement it has enjoyed since the territory’s handover from Britain in 1997. Not only are its people willing (and allowed by law) to challenge their government openly, but they also could become an inspiration for protests elsewhere in China. The spread of news and images of the protests has been blocked or heavily censored on the mainland, but as the protests carry on, so does the risk of contagion. In that sense it marks one of the most difficult tests of Chinese rule since Tiananmen.
> 
> Compounding the difficulty is the lack of a middle ground. The protesters’ main demand is that the people of Hong Kong be allowed to vote for any candidate of their choosing in elections for the post of chief executive in 2017 (the first in which citizens would have such a vote). President Xi Jinping has made clear he will have nothing resembling full Western democracy within China’s borders. The current election plan, put forward by the central government on August 31st, gives the central government an effective veto over nominees to ensure that Hong Kong remains firmly under its control.
> 
> Several protest movements have converged to challenge that control. Until recently the best-known movement had been Occupy Central with Love and Peace, which is modelled on Occupy Wall Street and named after an important business district at the heart of Hong Kong. But even Occupy’s leaders worried whether they could muster meaningful numbers.
> 
> The biggest driver of these protests have been university students and secondary school students, thousands of whom boycotted classes last week. On the evening of September 26th the leader of the secondary school students, 17-year-old Joshua Wong of Scholarism , was arrested; a move that, along with the use of pepper spray by police, was credited with swelling the popularity of the protests over the weekend (Mr Wong was released on Sunday). In the early hours of September 28th Benny Tai, one of the leaders of Occupy Central, announced that their protest, which had been scheduled for October 1st, China’s national day holiday, would begin immediately.
> 
> Mr Leung has shown no sign of bending. On the afternoon of September 28th, at a press conference held inside the government headquarters while thousands of protesters surrounded the building, Mr Leung repeated his endorsement of the election plan. It calls for chief executive candidates to be screened by a committee stacked with Communist Party supporters (he was elected by a similar committee in 2012, collecting 689 votes along with the derisive nickname “689”). Mr Leung acknowledged that the plan may not have been the “ideal” that some wanted, but he called it progress nonetheless. He said it had given Hong Kong citizens the “universal suffrage” they had been promised. Mr Leung said he welcomed “rational” dialogue but that the government would be “resolute” in dealing with the “unlawful” demonstrations. Asked whether the Chinese army would ever be used, Mr Leung expressed his confidence in the police. The tear gas canisters began flying shortly afterward, surprising protesters who exclaimed variations of “are you kidding?” and “shame on you”. Many donned goggles and unfurled umbrellas to protect themselves against the gas, while some raised their hands and yelled, “don’t shoot”. The protests did not become violent, but they grew and spread to other areas. The calls for Mr Leung's resignation became louder.
> 
> Hong Kong and central government authorities appear for now to be hoping that the protests will dissipate without an escalation of force. Riot police were pulled back on the afternoon of Septemer 29th. Censors on the mainland have worked hard to block the spread of news and images  from Hong Kong. At some point during the protests Chinese authorities seem to have blocked access to Instagram , a photo-sharing site. (Facebook and Twitter have been blocked for years by China’s so-called Great Firewall.)
> 
> The expectation of the Communist Party's supporters in Hong Kong, including the tycoons who have long run the territory, is that pragmatism will win the day over idealism. Many bankers and business executives feel there is no chance that China’s leaders will ever compromise; they view the protests as an irritant. The response from America and Britain has been almost negligible thus far (a statement from the American consulate  in Hong Kong said America did not “take sides” or support "any particular individuals or groups involved”. Many of the territory’s 7m citizens are sympathetic to the demonstrations. But in most neighbourhoods people are going about their business as usual. Even near the areas of protest the city continues to function. This is partly a testament to the restraint and sense of civic responsibility of the demonstrators (who have even picked up after their own trash and, in some cases, sorted for recycling).
> 
> Without a political resolution in sight, questions remain about how much staying power the protests will have, and how much patience the government will show. The possibility looms of a more severe use of force. A two-day Hong Kong holiday this week, on October 1st and 2nd to observe national day, may bring some answers either way. Organisers expect more people to join the protests. Worryingly for the government, that could include tourists travelling from the mainland, where the holiday is also observed. The risk of Hong Kong's unrest spilling over into mainland China may continue to rise.




I _believe_ that China, not HK, can and must change. What's more, I _think_ that Xi Jinping _*believes*_ that, too, and I think he wants to put those changes in motion. 

What kind of change?

As I said above, China needs to start looking more and more like HK - honest and efficient, and then something like Taiwan - democratic, until, finally, it looks a lot like Singapore: a functioning _conservative_ (Confucian) democracy ... which will allow it to become the greatest, richest and most powerful empire the world has ever seen: bigger and richer than either the 19th century British or 20th century American empires. If China cannot change it cannot _grow_. Change, towards an honest, efficient government that respects the rule of law and the _consent of the governed_, is not optional, it is absolutely necessary if Xi Jinpiung wants to preserve China's search for a _system_ based on the rule of a meritocracy. Back _cicrca_ 1990 Anson Chan quipped that the big news wasn't that China had taken over HK, it was that HK would now have to take over China. She was addressing, specifically, the chronic, horrid levels of corruption and maladministration in China ... and she was, still is, right. China must become more and more and more like HK. HK has nothing, at all, to learn from Beijing.

*But:* there are political factions and differing policy views in Beijing. Xi Jinping is *not* a dictator, à la Hitler or Stalin, or even an 'absolute monarch' like a Canadian prime minister can be. There is an _opposition_ in Beijing, even inside the Zhongnanhai, and it is powerful and dangerous and committed to its own view of China's future.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a link to a _CNN_ report with some videos.


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I apologize to have  :highjack:  but I actually think that, in terms of global security, what happens in, around and to China is a damned site more important that whatever happens in, around or to Ukraine and/or to Iraq and Syria, combined...



Speaking personally, you are doing a service here.  I don't think apologies are necessary.  Thanks for the news and the insights.

Cheers.


----------



## tomahawk6

However enlightened the Chinese communists have become,these protests are a threat to the power structure.Its only a matter of time before the gloves come off.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> However enlightened the Chinese communists have become,these protests are a threat to the power structure.Its only a matter of time before the gloves come off.




You're quite right, T6 ... but the issue is: _*where*_ will the gloves come off? In the streets of HK? Or, more quietly, in the corridors of power, inside the red walls of the Zhongnanhai palace?

If they come off on the streets of HK then the process of reunification (the _great matter_ of Taiwan) will be set back by a generation. If they come off in Beijing then I have no ideas about the outcomes.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> You're right, it will look bad and there may be economic repercussions



...and sure enough...

Reuters



> *TSX drops on Hong Kong protests; Encana rises on deal*
> 
> By John Tilak
> 
> TORONTO (Reuters) - *Canada's main stock index dropped on Monday, with every major sector lower, as anxiety over democracy protests in Hong Kong rekindled the bearish sentiment that swept the market last week.*
> 
> One bright spot amid a sea of red was Encana Corp (ECA.TO: Quote), whose shares jumped 3 percent after the company said it agreed to buy Fort Worth, Texas-based Athlon Energy (ATHL.N: Quote) for $5.93 billion in cash.
> 
> *Hong Kong protesters defiantly stood their ground on Monday in the face of tear gas and police baton charges, while the Communist government in Beijing said it would not tolerate dissent and warned against any foreign interference.*
> 
> The resource-heavy Canadian index's decline followed a big drop last week when the market was hit hard by a rally in the U.S. dollar and weakness in commodity prices.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more food for thought on the economic side...

Yahoo Finance/Business Insider



> *Why the next global crisis may stem from China*
> CNBC
> By Katy Barnato – 5 hours ago
> 
> *A "poisonous combination" of low economic growth and high debt could catapult the world into its next crisis, led by China and the "fragile eight" countries, warned a report by senior economists on Monday.*
> 
> This year's Geneva Report, whose authors include ex-Federal Reserve economist Vincent Reinhart, said global debt levels were still rising, particularly in developing countries.
> 
> "Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to deliver and the global debt-to-GDP is still growing, breaking new highs. At the same time, in a poisonous combination, world growth and inflation are also lower than previously expected," Reinhart and colleagues wrote in the 16th annual Geneva Report.
> The authors said the ratio of global debt to GDP was "increasing at an unabated pace and breaking new highs". They calculated that world debt levels stood at 212 percent of the global economy, excluding the financial sector, in 2013-up 38 percent points since 2008.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *China's debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 217 percent, according to the Geneva Report. This ratio was higher than most of its emerging market peers, but below developed economies like the U.K. and U.S. and Japan.*
> 
> Debt levels are also rising in the "fragile eight" countries of India and Indonesia in Asia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile in South America, plus Turkey and South Africa. These are all major emerging markets that suffered credit bubbles and escalating current account deficits following quantitative easing by the Fed.
> 
> (...EDITED)



And London is concerned about its former colony:

BBC



> *Hong Kong protests: UK 'concerned' about situation*
> 
> *The British government has said it is "concerned" about the situation in Hong Kong after clashes between police and pro-democracy activists.
> 
> Tens of thousands of protesters remained on the streets of Hong Kong on Monday, defying attempts by the Hong Kong authorities to make them leave*.
> 
> A Foreign Office statement called for the rights of those demonstrating to be protected.
> 
> But China says other countries should not interfere in Hong Kong's affairs.
> 
> Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997, when it was handed back to China under an agreement which allowed the territory a degree of autonomy and guaranteed certain basic freedoms, including the right to peaceful protest.
> 
> Hong Kong was allowed to keep its economic and social systems and move towards democratic elections under the "one country, two systems" formula.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is that newspapers assessment of the situation:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/40ba38de-485b-11e4-b5ad-00144feab7de.html#slide0


> Hong Kong expects democracy protests to last for ‘long period’
> 
> By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong
> 
> September 30, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: _Bloomberg_
> 
> CY Leung, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said the democracy protests sweeping the territory would last “quite a long period” as protesters prepare for the October 1 National Day holiday which is expected to bring massive crowds on to the streets.
> 
> Thousands of protesters camped outside government headquarters in Admiralty on Monday night, calling for the resignation of Mr Leung who is considered pro-Beijing. Students carried cardboard cutouts, complete with horns, of the embattled chief.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: _Bloomberg_
> 
> Chinese media have been ordered not to cover the protests, which have created the biggest crisis for the Communist party since Tiananmen. On Tuesday Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, said protesters were “jeopardising the global image of Hong Kong” and accused foreign media of making a “groundless comparison” with Tiananmen to “mislead and stir up Hong Kong society”.
> 
> By late afternoon on Tuesday large numbers of people had started gathering along the main road leading to the government buildings. The crowds stretched all the way to the Mandarin Oriental hotel, one of the city’s landmarks near the financial district.
> 
> Protesters had earlier started stockpiling supplies, ahead of the National Day holiday. Hong Kong has also cancelled the firework display held annually on October 1 to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
> 
> On Monday, huge numbers of people poured into the area to join protesters calling on Beijing to reverse course on a controversial electoral reform plan. China last month agreed to introduce universal suffrage for the chief executive election, including restrictions that make it impossible for critics of Beijing to run. On Tuesday, Mr Leung stressed that Beijing “will not rescind its decision”.
> 
> After the scene turned into a party-like atmosphere on Monday, some protesters put up notices on Tuesday reminding people that “civil disobedience is not a carnival”. One placard said: “Not hungry, don’t eat; not thirsty, don’t drink”.
> 
> Underscoring the anger towards the Hong Kong government, protesters hung up an Ikea stuffed wolf – which sounds like Leung in Cantonese – named Lo Mo Sai, which sounds similar to a strong curse in Cantonese.
> 
> Protest organisers estimated that 80,000 people gathered in Admiralty on Monday. The large numbers materialised after the government removed riot police who had fired tear gas and pepper spray at protesters during a tense stand-off on Sunday.
> 
> Many people said the decision to use tear gas on the peaceful protesters backfired by sparking more sympathy for the pro-democracy movement. Critics added that the decision to arrest several student leaders on Friday, including Joshua Wong, the 17-year-old leader of a group called Scholarism, also sparked a backlash.
> 
> Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and WeChat and communication apps such as FireChat have exploded with images of the huge demonstration in Hong Kong – the only place in China where people can protest without retribution.
> 
> People created hashtags for #OccupyHongKong and #UmbrellaRevolution, in a reference to the umbrellas that protesters used to protect themselves from tear gas.
> 
> Chinese censors have blocked Instagram to prevent images of the protesters on Hong Kong’s streets being seen in the mainland. They also blocked searches for terms such as “tear gas” and “Occupy Central” – one of the democracy groups leading the protests – on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service.
> 
> “Hong Kong people have never let me down,” said Martin Lee, a 76-year-old democracy activist, adding that Sunday’s protest was the “most dramatic” of his life.
> The protests in Hong Kong have spilled over into Taiwan where about 100 demonstrators on Monday called for the immediate end of economic and political talks with China to show solidarity with Hong Kong.
> 
> Since Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the territory has been ruled under the “one country, two systems” formula agreed by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. China later agreed to introduce universal suffrage – one person, one vote – for the election of chief executive, the top political job in Hong Kong.
> 
> But when China launched the plan last month, critics called it a “sham democracy”. Potential candidates for chief executive would need support from a majority of the 1,200 members of a nomination committee that is stacked with Beijing loyalists.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Julie Zhu in Hong Kong_



And this, also from the _FT_, for reference:

*Hong Kong’s path to universal suffrage*

_*1984*_: Sino-British Joint Declaration formally begins the process of returning Hong Kong to China under the “one country, two systems” principle, in which the territory will retain its capitalist economy and partial democracy for 50 years after the handover

_*1985*_: Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, is approved by Beijing. One of its stated aims is to introduce universal suffrage for the election of the legislative council and the chief executive following “nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee”

_*1997*_: Hong Kong returns to Chinese rule. Tung Chee-hwa, a former shipping tycoon, is appointed by Beijing to govern the territory

_*2004*_: Beijing rules out universal suffrage for chief executive elections in 2007 and legislative council elections in 2008, and decrees that its approval must be sought for any change to the territory’s electoral laws.

_*2005*_: Mr Tung resigns and is replaced by Donald Tsang

_*2007*_: Mr Tsang begins a new five-year term as chief executive after being elected by an 800-strong committee. Beijing reveals plans to allow Hong Kongers to elect their chief executive directly in 2017 and their legislators by 2020

_*2012*_: Leung Chun-ying elected chief executive by 1,200-strong committee

_*2013*_: Occupy Central with Love and Peace, a campaign group pledging nonviolent civil disobedience if Beijing does not introduce universal suffrage consistent with “international standards”, is founded by Benny Tai Yiu-ting, associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong

_*June 10 2014*_: Beijing white paper on Hong Kong reiterates support for moving towards universal suffrage but says there are limits to the “high degree of autonomy” that Hong Kong enjoys

_*June 29*_: Close of unofficial referendum run by democracy activists in which more than 800,000 people vote on proposals for electoral reform. Beijing brands the poll illegal

_*July 2*_: Police arrest more than 500 protesters at a pro-democracy march

_*August 15*_: Mr Leung signs petition opposing the demands of the pro-democracy movement

_*August 17*_: The Alliance for Peace and Democracy, a group founded to counter Occupy Central, marches through the city

_*August 31*_: Thousands of pro-democracy campaigners protest in Hong Kong after China reveals its framework for universal suffrage. No more than two or three candidates for chief executive will be able to stand, each of whom must receive majority backing from a 1,200-strong nominating committee, which is made up of mostly pro-Beijing elites

_*September 22*_: Students begin a week-long class boycott to protest against China’s framework for Hong Kong electoral reform

_*September 26*_: Student activists storm Civic Square, an area beside the Hong Kong government headquarters. Police attempts to remove them included a number of arrests, including 17-year-old protest leader Joshua Wong, who was released two days later

_*September 28*_: Occupy Central leader Benny Tai announces that the long-awaited civil disobedience campaign has formally been launched – three days before the original planned October 1 start date – as the group seeks to build on the student demonstrations. Later in the day, riot police deploy tear gas and pepper spray in an attempt to disperse thousands of people gathered in Hong Kong’s city centre

_*September 29*_: Hong Kong withdraws riot police from the streets, in a move that appeared to open the way for tens of thousands of people to stream into the area to join the protest movement

_*September 30*_: Protesters start to stockpile supplies in preparation for the National Day holiday on October 1 when even larger crowds are expected to take to the streets of Hong Kong on the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China


----------



## dimsum

Not related to the HK protests, but an interesting story in China trying to suppress the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang:



> Senior Chinese officials have warned the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) there will be "wider implications" over tonight's Foreign Correspondent story about unrest in western China.



http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-30/abc-warned-of-wider-implications-from-china-story/5779218


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> However enlightened the Chinese communists have become,these protests are a threat to the power structure.Its only a matter of time before the gloves come off.




It's a bit dangerous, _in my opinion_, to use the word "enlightened" when referring to China.

When we say _enlightenment_ or _enlightened_ we tend to think about the 18th century Scottish and later, broader European "age of enlightenment".

The Chinese had an "age of enlightenment," too, but it happened 2,500, not 250 years ago.

The Chinese are _enlightened_, but not in quite the same way we are ...

Our enlightenment came about, in some large part, because of the horrors of the Thirty Years War and, especially, of the religious _absolutism_ that provoked and accompanied it.

China's enlightenment began during the _Spring and Autumn Period,_ an era (around 750-400 BCE) or revolutionary political (and social) change in China.

Our enlightenment led to modern _liberalism_. We, _liberals_, demand, for example, that our political leaders answer to us, on an individual, vote-by-vote basis. China's enlightenment gave us Confucianism, which leads to a very _conservative_ political view. (And you need to be very, very careful with those two words. I equate (and use) _liberal_ to someone who believes in _individualism_, to the "rights of the sovereign individual" being paramount. Confucianism is related to the notion of filial responsibility which stretches from father and son, to subject and governor, governor and emperor and, finally, to emperor and _heaven_.) Confucians have no difficulty with the idea that, today, Xi Jinping is the _Paramount Leader_ answerable only to ... to heaven?


----------



## tomahawk6

I use the term enlighten with regard to communism.The PRC were the first to allow some capitalism with tight controls and it allowed the economy to grow while the USSR stagnated and collapsed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Fair enough, T6, and I sort of guessed something like that, but Deng Xiaoping's shift to free markets should, also, be seen - as the Chinese see it -  as a _return_ to an ancient (far, Far, FAR before Adam Smith) socio-economic structure.

What I'm trying to do is to remind us all that we, all of us, tend to see the world though the lens of our own experiences. Th Chinese, a billion or more of them, have different histories, different experiences and they see the same world, but through a vastly different _lens_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I love this picture that @jackycwong posted on _Twitter_ with the caption: "Only in Hong Kong - doing homework while protesting #OccupyCentral"






The protest has _morphed_ a bit. CY Leung has, apparently, declined to use any more force and I'm _guessing_ he will allow the protest to play itself out over the 1 Oct holiday long weekend. The police and protesters seem to have achieved a _modus vivendi_ which allows the protest to continue while the City, proper, still works.

I _think_, based on what I am getting first hand, that many, many HK people, people who are, normally, very apolitical, are very much onside with the students on this. My _suspicion_ is that Mr Leung knows that and has advised Beijing to let him handle it his way ... *BUT* if his way is to "wait them out" then I'm afraid it will not work.

This is a golden moment for Xi Jinping, equivalent, in many ways, to the situation in 1976/77, when Deng Xiaoping worked his back into power, post the deaths of Zhou Enlai (his friend, political champion and protector) and Mao (his bitter enemy). If Xi can do to the hardliners what the purge of the _Gang of Four_ did for Deng, then he can make a bold move to _revolutionize_ Chinese politics by allowing, indeed encouraging greater local democracy in HK, and promising reform to all Chinese provinces, just as Deng, for example, made Shenzhen into a "special economic zone" and set the _return to a market economy_ in motion for all of China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Just an aside ...
> 
> This is, I'm fairly certain, the crowds around the HK Cenotaph, in Central:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ... can you imagine young Americans or Brits or Canadians obeying the "(Please) Keep Off the Grass" signs?  :not-again:




And, equally, in the "it would never happen here" category ~ here being New York or Toronto or Ottawa:






HK student protesters clean up the protest site.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hey, it's HK, it's how things are done.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

More photo's of the protest here at  Cryptome.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Further to my "It's HK, is how things are done," meme, the _BBC_ notes the same thing in an article with several photos and videos.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China has manifold problems, some serious, some _normal_ for any national economy, but of them all I would put one at the very top of the list: *water*.
> 
> Look at this graphic:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: http://greenleapforward.com/2010/01/06/charting-chinas-water-future/
> 
> Now, look at this article.
> 
> Not only does China have a _supply_ problem, the water is does have is of poor quality.
> 
> Several billions of US dollars can and will improve the latter situation but _supply_ will remain problematical.
> 
> There is _new_, fresh water is Est Asia without significant _demand_ ... but it is all North of China.




Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_ is a highly critical story about the latest water diversion project:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21620226-worlds-biggest-water-diversion-project-will-do-little-alleviate-water-scarcity-canal-too


> *Water consumption*
> A canal too far
> *The world’s biggest water-diversion project will do little to alleviate water scarcity*
> 
> Sep 27th 2014 | XICHUAN, HENAN PROVINCE | From the print edition
> 
> THREE years ago the residents of Hualiba village in central China’s Henan province were moved 10km (six miles) from their homes into squat, yellow houses far from any source of work or their newly allocated fields. These days only the very young and very old live there. Close to their old farms, a giant concrete canal now cuts a swathe. From October 31st the channel will gush with water flowing from China’s lush south to the parched north.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The new waterway is part of the biggest water-diversion scheme in the world: the second arm of what is known as the South-North Water Diversion Project. This is designed to solve an age-old imbalance. The north of China has only a fifth of the country’s naturally available fresh water but two-thirds of the farmland. The problem has grown in recent decades because of rapid urban growth and heavy pollution of scarce water supplies.
> 
> The result is a chronic shortage. The World Bank defines water scarcity as less than 1,000 cubic metres (35,300 cubic feet) of fresh water per person per year. Eleven of China’s 31 provinces are dryer than this. Each Beijing resident has only 145 cubic metres a year of available fresh water. In 2009 the government said that nearly half the water in seven main rivers in China was unfit for human consumption. All this has encouraged ever greater use of groundwater. Much of this is now polluted too.
> 
> In 1952 Mao Zedong suggested the north could “borrow” water from the south. After his death China’s economic boom boosted demand for such a scheme and provided the cash to enable it. In 2002 the diversion project got under way. An initial phase was completed last year. This involved deepening and broadening the existing Grand Canal, which was built some 1,400 years ago, to take 14.8 billion cubic metres of water a year more than 1,100km northward from the Yangzi river basin towards the port city of Tianjin.
> 
> In late October the second, far more ambitious and costly route is due to open. This new watercourse, over a decade in the making, will push 13 billion cubic metres of water more than 1,200km from the Danjiangkou dam in the central province of Hubei to the capital, Beijing. The aim is to allow industry and agriculture to keep functioning; already in 2008 Beijing started pumping in emergency supplies from its neighbouring province, Hebei. The new canal will help avert an imminent crisis. But the gap between water supply and demand will remain large and keep growing.
> 
> The transfer will supply about a third of Beijing’s annual demand. A spur of the canal will provide an even greater proportion of Tianjin’s. But these shares will shrink over time. Even if people use less water, population growth, the expansion of cities and industrialisation will increase China’s overall demand. By lubricating further water-intensive growth the current project may even end up exacerbating water stress in the north.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Shifting billions of cubic metres across the country has caused huge disruption. The government says it has moved 330,000 people to make way for the central route. Laixiang Sun of the University of Maryland in America reckons the number uprooted is at least half a million. There will also be health and environmental costs. Diverting river-water northward could promote the spread of diseases common in the south, particularly schistosomiasis, a debilitating snail-borne disease. Reduced flow in the Yangzi may make coastal water supplies vulnerable to intrusion by seawater and increase the potential for drought.
> 
> The financial cost is also high. Mr Sun puts the cost of the project at more than $62 billion—far higher than the original $15 billion price tag. His estimate does not include the running of the project or the building of 13 new water-treatment plants to clean the water.
> 
> By increasing supply, the government is failing to confront the real source of the problem: high demand for water and inefficient use of it. Chinese industry uses ten times more water per unit of production than the average in industrialised countries, according to a report by the World Bank in 2009. A big reason for this is that water in China is far too cheap. In May 2014 Beijing introduced a new system that makes tap water more expensive the more people use. But prices are still far from market levels. Officials turn a blind eye to widespread extraction of un-tariffed groundwater by city dwellers and farmers, despite plummeting groundwater levels.
> 
> Raising the price would cut demand and encourage more efficient use. It should also help lure industry away from water-scarce areas where prices would be set at higher rates. Arid areas that are forced by the government to pipe water into desiccated cities like Beijing could offset their losses by charging higher tariffs.
> 
> Yet such solutions make officials nervous. They do not want to scare industries away from cities by charging them more for water. They also do not want to face angry protests by residents. Hence they prefer shifting water around in pipes and canals. Britt Crow-Miller of Portland State University describes the diversion project as “a physical demonstration of political power”. In Henan giant billboards make this clear: they call on locals to support the project “to bring the capital clean water and blue skies”. No reciprocal signs ask Beijingers to thank their southern comrades.
> 
> In the absence of any grand plan to cut demand, the government will need to keep the water flowing north. This makes it more likely that a third part of the diversion project might one day go ahead. This would deploy tricky engineering at great altitude to transfer water from the headwaters of the Yangzi to the upper reaches of the Yellow river across the Tibetan plateau. Such a massive project would still not solve the problem. But it might keep water flowing for a few years more—and in China politics is thicker than water.




Raising the price of water is, indeed, part of the solution, but, despite the amazing changes that have occurred in the past 35 years, China is not, yet, a wealthy country. Until China can afford to "pay as it goes" then projects like these, with their environmental risks and social disruptions, will be needed.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dimsum said:
			
		

> I'm fairly certain that this will resolve itself peacefully.  As you've said, the HK population is generally indifferent to "how" they're being governed, as long as the money flows.
> 
> The next few hours will be very important as, from what I'm reading/seeing at least, the crowds are still massive and blocking traffic in/out of the financial district.  Forget the police/government; I don't think most HKers will stand by while the financial sector is crippled.




That, according to a _Wall Street Journal_ report, is Beijing's tactic: "Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong's chief executive, has adopted a new strategy to marshal the city's widespread pro-democracy protests: allow the demonstrations to continue until the protesters tire or lose support from the wider public, according to a person familiar with the matter ... The impetus to resolve the standoff peacefully has come from the Chinese government in Beijing, this person said."


----------



## tomahawk6

The protestors are calling for the Chief Executive to step down.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The protestors are calling for the Chief Executive to step down.




Some are, it is a loosely organized series of protests, actually.

Calling for CY Leung's resignation is a mistake.

Remember the first Principle of War, the "Master Principle:" *Selection and Maintenance of the AIM*.

The AIM was, and should remain: democratic, interference free elections in HK, including the selection of candidates for the post of Chief Executive. That's a good, clear, and _*achievable*_ aim.

Changing the aim to or to include CY Leung's resignation makes no sense. He's not the enemy. The enemy is in Beijing; it's Li Fei and his faction. Plus, of course, there's always the good old "Law of Unintended Consequences."

Can the students force CY Leung's resignations? It's possible, a remote possibility, in my opinion, but, Yes, it's _*possible*_. But consider what happens next ... what have they accomplished? They have embarrassed, even humiliated Xi Jinping and the old men in power in Beijing. How does that help? Who does that help? I don't think it helps at all ... except that I'm pretty sure it would enhance the power of Li Fei and his hardline friends.


----------



## CougarKing

More for today:

*China watches Hong Kong protests, fearful of contagion* 

[Yahoo! - AFP News]



> China's refusal to allow free elections in Hong Kong risks an open-ended confrontation that will test how far Beijing will go to stop the city's pro-democracy fever from infecting the mainland.
> 
> While a heavy-handed response threatens the city's reputation as a stable, world-class business hub, Beijing fears that unchecked protests could spill across the border and ignite discontent with one-party Communist rule.
> 
> "China is watching this very nervously," said Michael Kugelman, an Asia expert with the DC-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "We are getting close to an inflection point."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)








Photo By Philippe Lopez
-


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's a good _Occupy HK_ slide show here, on the _Financial Times_ website.


----------



## Kirkhill

So Xi and Putin share the same problems.

Hong Kong is Xi's version of the Maydan (but a whole lot better organized and effective for its lack of violence and civic minded protesters).

Xinjiang is his Caucasus (with exactly the same people - the Turks).

Vlad and Jinping can only meet by going through the Turks...... meanwhile they are pressured from the outside by people that have sampled both Western "liberalism" and local autocracy.  In China's case it is kind of a self-inflicted wound.  They let pride get the better of common sense.  They asked for and got Hong Kong.  Kind of like catching a dog and having to live with the fleas.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> Xinjiang is his Caucasus (with exactly the same people - the Turks).



Then what is the Russian parallel for Tibet?  (*Tibet is called Xi Zang/西藏 in Chinese)


----------



## Kirkhill

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Then what is the Russian parallel for Tibet?  (*Tibet is called Xi Zang/西藏 in Chinese)



Siberia?  ???


----------



## CougarKing

The "Umbrella revolutionaries" are sent a message by the party in Beijing...



> *Beijing just sent a chilling message to Hong Kong's umbrella revolution*
> 
> HONG KONG - Beijing has a harshly worded message for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
> 
> Not only is Beijing unwilling to reconsider the August decision to allow only Communist Party-approved candidates to run for Hong Kong's highest office, but Hong Kongers who continue to participate in the protests should expect dire consequences, an editorial in the People's Daily newspaper warned today.
> 
> Some activists and analysts, including a former Tiananmen student leader, say the piece bears a marked similarity to a notorious editorial that ran the People's Daily more than 25 years ago. That piece was later blamed for leading to the brutal crackdown on demonstrations, which killed hundreds or thousands, depending on estimates.
> 
> Today's People's Daily editorial (link in Chinese) says the Beijing stance on Hong Kong's elections are "unshakable" and legally valid. It goes on to argue that the pro-democracy "Occupy Central" protests are illegal and are hurting Hong Kong. _"If it continues, the consequences will be unimaginable,"_ the editorial warns.
> 
> The editorial advises Occupy Central's participants to "stop all illegal behavior as soon as possible," and return order and peace to Hong Kong. It concludes: _"If a few people are determined to go against the rule of law and provoke disturbances, in the end they will reap what they have sown."_
> 
> *Quartz*


----------



## Edward Campbell

I _think_ - pure guesswork, nothing more - that _People's Daily_ is trying to frighten the student demonstrators , as Brian Gable suggests in today's _Globe and Mail_:





Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/not-that-that-ever-happened/article20859573/#dashboard/follows/

But I'm also _guessing_ that the _Wall Street Journal's_ sources (link posted earlier today) have it right better.

There are HUGE, _strategic_ issues at play here: Taiwan, especially. Another Tiananmen would be an even more HUGE problem ~ it just doesn't make sense, to me ... but I'm a _laowai_ so what do I know?


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I _think_ - pure guesswork, nothing more - that _People's Daily_ is trying to frighten the student demonstrators ...
> 
> But I'm also _guessing_ that the _Wall Street Journal's_ sources (link posted earlier today) have it right better.
> 
> There are HUGE, _strategic_ issues at play here: Taiwan, especially. Another Tiananmen would be an even more HUGE problem ~ it just doesn't make sense, to me ... but I'm a _laowai_ so what do I know?



And it, the _WSJ's_ version of a strategy, might be working. There are many reports this morning that locals in Mong Kok (North of Kowloon, away from the Central/Admiralty/Causeway Bay business district, and with less media attention) are attacking the students, demolishing their camps and so on.


----------



## Kirkhill

http://news.yahoo.com/women-targeted-sexual-assaults-h-k-protests-133101427.html



> Women targeted in sexual assaults at H.K. protests
> AFP
> 
> Women pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong are being targeted with sexual assaults and harassment, demonstrators and an international human rights group said as violence broke out in two of the city's busiest shopping districts.
> 
> Amnesty International accused the police of "failing in their duty" to protect demonstrators on Friday evening, saying officers "stood by and did nothing" when counter demonstrators and suspected triad members clashed with activists at protest sites in Mongkok and Causeway Bay.
> 
> "Women and girls were among those targeted, including incidents of sexual assault, harassment and intimidation" in the commercial hubs, Amnesty said in a statement.
> 
> The pro-democracy demonstrations have taken over major thoroughfares in the city, causing traffic to grind to a standstill for the past week.
> 
> An AFP reporter spoke to one young woman protester in Causeway Bay who said her three friends had been assaulted by a man who was opposed to the Occupy movement, whose supporters have vowed to stay on the streets until their goal of universal suffrage is achieved.
> 
> The three women were all crying as they were bundled into a police van.
> 
> "We are making further inquiries -- these girls say they were indecently assaulted," a police officer on the scene told AFP.
> 
> Tensions remained high throughout Saturday at the three main protest sites where democracy activists have held sit-ins for the last week as organisers reinforced barricades and set up lookout points in case of further assaults by counter demonstrators.
> 
> An AFP reporter in Mongkok on Saturday afternoon heard a female counter-demonstrator tell pro-democracy crowds through a loudspeaker: "Women are supposed to be touched by men." She spoke in Cantonese with a mainland accent.
> 
> Amnesty said that a woman at the Mongkok clashes had also been attacked on Friday.
> 
> "A man grabbed her breasts while she was standing with other protesters at around 4:00 pm (0800 GMT)," they said in a statement.
> 
> "She also witnessed the same man assault two other women by touching their groins," it added, with other protesters intervening to help her.



So is this the Chinese version of Vlad's strategy?  If you can't put Uniforms into the street then put a motley amalgam of "civic-minded" locals, gangsters and agents provocateurs into the streets?

All those decent students, keeping off the grass and doing their lessons, are about to be f*cked over by their government - without the government honestly displaying its hand.

No Tiananmen.  More like the Gordon Riots

As these tactics become more common, governments not using their institutions overtly but relying on the covert, what happens to the institution of government and its agencies which rely on the trust of their governed?  When do people start ignoring all laws everywhere completely?


----------



## CougarKing

As Chinese leaders mull whether to use the PLA garrison against the protesters, many of them are also aware that using force like at Tiananmen Square would effectively mean the end of the "one country, 2 systems" arrangement in Hong Kong.

Reuters



> *Stark choices face Beijing over any PLA on Hong Kong streets*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Thorny political, legal and strategic realities make any such involvement of the PLA exceptionally difficult, however, and *Hong Kong's 27,000-strong police force is expected to remain in charge for the time being*.
> 
> Government advisers and experts believe leaders in both Beijing and Hong Kong understand the immense political costs of ordering the PLA out of their barracks, ending at a stroke Hong Kong's vaunted autonomy under the "one country-two systems" formula under which Britain agreed to hand over the Asian financial hub.
> 
> Foreign diplomats are monitoring developments closely, noting moves in recent months to upgrade PLA facilities in Hong Kong and unconfirmed reports of anti-riot drills being staged at both urban and rural bases.
> 
> * The garrison comprises between 8,000 to 10,000 personnel, mostly infantry troops, spread between bases across the border in Shenzhen and in Hong Kong, envoys estimate. It includes a small naval and air-force attachment.
> 
> "I think that (Hong Kong) policymakers at the highest level ... are fully aware in that if the PLA were deployed, in the eyes of the world it would be the end of one country-two systems,"* Regina Ip, an adviser to embattled Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying and a former security chief, told Reuters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Further reports seem to indicate that:

     1. The Beijing government is using _triad_ gangsters to lead or, at least stir anti-proter sentiment amongst the (relatively) poor working people in the Mong Kok district. The central government has used gangster before and the gangsters,
         even without central government pressure, are losing money from gambling and prostitutioin and the like in Mong Kok and they would like the protest to end. But, some of the public reaction is real: small businesses are hurting because the
         protests are bad for business; and

     2. The protest leaders have promised they there will be access, for government workers, etc, to the buildings in the government complexes in the central business district.

I agree that the political and strategic calculus is hideously complex.

Look at KAL's cartoon in this week's edition of _The Economist_:





Source: http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21621894-kals-cartoon

You know, I suspect the students were surprised ... no, shocked, when the HKP didn't sweep them off the streets after one night. Now they understand that they have a _political position_ which commands attention in Beijing. The trick, if that's the right word, is how to use that political position or, at least, how to avoid misusing it. It's complex for them, too.

"Selection and maintenance of the AIM ..."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is a good SitRep as we head into week two:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ef08654a-4c71-11e4-a0d7-00144feab7de.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fhome_us%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct&siteedition=intl#axzz3FBoLIOmk


> The tumultuous week of protest that has shaken Hong Kong
> *Fears rise over end game for pro-democracy protests as rhetoric escalates on both sides*
> 
> By David Pilling in Hong Kong
> 
> October 5, 2014
> 
> The tumultuous week that has shaken Hong Kong began with the tear-gassing of pro-democracy protesters and ended with a wave of seemingly orchestrated street thuggery. In between came scenes of carnival-like celebration as tens of thousands of impeccably organised and unfailingly polite students set up camp throughout one of the world’s most important financial centres in pursuit of their aim of “genuine” universal suffrage.
> 
> But as the rhetoric escalated in recent days from both Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s embattled leader, and from Beijing, whose official media brusquely dismissed the protests as “futile”, what everyone really wanted to know was how this would end.
> 
> Mr Leung, whose resignation the students are seeking, raised the stakes by saying he would take “all necessary actions” to restore order by Monday. Some supporters of the students, including university professors, begged them to leave the streets before they got hurt.
> 
> “There’s all sorts of ways this can turn out badly,” said David Zweig, a China expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who said the students should declare a partial victory and go home rather than face a potentially violent crackdown. The alternative, he said, was being crushed, either slowly through a drawn-out waiting game, or quickly through the use of lightning arrests and more barrages of tear gas.
> 
> The pro-democracy protests, which have turned Hong Kong upside down, started with the occupation of government offices 10 days ago. Since then they have gone through several distinct, often confusing, phases, as the numbers involved ebbed and flowed and the dynamics of the cat-and-mouse game between protesters and government shifted.
> 
> After protests were triggered by the initial occupation of government offices on 26 September led by Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old high-school pupil, pro-democracy group Occupy Central brought forward its planned action to occupy the central business district. Then came the tear-gassing last Sunday night, a use of force that shocked many Hong Kong residents unaccustomed to robust police action. This brought another wave of sympathisers on to the streets.
> 
> As last Wednesday’s National Day bank holiday approached, the police virtually disappeared from the streets. That left swaths of the city to a party-like atmosphere, damped only by a lingering fear of what might come next. Jo Tong, a 26-year-old PE teacher, was camped out on one of the city’s main highways with a friend. She said her relatives in mainland China thought protesters like her were foolish. “They think you can’t challenge laws made in China,” she said. “You just have to obey.”
> 
> Markets, which weathered the 1997 handover and the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), were shaken but not stirred. In the holiday-shortened week, the Hang Seng index fell a modest 2.6 per cent, and actually rose 0.6 per cent on Friday amid signs that the protests might peter out. The Hong Kong dollar weakened marginally, but the peg with the US dollar held firm. “From a business standpoint, all our offices are open, our trading floors are open and only a couple of our branches are closed,” said one senior banker.
> 
> But the mood changed decisively again on Friday night as gangs of thugs – some allegedly with “triad” organised crime connections – beat up protesters in the Mongkok area of Kowloon. Pro-democracy supporters, many of whom stuck defiantly to their non-violent principles, accused the police of standing by as they came under attack.
> 
> “We didn’t fight back, but the police just stood there,” said Paul Lam, a 25-year-old purchasing assistant in a green flak jacket and black jeans. In the weekend that followed, parts of Mongkok, a busy shopping area on the opposite side of Victoria Harbour from the main protests, became a virtual no-go area as students and anti-occupy protesters fought running street battles.
> 
> At times arguments flared between pro-democracy leaders as they tried to bring their amorphous movement under greater tactical control. There were disagreements about whether protests had become too dispersed and whether to talk to the authorities without conditions. Albert Ho, a veteran pro-democracy campaigner, said it would be hard to get the students to go home unless they won some concrete concessions. “Ninety per cent of the protesters are very young people, aged between 20 and 30. We can’t tell them what to do and expect them to listen.”
> 
> In the absence of reliable polls, it has been hard to gauge public sympathy for the demonstrations. Although most people in Hong Kong say they want more democracy, some see the students’ action as naive and disruptive.
> Critics have also argued that the pro-democracy camp, in rejecting Beijing’s offer of limited universal suffrage, will end up losing everything. Instead of the proposed system for 2017, in which 5m registered voters would get the chance to choose from a list of pre-screened candidates, the next chief executive would be elected under current rules. Mr Leung, the current chief executive, was selected with just 689 votes from the members of a 1,200-strong pro-Beijing committee that decides.
> 
> “You can’t change China,” said Mr Zweig. “The best you can do is slow down what I call the ‘mainlandisation’ of Hong Kong. I don’t know if the students can ever go beyond that.”




I _think_ (just hope?) that David Zweig is wrong. I _believe_ China can be changed. I hope Xi Jinping has embarked on a programme to change China. If he has then it would not shock me if he is also looking at extending his term in office beyond the current "term limits" established by Deng Xiaoping.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a report that some protestors, the ones in the Mong Kok area, anyway, are preparing to move out.


----------



## CougarKing

The comments in response to the facebook posting for this were quite funny...there's a lot of pro-China students, many of whom were barely old enough to remember or who weren't born before the 1997 handover, who are posting to denounce British colonialism...which has nothing to do with the Hong Kong protests. A tenuous, illogical connection that they're drawing-  that just because one is against the Chinese govt. that they are necessarily in favour of British colonialism.   : The younger students at the posting soon got flooded and overwhelmed by those Canadians posting in favour of the protesters. 

Vancity Buzz



> *UMBRELLAS PILED IN FRONT OF VANCOUVER CHINESE CONSULATE IN SUPPORT OF HONG KONG*
> 
> This morning, hundreds of Vancouverites added their voice to Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution by protesting outside the entrance of the People’s Republic of China Consulate on Granville Street.
> 
> An estimated 300 attendees attended the rally, which included the act of piling hundreds of umbrellas in front of the driveway gate.
> 
> Another rally is planned for 3 p.m. tomorrow (Sunday, October 5) at Robson Square (Vancouver Art Gallery south side).
> 
> Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have brought Central Hong Kong to a standstill to oppose Beijing’s plan to require a pro-Chinese government committee to screen the nominees of Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive public elections in 2017.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kirkhill

S.M.A.

That raises an interesting question.  What are intra-"Chinese" relations like within the "Chinese" community in Canada?

Mainland Han - Mainland Others - Northerners - Southerners - Hong Kong - Taiwan - Diaspora Chinese such as those from Singapore, Malaysia and the West Indies?

"We" - or as ERC might put it - the "laowai" - have a tendency to combine all of the above just the same as we do for most other communities.

Do these communities bring their mutual belligerence to Canada?  (And no this is not a racist probe - Rangers and Celtic fans, just like Millwall and the Hammers - take a generation or two to adjust).


----------



## Edward Campbell

A few years ago, here at Carleton University, there were several Chinese Student Associations. The first division was linguistic: there were Associations for Mandarin speakers and separate Associations for Cantonese students; the next level of division, within each linguistic group, was between e.g. Mandarin speaking mainlanders and Mandarin speaking Taiwanese, and I think there may have been another division, amongst the mainlanders, between pro and anti communists. The HK (Cantonese speaking) students kept themselves apart from the Cantonese speaking mainlanders ... and so it went.


----------



## CougarKing

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> That raises an interesting question.  What are intra-"Chinese" relations like within the "Chinese" community in Canada?
> 
> Mainland Han - Mainland Others - Northerners - Southerners - Hong Kong - Taiwan - Diaspora Chinese such as those from Singapore, Malaysia and the West Indies?



Well here in Richmond, BC, the wave of immigrants over the past couple of decades has been predominantly Mandarin speakers from various regions of China, with a sprinkling of Taiwanese; the few Cantonese speakers are mainly from Hong Kong.

Vancouver's "other" Chinatown was the historical one, based more on Cantonese speakers from both Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province, that has been around since the late 1800s, if I can recall correctly. Some of the more recent immigrants to Richmond have found their way there.

As I said before much earlier in this thread, the mainlanders are not monolithic. Each province has a dialect varies in different degrees depending how far they are from Beijing. 

The dialect Sichuanese or _Sichuan hua_, (old spelling Szechwan in the Wade Giles system), while spoken mainly in Sichuan, can be understood by people in neighbouring provinces; the giant, province-size municipality of Chongqing, (where I used to work for the Canadian Consulate) has its own dialect of _Chongqing hua_ which is pretty much the same as _Sichuan hua._ If you go a little further to the city of Kunming in the neighbouring province of Yunnan, the dialect will have greater variations, but the locals will still able to understand something like 70% of what people from Chongqing or Sichuan say.

A classmate of mine from Beijing said she could probably understand something like 30% of _Sichuan hua_ or _Chongqing hua_. 

For example, to give one an idea of the variations, in Chongqing, the word for passport, pronounced "hu zaho" (护照) in Mandarin is actually pronounced "fu zhao" in _Chong qing hua_.

My point is that when Chinese people overseas tend to find themselves in larger groups of fellow mainland Chinese, they tend to gravitate toward others who share the same dialect; the Shanghainese, the Hunanese, the Sichuanese, etc. 

That's why when you go to a Chinese restaurant, they will focus on a certain speciality, such as Sichuan cuisine (hotpot) or Xiao long bao/dumplings (from Shanghai/Jiangan regions) Of course, if you go to the local Asian supermarket TNT or Aberdeen mall in Richmond, they will of course still use Mandarin to interact with all other Chinese.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It appears to me that the situation in HK is unfolding as it should, and must:

     1. The students must disperse, empty handed in political terms. Cy Leung and Beijing must win. Beijing will not, cannot tolerate being 'beaten' by anyone; but, and it's a *Big BUT*

     2. In a few (not many) months, but not just a few weeks, Beijing must concede some ground to the students. My guess is that political parties, plural, will be tolerated in HK and the _official_ (sanctioned by Beijing) parties will be allowed
         to run candidates in the civic elections, including for the Chief Executive. I have read/heard that China is, already, looking to some sort of "opposition party" as a political safety valve. HKJ might be a good test bed.


----------



## CougarKing

More food for thought to help further answer Kirkhill's question:

Reuters




> *Are 'Hong Kong people' still Chinese? Depends on how you define 'Chinese'*
> By: Alan Chin, Reuters
> October 6, 2014 6:31 AM
> 
> (Alan Chin was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. He has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central Asia. He is a contributing photographer to The New York Times, the Chinese magazine Modern Weekly, and his work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Chin is currently working on a book project about his ancestral region of Toishan in southern China.)
> 
> “Hong Kong people! Hong Kong people!” shouted tens of thousands of Occupy Central demonstrators on the streets of downtown Hong Kong as they braved police pepper spray and tear gas this weekend. So simple and self-evident, the slogan gets to the heart of the matter, because beyond the immediate causes of contention are the much larger existential issues of who gets to define just exactly what it means to be part of China, and to be Chinese.
> 
> Hong Kong, normally the most civil and efficient of cities, has been swept by an enormous wave of characteristically polite and peaceful protest directed against the Beijing-leaning government’s dilution of long-promised reforms. These would have allowed direct election of the chief executive, under the much touted but perhaps never well understood “One Country; Two Systems” formula.
> 
> It was never going to be easy, to have one country where there is still a border dividing the two sides, separate currencies, cars driving on opposite sides of the road, and mutually incomprehensible languages; let alone competing political systems with vastly different ideas of citizenship, rule of law, and transparency.
> 
> China is a one-party state; Hong Kong has many political parties, all operating freely. China has the Great Firewall that just now has blocked Instagram, fearing people on the mainland would see the protests; Hong Kong has open Internet. These and countless other contrasts may outweigh — perhaps far outweigh — the shared cultural heritage and economic prosperity that bind these two Chinas together.
> 
> For 150 years, Hong Kong was a British colony. Especially during the Cold War, it felt like that would be the case forever. But Hong Kong was first occupied during the gunboat imperialism of the 19th century Opium Wars, so even fervently anti-Communist and Westernized Chinese always felt great ambivalence towards the British: gratitude and admiration terribly tempered by sufferance of arrogance and injustice.
> 
> As it turned out, Britain’s last great colony was also its most successful. The racist exploitation of previous generations gradually transformed into Hong Kong becoming a sanctuary for refugees and an entrepot for free trade and manufacturing. It was as if the decline and fall of the once mighty British Empire somehow mellowed the colonizers and colonized both. The British had never run Hong Kong as a democracy; they simply appointed governors. But at the eleventh hour before the handover to China in 1997, perhaps out of guilt or repentance, they negotiated a deal for the protection of civil liberties, open markets, and gradual democratization in Hong Kong for 50 years. China’s leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, not wanting to kill a gold-egg-laying goose, agreed.
> 
> *Seventeen years into the arrangement, the honeymoon of reunification is long over. Despite tremendous economic development and rising wealth in China, political evolution has not kept pace. In fact, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration has backslid in terms of civil society, cracking down hard on dissidents and flexing military muscle abroad on the South China Sea, entering into confrontations with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines and the other Southeast Asian countries.
> 
> So when the Chinese government, backed by Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s current chief executive, announced that only candidates approved by a pro-Beijing committee would be permitted to compete in what were promised to be free elections*, there was, as Phelim Kine of Human Rights Watch said Monday, a *“profound sense of betrayal that the Chinese government has reneged on its commitment to allow universal suffrage in 2017.”*
> 
> ——
> 
> Democracy, even applied to the seven million citizens of Hong Kong as opposed to the nearly 1.4 billion population of China, seems a dangerous harbinger of chaos and tumult for the regime. And yet that fear is already self-fulfilling, as Mr. Kine describes: “Hong Kong has a long history of peacefully managing mass protest, so the excessive response really suggests that the police might have been under the political influence of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.”
> 
> Kine continued, *“Every October 1, (China’s National Day) many Chinese come to Hong Kong, it’s a favored holiday destination to watch the huge fireworks; humiliatingly for the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, the fireworks have been cancelled, apparently in a move to reduce the numbers of people on the street.
> 
> That means that instead of a fireworks display, large numbers of mainland tourists are going to get a hands-on, real-time lesson in peaceful protest by the citizens of Hong Kong, who are seeking to pressure the government to grant a right that was promised, a right routinely denied in China.”*
> 
> Polls have steadily shown that larger and larger percentages of Hong Kong citizens identify as “Hong Konger” rather than “Chinese” even as the government seeks greater conformity.
> 
> *To many in Hong Kong, then, “Chinese” may primarily mean a cultural, ethnic, or racial marker of identity rather than of political nationality. There are “Chinese” of various types who make up the majority population in Taiwan and Singapore, a significant percentage in Malaysia and Thailand, and large numbers around the world.
> 
> So when the demonstrators chant “Hong Kong People!” they are asserting that to be a citizen of Hong Kong is emphatically not the same as being Chinese.* For the authorities in Beijing, this may send shivers down their spines. Because there is nothing they hate and fear more than the center not holding, torn apart by rough beasts. They are unable to see that it is China’s own political shortcomings that encourage this fundamental debate and resulting protest.
> 
> –
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

In this report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, we get a look at the "surge" of Chinese investment into Europe during the (still ongoing) financial crisis:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/53b7a268-44a6-11e4-ab0c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3FBoLIOmk


> Chinese investors surged into EU at height of debt crisis
> 
> By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
> 
> October 6, 2014
> 
> As investors fled Europe in the worst days of its sovereign debt crisis, China-based companies moved in the other direction and surged in, with cash flowing from China into some of the hardest-hit countries of the eurozone periphery.
> 
> In 2010, the total stock of Chinese direct investment in the EU was just over €6.1bn – less than what was held by India, Iceland or Nigeria. By the end of 2012, Chinese investment stock had quadrupled, to nearly €27bn, according to figures compiled by Deutsche Bank.
> 
> The buying spree, analysts say, was nothing short of a transformation of the model of Chinese outbound investment. It is expected to increase steadily over the next decade.
> 
> “We saw a massive spike in Chinese investment in Europe, particularly [mergers and acquisitions] during the height of the debt crisis,” says Thilo Hanemann, an expert in Chinese outbound investment and research director at Rhodium Group, a research consultancy.
> 
> “This was partly opportunistic buying because assets were cheap and partly it was a structural secular shift in Chinese outbound investment, from securing natural resources in developing countries to acquiring brands and technology in developed countries.”
> 
> The Financial Times this week investigates the modern trail of Chinese investment, migration and ambition in Europe. A series of reports from Beijing to Milan to Madrid to Lisbon to Athens reveal the scale of China’s expansion in Europe, the flow of investment and the strategies of Chinese investors and migrants caught up in a national effort – a “going out” policy in place since 1999 – to find new markets and enhance China’s economic strength.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The incursion has not been all plain sailing. When a Chinese state-owned consortium won the bid to build a road from Warsaw to the German border, the government in Beijing presented the deal as a model for Chinese contractors in Europe.
> 
> But after cost over-runs and repeated breaches of local labour law, the Polish government cancelled the contract with Covec, the Chinese consortium, in 2011 – less than two years into the project.
> What befuddled the Chinese company most were Polish environmental laws requiring tunnels for wildlife to be built beneath the road and a two-week work stoppage while seven rare species of frogs, toads and newts were moved out of the way.
> 
> The disaster has become business folklore in Beijing – a parable of the legal and cultural issues Chinese investors face when trying to do business or buy companies in Europe. Still, the obstacles faced by Covec, as well as other pioneering companies, have not dented China’s confidence in European ventures even in times of turmoil.
> 
> Total annual Chinese investment in Europe has dropped somewhat from the peak years of 2011 and 2012, but analysts across the continent see robust deals in the making and signs that investment will increase significantly this decade.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Official data on Chinese outbound – and inbound – investment are notoriously unreliable because the government does not measure most activity by Chinese companies’ offshore subsidiaries and does not attempt to work out where investment ends up.
> 
> Independent entities such as Rhodium Group and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US-based think-tank, have chronicled a recent shift in Chinese money from resource-rich developing countries in Africa to partnerships in developed countries, including Europe.
> 
> Private Chinese enterprises are playing an important role in the transition. State-owned Chinese companies were the vanguard for China’s outward investment, with state-owned businesses accounting for 78 per cent of investment in Europe between 2008 and 2013, according to Deutsche Bank. At home, state behemoths dominate industries such as telecoms, transport, energy and finance.
> 
> But between 2011 and 2013, private companies’ share in Chinese M&A activity in the continent rose to over 30 per cent – compared to 4 per cent in the previous three years, Deutsche Bank research shows.
> 
> Investment tends to cluster in individual countries in any given year, according to data compiled by the Heritage Foundation. So far in 2014, Italy has been China’s biggest target in Europe with a surge of investment in the first half of the year. Close to half of the $7bn in total Chinese investment in Italy was made in 2014 alone. Portugal saw a jump in 2011 and in 2014. The UK has had two years of soaring Chinese activity. Since the debt crisis, Spain has experienced steady increases.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese investment into Europe – while growing – still faces several obstacles. “Relative to China’s $4tn in foreign exchange reserves, the volumes are still not that large because Europe is not willing to sell China its top technologies and it doesn’t have very much else that China really wants,” said Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the conservative US think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and compiler of an independent database on Chinese outbound investment. “In the future, we’re probably going to see a steady increase [in Chinese investment to Europe] but no huge breakthroughs.”
> “Companies are now buying $200m German companies instead of $20m ones,” Mr Scissors said.
> 
> Foreign direct investment into China, which hit $117bn last year, still significantly outstrips China outbound investment, which reached $108bn in 2013, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce data.
> 
> Those same figures suggest Europe was the only region that saw a drop in outbound Chinese investment in 2013, with a fall of more than 15 per cent. However, the data appear to significantly undercount the actual flow and do not count investment routed to Europe through Hong Kong.
> 
> In just one example of how problematic these official figures can be, they have historically counted tiny Luxembourg as the largest recipient of Chinese investment in Europe. That is because Chinese companies often choose to incorporate legal entities there to take advantage of looser tax and corporate structure requirements before using those entities to make investments elsewhere in the continent.
> 
> Liao Qun, chief economist and head of research at Citic Bank, predicts China’s total outbound investment to exceed $200bn by 2017 and a growing share of that amount will be destined for Europe.
> 
> A survey by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China found that Chinese companies rated labour laws, human resource costs, immigration rules and “cultural differences in management style” as the biggest obstacles to operating in the continent.
> 
> But in a sign of things to come, an overwhelming majority – 97 per cent – of Chinese companies that have invested in Europe said they plan to invest more in the coming years.
> 
> *Rise of the Chinese private equity buyer*
> 
> The sale of PizzaExpress, a popular UK restaurant chain, to Beijing-based Hony Capital in July highlights the rise of Chinese private equity buyers determined to snap up assets across Europe, writes Anne-Sylvaine Chassany.
> 
> “Suddenly there’s a growing interest in Europe to understand this new contingent of buyers,” Iain Drayton, a Hong Kong-based Goldman Sachs banker who advises private equity groups, says. “A number of Chinese private equity firms have raised large pools of capital and are looking to deploy it beyond the boundaries of Asia, into Europe or the US.”
> 
> Hony Capital, with more than $6.8bn in assets under management in seven funds, is part of a new generation of homegrown investment firms now on the look out for overseas companies they think they can help expand in their domestic market. In doing so, they are emulating state owned companies that dipped their toes first over the past years, and have since ramped up efforts to acquire technologies and consumer brands in Europe.
> 
> Last month, the Shanghai-based conglomerate Fosun submitted a last minute counterbid for Club Med, battling the Italian private equity group Investindustrial for control of the French holiday resort operator.
> 
> Chinese private equity groups are less likely to suffer from a lack of credibility than those earlier players, bankers say.
> 
> “In the past, Chinese companies tended to take longer than Western groups to make decisions on acquisitions, and would not live up to the price expectations they raised,” Eric Meyer, a Société Générale banker who has advised Chinese clients including Fosun, says. “It’s no longer the case. They are truly motivated buyers.”
> 
> State backed consumer group Bright Food sought and failed to buy United Biscuits, the UK maker of biscuits and Jaffa Cakes, in 2010. Two years later, however, the Shanghai-based company made a winning £1.2bn offer for breakfast cereal brand Weetabix. It has since added French wine merchant Diva Bordeaux to its European purchases. Chinese property and entertainment conglomerate Wanda paid more than £300m for Dorset luxury yachtmaker Sunseeker International last year.
> 
> The trend will only strengthen, according to Mr Drayton, as Chinese private equity groups will be able to pay the extra amount of money allowing them to win over western buyout groups in competitive auctions.




Foreign direct investment has been a contentious issue for a long, long time. We got our knickers in a knot, here in Canada, in the 1950s and '60s over US investment; the Americans were all aflutter, thirty or forty years ago, when the Japanese were on a shopping spree; now it's Europe. The simple fact is that capital goes where it's wanted and needed. Companies need funding, when the local banks and investors get cold feet they, the companies, welcome foreign investment. It isn't always a smooth (or pleasant) process, nor is it without cultural difficulties, but it is part of the ongoing ebb and flow of capitalism, even when the capitalists are Chinese.


----------



## dimsum

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> More food for thought to help further answer Kirkhill's question:
> 
> Reuters



When I last visited HK about a year ago, I remember speaking to a shopkeeper who mentioned that most times, they would unconsciously ignore a customer unless s/he spoke Mandarin.  HKers, in my opinion, are proud to be "not Mainlanders" but as a pragmatic people, they have no problems working/investing in China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> It appears to me that the situation in HK is unfolding as it should, and must:
> 
> 1. The students must disperse, empty handed in political terms. Cy Leung and Beijing must win. Beijing will not, cannot tolerate being 'beaten' by anyone; but, and it's a *Big BUT*
> 
> 2. In a few (not many) months, but not just a few weeks, Beijing must concede some ground to the students. My guess is that political parties, plural, will be tolerated in HK and the _official_ (sanctioned by Beijing) parties will be allowed
> to run candidates in the civic elections, including for the Chief Executive. I have read/heard that China is, already, looking to some sort of "opposition party" as a political safety valve. HKJ might be a good test bed.




The _Financial Times_ offers six possibilities in an article:

     *1. Protest victory* – The Hong Kong government agrees to reopen the debate for electoral reform in 2017, paving the way for a move towards what the students call “true universal suffrage”. CY Leung steps down. 

             _This appears as remote as ever, with Beijing and the Hong Kong leadership saying this is simply not an option._

     *2. Partial protest victory* – Leung steps down, and his replacement offers a dialogue on electoral reform, but stops short of promising any changes before 2017. A watered-down version of this would be for Leung himself to open a new dialogue on reform.

            _Again, this looks unlikely. Leung has vowed not to resign, while Beijing has offered him vocal backing. Though street protests contributed to the early end of Tung Chee-hwa’s rule in 2005, those protests (which were in 2003) were larger,
            more broad-based and were partly related to the handling of the Sars epidemic. And the government has said all along that the essentials of the electoral reform process are not up for negotiation. Even so, Vox has more on how a victory might be won._

     *3. Violent crackdown* – The Hong Kong government, feeling overwhelmed, calls in military support from China. A repeat of the Tiananmen massacre follows.

             _This has always been an extremely remote possibility, albeit one that has been much talked about. Again, leaders in Hong Kong and Beijing have been quick to dismiss this option, focusing instead on a police response._

With protesters’ numbers smaller, and some concessions on their part already made, the most likely scenario is likely to be one of the following.

      *4. Fatigue wins* – Protesters, realising the government will offer them little or nothing, decide to call it a day. Their numbers drop even further, making it impossible to control their current protest areas. The streets reopen, and students
              go back to class. Any stragglers are easily dealt with by the police.

              _This is probably the government’s base case scenario – giving away nothing, and winning the battle. But despite falling numbers during the daytime, the protest movement still appears vibrant once work and class is over at night._

     *5. Police crackdown* – Protesters hold on for long enough, and with sufficient numbers, so that the government decides to act. Thousands of police are deployed with riot gear, tear gas, pepper spray and the threat of rubber bullets.
             Hundreds are arrested but the streets are cleared in hours.

             _Protesters were bracing themselves for such action over the weekend, although the authorities appear to have put any such plans on ice for now. Such a move might serve to reboot support for the protests, especially among older Hong Kong people._

     *6. A deal* – The government offers small but significant concessions, such as a redrawing or expanding of the 1,200-strong nomination committee that will screen candidates for chief executive. Most expect it to be made up largely of tycoon-backed elites,
             giving plenty of wiggle room for a more “representative” body. The government could also explore tax or welfare reform, a change to housing policy or a host of other ideas to alleviate some of the pressing problems for Hong Kong’s poor and middle classes.

             _This is beginning to look like the most likely scenario – offering a face-saving way out for all parties, without violence._

My _guess_ is that 6, a Deal, disguised to look like 4, Fatigue, is most likely. An open deal seems less likely to me because it will involve a loss of _"face"_ for too many important people and factions. The students can afford to _appear_ to lose without losing too much face (they don't have much to begin with) but CY Leung, Li Fei and Xi Jinping will not tolerate losing any face; it's just not done.


----------



## CougarKing

More about the PLA garrison in Hong Kong:



> *PLA tools up in Hong Kong*
> 
> Ian Cameron, Hong Kong - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
> 06 October 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Armoured vehicles at the Gun Club Hill Barracks of the PLA's Hong Kong Garrison in downtown Kowloon on 6 October. Source: Ian Cameron_
> 
> The Hong Kong Garrison of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) appears to have heightened its preparedness in light of pro-democracy protests sweeping the city in the past eight days.
> 
> *A local resident noted the barracks were hosting "abnormal levels" of military equipment and that it was the most ever seen. About 25 armoured vehicles, mostly Type 91 (ZFB91) 6x6 internal security armoured vehicles, were present. Some ZFB91s were covered by tarpaulins, but most appeared ready to roll.*
> 
> PLA guards armed with pepper spray canisters and riot shields were patrolling the perimeter fence. In addition, military trucks had wire mesh grilles over windows to protect them from potential rioters. *From this PLA base, troops could reach protest epicentres in the Admiralty and Mong Kok districts within minutes. Troop contingents in the 17 other PLA bases in the Hong Kong special administrative region are likely to be on high alert too.*
> 
> *IHS Jane's 360*


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is a a report floating about that suggests that CY Leung could be under investigation for corruption.

If it's true it opens up 'opportunities' for Beijing:

     1. It can fire Leung but stand fast on the important demands (to allow open nominations for the Chief Executive post) thereby giving the students a 'win' on one issues and, thereby, allowing them to withdraw and save some 'face;' or

     2. It could still allow CY Leung to 'wait out' the students and then fire him later and _then_ deal with the central issues of HK's obvious concern.


----------



## CougarKing

As expected for a while since China also overtook Japan recently:

Business Insider



> *China Just Overtook The US As The World's Largest Economy*
> Business Insider
> By Mike Bird – 5 hours ago
> 
> Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us in April that it was all about to happen.
> Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.
> 
> The simple logic is that prices aren't the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than in San Francisco, so it's not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist's Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.
> 
> So the IMF measures both GDP in market-exchange terms and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing-power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world's biggest economy.
> 
> We've just gone past that crossover on the chart below, according to the IMF.*By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world's purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion):*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> As expected for a while since China also overtook Japan recently:
> 
> Business Insider




Yeah, but the data is based on PPP (purchasing power parity) which is excellent when measuring, say, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark and Estonia; it's less useful when you add, say, Malaysia, Fiji and China to the mix and it becomes almost useless when the economies are too disparate ~ say Australia, Benin and China.

Second, don't forget that there are "three Chinas:" a wealthy, first world country on the East Coast, a developing country in the centre and a third world country in thew West.

Finally: all numbers coming from China are somewhat suspect.

*But*, all that being said: never before, in all of human history have so many people been lifted from real, abject poverty to (relative) prosperity (a working class/lower middle class socio-economic status).


----------



## CougarKing

China's MSS heads can deny this all they want but everyone knows that they do it...



> *China angered after FBI head says Chinese hacking costs billions*
> 
> [reuters]
> 
> - Oct 9, 2014
> 
> Charges over hacking and internet spying have increased tension between the two countries. In May, the United States charged five Chinese military officers with hacking into U.S. companies, prompting China to suspend a Sino-U.S. working group on cyber issues. China has denied wrongdoing.
> 
> Speaking on CBS' 60 Minutes program on Sunday, FBI Director James Comey said Chinese hackers were targeting big U.S. companies, and that some of them probably did not even know they had been hacked.
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, asked about Comey's remarks at a daily news briefing, said China banned hacking and "firmly strikes" against such criminal activity.
> 
> "We express strong dissatisfaction with the United States' unjustified fabrication of facts in an attempt to smear China's name and demand that the U.S.-side cease this type of action," Hong said.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There is a a report floating about that suggests that CY Leung could be under investigation for corruption.
> 
> If it's true it opens up 'opportunities' for Beijing:
> 
> 1. It can fire Leung but stand fast on the important demands (to allow open nominations for the Chief Executive post) thereby giving the students a 'win' on one issues and, thereby, allowing them to withdraw and save some 'face;' or
> 
> 2. It could still allow CY Leung to 'wait out' the students and then fire him later and _then_ deal with the central issues of HK's obvious concern.



Speaking of which...here's more on China (through the SAR govt.) trying to shift attention to CY Leung...

Reuters



> *Hong Kong calls off talks with student activists as city leader investigated*
> BY JAMES POMFRET AND CLARE BALDWIN
> HONG KONG Thu Oct 9, 2014 12:46pm EDT
> 
> (Reuters) - Hong Kong called off talks with protesting students on Thursday, dealing a heavy blow to attempts to defuse a political crisis that has seen tens of thousands take to the streets to demand free elections and calling for leader Leung Chun-ying to resign.
> 
> The government's decision came as democratic lawmakers demanded anti-graft officers investigate a $6.4 million business payout to Leung while in office, as the political fallout from mass protests in the Chinese-controlled city spreads.
> 
> "Students' call for an expansion of an uncooperative movement has shaken the trust of the basis of our talks and it will be impossible to have a constructive dialogue," Chief Secretary Carrie Lam said on the eve of the planned dialogue.
> 
> She blamed the pull-out on students' unswerving demands for universal suffrage, which she said was not in accordance with the Asian financial center's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, and on what she described as their illegal occupation of parts of the city and fresh calls for people to rally
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

:facepalm:  :facepalm: "Sex and the City" meets "the Real Housewives of in Vancouver" ; a new tv reality series that may local skew public perception to paint the "snobby Shanghai socialite debutante" stereotype on recent, wealthy Chinese immigrants:  

*ULTRA RICH ASIAN GIRLS VANCOUVER REALITY SHOW PREMIERING SOON*


----------



## Edward Campbell

Both pessimistic and optimistic views on the HK situation are expressed in these two articles which are reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from, respectively, the _Financial Times_ and _Foreign Affairs_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/06e60966-51df-11e4-b55e-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3FvgzLIPW


> ‘Zero chance’ of protest success, says HK leader
> 
> By Patti Waldmeir
> 
> October 12, 2014
> 
> CY Leung, Hong Kong’s embattled chief executive, reiterated his calls for pro-democracy protests to end as a campaign of civil disobedience in the Chinese territory entered its third week.
> 
> Mr Leung said in a Sunday morning television interview that there was “zero chance” Beijing would meet the protesters’ demands for a change in the nomination procedure for chief executive, and rejected calls for his resignation. “I believe my stepping down will not solve the problem since [the protesters] are demanding the National People’s Congress to withdraw its decision and [introduce] civil nomination, which is impossible,” he said.
> 
> Mr Leung also defended his decision to accept a £4m payout from an Australian company, which he said involved a non-compete agreement rather than the delivery of any services.
> 
> In August the NPC decided that Beijing would in effect be able to screen candidates who want to run for Hong Kong’s chief executive election in 2017. China rules the territory through a “one country, two systems” formula that specifies universal suffrage as an eventual goal, but democracy activists have said the nomination system renders the notion of universal suffrage meaningless.
> 
> The Hong Kong leader called the protests of the past fortnight, which continued over the weekend with large crowds turning up on Friday and Saturday nights in some parts of Hong Kong, a “mass movement that has spun out of control” and that “cannot go on for a long time”.
> 
> Student leaders on Saturday wrote an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping , whose Communist party ultimately controls Hong Kong under the legal regime agreed when the UK handed the former British colony back to China in 1997. Two leading student groups published the letter stressing that the current protest movement “is definitely not a colour revolution”, a reference to insurrections that have overthrown governments in former eastern bloc countries and in the Middle East.
> 
> Meanwhile, Beijing continued to control access in the mainland to information about the Hong Kong protests, with state media emphasising the inconvenience that they cause to local residents. Global Times, the Communist party’s tabloid mouthpiece, said in a weekend editorial that the movement was “rapidly losing the people’s support”. “Hong Kong society cannot tolerate commercial streets occupied by a group of political fanatics”, the newspaper said.
> 
> Over the weekend, Beijing also detained mainland scholar and rights advocate Guo Yushan, who founded an influential non-governmental think-tank. Mr Guo was involved in the escape from house arrest of Chen Guangcheng, the legal activist, in 2012. He is the latest of dozens of people who have been detained on the mainland apparently in connection with the Hong Kong protests.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Zhang Yan_



But, on the optimistic side, Prof John Delury (Yonsei University) says that notwithstanding the immediate reactions of people in HK and Beijing, the students have already won:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142159/john-delury/out-of-tiananmens-shadow


> Out of Tiananmen's Shadow
> *Why the Protesters Have Already Won*
> 
> By John Delury
> 
> OCTOBER 6, 2014
> 
> The past has a strange way of finding echoes in the present, as if history’s hungry ghosts will not stop until they are sated. Over the past two weeks, Hong Kong has been drenched not just in rain but also in history, as a class boycott grew into what The Economist's Gady Epstein summed up as “the first large-scale student-led protest for democracy to erupt in any Chinese city since 1989.” Similarities to the protest and crackdown at Tiananmen Square have indeed been striking -- and unnerving, given the outcome of that beautiful and terrible spring. But 1989 is not the only touchstone for Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Tracing the wider web of historical parallels reveals that the kids occupying Central have already won.
> 
> The protests originated with a decision made in Beijing on August 31, when the National People’s Congress ratified a disappointing plan for Hong Kong’s election of chief executive in 2017. Hong Kong’s democrats want the city to select its own top official by popular vote, but universal suffrage turned out to be just a little too radical for Beijing’s mandarins to countenance, in keeping with a hundred years of resisting self-rule. Chinese citizens have elected their own national leaders just once, in the ill-fated election of 1912, a year after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Early on, Mao Zedong promised an inclusive, socialist form of “New Democracy,” but that soon gave way to a totalist, top-down monopoly on political power. In the 1980s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping belatedly granted villagers powers to elect their chiefs, but this innovative experiment in “grassroots democracy” never progressed to the county or city level, let alone to national leadership.
> 
> Thus, Hong Kong’s 2017 vote -- marking the twentieth anniversary of its “handover” from British colony to Chinese appendage -- could have been a historic opportunity to advance the country’s long march to self-government, a future first envisaged by “Father of the Nation,” Cantonese-born revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (who went to college in Hong Kong). Instead of entrusting Hong Kongers with a grand experiment, though, Beijing offered them a Potemkin election. Only candidates chosen by a handpicked election committee of 1,200 will be eligible to stand for office -- a kind of electoral college in reverse. The Chinese people, in other words, are still not trusted to choose their own rulers.
> 
> The stage was therefore set in September for some kind of civic rebuttal to Beijing’s fiat. As activist groups such as Occupy Central (Hong Kong’s answer to Occupy Wall Street) warmed up for nonviolent resistance, it was high school and university students who suddenly took the lead by boycotting classes en masse. Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old member of the student group Scholarism, marched the demonstrations to the doorstep of the chief executive building, and the police detained Wong and pepper sprayed his compatriots. Unwittingly, they were repeating the same mistake as Beijing back in May 1919 and the Communist Party in April 1989, when manhandling and arresting students only fueled larger protest and greater civic solidarity. Wong’s 40-hour detention, combined with more police aggression, including firing tear gas on the crowd on September 28, brought more than 100,000 demonstrators into the streets in time for the October 1 “National Day” holiday. Students celebrated 65 years since Mao founded the People’s Republic by occupying the streets of downtown Hong Kong and demanding democracy.
> 
> That weekend, I happened to be in Taiwan leading a group of South Korean students from Yonsei University for a dialogue with students at National Taiwan University. The students compared and contrasted relations between North and South Korea with the dynamics between Taiwan and China. It became clear that the Taiwanese participants were watching Hong Kong intently. One student remarked that Hong Kong was something like Taiwan’s “sacrificial lamb,” revealing their island’s fate should reunification ever come to be. A young professor described how increased trade with the mainland was exacerbating inequality in Taiwan, just as in Hong Kong. We later learned that hours before our student dialogue, as Wong was speaking to throngs of students in Hong Kong, an 18-year-old Taiwan independence activist named Yen Ming-wei threw the book Formosa Betrayed at Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou for failing to stand up to Beijing. Written by a U.S. Foreign Service officer stationed in Taiwan after World War II, the book describes the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek’s brutal suppression of Taiwanese dissent, starting with the infamous massacre of February 28, 1947.
> 
> As our student delegation visited Taipei’s 228 Incident museum, which commemorated the victims of February 28, events were taking a violent turn in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok neighborhood, where a mixture of disgruntled middle-aged residents and hired thugs, some with Mafia ties, assaulted the students’ protest tent. In the mainland, sending in thugs and holding back police is standard protocol for corrupt local cadres who want to silence critics -- an example of the malicious abuse of state power that has led President Xi Jinping to launch a nationwide anticorruption campaign. But “the siege of Mong Kok” also called to mind Chiang Kai-shek’s bloodletting during the Shanghai Spring of 1927, when he unleashed Green Gang members to rampage through the city, beating and killing political dissidents, labor union leaders, and communist activists. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in Mong Kok, but the specter of political violence cast a darker shadow over the protest.
> 
> Authorities in Beijing took this outbreak of “chaos” as their cue to warn students not to push any further against the orderly forces of “rule of law,” that is, the police and chief executive. Until then, mainland state media had been noticeably quiet about the demonstrations. But now, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, began firing salvos at the students by mocking their “daydream” of igniting a “color revolution” on the mainland. The newspaper commentary, which came out on October 1, was enough to send chills up the spine of anyone old enough to remember April 26, 1989, when the People’s Daily ran an editorial slamming the student marches as “unpatriotic disturbances.” That editorial, signed off on by Deng, outraged the intensely patriotic students and set them and party leaders on a crash course that would end in blood.
> 
> But perhaps the Hong Kong Federation of Students, despite being born after the Tiananmen massacre, had studied its lessons. In response to the October 1 editorial, student leaders insisted theirs was the Umbrella Movement, not the Umbrella Revolution, and that their struggle was for suffrage in Hong Kong, not in China. Adopting the prudent strategy of local protesters in the mainland, students focused their criticism on the Hong Kong government, not Beijing. Playful posters sprouted up deriding the sitting chief executive, C. Y. Leung, but left Xi alone.
> 
> Despite the students’ self-restraint, by the second weekend of protest, Occupy Central seemed headed toward a tragic denouement. The People’s Daily had defined the protests as not just unlawful but tantamount to treason. Leung warned darkly that the streets must be cleared by Monday or else. The police commander who ordered tear gas unapologetically defended his action and publicly stated he was prepared to do so again. Fearing a repetition of June 4, Bao Tong, who was a reformist party official in those days and is now one of Beijing’s most prominent democracy advocates, advised the students to take a break “for the sake of future room to grow. For tomorrow.” During reportedly tense and confused discussions on Sunday night, students, criticized for their lack of centralized leadership, performed democracy in action -- some decided to defend the barricades, many decided to go home.
> 
> When “tomorrow” came, on Monday morning, the big crowds had dispersed, but a core of students held on to their prized protest spaces. Gently, they had called the state’s bluff, and quietly, they had won, although what came next remained uncertain.
> 
> The odds of Beijing reversing its decision on 2017 are very slim. But in the history of student protest in modern China, winning the battle has been less important than fighting for the cause. Modern China’s first student demonstration, spearheaded by two young Cantonese intellectuals (Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao) visiting Beijing to take the civil service examinations in 1895, failed to achieve practical outcomes. The epochal May 4 movement of 1919 likewise had little immediate effect. And of course, student demands for democracy in 1989 were crushed by the tanks that drove them from Tiananmen Square.
> 
> Yet no history of modern China is complete without telling the stories of those movements, and strung together, they chart an alternate trajectory for the Chinese nation. There is nothing inevitable about the prospect of self-government in China, and there are no right or wrong tides of history to take comfort in. But neither, as one former Obama administration official argued, is it a “reality” that “Beijing is not going to lose” and that the students’ call for genuine democracy is a mere “pipe dream.” For what history does record are long and hard-fought struggles between competing visions of political life and social order, and the students in Hong Kong have made themselves heard and their vision known. In the past two weeks, they have revived a tradition that goes back not just to 1989 but all the way to 1895 and reaches into the core of modern Chinese identity. Even if theirs is the losing side so far, they are keeping the candle of Chinese democracy lit.




I _suspect_ CY Leung is right: Beijing will not 'surrender,' the loss of _"face"_ would make such a thing impossible. But I also _think_ that Prof Delury is right, too: the students have kept the flame alive; Beijing sees the flames of both _Tienanmen_ and _Central_ and understands that something, maybe not Western style _liberal_ democracy, but something other than arbitrary, secretive rule from the _centre_, the _Zhongnanhai_, must follow ... think Singapore's democracy wherein the _People's Action Party_ has governed continuously since 1959, never getting less than 60% of the popular vote.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, in Xinjiang, a Chinese policewoman of Uighur descent was reportedly brutally murdered...an example of how Uighur militants view people of their own ethnic group they see as collaborators with Beijing?

Reuters



> *Policewoman killed in China's Xinjiang: state media*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Two "thugs" stabbed to death a policewoman in the Chinese region of Xinjiang where the government says Islamists are using violence to push for a separate state, media reported on Monday.
> 
> The motorcycle-mounted attackers used sharp weapons to "cruelly attack and kill" the policewoman, China Central Television (CCTV) said on its official microblog on Monday.
> 
> *Media did not specify the ethnicity of the policewoman but judging by her name, she was Uighur, a Muslim minority that calls Xinjiang home.* CCTV citied a colleague of the woman as saying she was two months pregnant.
> 
> The attack occurred on Friday near a market in Pishan county, in Hotan prefecture.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

And more harsh measures exacted by Beijing in return:

Reuters



> *China court sentences 12 to death for Xinjiang attacks*
> Mon Oct 13, 2014 7:03am EDT
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - A court in the unruly far western Chinese region of Xinjiang sentenced 12 people to death and handed out dozens of other heavy sentences on Monday for attacks in July in which almost 100 people died.
> 
> The Xinjiang government said 59 "terrorists" were gunned down by security forces in Yarkant county in Xinjiang's far south, while 37 civilians were killed in the July 28 attacks.
> 
> Authorities said people had been killed when knife-wielding attackers had staged assaults in two towns.
> 
> Hundreds of people have been killed in the region in the past two years, most in violence between the Muslim Uighur people who call Xinjiang home and ethnic majority Han Chinese. The government has also blamed attacks in other parts of China, including Beijing, on Islamist militants from Xinjiang.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing and Hong Kong's SAR govt. taking advantage of the lull in protests, which seemed to lose momentum after it was reported that CY Leung was being investigated:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong police dismantle protest barriers, reopen major road*
> Tue Oct 14, 2014 5:29am EDT
> 
> By Donny Kwok and Farah Master
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hundreds of Hong Kong police used sledgehammers and chainsaws to dismantle pro-democracy barricades near government offices and the city's financial center on Tuesday, reopening a major road for the first time since protests began two weeks ago.
> 
> In a setback to protesters, traffic flowed freely along Queensway Road after their sit-in and barricades were cleared from the road. But other major protest sites remained in tact in the Admiralty and Mong Kok districts and pro-democracy demonstrators were defiant.
> 
> *"We will rebuild them after the police remove them," said protester Bruce Sze. "We won't confront the police physically."
> 
> Unlike Monday, which saw clashes between anti-protest groups and pro-democracy activists after police removed barricades, Tuesday's operation resulted in no such confrontations.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is something like a 'courtly dance,' with well defined steps which lead, eventually, to an 'appropriate' conclusion. As I have said before: Beijing will not, cannot lose; the students must back down and go home empty handed ... for now; Beijing, the old men in the _Zhongnanhai_ cannot , again must not lose _"face"_.*

However, later on, Beijing must address Hong Kong's (and Taiwan's) very legitimate concerns about the Chinese political _system_. I will also repeat that "one country-two systems" is a temporary measure. Everyone, in Beijing, in HK and in Taipei, wants "one country-one system," the problem is that the existing Chine Communist Party 'system' is unacceptable to everyone in HK and Taiwan and to a growing share of the mainland Chinese people, too. But the necessary reform is difficult and complex and dangerous because there are large, strong and ruthless forces - including within the Central Military Commission - that will conspire to block most reforms. The essential first step is the one Xi Jinping is making: attacking corruption. Corruption is a cancer that robs the emerging middle class and, even more, the poor, and entrenches and enhances the power of the _conservative_ few. But rooting our corruption will, not _may_, *will* require attacking, defeating and killing several, maybe many, very powerful men ... men who can be expected, with 100% certainty, to fight back. Once the war on corruption is well underway and when most 'ordinary' people have confidence in its ultimate success** the _Supreme Leader_, Xi Jinping for now, can turn to political reform.

My guess is that most Chinese do not think much of Western _liberal_ democracy: they look out at the USA, France and the Greece, and even at Australia and Canada or Japan and Taiwan and they wonder if Western style democracy is 'right' for them. They also look at Singapore which IS a democracy, but one with tight severe restrictions on some rights that we, in the _liberal_ West, take for granted, but which make sense in a _conservative/Confucian_ culture, and which protects other _fundamental_ rights better than is done in the liberal West, and they see a system which might be better suited to a Confucian society.

My _sense_ is that China has, for 2,000 years, been looking for "rule by a meritocracy." The problem is that neither the old, imperial system nor modern Chinese communism was/is able to produce a self sustaining meritocracy. But, we can see in the _liberal_ West and in _conservative_ Singapore, too, that other types of meritocracies - intellectual, entrepreneurial, financial - can sustain themselves when they are freed from too much (but not all) controls by bureaucrats. It follows, many (including me) think, that a political/bureaucratic meritocracy can grow and sustain itself if there are not too many controls on them ~ in other words if there is some 'room' for political competition.

Right now, in China, attention _appears_ to be focused on ways to encourage public self expression without allowing _official_ political opposition. So called "proactive polling" (not the computer science type) which (more or less continuously) asks people what they want the governments (local, provincial and national) to do about a range of issues. Some younger, well educated Chinese Communist Party members want a new course; they want to 'free' dissent and allow public, legal, political opposition. They believe that the CCP, like the PAP in Singapore, can sustain itself in (near perpetual) power by adapting itself to suit the popular will which is much easier to 'read' (discern) in an open political process. I _think_ people in Taiwan have a similar view. One can argue that, in Taiwan, the _Kuomintang_ and the _Democratic Progressive Party_, which occasionally _swap_ power, like Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, are, essentially the same party with two, slightly different 'world views,' like Liberals and Conservatives in Canada. (In fact the DPP was formed out of the KMY in response to institutionalized corruption.)

The old men in Beijing must, eventually, deal with HK's and Taiwan's legitimate concerns ... that means China, itself, must change.

_____
*   This concept of _face_ is hard for many of us to grasp but it matters in China; it matters a lot. Face is very roughly equatable to a combination of 'public regard'  and 'self respect,' but that's way too simplistic. 
** Which is why I _suspect_ that Xi Jinping _*might*_ be, now, planning to stay in office longer than the planned 10 year term.


----------



## Flavus101

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> And more * harsh* measures exacted by Beijing Inc return:



I don't think harsh is the right word. If you are a terrorist who has murdered hundreds of people I see nothing wrong with ending their stay on earth.


----------



## CougarKing

Li-Kai-shing enters the fray:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong tycoon calls for protests to end after tension over police beating*
> 
> By James Pomfret and Clare Jim
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong's most prominent tycoon, *Li Ka-shing*, on Wednesday urged protesters who have occupied parts of the city since late last month to go home, after police mounted their toughest action against the democracy activists in more than a week.
> 
> *Police arrested about 45 protesters in the early hours of Wednesday, using pepper spray against those who resisted, as they cleared a main road in the Chinese-controlled city that protesters had blocked with concrete slabs.
> 
> But footage of police beating a protester went viral, sparking outrage from some lawmakers and the public.* Authorities said police involved in the beating would be suspended.
> 
> Outrage over the beating could galvanise support for the democracy movement in the city where the protests over Chinese restrictions on how it chooses its next leader had dwindled from about 100,000 at their peak to a few hundred.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

...and China's proxy navy again in the news:



> *China's new Senkakus tactic? Fleets of fishermen*
> HIROYUKI AKITA, Nikkei senior staff writer
> 
> October 10, 2014 1:00 pm JST
> 
> 
> TOKYO - Something funny is going on in the waters around the Senkaku Islands, and it's making Japan nervous.
> 
> There has been a precipitous decline in the presence of Chinese government surveillance vessels around the group of islets in the East China sea, which are controlled by Japan but claimed by China. At the same time, the number of Chinese fishing vessels operating in the area has surged, a development some see Beijing's new approach in pursuing its territorial claims.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From January to September, the Japan Coast Guard told Chinese fishing boats operating within Japanese waters around the Senkaku Islands to leave on 208 occasions, a 2.4-fold jump from last year and 26 times larger than the figure for 2011.
> 
> So far, Chinese fishing boats have put up little resistance when warned by the coast guard to leave, but a Japanese security official says the situation could lead to a maritime collision like the one that occurred in autumn 2010, exacerbating bilateral tensions.
> 
> There has been no confirmed case of an armed Chinese fishing ship entering waters around the islands, according to the Japan Coast Guard, but it has been reported that maritime militias trained by the Chinese military were mobilized for territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
> 
> 
> *Nikkei Asian Review*


----------



## CougarKing

And the unrest resumes in Hong Kong:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong police clear protesters, barricades at key site*
> 
> By Clare Baldwin and James Pomfret
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hundreds of Hong Kong police staged their biggest raid yet on a pro-democracy protest camp before dawn on Friday, charging down student-led activists who have held an intersection in one of their main protest zones for more than three weeks.
> 
> The operation in the gritty and congested Mong Kok district, across the harbor from the heart of the civil disobedience movement near government headquarters, came while many protesters were asleep in dozens of tents or beneath giant, blue-striped tarpaulin sheets.
> 
> The raid was a gamble for the 28,000-strong police force in the Chinese-controlled city who have come under criticism for aggressive clearance operations with tear gas and baton charges and for the beating of a handcuffed protester on Wednesday.
> 
> (....SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

The HK Police force is, normally, highly regarded for its professionalism. My, personal _sense_ is that they are equal to the best forces in North America and Europe. But someone, not the whole force, just one supervisor and a couple of officers, blundered and beat up a protestor (actually a few of them) when such action was completely unjustified ~ it was a tiny handful of people venting their frustrations. But it has cost them HUGELY in HK. The people are getting tired of the protests, especially tired of the protests in the Mong Kok area, they want 'freer' flows of traffic in commercial districts, they want the police to open the streets ... but they are, I _think_, quite horrified by the unjustified beating of some students and angry at the police.


----------



## dimsum

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The HK Police force is, normally, highly regarded for its professionalism. My, personal _sense_ is that they are equal to the best forces in North America and Europe. But someone, not the whole force, just one supervisor and a couple of officers, blundered and beat up a protestor (actually a few of them) when such action was completely unjustified ~ it was a tiny handful of people venting their frustrations. But it has cost them HUGELY in HK. The people are getting tired of the protests, especially tired of the protests in the Mong Kok area, they want 'freer' flows of traffic in commercial districts, they want the police to open the streets ... but they are, I _think_, quite horrified by the unjustified beating of some students and angry at the police.



I haven't read that bit of news about the HKPF hitting protesters, but thanks to some good media attention via TV shows starting in the 80s, the (R)HKPF has been put on a bit of a pedestal.  Movies like Infernal Affairs (AKA The Departed) have shown corruption, etc. in the force, but prior to that, at least in the shows I remember from my childhood, the (R)HKPF was portrayed similarly to pre-9/11 US military (think JAG, etc.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

A local TV crew filmed what _appears to be_ seven plain-clothes officers kicking a protester while his hands were secured with plastic ties. The officers were identified by the HKP and have been suspended pending an investigation. The incidnt was widely reported in HK, including by the _South China Morning Post_, and beyond, and the video is available on the internet.


----------



## CougarKing

Let's see if these soon-to-be unveiled legal reforms next week will actually be effective...especially given Pres. Xi's highly publicized efforts to stamp out corruption.

Reuters



> *Companies look for more fairness as China eyes legal reforms at key meeting*
> Sat Oct 18, 2014 7:06pm EDT
> 
> By Ben Blanchard and Sui-Lee Wee
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China is set to unveil key legal reforms this week that will try to limit the influence local officials have on court cases, a move being closely watched by company executives who hope it will make the legal system more impartial.
> 
> The announcement is expected at the end of an Oct. 20-23 meeting of the ruling Communist Party elite, which has made the "rule of law" the theme of the gathering. The meeting, called a plenum, comes at a time when slowing economic growth in the world's second-largest economy is raising the prospect of more commercial disputes.
> 
> The business community, in particular Chinese private firms and foreign investors, have long complained about the difficulty of getting a fair hearing in court because judges usually answer to local governments and party organs, which often have their own interests to protect.
> 
> Chinese media has recently carried reports on local companies suing each other when a dispute arises, with the parties lodging separate cases in courts in their home provinces, which then inevitably find for the home firm.
> 
> In April, Knowles Corp (KN.N: Quote), a New York-listed maker of advanced micro-acoustic products, said its lawyers had been blocked by a provincial court from attending a patent infringement case involving Chinese group GoerTek.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

The F-35 may already be obsolete as China has developed passive detection systems that make stealth technology less effective.

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20141004/DEFREG03/310040023

TAIPEI — America’s most advanced stealth fighter poses a great risk to China’s air defense network — and the military is going to great lengths to learn how to shoot one down.

China claims it has a new passive detection “radar” capable of identifying stealth aircraft, including the more advanced F-22 Raptor fighter based at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.


----------



## CougarKing

Xi sending a message to corrupt Chinese officials that no country is a safe haven for them or their financial assets from his anti-corruption campaign:

Reuters



> *Australia set to help China seize assets of corrupt Chinese officials: paper*
> 
> SYDNEY (Reuters) - *Australian police have agreed to assist China in the extradition and seizure of assets of corrupt Chinese officials who have fled with hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit funds, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported on Monday.
> 
> The joint operation would make its first seizure of assets in Australia within weeks, the newspaper quoted Bruce Hill, manager of Australian Federal Police (AFP) operations in Asia, as saying in an interview.*
> 
> AFP officials in Canberra had no immediate comment.
> 
> China announced in July an operation called Fox Hunt to go after corrupt officials who have fled overseas with their ill-gotten gains, part of President Xi Jinping's broader crackdown on graft.
> 
> Getting such cooperation from Australia would be a coup for Beijing, which has struggled to get its hands on suspects in Western countries, whose governments have been reluctant to hand over wanted Chinese because of concerns over whether they would get fair trials back home.
> 
> *The United States, Canada and Australia are the three most popular destinations for suspected Chinese economic criminals, Chinese state media has said.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

For wanting to see a piece of chaotic, 1930s China, the movie "The Golden Era" might interest you. It's currently showing in some Canadian theatres, with English subtitles.

Cineplex summary: The Golden Era



> *The Golden Era (Mandarin w/e.s.t.)*
> 
> SYNOPSIS
> 
> In early-1930s Manchuria, twenty-year-old Xiao Hong flees home to escape a despotic, abusive father and an arranged marriage. Independently minded, she sets out to forge a new life in the city of Harbin, unconstrained by the social mores of her times. Soon after, she is abandoned by her lover, left with an unwanted pregnancy and a crushing hotel room debt. When the hotel owner threatens to sell her to a brothel, she writes a last-ditch, near-random plea for help to the editors of the International Gazette. Xiao Jun (Feng Shao Feng), the handsome, hard-drinking young writer sent by the journal to respond to her request, is enthralled by the fascinating young lady and her free spirit. Their intellectual affinity instantly apparent, the two writers become partners in bold, progressive thinking. And so begins not just a one-of-a-kind relationship, but also Xiao Hong's life in letters; the following decade of personal and social upheaval will see her evolve into a brilliant, politically engaged author.


----------



## CougarKing

A possible concession in the student protesters' talks with the Hong Kong SAR government?

Reuters



> *Hong Kong leader indicates possible concession as student-govt talks start*
> Tue Oct 21, 2014 7:06am EDT
> 
> By James Pomfret and Clare Baldwin
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - The panel chosen to pick candidates for Hong Kong's 2017 election could be made "more democratic", the territory's leader said on Tuesday, the first indication of a possible concession to pro-democracy protesters who have blocked city streets for weeks.
> 
> Leung Chun-ying was talking just hours before formal talks got under way between student protest leaders and city officials aimed at defusing the crisis in the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
> 
> "There's room for discussion there," he told reporters. "There's room to make the nominating committee more democratic."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the Canadian couple accused of spying in China.

If I can recall correctly, this couple had set up a cafe in a town right near China's border with North Korea, if I can correctly.

CBC



> *Kevin and Julia Dawn Garratt, accused of spying in China, held in near isolation, son says
> Canada, China relations strained ahead of Harper trip to China*
> 
> Thomson Reuters Posted: Oct 24, 2014 5:49 AM ET Last Updated: Oct 24, 2014 9:04 AM ET
> 
> A Canadian couple accused of spying near China's sensitive border with North Korea has been kept in near isolation for more than 80 days, their son said, and they have repeatedly been denied access to legal counsel.
> 
> Treatment of the couple, who are being held without charge at a remote facility in the border city of Dandong, has seriously strained China's ties with Canada ahead of a planned visit by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a multilateral summit next month in Beijing.
> 
> Kevin and Julia Garratt were allowed to meet briefly for breakfast last week - the first contact they had with each other during their detention.
> 
> "It's not their physical health I'm concerned about, it's more their mental health," said their son Simeon Garratt. "You put anybody in a situation like that for 80 days, where you can't talk to anybody else and with no outside contact, and you don't know what could happen. It's not about food or water."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Bad news for Uighur separatists if China's MSS gets their act together on this:

Reuters



> *China to improve intelligence coordination in terror fight*
> Sun Oct 26, 2014 11:43pm EDT
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - *China will seek to improve intelligence gathering and information coordination with an amendment to its anti-terror law, state media said on Monday, following an upsurge in violence in the far western region of Xinjiang.
> 
> Hundreds have died in the past two years or so in Xinjiang in unrest blamed by Beijing on Islamists who want to establish a separate state called East Turkestan.*
> 
> Rights groups and exiles though blame Beijing's repressive policies for stoking resentment among the Muslim Uighur people who call Xinjiang home.
> 
> China's anti-terror law will probably be amended this week to set up a national anti-terrorism intelligence system and a platform for sharing information across government departments, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
> 
> Improving China's anti-terror law will also assist in bettering international cooperation in the fight, it added.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

And some observers, like the editorial staff at _The Economist_, ass, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper: "For how long can the Chinese economy defy the odds?"

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21627627-new-study-asks-how-long-chinese-economy-can-defy-odds-even-dragons-tire


> China’s future growth
> Even dragons tire
> *A new study asks how long the Chinese economy can defy the odds*
> 
> Oct 25th 2014 | From the print edition
> 
> THE announcement this week that China’s economy had grown by 7.3% in the third quarter year-on-year was widely seen as marking the country’s “new normal” of slower growth. It was well below the roughly 10% pace China had averaged from 1980 until two years ago. Yet according to a new working paper by Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers of Harvard University, it is still abnormal: Chinese growth is likely to be lower still in future.
> 
> Forecasters often extrapolate from recent growth rates, the authors note. The IMF, for instance, projects that Chinese growth will slow almost imperceptibly over the next five years, from about 7.4% this year to 6.3% by the end of the decade. Yet Messrs Pritchett and Summers point out that if it is possible to infer anything from past patterns of growth around the world, it is that economies suffer from “regression to the mean”: growth rates in countries that have been growing fast tend to drop, often sharply, toward the long-run global average (of about 2% growth per year in real GDP per person).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Given this tendency, China’s long spell of breakneck growth—of more than 6% a year since 1977—already stands out. It is, the authors reckon, the longest such spell “quite possibly in the history of mankind, but certainly in the data”. In almost every other remotely comparable episode, very fast growth ended in a sharp slowdown, with a median drop in the growth rate of 4.7 percentage points. The IMF’s forecast of China’s growth over the next five years may seem slightly bearish, but it is wildly optimistic by historical standards.
> 
> China bulls may ask what it is that will hobble China’s growth, but the authors reckon the question should be reversed: the onus is on the bulls to explain why China should continue to defy history. Slowdowns often occur despite seemingly sound prospects: both Brazil in 1980 and Japan in 1991 looked like juggernauts, yet they managed scarcely any growth at all in real GDP per person over the following 20 years. A slowdown is not a sign of failure, they say; rather, persistent rapid growth suggests unusually good fortune or policy.
> 
> In China that has meant a broad move toward more liberal markets. The authors suggest that the way forward is treacherous, however. Richer countries are almost uniformly much more democratic than China. Yet a democratic transition (were China to embark on one) nearly always coincides with a period of falling growth (one notable exception being South Korea in the 1980s). For China to maintain its current rate of growth, in other words, it would have to beat long odds on multiple bets. The surest of historical rules of thumb implies that 20 years from now, China’s economy, measured by market exchange rates, will probably still be smaller than America’s (see chart).




I think we need to look at China as we sa, say, Britain in the 19th century and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.








                         Britain and the USA demonstrate that sustained periods (40 or 50 years) of fairly steady economic growth are possible, even in the face of competition

I think that there are impediments to sustained 7% growth, but there are also (historical) reasons to believe that, given the current global balances, high levels of growth can continue for 20 or even 30 more years.


----------



## CougarKing

He should have been aware this would happen to him for working on a sensitive topic:

Reuters



> *Chinese filmmaker to stand trial for constitution documentary*
> Mon Oct 27, 2014 1:56am EDT
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - *A filmmaker who made a documentary on China's constitutional governance will stand trial on charges of "illegal business activity", raising questions about Beijing's promise to uphold the rule of law in accordance with the constitution.*
> 
> *Shen Yongping* will be the first person prosecuted for documenting China's constitutional history in a film called "100 years of constitutional governance", his lawyer, Zhang Xuezhong, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
> 
> The trial comes at a time of increased optimism among some Chinese scholars about Beijing's willingness to enforce the supervision of China's Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression.
> 
> But Shen's detention and other arrests have eroded some of that optimism. Chinese intellectuals and international rights groups have denounced President Xi Jinping's administration for the worst suppression of human rights in years.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

While Hong Kong has allowed many protests in the past, would Beijing even tolerate this latest set of protests to last that long?? Comparatively, the Tiananmen protests were a few months at the most, if I can recall correctly from what I read.

Reuters



> *Nine out of 10 Hong Kong activists say will fight on for a year*
> Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:40pm EDT
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Nearly nine out of 10 Hong Kong protesters say they are ready to stay on the streets for more than a year to push for full democracy to counter China's tightening grip on the city, according to an informal Reuters survey on Tuesday.
> 
> For a month now, key roads leading into three of Hong Kong's most economically and politically important districts have been barricaded with wood and steel by thousands of protesters who have set up semi-permanent occupation zones amid a sea of tents.
> 
> The so-called "umbrella" movement, named after umbrellas used as flimsy shields against police pepper spray, has become one of the biggest political challenges to face China's Communist Party leadership since it crushed pro-democracy protests in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

To the aforementioned "string of pearls" perimeter and beyond...  

Military.com/Defensetech.org



> *China’s Submarine Fleet Takes Historic Steps Forward*
> by KRIS OSBORN on OCTOBER 29, 2014
> 
> *China’s submarine fleet made its first known trip into the Indian Ocean*, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. A Chinese attack submarine passed through the Straits of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia with sightings near Sri Lanka and the Persian Gulf.
> 
> It’s the latest report of the significant steps forward the Chinese navy has taken in advancing its submarine fleet. Earlier this year, a U.S. Navy report estimated that the Chinese navy has nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines able to launch strikes against the United States from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
> 
> The Chinese navy has ambitious plans over the next 15 years to rapidly advance its fleet of surface ships and submarines as well as maritime weapons and sensors, according to a report by the Office of Naval Intelligence.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, is an interesting article by Elizabeth Economy, a pretty well respected commentator on Chinese affairs:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142201/elizabeth-c-economy/chinas-imperial-president


> China’s Imperial President
> *Xi Jinping Tightens His Grip*
> 
> By Elizabeth C. Economy
> FROM OUR NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping has articulated a simple but powerful vision: the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It is a patriotic call to arms, drawing inspiration from the glories of China’s imperial past and the ideals of its socialist present to promote political unity at home and influence abroad. After just two years in office, Xi has advanced himself as a transformative leader, adopting an agenda that proposes to reform, if not revolutionize, political and economic relations not only within China but also with the rest of the world.
> 
> Underlying Xi’s vision is a growing sense of urgency. Xi assumed power at a moment when China, despite its economic success, was politically adrift. The Chinese Communist Party, plagued by corruption and lacking a compelling ideology, had lost credibility among the public, and social unrest was on the rise. The Chinese economy, still growing at an impressive clip, had begun to show signs of strain and uncertainty. And on the international front, despite its position as a global economic power, China was punching well below its weight. Beijing had failed to respond effectively to the crises in Libya and Syria and had stood by as political change rocked two of its closest partners, Myanmar (also known as Burma) and North Korea. To many observers, it appeared as though China had no overarching foreign policy strategy.
> 
> Xi has reacted to this sense of malaise with a power grab -- for himself, for the Communist Party, and for China. He has rejected the communist tradition of collective leadership, instead establishing himself as the paramount leader within a tightly centralized political system. At home, his proposed economic reforms will bolster the role of the market but nonetheless allow the state to retain significant control. Abroad, Xi has sought to elevate China by expanding trade and investment, creating new international institutions, and strengthening the military. His vision contains an implicit fear: that an open door to Western political and economic ideas will undermine the power of the Chinese state.
> 
> If successful, Xi’s reforms could yield a corruption-free, politically cohesive, and economically powerful one-party state with global reach: a Singapore on steroids. But there is no guarantee that the reforms will be as transformative as Xi hopes. His policies have created deep pockets of domestic discontent and provoked an international backlash. To silence dissent, Xi has launched a political crackdown, alienating many of the talented and resourceful Chinese citizens his reforms are intended to encourage. His tentative economic steps have raised questions about the country’s prospects for continued growth. And his winner-take-all mentality has undermined his efforts to become a global leader.
> 
> The United States and the rest of the world cannot afford to wait and see how his reforms play out. The United States should be ready to embrace some of Xi’s initiatives as opportunities for international collaboration while treating others as worrisome trends that must be stopped before they are solidified.
> 
> A DOMESTIC CRACKDOWN
> 
> Xi’s vision for a rejuvenated China rests above all on his ability to realize his particular brand of political reform: consolidating personal power by creating new institutions, silencing political opposition, and legitimizing his leadership and the Communist Party’s power in the eyes of the Chinese people. Since taking office, Xi has moved quickly to amass political power and to become, within the Chinese leadership, not first among equals but simply first. He serves as head of the Communist Party and the Central Military Commission, the two traditional pillars of Chinese party leadership, as well as the head of leading groups on the economy, military reform, cybersecurity, Taiwan, and foreign affairs and a commission on national security. Unlike previous presidents, who have let their premiers act as the state’s authority on the economy, Xi has assumed that role for himself. He has also taken a highly personal command of the Chinese military: this past spring, he received public proclamations of allegiance from 53 senior military officials. According to one former general, such pledges have been made only three times previously in Chinese history.
> 
> In his bid to consolidate power, Xi has also sought to eliminate alternative political voices, particularly on China’s once lively Internet. The government has detained, arrested, or publicly humiliated popular bloggers such as the billionaire businessmen Pan Shiyi and Charles Xue. Such commentators, with tens of millions of followers on social media, used to routinely discuss issues ranging from environmental pollution to censorship to child trafficking. Although they have not been completely silenced, they no longer stray into sensitive political territory. Indeed, Pan, a central figure in the campaign to force the Chinese government to improve Beijing’s air quality, was compelled to criticize himself on national television in 2013. Afterward, he took to Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging service, to warn a fellow real estate billionaire against criticizing the government’s program of economic reform: “Careful, or you might be arrested.”
> 
> Under Xi, Beijing has also issued a raft of new Internet regulations. One law threatens punishment of up to three years in prison for posting anything that the authorities consider to be a “rumor,” if the post is either read by more than 5,000 people or forwarded over 500 times. Under these stringent new laws, Chinese citizens have been arrested for posting theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Over one four-month period, Beijing suspended, deleted, or sanctioned more than 100,000 accounts on Weibo for violating one of the seven broadly defined “bottom lines” that represent the limits of permissible expression. These restrictions produced a 70 percent drop in posts on Weibo from March 2012 to December 2013, according to a study of 1.6 million Weibo users commissioned by The Telegraph. And when Chinese netizens found alternative ways of communicating, for example, by using the group instant-messaging platform WeChat, government censors followed them. In August 2014, Beijing issued new instant-messaging regulations that required users to register with their real names, restricted the sharing of political news, and enforced a code of conduct. Unsurprisingly, in its 2013 ranking of Internet freedom around the world, the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House ranked China 58 out of 60 countries -- tied with Cuba. Only Iran ranked lower.
> 
> In his efforts to promote ideological unity, Xi has also labeled ideas from abroad that challenge China’s political system as unpatriotic and even dangerous. Along these lines, Beijing has banned academic research and teaching on seven topics: universal values, civil society, citizens’ rights, freedom of the press, mistakes made by the Communist Party, the privileges of capitalism, and the independence of the judiciary. This past summer, a party official publicly attacked the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government research institution, for having been “infiltrated by foreign forces.” This attack was met with mockery among prominent Chinese intellectuals outside the academy, including the economist Mao Yushi, the law professor He Weifang, and the writer Liu Yiming. Still, the accusations will likely have a chilling effect on scholarly research and international collaboration.
> 
> This crackdown might undermine the very political cohesiveness Xi seeks. Residents of Hong Kong and Macao, who have traditionally enjoyed more political freedom than those on the mainland, have watched Xi’s moves with growing unease; many have called for democratic reform. In raucously democratic Taiwan, Xi’s repressive tendencies are unlikely to help promote reunification with the mainland. And in the ethnically divided region of Xinjiang, Beijing’s restrictive political and cultural policies have resulted in violent protests.
> 
> Even within China’s political and economic upper class, many have expressed concern over Xi’s political tightening and are seeking a foothold overseas. According to the China-based Hurun Report, 85 percent of those with assets of more than $1 million want their children to be educated abroad, and more than 65 percent of Chinese citizens with assets of $1.6 million or more have emigrated or plan to do so. The flight of China’s elites has become not only a political embarrassment but also a significant setback for Beijing’s efforts to lure back home top scientists and scholars who have moved abroad in past decades.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> A MORAL AUTHORITY?
> 
> The centerpiece of Xi’s political reforms is his effort to restore the moral authority of the Communist Party. He has argued that failing to address the party’s endemic corruption could lead to the demise of not only the party but also the Chinese state. Under the close supervision of Wang Qishan, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, tackling official corruption has become Xi’s signature issue. Previous Chinese leaders have carried out anticorruption campaigns, but Xi has brought new energy and seriousness to the cause: limiting funds for official banquets, cars, and meals; pursuing well-known figures in the media, the government, the military, and the private sector; and dramatically increasing the number of corruption cases brought for official review. In 2013, the party punished more than 182,000 officials for corruption, 50,000 more than the annual average for the previous five years. Two scandals that broke this past spring indicate the scale of the campaign. In the first, federal authorities arrested a lieutenant general in the Chinese military for selling hundreds of positions in the armed forces, sometimes for extraordinary sums; the price to become a major general, for example, reached $4.8 million. In the second, Beijing began investigating more than 500 members of the regional government in Hunan Province for participating in an $18 million vote-buying ring.
> 
> Xi’s anticorruption crusade represents just one part of his larger plan to reclaim the Communist Party’s moral authority. He has also announced reforms that address some of Chinese society’s most pressing concerns. With Xi at the helm, the Chinese leadership has launched a campaign to improve the country’s air quality; reformed the one-child policy; revised the hukou system of residency permits, which ties a citizen’s housing, health care, and education to his official residence and tends to favor urban over rural residents; and shut down the system of “reeducation through labor” camps, which allowed the government to detain people without cause. The government has also announced plans to make the legal system more transparent and to rid it of meddling by local officials.
> 
> Despite the impressive pace and scope of Xi’s reform initiatives, it remains unclear whether they represent the beginning of longer-term change, or if they are merely superficial measures designed to buy the short-term goodwill of the people. Either way, some of his reforms have provoked fierce opposition. According to the Financial Times, former Chinese leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have both warned Xi to rein in his anticorruption campaign, and Xi himself has conceded that his efforts have met with significant resistance. The campaign has also incurred real economic costs. According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Chinese GDP could fall this year by as much as 1.5 percentage points as a result of declining sales of luxury goods and services, as officials are increasingly concerned that lavish parties, political favor-buying, and expensive purchases will invite unwanted attention. (Of course, many Chinese are still buying; they are just doing so abroad.) And even those who support the goal of fighting corruption have questioned Xi’s methods. Premier Li Keqiang, for example, called for greater transparency and public accountability in the government’s anticorruption campaign in early 2014; his remarks, however, were quickly deleted from websites.
> 
> Xi’s stance on corruption may also pose a risk to his personal and political standing: his family ranks among the wealthiest of the Chinese leadership, and according to The New York Times, Xi has told relatives to shed their assets, reducing his vulnerability to attack. Moreover, he has resisted calls for greater transparency, arresting activists who have pushed for officials to reveal their assets and punishing Western media outlets that have investigated Chinese leaders.
> 
> KEEPING CONTROL
> 
> As Xi strives to consolidate political control and restore the Communist Party’s legitimacy, he must also find ways to stir more growth in China’s economy. Broadly speaking, his objectives include transforming China from the world’s manufacturing center to its innovation hub, rebalancing the Chinese economy by prioritizing consumption over investment, and expanding the space for private enterprise. Xi’s plans include both institutional and policy reforms. He has slated the tax system, for example, for a significant overhaul: local revenues will come from a broad range of taxes instead of primarily from land sales, which led to corruption and social unrest. In addition, the central government, which traditionally has received roughly half the national tax revenue while paying for just one-third of the expenditures for social welfare, will increase the funding it provides for social services, relieving some of the burden on local governments. Scores of additional policy initiatives are also in trial phases, including encouraging private investment in state-owned enterprises and lowering the compensation of their executives, establishing private banks to direct capital to small and medium-sized businesses, and shortening the length of time it takes for new businesses to secure administrative approvals.
> 
> Yet as details of Xi’s economic plan unfold, it has become clear that despite his emphasis on the free market, the state will retain control over much of the economy. Reforming the way in which state-owned enterprises are governed will not undermine the dominant role of the Communist Party in these companies’ decision-making; Xi has kept in place significant barriers to foreign investment; and even as the government pledges a shift away from investment-led growth, its stimulus efforts continue, contributing to growing levels of local debt. Indeed, according to the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper, the increase in the value of outstanding nonperforming loans in the first six months of 2014 exceeded the value of new nonperforming loans for all of 2013.
> 
> Moreover, Xi has infused his economic agenda with the same nationalist -- even xenophobic -- sentiment that permeates his political agenda. His aggressive anticorruption and antimonopoly campaigns have targeted multinational corporations making products that include powdered milk, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and auto parts. In July 2013, in fact, China’s National Development and Reform Commission brought together representatives from 30 multinational companies in an attempt to force them to admit to wrongdoing. At times, Beijing appears to be deliberately undermining foreign goods and service providers: the state-controlled media pay a great deal of attention to alleged wrongdoing at multinational companies while remaining relatively quiet about similar problems at Chinese firms.
> 
> Like his anticorruption campaign, Xi’s investigation of foreign companies raises questions about the underlying intent. In a widely publicized debate broadcast by Chinese state television between the head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and an official from the National Development and Reform Commission, the European official forced his Chinese counterpart to defend the seeming disparities between the Chinese government’s treatment of foreign and domestic companies. Eventually, the Chinese official appeared to yield, saying that China’s antimonopoly procedure was a procedure “with Chinese characteristics.”
> 
> The early promise of Xi’s overhaul thus remains unrealized. A 31-page scorecard of Chinese economic reform, published in June 2014 by the U.S.-China Business Council, contains dozens of unfulfilled mandates. It deems just three of Xi’s policy initiatives successes: reducing the time it takes to register new businesses, allowing multinational corporations to use Chinese currency to expand their business, and reforming the hukou system. Tackling deeper reforms, however, may require a jolt to the system, such as the collapse of the housing market. For now, Xi may well be his own worst enemy: calls for market dominance are no match for his desire to retain economic control.
> 
> WAKING THE LION
> 
> Xi’s efforts to transform politics and economics at home have been matched by equally dramatic moves to establish China as a global power. The roots of Xi’s foreign policy, however, predate his presidency. The Chinese leadership began publicly discussing China’s rise as a world power in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, when many Chinese analysts argued that the United States had begun an inevitable decline that would leave room for China at the top of the global pecking order. In a speech in Paris in March 2014, Xi recalled Napoleon’s ruminations on China: “Napoleon said that China is a sleeping lion, and when she wakes, the world will shake.” The Chinese lion, Xi assured his audience, “has already awakened, but this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” Yet some of Xi’s actions belie his comforting words. He has replaced the decades-old mantra of the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping -- “Hide brightness, cherish obscurity” -- with a far more expansive and muscular foreign policy.
> 
> For Xi, all roads lead to Beijing, figuratively and literally. He has revived the ancient concept of the Silk Road -- which connected the Chinese empire to Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe -- by proposing a vast network of railroads, pipelines, highways, and canals to follow the contours of the old route. The infrastructure, which Xi expects Chinese banks and companies to finance and build, would allow for more trade between China and much of the rest of the world. Beijing has also considered building a roughly 8,100-mile high-speed intercontinental railroad that would connect China to Canada, Russia, and the United States through the Bering Strait. Even the Arctic has become China’s backyard: Chinese scholars describe their country as a “near-Arctic” state.
> 
> Along with new infrastructure, Xi also wants to establish new institutions to support China’s position as a regional and global leader. He has helped create a new development bank, operated by the BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- to challenge the primacy of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And he has advanced the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which could enable China to become the leading financer of regional development. These two efforts signal Xi’s desire to capitalize on frustrations with the United States’ unwillingness to make international economic organizations more representative of developing countries.
> 
> Xi has also promoted new regional security initiatives. In addition to the already existing Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Chinese-led security institution that includes Russia and four Central Asian states, Xi wants to build a new Asia-Pacific security structure that would exclude the United States. Speaking at a conference in May 2014, Xi underscored the point: “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.”
> 
> Xi’s predilection for a muscular regional policy became evident well before his presidency. In 2010, Xi chaired the leading group responsible for the country’s South China Sea policy, which broadened its definition of China’s core interests to include its expansive claims to maritime territory in the South China Sea. Since then, he has used everything from the Chinese navy to fishing boats to try to secure these claims -- claims disputed by other nations bordering the sea. In May 2014, conflict between China and Vietnam erupted when the China National Petroleum Corporation moved an oil rig into a disputed area in the South China Sea; tensions remained high until China withdrew the rig in mid-July. To help enforce China’s claims to the East China Sea, Xi has declared an “air defense identification zone” over part of it, overlapping with those established by Japan and South Korea. He has also announced regional fishing regulations. None of China’s neighbors has recognized any of these steps as legitimate. But Beijing has even redrawn the map of China embossed on Chinese passports to incorporate areas under dispute with India, as well as with countries in Southeast Asia, provoking a political firestorm.
> 
> These maneuvers have stoked nationalist sentiments at home and equally virulent nationalism abroad. New, similarly nationalist leaders in India and Japan have expressed concern over Xi’s policies and taken measures to raise their countries’ own security profiles. Indeed, during his campaign for the Indian prime ministership in early 2014, Narendra Modi criticized China’s expansionist tendencies, and he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have since upgraded their countries’ defense and security ties. Several new regional security efforts are under way that exclude Beijing (as well as Washington). For example, India has been training some Southeast Asian navies, including those of Myanmar and Vietnam, and many of the region’s militaries -- including those of Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea -- have planned joint defense exercises.
> 
> A VIGOROUS RESPONSE
> 
> For the United States and much of the rest of the world, the awakening of Xi’s China provokes two different reactions: excitement, on the one hand, about what a stronger, less corrupt China could achieve, and significant concern, on the other hand, over the challenges an authoritarian, militaristic China might pose to the U.S.-backed liberal order.
> 
> On the plus side, Beijing’s plans for a new Silk Road hinge on political stability in the Middle East; that might provide Beijing with an incentive to work with Washington to secure peace in the region. Similarly, Chinese companies’ growing interest in investing abroad might give Washington greater leverage as it pushes forward a bilateral investment treaty with Beijing. The United States should also encourage China’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major regional free-trade agreement under negotiation. Just as China’s negotiations to join the World Trade Organization in the 1990s prompted Chinese economic reformers to advance change at home, negotiations to join the TPP might do the same today.
> 
> In addition, although China already has a significant stake in the international system, the United States must work to keep China in the fold. For example, the U.S. Congress should ratify proposed changes to the International Monetary Fund’s internal voting system that would grant China and other developing countries a larger say in the fund’s management and thereby reduce Beijing’s determination to establish competing groups.
> 
> On the minus side, Xi’s nationalist rhetoric and assertive military posture pose a direct challenge to U.S. interests in the region and call for a vigorous response. Washington’s “rebalance,” or “pivot,” to Asia represents more than simply a response to China’s more assertive behavior. It also reflects the United States’ most closely held foreign policy values: freedom of the seas, the air, and space; free trade; the rule of law; and basic human rights. Without a strong pivot, the United States’ role as a regional power will diminish, and Washington will be denied the benefits of deeper engagement with many of the world’s most dynamic economies. The United States should therefore back up the pivot with a strong military presence in the Asia-Pacific to deter or counter Chinese aggression; reach consensus and then ratify the TPP; and bolster U.S. programs that support democratic institutions and civil society in such places as Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, where democracy is nascent but growing.
> 
> At the same time, Washington should realize that Xi may not be successful in transforming China in precisely the ways he has articulated. He has set out his vision, but pressures from both inside and outside China will shape the country’s path forward in unexpected ways. Some commodity-rich countries have balked at dealing with Chinese firms, troubled by the their weak record of social responsibility, which has forced Beijing to explore new ways of doing business. China’s neighbors, alarmed by Beijing’s swagger, have begun to form new security relationships. Even prominent foreign policy experts within China, such as Peking University’s Wang Jisi and the retired ambassador Wu Jianmin, have expressed reservations over the tenor of Xi’s foreign policy.
> 
> Finally, although little in Xi’s domestic or foreign policy appears to welcome deeper engagement with the United States, Washington should resist framing its relationship with China as a competition. Treating China as a competitor or foe merely feeds Xi’s anti-Western narrative, undermines those in China pushing for moderation, and does little to advance bilateral cooperation and much to diminish the stature of the United States. Instead, the White House should pay particular attention to the evolution of Xi’s policies, taking advantage of those that could strengthen its relationship with China and pushing back against those that undermine U.S. interests. In the face of uncertainty over China’s future, U.S. policymakers must remain flexible and fleet-footed.




I agree broadly and generally with both her thesis and her conclusions.


----------



## CougarKing

Something literally closer to home than other recent articles on China:

Vancity Buzz



> *NORTH AMERICA’S FIRST CHINESE RENMINBI CURRENCY HUB PROPOSED FOR VANCOUVER*
> 
> The Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC) has released a new report that presents a case for the city of Vancouver to become Canada’s Chinese renminbi currency hub – the first hub of its kind in the Americas.
> 
> Currently, Canadian businesses are hampered by the inability to perform business transactions through converting the Canadian dollar into the Chinese renminbi. The renminbi is not traded freely on global financial markets, meaning there are foreign exchange costs for businesses between Canadian and Chinese companies.
> 
> *A currency hub in the country means Canadian businesses would be able to purchase the renminbi directly by using the Canadian dollar, reducing costs by potentially billions per year with the eradication of the need to go through foreign exchange transactions.* It will reduce supply chain costs, increase bargaining power and create more favourable and transparent pricing of goods.
> 
> Within the integrated Asian regional economic bloc, the U.S. dollar is increasingly being replaced by the renminbi as the currency of choice for conducting economic and financial activity. The renminbi is in the process of internationalization and becoming a stable global alternative to the U.S. dollar.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The main event at this year's Zhuhai air show...

Defense News



> *China Airshow Will Unveil J-31*
> Nov. 3, 2014 - 11:47AM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> TAIPEI — A Chinese airshow official has confirmed that China will unveil its stealthy J-31 fighter aircraft at China’s biggest commercial and defense airshow next week in Zhuhai, in the southern province of Guangdong near Hong Kong.
> 
> Known officially as the 10th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, the event will be held from Nov. 11-14. About 700 aviation companies and 120 aircraft will participate.
> 
> Built by Shenyang Aircraft, this will be the first public demonstration of the twin-engine J-31. The fighter is similar in configuration to the single-engine Lockheed F-35 stealth fighter. Chinese-language military blogs posted photographs of the J-31 practicing demonstration flights at Zhuhai last week.
> 
> *The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) will be exhibiting the JH-7A and J-10 fighters, Z-8KA helicopter, and the upgraded H-6M medium-range bomber capable of carrying cruise missiles. The Hongdu L-15 Falcon fighter trainer is not yet listed nor is there a press conference. Hongdu has made a special effort at other air shows in the Middle East and Asia to promote the aircraft.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus an older graphic to highlight the similarities and differences between the J-31 and F-35, etc.


----------



## CougarKing

Somehow I think the students may be "playing with fire" if they try to bring the fight direct to Beijing.

Reuters



> *Hong Kong students fine-tune plan to take democracy call to Beijing*
> Wed Nov 5, 2014 7:37am EST
> 
> By Clare Baldwin and Diana Chan
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Students calling for full democracy for Chinese-ruled Hong Kong are hoping to take their protest to Communist Party rulers in Beijing and are expected to announce details of their new battle plan on Thursday.
> 
> The plan signals a shift in the focus of the protests in the former British colony away from the Hong Kong government which has said it has limited room for maneuver.
> 
> But China is highly unlikely to allow any known pro-democracy activists into Beijing, especially if the trip coincides with this weekend's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum there.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Somehow I think the students may be "playing with fire" if they try to bring the fight direct to Beijing.
> 
> Reuters




I agree with you; this will be, I am 100% certain, "a bridge too far."

For reasons I have explained earlier the students can "win" in HK ... it cannot be an immediate, visible "win," but it can be a big win, all the same. But, and it is a Huge BUT, Xi Jinping cannot and will not "lose;" no leader can afford to lose that much _face_.


----------



## CougarKing

An update on China's carrier aviation arm:



> *Chinese Carrier Fighter Now In Serial Production*
> By: Mike Yeo
> Published: November 10, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark tail number 108_
> 
> 
> China has put the Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark carrier-borne multirole fighter into serial production, with at least eight production examples known to be flying already. This is in addition to the six J-15 prototypes, some of which conducted carrier trials on board China’s refurbished former Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier, Liaoning.
> 
> Undated photos published on Chinese online forums in October showed J-15s bearing the tail numbers 107 and 108 operating from an undisclosed airfield in China. Both aircraft carried the Flying Shark motif on the tail, along with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ensign on the fuselage, similar to all production J-15s seen so far.
> 
> It is worth noting that all production J-15s seen thus far have been powered by the Russian Saturn AL-31 turbofan engine instead of the locally-developed WS-10 Taihang. The Russian engine is still used in a number of aircraft types in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and PLAN.
> 
> To date, no WS-10 powered J-15s have been observed in carrier operations. The reason for that reticence to use the WS-10 is unclear, but it is possible that the Chinese are still not satisfied enough with the reliability of the WS-10 to use it for carrier operations.
> 
> 
> *USNI News*


----------



## tomahawk6

Putin managed to upstage Xi Jinping at APEC by being a gentleman.Vlad wrapped a shawl around Xi's wife.Chinese sensors pulled the images from the internet.

http://news.yahoo.com/putins-gallantry-upstages-chinese-host-apec-082636139.html


----------



## a_majoor

The Russians are also experts in PSYOPS and related disciplines. Putin "upstaging" the Chinese at the APEC summit was almost certainly a calculated act (even if Vlad really _is_ a gentleman, his "team" would be there to rapidly exploit the actions and imagery in almost real time).

It will be very interesting to see how Russia and China deal with each other, given they are both grounded and masters of the various disciplines we group under IA and IO...


----------



## Rifleman62

While President Obama chewed gum.


----------



## CougarKing

A new toy for the PLA-N submarine arm:

Defense News



> *China Shows Off New Sub-Launched Missile at Zhuhai*
> Nov. 11, 2014 - 08:55AM   |   By WENDELL MINNICK
> 
> ZHUHAI, CHINA — The new CM-708UNA submarine-launched cruise missile made its debut at Airshow China in Zhuhai, in the southern province of Guangdong near Hong Kong, on Tuesday.
> 
> The 128-kilometer range missile is the product of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), which also makes unmanned aerial vehicles and land-attack/anti-ship cruise missiles. A CASIC official at the display said the missile is in production.
> 
> *The CM-708UNA is launched by torpedo tube and is applicable for various submarines for targeting medium-to-large ships and inshore targets. The missile uses a strap-down inertial navigation system plus satellite navigation, a high-precision radar seeker and digital control. The missile is powered by a turbo engine and solid rocket booster.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A PLAAF female aerobatic team?

Cue theme song: Guess which "Top Gun" song this came from?   ;D



> Defense News
> 
> *China's First Female Aerobatic Fighter Pilots Take Flight*
> Nov. 11, 2014 - 03:13PM   |   By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
> 
> ZHUHAI, CHINA — The first women fighter pilots to join China’s famed aerobatic team showed off their skills in* J-10 jets *Tuesday as Beijing put on a display of its growing military might.
> 
> The pair strode to their fighter planes in lock-step with male pilots, all wearing identical green jumpsuits and sunglasses, as part of a performance by the Chinese air force’s “August 1st” aerobatic group at the country’s premier airshow.
> 
> *The two are part of a group of five female fighter pilots, who have not been identified by name, flying for the team named for the date of the founding of the army.*
> 
> State media has reported the women are the first to join the group.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)








photo source: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn


----------



## tomahawk6

China's new stealth fighter.Time will tell how stealthy it really is.)

http://news.yahoo.com/china-shows-off-stealth-fighter-101940905.html


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> China's new stealth fighter.Time will tell how stealthy it really is.)
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/china-shows-off-stealth-fighter-101940905.html



Already posted on the previous page.

In other news, beware of Chinese diplomats bearing gifts...especially ones meant to convince neighbours to drop their South China Sea claims...

Reuters



> *China offers ASEAN friendship, loans as South China Sea tension bubbles*
> 
> By Simon Webb and Paul Mooney
> 
> NAYPYITAW (Reuters) - China's Prime Minister Li Keqiang proposed a friendship treaty with Southeast Asian countries and offered $20 billion in loans on Thursday but held firm on the line that Beijing will only settle South China Sea disputes directly with other claimants.
> 
> *China, Taiwan and four members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have competing claims in the sea where concern is growing of an escalation in disputes.*
> 
> "China ... stands ready to become the first dialogue partner to sign with ASEAN a treaty of friendship and cooperation," Li told leaders at an East Asian summit in Myanmar.
> 
> The treaty is seen as an attempt by China to
> dispel any notion it is a threat and Li said China was willing to make pacts with more countries on good-neighborliness and friendship.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The Philippines, one of the ASEAN claimants, has irked China by seeking international arbitration over China's claims to about 90 percent of the South China Sea.
> 
> Philippine diplomatic sources were cool to China's treaty offer, saying it lacked substance and was similar to a 2012 Philippine proposal that China ignored.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I'm not sure what the _New York Times_ expected other than Xi Jinping being "a very confident and strong leader, and has a quite focused policy agenda,” as portrayed in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/world/asia/china-us-xi-jinping-obama-apec.html?_r=2


> Fruitful Visit by Obama Ends With a Lecture From Xi
> 
> By MARK LANDLER
> 
> NOV 12, 2014
> 
> BEIJING — The White House pushed very hard for President Xi Jinping to take questions during his news conference with President Obama at the end of their two days of meetings Wednesday. It did not want a repeat of the stilted, scripted encounter Mr. Obama had with Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, in 2009 on his first trip to China as president.
> 
> What the White House got was Xi Jinping, Unplugged, and that may have been more than it bargained for.
> 
> Discarding his standard bromides about the importance of new “major-country” relations between the United States and China, the Chinese leader delivered an old-fashioned lecture. He warned foreign governments not to meddle in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and foreign journalists to obey the law in China.
> 
> Mr. Xi’s thinly concealed anger turned a news conference that should have been a victory lap for two leaders who had just had a productive meeting into a riveting example of why the relationship between the United States and China remains one of the most complicated in the world. The determination to work together belies deep-rooted historical grievances; the happy talk of win-win solutions masks a ferocious rivalry.
> 
> The cooperation that Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi announced this week is real. Their joint plan to confront climate change could transform negotiations for a new global climate treaty. Their pledge to warn each other’s militaries about exercises could avert a calamitous clash in the treacherous waters of the South and East China Seas.
> 
> And yet Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi found themselves standing before the news media in the Great Hall of the People, wrestling with the same issues that could have divided Nixon and Mao, or Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin, who jousted with each other in a 1998 news conference, which Mr. Jiang had broadcast live across the country.
> 
> Wednesday’s session lacked the personal warmth of that exchange. For all their walks and private dinners, here and at the Sunnylands estate in California last year, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi have fashioned a relationship that is based, above all, on pragmatism.
> 
> Mr. Obama said his meetings with Mr. Xi had given him the chance to debunk the notion that “our pivot to Asia is about containing China.” Mr. Xi said: “It’s natural that we don’t see eye to eye on every issue. But there have always been more common interests between China and the United States than the differences between us.”
> 
> There is plenty of evidence that Mr. Xi is right, from concerns about Iran and North Korea to climate change and counterterrorism. But there are countervailing tensions when a rising power flexes its muscles against an established one, and as a Communist empire bristles at the judgments of a powerful democracy. All of this was on vivid display Wednesday.
> 
> The tensions surfaced after the two leaders finished their opening statements and Mr. Xi seemed to ignore two questions from a reporter for The New York Times — about whether China feared that the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia represented a threat to China, and whether China would ease its refusal to issue visas to foreign correspondents in light of a broader visa agreement with the United States.
> 
> White House officials said Mr. Obama had called on The Times reporter to make a point. Several of the newspaper’s China correspondents had their visas applications denied by the government, an issue Mr. Obama raised with Mr. Xi in one of their meetings.
> 
> After first taking an unrelated, clearly scripted, question from a state-owned Chinese paper — which drew a quizzical facial expression from Mr. Obama — Mr. Xi circled back, declaring that the visa problems of the news organizations, including The Times, were of their own making.
> 
> Mr. Xi insisted that China protected the rights of news media organizations but that they needed to abide by the rules of the country. “When a certain issue is raised as a problem, there must a reason,” he said, evincing no patience for the news media’s concerns about being penalized for unfavorable news coverage of Chinese leaders and their families.
> 
> The Chinese leader reached for an unexpected metaphor to describe the predicament of The Times and other foreign news organizations, saying they were suffering the equivalent of car trouble. “When a car breaks down on the road,” he said through an interpreter, “perhaps we need to get off the car and see where the problem lies.”
> 
> “The Chinese say, ‘let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off,’ ” Mr. Xi added, in a somewhat enigmatic phrase that was not immediately translated into English. It is normally interpreted as “the party which has created the problem should be the one to help resolve it.”
> 
> Mr. Xi was also dismissive of concerns about a surge of anti-American sentiment in the Chinese news media. One state-owned publication described Mr. Obama’s leadership style as insipid. “I don’t think it’s worth fussing over these different views,” Mr. Xi said.
> 
> He bluntly warned the United States and other foreign countries not to get involved in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, responding to an earlier question to Mr. Obama about recurring rumors in the Chinese press that the United States was stirring up the unrest there. The Occupy Central movement, he said, is illegal.
> 
> “Hong Kong affairs are exclusively China’s internal affairs, and foreign countries should not interfere in those affairs in any form or fashion,” Mr. Xi said, reading from notes he had scribbled.
> 
> Taken together, the statements offered an unvarnished glimpse at China’s president, two years into his term and after his extraordinary consolidation of power. He is neither a garrulous operator like Mr. Jiang nor a colorless party bureaucrat like Mr. Hu.
> 
> “Xi is in the early years of his term, is a very confident and strong leader, and has a quite focused policy agenda,” said David Shambaugh, the director of the China policy program at George Washington University.
> 
> Orville Schell, a longtime China observer at the Asia Society in New York, said Mr. Xi’s statements on the foreign news media, the first time he had publicly addressed the issue, were a “dash of cold water.”
> 
> “We had thought that China might be slowly evolving away from this retrograde notion of the media,” Mr. Schell added. But he noted that in a speech last month, Mr. Xi had echoed Mao’s view that the news media should function as a “necessary handmaiden of the party.”
> 
> Mr. Obama seemed content to play the straight man to Mr. Xi. He insisted that the United States had nothing to do with the Hong Kong protests, though he voiced support for free expression. And his references to human rights were carefully calibrated — reaffirming, for example, that the United States does not recognize a separate Taiwan or Tibet.
> 
> As Mr. Obama enters the twilight of his presidency, he appears determined not to let passions get in the way of cooperation with China. Asked about the negative portrayal of him in the Chinese press, he said it came with being a public official, in China or the United States. “I’m a big believer in actions and not words,” he said.
> 
> _Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Beijing, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong._




I'm not sure the APEC meeting was as "fruitful as the _Times_ wants to believe.

Here, also from the _New York Times_ are some graphics illustrating what the current situation is and what was promised: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/12/world/asia/climate-goals-pledged-by-us-and-china-2.html

China has a HUGE pollution problem and coal is the main reason.  Only nuclear power offers any sensible alternative. There is some scope for hydroelectric power on some big rivers in Russia, but there's not room for much more in China, proper. Yes, I do expect to se the world's largest solar plants in both the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts, but I don't expect them, or wind power, to produce much of China's energy needs. But Xi Jinping is not promising very much and Mr Obama is.

The "messages" about visas and Hong Kong are just that: messages ... delivered clearly, I think. Chinese leaders are not in the habit of sending such messages just because they like talking; Xi Jinping meant them to be heard and understood.


----------



## a_majoor

An intersting longer term look at the future of China. The most telling observation is how areas right next to Hong Kong, with unfiltered access to reporting from Hong Kong (including personal contacts and observation) have not taken up the torch for Democracy:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/13/why-china-wont-fall-apart/?print=1



> *Why China Won’t Fall Apart*
> Posted By David P. Goldman On November 13, 2014 @ 6:38 am In Uncategorized | 13 Comments
> 
> The default Western strategy towards China’s rise as an economic and military superpower appears to be to sit back and wait for it to fall apart. That isn’t going to happen, as the dean of Beijing’s foreign press corps, Francesco Sisci, observes in this short essay entitled, “The Great Resilience of the Communist State:”
> 
> As a modest chronicler of events in China for over a quarter of a century, I witnessed at least four events that might have caused the government to crumble, and yet nothing of the sort happened. These include the protest in Tiananmen in 1989, the demonstrations of the Falun Gong in 1999, the SARS epidemic in 2003, and the political attempt of Bo Xilai in 2012. Except for SARS, the other three were caused by deep rifts in the top leadership and efforts of one faction to eliminate another. They were violent internal power struggles causing more damage to Chinese politics than any foreign interference, and yet nothing happened to society.
> 
> The deep-seated reasons for this can be found in an essay I wrote a decade ago. True to that analysis, ten years later, and despite many predictions to the contrary, there still has been no revolution in China. The fact remains that while democratic protests have been raging for a month in Hong Kong, adjacent Shenzhen, whose people receive uncensored news from the territory, has shown no sign of contagion.
> 
> In a nutshell, now is no time for revolution for the Chinese people, who are experiencing a golden age in their history and have had no past experience with democracy to pine for.
> 
> China will need to reform at some point, Sisci argues:
> 
> This does not mean that revolutions or democratic demands are impossible in China. A mix of internal forces and international constraints could change the situation in the next decade. There are two elements which could drive change. The Chinese economy will be roughly as large as that of the US, and this will draw increased attention and fear from other countries because China does not share the political framework of the countries that have dominated the world over the past two centuries – the UK and US. Additionally, a large portion of the Chinese population will enjoy Western middle-class purchasing power, and private enterprises will be required to pay a larger portion of taxes as they will represent a large share of the GDP but as a whole they mighthave limited control over how their tax money is spent.
> 
> Dr. Sisci, the first foreigner to complete a Chinese-language doctorate at China’s Academy of Social Science, has been my colleague at Asia Times Online almost since its founding. He was right about China ten years ago and he’s right now.
> 
> For background on China’s economic resilience, see the presentation “China’s Two Economies” prepared by my colleagues and me at Reorient Group.
> 
> A word of advice to my conservative friends: don’t hold your breath. China’s economy and political system aren’t going to collapse. China will continue to gain power. We need to worry about our own sorry state of affairs: we couldn’t replicate the 1968 moon shot today. Investment in R&D and basic science is a shadow of what it used to be, and our shrunken military budget is biased towards white elephants like the F-35.  Our “Common Core” curriculum stops with algebra, while 90% of Chinese have a high school degree including at least one course in calculus.
> 
> There is a myth in the West that the Chinese only copy but don’t create. The past generation, to be sure, found it more cost-effective to adopt than to reinvent the wheel. That was then. A new generation of young Chinese with first-rate scientific qualifications is entering the market with ambitions to found the next Alibaba.
> 
> This is real competition, and we can’t make it go away by closing our eyes and wishing for revolution. We should be having a Sputnik moment right about now–I refer to the national mobilization after Russia beat us into space in 1957. Instead, we crank up the volume and listen to the theme from “Rocky.”
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Article printed from Spengler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler
> 
> URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/13/why-china-wont-fall-apart/


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> The most telling observation is how areas right next to Hong Kong, with unfiltered access to reporting from Hong Kong (including personal contacts and observation) have not taken up the torch for Democracy:
> 
> http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/13/why-china-wont-fall-apart/?print=1



Trust that the Chinese central govt. is keeping tabs on the booming economic and industrial cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai which are all in driving, rail or ferry range of Hong Kong. 

However, you overlooked the fact that people in the other special administrative territory in Macau have experienced a similar political awakening to their Hong Kong neighbours:

Macau's political awakening (BBC)


----------



## CougarKing

As expected. How far did they realistically expect to go?  :facepalm:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong student leaders blocked from taking democracy fight to Beijing*
> Sat Nov 15, 2014 4:46am EST
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Three Hong Kong student leaders were stopped from boarding a flight to Beijing on Saturday to take their fight for greater democracy directly to the Chinese government after airline authorities said their travel permits were invalid.
> 
> The students, led by Hong Kong Federation of Students' leader Alex Chow, had planned to go to Beijing with the intention of meeting Chinese Premier Li Keqiang as efforts to reach agreement with officials in Hong Kong had failed.
> 
> A Cathay Pacific spokesman told local media that Chinese authorities had told the airline the students' travel permits were invalid. He did not elaborate, though the representative of a student body did comment.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

For those wondering about China's F35 knockoff called the J31, here's its crucial weakness:



> *J-31 Stealth Jet Still Needs Fifth Generation Engine To Compete With Rivals*
> 
> Without a Fifth Generational Aero-Engine, the J-31, China's second fifth-generation fighter designed by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, is unable to compete against Lockheed Martin's F-35, according to the Guancha Syndicate based in Shanghai.
> 
> The J-31 is currently equipped with two RD-93 engines imported from Russia. However, the Russian engine was designed for fourth-generation fighters such as the MiG-29. *The thrust of two RD-93 combined cannot match a single F-135 engine on an F-35 fighter,* according to the report. When *compared with the two F-119 engines of F-22 Raptors, the gap is even wider. *In addition, the Russian-built engines also shortened the range of the J-31.
> 
> Pointing out that the J-31 was unable to fly directly from Shenyang in northeastern China to Guangdong province in the south for the Zhuhai Airshow, the Guancha Syndicate said that the range of the aircraft is estimated at no more than 2,000km.
> 
> *Asian-Defense*


----------



## tomahawk6

In time they will steal the plans for the engine or buy a Russian engine. :camo:


----------



## YZT580

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> In time they will steal the plans for the engine or buy a Russian engine. :camo:



Retrofitting is neither cheap nor without peril.  Any change in engine will require massive amounts of re-engineering: everything from intakes to simple things like cable lengths and fittings.  Even after an engine is selected and tested it will be years before the aircraft can be considered as useable.


----------



## CougarKing

More unrest in Hong Kong:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong protesters break into legislature as tensions rise again*
> Tue Nov 18, 2014 1:42pm EST
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - A small group of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters broke into the city's legislature early on Wednesday before police intervened to prevent others storming the building in a sudden escalation of tensions after a period of calm.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

One view that is skeptical of China's rise in this century, though probably not as pessimistic as Gordon Chang in his book The Coming Collapse of China.

Several factors, such as the income/poverty gap between the rich western, coastal/industrialized regions and the poor rural heartlands, as well as the endemic government corruption that plagues government agencies, despite Pres. Xi's anti-corruption drives, would impede China's progress to becoming a true regional power.

CNBC



> *Why China won't be Asia's dominant power*
> By Nyshka Chandran | CNBC – 12 hours ago
> 
> The argument that China is already Asia's pre-eminent power based on its growing economic and military capacities is weak, the authors say. They expect the limitations of China's economic might, a lack of close bilateral relationships and weak military capability to keep the country from becoming an advanced political-economy that wields influence in the region anytime soon.
> 
> "China is a dominant power, but it's not the dominant power in the region or the world. It's got the economic hardware in place... as a collective country, there's no denying that it's an economic and military power," said Vishnu Varathan, senior economist at Mizuho Bank.
> 
> *An unproductive economy*
> 
> China's gross domestic product growth rate of 7 percent may be a five-year low, but it's still the envy of most countries. However, experts say declining productivity is one of biggest tell-tale signs that China cannot maintain its current pace of growth.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Exaggerated military power*
> 
> The defense sector receives the lion's share of government finances, nearly 15 percent of the 2014 budget, but Dibb and Lee believe China will not become a military superpower until it's capable of taking decisive action on a global scale.
> 
> *"Although China has developed potent military capabilities to make it hazardous for U.S. forces to operate in the approaches to China, the fact remains that Beijing could not enforce a full military blockade of Taiwan or attempt a full-scale amphibious invasion of that island,"* they wrote.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

There are, in the Conservative Party, the CPC caucus in parliament and even within the current cabinet, deep divisions about China. There is a small faction that believes that the best way to promote change in China is to engage it, to bring it deeper and deeper into the big, wide world, largely through trade. There is another, even smaller faction, that is, essentially both timid and even racist. The PM, _it appears to me_, does not belong to either; he, I think, belongs to a larger faction that is overly cautious and actually content with our current reliance upon the USA as our only significant trading partner.

This report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ suggests to me that the large faction, the one to which the PM belongs, is selling us short:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/free-trade-deal-with-china-is-australias-gain-canadas-pain/article21662976/#dashboard/follows/


> Free-trade deal with China is Australia’s gain, Canada’s pain
> 
> NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
> BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Wednesday, Nov. 19 2014
> 
> Monday was “a very good day for Australia,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared after reaching agreement on a free-trade deal with Beijing that, he said, “opens the doors to China” for his country’s corporate sector.
> 
> Australia’s gain may be Canada’s pain, as Mr. Abbott’s triumph tilts the field against Canadian companies already struggling to gain a foothold in the world’s second-largest economy.
> 
> The Australian deal is now prompting calls in Canada for the Harper government to kick-start its own free-trade talks with China, which stands to find cheaper alternatives to its south than from across the Pacific once the agreement is finalized.
> 
> Among the key Australian industries that stand to benefit are metallurgical coal, education, financial services and insurance, important areas for Canada as well.
> 
> Australia will also gain an instant edge in other sectors, such as beef, dairy, lobster, wine, processed foods, pharmaceuticals, diamonds and aluminum. Each of those products expects to see the complete removal of Chinese tariffs in coming years.
> 
> The Australian department of foreign affairs and trade specifically names Canada as one of the competitors over which it will gain an advantage with the deal, which is expected to be in place in a year.
> 
> Its full implementation will bring to zero the tariffs on 95 per cent of Australia’s exports to China.
> 
> “Across the board, we’re probably seeing a 10-per-cent increase in competitiveness for Australian products on a like-for-like basis,” said Bryan Clark, director of international affairs and trade at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the country’s biggest business group.
> 
> Australia stands to gain a long head start, given that it took Beijing and Canberra nine years of negotiations to reach the agreement – and Ottawa has yet to start.
> 
> “It will give us a very strong competitive advantage over a period of time,” said Tracy Colgan, the Beijing-based president of Kamsky Associates Inc., a cross-border mergers and acquisitions consultant.
> 
> “We anticipate it’s going to kick off a surge in Australia’s China trade.”
> 
> For Canada, one of the single most important changes will be the deletion for Australia of a recently imposed 3-per-cent tariff on metallurgical coal, a major Canadian export to China.
> 
> Companies such as Teck Resources Ltd. will continue to face that pricing obstacle, while rival BHP Billiton Ltd. will not. Teck, which last year saw nearly $2.5-billion in revenue from China, declined comment.
> 
> (One of the beneficiaries of the Australian deal, ironically, is Montreal-based Saputo Inc., which last year bought Warrnambool Cheese & Butter Factory Co., an Australian company that will now have better access to the Chinese market.)
> 
> To date, the Canadian business community has not called loudly for free-trade talks with China, a matter that has proved politically difficult for a Conservative government whose Cabinet is deeply divided on closer ties with Beijing.
> 
> But with the Australian agreement now made, some say it’s time Canada seek the same. China has for years held out an invitation to free-trade talks, and a precursor Sino-Canadian economic complementarities study was completed in 2012. It found “there is room for much growth” in trade and highlighted a number of sectors – agriculture, natural resources, manufacturing and services – included in the Australian deal.
> 
> “We need to be moving forward on economic agreements,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the Canada China Business Council. The Australia deal can both serve as a template and an incentive, since “there’s a bunch of sectors in there that strike right at Canada.”
> 
> She added: “We’re always losing ground in China, and this is why it’s so important that we keep moving forward, and try to keep the pace up – because the rest of the world is really aggressively pursuing China.”
> 
> The Canadian share of Chinese trade has remained largely unmoved for years; Canada, with a population 50 per cent larger than Australia, does half its trade with China.
> 
> Even if Canada does open free-trade talks with Beijing, Ottawa may want to consider other side deals first, given the time it takes to conclude comprehensive agreements.
> 
> Sectoral agreements on aerospace and transportation, clean technology, agri-food, mining and natural resources “are the ones everyone agrees would be logical to start with,” Ms. Kutulakos said.
> 
> “Every advantage we can give ourselves, we should,” she said.




Don't get me wrong: the American market remains the biggest and best in the world and we want, need to protect our access to it ... but not at the expense of other markets: trade is not a zero sum game. America is not in real decline, but China is rising.


----------



## GAP

The counter argument to this is that China and Australia trade has been heavy for a long while, but Canada is the new guy on the block because of lack of effort on our part.


----------



## a_majoor

Perhaps the other counter argument is Canada wants to use the TPP to "get their toes wet" before going all in. As well, a larger regional free trade block like the TPP makes Canada less vulnerable to machinations by a *partner* in a bilateral trade agreement.


----------



## a_majoor

From both the Austrian perspective and simple common sense, this can only end badly as "stimulus" drives one or more malinvestment bubbles. This was discovered in the "South Sea Bubble" back in the 1700's, and reinforced most recently in 2008....

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/11/21/5331553/china-state-media-says-central.html#.VG-88WfAv9o



> China, Europe chase growth amid global slowdown
> 
> 
> 
> By JOE McDONALD
> AP Business Writer
> 
> 
> 
> Posted: Friday, Nov. 21, 2014
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> BEIJING China's central bank unexpectedly slashed interest rates on Friday to re-energize the world's No. 2 economy, joining a growing list of major economies that are trying to encourage growth in the face of a global slowdown.
> 
> The president of the European Central Bank said Friday he was ready to step up stimulus for the 18-country eurozone economy, where growth is meager and unemployment is soaring. And Japan's government this week delayed a tax increase after the country slipped back into recession. Japan's central bank late last month increased its purchases of government bonds and other assets to try to revive growth.
> 
> News of China's actions and the ECB's hints of further stimulus triggered a surge in stock markets, particularly in Europe. Germany's DAX rose 2.6 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.5 percent to close at a record high. Asian stocks had closed before the Chinese announcements.
> 
> Friday's moves highlighted an increasing divide in the global economy. The United States is showing signs of steady growth, prompting the Federal Reserve to rein in its stimulus efforts.
> 
> So far, the U.S. has escaped any drag from the slowdown overseas. Fed policymakers said at a meeting last month that the impact on the U.S. would be "quite limited."
> 
> Jay Bryson, a global economist at Wells Fargo Securities, said the U.S. is "relatively insulated" from overseas developments. Exports are a smaller source of growth than in other developed nations and many major employers, such as health care and education providers, are largely unaffected by overseas activity.
> 
> The slowdown in global growth is becoming an increasing concern for policymakers. Japan confirmed this week that it has fallen back into recession and will delay a tax increase to help consumer spending.
> 
> In Europe, it is not only weak growth but also the low inflation rate that is worrying the ECB. Low inflation or an outright drop in prices can weaken an economy further by encouraging delays in spending and investment. The economy of the 18-country eurozone grew by a scant 0.2 percent in the third quarter compared with the previous three months.
> 
> As indicators for the eurozone and global economy disappoint, ECB President Mario Draghi was firm in his message: ""We will do what we must to raise inflation and inflation expectations as fast as possible," he said in a speech in Frankfurt.
> 
> Of major economies, only the U.S. is considering raising interest rates. The Federal Reserve only recently ended a massive bond-buying program that helped reduce market interest rates because the economy is strengthening.
> 
> But the prospect of higher rates in the U.S. is exposing the country to a potentially painful rise in the dollar — currencies tend to strengthen with higher rates. The dollar hit a seven-year high against the yen, and jumped almost 1 percent against the euro on Friday. A stronger dollar makes it tougher for U.S. exporters to sell their goods internationally.
> 
> The People's Bank of China said it is trying to address "financing difficulties" caused by a shortage of credit. It also said the move was not a change in monetary policy and economic conditions are within an "appropriate range."
> 
> China's economic growth fell to a five-year low of 7.3 percent in the latest quarter and manufacturing and other indicators are declining. That has prompted suggestions Beijing might intervene to prop up growth.
> 
> The rate charged by banks for loans to each other rose this week to its highest level since early October, reflecting reduced availability of credit, a concern for Chinese economic planners.
> 
> "If necessary, the central bank will provide timely liquidity support," or extra credit to markets, it said in a separate statement.
> 
> The bank cut the rate on a one-year loan by commercial banks by 0.4 percentage points to 5.6 percent. The rate paid on a one-year savings was lowered by 0.25 point to 2.75 percent.
> 
> It was the first rate cut since July 2012, and comes after the Cabinet called this week for steps to reduce financing costs for industry to make the economy more efficient.
> 
> Bryson of Wells Fargo Securities said the bank's move would have only a limited impact on China's economy. But it does signal that Chinese officials' concerns about growth are rising, he said, a sign they may take further steps in the coming months.
> 
> In China, changes in interest rates have a limited direct effect on the government-dominated economy but are seen as a signal to banks to lend more and to state companies that they are allowed to step up borrowing.
> 
> "The reduction in the benchmark lending rate will mainly benefit the larger, typically state-owned firms that borrow from banks," said Mark Williams of Capital Economics in a report. Most of China's private companies cannot get loans from the state-owned banking industry and rely on an underground credit market.
> 
> "This does not necessarily signal that policymakers are going back on efforts to support smaller companies, or giving up on 'targeted easing,' but they apparently feel larger firms are now in need of support too."
> 
> 
> 
> AP Economics Writer Christopher S. Rugaber contributed to this report.
> 
> Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/11/21/5331553/china-state-media-says-central.html#.VG-88WfAv9o#storylink=cpy



Since much of the root problem is the debt overhang, preventing deleveraging and offering more incentives to the market to expand debt rather than to deleverage private accounts simply makes the problem shamble on like a grade "Z" zombie movie.


----------



## chanman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> For those wondering about China's F35 knockoff called the J31, here's its crucial weakness:



The RD-93s look very similar to the Hornet's F404 in size, weight, and thrust. The biggest difference seems to be a larger diameter and higher bypass ratio, maybe to improve fuel economy. I'm not sure how much stock to put into any plane before it actually hits production - at this stage, the design could always be revised later when the definitive engines become available. (The Rafale demonstrator flew with F404s

The real engine to watch carefully is the WS-10 - that's supposed to be used on the J-10, as well as China's various Flanker derivatives (the J-11B, J-15, and J-16) but production delays led to the earlier J-10 and J-11Bs getting Russian engines instead. Being able to produce it in volume greatly reduces reliance on the Russians for parts and aircraft manufacturing.


----------



## CougarKing

Russia's still willing to sell more Sukhoi jets to China despite the bad memory that came behind the origin of China's J-11 fighter/unauthorized Su-27 knockoff.

Janes IHS 360



> *Russia ready to supply 'standard' Su-35s to China, says official*
> 
> Russia is ready to supply 'standard' versions of the Su-35 combat aircraft to China, Sukhoi first deputy director general Boris Bregman recently told IHS Jane's .
> 
> "During talks we informed the Chinese side that we can supply a standard version of the Su-35 fighter, which has been fully completed, tested, and received Russian Air Force certification," he said on the sidelines of Airshow China 2014 in Zhuhai.
> 
> Bregman said that the adaptation of the fighter to meet customer requirements - or 'Sinification' - can be performed only as part of a supplementary contract. This work may include some design and development to include the integration of different enhancements, additional algorithms, and Chinese-language user interfaces.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

The sheer scale of this malinvestment is staggering. How this will end will be something new, simply due to the size and scope, but history suggests that it will end in tears:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/11/28/useless-investments-massive-waste/



> *Useless Investments, Massive Waste*
> Has China really wasted $7 trillion since the global financial crisis? Yes, yes it has, say researchers. The Financial Times:
> 
> In 2009 and 2013 alone, “ineffective investment” came to nearly half the total invested in the Chinese economy in those years, according to research by Xu Ce of the National Development and Reform Commission, the state planning agency, and Wang Yuan from the Academy of Macroeconomic Research, a former arm of the NDRC.
> 
> China is this year on track to grow at its slowest annual pace since 1990, and the report highlights growing concern in the Chinese leadership about the potential economic and social consequences if wasteful investment leaves projects abandoned and bad loans overloading the financial system.
> 
> Anyone who has driven past miles and miles of empty residential skyscapers surrounding second tier cities in China has figured something like this was at work. And the scale of misdirected investment is truly immense.
> 
> How it all works out is anyone’s guess, as nothing on the scale of China’s industrialization has ever been seen before, and those who call time on China’s bubble have been proven wrong many times over. Nevertheless, the least likely scenario of all would be for China to move seamlessly and smoothly from its current state up to fully developed status without suffering one or more massive economic checks and setbacks.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This is the big thing out of yesterday's Taiwan elections: "It’s possible, for example, that concern over fallout in Taiwan was a factor leading to cautious approach toward Hong Kong democracy protests. If the pro-China KMT continues to lose at the polls, will Beijing feel more freedom to crackdown in Hong Kong?"

My answers are: *Yes* to the preamble but *No!* to the question, itself. In fact I _suspect_ that China will look at the Taiwan municipal elections as a _warning_: Taiwan is losing faith in "one country, two systems" and is less and less inclined towards voluntary reunification.

China has an overwhelming *strategic vital interest* in a peaceful reunification of Taiwan into China and many Chinese scholars see Hong Kong as the "canary in the coal mine;" when things are going well in HK - economically, socially and, above all, politically - then Taiwan is more inclined to look favourably on reunification ... currently, in the face of Beijing's (relatively, but not really) hard line, Taiwan is backing away.


----------



## CougarKing

This won't be the end of the Hong Kong democracy movement, no matter how much the CCP hardliner members wish it...

Reuters



> *Hong Kong 'Occupy' leaders surrender as pro-democracy protests appear to wither*
> 
> By Clare Jim and Clare Baldwin
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Leaders of Hong Kong's Occupy Central movement surrendered to police on Wednesday for their role in democracy protests that the government has deemed illegal, the latest sign that the civil disobedience campaign may be running out of steam.
> 
> Three founders turned themselves in a day after calling on students to retreat from protest sites in the Asia financial center amid fears of further violence, just hours after student leader Joshua Wong had called on supporters to regroup.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

The problem with these three 'leaders' is that they lost control on Day 2 or 3 of the _movement_ and two different groups of students took over.

The news here (in HK) seems to suggest that the authorities are not too interested in these three: it is the more _active_ (and now and again even violent) protesters who are the problem.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Yeah, but the data is based on PPP (purchasing power parity) which is excellent when measuring, say, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark and Estonia; it's less useful when you add, say, Malaysia, Fiji and China to the mix and it becomes almost useless when the economies are too disparate ~ say Australia, Benin and China.
> 
> Second, don't forget that there are "three Chinas:" a wealthy, first world country on the East Coast, a developing country in the centre and a third world country in thew West.



And again China's economy in the media is trumpeted as the largest...

Market Watch/Yahoo News



> *It’s official: America is now No. 2*
> By Brett Arends | MarketWatch – 10 hours ago
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.
> 
> As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.
> 
> To put the numbers slightly differently, *China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.*
> 
> This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

After hearing a lot in recent years about the high end of the PLA's technological spectrum (ASAT weapons, ballistic missile-carrying subs, etc.), here is an article about the low end...



> *What China's Army-issue underwear reveals*
> 
> Source: Christian Science Monitor/Yahoo News
> 
> *There’s a lot to learn from an article that just appeared on the website of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; for example, Chinese soldiers’ underpants were equipped with elasticated waistbands only in the 21st century.*
> 
> Until recently, the article recalls, an infantryman would “have to worry about the rope of his big underpants, which would loosen suddenly but could never be untied when he wanted to answer the call of nature.”
> 
> Behind this tantalizing tidbit lies an illuminating point: Chinese military planners pay more attention to aircraft carriers and satellite-killer rockets than they do to their foot soldiers. Chinese infantrymen have a tradition of stripped-down fighting that dates back to the days when the Communist Party was fighting a guerrilla war before the revolution. *Money is no longer so scarce, but Beijing is still not spending much on its lowly grunts.*
> 
> The battlefield equipment that the average Chinese fighter wears would cost the equivalent of “two entry level iPhone6's,” says the article. His American counterpart would be carrying gear worth 10 times that, the equivalent of “a mid-level car,” according to the reporter’s estimate.
> 
> An example: US soldiers wear Kevlar helmets equipped with communications technology. *Most Chinese soldiers, the article says, are still wearing steel helmets; only a minority have Kevlar models and none of them have earphones or microphones.
> 
> “Communications basically relies on yelling,”*
> the article quotes a soldier on the point of retiring after 16 years’ service, Wang Fujian, as saying.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A one-time gesture or a sign that cooperation in space between these two powers will grow?

Defense News




> *China-US Space Relations See Small but Important Step*
> Dec. 14, 2014 - 02:50PM   |   By AARON MEHTA
> 
> WASHINGTON — China has taken a small, but potentially meaningful, step toward more normalized relations with the international space community, a top US general announced this month.
> 
> Gen. John Hyten, the head of US Air Force Space Command, told an audience at a Dec. 5 Air Force Association event that Chinese officials, *for the first time, have asked that the US share space situational awareness information directly through a military-to-military connection.*
> 
> Space Command typically shares that information with industry and other nations through conjunction summary messages (CSM), essentially small reports that tell satellite operators the Air Force predicts their system will be traveling dangerously close to another in-orbit object. The goal is to give those operators enough time to move their systems out of the way, either from another satellite or from space debris.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Adverse effects on the Chinese economy from the continuing drop in oil prices and the US vs. OPEC oil war?

Reuters



> *Oil prices fall as China's factories slow*
> Reuters
> 
> By Henning Gloystein
> SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices fell on Tuesday, with Brent mired near a 5-1/2 year low close to $60 per barrel, as Chinese factory activity slowed and concerns rose over the health of emerging market economies and their currencies.
> Oil prices have almost halved since June amid rising output and cooling demand, but producer club OPEC has so far resisted calls to cut production to shore up prices.
> 
> Data showing activity in China's factory sector shrank for the first time in seven months in December, adding to a slew of reports showing more fatigue in the world's No.2 economy, further dragged on oil prices.
> 
> Brent for January delivery was at $60.81 a barrel at 0420 GMT (11:20 p.m. EST), down 25 cents and close to the 5-1/2-year low of $60.20 hit on Monday.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Corruption in state-owned enterprises' foreign investments...

Reuters



> *Special Report: Depleted oil field is window into China's corruption crackdown*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> A subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), PetroChina Daqing Oilfield, paid $85 million to pump from three blocks in the ageing Limau field under a 2013 contract with Indonesia’s state-owned oil company, Pertamina, according to senior Chinese oil industry officials with knowledge of the transaction.
> 
> Today, the three Limau blocks squeeze out less than three percent of the oil pumped when output peaked in the 1960s. When PetroChina Daqing announced the deal, it didn’t disclose the seller, the price or any other financial details.
> 
> *“We all know it is a ridiculous investment, but I have no idea where the money has actually ended up,” says a senior Chinese oil industry official who has seen budget figures for the Limau wells.*
> 
> The management at CNPC is now investigating the deal as part of a sweeping crackdown on official graft by Chinese President Xi Jinping that has destroyed a powerful political rival who once ran the oil giant – Zhou Yongkang. The anti-corruption campaign is cutting a swathe through the senior management ranks at CNPC, with at least a dozen former top managers under arrest.
> 
> There is vast scope for corruption inside the CNPC empire, which includes its huge listed subsidiary PetroChina Company Ltd and hundreds of other units, say company officials familiar with the investigation. The group is one of the world’s biggest corporations, last year reporting revenues of $432 billion. Current and former senior company officials say it is difficult to keep track of all the businesses and deals underway.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Chinese oil industry officials say they have identified two other suspect deals in Indonesia in which the CNPC group paid a combined $350 million to buy assets from little-known private companies. “Basically, they are worthless,” says the same oil industry official who has seen the budgeting figures for the Limau deal. “It has caused heavy losses for the state.”*
> 
> CNPC chairman Zhou Jiping told an internal meeting in August that the company would “actively explore” new ways of conducting investigations in its overseas operations as part of its crackdown on corruption, the company said in a statement on its website. A CNPC group spokesman in Beijing declined to answer questions from Reuters about the suspect deals.
> 
> The story of the Limau transaction provides a window into the mechanics of what Chinese oil industry officials say is one suspect deal.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

With this amount of "hot" money floating around in the global economy, there should be identifiable ripple effects that can be traced (much like "hot" drug money distorted the real estate market in Miami in the 1980's as dealers looked for safe assets to put their cash into, as well as launder the money so they could withdraw it as "clean" cash:

http://qz.com/313393/more-than-1-trillion-in-secret-cash-sneaked-out-of-china-in-the-last-10-years/



> *More than $1 trillion in secret cash sneaked out of China in the last 10 years*
> WRITTEN BY
> Gwynn Guilford
> China's Transition
> December 16, 2014
> 
> China’s capital account might be closed—but it’s not that closed. Between 2003 and 2012, $1.3 trillion slipped out of mainland China—more than any other developing country—says a report (pdf) by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a financial transparency group. The trends illuminate China’s tricky balancing act of controlling the economy and keeping it liquid.
> 
> GFI says the most common way money leaks out in the developing world is through fake trade invoices. The other big culprit is “hot money,” likely due to corruption—which GFI gleans from inconsistencies in balance of payments data.
> In China, both activities have picked up since 2009. In fact, $725 billion—more than half of the outflows from the last decade—has left since 2009, just after the Chinese government launched its 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package.
> 
> Even after that wound down, the government encouraged investment to boost the economy, prodding its state-run banks to lend. Since loan officers dish out credit to the safest companies—those with political backing—this overwhelmingly benefited government officials and their cronies.
> 
> That’s left small private companies so starved for capital that they’ll pay exorbitant rates for shadow-market loans, which a lot of China’s sketchy trade invoicing outflows likely sneaked back in to speculate on shadow finance and profit from the appreciating yuan. Corrupt officials, meanwhile, shifted their ill-gotten gains into overseas real estate and garages full of Bentleys.
> 
> Those re-inflows inflate risky debt and had driven up the yuan’s value, threatening export competitiveness. China’s leaders were not exactly happy about this, and in March its central bank drove down the value of the currency in order to discourage hot money speculation on the yuan’s appreciation.
> 
> China’s policies leave it with few other options. To avoid the economic nosedive that likely would follow if the bad debt got written down, China’s leaders have the banks extending and re-extending loans, hoping to deleverage gradually.
> 
> That requires an ever-ballooning supply of money, though. The slowing of China’s trade surplus and foreign direct investment inflows leaves the financial system dependent on new sources of money—like speculative inflows from fake trade invoicing.
> 
> The developing countries with the most capital outflow in 2012, according to GFI.
> The danger of this is apparent already. For example, the government’s June 2013 crackdown on fake trade invoicing caused a seize-up in liquidity, pushing banks close to a meltdown.
> 
> This precarious relationship with liquidity might partially explain “Operation Fox Hunt,” the crackdown on Chinese government officials who have fled China or transferred assets to family members abroad. Already, 329 “foxes” have been snagged, and the government just demoted around 1,000 officials (paywall) whose relatives abroad refuse to return to China.
> 
> Xi’s so-called anti-corruption crusade has boosted his populist bona fides with the people. But there’s likely more behind it than just public relations. With China’s real estate market in the doldrums, its economy slowing, and its leader cracking down, the “foxes” have more reason than ever to sneak their spoils overseas. Making sure they don’t isn’t just a matter of legality, but of protecting China’s financial system from freezing up once again.


----------



## Dissident

That would explain Vancouver...


----------



## CougarKing

A development that may infuriate Tokyo:

Military.com



> *China Reportedly Building Military Base on Islands Near Japan*
> 
> China's military is building large-scale base facilities on islands near the Senkaku Islands southwest of mainland Japan, several Chinese sources said Sunday.
> 
> Construction is under way in the *Nanji Islands in Zhejiang Province*, lying about 300 kilometers to the northwest of the Japanese-administered, uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. China claims the Senkakus as Diaoyu.
> 
> The base is expected to enhance China's readiness to respond to potential military crises in the region as well as strengthen surveillance over the air defense identification zone it declared over part of the East China Sea in November last year, the sources said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Xi consolidating power as he continues his anti-corruption/graft drive...

Reuters



> *Special Report: Fear and retribution in Xi's corruption purge*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The dossier provides rare insight into the vast purge now convulsing the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping. The mainland businessmen who provided the dossier, along with material on multiple earlier missions Chen led to Hong Kong and overseas, were frank about their intention: to paint the then-governor as a profligate spender and put him in the sights of corruption investigators who are hunting officials all over China on Xi’s orders. As part of his crackdown on graft, Xi is demanding that senior officials halt lavish travel and entertainment.
> 
> The detailed nature of the documents purportedly describing Chen’s visit illustrate the lengths some in China are prepared to go to in an effort to exploit the crackdown. Xi’s graft busters are urging whistle-blowers to denounce officials as well as managers of state-owned companies in a campaign that is taking on some of the frenzy of the mass political movements of the Party’s early years. The crackdown is providing a rare opportunity to bring down the high and mighty in what is normally a tightly hierarchical party.
> 
> (...FULL ARTICLE AT LINK ABOVE)


----------



## McG

Matthew Fisher recently speculated that, despite ISIS and wars in Ukraine capturing news media focus, developments in China through 2014 will have greater influences on our future in the years beyond 2015.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/second+thought+Ukraine+Iraq+crises+news+China+moves+were+most+consequential/10681815/story.html#__federated=1


----------



## CougarKing

More Chinese troops head to Sudan; in the past an engineering battalion and other support units were sent as part of the UN peacekeeping forces there.



> *Oil for peace? China to send 700 peacekeepers to S. Sudan, signs energy deal*
> 
> [rt.com]
> 
> Quote
> China has announced it will deploy a 700-strong infantry battalion in South Sudan at the beginning of 2015. It comes as the war-torn African country signed an agreement with Chinese petroleum giant CNPC to boost oil production.


----------



## a_majoor

Some of the long term fallout of China's "one child" policy is now coming to the surface: "Bachelor villages" where the men vastly outnumber the women, and most eligible women move to the cities where the men have the ability to pay the "bride price" (which is rising to some pretty impressive levels). What the long term impact of such a huge demographic bulge of young men will do is debatable, but I suspect that it won't be good:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-25/china-needs-millions-of-brides-asap



> CHINA
> China Needs Millions of Brides ASAP
> 139 DEC 25, 2014 6:00 PM EST
> By Adam Minter
> 
> In the villages outside of Handan, China, a bachelor looking to marry a local girl needs to have as much as $64,000 -- the price tag for a suitable home and obligatory gifts. That's a bit out of the price range of many of the farmers who live in the area. So in recent years, according to the Beijing News, local men have been turning to a Vietnamese marriage broker, paying as much as $18,500 for an imported wife, complete with a money-back guarantee in case the bride fled.
> 
> But that fairy tale soon fell apart. On the morning of November 21, sometime after breakfast, as many as 100 of Handan’s imported Vietnamese wives -- together with the broker -- disappeared without a trace. It was a peculiarly Chinese instance of fraud. The victims are a local subset of a fast-growing underclass: millions of poor, mostly rural men, who can’t meet familial and social expectations that a man marry and start a family because of the country's skewed demographics. In January, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that China is home to 33.8 million more men than women out of a population exceeding 1.3 billion.
> 
> China's vast population of unmarried men is sure to pose an array of challenges for China, and perhaps its neighbors, for decades to come. What's already clear is that fraudulent mail-order wives are only the start of a much larger problem.
> 
> The immediate cause of China’s gender imbalance is a long-standing cultural preference for boys. In China’s patrilineal culture, they’re expected to carry on the family name, as well as serve as a social security policy for aging parents. In the 1970s, China’s so-called One Child policy transformed this preference into an imperative that parents fulfilled via sex selective abortions (made possible by the widespread availability of ultrasounds). As a result, millions of girls never made it onto China’s population rolls. In 2013, for example, the government reported 117.6 boys were born for every 100 girls. (The natural rate is 103 to 106 boys to every 100 girls.) In the countryside, the ratio can run much higher -- Mara Hvistendahl, in her 2011 book, Unnatural Selection, reports on a town where ratios run as high as 150 to 100. Long-term, such imbalances can create an excess of males that might reach 20 percent of the overall male population by 2020, according to one estimate.
> 
> Of course, social expectations aren’t just confined to boys. In China, daughters are expected to marry up -- and in a country where men far outnumber women, the opportunities to do so are excellent, especially in the cities to which so many of China’s rural women move. The result is that bride prices -- essentially dowries paid to the families of daughters -- are rising, especially in the countryside. One 2011 study on bride prices found that they’d increased seventy-fold between the 1960s and 1990s in just one representative, rural hamlet.
> 
> It’s a society-wide problem, but particularly in China’s countryside, where sex ratios are much wider, and the lack of affluence drives out young, marriageable women. These twin factors have given rise to what’s widely known as “bachelor villages” -- thousands of small towns and hamlets across China overflowing with single men, with few women. Though there’s no definitive study on their frequency, bachelor villages have received widespread attention from academics, as well as journalists. The 2011 study on bride prices cites Baoshi Village in Shaanxi Province, population 1013, including 87 single males over the age of 35. In rural China, where men are expected to marry before 30, those 87 men are likely to remain lifelong bachelors. They are also, in all likelihood, poor and uneducated. According to a 2006 study, 97 percent of Chinese bachelors between 28 and 49 haven’t completed high school.
> 
> The social consequences of a world without women is hotly debated, with lines drawn over whether a population heavily tilted toward men necessarily leads to more violence. A controversial 2007 study based on 16 years of province-level crime data claimed that rising sex ratios may account for one-seventh of China’s overall rise in crime, while a book from the same year suggests that an excess of male threatens both China’s domestic stability and the international order. Meanwhile, other studies argue just the opposite: that a gender imbalance reduces family conflicts and violence across society.
> 
> One outcome, however, is indisputable: a market where the demand for brides far outweighs the supply will inevitably give rise to industries that aim to close the gap. Bride trafficking is one such response, and it has a long history in China. In recent years, however, the limited data on the phenomenon suggests that the traffickers are increasingly focused on women from outside of China, including North Korea. According to the Diplomat, around 90 percent of North Korean defectors are blackmailed into the sex industry and forced marriages (the threatened alternative -- a return to North Korea -- is unthinkable). Women from the remote and impoverished minority regions of Vietnam are targets, as well. Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security reports that more than 5800 women have been trafficked out of the country in recent years, the majority of them having gone to China.
> 
> It’s unclear whether or not the Vietnamese women who ended up in Handan were trafficked, and it’d be unfair to assume that they were. Many Vietnamese women move to China’s countryside for the same reason that women from China’s countryside move to its cities: better economic opportunities. But the fact that the marriage broker who brought the wives to Handan has disappeared, and is now sought by police, strongly suggests that an organized ring of some kind was behind the marriages -- and the disappearances. It wouldn’t be the first time, either. Stories of runaway Vietnamese brides are common in the Chinese press.
> 
> In all likelihood, there will be more. One-hundred runaway brides seems like a lot, except when measured against tens of millions of bachelors whose best hope of a family might be convincing -- and paying -- a foreigner (or her broker/matchmaker) to settle down in his village. But for every bachelor who manages that, there will be thousands more who can’t. Indeed, even if they had the cash, there simply aren’t enough women in Vietnam and North Korea, even if they were all willing to settle into a farmer’s life in China’s countryside.
> 
> To contact the author on this story:
> Adam Minter at aminter@bloomberg.net
> 
> To contact the editor on this story:
> Cameron Abadi at cabadi2@bloomberg.net


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> What the long term impact of such a huge demographic bulge of young men will do is debatable, but I suspect that it won't be good:



Didn't you already post about China being the next "gay superpower", reminiscent of Sparta, not too long ago?  ;D


----------



## a_majoor

The "First gay superpower since Sparta" is actually from Mark Steyn, maybe the cleverest writer going these days.

Still, there are a great many second and third order effects of this that will be difficult to predict, much like cars were predicted for centuries [Leonardo Da Vinci had a design for a recognizable clockwork powered vehicle in the 1400's], but no one predicted shopping malls, drive in theatres or suburbs as a outcomes of automobile usage.


----------



## CougarKing

This doesn't change their "no-first strike" nuclear weapons use policy, or so they say.

Free Beacon



> *Chinese Military Confirms DF-41 Flight Test*
> Beijing says new multi-warhead missile does not change nuclear policy
> 
> BY: Bill Gertz
> December 26, 2014 3:36 pm
> 
> China’s People’s Liberation Army on Thursday confirmed that its military conducted a flight test of a new long-range missile that U.S. intelligence agencies say involved the use of simulated multiple warheads.
> 
> “China has the legitimate right to conduct scientific tests within its border and these scientific tests are not targeting any country or target,” PLA Sr. Col.  Yang Yujun told reporters at a year-end news briefing.
> 
> Yang was asked about the flight test of the DF-41 ICBM on Dec. 13 and whether the testing of the missile changed China’s strategic nuclear policy of not being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

The PLAN is also working on large surface cruisers for force projection. The proposed stats are pretty impressive, but we will have to wait a few years to see the finished product and how well it performs:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/china-also-developing-railguns-and.html



> *China also developing railguns and lasers for their navy but will first have a modern missile cruiser in about 2017*
> 
> China appears to be developing a new cruiser, potentially called the Type 055, which reportedly would displace approximately 10,000 tons and carry large numbers [about 128] of antiship cruise missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and land-attack cruise missiles as well as potentially laser and rail-gun weapons. The first 055 hull to begin construction in the 2015-2016 timeframe. The 055 CG is expected to replace PLAN Type 052D destroyer as China's main combatant surface, with at probably twice as many missile launchers (128 vs. 64). The 055 CG will play a major part in China's naval strategy starting with a projected entry into service of 2017-2020. Its large size, formidable armament and powerful sensors will match or exceed that any current U.S. or allied AEGIS warship in the Pacific.
> 
> It will become the principal escort for China’s future aircraft carrier battle group.
> 
> The US has begun testing combat lasers on ships, planes and ground vehicles in 2014 and will being testing railguns in 2016.
> 
> China appears to be building its first big cruisers. Although shipbuilders have yet to lay down the first ship of the class, a mockup suggests that China could be planning a cruiser of (by contemporary standards) very large proportions.
> 
> Some analysts have estimated the Type 055 at around 12,000 tons, and have suggested that it could carry up to 128 vertical launch cells. A cruiser of this size could threaten to strike into the deep interior with cruise missiles, or could control the airspace in order to protect a task force.
> 
> Researchers in China are trying to produce a railgun that can shoot slugs at 2.5km per second. At greater speeds the friction from air deforms the projectile’s aerodynamic profile, which can cause it to stray off course.


----------



## CougarKing

China's "Maginot Line" ...



> *Maginot Line in the South China Sea*
> 
> The Maginot Line was a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapons installations that France constructed just before the border with Switzerland and the borders with Germany and Luxembourg during the 1930s.
> 
> A mature network of military facilities in the Spratlys, including an expanded Fiery Cross presence, would effectively extend China’s ability to project power by over 800 kilometers (500 miles), particularly through Chinese Coast Guard patrols in contested areas and potentially even air operations. Similar to its relative economic supremacy, China’s relative advantages in military size, modernization, and professionalism suggest that it is the only South China Sea claimant that is potentially capable of establishing de facto air and sea denial over tiny islet networks in a maritime setting as vast as the Spratly archipelago.
> 
> *China’s German-built Tianjing Hao dredger is the largest of its type in Asia and China’s primary weapon in island-building, cost approximately $130 million to build. China may invest over $5 billion over ten years on reclamation in Johnson South Reef; the Philippines’ 2014 military budget is less than $2 billion.*
> 
> China is the only claimant whose economic prowess can support projects that, without violence, significantly alter the status quo there.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source: The Next Big Future


----------



## Edward Campbell

Island building is nothing new in Asia. A couple of the world's biggest, busiest (and best) airports are on large, artificial islands. If you can find an "anchor" point you can dredge from the open ocean floor and build, and build, and build ...

The impact on the marine ecology is unclear, but likely not good.


----------



## CougarKing

A large quantity in hull numbers does not ensure quality though, in spite of reported advancements in Chinese warship design and weaponry.

Defense News



> *China's DDGs Set To Outnumber Neighbors'*
> 
> TAIPEI — *China's Navy will outnumber the largest competitor in the region — Japan — in the number of phased-array radar-equipped destroyers in 2018, if production continues on schedule.
> 
> On Dec. 22, China commissioned its fifth 052C destroyer, the Jinan, leaving one last ship of that type to be finished.*
> 
> The People's Liberation Army Navy's (PLAN's) procurement of Luyang-class Type 052C/Ds and Type 055 guided-missile cruisers with phased-array radars will provide long range anti-aircraft warfare (AAW) support to four planned carrier strike groups. They will also provide coverage for high value units such as 20,000-ton Type 081 amphibious assault ships, said Tony Beitinger, vice president of market intelligence for AMI International.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC is completing construction of the world's largest Coast Guard "cutter".

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/why-china-is-building-the-worlds-largest-coast-guard-1677699141


----------



## a_majoor

I wonder about two things:

1. Do a large number of PLAN hulls negate things like American "Air-Sea Battle" doctrine, or just provide a target rich environment?

2. What sorts of "out of the box" thinking can be done to negate a quantitative advantage in hulls? 

For 2 I am thinking of robotic platforms like Seaglider and Waveglider that can stay at sea for months and keep tabs on the environment, but there are plenty of other approaches that can be taken as well.


----------



## tomahawk6

A surface ship is a prime target for submarines.A large surface fleet would be necessary for force projection.


----------



## CougarKing

China's CCP again wary of another religious group they see as a threat to their one-party rule: the growing (Evangelical/Protestant, etc.) Christian converts in their population.

Christian Science Monitor



> *In China, a church-state showdown of biblical proportions*
> 
> Christianity is booming in China, propelling it toward becoming the world's largest Christian nation. But as religion grows, it spurs a government crackdown.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Yet there is also trouble brewing for China’s faithful. As evangelical Christianity grows sharply, officials fear it could undermine their authority. Already, Christians may outnumber members of the Communist Party. That has far-reaching implications both for Chinese society and for a party that frowns on unofficial gatherings and other viewpoints. *In China, party members cannot be Christian.*
> 
> More than half of China’s Protestants attend illegal “house churches” that meet privately. The rest go to one of China’s official, registered Protestant churches, such as Chongyi. The official or legal churches, known since 1949 as the “Three-Self Patriotic Church,” operate under an arrangement that says in effect: We are patriotic, good citizens. We love China. We aren’t dissidents. We go to official theology schools. So the party will let us worship freely.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> For decades, Christianity here was considered something for older female peasants. But the demographics of religion are changing dramatically. China’s new faithful are younger, more educated, more urban, and more affluent.
> 
> One surprising change is that a majority of believers no longer view Christianity as something foreign. They increasingly view faith as transcending its Western missionary-derived system. Many Chinese no longer accept the idea that being Christian means forfeiting a Chinese identity.
> 
> *Last summer, China’s religious affairs chief said that 500,000 Christians are baptized each year in the country. A joint study between Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and Peking University in Beijing estimated that there are now 70 million Christians over age 16 in China. Communist Party membership is about 83 million.*
> 
> *Carsten Vala, an expert on religion in China at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, says 40 million to 60 million is “the low end of a conservative” estimate of the number of Evangelicals*.
> 
> Fenggang Yang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University in Indiana, says he thinks there are more than 80 million Christians and that China will have 245 million by 2030 if growth is steady – making it the world’s most populous Protestant nation.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The continued downward spiral of oil prices is also having an adverse effect on China's maritime industry:

Reuters



> *China's shipyards brace for leaner times as oil slump sours rig building spree*
> 
> By Brenda Goh and Rujun Shen
> 
> SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - For China's shipyards, the oil rig market that was supposed to be a blessing is in danger of becoming a curse.
> 
> As crude prices slide, oil producers are slashing new project spending. With a near 40 percent slice of a global market worth tens of billions of dollars, Chinese rig builders that offered juicy financing terms and discounts to leapfrog Asian rivals in recent years are now the most exposed to a slowdown.
> 
> Diversifying to pull out of a downturn in traditional shipbuilding, China's state and privately owned yards have lured orders away from regional peers, building scores of rigs for down payments of as little at 1 percent. Many haven't yet been chartered by oil explorers, industry watchers say.
> 
> *Some in the industry fear that rig builders are now heading toward a slowdown, possibly with cancellations and price cuts, that could persist longer than the oil market's slump. Even if oil prices recover enough to stoke exploration, an inventory of ready-made rigs will be on hand, delaying new construction.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *"We're having a big headache because there are no orders,"* said an official at a large state-backed Chinese shipyard, speaking condition of anonymity. He cited a lack of rig order enquiries for the year 2016 and beyond.
> 
> Earlier this month, *COSCO Corp COSC.SI, one of China's biggest shipyards, said it has decided to terminate building an offshore platform known as Octabuoy after failing to find buyers.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The Chinese entrepreneur who bought the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag from Ukraine on the pretext of turning her into a casino and turned it over to the PLA, now wants to be paid.

Agence-France-Presse via Yahoo News



> *China 'never paid businessman' who bought aircraft carrier*
> 
> The Chinese businessman who bought an unfinished Soviet-era vessel that became his country's first aircraft carrier was quoted Tuesday as saying that Beijing never repaid the $120 million it cost him.
> 
> *Entrepreneur Xu Zengping paid Ukraine a $20 million fee for the Varyag, which was eventually commissioned into the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy as the Liaoning. But the price ballooned once towing it to China -- a process that was delayed for years -- and other costs were included.*
> 
> Xu also revealed that the ship was still fitted with its original engines at the time it was transported to China, contrary to reports.
> 
> *Xu, a former PLA basketball player, was chosen to negotiate the acquisition, posing as a businessman who wanted to use it for a floating casino in Macau, and then giving it to the authorities.
> 
> But he told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper: "I still haven't received one fen (one hundredth of a yuan) from our government. I just handed it over to the navy."*
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The Chinese entrepreneur who bought the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag from Ukraine on the pretext of turning her into a casino and turned it over to the PLA, now wants to be paid.
> 
> Agence-France-Presse via Yahoo News




He'd best be careful ... his pay might amount to a (pretty cheap) bullet in the back of the head, and his family might be billed for that.*

Xi Jinping is serious about cleaning up corruption in China; he is even more serious about using his anti-corruption campaign to thin (decimate) the ranks of his political opponents and fill them with his own loyalists. Xu Zengping doesn't strike me as being a Xi loyalist ... you can connect the dots.

_____
* Mostly an old wives' tale (about families being required to pay for the bullet that executed their father/son/brother, etc) but families of men executed for certain crimes were punished by having property expropriated and being relocated to remote, poor regions, etc.


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the current economic slump related to falling oil prices and reported lack of orders at domestic shipyards hasn't affected military shipbuilding so far:

China Defence Blogspot



> *Serial launch of three warships in a single day by Hudong-Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai*
> 
> They are:
> 
> The 21st Type 054A FFG
> The 4th Type 071 LPD
> The 4th Type 815 AGI
> 
> (PICTURES AT LINK ABOVE)


----------



## CougarKing

Aw shucks.

Looks like there's gonna be some "lao wai"(老外) (Chinese slang for foreigners) who'll be upset they can't sneak into some dark corner in some local Starbucks deep in mainland China, and use a VPN to access Facebook or gmail aymore.  

They'll have to stick to using Renren (Chinese facebook) instead: 

Tech Crunch



> *China Cracks Down On VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’*
> 
> China is cracking down on VPNs, software that allows internet users to access Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and others services blocked in the country, according to state media and service providers.
> 
> *People’s Daily reports that China’s ‘Great Firewall’ internet censorship system was “upgraded for cyberspace sovereignty”, a move that affected the usage of at least three popular VPN services and attacked others with more vigor than usual.*
> 
> Strong VPN noted on its blog that it is suffering “connection issues” from China, while TunnelBear told TechCrunch it is investigating after reports from some China-based customers who “have been less successful in connecting over the last few weeks.”
> 
> Furthermore, Astrill, a service that is well used by China’s expat and business community, this week alerted users of issues with its iOS client.
> 
> An employee at Astrill reportedly told People’s Daily that the company did not know how long the disruption would last following the “upgrade,” although Astrill’s service on other platforms — including Apple’s Macs — is apparently not affected.
> 
> Other prominent VPN services noted stronger attacks, but claimed to operate as usual.
> 
> A spokesperson at ExpressVPN told TechCrunch that its “services appear to be working normally on all platforms, including for China customers.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Not really surprising considering the recent opening of more direct flights and passenger shipping routes between Taiwan and the mainland, although there have been direct trade links for years, with thousands of Taiwanese businessmen on the mainland.

Defense News



> *Chinese Spies Expand Operations in Taiwan*
> 
> TAIPEI — As relations continue to expand between China and Taiwan since the election of Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, so does espionage.
> 
> *With the 2009 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, cross-strait ties have flourished. The number of Chinese visitors to the island is now around 3 million annually. *The joke among many government officials in Beijing, according to media reports, is that it will be easier to buy Taiwan than invade it.
> 
> Recent cases show that China is clearly using money to coax political officials and military officers to view China as a benefactor, not an enemy.* Last year alone, 15 alleged spy cases surfaced. Of those, 90 percent involved either active or retired military personnel, according to a report presented to the legislature's Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee by the National Security Bureau*.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Along more conventional lines, the PLA is fielding a new(er) light tank for use in mountainous terrain, and another AFV (possibly a SP system):

http://china-defense.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-new-chinese-mountain-warfare-light.html



> *The new Chinese mountain-warfare light tank*
> 
> While pictures of this new Chinese (ZTQ-??) light tank have been appearing in Chinese internet since Dec 2011 but its turret has not been revealed until now.   Judging from armor protection offered by those extreme sloped glacis plates,  maybe there is a reason to keep its "head" covered all those years.
> 
> Not much is known about this new AFV but it has been spotted en route to the Tibet area on a regular basis.   It is also sporting a 105mm tank gun.
> 
> Posted by Coatepeque at 9:51 PM


----------



## CougarKing

One of three warships reported launched from a single Chinese shipyard in one day on the previous page of this thread:



> *China launches fourth Type 071 LPD*
> 
> IHS Jane's 360
> 
> The Hudong-Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai launched its fourth Type 071 landing platform dock (LPD) amphibious assault ship for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on 22 January.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> The other ship to be launched was the fifth Type 815 'Dongdiao' class intelligence gathering ship (AGI), which berthed adjacent to two other Type 815Gs that are fitting out, one of which was launched in April 2014.
> 
> A total of six Type 071 LPDs are anticipated. *Three Type 071s are currently stationed in the PLAN's South Sea Fleet base at Zhanjiang and it is possible that three more may be based with the East Sea Fleet*.
> 
> The Type 071 has an estimated length of 210 m, a displacement of 18,500 tonnes, and a well deck capable of holding four Yuyi-class assault hovercraft. If the hovercraft are removed it is estimated to be able to accommodate up to about 60 armoured vehicles and about 800 troops.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China's fourth Type 071 LPD was launched from the Hudong-Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai on 22 January. Source: Chinese internet


----------



## CougarKing

A rare military parade usually shown only every 10 years in Beijing on an anniversary of the PRC's founding will be held this year as well to send a message to Japan and the US...

Diplomat



> *China's Military Parade: A Warning to Japan and the US*
> 
> China’s military parade is not only meant to “intimidate” Japan — it’s a signal to the U.S. as well.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> China typically holds a major military parade on every tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The last parade came in 2009 under then-President Hu Jintao and incorporated 52 Chinese-made weapons systems, including cruise missiles, drones, and (flying overhead) fighter jets. *The 70th anniversary of the end of World War II provides Xi a handy excuse to hold his own military parade without waiting another four years for the 70th anniversary of the PRC to roll around.*
> 
> Back in 2009, an official from the National Day Military Parade Joint Command attempted to reassure observers that the public display of China’s military might was not meant to intimidate anyone. “A country’s military ability is not a threat to anyone; what is important is its military policy,” he insisted. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying echoed this stance when asked about the 2015 military parade in Tuesday’s press conference. “By hosting commemorative events with other counties, China is to awaken each and every virtuous man’s desire for and commitment to peace, to refresh people’s memory of the history and love for peace, and to showcase China’s staunch position of upholding the victory of WWII and the post-war international order, and safeguarding world peace,” Hua said.
> 
> One Chinese media report, however, is offering a different explanation. An online piece from People’s Daily attempts to unravel the political significance of China for the first time holding a military parade not linked to the anniversary of the PRC founding.* The very first reason? “To display China’s military power.” Military might is a crucial aspect of national strength, the piece explains, the necessary backing for both political chess matches and economic competition. Now that China has become a major player in the world’s geopolitical scene, it’s time for China to display its military power.*
> 
> *The second reason given by the People’s Daily piece is the one receiving all the attention: “to intimidate Japan.” *The piece explains, “In recent years, backed by the U.S. return to Asia strategy for containing China, Japan’s China policy has been more and more unrestrained… Barring an unexpected occurrence, Japan is going to take further steps toward amending its pacifist constitution and pushing toward national normalization.” The only way to stop this “insane attempt,” the piece argues, is for China to show its own military might and demonstrate its determination not to allow Japan to change the post-war order.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Xi looking for dissent within the Central Military Commission and other PLA arms?

Bloomberg



> *Chinese Army's Call For Commanders to Obey Xi Signals Tensions*
> 
> (Bloomberg) -- China’s military must “resolutely obey” orders from President Xi Jinping, a commentary on the PLA Daily website said, a sign Xi is seeking to quell possible dissent as his anti-graft probe penetrates deeper into the armed forces.
> 
> “Adherence to the Party’s absolute leadership is a founding principle of the army,” said the commentary published Wednesday on the website of the People’s Liberation Army. All officers and soldiers should “resolutely obey” the Communist Party and Central Military Commission Chairman’s orders. Xi heads the party and the CMC, the highest military body.
> 
> *Publication of the commentary comes two weeks after 16 People’s Liberation Army generals were put under investigation for graft as Xi seeks to root out corruption that he says undermines combat readiness.
> 
> “There must have been a lot of grumbling in the PLA,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. “It underscores that there must have been some friction between Xi and some leaders. Otherwise they wouldn’t need a front page commentary.”*
> 
> Representatives of the military participated for the first time in the annual plenary session of the party’s top disciplinary agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, earlier this month, according to the official WeChat account of the People’s Daily.
> 
> At a recent internal meeting with senior military officials, Xi urged top PLA officers to set an example for both the military and the public.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A _Liaoning/Varyag_ copy?

Agence-France-Presse via Yahoo News 



> *China building second aircraft carrier - reports*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> February 2, 2015 12:58 PM
> 
> BEIJING -- *A firm has won a contract to supply cabling for a second Chinese aircraft carrier, comments by local authorities suggested in the latest sign that Beijing is boosting its maritime power*, although news of the development was swiftly deleted online.
> 
> Authorities in Changzhou said on a verified social media account that "in 2015, our city will focus on promoting some major programs," including Jiangsu Shangshang Cable Group "winning the contract for China's second aircraft carrier".
> 
> The Changzhou Evening News carried a similar report at the weekend, although both the newspaper article and the post on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, were deleted shortly after publication.Neither report gave details of the ship.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> In a subsequent leak, Wang Min -- the Communist Party secretary of Liaoning province, where China's first aircraft carrier is based -- said the country was already working on a second ship to be completed around 2020.


----------



## CougarKing

Aside from these four mentioned in this article, should other Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines resurrect a form of SEATO? Meanwhile, ASEAN deals more with political-economic issues than security issues.



> *How to Push Back against an Aggressive China: Enter the 'Quad'*
> 
> James Jay Carafano
> February 5, 2015
> 
> Face it. China is a problem. Nations across the Pacific and Asia are looking for constructive solutions. And that's the promise of a Quad Dialogue - a forum for developing cooperative, synchronized policies among *India, Australia, Japan and the United States.*
> 
> Start with the facts. China's economic policies are increasingly mercantilist. It is developing military capabilities to exclude others from operating in Asia. Beijing is no friend of democracy. From a Chinese perspective, all these initiatives might make sense: they are reconstructing a world that looks like the Middle Kingdom. The rest of the world, however, would probably prefer to live in the 21st century.
> 
> China is going to be China. That's not going to change anytime soon. So unless the nations that have the power to punish bad behavior and take constructive steps, the neighborhood is going to get worse for everybody.
> 
> 
> *First*, the dialogue should focus exclusively on two issues - ensuring the freedom of the commons (air, seas, space and cyberspace) and establishing a common approach to resolving territorial disputes.
> 
> *Second*, the dialogue ought to remain a dialogue.
> 
> *Third*, the Quad dialogue shouldn't act like an exclusive club.
> 
> *Fourth*, the objective of the Quad is simple: to promote a sustainable, liberal order that makes sense, that does not advantage some nations at the expense of others.
> 
> *Fifth*, the Quad works only if its members are voices worth listening to.
> 
> *Sixth*, be prepared to argue with China.
> 
> 
> 
> *National Interest*


----------



## The Bread Guy

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Retaliation for Canada's accusations of Chinese state-supported hackers infiltrating Canadian federal computer networks?
> 
> 
> 
> Updated: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 20:40:28 GMT | By The Canadian Press, cbc.ca
> 
> *Canadians investigated in China for stealing state secrets, Chinese state media report*
> 
> Chinese media say two Canadian nationals are being investigated for suspected theft of state secrets.
> 
> The allegations relate to China's military and defence research, but the reports gave no other details.
> 
> The suspects are identified in Chinese state media as Kevin Garratt and Julia Dawn Garratt.
> 
> Canada's Foreign Affairs Department said it's aware of reports two Canadians have been detained in China and is trying get more information. The department said consular officials are ready to provide assistance.
> 
> Last week, Canada blamed Chinese hackers for infiltrating computers at the National Research Council of Canada, something the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa denied.
> 
> (...EDITED)
> 
> 
> 
> CBC
Click to expand...


The latest ....


> China has detained a Canadian man on suspicion of stealing and prying into state secrets but released his wife, also a Canadian, from custody on bail after holding the couple without charge for months, China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
> 
> The decision to detain Kevin Garratt, who ran a Christian coffee shop with his wife, paves the way for his formal arrest and possible prosecution in a case that has strained ties between Canada and China.
> 
> Beijing is widening a crackdown on foreign Christian groups along its sensitive border with North Korea.
> 
> Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Garratt had been formally detained on suspicion of the theft, citing the National Security Agency of Dandong, a city in the northeastern province of Liaoning, where the Garratts had lived for years.
> 
> "The relevant Chinese authorities are dealing with the case in accordance with the law, and maintaining the legal rights and interests of both people in accordance with the law," Hong told a regular news briefing.
> 
> Julia Garratt was released but barred from leaving mainland China for one year, the family said in a statement. Kevin Garratt has been moved to a "more formal detention center at an unknown location", the family added ....


----------



## CougarKing

Even if this fleet is deemed unlikely, individual PLA-N warships have been joining the antipiracy patrols off Somalia/the Gulf of Aden. Furthermore, Chinese warships have made port calls with South Asian allies such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka, if I can recall correctly. Two more client states of China in the region are Myanmar/Burma and Bangladesh, both of which use Chinese equipment in their military forces. There is also said to be a Chinese naval listening station in one of the Andaman Islands owned by Myanmar to keep tabs on Indian naval movements.

Defense News



> *Experts: Chinese '4th Fleet' Appears Unlikely*
> 
> TAIPEI — Despite reports that China is planning a fourth fleet for the Indian Ocean, India doesn't appear to be losing any sleep over it.
> 
> *Unconfirmed reports from Chinese-language articles and Western defense industry reports suggest China would build a fleet command headquarters at Sanya on Hainan Island.*
> 
> Yet the main obstacles to such a strategy include diplomacy, logistics, and reliability, despite conducting successful, but limited, anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia, experts say.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

When my family took one of those local tours that went around the Rockies and passed through Kelowna a number of years ago, nearly the whole bus was full of Chinese tourists...

Reuters



> *Chinese investors target hotels, wineries, mineral water in British Columbia*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Liu represents what real estate agents, lawyers and immigration consultants say is a transformative shift in where wealthy Asian individuals and families, primarily from mainland China, place their money in British Columbia, the West Coast province.
> 
> Vancouver has been a top destination for Asian immigrants for decades, helping make it Canada's most expensive housing market and one consistently ranked as North America's least affordable. Houses and luxury condos in the Vancouver area have been the investment of choice for both well-heeled new arrivals and China-based investors putting money abroad.
> 
> But with the Vancouver market looking pricey, *many of these investors are seeking other opportunities. They range from hotels and golf courses targeting Chinese tourists to berry farms, mineral water sources, and wineries that export to Asia.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Taipei sending a signal to Beijing by appointing a military official to the political body that deals with mainland China?

Reuters



> *Taiwan appoints military official as new China affairs chief*
> 
> TAIPEI (Reuters) - A military official and former deputy minister of foreign affairs was named on Monday as the head of Taiwan's China policy-making body. The previous chief announced his resignation last week.
> 
> *Andrew Hsia, currently the Deputy Minister of National Defense*, will become Minister of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), which handles cross-strait policy with its Chinese counterpart, China's Taiwan Affairs Office.
> 
> "Hsia has extensive administrative experience and policy-implementation capabilities," a statement on the website of Taiwan's executive branch said. "[He] will continue to promote the development of cross-strait relations."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The East China Sea and a possible conflict with Japan may also be likely, aside from the tensions with other neighbours over the South China Sea mentioned below:

Inquirer (Philippines newspaper)



> *US Navy intel officer says China gearing for war*
> 
> Jun Medina
> 
> SAN FRANCISCO — *China is flexing its muscles and preparing for military conflict in Asia, the outgoing intelligence chief of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet recently warned.
> 
> The warning came amid Beijing’s feverish reclamation efforts in disputed reefs and islets in the South China Sea* that analysts said could be converted into naval and air force bases to project its military might and dominate China’s smaller neighbors.
> 
> “*The strategic trend lines indicate the Communist Party of China is not only ‘rejuvenating’ itself for internal stability purposes*, but has been and continues to prepare to use military force,” *Navy Capt. James E. Fanell* said during a speech January 31 before more than 100 guests, including several admirals, at Pearl Harbor.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

The idea of social control to the level of family planning raises its ugly head again, only this time as a response to the previous "top down" one child policy. Other nations and regions that have tried to halt demographic decline tend to use incentives such as tax breaks, the example of Romania demonstrates that using force has negative unintended consequences. This also leads to another interesting question. Since wealthy nations tend to have fewer children (and the costs of raising children tend to rise to the extent that having large families is difficult), will rising Chinese wealth push family sizes down in the same way that happened in Europe and North America?:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-official-wants-to-force-couples-to-have-second-child-2015-02-13



> *China official wants to force couples to have second child*
> 
> Published: Feb 15, 2015 5:23 p.m. ET
> By
> LAURA HE
> 
> HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — After more than 30 years of imposing a one-child policy, China is facing a dilemma of rapid aging and serious gender imbalances. Now one of the nation’s birth-control officials is suggesting going the opposite way and forcing couples to have a second child.
> 
> Despite the relaxation of one-child policy last year, the expected baby boom failed to appear. Under the new policy, couples may have a second child if either was an only child, but only 9% of eligible families had applied to do so as of the end of 2014, according to statistics from the national birth-control authority.
> 
> While forcing people to have children could prove more difficult than forbidding them to do so, this is exactly what Mei Zhiqiang, deputy head of the birth-control bureau in Shanxi province and a Standing Committee member of the province’s political advisory body, has suggested.
> 
> “For the prosperity of our nation and the happiness of us and our children, we should make a serious effort to adjust the demographic structure and make our next generation have two children through policy and system design,” Mei said, according to various media reports.
> 
> The decades-old one-child policy has skewed China’s population older, as well as resulted in far more boys than girls, due to some couples seeking to make sure their only child would be male. The aging problem is weighing on China’s pension system, while the gender imbalance has made it hard for some men to find wives.
> 
> As a result, Mei said in his proposal to the provincial political advisory body earlier this year, the mere relaxation of the one-child policy isn’t enough, and two-child policy should be enforced.
> 
> The remarks have triggered public uproar in China, with the Shanghai-based Guangming Daily website publishing a commentary on Friday, referring to the idea as reflecting “a horrible mindset” and inspiring feelings of “ferocious [government] control.”
> 
> Separately, a report on the news portal of Sohu.com SOHU, +0.53%  , noted that Romania tried just such a policy during the 1960s, in which the Communist leadership banned all abortion and birth control and forced women to bear a certain number of children.
> 
> The result of the Romanian program was “a disaster,” the report said, prompting a spike in infant mortality, the deaths of many women in underground abortion clinics, and the shooting deaths of others who tried to escape from the country rather than bear children at the behest of the state.


----------



## CougarKing

An extended-range version of the Badger bomber in Chinese service:

*Xi Jinping visit reveals H-6 bomber details* 

IHS Jane's 360


> Xi visited a bomber unit outside the city of Xi'an operating three variants of the H-6 that have been in production since the late 1990s. They included the H-6H, which entered service in the late 1990s and is armed with two optically guided YJ-63/KD-63 land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs).
> 
> Also seen was the H-6M, which entered service in 2007 equipped with four wing pylons plus new electronic warfare and missile approach warning systems. The H-6M is armed with two KD-20/K-AKD-20 1,500-2,500 km range LACMs.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> Emerging in prototype form in 2007, the H-6K is the most radically modified variant, replacing its glass nose with a large solid nose housing a large radar and new electro-optical targeting pod. Its use of two Russian-made 12-ton thrust D-30-KP2 turbofans and *lighter-weight composites have reportedly extended its range by 30% to a combat radius of 3,500 km*.








The H-6K now serves in at least two PLAAF bomber regiments. (Chinese internet)
-




Chinese leader Xi Jinping's pre-New Year visit to a PLAAF bomber regiment provided the first full view of the cockpit of an XAC H-6K. Source: Via CCTV


----------



## CougarKing

Hong Kong's party loyalists seeking to curb the freedoms of their neighbours back in the territory:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong delegates to China's parliament seek mainland security laws to counter protests*
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - Two Hong Kong delegates to China's parliament are pushing to implement mainland security laws months after pro-democracy protesters shut down major parts of the Chinese-controlled city, broadcaster RTHK said on Sunday.
> 
> The last time Hong Kong tried to pass national security legislation was in 2003 when half a million people took to the streets, a key lawmaker withdrew his support and the government was forced to withdraw its proposal.
> 
> *Stanley Ng, chairman of the pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions, said his proposal was triggered by the so-called "Occupy Central" protests*, Hong Kong's failure to pass its own national security laws and its lack of laws addressing foreign intervention and secession.
> 
> A second Hong Kong delegate to China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress, Peter Wong, said he supported the proposal, RTHK said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

First the Gripen deal was nixed. Next came the Fencers rumours. Now a joint project?

Defense News



> *Argentina, China Could Jointly Develop Fighters*
> 
> TAIPEI — London's successful blocking of the Gripen fighter sale to Argentina appears to have done little to stop Buenos Aires' determination to replace its aging attack and fighter fleet. Nor has it halted its threats to use force to "liberate" the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands from British control.
> 
> *In October, Argentina's Defense Minister Agustin Rossi announced plans to procure 14 Saab Gripen fighters to replace its single-engine Dassault Mirage III/5, which saw combat during the 1982 Falklands War.
> 
> However, London quickly killed the deal*. When that was nixed, Argentine's President Cristina Kirchner traveled to Beijing, Feb. 2-5, and announced Argentina and China were creating a working group to facilitate the transfer of a variety of military equipment, including fighters. To further sweeten the pot, China takes Argentina's position on the Falkland Islands and has compared the dispute to China's sovereignty claims over disputed islands in the East and South China Seas.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More on Chinese developments in Hypersonic "boost-glide" weapons:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/china-and-usa-working-on-mach-10.html



> *China and USA working on mach 10+ hypersonic weapons*
> 
> China's hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), called WU-14 by the Pentagon, was launched into space by an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) booster, after which it returned to the atmosphere to glide at up to Mach 10. The test was conducted within China, says the defense ministry in Beijing. On Jan. 19, another object was test-launched from the same space base at Taiyuan, says analyst Richard Fisher of the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center. The Jan. 9 test was first detailed by Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon.
> 
> China became the third country after the Russian Federation and the United States to have successfully tested a hypersonic delivery vehicle able to carry nuclear warheads at a speed above Mach 10 - or 12,359 kilometers per hour (7,675 mph). China is also believed to be developing a hypersonic scramjet version that can be launched from air or ground.
> 
> Prompt Global Strike (PGS) is a United States military effort to develop a system that can deliver a precision conventional weapon strike anywhere in the world within one hour. A PGS system could also be useful during a nuclear conflict, potentially replacing nuclear weapons against 30 percent of targets. The PGS program encompasses numerous technologies, including conventional surface-launched rockets and air-launched hypersonic missiles, although no specific PGS system has yet been finalized.
> 
> Hypersonic missiles would be better at avoiding conventional anti-ballistic missiles. Normal rockets descend through the atmosphere on a predictable ballistic trajectory - their high speeds makes intercepting them extremely difficult. By the late 1980s, however, several countries began to develop interceptor missiles designed to destroy ballistic RVs. A hypersonic glider like the HGV could pull-up after reentering the atmosphere and approach its target in a relatively flat glide, lessening the time it can be detected, fired at, or (if the initial attack failed) reengaged. Gliding makes it more maneuverable and extends its range.
> 
> A vehicle like the WU-14 could be fitted to various Chinese ballistic missiles, such as the DF-21 medium-range missile (rumored to be called DF-26 with the HGV payload), and the DF-31 and DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles, extending their ranges from 2,000 km (1,200 mi) to 3,000 km (1,900 mi) and 8,000 km (5,000 mi) to 12,000 km (7,500 mi) respectively. Analysts suspect that the WU-14 will first be used in shorter-range roles as an anti-ship missile and for other tactical purposes to address the problem of hitting a moving target with a ballistic missile. Long-term goals may include deterrence of U.S. missile capabilities with the prospect of strategic bombardment against America, or other countries. With conventional interceptor missiles having difficulty against targets with late detection and maneuvering while traveling faster than Mach 5 (the WU-14 reenters the atmosphere at Mach 10), the U.S. may place more importance on developing directed-energy weapons as a countermeasure.
> 
> Chinese research papers have begun to synthesize discussions strategy and foreign weapons systems into what used to be purely technology-based studies. Second, interactions with People’s Liberation Army researchers confirm that such shifts are occurring. Third, these trends also emerge in scientific papers that explore China’s own pursuit of boostglide systems (rocket-launched gliders that travel in the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds) and scramjet engine designs (variants of ramjet air breathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow), when discussing prompt global strike advances These studies demonstrate Chinese efforts to master both supersonic and hypersonic propulsion. In doing so, they combine hypersonic and boost-glide technologies, when modeling trajectories with hypersonic and scramjet systems.11 In essence, Chinese experts are seeking to recombine technologies to create new systems. Also on view is the cross-domain nature of Chinese interest, with a marked focus on development of space, maritime, and nuclear domains, as well as cyber, among other means, to undermine similar U.S. systems. Overall, these studies provide insights into how and why China is not only seeking to pursue similar systems and advances, but also to develop them beyond the scope of existing U.S. capabilities.
> 
> SOURCES - DARPA, Wikipedia, Aviation Week, Defining the Spear: Chinese Interpretations of PGS


----------



## CougarKing

The climax of Pres. Xi`s anti-corruption drive?

Source: Reuters



> *'Stay tuned' as China readies to publish corruption confessions*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party's anti-graft watchdog has opened a new front in its campaign against corruption, announcing it will publish confessions by corrupt officials to warn and educate others.
> 
> President Xi Jinping has vowed to target high-ranking "tigers" as well as lowly "flies" in his anti-corruption drive, and has pledged to deepen the most sweeping campaign against graft in years.
> 
> "Behind every corruption case lies the shadow of a lost model of power, behind every book of repentance hides the remorse of self-blame and self-hate," the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said on its website late on Wednesday.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Watch for more of the "Four Comprehensives," as outlined in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _South China Morning Post_:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1723189/state-media-starts-promotion-xi-jinpings-political-theory-four


> China starts massive promotion of Xi Jinping’s ‘four comprehensives’ political theory
> *State leader's 'Four Comprehensives' framework to governing China gets extensive news coverage*
> 
> Teddy Ng and Mandy Zuo
> 
> UPDATED : Thursday, 26 February, 2015
> 
> State media has given widespread coverage to President Xi Jinping's political theory ahead of the national parliamentary session, advancing his vision for governing China.
> 
> The Communist Party's official mouthpiece _People's Daily_ devoted a 2,000-character front-page editorial to the "Four Comprehensives" theory that Xi has advocated since he came to power two years ago.
> 
> The theory refers to "comprehensively" building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform, governing the country according to rule by law, and enforcing strict party discipline.
> 
> Mainland media has given extensive coverage to the "Chinese dream" - a term Xi coined shortly after he came to power - and the latest elaboration of the four comprehensives reinforces a tradition of party leaders cementing their ideas into theories.
> 
> Though the catchphrases are often vaguely defined, they are cited by cadres at all levels to pledge their support to the party's policies and are seen as an attempt by leaders to establish their legacy.
> 
> Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao introduced his "scientific outlook on development" as the party's guiding socio-economic principle. Former president Jiang Zemin introduced his "three represents" theory, referring to social productive forces, cultural development and the fundamental interests of the majority, in 2000. Both Hu and Jiang's theories are enshrined in the nation's constitution.
> 
> State broadcaster CCTV featured the People's Daily editorial as its main news programme's fifth item, while the full editorial - the first of five to be published - was also run by Xinhua and local party newspapers around the nation.
> 
> Xi first mentioned the "Four Comprehensives" theory in a visit to Jiangsu province in December, and said the first step in the strategy was "achieving the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people", the editorial said.
> 
> The theory arose from "the aspirations of the masses" and was a crucial foundation to solving the problems that the nation faced, it said.
> 
> Led by Xi, the administration has conducted a massive anti-corruption campaign, targeting top politicians including the nation's former security tsar Zhou Yongkang , and stressed that it would improve the legal system and rule by law.
> 
> Renmin University political analyst Zhang Ming said the four comprehensives was a more concrete political motto than the Chinese dream.
> 
> "The public can better understand [the concept of] four comprehensives than the Chinese dream, which many regard as a very vague idea," he said.
> 
> Beijing-based political commentator Zhang Lifan said party leaders often came up with catchphrases and slogans to solicit public support.
> 
> Previous party leaders had also stressed the concepts behind the four comprehensives theory, such as building a prosperous society and maintaining strict governance by the party, but the implementation was often obstructed, Zhang said.
> 
> "The party is not using any new ideas but is sticking to the old concepts as it tries to solicit public support," he said.
> 
> Rampant corruption and power struggles among factions and vested interests within the party would be major obstacles to reforms, he added, while the risk of an economic downturn would pose further challenges to the party.




Many observers think this may be the most important _direction_ to the CCP and the Chinese government since Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" (2000) or even, perhaps, Deng Xiaoping's "black cats/white cats" remarks (1961) and Zhou Enlai's "Four Modernizations" (1963). In fact, many observers think that Xi Jinping may want to be like Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and fundamentally alter the very face of China and the Chinese people. Some analysts believe he is, now, just "setting the table" (partly by removing opposition) for a very long tenure as _Supreme Leader_ while he institutes wide ranging, deep seated socio-cultural, economic and even political reforms.


----------



## a_majoor

I'll buy economic reforms, since they are relatively easy to impliment, and even political reforms, but I have my doubts about social-cultural reforms. After all, you yourself have pointed out to us that while the forms and surface appearances may be different, China is still bing run in a similar fashion to the way it has been run since unification, and the modern ruing cabel is simply the "Red Dynasty".

Culture is very deep rooted (our own "Western" culture can trace roots going back to Classical Greek and Roman civilization), and it takes a lot to change it.


----------



## a_majoor

The American Interest suggests that the PLA might not sit quietly during the anti corruption purges. Long article (Part 1)

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/02/26/the-coming-coup-in-china/



> *China's Game of Thrones*
> The Coming Coup in China
> Sulmaan Khan
> 
> Whether Xi Jinping is confronting corruption, engaging in just another CCP purge, or some of both, the PLA is stuck dangerously in the middle.
> 
> 
> On January 11, 2011, the People’s Liberation Army tested a new J-20 stealth fighter jet. The move surprised the visiting American Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who had been given no warning of the test. But far more troubling than the jet itself was the fact that Chinese President Hu Jintao was as surprised as Gates. The head of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had been blindsided by his own military.
> 
> It was a telling moment that belied the conventional story of civil-military relations in China. That story begins in 1929, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) convened a meeting in Gutian, in Fujian province, that established as an inviolable principle the Party’s authority over the military. The Red Army, the CCP declared, was to implement the revolution under the command of the Party. Power grew from the barrel of the gun, as Mao Zedong put it, but the Party held the gun. In the official history, that was that: The military was subservient to the Party, and from then on the ideological work of enforcing that subservience fell to all Chinese citizens.
> 
> That is how the story is told, but the reality is less tidy. There were no guarantees in 1929 that the CCP would ever come to power. When it did, its establishment benefitted from individuals and groups who were often not directly answerable to anybody. Their ties to the CCP were frequently a matter of shared interest or passion more than any codified doctrine of civil-military relations.
> 
> None of this, however, stopped Xi Jinping from invoking the spirit of 1929 when he convened a new Gutian conference in September 2014. The traditions established at the 1929 gathering, Xi explained, needed to be carried forward. Guojiahua, the idea that the People’s Liberation Army should serve the country, not the Party, was erroneous and unacceptable. The military could not have an agenda independent of the Party.
> 
> Xi delivered another warning at the 2014 Gutian conference: on the perils of corruption. Corruption had to be rooted out, he announced, and the armed forces would do well to reflect on the Xu Caihou case. Xu, a former Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, had been jailed for bribery in June. There was much work to be done to keep the military pure, and Xi, so he declared to the assembled officials, was not going to slacken in that work.
> 
> In Xi’s decision to emphasize Party authority alongside the scourge of corruption, there is evidence of how precariously Chinese governance operates today. Had Party authority indeed been unquestioned, there would have been no need to assert it so insistently. If there were no resentment of the civilian government within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and perhaps even examples of insubordination, there would have been no reason to invoke the 1929 meeting in the first place. Many observers see Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign as a pretext for just another Party purge by a power-hungry would-be dictator. That a purge is going on there can be no doubt, but Xi is also driven by genuine concern about both the insidious damage being done to China by corruption and the involvement of the military in that corruption.
> 
> Xi’s dilemma is unenviable. He has to continue the drive, and the purge that is part of it, because he has staked his credibility on cleaning up the mess. More important, he needs to alleviate growing popular discontent and recover lost assets at a time when the economy is slowing somewhat and people are increasingly angry about entrenched inequality and anxious about the future.1 But he has to know that his anti-corruption drive threatens PLA members’ interests in unpredictable ways. To incur the wrath of men with guns is not something to be undertaken lightly. A military coup, once unthinkable in the PRC, is now conceivable.
> 
> To understand why, it is worth remembering that civil and military spheres have never been as neatly separated in China as in the West. “The sky is high and the emperor is far away” goes an ancient Chinese proverb: Central authorities were distant from the day-to-day lives of their subjects in such a vast state, so civilians had to assume functions that in the West would be considered best left to the military. When steppe nomads raided settlements, there was no time to wait for the emperor to send troops; people had to organize their own defense. Hence the stories of heroes fighting in China’s wilderness: men who with mighty staffs and sharpened spears, righteous fists and brave hearts, could defy and defeat anyone from marauding robbers to corrupt officials.
> 
> Myth and history came together to weave such romances deep into Chinese culture. The story is still told of the village of Sanyuanli, where, during the Opium War, local farmers surrounded and drove away British troops while the cowardly Qing court did nothing effective. The villagers prevailed principally because rain had soaked British muskets and because the British themselves were keen on a negotiated settlement, but that did not prevent the incident from being remembered as an example of Chinese martial valor.2 The Taiping Rebellion, which claimed some twenty million lives, was started off by Hong Xiuquan, a civilian who thought he was God’s younger son and who gathered civilians to the ranks of his heavenly army. The militias that sprung up to deal with the Rebellion were led mainly by civil servants independent of the Qing state’s armies; that these militias chose to offer their loyalty to the state was a matter of serendipity, not doctrine. The warlords who carved China up in the aftermath of the Qing’s fall were people to whom civil-military distinctions mattered little. They were armed men who governed bits of territory through shifting combinations of fear and the provision of social services. Mao Zedong’s concept of a people’s war, too, rested on the notion that hungry and dispossessed civilians could wage war. The Communists’ rise to power in fact owed much to its capacity to erase lines separating the civilian world from the military one.
> 
> After the Party took control, civilians continued to undertake jobs that in the West would have been left to a professional army. The PLA saw action in the Korean War, but so did young peasants from across the country, who dropped their ploughs and headed for the front to “resist America and help Korea.” In the late 1960s China launched a military intervention to support the Communist Party of Burma, and it too relied heavily on civilians from the southern provinces streaming down to do battle. The Red Guards as well, whether fighting each other, their elders, or foreign missions, saw themselves as troops. Theirs was the language of siege, command, battle, and conquest. Even today, the conflict with other Asian states over the Spratlys and Paracels involves civilian fishermen willing to fight for land they see as theirs. They are encouraged by the state, certainly, but the encouragement works because it builds on a tradition in which military action is dispersed, something anyone can conduct if the circumstances are right. Video games that allow Chinese to kill Japanese war criminals, or nationalist protests running well ahead of where the government wants them to go and spilling into anti-Japanese violence, show how deep this tradition still runs. Militias that are not terribly well regulated have become a hallmark of Chinese life.Militias that are not terribly well regulated have become a hallmark of Chinese life. To call China a militarized culture implies discipline. A “militia-rized culture”, where anyone can play at being a hero of the marsh, is closer to the mark.
> 
> There are, to be sure, other places where such cultures exist. Afghanistan and the Kurdish areas of the Middle East come to mind, as do lands inhabited by the Tuareg and Chechens. And as in other places, a militia-rized culture, while it has its uses, can be dangerous to a sitting government. If armed force is divorced from state authority, there is no reason it cannot turn against said authority. When the Mandate of Heaven passes from a government, it becomes a fair target. Whether it is the Sanyuanli villagers defying the British, Hong Xiuquan fighting the Qing, or Mao defeating the Kuomintang and the imperialists, stories abound of the Chinese people taking on authorities they disliked. And in Xi’s China there is plenty for a disgruntled marsh hero to fight.
> 
> Moreover, angry, unmarried, and underemployed young men—always a potential source of civil strife—loom everywhere in China, a legacy of the one-child policy and rampant female infanticide. Some who are wealthy and well connected can simply leave instead of voicing discontent, parking their assets in Boston or Manhattan real estate. But for the vast numbers of the discontent who remain, sustained uprisings directed against a disengaged, oppressive regime are a real and growing possibility. So the issue is not just civil-military relations; it is societal-civil-military relations, a triad rather than a dyad of potential trouble.
> 
> Xi Jinping knows all this. He is painfully aware that addressing the sources of discontent requires showing that the state actually cares about the well-being of its citizens. This is where the anti-corruption drive and the emphasis on rule of law come in. Corrupt functionaries, Xi wants his subjects to know, will no longer be able to get rich at the expense of the people. That this campaign has to apply to tigers as well as flies shows how deep Xi must believe the discontent runs. Taking on officials like Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, and, most recently, the spymaster Ma Jian was not something to be done lightly, even if they were political foes. The risk of damaging Party unity by attacking them was considerable, and presumably would not have been taken had Xi not considered the risk of inaction even greater. For the Chinese people to truly believe that their Chairman was bent on ridding the country of corruption, high functionaries, not just petty ones, had to fall. And the campaign had to go beyond the civilian sphere, for the military, too, is seen as being in need of subjugation to the law.
> 
> It remains hard to get concrete information on China’s military-industrial complex, but PLA personnel are clearly perceived to have profited from the system in ways that ordinary Chinese cannot. With the PLA’s involvement in a range of companies—from defense to petroleum, aerospace to infrastructure—the opportunities for skimming money abound. The evidence, as prosecutors frequently point out, can be found in the cars driven, in the favors done and received, in the red envelopes passed silently as gifts. Gu Junshan, connected to Xu Caihou, stands accused of siphoning off 30 billion yuan, bribing people by offering them the keys to a Mercedes filled with gold. Xu himself allegedly had received sufficient ill-gotten gains to fill ten trucks. Gao Xiaoyan, one of the few women to have reached the rank of PLA Major General, is now under investigation on bribery charges stemming from her work for a PLA hospital. The very opacity of the system makes it harder to pass off military dealings as legitimate. There is always room to imagine corrupt activity. If corruption is to be truly rooted out in China, the PLA will have to be subject to relentless investigation, too.
> 
> Evidence of wrongdoing has not been presented in ways likely to satisfy an American or British court, but corruption is nonetheless a real problem in China. All else equal, it is easier to be corrupt in a murky economy, with a legal system far from explicit, consistent, and impartial. The opportunities for truly damaging corruption abound, which is why there is little reason to doubt Xi’s sincerity and determination. The current chairman was a youth doing hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. Just what lessons he drew from this experience are unclear, but he might well have perceived Mao as rejuvenating China’s national strength by tearing into the cadres at the very top of the political apparatus. Officials were a threat to national security then; they are a threat to national security now, and it is Xi’s turn to deal with them. Xi, one suspects, is that most unpredictable and misunderstood of leaders: a true believer with a mission.
> 
> There are two main problems bedeviling Xi’s approach toward the PLA: its lack of credibility and its impact on troop morale. As to the former, in the absence of an independent ombudsman that could investigate Xi as ruthlessly as it does his political enemies, the anti-corruption campaign can never seem wholly honest and just. As already noted, it is widely perceived as an old-fashioned settling of political scores, and this simply comes with the political real estate. After all, Xi’s predecessors used similar campaigns and similarly high-sounding rhetoric to eliminate political opponents. Again, the weakness of Chinese rule of law comes into play. While optimists have made much of Xi’s emphasis on the “rule of law” and the “constitution”, the fact is that Article 51 of the constitution specifies that citizens may not infringe upon the interests of the state—a clause vague enough to mean that Xi, as the paramount representative of the state, will decide when citizens start infringing. The credibility problem is exacerbated by the fact that none of Xi’s political cronies has been prosecuted.
> 
> The second problem is that Xi’s campaign damages China’s national security planning. Even the non-corrupt in the PLA have little way of knowing when they have crossed the line, for the line can shift at the whims of their chairman. The virtues of unpredictability have been famously espoused by Sun Tzu (which may be part of Xi’s rationale as he takes on vested military interests), but under current circumstances it hurts more than it helps. The reason is simple: The national security calculus in China right now demands massive military modernization, and that costs money. It is risky—indeed, potentially fatal—to ask for money for weapons, if the chairman suspects that the money will be stolen. The PRC’s military budget has already grown to $132 billion (it is probably much higher). As military planners attempt to counter American and others’ capabilities, it will only swell further. But if Xi’s anticorruption drive makes senior PLA officers wary of proposing budget hikes, it may anger patriotic and nationalistic professional soldiers who might feel that they are betraying the national trust.
> 
> In an unpredictable situation, where an attempt to do their jobs by asking for investment in better military systems might lead to an investigation, PLA members have, broadly speaking, three options. The first is to keep a low profile and cooperate with Xi; the odds are reasonable that cooperation will ensure safety. Most seem to be following this particular course. But if one is already under investigation or if one is connected, however loosely, with someone Xi happens not to like, keeping a low profile might not work. A second option is therefore suicide. Two admirals, Ma Faxiang and Jiang Zhonghua, leapt from tall buildings; a general under investigation for corruption, Song Yuwen, is said to have committed suicide by hanging himself.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/02/26/the-coming-coup-in-china/



> The third option is resistance. Men with guns always have the option of using them.Men with guns always have the option of using them. One or more groups of officers who feel their well-deserved economic gains are being threatened might well opt to take Xi on militarily. As far as we know, such things have not happened under the reign of the CCP (not least because under Mao and Deng, the line between civilians and the military was blurred indeed), but China has historically been prone to the military taking a hand in political affairs. It was a Ming general, Wu Sangui, who first opened China to the invading Manchus. It was Yuan Shikai, a Qing general, who usurped the leadership of the Republic of China at its birth. It was a benevolent general, Zhang Xueliang, who kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek, his civilian leader, and forced him to come to terms with the CCP. There is no guarantee that such military interference will never happen again. A combination of motives—an eagerness to protect a privileged economic place, the fear that if one does not strike, one will be struck down, the idea that one must protect one’s country from a dictator bent on tearing it apart—could impel soldiers to try to seize political power. These are the circumstances in which military coups happen elsewhere; there is no reason to suppose that China is exceptional in this regard. There, as anywhere else, it is impossible to know what will happen when one threatens heavily armed men.
> 
> A successful military seizure of the Chinese state could take several forms. The simplest would involve a senior officer or group of officers cooperating silently, gathering enough power, and then suddenly placing Xi under house arrest. Martial law would be declared—for the purest of patriotic motives, of course—and life would go on as normally as possible under such circumstances. Bloodshed would be minimal; our imaginary cabal would have gathered enough support to make resistance futile. They might then be either a transition back to Party rule, or the declaration of a new government that might or might not keep the policies of its predecessor largely unchanged. As military coups go, this would be the cleanest, neatest option.
> 
> It is an unlikely outcome, however, because the PLA is divided. Many within it have a stake in Xi’s survival. Far more probable is a scenario in which officers in charge of one of China’s military districts—in Sichuan, say, or perhaps in Jilin—decide that they have tolerated more than enough interference from the central government and declare war. There might be considerable local support for such a move; regional identities remain strong within China and resentment of a rapacious central government is easy to foster. Bo Xilai fell in part because of his popularity in Chongqing. Affordable housing and the idea that he would not let his Chongqingers down made Bo a hero to many locals. Beijing’s arresting him was for many just another example of the central government interfering with Chongqing’s well-being. Capitalizing on local discontent and China’s militia-rized culture, an enterprising military commander could well gather enough strength to challenge Beijing.
> 
> Were such a thing to happen, China’s fate could go in one of several different directions. If our imaginary commander were strong enough, an outright seizure of the capital after long, bloody warfare would be one outcome. Mao Zedong, after all, managed to seize power and unify the country after battling a series of foes. But given Xi’s strength, outright victory would be unlikely. Instead, one can expect a bloody stalemate, with the country dividing along north-south lines as old as China itself. “Two Chinas”, to use that dreaded phrase, could emerge. Balkanization might not stop there either. Once other military commands see the possibility of successful defiance, they too might act. Xi might find that quashing secessionists costs more blood and money than he can get his hands on.Xi might find that quashing secessionists costs more blood and money than he can get his hands on. China might fall back into a new Warring States or warlord era, in which little fiefdoms spar, subside into coexistence, and then start sparring again.
> 
> All of this is purely speculative, of course. Fear of chaos and the patriotic education system provide a strong deterrent to such action. But unlikely things happen all the time. The survival of the CCP in the years following Gutian is one of them: The odds were stacked against the small band of peasants and dreamers who survived purges, a very long march, and Muslim warlords. It is worth remembering, too, that a unified China is far less of a norm in the five millennia of its history than what the official record claims. The country has fallen apart suddenly and violently many times in its past, often precisely because of the sorts of conflicts one sees unfolding today.
> 
> The rupture between civil and military spheres has often been heralded by academics as propitious for democratization. Transitions to democracy in Taiwan and Southeast Asia are cited as hopeful exemplars.3 However true the argument might be for Taiwan (though it fails to take account of the particular nature of civil society there, as well as of American pressure for democratization), there is little reason to hope for a peaceful, let alone democratic, outcome from civil-military conflict in China. Xi’s replacement would probably be another strong authoritarian leader, perhaps one more nationalistic and belligerent in his conduct of foreign affairs. In China, revolutions from below have tended toward violence, ending with the displacement of one despotism by another.
> 
> Even that might be better than a China falling to pieces. Disunity in China has meant immense violence in the past, with the effects often spilling over into neighboring countries. Given China’s integration into the global economy, internal chaos could spell trouble the world over.
> 
> The possibilities of military interference and subsequent trouble are not lost on Xi. He is too steeped in China’s past, and too savvy a political operator, not to realize that enemies can strike suddenly and without warning. Preventing military dissent was part of the rationale for forming his new national security council at the Third Plenum in 2013. Modeled in part on its American counterpart, the new body is tasked with both domestic and international security affairs; its mandate includes addressing terrorist threats from restive minorities as well as planning to neutralize American military power. It is also meant to be a “unified” structure for dealing with national security, with Xi himself at its head.
> 
> This means that the PLA’s perspectives on national security must now pass through a body that Xi chairs. The council is thus a way of reinforcing Party control over the military. It is a way of asserting authority, of making sure that marsh heroes do not go too far. (Xi might also have studied how Mao dealt with recalcitrant generals; Mao purged Peng Dehuai for an alleged anti-Party conspiracy. The new security council could allow Xi to keep an eye out for such conspirators). At one level, this is comforting: One does not want situations in which the Party Chairman is caught wrong-footed, as Hu Jintao was, before visiting senior American officials. But from the perspective of disgruntled PLA members, it constitutes another check on their capacity to do what they deem necessary.
> 
> To address resistance from within the military, Xi has also tried to reform the culture within the PLA. One initiative is to improve the auditing of military expenditures. The absence of external supervision has been cited as a reason for graft. Tighter regulations will keep power controlled and directed toward the goals of national security. Military modernization is hurt, after all, when funds that should go to purchase long-range missiles are purloined to buy bars of gold.
> 
> But much more important is the attempt to reorient troop loyalties. The risk of military dissent arises from the fact that soldiers might feel more loyal to their commanders than to Xi. A move is underway to educate them on the egregiousness of such thinking. Instead of answering to the “rule of man”, senior commanders and military academy leaders are making clear, troops must answer to the “rule of law”, which means obedience to the Party. Commanders, Major General Pan Liangshi recently declared, should have a “legal mind.” More than any Chinese leader since Mao, Xi seems bent on forging a cult of personality. The public appearances, the charismatic speeches, and the trinkets bearing his image help to portray him as the Great Helmsman, the embodiment, as with emperors of old, of the “rule of law” to whom the PLA’s soldiers owe ultimate allegiance as Commander-in-Chief. All this is being touted as the discipline crucial to combat readiness. It is also the discipline crucial to preventing the military from spiraling out of Party control.
> 
> It is difficult to take issue with Xi’s drive to control the military. Any civilian government wants to know that troops are responsive to the government, not to whoever happens to be in charge of their regiment. Anyone familiar with what revolutionary upheavals have looked like in China’s past can understand and even empathize with Xi’s concern.
> 
> Just how successful he will be, though, remains to be seen. That he must do something about corruption is undeniable, but can he subdue it without creating a new legal order that threatens Party rule too? True transparency is dangerous; it ultimately means setting up an authority not answerable to Xi or the Party. To have such an authority would be to place Xi and his allies at considerable risk. But absent such an authority, the anti-corruption drive will never be complete, never beyond cynical reproach; it will remain little more than a source of uncertainty and fear. And uncertain, fearful people can do shocking things.
> 
> 
> 1See Lant Pritchett and Lawrence H. Summers, “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean”, NBER Working Paper No. 20573.
> 
> 2See James Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Harvard University Press, 1992).
> 
> 3See the otherwise brilliant article by Andrew Scobell, “China’s Evolving Civil-Military Relations: Creeping Guojiahua”, Armed Forces and Society (Winter 2005).
> 
> Sulmaan Khan is assistant professor of international history and Chinese foreign relations at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, where he also directs the Water and Oceans program at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy. He is the author of Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).


----------



## Edward Campbell

I _believe_* the PLA is upset; I also _believe_* that some PLA admirals and generals and some other very senior officials are, very quietly, discussing how to rid themselves of this turbulent supreme leader. The problem, I _think_, for them is twofold:

     1. Xi Jinping is moving quickly and ruthlessly and he has broad support in the country and in the Party; and

     2. There are younger men who want the corrupt "old guard" to be purged so that they can move up in the _system_.

The HUGE cultural change I see coming is the attack on corruption and privilege. Corruption and privilege have been part of Chinese life (and European life, too, if we read our own history fairly) for millennia. We, Western Europeans and Americans and so on, rid ourselves of most of the worst effects of corruption and privilege in the 19th and 20th centuries because we saw that it was the most beneficial (utilitarian) thing to do: fair dealing and equality of opportunity do provide the 'greatest good to the greatest number.' I think Xi Jinping and many younger Chinese leaders see the same thing and want to rescue China from the scourge of corruption.

_____
* But I have no good citations to support my belief; it is, rather, just the product of observation and reading


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## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I _believe_* the PLA is upset; I also _believe_* that some PLA admirals and generals and some other very senior officials are, very quietly, discussing how to rid themselves of this turbulent supreme leader. The problem, I _think_, for them is twofold:



Speaking of which, did you notice an earlier post above about grumblings within the PLA about Xi's "iron rule" ?



> *Chinese Army's Call For Commanders to Obey Xi Signals Tensions*


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## Edward Campbell

Yes, I did. 

The PLA has been far too powerful for far too long.

Mao and Zhou Enlai "coddled' the PLA because they needed it. Deng Xiaoping did, too, but for different reasons. Ditto Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, also because they needed the PLA leadership's support more than the PLA leaders needed them. Xi Jinping _might_ be the first _supreme leader_ who doesn't 'need' the PLA ... the military reforms (professionalism, etc) that Jiang Zemin and, especially, Hu Jintao began are coming to fruition and the PLA is no longer an essential pillar of the Party.

My _sense_ is that Xi Jinping wants to create a modern, sophisticated, _businesslike_ state and the role of the army in that sort of state is subordinate ... something that will not sit well with many of the "old guard" in the PLA.


----------



## CougarKing

Renewed protests in Hong Kong:

Reuters



> *Three arrested at Hong Kong anti-China protest, scuffles with police*
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - At least three people were arrested as a group of about 400 people in Hong Kong clashed with police in the latest sign of ongoing tensions caused by China's influence in the city.
> 
> Protesters in Yuen Long, in Hong Kong's New Territories just a stone's throw from mainland China, chanted to "cancel the multiple-entry permit" and "topple the Chinese Communist Party" as they complained against so-called parallel traders, who buy goods in Hong Kong to sell at a profit across the border.
> 
> Demonstrators blocked the area's main street with garbage bins, halting traffic. Police used pepper spray and restrained some people. A female protester was bleeding from the nose as police dragged her away.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _South China Morning Post_ is reporting that 16 PLA major generals have been relieved/detained and are under investigation for corruption. Most (all?) are either relatives of or were senior aides more senior officers who are already being investigated.

It appears to me that Xi Jinping is striking harder and deeper at his military opposition ~ decapitating the "next generation," too.


Edited to add link: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1727199/16-pla-major-generals-many-them-newly-promoted-under-investigation


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## CougarKing

An example that shows that no positions in the PLA, even as high as the members of the CMC (or even former CMC members), are immune to scrutiny from Xi's anti-corruption drive:

Reuters



> *Exclusive: China investigates second top officer for graft - sources*
> 
> By Ben Blanchard and Benjamin Kang Lim
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China is investigating a second former top military officer on suspicion of corruption, two independent sources told Reuters, as President Xi Jinping widens his campaign against deep-rooted graft in the country.
> 
> *Guo Boxiong,* 72, was a vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission until he stepped down in 2012. Another former vice chairman, *Xu Caihou*, was put under investigation last year for corruption.
> 
> Before their retirement, the men had been two of China's top military officers who served together under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao. Xi was also a vice chairman with Guo and Xu from 2010-2012, before he became head of the party and military commission chief.
> 
> Serving and retired military officers have said graft in the armed forces is so pervasive it could undermine China's ability to wage war. In one case, a senior officer has been accused of making millions of dollars from selling hundreds of military positions.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


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## CougarKing

Maybe some Hong Kong residents are now regretting they ever traded the Union Jack for the PRC flag...

Reuters



> *UK lawmakers say China eroding freedoms in Hong Kong*
> 
> LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers banned from entering Hong Kong last year said Chinese regulations were eroding freedoms in the former British colony and urged their government to take a harder stance against Beijing.
> 
> Pro-democracy protests shut down parts of Hong Kong for two-and-a-half months last year in response to a decision by China to pre-screen candidates in a 2017 election that will choose the city's next chief executive.
> 
> On Friday a report by the British parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee said China's new nomination process was "unduly restrictive".
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Former President Hu Jintao also under the microscope?

Reuters



> *Former China leader not implicated in aide's investigation, official says*
> 
> By Ben Blanchard
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Retired Chinese President Hu Jintao is not being implicated in a corruption probe into a former top aide, a senior government spokesman said on Friday, adding that the official was being investigated more over financial issues than political ones.
> 
> Ling Jihua was demoted in September 2012 without explanation. Sources told Reuters that the move happened after his son was involved in a deadly crash involving a luxury sports car in Beijing.
> 
> Ling was dropped from his post as head of the party's General Office of the Central Committee, a powerful job similar to cabinet secretary in Westminster-style governments.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting idea to make cyber espionage more expensive for the Chinese:

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2015/03/05/one_way_to_counter_chinese_hacking_poison_the_well__107700.html



> *One Way to Counter Chinese Hacking: Poison the Well*
> By Adam Segal
> 
> The Director of National Intelligence released his annual threat assessment last week, and cyberattacks top the list. There were at least three headlines in Clapper’s written and oral statements. First, while a “cyber armageddon”—a destructive attack that debilitates wide swathes of U.S. infrastructure—might be possible, it is very unlikely. Instead, the risk is from an “ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyber attacks,” which will “impose cumulative costs on U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.” Second, China may get most of the press coverage, but Russia is a serious challenge. In fact, Clapper admitted that the “Russian cyber threat is more severe than we’ve previously assessed.” Third, Clapper accused Iran of hacking the Sands Casino and warned that the next wave of attacks could change or manipulate information, impairing decision making by government officials, corporate executives, or investors.
> 
> As several other U.S. government officials have done over the last several months, Clapper also claimed that attribution has become easier. Hackers can no longer assume that their attacks will be undetected and they can no longer expect that when attacks are unmasked, their identities will remain anonymous. With enough time and resources, attacks can be attributed. This, however, has not created deterrence. Breaking into networks remains easy, the gains of the attacks high, and the relatively long delays between attack and attribution create a permissive environment.
> 
> 
> This seems to be especially true in the case of China. Clapper notes that Chinese cyber espionage continues despite “detailed” private cybersecurity reports attributing attack on U.S. companies and government agencies, “scathing” public denouncements, and “stern” U.S. government demarches. Clapper does suggest one way of limiting attacks. Because Chinese hackers use relatively simple tools and techniques, improving defenses would force them to develop more sophisticated, expensive, and time consuming methods. The costs of economic espionage would go up.
> 
> (Recommended: How to Deter China)
> 
> Coincidentally, I was at a conference last week in Washington focused on this exact question: how do you raise the cost to Chinese hackers? There was a great deal of skepticism that the United States would be able to get China to accept a norm against the cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets, or business strategies. Other states do not believe the United States actually adheres to the norm, and many friends of the United States actively engage in cyber-enabled economic espionage. One participant, for example, noted an uptick in attacks on U.S. companies coming from South Korea.
> 
> There was also little sense that big technology companies would be interested in pursuing trade or other sanctions against the Chinese firms that are thought to be benefiting from the theft. Smaller firms might have the stomach for a fight, but the larger firms, with sizable investments in the market, are already overexposed to retaliation from the Chinese government. Things are already bad, with foreign technology being removed from government procurement lists and a draft counterterrorism law that would require firms to hand over encryption keys and install backdoors, and they fear that it will only get worse.
> 
> Instead of raising the costs by engaging in active defense where small groups of U.S. hackers with highly detailed intelligence disrupt attacks in China before they hit U.S. networks, the one idea that generated any enthusiasm was to lower the value of the information Chinese hackers stole through deception. Here the model is the Farewell Dossier. In 1981, French intelligence obtained the services of Col. Vladimir I. Vetrov, “Farewell,” who photographed and supplied 4,000 documents on KGB efforts to obtain scientific and technical secrets. President Mitterrand offered the information to President Reagan, and the CIA discovered that the Soviets had already stolen radar, computer, machine tool, and semiconductor technology. In an effort to conduct its own version of economic warfare on Moscow and poison the collection efforts, the CIA fed fake information to Soviet agents that would later fail. (Fans of The Americans will recognize this plot line. Elizabeth and Phillip send stolen plans of propellers that cause a submarine to sink.)
> 
> A strategy of poisoning the well would require cooperation from industry. Companies would have to help design fake but attractive data and maintain it on their networks (and make sure it was not used by mistake internally). This might be too high a bar for many companies, but even a failed cyber Farewell Dossier, or just the suggestion that companies are adopting such a strategy, could raise costs for Chinese hackers. Once there was a doubt about the veracity and usefulness of data, all information taken would be subject to much higher levels of scrutiny which may force a slow down in collection. Hackers might become more cautious, afraid of supplying faulty goods to their customers and superiors.
> 
> (Recommended: The U.S. Navy's Cruise Missile Nightmare)
> 
> Last year’s worldwide threat assessment contained no reference to making hacking more difficult for China but we shouldn’t read too much into one section of this year’s assessment. The United States will continue being detailed, scathing, and stern with China on cyber industrial espionage, and one U.S. government official at the meeting insisted that he was “not convinced that the boat had sailed on norms.” But Clapper’s brief mention of defensive measures may signal a small tilt away from developing a norm toward inflicting cost.


----------



## CougarKing

How many decades before realistic looking female robo-concubines, reminiscent of those seen in sci-fi movies like "Ghost in the Shell", will meet the demand from China's growing population of perpetually single and desperate male bachelors resulting from the one-child policy?  :blotto:

Market Watch



> *China’s factories are building a robot nation*
> 
> Published: Mar 8, 2015 5:38 p.m. ET
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Growing demand
> The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which represents robot manufacturers and research institutes, said China last year surpassed Japan to become the world’s biggest market for industrial robots. Some 200,000 were operating in China at the end of 2014, the IFR said, with 32,000 installed in 2013 alone, accounting for 20% of worldwide installations that year.
> 
> The robot-to-worker ratio in the country is still relatively low, the IFR said, with 30 robots working in manufacturing plants per 10,000 employees. Japan’s ratio is 11 times higher.
> 
> Four multinational companies — Switzerland’s ABB Group ABBN, +0.19%  , Japan’s Fanuc Corp. 6954, -0.95% FANUF, -1.33%  and Yaskawa Electric Corp. 6506, -0.90%  , and Germany’s Kuka Robotics KU2, +0.98%   — are the dominant suppliers of robotic systems for factories in China. Mir Industry, a Chinese industrial consultancy, said the four account for about 58% of the nationwide market.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## TCBF

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> How many decades before realistic looking female robo-concubines, reminiscent of those seen in sci-fi movies like "Ghost in the Shell", will meet the demand from China's growing population of perpetually single and desperate male bachelors resulting from the one-child policy?  :blotto:
> 
> Market Watch



- We could use them as part of our Foreign Workers Program instead of tearing all of those poor people away from their families, culture, and warm climate so they can hand us a double-double at forty below.


----------



## a_majoor

Although this article is about the global financial crisis, the section on China is quite interesting and pretty frightening at the same time. All the people who were putting their "eggs" in the basket marked Unlimited Chinese Growth will be getting a very nasty surprise.

And of course a hard landing of the Chinese economy is bound to have very negative effects in China itself. The bellicose attitude that China has been displaying in the last decade could also be a problem as the leadership decides that pointing people at "external" problems and enemies is the best way to deflect attention from the real crisis at home:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/11448051/Only-mass-default-will-end-the-worlds-addiction-to-debt.html



> *Only mass default will end the world's addiction to debt*
> As global debt rises off the scale, creditors stand to take a huge hit in a threatened tsunami of defaults
> by Jeremy Warner
> 7:04PM GMT 03 Mar 2015
> 
> In a valedictory speech at the weekend of characteristically Latin American duration – a mind-numbing three hours – the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, claimed that her country was the only one in the world to have reduced its national debt over recent years.
> 
> I doubt she is right about being alone in this “achievement” – there must surely be others - but even if she is, I’m not sure that reduction in the national debt via the mechanism of default is anything to boast of. Only Kirchner could think this a matter of national pride.
> 
> Nonetheless, where Argentina treads, others will surely soon be following. The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default.
> 
> Greece we already know about, but the coming much wider outbreak of debt repudiation will not be confined to sovereign nations. Last week, there was another foretaste of what’s to come in developments at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International. Taxpayers have had enough of paying for the country’s increasingly crisis-ridden banking sector, and have determined to bail in private creditors to the remnants of this financial road crash instead - to the tune of $8.5bn in the specific case of Hypo Alpe-Adria. Finally, creditors are being made to pay for the consequences of their own folly.
> 
> You might have thought that a financial crisis as serious as that of the past seven years would have ended the world economy’s addiction to debt once and for all. It has not. If anything, the position has grown even worse since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
> 
> According to recent analysis by McKinsey Global Institute, global debt has increased to the tune of $57 trillion, or 17pc, since 2007, with little sign of a slowdown in sight. Much of this growth has been in emerging markets, which were comparatively unaffected by the financial crisis. Yet even in the developed West, private sector deleveraging has been limited and, in any case, more than outweighed by growing public indebtedness. The combined public sector debt of the G7 economies has grown by 40pc to around 120pc of GDP since the crisis began. There has been no overall deleveraging to speak of.
> 
> *Where the West left off, Asia has taken up the pace, with a credit-induced real estate bubble that makes its pre-crisis Western counterpart look tame by comparison, much of it fuelled, as in Western economies, by growth in the shadow banking sector.
> 
> China’s total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282pc of GDP, the debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, that the US.
> 
> Attempts to rein in this growth have so far proved problematic. The Chinese property market has slowed markedly, which in turn has knocked the stuffing out of the all-important construction sector and its feeder industries. Starved of its regular fix of debt, the Chinese economy seems as incapable of generating decent levels of growth as the mature economies of the West. The addiction to credit has gone global.
> 
> In any case, China now seems to have abandoned all attempts at tighter credit conditions. At the weekend, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) again cut interest rates. It has also announced reduced reserve requirements in an attempt to further reinvigorate credit and prevent a hard landing. It may already be too late. The PBOC’s long-serving governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, will almost certainly soon be on his bike, in apparent punishment for the enforced policy reversal. Credit-fuelled growth, China’s high command seems to have concluded, is better than no growth at all.*
> 
> Some economists claim not to be too concerned by the explosion in global credit. For them, it is merely the mirror image of rising output, asset prices and wealth. And up to a point, they are of course right. Economies engaged in across-the-board deleveraging find it extremely difficult to grow, as the depression-like conditions afflicting much of the eurozone again remind us. Decent growth requires abundant credit.
> 
> But you can also have too much of a good thing. Today’s global economy is plainly a case of it. The world has taken on more debt than it is ever likely to be able to repay, absent of implausibly high levels of output growth or contractionary fiscal consolidation. This, in turn, makes the global economy highly vulnerable to continued financial crisis and balance sheet recession. Too much capacity and too much debt make a poisonous combination.
> 
> Credit cycles tend to be much longer than ordinary business cycles, which may have something to do with the cautionary effect that financial crises have on banking practice. It can take as much as a generation for a bank entirely to forget the normal disciplines of prudential risk management, and go for broke. Unfortunately, they always do eventually, once all institutional memory of the last crisis has died off.
> 
> A paper by the Bank for International Settlement’s Claudio Borio a number of years ago traced the origins of the credit boom that preceded Lehman’s collapse to the early 1990s. Others might put it as far back as the 1980s. He was, however, talking only about the American credit cycle. Looked at from a global perspective, the real bust has yet to arrive.
> 
> Traditionally, governments have dealt with big debt overhangs through inflation and financial repression. In extremis debts are monetised via central bank money printing. It’s the legal, backdoor approach to default. Creditors get progressively squeezed by low interest rates and rising prices. Regrettably, it doesn’t work so well in a deflationary environment, and it doesn’t work at all when the credit is in a foreign currency, hence the apparently intractable debt standoff that afflicts the eurozone. Southern Europe has in effect been borrowing in a hard, northern European currency.
> 
> In the early 19th century, more than half of UK incarcerations were for unpaid debts. The debtors’ prisons were filled to bursting. Then came the realisation that excessive debt was as much a problem for the creditor as the debtor, proper bankruptcy laws were introduced, and mechanisms for burden sharing put in place. Creditors found it harder to demand their pound of flesh.
> 
> Yet when the problem is as big, and international, as it is today, such solutions become virtually impossible, and unilateral default much more likely. How might the present explosion in debt end? The only thing that can be said with certainty is “badly”.


----------



## CougarKing

Does anyone else here think that conflict between these two nations is inevitable?

Bloomberg video



> *China Overtakes N. Korea as Japan’s Top Security Concern*
> 
> Japanese people are more concerned about China’s military strength and assertiveness in Asia than any other security issue, according to a public opinion poll released by the government at the weekend. Bloomberg's Isabel Reynolds has more on "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)



Reuters



> *Tokyo fire bombing survivor fears Japan starting down road to war again*
> Reuters
> 
> By By Elaine Lies | Reuters – 12 hours ago
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The U.S. bombing after midnight on March 10, 1945, annihilated a wide swathe of northeastern Tokyo, packed with small factories and houses made of wood and paper.
> An estimated 100,000 people were killed, many of them women and children - a toll higher than those of the Dresden fire bombing and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
> 
> Now, as memories fade of how civilians suffered during World War Two - suffering Saotome blames on Japan's wartime leaders who thought of their citizens as "weeds" - the 82-year-old author fears Japan may be marching toward war again.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Birth tourism in North America is not only popular with the Chinese but a number of other nationalities as well. I seem to recall reading about a Nigerian gang who helped smuggle in pregnant women from Nigeria, for a hefty free, all the way to the US or Canada.

South China Morning Post



> *US homes raided in crackdown on pregnant Chinese ‘birth tourism’ rings
> 
> Homes raided as agents target services accused of helping foreign women deliver more than 400 babies in US for
> automatic citizenship*
> 
> Federal agents have searched more than a dozen homes in a crackdown on so-called "maternity tourism" operators who arrange for pregnant Chinese women to give birth in the US, where their babies automatically become American citizens.
> 
> Agents targeted three alleged maternity tourism rings operating out of apartment complexes and other sites in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties on Tuesday.
> 
> *The businesses, catering largely to wealthy women paying up to US$80,000, were believed to have helped Chinese tourists deliver more than 400 American babies, court papers said.
> 
> There is nothing in US law making it illegal for pregnant women to enter the United States - and no one was arrested in the raids*.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

When I was studying in Beijing back in 2003 for an exchange program at a local university, I remember seeing bootleg DVD/VCD copies of the movie "Matrix Revolutions" being peddled on the street the same night I watched it in a movie theatre!   :facepalm:

Shanghaist blog



> *Of course fake Apple Watches are already on sale in China*
> 
> Less than 24 hours after Apple formally unveiled its new Apple Watch, knockoff versions have already been sighted at electronic markets in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
> According to CNN Money, the fakes were found at the Huaqiangbei electronics market in Shenzhen, with others being sold nationwide via e-commerce websites such as Taobao. Those at the market mimic the design and style of Apple's new offering, selling for between 250 yuan and 500 yuan, but online it is possible to find models selling at various different price points.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More on the corruption/graft of flag/general officers in the PLA as posted by ERC on the previous page:

South China Morning Post




> *Retired generals point to ‘horrible’ graft in PLA*
> Money, connections and personal bonds decide promotions, and the culture of confidentiality makes exposing wrong-doers difficult, former top brass says
> PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 10 March, 2015, 10:48pm
> UPDATED : Wednesday, 11 March, 2015, 5:37am
> Nectar Gan
> nectar.gan@scmp.com
> 
> All People’s Liberation Army ranks have a price, getting a Communist Party membership has a price, and important military positions are reserved for cronies, senior officers children and in-laws, three retired PLA major generals told local TV this week, addressing the “horrible” corruption in the military.
> 
> In the interview with mainland-tied Phoenix Television on Monday, the former senior officers called for reforms, from empowering the military anti-graft agency to improving defence spending transparency, to curbing rampant graft among troops.
> 
> *“Everybody in society knows that in the PLA … you need to pay to join the party. Promotions to become leaders at platoon, company, regiment and division levels all have their own price tags,”* said retired PLA Major General Yang Chunchang, who is a former department deputy head of China’s Academy of Military Sciences.
> 
> < Edited >


----------



## dimsum

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> When I was studying in Beijing back in 2003 for an exchange program at a local university, I remember seeing bootleg DVD/VCD copies of the movie "Matrix Revolutions" being peddled on the street the same night I watched it in a movie theatre!   :facepalm:
> 
> Shanghaist blog



Well, they don't call Shenzhen "the pirate capital" for nothing.


----------



## CougarKing

A model of the Chinese carrier _Liaoning_'s successor:

Source: IHS Jane's 360 - 10 March 2015







A model of a potential follow-on carrier to China's Liaoning was unveiled by Jinshuai Model Crafts in late 2014. Source: Jinshuai Model Crafts



> *People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) deputy political commissar Rear Admiral Ding Haichun has confirmed that construction of China's first indigenous aircraft carrier is underway*, according to the Hong Kong Commercial Daily newspaper, which interviewed several senior officers, including Rear Adm Ding, on the margins of the National People's Congress being held in Beijing.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> *In a separate report, the PLA Daily reported the successful development of an electromagnetic catapult, *citing the assertion by the project leader, Rear Admiral Ma Weiming, that it is the equal of American designs.
> 
> China has been very reticent to outline its carrier plans and ambitions. In January, information relating to a contract to supply components for the new carrier was removed from a company's website after it circulated online. On 6 March, Chinese media reported that two workers with access to bases in Dalian had been jailed for six and eight years for passing photographs of China's first carrier, Liaoning , to "foreign spies".


----------



## The Bread Guy

Can't see China putting up with this for long ....


> Four Chinese people were killed in southwestern Yunnan province Friday by a bomb dropped from a Myanmar warplane, state media reported, days after Beijing warned of escalating violence across the border.
> 
> The official news agency Xinhua said the bomb hit a sugarcane field in Lincang city, killing the four workers and injuring nine others.
> 
> It came after China's foreign ministry said earlier this week that a house in Yunnan had been hit by shelling from across the border in Myanmar, where the military are fighting rebel forces.
> 
> Beijing has previously warned of a threat to border stability after the dramatic upsurge in ethnic conflict in the remote Kokang region in Myanmar's northeastern Shan state.
> 
> Last month, Myanmar declared a state of emergency in Kokang in response to the conflict, which began on February 9.
> 
> The unrest has virtually emptied the main Kokang town of Laukkai, the epicentre of the fighting, with streets in the once-bustling frontier community transformed into a battleground.
> 
> More than 30,000 people have fled from Myanmar into Yunnan province, according to Xinhua.
> 
> Early Saturday morning, the agency reported that Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin had summoned Myanmar ambassador Thit Linn Ohn on Friday night to protest the deaths ....


----------



## a_majoor

More on the state of China's economy. The *truth* is probably not quite as bad as David Stockman makes out, but certainly it isn't all roses either. The amount of debt China is holding, the ramshackle credit and finance structures within China and (perhaps more importantly) the lack of transparency and manipulated data means there is no clear way to understand what is happening, much less take proper corrective action. This isn just the "Local Knowledge Problem" on steroids, this is moving into a dark cave without a light, rope or even a pole to test the ground in front of you....

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/chinas-monumental-ponzi-heres-how-it-unravels/



> *China’s Monumental Ponzi: Here’s How It Unravels*
> By David Stockman
> March 29, 2014
> 
> China is the greatest construction boom and credit bubble in recorded history. An entire nation of 1.3 billion has gone mad building, borrowing, speculating, scheming, cheating, lying and stealing. The source of this demented outbreak is not a flaw in Chinese culture or character—nor even the kind of raw greed and gluttony that afflicts all peoples in the late stages of a financial bubble.
> 
> Instead, the cause is monetary madness with a red accent. Chairman Mao was not entirely mistaken when he proclaimed that political power flows from the end of a gun barrel-–he did subjugate a nation of one billion people based on that principle. But it was Mr. Deng’s discovery that saved Mao’s tyrannical communist party regime from the calamity of his foolish post-revolution economic experiments.
> 
> Just in the nick of time, as China reeled from the Great Leap Forward, the famine death of 40 million and the mass psychosis of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Deng learned that power could be maintained and extended from the end of a printing press. And that’s the heart of the so-called China economic miracle. Its not about capitalism with a red accent, as the Wall Street and London gamblers have been braying for nearly two decades; its a monumental case of monetary and credit inflation that has no parallel.
> 
> At the turn of the century credit market debt outstanding in the US was about $27 trillion, and we’ve not been slouches attempting to borrow our way to prosperity. Total credit market debt is now $59 trillion—-so America has been burying itself in debt at nearly a 7% annual rate.
> 
> But move over America!  As the 21st century dawned, China had about $1 trillion of credit market debt outstanding, but after a blistering pace of “borrow and build” for 14 years it now carries nearly $25 trillion.  But here’s the thing: this stupendous 25X growth of debt occurred in the context of an economic system designed and run by elderly party apparatchiks who had learned their economics from Mao’s Little Red Book!
> 
> That means there was no legitimate banking system in China—just giant state bureaus which were run by  party operatives and a modus operandi of parceling out quotas for national credit growth from the top, and then water-falling them down a vast chain of command to the counties, townships and villages.  There have never been any legitimate financial prices in China—all interest rates and FX rates have been pegged and regulated to the decimal point; nor has there ever been any honest accounting either—-loans have been perpetual options to extend and pretend.
> 
> And, needless to say, there is no system of financial discipline based on contract law. China’s GDP has grown by $10 trillion dollars during this century alone—that is, there has been a boom across the land that makes the California gold rush appear pastoral by comparison.  Yet in all that frenzied prospecting there have been almost no mistakes, busted camps, empty pans or even personal bankruptcies.  When something has occasionally gone wrong with an “investment” the prospectors have gathered in noisy crowds on the streets and pounded their pans for relief—-a courtesy that the regime has invariably granted.
> 
> So in two short decades, China has erected a monumental Ponzi economy that is economically rotten to the core. It has 1.5 billion tons of steel capacity, but ”sell-through” demand of less than half that amount— that is, on-going demand for sheet steel to go into cars and appliances and rebar into replacement construction once the current pyramid building binge finally expires.  The same is true for its cement industry, ship-building, solar and aluminum industries—to say nothing of 70 million empty luxury apartments and vast stretches of over-built highways, fast rail, airports, shopping mails and new cities.
> 
> In short, the flip-side of the China’s giant credit bubble is the most massive malinvesment of real economic resources—-labor, raw materials and capital goods—ever known. Effectively, the country-side pig sties have been piled high with copper inventories and the urban neighborhoods with glass, cement and rebar erections that can’t possibly earn an economic return, but all of which has become “collateral” for even more “loans” under the Chinese Ponzi.
> 
> China has been on a wild tear heading straight for the economic edge of the planet—-that is, monetary Terra Incognito— based on the circular principle of borrowing, building and borrowing. In essence, it is a giant re-hypothecation scheme where every man’s “debt” become the next man’s “asset”.
> 
> Thus, local government’s have meager incomes, but vastly bloated debts based on stupendously over-valued inventories of land. Coal mine entrepreneurs face collapsing prices and revenues, but soaring double digit interest rates on shadow banking loans collateralized by over-valued coal reserves. Shipyards have empty order books, but vast debts collateralized by soon to be idle construction bays. Speculators have collateralized massive stock piles of copper and iron ore at prices that are already becoming ancient history.
> 
> So China is on the cusp of the greatest margin call in history. Once asset values starting falling, its pyramids of debt will stand exposed to withering performance failures and melt-downs. Undoubtedly the regime will struggle to keep its printing press prosperity alive for another month or quarter, but the fractures are now gathering everywhere because the credit rampage has been too extreme and hideous. Maybe Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate which went belly up last week is the final catalyst, but if not there are thousands more to come. Like Mao’s gun barrel, the printing press has a “sell by” date, too
> 
> Of the more than US$562 million (RMB3.5 billion) that it owed to debtors, US$112 million was borrowed from 98 private parties with annual interest rates of up to 36%, according to recent revelations from Chinese media. Under that kind of pressure, the only surprise is that the default didn’t happen sooner. The company struggled to find capital for years; the chairman is suspected of borrowing up to US$38.6 million with “fake mortgages.”
> 
> But before Xingrun gets branded as China’s worst small, private homebuilder, it’s important to understand how it ended up in the mess in the first place, and what specific factors brought the operation down, or at least to the brink of collapse (local government officials insist it hasn’t officially defaulted yet).
> 
> Xingrun’s business in Fenghua, a county-level city that is part of Ningbo in a manufacturing belt on China’s east coast, ran into trouble through a renovation project starting in 2007, Chinese media pointed out. The company attempted, after securing government support and taking over for another distressed local property company, to build high-rise apartment blocks in a village called Changting. The project required the company to build homes for the original residents before the existing village could be torn down and the new buildings built. Construction was slated to start in the first half of 2012. Xingrun projected that it could pay off its debts within three years.
> 
> The project never got to the construction phase. In fact, the small village homes are still standing. Xingrun built the replacement homes for the villagers but there’s no sign of its main housing product, high-rises. Nothing has happened because the residents of the village have tangled the project and the company in a lawsuit that has stretched for years.
> 
> That explains why Xingrun was unable to pay back its loans. But why has it come so close to keeling over now? Its troubles with the Changting project persisted for years but the company simply rolled over loans and borrowed at high rates from private lenders.
> 
> One problem for capital-strapped developers in the Ningbo area is that private lenders no longer want to lend to highly risky companies. In fact, they are calling in their loans. This is just one of the problems afflicting Xingrun. The value of property in some areas of Fenghua is decreasing and that trend has lowered confidence in developers’ ability to pay dizzyingly high interest rates.
> 
> Banks aren’t hot on lending to this kind of developer either. In the past, a developer such as Xingrun could ask the local branch of a commercial bank for more credit. The local branch would take that risk because loan officers there knew that, somewhere much higher up the chain, officials promoted the lending.
> 
> That support exists no longer. Now, when small developers beg local banks for credit, they will likely be turned away. Local bank managers are reportedly being told that they may lend to risky borrowers if they wish, but they will be held accountable.
> 
> High risk is something no one seems willing to stomach these days – in stark contrast to just a year ago.
> 
> Fenghua is a small town, and Xingrun’s reach beyond that area is limited. Analysts have come out strong in saying that such a default has little systemic risk. The bigger picture in the region, however, can’t be ignored.
> 
> Xingrun’s woes are still the woes of the local authorities. The default will add US$305 million (RMB1.9 billion) to Fenghua province’s non-performing loan portfolio, pushing up the rate of toxic assets to 5.27% and making it Zhejiang province’s most indebted government, according to calculations by The Economic Observer newspaper.
> 
> Add Fenghua’s problems to those of the greater Ningbo region. The area reportedly has at least six years of housing stock either sitting empty or under construction. The massive buildout will put small developers under great pressure to pay back loans, especially if private debtors are calling in high-interest loans. A slowdown in property prices won’t help either. Without a rescue from provincial-level banks, Fenghua won’t be the last local government stuck in a jam.


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing trying to antagonize Tokyo again. The ongoing territorial dispute today over the Senkakus between China and Japan is now spilling into the realm of history as well.

Shanghaiist



> *Chinese national flag found mounted to wreckage of sunk WW2 era Japanese warship*
> 
> Divers who went down to visit a sunk World War II era Japanese warship off the coast of Palau were surprised to find that someone had recently erected a large Chinese national flag.
> 
> According to Kyodo News, The flag was found on March 21 attached to the wreckage of *the fleet oiler Iro of the Imperial Japanese Navy*. The ship lies on the 40-meter deep seabed about 8 kilometers off Koror Island, Palau. The area is a popular spot for divers visiting the archipelago.
> 
> *On March 31, 1944 the ship was attacked and sunk in Palau Harbor by United States Navy aircraft carrier fighters from the Fast Carrier Task Force during Operation Desecrate One.*
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A worrying development on the aviation front:

IHS Jane's 360 



> *China's KJ-500 AEW&C platform 'enters service'*
> 23 March 2015
> 
> *Images from Chinese military issue websites indicate the Kongjing 500 (KJ-500) airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft has started to enter service with the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).*
> 
> While images of the KJ-500 in the PLAAF paint scheme first appeared in late 2014, the first image of one with an official serial number (30471), confirming its service entry, did not appear until 18 March.
> 
> First seen in early 2013, the KJ-500 is based on the Shaanxi Aircraft Corporation (SAC) Y-9 four-turboprop transport combined with a fixed phased-array radar developed by the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronic Technology (NRIET, or 14th Institute).
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The first image showing a KJ-500 with the serial number 30471 confirms its entry into PLAAF service. Source: Via Top81 website
> -
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The first clear images of the Shaanxi KJ-500 AEW&amp;C platform appeared in February 2013. (Via Top81 website)


----------



## cupper

Good to see they took all the duct tape off the nose and cockpit windows before taking it up. ;D


----------



## MilEME09

cupper said:
			
		

> Good to see they took all the duct tape off the nose and cockpit windows before taking it up. ;D



They just moved it to the inside after realizing they cant see


----------



## CougarKing

And another new sub design, capable of carrying a mini-sub, is unveiled:



> *'Type 093T' sub design breaks cover*
> 
> IHS Jane's 360
> 
> A computer-generated image of a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) has recently appeared on both news and social media websites. It illustrates a variant of the Type 093/Shang-class SSN carrying a docking hangar for a special forces swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV).
> 
> The accompanying text indicates the hangar can accommodate only about 2/3 of the length of the SDV (which it compares with the US Mk VIII SDV) and so remains flooded when the vehicle is docked. Consequently, as transfer of personnel to the SDV cannot easily be achieved with the submarine dived, the graphic shows SF personnel being transferred to the submarine by helicopter. The article refers to this as a wet-deck system and the SSN variant as a Type 093T.
> 
> - 24 March 2015
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A computer-generated image of a Chinese Type 093 SSN depicting a dry deck hangar and SDV, presumably for covert insertion of special forces. It also depicts sonar flank arrays and a deployment tube for a towed array. Source: via Chinese internet


----------



## CougarKing

The PLAAF sending a message to China's neighbours again:

Reuters



> *China air force conducts drill in west Pacific Ocean*
> ReutersReuters – 6 hours ago
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China's air force conducted its first drill above the western Pacific Ocean on Monday, the Defense Ministry said, in a move that could exacerbate tensions with its South China Sea neighbors including Taiwan and the Philippines.
> *
> People's Liberation Army aircraft conducted exercises over the western Pacific Ocean after they flew over the Bashi Channel, said Shen Jinke, an air force spokesman.* The channel is located between Taiwan and the Philippines, and is claimed by both.
> 
> The ministry showed photos of long-range bombers sitting on the tarmac along with their crews. The jets returned the same day, it said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Formal unveilling of the Chinese Cyberwar unit and capability. This is really a confirmation of what we already knew or suspected:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20150331.aspx



> *Information Warfare: China Takes A Victory Lap*
> 
> March 31, 2015:  After years of denying any involvement in Cyber War or having organized units for that sort of thing, China suddenly admitted that it was all true. This was all laid out in the latest (March 2015) issue of a Chinese military publication (The Science of Military Strategy). This unclassified journal comes out about once a year and makes it possible for all Chinese military and political leaders to freely discuss new military strategies. The March edition went into a lot of detail about Chinese Cyber War operations. Most of these details were already known for those who could read Western media. Many details of Chinese Cyber War activities are published in the West, if only to warn as many organizations as possible of the nature and seriousness of the threat. Apparently the Chinese leadership decided that the secrecy about their Cyber War activities was being stripped away by foreigners anyway so why bother continuing to deny. Publish and take a victory lap.
> 
> Since the 1990s China has continued to expand its enormous Internet Army (as it is called in China). Not all these programs are successful. For example since 2011 there has been an effort to force companies to organize their Internet savvy employees into a cyber-militia and inspire these geeks to find ways to protect the firm's networks. But by 2013 it was clear this project was not turning out exactly as expected, as many of the volunteers had become successful, but unpopular, censors. It’s now widely accepted that one of the most annoying things for the new Chinese middle class is the censorship (especially on the Internet). The most annoying censorship is the online version that is carried out by paid and volunteer censors at your company or in your neighborhood. This use of “local activists” to control discussions and inform on possible troublemakers (or worse, like spies or criminals) is an old Chinese custom and one that was highly refined by the 20th century communists (first the Russians, who passed it on to their Chinese comrades). The old-school informer network suffered a lot of desertions and other damage during three decades of economic freedom. But the government has been diligent about rebuilding the informer and censor network online, where it’s easier for the busybodies to remain anonymous and safe from retribution. The on-line informers are also useful for keeping an eye on foreign businesses.
> 
> Internal and external espionage is one of the main reasons the Chinese government took an interest in the Internet back in the 1990s. This resulted in nearly two decades of effort to mobilize the Chinese people as an Internet army. It was in the late 1990s that the Chinese Defense Ministry established the "NET Force." This was initially a research organization, which was to measure China's vulnerability to attacks via the Internet. Soon this led to examining the vulnerability of other countries, especially the United States, Japan, and South Korea (all nations that were heavy Internet users). NET Force has continued to grow, aided by plenty of volunteers.
> 
> In 1999, NET Force organized an irregular civilian militia, the "Red Hackers Union" (RHU). These are several hundred thousand patriotic Chinese programmers and Internet engineers who wished to assist the motherland and put the hurt, via the Internet, on those who threaten or insult China. The RHU began spontaneously (in response to American bombs accidentally hitting the Chinese embassy in Serbia), but the government gradually assumed some control, without turning the voluntary organization into another bureaucracy. Various ministries have liaison officers who basically keep in touch with what the RHU is up to (mostly the usual geek chatter) and intervene only to "suggest" that certain key RHU members back off from certain subjects or activities. Such "suggestions" carry great weight in China, where people who misbehave on the web are very publicly prosecuted and sent to jail. For those RHU opinion-leaders and ace hackers that cooperate, there are all manner of benefits for their careers, not to mention some leniency if they get into some trouble with the authorities. Many government officials fear the RHU, believing that it could easily turn into a "counter-revolutionary force." So far, the Defense Ministry and NET Force officials have convinced the senior politicians that they have the RHU under control. Meanwhile, the hackers (or “honkers” after the Chinese word for “visitor”) became folk heroes and the opportunity to join your company’s contingent of the “Online Red Army” appealed to many as a chance to be like the honkers.
> 
> NET Force was never meant to be just volunteers. Starting in the late 1990s, China assembled the first of what eventually grew to 40,000 Ministry of Public Security employees manning the Golden Shield Project (nicknamed as The Great Firewall of China). This was an effort to monitor and censor Internet use throughout the country and punish those who got out of line. In the last decade, over a billion dollars has been spent on this effort. While the Great Firewall cannot stop someone who is expert at how the Internet works but it does greatly restrict the other 99 percent of Internet users. And it provides a lot of information about what is going on inside all that Internet traffic. Foreign intelligence agencies are beginning to find the Great Firewall of China is going from nuisance to obstacle. This has put government intelligence organizations in a difficult position. In the U.S. the feds feel compelled to seek assistance from, and work with, hackers who are developing new ways to tunnel through the Golden Shield. There are several non-governmental outfits that are involved with this effort, and most are hostile to intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, some relationships have been formed, to deal with mutual problems.
> 
> It's not only the intel agencies who are keen to learn their way around, and through, the Great Firewall. Cyber War organizations see the Great Firewall as a major defensive weapon as well. The Chinese have a much better idea of what is coming into their country via the Internet, and that makes it easier to identify hostile traffic and deal with it. Some American Cyber War officials are broaching the idea of building something like Golden Shield, just for military purposes. But that would be difficult in most Western countries because of privacy issues. But with Golden Shield China could unleash worms and viruses on the Internet and use their Great Firewall to prevent Chinese systems from becoming as badly infected. China needs every advantage it can get because it has the worst protected, and most infected, PCs in the world. This is largely the result of so many computers using pirated software and poorly trained operators.  Meanwhile, the thousands of people running the Golden Shield are gaining valuable experience and becoming some of the most skillful Internet engineers on the planet.
> 
> The Chinese military also has a growing number of formal Cyber War units, as well as military sponsored college level Cyber War courses. Western Internet security companies, in the course of protecting their customers, have identified a growing number of Chinese hacking organizations. Some work directly for the military, secret police or other government agencies. These Cyber War units, plus the volunteer organizations and Golden Shield bureaucrats apparently work closely with each other and have provided China with a formidable Cyber War capability. NET Force, with only a few thousand personnel, appears to be the controlling organization for all this. With the help of RHU and Golden Shield, they can mobilize formidable attacks, as well as great defensive potential. No other nation has anything like it and now the Chinese are bragging about it.


----------



## CougarKing

This update on the G variant should taken in contrast to the Type 93T variant of the _Shang_ class unveiled last week, which can carry midget subs.

Military.com/Defensetech.org



> *China Unveils Three New Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarines*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The China Central Television showed satellite pictures earlier this week of the three submarines anchored at an unidentified port claiming that the new submarines are China’s most advanced Type-093G attack submarines.
> 
> “The Type-093G is reported to be an upgraded version of Type-093, China’s second-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine, which entered active service several years ago. With a teardrop hull, the submarine is longer than its predecessor and has a vertical launching system,” according to the China Daily report.
> 
> *The Chinese navy’s website said the new variant is engineered to reduce noise, improve speed and mobility and fire China’s latest YJ-18 supersonic anti-ship missile*, according to the report.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest PLAAF "toy" unveiled:



> *Is this China’s next generation stealth fighter bomber?*
> 
> the aviationist
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Although China is known to be working also on a new stealth fighter bomber, we don’t know much about the H-20, as the aircraft is believed to be dubbed.
> 
> The long-range strike aircraft should be built around the concept of a subsonic, radar evading, flying wing configuration and some scale models have even appeared at aviation exhibitions.
> 
> While previous artworks depicted shapes of Beijing’s LRS (long-range strike) inspired to several existing U.S. planes, including the F-117 Nighthawk, the YF-23 and the B-2, a new image has recently popped up on the prolific Chinese Internet.
> 
> It shows a manned tactical plane, with internal weapons bay as well as external pylons which carry stand-off missiles. The cockpit reminds the one of the Soviet-era Su-24 Fencer, a side-by-side two-seater.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Corruption may be sinking many of China's much touted foreign infrastructure deals (the so called "String of Pearls", energy and mining and although not stated the so called "trillion dollar" infrastructure buildout, which aims to spread a network of high speed trail lines, pipelines and telecommunication and electrical infrastructure throughout Asia and even into European Russia (west of the Urals). If people need reasons to have cold feet, they are getting them:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/06/corruption-undermining-chinas-soft-power/



> *Corruption Undermining China’s Soft Power*
> 
> China’s foreign infrastructure development projects, a key element of Beijing’s strategy for increasing its regional and global might, have not been going well. The FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) Blog reports that some of the trouble may be tied to China’s weakness for graft:
> 
> 
> Sri Lanka this month became the latest of at least five countries to shut down huge China-backed infrastructure and telecoms projects tainted by allegations of corruption.
> 
> The new government in Colombo suspended a $1.5 billion construction project for a port upgrade awarded to China Harbor Engineering Co Ltd, a subsidiary of state-owned China Communications Construction Company, or CCC. […]
> 
> Last year, Tanzania accused CCC of corruption in connection to another port project. Prosecutors charged the former head of the Tanzania Ports Authority and his deputy with fraudulently awarding a bloated contract worth more than $523 million to CCC for a port expansion.
> 
> Tanzania abandoned the project after officials said costs billed by CCC were double those for similar port projects.
> 
> Prosecutors said the Ports Authority awarded the the mega-contract in December 2011 without obtaining competitive bids.
> 
> The post goes on to discuss similar issues with Chinese projects in Zambia, Uganda, and Algeria as well.
> 
> It was a big win for Beijing when seemingly half the world signed up for its new World Bank competitor, the AIIB—and a big loss of face for Washington, which went public with its pleas for allies to snub China’s bank. But it’s no secret that America’s main concerns with the new institution were with its governance. Now, of course graft may be just one reason why Beijing doesn’t always find success with its development projects (or, as we have covered, mining and energy investments). For example, the “will they/won’t they” drama over the now-suspended Sri Lanka project (a key potential asset for China’s maritime strategy) has a lot to do with the regional affiliations of the new government, which is much less anti-India than its predecessor.
> 
> But the stories above, taken as a whole, demonstrate that China’s graft problems are real enough—and certainly will not improve in the near term, especially since Xi’s anti-corruption drive is really an old-fashioned Party purge in disguise. If countries with comparatively weak state institutions like Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia are balking at doing business with China because its development princelings skim money off the top and egregiously inflate project costs, the outlook for Chinese soft power may not be as rosy as people are currently predicting.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I've been banging the corruption drum for many, many years ... and, finally, someone (Xi Jinping) is rising to the challenge. And, make no mistake: it is the biggest, perhaps the only really serious challenge facing China. Everything else ~ the USA in Asia, Taiwan, Japan, water (which is a HUGE problem), energy and an ageing population ~ can be _managed_ but corruption must be stopped.

And stopping corruption may provoke armed rebellions when some very powerful generals are, as they must be, locked up or executed.


----------



## Kirkhill

How many Princes can 1.2 Bn people support?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:
			
		

> How many Princes can 1.2 Bn people support?




That (the _Red Princes_ galavanting around Beijing in their Ferraris (with the pretty young daughters of senior US diplomats in the passenger seats) is only a symptom of a HUGE problem that stretches from each farm and village through each and every district and provincial capital all the way up to and, I dare say, into the _Zhongnanhai_ (the compound, next to the Forbidden City in which the very top level leaders do their work.)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> And stopping corruption may provoke armed rebellions when some very powerful generals are, as they must be, locked up or executed.



Corruption and graft aside, let's not forget unrest provoked by ethnic separatist/nationalist causes...and this update has another example that's not from either Xinjiang or Tibet:

Reuters



> *One reported dead after pollution protest in northern China*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - One person died and 50 were arrested after some 2,000 police, using rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons, put down a protest by villagers against pollution from a chemical plant in China's Inner Mongolia, an overseas human rights group said.
> 
> *Inner Mongolia* has seen sporadic unrest since 2011 when the vast northern region was rocked by protests after an ethnic Mongol herder was killed by a truck after taking part in demonstrations against pollution caused by a coal mine.
> 
> *Ethnic Mongols, who make up less than 20 percent of Inner Mongolia's 24 million population, say their grazing lands have been ruined by mining and desertification and that the government has tried to resettle them in permanent houses.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



And meanwhile, in neighbouring (Outer) Mongolia... a rather strange adaptation of the Nazi ideology emerges to threaten Chinese tourists:

Shanghaiist



> *Images emerge of Mongolian neo-Nazi terrorists assaulting Chinese tourists*
> 
> Photos have emerged from the moment Chinese tourists were assaulted by a Mongolian neo-Nazi terrorist group last week.
> 
> Pubished on TakeFoto.cn, one of the photos depicts a Chinese national being forced to kneel in the snow by members of the ultra-national extremist group Khukh Mongol (Blue Mongolia).
> 
> This follows a public apology made by Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj for the incident, which took place on Burkhan Khaldun mountain in Khentii province, eastern Mongolia.
> mongolian-nazi-assault-tourists-3.jpg
> 
> According to a report by Xinhua, the extremists beat and hurled insults at the tourists.
> 
> This is not the first time that Chinese have been targeted abroad. A 2013 attack on Chinese nationals in Afghanistan left three dead, while one man managed to escape the kidnappers by untying himself and jumping from a moving car.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems that those who use VPNs in China to access banned websites, namely political dissidents, democracy activists, as well as certain foreign expats and diplomats who use VPNs in their free time might not be able to cope with the "Great Cannon".  

New York Times



> *China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet*
> 
> SAN FRANCISCO — Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country.
> 
> Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon.
> 
> *The Great Cannon*, the researchers said in a report published on Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Doesn't this trade-focused "maritime silk road", mentioned as the 2nd part of the strategy below, coincide with the locations of China's "string of pearls" that defines its strategic perimeter?

Defense News



> *China's 'One Belt, One Road' Strategy*
> 
> TAIPEI — China's "one belt and one road" initiative could usher in a new era that sees China as the undisputed geopolitical powerhouse in the region, experts say.
> 
> The initiative will establish new routes linking Asia, Europe and Africa. It has two parts — a new *"Silk Road economic belt"* linking China to Europe that cuts through mountainous regions in Central Asia; and the *"maritime Silk Road"* that links China's port facilities with the African coast and than pushes up through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping revealed during a speech at the Boao Forum on March 28 in Hainan, China, that China intends to push forward on the initiative that many are comparing to the ancient Silk Road.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

In a similar vein, I offer this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from [pi][Foreign Affairs[/i], about China's _expansion_ of the Spratleys:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143659/andrew-s-erickson-and-conor-m-kennedy/chinas-island-builders


> China’s Island Builders
> *The People’s War At Sea*
> 
> By Andrew S. Erickson and Conor M. Kennedy
> 
> APRIL 9, 2015
> 
> Recent satellite images show that the Spratly islands, a series of features in the South China Sea, are growing at a staggering pace. Tons of sand, rocks, coral cuttings, and concrete are transforming miniscule Chinese-occupied outcroppings into sizeable islands with harbors, large multi-story buildings, airstrips, and other government facilities. The parties behind the construction and defense of these islands remain a thinly veiled secret. As China builds up its presence in the South China Sea, it is also greatly increasing its ability to monitor, bully, and even project force against its neighbors. In Machiavelli’s words, Beijing has decided that it is more important to be feared than loved—and that making progress before a new U.S. president pushes back is crucial to its regional aspirations.
> 
> FOLLOW THE TRAIL
> 
> Chinese strategy in the South China Sea may have many components, but it rests on the shoulders of one man: President Xi Jinping. Since assuming office in 2012, Xi has directed the nation’s transformation into a Great Maritime Power” capable of securing its offshore rights and interests, including its unresolved maritime claims in the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas.
> 
> To meet this goal, Xi has built up China’s already powerful navy, which is led by Admiral Wu Shengli, a hard-charging, now the longest serving commander in modern Chinese history. While it has grown far more qualitatively than quantitatively since modernization accelerated in the mid-1990s, China already has more attack submarines than the United States, many of which are focused on a much smaller area. In September 2014, Wu reportedly took a weeklong trip by naval ship to survey land reclamation projects on several disputed South China Sea islands, indicating that his interest in promoting Chinese activities expand beyond wartime preparedness to include peacetime activities in the nation’s adjacent waters. There, Wu also observed joint operations drills held on Fiery Cross Reef, which were meant to enhance and showcase China’s growing ability to field a variety of forces across the South China Sea.
> 
> There has been a history of tensions with outside actors in waters claimed by China. On March 5, 2009, a frigate monitored three civil maritime vessels and two government-controlled trawlers during closely coordinated harassment against the survey vessel U.S.N.S. _Impeccable_ in international waters. China’s navy has kept itself out of direct confrontation when other forces are available to do their dirty work. This dynamic allows China’s navy to play “good cop,” cultivating closer relations with, and learning from, its American counterpart. Smaller, harder-to-monitor paranaval “bad cops” are then free to advance China’s claims in the East and South China Seas. Some of the lowest-end, least glamorous work is assigned to the most junior force in the sea: China’s maritime militia.
> 
> The _Impeccable_ incident was hardly the only one of its kind. Chinese maritime law enforcement (MLE) vessels have repeatedly harassed Indonesian government ships, reportedly including “point[ing] a large calibre machine gun at an Indonesian patrol boat.” On March 26, 2013, China’s most advanced fishery patrol ship, Yuzheng 310, confronted an Indonesian Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries vessel in the Exclusive Economic Zone off Natuna Island (claimed by Indonesia), apparently jamming its communications with headquarters in order to coerce the Indonesian vessel to release Chinese fishermen detained for illegal fishing. Chinese MLE vessels have bullied Vietnamese and Philippine ships as well, attacking fishing ships in international waters.
> 
> Meanwhile, as China’s navy trawls the sea, its civil maritime forces are also consolidating into the nation’s first unified Coast Guard. The already-large China Coast Guard’s (CCG) fleet greatly outnumbers that of Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines combined, and is projected to grow by 25 percent from 2012–15 as newer and larger ships replace smaller, older ones. The Chinese Coast Guard will soon receive from Chinese shipyards several 10,000-ton vessels that the country’s neighboring navies could only dream of having.
> 
> Finally, drawing on the world’s largest fishing fleet, China is also strengthening its maritime militia, a dual-hatted force of specially registered fishing vessels with fisherman–soldier crews. Portions of these coastal militias are organized by local military and government officials along the nation’s many ports, providing China with small tactical units designed to execute specific missions in support of the country’s more professional military and maritime interests. China has had maritime militias dating back to the 1950s, but they have increased in importance as Xi has sought a more active presence in the South China Sea. The use of maritime militias is an unusual approach with few foreign parallels, and U.S. policymakers need to take note. All together, China’s navy, local law enforcement, Coast Guard, and maritime militias are making the country a great maritime power, indeed.
> 
> OPENING THE GATES
> 
> Sitting at China’s “Great Southern Gate,” Hainan Province administers all of the nation’s land and sea claims in the South China Sea. A former backwater, the province is now at the frontline of China’s maritime interests and its officials are rising in stature. Within the past year, former State Oceanic Administration Director Liu Cigui, for example, has become Deputy Provincial Party Secretary and Hainan’s new governor. Former Hainan Governor, Party Chief Luo Baoming, plays a major role in the development of China’s maritime militia as First Director of Hainan’s National Defense Mobilization Committee. Following Xi’s guidance, Liu and Luo have pushed for greater levels of civil–military integration, strengthened the province’s maritime militia, increased maritime consciousness, and built dual-use infrastructure in the South China Sea. In 2013, Hainan allocated $4.5 million to the cause (split evenly between the province and counties).
> 
> Concurrently, in 2012, Beijing established Sansha City, a South China Sea prefectural seat on Woody Island, as a micro-capital for the region. A prefecture of Hainan Province, Sansha City is the nation’s largest by area while also its smallest by population. Of Hainan’s three prefectural cities, it is the one charged with administering the entirety of the South China Sea’s features. It boasts an expanded port and airplane runway, aircraft hangars, communications facilities, coastal defense positions, and a military garrison. Chinese enterprises seeking political credit scramble to invest in the island’s physical and intellectual infrastructure, which already boasts a variety of installations, including power generation systems, desalination plants, schools, and the National Library of China’s first branch outside Beijing.
> 
> Government investment in Sansha City is even greater. Sansha’s Mayor Xiao Jie recently stated that the city’s first 28 infrastructure projects totaled 24 billion renminbi ($3.81 billion), with much more investment still to come. The city’s namesake, 7,800-ton supply ship Sansha-1, was the first ship registered by Sansha City’s Maritime Safety Administration and services Chinese outposts throughout the South China Sea. And, in 2013, a new maritime militia company was established in Sansha City to join naval and civil law enforcement forces in administering surrounding waters.
> 
> Meanwhile, ongoing efforts to establish a permanent population in the area represent an attempt to bolster legal claims on many of the disputed islands and reefs; these days, the island has approximately 1,443 permanent residents, and a migrant population of over 2,000. China is preparing for more outposts under Sansha City’s jurisdiction, too. The cutter suction dredger _Tianjing_, Asia’s largest, has pumped sand onto five Spratly reefs in 2014 to create and expand regional islands. The dredger _Tianqi_ is engaged in similar activities throughout the Paracels. Since early 2015, multiple People’s Armed Forces Departments have been established on Woody Island, two islands in the Paracels, and one in an unspecified location in the Spratlys. These departments were built specifically to strengthen militia work on the islands.
> 
> MARITIME MILITIA MOBILIZATION
> 
> On April 8, 2013, Xi visited a fishing village on Hainan’s southern coast, where he inspected the Tanmen Village Maritime Militia Company, commending and encouraging its work. Xi’s choice of venue was no accident: Established in 1985, the Tanmen Company has received more than 20 awards from both the People’s Liberation Army PLA Headquarters and provincial governments for setting an example for other companies to emulate. Tanmen employs over 8,500 people and 300 fishing vessels devoted to developing the Spratlys. The company’s guerrilla ideology designates the South China Sea as its “fields” and its employees’ fishing vessels as their “homes,” and militia members both monitor and report on local conditions, while training to execute other operations as needed. The group vocally defends Chinese territorial claims, even after operatives were reportedly beaten and detained in Philippine jails and one of their ships was sunk by a Philippine Navy vessel. The company is also active in the political mobilization of the nearby fishing communities, encouraging others to invest in the construction of newer, higher-quality fishing vessels. These efforts have expanded Chinese patriot fishermen fleets multifold in recent years.
> 
> Tanmen’s latest assignment is supporting island building in the South China Sea—familiar territory for a company that has been long charged with supplying building materials for construction in the region. Since the 1980s, Tanmen has delivered concrete, stone, rebar, water, and food to all seven Chinese-occupied Spratly reefs. Since the 1990s, members have delivered 2.65 million tons of materials to PLA stations in the Spratlys, often camping on the islands while assisting with construction. Working in greater numbers and capable of reaching shallower waters, trawlers operated cheaply by Tanmen and other militias sometimes prove more efficient than larger, more professional resupply vessels. Smaller craft can simultaneously resupply multiple stations instead of fuel-thirsty helicopters or scarce dedicated supply ships. Fishing vessels also draw much less attention politically than navy or coast guard vessels.
> 
> The nation’s foremost military newspaper emphasizes these fishermen’s flexibility and legitimacy, writing “putting on camouflage they qualify as soldiers, taking off the camouflage they become law abiding fishermen.” Maritime militia units are charged with making both peacetime and wartime contributions to Maritime Rights Protection under the rubric of People’s War at Sea. After Xi’s visit, for instance, an exercise titled Maritime Mobilization – 1312 involving many militia units from other counties was held in Tanmen’s home county, Qionghai. Other exercises have involved a 2014 joint exercise to protect drilling platforms, escort supply ships, and repel sudden incursions by foreign vessels. The Tanmen Company has been praised for its reconnaissance work, providing valuable intelligence for the military. The company also assists civil law enforcement vessels by conducting search and rescue missions; state media recently lauded its heroic rescue of other ships stranded in typhoon conditions.
> 
> Such maritime militia activities are growing along China’s southern coast; with cities and counties in Guangdong, Fujian, and Guangxi Provinces all experimenting with and strengthening paramilitaries under close supervision of local party, government, and military officials. Chinese state-run fishing company official He Jianbin has openly spoken of arming fishermen and using them for political or military purposes in the South China Sea, claiming that Vietnam’s maritime militia severely threaten China’s fishing fleet, since the Vietnamese fleet is armed and Chinese fishermen are not. He called for the arming of Hainan’s vast fishing fleet and the formation of maritime militias, stating that 5,000 fishing vessels would allow 100,000 armed fishermen to become a force greater than that of any other South China Sea competitor. Although this inflammatory language doesn’t represent current official policy, more nuanced statements in military documents nevertheless indicate support for additional measures.
> 
> ROILING WATERS
> 
> China’s leadership has turned its focus toward the Spratly islands. Alongside the building materials that have been delivered and installed, airstrips, radar, and other defenses may soon follow. Chinese goals likely involve increased control over features within the South China Sea, as well as increased surveillance capabilities in the region’s waters and airspace—all to win without fighting against neighbors. At this rate, the majority of South China Sea airspace will likely come under the aegis of a Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) before the Obama administration leaves office—a likely goal given Beijing’s apparent judgment that the next U.S. president is likely to be firmer in opposing Chinese assertiveness. From Xi’s bold directives to the Tanmen Company’s low-profile implementation, China will have a busy agenda over contested waters and the island features that are beginning to rise from their depths. China is rapidly building new turf in the region—small islands that grow larger by the month. All this makes the assessment of former top CIA China analyst Christopher Johnson of particular concern: “They believe Obama is fundamentally weak and disinterested.” In the South China Sea, there is reason to worry that Beijing is busy making hay while the sun is hot.




I have not included anywhere near all the hyperlinks in the original article ~ some are in Chinese, only and some other are background for academics.

_I think_ it is important to note _*WHY*_ China is doing this, as Prof Erickson and Mr Kennedy, a Research fellow at the China Maritime Studies Institute, point out, China is trying to assert and enforce it's claims in its _region_ before America can act to defend the positions of its traditional allies in that region.


----------



## Spencer100

Here is an interesting piece from the WSJ.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/03/31/meet-the-chinese-maritime-militia-waging-a-peoples-war-at-sea/


----------



## CougarKing

Lax discipline goes hand-in-hand with corruption in the PLA:

Reuters



> *China's military warns about corruption on key anniversary*
> Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:29am EDT
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - The Chinese military's official newspaper issued a warning on Friday that a country riven with corruption will only face national humiliation, as it marked the 120th anniversary of a treaty that handed over control of Taiwan to Japan.
> 
> The embarrassment of the Sino-Japan War and the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki still resonates in China and the government has used its anniversary to remind people that graft-ridden nations do not win wars.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



South China Morning Post



> *PLA commissar says lax discipline at top invites disaster*
> 
> Failure to strictly discipline generals would bring "endless disasters" to the army, a Communist Party newspaper on Sunday quoted the political commissar of the Lanzhou military command as saying, amid renewed speculation over the fate of retired military chief Guo Boxiong.
> 
> Asked by People's Daily how the People's Liberation Army's Lanzhou Military Area Command - Guo's former power base - had beefed up its discipline after recent graft cases, *Lieutenant General Liu Lei said such cases had underscored a perception that some leading generals felt they were above the law.*
> 
> (-EDITED-)


----------



## Spencer100

China's first runway on the Spratly's is almost finished.

http://www.janes.com/article/50714/china-s-first-runway-in-spratlys-under-construction


----------



## tomahawk6

Definitely a cause of concern for China's neighbors.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, is a less pessimistic view of China's financial situation, based on consideration of three significant reforms:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21648641-slowing-economy-commands-headlines-real-story-reform-quiet-revolution


> *Reform in China*
> The quiet revolution
> *A slowing economy commands headlines, but the real story is reform*
> 
> Apr 18th 2015 | From the print edition
> 
> WITH China, the received wisdom belongs to the pessimists. Figures this week revealed that growth has slowed sharply and deflation set in, as the economy is weighed down by a property slump and factory production is at its weakest since the dark days of the global financial crisis. In the first three months of 2015, GDP grew at “only” 7% year-on-year. Growth for 2015 will probably be the weakest in 25 years.
> 
> Fears are rising that, after three soaring decades, China is about to crash. That would be a disaster. China is the world’s second-largest economy and Asia’s pre-eminent rising power. Fortunately, the pessimists are missing something. China is not only more economically robust than they allow, it is also putting itself through a quiet—and welcome—financial revolution.
> 
> The robustness rests on several pillars. Most of China’s debts are domestic, and the government still has enough sway to stop debtors and creditors getting into a panic. The country is shifting the balance away from investment and towards consumption, which will put the economy on more stable ground (see article). Thanks to a boom in services, China generated over 13m new urban jobs last year, a record that makes slower growth tolerable. Given China’s far bigger economy, expected growth of 7% this year would boost the global economy by more than 14% growth did in 2007.
> 
> However, the real reason to doubt the pessimists is China’s reforms. After a decade of dithering, the government is acting in three vital areas. First, in finance, it has started to loosen control over interest rates and the flow of capital across China’s borders. The cost of credit has long been artificially low, squashing the returns available to savers while, at the same time, succouring inefficient state-owned firms and pushing up investment. Caps on deposit rates are becoming less relevant, thanks to an explosion of bank-account substitutes that now attract nearly a third of household savings. Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, has said there is a “high probability” of full rate-liberalisation by the end of this year.
> 
> China is also becoming more tolerant of cross-border cash flows. The yuan is, little by little, becoming more flexible; multinational firms are able to move revenues abroad more easily than before. The government’s determination to get the IMF to recognise the yuan as a convertible currency before the end of 2015 should pave the way for bolder moves.
> 
> The second area is fiscal. Reforms in the early 1990s gave local governments greater responsibility for spending, but few sources of revenue. China’s problem of too much investment stems in big part from that blunder. Stuck with a flimsy tax base, cities have relied on sales of land to fund their operations and have engaged in reckless off-books borrowing.
> 
> The finance ministry now says it will sort out this mess by 2020. The central government will transfer funds to provinces, especially for social priorities, while local governments will receive more tax revenues. A pilot programme has been launched to clear up local-government debt. It lays the ground for a municipal-bond market—despite the risks, that is better than today’s opaque funding for provinces and cities.
> 
> The third area of reform is administrative. In early 2013, at the start of his term as prime minister, Li Keqiang pledged that he would cut red tape and make life easier for private companies. It is easy to be cynical, yet there has been a boom in the registration of private firms: 3.6m were created last year, almost double 2012’s total.
> 
> The high road of lower growth
> 
> In time, these reforms will lead to capital being allocated more efficiently. Lenders will price risks more accurately, with the most deserving firms finding funds and savers earning decent returns. If so, Chinese growth will slow—how could it not?—but gradually and without breaking the system.
> 
> Yet dangers remain. Liberalisation risks breeding instability. When countries from Thailand to South Korea dismantled capital controls in the 1990s, their asset prices and external debts surged, ultimately leading to banking crises. China has stronger defences but nonetheless its foreign borrowing is rising and its stockmarket is up by three-quarters in six months.
> 
> And then comes politics. Economic reforms have high-level backing. Yet the anti-corruption campaign of President Xi Jinping means that officials live in fear of a knock on the door by investigators. Many officials dare not engage in bold local experiments for fear of offending someone powerful.
> 
> That matters because reform ultimately requires an end to the dire system of hukou, or household registration, which relegates some 300m people who have migrated to cities from the countryside to second-class status and hampers their ability to become empowered consumers. Likewise, farmers and ex-farmers need the right to sell their houses and land, or they will not be able to share in China’s transformation.
> 
> Ever fond of vivid similes, Mr Li says economic reforms will involve the pain a soldier feels when cutting off his own poisoned arm in order to carry on fighting. “Real sacrifice”, he says, is needed. China’s quiet revolution goes some of the way. But Mr Li is right: much pain lies ahead.




Equally important, IF it both is thorough and sticks, will be Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption.


----------



## a_majoor

China's attempt to corner the market on Rare Earth Elements (an important component of modern electronics) resulted in formerly uneconomical mines in the US being reopened, and successful experiments performed to extract these elements from deep sea muds dredged off of Hawaii. Now another alternative is being explored. The grasping hand of Mercantilism is being arm wrestled by the invisible hand of the Market, with predictable results:

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-boron-based-atomic-clusters-mimic-rare-earth.html


----------



## CougarKing

While Canada courted India last week, China was courting India's rival...

Reuters



> *China, Pakistan launch economic corridor link*
> 
> By Katharine Houreld
> 
> ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - China and Pakistan launched a plan on Monday for energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan worth $46 billion, linking their economies and underscoring China's economic ambitions in Asia and beyond.
> 
> China's President Xi Jinping arrived in Pakistan to oversee the signing of agreements aimed at establishing a Pakistan-China Economic Corridor between Pakistan's southern Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea and China's western Xinjiang region.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

China and Pakistan need one another, but it's an unhealthy relationship.

Neither "likes" the other. The Chinese, correctly _in my opinion_, see Pakistan as a hotbed of Islamic extremism and a source of support for the _separatist_ movement (often described as a _terrorist_ movement) in Xinjiang Province. But, Pakistan helps to keep India focused on its own backyard and, the Chinese hope, prevents it from effectively countering China's moves in the region they share. Pakistan knows that China looks down on it as a third rate, uncultured, client state ... and the Pakistanis resent it. There's little real _mutual benefit_ in the relationship; it's based on the deeply flawed notion that the enemy of my enemy is, _de facto_, my friend. (Sometimes that's true, it's even quite often true, but it is far from be axiomatic.)

But, in Pakistan's favour: it occupies an important geo-strategic position in so far as China's ambitions are concerned: it is on the two of the three _silk road_ paths from China to Europe and it can provide a good deep water port at Gwadar. In China's favour it can provide Pakistan with the financial and technological resources it needs to escape the downward spiral of Islamism ... something _I think_ (just _hope_?) many (just some?) in leading positions in the military and the bureaucracy recognize as being tghe biggest threat to Pakistan's future.


----------



## CougarKing

The leaders in Beijing vowing no concessions over Hong Kong's electoral blueprint...a move they may regret as Hong Kongers may get more restless:

Reuters



> *Hong Kong unveils electoral reform package, vows no compromise*
> 
> By Clare Baldwin and James Pomfret
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - The Hong Kong government gave lawmakers their first look on Wednesday at a long-awaited electoral blueprint for selecting the city's next leader, a plan that reflects China's desire for a tightly controlled poll despite calls for more democracy.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> *
> The blueprint for the proposal that the public vote on two or three candidates pre-selected by a 1,200 member pro-Beijing nominating committee was first outlined by China's parliament,* the National People's Congress, last August.
> 
> *The Hong Kong government stood by that blueprint, offering no concessions to win over democratic lawmakers who have vowed to veto it when the government seeks formal approval.*
> 
> The opposition camp holds a one-third veto bloc, but Beijing-backed Leung said he remained hopeful that four or five democrats could be persuaded to change their minds.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## RedcapCrusader

Hong Kong deserves complete and total autonomy
 China didn't win the first time, what makes them think they can win round 2?


----------



## Edward Campbell

The current, print edition of _Foreign Affairs_ is focused on China.







There are several good articles and I'm going to post an introductory essay and a couple of ones I enjoyed under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the May/June 2015 issue of _Foreign Affairs_.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143456/gideon-rose/china-now


> China Now
> 
> By Gideon Rose
> FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE
> 
> When is an anticorruption campaign not just an anticorruption campaign? When it might be a harbinger of a regime’s approaching developmental crisis.
> 
> China’s extraordinary advances in recent decades have dragged the country up from totalitarian poverty to middle-income authoritarianism. The scale and speed of this transformation rank it as one of the great events in human history. But Beijing has now picked most of the low-hanging fruit of modernization, leaving it the unenviable task of trying to reach the upper branches of the tree without falling. So we decided it was time for a deep dive on China’s condition today, and have put together a great package with seven authoritative articles on the country’s politics, economics, demographics, national identity, corruption, and racial and ethnic tensions.
> 
> The authors—all top experts, most of them Chinese—have different perspectives, and some are more optimistic than others. But collectively, they paint a picture of a country bumping up against the classic challenges of the middle phases of development, pretty much across the board. China’s existing institutions seem unlikely to be able to manage the country’s problems for too much longer, yet Beijing seems unlikely to adopt the reforms that could help because they would threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. President Xi Jinping’s signature anticorruption campaign emerges throughout as the epitome of the situation—the regime’s attempt to deal (and be seen to deal) with some of the country’s major problems, but one that will have a hard time achieving its ambitious goals.
> 
> There is plenty of evidence here to support the view that China’s next decade will be a turbulent one: that the anti­corruption campaign, adopted as a sort of strong medicine to cure the communist regime’s ills, will in fact only hasten the patient’s demise, by heightening the contradictions within the elite.
> 
> But there is also evidence to support the view that the regime may be able to muddle through for quite a while. Xi and his government have plenty of assets as well as liabilities, including support from the mass public and key elite factions, vast foreign exchange reserves, a protected currency, control of the banking system, smart technocrats, a large real economy, and the absence of any significant opposition movement.
> 
> And it’s possible that the likeliest scenario will be neither crisis nor resilience but rather an eventual gradual political evolution, like those of other former authoritarian regimes dominated by a single party, such as Mexico or Taiwan.
> 
> Whatever China’s future holds, it should be fascinating to watch the drama play out. This package provides an accurate snapshot of the situation today—and the material to form educated guesses about what will come next.



http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143336/hu-angang/embracing-chinas-new-normal


> Embracing China's "New Normal"
> *Why the Economy Is Still  on Track*
> 
> By Hu Angang
> 
> FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE
> 
> It is clear by now that China’s economy is set to slow in the years to come, although economists disagree about how much and for how long. Last year, the country’s GDP growth rate fell to 7.4 percent, the lowest in almost a quarter century, and many expect that figure to drop further in 2015. Plenty of countries struggle to grow at even this pace, but most don’t have to create hundreds of millions of jobs over the next decade, as China will. So understandably, some experts are skeptical about the country’s prospects. They argue that its production-fueled growth model is no longer tenable and warn, as the economist Paul Krugman did in 2013, that the country is “about to hit its Great Wall.” According to this view, the question is not whether the Chinese economy will crash but when.
> 
> Such thinking is misguided. China is not nearing the edge of a cliff; it is entering a new stage of development. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called this next phase of growth the “new normal,” a term that Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of the global investment firm PIMCO, famously used to describe the West’s painful economic recovery following the 2008 financial crisis. But Xi used the phrase to describe something different: a crucial rebalancing, one in which the country diversifies its economy, embraces a more sustainable level of growth, and distributes the benefits more evenly. The new normal is in its early stages now, but if Beijing manages to sustain it, China’s citizens can count on continued growth and material improvements in their quality of life. The rest of the world, meanwhile, can expect China to become further integrated into the global economy. The Chinese century is not at the beginning of the end; it is at the end of the beginning.
> 
> FOLLOWER TO LEADER
> 
> Understanding China’s new normal requires some historical context. As a latecomer to the modern economy, China has followed what one could call a “catch-up growth” model, which involves rapid economic growth following years of lagging behind. From 1870 to 1913, for example, the U.S. economy followed precisely this path, growing at an average rate of four percent. Between 1928 and 1939, Russia’s GDP grew at an average rate of 4.6 percent. And from 1950 to 1973, Japan’s economy grew at an average rate of 9.3 percent. Yet none of those countries came close to matching China’s record from 1978 to 2011: an average GDP growth rate of nearly ten percent over 33 years.
> 
> This ascent has helped China’s economy approach, and perhaps even surpass, that of the United States. In terms of purchasing power parity, a measure economists use for cross-country comparisons, China’s GDP surpassed that of the United States in 2010 or 2014, depending on whether one relies on historical statistics from the Maddison Project or data from the World Bank’s International Comparison Program. Yet if one relies on the World Bank Atlas method, China’s economy won’t likely outgrow the United States’ until 2019. And China’s GDP still trails that of the United States if calculated using current U.S. dollars. But the best method for comparing the two economies objectively is power generation, since it is physical and quantifiable. It also closely tracks modernization; without electricity, after all, or at least without a lot of it, one can’t run factories or build skyscrapers, which is exactly what China has been doing. In 1900, China generated 0.01 percent of the power the United States did. That figure rose to 1.2 percent in 1950 and 34 percent in 2000, with China surpassing the United States in 2011. In this respect, China has caught up.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s rise has also brought massive benefits to the country’s population, although here there is obviously much more to be done. With a population more than four times as large as that of its closest economic competitor, China won’t likely match even half the United States’ GDP per capita until around 2030. To be sure, the country has made major strides in other areas. Its average life expectancy (around 76 years) is nearing the United States’ (around 79 years). Educational levels in the two countries are comparable. And measured by the Gini coefficient, economic inequality in China may now be lower than it is in the United States. Yet since 1979, most of the windfall from China’s rise has accrued mainly to those who live in urban or coastal areas. Realizing Beijing’s ultimate development goal—“common development and common prosperity”—will require not only more sustainable growth but also more evenly distributed gains.
> 
> SLOWER BUT STEADIER
> 
> To a certain extent, China’s latest slowdown was inevitable. Three decades of breakneck growth have left China with an economy that is simply massive, making marginal increases in size all the more difficult. Even measured using current exchange rates, Chinese GDP exceeded $10 trillion in 2014, which means that growing by ten percent would amount to adding $1 trillion to the economy after one year, a sum greater than the entire GDP of Saudi Arabia, which is among the world’s largest economies. Growth on this scale was bound to become unsustainable at some point. It essentially requires an unlimited supply of energy and puts enormous stress on the environment. China already emits more carbon into the atmosphere than the United States and the EU combined, and its emissions are still increasing.
> 
> Given all this, China has little choice but to pare back. Although a seven percent growth rate is still high in comparison to most economies of the world, it will reduce China’s demand for basic inputs, whether coal or clean water, to more manageable levels. It will also allow China to finally address its contribution to global climate change, in part by making good on the U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change, a 2014 agreement that requires China to begin reducing its carbon emissions by no later than 2030. Thanks to slower growth and a host of new energy-conservation policies, China will likely reach that target well ahead of time.
> 
> Beijing’s shift toward the new normal has already begun, and so far, the results are impressive. Consider its 12th five-year plan, which was approved in 2011 and will run through 2015. Despite the plan’s unfolding in a time of declining growth, five of its goals have strengthened the economy and improved the lives of Chinese citizens. The first was a commitment to creating 45 million new jobs in urban areas. Beijing has already exceeded the target, creating over 50 million jobs in the country’s cities, a feat that stands in stark contrast to the unemployment crises in the United States and Europe during the same period. The second involved economic restructuring, calling for the expansion of the country’s service sector from 43 percent of GDP in 2010 to just over 48 percent in 2014; in this case, too, the government has already hit its target, diversifying the economy and boosting employment in the process. The third objective, an emphasis on scientific innovation, mandated an increase in state funding for research and development from 1.75 percent of GDP in 2010 to 2.20 percent in 2015. Again, Beijing has hit its mark, turning the country into the world’s second-largest funder of research and development. (The investment is already paying dividends: in 2012, less than three decades after China passed its first patent law, nearly 50 percent more patent applications were filed in China than in the United States.) The fourth priority was social welfare, including an expansion of the health-care system, which now covers more than 95 percent of China’s total population. The last emphasized conservation. It called for improvements in eight environmental indicators, such as the share of nonfossil fuels that make up primary energy consumption and the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in proportion to GDP.
> 
> The plan’s growth targets, meanwhile, were relatively modest by China’s standards. The central government set a goal of seven percent GDP growth and aimed to double per capita GDP by 2020 compared with the 2010 level. These targets sent a clear signal, especially to state governments that look to Beijing for guidance: when it comes to growth, focus on quality, not quantity.
> 
> The average income in urban areas is still more than twice as large as that in rural regions, but the gap is set to decrease in the coming years—a development that will boost domestic consumption and drive continued GDP growth. Of course, China’s relative slowdown will also pose difficult challenges, particularly in the realm of job creation and food production, where growth rates will likely slow. But this is the cost of structural transformation, and it is a price well worth paying to carry the country forward.
> 
> GLOBAL GAINS
> 
> The new normal won’t be limited to its effects on China itself: by rebalancing its domestic economy, the country will take on an even greater role abroad. China is already the world’s largest contributor to global growth, and if its economy continues expanding at a rate of around seven percent, the country will likely remain, in terms of purchasing power parity, the most important force driving global growth. From 2000 to 2013, China was responsible for nearly 23 percent of global growth (the United States contributed almost 12 percent). My own forecasts suggest that this figure will increase to 25 percent before 2020, helping keep global growth rates above three percent.
> 
> In trade, too, China is already the world’s leader, and it will continue its upward trajectory. According to the International Monetary Fund’s Direction of Trade Statistics database, it is the largest source of trade for some 140 countries, and its trading activities accounted for some 13 percent of the world’s total growth from 2000 to 2012. But if Beijing wants to raise domestic consumption and reduce China’s dependence on exports, it will have to open China’s borders, by cutting tariffs, encouraging Chinese companies to expand internationally, establishing more free-trade zones, and increasing its trade in the service sector. And to attract more foreign investment, Beijing will have to deliver on basic reforms, such as capital account liberalization, which involves easing restrictions on money flows across the country’s borders, and the creation of a so-called negative list, a single document that indicates which sectors of the economy are not open to foreign investment, signaling that all the others are.
> 
> China is poised to make greater contributions in the realm of ideas as well. The country is now among the world’s largest generators of intellectual property; from 2000 to 2012, inventors in China were responsible for nearly 62 percent of the growth in the world’s patent applications (inventors in the United States contributed to around 25 percent). And as part of its new commitment to innovation, Beijing will likely adopt stricter intellectual property protections and encourage Chinese companies to apply for international patents and disseminate new technologies, especially to developing countries.
> 
> The more integrated China’s economy becomes, the more it will act as a global stabilizer, just as it did following the 2008 financial crisis. It was Beijing’s aggressive stimulus plan that arguably contributed the most to the global recovery after the crisis hit. By ensuring that China kept its growth rate at over nine percent, Beijing helped turn negative global growth positive. China will continue to serve this role moving forward, but it will also act through more formal channels, mainly international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to reform the international financial order in ways that benefit developing countries.
> 
> As China increases its economic lead, it will inevitably be called on to assume greater global responsibilities. But in many ways, Beijing is already stepping up, knowing full well that the success of China’s next stage of development depends as much on the wider world as it does on China itself. China can’t thrive without a balanced, rules-based global order, and so the country will continue to advocate for the liberalization of trade, the end of protectionism everywhere, regional cooperation, and a system of global governance more representative of developing countries. The new normal, in this sense, is about building a China strong enough not only to hold its own but also to help others.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Generation Xi: students at a Confucian temple in Nanjing, August 2009 (Reuters / Jeff Xu)[/img]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143333/perry-link/what-it-means-to-be-chinese


> What It Means to Be Chinese
> *Nationalism and Identity in Xi’s China*
> 
> By Perry Link
> 
> FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE
> 
> What does it mean to be Chinese? A strong tradition in premodern China held that it meant thinking, behaving, and living in a society in accord with heaven-sanctioned principles exemplifying the best way to be human. Other peoples could learn this Chineseness, and they could also become civilized, but they could never rival China in either defining propriety or drawing people into accordance with it.
> 
> For centuries, this way of thinking went largely unchallenged, and even today, its fundamental assumptions run deep. To be Chinese still means to exhibit proper behavior and to be part of a civilization that has primacy in the world. Most modern Chinese would accept this, at least tacitly. Where they would disagree—often sharply—is over just what values Chineseness should stand for today. Is the moral model of premodern times still relevant in the modern political context, or should it be displaced by newer ideas of political morality? Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” is best understood as a backward-looking answer to the question. But in spite of his wishes, the debate will continue, and it could contribute to instability and even violence in the coming decades.
> 
> OLD SCHOOL
> 
> Traditional Chinese family values, often called “Confucian,” were deeply ethical, although not egalitarian. A father had authority over a son, and the son was bound to obey. But the father was bound, too: he had to be a proper father, treating his son as a father should, and could be held up to public scorn if he did not.
> 
> Political norms were based on the family model. A ruler had absolute authority over his subjects but was morally bound to treat them properly. If he did not, they could flee or rebel, and the ruler might lose his “heavenly mandate” to rule. And how could rulers learn what proper treatment of subjects was? By reading and internalizing texts. Officials at all levels were chosen through examinations in the Confucian classics, the memorization of which was thought to instill a morality that equipped them to be proper leaders.
> 
> This system worked, but not always well. Sometimes the exams were corrupted, and sometimes the world of officialdom amounted to little more than routinized bribery—flaws that were clearly in evidence during the mid-nineteenth century. But even with the system at a low point, assumptions about how it was supposed to work held strong. The legitimacy of officials was supposed to be based on their morality, with virtue increasing all the way up the chain to the emperor—the “son of heaven,” whose only superior was nature itself. Non-Chinese peoples who fell outside this system, meanwhile, were considered ethically inferior; their role was to pay tribute to, and learn from, the center.
> 
> The term “Chinese” implicitly meant “Han,” referring to China’s dominant ethnicity. Over the last century, both nationalist and communist governments have tried to counter this ethnocentricity, embracing a definition of “national citizen” that included non-Han peoples as well. This new usage gained some traction at official levels, but in daily life, “Chinese” has continued to be understood, implicitly, as Han. A Han family living in Singapore or San Francisco, for example, is regarded as huaqiao—meaning “Chinese abroad”—even after several generations, but nobody would think to use that term to refer to a Uighur from Xinjiang who has moved to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. In the unlikely event that a Caucasian baby were adopted by Chinese parents and raised in China, the child would not easily be thought of by locals as Chinese. But a Han baby adopted and raised in the United States is normally regarded by both Chinese and American communities as “one of us.”
> 
> Throughout most of China’s history, the traditional moral-political model was able to withstand or absorb outside influences. Buddhism came from India, Mongol and Manchu invaders swept in from inner Asia, and traders from the Near East arrived along the Silk Road and by sea, but the system held fast. Chineseness was too powerful to  be dislodged; it was the invaders  who adapted.
> 
> The arrival of the industrialized West, however, broke the pattern. When the British, armed with advanced cannons, won a series of starkly unequal battles along the Chinese coast in the mid-nineteenth century, China was shocked in an unprecedented way. Feelings of humiliation grew even stronger at the end of the century when Japan—a “little brother” civilization in the traditional Confucian world, but one that had cleverly learned the Westerners’ tricks—defeated China in another quick and one-sided war. Chinese leaders recognized the need to change, albeit reluctantly, and ever since, their mantra has been “Do what is necessary to rebuff the outsiders—but only what is necessary,” keeping Chineseness intact otherwise.
> 
> One of the first responses by the Chinese to the British cannons was to upgrade their own. But to do that, China needed Western science, and to get that, it needed Western schooling—which meant learning Western languages and traveling abroad. This seemed a slippery slope; the core of Chineseness might fade away. Some Chinese thinkers in the early twentieth century went so far as to call for scrapping the traditional model and opting for all-out westernization. But most stopped short of that. Mao Zedong, for one, used the slogan “foreign things for China’s use”—with China, by implication, retaining its core identity.
> 
> Meanwhile, the modern world kept coming: electricity, textile mills, rail and air travel, finance, diplomacy, computers, the Internet, and more. China did not really have a choice about whether to let these things in, even though some of them undermined established patterns. Having to pay lip service to words such as “democracy” while continuing to resist what they actually meant led to hypocrisy. Mao called his rule a “people’s democratic dictatorship” and claimed that it was administered through “democratic centralism.”
> 
> Such language was an attempt to continue the traditional authoritarian model under a fashionable modern label. But other Chinese took the new words and concepts at face value. Early-twentieth-century thinkers, such as Hu Shih and Luo Longji, embraced Western notions of democracy and citizen rights, as did more recent figures, such as the late astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.
> 
> Ordinary Chinese people, too, have moved in this direction; the notion that everyone has rights has spread widely in recent decades. In Mao’s time, simply pronouncing the phrase “people’s rights” in public was dangerous; today, even farmers in small towns organize to assert their rights. The change has been gradual, but it is real.
> 
> BACK TO THE FUTURE?
> 
> In recent decades, Chinese Communist Party leaders have tried to revive the traditional moral-political model with certain modern adaptations. Xi’s “Chinese dream,” for example, emphasizes wealth, national pride, and obedience to authority. Media and schools stress the idea of patriotism, with “love of country” considered conterminous with “love of the Communist Party.” Ideas such as democracy, human rights, and modernization are mentioned as well, but generally with the appendage “with Chinese characteristics,” to indicate that they have been modified to fit into Communist Party authoritarianism. And a “Chinese model” of development supposedly offers other countries an example of an authoritarian route to wealth and power.
> 
> Underlying all these developments is a vision of China returning to its place at the center of the world, serving as the defining example of how things should be. Yet this vision remains a mere possibility, not a certainty, because strong currents in Chinese society run against it. Foremost among them is the popular perception that the prevailing system benefits a privileged elite more than the nation as a whole.
> 
> The gap between rich and poor in China has grown immensely in recent years, and common people often feel that the wealth of the politically connected elite has been won through graft, repression, and private connections more than hard work and enterprise. Ordinary people see their land confiscated and their savings depleted, and those who resist are bullied by hired thugs. The Internet has made it difficult to keep events of this kind secret, and popular resentment has led to protests, including strikes, demonstrations, and road blockades. Hundreds of them occur every day, forcing Beijing to spend scores of billions of dollars annually on “stability maintenance”—a euphemism for “domestic security.”
> 
> On the Internet, meanwhile, there have been recent signs that some Chinese have been moving away from equating the country with the Communist Party. Because Internet censors use filters to track the use of sensitive words such as “government,” regular Internet users have invented sly substitutes. Standard work-arounds for references to China’s rulers have included terms such as “heavenly dynasty” and even “western Korea”—meaning “western North Korea.” Forty years ago, such sarcasm was unthinkable. Twenty years ago, it was rare. Today, it suggests the emergence of new grounds for conceiving of national identity, based on something other than identification with the party.
> 
> Xi’s “Chinese dream” stresses party-loving patriotism and materialism, but it does not say anything about the moral treatment of fellow human beings in daily life. This is a major weakness, given the heavy emphasis that Confucian tradition puts on interpersonal ethics. No dream about what it means to be Chinese in the twenty-first century can feel right in Chinese culture if it omits all mention of moral behavior. Democracy advocates who speak of “rights” and “dignity” may be using foreign terms, but they are also answering a very traditional Chinese question about how people should relate to one another.
> 
> China’s rulers surely recognize the lacuna in their dream, but they fear the concept of citizenship because it gives the populace too much autonomy. They want followers, not citizens. This is why they spend so much effort and money pushing the ideas of materialism and state strength, whose shallow appeal has had considerable success. Many Chinese, especially the urban young, have bought into the notion that being Chinese in the twenty-first century means being materialistic, nationalist, and aggressive. Whereas Chinese students of a generation ago admired Western life and values so much that they built a statue, Goddess of Democracy, on Tiananmen Square, today, after decades of government-sponsored anti-Western indoctrination, many see the West more as a hostile rival than as a friend.
> 
> LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS
> 
> Beijing’s massive domestic security efforts are geared primarily toward keeping a lid on protests by China’s lower classes. But not all sources of contemporary instability are rooted in economic inequality. Power rivalry within the elite, for example, is a perennial concern. Recent factional squabbling has occurred among the so-called princelings (children of prominent revolutionaries), the Youth League faction (allies of former President Hu Jintao), and the Shanghai Gang (associates of former President Jiang Zemin).
> 
> Strife among competing factions of the elite differs from friction between the elite and the underclass, but the two levels of conflict can align when members of the elite see opportunities to manipulate popular discontent to their advantage. This occurred in 2009–11, for example, when the Chongqing-based princeling Bo Xilai exploited widespread anger over corruption in order to build support for his attempt to jump ahead of his rival princeling Xi and position himself as the country’s next leader. Bo’s gambit failed: he now sits in prison. Meanwhile, having ascended to the top himself, Xi is using an anticorruption campaign in part to fuel his own popularity and bring down rivals.
> 
> One sign of insecurity within the elite is the eagerness of many to send wealth and family abroad. Many rich Chinese have emigrated in recent years or have at least taken steps to make their future emigration easier; Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and the United States are favorite destinations. The number of Chinese students from prominent families sent to school in the West has risen sharply, as have private Chinese real estate investments in North America. And residents of Hong Kong have complained that maternity wards in local hospitals have become overcrowded because mainland Chinese women come to give birth there, so as to ensure that their babies receive automatic local residency rights.
> 
> China’s military bureaucracy is less transparent than its civilian counterpart, but it appears to be just as fraught with corruption and internal rivalries. The danger of military disobedience is indirectly suggested by warnings from civilian leaders (including Xi) against any such actions.
> 
> China has many strong regional identities—in Guangdong, Sichuan, the Northeast, and elsewhere—and patterns of talking back to Beijing, or pretending to obey while in fact going one’s own way, have played out for decades. Yet residents of these regions would have no hesitation in identifying themselves as Chinese; their local actions pose little threat to national unity or the stability of communist rule. The Chinese heartland, therefore, is not in danger of falling apart. But the demands for autonomy by Tibetans, Uighurs, and the residents of Hong Kong and Taiwan do represent a challenge to the official conception of national identity.
> 
> For Tibetans and Uighurs, the desire for self-rule is rooted primarily in differences of ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. For Han Chinese living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the impulse emerges from the past century’s history and politics, which have given them a sense of independent identity. Since party ideology holds that minorities are treated equally and love the motherland, secessionist longings by Tibetans and Uighurs embarrass the authorities in Beijing and pose a threat to their claims of legitimacy. The economic and social success of Hong Kong and Taiwan pose a different sort of threat by making clear, contrary to Beijing’s official line, that Western-style democracy can work just fine with Chinese citizens.
> 
> Beijing’s response to all four cases has been the same, essentially declaring that each area is part of China whether its residents desire it or not. Communist Party leaders have used all four to stimulate nationalist sentiment within the Chinese heartland and to position themselves as guardians of national pride. To hear party officials tell it, the otherwise diverse figures of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, the former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, and the Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong have one trait in common: their desire to “split the motherland.”
> 
> MAO BETTER BLUES
> 
> The popular Western view of China  as a self-confidently rising power is dangerously superficial. The country is certainly wealthier than it was four decades ago, and its military, diplomatic stature, and international economic presence are all much stronger. Living standards have improved, and hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved out of poverty through their own hard work. Beneath the surface, however, insecurity is widespread among everyone from rural farmers to members of the privileged urban class. People fear tainted food, water, and air, and rampant corruption and chicanery sour the public mood and erode trust. The spread of the Internet and the readiness of ordinary people to assert their rights have made it far harder for the government to keep society in line today than during Mao’s regime two generations back.
> 
> Hu, who stepped down as the top leader in 2012, seemed to spend the last few months of his term running out the clock. His successor, Xi, took office knowing that China faced a crisis and that he had to try something different. His response, however, has been to fall back on the familiar revolutionary ideas of his parents’ generation. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was Mao’s confederate in the 1940s and 1950s. He strongly believed that a Spartan, uncorrupt Communist Party organized under a unified command could “serve the people” (in the words of the then-common slogan) and could bring them happiness. Mao later persecuted Xi senior, and the Maoist project failed in spectacular ways. Xi junior observed those failures, but he has nevertheless started to head down a similar path. Since 2012, he has sought to fashion himself as a repeat of Mao—centralizing power, launching anticorruption drives, targeting rivals, and even suggesting a move toward a cult of personality.
> 
> This is a dangerous game, for several reasons. Xi is no Mao, in terms of either intellect or charisma, and the society over which he rules is far more refractory than the one Mao dominated. Although Xi’s anticorruption campaign has drawn popular support and hurt some of his enemies, continuing it in earnest will soon require going after his own allies, including relatives and senior military officials, which could produce a backlash sufficient to take down the regime. However, failing to press forward—the more likely prospect—will expose Xi as just another conventional ruler and cause his popular support to drop. In this sphere, as in others, the lessons of the 1950s have limited contemporary utility.
> 
> The scholar Jonathan Spence titled his excellent history of the country _The Search for Modern China_. The word “search” was an inspired choice. For nearly two centuries, the great ancient civilization of China has been looking for a way to reinvent itself for the modern era. This process has involved fits, starts, and reversals; it has caused trauma and led to at least 70 million unnatural deaths.
> 
> The key questions today are whether the Communist Party’s project to revive Chinese-style authoritarianism in modern clothing will succeed and, if so, what its effects will be—both on China and on the world at large. Taking both global and local history into account, one would have to bet against success; despite occasional setbacks, the long-term trend toward greater popular participation in politics seems clear. But the Chinese government has pulled off unexpected successes in many areas in recent decades, so it could surprise here as well. If it does—if it can engineer its retrograde political vision at home and export authoritarianism abroad—both China and the world will suffer, left waiting for a vision of Chinese identity more suitable for the present age.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2





Ethnic minority delegates in front of the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square, March 2015. (Reuters / Carlos Barria)[/img]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143330/gray-tuttle/chinas-race-problem


> China’s Race Problem
> *How Beijing Represses Minorities*
> 
> By Gray Tuttle
> 
> FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE
> 
> For all the tremendous change China has experienced in recent decades—phenomenal economic growth, improved living standards, and an ascent to great-power status—the country has made little progress when it comes to the treatment of its ethnic minorities, most of whom live in China’s sparsely populated frontier regions. This is by no means a new problem. Indeed, one of those regions, Tibet, represents one of the “three Ts”—taboo topics that the Chinese government has long forbidden its citizens to discuss openly. (The other two are Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989.)
> 
> But analyses of China’s troubles in Tibet and other areas that are home to large numbers of ethnic minorities often miss a crucial factor. Many observers, especially those outside China, see Beijing’s repressive policies toward such places primarily as an example of the central government’s authoritarian response to dissent. Framing the situation that way, however, misses the fact that Beijing’s hard-line policies are not merely a reflection of the central state’s desire to cement its authority over distant territories but also an expression of deep-seated ethnic prejudices and racism at the core of contemporary Chinese society. In that sense, China’s difficulties in Tibet and other regions are symptoms of a deeper disease, a social pathology that is hardly ever discussed in China and rarely mentioned even in the West.
> 
> When placed next to the challenge of maintaining strong economic growth, fighting endemic corruption, and managing tensions in the South China Sea, China’s struggle with the legacy and present-day reality of ethnic and racial prejudice might seem unimportant, a minor concern in the context of the country’s rise. In fact, Beijing’s inability (or unwillingness) to confront this problem poses a long-term threat to the central state. The existence of deep and broad hostility and discrimination toward Tibetans and other non-Han Chinese citizens will prevent China from easing the intense unrest that roils many areas of the country. And as China grows more prosperous and powerful, the enforced exclusion of the country’s ethnic minorities will undermine Beijing’s efforts to foster a “harmonious society” and present China as a model to the rest of the world.
> 
> IT TAKES A NATION OF BILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK
> 
> Estimates vary, but close to 120 million Chinese citizens do not belong to the majority Han ethnic group. Ethnic minorities such as Kazakhs, Koreans, Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other groups represent only eight percent of China’s population. But their existence belies a commonplace notion of China as a homogeneous society. It’s also worth noting that, taken together, the regions of China that are dominated by non-Han people constitute roughly half of China’s territory and that if non-Han Chinese citizens formed their own country, it would be the 11th largest in the world, just behind Mexico and just ahead of the Philippines.
> 
> Although Tibetans represent only about five percent of China’s non-Han citizens, their struggle attracts significant international attention and is in many ways an effective stand-in for the experience of the other minority groups. Tibetans have long been treated as second-class citizens, deprived of basic opportunities, rights, and legal protections that Han Chinese enjoy (albeit in a country where the rule of law is inconsistent at best). The central government consistently denies Tibetans the high degree of autonomy promised to them by the Chinese constitution and by Chinese law. The state is supposed to protect minority groups’ cultural traditions and encourage forms of affirmative action to give minorities a leg up in university admissions and the job market. But such protections and benefits are rarely honored. The state’s approach toward the Tibetan language well illustrates this pattern: although the government putatively seeks to preserve and respect the Tibetan language, in practice Beijing has sought to marginalize it by insisting that all postprimary education take place in Chinese and by discouraging the use of Tibetan in business and government.
> 
> More overt forms of discrimination exist as well, including ethnic profiling. Security and law enforcement personnel frequently single out traveling Tibetans for extra attention and questioning, especially since a wave of protests against Beijing’s policies—some of which turned violent—swept Tibet in 2008. Hotels in Chinese cities routinely deny Tibetans accommodations—even those who can “pass” as Han, since their identity cards designate them as Tibetan. Worse, since 2008, the state has placed new restrictions on Tibetans’ civil rights, forbidding them to establish associations devoted to issues such as the environment and education—something Han Chinese are allowed to do.
> 
> Deprivations of that kind are part of a broader, more systemic inequality that characterizes life for Tibetans in China. Andrew Fischer, an expert on Tibet’s economy, has used official Chinese government statistics to demonstrate that Tibetans are much less likely to get good jobs than their Han counterparts due to the lack of educational opportunities available to them. Even in Tibetan-majority areas, where Tibetans should enjoy some advantage, Tibetans earn lower incomes relative to Han Chinese.
> 
> It is hard to know exactly what role racism or ethnic prejudice plays in fostering these inequalities. In part, that is because it is difficult to generalize about the views of Han Chinese toward Tibetans and other minorities; just like in the West, public opinion on identity in China is shaped by the ambiguity and imprecision of concepts such as ethnicity and race. Still, it is fair to say that most Han Chinese see Tibetans and other minorities as ethnically different from themselves and perhaps even racially distinct as well.
> 
> That was not always the case. In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and officials talked about Tibetans and Chinese as all belonging to “the yellow race.” By the 1950s, however, such ideas had gone out of fashion, and Mao Zedong’s government launched a project to categorize the country’s myriad self-identifying ethnic groups with the aim of reducing the number of officially recognized minorities—the fewer groups there were, the easier they would be to manage, the government hoped. This had the effect of creating clearer lines between the various groups and also encouraged a paternalistic prejudice toward minorities. Han elites came to see Tibetans and other non-Han people as at best junior partners in the project of Chinese nation building. In the future, most Han elites assumed, such groups would be subsumed by the dominant culture and would cease to exist in any meaningful way; this view was partly the result of Maoist tenets that saw class consciousness as a more powerful force than ethnic solidarity.
> 
> RACISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
> 
> Perhaps the most striking aspect of contemporary racism and ethnic prejudice in China is its continuity with the past. Throughout the many convulsions China has experienced in the past century, there has never been a watershed moment or turning point in Chinese thinking about race and ethnicity. And regardless of communism’s putative colorblindness, racial and ethnic identity was central to early, pre-Maoist versions of Chinese nationalism, which never ceased to influence the country’s political culture.
> 
> Although traditional Chinese thought posited the superiority of Chinese culture, it was not explicitly racist. But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese intellectuals who had studied in Japan—which, during that period, was self-consciously embracing many Western ideas, including some relating to race—began bringing home new, more essentialist ideas about race and ethnicity. Chinese scholars adopted the Japanese term minzoku-shugi (minzu zhuyi in Chinese), which Chinese speakers use today as the equivalent of “nationalism.” But as the historian Frank Dikotter has argued, minzu zhuyi “literally meant ‘racism,’ and expressed a nationalist vision of race.”
> 
> By the 1920s, the question of China’s racial and ethnic identity began to take on greater importance as the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen sought to transform the crumbling Chinese empire into a modern state. In 1921, Sun declared that China must rid itself altogether of the idea of separate races. “We must facilitate the dying out of all names of individual peoples inhabiting China, i.e., Manchus, Tibetans, etc.,” Sun said. He had a specific model in mind: the United States. “We must follow the example of the United States of America,” he said, in order to “satisfy the demands and requirements of all races and unite them in a single cultural and political whole, to constitute a single nation.”
> 
> Of course, at that time, the United States was hardly a paragon of racial justice and tolerance. But in the decades following Sun’s remarks, the U.S. civil rights movement began the process of eliminating legally sanctioned discrimination and reducing prejudice in society. Although racial inequality remains a serious problem in the United States, individual and official views on race have changed dramatically during the past century.
> 
> The story is far less hopeful in China. Although China’s constitution and ethnic autonomy laws create the appearance of progress, there are no mechanisms for enforcing the vision of equality put forward by those texts. Put simply, there is no Chinese Department of Justice or Chinese Supreme Court to which Tibetans can appeal to fight discriminatory practices.
> 
> MINORITY REPORT
> 
> It is hardly surprising that Han views of Tibetans include an undercurrent of prejudice and paternalism. After all, Tibet came to be ruled by Beijing through conquest.
> 
> One of the main challenges facing Mao’s Communist forces after their triumph in the Chinese Civil War was the consolidation of the central government’s control of China’s frontier provinces. Between 1949 and 1951, Chinese Communists used the threat of overwhelming military force to incorporate Tibet into China. By that point, Tibet had enjoyed self-rule, if not international recognition as a state, for more than three decades.
> 
> From the beginning, racial nationalism played a crucial role in Beijing’s consolidation of control over Tibet. In this respect, Chinese communism mirrored the European colonialism that had dominated China in earlier eras. In 1954, the state formally “recognized” some 30 ethnic groups, including the Tibetans, as minority ethnicities. Over the course of the next three decades, Beijing would add another 18 ethnic groups to that list. Of course, within the borders of their home territories, many of those groups made up almost total majorities.
> 
> Beijing spun this recognition as a sign of China’s respect for minorities. In reality, it was merely a step in codifying inequality. The Communist Party deemed Tibetans and most other ethnic minorities unfit for leadership roles and made it clear that it was not interested in including them in high-level decision-making. In 1958, authorities placed the leading ethnic Tibetan Communist, Puntsok Wanggyel, under house arrest, charging him with the crime of “local nationalism”; he would spend the next 20 years incarcerated. And although Tibetans and other minority groups were subjected to (and sometimes willingly participated in) the radical reforms and revolutionary violence of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, they were never offered positions within the party leadership.
> 
> At the same time, the Communist Party began educating the Han majority in a new form of official racism. Ten “minority films” produced by the government between 1953 and 1966 and screened widely throughout the country depicted ethnic minorities as living in harsh, primitive conditions prior to their “liberation” by Chinese Communists. One of these films, The Serf (1963), is still shown today. It features a mute Tibetan protagonist, an unintentionally apt symbol for the way in which authorities in Beijing have sought to silence appeals for Tibetan autonomy and self-representation. Other official efforts to inculcate racist views included museums that distorted Tibet’s past, depicting it as a “hell on earth” and portraying Tibetans as a savage, backward people in need of civilizing.
> 
> For Mao, instituting an official form of racism was not merely a way to justify quasi-colonial rule in Tibet and elsewhere but also a means for shoring up a Chinese national identity that would otherwise fragment along any number of potential fault lines: rich and poor, urban and rural, coastal and inland. Just as China needed external “others”—the British, the Japanese, the Koreans—to rally against, so the state needed internal others to shift attention away from the party’s domination and exploitation of the Chinese people.



End of Part 1


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> CHAUVINISM OR RACISM?
> 
> The level of tension in Tibet today rivals that of the late 1950s, when the Chinese Communists forced unwelcome social, religious, and economic changes on the area. Early Tibetan attempts to drive out Chinese forces were forcefully suppressed, but Beijing has never been able to totally eradicate resistance to its control. For decades, the Dalai Lama has served as a powerful symbol of Tibetan self-determination—and as an intense irritant to Beijing—traveling the world to garner support for greater political, religious, and civil rights for Tibetans. Meanwhile, challenges to Beijing’s control have emerged on the ground as well. During the unrest in 2008, nearly 100 protests broke out in Tibet; around 20 percent of them escalated into violent riots, as protesters looted shops, set fire to police stations and government buildings, and attacked security personnel.
> 
> But the 2008 unrest was something of an aberration from the contemporary norm: generally, the central state maintains firm control of the Tibetan Plateau and enforces its rule with a strong military, police, and bureaucratic presence. And rather than produce doubts among the Han majority about the wisdom of Beijing’s policies toward Tibet, the unrest instead encouraged some Han Chinese, including well-educated elites, to embrace a belief in an essential racial difference between themselves and Tibetans, whom many Han people have come to see as inherently dangerous.
> 
> One reason that attitudes and beliefs about race and ethnicity have changed so little in China is the extent to which the state has blocked discussion of the topic through its control of universities and research institutions and through its obsessive monitoring and censoring of the press and electronic communications. Communist Party ideologues and state media outlets occasionally acknowledge racism by referring euphemistically to “Han chauvinism.” But such admissions usually come only in the wake of campaigns to repress dissent in minority-dominated regions.
> 
> Occasional criticism from within the Communist Party has had little effect. In a speech delivered in Lhasa, Tibet, in 1980, the party leader Hu Yaobang explicitly compared Beijing’s Tibetan policy to colonialism and argued that it had failed to live up to communist ideals: “We have worked nearly 30 years, but the life of Tibetans has not notably improved,” he lamented. He called for the state to make good on its promises of autonomy and “to let Tibetans really be the masters of their own lives,” proposing a series of specific measures: compelling some Han Chinese officials to learn the Tibetan language, replacing Han party officials in Tibet with ethnic Tibetan ones, and creating more opportunities for higher education in Tibet. But the government mostly ignored Hu’s ideas; as with other instances of government recognition of Han chauvinism, this foray into self-criticism was short-lived and inconsequential.
> 
> GO WEST, YOUNG HAN
> 
> Chinese Communist Party officials have long argued that the government’s “Develop the West” campaign, which seeks to increase growth and create economic opportunities in Tibet and other frontier provinces, is the best way to redress ethnic inequality in China. “Development is the foundation of resolving Tibet’s problems,” declared Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2006. But as Fischer, the expert on Tibet’s economy, has revealed, Beijing has directed most of the development funding toward government administration and massive infrastructure projects that surely help central authorities exercise more control but whose benefit to Tibetans is less obvious. Aside from the small number of Tibetans who serve as Communist Party bureaucrats, very few Tibetans can take advantage of such funding and development, since their levels of educational attainment and Chinese-language abilities generally fall below those of the Han workers who arrive from other provinces to compete for jobs. The result is what Fischer has termed “disempowered development,” which marginalizes Tibetans in their own autonomous region.
> 
> Whatever economic improvements the campaign has created, it has also had a counterproductive effect on Han views of Tibetans. Han people often describe the Tibetans as ungrateful for the largess of the central state. As Emily Yeh, an expert on development in Tibet, has written, many Han Chinese tend to see economic projects there as a “gift” to the Tibetans rather than as an instrument of Beijing’s power and control. This perception fuels a view of Tibetans as lazy, unproductive, incapable of managing their own economy, and dependent on the central state.
> 
> MAKING CONTACT
> 
> In the context of the current political environment in China, it is difficult to imagine how the condition of China’s ethnic minorities might be improved. The authorities treat any activism or dissent in Tibet and other minority-dominated areas as separatist incitement or even terrorism. And given the fact that Han Chinese citizens themselves enjoy few political or civil rights, it might be unrealistic to hope for an improvement in minority rights.
> 
> Still, there are officials within the Chinese Communist Party and state structures who recognize the need  for change. One way they could start improving relations among China’s ethnic groups would be to revive the ideas of Hu Yaobang. Beijing should increase the numbers of Communist Party and government officials of Tibetan descent; put Tibetans in real positions of power, such as party secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region; and create a Tibetan-language educational system, especially in rural areas of Tibet. Beijing should also start protecting constitutional guarantees and enforcing existing laws regarding ethnic autonomy, even if doing so requires creating a new administrative or judicial body to hold officials accountable.
> 
> Perhaps what China really needs is a truth-and-reconciliation process through which Tibetans and other minorities could safely air their grievances and the Chinese state could acknowledge the abuses of the past. Of course, such an undertaking will be unimaginable as long as China remains a one-party authoritarian state. But nothing currently prevents the Communist Party from simply acknowledging that its policies and practices have failed to bring minority ethnicities willingly into the Chinese state. Such a concession would cost the party very little and would be a significant first step toward improving relations and creating a foundation for a more stable society.
> 
> The best hope for change, however, lies with ordinary Han Chinese. If they could see through the Communist Party’s attempts to divide and dominate, then they might come to realize that all Chinese citizens share a similar desire for freedom from government oppression. The U.S. civil rights movement succeeded only after significant numbers of white Americans, appalled by the brutality and inequality blacks faced, allied with black organizations and movements that had been fighting against racism for decades. Likewise, any substantive change in Beijing’s policies toward Tibetans and other minorities will take a similar change in the views of China’s dominant ethnic group.
> 
> Such a stark shift might be catalyzed by more person-to-person contact between Han Chinese and Tibetans; according to the so-called contact hypothesis, such interactions make it easier for people from different ethnic groups to overcome their prejudices and fears. Such contact is now happening more than ever before. Owing to the Develop the West campaign, migrant workers now travel to and from Tibet in huge numbers. And since the opening in 2006 of a train line that connects Lhasa to the city of Xining, in Qinghai Province (the first railway to link Tibet to another Chinese region), Han Chinese tourists have poured into the region; this year, 15 million are expected to visit. Meanwhile, even as mainstream Han views of Tibetans have hardened in recent years, a growing number of Han Chinese—especially young people—have begun to demonstrate a sincere and respectful interest in Tibetan society, culture, and religion.
> 
> But those developments hardly provide ample grounds for optimism. Barring fundamental changes in Beijing’s policies, it is likely that ethnic and racial prejudice against Tibetans and other minorities will remain a serious weakness in the fabric of Chinese society.


----------



## CougarKing

Despite enmity between these two parties that dates back to the Chinese Civil Wars/unrest that happened before and after World War II, the current round of cross-strait overtures continues to have momentum:

Reuters



> *Taiwan ruling party says chief to meet China's Xi Jinping*
> Thu Apr 23, 2015 11:10pm EDT Email This Article |
> 
> TAIPEI (Reuters) - *Chinese President and Communist Party chief Xi Jinping will hold talks with the chairman of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang (KMT) in Beijing next month, the KMT said on Friday, in what would be the first meeting between the heads of the two parties*.
> 
> Business ties between Taiwan and China have improved to their best level in six decades since Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008. But both sides remain political rivals, with China viewing the democratic island as a renegade province.
> 
> Taiwan's pride in its democracy helps reinforce the unwillingness of many to be absorbed politically by China, which has not ruled out force to ensure unification.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The PLA-N preparing for a future amphibious invasion of Taiwan or one of the South China Sea atolls held by neighbouring nations?

Janes



> *LHD model hints at potential Chinese requirements*
> Richard D Fisher Jr, Washington, DC - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
> 23 April 2015
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A company-produced model of what could be China's first landing helicopter dock amphibious assault ship. Source: Via CJDBY website
> 
> An apparent company-produced model of a landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious assault ship may offer an indication of the configuration and capabilities of such a ship that is expected to be produced for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).
> 
> An image of the model appeared on Chinese military web pages on 22 April. A subsequent online search found the same image on a model manufacturer's website with the designation Type 081.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> However, for nearly a decade Chinese and other sources have projected that the PLAN would acquire an LHD, with up to six platforms in the class. These would complement an expected force of six Type 071 landing platform
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The LHS has three sponsons featuring vertical launchers, possibly for SAM systems. (Via CJDBY website)


----------



## CougarKing

More news about China's lone carrier:

Shanghaiist



> *Operational fighter jets loaded onto China's first aircraft carrier*
> 
> China's first aircraft carrier has become equipped with operational fighter jets, reports Want China Times.
> Leaked photographs reportedly show four J-15 fighter jets being loaded onto the Liaoning - China's only aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier's 180 metre long hangar will eventually be able to house 24 jets of a same size as the J-15, a fighter plane which can attain speeds of nearly 3,000 kilometres per hour and is equipped with four missiles.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More to add to China's reclamation activities/"Great Wall of Sand" in the South China Sea:

Popular Science



> *CHINESE SHIPYARD LOOKS TO BUILD GIANT FLOATING ISLANDS*
> By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer
> 
> 
> This CGI shows one of JDG's floating islands, which is likely the largest 120m X 900M configuration. The floating island can support both civilian and military missions, including supply, landing aircraft and basing of amphibious vehicles.
> China, not just satisfied with turning South China Sea reefs into airports, is looking to expand its naval basing activities by building giant floating islands.
> 
> The April 2015 press conference of the Jidong Development Group included interesting guests, like this PLA officer. Considering that the first floating island will be based as a deep sea support project in the South China Sea, the PLA could have dual use interests in JDG's technology.
> The Jidong Development Group (JDG), a construction company, and Hainan Hai Industrial Company (Hai is Mandarin for ocean) are proposing to build a floating sea base for multipurpose usage, such as tourism, shipping, power generation and offshore fossil fuel extraction. The floating sea base would be based in the South China Sea, for logistical support activities.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

This concept looks like Kirkhills conception of floating supply/deployment bases (and seems to be used for much the same purposes). It might actually be a worthwhile project for Canada to look into, seeing as gigantic concrete pontoons are relatively quick and easy to make while building new Canadian warships is likely to be another "trail of tears" experience. With a few of these and a couple of sea going tugs at least we have something to bring to the table when the next crisis arrives...


----------



## CougarKing

More recent Qinghua/Tsinghua University alumni gaining influence in the party and Chinese govt; the next generation of Chinese leaders after Xi Jinping and other Politburo standing committee members are already positioning themselves.

Diplomat



> *The Rise of a New Tsinghua Clique in Chinese Politics
> 
> Three Tsinghua alums with strong ties to each other — and to Xi Jinping — are climbing the ranks in Chinese politics*.
> 
> Since Xi Jinping took power in November 2012, a new Tsinghua Clique has risen in Chinese politics. *In contrast to members of the old Tsinghua Clique, who just happened to be graduates of the same university (such as Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Huang Ju, and Wu Guanzheng), members of the new Tsinghua Clique have strong personal ties with one another.*
> 
> A key member of the new Tsinghua Clique is *Chen Xi*, executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department. A native of Fujian, Chen went to Tsinghua University along with Xi Jinping in September 1975 as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier student (gongnongbing xueyuan). Chen and Xi were enrolled in the same department — the Department of Chemical Engineering — with different majors. Chen majored in materialization, and Xi in basic organic synthesis. The two reportedly were roommates for three and a half years, and Xi recruited Chen as a CCP member in November 1978.
> 
> After Xi became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee in charge of personnel affairs in October 2007, Chen was quickly promoted from Tsinghua University to the Ministry of Education as a vice minister and deputy party group secretary. Chen was transferred to Liaoning as deputy party secretary in less than two years and was promoted again in seven months to the rank of full minister as the party group secretary of the China Association for Science and Technology, replacing Deng Nan (daughter of Deng Xiaoping).
> 
> *After Xi became president of the PRC, Chen was appointed as the executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department in April 2013, where he controls the Party’s personnel affairs on behalf of Xi.*
> 
> *Two other members of the new Tsinghua Clique are protégés of Chen Xi at Tsinghua University. Both Hu Heping and Chen Jining have had long association with Tsinghua University.* Both went to that university as undergraduates in the early 1980s and then obtained their master’s degrees there. Then the two went abroad for doctoral degrees. Chen went to the United Kingdom for a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering, and Hu studied in Japan for a doctoral degree in river basin environments. Hu returned to Tsinghua as an associate professor in the Department of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering (Hu Jintao’s old department) in December 1996. Chen returned to Tsinghua as an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering in March 1998.
> 
> Apparently, Hu Heping was closer to Chen Xi. While Chen was party secretary of Tsinghua University, from February 2002 to November 2008, Hu served under Chen in several different posts. Hu was appointed director of the Organization Department of the Tsinghua University Party Committee in November 2002 and was made dean of the Office of Academic Affairs in September 2003.
> 
> In February 2006, both Hu Heping and Chen Jining were appointed vice presidents of Tsinghua University. Hu later succeeded Chen Xi as party secretary of Tsinghua in December 2008, and Chen was promoted to president of Tsinghua in February 2012. Five months after Chen Xi’s appointment as the executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department, Hu was transferred to Zhejiang as a standing member and director of the Organization Department of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee. Chen Jining was also promoted to the Ministry of Environmental Protection as the party group secretary in January 2015. Chen Jining was appointed minister of Environmental Protection one month later, and Hu was promoted to deputy secretary of Shaanxi in April 2015.
> 
> *The three men now have been placed in strategic positions for further promotions*. Chen Xi is a good candidate for the position of Central Organization Department director in two years. If he can secure this position, he would be guaranteed a seat on the Politburo and the Secretariat. Chen Jining is a good candidate for a senior position in the State Council and also a good candidate for a membership on the Politburo. Hu Heping also has a good chance to be promoted as party secretary of one of the four centrally administered municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing) and could enter the Politburo in that capacity.


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> More recent Qinghua/Tsinghua University alumni gaining influence in the party and Chinese govt; the next generation of Chinese leaders after Xi Jinping and other Politburo standing committee members are already positioning themselves.
> 
> Diplomat


'


This ought not to be totally surprising ... think 19th century Britain and early 20th century America, and, indeed, 21st century France. 

Universities in China are ranked: 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th class, and entry is dependent on a rigorous (and, largely, honest) examination system. Above the 1st class we find two universities: Peking University (also know as Beijing University) and Tsinghua which are something like China's Oxford and cambridge or Harvard and MIT. They are _magnet_ schools; they attract (and accept only) the very, very best and brightest. (There's a reason Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard: she's very smart, an excellent student, by all accounts, but she wasn't academically smart enough for _Peking_ or _Tsinghua_ so a prestigious foreign school was thought to be a better choice.)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> (There's a reason Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard: she's very smart, an excellent student, by all accounts, but she wasn't academically smart enough for _Peking_ or _Tsinghua_ so a prestigious foreign school was thought to be a better choice.)



Then there's also those princelings like Bo Guagua, the son of ousted Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, who apparently have the pull and cash to get into Harvard's Kennedy School of government but still live the reckless, party playboy lifestyle typical of such princelings.

One would think with their parents' connections, they would get into "Bei da", "Qing da" or other top Chinese schools, but even the cram schools used by many rich kids to try to get into university apparently aren't enough for them to squeak through the rigorous exams -that are probably as hard as those that tested scholar-official candidates from the Qing Dynasty and earlier..


----------



## Edward Campbell

My _impression_ ~ and I really need to emphasise that word ~ is that the conduct and privileges of the _princelings_ is a cause (more than just a symptom) of real, measurable dissatisfaction among ordinary Chinese people, including at least some Party members.

Most Chines people, the ones that I know, anyway, including those who are in the Party and who work in the government, want to live quiet, peaceful, productive and (increasingly) prosperous lives ~ just like most of us. Most Chinese people, Party members and soldiers included, are honest, hard working, very family oriented folks who work hard (and honestly) and expect to be treated reasonably fairly. Most Chinese people that I have met expect a certain amount of capriciousness from the government, and they are not surprised when Chinese officials, like their Canadian counterparts, feel "entitled to their entitlements;" but they really want Xi Jinping's attack on corruption to work. 

I don't know how far Xi Jinping wants to push the anti-corruption campaign. My _guess_ is that he wants to purge the top levels of the PLA and the bureaucracy (national and provincial) of the supports and allies of his opponents (real, immediate and potential). That _guess_ is based on a _hunch_ that Xi Jinping does not intend to resign at the end of his nominal ten year term in office. I _suspect_ he wants to stay in office for as long as it takes to become another Deng Xiaoping: someone who fundamentally changes China, for the better. My _feeling_ is that a more honest, more transparent, better governed China is part of his "master plan."

I think that cracking down on the _princelings_, and their wealthy parents, may be part of the larger project; in _my opinion_ it would be a very popular part.


----------



## dimsum

Cantonese language could disappear, says UBC linguist Zoe Lam



> The Cantonese language could disappear within a couple of generations because of social pressures and the actions of the Chinese government, according to a UBC linguistics researcher.
> 
> Zoe Lam says while there are an estimated 70 to 100 million Cantonese speakers around the world right now, the Chinese government's preference for the Putonghua language — also know as Mandarin — is threatening the survival of Cantonese.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cantonese-language-could-disappear-says-ubc-linguist-zoe-lam-1.3053933

BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.

Even Teochew (a much smaller "city" dialect) isn't taught anywhere and there are still millions of speakers in SE Asia and overseas.  If anything, the last line about native speakers' children in Canada and elsewhere losing Chinese altogether to the predominant language in their country is more of a possibility.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dimsum said:
			
		

> Cantonese language could disappear, says UBC linguist Zoe Lam
> 
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cantonese-language-could-disappear-says-ubc-linguist-zoe-lam-1.3053933
> 
> BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.
> 
> Even Teochew (a much smaller "city" dialect) isn't taught anywhere and there are still millions of speakers in SE Asia and overseas.  If anything, the last line about native speakers' children in Canada and elsewhere losing Chinese altogether to the predominant language in their country is more of a possibility.




I have a friends who used to teach in a university in the USA but who transferred to a very prestigious private elementary/grammar/high school for a large increase in salary/benefits (the really first class health insurance, alone, was persuasive). She is very well paid to teach Mandarin to the children of the really rich folks in a very rich city ... But her pet project, which she subsidizes from her own purse, is a programme for the adopted ethnic Chinese children of middle class families: she teaches them both language (Mandarin) and Chinese culture so that they understand, as they grow, that, while they are Americans, their genetic heritage is Chinese and they learn that "heritage" from another person who looks like them. She assures me that she is not alone in this project ~ that other Chinese-American teachers are doing very similar things in other American (and Canadian?) cities, probably in Cantonese, too.


----------



## CougarKing

Dimsum said:
			
		

> BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.



Aside from Cantonese, the other dialect spoken by a lot in the diaspora is Hokkien, or Fujianese (福建話 Fu jian hua), the dialect of China's Fujian province.

The fact that both Cantonese and Hokkien are spoken by the diaspora throughout the world indicates which provinces that most overseas Chinese trace their roots: Fujian and Guangdong (where they speak Cantonese)

Hong Kong used to be part of Guangdong province before 1840s Opium War and virtually all the social media there today is in Cantonese.

Most of the overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, such as in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia speak Hokkien. This includes a sizable part of the Chinese in Singapore. 

Because Fujian province is right across from Taiwan, Hokkien actually has some similarities with the Taiwanese dialect spoken by Taiwan's benshengren/本省人.


----------



## CougarKing

Some China watchers fear this may be the result if Xi's anticorruption drive is "too successful" :

The Diplomat



> *The Anti-Corruption Drive and Risk of Policy Paralysis in China
> Could the anti-corruption drive be encouraging government inaction?*
> 
> Like it or not, President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is extremely popular among Chinese people. According to an online survey, “combating corruption” trails “income distribution” as the top two concerns of the Chinese public. There are already reports suggesting that the campaign has helped reduce the transaction cost for ordinary people to get things done in China.
> 
> But from the perspective of the more than eleven million government officials in China, *this also means reduced opportunities to access “grey income” (i.e., bribes), which accounts for 12 percent of China’s GDP. Consequently, civil servant jobs are increasingly losing their attractiveness in China*. According to a recruitment website, more than ten thousand civil servants had quit their jobs in the three weeks following the Spring Festival in Feburary. The exodus of civil servants poses particular challenges for the operation of the judicial system. Already burdened by heavy caseloads, high risks, and government interference, judges are leaving in droves. As aura of appeal for civil service fades, China faces growing pains in policy making and implementation.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Some China watchers fear this may be the result if Xi's anticorruption drive is "too successful" :
> 
> The Diplomat




Yanzhong Huang is certainly correct; there are risks, some big risks, to the anti-corruption campaign but it - corruption - was the key issue about which the late Lee Kuan Yew warned Chinese leaders over and over again. And _I am certain_ that Lee was correct: corruption, which sucks the life out of productive people and creates mistrust in the whole state, is a bigger enemy than the _barbarians_ could ever be.

If Xi Jinping wants to remake China, which _I believe_ he does, if he wants to be another Deng Xiaping, which _I also think_ is one of his aims, if he even wants to be one of the Chinese _greats_, remembered and even venerated for centuries to come, then corruption must be his target. He must take the risks and reach for the brass ring.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _BBC News_, is an overview of the dispute in the South China Seas:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29560533


> Tiny islands key to ownership of South China Sea
> 
> By Bill Hayton
> BBC News
> 
> 3 May 2015
> 
> South East Asia says it's "seriously concerned" about China's building of artificial islands in disputed parts of the South China Sea.
> 
> In response, China says it's "severely concerned" about the South East Asian nations' statement.
> 
> South East Asia says China's actions have "eroded trust and confidence and may undermine peace, security and stability".
> 
> China retorts that what it's doing is "entirely legal and shouldn't be questioned".
> 
> Are the gloves coming off in the South China Sea disputes?
> 
> China has reacted angrily to a formal statement issued on Monday by the 10 countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations, criticising its huge island-building programme in the Spratly Islands.
> 
> China is using dredging ships and construction teams to turn at least six coral reefs into large bases with harbours.
> 
> One will have a 2,900-metre (1.8-mile) long runway.
> 
> There is widening concern that China will use these bases as springboards to assert control over the whole of the South China Sea.
> 
> China says it is just protecting its territorial rights and its fishing fleet.
> 
> It seems bizarre that some of the smallest islands on the planet now lie at the centre of one the world's biggest territorial disputes.
> 
> If they were just a couple of metres lower, they wouldn't even qualify as islands but because they stick up above the surface of the South China Sea, countries can claim them and, more importantly, the territory and the resources in the waters around them.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China is carrying out land reclamation in the Spratlys   Source: BBC Article
> 
> Whoever controls the islands will have the strongest claim to the 1.4 million sq miles of the South China Sea and all the fish in it and oil under it.
> 
> That's why, for the six countries bordering the sea (seven if you count Taiwan separately), these 250 or so rocks, reefs and islands, with a total area of just six sq miles, are worth all the money and effort they spend on them.
> 
> But it's actually about much more than even that.
> 
> Two disputes
> 
> To understand why American and Chinese ships and planes are confronting each other in the South China Sea it is important to realise that there are actually two different disputes taking place there.
> 
> One is about which country owns the features that dot its waters.
> 
> The other, more critical dispute is about the future of the international system that has run the world since the end of World War Two.
> 
> What international rules should countries follow and who should make them?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It's the overlap between these two disputes - between which country rightfully occupies which islet and which countries set the world's rules - that makes the South China Sea disputes so dangerous.
> China has convinced itself that it is the rightful owner of almost the entire sea.
> 
> As a result, South East Asian countries with rival claims - Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines - are trying to bolster their position by involving the other big powers - primarily the US, but also Japan and India - on their side.
> 
> The US doesn't particularly care which country controls which island, but it's getting drawn into the disputes because of its wider interests.
> 
> The authorities in Beijing see things the other way around.
> 
> They think the US, anxious to remain the world's leading power, is corralling the countries of East and South East Asia to contain a rising China.
> 
> But what concerns the US, and many other countries, is not China's rise, as such, but Beijing's efforts to redefine international law to suit its own interests in the sea.
> 
> As a result, the US and its allies and friends are working together to "hold the line". This is where the danger lies.
> 
> International challenge
> 
> As China tries to extend its control over the water of the sea (as opposed to the islands), it is challenging both the other countries in the region and the international system.
> 
> Under current international law - laid down in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea - a country can only own a piece of sea if it owns the land next to it.
> 
> A country that owns an island also "owns" 12 nautical miles of seabed around the island and has the rights to the resources (but not the territory) up to 200 nautical miles around.
> 
> However, the Chinese government and its state-owned enterprises (particularly oil companies and fishing enterprises) are trying to assert ownership of the South China Sea itself, plus its seabed and its resources, many hundreds of miles away from the Chinese coast.
> 
> This is a challenge to the other countries around the sea with claims of their own, to the US whose role as a global military and commercial power depends upon unimpeded access through the world's seas and to every other country that believes in the current rules of international law.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese fort at the Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands   Source: BBC Article
> 
> They say (broadly) that the sea more than 12 nautical miles away from a coast doesn't belong to anyone and is therefore free for anyone to use in any way they see fit. (It's more complicated than that but that's the basic principle.)
> 
> Japan needs one oil or gas tanker to cross the South China Sea every six hours to keep its economy functioning; South Korea is similarly dependent on energy imports.
> 
> Both countries have other concerns about the way that China is rising too.
> 
> Japan has its own dispute with China over the Senkaku/Daioyu islands, sees common cause with Vietnam and the Philippines and has begun supplying both with coastguard ships and other equipment and training to help them defend their maritime claims.
> 
> South Korea is less vocal, but also concerned and also supplying weaponry to the Philippines and Indonesia.
> 
> India does not depend upon the South China Sea so much, but it fears the consequences if China comes to dominate Asia.
> 
> It has two disputes with China over border areas in the Himalayan Mountains.
> 
> It is also nervous about China's growing relations with countries around the Indian Ocean and has been developing security ties with Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan and Australia (among others) in response.
> 
> 20th Century dispute
> 
> The Chinese authorities say they have been the historic "owners" of the sea "since ancient times".
> 
> The Chinese government's interest in the sea actually only began in the early 20th Century.
> 
> For all but the briefest periods of recorded history (one exception is a 30-year period from 1400-1430, during which time the so-called eunuch admirals, including Zheng He, voyaged as far as East Africa) the Chinese authorities were barely able to control their own coastline, let alone islands hundreds of miles away.
> 
> ____________________________________________________________​
> *Zheng He: The Eunuch Admiral*
> 
> Zheng He was born in the poor province of Yunnan in 1372 into a Muslim family from Central Asia who had fought for the Mongols.
> 
> Captured by the armies of the Ming dynasty, he was castrated at the age of 10.
> 
> He was sent to serve the emperor's son, and so distinguished himself in battle that he rose to the rank of admiral.
> 
> His armada, bigger than the combined fleets of Europe, featured giant treasure ships 400ft (122m) long and 160ft (50m) wide.
> 
> He sailed throughout South East Asia and the Indian Ocean, and on to the Persian Gulf and Africa, creating new navigational maps, and spreading Chinese culture.
> 
> He opened up trade routes that are still flourishing today, and gained strategic control over countries that are now once again looking to China as undisputed regional leader.
> 
> ____________________________________________________________​
> This version of history is not the one taught in Chinese schools.
> 
> This strongly held, but historically unjustified sense of ownership is what is putting China on collision course with its neighbours and the US.
> 
> It is the reason why China behaves with such high-handedness when sending oil rigs to drill in disputed waters, for example.
> 
> To protect themselves against China's encroachments, other countries are forming new security relationships.
> 
> These overlapping interests have the potential to turn a local dispute into a regional or even a global one.
> 
> At a time of so many international crises, the South China Sea disputes appear relatively small - but they could get big very quickly.
> 
> Changing this behaviour will require the countries of the region to come to a better understanding of the shared history of the South China Sea.
> 
> That will be hard but it will be easier than the alternative of escalating conflict and the increasing risk of superpower confrontation.
> 
> _Bill Hayton is the author of_ The South China Sea: The struggle for power in Asia_, just published by Yale University Press._




One additional bit: _in my opinion_, China is trying to establish "facts on the ground" which they (and Israel) maintain matter in both _realpolitik_ theory and international law practice.


----------



## CougarKing

Serve non-halal food. Earn the ire of locals. Call in the People's Armed Police. Repeat as necessary. 

Shanghaiist



> *Muslims in Qinghai discover non-halal products at halal cake shop, proceed to smash up the shop*
> 
> A group of Muslim residents smashed up a halal cake shop in Xining city, Qinghai province after they found non-halal products in a delivery van belonging to the shop.
> 
> When the Muslim residents discovered no-halal food in the van, they believed that the store was selling non-halal products and became rather angry about the whole affair.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

People who haven't spent much time in China may think that China is rather like us ... it's not. The Chinese do not _accommodate_. Someone, probably a _Han_ Chinese business owner, somewhere, likely in Xinjiang province, has made some Muslim_ish_ products and labelled them _Halal_; they aren't and no one cares; no one checks, either; there are not _accommodations_ for Muslims; there is, just barely, some, limited _toleration_. The people in the _Zhongnanhai_, the HQ of the Party in Beijing, are probably happy this is going on: it creates unrest which allows the PLA to go in and bang heads, which pleases the overwhelming majority of Chinese who think Muslims are backwards and, somewhat, _less_ that civilized.

I actually feel somewhat sorry for the Uyghurs, even though I, too, think they are backwards and a wee bit less than civilized: they have been dealt a bad hand; they cannot win; how painfully they choose to lose is up top them, but lose they will. This is China ... eventually, the Chinese always win in China.


----------



## CougarKing

Something that may have lessons for South China Sea encounters as well, between China and Vietnam, or between China and the Philippines, to prevent escalation:

Diplomat



> *Improving Order in the East China Sea*
> 
> The accidental escalation of interstate incidents at sea has the potential to pose a serious threat to maritime security and stability in the Asia-Pacific Region. Competing territorial claims and disputes over freedom of navigation have generated a growing number of standoffs at sea involving military, law enforcement, and civilian vessels. With aircraft playing chicken, fishing vessels ramming coast guard ships, and naval forces intimidating one another’s auxiliaries, there is a growing potential for an accident that could escalate into conflict.
> 
> Statesmen in the region have sought to reduce this risk through a maritime security order undergirded by confidence-building mechanisms. The most recent development in this order is the *Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES)*. Adopted a year ago in April 2014 by the West Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS), CUES institutionalizes a set of suggestions for prudent behavior and clear communication at sea. As highlighted at a recent CSCAP meeting, however, the CUES agreement has some significant limitations.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



In fact, the PLA-N and USN recently conducted a CUES exercise this year:

*USS Fort Worth conducts first CUES activity with Chinese warship* 

IHS Jane's 360



> The activity was conducted in international waters in the South China Sea, beginning on 23 February, *with the Type 054A Jiangkai II-class guided-missile frigate Hengshui (572)*.
> 
> CUES was ratified unanimously by 25 Asia-Pacific countries at the 14th Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) in 2014. The set of protocols, designed to improve understanding and build confidence between navies, consists of standardised phrases for naval vessels and aircraft to use in unexpected encounters, with the aim of preventing any tensions from escalating into conflict.







The US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) is seen here operating near where the tail of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 was discovered. The aircraft crashed into the Java Sea on 28 December 2014. Source: US Navy


----------



## CougarKing

This shouldn't come as a surprise, considering most _Wai-shengren_/外省人/ (Taiwanese whose predecessors only came to the island in 1949) are more likely to vote for the KMT/GMD and still want reunification, albeit on their terms rather than Beijing's terms.

Shanghaiist



> *Taiwan party leader voices support of reunification with China*
> 
> Taiwan's Nationalist Party leader reaffirmed the party’s support of the eventual reunion with China when he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
> In an ongoing effort to alleviate the tension between the two sides, Nationalist Party Chairman Eric Chu met with Xi Jinxing on Monday to discuss the future of Taiwan and China, marking the highest-level talks between both sides in six years.
> Chu also affirmed Taiwan’s desire to join the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as "China's Taipei", after its initial application, which implied that Taiwan was an independent nation, was rejected.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> This shouldn't come as a surprise, considering most _Wai-shengren_/外省人/ (Taiwanese whose predecessors only came to the island in 1949) are more likely to vote for the KMT/GMD and still want reunification, albeit on their terms rather than Beijing's terms.
> 
> Shanghaiist




And that brings me back to why Beijing is making a serious *strategic* blunder in Hong Kong.

The reunification of China ~ bringing Taiwan 'back' into the Chinese state ~ is China's main, central, _*strategic*_ aim: more important than the South China Seas; more important than shoving America off the Asian mainland; more important than making Japan into a 'younger brother;' it's what drives many, many, many Chinese leaders.

The reunification of China ought to be easy: a significant share of the Taiwanese Chinese (as opposed to the native, ethnic Formosans), probably a solid majority, wants to rejoin China but, as you say, on their own terms.

"One country-two systems," is the bare minimum that Taiwan can accept. One country-two systems can be made to work for Taiwan but, and it's a *Big BUT*, only if it can be made to work in Hong Kong, first. I used to think that "one country-_n_ systems" was the right answer but a very wise Chinese friend explained to me that one country-two systems is as much as the leadership in Beijing can tolerate now and that it is as much as they can swallow in the future. (There are, still, some real hardliners in Beijing who believe that force (of arms) is the best, only 'good' way to manage the reunification of Taiwan and the governing of Hong Kong.) One country-two systems can, in my opinion, be made to work for China, too. The Chinese are experimenting with various governing techniques, including local elections: Hong Kong and Taiwan should be, can be good "test beds," better than small, polyglot Singapore, for _democracy with Chinese characteristics_ (to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping).

But, and it's an even Bigger BUT, the "second system" has to be something more than Hong Kong has now, IF the Chinese want Taiwan without a fight ~ and only a lunatic fringe wants to fight. The leadership in the _Zhongnanhai_ need to loosen the control on HK, not strengthen them, and allow HK to become more and more like Taiwan. HK is, _I think,_ more _conservative_, more _Victorian English liberal_ and more Confucian than Taiwan; _my guess_ is that HK wants something akin to 'pure' John Locke and is less concerned with "legislative democracy" and more concerned with good government and, above all, the rule of law. _My suspicion_ is that China can incubate, in HK, a "second system" that can be readily adapted to suit Taiwan.

It must be noted that Xi Jinping is not, in any respect "soft," on HKJ; he is not a fan of parliamentary democracy. He is supported by hardliners (in and out of government) like Zhang Dejiang, Chen Zuoer and, above all, Li Fei.

Another but: *BUT *Xi Jinping must outgrow Zhang, Li and Chen and see that the way to reunify China, peacefully, is by using HK as a model of what Taiwan can, reasonably and confidently, expect.


----------



## CougarKing

Another link in China's "New Silk Road" project: the fact that the Russian invasion of Georgia is still fresh in the memories of Georgians probably would have made this easier for China.

Diplomat



> *China’s Growing Presence in Georgia
> China looks set to become a genuine player in Georgia and the South Caucasus*
> 
> There is perhaps no less comfortable place for a struggling democracy than the blurry space between the hardening frontiers of the liberal democratic West and an increasingly expansionist, militant Russia. For states like Georgia, well beyond NATO’s fortified border in a region where even neutrality is considered a lot cast for Moscow, taking a side is not so much a choice as it is a necessity for state survival. But the rapidly growing presence of China, for the first time, opens up the possibility of a Sino-Georgian third way just as local confidence in Western alignment hits new lows.
> 
> China’s interest in Georgia and the South Caucasus is neither new nor particularly unexpected. Though flying under the radar, *Chinese investment has been rising in the region for at least several years, in search of investment opportunities and low-cost diplomatic dividends. But Beijing’s appreciation for the South Caucasus as a strategic region worthy of genuine attention is a more recent phenomenon, driven in large part by Beijing’s ambitious multi-billion dollar bet on the New Silk Road (NSR), for which Georgia and the South Caucasus are set to play a critical role. *Though its location may be geopolitically unenviable, Georgia’s position as a connector state between the Eurasian interior and Europe has caught Chinese interest.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Resistance within the PLA to Xi's anti-graft fight:

Reuters



> *China military says some not taking graft fight seriously*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - There are some in China's armed forces, the largest in the world, who are not taking the fight against corruption seriously, brushing problems under the carpet and not daring to go after senior officers, its official paper said on Thursday.
> 
> Weeding out graft in the military is a top goal of President Xi Jinping, chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls China's 2.3 million-strong armed forces.
> 
> *Serving and retired Chinese military officers have said military graft is so pervasive it could undermine China's ability to wage war, and dozens of senior officers have been taken down.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _BBC News_, is an overview of the dispute in the South China Seas:
> 
> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29560533
> 
> One additional bit: _in my opinion_, China is trying to establish "facts on the ground" which they (and Israel) maintain matter in both _realpolitik_ theory and international law practice.




And, according to photographs, shared with Reuters by Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Vietnam is also building artificial islands on Sand Cay and West London Reef in the Spratly archipelago and some buildings have been erected. The report says they are far smaller projects than the ones undertaken by China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And, to further stir the pot, _Reuters_ reports that Japan, Philippines to hold first naval drill in South China Sea. The article says that, 

     "Japan and the Philippines will hold their first joint naval drill this month in the South China Sea near a disputed shoal claimed by Beijing, sources in Tokyo and the Philippines said.

      The May 12 maritime safety exercise, which will practice the code for unplanned encounters at sea, known as CUES, is part of an agreement signed by Japan and the Philippines in January aimed at tightening security cooperation.

      The nature of the training is unlikely to worry China unduly, as it has conducted similar exercises with the United States in the past."


----------



## CougarKing

Another group, predominantly from Shaanxi province, to watch in Chinese politics alongside President Xi:

Diplomat



> *In China, Xi Jinping's Shaanxi Clique on the Rise
> Politicians with ties to Shaanxi, Xi’s home province, have fared well since Xi came to power.
> *
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The home province of Xi Jinping, Shaanxi has become an important training ground for top leaders in China. In addition to Xi, one may also find *Wang Qishan *with extensive links to the province. A native of Shanxi who was born in Shandong and grew up in Beijing, Wang Qishan spent 10 years in Shaanxi. He started off as a “sent-down youth” in Yan’an Prefecture in January 1969, just as Xi did, but in a different county. Wang was soon recruited by the Shaanxi Museum and then began his studies at the Northwest University in Xi’an.
> 
> Among Politburo members, one may also find three other individuals with work experiences in Shaanxi. Li Jianguo, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, was party secretary of Shaanxi for a decade, from 1997 to 2007. *Li Zhanshu*, director of the General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, was a standing member and deputy secretary of Shaanxi under the leadership of Li Jianguo, from 1998 to 2003. *Zhao Leji*, director of the Central Organization Department, was Li Jianguo’s successor as party secretary of Shaanxi. A native of Shaanxi, Zhao grew up in Qinghai. He was the top party boss of his home province from 2007 to 2012.
> 
> At the age of 69 in 2015, Li Jianguo will have to retire in two years. But both Li Zhanshu and Zhao Leji are strong candidates for the membership of the Politburo Standing Committee in 2017. *Li Xi*, an alternate member of the 18th Central Committee, will become at least a full member of the 19th Central Committee. If he can turn Liaoning’s economy around in the next two years, Li would even have a chance for a seat at the Politburo.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_ is a useful overview of Sino-Russian relations ~ and uneasy _coupling_:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21650566-crisis-ukraine-drawing-russia-closer-china-relationship-far-equal
My emphasis added


> Russia and China
> An uneasy friendship
> *The crisis in Ukraine is drawing Russia closer to China. But the relationship is far from equal*
> 
> May 9th 2015 | From the print edition
> 
> THE celebrations in Moscow on May 9th to commemorate the capitulation of Nazi Germany 70 years ago will speak volumes about today’s geopolitics. While Western leaders are staying away in protest against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine (and the first annexation of sovereign territory in Europe since the second world war), China’s president, Xi Jinping, will be the guest of honour of his friend, Vladimir Putin. Western sanctions over Ukraine, and what looks set to be a long-term chilling of relations with America and Europe, has given Russia no option other than to embrace China as tightly as it can.
> 
> Next week, in a further symbol of the growing strategic partnership between the two countries, three or four Chinese and six Russian naval vessels will meet up to conduct live-fire drills in the eastern Mediterranean. The exercise, which follows several similar ones in the Pacific since 2013, aims to send a clear message to America and its allies. For Russia the manoeuvres signal that it has a powerful friend and a military relationship with a growing geographic reach. For China even a small-scale exercise of this kind (its ships are coming from anti-piracy duty in the Gulf of Aden) speaks of increasing global ambition in line with Mr Xi’s slogan about a “Chinese dream”, which he says includes a “dream of a strong armed-forces”.
> 
> At a more practical level, the exercise provides a shop-window for China’s Type 054A guided-missile frigate, which it would like to sell to the Russians. It also offers operational experience in an unstable region in which it has an expanding economic presence. In 2011 China organised the evacuation of more than 38,000 Chinese from Libya during that country’s upheaval. Last month its navy pulled several hundred of its citizens out of Yemen, which is being torn apart by civil war. There are thought to be at least 40,000 Chinese working in Algeria and more than 1m across Africa.
> 
> Relations between China and Russia have been growing closer since the end of the cold war. Both, for different reasons, resent America’s “hegemony” and share a desire for a more multipolar world order. Russia, a declining great power, is looking for ways to recover at least some of its lost status; whereas China, a rising power, bridles at what it sees as American attempts to constrain it. As fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council, both with autocratic governments, Russia and China find common cause in sniping at Western liberal interventionism. The two countries settled all of their long-standing border disputes in 2008, just a month before the Russian-choreographed war in Georgia. Russia saw the deal as a way for it to concentrate more of its military forces in the west as a deterrent against the further expansion of NATO.
> 
> But there have been occasional tensions. Russia played a key role during the 1990s in helping China to modernise its military forces. Russia was able to preserve a defence-industrial base that would otherwise have withered from lack of domestic orders. But since the middle of the last decade, irked by China’s theft of its military technology and its consequent emergence as a rival in the arms market, Russia’s weapons sales to its neighbour have slowed.
> 
> Russia is also wary of becoming little more than a supplier of natural resources to China’s industrial machine—a humiliating position for a country that until recently saw China as backward. As long as Russia could sell to Europe all the gas required to keep the Russian economy growing, it could put deals with China on hold. These included plans for two gas pipelines from Siberia into China that were announced in 2006 and then quietly dropped as the two sides bickered over prices.
> 
> All that has changed. The Ukrainian crisis is, as Russian media put it, forcing Russia to “pivot” its economy towards Asia in an effort to lessen the impact of Western sanctions by finding alternative markets and sources of capital. For China it is a golden opportunity to gain greater access to Russia’s natural resources, at favourable prices, as well as to secure access to big infrastructure contracts that might have gone to Western competitors and to provide financing for projects that will benefit Chinese firms.
> 
> In theory, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and its seizure of Crimea violate two of China’s most consistently held foreign-policy tenets: non-interference in other states and separatism of any kind. But China abstained from voting on the UN Security Council resolutions condemning Russia, while Chinese media have given Russia strong support. China has quietly welcomed a new cold war in Europe that might distract America from its declared “rebalancing” towards Asia.
> 
> Striking evidence of the new closeness between China and Russia was a $400 billion gas deal signed in May last year under which Russia will supply China with 38 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas annually from 2018 for 30 years. At China’s insistence, the gas will come from new fields in eastern Siberia and will pass through an as yet unbuilt pipeline—the better for ensuring that it will not be diverted elsewhere. Other deals have followed. The biggest was a preliminary agreement signed in November for Russia to sell an additional 30 bcm a year through a proposed pipeline from western Siberia. In every instance it is probable that China was able to drive a hard bargain on price.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Russia’s weakness was also clear in its recent decision to resume high-tech arms exports to China. In April it agreed to sell China an air-defence system, the S-400, for about $3 billion. This will help give China dominance of the air over Taiwan and the Senkaku islands (Diaoyu to the Chinese, who dispute Japan’s claim to them). In November Russia said it was prepared to sell China its latest Sukhoi-35S combat aircraft. Initially it had refused to sell any fewer than 48, in order to make up for losses it calculated it would suffer as a result of China’s inevitable pilfering of the designs. Now it has meekly agreed to sell only 24.
> 
> But problems ahead are discernible. One is that both countries are competing for influence in Central Asia, once Russia’s backyard (Mr Xi was due to head there before proceeding to Moscow). Mr Putin wants to establish his Eurasian Economic Union partly to counter growing Chinese economic power in Central Asia, through which China wants to develop what it calls a Silk Road Economic Belt. China is using the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), of which Russia and Central Asian nations are also members, to boost its security ties in the region as well: it often holds counter-terrorism exercises with its SCO partners. Another difficulty is Russia’s military and energy links with countries such as India and Vietnam, both of which are rivals of China. But the biggest problem of all may be Russia’s irritation with being forced into an increasingly subservient role in its relations with China. For Russia the partnership with China has become painfully necessary. For China it is nice to have, but far from essential.




The _balance_, it appears to me, is all in China's favour ...


----------



## Kirkhill

China now has a "Near-Abroad" that extends to the Ukrainian border.....

How much of the Old Soviet would China be willing to sacrifice for good trade relations?

And with Russia's high tech WW2 arsenal stalling on parade and bursting into flames .... well, while I don't like Chinese manufactured industrial goods because they are shoddy, many people do like them and they work.  I would expect the Chinese arsenal to work.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My _sense _of the the Chinese is that many are quite _isolationist_: I have heard, several times, educated Chinese people suggest that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Qing dynasty bit off more than China needed to chew by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang provinces. Many Chinese _appear to believe_ that they would be a lot better off if both _Autonomous Regions_ were independent (_client_) states like Mongolia.

I've mentioned this before, but maybe it helps illustrate what I mean: in most Chinese schools there is a large world map in the main hallway; often these maps are mosaic representations or paintings and not to wholly accurate scale. Chine is always in the very centre - detailed in bright red with gold highlights. The lands bordering China are shaded in lighter reds and then orange and yellow as one gets into European Russia and the Middle East. Great Britain and Western Europe are, usually, a nice, pleasant green, and Canada, Australia and America are often blue or blue-green. The maps indicate that China is, indeed, the centre of the world, but it also indicates that everywhere else is foreign and, most likely, _barbarian_ or, at least, less civilized than China.

I _think_ China wants to _dominate_ Asia, but I _doubt_ it has any real _expansionist_ ambitions. The Chinese will be wiling to pay a fair, but toughly negotiated price for Russia's natural resources and the Chinese will not tolerate any failures to deliver. They want _tribute_, but in a _soft power_ sense, from all of Sinic Asia which includes, if the maps on the school walls are any indication, Central and Eastern Siberia ~ remember what I've said before about the Yenisey River being the border between Central Asia and East Asia and the Himalayas being the border between South Asia and East (Sinic) Asia. Geography make life fairly simple for the Chinese as long as everyone understands that Sinic Asia extends from Singapore all the way up to the Laptev Sea.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> The reunification of China ought to be easy: a significant share of the Taiwanese Chinese (as opposed to the native, ethnic Formosans), probably a solid majority, wants to rejoin China but, as you say, on their own terms.



Not so fast, take note that Taiwan's _benshengren_ (native, non-aboriginal, ethnically Han Chinese "Formosans") still outnumber the _waishengren_ on the island, which explains why Taiwan parties who distrust the mainland, like the DPP, still have influence in the legislative yuan.  

The ff. article also points out the history of the post-war Sunflower student movement, which helped to shape a distinct Taiwanese identity separate from China.

Diplomat



> *Taiwan: Cross-Strait Relations and the 2016 Elections*
> 
> Both the ruling and opposition parties need to navigate some tricky waters ahead of next year’s presidential elections.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Third, Ma’s policy of engaging China also produced two outcomes that many found disturbing. On the one hand, the promotion of cross-strait exchange over the past seven years created the unintended consequence of accelerating people’s detachment from the Mainland. The frequent cross-strait exchanges – more than 10 million Chinese tourists have visited Taiwan since 2008 – have allowed people in Taiwan to personally witness the difference between themselves and Mainland Chinese.* On the other hand, some Taiwanese have started to worry that the Ma administration is leaning “too close” to Beijing: *The rapid pace of exchanges that started with economic and people-to-people interactions seven years ago appear to portend an early start to Taiwan’s political negotiations with the Mainland. To hold the government in check, Sunflower student protesters called on the government to halt the enforcement of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement before the government creates and passes a uniform supervisory bill covering all cross-strait agreements.
> 
> Finally, the Sunflower Student Movement reflected the rise of a Taiwanese national identity.* According to a recent poll conducted by the Taiwan Brain Trust in February 2015, if given the option of being “Taiwanese” or “Chinese,” 89.5 percent of the respondents would identify themselves as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese.”* This result is not just fallout from the March protest, but is part of a steady trend over recent decades. Annual polls by National Cheng-chi University’s Election Study Center in Taiwan shows that the number of people who would identify themselves as Chinese has dropped from 10.5 percent in 1992 to 3.5 percent in 2014, while the number of people identifying themselves as Taiwanese has grown from 17.6 percent to 60.4 percent in 2014. In contrast to public doubts about the KMT’s engaging China policy, the rising Taiwanese identity and dwindling Chinese identity in Taiwan appear to accord with the DPP’s pro-independence policy, which potentially expands the DPP’s public support for the presidential election in 2016.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kirkhill

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> My _sense _of the the Chinese is that many are quite _isolationist_: I have heard, several times, educated Chinese people suggest that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Qing dynasty bit off more than China needed to chew by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang provinces. Many Chinese _appear to believe_ that they would be a lot better off if both _Autonomous Regions_ were independent (_client_) states like Mongolia.
> 
> I've mentioned this before, but maybe it helps illustrate what I mean: in most Chinese schools there is a large world map in the main hallway; often these maps are mosaic representations or paintings and not to wholly accurate scale. Chine is always in the very centre - detailed in bright red with gold highlights. The lands bordering China are shaded in lighter reds and then orange and yellow as one gets into European Russia and the Middle East. Great Britain and Western Europe are, usually, a nice, pleasant green, and Canada, Australia and America are often blue or blue-green. The maps indicate that China is, indeed, the centre of the world, but it also indicates that everywhere else is foreign and, most likely, _barbarian_ or, at least, less civilized than China.
> 
> I _think_ China wants to _dominate_ Asia, but I _doubt_ it has any real _expansionist_ ambitions. The Chinese will be wiling to pay a fair, but toughly negotiated price for Russia's natural resources and the Chinese will not tolerate any failures to deliver. They want _tribute_, but in a _soft power_ sense, from all of Sinic Asia which includes, if the maps on the school walls are any indication, Central and Eastern Siberia ~ remember what I've said before about the Yenisey River being the border between Central Asia and East Asia and the Himalayas being the border between South Asia and East (Sinic) Asia. Geography make life fairly simple for the Chinese as long as everyone understands that Sinic Asia extends from Singapore all the way up to the Laptev Sea.



Very interesting.

Back in Mao's day the discourse coming out of China often included the word hegemony.  Both in terms of the US and China.  I never understood the niceness of the work back then.  It was for me just a synonym for empire. Now, after reading your explanation, I believe I see the reason for the nicety.  I wonder if China differentiates between the eras of the Honourable East India Company - Jardine & Matheson - Raffles and the later Victorian era of Gladstonian Empire (post-1857)?

Also, with respect to colour, I understand that colour in China hold specific significance.  White for Death and Red for Prosperity come to mind.  Do Blue and Green hold any particular meaning?  Do they reflect merely the absence of Chinese Prosperity?  Or are they perceived as something more inimical?  Yin and Yang?

Any chance you can turn up one of these maps and post it?


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Not so fast, take note that Taiwan's _benshengren_ (native, non-aboriginal, ethnically Han Chinese "Formosans") still outnumber the _waishengren_ on the island, which explains why Taiwan parties who distrust the mainland, like the DPP, still have influence in the legislative yuan.
> 
> The ff. article also points out the history of the post-war Sunflower student movement, which helped to shape a distinct Taiwanese identity separate from China.
> 
> Diplomat



I acknowledge and agree that there is considerable resistance to reunification in Taiwan. But, that being accepted, _I believe_ it, reunification, is going to happen ... peacefully.

I _think_ that part, not a huge part but a part, all the same, of the rationale for the anti-corruption campaign is to purge the hardliners, especially from the military, who are tied, closely, to Jiang Zemin and the _Shanghai Gang_. (Now, it's important to understand that Xi Jinping was _associated_ with, but not considered part of, Jiang's _faction_ within the CCP ~ but it was Hi Jintao who made him party chief in Shanghai (2006) and then appointed him Party Secretary (2007).) I _suspect_ that purging the hardliners is a necessary precondition to reforming (liberalizing) HK's political system and offering it as a model to Taiwan.


----------



## tomahawk6

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I acknowledge and agree that there is considerable resistance to reunification in Taiwan. But, that being accepted, _I believe_ it, reunification, is going to happen ... peacefully.
> 
> I _think_ that part, not a huge part but a part, all the same, of the rationale for the anti-corruption campaign is to purge the hardliners, especially from the military, who are tied, closely, to Jiang Zemin and the _Shanghai Gang_. (Now, it's important to understand that Xi Jinping was _associated_ with, but not considered part of, Jiang's _faction_ within the CCP ~ but it was Hi Jintao who made him party chief in Shanghai (2006) and then appointed him Party Secretary (2007).) I _suspect_ that purging the hardliners is a necessary precondition to reforming (liberalizing) HK's political system and offering it as a model to Taiwan.



I don't see reunification with a communist China.This is not Hong Kong after all.Perhaps if the CP collapses in favor of a democratic system there could be reunification.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I don't see reunification with a communist China.This is not Hong Kong after all.Perhaps if the CP collapses in favor of a democratic system there could be reunification.




The chances of the CCP collapsing are poor.

Democracy, as we think of it, is bit of a delicate, hothouse flower. It can transplant (Japan, Taiwan and Singapore all have local variants) but it's not _natural_ for a Confucian culture.

Hong Kong has, in many, many respects a qualitatively "better" _government_ than does the USA: more open, much more honest, supremely more competent and fully respectful of civil and property rights. Taiwan is still "too American:" too much political chicanery, too much bureaucratic corruption, too little "peace, order and good government," to quote our Constitution.*

Democracy is a wonderful system but many, many well educated Chinese believe, firmly, that it is not the best system; they _think_ (just _hope_?) that their 2,500 year old quest for a meritocracy can be brought to fruition with a sufficiently well educated, socially cohesive and well educated population.

_____
* See § 91:

                 91. It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada, in relation to all
                       Matters not coming within the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces ...


----------



## tomahawk6

Edward my problem with the PRC is that they are still communist,albeit with a capitalist slant.I would not wish to live in such a system.I like the people just not their government.

China is looking to use Dijibouti as a naval base along with France and the US.

http://www.stripes.com/news/africa/china-looks-to-join-us-france-with-military-base-in-djibouti-1.345715


----------



## CougarKing

Taiwan's subs in the spotlight again; the approach taken towards this subject by Taiwan's 2 foremost parties, the DPP and the KMT/GMD, would be able to give a better idea how each party would handle defence policy (vis-a-vis China) in general.

The DPP was the only opposition party to ever beat the KMT/GMD and take power during Chen-Shui Bian was president from 2002-2008. With the Guomindang now back in power under Ma-Jing Jieou, the DPP currently has 40 out of 113 seats in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan.

Diplomat



> *Taiwan’s Submarine Saga
> 
> The Indigenous Defense Submarines program has had a long and convoluted history.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> Intentions of the KMT and DPP
> 
> Legislator Lin Yu-fang’s long advocacy for the submarines procurement program clearly reflects the Kuomintang’s (KMT) stance. Lin submitted a joint proposal that was endorsed by 130 Legislative Yuan members, which said *“the Executive Yuan should express its strong position and request the United States to help Taiwan build six of the eight submarines domestically through technology transfer.* MND and the Navy will have the support of the Legislative Yuan as long as the  policy of building submarines domestically is fully implemented, otherwise the entire budget will be frozen.” There has been no significant policy change since this legislative proposal was approved on May 24, 2002. However, the program has stalled since Ma Ying-jeou became president in 2008, hamstrung by differing views over IDS.
> 
> *Compared to the KMT, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is more proactive on the IDS program. In the DPP’s Fifth Defense Policy Blue Paper, China’s Military Threats against Taiwan in 2025, released in March 2014, then-Party Chairman Su Tseng-chang called for a concept of “two-stage indigenous production of submarines.” *Six months later, the DPP published its Seventh Defense Policy Blue Paper, Bolstering Taiwan’s Core Defense Industries, which was endorsed by Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen. It offered a more detailed description of the concept. The DPP set out a number of viewpoints:



Part of the DPP's plan for the sub program had they stayed in power:



> *Stage one of this project will use life extension and reverse engineering of the current ZWAARDVIS-class submarine to maintain Taiwan’s submarine force, and to increase the industry’s experience and confidence.* Life extension and reverse engineering should be conducted simultaneously. The life extension of two vessels as well as the production of two additional vessels through reverse engineering should be completed six to eight years into the project. The extended ZWAARDVIS-class submarines will then replace the current GUPPY-class submarines as training vessels.
> 
> *The goal of stage two is to design and produce six or more submarines of 1500-ton surface displacement to form a fleet of eight and establish a sufficient submarine force, and to increase Taiwan’s submarine building capacity*. Once the project is initiated (projected at 2017), production of a new submarine will start every three years. The first submarine will be completed approximately eight to ten years after the program launch (between 2025 and 2027), completing the production of six submarines in 23 to 25 years (between 2040 and 2042).
> 
> The estimated cost for both stages is between NT$350 to $400 billion (US$11.5 to 13.1 billion). With the projected 23-years timeframe, an estimated NT$17.3 billion (US$567.6 million) will be required each year.


----------



## CougarKing

An option that would overwhelm China's neighbours with competing claims in the South China Sea?

Diplomat



> *Will Beijing Deploy 42,000 Drones to Secure the South China Sea?
> 
> American experts stress that China will deploy most of its growing fleet of UAVs locally.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> “China is advancing its development and employment of UAVs. Some estimates indicate China plans to produce upwards of 41,800 land- and sea-based unmanned systems, worth about $10.5 billion, between 2014 and 2023,” the Pentagon notes. The report continues:
> 
> In 2013, China unveiled details of four UAVs under development — the Xianglong, Yilong, Sky Saber, and Lijian — the last three of which are designed to carry precision-strike capable weapons. The Lijian, which first flew on November 21, 2013, is China’s first stealthy flying wing UAV.
> 
> Over at Breaking Defense, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. interviewed Paul Scharre, an expert on emerging weapon technologies, and Kelley Sayler, a research associate at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) to shed some more light on the Pentagon’s assessment of China’s burgeoning fleet of UAVs.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Just a reminder.Drones require bandwidth which would require a satellite system that the PRC lacks at the moment to operate 42000 drones.


----------



## CougarKing

"The holy grail" of the anti-corruption drive:

Diplomat



> *Is China's 'Sunshine Law' Within Reach?
> How close is China to the holy grail of anti-corruption: asset declaration for officials?*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Once the average civil servant realizes that anti-corruption is going to continue, China finally has a chance to see the “unspoken rules” torn down and replaced by fairness and justice. Even now, they are starting to support Xi’s anti-corruption.
> 
> *Of course, those officers who support anti-corruption policy belong to a certain category: civil servants with ambitions and aspirations who nonetheless are not willing to associate with evil doers and seek ill-gotten gains*. When the anti-corruption campaign first started, these officials were suspicious and even afraid. It anti-corruption came to a sudden halt, those civil servants who actively cooperated with the effort would face serious consequences. To gain their cooperation Xi first had to “draw the snake from its hole” – to reassure them to make them poke their heads out. Now, two years have passed, and these potential allies are feeling restless – they’ve seen the corrupt officials they hated all along be taken down, and the corrupt they hate so much is being clean up by the central government. Suddenly, these civil servants see an opportunity and hope – they begin to become more active.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Just a reminder.Drones require bandwidth which would require a satellite system that the PRC lacks at the moment to operate 42000 drones.



It doesn't have to be a satellite ...







A tethered _aerostat_ at Naval Air Station Key West
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/googles-balloon-based-wireless-networks-may-not-be-a-crazy-idea/








UK Helikite Commerciual Grade System
http://www.allsopphelikites.com/index.php?mod=page&id_pag=45


----------



## Bird_Gunner45

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Just a reminder.Drones require bandwidth which would require a satellite system that the PRC lacks at the moment to operate 42000 drones.



They only require bandwith if they are HALE/MALE UAS that are operating outside of the line of sight of the ground station. So, 42000 drones operating from ground stations utilizing long loiter times and long range line of sight in mainland china could entirely be operated to partol the China Sea or anywhere along the coast (not at the same time likely due to signals deconfliction, but I digress). From China a UAV could easily be launched to patrol over Japan or Taiwan with zero requirement for a sattelite (aside from the GPS signal). If they want their UAVs to go to the US west coast, Australia, etc than yes, they require a sattelite.


----------



## CougarKing

So they're modifying their J31 so it can be like the F-35B?  

UPI -  

May 13, 2015 other source: Reuters


> *China developing STOVL naval aircraft *
> 
> In late March, the Aviation Industry Corp of China -- China's leading aircraft maker -- announced that subsidiaries AVIC Chengdu Engine Group and China Aviation Engine Establishment signed an agreement to cooperate on development of an engine for a STOVL aircraft.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> This reported STOVL aircraft development project is not the first time China has looked at such an aircraft. The People's Liberation Army asked the country's aircraft institutes to develop a STOVL platform but later abandoned the idea because of technical difficulties.
> 
> The PLA also tried to buy Britain's Hawker Siddley Harrier jet in the late 1970s but found the costs prohibitive, the newspaper said, quoting unidentified Western military observers.


----------



## CougarKing

The South China Sea and China's "rare earths" industry in the news again...

China hoping to set up an ADIZ in the South China Sea?

Reuters



> *U.S., China set for high-stakes rivalry in skies above South China Sea*
> Fri May 15, 2015 6:03am EDT
> 
> By Greg Torode
> 
> HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the U.S. navy sent a littoral combat ship on its first patrol of the disputed Spratly islands in the South China Sea during the past week, it was watching the skies as well.
> 
> The USS Fort Worth, one of the most modern ships in the U.S. navy, dispatched a reconnaissance drone and a Seahawk helicopter to patrol the airspace, according to a little-noticed statement on the navy's website.
> 
> While the navy didn't mention China's rapid land reclamation in the Spratlys, the ship's actions were a demonstration of U.S. capabilities in the event Beijing declares an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the area - a move experts and some U.S. military officials see as increasingly likely.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)




Btw, isn't Canada another notable source of "rare earths" in the world?



> *How China Threw Its Rare Earths Monopoly Away*
> By Ed Dolan
> 15 hours ago
> 
> 
> When China threatened an embargo. Prices of REEs soared. However, the erosion of China’s dominance of REEs holds important lessons for all supposed natural monopolies.
> 
> The first clue should have been that rare elements are not really rare. All seventeen rare earth elements are more abundant in the earth’s crust than gold, and some of them are as abundant as lead. The thing that makes them hard to mine is the fact that they do not occur in highly concentrated deposits like gold and lead.
> 
> On the demand side, REEs turned out to be not quite as irreplaceable in high-tech products as it seemed at first. At least in many cases, producers use REE-dependent technologies not because they are the only way to do something.
> 
> The bottom line: China still has a large market share - around 70 percent, Gholz estimates - but its apparent natural monopoly proved illusory. Its attempts to turn REEs into an economic weapon by exploiting low short-run elasticities only accelerated the development of alternative sources and new technologies.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Yahoo Finance*


----------



## The Bread Guy

Unified theory of the "ball" China's keeping its eye on?




Source


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_ is a report on China's efforts to "defuse the tensions" caused by its island building projects:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c41c9f8a-fbae-11e4-b75b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3aOCOZMqq
My *emphasis* added


> China and US seek to defuse maritime tensions
> 
> Tom Mitchell in Beijing
> 
> May 16, 2015
> 
> China and the US sought to defuse growing tensions over land reclamation projects in the South China Sea on Saturday, with Beijing’s foreign minister expressing confidence that the disputes could be settled peacefully.
> 
> But Wang Yi refused to budge from the Chinese government’s position that the construction of airstrips and other infrastructure on reefs and islets contested by the Philippines and Vietnam “is something that falls fully within the scope of China’s sovereignty”.
> 
> “China’s determination to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity is as firm as a rock and is unshakeable,” Mr Wang added. “China and the US do have differences on the South China Sea issue but we also both hope to maintain peace and stability in the region and are committed to international freedom of navigation.”
> 
> Mr Wang was speaking at a briefing with his US counterpart, John Kerry, who is paying his first visit to the Chinese capital since the two countries’ presidents signed breakthrough environmental and military communication accords in November. Bilateral relations have, however, since been tested by satellite photos showing the extent of Chinese building activity in the South China Sea.
> 
> “I urged China to take actions that will join with everybody in helping to reduce tensions and increase the prospect of a diplomatic solution,” Mr Kerry said. “I think we agreed that the region needs smart diplomacy . . . and not outposts and military airstrips.”
> 
> Mr Kerry declined to confirm recent reports that the US military would send air and naval patrols close to islets and reefs on which China is building fortifications. Mr Wang also declined to comment on how Beijing would respond to such patrols.
> 
> Chinese officials and analysts have argued that they are merely catching up with rival claimants such as the Philippines and Vietnam, which have also fortified islets claimed by Beijing.
> 
> “The Chinese government has restrained itself,” said Shen Dingli at Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies in Shanghai. “Our islands are still controlled by others, but we are not using force to take them back.”
> 
> Other analysts, however, point to what they feel is a deliberate effort by Beijing to slowly but surely take control of contested areas.
> 
> “Beijing’s behaviour alternates between assertive, at time aggressive, actions to gain control of islands and waters and ameliorating gestures to lower tensions and consolidate gains,” analysts for the International Crisis Group wrote in a recent report. “Xi Jinping’s foreign policy style has been characterised by soothing words but assertive actions on the ground, creating confusion among both external and internal observers.”
> 
> _Additional reporting by Wan Li_




Although the article headline says "China and US seeks to defuse tensions ..." _my sense_, based on what I've read, is that Secretary Kerry was blustering, and bluster is, _in my opinion_, the worst possible approach to take with China. This is not the 1790s, or mid 19th century, John Kerry is not Lord Macartney nor is Barak Obama's early 21st century America equivalent to Queen Victoria's imperial Britain. Tactics need to suit the "ground," and the _ground_ in Asia is far, far different than it was 200 years ago. The Chinese will not be pushed on issues of its perceived "sovereignty and territorial integrity," but it can, I believe, be pulled into mutually accetable arrangements with its East Asian neighbours and their American "protector."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Michael Mazza of the American Enterprise Institute opines, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The National Interest_, that America should "stand up to China," in the South China Seas:

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/time-stand-china-the-south-china-sea-12902


> Time to Stand Up to China in the South China Sea
> 
> Michael Mazza
> 
> May 17, 2015
> 
> It has been more than fifty years since baseball legend Yogi Berra last took the field as a player, but the wisdom of many of his “Yogiisms” remains evident—even for the realm of international politics. On Tuesday—incidentally, the Hall of Famer’s 90th birthday—the _Wall Street Journal_ reported that the Pentagon “is considering using aircraft and Navy ships to directly contest Chinese territorial claims to a chain of rapidly expanding artificial islands, U.S. officials said, in a move that would raise the stakes in a regional showdown over who controls disputed waters in the South China Sea.”
> 
> Were Yogi secretly an Asia hand, he might have remarked that it’s déjà vu all over again. In April 2014, the _Journal_ similarly reported that “the U.S. military has prepared options for a muscular response to any future Chinese provocations in the South and East China seas” and that “any new moves in the region by China to assert its claims unilaterally would be met by an American military challenge intended to get Beijing to back down.”
> 
> 
> By that time, as we now know, China’s land-reclamation efforts in the South China Sea were already underway. Perhaps the Obama administration was hoping the revelation of new military plans would dissuade Beijing from moving forward, but Xi Jinping was clearly undeterred. Indeed, later that week, China sent a massive oil rig into disputed waters in a blatantly unilateral move to assert its sovereignty.
> 
> (Recommended: Is America Still a Military Superpower?)
> 
> Fast-forward a year, and China has now reclaimed land on seven features in the South China Sea. It has been building islands out of reefs and then structures atop those islands, likely including military facilities. Beijing has created new facts on the ground—heck, it’s created new ground—and, in doing so, has created conditions in which it will be far more difficult for its leaders to compromise. It is unlikely that U.S. or broader international pressure will convince China to reverse the steps that it has taken, for to do so would weaken the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s position both at home and abroad.
> 
> (Recommended: How America Would Wage War Against Iran)
> 
> Paradoxically, now that Xi Jinping has less wiggle room to significantly alter his approach to the disputed territories, the United States announces it is finally considering steps—beyond strongly worded statements—to defend its interests in the South China Sea. Those interests include freedom of the seas and skies and maintenance of regional peace and stability.
> 
> The Chinese, of course, are alarmed. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying described the potential U.S. moves as “risky and provocative.” But should the White House decide to proceed with the Pentagon plans, it would hardly be escalatory. China’s decisions to build islands, to use naval frigates to secure its dredgers and to fortify the new outputs—these are escalatory steps, and ones to which a military response is appropriate.
> 
> Imagine that the United States had anchored a series of oil rigs off China’s coastline, not far outside Chinese territorial waters, and then festooned those oil rigs with air and missile defenses, Tomahawks and destroyer berths. Imagine then that Washington had asserted that those oil rigs were entitled to their own territorial waters and airspace over which the United States had sovereignty. Such is an imperfect but illustrative metaphor for Chinese actions in the Spratly archipelago. The American delay in reacting does not change the fact that China opted for a confrontational course of action that would inevitably tempt crisis.
> 
> (Recommended: China Would Defeat America in a War?)
> 
> In this case, fortunately, American action is better late than never. Although the new islands are almost certain to remain, U.S. action can serve three ends. First, a newly muscular approach from Washington could lead Xi to moderate China’s behavior—Beijing might avoid new dredging and could, for example, decide to station coast guard vessels instead of frigates in its freshly dug harbors.
> 
> Second, although U.S. allies and partners have generally welcomed the Obama administration’s “rebalance” to Asia, they have been skeptical about Washington’s commitment to its security guarantees and to its traditional role as custodian of peace in the region. A new willingness to stand up to Beijing in a meaningful way—a readiness that has been noticeably absent over the past year—would calm nerves in allied capitals.
> 
> Third, by flying over those features not deemed to be islands prior to reclamation and by sailing within 12 nautical miles of those erstwhile reefs, the United States military will defend freedom of the seas and over-flight. Doing so is important for the Air Force and Navy’s ability to operate freely in not only the South China Sea, but also globally. Adverse changes to norms of behavior and to traditional interpretations of international law cannot be confined to one corner of the globe.




One vital factor, _in my opinion_, is that neither America nor China can "win" against the other, save in an all out (and incredibly stupid) nuclear exchange. Our colleague Thucydides has explained this often enough using the _elephant vs whale_ or _tiger vs shark analogies_. The two giants live in different realms: America owns the seas, it can sweep China off them, up to a point, but China owns the Asian land mass and American cannot fight, much less ever hope to win a war against China on the Asian landmass.

One other factor: China is, in my _quesstimation_, willing to play "bumper  cars" in the South China seas with ships and aircraft. The Chinese would not be terribly unhappy if an American aircraft shot down a Chinese one or if an American ship sunk a Chinese vessel ... they would lie about the causes and so on but many, many, many (a solid majority) of the world's peoples would belive the lie. And how, in the current climate of partisan _culture wars_, would America react when China sunk a US ship in retaliation by 'accident?' The Chinese would, I think,  actually welcome an attack by the USA because the Chinese know that as long as they remain "at home," including in coastal waters, they cannot lose ~ they might not win but they will not lose.

I have no objection to America "standing up" to China, in fact, if there was adult leadership in the White House, the Congress or the Pentagon, it might be a good idea ... but there isn't and there is nothing on the politcal horizon to suggest there might be in the near to medium term. "Standing up to China," if organized by the current political, bureaucratic and military clowns, will backfire.


----------



## chanman

The problem with the idea of the US confronting China over those maritime happenings is that the US has no stake in the matter. The fish will still be caught and the oil pumped whether the trawlers pay their taxes to Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, Manila, or Hanoi, and those resources will still be making their impact onto the commodity markets (whether by being exported or by reducing national demand for imports is irrelevant).

As for who has enough skin in the game to ante up to actual confrontation... I notice that the PLAAF's aggressor squadron (flying Su-30s) are painted up to mimic Vietnam's own Su-30s and not anyone else's big fighters - all the other Flanker/Eagle operators paint their aircraft grey.




			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I acknowledge and agree that there is considerable resistance to reunification in Taiwan. But, that being accepted, _I believe_ it, reunification, is going to happen ... peacefully.



They may even never reunify, but I think China will (if it does not already have) the economy leverage to bring Taiwan to heel if they are willing to play hardball* (and that's a phase that would need to be passed through something as deliberate and risky as an invasion).

200,000 Taiwanese live and work in China. Taiwan's biggest firms have lots of capital invested as well. Even if it cared to, the US** would be hard-pressed to prop up Taiwan the way the USSR propped up Cuba. Many of Taiwan's industries like semiconductors are integrated parts of the global supply chain*** that almost inevitably passes through China.

* I don't even mean in the sense of hostage taking or expropriating Taiwanese assets. Just levying more and more passive-aggressive bureaucratic red tape on companies that use Taiwanese suppliers and giving preferential treatment to those that don't would go a long way. 

** No one else has any particular ties to or reasons for solidarity with Taiwan unless you count Japan as the ex-colonial master, especially since their own economies stand to benefit from the shift in supply chains. Samsung chips instead of TSMC for instance

*** Someone always suggests that Taiwan goes it alone. There are very few countries that exist mostly outside the global economy, and they tend to be dirt poor. Unless they seal their borders, the predictable outcome tends to be everyone capable of leaving looking for opportunities that don't involve a subsistence or near-subsistence existence


----------



## chanman

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Michael Mazza of the American Enterprise Institute opines, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The National Interest_, that America should "stand up to China," in the South China Seas:
> 
> http://nationalinterest.org/feature/time-stand-china-the-south-china-sea-12902
> 
> One vital factor, _in my opinion_, is that neither America nor China can "win" against the other, save in an all out (and incredibly stupid) nuclear exchange. Our colleague Thucydides has explained this often enough using the _elephant vs whale_ or _tiger vs shark analogies_. The two giants live in different realms: America owns the seas, it can sweep China off them, up to a point, but China owns the Asian land mass and American cannot fight, much less ever hope to win a war against China on the Asian landmass.
> 
> One other factor: China is, in my _quesstimation_, willing to play "bumper  cars" in the South China seas with ships and aircraft. The Chinese would not be terribly unhappy if an American aircraft shot down a Chinese one or if an American ship sunk a Chinese vessel ... they would lie about the causes and so on but many, many, many (a solid majority) of the world's peoples would belive the lie. And how, in the current climate of partisan _culture wars_, would America react when China sunk a US ship in retaliation by 'accident?' The Chinese would, I think,  actually welcome an attack by the USA because the Chinese know that as long as they remain "at home," including in coastal waters, they cannot lose ~ they might not win but they will not lose.
> 
> I have no objection to America "standing up" to China, in fact, if there was adult leadership in the White House, the Congress or the Pentagon, it might be a good idea ... but there isn't and there is nothing on the politcal horizon to suggest there might be in the near to medium term. "Standing up to China," if organized by the current political, bureaucratic and military clowns, will backfire.



I prefer the sports analogy, US activity in the area isn't just an away game, it's an exhibition game, possibly even in a different league. For China (or Vietnam, or whoever's claim it is depending on which island we're talking about), these are home games and it's the playoffs. The US might have a definite advantage - say, a great NHL team playing against a team in the KHL or SEL (the top level Swedish league). The NHL team is more talented, better coached, better equipped, but they're jet-lagged, the rink is an unfamiliar size, the rules are slightly different, and the locals are hungrier.

Also, the next most assertive country in the area is (still officially communist) Vietnam and the most likely to end up fighting with China over (as they've done a few times in the past) and I'm not sure that's a particularly politically viable sell job in the US. Especially not if Vietnam's disputes with the Philippines also heat up and Taiwan backs China's claims.


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> My _impression_ ~ and I really need to emphasise that word ~ is that the conduct and privileges of the _princelings_ is a cause (more than just a symptom) of real, measurable dissatisfaction among ordinary Chinese people, including at least some Party members.
> 
> Most Chines people, the ones that I know, anyway, including those who are in the Party and who work in the government, want to live quiet, peaceful, productive and (increasingly) prosperous lives ~ just like most of us. Most Chinese people, Party members and soldiers included, are honest, hard working, very family oriented folks who work hard (and honestly) and expect to be treated reasonably fairly. Most Chinese people that I have met expect a certain amount of capriciousness from the government, and they are not surprised when Chinese officials, like their Canadian counterparts, feel "entitled to their entitlements;" but they really want Xi Jinping's attack on corruption to work.
> 
> I don't know how far Xi Jinping wants to push the anti-corruption campaign. My _guess_ is that he wants to purge the top levels of the PLA and the bureaucracy (national and provincial) of the supports and allies of his opponents (real, immediate and potential). That _guess_ is based on a _hunch_ that Xi Jinping does not intend to resign at the end of his nominal ten year term in office. I _suspect_ he wants to stay in office for as long as it takes to become another Deng Xiaoping: someone who fundamentally changes China, for the better. My _feeling_ is that a more honest, more transparent, better governed China is part of his "master plan."
> 
> I think that cracking down on the _princelings_, and their wealthy parents, may be part of the larger project; in _my opinion_ it would be a very popular part.




More on Xi Jinping's anti-corruption camaping in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/92bb8134-02a4-11e5-b31d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3bA7m15Gb


> China uses prison visits to scare officials straight
> 
> Charles Clover in Beijing
> 
> May 25, 2015
> 
> Chinese officials are being sent on prison visits in a new, “scared-straight” approach to warn them of the perils of bribe-taking.
> This month 70 officials from central Hubei province met former colleagues serving sentences for corruption during a day spent touring the inside of a local prison.
> 
> Under President Xi Jinping, China has undertaken the largest anti-corruption crackdown in decades in an effort to clean up the sprawling Communist party bureaucracy.
> 
> Mr Xi has vowed to tackle high-ranking “tigers” as well as lowly “flies”. More than 100 high-ranking officials have been placed under investigation for corruption since 2012, while tens of thousands of lower-level officials have been arrested.
> 
> The party’s draconian Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which is spearheading the corruption campaign and has organised the prison visits nationwide, said they were part of an “educational approach” to fighting corruption.
> 
> The tours featured visits of former officials now languishing in jail, such as Lu Xingguo, former head of land resources in Hubei’s Fang district, who used to be nicknamed “the three-plenty secretary . . . plenty of buddies, plenty of gambling parties and plenty of cash”, according to the Qinchu Web, a provincial party-affiliated news website.
> 
> “The three-plenty secretary reminds all cadres to be mindful of their social circles, to purify their circle of friends and to rectify their work relationships,” the article quoted the tour guide as saying.
> 
> Participants reportedly met 15 former colleagues who are now behind bars, who admonished them to steer clear of a life of crime and to educate themselves about public service to avoid suffering the same fate.
> “I will take this as a lesson, and always be on my guard,” the newspaper quoted the head of one municipality as saying. “I must not err when it comes to self-discipline and integrity.”
> 
> However, the public, largely a jeering bystander on the sidelines of top-level party intrigue, found much to laugh at in the prison-visit scheme.
> 
> Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, was rife with ridicule on Monday.
> 
> “For them this is just a theme party. They are all thinking about where to go to have a banquet after cleansing their souls,” said one Weibo user, going by the handle Ladycheng.
> 
> In other provinces, prison tours similar to those in Hubei have been supplemented by visits to military bases, where officials and their spouses dress up in People’s Liberation Army Uniforms and chant revolutionary slogans.




It will take more than playing "Mr Dressup" and chanting slogans to reform China ... punitive measures need to be used at all levels and they need to be seen to be being used. Something like Southern US "chain gangs" where former officials, convicted of corruption, can be seen to be sweeping streets or carrying loads iof bricks, under guard, would help ... (public punishment was and still is normal in China)


----------



## PPCLI Guy

China issued a White Paper on their new Military Strategy today.  It makes for some interesting reading....

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2015-05/26/c_134271001.htm


----------



## Edward Campbell

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> China issued a White Paper on their new Military Strategy today.  It makes for some interesting reading....
> 
> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2015-05/26/c_134271001.htm




_First reaction_:

Page 2 is interesting: it recycles Xi Jinping's "Four Comprehensives", firmly aligning the White Paper with Xi's own socio-political _doctrine_, it then goes on to list "strategic tasks" that would not be out of place for America, Britain or even Canada.

On page 3, the principles of "active defence," especially _"To endeavor to seize the strategic initiative in military struggle, proactively plan for military struggle in all directions and domains, and grasp the opportunities to accelerate military building, reform and development," _ should tell us that China will push harder and farther in East Asia. The aim, as I see it, is to neutralize and even roll back America's _Pacific Pivot_.

Page 4 is _revolutionary_ for China, _I think_. This looks like building an offensively capable, _expeditionary_ force that can do more than just protect and promote China's vital interests, it can impose China's will far from the homeland ... just as 19th century Britain did and 20th/21st century America does.

On page 5 I see some military common sense: _"Pushing ahead with logistics modernization. China's armed forces will deepen logistics reform in relevant policies, institutions and support forces, and optimize strategic logistics deployment. They will innovate the modes of support, develop new support means, augment war reserves, integrate logistics information systems, improve rules and standards, and meticulously organize supply and support, so as to build a logistics system that can provide support for fighting and winning modern wars, serve the modernization of the armed forces, and transform towards informationization."_

Pages 6 and 7 _seem, to me_, to be reassurance for the military (page 6) and the region (page 7).

Overall I find the paper remarkable clear, something that is often rare in Chinese officialdom. I guess it is meant to be understood by the Chinese _establishment_, the Chinese people and the wider world.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the situation. China's new emphasis on expaditionary force projection probably has to do with this:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/26/beijing-snarls-at-south-china-sea-pushback/



> *Beijing Snarls at South China Sea Pushback*
> 
> Beijing’s territorial plays in the South China Sea, especially its land reclamation efforts, are provoking a lot of pushback. Earlier today, we wrote about how Japan is bolstering the anti-China coalition by joining U.S.-Australian military exercises and strengthening its defense ties with Malaysia, as well as with Vietnam and the Philippines. On top of that, the U.S. has ordered its ships and aircraft to ignore what China claims are legitimate exclusion zones around its artificial islands, of which there are currently seven, including at least one airbase. The Chinese legal claims, we have mentioned, are shaky at best.
> 
> Beijing is reacting to the backlash furiously. Even as it blasted U.S. flights over its land reclamation projects in the Spratlys as “provocative behavior” that could lead to open conflict, it released a new military doctrine whitepaper, the eighth since 1998. The document (which you can read in English in full here) stresses a shift away from a military designed strictly for territorial defense to one that is able to project power on the high seas, in cyberspace, and in outer space. Here’s a chunk on naval power from China’s mouthpiece, the Global Times:
> 
> The Chinese navy kept troops close to land from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s under the strategy of inshore defense. Since the 1980s, the Navy has realized a strategic transformation to offshore defensive operations.
> 
> The shift in the PLA Navy’s focus to a combination of “offshore waters defense and open seas protection” is essential as China is facing rising challenges from the sea and the country is more reliant on maritime resources and energy, said Yu Miao, another AMS researcher.
> 
> The traditional mentality that control of the land is more important than control of the sea must be abandoned, and great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests, said the paper.
> 
> The PLA Navy will enhance its capabilities for strategic deterrence and counterattack, maritime maneuvers, joint operations at sea, comprehensive defense and comprehensive support.
> 
> With China’s foes banding together, the U.S. getting much more involved, and Southeast Asian countries going on a naval shopping spree, tensions are spiking. Everyone is betting China will back off if its faced with enough opposition. But so far, Beijing is not showing any signs that it’s about to blink. In fact, it’s digging in.


----------



## Kirkhill

> China's armed forces mainly shoulder the following strategic tasks:
> 
> -- To deal with a wide range of emergencies and military threats, and effectively safeguard the sovereignty and security of China's territorial land, air and sea;
> 
> Comment: - Motherhood and apple-pie.  A statement that could/should appear in any White Paper of any nation.
> 
> -- To resolutely safeguard the unification of the motherland;
> 
> Comment: This one strikes me as interesting.  Unification not union.  That can be interpreted as indicative of future action rather than merely preserving the status quo.  Presumably this refers to Taiwan.  But what else might it refer to?
> 
> -- To safeguard China's security and interests in new domains;
> 
> Comment: Less ambiguity here.  What new domains?  Hong Kong?  Or a broader reach? The Spratlys? The Stans? Siberia?
> 
> -- To safeguard the security of China's overseas interests;
> 
> Comment: As a Canadian whose fellow Canadians have overseas interests I can't begrudge China this one.
> 
> -- To maintain strategic deterrence and carry out nuclear counterattack;
> 
> Comment: It is what it is.
> 
> -- To participate in regional and international security cooperation and maintain regional and world peace;
> 
> Comment: Very noble.  Almost Canadian in its scope.
> 
> -- To strengthen efforts in operations against infiltration, separatism and terrorism so as to maintain China's political security and social stability; and
> 
> Comment: Separatism to be handled in a very non-Canadian manner.  And how does that line up with Xinjiang, Tibet, unification and new domains?
> 
> -- To perform such tasks as emergency rescue and disaster relief, rights and interests protection, guard duties, and support for national economic and social development.
> 
> Comment: Just like Canada - except for some question about how the rights are determined.



This next paragraph suggests something that is very Canadian in its search for balance.  A lot of Yin and Yang going on here.

From a Commander's point of view I would think it could be problematic in that instead of clear guidance there is a lot of opportunity for interpretation, some might say latitude or initiative.   The problem could be: are the commanders conditioned to take the initiative and is the CPC willing to accept the consequences of people making the wrong decisions?   In Canada Generals don't get shot for overshooting the budget.



> To implement the military strategic guideline of active defense in the new situation, China's armed forces will uphold the following principles:
> 
> -- To be subordinate to and in the service of the national strategic goal, implement the holistic view of national security, strengthen PMS, prevent crises, deter and win wars;
> 
> -- To foster a strategic posture favorable to China's peaceful development, adhere to the national defense policy that is defensive in nature, persevere in close coordination of political, military, economic and diplomatic work, and positively cope with comprehensive security threats the country possibly encounters;
> 
> -- To strike a balance between rights protection and stability maintenance, and make overall planning for both, safeguard national territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and maintain security and stability along China's periphery;
> 
> -- To endeavor to seize the strategic initiative in military struggle, proactively plan for military struggle in all directions and domains, and grasp the opportunities to accelerate military building, reform and development;
> 
> -- To employ strategies and tactics featuring flexibility and mobility, give full play to the overall effectiveness of joint operations, concentrate superior forces, and make integrated use of all operational means and methods;
> 
> -- To make serious preparations to cope with the most complex and difficult scenarios, uphold bottom-line thinking, and do a solid job in all aspects so as to ensure proper responses to such scenarios with ease at any time and in any circumstances;
> 
> -- To bring into full play the unique political advantages of the people's armed forces, uphold the CPC's absolute leadership over the military, accentuate the cultivation of fighting spirit, enforce strict discipline, improve the professionalism and strength of the troops, build closer relations between the government and the military as well as between the people and the military, and boost the morale of officers and men;
> 
> -- To give full play to the overall power of the concept of people's war, persist in employing it as an ace weapon to triumph over the enemy, enrich the contents, ways and means of the concept of people's war, and press forward with the shift of the focus of war mobilization from human resources to science and technology; and
> 
> -- To actively expand military and security cooperation, deepen military relations with major powers, neighboring countries and other developing countries, and promote the establishment of a regional framework for security and cooperation.



ERC - If, by Chinese standards, this qualifies as clarity, then I'm afraid I wouldn't do well over there.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Re: Kirkhill's comments

-- To resolutely safeguard the unification of the motherland;

Comment: This one strikes me as interesting.  Unification not union.  That can be interpreted as indicative of future action rather than merely preserving the status quo.  Presumably this refers to Taiwan.  But what else might it refer to?  I think you have this right: it's mostly about Taiwan. 

-- To safeguard China's security and interests in new domains;

Comment: Less ambiguity here.  What new domains?  Hong Kong?  Or a broader reach? The Spratlys? The Stans? Siberia?  I think this refers to the South China Seas. While I think China wants to _dominate_ the Stans and Siberia I do not believe it sees them as "new domains."

-- To strengthen efforts in operations against infiltration, separatism and terrorism so as to maintain China's political security and social stability; and

Comment: Separatism to be handled in a very non-Canadian manner.  And how does that line up with Xinjiang, Tibet, unification and new domains? I think this is a not at all veiled warning to the Muslims: do not spread _separatism_ in Xinjiang.

As to the rest: phrases like "national strategic goal," "holistic view" and "people's war" all have well understood meanings in Chinese and they are understood by Chinese. I think if you ignore some of the phrasing the _principles_ are not all that foreign.


----------



## PPCLI Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> -- To safeguard China's security and interests in new domains;
> 
> Comment: Less ambiguity here.  What new domains?  Hong Kong?  Or a broader reach? The Spratlys? The Stans? Siberia?  I think this refers to the South China Seas. While I think China wants to _dominate_ the Stans and Siberia I do not believe it sees them as "new domains."



I am fairly certain that this is about the cyber, space, and information domains....


----------



## Edward Campbell

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> I am fairly certain that this is about the cyber, space, and information domains....




Yes, of course ... more likely than any new physical domains.


----------



## Kirkhill

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> I am fairly certain that this is about the cyber, space, and information domains....



That makes sense.  Thanks for that.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And some of the fallout from Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign is already being feli according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the n_Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e15a7de6-ff83-11e4-bc30-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3bS9ZD5Sj


> Asia casinos hedge their bets amid China corruption crackdown
> 
> Ben Bland in Macau
> 
> May 27, 2015
> 
> Casino investors are divided over the regional impact of the corruption crackdown in China, with some hoping to pick up business from struggling Macau while many fear an industry slowdown across Asia.
> 
> After a decade of breakneck casino expansion, Macau saw its first annual fall in gaming revenue last year as President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive scared off many of the Chinese high rollers who had been pumping up gaming profits in the tiny, former Portuguese territory.
> 
> Pressure on gaming groups in Macau will grow as they open more than $20bn of long-planned casino resorts over the next two years, starting with the launch of the $3.2bn Galaxy extension on Wednesday.
> 
> Analysts at Morgan Stanley expect gross gaming revenue in Macau to fall 24 per cent this year to $33bn, and many industry executives are concerned that this drop will crimp ambitious growth plans in other Asian nations.
> 
> “This challenge doesn’t help anyone,” says Thomas Arasi, the president of Bloomberry Resorts, which operates the Solaire casino resort in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. “It’s a general downdraft.”
> 
> Mr Arasi comments came at an industry conference in Macau, where the debate about the fallout from the Chinese anti-graft campaign overshadowed talk about the 20-plus large casino projects planned across Asia.
> 
> Japan, South Korea and Vietnam are considering legalising casino gambling for citizens, after seeing how Singapore did so without generating the same concerns about corruption and money-laundering that plague Macau.
> 
> Praveen Choudhary, a gaming analyst at Morgan Stanley, says that while “a year ago people were jumping up and down” about the possibility of Japan and South Korea legalising casino gambling, investors have become much more cautious.
> 
> “In the long term, the Asian gaming industry should be seen in a positive light but we need to see Macau hit the bottom first and I have no idea when that will be,” he adds.
> 
> Morgan Stanley says that the fallout could even reach the US, cutting its forecast for Las Vegas gaming revenue this year by 2 per cent to $6.2bn because of a predicted drop in gamblers from China.
> 
> Geoff Freeman, the president of the American Gaming Association, which represents companies including Las Vegas Sands, MGM Resorts and Wynn Resorts, argues that the Macau slowdown will make US casino groups more reluctant to invest in other Asian countries unless regulations are eased.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “There’s going to need to be, in a more constrained market, probably a different approach on the regulatory side as well,” he says.
> 
> With several large casinos scheduled to open in Macau and around the region in the coming two years, competition is heating up at a time when demand is shrinking.
> 
> Vitaly Umansky, a gaming analyst at Sanford Bernstein, says that in this tougher climate, there is a real danger of new supply cannibalising the existing market.
> 
> “If Japan or South Korea legalise local gaming it will be bad for the Philippines,” he says, because many Japanese and Korean gamblers have been frequenting the Southeast Asian nation’s casinos.
> Some Asian casino developers are putting on a brave face, claiming that they can attract Chinese gamblers who no longer feel comfortable in Macau.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Matt Hurst, executive vice-president of casino operations at the under-construction $2bn Tiger Resort in Manila, says that some of the junket operators who lend to high-stakes Chinese VIP gamblers have begun to bring their clients to the Philippines since the Macau crackdown began.
> 
> “Once that business becomes established in the Philippines, I think it’s going to stay,” he says.
> 
> Robert Soper, president of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, a Native American group that runs a casino in the US state on Connecticut, is equally bullish.
> 
> He is bidding to build a $1.6bn casino resort in Incheon, South Korea, even though local gamblers will not be allowed to bet under current rules.
> 
> “What’s happening in Macau is not a deterrent for our plans in Korea,” he says. “China is still a remarkable market and there’s still a large opportunity to draw Chinese customers for gaming and non-gaming.”
> 
> But Aaron Fischer, an analyst at CLSA, wrote in a recent report that while Australia, Cambodia, the Philippines and South Korea all saw marked increases in VIP business in the second half of last year, “this is not nearly enough to offset the full decline in Macau”.




When China sneezes Asia catches a cold.


----------



## tomahawk6

China's attempt to turn the South China Sea into part of China will increase the likelihood of armed conflict.

http://theweek.com/articles/557430/what-china-dangerously-underestimates-about-americas-interest-south-china-sea


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, suggests to me that island building will go ahead for the simple reason that no one has the will and the means to stop it:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c5e1443a-0773-11e5-a58f-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fworld_asia-pacific_china%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz3beNAfCRv


> China defends island building in disputed seas
> 
> Charles Clover in Singapore
> 
> May 31, 2015
> 
> China has vigorously defended its effort to dredge new islands in the South China Sea, and said features such as deep water harbours and a 3km airstrip capable of accommodating fighter jets are for peaceful purposes.
> 
> Chinese Admiral Sun Jianguo told the audience at the International Institute for Strategic Studies summit in Singapore, known as the annual Shangri-La dialogue, that the islands are aimed at providing “international public services” such as search and rescue and meterological forecasting. China had “no ulterior motives” he said.
> 
> Few experts believe the assurances, and the Chinese delegation was peppered with questions on why the country has dredged over 2,000 new acres of reclaimed land in the last year and a half — more than 400 times any other claimant in the South China Sea, according to one US official. Other regional powers such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia claim remote coral atolls in the area as well.
> 
> Despite sharp disagreements, analysts judged the tone of the remarks by US defence secretary Ashton Carter and his counterpart Adm Sun to be more restrained than on previous occasions when the two sides have clashed over China’s claims.
> 
> Mr Carter on Saturday reiterated a US call for an immediate halt to island building by all countries in the region and pledged that the US would continue “freedom of navigation activities” such as sailing ships and planes near the disputed islands, which China considers to be a violation of maritime law.
> 
> However, he did not give any further detail on how the US would seek to challenge China or prevent the further development of the islands into military facilities, though the US has said it is considering air and sea patrols .
> 
> Members of the Chinese delegation said they were pleased Mr Carter had not taken a more confrontational tone, and Adm Sun’s remarks on Sunday appeared to have been moderated accordingly.
> 
> “This shows the Chinese are not trying to raise the temperature, which is good news,” said Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.
> 
> Fen Osler Hampson, of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Ottowa, called Mr Carter’s speech a “Pivot Kumbaya” referring to the US strategy known as the Asia Pivot. The speech emphasised the US would work together with all regional powers with interests in the South China Sea, and appeared wary of showing the US acting unilaterally to challenge China. “He was in effect saying ‘Let’s all sing from the same songbook’”, said Mr Hampson.
> 
> Washington raised the temperature in May when a P-8 Poseidon spy aircraft carrying a TV crew from CNN flew over islands claimed by China and received radio challenges from Chinese military telling them to leave.
> 
> Mr Carter said international law does not recognise China’s claims. “Turning an underwater rock into an airfield simply does not afford the rights of sovereignty or permit restrictions on international air or maritime transit,” he told the audience on Saturday.
> 
> The goals of China’s accelerated island building programme, say diplomats and experts, remain elusive. Over the past 7 months, according to one US official, China has created more acreage of dredged sand on formerly submerged coral reefs than all other claimants in the south China sea combined have over the past 60 years.
> 
> China may be seeking “de-facto control of the South China Sea in such a way that all neighbours will have to maintain good relations with China or else put their prosperity at risk,” said the US official. Roughly $7tn in international trade passes through the Sea every year.
> 
> Experts have been at pains to explain the rapid acceleration of China’s dredging programme over the past year. Mr Medcalf said China’s island building strategy represents a “passively assertive approach” that does not necessarily require putting its airforce or navy in risky high seas or air confrontations with US jets and ships.
> 
> “The island building is actually quite provocative but the difference is that it puts the burden of risk on other countries. In any incident that occurs, China will be able to say ‘you started it, proximate cause of this was you’. It’s a clever strategy and it leaves the rest of the region with no risk-free options.”
> 
> Most analysts assume the ultimate goal of building fighter capable airstrips is to be able to enforce a claim to airspace over the Sea as an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), similar to one China claimed over islands disputed with Japan in the East China Sea in 2013.
> 
> Adm Sun said the question of an ADIZ “will depend on whether our security in the sea and in the air will be threatened”.




It appears that both China and the USA want to avoid "raising the temperature."

As with the Philippines marines on a derelict warship, "facts on the ground" matter, they are indisputable and they can only be changed by mutual agreement or force. The Chinese have threatened to tow the hulk away, but that _might_ (should) provoke a real US reaction: maybe giving the Philippines a better, armed, platform with which to stake their claims and providing air cover, too; that would be the sort of escalation that would harm China's interests, but, simultaneously, would drag the US into a confrontation it desperately wants to avoid. (China doesn't want a confrontation either, _in my opinion_, but it has less to lose.)

Here is a graphic reminder of what's in contention:





The red line is China's claim (wholly unsupported by e.g. UNCLOS) the other lines are
competing claims from e.g. Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and others.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Prof Timothy Garton Ash, a European specialist from Oxford University, discusses China's near future prospects in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/chinas-xi-is-conducting-the-worlds-greatest-political-experiment/article24779895/


> China’s Xi is conducting the world’s greatest political experiment
> 
> TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
> Special to The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Wednesday, Jun. 03, 2015
> 
> _Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University._
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Can Xi do it? This is the biggest political question in the world today. “Yes, Xi can,” some tell me in Beijing. “No, he can’t,” say others. The wise know that nobody knows.
> 
> There is a great debate going on in Washington about whether the United States should change its China policy in response to Beijing’s more assertive stance under President Xi Jinping. This includes the reported stationing of artillery on the extraordinary artificial islands it is building on underwater reefs in the South China Sea.
> 
> It also matters to everyone everywhere whether China can sustain its economic growth as it exhausts its ready supply of cheap labour, and can avoid the traps into which some middle-income economies have stumbled.
> 
> Yet, even more than in other countries, the future of China’s foreign policy and of its economy depend on the quality of decision making produced by the political system. It’s the politics, stupid.
> 
> By now, it is clear what Mr. Xi is aiming to do. He is trying to steer a complex economy and society through difficult times by top-down changes, led and controlled by a purged, disciplined and reinvigorated Leninist party. He is doing this in unprecedented conditions for such a party, consciously trying to combine the “invisible hand” of the market with the “visible hand” of the party-state.
> 
> The “great helmsman” Mao Zedong is clearly one inspiration, but the pragmatic reformer Deng Xiaoping is another. A commentary from the official news agency Xinhua declared, “To Reignite a Nation, Xi Carries Deng’s Torch.”
> 
> Much of the reignition so far been about establishing control over the party, state, military and what there is of civil society, after the Bo Xilai affair made apparent an internal crisis of party rule. Yet, as a hereditary Communist, the President may genuinely believe that enlightened, skillful authoritarian rulers can handle things best: Lenin’s wager, but also, in different variations, Plato’s and Confucius’s.
> 
> Sinologist Ryan Mitchell notes that in a 1948 article, a veteran Chinese Communist called Xi Zhongxun was quoted as saying that “the most lovable qualities of us Communist Party folks are devotion and sincerity.” Speaking to party members in 2013, his son, Xi Jinping, said that “leading cadres must treat the masses with devotion and sincerity.”
> 
> This experiment is life-changing for the thousands of purged officials who have disappeared into the tender embrace of the relevant party and state organs. Being a senior FIFA official is light entertainment by comparison, even if some of them may have missed their five-star Swiss breakfasts.
> 
> It is also extremely uncomfortable for those Chinese who believe in free and critical debate, independent civic initiative and non-governmental organizations. Here, I found a striking contrast with earlier visits to Beijing. It’s not just the exacerbated difficulty of accessing Gmail, Google Docs and so much else on the Internet. More seriously, I felt a real nervousness among intellectuals who a few years ago were so outspoken.
> 
> The boundaries of what can be said publicly seem to be narrowing all the time. Leading activists, civil-rights lawyers and bloggers have been arrested, charged and imprisoned. A new draft law proposes almost Putinesque restrictions on NGOs. Another extends the definition of “national security” to include ideology and culture, with formulations like “carrying forward the exceptional culture of the Chinese nationality and defending against and resisting the infiltration of harmful culture.”
> 
> Yes, that’s all true, say analysts of the “yes, Xi can” persuasion – and, if they are outside the system, they usually add that it is most regrettable. But, they say, look at the reform program that is being pressed through with similar determination. Its key features are not easily summarized in familiar political and economic terms, because the Chinese mix is unique. For example, complex measures to address a dangerous overhang of local government debt, the introduction of property rights for agricultural land and changes to the household registration (hukou) system may be as consequential as anything that can be captured in a Western headline.
> 
> If all this were to succeed as intended, Western liberal democratic capitalism would have a formidable ideological competitor, with worldwide appeal, especially in the developing world. For the West, there would be a silver lining: Competition keeps you on your toes. Western hubris in the early 2000s, both abroad, plotting regime change in Iraq, and at home, indulging the turbo-charged excesses of financial capitalism, surely had something to do with the sense of facing no serious ideological competition.
> 
> Now, this outcome is obviously not what I, as a liberal and a democrat, would wish for Chinese friends. But I do emphatically wish for them, and for ourselves, a China that experiences evolutionary and not revolutionary change.
> 
> There are many reasons for that view, not least that most Chinese embrace it themselves, but the most important concerns nothing less than war and peace. A Communist regime in crisis would probably find it impossible to resist the temptation of playing the nationalist card more aggressively somewhere in its neighbourhood, building on decades of indoctrination, a selective interpretation of the recent past and a narrative of 150 years of national humiliation.
> 
> If China is already warning off U.S. surveillance planes from overflying its artificial islands, imagine how it might lash out if it faced a systemic crisis at home. An armed conflict would not need to be directly between China and the United States in order to be dangerous. However clear the “red lines” drawn by the United States – and those lines should certainly be clearer than President Barack Obama’s have been, in China’s interest as well as everyone else’s – the risk of miscalculation would be high.
> 
> Therefore, I conclude that, while this is not the evolutionary path that I and many others discerned and welcomed in China around the time of the Beijing Olympics, we must still hope that Mr. Xi will manage to “cross the river by feeling the stones.”
> 
> My greatest concern flows not from a personal belief in liberal democracy as a realization of individual freedom, although it would be dishonourable to pretend that doesn’t matter, but from the insights of political analysis that lead us to liberal democracy. Insights such as this: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” (James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51).
> 
> Yes, dear comrades, it might be true, even though it was an American who said it.
> 
> In the short to medium term, my hunch is that Mr. Xi’s brand of smart authoritarianism will keep not just his party in power but also the whole show on the road. That medium term could certainly span the two five-year periods that are all that is allowed for the President’s formal tenure of power – the Chinese Communist Party having learned a lesson from the Soviet era of Leonid Brezhnev in a way that FIFA plainly has not.
> 
> There are so many significant power resources still at his disposal, including some genuine personal popularity and widespread national pride. I would, therefore, take a (small) bet that, in this narrow sense, “yes, Xi can” will prove correct. But in a broader sense and in the longer term? Watch out for a rocky 2020s.




I think Timothy Garton Ash is correct on three things:

     1. Xi Jinping is going to try to emulate Deng Xiaoping in making quite funbdamental changes in Chinese society;

     2. Xi Jinping is _inspired_ by Confucius far more than Lenin or Mao; and

     3. Xi Jinping has a much firmer grip on China than did either Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin and is likely so "succeed" ... what's less clear is just what it is that he intends to do.


----------



## a_majoor

Long article from The American Interest on China's involvment with Burma. This should also alarm India, since Burma also is close enough to be in her sphere of influence as well :

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/09/burma-in-play/

(Part 1)


> Burma in Play
> Rena Pederson
> 
> Burma is newly enmeshed in Asia’s Game of Thrones, a development far more important than the topics Western media typically choose to focus on.
> 
> 
> Some say it is more of a “Winter Thaw” than a “Burma Spring”, but what used to be a pariah nation—the darkened house in the neighborhood—is changing. Just down the road from where Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was held prisoner in her home for more than 15 years, a luxury development with penthouses, a swimming pool, restaurants, and indoor golf is now opening. Rangoon street kids who used to tap on car windows to sell strands of flower necklaces can now be seen hawking real estate listings. Though most people in the country are still scraping by on barely $2 a day, Burma now boasts gastro bars with wi-fi and satellite television. You can rent a cellphone at the airport and drink an iced latte at a copycat Starbucks.
> 
> Burma, renamed Myanmar by its military rulers, is making up for temps perdu. At the pricey new French restaurant Agnes I discovered that you can now order a respectable foie gras while enjoying a view of the magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda. After years of isolation, Burma is indeed open for business. MasterCard, Ford, and Chevrolet have raced into the market. Coca-Cola jumped in quickly and had to add another bottling site to meet demand. More than 500 businesses are taking a chance on what used to be a blacklisted backwater, investing more than $50 billion since the military started liberalizing the economy in 2011. The growth rate for 2015 is projected to be almost 8 percent.
> 
> The Southeast Asia Games in Burma in 2013 were a coming-out party of sorts to celebrate the partially relaxed military rule. The opening ceremony was a lavish extravaganza with Olympic-level fireworks, largely paid for and stage-managed by China. The Chinese not only subsidized the opening and closing ceremonies; they also trained 200 Burmese athletes in China and provided 700 coaches to help make the local team look good. The $33 million in support was a tangible example of Beijing’s new efforts to enhance its soft power in Burma, where Chinese megaprojects have stirred increased resentment.
> China is still a major player in this rapidly emerging country, despite steps the new, nominally civilian government has taken to show independence from the colossus to the north. Billions of dollars are at stake, but an even weightier question is which model will have the most influence in Burma’s evolution: China’s authoritarian state capitalism or a Western-style marriage of democracy and open markets?
> While much of the news about regional tensions has focused on territorial disputes in the Pacific, an important new venue in Asia’s Game of Thrones is also emerging to the south, in Burma. Why Burma?
> 
> •Burma has oil and gas, and China wants to reduce the risk of transporting oil through the Malacca Straits chokehold.
> •Burma has vast potential for hydropower resources, thanks to the mighty rivers that flow down from the Himalayas. China wants that electricity to meet its voracious energy needs, and is pursuing some 63 hydropower projects.
> •Burma offers a market of more than fifty million people. China currently dominates trade, but the United States wants in on the action.
> •Burma is strategically located next to India, the world’s largest democracy and China’s rival for dominance. The United States would be happier if Burma were a more democratic presence in mainland Southeast Asia; China would be happier if Burma did its bidding.
> 
> The United States, along with most Western nations, turned away from Burma in 1988 when the military dictatorship cracked down on student protests by killing more than 3,000 people in the streets. Having gunned down its own share of local protesters, China had no qualms about dealing with the brutal generals. Over the years, Chinese investment jumped from $1 billion to nearly $20 billion, nearly half of Burma’s GDP.
> 
> That doesn’t mean the Burmese grew fonder of their Chinese benefactors. To the contrary, they have a longstanding fear of being overrun. Burma and China share a 1,300-mile border and have long been uneasy neighbors. There is a history of conflict, from Manchu invasions across the mountains in the 18th century to Chinese Communist incursions in the 20th century. Resentment against Chinese influence sparked riots in 1967. More recently, concern has grown about Chinese military support for ethnic Chinese enclaves in northern Burma. China has provided backdoor military support to the Wa State, a former Communist stronghold that has become a narco-state with its own militia of 30,000 quasi-soldiers. China denies directly providing arms to the Wa, but Jane’s Intelligence Review has reported Chinese assistance in the form of surface-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, and armed helicopters.
> 
> Most Burmese also resent the fact that ethnic Chinese dominate commerce in border areas and cities such as Mandalay. They are aware that much of the country’s jade, gems, and teak is being trucked off to China. Burma produces some $4.3 billion per year in high quality jade, and at least half of that is probably spirited over the border into China with little or no taxation. Burma has the world’s only remaining golden teak forest, but the acreage has shrunk dramatically thanks to illegal teak shipments to China. Global Witness reported in 2009 that one truck carrying 15 tons of illegal logs crossed the border into China’s Yunnan province every seven minutes.Global Witness reported in 2009 that one truck carrying 15 tons of illegal logs crossed the border into China’s Yunnan province every seven minutes.
> 
> Many Burmese also blame the Chinese for the drug trade that seeped in from China after World War II and resulted in the rise of the notorious poppy-growing “Golden Triangle” in northern Burma. Recent reports say opium production rose 26 percent in 2014. Heroin abuse has become so prevalent in northern Burma that syringes reportedly are being used in some villages to make change. Farmers in the border area also complain that human traffickers from China brazenly lure Burmese women to their country with promises of good jobs, only to trap them in slave labor conditions or in the sex trade. Many never return.
> 
> So there are plenty of reasons for Burmese to be wary of Chinese, and welcome closer ties to the West. As part of a “normalization” of relations with Burma, the Obama Administration has eased economic sanctions that were beefed up during the Clinton and Bush Administrations. A knowledgeable Burma hand, Derek Mitchell, is now serving as the first U.S. Ambassador to Burma in 22 years. Joint military exercises are in the works. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an historic visit in 2011, followed by President Obama in 2012 and again in 2014.
> 
> U.S. diplomats downplay the idea that this courtship is in any way an attempt to counterbalance China’s influence in the region. They maintain that the “pivot to Asia” is a founding precept of the Obama Administration and is simply “in the American interest.” A senior diplomat told me, “We are interested in a stable region, a cohesive region. A stable ASEAN means more economic potential in the region.” Translation from diplospeak: A stable region is less vulnerable to Chinese domination.
> 
> Initially, the quasi-civilian government headed by former general Thein Sein moved with surprising speed to open Burma’s society and economy. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest ended finally in November 2010 and she soon won a seat in Parliament. Restrictions on the press and unions were relaxed.
> 
> Those were all welcome changes, but the generals in top leadership positions have balked at further reform. Corruption is systemic. Most of the country still lacks electricity. Religious intolerance has flared up. Journalists are being arrested. One was beaten and shot to death; five others got ten-year sentences at hard labor for reporting on a suspected chemical weapons plant. And on a host of key issues—often complicated by Chinese interests—progress has been slow. Four such issues are key.
> Peace talks in conflict areas: Despite the recent approval of a draft for a ceasefire, widespread peace has yet to be achieved with ethnic groups that have been fighting for greater autonomy for more than six decades. The fighting in the northern Kachin state has displaced more than 100,000 predominantly Christian villagers; Chinese officials promptly sent refugees who had fled across the Chinese border back to the combat zone. Border tensions flared again this year after clashes between the Burmese military and rebels in the Kokang region, which is largely ethnic Chinese. As a result, China beefed up its presence on the border. When a Burmese plane mistakenly dropped a bomb inside Chinese territory that killed five farm workers, China testily deployed fighter jets.
> 
> Political repression: The generals ordered the release of hundreds of political prisoners in 2011, some announced with digital savvy on Facebook. But hundreds more have been arrested since then for peaceful protests. Many are poor farmers whose only offense was protesting the confiscation of their land, often for sweetheart deals benefiting business cronies of the military and Chinese investors.
> Religious strife: Recent eruptions of sectarian violence in Rakhine State in western Burma have left hundreds of Muslims dead in a region that includes the nation’s premier beach destinations and a major Chinese oil and gas entrepôt. The attacks have displaced more than 140,000 people, who are now stranded in squalid camps. Human rights organizations say the persecution of these Muslims, known as “Rohingya”, is tantamount to “ethnic cleansing.”Human rights organizations say the persecution of these Muslims, known as “Rohingya”, is tantamount to “ethnic cleansing.” When the new U.N. Human Rights Rapporteur, Yanghee Lee, complained about treatment of the Rohingya, an ultra-nationalist monk named U Wirathu publically called her a “bitch” and a “whore.” Instead of apologizing, the Burmese government accused the envoy of meddling.
> 
> North Korean affairs: The U.S. government has strongly urged Burma to stop its illicit dealings with North Korea, but sub rosa arms exchanges apparently continued and resulted in new American sanctions against a high-ranking procurement officer. Troubling questions remain about North Korea’s role in Burma’s nascent missile and nuclear programs. In the past, North Korean technicians reportedly entered Burma via flights from China, and military equipment has been transported overland into Burma through China.
> 
> Constitutional reform: Although it may appear that the military has relinquished its control, the truth is that the constitution rigged and rammed through by the military perpetuates its control through a “Praetorian Democracy.” An 11-member National Defense and Security Council, composed largely of former generals, is the ultimate authority. The military allotted 25 percent of the seats in the parliament to itself, and controls even more seats through a proxy political party, the Union Solidarity and Defense Party (USDP).
> 
> Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party have collected more than five million signatures, nearly 10 percent of the population, on petitions calling for constitutional revisions to reduce military control. High-level discussions have started with the leadership about revisions, but they haven’t happened yet. And the NLD has little leverage to make them happen.
> 
> A key stumbling block is Article 59f, which effectively bars Suu Kyi from serving as President. It stipulates that anyone who is married to a foreigner or has children with a foreign passport cannot serve in the top office—and it just so happens Suu Kyi’s late husband was British and her children have foreign passports.
> 
> Against this tangled backdrop, Congress expressed bipartisan concern when the Obama Administration sought approval for greater assistance to the Burmese military in 2014. Senior officials wanted support for non-lethal assistance to the military, such as training on human rights. But both Republicans and Democrats were reluctant, citing the abuses committed against ethnic and religious minorities and continued commerce with North Korea. “I personally don’t believe that the Burmese military needs to be trained to stop killing and raping and stealing lands from people within their own country”, Joe Crowley (D-NY) protested.
> 
> In defense of the military outreach, senior U.S. Defense official Vikram Singh contended that engagement would be an opportunity to shape the military’s outlook and dilute its reliance on old partners and arms suppliers, notably China. “Burma is finding itself having, for the first time in many years, to actually figure out where it wants to place its bets, where it wants to put its cards, who it wants to deal with”, Singh said. “We want to shape the kind of choices that Burma makes.”


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2:



> The Chinese have not taken the revived U.S. interest in the region lightly. In recent months they have criticized U.S. government policy in harsh terms. The Communist Party-supported Global Times hit back hard when the New York Times ran an editorial in January saying China was responsible for the wholesale looting of Myanmar’s natural resources, often by “outright theft.” The Global Times accused the American newspaper of trying to drive a wedge between Myanmar and China, saying:
> 
> The West may believe China is as greedy as their ancestors were, who traded slaves and stripped as much wealth from their colonies as they could. . . . Institutions like the New York Times consider Myanmar a pawn. They don’t care about Myanmar’s progress but rather how the country will help to drag China down. As long as Myanmar stays independent, it will see through the tricks of Western media such as the New York Times.
> 
> So the Great Game is indeed on in Burma, and the U.S. government is racing to get even more commercial and cultural ties in place as well as establish military connections. Companies like GE, Hilton, Gap, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken are establishing beachheads. The Fulbright academic exchange program is again up and running. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Bush Presidential Center have started leadership-training programs.
> 
> For its part, China sees Burma as a key part of President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” of rejuvenation and regional hegemony. China needs Burma’s resources to make that dream a reality. Burma is an important link in the ambitious new “Silk Road Economic Belt” of rail and road connections linking China with Europe via Central and Western Asia. Burma is also part of the companion “Maritime Silk Road”, which would connect China with Southeast Asian countries, Africa, and Europe. These projects are sometimes described as a “Marshall Plan with Chinese Characteristics.” They will bring billions in infrastructure to emerging economies. In the process, they will provide new markets and resources to China.
> 
> While the U.S. government is trying to put out fires in the Middle East, China is moving forward aggressively with new ports, high-speed rail links, and fiber-optic cable connections to Eurasia and Africa. If fully embraced by the European Union and other Eurasian actors, the new versions of the ancient Silk Road could connect 65 percent of the world population to China, with increased trade ties to Nairobi via Mombasa, Istanbul, Athens, Rotterdam, Moscow, and Tehran.
> 
> Yes, the U.S. government proposed its own “New Silk Road Initiative” in 2011 to stimulate commerce between Afghanistan and Central and South Asia, but progress has been slow. China claims that fifty countries have stepped up to participate in its plan, although some have expressed private reservations about the political price they may pay for financial ties that bind. In particular, countries next door in Southeast Asia worry that they will become tributaries in greater China’s sphere of influence. Indeed, the Burmese are concerned their country “could become a second Crimea.”Indeed, the Burmese are concerned their country “could become a second Crimea.” That’s how U Than Htut Aung, the chief executive of Eleven Media, explained why his newspapers campaigned vigorously against the $20 billion railroad project in Burma that is part of the Chinese Silk Road plan.
> 
> The Kyaukphyu-to-Kunming railway was supposed to follow pipelines that began carrying oil and gas across Burma to energy-hungry China in 2014. That $2.5 billion pipeline deal pumped lucrative sums into the pockets of Burmese leaders, but the companion rail project gave them pause. Did they really want to be bound to another mega-deal that mostly benefitted China? In the end, the Burmese decided “no”; the government allowed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding to expire during the summer in 2014.
> 
> Two other controversial projects illustrate the billions of dollars in resources that the Chinese have at stake in Burma: the giant Myitsone Dam and the Letpadaung Copper Mine. Both deals were finalized between December 2009 and June 2010, when China pushed the closure before Burma’s leadership changed in 2011. Both have run into local resistance. One of incoming President Thein Sein’s first acts was to temporarily suspend work on the $3.8 billion Myitsone Dam, which had sparked demonstrations around the country.
> 
> Tensions continue to flare at the Letpadaung copper mine, which is jointly operated by the giant Wanbao company of China and a Burmese military conglomerate. When farmers protested land seizures to expand the mine, police officers opened fire. A 56-year-old woman died from a gunshot wound to the head. The assault triggered a loud public outcry. Two Chinese contractors were later briefly kidnapped.
> Such controversy has created major uncertainty for Chinese investors. China’s investments in Burma during 2012–13 declined to $407 million after years of billion-dollar growth. China’s current priority seems to be protecting its legacy investments from further damage with ostentatious support for events like the Southeast Asia Games and political charm campaigns.
> 
> Future relations may hinge on Burma’s general elections this November. All the seats in parliament will be up for grabs, and leadership could change at the top. President Thein Sein, the deceptively mild-mannered acolyte of the old regime, has said he will not seek another term, but he has been consolidating his power and might bow to requests from his military brethren to stay the course. Other contenders might include House Speaker Shwe Mann, another former general who is a sometime ally of Suu Kyi, and Commander in Chief Min Aung Laing, a hard-line general who has openly thwarted democratic reforms.
> 
> And what about Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been at the forefront of the democracy movement in Burma for 27 years? The Nobel Laureate will turn seventy on June 18. Though her health is sometimes fragile, she is expected to lead her party to significant gains, unless she decides to boycott the elections over the generals’ refusal to seriously address constitutional reform. If she abjures a boycott, several questions remain. Will the NLD be able to overcome government roadblocks to become more of a force in Parliament? Will minority-ethnic regions be allowed to gain more representation? How much power will the military insist on retaining? Might even a fairly nasty military government faking a democratic system still lean closer to the United States than to China? If so, are we in for more of the oldest debate in town, this time with Burmese characteristics: the compulsions of raison d’état versus the missionary call of human rights and democracy promotion? It could be.
> 
> In some ways, the current situation echoes that of the 1950s, when newly independent Burma had a weak democracy and a large and rising Chinese neighbor. Faced with the choice of allying with the growing Communist bloc or the Western democracies, President U Nu proclaimed Burma a non-aligned nation determined to stay buddies with everyone. The idea was to give Burmese independence room to grow and to force both power blocs to seek Burma’s favor.
> 
> Today, Burmese leaders are attempting to chart an independent course again by zig-zagging away from the relationship with China to date other countries. Regional powers India, Thailand, and Japan are on Burma’s dance card, as well as the United States and Russia.Regional powers India, Thailand, and Japan are on Burma’s dance card, as well as the United States and Russia. When tenders were awarded for offshore oil and gas exploration, the winners included Royal Dutch Shell, U.S.-based ConocoPhillips, Oil India, Italy’s Eni Myanmar, and France’s Total. Top telecommunications contracts have gone to Norway and Qatar.
> 
> That doesn’t mean Burma has thrown China into the river delta, or that China won’t dominate Burma’s future. That could be, too. Beijing has continued currying favor by hosting a steady stream of red carpet visits for Burmese government leaders as well as key members of the NLD.
> China’s moves to insinuate itself into its neighbor’s economic and political affairs reflect a traditional strategy. As Henry Kissinger has observed, the Chinese play foreign affairs like they play their ancient game of Wei qi (known in the West by its Japanese name, Go.) Wei qi works as a test of wills. Players take turns placing stone pieces on a board, building up positions of strength, while working to surround and capture the opponent’s stones. The balance of power may shift back and forth as each player reacts and plans ahead. By game’s end, the winner may not be apparent to the untrained eye but will have the margin of dominance the players will recognize. As Kissinger describes it, wei qi is about patient, subtle encirclement. China’s leaders, he observes, were brought up on the concept of shi: the art of understanding matters in flux. They understand that wei qi is about a long campaign. Their time horizons are decades or even centuries, not presidential terms. They are banking that their web of interests in Burma’s economy will be difficult to untangle.
> 
> China also has carefully courted Burma’s favor in ASEAN, which Burma chaired in 2014. Five ASEAN nations—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—claim sections of the South China Sea, where China is asserting its own claims. In the past, China has insisted on negotiating the disputed boundaries with other claimants individually, while ASEAN members have proposed negotiating collectively. Burma’s support has gained even more value to China. At a recent meeting of ASEAN leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Burma kept mum about the South China Sea controversy, to China’s advantage.
> 
> Mizzima, a pro-democracy publication published in India, voiced its concerns about the power struggle in Burma in this way:
> 
> When the history books on Myanmar are written a generation from now, will President Thein Sein’s political and economic reform era go down as the point when the West sold out or woke up? When the history books are written, will President Thein Sein’s reform process be portrayed as a genuine attempt by the Myanmar military to come in from the cold and bring real democracy to their troubled people? Or will it be described as a silent coup in which the military was able to con the West and maintain their grip on power while holding on to their ill-gotten gains and avoiding retribution?
> 
> The magazine might well have added, “Which of the great powers contending for treasure in Burma will have the greatest influence on what comes after the Burma Spring? Which country will bend the arc of history in a positive direction in the region—or not?” And so, the Asian Game of Thrones moves to a new level.
> 
> Rena Pederson, a former adviser on strategic communications at the U.S. Department of State, is the author of The Burma Spring: Aung San Suu Kyi and the New Struggle for the Soul of a Nation (Pegasus, 2015).


----------



## Underway

Gwynn Dyer's take on the South China Sea.





> Yes, stupid things do happen
> Is China willing to go to war over reefs in South China Sea?
> 
> By:  Gwynne Dyer
> 
> "If the United States' bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a U.S.-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea," said an editorial in the Global Times last week. The Global Times is an English-language daily paper specializing in international affairs that is published by the People's Daily, the Chinese government's official newspaper. So we should presumably take what it says seriously.
> 
> But really, a U.S.-Chinese war in the South China Sea? Over a bunch of reefs that barely clear the water at high tide, and some fishing rights and mineral rights that might belong to China if it can bully, persuade or bribe the other claimants into renouncing their claims? The GDP of the United States is $16.8 trillion each year, and China's GDP is $9.2 trillion. All the resources of the South China Sea would not amount to $1 trillion over 50 years.
> 
> Great powers end up fighting great wars. Counting a pre-war arms race, the losses during the war (even assuming it doesn't go nuclear), and a resumed arms race after the war, the long-term cost of a U.S.-Chinese war over the South China Sea could easily be $5 trillion. Are you sure this is a good idea?
> 
> Yet, stupid things do happen. Consider the Falklands War. In 1982, Britain and Argentina fought a quite serious little war (more than 900 people were killed, ships were sunk, etc.) over a couple of islands in the South Atlantic that had no strategic and little economic value.
> 
> Maybe that's not relevant. After all, Argentina had never been a great power, and by 1982 Britain was no longer really one either. The war in the Falklands was, said Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, "a fight between two bald men over a comb." Yet it is a bit worrisome, isn't it? It didn't make strategic or economic sense, but they did it anyway.
> 
> Let's look at the question from another angle. Who is the messenger that bears such alarming news about a U.S.-Chinese war? The Global Times, although published by the Chinese Communist government, is a tabloid newspaper in the style of the New York Post or the Daily Mail in Britain: down-market, sensationalist and not necessarily accurate.
> 
> But it has never published anything that the Chinese authorities did not want published. So the question becomes: WHY did the Chinese authorities want this story published? Presumably to frighten the United States enough to make it stop challenging the Chinese claims in the South China Sea. This is turning into a game of chicken, and China has just thrown out the brakes.
> 
> Would Beijing really go to war if the United States doesn't stop overflying the reefs in question and carrying out other activities that treat the Chinese claim as unproven? Probably even the bosses in Beijing don't know the answer to that. But they really do intend to control the South China Sea, and the United States and its local friends and allies (the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan) really will not accept that.
> 
> The Chinese claim truly is astonishingly brazen. The "nine-dash line," an official map published by the Beijing government in 1949, claims practically ALL the uninhabited reefs and tiny islands in the shallow sea as Chinese territory, even ones that are 700 km from the Chinese coast and 150 km from the Philippines or Vietnam.
> 
> Since the islands might all generate Exclusive Economic Zones of 300 km, China may be planning to claim rights over the entire sea up to an average of about 100 km off the coasts of the other countries that surround the sea. It hasn't actually stated the details of that claim yet, but it is investing a lot in laying the foundations for such a claim.
> 
> It's as if the United States built some reefs in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, claimed them as sovereign territory, and then said that the whole sea belonged to the U.S. except for narrow coastal strips for Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, etc.
> 
> China is actually building islands as part of this strategy: taking low-lying reefs and building them up with enormous quantities of sand, rock and cement to turn them into (marginally) habitable places. Then it acts astonished and offended when other countries challenge this behaviour, or even send reconnaissance flights to see what the Chinese are up to.
> 
> The veiled threats and the bluster that accompany this are intended to warn all the other claimants off. It's been going on for years, but it's getting much more intense as the Chinese project for building military bases all over the South China Sea (it denies that that's what they are, of course) nears completion. So now the rhetoric steps up to actual warning of a Chinese-U.S. war.
> 
> The Global Times is right, whether its writers know it or not. If China keeps acting as if its claims were universally accepted and unilaterally expanding the reefs to create large bases with airstrips and ports, and the U.S. and local powers go on challenging China's claims, then there really could be a war. Later, not now, and not necessarily ever, but it could happen.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here are two articles that may shed some light on what's happening in the Soiuth China Seas:

http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/intelligence-check-just-how-preposterous-are-chinas-south-china-sea-activities/?utm_content=buffer65f9c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer


> Intelligence Check: Just How 'Preposterous' Are China's South China Sea Activities?
> *It’s time for the Pentagon to issue a sober and balanced public assessment on the South China Sea territorial disputes.*
> 
> By Greg Austin
> 
> June 11, 2015 (It's already early morning on 11 Jun 15 is East Asia)
> 
> On 27 May 2015, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr, the newly promoted Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, said that one of his main challenges, alongside a nuclear armed and erratic North Korea, would be “China’s preposterous claims to and land reclamation activities in the South China Sea.” So now a coral reef with an airfield is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon?
> 
> Harris’ statement was widely interpreted as meaning that China was engaged in an unjustified land grab, tantamount to coercion of or even aggression against the country’s southern neighbors. Three days later, a Chinese general repeated to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that China has shown “great restraint” in defending its territorial claims against unreasonable derogation by its southern neighbors. China sees its actions as defensive and in no way constituting aggression. There is a highly significant discrepancy between the two assessments. If Harris is wrong about the Chinese motivation, this must represent a significant intelligence failure by the United States. There is nothing more essential to national security intelligence than a correct assessment of a potential adversary’s motivations (intent) in the military sphere.
> 
> For the record, China is a country with more than 4,000 km of coastline in the South China Sea. Under international law, it is entitled to claim an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 200 nm from the baselines of its territorial sea. On a rough estimate, it is entitled to around one million sq km of EEZ in the South China Sea based just on its mainland coast and the coast of Hainan Island.
> 
> A country’s international law claims to territory or maritime jurisdiction are only those articulated by its government in a formal manner. Beyond its South China Sea coast and Hainan (and minor islands close to these coastlines), and associated territorial sea and contiguous zones, China’s claims in the South China Sea have the following elements.
> 
> _*Territorial Claims*_
> 
> 1. A claim to Pratas islands which is identical in character with the claim of Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
> 
> 2. A territorial claim to the Spratly Islands and Paracel Islands which is identical in character with the claims of Vietnam and Taiwan and which, as a claim, is fully compatible with international law. Someone must own the islands. (Scarborough Shoal,
> which has rocks above sea level of a type that other countries have claimed as subject to sovereignty, is part of the Spratly group in Chinese claims. It is not claimed by Vietnam.)
> 
> 3. A territorial claim to the Macclesfield Bank, a small submerged featured known in Chinese as Zhongsha Islands, which does not qualify as land territory under international law and cannot be subjected to territorial sovereignty.
> 
> Of these, only the claim to Macclesfield Bank would not be in conformity with international law. Otherwise, China’s claims to territory are nor more or less preposterous than those of Vietnam. Based on research for my 1998 book, China’s Ocean Frontier, China’s claims to at least some of the islands are less preposterous than those of Vietnam and the Philippines, but that China’s claims to the entire Spratly group are probably not, in respect of each and every natural island, superior to those of other claimants.
> 
> One unusual problem about sovereignty claims in the Spratly Islands is that Taiwan, a political entity not recognized as a state, is an active claimant.  This is further complicated by the likely implication that states which recognize Taiwan as part of “one China” are probably obliged to recognize Taiwan’s territorial rights as also adhering to “one China,” although that entity has an indeterminate status in international law.
> 
> _*Maritime Resource Jurisdiction*_
> 
> 1. A 200 nm EEZ jurisdiction from the baselines of its land territory in full conformity with international law.
> 
> 2. A claim to continental shelf jurisdiction from its land territory in full conformity with international law.
> 
> In addition, China has used the so-called nine-dashed line enclosing almost the entire South China Sea on many official maps since 1947 but it has not yet decided what, if any, legal force to ascribe to it. If it did ascribe any legal force, that would not be compatible with international law (verging on “preposterous”). Chinese officials have from time to time referred to China’s historic rights within this area but have not clarified what these might be beyond the territorial claims. The only possible historic right China could claim compatible with international law would be related to traditional fishing in another state’s recognized economic jurisdiction.
> 
> _*Preposterous or Not?*_
> 
> On balance, it is hard to see how Admiral Harris would justify use of the undiplomatic term “preposterous” in respect of the China’s current claims in the South China Sea. He may be justified in using it (in private) if China did go ahead and claim legal force of any kind to the u-shaped line.  China went close to this (being “preposterous”) by including the line without any explanation or discussion in a sketched map attached to its submission on the extent of its claimed resource jurisdiction on the continental shelf which it submitted to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.  Since the line bears no relationship to the legal criteria outlined in the required submission, it would only be fair to leave open any suggestion as to what it means. The State Department made plain in December 2014 that “China has not clarified through legislation, proclamation, or other official statements the legal basis or nature of its claim associated with the dashed-line map.” The Philippines has brought a case against China in the Court of Arbitration to seek clarification of the Chinese intent behind the dashed-line in that submission.
> 
> It is now widely known that the nine-dashed line was first used (in a slightly different form) in a map released by China in 1947 (before the Communist Party came to power). What is not widely discussed is that the Chinese move followed by less than two years the Truman Declaration in which the United States broke with pre-existing international law by claiming resources jurisdiction in the seabed of the continental shelf beyond the territorial sea. Perhaps China in 1947 was staking out a similar claim as other states rushed to emulate the revolutionary and expansionary U.S. claim.
> 
> Sources in China close to the government say that it has been unable to decide what to do about this nine-dashed line left over from history. Some constituencies in China have argued that China has “sovereignty” over all of the sea areas enclosed by the line, but the government has not endorsed this view–ever. So it has become a sensitive domestic political matter in which leaders face the accusation of being a traitor if they surrender the line. Such a charge has been publicly levied by Chinese hawks against former President Jiang Zemin for his border agreement with Russia. At the same time, there are more than a few Chinese official statements that appear to limit China’s claims to maritime resource jurisdiction to those embodied in the Law of the Sea Convention.
> 
> _*Land Reclamation*_
> 
> Admiral Harris also characterized China’s land reclamation activities as “preposterous.” By contrast, it should be noted, China regards these reclamations as examples of its “great restraint.” What significance should we attach to the reclamations?
> 
> For the record, to my knowledge, all of China’s current land reclamation is on submerged features in the vicinity of the Spratly Islands that have been the subject of Chinese physical presence for over two decades, so China has not permanently occupied new features in the last eighteen months, or even the last 20 years. A list of these features was noted in my 1998 book on the subject, China’s Ocean Frontier, as follows:
> 
> Between 1987 and 1996, the PRC occupied eight features in the Spratly group. These included Fiery Cross Reef, a totally submerged feature where the PRC in early 1988 conducted major engineering works to construct an 8000 square metre platform of concrete and steel rising two metres above the sea. It erected structures on Cuarteron Reef, Gaven Reef, Subi Reef, Dongmen Reef and Johnson Reef in 1988 and 1989 and on Mischief Reef in late 1994.
> 
> In September 2014, when new construction was revealed on Johnson Reef, a Chinese commentator echoed the Foreign Ministry by saying that the country needed to improve facilities there to make the lives of its occupants easier, but he added that China also needed an airbase to prepare for emergencies. He noted that this would be a breach by China of the 2002 Code of Conduct but that Vietnam and the Philippines had consistently breached it, and that China had shown great restraint by not using force to evict their forces form the islands and submerged features they occupied. On 9 April 2015, as CSIS in Washington observed, China acknowledged for the first time an unspecified military purpose to the reclamations which was almost certainly intended to mean a defensive position.
> 
> It is hard however to credit the extreme view published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that a 10,000 ft. runway that China appears to be building on Fiery Cross Reef “could enable China to monitor and potentially control the airspace over the South China Sea, which would provide greater capability to exert sea control.” This to me is hypothetically possible (in terms of monitoring) but preposterous in terms of practical realities (controlling all South China Sea air space from one reef airfield against the might of the United States and its allies). This sort of  overblown assessment reflects the mood in Washington and in U.S. Navy circles that borders on rage at what they see (mistakenly) as China’s destabilization without any willingness to consider that actions of Vietnam, the Philippines or the United States itself might be contributing to the instability.
> 
> The Philippines has expressed concern in 2015 that China may be planning reclamation activity in Scarborough Shoal, an underwater feature that China took control of in 2012 after repeat confrontations with Philippines vessels.
> 
> _*Propaganda and Intelligence*_
> 
> The propaganda tactic being repeatedly used by those who see China as the only provocateur is to blur complex matters of law, dates and sequencing of events to paint China in the worst possible light. China is not blameless but the hysteria coming from the anti-China camp might be seen as laughable were it not so serious. It has been well summarized by a Chinese commentator in 2014: “Manila and its Western supporters have a rather ludicrous logic that the Philippines and Vietnam can do anything on the Nansha [Spratly] Islands and China can’t take any countermeasures.” The U.S. State Department position has consistently been relatively measured and restrained. It needs to reassert some control over PACOM’s public diplomacy.
> 
> But this is not simply an institutional coordination problem in Washington. It is a serious intelligence failure on the part of the U.S. Navy leaders in the Pacific. They are expert in the Law of the Sea but they have far less expertise on the law of territorial acquisition and sovereignty. The Pentagon, and PACOM in particular, have appeared on too many occasions deeply inexpert or biased on China. In public and in private, PACOM officers too often rush to ascribe the most silly intentions to China without offering any sort of reasoned and empathetic assessment of how the Chinese might see the problem.
> 
> A new and more empathetic study of the issue from the United States government might also evaluate the reliability of the repeated reassurances from Chinese leaders that their activities in defence of the Spratly claim represent no threat to international commercial shipping. The U.S. intelligence community is capable of such a balanced study. It may exist already. The world would be a safer place if it could see such a balanced study by the U.S. intelligence community in the public domain.



                         _*And*_

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a301aa60-0dcf-11e5-aa7b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3caj7WUd6


> US v China: is this the new cold war?
> 
> David Pilling
> 
> June 10, 2015
> 
> Strange things are happening in the South China Sea. In the past 18 months, Beijing has reclaimed 2,000 acres of land, converting several submerged reefs and rocks into fully fledged “islands”. Beijing’s land-reclamation efforts have dwarfed those of other countries, notably the Philippines and Vietnam, which have rival claims to the nearby Spratly Islands. China is also constructing piers, harbours and multistorey buildings (though there is no Fifa football stadium yet). On Fiery Cross Reef, in the Spratly Islands, it has built a 3km runway capable of handling all the military aircraft at Beijing’s disposal.
> 
> The splurge of activity has set alarm bells ringing. This month, in a speech in Tokyo, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, president of the Philippines, likened China’s activity to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Ashton Carter, US defence secretary, called Chinese actions “out of step” with international norms. The US, he said, would “fly, sail and operate” wherever international law allowed. He explicitly denied that the act of “turning an underwater rock into an airfield” conferred any rights of sovereignty or restricted any other nation’s right of sea or air passage. China and other claimants, he said, should immediately cease all land reclamation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese construction at Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea
> 
> That begs the question: what is the US going to do about it? The short answer may be not much. The US continues to fly military planes near the new islands. It and other nations are stepping up military co-operation in an effort to show a united front. Yet China’s island reclamation programme has proceeded apace. Mr Carter’s words sound like President Barack Obama’s “red line” in Syria. If Beijing continues to call Washington’s bluff, the truth will be out: the US speaks loudly but carries a small stick.
> 
> Why is it so hard for Washington to act? For one thing, though Beijing’s actions may not be in the spirit of co-operation, neither are they overtly illegal. Both the Philippines and Vietnam have also reclaimed land. China has merely done so on an industrial scale. Nor is China’s claim to the Spratlys entirely spurious, say legal experts. True, the islands are closer to the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, three of the other claimants (along with Brunei). Yet proximity is not always decisive as Argentina can testify in relation to its dispute with the UK over the Falklands/Malvinas. Finally, China is not obviously threatening freedom of navigation. It does seek to restrict military activity within claimed territorial waters. That may contravene international law, although the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea says military activity — such as surveillance — should be carried out with “due regard” to the rights of the relevant coastal state. Where China is clearly trying it on is its effort to extend such restrictions to artificial islands. When the US flew a P-8 Poseidon aircraft near a new island recently, the Chinese navy told it to clear off.
> 
> Again, it boils down to what the US is prepared to do about it. It says it is considering sending warships within 12 miles of China’s new creations. Having made that threat, it may very well feel obliged to carry it through. China, though, is not powerless to respond. It could send in its own warships. If it really wants to up the ante, it could declare an air defence identification zone over all or part of the South China Sea, theoretically obliging incoming aircraft to report their presence to Beijing.
> 
> If China and the US are engaged in a game of bluff, the suspicion is that China may have more stomach for the fight. Its tactic is to pick quarrels over seemingly small-bore matters that individually are not worth shedding blood over. Yet collectively, almost imperceptibly, they advance China’s ambition to challenge US “primacy” in the region. Hugh White, an Australian academic, says China is cutting “very thin slices of a very long sausage”. Xi Jinping has already told us what the sausage looks like. China’s president has pressed for a new type of “great power relationship” that would bring Beijing greater respect — and power — in Asia. That does not threaten US primacy globally, but it does challenge it in Asia, where China wants to be treated as an equal, at least.
> 
> Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea are an important part of that strategy. As Carl Thayer, a security expert at the University of New South Wales, writes: “China has changed ‘facts on the ground’ and presented the region with a fait accompli”. The problem with faits accomplis — as Washington is discovering — is that you can’t do anything about them.




So, what is it? Is Gwynne Dyer right? Are we drifting towards a real, _hot_ war? Is Greg Austin right? is America misreading both recent history (since 1980) and Chinese intentions and making a mountain out of a molehill? Or is David Pilling right? is this all just part of a Chinese strategy to "rebalance" the _regional_ power relationships, and is the US (and it's Pacific allies) powerless to respond?

All three cases have merit.

Mostly, I agree with Mr Pilling: China is following a well considered _regional_ strategy ~ it is not challenging America globally ... yet ~ and the US cannot do much about the new "facts on the ground" except dig itself (and its allies) a deeper hole.

I also agree with Mr Austin that America, not China, is the one being "preposterous."

But I _fear_ that Mr Dyer may be right and 'strategists' and 'leaders' in Washington (and I deeply mistrust the judgment of both groups) may provoke a war that no one in their right minds really wants and which America cannot win.


Edited to add: 

CSIS has added some good photos of the reclamation work here.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _New York Times_ reports that " Zhou Yongkang, China’s former domestic security chief, was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for accepting bribes, abuse of power and revealing state secrets ... He is the highest-ranking Chinese official to be convicted of corruption ... Mr. Zhou, 72, was tried in secret in the northeastern city of Tianjin ... he [said he] admitted guilt and would not appeal his conviction."





Zhou Yongkang looking his age at his sentencing ... without his hair dyed jet black

Zhou Yongkang was a real power in China; Xi Jinping is, indeed, a "giant killer" and _I suspect_ he will have less and less opposition for whatever he has in mind for China.


----------



## tomahawk6

China has a successful test of their hypersonic nuclear capable missile .This is a game changer which will accelerate US development.No doubt Russia is alarmed as well.

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/06/china-tests-wu-14-amid-us-tensions/

China's Wu-14 can penetrate the U.S. missile defense systems

The hypersonic nuclear delivery vehicle can travel up to ten times the speed of sound or 7,680 miles per hour. That means, if launched from Shanghai, it can hit San Francisco in about 50 minutes. The even bigger cause of worry for the United States is that it is fully capable of penetrating the U.S. missile defense systems. The test was carried out in Western China last week.


----------



## Harrigan

Is there any independent proof backing up the twice-stated claim that "it is fully capable of penetrating the U.S. missile system"?  As this system has been in development for some time I suspect that:

a) the US is keeping well ahead technologically, and
b) the US would never comment on whether weapon "x" can or cannot penetrate its missile defence systems

Seems a bit sketchy to me.

Harrigan


----------



## tomahawk6

The US program is called Waverunner and has achieved Mach 5.We still need to see the technical results of the Chinese test.The Chinese test vehicle was launched from an ICBM.The US test vehicle was launched from a B-52.The Chinese have zero anti missile capability.It wouldnt do to discuss capabilities of the US defensive shiled vs a hypersonic weapon.


----------



## Harrigan

I agree.  That is why I am skeptical of claims that System "X" is fully capableof penetrating the U.S. missile defence systems.  WAAAY too early to be suggesting that, IMHO.

Harrigan


----------



## tomahawk6

Not an air defense guy,but I would think you would need need a hypseronic kill vehicle or launch a salvo of missiles at the target.


----------



## Brasidas

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Not an air defense guy,but I would think you would need need a hypseronic kill vehicle or launch a salvo of missiles at the target.



Or something along the lines of a Bomarc?


----------



## tomahawk6

Safeguard.I suspect the current defensive missile system is capable of intercepting the few hypersonic missiles that China can produce.Throw in the potential of HEL and you could probably defeat a limited attack.Such an attack would cause an almost immediate retaliatory strike on the PRC.I just dont see that happening but one never knows.

http://srmsc.org/


----------



## Edward Campbell

Prof Daniel Bell of Tsinghua University (a Canadian, by the way), with whom I often agree, posits in this article, which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Time_, that the Chinese Communist party will _morph_ over the next decades into something more suitable to its real role in society:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/855dc7b2-16aa-11e5-b07f-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3dj47KobK


> For China the end of the Communist party is nigh — but in name only
> *Organisation’s appellation will soon be obsolete as it is not communist or a party, writes Daniel Bell*
> 
> Daniel Bell
> 
> June 21, 2015
> 
> China’s economic troubles and increasingly rigid ideological controls have led prominent China watchers to forecast the crack-up of its political system. I share the view that the Chinese Communist party may soon be extinct — but the extinction will be in name only.
> 
> In fact, the CCP is neither communist nor a party. Few Chinese believe it will abolish the market economy and lead the march to higher communism. It is “Leninist” in the sense that it is vertically organised and rules supreme over the state apparatus but it lacks other vital features, such as the idea that class conflict is the motor of history, a commitment to the idea of communism at home, and support for revolutionary overthrow of capitalist regimes abroad.
> 
> And the days of Leninist-style political mobilisation are long gone because the party must be sensitive to public opinion. The CCP can mobilise around causes such as its anti-corruption drive if there is already social demand; but no longer around hare-brained schemes such as the Great Leap Forward, which radically conflict with what people want and what most scholars see as sensible.
> 
> Nor is the CCP a political party. In the past three decades, it has (re-)established a meritocratic system similar to that of imperial China: government officials are selected using exams, then promoted based on performance on lower rungs. With 86m members, the CCP is a pluralistic organisation that co-opts leaders of different sectors of society, including keen capitalists, and it aims to represent the whole country.
> 
> It is puzzling that the CCP should cling to its name given widespread antipathy in China to communism. Even party members distrust Marxism, and most students dread their compulsory Marxism classes. The very idea of a party that represents part of the population also has negative overtones. Confucius criticised quarrelsome people who associate along party lines, and surveys in China show a preference for “guardianship discourse” with elites responsible for the good of the whole society.
> 
> So why does the CCP stick with the name? It makes sense to change it to something — say, the Chinese Meritocratic Union — that better corresponds with the reality of the organisation, as well as to what it aspires to be.
> 
> In informal political talk in Beijing, there is often agreement that the name should be changed. It is also recognised that it cannot be changed now because the organisation still draws on CCP history for its ideological legitimacy.
> 
> Yet the past 30 years have on balance been positive; and furthermore the CCP is increasingly looking to the long run of Chinese history for ideological legitimacy. The more it identifies with pre-revolutionary history, the more it can distance itself from the recent past.
> 
> The days of Leninist-style political mobilisation are long gone because the party must be sensitive to public opinion
> 
> Most important is to improve political meritocracy. The CCP does not need a unifying ideology, so long as people agree that the political system does a good job of selecting public officials with superior qualities.
> The pressing problem of corruption casts doubt on the question of virtue. So the anti-corruption campaign is essential to buttressing the legitimacy of the CCP, though we will not see results for a few years.
> 
> Another reason the name cannot be changed now owes more to Confucianism than to communism. Revolutionary heroes who fought to establish a great nation are still attached to the name. Filial piety is a core value in China, and dutiful sons and daughters should not upset the elderly — especially those who sacrificed for the country. Sometimes harmony matters more than truth.
> 
> In a couple of decades, however, the generation of revolutionary heroes will have sadly left this world. At that point, there will be less reason to stick to an obsolete name that needlessly casts the ruling organisation in a negative light.
> 
> So here is my prediction. In 2035, the CCP will still be in power but it will not be called the CCP.
> 
> _The writer is a professor at Tsinghua University and author of ‘The China Model’_




I have mentioned several times, in this thread, that the CCP, post Mao, is trying to re-invent the _Confucian_ state. Prof Bell and I are not the only ones who hold this view ... but, in the West, in America especially, scholars and policy makers persist in misunderstanding what the CCP is and how it thinks.

Of course there are legitimate contrary views ... but those, including many, many important US officials and admirals and generals who persist in _believing_ (or just (dishonestly) claiming) that the Chinese government is communist are doing a disservice to informed debate.


Edited to add:


I think it's important to understand three things about Xi Jinping:

     1. He wants China to be a thoroughly modern, sophisticated, 21st century society ~ with all that implies;

     2. He, equally totally, rejects the Western, _liberal_, democratic model; he is _convinced_ that our socio-political model has sown the seeds of our own destruction and he will not allow China to follow. Notwithstanding
         his, and many other Chinese leaders', affection and admiration for Lee Kuan Yew's _Singapore model_, he (and they) recognize that what works in a tiny, homogeneous city-state which _inherited_ excellent socio-political _institutions_
         may not, likely will not work in the HUGE, diverse, Chinese state; and

     3. He is a _Confucian_ by education and instinct.

In _my considered_ (and I believe informed) _opinion_, those are FACTS and need to taken into account whenever we consider what to do with, about, to or for China.


Edit: spelling  :-[


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese have made off with a treasure trove of data on US government employees (and apparently also people connected to government such as lobbyists, not to mention every person who was ever named on these forms; spouses, former employers, aquaintences...). In terms of "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, this allows the Chinese to apply pressure directly to individual Americans, a form of precision targeting that we could only dream of:

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/245614-chinas-hackers-got-what-they-came-for



> *China's hackers got what they came for*
> By Cory Bennett - 06/21/15 08:00 AM EDT
> 
> The Chinese hackers who are believed to have cracked into the federal government’s networks might not be back for a while.
> 
> They got what they came for.
> 
> “I think they have 95 percent of what they want from both U.S. industry and government,” said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at security research firm Trend Micro.
> 
> While China’s aggressive hacking operations are certain to continue, experts say the mammoth data breach at the Office of Personnel Management is a watershed event that will allow Beijing to move from broad reconnaissance to narrowly tailored snooping.
> 
> Having already obtained private information on up to 14 million federal employees — including Social Security numbers, arrest and financial records, and details on mental illness and drug and alcohol use — China’s hacking teams can now retreat to the shadows.
> 
> “For this point in time we won’t see another massive attack like this. Instead, it will be more targeted ones,” said Tony Cole, global government chief technical officer for security firm FireEye, which has conducted extensive research on Chinese cyber campaigns.
> 
> U.S. officials are still trying to figure out the full scope of the data breach, which is believed to have affected security clearance information for the military and spy agencies.
> 
> While the United States has not publicly blamed China, investigators privately say China was behind the cyberattack.
> 
> The OPM hacks have likely helped China fill out an exhaustive database of federal workers that their teams have slowly been building for over a year.
> 
> “Knowing almost every person is incredibly helpful,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which monitors critical infrastructure attacks. “That type of information they presumably never had access to before.”
> 
> Because the hack went undiscovered for a year, the hackers likely had time to do an exhaustive sweep through federal networks.
> 
> “If somebody was in last year and they had that much time,” Cole said, “then the odds are that they have a huge cache and have really taken all the crown jewels in that system.”
> 
> It appears the digital infiltrators were casting a wide net, similar to the tactics used when targeting health insurers like Anthem and Premera Blue Cross.
> 
> While those attacks compromised the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than 90 million people, researchers suspect that the goal was collecting information on U.S. government officials.
> 
> With the OPM hack, they likely hit the mother lode.
> 
> With a deep data set now safe in hand, Chinese hackers can shift to a “much more clandestine” stage of espionage, Kellermann said.
> 
> “They’re going through this data now, and more than likely they're looking for a candidate on whom they may actually want to try and gather more data,” Cole said.
> 
> Cole said these digital warriors are looking for exploitable personal details — people who have seen counselors or psychiatrists, for instance.
> 
> The thought, Cole said, is “Let’s find out who the counselor is, go crack their system.”
> 
> “There's plenty of information that they could still collect in terms of full medical records or more details or financial records,” Alperovitch said.
> 
> Beijing officials aren’t going to lose an appetite for maintaining the most comprehensive database possible on U.S. workers, which is a valuable resource in the emerging era of cyber warfare.
> 
> Cole suspects the OPM hacking team left behind so-called “beachheads,” essentially undetected entry points that could allow intruders back into a network even after getting kicked out.
> 
> “It’s difficult to actually dig through and find all of those indicators,” Cole said. “The government does have some good experts, however, not a lot of them.”
> 
> In due time, the Chinese hackers will be back for more.
> 
> “They will always be interested in coming back for updates,” Alperovitch said. “The reality is these are campaigns. And persistent campaigns.”
> 
> “I have no worries,” he added, “about Chinese intelligence operatives being out of work any time soon.”


----------



## YZT580

And if they have been successful in the U.S. it is likely that they have done the same in Canada, Britain, Australia and all of their other potential adversaries:  anyone in other words who maintains their sensitive information on disc.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is yet more on the South China Seas and America's reactions to China's actions in that region in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cd6a9192-159d-11e5-8e6a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3dj47KobK


> US-China: Shifting sands
> 
> Geoff Dyer
> 
> June 21, 2015
> 
> *There are concerns Washington needs a fresh approach to Beijing amid fears it is trying to push the US out of Asia*
> 
> The satellite images of bright strips of sand rising from turquoise waters and surrounded by an intricate network of support ships struck a nerve around the globe. The man-made islands vividly showed China’s slow-motion efforts to assert more control in the South China Sea but, more than that, they represented a direct challenge to the US which has long policed a waterway crucial to the global economy.
> 
> The images, released in April by the Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have contributed to a distinctive shift in the American debate about China. Washington is starting to sound rattled. Not only is the US alarmed at Beijing’s ambitious foreign policy, whether in the South China Sea or the launch of its own international banks, but there is also a creeping fear that America is no longer sure about how to cope with Beijing’s growing influence.
> 
> “The consensus of 35 years and five administrations about how to deal with China is fraying so severely that we have lost confidence in the fundamental underpinnings of US-China policy,” says Frank Jannuzi, former Asia adviser to John Kerry and now head of the Mansfield Foundation, a Washington think-tank. “So people are beginning to look for a new approach.”
> 
> A decade ago Robert Zoellick, then the deputy secretary of state, summed up the relaxed confidence with which the US viewed China’s rise when he urged Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder” in a US-led world. Instead of a “responsible stakeholder”, however, many in Washington now see a rival with increasingly sharp elbows and a plan to squeeze the US out of Asia.
> 
> The White House is still committed to an approach that involves engaging China and hedging against its increasing military power. It will emphasise the potential for co-operation when the two governments meet in Washington this week for an annual summit, known as the strategic and economic dialogue.
> 
> But among the former officials, analysts and think-tanks who set the tone for the broader Washington debate, there is an urgent search for a plan B. The proposals range from major military spending to cutting a grand bargain with Beijing but they are all rooted in a fear that the status quo cannot hold.
> 
> Mr Zoellick, an adviser to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, thinks the extent of the Chinese challenge to the US-led system is sometimes overstated, noting Beijing’s constructive role during the financial crisis. But he acknowledges that “it is one of these fluid periods and the United States has lost the initiative on a lot of these issues”.
> 
> _Great wall of sand_
> 
> Washington has complained for years about aspects of China’s military spending and its behaviour in cyberspace but in recent months the irritants have been magnified. Perhaps more than any other subject, it is the South China Sea that has shifted US views about what a rising China will portend. The Pentagon has looked on in alarm since the start of the year as China has accelerated its audacious transformation of reefs and sandbanks into islands that can host ports, airfields and other potential military facilities, creating “a great wall of sand”, as Pacific commander Harry Harris calls it.
> 
> The frenzy of island-building followed China’s declaration in 2013 that it was establishing an air defence zone in the East China Sea. The Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia, which was unveiled in 2011, was partly designed to restrain China. But Beijing’s ambitions have if anything expanded, especially since Xi Jinping took power in late 2012.
> 
> China’s approach in maritime disputes is sometimes described as a “cabbage strategy”, a slow, deliberate accumulation of new island facilities and naval presence that gradually shifts the military balance in the South China Sea. The US is taking seriously the prospect of being squeezed out of a crucial maritime artery that is used for up to 50 per cent of global commerce.
> 
> “They are peeling back the cabbage, one leaf at a time,” says Michael Green, former Asia director at the White House national security council now at CSIS. “There is now a consensus over China’s trajectory, but not over what should be done.”
> 
> The anxiety about a more abrasive Beijing has been amplified by reports of Chinese cyber attacks on US companies and government agencies. In his speech a decade ago, Mr Zoellick warned that the US would not tolerate “rampant theft of intellectual property”. Rather than back off, however, US officials believe China, which denies the accusations, has stepped up its use of hacking to secure trade secrets.
> 
> The paranoia about the Chinese cyber threat can at times obscure the reality that the US does some of the very same things to China. Speaking about the recent hack of US government personnel files, former NSA director Michael Hayden described the incident as “honourable espionage work”. He added: “To grab the equivalent in the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice.”
> 
> The US has also been caught flat-footed by China’s efforts to build institutions that might challenge its role at the heart of the international financial system. After Beijing last year launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, seen by many as a potential rival to the World Bank, the Obama administration tried to convince allies to stay out — at least until China’s role in the bank was clearly defined. However, it was left isolated after Britain and other allies joined the Beijing-based institution.
> 
> Some in Washington are also watching closely to see whether the International Monetary Fund will label the renminbi an official reserve currency, fearing that it would give the Chinese currency an important stamp of legitimacy in its challenge to the dollar.
> 
> Moreover, the administration’s ability to present a coherent economic strategy in Asia has encountered considerable resistance in Congress. One reason for the creation of the AIIB is the failure of Congress to approve a 2010 reform that would have given Beijing a bigger say in the IMF. More recently, the administration has struggled to win support from Congress for a 12-country Asia-Pacific trade pact, although the White House still hopes to get the backing it needs over the next fortnight.
> 
> Some of America’s closest friends in the region warn that the trade votes will be crucial for its Asia strategy. K. Shanmugam, Singapore’s foreign minister, says that, if Congress blocks the Pacific trade deal, “how will people view America as reliable, how will people see America as a country that can still get things done?”
> 
> _Search for plan B_
> 
> Amid the mounting unease, three approaches to retool US-China policy are being proposed.
> 
> Traditionally the lobby pushing the administration to get tougher on China has been driven by hawkish Pentagon officials. But now that group is drawing support from members of the foreign policy establishment. The most eye-catching example is a report from the Council on Foreign Relations written by Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who once worked closely with Henry Kissinger, and Ashley Tellis, a former state department official.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In addition to calling for the US to maintain military “predominance” over China, one of the most striking features of their report is the way it flirts with some of the economic tools of the containment strategy used against the Soviet Union during the cold war. They call for much stricter controls on exports of technology to China, especially those with potential military uses, and for trade arrangements in the region that deliberately exclude China.
> 
> “Thanks to it being embedded in the liberal economic order for the last 30 years, China has grown dramatically,” says Mr Tellis. But China’s growth, he says, has now “moved into fundamental military capabilities”. China’s official military budget of $145bn — some put it higher — is about a quarter of that of the US but, while America has global responsibilities, China is focused solely on its Asian backyard.
> 
> Such an approach, however, could encourage a cycle of retaliatory trade measures by Beijing, likely damaging US companies in China. It could also run foul of the World Trade Organisation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Others call for the US to move in the opposite direction and find new ways to accommodate Beijing. The argument goes that the US still enjoys military superiority over China, so better to try to establish a new status quo from a position of strength rather than from weakness in a decade’s time.
> 
> Michael Swaine at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington has suggested the outlines of a geopolitical bargain in Asia that would remove the potency from some of the most dangerous potential flashpoints. It would mean more stringent restrictions on US arms sales to Taiwan, for instance, in return for a Chinese commitment not to use force against the island, while he believes the two countries should work together to engineer a united and nonaligned Korea.
> 
> Such proposals generate strong objections. There is the political difficulty of seeking a bargain when leaders in Washington and Beijing would be vulnerable to charges of “selling out”. Many US observers believe China would view such an effort as a sign of American weakness, encouraging them to push harder rather than seek an agreement. Then there is the reaction in the region. If the US were to strike a deal with China, countries such as Japan and Vietnam might be tempted to invest more heavily in their own security to prevent eventual domination by Beijing.
> 
> A third group argues that the US and China need to develop common projects to help build trust between them, “inch by inch”. Yet, while such an approach might create some stability, it would not resolve issues such as the South China Sea where tension has the potential to poison other aspects of the relationship.
> 
> US officials acknowledge that China has become tougher to deal with in recent years. But they also tend to roll their eyes at the countless suggestions they receive for ways to hit back at Beijing. They insist that even amid major disputes the two governments have been able to work together on key issues, whether it is the Iran nuclear talks or a climate change deal. Even sceptics know the US has no choice but to keep trying to engage Beijing.
> 
> The administration has used the anxiety to boost its relationships around the region. Military co-operation with countries ranging from Japan to Vietnam has been expanded. Even with China’s growing military reach, the US still has a formidable position in Asia.
> 
> Mr Zoellick says that the US will need to respond firmly on the security and cyber disputes between the countries but argues that the administration could find other ways to work with China. Rather than seeing the renminbi as a threat to the dollar, the US could use Beijing’s aspiration for its currency to play a greater role as a lever to encourage the sort of reform to the Chinese financial system that Washington has long wanted to see.
> 
> “Working with China’s economic reformers could actually strengthen our national interest,” he argues.
> 
> _Rock and a hard place_
> 
> The thorny subject that the administration cannot avoid, however, is the South China Sea. For the past year, the Pentagon has been preparing options to push back against Beijing that would include deploying ships and aeroplanes into areas around the disputed territories. The message would be clear: the US does not recognise the reclaimed land as islands with their own territorial waters.
> 
> But such proposals are not universally supported within the administration. Some officials worry about Chinese retaliation, while others are wary of a confrontation while the US is fighting fires in the Middle East and Europe.
> 
> “The big question is whether you can have a significant increase in tension in somewhere like the South China Sea and not have it affect all the other areas where the two governments work together,” says Elbridge Colby at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank. “That is the part that we just do not know.”




The FT's editors sum the problem up in five images:











                         
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	







I mistrust official Washington policy because _I believe_ that the Pentagon, especially, and the White House and the Congress, too, _do not understand China_, they know they don't understand China and _they don't care_ because their aim is protect their own, individual "rice bowls," not America's vital interests.


----------



## Harrigan

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I mistrust official Washington policy because _I believe_ that the Pentagon, especially, and the White House and the Congress, too, _do not understand China_, they know they don't understand China and _they don't care_ because their aim is protect their own, individual "rice bowls," not America's vital interests.


I agree with you, Mr.Campbell.  I think there is a fundamental difference between what the US says publically and what they know privately, and they see an advantage in playing up the "threat" of China.  The 5 summary images are actually quite good as well, at least so far as highlighting the issues, if not a balanced view.  From what I have seen, I have the following five observations/questions ref: China:

1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IS the trade agreement deliberately excluding China.  That is the whole point of it, is it not?

2. Should China not have global responsibilities like the US?  They do have interests around the globe, as do other countries (Russia, UK, France, etc).  Why are we (the west) so shocked by this?

3. I am glad that the last article did mention that the US conducts cyber-espionage on China too.  While we tend to hear many, many stories of the scourge of Chinese hackers, name me a country that does NOT conduct cyber-espionage for its national interests (be they economic or strategic).  That's not to excuse its threat - it is very real.  But everyone does it, so perhaps we shouldn't be so pious about our own innocence in this field.

4.  On the South China Sea, China's claims are not much different than the other claimants except that they are doing more than the others to entrench themselves.  All of those countries (except maybe Brunei) maintain outposts on the rocks and shoals in the same manner as China.  Nothing is stopping them from building up their own rocks, except perhaps will.  As for the US involvement, consider it in reverse:  if China decided that it had a responsibility to "police a waterway crucial to the global economy" such as....the Straits of Florida...., how would the US react?  Would it be so understanding of the "freedom of navigation" exercise?  (We know our own reactions to "freedom of navigation" exercises carried out by Bears along the Labrador and Beaufort Sea coasts....)

5.  China clearly has a long-term strategy, and the patience to achieve it.  We in the west tend to talk about long-term strategy, but don't have the patience to wait that long IMHO.

Harrigan


----------



## Edward Campbell

Harrigan said:
			
		

> I agree with you, Mr.Campbell.  I think there is a fundamental difference between what the US says publically and what they know privately, and they see an advantage in playing up the "threat" of China.  The 5 summary images are actually quite good as well, at least so far as highlighting the issues, if not a balanced view.  From what I have seen, I have the following five observations/questions ref: China:
> 
> 1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IS the trade agreement deliberately excluding China.  That is the whole point of it, is it not?
> _I think_ that the "whole point" of the TPP is to *get ready* for China, to develop an integrated framework into which China will want to fit._ My guess_, anyway.
> 
> 2. Should China not have global responsibilities like the US?  They do have interests around the globe, as do other countries (Russia, UK, France, etc).  Why are we (the west) so shocked by this?
> China has, actually, participated in e.g. some peacekeeping missions in Africa and the anti-Piracy mission on the Horn of Africa. But the Chinese are quite happy to let the US spend billions on e.g. freedom of the seas
> while they (China) get a free ride.
> 
> 3. I am glad that the last article did mention that the US conducts cyber-espionage on China too.  While we tend to hear many, many stories of the scourge of Chinese hackers, name me a country that does NOT conduct cyber-espionage for its national interests (be they economic or strategic).  That's not to excuse its threat - it is very real.  But everyone does it, so perhaps we shouldn't be so pious about our own innocence in this field.
> 
> 4.  On the South China Sea, China's claims are not much different than the other claimants except that they are doing more than the others to entrench themselves.  All of those countries (except maybe Brunei) maintain outposts on the rocks and shoals in the same manner as China.  Nothing is stopping them from building up their own rocks, except perhaps will.  As for the US involvement, consider it in reverse:  if China decided that it had a responsibility to "police a waterway crucial to the global economy" such as....the Straits of Florida...., how would the US react?  Would it be so understanding of the "freedom of navigation" exercise?  (We know our own reactions to "freedom of navigation" exercises carried out by Bears along the Labrador and Beaufort Sea coasts....)
> 
> 5.  China clearly has a long-term strategy, and the patience to achieve it.  We in the west tend to talk about long-term strategy, but don't have the patience to wait that long IMHO.
> _I agree, 100%._
> Harrigan


----------



## Harrigan

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China has, actually, participated in e.g. some peacekeeping missions in Africa and the anti-Piracy mission on the Horn of Africa. But the Chinese are quite happy to let the US spend billions on e.g. freedom of the seas
> while they (China) get a free ride.



Isn't this a good thing from our perspective?  Having China participate in peacekeeping missions in Africa would seem to be a positive step.  And participating in anti-piracy missions in Africa, in cooperation with western allies, would seem to be in accordance with freedom of the seas by definition.  Shouldn't we be asking China to do more?

What I find odd is that there is an inference in US policy in the South China Sea that increased Chinese presence on those rocks, even with airstrips, would somehow inhibit freedom of the seas.  Ultimately all the traffic that flows through the South China Sea is transiting by the Chinese mainland either before or after, so if China wanted to, for some reason, inhibit the flow of trade through the area, they would already be doing it.  Besides, the area is also a key trade artery for China as well - it is not in their interests to reduce the flow of trade through the area. 

Is "freedom of the seas/navigation" even the issue here?

Harrigan


----------



## a_majoor

Wow, this keeps getting worse and worse. The Chinese making off with the security and personal information of millions of American government employees was bads enough, but they may ahve compromised other organizations as well. "Unrestricted Warfare" against individual US citizens has no doctrinal or even conceptual counterpert in the West, and the situation is completely asymmetric; there is no means available to us to gather such detailed information on millions of Chinese citizens, much less government workers and their security information.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/06/23/usis-cyberattack-may-have-been-more-widespread-than-previously-known/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1



> *Cyberattack on USIS may have hit even more government agencies *
> By Christian Davenport June 23 at 5:44 PM 
> 
> Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) has asked for contractors to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP).
> 
> The massive cyberattack last year on the federal contractor that conducted background investigations for security clearances may have been even more widespread than previously known, affecting the police force that protects Congress and an intelligence agency that helped track down Osama bin Laden.
> 
> After Falls Church, Va.-based USIS suffered the intrusion, the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Homeland Security issued stop-work orders to the company. And eventually OPM, which conducts background checks for the overwhelming majority of the federal government, canceled USIS’s contracts, effectively putting the company out of business.
> 
> But now USIS has told Congress in a letter obtained by The Washington Post that the breach may have been even more damaging: OPM, two DHS agencies — Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the U.S. Capitol Police and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were all hit.
> 
> The revelation comes as members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are scheduled on Wednesday to question leaders of USIS and KeyPoint Government Solutions, which is now one of the leading providers of security investigations. It was also hacked last year.
> 
> Separately, the committee has been concerned about major intrusions into OPM’s networks that were publicly disclosed in recent weeks. One affected the database for background checks for clearances; another involved the personnel records of more than 4 million current and former employees.
> 
> The committee wants to know if the attacks on the contractors led to the breaches at OPM. On Tuesday, Katherine Archuleta, OPM’s director, told a Senate hearing that hackers used a credential used by KeyPoint to breach the agency’s network.
> 
> “I want to be very clear that, while the adversary leveraged [a] compromised KeyPoint user credential to gain access to OPM’s network, we don’t have any evidence that would suggest that KeyPoint as a company was responsible or directly involved in the intrusion,” she said.
> 
> KeyPoint CEO Eric Hess said in prepared testimony for Wednesday’s hearings that “we have seen no evidence suggesting KeyPoint was in any way responsible for the OPM breach.”
> 
> He added, “KeyPoint is committed to ensuring the highest levels of protection for the sensitive information with which we are entrusted.”
> 
> In a statement to The Post, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee’s ranking member, said that contractors “have become a weak link in our nation’s security clearance process.”
> 
> “Based on this new information, the data breach at USIS appears much more damaging than previously known, affecting our intelligence community, our immigration agencies, and even our police officers here on Capitol Hill,” he said. “It is unclear why USIS withheld this information from Congress for so long, especially since I raised this question more than seven months ago.”
> 
> USIS and KeyPoint spokesmen declined to comment, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency did not respond to a request for comment. After the breach was disclosed last year, both DHS and the Capitol Police said they notified all of their employees about the intrusion and took steps to protect their privacy.
> 
> During a hearing last week on the OPM breach, which has been linked to Chinese intruders, Cummings said one of the most critical questions was: “Did these cyber attackers gain access to OPM’s data systems using information they stole from USIS or KeyPoint last year?”
> 
> After a classified briefing on the matter, Cummings issued a statement that said he now feels “more strongly than ever” that the committee should hear from USIS and KeyPoint.
> 
> Cummings has been pressing the companies for more information for months but has had little luck and at one point accused USIS and its parent company of “obstructing this committee’s work.”
> 
> Robert Gianetta, USIS’s chief information officer, and Eric Hess, the chief executive of KeyPoint, are expected to appear before the committee on Wednesday along with Archuleta, the OPM director.
> 
> In response to questions submitted to the company in November, a USIS attorney provided an eight-page letter Tuesday, saying USIS discovered the breach itself and “consistently, openly and willingly shared information with the government regarding the cyber-attack.” It said it suffered the intrusion even though its security systems “met or exceeded requirements” imposed by the government.
> 
> USIS also has accused OPM of neglecting to share information that might have helped it detect its intrusion earlier. In addition to this year’s attack, OPM’s network was also breached months before the USIS attack.
> 
> The company also faces a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that it improperly “dumped” 665,000 background investigation cases, saying they had received a required quality review when in fact they had not. The suit, filed by Blake Percival, a former field work services director, and joined by the Justice Department, says the company rushed through the investigations in order to hit revenue incentive targets.
> 
> The Justice Department last week filed an objection to the bankruptcy plan of Altegrity, USIS’s parent company, saying that any damages awarded in the suit should not be erased by the bankruptcy.
> 
> Lisa Rein contributed to this report.


----------



## chanman

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Wow, this keeps getting worse and worse. The Chinese making off with the security and personal information of millions of American government employees was bads enough, but they may ahve compromised other organizations as well. "Unrestricted Warfare" against individual US citizens has no doctrinal or even conceptual counterpert in the West, and the situation is completely asymmetric; there is no means available to us to gather such detailed information on millions of Chinese citizens, much less government workers and their security information.
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/06/23/usis-cyberattack-may-have-been-more-widespread-than-previously-known/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1




The OPM hack was, if not the master key, then at least the lock schematics for US government computer systems. Independent of any security measures (no matter how dated or bad in the OPM's case), the weakest link is always user error. The most productive use of that data is not in the old KGB-style way of turning an individual, but in creating incredibly targeted spear phishing attacks - essentially booby-trapped email that provides the initial infection vector. Not only do they have a detailed directory of who to target (more than before anyway), but the phishing attacks can now be incredibly detailed, made to look like one of the inane promotional messages from their travel agent or insurance company that people open, glance at, and delete without a second thought.

Defending against such attacks has always been nearly impossible (working as they do on social engineering), but that kind of information makes it that much harder to protect against. (Although given the state of government IT, I'd be hard-pressed to believe they've been ever tried particularly hard ever.


----------



## Edward Campbell

KAL gets it about right, in _The Economist_:

     
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



     _Source_: http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21656244-kals-cartoon?fsrc=scn/li/cp/kal/st/june27th

SIGINT is a global business: waged against friends, foes and neutrals; military and civilians; governments and corporations; and BY governments and corporations.


----------



## dapaterson

China vs Hong Kong: One man's perspective.

http://nextshark.com/hong-kong-china-differences-designs/

I particularly like the telephone pad...


----------



## The Bread Guy

Making it easier to make "your" fleet "our" fleet ....


> China's government has passed new guidelines requiring civilian shipbuilders to ensure their vessels can be used by the military in the event of conflict, state-run media said on Thursday.
> 
> The regulations require five categories of vessels including container ships to be modified to "serve national defence needs", the state-run China Daily newspaper said.
> 
> The regulations "will enable China to convert the considerable potential of its civilian fleet into military strength", it said.
> 
> The report said that China had about 172,000 civilian ships at the end of last year, suggesting the measure could be a major boost to China's navy.
> 
> China's government will cover the costs of the plan, it added ....


----------



## Edward Campbell

This report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is a couple of days old but it makes the important point that while others are talking China is building:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/519bb548-2077-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f25d0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3f2mTDMEz


> China makes rapid progress on reclaimed islands’ facilities
> 
> Charles Clover in Beijing
> 
> July 2, 2015
> 
> China is racing ahead with construction projects on reclaimed land in the South China Sea, satellite images show, with an airstrip capable of handling combat jets among projects now close to completion.
> 
> The building of the 3km runway on Fiery Cross Reef is a step some analysts say may presage an attempt to claim the airspace over the disputed waters.
> 
> A year and a half ago the reef in the Spratly Islands was a mere lump of coral but it is now a small island, following a concerted effort by high-tech dredging barges.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Meanwhile, a port has been added to facilities at Johnson South Reef, another reclaimed island in the Spratlys, with up to six security and surveillance towers under construction.
> 
> Fiery Cross and Johnson South are among just over half a dozen submerged rocks and coral atolls that China has dredged into islands in the past 18 months, an effort Harry Harris, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, likened in April to “a great wall of sand”.
> 
> China insists the facilities it is building on the islands are for peaceful purposes but western analysts say there is clear evidence China plans to use them as military bases in an effort to back its hegemonic maritime claims in the South China Sea. China claims sovereignty over 90 per cent of the Sea.
> 
> US officials say they believe the airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef could eventually base fighter jets that could enforce an Air Defence Identification Zone over the South China Sea, if China were to claim one. China claimed such an ADIZ over the East China Sea in November 2013, provoking a diplomatic confrontation with the US and Japan.
> 
> The latest photographs of the airstrip were taken by DigitalGlobe, a satellite imagery company, and published by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
> 
> _Shifting sands
> 
> Estimated landmass for China’s reclaimed reefs (sq m)_
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A handout picture made available by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Public Affairs Office on 20 April 2015
> shows construction at Kagitingan (Fiery Cross) Reef in the disputed Spratley Islands in the south China Sea by China on 18 February 2015.
> 
> _Mischief Reef: 5,580,000
> Subi Reef: 3,950,000
> Fiery Cross Reef 2,740,000
> Cuarteron Reef: 231,100
> Gaven Reef 136,000
> South Johnson Reef: 109,000
> Hughes Reef: 76,000_
> Source: AMTI
> 
> AMTI said the airstrip was being paved and marked, while an apron and taxiway had been added adjacent to the runway. Two helipads, up to 10 satellite communications antennas and one possible radar tower were visible on Fiery Cross Reef, it said.
> 
> Last month China’s foreign ministry said it was nearing completion of some features in the South China Sea, an apparent effort to mollify criticism of its building works. However, the statement appeared to leave open the possibility that work would start or continue on other features.
> 
> “Basically what they are saying is that they are nearing the end of this phase, and they’ll start the next phase whenever they want,” said one western diplomat in Beijing.




The Chinese, like the Israelis, are believers in "facts on the ground."


----------



## Brad Sallows

Typhoon season should be interesting.


----------



## tomahawk6

China's stock markets are in freefall today.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-stock-market-crashing-chinese-095900183.html


----------



## cupper

It's gotta be cheaper than building an aircraft carrier. And it has the bonus of being unsinkable. But like Brad pointed out, typhoon season will be very interesting. Someone should give them a tour of the Jersey Shore. :nod:


----------



## a_majoor

More on the Chiese stock market crash. As this unravels, this might start putting pressure on the financial institutions which made large loans to state enterprises and other projects which are (in real terms) non-performing. This mountain of debt could well have much more severe consequences than the relatively small mountain of Greek debt. Think of how the Japanese economy, which was "set to surpas that of the Unitted States" at the end of the 1980's, suddenly went into deflationary mode when the vastly overvalued real estate bubble underlying the bank's assets popped. Since much of the world bet heavily on China, there will be consequences (as the Australians are discovering) It will be interesting to see how the Chinese bail themselves out of this one:

http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/chinese-chaos-worse-than-greece/story-fnu2pycd-1227430761673



> *Chinese chaos worse than Greece *
> 
> WHILE the world worries about Greece, there’s an even bigger problem closer to home: China.
> 
> A stock market crash there has seen $3.2 trillion wiped from the value of Chinese shares in just three weeks, triggering an emergency response from the government and warnings of “monstrous” public disorder.
> 
> • LATEST: CHINESE INVESTORS FLEE FOR SAFETY
> 
> And the effects for Australia could be serious, affecting our key commodity exports and sparking the beginning of a period of recession-like conditions.
> 
> “State-owned newspapers have used their strongest language yet, telling people ‘not to lose their minds’ and ‘not to bury themselves in horror and anxiety’. [Our] positive measures will take time to produce results,” writes IG Markets.
> 
> “If China does not find support today, the disorder could be monstrous.”
> 
> In an extraordinary move, the People’s Bank of China has begun lending money to investors to buy shares in the flailing market. The Wall Street Journal reports this “liquidity assistance” will be provided to the regulator-owned China Securities Finance Corp, which will lend the money to brokerages, which will in turn lend to investors.
> 
> The dramatic intervention marks the first time funds from the central bank have been directed anywhere other than the banks, signalling serious concern from authorities about the crisis.
> 
> At the same time, Chinese authorities are putting a halt to any new stock listings. The market regulator announced on Friday it would limit initial public offerings — which disrupt the rest of the market — in an attempt to curb plunging share prices.
> 
> While the exact amount of assistance hasn’t been revealed, the WSJ reports no upper limit has been set.
> 
> All short-selling — the practice of betting that stocks will fall — has been banned, and Chinese media has rushed to reassure citizens.
> 
> Yesterday, shares in big state companies soared in response to the but many others sank as jittery small investors tried to cut their losses, Associated Press reports. The market benchmark Shanghai Composite closed up 2.4 percent but still was down 27 percent from its June 12 peak.
> 
> Experts fear it could turn into a full-blown crash introducing even more uncertainty into global markets as Europe teeters on the edge of a potential eurozone exit by Greece, after Sunday’s controversial referendum.
> 
> WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR AUSTRALIA?
> 
> For Australia, the market crash in China is likely to impact earnings on key exports iron ore and coal, further slashing government revenue, while also putting downward pressure on the Australian dollar.
> 
> Jordan Eliseo, chief economist with ABC Bullion, said it was important to remember that the amount of wealth Chinese citizens have tied up in the stock market is relatively minor compared with western investors.
> 
> Stocks only make up about 8 per cent of household wealth in China, compared with around 20 per cent in developed nations.
> 
> “The market crash there is generating headlines, but it’s not going to have the same impact as a comparable crash would in a developed market,” he said.
> 
> “What it means for Australia, though, is it’s very clear there are some serious imbalances in the Chinese economy, and the rate of growth they’ve enjoyed in the past is over. There’s no question our export earnings are going to take another hit.”
> 
> Mr Eliseo predicts Australia is likely to experience “recession-like” conditions such as negative wage growth for many years to come. “I believe that’s going to be the new norm,” he said.
> 
> WHAT ARE THEY DOING ABOUT IT?
> 
> On Saturday, China’s 21 largest brokerage firms announced that they would invest more than $25.35 billion in the country’s stock markets to curb the declines.
> 
> The brokers will spend at least 120 billion yuan ($25.75 billion) on so-called “blue chip” exchange traded funds, the Securities Association of China said in a statement after an emergency meeting in Beijing.
> 
> On Friday the Shanghai Composite Index closed down 5.77 per cent to end at 3,686.92 points. Since peaking on June 12 Shanghai has dropped nearly 29 per cent, which Bloomberg News said was its biggest three-week fall since November 1992.
> 
> The Shanghai market had swelled by 150 per cent in the last 12 months and experts had expected a sharp correction, though the rate at which it has occurred is unnerving many.
> 
> Middle-class Chinese investors, encouraged by the government, have been pumping money into the stock market. The WSJ quoted 51-year-old Li Ping, who sold her 7 million yuan ($1.5 million) Beijing apartment to plough 4 million yuan into stocks.
> 
> Ms Li said she thought the market would stabilise and rise again. “The fund that I have invested in is very mature and professional,” she said.
> 
> CRACKDOWN AS PANIC TRIGGERS ‘SUICIDE’ RUMOURS
> 
> Underscoring growing jitters amid the three-week sell-off, police in Beijing detained a man on Sunday for allegedly spreading a rumour online that a person jumped to their death in the city’s financial district due to China’s precarious stock markets.
> 
> The 29-year-old man detained was identified by the surname Tian, and is a manager at a technology and science company in Beijing, police said in a post on their official microblog.
> 
> Police said Tian’s alleged posting of the rumour took place Friday and called on internet users to obey laws and regulations, not to believe and spread rumours, and to cooperate with police.
> 
> The state-run Xinhua news agency reported that Tian allegedly posted the rumours with video clips and screenshots Friday afternoon.
> 
> The post, which is said to have gone viral, “provoked emotional responses among stock investors who suffered losses over the past weeks”, Xinhua said.
> 
> Xinhua added that a police investigation showed that the video in question had been shot on Friday morning in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu where a man had jumped to his death. Local police there were investigating that case, Xinhua said.
> 
> The original post was unavailable Sunday on China’s tightly controlled social media, where authorities are quick to delete controversial material.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ever hear of "too big to fail?"  :nod:


----------



## a_majoor

Indeed. Japanese banks were not "allowed" to fail either, but reality has a way of seeping in when people are not looking.


----------



## Edward Campbell

This could be in the Russia thread, but, as I have mentioned the Chinese _threat_ to Russia in Eastern and Central Siberia in this thread I will add this article, by Prof Salvatore Babones, of the University of Sydney, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, here:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2015-07-05/russias-eastern-exposure


> Russia's Eastern Exposure
> *Moscow's Asian Empire Crumbles*
> 
> By Salvatore Babones
> 
> July 5, 2015
> 
> Contemporary analysis of Russian foreign policy understandably focuses on Ukraine and the Caucasus, but real drama is unfolding much farther east. Having lost its European empire in the twentieth century, Russia may find that its biggest threat in the twenty-first is that of the loss of its Asian empire. Stretching for thousands of miles east of Siberia, the Russian Far East is thinly settled and poorly integrated into the rest of the country. In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States because it could neither govern nor defend it. Today’s Russia must act soon to prevent a similar scenario on its eastern flank.
> 
> Until its fall in 1644, China’s Ming dynasty claimed suzerainty over all of what is now the Russian Far East and much of Central Asia. With its own political system lacking the modern concept of sovereignty, China did not establish settler colonies to reinforce its claims to these territories. And so, when Russia began to expand eastward from Siberia into the Far East in the 1600s, it did not encounter any Chinese garrisons.
> 
> By 1689, Russian presence in the region was sufficient to prompt the negotiation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which defined a formal boundary between the Russian and Chinese spheres. In time, Russia grew overwhelmingly more powerful than China. In 1858, representatives of Tsar Alexander II and the Qing Xianfeng emperor signed the Treaty of Aigun. This treaty, forced on China in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, formalized Russia’s sovereignty over what is now the Russian Far East. In the ensuing 1860 Treaty of Beijing, China further ceded the area that would become the Russian port city of Vladivostok.
> 
> Along with the treaties that granted Hong Kong to Britain and opened other ports to Western countries, China’s two treaties with Russia reflect the decay of China’s imperial court and the rise of the European colonial powers. Although the return of Hong Kong in 1997 closed the book on Western European colonialism in China, the issue of Russian colonialism is still very much open. China’s demands for restitution in Asia may be dormant, but they are not settled.
> 
> Today, the entire Russian Far East is inhabited by fewer than seven million people. Two million of these live in the Primorsky Territory surrounding Vladivostok, which lies on the Sea of Japan. That leaves a vast territory between Siberia and the Pacific with a total population of under five million. In the popular imagination, it is Siberia that is an empty, frozen wasteland. In fact, Siberia’s population of 19 million makes that territory look positively metropolitan compared to the Far East. And like Siberia, the Far East is losing numbers—only faster.
> 
> Population—or depopulation—is the crux of Russia's problems in the Far East. Twenty-nine of China's 33 provincial-level administrative divisions have populations larger than that of the entire Russian Far East. China's population is shrinking at roughly the same rate as Russia's, but with more than 1.3 billion people, China has more runway before it falls off a cliff. Many people in the Far East are raising the alarm about being inundated by undocumented immigrants from China, but today's modest influx may be only a small fraction of future flows. Nobody knows how many Chinese currently live in Russia, let alone how many may stream across the porous border in the future.
> 
> And then there are the economics of the region. Over time, the Russian Far East has come to depend more and more on investment from China—witness Gazprom’s much-trumpeted pipeline deals with China National Petroleum Corporation. In turn, the region will find itself more and more in the position of Mongolia: drawn into China's orbit. Even if China continues to show no interest in exerting influence on Russia, its influence will increase all the same. As long as China is bursting at the seams with people and capital while the Russian Far East remains empty and poor, population and money will flow from China into the Far East.
> 
> Today, Chinese labor and capital may seem welcome, even a godsend. Tomorrow might be a different story. Once China has extensive interests in Russia, the Chinese government will face strong lobbying to promote and secure those interests. In the current swell of Chinese patriotism, which includes demands to fix past wrongs, China might decide to reconsider its old treaties with Russia, much as it has in its South China Sea disputes, where China has recently rediscovered the value of vague Ming-era claims to suzerainty. Once China has significant resources at stake in the Russian Far East, and once China is more confident of its preponderance of power over Russia, it may do the same in Russia.
> 
> *PRIMO PRIMORYE*
> 
> Some in the West might wonder why China would even want these frozen territories. But, in reality, wide swaths of the region are hospitable, resource-rich, and accessible. In particular, the Primorsky Territory (better known simply as Primorye), with its capital at Vladivostok, is potentially a very desirable place to live. Immediately opposite the Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Honshu, Primorye is the underdeveloped hinterland of northeast Asia. In the southern half of Primorye, average temperature and precipitation levels are comparable to those in Moscow. If not exactly a tropical paradise, Primorye is no Arctic tundra.
> Related Tweets
> 
> Geographically, Primorye and its capital, Vladivostok, seem like ideal links in high value-added Asian commodity chains. Vladivostok is one of Russia's main cultural and educational centers and a major port city. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai are all roughly 2-3 hours away by plane, and Vladivostok has direct road, rail, and pipeline links to the Asian interior. China has even raised the possibility of linking Vladivostok into its high-speed passenger rail system. The region needs more infrastructure, but it is starting from a reasonably strong base.
> 
> The biggest barrier to development in Primorye has probably been Russia's restrictive visa regime. Russia has designated the Primorsky Territory a special economic zone with reduced tax rates and streamlined administrative procedures, but most outsiders face onerous visa restrictions when visiting Russia. Increased productivity depends on freedom of movement. It would be good for business development in the Russian Far East to make Primorye a special visa-free zone as well as a special economic zone.
> 
> Such moves would, of course, flirt with ceding influence to China. But the alternative to institutional reform in the Far East may be complete depopulation. Until 1991 Vladivostok was a closed military reserve. A little openness might go a long way. To be sure, Russia may not be ready to host an Asian San Francisco, but the need for Russia to shift its center of gravity eastward has long been obvious. The tsars understood it. The Soviets understood it. The Kremlin should understand it too. Today’s Russia should recognize the value of the Far East and see that it cannot be developed by government fiat. All three regimes have tried it and failed. By making the Far East a laboratory for more open institutions, it could save the territory—and save the country.




I'll repeat: many (most? all?) of the Chinese people I know believe that Eastern and Central Siberia (basically everything East of the Yenesei River ~ some (a few) say everything East of the Urals) are part of Asia and they regard Russia as a European state, an interloper in Asia.

_My guess_ is that China doesn't want absolute sovereignty over Siberia; they, the Chinese, just want Russia out of Asia (just as they want the USA off the Asian mainland, i.e. out of Korea) and they will be happy to have one or two or a few independent states, à la Mongolia, there.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> More on the Chiese stock market crash. As this unravels, this might start putting pressure on the financial institutions which made large loans to state enterprises and other projects which are (in real terms) non-performing. This mountain of debt could well have much more severe consequences than the relatively small mountain of Greek debt. Think of how the Japanese economy, which was "set to surpas that of the Unitted States" at the end of the 1980's, suddenly went into deflationary mode when the vastly overvalued real estate bubble underlying the bank's assets popped. Since much of the world bet heavily on China, there will be consequences (as the Australians are discovering) It will be interesting to see how the Chinese bail themselves out of this one:
> 
> http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/chinese-chaos-worse-than-greece/story-fnu2pycd-1227430761673



The rout continues today, the _Financial Times_ reports that: _"Hundreds of Chinese companies have halted trading in their shares as Beijing struggles to insulate the economy from the country’s steepest equity decline in more than two decades ... Another 173 firms listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen announced trading suspensions after the market closed on Tuesday, bringing the total to around 940, or more than a third of all listed firms on the two exchanges."_ That's $1.4 Trillion (more than Canada's GDP) off the table in double quick time.


----------



## Edward Campbell

_The Economist_ is perplexed by what's going on in China according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinas-stockmarket-crash?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/aredflag


> China's stockmarket crash
> A red flag
> 
> Jul 7th 2015, 9:36 BY S.R. | SHANGHAI
> 
> CHINA is certainly not the first country to try to prop up a falling stockmarket. The central banks of America, Europe and Japan have all shown form in buying shares after crashes and cutting interest rates to cheer up bloodied investors. But the circumstances and the manner of China’s intervention of the past ten days make it an outlier, worryingly so.
> 
> The trigger in China’s case is perplexing. Yes, the stockmarket is down a third over the past month, but that has simply taken it back to March levels; it is still up 80% over the last year. Growth, though slowing, has stabilised recently. Other asset markets are performing well. Property, long in the doldrums, is turning up. Money-market rates are low and steady, suggesting calm in the banking sector. The anticipated correction of over-valued stocks hardly seems cause for much anguish.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yet China’s intervention has screamed of panic. Had the central bank stopped at cutting interest rates—justifiable support for the economy when inflation is so low—that would have been reasonable. Instead, there has been a spectacle of ever-more drastic actions to save the market. Regulators capped short selling. Pension funds pledged to buy more stocks. The government suspended initial public offerings, limiting the supply of shares to drive up the prices of those already listed. Brokers created a fund to buy shares, backed by central-bank cash. All the while, state media played cheerleader. Far from saving the market from drowning, the succession of life buoys only pushed it further under water. The CSI 300, an index of China’s biggest-listed companies, fell almost 10% over seven trading days after the rate cut. ChiNext, an index of high-growth companies that is often described as China's Nasdaq, fell by 25%.
> 
> Theories have flourished about why the government has waded in so heavily. The apparent desperation is, some believe, a sign that officials see a looming economic collapse, and are trying to staunch the wound before social upheaval ensues. That story is intriguing, but it is not the most likely.
> 
> Lost in all the drama about the stockmarket is that it still plays a surprisingly small role in China. The free-float value of Chinese markets—the amount available for trading—is just about a third of GDP, compared with more than 100% in developed economies. Less than 15% of household financial assets are invested in the stockmarket: which is why soaring shares did little to boost consumption and crashing prices will do little to hurt it. Many stocks were bought on debt, and the unwinding of these loans helps explain why the government has been unable to stop the rout. But this financing is not a systemic risk; it is just about 1.5% of total assets in the banking system.
> 
> If economic stability is not in peril, why then the panic? The most compelling explanation is politics. The government has staked much credibility and prestige on the stockmarket. When the going was still good, the official press was chock-a-block with articles about how the rally reflected the economic reforms that Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, was set to push. Li Keqiang, the premier, said repeatedly that he wanted equity markets to provide a bigger share of corporate financing—comments, from punters' perspective, not unlike waving a red cape in front of a bull. The sudden end to the rally is the first major dent in the public standing of the Xi-Li team. The botched attempts to stabilise the market only make them look weaker, giving succour to their critics.
> 
> But the biggest concern about the panicked policy response is what it says about the government's agenda. The economic hopes invested in Messrs Xi and Li stemmed from their pledge in late 2013 to let market forces play a “decisive role” in allocating resources. The actions of the past ten days have made abundantly clear that it is still the other way around: the Chinese government wants a decisive role in markets.
> 
> The failure of share prices to do their bidding is, in that respect, welcome. It shows that the Communist Party, powerful though it may be, cannot indefinitely bend markets to its will. Chinese leaders should heed that lesson and get on with the challenges of liberalising their economy. A relapse towards statism will not just set China back. It also will not work.




_The Economist_'s explanation, "The most compelling explanation is politics," makes sense to me.


----------



## cupper

I'll admit that my knowledge of the Chinese economy is limited to uninformed, but isn't it really built on a house of cards, and doomed to some form of collapse being long overdue.

A couple of former coworkers from China indicated that costs for the average citizen, not the new capitalist rich class was way beyond their means. The ghost cities of empty high rise apartments, the population shift from rural regions to the cities. It all seems to be converging towards a cliff.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _correction_, if that's what it is, is spreading, according to this article whch is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9382843e-2511-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c.html#axzz3fEoIWhPH


> China ramps up efforts to halt stock market rout
> 
> Josh Noble in Hong Kong and Gabriel Wildau in Shanghai
> 
> July 8, 2015
> 
> China’s central bank stepped up state support for sinking stocks on Wednesday, as investors rushed to sell what they still could after a fresh wave of share suspensions that has halted trading in half the market.
> 
> The Shanghai Composite closed down 5.9 per cent after falling as much as 8 per cent at the open. The Shenzhen index lost 2.5 per cent, while the start-up ChiNext board managed to inch up 0.5 per cent.
> 
> The renewed selling followed another round of share suspensions overnight that have now halted trading in 1,476 stocks — or more than 50 per cent of all listed companies on China’s two main exchanges. The suspensions have frozen $2.6tn worth of equity, according to Bloomberg calculations.
> 
> The sell-off was equally pronounced in Hong Kong, where global investors typically trade Chinese stocks. The Hang Seng index suffered one of its biggest point drops on record, shedding 5.8 per cent to erase all its gains over the previous 12 months.
> 
> Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, the bourse operator, dropped 8.3 per cent, taking its loss over the past five days to almost 30 per cent and robbing it of its crown as the world’s most valuable exchanges operator. That now reverts to CME Group.
> 
> The Hang Seng China Enterprises index of large Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong tumbled 8.8 per cent, and is now down a tenth since the start of the year.
> 
> As the stock rout continued, Beijing responded with further measures to steady the market. The People’s Bank of China said it was helping state-owned China Securities Finance Corporation access liquidity to help the fund “hold the line against the outbreak of systemic or regional financial risk”.
> 
> This is the clearest statement yet about what CSF is doing — buying shares directly using PBoC money, a big departure from its traditional role of lending to brokerages to support margin lending.
> 
> The CSF is also providing Rmb260bn ($41.8bn) of credit to brokerages in order to help them buy shares, according to the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
> 
> In a separate statement the CSRC added that the CSF would continue to buy blue-chips, but would also step up purchases of shares in smaller companies to “relieve the problem of strained liquidity”.
> 
> In its statement ahead of Wednesday’s open, the CSRC had noted: “There is a mood of panic in the market and a large increase in the irrational dumping of shares, causing a strain of liquidity.”
> 
> In a further effort to halt the rout, China’s state-sector administrator instructed government-owned companies not to sell shares, while the insurance regulator said it had cleared “qualified insurers” to increase their asset allocation to equities.
> 
> As stocks fell on Wednesday, large-caps broke their recent run of gains, with PetroChina — the country’s biggest company — dropping 8.6 per cent. ICBC, the world’s largest bank by assets, shed 4.7 per cent, while Ping An Insurance sank by the daily limit of 10 per cent.
> 
> Since hitting a seven-year high in mid-June Chinese stocks have been in free fall, with both major indices dropping more than a third to wipe $3tn off their value.
> 
> The government has already taken a number of steps to prevent further selling by Chinese retail investors — who dominate the market — such as suspending initial public offerings, and using state funds to buy shares directly. It has also cut trading fees in a bid to improve market liquidity.
> 
> In spite of the panic selling, a handful of global investment banks sounded a bullish note on the Chinese market.
> 
> HSBC upgraded its rating on China to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target for the Shanghai Composite to 4,000 points (it is currently trading around 3,500), while Goldman Sachs said it expected the CSI 300 index to rise more than a quarter from its current level over the next year.




Here, also from the FT, is a Q&A piece for those of us who are replexed:



> Question & Answer: China’s share trading suspensions
> *Why are Chinese companies choosing this strategy and will the authorities allow it to continue?*
> 
> Tom Mitchell in Beijing and Gabriel Wildau in Shanghai
> 
> July 8, 2015
> 
> If corporate management, like diplomacy, can be said to be war by other means, China’s two most famous military strategists would probably approve of the moves by more than 1,400 Shanghai and Shenzhen-listed companies to suspend trading in their shares. Both Sun Tzu, author of the _Art of War_, and the father of China’s Communist revolution, Mao Zedong, knew the folly of an army venturing on to the battlefield when conditions were not its favour.
> 
> *How extensive are the suspensions?*
> 
> On Wednesday morning, hundreds more companies said they would suspend trading, bringing the total to 1,476, more than half of China’s 2,808 listed companies.
> 
> Most are listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange’s ChiNext board, the preferred destination for technology companies and China’s answer to the Nasdaq. The ChiNext has risen further, and fallen faster, than any of its domestic peers.
> 
> This was reflected in Tuesday’s 5.3 per cent fall in the broader Shenzhen Composite index, compared to the Shanghai Composite index’s 1.3 per cent decline.
> 
> *Why are they doing this?*
> 
> Most of the companies have cited “significant matters”, a phrase that would normally hint at an impending merger, acquisition or restructuring.
> 
> It is unlikely, however, that China is on the cusp of an M&A boom, especially in the context of a market that has shed more than 30 per cent of its value in about three weeks.
> 
> Some analysts believe the suspensions are instead related to one of the scariest “known unknowns” surrounding the market meltdown — just how many controlling shareholders have pledged their shares as collateral for bank loans.
> 
> Those who have pledged shares could be required to liquidate them when their value falls a certain amount, potentially triggering another major sell-off.
> 
> It is one of the biggest potential “transmission mechanisms” between China’s stock markets and the wider economy.
> 
> *How long can these suspensions last and why aren’t all companies seeking shelter from the storm?*
> 
> The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges have complicated rules specifying different suspension periods, for reasons ranging from major asset restructurings to whether a company is concerned that price-sensitive information may leak. While the rules require various levels of disclosure when a company seeks to extend its suspension, they can effectively halt trading for weeks or months at a time.
> 
> The more companies that suspend their shares, the worse China’s stock markets look. Most companies that have done so are not particularly well known, and state-controlled firms are now buying blue-chip stocks in an effort to support the Shanghai and Shenzhen Composite indices. If blue-chips were to stop trading, the government might as well just close the markets outright.
> 
> *Can avoiding a market meltdown and wider banking crisis really be as simple as that?*
> 
> Hardly. The latest suspension applications may be rejected by the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. They and their regulator, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), know that this looks terrible and represents a huge reputational risk.
> 
> Moreover, the Chinese government has long prided itself for acting “responsibly” in times of crisis. Most notably, it did not devalue the renminbi when its neighbours’ currencies plummeted during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, even though this rendered China-based exporters less competitive. Ten years later, Beijing took extraordinary measures to boost domestic demand during the global financial crisis, providing a crucial fillip for the global economy.
> 
> Mass suspensions, however, are essentially a more discrete form of market closure — one of the worst policy responses a government can take. The Indonesian government infamously closed stock markets for a few days during the depths of the global financial crisis.
> 
> *So what does this mean for minority shareholders, especially the small “mom and pop” retail community, and foreign investors?*
> 
> Many retail investors may, in fact, welcome the suspensions, which at least postpone any reckoning they may have to face. Even when a company’s trading suspension is lifted, “circuit breakers” restrict any one stock’s daily fall to 10 per cent, so it would take a while for them to catch up with the broader market collapse.
> 
> For foreign investors, the suspensions raise significant concerns. Over recent years, the CSRC has rapidly expanded its quotas for Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors as part of Beijing’s broader strategic aim of internationalising the renminbi. Institutional investors, however, take a dim view of such gamesmanship.
> 
> Last month, the MSCI decided to delay inclusion of Shanghai and Shenzhen-traded shares in its global emerging market index — probably until May 2017 — meaning that China Inc’s representation remains restricted to Hong Kong-listed H shares and red chips, the mainland China companies incorporated outside mainland China and listed in Hong Kong.
> 
> The current controversy over China’s mass trading suspensions would appear to validate that decision.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Wan Li_


----------



## a_majoor

The Chinese market continues to plunge. Losses of three trillion dollars is pretty astounding. Greece may suddenly become a sideshow:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/china-markets-crisis-government-efforts-fail-halt-plunge-n388496?cid=sm_tw&hootPostID=9df940a1c6f0a8e2405100f8640c0a72



> *China Markets Crisis: Government Efforts Fail to Halt Tumble*
> by Ed Flanagan
> 
> BEIJING — Unprecedented steps aimed at propping up Chinese investor confidence failed to stop the country's main stock markets from tumbling yet again on Wednesday.
> 
> Within the first hour of trading some 1,400 companies — representing more than 40 percent of China's stock market cap — had suspended trading. Some were frozen before the opening bell after petitioning the government while others quickly met the 10-percent daily limit on losses.
> 
> Since the crisis began over three weeks ago, China's Shanghai and Shenzhen Composites have lost more than 30 percent and 40 percent of their value respectively, adding up to $3 trillion dollars in equity lost.
> 
> "There is a mood of panic in the market and a large increase in irrational dumping of shares, causing a strain of liquidity in the stock market," China's Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement.
> 
> Related: Chinese Stunned as $2.8 Trillion Is Wiped From Markets
> 
> The pain of these devastating losses is not primarily being felt by professional money managers. Instead, retail traders — regular citizens and pensioners investing their savings and accounting for nearly 85 percent of traders — are bearing the brunt.
> 
> For one investor, panic gave way to confusion.
> 
> "One of the stocks I hold has been suspended, but because I can't sell yet I am not sure if I will make money or lose more," said Wang, who like other investors NBC News spoke to asked to be referred to by his surname.
> 
> The Beijing office cleaner said he just hoped the government would take further steps to calm markets — a common refrain among investors.
> 
> Chinese government agencies published a series of measures throughout the day, including urging major shareholders and top executives of listed companies to buy their own shares, and allowing insurers to buy more blue-chip stocks.
> 
> But such steps did not prevent the bloodbath. The CSI300 index of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen fell 6.8 percent, to 3,663.04. The Shanghai Composite Index lost 5.9 percent, to 3,507.19 points.
> 
> Analysts say this has been the biggest sell-off since 2007, and equivalent to 10 times the annual economic output of Greece.
> 
> Around 85 percent of China's investors have account balances of less than $16,000, according to Oliver Rui, the director of CEIBS-World Bank China Centre for Inclusive Finance, a business school. Only 6 percent of traders have college degrees.
> 
> How these investors became dominant traders in the market can be largely attributed to government policy. And in light of a cooling housing market and low interest rates, many Chinese in recent years have been searching for places to invest their savings.
> 
> Yuan is one of millions who put savings in the markets when they were booming. And like so many others, the 50-year-old from Hebei province called on the government to stop the pain.
> 
> "This is not the bottom right now," he said. "The government should have done something earlier when the index was higher — they are moving too slow."



and





> *Why China's stock market meltdown should be a cause for global worry*
> If the market fall accelerates the economic slowdown, other countries that have not been affected by China's market fall will be hit soon
> Shishir Asthana  |  Mumbai
> July 8, 2015 Last Updated at 10:30 IST
> 
> Related News
> Devangshu Datta: Attention focused on Greece and China
> 33 stocks outperform markets ahead of MSCI inclusion
> BSE announces change in banking index calculation
> Greek referendum hasn't created a panic-like situation: Samir Arora
> Nikkei takes over Asia Markit PMI series sponsorship from HSBC
> 
> While all attention is fixed on Greece and how world markets will be affected post the ‘No’ vote to solve the $382 billion debt problem, a bigger loss in one of the world's biggest financial markets escaped attention untill this week.
> 
> China’s stock market has lost over $3 trillion in value in less than a month without creating a domino effect across the world. Chinese markets continued their plunge this week, wiping close to 37 percent off the market’s valuation from June 12 peak. The intensity of the loss can be judged from the fact that it is nearly twice the market capitalisation of all stocks traded in India and more than the Spanish, Russian, Italian, Swedish and Dutch stock markets combined.
> 
> Normally when one market falls, especially of the size of China, other markets follow suit. China in fact is the second biggest market in terms of market capitalisation but despite a 37 per cent fall in its value,  Dow Jones, representing the largest market, is down by less than only one per cent in a month. World markets seem to be dancing to the tune of Greece markets more than the events in China. China’s fall is not even being replicated in other emerging markets.
> 
> ALSO READ: China plans to use Internet to juice up its economy
> 
> So why is it that China is falling in isolation?
> 
> The answer is absence of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) in the country. FIIs exposure to China is through stocks listed in Hong Kong in what is known as H shares. China prevented entry of foreign investors in its country. Reuters reports that a landmark scheme linking Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets launched last November has failed to get much foreign participation, with concerns about stock ownership and how trades are settled dogging investors. Even MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) index decided to delay inclusion of China’s A share in its list of investable shares.
> 
> According to Thomson Reuters data, foreign investors account for less than 1 percent of the mainland equity market as compared to nearly 25 per cent for India. Thanks to this limited exposure by foreign players directly in China, a contagion to other markets has been prevented.
> 
> But this is likely to be short lived. Investors who have lost money in the recent market crash are retail Chinese investors. Over 85 per cent of trading volumes in China is from its retail investors.
> 
> ALSO READ: China brokers to invest $19 bn to curb market plunge
> 
> A crash in the property markets last year forced many retail investors to divert their funds to equity markets. Government incentives and opening up of relaxed margin funding helped fuel the sharp rally in Chinese equity markets. Government used all the machinery in its hand including state media to urge public to invest in stocks.
> 
> This has resulted in more stock market investors in China than there are Communist Party members. The Chinese equity market now has more than 90 million individual investors, according to China Securities Depository and Clearing Co, compared to the Communist Party's 87.8 million reported members at the end of last year.
> 
> Most of these investors have utilised margin funding facilities and are heavily leveraged. Goldman Sachs pointed out in a report that the outstanding margin financing, at 2.2 trillion yuan ($355 billion) earlier this week (more than five times of what it was a year ago), was the equivalent of 12 per cent of the value of all freely traded shares on the market, or 3.5 per cent of China’s GDP. Both “are easily the highest in the history of global equity markets,” its analysts noted. But with Chinese shadow banks and peer-to-peer lenders also offering cash to investors, the amount of hidden leverage in the market is estimated to be as much as 50 per cent higher.
> 
> Numerous steps taken by the government failed to prevent the slide. Margin funding norms were relaxed, new issue launches were cancelled to prevent investors from selling shares in the market to invest in these issues, exchange fees were lowered, pension funds were allowed to invest nearly 30 per cent of their corpus in equities, interest rates were cut and investors were allowed to even pledge their apartments to invest in the market. But none of these have worked.
> 
> In the most recent move,  China has infused liquidity in its market and has asked Pension Fund manager not to sell a single share from its portfolio. Late Sunday night, China Securities Regulatory Commission said that it will uphold market stability by providing liquidity to China Securities Finance, a state unit that makes margin finance available to brokers. As a result, Chinese market opened with gap of 7.2 per cent higher but have conceded all the gains and presently trade only 0.7 per cent higher.
> 
> Even the state media and opinion makers were roped in to urge investors to hold onto shares for the glory of the Chinese nation but to no avail.
> 
> The Economist points out that the longer term consequences of the correction are more worrying than the short term one. Economic activity normally slows down after the market falls sharply and fails to recover.
> 
> China is already slowing down and the last thing it needs is a stock market crash which will impact consumption. If the market fall accelerates the economic slowdown, other countries that have not been affected by China’s market fall will be hit. After all China is the largest consumer of a number of goods and commodities in the world.


----------



## a_majoor

The fate of the Red Dynasty may hinge on the events in the Chinese stock market and economy in the coming days. Their "Mandate from Heaven" is explicitly tied to economic growth and stabilty, and if they don't deliver, the consequences could be severe:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/07/08/chinas-three-bubbles/



> *China’s Three Bubbles Walter Russell Mead*
> 
> The sell-off in Chinese equities accelerated Wednesday as new government efforts to arrest falling stock prices proved ineffectual. Major indices closed down six to seven percent, with shares in 72 percent of companies now unable to be traded. Beijing’s efforts to force the market upward by pumping money into the stock of large state-owned companies are failing to reassure panicked investors. As the market seizes up, the panic is spreading from margin traders to mutual fund holders. The WSJ reports:
> 
> Contagion from the plunge in Chinese stocks spread Wednesday in a sign investors within China and overseas are losing confidence in Beijing’s ability to stem the slide in the country’s equity markets and manage its economic reforms.
> 
> Shares listed on the country’s main Shanghai market dropped 5.9%, deepening a slump that has seen the market fall by nearly a third since mid-June.
> 
> The gloom is no longer confined to stocks. The yield on China’s benchmark government bonds rose sharply, while investors unloaded billions worth of dollar-denominated debt issued by Chinese companies. China’s currency, the yuan, fell to a four-month low in offshore markets, while a global selloff in commodities continued, with oil down in early Asian trading and metals such as copper trading close to six-year lows.
> 
> We don’t know, and no one knows, what the Chinese market will do tomorrow or next week. This could be the Big One, the correction that deflates the whole huge China bubble of overbuilt investment that has been accumulating for years and will, after lots of pain, put the Chinese economy on an ultimately sounder basis. Or it could be just another correction on the way up to a ceiling that hasn’t yet been reached. So this may or may not be the beginning of the major economic crisis that China is bound to experience at some point in the future.
> 
> Short of that, however, it is already a political crisis—the biggest challenge President Xi Jinping has faced since coming to power. The Chinese government plays a huge role in systematically managing the country’s economy, and it has staked its legitimacy on its ability to make the economy grow. Moreover, it has taken a very clear position on the stock market crash: this shouldn’t be happening and the government will make it stop. Therefore, the government’s failure to stabilize stock prices is going to be seen as a failure of official policy. Criticism of the stock market will turn into criticism of the political leadership, and it must be said that the political leadership hasn’t demonstrated great skill in the early days of the crisis. Premier Li has allowed himself to become identified with the efforts to stabilize the stock market. If those measures succeed, he looks like a hero. But after the latest rout, a lot of people in China don’t think the policies are working.
> 
> This is going to be a difficult one to ride out. China’s government claims to be able to deliver the benefits of growth along with the blessings of stability. To get growth, China has had to allow more and more market-based economic activity to take place. But in the interests of stability, and to assure faster gains than an unmanaged free market might deliver, Chinese authorities have also interfered systemically in the economy. The banking system, particular, is largely politically driven. The allocation of capital is not very efficient, and many state-owned companies have long been on life support, with banks ordered to give them the credit they need. Moreover, local governments have systematically distorted real estate markets and become dependent for their financial health on a real estate and infrastructure bubble that must be seen to be believed.
> 
> So China’s extraordinary years of lending and growth have surely created an economic bubble, but they have created two other bubbles as well. First, a political bubble based in the belief that China’s government techniques can defy the laws of economic gravity and create long-term, stable, above-market rates of growth in the developing world. Second, a geopolitical bubble based on the belief that China’s stellar economic record of the last few decades will continue indefinitely into the future with immense consequences for the international order. That is, the country’s success has encouraged authoritarian regimes and technocrats all over the world to believe that markets can be managed long term, and that market forces can be indefinitely held at bay.
> 
> China’s hothouse growth has been the wonder of the world. But when the Big One comes, all three of the country’s bubbles are likely to burst. For China’s authorities, their stake in their current battle with the stock market are much greater than they might appear to outsiders. This isn’t just a crisis of China’s financial markets. It is a crisis of China’s political system and international strategy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _Globe and Mail_ reports that, "China’s main stock market jumped 6.4 per cent – almost as much as it had fallen the previous day – after its securities regulator ordered shareholders with stakes of more than 5 per cent not to sell shares for the next six months ... The advance brought relief throughout Asia. A 1.8 per cent climb by MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was its biggest since April. The main emerging markets index scored its best gain since January ... Europe’s mining and metals stocks, which are closely linked to China’s fortunes, led the pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index up 0.9 per cent ..."

The _Financial Times_ suggests that there may be more to come, because, "China’s stock market rout began in mid-June following a clampdown on margin finance — the use of borrowed money to buy shares. That has prompted a rapid unwind of leveraged trades, a process many believe is still far from reaching its end ... “The deleveraging process is likely to continue in the near term and therefore the [domestic] share market will probably remain volatile,” said analysts at UBS. "

We'll have to wait and see if this is just a dead cat bounce or if the Chinese markets have corrected themselves for overheating in the past year.


----------



## tomahawk6

The government bans stock holders from selling for six months ? So much for free markets commie style.


----------



## Edward Campbell

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The government bans stock holders from selling for six months ? So much for free markets commie style.




The ban only applies to those who hold more than 5% of a company ~ we, and you in the USA, also have rules governing trades by major shareholders.

There is a useful primer on Chinese stocks in an article in _The Economist_. here are a couple of extracts:

    "The first mistake—often made by China pessimists—is to think that the market crash presages an economic collapse. That is most unlikely. True, the stockmarket is down by a third in a few weeks, but it has fallen back only to March levels;
     it is still up by 75% in a year.

     Lost in the drama is the fact that the stockmarket still plays a small role in China. The free-float value of Chinese markets—the amount available for trading—is just about a third of GDP, compared with more than 100% in developed economies.
     Less than 15% of household financial assets are invested in the stockmarket, which is why soaring shares did little to boost consumption and their crash should do little to hurt it. Many stocks were bought with debt, and the unwinding of these loans
     helps explain why the government has been unable to stop the rout. But such financing is not a systemic risk; the loans are about 1.5% of total assets in the banking system. The economy is solid. Growth, though slowing, has stabilised. The
     property market, long becalmed, is picking up. Money-market rates are low and steady, suggesting banks are stable."

                    _AND_

    "If economic stability is not in peril, the best explanation for the interventions is politics. When the stockmarket was soaring, the press cheered the bull run as an endorsement of the economic reforms of the Xi-Li team. Now that it is falling,
     regulators want to shore up the leadership’s reputation.

     It is not just the motive that is dodgy; the nature of the intervention is also unwise. Cutting interest rates as support for the economy when inflation is so low is fair enough. But regulators capped short-selling; pension funds pledged to buy
     more stocks; the government suspended initial public offerings; and brokers created a fund to buy shares, backed by central-bank cash (see article).

     Just as the Communist Party distrusts market forces, so it misunderstands them. Botched attempts to save stocks suggest it is losing control, while a successful rescue would have made buying shares a one-way bet—inflating the bubble
     still further. One of the persistent illusions about China’s governance is that, whatever its other shortcomings, eminently capable technocrats are in control. Their haplessness in the face of the market turmoil points to a more disconcerting reality.

     China is not the first country to prop up a falling stockmarket. Governments and central banks in America, Europe and Japan have form in buying shares after crashes and cutting interest rates to cheer up bloodied investors. What makes China
     stand out is that it panicked when a correction of clearly overvalued shares had been expected. Rather than calming investors, its barrage of measures screamed of desperation."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is an interesting _infographic_ that illustrates the "rise of China" based on Internet usage. The _x_ axis is from 1990 to 2011 (22 years). It was the often reviled Jiang Zemin who opened China to the Internet and, therefore, gave the Chinese some, limited, access to the world.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Xi Jinping has some harsh words for the Chinese military according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright from the _Financial Times_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5e531480-2eb8-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html#axzz3gM84esQu


> Xi warns China military amid anti-corruption purge
> 
> Charles Clover in Beijing
> 
> July 20, 2015
> 
> China’s President Xi Jinping moved to address lingering resentments in the country’s military created by the anti-corruption purge that has felled more than 200 senior officers, reminding military leaders they must “resolutely” obey the Communist party.
> 
> Mr Xi delivered the sternly worded message to the home unit of Xu Caihou, formerly one of China’s highest ranking generals who was arrested last year in a massive bribery scandal.
> 
> Mr Xu “caused comprehensive and deep harm to the construction of the army”, Mr Xi told the officers of the 16th Army Group based in the north-west town Changchun at the weekend.
> 
> Mr Xu had been the unit’s chief political officer and commissar from 1985-1992, according to his official biography. The 16th Army Group was subjected to a significant top level reshuffle in late 2014, following Mr Xu’s arrest, according to Chinese media reports.
> 
> “We must thoroughly cleanse the influence of Xu Caihou, ideologically, politically, and also in terms of organisation and work style,” Mr Xi said.
> 
> He also stressed that disobedience to the ruling party would not be tolerated — remarks highlighting that China’s civilian leadership may not be taking the military’s loyalty entirely for granted in the wake of the most severe purge of armed forces since the 1980s.
> 
> “We must always firmly adhere to the fundamental principle and system whereby the party maintains absolute leadership over the army under any circumstances,” Mr Xi told senior officers.
> 
> “(The army) must resolutely conform to orders from the party Central Committee and the Central Military Commission,” he said.
> 
> Mr Xu was ultimately not prosecuted for health reasons and died in March of cancer, but his arrest exposed a massive bribes-for-promotion ring that has enveloped much of the command structure of the People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> Investigators last year found more than a tonne of cash and precious gems in Mr Xu’s house, much of which had apparently been given in exchange for promotions by hundreds of senior officers.
> 
> On July 6 the People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, said that since 2013 more than 200 officers of lieutenant-colonel rank and above had been punished for corruption-related offences.
> 
> Insiders say that one of the motivations for the graft probes was to reassert party control, after Mr Xi saw the disrespect with which the PLA treated his predecessor, Hu Jintao.
> 
> The daylight between civilian and military leaders under Mr Hu was alluded to in a 2011 speech by Robert Gates, then-US secretary of defence. “Over the past several years we have seen some signs of  . . . a disconnect between the military and the civilian leadership,” he said.
> 
> Analysts said that while the anti-corruption campaign may have exacerbated tensions with the military, ultimately the party’s authority over the PLA remains unquestioned.
> 
> “While the PLA has a privileged position, it is first and foremost a party army,” said Euan Graham, the director of the international security programme at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
> 
> _Additional reporting by Owen Guo_




Interesting, as Euan Graham says, the PLA is, above all, an organ of the party (the _dynasty_) but it was not, always, a tool of the party leader. _It appears to me_ that Xi Jinping is trying to consolidate the power of his own supporters by weakening other power centres, like the PLA and the security services.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, is an interesting perspective on the recent Iran nuclear agreement, looked at from China's point of view:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-07-21/sino-iranian-tango


> The Sino-Iranian Tango
> *Why the Nuclear Deal is Good for China*
> 
> By Michael Singh
> 
> July 21, 2015
> 
> The recent nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) will have major implications for security in the Middle East. But the impact of the deal will be much wider.
> 
> Just how wide was demonstrated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who, even before the official press conference announcing that the agreement had been concluded, declared that the deal obviated any need for NATO missile defenses in Europe, which have long been a point of contention between the United States and Russia. The deal will also likely lead to billions of dollars of investment by India in Iran’s southern port of Chabahar, long-awaited progress on a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan, and perhaps even the provision of Iranian gas to a Europe eager to reduce its energy dependence on Russia.
> 
> The biggest impact of all, however, may be on China. Iran and China have long-standing ties that are free of the historical baggage that complicates Tehran’s relations with Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Modern Sino-Iranian relations predate U.S. President Richard Nixon’s opening to China, and China has been an indispensable security partner to Iran, including by supplying it with arms and, as Orde Kittrie noted in another article for Foreign Affairs, by providing it with key nuclear components.
> Thanks to the two countries’ historically close relations and their mutual suspicion of the United States, many well-regarded China scholars expected China to play a spoiler role in the talks. But by all accounts, Chinese involvement was constructive. Beijing’s approach may have been motivated by a desire to shape a diplomatic outcome to head off either of two undesirable outcomes: a U.S.-Iranian war that could endanger China’s oil imports from the Persian Gulf or a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement that could leave that waterway ringed by American partners. Like Iran, China also likely sought the reversal of American sanctions, which in recent years threatened not only Chinese nuclear and arms exporters but more strategically important institutions such as Chinese banks and oil giants.
> 
> Throughout the nuclear negotiations, China was careful to maintain close ties with Iran from within the P5+1, shielding the country from the effects of sanctions resolutions even as it voted in favor of them at the United Nations. Chinese-Iranian trade increased from about $3 billion in 2001 to over $50 billion in 2014 (the precise number is difficult to determine), and Chinese oil imports from Iran rose in 2014 and 2015 to their highest levels ever, after temporarily declining in 2012–13.
> 
> Sino-Iranian security ties also continued to expand during the period of negotiations, and they went well beyond nuclear and arms exports. Chinese fighter jets reportedly refueled in Iran in 2010, and Chinese warships paid a visit to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in 2014—both firsts. Additionally, China at least indirectly supported Iran’s regional agenda by vetoing multiple UN Security Council resolutions on Syria.
> 
> The recently concluded nuclear deal will allow the already strong Chinese-Iranian relationship to expand unfettered. U.S., European, and UN sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities—including the extraterritorial sanctions that, in effect, targeted Chinese entities—will be lifted or suspended, controlled nuclear exports will be permitted, and even restrictions on the provision of arms and missile technology to Iran will be terminated in no more than five and eight years, respectively. And Iran will be actively seeking international partners to help it translate the deal into greater economic and diplomatic clout in its neighborhood and beyond.
> 
> For Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Iran deal could not have come at a better time. His “One Belt, One Road” initiative envisionsa chain of energy, infrastructure, and maritime links from East Asia extending to Europe through the Middle East and Central Asia. Iran’s location at the crossroads between these regions makes its participation in the initiative important for Beijing.
> 
> For its part, Tehran, unlike Arab states that have been more skeptical of the Chinese initiative, has expressed enthusiasm about the “One Belt, One Road” plan. The Barack Obama administration has been at pains to point out that Iran’s domestic investment needs stand at $500 billion, a sum far greater than the $100 billion to $150 billion in unfrozen assets Tehran is likely to receive once the nuclear deal is implemented. Left unsaid is where the rest of the money will come from. Beijing, which recently pledged to invest $46 billion in an “economic corridor” in Pakistan and tens of billions of dollars to capitalize the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, will likely be happy to chip in. An Iranian deputy minister claimed last year that China had already pledged to double its infrastructure investment in Iran to $52 billion.
> 
> A good deal of that future investment by China may well focus on Iran’s energy sector. Prior to the imposition of oil export restrictions on Iran, Tehran was China’s third-largest supplier of crude; as of 2014, it came in sixth. Even with sanctions lifted, Beijing may hesitate to increase the proportion of its oil imports that comes from Iran out of a concern about becoming too dependent on any single source. Yet China’s upstream investment in the Iranian energy sector may increase nevertheless, in large part to bolster Chinese energy security. Iran is unlikely to be swayed by any future Western political pressure to curtail oil exports to China, and Iran is the only country whose location would allow overland Chinese pipelines to reach the energy-rich Persian Gulf and thus reduce Beijing’s vulnerability to the disruption of maritime chokepoints such as the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca.
> 
> As a recently released military white paper makes clear, China is seeking to expand its forces’ ability to “effectively secure China’s overseas interests.” This has manifested in Chinese warships’ participation in counterpiracy missions in the region, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s evacuation of thousands of Chinese nationals from Libya in 2011—the first operation of its kind by China—and Beijing’s reported plan to establish a naval facility in Djibouti. As Beijing seeks to expand its power and influence, Iran is a logical partner. It is the only large, powerful state in the region not already allied with the United States, and it sits astride land and sea routes of vital importance to Beijing. Little wonder, therefore, that in October 2014, the Chinese defense minister publicly expressed Beijing’s desire to expand military ties with Iran (a sentiment Iran has reciprocated by inviting China to expand its naval presence in Iran), and that China’s top counterterrorism official recently visited Iran to seek expanded cooperation against extremists.
> 
> The growth in Sino-Iranian economic and security ties could prove challenging for the United States. China and Iran both appear committed to chipping away at the existing U.S.-led international order. China has established regional security and economic institutions that compete with those dominated by the United States and its allies, and Iran has vocally challenged the authority of the UN Security Council and U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. Furthermore, both enjoy alliances of convenience with Russia, which similarly competes with the United States.
> Increased Sino-Iranian cooperation would not be a mere diplomatic nuisance, however. As sanctions on Iran lifted, China has the capacity—through military assistance, economic investment, and the transfer of technology—to facilitate Iran’s rise as a regional power. Given Iran’s record of working through proxies, Chinese assistance could also indirectly strengthen nonstate actors supported by Iran. And Iran can offer China a strategically important foothold in the Middle East, should it choose to challenge U.S. influence there.
> 
> But a deeper alliance with Iran could also pose problems for China. Iran is notoriously difficult to work with, even for countries with which it would seem to share interests in common. For example, in April 2014, Iran canceled a $2.5 billion contract with the China National Petroleum Corporation, even as Iranian diplomats were urging the expansion of Sino-Iranian economic ties. Such difficulties may grow as sanctions are lifted and Iran’s alternatives to Chinese firms expand. Another obstacle to Sino-Iranian ties will be Iran’s support for terrorist groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Taliban, which Beijing worries could pose a threat to its own interests.
> 
> Furthermore, increasing ties with Iran could frustrate China’s efforts to expand its economic partnerships with other regional states, especially Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which see Iran as a chief rival. Iran is an important supplier of oil for China, but Saudi Arabia remains its top source of crude imports. As these states and Iran contend for regional influence, China could be increasingly pressed to choose sides.
> 
> The U.S. response to deepening Sino-Iranian ties will likely lean heavily on coercive diplomacy—persuading Beijing of the downsides of facilitating Iranian regional behavior, while imposing costs on any Chinese entities that contribute to prohibited Iranian activities such as the provision of arms to proxies. U.S. allies in the region—especially the countries China wants to cultivate as economic partners as part of its “One Belt, One Road” plan—can help influence Beijing’s approach. The context for such actions is also important; the stronger the U.S. alliance system and security architecture in the region, the less likely Iran and China may be to challenge it. And the greater the extent to which China can be persuaded to avoid adopting a zero-sum mindset and instead see the U.S. order as a benefit to its interests, the better.
> 
> But what the United States should not do, as it weighs the costs and benefits of the nuclear agreement with Iran, is neglect the accord’s wider implications, which stretch well beyond the battlefields of the Middle East.




Wheels within wheels, within wheels ...


----------



## Edward Campbell

More about the South China Seas and the islands and islets (and just a few rocks) and disputes regarding them all:





Source: https://www.pinterest.com/source/amti.csis.org/
Please note the two different words Proven and _Probable_


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, is an interesting analysis of Xi Jinping's _pivot_ towards Confucianism:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21659753-communist-party-turns-ancient-philosophy-support-confucius-says-xi-does


> Confucius says, Xi does
> *The Communist Party turns to ancient philosophy for support*
> 
> Jul 25th 2015 | QUFU | From the print edition
> 
> TWO emerging cults are on display in Qufu, a city in eastern China where Confucius was born. One surrounds the ancient sage himself. At a temple in his honour, visitors take turns to bow and prostrate themselves before a large statue of Confucius seated on a throne. For each obeisance, a master of ceremonies chants a wish, such as for “success in exams” or “peace of the country”. On the other side of the city the tomb of Confucius is the scene of similar adoration—flowers adorn it as if he were a loved one recently lost.
> 
> The other cult in Qufu surrounds the country’s president, Xi Jinping. People still recall with excitement the trip he made to the city in 2013. It was the first by a Communist Party chief in more than two decades; in fact, though Mr Xi has visited Qufu he has not, since becoming China’s leader, paid respects at the birthplace of Mao Zedong at Shaoshan in Hunan province. Today plates decorated with Mr Xi’s image are for sale in Qufu’s trinket shops. His beaming face is on display on a large billboard outside the Confucius Research Institute, together with a quotation from the modern sage: “In the spread of Confucianism around the world, China must fully protect its right to speak up,” it begins.
> 
> Since he came to power in 2012, Mr Xi has sought to elevate Confucius—whom Mao vilified—as the grand progenitor of Chinese culture. He did not go so far as to pay homage at the Confucius temple in Qufu, where Mao’s Red Guard mobs once wrought havoc (one of their slogans, “Revolution is not a crime”, still survives daubed on a stone tablet). Neither did his few published remarks include explicit praise for Confucian philosophy, which still raises hackles among party hacks brought up to regard it as the underpinning of “feudal” rule in premodern China.
> 
> To emperors, who were regular visitors to Qufu, Confucianism was practically a state religion. “Uncle Xi”, for all the mini-cult surrounding him, does not seem keen to be viewed as a latter-day emperor. But like leaders of old, he evidently sees Confucianism as a powerful ideological tool, with its stress on order, hierarchy, and duty to ruler and to family. Unlike the party’s imported, indigestible Marxist dogma, Confucianism has the advantage of being home-grown. It appeals to a yearning for ancient values among those unsettled by China’s blistering pace of change.
> 
> Though the party has quietly been rehabilitating Confucius for some time, under Mr Xi the pace has quickened. In February 2014 he convened a “collective study” session of the ruling Politburo at which he said that traditional culture should act as a “wellspring” nourishing the party’s values. Official accounts of the session made no mention of Confucius, but party literature made it clear that the values Mr Xi spoke of—such as benevolence, honesty and righteousness—were those espoused by the philosopher. In September Mr Xi became the first party chief to attend a birthday party for Confucius (who turned 2,565). China, he told assembled scholars from around the world, had always been peace-loving—a trait, he said, that had “very deep origins in Confucian thinking”. In May state media reported that the link between Marxism and Confucianism, which some might consider rather tenuous, was the “hottest topic” in the study of humanities in 2014.
> 
> _*Add plenty of sage*_
> 
> Under Mr Xi the party has tweaked its ideological mantras to sound more Confucian. At the party congress in 2012 that marked Mr Xi’s assumption of power, slogans about “core socialist values” were distilled into 12 words, each formed by two Chinese characters and plastered all over Beijing and other cities. The ideas are a hotch-potch. Some are strikingly Western, such as democracy, freedom and equality. There is a nod to socialism with “dedication to work”. Others, such as harmony and sincerity, look more Confucian. Zhang Yiwu of Peking University notes a similarity with the “shared values” adopted by Singapore’s government in 1991. Authoritarian Singapore, where officials hold Confucianism in high regard, has been an inspiration to China, Mr Zhang says.
> 
> There is certainly a competitive streak in the party’s growing fondness for the sage. China is surrounded by countries that think of themselves as Confucian, including Japan, which China sees as a rival, as well as South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam. When, a decade ago, China began setting up language schools abroad to enhance its soft power, it called them Confucius Institutes. That was partly an effort to gain control of the Confucian brand (and partly because “Mao Institutes” would somehow have lacked appeal). There are now 475 such institutes in 120 countries.
> 
> A few scholars would like Mr Xi to go much further, by setting up a new form of government based on Confucianism. Prominent in this camp is Jiang Qing, who runs a Confucian academy in the south-western city of Guiyang. In a co-written article published by the New York Times in 2012 Mr Jiang proposed that China set up a tricameral parliament. One of the chambers would be led by a descendant of Confucius. (There are plenty of them, including roughly a quarter of Qufu’s population. This correspondent’s taxi driver boasted that he was a 77th-generation descendant.) Another chamber would be made up of “exemplary persons” nominated by scholars steeped in Confucian classics.
> 
> Mr Xi, a staunch defender of the party’s monopoly on power, would never agree to Mr Jiang’s plan. Yet there is an open-ended tone to another slogan now draped across bridges in Beijing: “The people have faith, the nation has hope and the country has strength.” Faith in what, it does not say—but Confucianism, it can be guessed, would have the party’s blessing. The two cults are now entwined.




I have mentioned this before: Confucius offers a "complete _system_" for social organization, from the family up to and including the empire. What's more it is a _system_ that is, very likely, more compatible with one-party rule than is Wester, _liberal_ democracy.


----------



## a_majoor

While seaplane technology is actually old, the use of large sea planes hasn't been a factor in military operations since the Second World War, so this is interesting, especially in the increased flexibility it gives China in the South China Sea region (both in terms of rapid logistics and surveillance capabilities).

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/naval/naval-aviation/2015/03/28/china-seaplane-islands-scs-claims-spratley-reef/70542218/



> *Seaplane Could Advance Chinese SCS Claims*
> By Wendell Minnick 12:55 p.m. EDT March 28, 2015
> 
> TAIPEI — A new Chinese-built seaplane could help seal Beijing's control over its claims in the South China Sea (SCS), say military specialists on China.
> 
> The Jiaolong (Water Dragon) AG600, under construction by China Aviation Industry General Aircraft (CAIGA), will be China's largest operational seaplane. CAIGA did not respond to inquiries after the company's announcement on March 17 that it had completed the front fuselage assembly for the prototype.
> 
> According to brochures obtained at the 2014 Airshow China in Zhuhai, the aircraft is powered by four turboprop WJ-6 engines and has a range of 5,500 kilometers, which would provide substantial movement within the SCS. In the Spratly Islands, China is currently constructing artificial islands on Hughes Reef, Johnson South Reef and Gaven Reef.
> 
> Despite the lack of direct mainland access to Beijing's strategic claims in the SCS, the aircraft are seen as a boon to solidifying control of the area by China's military and maritime enforcement agencies for island hopping within the crowded clusters of the 750 reefs, islets, atolls and islands in the Spratly Islands archipelago.
> 
> "Amphibious planes like the AG600 would be perfect for resupplying the new artificial islands that the Chinese are building in the SCS," said Richard Bitzinger, coordinator of the Military Transformations Program at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
> 
> "At the same time, these islands would be excellent bases of operations for the AG600 to engage in maritime patrols of claimed territories."
> 
> The AG600 will also serve as political leverage, said Ching Chang, a research fellow at Taiwan's ROC Society for Strategic Studies.
> 
> "States need effective governance to support their territorial claim" and the AG600 will enhance China's capability in "law enforcement, fishery patrol, anti-poaching activity on coral reefs, pollution prevention, search and rescue, medical rescue transportation, meteorological and seismic survey, namely, all the government functions that may signify its substantial governance in the South China Sea."
> 
> This type of governance and control will serve China's argument that the islands are "inhabitable according to UNCLOS [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea] requirements, which support the PRC [People's Republic of China] to claim an EEZ [exclusive economic zone] in the South China Sea."
> 
> CAIGA brochures indicate the AG600 can fulfill four missions: search and rescue (SAR), fire fighting, transport (up to 50 passengers), and maritime surveillance. These aircraft might also serve China's military in the roles of signal intelligence and electronic intelligence, said Sam Bateman, adviser, Maritime Security Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore.
> 
> However, Bateman does not see these aircraft as a "game changer" in the SCS, though they could serve to "quickly resupply and reinforce the military outposts on islands without air strips."
> 
> CAIGA brochures make no mention of a military application, but history indicates that seaplanes have a relatively small commercial market. The existing producers of large amphibious aircraft, Japan and Russia, indicate that the market for fire fighting and SAR missions is small, said Vasiliy Kashin, a China military specialist at Moscow's Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. Both aircraft producers are legacies of the Cold War, he said, and in comparison China has created a new design and established a new production line for an aircraft that has a terrible commercial market history.
> 
> "Since the program can hardly be justified by the civilian demand, the likely explanation is that the program has a significant military importance," Kashin said.
> 
> The AG600 is not the only seaplane under development by CAIGA. At the 2014 Airshow China, the company displayed models of the twin-engine turboprop-engine powered H660 and H631, each with a similar payload and range. There was also a model of the four turbofan-engine powered H680 Sea Eagle.
> 
> The company also builds two light passenger seaplanes, the 208B and HO300, both with a range of roughly 1,000-1,500 kilometers.


----------



## Edward Campbell

And yet more on those islands (because those seaplanes have to go somewhere, don't they?) in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_:

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21659771-asian-coastguards-are-front-line-struggle-check-china-small-reefs-big-problems


> Small reefs, big problems
> *Asian coastguards are in the front line of the struggle to check China*
> 
> Jul 25th 2015 | BEIJING, TAIPEI AND TOKYO | From the print edition
> 
> EVERY ten or so days, and rarely at weekends, the Chinese coastguard arrives at eight in the morning, in time for the Japanese foreign ministry to deliver a formal complaint to its Chinese counterpart by lunchtime. It is something of a ritual these days. Chinese vessels breach the 12-mile territorial limit of Japan’s Senkaku islands, which China claims and calls the Diaoyu islands. Japanese coastguard cutters shadow them warily until the Chinese decide that national honour has been satisfied and sail away. Call this little dance an improvement: in 2012, with anti-Japan fervour at its height, aggressive incursions into Senkaku waters highlighted the risk that China might even provoke a war with its neighbour over the uninhabited rocks.
> 
> That the dance is carried out by coastguard vessels, white-painted and minimally armed, also allows both sides to disengage more easily. Yet gunmetal-grey warships lurk nearby. One reason China has backed off in recent months is the solid presence of the Japanese navy just over the horizon. And were the two countries ever to come to blows over the Senkakus, America has made it clear it would come to Japan’s aid. (It claims no view over the territorial dispute, which did not stop it using the Senkakus for bombing practice during its post-war occupation of Japan.)
> 
> Facing pushback in the East China Sea, China has turned to softer targets: the islands, reefs and atolls of the South China Sea. These have long been the subject of territorial disputes among littoral states, especially involving the Philippines and Vietnam. But China has increased the tensions sharply in the past year. First, without consultation it towed an oil rig into Vietnam’s claimed Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). More troubling is confirmation of China’s massive landfill work on disputed reefs and islands a very long way from China’s shores. In contrast with Japan, China’s neighbours to the south are poorer and weaker, and they lack cast-iron American security guarantees. A vacuum has existed in the South China Sea since American forces withdrew from the Philippines in 1992.
> 
> Game of shadows
> 
> China’s neighbours are unnerved by its rapid increase in defence spending, in particular its pursuit of a blue-water navy. They note a Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who is not shy about flexing Chinese muscle. He likes to talk of China’s “peaceful rise” and of a “new type of great-power relationship”—one that appears to leave little space for small countries.
> 
> In both Beijing and Washington, strategists have long liked to grapple with whether America and China are destined to fall into a “Thucydides trap”. In the original, the Spartans’ fear of the growing might of Athens made war inevitable. The modern parallel states that an existing power (America) is bound to clash with a rising one (China). In Japan the point is made differently: at sea modern China is behaving with the paranoid aggression of imperial Japan on land before the second world war. “They are making the same mistakes that we did,” says a Japanese official.
> 
> For now, it is a game of diplomacy, legal manoeuvre, positioning and the creation of facts on the ground (or, rather, on the water). It is played mainly by non-military forces: dredgers and barges; oceanographic and other survey ships; and, above all, coastguards. China insists that its landfill work is intended to provide public goods such as lighthouses, typhoon shelters for fishermen, weather stations and search-and-rescue facilities. But American defence officials are certain the purpose is, in fact, military. At Fiery Cross reef a new airstrip 3km (1.9 miles) long could take any of China’s military aircraft, and what look like hangars for fighters are being built. Artillery has been seen at another outpost. American planners say that these positions are vulnerable—“aircraft carriers that can’t move”, as one puts it—and would quickly be put out of action in any conflict. But short of war the artificial islands would serve as useful forward bases to project Chinese power.
> 
> China claims an ill-defined U-shape, the “nine-dashed line”, that encloses much of the South China Sea (see map) and clashes with the claims of several of its neighbours. Again, America affects to take no position on who owns what. Its priority, it says, is to preserve the right of free navigation by both air and sea. It periodically sends military reconnaissance aircraft near the newly built islands to make this point.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China is not the first country to build in the South China Sea, but it is now by far the most energetic. By shredding trust with South-East Asian claimants, China’s actions make a long-promised code of conduct for dealing with territorial disputes ever more elusive. Its assertiveness has pushed several South-East Asian countries closer to America, lending justification for the American “pivot” to Asia. Countries alarmed at Chinese assertiveness have rushed to buy military equipment.
> 
> In the face of strong domestic opposition, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is pushing new security bills through parliament that would loosen the constraints on Japan helping its American ally. He would, for instance, like Japan to join the American navy in South China Sea patrols. Japan is also financing the construction of ten new coastguard vessels for the Philippines and six for Vietnam. It is all part of a concerted “anti-coercion strategy”, says Narushige Michishita of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
> 
> Meanwhile, Vietnam’s relations with America go from strength to strength (while it increases arms purchases from Russia). The Philippines has signed a new defence pact that would allow America to return to its former base in Subic Bay as well as other bases. And it plans to beef up its neglected armed forces. The shopping list includes new fighters, frigates and maritime reconnaissance aircraft. But, given the scale of the country’s corruption, some wonder how much of a punch the extra pesos will deliver.
> 
> Many are now closely watching the proceedings of a UN-sponsored arbitration panel at The Hague, where the Philippines is seeking a ruling on whether China’s building on submerged reefs confers the right to territorial waters and EEZs under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The panel cannot settle the question of ownership, but the Philippines is hoping for a moral victory that will undermine China’s vague but sweeping claims. China has refused to take part in the process, but is being drawn willy-nilly into the legal argument.
> 
> One China, one claim
> 
> At the junction of the East China Sea and the South China Sea lies Taiwan, which China claims. Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have greatly eased in recent years, as the Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, and his Kuomintang (KMT) have sought reconciliation with the mainland Communists. But a test of relations is on the horizon with a presidential election that is likely to see Mr Ma replaced by Tsai Ing-wen of the more independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). She has tried to assuage American worries of cross-strait crisis by speaking of her desire to maintain stable, predictable relations with the mainland. But China does not trust her party.
> 
> Besides, the South China Sea disputes have the potential to become a new bone of contention between Taiwan and China. Taiwan shares identical claims to China’s in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Indeed the nine-dashed line was first drawn up by the KMT in 1946 (it had 11 dashes then) when it still ruled China and set out to retake islands following Japan’s surrender. Identical claims actually suit China, since they reinforce the pretence that there is just “one China” (with China and Taiwan disagreeing over precisely what it is). But America recently pressured Mr Ma to clarify Taiwan’s claim as a means of undermining the absurdly sweeping nature of China’s.
> 
> Mr Ma, a Harvard-trained lawyer who is keen that his country is seen to be upholding international law, said that under UNCLOS Taiwan claims only the 12-mile limit around its islands, not all the seas within the nine-dashed line. A DPP government might adopt a still narrower position. Ms Tsai insists that Taiwan will defend Taiping or Itu Aba, the largest island in the Spratlys, which it holds, but is vaguer about other features.
> 
> Diplomatic nuance will not change the inexorable shift that is taking place in Asia’s balance of power. Military experts offer the following rough reckoning: Taiwan lost the ability to halt a Chinese invasion on its own several years ago; Japan may be able to keep protecting its farthest-flung islands only for another 10-15 years. So the longer-term questions are: can either country inflict enough damage on China to deter it from attacking and, more importantly, how far is America still willing or able to tip the scales? Two decades after a cross-strait crisis in which China fired missiles close to Taiwan, would America again deploy aircraft-carriers nearby as a warning? Few offer an unqualified “yes”.
> 
> Military thinking is changing markedly. America is seeking new weapons to try to break through China’s growing “anti-access/area denial” (A2/AD) capability. This involves, for example, anti-ship missiles designed to hold back the Americans, perhaps at the “first island chain” (which runs from Japan to Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia). Such is the mismatch that neighbours are now planning their own A2/AD strategies to fend off China.
> 
> Toshi Yoshihara of the US Naval War College thinks that Japan should focus on things like shore-based anti-ship missiles, submarines, “guerrilla warfare at sea” with fast missile boats and mine warfare. America is quietly pushing Taiwan to adopt similar tactics. And Japanese officials privately admit that Taiwan’s security is essential to Japan’s. Andrew Krepinevich of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think-tank in Washington, DC, suggests that America should help extend what he calls “archipelagic defence” to the Philippines.
> 
> If you can’t beat them, contain them
> 
> Such advice may be a counsel of despair, an admission that the East China Sea and South China Sea are bound to become Chinese lakes, and that the best that can be done is to contain China within them. Nobody wants to test such notions, not least because of the risk tensions pose to global prosperity. The aim in the coming years must be to draw a rising China into co-operative relationships with its neighbours, while deterring bad behaviour.
> 
> China is hardly without internal problems, or indifferent to external pressure. Some experts in Beijing think their country has been too assertive at sea of late. China has said its land reclamation in the South China Sea is coming to an end. Mr Xi will want to avoid too many controversies ahead of his visit to America in September.
> 
> For now, whether competition in Asia can be prevented from turning into conflict may come down to whether the crews on lightly armed coastguard ships in the waters around China can keep their heads.




China is not practicing _soft power_ politics here. This is naked _hard power_. China wants to establish itself as the premier power in East Asia: it wants America _out_ but it will settle for America being _in_ but emasculated.

My _guesstimate_ is that China is willing to play "bumper cars' with ships and even a few aircraft. My _guess_ is that they would be prepared to lose a plane and a ship, or two, or ... IF they felt that would contribute to the achievement of their goals. I suspect that the Chinese leadership sees the American government as weak and indecisive but, still, able to lash out with massive power. Once again, my _guess_ is that they (the Chinese) are cautious but _*NOT*_ afraid.

The fact that Japan, not America, is stepping up to support (arm) Philippines and Viet Nam is telling. The Japanese have a massive debt problem, far worse than America's, but they understand the stakes in this "game." 

Look at this map:

                    
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




The East and South China Seas are "narrow seas" (like the Baltic and Persian Gulf) as Alfred Thayer Mahan explained them and they are strategically vital and, therefore, dangerous.

(By the way, for those who note that the Strait of Malacca is even more _strategically_ vital, and narrower still, the Chinese are exploring a canal, across Thailand, to bypass them ...


----------



## Edward Campbell

_Enter the Dragon?_

The _Financial Times_ reports that "The International Monetary Fund’s board has been told Athens’ high debt levels and poor record of implementing reforms disqualify Greece from a third IMF bailout of the country, raising new questions over whether the institution will join the EU’s latest financial rescue."

That may mean that Greece needs one of two things:

     1. Debt relief from, especially, Germany and the other Northern European (responsible) _Eurozone_ members ~ something that may be a difficult political problem; or

     2. A new source of external funding.

_Could China be that new source of funding?_

Despite problems in the Chinese domestic market, China is still sailing along on a virtual sea of cash ~ what it neds are better trading opportunities. How about a new "door" into Europe, through Greece?


----------



## CougarKing

The enforcement of the East China Sea ADIZ has begun...with a Laotian airliner?  ;D

Diplomat



> *A First: China Turns Back Commercial Flight For Violating East China Sea ADIZ Rules
> 
> China’s enforcement of its East China Sea air defense identification zone (ADIZ) is starting to work out.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> A little-noticed report published earlier this week in Air Transport World showcases one such case. According to that report, a Lao Airlines flight flying from South Korea’s Gimehae International Airport to Laos was asked to turn back by Chinese air traffic controllers and complied. The report notes that the Chinese air traffic controllers told the aircraft that it did not have adequate approval to pass through China’s East China Sea ADIZ. According to the report, the flight (No. QV916), an Airbus A320, was an hour into its scheduled flight path, “which would have put the aircraft over disputed areas of the China Sea,” before it turned back. Starting last year, Chinese air traffic authorities began to require that all civilian flights flying through the East China Sea ADIZ file pre-flight plans, transponder details, and other technical details ahead of their flights, according to the Air Transport World report. The incident involving QV916 is the first instance of a commercial flight being turned back due to a failure to comply with Chinese air traffic authority requirements, but at least 55 airlines worldwide are complying with the terms of China’s ADIZ.
> 
> The following image shows QV916′s flight path on July 25.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

I wonder how the current economic crisis in China will affect their plans to host this?

Vancity Buzz



> *Beijing wins bid to host 2022 Olympic Winter Games*
> BY
> KENNETH CHAN
> 2:58 AM PDT, THU JULY 30, 2015
> 
> Beijing has won the right to host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, beating its only competitor Almaty, Kazakhstan to become the first city in history to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
> 
> On Friday, IOC members voted for Beijing in a narrow vote during the sport organization’s 128th session held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Beijing received 44 votes whereas Almaty had 40.
> 
> The Beijing Winter Games will of course come just 14 years after the 2008 Summer Olympics held in the same city.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Here's some belated posts from the past couple of months, to give some background on next year's Taiwan elections, which mainland China will be watching:

2 women candidates running against each other in the upcoming Taiwan presidential elections. Not surprisingly China is rooting for Hung, the pro-Guomindang/Kuomintang candidate. Meanwhile the pro-independence DPP candidate, Tsai, has grabbed international attention, to the point she was recently featured in the cover of Time magazine (Asia edition).

Shanghaiist



> *Taiwan to elect first female president in 2016 elections*
> 
> Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) has received an average approval rate of 46 percent, qualifying her to be the Kuomintang (KMT)'s only candidate for Taiwan's 2016 presidential election.
> Hung is expecting the KMT to formally nominate her on July 19, during the national party convention. Once she is nominated, she will be running against another female, the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who resigned as her party's chairperson after Ma Ying-jeou was re-elected as president.
> “I hope this battle between two women will bring forth a whole new understanding and set an example of true democracy,” Hung tells reporters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



One of the 2 female presidential candidates in Taiwan's upcoming presidential election was featured on Time:

Shanghaiist



> *Tsai Ing-wen, chief of Taiwan's DPP, graces the latest cover of TIME*
> 
> The Democratic Progressive Party's presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has been featured on the international cover of TIME magazine ahead of Taiwan's upcoming 2016 presidential election.
> The issue features a (paywalled) piece by Emily Rauhala on how the former DPP's party chair rose to become the early front runner in the upcoming January election and her vision for the future of Taiwan.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Reuters




> *China says will welcome only anti-independence candidate for Taiwan president*
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Thursday said it would welcome only an anti-independence candidate at Taiwan's presidential election in January, offering its first comment on the likely contender for the island's pro-China ruling Nationalist Party.
> 
> Taiwan is one of the most sensitive of all policy issues for the Communist Party in Beijing, which claims the island as its own and views it as a renegade province, to be bought under its control by force if necessary.
> 
> The vote in self-ruled Taiwan is shaping as a contest between two women, deputy parliamentary speaker Hung Hsiu-chu from the Nationalists and the pro-independence opposition Democratic Progressive Party's candidate, Tsai Ing-wen.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



More on Hung, the KMT/Guomindang's frontman, or should I say, frontwoman:

Diplomat



> *The Challenging Road for Taiwan’s Newest Presidential Candidate
> KMT candidate Hung Hsiu-chu faces an uphill battle, thanks to a controversial approach to cross-strait relations.*
> 
> On June 14, Taiwan’s ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), announced that presidential candidate and deputy speaker of the legislature Hung Hsiu-chu passed the minimum polling criteria of a 30 percent approval rating, with an average of 46 percent approval. After gaining the approval of the Central Standing Committee, Hung was officially nominated by the KMT in the national party congress on July 19.
> 
> Nicknamed “Little Hot Pepper,” Hung is known for her straightforward speaking style in the legislature. She’s been equally fiery in her policy pronouncements. When Hung announced she would seek the KMT nomination, she proposed “one China, same interpretation” as the plank for her cross-strait policy. Under the “one China, different interpretations” of the1992 Consensus, the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) both claim to be the sole representative of China. Hung argues that this consensus has already served its purpose. She would like to upgrade the 1992 consensus to both sides having the “same interpretation” of “one China,” laying the foundation of a stable relationship between two sides. Hung has also championed a cross-strait peace agreement, which she says will ensure a legal basis for the peaceful interactions between Taiwan and the Mainland.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Interestingly, one of the DPP candidates is a Tiananmen dissident who escaped from the mainland:

Shanghaiist



> *Tiananmen dissident Wu'er Kaixi runs for seat in Taiwan's parliament*
> 
> Wu’er Kaixi, a Chinese democracy activist and one of the former student leaders in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, has announced that he will be running for a seat in the Taiwan parliament.
> Twenty-six years ago, Wu’er fled China and moved to Taichung after Beijing's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, and has now pledged to fight for human rights and justice in his adopted home. He also pledged to take a tougher approach to Taiwan’s relations with China.
> Wu’er’s rival, Chang Liao Wan-chien, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) contender, will also be running for the same parliament seat in Taichung. Recently, Wu’er reached an agreement with Chang whereby the one with the least support would endorse the other in a bid to unseat Tsai Chin-long, an incumbent legislator from the pro-China Kuomintang (KMT). They both agreed that Tsai must be defeated.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

... provides a neat "Five Minutes Guide" to the situation in the South China Seas at the link.


----------



## CougarKing

China developing its support infrastructure for the aircraft carrier _Liaoning_ and her planned sisters in its fleet:

Inquirer(Philippines newspaper) 



> *China cryptic on ‘second aircraft carrier base’ near West Ph Sea*
> 
> Quote
> The Chinese Ministry of National Defense said on Thursday that whether a new port being built in Hainan province could host aircraft carriers, as some media have recently speculated, would be decided “in accordance with the tasks required”.
> 
> Canada-based Kanwa Asian Defense, a regional defense magazine, said in its August issue that a 700-meter dock in Sanya City, is a second aircraft carrier base for the People’s Liberation Army navy.
> 
> The South China Morning Post quoted the magazine as saying that China “has put the finishing touches to the world’s longest aircraft carrier dock,” and the facility could service carriers on both of its sides.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

If you want to see the impact of Deng Xiaoping, especially, but also of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, look at this graph from _Our World in Data_:







There are many reasons for the rise in people NOT living in absolute poverty, but the decline in the numbers who do live in absolute poverty coincides with the death of Mao (1976) and the rise of Deng who pursued and adapted and magnified the policies of his old friend and colleague Zhou Enlai.*

Deng set the table, Ziang and Hu exploited his reforms and put in place (sometimes contradictory) policies that (sometimes) encouraged _productive_ growth. 

_____
* Zhou was, inexplicably, a communist, of sorts, a Leninist, in reality. He believed, _I think_,  that Western, _liberal_ democracy was "good," but not for China. He appears to have believed that only a Russian style autocracy could work with the vast, illiterate Chinese peasantry. His focus was on primary education and primary health care. In 25 years, a generation, he reshaped China and made it possible for Deng to pursue "socialism with Chinese characteristics," i.e. a market economy overseen by a dictatorship that is trying to reshape itself into an self perpetuating _autocratic meritocracy_.


----------



## CougarKing

The US may piss off Turkey if they help China crack down on Ankara's Uighur cousins...and there goes Turkish support for the air campaign against ISIS:  

Reuters



> *China appeals for U.S. help to fight Xinjiang militants*
> Tue Aug 4, 2015 10:57pm EDT
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China has appealed for U.S. support in fighting Islamist militants in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang, saying they are also a threat to the United States.
> 
> Chinese officials say the *East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)* recruits Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority from Xinjiang, and trains them with extremists in Syria and Iraq, with the intent of returning to China to wage holy war.
> 
> Many foreign experts, however, have questioned whether ETIM exists as the coherent group China claims it is.
> 
> The threat of terror grows "more complicated and severe by the day", China's Foreign Ministry said late on Tuesday, following a meeting between Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping and Tina Kaidanow, Ambassador-At-Large for the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

As I stated before,Erdogen is trying to get enough support to form a government after the thrashing his party took in elections.That is why they bombed the PKK.The Turks dont want to upset the Chinese and they understand terrorism and the need to defeat it.


----------



## CougarKing

From PLA Generals to China's fledgling environmental regulatory agency, no one is immune to Xi's corruption drive:

Diplomat



> *Guo Boxiong, Jiang Zemin, and the Corruption of the Chinese Military
> If two of the most powerful military leaders in the past 16 years are corrupt, who in the Chinese military is not?*
> 
> Finally, Guo Boxiong, former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and former Politburo member, has been dismissed from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and handed over for a court martial.
> 
> According to Xinhua News Agency, at its meeting on July 30, the Politburo of the CCP reviewed the report on Guo’s case and decided to expel him from the Party and turn his case over to military prosecutors because of his involvement in taking huge bribes, directly and indirectly.
> 
> Along with Xu Caihou, another former vice chairman of the CMC and Politburo member who was expelled from the Party for corruption, Guo practically controlled the People’s Liberation Army for 13 years on behalf of Jiang Zemin, former president and chairman of the CMC as well as former general secretary of the Party.
> 
> During his first decade as chairman of the CMC from 1989 to 1999, Jiang did not have any actual power over the military. In September 1999, Jiang began to assert his authority by appointing two of his confidants to the CMC. One was Xu Caihou, the then-executive deputy director of the General Political Department. The other was Guo Boxiong, the then-executive deputy chief of staff of the General Staff Department.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Diplomat



> *Aide to China's Former President Expelled From Party, to Face Trial
> It’s official: Ling Jihua has been expelled from the Party for “serious discipline violations.”*
> 
> A former aide to Chinese President Hu Jintao has been officially expelled from the Communist Party, Xinhua reported on Monday. Ling Jihua, who served as head of the Central Committee’s General Office during Hu’s tenure, was announced to be under an internal Party graft investigation last December. Now his case will be turned over to the courts for prosecution.
> 
> “Ling Jihua’s actions completely deviated from the characteristics and goals of the Party,” Xinhua said, citing an official report from the Politburo. “He seriously violated Party discipline, did enormous damage to the Party’s image, and had an extremely negative influence on society.”
> 
> That announcement followed two years of rumors that Ling was in the Party’s cross-hairs. In March 2012, Ling’s son was killed in a car crash, the lurid details of which (Ling was driving a Ferrari whose passengers included two half-naked women) served to embarrass the Party as it prepared for its delicate, once-in-a-decade leadership transition. In addition to that incident, which led to Ling being suspected of corruption, the Chinese rumor mill has since linked Ling with former high-ranking officials Bo Xilai, Xu Caihou, and Zhou Yongkang as part of a plot to at best undermine – and at worst overthrow – current President Xi Jinping.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Diplomat



> *China's Anti-Corruption Fight Turns Toward Environmental Agency
> With the investigation of a vice minister, China gets serious about holding environmental officials accountable.*
> 
> By chinadialogue
> 
> Retired Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) vice minister Zhang Lijun has fallen foul of China’s ongoing corruption crackdown, becoming the highest-ranking environmental official yet to be investigated.
> 
> China’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), announced details of the probe on July 30.
> 
> “Zhang Lijun, former vice minister for environmental protection and member of the ministry’s Party group, is under investigation for serious breaches of discipline and law,” the CCDI said on its website.
> 
> Zhang, 63, retired from the MEP two years ago. He previously served as deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Agency in 2004, and four years later was promoted to vice-minister with the granting of ministerial status to SEPA (now known as the MEP) in 2008. He held that post until his retirement in 2013.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Xi Jinping's sword is swinging very, very close to dangerous territory.

_My sense_ has been that both Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin were to be left "clean" in any investigations, but some of their closest associates are now accused and one _guesses_ that rumours are rife in China about Xi's predecessors.

The danger is a backlash from within the broader party: _I think_ that Xi's _eforms_ are popular, but not if they taint the _idea_ that the "party knows best."


----------



## CougarKing

It seems a little early to tell who will replace Xi Jinping at this point, but often the party elders seem to always have an eye on those potential political stars who rise through the ranks. But they can sometimes be wrong, as in the case former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai.

While tiny Guizhou province may seem like a backwater which will hardly be a proving ground for a potential Chinese leader like Chen Min Er 
(陈敏尔), take note that Hu Jintao once was assigned to Tibet (called Xizang in Chinese), which had and continues to have its own set of problems. This was before Hu later rose to become Jiang Zhemin's VP before succeeding him. 

Diplomat



> *Is This Man China's Next Leader?
> The rise of a Zhejiang clique is good news for Chen Min’er, the new party secretary of Guizhou Province.*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Professor Bo Zhiyue
> By Bo Zhiyue
> August 03, 2015
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The real winner of this round of reshuffles, though, is Chen Min’er, governor of Guizhou. He was promoted to party secretary of Guizhou on the same day as Zhao.* Chen’s political credentials don’t compare to those of Zhang but he enjoys a huge advantage as one of Xi Jinping’s confidants.*
> 
> Chen worked closely with Xi in Zhejiang for four years and four months. During Xi’s stint in Zhejiang, Chen was a standing member and the director of the Propaganda Department of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee. Under his charge, Zhejiang Daily, the newspaper of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, carried a series of articles from February 25, 2003 to March 25, 2007 by an author named “Zhexin,” the pen name of Xi Jinping.
> 
> *Chen was transferred to Guizhou in January 2012 and was promoted to governor of Guizhou one year later. He is a full member of the 18th Central Committee and has only been governor of Guizhou for two and a half years. With this promotion, he would be qualified to compete for a seat on the Politburo in two years.*
> 
> A native of Zhejiang who has spent most of his political career in his home province, Chen is a good representative of a Zhejiang clique in Chinese politics. Born in September 1960, Chen is the first member of the Zhejiang clique to emerge as a sixth generation leader. It is likely that he could become a front-runner as Xi’s successor in another five years.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The ripples of China's economic slowdown continue:

Agence-France-Presse via Inquirer



> *China losing luster for foreign investors*
> 
> Agence France-Presse
> 12:45 PM August 9th, 2015
> 
> BEIJING, China – The once irresistible allure of the Chinese market to foreign multinationals is losing some of its luster as slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy hits their sales.
> 
> The latest figures from firms reporting during the current results season in Europe, the United States and Japan paint a picture of overseas firms facing a worsening of operating conditions in China.
> 
> Volkswagen, which has invested heavily in China and has just displaced Toyota as the world’s leading car manufacturer, saw sales in the country — which it describes as its “second home market” — fall 3.9 percent in the first half, its first drop in a decade.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Worse than expected’
> Such challenges have been compounded by the country’s slowing economy.
> 
> *Japan’s second-biggest steelmaker JFE Holdings lowered its annual profit forecast in late July because of “the economic slowdown in China and the overproduction of steel” in the country, the world’s largest consumer of the metal.
> 
> In the United States, industrial giant UTC, the maker of Otis lifts, revised down its earnings forecast for 2015 partly on the back of what it described as “a slowing China”.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Reuters



> *China under mounting pressure to ease policy as economy stumbles*
> Reuters
> By By Koh Gui Qing – 8 hours ago
> 
> By Koh Gui Qing
> BEIJING (Reuters) - China is under growing pressure to further stimulate its economy after disappointing data over the weekend showed another heavy fall in factory-gate prices and a surprise slump in exports.
> Producer prices in July hit their lowest point since late 2009, during the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and have been sliding continuously for more than three years.
> Exports tumbled 8.3 percent in the same month, their biggest fall in four months, as weaker global demand for Chinese goods and a strong yuan policy hurt manufacturers.
> "Policy focus is definitely the (producer) deflation at this stage," said Zhou Hao, economist at Commerzbank AG in Singapore.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Don't they already have jungle experience not only by using the tropical environment of Hainan Island and the jungle parts of Yunnan provice as training areas, but from China's 1979 abortive invasion of Vietnam?

Take note that the Chinese also sought Brazilian help with training for the crew of their aircraft carrier _Liaoning._ 

Defense News



> *Chinese Seek Brazilian Assistance With Jungle Training*
> By Tim Mahon 1:02 p.m. EDT August 9, 2015
> 
> MANAUS, Brazil — Chinese military officials have requested the Brazilian Army's assistance in developing their own jungle warfare training capabilities, officials here said.
> 
> Briefing reporters in July, Col. Alcimar Marques de Araújo Martins, commander of the Centro de Instruçao de Guerra na Selva (CIGS – Jungle Warfare Training Center,) indicated that China had recently arranged to send a group of officers and NCOs to be trained at the CIGS, but they canceled their attendance in favor of an alternative approach.
> 
> *“They have now asked us to provide a number of trainers and our jungle warfare training expertise to assist them in developing their own program in China,”* he said. There was no indication as to the immediacy of such cooperation or the number of trainers likely to be sent.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Canadian exporters will be hurt by this as well:

Reuters



> *China's move to cut currency's value could hurt exporters across US and global economies*
> The Canadian Press
> By Joe McDonald, The Associated Press
> 
> BEIJING, China - *China's bold move Tuesday to sharply devalue its currency threatens to squeeze exporters around the world whose goods will likely become comparatively costlier than many Chinese products.*
> 
> The action has also intensified fears about the weakening of the world's second-largest economy, whose growth rate has reached a six-year low as exports have steadily dwindled.
> 
> A cheaper yuan will benefit China's exports by making them less expensive overseas. Yet those gains would come at the expense of manufacturers in other countries, including the United States and Europe. U.S.
> exporters have long complained that China manipulates its currency to gain a trade advantage. Some members of Congress have backed legislation to impose retaliatory tariffs.
> 
> As China's once-breakneck growth has slowed, its reduced demand for foreign raw materials — from oil to coal to copper — has, in turn, slowed growth in countries like Australia and Brazil.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more on the ripple effects of the stock market crisis:

Reuters



> *Automakers feel China heat as buyers burnt by stocks rout desert showrooms*
> By By Jake Spring | Reuters – 16 hours ago
> 
> By Jake Spring
> BEIJING (Reuters) - The great Chinese stock slump that first whacked luxury car sales is spreading to mass-market brands as wannabe customers like Zhang Jiabin count the cost of soured investments.
> The 37-year-old food company executive lost nearly $6,500 when shares tumbled in June and July, and can't now afford the new Volkswagen Tiguan sport-utility vehicle he had his eye on. "I can't draw money," Zhang said, "I'll wait until (the market) goes up."
> Auto sales in China fell 7.1 percent in July from a year earlier as many more who lost out in a trillion-dollar share slump joined Zhang in delaying purchases. The monthly drop, the biggest in two and a half years, was the fourth in a row and marked China's longest streak of sales declines since at least the 2008 global financial crisis.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More on the Chinese economy. The markets and the currency are starting to decline, and in the embedded videos there was interesting commentary about Chinese exports declinging 8% as well. The question is not will whne this market correction play out but rather what steps the Chinese government will use to "stabilize" the market, and what second and third order effects the "stabilization" will create in the wider global economy:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-11/asian-futures-tip-another-down-day-as-yuan-move-rattles-markets



> *China Roils Markets for Second Day as Yuan Tumbles With Stocks *
> by Stephen Kirkland and Jeremy Herron
> August 11, 2015 — 7:26 PM EDT Updated on August 12, 2015 — 1:34 PM EDT
> 
> Concerns China’s economy is faltering torpedoed stocks around the world for a second day and fueled demand for the safety of gold and Treasuries.
> 
> American equities attempted a comeback in afternoon trading, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index trimmed its decline to 0.5 percent as of 1:25 p.m., paring a 1.5 percent slide. The rebound came too late for European stocks, which plunged 2.7 percent for the biggest one-day rout since October. China’s yuan led a slide in Asian currencies, and emerging-market shares plunged.
> 
> The dollar retreated, while Treasuries got a boost as investors speculated that the yuan’s devaluation will slow inflation globally. That led to bets that the Federal Reserve may delay raising interest rates, while a weaker U.S. currency boosted the appeal of some commodities.
> 
> “China is a big growth driver around the world, so there’s a certain risk to global growth,” said Otto Waser, chief investment officer at R&A Research & Asset Management AG in Zurich. “If the world economy turns out to be weaker, the Fed will keep an eye on the dollar.”
> 
> The S&P 500’s drop sent it careening through its 200-day moving average, a level that has halted previous selloffs this year. The gauge’s comeback has stalled at that mark.
> 
> The U.S. financial-services industry was among the worst-performing sectors as U.S. government debt rallied. Bank shares had surged in recent months amid expectations that a Federal Reserve rate increase will expand lending margins and boost profits.
> 
> Traders pushed down the odds on a September rate increase by the Fed to about 40 percent on Wednesday, from 54 percent as recently as Aug. 7, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
> 
> The yield on 10-year Treasury notes slid two basis points to 2.12 percent. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index slipped 0.8 percent to a three-week low, as European currencies led developed-market gains in foreign-exchange markets.
> 
> China’s decision on Tuesday to devalue the yuan and shift to a more market-determined rate sparked concern that any slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy will spill over to the European and American markets.
> 
> Data Wednesday showed fixed-asset investment in China grew at the slowest pace since December 2000 in July, while the rate of expansion for retail sales and industrial production also weakened.
> 
> “In an emotional environment like this fundamentals don’t necessary play entirely into it,” Gene Peroni, a fund manager at Advisors Asset Management Inc. in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, said in a phone interview. His firm oversees $14.7 billion. “You have reactive behavior and investors scrambling trying to reorient their portfolios and play the guessing game of what the ramifications are here.”
> 
> The devaluation is designed to cushion the yuan from strengthening along with the dollar after a projected interest-rate increase in the U.S., according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
> 
> “This is about Fed liftoff most obviously and further dollar strength,” Robin Brooks, chief currency strategist at Goldman Sachs in New York, wrote in a note to clients. “It certainly makes sense for China’s policy makers to buy some flexibility ahead of Fed liftoff.”
> 
> Emerging-market currencies bore the brunt of selling in reaction. Vietnam widened the trading band on its currency Wednesday, underscoring the risk of competitive devaluations that’s dragging down exchange rates from Brazil to South Korea.
> 
> Developing-nation stocks extended declines in a bear market, with the MSCI Emerging Markets Index losing 1.2 percent.
> 
> Gold rose for a fifth day, the longest stretch since May, as China’s devaluation spurred demand for haven assets. Bullion advanced 0.9 percent to $1,118.25 an ounce.


----------



## CougarKing

The markets rallying in anticipation of an economic stimulus from Beijing?

Canadian Press



> *World stock markets rise, led by surge in Chinese shares on stimulus hopes*
> The Canadian Press
> 
> By Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press
> 
> TOKYO - Global stock markets were moderately higher Monday led by a surge on the Shanghai index on hopes for stimulus measures following weak Chinese economic data.
> 
> KEEPING SCORE: France's CAC 40 added 0.5 per cent to 5,179.07 and Germany's DAX gained 0.4 per cent to 11,541.35. Britain's FTSE 100 inched up 0.1 per cent to 6,724.04. U.S. shares were set to recover from recent losses. S&P 500 futures were up 0.3 per cent at 2,078.80.
> CHINA TRADE: China's July trade shrank by unexpectedly wide margins, showing the world's second-largest economy faces weak demand both at home and abroad. Exports contracted by 8.3 per cent over a year earlier and imports were off by 8.1 per cent. For the year to date, exports are off 14.6 per cent and imports down by 0.8 per cent. That increases pressure on Beijing to stimulate domestic growth and to avert politically sensitive job losses in export industries.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more on the breaking news of that huge explosion in the city of Tianjiin, which is southeast of Beijing. 

The result of poor safety practices by some Chinese companies to cut costs?

Reuters



> *Huge explosions in China's Tianjin port area kill 13, hurt 250: media*
> Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:22pm EDT
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Two massive explosions caused by flammable goods rocked an industrial area in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin late on Wednesday, killing 13 people and injuring around 250, the official China Daily newspaper reported.
> 
> Pictures posted on Chinese media websites showed fire shooting into the air, nearly twice the height of nearby apartment buildings. Residents and workers, some bleeding, could be seen fleeing the scene.
> 
> State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said the blasts erupted in a shipment of explosives at around 11:30 p.m. local time, triggering a blast wave that was felt kilometers (miles) away.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

A variety of images at the link.The shipping company CO looks like the scape goat as he is in custody.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3195477/Fifty-people-injured-enormous-blast-explosives-shipment-hits-Chinese-city.html


----------



## jollyjacktar

Put me in mind of Halifax 1917.


----------



## tomahawk6

Or Port Chicago,Ca. circa 1944.

http://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/disasters-and-phenomena/port-chicago-ca-explosion.html


----------



## CougarKing

Xi Jinping sends a veiled message to Jiang Zhemin and Hu Jintao, etc. Perhaps Xi's wary of Jiang or Hu exercising more influence the same way Deng Xiaoping continued to do so in the 1990s right up to his death.


If I can recall correctly, before the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping was semi-retired despite being party chairman, but he used his influence on the Politburo standing commitee to override then-Premier Zhao Ziyang and purge him for sympathizing with the protesters. Then Deng ordered the crackdown.

Diplomat



> *China's State Media Tells Retired Officials to Stay Retired
> The article from People’s Daily seems to be a veiled reference to former leader Jiang Zemin*
> 
> The August 10 edition of People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, carried a short commentary discussing the phenomenon of supposedly retired officials continuing to exert their influence on Party and government decisions.  The piece notes that “most” leading cadres gracefully leave the political stage upon their retirement *– but “some leading cadres not only plant ‘trusted aides’ [in key positions] during their time in office to create circumstances in which they can exercise their power in the future, but are still unwilling to give up control of important affairs in their old departments many years after their retirement.*”
> 
> According to the commentary, these meddling officials create difficulties for new leadership, making it hard for them to complete their work. Interference from retired officials also creates a “debased mood” in departments where it occurs, as officials are unwilling to act.
> 
> That retired officials should be retired in both name and deed is a “social rule,” People’s Daily argues. After leaving their original positions, officials “naturally will no longer possess their original authority or status.”  The piece called on retired cadres to “promptly adjust their attitude and adapt to life changes, so as to avoid sinking into endless troubles.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Photo essay on the explosions that rocked Tianjin. Still no word on the actual origin of the explosions for now:

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/08/photos-of-the-aftermath-of-the-massive-explosions-in-tianjin-china/401228/


----------



## CougarKing

China's censors working overtime to deflect blame on officials involved:

Shanghaiist



> *CCTV telecast of Tianjin presser cut short after question on safety distance to hazardous materials*
> 
> So far, Wednesday night's massive explosions in Tianjin have brought up many questions and few answers. A live press conference earlier this morning wasn't terribly helpful in shedding light on the tragic disaster that has claimed at least 50 lives either, after it was abruptly cut short following some uncomfortable questions from reporters.
> After reassuring reporters that the potentially hazardous air was being blown away from the city, a government spokesperson tried to leave the conference but was bombarded with questions. Eventually, he gets one he isn't prepared at all to answer, leading to some extremely awkward silences.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Shanghaiist



> *China's censors crack down on online chatter about the Tianjin explosions*
> 
> Aside from some wind-related misinformation leaking through, China's censors have managed to maintain that tight control of the Chinese internet we have come to expect following disasters like the Tianjin explosions, liberally expunging thousands upon thousands of "dangerous" tweets.
> Many Weibo posters have claimed that their posts on the disaster have "disappeared". With just two days gone by since the blast and so little reliable information available, it is hard to discern if China's PR team are simply deleting inaccurate and potentially harmful rumors—like that pollutants from the explosions will be blown to Beijing—or are harmonizing potentially inconvenient truths.
> The top 10 most censored terms on Free Weibo, which captures all messages censored or deleted on the social media platform, are almost entirely made up of some combination of "Tianjin" and "explosion."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

As the death toll rises, the blast area is evacuated after a deadly chemical is found in the air:

Vancity Buzz



> *3 km radius of China blast evacuated, deadly sodium cyanide found*
> BY
> VANCITY BUZZ STAFF
> 3:26 PM PDT, SAT AUGUST 15, 2015
> 
> According to BBC News, local authorities have confirmed that high concentrations of sodium cyanide, an extremely toxic chemical, was stored at the site. Inhalation exposure with the chemical results in rapid death, sometimes within minutes.
> 
> A tweet by the People’s Daily China newspaper also said the military’s anti-chemical warfare soldiers had been deployed to the site.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Reuters



> *China blasts death toll 112 and likely to rise as scores of fire fighters missing*
> Sun Aug 16, 2015 1:46am EDT
> 
> By Megha Rajagopalan
> 
> TIANJIN, China (Reuters) - The death toll from massive explosions in China's port of Tianjin has risen to 112 and 95 people, most of them fire fighters, are missing, state media said on Sunday, suggesting the toll will rise significantly.
> 
> More than 720 people remained in hospital four days after Wednesday's disaster, which sent massive yellow and orange fireballs into the sky, rained burning debris on to a vast industrial zone, crumpled cars and shipping containers, burnt out buildings and shattered windows of nearby apartments.
> 
> President Xi Jinping on Saturday urged authorities to improve safety and learn lessons paid for with blood.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cupper

*Chinese companies face culture shock in countries that aren’t like China*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinese-companies-face-culture-shock-in-countries-that-arent-like-china/2015/08/14/a048eb64-3bbd-11e5-88d3-e62130acc975_story.html



> PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Faced with slower growth at home and rising labor costs, Chinese entrepreneurs are seeking foreign markets as never before. But as they rush abroad, they are grappling for the first time with unruly trade unions, independent courts and meddlesome journalists. And for many, navigating the unfamiliar waters of multiparty politics and confronting the power of public opinion makes for heavy going.
> 
> As they venture into foreign democracies, many Chinese companies experience culture shock. Having made their money in a one-party state, where political connections are the key to a successful business and the rule of law is easy to sidestep, they are finding things just aren’t as simple abroad.
> 
> From the United States to Asia, Chinese entrepreneurs have a litany of complaints and have made a succession of costly mistakes. Even in tiny Cambodia, where China has become a major investor in the garment industry, they can sound bitter.
> 
> “Trade unions are all the same: They are black-hearted,” complained He Enjia, president of the Textile Enterprise Association of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia.
> 
> “In the last two years, things changed in Cambodia,” he added, explaining that factory owners used to be able to hire police to suppress striking workers. “Now it’s impossible. The influence of the opposition party is growing, with the help of the Western media.”
> 
> By some measures, outward investment from China outpaced foreign investment into the country for the first time last year. But abroad, where the public often demands greater transparency and courts enforce stricter environmental and labor laws, it is a steep learning curve for many Chinese companies, experts say, that mirrors the challenges foreign companies faced when they first entered China more than two decades ago.
> 
> “If you look at foreign companies going into China, it was extremely difficult for them to adjust,” said Thilo Hanemann, who tracks global investment flows at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic advisory firm. “Chinese companies are now going through the same thing, but it is even more complicated for them. The regulatory environment they grew up in is so vastly different than in markets overseas.”
> 
> The flow of capital out of China had begun to make it expensive for the country’s central bank to maintain the yuan’s value against the dollar. Last week’s surprise devaluation will push up the price of foreign investment for Chinese companies, but — if investors think the currency will weaken further over time — could encourage some to invest abroad now before the exchange rate falls further.
> 
> Some of the first major movers were state-owned companies, extracting the raw materials, such as oil and iron ore, that China needed to fuel its booming economy. Construction companies have also followed government money abroad, as China builds roads, dams and other infrastructure from Asia to Africa.
> 
> But, as rules governing outward investment have been liberalized, private companies, from garment manufacturers chasing lower wages in Southeast Asia to IT companies chasing new markets, are also moving abroad.
> 
> Official figures show outbound direct investment from the country rose 14 percent last year to $103 billion, and the government says that if outbound investment through third parties is included, it would exceed foreign direct investment for the first time.
> 
> That would be a major milestone for China, even if the figures are not exactly reliable. In any case, Rhodium’s Hanemann said the hasty expansion abroad should not be seen as a sign that China is about to take on the world.
> 
> “It’s not a sign of strength; it’s a sign of weakness,” he said. In the past, Chinese companies could reap such handsome profit growth at home that “they neglected global value chains” and did not develop overseas expertise, he said.
> 
> But as China’s economy slows, as it confronts huge overcapacity in its steel and cement industries, and as labor and land costs rise, companies are being forced to diversify abroad, to “play catch-up” and learn new skills in order to survive.
> 
> It has not been smooth sailing. Indeed, there are countless examples of costly miscalculations.
> 
> In the United States, Chinese companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage claims over drywall imported to rebuild thousands of homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; it is alleged to have emitted toxic gas, caused respiratory problems and corroded electrical appliances.
> 
> In Texas, state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) is being sued for $7.5 billion by a former joint venture partner, Tang Energy, which claims it cheated on their deal to develop wind power — partly by creating competing businesses in the same field. It is something AVIC might have gotten away with at home but not in the West.
> 
> “In China, the state owns the enterprises, and it owns the court. So if you’re a state-owned company, you never have to worry about having a fair fight. And here they have a fair fight on their hands,” E. Patrick Jenevein III, Tang’s chief executive, said last year, according to the Dallas Morning News.
> 
> In Poland, China Overseas Engineering Group had its contract to build a highway in the run-up to the 2012 European soccer championships canceled after costs ballooned: The company had failed to allow, among many other things, for the cost of compliance with local environmental laws, including the need to build tunnels under the road for frogs to cross.
> 
> All over the world, Chinese companies have faced a political backlash for bringing in their own workers rather than employing locals — and for mistreating the locals they do employ.
> 
> There are, of course, very different problems in different places. Strict laws against pollution and corruption might pose problems in the West, but they are less of a concern in countries such as Cambodia, entrepreneurs say.
> 
> But Li Yi, secretary general of the Guangxi province branch of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia, says Cambodia’s many nongovernmental organizations are a nuisance.
> 
> “To grab Western funds, they do everything they can to pick holes and deliberately target big projects,” he said.
> 
> There are cultural differences, too. Chinese managers complain that Cambodians are not as hardworking as Chinese, but their heavy-handed efforts to increase productivity are not always successful.
> 
> In June, a Chinese construction site manager was reported to have screamed at his workers once too often for being lazy, according to the Phnom Penh Post. After their shift was over, a group of workers returned to the site at night and hacked the manager to death with an ax, police told the newspaper.
> 
> Li said that at least the business culture here is similar when it comes to bribing officials — Cambodians, he said, usually keep their word, unlike their counterparts in certain other countries. “They take money, and they keep their promise,” he said. “If they can’t do something, they say so directly. Not like some officials, who take money but then say they can’t help.”
> 
> In Burma, the transition from military rule to military-controlled democracy brought problems for Chinese mining and dam-building companies not used to a world where public opinion suddenly mattered.
> 
> Li Guanghua, general manager of the China Power Investment Corp., said his company learned painful lessons from the suspension of the Myitsone dam project in 2011, after questions about its environmental impact, and whether Burma would see much of the benefits of the dam, turned public opinion strongly against the project.
> 
> Now the company is being more careful to talk to local communities, opposition politicians and the news media as it tries to get the project restarted.
> 
> “We think transparency is very important now,” he said in an interview.
> 
> But have other Chinese companies learned that lesson?
> 
> “I can’t guarantee that,” he answered, with a smile.


----------



## Brad Sallows

>“In the last two years, things changed in Cambodia,” he added, explaining that factory owners used to be able to hire police to suppress striking workers. “Now it’s impossible."

You just can't get good hired goons any more.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Personally, I like this part:

"_Li said that at least the business culture here is similar when it comes to bribing officials — Cambodians, he said, usually keep their word, unlike their counterparts in certain other countries. “They take money, and they keep their promise,” he said. “If they can’t do something, they say so directly. Not like some officials, who take money but then say they can’t help._”

Nice to see there are still some honest corrupt officials out there  ;D


----------



## cupper

Yes, Honour among thieves.  :nod:


----------



## cupper

Chinese agents hunting Chinese nationals who fled to the US for various reasons other than dissenting views.

*Obama Administration Warns Beijing About Covert Agents Operating in U.S.*

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/obama-administration-warns-beijing-about-agents-operating-in-us.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0



> WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has delivered a warning to Beijing about the presence of Chinese government agents operating secretly in the United States to pressure prominent expatriates — some wanted in China on charges of corruption — to return home immediately, according to American officials.
> 
> The American officials said that Chinese law enforcement agents covertly in this country are part of Beijing’s global campaign to hunt down and repatriate Chinese fugitives and, in some cases, recover allegedly ill-gotten gains.
> 
> The Chinese government has officially named the effort Operation Fox Hunt.
> 
> The American warning, which was delivered to Chinese officials in recent weeks and demanded a halt to the activities, reflects escalating anger in Washington about intimidation tactics used by the agents. And it comes at a time of growing tension between Washington and Beijing on a number of issues: from the computer theft of millions of government personnel files that American officials suspect was directed by China, to China’s crackdown on civil liberties, to the devaluation of its currency.
> 
> Those tensions are expected to complicate the state visit to Washington next month by Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
> 
> The work of the agents is a departure from the routine practice of secret government intelligence gathering that the United States and China have carried out on each other’s soil for decades. The Central Intelligence Agency has a cadre of spies in China, just as China has long deployed its own intelligence operatives into the United States to steal political, economic, military and industrial secrets.
> 
> In this case, said American officials, who discussed details of the operation only on the condition of anonymity because of the tense diplomacy surrounding the issue, the Chinese agents are undercover operatives with the Ministry of Public Security, China’s law enforcement branch charged with carrying out Operation Fox Hunt.
> 
> The campaign, a central element of Mr. Xi’s wider battle against corruption, has proved popular with the Chinese public. Since 2014, according to the Ministry of Public Security, more than 930 suspects have been repatriated, including more than 70 who have returned this year voluntarily, the ministry’s website reported in June. According to Chinese media accounts, teams of agents have been dispatched around the globe.
> 
> American officials said they had solid evidence that the Chinese agents — who are not in the United States on acknowledged government business, and most likely are entering on tourist or trade visas — use various strong-arm tactics to get fugitives to return. The harassment, which has included threats against family members in China, has intensified recently, officials said.
> 
> The officials declined to provide specific evidence of the activities of the agents.
> 
> The United States has its own history of sending operatives undercover to other nations — sometimes under orders to kidnap or kill. In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the C.I.A. dispatched teams abroad to snatch Qaeda suspects and spirit them either to secret C.I.A prisons or hand them over to other governments for interrogation.
> 
> Neither China’s Ministry of Public Security nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to faxes requesting comment. But Chinese officials have often boasted about their global efforts to hunt economic fugitives, and the state news media has featured reports detailing the aims and successes of Operation Fox Hunt.
> 
> According to the Chinese news media, Beijing has sent scores of security agents abroad to “persuade” their targets to return home. Just how they accomplish their aims is unclear, and questions have been raised about why a number of suspects, presumably sitting on significant wealth abroad, have willingly returned to China.
> 
> Liu Dong, a director of Operation Fox Hunt, has said Chinese agents must comply with local laws abroad and that they depend on cooperation with the police in other countries, according to a news report last year. But in a telling admission, he added, “Our principle is thus: Whether or not there is an agreement in place, as long as there is information that there is a criminal suspect, we will chase them over there, we will take our work to them, anywhere.”
> 
> It is unclear whether the F.B.I. or the Department of Homeland Security has advocated within the Obama administration to have the Chinese agents expelled from the country, but the White House decision to have the State Department issue a warning to the Chinese government about the activities could be one initial step in the process.
> 
> The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are in charge of tracking the activities of foreign government agents inside the United States, and American officials said that both agencies had amassed evidence about the Chinese law enforcement agents by speaking to Chinese expatriates and by monitoring the agents themselves.
> 
> One American official acknowledged that Chinese agents had been trying to track down Ling Wancheng, a wealthy and politically connected businessman who fled to the United States last year and had been living in a lavish home he owns outside Sacramento. Should he seek political asylum, he could become one of the most damaging defectors in the history of the People’s Republic.
> 
> Chinese state news media published Interpol alerts in April for 100 people that Beijing described as its most-wanted fugitives worldwide. But experts who have studied the names raised doubts whether the listed men and women are truly the government’s top priority. Among the alleged fugitives, they said, are a former deputy mayor, employees of state-owned enterprises and a history professor, but few if any at the highest echelons of power.
> 
> American officials did not disclose the identities or numbers of those being sought by the Chinese in the United States. They are believed to be prominent expatriates, some sought for economic corruption and some for what the Chinese consider political crimes.
> 
> That reluctance reflects divisions with the Obama administration over how aggressive to publicly confront China on a number of security issues.
> 
> For instance, the White House has gone out of its way to avoid making any public accusations that the Chinese government ordered the computer attack on the Office of Personnel Management, which led to the theft of millions of classified personnel files of government workers and contractors. While James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, initially said that “you have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did,” he avoided repeating that accusation when pressed again in public on the matter.
> 
> China and the United States do not have an extradition treaty, and State Department officials would not say whether the warning carried any threats of penalties. Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, declined to comment about the diplomatic warning but said that “generally speaking, foreign law enforcement agents are not permitted to operate within the United States without prior notification to the attorney general.”
> 
> It is a criminal offense, he said, “for an individual, other than a diplomatic or consular officer or attaché, to act in the United States as an agent of a foreign power without prior notification to the attorney general.”
> 
> Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that “the United States is not a safe haven for fugitives from any nation.” But he added that if the United States was going to help China hunt down fugitives, Beijing must provide evidence to the Department of Justice.
> 
> Too often, he said, “China has not provided the evidence we have requested.”
> 
> Steve Tsang, a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute, said the clandestine deployment of security agents in pursuit of Chinese abroad has a long pedigree under the Communist Party, which sees itself as wielding dominion over all Chinese people regardless of what passport they may hold. “The party believes if you’re of Chinese ancestry then you’re Chinese anyway, and if you don’t behave like one you’re a traitor,” he said.
> 
> Mr. Tsang said the agents’ methods of persuasion often relate to the person’s family back in China, ranging from subtle insinuations to explicit threats, including against children or grandchildren. “They can be very imaginative,” he said.
> 
> The agents are described as mostly young, highly skilled officers who have repeatedly undergone “rapid-fire deployment” since the campaign began last year.
> 
> “Within 49 hours, they can make their arrest anywhere in the world,” said a report published last year on Chinese Police Net, a website run by the Ministry of Public Security.
> 
> Such official statements, while directed toward a domestic audience, have stirred concern overseas. That is because Chinese agents are barred from making arrests on foreign soil, including the top destinations for alleged fugitives: the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These and a number of other countries do not have extradition treaties with China.
> 
> China says it follows local laws overseas. But in December, two Chinese police officers were caught operating in Australia without the permission of local authorities, according to local news media reports that were confirmed by Australian officials. The officers had traveled to Melbourne from the northeast province of Shandong to pursue a Chinese citizen accused of bribery, the reports said.
> 
> Australian officials promptly summoned diplomats from the Chinese Embassy in Canberra, as well as in Beijing, to express their displeasure, according to a spokesman for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
> 
> “The government registered with China its deep concerns about this, making clear it was unacceptable,” said the spokesman, who added “the government has been assured by Chinese authorities that there would be no repeat of these actions.”
> 
> Li Gongjing, a captain in the economic crime division of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, explained the agents’ approach in an interview with Xinmin Weekly magazine last November.
> 
> “A fugitive is like a flying kite,” he said. “Even though he is abroad, the string is held in China. He can always be found through his family.”
> 
> Correction: August 16, 2015
> An earlier version of a capsule summary with this article rendered incorrectly the official name of the Chinese effort that uses covert agents in the United States to pressure expatriates to return home. It is Operation Fox Hunt, not Operation Fox.


----------



## chanman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Canadian exporters will be hurt by this as well:
> 
> Reuters
> 
> Plus more on the ripple effects of the stock market crisis:



China is the largest consumer for a lot of raw materials Canada exports (various ores, lumber, coal, etc.) Even where they aren't sourcing from Canadian suppliers, when China (or any other country really) greatly drops their demand for those raw inputs for industrial activity, prices (and Canada's balance of trade, and the profitability or lack thereof of Canadian companies in those industries) fall as well - one of the contributing factors to current low oil prices.

Also, I have some doubts because thus far, the falling Canadian dollar hasn't improved the lot of Canadian manufacturers at all despite its dramatic drop over the last year.


----------



## CougarKing

The economic spiral downward continues:

Reuers



> *Wall Street, Europe slip after Chinese selloff*
> Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:58pm EDT
> 
> By Chuck Mikolajczak
> 
> NEW YORK (Reuters) - *A 6 percent tumble in Chinese shares on Tuesday and disappointing earnings from Wal-Mart dented U.S. equities while copper and oil prices touched multi-year lows.*
> 
> Wal-Mart Stores Inc WMT.N fell 3.2 percent to $69.63 as the biggest drag on the Dow after the major retailer reported weaker-than-expected quarterly earnings and lowered its full-year forecast.
> 
> "There is no real good news that would allow this market to break out," said Rick Meckler, president of investment firm LibertyView Capital Management in Jersey City, New Jersey.
> 
> "A name like Wal-Mart today is part of what keeps the market kind of range bound, there are just too many companies with international businesses that are not really firing on all cylinders and then you throw in moves in China."
> 
> *A broad measure of Asian stocks fell to its lowest in two years and Wall Street traded lower as the Chinese yuan weakened against the dollar, sparking renewed fears that Beijing may be intent on a deeper devaluation of the currency.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China's PLA tests the Dong Feng 41 (East Wind 41) ICBM.

Diplomat



> *China Tests New Missile Capable of Hitting Entire United States
> 
> Beijing’s ICBM arsenal appears to be rapidly expanding.*
> L1001025
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> August 19, 2015
> 
> On August 6, China has tested its newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with two guided simulated nuclear warheads, according to information obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.
> 
> *The August 6 flight test was the fourth time a DF-41 (CSS-X-20) long-range missile has been tested in the last three years* and allegedly confirmed that the ICBM is capable of carrying multiple warheads.
> 
> China’s first test of the DF-41’s multiple warhead (aka multiple, independently-targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs) capability allegedly took place in December 2014, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Previous tests occurred in July 2012 and December 2013 at the Wuzhai Missile and Space Testing facility located some 250 miles southwest of Beijing. The location of the August 2015 test site, however, remains unknown.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is an interesting and, I hope, enlightening article about what is happening in China, beyond the immediate symptoms:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/388bf2ca-475a-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3jU4O9bQ1


> The Chinese model is nearing its end
> *The country is now going through a crisis of transition, unparalleled since Deng Xiaoping*
> 
> George Magnus
> 
> August 21, 2015
> 
> _The writer is an associate at Oxford university’s China Centre and a senior adviser to UBS._
> 
> August in China has been anything but the quiet month of myth. Developments in the equity and foreign exchange markets and even the appalling industrial accident in Tianjin might seem mere bad luck when considered individually. Together, however, they symbolise a slow-motion denouement of China’s economic and political model. The country is now going through a crisis of transition, unparalleled since Deng Xiaoping set out to put clear water between China’s future and the Mao era.
> 
> The signs are that it is not going so well. Rebooting the authority and primacy of the Communist party, the pursuit of often contentious reforms, financial liberalisation and rebalancing the economy while trying to sustain an unrealistic rate of growth are complex and mutually incompatible goals.
> 
> Deng’s task in a pre-industrial society without a middle class and social media was, in many ways, easier. Determined to avoid the concentration of power in one individual, he empowered government bodies and ministers, especially the State Council and the prime minister, and encouraged openness and a consensus-driven political model. This worked well enough until the 21st century, but gradually tended towards atrophy. The party succumbed to corruption and paid scant attention to citizens’ concerns about social, environmental and product safety. The economy built up high levels of debt, overcapacity and an addiction to misallocated and credit-fuelled investment.
> 
> To address these serious problems, President Xi Jinping has turned the clock back. He has accumulated more power than any leader since Mao and consistently emphasised the Leninist need for “party purity” to avoid the fate of the Soviet Communist party. Among his first policies was an extralegal anti-corruption campaign that continues to this day. He has usurped the authority of government institutions by establishing party bodies, known as “small leading groups”, that are more numerous than ministries and hold sway over the most important functions of the state.
> 
> There was doubtless a strong case for some re-centralisation of power in China, especially to implement the party’s ambitious reforms. Yet while some reforms have made progress, many important ones affecting the role of the state in the economy and the introduction of market mechanisms have suffered from dilution and the opposition of vested interests. The clampdown on civil society, media, legal and non-governmental institutions has not helped. A strong central authority, perversely, has stifled important reforms, removed authority and accountability from those institutions responsible for carrying them out and produced conflicted decision-making.
> 
> That is why August’s events matter. Encouragement of the stock market was supposed to be a weathervane for market mechanisms and a more efficient allocation of capital. But equities suffered a relapse, following extraordinary support measures estimated at more than $150bn. The indices are still flirting with the nadir reached in early July. Caught between its roles as cheerleader and regulator, the government has shown a lack of trust in the very market forces it sought to introduce.
> 
> This month’s mini-devaluation of the renminbi was explained officially as an incremental change to China’s financial liberalisation, designed to help the currency’s admission later this year to the International Monetary Funds’s accounting unit, the Special Drawing Right. Yet the action was communicated poorly at best. Again, the authorities have been conflicted, torn between a strong renminbi policy to help rebalance the economy, and a softer one to respond to weakening growth. Economic statistics this summer, especially for exports, manufacturing and investment, were disappointing, underscoring that weaker performance for the past four years has become impervious to stimulus measures, which this year already add up to more than 1 per cent of gross domestic product.
> 
> A central part of the challenge for China will be its ability to manage employment, a more politically sensitive indicator than GDP. The official unemployment rate, supposedly about 4 per cent over many years, is fiction. Current developments in investment and labour-intensive construction, the low registration for unemployment benefits among those without urban registration status, the weakness of the benefit system and the difficulties of finding suitable work for 7m graduates a year are among many reasons to believe that the jobless rate may not only be higher than the 6.3 per cent estimated by the International Labour Organisation but rising.
> 
> China’s economic transition was always going to be difficult, but developments this year suggest that things are not going according to plan. The centralisation of power is proving to be a double-edged sword for reform, the anti-corruption campaign is choking off initiative and growth and the economy cannot be kept on an unrealistic expansionary path by unending stimulus.
> 
> The time for accepting a permanently lower growth rate is drawing closer. It will test the legitimacy and reform appetite of China’s leaders in ways that will determine the country’s prospects for years to come.




There are all sort of people out there, including me, here, commenting on and prognosticating about China: some are "old China hands," some are academics, most are just "observers" with no special insights. George Magnus is a financier who appears, to me, to understand that economics in China cannot be divorced from politics.

The question of the "model," is, _in my opinion_, central. I remain convinced that the Chinese _intelligentsia_ remains convinced that Western style Liberal democracy is not _right_ for China and they continue the 2,500 quest for a meritocracy. (a Canadian academic, Daniel A Bell, who teaches at one of China's two most prestigious universities, has written a book, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy that explains this and, somewhat controversially, 'explains' why liberal democracy is not 'right' for China.

The problem with any 'right' model ~ except, maybe, Singapore's ~ is that it fails the _consultative_ test. I would argue that a good, legitimate government is one which governs with the consent of the governed. We, of course, see elections as the only valid way to demonstrate _consent_ but some (not all) Asians might, reasonably, differ. The great advantage of popular, electoral democracy is that it gives _consent_ after a period of consultation. Now, I have argued, elsewhere that _"we" [size=10pt][Canadians]__ "are, generally, disengaged from policy politics" _[/size], but that doesn't negate the fact that politicians _propose_ polices and programmes and Canadians get to "pass" on them: _yea_ or _nay_.

There are limits to what any government, meritocracy or not, can _tell_ the people to do. The people: American people, Russian people, Algerian people and Chinese people, too, "demand" some say in which direction they will be herded. The CCP has yet to find any way that is as effective as popular elections to consult the people on the _direction_.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Same subject and the same _caveat_: I don't know if _The Economist_ knows more than anyone else or has better insights, but, as readers here may have guessed I tend to trust it more than most other sources for real analysis ... anyway, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act is an article from that newspaper that says that some (many? most?) people are overreacting:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661959-despite-financial-nervousness-rebalancing-continues-why-chinese-economic-worries-look-overdone


> Why Chinese economic worries look overdone
> *Despite financial nervousness, rebalancing continues*
> 
> Aug 21st 2015 | China
> 
> WITH investors already in a febrile state of mind about China’s slowdown, the latest bits of gloomy news only seemed to confirm their worst fears. A survey showed that its manufacturing sector is on track in August for its weakest month since the dark days of the global financial crisis more than six years ago. Adding to the sense of panic, Chinese stocks plunged another 4% on Friday, closing off one of their worst weeks in years. The sell-off, which has already scorched emerging markets, enveloped developed markets as well; European, Japanese and Australian stocks all fell. Investors, though, are hardly known for taking measured views when markets get topsy-turvy. There is good reason to be anxious about China, but the pessimism is almost certainly overdone.
> 
> No one doubts that China’s factories are struggling. Industrial growth was 6% year-on-year in July, well below the double-digit rates of the not-too-distant past. The manufacturing survey published on Friday suggests that it is likely to slow yet further. New orders, exports and production are all down in August. One-off factors might have added to the troubles: last week’s deadly explosion in Tianjin wreaked havoc at one of the world’s busiest ports and, on top of that, thousands of factories are winding down their operations, ordered to close for a major military parade next month. But the malaise runs far deeper than these problems. Excess capacity built up over years weighs on manufacturers of everything from solar panels to office chairs. Private companies have started to deleverage but state-owned firms are only going deeper into debt.
> 
> In other areas, though, things are—shock, horror—looking up. For the past two years, the main fears about China have centred on its property market, the heart of its economy. In recent months, prices have stabilised across much of the country and started to rebound in major cities. Developers have vast backlogs of unsold homes, so new housing starts are still falling and a big upturn in construction seems improbable. Exporters of commodities thus have little to cheer. But the bigger concern about the housing downturn was that it would undermine China’s financial stability and, in that respect, the recovery in property sales is welcome.
> 
> What’s more, China is not just about heavy industry. At the same time as growth is slowing, the structure of the economy is also changing. The services sector supplanted manufacturing a couple of years ago as the biggest part of China’s economy, and that trend has only accelerated this year. The alarm on Friday stemmed from an unexpected fall in the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for manufacturing sponsored by Caixin, a respected Chinese financial magazine. That gauge has been lilting southward for a while. By contrast, Caixin’s PMI for the services sector jumped to an 11-month high in July.
> 
> Brazilian iron-ore producers or Indonesian coal miners can take little solace from this. Whether the services are provided by accountants or restaurants, they consume far less energy and raw materials than heavy construction. But for China as a whole, there is more to the country than the building of highways and skyscrapers.




The author could have added Canadian natural resource _"hewers and drawers"_ to the Brazilians and Indonesians: the "rebalancing" will sideswipe us, too.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is an interesting look at Sino-Russian trade relations here, with my less than authoritative comments/speculation.


----------



## The Bread Guy

What appears to be a slick PLA Navy recruiting video via YouTube - enjoy!


----------



## CougarKing

When Charlene Chu of Autonomous Research makes a report about China's economic woes, people listen:

Business Insider




> *The world's top China analyst has a doomsday scenario*
> 
> LINETTE LOPEZ
> 
> Aug. 18, 2015, 8:56 AM107,123  56
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *The report said: "This in turn would likely lead to a significant pullback in credit, putting the brakes on GDP growth and bringing an end to China's decades of stellar economic growth.* At that point, social and political stability — the critical wild cards in this equation — could come under question."
> 
> This is what doom looks like
> 
> Chu's thesis goes against an idea we've been hearing over and over since Chinese stocks started crashing: that the stock market is not at all connected to China's real economy.
> 
> *The connection is in corporate working capital loans that banks lent out that, she posits, may have been invested in the stock market. Now that the stock market is crashing, those loans are under intense pressure. That, in turn, puts major pressure on the banks and zaps liquidity.
> 
> As the picture darkens, investors will start to take their money out of China — capital flight.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Scapegoats for the recent Tianjin blasts?

Reuters



> *Chinese police arrest 12 suspects in Tianjin blasts: Xinhua*
> Wed Aug 26, 2015 9:18pm EDT
> 
> August 17, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
> 
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese police have arrested 12 people suspected of involvement in this month's massive explosions in the city of Tianjin that killed 139 people and devastated the port area, the state-run Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.
> 
> Among those arrested were the chairman, vice-chairman and three deputy general managers of the logistics company that had been storing the chemicals that blew up, the agency said, quoting police. It did not say who the rest were.
> 
> The news comes a day after China sacked the head of its work safety regulator for suspected corruption.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

"The American Interest" on how economic turmoil could be fatal to the "Mandate of Heaven" that the CCP currently holds:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/25/chinas-economic-crisis-gets-political/



> *China’s Economic Crisis Gets Political*
> 
> When China’s financial markets began to melt down last month, we argued that the government wasn’t just facing an economic crisis—that it was facing a political crisis as well. The Chinese Communist Party, which systematically manages large swathes of the country’s economy, has staked its legitimacy and popular support on the ability to deliver white-hot economic growth, year after year. This system has worked brilliantly for decades, but when growth falters, the whole political-economic edifice is called into question. Before an economic crisis snowballs into a direct challenge to the Chinese political system, however, we would expect the heads of specific Party officials to roll. As Walter Russell Mead put it in July:
> 
> 
> The Chinese government plays a huge role in systematically managing the country’s economy, and it has staked its legitimacy on its ability to make the economy grow. Moreover, it has taken a very clear position on the stock market crash: this shouldn’t be happening and the government will make it stop. Therefore, the government’s failure to stabilize stock prices is going to be seen as a failure of official policy. Criticism of the stock market will turn into criticism of the political leadership, and it must be said that the political leadership hasn’t demonstrated great skill in the early days of the crisis. Premier Li has allowed himself to become identified with the efforts to stabilize the stock market. If those measures succeed, he looks like a hero. But after the latest rout, a lot of people in China don’t think the policies are working.
> 
> By now it seems clear that Premier Li’s efforts have emphatically not succeeded, leaving him especially exposed to the upcoming political ramifications of the market slowdown. The Financial Times reports:
> 
> 
> The China-led turmoil that has rocked global markets in the past two weeks has also shaken the ruling Communist party and left Li Keqiang, the prime minister, fighting for his political future, according to analysts and people familiar with the internal workings of the party.
> 
> Among party officials and politically connected people in Beijing, the hottest topic of conversation is whether Mr Li will take the fall for Beijing’s perceived mismanagement of the stock market crash and the country’s broader economic slowdown…
> But even if Mr Li is blamed by the party elite for his handling of the crisis, most analysts and serving officials believe his removal from power would be too damaging to party prestige and credibility and that he is almost certain to remain in office, at least until the next five-yearly party Congress in 2017.
> 
> It appears, in other words, that China’s economic crisis is beginning to spill over into the political system. The market failure is being perceived as a failure of official policy. Accordingly, official policy—or the policymakers—will have to change. The severity of this change—from a reshuffling of leadership to something more comprehensive—will depend on the extent of the economic damage. If things don’t improve, it looks like Premier Li will be one of the first to go, as we predicted last month.
> 
> Of course, it’s possible that the Chinese technocrats will figure out a way to get their economy out of this particular pickle, at least for now, and that Li’s star will consequently rise. But even if this happens, it shouldn’t obscure the broader troubles that China faces over the long term. China’s hothouse growth cannot last forever, even if the latest meltdown is not “The Big One.” When the economic bubble finally does burst, China’s entire political system will be in trouble as well.


----------



## a_majoor

And more on "China will grow old before it becomes rich":

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-20/xi-said-to-put-population-over-growth-in-china-s-economic-plan-idkp0hyy



> *China Said to Consider Policy Shift to Put Population Growth Before Economy *
> Bloomberg News
> August 20, 2015 — 5:01 PM EDT Updated on August 21, 2015 — 4:17 AM EDT
> 
> Facing a demographic time bomb that threatens China’s economic rise, President Xi Jinping is considering shifting his priority to population growth, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
> 
> Xi’s economic planners may for the first time emphasize “population policies” over gross domestic product in the country’s next development blueprint, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The focus sets the stage for a host of rule changes regarding health, pensions, social welfare and possibly lifting the caps on children some families can have, the person said.
> 
> More than three decades into an industrial boom that has created the world’s second-largest economy, China’s struggling to get rich before it grows old. The working-age population shrank for the first time in at least two decades last year as growth slowed, echoing Japan’s downturn in the late 1990s. As part of the shift, the party may lower its hard growth target of 7 percent to a range between 6.5 percent and 7 percent and make that a flexible guideline, the person said.
> 
> Mu Guangzong, a professor at Peking University’s Institute of Population Research, said that avoiding the same fate requires immediate action to loosen birth limits and strengthen the social safety net for the elderly.
> 
> “Reform is lagging too far behind and has been too cautious,” Mu said. “We must move from restricting childbirth to encouraging it as soon as possible. We must complete a thorough change of population policy.”
> 
> One-Child Policy
> 
> The “one-child” policy, which limits most couples to one or two children depending on ethnic background and where they live, was a cornerstone of late leader Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to overhaul the economy. When the policy was adopted 36 years ago, the thinking was that the birth rate of almost 3 children per woman was a drag on growth.
> 
> The cap has since been relaxed and calls to lift it completely have gained traction as the fertility rate plunged and eroded the labor pool. In December 2013, the legislature allowed couples to have two children if either parent was an only child.
> 
> The challenge China faces is motivating parents like Feng Yanbin, 37, of Beijing, to give her daughter a brother or sister. The cost of raising a second child has deterred Feng and her husband, even though they’re eligible.
> 
> “To have a child in China is a test of a family’s economic strength,” Feng said. “The policy has been changed, but the younger generation in the cities still need to consider their economic situation before having a baby.”
> 
> Five-Year Plan
> 
> About 1.5 million couples had applied for a second child under the new policy as of May, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission. That lagged official projections of an additional 2 million new births annually.
> The results have fueled calls for a more dramatic approach as Xi finishes the country’s next five-year plan, a Stalinist holdover of China’s old command economy. The plan was expected to be discussed with Communist Party elders earlier this month before approval at party meetings in October.
> 
> “The dependency ratio is increasing, the pace of aging is quickening and the working-age population is shrinking,” said Ren Yuan, a deputy director of the Institute of Population Research at Fudan University in Shanghai. “The 13th five-year plan needs to be tailored to manage the sustainable and balanced growth.”
> 
> Liu He, who manages the day-to-day activities of Xi’s Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, is overseeing the plan, the person familiar with the matter said. His team has studied the lessons of Japan in dealing with its own demographic bubble, the person said.
> 
> Diapers, SUVs
> 
> The number of people 15 to 64 years of age fell about 1.6 million last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Like Japan, the decrease has coincided with a slowdown in China’s economy, which is on track this year to grow at its slowest pace in a quarter century.
> The policy shift raises the prospects for new demand for everything from health care to SUVs. Shares of Hengan International Group, which makes diapers and other personal hygiene products, rose 2.2 percent to HK$80.70 in Hong Kong amid a 1.5 percent drop in the benchmark Hang Seng Index.
> 
> “The whole Chinese economy will benefit if the policy succeeds,” said Steve Wang, the chief China economist at Reorient Financial Markets Ltd. in Hong Kong. “Chinese families spend a lot of money on children’s health and education.”
> 
> Graying Population
> 
> In 2050, about one-third of Chinese will be 60 or older, compared to just 12 percent in 2010, according to United Nations projections. The aging society is already straining the social safety net and providing another cost consideration for parents such as Wang Hongye, a 30-year-old mother from Beijing.
> 
> “I don’t want a second child,” said Wang, who’s concerned about providing the son she has with an apartment and nice wedding. “We are also under pressure to pay our own mortgage and to feed our parents as they get older.”
> The emphasis on population policies suggests a broader agenda focused on pensions, social welfare and health care, as well as family planning policies.
> 
> “An adjustment to childbirth policy alone can no longer solve our profound population crisis,” said Mu of Peking University. “We must accompany it with social and public policies such as senior care policies. Society should provide a safety net.”


----------



## CougarKing

China's cross-burning campaign/crackdown on subversive Christian churches continues, brushing aside activists such as this Christian lawyer:

Shanghaiist



> *Christian lawyer taken away by Wenzhou authorities amid cross removal campaign*
> 
> Christian lawyer Zhang Kai was taken away by government workers on Tuesday night, his colleague said, as authorities have been carrying out orders to remove crosses from church roofs across the city.
> 
> Yang Xingquan said in an Associated Press report yesterday that not even Zhang's family had heard from him, two days after he was apprehended.
> 
> *Zhang was one of the lawyers offering legal assistance for Zhejiang churches targeted in a government "clean-up" campaign that has resulted in thousands of crosses being taken down from local Christians' places of worship and some of the buildings being completely demolished.*
> 
> AP reports that Zhang and his assistant were escorted away by government workers while in a church in Wenzhou, known as "China's Jerusalem" due to its large Christian population, on Tuesday night.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

In this article, _The Great Fall of China_, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, that newspaper gives us it's take on the current economic situation in the _Middle Kingdom_:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21662544-fear-about-chinas-economy-can-be-overdone-investors-are-right-be-nervous-great-fall


> The Great Fall of China
> *Fear about China’s economy can be overdone. But investors are right to be nervous*
> 
> Aug 29th 2015 | From the print edition
> 
> ONCE the soundtrack to a financial meltdown was the yelling of traders on the floor of a financial exchange. Now it is more likely to be the wordless hum of servers in data centres, as algorithms try to match buyers with sellers. But every big sell-off is gripped by the same rampant, visceral fear. The urge to sell overwhelms the advice to stand firm.
> 
> Stomachs are churning again after China’s stockmarket endured its biggest one-day fall since 2007; even Chinese state media called August 24th “Black Monday”. From the rand to the ringgit, emerging-market currencies slumped. Commodity prices fell into territory not seen since 1999. The contagion infected Western markets, too. Germany’s DAX index fell to more than 20% below its peak. American stocks whipsawed: General Electric was at one point down by more than 20%.
> 
> Rich-world markets have regained some of their poise. But three fears remain: that China’s economy is in deep trouble; that emerging markets are vulnerable to a full-blown crisis; and that the long rally in rich-world markets is over. Some aspects of these worries are overplayed and others are misplaced. Even so, this week’s panic contains the unnerving message that the malaise in the world economy is real.
> 
> Scoot first, ask questions later
> 
> China, where share prices continued to plunge, is the source of the contagion (see article). Around $5 trillion has been wiped off global equity markets since the yuan devalued earlier this month. That shift, allied to a string of bad economic numbers and a botched official attempt to halt the slide in Chinese bourses, has fuelled fears that the world’s second-largest economy is heading for a hard landing. Exports have been falling. The stockmarket has lost more than 40% since peaking in June, a bigger drop than the dotcom bust.
> 
> Yet the doomsters go too far. The property market is far more important to China’s economy than the equity market is. Property fuels up to a quarter of GDP and its value underpins the banking system; in the past few months prices and transactions have both been healthier. China’s future lies with its shoppers, not its exporters, and services, incomes and consumption are resilient. If the worst happens, the central bank has plenty of room to loosen policy. After a cut in interest rates this week, the one-year rate still stands at 4.6%. The economy is slowing, but even 5% growth this year, the low end of reasonable estimates, would add more to world output than the 14% expansion China posted in 2007.
> 
> China is not in crisis. However, its ability to evolve smoothly from a command to a market economy is in question as never before. China’s policymakers used to bask in a reputation for competence that put clay-footed Western bureaucrats to shame. This has suffered in the wake of their botched—and sporadic—efforts to stop shares from sagging. Worse, plans for reform may fall victim to the government’s fear of giving markets free rein. The party wants to make state-owned firms more efficient, but not to expose them to the full blast of competition. It would like to give the yuan more freedom, but frets that a weakening currency will spur capital flight. It thinks local governments should be more disciplined but, motivated by the need for growth, funnels credit their way.
> 
> Fears over China are feeding the second worry—that emerging markets could be about to suffer a rerun of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Similarities exist: notably an exodus of capital out of emerging markets because of the prospect of tighter monetary policy in America. But the lessons of the Asian crisis were well learned. Many currencies are no longer tethered but float freely. Most countries in Asia sit on large foreign-exchange reserves and current-account surpluses. Their banking systems rely less on foreign creditors than they did.
> 
> If that concern is exaggerated, others are not. A slowing China has dragged down emerging markets, like Brazil, Indonesia and Zambia, that came to depend on shovelling iron ore, coal and copper its way (agricultural exporters are in better shape). From now on, more of the demand that China creates will come from services—and be satisfied at home. The supply glut will weigh on commodity prices for other reasons, too. Oil’s descent, for instance, also reflects the extra output of Saudi Arabia and the resilience of American shale producers. Sliding currencies are adding to the burden on emerging-market firms with local-currency revenues and dollar-denominated debt. More fundamentally, emerging-market growth has been slowing since 2010. Countries from Brazil and Russia have squandered the chance to enact productivity-enhancing reforms and are suffering. So has India, which could yet pay a high price.
> 
> The rich world has the least to fear from a Chinese slowdown. American exports to China accounted for less than 1% of GDP last year. But it is hardly immune. Germany, the European Union’s economic engine, exports more to China than any other member state does. Share prices are vulnerable because the biggest firms are global: of the S&P 500’s sales in 2014, 48% were abroad, and the dollar is rising against trading-partner currencies. In addition, the bull market has lasted since 2009 and price-earnings ratios exceed long-run averages. A savage fall in shares would spill into the real economy.
> 
> Ageing bull
> 
> Were that to happen, this week has underlined how little room Western policymakers have to stimulate their economies. The Federal Reserve would be wrong to raise rates in September, as it has unwisely led markets to expect. Other central banks have responsibilities, too. Money sloshing out of emerging markets may try to find its way to American consumers, leading to rising household borrowing and dangerous—and familiar—distortions in the economy. So Europe and Japan should loosen further to stimulate demand.
> 
> Monetary policy is just the start. The harder task, in the West and beyond, is to raise productivity. Plentiful credit and relentless Chinese expansion kept the world ticking over for years. Now growth depends on governments taking hard decisions on everything from financial reforms to infrastructure spending. That is the harsh lesson from China’s panic.
> 
> _From the print edition: Leaders_




The assessment:

          First, "China is not in crisis."

          But, "its ability to evolve smoothly from a command to a market economy is in question as never before."

          Second: "A slowing China has dragged down emerging markets, like Brazil, Indonesia and Zambia, that came to depend on shovelling iron ore, coal and copper its way (agricultural exporters are in better shape). From now on,
                         more of the demand that China creates will come from services—and be satisfied at home."

          And, "Plentiful credit and relentless Chinese expansion kept the world ticking over for years. Now growth depends on governments taking hard decisions on everything from financial reforms to infrastructure spending.
                   That is the harsh lesson from China’s panic."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Financial Times_, is more analysis ~ good, solid, reasoned analysis, _in my opinion_ ~ of the ongoing Chinese financial _crisis_:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/24de9e86-4d76-11e5-9b5d-89a026fda5c9.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3kCcoZX41


> China: Credibility on the line
> *The Beijing leadership’s efforts to control the stock market turmoil have dealt a serious setback to plans for economic reform*
> 
> Jamil Anderlini
> 
> August 28, 2015
> 
> As Chinese stocks plummeted on “Black Monday”, triggering waves of panicked selling around the globe, China’s leaders seemed strangely unperturbed.
> 
> Premier Li Keqiang was quoted in state media calling for development of China’s 3D printing industry. President Xi Jinping attended a Communist party meeting, where he vowed to crush followers of the Dalai Lama and urged Tibetans to absorb “Marxist values”.
> 
> In the days that followed, under strict orders from the Communist party’s propaganda department, the country’s heavily censored media was no longer dwelling on the global sell-off or China’s role in it. In the rare reports on the worst multi-day Chinese equity rout since 1996, they admonished “global financial markets [that] have overreacted like a burnt child fearing fire”.
> In a way they were right.
> 
> Behind the global headlines declaring the “great fall of China” nothing actually changed in the country’s “real” economy, which has been slowing for years but is still growing in line with the government’s target of around 7 per cent — at least according to official figures.
> 
> But what did change this week is the perception, pushed by many on Wall Street and in the City of London, that China’s authoritarian leaders were the world’s most competent technocrats.
> The mishandling of a bursting stock bubble — and especially the decision on August 11 to break a two-decade taboo and devalue the renminbi — have badly shaken global faith in the Chinese model of market authoritarianism.
> 
> “Many of the market’s substantive worries (economic collapse, financial collapse, competitive devaluation) are overblown,” says Arthur Kroeber, head of research at Gavekal Dragonomics. “But markets trade as much on policy signals as on economic reality, and there has clearly been a breakdown of communication between Beijing and the rest of the world.”
> 
> The problem is not just one of public relations or global perception, however. Many of the actions the authorities have taken since late last year now appear badly mistaken. More recently, the moves have smacked of panic.
> 
> Not only have global investors lost faith in China’s mandarins but within China itself the reform-minded officials who have overseen the turmoil have also been widely discredited, their plans for market-oriented economic reforms now in tatters.
> 
> In April, as investors were questioning whether China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index was approaching a bubble after doubling in less than a year, the Communist party’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, ran a prominent editorial dismissing those fears and declaring the start of a long-term bull market. “The capital markets can be a true reflection of the ‘China dream’,” the paper crowed. “As carriers of the ‘China dream’ [the markets] hold enormous opportunities for investors.”
> 
> Encouraged by what appeared to be an apparent ironclad guarantee from the ruling party, small investors poured money into already overpriced stocks.
> 
> The benchmark index peaked on June 12 then began to slide, accelerating as the government watched helplessly, until July 8 when a plan approved by Premier Li and vice-premier Ma Kai was rolled out to save the market.
> 
> China’s stock exchanges, set up in the early 1990s, have been through several booms and busts, and every time they have peaked the government has halfheartedly tried to prop up share prices before giving up and allowing them to fall. But this time Beijing went all-out: banning short sellers, encouraging margin trading, halting initial public offerings, prohibiting share sales by all major investors and ordering state-owned funds and investors to buy up shares on a massive scale.
> 
> This unorthodox intervention convinced many Chinese punters to pile back in. But the moves were viewed with deep scepticism by investors abroad, especially after Beijing effectively criminalised large share sales.
> 
> “The Chinese authorities’ instinctive reaction to everything is control and retribution,” says a Hong Kong-based partner at a large hedge fund. “Global investors look at the witch-hunt going on in the equity market and they ask what the hell is going on?”
> 
> Currency intervention
> 
> The biggest shock was still to come. Just before China’s markets opened on August 11, the People’s Bank of China announced it would devalue the currency by around 2 per cent against the dollar in a “one-off” move.
> 
> The central bank also said this devaluation, the first by China since 1994, would be accompanied by a new “market-oriented” mechanism for setting the daily benchmark from which the currency can rise or fall by up to 2 per cent on a given day. This effective de-pegging of the renminbi from the dollar led to two more days of devaluation before the central bank decided to halt the slide by buying the Chinese currency and selling US dollars.
> 
> In a hastily called — and extremely rare — press conference two days later, the PBoC vowed to intervene in the market whenever Beijing saw the need, reversing the earlier decision to allow the market to set exchange rates.
> 
> The PBoC has since spent roughly $200bn in the onshore and offshore currency markets to keep the renminbi from devaluing further, begging the question of why it decided to de-peg its currency to begin with.
> “Before they announced this reform they had a credible peg to the US dollar and they hardly needed to intervene in the [foreign exchange] markets, but now they are having to spend huge amounts just to achieve the same effect,” says a person with ties to the PBoC. “It’s like they decided to cross the river because it looked nice and calm but then they slipped and got dragged downstream, and now they are having to use all their strength to get back to the shallow water they were in before.”
> 
> At the end of July, China’s foreign exchange reserves stood at $3.65tn, the largest in the world. If the PBoC were to keep intervening in the currency markets at the current rate (and no other cash flowed in) those reserves could be gone within a year.
> 
> The apparent mishandling of what could have been an important step towards a freely floating currency — a key part of becoming a rival currency to the dollar, a cherished policy objective — has left reform-minded officials within the regime deeply discredited.
> 
> “The government clearly has the right intentions to proceed with reforms but is fumbling the communication and implementation of those reforms,” says Eswar Prasad, former China head at the IMF. “Internal support for market reforms is eroded every time they see big volatility and that is why we have seen this whipsawing between liberalisation and control.”
> 
> Contradictory policy
> 
> That same tension can be seen in the attempts to prop up the stock market.
> 
> State-owned entities have spent more than $200bn buying stocks to reverse the stock market crash, say people familiar with the matter. Monday’s crash, when Chinese stocks fell 8.5 per cent in their worst day since February 2007, appears to be largely due to the Chinese government’s decision to cut its losses and stop buying shares to prop up the index.
> 
> The fall was also blamed on the fact the government did not cut interest rates or inject cash into the banking system over the weekend, as many investors had expected. The PBoC did both on Tuesday, after the benchmark index had already fallen by more than a quarter in just one week.
> 
> There was more support to come. A group of state-owned stock investors known as the “national team” poured back in to buy shares in the last hour of trading on Thursday and lifted the index from a small loss to close up more than 5 per cent. The market closed up another 4.8 per cent yesterday, but the total market value wiped out since the peak in early June is around $4.5tn — more than the entire German economy.
> 
> The main reason for renewed state intervention late this week was a directive from top party leaders to provide a backdrop of rising markets when Beijing hosts a huge military parade next Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the “Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression”, according to market participants and people familiar with the matter.
> 
> In private, some officials say the incoherent and contradictory policy reversals of recent weeks have much to do with the planning and preparation of the parade.
> 
> Because President Xi Jinping is preoccupied with making this display of military might and “national rejuvenation” a success, he has left the economic response to other leaders, these people say. But since taking power in 2012, Mr Xi has concentrated decision-making power in his own hands to such an extent that his weakened underlings are unable to make firm decisions and stick with them.
> 
> “People are finally starting to realise the Chinese government is not omnipotent and omniscient,” said Jim Chanos, the hedge fund manager and long-term bear on China, in an interview with CNBC. “The way they handled the run up in their stock market, the panicked responses, the devaluation, the non-devaluation, the various different mixed signals coming out of the various different ministries, I think has started to give investors pause [and realise] that in fact, like many of us, sometimes they don’t have a clue.”
> 
> _Additional Reporting by Christian Shepherd_



_I think_ that the penultimate paragraph is the key to understand what's really important: Xi Jinping's _leadership_ has been compromised.

I hear _rumours_ that Premier Li Keqiang will "wear" this and is on his way out of the small leadership cadre, but, this crisis, such as it is, reflects poorly on Xi's "cult of confidence" in his own "competence." In the final analysis the CCP's rule depends upon the people being satisfied: _fear_ is a great dissatisfier, and economic uncertainty, coupled with uncertainty about the competence of the supreme leader can induce _fear_ in the people, broadly, and in all levels of the CCP, even those very near the top. To paraphrase President Franklin D Roosevelt, Xi Jinping has "nothing to fear but fear itself."


----------



## CougarKing

China unveils its DF26C "Guam Killer" nukes!

Diplomat



> *Revealed: China for the First Time Publicly Displays 'Guam Killer' Missile
> In preparation for a military parade, Beijing has for the first time openly revealed one of its deadliest missiles.*
> 
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> August 31, 2015
> 
> During rehearsals for the military parade on September 3rd, commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in China, the Second Artillery Corps of the People’s Liberation Army has for the first time publicly shown some of the most modern missiles in its inventory.
> 
> According to IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, the parade preparations offered glimpses on new missiles such as the Dong Feng (DF, East Wind) DF-15B short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), the DF-16 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM),  the DF-21C MRBM, the warhead section of the DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the DF-31 A ICBM, the DF-10 land-attack cruise missile (LACM) and the DF-26 intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) – dubbed the “Guam killer” missile.
> 
> The presence of the DF-26 at the rehearsals was confirmed by Shao Yongling, a senior colonel from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Second Artillery Command College in an interview with the Global Times:
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_ is an interesting point of view about the significance of the forthcoming 70th anniversary (of the end of WWII) parade in Beijing by Prof Charles Burton, of _Brock U University_) who has extensive academic and personal ties to China:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/who-will-march-with-china-at-xis-parade/article26180862/
My emphasis added


> Who will march with China at Xi’s parade?
> 
> CHARLES BURTON
> Special to The Globe and Mail
> 
> Published Tuesday, Sep. 01, 2015
> 
> On Thursday in Beijing, a massive military pageant will course through Tiananmen Square. For hours, thousands of crisply trained troops will march in formation as line after line of tanks, missiles and every other instrument of destruction, more than 500 in all, puts on a display meant to shock and awe.
> 
> Nobody will rain on this parade. To achieve a “military parade blue sky” on the day, the government has been restricting the use of vehicles and temporarily closed polluting industries for miles around. They also imposed new software on China’s Great Firewall to enhance Internet censorship, which the Communist Party newspaper called an “upgrade for cyberspace sovereignty.”
> 
> These steps, combined with the usual roundup of outspoken lawyers and human-rights proponents, attest to the importance that the party has placed on this show of its military might. To further mark the occasion, a large number of prisoners who served in the Communist military before their life of crime will be granted clemency and released from jail.
> 
> The pretext is the 70th anniversary of “victory of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world’s anti-fascist war” – also known as the Second World War. Of course, the huge contribution of Allied forces, the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang (now in exile in Taiwan) and the U.S. atomic bombs to defeat the Japanese has been slighted in a new revisionist narrative that buttresses China’s increasingly assertive expansionist strategy.
> 
> Many world leaders have been invited to watch from the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking the Tiananmen Square. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally announced the list of China’s “true friends” who will view the parade alongside the Communist leadership.
> 
> In a sign of China’s spiralling dominance in East Asia, the President of South Korea will be a prominent participant. In sharp contrast, North Korea – whose Workers’ Party had previously been characterized “as close as lips to teeth” to the Chinese Communist Party – is sending just a member of its Politburo. This startling gesture raises the question of how much longer South Korea will allow U.S. troops to be stationed there. Vietnam’s President will also attend, but not leaders of Malaysia, the Philippines or other parties to the South China Sea territorial dispute.
> 
> The guest list comprises 30 state leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Jacob Zuma of South Africa and Pakistan’s Mamnoon Hussain. But no leaders are attending from the United States, Japan, Germany or Canada.
> 
> With its invitation to the parade, Beijing is essentially asking countries: “Whose side are you on?” South Korea’s and Vietnam’s responses suggest how they see the future of the Sino-American power balance. On the other hand, the attendance by the President of the Czech Republic forms the sole exception to the European Union’s reluctance to show up and symbolically affirm China’s continuing rise in the global order.
> 
> This all comes at a time when the Communist Party is feeling less secure about its rule, given that China’s economic institutions remain in serious, unprecedented crisis, and there have been surprising expressions of public anger over tragedies such as the Tianjin chemical explosion and even fundamentals such as food safety.
> 
> President Xi Jinping has responded with a crackdown on “Western influences,” a consolidation of power for his office and an intense anti-corruption purge incarcerating and harshly interrogating more than 100,000 Communist officials, most associated with factions in China’s security apparatus or military, or with loyalty to previous party strongmen Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. However, the ferocity of this latest oppression has caught public attention, prompting a rare and intriguing admission in China’s state media that “the scale of the resistance” to Mr. Xi’s new policies “is beyond what could have been imagined.”
> 
> This does not bode well, but don’t expect the party to court the citizenry by moving toward democratic political institutions, a free press or an independent judiciary. Any shortcomings of China’s governance will continue to be ascribed to the foreign-inspired moral failings of corrupted individual officials, not to any deficiencies in the political and economic system itself.
> 
> Over time, the regime’s response will most certainly be more sabre-rattling assertions of nationalism, to rally the public behind Mr. Xi’s leadership. Thursday’s parade could be just the beginning of a new era in Chinese Communist militarism.




If, a big IF, Xi Jinping has _purged_ enough of the "old guard" then he may be ready to move to consolidate and extend his hold on power. Xi is "due" to hand over to a successor in about 2120 to 25, after 8 to 12 years in power. He is, now 62 years old. Deng Xiaoping was _Paramount Leader_ for 14 years, serving, actively, until he was well into his 80s. My _guess_ is that Xi Jinping has "plans" for China, plans that rival the changes Deng introduced ~ I have no idea what he intends, by the way ~ and _I suspect_ he may feel a need for 20 or so years to accomplish his aims.


----------



## CougarKing

Mao's communist insurgents only had a small part in the ultimate victory against Japan in World War II, but they're celebrating as if they're the main victor. Oh well, to think China's young minds are easily influenced by revisionist history.

Canadian Press



> *China showing off huge trove of new military gear at parade; missiles to be closely watched*
> The Canadian Press
> By Christopher Bodeen,
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> PARADE BASICS:
> 
> The parade will feature more than 12,000 troops, upward of 200 planes and helicopters and around 500 pieces of equipment, including tanks, rocket launchers and missiles of all sizes and ranges. China says more than 80 per cent of the gear is being shown in public for the first time.
> 
> Of greatest interest are China's strategic weapons: bombers and missiles capable of attacking targets thousands of kilometres away. That's of particular concern to the U.S. and its allies in the region, especially Japan, with whom China has tussled over mineral rights and the ownership of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
> 
> China's rising capabilities also expose the vulnerability of Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory and threatens to conquer by force if necessary.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> MISSILES:
> China's missile corps, formally known as the Second Artillery, has long served as its most potent means of projecting force abroad, and new developments are always closely scrutinized. Unlike the United States and Russia, China is not bound by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and has poured resources into developing missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometres.
> 
> *Observers will be looking for an appearance by the DF-16, a short-range ballistic missile loaded two to a truck, along with the DF-21D, an intermediate-range, anti-ship ballistic missile capable of sinking an American aircraft carrier in a single strike.
> *
> (...SNIPPED)



Meanwhile, a former Taiwan vice-president with a pro-reunification tilt gets slammed by Taiwan's current president for attending the parade:

Shanghaiist



> *Ma Ying-jeou rebukes Lien Chan for attending Beijing's WW2 military parade*
> 
> Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said that it is "inappropriate" for *former Vice President Lien Chan* to be traveling to Beijing for the upcoming "Victory Day" parade on September 3.
> 
> *Lien, ex-chairman of the Kuomintang,* flew out to the Chinese capitol yesterday along with a political envoy, including Chang Jung-kung, former Vice Secretary-general of the KMT. They are scheduled to meet with
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 1 for the purpose of pursuing "peace in the Taiwan Strait and stability in the region," according to Chang.
> 
> This is despite Ma criticizing the move at a polling station in Taipei just a day before.
> 
> “It is not appropriate [for Lien] to attend, and that is the stance of the Republic of China [ROC] government,” he told reporters outside the Taipei City Council building on Saturday.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

While Obama visits Alaska...the PLA-Navy shows its global reach:

Reuters



> *Five Chinese ships in Bering Sea as Obama visits Alaska*
> Wed Sep 2, 2015 5:08pm EDT
> By Phil Stewart
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Five Chinese Navy ships are sailing in international waters in the Bering Sea off Alaska, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, in an apparent first for China's military that came as U.S. President Barack Obama toured the U.S. state.
> 
> Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it was the first time the United States had observed Chinese Navy ships in the Bering Sea.
> 
> "We respect the freedom of all nations to operate military vessels in international waters in accordance with international law," Davis said.
> 
> The appearance of the ships is an example of the expanding reach of China's navy and overlapped with a three-day visit by Obama to Alaska as part of his efforts to raise awareness about climate change.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Quite interesting that Xi would choose to announce this on the same day the PLA is conducting a massive parade in Beijing for the World War II victory 70th anniversary. Now, the PLA is getting even further from its former size when it used to be the "2 million man Army" :

Reuters



> *Xi says Chinese military will cut forces by 300,000*
> Wed Sep 2, 2015 10:28pm EDT
> BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Thursday that China will cut its number of troops by 300,000, as he kicked off a massive military parade marking 70 years since the end of World War Two in Asia.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Quite interesting that Xi would choose to announce this on the same day the PLA is conducting a massive parade in Beijing for the World War II victory 70th anniversary. Now, the PLA is getting even further from its former size when it used to be the "2 million man Army" :
> 
> Reuters




I think it's important to remember two things:

     1. The old, two million (plus) strong "people's army" was well nigh useless on anything like a modern battlefield. The new, much smaller PLA is much more professional, better equipped, trained, more modern and sophisticated;

     2. The Chinese "People's Armed Police" (1.5 million strong) is, now, since the mid 1980s, responsible for most public safety/security issues ~ tasks for which the PLA was responsible in the 1950s through the 1980s.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

meanwhile out in the Bering sea

http://www.ibloomberg.net/five-chinese-navy-ships-are-operating-in-bering-sea-off-alaska-coast/

 Five Chinese navy ships are currently operating in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska, the first time the U.S. military has seen such activity in the area, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The officials said they have been aware in recent days that three Chinese combat ships, a replenishment vessel and an amphibious ship were in the vicinity after observing them moving toward the Aleutian Islands, which are split between U.S. and Russian control.

They said the Chinese ships were still in the area, but declined to specify when the vessels were first spotted or how far they were from the coast of Alaska, where President Barack Obama is winding up a three-day visit.

“This would be a first in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands,” one defense official said of the Chinese ships. “I don’t think we’d characterize anything they’re doing as threatening.”

Pentagon officials also said there was no information suggesting the Chinese ships had gone through the Bering Strait, a narrow waterway north of the sea that abuts Alaska.

China’s defense ministry couldn’t be reached to comment.


----------



## tomahawk6

The PLAN ships sent into US awters off Alaska IMO,is a counter to the US sending ships and planes into their exclusion zone in the South China Sea. The Observer had an interesting article about what the US response would be in the event of an attack on Alaska or Canada.I dont take it seriously but its an interesting scenario.

http://observer.com/2015/09/will-china-invade-alaska-canada-will-russia/


----------



## Robert0288

If there's an icebreaker in there it may be going for the NW passage.



			
				Colin P said:
			
		

> meanwhile out in the Bering sea
> 
> http://www.ibloomberg.net/five-chinese-navy-ships-are-operating-in-bering-sea-off-alaska-coast/
> 
> Five Chinese navy ships are currently operating in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska, the first time the U.S. military has seen such activity in the area, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
> 
> The officials said they have been aware in recent days that three Chinese combat ships, a replenishment vessel and an amphibious ship were in the vicinity after observing them moving toward the Aleutian Islands, which are split between U.S. and Russian control.
> 
> They said the Chinese ships were still in the area, but declined to specify when the vessels were first spotted or how far they were from the coast of Alaska, where President Barack Obama is winding up a three-day visit.
> 
> “This would be a first in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands,” one defense official said of the Chinese ships. “I don’t think we’d characterize anything they’re doing as threatening.”
> 
> Pentagon officials also said there was no information suggesting the Chinese ships had gone through the Bering Strait, a narrow waterway north of the sea that abuts Alaska.
> 
> China’s defense ministry couldn’t be reached to comment.


----------



## tomahawk6

Now a video is released of a PRC attack on US forces in the Pacific.

http://blogs.cfr.org/davidson/2015/09/03/chinese-animators-envision-a-future-asia-pacific-war-and-blow-up-the-internet/


----------



## Kirkhill

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Now a video is released of a PRC attack on US forces in the Pacific.
> 
> http://blogs.cfr.org/davidson/2015/09/03/chinese-animators-envision-a-future-asia-pacific-war-and-blow-up-the-internet/



Does this open the Chinese up to "unintended consequences"?  It has been speculated that the US could move some of its missile arsenal from Nuclear warheads to PGM warheads.  The argument has been that it would be destabilizing because it is impossible to tell if a Ballistic Missile is conventional or nuclear so the "recipient" has to assume that it is nuclear and act accordingly - and only has minutes to do so.

What would happen if the US decided to replace some portion of its IRBM(SLBM) / ICBM fleet with PGM warheads?  (A Poseidon C3 loaded with SDBs for example).


----------



## tomahawk6

Thats an evolution that is bound to happen.Manueverable warheads are a real problem,but laser defensive weapons might be just the counter.Another strategy is to kill the missile prior to detaching its warheads.Third option is a nuclear warhead to take out a swarm of these missiles.


----------



## Kirkhill

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Thats an evolution that is bound to happen.Manueverable warheads are a real problem,but laser defensive weapons might be just the counter.Another strategy is to kill the missile prior to detaching its warheads.Third option is a nuclear warhead to take out a swarm of these missiles.



Mega-Genie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VZ7FQHTaR4

Genie - The primary weapon of the RCAF Voodoo


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _The Economist_, is that newspaper's accurate (in my opinion) analysis of what China's recent military parade was all about:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21663278-real-purpose-rare-military-display-was-show-who-charge-parades-end


> Parade’s end
> *The real purpose of a rare military display was to show who is in charge*
> 
> Sep 5th 2015 | BEIJING | From the print edition
> 
> AFTER weeks of market mayhem, it must have made a nice change for Xi Jinping, China’s president, to be reviewing ranks of smartly-dressed people who move in perfect synchronicity and do exactly what he tells them. Vast military parades may have gone out of fashion elsewhere, but Asian countries still like to strut their stuff. After displays of hardware and prowess in India, Pakistan, Russia and Taiwan this year, China held the most vainglorious march-past yet under clear blue skies (especially seeded for the purpose) in Tiananmen Square on September 3rd.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Picture from the article
> 
> The event marked Victory Day, which was invented as a holiday only in 2014 to mark the end of the People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as the years leading up to and during the second world war are known in China. It was China’s first large-scale military parade since 2009, the first to celebrate anything other than the Communist Party’s rule and the first involving foreign troops. But Mr Xi (pictured above) did not have to hold it. Such parades had always been reserved for the decennial anniversaries of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1st 1949. This one came out of sequence, four years early. Why?
> 
> The government described the display as an international celebration, befitting the 70th anniversary of an Allied victory. But an online article in the _People’s Daily_, the party’s mouthpiece, earlier this year made clear what this meant. The parade’s purpose, it said, was to “deter Japan” and “show off China’s military might”. This was promptly toned down to “conveying to the world that China is devoted to safeguarding international order after world war two, rather than challenging it”. China argues that the main threat to the international status quo is the desire of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, to rewrite his country’s pacifist constitution. So the polite version is not, in fact, all that different from the blunt one.
> 
> Thirty heads of state or government joined Mr Xi on the reviewing stand, including Vladimir Putin (hardly a notable guardian of the international order, but never mind). Their countries form a map of those parts of the world where China’s clout is strong: Central Asia (leaders of four of its five “stans” turned up), parts of South-East Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos); Africa (South Africa, Egypt, Sudan); as well as, increasingly, eastern Europe. The only surprising visitor was South Korea’s Park Geun-hye, fresh from a tense stand-off with the North. She resisted American pressure to turn down the invitation, presumably in the hope of persuading China to exert some moderating influence on its capricious North Korean client.
> 
> But no other presidents or prime ministers came from democracies which fought on the same side as China during the war: that is, America and its Western allies. The prospect of watching Chinese soldiers goose-stepping in a square around which, 26 years ago, the army had slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators proved too much for Westerners to stomach. Earlier this year the Chinese had toyed with the idea of laying on an accompanying civilian bash, which Europeans and Americans could have attended. But nothing came of that.
> 
> Mr Xi is unlikely to have been surprised or disappointed by the West’s absence. Standing with Mr Putin enabled him to show a defiance of the West, which the party likes to portray as bent on keeping China weak. Soon after he assumed power, Mr Xi and fellow leaders visited a museum next to Tiananmen Square to see an exhibition called “The Road to Rejuvenation”. It purports to show how the Chinese people, having been “reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society since the Opium War of 1840, rose in resistance against humiliation and misery.” On Victory Day last year, the same leaders did much the same thing, this time visiting a museum in Beijing commemorating the war. Its displays aim to show that China’s wartime resistance to Japan was its first victory after the “century of humiliation”.
> 
> At the parade, Mr Xi spelled out the contemporary significance of such visits. Rather as America and the Soviet Union had become superpowers because of what they did in the war, the president argued, so China’s wartime role had “re-established China as a major country”.
> 
> A huge display of weaponry reinforced the point. Twelve thousand troops marched past, with attack helicopters roaring overhead in a formation spelling out the number 70. China gave the world a first sight of new tanks, fighters and bombers, and of several new missile systems. These included the DF-16 medium-range ballistic missile, two nuclear-capable intercontinental types (the DF-5B and DF-31A) and the so-called “carrier killer”, the DF-21D that can destroy an aircraft-carrier in one blow (see chart). All these are of concern to America.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A hefty dose of historical revisionism was also on display, aimed at burnishing the party’s wartime achievements. Chinese historians often complain that the sacrifices of their soldiers and people during the second world war are shamefully neglected. Their complaint is justified: 14m Chinese people perished at the hands of Japanese troops or as a result of famine. But there is a problem. Although Communist forces engaged in guerrilla fighting, the brunt of the battlefield campaign was borne, as Rana Mitter of Oxford University points out, by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (the KMT, which now rules Taiwan). China glosses over the KMT’s role.
> 
> The parade was also aimed at showing off Mr Xi himself. For the president it was an opportunity, nearly three years after taking over as China’s leader and amid a fierce campaign against corruption in the party and army, to show that he is truly in charge (and not at all anxious about the country’s economy: keeping the air clean for the parade involved stifling swathes of northern China’s industry, see article). The foreign dignitaries were his spear-carriers.
> 
> Mr Xi has closer links with the 2.3m-strong armed forces than any recent president. Early in his career he was a personal secretary to the defence minister. Unlike his predecessors, he took over the party’s main instrument for controlling the armed forces, the Central Military Commission (CMC), immediately upon taking office.
> 
> Interactive graphic, from the article
> 
> He has displayed muscle to his commanders in a way that earlier party leaders rarely dared to do—charging numerous generals with corruption, including the two highest-ranking officers under his predecessor: Xu Caihou (now dead) and Guo Boxiong. Mr Xi is now filling senior ranks with his own protégés. In an intriguing recent example, an order promoting to full general the head of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary force, bore Mr Xi’s signature first. Normally, the prime minister’s name comes first on PAP promotions.
> 
> How Mr Xi is viewed by senior officers is hard to judge. Many of them must be grumbling about the erosion of their privileges as a result of his anti-corruption efforts. Mr Xi will want to ensure their support with more than just morale-boosting parades—one reason why he is unlikely to scale down the double-digit increases in military spending in which he and his predecessors have indulged for many years (though, as he announced at the parade, he will continue efforts to trim the ranks—this time by 300,000). But the message he wanted to send with the show was as clear as the skies: China is resurgent and so are the armed forces, of which Mr Xi is the undisputed commander-in-chief.




I agree with this analysis and offer no further comment.


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think it's important to remember two things:
> 
> 1. The old, two million (plus) strong "people's army" was well nigh useless on anything like a modern battlefield. The new, much smaller PLA is much more professional, better equipped, trained, more modern and sophisticated;
> 
> 2. The Chinese "People's Armed Police" (1.5 million strong) is, now, since the mid 1980s, responsible for most public safety/security issues ~ tasks for which the PLA was responsible in the 1950s through the 1980s.



Another article explores the reasons behind the cuts:

Diplomat



> *The Real Reason China Is Cutting 300,000 Troops
> The troop reduction announced by Xi Jinping heralds a new round of PLA reforms.*
> 
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> September 08, 2015
> 
> As The Diplomat reported previously, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced last week that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will reduce its forces by 300,000 troops. Xi made the announcement during a speech just before a massive military parade in Beijing, held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
> 
> While Xi framed the troop cut as part of the PLA commitment to “carry out the noble mission of upholding world peace,” military analysts agree the move is part of a broader context: the restructuring of the PLA as part of a push to modernize China’s armed forces.
> 
> The troop reduction announced on September 3 fits in a long line of cuts and restructurings made since the 1980s. The PLA’s size has been cut four times since then–by one million in 1985, by 500,000 in 1997, by 200,000 in 2003, and now by 300,000.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *“Cutting the number of troops is conducive to pooling resources, speeding up the pace and improving the quality of informatization construction,” *Yang said, emphasizing that the reduction of China’s military will not decrease its ability to defend China’s interests. Even after the troop cuts are completed in 2017, China’s military (at 2 million troops) will remain the largest in the world.
> 
> *Rory Medcalf, who heads the National Security College at Australian National University, pointed out that the move may be just as much about China’s defense budget as anything else. *“Personnel are a massive cost in a military budget, and there’s been a lot of growth in military wages in China in recent years, so there are sensible capability reasons to cut personnel numbers without cutting effectiveness,” he told The New York Times. Medcalf noted that the decreased personnel budget could allow more funds to be devoted to continuing to modernize the PLA.
> 
> *At the end of Yang’s press conference, the spokesperson noted that the troop reduction is just the beginning of a new round of reform in the PLA.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *For example, China’s new military strategy white paper, released this May, called for a greater role for China’s navy*. The PLA called for an end to “the traditional mentality that land outweighs sea” – a change that could face opposition from army officers used to enjoying more prestige than their naval and air force counterparts.
> 
> Former Chinese military officer Xu Guangyu told the Los Angeles Times that the troop reduction could help pave the way for a rebalancing in China’s military, allowing for China’s air force and navy to be proportionately larger parts of the overall PLA.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another set of PLA exercises to intimidate Taiwan:

Reuters



> *China to hold live-fire drills in Taiwan Strait*
> Thu Sep 10, 2015 1:02am EDT
> BEIJING (Reuters) - The Chinese military will hold three days of live-fire drills in the sensitive Taiwan Strait starting from Friday, the government said in a notice issued to warn shipping away from the area.
> 
> China claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own and has never renounced the use of force to bring the democratic island under its rule. Defeated Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war with the Communists in 1949.
> 
> Ties have generally improved under Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, who has signed a series of landmark trade and economic pacts with China, but deep suspicions remain on either side.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another potential export for China's client states: will we see these flying in Zimbabwe and other African nations in a decade?

Shepard Media



> *Armed Z-19E prepped for export*
> 
> 10th September 2015 - 10:12 by Gordon Arthur in Tianjin
> 
> 
> Designated the Z-19E, and based on the Z-19 already in service with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), this attack craft is squarely targeted at the export market. Positioned as a lower-cost alternative to Western and Russian craft, it may appeal to countries with limited budgets.
> 
> HAIG, a subsidiary of the Aviation Corporation of China (AVIC), stated, ‘It adopts an anti-crash airframe, bulletproof and anti-crash fuel tanks and seats, and integrated and smaller-sized avionics and fire control system.’
> 
> HAIG’s description of the Z-19E continued: ‘It may carry tank-killing missiles, air-to-air missiles, aircraft rockets and a machine gun turret, which are mainly used to attack enemy ground targets such as tanks, armoured vehicles and strong fortifications.’
> 
> Indeed, the example displayed in Tianjin was accompanied by a range of generic examples of the aforementioned munitions.
> 
> The only weaponry to be specified were NORINCO 57-1AH rockets, which are launched from 18-tube HF25G launchers. 57-1AH rockets have an effective range of 2,000m and maximum range of 6,000m. Of their 4kg overall weight, the warhead weighs 1.13kg.
> 
> The Z-19E on display was fitted with a chin-mounted EO turret that appears to emanate from CAMA (Luoyang) Measurements & Controls.
> 
> The twin-seat tandem Z-19 is based on the Z-9W armed helicopter, itself developed from the Airbus Helicopters Dauphin. It thus features a fenestron tail and is powered by twin 700kW WZ-8C engines. Chinese pilots of the Z-19 use helmet-mounted sights, but the Z-19E likely does not possess all the features of the Chinese military version.
> 
> The Z-19 is a lighter craft than the Z-10 attack helicopter, which is also in PLA service.


----------



## CougarKing

China's anti-graft crusader speaks out: quite ironic that he would speak about legitimacy when corruption (e.g. paying off officials for promotion) is often one of the means by which many in that organization rise through the ranks with claims of "legitimacy supported by the proletariat"  :. 

Shanghaiist



> *China's top graft-buster breaks precedent by discussing the Communist Party's 'legitimacy'*
> 
> At a Communist Party meeting held in Beijing this week to discuss "disciplining the party," the head of China's top anti-graft watchdog made comments focusing on the CCP's "legitimacy" that raised more than a few eyebrows.
> 
> Politburo Standing Committee member *Wang Qishan*, leading figure in President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive and some say China's second leading man, brought up this most taboo of words while meeting with foreign attendees at the "The Party and World Dialogue 2015" in Beijing on Wednesday. Xinhua later summarized his startling comments for public consumption:
> 
> Wang said the legitimacy of the ruling Party lies in history, its popular base and the mandate of the people. He said in the course of building a comfortable life and rejuvenating the nation, the CPC [Communist Party of China] has to enhance its leadership and win the trust and confidence of the people so as to address complex situations and overcome various challenges.
> 
> While this paragraph of CCP jargon may not seem all that shocking at first glance, it turns out this marks the first time that the word "legitimacy" has ever appeared in the Party's official disclosure.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good catch, SMA ... more on Wang Qishan here; he is too old to be considered for the next leadership generation, but he is, indeed, Xi Jinping's chief "fire fighter."

I'm surprised at anyone, especially someone as close to Xi Jinping, raising, even obliquely, the issue of "legitimacy."

The "legitimacy" of the CCP has rested, since Deng Xiaoping, at least, on the notion that the Party, like the dynasties of old, has a "mandate" conferred, without quite saying as much, by history, its own actions and the "will of the people." The problem which has bedevilled successive leaders is just how one understands (measures) the "will of the people." Clearly, for us in the democratic world, the "will of the people" is measured at periodic, free elections. But many Asian leaders, including some democrats, mistrust Western political forms and norms. They believe, with some merit, we must admit, that the "will of the people" can be and often is _shaped_ by slick advertising campaigns and by buying our votes with our own money.

The CCP has allowed some remarkably free and fair elections: always, _as far as I know_, in small, generally rural centres, and, generally, only after some maladministration by the (appointed by the CCP) local leadership has produced very poor results, if not a small disaster. The sense _seems to me_ to be that when things have gone from bad to worse the people just _might_ select better, smarter leaders who will get better results. I don't know how well things have turned out.

The other, more popular amongst more moderately senior officials, approach is to gauge the "popular will" by _active_ polling: finding out what issues matter to most people and then finding out, using modern, sophisticated, Western market research (polling) techniques, what courses of action the people favour. Polling, especially good, reliable polling, is very expensive ... but, then, so are elections. The great advantage to _active_ polling is that one needn't release the data if it doesn't conform closely enough to the party's own _received wisdom_.


----------



## CougarKing

Here's what Pres. Xi Jinping wants to discuss with Obama at the state visit next week.

To think that Obama gets to meet with Pres. Xi Jinping directly, whereas, if I can recall correctly from PM Harper's state visit to China in Feb. 2012, Harper only met then-Premier Wen Jiabao (who is below Xi), since the two were considered equal rank. And we know how the Chinese are a "stickler" when it comes to rank and protocol. 

Another staff person from the time I used to work with DFAIT/DFATD told me the story of the time at this consular conference in Southwest China when the Congolese ambassador was to called up to a stage ahead of the Consul-Generals of the US, Canada, France, Germany etc. , simply because in Chinese eyes, ambassadors outranked Consul-Generals and other diplomats, regardless of each nation's clout and relative importance. 

Shanghaiist



> *This is what Xi Jinping wants to talk about at the White House*
> 
> In the latest of a string of articles talking up the importance of Xi Jinping's visit to the USA, state media recently published an article detailing six topics that he will be looking to discuss with Barack Obama.
> 
> The article, published by Beijing News, begins by rubbishing any accusations that cyber attacks on US servers were launched from the PRC. It expresses dismay over speculations about the "mischief reef" constructions in the South China Sea. *Bad mouthing of the Chinese economy has also been deemed unwelcome.*
> 
> The six topics are as follows:
> 
> *1. China is no threat to the established international order*: Quoting a speech from Xi delivered at this month's General Assembly in Beijing, "The world should work together to maintain international order and the international system has the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as its core. Actively building new international relations in order to capitalise on cooperation is part of the core."
> 
> *2. China's development will not lead to conflict with other nations:* Xi will say that China wishes to offer mutual benefits through cooperation. State media goes on to say that US Secretary of State John Kerry and and Xi agreed earlier in May that the Pacific region is big enough for the two great powers.
> 
> 3. China won't engage in building its own spheres of influence: Instead, China seeks to build a community of interests and destiny. Xi is quoted as saying, "We live in the same global village, the intersection of history and reality of life, in the same space and time, becoming closer and closer all the time. This is the 'community of destiny'."
> 
> *4. Initiatives such as the New Silk Road are not an attempt to vie for leadership:* Xi will be looking to outline in full his intentions for economic plans such as the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road, emphasizing that these are not an attempt to gain influence over neighboring countries
> 
> *5. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is not an attempt to overturn the existing financial system:* Instead, the controversial bank is merely an honest attempt to remove bottlenecks to infrastructure funding in underdeveloped areas of Asia.
> 
> *6. Construction in the South China Sea is not aimed at any one nation: B*uilding on the islands is instead necessary in order for China to fulfill its international obligations and the US must remain impartial when stepping into disputes in the region.
> 
> No doubt the US will have their own take on these issues, particularly with regard to the AIIB and developments in the waters to the south of China. The Obama administration has done everything in its power to discourage its allies from joining the China-led bank and is trying to put a lid on Beijing's ambitions in the South China Sea.
> By Daniel Cunningham and Dominic Jackson


----------



## CougarKing

Could these conciliatory gestures by Xi towards CCP hardliners be an indication that he hasn't fully consolidated power? 

Reuters



> *Four funerals and a wedding: China's Xi mends political bridges*
> Sat Sep 19, 2015 11:24pm EDT
> 
> By Benjamin Kang Lim
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - *Chinese President Xi Jinping's attendance at the funeral earlier this year of a one-time propaganda minister was a surprise; Deng Liqun, who died aged 99, was never a top-ranked official and had been a political enemy of Xi's father.*
> 
> Xi's presence, sources said, was in fact part of a nascent effort to heal wounds across China's ideological divide after his unrelenting crackdown on corruption alienated senior officials from the ruling Communist Party, government and military.
> 
> Xi wants to consolidate support ahead of the 19th party congress in 2017, when the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, is reshuffled, said the sources, who have close ties to the leadership.
> 
> *While Xi is expected to rule until 2023, he needs to get allies on the committee who will back his three-year war on corruption and his plans for reforming China's slowing economy, experts said.*
> 
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> FATHER'S NEMESIS
> 
> That's why Xi was among the mourners at Deng's funeral in Beijing on Feb. 17, where he bowed three times before the body of the ultra-conservative Marxist ideologue, sources said.
> 
> Xi had no obligation to go, the sources added, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to foreign media.
> 
> Deng had also been a nemesis of Xi's late father, Xi Zhongxun, a vice premier in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
> 
> "Deng Liqun was a leftist and Xi Zhongxun a rightist. They were political enemies since ... the 1950s," one source said.
> 
> *In China, leftists are opposed to market-oriented reforms and Western-style democracy, while rightists are more liberal-minded. Precisely where President Xi sits is fluid, which is how he wants it, experts say.
> 
> "Xi went because he needs leftists in his fight against corruption," the source said.*
> 
> Experts believe that, in a worst-case scenario, conservatives could try to oust Xi, especially if the economy falters further and unemployment sky-rockets.
> 
> The president has walked a tightrope targeting "tigers", or senior figures, in his corruption crackdown.
> 
> Among them has been former security tsar Zhou Yongkang, a conservative heavyweight jailed for life in June.
> 
> Despite that balancing act and China's plunging stock markets, Xi is sure to display confidence when he holds talks with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington this week and give little ground on issues
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

My _guess_, and that's all it is, is that the Party _apparatchiks_ are confused and frightened. The old line, led by Zhou Enlai, and including Deng Xiaoping, were, largely, honest, frugal and _traditional_ in the Chinese social values. (There were stories, almost all of them based on facts, about the personal honesty of ordinary Chinese in the 1950s and '60s: wallets lost on trains being returned a day later, with every penny still there, etc.) The problem was Mao and his cronies: Mao was, somewhat notoriously, dishonest ~ in many small things ~ and, very unlike, say, Zhou Enlai, was overly fond of comforts and prestige. That rubbed off on the entire CCP and the old, old Chinese malady of official corruption retuned in full force. Post Deng, the Party was buffeted by the _conservative_ forces of Jiang Zemin and the _liberal_ one of Hu Jintao: both tried to reshape elements of the Chinese economy and both turned a blind eye to the deeper social and economic problems caused by rampant corruption.

The Chinese military also lost their way, although Jiang started and Hu continued many organizational and operational reforms; the "old men," the 80 and 90 year olds who still held considerable power in the PLA, from the 1970s onwards, had ceased caring much about the efficiency and effectiveness of the military, they had become _capitalists_. The PLA owned, still owns, _I think_, major industrial enterprises ~ one can understand the notion that the PLA might want to own shipyards, weapon factories and aerospace firms but, as late as the 1990s, the PLA, the "old men," also owned toy factories, amongst other things. Mao and Deng Xiaoping had allowed this, neither Jianfg Zemin nor Hu Jintao had made many efforts to clean it up, both preferring to wait for the "old men" to die rather then take action. It went on for generations: who is to blame many, many Party members for thinking it's "normal?"

But it's not "normal." Corruption sucks several, measurable percentage points of GDP out of the economy and lines the pockets of a few with the output of the many. The Chinese, under Deng, Jiang and Hu, did all the easy stuff; they "ate the low hanging fruit" in terms of economic development and growth. Now they need to reform the economy and that means fundamental reforms in the Party. Change may be good, but it is also scary.

_I suspect_ that Xi Jinping, who I see, in my own mind, as a _traditionalist_, sees himself as a reformer in the mould of Deng Xiaoping: someone who will make a fundamental break with the past and set the country and the Party on a new, more productive and, in the case of the CCP, a more honest course.

_My sense_ is that the "lefties" _a)_ see themselves as the heirs of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and _b)_ are more, personally, honest, while the "new right," the heirs of Jiang Zemin, are more willing to turn a blind eye to corruption if it will help them in their short term goals. I think Xi Jinping aims to cleanse the party of Jiang's old _Shanghai Gang_, "red meat" capitalists' tolerance of (even fondness for) corruption without losing their entrepreneurial spirit, and to do that he needs, right now, the political support of the "old left."

Is Xi Jinping a _communist_ (as Zhou and Deng, undoubtedly, were in the 1920s and into the 1950s)? No, _I think not_. Is he a _capitalist_, like Deng became and Jiang was? No, not that either, _in my opinion_. _I think_ he sees himself more as Sun Yet Sen ... which doesn't help much if one wants to apply economic labels. But, think back to 1923 (no, even I wasn't alive then) when Dr Sun gave a speech to the _Students' Union_ in _Hong Kong University_ saying that it was a mix of corruption in China and the British notion of_ "peace, order and good government"_ that he could see in Hong Kong that made him into a revolutionary. That, _I believe_, is the notion that drives Xi Jinping; but giving China "peace, order and good government" depends, first, on rooting out corruption.


----------



## CougarKing

All eyes on Xi Jinping as he arrives in the US:

New York Times



> *Xi Jinping of China Arriving in U.S. at Moment of Vulnerability*
> 点击查看本文中文版
> 
> BEIJING — President Xi Jinping of China looked regal as he stood in a limousine moving past Tiananmen Square this month, wearing a traditional suit of the kind favored by Mao and waving at parade troops assembled at attention. But the luster of Mr. Xi’s imperial presidency has dulled lately.
> 
> China’s economy has slowed more abruptly than policy makers have appeared ready for, alarming investors around the world. The government overestimated its ability to keep stock prices aloft, spending billions to bolster the Chinese markets. *Mr. Xi’s ambitious reform agenda, including an effort to revive a bloated state sector, has yielded few concrete results.*
> 
> Often described as the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party in generations,* Mr. Xi is to arrive in the United States on Tuesday facing economic headwinds and growing doubts about his formula for governing — a sharp contrast with the image of unruffled control he projected when he hosted President Obama last year.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Anyone else here watch Kevin Spacey's "House of Cards" on Netflix, anyone?   ;D

Shanghaiist



> *Xi Jinping delivers speech in Seattle, says his corruption crackdown 'is no House of Cards'*
> 
> Just hours after landing in Seattle for his first state visit to the U.S., Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a wide-ranging speech touching on cybersecurity, China's economy, the "Chinese Dream," and classic American rom-coms, impressing observers with his knowledge of American pop culture.
> Speaking at the Washington State Welcoming Banquet in Seattle, the Chinese leader's line of the night has to go to his dismissal of speculation that his infamous anti-corruption campaign has been about removing his own political enemies.
> “We have punished tigers and flies. It has nothing to do with power struggles. In this case there is no House of Cards," he said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Meanwhile both protesters and supporters were awaiting his arrival:

Shanghaiist



> *Xi Jinping met in Seattle by spirited mix of supporters and protesters*
> 
> For his first state visit to the United States, Chinese President Xi Jinping was met by a typically American mix of supporters and protesters, chanting slogans, holding signs and waving flags to warmly welcome him to Seattle.
> Around 100 people marched in downtown Seattle late yesterday afternoon to the Westin Hotel, where the Chinese president is staying. The Seattle Times reports that dozens of police officers blocked them from reaching the hotel. But that didn't stop the crowd from shouting "Xi go home!" Hoping that the Chinese leader would just take the hint and leave. When that didn't happen, the protest wound down after a couple of hours.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese fighters buzz another RC-135? It's horrible timing for this, especially during a state visit by a PRC leader to the US.

Defense News



> *Chinese Jets In 'Unsafe' Intercept of US Spy Plane*
> Agence France-Presse 4:40 p.m. EDT September 23, 2015
> 
> WASHINGTON — Two Chinese fighter jets passed dangerously close to an American spy plane in international airspace over the Yellow Sea, a US official said Tuesday.
> 
> News of the close encounter came as Chinese President Xi Jinping began a state visit to the United States.
> 
> The incident occurred Sept. 15 when the Chinese planes intercepted an American RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft and crossed directly in front of it, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have posted a long, three part, but very useful article in the _"Grand Strategy for a Divided America"_ thread but it should be read by all with an interest in China's _strategic_ dilemmas, too.


----------



## CougarKing

Seems quite ironic that Xi would want to meet Mark Zuckerberg considering that Facebook is banned in China. And to think that Mark Zuckerberg's Mandarin language skills are so good he didn't utter a word of English when he met the Chinese president. Zuckerberg's Chinese language skills are probably close to the level of Mr. "Da Shan"/Mark Roswell of Canada.

Diplomat



> *China's President Woos (and Reassures) US Business Leaders
> At a meeting with U.S. and Chinese CEOs, Xi addressed fears that U.S. companies are no longer welcome in China.*
> 
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> September 24, 2015
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping spent his second day in Seattle on Wednesday, his itinerary packed full of activities designed to court American business leaders – particularly those from the high-tech sector. Xi attended a roundtable meeting with U.S. and Chinese CEOs and toured Boeing and Microsoft’s headquarters before looking in briefly at the U.S.-China Industry Internet Forum. For Xi, the name of the game was reassurance – trying to quell rising fears in the U.S. high-tech community that China is trying to force their firms out of its market in favor of domestic alternatives.
> 
> The CEO roundtable, co-hosted by the Paulson Institute and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, brought together 15 American and 15 Chinese CEOs. Attendees included Mary Barra (CEO of General Motors), Jeffrey Bezos (Amazon), Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway), Tim Cook (Apple), Robert Iger (Walt Disney Co.), Dennis Muilenburg (Boeing), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Virginia Rometty (IBM) on the U.S. side. Chinese CEOs included Jack Ma (Alibaba), Pony Ma (Tencent), Zhang Yaqin (Baidu), Lu Guanqiu (Wanxiang Group), and Yang Yuanqing (Lenovo).
> 
> Xi’s message to this group was that China’s market will only become more hospitable to foreign businesses. When it comes to China’s economic reforms, Xi said, “There is good news and I believe there will be more good news in the future.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

_Kal_, drawing in the _Economist_, sums up Paramount Leader Xi Jinping's dilemma in visiting America:

                    
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




                    Source: http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21667971-kals-cartoon?fsrc=scn/li/cp/pe/st/kalcartoonseptember25th


----------



## CougarKing

Some of the latest news on this week for China:

Perhaps it seems the US may have to rely on its allies' partner agencies  among the other "5 Eyes" for a while for foreign-intelligence gathering in China after this?

CNN



> *U.S. pulls spies from China after hack*
> 
> By Evan Perez
> 
> Data breach causes U.S. to pull spies from China
> The United States is pulling spies from China as a result of a cyberattack that compromised the personal data of 21.5 million government workers, a U.S. official said Tuesday.
> The U.S. suspects that Chinese hackers were behind the breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which exposed the fingerprints of 5.6 million government employees.
> 
> Because the stolen data includes records on State Department employees, the hackers could, by process of elimination, identify embassy personnel who are actually intelligence agents
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus...more possible separatist violence?

No word yet on whether this was related to any of the dissident or separatist causes in China, but most of what Chinese state media should be taken with a grain of salt anyways.

Reuters



> *Series of bombs in southwest China kills at least seven*
> Wed Sep 30, 2015 9:52am EDT
> 
> BEIJING (Reuters) - A series of package bombs exploded on Wednesday in the southwest China city of Liuzhou, killing at least seven people and injuring 51, state media said.
> *
> The official Xinhua news agency said police had determined the blasts were a "criminal" act and identified the suspect as a 33-year-old local man surnamed Wei, but added the investigation was continuing.*
> 
> Media images showed a collapsed building, smoke and streets strewn with rubble in Liuzhou in Guangxi region. Two people were missing, state radio said on its microblog.
> 
> Bombs were sent to 13 places ranging from hospitals and shopping malls to prisons and government offices, reports said, adding that a terrorist attack had been ruled out.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



A further sign that the current Chinese economic slump won't improve? But then again everyone's also watching what Jack Ma of Taobao/AliBaba is also going to do...

Shanghaiist



> *Li Ka-shing under attack by Chinese media for selling assets on the mainland*
> 
> Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Asia, has fallen victim to attacks by Chinese media who view his selling of assets on the mainland as immoral and ungrateful.
> The Hong Kong tycoon, who until recently enjoyed the adulation of media both on the mainland and in Hong Kong for his investing prowess, has been criticized for withdrawing from China via a series of asset sales and domiciling his flagship investment vehicles offshore rather than in Hong Kong.
> An article in the People's Daily attacking Li read: "Li Ka-shing’s choices do appear particularly brazen. In the eyes of ordinary people, we shared comfort and prosperity together in the good times, but when the hard times come he abandons us. This has really left some people speechless.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

As if the intrigue surrounding the US spies mentioned above wasn't enough...

Source:  Reuters



> World | Wed Sep 30, 2015 4:54am EDT
> *China says arrests two Japanese for spying*
> BEIJING/TOKYO
> China has arrested two Japanese for spying, the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, and Japan said the two had been held since May and diplomats were doing all they could to help.
> 
> Japan's Asahi newspaper said one man was taken into custody in China's northeast province of Liaoning near the border with North Korea and the other in the eastern province of Zhejiang near a military facility. Both were from the private sector, it said.
> 
> The newspaper added China appeared to be looking into whether the men were acting under instructions from the Japanese government. Japan's Kyodo news agency said both the men were in their 50s.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Economic issues, Xi Jinping's brief and barely noticed (wedged, as he was, in between the Pope and Putin) visit to America and the recent "victory" parade have all overshadowed the 66th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples' Republic of China on 1 Oct 49. Even events in China were low key: http://en.people.cn/n/2015/1001/c90785-8957669.html


----------



## CougarKing

And moving on to the naval front...

The picture at the link below already shows the keel laid at the shipyard for their future indigenous carrier:

US Naval Institute



> *China’s First Domestic Aircraft Carrier Almost Certainly Under Construction *
> 
> By: Sam LaGrone
> September 30, 2015 7:09 PM • Updated: October 1, 2015 11:35 AM
> 
> China has quietly begun construction on its first domestic aircraft carrier in the same northern Chinese shipyard that refurbished the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s current Soviet-era carrier, USNI News has learned.
> 
> Several sources confirmed to USNI News that an unknown shipbuilding project — first noticed publically by Jane’s in late February — is almost without a doubt the bones of the PLAN’s first domestically-built carrier.
> 
> Sources pointed USNI News to an April photograph that emerged on the Chinese language Internet of a ship under construction at the Dalian yard believed to be the super structure of the PLAN’s second carrier.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

"White Elephants" for appearances' sake? Says one analyst.

Diplomat



> *China’s Nuclear Submarine Distraction
> Appearing to be powerful can sometimes distract from building the capability that generates power.*
> 
> By Robert Potter
> October 01, 2015
> 
> The People Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is presently undertaking a substantial modernization effort. This process has been the center of significant analysis for the better part of twenty years. Although it is quite clear that the development of a modern navy is a core component of Chinese government policy, this initiative is presently stuck between competing efforts. *On the one hand, the People’s Republic is attempting to develop a naval capability that is modern and maximizes China’s present advantages. On the other, sits a desire to have a navy of a great power.*
> 
> In many ways these efforts channel into the same programs. For example, China’s successful efforts to produce long production runs of surface combatants is widely recognized. But not every decision that the PLAN faces is absent a tradeoff between the development of capability and accumulation of prestige.
> 
> This is not the first time that a Chinese government has faced this sort of decision.* During the self-strengthening movement of the late nineteenth century, the Qing Dynasty developed one of the largest fleets in the world. *It was the fleet of a great power, consisting of large battleships and cruisers. The Qing government developed this fleet with the expectation that the prestige it conferred was representative of capability. The United States itself used its fleet of battleships to announce its presence on the world stage in the early twentieth century. *However, the Beiyang Fleet, when tested, was soundly defeated by a better managed but less powerful Japanese fleet. Essentially, Qing Dynasty China had produced a very sharp tip of the spear while neglecting to actually develop the shaft.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

An article that discusses why nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are simply beyond China's means:

National Interest



> *Revealed: China Can't Build Lethal Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carriers*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The Jane’s analysis indicates that the ship might be between 558ft and 885ft long with a beam greater than 98ft. That’s a little small for a conventional aircraft carrier—and the Jane’s analysts note that they can’t conclusively say the new ship is a carrier. But that length—assuming the Jane’s analysts are correct—would be about the same as India’s Vikramaditya. The beam, however, is somewhat narrow—most carriers are much wider—which means this could be an amphibious assault ship or something else entirely.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> *The reason is simple—China does not have the experience in designing and building large military vessels the size of a carrier or amphibious assault ship.* It lacks the requisite expertise in designing and building the propulsion systems for such a vessel.* Further, China is lagging behind on metallurgy for the vessel’s hull. As for catapults—it took the U.S. Navy years to perfect steam catapults and the jury is still out on Ford’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS). Stealing technology can get Chinese engineers only so far—practical experience makes a difference.*
> 
> *China simply does not currently have the technology to build nuclear-powered carriers.* Right now, the Chinese are struggling to build modern nuclear reactors for their submarine fleet. Indeed, Chinese nuclear submarines are comparable to 1970s vintage Soviet designs. China is nowhere near ready to scale up those designs to be suitable for a carrier.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

As much as the CCP cadres in Beijing hate to admit it, there is actually a Hong Kong nationalistic consciousness, distinctly separate from any unified Chinese national consciousness, that is developing. Whether that will one day lead to an independent city-state much like Singapore or simply fade into obscurity in 2047, when the 50 year "One country, two systems" arrangement for Hong Kong officially ends, remains to be seen.

Shanghaiist



> *Hong Kong Football Association fined by FIFA for fans booing Chinese national anthem*
> 
> The Hong Kong Football Association (HKFA) has been fined 40,000 HKD after fans booed the Chinese national anthem during some recent World Cup qualifying matches. The HKFA has been warned that further incidents will incur more severe punishments in the future.
> Hong Kong fans first booed “March of the Volunteers" before a match between Hong Kong and Bhutan; and later did it again before a match against Qatar. HKFA has blamed the incidents on "a small minority of fans" who also chucked a carton of lemon tea onto the field during the Qatar match.
> 
> (....SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile in Taiwan...

A sign that the KMT/Guomindang view their chances of re-election as slim? The DPP may yet return to power in Taipei, to the annoyance of Beijing.

Diplomat



> *Taiwan’s KMT Moves to Replace Its Presidential Candidate
> Facing disastrous polls, Taiwan’s ruling party will officially consider options for replacing nominee Hung Hsiu-chu.*
> 
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> October 08, 2015
> 
> It’s no secret that Taiwan’s current ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), faces an uphill battle to retain the presidency in the January 2016 election.* KMT candidate Hung Hsiu-chu is trailing opposition candidate Tsai Ing-wen, head of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in the polls – by double-digits.* Tsai is consistently showing 40-50 percent support in the polls, while Hung’s numbers are closer to those of third party candidates James Soong – both of them far behind Tsai. One recent poll had Tsai at 45 percent support and Hung at only 12 percent.
> 
> Any KMT candidate would be facing strong headwinds, as demonstrated by abysmal approval ratings for current KMT president Ma Ying-jeou and sweeping DPP victories in last fall’s local elections. But many in the party seem to believe Hung specifically is the problem. Nicknamed “little hot pepper,” her fiery disposition may be working against her on the campaign trail, especially given that some of her policy positions on cross-strait relations seem out of touch with the current mood in Taiwan (and with the KMT mainstream).
> 
> The KMT is worried enough about Hung’s viability as a candidate that it may actually move to replace her. On Wednesday, the KMT’s Central Standing Committee unanimously agreed to hold a special party congress to officially talk about the possibility of replacing Hung. The congress should be held before the end of October, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA).
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Just in case anyone thinks that Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has stalled, in the face of economic headwinds, it hasn't ... _People's Daily_ reports that: "Jiang Jiemin, former head of China's state-owned assets regulator, sentenced to 16 years in prison Mon for corruption"





Source: https://twitter.com/PDChina?lang=en


----------



## CougarKing

At this rate, is a clash inevitable between Beijing and one or more of their Southeast Asian neighbours?

Diplomat



> *China Enforcing Quasi-ADIZ in South China Sea: Philippine Justice
> Beijing is already effectively implementing an air defense identification zone.*
> 
> By Prashanth Parameswaran
> October 13, 2015
> 
> China is effectively enforcing an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the South China Sea, a Philippine justice said at a Washington, D.C.-based think tank last week.
> 
> Since China enforced an ADIZ – a publicly defined area where unidentified aircraft can be interrogated or intercepted before entering sovereign airspace – in the East China Sea, many have speculated that it is only a matter of time before Beijing will impose one in the South China Sea as well.
> 
> But Antonio Carpio, a senior associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, said at a lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that China was already effectively enforcing a quasi-ADIZ in the South China Sea. Any Philippine plane that flies over the Spratlys, Carpio explained, now receives a stern warning from China via radio to “stay away from the area.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> _I think_ Japan must move to support the Philippines and Viet Nam since the USA either cannot or will not. If Japan does not step in China will take it all while Obama hikes up his skirts and tries to tip-toe through the deep water.



Contrary to what you said before, it seems the US is actively challenging China's ludicrous territorial claim to the whole of the South China Sea:

Financial Times



> *US warships to challenge Chinese claims in South China Sea*
> 
> October 8, 2015
> 
> A senior US official told the Financial Times that the ships would sail inside the 12-nautical mile zones that China claims as territory around some of the islands it has constructed in the Spratly chain. The official, who did not want to be named, said the manoeuvres were expected to start in the next two weeks.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Washington Post



> *U.S. Navy to China: We’ll sail our ships near your man-made islands whenever we want*
> 
> October 8
> 
> Defense officials told The Post that the plan could be carried out by a destroyer or a cruiser, both of which carry helicopters and a variety of weapons, or a more lightly armed littoral combat ship (LCS). The Navy would not anticipate a skirmish with the Chinese as a result, the officials said.
> 
> “*The objective to this would be to demonstrate that this is international water*,” one official said. “Whether that is a destroyer loaded out with missiles or an LCS with less weapons, the point wouldn’t be about which weapons the Navy is sending.”



A move welcomed by at least one of their allies in the region:

Philippine Star



> *Philippines backs US plan to sail ship near Chinese-built island*
> (Associated Press) | Updated October 13, 2015 - 10:04pm
> 
> MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines on Tuesday backed a reported U.S. plan to challenge China's territorial claims by deploying an American Navy ship close to a Chinese-built island in the South China Sea, saying it was important for the international community to safeguard freedom of navigation in the disputed waters.
> 
> The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said the reported U.S. plan to send a ship within 22 kilometers (14 miles) of the artificial island in the Spratly Islands "would be consistent with international law and a rules-based order for the region."
> 
> The U.S. newspaper Navy Times reported last week that the Navy may soon receive approval for the mission to sail close to the island.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more to put this in context:

Diplomat



> *South China Sea: What 12 Nautical Miles Does and Doesn’t Mean
> What does Washington actually hope to accomplish by sailing within 12 nm of Chinese claims in the South China Sea?*
> 
> By Graham Webster
> October 15, 2015
> 
> The U.S. Navy is reportedly preparing to conduct “freedom of navigation” (FON) operations, sending one or more surface ships within 12 nautical miles (nm) of Chinese-claimed features in the South China Sea. The administration has been pressured to go ahead with this demonstration of U.S. views on conduct at sea, but the terms of the public debate have failed to match the legal and political implications.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *One U.S. objective might be to force China’s government to make explicit claims in the language of UNCLOS, claims that could later be challenged through mandatory dispute resolution under the convention by a state that has actually ratified it.* U.S. requests in official and unofficial forums for China to clarify its claims have not produced results, so FON operations could be intended to further that goal. Disrupting China’s ambiguity carries risk, however, since Chinese officials might find themselves forced into maximalist claims that public opinion would make it hard to walk back.
> 
> *Another U.S. objective could be to continue the longstanding U.S. practice of FON operations while being seen to be “doing something” about China’s South China Sea activities that are objectionable to other claimants and regional states.* This desire to have U.S. efforts be seen publicly fuels suggestions from non-authoritative Chinese sources, such as retired military officers and media analysts, who have said China could respond to FON operations with potentially dangerous tactics like ramming ships. If the goal were merely continuing the U.S. FON program, a quiet mission, also sailing past outposts constructed by Vietnam or other states, would have sufficed.
> 
> *U.S. officials may believe the Chinese strategy has been to change the “facts on the water” while avoiding specific claims that might not find support under international law.* If so, the risk of locking Chinese officials into a maximalist claim, or provoking a potentially dangerous response, might be deemed acceptable. If this is the case, the United States might do better to engage in a joint patrol with an ally who is a member of UNCLOS, since that state could potentially avail itself of dispute resolution under the convention. The advance publicity given to U.S. deliberations could also allow Chinese authorities to prepare to challenge the United States peacefully and avoid catching local security forces off-guard.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

This article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, is a couple of days old but it germane to SMA's post just above:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2015-10-12/all-good-fon


> All in Good FON
> *Why Freedom of Navigation Is Business as Usual in the South China Sea*
> 
> By Mira Rapp-Hooper
> 
> October 12, 2015
> 
> By all appearances, the U.S. Navy is poised to begin Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea. Rumors first emerged in May 2015 that the Pentagon was contemplating military operations around China’s new artificial islands among the Spratly Islands. Through such exercises, the United States would aim to demonstrate that it does not recognize spurious Chinese claims to water and airspace around the islands. So far, the Department of Defense has declined to make moves near China’s so-called Great Wall of Sand. The administration has, however, consistently stated that there are U.S. national interests in freedom of navigation and overflight in this vital waterway, where $5 trillion of global trade passes each year. With the presidential summit between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping now complete, operations seem imminent.
> 
> At the very least, the public debate about South China Sea Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) has already begun. Already, two myths about their role in U.S. foreign policy have emerged. The first is that they are a strict alternative to diplomacy with China. According to a Politico article, this narrative holds that there are some “military leaders who want to exercise their freedom of navigation” while diplomats are demurring in the interest of continued diplomacy with China. The second misconception is that they would challenge China’s claims to territory in the Spratly Islands. Even the best reporting on these exercises suggests, as did a recent Wall Street Journal article, that the purpose of FONOPS is to “directly contest Chinese territorial claims.”
> 
> Combined, these two misconceptions suggest that U.S. FONOPS would be a serious escalation by Washington in the South China Sea. As the history of the Freedom of Navigation Program and its relationship to international law make clear, however, such operations would complement U.S. diplomacy and, although they would contest China’s claims to water and airspace under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), they would not contest its claims to territory. If the Obama administration decides to begin these exercises in the coming days, there are a few ways for it to signal that FONOPS are simply business as usual.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Scott Swift stands in front of a large poster of an Australian Navy frigate
> as he prepares to hold a media conference at the 2015 Pacific International Maratime Exposition in Sydney, Australia,
> October 6, 2015. In a strongly worded address, Swift said the United States remained "as committed as ever" to protect
> freedom of navigation through the region._
> 
> REPUTATION FOR FON
> 
> Freedom of navigation operations have long been a part of U.S. foreign policy. In 1801–1805, an embryonic U.S. Navy saw its first action protecting American overseas commercial interests in the Barbary Wars, when pirates demanded that the Jefferson administration pay tribute so that merchant ships could pass through the Mediterranean Sea. It was not until 1979, however, under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, that the mission was formalized into a freedom of navigation program. The U.S. FON program was developed in conjunction with UNCLOS and was officially established a year later. Although Washington is not a signatory to UNCLOS, the goal of the FON program has always been to promote international adherence to it. The FON program does so by challenging “excessive claims” to maritime and air space that do not conform with the convention.
> 
> The Department of State and Department of Defense jointly oversee the FON program, which has three major components. The State Department files diplomatic protests of excessive claims; State and Defense consult with their international counterparts on claims’ consistency with international law and work with the through military-to-military engagements; and Defense conducts what it calls “operational assertions,” through which it demonstrates physically the United States’ nonrecognition of excessive claims.
> 
> Although there is no open source repository of data on the exact frequency and location of the Pentagon’s FONOPS, available figures indicate that the United States uses the tool quite frequently, particularly in Asia. The Department of Defense challenged 19 excessive claims worldwide in 2013 and 35 claims in 2014. Of those 35, 19 were located in the U.S. Pacific Command’s geographic region of responsibility. And they were equal opportunity challenges; in 2013–2014, the Department conducted FONOPS of various forms against China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—each of the countries that occupies territory in the South China Sea.
> 
> Despite these facts, the debate in Washington has persisted in the idea that FONOPS are extraordinary measures above and beyond diplomacy. Reports have suggested that U.S. military commanders support South China Sea FONOPS, whereas the White House and the Pentagon have been hesitant to pursue them. Others have argued that the Obama administration has preferred the State Department’s “creative diplomacy” to the use of FONOPS, suggesting that there is room for only one agency or approach to engaging China’s island building in the South China Sea. But diplomacy and FONOPS are complementary tools, not stark alternatives, and a decision to begin FONOPS should not be seen as a victory for military over civilian leaders, or as a sign that diplomatic efforts have been exhausted.
> 
> For their part, Chinese officials have stated that they would interpret U.S. exercises within 12 nautical miles of the features they hold in the Spratlys as provocative challenges to Chinese sovereignty. Beijing has every reason to imply that it would respond harshly to any maneuvers. The trouble is that the same misconception about the purpose of FONOPS has been proffered in Washington as well.
> In a recent Senate hearing, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued that Washington’s failure to transit within 12 nautical miles of China’s claims “grants de facto recognition” of them. A report soon followed with the headline “McCain: U.S. Should Ignore China’s Claims in South China Sea.” This was likely not the message the Senator intended to convey, but reporting has consistently suggested that FONOPS would be used to push back against China’s claims to territory. The United States, however, has a long-standing policy that it does not take a position on other countries’ sovereignty disputes. FONOPS are meant to challenge excessive claims to water and airspace; they do not challenge territorial claims.
> 
> In other words, the FONOPS reality is both considerably more nuanced and far less escalatory than the popular narrative suggests.
> 
> FON WITH OBAMA
> 
> In the aftermath of the Obama-Xi summit and with Beijing firmly committed to its position that it will continue to build what it likes in the Spratly Islands, Washington may begin FONOPS in the area in the coming days or weeks. If it does so, the basic facts of the Freedom of Navigation Program and of UNCLOS should serve as reminders that these operations do not represent a significant change in U.S. policy in the South China Sea.
> 
> First, under UNCLOS’ principle of innocent passage, foreign navies are entitled to transit within a state’s 12-nautical-mile territorial sea, as long as that vessel does nothing that is prejudicial to peace. Put differently, even if the United States didrecognize China’s sovereignty in the Spratlys, which it does not, international law permits it to pass peacefully nearby. China exercised this right in early September, when it transited U.S. territorial waters in the Bering Sea. The International Court of Justice has affirmed that this and operations like FONOPS are consistent with the right of innocent passage.
> 
> Second, precisely because the South China Sea territories are disputed, and because Washington does not take a position on such sovereignty disputes, it need not recognize territorial seas or airspace around any of China’s artificial features—or those of any other countries. In short, territorial seas are a function of recognized state sovereignty, and where that sovereignty is disputed, vessels and aircraft may pass freely.
> 
> Third, even if China’s Spratly holdings were uncontested, the fact remains that Beijing’s seven island features are artificial. Under UNCLOS, man-made islands do not confer territorial seas or airspace. Rather, they are granted only a 500-meter safety zone. In China’s case, before its building spree, at least three of its seven artificial islands were low-tide elevations or reefs, rather than rocks or islands. Under international law, these features are not even subject to sovereignty claims—by China, or by anyone else. By this logic, even without persistent sovereignty disputes, Mischief Reef, Gaven Reef, and Subi Reef would not be entitled to water or airspace of their own, and therefore may be especially appropriate features around which to transit.
> 
> As Washington prepares to conduct FONOPS, there are two steps it can take to show that these exercises are not escalatory but are usual practice in the global commons. First, Washington should alert countries in the region about its plans and should ask for their public support where possible. Australia, India, and Japan have all recently expressed serious concern that China’s island building will threaten freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Their public support for U.S. maneuvers would demonstrate that this is not an issue of U.S.-Chinese tit-for-tat but a matter of regional diplomacy and rule of law.
> Second, whether the Pentagon decides to operate within 12 nautical miles of only those Chinese features that were previously reefs, or opts to transit near other Chinese artificial islands too, it should conduct FONOPS around other claimants’ features as well, including low-lying reefs that are controlled by the Philippines or rocks held by Malaysia or Vietnam. Given that these countries are themselves gravely concerned about freedom of navigation and have expressed a willingness to sign on to recent U.S. diplomatic proposals to halt destabilizing activities in the South China Sea, it is unlikely that they would object to inclusion in this demonstration of legal principle.
> 
> U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter declared in May that the United States would continue to “fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows,” and the Obama administration reiterated this pledge to Xi in September. Spratly Islands FONOPS are entirely consistent with this position. By soliciting the support of other regional states and conducting exercises around the features of multiple claimants, Washington can reinforce this program’s long history and record. Freedom of navigation is just business as usual in the South China Sea.




There is, still, considerable, room for both misunderstandings/miscommunications, accidental or intentional, and incorrect responses, both American and Chinese, to FON exercises.


----------



## CougarKing

What possible military advantage would Taiwan have in using missiles to target huge population centres on the mainland such as Hong Kong or Shanghai in the event of a war with China? Missiles are a far cry from WW2-era carpet bombing.

Especially with the thousands of Taiwanese expatriate businessmen who live and work on the mainland in such areas.

Shanghaiist



> *PLA decides that now is the time to base surface-to-air missiles in Hong Kong*
> 
> China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) is building a surface-to-air missile defense facility at a Hong Kong base. The facility based in Shek Tong is expected to be completed in December, and will reportedly be able to intercept missiles launched from the US and Taiwan.
> 
> According to Apple Daily, the facility will include* six HQ-6 surface-to-air mobile missile launchers* that can deliver projectiles up to 12,000 meters. It will also include a search radar that can track up to 60 aerial targets as far as 50km away and attack four them simultaneously.
> 
> The SCMP reports that according to Anthony Wong Dong, a Macau-based military observer, the deployment is not political in nature. Instead he suggests that the PLA are merely improving Hong Kong's defenses given it has long been too weak in its anti-aircraft capabilities.
> 
> According to Wong, *this deployment is long overdue given the fact that the 1990s the Taiwanese government refused to rule out an attack on Shanghai and Hong Kong in the event of war. *A war which the PLA have already been practicing for.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I have rattled on several times over the past few years about "grassroots democracy" and local elections in China. I have explained that the Chinese leadership, the small handful of middle-aged men (they're all men right now) in the _Zhongnanhai_ in Beijing don't believe that our, Western _liberal_ democracy works ...

               (Parenthetically, when they see this



who can blame them?)

... they are, in the main, _Confucians_ by education and instinct and they continue the 2,500 year long search for a _meritocratic_ form of government.

One of the problems is that the _meritocracy_ is very, very hard to implement and, just as we know that not all platoon commanders, even most, platoon commanders, are going to turn into a Gen Vance, many of the "leaders" selected to earn their spurs at the bottom of the heap in the CCP structure, as local neighbourhood or village chiefs, fail. This is especially true in the rural villages when, too often, the man (or woman ~ there is an increasing number of women at all but the most senior levels in the CCP), often from a city, just recently graduated from a university, cannot make an old, dilapidated agricultural enterprise work. Then, the Chinese turn to local elections ... which appear to me (I have seen one, close up) to be quite "free and fair." Sometimes (often? usually?) the Party runs a candidate, often the one who just failed (as a sort of punishment/humiliation, I think), but the locals are allowed to nominate their own choices and, more often than not, that local choice wins. Whether or not the "freely elected" leader does any better than an appointed one is an open question. To the best of my knowledge (which may be very imperfect) local elections have been confined, exclusively, to very small towns and villages in rural regions.

Anyway, until now, all I've had to post are my personal observations and the reports of friends, but here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_ (a pretty solid source) is an article on the subject by someone who has carefully researched the subject:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-10-14/country-lessons


> Country Lessons
> *A Rural Incubator for China’s Political Reform?*
> 
> By Salvatore Babones
> 
> October 14, 2015
> 
> In the spring of 1989, students from Beijing's elite universities protested in Tiananmen Square to demand democratic reform. The military crackdown and repression that followed were not limited to Beijing, and its victims were not only students. But the Tiananmen movement of 1989 has nevertheless gone down in history as one of the world's great student movements for democracy.
> 
> In China and elsewhere, democratic student movements often disappoint. From revolutionary France and postcolonial Africa to Weimar Germany and today’s Iraq, history has shown that stable democracies can be built only on a broad base of politically educated citizens—ordinary people who believe that democratic decision-making and the rotation of leaders into and out of power are both normal and fair.
> 
> Democratic norms, of course, must be learned. And although they are often learned first by urban elites, it's no good having democratic leaders without a democratic society. If democracy flowers in urban squares such as Tiananmen, then it must also be rooted in the countryside. Even in rapidly urbanizing China, most people are still no more than one generation removed from the land—and so it is in China’s villages, through local elections and popular protests, that potentially transformative democratic habits might be forming.
> 
> RURAL ROOTS
> 
> Western political philosophers have romanticized the virtues of the countryside for millennia. In the Politics, Aristotle claimed that farmers make the best raw material for participation in representative democracies because they are too busy working to meddle in government. Romans of the early Republic revered the citizen-farmer Cincinnatus. And Thomas Jefferson believed so strongly in the political class of the small farmer that the very term "Jeffersonian democracy" has come to mean a republican government founded on the universal (white, male) suffrage of a largely agricultural population.
> 
> In India, Mahatma Gandhi looked to traditional village councils as the training grounds for democratic life. India's post-independence rulers discarded Gandhi's vision in favor of the centralization of power at the national level. After three major wars, two separatist insurgencies, and a 21-month suspension of the rule of law, in 1992 India returned to Gandhi's vision and reinstated village councils.
> 
> China, too, has elected village councils. Democratic experiments begun in the 1980s were suspended after 1989, but they resumed in the mid-1990s. After 1998, the direct election of village-level representatives was in principle rolled out nationwide. By law, these posts are contested on secret ballots.
> 
> These elections are generally free and fair, if lackluster. Indeed, most village elections are sleepy occasions firmly under the control of local Communist Party bosses: the party recruits and vets the candidates, and in the years since agricultural taxes were abolished in 2006, there has been little to fight over. Only rarely does a village election flare into national prominence because of a dispute over environmental pollution or land grabbing.
> 
> Still, since the late 1990s, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have participated in a quiet triennial ritual in which they choose their local leaders. Of course, corrupt incumbents representing entrenched interests often stay in office without real opposition. But even officials such as these are learning to become more responsive to popular opinion, and on occasion, local authorities have even been thrown out of office by angry voters.
> 
> In some ways, village elections are merely a tool used by the undemocratic Chinese Communist Party to keep watch over local functionaries. But even if the specific outcomes of China's village elections are not very important for the future of democracy at the national level, the democratic norms being developed in the villages are. Chinese villagers are learning that elections are the way leaders are chosen and that if they make enough fuss, they can even fire their leaders. The significance of these lessons should not be minimized—and they are perhaps best learned in circumstances like China's village elections, where the choices on offer are limited and the stakes are relatively low.
> 
> EDUCATION IN DEMOCRACY
> 
> China's limited education in electoral democracy is restricted to rural areas, but that doesn't mean that only rural residents have a stake in village elections. Although nearly 55 percent of China's population lives in cities, some 65 percent of Chinese nevertheless have rural hukou, or household registrations, which determine the allocation of many state services. In other words, nearly two-thirds of China's population is formally tied to rural villages. And many rural-urban migrants—who constitute around 36 percent of China's urban population—have one child living with relatives in the countryside. China's new urbanites thus have enduring ties to the land.
> 
> Another large segment of China's population lives in formerly rural villages that have suddenly found themselves on the edges of China's growing cities. Such settlements can be breeding grounds for grievances encouraged by rapid urbanization. In a highly publicized incident in 2011, residents of the eastern village of Wukan publicly protested the corrupt transfer of land rights to developers from nearby Lufeng, a rapidly growing city infamous as the illegal drug capital of China. In the village elections that followed, the sitting administration was decisively defeated.
> 
> According to Chinese government reports, tens of thousands of such "mass incidents"—official jargon for unauthorized gatherings of 100 or more people—have occurred since the early 1990s. Most are sparked by wage disputes, land seizures, or environmental pollution. Nearly half of them have involved protests against specific political officials.
> 
> Wage disputes overwhelmingly concern rural-urban migrants, and land seizures are highly concentrated in the villages of China's urban fringes. No one knows for sure the extent to which the experience of village elections prompted the participants in these protests to stand up for their rights—if at all. But rural-urban migrants are a massive and growing segment of the Chinese population, and many of their children are still forced by their hukou to experience village life firsthand. Might not the democratic norms developed in villages carry over to cities, where so many democratic movements have taken shape?
> 
> Rural-urban migrants have served as a democratizing force in the past, most notably in nineteenth-century England. On August 16, 1819, tens of thousands of pro-democracy activists gathered in Manchester and throughout Lancashire, in England’s northwest, to demand greater representation for the county’s townspeople. Most of these demonstrators were recent transplants from farm to city; the keynote speaker in Manchester, the radical politician Henry Hunt, was the son of a country squire. As the assembly in Manchester grew, the authorities panicked, ordering the cavalry to charge on the crowd. Around a dozen people were killed in what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre. As with the aftermath of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the immediate outcome of the Peterloo Massacre, which is widely regarded as the seminal event of the British parliamentary reform movement, was repression rather than reform. Change didn't come until 1832, when the city of Manchester finally achieved representation in Parliament. And universal suffrage came much later, in 1918 for adult men and some women and in 1928 for all adults. It took 99 years for the United Kingdom to progress from the first major confrontation of the parliamentary reform movement to universal male suffrage.
> 
> THE PACE OF CHANGE
> 
> It took China just 35 years to make up for the economic costs of a century and a half of colonialism, occupation, civil war, and centralized maladministration. This raises the question of whether political reform in China could proceed at a similar pace. Of course, if real democracy ever comes to China, it won't come from a Tiananmen-style revolution, and it won't come from top-down reform. It will come the same way it did in South Korea and Taiwan: through a growing sense of entitlement among ordinary people to select their own leaders, coupled with a growing realization among authoritarian rulers that repression is ultimately unsustainable. Democracy, in short, will arrive through the slow evolution of norms.
> 
> Given that most of China's population is still close to the land, village democracy is an important force for normative change. Rural children born in 1980 are now the veterans of half a dozen regular election cycles. Equally at home in country and city, they have also become accustomed to the mundane freedoms of consumer choice and online criticism. Networked by social media, they are increasingly aware of and demanding their rights under Chinese law. The Chinese government has so far been reluctant to violently suppress their protests.
> 
> Today, these urban dwellers are still outnumbered by their more cautious elders. But by 2017 or 2018, the post-1980 generations will make up a majority of the Chinese population, and a decade later, they will make up a majority of the adult population. By 2040, they will be running the country. If this generation chooses to pursue democratic reform, the seemingly empty gesture of village elections will in retrospect seem highly consequential. China's market reforms grew out of its villages. Perhaps its political reforms will, too.




Edit: typo


----------



## CougarKing

The latest on China's ECS ADIZ as well as the other planned ADIZ for the SCS/South China Sea.

Diplomat



> *An ADIZ with Chinese Characteristics
> Australia must join other countries in the region in protecting its right of overflight.*
> 
> By Alice Slevison
> October 19, 2015
> 
> While China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over disputed waters in the East China Sea (ECS) caught many by surprise,* today’s debate circles around the likelihood that Beijing might take the same action over the South China Sea (SCS)*. In its pursuit of maritime primacy in Northeast Asia, China has strayed far from the international norms that dictate the implementation and use of an ADIZ.
> 
> An ADIZ is an airspace beyond a country’s sovereign territory within which the state requires the identification, location, and air traffic control of aircraft in the interests of national security. The mechanism is a legacy of the Cold War, having first been declared by the U.S. in 1950. More than 20 states now administer their own ADIZ.
> 
> According to the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, when entering the zone, such as the one declared over the ECS, all aircraft are required to identify themselves, report flight plans, and inform ground control of their exact position. Such regulations apply to commercial aircraft as well as military aircraft. On the latter count, China’s ADIZ fails to uphold the normative principle that military aircraft simply transiting through an ADIZ shouldn’t be obliged to report to the host country. China has threatened to meet non-compliance with “military defensive measures.” The U.S. State Department was highly critical of the coercive measure, claiming that “the U.S. does not apply its ADIZ procedures to foreign aircraft not intending to enter the U.S. national airspace.” The State Department urged China “not to implement its threat to take actions against aircraft that do not identify themselves or obey orders from Beijing.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Although the streets of London are filled with civil rights protesters,          the Queen welcomes Paramount Leader Xi Jinping with the mix of informality and pomp and
                                                                                                                                                                                                           circumstance that the Brits carry off so well


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Financial Times, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper, says that Washington and London are "diverging" on how to deal with China ... and Washington is not amused:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/69c2c230-76dd-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html?ftcamp=social/free_to_read/uk_china_us/twitter/awareness/editorial&segid=0100320#axzz3p74B4mIH


> US takes stern line on UK’s shift to China
> 
> Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
> 
> October 20, 2015
> 
> Just before Xi Jinping visited the US last month, President Barack Obama warned that he was prepared to sanction China over cyber crime. His stern message stood in contrast to the stance in the UK ahead of the Chinese leader’s visit this week, which saw officials haggle over whether the Sino-British relationship had entered a “golden decade” or a “golden era”.
> 
> The US and UK both lined up suitable pomp for Chinese leader. Mr Xi was feted with a 21-gun salute at the White House and a state banquet. In Britain, he will dine at Buckingham Palace and address parliament.
> But China experts in Washington say that in almost every other way, the two Atlantic allies have diverged in the way they treat the rising Pacific power.
> 
> Evan Medeiros, head of the Asia practice at Eurasia Group and a former top Asia adviser to Mr Obama, says Britain is misguided in its China approach.
> 
> “If there is one truism in managing relations with a rising China, it is that if you give in to Chinese pressure, it will inevitably lead to more Chinese pressure,” he says.
> 
> “London is playing a dangerous game of tactical accommodation in the hopes of economic benefits, which could lead to more problems down the line.”
> 
> While the US tries to strike a balance between pushing for a constructive relationship and chastising China over issues from human rights to cyber espionage to aggressive action in the South China Sea, David Cameron, the UK prime minister, and George Osborne, his chancellor, have been accused of selling out to boost trade and win Chinese investment.
> 
> During a much criticised recent visit to Xinjiang, the Chinese province where the Communist party has persecuted the ethnic locals, Mr Osborne said he wanted to “take a risk” with the China relationship, in an approach that Washington sees as appeasing China for economic advantage.
> 
> “What is concerning is the message that has been sent that commerce and economic co-operation is the only metric that will guide the UK’s policy towards China,” says Tom Wright, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution.
> 
> While the US is worried about the “Hollandisation” of Britain — abandoning the pursuit of power as it spends less on defence and steps back from playing a role on the international stage — officials are particularly disconcerted with its stance on China.
> 
> The British Foreign Office rejected suggestions the UK was sacrificing its principles for trade, saying the government was “committed to engaging with China on human rights and ministers will continue to raise our human rights concerns with counterparts”.
> 
> US-UK ties suffered in March when the Obama administration lambasted Britain’s “constant accommodation” of China. The rebuke came after the UK gave the White House little notice that it would become the first G7 country to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a $50bn lending institution that China founded to counter the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
> 
> “The thing that upset us was that it was done in almost zero consultation with the US,” says a former administration official. “Britain didn’t just undermine the US. It undermined the entire G7.”
> 
> The UK stance marks a turning point from 2012 when Mr Cameron met the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, prompting China to freeze out British officials for more than a year.
> 
> “The Chinese very effectively played hardball against the British,” says one former senior US official. “There was a major rethink at the highest levels of the UK government that we were going to fall over ourselves to send a signal that we want a good relationship with China. It’s a pretty un-British thing to do.”
> 
> Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, says Mr Cameron looks weak in comparison to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who has been more willing to raise human rights issues with Beijing.
> 
> “She started early on, she was unapologetic, and the Chinese got used to it,” says Ms Richardson.
> 
> Chris Johnson, a former top China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, also questions the UK approach but says Britain is at a disadvantage compared with the US when dealing with China because while
> “Barack Obama can stand next to Xi Jinping and tell him the ways in which he sucks, UK leaders cannot do that”.
> 
> But he adds Britain needs to be careful about the investments it seeks from China. He says China is engaging in what Mao Zedong described as “capture the countryside and then take the cities,”, referring to the way Chinese companies are making inroads into critical sectors.
> 
> Huawei this year got the green light to invest in Britain after a panel concluded it did not pose a security risk, a different situation from the US where it faces huge mistrust.
> 
> China and the UK will this week announce that Chinese companies will take a one-third stake in a UK nuclear project.
> 
> Patrick Cronin, an Asia expert at the Center for a New American Security, says the UK needs to be careful to maintain a balance between national security and economic interests, particularly as China targets areas such as energy, telecoms and finance.
> 
> “There is a growing concern in Washington about China’s intentions with respect to deepening ties with our key ally in Britain,” says Mr Cronin. “The Chinese are definitely insinuating themselves way into the inner sanctum of the British national security [world] through these investments.”
> 
> One congressional staffer says the US is concerned that the UK is not acting as a strong ally in terms of sticking up for international norms, something that is particularly pertinent as the US prepares to challenge Chinese claims to sovereignty in disputed waters in the South China Sea.
> 
> “I don’t think there are any immediate consequences even if you buy into the view that Cameron is bringing the UK into an era of golden irrelevance,” he says. “But if this is a glide path over the next decade towards the Hollandisation of the UK, then that will have implications and we will have to reassess not just on Asia but on a number of areas.”




I'm pretty certain that the USA, _official Washington_ (the government: White House, State Department, Pentagon and the Congress) and the _government in waiting_ ('unofficial Washington:' the Congress (again) K Street (the lobbyists) and the think tanks) has its collective head up its ass regarding China.

China is not "rising" any more; it has risen; it's here as a great, soon to be global power with its own vital interests which it will promote and protect, as all nations, great and small, should.

The US, including the American people, are still caught up in the _myth_ of American exceptionalism, _special providence_, call it what you will. America is exceptional, as Rome _was_, as Spain and Britain _were_; great powers, generally, get one chance, only at being great ... China might be the exception, it was a superpower 2,000 years ago and, again, 1,000+ years ago (_Tang_ Dynasty) and 500 years ago (_Ming_ Dynasty), too, but it's status went unnoticed because the world was not _integrated_.  Rome was not less because ~ too far away to be noticed ~ China was also a great imperial power (_Qin_ Dynasty). America, and the world, needs to 'accommodate' China as a competitor, not as an enemy.


----------



## a_majoor

Considering Obama's constant snubs against the UK, I'm not surprised HM's government is choosing to go their own course without too much reference to the Administration. Of course, a great deal of the world is no longer paying attention to official Washington any more (historians will probably mark the "Red Line" pronouncement against Syria as the official "best before" date). 

The unravelling of the Liberal world order (Individual freedom, unfettered use of property, Rule of Law; initially created by the British Empire and handed off the the United States in the aftermath of WWII) may well be looked at as one of history's great tragedies.


----------



## CougarKing

China using Russian space engines to further their ICBM program:

Diplomat



> *Space: China Plays the Russia Card?
> Russian engines could offer China a fast track for its ICBM capability building.*
> 
> By Kent Johnson
> October 21, 2015
> 
> Have you been watching? In August, China quietly tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), to which it attached two “simulated” warheads. This missile, alternately called the DF-41 or CSS-X-20, has been tested four times since 2012. Why do we care? Because China’s ability to launch multiple warheads – on one rocket – is a significant technological advancement. And uniquely dangerous: The proliferation of multiple Chinese warheads, or heavy-lift rockets carrying nuclear-tipped “multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles,” could put us on the fast-track to the past.
> 
> What if, hypothetically, China continued to mature this capability and accelerated ICBM testing? What if China decided to upgrade its ICBM launch capacity, or supplement it, with Russian ICBM rocket engines? And what if Russian rocket engines offered China the chance to accelerate ICBM launches, and consequently delivered a “break out” or “leap ahead” ability essential to seizing the high ground – space. The result could be militarily and politically destabilizing – even making all of the en vogue discussion about Chinese anti-access/area-denial capabilities (or A2/AD for short) with advanced missile technology look like yesterday’s news.
> 
> And yet that is the course we may be on.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Some noteworthy developments from Xi's visit, including the first two which are security-related:

Diplomat



> *China’s Dirty Money: How Dangerous Is the China-UK Nuclear Deal?*
> Is Beijing “friend or foe” in cyber nuclear joint development?
> GA
> By Greg Austin
> October 22, 2015
> 
> Pundits of all stripes in the U.K. have worked themselves into a lather over the announcement of old news that China would invest in a U.K. nuclear power plant which is due to begin producing electricity in 2025. In a visit to China last month, Chancellor George Osborne made a strategic investment agreement with Beijing for two additional nuclear power plants.
> 
> *The news has been dramatized in the media which see the danger of China’s spy agencies taking control of or damaging the operating nuclear power plant during some sort of crisis. *This produced the unusual event of GCHQ, Britain’s cyber espionage agency, saying to the press in response a week ago that it had a role in monitoring cyber security aspects of the country’s critical infrastructure. U.K. security agencies are genuinely concerned.
> 
> Throughout Asia, and in the United States, the military strategic implications of China’s expanding global investment portfolio have been a concern for some time, as the debate over Huawei investment in the United States and Australia shows. Yet BT (British Telecom) is one of Huawei’s best customers and it describes the Chinese firm as a trusted supplier of multi-billion pound contracts. In 2013, the U.K. government appears to have conceded that it did not give due security consideration to the 2005 contract with Huawei.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Philippine Star



> *The Latest: China, UK agree 'not to carry out hacking'*
> (Associated Press) | Updated October 22, 2015 - 5:46am
> 
> LONDON - The latest news on the second day of Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Britain. All times local.
> 
> 5:55 p.m.
> 
> *China and Britain have agreed not to engage in industrial hacking or cyber theft of trade secrets.
> 
> Prime Minister David Cameron says he and visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping had "open discussions" on "difficult issues" such as cyber espionage.*
> 
> His spokeswoman says there was a clear commitment by both sides "not to conduct or support the cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets or confidential business information."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



And here's another on the economic front:

Shanghaiist



> *Beijing issues first offshore yuan bond in London*
> 
> Coinciding in timely fashion with the start of President Xi's state visit to the UK, China’s central bank has issued its first RMB denominated bonds outside of China and Hong Kong in London this week.
> 
> In a major deal for China-UK economic relations, the 5 billion yuan one-year bills issued by the People's Bank of China (PBOC) attracted bids of more than RMB30bn ($4.7bn), and the resounding success of the auction has led to speculation that China's finance ministry will announce a second longer-dated bond in due course.
> 
> Spencer Lake, global head of capital financing at HSBC,* hailed the bond as a milestone in the accelerating internationalization of the renminbi*. “This strategic move demonstrates the clear commitment by the Chinese authorities to grow the offshore bond market and the confidence in the City of London as a leading renminbi hub for future activities,” he said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China using Russian space engines to further their ICBM program:
> 
> Diplomat



Orbital Technologies and ULA have been hamstrung by their dependence on Russian Rocket engines, so this is a two edged sword.


----------



## Edward Campbell

There is another "Asian Pivot" underway as the UK tries to catch up with others according to this article which is reproduced under the the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Ted Economist_:

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21676773-america-not-only-country-can-pivot-british-government-makes-big-bet-asias


> The British government makes a big bet on Asia’s rising power
> *America is not the only country that can pivot*
> 
> Oct 22nd 2015 | Britain
> 
> TWO previous Chinese presidents have been granted state visits to Britain, in 1999 and 2005, but on neither occasion was the red carpet rolled out with quite so much gusto as it was for Xi Jinping this week. As well as the usual pomp, pageantry and banquets in white tie at Buckingham Palace and the Guildhall in the City of London, there was an almost bewildering variety of official visits to squeeze into the president’s four-day trip, from universities to football clubs, from London to Manchester. Mr Xi even addressed both houses of Parliament, a privilege reserved for very few dignitaries.
> 
> Rarely has a visiting head of state been granted such a tour—but then rarely has a British government staked so much on one relationship. While many Western countries, including America, still prefer to keep the people’s republic at arm’s length, ready to trade with the world’s second-largest economy but not much else, Britain is positively embracing China, hailing the start of a “golden era” in relations.
> 
> During Mr Xi’s visit the two countries announced a string of deals that aim to position Britain as China’s principal interlocutor with the West, adding a significant new dimension to Britain’s foreign policy. “This is a long-term strategic call,” argues Robin Niblett, head of Chatham House, a think-tank. If all goes well, Britain will certainly benefit, but it is already clear that those benefits will have to be considerable if they are to outweigh the scepticism—hostility, even—that Britain’s Asian pivot has provoked among the country’s allies. Even George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer and principal proponent of the pivot, has said it is a “risk”.
> 
> So what do the two former antagonists, on opposite sides of the cold war and imperial adversaries before that, hope to get out of this new golden era? The Chinese are not so much interested in Britain as an overseas market, with its relatively small population, but as a “great platform from which China can go global,” says Mr Niblett. In this respect, access to the City and its financial markets has become of critical importance to China’s thinking, particularly as it seeks to internationalise the yuan. As Mr Xi told Parliament, “the UK is the leading offshore trading centre outside Hong Kong,” and the City has already taken a lead with respect to offshore yuan trading. The Bank of England was the first G7 central bank to sign a swap agreement with China’s central bank; Chinese commercial banks recently sold offshore yuan-denominated bonds in the City; and on October 20th, the first full day of Mr Xi’s visit, China sold its first sovereign bond in London, worth over $4 billion.
> 
> As well as boosting Chinese liquidity, and hopes that the yuan will one day become an internationally traded currency to rival the dollar, dealing in the City will “give the Chinese enhanced credibility”, says Gary Campkin, a director of TheCityUK, a finance lobby group. That is also why the Chinese so valued Britain’s decision to become the first major Western power to join the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in March.
> 
> From Britain’s point of view, it is rather more simple. The cash-strapped chancellor needs all the inward investment he can get, particularly in infrastructure and energy, and China seems keen to oblige. Up to now, Chinese investment in Britain has been relatively modest, but this is set to change dramatically. On October 21st the government sanctioned a £6 billion ($9.3 billion) investment by a Chinese state power company in a nuclear plant being built at Hinkley Point in Somerset by the French company EDF, with the promise of more nuclear deals to come. Mr Osborne also hopes to secure Chinese money for several projects in the development of a “Northern Powerhouse” of English cities—hence Mr Xi’s side-trip to Manchester. In a further attempt to boost Chinese spending, the government has announced that it will cut the cost of two-year multiple-entry visas for Chinese tourists, who are particularly good at parting with their money in Britain.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In terms of exports to China, Britain has long lagged behind European rivals such as France and Germany (see chart), even if it has been doing considerably better with China than with other emerging markets. But, as Stephen Phillips of the China-Britain Business Council argues, as the Chinese try to rebalance their economy away from cheap manufacturing towards more sophisticated services, this might play to Britain’s competitive advantages in sectors like education, high-end engineering and scientific research. One stop on Mr Xi’s trip was Imperial College London, which announced a slew of new education and research collaborations with China.
> 
> However, the plethora of deals was accompanied by plenty of complaints about the consequences of cosying up so warmly to the authoritarian Mr Xi. Many parliamentarians are aggrieved at how far trade has come to trump any official concerns over human rights in places like Hong Kong, let alone within mainland China, including Tibet. It was left to John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, to talk about the importance of civil rights, pointedly referring to the last Asian leader to address both houses of Parliament: Aung San Suu Kyi, a campaigner for democracy in Myanmar. One Labour MP remarked that Britain was behaving “like a supplicant fawning spaniel that licks the hand that beats it.” More ominous was a drumbeat of criticism from Washington, where there are grave worries that Britain’s kowtow is separating it from America and undermining Western resolve to stand up to China in regions like the South China Sea, and on questions of human rights.
> 
> Even on the economic front, Mr Xi’s visit attracted plenty of controversy, coinciding with the announcement of painful job losses in Britain’s steel industry that are blamed on a flood of cheap Chinese imports. Nor is everyone completely comfortable with the role that China will now play in Britain’s nuclear industry. As Mr Osborne concedes, it is a pivot with risks.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Xi Jinping is going "all out" on his UK trip, and it's for british not Chinese domestic consumption ...

     
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




These are the sorts of images that dominate Chinese (state run) media:









The Chinese are wooing the Brits who they seem to see as their most likely entrée before they tackle the full European banquet.


----------



## CougarKing

China unveils its latest reversed-engineered copy (COUGH!) I mean unlicensed variant, of the Russian Su27 Flanker:

Defence Aviation



> *Shenyang J-16 Silent Flanker Chinese Intermediate Stealth Fighter*
> 
> Posted by: Larkins Dsouza February 27, 2012 8 Comments 4,600 Views
> 
> *China is developing a heavily modified variant of the J-11B code named J-16 Silent Flanker. It features stealth design like internal weapons bays, stealth-optimized engine intakes, and canted vertical fins. *It’s the race of the stealth fighters, the United States, Russia, India, Japan, India, China everyone seems to want to have a bite at it. China is trying hard to modernize and fill in their need for fourth generation fighters, meanwhile working very hard every way possible to develop it’s Fifth generation fighter capability. One such attempt is with a heavily modified and reversed engineered Sukhoi Su-27 code named Flanker by the NATO.
> 
> It seems like the Chinese have found a very much liking towards Su-27 or it seems to be a very effective platform for modification and development. Shenyang managed to convert a fourth generation Su-27 (modified into J-11B)  into a fifth generation stealth fighter called Shenyang J-16 code named Silent Flanker. This isn’t the first time a fourth generation fighter was developed into a fifth generation stealth, Boeing managed to develop a F-15 Eagle into F-15 Silent Eagle, marketed to countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea who are far from Fifth Generation fighters capabilities. So this claim of development by the Chinese seems to be very authentic.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## chanman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China unveils its latest reversed-engineered copy (COUGH!) I mean unlicensed variant, of the Russian Su27 Flanker:
> 
> Defence Aviation



Article is date-stamped early-2012. Also, all other images of the J-16 show a twin-seat aircraft in the same configuration as the Su-30. The image used in the article looks like a photoshop someone did for a RIFTS game (the result pulled by Google reverse-image search).

The photoshopper appears to have started with this image of a J-11B and trimmed the nose and fins, while adding in the dorsal spine and cockpit of a Mig-29


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese political dissident and artist Ai Wei Wei is asking the public around the world for Legos after the Lego maker refused his bulk order:  

Source:NPR


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Chinese political dissident and artist Ai Wei Wei is asking the public around the world for Legos after the Lego maker refused his bulk order:
> 
> Source:NPR




So it's Australia and Denmark, not China, that are involved, right?


----------



## CougarKing

Moving from Legos back to geopolitics...  ;D 

An update on the aforementioned FON ops in the South China Sea: the USS _Lassen_ will come close to those Chinese atolls:

*U.S. Navy to send destroyer within 12 miles of Chinese islands*

Source: Reuters



> Oct 26, 2015
> The U.S. Navy plans to send the destroyer USS Lassen within 12 nautical miles of artificial islands built by China in the South China Sea within 24 hours, in the first of a series of challenges to China's territorial claims, a U.S. defense official said on Monday.
> The patrol would occur near Subi and Mischief reefs in the Spratly archipelago, features that were formerly submerged at high tide before China began a massive dredging project to turn them into islands in 2014.
> 
> [ ...EDITED]
> Additional patrols would follow in coming weeks and could also be conducted around features that Vietnam and the Philippines have built up in the Spratlys, the official added.
> 
> 
> “This is something that will be a regular occurrence, not a one-off event,” said the official. “It’s not something that’s unique to China.”
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

_The Economist_ looks at sea power in Asia in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21674648-china-no-longer-accepts-america-should-be-asia-pacifics-dominant-naval-power-who-rules


> Sea power
> Who rules the waves?
> China no longer accepts that America should be Asia-Pacific’s dominant naval power
> 
> Oct 17th 2015 | From the print edition
> 
> IN THE next few days, out of sight of much of the world, the American navy will test the growing naval power of China. It will do so by conducting patrols within the putative 12-mile territorial zone around artificial islands that China is building in the disputed Spratly archipelago. Not since 2012 has America’s navy asserted its right under international rules to sail so close to features claimed by China. The return to such “freedom of navigation” patrolling comes after a visit to Washington by Xi Jinping, China’s president, that failed to allay concerns about the aggressive island-building in the South China Sea.
> 
> China will protest, but for now that is probably all it will do. The manoeuvres are a clear assertion of America’s sea power, which remains supreme—but no longer unchallenged. The very notion of “sea power” has a 19th-century ring to it, summoning up Nelson, imperial ambition and gunboat diplomacy. Yet the great exponent of sea power, the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who died in 1914, is still read with attention by political leaders and their military advisers today. “Control of the sea,” he wrote in 1890, “by maritime commerce and naval supremacy, means predominant influence in the world; because, however great the wealth product of the land, nothing facilitates the necessary exchanges as does the sea.”
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sea power of both the hard, naval kind and the softer kind that involves trade and exploitation of the ocean’s resources is as vital as ever. Bits and bytes move digitally, and people by air. Physical goods, though, still overwhelmingly go by sea: a whopping 90% of global trade by weight and volume. But the sea’s freedom and connectivity are not inevitable. They rely on a rules-based international system to which almost all states subscribe for their own benefit, but which in recent decades only America, in partnership with close allies, has had the means and will to police.
> 
> Since the second world war, America’s hegemonic power to maintain access to the global maritime commons has been challenged only once, and briefly. In the 1970s the Soviet Union developed an impressive-looking blue-water navy—but at a cost so huge that some historians regard it as among the factors that brought the Soviet system to collapse less than two decades later. When the cold war ended, most of that expensively acquired fleet was left to rust, abandoned in its Arctic bases.
> 
> That may now be changing. On October 7th Russia ostentatiously fired 26 cruise missiles from warships in the Caspian Sea at targets in Syria (it denied American claims that some fell in Iran). Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, milked the propaganda value: “It is one thing for the experts to be aware that Russia supposedly has these weapons, and another thing for them to see for the first time that they really do exist.” Western military planners must now contend with Russia’s demonstrated ability to hit much of Europe with low-flying cruise missiles from its own waters.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But by far the more serious naval challenger is China. From modest beginnings it has created a navy that has grown from a purely coastal outfit to a potent force in its “near-seas”, ie, within the first island chain from Japan to the Philippines (see map). It is now evolving again, into something even more ambitious. Over the past decade, long-distance operations by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) have become more frequent and technically demanding. As well as maintaining a permanent counter-piracy flotilla in the Indian Ocean, China conducts naval exercises far out in the western Pacific. Last month a group of five Chinese naval vessels passed close to the Aleutian Islands after a Russian-Chinese military exercise.
> 
> The sea’s the thing
> 
> In May China issued a military white paper that formalised the addition of what it calls “open-seas protection” to the PLAN’s “offshore-waters defence” role. A strategy that used to put local sea control first now emphasises China’s expanding economic and diplomatic influence. The primacy China once gave its land forces has ended.
> 
> The traditional mentality that land outweighs the sea must be abandoned, and great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests. It is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime force structure commensurate with its national security.
> 
> Taiwan remains at the centre of these military concerns. China seeks to develop not only the means to recover the renegade province (as it sees it), by military means if necessary, but also to fend off Taiwan’s main protector, America. China has not forgotten its humiliation in 1996 when America sent two carrier battle groups, one through the Taiwan Strait, to deter Chinese missile tests aimed at intimidating the Taiwanese government. America’s then-defence secretary, William Perry, crowed that, although China was a great military power, “the strongest military power in the western Pacific is the United States.”
> 
> China is determined to change the balance. It has invested heavily in everything from shore-based anti-ship missiles to submarines, modern maritime patrol and fighter aircraft, to try to keep America beyond the first and, ultimately, second island chains. China is also seeking the ability to patrol the choke points that give access to the Indian Ocean, through which most of its oil imports enter. About 40% comes through the Strait of Hormuz and over 80% through the Malacca Strait. Among the goals it appears to have set itself are to protect economically vital sea lanes; to constitute a dominating presence in the South and East China Seas; and to be able to intervene wherever its expanding presence abroad, whether in terms of investment or of people, may be threatened.
> 
> In August the Pentagon announced a new Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy. It stresses three objectives: to “safeguard the freedom of the seas; deter conflict and coercion; and promote adherence to international law and standards”. It confirmed that America was on schedule to “rebalance” its resources by deploying at least 60% of its naval and air forces to the Asia-Pacific by 2020, a target announced in 2012. Ray Mabus, the navy secretary, has asked Congress for an 8% increase in his budget, to $161 billion for the next fiscal year; he wants the navy to grow from 273 ships to at least 300. Some Republicans say that 350 is the right number.
> 
> Is America right to be worried? The way China is going about becoming a global maritime power differs somewhat from the Soviet Union’s great period of naval expansion. Apart from the powerful Soviet submarine fleet, the main purpose of which was strategic nuclear strike and stopping American reinforcements crossing the Atlantic to come to Europe’s aid, the Soviet navy was mostly concerned with expressing great-power status and extending Soviet influence around the world through “presence” missions that impressed allies and deterred enemies.
> 
> Power plays
> 
> These matter to China, too: a central element of what Mr Xi calls the “China dream” is its transformation into a military power that can cut a dash on the world stage. When large naval vessels exercise or enter port far from home they can be used to influence and coerce. It is understandable that a country of China’s size, history and economic clout should want some of that. Nor is it strange that China should want to prevent a possible adversary (ie, America) from operating with impunity near its own shores.
> 
> What makes China’s rise as a sea power troubling for the countries that rely on America to maintain the rules-based international order and the freedom of the seas are its behaviour and where it lies. The Indian Ocean, South China Sea and East China Sea are vital transit routes for the world economy. Eight out of ten of the world’s busiest container ports are in the region. Two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments travel across the Indian Ocean on their way to the Pacific, with 15m barrels passing through the Malacca Strait daily. Almost 30% of maritime trade goes across the South China Sea, $1.2 trillion of which is bound for America. That sea accounts for over 10% of world fisheries production and is thought to have oil and natural-gas deposits beneath its floor.
> 
> Much of this is contested, with China the biggest and most aggressive of the claimants. In the South China Sea Beijing’s territorial disputes include the Paracel Islands (with Taiwan and Vietnam); the Spratlys (with Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei) and Scarborough Shoal (with the Philippines and Taiwan). China vaguely claims sovereignty within its so-called nine-dash line over more than 90% of the South China Sea (see map). The claim was inherited from the Kuomintang government that fled to Taiwan in 1949; whether this applies only to the islands and reefs, or to all the waters within it, has never been properly explained. In the East China Sea a dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands (which Japan controls) rumbles on, though the mutual circling of coastguard vessels has become more ritualised of late.
> 
> America takes no position on these disputes, insisting only that they should be resolved through international arbitration rather than force, and that all sovereignty claims should be based on natural land features. Yet China is using its growing sea power coercively, carrying out invasive patrols, encroaching on other claimants’ waters and, most recently, creating five artificial islands in vast land-reclamation projects on previously submerged features (which, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, do not grant entitlement to the 12-mile territorial waters). These are being equipped as advanced listening posts and three are getting runways and hangars, meaning they can rapidly be put to military use.
> 
> China is not the first to build in the area. But in less than two years it has reclaimed nearly 20 times as much artificial land as rival claimants together have in the past 40. Its bases would be easy for America to neutralise; but, short of war, they allow China to project military power much farther than hitherto. No wonder America’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, recently vowed that American forces will “sail, fly and operate anywhere that international law permits”, and that those “freedom of navigation” patrols would resume.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Pentagon document notes that the PLAN now has the largest number of vessels in Asia, with more than 300 warships, submarines, amphibious ships and patrol craft. Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam can muster only about 200 between them, many of those older and less powerful than China’s (see table). This preponderance is hardly less daunting when it comes to maritime law-enforcement vessels: it has 205 compared with 147 operated by those five countries, which it often uses to stake its territorial claims while more lethal naval forces lurk over the horizon. Although nearly all the countries in dispute with China are trying to buy or build new ships, the capability gap continues to widen.
> 
> On the horizon
> 
> China could therefore threaten, if so minded, the rules and norms governing maritime boundaries and resources, freedom of navigation and the peaceful resolution of disputes. Would America be ready to face that challenge? Those who fear that America’s ultimate retreat is inevitable are almost certainly wrong. Although growing fast, China’s entire (official) defence budget is not much more than that of America’s navy alone. America has ten nuclear-powered supercarriers, one of which is permanently based in Japan. China has just one, a small, refurbished Soviet-era affair, and two more under construction. All three of America’s latest Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers (pictured), the world’s most advanced surface warships, will be deployed in the Asia-Pacific region along with other new ships and aircraft. Chinese military experts believe that the PLAN will take another 30 years to match the efficiency of the American navy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> America also has the advantage of having other navies to work with and alongside, both in the region and globally. Japan’s Maritime Self-Defence Force lacks power-projection, but is regarded as the fifth-best navy in the world and is used to exercising with the American navy. The relaxation of national-security laws last month, allowing the Japanese navy to co-operate much more closely with allies on a greater range of missions, went down badly in Beijing. And Japan is working hard with regional neighbours who are in territorial disputes with China. It has made soft loans to the Philippines and Vietnam for new patrol vessels and older destroyers.
> 
> The Indian navy is another powerful ally. As concern about China has grown, it has started to drill with Western navies, who rate its competence highly. The annual Malabar exercise with the American navy now also includes ships from Australia, Singapore and, this year for the first time, Japan. The newish government of Narendra Modi is aiming for a 200-ship navy by 2027, with three carrier task groups and nuclear-powered submarines.
> 
> Catching up with the PLAN is impossible, but the Indian navy is determined to stop the Indian Ocean becoming a “Chinese lake”. Indian strategists have long believed that China is establishing a network of civilian port facilities and underwriting littoral infrastructure projects to boost its vessels’ ability to operate in waters which the Indian government thinks should be under its dominion. China now often sends its nuclear-powered submarines into the Indian Ocean.
> 
> China has benefited as much as any other country from the hegemonic power of the American navy to preserve peace in the Asia-Pacific region. This has helped its remarkable growth. Yet it seems determined to challenge that order. It is understandable that China should want to make it riskier for the American navy to operate close to its own littoral. And for a country that wants a “new type of great power relationship”, relying on America to police the seas is demeaning, though the notion that America and its allies are threatening to blockade the sea lanes of communication that are the arteries of China’s, and the world’s, trade is fanciful in any scenario short of war. But should it ever come to war over, say, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, China will want to deny America the ability to come to Taiwan’s aid, or at least delay it. The flip-side is that by developing a navy which intimidates its neighbours, China is driving them ever more closely into America’s embrace.
> 
> Moreover, being a strong but still second-best sea power can result in disastrous miscalculation. Germany challenged British naval supremacy early in the 20th century by provoking ruinously expensive competition in battleship construction. But it was still powerless to break Britain’s blockade during the first world war. As for Japan, six months after its surprise attack on Pearl Harbour during the second world war, it lost the decisive battle of Midway and with it a large part of the fleet it had built with such hubris.
> 
> There is nothing wrong with China regarding a powerful blue-water navy as essential to its prestige and self-image, particularly if it eventually concludes that it should be used to reinforce international rules rather than undermine them. The worry is that China itself may not know what it will do, and that the temptation to use it for more than flag-waving, diplomatic signalling and discreet bullying will become hard to resist. As Mahan observed: “The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war.” It does not have to be like that, but America must prepare for the worst.
> 
> _From the print edition: International_




I remain convinced that China's strategic aims are to:

     1. Be the undisputed "great power" in Asia ~ all of Asia;

     2. Persuade (or, perhaps, just wait patiently for) America to remove all it's military presence from the Asian mainland; and

     3. Secure the sort of global prestige that being a major naval power (being able to "project power") confers.


----------



## CougarKing

Gotta love China's hypocrisy on this as they engaged in a dispute against the Philippines over the South China Sea on the International Court/UN:: should we be surprised?

Diplomat



> *Did China Just Hack the International Court Adjudicating Its South China Sea Territorial Claims?
> 
> Sometimes context and timing can be damning evidence.*
> By Jason Healey and Anni Piiparinen
> October 27, 2015
> 
> Attribution for cyberattacks is said to be notoriously difficult, but sometimes context and timing are damning evidence.
> 
> In July, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague conducted a hearing on the territorial dispute in the South China Sea between the Philippines and China. On the third day of the hearing, the Court’s website was suddenly knocked offline. The attack, made public by Bloomberg last week, reportedly originated from China and infected the page with malware, leaving anyone interested in the landmark legal case at risk of data theft.
> 
> The two countries are in the midst of a decades-long dispute over the Scarborough Shoal and other territories in the South China Sea, which should come as no surprise to readers of The Diplomat. Just in case, here’s the backstory: In a precedent-setting turn this summer, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration began hearing a case brought by the Philippines that argues that China’s territorial claims violate international law under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
> 
> In an attempt to deter the Chinese expansion, “the Philippines is asking the court to rule on the validity of China’s nine-dash line as a maritime claim; the status of individual features that China occupies; and Beijing’s interference in Philippine activities in the South China Sea.” If successful, the Philippines’ legal challenge might set a precedent for other Southeast Asian countries to non-militarily wrestle China over the disputed waters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Ian Bremmer, CEO of the Eurasia Group has posted a little map showing the contested islands (and islets and rocks) in just one group, the Spratlys, which lie just off the Philippines island of Palawan:






You can see that five counties have, in some way or another, _occupied_ some of the "islands," and three countries, China, Taiwan and Vietnam have "developed" some of the islands, while the Philippines have an old construction airfield on an island in the Subi Reef group.


----------



## CougarKing

As expected:

Philippine Star



> *China summons US ambassador to protest ship near reef*
> By Christopher Bodeen and Robert Burns (Associated Press) | Updated October 28, 2015 - 8:41pm
> 
> BEIJING — China summoned the American ambassador to protest the U.S. Navy's sailing of a warship close to one of China's artificial islands in the South China Sea, in an act that challenged Chinese sovereignty claims.
> 
> China's Foreign Ministry said on its website Wednesday that Executive Vice Minister Zhang Yesui told Max Baucus that the U.S. had acted in defiance of repeated Chinese objections and had threatened China's sovereignty and security. While offering no details, Zhang said Tuesday's "provocative" maneuver also placed personnel and infrastructure on the island in jeopardy.
> 
> China was "extremely dissatisfied and a resolutely opposed" the U.S. actions, the ministry said. The U.S. State Department declined to confirm the Tuesday meeting, or comment on any remarks made on the issue.
> 
> China says authorities monitored and warned the destroyer USS Lassen as it entered what China claims as a 12-mile (21-kilometer) territorial limit around Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands archipelago, a group of reefs, islets, and atolls where the Philippines has competing claims.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)





> Plus more, reposted from another forum:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The US flags on this map point to the location where the US Navy warship USS _Lassen_ passed within 12 miles of the artificial islands re Subi Reef (Zamora Reef) and Mischief Reef (Panganiban Reef)
> 
> Plus here's a disposition of which nations occupy and claim which islets/atolls:


----------



## CougarKing

Plus the latest intrigue on the espionage and counterintelligence front:

Defense News



> *China Accused of Trying To Acquire Fighter Engines, UAV*
> By Wendell Minnick 12:28 a.m. EDT October 28, 2015
> 
> TAIPEI — China attempted to acquire advanced US fighter aircraft engines and a UAV, according to US Federal Court documents unsealed last week. The case is being heard in Florida.
> 
> The documents allege that Wenxia "Wency" Man and Xinsheng Zhang *attempted to acquire and export to China the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper UAV, the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine used on the F-35 stealth fighter, the P&W F119 engine used on the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, and the General Electric F110 engine used on the F-15 and F-16 fighters.*
> 
> An undercover Homeland Security Investigations special agent thwarted their effort. The items are restricted for export under US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. China has been on the list since 1990. The undercover operation was begun in 2011, according to documents.
> 
> *Man was born in China and became a US citizen in 2006. She was arrested Sept. 1, but Zhang remains a "fugitive" and is believed to be in China.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest news, plus more food for thought in the 2nd article which surprisingly shows that even China benefits from the USN FONOPS, ironically:

(even if I sometimes take Diplomat writer Dingding Chen's articles with a grain of salt given his pro-China bias in some cases)

Diplomat



> *Top US, Chinese Naval Officials Meet to Discuss South China Sea Tensions*
> 
> Top officials from the U.S. and Chinese navies will meet to discuss recent tensions in the South China Sea.
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> October 29, 2015
> 
> Admiral Wu Shengli, the current commander of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN), and Admiral John Richardson, the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, will hold an hour-long video conference on Thursday, two days after the United States sent a guided-missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese artificial island in the South China Sea, to discuss current tensions in the region.
> 
> The meeting will be the first high-level interaction between U.S. and Chinese senior military leaders over tensions in the Spratly Islands since the patrol by the USS Lassen on Tuesday, October 27. The USS Lassen, accompanied by P-8A Poseidon and P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, asserted high seas freedoms within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands.
> 
> The conversation between Wu and Richardson will focus on the freedom of navigation patrol and on related issues. China’s Ministry of Defense notes that Wu will present China’s “solemn position on the U.S. vessel’s entry without permission,” echoing language used by the Chinese foreign ministry. According to Reuters, Thursday’s video conference will be the third of its kind between the top officers of both the U.S. Navy and the PLAN.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Diplomat



> *Both the US and China Benefit From US Navy's Freedom of Navigation Assertions
> 
> And so U.S.-China tensions over the South China Sea enter a new era. What can be expected?*
> GPPi-II-129 (1)
> By Dingding Chen
> October 29, 2015
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *What are the benefits to the U.S. with this move?*
> 
> *First, by entering the 12 nautical mile zone of China’s man-made islands, the U.S. directly challenges China’s sovereignty claims*. The main U.S. claim is that the two features—Subi and Mischeef reefs—do not enjoy a 12 nautical mile territorial sea status as they are submerged at low-tide features. Interestingly, China has not previously made any officials claims that the two features do have territorial sea status. Nonetheless, this new U.S. move is believed to put pressures on China to clarify its position on such features and the larger nine dash line issue in the future.
> 
> *Second, this move shows to the whole world that the U.S. is still the real leader in global affairs and that its navy can go anywhere it wants to demonstrate its power.*
> 
> *Third, the U.S. move has won support from its allies in Asia, particularly Japan and the Philippines.* These allies have long argued for a tougher U.S. policy toward China regarding the South China Sea, and finally the U.S. is answering the call. Finally, this particular operation ended safely without causing any conflict with the Chinese navy, thus paving some ground for future more regular operations.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)





> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> While it might seem that the U.S. has won some points with this new operation, *China has actually also benefited some from this tension. This might be hard for some to believe, but a low-level tension between China and the U.S. is not all that bad for China.*
> 
> *The U.S. intrusion would give China a more legitimate reason to militarize these maritime features.* The logic is this: the U.S. started this game and we are just responding to it. Indeed, this has been the pattern of China’s foreign policies in the last few years, as I have discussed elsewhere .  Defensive assertiveness is the main feature of Chinese foreign policy these days and we should expect this pattern to be continued in the ongoing U.S.-China showdown.
> 
> Moreover,* tensions in the South China Sea strengthen the CCP’s domestic rule, even though this might be an unexpected outcome from the U.S. perspective. A number of scholars have studied the ‘rally round the flag’ effect during an international crisis, concluding that domestic criticisms of government policies drop sharply during international crises*. Given the already high-level of nationalistic sentiments in China, a crisis involving China and the United States would only strengthen the CCP and President Xi Jinping’s popularity in China.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Securing the South China Sea is more than a matter of pride for Xi and other members of the Politburo standing committee. As stated in the 2nd article above, it would also help strengthen the CCP's perceived legitimacy among its people and domestic rule:

Diplomat



> * Don’t Underestimate Xi Jinping’s Resolve in the South China Sea
> 
> U.S. freedom of navigation operations could spark a more intense reaction than Washington bargained for.*
> By Mu Chunshan
> October 29, 2015
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> There’s No Retreat for China in the South China Sea
> 
> Finally, the U.S. should be absolutely clear on one point: the South China Sea has already become one of China’s “core interests.” To put it another way, the South China Sea has joined Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet as areas where China cannot give up or give in.
> 
> So China’s development of the South China Sea will continue, despite U.S. dissatisfaction or interference. To China, this is a necessary part of becoming a maritime power after decades of economic development and strengthened national power – it’s a natural evolution, not something that can be halted. As the U.S. responds to China’s South China Sea policy, Washington must take into account that this change in China’s stance is part of a natural and even inevitable historical trend.
> 
> But China’s development of the South China Sea does not mean using force to change the status quo. That is why China’s new leaders have built islands rather than resorting to military means.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

For the Chinese the China Seas are "home water," _mare nostrum_, if you like. They are, rather, like the Gulf of Mexico is to the USA ... 









                    Both the South China Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are "international," but both are also important to the dominant (great power) states in each region


----------



## dimsum

China officially ends 1-child policy:



> China's ruling Communist Party announced Thursday that all couples will be allowed to have two children, ending the country's decades-old, unpopular one-child policy that has risked becoming a demographic burden as the population ages.
> 
> The one-child policy had been watered down several times since it was introduced in 1979, to the extent that most couples already qualified to have two kids.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-things-to-know-about-china-s-1-child-policy-1.3294335


----------



## a_majoor

A more detailed article about the end of the one child policy:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/005084-end-of-one-child-policy-is-unlikely-to-solve-chinas-looming-aging-crisis



> *End Of One-Child Policy Is Unlikely To Solve China's Looming Aging Crisis *
> by Joel Kotkin 10/29/2015
> 
> By finally backing away from its one-child policy, China would seem to be opening the gates again to demographic expansion. But it may prove an opening that few Chinese embrace, for a host of reasons.
> 
> Initially, the one-child policy made great sense. The expansion of China’s power under Mao Zedong was predicated in part on an ever-growing population. Between 1950 and 1990, the country’s Maoist era, the population, roughly doubled to 1.2 billion, according to U.N. figures. Deng Xiaoping’s move to limit population growth turned out to be a wise policy, at least initially, allowing China to focus more on industrialization and less on feeding an ever-growing number of mouths.
> 
> Three decades later, this policy clearly has outlived its usefulness. China’s population growth is now among the slowest in the world, and it is aging rapidly. The U.N. expects the Chinese population to peak around 2020, about when India will pass the Middle Kingdom as the world’s most populous country.
> 
> Perhaps the most troubling impact will be on the workforce. In 2050, the number of children in China under 15 is expected to be 60 million lower than today, approximately the size of Italy’s population. It will gain nearly 190 million people 65 and over, approximately the population of Pakistan, which is the world’s sixth most populous country.
> 
> The same broad pattern will play out in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Japan, but those countries’ much greater per capita wealth gives them a greater ability to cushion the impact than China. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt envisions a developing of fiscal crisis in China caused by “this coming tsunami of senior citizens,” with a smaller workforce, greater pension obligations and generally slower economic growth.
> 
> These factors were clearly part of the calculus that led to suspending the one-child policy. But if China’s rulers think they can change demographic trends on a dime, they are massively mistaken.
> 
> The birthrates of many other East Asian countries have plummeted as well, despite campaigns to promote fertility. In South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore birthrates are near one per woman, roughly half the rate needed to sustain the current population. With the exception of Singapore, which accepts many immigrants, none have a reasonable path away from rapid aging of their populations and shrinking workforces.
> 
> So what is causing this plunge? Gavin Jones, a demographer based at the National University of Singapore, identifies primarily rapid urbanization and sky-rocketing house prices. In 1979, China’s population was 80 percent rural; today the proportion is roughly half that.
> 
> This transformation makes reversing the one-child policy largely moot, Jones says. Indeed a 2013 easing of restrictions on family size in certain circumstances elicited far fewer takers than expected. Barely 12 percent of eligible families even applied.
> 
> One critical problem is the high cost of real estate, particularly in China’s most important cities, which makes it difficult for young couples to attain the space to house a larger family, let alone leave them sufficient financial resources to raise the children. China’s main cities have suffered arguably the world’s most rapid growth of property prices relative to income. Last year, The Economistestimated house price to income ratios of nearly 20 in Shenzhen 17 in Hong Kong and over 15 in Beijing, between 50% and 100% higher than ultra-expensive Western places like San Francisco, Vancouver or Sydney.
> 
> This explains in part why prosperous cities like Shanghai and Beijing, now have among the lowest fertility rates ever recorded — down near 0.7 per woman, or one-third the replacement rate. If the experience of densification and high prices spread to other Chinese cities, officials may be lucky if couples even bother to have one child.
> 
> One alternative strategy may be to slow urbanization and disperse population to less congested areas, but policy seems to be headed in the exact opposite direction. In 2013 China announced plans to bring an additional 250 million people from the countryside into the city.
> 
> This could boost the economy, as planners hope, but also reduce the fertility rate. All over the world the displacement of rural populations, accelerate the pattern of low fertility, notes the demographer Jones. For one thing, separation from their relatives in the countryside means there is little in the way of family support for taking care of children.
> 
> Jones suggests that urbanization has also undermined the traditionally family centered religious values of Chinese society. Pew Research identifies China as the least religious major country in the world, making it, even more than Europe, a paragon of atheism. All around the world, the decline of religious sentiments has been associated with low fertility around the world.
> 
> Finally the announcement’s timing may not be fortuitous. When China’s economy was booming and the future looked limitless, more families might have considered a second child. But with the economy slowing, it seems logical to expect that weak economic conditions will reduce fertility rates further, as has been the case in Japan and Taiwan.
> 
> What matters most here is what China’s decision reveals about changing attitudes on population. For the last half century, we have tended to be worried about overpopulation, particularly in Asia. And to be sure some parts of the world, notably sub-Saharan Africa still have birthrates far above their capacity to accommodate newcomers.
> 
> But it is now clear that many parts of the world — notably East Asia and Europe — face a very different demographic challenge rooted in falling fertility, diminishing workforces, and rapid aging. As British author Fred Pearce has put it, “The population ‘bomb’ is being defused over the medium and long term.”
> 
> Eliminating the one-child policy may not much change the current trajectory of China’s demography, but it marks a significant shift in the debate about population that will be with us for decades to come.
> 
> This piece first appeared at Forbes.
> 
> Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.


----------



## a_majoor

We are already living in a version of this system, although it is not monolitiic or government controlled, (Reputation scores on sites like Ebay exist, we routinely use credit scoring and who knows what sorts of judgements are being made on the basis of big data analysis of things like our posts on social media sites?). 

The biggest difference is markets using this sort of data to provide incentives is a competative process, and users can choose or not to participate, while the State using this sort of data to conmtrol people is not something anyone can "opt out" of":

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/chinas-social-credit-system.html



> *China's Social Credit system, computerized Orwell with a government reputation and trust score*
> 
> The Chinese government is building an omnipotent "social credit" system that is meant to rate each citizen's trustworthiness.
> 
> By 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distils it into a single number ranking each citizen.
> 
> That system isn't in place yet. For now, the government is watching how eight Chinese companies issue their own "social credit" scores under state-approved pilot projects.
> 
> One of the most high-profile projects is by Sesame Credit, the financial wing of Alibaba. With 400 million users, Alibaba is the world's biggest online shopping platform. It's using its unique database of consumer information to compile individual "social credit" scores.
> 
> More and more of Baihe's 90 million clients are displaying their credit scores in their dating profiles, doing away with the idea that a credit score is a private matter.
> However, Sesame Credit will not divulge exactly how it calculates its credit scores, explaining that it is a "complex algorithm".
> 
> A lengthy planning document from China's elite State Council explains that social credit will "forge a public opinion environment that trust-keeping is glorious", warning that the "new system will reward those who report acts of breach of trust".
> 
> Here is a translation of the planning outline for China's social credit system 2014-2020.
> 
> A reputation system computes and publishes reputation scores for a set of objects within a community or domain, based on a collection of opinions that other entities hold about the objects. The opinions are typically passed as ratings to a central place where all perceptions, opinions and ratings can be accumulated. A reputation center uses a specific reputation algorithm to dynamically compute the reputation scores based on the received ratings. Reputation is a sign of trustworthiness manifested as testimony by other people.
> 
> Fortunately any government reputation system will be far less than the cultural revolution or the One child policy
> 
> The Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966, after Mao alleged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society at large, aiming to restore capitalism. He insisted that these "revisionists" be removed through violent class struggle. China's youth responded to Mao's appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself. It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life.
> 
> Millions of people were persecuted in the violent struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property.
> 
> The 'one-child' policy has led to what Amartya Sen first called 'Missing Women', or the 100 million girls 'missing' from the populations of China (and other developing countries) as a result of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect"
> 
> Notable examples of practical reputation applications
> 
> Search: web (see PageRank)
> eCommerce: eBay, Epinions, Bizrate, Trustpilot
> Social news: Reddit, Digg, Imgur
> Programming communities: Advogato, freelance marketplaces, Stack Overflow
> Wikis: Increase contribution quantity and quality (Dencheva, Prause and Prinz 2011)
> Internet Security: TrustedSource
> Question-and-Answer sites: Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Gutefrage.net
> Email: anti-spam techniques, reputation lookup (RapLeaf)
> Personal Reputation: CouchSurfing (for travelers),
> Non Governmental organizations (NGOs): GreatNonProfits.org, GlobalGiving
> Professional reputation of translators and translation outsourcers: BlueBoard at ProZ.com
> All purpose reputation system: Yelp, Inc.
> Academia: general bibliometic measures, e.g. the h-index of a researcher.
> 
> 
> 
> Gamified Authoritarianism
> 
> The ACLU reported that higher scores were to be rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
> 
> USA - pay the fee for faster service and pre-apply for screening
> 
> The United States TSA’s airline passenger “whitelist” system could evolve in this direction.
> 
> In the private sector, Frank Pasquale notes that elements of its judgment-and-reward system already exist in the U.S. private-sector credit scoring infrastructure.
> 
> The US has expedited Visa services. There is a $60 fee for expedited US passports.
> 
> You can apply for a trusted traveler program.
> 
> Canada and the USA have the NEXUS prescreened traveler program.
> 
> Credit scores effect the interest that people pay for cars and houses and credit cards. This has far more financial impact than faster travel Visas.
> 
> Many Futurists have talked about Reputation systems replacing currency
> 
> In 2004, the Institute for the Future, Marina Gorbis and Jason Tester created the "Reputation Statement of Account," an "artifact from the future," a plausible but imagined future object.


----------



## Edward Campbell

The Indian MOD's spokesman has posted (on _Twitter_) that "INS Sahyadri, now on operational deployment to South China Sea & North West Pacific region, enters Manila."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> We are already living in a version of this system, although it is not monolitiic or government controlled, (Reputation scores on sites like Ebay exist, we routinely use credit scoring and who knows what sorts of judgements are being made on the basis of big data analysis of things like our posts on social media sites?).
> 
> The biggest difference is markets using this sort of data to provide incentives is a competative process, and users can choose or not to participate, while the State using this sort of data to conmtrol people is not something anyone can "opt out" of":
> 
> http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/chinas-social-credit-system.html




See my comments, elsewhere in this thread, about China looking for alternatives to our version of _liberal_, participatory democracy. I have mentioned experiments with _active polling_ to try to determine what the people want (one HUGE advantage that most Chinese academics concede to our style of participatory (electoral) democracy) ... one of the steps _might_ be to determine who ought to have a _voice_: only the _trusted_?


----------



## a_majoor

Our own 2000+ year old experiment with participatory democracy has been moving from people being self selected (Timocracy), to limited franchises to ultimately assuming everyone who is warm and capable of walking into a polling station is also capable of making an informed decision. While I agree with Churchill that the best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average voter, I also find ideas like having some arbitrary "social rating" determining if you can vote a bit alarming. (In a Timocracy, you at least directly demonstrated your ability to make informed votes by having the ability and willingness to don armour, pick up a spear and stand in the ranks to defend the _polis_).

Since in many of these social media rating systems I see no explanation of "how" you are rated, it will be difficult to protest your being excluded from voting, or understanding just who is being chosen. And of course there is always the danger of the algorithms being manipulated to ensure that only the "right" people can participate. (This is a perennial problem with virtually any participatory system, not just the Chinese proposal).


----------



## CougarKing

China's latest response to the USN's FON Ops last week:

Diplomat



> *Chinese J-11 Fighters Exercise in the South China Sea After US Navy Patrols
> 
> After protesting a U.S. Navy freedom of navigation patrol, the PLA flexes its airpower muscles in the South China Sea.*
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> November 02, 2015
> 
> Chinese fighter jets are carrying out exercises in the South China Sea. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) released images late last week that showed J-11BH/BHS fighters in the South China Sea. The jets were armed with missiles and are likely part of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s 8th Aviation Division in Hainan Province. The fighters are companied by other aircraft and warships from the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) South Sea Fleet. Though unconfirmed by the PLA, the J-11s are most likely flying from Woody Island (known as Yongxing Island in Chinese) in the Paracels. Woody Island is the location of the sole operational Chinese military airstrip in the South China Sea at the moment though China is thought to be building at least two additional airstrips in the Spratly Islands, where it has built man-made islands.
> 
> The aerial exercises come after a heated week in the South China Sea. On Tuesday, October 27, the United States Navy staged its first freedom of navigation operation within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, where China has constructed an artificial island. The U.S. freedom of navigation operation asserted high seas navigational freedoms in those waters and drew an angry response from the Chinese government. Additionally, on Thursday, October 29, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, where the Philippines has filed a case against China over its behavior and claims in the South China Sea, decided that it had jurisdiction to assess the merits of the Philippines’ arguments. That development too drew a strong response from the Chinese government, which declared the Court “null and void,” among other things.
> 
> Under pressure to act to in the South China Sea, the PLA has evidently chosen to demonstrate its aerial force projection capabilities in the South China Sea by flying these J-11 fighters from Woody Island. Speaking to the South China Morning Post, retired Chinese General Xu Guangyu, notes that the exercises are ” a signal China sent to the US that it is serious about its claims. This is the minimum level of response China should have, or it will fail the expectation of its people.” The fighters will also renew speculation that China could be looking to eventually enforce a South China Sea air defense identification zone (ADIZ). In November 2013, Beijing unilaterally declared an ADIZ in the East China Sea, though it has had mixed results in enforcing the ADIZ.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Aside from this one can notice some pro-China sentiment meshed into  Hollywood movie storylines, such as in "the Martian" movie, where China offers booster rockets for the rescue mission to save Matt Damon's character. Is it really that surprising when Chinese companies own such Hollywood movie companies/studios as Lionsgate?  

Shanghaiist



> *EXPOSED: Beijing's covert radio network airing China-friendly news across the globe*
> 
> A special investigative report from Reuters published on Monday details the expanding network of radio stations across the U.S. covertly controlled by State broadcaster China Radio International.
> 
> The CRI-backed stations in the United States broadcast in more than a dozen American cities, including Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston and San Francisco, and are part of a wider global radio network comprising at least 33 such radio stations in 14 countries. They offer a mix of news, music and cultural programs that are all China-friendly. News segments often focus on China's development, such as its space program, as well as its contribution to humanitarian causes.
> 
> Many of the shows are highly professional and indistinguishable from mainstream American radio shows, while others are much less polished with some broadcasters even speaking English with noticeable Chinese accents.
> 
> The stations primarily broadcast content created or supplied by CRI and generally avoid any criticism of China. Their political angle noticeably reflects the Chinese government's rhetoric on issues, such as the current tension in the South China Sea between China and the United States. For example:
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## dimsum

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Aside from this one can notice some pro-China sentiment meshed into * Hollywood movie storylines, such as in "the Martian" movie, where China offers booster rockets for the rescue mission to save Matt Damon's character.* Is it really that surprising when Chinese companies own such Hollywood movie companies/studios as Lionsgate?
> 
> Shanghaiist



Actually, that is from the original novel.


----------



## a_majoor

A more blatent example is the heavily hyped film "Hero", which is beautifully filmed and ends with a pretty crude propaganda message; the Emperor is _fully justified _ in killing millions to unify China and supress competing factions, and the epynomous Hero of the movie stays his hand and refuses to take his revenge for the Emperor's forces destroying his own home village (not to mention the various places beseigned and laid waste by Imperial forces during the course of the movie).

This was actually heavily promoted by Hollywood heavyweights during its run.


----------



## Cloud Cover

Essex amphibious group arrives in Pacific as USN reiterates rights to South China Sea access

http://www.janes.com/article/55709/essex-amphibious-group-arrives-in-pacific-as-usn-reiterates-rights-to-south-china-sea-access

Key Points
•An amphibious ready group embarked with a marine expeditionary unit has arrived in 7th fleet waters 
•The USN has not ruled out the possibility that the ARG may be deployed for South China Sea operations 

The US Navy's (USN's) Essex Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) has arrived in the service's 7th Fleet area of responsibility, the service confirmed to IHS Jane's on 3 November.

The group, which includes the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2), the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Anchorage (LPD 23) and the Whidbey Island-class amphibious dock landing ship USS Rushmore (LSD 47), crossed the international dateline on 1 November, said Lieutenant Dave Levy, a public affairs officer with the USN's Expeditionary Strike Group Seven (ESG 7).

Embarked with the ARG is the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which includes the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM) 161 (Reinforced).

The arrival of Essex ARG in the 7th Fleet AOR follows a 27 October freedom of navigation (FON) operation by USN destroyer USS Lassen (DDG 82), which sailed within 12 n miles of what China views to be its territorial waters in the Spratly Islands. Beijing responded by saying that the US operation "threatens China's sovereignty and security interests, jeopardises the safety of personnel and facilities [on the] reefs, and damages regional peace and stability".

Lt Levy said that although "the ARG and its embarked 15th MEU are currently in transit to the service's 3rd Fleet and will not be homeported in the region … it will be conducting some operations during its stay as assets of the 7th Fleet".

He did not elaborate on the nature of these operations and expected length of stay, but IHS Jane's understands that Anchorage will participate in the Brunei phase of the annual 'Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training' ('CARAT') exercise, which started with an opening ceremony at Muara Naval Base on 2 November.


----------



## CougarKing

Descendants of the Chinese civil war rivals meet:

Diplomat



> *China and Taiwan Leaders Emphasize Kinship, 1992 Consensus in Historic Talks
> 
> Much of what Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping said was intended to influence a third party: DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> November 07, 2015
> 
> Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou and Chinese President Xi Jinping met for the first time in Singapore on Saturday, marking the first-ever meeting between the top leaders of Taiwan and mainland China. As expected, the two men addressed each other as “mister” and spoke as the “leaders” (rather than the presidents) of Taiwan and China – a practical way of avoiding the fact that neither government officially recognizes its counterpart as legitimate.
> 
> There were no new agreements or joint statements issued at the meeting. Instead, the talks provided a way for Ma and Xi to look back at the past seven years of cross-strait relations, and to provide their blueprint for continuing the relationship under the next president. That president is likely to be Tsai Ing-wen, chair of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, and indeed Tsai and the DPP seemed to be the intended audience for much of what Ma and Xi said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Seems no one's interested in China's so-called stealth fighters at this defence expo in Dubai:

Defense News



> *China Touts Stealth Fighter Jet, But So Far No Takers*
> 
> DUBAI, UAE — China showcased its first stealth fighter jet here on the opening day of the Dubai Air Show, but so far the fifth-generation aircraft has no customers in sight.
> 
> The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) is “in negotiations” with the Chinese Air Force to buy the multi-role FC-31, AVIC project manager Lin Peng told reporters on Sunday. Peng declined to say when a deal would be finalized.
> 
> Top company officials briefed the media on the stealth characteristics and attack capabilities of the FC-31, but did not take questions from the audience.
> 
> *This is the first time the Chinese company has showcased the FC-3, also known as the J-31 internationally, although a prototype aircraft flew during the Zhuhai Air Show in China last year.* Chinese fighters are designated with a “J” for fighter and “FC” for export.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## chanman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Seems no one's interested in China's so-called stealth fighters at this defence expo in Dubai:



Buying (modern) Chinese fighters also means being logistically tied to the Russians for engines. I suspect not too many countries able to afford the J-31 are particularly interested in becoming dependent on not one, but two foreign powers to keep their fleet up and running.


----------



## YZT580

chanman said:
			
		

> Buying (modern) Chinese fighters also means being logistically tied to the Russians for engines.



Not any more.  They seem to have created a Chinese knock-off of the Russian engine for the Chinese knock-off of the American stealth.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here are two interesting maps, one courtesy Ian Bremmer of the _Eurasia Institute_, the other from _The Economist_, comparing China's economies, on a province by province basis, to national economies and China's provinces, by average life span (as a measure of good health) to other countries:






 and 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



        China's GDP, province by province, compared to other nations (Source: Ian Bremmer)                      Longevity in China, province by province, compared to other countries (Source: _The Economist_)


----------



## CougarKing

While the UNCLOS case over the South China Sea disputes between China and the Philippines continues at The Hague...

Chinese leaders are still trying to woo their Southeast Asian neighbours through ASEAN and APEC:

Diplomat



> *China's President Will Head to Philippines for APEC Summit
> 
> China is hoping the South China Sea issue won’t get raised on what looks to be an ice-breaking trip for Xi Jinping.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> November 11, 2015
> 
> Fresh off the Chinese president’s tours of Vietnam and Singapore last week, China’s Foreign Ministry had another announcement on Monday: Xi Jinping also plans to attend the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit, to be held November 18-19 in the Philippines. That will bring Xi into the lion’s den, so to speak. Manila has been one of the most outspoken critics of China’s moves in the South China Sea, even filing a case against China in an international arbitral tribunal. It’s another indication that China is trying to mend frayed relationship with ASEAN states, even as Xi shows no sign of changing his country’s approach to the maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
> 
> Tensions between China and the Philippines are especially high. Philippine President Benigno Aquino hasn’t met with Xi since last year’s APEC summit in Beijing, when the two had a brief encounter on the sidelines of the summit. According to Marciano Paynor, the head of the Philippines’ APEC organizing committee, an official bilateral meeting between the two leaders has not yet been scheduled, but they are expected to meet.
> 
> China, however, hopes that Xi won’t face questions or criticism about the South China Sea issue at the APEC summit. Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong, who gave a press conference on Xi’s attendance at the APEC summit, said that “as far as I know, at this year’s summit, there are no plans to discuss the South China Sea.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Diplomat



> *China Seeks to Woo ASEAN Through Singapore
> 
> China continues to hope its economic offerings can mend its relationships in Southeast Asia.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> November 10, 2015
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up his brief tour of Southeast Asia on Saturday, after spending two days each in Vietnam and Singapore. Xi’s stop in Singapore was largely overshadowed by the historic meeting between Xi and Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou at the Shangri-La Hotel on Saturday. But Xi’s trip to Singapore wasn’t all about cross-strait relations; rather, it was part of Xi’s attempt to mend China’s image in the Southeast Asian states – many of which have concerns over China’s actions in the South China Sea.
> 
> While Singapore is not a claimant in the South China Sea disputes, the city-state has a vested interest in making sure the maritime tensions don’t spill over to poison diplomatic relations among the Southeast Asian states and China. Along with Indonesia, Singapore has tried to play the role of neutral mediator, but often found its efforts blocked by China’s insistence that the disputes can only be handled bilaterally. Singapore has continued to raise its concerns about the disputes, with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong warning in his remarks at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue that a new approach is needed. “If the present dynamic continues, it must lead to more tensions and bad outcomes,” Lee said.
> 
> China, meanwhile, saw Xi’s visits to Vietnam and Singapore as a chance to remind the region of the fruits of cooperation with China – to display the carrot, rather than the stick. Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told reporters at a pre-trip briefing that Xi’s visits to Vietnam and Singapore would “be a big boost to China-ASEAN ties,” according to Xinhua. Liu pointed out that Singapore is currently the coordinator for China-ASEAN relations, and said the China-Singapore relationship can serve as a model form China-ASEAN ties.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



But round one at court goes to the Philippines:



> *Philippines scores against China in UN arbitration*
> By Matikas Santos
> INQUIRER.net
> 12:44 AM October 30th, 2015
> 
> The Philippines scored a victory at the international Arbitral Tribunal after the panel unanimously decided Thursday that it has jurisdiction over the maritime dispute between China and the Philippines involving parts of the South China Sea (West Philippine Sea.)
> 
> The decision means that the tribunal, convened under the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), will hold further hearings to settle the increasingly contentious dispute.
> 
> <snipped> SOURCE LINK embedded in Headline


----------



## CougarKing

China adding another key point to its "String of Pearls" part of which will help them encircle rival India:

Diplomat



> *Chinese State Firm Takes Control of Strategically Vital Gwadar Port
> 
> A Chinese state-owned firm officially signed a multi-decade lease for control of the Gwadar Port free-trade zone*
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> November 13, 2015
> 
> On Wednesday, Chinese Overseas Ports Holding Company Ltd (COPHCL), a Chinese state-owned enterprise, officially took control of the strategically important port at Gwadar in Pakistan. The Chinese firm officially signed a 40-year lease for over 2,000 acres of land in Gwadar, marking a milestone in the implementation phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a major bilateral initiative to build transportation and other infrastructure along the length of Pakistan, connecting the country’s Arabian Sea coast with the Himalayan border with China. CPEC was unveiled during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s April 2015 state visit to Pakistan, where Gwadar was high on the agenda.
> 
> Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Reform Ahsan Iqbal handed over the lease to Wang Xiaodao, the vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission. Gwadar is a designated free-trade zone by the Pakistani government. The designation will last for 23 years. Additionally, because of Gwadar’s location in the restive southern Pakistani province of Balochistan, the Pakistani government has created a protection force for Chinese workers who will be working on CPEC projects, including at Gwadar.
> 
> The security situation in Balochistan is a concern for China, which wants to avoid CPEC projects and Chinese contractors potentially facing attacks. On Sunday, just days before the port hand-over, Pakistan’s chief of naval staff, Admiral Mohammad Zakaullah, said that the Pakistani Navy would also protect Gwadar “against all asymmetric threats under the prevalent precarious internal and external security environment.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the S400 SAM batteries ordered by China earlier this year:

Diplomat



> *China to Receive Russia’s S-400 Missile Defense Systems in 12-18 Months
> 
> With the exception of an approximate delivery date, details of the Sino-Russian weapons deal remain murky.*
> L1001025
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> November 17, 2015
> 
> China will receive its first batch of S-400 Triumph long-range anti-aircraft missile systems within the next 12 to 18 months, TASS reports.
> 
> “Supplies are planned no earlier than in a year, or more likely, in a year-and-a-half,” a Russian defense industry source told TASS last Thursday.
> 
> The signing of the contract for* four to six S-400 Triumph (NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler) missile defense systems* was officially announced this April, although the deal was likely already concluded in the first quarter of 2014. The contract value is estimated at about $3 billion.
> 
> Additional details on the Sino-Russia arms deal, however, are difficult to come by. Back in April, Director General of arms exporter Rosoboronexport Anatoly Isaykin merely told reporters that he “would not disclose the contract details, but yes, China has indeed become the first buyer of the Russian newest air defense system, which only emphasizes the strategic level of our relations.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Haven't tank destroyers been obsolete since the advent of the MBT, which essentially combines the agility/maneuverability of the pre-WW2 designations of medium tanks with the heavy armour and firepower of heavy tanks? 

Diplomat



> *China to Retire Its Armored Tank Destroyers
> 
> The Chinese military is replacing its tank destroyers with anti-tank missiles and attack helicopters.*
> L1001025
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> November 19, 2015
> 
> The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will retire its armada of Type 89 (aka PTZ89) tank destroyers, Asia One reports based on information published in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the PLA.
> 
> The PLA Daily published a picture of 18 self-propelled guns that look like Type 89 tank destroyers departing a military base of the PLA Shenyang Military Command’s 39th Group Army.
> 
> The newspaper said that an official retirement ceremony for the obsolete armored vehicles was held on November 3.
> 
> The Type 89 tank destroyer entered the PLA’s service in 1989. From 1989 to 1995 around 100 vehicles were produced. The tank destroyer’s main armament is a 120-mm/L50 smoothbore gun, equipped with a semi-automatic gun loader.  Since the gun is not stabilized, the armored vehicle cannot fire accurately on the move.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The local backlash in Australia over Chinese state firm's lease of the port of Darwin:

Diplomat



> *Yes, a Chinese Company Leased Darwin Port. So What?
> 
> The furor over Darwin Port exposes Australia’s anti-China impulses.*
> GA
> By Greg Austin
> November 19, 2015
> 
> In Australia, parts of the northern port of Darwin have been leased to a Chinese company for 99 years. This has sparked a firestorm of criticism in Australia media about the perceived security threat — a threat that is overblown and overhyped.
> 
> Two wharves in the port have been leased to a Chinese company called Landbridge. The company already operates widely in Australia, including Sydney. According to its website, “Landbridge Industry Australia Pty Ltd is a privately held Australian entity wholly owned by Landbridge Group Co., Ltd,” which is “a large scale privately owned enterprise based in Shandong Province of China.” It is hardly the most transparent company in Australia or the world.
> 
> Australia’s conservative print media outlet *The Australian newspaper reported that “Landbridge is owned by Chinese billionaire Ye Cheng, who is a senior Communist Party official.” I would like to know which senior post he occupies in the Chinese Communist Party. *He has acknowledged that he is a “National Committee Member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the Deputy of Shandong Provincial People’s Congress.” This does not equate to being a senior official of the Communist Party. Perhaps the newspaper has not noticed the anti-corruption campaign in China, which has seen the complete separation between billionaire status and holding a “senior position” in the Communist Party.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China officially buys Su35s!

Reuters



> World | Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:36am EST
> 
> *Russia, China sign contract worth over $2 billion for Su-35 fighter jets*
> MOSCOW
> 
> *China is to buy a batch of 24 Sukhoi-35 fighter jets from Russia in a deal worth more than $2 billion, an industry source told Reuters on Thursday, in a move that may help the Kremlin's strained finances.*
> 
> A spokeswoman for Russian state holding Rostec confirmed a deal between the two countries had been signed involving Su-35 fighter jets, but declined to provide details.
> 
> The deal makes China the first foreign buyer of the Su-35, one of Russia's most advanced military aircraft, and is one of the largest contracts for military jets to have ever been signed between the two countries.
> 
> Russia and China have been in talks for several years over the Su-35s, and in 2012 the two sides signed a preliminary agreement for Beijing to buy some of the jets, the Kommersant newspaper reported.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More on Chinese "Ghost cities". Using social media and internet tracking of users to identify where there are empty cities is an interesting twist, and the description of buildings being essentially empty shells makes the idea these were mostly Keynesian sinkholes for investment monies somewhat more realistic. If these places really are essentially uninhabitable, then the popping of the housing bubble in China will be very ugly indeed:

http://www.newser.com/story/216295/chinas-ghost-cities-were-hidden-until-now.html



> *China's 'Ghost Cities' Were Hidden Until Now*
> MASSIVE EMPTY HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS FEEL LIKE 'AN ABANDONED MOVIE SET'
> By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
> Posted Nov 18, 2015 6:21 PM CST | Updated Nov 21, 2015 5:00 PM CST
> 
> (NEWSER) – People have known about China's "ghost cities" for years, but it turns out finding and tracking these massive, mostly empty housing developments is pretty much as difficult as hunting an actual ghost. That is, until China's largest search engine got involved, Quartz reports. Tech company Baidu was able to identify 50 ghost cities by spending months studying data from 770 million users. Any residential areas with less than a quarter the number of expected Baidu users were classified as a ghost city. It's thought to be the most accurate image of these empty towns ever created. "Now that we know where the ghost areas are, we can try to identify why these areas are 'ghostly' and do something about it," Baidu researcher Haishan Wu tells NPR.
> 
> China's ghost cities sprang up in the past decade through a combination of a housing shortage, a real estate boom, and laws that allow cities to buy cheap rural land and sell it to developers for huge profits, NPR reports. But some developers misjudged demand in certain areas, leaving housing empty and feeling like—in the words of one NPR staffer who visited a ghost city—"an abandoned movie set." Part of the problem is that a lot of the housing consists of just concrete walls, often lacking even a toilet. And the surrounding neighborhoods don't boast much in the way of amenities, either. Wu tells NPR people probably don't want to live in places without schools, hospitals, or malls. However, urban planning experts believe China's ghost cities can be returned to the land of the living with a little time and effort. (China, meanwhile, found a vast gold deposit—but there's a catch.)


----------



## Edward Campbell

One picture, of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (left) and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, sums up the strained but "correct" relations
between China and Japan and, indeed, between China and all of Asia, right now.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I see China isn't pussy footing around when dealing with little Johnny Jihad.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3330368/Chinese-police-use-FLAMETHROWER-terror-suspects-grenades-tear-gas-fail.html


----------



## CougarKing

The USN's next FONOP in the South China Sea.

Diplomat



> *Next US Navy South China Sea Freedom of Navigation Operation: Mischief Reef
> 
> The U.S. Navy will likely sail within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef soon.*
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> November 23, 2015
> 
> The U.S. Navy may be gearing up for its second freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese artificial island. Bill Gertz, at the Washington Free Beacon, citing U.S. officials with knowledge of matter, reports that two U.S. Navy warships will sail within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef. The operation is expected to take place in “several weeks.” The U.S. Navy carried out its first freedom of navigation operation within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese artificial island on October 27, when an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the USS Lassen, sailed past Subi Reef.
> 
> The choice of Mischief Reef for a second freedom of navigation operation makes sense and should help the Obama administration assert that it does not recognize any territorial sea claim around these features in the Spratly Islands. As I wrote recently, the October 27 operation left matters ambiguous, causing considerable disagreement among many well-informed South China Sea experts about what precisely the United States asserted with its freedom of navigation operation there. The United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS) determines the conditions under which certain features generated maritime entitlements, including 12 nautical mile territorial seas and 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Is this (a Chinese company takes a very long term lease on two warves in the Norther Australian port of Darwin) another step in China's "string of pearls" strategy or just a normal business deal by a billionaire Chinese entrepreneur?

My suspicion is that almost all Chinese billionaires, and _Forbes_ says there are 335 of them are, somehow, tied to the Xi Jinping and the men in the _Zhongnanhai_. Even if they are not, in any way, _agents_ of the Chinese government those billionaires are conscious of the fact that their financial base is subject to interference from the Chinese government, and they are, by and large, just like American or British or Canadian billionaires (and _Forbes_ says we have nearly 40 of them), they are, by and large, _patriots_, too.

So _my guess_: it is a normal business deal, Ye Cheng has the kinds of corporate interests that make it a sensible deal, that China _will_ exploit for its own purposes, too.


----------



## CougarKing

Bo Guagua, the playboy dilettante son of former rising star and fallen Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, probably ranks pretty low on this list. 

Diplomat



> *Who Are China's 'Princelings'?
> 
> Princelings are often talked about as a bloc, but in truth there are several different kinds.*
> Professor Bo Zhiyue
> By Bo Zhiyue
> November 24, 2015
> 
> The children of veteran communists who held high-ranking offices in China before 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, are commonly called “princelings.” There are princelings by birth — sons and daughters of former high ranking officers and officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — and princelings by marriage.
> 
> Princelings by birth could also be further divided into subcategories: *princeling politicians, princeling generals, and princeling entrepreneurs.* President Xi Jinping, for instance, is a typical example of a princeling politician. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a veteran communist who served as secretary general and vice premier of the State Council in the 1950s and the 1960s and as a Politburo member in the 1980s. Yu Zhengsheng, the No. 4 ranking Politburo Standing Committee member and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is also a princeling politician whose father, Huang Jing (Yu Qiwei), was the first communist mayor of Tianjin and the first minister of No. 1 Machine Building Industry. Huang was once married to Li Yunhe (i.e., Jiang Qing), who later married Mao Zedong.
> 
> Examples of princeling generals include General Zhang Youxia, director of the General Armaments Department; Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the PLA Navy; and General Liu Yuan, political commissar of the General Logistics Department. Zhang’s father was General Zhang Zongxun, former deputy chief of staff and director of the General Logistics Department of the People’s Liberation Army. Wu’s father, Wu Xian, was former vice governor of Zhejiang. Liu’s father, Liu Shaoqi, was former president of the People’s Republic of China.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Long article in the WSJ on how demographic changes in China could affect the global economy. Other technological and social changes will also have a great impact on China (the ide of "customizable" products and 3D printing favours short production runs and having the manufactuing close to the point of consumption rather than factories shipping around the world). And of course, the lifting of the one child policy won't result in new workers arriving for another 16+ years (and this also assumes people are going to have lots of children once the restriction is lifted, an assumption which might not to be proved true):

http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-chinas-workforce-dwindles-the-world-scrambles-for-alternatives-1448293942?tesla=y


----------



## CougarKing

The PLA-Navy gets to use this base for 10 years:

Diplomat



> *US General: China Has 10 Year Contract for First Overseas Military Base
> 
> A U.S. general confirms China will open a base in Djibouti. Here’s why that shouldn’t be taken as a threat.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> November 26, 2015
> 
> China has signed a ten-year contract to open up its first military base overseas – in Djibouti, at the intersection of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea – according to a U.S. military official. Kristina Wong of The Hill cited U.S. General David Rodriguez, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, confirming the news to defense reporters.
> 
> China is “going to build a base in Djibouti, so that will be their first military location in Africa,” Rodriguez said. He described the base as a logistics hub that China would use to “extend their reach.”
> 
> Though China has consistently refused to confirm reports that it will establish a military presence anywhere overseas, the government of Djibouti has talked openly about the prospect. Back in May, President Ismail Omar Guelleh told AFP that China and Djibouti were in talks about opening up a Chinese military base. A Chinese military presence would be “welcome,” he added.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

This report is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _New York Times_:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-military-peoples-liberation-army.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0


> Xi Jinping Announces Overhaul of China’s Military Forces
> 
> By CHRIS BUCKLEY
> 
> NOV. 26, 2015
> 
> BEIJING — President Xi Jinping of China has announced a major reorganization of the nation’s military, state-backed news media reported on Thursday, laying out plans to create new command systems intended to integrate and rebalance land, air and sea forces into a more nimble People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> Mr. Xi told a meeting of more than 200 senior military officers that the changes would take years and were essential to ensuring that the People’s Liberation Army could shoulder its increasingly complex and broad responsibilities, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
> 
> “National defense and military development are at a new and historic starting point,” said Mr. Xi, who also serves as chairman of the Central Military Commission, which oversees the armed forces.
> 
> “Encourage the composition of forces to become broader, more integrated, multifunctional and flexible,” he was quoted as saying. “Focus on seizing the high ground of future strategy for military competition.”
> 
> Mr. Xi presided over the three-day meeting that opened on Tuesday to discuss the military overhauls, signaling a major step forward in his program to shift the focus of China’s military from traditional land armies and military regions to a more flexible, cohesive set of forces that can advance the country’s maritime claims and external interests. China’s military planning and spending have increasingly focused on territorial disputes in the South China Sea and in waters near Japan.
> 
> At a military parade in Beijing on Sep. 3, Mr. Xi announced that the People’s Liberation Army, which includes naval, air force and ballistic missile forces, would reduce its number of personnel by 300,000 in coming years, bringing the total to a little under two million. Currently, about 1.4 million members of the military are land forces.
> 
> In November 2013, Communist Party leaders approved a program of changes that included restructuring the military.




In my opinion this is just another step in a long process that started over 30 years ago. The process of reorienting the PLA away from Mao's vision to something like the one shared by Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and now by Xi Jinping, himself, is long, slow and difficult but undoubtedly necessary if China wants to be more than just master of its own territory.


----------



## CougarKing

While the oral hearings at The Hague between China and the Philippines continue for the 3rd Day, meanwhile the PLA continues resupplying its Sourh China Sea possessions with this vessel:



> IHS Jane's 360 - 25 November 2015
> *Chinese army commissions new logistics ship to bolster South China Sea presence*
> Photos taken from China Defense Blog
> _Army's new LSM to support South China Sea Garrisons_
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -


----------



## CougarKing

Another prototype makes a test flight:



> *J20 prototype 2017 conducts its maiden flight*
> 
> - November 24, 2015
> 
> China Defense Blog
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -


----------



## The Bread Guy

On the more "social" end of the spectrum ....


> Canada's China-born Miss World contestant was stopped in Hong Kong on Thursday and denied permission to board a flight to the beauty pageant finals in China, a move she said was punishment for speaking out against human rights abuses in the country.
> 
> Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old Toronto actress who was crowned Miss World Canada in May, was unable to obtain a visa in advance of her arrival for the contest finals this week in Sanya, on the southern Chinese resort island of Hainan.
> 
> But she said she attempted to enter the country anyway based on a rule that allows Canadian citizens to obtain a landing visa upon arrival in Sanya.
> 
> Lin, who is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a religious group that says it is repressed in China, told reporters at Hong Kong's international airport that she was prevented from boarding a Dragonair flight to Sanya. She said there has been no response from the Chinese authorities so far.
> 
> "There's no comment from the Chinese embassy ... so I realize that's the tactics they're using, they just want to let it die down," said Lin, who was wheeling a silver suitcase and dressed in a long brown trench coat ....


----------



## tomahawk6

With the US all but pulling out of the Azores,the Chinese came calling offering to take over Lajes Airfield and of course contribute to the local economy.A big mistake for Washington.

http://portuguese-american-journal.com/terceira-u-s-to-reduce-military-presence-in-lajes-air-field-azores/


----------



## Bearpaw

One has to wonder what mischief the Chinese are up to when they are seeking bases in the Azores or in Greenland.

"Lately, China has been actively looking at securing military facilities much closer to the United States, namely in Greenland and the Caribbean, and more frequent exploratory Chinese missions in the Atlantic, near the Azores, are expected in the near future, it has been reported." --- from article cited by T6.

Bearpaw


----------



## tomahawk6

I expect that it is in response to the presence of the USN in the South China Sea.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the social aspect: millions of Chinese are experiencing the world, which should cause some changes to the Chinese mind set as they encounter different cultures:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/30/the-big-china-story-nobodys-really-covering/



> *The Big China Story Nobody’s Really Covering*
> 
> The Chinese Discovery of the World is one of major stories of our age: For the first time in China’s 2,500 years of history, millions of its citizens are venturing beyond their home towns and cities and out beyond the boundaries of the Middle Kingdom itself. According to the Wall Street Journal, economic troubles mean that fewer Chinese have been traveling abroad this year. Yet despite the tourist slowdown, a large number of Chinese citizens are still going abroad:
> 
> 
> Spending on travel abroad fell to $19 billion in October, a chunky drop from the $25 billion spent in September, according to services trade data published Monday. The level is still above the $16 billion spent a year ago in October, but the year-over-year growth rate is ebbing to around 20% from more than 60% in the first half.
> 
> The least adventurous of these travelers go with tour companies of the “if today is Tuesday, this must be Belgium” variety. But more and more are coming for longer stays, getting an appreciation for cultures and civilizations very different from their own.
> 
> This matters. China has always been the most insular of the world’s great civilizations. At one end of the Silk Road, and cut off by geography from the other great centers of civilization, China never experienced the constant interplay between high civilizations and great empires that characterized, for example, both European and Middle Eastern history from ancient times. China never lived in the presence of the Other, sometimes admired, sometimes feared, in the formative way that German, Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Indian civilizations did.
> 
> When the outside world burst into Chinese awareness in the 19th century, it came as a horror show. Weakened by isolation and introspection, China struggled for 150 years to adapt and to maintain its independence and dignity. Now, thanks to China’s economic development and the technological progress that allows human beings to travel the world, millions of Chinese people are immersing themselves in other cultures and civilizations.
> 
> This encounter will change China and it will change the world. Understanding how the new awareness of other countries and cultures is affecting the way people in China view their own history and way of life is critical for anybody who wants to see where the 21st century is headed. The great surge of Chinese tourists to sample the wider world’s restaurants, museums, cultural monuments, and natural wonders is one of the forces that is transforming the world as the first global civilization takes shape. Sadly, too many journalists and media outlets seem more interested in fact-checking Donald Trump than in getting their fingers on the pulse of world history. The press lavishes ink on relatively small bore events as one of the most consequential events in our time pass almost unnoticed.


----------



## Kirkhill

Bearpaw said:
			
		

> One has to wonder what mischief the Chinese are up to when they are seeking bases in the Azores or in Greenland.
> 
> "Lately, China has been actively looking at securing military facilities much closer to the United States, namely in Greenland and the Caribbean, and more frequent exploratory Chinese missions in the Atlantic, near the Azores, are expected in the near future, it has been reported." --- from article cited by T6.
> 
> Bearpaw



The Azores make an excellent staging ground for interventions into Africa, particularly West Africa, where China has interests.  Bonus points for it being under America's nose.


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC 022 catamaran missile boat.The design has been around for awhile but it seems a cheap platform for defending their South China Sea bases.According to the article each vessel has 8 anti-ship missiles which could possibly overwhelm a ship's defenses.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/12/chinas-type-022-catamaran-missile-boats.html


----------



## CougarKing

To think some 20 or 30 years ago some would have scoffed at the idea of the RMB/ Yuan becoming an IMF reserve currency:

Diplomat



> *China’s Currency Goes Global
> 
> What are the implications of the recent IMF decision on the renminbi?*
> anthony-fensom
> By Anthony Fensom
> December 03, 2015
> 
> The International Monetary Fund’s decision to include the Chinese currency in its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket from October 2016 has been viewed as a major step forward in Beijing’s international economic aspirations. *The first change in the SDR’s currency composition since 1999 could result in the yuan eventually replacing the euro as the main alternative currency to the dollar,* with an estimated $1 trillion in global reserves expected to be converted to yuan-denominated assets.
> 
> Pacific Money spoke to Roger Bridges, chief global strategist for interest rates and currencies at Nikko Asset Management Australia, on the IMF’s move and its implications for global markets.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I expect that it is in response to the presence of the USN in the South China Sea.



And speaking of the South China Sea, the Philippines continues its case against China over their rival claims at the International Tribunal at Hague:

Diplomat



> *Philippine FM: China’s 9-Dash Line a ‘Berlin Wall of the Sea’
> 
> Before an arbitral tribunal, the Philippines’ foreign secretary slams China’s actions in the South China Sea.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> December 03, 2015
> 
> On Monday, the Philippines finished presenting its arguments on the South China Sea issue before an international tribunal in The Hague. The Philippines, as Diplomat readers know, filed an arbitration case against China on the South China Sea issue in 2013, seeking clarity on the legality of China’s nine-dash line, the status of certain features in the South China Sea, and the Philippines’ own maritime rights in the disputed region. Arguments on the merits of the case opened on November 24.
> 
> On November 30, Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Albert del Rosario wrapped up the Philippine position in his concluding remarks. *In the speech, del Rosario praised the power of international law to bring clarity to the disputes. He also accused China of “failing” to uphold international law.*
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More on the aforementioned Chinese LHD design:

Navy Recognition



> *First Details on Likely Future Type 75 LHD for PLAN Showed Up on China Government Website*
> 
> The first details on a future landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious assault ship for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) may have emerged on a government website in China.
> 
> The first details on a future landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious assault ship for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) may have emmerged on a government website in China.
> Poster showing an LHD design on CSOC (China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Company) stand during AAD 2014 in South Africa
> 
> An article published on an official website of the Shanghai communist party mentions a company, Hudong Heavy Machinery Co., LTD (member of CSSC China State Shipbuilding Corporation, the largest shipbuilding group in China) that has been contracted to built "16PC2-6B" diesel engines for a new project of amphibious assault ship. The French Mistral class and Japanese Izumo class are mentioned as well.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest incident from the South China Sea:

Asian News Network



> *Chinese ship rams Philippine boat in disputed shoal; 1 dead*
> Asia News Network
> 
> By Dona Z. Pazzibugan in Manila/Philippine Daily Inquirer | Asia News Network – Mon, Jun 25, 2012
> 
> Manila (Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN) - A Chinese vessel last week rammed a Philippine fishing boat north of the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, killing a Filipino fisherman and leaving four others missing.
> 
> Executive Director Benito Ramos of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) yesterday said the Chinese vessel might have intentionally hit the fishing boat AXL John on Wednesday, but the vessel did nothing to help the fishermen.
> 
> "They did not [help]," Ramos said. ¿That¿s why it¿s suspicious. If it was accidental, then they should have helped."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China finally dealing with problem of so many unregistered rural migrants living illegally in China's urban areas?

Diplomat



> *China Wants Hukous for Its 13 Million Unregistered Citizens
> Top Chinese leadership demanded an initiative to grant hukous to China’s unofficial citizens.*
> 
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> December 10, 2015
> China declared on Wednesday that it will provide household registration permits (known as a hukou in Chinese) to around 13 million unregistered people. The announcement came in a statement from the Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reform, led by Xi Jinping himself.
> 
> In China, citizens are issued a hukou based on their place of residence. The permit allows people to access basic social services, from medical insurance to schooling for children. The hukou system is often discussed in the context of rural-to-urban migration, as migrant workers can find it nearly impossible to get a hukou in their new place of residence.
> 
> But, as The Diplomat reported earlier this year,* around 13 million Chinese lack any form of hukou – largely because they were born in violation of the one-child policy or born out of wedlock. For many families, their children are denied hukous – and thus an education – simply because the family cannot afford to pay the fines associated with breaking the one-child policy. Now that China has scrapped the one-child rule, moving to let all couples have a second child, the discrimination against these unregistered Chinese looks even more out of place.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The threat posed by Chinese SSKs to US CVBGs is reviewed:

Diplomat



> *The Chinese Submarine Threat
> 
> What is the scale of the threat to U.S. supercarriers of China’s growing undersea capabilities?*
> By Ben Ho Wan Beng
> December 10, 2015
> 
> 
> There has been extensive debate in recent years about modern Chinese anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems rendering the aircraft carriers of the United States Navy (USN) highly vulnerable if Beijing and Washington were to clash in the western Pacific. Particularly ominous is the growing undersea arm of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). According to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, C*hina’s attack submarine fleet consists mainly of diesel-electric boats (SSKs) ­– there are 57 of them, as well as five nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). Of these, the more modern ones include two Shang SSNs, 12 Kilo SSKs, and 12 Yuan SSKs.*
> 
> *Experts often allude to the threat posed by SSKs to the U.S. flattop. This is because the SSK, which is quieter than its nuclear-powered counterpart, is seemingly often able to slip detection by the carrier’s escorts.* There have been numerous instances of American carrier groups being surprised by SSKs, friendly or otherwise, during either training exercises or regular deployments. The most famous is arguably the 2006 incident of a Song surfacing at a distance within firing range of the Kitty Hawk battle group. Critics point out that if a relatively inferior sub like the Song was able to penetrate the carrier’s screen, a more capable one such as the Kilo would find the endeavor easier. And in a similar case in October this year, a Chinese boat reportedly “stalked” the Reagan carrier strike group (CSG), setting off alarm bells amongst U.S. defense officials. So the question is to what extent would PLAN submarines threaten U.S. carriers during a conflict? This questions has two parts: 1) assessing how likely it is that a Chinese boat would be able to locate and track the American capital ship, and, 2) if it is able to do so, the extent to which it damage or sink the flattop.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## quadrapiper

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The threat posed by Chinese SSKs to US CVBGs is reviewed:
> 
> Diplomat


If the USN wanted to make a case for increased ASW funding, perhaps have a carrier group come to the BC coast to play with our West Coast subs?


----------



## CougarKing

My post above about the fishing boat ramming incident was actually from 2012. I apologize for my error.

Still, the South China Sea remains an area of contention between China and neighbors. 

The Chinese make stern warnings against a civilian aircraft carrying a BBC reporter near the artificial islands controlled by China:

BBC



> *Navy warns as BBC flies near China islands*
> 
> 1 hour ago
> 
> Countries from around the world have insisted that China's expansion into the South China Sea is illegal.
> 
> It is building a huge artificial island in the Spratly Island chain, one of the most contested areas in the world.
> 
> The islands are difficult to reach, but BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes flew in a small civilian aircraft into China's self-declared security zone, 140 miles off the coast of the Philippines.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Australia's own FONOP was actually occurring simultaneously with the attempt by that BBC reporters' plane to go over Mischief Reef mentioned above:

Diplomat



> *Did Australia Secretly Conduct Its Own Freedom of Navigation Operation in the South China Sea?
> 
> An accidental scoop by a BBC reporter suggests so.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> December 16, 2015
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Though Wingfield-Hayes says his aircraft was warned away repeatedly (and aggressively) by the Chinese navy, he didn’t catch any Chinese response to the Australian broadcast. *Details released later provided a specific date for the radio transmission (November 25) and identified the aircraft as an RAAF AP-3C Orion.*
> 
> As Wingfield-Hayes explains, Australia has never publicly announced its own freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Yet here was a radio transmission that suggested Australia was doing just that. In response to the highly-publicized U.S. FONOP near Subi Reef in late October, *Australia expressed strong support for the rights of freedom of navigation and overflight, but was coy about whether it would conduct its own such operations, either independently or with the United States.*
> 
> ABC picked up the story from there, including a clip of the audio recording from Wingfield-Hayes. According to ABC, the Australian government still has not announced that it undertook a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea. The Department of Defense confirmed some of the details, however, telling ABC that *“a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion was conducting a routine maritime patrol in the region as part of Operation GATEWAY from 25 November to 4 December.*”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

How seriously does China take tiny islands?  Quite, according to this:


> Last year the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes travelled across the South China Sea in a fishing boat and became the first journalist to observe close-up how China is constructing new islands on coral reefs. A few days ago he returned to the area in a small aircraft - provoking a furious and threatening response from the Chinese Navy.
> 
> The scattered atolls, reefs and sand bars known as the Spratly Islands are a very difficult place to get to. Some are controlled by Vietnam, others by the Philippines, one by Taiwan, and then of course there are those controlled by China.
> 
> Don't expect an invitation from Beijing. Believe me, I've tried. Only the Philippines will let you visit a tiny 400m-long scrap of land called Pagasa. It's just about big enough to land a small aircraft on.
> 
> After months of planning and negotiation, I was sitting in a hotel room in Manila packed and ready to go when the phone rang. It was my colleague Chika.
> 
> "Our permission to land on Pagasa has been revoked!" she announced.
> 
> My heart sank. What had happened? Had the Philippine government been threatened? China's President Xi Jinping was about to arrive in town. Perhaps Manila didn't want a scene?
> 
> In fact it was worse. Somehow Beijing had found out what we were up to.
> 
> Next came a call from my editor in London.
> 
> "The Chinese embassy has been on the phone. They're warning of problems if the BBC tries to visit what they say is territory illegally occupied by the Philippines in the South China Sea," he said.
> 
> I mentally kicked myself. How had they found out? I should have been more careful.
> 
> And so for a week I was forced to sit in my hotel room and watch while President Xi came and went. Then, more frantic negotiation… and finally the Philippine government relented. We could go ...


And we ARE talking tiny ...


----------



## CougarKing

So much for all that rhetoric from China's foreign ministry about the need to protect the environment in the areas they claim:

Shanghaiist



> *WATCH: Chinese fishermen ransack coral reefs in the South China Sea for all their worth*
> 
> The Chinese government is continuing full steam ahead with its mission to seize control of the hotly contested South China Sea, leaving in its wake some completely ravaged underwater environments.
> 
> Less than a mile away from a Filipino military base, *Chinese poachers are plundering reefs for all the coral and clams they can carry, turning once vibrant coral reefs into deserts under the protection of China's navy*. The BBC captured the environmental looters on camera for us:
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More food for thought on how the PLA is adapting to modern warfare:

Diplomat



> *China and the 'Three Warfares'
> 
> Beijing is increasingly exploiting information operations for influence in areas of strategic competition.*
> By Michael Raska
> December 18, 2015
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Operationalizing the ‘Three Warfares’*
> 
> At the operational level, the “Three Warfares” became the responsibility for the *PLA’s General Political Department’s Liaison Department (GPD/LD), which conducts diverse political, financial, military, and intelligence operations. *According to the Project2049 Institute, GPD/LD consists of four bureaus: (1) a liaison bureau responsible for clandestine Taiwan-focused operations; (2) an investigation and research bureau responsible for international security analysis and friendly contact; (3) an external propaganda bureau responsible for disintegration operations, including psychological operations, development of propaganda themes, and legal analysis; and (4) a border defense bureau responsible for managing border negotiations and agreements. The Ministry of National Defense of the PRC provides more general terms, emphasizing “information weaponization and military social media strategy.”
> *
> In practice, the GPD/LD is also linked with the PLA General Staff Department (GSD) 2nd Department-led intelligence network.* One of its core activities is identifying select foreign political, business, and military elites and organizations abroad relevant to China’s interests or potential “friendly contacts.” *The GPD/LD investigation and research bureau then analyses their position toward China, career trajectories, motivations, political orientations, factional affiliations, and competencies.
> *
> 
> The resulting “cognitive maps” guide the direction and character of tailored influence operations, including conversion, exploitation, or subversion. *Meanwhile, the GPD’s Propaganda Department broadcasts sustained internal and external strategic perception management campaigns through mass media and cyberspace channels to promote specific themes favorable for China’s image abroad – political stability, peace, ethnic harmony, and economic prosperity supporting the narrative of the “China model” (zhongguo moshi).*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

I find it hard to believe China's _Xia_ class SSBNs didn't conduct these patrols before the _Jin_ class came online:

Diplomat



> *China Deploys First Nuclear Deterrence Patrol
> 
> China reportedly deployed its first-ever submarine nuclear deterrence patrol. What does it mean?*
> 
> By Benjamin David Baker
> December 19, 2015
> 
> During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was ultimately perceived to be an effective way of keeping tensions between the Warsaw Pact and NATO from exploding into war. Although much of the rhetoric surrounding Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) disappeared along with the Soviet Union, nuclear states still keep sizable arsenals to dissuade others from attacking them.
> 
> A central part of having a credible nuclear response option is to develop a so-called “nuclear triad.” This consists of having ground-, air- and sea-based nuclear capabilities, in order to retain a “second strike” capability in case an opponent launches its nukes first. Submarines and small, mobile land-based launch platforms armed with nuclear ballistic and so-called Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) are crucial to a second strike capability, since they are difficult to detect and target.
> 
> China has recently achieved some important milestones with regards to both these capabilities. *According to IHS Jane’s, U.S. military officials confirmed that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has deployed a Type-094 Jin-class nuclear-powered ballistic submarine on a nuclear deterrence patrol. If true, this represents the first time that China has deployed a sub on this kind of mission*.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China irked by another US move:

Aviationist



> *Two U.S. B-52 skirt Chinese-controlled man-made island in the South China Sea sparking Chinese protest*
> Dec 19 2015 -
> By David Cenciotti
> 
> On Dec. 10, *two U.S. Air Force B-52 strategic bombers on a routine long-range mission flew within 12 nautical miles (the standard boundary of the territorial waters) of one of the seven Chinese man-made islands in the South China Sea, sparking China’s protests.*
> 
> Although Washington has not taken an official stance on sovereignty claims surrounding the islands it does maintain that China’s new islands do not enjoy the traditional 12NM territorial limit. However, according to the Pentagon, the aircraft were not flying a so-called “freedom of navigation” mission (a pre-planned navigation used to assert U.S. rights to “innocent passage” in or close to other nation’s territorial waters): one of the aircraft flew within 2 miles of an artificial island along unintentional route. Interesting, since “navigation errors” are a bit surprising on long-range bombers equipped with redundant GPS, INS systems that should make their navigation quite accurate.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Please note another article on how their rival Vietnam is also looking north, with Russia stirring the pot by selling arms to both of them.

Diplomat



> *China’s Arctic Strategy: The Geopolitics of Energy Security*
> 
> Insights from Øystein Tunsjø
> By Mercy A. Kuo and Angelica O. Tang
> December 16, 2015
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> How is China positioning itself in the Arctic?
> 
> China has not published any official Arctic strategy, policy or white paper, which suggest that the region has not been a priority and presently not high enough on the political agenda in Beijing. Nonetheless, statements by Chinese officials and China’s membership as a permanent observer in the Arctic Council have clarified China’s position on Arctic affairs and acknowledged China’s interests in the region. China’s growing activism in the Arctic is primarily shaped by scientific and climate considerations, commercial interest in the petroleum, shipping and mineral sector, as well as diplomatic and legal concerns. China’s willingness to become an Arctic Council observer supports the view that China does not challenge the sovereignty of the littoral states in the Arctic Ocean and remains committed to respecting the rule of law, including UNCLOS. China is positioning itself, and gaining a “foot in the door,” in order to access and extract resources and take advantage of strategic, economic, military, and scientific opportunities in the Arctic region in the years ahead.
> 
> How does China’s Arctic strategy fit into its Maritime Silk Road initiative?
> 
> China’s objectives in the Arctic could complement the One Belt, One Road Strategy (OBOR). Geographically, the Indian Ocean and the Arctic Ocean are the southern and northern flanks of the Eurasian landmass. Investments in shipping and infrastructure along the Northern Sea Route and the Maritime Silk Road can enhance China’s Silk Road Economic Belt strategy. In addition, China remains a huge littoral state. Consequently, China can add three oceanic frontiers to Mackinder’s “heartland” in Eurasia and overcome some of the challenges in controlling the heartland envisioned in the past. This could provide China with a favorable geopolitical position and an opportunity to “command the world islands” – Asia, Europe and Africa – in the twenty first century. However, it remains to be seen if China can successfully implement the OBOR strategy and whether Chinese investments in the Arctic region can complement this strategy.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Next thing you know, Beijing will claim North America after reading the book "1421" ...  :

Telegraph



> Beijing lays claim to South Korean waters
> Renewed concerns over territorial disputes in Western Pacific as China pushes out sea borders
> 
> By Julian ryall, Tokyo
> 
> 5:05AM GMT 23 Dec 2015
> 
> China is demanding that South Korea cede a large portion of its exclusive economic zone in the Yellow Sea to Beijing, including a submerged sea mount named Ieo that hosts a Korean marine research facility.
> 
> Officials of the two nations opened talks on the issue in Seoul on Tuesday, although recent claims by China that the sea mount falls within Chinese waters and should be known as Suyan Rock are causing concern.
> 
> Beijing's military have already effectively seized control of a number of reefs and shoals in the South China Sea, ignoring claims to the islands and their surrounding waters by Vietnam and the Philippines.
> 
> China is also becoming increasingly aggressive in the number and frequency of incursions by ships and aircraft into waters around Japan's Senkaku Islands, which Beijing claims are historically Chinese territory and should be known as the Diaoyu islands.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A retired Royal Australian Navy commodore and a US Navy JAG officer examine the pros and cons of the recent USN FONOPS in the South China Sea:

Diplomat



> *The Strategist, the Lawyer and the South China Sea
> 
> Understanding law and politics in contested waters.*
> By Kerry Lynn Nankivell
> December 22, 2015
> 
> Readers of The Diplomat were recently afforded an exchange by two leading experts in South China Sea disputes. *Dr. Sam Bateman, a retired commodore of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), wrote of the strategic problems associated with U.S. Freedom of Navigation Operations (FON OPS) in the South China Sea. Bateman warns of the United States “militarizing” a sensitive circumstance and “turning back the clock” on international law*. Responding to these claims, *Commander Jonathan Odom, judge advocate general (JAG), former oceans policy advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and current military professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, defended the FON OPS program by noting the legal errors underpinning Bateman’s argument.*
> 
> At face value, each author’s analysis is useful but incomplete. Accepting Bateman’s approach means believing that FON OPS are illegal, or at least legally controversial. As Odom retorts, this is simply untrue. But accepting Odom’s legal defense of freedom of navigation as the last word in the South China Sea is to ignore the central geopolitical questions at hand. In the final reading, the lawyer’s discussion places boundaries on what is legitimately contested in the South China Sea in a way that the strategist finds hard to accept, while the strategist raises questions that the law can’t answer. Both Odom and Bateman make an important contribution to understanding the circumstance unfolding, though their arguments only relate to each other indirectly. This failure to communicate reflects the shrinking space for dialogue in the U.S.-China relationship itself, which sometimes rehearses the same arguments.
> 
> The Bateman-Odom dialogue carries special lessons. Precisely because the lawyer and the strategist find it hard to directly engage one another, their dialogue can teach us about the relationship between law and geopolitics in the South China Sea disputes and what it means for strategy and operations.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Reminds me of the time several foreign diplomats and journalists were literally pushed away by government workers for reporting on the trial of human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang:

Shanghaiist



> *China to expel French journalist who questioned treatment of Muslim minority in Xinjiang*
> *
> Ursula Gauthier is set to be the first foreign journalist to be shown the door since 2012 after writing an article which criticized Chinese government policy towards Uighurs in Xinjiang.*
> 
> French news magazine L'Obs confirmed in a statement on Friday that Gauthier would not have her J visa renewed, presenting her with no choice other than to leave the country by December 31.
> 
> In the article, originally published on December 18, Gauthier suggested that China was using last month's Paris attacks to justify crackdowns on Uighur people in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. L'Obs said Gauthier has since received death threats after her article was published.
> 
> A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said the article "openly supports terrorist activity, the killing of innocents and has outraged the Chinese public." His comments appeared in a question-and-answer posted on the ministry's website on Saturday.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More fallout from China's more aggressive attitudes. The success of Australia in getting highly competitive bids for the new submarines should be a lesson for Canada (and if these are AIP boats which could operate under the ice, then they would be ideal for Canadian use as well.).

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/12/japan-france-and-germany-offer-lower.html



> *Japan, France and Germany offer lower cost bids for Australia's 12 submarine order*
> 
> Confidential bids lodged with the Australian government last month by Germany, France and Japan each offer a dramatically lower cost of building an eight-submarine fleet in Adelaide than was ­anticipated, in the range of A$10 billion-A$12 billion. It was previously expected that the project would cost about A$20 billion, based on a 12-boat fleet.
> 
> Even if the government decides to restore its original promise of building 12 submarines rather than eight, the bidders estimate the construction cost will reach only about A$15 billion, a little more than A$1 billion a boat, amounting to a potential $5 billion saving for taxpayers.
> 
> The lower cost estimates reflect the robust competition between the three international bidders to secure the submarine deal, which will be the most lucrative defence contract in the ­nation’s history.
> 
> The cheaper than expected estimates for building the new fleet may tempt the government to try to keep its original promise of building 12 submarines, rather than the revised figure of eight submarines with an option for four more that was in Tony Abbott’s draft defence white paper before he was deposed by Malcolm Turnbull in September.
> 
> The Australian government wants the largest and most sophisticated conventional submarine ever built, a 4000-plus tonne boat with a US combat system and the ability to fire cruise missiles and deploy special forces.


----------



## PuckChaser

We'd probably save a lot of money building the CSC and JSS overseas, and leave the fisheries and AOPS for our small and ill-equipped shipyards.


----------



## a_majoor

PuckChaser said:
			
		

> We'd probably save a lot of money building the CSC and JSS overseas, and leave the fisheries and AOPS for our small and ill-equipped shipyards.



Good point. On a further tangent, since submarines are _the_ capital ship for the 21rst century, the idea of getting 12 modern subs on the Australian model would be a good response by the RCN to the changing situation in the Pacific (and if someone were really clever, going in with the Australians for a total build of 20+ submarines would provide some huge economies of scale for all parties).


----------



## YZT580

Unfortunately, from what I understand, an AIP boat is not suitable for sustained under ice ops. which is the operating condition for one third of the waters for which the RCN is responsible.


----------



## CougarKing

Gents, 

Please note a similar thread on Australia mulling the purchase of Soryu class subs from Japan, with competing bids by the Germany's TKMS Endeavour project and France's DCNS Barracuda project.

------------------------------

Anyways, on the aviation front, the low-rate-initial production/LRIP version of the J-20 stealth fighter has just been unveiled by the PLAAF:

Air Recognition



> *China reportedly rolled out first LRIP version of the Chengdu J-20 fighter aircraft
> *
> According to pictures released on Chinese specialized websites, the first low rate initial production (LRIP) version of the Chengdu J-20 5th-gen fighter aircraft, numbered 2101, made its first appearance at Chengdu State Aircraft Factory No.132 Aircraft Plant. It may now perform its maiden flight in the next few weeks, local sources said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A video has surfaced showing operations aboard China’s only aircraft carrier, the _Liaoning_, complete with the head of the Chinese Navy’s making a visit and J-15 fighters landing and launching. 

More importantly, this video at the link below shows how much Chinese aircraft carrier operations have evolved.

Foxtrot Alpha


----------



## Edward Campbell

I suppose it's an open secret, if it was ever a secret at all, but the _Financial Times_ now repots that "China’s defence ministry confirmed on Thursday that it is building a second aircraft carrier as Beijing seeks to assert its claims over a number of contested islands and reefs in the South and East China seas ... Speaking at a briefing, ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said China had started to design and construct a 50,000-tonne vessel capable of hosting the People’s Liberation Army’s J-15 fighter."


----------



## CougarKing

Moving from naval aviation to stealth:

PopularScience



> *CHINESE STEALTH FIGHTER J-20 STARTS PRODUCTION
> COMING SOON TO ASIAN AIRSPACE NEAR YOU*
> By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer  Posted December 28, 2015
> 
> In a Christmas gift for Chinese fighter pilots, December 25th saw the unveiling of a new J-20 fighter in fresh yellow fuselage primer on the runway of the Chengdu Aviation Corporation (CAC) factory. More notable than its paint color, however, was the numbering of the plane: "2101." As opposed to "2018" or "2019" to follow the eighth flying prototype "2017," "2101" suggests the plane is the first of the low rate initial production (LRIP) airframes, which signify the move away from prototype production to building fighters for actual military use.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest addition to China's "String of Pearls", despite that border dispute between China and Myanmar last June:

Diplomat



> *Chinese Company Wins Contract for Deep Sea Port in Myanmar
> 
> CITIC Group has won a contract to develop a port in Kyaukpyu on the Bay of Bengal.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> January 01, 2016
> 
> 
> China’s CITIC Group Corporation has won two contracts related to a special economic zone in western Myanmar, Reuters reports, including building a deep sea port on the Bay of Bengal. CITIC’s consortia (including China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd., China Merchants Holdings, TEDA Investment Holding, and Yunnan Construction Engineering Group) will lead projects to build the port as well as an industrial area at the Kyaukpyu Special Economic Zone in western Myanmar’s Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh to the north and the Bay of Bengal to the west.
> 
> The contracts give yet another Chinese company a pivotal role in developing maritime infrastructure on the Indian Ocean, adding to China’s involvement in a number of regional ports (Chittagong in Bangladesh, Gwadar in Pakistan, and Colombo in Sri Lanka). Taken together, those ports are sometimes referred to as China’s “string of pearls” — a concept that assumes they will be of military as well as civilian use.
> 
> Kyaukpyu is of particular interest to China because overland links between Myanmar and southern China can reduce reliance on the potential chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca. By eliminating the need to travel via the Strait of Malacca, Kyaukpyu Port would save about 5,000 kilometers in sailing distance for shipments traveling to China from India and points beyond. The drive to diversify its shipping routes – and to increase economic clout in neighboring countries – is a major impetus behind the new “Belt and Road” initiative, which envisions infrastructure and trade networks linking China with every part of the Eurasian continent.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Both countries sending messages to rivals India and Japan?

Diplomat



> *A First: China and Pakistan Conclude Naval Exercise in East China Sea
> 
> For the first time, the two “all weather” partners hold a naval exercise in the East China Sea.*
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> January 04, 2016
> 
> The Pakistani Navy and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) have concluded their first-ever exercise in the East China Sea. The exercise, which took place from December 31, 2015 to January 1, 2016, was part of a seven-day visit to Shanghai by a Pakistani naval taskforce consisting of a frigate and a supply ship. According to the Chinese defense ministry, the exercise included a joint drill focused on ship formation movement, search and rescue, and live-fire exercises striking aerial and sea targets. The exercise also included an anti-piracy component and, according to a CCTV report, an anti-submarine warfare component.
> 
> According to the Chinese Ministry of Defense, the Pakistani taskforce was headed by Commodore Bilal Abdul Nadir, who heads the 25th Destroyer Flotilla of the Pakistani Navy. The two ships that participated in the exercise included the PNS Shamsheer, the second of Pakistan’s four Zulfiquar-class frigates, and a 25-ton supply ship, the Nasr. On the PLAN’s part, at least two missile frigates participated in the exercises — most likely, two of the PLAN East Sea fleet’s four Jiangkai-II-class frigates. Nadir, in an interview with the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, described the exercises as “very significant,” noting that they would “enhance the interoperability and cohesion between the two navies.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Slowly, the party is taking oppressive control of Hong Kong despite the "One-country, two systems" agreement they had with the Brits before they left in 1997:

Shanghaiist



> *Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore,' student activist speaks to the world about missing HK bookseller*
> 
> Looking to raise international attention about the current situation in Hong Kong, Agnes Chow Ting, prominent member of the Hong Kong student activist group Scholarism, is speaking out on the curious case of the missing local bookseller.
> 
> The five-minute video featuring Chow titled "An Urgent Cry from Hong Kong" was uploaded to her Facebook page on Saturday, it has gained more than 20,000 likes and 10,000 shares in two days.
> 
> In the video, Chow recounts the mysterious disappearance on Wednesday of HK bookseller Lee Bo, a major shareholder in the Causeway Bay Bookstore, which sells books critical of the leadership in Beijing. Lee is the fifth person associated with the bookstore to go missing.
> 
> Lee was last heard from by his wife who he called the night of his disappearance from Shenzhen, speaking in Mandarin instead of Cantonese, saying that he was assisting mainland police in an investigation.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A picture of the 2nd carrier taking shape:

Sputnik News


----------



## CougarKing

More economic trouble for China:

Diplomat



> *China Suspends Stock Market Trading After 7 Percent Drop
> 
> A new “circuit-breaker” mechanism for China’s stock market kicked in on its first day in effect.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> January 05, 2016
> 
> China halted trading on its stock markets on Monday, after a 7 percent drop in the CSI 300 index triggered the new “circuit-breaker” mechanism. The first trading day of 2016 was the worst start to a year for Chinese stock markets, according to Bloomberg.
> 
> The circuit-breaker mechanism was unveiled in September, after a nearly 40 percent stock market slump over the summer. The mechanism was designed to keep the market from moving too far in one direction on any given day. If the CSI 300 index, which reflects the performance of 300 stocks traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets, drops or rises 5 percent, the circuit-breaker kicks in to suspend trading for 15 minutes. If the index rises or falls by 7 percent in one day, trading is suspended. The mechanism took effect with the start of the new year, meaning it was brought into use on its first day in action.
> 
> On Monday,  the index dropped 5 percent and trading was suspended at 1:12 pm local time, according to Xinhua. As soon as trading resumed, the index slumped again, hitting the 7 percent mark and triggering the automatic suspension at 1:33 pm, around seven minutes after trading resumed. The rapid drop after trading was reinstated prompted some analysts (including Bob Pisani of CNBC) to suggest that the circuit breaker mechanism itself was part of the problem.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus, some food for thought:

Diplomat



> *Why the EU Should Grant China Market Economy Status
> 
> Granting China market status is a political decision, not an economic one.*
> kerry_brown_q
> By Kerry Brown
> January 05, 2016
> 
> 
> It has been over a decade since the European Union (EU) jettisoned its attempts to defy the United States and lift the arms embargo imposed against the Chinese after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The painful diplomatic machinations around this on the European side ended a period in which, on the whole, the Chinese had maintained strong hopes towards Brussels. Such hopes are most visibly testified to now in the White Paper produced in 2003 by the State Council in Beijing serenading the importance of the Europeans as diplomatic, intellectual, and, of course, economic partners.
> 
> After 2004, when attempts to lift the embargo ended, the language about the EU emanating from Beijing became frostier. During the worst period, high level bilateral summits were cancelled over meetings between European leaders and the Dalai Lama. Chinese officials and scholars in Beijing would go puce with rage over what they declared was the unjustified sanctimonious tone they had to endure from EU delegations. This resulted in the second white paper in 2014, a far harsher, more hectoring document. Both sides had long since been disabused of their softer hopes towards each other.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Freedoms being eroded in Hong Kong day by the day...

Shanghaiist



> *Hong Kong bookstores pulling banned books off shelves in light of missing publishers mystery*
> 
> 
> Singapore-based bookstore chain Page One seems to be taking the mysterious disappearance of Lee Bo and his colleagues pretty seriously, removing from its Hong Kong shops all material banned from the mainland.
> 
> According to SCMP, the removal project began last year, around the time the first executive of Causeway Bay Bookstore went missing. "We were told to take all politically sensitive books off the shelves in late November," reported a salesman from the Page One outlet in Tsim Sha Tsui. "The manager did not tell us the reason, but said Page One would no longer sell banned books ever again."
> 
> Other Page One employees in Hong Kong have corroborated the ceasing of sales, none able to account for the decision.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus an update on the aforementioned case of the missing bookseller:

Shanghaiist



> *Missing Hong Kong bookseller revealed to be a British citizen*
> 
> 
> Another day, another development. It's now been revealed that the mysteriously missing Hong Kong bookseller Lee Bo is also a British citizen, which would seem to only further complicate matters.
> 
> The information was confirmed yesterday by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a spokesperson declared the following:
> 
> We are deeply concerned by reports about the disappearance and detention of individuals associated with the Causeway Bay Books bookstore in Hong Kong. We can confirm that one of the individuals is a British Citizen and we have urgently requested the Hong Kong and mainland authorities' assistance in ascertaining this individual’s welfare and whereabouts. We stand ready to provide consular assistance.
> 
> We encourage the Hong Kong SAR Government to honour its commitment to protecting the freedom of the press, and we hope the Chinese authorities will continue to make every effort to ensure that the environment in which the media and publishers operate in the Hong Kong SAR supports full and frank reporting.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Straight out of a propaganda film...  :

Shanghaiist



> *Cute flight attendants used as latest weapon in battle for South China Sea territory*
> 
> Images of flight attendants posing for pictures at one of the recently built airstrips that China has developed on disputed islands in the South China Sea have recently gone viral, with netizens sarcastically praising the country's growing strength in the region.
> *
> According to NetEase, China allowed two civil airlines to land on the newly-built airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef, referred to as Yongshu Reef by the Chinese. *The mission was declared a success, with the flight attendants posing for a series of photos which serve to demonstrate China's undisputed sovereignty over the territory.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

Actually, the images of the greenhouse are, possibly, more important ...





... still using pretty girls ~ good PR in all of Asia; but, also ...





... indicating that Fiery Cross is there for the "long haul;" and ...





... can, potentially, wait out a blockade.

This is, _I think_, just one part of a "layered' campaign in which the real target is US power in East Asia. (_I suspect_ North Korea is another club in the same golf bag.) The Chinese aim, _I guess_, is to replace America as the dominant power in Asia and make Japan, the Koreas, Philippines, Thailand etc _kowtow_, politically and strategically, to Beijing as "little brothers."


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

A "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> A "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"?



 ;D  :nod: 

Yes, something like that ... perhaps SMA, who is far, far better at language issues than I, can weigh in on the "little brother" notion. I have heard it used ~ it has been interpreted to me as that ~ by Chinese, when referring to the "proper" relationship between e.g. China and Japan, specifically, and between China and other _Sinic_ peoples.

I don't think the Chinese want an empire, not even of the American type. Some (many?) Chinese scholars think that the Qing went too far in the 18th and 19th centuries in gobbling up Tibet and Xinjiang which are too full of _non-Sinic_ or, at least, _less-Sinic_ peoples. Some scholars think that too much "foreign" influence weakens China's culture which they see as unique and superior.


----------



## CougarKing

PLA-N growth over last year:

Navy Recognition



> *The Impressive Commissioning Pace of the Chinese Navy (PLAN) in 2015*
> 
> 2015 was a record year for the the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy) in terms of new vessels procurement.* No less than 3 destroyers, 4 frigates and 5 corvettes were commissioned into the Chinese fleet*. Let's take a look back at the impressive number of units that joined the PLAN's fleet last year.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

10,000 tons...that's the average tonnage of a WW2 heavy cruiser/1930s treaty cruiser!

It dwarfs the 2 ex-USCG _Hamilton_ class cutters the Philippine Navy is using to patrol the same disputed areas of the South China Sea!

Diplomat



> *Beijing Builds ‘Monster’ Ship for Patrolling the South China Sea
> 
> According to Chinese state media, the ship will be the largest coast guard vessel in the world.*
> 
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> January 13, 2016
> 
> 
> China has finished construction on a second 10,000-ton China Coast Guard (CCG) cutter destined for patrols in the South China Sea, Chinese state media reports. The ship, designated CCG 3901, “has been completed recently and is ready to start protecting China’s maritime rights,” The Global Times announced. A sister ship, the CCG2901, already deployed to the East China Sea in 2015.
> 
> The CCG 3901, constructed at Shanghai’s Jiangnan Shipyard, has been dubbed the ‘monster’ by the media due to its unusual large size for a coast guard vessel. *According to some sources, the vessel could have a displacement 12,000 to 15,000 metric tons once all systems have been installed aboard. In comparison, the China Coast Guard ship outsizes a the U.S. Navy’s Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser by about 50 percent*, and is also bigger than an Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyer (e.g., the USS Lassen), which displaces around 9,700 tons. In addition, it also outclasses Japan’s 6,500-ton Shikishima-class coast guard cutters.
> 
> According to Chinese state media, the coast guard vessel can reach a top speed of up to 25 knots and is equipped with 76 millimeter rapid fire guns, two secondary guns and two anti-aircraft guns. It also has a helicopter platform and hangar in the stern large enough to accommodate larger rotary wing aircraft.  With the exception of the CCG 3901s sister ship, all other China Coast Guard vessels have so far been only lightly armed or are equipped with water cannons.
> 
> Unlike actual surface naval combat, in hostile encounters between coast guards the size of the ship plays a large role, particularly in the South China Sea, which has seen numerous instances of ‘ramming contests’ with two vessels often engaging in games of chicken trying to scare the other vessel off.  The CCG 3901 appears to be first and foremost a coercive instrument for such encounters and will help to advance China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Fallout from the unwinding of the Chinese economy will have global consequences:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/11/the-china-bubble/



> *The China Bubble*
> Walter Russell Mead
> 
> It’s probably bursting, one way or another. And the world hasn’t figured out what to do about it.
> 
> As China’s stock markets sagged through the early days of 2016, there has been no shortage of follow-up stories in the MSM that try to paint the bigger picture—about how China’s slowdown is having knock-on effects around the world. Here at TAI, we have been following the commodity crash story for some time—and not just as a piece of economic news mostly interesting to financial market speculators. This is a political and a geopolitical story as well. Falling commodity prices matter to everything from the security of Putin’s power base to the ability of the oil-dependent Nigerian state to wage an effective war against Boko Haram; the fate of democracy in countries like Brazil and South Africa is complicated by the prospective fallout from the commodity crash; Venezuela may implode into chaos as a result of the oil crash, and fears for Venezuela’s future were a major consideration in Cuba’s decision to respond to the Obama Administration’s normalization overtures. In other words, significant shifts in world commodity prices can tilt the balance of power, undermine the stability of some governments, and boost the prospects of others.
> 
> But the story may be getting still bigger. We may be looking at something more serious than the unwinding of a commodity boom; we may be looking at the bursting of a bubble that could dwarf what happened in 2008. The China Bubble is bigger than the real estate bubble, and its liquidation could pose bigger risks for world politics than the subprime implosion.
> 
> There’s a difference between China and the China Bubble. China is a middle-income developing country bumping up against the limits of a growth model built on massive exports of manufactured goods. There are lots of bubbles inside China, largely because both national and local governments have pursued a mix of stimulative policies even as the health of the underlying growth model deteriorated. Massive over-investment in real estate, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, overvalued stock prices and poorly priced financial assets have created an increasingly toxic and dangerous economic situation inside China, and a rattled government is doing its best to keep the system from imploding. The government is hoping to achieve a “soft landing” as China switches away from growth led by manufacturing for export to growth led by services and internal consumption. We shall see; China’s regulators and managers are skilled and have a lot of ammunition. But this is a difficult maneuver to execute and as Chinese society and the Chinese economy both become more complex, the task of running the country keeps getting harder.
> 
> The China Bubble on the other hand is an international phenomenonThe China Bubble on the other hand is an international phenomenon. All over the world, the producers of commodities and manufactured goods have bought into the idea that Chinese demand is a perpetual growth machine. Producers of everything from cotton to copper to soybeans to silicon chips have assumed that double digit growth in China’s appetite for the components of its industrial machine will continue indefinitely—and they have invested to create the capacity to match this inexorably growing demand. From the jungles of Africa and the backwoods of Brazil to the rice paddies of Thailand and the Australian Outback there have been massive investments in mining, agriculture, energy production and infrastructure that assume continuing and even accelerating growth in Chinese demand.
> 
> These investments, the excess capacity they represent, and the stocks and bonds dependent on these investments (both inside and outside China) are what the China Bubble is about.
> 
> The Chinese government may or may not succeed in stabilizing the economic situation there, at least for now, and Beijing may or may not succeed at avoiding the dreaded “middle income trap” in which formerly rapidly growing developing economies hit a wall after reaching a certain level of per capita prosperity. And the inevitable deceleration of Chinese growth that comes with the transition to a less export-dependent economy may or may not result in a financial crash inside China. But whether or not China’s economic planners execute their new strategy effectively, the China Bubble is going to burst.
> 
> That is to say, if China’s economic managers fail, the financial system implodes and China faces a wrenching transition and a hard landing, the massive global investments built to sustain China’s manufacturing growth will fail—dramatically, suddenly, and expensively. But even if China’s economic managers succeed, and the country moves to a soft landing with growth still strong but increasingly based outside manufacturing and the export economy, the global investments predicated on China’s continuing hunger for the commodities and components it needs for a manufacturing export boom will also fail.
> 
> We do not yet know whether China’s economy will fall into recession, or how exactly China will manage its mix of overbuilt manufacturing capacity, land speculation, empty apartments, local government debt, and over-built infrastructure even as it attempts to move to a more market based economy. We do not and cannot know when all of China’s chickens will come home to roost—and how fast they will be running to get there.
> 
> But we do know that the vast global network of mines, roads, agricultural development, and financial speculation built on the assumption that the old Chinese economy would grow at eight percent forever is running on empty. The commodity price crash, a direct consequence of massive over-investment in production facilities whose output cannot be sold at a price that justifies the original investment, is already here. The consequences of the crash on financial markets, tax revenues, and trade flows are already being felt. From the South African rand (which plunged over the weekend by ten percent to unheard of levels) to the Brazilian real and the Australian dollar, the currencies most closely linked to the old China paradigm have already crashed.
> 
> The earthquake has happened; we are now watching the tsunami surge around the world. From Germany’s high tech capital goods export sector to the copper pits of Zimbabwe, those who have invested on the basis of indefinite high growth of the old Post-Mao China economy are now waking up to the new post-post-Mao reality of sharply lower growth in demand for the key inputs of an export based manufacturing system.
> 
> But we have not yet hit bottom. The new reality of a much slower growth in China’s demand for basic manufacturing inputs is still young and its impact is only now beginning to be felt. There is more to come, and the consequences have yet to manifest themselves fully. Over the next few weeks and months, the realization that the China Party has ended will spread through more industries and more markets.
> This is going to present a challenge for central bankers above all others; the consequences of the old bubble, in the form of ultra-low interest rates, are still with us as the world economy has looked in vain for a return to robust, unassisted growth since the 2008 crisis. The Fed had just started to raise interest rates when the latest bout of China-related instability knocked global financial markets for a loop and raised anxieties about 2016. Interesting times.


----------



## CougarKing

China's agenda for the Middle East region is examined:

Diplomat



> *Revealed: China's Blueprint for Building Middle East Relations
> 
> The first “Arab Policy Paper” provides Beijing’s official vision for China-Middle East relations*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> January 14, 2016
> 
> On Wednesday, one week before Chinese President Xi Jinping is reportedly scheduled to arrive in Egypt for his first visit to the Middle East, China issued a lengthy explanation of its approach to the region in a document titled “China’s Arab Policy Paper.”  The paper briefly traces the history of China-Arab relations, from exchanges via the ancient Silk Road to the founding of the China-Arab State Cooperation Forum in 2004, before outlining China’s plan for expanding cooperation in the future.
> 
> Some caveats, first: like China’s 2015 policy paper on Africa, the “Arab Policy Paper” does not lay out specific policies for specific countries (in fact, there’s not a single country named in the paper, besides China). The paper presents a blanket vision for regional relations, without getting in to the complexities of how that vision will be realized in bilateral relationships with individual states. This is a paper about China’s approach to “Arab countries,” not China’s approach to say, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. For China’s purposes, the “Arab countries” are those with membership in the League of Arab States, which serves as the basis of the China-Arab State Cooperation Forum.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China's own Arctic ambitions exhibited by the fact that they have icebreakers:

China Defense blogspot



> BEIJING, Jan. 5 (ChinaMil) -- *Haibing 722, the first ship of the Type-272 icebreakers of the PLA Navy, has started its military service with a ceremony marking its commission held at a naval port in Huludao, northeast China's Liaoning province a few days ago.*
> 
> The Haibing 722 will take on the tasks of ice condition investigation, ice breaking and maritime search and rescue in ice zone in the Bohai waters.
> 
> The icebreaker, designed and built independently by China, started to be built in November 2013 and was launched in March 2015. It is 103.10 meters long and 18.40 meters wide with a full-load displacement of 4,860 tons and a maximum speed of 18 knots. it is able to resist force 12 wind and navigate continuously up to 7,000 sea miles.
> 
> There is a helicopter platform on the Haibing 722 where one Z-8 helicopter can take off and land.








Photo: China Defense Blog


----------



## CougarKing

The DPP win is also a loss for mainland China, since their KMT/Guomindang opponents have been more conciliatory towards Beijing and more amenable towards unification in recent years.

Diplomat



> *It's Official: DPP's Tsai Ing-wen Is Taiwan's Next President
> 
> The DPP won a landslide victory in the presidential race, and looks to secure a legislative majority as well.*
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> January 16, 2016
> 
> *Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party is the opposition no more – the DPP won the presidency in Saturday’s elections in a landslide victory that resets Taiwan’s political landscape.
> 
> DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen handily defeated both candidate Eric Chu of the Kuomintang (KMT),* the party of current President Ma Ying-jeou, and third party candidate James Soong to claim victory. According to Taiwan’s Central Election Commission, with 98 percent of the results in, Tsai and running mate Chen Chien-jen had claimed 56.2 percent of the votes, with Chu at 30.9 percent and Soong at 12.8 percent.
> 
> Tsai will be Taiwan’s first female president and only the second DPP president, following Chen Shui-bian’s 2000-2008 tenure. Unlike Chen, who managed only a plurality to eke out a victory in 2000, Tsai was elected by a convincing margin that will give her a clear mandate going forward. Ma won election in 2008 with similar numbers, claiming 58.4 percent of the vote. In her victory speech, Tsai said the election results proved the strength of Taiwan’s democracy.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The DPP win is also a loss for mainland China, since their KMT/Guomindang opponents have been more conciliatory towards Beijing and more amenable towards unification in recent years.
> 
> Diplomat




I agree, and, further, I think it is a "good" loss for the CCP and the old men in the _Zhongnanhai_ because it might help to refocus them on the nature of the bad advice upon which they are acting with respect to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is the test bed for "one country two systems." _*One country two systems*_ is the only way that Taiwan can be reunited with China peacefully. If the Chinese screw up _*one country two systems*_ in HK, as they are on a path to doing, then they will "lose" Taiwan.


----------



## CougarKing

A sign the gravy train is about to stop? Economic analysts foretelling gloom and doom with only a 6.9% growth rate for China...

Shanghaiist



> *25% of US companies in China are planning to leave, says AmCham survey*
> 
> A growing number of US companies operating in China say they plan to move their business out of the country according to a recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
> 
> The organization's annual business climate survey report found that* 25 percent of respondents have either moved or are planning to move capacity outside of China. While half of respondents are moving capacity to "Developing Asia," 40 percent say they are moving capacity to the US, Canada or Mexico.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Nothing's gonna come out of this considering how much British investments are in China, aside from London's adherence to its own "One-China" policy:

Shanghaiist



> *UK petition asking government to recognize Taiwan as a country gathers public support*
> 
> An online petition is calling on the UK government to recognize the Republic of China as an independent country and resume normal diplomatic relations.
> 
> The petition titled "Recognise Taiwan as a country" was created by Lee Chapman on the petition section of the UK government website on January 18. It urges the UK government to recognize the sovereignty of the Taiwanese government.
> 
> "Due to the One China policy the United Kingdom doesn't recognise the Government of the Republic of China and all diplomatic relations between the two countries take place on an unofficial basis," said the petition.
> 
> "It's time to change this. Taiwan is an independent country. Taiwan maintains the Taipei Representative Office in the U.K. in London with a branch office in Edinburgh while the United Kingdom maintains the British Office Taipei in Taipei. This is ridiculous and must change," it continued.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting look at where China "really" stands in the global manufacturing system. This also has implications when looking at things like the PLA/PLAN's rapib modernization and buildup:

http://www.ejinsight.com/20160121-what-ball-pen-tells-us-about-china-s-manufacturing-weakness/



> *What a ball pen tells us about China’s manufacturing weakness *
> 
> Premier Li Keqiang recently made a shocking revelation about the industrial capabilities of China on national television: despite the fact that the country is widely known as the “world’s factory” and produces everything from iPhones, aircraft carriers, high-speed railways to spacecraft, until now there is not a single manufacturer in China that is able to produce the tiny rotating ball fitted to the tip of a ball pen that disperses ink as you write.
> 
> Each of these tiny metal balls has to be imported by Chinese pen manufacturers from overseas suppliers.
> 
> Many TV viewers in the mainland were deeply shocked and saddened by this revelation, as they had all been under the impression that China is already a world-class industrial power.
> 
> The harsh fact is that, even though China produces 38 billion ball pens every year, it is still unable to manufacture the key component, the rotating ball point.
> 
> How could a tiny component of an object so commonplace that goes for less than one US dollar prove to be an insuperable hurdle for the entire Chinese industrial complex?
> 
> Qiu Zhiming, chief executive of Beifa Group Co. Ltd., China’s leading stationery manufacturer, said the reason it is so difficult to produce that component is that the ball — which is usually made of brass, steel or tungsten carbide and kept in place by a socket at the tip of the ball pen — is so tiny (usually not more than 0.1 millimeter in diameter) that it requires state-of-the-art machinery and cutting-edge computerized measurement equipment with pinpoint precision to produce, not to mention the ability to produce the high-quality steel material of which it is made. The margin for inaccuracy in the production process of this tiny ball point is basically zero, or else it won’t be able to be fitted into the socket perfectly and rotate freely in order to deliver ink.
> 
> Unfortunately, all these key technologies remain the weakest links in China’s manufacturing industry even to this day.
> 
> As a result, all the rotating metal balls fitted to made-in-China ball pens have to be imported from Germany, Switzerland or Japan.
> 
> The root cause of China’s backwardness in some of the key industrial technologies lies in the fact that state-run and private manufacturers are unwilling to invest in research and development because, in most cases, it won’t bring profits and extra market share, owing to the lack of protection for intellectual property and rampant plagiarism by other competitors.
> 
> Besides, the overall quality and professionalism of technicians in China’s manufacturing industry still lag far behind those in other major industrial countries.
> 
> Even if you have the best machinery, you still can’t roll out the best products if you don’t have the best people to operate it.
> 
> There is also the problem of China’s inability to produce the best kind of steel materials.
> 
> Today the country still relies heavily on specially made and high-quality steel alloy imported from Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States to build its high-speed railways, bridges and even aircraft carriers and submarines.
> 
> The State Council launched a RMB$60 million program four years ago to facilitate the research and development of strategic industrial materials such as high-quality steel so as to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign imports, because it is not only an industrial issue but also a national security concern.
> 
> However, four years have passed, and the program seems to have achieved nothing.
> 
> The reason Premier Li raised the issue even at the risk of “hurting Chinese people’s feelings” is apparent: as China is undergoing a downturn in economic growth, his words serve as a timely reminder for manufacturers that they should have a sense of crisis, and unless they are able to achieve technological breakthroughs and step up investment in high value-added production rather than continuing to play safe and rely on labor-intensive manufacturing, it won’t be long before the country completely loses its growth momentum.
> 
> The day China can produce a 100 percent homemade ball pen will be the day it truly qualifies as a first-class industrial power.
> 
> This article appeared in the Hong Kong Economic Journal on Jan. 21.
> 
> Translation by Alan Lee


----------



## chanman

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Interesting look at where China "really" stands in the global manufacturing system. This also has implications when looking at things like the PLA/PLAN's rapib modernization and buildup:
> 
> http://www.ejinsight.com/20160121-what-ball-pen-tells-us-about-china-s-manufacturing-weakness/



I wonder if North American industry is capable of that level of fine manufacture, or if it's an industrial niche that everyone else has ceded over to the _mittelstand_ and the Japanese (or Swiss) equivalents. 

Nearly all of my brother's optometry equipment is manufactured in either Switzerland or Germany.


----------



## The Bread Guy

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> 2 updates on the 2 Canadians investigated for spying in China:
> 
> Yahoo News
> 
> Canadian Press via Yahoo News





			
				milnews.ca said:
			
		

> The latest ....
> 
> 
> 
> China has detained a Canadian man on suspicion of stealing and prying into state secrets but released his wife, also a Canadian, from custody on bail after holding the couple without charge for months, China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
> 
> The decision to detain Kevin Garratt, who ran a Christian coffee shop with his wife, paves the way for his formal arrest and possible prosecution in a case that has strained ties between Canada and China.
> 
> Beijing is widening a crackdown on foreign Christian groups along its sensitive border with North Korea ...
Click to expand...

Man now indicted ...


> China's Foreign Ministry said Friday that an investigation has suggested that a Canadian man charged with spying and stealing Chinese state secrets had carried out assignments for Canadian intelligence agencies.
> 
> Canada's government said Thursday it was concerned that Kevin Garratt had been indicted and that it had raised his case with the Chinese government "at high levels."
> 
> Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said authorities found evidence "which implicates Garratt in accepting assignments from Canadian espionage agencies to gather intelligence in China."
> 
> Garratt has been indicted by prosecutors in Dandong, a city on the North Korean border where he and his wife ran a popular coffee shop and conducted Christian aid work for North Koreans.
> 
> Garratt and his wife Julia — who have lived in China for 30 years — were arrested in August 2014 by the state security bureau. Julia Garratt was released on bail in February 2015 ...


----------



## CougarKing

A last gesture by President Ma to reaffirm the ROC/Taiwan's claim to Spratlys; he leaves office this May when President Tsai begins her term.

Unfortunately, some may see Taiwan's consolidating its claim on the area as helping to reinforce mainland China's claim as well, since Beijing still envisions eventual reunification and inheriting all of the ROC's claims.

Diplomat 



> *From South China Sea Island, Taiwan's President Presents 'Roadmap' for Peace
> 
> Ma Ying-jeou reaffirmed Taiwan’s sovereignty claims but also offered a plan for moving beyond the disputes*.
> shannon-tiezzi
> By Shannon Tiezzi
> January 29, 2016
> 
> As planned, on Thursday, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou traveled to Itu Aba, the largest naturally-occurring member of the disputed Spratly Island group in the South China Sea. *The stated reason for the trip was to greet the roughly 200 Taiwanese coast guard personnel stationed on the island, the lone feature in the South China Sea controlled by Taiwan.
> *
> Ma traveled to Itu Aba (known as Taiping Island in Chinese) on board a C-130 transport plane, making use of the newly-extended airstrip on the island. He arrived around 11 a.m. local time, and was back in Taipei before 6 p.m. Ma was the second Taiwanese president to visit Itu Aba, following a trip in 2008 by Chen Shui-bian.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another USN FONOP, this time just off the nearby Paracels also claimed by China:

Defense News



> *Pentagon: US Warship Sails by Island Claimed by China*
> Agence France-Presse 12:14 p.m. EST January 30, 2016
> 
> WASHINGTON — A US warship sailed within 12 nautical miles of a disputed island in the South China Sea Saturday to assert freedom of navigation, drawing a protest from Beijing, officials said.
> 
> "We conducted a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea earlier tonight," Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said in a statement.
> *
> Davis said the guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur made the "innocent passage" off Triton Island in the Paracel island chain, which is claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

While Edward has long said the goal of the Chinese is to get America out of Asia, and that the DPRK serves as a useful tool for the Chinese to prod others in the region, it looks like that is starting to backfire against the long term goals of the Chinese:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/28/after-nuke-test-south-korea-warms-to-u-s-missile-shield/



> *After Nuke Test, South Korea Warms to U.S. Missile Shield*
> 
> After North Korea conducted some sort of nuclear test early this month, we’ve watched as South Korea and Japan hug each other—and the United States—tighter. Well, that process looks poised to continue, according to the Wall Street Journal:
> 
> South Korea is leaning toward introducing an advanced U.S. missile defense system to guard itself against threats from North Korea following Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test, a bulwark strongly opposed by China.
> 
> Current and former American officials who have recently spoken with top South Korean policy makers say the country hasn’t decided yet whether to adopt the system that the U.S. has offered but that informal talks between Washington and Seoul had increased recently [. . .]
> A former U.S. official who recently met with senior South Korean officials said a consensus appeared to be forming in Seoul. “Behind the scenes it looks like Thaad is close to a done deal,” this person said.
> 
> Although the defense shield would very much be aimed at protecting South Korea from the DPRK, China can’t be happy about deepening ties of this sort between Seoul and Washington. As we said after the test occurred, the biggest loser from the fallout is Beijing. Every time Pyongyang misbehaves, the rationale for a U.S.-led alliance in northeast Asia gets stronger.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I doubt that worries the Chinese ... they certainly cannot blame SK for wanting protection and they cannot offer much.

China's biggest ally in getting America off the Asian mainland is ...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.





The more America over-stretches itself (economically, militarily and politically), confuses its _fears_ with its _*vital interests*_, and pivots, this way, then that until it is strategically dizzy, then the closer China is to its aim.


----------



## CougarKing

ERC,

So in essence, the US pursuing FONOPS in the South China Sea plays to Beijing's agenda? So they can paint the US as an aggressor in order to incite ultra-nationalism among the masses in China and thus secure more legitimacy for the CCP? 

And speaking of clashing interests...

The fact that Japan's former colony of Taiwan moved away politically from China with the election of Tsai in the last ROC election may further complicate Japan and mainland China's already tense relationship. Perhaps the talks between Tokyo and Taipei over the possibility of Taiwan's getting _Soryu_ class subs, as mentioned in another thread, may be furthered by Tsai's election and increasingly pro-Japan stance.

Diplomat



> *Taiwan Elections: An Opportunity for Japan?
> 
> Tsai Ing-wen’s victory was greeted with enthusiasm in Tokyo.*
> By Chen Yo-Jung
> January 29, 2016
> 
> In East Asia, few things happen outside of China’s shadow. The recently concluded presidential election in Taiwan was no exception, although its outcome was far from what Beijing had wanted.
> 
> By electing a new president with pro-independence inclinations, Taiwan has sent an unmistakable message to China: While it does need to do business with China, it wants to keep the latter at arm’s length and rejects any direct or indirect attempt at reunification.
> 
> “China” as usual is on everyone’s mind in the wake of Tsai Ing-wen’s victory. But in comparison to past major political upheavals in Taiwan, *this election appears to be bringing into the geopolitical picture of the Strait of Taiwan a new but potentially significant regional player: Japan.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> ERC,
> 
> So in essence, the US pursuing FONOPS in the South China Sea plays to Beijing's agenda? So they can paint the US as an aggressor in order to incite ultra-nationalism among the masses in China and thus secure more legitimacy for the CCP?
> 
> And speaking of clashing interests...
> 
> The fact that Japan's former colony of Taiwan moved away politically from China with the election of Tsai in the last ROC election may further complicate Japan and mainland China's already tense relationship. Perhaps the talks between Tokyo and Taipei over the possibility of Taiwan's getting _Soryu_ class subs, as mentioned in another thread, may be furthered by Tsai's election and increasingly pro-Japan stance.
> 
> Diplomat




Both are good points, SMA, although I think your first one is stretching things just a bit ...

I keep saying that _I think_ that the Chinese do _strategy_ different from us, different from the 2016 "us," anyway: they, the Chinese, think in terms of the mid to long term objectives and results; we, the US led West, seem focused only on immediate gratification.

For example, the Chinese are building "facts on the ground" in the South China Seas, for the long term, and are making a big splash about doing it peacefully ...





Fiery Cross Reef welcomed its first Chinese tourists to the disputed South China Sea islands, as families
of the frontier soldiers stationed on the island fly out for a visit.

Meanwhile, the US is doing this:






Which "looks" more peaceful and friendly? Which is the better soft power approach?

The US is very right to do FONOPS; they do so one everyone's behalf, even, in a way, on China's behalf ... the Chinese, as a major, global trading nation, are taking a "free ride" on _*freedom of the seas*_ on the back of the US Navy. But, meanwhile, the Chinese are "soft selling" their actions ...


----------



## a_majoor

While this situation is not unique to China (Greece, Ontario and Detroit should all come to mind), the magnitude of the Chinese credit bubble is so much greater that it will knock down everyone else like a chain of dominos. F.A. Hayek was very clear that credit bubbles created dangerous malinvestmensts in the system, and clearing the bad credit needed to be done as quickly as possible (even at the risk of a large amount of short term pain). It is also thought that the Great Depression was really a result of the massive debt overhang caused by all the Imperial powers taking on massive amounts of debt to prosecute the war, which should serve as a clear warning to us:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/business/dealbook/toxic-loans-in-china-weigh-on-global-growth.html?_r=1



> *Toxic Loans Around the World Weigh on Global Growth*
> By PETER EAVISFEB. 3, 2016  206 COMMENTS
> 
> Beneath the surface of the global financial system lurks a multitrillion-dollar problem that could sap the strength of large economies for years to come.
> 
> The problem is the giant, stagnant pool of loans that companies and people around the world are struggling to pay back. Bad debts have been a drag on economic activity ever since the financial crisis of 2008, but in recent months, the threat posed by an overhang of bad loans appears to be rising. China is the biggest source of worry. Some analysts estimate that China’s troubled credit could exceed $5 trillion, a staggering number that is equivalent to half the size of the country’s annual economic output.
> 
> Official figures show that Chinese banks pulled back on their lending in December. If such trends persist, China’s economy, the second-largest in the world behind the United States’, may then slow even more than it has, further harming the many countries that have for years relied on China for their growth.
> 
> But it’s not just China. Wherever governments and central banks unleashed aggressive stimulus policies in recent years, a toxic debt hangover has followed. In the United States, it took many months for mortgage defaults to fall after the most recent housing bust — and energy companies are struggling to pay off the cheap money that they borrowed to pile into the shale boom.
> 
> In Europe, analysts say bad loans total more than $1 trillion. Many large European banks are still burdened with defaulted loans, complicating policy makers’ efforts to revive the Continent’s economy. Italy, for instance, announced a plan last week to clean out bad loans from its plodding banking industry.
> 
> Elsewhere, bad loans are on the rise at Brazil’s biggest banks, as the country grapples with the effects of an enormous credit binge.
> 
> “If you have a boom and then a bust, you create economic losses,” said Alberto Gallo, head of global macro credit research at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London. “You can hope the losses one day turn into profits, but if they don’t, they are a drag on the economy.”
> 
> In good times, companies and people take on new loans, often at low interest rates, to buy goods and services. When economies slow, these debts become difficult to pay for many borrowers. And the bigger the boom, the more soured debt that is left behind for bankers and policy makers to deal with.
> 
> In theory, it makes sense for banks to swiftly recognize the losses embedded in bad loans — and then make up for those losses by raising fresh capital. The cleaned-up banks are more likely to start lending again — and thus play their part in fueling the recovery.
> 
> But in reality, this approach can be difficult to carry out. Recognizing losses on bad loans can mean pushing corporate borrowers into bankruptcy and households into foreclosure. Such disruption can send a chill through the economy, require unpopular taxpayer bailouts and have painful social consequences. And in some cases, the banks might find it extremely difficult to raise fresh capital in the markets.
> 
> Even so, the drawback of delaying the cleanup is that the banks remain wounded and reluctant to lend, damping any recovery that takes place. Japan, economists say, waited far too long after its credit boom of the 1980s to force its banks to recognize huge losses — and the economy suffered for years after as a result.
> 
> Now many banking experts are beginning to worry about China’s bad loans.
> 
> Fears that the country’s economy is slowing have weighed heavily on global markets in recent months because a weak China can drag down growth globally.
> 
> Many of these concerns focus on China’s banking industry. In recent years, banks and other financial companies in China issued a tidal wave of new loans and other credit products, many of which will not be paid back in full.
> 
> China’s financial sector will have loans and other financial assets of $30 trillion at the end of this year, up from $9 trillion seven years ago, said Charlene Chu, an analyst in Hong Kong for Autonomous Research.
> 
> “The world has never seen credit growth of this magnitude over a such short time,” she said in an email. “We believe it has directly or indirectly impacted nearly every asset price in the world, which is why the market is so jittery about the idea that credit problems in China could unravel.”
> 
> Headline figures for bad loans in China most likely do not capture the size of the problem, analysts say. In her analysis, Ms. Chu estimates that at the end of 2016, as much as 22 percent of the Chinese financial system’s loans and assets will be “nonperforming,” a banking industry term used to describe when a borrower has fallen behind on payments or is stressed in ways that make full repayment unlikely. In dollar terms, that works out to $6.6 trillion of troubled loans and assets.
> 
> “This estimate really isn’t that unreasonable,” Ms. Chu said in the email. “We’ve seen similar ratios in other countries. What’s different is the scale, which reflects the massive size of China’s credit boom.” She estimates that the bad loans could lead to $4.4 trillion of actual losses.
> 
> Although there is not enough official data to come up with a precise figure for bad loans, other analysts have come up with estimates of around $5 trillion.
> 
> Given the murkiness of the Chinese financial industry, other analysts arrive at estimates for a “baseline” figure for bad loans. Christopher Balding, an associate professor at the HSBC School of Business at Peking University, said that an analysis of corporations’ interest payments to Chinese banks suggested that 8 percent of loans to companies might be troubled. But Mr. Balding said it was possible that the bad loan number for China’s overall financial system could be higher.
> 
> The looming question for the global economy, however, is how China might deal with a vast pool of bad debts.
> 
> After a previous credit boom in the 1990s, the Chinese government provided financial support to help clean up the country’s banks. But the cost of similar interventions today could be dauntingly high given the size of the latest credit boom. And more immediately, rising bad debts could crimp lending to strong companies, undermining economic growth in the process.
> 
> “My sense is that the Chinese policy makers seem like a deer in the headlights,” Mr. Balding said. “They really don’t know what to do.”
> 
> In Europe, for instance, some countries have taken years to come to grips with their banks’ bad loans.
> 
> In some cases, the delay arose from a reluctance, at least in part, to force people out of their homes. Even though Ireland’s biggest banks suffered huge losses after the financial crisis, they held back from forcing many borrowers who had defaulted out of their homes. In recent years, the Irish government has pursued a widespread plan that aims to reduce the debt load of financially stressed homeowners. Such forbearance appears not to have weakened the Irish economy, which has recovered at a faster rate than those of other European countries.
> 
> Still, the perils of waiting too long are evident in Italy, which in January announced a proposal to help banks sell their bad loans. Some critics of the plan say it resembles a government bailout of the banks, while other skeptics say the banks might not use it because it appears to be too expensive.
> 
> “The big problem in the Italian system is that they acted very late,” said Silvia Merler, an affiliate fellow at Bruegel, a European research firm that focuses on economic issues. “They could have done something smarter — and they could have done it earlier.”


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting contrast between how China sees childhood education and the relentless efforts of our educators to ensure boys can go to girl's washrooms (via 25 different "gender choices").

http://army.ca/forums/index.php?action=post;topic=2941.3150;last_msg=1416093



> *Wanted in China: More Male Teachers, to Make Boys Men*
> By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZFEB. 6, 2016
> Photo
> 
> Lin Wei is a sixth-grade teacher at a primary school in Fuzhou, China. Chinese educators are worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered students. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
> 
> FUZHOU, China — The history class began with a lesson on being manly.
> 
> Lin Wei, 27, one of a handful of male sixth-grade teachers at a primary school here, has made a habit of telling stories about warlords who threw witches into rivers and soldiers who outsmarted Japanese troops. “Men have special duties,” he said. “They have to be brave, protect women and take responsibility for wrongdoing.”
> 
> Worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered and effeminate boys, Chinese educators are working to reinforce traditional gender roles and values in the classroom.
> 
> In Zhengzhou, a city on the Yellow River, schools have asked boys to sign pledges to act like “real men.” In Shanghai, principals are trying boys-only classes with courses like martial arts, computer repair and physics. In Hangzhou, in eastern China, educators have started a summer camp called West Point Boys, complete with taekwondo classes and the motto, “We bring out the men in boys.”
> 
> Education officials across China are aggressively recruiting male teachers, as the Chinese news media warns of a need to “salvage masculinity in schools.” The call for more male-oriented education has prompted a broader debate about gender equality and social identity at a time when the country’s leaders are seeking to make the labor market more meritocratic.
> 
> It also reflects a general anxiety about boys in Chinese society. While boys outnumber girls as a result of the longstanding one-child policy and a cultural preference for sons, they consistently lag in academic performance. Some parents worry about their sons’ prospects in an uncertain economy, so they are putting their hopes in male role models who they believe impart lessons on assertiveness, courage and sacrifice.
> 
> The view that there is an overabundance of female teachers that has had a negative effect on boys has, perhaps predictably, led to a backlash. Parents have accused schools of propagating rigid concepts of masculinity and gender norms, and female educators have denounced efforts to attract more male teachers with lavish perks as sexist.


----------



## CougarKing

Mr. T,

You forgot the source link of your article above, which I found and posted below:

New York Times

You accidentally copied and pasted the link for the screen where you compose a new post.


----------



## CougarKing

The "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong resumed on the eve of Chinese New Year/Spring Festival a couple of days ago:

CNN



> *Hong Kong police fire warning shots during Mong Kok fishball 'riot'*
> 
> By Euan McKirdy and Wilfred Chan, CNN
> 
> Hong Kong (CNN)Fires were still burning in the Hong Kong district of Mong Kok Tuesday morning after a night of violence during the Chinese New Year holiday between riot police and protesters.
> 
> Clashes erupted after government officials tried to evict street vendors from one of the city's busiest shopping areas, in Kowloon on the mainland side of Victoria Harbour.
> 
> Traditionally, authorities have turned a blind eye to unlicensed food stalls during the busy holiday period, but authorities were taking a stronger line against them this year, fencing off areas which had previously been used by the hawkers.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

This latest provocative move by China doesn't contribute to stability in the South China Sea:

Fox News



> *Exclusive: China sends surface-to-air missiles to contested island in provocative move*
> 
> The Chinese military has deployed an advanced surface-to-air missile system to one of its contested islands in the South China Sea according to civilian satellite imagery exclusively obtained by Fox News, more evidence that China is increasingly "militarizing" its islands in the South China Sea and ramping up tensions in the region.
> 
> The imagery from ImageSat International (ISI) shows *two batteries of eight surface-to-air missile launchers as well as a radar system on Woody Island, part of the Paracel Island chain* in the South China Sea.
> 
> It is the same island chain where a U.S. Navy destroyer sailed close to another contested island a few weeks ago. China at the time vowed “consequences” for the action.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

A civilian satellite picked up this image at a civilian airport of what is no doubt a copy of an F-22.

https://www.yahoo.com/autos/where-did-china-f-22-194030501.html


----------



## CougarKing

With the Chinese takeover of ownership of western defense firms such as the Italian shipyard Ferreti, of course there would be renewed interest in this, especially in the US.

And it's not just in the defense industry...there was concern here in Canada about CNOOC's acquisition of Nexen a few years ago. In Australia, their government banned Huawei technologies from building their national broadband network.

Defense News



> *Chinese Interest in US Firms Drives Case Surge for Watchdog Panel*
> By Andrew Clevenger, Defense News 9:41 p.m. EST February 22, 2016
> 
> WASHINGTON — Chinese interest in American companies continues to increase the caseload examined by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), according to the panel’s annual report to Congress.
> 
> CFIUS examines deals that involve foreign investments in US assets for their national security implications. In its latest report on Feb. 19, the total cases CFIUS covered jumped to 358 for the three year period 2012–2014, up from 322 from 2011–2013 and 318 from 2010–2012.
> 
> China had the most cases reviewed with 68, an increase of 26 percent from the previous year’s totals, ahead of the United Kingdom’s 45, Canada’s 40, and Japan’s 37, according to the new figures. From 2011-2013, those four countries represented 54, 49, 34 and 34 cases, respectively. In the previous year’s report, the UK ranked first with 68 cases, followed by China’s 39, Canada’s 31 and France’s 28.
> 
> *“I think that the spike in Chinese cases reflects the level of investment by China in the United States generally,” *said Christopher Brewster, an attorney with Washington-based Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. “While we knew the number of cases was going to be large, it is instructive that the jump from 2013 to 2014 is as large as it is. It shows a fairly healthy investment in the US national security sector.”
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

For those here unaware, many J-11s are the Chinese reverse-engineered version of the Russian Su27, although an earlier batch of Russian Su27s was purchased.

Defense News



> *China Deploys Fighter Jets To Contested Island in South China Sea*
> Agence France-Presse 7:57 p.m. EST February 23, 2016
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON — China has deployed fighter jets to the same contested island in the South China Sea to which it also has sent surface-to-air missiles, US officials said Tuesday.
> 
> Citing two unnamed US officials, Fox News said US intelligence services had spotted *Chinese Shenyang J-11 and Xian JH-7 warplanes* on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel Islands chain over the past few days.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese evidently are placing a HF radar in the Spratley's to detect stealth aircraft,but the radar also would be capable of monitoring surface traffic.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/look-out-america-china-can-un-stealth-us-fighter-jets-15293


China appears to be building a new high-frequency radar on an artificial feature in the Spratly Islands that could allow Beijing to track even the stealthiest American warplanes, including the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and even the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has acquired satellite evidence of the construction.

“Placement of a high frequency radar on Cuarteron Reef would significantly bolster China’s ability to monitor surface and air traffic coming north from the Malacca Straits and other strategically important channels,” reads a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Improved radar coverage is an important piece of the puzzle—along with improved air defenses and greater reach for Chinese aircraft—toward China’s goals of establishing effective control over the sea and airspace throughout the nine-dash line.”


----------



## tomahawk6

The PI is going to assume even more strategic value as it is well situated for basing ships and planes to monitor PRC activities in the South China Sea.Here is a map of the area.Another option sure to anger the Chinese would be to seek use of bases in Vietnam.

https://csis.cartodb.com/viz/4c461308-d73e-11e5-9a49-0e3ff518bd15/embed_map

One of China’s highly developed islands in the northern part of the South China Sea, Woody Island, has been equipped with surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft. These moves have come just as many defense analysts have predicted for years and are likely an indication of things to come for China’s other island outposts throughout the South China Sea.

There is also evidence that China is installing a high-frequency long-range radar array on Cuarteron Reef, one of their handful of manmade islands in the south-central part of the South China Sea. This radar type is known to be used for detecting aircraft and ships at extreme ranges far over-the-horizon and can theoretically detect some stealthy aircraft under certain circumstances. It is just one of many other sensors popping up on this island and others, although the existence of such a capability provides even more evidence that China is actively seeking an aggressive anti-access, area denial strategy over the South China Sea.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/02/us-would-need-massive-military-bases-in.html


----------



## CougarKing

Another symptom of further economic troubles?

Reuters



> Markets | Mon Feb 29, 2016 10:27am EST
> 
> *China expects to lay off 1.8 million workers in coal, steel sectors*
> BEIJING | By Kevin Yao and Meng Meng
> 
> China said on Monday it expects to lay off 1.8 million workers in the coal and steel industries, or about 15 percent of the workforce, as part of efforts to reduce industrial overcapacity, but no timeframe was given.
> 
> It was the first time China has given figures that underline the magnitude of its task in dealing with slowing growth and bloated state enterprises.
> 
> Yin Weimin, the minister for human resources and social security, told a news conference that 1.3 million workers in the coal sector could lose jobs, plus 500,000 from the steel sector. China's coal and steel sectors employ about 12 million workers, according to data published by the National Bureau of Statistics.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

From last month: please note the highlighted part about Chinese ships and aircraft harassing a Philippine Navy supply ship headed for outposts like that grounded LST.

Philippine Star



> *DFA chief: China not above international law*
> By Pia Lee-Brago (The Philippine Star)
> March 1, 2016
> 
> *A Philippine Navy cargo vessel on troop transport and re-supply operations in the vicinity of Hasa-hasa (Half Moon) Shoal - 60 nautical miles from the southern portion of mainland Palawan - last month was harassed by Chinese naval and maritime surveillance ships.*
> 
> Information obtained by The STAR showed that _BRP Laguna_ was sailing from Rizal Reef to Lawak Island when five Chinese vessels appeared and made hostile maneuvers before midnight of Feb. 5 up to dawn of Feb. 6.
> 
> _"Aside from the two gray ships and three white Chinese ships, two Chinese helicopters also hovered over the BRP Laguna. The captain ordered the shutting down of lights inside the ship and nobody was allowed among us aboard to use flashlights even if we needed to go to the comfort room,"_ one of the passengers of the Navy ship said.
> 
> The Chinese vessels later dropped anchor not far from the mooring area of _BRP Laguna_ in the vicinity of Pag-asa Island. - Jaime Laude
> 
> (...EDITED/SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

China continues to use easing to try to keep the economy from bottoming out. The question becomes how much room is left to "ease", since the fundamentals which drove the ecoonomy for the last several decades (export driven manufacturing) has cratered due to the drop in demand. There are also severalm references to "supply side" in the article, but in the context this is much like Vizzini continuing to use the word "Inconceivable!":

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-rrr-idUSKCN0W214P



> *China central bank resumes easing cycle to cushion reform pain*
> BEIJING/SHANGHAI | By Pete Sweeney
> 
> China's central bank resumed its easing cycle on Monday, injecting an estimated $100 billion worth of long-term cash into the economy to cushion the pain from job layoffs and bankruptcies in industries plagued by overcapacity.
> 
> The People's Bank of China (PBOC) said on its website it was cutting the reserve requirement ratio, or the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves, by 50 basis points, taking the ratio to 17 percent for the biggest lenders.
> 
> The cut came just days after China used its role as host of the Group of 20 (G20) to reassure trading partners that it did not intend to further devalue the yuan, after a surprise 2 percent devaluation last August threw markets into a spin.
> 
> The PBOC's announcement also comes shortly before the annual meeting of China's parliament, which must try to engineer a huge economic shift toward services and consumption and away from basic manufacturing, while also keeping growth stable.
> 
> The move was a surprise to some observers, given that the PBOC had previously said it would rely more on daily injections of short-term money to keep cash flowing, rather than the long-term addition of funds from an RRR cut.
> 
> The cut is effective from March 1, and it comes after signs of increasing tightness in the money market last week, despite repeated daily injections through open market operations, including a 230 billion yuan injection on Monday morning.
> 
> "This reflects the central bank is keen to ease liquidity in the China banking sector," wrote Iris Pang, an economist at Natixis in Hong Kong. She said the move would release 689 billion yuan ($105 billion) for fresh lending; economists at ANZ bank put that figure at about 650 billion yuan.
> 
> Some of that lending could help struggling industries meet the costs of restructuring.
> 
> Economists said the cut suggested regulators were less worried that moves needed to pump more money into a struggling economy would hammer the yuan exchange rate CNY=CFXS, and by extension accelerate the rate of capital outflows.
> 
> Falls in the yuan and a flood of money out of China at the end of last year unnerved global financial markets and prompted China to take steps to stabilize the yuan in on- and offshore markets. CNH= CNY=
> 
> Related Coverage
> › China central bank cuts reserve requirement ratio
> 
> There is a broad consensus among private sector economists that the currency will fall further as China's economy slows, but more doubt about whether it can control that process without imposing outright capital controls.
> 
> A number of economists said Monday's move suggested Beijing might be returning to the path of easing policy and the currency steadily. Both offshore and onshore rates for the yuan fell around 0.2 percent to just over 6.55 per dollar on Monday and are now down around 1 percent since the end of the Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February.
> 
> "Previously the PBOC had stated it was worried that further RRR cuts would undermine the yuan," said Mark Williams at Capital Economics in London.
> 
> "So this shows that either the pressure is not so strong anymore or that they've changed their mind following the tighter monitoring of exchange flows we've seen recently."
> 
> China last cut the RRR on Oct. 23, when it also reduced interest rates by 25 basis points to rein in financing costs for China's heavily indebted firms.
> 
> BRIEF HIATUS
> 
> The PBOC said the RRR cut would help create an appropriate monetary environment to support a "supply-side reform" project Beijing hopes will put the world's second-largest economy on a more sustainable growth path.
> 
> The problem has been that weak demand at home and abroad, combined with high debt service costs, has punished margins at many Chinese firms, with recent data showing rising negative pressure on wages and job creation.
> 
> On Monday, Chinese regulators said they expect 1.8 million workers in the steel and coal sectors will be laid off as a result of structural reforms, but said this should not result in a spike in unemployment.
> 
> Beijing had previously announced a 100 billion yuan fund to help retrain laid off workers.
> 
> "China's government is pushing forward the 'supply-side' reform and the move needs someone to pay the costs. A loosening monetary environment is what we need," said Li Huiyong, an economist at Shenyin & Wanguo Securities in Shanghai.
> 
> "We believe the central government will keep its loosening policy stance this year to support the economy."
> 
> That tightness in the money market has been blamed for denting sentiment among stock investors, who have embarked on another round of sharp selloffs since last Thursday. [.SS]
> 
> Chinese banks, armed with fresh lending quotas, extended a record 2.51 trillion yuan of new loans in January, suggesting Beijing was keeping monetary conditions loose to counter a protracted economic slowdown.
> 
> The world second-largest economy grew 6.9 percent in 2015, its slowest pace in 25 years. A spate of soft data points to further weakness at the start of the year as Beijing struggles to cushion the slowdown.
> 
> Chinese leaders outlined initiatives after a policy meeting last October, where they reiterated goal of doubling GDP and incomes between 2010 and 2020 and committed to liberalizing the service sector to foreign investment.
> 
> ($1 = 6.5535 Chinese yuan renminbi)
> 
> (Additional reporting by Kevin Yao, Shao Xiaoyi, Nicholas Heath and Nathaniel Taplin in BEIJING and Patrick Graham in LONDON; Writing by Pete Sweeney; Editing by Mike Collett-White)


----------



## CougarKing

The bully at it again:

Philippine Star



> *China takes Philippine atoll*
> By Jaime Laude (The Philippine Star) | Updated March 2, 2016 - 1:00am
> 
> MANILA, Philippines – The Chinese have taken over another traditional Filipino fishing ground near Palawan where they have stationed up to five ships to keep local fishermen at bay, sources said.
> 
> Now effectively under Chinese control is Quirino or Jackson Atoll, which has been a rich source of catch for a long time for fishermen from Palawan, Southern Luzon, Western Visayas and even Manila.
> 
> Gray and white Chinese vessels have not left the atoll, which Filipino fishermen also call Jackson Five, because of the existence of five lagoons in the area.
> 
> The Chinese are claiming almost the entire South China Sea, including the West Philippine Sea. Manila is contesting Beijing’s claim before an international arbitral court based in The Hague.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Unfortunately for the PLA-N, this floating dock can't repair ships the size of their lone aircraft carrier _Liaoning_, which would probably need the drydocks at Dalian or Qingdao or even the larger civilian drydocks one can find in Hong Kong, Guangzhou or Shenzhen.

Navy Recognition



> *China Launched Floating Dock Huachuan I to Repair PLAN Vessels Virtually Anywhere*
> 
> The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy) launched its first self-propelled floating dock nammed Huachuan I. According to the the official People’s Liberation Army Daily, “The ship’s launch marks a further breakthrough in shifting repairs to our military’s large warships from set spots on the coast to mobility far out at sea.”
> 
> *The dock can repair almost the entire PLAN fleet corvettes, frigates, destroyers and submarines (but not the Liaoning aircraft carrier or the Type 071 LPDs) virtually anywhere.*


----------



## CougarKing

Should China fear a Trump presidency?

CNBC



> *Billionaire: Trump like a ‘kindergartener’ on China*
> By Matthew J. Belvedere | CNBC – 9 hours ago
> 
> Billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Ken Langone — both of whom support Ohio Gov. John Kasich for the GOP presidential nomination — blasted Republican front-runner Donald Trump a day after the outspoken real estate mogul scored big victories on Super Tuesday.
> 
> Druckenmiller, founder and former chairman of Duquesne Capital, told CNBC's " Squawk Box " on Wednesday that Trump's got it wrong when it comes to the economy, especially in his rhetoric concerning China .
> 
> "[Trump] has a kindergartner ... view of economics," the former hedge fund manager said. "The man says China is manipulating the currency. China is in the middle of the biggest currency run in history. They're losing $100 billion a month. They're intervening every day to hold their currency up."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Should China fear a Trump presidency?
> 
> CNBC



Fear is the wrong word.He will be tougher than the present administration,but at the end of the day he is a realist and deal maker.China's encrouchment in the South China Sea,must be confronted.The recent Chinese occupation of PI territory has to stop.One way might be to see if Vietnam would be interested in allowing the US air and naval basing rights.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

I've been saying for a while now that any American who wishes to vote for Trump should first pass the following test:

Looking at themselves in the mirror, they have to pronounce the following sentence - having thought through the consequences that these words convey - without wincing, choking up or breaking out into uncontrollable laughter: "May I present to you President Trump, Leader of the free world". If they can then they can vote for him.


----------



## tomahawk6

Trump represents a protest vote against the Republican establishment.I remember when Reagan ran for office and the media tried to portray him as cowboy.He turned out pretty good.


----------



## George Wallace

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Trump represents a protest vote against the Republican establishment.I remember when Reagan ran for office and the media tried to portray him as cowboy.He turned out pretty good.



I think the majority of Trump detractors are not seeing beyond the "Television personality" of Donald Trump.  He has proven himself to be successful, capable of recovering from defeat and bankruptcy in the past, to rebuild his businesses.  Not something that most are capable of.   

While many dismiss Trump for this, they totally ignore Hillary Clinton having been caught up in lies about Bosnia, Bengazi, and other lies; as well as her lack of concern for National Security with her handling of her email and other electronic accounts/communications.

Americans have some very hard choices to make in this election.


----------



## a_majoor

China may announce a 20% increase in military spending. I can think of another nation which needs a boost in military spending.....

http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/03/chinaexpected-to-announce-20-military.html



> *China Expected to announce a 20% military budget increase to fund accelerated weapon system modernization and procurement*
> 
> China is expected to announce its biggest military budget increase in nearly a decade in the next couple of days, fuelled by increasing tensions in the South China Sea and the need for the latest weaponry.
> 
> China's military insiders say the budget could increase by up to 20 per cent. Last year the budget was $200 billion.
> 
> "The Chinese Government is not only determined but capable of continuously increasing the military budget," Professor Shi Yinhong from the Renmin University of China said.
> 
> "In the arms race in the Western Pacific, China wants to close the gap with the US."
> 
> The increase will fund a massive reform program, which will make the People's Liberation Army a meaner and leaner fighting machine.
> 
> The world's largest army has cut 300,000 soldiers and money is needed to pay them out.
> 
> On top of this, to keep morale and loyalty up, President Xi Jinping will hand out a pay rise.
> 
> Most of the increase will be for advanced weapons like new missiles.



Of course, like Russia, China is facing increasing economic pressures, which may derail these plans.


----------



## CougarKing

The USS _John C. Stennis_ CSG is on its way after the PLA-N's seizure of Jackson Atoll/Quirino Atoll from the Philippines earlier this week:

Defense News



> *The U.S. just sent a carrier strike group to confront China*
> By David Larter, Navy Times 5:53 p.m. EST March 3, 2016
> 
> 
> The U.S. Navy has dispatched a small armada to the South China Sea.
> 
> The carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers and the 7th Fleet flagship have sailed into the disputed waters in recent days, according to military officials. *The carrier strike group is the latest show of force in the tense region, with the U.S. asserting that China is militarizing the region to guard its excessive territorial claims.*
> 
> Stennis is joined in the region by the cruisers Antietam and Mobile Bay, and the destroyers Chung-Hoon and Stockdale. The command ship Blue Ridge, the floating headquarters of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, is also in the area, en route to a port visit in the Philippines, and Stennis deployed from Washington state on Jan. 15.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Adding another bead to the "String of Pearls?"

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/03/12/is-china-encircling-india/



> *Is China Encircling India?*
> 
> New Delhi has long worried that Beijing is establishing a “string of pearls” to encircle India in the Indian Ocean. One of the projects stirring those fears was a “port city” in Sri Lanka. Yet the development, which was embroiled in various controversies, looked like it might die after Sri Lanka’s former China-friendly president lost his election last year.
> 
> A year later, the new president has put it back on track. The Guardian:
> 
> President Maithripala Sirisena had suspended the contentious $1.4bn plan to build on reclaimed land next to Colombo’s main harbour shortly after taking power in January last year.
> 
> But the port city, initiated by Chinese president Xi Jinping in September 2014 and expected to include housing, a marina and a Formula One racetrack, was again given the green light on Thursday.
> 
> “The cabinet committee on economic management has recommended allowing resumption of the project subject to limitations and conditions stipulated in the EIA (environmental impact assessment),” the government said in a statement.
> It did not say what the conditions were, but official sources told AFP that Chinese investors were given permission to resume work on the project without any major modifications.
> 
> In 2010, China financed another deepwater port in Sri Lanka which had India’s analysts squirming. So far, India’s response to Colombo’s decision has been muted. But we imagine officials in New Delhi aren’t happy. In the past year, we haven’t heard so much about India’s “string of pearls” worries. That could be about to change.


----------



## CougarKing

Haven't they learned anything from 2008?  :facepalm:

The Diplomat



> *Can ‘New’ Keynesianism Save the Chinese Economy?*March 06, 2016
> 
> ... recent economic policies in China appear to have overlooked “productivity” – the essence of economic growth – entirely and focused instead on encouraging the sale of more houses and apartments at steadily rising prices. ...
> 
> *The Chinese government relies on property-related taxes and sales for some 40-60 percent of its financing*. So it is not just individual and institutional investors who are addicted to the property bubble, but also all levels of government. Local government together with infrastructure-related industries have also accumulated tremendous debt due to the aggressive and excessive expansion of cities and towns. The fate of commercial banks, needless to say, is tied to ever-higher property prices. ...
> 
> ... when it comes to technologies that are developed in competitive market environments through continuous investment in R&D over a span of decades, Chinese industries typically struggle to bridge the gap. This can be attributed to an *economic system that gives extraordinarily high returns to rent-seeking behaviors* – for instance, monopolizing markets through administrative and even legislative means, bribing authorities to bypass labor regulations, quality regulations and environmental regulations, or pirating patents and design for free ...
> 
> ... it is worth mentioning that the other part of China’s “New” Keynsianism, namely the *One Belt One Road initiative*, which is about exporting the products and services of over-capacity, infrastructure-related industries overseas, also seems riskier than usual. Put another way, if these proposed infrastructure projects in targeted developing countries were attractive and low risk, they would have been financed and done. The fact that they are not itself implies higher risks are involved.


----------



## tomahawk6

This article is about China's growing naval power and its new cruiser which will include an array of SSM,Anti-ship and SAM missiles.The class will include an electric drive.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-chinas-dreadnought-tip-the-naval-balance-15539

China’s Type 055 cruiser, which is currently in development.

Some further hints about the mysterious behemoth, suggested as 11,500 tons fully loaded, were revealed in the Chinese magazine Shipborne Weaponry (舰载武器), published by a Zhengzhou institute of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC). According to this description, which includes several rather detailed line drawings, the ship is projected to be 175 meters in length and twenty-one meters wide, with a draft of 6.5 meters and a top speed of thirty-two knots. The ship will wield four types of “new-type” (新型) missiles (discussed below), but that arsenal does not even account for the “long-range land attack cruise missile” (远程对地巡航导弹) and “sea-based missile interceptor” (海基反导导弹). In addition to electric drive propulsion, this analysis boasts that the the all-important phased array radars have been upgraded to include both X-band and S-band arrays—and thus may be on part with America’s top air-defense ships. This analysis holds that 055’s larger displacement will enable “larger weapons magazines and enhanced combat potential, so that its distant seas comprehensive fighting power will be much stronger” than its predecessors.


----------



## tomahawk6

1974 Parcels Sea Battle between the RVN and China.Use by China of civilian vessels constrained RVN naval vessels.The professor outlined 5 tactics the Chinese are using today.Quite well done.

https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/7b5ec8a0-cc48-4d9b-b558-a4f1cf92e7b8/The1974ParacelsSeaBattle.aspx


----------



## CougarKing

I find it ironic that Zuckerberg would do this when Facebook is banned in China. And authorities are cracking down on the use of VPNs to access banned websites.

Canadian Press



> *Zuckerberg's run in Beijing's toxic air stirs Chinese public*
> 
> Didi Tang, The Associated Press
> The Canadian Press
> March 18, 2016
> 
> BEIJING, China - A photo of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg jogging Friday morning in downtown Beijing's notorious smog has prompted a torrent of amusing comments and some mockery on Chinese social media.
> 
> Zuckerberg is a favourite personality among the Chinese public, despite Facebook being banned in the country alongside other overseas social media platforms. He's also become somewhat notorious for persistent yet so far futile efforts to woo leaders enforcing China's strict online censorship.
> 
> The young tech tycoon is in Beijing to attend an economic forum over the weekend, when some of the world's business and finances leaders will rub shoulders with senior Chinese politicians.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A Canadian connection in this Chinese takeover:

Reuters



> *Canada's Bankers Petroleum agrees to takeover by Chinese firm*
> Reuters – 11 hours ago
> 
> TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's Bankers Petroleum Ltd , one of Albania's largest foreign investors, said on Sunday it has agreed to be acquired by affiliates of China's Geo-Jade Petroleum Corp <600759.SS> for C$575 million ($442.34 million).
> *
> Bankers Petroleum said it will be bought by firms owned by the Chinese oil and gas exploration and production company for C$2.20 ($1.69) per share.*
> 
> Shares of Bankers Petroleum closed at C$1.11 in Toronto on Friday.
> 
> The Canadian company said its corporate and technical headquarters will remain in Calgary. The deal is subject to shareholder approval at a meeting before the end of May. Bankers Petroleum said the company will be delisted after the sale.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The Chinese Coast Guard rammed Filipino fishermen in one area while pissing off the Indonesian Coast Guard in another area: by retrieving a Chinese fishing boat illegally fishing in Indonesian waters.

Philippine Star



> * China flexes muscle in disputed waters*
> By Pia Lee Brago, Cesar Ramirez (The Philippine Star) | Updated March 22, 2016 - 12:00am
> 
> Indonesia also mulling arbitration
> 
> MANILA, Philippines - *Beijing is flexing its military muscle in the South China Sea, driving away Filipino fishermen from Panatag Shoal and preventing the Indonesian coast guard from detaining a Chinese vessel caught poaching in Indonesia’s waters.*
> 
> The development prompted Jakarta to summon the Chinese ambassador and sparked new concerns over China’s growing assertiveness in staking its claims in disputed waters.
> 
> Indonesian fisheries minister Susi Pudjiastuti said his country has for years been pursuing and promoting peace in the South China Sea.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Jakarta Post



> *RI confronts China on fishing*
> Haeril Halim, Anggi M. Lubis and Stefani Ribka, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Headlines | Mon, March 21 2016, 6:35 AM
> 
> 
> *The government will issue a protest against the actions of Chinese coast guard vessels* that forcibly rescued a Chinese fishing boat that had been caught by the Maritime and Fisheries Monitoring Task Force fishing illegally near Natuna Islands on Sunday.
> 
> Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti said her office would summon Chinese Ambassador to Indonesia Xie Feng on Monday to demand an explanation about the violation adding that she had asked Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi to prepare a formal protest letter to be sent to Beijing.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Not surprising:

Canadian Press



> *From Israel to Colombia, who's laundering money in China*
> 
> Erika Kinetz, The Associated Press
> The Canadian Press
> March 28, 2016
> 
> SHANGHAI - China is emerging as a global hub for money laundering, not just for Chinese but for criminals around the world, The Associated Press has found. There are a number of options in China for cleaning dirty money, including through major state-run banks, import-export schemes, and informal money transfer systems that date back a millennium, according to recent police investigations and lawsuits in Europe and the United States.
> 
> Here's who law enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe believe is laundering money in China:
> 
> —*The FBI says sophisticated cyber-scammers tricked thousands of Western companies out of $1.8 billion in just over two years by impersonating top corporate executives in a scam known as the fake president, fake CEO or business email compromise scam*. The bureau says it has received 13,500 complaints from victim companies so far, with the number rising dramatically in 2015. The known culprits are not Chinese, but the top destinations for the stolen funds are bank accounts in China and Hong Kong, according to the FBI.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting article, especially just after Easter:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/03/28/christianity-with-chinese-characteristics/



> *Christianity With Chinese Characteristics*
> 
> According to the new theology being promoted by the Chinese government, Jesus would have joined the Communist Party. The BBC:
> 
> 
> If Jesus was alive today, would he be a member of the Chinese Communist Party? Well, perhaps he would, according to one Beijing based priest, who serves in an official, state-sanctioned church.
> 
> The Chinese Communist Party once tried to destroy religion. It failed. And today, according to some estimates, there are more Christians in China than Communist Party members. Up to 100 million will be celebrating across China this Easter weekend. But what it failed to destroy, the Party still wants to control. So, an officially atheist government effectively runs its own churches and controls the appointment of its own priests.
> 
> The big story here is that the spread of Christianity (the BBC estimates there could be up to 100 million Chinese Christians) continues to unnerve Chinese officials. The Chinese government may be fearful of the example of nearby South Korea, where Christians played a major role in the replacement of the dictatorship by democratic government—or they may be thinking about Poland, where John Paul II played a role in the overthrow of Communist rule. Christians in both countries point with pride to the peaceful nature of the change and say that’s a good sign that Christians could help with a similarly peaceful change in China. But Communist authorities, in the midst of the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in decades, aren’t interested in political change, however peaceful it may be.
> 
> The Party’s latest strategy is likely to backfire. Since 1949, the Communists have tried harsh, murderous persecutions; they have tried gentle pressure; they have tried repression and they have tried toleration. Nothing has worked; Christianity continues to spread in China, and younger generations and educated people continue to be drawn toward it. At the start of the Communist era, there were only about three million Christians in China. Today the number is twenty to thirty times that total, and it continues to grow.
> 
> At some point, one can only hope that Chinese authorities will realize that the modern, complex society that China wants to become will be more stable and more secure with a large Christian population free to live out and act on their beliefs. In a society that wants to fight corruption, close the gap between rich and poor, and show more compassion toward those in need, Christians can play a constructive role.
> 
> The era in which Chinese Christians were a tiny sect dependent on foreign missionaries and looking overseas for leadership is over. China needs the talents and the idealism of its growing Christian minority (which may soon be ten percent of the total population) if the Middle Kingdom is to flourish in the 21st century. The question may not be whether Jesus would join the Communist Party, but whether today at a time when the Communist Party is deeply corrupt, its Marxist ideals dead, Chinese society divided by materialism, and socialism a global failure, a young Mao Tse Tung would have joined the Christian Church.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Major piece at USNI News with lots on international law:
https://news.usni.org/2016/03/28/opinion-dont-miss-the-boat-on-australian-and-u-s-policy-in-the-south-china-sea



> Opinion: Don’t Miss the Boat on Australian and U.S. Policy in the South China Sea
> By: James Kraska and Pete Pedrozo
> https://news.usni.org/author/jkraska
> ...



Prof. Kraska is good on international law and Canada's claim to the Northwest Passage--see p. 41 PDF here:



> The Law of the Sea Convention and the Northwest Passage
> http://www.cdainstitute.ca/images/vimy_paper2.pdf



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

While the Philippines converts ex-US Coast Guard _Hamilton_ class cutters into frigates, China does the opposite with its older frigates. Both rival claimants to the Spratlys may see these older vessels brushing bows against each other soon enough.

Janes.com



> *China converting old frigates into coastguard cutters*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Work appears to be underway to modify a number of Type 053H2G 'Jiangwei I'-class frigates for transfer from the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to the China Coast Guard.
> 
> Photographs show two 'Jiangwei I' frigates alongside at a naval shipyard in Pudong, Shanghai, one of which has had most of its armament removed and the hull painted white. Limited work has been undertaken on the second so far.
> 
> <<snipped>>


----------



## CougarKing

Reinforcing the HQ-9 SAM batteries and the J-11 fighters on the PLA's Woody Island outpost are SSMs as well:

US Naval Institute



> *China Defends Deployment of Anti-Ship Missiles to South China Sea Island*
> By: Sam LaGrone
> March 30, 2016 6:37 PM • Updated: March 31, 2016 7:08 AM
> 
> Beijing is defending the deployment of anti-ship cruise missiles to Woody Island in the South China Sea, according to a Wednesday statement from the Chinese foreign ministry.
> 
> “China’s deployment of national defense facilities on its own territory is reasonable and justified,” ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Wednesday.
> “It has nothing to do with the so-called militarization.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> “While the HQ-9 deployment was a big deal because it was the first observation of a major weapon system on Woody Island, t*he YJ-62 is really the second act that provides an anti-surface capability to complement the HQ-9’s anti-air,” *Chris Carlson, a retired U.S. Navy captain and naval analyst told USNI News on Thursday.
> “In my view, China is making it clear that any attempted intrusion, be it by air or on the ocean surface, will be met by their defenses.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Image of the mock up of the 055 Cruiser,which is nearing completion.The CG itself will be able to kill satellites.This will be a major concern for the USN I suspect.

http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/eastern-arsenal/learning-more-about-china%E2%80%99s-new-massive-warship-plan-055-cruiser


----------



## CougarKing

The RAND think tank makes a radical recommendation on how Taiwan is to survive a future Chinese invasion preceded by massive air strikes and missile bombardments: : scrapping their fighter jet force in favor of a defense that relies heavily on SAMs/AD artillery.

Defense News



> *Analysis: Rand Report Spells Doom For Taiwan*
> Wendell Minnick, Defense News 10:31 a.m. EDT April 5, 2016
> 
> *Liquidate Fighter Fleet, Procure SAMs, If Taiwan Wants To Survive*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *Rand recommends that Taiwan retain only a small number of F-16 MLUs and use the savings to create “Air Defense Platoons” patterned after the US Indirect Fire Protection Capability-2 (IFPC-2) platoon under development.* It consists of a set of four multimissile launcher trucks, each with 15 launch tubes, command elements, improved Sentinel radar, and a command and control backbone called the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System that is shared with the Patriot systems. The configuration will use surface-to-air variants of the AIM-9X missiles and AIM-120 AMRAAM active radar-guided missiles.
> 
> *The Rand report suggests an aggressive increase in the numbers of mobile Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Tien Kung (Sky Bow)-2/3 SAMs*. Silo-based and immobile radar facilities, such as the TK-2 base in Tamshui and on Dongyin Island, would be destroyed within the first wave of Chinese missiles and attack aircraft during a war.
> 
> Rand postulated four alternative future force structure options that include a mix of current fighter aircraft and new aircraft, as well as different SAM mixes.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> [/b]


----------



## a_majoor

A look at the consequences of China's "one child" policy:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/one-child-policy-china-s-grieving-parents-demand-compensation-n558116



> *One-Child Policy: China's Grieving Parents Demand Compensation*
> by JANIS MACKEY FRAYER
> 
> BEIJING — Bereaved parents are demanding more compensation from China's government, blaming the now-defunct one-child policy for robbing them of the chance to have more kids.
> 
> "I don't have any hope anymore," said Zhou Ru Xian, whose 24-year-old daughter died in 2013.
> 
> Zhou was among those at a Beijing protest highlighting the issue on Tuesday. Hundreds of police officers later herded many of the demonstrators onto buses.
> 
> The anger of such parents has intensified since the government last year announced it was reforming the one-child policy and giving couples the option of having a second baby. For decades, such an offense brought serious punishment including jail time, fines, or forced sterilization.
> 
> Critics claim changing family planning laws now may not be enough to stave off a demographic crisis in China. The population is expected to peak at 1.45 billion by 2050, when one-in-three Chinese will be over the age of 60 and a shrinking workforce may be unable to keep up.
> 
> Some parents say they receive up to 500 yuan ($77) per month from the government but insist that sum does not cover the cost of living or equal what a child could provide.
> 
> And for many, the relaxation of the one-child policy comes too late for them to get a second chance.
> 
> "To follow the law I made a decision to have only one child," said Zhou, who feared losing her job at a state-run company if she violated the controversial rule. The 53-year-old now dreads growing old alone with no one to support her.
> 
> Related: The Real Reasons Behind China's New Child Policy
> 
> Zhou and her husband put everything into raising their daughter, Yu Zhen, who excelled at school and went to study at a university in Japan.
> 
> However, Yu struggled to cope when a romantic relationship soured. Zhou's daughter leapt to her death from the 9th floor of a building three years ago.
> 
> "I have been dead since that day," said Zhou, wiping away tears. "The government made a promise to us, but now it doesn't keep its word."


----------



## CougarKing

Yet another Chinese spy case aside from USN LCDR Lin's case mentioned in another thread:

Defense News



> *Chinese National Arrested for Carbon Fiber Theft Attempt*
> Wendell Minnick, Defense News 11:40 a.m. EDT April 21, 2016
> 
> TAIPEI — The US government has arrested a Chinese national for allegedly attempting to export, without a license, high-grade carbon fiber used primarily in aerospace and military applications.
> 
> *Sun allegedly instructed HSI undercover agents to use the term “banana” to refer to carbon fiber in their communications*. On April 11, Sun traveled from China to New York to purchase the carbon fiber and told HSI agents that the fiber was for the Chinese military. Sun also told agents that he had worked in the Chinese missile program as an employee of the China National Space Administration in Shanghai and had a close relationship with the military, according to the charge sheet.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

A US citizen was caught trying to export under water drone tech to China.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-charges-woman-exporting-underwater-drone-technology-china-162915858.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Florida woman was charged with conspiring to illegally export U.S. technology used in underwater drones to a Chinese state-owned entity, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday.

Amin Yu, 53, of Orlando, Florida worked from 2002 until February 2014 to obtain systems and components used in marine submersible vehicles at the direction of her co-conspirators at Harbin Engineering University in China, according to the charges.


----------



## CougarKing

: China warns its women against dating foreigners or "lao wai"... 

Associated Press



> *China warns of foreign spies with 'Dangerous Love'*
> The Associated Press
> April 19, 2016
> 
> BEIJING, China - China is marking National Security Education Day with a poster warning young female government workers about dating handsome foreigners, who could turn out to have secret agendas.
> 
> Titled "Dangerous Love," the 16-panel, comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.
> 
> The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar, but he actually is a foreign spy who butters Xiao Li up with compliments on her beauty, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners and romantic walks in the park.
> 
> After Xiao Li provides David with secret internal documents from her job at a government propaganda office, the two are arrested. In one of the poster's final panels, Xiao Li is shown sitting handcuffed before two policemen, who tell her that she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Good article about China's current leadership struggle.

http://www.forbes.com/sites#/sites/gordonchang/2016/04/24/chinas-political-turmoil-worsening-affecting-the-economy/#1231caad760f

On the 15th of this month, the premier of China made inspection visits of Tsinghua and Peking Universities in Beijing. Now the talk in the Chinese capital is the “rapid rise in the political status of Li Keqiang,” as one Chinese observer put it. Premier Li, says former official Liang Jing, “may become a strong challenger to Xi Jinping.”

That is a lot to infer from a couple of stopovers at institutions of higher education, but political watchers in Beijing these days scrutinize Li’s every move.


----------



## Edward Campbell

My _guess_ remains that Xi Jinping sees himself as some sort of a transformative leader, à la Deng Xiaoping, and he will, therefore want to hold power for longer than the normal nine years. But Deng, it must be remembered, was in office as Paramount Leader for 12 years, but, in retirement, he held some fictitious title like the deputy assistant secretary of the senior citizens' chess club, but he was amazingly influential, even turning China away from democratic reform (Tiananmen Square and all that) and back to market economics, and he outshone Jiang Zemin and, eventually, forced Jiang to adopt his (Dengs) policy positions.


----------



## dapaterson

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> : China warns its women against dating foreigners or "lao wai"...
> 
> Associated Press


I for one fully support teaching women to distrust flowers, gifts and compliments.


----------



## Journeyman

dapaterson said:
			
		

> .... distrust flowers, gifts and compliments.
> 
> 
> 
> ....an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man...
Click to expand...

...._and_  red-heads; they're evil.  :nod:


Cue Vern in 3....2...      ;D


----------



## CougarKing

Redheads aside...

Meanwhile in the South China Sea, the Chinese Coast Guard clashes with Filipino fishermen:

Inquirer



> *Philippine Fishermen put up fight vs. China Coast Guard at Scarborough Shoal*
> 
> SUBIC, Zambales—Filipino fishermen last week fought off a Chinese Coast Guard vessel that was driving them away from the Scarborough Shoal, according to a crew member of a fishing vessel that had just arrived from the shoal.The crew of FB Leslie May struck the approaching rubber boat deployed by the Chinese on April 15 after the Chinese patrol threatened to cut off the vessel’s anchor, said Joely Saligan, 36, a fisherman from Barangay Calapandayan here.The Filipinos were fishing near the shoal around 9 a.m. on April 15 when the Chinese chanced upon them.“Their rubber boat was damaged and they immediately left us there. At that instance, we knew they called for backup,” Saligan told the Inquirer on Saturday.
> 
> Saligan, who was tasked with managing the engine of FB Leslie May, said the rubber boat returned, escorted by a Chinese Coast Guard ship. One of the ship’s crew members ordered the Filipinos to leave the shoal, he said.The shoal is located 230 kilometers from Masinloc town, Zambales province, well within the Philippines’ 370-km exclusive economic zone.It is also known to residents of this coastal town as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc.“Philippines go away! Go home!” Saligan said, quoting one of the Chinese coast guards.Instead of leaving, Saligan said they turned to the other Filipino fishermen who were in the area.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

One major result of capital flight of billions from mainland China in recent years: China's noveau rich 1 percenters, taking advantage of Canada's and other western nations' immigrant investor visa category, and who have been dumping their fu er dai/富二代/"2nd generation rich" kids in places like here in Vancouver where they form muscle car clubs to the annoyance of locals here:   

New York Times



> *Chinese Scions’ Song: My Daddy’s Rich and My Lamborghini’s Good-Looking*
> 
> By DAN LEVIN
> APRIL 12, 2016
> 
> China’s rapid economic rise has turned peasants into billionaires. Many wealthy Chinese are increasingly eager to stow their families, and their riches, in the West, where rule of law, clean air and good schools offer peace of mind, especially for those looking to escape scrutiny from the Communist Party and an anti-corruption campaign that has sent hundreds of the rich and powerful to jail.
> 
> With its relatively weak currency and welcoming immigration policies, Canada has become a top destination for China’s 1 percenters. According to government figures, from 2005 to 2012, *at least 37,000 Chinese millionaires took advantage of a now-defunct immigrant investor program to become permanent residents of British Columbia, the province that includes Vancouver.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Many residents say the flood of Chinese capital has caused an affordable housing crisis. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada to buy a home, according to a 2016 survey by the consulting firm Demographia. The average price of a detached house in greater Vancouver more than doubled from 2005 to 2015, to about 1.6 million Canadian dollars ($1.2 million), according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.
> 
> *Residents angry about the rise of rich foreign real estate buyers and absentee owners, particularly from China, have begun protests on social media, including a #DontHave1Million Twitter campaign. The provincial government agreed this year to begin tracking foreign ownership of real estate in response to demands from local politicians.*
> 
> The anger has had little effect on the gilded lives of Vancouver’s wealthy Chinese. Indeed, to the newcomers for whom money is no object, the next purchase after a house is usually a car, and then a few more.
> 
> *A large number of luxury car dealerships here employ Chinese staff, a testament to the spending power of the city’s newest residents. In 2015, there were 2,500 cars worth more than $150,000 registered in metropolitan Vancouver, up from 1,300 in 2009, according to the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia.
> 
> Many of Vancouver’s young supercar owners are known as fuerdai, a Mandarin expression, akin to trust-fund kids, that means “rich second generation.” *In China, where the superrich are widely criticized as being corrupt and materialistic, the term provokes a mix of scorn and envy.
> 
> The fuerdai have brought their passion for extravagance to Vancouver. White Lamborghinis are popular among young Chinese women; the men often turn in their leased supercars after a few months for a newer, cooler status symbol.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more on further capital flight to come:

Reuters



> *China expected to see $538 billion capital exodus in 2016, IIF says*
> By Marc Jones | Reuters – 8 hours ago
> 
> 
> By Marc Jones
> 
> LONDON (Reuters) - Global investors are expected to pull $538 billion out of China's slowing economy in 2016, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimated on Monday, although the pace of outflows has dropped.
> 
> That number would be down a fifth from the $674 billion pulled out last year, the industry association said, but could accelerate again if fears re-emerge of a "disorderly" drop in the yuan, or the renminbi, as the currency is also known.
> 
> Capital exodus from China can influence emerging markets more generally, partly because of its sheer size and partly because sustained outflows can trigger more exchange rate volatility, which could then feed a fresh wave of outflows.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

This is from the same kind of manipulative diplomacy that China uses to quash Taiwan's membership bid at the UN every year:

Quartz



> *Hello Gambia! Beijing is searching far and wide for allies to back its grab of the South China Sea*
> 
> China has a habit of making improbably grouped friends. When it held a World War 2 victory parade last year, key attendees included officials from East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Korea.
> 
> Today Beijing is cobbling together a similarly incongruous group of nations in support of its position on the South China Sea—ahead of an upcoming ruling in an international court that isn’t likely to go China’s way.
> 
> *China says nearly all of the South China Sea is its territory, basing its claim partly on a nine-dash line drawn after the end of World War 2—a line that conflicts with the claims of other nations in the area, including the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The Philippines is legally challenging the validity of that line, saying it violates agreements about exclusive economic zones and territorial seas established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Permanent Court of Arbitration under the United Nations will issue a ruling, likely in late May or early June.
> 
> China has refused to recognize the court’s authority in the matter and says its position—that the issue should be resolved directly between the nations involved—will not change regardless of the ruling. In the meantime, it’s drumming up international support to complement its militarization, island-building, and aggressive fishing in the sea.*
> 
> Last week *Gambia released a statement expressing its support for China’s position*. It said that China had “indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and the adjacent waters” that the court has “no jurisdiction in pronouncing a verdict on maritime boundaries in the South China Sea,” and that the matter ought to be resolved bilaterally. Gambia, which lies on Africa’s west coast and faces the Atlantic Ocean, would seem a rather odd nation to be weighing in on the matter.
> 
> Not every ally Beijing has enlisted is so remote. *China’s foreign ministry indicated over the weekend that three nations in Southeast Asia have voiced their support for Beijing’s position: Laos, Cambodia, and Brunei*. All three oppose “any attempt to unilaterally impose an agenda,” according to state news wire Xinhua, and agree that nations should resolve disputes between themselves.
> 
> Of course, Laos is completely landlocked, and Cambodia’s single stretch of coastline faces the Gulf of Thailand, well removed from the waters around China’s nine-dash line. China is also a major aid donor to and trade partner with both of the economically challenged nations. Brunei actually does face the South China Sea—but it’s an oil-enriched speck of a nation with fewer than 500,000 people.
> 
> *China is also courting Russia, which has reasons to dislike the Permanent Court of Arbitration*: A Ukrainian businessman brought a case to the court over his right to operate a passenger airport in ­Crimea after Russia annexed the peninsula. The court, Moscow argues, lacks jurisdiction over the matter.
> 
> “Both China and Russia should remain alert against behavior abusing the mechanism of compulsory arbitration,” said Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, who visited his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov Moscow last week.
> 
> Lavrov indicated Russia favors direct negotiation between the countries involved and opposes “any attempts to internationalize” the South China Sea issue.


----------



## tomahawk6

Another super read concerning the growing PRC capability in the hypersonic weapons field.To acheive this capability ahead of the US would give China the edge in the Pacific.I suspect that China will be the first to deploy these Mach 5 missiles.At the moment we lack the ability to shoot them down.We would be looking at either war with China or a serious loss of face if we failed to respond to PRC aggression.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/asias-mach-5-nightmare-chinas-hypersonic-weapons-build-16006

Back just three years ago, in February of 2013, a high-ranking US naval official remarked that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was preparing to wage, if called upon, what he called “a short sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea …”

Capt. James Fanell, then deputy chief of staff intelligence and information operations for PACFLEET, made the remark in reference to training exercises being conducted by China when it came to Japanese holdings in the East China Sea. Such remarks took the press by storm, clearly a sign of the dangers presented by Beijing’s rapid military modernization as well as its constant saber-rattling over the Senkaku Islands.


----------



## jollyjacktar

‎China‬'s ‪‎PLA‬ army enlists rap-style music video to recruit young soldiers  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTdOnDSPZ_Q

The video very good I must say, but it does cement my belief that rap is shit, no matter the language.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> One major result of capital flight of billions from mainland China in recent years: China's noveau rich 1 percenters, taking advantage of Canada's and other western nations' immigrant investor visa category, and who have been dumping their fu er dai/富二代/"2nd generation rich" kids in places like here in Vancouver where they form muscle car clubs to the annoyance of locals here:



Every gun shop in Vancouver has a Mandarin speaker as that's where the real money is.


----------



## CougarKing

Colin P said:
			
		

> Every gun shop in Vancouver has a Mandarin speaker as that's where the real money is.



And speaking of "the real money"...

Vancouver's real-estate controversy in the news again:

Vancity Buzz



> *
> Chinese-language reality show about high-end real estate might be coming to Vancouver*
> By
> Lauren Sundstrom
> 9:01 AM PDT, Fri May 06, 2016
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The trailer is titled Gold Broker and prominently features local real estate agent Chris Lee showing prospective home buyers luxurious properties in Vancouver. Sprinkled throughout the trailer are b-roll shots of Vancouver scenery.
> 
> *At one point, a real estate agent holds up a sign that reads “18.5m.”
> 
> The trailer comes as controversy about the state of the city’s real estate market starts to reach new heights. With bidding wars resulting in homes selling for $1 million over the asking price, monthly sales consistently breaking records, and young Vancouverites seeking alternatives to get a foot in the proverbial real estate door, buying a home in Vancouver has become a hot topic.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest USN FONOP in the South China Sea:



> *U.S. Warship Challenges China's Claims in South China Sea*
> 
> (Source: Bloomberg link embedded in headline above)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _*USS William P. Lawrence*_


----------



## CougarKing

Tsai is finally inaugurated into office in Taiwan: it remains to be seen if she will more aggressively pursue independence from this day forward. And if her moves will incite mainland China to send the PLA across the Strait to end the existence of the "Republic of China" once and for all.

Or whether she will be more pragmatic and maintain the "ROC" status quo while laying the groundwork for her successor to take them further down the independence path.

Defense News



> *Taiwan Swears In Independence-Minded President*
> Wendell Minnick, Defense News 11:30 a.m. EDT May 20, 2016
> 
> TAIPEI — Beijing’s Communist Party leadership has a new problem with what it terms its “renegade province” off China’s east coast. On Friday, Taiwan swore in a new president who pledged to continue democratic reform, improve the economy, and maintain cross-strait peace and security.
> 
> Taiwan’s 14th president, Tsai Ing-wen, the first woman to serve, said in her inaugural address that the “two governing parties across the strait must set aside the baggage of history, and engage in positive dialogue, for the benefit of the people on both sides.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)





> *New Taiwan president pledges peace, urges China to drop historical baggage*
> By: J.R. Wu and Faith Hung, Reuters
> May 20, 2016 6:48 PM
> 
> TAIPEI - Taiwan's new president urged China on Friday to "drop the baggage of history" in an otherwise conciliatory inauguration speech that Beijing's Communist Party rulers had been watching for any move towards independence.
> 
> President Tsai Ing-wen was sworn in with Taiwan's export-driven economy on the ropes and China, which views the self-ruled island as its own, looking across the Taiwan Strait for anti-Beijing sentiment that could further sour economic ties.
> 
> Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has traditionally favored independence, won parliamentary and presidential elections by a landslide in January on a voter backlash against creeping dependence on China. It takes over after eight years under China-friendly Nationalist Ma Ying-jeou
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Meanwhile, unrest continues in Hong Kong:



> *Top China official visit stirs anger in Hong Kong*
> By: Aaron Tam, Agence France-Presse
> May 18, 2016 12:10 PM
> 
> HONG KONG - One of China's most powerful officials lands in Hong Kong Tuesday in an attempt to build bridges in the divided city, but the trip has already stirred anger among opponents.
> 
> The three-day visit by Zhang Dejiang, who chairs China's communist-controlled legislature, is the first by such a senior official in four years and comes as concerns grow in semi-autonomous Hong Kong that Beijing is tightening its grip.
> 
> While Zhang is ostensibly visiting to speak at an economic conference on Wednesday, the trip is widely seen as a bid to take the temperature in an increasingly febrile political climate which has fostered a fledgling independence movement, riling China.
> 
> As part of the trip, Zhang will meet with a group of veteran pro-democracy lawmakers Wednesday evening, a rare move observers say is designed to defuse frustrations.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

Remember these guys?


			
				milnews.ca said:
			
		

> The highlighted company's name is coming up again, this time dealing with Canada....CBC.ca, 15 May 12
> 
> 
> 
> The former head of U.S. counter-espionage says the Harper government is putting North American security at risk by allowing a giant Chinese technology company to participate in major Canadian telecommunications projects.
> 
> In an exclusive interview in Washington, Michelle K. Van Cleave told CBC News the involvement of Huawei Technologies in Canadian telecom networks risks turning the information highway into a freeway for Chinese espionage against both the U.S. and Canada.
> 
> Huawei has long argued there is no evidence linking the company to the growing tidal wave of international computer hacking and other forms of espionage originating in China.
> 
> Nonetheless, the U.S. and Australia have already blocked Huawei from major telecom projects in those countries, and otherwise made it clear they regard China's largest telecommunications company as a potential security threat.
> 
> Van Cleave, who served as top spy-catcher for the Bush administration until 2006, describes Huawei as a potential "stalking horse" for Chinese military and intelligence objectives ...
> 
> 
> 
> More on the Aussies' concerns here and here, with a U.S. Open Source Centre report on the company (shared by the Federation of American Scientists via their Secrecy News blog) from a while back attached.
Click to expand...

The latest ...


> *The Canadian government is preparing to reject the permanent residence applications of three Chinese people who work for China’s telecom giant Huawei, citing concerns of spying, terrorism or government subversion.
> 
> A fourth individual, who used to work for Huawei and whose spouse is currently employed by the company, was also told the couple’s application would be rejected. The cases come after Huawei, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, which started operating in Canada in 2008, faced unsubstantiated spying concerns in recent years.*
> 
> In a March 18 letter from the Canadian consulate in Hong Kong, an immigration officer told a Chinese applicant that officials were preparing to reject the person’s application, which also included the applicant’s spouse; both individuals currently work for Huawei. The letter said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the principal applicant is inadmissible under section 34(1)(f) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which deems individuals involved in espionage, terrorism or government subversion inadmissible ...


More from Vice here.


----------



## CougarKing

The "culture wars" in China continue: A Chinese tycoon unveils a plan to open a series of theme parks to challenge the 2 new Disneylands in Hong Kong and Shanghai. In his speech at the video report, he justified these theme parks by saying they will reportedly focus more on Chinese culture, all the while alluding to the usual "China was a victim of western influence and colonialism" view that seems to dominate their history books. 

*While there are many theme parks in China, probably the closest forerunner I can think of to these "Wanda Cities" would be the "Middle Kingdom" park in Hong Kong that used to be right beside Ocean Park; Middle Kingdom was a theme park where old, imperial China was recreated.

Forbes



> *China's richest man unveils plan to take down Disney*
> 
> Casey Hall
> May 29, 2016
> 
> This weekend China’s massive real estate and entertainment conglomerate, Dalian Wanda, is unveiling the first of a series of* “Wanda Cities”*.
> 
> The company, headed by China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, has overtly taken aim at the foreign entertainment and theme park interloper, *Disney (who are slated to open their $6 billion Shanghai Disney theme park on June 16*, though a soft opening period is already underway).
> 
> (...SNIPPE


----------



## The Bread Guy

Oooh, SOMEONE's touchy ...


> China's visiting foreign minister publicly berated a Canadian journalist on Wednesday for asking a question about his country's human rights record.
> 
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said it was "irresponsible" of a journalist from the web outlet iPolitics to ask about human rights and the jailing of a Canadian, Kevin Garratt, who is charged with espionage.
> 
> Wang appeared visibly angry as he delivered the scolding in the lobby of Global Affairs headquarters at a joint news conference with Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion.
> 
> "Your question is full of prejudice and against China and arrogance ... I don't know where that comes from. This is totally unacceptable," Wang said through a translator.
> 
> "Other people don't know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it is the Chinese people who are in the best situation, in the best position to have a say about China's human rights situation," he continued.
> 
> "So I would like to suggest to you that please don't ask questions in such an irresponsible manner. We welcome goodwill suggestions but we reject groundless or unwarranted accusations." ...


Quite _*un*_diplomatic for a foreign minister ...


----------



## Lumber

Suddenly, I like China a little bit more. What's wrong with showing a little gusto?


----------



## The Bread Guy

Lumber said:
			
		

> What's wrong with showing a little gusto?


Not to mention a bit of hypocrisy - but what are diplomats for, right?


----------



## Edward Campbell

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Oooh, SOMEONE's touchy ...Quite _*un*_diplomatic for a foreign minister ...




There are a couple of issues at play ... Chinese sensitivity to complaints about what they see as "internal/domestic" matters is long standing. Then there is this "spying" issue.

If we want a free trade deal with China, and I think we do, then we must expect a "shopping list" from the Chinese. That list will not be confined to just trade issues ... they will want a bit of _kow-towing_, too.

_I think_ that Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit is all about that potential trade deal and _I suspect_ that every word and move, here and in China, has been carefully choreographed.


----------



## Lumber

Maybe we should take a page out of their books and simply mind our own business. 

I'm sure that once the billions in investment start pouring in, and the standard of living starts going up, people will forget all about their perceived distaste for the Maoists.

Pass me the gravy;
These Benjamins need some sauce.
Dalai Lama, who?


----------



## Lightguns

Concur, I am getting tired of our (western) need to moralize everything.  

What's interesting is how much the Liberals are going to have to taint their relationship with First Nations to make this happen.  I think it would be unwise to string the Chinese too long, especially since Canadian oil and gas wants access to this market.  Liberals could find themselves between an economy and an armed native protest, AKA Rexton, NB on a national scale.  FN are really expecting this guy to shut down all these pipelines and view his reluctance to support as acceptance of their hegemony over natural resources with the "duty to consult" is still very mucky concept.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Lightguns said:
			
		

> Concur, I am getting tired of our (western) need to moralize everything.
> 
> What's interesting is how much the Liberals are going to have to taint their relationship with First Nations to make this happen.  I think it would be unwise to string the Chinese too long, especially since Canadian oil and gas wants access to this market.  Liberals could find themselves between an economy and an armed native protest, AKA Rexton, NB on a national scale.  FN are really expecting this guy to shut down all these pipelines and view his reluctance to support as acceptance of their hegemony over natural resources with the "duty to consult" is still very mucky concept.




It really, really shouldn't be too hard ... expensive? yes, hard? no.

There is only a tiny minority of people who really know and care about the environmental issues (rather more don't know but care a lot); *this is mostly about money*. The First Nations want a lot of it ... hard to blame then, really. The First Nations can,_ I believe_, be bought ... now it's up to Prime Minister Trudeau to to negotiate the price.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Lightguns said:
			
		

> Concur, I am getting tired of our (western) need to moralize everything.
> 
> What's interesting is how much the Liberals are going to have to taint their relationship with First Nations to make this happen.  I think it would be unwise to string the Chinese too long, especially since Canadian oil and gas wants access to this market.  Liberals could find themselves between an economy and an armed native protest, AKA Rexton, NB on a national scale.  FN are really expecting this guy to shut down all these pipelines and view his reluctance to support as acceptance of their hegemony over natural resources with the "duty to consult" is still very mucky concept.



You find the FN responses a mixed bag, depending on the product and where they sit on the supply chain and the risk/benefit analysis for them. examples http://haisla.ca/economic-development/kitimat-advantage/
http://www.metlakatla.ca/overview/economic-development


----------



## Lumber

The article stated that one of the things the Chinese are looking for in order to consider a free trade agreement with Canada is that we approve and build the Northern Gateway pipeline. However, what about the alternative refinery producing oil from train-shipped solid bitumen?



> *Forget tankers and pipelines, David Black has a plan for a ‘West Coast exit’ for Canada’s oil*



http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/david-black-refinery-oil?__lsa=41a9-1df7


----------



## Kirkhill

Colin P said:
			
		

> You find the FN responses a mixed bag, depending on the product and where they sit on the supply chain and the risk/benefit analysis for them. examples http://haisla.ca/economic-development/kitimat-advantage/
> http://www.metlakatla.ca/overview/economic-development



I think another part of the problem is one that the First Nation governments share with all other authorities: legitimacy.

My sense is that in a number of instances the "government", the chief and his clan, negotiate a deal but the deal is not upheld by the rest of the "nation", for a variety of reasons.  It is kind of like the problem that the federal and provincial governments have in microcosm  - not everybody accepts the legitimacy of the government.  This is particularly true of the activist community where the only legitimate authority appears to be the conscience of the individual unless their "tribe" is in control.

Heck of a way to run a railroad.

Really should have been more careful with that "following orders" defence at Nuremberg.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Outside the trade/oil pipeline front, some recent signs of another element (?) of China's hybrid approach to poking without fighting (for now, anyway) ...


> The Chinese are set to consolidate their control over the South China Sea with their final and most controversial round of island building right up against the Philippines.
> 
> Key points:
> 
> China paying fishermen to build guerilla force in South China Sea
> Hainan island fishermen build on, and occupy, the disputed islands
> Many are ancestors of fishermen who helped establish the People's Republic
> 
> To do the job they will be relying on their maritime militia, a well-funded force drawn from China's vast fishing fleet.
> 
> The fishermen of Hainan Island are the forward guards in China's battle to take all of the South China Sea.
> 
> Operating as a guerrilla force and under civilian cover, they occupy and help build disputed islands ...


More here, here and here.


----------



## tomahawk6

Work is progressing on China's second aircraft carrier.Impressive learning curve.

http://www.businessinsider.com/satellite-imagery-reveals-chinas-progress-on-their-second-aircraft-carrier-2016-6


----------



## YZT580

They are ramping up their dominance of the South China Sea.  News reports released today indicate that they are establishing an ADIZ  to effectively assume control of all aviation activity there.  They have already indicated that they will not accept the World Court ruling regarding authority and they have militarized the Spratleys.  Finally they are infiltrating many of the other islands via their very extensive fishing fleet and backing them up with the coast guard, an armed fleet that is greater than the majority of Pacific nations naval fleets.  Very perilous times.


----------



## tomahawk6

Like Hitler moving into country after country,until he was stopped- China may only be stopped by force.Who will have the stones to do the deed has yet to be seen.


----------



## CougarKing

On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre today:

Source: Reuters



> *Democracy is nothing to fear, Taiwan tells China on Tiananmen anniversary*
> 
> Published June 5, 2016 1:35am
> By J.R. WU, Reuters
> 
> TAIPEI - On the anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on student-led protests in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Taiwan's new president told China on Saturday that democracy is nothing to fear.
> 
> Tsai Ing-wen said in a Facebook post on the 27th anniversary that Taiwan could serve as an example to China.
> 
> Tsai said in the run-up to Taiwan's elections earlier this year that she had seen people from China, as well as the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, mixing with crowds in Taiwan.
> 
> "These many friends, after experiencing things for themselves can see that in fact there's nothing scary about democracy. Democracy is a good and fine thing," wrote Tsai, who took office last month.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

China gave Iraq 3 Cai Hong-4 (CH-4) drones.The Chinese say that it is superior to the US Predator.It is bigger than the Predator so a better comparison might be the Reaper.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a21197/the-iraqi-army-is-flying-chinese-made-killer-drones/


----------



## CougarKing

And it happens again since the earlier Sept. 23 2015 buzzing of another RC135: the old Cold War-era normal is now the "new normal" :

CNN



> * U.S.: Chinese jet makes 'unsafe' intercept of Air Force plane*
> 
> By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspond
> 
> Updated 10:20 AM ET, Wed June 8, 2016
> 
> (CNN)A U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying Tuesday in international airspace over the East China Sea was intercepted in an "unsafe manner" by a Chinese J-10 fighter jet, several defense officials tell CNN.
> 
> The Chinese jet was never closer than 100 feet to the U.S. aircraft, but it flew with a "high rate of speed as it closed in" on the U.S. aircraft, one official said. Because of that high speed, and the fact it was flying at the same altitude as the U.S. plane, the intercept is defined as unsafe.
> 
> The officials did not know if the U.S. plane took any evasive action to avoid the Chinese aircraft or at what point the J-10 broke away. It is also not yet clear if the U.S. will diplomatically protest the incident. Officials said the RC-135 was on a routine mission.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CBH99

I know I might get flamed for this, but does anybody else find the narrative of the media reports on things like this to be somewhat embellished?

I'm pretty sure if a Chinese EW/ISR aircraft were flying near our coastline, we might have a few CF-18's go out & meet them.  And I'm sure the Hornets would be approaching at a fairly decent rate of speed also.  

In the case of some of the Russian intercepts - yes, absolutely.  Dangerously close.  Barrel rolls over the NATO aircraft - deserving of the media report of "dangerous intercept".   But this doesn't seem to be the case in regards to this particular incident.


----------



## CougarKing

So much for rule of law even in China's courts:

South China Morning Post



> *1,000 Chinese lawyers condemn police attack after attorney has clothes ripped off in court
> 
> Wu Liangshu assaulted after he refuses to hand over mobile phone for checks, according to media report*
> PUBLISHED : Monday, 06 June, 2016, 12:42pm
> UPDATED : Tuesday, 07 June, 2016, 10:21am
> 
> About 1,000 lawyers in China have signed a statement condemning an attack on a lawyer who says he was assaulted in a courtroom by police officers.
> 
> *The lawyer, Wu Liangshu, says he was beaten by three court policemen in the presence of two judges and one other official on Friday after his request to file a case in a district court in Nanning, Guangxi, was rejected.*
> 
> The clash broke out when Wu refused to hand over his mobile phone for inspection by Qingxiu district court police. Wu had used the phone to record a conversation with court officials in its petition office.
> 
> “The refusal to establish a court case and the violent assault and search of a lawyer seriously damage the rights of attorneys. If even a professional lawyer is treated with barbaric and violent means, just imagine how they deal with civilians,” said the lawyers’ statement, posted online on Sunday evening.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

China has been trying to get US military jet engines the age old way,trying to steal the technology and or use a front man to buy the engines.So far no dice but they will keep trying.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/10/news/us-china-military-jet-engine-espionage/index.html

China appears to be going to great lengths to get its hands on high-tech U.S. jet engines to beef up its military capabilities. 

On Thursday, a woman named Wenxia Man was convicted in a Florida court of conspiring to evade U.S. export laws by illegally acquiring and sending fighter jet engines and drones to China, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Prosecutors said Man was working with an associate in China to buy and export engines made by Pratt & Whitney and General Electric (GE), which are found in a range of top U.S. military aircraft, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-22 and the F-16 fighter jets. She was also found to have tried to export a General Atomics drone, and technical data for the different hardware items.


----------



## CougarKing

The last thing one wants to see when they arrive at Shanghai's Pudong airport:

CNN



> *Man hurls explosive device at Shanghai airport, then attempts suicide*
> 
> By Steven Jiang and Paul Armstrong, CNN
> 
> Updated 1427 GMT (2227 HKT) June 13, 2016
> 
> 
> Beijing (CNN)Four passengers were wounded after a man hurled an explosive device at a check-in counter at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport on Sunday afternoon, before attempting to kill himself.
> "According to the initial police investigation, a man took out a homemade explosive device in a beer bottle from a bag he was carrying and threw it in front of the check-in counters.
> "After the beer bottle exploded, the man took out a dagger from his bag, slashed his own neck and collapsed on the floor," according to a Shanghai Police press statement.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

I am sure the Chinese government will assist him with his quest to die down the road.  Just not as he envisioned, that's all.


----------



## CougarKing

Xi's anti-corruption drive continues, going not only after officials but their families as well:

Wall Streel Journal



> *China Sentences Son and Wife of Ex-Security Chief to Prison
> Prosecutors accused Zhou Yongkang’s son and wife of accepting bribes*
> By James T. Areddy
> Updated June 15, 2016 9:43 a.m. ET
> 2 COMMENTS
> 
> SHANGHAI—A Chinese court on Wednesday found a son of China’s disgraced former security czar, Zhou Yongkang, guilty of engaging in a business conspiracy along with his father to illegally control millions of dollars in assets, and sentenced him to a lengthy prison term.
> 
> The son, 44-year-old Zhou Bin, was jailed for 18 years and fined $53 million, according to a court document published in Chinese state media that accused him of accepting bribes and business offenses. State media also reported a guilty verdict against the elder Mr. Zhou’s wife, a 47-year-old former television personality named Jia Xiaoye, who received a nine-year sentence and a $155,000 fine for corruption-related offenses.
> 
> The prosecution of the elder Mr. Zhou shortly after he retired in 2012 stood out as the high-water mark of an anticorruption push pursued by Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the past, party members of Mr. Zhou’s rank were considered untouchable, as were their family members.
> 
> ​More recently when Chinese officials have fallen, prosecutors have invariably alleged corruption by family members. It is less common, however, for details of action against the family members to be aired publicly. But Mr. Zhou’s case has been handled differently. Both before and after the party announced a formal investigation of the politician in mid-2014, numerous associates from his personal, business and government life also have faced prosecution.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the bookseller Lam case:

Source: AFP via Channel News Asia (Singapore)



> *Hong Kong bookseller 'blindfolded, interrogated' during detention in China*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> June 16, 2016 10:44 PM
> 
> 
> HONG KONG - A Hong Kong bookseller known for selling titles critical of Beijing told Thursday how he was blindfolded, kept in a cell and interrogated by Chinese authorities after going missing eight months ago.
> 
> Lam Wing-kee is one of five booksellers who published salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians and disappeared at the end of last year in a case that heightened fears Beijing was tightening its grip on Hong Kong.
> 
> He said that although he was not physically harmed, he had suffered mentally in detention and was unable to contact a lawyer or his family. He was kept in confinement, unable to walk outside and repeatedly interrogated.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China will not be happy if these US officials do meet Tsai.

Defense News



> *US Congressional Commission in Taiwan To Meet With New President*
> Wendell Minnick, Defense News 10:22 a.m. EDT June 20, 2016
> 
> 
> TAIPEI — The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission is in Taiwan this week meeting with senior members of the new presidential administration and members of the legislature.
> 
> Taiwan’s 14th president, Tsai Ing-wen, the first woman to serve, won the presidency in January. The election also covered the legislature and resulted in a clear mandate for the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tsai’s DPP also won a majority of legislative seats and confirmed long-held suspicions among political pundits that the then-ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), was out of touch with the demographic shifts in the society.
> 
> Larry Wortzel will lead the US delegation. Wortzel, a 32-year military veteran, had served as a US Army attaché to Beijing where he witnessed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He is also the only defense attaché to have jumped with China’s airborne corps. His book, “The Dragon Extends its Reach,” is considered required reading among many China military watchers.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More about China's "proxy navy" as a tool for furthering its South China Sea claims : its fishing fleet. 

Diplomat



> *Chinese Fishermen: The New Global Pirates?
> 
> It’s not just the South China Sea — Chinese fishing vessels have been accused of illegal activities all over the world.*
> By Cal Wong
> June 21, 2016
> 
> 
> The Indonesian Navy intercepted a Chinese vessel that was caught illegally fishing in Indonesian territory off the Natuna Islands on Saturday, June 18. Indonesian Navy spokesman First Admiral Edi Sucipto said the seven crew members of the Chinese vessel were detained. This is the third incident in the Natuna Islands involving Chinese vessels.
> 
> A statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed that the Indonesian navy had fired warning shots at a Chinese vessel, injuring one Chinese fisherman and damaging the boat. However, China emphasized that the waters in question are regarded as “China’s traditional fishing grounds,” and accused Indonesia of an “abused of force.”
> 
> For its part, Indonesia has said it will continue to take “decisive” action against foreign ships operating illegally in its waters after the comments from Beijing. “We will not hesitate to take decisive action against foreign ships, whatever their flag and nationality, when they commit violations in Indonesian territory,” Sucipto said
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

And China backtracks on years of progress in cross-strait relations under Pres. Ma in what seems to be a campaign to isolate a Taiwan under the DPP's Tsai. 

Associated Press



> *China cuts contact with Taiwan liaison body over Tsai*
> [Christopher Bodeen, The Associated Press]
> 
> June 25, 2016
> 
> 
> BEIJING, China - Beijing said Saturday it had cut off contact with the main Taiwan liaison body because of President Tsai Ing-wen's refusal to endorse the concept of a single Chinese nation, ratcheting up pressure on the new Taiwanese leader.
> 
> In a statement posted on the website of the Cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office, spokesman An Fengshan said contacts between bodies responsible for ties had been suspended starting from Tsai's May 20 inauguration.
> 
> "Because the Taiwan side has been unable to confirm the '92 consensus that embodies the common political foundation of the one-China principle, the mechanism for contact and communication between the two sides has already been suspended," the statement quoted An as saying.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Please note an older thread on the separate, Chinese-funded Nicaragua Canal project.

Agence France Presse via Yahoo News



> *Chinese ship to inaugurate wider Panama Canal*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> June 26, 2016 6:31 PM
> 
> 
> PANAMA CITY - A giant Chinese-chartered freighter is to nudge its way through the Panama Canal on Sunday to mark the completion of nearly a decade of expansion work forecast to boost global trade.
> 
> The vessel, especially renamed COSCO Shipping Panama, will inaugurate the widened canal in an hours-long voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean via a new shipping lane and gigantic locks that have been fitted to the century-old waterway.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

I could have sworn there was an older thread on this, but it doesn't seem to turn up in any searches.

MSN



> *The World's Largest Military Plane in Production is China's Y-20*
> Popular Science
> 
> Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer
> 20/06/2016
> 
> These billionaires certainly still understand the importance of money – most of the time anyway. We reveal the spending secrets of the world's most frugal billionaires.
> The world's most frugal billionaires
> 
> China Y-20 transport aircraft 11051 © Provided by Popular Science China Y-20 transport aircraft 11051 On June 15th 2016, the first operational Y-20 heavy transport aircraft entered service into the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). China has now joined the United States and Russia as the only countries which can design and built its own strategic transport aircraft. It's built by the Xian Aircraft Corporation, and apparently has been assigned the call sign "Roc", after the giant mythical bird. In fact, of planes still in production, the 200 ton Y-20 is the world's largest, as it's larger than the Russian Il-76 and the American C-17A Globemaster ended production in 2015.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Beijing talks tough ahead of the expected July 12 ruling of the Hague ITLOS court ruling between China and the Philippines over their conflicting South China Sea claims:

Reuters via Interaksyon(Philippines news site)



> *Beijing to reject Hague ruling on PH's South China Sea case*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> June 30, 2016 11:41 AM
> 
> BEIJING -- Beijing will reject any ruling by an international tribunal in a contentious case brought by the Philippines over the South China Sea, the foreign ministry said, as tensions mount over the disputed waters.
> 
> The United Nations-backed Permanent Court of Arbitration said Wednesday it will rule on July 12 in a closely watched case challenging China's claims to much of the strategic waterway.
> 
> Beijing has consistently rejected the tribunal's right to hear the case and has taken no part in the proceedings, mounting a diplomatic and propaganda drive to try to undermine its authority.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## MarkOttawa

USAF being awfully public:



> USAF “Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With China”
> 
> Further to this post on the difficulties carrier-based USN F-35Cs would have in a war with China (“range, range, range” amongst other things)...
> 
> this air force concept of operations for a very thinly-disguised war with China strikes me as pretty darn complicated (it’s amazing to me that such military planning vs a country not officially a US adversary–yet–should be made public; but the US services can be awfully frank). Could all the advance arrangements necessary be in place in time (e.g. fuel and munitions at all those bases)? Would the foreign governments concerned go along? And what about range to targets, especially those beyond just the coast of the mainland [see comment]?..
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/mark-collins-usaf-officers-give-new-details-for-f-35-in-war-with-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

China demonstrating how the upcoming ruling at the Hague won't have much of an effect on their intent to secure their claims in the area:

Agence-France Presse via Interaksyon (Philippines news site)



> *China must prepare for 'military confrontation' in South China Sea - state media*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> July 5, 2016 1:58 PM
> 
> BEIJING, China -- Beijing must prepare for "military confrontation" in the South China Sea, state-run media said Tuesday, as it began naval drills in the area ahead of an international tribunal ruling over the maritime dispute.
> 
> China asserts sovereignty over almost all the resource-rich strategic waterway despite rival claims from Southeast Asian neighbors -- raising tensions with the United States, which has key defense treaties with many allies in the region.
> 
> On Tuesday, China began a week of naval exercises in waters around the Paracel Islands.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

"Stalking" sounds less politically correct than "doing surveillance and freedom of navigation operations".  ;D

Defense News



> *U.S. Navy destroyers stalk China's claims in South China Sea*
> David Larter, Navy Times 10:02 p.m. EDT July 6, 2016
> 
> U.S. Navy destroyers have been quietly stalking some of China's man-made islands and claims in recent weeks ahead of a ruling on contested claims in the South China Sea.
> 
> *Over the past two weeks, the destroyers Stethem, Spruance and Momsen have all patrolled near Chinese-claimed features at Scarborough Shoal and in the Spratly Islands, according to two defense officials.*
> 
> “We have been regularly patrolling within the 14 to 20 nautical mile range of these features,” one official said, who asked for anonymity to discuss diplomatically-sensitive operations.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

Well, THAT was quick ...

_"Philippines Wins South China Sea Case Against China, Court Issues Harsh Verdict"_
_"China rejects ruling on South China Sea as ‘null and void’ "_


----------



## tomahawk6

PRC has commissioned its latest destroyer the Yinchuan.Experts think the ship is not in the Arleigh Burke class but that it might give the Japanese Atago or the ROK Navy Sejong the Great destroyer class a run for their money.







http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-newest-guided-missile-destroyer-2016-7


----------



## Colin Parkinson

In light of the new ruling, the US should organize an international exercise in those waters with ships from all of the countries except China taking part.


----------



## CougarKing

China begins to rattle sabers and make war threats after not getting its way:

Agence-France-Presse via Interaksyon (Philippines news site)



> *Angry China claims right to declare South China Sea air defense zone*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> July 13, 2016 2:01 PM
> 
> BEIJING, China -- Beijing "has the right" to declare an air defense identification zone over the South China Sea, it said Wednesday as it stepped up denunciations of an international tribunal that ruled against its expansive claims in the strategic waters.
> 
> Whether Beijing set up such a zone -- which would require civilian aircraft to identify themselves to military controllers -- depended on "the level of threat we receive," said vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin.
> 
> "Do not turn the South China Sea into a cradle of war," he told reporters, insisting: "China's aim is to turn the South China Sea into a sea of peace, friendship, and cooperation."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



It's not just mainland China that rejected the ITLOS ruling, but the other China (Taiwan) as well.

Agence-Frace-Presse via Interaksyon(Philippines news site)



> *Taiwan sends warship to South China Sea after rejecting tribunal ruling*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> July 13, 2016 12:36 PM
> 
> 
> TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A Taiwanese warship set sail for the South China Sea on Wednesday "to defend Taiwan's maritime territory," a day after an international tribunal ruled China has no historic rights in the waterway and undermined Taipei's claims to islands there.
> 
> President Tsai Ing-wen rallied troops on the deck of the frigate, saying Taiwanese were determined to "defend their country's rights," before the warship headed for Taiwan-controlled Taiping island in the Spratly island chain from the southern city of Kaohsiung.
> 
> The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled Tuesday that China has no historic rights to its claimed "nine-dash line" and that it had violated the Philippines' sovereign rights in the exclusive economic zone.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Article outlining the Hague decision and how the PRC has backed away from the so called 9 line.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/south-china-sea-arbitration-award-breathtaking-17004

Notice that the ‘nine-dash line’ doesn’t figure at all in these claims. That suggests that Beijing may have come to the realization that the line has become a historical burden rather than a strategic advantage. The quiet disappearance of the ‘nine-dash line’ from China’s official claims is a major policy change. Although it will be hard to ascertain the Chinese leadership’s latest view on the ‘nine-dash line,’ this statement is ground-breaking in implying that China doesn’t take it as a territorial demarcation line—that is, China doesn’t claim 90% of the South China Sea as ‘a Chinese lake’, as is so often alleged in international media. Such clarification, even if only deducible by implication, is probably the most important signal Beijing wants to send to the outside world following the award.

Also notice that although the claim to sovereignty and maritime rights over ‘all the islands’ appear sweeping, the claim doesn’t specify the nature or scope of those islands. The ambiguity is likely meant to leave room for future negotiation with other countries. It’s possible that Beijing may eventually bring those claims in line with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in some manner, subject to satisfactory negotiation outcomes.


----------



## a_majoor

China reveals an upgrade to their current MBT:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/china-reveals-upgrade-t96b-tanks-with.html



> *China reveals upgrade T96B tanks with improved engines and electronics*
> 
> China North Industries Corporation (Norinco), has developed a new variant of its Type 96 (ZTZ-96) main battle tank (MBT) in time to participate in the 30 July to 16 August International Army Games organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
> 
> At least five T-96Bs arrived in Russia on 7 July to take part in the Masters of Automobile and Tank Hardware competition, according to Russian media reports. The 'Tank Biathlon' portion of this competition received wide coverage in Chinese state media last year when Norinco's 50-tonne T-96A MBT was allowed to participate.
> 
> Except for an improved ventilation system, the T-96B appears to show no visible changes to the turret, optical sensors or main 125 mm gun armament.
> 
> Unconfirmed Chinese reports indicate that computer and digital communication systems have been improved, allowing tank commanders to benefit from common integrated intelligence of the battlefield processed at higher levels of command.
> 
> The reports also point to improvements reportedly made to the T-96B's engine, exhaust system, suspension, and running wheels.
> 
> The engine and new rear-mounted exhaust system appear to have benefited from those developed for Norinco's VT-4 export MBT. If this is the case, the T-96B may have a 1,200 hp liquid-cooled diesel engine.


----------



## a_majoor

Anyone using the Opera web browser might want to reconsiderASAP:

https://voxday.blogspot.ca/2016/07/chinese-buy-opera.html



> *Chinese buy Opera*
> 
> This should shake things up in the browser world, to say the least:
> 
> After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera's browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV. The consumer arm has 560 workers, but the company hasn't said what will happen to its other 1,109 employees.
> 
> The original deal, announced in February, reportedly failed to gain regulatory approval. While expressing disappointment that it was scrapped, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen says "we believe that the new deal is very good for Opera employees and Opera shareholders." The acquisition was approved by Opera's board, and the company now has 18 months to find a new name, according to Techcrunch.
> That's great news for Brendan Eich and Brave, which is already the best browser out there. I still use Pale Moon for a few things, but 85 percent of my work is now done on Brave.
> 
> Anyhow, I would not advise using Opera or OperaMail anymore. It's bad enough to share things with the US government through Google and Microsoft, but this is a whole new can of worms.


----------



## CougarKing

Cooler heads prevailing in Beijing after the recent UN Tribunal ruling over the South China Sea?

IHS Jane's 360



> *Chinese HQ-9 battery being removed from Woody Island*
> 
> Imagery taken on 8 July shows most of the dispersed HQ-9 battery components concealed under camouflage netting. Three transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) vehicles and the battery's Type 305A target acquisition radar (TAR) remained uncovered.
> 
> Imagery captured a day later shows HQ-9 battery components uncovered and garrisoned together near the radar position. On 10 July, subsequent imagery showed a column of vehicles, including probably HQ-9 TELs, parked on a road adjacent to the island's southern harbour.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> At present, Woody Island lacks garrison facilities sufficient to house the HQ-9 battery. Continued construction on the island may result in a garrison and a prepared SAM site appearing in the near future.





Airbus Defence and Space imagery showing the removal of HQ-9 strategic SAM components from Woody Island. The TELs and engagement and acquisition radars are no longer present at the deployment site. Source: ©CNES 2016, Distribution Airbus DS / ©2016 IHS


----------



## CougarKing

A sign showing Putin's support of Beijing's SCS claim?

ABC News (Australia)



> *China, Russia to hold joint exercises in South China Sea: Beijing*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> July 28, 2016 5:40 PM
> 
> BEIJING - China and Russia will hold joint naval exercises in the South China Sea in September, Beijing's defense ministry said Thursday, after an international tribunal invalidated the Asian giant's extensive claims in the area.
> 
> The drills will be carried out in the "relevant sea and air of the South China Sea", defense ministry spokesman Yang Yujun told reporters at a monthly briefing.
> 
> With international diplomatic tensions mounting and Washington regularly sending warships into the strategically vital area to assert the right to freedom of navigation, the move could see vessels from several of the world's most powerful militaries in the same region at the same time.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

China wants its own BMD/THAAD system:

Reuters



> World | Thu Jul 28, 2016 6:01am EDT
> Related: World, China, South Korea
> *China says pressing ahead with own anti-missile system
> *
> China's Defence Ministry confirmed on Thursday that it was pressing ahead with anti-missile system tests after pictures appeared on state television, amid anger at South Korea's decision to deploy an advanced U.S. anti-missile system.
> 
> An announcement by South Korea and the United States this month that they would deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) unit has drawn protests from China, which warned that the system would destabilize regional security.
> 
> The decision by the United States and South Korea is the latest move to squeeze increasingly isolated North Korea, but China worries the system's radar will be able to track its military capabilities. Russia also opposes the deployment.
> 
> Pictures broadcast this week on Chinese television were the third time since 2010 that China has publicly indicated tests of its own anti-missile system, state media said.
> 
> "To develop suitable capabilities for missile defense is necessary for China to maintain its national security," Defence Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun told a regular monthly briefing, when asked about the footage.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## MarkOttawa

The really scary elephant in room--thinking about the now thinkable:



> RAND on War Between the Dragon and the Eagle
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/mark-collins-rand-on-war-between-the-dragon-and-the-eagle/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CougarKing

Would the CCP really be willing to risk China losing 30 years' worth of economic development and better living standards for its people simply for their claim on the South China Sea? Would Xi and the current seatholders of the Politburo Standing Committee really lose face if they blinked like Krushchev did over Cuba?

International Business Times



> *Beijing warns of war in South China Sea and urges military, police and public to prepare
> 
> China's defence minister has warned of a 'threat from the sea' and to maritime security*
> 
> Priyanka By Priyanka Mogul
> August 3, 2016
> 
> 
> China's defence minister Chang Wanquan has warned the military, police and the public to prepare for a "people's war at sea" as tensions over the South China Sea dispute escalated.
> 
> The comments come weeks after The Hague ruled against China's historic claims over the disputed maritime asset, stating the country had violated the Philippines' sovereign rights through its activities in the region.
> 
> Urging the country to prepare for mobilisation to "safeguard sovereignty", Wanguan called for recognition of the "seriousness of the national security situation".
> 
> According to the country's official Xinhua News Agency, Beijing has placed emphasis on a "threat from the sea" and maritime security threats, calling for the public to be educated on national defence issues.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

I _think_ (_guess_ is a better word) that this is part of a "mid-term" power struggle within the small (less than ten, about seven, right now, I _think_) leadership team.

My guess is that Xi sees himself as a transformative leader, à la Deng Xiaoping, while the military is trying (and failing, I also _guess_) to regain some of the power it had.

China will risk _*some*_ level of conflict ... even with America. They are, I have said, willing to play "bumper cars" on the sea and in the air and even take and inflict a few casualties. Could it spiral out of control? Yes. Are the Chinese leaders, including the generals, that stupid? No, _I think_ not ... but how about others, including the next US president?  :dunno:


----------



## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I _think_ (_guess_ is a better word) that this is part of a "mid-term" power struggle within the small (less than ten, about seven, right now, I _think_) leadership team.
> 
> My guess is that Xi sees himself as a transformative leader, à la Deng Xiaoping, while the military is trying (and failing, I also _guess_) to regain some of the power it had.
> 
> China will risk _*some*_ level of conflict ... even with America. They are, I have said, willing to play "bumper cars" on the sea and in the air and even take and inflict a few casualties. Could it spiral out of control? Yes. Are the Chinese leaders, including the generals, that stupid? No, _I think_ not ... but how about others, including the next US president?  :dunno:



The thing is, all the conflicts the PRC has been directly involved in since 1949 have been mainly land campaigns, with the exception of botched PLA amphibious landings on the Taiwan-held offshore island bases like Kinmen and Quemoy in the 1950s.

Chinese 1945-49 Civil War: mainly a ground war on the mainland but with some small riverine actions as some Nationalist naval units defected to Mao's side
1950s Korean War: mainly an air-ground war when China entered 
1960s Sino-India conflict: mainly a ground war over the Himalayas
1979 Sino-Vietnam War: an aborted Chinese invasion with heavy casualties 

As stated above, Chinese state media has told the public to prepare for "a People's War at Sea". Despite their force numbers and huge military industrial complex, anyone can see they have limited naval experience. So you think the Politburo Standing Committee is prepared to plunge their country into a limited naval war against the US and its regional allies like Vietnam, Japan, Australia and the Philippines?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Well, almost no one, and that includes the Chinese, ever learns much from experience, do they? If they did we've invented tanks and artillery and submarines and jet fighters by about 500 BCE, we'd certainly fought thousands of wars by then ...  [

_I think_ that the Chinese leadership (political and military) understands that if it, China, is going to play "bully-boy" in a maritime region - South East Asia - then it will need to learn how to build and use maritime forces.

What _I don't think_ is that the willingness to confront, and even to play "bumper cars" with the Americans, if it comes to that, equates, in any way, to a willingness to go to war. My sense is that the Chinese long term plan involves being the regional hegemon ~ replacing the US in that role ~ without fighting for the title.


----------



## CougarKing

All PLA naval and air units on a "war footing"?

Reuters



> *China conducts "combat patrols" over contested islands*
> Reuters
> August 6, 2016
> 
> China's Air Force sent bombers and fighter jets on "combat patrols" near contested islands in the South China Sea, in a move a senior colonel said was part of an effort to normalize such drills and respond to security threats.
> The exercises come at a time of heightened tension in the disputed waters after an arbitration court in The Hague ruled last month that China did not have historic rights to the South China Sea.
> *The air force sent several H-6 bombers and Su-30 fighter jets to inspect the airspace around the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal,* Senior Colonel Shen Jinke of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force said, according to state news agency Xinhua.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## GAP

A good strong typhoon will clear up that little Spratley problem and wash everything clean.....


----------



## CBH99

E.R. Campbell,

That _may_ be the Chinese goal, but I doubt they will be able to accomplish it without fighting for it.

The UN ruling makes it extremely difficult for the Chinese to back up their actions/claims with any sort of credibility, since the world body has already told them they are in the wrong.

And while the Chinese infringe upon the sovereignty of their neighbours, forcefully take their resources, and bully their maritime assets (both civil and military) - the US is doing the exact opposite.

The US is insisting upon the recognition of borders, freedom of the sea, sovereign use of maritime resources by smaller nations, etc.


At the end of the day, I think the US has done a great job of building relations with China's neighbours, providing them with assets, reassurance patrols, etc.  I don't think China can infinitely expand its type of influence without 'somebody' standing their ground - and therefore starting a conflict.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Although there are no political parties, _per se_, in China, there are _factions_ within the CCP that are, probably, more extreme that our Conservative vs NDP or the US Democrats vs Republicans. One such faction, which is opposed to much of what the current Paramount Leader Xi Jinping is doing, is in the military. The PLA has a strong political voice and it is not shy about using it. Threats of war and military action are pretty common from the military _faction_, and retaliation ~ arrests and disappearances ~ are equally common from the Xi _faction_. Civilian control of the military is not as firmly rooted in China as it is in the West but Xi is doing real, serious harm to the military faction's political power as he tries to bring it to heel.


----------



## CougarKing

China using gas platforms near Japan for military purposes?



> *East China Sea: Japan Spots Chinese Radar on Gas Exploration Platform*
> Does the radar suggest the creeping militarization of gas platforms in the East China Sea?
> 
> By Ankit Panda
> August 09, 2016
> 
> Adding to tensions in the East China Sea, a Japanese foreign ministry spokesman noted on Sunday that authorities in Tokyo discovered that China had installed radar equipment on a gas platform this summer, in late June, near disputed waters.
> 
> The Japanese discovery of a radar on board a gas platform has stoked fears that China may be converting its gas exploration platforms for partial military use. The approach would echo China’s artificial islands in the Spratly Islands in South China Sea, which Beijing claims are for non-military use.
> in a slideshow (PDF) released on August 6 by the Japanese foreign ministry, showing Chinese gas exploration platforms in the East China Sea.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Map taken from Akit Panda's Twitter account]
> 
> The Diplomat
> 
> 
> 
> ​*


*​*


----------



## a_majoor

Forget Africa, here is where the real centre of gravity is:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-vietnam-idUSKCN10K2NE



> *Exclusive: Vietnam moves new rocket launchers into disputed South China Sea - sources*
> HONG KONG | BY GREG TORODE
> 
> Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy May 21, 2015. U.S....
> 
> Vietnam has discreetly fortified several of its islands in the disputed South China Sea with new mobile rocket launchers capable of striking China's runways and military installations across the vital trade route, according to Western officials.
> 
> Diplomats and military officers told Reuters that intelligence shows Hanoi has shipped the launchers from the Vietnamese mainland into position on five bases in the Spratly islands in recent months, a move likely to raise tensions with Beijing.
> 
> The launchers have been hidden from aerial surveillance and they have yet to be armed, but could be made operational with rocket artillery rounds within two or three days, according to the three sources.
> 
> Vietnam's Foreign Ministry said the information was "inaccurate", without elaborating.
> 
> Deputy Defence Minister, Senior Lieutenant-General Nguyen Chi Vinh, told Reuters in Singapore in June that Hanoi had no such launchers or weapons ready in the Spratlys but reserved the right to take any such measures.
> 
> "It is within our legitimate right to self-defense to move any of our weapons to any area at any time within our sovereign territory," he said.
> 
> The move is designed to counter China's build-up on its seven reclaimed islands in the Spratlys archipelago. Vietnam's military strategists fear the building runways, radars and other military installations on those holdings have left Vietnam's southern and island defenses increasingly vulnerable.
> 
> Military analysts say it is the most significant defensive move Vietnam has made on its holdings in the South China Sea in decades.
> 
> Hanoi wanted to have the launchers in place as it expected tensions to rise in the wake of the landmark international court ruling against China in an arbitration case brought by the Philippines, foreign envoys said.
> 
> *The ruling last month, stridently rejected by Beijing, found no legal basis to China's sweeping historic claims to much of the South China Sea.*
> 
> Vietnam, China and Taiwan claim all of the Spratlys while the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei claim some of the area.
> 
> "China's military maintains close surveillance of the situation in the sea and air space around the Spratly islands," China's defense ministry said in a faxed statement to Reuters.
> 
> "We hope the relevant country can join with China in jointly safeguarding peace and stability in the South China Sea region."
> 
> The United States is also monitoring developments closely.
> 
> "We continue to call on all South China Sea claimants to avoid actions that raise tensions, take practical steps to build confidence, and intensify efforts to find peaceful, diplomatic solutions to disputes," a State Department official said.
> 
> STATE-OF-THE-ART SYSTEM
> 
> Foreign officials and military analysts believe the launchers form part of Vietnam's state-of-art EXTRA rocket artillery system recently acquired from Israel.
> 
> EXTRA rounds are highly accurate up to a range of 150 km (93 miles), with different 150 kg (330 lb) warheads that can carry high explosives or bomblets to attack multiple targets simultaneously. Operated with targeting drones, they could strike both ships and land targets.
> 
> That puts China's 3,000-metre runways and installations on Subi, Fiery Cross and Mischief Reef within range of many of Vietnam's tightly clustered holdings on 21 islands and reefs.
> 
> While Vietnam has larger and longer range Russian coastal defense missiles, the EXTRA is considered highly mobile and effective against amphibious landings. It uses compact radars, so does not require a large operational footprint - also suitable for deployment on islets and reefs.
> 
> "When Vietnam acquired the EXTRA system, it was always thought that it would be deployed on the Spratlys...it is the perfect weapon for that," said Siemon Wezeman, a senior arms researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
> 
> There is no sign the launchers have been recently test fired or moved.
> 
> China took its first Spratlys possessions after a sea battle against Vietnam's then weak navy in 1988. After the battle, Vietnam said 64 soldiers with little protection were killed as they tried to protect a flag on South Johnson reef - an incident still acutely felt in Hanoi.
> 
> In recent years, Vietnam has significantly improved its naval capabilities as part of a broader military modernization, including buying six advanced Kilo submarines from Russia.
> 
> Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam's military at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the deployment showed the seriousness of Vietnam's determination to militarily deter China as far as possible.
> 
> "China's runways and military installations in the Spratlys are a direct challenge to Vietnam, particularly in their southern waters and skies, and they are showing they are prepared to respond to that threat," he said. "China is unlikely to see this as purely defensive, and it could mark a new stage of militarization of the Spratlys."
> 
> Trevor Hollingsbee, a former naval intelligence analyst with the British defense ministry, said he believed the deployment also had a political factor, partly undermining the fear created by the prospect of large Chinese bases deep in maritime Southeast Asia.
> 
> "It introduces a potential vulnerability where they was none before - it is a sudden new complication in an arena that China was dominating," he said.


----------



## CougarKing

Last week, the Philippines sent a special envoy to China, Fidel Ramos, a former president of the Philippines during the 1990s. Ramos is not only a former military general and a foreign graduate of West Point, but he also fought in the Korean War as a junior officer with the Philippine contingent (PEFTOK) sent as part of UN forces in Korea. So he fought against Chinese troops at one point in his youth.

It seems the use of Ramos as a special envoy through a back channel has worked, since tensions seem to have finally began to relax.

Wall Street Journal



> *Beijing Flies Bombers Over Disputed South China Sea
> Development comes as former Philippine leader heads to China for talks on resolving maritime dispute*
> 
> By CRIS LARANO
> Updated Aug. 7, 2016 12:13 p.m. ET
> 
> Beijing said over the weekend that it flew bombers, fighter jets and other military aircraft over contested areas of the South China Sea recently, an announcement that came as former Philippine President Fidel Ramos prepared to head to China for preliminary talks aimed at settling the territorial dispute.
> 
> The office of Mr. Ramos, who was appointed last month by President Rodrigo Duterte as special envoy to resolve the dispute following an international tribunal’s ruling against China’s claims, confirmed that he would travel to Beijing on Monday.
> 
> < Edited >
> 
> *Mr. Ramos, 88 years old, is a respected elder statesman in Asia and has maintained good personal ties with China since ending his single, six-year term as president in 1998. A person close to Mr. Ramos said that he has been busy preparing for the talks with a small delegation that will travel with him, including his Mandarin-speaking grandson.*
> 
> < Edited >



Interaksyon (news site for Channel 5 in the Philippines)



> *Ramos meets senior Chinese official to mend ties*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> August 12, 2016 1:27 PM
> 
> HONG KONG, China -- Former President Fidel Ramos said Friday he had met with a senior Chinese official during a trip to Hong Kong aimed at improving ties between Manila and Beijing, with both sides working towards formal discussions.
> 
> Relations have cooled since a UN-backed tribunal ruled last month that China's claims over most of the South China Sea were invalid, in a sweeping victory for the Philippines which brought the case.
> 
> Ramos -- a longtime advocate of closer Philippine-Chinese ties -- was sent as a conciliatory envoy by President Rodrigo Duterte.
> 
> In a two-day meeting in Hong Kong, Ramos said he had discussions with Madam Fu Ying, chair of the foreign affairs committee of the National People's Congress -- China's communist-controlled legislature. Fu Ying is a former ambassador to Manila.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Major update: Perhaps this 2nd carrier will actually be used by China to show the flag compared to her predecessor which was only used for training?

*China's first indigenous aircraft carrier nearing completion*

IHS Jane's 360 - 17 August 2016



> The imagery shows that, with the addition of the bow section and other exterior components, the assembly of the Type 001A CV is nearly complete. Two of the component fabrication areas adjacent to the dry dock are largely clear of materials, indicating that work on the Type 001A hull is nearing an end. Few uninstalled components remain present, including the forward aircraft elevator.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> Across the harbour from the Type 001A's dry dock, work on Dalian's three Type 052D DDG hulls is progressing. One hull remains in dry dock, with two pier side. The first hull is visibly complete and is undergoing sea trials, while the second hull, launched on 3 August 2016, awaits the installation of various components.
> 
> Berthed at the northern end of the ship yard, the second hull lacks many sensor and weapon fittings. Notably absent are the forward 130 mm gun, the forward vertical launch system, and various sensor fittings, including the Type 366 radar mounted atop the bridge.






Airbus Defence and Space imagery showing the Type 001A hull in dry dock at Dalian. The hull is largely complete, with just one aircraft elevator, superstructure, and some deck sections left to be added. Source: CNES 2016, Distribution Airbus DS/© 2016 IHS​


----------



## tomahawk6

The PRC 052D destroyer is felt to be better than the Japanese Atago.I wouldnt be so quick to write off the Atago.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/08/china-launches-more-52d-carrier-killer.html








August 16, 2016

China Launches More 52D ‘Carrier Killer’ Destroyers but next type 55 will match US destroyers

The Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company, traditionally China’s largest shipbuilder, has launched its second Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyer—dubbed “Chinese Aegis”—on August 3 in Dalian in Northeast China, IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly reports. It is only the second vessel of its type built at the Dalian New Shipyard. The first Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyer is currently being fitted, with a third ship to be launched in the immediate future.

Other vessels of the class have been built by the Jiangnan Shipyard, located on Changxing Island in Shanghai. The shipyard has built eight Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyers so far and launched its ninth vessel this July. At least four more are planned, indicating that the number will go beyond the initial number of 12 Luyang III-class vessels before shifting production to the newer Type 055D multi-role cruisers.

The Type 052D destroyer class is part of China's overall anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy and has purportedly been specifically designed to repel attacks by enemy aircraft carrier strike groups, submarines, and anti-ship missiles.

Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyer is equipped with 64 vertical launch cells, each capable of carrying one to four missiles. The ship carries one of the PLAN’s deadliest anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), the vertically-launched YJ-18 ASCM. Next to its YJ-18 arsenal, Type 052D guided-missile destroyers are also equipped with modern HQ-9 surface-to-air-missiles.


----------



## Lumber

Let's see... 64 VLS Cells... their ASMs are vertically launched... that means up to 64 potential vampires... yikes...


----------



## Lightguns

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> China using gas platforms near Japan for military purposes?



What a waste of money, to think what all that money could do to improve the lives of the average Chinese peasant, clean infrastructure, clean air, clean water.  They could bury by simply offering a far better quality of life to their people.  What fools!


----------



## CougarKing

Lightguns said:
			
		

> What a waste of money, to think what all that money could do to improve the lives of the average Chinese peasant, clean infrastructure, clean air, clean water.



Well if you go visit the prosperous coastal cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, you'll see that those areas are quite developed and there is an emergent middle class; go to the Xintiandi area of Shanghai and you might even think you were in a first world country complete with Zara luxury shops and Haagen Dazs ice cream shops.  And them there's Shanghai Disneyland!

However, some sources I've read suggest that wealth generation has been becoming more unequal in recent years, with the poorer and getting poorer and the "noveau rich" class of China, aka the "tu hao" (土豪)class, becoming richer and richer, but only bringing their money and children overseas in places such as here in Canada. That's why you see 19-year old 2nd generation children of investor immigrants driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis in parts of Vancouver. 

If you go further inland to the more rural areas, the poverty is more apparent, and it wouldn't surprise you that millions of these peasants actually go to the more prosperous areas to form part of the huge underground economy. I say "underground economy" because many of these rural residents are prevented by the so-called "hu kou" (户口) or household registration system from settling in these urban areas and are thus prevented from receiving social or health care benefits.

When I worked in the Canadian Consulate in the inland city of Chongqing, China back in 2011-2012, the contrast between rich and poor seemed more apparent to me. In the downtown up-scale area of Jiefangbei with its hotels and high-end malls, you'll see fish mongers and "bang-bang" men (porter helpers) carrying their loads on marble streets alongside Mercedes driven by Chongqing's own noveau rich class. The inland cities are catching up, but at what cost?


----------



## tomahawk6

China's cities have huge smog issues and water is a problem as well.The economy has outrun the infrastructure.Thats an expensive fix.


----------



## CougarKing

More on the progress of the 2nd Chinese carrier mentioned above:

Popular Mechanics



> *Here Comes China's First Homebuilt Aircraft Carrier
> 
> ​China's second aircraft carrier probably won't be ready for action until 2020.​*
> 
> By Kyle Mizokami
> AUG 18, 2016
> 
> 
> China's first home-built aircraft carrier is nearing completion. Satellite photographs indicate most major construction is complete, though much remains to be done and the carrier probably won't be operational until 2020 at the earliest.
> 
> The ship is the first of the Type 001A class and has been tentatively nicknamed "CV17" by China-watchers. China's first carrier, Liaoning, is CV16. Liaoning was originally a Soviet aircraft carrier and was bought in the late 1990s as scrap—with the stated intention of being converted into a casino. But she found her way into the hands of the Chinese Navy and spent more than a decade being refitted before being finally commissioned in 2012. China is building CV17 itself. Here's video of Liaoning conducting flight operations in the Yellow Sea:
> 
> Like Liaoning, CV17 has a ski ramp to assist aircraft takeoffs. The U.S. Navy uses a more efficient steam-powered catapult system to launch aircraft and is transitioning to electromagnetic propulsion in the new USS Gerald R. Ford-class ships. The presence of a ski ramp on CV17 suggests that China has not fully mastered the catapult system and is sticking to what it knows for now.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A controversial figure from the Chinese diaspora in the US dies. Some say Harry Wu was a human rights champion, while others say he was an opportunistic "charlatan". 

Asia Times



> *The contradictions of Harry Wu*
> 
> By George Koo on August 20, 2016 in AT Top Writers, China, George Koo
> 
> Harry Wu, who died at 79 on April 26 while vacationing in Honduras, is to many fellow Americans a human rights activist who survived years in Chinese labor camps to expose the horrors there. Many admire this man who started his life in the U.S. working in a doughnut shop to become a ‘Hoover scholar’ and a popular speaker, win a Nobel Peace prize nomination, make friends among the Congressional community, and attain world celebrity. This writer takes a different view.
> 
> When Harry Wu unexpectedly died while on vacation in Honduras, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave him quite a tribute. She said, “With his passing, the world has lost a global champion for freedom and democracy.” Well ahem, in light of more recent disclosures, may be not.
> 
> Recent reports, first in Foreign Policy (May 25) then in New York Times (August 14), described a morally corrupt person, not a knight in shining armor. Wu was accused of having absconded with millions that did not belong to him and was to face charges of sexual misconduct in court. The heading from Foreign Policy said it all: “In death, a darker tale of extortion and sexual misconduct threatens to tarnish his legacy.”
> 
> These posthumous disclosures hardly surprised those of us in the Chinese American community that had been following his career. We always knew him to be a charlatan and a scoundrel.
> 
> But give Harry Wu credit for being a trailblazer. He discovered that he could make a nice living by saying nasty things about China. Sometimes his statements were believable because they were based on facts skillfully doctored or exaggerated. Other times, he simply made them up as he went; the more lurid he made it, the more compelling he became. The western media could not get enough of his stuff and members of Congress were the most ardent members of his fan club.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kirkhill

Dan Fraser said:
			
		

> What a waste of money, to think what all that money could do to improve the lives of the average Chinese peasant, clean infrastructure, clean air, clean water.  They could bury by simply offering a far better quality of life to their people.  What fools!



It's cheaper to build a few pretty warships for photo-ops than it is to build sewers and water treatment plants, supply scrubbers for all your power plants and ensure that your road beds are properly compacted before you lay asphalt.  Nobody sees any of that stuff.


----------



## CougarKing

More on the Type 055 project vessels, called "cruisers" by some due to their size, while called mere "destroyers" by others:

(pics of construction below article)

Navy Recognition



> *Pictures Showing China's Type 055 Next Gen Destroyer Under Construction in Shanghai*
> 
> Recent pictures from China confirm that the first hull of the next generation Type 055 Guided-Missile Destroyer (DDG) for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy)* entered final assembly stage at the Jiangnan Changxing naval shipyard located near Shanghai.* The information is reported from our colleagues from East Pendulum.
> 
> Through photos taken by Shanghai-based spotters, we can witness the chronological assembly of the first Chinese destroyer *displacing over 10,000 t*:
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another picture of China's 2nd carrier taking shape:



> *Liaoning II class CV (CV17) construction update
> 
> Aug 27th 2016*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Photo: China Defense Blog


----------



## CougarKing

^ from the same source as the last post above:

*6 additional naval aviators certified for carrier operations*


----------



## CBH99

Soooooo....just throwing this out there.  Isn't meaningful in the slightest, feel free to flame me for it.

But does anybody else find it really discouraging that the Chinese can design a class of warship and BUILD AN ENTIRE ******* FLEET OF THEM, all before we've even finished deciding what capabilities our new design may or may not have?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Soooooo....just throwing this out there.  Isn't meaningful in the slightest, feel free to flame me for it.
> 
> But does anybody else find it really discouraging that the Chinese can design a class of warship and BUILD AN ENTIRE ******* FLEET OF THEM, all before we've even finished deciding what capabilities our new design may or may not have?




Remember what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said? "*... the admiration I have for China because, uh, their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to ...*"

The Defence Ministry is not all that different from, say, the Pentagon: it's big, it's important but it is, now, in the early 21st century as subservient to the Zhongnanhai ( 中南海) the central headquarters for the Communist Party of China and the State Council (central government) of the People's Republic of China, which is hidden from the people behind it's red walls ...

           
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




... as the Pentagon is to the White House and Congress in Washington.

And just as in Washington money is the key to military programmes.

The difference is that whereas the US defence budget is full to overflowing with "pork barrel" measures and individual legislator's pet projects and social engineering and downright contradictory "directives," the Chinese, being, in part, a dictatorship, doesn't need to hide political patronage projects like a "bridge to nowhere" in other appropriations and the defence ministry is (relatively) free to spend its allocations quickly and sometimes even efficiently on projects that have the blessing of the Zhongnanhai.

Don't get me wrong: there is still plenty of room for bureaucratic bungling, official ineptitude, corruption and nepotism in China's procurement system.

Our, Anglo-American solution to corruption, nepotism and ineptitude was (and still is): *process*. And we have piled process upon process over the years and then added a few more until the "system" looks more like this ...

                      
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




... than the streamlined beauty we want ...

                      
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




The Chinese are not "smarter" than us, but they are, also, not overburdened with processes piled upon processes that lead to bureaucratic infighting and, eventually, "management by inertia."


----------



## CougarKing

More on China's proxy navy: their fishing fleet.

*East China Sea: Dress Rehearsal for Invasion?*

Real Clear Defense



> August 30, 2016
> 
> The various scenarios for war in the East China Sea, and possibly in the South China Sea, usually fall into two main categories. There is the “accidental” fight scenario. A Chinese destroyer’s radar locks onto a Japanese warship. The Japanese captain fires back in self-defense and the incident spirals out of control.
> 
> That is one scenario. Another, possibly more realistic, is *the “swarm” scenario: Several hundred “fishing boats” sail from ports in Zhejiang province for the Senkaku, where they overwhelm the Japanese Coast Guard by their sheer numbers*.
> 
> This time, the fishing boats land some 200 or so commandoes disguised as fishermen or “settlers.” The Senkakus are not garrisoned by Japanese troops, so no shots are fired. The Chinese side says it is not using force, merely taking possession of what it claims to be its sovereign territory.


----------



## CougarKing

The PLA's J-20 stealth fighters are reportedly preparing for exercises over Tibet (called Xizang in Chinese):

(photo originally from Defence-blog.com)






air.DFNS.net



> *China’s J-20 stealth fighter to take part in military drills in Tibet*
> 
> by DFNS · September 2, 2016
> 
> China’s newest Chengdu J-20 heavy stealth fighter taking part in military drills in Tibet.
> 
> The new J-20 fifth-generation fighter was spotted on the runway of the airfield in Tibet. That was reported by Mike Yeo.
> 
> The Chengdu J-20 is a stealth, twinjet, fifth-generation fighter aircraft developed by China’s Chengdu Aerospace Corporation.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More vaporware?

Air Recognition - 02 September 2016



> *China started new long range bomber development*
> 
> Ma gave no other details about the aircraft or when it would be introduced, saying only that "you will see it in the future.''
> 
> PLAAF's long range strike capabilities mainly rely on its fleet of 120 Xian H-6 strategic bombers, a license-built version of the Soviet-era's Tupolev Tu-16. The last variant, the H-6K, is designed for long-range attacks and stand-off attacks. In 2015, about 15 H-6Ks were in service.
> 
> China last year revealed its new generation H-6K strategic bomber equipped with the DH-20 land-attack cruise missile, giving it the ability to hit targets as far away as Australia. Only Russia and the U.S. are currently able to launch cruise missiles from the air.


----------



## Kirkhill

Sino-Britannic relations:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/03/g20-honey-trap-warning-fears-prime-ministers-officials-will-be-s/



> G20 'honey trap' warning: Fears Prime Minister's officials will be seduced by Chinese spies and have hotel rooms bugged



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/02/theresa-may-risks-row-with-chinese-hosts-by-refusing-to-commit-t/



> Theresa May risks row with Chinese hosts by refusing to commit to Hinkley Point during G20 summit



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/09/chinas-relationship-with-uk-at-risk-over-hinkley-point-delay-war/



> China has warned Britain that the relationship between the two countries is at a "critical juncture" and will be at risk unless it goes ahead with the Hinkley Point nuclear power station.
> 
> Theresa May, the Prime Minister, delayed a final decision on plans for Britain's first new nuclear power station for a decade last month amid concerns about Chinese investment.
> 
> Nick Timothy, her joint chief of staff, previously said MI5 believed Chinese intelligence services "continue to work against UK interests at home and abroad".
> 
> Writing in the Financial Times, Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador, said the delay to approving the plant could put "mutual trust" between the two countries in jeopardy.


----------



## tomahawk6

Obama's trip to China got off to a rocky start when he was forced to deplane from the rear door,due to a problem with the forward ladder.It was a clear sign of Chinese displeasure.


----------



## CougarKing

Other sources say the exercises below are amphibious and include warships, aircraft and amphibious armor from both nations, obviously sending a message about the PRC stance on the South China Sea, though not necessarily that of Putin...

Reuters



> *China, Russia naval drill in South China Sea to begin Monday*
> 
> By: Reuters
> 
> September 11, 2016 5:40 PM
> 
> BEIJING
> - China and Russia will hold eight days of naval drills in the South
> China Sea off southern China's Guangdong province starting from Monday,
> China's navy said.The exercises come at a time of heightened
> tension in the contested waters after an arbitration court in The Hague
> ruled in July that China did not have historic rights to the South China
> Sea and criticized its environmental destruction there. China rejected the ruling and refused to participate in the case.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

China's economy is probably more of a long term threat to everyone than the PLAN:

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2016/05/26/the-next-devolution-in-china/?singlepage=true



> *The Next Devolution in China*
> BY STEPHEN GREEN MAY 26, 2016 CHAT 58 COMMENTS
> 
> If you think this is a followup to Monday's "The Next Revolution in China" piece -- you're right.
> 
> And what a followup we have, thanks to the Observer's Jonathan Russo, who says that China's "land mine of debt is about to explode."
> 
> Read:
> 
> Even the ratings agencies, like Moody’s, are negative. The Wall Street Journal, both the NY (Times) and Financial Times, Bloomberg and Forbes are all covering the story. Private hedge fund reports (see Kyle Bass), predicting China’s economic collapse, circulate among the investing classes by email, the way Russian Samizdat reports in the 1970s circulated hand to hand. The coup de grace however might be the Economist Magazine’s May 7 issue with its 13-page special report on China’s land mine of debt and what happens when it blows up. It is must-reading for anyone with skin in the economy.
> 
> When you understand Xi’s dilemma, you understand everything Xi does. He knows more about China’s problems than you.
> 
> The explosion Xi prepares is already felt. According to a top commodity producer quoted in the Financial Times about Chinese trade policy, “This is war. This is not trade.”
> 
> American politicians, starting with Donald Trump, but quickly followed by Bernie Sanders and belatedly Hillary Clinton, are preparing their counter-attack strategies. China’s number one export is not steel, electronics, textiles or toys… It is deflation. China is dumping everything from finished steel to appliances. Just walk into Best Buy and you’ll see a wall of Chinese-made air conditioners priced so low it is clear no one is making money. In fact, a good friend of mine, who is in the commodity business and visits China at least 12 times a year, said the air conditioner factories cannot pay their suppliers or truckers in cash. They’re paid with air conditioners.
> 
> 30-some-odd years ago, Saturday Night Live did a John DeLorean sketch where the beleaguered automobile entrepreneur (Brad Hall) was in so much debt that he was trying to pay Dave the dry cleaner delivery guy (Eddie Murphy) with DeLorean cars instead of cash. It wasn't a great sketch by any means (it was from SNL's Dark Days when Dick Ebersol ran the show in Lorne Michael's absence), but it did reveal an essential economic truth about desperate times:
> 
> John DeLorean: "Dave, how would you like the keys to a brand new silver DeLorean? How about that?"
> Dave the Dry Cleaner: "You gave me a silver one last week."
> 
> DeLorean: "How about electric blue?"
> 
> Dave: "I got electric blue two weeks ago... I got five of your cars, man. They don't work and nobody gonna buy them. I'd rather have the $13.50."
> 
> [Dave takes the clean clothes back and leaves.]
> 
> But in Communist China, Dave can't just walk away with the goods.
> 
> China exported its way to semi-prosperity by providing cheap goods to debt-happy consumers in the West. But for a huge country like China, that path is a dead end because there are only so many consumer goods that the rest of the world, even debt-happy Americans, can absorb.
> 
> A smaller country like Israel or South Korea can probably export their way to ever-increasing wealth for just about ever. But China had over a billion people -- almost one-fifth of the entire human population -- to lift up out of dirt-scratching poverty. The Export Gravy Train can carry only so many people, only so far.
> 
> Beijing has been trying to convert from an export-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy like our own, but it hasn't worked as planned. Corruption, thrift, and a lack of consumer confidence have kept Chinese saving instead of spending. So China keeps cutting export prices -- "exporting deflation," as Russo and others have put it -- in an attempt to do three things:
> 
> 1. Keep the factories humming.
> 
> 2. Keep the jobs machine creating jobs.
> 
> 3. Keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.
> 
> Back to Russo for a moment:
> 
> This exporting of heavily subsidized commodities and manufactured goods buys Xi and China time. Time to inject trillions of renminbi into China’s rust belt as he has just promised to do. No pesky fiscal conservatives in his congress to oppose an industry bailout. Xi is determined to ward off the social unrest that will follow the debt blow up.
> 
> That's how a real-world Chinese air conditioner factory finds itself doing a tragic imitation of Brad Hall's unfunny imitation of John DeLorean's cocaine-fueled imitation of a profitable carmaker.
> 
> And if you're a supplier to the air conditioner factory, what can you do? Like Dave the Dry Cleaner, you'd really rather have the $13.50. And in a free economy, you'd tell the air conditioner factory owner to go get stuffed -- he's not getting any more of your condenser units until he ponies up the cash. But Xi can't allow that kind of disruption, and so you, the condenser manufacturer, agree to take payment in air conditioners instead of in cash. As does the guy who makes the logic board for the control panel, and the other guy who makes the power supply.
> 
> Pretty soon there are air conditioners everywhere, but nobody anywhere has the damn $13.50 they're owed.
> 
> When you're up to your ass in air conditioners, it's difficult to remember your initial objective was to heat up the economy.
> Repeat this same situation across hundreds (thousands?) of businesses across China's newly wealthy coastal regions, and you're looking at the potential for an economic clusterfudge that could make 2007-08 feel like the Reagan years.
> 
> So it might be warm weather now, with plenty of demand for air conditioners. But in China, as elsewhere, winter is coming.



and:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/243817



> BUBBLES GOTTA POP: US Think Tank Warns That Australia Is About 6 Weeks Away From Housing Collapse.
> 
> Real estate prices in Australia’s largest housing markets have soared over the past couple of years fueled, in no small part, by demand from Chinese buyers looking for offshore locations to park cash. The Sydney and Melbourne markets have been the largest beneficiaries of foreign capital with real estate prices up 53% and 51%, respectively, since 2012. That said, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics it looks like home prices in Australia have already started their descent.
> 
> Looks like China may have found yet another way to export its economic mismanagement.



Vancouver's housing bubble is also this inflated, and could suffer the same fate.


----------



## Kirkhill

> Chinese farmers grow tobacco in Zimbabwe on faltering land seized from white farmers
> 
> Peta Thornycroft, The Telegraph | September 20, 2016 11:22 AM ET
> 
> 
> Chinese farmers have taken over formerly white-owned farms for the first time, investing millions of pounds into tobacco production.
> 
> Farms that were badly managed for nearly 20 years, after Robert Mugabe’s mass seizure of white-owned land, are now being worked again in the hope of reaping a potentially huge reward.
> 
> At least five farms have attracted Chinese investment in Mashonaland Central, a region to the north-west of Harare, that was traditionally one of the country’s best tobacco-producing areas.
> 
> Safe in the knowledge that Mugabe’s policy of strengthening ties with China will offer a degree of protection, they have poured money into machinery and are taking advice from international experts.
> 
> China has become the largest investor in Zimbabwe, whose economy, still reeling from the land seizures of 2000 and hyperinflation, has taken a nosedive once again. Unemployment is running at about 90 per cent and the regime is so short of money that it cannot pay teachers or civil servants.
> 
> The dire economic conditions have prompted rare protests against Mugabe’s regime by a coalition of opposition parties.
> 
> On Saturday, a heavy police presence in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare stopped a planned mass demonstration, as activists claimed police used live ammunition to disperse small protests.
> 
> While Zimbabwe’s land reform process has has empowered around 60,000 small-scale black tobacco farmers, who grow lower grades of tobacco, many of the bigger farms distributed among Mugabe’s cronies have not fared so well.
> 
> Related
> 
> Zimbabwe plans to dehorn 800 rhinos after five per cent of South Africa’s were killed last year
> Rioters in Zimbabwe’s capital block roads, clash with police during protests over economic conditions
> Farms just north of Harare lie fallow amid broken fences, fields scorched by fires and scarce livestock. There are few surviving indigenous trees as many were felled by new farmers who could not afford coal to cure their tobacco.
> 
> A generation of evicted white farmers have moved abroad or live hand-to-mouth, waiting for promised compensation.
> 
> One farm worker in Mvurwi, about 60 miles north of Harare, said there were now plenty of jobs in the district after years of difficulties following the departure of the white landowners. “The Chinese are spending money,” he said.
> 
> An insider in the tobacco industry said the Chinese company would be paying a hefty rental for the land they are now using to the “political” men who now own the farms.
> 
> “The Chinese will pay a percentage of the income from the tobacco as rent,” he said. “Some of that rental should be shared with the white farmers who left their homes with nothing and received no compensation from the government, but they probably don’t know their old farms are now about to start making money again.”



China has owned Zimbabwe since Mugabe's Shona tribe based ZANU subjugated Nkomo's Ndebele based ZAPU.  China backed ZANU against Ian Smith while Russia backed ZAPU.

This one could just have easily gone under any of the following:

Anti-Colonialism
Neo-Colonialism
Triumphs of Socialism 
Brexit.


----------



## CougarKing

A milestone that Mao would never have dreamed of happening to the PRC; Deng had other ideas which set the country on a different course than his CCP predecessors wanted.

Reuters



> *China's yuan joins elite club of IMF reserve currencies*
> By: Reuters
> October 2, 2016 12:46 AM
> 
> 
> MANILA - China's yuan joins the International Monetary Fund's basket of reserve currencies on Saturday in a milestone for the government's campaign for recognition as a global economic power.
> 
> *The yuan joins the US dollar, the euro, the yen and British pound in the IMF's special drawing rights (SDR) basket, which determines currencies that countries can receive as part of IMF loans.* It marks the first time a new currency has been added since the euro was launched in 1999.The IMF is adding the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or "people's money", on the same day that the Communist Party celebrates the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

The new splinter camo pattern on the J-20.You get a glimpse of it on one of SMA's photos.The link has several taken while in flight.


http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a23435/new-pictures-of-chinas-stealth-fighter/


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Looks like the Chinese are buying up Malaysia as well as the Philippines.

https://dinmerican.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/najib-razaks-secret-deal-with-china/ 

Marked “For Internal Use Only” an Appendix to a Term Sheet due to be approved by the Malaysian Cabinet tomorrow (27th July) lays out in detailed figures how  Najib plans for over US$7 billion in accumulated 1MDB/Jho Low company debts to be wiped out by taxpayers in a secret deal between his Ministry of Finance and the Chinese state company CCCC (China Communications Construction Company).  more at link


----------



## a_majoor

FP on the Philippines "flip" to China. One can only wonder how well that will turn out for the islands, particularly since it seems to be driven from the top down, rather than a "bottom up" movement based on economics, social and cultural preferences:





> *Duterte’s Flip-Flop Into Bed With China Is a Disaster for the United States*
> With the Philippine president ditching Washington for Beijing, the contest to control the South China Sea just got a lot more complicated.
> BY MAX BOOTOCTOBER 20, 2016
> 
> International relations theorists of a “realist” persuasion like to claim that states are rational actors pursuing their strategic interests in an anarchic world where power alone matters. Ideology and domestic politics do not much concern these thinkers; they believe that a nation’s foreign policy is much more likely to be shaped by factors such as geography, demography, and economics.
> 
> This was the viewpoint of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who famously tried to realign China from being a foe of the United States to a friend — never mind that the Chinese leader they had to deal with was Mao Zedong, one of the worst mass murderers in history. “Nixinger” believed, correctly, that China’s interest in countering Soviet power would lead it to draw closer with the United States.
> 
> But even in the case of China the applicability of realist insights was limited. China did not begin the transformation that would make it a leading economic force and trade partner of the United States until Mao had died, replaced by the reformist Deng Xiaoping. Even today China is more foe than friend of America.
> 
> Today, the Philippines is Exhibit A in illustrating the limits of the realist conceit that some unvarying strategic logic governs foreign policy.Today, the Philippines is Exhibit A in illustrating the limits of the realist conceit that some unvarying strategic logic governs foreign policy. The Philippines has seen a vertigo-inducing change in its foreign-policy orientation since Rodrigo Duterte became president this summer. This crude populist is now transforming the Philippines’ relationship with the United States in a fundamental and worrying manner.
> 
> The Philippines is America’s oldest ally in Asia, and until recently one of the closest. The United States ruled the Philippines as a colonial power from 1899 to 1942 and implanted its culture in the archipelago. In World War II, U.S. and Filipino troops fought side by side against the Japanese occupiers. In 1951, Washington and Manila signed a mutual defense treaty. For decades afterward, the Philippines hosted two of the largest U.S. military installations overseas at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. Those bases were closed in 1991 amid a wave of anti-Americanism, but the U.S. military presence has been ramping up again as the Philippines felt increasingly threatened by Chinese military expansionism. In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an agreement with then-President Benigno Aquino III that would allow U.S. forces more regular access to bases in the Philippines and increase the tempo of training exercises and military cooperation between the two countries.
> 
> Now that achievement looks increasingly like a dead letter. Duterte journeyed to Beijing this week to announce his “separation from the United States” in military and economic terms. “America has lost,” Duterte said. He claimed that a new alliance of the Philippines, China, and Russia would emerge — “there are three of us against the world.” His trade secretary said the Philippines and China were inking $13 billion in trade deals; that’s a pretty hefty signing bonus for switching sides. Duterte said he will soon end military cooperation with the United States, despite the opposition of his armed forces.
> 
> What could account for this head-snapping transformation? Manila’s strategic and economic interests have not changed. While China is the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner, its largest is Japan, a close American ally and a foe of Chinese expansionism. The third-largest trade partner is the United States. The fourth-largest is Singapore, another U.S. ally that is concerned about China’s vast territorial ambitions and aggressive behavior. Taken together, the Philippines sends 42.7 percent of its exports to Japan, the United States, and Singapore, compared with only 10.5 percent to China and 11.9 percent to Hong Kong. The Philippines gets 16.1 percent of its imports from China; almost all of the rest comes from the United States and its allies, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. So it’s not as if there is an especially pressing economic case for the Philippines to realign from the United States to China.
> 
> There is a pressing strategic case, however, not to do so. China continues to assert sovereignty in the South China Sea in violation of Philippine claims, as an international court ruled in July in a case brought by Duterte’s predecessor. China wants to grab for itself what could be billions of dollars’ worth of natural resources, from fish to oil, in the South China Sea.
> 
> Moreover, the Philippine people remain largely pro-American. English is the lingua franca of the Philippines. The Armed Forces of the Philippines have many decades of cooperation with the United States and have been built in the image of the U.S. military; they have no experience working with China’s People’s Liberation Army. Moreover, and despite Duterte’s nasty rhetoric and ad hominems, the United States continues to express its desire to protect the Philippines.
> 
> This massive geopolitical shift is entirely Duterte’s doing. It cannot be explained any other way. It is a product of his peculiar psychology.This massive geopolitical shift is entirely Duterte’s doing. It cannot be explained any other way. It is a product of his peculiar psychology.
> 
> He has long been ideologically hostile to the United States — he has called Obama a “son of a whore” — and he feels an ideological affinity with China’s authoritarian rulers. Although elected democratically, Duterte is a strongman in the making. He has already violated the rule of law to unleash death squads that are said to have killed at least 1,900 people, including a 5-year-old boy, in the name of fighting drugs. He has cited Hitler as his role model: “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” He has also said “I don’t give a shit” about human rights. China’s rulers don’t put their worldview quite so crassly, but they, too, don’t care much for human rights. The Duterte-Xi Jinping marriage thus seems like a natural match.
> 
> From the American viewpoint, Duterte’s flip-flop — assuming it leads to a lasting strategic shift — is a potential disaster. Aligned with the United States and its regional allies, the Philippines can provide a vital platform to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China and East China seas.
> 
> If the Philippines becomes a Chinese satrapy, by contrast, Washington will find itself hard-pressed to hold the “first island chain” in the Western Pacific that encompasses “the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and the Philippine archipelago.” Defending that line of island barriers has been a linchpin of U.S. strategy since the Cold War. It now could be undone because of the whims of one unhinged leader.
> 
> China could either neutralize this vital American ally or even potentially turn the Philippines into a PLA Navy base for menacing U.S. allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. At the very least, the U.S. Navy will find it much harder to protect the most important sea lanes in the world; each year $5.3 trillion in goods passes through the South China Sea, including $1.2 trillion in U.S. trade.
> 
> The opposition is already making hay over Duterte’s China trip. A Supreme Court justice in Manila has warned the president that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, it could result in his impeachment. The only good news from the American standpoint is that what Duterte is doing could be undone by a more rational successor, assuming that democracy in the Philippines survives this time of testing.
> 
> Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.


----------



## ModlrMike

If Duterte pushes much more, he may find himself on the sad end of a coup d'etat.


----------



## tomahawk6

J-20 stealth fighter is now an open secret.


----------



## tomahawk6

China lost their first female pilot in a J-10 crash,Captain Yu Xu. Her co-pilot survived.






http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/asia/china-woman-fighter-pilot-killed/index.html

(CNN)One of China's first female fighter pilots and a member of the country's air force aerobatics team was killed in a training accident over the weekend, according to Chinese state-run media.

Capt. Yu Xu, 30, died Saturday during a routine training flight with the aerobatics team, according to the reports.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Canadian Forces Recruiting website hacked, directing users to Chinese State run website.  First the BC teachers union, now this.  The Commies are out to get us.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-forces-website-hacked-1.3855719


----------



## tomahawk6

The Chinese have developed a long range AA missile with a range of over 300 km. Its probably a knock off of the Russian R37 missile.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/8a32061b-dbf7-3e35-8e16-c8a213acbad9/ss_china-successfully-fires.html






The missile is about 28 percent of the length of the J-16, which measures 22 meters (about 72 feet). The puts the missile at about 19 feet, and roughly 13 inches in diameter. The missile appears to have four tailfins. Reports are that the size would put into the category of a very long range air to air missile (VLRAAM) with ranges exceeding 300 km (roughly 186 miles), likely max out between 250 and 310 miles. (As a point of comparison, the smaller 13.8-foot, 15-inch-diameter Russian R-37 missile has a 249-mile range). This missile would easily outrange any American (or other NATO) air-to-air missile.


----------



## a_majoor

More on China's economy. Trying to find clear metrics to make sense out of things makes for a much different picture than most people paint:

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/11/29/the_surest_measure_of_how_chinas_economy_is_losing_112131.html#disqus_thread



> *The Surest Measure of How China's Economy Is Losing*
> By Derek Scissors
> November 29, 2016
> 
> American presidential elections are a patchy time for the use of facts. It turns out presidential transitions are, too. Donald Trump as president-elect has triggered a slew of comments and articles about China’s pending leadership of the world economy. Journalists and pundits may value words over money; economists should not.
> 
> There are data, grounded in real-world calculations, that show China’s economic importance falling -- not rising slowly, nor staying stable, but falling. The most important indicator is net private wealth, which is the single best measure of a country’s economic size and of the pool of resources available to its public sector for military or social spending.
> 
> In work dating back to 2000 and carried out with no geo-economic agenda, Credit Suisse has estimated private wealth. The new estimates, through the middle of 2016, show American private wealth at $84.8 trillion and Chinese private wealth at $23.4 trillion. Moreover, the gap is widening. With $60 trillion less in private wealth than the United States, China’s global economic leadership is a fable.
> 
> Private Wealth
> 
> There are of course more facts to bring to the argument at hand than the Credit Suisse data, but the latter are an excellent place to start. The data series is well behaved statistically, which means it has credibility. It is measured globally, so shares can be calculated. The result: the People’s Republic of China’s level of private wealth actually fell from mid-2015, both in amount and in share.
> 
> This year’s estimate could obviously be revised. Moreover, the PRC is huge and the margin of error in estimating its private wealth is likely over $1 trillion. But a decline is consistent with reports both of heavy capital outflow and surging debt. Even stability would emphatically not be the large annual gain many implicitly assume when discussing China’s economy.
> 
> Since the world economy as a whole is not doing well, the PRC’s performance could be typical. It is not: China’s global share of private wealth fell from 9.5 percent to 9.1 percent. As a more comprehensive global figure rather than national, this is less vulnerable to measurement errors. China is probably underperforming the global average in private wealth.
> 
> Margin of error means very little in Sino-American comparisons, because the gap between the two economies is so large. Credit Suisse shows U.S. private wealth adding $1.7 trillion over the previous year, expanding its enormous lead over China. America’s share held at nearly one-third of the global total. (It’s worth noting that Credit Suisse’s raw number is lower than the Federal Reserve’s figure for U.S. household net worth.)
> 
> All of this may seem unbelievable to those fed a steady diet of China’s inexorable rise. In fact, a longer view from Credit Suisse does show China’s rise. At the end of 2000, the PRC’s private wealth was only $4.6 trillion and its share was 4 percent. The US numbers were $42.3 trillion and 36.2 percent. The PRC has narrowed the gap significantly since then.
> 
> Popular perception begins to go wrong at the beginning of this decade. America’s global wealth share hit a low of 26.9 percent at the end of 2009. It has since outpaced the increase in China’s global share. The key event was when growth in the PRC’s share stalled at the end of 2013. For at least a decade prior to 2010, China outran the United States. For the past six years, the United States has matched China in wealth growth, and for the past three years, the United States has outpaced it.
> 
> The Public Sector
> 
> By now, the private wealth results should no longer be controversial. China’s economic challenges are becoming clear to everyone. Meanwhile, America’s economic challenges are not about total wealth, but rather are about distribution and economic participation. At the national level, the true controversy comes in the task of assessing public-sector wealth.
> 
> At 30,000 feet, it’s easy to be accurate. Both economies now face mountains of public or semi-public debt. Both governments own a great deal of hard-to-evaluate land. China, thanks to its huge state-owned enterprises, has much more in the way of public financial assets. The huge American advantage on the private side narrows when the public sector is included.
> 
> What’s tricky is determining the exact figures. The Communist Party suppresses reports of the PRC’s debt problems. The United States does an uneven job of evaluating public-sector assets. Using Federal Reserve data, U.S. net national wealth was $81.1 trillion in the middle of 2016. That net wealth was smaller than seems to make sense in light of federal debt.
> 
> The Fed’s figure, however, is based on higher U.S. private wealth than Credit Suisse finds, which obscures the comparison to China. And the Fed may overstate the value of nonfinancial assets versus financial debts. Trying to correct for these issues generates a U.S. net wealth figure of $74.3 trillion to compare to China.
> 
> For the PRC, gross public-sector assets seemed consistently measured over time. They are reported to have passed $19 trillion by the middle of 2016. The state owns most land. It is difficult to assign value to large amounts of land, including in the United States, because mass sales would cause prices to plummet. It is made more difficult in the PRC by a highly distorted market. This is a source of error on the asset side.
> 
> Debt is also in question, where independent estimates typically measure national debt rather than public. Formal central and local government debt of over $4 trillion is minor and receives far too much attention. There’s more than twice as much debt held by state-owned enterprises, and perhaps much more in addition that is going unreported. This is another source of error.
> 
> China’s net wealth figure is therefore harder to figure than that of the United States. The number is above $27 trillion, with $27.4 trillion the best guess. In the middle of 2016, the wealth gap between the United States and China was close to $47 trillion.
> 
> What About GDP?
> 
> Whether wealth exaggerates the U.S. economic lead is a fair question. For decades, China has reported much faster growth in gross domestic product. By 2015, the difference in the two countries’ GDP measured only $7 trillion. But GDP shows activity, not prosperity. For example, if a building is built and torn down over and over, every senseless iteration adds to GDP.
> 
> If this criticism seems like a stretch, it’s less of one in the PRC, as evidenced by what would be a property bubble anywhere else. More generally, it is telling that China can report GDP growth above 6.5 percent, yet independent observers see stagnant private wealth, and even the government admits debt has soared for six years. China has a very active economy, but not a very productive one.
> 
> There are other reasons to de-emphasize GDP. GDP per capita has no meaning -- it cannot be spent or saved. What is spent or saved is actual income, the building block of wealth. The Chinese government itself puts 2015 disposable income at an average of $3,400. The equivalent U.S. figure was $42,600. Adjusting for population, this is very much in keeping with the national wealth numbers.
> 
> The last refuge of scoundrels on this topic is called purchasing power parity. The basic idea is that the PRC’s $3,400 buys more than America’s $42,500. This is very possibly true, but PPP assumes a very strong form of competitive pressure that creates a single price for the same goods and services globally. Much Chinese economic policy remains aimed at suppressing competition, and Chinese economic size cannot be adjusted using PPP.
> 
> The Future
> 
> The once-fashionable question of when China will pass the United States in economic size has given way to wondering if it will ever happen. The answer is, not for decades and probably never. The last 16 years considered as a whole have seen China gain ground on the United States in its share of global private wealth, but not in the absolute amount. More recently, as the PRC’s debt jumped, there’s been no catch-up at all.
> 
> Even granting a large margin of error in wealth estimates, China is in no condition to close the gap. The reason is that the Party began abandoning market-based reforms no later than the end of 2006 and doubled down on state primacy when the global financial crisis hit. Not coincidentally, Chinese performance began to deteriorate fairly soon thereafter, and it remains sluggish.
> 
> A China that re-embraces market-driven reform can return to the 2000’s and again creep up on the United States in economic size (faster, if the United States does not address its own problems). But for now, and for many years to come, the idea that China can be the leading global economy is off by tens of trillions of dollars.
> 
> The views expressed are the author's own.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Watch out--note geopolitics "Comment":



> Big Dragon “Yikes!”–From 2010 to 2020 “China is set to nearly double its military spending…”
> 
> This should sure get the attention of PEOTUS Trump...
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/mark-collins-big-dragon-yikes-from-2010-to-2020-china-is-set-to-nearly-double-its-military-spending/



Meanwhile some tough talk:



> South China Sea: Why is USN Admiral Leading on US Policy vs China? Part 2
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/mark-collins-south-china-sea-why-is-usn-admiral-leading-on-us-policy-vs-china-part-2/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Dragon fesses up:



> China Appears to Confirm It Has Militarized Disputed Spratly Islands
> 
> The Chinese government appeared to confirm on Thursday [Dec. 15] that it had begun placing antiaircraft guns and other defenses on the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, despite earlier promises that it would not militarize the islands.
> 
> Satellite images released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington this week showed “large antiaircraft guns and probable close-in weapons systems” on its outposts in the Spratlys.
> 
> “As for necessary military facilities, they are primarily for defense and self-protection, and this is proper and legitimate,” the Chinese Defense Ministry said on its website in response to the report, which was made by the group’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. “For instance, if someone was at the door of your home, cocky and swaggering, how could it be that you wouldn’t prepare a slingshot?”
> 
> The comments left little doubt that such installations were part of China’s plan to deepen its territorial claim over the islands, which has raised tensions with its neighbors and Washington over freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest commercial waterways...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/world/asia/china-spratly-islands.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0



More:



> In South China Sea Islands, Anti-Aircraft And Radar Systems Emerge In Full Color
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/15/505721549/in-south-china-sea-islands-anti-aircraft-and-radar-systems-emerge-in-full-color?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

How will PEOTUS Trump deal with the South China Sea?



> Muted U.S. Response to China’s Seizure of Drone Worries Asian Allies
> 
> Only a day before a small Chinese boat sidled up to a United States Navy research vessel in waters off the Philippines and audaciously seized an underwater drone from American sailors, the commander of United States military operations in the region told an audience in Australia that America had a winning military formula.
> 
> “Capability times resolve times signaling equals deterrence,” Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. told a blue-chip crowd of diplomats and analysts at the prestigious Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, the leading city in America’s closest ally in the region.
> 
> In the eyes of America’s friends in Asia, the brazen maneuver to launch an operation against an American Navy vessel in international waters in the South China Sea about 50 miles from the Philippines, another close American ally, has raised questions about one of the admiral’s crucial words. It was also seen by some as a taunt to President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has challenged the One China policy on Taiwan and has vowed to deal forcefully with Beijing in trade and other issues.
> 
> “The weak link is the resolve, and the Chinese are testing that, as well as baiting Trump,” said Euan Graham, the director of international security at the Lowy Institute. “Capability, yes. Signaling, yes, with sending F-22 fighter jets to Australia. But the very muted response means the equation falls down on resolve.”
> 
> Across Asia, diplomats and analysts said they were perplexed at the inability of the Obama administration to devise a strong response to China’s challenge. It did not even dispatch an American destroyer to the spot near Subic Bay, a former American Navy base that is still frequented by American ships, some noted.
> 
> _After discussions at the National Security Council on how to deal with the issue, the Obama administration sent a démarche to China demanding the return of the drone_ [emphasis added]. On Saturday [Dec. 17], China said it would comply with the request but did not indicate when or how the equipment would be sent back.
> 
> The end result, analysts said, is that China will be emboldened by having carried out an act that amounted to hybrid warfare, falling just short of provoking conflict, and suffering few noticeable consequences...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/world/asia/muted-us-response-to-chinas-seizure-of-drone-worries-asian-allies.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

Trump told China to keep the drone.Probably not one of his smartest utterances.Perhaps he wanted to show that the drone was of little value.After the drone might have secrets that shouldnt be revealed.Now the drone can be used to improve Chinese drones and figure out how to jam US drones.

This drone is known as a Littoral Battlespace Sensing glider. We might want it back without starting a shooting war.

http://www.navaldrones.com/LBS-Glider.html


----------



## MarkOttawa

Sales?



> China tests latest J-31 stealth jet fighter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China has tested the latest version of its fifth-­generation stealth fighter, state media reported yesterday, as it tries to end the West’s monopoly on the world’s most advanced warplanes.
> 
> The test comes as the nation flexes its military muscles, sending its sole aircraft carrier the ­Liaoning into the western Pacific in recent days to lead drills there for the first time.
> 
> The newest version of the J-31 — now renamed the FC-31 Gyrfalcon — took to the air for the first time on Friday [Dec. 23], the China Daily reported.
> 
> The twin-engine jet is China’s answer to the US F-35, the world’s most technically advanced fighter. In the past China has been accused of copying designs from Russian fighters, and some analysts say the FC-31 bears a close resemblance to the F-35.
> 
> When completed, the FC-31 will become the country’s second fifth-generation fighter after the J-20, which put on its first public performance in November.
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/china-tests-latest-j31-stealth-jet-fighter/news-story/f45622f5844f602709dedafc247ad4f9



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Ostrozac

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Sales?



Pakistan for sure. Possibly small numbers for Iran and Nigeria, too.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the Evolution of Chinese leadership:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/28/xi-eyes-putin-model-for-extending-his-rule/



> *Xi Eyes “Putin Model” for Extending His Rule*
> 
> When Chinese President Xi Jinping earned the designation of China’s “core” leader in October, speculation ran rampant about whether Xi was laying the groundwork for an extended period of strongman rule, even after his second term expires in 2022. New reporting from The Wall Street Journal suggests that prospect is increasingly likely:
> 
> Now, as he nears the end of his first five-year term, many party insiders say Mr. Xi is trying to block promotion of a potential successor next year, suggesting he wants to remain in office after his second term expires in 2022, when he would be 69 years old.
> 
> Mr. Xi, who is president, party chief and military commander, “wants to keep going” after 2022 and to explore a leadership structure “just like the Putin model,” says one party official who meets regularly with top leaders. Several others with access to party leaders and their relatives say similar things. […]
> 
> Mr. Xi’s efforts to secure greater authority may help ensure political stability in the short run, as an era-defining economic boon starts to falter. But they risk upending conventions developed since Mao’s death to allow flexibility in government and ensure a regular and orderly transition of power.
> 
> The true test of Xi’s ambition will come at the Party Congress next year, when he will have a chance to refresh the ranks of the party leadership. Early signs suggest that he will stack the Politburo and the Central Committee with loyalists to make the party more disciplined and personally loyal; he could also downgrade the role of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee to facilitate a stronger presidential system. In any case, it seems that China is continuing to move away from its post-Mao rule by committee, a system formed in response to the horrible and murderous abuses that occurred periodically under Mao’s untrammeled rule, and back toward one-person rule.
> 
> Xi’s apparent interest in a Putin-style leadership model also points to a wider phenomenon. All over the world, including in the U.S., the trend is away from the anonymous rule of technocrats and experts and toward rule by strong personalities. Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Abe in Japan are all manifestations of the trend, each embracing an unapologetic nationalism while projecting an image as a tough and decisive leader. Xi is already a member of that club, but his ongoing power consolidation could further cement his status among the ranks of the strong-willed leaders who are increasingly driving the global agenda these days.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> More on the Evolution of Chinese leadership:
> 
> http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/28/xi-eyes-putin-model-for-extending-his-rule/




I have been saying for quite some time that I have a _hunch_ that Paramount Leader Xi sees China's problems as being of a nature that requires sustained, mature and generally popular leadership. I suspect he sees himself as the heir to Deng Xiaoping: someone who is _*needed*_ to effect fundamental change in China.

My problem is that _*I have no idea about the direction he wants to go*_.  :dunno:

My own, _personal_ view is that China needs to stabilize its economy, in part by getting the government out of more and more sectors but using government generated _demand_ to help smooth out the inevitable peaks and valleys ~ Maynard Keynes, anyone? I also think that China needs to bring Taiwan back into the federation ... willingly, and I do not believe that is possible unless the remaining hard-liners in the _Zhongnanhai_, the HQ of the Party in Beijing, are purged and the entire Chinese approach to Hong Kong is reversed. (I know I have mentioned that a friend, a scholar, told me that China could have "one country - two systems" for a generation or two, but not, ever, "one country - _n_ systems" (one for each "special" province). Her view is that two systems are viable for a while (say 50 to 75 years) while both China and the "special" provinces learn from one another. She did not believe that the messy, almost chaotic Western style democracy of Taiwan is suitable for China in the next century or so but she thought that parts of it ~ formal parties, for example, committed to "charters" ~ could be introduced first at province level and then to the whole country ... provided each "party" is Chinese _nationalist_ and committed to a strong, central (oligarchical) almost _imperial_ style of government.)


----------



## OTR1

From Canberra Times letters page....


----------



## MarkOttawa

As for PLAN carrier development:



> China's carrier replenishment ship begins sea trials
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The People's Liberation Army Navy's (PLAN's) new Type 901 replenishment ship commenced sea trials on 18 December, according to Chinese media.
> 
> The 45,000-tonne vessel, which was built at Guangzhou Shipyard International's Longxue shipyard on the Pearl River, is expected to provide logistics support to the PLAN's nascent carrier force.
> 
> Photographic evidence of the ship's construction emerged in late 2015, not long before it was launched on 15 December 2015. It is equipped with three gantries and a fourth high-point structure port side aft, configured with five hose rigs for liquid refuelling on the port side and four on the starboard side. The central gantry provides a transfer station for solids on each side.
> 
> The ability to have multiple hoses connected will enable the Type 901 to not only provide aviation fuel and fuel oil to the carrier simultaneously, but also minimise the duration of each replenishment serial: a potentially hazardous evolution which limits the carrier's manoeuvrability and precludes it from operating aircraft.
> 
> The Type 901 will be able to refuel a carrier from its port side and, when fully worked-up, the ship will also be able to simultaneously refuel one of the carrier's destroyer/frigate escorts on its starboard side.
> 
> Replenishment of solids can be expected to include food and equipment spares, as well as air-launched munitions.
> 
> Propulsion of the Type 901 is thought to be provided by four QC280 gas turbines, each delivering 28 MW, enabling the ship to achieve a maximum speed of about 25 kt. This is significantly faster than the Fuchi-class (Type 903A). The speed is needed for the Type 901 to keep pace with the carrier and its escorts.
> 
> Refuelling conventionally powered carriers may be required every 3-4 days if conducting intensive flying operations requiring the carrier to operate near its maximum speed for extended periods.
> http://www.janes.com/article/66613/china-s-carrier-replenishment-ship-begins-sea-trials



Meanwhile:



> Chinese Carrier Moves Ahead Following Year of Increased Activity in South China Sea
> 
> Chinese warships, led by the country’s first aircraft carrier, the Soviet-built Liaoning, sailed past Taiwan and into the South China Sea earlier this week. It was a move that caught the attention of both Taiwan and Japan, who closely observed the six-vessel group.
> 
> “China is developing a regional military capability,” said Brad Glosserman, security analyst at Pacific Forum. "The Chinese believe that they need to have the capacity and the ability to protect their interests as they become increasingly far flung. They see that a power that aspires to the status it has, will have the a fully fledged military... they're going to go from a green water, in other words a close-water navy, to blue water, which is one capable of sailing in the oceans.”
> 
> Glosserman says part of that progression is possessing an aircraft carrier, and he says the world may be “very quick to tie it to other developments, and I think that we should look at this as something that China is going to do regardless.”..
> http://www.voanews.com/a/china-carrier-south-china-sea/3656913.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Further to this post,



> Xi’s China: Grumbling (and Rumbling?) in the PLA
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/mark-collins-xis-china-grumbling-and-rumbling-in-the-pla/



the president keeps cleaning the PLA house:



> China’s veteran generals fading out in massive PLA reshuffle
> _Changes to come ahead of 19th National Congress as President Xi Jinping consolidates his power_
> 
> China’s military is stepping up the pace of a massive reshuffle among its leadership ahead of a Communist Party congress later this year as President Xi Jinping consolidates his power within the armed forces, according to sources familiar with the matter.
> 
> Nearly 50 senior officers are due to leave their positions as part of the shake-up, including 18 full-ranking generals, two independent sources told the South China Morning Post.
> 
> The coming changes are aimed at promoting a new generation of officers, with veterans giving way to younger talent to take over the leadership, one source said...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2062223/chinas-veteran-generals-fading-out-massive-pla



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

The role of the J-20 may be to interdict refueling aircraft and AWACS.This strategy would in effect force opposing air forces to operate out of range of these aircraft. My solution would be to let carriers target these planes directly,without endangering the supporting aircraft.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-purpose-behind-chinas-mysterious-j-20-combat-jet-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T

In November, China debuted the Chengdu J-20, a large, stealthy jet that some have compared to the F-22 Raptor. But according to experts, the J-20 is not a fighter, not a dogfighter, not stealthy, and not at all like the F-22 or F-35.

Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute, told Business Insider that the J-20 is a "fundamentally different sort of aircraft than the F-35."

Davis characterized the J-20 as "high-speed, long-range, not quite as stealthy (as US fifth-gen aircraft), but [the Chinese] clearly don't see that as important." According to Davis, the J-20 is "not a fighter, but an interceptor and a strike aircraft" that doesn't seek to contend with US jets in air-to-air battles.

Instead, "the Chinese are recognizing they can attack critical airborne support systems like AWACS (airborne early warning and control systems) and refueling planes so they can't do their job," Davis said. "If you can force the tankers back, then the F-35s and other platforms aren't sufficient because they can't reach their target."


----------



## a_majoor

National Interest on the uncertain future of Asia. The economic fundamentals have never really been properly reported, and there is no doubt that some nasty surprises will surface, ones which we are not fundamentally prepared for. This is a long article, so only page one is posted, remainder on link:

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/think-asia-will-dominate-the-21st-century-think-again-19429



> *Think Asia Will Dominate the 21st Century? Think Again.*
> Michael R. Auslin deconstructs the tensions lurking below the region’s prosperous surface.
> Dov S. Zakheim
> February 13, 2017
> Michael R. Auslin, The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 304 pp., $30.00.
> 
> MICHAEL R. Auslin opens his book with a preface entitled “The Asia that Nobody Sees.” He might better have entitled it “Hiding in Plain Sight.” For far too long, but especially during the Obama years, policymakers chose to focus on Asia’s remarkable economic growth, coupled with an era of relative peace. Too often they overlooked economic, demographic, social, political and military tensions that did not lurk all that far below Asia’s shiny surface.
> 
> Barack Obama, who spent part of his formative years in Indonesia, was a leading cheerleader for the concept of the Asian century. He seemed to care little about Europe and preferred to avoid the troubles of the Middle East as much as possible. He embraced the notion of a rising Asia that soon would constitute America’s most vital interests. It was in that spirit, too, that Hillary Clinton announced the “pivot to Asia,” which was meant to refocus American military power and political and economic priorities away from Europe and the Middle East and instead underscore Asia’s importance to the United States.
> 
> Of course, much of the Middle East is in Asia; so too are five former Soviet republics; so too is Afghanistan. But when Obama and Hillary Clinton referred to Asia, they generally meant East Asia, though at times they expanded their definition to include South Asia, employing the term “Indo-Pacific.” But their focus was primarily on East and Southeast Asia, and particularly on China, Japan, Korea and five of the eight ASEAN states—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. It is these countries, plus India, that constitute Asia’s economic powerhouses (Brunei is an oil-rich country having more in common economically with the states of the Arabian Gulf than with its ASEAN partners). Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar lag far behind in political and economic development. Auslin likewise pays them far less attention than he does to their more advanced ASEAN partners, though the Obama administration, consistent with its policy of outreach to enemies and other subjects of long-time American sanctions, moved quickly to improve relations with Myanmar when the “Burmese Spring” blossomed in 2010.
> 
> Auslin asks what he terms “inconvenient questions,” such as: “How resilient are Asian countries to economic shocks? How adaptable are leading economic sectors and government policies?” Of course, the answers depend on the country in question. But Auslin rightly recognizes that these issues are not unique to any one state in the region and are common to virtually all of them. As he points out,
> 
> Asian countries, developed and developing alike, face significant challenges. . . . Demand from Western countries will possibly level off as those societies age and as incomes remain stagnant. . . . Corruption, malinvestment, and waste eat away at economic efficiency.
> 
> AS AUSLIN demonstrates, China is the prime exemplar of these developments. Chinese economic statistics, never fully reliable, continue to be adjusted downward. Wages have risen sharply over the past decade; indeed, for several years, the minimum wage was growing at double digits—as high as 18 percent. The Chinese banking system remains opaque, and bank balance sheets are unreliable, as they continue to overstate the value of their assets, notably state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, obtaining financing in China often requires connections in Beijing, further undermining the efficiency of the banking system. Finally, local and provincial regulations often impede business growth, while corruption, particularly at those levels, remains rampant, despite President Xi Jinping’s ongoing efforts to clean house. Lastly, Auslin rightly identifies yet another scourge that China—and other Asian economies—suffer from: Mafia-like intimidation, or worse, of foreign investors. Not surprisingly, companies that are contemplating investment in East Asia are looking more and more at Vietnam, Malaysia or Indonesia, or even the Philippines, rather than risk shrinking margins in China.
> 
> The SOEs are an albatross around China’s economic neck, yet even the increasingly powerful Xi, recently crowned China’s “core leader,” has been unable to shut most of them down. The management, ownership and finances of many private businesses also are opaque. Often, businesses that are nominally private are actually owned by the government through a complex chain of holding companies. This is particularly the case with respect to firms in the high-tech and aerospace sectors.
> 
> The era of untrammeled Chinese economic growth appears to be over—and that development naturally does not account for whatever actions a new Trump administration will take to even the playing field of Chinese-American trade. Should the administration initiate steps that would lead to a trade war with Beijing, it would seriously affect the American economy, but devastate China’s. U.S. economic fundamentals are strong, and may even be getting stronger, while China, as Auslin notes, has not yet achieved sustainable development. China’s economic vicissitudes are far from over.


----------



## chanman

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> The role of the J-20 may be to interdict refueling aircraft and AWACS.This strategy would in effect force opposing air forces to operate out of range of these aircraft. My solution would be to let carriers target these planes directly,without endangering the supporting aircraft.
> 
> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-purpose-behind-chinas-mysterious-j-20-combat-jet-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T
> 
> In November, China debuted the Chengdu J-20, a large, stealthy jet that some have compared to the F-22 Raptor. But according to experts, the J-20 is not a fighter, not a dogfighter, not stealthy, and not at all like the F-22 or F-35.
> 
> Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute, told Business Insider that the J-20 is a "fundamentally different sort of aircraft than the F-35."
> 
> Davis characterized the J-20 as "high-speed, long-range, not quite as stealthy (as US fifth-gen aircraft), but [the Chinese] clearly don't see that as important." According to Davis, the J-20 is "not a fighter, but an interceptor and a strike aircraft" that doesn't seek to contend with US jets in air-to-air battles.
> 
> Instead, "the Chinese are recognizing they can attack critical airborne support systems like AWACS (airborne early warning and control systems) and refueling planes so they can't do their job," Davis said. "If you can force the tankers back, then the F-35s and other platforms aren't sufficient because they can't reach their target."



Carriers still use dedicated AWACS although inflight refueling is done with buddy refuelling now. More to the point, bringing the carriers in closer just shifts the risk from USAF aircraft and bases to Navy aircraft and vessels.


----------



## a_majoor

President Trump shakes up China as well. They should have read "The Art of the Deal"

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-trump-is-overshadowing-chinas-biggest-political-gathering-2017-3



> *How Trump is overshadowing China's biggest political gathering — even though he's half a world away*
> South China Morning Post
> Laura Zhou, South China Morning Post
> 
> US President Donald Trump may not be attending the annual gatherings of China’s political elite but uncertainty over his policies is casting a long shadow over the events in Beijing.
> 
> About 5,0000 government officials, party bigwigs and company executives are gathering in the Chinese capital to discuss government policy for the year ahead.
> 
> Though the meetings are strictly stage managed and most of the discussions and decisions take place behind closed doors, the annual meetings, better known as the “two sessions” in China, give a glimpse into Beijing’s political priorities and economic expectations.
> 
> They will be in special focus this year as Beijing adjusts to rising uncertainty from the Trump administration and its policies.
> 
> On the sidelines of the first day of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on Friday, delegates said China was putting some decisions on hold because of the question marks over Trump’s direction.
> 
> One area of concern is currency reform.
> 
> Yu Yongding, a former member of the central bank’s monetary policy committee and a senior researcher of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said various US issues, including Sino-US ties and Trump were having a big impact on plans to overhaul the China’s foreign exchange rate system. “We must not give Trump an excuse to accuse China of currency manipulation,” Yu said.
> 
> “If the Trump administration did decide to do so, we would fight back forcefully. If not, it would shift the bilateral friction to trade, tariffs and investment and make things more complicated. There are still many uncertainties. I believe the central bank will take a wait-and-see approach until the situation becomes clear.”
> 
> Wang Hongguang, former deputy commander of Nanjing military area command, also expressed concerns about Trump’s potential impact on relations with China, and is watching closely whether the reasonably smooth talks between the US president and State Councillor Yang Jiechi would signal any turnaround.
> 
> This year’s two sessions come at a time of heightened tension between China and United States; ties between the two countries have been bumpy since Trump’s victory in the presidential election in November.
> 
> In an unprecedented move, Trump, while president-elect, broke decades-long protocol in December by accepting a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
> 
> Trump ... broke decades-long protocol in December by accepting a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
> The call was the first such contact with Taipei by a US president-elect or president since Jimmy Carter severed formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and adopted a one-China policy in 1979.
> 
> Trump then publicly questioned US support for the one-China policy, alongside constant criticism of China’s currency tactics, threats to slap punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, and bluster over China’s military build-up in the South China Sea – all of which are believed to have reinforced the concerns of the nation’s top leaders who prize stability and predictability as top priorities.
> 
> Though most policies of the new US administration have yet to be announced, Trump, who has advocated protectionism, claimed that by slapping tariffs on Chinese goods, he would create more manufacturing jobs in the United States. This unnerved policymakers and businesspeople in China, which has a larger trade surplus with the US than with any other nation.
> 
> Heightened trade tension with Washington would be the last thing Beijing wanted as the ruling Communist Party prepares for a leadership transition later this year amid increasingly downward economic pressure.
> 
> On Tuesday, Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng urged Washington to negotiate any disputes with Beijing and warned that trade war “should not be an option”.
> 
> Deng Yuwen, a public commentator in Beijing and a researcher at the Charhar Institute think tank, said such concerns would be reflected in this year’s government work report, which is considered an indirect yet authoritative guide for the coming year’s policy priorities.
> 
> “For example, when it comes to setting a fiscal budget or making economic development plans, a greater emphasis could be placed on how to increase domestic demand [so as to deal with the uncertainty under Trump],” he said.
> 
> Deng said the possibility of protectionist policies under Trump would also be on the agenda during panel discussions among executives of private- and state-owned companies attending the meetings.
> 
> “I think those working in trade businesses and executives looking to invest in the US will bring up the topics.”
> 
> Wei Jianguo, vice-director of the China Centre for International Economic Exchanges and a former vice-minister of commerce, said the two sessions this year would be a “timely and proper opportunity” for Beijing to dispel fears among those who worry about Trump’s possible protectionist policies, which Wei believed would be unlikely to happen.
> 
> “Trump’s goal is to put America first, and as the world’s second-largest economy with the largest domestic market, China is the only one that can help Trump achieve this goal,” Wei said.
> 
> “I am optimistic about the trade future between China and the US, though disputes and conflicts could hardly be avoided, so Beijing can take this chance to appease those who have such concerns.”
> 
> China is also facing increasing challenges in its neighbouring regions, including the South China Sea, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula, many of which are related to China’s rivalry with the US.
> 
> “Although the two sessions will be mostly focused on domestic issues rather than foreign policies, this year is special because China is now embroiled in a restive environment and Trump is seen a major factor in this instability,” Deng said.
> 
> Additional reporting by Frank Tang and Choi Chi-yuk.
> 
> Read the original article on South China Morning Post. Copyright 2017. Follow South China Morning Post on Twitter.


----------



## Underway

Amazing video.  Also some interesting tidbits on how Canada should respond.

Why China Can Not Rise Peacefully


----------



## a_majoor

China imposes tighter controls on capital outflows. This could have some serious ripple effects if it suddenly pulls the rug out from under many hot property markets:

https://betterdwelling.com/chinas-capital-outflows-just-reversed-bad-news-for-global-real-estate/



> *China’s Capital Outflows Just Reversed, Bad News For Global Real Estate *
> March 9, 2017
> 
> The world’s greatest overseas real estate binge might finally be over. According to the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), China saw its foreign exchange reserves rise to over US$3 trillion. The unexpected rise is the first in 8 months, and may indicate that the new regulatory crackdown on capital outflows is actually working. This is bad for real estate markets that have seen a sudden surge of buying activity from Mainland Chinese buyers.
> 
> China’s Capital Outflows
> 
> China’s capital outflows turned into inflows, meaning more foreign currency went into the country than left. The PBoC found itself with US$6.9 billion more than the month before, a 0.25% increase. This comes after US$220 billion in outflows in 2016, and another $12 billion in January. While it doesn’t seem like a lot in contrast, analysts polled by Reuters expected a drop of more than US$25 billion. Analysts are now adjusting projections since this means China’s foreign reserves are a full US$31.9 billion higher than they anticipated. This could mean that China’s new capital controls are much more effective than analysts had previously anticipated.
> 
> China’s Capital Controls
> 
> We’ve talked about China’s capital controls quite a few times, but in case you missed it here’s a brief intro. Chinese citizens are limited to exporting US$50,000 per person, per year. Not even enough to make a down payment on a house in Vancouver. So friends, family, strangers for money would lend their quotas to other people, so they could do a form of “soft” money laundering called smurfing.
> 
> Smurfing is a process where a large amount of money is broken down into smaller numbers to evade regulatory flags. The money is then wired by a number of people, then assembled by an overseas bank as a single account. Before you get the misconception that Chinese homebuyers are criminals, this is a fully legal process in countries like Canada, and the US where banks are even happy to help. This process plays a very important part in buying a home, and even paying the mortgage.
> 
> This all changed this year, when the PBoC and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) created additional rules to stop the outflow. The US$50,000 limit is still the same, but now banks are required to report transfers over ¥200,000 (US$29,000), and you’re no longer allowed to “lend” your allowance. Oh yeah, and the new rules strictly prohibit export of capital for buying bonds, “insurance-type” products, and real estate.
> 
> Companies now require government approval to purchase property abroad, and they can’t easily obtain it unless buying property has always been their primary business. Break the rules, you get a three year ban on exporting capital, and are investigated for money laundering. Being subject to a money laundering investigation in China is not fun from what I’ve been told.
> 
> Impact on Global Real Estate
> 
> Mainland Chinese investors are now the world’s largest buyers of overseas real estate. It’s actually sprung up multi-billion dollar businesses like Caimeiju, and Juwai that sell billions in overseas property, often sight unseen. These buyers added fuel to the fire created by over enthusiastic domestic buyers with massive mortgages, sending property rates soaring in Canada, Australia, England, France, Hong Kong…actually, pretty much everywhere.
> 
> Now that the capital controls expressly prohibit real estate purchases, it’s kind of tricky for Chinese buyers to continue to drive the market. Actually, it’s likely pretty hard to even get the money to pay the mortgage on current purchases. Vancouver, Canada – a hotspot for Chinese buyers, saw a sales decline of 78% during this Chinese New Year, one of the most popular times to buy. Bloomberg also reported that Chinese real estate buyers were suddenly short on cash after the change in rules. February’s inflow of foreign exchange might be the first official data point to show that China’s buyers can’t continue to drive international real estate markets.
> 
> Mainland Chinese buyers aren’t the only driver of soaring real estate prices in global capitals. However, many markets saw locals taking out record amounts of debt to compete with well funded foreign investors. It’ll be interesting to see if the narrative continues to be told that Chinese buyers are driving markets, or if locals will realize they’re now providing liquidity for those same well-funded investors that need to get out.


----------



## tomahawk6

The PLA has taken a big step toward jointness,it will be interesting to see how concept works.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinas-xi-restructures-military-consolidates-control-051624357.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced a military restructure of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to transform it into a leaner fighting force with improved joint operations capability, state media said.

Centered around a new, condensed structure of 84 military units, the reshuffle builds on Xi's years-long efforts to modernize the PLA with greater emphasis on new capabilities including cyberspace, electronic and information warfare.

As chair of the Central Military Commission, Xi is also commander-in-chief of China's armed forces.

"This has profound and significant meaning in building a world-class military," Xi told commanders of the new units at the PLA headquarters in Beijing, according to the official Xinhua news agency report late on Tuesday.

All 84 new units are at the combined-corps level, which means commanders will hold the rank of major-general or rear-admiral, the official China Daily reported Wednesday, adding that unit members would likely be regrouped from existing forces given the Chinese military was still engaged in cutting its troops by 300,000, one of the wide-ranging military reforms introduced by Xi in late 2015.


----------



## a_majoor

Decades long strategic planning. Our planning horizons seem to be measured in months, by contrast:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/20170124205449.aspx



> *Confronting China's Slow Invasion of the South China Sea Is Long Overdue*
> 
> by Austin Bay
> January 24, 2017
> Since the 1990s, China has insistently waged a slow and deliberate imperial war of territorial expansion in the South China Sea.
> 
> "Imperial war" is the apt description. China exhibits classic imperial ambition. Using economic, diplomatic and military muscle (camouflaged by propaganda), Beijing adds territory to its imperial dominion at the expense of less powerful neighbors.
> 
> In 1950, the newly installed Communist regime in Beijing took Tibet. The Communists defended their action by claiming that "traditionally" Tibet was a Chinese province. As progressive Communists they were liberating Tibet from non-progressives. If that sounds like old time Communist propaganda gospel, it was.
> 
> Invading Tibet took two weeks. By mid-1951, Beijing had full control of the country.
> 
> Weeks and months were the time metric for China's Tibet operation. Soldiers armed with rifles and artillery pieces were the means.
> 
> Reporters and headline writers understand the pace and weaponry of that kind of war -- rapidly seizing objectives while firing guns.
> 
> Tibet is a destination for Buddhist pilgrims and mountain climbers, not an international trade route. So who cared? India cared. Tibet is an invasion route into India. India felt threatened. In 1962, the Sino-Indian War flared over control of southern Himalayan passes. China won. So China's invasion of Tibet stood and still stands.
> 
> Beijing's South China Sea invasion moves at a different pace: decades. That makes recognizing the invasion difficult and confronting it even more problematic.
> 
> News media focus on hours, days and weeks, perhaps a year or two. Politicians, particularly in democracies, focus on electoral time. U.S. presidents have a four to eight year policy window -- not even a decade.
> 
> Over the last 30 years, China's principal weapon systems in the South China Sea haven't been bayonets, aircraft and warships, though Beijing is making increasing use of those classic means of coercion and menace.
> 
> China's principal weapons have been offshore construction barges, construction crews and exploratory oil drilling rigs, all supported by shepherding coast guard vessels and swarms of fishing boats.
> 
> The barge-borne construction crews usually begin with a "sea feature" like a reef or a rock in the South China Sea. A sea feature is not habitable. A sea feature is not, in and of itself, sovereign territory.
> 
> No matter. Only power matters to Beijing. The construction crews add thousands of cubic meters of dredged sand and reinforced concrete to the sea feature. Voila, an artificial islet. The crews top their manufactured islet with military-grade runways capable of handling high-performance combat aircraft. If the final product looks something like a stationary naval aircraft carrier surrounded by a strip of sand, that isn't a glitch, it's a feature.
> 
> The counterfeit archipelago Beijing has created now extends south from the Chinese coast and Hainan Island to close to Borneo and the Filipino island of Palawan.
> 
> Beijing has added a political coup de grace: the counterfeit archipelago is now sovereign Chinese territory, like Shanghai. Beijing's claim is utter fraud. It has no legitimate historical claim to the area.
> 
> China's man-made islands encroach on the sovereign territory and Exclusive Economic Zones of the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. The islets and Beijing's claim to sovereignty also challenge Indonesian territorial sovereignty. Singapore is wary, and Singapore sits on the Strait of Malacca, the primary shipping route between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
> 
> Every year, ships hauling goods worth some five trillion dollars traverse the South China Sea. China's counterfeit islands disrupt this traffic.
> 
> This isn't the distant Shangri-La of Tibet. This is a non-theoretical threat to global trade.
> 
> China's aggression has provoked intense resistance, particularly from Vietnam and the Philippines. But 2017 finds the Philippines buckling, despite its court victory. During the Obama Administration, the U.S. Navy did conduct Freedom of Navigation Operations to assert maritime right of passage. However, I think Beijing read the Obama Administration as feckless and unwilling to lead. Its island-creation program intensified.
> 
> The Trump Administration has said China's South China Sea invasion won't stand. In many quarters this is read as provocative. I say this response from Washington is long overdue.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Decades long strategic planning. Our planning horizons seem to be measured in months, by contrast ...


Yeah, not knowing who the government'll be a decade from now _does_ make it harder to plan.

Meanwhile ...


> China has signed an agreement saying it will stop conducting state-sponsored cyberattacks aimed at stealing Canadian private-sector trade secrets and proprietary technology.
> 
> This industrial espionage accord was worked out this past Friday during high-level talks in Ottawa between senior Communist Party official Wang Yongqing and Daniel Jean, the national security and intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
> 
> “The two sides agreed that neither country’s government would conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors,” an official communiqué drawn up between China and Canada says ...


We'll see ...


----------



## The Bread Guy

CHN-IND border hijinks - this, from the BBC:


> *China 'asks India to withdraw troops' from Nathu La pass*
> 
> China has accused India of incursion into its territory between Sikkim and Tibet, in a dispute which has raised tensions between the countries.
> 
> Officials said Indian border guards had obstructed "normal activities" on the Chinese side, and called on India to immediately withdraw them.
> 
> India also recently accused Chinese troops of incursion on its side.
> 
> The area, the Nathu La pass, is used by Indians going for pilgrimages to Hindu and Buddhist sites in Tibet.
> 
> The region saw clashes between China and India in 1967, and tensions still flare from time to time.
> 
> The BBC's South Asia Editor Ethirajan Anbarasan says the latest development appears to be one of the most serious escalations between the countries in recent years ...


----------



## tomahawk6

The new type 055 destroyer.At 12,000 tons its more like a cruiser with a more potent anti-ship capability.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anderscorr/2017/07/01/chinas-new-destroyer-the-u-s-navys-anti-ship-missile-failure-and-preemption/#29159adf638f

China unveiled its Type 055 naval destroyer on June 28, the latest step in its decade and a half of military buildup. The new Chinese destroyer outcompetes U.S. destroyers and cruisers, highlighting a major failure in U.S. Navy planning that stretches back to the 1990s. Given the 055’s long-range supersonic YJ-18 and YJ-12 over the horizon (OTH) anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), the Chinese destroyer currently outcompetes U.S. Arleigh Burke class destroyers and bigger Ticonderoga class cruisers. Both ships rely on fewer and shorter-range Harpoon anti-ship missiles (ASMs) and aircraft carriers that are themselves vulnerable to China’s ballistic missiles. The U.S. Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), under development since 2009, would right the balance, but not for years to come, and meanwhile we must assume China will continue improving its capabilities.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Wonder where PLAN got the design:



> China Explores Electromagnetic Carrier Launch System
> 
> A recently released photo on the Chinese Internet has furthered speculation that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has begun trials of an electromagnetic (EM) catapult launch system, known as electromagnetic aircraft launching system (EMALS) in the West. It was previously rumored that China had successfully constructed its first EMALS in November 2016, but there were no official reports or pictures at the time.
> 
> The photo shows a prototype Shenyang J-15T “Flying Shark” with nose gear designed for catapult-assisted takeoff but arrested recovery (CATOBAR) operations. The nose gear also features a front and rear holding rod that is similar to the American EMALS launch rail. The J-15 airframe is derived from Russia’s Sukhoi Su-33 carrier-borne fighter.
> 
> Rear Admiral Ma Weiming, the PLAN’s propulsion and power specialist, said in a university seminar that he is confident that the EMALS will be installed on the “No. 3 carrier.” A Chinese analyst noted that this could refer to the third domestically built carrier, not including the Liaoning. Ma also said that the plan to build the No 3 carrier is delayed, since the PLAN is still evaluating both steam and EM catapults. He said that the EMALS is more reliable, less complex and cheaper than the steam catapult and the decision will come in a matter of weeks.
> 
> China has already built facilities to test both conventional steam CATOBAR and EM launch systems. Satellite photos of Huangdichun airbase show an EM launch rail parallel to the steam rail.
> 
> Professor Wang Qun, an analyst at the National Security and Military Strategy Research Center, noted that using EMALS on a conventionally powered carrier will consume additional fuel and energy and hence compromise the ship’s combat effectiveness.
> 
> Concurrently, Chinese state media has released footage of J-15s conducting numerous sorties on the Liaoning, some of them carrying the YJ-83K anti-ship missile. The carrier group turns towards the South China Sea, where China is asserting its claim of control. According to the Pentagon’s latest report on Chinese military power, the Liaoning task group conducted a second round of integration training there last December.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _A J-15 lands on the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, carrying a YJ-83K anti-ship missile. Inset: The J-15T prototype attached with holding rods similar to Western EMAL systems._
> https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2017-07-06/china-explores-electromagnetic-carrier-launch-system



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chinese military cuts and re-org (Indian story):



> China to downsize army to under a million in biggest troop cut
> 
> China will downsize its 2.3 million-strong military, the world's largest, to under one million in the biggest troop reduction in its history as part of a restructuring process, an official Chinese daily said.
> 
> The People's Liberation Army (PLA) will increase the numbers of other services, including navy and missile forces, the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese military, reported.
> 
> Jun Zhengping Studio, a Chinese social WeChat account run by the newspaper published an article yesterday on structural reform in the military, saying that “the old military structure, where the army accounts for the vast majority, will be replaced after the reform”.
> 
> “The reform is based on China's strategic goals and security requirements. In the past, the PLA focused on ground battle and homeland defence, which will undergo fundamental changes,” the report said.
> 
> “This is the first time that active PLA army personnel would be reduced to below one million,” it said.
> 
> It added that the number of troops in the PLA Navy, PLA Strategic Support Force and the PLA Rocket Force will be increased, while the PLA Air Force's active service personnel will remain the same.
> 
> According to the Ministry of Defence data, the PLA Army had about 8.50 lakh combat troops in 2013. No official numbers of the total strength of PLA Army were released.
> 
> Earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping had announced that the PLA will be cut by three lakh troops.
> 
> “The total PLA personnel was about 2.3 million before the country announced a cut of 300,000 troops in 2015,” state-run Global Times reported.
> 
> “This reform will provide other services, including the PLA Rocket Force, Air Force, Navy and Strategic Support Force (mainly responsible for electronic warfare and communication), with more resources and inputs, and the PLA will strengthen its capability to conduct overseas missions,” Xu Guangyu, a senior adviser to the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, was quoted by the media report...
> http://www.thestatesman.com/world/china-to-downsize-army-to-under-a-million-in-biggest-troop-cut-1499835458.html



Last year:



> Xi’s China: Grumbling (and Rumbling?) in the PLA
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/mark-collins-xis-china-grumbling-and-rumbling-in-the-pla/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile back in the Himalayan military cockpit, from a longish article--Neville Maxwell wrote the book on the 1962 Sino-Indian war:



> This is India’s China war, Round Two
> _The absurd myth of an ‘unprovoked Chinese aggression’ in 1962 has fermented in India a persistent longing for revenge_
> By Neville Maxwell
> 
> With India and China interacting over more than 3,000km of undefined frontier, friction is constant and that one day it would break back into border war has seemed inevitable. Two great Indian delusions have created this situation.
> 
> The lesser of these was the outright falsehood spun in the shock of immediate and utter Indian defeat in 1962’s Round One border war with China, when, after the hesitant launch of an Indian offensive to drive the Chinese out of India-claimed territory on the Chinese side of the McMahon Line, the pre-emptive Chinese counter-attack had in little more than a month crushed the Indian Army. It enabled the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to vacate all the territory it had occupied with nothing more than the minatory – and humiliating – warning to India, “don’t challenge us again”.
> 
> *This standoff is China telling India to accept changing realities*
> http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2102547/standoff-china-telling-india-accept-changing-realities
> 
> The absurd myth of an “unprovoked Chinese aggression” which had taken India by surprise was promulgated to resurrect the broken image of “Pandit” Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister personally and pre-eminently responsible for the national disaster. Although long ago exposed and belied internationally, in India the myth has fermented in high military as well as political circles a longing for revenge.
> 
> *Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war*
> http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1461099/neville-maxwells-revelation-reveals-india-was-hiding-nothing-over-its-1962
> 
> The underlying and greater delusion is that India’s geographical limits are set by millennial historical forces. The process of boundary formation established and required by the international community (negotiation to achieve agreement on border alignment and cooperation to demarcate the agreed alignment on the ground) thus becomes otiose for the Indian republic. India, having “discovered” the alignment of its borders through historical research, need only display them on its official maps and those would become defined international boundaries “not open to discussion with anybody”, as Nehru put it in a notorious order in 1954.
> 
> *Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript*
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1461102/neville-maxwell-interview-full-transcript
> 
> He applied his own ruling literally and categorically, rejecting Beijing’s repeated calls for negotiation; and every one of his scores of successors in the Indian leadership has clung, or felt nailed to, that obdurate and provocative stance, in effect claiming the sole right unilaterally to define China’s as well as India’s borders. Every generation of literate Indians is inculcated with that false sense of national oppression by the cartographic image showing broad areas of Indian territory “occupied” by China, with reminders that Beijing’s maps reveal an intention to seize even more...
> http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2102555/indias-china-war-round-two



More at end here on 1962 war and "The Himalayan Military Cockpit":



> Expansionist Dragon Cartography and…
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/mark-collins-expansionist-dragon-cartography-and/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

What's the PLA Navy's strategic thinking?



> How China's Navy Is Preparing to Fight in the 'Far Seas'
> 
> On June 28, the Chinese navy launched the first of a formidable new class of warship. At over twelve thousand tons and bristling with sensors and weapons, the Type 055 destroyer is among the most advanced surface combatants in the world. When completed, it will join the world’s fastest-growing fleet, a service that commissioned twenty-three new surface ships in 2016 alone, compared with just six for the U.S. Navy and zero for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. Clearly some great fear or ambition hastens China’s investment in sea power.
> 
> But what is it?
> 
> Unfortunately, Beijing is saying very little. And what it does say is unconvincing. For example, PLA Navy officer Zhang Junshe (张军社) claims the Type 055 will protect international sea lanes, upon which the Chinese economy is increasingly dependent, but does not name which country or group threatens them in the first place. He tells us the ship will help fulfill China’s “international responsibilities” (国际责任) and provide “public security goods” (公共安全产品), but these are just meaningless buzzwords that foreigners use—surely they have no purchase in the halls of Zhongnanhai. He suggests the new warship will operate with Chinese aircraft carriers, but where and for what ends, he does not say.
> 
> Faced with a lack of reliable information, much foreign analysis of Chinese intentions ultimately rests on a few facts and lots of speculation. Our understanding of Beijing’s designs in waters beyond East Asia—the so-called “Far Seas”—is especially poor. Thus, when candid statements do become available, they deserve careful consideration. In mid-2016, a PLA Navy periodical called Naval Affairs (海军军事学术) published an article that may help shed light on China’s Far Seas naval ambitions. Because Naval Affairs is an “internal distribution” publication—that is, only available to those within the Chinese military—it treats subjects with the rarest of candor. As such, if offers a valuable window into how the PLA Navy actually thinks about strategy.
> 
> Entitled “Several Issues China Must Emphasize as it Strategically Manages the Two Oceans Under the New Situation,” the article was written by two PLA Navy officers, both researchers at the Naval Research Institute, the home of Chinese naval strategy. The first author, Lt. Cdr. Tang Jianfeng (唐剑峰), is a staff officer in NRI’s Research Guidance Department. His coauthor is Cdr. Yang Zukui (杨祖快), Deputy Director of NRI’s Research Office. Tang and Yang are mid-level strategists writing about what China’s naval strategy should be, not necessarily what it is. However, their analysis is informed by privileged knowledge of PLA Navy doctrine, existing and planned capabilities, and the aims and preferences of their superiors, whom they naturally seek to please. What does it say?..
> http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-chinas-navy-preparing-fight-the-far-seas-21583?page=show



Read on.  Graphic of Type 055 (cf USN Arleigh Burke-class):






Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terrible Terry Glavin (a personal friend) has at Canada's comprador-class again:



> China's disgraceful campaign to purge the name of Liu Xiaobo
> ...
> Another fairly reliable indication of just how rattled and gloomy China’s ruling class is that it’s even odds that anyone who can afford to has already left the country, or is considering leaving soon, or is already making plans to leave. Three years ago, a Barclays Wealth survey found that one in three “super-rich” Chinese had already bolted the country, and two out of three millionaires had either already left or were planning to get out. In a new survey published this week, Shanghai’s Hurun magazine and Visas Consulting Group found that half of China’s remaining millionaires are thinking about leaving.
> 
> Canada is their second-favourite destination of choice, after the United States, and Vancouver is their favourite Canadian city. _More than 100,000 Chinese millionaires have moved to Metro Vancouver in recent years. Most of them obtained Canadian citizenship through the scandal-rocked and now shuttered Immigrant Investor Program_ [emphasis added]. It should be without controversy to say that these things are “linked.”
> 
> Whether China’s millionaires physically leave China or not, they’re sending their money abroad by the container-load...
> 
> Meanwhile, in his new capacity as Canada’s ambassador, the comically unserious former cabinet minister John McCallum continues to flounce around China apologizing to sundry gatherings of Communist Party consiglieri about how stubbornly touchy Canadians can be about such free-trade inconveniences as democracy and the rule of law. Back in Canada, the sore point about the “exploratory talks” for a Canada-China free trade deal is supposed to be whether trade and human rights should be linked – as though they weren’t already and haven’t always been inextricably and intimately linked, not least by the regime in Beijing.
> 
> The incarceration of dozens of journalists and writers – China is the worst offender in the world for jailing writers – along with the imprisonment of thousands of Chinese prisoners of conscience, is directly linked to the purposes of ensuring the Beijing regime’s continuing, unexamined gluttony in its trade rackets, both foreign and domestic. It’s how business is done in China. It’s how Xi Jinping and his cronies get away with murder...
> 
> No matter how impudently or often he bellyaches about it, Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to Canada, cannot be allowed to get away with the propaganda lie that “Canadian media often mix human rights issue with economic and trade issues.” It is a too-rare occasion, or at least not nearly done often enough, for one thing, but more pertinently, it is Lu’s own Communist Party that insists on the linkage, except in this way: anyone messes with us on human rights, we’ll mess with them on trade...
> 
> There are...also quite obvious, direct and functional links between the way China’s princelings amass and hide their fortunes and _the way Canada’s Liberal-heavy China trade lobby serves as a happy accomplice and collaborator in the intimidation, persecution and plunder of the Chinese people_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The moment Liu Xiaobo died, in the eighth year of an 11-year sentence for appending his name to a modest democratic charter, Canada’s Governor General was swanning around in Beijing with Xi Jinping. His Excellency David Johnston was lavished with much complimentary notice in China’s news media – which had been scrubbed of any reference to Liu Xiaobo’s agonies...
> http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-chinas-disgraceful-campaign-to-purge-the-name-of-liu-xiaobo


  
Compradors--China now getting its revenge on the West:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/comprador

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And a tweet by Mr Glavin:
https://twitter.com/TerryGlavin/status/887730576882417664



> @TerryGlavin
> 
> "I told President Xi, 'Now we come to the part where I perform a cloying Canadian folk dance,' and he sighed, 'OK.'"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Governor General defends China visit amid Nobel peace laureate's death*
> 
> As Gov. Gen. David Johnston prepares to end his service as the Queen’s representative in Canada, he took a moment to defend his goodwill mission to Chin...
> http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/governor-general-defends-china-visit-amid-nobel-peace-laureate-s-death-1.3510058



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

A tweet--NATO on notice?



> SeaWaves Magazine‏ @seawaves_mag
> 
> *Chinese Navy deployed*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://twitter.com/seawaves_mag/status/889251816998883328



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Excerpts from longish piece:



> Does China’s J-20 rival other stealth fighters?
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> *How might China utilize the J-20*
> 
> The J-20 has the potential to considerably enhance China’s regional military strength. According to a 2014 U.S. Naval War College report, an operational stealth fighter would “immediately become the most advanced aircraft deployed by any East Asian Power,” surpassing the aircraft fielded in India, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, or Taiwan. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission advances a similar assessment, noting that the arrival of the J-20 will enhance China’s military leverage against opposing forces in the region. With the J-20 expected become fully operational in the next couple of years, the PLAAF has a considerable head start over the Indian, Japanese, and Korean air forces, which are not slated to put their locally-made advanced fighter counterparts into service until the 2020s.
> 
> Opinions vary about the J-20’s comparative strengths as an air superiority (air-to-air) fighter or a strike (air-to-ground) aircraft. Some analysts believe that the J-20’s emphasis on frontal stealth makes it an effective long-range interceptor, meant for mid-air engagements. Others see the J-20 as a long-range strike aircraft, best suited for penetrating enemy air defenses and damaging critical infrastructure on the ground. Such high-value targets would include airfields, command bases, and other military installations. A 2015 RAND report noted the J-20’s “combination of forward stealth and long range could hold U.S. Navy surface assets at risk, and that a long-range maritime strike capability may be a cause for greater concern than a short-range air-superiority fighter like the F-22.” The J-20’s size and weapons configuration may, however, preclude it from functioning as an effective strike fighter in either context. Importantly, the mission types Chinese pilots are trained for may determine how the J-20 is eventually utilized...
> 
> Reports differ regarding the J-20’s range, which is expected to fall between 1,200 and 2,700 kilometers. Regardless of this uncertainty, the J-20’s combat radius is likely to extend well-beyond the Chinese mainland. The U.S. Naval War College suggests that the J-20 could be an “effective surface-attack platform for out to several hundred nautical miles at sea.” Air Power Australia notes that the J-20 would be a suitable choice of aircraft for operating within China’s “first island chain” and “second island chain.” Should China integrate aerial refueling aircraft with the J-20, the stealth fighter’s operational range would extend even further across the Asia-Pacific.
> 
> Increased range offers China considerable flexibility in terms of basing options. Basing the J-20 further inland means the J-20 can conduct distant missions before returning to the relative safety of China’s Integrated Air Defense System. This modernized aerial defense net – composed of early warning sensors, long-range surface-to-air missiles, and air interceptors – may deter opposing air forces from pursuing J-20s into the mainland.
> http://chinapower.csis.org/china-chengdu-j-20/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

While nay saying of China's economy seems to be an annual sporting event, there are plenty of signs things are not quite the way the Chinese want us to see them:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-06/china-s-ascent-isn-t-looking-so-inevitable-anymore



> *Has China's Rise Topped Out?*
> The spread of its global economic influence is slowing sharply.
> By Michael Schuman
> August 6, 2017 at 17:00:06 EDT
> 
> The fall from grace of China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co. Ltd. continues to get steeper. Not long ago, the mysterious firm was chasing one foreign deal after another, becoming a symbol of China’s global economic ambitions. Now it appears the government may be pressuring Anbang to divest those prized foreign assets. If that proves to be the case, China will have given foreign businessmen yet another reason to be wary of working with Chinese companies: the uncertainty of an erratic, intrusive state meddling in private financial affairs.
> 
> But the Anbang case is also part of something bigger, and for China’s economic future, scarier. In just about every category, China’s rise into a global economic superpower has stalled. And the Chinese government sits at the heart of the problem.
> 
> Most people around the world still seem to believe China’s ascent is relentless and inevitable. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that while more of those polled still see the U.S. as the world’s leading economy, China is quickly narrowing the gap. Chinese President Xi Jinping has been feeding that positive image by presenting his country as a champion of globalization, trade and economic progress.
> 
> Statistics tell a different story. The common perception is that China is swamping the world with exports of everything from mobile phones to steel to sneakers. In fact, the entire Chinese export machine is sputtering. Between 2006 and 2011, China’s total merchandise exports nearly doubled, powering the country through the Great Recession. Since then, they’ve increased less than 11 percent, according to World Trade Organization data.
> 
> The same trend holds for China’s currency. In late 2014, the renminbi broke into the top five most-used currencies for global payments, reaching an almost 2.2 percent share. China seemed well on the way to achieving its long-stated goal of turning the yuan into a true rival to the dollar. But that progress has reversed. In June, the renminbi chalked up only a 2 percent share, according to Swift, slipping behind the Canadian dollar.
> 
> The situation isn’t very different in China’s capital markets. While the government has cracked open its stock and bond markets to foreign investors, they still prefer buying Chinese shares listed in Hong Kong or New York to those in Shanghai or Shenzhen. For instance, domestically traded A-shares in a China equities fund managed by Zurich-based GAM account for less than 10 percent of its holdings.
> 
> In part, China is simply running into the difficult transition every country faces when losing its low-cost advantage. Facing stiff competition from countries like India and Vietnam, where wages are lower, China is losing ground in apparel and textile exports to the United States. Meanwhile, the Chinese economy isn’t replacing these traditional exports with new, high-value ones quickly enough. For example, in 2016, China exported 708,000 passenger and commercial vehicles, a sharp deterioration from the more than 910,000 shipped abroad in 2014.
> 
> Rather than boosting China’s global expansion, government policy is holding it back. The renminbi remains a sideshow in currency markets because the state can’t stop fussing with its value. In May, the central bank actually reversed its stated policy to liberalize the renminbi’s trading and imposed more control. Investors haven’t forgotten the heavy hand Beijing employed to try to quell a stock market collapse in 2015, leaving them wary of exposing themselves to Chinese shares.
> 
> Nowhere is the disconnect between China’s global ambitions and actual policy greater than with the government’s interference in overseas direct investment. For a while, officials were encouraging big companies to shop abroad, resulting in a surge of deal-making by firms like Anbang. That led to a debt-crazed buying binge. Having created the problem, the government then stepped in to “fix” it, by suddenly changing course and clamping down on foreign deals. According to the American Enterprise Institute, China’s offshore investment still grew by 9 percent in the first half of 2017, but only because of one giant deal -- state-owned China National Chemical Corp.’s acquisition of Syngenta AG. Take that one out, and overseas investment would have fallen by about a third.
> 
> The root cause of China’s global stall is this continued inability to let markets be markets. Meddling in the allocation of finance has ensured that much-needed capital gets gobbled up by the politically connected, not the competitive. Then the government tries to rectify the damage with more government. In an effort to rejuvenate exports, China has unleashed a subsidy-rich industrial program to upgrade its manufacturing called “Made in China 2025.” To help companies expand around the region, the government has cooked up the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure-building scheme that looks to many like a boondoggle.
> 
> The fact is that Chinese companies will face enough trouble transforming into global players -- with the brands, technology, financial savvy and management expertise to battle it out with the world’s best -- without bureaucrats intruding. Anbang may or may not be an overleveraged neophyte that bit off more than it could chew. The point is that China would be better served letting the market decide.
> 
> This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile at the Himalayan military cockpit--a bit alarmist headline but (note Chinese leaking)...



> China and India on brink of armed conflict as hopes of resolution to border dispute fade
> _Chinese military primed for battle, military sources say; Indian troops ‘prepared for any eventuality’_
> 
> Chinese and Indian troops are readying themselves for a possible armed conflict in the event they fail in their efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to their border dispute on the Doklam plateau in the Himalayas, observers said.
> 
> On Friday [Aug. 11], India’s defence minister Arun Jaitley told parliament that the country’s armed forces are “prepared to take on any eventuality” of the stand-off, Indian Express reported the same day.
> 
> Sources close to the Chinese military, meanwhile, said that the People’s Liberation Army is increasingly aware of the possibility of war, but will aim to limit any conflict to the level of skirmishes, such as those contested by India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
> 
> China repeats demand for remaining 53 Indian troops to leave its territory in disputed region
> 
> “The PLA will not seek to fight a ground war with Indian troops early on. Instead it will deploy aircraft and strategic missiles to paralyse Indian mountain divisions stationed in the Himalayas on the border with China,” a military insider told the South China Morning Post on condition of anonymity, adding that he believes Indian troops will probably hold out for “no more than a week”.
> 
> Another military source said that officers and troops from the Western Theatre Command have already been told to prepare for war with India over the Doklam crisis.
> 
> “There is a voice within the army telling it to fight because it was Indian troops that intruded into Chinese territory in Donglang [Doklam],” the second source said. “Such a voice is supported by the public.”
> 
> Diplomacy to defuse China-India border crisis hits a roadblock, sources say
> 
> Both sources said that China’s military believes any conflict will be controlled, and not spill over into other disputed areas, of which there are currently three along the 2,000km border between the two Asian giants.
> 
> However, Indian defence experts warned that once the first shot is fired, the conflict may escalate into full-scale war. That in turn could result in New Delhi blockading China’s maritime lifeline in the Indian Ocean.
> 
> “Any Chinese military adventurism will get a fitting reply from the Indian military,” Dr Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy, a research associate at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, told the Post.
> 
> “Certainly, it will be detrimental for both, but if Beijing escalates [the conflict], it will not be limited. Perhaps, it may extend to the maritime domain as well,” he said.
> 
> Amid China-India row, Modi takes to Weibo with sympathy for Sichuan quake victims
> 
> “If China engages in a military offensive against India, New Delhi will take all necessary measures ... [and will] respond to Chinese actions in its own way. Why only a border war? It could escalate to a full-scale India-China war,” he said...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2106493/china-and-india-brink-armed-conflict-hopes-resolution



Pity North Korea getting all the attention elsewhere.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

It's being reported that Chinese State media has given a deadline of August 19th for Indian Forces to withdraw or they will be forcefully removed from the region. This could get ugly, really fast, India is unlikely to back down and let China Annex part of Bhutan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

MilEME09 said:
			
		

> It's being reported that Chinese State media has given a deadline of August 19th for Indian Forces to withdraw or they will be forcefully removed from the region. _This could get ugly, really fast_, India is unlikely to back down and let China Annex part of Bhutan.




I agree. This is, potentially, much more serious than the American "bluster war" with North Korea.

India is anything but a pushover; the Indian Army is, I think, one of the best in the world, probably, qualitatively, quite a bit better than the Chinese PLA which is still in the midst of a generation long project aimed at making the PLA smaller and much more professional.


----------



## The Bread Guy

MilEME09 said:
			
		

> It's being reported that Chinese State media has given a deadline of August 19th for Indian Forces to withdraw or they will be forcefully removed from the region. This could get ugly, really fast, India is unlikely to back down and let China Annex part of Bhutan.


Meanwhile, this from Indian media ...


> Forays into the Indian Ocean by Chinese submarines is on the rise. On April 22, a Yuan class diesel-electric submarine was spotted in the Indian Ocean. This is one of the more modern and dependable Chinese submarines; they have a reputation of being "quiet."
> 
> The Yuan class boat visited Karachi on May 26 and left on June 1 and then, again on July 11 for six days. Karachi is perhaps a natural destination for a Chinese submarine as Pakistan is a close ally. In recent times, Sri Lanka has not been keen to host Chinese submarines or as the Lankans say, submarines from any countries. The submarine was also accompanied by a PLA vessel.
> 
> The official reason for the presence of the PLA Navy has been "anti-piracy" missions. But surely, a submarine, and one as advanced as this one, isn't the best way of fighting pirates off the coast of East Africa ...


----------



## MilEME09

Reportedly China is trying to get a naval base set up in Pakistan, if so, this could become a regional conflict really fast, and a war of three nuclear armed nations is a lot more of a worry then US vs NK


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now in Oz--will Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and free trade with the Dragon-mad Liberals notice?



> Anti-espionage laws head to parliament
> _The Turnbull government will crack down on foreign interference with new laws to come to parliament before the end of the year._
> 
> New laws to deal with espionage and foreign interference will be brought to parliament by the end of the year.
> 
> Attorney-General George Brandis is putting the finishing touches to the laws, which were initiated in May just before media reports of Chinese Communist Party influence over the Liberal and Labor parties.
> 
> "It's the government's expectation to introduce a bill before the end of this year," Senator Brandis told Sky News on Friday.
> 
> A Four Corners-Fairfax investigation in June named two billionaires that domestic intelligence agency ASIO identified as having links to the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> Between them, Chau Chak Wing and Huang Xiangmo donated $6.7 million to the major parties.
> 
> Senator Brandis is understood to have been briefed by US security officials on the operation of America's Foreign Agents Registration Act, which could provide a model for the Australian laws.
> 
> The US laws, which began in 1938, require people acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to disclose on a website their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as their activities, receipts and spending.
> 
> Penalties for breaching the US laws range from $5000 to five years in jail.
> 
> Intelligence agency ASIO's last annual report said Australia was a target of espionage and foreign interference because of its alliance with the US and the desire by foreign interests to gain insights into the country's positions on international diplomatic, economic and military issues.
> 
> There was also foreign interest in Australia's energy and mineral resources, innovations in science and technology and "a desire to shape the actions of decision-makers and public opinion".
> 
> As well, ASIO has warned of "malicious insiders" - both self-motivated and recruited - who threaten to sabotage computer systems, use information to facilitate attacks or leak information to harm Australia's national security.
> 
> The government is also considering laws to ban donations from foreign citizens and entities to political parties, associated entities and third parties.
> http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/09/22/anti-espionage-laws-head-parliament



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

To repeat--will Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and free trade with the Dragon-mad Liberals notice?



> Spies and a magic weapon: why are Australia, NZ so suspicious of China?
> _Controversy over a New Zealand MP who taught English to Chinese spies is just the latest in a series of events undermining Beijing in the court of opinion Down Under_
> 
> IF CHINA is indeed trying to influence domestic policy in Australia and New Zealand, as critics in both countries are claiming, its approach appears to be backfiring.
> 
> Recent controversies regarding Chinese influence down under – including the revelation last week that the New Zealand MP Yang Jian had taught English to Chinese spies – have prompted discussions in both Canberra and Wellington on whether more should be done to protect policymakers and parliaments from foreign interference.
> 
> Some experts said Yang’s case – as well as media reports alleging that China had been trying to buy influence through political donations and monitoring its students abroad – had raised suspicions of Beijing’s intentions and undermined it in the court of public opinion.
> 
> Last week, Yang, an MP for New Zealand’s governing National Party, confirmed he had taught English to Chinese spies in the 1980s and 1990s. The Financial Times and New Zealand website Newsroomreported that Yang had been investigated by the country’s spy agencies over connections to China – links that are yet to be proven.
> 
> Yang rejected allegations he was a spy and denied being disloyal to New Zealand despite admitting he had been a member of the Communist Party while in China, and had not declared the names of the military institutions he taught at when applying for citizenship. He claimed the allegations were a “smear campaign” to damage him and the National Party ahead of Saturday’s general election “just because I am Chinese”.
> 
> China’s foreign ministry also dismissed the reports, saying that “certain media make up fake news by inventing groundless assumptions based on hearsay evidence and fabricating something out of thin air”.
> 
> Whatever the truth of the allegations against Yang, his story has highlighted the increasing sensitivity in Australia and New Zealand regarding Chinese influence.
> 
> Professor Anne-Marie Brady at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, who presented a conference paper on the topic over the weekend, said that _under President Xi Jinping there had been a growing Chinese effort to influence domestic policy in other countries_ [emphasis added], including in New Zealand where Chinese consular authorities keep an eye on the growing ethnic-Chinese population and Chinese-language media has links to the Communist Party...
> http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2112473/spies-and-magic-weapon-why-are-australia-nz-so-suspicious-china



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Much else also mentioned by Chairman of JCS:



> America's top general says China will probably be the 'greatest threat to our nation' by 2025
> 
> The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs testified to the Senate Armed Services Commitee on Tuesday [Sept. 26] that China would "probably" pose the greatest threat to the United States by 2025.
> 
> In a hearing before the Committee votes to reappoint Gen. Joseph Dunford in his current role as the top military advisor to the president, he addressed the rise of China, Russia's increasing use of electronic and cyber warfare, and worries over threats from North Korea.
> 
> "The Russians, Chinese, and others are doing what I describe as conducting competition at a level that falls below conflict," Dunford said. "In my judgment, we need to improve our ability to compete in that space and in the areas specifically ... our electronic warfare and information operations capability."
> 
> Although Dunford is expected to easily win support from Congress to remain on the job, he was asked about a variety of issues. Here's what he said in response to a number of senator's questions...
> http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-general-says-china-will-be-the-greatest-threat-by-2025-2017-9



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Shape of things to come?



> Live-fire show of force by troops from China’s first overseas military base
> _Armed forces send message of combat readiness to Djibouti militants and other potential attackers, observers say_
> 
> The exercises in Djibouti on Friday [Sept. 22] involved dozens of officers and took place at the country’s national gendarmerie training range, the People’s Liberation Army Navy said in an online report.
> 
> Troops arrived at the base – China’s first overseas garrison – less than two months ago and the drill was meant to test the personnel’s capacity to handle a range of weapons and tasks in extreme heat, humidity and salinity, the report said.
> 
> Temperatures in the African nation routinely rise above 40 degrees Celsius at this time of year.
> 
> “This is the first time our soldiers stationed in Djibouti have left the camp to conduct combat training,” base commander Liang Yang was quoted as saying.
> 
> China sends troops to military base in Djibouti, widening reach across Indian Ocean
> 
> “The live-fire training will help explore a new training model for the [Chinese] overseas garrison.”
> 
> Footage aired by state-run CCTV showed PLA marine corps using various weapons – from pistols to automatic rifles, sniper rifles and machine guns – to fire at targets.
> 
> Beijing-based military expert Li Jie said the troops had to be on combat alert at all times because of the region’s complex political conditions and Djibouti’s geographic importance.
> 
> 'Chinese Navy logistics base in Djibouti will drive other investment'
> 
> The African nation is at the southern entrance to the Red Sea along the route to the Suez Canal, and Eritrea and Somalia. It also hosts US, Japanese and French bases.
> 
> “The PLA troops based in Djibouti should be able to protect themselves and resist attacks from terrorists, pirates, local armed forces, or even foreign troops,” Li said.
> 
> Chinese defence adviser says Djibouti naval facility is a much-needed ‘military base’
> 
> China’s Procuratorial Daily, the top prosecutor’s official newspaper, reported earlier that a Japanese naval vessel sent divers to approach a Chinese warship as both vessels were docking at Djibouti. Without specifying the time of the encounter, the report said Chinese naval troops used “a strong light and a verbal warning” to drive away the Japanese divers.
> 
> Japanese frogmen approached Chinese warship at Djibouti, state media say
> 
> The _Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force established a base in Djibouti in 2011_ [emphasis added], and Tokyo said last year it was considering expanding the facility.
> 
> China began building what it describes as a logistics base in Djibouti last year, but docking facilities for navy ships, barracks and other military equipment are still under development.
> 
> The 36-hectare base will resupply vessels taking part in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions off the coasts of Yemen and Somalia...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2112780/live-fire-show-force-troops-chinas-first-overseas



From 2015:



> Why are there so many military bases in Djibouti?
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33115502#



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Top Dragon grasping PLA:



> Xi Jinping clears decks for top-level changes to China’s military
> _Party congress expected to usher in major changes at body that controls People’s Liberation Army_
> 
> China’s ongoing military leadership reshuffle, which has seen two heavyweights in the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC) lose their commands in the past month, will help President Xi Jinping shake up the body, which controls the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and increase his dominance of it, analysts said.
> 
> The ousting of General Fang Fenghui, former head of the CMC’s Joint Staff Department, and General Zhang Yang, former head of the commission’s Political Work Department, from the functional posts that gave them CMC membership is further proof that Xi, who also chairs the CMC, is cementing his control over the military.
> 
> In late August, the Ministry of National Defence revealed that General Li Zuocheng, a decorated veteran of the Sino-Vietnamese war, had replaced Fang as chief of the Joint Staff Department. Then, on September 8, the army mouthpiece PLA Daily carried a report referring to Admiral Miao Hua, formerly the PLA Navy’s political commissar, as head of the Political Work Department.
> 
> Xi promoted Li to full general and Miao to the equivalent naval rank in 2015 and both men are seen as being firmly in his camp.
> 
> Fang and Zhang were also left off the list of members of the military delegation to next month’s five-yearly Communist Party congress, while Li and Miao will be among those in attendance.
> 
> “The CMC’s Joint Staff Department head is the man who oversees the PLA’s battle operations, while the Political Work Department chief takes care of ideological education,” a Beijing-based retired senior colonel, who asked not to be named, said.
> 
> “Xi can only implement reforms when he really controls both the barrel of the gun and the pen, so he should assign men he trusts to the two important jobs,” he said.
> 
> In an unprecedented military overhaul launched in 2015, Xi announced that the PLA, the world’s biggest army, would shed 300,000 troops, taking their number down to two million. He also scrapped the PLA’s four former headquarters – General Staff, General Political, General Logistics and General Armaments – and established 15 functional departments to divide their powers. The PLA’s seven military commands were also reshaped into five theatre commands.
> 
> Sources close to the military told the South China Morning Post that Xi would use the party congress, due to open on October 18, to restructure the CMC...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2113054/xi-jinping-clears-decks-top-level-changes-chinas



Then see this excellent, cautionary, long read:



> The Chinese World Order
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/chinese-world-order/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

I suspect the author (a Canadian) of this AvWeek piece is on to something--perhaps the comprador Liberals' ultimate fall-back position is to have Comac effectivel take over Bombardier aviation and CRRC take Bombardier rail (but politically possible, would US allow the former?):



> Opinion: Why Boeing vs. Bombardier Is Really About China
> Oct 9, 2017 Danny Lam
> 
> The trade dispute sparked by Boeing’s charges that Bombardier is dumping C Series aircraft at unfair prices is marked by loud rhetoric on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. Ottawa’s Liberal government has threatened Boeing’s defense business in Canada and enlisted UK Prime Minister Theresa May to lobby U.S. President Donald Trump. But Canada’s attempts to derail the petitions filed by Boeing with the U.S. Commerce Department and International Trade Commission have had no effect so far. The reason: The true target is not really Canada, but China and its aircraft industry.
> 
> U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer charges that Beijing’s efforts to subsidize and create national champions and force technology transfers distorts markets throughout the world and is an “unprecedented” threat to the global trading system. Take aviation. By 2036, China is projected to be the No. 1 or No. 2 market in commercial aviation, a sector long dominated by Airbus and Boeing. Its national champion is Comac, which manufactures the ARJ21 regional jet and C919 narrow-body and is developing—with Russia—the CR929 widebody. Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” plan sets aggressive targets for its aircraft industry, tasking Comac with taking more than 10% of the domestic market for mainline commercial aircraft.
> 
> That goal is backed by mercantilist policies and substantial government subsidies. Beijing has tried to break into markets before. China has poured tens of billions of dollars into cracking the semiconductor oligopoly controlled by U.S., Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese companies. But so far it has not been successful in securing state-of-the-art integrated-circuit manufacturing technology because the industry has worked collaboratively to frustrate Chinese mercantilist ambitions. This has prevented the semiconductor market from suffering the fate of solar photovoltaics, or steel, where the market has been gutted by excess capacity from hundreds of new Chinese businesses.
> 
> Bombardier’s China strategy amounts to aiding and abetting Chinese mercantilism in commercial aviation, with predictable consequences for the global aerospace industry. The company entered into an agreement with Comac in 2012 to explore synergies between the C Series and C919, with the goal of challenging the Airbus-Boeing duopoly. Nothing concrete came out of that, and Bombardier nearly went bankrupt in 2015 before receiving investments from Canadian provincial and federal entities of at least $3 billion.
> 
> In May 2017, the Financial Times reported that Comac and Bombardier held talks about Chinese entities buying a stake in Bombardier Commercial Aircraft or the C Series, quoting an unnamed source as saying, “everything is on the table.” That included Chinese access to Bombardier’s technologies and its marketing, distribution and support infrastructure. _This potential collaboration with China is, in my opinion, the principal but unspoken reason behind Boeing’s trade complaint_ [emphasis added].
> 
> As a Canadian company, Bombardier is entitled to preferences under the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) that sharply restrict U.S. trade actions so long as the product qualifies as NAFTA-origin. Indeed, Canada’s entitlement to arbitration under NAFTA’s Section 19 may be its last resort in the C Series dispute short of taking its case to the World Trade Organization. Not surprisingly, the U.S. wants to eliminate Chapter 19 in the renegotiation of NAFTA now underway.
> 
> So long as components add up to 50% of transaction value or 60% of net cost, a product qualifies for NAFTA preference. What if Chinese aerospace companies gained access to those same NAFTA preferences?
> 
> In its defense against Boeing’s claims, Bombardier says more than 50% of Canadian-assembled C Series aircraft come from the U.S., including its engines and avionics. The wing comes from Bombardier’s plant in Northern Ireland, but much of the fuselage already comes from SACC in China. It is conceivable that Bombardier could incorporate NAFTA-qualified engines, avionics and subsystems, but complete the final assembly in China—and have an aircraft that still qualifies as NAFTA-origin under the current rules.
> 
> Similarly, Chinese-built aircraft branded “Bombardier” could be sold from Canada while bypassing all tariffs against a China-based manufacturer. And Bombardier technology could enable Comac to build a successor to the C919 that would be truly competitive with Airbus and Boeing offerings in China. _In other words, with Chinese investment, Comac-Bombardier could rapidly stand up as a capable competitor to the Airbus-Boeing duopoly in the North American and Chinese markets_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Boeing’s complaints about C Series subsidies are getting the media attention, but _Bombardier’s willingness to transfer technologies and knowhow to China is at the heart of this trade dispute_ [emphasis added].
> 
> _Danny Lam is a research associate at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. His research includes work on China, NAFTA and defense issues. The views expressed are not necessarily those of Aviation Week. _



From 2015, also based on an AvWeek piece, note links at end:



> Bombardier Really Bombing? Chicom Combardier?
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/bombardier-really-bombing-chicom-combardier/



On rail later in 2015 (CRRC is merged super-big Chinese company):



> Running Off the Rails, or, Bust Up Bombardier? Dragon’s Embrace Section
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/mark-collins-running-off-the-rails-or-bust-up-bombardier-dragons-embrace-section/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

So who is the intended target of US messaging?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rhetoric-on-north-korean-nukes-a-message-to-china-not-pyongyang-says-david-petraeus/article/2638281



> *'Rhetoric' on North Korean nukes a message to China, not Pyongyang, says David Petraeus*
> 
> by Daniel Chaitin | Oct 22, 2017, 11:04 AM | Updated Oct 22, 2017, 12:57 PM Share on Twitter  Share on Facebook  Email this article  Share on LinkedIn  Print this article
> David Petraeus interprets all of the "rhetoric" about the North Korea nuclear threat as being directed at China, rather than Pyongyang, to convince Beijing to get tough in negotiations as it could have the ability to strike a U.S. city "on this president's watch."
> 
> "I think there's still an opportunity here," Petreaus said Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week," responding to a fellow former CIA director's warning that there is a 20 to 25 percent chance of an armed conflict with North Korea.
> 
> Comments like these, Petraeus said, are aimed at getting Chinese President Xi Jinping's attention. China "has the ability to bring North Korea to its senses but doesn't want to bring it to its knees," the former Army general added.
> 
> Asked if China is unable to sway a belligerent North Korea, Petraeus said Beijing needs to understand "the new strategic reality that would result, which is very uncomfortable to them," and listed off number of consequences, including the possibility of returning nuclear weapons to South Korea.
> 
> Ways for China to pressure North Korea include cracking down on trade and U.N. Security Council resolutions, Petreaus noted.
> 
> Former CIA Dir. David Petraeus to @ThisWeekABC: Nuclear war with North Korea unlikely. https://t.co/zRbURS7MKl pic.twitter.com/I1wRI21mGS— ABC News (@ABC) October 22, 2017
> 
> On the possibility of a nuclear war, Petreaus said is "certainly concerned" but didn't put too much stock into it being a likely outcome, though he did mention that he believes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could have a nuclear weapon capable of striking the U.S. while President Trump is still in office.
> 
> "All of this, again is a communications strategy that is trying to make sure that China understands that this administration is in a very different situation from any of its predecessors," Petreaus explained. "That North Korea on this president's watch could have the capability to hit a city in the United States with a nuclear weapon."


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLA is "taking advantage of the large number of Chinese-heritage scientists at Australian universities" (lots of photos)--one wishes Justin Trudeau et al. were more interested in what is going on in this country:



> Australian universities are helping China's military surpass the United States
> 
> In Beijing, President Xi Jinping is systematically reforming and strengthening the military - part of the Strong Army Dream that is intimately tied to his signature slogan "the China Dream".
> 
> But it now seems that this Strong Army Dream is being realised with Australian help.
> 
> Scientists at Australian universities are collaborating with China's top military technology universities on programs beneficial to the People's Liberation Army which, contrary to its name, is the army of the Chinese Communist Party rather than the Chinese people.
> 
> The scientists' work includes sophisticated computing seen as essential to China's ambition to eclipse the United States in advanced military technology.
> 
> The man at the centre of many exchanges with Australian universities is Lieutenant-General Yang Xuejun, who has been a Communist Party member since the 1980s and was a promoted to the party's powerful Central Committee at this week's 19th Party Congress. The Congress reappointed Xi as party chairman for another five-year term and elevated him to a status alongside Mao Zedong as a great leader.
> 
> Until recently Yang was president of the PLA's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). One of the PLA's leading supercomputer experts, he is now president of the PLA Academy of Military Science, China's foremost military research centre.
> 
> Scientists at the University of NSW and the University of Technology Sydney have worked with Yang, whose research with Australian scientists has resulted in over a dozen scientific papers, mostly on supercomputer technology. In a recent Chinese CCTV propaganda documentary, he highlighted the importance of supercomputer research in China's military plans. NUDT supercomputers are used in advanced aircraft design, combat simulation and the testing of tactical nuclear weapons.
> 
> One of Yang's most productive collaborators is Xue Jingling, Scientia Professor of Computing Science and Engineering at the University of NSW. Starting in 2008, their joint research has focused on stream processing technology, one of the foundations of NUDT's record-breaking Tianhe series supercomputers.
> 
> Xue has extensive links with NUDT, having published over two dozen papers with NUDT supercomputer experts. In 2009 he also became a professor at NUDT, an affiliation not mentioned on his UNSW profile. Some of Xue's research with NUDT has been funded by grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) worth over $2.3 million. _Three of Xue's current doctoral students at UNSW are graduates of NUDT and are likely all PLA personnel_ [emphasis added].
> 
> A spokesperson said UNSW is aware of the research being undertaken by Xue and his students, and the collaboration with General Yang, and believes it meets the provisions of the Commonwealth Defence Trade Controls Act.
> 
> *Digging deeper*
> 
> NUDT has collaborated with Australian researchers on hundreds of papers in high-tech fields like materials science, artificial intelligence and computer science. The _PLA university's international collaborations are heavily concentrated in Australia, taking advantage of the large number of Chinese-heritage scientists at Australian universities_ [emphasis added].
> 
> ...Scientists from CSIRO, ANU, Curtin University and the University of Wollongong have also recently engaged in similar work with the PLA.
> 
> The optics of Australian scientists working closely with researchers linked to the PLA are a matter of deep concern. The head of the ANU's National Security College, Rory Medcalf, notes that these PLA links may jeopardise future research partnerships with the US defence industry...
> http://amp.smh.com.au/world/australian-universities-are-helping-chinas-military-surpass-the-united-states-20171024-gz780x.html



Lots more.  Wish Dick Fadden were still in our gov't.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Note engines:



> Chinese Fighter Developments Revealed
> 
> New information on China’s jet fighter development has emerged this week, during the twice-in-a-decade Communist Party Congress (CPC). Many of the country’s senior defense industrial leaders also hold positions in the upper ranks of the party. As such, they use the event to try to gain advantage over their rivals in the budgeting process. In particular, significant developments in the stealthy J-20 and FC-31 programs have been revealed.
> 
> The Chengdu J-20 first flew in the beginning of 2011 but did not make its first public appearance until the 2016 Zhuhai Air Show—and then only in a brief flypast. The latest reports state that the aircraft has entered low-rate production and that it is close to being deployed with operational combat units. Official but anonymous Chinese sources have stated that putting the J-20 into service is aimed at creating leverage for China in advance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit, scheduled for next month.
> 
> The same Chinese sources state that the J-20 now has a reliable domestically produced powerplant. Previous models of the J-20 were powered with the Russian-made Saturn/Lyulka AL-31F engine. The Chinese engine can still not match the performance of the Pratt & Whitney F119 that powers the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, but it supposedly enables the J-20 to supercruise. There will be 100 J-20s in service by 2020 and another 100 by 2023, it is reported.
> 
> The Shenyang FC-31 has gone through a major redesign to correct a number of shortcomings seen in the original prototypes. Among other changes, the structure has been reworked so that it is now three metric tons heavier and between 20 and 30 inches longer. The aircraft’s Russian-made RD-33 engine has been replaced with a Chinese engine that is supposedly “smokeless,” and the aircraft’s planform has been redesigned in order to reduce its radar cross section.
> 
> The new FC-31 variant is also supposed to receive the new WS-19 engine in 2019 and will give this aircraft supercruise capability as well. The radar is also reported to have been upgraded with new modes, including the ability to carry out dependent targeting or battlefield management tasks. The extra airframe structure will help in the eventual design of a carrier-capable version.
> 
> Other Chinese sources are also claiming that Indonesia is a serious potential export prospect for the FC-31. Jakarta had previously taken a minor role in the development of the Korean KF-X stealthy fighter. But that cooperation has reportedly ended.
> 
> The J-10C is the third and most advanced version of the single-engine fighter produced at Chengdu. It has completed a number of weapons tests and other operational validation flights. Most recently the aircraft successfully demonstrated air-to-air refuelling with one of the PLAAF’s tankers.
> 
> A NATO intelligence officer with significant experience in China told AIN that this week’s news was significant for being all about "indigenous" Chinese programs. “You notice that nothing has been said about the Russian aircraft in the PLAAF, or the copies that Chinese industry now builds of the Sukhoi Su-27. That is not an accident, and it shows that in President Xi’s ‘new China,’ the emphasis is definitely on the country’s own home-grown weaponry,” he said.
> https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2017-10-27/chinese-fighter-developments-revealed



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Suborning open societies is much more cost effective than military confrontation. One can only wonder how many of our organizations have been penetrated and suborned?

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/11/13/chinas-influence-game/



> *China’s Influence Game Down Under*
> CHARLES EDEL
> China’s sophisticated infiltration of Australian politics is a troubling example of how authoritarian states can subvert open societies. The United States should heed the lesson.
> 
> Tragedy hovered over the birth of the American Republic. But that tragedy was not defined mainly by the carnage of the American Revolution, which resulted in the death of more than one percent of the population. Rather, for the American statesmen who came together to draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and met a dozen years later to design the Constitution, the life and death of the republics of antiquity preoccupied their thoughts. Steeped in the history of Greece and Rome, the Founders realized that the odds of creating and maintaining a self-governing republic in the face of hostile autocratic states were stacked against them. Nowhere was this danger greater than in the threat foreign interference posed to political independence.
> 
> America’s founding generation obsessed over this danger. During the debates at the Constitutional Convention, John Jay made the case in The Federalist (No. 2) that the “dangers from foreign force and influence” could exacerbate the country’s internal divisions and leave it distracted, weakened, and vulnerable. These fears materialized in the 1793 Genêt Affair, when France’s Ambassador to the United States sought to interfere in American politics on behalf of France. Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State, charged that such blatant interference in America’s democracy was “hazardous to us” and its implications were “humiliating and pernicious.” He demanded that the French immediately recall their ambassador. John Quincy Adams warned his fellow citizens that “of all the dangers which encompass the liberties of a republican State, the intrusion of a foreign influence into the administration of their affairs, is the most alarming, and requires the opposition of the severest caution.”
> 
> In the aftermath of U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of several Trump campaign officials on charges of conspiracy, the problem of foreign interference in our democracy now hangs over the White House. But Putin’s Russia is not the only country seeking to shape the choices of democratic societies. Putin’s Russia is not the only country seeking to shape the choices of democratic societies. A different, subtler, more sophisticated, and potentially long-ranging effort is being waged by Xi Jinping’s China.
> 
> Because Washington is riveted by the unfolding Russian drama, because most of Beijing’s efforts fly under the radar, and because Beijing has repeatedly claimed that its state-directed activities are solely the exercise of soft power, many Americans have missed China’s attempts to influence, shape, and suborn democratic decision-making. But a look at the debates currently roiling the Australian political, educational, and business communities offers some notable insights into Beijing’s influence efforts. It also previews likely challenges ahead for American policymakers.
> 
> Over the past several months, the Australian media and government have sought to analyze Chinese influence across Australian society. The resulting reports, which began appearing in print and on television in early June, revealed that Beijing was monitoring and directing Chinese student groups in Australia, had threatened Australian-based Chinese dissidents and their families, was attempting to silence academic discourse in Australia deemed offensive to China, and was seeking control of all Chinese-language media in Australia. This came on the heels of revelations that individuals in Australia with links to the Chinese Communist Party had made major political donations to Australian politicians. The sum of these actions has prompted an intensifying debate among Australia’s national security community and politicians.
> 
> The Australian intelligence services have long known about the risks posed by Chinese influence, but the matter is now attracting significant public scrutiny. In late May, Duncan Lewis, the head of ASIO (the Australian equivalent of the FBI), warned Parliament that foreign influence efforts in Australia were occurring at an “unprecedented scale.” The implications to Australian democracy, he noted, were potentially extreme, as such interference “has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation’s sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests.” And while Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not cite China by name in early June, he amplified this concern by noting that Australian “interests are also directly threatened by attempts by foreign states to compromise the integrity of our democratic institutions and processes.” Discussing Russian influence operations and cyber disinformation campaigns in the American election, and noting that similar threats could compromise the integrity of Australia’s “democratic institutions and processes,” Turnbull called for a revamping of the legal framework governing political donations and disclosures.
> 
> Unlike America, which requires individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments to register their activities, and which theoretically bans political campaign contributions from foreign sources, Australian law has no such provisions. As revealed in an Australian television investigative special this summer, this loophole allowed for several prominent Australian-Chinese businessmen with ties to the Chinese government to make substantial contributions to Australian politicians. In some instances, these appeared tied to a quid pro quo of support for Chinese government positions. Prompted by growing concerns of Chinese influence in its electoral system, the Australian government is now drafting legislation in an effort to address these gaps. Expected in early 2018, the new laws are likely to tighten campaign finance rules, require the registration of foreign agents, further define espionage, and provide a more effective legal framework to combat foreign interference.
> 
> On Australian campuses, too, a vigorous debate has been occurring over the nature of Chinese influence. Journalists have reported instances of Chinese agents monitoring Chinese students in Australia and threatening their families in China when they voice opinions contrary to Beijing’s. In Sydney and elsewhere, an uptick in protesters disrupting lecturers deemed offensive to Chinese sensibilities is a sign of the times; and concern is growing that universities, eager for donations, investments, and fees generated from foreign students paying significantly higher tuition, might not defend their institutional values as forcefully as they otherwise might. Australian politicians now acknowledge that this type of activity poses a threat to free and open societies, since free speech serves as the basis of liberal education, and is more broadly the cornerstone of democratic debate.
> 
> In early October, the Secretary of Australia’s Foreign Ministry spoke bluntly of “untoward influence and interference” at Australian universities. Speaking at the University of Adelaide’s Confucius Institute, a Chinese-government-funded academic institution, Frances Adamson, who formerly served as Australia’s Ambassador to China, warned, “The silencing of anyone in our society — from students to lecturers to politicians — is an affront to our values.” Julie Bishop, Australia’s Foreign Minister, echoed this point recently, stating that Australia will not tolerate “freedom of speech curbed in any way involving foreign students or foreign academics.” Penny Wong, the Labor shadow Foreign Minister, made a similar point declaring that “we would not want any group to seek to silence another in the contest of … ideas.”
> 
> Along similar lines, Australia’s Chinese-language media now largely speaks with one voice. A major report in 2016 documented that the Chinese Communist Party exerts significant influence over Chinese-language media in Australia. The report cautioned that “the notion that the Chinese-language media in Australia has been ‘taken over’,” was too simplistic. However, leading Australian Sinologist John Fitzgerald has noted that the “extensive reach of the Chinese party-state silences and intimidates alternative voices and commentaries” in Australia. Attempting to govern the debate in Australia among the Chinese-speaking community, Beijing also appears to be trying to control the flow of advertising dollars to independent Chinese-language newspapers.Attempting to govern the debate in Australia among the Chinese-speaking community, Beijing also appears to be trying to control the flow of advertising dollars to independent Chinese-language newspapers.
> 
> Although some of these issues resonate in the Australian business community, the debate there has been quieter. China may be a near-peer economic competitor of the United States, but it looms much larger for the smaller, export- and capital-dependent Australian economy. The relative size of U.S. and Australian trade flows with China bears the point out. About 31 percent of Australian exports go to China, which is by far Australia’s largest export market, whereas China is the United States’ third largest export market, and the destination for 8 percent of U.S. exports. The common narrative in Australia is that it got through the financial crisis of 2008 without a recession because of Australia’s close trade relationship with China. This narrative is only partially correct, since Australia’s massive exports to China rest in no small part on the industrial and technical capacity built up by decades of foreign investment, especially from the United States, whose investments in the country are more than five times greater than China’s. But even with this important qualification, the different sizes of the U.S. and Australian economies and the relative share of each country’s exports to China shape very different mindsets among the business communities in the two countries.
> 
> In the United States, there has long been discussion of unfair Chinese trade practices, state-sponsored cyber attacks on American companies, and the theft of intellectual property. In Australia, the broad contours of the debate are different, primarily because most of the country’s trade commodities—iron ore, coal, and tourism—are less hackable. While the debate has intensified around access to and vulnerabilities of Australia’s critical infrastructure, and there is considerable public opposition to foreign ownership in the agricultural sector, the business community has not yet been convinced that the risks outweigh the opportunities.
> 
> But even here, the debate is slowly changing as a growing number of business leaders in Australia acknowledge the challenges of dealing with a command economy practicing mercantile policies. James Packer, the Australian casino magnate who has expanded his businesses into Macau and Hong Kong, previously advocated for Australia to start offering its Chinese friends a better return on investment. But after his employees were jailed by Chinese authorities in 2016, and he took a considerable financial hit, Packer became acutely aware of the risks of doing business in China.
> 
> Absent rule of law, secure property rights, and any guarantees of procedural fairness in China, the Australian business community increasingly recognizes that little will safeguard their investments. Multinational companies have learned the hazards accompanying demands for access to proprietary commercial information, with large-scale thefts of intellectual property that negate investments in research and development. Australian businesses are now learning similar lessons, but the China debate in the Australian business sector is probably five years behind the same debate in the United States.
> 
> While Australia has lately begun paying more attention to Chinese actions in the political, academic, media, and business spheres, the breadth of these activities is only starting to become clear. Behind most of these activities is a Chinese state-directed campaign to build support for Beijing’s larger political agenda. Referred to as “influence operations” and “political warfare” in an earlier era, such efforts combine overt and covert methods to create an environment in foreign capitals that is politically and socially conducive to Chinese interests. Professor Anne-Marie Brady, of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has documented these efforts in an extraordinarily thorough report tracking China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping. Brady examines the attempts of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party to “guide, buy, or coerce political influence abroad.” While most of her research focuses on activities in New Zealand, it is broadly applicable to liberal democracies around the world.
> 
> Coincidentally, the Austrian political philosopher Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies at the very same university in New Zealand some seventy years ago. Having fled the Nazis for New Zealand, Popper argued that history could be understood as a drawn-out battle between proponents of open, dynamic societies and authoritarians preferring closed societies, with citizens “who obey, who believe, and who respond to [their] influence.” According to Popper, it would always be in the interest of the authoritarians to try to influence the affairs of open societies to further their own agenda. Popper cautioned that the enemies of open society were powerful and numerous, while liberal democracies were rare, fragile, and required extreme vigilance to maintain.
> 
> In this instance, it is necessary to emphasize that criticism of the Chinese Communist Party’s activities is not, and never should be, equated with criticism of people of Chinese ethnicity. As Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University observed in September, failing to address this issue relegates Australian citizens of Chinese descent to a second-class status, and dismisses the protection of their rights as less important than stable relations with the Communist Party that runs China. An open society welcomes, and indeed encourages, the integration of talented individuals from all backgrounds.
> 
> An open and free society will always be vulnerable to external influences. America’s Founders recognized this reality, and sought to build protections against foreign interference. When Citizen Genêt attempted to meddle in America’s sovereign democratic processes, it was Alexander Hamilton who suggested sunshine as the best disinfectant. In a cabinet meeting of the President’s advisors, Hamilton strongly urged that the government lay “the whole proceedings” with “proper explanations” before the American people in order to prevent Genêt and his American sympathizers from undermining the country’s confidence in Washington’s administration.
> 
> Hamilton understood that transparency and open debate were critical to preserving the sovereignty of the American Republic in the face of foreign interference. More than two hundred years later, confronted by Russian and Chinese influence efforts, Australia and the United State are re-learning the lesson that open societies demand vigilance and require defenders. The first step is recognizing the threat posed by authoritarian states seeking to influence free societies. Governments must also inoculate the public to these threats by conducting public education campaigns to ensure broader understanding. Fundamentally, without a more robust defense of liberal values, open societies could find their core national interests of sovereignty, freedom of expression, and the free flow of ideas, goods, and people irreparably damaged. As the American Founders understood, the preservation of national interests requires the unceasing defense of liberal values.
> 
> Published on: November 13, 2017
> Charles Edel is a Senior Fellow & Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Centre, and author of a forthcoming USSC report on the American presidency. Previously, he served as Associate Professor of Strategy & Policy at the U.S. Naval War College.


----------



## ModlrMike

The foregoing bears reading for Canada. I would not be surprise to find many of the same tactics at work here.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Oz gov't responding--and Justin Trudeau and his comprador friends?



> Australia to introduce safeguards against covert foreign interference
> 
> Australia said on Tuesday [Nov. 14] it will introduce reforms by the end of the year to combat foreign interference and covert political influence, which could pose a threat to the economy and political system.
> 
> The decision to improve safeguards follows a review of Australia’s espionage and foreign interference laws and will include legislation to ban foreign political donations, Attorney-General George Brandis told Parliament.
> 
> “Espionage and covert foreign interference can cause immense harm to our national sovereignty, to the safety of our people, to our economic prosperity, and to the very integrity of Australian democracy,” Brandis said.
> 
> Policies modeled in part on the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring individuals or institutions to make a declaration if acting on behalf of a foreign power to influence the political processes, would also be introduced, he said.
> 
> While Brandis did not mention any countries targeted by the legislation, _there has been growing concern about China extending its influence_ [emphasis added].
> 
> In June, Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, reported there had been a concerted campaign by China and its proxies to “infiltrate” the Australian political process and institutions to promote their interests.
> 
> China dismissed the accusation as “totally unfounded and irresponsible”.
> 
> This week, one of Australia’s largest independent publishers said it decided to delay the publication of a book that alleges widespread Chinese government influence in Australian institutions due to legal concerns [more here http://www.smh.com.au/national/free-speech-fears-after-book-critical-of-china-is-pulled-from-publication-20171112-gzjiyr.html ].
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-legislation-foreign/australia-to-introduce-safeguards-against-covert-foreign-interference-idUSKBN1DE0NT



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

_Globe and Mail_ reporter in Beijing's story on China's active measures in Canada (paper has been hard on the Chicom case for quite some time):



> Australian publisher drops book on Chinese influence; author warns Canada is also at risk
> 
> Alarmed by creeping Chinese influence on Australian political life, Clive Hamilton set out to investigate.
> 
> Businesses and people connected to China had already become the biggest foreign financial contributors to the country's political parties. But "it seemed to me there was much more going on" said Prof. Hamilton, a scholar at Charles Sturt University.
> 
> He found much to write about – only to become, himself, the subject of China's efforts to promote its agenda around the world, after fears of retaliation by Beijing caused his publisher to back away from a book containing his findings.
> 
> Now, he is warning about the risks of China's rising power – including in Canada, which has become an important target for a Beijing-led campaign that relies on shadowy government-funded agencies to spread influence among Chinese people living overseas.
> 
> Such "united front" work has been called a "magic weapon" by President Xi Jinping, who echoed a formulation that dates all the way back to Mao Zedong. But Mr. Xi has overseen an effort to enhance China's international standing unparalleled in recent history, either in China or among countries such as Russia or Turkey, whose foreign-influence campaigns Beijing has eclipsed in scale and ambition.
> 
> China has cast its united front efforts both as a necessary corrective to negative images of the country and a bid to invite participation in its domestic development by the worldwide community of ethnic Chinese.
> 
> "We have expanded to the maximum extent the boundaries of unity and called on Chinese people from every corner of the world to secure the core interests of our country, and to contribute to our reform and development," Zhang Yijiong, administrative vice-minister of the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party Central Committee, said in a rare public appearance in late October...
> 
> But in courting Beijing, Australia has allowed China to gain so much sway, Prof. Hamilton warns, that "it will take a decade of determined effort to unwind the program of influence that has been executed in this country."
> 
> And, he says, other countries would do well to heed what he has experienced — including _Canada, where schools at all levels are increasingly reliant on tuition dollars from Chinese students while Ottawa has approved controversial investments in sensitive sectors as it holds talks toward a free-trade agreement with Beijing.
> 
> Canada is far less economically reliant on China than Australia. But its large population of Chinese immigrants has also made it a target for the United Front Work Department and other arms of the Communist Party and Chinese government tasked with exerting Beijing's influence abroad_ [emphasis added].
> 
> A 2016 book, United Front Theory and the Frontier of Its Practice, says groups of large, relatively new immigrants overseas are "one of the most heated topics" for Chinese study, which has led researchers to devote special attention to countries such as Canada.
> 
> The book then provides a description of networks of influence among the roughly one million Chinese immigrants who have arrived in Canada since 1980.
> 
> Everyday Chinese in Canada continue to show "a very limited degree" of political interest – but that, the authors suggest, provides fertile ground for united front influence.
> 
> "The positive effects of Chinese political organizations and the encouragement from Chinese political parties have not been fully exploited," says the book, whose primary authors are Chen Mingming, a retired Chinese foreign affairs official, and Xiao Cunliang, who was formerly in charge of united front work in a Chinese province.
> 
> _"The huge increase in population has given Chinese people stronger political influence in Canada. The number of Chinese people running for all levels of government positions is increasing. Some Chinese elites have had very impressive performances in elections,"_ [emphasis addes] the authors write in the book, which The Globe and Mail obtained in Beijing...
> 
> Australia...is planning new rules to force the registration of foreign agents. Canada has no such legislation, although such a law has long existed in the U.S., where the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission recently recommended registering Chinese journalists as foreign agents...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/australian-publisher-drops-book-on-chinese-influence-author-warns-canada-is-also-at-risk/article37024966/



Meanwhile our comprador-in-chief:



> Trudeau mulling China trip in December, free trade talks possible
> http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-mulling-china-trip-in-december-free-trade-talks-possible-1.3684761



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Post from 2015 on Chinese active measures etc. in Canada based on a _Globe and Mail_ story (the paper really is doing quite a job on this matter):



> Spookery in Canada: China, CSIS and…the Ontario Government, Part 2
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/mark-collins-spookery-in-canada-china-csis-and-the-ontario-government-part-2/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Further to post above, Aussies are waking up to Chinese active measures in their country.  Globe and Mail has been doing a lot to make Canadians aware but will Justin Trudeau and our compradors pay any heed?


> Security agencies flag Chinese Manchurian candidates
> 
> ASIO has identified about 10 ­political candidates at state and local government elections whom it believes have close ties to Chinese intelligence services, in what sec­urity officials assess as a deliberate strategy by Beijing to wield influence through Australian politics.
> 
> Days after the Turnbull ­government unveiled a package of measures aimed at cracking down on foreign meddling in ­Australia’s political affairs, fresh ­details are emerging about the ­extent to which political parties have been compromised by ­foreigners, in particular the Chinese government.
> 
> Most of those whom security services identified as having close ties to Chinese intelligence ser­vices and the Communist Party were candidates at local government elections, but concerns have been raised about state and federal figures as well.
> 
> The Weekend Australian ­understands that at least one of those candidates successfully ­obtained elected office, and ­remains there today.
> 
> It is understood that in the case of that politician, ASIO believes his ­relationship with the Chinese ­security services predates his ­election.
> 
> ASIO believes the cultivation of political candidates is part of an orchestrated campaign by Beijing to insert agents of influence into Australian parliaments.
> 
> Sources with knowledge of Beijing’s tactics described it as “strategic and deliberate’’.
> 
> Much of the concern centres on politics in western Sydney, where parties vie for the support of ethnic constituencies. The extent of the penetration has been described to The Weekend Aus­tralian as being “patchy but deep”.
> 
> Political parties are easy ­targets for intelligence services because they are porous and ­simple to join.
> 
> On Wednesday, the government unveiled a suite of measures aimed at cracking down on foreign interference, which ASIO has declared is occurring at ­“unprecedented levels”.
> 
> In its annual report this year, ASIO said it had “identified foreign powers clandestinely seeking to shape the opinions of members of the Australian public, media ­organisations and government officials in order to advance their country’s own political objectives...
> 
> Neither ASIO nor the Turnbull government named the countries it believed were guilty of meddling in Australia’s affairs, but it is an open secret that the new laws are aimed ­principally at China and, to a ­lesser extent, Russia, which under President Vladimir Putin sees espionage as an extension of state power.
> 
> The new measures include a registry of foreign agents, a move designed to provide greater transparency around benign forms of foreign activity, such as lobbying, as well as the creation of the new offence of “unlawful foreign ­interference”, which will target covert, hostile acts.
> 
> Taken together, these new measures underscore the concerns that exist around the vulnerability of Australia’s political institutions...
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/national-security/security-agencies-flag-chinese-manchurian-candidates/news-story/81e6dad4b472180141f543d2f08e3e25



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Long article in The American Interest on how China seeks to influence or subvert institutions in Democratic nations. While the article focuses on Australia and New Zealand, the same sorts of efforts are u underway in the United States and Canada as well. We would be well aware of these sorts of soft attacks on Canadian institutions:

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/12/15/this-sputnik-moment/

Archived article here: https://navy.ca/forums/threads/127064/post-1513234/topicseen.html#msg1513234


----------



## MarkOttawa

More on Chinese foreign influence/active measures:



> [2016] How Convenient: “Ontario minister Michael Chan defends China’s human-rights record”
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/mark-collins-how-convenient-ontario-minister-michael-chan-defends-chinas-human-rights-record/
> 
> [Australian] Laws on foreign influence just the beginning in fight against Chinese coercion
> http://www.smh.com.au/comment/laws-on-foreign-influence-just-the-beginning-in-fight-against-chinese-coercion-20171206-gzzr4j.html
> 
> Saying the unsayable in Australia’s relations with China
> https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/saying-unsayable-australia-s-relations-china
> 
> Plus a recent (career) Canadian ambassador to China:
> 
> Trudeau’s China setback was a self-inflicted wound
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/trudeaus-china-setback-was-a-self-inflicted-wound/article37222702/



That ambassador to China (David Mulroney, who also led the "Afghanistan Task Force" under PM Harper) is quoted here:



> Beware effects of China's 'united front' in Canada: former envoy
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/beware-effects-of-china-s-united-front-in-canada-former-envoy-1.3712754



Also from a pretty hard-line Canadian prof who once worked at our embassy in Beijing:



> Canada-China relations are now ripe for a rethink
> http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/burton-canada-china-relations-are-now-ripe-for-a-rethink



Then there is the inimitable Terry Glavin, hard on our comprador class (a nice reversal, with Chinese history in mind: https://www.britannica.com/topic/comprador )



> The whole Liberal establishment covets close China relations... and for what?
> http://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-the-whole-liberal-establishment-covets-close-china-relations-and-for-what
> 
> As Chinese money corrupts western politics, Trudeau's Liberals keep cashing in
> http://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-liberals-not-keen-to-prohibit-foreign-read-chinese-money-from-influencing-canadian-voters



The _Globe and Mail_, for its part, has been hard on the China case for quite a while:



> Ethnic Chinese Abroad: Once a Dragon, Always a Dragon Says Beijing
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/mark-collins-ethnic-chinese-abroad-once-a-dragon-always-a-dragon-says-beijing/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Long article on Wired about the Chinese "Social Credit" system. This is an interesting way to use soft power to nudge or push citizens into behaviours desired by the State. Canada is rolling out the "Carrot" app which has similar attributes. You don't have to guess what happens to people with low ""Social Credit" scores.....

Archived article: https://army.ca/forums/threads/127076.0.html

https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/



> MARA HVISTENDAHL
> BUSINESS
> 12.14.1706:00 AM
> *INSIDE CHINA'S VAST NEW EXPERIMENT IN SOCIAL RANKING*
> 
> IN 2015, WHEN Lazarus Liu moved home to China after studying logistics in the United Kingdom for three years, he quickly noticed that something had changed: Everyone paid for everything with their phones. At McDonald’s, the convenience store, even at mom-and-pop restaurants, his friends in Shanghai used mobile payments. Cash, Liu could see, had been largely replaced by two smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat Pay. One day, at a vegetable market, he watched a woman his mother’s age pull out her phone to pay for her groceries. He decided to sign up.
> 
> To get an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell phone number and scan his national ID card. He did so reflexively. Alipay had built a reputation for reliability, and compared to going to a bank managed with slothlike indifference and zero attention to customer service, signing up for Alipay was almost fun. With just a few clicks he was in. Alipay’s slogan summed up the experience: “Trust makes it simple.”
> 
> Alipay turned out to be so convenient that Liu began using it multiple times a day, starting first thing in the morning, when he ordered breakfast through a food delivery app. He realized that he could pay for parking through Alipay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s license and license plate numbers, as well as the engine number of his Audi. He started making his car insurance payments with the app. He booked doctors’ appointments there, skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese hospitals are famous. He added friends in Alipay’s built-in social network. When Liu went on vacation with his fiancée (now his wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants and bought trinkets with Alipay. He stored whatever money was left over, which wasn’t much once the vacation and car were paid for, in an Alipay money market account. He could have paid his electricity, gas, and internet bills in Alipay’s City Service section. Like many young Chinese who had become enamored of the mobile payment services offered by Alipay and WeChat, Liu stopped bringing his wallet when he left the house.


----------



## dimsum

Thucydides said:
			
		

> You don't have to guess what happens to people with low ""Social Credit" scores.....



Nope, you don't.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now, does anyone expect Justin Trudeau's comprador governement to do anything like the Aussies (not that the RCMP would have the resources to do much in any event)?



> AFP ready to enforce new spying laws
> 
> Chinese spies or Russian agents of influence may soon have the Australian Federal Police knocking on their door with the nation’s top cop, AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin, confirming police were preparing to prosecute the new foreign interference laws.
> 
> Mr Colvin said discussions were under way between the AFP and domestic security agency ASIO on how many potential criminal investigations might arise from the Turnbull government’s revamped foreign interference laws.
> 
> The laws introduce an array of new offences, including the crime of unlawful foreign interference which makes it illegal to engage in covert attempts to influence Australian politics. The laws also require foreign operators, such as state-owned foreign media outlets, to register as foreign agents. A failure would breach the law.
> 
> The combined effect of the legislation is to criminalise behaviour that was once mainly of concern to intelligence agencies, necessitating a much greater role for police, who are already flat to the boards managing the surging terrorism threat.
> 
> This, too, was under consideration by the police, Mr Colvin said.
> 
> “We are looking at the nature of new offences and we’re talking to our partners about the number of investigations we’re likely to conduct,’’ Mr Colvin said. “We’re also looking at the kind of investigative capabilities we’ll need.’’
> 
> The new laws are likely to create a fresh resourcing headache for the AFP, which is already straining to keep abreast of the threat posed by Islamic State-inspired terrorism.
> 
> Proving the crime of foreign interference is also likely to rely heavily on surveillance resources and technique.
> 
> The _government hopes that the creation of new foreign interference offences will act as a stiff deterrent to would-be foreign agents, who in the case of China, are often Australian citizens sympathetic to Beijing’s cause_ [emphasis added, imagine our gov't suggesting that].
> 
> At the same time, former attorney-general George Brandis has made it clear the laws are much more focused and clear than similar regimes overseas and were written to be used. However, the laws have infuriated the Chinese government. its embassy in Canberra earlier this month accused the Turnbull government of undermining “mutual trust’’...
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/national-security/afp-ready-to-enforce-new-spying-laws/news-story/d4986a9a7fae05a9068de5d440f658be



To its great credit the _Globe and Mail _, for its part, is hard on the China case in Canada, e.g.:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/two-conservative-senators-business-venture-linked-to-china/article37340503/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/beijing-foots-bill-for-visits-to-china-by-canadian-senators-mps/article37162592/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/globe-editorial-does-justin-trudeau-get-china/article37275351/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dimsum

> The government hopes that the creation of new foreign interference offences will act as a stiff deterrent to would-be foreign agents, who in the case of China, are often Australian citizens sympathetic to Beijing’s cause [emphasis added, imagine our gov't suggesting that].



I don't know - my take on reading that sentence was that the Australian (the newspaper) suggested it, especially the second half of the sentence, not the government.  Aside from tough talk, it'd be interesting to see how that would pan out as China is Australia's largest trading partner.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Dimsum: one can read between the lines here in ASIO's (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) 2016-17 annual report:



> ...
> *Countering espionage, foreign interference and malicious insiders*
> 
> ...We identified foreign powers clandestinely seeking to shape the opinions of members of the Australian public, media organisations and government officials in order to advance their country’s own political objectives. Ethnic and religious communities in Australia were also the subject of covert influence operations designed to diminish their criticism of foreign governments. These activities—undertaken covertly to obscure the role of foreign governments—represent a threat to our sovereignty, the integrity of our national institutions and the exercise of our citizens’ rights...
> https://www.asio.gov.au/AR2017-01.html



Plus in another section:



> ...
> *Espionage and foreign interference*
> 
> ...Interference by foreign actors can undermine Australia’s sovereignty by advancing a foreign state’s cause through covertly interfering in Australia’s political system and seeking to unduly influence public perceptions of issues. Foreign interference in Australia’s diaspora communities through harassment or other means can erode the freedoms enjoyed by all people living in Australia...
> https://www.asio.gov.au/AR2017-03.html



News story:



> ASIO battling spy threat from China and Russia
> ...
> ASIO’s update comes amid a debate about Chinese government influence in Australia and after a warning from former ­Defence Department head ­Dennis Richardson about espionage operations in the country.
> 
> He said China was not the only country undertaking such operations.
> 
> Neil Fergus, the chief executive of international consultancy Intelligent Risk, said there was a “fine line” between legitimate acts of soft diplomacy and foreign ­interference, and he believed that had been crossed by China in its activities in Australia.
> 
> “(The government is) putting pressure on individuals and to the extent it’s been alleged that family members of some individuals have been threatened back in mainland China,” Mr Fergus told The Australian.
> 
> He said the Russian government’s activities related more to “disinformation” campaigns, and other smaller countries were also threatening Australians.
> 
> “There are some Asian countries that monitor Australian citizens who came from their countries,” Mr Fergus said.
> 
> A spokesman for Attorney-General George Brandis, who oversees ASIO, said he had previously warned about the threat of interference from foreign intelligence and undertaken a comprehensive review of Australia’s espionage and foreign interference laws.
> 
> Labor MP Anthony Byrne, who is deputy chairman of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, said the report was a wake-up call to the public and policymakers...
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/national-security/asio-battling-spy-threat-from-china-and-russia/news-story/78ae4df93a6e9e3e664b28bdd1e88b96



Lots more if link just above doesn't work
https://www.google.ca/search?q=These+activities+...+represent+a+threat+to+our+sovereignty%2C+the+%C2%ADintegrity+of+our+national+institutions+and+the+exercise+of+our+citizens%E2%80%99+rights&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b&gfe_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=74dFWqTHH-ufXrGHl_gL

Rather different from Canada, eh?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

More on CCP's foreign interference/active measures/propaganda abroad--Justin Trudeau open your eyes--excerpts:



> United Front Work after the 19th Party Congress
> 
> Lost in the sea of political rhetoric and policies laid out during the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 19th Congress in October were references to United Front Work—an important group of policies that the CCP uses to forge consensus at home and exert influence abroad (Xinhua, November 3). Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s remarks on the United Front deserve particular attention...
> 
> The recent public extension of the [United Front Work] Department’s efforts to any place with a sizeable population of Chinese emigrants, students or even visitors, also mean it is now relevant to many foreign governments.
> 
> An increasingly sensitive united front constituency, the established Chinese Diaspora groups around the world and the groups of PRC raised Chinese entrepreneurs, emigrants and students, all subsumed under the label ‘Overseas Chinese’ will be united with through ‘the maintenance of extensive contacts’. In 2017, as result of united front work in places like Australia and New Zealand, the relevance of Xi’s emphasis was starting to become apparent even though the groundwork had often been laid years or even decades before.
> 
> While the CCP has been emphatic in rejecting what it calls interference in China’s domestic affairs, if the recent cases of Chinese influence over politicians in Australia and New Zealand are any indication, we might well see a dramatic increase in United Front-related interference elsewhere...
> https://jamestown.org/program/united-front-work-19th-party-congress/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

There's an interesting story in the _*Globe and Mail*_ about how the Chinese are trying to gain better control of the Muslim Uyghur in Xinjiang province in the far North-West of China:



> "It's a mix of the North Korean aspiration for total control of thought and action, with the racialized implementation of apartheid South Africa and Chinese AI [artificial intelligence] and surveillance technology," said Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans. "It's a truly remarkable situation, in a global sense."



It's worth the read ...


----------



## Edward Campbell

The _*South China Morning Post*_ reports on the progress of China's third aircraft carrier  which is being built in Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard. It is reported that "*The sources all said it was too early to say when the third vessel would be launched, but China plans to have four aircraft carrier battle groups in service by 2030* ... [and] ... *Shipbuilders and technicians from Shanghai and Dalian are working on the third vessel, which will have a displacement of about 80,000 tonnes – 10,000 tonnes more than the Liaoning, according to another source close to the PLA Navy.*"


----------



## MarkOttawa

Whilst on the PLA Navy aircraft carrier front:



> China has started building its third aircraft carrier, military sources say
> _Work on the vessel, which will use a hi-tech launch system, began at a Shanghai shipyard last year but it is not known when it will be completed_
> 
> China started building its third aircraft carrier, with a hi-tech launch system, at a Shanghai shipyard last year, according to sources close to the People’s Liberation Army.
> 
> One of the sources said Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard Group was given the go-ahead to begin work on the vessel after military leaders met in Beijing following the annual sessions of China’s legislature and top political advisory body in March.
> 
> “But the shipyard is still working on the carrier’s hull, which is expected to take about two years,” the source said. “Building the new carrier will be more complicated and challenging than the other two ships.”
> 
> China has been trying to build up a blue-water navy that can operate globally and support its maritime security, but it so far has only one aircraft carrier, the Liaoning – a repurposed Soviet ship it bought from Ukraine that went into service in 2012.
> 
> Its first Chinese designed and built aircraft carrier, the Type 001A, is expected to go into full service later this year.
> 
> The sources all said it was too early to say when the third vessel would be launched, but China plans to have four aircraft carrier battle groups in service by 2030, according to naval experts.
> 
> Shipbuilders and technicians from Shanghai and Dalian are working on the _third vessel, which will have a displacement of about 80,000 tonnes – 10,000 tonnes more than the Liaoning_ [emphasis added]“China has set up a strong and professional aircraft carrier team since early 2000, when it decided to retrofit the Varyag [the unfinished vessel China bought from Ukraine] to launch as the Liaoning, and it hired many Ukrainian experts ... as technical advisers,” the second source said.
> 
> The sources also confirmed that the new vessel, the CV-18, will use a launch system that is more advanced than the Soviet-designed ski-jump systems used in its other two aircraft carriers.
> 
> Its _electromagnetic aircraft launch system will mean less wear and tear on the planes and it will allow more aircraft to be launched in a shorter time than other systems_ [emphasis added], according to another source close to the PLA Navy...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2126883/china-has-started-building-its-third-aircraft-carrier



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile China looks like establishing a fairly serious naval foothold in Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean--Indians will be quite unhappy (and US?):



> First Djibouti ... now Pakistan port earmarked for a Chinese overseas naval base, sources say
> _The facility would be similar to one in operation in African nation, offering logistics and maintenance services to PLA Navy vessels_
> 
> Beijing plans to build its second offshore naval base near a strategically important Pakistani port following the opening of its first facility in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa last year.
> 
> Beijing-based military analyst Zhou Chenming said the base near the Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea would be used to dock and maintain naval vessels, as well as provide other logistical support services.
> 
> “China needs to set up another base in Gwadar for its warships because Gwadar is now a civilian port,” Zhou said.
> 
> “It’s a common practice to have separate facilities for warships and merchant vessels because of their different operations. Merchant ships need a bigger port with a lot of space for warehouses and containers, but warships need a full range of maintenance and logistical support services.”
> 
> Another source close to the People’s Liberation Army confirmed that the navy would set up a base near Gwadar similar to the one already up and running in Djibouti.
> 
> “Gwadar port can’t provide specific services for warships ... Public order there is in a mess. It is not a good place to carry out military logistical support,” the source said...
> 
> Gwadar port is a key part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a centrepiece of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s broader “Belt and Road Initiative” to link China through trade and infrastructure to Africa and Europe and beyond. The corridor is a multibillion-dollar set of infrastructure projects linking China and Pakistan, and includes a series of road and transport links...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2127040/first-djibouti-now-pakistan-port-earmarked-chinese



Paks deny naval base plan, but with bad relations with US and Trump cutting security assistance...



> Pakistan denies reports of Chinese military base near Gwadar
> _Pakistan’s Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Mohammad Faisal dismissed the reports as “propaganda” against the development of CPEC and strengthening Pakistan and China relations..._
> http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/pakistan-denies-reports-of-chinese-military-base-near-gwadar/story-5Qkpxhw62aF80Jpo35ux3J.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

And the Chinese are helping the Greeks expand that country's largest harbour at Piraeus.


----------



## a_majoor

The tricky part of the "Chain of Pearls" strategy is ensuring the people who you paid off to get those ports stay bought when you really need them. The Chinese might discover their choice of partnerships was not entirely well thought out.....


----------



## MarkOttawa

Whilst on the traditional spook front:



> Alleged CIA China turncoat Lee may have compromised U.S. spies in Russia too
> 
> The arrest last week of a former CIA officer suspected of spying for China exposed one of the most significant intelligence breaches in American history. But the damage is even worse than first reported, sources familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
> 
> A secret FBI–CIA task force investigating the case concluded that the Chinese government penetrated the CIA's method of clandestine communication with its spies, using that knowledge to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants, according to multiple current and former government officials.
> 
> American officials suspect China then shared that information with Russia, which employed it to expose, arrest and possibly even kill American spies in that country, said the current and former officials, who declined to be named discussing a highly sensitive matter. The possible sharing with Russia has not previously been reported.
> 
> Those sobering findings, sometime after the inquiry began in 2012, led the CIA to temporarily shut down human spying in China, and to overhaul the way it communicates with its assets around the world, according to former government officials familiar with the case.
> 
> It was a shocking blow to an American spy agency that prides itself on its field operations. There was also a devastating human cost: Some 20 CIA sources were executed by the Chinese government, two former officials said — a higher number of dead than initially reported by NBC News and the New York Times. Then an unknown number of Russian assets also disappeared, sources say.
> 
> Eventually a top secret joint FBI-CIA task force investigation led authorities to suspect that former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee had been spying for China. Lee, 53, was arrested this week and charged, not with espionage, but with a single count of possessing classified information.
> 
> U.S. officials told NBC News they don't believe Lee ever will be charged as a spy, in part because they don't have all the proof they might need, and in part because they would not want to air the evidence they do have in a public courtroom...
> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/cia-china-turncoat-lee-may-have-compromised-u-s-spies-n839316



Earlier:



> Solving the CIA’s Mass Murder Mystery [by former NSA officer John Schindler]
> http://observer.com/2018/01/fbi-arrests-ex-cia-officer-accused-of-compromising-chinese-informants/
> 
> Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/cia-china-mole-arrest-jerry-chun-shing-lee.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

But Justin Trudeau and our pseudo-capitalist Canadian compradors just don't care:



> AFP and ASIO to co-operate on China investigations
> 
> Australia’s police and intelligence chiefs are ramping up efforts to charge spies and counter foreign interference as senior officials concede the previous "catch and deport" system needs overhauling.
> 
> Fairfax Media has confirmed ASIO chief Duncan Lewis and federal police commissioner Andrew Colvin met earlier this month to discuss a new law enforcement regime that could see federal police dedicated to investigating foreign interference and espionage.
> 
> Until now, police have not been directly involved, while intelligence agencies have tended to deport people suspected of spying or foreign influence, instead of prosecuting them under the espionage law.
> 
> The recent meeting between Mr Lewis and Mr Colvin comes amid _efforts by officials in Canberra and Washington to place the countering of foreign interference, influence and intelligence operations on a similar footing to tackling terrorism_ [emphasis added].
> 
> ...new submissions to the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence and security provide ballast for those arguing for more transparency of Australian organisations that are closely aligned to the Chinese government, and its main vehicle for foreign interference, the United Front Work Department. Increasing transparency is a key objective of the proposed laws.
> 
> A lengthy submission by prominent left-leaning academic Professor Clive Hamilton names dozens of United Front organisations in Australia, describing their cultivation of Labor and Liberal politicians. The submission is the most detailed expose´ of Chinese government influence operations in Australia to ever be published.
> Mr Hamilton’s submission states that “the core of Beijing’s presence on university campuses” is represented by at least 37 Chinese Students and Scholars Associations “covering nearly all Australian universities, including all Group of Eight universities, as well as the CSIRO”.
> 
> “CSSAs play a central role in the Chinese government’s efforts to monitor, control and intervene in the lives of Chinese students in Australia and to limit academic freedom on universities,” the submission states...
> http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/afp-and-asio-to-co-operate-on-china-investigations-20180129-p4yz0n.html



See also:



> China vs America: the espionage story of our time
> ...
> Another factor to take into consideration is the successful Chinese propaganda campaign that has been playing out in the United States for years. One reason why America may not yet view China as the growing competitor that it is is because more than 100 Beijing-funded ‘Confucius Institutes’ have been established on US college campuses (and more than 500 worldwide), promoting a benign picture of China and often pressuring colleges to shy away from events that would criticise Beijing...
> https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/01/china-vs-america-the-espionage-story-of-our-time/



More on what Confucius Institutes say:
https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/?s=confucius

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## daftandbarmy

A New Silk Road https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/a-new-silk-road


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now an RCMP/FBI angle that so far has got very little Canadian media coverage--story is Jan. 25 (!):



> McGill professor denies involvement in alleged theft of U.S. military technology
> _Ishiang Shih says the allegations he may have been involved in theft of military technology are part of a misunderstanding._
> 
> An FBI investigation into a threat to U.S. national security — with military secrets apparently being given to the Chinese government — has landed at the door of a McGill professor.
> 
> Last week, RCMP officers raided the Brossard home of McGill associate professor Ishiang Shih, who teaches electrical and computer engineering.
> 
> According to an FBI affidavit, money was transferred by wire from the U.S. to a Brossard company registered in Shih’s name. The money was sent by Shih’s brother, Yi-Chi Shih — who is also an associate professor of engineering at the University of California in Los Angeles.
> 
> Yi-Chi Shih was arrested Friday, Jan. 19 in Pasadena along with Kiet Ahn Mai. Federal prosecutors say the men conspired to have a U.S. company make special high-speed computer chips that were illegally exported to a Chinese company connected to Shih, according to the affidavit. The affidavit alleged a scheme to defraud a U.S. company of its technology and divert it to China unlawfully.
> 
> Authorities say the chips have a number of commercial and military uses, including radar and electronic warfare applications, and that the chips that were exported to China were done in violation of national security laws.
> Reached by La Presse this week, Ishiang Shih said the allegations that he may have been involved in theft of military technology are part of a misunderstanding. He added that he is in the process of looking for a lawyer.
> 
> A home registered to Shih and his wife was raided by the RCMP on Jan. 19 and documents were seized. La Presse reported the raid is part of the ongoing FBI probe into the theft of military technology involving the creation of chips used in radar systems, signal jamming and anti-signal jamming systems, and that some of the technology was turned over to China. However, Thom Mrozek, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney General, would not confirm to the Montreal Gazette Thursday that Ishiang Shih was part of the investigation.
> 
> Ishiang Shih was mentioned in the affidavit as having received a shipment from UPS in connection with the investigation. The package was shipped to McGill’s McConnell Engineering building.
> 
> The FBI investigation monitored communications between the two brothers both by text messages and email about the shipment. Yi-Chi Shih’s travel was also monitored, and his lengthy travel itinerary included several trips to China and Montreal during a 10-year period.
> 
> Ishiang Shih has a business registered in his name called JYS Technologies. The business’s address is a detached home on Auteuil Ave. in Brossard that was sitting empty on Thursday. There were notes posted on two of the windows, with the letterhead of the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales, the public prosecutions department, stating that the house was being monitored. Anyone who noticed any vandalism, negligence or theft was urged to call a private security firm.
> 
> According to a neighbour, a Chinese family lived in the house for several years, but the house has sat empty for the last year.
> 
> The home registered to Ishiang Shih is located a few blocks farther west on Auteuil Ave...
> http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mcgill-professor-denies-fbi-claim-he-stole-military-technology-report



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a nice piece by _South China Morning Post's_ (leading English Hong Kong daily) man in "Hongcouver":



> Does Canada really have more in common with China than with the US? Democracy, the NHL and an 8,891km border suggest not
> 
> Justin Trudeau’s man in Beijing, Ambassador John McCallum, has become possessed of a novel notion – that Canada now is more closely aligned in important ways with China than it is with the United States.
> 
> Yes, that United States, the one with which Canada shares its most important military alliance, the concepts of universal suffrage and representative elected government, more than US$600 billion in annual trade, the National Hockey League and an 8,891km border.
> 
> So, the ambassador’s observations last week raise a number of important questions, not least of which is whether McCallum has recently received a blow to the head or otherwise taken leave of his senses...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2131471/does-canada-really-have-more-common-china-us



Read on.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

Also from the SCMP: "*China’s military fires up world first in revolutionary rail gun technology.*"

     "Photographs of a rail gun mounted on a warship docked in Wuhan, Hubei province, have surfaced on Chinese military websites in the last week,
      indicating the People’s Liberation Army Navy is testing the electromagnetic weapon and has been able to make it more compact ... [but] ... 
      sources close to Chinese military told the South China Morning Post that the destroyer’s propulsion system and internal design were not suited for the rail gun .. [and] ...
      The gun in the photographs was installed on a Type-072 landing ship refitted to house the bulky electrical equipment."


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Recent studies are showing that the Chinese are becoming the largest source of innovators on the globe, we used to be able to maintain a technology edge, but those days may be fading. The loss of industry appears to have a direct result on the innovation that a society has. Whether this was China's aim, or a useful byproduct for them, is unclear.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Very interesting--and relevant to plans in US Nuclear Posture Review to have a few SLBMs, each with a single low-yield nuke:



> China plans sea-based anti-missile shields ‘for Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean’
> _Beijing carried out successful test of mid-course defence system on Monday_
> 
> The assessment came as Beijing announced it had carried out a successful test of its ground-based mid-course defence system on Monday.
> 
> Testing of the anti-ballistic missile system that could shield China from a ballistic missile attack is part of efforts to catch up with the top nuclear nations with anti-missile technology, the United States and Russia. China previously carried out tests of the system in 2010 and 2013.
> 
> Beijing is also working on a sea-based system for the Asia-Pacific region to breach the cold war era line of containment, according to observers. The “first island chain” is a series of archipelagos lying between China and the world’s largest ocean that Beijing says has been used by the United States as a natural barrier to contain it since the cold war.
> 
> “China’s sea-based anti-missile system aims to defend both its territory and overseas interests, because sea-based defence systems will be set up wherever its warships can go,” said Song Zhongping, a military commentator on Phoenix Television. “The first area it will target is the Asia-Pacific region and the Indian Ocean to protect its overseas interests.”
> 
> China has been trying to build up a blue-water navy that can operate globally and safeguard its maritime interests. Observers have said Beijing plans to have four aircraft carrier battle groups in service by 2030. And with three-quarters of its oil imports passing through the Indian Ocean or Strait of Malacca, Beijing is looking to boost maritime defence.
> 
> “With the US and other countries taking on the Indo-Pacific strategy to counter China, Beijing will definitely deploy anti-missile systems in these areas in response,” said Song, a former member of the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Artillery Corps.
> 
> Macau-based military expert Antony Wong Dong said China had developed a new generation sea-based HQ-26 anti-missile system with an ultra long-range 3,500km cruise missile [?]. The system is expected to be installed on the country’s biggest destroyer, the Type 055, which has a maximum displacement of 13,500 tonnes...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLAAF says J-20 operational but...



> Why China’s first stealth fighter was rushed into service with inferior engines
> _Problems encountered in development of new WS-15 engine mean PLA Air Force’s first J-20s are not so stealthy at supersonic speeds_
> 
> China rushed its first advanced stealth fighter jet into service ahead of schedule last year, using stopgap engines, in the face of rising security challenges in the region, the South China Morning Post has learned.
> 
> But that means its capabilities will be severely limited, affecting its manoeuvrability and fuel efficiency as well as its stealthiness at supersonic speeds.
> 
> Without saying how many were in operation, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force confirmed on Friday that the J-20, the country’s fifth-generation fighter, had entered combat service, meaning it was combat-ready.
> 
> However, the aircraft was equipped with inferior engines designed for earlier warplanes when it first joined the air force in March last year because “critical problems” with its tailor-made WS-15 engine, exposed by an accident in 2015, had not been fixed, two independent military sources told the Post.
> 
> “The WS-15 engine designed for the J-20 exploded during a ground running test in 2015,” one source said, adding that no one was injured in the accident.
> 
> “The explosion indicated the WS-15 is not reliable, and so far there is no fundamental solution to overcome such a problem … that’s why the J-20 is using WS-10B engines now.”
> 
> The WS-10B is a modified version of the WS-10 Taihang engine, which was designed for the country’s fourth-generation J-10 and J-11 fighters.
> 
> The explosion was confirmed by another source close to the military, who said the reasons it happened were complicated, with one being the quality control of its single-crystal turbine blades, the key component for such a powerful turbofan engine.
> 
> ...the thrust-to-weight ratio of the original WS-10 engine was only 7.5, while that of the WS-10B tops out at about nine. The thrust-to-weight ratio of the all-direction, vector turbofan WS-15 Emei engine is more than 10 – one of the basic requirements for giving the J-20 “supercruise” ability.
> 
> Supercruise allows stealth fighters like the US’ F-22 Raptor to fly at supersonic speeds without using afterburners, making them harder to detect. The F-22 is powered by the world’s most advanced jet engine, the Pratt & Whitney F119.
> 
> But achieving supercruise would require the single-crystal turbine blades of the WS-15 engine to cope with temperatures even more extreme than those handled by the WS-10...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2130718/why-chinas-first-stealth-fighter-was-rushed-service



Lots more.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Must-read from a Canadian who knows China very well (have heard Chinese is what he speaks at home):



> Burton: Canada must smarten up on its China policy
> 
> If you believe the Chinese Xinhua News Agency, Canada is blithely considering a Chinese Communist proposal to sell out the liberal values that define global institutions such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization, in favour of a made-in-China model that will serve Beijing’s authoritarian nationalist aspirations.
> 
> China’s official state news agency said that Song Tao – who heads the Communist Party Central Committee’s International Liaison Department – briefed Canadian officials last month on Beijing’s plan to displace the United States as the world’s superpower by “building of a community with a shared future for mankind,” which Xinhua said is “not only important to China but bears profound interest for the rest of the world.”
> 
> The decisions being made now are going to radically change the values of global diplomacy and justice for the next century or more. What Canada needs to do is seriously rethink its approach to China, in order to meet the challenge of China’s rise.
> 
> A good start is to recognize the yawning need for regulations that monitor Western public servants and politicians who, after they retire from government, go into lucrative businesses and consultancies funded by China-related sources.
> 
> When former officials enrich themselves with Beijing’s money, once they’re no longer managing China-related policy, it raises huge questions about whether these people had been compromised in defending Canada’s national interests vis-à-vis China while in office. A post-retirement second career, trading on their China-related “friendships” cultivated in government service, is just not OK.
> 
> Multi-ethnic nations such as Canada should encourage citizens of Chinese origin to seek political office; we need legislatures that reflect our diversity. But the sole legitimate function of a politician is to serve the purposes of their nation of citizenship. Any politicians with divided loyalties who spend a lot of time in China for vaguely defined purposes should not have a voice in policymaking impinging on the interests of China in Canada.
> 
> And, obviously, Canadian political parties should not be accepting funding from foreign sources, indirectly or otherwise. Most Western nations’ think tanks that advise on China relations routinely accept funding from China-related sources. And our media often provide an influential platform to apologist pundits whose grants and China travel are on Beijing’s dime through “exchanges.”
> 
> Canada indeed urgently needs a lot more expertise on China so we can better realize our interests with that country, but we should pay for it ourselves.
> 
> We also need to get more resources to our police and security agencies to counter Chinese subversion. Any accredited diplomat who menaces or harasses people in Canada, including ethnic Chinese democracy activists or members of the Tibetan and Uyghur communities, in ways that are incompatible with their diplomatic status should be declared persona non grata and sent home.
> 
> Likewise, Chinese state security agents who enter Canada under false pretences for the same purposes should be tracked down and criminally charged.
> 
> Getting serious about defending against subversion is another important national security concern. Ottawa must expend more energy combating Chinese political, military and economic espionage, and put more resources into identifying people who transfer Canadian secrets and restricted technologies to agents of the Chinese state.
> 
> Beyond our own borders, democracy in Taiwan and Hong Kong should be celebrated, but we shun their progressive leaders who share our values because China tells us to – or else. Canadian leaders should continue to meet with the Dalai Lama periodically, as a legitimate expression of our concern over the situation of Tibetans in China. We must apply our human rights standards equally to all people.
> 
> Finally, it is shocking that there is even a debate over whether Beijing, through the China Communications Construction Company, should be allowed to purchase Canada’s largest publicly traded construction company, Aecon Group. This in itself reveals serious flaws in Canada’s China policy.
> 
> Aecon helped build the CN Tower, Vancouver’s Skytrain, the St. Lawrence Seaway and is about to work on the Darlington nuclear power plant. The growing public outcry against the sale led the government to announce this week that it will order a full national security review. But we will never know what the review indicates as cabinet will assess it in secret.
> 
> If Ottawa bows to Chinese pressure and allows this sale, expect the new version of Aecon to enter unrealistically competitive bids on critical Canadian infrastructure projects, and the Chinese military to have the blueprints of all past and future Aecon projects in perpetuity for their own use, or to share with North Korea should it work that way.
> 
> The Aecon purchase is just one small piece, but a large indicator, of a larger coordinated Chinese Communist plan. Let’s come to our senses and just say “no.”
> 
> _Charles Burton is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. and is a former counsellor at the Canadian embassy in Beijing._
> http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/burton-canada-must-smarten-up-on-its-china-policy



More on Prof. Burton:
http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~cburton/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Whilst really down under, in New Zealand--Justin Trudeau and LPC wake up and smell the Maotai:



> Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern orders security agencies to look into case of burgled professor
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Prime Minister today weighed in on the mysterious case of the professor and the break-ins, instructing the nation's intelligence agencies to look into claims made by a Christchurch-based China expert.
> 
> Last week the Herald broke news University of Canterbury academic Anne-Marie Brady told an Australian parliamentary committee she linked her work to a spate of recent burglaries and her sources on the Chinese mainland had been interrogated by state security officials.
> 
> Brady gained international profile in September after publishing research detailing the extent of China's influence campaigns in New Zealand focusing on a nexus of political donations, appointment of directorships and information management.
> 
> Brady told the Australian parliament her office on campus was broken into in December, and last week her home was burgled - with computers, phones and USB storage devices stolen with other obvious valuables ignored by thieves.
> 
> The latter event was preceded by an anonymous letter detailing push-back against those not toeing the official line out of Beijing and warning: "You are next."
> 
> The matter is being investigated by the police.
> 
> At her post-Cabinet press conference today the _Prime Minister said she first became aware of the affair through media reports_  [emphasis added, curious] and expressed alarm over Brady's claims.
> 
> "I think anyone would be concerned [about] any criminal act if it were in response to the work she's doing," Ardern said.
> 
> She said as Minister responsible for national security and intelligence she was following up the matter and would "certainly be asking some questions"...
> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11997764
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

USAF secretary on China vs Russia as "pacing threat" (NORAD implications?):



> How U.S. Air Force Is Preparing For War With China
> 
> The U.S. Air Force is reimagining the way it fights on the modern battlefield in preparation for any potential clash with China.
> 
> As the Pentagon looks to pivot from the counterterrorism fight in the Middle East to “great-power” conflict, the “pacing threat” for the Air Force is not Russia but China, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told Aviation Week Feb. 21 ahead of the Air Force Association’s (AFA) annual Air Warfare Symposium. While Russia also is a threat to its neighbors, it is not changing as quickly as China, she says.
> 
> “When we look at what the Air Force has to do, the Air Force has to be prepared for either of those threats, but because China is innovating faster, we consider that to be our pacing threat,” Wilson says.
> 
> Now, armed with the biggest infusion of cash for research and development the service has seen in years, Air Force military and civilian leaders are trying to find smarter ways to counter that threat. The fiscal 2019 budget request lays the groundwork for the Air Force to accelerate a next-generation fighter family of systems, with a renewed focus on electronic warfare, as well as to build a sophisticated battle management system to more effectively image the battlefield and improve the resilience and agility of critical space assets.
> 
> To ensure air superiority well into the century, the Air Force is developing a family of systems dubbed “Next-Generation Air Dominance” (NGAD). This year, the service added $2.7 billion over the next five years to accelerate NGAD, bringing total spending over that time period on the program to almost $10 billion.
> 
> The effort will include a “renewed emphasis” on electronic warfare, Wilson says, declining to elaborate.
> 
> It is unclear if NGAD will include a next-generation fighter to replace the Lockheed Martin F-22 or F-35 or both. Top service officials have previously disclosed details of a future platform called “Penetrating Counter Air” (PCA), a new air superiority fighter. The service is working on a more powerful, fuel-efficient engine to extend the range of the PCA, as well as advanced stealth technology to allow it to avoid enemy radars, Gen. Mike Holmes, head  of Air Combat Command, told Aviation Week in August (AW&ST Sept. 4-17, 2017, p. 29).
> 
> Such a capability will be critical as potential adversaries develop ever more lethal weapons, such as Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system and the Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter, Holmes said at the time...
> http://aviationweek.com/defense/how-us-air-force-preparing-war-china



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dimsum

NYT article about the lack of info about Xi Jinping, who now has no term limit.



> Behind Public Persona, the Real Xi Jinping Is a Guarded Secret
> 
> BEIJING — One Sunday last month, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traveled to a village in the mountains of Sichuan Province. He wore an olive overcoat with a fur collar, which he kept zipped up even when he entered an adobe house to meet with villagers. Around an indoor fire pit, he sat among a circle of people wearing traditional clothes of the Yi minority group.
> 
> “How did the Communist Party come into being?” he asked at one point as he extolled the virtues of socialism. Without hesitating, he answered. “It was established to lead people to a happy life,” he said, and then he added:
> 
> “That’s what we should do forever.”
> 
> Mr. Xi’s remark — specifically its open-ended pledge — suddenly resonates more deeply than before. Barring the unexpected, delegates gathering this week for the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing will rubber-stamp constitutional changes that will enable Mr. Xi to remain the country’s leader indefinitely by eliminating presidential term limits.
> 
> Mr. Xi, who will turn 65 in June, has done more than any of his predecessors to create a public persona as an avuncular man of the people, even as he has maneuvered behind the scenes with a ruthless ambition to dominate China’s enigmatic elite politics.
> 
> The government’s propaganda apparatus regularly depicts him as a firm yet adoring patriarch and leader who fights poverty and corruption at home while building China’s prestige abroad as an emerging superpower.
> 
> What is striking is how little is known about Mr. Xi’s biography as a leader, even though he has held the country’s highest posts since 2012 — president, general secretary and commander in chief, among others.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-leader.html


----------



## MarkOttawa

When will Justin Trudeau, Liberals and our complicit compradors awake?



> US Sounds Alarms Over Chinese Tech, IP Thefts & Espionage
> 
> The alarm bells are going off all over Washington and Silicon Valley that Chinese startup investors are coming — and are pumping their money into tech startups at a pace that is making Congress stand up and take notice.
> 
> Just this week, President Donald Trump cited national security concerns when he blocked Singapore-based Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of Qualcomm, a U.S.-based technology firm that has made huge investments in artificial intelligence and other dual-use technologies important to both the commercial sector and the Pentagon. While his decision is being framed as a telltale sign of his newly muscular nationalist “America First” policies, members of Congress, Pentagon brass and tech experts have been raising the flag all week over the precarious American advantages in artificial intelligence, and the massive strides China has made in closing the gap.
> 
> In particular, Beijing has set out on a path to diminish the Pentagon’s traditional technological advantages “by targeting and acquiring the very technologies that are critical to our military success,” the Pentagon’s head of manufacturing and industrial base policy Eric Chewning, told a House panel on Thursday.
> 
> China has said it plans to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, a plan underlined by massive investments that cut across civilian and military applications. In 2017 alone, $12.5 billion in startup funding flowed into artificial intelligence companies, with Chinese startups receiving 48 percent of that money.
> 
> Adm Harry Harris, head of Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday that China is “blurring lines” between military and civilian industry and efforts, warning that U.S. policymakers and businesses need to be be more sensitive the advantages that our open society provides competitors. In particular, when it comes to China, he’s worried about the “purchase of large tracts of land near our training and electronic ranges,” which are ripe for espionage.
> 
> A bill being currently being considered by Congress aims like an arrow straight at the heart of this issue, and if passed, would institute sweeping changes in the national security reviews performed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The White House, Pentagon, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers are all behind The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2017 (FIRRMA) that would grant the government more power to block technology transfers, the sharing of intellectual property with certain foreign individuals, and even scrutinize proposed land sales near sensitive military and intelligence installations in the United States...
> https://breakingdefense.com/2018/03/us-sounds-alarms-over-chinese-tech-ip-thefts-espionage/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Will Justin Trudeau and all our Canadian compradors (of whom Jean Chrétien is a prime Liberal example) ever wake up, diversity and inclusiveness be damned?



> Bigger overseas liaison agency fuels fears about Chinese influence
> _United Front Work Department will take over responsibility for ethnic and religious affairs, adding to concerns that Beijing is tightening its grip_
> 
> The consolidation of the United Front Work Department is part of a restructure of party agencies announced on Wednesday. It will take over the duties of state agencies overseeing ethnic and religious affairs, as well as the overseas Chinese portfolio.
> 
> Observers said the move added to concerns about Beijing’s tight grip on religious and ethnic affairs, and worries about its political infiltration overseas...
> 
> Back in 2015, President Xi Jinping said a rapidly changing internal and external situation meant the department’s work had to be more coordinated.
> 
> The department has meanwhile extended its reach over the years, with its bureaus responsible for liaising with people in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and foreign nations, for example, coordinating with Chinese student associations in other countries...
> 
> It will also be responsible for studying the conditions faced by overseas Chinese, cultural exchanges and for uniting the Chinese diaspora.
> 
> Strengthening the power of the United Front Work Department is part of a sweeping restructure that will see more fusion of the party and the state.
> 
> But it comes as the department is under growing scrutiny from Western governments, such as Australia and the United States, that are suspicious of China’s tactics to spread its influence abroad and meddle in local politics [_Canada_?]...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2138279/bigger-overseas-liaison-agency-fuels-fears-about



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Under Xi CCP's United Front Work Department getting lots more powerful:



> Chinese Communist Party takes firmer grip on propaganda levers
> 
> The Communist Party has taken direct control over the Chinese media, and the party's organisation, "United Front" will take over all dealings with overseas Chinese, as president Xi Jinping continues to weaken the institutions of the state.
> 
> China's state run television and radio broadcasters will be merged into a new body called Voice of China, which is designed to improve China's influence overseas.
> 
> Voice of China will allow "correct guidance of public opinion" and will "strengthen international dissemination capacity building, and tell China stories well", according to a document released by the party's Central Committee.
> 
> The changes constitute a major shake up.
> 
> Xi is streamlining the government of China, and placing it more clearly under party supervision, to make it clear the Communist Party is in control.
> 
> The United Front, a shadowy party body that has been accused in Australia recently of attempting to covertly interfere in overseas Chinese communities, will absorb three state agencies that had dealt with religious groups, overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities in China.
> 
> Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Willy Lam, said the restructure was "a new ball game" that gave United Front additional authority and power.
> 
> An _official document said that United Front would "manage administrative affairs of overseas Chinese", make policy, "investigate and study" overseas Chinese affairs, coordinate social organisations, and contact relevant overseas societies and representatives_ [emphasis added].
> 
> United Front will guide and promote overseas Chinese propaganda, cultural exchange and Chinese language education.
> 
> This would "more extensively unite overseas compatriots and returned overseas Chinese and their relatives", according to Xinhua.
> 
> But Lam warned of a backlash.
> 
> Putting United Front in charge of overseas language education could add credence to the argument of US politicians who are pushing a draft bill for Confucius Institutes to be registered as agents of foreign influence, he said.
> 
> Confucius Institutes currently come under China's education department...
> https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/chinese-communist-party-takes-firmer-grip-on-propaganda-levers-20180322-p4z5p1.html



Then read this super-stinger from Terry Glavin:



> China is a bigger threat than Russia—but you won’t hear Trudeau say it
> _Terry Glavin: Trudeau is quick with harsh words for Putin, but when it comes to clear cases of Chinese meddling in Canada why does he stay mum?_
> http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/china-is-a-bigger-threat-than-russia-but-you-wont-hear-trudeau-say-it/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

China lost a submarine in 2003 with its entire crew dead including a flag officer.Sounds like what happened with some other AIP equiped subs lately.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/2003-chinese-submarine-was-lost-sea-how-the-crew-died-25072


The Type 035 Ming-class submarine was an outdated second-generation design evolved from the lineage of the Soviet Romeo-class, in turn a Soviet development of the German Type XXI “Electric U-Boat” from World War II. The first two Type 035s were built in 1975 but remained easy to detect compared to contemporary American or Russian designs. Though China operated numerous diesel submarines, due to concerns over seaworthiness, they rarely ventured far beyond coastal waters in that era. Nonetheless, Chinese shipyards continued to build updated Ming-class boats well into the 1990s. Submarine 361 was one of the later Type 035G Ming III models, which introduced the capability to engage opposing submerged submarines with guided torpedoes. Entering service in 1995, she and three sister ships numbered 359 through 362 formed the North Sea Fleet’s 12th Submarine Brigade based in Liaoning province.

On April 25, 2003 the crew of a Chinese fishing boat noticed a strange sight—a periscope drifting listlessly above the surface of the water. The fishermen notified the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) which promptly dispatched two vessels to investigate.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Looks like China is coming out to play.



> Satellite images show dozens of Chinese naval vessels putting on a huge show of force in the South China Sea
> Up to 40 ships can be seen in a line formation with submarines flanking a carrier
> Satellite images taken on Monday above off Hainan island in South China Sea
> Beijing describes it as combat drills that were part of routine annual exercises
> Analysts describe it as an unusually large display of China's growing naval might
> 
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5548687/Satellite-images-reveal-force-Chinese-navy-South-China-Sea.html#ixzz5AxrhJHfL
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## Edward Campbell

Huge, if it true and a real coup for Xi Jinping; he trumps Trump. 

Edited to add: Now the _*SCMP*_ reports that what Kim and Xi discussed was trhe "complete denuclearization" of the peninsula which means all US nukes must go, too.

At a guess: President Trump, the USA s a whole, cannot and will not accept that, even though both South Korea and Japan might be in favour. That will, likely leave Trump looking, diplomatically, like the guy who doesn't want peace while Xi will be painted, by his own media, as the guy almost got a nuclear free Korea ... but was stabbed in the back by Trump, the racist, _Sinophobe_, warmonger.


----------



## Edward Campbell

So, it appears that what North Korean leader Kim Jong-un put on the table about "denuclearization" was nothing more than what has been there for decades: he is, probably, I'm guessing willing to decommission his nuclear weapons programme IF, but only if the USA removes ALL of its nuclear weapons from South Korea ... denuclearization, in other words, means for everyone on the entire Korean peninsula.

Two articles in Foreign Affairs pertain:

First, Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite say, in "When Trump Meets Kim Jong Un; A Realistic Option for Negotiating With North Korea" that there is a spectrum of possibilities: "On one end of the spectrum is the popular notion of denuclearizing North Korea, which usually means complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, or CVID. Although professing nominal commitment to this goal, Kim appears to be conditioning it on such formidable requirements that it is extremely unlikely his regime will actually pursue this in any meaningful time frame, no matter how hard the United States sanctions, threatens, or incentivizes it. Kim believes it would be suicidal to give up his “existential” deterrent, so complete denuclearization is simply not on the table today ... [but] ... Even if it were negotiable in the near term, CVID is based on an outdated understanding of North Korea’s nuclear enterprise. When the U.S. government developed the CVID concept in the mid-2000s, North Korea had conducted just one nuclear explosion test and its long-range ballistic missile program was still in its infancy. North Korea’s technical progress over the intervening decade—five additional nuclear tests and dozens of missile flights—means that a more sophisticated and intrusive approach to rolling back its dangerous capabilities is needed." But, they say, "On the other end of the spectrum, and what North Korea might accept following a summit, is a simple temporary suspension of nuclear and missile flight testing, as Russia has suggested, for which Kim would still demand some sanctions relief or other incentive. But the Trump administration would immediately reject such a minimalist concession. After all, Pyongyang’s unchecked arsenal is already worrisome, and it can continue to grow and improve without full-scale tests;" and

Second, Oriana Skylar Mastro writes, in "Why China Won’t Rescue North Korea; What to Expect If Things Fall Apart" that "U.S. officials have long agreed with Mao Zedong’s famous formulation about relations between China and North Korea: the two countries are like “lips and teeth.” Pyongyang depends heavily on Beijing for energy, food, and most of its meager trade with the outside world, and so successive U.S. administrations have tried to enlist the Chinese in their attempts to denuclearize North Korea. U.S. President Donald Trump has bought into this logic, alternately pleading for Chinese help and threatening action if China does not do more. In the same vein, policymakers have assumed that if North Korea collapsed or became embroiled in a war with the United States, China would try to support its cherished client from afar, and potentially even deploy troops along the border to prevent a refugee crisis from spilling over into China ... [but] ... But this thinking is dangerously out of date. Over the last two decades, Chinese relations with North Korea have deteriorated drastically behind the scenes, as China has tired of North Korea’s insolent behavior and reassessed its own interests on the peninsula. Today, China is no longer wedded to North Korea’s survival. In the event of a conflict or the regime’s collapse, Chinese forces would intervene to a degree not previously expected—not to protect Beijing’s supposed ally but to secure its own interests."

I suspect that the latter consideration is what drove Kim Jong-un to visit Beijing. My guess is that he and his inner circle ~ much of which I think is on China's payroll, already ~ understand that they need Xi Jinping much, Much, MUCH more than he needs North Korea. 
While I believe that a war on the Asian mainland that involves the USA would be both:

     1. A regional geo-strategic, political, economic and social disaster of the first order; and
     2. Unwinnable unless the word "win" has taken on a whole new meaning; 

I do not, for even a µsecond, discount the possibility that the new Trump Team in Washington is (relatively) unconcerned about potential consequences and is, instead, focused on immediate "returns."

If, and it's a big, Big IF,  my readings of the East Asian tea leaves are correct, then I think that:

     1. Kim requested this meeting because he knows that ~
        a. He's being backed, father and father, into a corner fro which there is only one exit: a nuclear war that will shatter the whole Korean peninsula
            and kill him, and
        b. He needs Chinese backing to face President Trump; and
     2. Xi Jinping agreed to the meeting because ~
        a. He needs ~ for his on geo-strategic purposes ~ to be "in" this process IF it results in anything other than a war ... and he believes that he
            can prevent Kim, at least, from launching such a thing ~ by having him, Kim Jong-un, killed if that's what it takes, and
        b. He needs to keep President Trump off balance.

What does President Trump need?

I think he needs a quick, domestic, public relations success in which he can be seen as having done something useful. Thus far his presidency has been a massive, doltish failure. he needs to show America ~ no one else really cares ... the world fears Donald Trump but it doesn't care about him ~ that he can make a deal. He is, of course, a lousy, failed businessman who can only make deals when he has a bankruptcy court behind him. He simply doesn't know how to make deals, he's a serial bankrupt who inherited the base of his fortune from his father, Fredrick Trump, who was, actually, a successful real estate developer. If he wants to be re-elected in 2020 he needs to show his base, and others, that he has managed, at least, to do something right ... that something may be what Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite describe as "comprehensive and verified capping of North Korea’s threatening strategic capabilities and activities." Such a "broad cap" they say  "could serve the medium-term interests of the United States and its two allies, Japan and South Korea, while also finding acceptance in China and North Korea." All President Trump rally needs is for the world to let its breath out ... to stop fearing that a nuclear war is just around the corner.

Xi Jinping, however, has other goals.

He is, I think, trying to position himself as the wise and trusted Paramount Leader of a great, peace loving nation. He wants China to displace America as the world's "indispensable nation" and he intends to be in power when that happens.  Xi can afford to "play" a longer "game" .. he doesn't have to face re-election or possible impeachment. He will be happy with almost any deal, short of war, because he will receive credit for pushing Kim to the bargaining table.

I think that Xi Jinping, not Kim Jong-un is responsible for the "offer" to denuclearize the Korean peninsula ... the offer will be immensely popular in both Japan and South Korea and, indeed, throughout and even beyond Asia. It cannot be accepted but the blame that will be shard, equally, between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> Huge, if it true and a real coup for Xi Jinping; he trumps Trump.
> 
> Edited to add: Now the _*SCMP*_ reports that what Kim and Xi discussed was trhe "complete denuclearization" of the peninsula which means all US nukes must go, too.
> 
> At a guess: President Trump, the USA s a whole, cannot and will not accept that, even though both South Korea and Japan might be in favour. That will, likely leave Trump looking, diplomatically, like the guy who doesn't want peace while Xi will be painted, by his own media, as the guy almost got a nuclear free Korea ... but was stabbed in the back by Trump, the racist, _Sinophobe_, warmonger.



I'm confused- the US apparently hasn't had nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1991. How can the US further "denuclearize" the Peninsula?


----------



## MarkOttawa

SeaKingTacco: By abandoning its treaty obligation to defend the South?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## SeaKingTacco

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> SeaKingTacco: By abandoning its treaty obligation to defend the South?
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



I suppose. But that also means removing US troops from South Korea, right?

If the US does that, it does not mean that North Korea would invade the very next day (I am of the opinion that North Korea is conventional force paper tiger and is in capable of successfully invading South Korea. Even Kim must know that.). Would lead to the reunification of Korea, eventually? Who knows?

The US leaving South Korea would reorder the balance of power in Southeast Asia in favour of China. Which would cause the Japanese to question their relationship with the US and possibly lead them to do, what?

Lots of interesting possibilities.


----------



## Edward Campbell

As I think I might, just barely, understand it ~ and see this in the _*South China Morning Post*_ for more details, Kim wants "assurances" ~ which may well involve at least a pledge to withdraw US troops, eventually ~ but he's unlikely to offer much that is anywhere near "*complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization*."

My guess is that Xi put the words in Kim's mouth; he, Xi Jinping, has nothing to lose and, potentially, if President Trump in his haste to show that he can do some sort of a "deal" makes a strategic mistake ~ highly likely in my opinion 'cause he's a dimwit, a lot to gain.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Life for USN carrier groups off China, and USAF/USMC bases, could get more complicated:



> Revealed: China's Nuclear-Capable Air-Launched Ballistic Missile
> _China is developing a nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile, likely based off the DF-21._
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China is developing and has been flight-testing a nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) along with a new long-range strategic bomber to deliver it, The Diplomat has learned.
> 
> According to U.S. government sources with knowledge of the latest intelligence assessments on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, China has conducted five flight tests of the unnamed missile. The U.S. intelligence community is calling the new missile the CH-AS-X-13.
> 
> The missile was first tested in December 2016 and was most recently tested in the last week of January 2018, according to one source. In recent years, the directors of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) have made reference to this nuclear-capable ALBM in their two most recent on-record worldwide threat assessments.
> 
> The two most recent tests of the system involved aerial launches off a modified H-6K strategic bomber capable of being refueled while in the air.
> 
> The new bomber, dubbed the H6X1/H-6N by the U.S. intelligence community, has been modified from standard variant H-6s for the ALBM delivery mission. The modifications have been made by Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, the manufacturer of all H-6 bomber variants since the late-1950s. The H6X1/H-6N may have been the subject of speculation in August 2017, when an image of an unidentified H-6 variant appeared on Chinese social media.
> 
> The CH-AS-X-13, meanwhile, is a two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile with a 3,000 kilometer range; it is likely a variant of the DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile. The missile may use lighter weight composite materials in its airframe to reduce the necessary carry weight for the bomber.
> 
> The H6X1/H-6N is assessed to have a combat radius of nearly 6,000 kilometers — a significant improvement from older H-6 variants. As a system for nuclear delivery, the CH-AS-X-13 on the H6X1/H-6N, assuming a launch from the edge of the bomber’s combat radius, will be capable of threatening targets in the contiguous United States, Hawaii, and Alaska.
> 
> According to a source who spoke with The Diplomat, the U.S. intelligence community assesses that the CH-AS-X-13 will be ready for deployment by 2025.
> 
> This is in line with a September 2016 announcement by People’s Liberation Army Air Force General Ma Xiaotan, referenced in the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2017 report on Chinese military power, that China would develop a new generation of long-range strategic bombers to be deployed around the mid-2020s.
> 
> Aside from the H6X1/H-6N, China has developed the H-6 into a range of support and attack roles. The H-6K, for instance, is capable of delivering standoff range CJ-20 land-attack cruise missiles with precision guidance. These bombers have conducted missions across the so-called First Island Chain, into the western Pacific.
> 
> Additionally, the People’s Liberation Army Navy operates the H-6G, which is designed for anti-ship and maritime support missions.
> 
> In recent years, senior U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged the development of a nuclear-capable ALBM in China...
> https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/revealed-chinas-nuclear-capable-air-launched-ballistic-missile/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

From lengthy CSIS piece (the US one most people outside Canada know)--has video, further links at original:



> Does China’s J-20 rival other stealth fighters?
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> *How might China utilize the J-20*
> 
> The J-20 has the potential to considerably enhance China’s regional military strength. According to a 2014 U.S. Naval War College report, an operational stealth fighter would “immediately become the most advanced aircraft deployed by any East Asian Power,” surpassing the aircraft fielded in India, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, or Taiwan. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission advances a similar assessment, noting that the arrival of the J-20 will enhance China’s military leverage against opposing forces in the region. With the J-20 expected become fully operational in the next couple of years, the PLAAF has a considerable head start over the Indian, Japanese, and Korean air forces, which are not slated to put their locally-made advanced fighter counterparts into service until the 2020s.
> 
> Opinions vary about the J-20’s comparative strengths as an air superiority (air-to-air) fighter or a strike (air-to-ground) aircraft. Some analysts believe that the J-20’s emphasis on frontal stealth makes it an effective long-range interceptor, meant for mid-air engagements. Others see the J-20 as a long-range strike aircraft, best suited for penetrating enemy air defenses and damaging critical infrastructure on the ground. Such high-value targets would include airfields, command bases, and other military installations. Some have also noted that if outfitted with long-range air-to-air missiles, the J-20 could be utilized to target foreign intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and refueling aircraft. A 2015 RAND report noted the J-20’s “combination of forward stealth and long range could hold U.S. Navy surface assets at risk, and that a long-range maritime strike capability may be a cause for greater concern than a short-range air-superiority fighter like the F-22.” The J-20’s size and weapons configuration may, however, preclude it from functioning as an effective strike fighter in either context. Importantly, the mission types Chinese pilots are trained for may determine how the J-20 is eventually utilized...
> https://chinapower.csis.org/china-chengdu-j-20/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLA Navy definitely sending message (all the more reason for JMSDF to turn big Izumo-class "helicopter destroyers" into F-35B carriers http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/japan-could-buy-f-35bs-put-them-their-sort-aircraft-carriers-24985 ):


> In first, Chinese aircraft carrier performs drills in Pacific, Japanese Defense Ministry says
> 
> The Defense Ministry in Tokyo confirmed Saturday that for the first time China has conducted a drill in the Pacific with its sole operating aircraft carrier.
> 
> The ministry said it had detected several apparent fighter jets being launched from the Liaoning, which was sailing eastward with six other Chinese Navy vessels some 350 km (over 200 miles) south of Japan’s westernmost island of Yonaguni, in Okinawa Prefecture, on Friday morning.
> 
> On Saturday, the carrier and its escorts passed through the Miyako Strait between the islands of Miyako and Okinawa, venturing northwest toward the East China Sea.
> 
> The Chinese government had earlier notified vessels in the area of plans to conduct the drill, it said.
> 
> The operations by the Chinese Navy came after the Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighters for three straight days in response to bombers and other aircraft flying in waters near Okinawa Prefecture.
> 
> On Friday, two Chinese H-6 heavy bombers flew through the Miyako Strait, while it sent a total of six aircraft, including fighter jets, through the strategic entryway into the Pacific on Thursday. The ASDF also scrambled fighters in response to a sighting of a Chinese Navy drone north of the Miyako Strait on Wednesday.
> 
> Japan’s Defense Ministry said earlier this month that Chinese military aircraft had flown through the Miyako Strait a record 36 times in fiscal 2017, as China seeks to extend its reach further into the Western Pacific with what it calls “regular” exercises.
> 
> The Chinese Air Force also conducted exercises over the Miyako Strait in late March, labeling the drills “rehearsals for future wars.”
> 
> Tokyo and Beijing are embroiled in a dispute over the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, known in China as the Diaoyu, in the East China Sea.
> 
> China is in the midst of a military modernization program heavily promoted by President Xi Jinping, who has overseen a shift in focus toward creating a more potent fighting force, including projects such as building a second aircraft carrier, integrating stealth fighters into its air force and fielding an array of advanced missiles that can strike air and sea targets from long distances.
> 
> Earlier this month, the Liaoning participated in a massive naval fleet review — the country’s largest since 1949 — in the South China Sea.
> 
> More than 10,000 service personnel, 48 vessels and 76 aircraft took part in the review, including high-tech submarines and warships as well as advanced fighter jets. More than half of the vessels were commissioned after the Communist Party’s National Congress in 2012, when Xi became the party’s general secretary.
> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/21/national/first-chinese-aircraft-carrier-performs-drills-pacific-japanese-defense-ministry-says/



Photos from a tweet:
https://twitter.com/NavyVessels/status/987513630215188481



>



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## daftandbarmy

Lawrence Solomon: China has declared economic war against us — and we’re helping them win

The West has been China's financier and enabler, fecklessly comforting ourselves with the gains gotten from cheaper consumer goods, and putting out of mind the long-term pains that await us 

China is systematically hollowing out the West’s industries, not just toys and T-shirts, as was the case decades ago, but increasingly strategic industries vital to national security. China isn’t succeeding simply because of its comparative advantage in cheap labour. It’s succeeding because of its comparative advantage elsewhere — in its ability to overwhelm target industries using the power of the state

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-china-has-declared-economic-war-against-us-and-were-helping-them-win/wcm/f11d724d-c84e-489b-921f-f5be1eefc125


----------



## Edward Campbell

daftandbarmy said:
			
		

> Lawrence Solomon: China has declared economic war against us — and we’re helping them win
> 
> The West has been China's financier and enabler, fecklessly comforting ourselves with the gains gotten from cheaper consumer goods, and putting out of mind the long-term pains that await us
> 
> China is systematically hollowing out the West’s industries, not just toys and T-shirts, as was the case decades ago, but increasingly strategic industries vital to national security. China isn’t succeeding simply because of its comparative advantage in cheap labour. It’s succeeding because of its comparative advantage elsewhere — in its ability to overwhelm target industries using the power of the state
> 
> http://vancouversun.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-china-has-declared-economic-war-against-us-and-were-helping-them-win/wcm/f11d724d-c84e-489b-921f-f5be1eefc125




Which is, roughly, what we said about Germany and Japan fifty_ish_ years ago ... remember the brouaha when Sony bought the US movie studios?

It's also, of course, what the Brits said about the upstart Germans and Americans in the 1870s ...

Now, China is bigger ... bigger than Japan and Germany and the EU and USA combined, so the impact as it "rises," again, is going to be quite marked. 

The Chinese and the Indians are, both, emulating late 19th century America: they are trying to "home grow" their economy so that they can make everything they need; that sort of protectionism works in the short term, in the mid to long term it seems to fail ~ at least it does by my reading of economic history over the past 1,000 years or so.


----------



## TQMS

A little PAO info from this mornings email.

RUSSIA AND CHINA MILITARIES REACH ‘NEW HEIGHTS’ TOGETHER,  AGREE TO CHALLENGE U.S. IN MIDDLE EAST
http://www.newsweek.com/china-russia-military-reach-new-heights-together-agree-challenge-us-middle-899689
(Newsweek, 24 April 18) Russia and China have pledged to strengthen their bilateral military and political ties as part of a strategic cooperation that challenges U.S. interests, especially to Washington's stance on Middle East allies Syria and Iran.


----------



## MarkOttawa

I usually don't agree with _NY Times_-man Tom Friedman but he's spot on here--Justin Trudeau and his comprador friends should read this piece:



> The U.S. and China Are Finally Having It Out
> 
> With the arrival in Beijing this week of America’s top trade negotiators, you might think that the U.S. and China are about to enter high-level talks to avoid a trade war and that this is a story for the business pages. Think again. This is one for the history books.
> 
> Five days of meetings in Beijing with Chinese, U.S. and European government officials and business leaders made it crystal clear to me that what’s going on right now is nothing less than a struggle to redefine the rules governing the economic and power relations of the world’s oldest and newest superpowers — America and China. This is not a trade tiff.
> 
> “This is a defining moment for U.S.-China relations,” said Ruan Zongze, executive vice president of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s research institute. “This is about a lot more than trade and tariffs. This is about the future.”
> 
> In one corner stand President Trump and his team of China trade hard-liners, whose instinct is basically right: This is a fight worth having now, before it is too late, before China gets too big...
> 
> Here’s how we got here: In Act I, U.S.-China relations were all geopolitics, with the U.S. and China against the Soviet Union. That lasted until the late 1970s, when Act II began: China shifted toward capitalism, becoming a huge factory and new market — and 30 years later turned into the world’s second-largest economy.
> 
> In large part this was due to the work ethic of the Chinese people, the long-term thinking of China’s leaders and the government’s massive investments in infrastructure and education. But in part it was also due to China’s willingness and ability to bend or ignore rules of the World Trade Organization and, at times, outright cheat.
> 
> In some cases China used industrial espionage to just steal innovations from the West. Other moves were more subtle: When China joined the W.T.O. in 2001, it was allowed in as a “developing nation,” subject to very low tariffs on its exports to our country but permitted to impose high tariffs to protect its own rising industries from U.S. and European competition.
> 
> The assumption was that as China grew, and the W.T.O. moved to a new regime, China would quickly cut its tariffs — like its 25 percent tax on car imports, compared with the 2.5 percent tariff imposed by the U.S. But the W.T.O. still has not completed a new trade round and China has refused to voluntarily lower its tariffs.
> 
> Moreover, China developed an industrial policy that often bent W.T.O. rules...
> 
> ACT III opened in October 2015, when China announced its new long-term vision: “Made in China 2025,” a plan to dominate 10 next-generation industries, including robotics, self-driving cars, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, biotech and aerospace.
> 
> When the U.S. and Europe saw this, they basically said: Wow. We were ready to turn the other cheek when your combination of hard work, cheating and industrial policy was focused on low-end industries. But if you use the same strategies to dominate these high-end industries, we’re toast. We need some new rules.
> 
> And I heard this as much from E.U. officials as U.S. ones. That is why _many E.U. countries are now scrambling to pass new laws to prevent China from buying up their most advanced industries_ [emphasis added]. And that is why China is telling E.U. countries, as one E.U. official put it, “Whatever you do, don’t join the U.S. camp” on trade [_just what China's ambassador is telling us_: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chinas-envoy-assails-canadas-concerns-over-state-owned-takeovers/?cmpid=rss ]. The last thing Beijing wants is a U.S.-E.U. united front demanding it play fair...
> 
> Economics is not like war — they can win and we can win. On one condition — we all play by the same rules: hard work and innovation, not hard work and stealing intellectual property, massive government interventions, ignoring W.T.O. rules, lack of reciprocity and forcing Western companies to pay to play inside China.
> 
> That is what this moment is about — that’s why it’s a fight worth having. Don’t let the fact that Trump is leading the charge distract from the vital importance of the U.S., Europe and China all agreeing on the same rules for 2025 — before it really is too late...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/opinion/america-china-trump-trade.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

A long article (read it at the link) about China's military growth and the "Decade of concern". The issue, according to one naval analyst is China's timetable, with the ability to invade Taiwan by 2020 and 2049 as the possible end date for China to achieve "global hegemony". This is not to say that war will automatically be triggered on these dates, but rather that China wishes to have the ability starting at these dates to achieve her aims, peacefully if possible, but by force if necessary, whenever they choose after that point.



> If one has not read Xi Jingping's words and realized the supremacist nature of the "China Dream" and carefully watched the nature of China's "rise," then one might innocently ask the obvious question: "Why does it matter that the PRC seeks regional or even global hegemony?"
> That is, why can't the world simply abide a "rising China," a seemingly benign term so often employed by Beijing's propaganda organs and PRC supporters worldwide. After all, fewer would be concerned if, say, a "rising Brazil" or a "rising India" sought regional hegemony and proclaimed a desire to "lead the world into the 21st century."
> 
> The answer goes to the heart of the nature of China's leadership, and what it does. Under the [Chinese Communist Party] the PRC is an expansionist, coercive, hyper-nationalistic, military and economically powerful, brutally repressive, totalitarian state.
> 
> The world has seen what happens when expansionist totalitarian regimes such as this are left unchallenged and unchecked.



I'll leave it to you to read the article and draw your own conclusions. I suspect that the projected timetable may be somewhat more ambitious than practical or possible, and issues like demographics or the "popping" of debt or investment bubbles could seriously throw off any calculations (unfortunately, the net effect might be to advance conflict as desperate leadership cadres look for an "out).

A Vital Warning About China and the Looming 'Decade of Concern'

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/a-vital-warning-about-china-and-the-looming-decade-of-concern/


----------



## MarkOttawa

US Navy lacking legs in face of Chinese A2AD:



> Navy’s Top-Dollar Stealth Fighter May Not Go the Distance
> _New report raises questions about multibillion-dollar program_
> 
> The Navy’s newest fighter jet, the stealthy F-35C, may not have the range it needs to strike enemy targets, the House Armed Services Committee said in a new report, raising troubling questions about whether the multibillion-dollar program is already outpaced by threats.
> 
> And critics say the Navy fighter — part of the Joint Strike Fighter initiative, the most expensive weapons program in history — may actually have been out of date years ago.
> 
> The committee’s conclusion, buried in the 606-page report on the fiscal 2019 defense authorization bill, is confirmation from lawmakers who support the jet program that the aircraft carrier-based version of the F-35 may not have enough effective range without refueling to function well in likely future wars.
> 
> “While the introduction of the F-35C will significantly expand stealth capabilities, the F-35C could require increased range to address necessary targets,” the report states.
> 
> The reason, experts say, is that the aircraft carriers from which the F-35Cs would operate may be required to sail too far away from enemies to avoid their increasingly long-range missiles...
> 
> If the Navy has to sail its carriers in the neighborhood of 1,000 nautical miles away from increasingly long-range missiles, then its stealthy F-35Cs will have to be refueled by tanker aircraft that are not stealthy.
> 
> The F-35Cs have an effective range — known as a combat radius (or the distance from the carrier they can operate) — that is now projected as 670 nautical miles.
> 
> The refueling operations would expose the fighter jets and tankers to adversaries, defeating the value of the F-35C’s radar-evading materials and sleek silhouette. Lt. Lauren Chatmas, a Navy spokeswoman, said the risk is “acceptable” because the refueling will occur far from enemy threats. But Clark maintains enemy fighters might still find U.S. aircraft even hundreds of miles out if any are not stealthy.
> 
> Alternatively, the Navy could operate its carriers — which have self-defense capabilities — closer to enemy territory or nearer to enemy warships and aircraft. But that would raise the risk to these floating cities, each of which typically carries more than 6,000 sailors and costs roughly $13 billion.
> 
> *‘Carrier killer’ missile*
> 
> The Navy has already bought 28 of the jets and requested nine more for fiscal 2019. It won’t deploy F-35Cs on a carrier until 2021.
> 
> But the likely inadequacy of the F-35C’s combat radius should not surprise the Navy, experts say.
> 
> Approximately a decade ago, China finished developing its “carrier killer,” the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, with a reported range of 780 nautical miles, though the People’s Liberation Army is reportedly still perfecting the system for giving the missile targeting information.
> 
> The U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile has a range in excess of 1,000 nautical miles, and the Navy expects to field an anti-ship variant in four years. Given Chinese and Russian advances, and the fact that F-35s will fly for 60 years, the realistic prospect of adversaries’ having the ability to hold carriers at risk from 1,000 nautical miles or more during the F-35’s lifespan was foreseeable, critics say.
> 
> Already, China’s CSS-5 anti-ship cruise missile can strike ships about 930 miles away, the Defense Intelligence Agency has testified...
> 
> The committee’s report directs the Navy secretary to brief the Armed Services panels by January 2019 on options, including manned and unmanned aircraft that would “expand the strike range of a carrier air wing in a contested environment.” That could include “developing a stealth tanker capability, improved engine technology or to develop and procure a strike capability that is purposely built to strike at increased range.”..
> https://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/f-35c-navy-stealth-range



Note that designs competing for USN's carrier-borne MQ-25A Stingray tanker UAV are not required to be stealthy:
https://news.usni.org/2018/04/09/navy-prioritizing-speed-field-price-mq-25a-stingray-program

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Retired AF Guy

The latest from Bloomberg:



> Trudeau Blocks Chinese Takeover of Aecon on Security Grounds
> By Josh Wingrove
> 
> May 23, 2018, 5:24 PM EDT Updated on May 23, 2018, 7:38 PM EDT
> 
> Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its decision Wednesday after launching a security review of the C$1.2 billion ($930 million) deal earlier this year, according to a statement from Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains obtained by Bloomberg News. A representative from Toronto-based Aecon said the company is aware of the government’s decision and will be issuing a response.
> 
> U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this year blocked Broadcom Ltd.’s hostile takeover of Qualcomm Inc. because it could “impair the national security of the United States.” Trump has killed several foreign deals involving China since taking office and his administration continues to spar with China over trade. This is the first major foreign takeover blocked by the Trudeau government since he won power in 2015.
> 
> “We listened to the advice of our national security agencies throughout the multi-step national security review process under the Investment Canada Act,” Bains said in the statement. “Based on their findings, in order to protect national security, we ordered CCCI not to implement the proposed investment.”
> 
> Canada is “open to international investment that creates jobs and increases prosperity, but not at the expense of national security,” Bains added.
> 
> Stock Falls
> 
> Shares of Aecon, which helped build Toronto’s iconic CN Tower, declined in recent weeks to the lowest since the deal was announced in October on concern that it would be blocked. Aecon’s construction work includes several sectors that could impact national security, including building out the nation’s telecommunications networks.
> 
> Aecon closed at C$17.34 in Toronto trading Wednesday, 14 percent below the C$20.27 a share offer from CCCC International Holding Ltd. to acquire the construction firm. Before the recent declines, there was widespread speculation in Canada that the deal might be approved as Trudeau sought warmer ties with China.
> 
> Clear Evidence
> 
> A person familiar with the file, speaking on condition they not be identified, said the government did its due diligence and ultimately followed the advice of Canadian national security agencies that had reviewed the deal and had information that was not publicly available.
> 
> Aecon’s project portfolio includes work in sensitive fields such as telecommunications, nuclear power and military housing and training facilities, Anita Anand, a professor of law at the University of Toronto who holds J.R. Kimber Chair in Investor Protection and Corporate Governance, said in an interview before the decision was announced. She had called for it to be blocked.
> 
> “There is clear evidence that there are national security issues at play in this transaction,” she said in an earlier interview. If government sees “reasonable grounds to believe there’s a potential injury to national security, then it should intervene.”
> 
> Considering Trade Talks
> 
> Aecon operates companies across the mining, infrastructure, energy and services industries, building projects from factories, roads and sewers to theaters, book stores and hotels, according to its website. CCCI’s Beijing-based parent is one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world. Its core businesses include infrastructure construction and design and dredging, with revenue of $62 billion.
> 
> The move comes at a critical point for the future of the country’s trade relationships. Canada is considering launching trade talks with China as it seeks to become less reliant on the U.S. market. It is also haggling with the U.S. and Mexico over how to update the North American Free Trade Agreement.
> 
> Chinese acquisitions in Canada’s economy have cooled since 2012, when the previous Conservative government imposed limits on investment by state-owned enterprises in the energy sector following CNOOC Ltd.’s takeover of Nexen Inc. in Alberta.
> 
> In 2009, national security considerations were formally added as a consideration under Canada’s foreign investment review process. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned in 2012 that some foreign state-owned enterprises may represent a threat to national security.
> 
> — With assistance by Scott Deveau



 Article Link


----------



## tomahawk6

The US has told China not to come to RIMPAC.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/05/23/china-was-just-uninvited-from-rimpac-heres-why/


----------



## MarkOttawa

Wow! CSIS throws down the gauntlet to Justin Trudeau, Liberal Party and our comprador class--a few excerpts from a very major paper, how will China react?



> RETHINKING SECURITY
> *CHINA AND THE AGE OF
> STRATEGIC RIVALRY*
> Highlights from an Academic Outreach Workshop
> ...
> Whether a Chinese partner company is a state-owned enterprise
> or a private one, it will have close and increasingly explicit ties
> to the CCP.
> 
> Unless trade agreements are carefully vetted for national
> security implications, Beijing will use its commercial position
> to gain access to businesses, technologies and infrastructure
> that can be exploited for intelligence objectives, or to potentially
> compromise a partner’s security.
> 
> China is prepared to use threats and enticements to bring
> business and political elites to its side, and motivate them to
> defend the Chinese perspective on disputes such as the status
> of Taiwan and the South China Sea.
> 
> Beijing works actively to influence ethnic Chinese groups,
> Chinese students and ethnic Chinese businesses in other
> countries, often curtailing their freedom of expression to
> promote a narrative favourable to its views. It has also often
> purchased control of local Chinese-language news outlets.
> 
> Academics and reporters who question Chinese activities are
> harassed by Chinese diplomats and Chinese-controlled media...
> 
> China’s  military  is  investing  significantly  in  technology,
> innovating to rival the US in the military application of artificial
> intelligence, unmanned weapons systems, quantum computing,
> and directed-energy weapons.
> 
> ...China’s continued rise is not inevitable and may yet elicit
> international action both to contain and accommodate its ambitions.
> For now, its dominance strategy appears relentless and irresistible...
> https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/csis-scrs/documents/publications/CSIS-Academic-Outreach-China-report-May-2018-en.pdf



Just about as blunt as one can get.  One also wonders how the current gov't will react.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

UK _Guardian_ story on what above CSIS report from meeting of academics says on New Zealand:



> Chinese interference in New Zealand at 'critical' stage, says Canada spy report
> _Jacinda Ardern says country is ‘vigilant’ and that Five Eyes membership is not being questioned_
> 
> A report released by Canada’s spy agency has warned that New Zealand, one of its closest allies, has been influenced at every level of society by the Chinese government, and that the situation has reached a “critical” stage.
> 
> The report states that New Zealand is viewed as “the soft underbelly” of its western big brothers such as the UK and US.
> 
> “President Xi Jinping is driving a multi-dimensional strategy to lift China to global dominance,” it stated, and New Zealand was a key pawn in its strategy, with the government regarding its relations with the island nation as “an exemplar” of how it would like to steer future relations with other states.
> 
> The _report was published by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) but does not reflect the spy agency’s official views, and was based on reports to CSIS during an academic workshop_ [emphasis added--see p. 81 PDF here https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/csis-scrs/documents/publications/CSIS-Academic-Outreach-China-report-May-2018-en.pdf].
> 
> The report claimed New Zealand’s business, political and intellectual elite had all been targeted by the Chinese Communist party, and that business tie-ups with companies, universities and research centres had been used to “influence activities and to provide access to military technology, commercial secrets and other strategic information”.
> 
> “Massive efforts” had also been made to bring Chinese-language media and Chinese community groups under the party’s control, and political donations have been made, it said.
> 
> “New Zealand provides a vivid case study of China’s willingness to use economic ties to interfere with the political life of a partner country,” the report stated, warning that smaller states were “particularly vulnerable” to Chinese influence. New Zealand is home to just 4.7 million people.
> 
> “An aggressive strategy has sought to influence political decision-making, pursue unfair advantages in trade and business, suppress criticism of China, facilitate espionage opportunities, and influence overseas Chinese communities.”..
> 
> The country’s membership of the Five Eyes (an intelligence sharing network between Australia, the US, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand) as well as Nato and other important military partnerships is also appealing.
> 
> “New Zealand’s economic, political and military relationship with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is seen by Beijing as a model for relations with Australia, the small island nations in the south Pacific, and more broadly other western states” the report said.
> 
> “Some of these activities endanger New Zealand’s national security directly, while others have a more long-term corrosive effect.”
> 
> New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said New Zealand had a “very strong” relationship with Canada, particularly with its prime minister, Justin Trudeau. “I have had no indication that our Five Eyes membership is under question, from Canada or any other of our partners, nor have I heard that it has been raised with any of my colleagues,” she said...
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/01/chinese-interference-in-new-zealand-at-critical-stage-says-canada-spy-report



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile Justin Trudeau and his comprador friends and colleagues should note what's going on in Australia:



> Australia to review spy laws amid Chinese influence concerns
> 
> Australia will review its espionage laws, the government’s chief legal officer said on Wednesday, as the country seeks to strengthen spy agencies strained by juggling counter-terror work and worries about China’s rising influence.
> 
> For years Australia has been handing extra cash and extra powers to its police and spy agencies to bolster their counter-terrorism abilities.
> 
> Then in December, responding to “disturbing reports about Chinese influence,” the government turned its attention on interference in politics and announced a crackdown on political donations and the outlawing of foreign interference.
> 
> “We live in an unprecedented age of foreign interference, influence, espionage and domestic terrorism,” Australia’s Attorney-General Christian Porter told radio station 5AA in the city of Adelaide on Wednesday [May 30].
> 
> “We think it’s very appropriate to step back and look at the whole system from top to tail,” adding that the government was not aiming its intelligence laws at “any one international country”.
> 
> However the review, which will run 18 months and is the deepest in four decades, is to be headed by former Australian spymaster Dennis Richardson, who last year warned China in particular was conducting extensive espionage against Australia.
> 
> “With China we’re in a situation which we were never in previously, where we now have levels of concern - because they have levels of capacity and ambition - that weren’t the case,” said Professor Greg Barton, a security expert at Deakin University in Melbourne.
> 
> Outdated laws that have not kept pace with the advent of the internet and cybersecurity challenges, as well as arcane information sharing rules between Australian intelligence agencies, would be likely candidates for reform, he said.
> 
> ...intelligence officers have found themselves increasingly focused on thwarting Chinese influence as public concern has deepened, while ties between the trading partners have soured.
> 
> The country’s current spy chief has warned that universities need to be “very conscious” of foreign interference - an apparent reference to China’s perceived involvement on campuses.
> 
> This month, the rift between the countries, opened in the wake of Australia’s foreign influence crackdown, widened.
> 
> China’s top diplomat rebuked Australia for applying “colored glasses” to the relationship, as Australia’s largest winemaker, Treasury Wine Estates Ltd suddenly encountered problems clearing its products through Chinese customs.
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-review/australia-to-review-spy-laws-amid-chinese-influence-concerns-idUSKCN1IV0TZ



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And in Canada certain matters are being brought to the PM's attention:



> Trudeau urged to probe Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s role in Canada
> 
> Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being urged to gather security agencies and top policy makers to determine the security threat and economic cost of transferring Canadian intellectual property to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies.
> 
> Andy Ellis, former assistant director of operations at the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, said he was alarmed at the extent of the inroads that Huawei has made into Canadian universities with the aim of acquiring leading-edge 5G wireless technology.
> 
> A Globe and Mail investigation published Saturday [ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-canadian-money-and-research-are-helping-china-become-a-global/ ] revealed that Huawei has established a vast network of relationships with Canadian universities to create a steady pipeline of intellectual property to aid in the development of next-generation mobile networks.
> 
> The concerns come in the wake of Ottawa’s decision to block Aecon Group’s takeover by a Chinese state-owned company on national-security grounds, and follows the Liberal government’s attempts since assuming office to improve trade relations with China, possibly leading to a free-trade deal.
> 
> Huawei has committed about $50-million to 13 leading Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, McGill University and the University of British Columbia, to fund the development of 5G mobile technology, which it has used as a basis to file hundreds of patents. Canadian university professors have transferred full rights to their inventions to Huawei in 40 instances.
> 
> ...It was recently revealed that Huawei is helping China’s state security apparatus spy on its Uyghur minority. Former top Canadian intelligence officials have warned that Huawei could use 5G technology for espionage, a charge denied by Huawei spokesman Scott Bradley.
> 
> A spokesman for Mr. Trudeau on the weekend deferred questions about Huawei to Industry Minister Navdeep Bains. His department said on Sunday that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grants to academics “are awarded through an independent peer-reviewed process to ensure excellence and impartiality.” It added that businesses partnering and co-funding the research “must demonstrate economic, social or environmental benefits for Canadians. Canadians can rest assured that our government will never compromise national security and will always listen to the advice of public-security officials.”..
> 
> The Globe investigation also raised concerns about the extent to which Huawei is benefiting from Canadian university researchers – whose salaries and research are largely funded by governments – to build its 5G patent warchest. Several observers called on the government to enact changes to ensure Canada captures more of the economic value from research that it helps to fund...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-trudeau-urged-to-probe-chinese-telecom-giant-huaweis-role-in-canada/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Back to the Dragon of Oz:



> The Labor Party's China problem
> 
> When Australia’s chief [internal] spy, ASIO boss Duncan Lewis, told a Senate estimates hearing last week that Australia faced a greater  threat from espionage today than at any time since the Cold War he was careful not to specify which countries might be targeting us.
> 
> No one doubts that he was talking about China. The senators who were questioning him were undoubtedly talking about China.
> 
> _As evidence of Chinese efforts to influence Australian institutions mounts, both major parties have reason for self-reflection_ [emphasis added].
> 
> When he quit his role as an elected representative of the Australian people the Liberal trade minister Andrew Robb walked into an $880,000-a-year job with a billionaire closely aligned to the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> Robb was the architect of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
> 
> Tony Abbott was among a handful Liberal heavy weights who were embarrassed after they had to return a fistfull of designer watches worth around $250,000 to a visiting Chinese billionaire. They thought they were fake, they explained when the story went public.
> 
> An ABC investigation last year found that Chinese individuals and companies were the largest foreign donors to the two parties, pouring more than $5.5 million into Labor and Liberal coffers between 2013 and 2015.
> 
> But one faction of one party appears to be more conflicted than sections of Australian politics, the Sussex Street machine of the powerful NSW Right.
> 
> Sam Dastyari, who quit politics when it was revealed he had taken donations from Chinese businesses and then echoed Chinese government talking points, was a rising star of the faction.
> 
> Its most dominant figure is Bob Carr, the former foreign affairs minister and NSW premier now at the centre of the China influence controversy.  Carr is the director of the Australia-China Relations Institute, which was established by Chinese-Australian businessman Huang Xiangmo, the prolific political donor (and a controversial source of funds to Dastyari).
> 
> The NSW Labor right’s ties to Chinese businessmen, some of whom have links to the Chinese Communist Party and its arm of international influence, the United Front Work Department, is causing increasing disquiet in the broader party, particularly members from Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.
> 
> In writing this story Fairfax Media spoke to party members as well as figures in national security and intelligence circles who did not want to go on record for political and legal reasons.
> 
> But a common view is that figures associated with the Chinese Communist Party did not specifically target the NSW Labor right - indeed they have sought to influence both parties and other major Australian institutions - but that the NSW faction proved to be an unusually fertile ground to seek influence [read on]...
> https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-labor-party-s-china-problem-20180601-p4ziuq.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Journeyman

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> And in Canada certain matters are being brought to the PM's attention



Not trying to be too pedantic, but I feel there's a significant gap between a "Globe and Mail piece," and actually acquiring the PM's "attention." 

"A spokesman for Mr. Trudeau ...deferred questions about Huawei to *Industry Minister*," suggests that the actual Intelligence/Security services haven't managed to get his attention.  The article further highlights that NSERC grants are "awarded through an independent peer-reviewed process to ensure excellence and impartiality"... demonstrating "economic, social, or environmental benefits for Canadians" -- not even a hint that security awareness is an issue.

:dunno:


----------



## MarkOttawa

In South China Sea, Marine Nationale/Royal Navy to the fore:



> France, Britain to sail warships in contested South China Sea to challenge Beijing
> _Defence ministers tell security forum they are contributing to rule-based order_
> 
> France and Britain will sail warships through the South China Sea to challenge Beijing’s expanding military presence in the disputed waters, their defence ministers said on Sunday [June 3].
> 
> The two countries, both permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, made the remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, echoing the latest US plan to ramp up its freedom of navigation operations to counter Beijing’s militarisation in the region and its stance that territorial disputes should be a matter between China and its Asian neighbours.
> 
> A French maritime task group, together with British helicopters and ships, will visit Singapore next week and then sail “into certain areas” of the South China Sea, French armed forces minister Florence Parly told the annual defence forum.
> 
> Without naming China, she suggested the warships will cross into “territorial waters” claimed by Beijing and envisioned a potential encounter with its military.
> 
> “At some point a stern voice intrudes into the transponder and tells us to sail away from supposedly ‘territorial waters’,” she said. “But our commander then calmly replies that he will sail forth, because these, under international law, are indeed international waters.”
> 
> Parly said although France was not a claimant in the South China Sea disputes, by conducting such exercises “on a regular basis with allies and friends” it was contributing to a rule-based order.
> 
> “By exercising our freedom of navigation, we also place ourselves in the position of a persistent objector to the creation of any claim to de facto sovereignty on the islands,” she said.
> 
> Instead of accepting the situation as a fait accompli, Parly said France should question it, otherwise it will be established as a right...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2149062/france-britain-sail-warships-contested-south-china-sea



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dimsum

A Retiring Chinese General Reveals China’s Greatest Military Weakness Is A US Strength



> China’s People’s Liberation Army Gen. He Lei, one of the more hawkish voices asserting Beijing’s absolute rights to the South China Sea, made a telling observation at a defense conference in Singapore that reveals his military’s biggest weakness.
> 
> China has undertaken massive strides to build a world-class navy. After what the nationalists in China call a century of humiliation, going back to Japan’s occupation of China, Beijing has emerged as a military power that could soon surpass the U.S.
> 
> But even with the world’s largest military, cheap labor, massive spy services, and suspected cyber theft of U.S military secrets, the Chinese can’t match the U.S. where it counts.
> 
> “I am retiring soon. My one big regret is that I never had a chance to fight in a war,” Gen. He said, according to Aaron Connelly, director of the Southeast Asia Project at the Lowy Institute.
> 
> Though it’s strange to regret peace, He correctly identified what the Academy of Military Science of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army previously told Business Insider was the Chinese military’s biggest weakness: inexperience.
> 
> The People’s Liberation Army, the military-owned by China’s Communist Party, has never fought a real war. Its missions center around humanitarian relief and policing its own borders. Besides a brief fight with Vietnam, the entire post-World War II period for China has been peaceful.
> 
> Meanwhile, the U.S. and Russia, other top-tier militaries, have engaged in regular battles.
> 
> While much of China’s emerging new military doctrine seems sound, in theory, it’s yet to be tested...



In particular, a comment by James Doyle is interesting:


> "Besides a brief fight with Vietnam,...
> ...in which the Vietnamese handed them their asses....
> 
> The Chinese have another hidden weakness. All the staffs and commands are riven by divided loyalties. Because the PLA has always been expected to be financially and materially self-sufficient, they have always had an entire manufacturing base. During the economic liberalization of the 90s various factories established ties with various export networks and other business interests and for a PLA officer this is where the real money is. (All that old "Serve the People" stuff died with Mao Zedong.) So that's where his real loyalties lie, regardless of where or to whom he's assigned. think of how that's going to distort promotion selections and general decision-making.



https://taskandpurpose.com/chinese-military-weakness/


----------



## MarkOttawa

France upping its naval and air force games in South China Sea and Indo-Pacific (further links at original):



> On the water and in the air, French military pushes back against Beijing’s South China Sea claims
> _France has sent warships through contested waters and will hold air exercises in the area later this year_
> 
> In late May, the French assault ship Dixmude and a frigate sailed through the disputed Spratly Islands and around a group of reefs that China has turned into islets, pushing back against Beijing’s claim to own most of the resource-rich South China Sea.
> 
> “Our patrol involved passing close to these islets to obtain intelligence with all the sensors it is possible to use in international waters,” the Dixmude’s commanding officer, Jean Porcher, said.
> 
> Writing in The Wall Street Journal, a researcher from the Hudson Institute think tank who was on board, said “several Chinese frigates and corvettes” tailed the French vessels.
> 
> *China puts missiles back on contested South China Sea island as United States pushes allies for bigger military presence in waters*
> 
> Porcher said the ship maintained “cordial” radio contact with Chinese military vessels, “which were present in the area until we left”.
> 
> So far the United States has taken the lead in confronting China over its territorial claims in the South China Sea, which are contested by several neighbours, particularly Vietnam.
> 
> But France, which along with Britain is the only European nation to regularly send its navy into the region, has also waded into the dispute, sending its ships into the South China Sea three to five times a year.
> 
> In _August, the air force will stage its biggest-ever exercises in Southeast Asia as part of a strategy to mark France’s presence in a region that is home to 1.5 million French citizens in the country’s overseas territories_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Three Rafale fighter jets, one A400M troop transporter and a C135 refuelling tanker will fly from Australia to India, with several stops along the way.
> 
> The sea and air operations follow a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron last month to Australia, where he spoke of the need to protect the Indo-Pacific region from “hegemony” – a veiled reference to Beijing’s growing might.
> 
> He stressed that France, which will be the last country in the European Union after Britain leaves the bloc to have territories in the Pacific, did not want to antagonise China.
> 
> But a “strong Indo-Pacific axis” was needed to ensure respect for freedom of navigation and aviation in the region, he told Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
> 
> ...France had already began to push back against China’s expansionism before Macron took power.
> 
> Since 2014, the navy has sailed regularly through the South China Sea as part of its stated bid to uphold a rules-based maritime order.
> 
> *France, Britain to sail warships in contested South China Sea to challenge Beijing*
> 
> In 2016, then French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (now the foreign minister) called on other European navies to develop a regular and visible presence in the South China Sea.
> 
> Besides protecting navigation, France has cited the need to defend the interests of its citizens scattered across five French territories in the Pacific, including New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
> 
> “This region is also our home,” Defence Minister Florence Parly said during a visit to Singapore earlier this month.
> 
> Valerie Niquet, an expert on the Asia-Pacific region at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said France’s growing assertiveness showed the US was no longer the only Western power “getting involved in the area”...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2150407/water-and-air-french-military-pushes-back-against



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Conclusion of a piece by Matthew Fisher at CGAI speaks for itself:



> Beware of the Dragon: The Challenges of China’s Assertive Posture
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...Canada, almost alone now among Western nations, is so soft on China...
> 
> _*Matthew Fisher* is a Fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He was born in northwestern Ontario and raised there and in the Ottawa Valley. He has lived and worked abroad for 34 years as a foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail, Sun Media and Postmedia. Assignments have taken him to 162 countries. An eyewitness to 19 conflicts including Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, Chechnya, the Balkan Wars, Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, the two Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, Matthew was appointed as the first Bill Graham Centre/Massey College Resident Visiting Scholar in Foreign and Defence Policy in 2018._
> 
> @mfisheroverseas [twitter]
> https://www.cgai.ca/beware_of_the_dragon_the_challenges_of_china_s_assertive_posture



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Trump's beginning trade war with China could sure mess up the plans of Justin Trudeau and our Liberal compradors (further links at original):



> Afraid to anger Trump, Canada stays fickle about China trade
> _A promised golden decade appears to be on hold as Trudeau weighs up the costs of cosying up to Beijing_
> 
> The “golden decade” Premier Li Keqiang said China and Canada were building in September 2016, as the two countries launched exploratory talks for a free-trade agreement (FTA), appears some way off yet. That FTA now seems dead in the water, collateral damage in a trade dispute between Canada and its largest trading partner, the United States.
> 
> Canada had shown signs of wanting to reduce its reliance on the US by reaching out to China, its third-largest trading partner, but analysts now say it must tread carefully or risk further damage to its already strained relations with the US. Given Washington is on the brink of a full-blown trade war with Beijing, it might not take well to seeing its neighbour cosy up to its opponent.
> 
> Chinese investment in Canadian oil shows bigger isn’t always better
> 
> This makes life harder for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is at a crossroads on how to deal with the unpredictable US president, Donald Trump, who insulted Trudeau after the G7 summit concluded on Saturday, only to say three days later that the pair had “a very good relationship”.
> 
> “If there was free trade between Canada and China, the US would see this as being at cross purposes to its crackdown on China’s unfair trade practises,” said Charles Burton, formerly a diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing [and very hard-nosed on CCP China].
> 
> “Canada would be perceived as a back door by which China could evade tariffs and other sanctions imposed by the US. So free trade with China could further damage Canada-US trade relations which would be disastrous for Canada.”
> 
> Jiang Wenran, a senior fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Asian Research [and a notable comprador], said the Liberal government did not have a clear strategy of using China or a potential FTA with China as a counter to an aggressive US push on North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) negotiations.
> 
> “The temporary dominant view is that it’s better to hold off FTA talks with China in order not to offend the US so Canada can secure a better Nafta deal,” Jiang said.
> 
> “But the latest assaults by President Trump and his advisers on Trudeau have indicated that the US does not seem to care one way or the other. Thus, Canada remains at a crossroads on how to effectively engage China for its own long-term benefits [read on].”..
> http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2151073/afraid-anger-trump-canada-stays-fickle-about-china-trade



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Good2Golf

> Canada had shown signs of wanting to reduce its reliance on the US by reaching out to China, its third-largest trading partner, but analysts now say it must tread carefully or risk further damage to its already strained relations with the US. Given Washington is on the brink of a full-blown trade war with Beijing, it might not take well to seeing its neighbour cosy up to its opponent.



CCFTA should be pursued independantly of NAFTA, and needs to be looked at in earnest anyway, notwithstanding POTUS' recent rail against Canada. The US Empire is in decline (perhaps doesn't know it, or acknowledge it yet) and Canada should be thinking longer term than surviving enough with Big Brother to make it past the 2018 mid-terms.

:2c:

G2G


----------



## MarkOttawa

Yet another piece Justin Trudeau and LPC should read:



> China’s ‘Thousand Talents’ plan key to seizing US expertise, intelligence officials say
> _Pentagon tells House Armed Services Committee programme is an aggressive, 10-part ‘toolkit for foreign technology acquisition’_
> 
> China’s “Thousand Talents” programme to tap into its citizens educated or employed in the US is a key part of multi-pronged efforts to transfer, replicate and eventually overtake US military and commercial technology, according to US intelligence officials.
> 
> The programme, begun in 2008, is far from secret. But its unadvertised goal is “to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of US technology, intellectual property and know-how” to China, according to an unclassified analysis by the National Intelligence Council, the branch of US intelligence that assesses long-term trends.
> 
> The programme was highlighted on Thursday to House Armed Services Committee members as Pentagon and intelligence officials outlined what they said was an aggressive, 10-part Chinese “toolkit for foreign technology acquisition”.
> 
> More foreigners moving to China for work, study finds
> 
> The National Intelligence Council’s analysis, produced in April, described the talent plan as “China’s flagship talent programme and probably the largest in terms of funding”. It was also cited in a combative White House report posted on Tuesday [June 19] titled “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World”...
> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2152005/chinas-thousand-talents-plan-key-seizing-us-expertise



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

One might say alarmist but still...unless China believes US would rapidly escalate to serious nuclear retaliation.  See after my 2016 post:



> Would China Launch a Massive Pearl Harbor-style Attack Against America?
> _Dave Majumdar is the Defense Editor of The National Interest._
> 
> While tensions between Beijing and Washington remain primarily in the economic realm as the two great powers levy massive tariffs on each other’s exports, as relations continue to sour, those antipathies could spillover into the military realm.
> 
> As it currently stands, China and the United States do not see eye-to-eye on a number of issues including Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and its construction of artificial islands in those waters.
> 
> There are also tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan, where Beijing considers the island to be a renegade province while Washington has essentially provided Taipei with a de facto security guarantee under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA).
> 
> If tensions between the United States and China were to somehow reach a boiling point during a crisis, there is a possibility that a conflict might break out. However, with both nation fielding long-range precision-guided weapons, a war between the two great powers might be fundamentally different than previous engagements between such titans during prior conflicts. Indeed, the capabilities of these new weapons might mean that one side or the other might be tempted to launch a massive preemptive strike to win a swift victory because of the advantages of striking first.
> 
> Recommended: How an ‘Old’ F-15 Might Kill Russia’s New Stealth Fighter
> 
> Recommended: How China Plans to Win a War Against the U.S. Navy
> 
> Recommended: How the Air Force Would Destroy North Korea
> 
> “U.S. leaders and policymakers should understand that in the event of an unforeseen U.S.-China crisis, especially one that appears to threaten China’s claimed core strategic interests or the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, a preemptive missile strike against the forward bases that underpin U.S. military power in the Western Pacific could be a real possibility,” Thomas Shugart, the U.S. Navy’s branch head for Sea Based Strategic Deterrent Acquisition—the a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security—wrote in a report in War on the Rocks.
> 
> “This might be the case particularly if China perceives that its attempts at deterrence of a major U.S. intervention—say in a cross-strait Taiwan crisis or in a brewing dispute over the Senkaku Islands—have failed.”
> 
> In Shugart’s estimation, given the range and precision of Chinese cruise and ballistic missiles, Beijing could hit most of the United States’ bases in the Pacific without warning. If the Chinese could strike with a large enough salvo or salvoes of weapons, Beijing could potentially knock the United States out of a war in the Western Pacific in rapid order—though the risks would be grave. Such a strike would be similar in concept to what the Imperial Japanese fleet hoped to accomplish during their attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
> 
> “When weapon accuracy is improved to a few meters (or tens of feet), the estimated likelihood of destruction for some “soft” targets by conventional weapons (perhaps equivalent to a .001kT warhead) appears roughly equivalent to the effects of typical tactical nuclear weapons, which were likely to miss their targets by several hundred feet,” Shugart wrote.
> 
> “By marrying great accuracy with numerous ballistic missiles, China may have developed a capability that the Soviet armed forces never had: the ability to strike effectively, in a matter of minutes, U.S. and allied bases, logistical facilities, and command centers without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, and without having established air superiority.”..
> http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/would-china-launch-massive-pearl-harbor-style-attack-against-26406



From 2016:



> USAF “Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With China”
> ...
> this air force concept of operations for a very thinly-disguised war with China strikes me as pretty darn complicated (it’s amazing to me that such military planning vs a country not officially a US adversary–yet–should be made public; but the US services can be awfully frank). Could all the advance arrangements necessary be in place in time (e.g. fuel and munitions at all those bases)? Would the foreign governments concerned go along? And what about range to targets, especially those beyond just the coast of the mainland?..
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/mark-collins-usaf-officers-give-new-details-for-f-35-in-war-with-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

What about Canadian pols, especially Liberals?



> China’s Huawei Leads as Corporate Sponsor of Australian Politicians’ Travel
> 
> A dozen Australian politicians were treated to lavish overseas trips paid for by a Chinese technology company that has been dogged in the West by questions about security and privacy, according to a report released on Tuesday, raising new concerns about Chinese efforts to influence Australia’s lawmakers.
> 
> The company, Huawei, was the biggest corporate sponsor of overseas travel for the country’s politicians from 2010 to this year, according to an independent analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Canberra.
> 
> Huawei has been essentially shut out of doing business in the United States, and is likely to be barred from bidding on contracts to build a fifth-generation, or 5G, telecom network in Australia over concerns about spying and security.
> 
> The report comes amid heightened concerns about Chinese meddling in Australian politics, and a government effort to pass a law designed to combat foreign interference.
> 
> The cost of courting 12 federal politicians “shows you the investment that Huawei is putting into getting their message across to members of Parliament,” said Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
> 
> “Huawei stands out significantly ahead of anyone else simply because of the numbers of people that it’s taken to China,” he said.
> 
> Huawei provided business-class flights to its headquarters in Shenzhen, China, and paid for the politicians’ hotels, local travel, meals and other expenses. The report did not include the costs involved.
> 
> _Among the politicians to make the trip were Julie Bishop, the foreign minister, and Steven Ciobo, the trade minister_ [!!! emphasis added]...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/world/australia/huawei-china-australia.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Honkin' big DDGs:



> China launches two destroyers with tech similar to US Navy’s Aegis system
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China has launched a pair of new destroyers on July 3 from their dry docks in Dalian, Liaoning province, which borders North Korea, according to Chinese media.
> 
> The vessels are designed for long-range air defense, anti-surface warfare and anti-submarine warfare.
> 
> The completed construction of the two destroyers, widely known as Type 055 vessels, contributes to the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s determined naval buildup.
> 
> The recently launched vessels are equipped with multifunction phased array radars similar to the U.S. Navy’s Aegis system and could accompany future carrier battle groups as China continues to expand its carrier program.
> 
> China’s ambitions for a blue-water navy are no secret. In November 2012, then-President Hu Jintao reported to the Chinese Communist Party Congress his desire to “enhance our capacity for exploiting marine resource ... and build China into a strong maritime power.”
> https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2018/07/03/china-launches-two-destroyers/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

About the tariff spat Cramer is glad that Trump stood up to China.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cramer-says-trump-is-not-wrong-on-the-china-trade-war/ar-AAzFhft?ocid=spartanntp


----------



## tomahawk6

China may cry Uncle. 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/is-president-trump-already-winning-the-trade-war/ar-AAzFTsT?ocid=spartanntp


----------



## CBH99

Cramer is a moron, and it's way too early to tell which side is winning.  If it's a trade war Trump wants, it won't be won in the first 48hrs.

If by lessening it's already weaker export market, while simultaneously increasing the costs that Americans will be paying for goods imported from overseas...then...yeah?  Trump is "winning"?   About as much as Charlie Sheen was when he coined the term...


"America First" is nothing more than a catchy phrase used to trigger emotional nostalgia & patriotism for an idea.  An idea that doesn't exist anymore.  

If he truly cared about "America First" he would deal with the mass of school shootings (at least 17 in the US, just this year, so far) - pursue and possibly even be more aggressive on environmental issues, even if just for the betterment of the local environment (i.e., Flint Michigan, Great Lakes, polluted rivers & lakes, toxic soil, etc), actually spend money on local infrastructure projects (Still has only spent 18% of what he said needed to be spent, and none of it in a well-planned manner that was designed to 'skyrocket' the GDP), and recognize that pumping the Pentagon full of money in the hopes that the money would trickle down to local communities in the form of services to personnel, spending by personnel, real estate sales, etc isn't the best way to do it.  (Security State...over 1 Trillion now spent a year by the US between military & intelligence agencies).  

America First at it's very core should be politicians and lawmakers who PUT AMERICA FIRST.  As a noble idea, in addition to the tangible.  


America First should be about being able to send your kids to school without worrying that their entire class might get shot.  America First should be about common sense gun laws that promote public safety while still protecting the 2nd Amendment.  America First should be a clean, sustainable environment.  Affordable access to health care, etc.  

It's not that.  It's Trump first.  Trump's petty squabbles.  Trump's trade wars.  Trump's alienation of allies, treaties, and internationally recognized organizations.  Trump's hardcore line on immigration that has families separated and caged.  Trump's desire to 'cause drama' where there doesn't need to be any.  (I'm sorry, but if your the President of the United States and you need to make a public statement, it shouldn't be able to be summarized in 140 characters or less...come the f**k on...)  


Back on topic T6... China plays the long game.  They aren't going to cry Uncle anytime soon.


----------



## Brad Sallows

A longish read by Christopher Balding, about his 9 years in China.  My short take: China is not a nation with a government with which we should be in the least accommodating.


----------



## MarkOttawa

China has plenty of compradors in US too:



> BUYING POWER
> Meet the U.S. Officials Now in China’s Sphere of Influence
> _There's a slew of one-time U.S. politicians and officials who have lobbied for China or whose business interests are closely connected to it._
> 
> As China’s wealth has grown, so has its sophistication at currying favor in Washington and among the American elite.
> 
> Both the Chinese government and Chinese companies, often with close state ties, have retained lobbying and public-relations firms in the Beltway, in some cases hiring former U.S. officials as personal lobbyists.
> 
> Beijing has also learned how to harness its economic might by alternately opening its doors to companies who play by China’s rules, and slamming the door on companies that go against its red lines. In some cases, this grants Beijing powerful sway over foreign companies with business interests in China. This has raised concerns that current U.S. government officials may have an eye on their future prospects in China even before leaving office.
> 
> While it may seem politics as usual in Washington today, some are alarmed.
> 
> “Nobody in the 1980s would have represented the Russian government. And now you find so many lobbying for the Chinese government,” said Frank Wolf, a retired U.S. representative from Virginia who long served as the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “I served in Congress for 34 years. I find it shocking.”
> 
> Below are some of the more prominent former U.S. politicians and officials whose have lobbied for China or whose business interests are closely connected to it [read on]...
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-us-officials-who-now-lobby-for-china



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Very interesting article by USN Pacific Fleet's Director of Intelligence--one excerpt:



> How We Lost the Great Pacific War
> ...
> With steady improvement of adversary reach and capability, our forces forward had grown vulnerable. They were no longer large or capable enough to offer decisive deterrence or to disrupt or delay sufficiently an adversary...
> https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/how-we-lost-great-pacific-war



Relevant post from 2016, note further links at start:



> US Navy: Carriers or Subs, with the Dragon in Mind
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/mark-collins-us-navy-carriers-or-subs-with-the-dragon-in-mind/



Mark
Ottawa


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

A long article in "Asia Times" which lays out the dangers of Xi Jinping's personality cult unravelling if there is too much turbulence in the economic future. (This article could equally be in the political forum under trade). While the downside of unravelling the personality cult under a "one man" rule is pretty devastating, I suspect there will be enough resilience in the "Red Dynasty" (as Edward so eloquently described it) to maintain "The Mandate of Heaven" and quietly (or not so quietly) pushing Xi aside. 

China's economic Archilles heel has been its export economy, and President Trump has certainly zeroed in open that with his tariffs, one can wonder how carefully the US team has calibrated their push, given the real uncertainty surrounding Chinese economic numbers.

http://www.atimes.com/chinas-new-woes-unravel-xis-personality-cult/



> *China’s new woes unravel Xi’s personality cult*
> Xuan Loc DoanBy XUAN LOC DOAN AUGUST 5, 2018 12:02 PM (UTC+8)
> 
> 249 10
> China’s – or, perhaps, more correctly, Xi Jinping’s – propagandists hail him as an exceptional leader. Yet with the country faced with several serious and rising problems, notably a deepening and damaging trade war with the United States, people may now realize that the Chinese ruler isn’t as great as they trumpet.
> 
> -snip-
> 
> After a meeting on July 31, the Politburo, a top decision-making body comprising China’s 25 most senior leaders, issued a statement saying China’s economy maintained steady growth with good momentum in the first half of 2018. However, it now “faces some new problems and challenges,” the body acknowledged.
> 
> More precisely, according to Xinhua, which carried the statement, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth stayed within the range of 6.7 to 6.9% for 12 straight quarters. “But a slight weakening was spotted in June in industrial output and investment, and worries have been on the rise that escalating trade tensions could bite into the economy in the future.”
> 
> While the state news agency didn’t specify, it was America’s rising tariffs against the Asian giant that caused the “escalating trade tensions” and led to China’s “new problems and challenges.”
> 
> In a piece on July 29, Li Hong, an editor with the Global Times, a party-backed nationalistic paper, said: “Under constant pressure from the Trump administration’s escalating tariffs and coercion, Chinese stocks have tumbled, shedding some 20 percent from their highs last year” and “partially affected by the trade tension, business activity in China has eased since April.”
> 
> Li also observed that “the world’s second-largest economy is due for a bumpy ride in the second half, as the [Trump] administration has increased the pressure by threatening to impose 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports at the end of August.”
> 
> -snip-
> 
> But, with America’s economy doing well, its stock market faring better than China’s since the trade dispute began and with Trump making peace with the European Union, the US’s biggest trading partner and one of Washington’s closest and strongest allies, America is gaining the upper hand over China and thus is likely to ratchet up its trade war on China.
> 
> Beijing is thus faced with a big dilemma. If the trade war escalates, then it will certainly greatly damage China’s economy and Xi’s ambition. The fundamental factor behind the country’s emergence as a major power is its impressive economic growth over the past four decades.
> 
> Such an economic performance is also the ultimate reason behind Xi’s overt ambition of transforming it into a global power and leader. His failure to maintain high economic growth and to achieve the “Chinese dream” that he has ardently championed will make many within the Party and wider society question his unalloyed power and indefinite rule.



Read the full article at the link


----------



## a_majoor

Meanwhile, China tests new hypersonic flight vehicles:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2158524/chinas-hypersonic-aircraft-starry-sky-2-could-be-used



> *China’s hypersonic aircraft, Starry Sky-2, could be used to carry nuclear missiles at six times the speed of sound*
> First test flight of experimental design, which rides its own shock waves, deemed a ‘huge success’
> PUBLISHED : Monday, 06 August, 2018, 9:14pm
> UPDATED : Monday, 06 August, 2018, 11:38pm
> 
> China has successfully tested a new hypersonic aircraft that could one day be used to carry missiles at such speeds as to make them unstoppable, according to scientists involved in the project.
> 
> The Starry Sky-2, which is an experimental design known as waverider – for its ability to ride on the shock waves it generates – completed its first test flight on Friday at an undisclosed location in northwest China, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics said in a statement issued on Monday.
> 
> The aircraft was carried into space by a multistage rocket before separating and relying on its own power. During independent flight it conducted extreme turning manoeuvres, maintained velocities above Mach 5.5 (five-and-a-half times the speed of sound) for more than 400 seconds, and achieved a top speed of Mach 6, or 7,344km/h (4,563mph) the statement said.
> 
> On completion of the flight, which was deemed a “huge success”, the aircraft landed in a designated target zone, it said.
> 
> The entire flight was controlled and provided effective test data, while the aircraft itself was recovered “whole”, the statement said.
> 
> “The test … has laid a solid technological foundation for engineering applications of the waverider design,” it said.
> 
> Although still at the experimental stage, once fully developed, waveriders could be used to carry warheads capable of penetrating any anti-missile defence system currently available.
> 
> Beijing-based military analyst Zhou Chenming said it would most likely be used for carrying conventional warheads rather than nuclear ones, though added that such a capability was still some way away.
> 
> “I think there are still three to five years before this technology can be weaponised,” he said.
> 
> “As well as being fitted to missiles, it may also have other military applications, which are still being explored.”
> 
> The Starry Sky-2 is not China’s first hypersonic aircraft – it has been testing hypersonic glide vehicles since 2014 – but is the only one that makes use of waverider technology.
> 
> The new aircraft, which has a flatter, wedge-shaped fuselage to improve its supersonic lift-to-drag ratio, also has much greater manoeuvrability that makes early warning or interception more difficult.
> 
> Mike Griffin, a former Nasa administrator and now the Pentagon’s defence undersecretary for research and engineering, said earlier this year that China had built “a pretty mature system” for a hypersonic missile to strike from thousands of miles away.
> 
> China is not alone in developing hypersonic weapons, the United States and Russia are too.
> 
> Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system had reached speeds of Mach 20, while a new hypersonic glide vehicle, the Avangard, which was “absolutely invulnerable to any missile defence system” would come into operation next year, followed by a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile in 2020.
> 
> US targets Chinese and Russian missiles with THAAD upgrade in South Korea: military analysts(
> 
> The US is working on several designs, including the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 and Advanced Hypersonic Weapon. Earlier this year, the US Air Force allocated US$1 billion for the design and development of a hypersonic missile that could be launched from a warplane.


----------



## a_majoor

Came across this interesting article, which once again brings up the idea that the "numbers" used to calculate Chinese economic performance etc. are not credible, and provides a few few numbers of their own. Now I hope that people with more inside knowledge of China can comment on this, because while i agree that many economic numbers have been exaggerated or discounted by the Chinese for their propaganda or internal purposes, I'm having a bit of a hard time with the magnitude of difference being suggested here:

https://www.tbwns.com/2018/08/13/the-bears-lair-chinas-coming-austrian-collapse/



> *The Bear’s Lair: China’s coming Austrian collapse*
> MARTIN HUTCHINSONAugust 13, 2018
> 
> “The coming collapse of China” has been predicted many times. Indeed, an excellent book of that title was a best-seller back in 2001. Yet the fictitiousness of Chinese economic statistics remains, and the over-leverage in the economy worsens. Like several other successful non-market economies, China has successfully sought rents from other countries through flaws in the global economic system. Thanks to President Trump, that is now changing, and the result for China will not be pretty.
> 
> Conventional wisdom is that China is the most successful growth story ever seen, that it will overtake the United States in terms of GDP in the early 2020s and (for some China optimists) that it will overtake the U.S. in terms of GDP per capita by 2050. Certainly, that’s what Xi Jinping is aiming at, with his removal of the limits on his tenure and his attempt to dominate the world’s intellectual property by 2025.
> 
> There is just one problem: China’s economic statistics are largely fictitious, and the gap between statistics and reality is growing ever larger. If the statistics are nonsense, then probably the economic power is nonsense as well.
> 
> The most egregious flaw in China’s statistics is the savings rate. For decades we have been told that the Chinese people are extraordinary savers, with a savings rate of some 46% of GDP, according to the latest figures, compared with around 6.8% of GDP (Itself a figure recently and dubiously inflated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis) in the United States. Touchingly sentimental pictures are painted of the noble impoverished Chinese, earning one fiftieth of a Western wage but nevertheless saving nearly half of that pittance, seven times the American rate of saving, because of the country’s notorious lack of social services for the elderly.
> 
> If China really had a savings rate of 46%, the economy would look quite different. There would be very little debt in the system; the banks would have a very low loans to deposits ratio and low leverage, like banks in nineteenth century Britain. Consumer debt would be almost non-existent, while the Chinese market would have an enormous variety of saving and investment schemes, to take care of all the accumulated wealth. New company formation would be very high, but “venture capital” would be very scarce, because new companies would be capitalized from the savings of the founders’ relatives and friends. Overall, China might well have a rapid growth rate, but it would be a very contented, stable economy.
> 
> A recent Financial Times examination of China’s economy illustrates the problem; it shows consumer debt almost doubling as a share of GDP, from roughly 20% to 40% in the last five years and tells pathetic stories of young, highly educated Chinese who max out their credit cards, desperately hoping to boost their earnings sufficiently to pay that debt back. But Chinese elite youths brought up in a society with a 46% savings rate would have neither the desire nor the need for heavy credit card usage. First, they would have been brought up in families with a fanatical devotion to deferring consumption, so would regard the over-indebted Western Millennial lifestyle with undiluted horror. Second, because of their families’ savings habits, such elite youths would be beneficiaries of very substantial trust funds from their relatives, and so would have no need of credit cards.
> 
> If the savings rate is fiction, then so are all China’s economic statistics. GDP is at least one third lower than claimed, to account for the missing savings, and growth rates over the last decades correspondingly lower, On the other hand, China’s foreign debt is all too real, and most of the domestic debt also appears to be solid, so China’ s gross debt, already alarmingly high at 299% of GDP according to the Institute for International Finance, is in reality about 450% of true GDP, substantially higher than that of any other country. With such a level of debt, China is not about to overtake the West, it is in imminent danger of collapse. Indeed, it is at first sight something of a mystery why it has not collapsed already under the weight of its excesses.
> 
> As often in these questions, some history is useful here. China is not a market economy, nor anything close to one. Instead it is an economy that has been benefiting from two sources of unearned foreign increment: the “unequal deals” it has been able to impose on Third World countries that provide it with raw materials and seizure of Western intellectual property without paying for it.
> 
> There are three previous examples of societies that appeared to become very successful by non-market looting of foreigners, two of which used military means to achieve it and the third used a mixture of military and economic means. Those societies were Napoleonic France, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Of those examples, the Third Reich is not very relevant to modern China because its looting was mostly (though not entirely) military and its economic hegemony was remarkably brief and probably not sustainable.
> 
> Napoleonic France is an interesting precedent. This is a society that has been excessively admired by recent British conservative historians, yet the Empire’s economy rested on looting its subject states and Napoleon himself was economically illiterate, dismissing Jean-Baptiste Say, one of the two best French economists ever (no, the other is not Thomas Piketty!) from the public service.
> 
> However, the great Lord Liverpool noticed in 1809 that Napoleon’s Empire was unstable; it relied upon loot from a continued supply of new victims to maintain itself. Consequently, a steady and moderate pressure, as applied by the economically stable Britain through the Peninsular War, caused Napoleon to adopt the desperate expedient of invading Russia, after which the Empire collapsed, economically and militarily. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s Empire had been a very impressive structure at its peak, apparently wealthier and more powerful than its rivals, an excellent example of how an exploitative state run on non-market economics can dominate for a time.
> 
> The Soviet Union was in many ways an even more impressive example; its apparent strength and prosperity around 1970 has vanished down the memory hole of history. It relied in the early post-war years on exploiting the industry and technology of the fallen Nazi Reich and other countries of its Eastern European empire. Later, it borrowed from the over-liquid international banking system, relying on never having to pay the money back. With its statistics calculated on the basis of prices set by its own central planners, Soviet growth in 1945-70 was rapid; by 1970 the Soviet Union claimed to have around 65% of the GDP of the United States, according to calculations accepted by both sides. Since its population was 20% greater than the United States in 1970, GDP per capita was over half the U.S. level.
> 
> Unhappily for Vladimir Putin’s dreams of glory, when capitalism impinged on the former Soviet Union after 1991, its economic strength was proved to be an illusion. Per capita GDP fell to around one tenth of the U.S. level, although it has recovered somewhat since 2000. There was a certain amount of real impoverishment of the Russian people in the 1990s, but in truth much of the Soviet Union’s 1970 wealth had been illusory, a result of using prices divorced from international levels. Nevertheless, for most of the 1970s, the Soviet Union had more megatons of nuclear missiles than the United States, so in terms of both wealth and throw-weight it appeared highly globally competitive. As with China today and Napoleonic France, people talked of it overtaking the United States altogether by 1980 or so.
> 
> Napoleonic France, the Soviet Union and today’s China rely on easy money and dozy adversaries to build up their power on an exploitative basis. In China’s case, entry to the WTO in 2001 and its gross abuse of Western intellectual property built its strength artificially, as was the case with the 1960s Soviet Union and Napoleonic France. However, as Liverpool showed from 1809 and Reagan showed in the 1980s, a determined adversary, who is aware of the exploitative games played by the would-be economic hegemon, can force it to abide by market rules, at which point its over-extended economy will collapse, or at least shrink back to a level sustainable from its domestic finances and capability.
> 
> As with Reagan confronting the Soviet Union after 1981, the United States now has a President in Donald Trump who will prevent China from taking advantage of the international trading, intellectual property and credit system by non-market means. To achieve this, he must tighten intellectual property rules, as he is doing, and ensure that China’s flouting of “level playing field” WTO norms is met by equal barriers from the U.S. and ideally from the West as a whole.
> 
> Then (and this will be difficult for a convinced easy-money man like Trump) he must tighten the international money markets sufficiently that liquidity is not available ad infinitum to finance China’s “Belt and Road” and other expansion schemes. China must not be allowed to take over economically a strip of countries between itself and Africa, including much of the Middle East, thereby giving itself more resources to exploit in its non-market economy. Much of China’s investment in the last quarter-century, domestic and international, has been “malinvestment” in the Austrian economists’ use of that term; and must be liquidated for the economy to regain its health.
> 
> With these initiatives, China will soon be faced with a massive credit crisis, as it can no longer borrow to prop up its fictitious shell of an economy. Like the Soviet Union and post-Napoleonic France, it will emerge healthy, but economically a third of its former size. By forcing this, Trump will perform a massive service for the United States and its Western allies, but also in the long run for China itself and especially for its industrious but not pathologically frugal people.
> 
> -0-
> (The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)


----------



## a_majoor

National Review on the so called "Belt and Road" initiative. The predatory nature of China's "investments" in third world nations should be concerning, as well as the implicit danger that we in the West could end up on the hook for bailing things out through the IMF.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/china-belt-and-road-initiative-xi-jinping-masking-problems-at-home/



> *The Belt and Road Illusion*
> By Therese Shaheen
> August 15, 2018 6:30 AM
> 
> China’s international-development project reflects its global ambitions but masks problems at home.
> 
> The president is a man who often makes aspirational statements and presents them as fact. He has a grandiose sense of what he is accomplishing, causing allies and adversaries to parse his every comment to separate reality from illusion. Through his pronouncements, the president touts his country’s strength, security, and its determination to make its own way unencumbered by entangling alliances and agreements. It is an effective technique, forcing other countries to rethink their policies and reconsider their relationships. Still, he has a firm grip on his party after having dispatched numerous potential rivals or challengers through his sheer audacity. The party has fallen in line behind him, its stalwarts reasserting the president’s positions as their own.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But enough about China’s Xi Jinping.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In fact, President Donald Trump is one foreign leader who’s not buying it. In the ways that his administration is applying pressure on China — by highlighting the U.S.’s commitment to Taiwan, challenging China’s military adventurism in the region, blocking investments in sensitive U.S. sectors, and even pursuing a unilateral tariff policy — it seems clear that Trump and his team are comfortable pushing against the illusions that Xi wants the world to believe about China.
> 
> Xi is the master — okay, there’s at least one other leader in his league — of making people respond to his utterances and declarations as though they were fact, distracting his observers to obscure the reality in the background. In the foreground, the world sees China’s conspicuous urban wealth, global companies dominating its sectors, the largest banks in the world, military expansion, and diplomatic energy. This obscures runaway public and private debt, an aging population with no social-support system after decades of the disastrous one-child policy, and rural poverty that approaches the worst found anywhere else in the world.
> 
> The latest example of this policy of distraction is the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is feeding the latest source of anxiety about China’s pretensions to great-power status. The Economist recently devoted its cover to “Planet China,” with a focus on the BRI. The unclassified synopsis of National Defense Strategy of the U.S. for 2018 does not mention the BRI by name, but the implication is clear in its statement that “China is leveraging . . . predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage” with the long-term goal of displacing the United States, first in the region and, ultimately, globally. On August 7, in a dinner meeting in New Jersey with several CEOs of American companies, even President Trump referenced the BRI, calling it “insulting” while addressing his broader priority of stopping China’s unfair trade practices.
> 
> -snip-
> 
> But behind the illusion of China’s economic miracle is a reality that is becoming hard to deny, and there may be whiffs of frustration and disillusionment starting to swirl around Xi as a result. The drivers are many and interrelated, but a quick recap of some of the most compelling is in order. First, China’s debt as a percentage of GDP has nearly doubled in ten years. Every actor in the economy, from the central government to local governments, companies, and households, is dangerously over-leveraged. Second, China faces bubbles of overcapacity in several asset classes, most notably real estate, contributing to cities featuring empty malls and condo developments (about which much has been written of late). Third, China has too many older people and too few young people, a result of terrible social policies. The country faces a decline in the number of workers to retirees: from 5–1 to 2–1 in the next 15 years. Even now, only about a quarter of Chinese workers contribute to the pension system. Finally, China is a country in which massive rural poverty is already the reality. This creates several negative pathologies of its own, including the possibility of widespread cognitive handicaps among the poor.
> 
> Given these realities, the BRI should be viewed with skepticism, not feared as a master plan for global dominance. Much of the growth in Chinese overseas investment, for instance, is a way to channel excess capacity by state-owned enterprises that have grown too large, have too much debt, and are chasing too few opportunities inside China. There are only so many Chinese ghost cities that can be built.
> 
> Some believe the BRI is a way for China to export debt deliberately: “Debt-trap diplomacy” by which the PRC can use its leverage and onerous lending terms to take control of strategic infrastructure projects under the guise of economic partnership. In Sri Lanka last year, the government ceded control to Beijing of the debt-laden but strategically located Hambantota port facility on the southern end of the island nation,  roughly halfway between the strait of Malacca and the strait of Hormuz. Hambantota had been a ballyhooed example of a BRI “partnership,” but in the end only one “partner” benefited.
> 
> Whether the PRC’s intent in this case was predatory or just bad economics is almost beside the point. The fact remains that there is a lot of unfavorable economics behind China’s impetus to be seen as an expansionist power, given its pressing domestic realities.



Read the full article at the link


----------



## Good2Golf

...as opposed to the assumed awesomeness/success of Trump's own BRI*.  ;D

Regards
G2G



* - _Bilaterals Renewal Initiative_.


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLAAF joining a PLA nuke triad:



> China, close to establishing its own ‘nuclear triad,’ has practiced targeting US
> 
> The Pentagon, for the first time, has publicly reported what commanders in the Pacific have known about, and kept a wary eye on, for some time: China is practicing long-range bombing runs against U.S. targets.
> 
> While the Defense Department annually reports on the rapid growth in capabilities of China’s air, land and sea forces, the 2018 report is the first to acknowledge the direct threat to U.S. territory.
> 
> Recent developments on China’s H-6K variant of its Badger bomber give the bomber “the capability to carry six land-attack cruise missiles, giving the PLA a long-range standoff precision strike capability that can range Guam,” the report said. It also acknowledged frequent bombing practice runs that U.S. commanders at the newly renamed U.S. INDOPACOM in Hawaii have watched expand in numbers and distance.
> 
> During a trip to the command last October, defense officials described to Military Times the frequent incursions to test Guam’s air-defense zone as one of the many changes in China’s behavior in the Pacific that create worry. Compared to North Korea, which officials said they still view as “a fight we can win,” with China they “worry about the way things are going."
> 
> The $716 billion defense budget for FY2019 is largely focused on getting U.S. forces ready again for a great power fight, with investments in new fighters, bombers and ships to keep the U.S. at pace with — and ahead of — the Chinese investments.
> 
> “The PLA has been developing strike capabilities to engage targets as far away from China as possible. Over the last three years, the PLA has rapidly expanded its overwater bomber operating areas, gaining experience in critical maritime regions and likely training for strikes against U.S. and allied targets,” the 2018 report found.
> 
> More worrisome, the report found, “the PLA Air Force has been re-assigned a nuclear mission. The deployment and integration of nuclear-capable bombers would, for the first time, provide China with a nuclear “triad” of delivery systems dispersed across land, sea and air.”
> 
> The unclassified version of the annual report to Congress on China’s military and security developments was released Thursday; a separate classified version was also prepared for the Hill.
> 
> The Pentagon emphasized that even as it is monitoring and re-calibrating its own defense strategies and investment priorities to be prepared for a potential great power fight in the future with China, “the Department of Defense’s objective is to set the military relationship between our two countries on a path of transparency and non-aggression," the report said...
> https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/17/pentagon-china-close-to-nuclear-triad-has-practiced-targeting-us/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Profiling with Chicom characteristics--at _Defense One's_ "D-Brief" (further links at original):



> ...
> *Careful on LinkedIn, intel pros — China is trying to recruit you*. That’s one message from William Evanina, the U.S. counter-intelligence chief, who spoke to Reuters on Thursday [Aug. 30] about the matter.
> 
> *Writes Reuters*: “It is highly unusual for a senior U.S. intelligence official to single out an American-owned company by name and publicly recommend it take action. LinkedIn boasts 562 million users in more than 200 countries and territories, including 149 million U.S. members.”
> 
> *No secret: *Defense One long ago chronicled how LinkedIn is an easy phone book for spotting intelligence professionals (special operators, spies, codebreakers, you name it…). In 2013, we pieced together the super-secretive National Security Agency’s org chart (much of it, anyway) using, in part, LinkedIn profiles. It’s a “It’s a marvelous intelligence goldmine,” tweets Marc Ambinder, former Defense One contributor who broke that scoop, Friday morning...



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Could be getting pretty close to RCAF's NORAD area:



> How a potential Chinese-built airport in Greenland could be risky for a vital US Air Force base
> 
> With less than 60,000 people spread across more than 830,000 square miles, Greenland relies heavily on air transport to move supplies and people up and down its coast.
> 
> So when the local government issued a solicitation to build three new airports, the move made sense from a business perspective. The project would be expensive, but would improve commerce and make life on the island easier for its residents.
> 
> Then a Chinese company — owned by the government in Beijing, and once blacklisted by the World Bank — put forth a bid, and a simple request for proposals transformed into a project with international diplomatic ramifications.
> 
> Denmark, which has final say on national security issues involving Greenland, objected. The government in Greenland then insisted China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), which has succesfully worked on large infrastructure projects around the world, would remain one of its finalists for the projects, setting up intense negotiations between two governments [_our gov't blocked CCCC from taking over big construction firm Aecon_ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-china-is-not-a-threat-to-canada-and-doesnt-deserve-unfair-treatment/ ].
> 
> All this comes as officials across Europe are raising alarm over whether Chinese economic influence on the continent is becoming a national security problem — with Danish officials specifically worried that the partly-government owned company’s interest in Greenland could have a lasting impact on a key American military base located there...
> 
> 
> 
> In recent years, Chinese firms have invested in several Greenland-based projects, including a mine for rare earth elements and uranium in southern Greenland and an iron mine near the capital, Nuuk. That kind of economic investment has been welcomed as a boost to the local economy.
> 
> But in 2016, a Chinese company attempted to buy a former U.S. military base, and the government in Denmark stepped in, vetoing the deal. At the time, Danish officials were quoted anonymously in the press, saying they had resisted the deal as a favor to its longtime American ally.
> 
> The CCCC bid for the airport contract would represent another major investment. The airport has an estimated cost of 3.6 billion Danish krone (U.S. $560 million). Such a massive infrastructure project for whatever company wins could potentially set Beijing up as a major economic driver for Greenland.
> 
> Like elsewhere in Europe, “the big fear is that even a small Chinese investment will amount to a large part of Greenland’s GDP, giving China an outsized influence that can be used for other purposes,” said Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College’s Institute for Strategy...
> 
> 
> 
> The _U.S. Air Force’s Thule Air Base, located on the western side of Greenland, is home to several strategic assets vital to America’s homeland defense. The Air Force’s 21st Space Wing operates systems related to missile warning, space surveillance and space control from the base; forces also operate the Upgraded Early Warning Radar, used to track incoming ballistic missiles_ [emphasis added].
> 
> In addition, the base is home to a 10,000-foot runway and what the Pentagon claims is “the northernmost deep water port in the world,” which would become incredibly important for any military operation that runs through the Arctic.
> 
> “A Chinese presence in Greenland would complicate the U.S. position on the island — ultimately it is not impossible to imagine that China could pressure the Greenlandic government to ask the Americans to leave or demand permission to get a Chinese military or dual-use presence there,” Rahbek-Clemmensen noted...
> https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/09/07/how-a-potential-chinese-built-airport-in-greenland-could-be-risky-for-a-vital-us-air-force-base/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Good2Golf

Since the World’s geo-political-military-economic framework appears to be moving towards economic influence, particularly in distributed bi-lateral agreements (sound familiar?), this should come as no surprise to many/most onlookers.  China’s brick and road initiative isn’t just for Southeast Asia...

Interesting times ahead, and Greenland is likely only the first major close-to-home development likely to be pursued by Beijing. 

Regards
G2G


----------



## MarkOttawa

How tough with China are Justin Trudeau and LPC compradors willing to get (note Japan and India near end)?



> Ottawa launches probe of cyber security
> 
> Canada is conducting a national security analysis to minimize cyberthreats to the country from equipment made by foreign telecommunications companies, including China’s Huawei – a study that has gained importance since the United States and Australia banned the telecom giant from participating in new wireless cellular networks.
> 
> Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who recently had discussions in Australia about possible threats from Huawei during a meeting of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, said on Tuesday the security analysis is government-wide, but would provide no further details.
> 
> Mr. Goodale visited Australia in late August, shortly after Canberra barred Huawei and rival Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE from supplying parts there for the development of the mobile network known as 5G, citing national security.
> 
> “We had the opportunity to hear from Australia in terms of its decision and the decision-making process that is under way in a great many countries," Mr. Goodale told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday after a cabinet meeting. "That was useful information from Canada’s point of view, and we are making sure we have the analysis and ultimately the set of decisions that will keep Canadians safe.”
> 
> Huawei did not have an immediate response to Ottawa’s national security analysis.
> 
> 5G is the next stage in cellular technology, and will require massive infrastructure to deliver the promised faster downloads. Under Chinese law, companies must “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work” as requested by Beijing, and security experts in the United States and Canada warn that equipment produced by firms such as Huawei could be compromised on behalf of China’s ruling party.
> 
> When asked whether Ottawa is considering following the United States and Australia, Mr. Goodale said he did not want to talk about specific companies, but added that “nothing is left out” of the security analysis...
> 
> Mr. Goodale did not say when the security analysis began, but the _Trump administration, Congress and U.S. security agencies have been cranking up pressure on Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand – three of its partners in the Five Eyes – to ban Huawei from 5G networks_ [emphasis added].
> 
> An official in Mr. Goodale’s office later told The Globe the _analysis began well before Australia announced its 5G ban on Huawei and ZTE_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Japan is also studying whether additional regulations are needed to reduce “security risks from using network equipment from Chinese companies," according to the Wall Street Journal, which spoke to officials responsible for cybersecurity in the Japanese government’s cabinet office. The Japanese business newspaper Sankei Shimbun also reported that the security restrictions being contemplated would effectively ban Huawei and ZTE from Japan.
> 
> Huawei’s future in India has also come into question. The Economic Times of India cited the country’s telecom secretary in a recent report saying the Chinese firm was being excluded from the government’s list of partner companies for 5G trials. “We have written to Cisco, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia, and telecom service providers to partner with us to start 5G technology-based trials, and have got positive response from them,” telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan told ETT. “We have excluded Huawei from these trials.”
> 
> Huawei has denied it is being excluded from 5G trials in India, pointing to comments from the telecom secretary that she might be open to including the firm.
> 
> In early September, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the spy agency tasked with protecting Canadians from cyberattacks, acknowledged to The Globe that it has been conducting security tests since 2013 on telecommunications equipment sold in Canada by Huawei. Britain has a similar testing system, but a report in July found that the results give only limited assurances that Huawei’s operations pose no threat...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-launches-probe-of-cyber-security/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

Too close for comfort between a US and PRC destroyers.  


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6235429/US-Navy-destroyer-forced-veer-course-maneuver-prevent-collision-Chinese-ship.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ito=1490&ns_campaign=1490


----------



## tomahawk6

Mr Meng the President of Interpol was arrested in China of suspicion of corruption.  


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/asia/china-interpol-men-hongwei.html


----------



## MarkOttawa

China using its "One Belt, One Road" to grasp _Weltmacht_ in Africa--start of good piece by _Globe's_ Geoffrey York:



> China flexes its political muscles in Africa with media censorship, academic controls
> 
> When he announced another US$60-billion in financing for Africa last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised that the money had “no political strings attached.”
> 
> But a series of recent incidents, including cases of media censorship and heavy-handed academic controls, have cast doubt on that promise. China’s financial muscle is rapidly translating into political muscle across the continent.
> 
> At a major South African newspaper chain where Chinese investors now hold an equity stake, a columnist lost his job after he questioned China’s treatment of its Muslim minority.
> 
> In Zambia, heavily dependent on Chinese loans, a prominent Kenyan scholar was prevented from entering the country to deliver a speech critical of China. In Namibia, a Chinese diplomat publicly advised the Namibian President to use pro-China wording in a coming speech. And a scholar at a South African university was told that he would not receive a visa to enter China until his classroom lectures contain more praise for Beijing.
> 
> Mr. Xi’s promise to African leaders in early September was the latest reiteration of a frequent Chinese boast: a non-interference pledge that often wins applause from a continent with a history of Western colonialism and conditional World Bank loans. China routinely touts its financial engagement with Africa as a “win-win” situation for both sides, in contrast to exploitative Western policies.
> 
> For years, Africa has embraced China’s offers of investment, loans and trade. Chinese money has become the biggest new source of financing and investment in many African countries. But there are growing concerns that this assistance might not be as benign as they had once believed.
> 
> African governments and businesses, eager for Chinese funds, are increasingly willing to suppress or censor viewpoints that Beijing does not like. Backed by dramatically rising investment and loans, Chinese influence is sharply increasing in African media, academia, politics and diplomacy...
> 
> Another sign of Beijing’s political power is the huge number of African leaders who flock to the summit of China’s main African organization: the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). More than 50 African leaders attended the latest FOCAC summit in China last month, where Mr. Xi announced his US$60-billion pledge. In fact, many more African leaders attended the Beijing summit than the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where less than 30 African leaders were in attendance this year...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-flexes-its-political-muscles-in-africa-with-media-censorship/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

The full article is behind the WSJ paywall, but even this excerpt is worth the read. The United States rolls out it's new China policy:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/309845



> OCTOBER 9, 2018
> WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Did Cold War II break out last week while no one was watching?
> 
> The Trump administration’s China policy swam into view, and it’s a humdinger. Vice President Mike Pence gave a guide to the approach in a speech last week at the Hudson Institute (where I am a fellow). Denouncing what he called China’s “whole of government” approach to its rivalry with the U.S., Mr. Pence vowed the Trump administration will respond in kind. He denounced China’s suppression of the Tibetans and Uighurs, its “Made in China 2025” plan for tech dominance, and its “debt diplomacy” through the Belt and Road initiative. The speech sounded like something Ronald Reagan could have delivered against the Soviet Union: Mr. Xi, tear down this wall! Mr. Pence also detailed an integrated, cross-government strategy to counter what the administration considers Chinese military, economic, political and ideological aggression.
> 
> In the same week as the vice president’s speech, Navy plans for greatly intensified patrols in and around Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea were leaked to the press. Moreover, the recently-entered trilateral U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement was revealed to have a clause discouraging trade agreements between member countries and China. The administration indicated it would seek similar clauses in other trade agreements. Also last week, Congress approved the Build Act, a $60 billion development-financing program designed to counter China’s Belt and Road strategy in Africa and Asia. Finally, the White House issued a report highlighting the danger that foreign-based supply chains pose to U.S. military capabilities in the event they are cut off during a conflict.
> 
> Any one of these steps would have rated banner headlines in normal times; in the Age of Trump, all of them together barely registered. But this is a major shift in American foreign policy.



WSJ link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pence-announces-cold-war-ii-1539039480


----------



## CBH99

Seems like the US is playing catch-up to a much more ambitious & globally focused China.  While the US is focused on global military operations (some quite necessary) - China is building trade agreements & providing condition free loans to several countries.  

The US wants to discourage trade agreements with China, which is silly as China is very quickly becoming the world's largest economy - telling countries not to develop trade agreements with China is basically asking those countries to shoot themselves in the foot for the sake of US friendship.  (A friendship Trump hasn't been eager to honour in many cases.)


And ofcourse there is a huge security risk of having Chinese based supply chains supporting US military capabilities.  That's the one case where "Made in America" should probably be mandatory.  Not just in the case of the supplies being disrupted during a conflict, but the sheer vulnerability created by using Chinese circuitry in US military hardware.  

It wasn't that long ago (Like AT ALL) that China executed 18 CIA officers (No, I'm not kidding) -- precisely because the tech they were using was...guess what?  Made in China.  In that case, quite intentionally so.


----------



## Journeyman

CBH99 said:
			
		

> .....China executed 18 CIA officers ...


It may seem like a pedantic point, but for accuracy, the PRC executed an unconfirmed number of CIA _sources_ -- no actual American CIA officers were killed.

And while compromised comms were very much a factor, the Chinese were aided by Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA officer who they had recruited;  he's since been arrested and is awaiting trial in the States.


----------



## QV

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/waking-up-to-chinas-infiltration-of-american-colleges/2018/02/18/99d3bee8-13f7-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.662e41fb1a74

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

A couple of articles on Chinese spies and spy tech.


----------



## MarkOttawa

More Chinese spying--unusual to arrest and charge serving Ministry of State Security officer, and note extradition from Belgium:



> Chinese Officer Is Extradited to U.S. to Face Charges of Economic Espionage
> 
> A Chinese intelligence official was arrested in Belgium and extradited to the United States to face espionage charges, Justice Department officials said on Wednesday, a major escalation of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on Chinese spying.
> 
> The extradition on Tuesday of the officer, Yanjun Xu, a deputy division director in China’s main spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, is the first time that a Chinese intelligence official has been brought to the United States to be prosecuted and tried in open court. Law enforcement officials said that Mr. Xu tried to steal trade secrets from companies including GE Aviation outside Cincinnati, in Evendale, Ohio, one of the world’s top jet engine suppliers for commercial and military aircraft.
> 
> A 16-page indictment details what appears to be a dramatic international sting operation to lure Mr. Xu to what he believed was a meeting in Belgium to obtain proprietary information about jet fan blade designs from a GE Aviation employee, only to be met by Belgian authorities and put on a plane to the United States.
> 
> China has for years used spycraft and cyberattacks to steal American corporate, academic and military information to bolster its growing economic power and political influence. But apprehending an accused Chinese spy — all others charged by the United States government are still at large — is an extraordinary development and a sign of the Trump administration’s continued crackdown on the Chinese theft of trade secrets.
> 
> The administration also outlined on Wednesday [Oct. 10] new restrictions on foreign investment aimed at keeping China from gaining access to American companies.
> 
> The arrest of Mr. Xu “shows that federal law enforcement authorities can not only detect and disrupt such espionage, but can also catch its perpetrators,” Benjamin C. Glassman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a statement.
> 
> The coming trial, in federal court in Cincinnati, could further expose China’s methods for stealing trade secrets and embarrass officials in Beijing — part of what current and former administration officials said was a long-term strategy to make stealing secrets costly and shameful for China...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/us/politics/china-spy-espionage-arrest.html



DoJ news release:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-intelligence-officer-charged-economic-espionage-involving-theft-trade-secrets-leading

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terry Glavin slashes and burns his way through our comprador class:



> Glavin: China, not the United States, is the greater threat to Canada's trade sovereignty
> ...
> Just to quickly set the preposterously muddied record straight, Article 32 [of USMCA] is an American innovation that merely stipulates that Canada may not enter into a “free trade” agreement with a non-market economy – by which the Americans have since helpfully conceded they meant a command-and-control police state like China – without so much as a by-your-leave from the other parties to the newly christened U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement. For that matter, neither may the United States or Mexico.
> 
> If any of the three parties choose to enter into talks with a non-market economy (from here on we’ll just say “China”), the other parties are to be given three months prior notice. During the talks, the other parties are to be kept abreast of what’s on the table and what’s not. If the other parties don’t like the resulting deal, they can put China’s partner outside the USMCA and carry on by themselves in a bilateral trade arrangement.
> 
> That this should have incited such hoarse-throated imbecilities about Canadian “sovereignty” to emanate from Canada’s international-trade policy establishment and the Canada-China business lobby (same thing, as often as not) and a section of the business press should tell you something about just how far the rot has spread since former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s first Team Canada brigade was so warmly welcomed in Beijing back in 1994.
> 
> With nearly a quarter of a century of lucrative post-politics sinecures, Canada-China “friendship” sleaze-baggery and shameless pro-Beijing think-tankery having taken its moral and intellectual toll, it is no wonder that the very idea that China is some kind of normal trading country has been normalized.
> 
> ...Wenran Jiang, the exuberantly Beijing-friendly think-tanker with the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, whose name seems to be an indelible must-consult entry in each and every digital CBC news and public-affairs show rolodex – was beside himself about Article 32. “Anything now we do must be subject to American approval, and this is a severe concession and a sacrifice and a giveaway of our sovereignty, period,” he told CBC News.
> 
> While Wenran Jiang’s rubbish is barely distinguishable from the shouting coming from the Chinese Embassy, and Duncan Cameron, “publisher emeritus” of the chronically unserious pseudo-left webzine Rabble is making pretty well the same stupid noises about Canadian sovereignty as Ontario economic development minister Jim Wilson, you have to laugh. But it is no laughing matter that among the G7 countries, Canada’s political class remains uniquely persistent in its refusal to recognize China for what it is: a vicious, expansionist police state ruled by a violent, corrupt oligarchy that is quite explicit about its intent to overthrow the American-led world order that has guaranteed Canada’s peace and prosperity over the past 70 years.
> 
> Only this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau again rebuffed American entreaties to exclude Huawei Technologies from Canada’s fifth-generation cellular systems. Trudeau said he would not allow “politics” to intrude on such decisions, and would rely instead on the advice of experts – by which he meant the assurances of bureaucrats at the Communications Security Establishment that they’re up to the job of ensuring that Huawei, a behemoth based in Shenzhen, China, won’t be allowed to get away with spying.
> 
> In so doing, Trudeau is ignoring three former heads of Canada’s spy services, including former Canadian Security Intelligence Services director Ward Elcock, who has stated bluntly that Huawei “is essentially under the control of the Chinese government.” Trudeau is also choosing to ignore the counsel of six U.S. intelligence agencies and the Australian security and intelligence establishment. These are not “experts”? This is not about “politics”? Of course it is...
> 
> Despite Article 32, Trudeau has insisted that Canada will continue to pursue ever-closer trade ties with China. As for a free trade deal, it was never possible anyway. You can’t strike a genuinely “free” trade deal with a wholly unfree country such as China. Besides that, if an anodyne clause like Article 32 has turned Canada into a “vassal state” of the U.S., what would you expect would become of Canadian sovereignty under a full-bore comprehensive trade agreement with the princeling oligarchs of Beijing, overseers of the largest and most sophisticated slave state in human history?
> https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-china-not-the-united-states-is-the-greater-threat-to-canadas-trade-sovereignty



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Long article in the Christian Science Monitor about how and why the United States is recasting its relationships with China. Most interesting is the former policy of overlooking human rights and other factors in an effort to keep China economically engaged seems to be over. Excerpt from Instapundit, full article here:


https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2018/1016/Signs-mount-of-a-fundamental-shift-in-US-China-ties

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/310568


> CHANGE: Signs mount of a fundamental shift in US-China ties.
> 
> With efforts to resolve the tit-for-tat tariff battle in limbo, Vice President Pence this month served public notice that the US sees trade as just one grievance among many against China’s economic, military, geopolitical, and human rights policies. And he explicitly questioned a core assumption of US policy over the past two decades: that support for modernization in China and its integration into the world economy would temper Chinese leaders politically and provide the basis for a relationship of cooperation. Mr. Pence said, in effect, that ship had now sailed.
> 
> A new cold war, if that’s what it becomes, will likely look far different from the first. The Soviet Union was an underdeveloped country with an outsized military and a fearsome nuclear arsenal. China is also a nuclear power, and has been gradually building up its military reach in recent years. Yet with China, the root source of competition and of steadily growing friction has been an economic one. More specifically, it’s about how China has been using its growing economic might.
> 
> It’s interesting that Ned Temko should bring up the Soviet Union’s lack of economic might, when for decades we had been assured (always by the Left) that the Soviets were on the brink of overtaking us — if they already hadn’t. Given China’s debt explosion and coming demographic implosion, you have to wonder if they’re as economically mighty as so many people think they are.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Growing CCP China threat--excerpts from piece at Macdonald-Laurier Institute:



> Disruptive innovation in China’s military modernization: Preston Lim for Inside Policy
> 
> At the end of August, China’s second aircraft carrier sailed from its shipyard in Dalian, in northeastern China, to commence final sea trials. The 65,000-tonne vessel is China’s first domestically-built carrier and could be fully operational as early as October 2019.  Some have identified technological issues with the ship, but most analysts agree that the PLA Navy (PLAN) is entering a new era: one characterized by force projection rather than mere regional defence.
> 
> Many of those writers, while essentially correct, have missed an important point: the aircraft carrier is far from the most important tool in China’s growing armoury. This article applies the theory of disruptive innovation to examine some of the ways in which the Chinese are transforming naval warfare – most notably, through investment in anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
> 
> China’s military build-up – symbolized most boldly by the carrier construction program – is part and parcel of President Xi Jinping’s articulation of a new “Chinese Dream.” At the 19th Communist Party Congress, held in October 2017, Xi promised to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” with plans to boast a “world-class army by 2050.” To understand President Xi’s focus on the military, it is important to revisit China’s modern history.
> 
> President Xi and other Chinese leaders have tended to see China’s recent record as one of national humiliation. The 19th and 20th centuries were defined by foreign colonial intervention in Chinese domestic affairs, with calamity following calamity: the Opium Wars, the failed Boxer Rebellion, and the Sino-Japanese War, which became part of the Second World War. As late as 1996, the Chinese government was left helpless when American aircraft carriers sailed through the Taiwan Strait with impunity during a spat between China and Taiwan.
> 
> Now, the long “century of humiliation” is over. And despite slowing economic growth, caused only in part by the ongoing trade war with America, President Xi remains intent on building a Chinese dream undergirded at least in part by military muscle.
> 
> China’s military rejuvenation has, on one hand, come in the form of increased spending, with Beijing boasting a defence budget of $227 billion. Indeed, the sheer number of new naval platforms, with 18 ships commissioned in 2016 alone, is nothing short of incredible. Though naval analysts continue to debate whether or not the PLAN is a “blue-water navy” – i.e., capable of exercising “sea control at long ranges” – China’s force projection capabilities will only improve in coming years.
> 
> Yet perhaps a more important criterion of China’s growing military clout is investment in technological development. In other words, to focus on traditional terms of comparison, such as total defence outlays or number of aircraft carriers, would be to obscure a critical aspect of China’s military ascendance. While China has proven capable of domestically producing traditional weapons systems – the J-20 “Chengdu” fifth-generation stealth aircraft, for example, or the Type 001A aircraft carrier currently undergoing sea trials – its real genius lies in its embrace of disruptive innovation...
> 
> China has in recent years developed an array of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, which would render American operations in the South China Sea difficult in the event of hostilities. Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles, such as the DF-21D or the DF-26, are capable of at least disabling (if not destroying) a super-carrier or its escorts. The recently-commissioned DF-26 has a range of 3000-4000 kilometers and can even reach as far away as US facilities on Guam, making it an ideal weapon to forestall American naval entry into the Western Pacific.
> 
> The Chinese have creatively deployed shorter-range anti-ship missiles that would reduce America’s ability to operate freely in the littoral zone...
> 
> Anti-ship missiles and a growing submarine fleet are but the most conspicuous items on a long list of A2/AD competencies. The Chinese are developing lasers to disrupt enemy aerial operations, unmanned vehicles, and a range of other complementary capabilities. Such technologies will allow the Chinese military to at least partially offset American military dominance...
> 
> Responding to the Chinese missile threat means meeting innovation with innovation. The American military has already pioneered a repertoire of counter-A2/AD systems, including “long-range strike vehicles, hyper-sonic weapons…and submarine launched cruise missiles.”..
> 
> ...Western analysts will need to pay attention to the right metrics. While China’s capital ships are certainly important, China’s embrace of disruptive innovation will prove far more consequential in the long term. To ensure continued relevance, the United States and its alliance partners will likewise need to prioritize continual and disruptive innovation.
> 
> _Preston Lim is a graduate of the Schwarzman Scholars program and received his Master’s in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University._
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/disruptive-innovation-chinas-military-modernization-preston-lim-inside-policy/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Excerpts from very cogent piece:



> Is China Waiting Us Out?
> _While the U.S. bombs, Xi Jinping is building—one power play at a time._
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The one constant in recent U.S. foreign policy—regardless of which party occupies the White House or controls Congress—is that it prioritizes military intervention, both covert and overt, to advance its interests overseas.
> 
> ...With a continued troop presence in Afghanistan and Syria, a looming conflict with Iran, and even talk of an intervention in Venezuela, Trump is keeping the U.S. on its perpetual wartime footing.
> 
> This is good news for Beijing, whose own foreign policy could not be more different. Rather than embracing a reactive and short-sighted approach that all too often ignores second- and third-order consequences, the Chinese strategy appears cautious and long-ranging. Its policymakers and technocrats think and plan in terms of decades, not months. And those plans, for now, are focused more on building than bombing.
> 
> This is not to say that China’s foreign policy is altruistic—it is certainly not. It is designed to cement China’s role as a great power by ensnaring as many countries as possible in its economic web. China is playing the long game while Washington expends resources and global political capital on wars it cannot win...
> 
> While the Chinese have been in a hurry to rebuild and modernize their country, they seem content to wait out foreign policy problems even if it takes a generation or two. One can see how this approach worked with Hong Kong and may in time ensure an upper hand with Taiwan. Sometimes doing nothing equates to doing more. In America it’s the opposite: both Republican and Democratic administrations have let present domestic problems fester while pursuing expensive, reactionary military policies abroad.
> 
> In contrast to Washington’s military-first approach, China’s signature foreign policy project today is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a critical component of its decades-long effort to restore its global power status. The BRI, which is well underway, is an attempt to spread China’s influence through investment projects in upwards of 68 counties along the old Silk Road connecting Europe to Asia by land and by sea via the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” component...
> 
> Right now the biggest threat to that [China's] success is internal. Endemic corruption, insufficient rule of law, environmental destruction, a looming demographic shift, and ever-increasing economic inequality are all serious issues. In a country of 1.4 billion people, any one of those problems, much less all of them combined, could scuttle China’s rise. Its leadership, most especially Xi, appears to comprehend the gravity of these issues...
> 
> Even if the U.S. lurches to the left in the coming election cycles, the Chinese have little to fear. Interventionism is likely to remain the default response of U.S. policymakers, regardless of which party occupies the White House. And, it may just be its Achilles heel...
> 
> _Michael Horton is a foreign policy analyst who has written for numerous publications, including Intelligence Review, West Point CTC Sentinel, The Economist, The National Interest, and The Christian Science Monitor. _
> https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-china-waiting-us-out/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Journeyman

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Excerpts from very cogent piece:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Is China Waiting Us Out?
> https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-china-waiting-us-out/
Click to expand...

The entire article is very much worth reading   :nod:

Thank you.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Wake up, Canadians:


> Learning from Australia about China’s Influence Activities: New MLI Commentary
> 
> For over a decade, Australia has been in the Chinese Communist Party’s crosshairs in the form of political influence activities. The Australian public is becoming more aware of this reality in large part due to the work of Clive Hamilton – author of the best-selling book Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia.
> 
> However, Canadians remain largely ignorant to the fact that Beijing is increasingly attempting to infiltrate and influence our political, social, and economic systems. What should we be doing to prevent and protect against these sorts of operations?
> 
> To shed light on this issue, MLI has released a new commentary titled "China’s Influence Activities: What Canada can learn from Australia" ( https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/files/pdf/201801026_Commentary_Hamilton_FWeb.pdf ). Based on remarks by Clive Hamilton at an MLI panel event, this commentary examines the strategy, tactics, and reasons behind China’s influence operations. It offers a compelling and sobering analysis of the Australian experience and provides lessons for Canada as we begin to face similar challenges.
> 
> “Canada’s place in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) strategic map of the world is as important as Australia’s in its own way,” writes Hamilton. “It too has been subject to a ‘full court press’ of influence operations.”
> 
> The main threat identified in the commentary is that Beijing has been working to sway elite opinion, attempting to get decision-makers in Western countries to conform with the Communist Party’s agenda.
> 
> “The CCP has built a complex network of agencies tasked with exerting influence abroad. The agencies deploy sophisticated techniques to influence, persuade, and coerce others to act in ways approved by Beijing. The techniques have been refined over decades and are far more extensive, intrusive, and secretive than those used by other nations.”
> 
> Through front groups, business associations, cultural and religious groups, and much more, Beijing works to influence the Chinese diaspora community and the target country’s opinion leaders. The CCP’s influence campaign has yielded dividends for Beijing, although Australia is pushing back.
> 
> Hamilton identifies new laws against foreign interference as a useful first step. Other measures, such as tighter rules on foreign investment into critical infrastructure like 5G telecommunications technology, are needed to counter future threats.
> 
> However, Hamilton argues that Australia and indeed much of the West are still far away from an institutionalized mindset of “China-vigilance,” which is necessary to rebuff the CCP’s sustained attempts to influence, interfere, and subdue.
> 
> “There is much work [to do] before we can be confident that our sovereignty and democratic processes are no longer subject to unwelcome foreign influence.”
> 
> To learn more about Chinese influence operations in Australia and what Canada can learn from Australia’s experience, read Clive Hamilton’s full commentary here.
> 
> ***
> _Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and public intellectual. Since 2008, he has been Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. _
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/learning-australia-chinas-influence-activities-mli-commentary/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

More:



> China threatens the democratic world order—and Canada can’t be a weak link
> _Opinion: Despite our allies’ warnings, Ottawa isn’t taking the threat of authoritarian China seriously. That could be disastrous_.
> https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/china-poses-a-challenge-to-the-democratic-world-order-and-canada-cant-be-a-weak-link/





> China’s silent invasion of Western universities: Christian Leuprecht in the Toronto Star
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/china-silent-invasion-universities-leuprecht-star/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Quite a few people are now saying China has already effectively won control of South China Sea:



> China Has Built ‘Great Wall of SAMs’ In Pacific: US Adm. Davidson
> _From militarized atolls in the South China Sea to a growing Chinese navy looking increasingly aggressive, the head of the Indo-Pacom command lays out his needs and concerns. _
> 
> HALIFAX: By turning reefs and atolls in the disputed South China Sea into fortified artificial islands, complete with anti-aircraft Surface-to-Air Missiles, China has transformed “what was a great wall of sand just three years ago [into] a great wall of SAMs,” the US commander in the Pacific said here today.
> 
> The militarization of the vital waterway for commercial shipping has been a major concern of Washington and its Asian neighbors for the past several years. But China’s increasingly aggressive challenges of American naval vessels operating in what the US and its allies consider international waters — including a near collision of two ships in September — raises the specter of a deadly accident that might escalate into war. And if a war breaks out, the island bases become a strategic southward extension of China’s land-based defense against US ships and planes, known in the trade as Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD).
> 
> As China builds more warships for its navy and continues to militarize its coast guard, Beijing has already dwarfed the fleet the United States can commit to the region, at least if you’re counting the number of hulls in the water. (Many of the Chinese ships are smaller, shorter-range coastal vessels, however). So, after the chief of Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), Adm. Philip Davidson, spoke to the annual Halifax Security Conference here, I asked him how he plans to keep up.
> 
> “We need a bigger Navy,” he said, noting how Navy leaders have repeatedly called for growing the fleet from 286 ships today to a 355-ship fleet. As the Chinese fleet continues to grow, he told me, “the capacity concern is going to become a greater concern in years to come.”..
> https://breakingdefense.com/2018/11/china-has-built-great-wall-of-sams-in-pacific-us-adm-davidson/



Good luck with the funding.

Plus:



> The End of U.S. Naval Dominance in [East] Asia
> ...
> The rapid rise of the Chinese Navy has challenged U.S. maritime dominance throughout East Asian waters. The United States, though, has not been able to fund a robust shipbuilding plan that could maintain the regional security order and compete effectively with China’s naval build-up. The resulting transformation of the balance of power has led to fundamental changes in U.S. acquisitions and defense strategy. Nonetheless, the United States has yet to come to terms with its diminished influence in East Asia.
> 
> The New Balance of Power in East Asia
> 
> In early 2017, the Chinese Navy had 328 ships. It now possesses nearly 350 ships and is already larger than the U.S. Navy. China is the largest ship-producing country in the world and at current production rates could soon operate 400 ships. It commissions nearly three submarines each year, and in two years will have more than 70 in its fleet. The Chinese Navy also operates growing numbers of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and corvettes, all equipped with long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. Between 2013 and 2016, China commissioned more than 30 modern corvettes. At current rates, China could have 430 surface ships and 100 submarines within the next 15 years.
> 
> According to the RAND Corporation, China’s fleet is also now more modern, based on contemporary standards of ship production. In 2010, less than 50 percent of Chinese ships were “modern;” in 2017, over 70 percent were modern. China’s diesel submarines are increasingly quiet and challenge U.S. anti-submarine capabilities. China’s ship-launched and air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles possess significant range and stealth and are guided by increasingly sophisticated targeting technologies. China’s Navy now poses a significant challenge to the U.S. surface fleet. Moreover, its DF21C and DF26 conventional intermediate-range ballistic missiles also pose a challenge to U.S. assets in the region, and can target U.S. maritime facilities in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Guam.
> 
> Despite the growth of the Chinese Navy, the United States retains maritime superiority throughout East Asia. But the trend is what matters and the trend is less rosy. In early 2018, the size of the active U.S. fleet was 280 ships. Going forward, according to the Congressional Budget Office, if the Navy’s budget is the average of its budget over the prior 30 years in real dollars and it maintains its aircraft carrier and ballistic submarine construction schedules, in 12 years the active naval fleet will decline to 237 ships. In six years, the U.S. submarine fleet will decline to 48 ships, and in eleven years the number of U.S. attack submarines will decline to 41 ships.
> 
> Both the Navy and the White House have pushed to grow the U.S. fleet, but budgets have not kept pace with their plans...
> 
> The combination of China’s rising naval capabilities, the PLA’s ability to target U.S. naval access to regional maritime facilities, and declining alliance cooperation has compelled the United States to adjust its security policy to contend with emerging Chinese war-fighting capabilities within East Asian seas—the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea.
> 
> The U.S. Navy is relying on technology to compensate for declining ship numbers. It is developing longer-range anti-ship cruise missiles to contend with China’s anti-ship cruise missiles, and longer-range torpedoes to contend with China’s submarine fleet. It is developing “dispersed lethality” capabilities to contend with the quantity of Chinese ships and their ability to “swarm” against U.S. ships. It is also developing directed energy and long-range hypersonic railgun technologies. Most significant, the Navy is focused on developing large quantities of drones as its long-term solution to declining ship numbers. It is developing and testing undersea anti-submarine and anti-mine drones, miniature reconnaissance drones that can operate in large numbers to allow simultaneous targeting of multiple Chinese platforms, carrier-based attack drones and refueling drones, air-launched electronic warfare drones, and unmanned surface vessels for minesweeping operations and anti-submarine warfare.
> 
> The United States now faces a future without assured access to the South China Sea and U.S. naval facilities in the region...
> https://www.lawfareblog.com/end-us-naval-dominance-asia



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

From 2016, USN's Boeing MQ-25 Stingray aerial tanker drone--not/not strike UCAC--is supposed to alleviate range problem (when it gets into service https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/08/30/us-navy-selects-builder-for-new-mq-25-stingray-aerial-refueling-drone/)



> War Between the Dragon and the Eagle: USN Carriers up to It?
> 
> Further to this post (note “Comments”),
> 
> RAND on War Between the Dragon and the Eagle https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/mark-collins-rand-on-war-between-the-dragon-and-the-eagle/
> 
> 
> the carriers’ future capabilities are questioned (both the people quoted are retired naval officers):
> 
> '*The US Navy Is Now Facing Its Greatest Fear: Obsolete Aircraft Carriers?*
> 
> If the United States Navy is either unwilling or unable to conceptualize a carrier air wing that can fight on the first day of a high-end conflict, then the question becomes: Why should the American taxpayer shell out $13 billion for a Ford-class carrier?
> 
> That’s the potent question being raised by naval analysts in Washington—noting that there are many options that the Navy could pursue including a stealthy new long-range, carrier-based unmanned combat aircraft or a much heavier investment in submarines [emphasis added]. However, the current short-range Boeing F/A-18 Hornet-based air wing is not likely to be sufficient in the 2030s even with the addition of the longer ranged Lockheed Martin F-35C Joint Strike Fighter.
> 
> “If these carriers can’t do that first day lethal strike mission inside an A2/AD bubble, why are we paying $13 billion dollars for them?” asks Jerry Hendrix [see here], director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security [see here], during an interview with The National Interest. “There are people making that statement: ‘it’s not our job on day one’—they can say there are all these other missions—presence and show-the-flag—but if that’s where they fit, their price ought to be scaled to that.”
> 
> To justify the expense of the carrier, and to keep them relevant, the U.S. Navy needs to revamp the composition of the carrier air wing so that it can participate in countering anti-access/area denial bubbles on the first day of combat, Hendrix said. The Navy must develop a new, long-range, unmanned strike aircraft that can counter those emerging threats, “Otherwise, what’s the point?” Hendrix asked. “If you’re not willing to make the shift in investment to have an asset that can do long-range strike from the carrier, perhaps we need to look at investing elsewhere [see “New US Navy Drones: UCLASS to be Tankers Not Recon/Strike?“].”
> 
> Bryan McGrath [see here], managing director of the naval consultancy FerryBridge Group, agreed with Hendrix. “The case for the carrier will suffer if the Navy drags its feet on what comes next in the air wing,” he told The National Interest—also advocating for the development of a new carrier-based long-range unmanned strike aircraft. “Always remember—the carrier doesn’t care what it launches and recovers. It is just a floating airport. The air wing is the key. Get the air wing wrong—or continue to—and yes, the CVN investment makes less sense.”
> 
> While many within senior Navy leadership know and understand the problem—the protracted and expensive development of the Lockheed Martin F-35 has left the Navy gun-shy. “The plain truth is that the F-35 acquisition has negatively reinforced learned behavior in naval aviation acquisition. There is real fear in what you hear acquisition officials saying in why they want to slow-roll UCLASS into a tanker/ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platform rather than a rangy, semi-stealthy, striker,” McGrath said. “Of course the tanking and the ISR are important… But they are additive to what is already in the Joint architecture. What the Joint architecture lacks is mobile, semi-stealthy, long-range strike. Utterly lacks it. But the technical challenges are judged to be more difficult than those associated with an ISR/Tanker bird, and there is no appetite or stomach—or any other appropriate noun—within the acquisition community to take on tough technical challenges.”..'
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/mark-collins-war-between-the-dragon-and-the-eagle-usn-carriers-up-to-it/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Half Full

Here's an article on Chinese near monopoly on rare earth metals.  It would appear they are using their economic chessman-ship to screw the US militarily. 
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/11/china-beating-us-rare-earths-game/152674/?oref=d-dontmiss


----------



## MarkOttawa

RAND on PLA aerospace vs US:



> Defeat, Not Merely Compete
> _China's View of Its Military Aerospace Goals and Requirements in Relation to the United States_
> 
> Over the past two decades, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has made rapid advances in building up new capabilities and operational concepts. Aerospace power has been a core feature of the PLA's rapid modernization. In particular, since 2004, the PLA Air Force has pursued a service strategy aimed at developing the capacity to "simultaneously prosecute offensive and defensive integrated air and space operations." This report explores the extent to which the desire to "compete" with the U.S. Air Force (or other advanced air forces) shapes PLA thinking about the development of military aerospace power. It examines how China selects between the options of "copying" foreign powers and "innovating" its own solutions to various operational military problems, as well as which areas China chooses to not compete in at all.
> 
> *Key Findings*
> 
> _PLA's goal is to defeat, not merely compete_
> 
> The main driver for Chinese military aerospace power development is the PLA's view that it needs to be prepared to deter and, if necessary, defeat the United States in a high-end clash.
> 
> The PLA appears to copy foreign militaries when it can find low-cost hardware, organizational, or operational concepts that it can adapt from abroad to solve the operational challenges it confronts. In contrast, when foreign capabilities or organizational practices are irrelevant to Chinese military aerospace problem sets, the PLA either innovates its own solution or declines to replicate the foreign capability (although it does continue to track and study these).
> 
> The PLA appears not to compete in certain areas because it does not need certain capabilities to accomplish its directed mission, or it has other means to address the military problem at hand.
> 
> *Recommendations*
> 
> The USAF should understand the advances that China is making in specific domains related to ISR, strategic and tactical lift, and strike platforms and assets as well as power projection in and through space and against space-based satellite architectures.
> 
> In addition, the USAF should monitor a range of other PLA investments and changes, including in the realms of doctrine, organization, training, manpower, logistics, procurement, and facilities.
> 
> *Table of Contents*
> ...
> https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2588.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

China doesn't need to compete head-to-head in all avenues of military projection, because they aren't the ones sailing to the other side of the world looking for a fight.  

They don't need to put the same emphasis on tanker support, long range airborne ISR, blue-water power projection, etc etc to the SAME EXTENT as the USA, because they are fighting from home.  Fighting from their own shores, or close to them.  Launching ships and aircraft from, at most, perhaps a few hundred miles away.


And in a military confrontation with China...who really wins, militarily?  

Let's say the US surges submarines, aircraft carriers, and high-end surface assets that quickly gain dominance in their area.  They take out Chinese fighter aircraft & ISR assets, sink enough of their subs that they gain undersea dominance, and sink enough PLAN surface vessels that the USN can operately relatively freely.  

They take out the artificial islands - which won't be hard at all, as a few well placed missile strikes against the airfields & offensive missile sites essentially make those islands fairly useless.  


Now what?  The USN is supposed to patrol there forever, to cement their global empire?  Prevent China from building new ships, and new aircraft, to replace their losses?  

And what happens when China (the world's most populous country) rebuilds some aircraft fleets & naval fleets...which, with their industrial base, doesn't take long.  Now what?  The whole thing kicks off again, because China still wants to control what amounts to their own Caribbean sea?  The South China Sea even has _China_ in it's bloody name for crying out loud.


The PLAN doesn't need to compete in every avenue with the USN.  Or the USAF.  It has no need to, as it isn't trying to surge it's forces into the Gulf of Mexico.  It just needs to focus on long range weapon systems that keep the USN as far away as possible, and create enough of a brutal deterrent 'bubble' that any USN asset cursed enough to be ordered into the arena is promptly destroyed.

The PLAN and PLAAF know this.  The USN probably knows this too.  US politicians (in which I don't know of hardly any that are in favour/support of economic or military warfare against China) seem to be the ones who haven't figured out it's a losing war, even if you win a few opening battles.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of related earlier AvWeek article:



> China’s Growing Ability To Drive Away U.S. Forces
> 
> If there is a theme to China’s military developments, it is pushing the adversary back. A vast and growing assembly of sensors and weapons is the modern expression of what the former Soviet Union called a reconnaissance-strike complex. The targets are ships, submarines and bases in the Western Pacific, most obviously the U.S. Navy’s ships, its base on Guam and the U.S. Air Force facilities on that Pacific island. The message: Go away.
> 
> The same idea of pushing back appears in the field of air combat, in which the PL-XX missile has such obviously long range that commanders may have to pull vulnerable support aircraft away from the enemy.
> 
> The Soviet Union could never focus like this. Warding off the seaward threat from the U.S. was only one major military task for Moscow in the Cold War. For China, intent on having a free hand in dealing with Taiwan, driving U.S. forces from the Western Pacific has become the core of strategy.
> 
> Focus brings results. Year after year, China introduces new systems to find, track and attack U.S. targets beyond the first chain of islands to its east; year after year, the deployed numbers rise. The resources China spends facing other directions are modest by comparison. The U.S., like the former Soviet Union, has other priorities; it cannot put the bulk of its military effort into dealing with the one problem of maintaining access to East Asia.
> 
> “China is developing a dense, overlapping set of strike capabilities, including anti-ship ballistic missiles, anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles, strike aircraft, surface combatants, submarines, aircraft carriers, etc., etc.” says analyst Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The overlapping of capabilities is important: China is generally not relying on any one method to deal with any one kind of target.
> 
> - The effort is broad and deep, not based on any one system
> - Reconnaissance systems and weapons advance together
> 
> The strike capabilities are complemented by an equally dense and overlapping intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance network. Cheng says this could allow China to monitor the air, sea, sub-surface and space domains out to the second island chain: Guam, the Marianas and Australia. The ability to do so within the first island chain—Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia—is already in place.
> 
> If all this keeps the U.S. at bay, not only will Taiwan’s freedom be imperiled. Other neighbors of China may have to bend to the will of the nationalist, authoritarian government in Beijing. Excluding the U.S. from the Western Pacific would also prevent it from fulfilling treaty obligations to protect Japan...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.thefifthcolumn.xyz/Forum/viewthread.php?tid=32&page=10#pid12727



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Parts of our government being more forthright than others:



> Agencies cite spy threat to crucial networks
> 
> Canadian companies should watch out when they use technology supplied by state-owned companies from countries that want to steal corporate secrets, the country's security agencies have warned them.
> 
> The RCMP organized two workshops last March — one in Calgary, the other in Toronto — to raise awareness about threats to critical systems, including espionage and foreign interference, cyberattacks, terrorism and sabotage, newly disclosed documents show.
> 
> Canadian Security Intelligence Service materials prepared for the workshops advise that "non-likeminded countries," state-owned enterprises and affiliated companies are engaged in a global pursuit of technology and know-how driven by economic and military ambitions.
> 
> The materials were released to The Canadian Press in response to an access-to-information request.
> 
> The heavily censored records do not go into detail about specific countries. But the presentation does include a passage from a 2017 U.S. government report saying competitors such as China steal American intellectual property valued at hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
> 
> In addition, CSIS openly warned in 2016 that Russia and China were targeting Canada's classified information and advanced technology, as well as government officials and systems.
> 
> The presentations to industry dissected techniques used by adversaries and offered advice on protecting confidential information and assets.
> 
> The intelligence community's concerns emerge as Canada considers allowing Chinese firm Huawei Technologies to take part in developing a 5G telecommunications network.
> 
> Former security officials in Canada and two members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have warned against such a move, saying the company's ties to Beijing could compromise the security of Canada and its closest allies. Huawei has denied engaging in intelligence work on behalf of any government.
> 
> The workshops led by the RCMP's critical infrastructure team highlighted the problem of "supply chain vulnerability" — a back-door tactic to infiltrate systems.
> 
> The RCMP did not respond to questions about the sessions. CSIS spokesman John Townsend said the concerns stem from cases where equipment and related computerized control systems and services are manufactured and installed by companies controlled by or affiliated with a foreign government.
> 
> "These foreign governments may pursue not only profitable commercial objectives but may also try to advance their own broader and potentially adverse strategic and economic interests," he said.
> 
> The tactics could include gaining influence and leverage over the host country, espionage, technology theft and malicious cyberactivities, Townsend added.
> 
> The security presentations also warned of "spear-phishing" attempts by hostile forces to gain access to computer systems through emails that fool employees into giving up passwords or other sensitive data.
> 
> The agencies encouraged companies working on leading-edge research to take stock of protective measures and develop a corporate security plan to manage risks. For instance, scientists should consult corporate security about precautions when outside delegations visit.
> 
> "If you detect suspicious activity, contact authorities," the presentation materials say. "All infrastructure sectors should remain engaged with RCMP and CSIS to share security intelligence."
> 
> Patrick Smyth, vice-president of performance at the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said security is "top of mind" for member companies, which share information and help each other ensure they are prepared for emerging hazards and threats.
> 
> Cyberattacks are an evolving threat, but not a new one for pipeline operators, he said in an interview.
> 
> "They've been looking at it for a number of years and tracking the evolution around the sophistication of bad actors who might wish to find entry points into individual companies, and take over control of certain elements of the infrastructure and cause damage," he said.
> 
> If a state-owned enterprise is looking to acquire an asset, "these companies have programs, checks and balances in place to address that."
> 
> Pipeline operators receive intelligence from the RCMP, CSIS, the federal natural-resources and public-safety departments and U.S. agencies, Smyth added. However, he sees a place for the awareness workshops, saying any "additional source of information and intelligence is helpful."
> https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/agencies-cite-spy-threat-to-crucial-networks/ar-BBQ4F15?li=AA521o



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Where might China be watching (note Canadian angle near end)?



> Stop China’s Infiltration of US Railroads
> 
> America shouldn’t be buying Chinese railcars, ceding control of its rail industry, or injecting spyware-laden rolling stock into its transportation network.
> 
> A myriad of problems has led to a “surprising level of foreign dependence on competitor nations,” according to the White House’s long-awaited report on the severe challenges facing our manufacturing and defense industrial base. A look at one field — manufacturing the railroad cars that carry America’s commuters and freight — reveals growing dangers that demand urgent action.
> 
> Transportation is among the priority sectors under the Made in China 2025 industrial policy, which aims to help Chinese firms in various sectors reach the highest levels of the global manufacturing chain. In the business of railcars, the banner is being carried by China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation, a massive state-owned conglomerate with deep ties to the Communist Party of China.
> 
> CRRC has set up two U.S. subsidiaries — CRRC MA in Massachusetts and CRRC Sifang Americas in Chicago — and pursues U.S. contracts with predatory zeal. Since 2014, the company has been awarded four contracts totaling $2.5 billion to build metro cars for the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In each case, CRRC used massive subsidies and other resources from the Chinese government to dramatically underbid its competitors —regularly by 20 percent or more. In one case, the Chinese bid was half as much as another competitor. To have any company consistently come in so low is unheard of.
> 
> It is clear that these bids aim not for short-term profit, but medium-term market domination. The pattern was set in Australia, where it took less than a decade for China to gain control of the freight-railcar market. A recently deleted tweet by CRRC boasted that the company controls 83 percent of the global rail market and asked followers, “How long will it take for us conquering [sic] the remaining 17 percent?”
> 
> But the increasing presence of made-in-China rolling stock on North American rails means more than the loss of manufacturing jobs. Modern railcars are not just boxes on wheels, but full-fledged parts of the Internet of Things that soak up and transmit information.
> 
> The commuter trains manufactured by CRRC will contain Wi-Fi systems, automatic train control, automatic passenger counters, surveillance cameras and internet-of-things technology that will be deeply integrated into the information and communication technology infrastructure of transit authorities, all sole-sourced from a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Chinese surveillance cameras could track the movements and routines of passengers, searching for high-value targets from whose devices intelligence officials can vacuum data from using the train’s Wi-Fi systems. This is not an unrealistic prospect. Already, China is openly developing a system of “algorithmic surveillance” that uses advances in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to enable the Chinese Communist Party to monitor the movements and patterns of its own citizens, purportedly to fight crime.
> 
> The risks are even sharper in freight cars, whose onboard GPS systems and telematics monitor the contents and health of trains carrying sensitive cargo such as toxic chemicals and military equipment. If China is allowed to insert its railcars into U.S. freight networks, it could give Beijing early and reliable warning about U.S. military mobilization and logistical preparations for conflict. It could also give China a destabilizing economic competitive edge, by detecting, say, shortages of critical material such as oil or chlorine gas based on a change in their movements on freight railroads.
> 
> As well, Chinese internet-connected products on U.S. rails could be designed to be more susceptible to cyber-attack or hacking by third parties, as has been done with numerous other products.
> 
> While CRRC has yet to produce any freight railcars for the U.S. market, it is clearly on their radar. In 2014, CRRC launched a now-defunct joint venture with an American firm in Wilmington, North Carolina to build freight cars, but shuttered the facility before filling any orders following rounds of layoffs and a federal investigation into Vertex’s ties to the Chinese government. _They have also already begun making inroads in Canada with the establishment of a freight railcar assembly facility in Moncton, New Brunswick_ [emphasis added]. Should CRRC shift its focus to freight in the United States, it is likely that CRRC would underbid any American competitors and quickly start to dominate the country’s freight railcar fleet.
> 
> U.S. lawmakers have recognized and taken steps to address similar threats to products such as computer chips, drones, and cellular technology, and indeed, both chambers of Congress recently passed a ban on federal funding from going to CRRC. Yet policymakers may not fully understand the scope or impact of China’s incursion into an increasingly digitized rail network. CRRC is likely to continue to win contracts without federal funding and the security of the trains already being built will continue to remain in question. There may not be a silver bullet to this problem, but it’s time for our nation’s leaders to put an end to CRRC’s infiltration of the U.S. rail manufacturing industry by developing comprehensive solutions to ensure the integrity of our nation’s transportation systems. Nothing stands in their way.
> https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/11/stop-chinas-infiltration-us-railroads/153025/



From 2016 on Canadian angle:



> Moncton lands new rail car manufacturing plant
> _ARS Canada Rolling Stock will build rail cars at old Hump Yard, employ up to 700_
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> News of a major influx of jobs for Moncton spilled out not from a government announcement but an exclusive report by Radio-Canada on Thursday, with an American-based company saying it will begin producing rail cars at the city's Hump Yard.
> 
> Radio-Canada reports Miami-based ARS Canada Rolling Stock plans to start production of grain hoppers, box cars and TC-117 rail cars in Moncton, saying it will create 200 jobs in the first phase of production.
> 
> TC-117 rail cars will replace the DOT-111s which were involved in the 2013 Lac-Mégantic disaster, and are being phased out of use by Nov. 1 because of regulations imposed by Transport Canada...
> 
> The company plans to produce 1,500 rail cars to be used in the Canadian and U.S. markets within the first year of production...
> 
> The province has not responded to questions about how much, if any, public money is being given to ARS.
> 
> Contreras told CBC details of its agreement with the Gallant government to bring ARS to Moncton will be revealed at an announcement in October [2016]...
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/moncton-rail-car-train-jobs-1.3784247



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

This has been flying pretty much under, er, the aviation business rada--excerpts, note Canadian angle:



> ANALYSIS: How China investment changes fortunes of Western firms
> 
> What do a pair of seating manufacturers, four light aircraft manufacturers, an aerostructures specialist, and one of Europe's top maintenance, repair and overhaul houses have in common? They are among around a dozen Western aerospace companies that now effectively have the name of a Chinese owner over the door.
> 
> China – the biggest emerging market for commercial aviation products and services – has been busily creating its own indigenous industry over the past 20 years, attracting investment from Airbus, Boeing, Embraer and others. However, at the same time, money has been flowing the other way in arguably even greater amounts, creating a mini Chinese aerospace empire in the USA and Europe.
> 
> Earlier this decade, Chinese entities bought US GA brands Cirrus Aviation, Enstrom Helicopter, and Mooney. In the past two years, the focus has switched to Europe, with Austria's Diamond Aircraft, Gardner Aerospace of the UK, and Switzerland's SR Technics all coming under Chinese control, together with UK cabin interiors specialists Acro, AIM Altitude, and Thompson Aero Seating.
> 
> The background to each of the acquisitions differs. Most of the Western firms have been family-owned or backed by equity holders keen to exit at a profit. The Chinese investors range from private entrepreneurs to state-backed conglomerates making strategic additions to their portfolios.
> 
> Their game plans differ too...
> 
> Another Chinese name better known in the aviation world has also been expanding its footprint in the cabin interiors market. Two years after buying Bournemouth-based premium cabin monuments specialist AIM Altitude and Northern Ireland's Thompson Aero Seating, AVIC announced at July's Farnborough air show that it is merging them into a new unit called AVIC Cabin Systems.
> 
> The division will also include a Chinese seat-maker and cabin fixtures manufacturer FACC of Austria, which AVIC has owned for almost a decade. According to Richard Bower, chief executive of AIM Altitude, the combined entity will allow the companies to merge their capabilities.
> 
> Although each business will remain independent, there will be "some co-ordination" in terms of research and development and customer marketing...
> 
> _Perhaps the most significant Chinese acquisition of the past 12 months has been the sale of a majority stake in Diamond Aircraft of Austria – a business that includes a sister company in Canada_ [emphasis added] and the Austro engine manufacturer – to Wanfeng Aviation by founder Christian Dries. Dries described Diamond – a small business that he bought in the early 1990s and turned into one of the world's biggest producers of training aircraft – as "my life’s work".
> 
> New chief executive Frank Zhang says Wanfeng did not "buy Diamond simply as an investment opportunity" but because it could develop the company into "the leading brand and producer of fixed-wing light aircraft in the general and business aviation market, but also in the fields of special mission".
> 
> Interestingly, Diamond’s strategy under Dries had been for the past few years to move steadily into the higher-margin special missions market, and away from the more price-sensitive flying school sector. Israel's Aeronautics, for instance, uses Diamond's DA42 platform as the platform for its Dominator unmanned surveillance air vehicle. At the Farnborough air show, Diamond debuted the latest version of its aerobatic trainer, the Dart 550.
> 
> _Having a Chinese company owning a manufacturer of aircraft marketed to military customers has not met with any objections from the Austrian or Canadian governments, insists Wanfeng_ [emphasis added]. "Since the takeover, we have not experienced one single situation reflecting to the new ownership and can say that there is no impact on any business of Diamond," it says. All research and development activities will remain in Austria.
> 
> *US AMBITIONS*...
> https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-how-china-investment-changes-fortunes-of-w-452097/



Plane made by Diamond Aircraft of London, Ont.:





https://www.diamondaircraft.com/aircraft/special-mission-aircraft/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dapaterson

Canada has arrested the CFO of Huawei, who is the daughter of the founder.  She is facing extradition to the US.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4733360/huawei-cfo-wanzhou-meng-arrest-extradition/?utm_medium=Twitter&utm_source=%40globalbc



> Wanzhou Meng, who also goes by Sabrina Meng, was arrested in Vancouver on Saturday, Dec. 1, Department of Justice Canada spokesperson Ian McLeod told Global News.
> 
> He said Meng faces extradition to the U.S., and that a bail hearing has been set for Friday.
> 
> 
> “As there is a publication ban in effect, we cannot provide any further detail at this time,” McLeod said. He added that the publication ban was sought by Meng.
> 
> Huawei has not responded to Global News’ request for comment.



EDIT to add: The Guardian reports the arrest is associated with Huawei's alleged violation of US export restrictions to Iran. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/05/meng-wanzhou-huawei-cfo-arrested-vancouver


----------



## MarkOttawa

CSIS director goes very public on current threats, without naming China or Huawei (note naive universities):



> CSIS director warns of state-sponsored espionage threat to 5G networks
> 
> Canada’s top spy used his first public speech to warn of increasing state-sponsored espionage through technology such as next-generation 5G mobile networks.
> 
> Canadian Security Intelligence Service director David Vigneault’s comments come as three of the country’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing allies have barred wireless carriers from installing equipment made by China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in the 5G infrastructure they are building to provide an even-more-connected network for smartphone users.
> 
> The United States, Australia and New Zealand have taken steps to block the use of Huawei equipment in 5G networks. Neither Canada nor Britain has done so.
> 
> On Monday, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, publicly raised security concerns about Huawei telecommunications being involved in his country’s communications infrastructure.
> 
> Both Canada and Britain are conducting security reviews of the Chinese company’s 5G technology.
> 
> Speaking Tuesday in Toronto at the Economic Club of Canada, CSIS’s Mr. Vigneault told a business audience that hostile states are targeting large companies and universities to obtain new technologies. He refrained from naming any particular country, company or university.
> 
> “Many of these advanced technologies are dual-use in nature in that they could advance a country’s economic, security and military interests,” he told an audience of about 100 people.
> 
> Mr. Vigneault said there are five potential growth areas in Canada that are being specifically threatened, including 5G mobile technology where Huawei has been making inroads.
> 
> “CSIS has seen a trend of state-sponsored espionage in fields that are crucial to Canada’s ability to build and sustain a prosperous, knowledge-based economy,” he said. “I’m talking about areas such as AI [artificial intelligence], quantum technology, 5G, biopharma and clean tech. In other words, the foundation of Canada’s future growth.”
> 
> Mr. Vigneault said large corporations typically hold the most valuable information but they try to put in state-of-the-art cyberdefences, while _Canadian universities are largely unaware how they are vulnerable to economic espionage and the threat of infiltration by unnamed state actors who would use their expertise to gain an edge in military technologies. Huawei has developed research and development partnerships with many of Canada’s leading academic institutions_ [emphasis added]...
> 
> Canada and Britain have so far resisted the U.S. lobbying campaign and risk facing restrictions on what sensitive intelligence from allies is shared with them.
> 
> Speaking Monday in Scotland, MI6′s Alex Younger said Britain has to make a decision about Huawei after the United States, Australia and New Zealand acted against the Shenzhen-based company.
> 
> “We need to decide the extent to which we are going to be comfortable with Chinese ownership of these technologies and these platforms in an environment where some of our allies have taken very definite positions,” Mr. Younger told students at the University of St. Andrews...
> 
> Chinese law requires companies in China to “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work” as requested by Beijing. Huawei Canada vice-president Scott Bradley has told The Globe and Mail that the company is not a national security threat and its “highest priority is – and always has been – the security and privacy of networks that we help to equip here in Canada.”
> 
> Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told The Globe on Tuesday that officials are weighing “very carefully” the security challenges of safeguarding Canada’s telecommunications network from any potential threat from Huawei’s 5G technology...
> 
> A ban would come as a blow to Canada’s biggest telecom companies, including BCE Inc. and Telus, which have given Huawei an important role in their planned 5G networks. BCE and Telus have declined to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that the United States has asked telecom executives in allied countries to forgo Huawei 5G equipment...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canadas-spy-chief-warns-about-state-sponsored-espionage-through/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Getting ready for _Weltmacht_:



> China says 8,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping standby force is ready
> 
> AP
> 
> BEIJING – China said Thursday it has assembled a standby force of thousands of United Nations peacekeepers, furthering its leading role in the global body’s efforts to tamp down conflicts worldwide.
> 
> Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang told reporters at a monthly briefing that the 8,000-member force had passed an assessment last month approved by U.N. Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix. That fulfills a pledge made at the U.N. three years ago by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
> 
> China provides the most peacekeepers of any permanent U.N. Security Council member and is the second-largest contributor to the operations’ multibillion-dollar budget, at slightly over 10 percent. The United States is the largest contributor to peacekeeping, but deploys only 50 officers to U.N. missions.
> 
> China has also trained more than 1,500 peacekeepers from more than a dozen countries, Ren said.
> 
> “The Chinese military is fulfilling its responsibility to safeguard world peace and building a community of shared future for mankind with concrete actions,” Ren said. China was ready to both increase the number of peacekeepers it contributes as well as their particular skill sets, Ren said...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/30/asia-pacific/china-says-8000-strong-u-n-peacekeeping-standby-force-ready/#.XAmR1-J7mM9



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Retired AF Guy

From Politico, but originally posted in the South China Morning Post. Looks like Canada could be targeted by China because of he Wanzhou arrest.



> Beijing threatens Canada with ‘grave consequences for hurting feelings of Chinese people’
> 
> By ZHOU XIN | SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST and KEEGAN ELMER | SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
> 
> 12/09/2018 11:24 AM EST
> 
> This story is being published for POLITICO as part of a content partnership with the South China Morning Post. It originally appeared on scmp.com on Dec. 9, 2018.
> 
> China has ratcheted up the pressure on Canada to release the detained executive of Huawei Technologies over the weekend by threatening “grave consequences” and accusing Canada of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people,” escalating the case into one of the worst diplomatic rows between Beijing and Ottawa.
> 
> Chinese foreign vice-minister Le Yucheng on Saturday summoned Canadian ambassador John McCallum to lodge a “strong protest” against the arrest of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver and urged Ottawa to release Meng immediately, according to a brief foreign ministry statement.
> 
> Meng, the chief financial officer at Huawei and a daughter of the Chinese telecom giant’s founder, was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 and faces extradition to the United States, which alleges that she covered up her company’s links to a firm that tried to sell equipment to Iran in defiance of sanctions.
> 
> The arrest of Meng in Canada, which took place on the same night that Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump dined together in Buenos Aires, has infuriated Beijing.
> 
> The official Xinhua news agency published an editorial on Sunday morning condemning the arrest as an “extremely nasty” act that had caused “serious damage to Sino-Canada relations,”
> 
> “According to the words of the Canadian leader, he had known of the action in advance,” Xinhua said, referring to the fact that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — whom it did not did name directly — had a few days’ notice of the arrest.
> 
> “But he didn’t notify the Chinese side. Instead, he let this kind of nasty thing to happen and assisted the US side’s unilateral hegemonic behavior — this has hurt the feeling of Chinese people,” Xinhua added.
> 
> The last time that Beijing accused Canada of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people was more than a decade earlier in 2007, when then-prime minister Stephen Harper hosted the Dalai Lama.
> 
> People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, published a similarly strongly worded statement, condemning Canada for arresting Meng and threatening to take action against Ottawa if Meng is not released.
> 
> “The Canadian side must realize clearly that there’s no vagueness between justice and arbitrariness,” the People’s Daily editorial reads.
> 
> “The Canadian side must correct its wrongs and immediately stop its infringement of the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese citizen to give the Chinese people a right answer so that it can avoid paying a dear price.”
> 
> The joint condemnation by China’s foreign ministry, Xinhua and the People’s Daily against Ottawa is an unusual step, reflecting how seriously Beijing is taking the case and its determination to set Meng free.
> 
> While China did not specify what action it would take to inflict pains on Canada, the harsh wording suggests that it has plans to retaliate.
> 
> These could range from the freezing of diplomatic exchanges to the suspension of trade and would be likely to be set in motion if Meng is extradited to the U.S.
> 
> David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China, told Reuters on Friday that there will probably be “a deep freeze with the Chinese in high-level visits and exchanges.”
> 
> “The ability to talk about free trade will be put in the ice box for a while. But we’re going to have to live with that. That’s the price of dealing with a country like China,” Mulroney was quoted as saying.
> 
> Shi Yinhong, director of Renmin University’s Center for American Studies and an adviser to the State Council, said that the Meng incident put China in a bind between the need to show it can protect its business people abroad without spooking other advanced industrial nations with a strong response against Canada.
> 
> “China is concerned that in the future more of its important people abroad will be seen as a threat, and that their safety will become an issue.”
> Media wait outside of the British Columbia Supreme Court to cover the trial of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou.
> 
> “On the other hand, especially in the context of the comprehensive tension between Beijing and Washington, China has an interest to maintain and improve relations with other advanced industrial countries.
> 
> “If China takes a very strong revenge against Canada, it will hurt these relations. This is a dilemma, and it is difficult to predict what will happen.”
> 
> Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, said Saturday there is “nothing to add beyond what the minister said yesterday”.
> 
> Freeland told reporters on Friday that the relationship with China was important and valued, and Canada’s ambassador in Beijing has assured the Chinese that consular access will be provided to Meng.
> 
> A court hearing over whether Meng should be bailed will continue on Monday.
> 
> Reuters contributed to this report.



Article Link


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Now that's a serious attack on Canada.

With the Liberal's "social justice" approach to everything, what could possibly be more devastating than being accused of hurting someone's feelings. ???


 ;D


----------



## Cloud Cover

Well, they’ve taken into custody one of Trudeau’s former advisors.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/former-canadian-diplomat-arrested-in-china-reports-1.4213122

They do not understand that at this point our courts and prosecutors are running with this, not the government.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Well that didn't take long. China makes good on its threat. 



> Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig detained in China after arrest of Huawei CFO Sabrina Meng Wanzhou in Canada
> 
> 
> Move comes after police in Canada arrested the chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies on December 1 at the request of US authorities
> 
> PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 11 December, 2018, 9:52pm
> UPDATED : Tuesday, 11 December, 2018, 11:46pm
> 
> A former Canadian diplomat has been detained in China while a Canadian court weighs whether to grant bail to a top Chinese technology executive who is being held in Vancouver pending a US extradition request.
> 
> The International Crisis Group confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that it was “aware of reports that its North East Asia Senior Adviser, Michael Kovrig, has been detained in China”.
> 
> “We are doing everything possible to secure additional information on Michael’s whereabouts as well as his prompt and safe release,” the statement said.
> 
> The release did not indicate the reasons for Kovrig’s detention.
> 
> The news came as a court in Vancouver is set to decide whether to grant bail for Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of China’s telecommunications giant, Huawei Technologies.
> 
> Meng was arrested in Vancouver on December at the US government’s request, which accused Meng of violating US sanctions against Iran.
> 
> The arrest had angered Beijing. Over the weekend, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng summoned Canadian Ambassador John McCallum on Saturday night to lodge a “strong protest” and warned Ottawa of “grave consequences” from Meng’s arrest.
> Canada did not inform us of Huawei executive Sabrina Meng Wanzhou’s arrest until asked, China says
> 
> Kovrig has been a full-time expert for the ICG since February 2017. He served as senior adviser for North East Asia, conducting research and providing analysis on foreign affairs and global security issues in North East Asia, particularly on China, Japan and the Korean peninsula.
> 
> More to come …



 Article Link


----------



## garb811

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> Well, they’ve taken into custody one of Trudeau’s former advisors.
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/former-canadian-diplomat-arrested-in-china-reports-1.4213122
> 
> They do not understand that at this point our courts and prosecutors are running with this, not the government.


Not to be pedantic but calling him "one of Trudeau's former advisers" might be a bit of a stretch. Looks like he was posted to Hong Kong with GAC in 2016 and was simply was one of the many who would have worked to coordinate and support the visit and he was just doing some resume inflation on LinkedIn...


----------



## MarkOttawa

Vs. Japan in East China Sea--from RAND, US implications too:



> China's Military Activities in the East China Sea
> _Implications for Japan's Air Self-Defense Force_
> 
> A long-standing rivalry between China and Japan has intensified in recent years, owing in part to growing parity between the two Asian great powers. Although the competition involves many issues and spans political, economic, and security domains, the dispute over the Senkaku Islands remains a focal point. The authors examine how China has stepped up its surface and air activities near Japan, in particular near the Senkaku Islands. They survey the patterns in Chinese vessel and air activity and consider Japan's responses to date. The authors conclude that resource constraints and limited inventories of fighter aircraft pose formidable obstacles to the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force's ability to match Chinese air activity. Given China's quantitative advantage in fighter aircraft, Japan's current approach may not be sustainable. The authors offer recommendations for the United States and Japan to manage emerging challenges.
> 
> *Key Findings*
> 
> _China and Japan have experienced a dramatic increase in nonlethal encounters between military aircraft near Japan_
> 
> Chinese military aircraft have flown with increasing frequency near the Senkaku Islands and the Miyako Strait, which Chinese strategists regard as a critical passageway through the first island chain.
> The higher rate of activity has spurred Japan to adjust deployments and increase its acquisitions to keep pace with the growing Chinese presence and defend what Japan views as its airspace.
> 
> _Military improvements are Japan's most significant effort to push back on China's increased air activities_
> 
> The Japanese government has prioritized a defense posture more focused on the region and the procurement of assets meant to strengthen the capabilities of the Japanese Self-Defense Force in island defense.
> It has also increased the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) budget and established a JCG patrol unit tasked specifically with patrolling the Senkaku Islands.
> 
> _The stress of constantly responding to the Chinese air activities has added pressure to an already overstretched Japanese Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF)_
> 
> The increased operational tempo exacerbates maintenance issues, as the frequency with which aircraft require inspections and maintenance is increasing.
> Although the real-world experience that JASDF pilots are gaining is useful, the increased incursions into Japanese airspace are also negatively impacting pilot training, as pilots are unable to devote this time to the study of other missions.
> 
> *Recommendations*
> 
> U.S. and Japanese officials should exchange views on ways that Japan could respond quickly and effectively to any surge scenarios involving sudden, large numbers of Chinese military aircraft flight operations near Japan.
> The allies should include the issue of Japanese reprioritization of assets to the southwestern region in their discussions of U.S. force realignment.
> U.S. officials can share experiences of how scrambling protocols evolved during the Cold War to meet the changing situation.
> The United States should work with Japan to train in how to rely on existing and planned ground-based air defenses as a suitable and appropriate counter to some Chinese air incursions.
> Japan might also want to consider cross-domain and bilateral responses with other nations in its efforts to counter Chinese intransigence.
> 
> *Table of Contents*
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2574.html
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terry Glavin hammers China and Trump on Meng Wanzhou/Huawei--and warns Canada to wake up:



> Glavin: Squeezed by China and Trump, Canada must rewrite foreign policy – fast
> 
> _The events of the past few days should serve as a bracing warning to our government to overhaul its operating manual with China._
> 
> Donald Trump is not what you would call a paragon of circumspection or tact at the best of times, so it should perhaps come as no surprise, but the American president has now poured buckets of gasoline on what was already a geopolitical bonfire in the case of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei chief financial officer detained in Vancouver earlier this month at the request of the U.S. Justice Department.
> 
> It’s bad enough that Beijing’s macabre propaganda machinery has been churning out the most bloodcurdling threats of punishment and consequence-suffering that Canadians should be expected to endure for our impertinence in merely acting in accordance with the law and abiding by a U.S. extradition request to detain Meng on charges of fraud and evading sanctions in laundering money out of Iran by deception, via Skycomm, a Huawei proxy corporation.
> 
> Quite apart from the casual contempt for due process, judicial independence and the rule of law implicit in his remarks on Tuesday, Trump gave every impression that Canada merely acted as an American lickspittle when the Mounties apprehended Meng during a Dec. 1 flight stopover at Vancouver International Airport.
> 
> “If I think it’s good for the country, if I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security – I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary,” Trump said.
> 
> With those words, Trump transformed the U.S. Justice Department’s evidence-rich case against Meng and a highly sensitive but otherwise fairly textbook extradition request into something more like a stack of high-stakes poker chips for him to play in his petty trade talks with Beijing...
> 
> Sleaziness of this type is America’s business and none of our concern, but Canada did not act on the Justice Department’s extradition request just so that American negotiators could up the ante in quarrels about tariffs, intellectual property and all those other Chinese trade irritants that Trump insists must be removed in order to make America great again.
> 
> That’s not what the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty is for.
> 
> Never mind that Trump had no idea about the Dec. 1 move to snag Meng. Never mind the State Department’s insistence that there was no connection between the U.S. Justice Department’s extradition request and Trump’s trade feud with Xi. The U.S. Justice Department’s case, which will have to be argued by Canadian government lawyers in extradition proceedings that will play out for months on end, is now tainted.
> 
> It was clear from the start that the optics were going to be awkward. Meng was arrested the same day that Trump and Xi were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina to settle the terms of a 90-day tariff-war truce to allow for trade negotiations.
> 
> It was clear, too, that the case in Canada would be burdened by weird legal intricacies. Canada can’t extradite anyone to face charges for a crime that doesn’t have an extremely close parallel in Canadian law. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was already going to have to stickhandle the asymmetry between Canada’s relatively parochial and largely useless sanctions laws and the extraterritorial aspects of American far-reaching sanctions laws.
> 
> Now, Wilson-Raybould has been put in the position of having to argue that the grubby ulterior motives Trump has slathered all over Meng’s case are wholly immaterial to the matter.
> 
> In the meantime, Beijing is turning the screws on Canada. Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG) and a Canadian diplomat on leave, was nabbed by China’s Ministry of State Security in Beijing on Monday. According to a report in a Beijing newspaper, Kovrig is being investigated by state security officials on charges that he was involved in activities that “harm China’s national security.” China’s Foreign Ministry said earlier that if Kovrig was working for the ICG, he was committing a crime, because the ICG is not registered with the Chinese government.
> 
> Kovrig was known to have strong views opposing Huawei’s involvement in the development of fifth-generation internet technologies in western countries. Nobody knew his whereabouts Wednesday. Said Brock University’s Charles Burton, himself a former diplomat in China: “My heart goes out to Mr. Kovrig … I believe that he will be tortured in interrogation.”
> 
> As for Meng, who Chinese authorities say Canada “kidnapped,” she was released on a $10-million bail agreement Tuesday after hearings conducted in open court, where she was ably represented by competent counsel. Her family owns two mansions in Vancouver. Her father, Huawei’s president and founder, is a former People’s Liberation Army member. While she awaits her formal extradition hearings, she will be confined to metro Vancouver. She will wear an electronic ankle bracelet, and will be monitored and escorted around by a blue-chip security company whose services she will pay for herself. _All that was missing from her bail arrangement was a wine steward and an aromatherapist. She says she looks forward to spending quality time with relatives and reading novels_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Meng’s case hasn’t just revealed Huawei to be the tool of the Chinese oligarchy and the menace to national security that Justin Trudeau’s government has been warned about, time and time again, by a succession of Canadian and American security and intelligence agencies – warnings the government has ignored.
> 
> The whole thing has exposed the charade of Canada’s rotten China policy, with its cavalier inattention to the increasingly savage police-state conduct China exhibits at home and abroad, and its absurd pretensions about strengthening and deepening “win-win” relationships in Canada-China trade and diplomacy.
> 
> The _events of the past few days cannot be undone. They should serve as a bracing lesson, an opportunity to wholly rewrite Canada’s operating manual with China, a good thing, in the long run.
> 
> But for now, Canadians are standing alone at the edge of an abyss, with a Chinese noose around our necks and American shivs sticking out of our backs_ [emphasis added.]
> https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-squeezed-by-china-and-trump-canada-needs-to-rewrite-foreign-policy-fast



No minced words from Terrible Terry (disclosure, a good friend)

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

I have every confidence that Justin Trudeau will handle this correctly, and that the situation will balance itself. Wouldn’t it be funny if Kim Jong got involved and had our guy released in return for some below market value oil.


----------



## chanman

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> Well, they’ve taken into custody one of Trudeau’s former advisors.
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/former-canadian-diplomat-arrested-in-china-reports-1.4213122
> 
> They do not understand that at this point our courts and prosecutors are running with this, not the government.



I'm pretty sure the goal here is not to influence this trial but to intimidate countries that might receive extradition requests from the US in the future into potentially reconsidering their cooperation with Washington.


----------



## Cloud Cover

Ya.. But then they grabbed a second Canadian person and the state run media said that Canada will pay a heavy price. 

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-will-pay-chinese-state-media-threaten-repercussions-over-huawei-arrest-1.4216293 

They either do not understand that the gov cannot interfere in the court process, or they don't care.


----------



## dimsum

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> They either do not understand that the gov cannot interfere in the court process, or *they don't care*.



I'll wager option B.


----------



## CBH99

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-us-not-china-is-the-real-threat-to-international-rule-of-law/



Food for thought is all.


----------



## Cloud Cover

In  global economy 3.0, where the decisions of a corporation to act like untouchable sovereign states occurs, there is inevitably going to be some blow back on the executives of those multi nationals. This not the first time corporate executives have been arrested, detained and extradited to foreign nations for trial (it happened to 2 US C levels in regards to some violations of South Korean law) however this is by far the most high profile.

Extraditions for criminal activity take place all the time, narcotics and drug smuggling has turned into a supply chain narconomics industry complete with accountants, lawyers, purchase orders, contracts etc. When you think about it, El Chapo was a leader of a corporation (and a ruthless one. He may have ordered the murder of many people, but the actions of some "cleaner" corporations certainly exploit or result in injury and deprivation to innocent people as well). As I  said, welcome to Globalization 3.0, where it now gets nasty as empires rise and fall and nation states either assert or wither. The promise of the "rising tide to lift all boats" has become a swirling toilet, and Canada is the bathroom attendant right now.


----------



## chanman

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> Ya.. But then they grabbed a second Canadian person and the state run media said that Canada will pay a heavy price.
> 
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-will-pay-chinese-state-media-threaten-repercussions-over-huawei-arrest-1.4216293
> 
> They either do not understand that the gov cannot interfere in the court process, or they don't care.



They don't care, because this isn't about Canada - this is part playing to their domestic audience that they have weight to throw around and are willing to do so, and it's part warning to other countries.

Maybe next time Belgium will be more reluctant to cooperate compared to just a couple months ago. Or maybe the next country China leans on won't have the same separation between the executive and the judiciary.

It's the same rationale as Saudi Arabia's spat over the LAVs - that was an implied threat to other countries that they buy a lot of arms from to stay in their own lane. In this case, it's that complying with US extradition requests (at least for VIPs) may bring a load of messy diplomatic and/or economic headaches and repercussions.


----------



## ModlrMike

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> I have every confidence that Justin Trudeau will handle this correctly, and that the situation will balance itself. Wouldn’t it be funny if Kim Jong got involved and had our guy released in return for some below market value oil.



Yes, in the same way that the budget has balanced itself.


----------



## Cloud Cover

We need a sarcasm meter.


----------



## CBH99

*It's the same rationale as Saudi Arabia's spat over the LAVs - that was an implied threat to other countries that they buy a lot of arms from to stay in their own lane. In this case, it's that complying with US extradition requests (at least for VIPs) may bring a load of messy diplomatic and/or economic headaches and repercussions.*
[/quote]


In this case I think your giving Saudi Arabia too much credit.  

The government in Beijing is incredibly intelligent, with foresight being a primary thought process.  

In the case of Saudi Arabia, I think it was just a crazy @$$ Saudi prince, who has manipulated his way into power, having a hissy fit over some Twitter remarks - Saudi style, ofcourse - and that the rest was an ill-conceived consequence.


----------



## YZT580

If I were in CSIS I would be running the names of every person who showed up carrying a picket sign saying free her.  It just shows China's reach that they can draft and organise such a gathering in any country they chose at very short notice.


----------



## dimsum

> Report: China is driving use of armed drones in Middle East
> 
> BEIRUT — The use of armed drones in the Middle East, driven largely by sales from China, has grown significantly in the past few years with an increasing number of countries and other parties using them in regional conflicts to lethal effects, a new report said Monday.
> 
> The report by the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, found that more and more Mideast countries have acquired armed drones, either by importing them, such as Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or by building them domestically like Israel, Iran and Turkey.



https://www.stripes.com/report-china-is-driving-use-of-armed-drones-in-middle-east-1.561043


----------



## MarkOttawa

Just a taste of Terry Glavin eviscerating our dashing PM:

On Huawei, Trudeau fails to assert the Canadian values he touts
_Terry Glavin: Canada has been repeatedly warned that the telecom giant poses a security threat. Yet when he talks about China, the PM is all wishy-washy platitudes _

He still doesn’t get it.

Either that, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau does get it, and he’s desperately afraid that the rest of us are going to figure it out. Either way, his evasions, elisions, dodges and deflections in response to the detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wangzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant earlier this month betray his preference to cringe and cower rather than stand up to Xi Jinping’s increasingly bellicose police state in Beijing.

Decide for yourself which is worse, but in either case you would be a fool to believe a word Trudeau has been saying. And in all his public statements since President Xi blew a gasket about Meng’s arrest, setting off the nastiest upheaval in nearly half a century of Canada-China diplomacy, the most strenuous effort Trudeau has been making is to the purpose of not saying anything of substance at all.

During a rambling year-end interview with CTV’s Evan Solomon, broadcast on Sunday, Trudeau refused to provide a straight answer to any of these questions.

...Beijing is warning that worse may be yet to come.

This is what Canada has been reduced to. We grovel and whinge. We twist ourselves into contortions rather than say anything that might offend Beijing. We pretend we’re just innocents caught in the middle of a superpower pissing match, and we boast about “Canadian values” we’re too afraid to assert.





https://www.macleans.ca/news/world/on-huawei-trudeau-fails-to-assert-the-canadian-values-he-touts/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## YZT580

Too bad you can't send Terry MilPoints


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chinese cyberespionage--statement by Canada (just from CSE, fairly technical) hardly compares with US, UK and Australia:

1) AP news story:



> US charges 2 hackers with alleged Chinese intelligence ties
> https://www.apnews.com/e6c557c09c0d4a09bc92e177162eacc9



2) UK gov statement:



> UK and allies reveal global scale of Chinese cyber campaign
> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-allies-reveal-global-scale-of-chinese-cyber-campaign



3) Australian news:



> ...
> The indictments were immediately welcomed by the Australian government, which called on China to stop seeking a competitive advantage by stealing trade secrets and confidential business information from other nations.
> 
> National Cyber Security Adviser Alastair MacGibbon said: "This is audacious, it is huge, and it impacts potentially thousands of businesses globally. We know there are victims in Australia."
> 
> Mr MacGibbon said the theft had disadvantaged Australian businesses and their staff.
> 
> "And that essentially takes food from the people of Australia," Mr MacGibbon told the ABC. "It helps them compete in a way that we can't."
> 
> The decision by the federal government to effectively name and shame Beijing over the industrial espionage marks a major departure from the usual practice of not attributing hacking behaviour and reflects the intense frustration of Canberra at China's persistent efforts to steal commercial secrets...
> 
> Australian _Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton joined the international outcry_ [emphasis added].
> 
> "Today, the Australian government joins other international partners in expressing serious concern about a global campaign of cyber-enabled commercial intellectual property theft by a group known as APT10, acting on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security," they said in a statement.
> 
> "Australia calls on all countries – including China – to uphold commitments to refrain from cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets and confidential business information with the intent of obtaining a competitive advantage."..
> https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/shocking-outrageous-us-charges-chinese-hackers-for-industrial-scale-theft-20181221-p50nl0.html



4) CP story:



> Canada among targets of alleged Chinese hacking campaign
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/canada-among-targets-of-alleged-chinese-hacking-campaign-1.4225913



5) CSE statement:



> Canada and Allies Identify China as Responsible for Cyber-Compromise [mealy-mouthed wording, that]
> https://cse-cst.gc.ca/en/media/media-2018-12-20#cyberespionage



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And from _Globe and Mail_ on China's cyberespionage, bang on:



> Canada joins U.S., U.K. in calling out China for state-sponsored hacking campaign
> 
> ...
> Canada’s statement from the Communications Security Establishment was not as strong as the disapproval registered by some allies. The Americans called it “outright cheating and theft,” the British said China must stop what it called “the most significant and widespread cyber intrusions against the U.K. and allies uncovered to date” and the Australians expressed “serious concern” about Beijing’s “intellectual property theft.”
> 
> The Communications Security Establishment, for its part, merely named China as responsible, saying that it is “almost certain that actors likely associated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of State Security (MSS) are responsible for the compromise … beginning as early as 2016."
> 
> The international censure of China comes amid increasing diplomatic tension with Canada over potential Chinese state influence in this country’s networks. Ottawa has been weighing whether to allow China’s flagship tech company, Huawei Technologies, to supply gear for next-generation 5G mobile networks. Chinese law requires companies in China to “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work” as requested by Beijing. Three of Canada’s closest military and intelligence allies – the United States, Australia and New Zealand – have already barred Huawei from these future networks for national security reasons...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-joins-us-uk-in-calling-out-china-for-state-sponsored/



When will Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts, LPC and our compradors wake up?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

I think he's being advised to walk gently until they can secure the release of the 2 Canadians currently in Chinese custody...


----------



## Colin Parkinson

CBH99 said:
			
		

> I think he's being advised to walk gently until they can secure the release of the 2  3 Canadians currently in Chinese custody...



FIFY


----------



## The Bread Guy

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Chinese cyberespionage--statement by Canada (just from CSE, fairly technical) hardly compares with US, UK and Australia:
> 
> 1) AP news story:
> 
> 2) UK gov statement:
> 
> 3) Australian news:
> 
> 4) CP story:
> 
> 5) CSE statement:


6)  U.S. DoJ statement:


> The unsealing of an indictment charging Zhu Hua (朱华), aka Afwar, aka CVNX, aka Alayos, aka Godkiller; and Zhang Shilong (张士龙), aka Baobeilong, aka Zhang Jianguo, aka Atreexp, both nationals of the People’s Republic of China (China), with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft was announced today.
> 
> The announcement was made by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman for the Southern District of New York, Director Christopher A. Wray of the FBI, Director Dermot F. O’Reilly of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) of the U.S. Department of Defense, and Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers.
> 
> Zhu and Zhang were members of a hacking group operating in China known within the cyber security community as Advanced Persistent Threat 10 (the APT10 Group).  The defendants worked for a company in China called Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Company (Huaying Haitai) and acted in association with the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s Tianjin State Security Bureau.
> 
> Through their involvement with the APT10 Group, from at least in or about 2006 up to and including in or about 2018, Zhu and Zhang conducted global campaigns of computer intrusions targeting, among other data, intellectual property and confidential business and technological information at managed service providers (MSPs), which are companies that remotely manage the information technology infrastructure of businesses and governments around the world, more than 45 technology companies in at least a dozen U.S. states, and U.S. government agencies ...


More in indictment here.


----------



## tomahawk6

Article dubbed "Princess Meng" who has a lot of Chicom connections,someone they want back. 

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/how-arrest-of-chinese-princess-exposes-regimes-world-domination-plot  

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver on Dec. 6 led to immediate blowback.
Furious Chinese Communists have begun arresting innocent Canadians in retaliation. So far, three of these “revenge hostages” have been taken and are being held in secret jails on vague charges. Beijing hints that the hostage count may grow if Meng is not freed and fast. 

But to say that she is the CFO of Huawei doesn’t begin to explain her importance — or China’s reaction.
It turns out that “Princess” Meng, as she is called, is Communist royalty. Her grandfather was a close comrade of Chairman Mao during the Chinese Civil War, who went on to become vice governor of China’s largest province.
She is also the daughter of Huawei’s Founder and Chairman, Ren Zhengfei. Daddy is grooming her to succeed him when he retires.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Another Canadian arrested in China, this time for smuggling drugs.



> Canadian accused of smuggling ‘enormous amount of drugs’ into China: state media
> 
> By Rahul Kalvapalle	National Online Journalist  Global News
> 
> December 26, 2018 9:24 pm
> Updated: December 26, 2018 9:27 pm
> 
> A Canadian citizen is set to be tried on drug charges in the Chinese port city of Dalian, Chinese state media reported amid already-heightened tensions between Beijing and Ottawa.
> 
> Global Times, a tabloid operated by the Communist Party of China, identified the suspect as Robert Lloyd Schellenberg.
> 
> Schellenberg was scheduled for an appeal hearing for Saturday, Dec. 29 after he was earlier found to have smuggled “an enormous amount of drugs” into China, according to Dalian.runsky.com, a news portal operated by Dalian authorities.
> 
> The Dalian government news portal stated sarcastically that Schellenberg’s audacity was to be admired given that he “actually dared to smuggle drugs into China.” It pointed out that Chinese criminal law offers “no sympathy” for drug crimes.
> 
> Global News reached out to the Canadian government for comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
> 
> China has some of the harshest drug laws in the world.
> 
> People found guilty of smuggling large quantities of drugs face sentences ranging from 15 years’ imprisonment to life imprisonment and even the death penalty, the Global Times reported.
> 
> In 2009, China executed British citizen Akmal Shaikh after he was caught smuggling heroin. Shaikh’s death prompted outrage in the U.K. over the apparent lack of any mental health assessment.
> 
> The following year, Chinese authorities executed Japanese national Mitsunobu Akano for smuggling drugs.
> 
> Schellenberg’s reported detention comes as Canada and China spar over the fate of Canadian nationals Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were detained in China on suspicion of endangering national security.
> 
> Their detention came shortly after Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Chinese tech giant Huawei, in Vancouver at the behest of U.S. authorities who are seeking her extradition.
> 
> China has demanded that Canada release Meng immediately, but neither country has drawn a direct connection between her arrest and the detention of Canadians in China.
> 
> Follow @Kalvapalle
> 
> © 2018 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.



Article Link


----------



## The Bread Guy

Nice port you have there, Kenya - shame if anything ever happened to it ...


> *Will China seize prized port if Kenya can’t pay back its belt and road loans?*
> Kristin Huang, South China Morning Post, Sunday, 30 December, 2018, 5:25pm
> 
> The prospect that China might at some point be able to seize Kenya’s prized port of Mombasa has caused public confusion and alarm and again raised questions about the risks of participating in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”.
> 
> Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has strongly denied a local media report that the East African nation was at risk of having China seize the strategic port in compensation for unpaid debt related to belt and road infrastructure development projects.
> 
> According to online news portal African Stand, Kenya may soon have to hand over control of its largest and most developed port, while other assets related to the inland shipment of goods from Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast, may also be affected ...


Soft Power:  Soft, until it isn't anymore ...


----------



## CBH99

This has become a more publically aware issue in recent years, and there are a few examples already in Eastern Europe.


China provides loans for development, specifically targeting countries and POLITICAL LEADERS WITH EXCEPTIONALLY POOR economic policies/controls.  Then, when the loans aren't repaid, China seizes airports, highways, ports, or other infrastructure as "repayment" for the loan -- meanwhile giving China access to important infrastructure in countries it may not otherwise have.


Smart, but sinister.


----------



## MarkOttawa

More on growing PLA Air Force capabilities (e.g. refueling), note RAND report:



> China’s Long-Range Bomber Flights Pose New Threat to Regional Powers and U.S.
> ...
> China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has sent its Xian H-6K strategic bombers on an increasing number of long-range flights in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years.
> 
> Before 2015, China’s bombers stayed relatively close to its coast and were regarded almost exclusively as a means of deterrence and self-defense. However, the bombers now routinely travel beyond the First Island Chain. The H-6K bombers have traveled 1,000 km from China’s coast during some of these flights, which brought them within striking distance of potential U.S. military targets in the Second Island Chain, most notably Guam.
> 
> The flights are another example of how China’s military doctrine is shifting away from relying primarily on “active defense” and toward developing greater offensive capabilities, enhanced power projection, and achieving strategic goals well beyond its traditional sphere of influence. The flights are also another indicator that China increasingly believes it will be able to effectively compete with the U.S. military in the near future.
> 
> A new report from the RAND Corporation [ https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2567.html ] chronicles the history of China’s long-range bomber flights in the Asia-Pacific region and places them within the context of the “remarkable strategic transformation” that the PLAAF has undergone over the last two decades. “Once viewed as a backward force equipped with antiquated aircraft flown by poorly trained pilots, the PLAAF has gradually stepped out of the shadow of China’s ground forces and emerged as one of the world’s premier air forces,” the report asserts [read on]...
> https://www.offiziere.ch/?p=34922



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

CBH99 said:
			
		

> This has become a more publically aware issue in recent years, and there are a few examples already in Eastern Europe.
> 
> 
> China provides loans for development, specifically targeting countries and POLITICAL LEADERS WITH EXCEPTIONALLY POOR economic policies/controls.  Then, when the loans aren't repaid, China seizes airports, highways, ports, or other infrastructure as "repayment" for the loan -- meanwhile giving China access to important infrastructure in countries it may not otherwise have.
> 
> 
> Smart, but sinister.



One thing I always though a bit short sighted about that is what happens when the "owing" party decides to seize and "nationalize" the property, tossing the Chinese out of the country? This happened to Western powers during the "de colonialization" period, and China can't simply box up the property and take it back to China, nor does it have the sort of Force Projection capabilities to go around garrisoning every mine, sea port, road project that some third world government seizes.

I'm sure at some point some third world nation is going to do the cost/benefit calculations, or simply reach a point where their national pride is pushed too far. I expect a great deal of ...excitement... in the markets when and if that occurs.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

yes I do look forward to China experiencing life as the Colonial Master in this modern day. Already in one African country Chinese nationals are not allowed inland for fear of retribution. China apparently supplies "armed security" at some of it's African/Asia sites. Sooner or later they are going to heavy hand it and that will ignite the fire that spark a nationalistic pushback.


----------



## a_majoor

Mark Steyn says "I told you so" about the effects of China's one child policy and its aftermath. The essay points out that China is facing a population decline, and Chinese society has been radically transformed by the decades of the one child policy, making recovery extremely difficult. In economic terms, Styne believes China will grow old before it grows rich.

https://www.steynonline.com/9128/a-forest-of-bare-branches

A thought provoking essay.


----------



## Journeyman

Thucydides said:
			
		

> A thought provoking essay.


Indeed; I agree with his demographic views of China 'getting old before it gets rich,' and lashing out as it does.

However, it's a pretty gutsy move for such an arch-conservative American to state "Weak powers behave more irrationally than strong ones."  Again, indeed.
#EndofEmpire?


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Interesting analysis from Donald Clarke at the LawFare blog on the detention of Robert Schellenberg by the Chinese government.



> China’s Hostage Diplomacy
> By Donald Clarke
> 
> Friday, January 11, 2019, 10:54 AM
> 
> An obscure Chinese drug case has been pushed to the center of China’s relations with Canada—and, by implication, with the rest of the world. The case appears to reinforce the message, previously suggested by the detentions of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, that China views the holding of human hostages as an acceptable way to conduct diplomacy.
> 
> Canadian Robert Schellenberg entered China in November of 2014 and was detained the following month on charges of planning to smuggle almost 500 pounds of crystal methamphetamine from China to Australia. Sentenced just last November to 15 years’ imprisonment, he effectively lost—indeed, more than lost—his appeal in the Liaoning Provincial High Court on Dec. 29, 2018. The High Court sent his case back for retrial, suggesting a harsher sentence would be appropriate. That could include the death penalty.
> 
> Several unusual features of the Schellenberg case suggest that it may be connected to China’s efforts to get Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive detained in Canada on Dec. 11, released before she is extradited to the United States to face charges of bank fraud related to Iran sanctions.
> 
> 1. Extraordinary delay in trial and sentencing. The original trial was on March 15, 2016. Given that Schellenberg was detained more than a year earlier, on Dec. 3, 2014, that already represents an unusual delay in China’s usually speedy criminal procedure system. (In the case of Yang Jia, for example, in which the defendant was charged with premeditated murder of six police officers, less than two months elapsed between the date of the offense and the date of the trial, and those proceedings were actually delayed because of the Beijing Summer Olympics.) And the sentence was not pronounced until more than 32 months later, on Nov. 20, 2018. China's Criminal Procedure Law says that sentencing should normally be within two months of the trial, and at most three months. That period may be extended a further three months for various reasons with the permission of the court above the one that conducted the trial. Any further extension requires the sentencing court to apply to and receive specific permission from the Supreme People's Court, China’s top judicial body. Was that obtained? And why was there a delay in the first place, both before the trial and between trial and sentencing?
> 
> Usually this kind of delay is a sign of internal controversy within the judicial system, and suggests that the case in question is not open-and-shut. Perhaps the evidence of Schellenberg’s guilt was weak. In such cases, the court doesn't want to embarrass police and prosecutors by acquitting, but it is also reluctant to convict, so it just sits on the case. This is happening, for example, in the extraordinary case of Mark Swidan, tried in 2013 by the Guangdong Jiangmen Intermediate People's Court. Swidan has consistently maintained his innocence, and over five years after the trial, the court has yet to issue a judgment.
> 
> 2. The decision to send back for retrial. The outcome of the appeal (announced after only twenty minutes of deliberations, suggesting that it was decided in advance) is very unusual. The court, instead of deciding the appeal one way or the other by itself, sent the case back down to the original trial court for a re-trial (chongshen 重审). On the basis of a quick-and-dirty calculation using available statistics, I found that in 2017, re-trials were ordered in at most two percent of criminal appeals.
> 
> The circumstances of this particular retrial order make it even more of an outlier. When cases are sent back for retrial, it is generally because clearing up unclear facts is expected to benefit the defendant. A knowledgeable colleague agreed that he had never heard of a case being sent back for retrial on the grounds that clearing up unclear facts might show that a heavier punishment was merited. (I should note that I have no statistics on this and am relying only on impressions gathered over the years. I cannot affirm that no such cases exist.)
> 
> Why the highly unusual outcome in the Schellenberg case? It might be random chance. But it might be something else. China’s Criminal Procedure Law does not allow an appeals court to increase the sentence when a defendant appeals. It can increase it if the procuracy (China’s prosecuting body) also appeals. So may be that the procuracy did not formally appeal Schellenberg’s sentence—remember that any decision about this would have been made in November, before China had any interest in politicizing cases involving Canadians. If it did not, then the original sentence of 15 years could not be increased by the appeals court.
> 
> But there is a loophole in the law. If, as in this case, the appeals court doesn't make a decision and instead sends case back down for retrial, there is no rule that says the original court cannot impose a harsher sentence on retrial. And during the appeal hearing, the procuracy alleged new and more serious facts that would justify a death sentence. Thus, sending the case back for retrial gives China the opportunity to threaten death and to drag out that threat for as long as necessary. Schellenberg could, for example, be sentenced to death with a two-year suspension. Even though such sentences are virtually always commuted when the two-year period expires, everyone would understand that the Chinese authorities could always find a reason not to commute.
> 
> 3. Extraordinary speed in scheduling the retrial. Schellenberg’s retrial has been scheduled for Jan. 14, a mere 16 days after the appeal decision. This is barely time for the minimum 10 days’ notice of trial required by China’s Criminal Procedure Law (Art. 187), and it is not clear that notice was in fact provided on or before Jan. 4 as required. Given that the prosecution apparently plans to make new allegations that would justify the imposition of a death sentence, such a brief time is utterly inadequate for the preparation of a meaningful defense.
> 
> 4. Why invite the international press? China’s State Council Information Office laid on a special trip to Dalian for the international press to observe the appeal hearing. Why? China had 1.3 million criminal cases in 2017, of which about 110,000 were drug cases. No doubt the numbers for 2018 are roughly similar. What was so special about this case? China’s attitude toward media observation of trials seems to be that if the media want to observe, they cannot, but they may be invited to observe proceedings in cases that had previously garnered little or no publicity.
> 
> Two possible hypotheses suggest themselves: (1) China wished to show the international community that Chinese criminal proceedings give full due process to defendants and fully protect their rights; (2) China wished to show Canada that it is deadly—literally deadly—serious about getting Meng Wanzhou released.
> 
> The account of the hearing provided in a Twitter thread by Wall Street Journal reporter Eva Dou effectively rules out the first hypothesis. The combination of unusual circumstances—inviting the press to observe, the rarity of the outcome and the haste of the retrial—all point to the second as more plausible.
> 
> If this hypothesis is correct, then China has moved from merely detaining Canadians as hostages to actually threatening—subtly, to be sure—to kill a Canadian who would otherwise not have been executed if it does not get what it wants.
> 
> To be sure, this is only a hypothesis. Schellenberg’s original conviction and sentencing cannot be connected to the Meng case, having preceded it. And no doubt Canadians are among those who have in the past committed, and in the future will commit, crimes in China. Not every detention of a Canadian is necessarily connected with the Meng case.
> 
> But the Kovrig and Spavor detentions, together with the opacity about their cases and the recent extraordinary admission, even proclamation, by China’s ambassador to Canada that the two were in fact detained as part of China’s “self-defense” in the Meng case, mean that it is now legitimate for Canadians in China—along with any citizen of a country that might in the future offend China—to wonder whether all these unusual circumstances are really just a coincidence.



 Article Link


----------



## tomahawk6

China seems to be interested in commercial/naval shipyards as a way to establish naval bases across the globe including Subic Bay. 

https://www.stripes.com/news/pair-of-chinese-firms-eye-subic-bay-shipyard-causing-alarm-in-the-philippines-1.564337 

The Chinese are seeking a commercial foothold in a strategic port that was once the United States’ largest naval facility in the Far East.
A pair of Chinese firms are in the running to buy a massive shipyard in Subic Bay from South Korea’s Hanjin Group, local media reported Saturday.
The harbor, once known as Naval Base Subic Bay, was home to thousands of U.S. sailors and their families before the Navy left in 1992. It’s still a regular port call for U.S. warships and Marines who practice beach landings nearby in Zambales province.
Subic’s importance has grown in recent years amid Chinese efforts to build military facilities on artificial islands and claim sovereignty over territory to the west in the South China Sea.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Public DIA report on on PLA etc.:



> DIA Chinese Military Power Report
> 
> _The following is the Defense Intelligence Agency report, China Military Power that was published on Jan. 15, 2019_
> 
> From the Report’s Introduction
> 
> The Defense Intelligence Agency—indeed the broader U.S. Intelligence Community—is continually asked, “What do we need to know about China?” What is China’s vision of the world and its role in it? What are Beijing’s strategic intentions and what are the implications for Washington? How are the PLA’s roles and missions changing as it becomes a more capable military force?
> 
> Since Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution in October 1949 brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, China has struggled to identify and align itself with its desired place in the world. Early factional struggles for control of party leadership, decades of negotiations to define territorial boundaries, and continued claims to territories not yet recovered have at times seemed at odds with the self-described nature of the Chinese as peace-loving and oriented only toward their own defense. Chinese leaders historically have been willing to use military force against threats to their regime, whether foreign or domestic, at times preemptively. Lack of significant involvement in military operations during the last several decades has led to a sense of insecurity within the PLA as it seeks to modernize into a great power military.
> 
> Still, the United States has at times found itself in direct conflict with China or Chinese forces. China supported two major conflicts in Asia after the Second World War, introducing Chinese volunteer forces in Korea and providing direct Chinese air and air defense support to Hanoi in Vietnam. In addition, China fought border skirmishes with the Soviet Union, India, and a unified Vietnam. In all three cases, military action was an integral part of Chinese diplomatic negotiations. Since then, China has concluded negotiations for most of its land borders (India and Bhutan being the outliers) but remains in contention with Japan, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam over maritime borders, which may in part explain motivation for the PLA Navy’s impressive growth and the new emphasis on maritime law enforcement capabilities.
> 
> China’s double-digit economic growth has slowed recently, but it served to fund several successive defense modernization Five-Year Plans. As international concern over Beijing’s human rights policies stymied the PLA’s search for ever more sophisticated technologies, China shifted funds and efforts to acquiring technology by any means available. Domestic laws forced foreign partners of Chinese-based joint ventures to release their technology in exchange for entry into China’s lucrative market, and China has used other means to secure needed technology and expertise. The result of this multifaceted approach to technology acquisition is a PLA on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world. In some areas, it already leads the world.
> 
> Chinese leaders characterize China’s long-term military modernization program as essential to achieving great power status. Indeed, China is building a robust, lethal force with capabilities spanning the air, maritime, space and information domains which will enable China to impose its will in the region. As it continues to grow in strength and confidence, our nation’s leaders will face a China insistent on having a greater voice in global interactions, which at times may be antithetical to U.S. interests. With a deeper understanding of the military might behind Chinese economic and diplomatic efforts, we can provide our own national political, economic, and military leaders the widest range of options for choosing when to counter, when to encourage, and when to join with China in actions around the world.
> 
> This report offers insights into the modernization of Chinese military power as it reforms from a defensive, inflexible ground-based force charged with domestic and peripheral security responsibilities to a joint, highly agile, expeditionary, and power-projecting arm of Chinese foreign policy that engages in military diplomacy and operations across the globe...[lots more]
> https://news.usni.org/2019/01/15/dia-chinese-military-power-report



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Stealth bomber developments in particular:


> Intelligence Report Confirms Two Chinese Stealth Bombers
> 
> A new report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) offers the first official acknowledgment of the existence of two stealth bomber development programs by China’s air force.
> 
> A previously-confirmed Chinese strategic bomber and a newly acknowledged stealth “fighter-bomber” are both now under development, the DIA says in a China Military Power report released Jan. 15.
> 
> The Pentagon first acknowledged a strategic bomber program exists in a 2017 report to Congress. The admission came a _year after a senior Chinese air force official publicly confirmed the effort to develop a new strategic comber variously called H-X and H-20_ [emphasis added].
> 
> For several years, Chinese and foreign media have speculated about the existence of a separate stealth bomber development project sometimes called the JH-XX, a replacement for the Mach 1.8-class Xian JH-7 fighter-bomber.
> 
> The new DIA report also _describes the second project as a “medium”-range stealth bomber. In a chart showing the “aircraft systems characteristics” of the Chinese air force fleet, a “next gen” fighter bomber is shown as a development project_ [emphasis added] with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, long-range air-to-air missiles and precision-guided munitions.
> 
> The same chart also describes the “long-range bomber” now in development as equipped with an AESA and precision-guided munitions, but not long-range air-to-air missiles.
> 
> “These new bombers will have additional capabilities, with full-spectrum upgrades compared with current operational bomber fleets, and will employ many fifth-generation fighter technologies in their design,” the DIA report states.
> 
> The _initial operational capability for both bombers is expected “no sooner” than 2025, the DIA reports, although it caveats that forecast by adding “probably_ [emphasis added].”
> 
> China has unveiled two stealth fighters—the J-20 and FC-31—and numerous designs for radar-evading unmanned aircraft systems over the last decade. China also has introduced a series of fourth-generation fighters, including the J-10, J-16 and newly acquired Sukhoi Su-35, over the same period.
> 
> Although a previous Pentagon report to Congress in August described the Chinese fighter fleet as possessing about 2,000 combat aircraft, the new report by the DIA lowers the estimate by 15% to around 1,700 aircraft.
> 
> By contrast, China’s bomber fleet has relied upon Xian’s JH-7 and H-6 bombers for decades, with recent upgrades adding to the range and weapons mix of the H-6. AVIC also displayed a model of a JH-7 at Airshow China in November. It was displayed with the designation “JH-7E,” which appeared to indicate a new configuration or perhaps an export variant.
> 
> _As the H-20 and JH-XX enter service in the next decade, the DIA expects China’s next-generation bomber force to perform a nuclear strike mission and complete a Western-style nuclear triad by augmenting the capabilities of Chinese submarines and ground-based rocket forces_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “As of 2017, the Air Force had been reassigned a nuclear mission, probably with a developmental strategic bomber,” the DIA report says.
> 
> China’s stealthy new fighter-bomber also could introduce a unique capability among world air forces. The DIA indicates that China’s air force is developing a medium-range aircraft with stealth characteristics.
> 
> The U.S. Air Force has analyzed similar concepts such as the FB-22 and the initial design of the Long Range Strike-Bomber, but never launched development of such an aircraft. Since the retirement of the medium-range General Dynamics F-111, Western and Russian air forces have depended on comparatively short-range fighter-bombers with little passive ability to avoid radar detection, such as the Boeing F-15E and Sukhoi Su-34.
> http://aviationweek.com/defense/intelligence-report-confirms-two-chinese-stealth-bombers



Mark
Ottawa


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## a_majoor

Interesting article published by the NYT. Doubly remarkable since the NYT is usually reliably "Liberal", but is essentially publishing an article in support of the policies of this Administration. How much traction it will get and how far the Administration is actually prepared to go are two questions which will be worth looking at in a few months time to see how much the needle has moved:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/us-china-trade.html

From the article:



> After years of unsuccessful talks and handshake deals with Beijing, the United States should change course and begin cutting some of its economic ties with China. Such a separation would stop intellectual property theft, cut off an important source of support to the People’s Liberation Army and hold companies that are involved in Chinese human rights abuses accountable.
> 
> This will be no easy task. Some industries will have problems finding new suppliers or buyers, and there are entrenched constituencies that support doing business with China. They argue that any pullback could threaten economic growth. But even if American exports to China fell by half, it would be the equivalent of less than one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. The cost of reducing Chinese imports is harder to assess, but there are multiple countries that can substitute for China-based production, none of them strategic rivals and trade predators.
> 
> The United States economy and its national security have been harmed by China’s rampant theft of intellectual property and the requirement that American companies that want to do business in the country hand over their technology. These actions threaten America’s comparative advantage in innovation and its military edge.


----------



## ModlrMike

Not such an outrageous idea. There are any number of the "smaller dragons" that could step into the void, as well as countries such as India. In addition, South and Central America could also be good ground for this. The upshot would be to improve the standard of living in these areas, which in turn might reduce some pressure on the US southern border.


----------



## a_majoor

China ramping up the pressure on Canada. 
https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/chinas-plan-to-break-off-us-allies/

*China’s Plan to Break off US Allies*
There’s a reason Beijing is pressuring Canada – not the US – over Meng Wanzhou’s arrest. Australia and New Zealand could be next.

From the article:


> The commentary added, “We need to select counter-targets and make those countries be beaten very painfully. We argue that in this complex game, China should focus on the Five Eye alliance countries, especially Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They follow the United States to harm China’s interests, especially in a step-by-step manner. Their performance is radical, and they are some of the targets that China should first hit.”
> 
> This was a public declaration that Beijing is set for retaliation against U.S. allies such as Canada and will adopt specific measures to implement the strategy of removing America’s friendly partners. In that sense, China’s measures against Canada are an example of the Chinese idiom “killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.” The goal is to deter other countries from angering China at the United States’ behest.
> China’s strategy of forcing U.S. friendly forces to choose to stand on the Chinese side has achieved some results already. For example, since 2012, China has succeeded in forcing some Southeast Asian countries to stand on the Chinese side in the South China Sea disputes through its sharp strength and other means. Then, China impounded Singapore’s armored vehicles in Hong Kong in November 2016, which convinced Singapore to no longer echo U.S. views over the South China Sea. Even Japan has shifted a bit to China’s side. In October 2018, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to Beijing and said that Japan would no longer confront China. Since then, he has been more cautious in using the term “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy” as coined by the Trump administration.
> 
> In fact, Beijing believes that China has already settled the western Pacific in this sense. Now, China’s strategy of forcing U.S. allies to choose to stand on its own side is set to expand to the  eastern Pacific. The Global Times editorial firmly believes that “achieving this goal or doing it to a considerable extent is very likely to be done.”


----------



## YZT580

That is not the manner in which trusted trade partners converse with one another.  Perhaps it is time to clear the Made in China products from the shelf and pursue other markets.  Although China represents 1/6 of the global population there are enough folks in S.America, India, Viet Nam and the Philippines to more than make up the difference and we don't have to sell our souls to deal with them either.


----------



## Journeyman

YZT580 said:
			
		

> That is not the manner in which trusted trade partners converse with one another.


:rofl:   Yes, I had to re-check the thread title;  I thought you were referring to …. someone else.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile on the Indian front--more imagery at original:



> This bomber, a mainstay of the Chinese air force, is now being deployed against India
> 
> After the 2017 Doklam stand-off, the Chinese army has turned the gaze of the H-6K bomber aircraft towards India by deploying it at Wugong.
> 
> New Delhi: China is believed to be deploying its frontline Xian H-6K bomber against India in the aftermath of the face-off between the two militaries in Doklam in 2017.
> 
> The Xian H-6K is the backbone of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
> 
> A licensed version of the Russian Tu-16 ‘Badger’, the H-6K is a medium-range bomber, which first flew on 5 January 2007, and was commissioned into service on 1 October 2009.
> 
> The H-6Ks — manufactured by Xi’an Aircraft Company (XAC) — produced until now have been deployed towards the American territory of Guam, Taiwan and the South China Sea. But in the aftermath of the 2017 Doklam stand-off, the PLAAF has turned the H-6Ks’ gaze towards India.
> 
> The fourth batch of H-6Ks is supposedly being deployed against India at Wugong for the PLAAF 36th Division under division commander Hao Jianke and regiment commander Wang Guosong in the Central Theatre Command.
> 
> *Details of the aircraft*
> 
> According to Chinese internet, the XAC’s internal reports have claimed that the H-6K was designed in early 2000 and started prototype production in 2003.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The new H-6K version with a solid nose cone instead of a glass one is powered by Aviadvigatel D-30KP-2 turbofan engines, with thrust of 12,000kg, similar to the Russian Il-76MD transporters.
> 
> The H-6K has a nose cone-mounted ground-scanning radar, and chin-mounted electro-optical (EO) turret.
> 
> The electronic countermeasure (ECM) antennae are observed on the nose cone and on the vertical tail-fin. Missile approach warning system (MAWS) sensors are seen on the nose cone as well as the tail.
> 
> The satellite communication antenna is mounted on the top of the rear fuselage, and a datalink turret is below the rear fuselage.
> 
> *Armaments it carries*
> 
> The H-6K carries six pylons, three on each wing. One of the pylons on each wing is placed between the engine and landing gear. Thus it can carry six KD-20As, the air-launched version of the DF-10 land attack cruise missiles [read on]...
> https://theprint.in/security/this-bomber-a-mainstay-of-the-chinese-air-force-is-now-being-deployed-against-india/175511/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Whilst Taiwan:



> U.S. Increasingly Concerned About a Chinese Attack on Taiwan
> _The Pentagon says reunification is the primary driver of China’s military modernization._
> 
> The U.S. Defense Department is increasingly concerned that China’s growing military might could embolden it to launch a full-out attack on Taiwan.
> 
> A new assessment of China’s military power published by the department’s Defense Intelligence Agency hints that Beijing is building up its military capabilities so that it will have a range of options to attack Taiwan if it decides to—and potentially the United States if it intervenes militarily.
> 
> The news comes amid Washington’s renewed focus on Beijing’s mounting economic and military clout. The two countries are locked in a trade war that has roiled global markets and dampened economic outlooks. Meanwhile, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, in his first day on the job earlier this month, told his staff to focus on “China, China, China.”
> 
> As the assessment began to emerge in the U.S. news media, a senior Chinese military official warned the U.S. Navy’s top officer on Tuesday in Beijing against any “interference” in support of Taiwan’s independence. In a meeting with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, General Li Zuocheng, a member of the Central Military Commission, said Beijing would defend its claim to Taiwan “at any cost.”
> 
> Beijing has signaled for years that it wants Taiwan to be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. The two split after China’s 1949 civil war won by Mao Zedong’s communists. It has opposed any attempt by the island nation to declare independence. This goal “has served as the primary driver for China’s military modernization,” according to the report.
> 
> The Pentagon is also concerned about China’s growing military presence far from its borders, including in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, where it has built a permanent base, a senior defense official told reporters Jan. 16.
> 
> “We now have to be able to look for a Chinese military that is active everywhere,” the official said. “I’m not saying that they are a threat or about to take military action everywhere, but they are present in a lot of places, and we will have to interact with them, engage with them, deal with them, monitor them more broadly than we’ve ever had to before.”
> 
> The Defense Department is particularly worried that this increase in capability makes a regional conflict more likely, the official said, with the most likely target being Taiwan. Leaders of the People’s Liberation Army might inform Chinese President Xi Jinping sometime soon that they are confident in their capability to take on both Taiwan and the U.S. Navy, the official stressed.
> 
> “As a lot of these technologies mature, as [China’s] reorganization of their military comes into effect, as they become more proficient with these capabilities, our concern is they will reach a point where internally, within their decision-making, they will decide that using military force for a regional conflict is something that is more eminent,” the official said.
> 
> _In recent months, U.S. Navy ships have repeatedly traversed through the Taiwan strait, which separates mainland China from the island nation_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Elbridge Colby, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, said the change in the Pentagon’s assessment of the risk to Taiwan is “very significant”—particularly because for China, taking on Taiwan means taking on the U.S. Navy.
> 
> “A change in the assessment on Taiwan would be very significant, particularly if they believe the Chinese think they might be able to use force and achieve their objectives and either seize or suborn the island,” said Colby, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018.
> 
> In that capacity, Colby was the lead official in the development of the department’s National Defense Strategy, which lays out a shift in focus from the counterterrorism fight in the Middle East to a potential clash with a near-peer competitor such as Russia or China.
> 
> _In the coming years, the Chinese military is expected to acquire advanced fighter aircraft, modern naval vessels, sophisticated missile systems, and space and cyberspace assets, said Dan Taylor, a senior defense intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
> 
> China is also investing in hypersonic glide vehicles, medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Guam from the Chinese mainland, and a capability to shoot down targets in space—such as U.S. satellites, the senior defense official said. Meanwhile, the deployment of China’s first strategic bomber would provide Beijing with its first credible nuclear triad, according to the report_ [emphasis added].
> 
> While China may be catching up with the United States in terms of technology, the official said the Chinese military is a long way from achieving parity with the U.S. military on an operational level. Beijing has not fought a war in 40 years, the official said, while the United States has been engaged in operations in the Middle East for decades.
> 
> But Beijing is working quickly to reorganize and boost its training.
> 
> “There will be significant growing pains, but they seem to have chosen a blueprint for how they want to move forward to be what they consider an advanced military,” the official said. “But it will take some time.”
> 
> _Update, Jan. 17, 2018: This article was updated to include remarks by Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng to U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson._
> https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/u-s-increasingly-concerned-about-a-chinese-attack-on-taiwan/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

*China is also investing in hypersonic glide vehicles, medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Guam from the Chinese mainland, and a capability to shoot down targets in space—such as U.S. satellites, the senior defense official said. Meanwhile, the deployment of China’s first strategic bomber would provide Beijing with its first credible nuclear triad, according to the report [emphasis added].

While China may be catching up with the United States in terms of technology, the official said the Chinese military is a long way from achieving parity with the U.S. military on an operational level. Beijing has not fought a war in 40 years, the official said, while the United States has been engaged in operations in the Middle East for decades.
*



While true, I think they are comparing apples to oranges here.

Yes, the US military has been engaged in continuous warfare for decades, especially COIN & counter-terror operations throughout the Middle East.

However, any war fought in the South China Sea will be predominantly naval & air oriented in nature.  And in this realm, neither the US Navy nor the PLA-N have been in any large scale recent conflicts, and neither have experience operating in an area where there could be DOZENS of ships from both sides operating in 'relatively' close proximity to each other - on a combat footing, looking to engage each other aggressively.  


The USN has been busy perfectly escort duties in the Persian Gulf, assisting with anti-piracy operations off the coast of Africa, and lending sea-based firepower (launching guided missiles) to land targets.  But they don't have the recent experience of a force-on-force scenario of this magnitude in which literally we could have 50 ships from each side hunting each other down.  Add submarines, cruise missiles, man-made islands, and the Chinese "fisherman's fleet" - and neither side has recent experience in this type of warfare.


And while yes China has developed the ability to strike targets in space, I think all parties agree that striking even one target in space is a bad idea for everybody.  Economic fluidity would drop near instantly once a satellite has turned into a floating cloud of space debris, taking out other satellites as it orbits, creating an even bigger cloud of satellite-killing death.  Unless the target is very specifically targeted and the aftermath studied extensively, taking out a space target with a land-based missile will hurt both sides equally.  (Both the USA and Russia seem to have satellite killing satellites, which I'm guessing will be the way that goes if it happens.)




At the end of the day, it'll be interesting to see how the China vs. Taiwan conflict pans out.  It truly will be.

-  Will the rest of the world abandon business with China, after the MASSIVE civilian losses on the Taiwanese side?  

-  Will countries look to alter their trade relationships, and perhaps provide initiatives and funding to build up new trading partners, if China by all accounts murders tens of thousands of innocent civilians in a couple of hours?  (Only foreseeable outcome I can see with hundreds of missiles being launched into a highly urbanized island...)

-  Will the USN and PLA-N clash on the seas?  If so, what will the outcome be?  Truly... both highly sophisticated organizations with advanced weapons, in a fairly tight operating area, with numbers & land-based assets overwhelmingly on the Chinese side?  

-  Will Russia play a role in distracting western assets by causing a bit of instability and trouble in northern/eastern Europe, if for no other reason than to force the US & NATO to limit the number of assets they can deploy to the SCS?  


It will be interesting to watch it all unfold, if it does...


----------



## MarkOttawa

CBH99: Indeed--as far as I know there has not been a serious multi-ship surface engagement, at whatever distance, between any serious navies since WW II.  That's now some 73 and a half years ago, an awfully long time for no combat experience by military (OK, naval) forces.  Gulf of Tonkin 1964 does not count:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2008-02/truth-about-tonkin

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

I was reading strategypage about North Korea. In the article it stated that complained about Chinese fighters harassing maritime surveillance aircraft operated by Canada,Japan, Australia and New Zealand. 

https://www.strategypage.com/qnd/korea/articles/20190111.aspx 


December 19, 2018: The international air patrol off the west coast of North Korea has seen many of its aircraft harassed by Chinese jet fighters. The patrol, in international waters, uses large, slow, maritime patrol aircraft and aircraft from Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have complained, and documented, the harassment efforts by the Chinese. The patrol seeks out ships smuggling goods for North Korea. This includes ships (some of them known by name and type) that are used to transfer smuggled goods (including oil) at sea to North Korea ships.


----------



## CBH99

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2182752/us-china-battle-dominance-extends-across-pacific-above-and


More and more, I find myself just shaking my head.  The US really has become a "lazy superpower" - in which despite spending almost A TRILLION DOLLARS ANNUALLY on defense & intelligence organizations, can't seem to find a few million here & there to take care of it's own citizens when the time comes.


Not having electrical power or the ability to filter clean drinking water MONTHS after a tropical storm is just embarrassing.

A team of engineers/mechanics/whoever, and a bit of money to take care of the trip/expenses - billed directly to whoever pays the bills - is all that would be needed for Guam, Puerto Rico, etc - to have a functioning power system, clean water generation, etc etc.  The leadership is just never there, nor is the money it seems.

If you can't be bothered to hire people to fix the issue, at least provide the local government with some funds so they can hire the people to get things moving again.  But not doing either is just pathetic.


Also, in regards to education - China enrolls approx. 15,000 students from the US territories in Chinese universities each year.  Amongst their studies, they learn to speak Mandarin.  

Why is the US not enrolling these people in American universities, in the Mainland US, to help bridge the educational gap between people who grow up in these territories, and their CONUS counterparts?  Is it because these people enroll in the US military at 3x the national average, and therefore have more educational opportunities that way?  


At the end of the day...China seems to have some pretty clear goals, a solid blueprint for achieving those goals, and solid leadership in place to work towards accomplishing them.  The US does not.  In many of these cases, China is simply filling the void that exists because of a lack of US leadership in a given geographic, political, or scientific area.


----------



## a_majoor

Shifting focus to economics again, the Chinese economy is moving towards consumer spending. While this is good for China (perhaps) a lot of the West has become dependent on Chinese savings....

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-04/tectonic-shift-chinas-economy-has-largely-gone-unnoticed-investors

*"A Tectonic Shift In China's Economy Has Largely Gone Unnoticed By Investors"* 



> Back in August 2 we reported of a historic event for China's economy: for the first time in its modern history, China's current account balance for the first half of the year had turned into a deficit. And while the full year amount was likely set to revert back to a modest surplus, it was only a matter of time before one of the most unique features of China's economy - its chronic current account surplus - was gone for good.
> 
> Then back in November, UBS wrote that the upcoming loss of China's current account cushion, softening domestic activity, and upcoming tariffs mean that "for the first time in 25 years, China would have to make a choice between external stability and growth."
> Now it is the Wall Street's Journal's turn to bring attention to this topic, calling it a "tectonic shift" in China's economy, which has largely gone unnoticed by investors, and which is "quietly beginning to upend the global financial system."
> 
> A key driver behind China's declining current account is that after having long been the world’s heavyweight saver and a huge buyer of foreign assets like Treasurys, the world's most populous nation is now a big spender, and in early 2018, China got more of its growth from consumption than the U.S., the global king of consumer spending where some 70% of economic growth is due to consumer spending. And as China's increasingly wealthy population spends more at home and abroad, its total trade surplus with the rest of the world has shriveled to a fraction of its former size.
> 
> In other words, China is rapidly becoming the next US.



read the rest at the link


----------



## larry Strong

Might be in the wrong spot.....



McCallum has resigned.......good riddance......


https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-s-ambassador-to-china-john-mccallum-resigns-at-trudeau-s-request-1.4270477


Cheers
Larry


----------



## MarkOttawa

Larry Strong:



> McCallum has resigned.......good riddance......



Embarrassing doofus and hapless comprador. Friend of mine tweets:
https://twitter.com/FredLitwin/status/1089253808071270400



> @FredLitwin
> 
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ambassador-mccallum-out-after-trudeau-asks-for-his-resignation-1.4270477
> 
> What next for John McCallum? Perhaps years of highly-paid work representing his people, the Chinese Communists. Or maybe just a Senate seat.



Mark
Collins


----------



## MarkOttawa

Seeing as Justin Trudeau has accepted John McCallum's resignation, will the erstwhile ambassador still have diplomatic immunity if he goes back to China to get his things? Just wondering.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## SeaKingTacco

McCallum was a disasterous choice as ambassador to China. His track record of bizarre behaviour has existed at least since his days as MND. Whomever recommended him should also lose their job.

I am surprised to see the Liberals cave to pressure on this one. I guess when the criticism is nearly universal and from every direction, what choice do you have?


----------



## YZT580

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> McCallum was a disasterous choice as ambassador to China. His track record of bizarre behaviour has existed at least since his days as MND. Whomever recommended him should also lose their job.
> 
> I am surprised to see the Liberals cave to pressure on this one. I guess when the criticism is nearly universal and from every direction, what choice do you have?


 Trudeau should have condemned his comments as soon as they were made and also made it clear that he was not representing the government of Canada when he misspoke.  His failure to do that indicates that he was simply hoping that things would blow over and that he wouldn't have to actually make a decision.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Interesting to see how the resignation plays in China.


----------



## MarkOttawa

McCallum may well be called a "courageous defender of improving China-Canada relations" .

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## RangerRay

Larry Strong said:
			
		

> Might be in the wrong spot.....
> 
> 
> 
> McCallum has resigned.......good riddance......
> 
> 
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-s-ambassador-to-china-john-mccallum-resigns-at-trudeau-s-request-1.4270477
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Larry



I always thought he was a fart-catcher for the Chinese. I seem to remember when the Liberals and the corporate lobby were bent out of shape over PM Harper ‘disrespecting ‘ the Chinese, McCallum was so angry he was vibrating.   Never seen the guy so animated before.


----------



## CBH99

I'm not a McCallum fan by ANY means at all.  Useless as a twig in the ocean, in my opinion...



However, perhaps there was a grander goal behind his comments?

With Canada/China relations at an all-time low, and China openly committing to hostage diplomacy by arresting Canadian citizens in response to us arresting one of theirs - perhaps his ploy to diplomatically distance Canada from the issue came from a good place?  

Perhaps his intent was to say "Hey, she might have some pretty good legal arguments here..." - in an attempt to portray Canada was more neutral in the matter than we currently appear.  By arresting her in Vancouver as per our legal obligations, we are adhering to the legal processes of Canada and the United States.  But by ALSO saying she may have some good legal arguments to obtain her freedom, perhaps he was trying to paint Canada was unbiased either way?


Either way, this incident never should have happened, in my humble opinion.  This was political right from the beginning, and it's pretty hard for us to point the finger for China arbitrarily arresting our citizens when we did it first, and of-course we had to do it with someone who is basically ROYALTY within the CPC.

If the Americans wanted her, they could have diverted the flight once it was in US airspace and made their arrest on their own turf - since she was scheduled to fly through US airspace anyway - instead of dragging us into their trade war tit-for-tat with China.    :2c:


----------



## Journeyman

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> Whomever recommended him should also lose their job.


Perhaps no one specifically, but 'inner circle nepotism';  he _was_  McGill's Dean of Arts when Trudeau and Gerald Butts were students.  :dunno:

Concur with the comment on his MND time.  :not-again:


----------



## SeaKingTacco

CBH99 said:
			
		

> I'm not a McCallum fan by ANY means at all.  Useless as a twig in the ocean, in my opinion...
> 
> 
> 
> However, perhaps there was a grander goal behind his comments?
> 
> With Canada/China relations at an all-time low, and China openly committing to hostage diplomacy by arresting Canadian citizens in response to us arresting one of theirs - perhaps his ploy to diplomatically distance Canada from the issue came from a good place?
> 
> Perhaps his intent was to say "Hey, she might have some pretty good legal arguments here..." - in an attempt to portray Canada was more neutral in the matter than we currently appear.  By arresting her in Vancouver as per our legal obligations, we are adhering to the legal processes of Canada and the United States.  But by ALSO saying she may have some good legal arguments to obtain her freedom, perhaps he was trying to paint Canada was unbiased either way?
> 
> 
> Either way, this incident never should have happened, in my humble opinion.  This was political right from the beginning, and it's pretty hard for us to point the finger for China arbitrarily arresting our citizens when we did it first, and of-course we had to do it with someone who is basically ROYALTY within the CPC.
> 
> If the Americans wanted her, they could have diverted the flight once it was in US airspace and made their arrest on their own turf - since she was scheduled to fly through US airspace anyway - instead of dragging us into their trade war tit-for-tat with China.    :2c:



I doubt all of this. It was stupidity and incompetence, pure and simple.


----------



## tomahawk6

He wasn't on the same page as the government so he had to go.


----------



## tomahawk6

A Vietnamese fisherman found a Chinese practice torpedo and brought it to shore, where police were notified who then brought in the Navy. It was a Yu6 torpedo a knockoff of the US mk48 Mod 3.

https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htsub/articles/20190124.aspx


torpedo video 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=d_5KRLrR-l0


----------



## RangerRay

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> I doubt all of this. It was stupidity and incompetence, pure and simple.



I wouldn’t put it past him to freelance on this. Like I say, he has a history of butt-snorkeling the Chinese.


----------



## YZT580

CBH99 said:
			
		

> I'm not a McCallum fan by ANY means at all.  Useless as a twig in the ocean, in my opinion...
> 
> 
> 
> However, perhaps there was a grander goal behind his comments?
> 
> With Canada/China relations at an all-time low, and China openly committing to hostage diplomacy by arresting Canadian citizens in response to us arresting one of theirs - perhaps his ploy to diplomatically distance Canada from the issue came from a good place?
> 
> Perhaps his intent was to say "Hey, she might have some pretty good legal arguments here..." - in an attempt to portray Canada was more neutral in the matter than we currently appear.  By arresting her in Vancouver as per our legal obligations, we are adhering to the legal processes of Canada and the United States.  But by ALSO saying she may have some good legal arguments to obtain her freedom, perhaps he was trying to paint Canada was unbiased either way?
> 
> 
> Either way, this incident never should have happened, in my humble opinion.  This was political right from the beginning, and it's pretty hard for us to point the finger for China arbitrarily arresting our citizens when we did it first, and of-course we had to do it with someone who is basically ROYALTY within the CPC.
> 
> If the Americans wanted her, they could have diverted the flight once it was in US airspace and made their arrest on their own turf - since she was scheduled to fly through US airspace anyway - instead of dragging us into their trade war tit-for-tat with China.    :2c:


  There is no way that the U.S. could have diverted her flight to a destination in the states for the purpose of arresting her short of forcing the aircraft to land through threat of force.  International protocol forbids that type of action and for good reason.  Should the U.S. have taken such drastic action, no American would ever be safe ever again unless they remained over the continental U.S.  ICAO regs specifically forbid military action against civilian aircraft, even in wartime.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

RangerRay said:
			
		

> I wouldn’t put it past him to freelance on this. Like I say, he has a history of butt-snorkeling the Chinese.



Possible, but I watched him in an interview a week or so ago and the way he answered reporters questions I was thinking he should be in a retirement home, not in a senior ambassadors position. On the other hand may be he wasn't having a good day. Who knows??


----------



## The Bread Guy

RangerRay said:
			
		

> I always thought he was a fart-catcher for the Chinese ...





			
				RangerRay said:
			
		

> ... he has a history of butt-snorkeling the Chinese.


Funny you should mention it -- this, from U.S.-gov't-funded Radio Free Asia (higlhights mine) ...


> Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has fired his ambassador to Beijing after he made comments about an ongoing extradition process involving Meng Wanzhou, a top executive with China's flagship telecom giant Huawei.
> 
> John McCallum was fired after he told the Toronto Star newspaper on Friday that it would be "great" if the U.S. dropped its extradition request for Meng, who is currently under house arrest at her Vancouver home after her arrest on Dec. 1 at Washington's request.
> 
> His comment came after he had retracted an earlier comment to the effect that Meng, Huawei's chief financial officer, had a strong argument to make against being extradited.
> 
> McCallum's sacking prompted a chorus of protest and support from Chinese newspapers, which are tasked with promoting the views of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> The Global Times newspaper said in an editorial that the move "reveals political interference," in Meng's case, which has soured ties with Beijing.
> 
> _*Ottawa is now as "sensitive as a frightened bird," the newspaper said, adding that Trudeau's government "knew the geopolitics in the case from the very beginning, but were afraid to point them out."
> 
> "You cannot live the life of a whore and expect a monument to your chastity,"*_ the paper said***, citing a Chinese folk saying.
> 
> The paper also ran an opinion article containing personal attacks on the journalist who reported the former diplomat's comments on Friday, while Ling Shengli, an analyst with the China Foreign Affairs University, a diplomatic school under the aegis of the foreign ministry, hinted that Beijing would like to see McCallum reinstated.
> 
> _*"If McCallum could stay on [in] his position, he may help reduce the damage that Meng's case would bring to bilateral relations,"*_ Ling wrote.
> 
> The English-language China Daily wrote that _*"McCallum was merely stating the truth when he observed that Meng has a strong case against extradition, which he rightly said was politically motivated."*_ ...


*** - You can read the full editorial here.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Trudeau's recent (and sadly comical) visit to India can't have made China too happy:

How India Will React to the Rise of China: The Soft-Balancing Strategy Reconsidered

China’s provocative behavior in the South China Sea and increasing economic and naval presence in the Indo-Pacific are among the reasons the United States has recently characterized China as a “strategic competitor.” Some analysts seem to assume New Delhi is a natural partner and will join the United States in this struggle as China becomes more powerful and threatening. However, while these analysts do acknowledge the constraints, they nonetheless tend to overestimate India’s willingness to serve as a counterweight to China, while underestimating internal and external constraints on such explicit balancing behavior. My contention is that India is likely to form both a soft-balancing coalition, relying on diplomacy and institutional cooperation, and a limited hard-balancing coalition, that is, strategic partnerships short of formal alliances. But an outright alliance with the United States is very improbable. The recently concluded U.S.-India “two-plus-two” meeting of foreign and defense ministers and secretaries suggests that the path toward a limited hard-balancing coalition may be opening despite many remaining hurdles. Whether a limited U.S.-India hard-balancing coalition progresses toward an outright hard-balancing alliance will depend heavily on China’s behavior, especially the threat level it poses to India in the years to come.

https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/india-and-the-rise-of-china-soft-balancing-strategy-reconsidered/


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, from the South China Morning Post, is interesting:

*Chinese scientists make progress on nuclear submarine communication*



> China’s nuclear submarines may be stealthier and better able to communicate in the deep ocean after progress was made on key technology, according to state media.
> 
> People’s Daily reported on Friday that a successful test transmission of real-time high-capacity data between deep ocean transponders and the Beidou navigation satellite system had been carried out.
> 
> Marine research ship Kexue, or “Science”, conducted the test in the western Pacific along with several other missions on a 74-day trip before returning to its home base of Qingdao, Shandong on Thursday.
> 
> Wang Fan, one of the marine scientists aboard the vessel, told the state newspaper important progress had been made.
> 
> “This technology … significantly increases the safety, independence and reliability of deep ocean data transmission,” Wang said, adding that using China’s Beidou system meant the submarines no longer had to rely on foreign satellites for such communication.
> 
> “The transponder with Beidou, at a depth of 6,000 metres, has been safely in operation for more than a month now and it is working well,” Wang said.
> 
> Real-time underwater transmission of temperature, salinity and currents data at the 6,000 metres depth – with transponders relaying signals every 100 or 500 metres – was “another big breakthrough” for the team, Wang added.
> 
> They did this using a combination of inductive coupling and underwater acoustic communication technologies, the scientist said.
> 
> Although the report did not give details on data size or quality of the transmission, the technology – when fully developed – could be useful to China’s submarines, especially its fledgling nuclear-powered ballistic missile-carrying (SSBN) fleet, according to analysts.
> 
> Transmitting information from the depths of the vast ocean is difficult, especially through the electromagnetic waves typically used in communication systems. Command and control of ballistic-missile submarines is done from land using very low or extremely low frequency communications, but the amount of data that can be transmitted is limited and can only go one way.
> 
> “[A submarine] usually can’t transmit on its own unless it raises a communications mast or buoy to the surface,” said Collin Koh, a research fellow with the Maritime Security Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
> 
> But doing so increases the risk of the submarine being detected, so a satellite link makes for stealthier and more efficient communication.
> Adam Ni, a researcher with Macquarie University in Sydney, said the development was the latest in China’s drive to modernise its submarine fleet.
> 
> “Along with advances in submarine stealth technology, strong surface fleet [to complement] infrastructure, and space-based information support, the latest breakthrough is another element of China’s modernising submarine power, especially its SSBN force, which is increasingly important for nuclear deterrence,” Ni said.
> 
> During its 12,000 nautical mile voyage, the Kexue also upgraded China’s observation network in the western Pacific, including 20 sets of deep ocean equipment, four large floating devices and more than 1,000 observation facilities that have been collecting information for five years, the report said.




Underwater communications is not my strong suit but I do know that transmitting data at anything much above the very, very slowest Morse code speeds from any significant depth, and 6,000 metres is a long bloody way down, is an achievement.

Also, don't forget that China is tied into a Canadian (UVic) deep ocean network, which may not be any threat to the USA or Canada but which is part of China's ongoing efforts to establish leadership positions in a wide range of technological areas, almost all of which have at least some military applicatuions.


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting article from "War on the Rocks" about the internal conversations between the PLA and civilian leadership expressing uncertainties over the actual abilities of the PLA PLAN and PLAAF. The thrust of these conversations might be considered similar to a giant After Action Review at very high levels. I would imagine similar conversations at the highest levels of the Canadian Armed forces would likely reveal many of the same issues:

https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/the-chinese-military-speaks-to-itself-revealing-doubts/



> *The Chinese Military Speaks to Itself, Revealing Doubts*
> Dennis J. Blasko
> February 18, 2019
> 
> Editor’s Note: This article is based on longer testimony presented to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on February 7, 2019.
> 
> A large body of evidence in China’s official military and party media indicates the nation’s senior civilian and uniformed leaders recognize significant shortcomings in the warfighting and command capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). However, most of this evidence is not translated into English for public consumption and is not considered in much of the foreign analysis of China’s growing military capabilities. This situation is not new, but goes back for decades.
> 
> Yet, the increasing scope and frequency of these self-critiques during the tenure of Xi Jinping as chairman of the Central Military Commission casts doubt over the senior party and military leadership’s confidence in the PLA’s ability to prevail in battle against a modern enemy. Furthermore, the limitations illustrated by these internal assessments will likely moderate China’s near- and mid-term national security objectives and the manner in which they are pursued. This lack of confidence in PLA capabilities contributes to Beijing’s preference to achieve China’s national objectives through deterrence and actions short of war.
> 
> ***
> 
> Myriad specific critiques of discrete functions in individual units form the basis for larger, generalized assessments of overall military capabilities. Going back to Deng Xiaoping, general self-assessments have been attributed to and referred to by Central Military Commission chairmen. In their first few appearances they are spelled out in full sentences, but later are abbreviated in short slogans or formulas, such as the “Two Incompatibles” or “Five Incapables.” The Chinese have not translated the short-form abbreviations for these slogans into English, and different interpreters may arrive at different translations of the terms, but the message is the same: The PLA must overcome multiple shortcomings in its combat and leadership capabilities. None of these general assessments have been included in any of the official white papers on national defense, which target audiences external to China.



As this is a long article, I will direct you to the link to read the rest.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chicoms really getting shameless:



> Toronto police probe online abuse of Tibetan-Canadian student leader accused of offending China
> _Incidents at Ontario universities this month have raised the spectre of Chinese government interference on Canadian campuses_
> 
> The torrent of abuse Chinese students and others directed at a Tibetan-Canadian student leader in Toronto has now become a police matter.
> 
> Detectives have begun investigating whether some of the thousands of angry online texts Chemi Lhamo received after being elected as a University of Toronto student-union president constitute criminal threats, Toronto police confirmed Wednesday.
> 
> The Internet barrage — and a petition signed by 11,000 people demanding Lhamo be removed from the position — was one of two incidents at Ontario universities this month that have raised the spectre of Chinese government interference on Canadian campuses.
> 
> Muslim and Tibetan student groups have called on the federal government to investigate whether such incursions did occur. China’s embassy in Ottawa has denied playing a part in either episode.
> 
> Meanwhile, Lhamo said university police have asked her to develop a safety plan in the wake of the online deluge, which would include letting them know where she is on campus hour by hour.
> 
> “It is a little threatening, to be roaming around hallways knowing that at any time I could be attacked,” she said in an interview. “We came to Canada hoping for a better quality of life. To be bullied even here … catches up on your mental health sometimes.”
> 
> Lhamo, 22, is a Canadian citizen of Tibetan descent who immigrated from India with her family 11 years ago. She was elected as president of the student union at the U of T’s Scarborough campus in early February. Though she is an advocate for Tibetan independence, she did not campaign on that issue and says she has no plans to make it part of her role as president.
> 
> But in the wake of her election, thousands of messages flooded her Instagram account, often crudely abusive and accusing her of being disloyal to China, a country where she has never lived.
> 
> The change.org petition — digitally signed almost entirely by people with Chinese names — suggested that her devotion to the Tibetan cause is “irrational” and an affront to international students at the university.
> 
> Beijing sees the movement for a free Tibet as a major threat; along with advocacy for the Uyghur minority, Taiwan, democracy in China and the Falun Gong sect, it is one of what the Chinese Communist party sometimes calls the “five poisons.”
> 
> _Lhamo said the Instagram texts included ones saying “Wish you would die young”; “The bullet for your penalty is made in China”; and “I kill all your family._ [emphasis added]”..
> https://nationalpost.com/news/toronto-police-probe-online-abuse-of-tibetan-canadian-student-leader-accused-of-offending-china



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## The Bread Guy

Retired AF Guy said:
			
		

> From Politico, but originally posted in the South China Morning Post. Looks like Canada could be targeted by China because of he Wanzhou arrest.
> 
> Article Link


The latest on that from the Dep't of Justice ...


> Canada is a country governed by the rule of law. Extradition in Canada is guided by the Extradition Act, international treaties and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which enshrines constitutional principles of fairness and due process.
> 
> Today, Department of Justice Canada officials issued an Authority to Proceed, formally commencing an extradition process in the case of Ms. Meng Wanzhou.
> 
> The decision follows a thorough and diligent review of the evidence in this case. The Department is satisfied that the requirements set out by the Extradition Act for the issuance of an Authority to Proceed have been met and there is sufficient evidence to be put before an extradition judge for decision.
> 
> The next step in the case is as follows:
> 
> The British Columbia Supreme Court has scheduled an appearance date for March 6, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. (PST) to confirm that an Authority to Proceed has been issued and to schedule the date for the extradition hearing.
> 
> During the extradition hearing, the Crown will make its detailed arguments in its submissions to the Court, where evidence will be filed and become part of the public record.
> 
> An extradition hearing is not a trial nor does it render a verdict of guilt or innocence. If a person is ultimately extradited from Canada to face prosecution in another country, the individual will have a trial in that country.
> 
> While court proceedings are underway, Ms. Meng will remain on bail subject to her existing conditions, as set by the court.
> Quick facts
> 
> The Authority to Proceed is the first step in the extradition process. The decision on whether to issue an Authority to Proceed was made by Department of Justice Canada officials, who are part of a non-partisan public service.
> 
> The next step is the judicial phase where a judge hears the case. If the judge decides a person should be committed for extradition, then the Minister of Justice must decide if the person should be surrendered (extradited) to the requesting country.
> 
> The Minister of Justice will not comment on the facts of this case given he may need to make a decision later in this process.
> 
> Under the Extradition Act and the Treaty, Canada must review the alleged conduct and determine whether it could have resulted in a jail sentence of 1 year of more if it had taken place in Canada. The conduct for which extradition is sought must also be considered criminal in both the United States of America and in Canada. This is known as “dual criminality”.
> 
> Canada’s extradition process protects the rights of the person sought by ensuring that extradition will not be granted if, among other things, it is contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including the principles of fundamental justice ...


More @ link and attached process flow chart.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Another one, with a military twist ...


> Adding another strange wrinkle to Canada-China relations, a Chinese official who oversaw research on his country’s burgeoning naval-submarine fleet has been placed under arrest in China and accused of illegally obtaining Canadian citizenship.
> 
> Bu Jianjie, who reportedly spent time as a visiting scholar at two Ontario universities in the mid-1990s, has also been charged with various corruption-related crimes and expelled from the Communist party.
> 
> The Canadian citizenship accusation stems from China’s ban on holding dual nationalities. Despite being a scientist with access to naval-defence technology and apparent citizenship from a Western country, however, authorities have not charged him with spying ...


More @ link, or via _South China Morning Post_ here (25 Dec 2018)


----------



## MarkOttawa

Our prime polemicist, Terry Glavin, hammers many of our pols on China:


> It's official – China is a threat to Canada's national security
> _Parliamentarians' report highlights Beijing’s complex campaigns of subversion, threats, influence-buying, bullying and espionage here_
> 
> When it comes to defending Canada from the menace posed by the People’s Republic of China, it is now a matter of public record, and should be a matter of some embarrassment to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, if not shame, that the course his government embarked upon for years was dangerously naive, if not recklessly thoughtless.
> 
> It’s a tragedy that it took the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s kidnapping of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and cultural entrepreneur Michael Spavor to prove that the Beijing regime was not the “win-win, golden decade” friend and trade partner Trudeau had incessantly harped about. Robert Schellenberg, dubiously convicted on drug-smuggling charges in the first place, had his 15-year jail sentence upgraded to a cell on death row. Canada’s canola exporters are stuck with $2.7 billion in export contracts that Beijing has ripped up. Threats of further punishment hang in the air.
> 
> It’s all because Canada detained Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou last December on a U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant. Meng is sought by the U.S. to face charges of fraud and dodging sanctions on Iran. Beijing needed to throw somebody up against a wall and slap him around, so President Xi Jinping chose Justin Trudeau.
> 
> Beijing’s complex campaigns of subversion, threats, influence-buying, bullying and espionage in Canada stretch back much farther than last December, of course. So does the sleazy tendency of Canadian politicians to look the other way, or rush to Beijing’s defence whenever anyone in the intelligence community publicly notices the obvious, or throw the director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service under the bus for pointing it out.
> 
> _When CSIS director Richard Fadden had the temerity to point out nearly a decade ago that there were provincial cabinet ministers and other elected officials in Canada who had fallen under Beijing’s general influence, several Liberal and NDP MPs demanded his resignation_ [emphasis added].
> 
> So it was refreshing to see that Tuesday’s first-ever annual report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) made no bones about it. China is a threat to Canada’s national security, the committee found.
> 
> Terrorism, espionage and foreign influence, cyber threats, major organized crime and weapons of mass destruction were all listed in the NSICOP report among the top threats to Canada. China figures in the report’s findings under espionage and foreign influence, and under cyber threats as well.
> 
> Russia is right up there, too, and although the report is redacted in several places, other unnamed governments were reported to be busy with the same dirty work. But it was the novelty of China being singled out for once, in a high-level federal government intelligence report, that’s worth noticing. Usually, Ottawa lets China get away with anything.
> 
> “_China is known globally for its efforts to influence Chinese communities and the politics of other countries. The Chinese government has a number of official organizations that try to influence Chinese communities and politicians to adopt pro-China positions, most prominently the United Front Work Department,” the report states, referring directly to Fadden’s whistleblowing in 2010.
> 
> The report also notes a 2017 warning from David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China, about Beijing’s influence-peddling efforts in Canada. To get what it wants, Beijing mobilizes student groups, diaspora groups, “and people who have an economic stake in China, to work behind the scenes.” The report also notes the unsavoury business of lavish political donations on offer from Chinese businessmen with close links to China’s Communist Party leadership_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Two years ago, the Financial Times obtained the United Front Work Department’s training manual, which boasts about the electoral successes of 10 pro-Beijing politicians in Ontario. “We should aim to work with those individuals and groups that are at a relatively high level, operate within the mainstream of society and have prospects for advancement,” the manual states.
> 
> The reason for the public’s relative inattention to influence-and-espionage threats posed by such foreign powers as China and Russia is that the federal government tends to avoid addressing the issue publicly. “As it stands now, an interested Canadian would have to search a number of government websites to understand the most significant threats to Canada,” the committee found.
> 
> “For some threats, such as terrorism, information is readily available and regularly updated . … For other threats, such as organized crime or interference in Canadian politics, information is often limited, scattered among different sources or incomplete. The committee believes that Canadians would be equally well served if more information about threats were readily available.”
> 
> _That information is available, of course. It just hasn’t been coming from the federal government. In his just-published book, Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, veteran foreign-affairs reporter Jonathan Manthorpe painstakingly enumerates the breadth and scope of the United Front Work Department’s organizations in Canada, and Beijing’s intimate links throughout Canada’s business class. Manthorpe relied solely on the public record, showing that Beijing’s strong-arming, its inducements and its subtle and not-so-subtle intimidation have been carried out in plain sight for years_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Last year, a coalition of diaspora groups led by Amnesty International provided CSIS with an exhaustive account of Beijing’s intensive campaign of bullying, threats and harassment targeting Canadian diaspora organizations devoted to Chinese democracy, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, Tibetan sovereignty, and the Uighurs. A Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang, the Uighur people are currently being subjected to an overwhelming tyranny of concentration camps, religious persecution, “re-education,” family separation and round-the-clock, pervasive surveillance. “Canada has become a battleground on which the Chinese Communist Party seeks to terrorize, humiliate and neuter its opponents,” says Manthorpe.
> 
> hat kind of subversion usually occurs behind the scenes. But for years, Confucius Institutes have operated openly in dozens of Canadian universities, colleges and high schools. “In most cases,” Manthorpe contends, “they are espionage outstations for Chinese embassies and consulates through which they control Chinese students, gather information on perceived enemies and intimidate dissidents.”
> 
> Because its mandate covers more than a dozen institutions and agencies, NSICOP — first proposed 15 years ago, but only now getting off the ground — had a lot of ground to cover. More than half of the report’s 121 pages are devoted to a review of the intelligence functions of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. But it’s subversion by foreign governments that seems to have caught the Parliamentary committee’s attention — CSIS told NSICOP the foreign-influence threat is becoming more acute, and countering it will call for “a more significant response” in the coming years.
> 
> With that in mind, the _committee is already working on a followup review of the mandate, priority and resources Ottawa provides Canada’s intelligence community to monitor and counter the foreign-influence threat. The committee’s report is expected to be released before the October federal election_ [emphasis added], but it won’t be focused on the foreign cyber threats Ottawa is already preparing to monitor and expose during the election campaign.
> 
> “We’re going to outline the primary-threat actors, we’re going to be examining the threat those actors pose to our institutions and, to a certain extent, our ethno-cultural communities,” NSICOP chair David McGuinty told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday. “We’re working feverishly to get it done.”
> 
> About time, too.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-its-official-china-is-a-threat-to-canadas-national-security



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

For what Dick Fadden, as then-CSIS director, said in 2010 about Chinese foreign-influence activities in Canada see 2) here:



> National Security Advisor to Canadian PM Retires…Successor?
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/mark-collins-national-security-advisor-to-canadian-pm-retires-successor/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Kirkhill

Theresa May fired her Defence Secretary over Huawei 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/05/03/williamson-affair-exposes-serious-dysfunction-british-establishment/



> the leak from the National Security Council did not concern state secrets but a policy question with clear public interest: should Britain allow a Chinese company to help build its 5G network?* Several governments have banned telecoms companies from using Huawei technology, including three of the so-called “five eyes” intelligence sharing community. A fourth, Canada, is reviewing its relationship with the firm.*
> 
> The proposition that Britain should ignore the reasonable warnings of the United States to invite Huawei, which is thought to be relatively cheap, to overhaul our infrastructure is controversial and requires open debate.



"Canada is reviewing its relationship with the firm".

Reviewing its relationship while China besieges Canada with embargoes on canola, soybeans, peas and pork and takes hostages.  And in the face of this situation we can't even find an ambassador to have a chat with Beijing.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> For what Dick Fadden, as then-CSIS director, said in 2010 about Chinese foreign-influence activities in Canada see 2) here:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Adding to above, here is a link to joint RCMP-CSIS report (Op Sidewinder) from 1997 on Chinese influences in Canada:

https://betterdwelling.com/operation-sidewinder-csis-rcmp/#_


----------



## MarkOttawa

This might get people in Canada antsy about "sovereignty":



> Pentagon Warns Of China’s Rise in the Arctic, Missile Subs, Influence Operations
> 
> Annual "China Military Power" report notes that Beijing’s deterrence fleet is up to six ballistic missile subs.
> 
> China is becoming a rising power not only in consumer technology and artificial intelligence but also in Arctic military operations and nuclear submarine construction, according to a new report from the Pentagon.
> 
> “Arctic border countries have raised concerns about China’s expanding capabilities and interest in the region,” notes the report, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019,” published today [ https://media.defense.gov/2019/May/02/2002127082/-1/-1/1/2019_CHINA_MILITARY_POWER_REPORT.pdf ]. Often called the “China Military Power” report, it’s required annually by Congress. This year, it highlights the country’s prowess in the Arctic. In 2018, China completed its ninth Arctic expedition last year, published its first Arctic strategy document, and launched its second icebreaker, the Xuelong 2. The ship, capable of breaking 1.5 meters of ice, is the first polar research vessel that “can break ice while moving forwards or backwards,” according to the report.
> 
> The warming Arctic might also cool, or at least complicate, Beijing’s budding friendship with Moscow. The Pentagon has watched growing Sino-Russia cooperation with concern In September, China joined Russia’s held its annual strategic Vostok wargame for the first time —but there are limits to what can be shared. _Russia sees possession of the Northern Sea Route that runs along its coast as critical to national security. “In September 2018, a Russian expert at the Russian International Affairs Council stated the Russian Federation was strongly opposed to foreign icebreakers operating on the Northern Sea Route, including U.S. and Chinese icebreakers_ [emphasis added],” says the report.
> 
> Still, the region offers considerable scope for commercial cooperation. The two nations are building a pipeline to bring liquified natural gas from Russia to China. They’ve also been working out details and divisions of shipping and joint commercial activity.
> 
> “We give major attention to the development of the Northern Sea Route [and] are considering the possibility of connecting it with the Chinese Maritime Silk Road,” Russian Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting in Beijing on April 25.
> 
> _Another possible Chinese use for the Arctic, the report said, is as a place to deploy its burgeoning fleet of ballistic missile submarines. China now has six Jin-class SSBNs, the report says, up from the five identified by open-source methods in November_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “China has constructed six JIN-class SSBNs, with four operational and two outfitting at Huludao Shipyard,” it said. “[They] are the country’s first viable sea-based nuclear deterrent.”
> 
> _Finally, the report notes — for the first time — Chinese influence operations_ [emphasis added]: “China views the cyberspace domain as a platform providing opportunities for influence operations, and the [People’s Liberation Army] likely seeks to use online influence activities to support its overall Three Warfares strategy and to undermine an adversary’s resolve in a contingency or conflict.”
> 
> Such operations are meant to persuade the world to “accept China’s narrative” on issues like the South China Sea and the One Belt One Road Initiative. Experts say China has developed a growing and largely underestimated presence on U.S. social media platforms. But the government’s influence activities exist offline as well. The report notes that _China is able to exert pressure on ethnic Chinese to conduct influence operations on behalf of the government through blackmail_ [emphasis added, report actually says a lot more--see pp. 8-9 PDF]."
> https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/05/pentagon-report-warns-chinas-rise-arctic-missile-subs-influence-operations/156726/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Kirkhill

Chris Pook said:
			
		

> Theresa May fired her Defence Secretary over Huawei
> 
> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/05/03/williamson-affair-exposes-serious-dysfunction-british-establishment/
> 
> "Canada is reviewing its relationship with the firm".
> 
> Reviewing its relationship while China besieges Canada with embargoes on canola, soybeans, peas and pork and takes hostages.  And in the face of this situation we can't even find an ambassador to have a chat with Beijing.



Further to this



> Martyn Vernon 3 May 2019 2:29PM
> @Corvo Nero Steven Poyner 3 May 2019 9:43AM
> 
> Lord Browne was  Member of Cameron  Cabinet Office  now Chairman Of Huawei UK.
> Sir Andrew Cahn was Cameron Head of UK Trade now Board Member of Huawei UK .
> John Suffolk was Cameron Chief Information Officer now Huawei UK Vice President and Cyber Security.
> 
> Do you think there is anything fishy going on  here?



From the comments in today's Telegraph.


----------



## tomahawk6

According to PACAF commander the J20 stealth fighter may be declared operational this year. Also the US has transferred some F16's to Taiwan to upgrade their defenses. I would think adding more Patriot batteries and land based anti ship missiles or MRLS. Of course little Taiwan probably wont be able to survive long if the balloon goes up, not without US help.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinas-stealth-jet-may-be-ready-this-year-us-commander-says/ar-AAAMvfD?ocid=spartanntp


----------



## a_majoor

Contending with China (or any other Power) is going to require an integrated DIME strategy. This long article talks about the economic aspects of the current "trade war" between the United States and China. A close read is probably needed to understand better how this affects Canada as well:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/trade-war-china-inevitable-56712



> *A (Trade) War with China is Inevitable*
> 
> Beijing's trade tussle and brazen technology theft stunts are part of an overlooked war that has been going on for decades.
> by Christopher Whalen
> 
> Five decades ago my father Richard Whalen published a book entitled Trade Warriors: The Guide to the Politics of Trade and Foreign Investment. Trade was a big deal in Washington in the 1970s, mostly focused on Japan. The resurgent Japanese economy and enormous flows of investment fueled by trade deficits were seen as a threat to American sovereignty. Many members of Congress, who were profiled in the book, had very specific concerns about trade, but the White House was generally the defender of free trade and capital flows that rebuilt the world after World War II.
> 
> Wind the clock forward forty years and much has changed. China, rather than Japan, is the focus of U.S. angst when it comes to trade and investment flows. Members of Congress still have concerns about global commerce, but these concerns are mostly focused on a narrative that seeks to maintain and expand global trade flows that benefit their constituents. But the big change that has occurred over the years since Trade Warriors was published is that now the White House is occupied by President Donald Trump, who largely rejects the assumption of free trade in the global economy—and particularly with China.
> 
> Since coming into office, Trump has targeted China for being an unfair, predatory trading partner. Trump has picked up the protectionist rhetoric that was traditionally the province of the Democratic Party, outflanking the pro-labor elements of the left and thereby gaining the support of the Rust Belt states in 2016. The defeat of Hillary Clinton was not only a defeat for the leading Democratic contender for the White House, but also marked the end of the comfortable and very corrupt consensus around supporting “free trade” with totalitarian police states like China.
> 
> Each time that Trump has imposed tariffs on Chinese products or set a deadline for the ongoing negotiations, the financial markets have quavered in fear, reflecting the abhorrence investors have for disruptive change. But most investors looking at China also reflect an infantile naivete when it comes to the true nature of the communist state. “When the time comes to hang the capitalists, they will bid against each other for the sale of the rope,” Vladimir Lenin is reported to have said.
> 
> Thus, the negative reaction of the financial markets to perturbations in U.S.-China relations is perhaps understandable but almost certainly overstated. “At the end of the day, the People’s Republic needs our commerce a lot more than we need their commerce," noted CNBC’s Jim Cramer, one of the few U.S. journalists willing to criticize the Chinese. “The United States is a cash-fueled economy, the [People’s Republic of China] PRC is a debt-laden house of cards. They need our money, but do we really need their cheap stuff? We’re winning, regardless of what you think of Trump. The truth is that China's a paper tiger, something that's obvious if you just look at the darned numbers.”



More at link


----------



## MarkOttawa

CCP China has been hard at very serious influence ops for some time--start of major article, note role of Chinese students abroad,



> China Has Been Running Global Influence Campaigns for Years
> _Pro-China protests ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics were orchestrated by Chinese officials. The world thought they were a spontaneous showing of Chinese nationalism._
> 
> In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, with the torch relay soon set to pass through San Francisco, an envoy from China met with the city’s then-mayor, Gavin Newsom.
> 
> Riots had broken out the month before in Lhasa, Tibet, leading to a crackdown by Chinese security forces. The torch’s journey through London and Paris had been marred by anti-China protests and arrests. Pro-Tibet and pro-Uighur activists, among others, were planning demonstrations in San Francisco, the torch’s only U.S. stop.
> 
> Beijing was deeply concerned about damage to China’s image as its Olympic debut approached, and hoped to clamp down on dissent beyond the country’s borders. The envoy who met with Newsom demanded that he prohibit the demonstrations and, in effect, suspend the First Amendment, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Newsom, now California’s governor, refused, according to the former official. (Newsom did not respond to a request for comment.)
> 
> So, in a series of covert and often coercive measures that have now become a hallmark of Beijing’s approach to image management, Chinese authorities took matters into their own hands. They orchestrated pro-Beijing demonstrations, deployed their own security, and made behind-the-scenes threats to activists, all while denying such measures—a strategy repeated across four continents along the torch relay.
> 
> _Judged by its scope and scale, and the sheer number of active participants, China’s 2008 measures amounted to arguably the largest covert global influence campaign in history, and a preview of how China—now a behemoth seen in Washington more as a threat than a partner—would approach power and influence as its international status grew_ [emphasis added]. Yet at the time, Western observers, who were preoccupied with domestic Chinese human-rights violations and what appeared to be a surge in organic Chinese nationalism in cities such as London and Paris, missed it almost entirely.
> 
> Beijing was almost certainly emboldened by the anemic international response to its squashing of protests over the torch run in 2008, and Western democracies are only beginning to grapple with the implications. _In the decade since, China has undertaken an expansive policy of surveilling, cultivating, and pressuring its diaspora; stolen trade secrets and intellectual property from Western businesses to catalyze China’s development; and carried out a coordinated international campaign of intimidation, even kidnapping dissidents and Chinese ethnic minorities abroad, forcing many to return to China to face imprisonment or worse_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Its actions during the torch run offered a hint of Beijing’s capabilities and the long arm of its security apparatus. Whereas Vietnam detained or expelled anti-China protesters prior to the torch arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, leaders in democratic countries could not simply ensure positive media coverage for China or clamp down on criticism. China responded by directly interfering with the rights and freedoms guaranteed in free societies to polish its own image.
> 
> In San Francisco, this meant organizing crowds to drown out protesters. After Newsom declined to ban rallies during the torch relay, _Chinese consular officers in California mobilized somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 Chinese students to attend the protests, according to the same former senior U.S. intelligence official, and confirmed by another former counterintelligence official who asked not to be named discussing Chinese efforts on U.S. soil. These students were asked to take part in counterdemonstrations, and given free transport, boxed lunches, and T-shirts. Those on Chinese government scholarships faced threats that their funding would be revoked if they did not participate_ [emphasis added].
> 
> According to the former senior U.S. intelligence official, Beijing also flew in intelligence officers to direct the pro-China demonstrators in real time. These officials, wearing earpieces connected to radios, directed groups of counter-protesters, who ripped down banners and occupied spaces so that anti-China demonstrators could not gather...
> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/05/beijing-olympics-china-influence-campaigns/589186/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Griff nach der Weltmacht:



> China, U.S., Canada: trade and political disputes and world domination (interview)
> 
> A trade dispute is growing between China and the U.S which could easily have repercussions worldwide.
> 
> The U.S and China will be together at the upcoming G-20 summit, at which point the situation may calm, or as many think, escalate.
> 
> At the same time the trade and diplomatic dispute between Canada and China continues over a Chinese executive detained in Canada and wanted by the U.S.
> 
> Charles Burton (PhD) is a political science professor at Brock University and former Canadian diplomat to China [ http://charlesburton.blogspot.com/ ]. He says this is playing out against a _longer term Chinese policy to become the world’s superpower_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Professor Burton says the U.S has long been unhappy with the huge trade imbalance with China, When China recently reneged on a deal that had been worked out towards more equity and requiring adherence to World Trade Organisation rules, the U.S. upped tariffs on many Chinese imports from 10% to a hefty 25% affecting about $250 billion worth of Chinese imports.
> 
> Charles Burton (PhD) political science professor, and former diplomat to China. (via Brock University News)
> 
> If a settlement isn’t reached in June prior to or at the G20 meeting, there are plans being discussed to add duties to an additional $325 billion worth of Chinese products.
> 
> This comes amid the ongoing Canada-China dispute. It is widely believed that China continues to exert pressure on Canada over its arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. Under relaxed house detention at one of her luxury properties in Vancouver, she awaits an extradition hearing to the U.S to face charges there connected to sales of equipment to Iran.
> 
> Michael Spavor (left) and former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig have been in Chinese custody under extremely harsh conditions on a charge of being a threat to Chinese security. This is widely believed to be retaliation for the detention of a Huawei executive in Canada wanted in the U.S for charges there (Associated Press/ International Crisis Group/Canadian Press)
> 
> Chinese pressure comes in the form of refusing imports of Canadian canola, and bureaucratic delays of other Canadian imports further harming Canada’s agricultural sector. There has the arrest and harsh imprisonment of two Canadians on charges of being threats to China’s security, and the sentencing to death of two Canadians accused of drug trafficking.
> 
> Professor Burton says _Canada’s polite gestures of objection will not work in changing China’s position. It is felt that this only adds to China’s perception of the current government being weak_ [emphasis added]. Burton notes there are a number of things Canada can to exert pressure on China in return such as inspect all Chinese shipments into Canada to cut off the supply of deadly fentanyl drugs. These delays would hurt China’s economy. Certain diplomatic expulsions would also send a strong signal.
> 
> These trade and diplomatic bullying tactics by China can be seen as part of a long term geo-strategic plan by China aimed at domination and becoming a world power if not the top world power. He says international organisations like the U.N and W.T.O. which are based on rules and which run counter to China’s ambitions.
> 
> In an article he wrote to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, he said, “Currently, there is no coherent multi-national strategy against Chinese influence operations. The less we respond to it in any substantive way, the more China is emboldened in its practice of global disruption.
> 
> _China’s remaking of the global rules is making the world safe for autocracy, tacitly demanding that Canada passively surrender our values to an authoritarian state_ [emphasis added]. Canada should be uniting with our allies in a coordinated stand for political justice and fair economic engagement with China. But this requires more than allocating resources and government expenditure. The political will has to be there”.
> http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/05/14/china-u-s-canada-trade-and-political-disputes-and-world-domination-interview/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Actually the Dragon rampant--note Japan section:



> Panda sinks claws deep into Canada: author
> _New book details the extent to which Beijing is wielding influence in Canada, North America – and beyond_
> 
> At a time when concern is rising in various parts of the globe that Chinese overseas investment and migration may not be benign, the latest book by Jonathan Manthorpe looks timely.
> 
> Published in January, Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, alleges the malign influence of a muscle-flexing Beijing over the business, political, media and academic circles of the North American nation.
> 
> The book appeared in the midst of an ongoing spat between Beijing and Ottawa that followed the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou in Canada, and the subsequent arrests of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China. It is widely believed that the Korvig and Spavor arrests were retaliations for Meng’s detention.
> 
> Though a Canadian by birth, the author sounding the alarm bells has been based in Europe, Africa, and Hong Kong, reporting for the Toronto Star and the Southam News. Now back in Canada, his focus continues to be on the wider world, with a specialization in things Sinic: his previous book was Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan.
> 
> Now a columnist for Asia Times, Manthorpe recently shared his thoughts and findings from his latest book, and his wider concerns about the rise of the People’s Republic of China and its leadership, the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> *Beijing vs Ottawa*
> 
> “Canada is importing corruption along with money” from China, Manthrope maintains – though he adds that China-related corruption has a long history in Canada. The difference today is one of scale.
> 
> “There is a distinction between the political corruption in Canada that created and benefited from the investor immigrant program of the 1980s, which I describe in some detail, and the corruption that has accompanied the vast amounts of money brought into Canada by the ‘Red Aristocracy,’” he said.
> 
> “I had hoped the distinction in size and in kind would be evident between Canada’s homegrown corruption and the triffid-like monstrosity that has grown out of the CCP royalty’s use of Canada as a money-laundering center in the last two decades or so.”
> 
> Claws of the Panda documents a confluence of corruption among politicians, businesses, casinos, organized crime and ordinary Chinese citizens. “At the core of the CCP’s campaign here, and in other target countries like Australia and New Zealand, has been what is known in shorthand as ‘elite capture,’” he said.
> 
> “There has been, and is, a strong element of corruption of Canadian establishment figures in that campaign.”
> 
> So can the corruption of the elites, the wealthy, and the politically-connected be separated from the day-to-day mindset of average Chinese-Canadians?  They can.
> 
> “Hundreds of thousands of people have come to Canada from Hong Kong and mainland China without having to use corrupt channels, or to find it necessary to make corruption a tool of their daily lives,” Manthorpe said.
> 
> “For the most part, Canadians of Chinese heritage lead ordinary Canadian lives, working hard … trying to ensure that their children have better opportunities and lives than they have, and being thankful that they live in a country where – by-and-large – the government can be depended on to see their role as providing services for and protecting the citizenry.”
> 
> The bad actors, he stresses, are the elite, but it is the elite who – due to their wealth and status – are the most visible. This visibility is to some extent due to dubious activity that does not stop at political corruption.
> 
> It is “exhibited in property purchases, expensive cars, behavior at casinos, obscene displays of wealth at public occasions, attempts to use bribery at private schools and universities, and the keeping of several households with concubines.” Manthorpe said.
> 
> The author paints a portrait of a deeply dysfunctional symbiosis between Canada and China. His book includes occasional references to offshore financial havens such as the Virgin Islands and the Caymans; it seems that Canada is now seen as a similar vector for laundering money and hiding business deals.
> 
> Manthorpe also depicts Canada as “the stalking horse for Washington.” It would appear Canada, thanks to its location, is emerging as a way for the PRC to launder its political ambitions through what many in the world view as a “clean” government in Ottawa, and a friendly and open society in Canada overall. And in addition to leveraging Canada’s cultural and geographical proximity to the US, Beijing also leverages Canadian prejudices.
> 
> “I think on some occasions the CCP has used both Canada’s closeness to the US to Beijing’s advantage, and has also understood and used Canadian antipathy towards the US for its own ends,” he said.
> 
> *Beijing vs Washington*
> 
> Still, as a critic of populists, Manthorpe is unconvinced that US President Donald Trump’s verbal and tariff assault on Beijing will make much difference to either the long game or the big picture.
> 
> “I don’t think either Trump’s tough talk with Beijing or the actions of the ideologues will have any beneficial results in either Washington’s relationship with Beijing or the CCP’s view of the world in general,” he said.
> 
> In fact, Trumpian policy, with its focus on economics and “America First,” is weakening key mechanisms that have the potential to strategically contain China. Related risks may be particularly high in the flashpoint South and East China Seas.
> 
> “The big danger I see at the moment, and one that makes a conflict more likely in my view, is that we have a US administration that does not seem to be dependable in its alliances,” he said.
> 
> “With the PRC rampant and neighboring Asian nations unsure whether they can trust Washington to honor its security treaty obligations, we have a dangerous situation where mistakes can easily happen.”
> Beijing vs Japan
> 
> While the book offers a wealth of information on various politicians and groups in Canada who provide sluices for PRC influence infiltration into North America, the author also researched how the CCP spreads anti-Japan and anti-US propaganda in Canada as a way to weaken the US-Japan alliance, and to keep South Korea and Japan at daggers drawn.
> 
> However, some passages related to the United Front Work Department of the CCP’s Central Committee – the body that manages relations with various individuals and organizations that are not party entities, but which hold social, commercial, or academic influence, or which represent interest groups – was excised by editorial guillotine.
> 
> “In the first draft of the manuscript there was quite a bit about the efforts of the various UFWD operations here to attack Japan, using both the Nanking Massacre and comfort women as agencies,” he said.
> 
> One such case covered a suburban Vancouver council. The local government body was persuaded to allow the erection of a statue to “The World’s Women” – which turned out to be comfort women propaganda. The Japanese consul-general in Vancouver managed to get that rejected.
> 
> “The ability to attack Japan and Japanese interests in Canada is one of the important aspects of the infiltration and influence-peddling of the CCP,” he noted.
> 
> *Beijing: Dominant or doomed?*
> 
> Manthorpe ends his book with the hope that the authoritarian regime in Beijing will “shatter.”
> 
> Yet that looks – from present vantage – to be a very vain hope. The One Belt, One Road initiative is advancing across the globe, suggesting that, far from weakening, Beijing is very successfully deploying capital and selling its system as a viable alternative to Western-led liberal democracy.
> 
> So how fragile, really, is the PRC?
> 
> “The point I was trying to make with my ‘shatter’ image was that we can never quite be sure how brittle the CCP regime really is,” he explained. “With the end of the Soviet Union and the Arab Spring we have seen several totalitarian states disappear overnight. I would suggest that the CCP’s fixation on the collapse of the Soviet Union indicates that it, too, is unsure of how firmly it is in power.”
> 
> This paranoia is reflected in the vigor with which state agencies are executing policies designed to forestall any such outcome. Beijing “has been brutal in its destruction of anybody that emerges, especially since 1989, that might become a national organization,” he said.
> 
> Meanwhile, the CCP is marshaling new formats of Chinese power. In an age when Beijing’s lack of soft power has been scoffed at, the CCP – the same body that executed the “Cultural Revolution” – is now promoting itself as the custodian of traditional Chinese culture. “I think the edifice of Chinese culture and history gives the PRC a stability, even in an authoritarian state, that other regimes have not had,” he said.
> 
> But a huge risk also lies at the very heart of Sinic legacies. “There has never been a peaceful transfer of power between Chinese dynasties that I am aware of,” the author warned.
> 
> Follow Jonathan Manthorpe’s columns in Asia Times here.
> https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/panda-sinks-claws-deep-into-canada-author/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And see this 2016 post on the earlier Garratt detention, then arrest--Justin and the Liberals refuse to wake up and smell the Maotai:



> Dragon Arrests Canadian: Retaliation for Our Help vs Chinese Spooking Against US?
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/mark-collins-dragon-arrests-canadian-relation-for-our-help-vs-chinese-spooking-against-us/



And now video of a CBC interview with Kevin Garratt:
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1523396163729

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

The Panda's claws in Canada reach broad and deep:



> Who’s going to stand up to China? This Canadian senator, for one.
> _Terry Glavin: Arrested Canadians, human rights abuses, spying: ‘Send the Chinese ambassador home,’ says Senator Thanh Hai Ngo _
> 
> Setting aside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s preferred option of pretending that it isn’t even happening, there are what you could call two schools of thought in and around Ottawa about how to respond to what all sides agree is the deepest rupture in Canada-China relations since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 30 years ago.
> 
> The first is the old Liberal establishment standpoint. It’s the one that has run an almost uninterrupted course ever since Jean Chretien’s first big Team Canada mission to China in 1994, the one Prime Minister Trudeau put into hyperdrive as soon as he took office in 2015.
> 
> It’s all about a deepening of trade, political connections, cultural ties and other such entanglements, a policy enthusiastically described by John McCallum, Canada’s last ambassador in Beijing, as “more, more, more.” It would be more than fair to say that this way of looking at things has been quite thoroughly discredited in recent months, but it’s still dominant in the Liberal Party’s governing circles.
> 
> The idea is that Canada’s overarching priority at the moment should be to grant whatever concessions Beijing deems necessary in order to put things back together again. That’s how to secure the release of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and it’s how to secure the lifting of Beijing’s embargo on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian canola and pork exports. _What Canada’s China-trade lobby and its variously supportive think-tanks and academic institutes want is to get everything back to the days of “more, more more,” as plausibly and discreetly as possible_ [emphasis added].
> 
> In Canada’s Senate, this remains the dominant view. And it’s strictly enforced.
> 
> An important dissenter from that view is Senator Thanh Hai Ngo, a 72-year-old human rights activist appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012. Senator Ngo is among a minority in the Upper Chamber whose view of the current state of play reflects the second school of thought.
> 
> In this way of looking at things, Xi Jinping’s brute-force retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. Justice department extradition request is of a piece with Beijing’s long game of global domination by alternatively subverting by “elite capture” and bullying weak and ordinarily China-compliant governments of the sort typified by Team Trudeau’s government.
> 
> President’s Xi’s most recent thuggish behaviour is all in the cause of undermining and supplanting the international rules and conventions that Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has attempted to rally UN member states to get behind—the global order that has allowed the world’s liberal democracies to flourish over the past 70 years or so.
> 
> _To the great annoyance of Liberal senators and the Senate’s mostly Liberal-appointed “independent” majority, Ngo sees things this way, and he has refused to comply with the long-standing policy dictum around Ottawa that it’s best to keep our heads down and behave the way Beijing wants in hopes of winning favourable trade concessions for Canadian corporations with business interests in China_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Ngo has fought for tough responses to the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of minority groups, Beijing’s regional belligerence, and the Chinese state’s intrusions in Canada. Over the past three years, Ngo has put 29 questions to the government about China’s human rights abuses, its infiltration of Canadian society and its harassment and intimidation of Chinese-Canadians and Tibetan-Canadians.
> 
> Over the past year, Ngo has put six pointed questions to the government side about the Trudeau cabinet’s wishy-washy response to the danger of Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet auction being thrown open to Huawei. The Shenzhen telecom behemoth, an arm of the Chinese state in everything but name, is owned by a “trade union” committee that does not represent Huawei workers but rather answers directly to the Communist Party brass in Beijing. Huawei’s CEO, Ren Zhengfei, Meng Wanzhou’s father, is a ranking Communist Party member.
> 
> Recent events have proved Ngo to have been consistently right about the threats Beijing poses to the international order, and about the sinister role Beijing’s agents of influence are playing in Canada. It’s a wonder he doesn’t just burst out with “I told you so,” lean back in his comfortable seat in the Upper Chamber and just sit there from now on, watching his adversaries squirm. But Ngo is not for sitting back.
> 
> Xi Jinping is engaged in a spiteful campaign against Canada at the moment and he’s winning, hands down, says Ngo. “I think so, yes.” In response to the arbitrary arrest of Spavor and Kovrig just days after Meng Wanzhou was detained in Vancouver on a U.S. warrant involving charges of bank fraud and violating U.S. sanctions in Iran, “Canada, so far, we didn’t do anything. . . we did nothing,” Ngo told me the other day.
> 
> “I think Canada should go a different way. I don’t think we should negotiate at the moment because they’re not going to budge at all. “They don’t even pick up the phone.” Another pair of Canadians convicted on drug offences in China have recently had their sentences conspicuously elevated to the death penalty. “What did we do? Nothing.”
> 
> In the bigger picture, Canada has remained mostly quiet about Beijing’s confinement of at least a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in the remote and almost entirely off-limits province of Xinjiang. Ngo describes Being’s draconian measures “nothing short of a cultural genocide.” Canada has further allowed itself to become hostage to a Beijing-patrolled “One China” policy that has grossly stunted Canada’s relations with a sister liberal democracy, Taiwan.
> 
> _Ngo says the reach of Beijing’s influence in Canada extends deeper than most people understand, and Canadians should pay attention to the way the Senate’s behaviour is enforced in China’s favour_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Senator Peter Harder, who headed up Trudeau’s 2015 transition to office, is a former president of the Canada-China Business Council. He’s also a former president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, which was controversially enriched in 2016 by a $200,000 donation from a Chinese banker and Communist Party insider. Harder is now the government leader in the 105-member Senate.
> 
> The Senate’s small “official” Liberal caucus is headed by Senator Joseph Day, the chairman of the Canada-China Legislative Association, which regularly brings together Canadian parliamentarians with China’s rubber-stamp People’s Political Consultative Conference. Even though Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi won’t even return Chrystia Freeland’s telephone calls, Day and a small group of legislative association parliamentarians were on a guided tour of Chinese cities just this past week. During the group’s previous tour in January, only a month after Kovrig and Spavor were whisked off to detention centres and denied access to lawyers, their case wasn’t even on the agenda, Senator Day admitted at the time.
> 
> The Conservatives claim the loyalties of 30 senators, but by far the largest caucus in the Senate is the 58-member “Independent Senators Group,” now led by one of the most controversial senate appointments in recent years, Yuen Pao Woo. The group is made up mostly of Liberal senate appointees.
> 
> While Trudeau has been choosing prospective Senate candidates from recommendations put forward by a newly-established “independent” advisory panel, the Independent bloc almost always votes with the government side. And although Woo doesn’t like being described as “Beijing-friendly,” he is rarely described any other way.
> 
> Woo’s maiden speech in the Senate was in opposition to a motion Ngo put forward protesting Beijing’s annexation of the South China Sea and its persistent defiance of international law.
> 
> Ngo’s motion was finally passed last year, but only after a great deal of procedural brinksmanship, and Ngo expects the same stiff opposition to greet the bill he’s put forward to amend the Investment Canada Act to ensure that all Canadian acquisitions by Chinese state-owned enterprises are subject to national-security reviews.
> 
> Canada can’t do much to restrain China except in alliance with like-minded democracies, Ngo says, but in the meantime there are tools at Canada’s disposal. Canada’s “Magnitsky law” has allowed Freeland to impose sanctions on notorious human rights abusers with the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Myanmar, but strangely, not against human rights abusers in China – not for what has been done to Kovrig and Spavor, and not even over what is being done to the Muslims of Xinjiang.
> 
> “All these things we know, and we don’t do anything. We should sanction them. But we sanction no Chinese official under the Magnitsky law,” Ngo said. “Not even one Chinese official.”
> 
> Among several defensive and diplomatic actions Canada could take, Ngo says Ottawa should close the many Beijing-sponsored Confucius Institutes that have set up shop in Canada’s schools and universities. “Close all these Confucius Institutes in Canada. These are spy hubs.”
> 
> At the top of Ngo’s list: revoke Chinese ambassador Lu Shaye’s credentials and order him out of the country. “Send the ambassador home. That’s it. Let China see that we’re serious about this.”
> 
> “We have to change our course. It doesn’t work.”
> https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/whos-going-to-stand-up-to-china-this-canadian-senator-for-one/



Mark
Ottawa


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## OldSolduer

Just an observation: The government of China is Communist right? With a President for life as well?


----------



## MarkOttawa

China's lovable, laugh-a-minute ambassador:



> Kelly McParland: China's ambassador has a simple message — give us what we want
> _While Lu may not be much of a diplomat, he fits in fine when it comes to his country’s growing ugliness and ballooning view of its own importance_
> 
> Lu Shaye is China’s ambassador to Canada. Ambassadors are typically referred to as diplomats, though that’s not a term that appears to apply in this instance, as Ambassador Lu’s idea of diplomacy is to deliver extended lectures on the failings and inadequacies of Canada as a country and a culture, occasionally tossing in insults or a warning or two for good measure. As the local face of an increasingly swaggering one-party state, he seems well-suited to his role. As a diplomat he’s a bust.
> 
> Lu set the tone for his ambassadorship soon after arriving in 2017. In an interview with The Canadian Press, he reprimanded Ottawa for paying too much attention to journalists, a profession for which China’s communist rulers have very little regard. Journalists in China understand that upsetting the powerful forces that run the country and its stifling censorship operations could be unhealthy for their career development, not to mention personal freedom.
> 
> Canada, of course, lets journalists run wild, blathering on about human rights and other unimportant issues, without even the cudgel of some potential jail time to keep them in line. As reported by The Canadian Press at the time, the new ambassador advised that politicians “should spend less time bowing down to Canadian journalists preoccupied with human rights and get on with negotiating an important free trade agreement with China.”
> 
> Lu has expanded on his numerous criticisms and complaints since then. Earlier this year he equated Canadians to white supremacists. He accused Ottawa of “backstabbing” China by detaining Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in her Vancouver mansion at the request of the U.S, and warned of “repercussions” if she wasn’t freed. In an address Friday he gathered many of these themes into one prolonged diatribe on the inadequacies of Canadian values and our fixation on democracy.
> 
> The core of the problem, as Lu explained it, is that Western societies don’t understand Chinese history and are misinformed about its present. The West views China as an “abnormal” country, to which we “condescend” in our mistaken belief that other societies value democracy as much as we do. As an example, he noted recent reports on the vast network of detention camps set up in China’s Xinjiang region, where a million or more Uyghur Muslims are being held in a massive state effort to eradicate their ethnic identity.
> 
> Despite plenty of evidence attesting to the ugly realities, Lu insisted the camps are just “vocational education and training centres” aimed at exterminating the threat of terrorism, just as the brutalities of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution were justified as necessary in eradicating “counter-revolutionaries” and “bourgeois elements.” Lu doesn’t question China’s latest cleansing program any more than Mao’s thugs questioned the need to imprison, torture and humiliate “revisionists.” Reports on the camps, he complained, are both “distorted” and “defaming.” As proof, he boasted, “In the recent two years or so, there has not been a single violent and terrorist attack and no more innocent people have been harmed.” Jailing people by the hundreds of thousands will do that for you.
> 
> Lu was similarly indignant about Western concern over Beijing’s burgeoning geo-political ambitions. “I want to tell you that the Chinese nation does not have the gene of aggression,” he retorted. “We have never launched a war of aggression against any other country and we have never occupied one inch of overseas colony in history.”
> 
> This would be news to Tibet, which China invaded in 1950 and has occupied since, during which tens of thousands of Tibetans are reported to have been killed as Beijing seeks to eliminate Tibetan cultural practices and religious traditions. China’s argument would be that Tibet is rightfully part of China, so the invasion was not an invasion, but a re-establishment of historical reality. It’s an old ploy used by dictatorial powers, and would be rolled out again if Beijing ever followed though on its numerous threats to seize Taiwan, or sought to turn Hong Kong into just another obedient Chinese province. It’s the same excuse cited for China’s construction of a series of islands in the South China Sea, dredging up sand and piling it on coral reefs so it can claim ownership and expand its territorial demands. Despite what Vietnam, the Philippines or other countries in the region may think, insisted Lu, “the South China Sea islands have all along been the inherent territory of China.” So there.
> 
> As Lu sees it, “Western countries’ psychological imbalance towards China’s economic and technological development comes down to the West-egotism.” We’re all a bunch of self-important ego-maniacs, too ignorant to understand the greatness of China’s past. On Friday he professed that Westerners “always believe that they are superior to any other nations.” Sure, the West has had a few good centuries, but lately it’s in over its head. The end of the Cold War, he charged, ushered in a period in which democracy-lovers “arrogantly believed that the Western system reached the peak of perfection and it was the best system in the world.”
> 
> What Lu would like would be for Canada and some of its fellow travellers to wise up and see things from China’s enlightened viewpoint.
> 
> “Chinese people are in the best position to judge China’s development,” he lectured. “We are confident about our own path, theory, system and culture. We will never change our own development path because of the different viewpoints of Western countries and several discredited articles in the West. We will stick to the path that we choose. For Western countries, the problem is how to get along with China.”
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://nationalpost.com/opinion/kelly-mcparland-chinas-ambassador-has-a-simple-message-give-us-what-we-want



Mark
Ottawa


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## GK .Dundas

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Just an observation: The government of China is Communist right? With a President for life as well?


A more accurate description might be an industrial feudal state.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Likely this visit was arranged 6 months to a year in advance. Berths, tugs, pilots would be needed, along with diplomatic clearances.

 https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/chinese-warships-cause-surprise-in-sydney-harbour/ar-AACiEwO?ocid=sf


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terry Glavin has a almost everybody, but China top of mind:



> Glavin: So much for having a rules-based international order. The G20 shows it no longer exists
> 
> Here’s an idea. Let’s pick 20 people at random from the millions of Hongkongers who have braved nightsticks and tear gas and pepper spray in the cause of democracy over the past few weeks, and replace the leaders of the G20 with them. This is totally out of left field, I fully realize. But for the fun of it, do you think you could make a case that the world would be, even in the slightest, worse off?
> 
> This wouldn’t be democratic, of course, but then again, look who’s in charge of the G20, and look at the disingenuous mumbo jumbo of the 12-page G20 Osaka Leaders Declaration. It’s exactly what you would expect of a document that must somehow purport to bear the imprimaturs of China’s Xi Jinping, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and 15 more such characters, including of course the infamously louche American president, Donald Trump.
> 
> There’s all sorts of JibJab about harnessing powers, seizing opportunities, tackling challenges and redoubling efforts, as well as affirming this, enhancing that, achieving things, fostering other things, reiterating even more things, and so on. The lies are amazing. “We share the notion of a human-centred future society…” No you don’t. “We remain committed to play a leading role in the global efforts to prevent and fight against corruption…” No you don’t. “We commit to continue support for girls’ and women’s education and training…” Like hell you do.
> 
> Behold, the rules-based international order. Twenty world leaders, ostensibly representing 90 per cent of the global economy and two-thirds of the world’s peoples – and really half of the world’s unfree peoples – and of course anything of substance occurs on the sidelines, even the gossip. Are we really going to allow Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman to host next year’s meeting, in Riyadh? Wouldn’t that be just a bit indelicate, now that Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has just more or less accused bin Salman of ordering the execution of that annoying Washington Post correspondent Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi in Istanbul last October?
> 
> And what in heaven’s name is Ivanka Trump doing here? Oh yes. Well, among other things, Justin Trudeau and Ivanka are supposed to showcase this thing Trudeau cooked up with the president’s daughter in Washington a couple of years back at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit. It’s morphed into something called EMPOWER, in capital letters, and they’ve since rooked Her Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands into it, and that’s why she’s here, too.
> 
> Poor dear Justin. Canada is enduring a sustained economic, technological and diplomatic attack waged by China, which has embargoed Canadian canola products and meat products and soybeans, made hostages of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, sentenced two other Canadians to death on drug-smuggling convictions, and he just can’t get a break. All because Canada was a good global citizen and agreed to act on a U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant for Meng Wanzhou, wanted stateside on 13 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy arising from the Shenzhen telecom behemoth Huawei’s alleged double-dealing and sanctions-busting in Iran. Trump said he’d put in a good word for Canada at the G20, but there’s no evidence he did. And poor Chrystia Freeland! All she’s managed to do is get a handful of countries to sign a petition to the effect that kidnapping is a bad thing.
> 
> _It’s not like any country is going to go out of its way to risk enraging Xi Jinping, though, if Canada won’t even make the effort. After all, who was that at the COWS ice cream parlour in Beijing this week, chatting up all the wonderful business opportunities that lie just waiting to be seized, or harnessed, or tackled, in China? Why it was Mary Ng, Trudeau’s minister of small business and export development. And who was that with her? Senator Peter Harder of course, the head of the Canada-China Business Council who Trudeau recruited to head up his transition team after the 2015 federal election, then appointed to lead the government side in the Senate_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “We hope that Canada is not naïve,” the Chinese foreign ministry stated after the G20 summiteers and their various sherpas and attachés and deputies and hangers-on had left Osaka. This was in reference to the gallant “coalition” Ottawa says it has assembled around the Korig and Spavor case. “Canada should not naïvely believe that mustering so-called allies to put pressure on China will have any effect.” You can’t say Beijing is wrong about that. It’s not like Trudeau’s government has done anything to cause Beijing to take Canada seriously. To Trudeau’s advantage, mind you, the sharpest media scrutiny he was subjected to in Osaka devolved into a controversy surrounding whether or not a video clip making the rounds had unfairly portrayed him as having been snubbed by Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro.
> 
> At least Freeland is still plugging away at shoring up Ukraine’s sovereignty, what with that Toronto conference and everything, where Canada convinced Ukraine to steady the course on democracy and expand trade with Canada, in exchange for Ukraine taking $25 million to spend on “inclusive and gender-responsive” policy as part of a $45-million support package. At least somebody, somewhere, cares about Ukraine. Only last month, the Council of Europe readmitted Russia to its parliamentary assembly, charging Russia only 33 million Euros in blood money. Russia was kicked out five years ago after invading and annexing a huge chunk of Eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, resulting in 13,000 deaths and causing more than one million people to pack their bags and trudge the backroads in search of food and shelter. Hey, bygones.
> 
> More bygones: As much as half of China’s pig population has had to be slaughtered and incinerated or buried because of a swine flue outbreak that Qu Dongyu, China’s vice minister of agriculture and rural affairs, did not seem to notice until it was a full-bore crisis. But Qu was elected to head up the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization on June 25. Wouldn’t want to upset Beijing and vote against their guy, would we?
> 
> And that’s the rules-based international order for you. Everywhere you look, it’s humming along just brilliantly, the G20 even moreso than the despot-packed UN Human Rights Council, or, say, Interpol, which held its cybersecurity meetings in Russia just a couple weeks back at a conference sponsored by the Kremlin-owned Sberbank. But at least Interpol isn’t run by China’s nominee, Meng Hongwei, anymore, since China disappeared the guy. Something about corruption, apparently. Who the hell knows?
> 
> Picking 20 random marchers in Hong Kong to run the G20 doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?
> https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-so-much-for-having-a-rules-based-international-order-the-g20-shows-it-no-longer-exists



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Influence/interference ops in full public view via high profile Canadian compradors:



> The real election threat is China
> _Terry Glavin: Ottawa has been focused on cyber-meddling. But consider the case of John McCallum for a glimpse at a more present danger. _
> 
> By happily admitting last week that he has been advising senior Chinese foreign ministry officials about how to influence the outcome of the October federal election, John McCallum, Canada’s disgraced former ambassador to China, has once again invited a whole lot of spirited public speculation about what the hell gives with this guy.
> 
> The most charitable view is that he’s just clueless, which is an easier hypothesis to defend than you might think. McCallum’s fumbles during his two years as Canada’s ambassador in Beijing reached such an embarrassing crescendo in January that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to fire him. It was in the early innings of the total collapse in diplomatic relations between Canada and China, and McCallum’s contribution was to give every impression that he’d broken with Ottawa and gone over to the other side.
> 
> The view of Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives is that there is something far more disquieting about McCallum’s candid admissions to the South China Morning Post last Monday. McCalllum said he’s been telling top Chinese officials that if Beijing played its cards right, it might be able to head off a Conservative election victory in October.
> 
> The Conservatives have issued a formal request to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to look into it. “I forcefully and unequivocally condemn recent comments by high-profile Liberals encouraging the Chinese government to help re-elect the government this October,” Scheer says. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says she’s similarly appalled. “I think that it is highly inappropriate for any Canadian to be offering advice or opinions to any foreign government on how that government ought or ought not to behave to secure any particular election outcome in Canada.”
> 
> McCallum said he’d advised top Chinese officials that any further “punishments” Beijing inflicts upon Canada would heighten the likelihood of Canadian voters turning to the Conservatives, who are “much less friendly to China than the Liberals.” He’s right about that. A case can be made that McCallum would have to be clueless to have said that out loud, but it’s not idiotic advice. And John McCallum is not just “any Canadian,” or just any random clueless person. And if CSIS were to properly scrutinize what’s up with McCallum, it’s a thick file.
> 
> READ MORE: Whose side is Jean Chrétien on?
> 
> Ottawa’s recent initiatives against foreign interference in elections have been focused on Russian-style disinformation and cyber-meddling of the type that preceded the 2016 election of Donald Trump. But Canada’s predicament is more like Australia’s, and Australia’s recent Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme would be a better model.
> 
> Launched last December in response to Beijing’s accelerated subversion of Australian politics and a series of scandals involving several Beijing-compliant politicians, the Australian law requires individuals or companies politicking on behalf of a foreign power to register and set out their activities on a public website.
> 
> It’s been eight years since Richard Fadden, who was then the CSIS director, warned that numerous Canadian politicians had come under Beijing’s spell. For his trouble, Fadden was admonished by the House of Commons Security Committee, which recommended that he be fired.
> 
> He should have been thanked for what has lately become obvious as prescience, but in any case, there is no evidence that McCallum, who has been a Liberal Party fixture since the days of Jean Chretien, has done anything illegal.
> 
> During his time in the House of Commons, long before his appointment as ambassador, McCallum took $73,000 in free trips to China, courtesy of the Chinese state and Chinese business interests—all perfectly legal. Following in Chretien’s well-worn footprints, McCallum is now working as a strategic adviser on China trade with the firm McMillan LLP. Again, perfectly legal.
> 
> As soon as he resigned in 2004 in the wake of the AdScam corruption scandal, Chretien carved out a lucrative practice greasing China’s investment wheels in Canada and Canadian corporate interests in China. And like McCallum, the former prime minister has been busy lately with indiscretions of his own on Beijing’s behalf.
> 
> Freeland has been forced to publicly rebuke Chretien for badgering the government to placate Beijing by simply instructing Justice Minister David Lametti to drop the extradition proceedings against Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou—the impudence that prompted Beijing to punish Canada in the first place. It was Meng’s defence case that McCallum was fired for pleading in January. McCallum also said it would be “great” if Trump intervened with the U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of Meng by somehow forcing the department’s lawyers to drop the whole thing.
> 
> Ever since Meng was picked up in Vancouver on the Justice Department’s extradition warrant—she faces 13 counts of fraud and conspiracy charges related to Huawei’s alleged sanctions evasions in Iran—the “punishments” Beijing has inflicted on Canada have been ominous and cruel. Among them: the Ministry of State Security’s detention of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor and a trade embargo on Canadian canola, soybeans, peas and meat products. With threats of further retaliation to come.
> 
> While McCallum and Chretien are just two among several former Liberal cabinet ministers, Liberal insiders and senior diplomats who have gone on to more lucrative engagements as corporate advisers, fixers and influence-wielders in the China trade circuit, there’s nothing illegal about any of this. Over the years, the practice has become normalized.
> 
> Appointing McCallum instead of a seasoned diplomat to the embassy post in Beijing back in 2017 was the Trudeau government’s way of boasting about just how much Canada wanted to deepen its ties with China. The credentials McCallum was fond of citing on his own behalf included his enthusiasm for China, his ethnically Chinese wife and the fact his three sons had each married Chinese women.
> 
> But McCallum’s enthusiasm has proved rather less than an asset. It turned out to be Canada’s greatest liability the moment Beijing began to bare its fangs over Meng’s arrest last December.
> 
> What got McCallum fired in January was not just that he expressed the opinion that owing to offhand remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump, Meng had a good case that the charges against her were political—thus contradicting Trudeau and Freeland, but pleasing Beijing. It was that he was warned to knock it off, and after explaining that he “misspoke,” he stated publicly that it would be “great” if the U.S. could secure Kovring and Spavor as part of a U.S.-China exchange to free Meng—when Freeland and Trudeau were insisting that Meng’s case be left to the courts. Freeland described McCallum’s conduct as “untenable,” and Trudeau fired him.
> 
> Ironically, only a few months before McCallum’s appointment, Trudeau’s officials had signed a multi-faceted agreement with Beijing that committed Canada to enter into talks for an extradition treaty. It is precisely the spectre of an extradition agreement with Beijing that has spurred hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers to take to the streets in recent weeks in a series of unprecedented and dramatic protests. No such protests erupted in Canada.
> 
> Beijing’s influence operations in Canada are at least as deeply entrenched as they have been in Australia, but there isn’t much in Canadian law to stand in Beijing’s way. The all-powerful United Front Work Department, which Chinese president Xi Jinping calls China’s “magic weapon,” is increasingly hyperactive in Canada. And Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have painted a big target on their backs by promising a dramatic break with what McCallum calls Canada’s “friendly” China policy going back a quarter of a century.
> 
> The election of a Conservative government would mean China can forget about a free trade deal with Canada. Scheer has further promised that China’s state-owned enterprises would lose their untrammelled access to Canadian markets. Along with the Kremlin and various state sponsors of terrorism, especially Iran, a Conservative government would count China as one of the “three of the greatest foreign threats to Canadian security and prosperity in the 21st century.”
> 
> Scheer says he’d deny any role for Huawei Technologies, Beijing’s “national champion,” in Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity rollout—it now seems certain that Ottawa will postpone its decision on Huawei and 5G until after the October election. Scheer says he’d also pull back the $250 million Trudeau’s Liberals have deposited in Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. A Conservative government would also launch complaints with the World Trade Organization to address the economic “punishments” that Beijing has already inflicted upon Canada.
> 
> In their letter to CSIS director David Vigneault, deputy Conservative leader Lisa Raitt and the Conservatives’ public safety critic Pierre Paul-Hus said: “Canadians expect that the upcoming election will be conducted in a free and fair manner, and that any and all incidents of foreign interference will be fully investigated.”
> 
> Canadians may well expect this, but it is specifically covert foreign election interference that is against the law in Canada, as is foreign funding of political parties and foreign funding of third-party activists during the legal campaign period. And Ottawa’s new multi-agency Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force was set up to block “covert, clandestine, or criminal” interference in elections, and not the sort of mischief McCallum has been making.
> 
> _When foreign influence operations are conducted out in the open, and foreign governments are invited publicly to influence voter preferences in order to achieve a particular election result, what is CSIS supposed to do_ [emphasis added]?
> https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-real-election-threat-is-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chicoms doing it to Aussies too--great kidnappers and a lovely bunch of people. And the fellow lived in the US:


> Australia 'deeply disappointed' by detention of citizen in China
> 
> Canberra on Friday [July 19] said it was "deeply disappointed" with the criminal detention of an Australian-Chinese writer in China, demanding Beijing release him if he is being held for "his political views".
> 
> Foreign Minister Marise Payne said Australia had received confirmation Friday that Yang Henjun, held by Chinese authorities since January, had been transferred to criminal detention, apparently on national security grounds.
> 
> In a strongly worded statement, Payne said the government had raised Yang's case repeatedly with Beijing at senior levels and written twice to China's foreign minister requesting a "fair and transparent" resolution, as well as access to his lawyer.
> 
> "This has not occurred," Payne said.
> 
> "The government has expressed concern about Dr Yang’s welfare and the conditions under which he is held," she added.
> 
> Payne said she had still not received clarification as to why Yang, also known as Yang Jun, was being held.
> 
> "If he is being detained for his political views, then he should be released," she said.
> 
> The author and democracy advocate was detained had been held in a secret location since being detained in January shortly after making a rare return to China from his current residence in the United States.
> 
> The foreign ministry in Beijing said then he was suspected of endangering "China's national security" -- which often implies espionage allegations.
> 
> Until this week he was being held under "residential surveillance at a designated location" (RSDL), a form of detention that allows authorities to hold people for serious crimes.
> 
> Payne confirmed Friday that he had been transferred to a criminal detention centre.
> https://www.afp.com/en/news/3954/australia-deeply-disappointed-detention-citizen-china-doc-1ix13h3



More detail at earlier story:



> Yang Hengjun: Australian writer detained in China expected to be charged, lawyer says
> _Yang, who has been detained for six months, is expected to be charged with endangering national security_
> ...
> Yang, a Chinese public intellectual who has long advocated for democratic reforms in China, has been detained for the last six months in an unknown location in China...
> 
> Yang’s case could complicate already cooling ties between Australia and China, over concerns about potential Chinese interference in national affairs, Huawei and human rights...
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/yang-hengjun-australian-writer-detained-in-china-expected-to-be-charged-lawyer-says



Meanwhile that interference in Canada:



> Falun Gong incident more reason Canada needs system to handle complaints of Chinese intimidation: Amnesty
> _Ottawa handles the issue with a scattershot approach that leaves possible victims unclear how to get help, Amnesty International's Canadian head says_
> 
> The alleged harassment of a Falun Gong practitioner at Ottawa’s Dragon Boat Festival is one more reason the federal government needs dedicated officials to handle complaints of Chinese-government intimidation, says a prominent human-rights watchdog.
> 
> The incident involving practitioner Gerry Smith was “very troubling,” and part of a wider pattern of coercion by Beijing’s representatives, said Alex Neve, Canadian head of Amnesty International.
> 
> But Ottawa continues to handle the issue with a scattershot approach that leaves possible victims unclear how to get help, he said.
> 
> “When something happens, they don’t really know where should they turn to report this,” he said. “Is this a criminal law matter, is this a security and intelligence matter, is this just a diplomatic incident? Is it all of the above, is it none of the above?”
> 
> Neve said Amnesty has been urging federal authorities for some time to create a single point of contact for people and groups “who feel intimidated by Chinese government.”
> 
> Such a system would also help Ottawa track the extent of the problem, he said.
> 
> Smith says he briefly entered the festival grounds last month with the nine-year-old son of a friend, and was ordered to remove a T-shirt bearing the words Falun Dafa — another name for Falun Gong — by the festival’s CEO. He said John Brooman told him he didn’t want the event politicized, and mentioned that it was co-sponsored by the Chinese embassy. Brooman also threatened to remove a group of other Falun Gong followers doing exercises outside the festival in city-owned Mooney’s Bay park, Smith charges.
> 
> A city councillor said he also saw some Falun Gong supporters handing out leaflets to people entering the festival.
> 
> China has a well-documented history of persecuting the group — seen as a threat to Communist control — while Canadian authorities have deemed the Falun Gong a spiritual movement deserving of human-rights protections...
> https://nationalpost.com/news/falun-gong-incident-more-reason-canada-needs-system-to-handle-complaints-of-chinese-intimidation-amnesty



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

One wonders how involved the Chinese consulate general in Vancouver, and various CPP United Front Work Department-supported local Chinese organizations, are in promoting pro-China actions on campus:



> Hong Kong protests tension spills over onto Simon Fraser University campus
> 
> Tensions over the ongoing protests in Hong Kong are growing globally, spilling over onto university campuses as far afield as Brisbane, Auckland — and now to Burnaby.
> 
> At Simon Fraser University, a controversy over three “Lennon Walls” — fixtures where people can post notes of support or inspirational wishes — shows how tensions related to increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong may get harder to manage on Canadian campuses. At least one academic is calling on all involved — both students and universities — to take a more formal, respectful approach.
> 
> “There are currently two walls,” said Joel Wan, founder of Vancouver Hong Kong Political Activists, a weeks-old, student organization whose Facebook page has posts about the situation at SFU.
> 
> The original Lennon Wall, located outside the main Bennett Library, was “repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, with post-it notes taken down. It’s gone for now,” said Wan.
> 
> On Wednesday, some students set up a temporary, second Lennon Wall with post-it notes at a booth. Plans for a third, more permanent Lennon Wall to be established Wednesday were scrapped after assessing security concerns.
> 
> “What’s been happening is that we have been reading about other universities having issues where the peaceful and respectful intent of the (Lennon Walls) hasn’t been respected,” said Sylvia Ceacero, executive director of the Simon Fraser Students Society, which supported the third wall.
> 
> “We are concerned about the safety of our board and staff and of all students. We just want to ensure and minimize the potential for altercations and conflict that has been seen at other universities.”
> 
> Lennon Walls have sprung up in Hong Kong in the wake of citizen protests against its government, with people sticking hundreds of post-it notes in an array of colours on pedestrian underpasses and outdoor staircases. They are handwritten scribbles of support and inspirational wishes for demonstrators protesting a controversial extradition bill that would ease the transfer of fugitives to mainland China.
> 
> Other cities have now picked up on mounting Lennon Walls, a concept that originated in Prague, Czech Republic, in the 1980s as an homage to the late John Lennon, assassinated in 1980.
> 
> Videos posted on social media show how disagreements over the political situation in Hong Kong between pro-Beijing students and those who support Hong Kong protesters have ended in shoving and punching at the University of Queensland in Australia and at New Zealand’s University of Auckland.
> 
> Leo Shin, a professor of Asian Studies at UBC, said Canadian campuses should consider what they can do to head off any serious conflict here.
> 
> “I think it is a matter of concern. That we have seen clashes among students in Hong Kong, in Australia and in New Zealand. We should anticipate similar kinds of conflicts to spill over to Canadian campuses,” he said.
> 
> “What’s happening in Hong Kong is of a great deal of interest to students who are migrants and among students, in general. There is a large population on Canadian campuses and here at UBC and SFU of students with ties to the Chinese-speaking world. China, Hong Kong and, to some extent, Taiwan. And there are also many second-generation and ‘1.5’ generation students,” he continued.
> 
> “There are all kinds and not all are equally concerned, but many are. There are some in the student population supporting the Hong Kong movement and some on (Beijing’s) side, and of course there will be differing opinions. The conflict or clashes in Hong Kong will spill and touch us.
> 
> “The tricky thing is what can be done? (A solution will involve finding ways to promote dialogue) in a manner that befits a university where we can disagree in a peaceful manner.”
> 
> Simon Fraser University spokeswoman Angela Wilson said it is aware the board of the student society is “considering erecting a Lennon Wall for students’ use. The society has shared that it is currently reviewing protocols to ensure that all safety considerations are met. SFU Campus Public Safety continues to monitor this situation and support campus safety.”
> 
> JLee-Young@postmedia.com
> https://theprovince.com/news/local-news/hong-kong-protests-tension-spills-over-onto-simon-fraser-university-campus/wcm/baed18be-fde7-43a7-9a9b-5627d3456199



See this earlier by CCP mouthpiece "Global Times':



> Chinese consulate in Australia praises patriotic students for counter-protest against separatists
> http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1159212.shtml



1330 update--note this in New Zealand:



> Chinese consulate praises students in scuffle at Auckland University
> https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/114669992/chinese-consulate-praises-auckland-university-students-in-scuffle-for-spontaneous-acts-and-deeds



Mark
Ottawa

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chicoms threaten India with a trade hammer:



> Exclusive: China warns India of 'reverse sanctions' if Huawei is blocked - sources
> 
> China has told India not to block its Huawei Technologies [HWT.UL] from doing business in the country, warning there could be consequences for Indian firms operating in China, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
> 
> India is due to hold trials for installing a next-generation 5G cellular network in the next few months, but has not yet taken a call on whether it would invite the Chinese telecoms equipment maker to take part, telecoms minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said.
> 
> Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of such gear, is at the centre of a geopolitical tug-of-war between China and the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration put the company on a blacklist in May, citing national security concerns. It has asked its allies not to use Huawei equipment, which it says China could exploit for spying.
> 
> Two sources privy to internal discussions in New Delhi said India’s ambassador in Beijing, Vikram Misri, was called to the Chinese foreign ministry on July 10 to hear China’s concerns about the U.S. campaign to keep Huawei out of 5G mobile infrastructure worldwide.
> 
> During the meeting, Chinese officials said there could be “reverse sanctions” on Indian firms engaged in business in China should India block Huawei because of pressure from Washington, one of the sources said, citing a readout of the ambassador’s meeting.
> 
> In response to Reuters’ questions, China’s foreign ministry said Beijing hoped India would make an independent decision on 5G bidders.
> 
> “Huawei has carried out operations in India for a long time, and has made contributions to the development of Indian society and the economy that is clear to all,” spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement.
> 
> “On the issue of Chinese enterprises participating in the construction of India’s 5G, we hope the Indian side makes an independent and objective decision, and provides a fair, just and non-discriminatory commercial environment for Chinese enterprises’ investment and operations, to realize mutual benefit.”
> 
> The Indian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment...
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-india-exclusive/exclusive-china-warns-india-of-reverse-sanctions-if-huawei-is-blocked-sources-idUSKCN1UW1FF



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile at Simon Fraser and other universities in Anglosphere:



> Hong Kong protests to Uygur camps: how Chinese students became a subject of scorn
> 
> Campus confrontations have erupted from Canada to New Zealand as mainland Chinese students react, sometimes violently, to public scrutiny of Beijing’s policies
> Such conflict is likely to persist _as Chinese diplomatic missions support robust rebuttals to those who disagree with China’s stance_ [emphasis added--that's one way of describing undiplomatic interference in domestic affairs]
> 
> A creative but controversial meme has been racking up likes on a Facebook page titled SFU Dank Memes, a private group frequented by more than 3,700 students at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU).
> 
> It features a Photoshopped image of a duplicitous masked operative from the popular video game ﻿Team Fortress 2 and an accompanying caption that reads: “_Try to figure out who’s the Chinese communist spy at SFU when half the school is Chinese. And worst of all, he could be any one of us_ [emphasis added].”
> 
> The purported undercover agent in their midst is an unidentified vandal captured by security cameras last week wrecking the university’s so-called Lennon Wall, a noticeboard turned campaign space which has been covered with a mosaic of multicoloured messages in support of Hong Kong’s anti-government protests
> .
> The wall has become one of several flashpoints amid an increasingly bitter debate among overseas ethnic Chinese students, which has sparked sometimes testy confrontations emotionally charged by questions of identity, history and political belief.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “To me, these memes aren’t even funny and merely show ignorance – similar to the racist jokes people made during earlier decades of Chinese immigration,” said 20-year-old student Matthew Wu, who hails from mainland China. “We are talking about serious discrimination towards mainlanders here.”
> 
> Wu, who declined to provide his real name, is among the 1.5 million Chinese students studying outside the country who have found themselves thrust into the spotlight at university campuses from Australia
> to New Zealand to Canada.  Hong Kong’s extradition bill protests, sometimes unruly, have rocked the city since June and have renewed international scrutiny of Beijing’s policies...
> 
> At the University of Queensland in Brisbane, mainland Chinese students last month came to blows with a group supporting the Hong Kong protests when the latter held a demonstration on campus.
> 
> The group, comprising of Hong Kong and Australian students, also condemned China’s mass incarceration of ethnic Uygurs in its far western region of Xinjiang. Mainland Chinese make up about 9,000 of the university’s 50,000-strong student population.
> 
> Meanwhile, at the Australian National University in Canberra and University of New South Wales in Sydney, local Lennon Walls have also been vandalised or become the site of verbal clashes.
> 
> And in New Zealand, at the University of Auckland, where mainland Chinese students make up about 10 per cent of the student body, a man made headlines last month when he was captured on film pushing a female Hongkonger to the ground after an argument over a Lennon Wall...
> 
> Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with their natural beauty, clean air and large Chinese diaspora, have long been popular destinations for mainland Chinese youngsters seeking an education overseas. More than 140,000 study at Canadian higher-learning institutions, where they pay an average of C$27,159 (US$20,400) per year in tuition – over four times that of Canadians.
> 
> Australia plays host to more than 135,000 mainland Chinese students, and New Zealand almost 30,000.
> 
> In Vancouver, one of Canada’s most expensive cities, mainland Chinese students are often perceived as uber-wealthy Lamborghini-driving migrants who lead lavish lifestyles and buy up expensive properties. Yet with all their privilege, perceived or otherwise, they often face difficulties integrating into mainstream society.
> 
> ...Ma said he and many other mainland Chinese saw displays of support for the Hong Kong protesters as campaigns aimed at separating the city from China, which they took personally.
> 
> “It challenges my understanding of my country and myself,” Ma said. He argued that Australian society should seek a greater understanding of the Chinese perspective.
> 
> “I do respect freedom of speech – that is a core value – but another core of Australia is multiculturalism. So in that sense, white Australians should also respect Chinese culture – and unity and unification are a very important part of it.”..
> 
> Beijing’s influence is on display through some 150 campus organisations that are chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), some of which receive partial government funding for events.
> Billed as a student-led group to help adjust to life abroad, American media reports claim to have seen CSSA members in WeChat conversations coordinating with consular officials to rally students for political ends.
> 
> Examples include attendance at a protest against a visit by the Dalai Lama to the University of California in San Diego in 2017, and the disruption of a talk by a Uygur activist at McMaster University in British Columbia earlier this year.
> 
> “They throw parties and provide rides for new mainland Chinese students, but they also serve as a powerful socialising and monitoring function, where new mainlanders learn that they do not enjoy all the freedoms other students at international universities have,” said Anders Corr, a geopolitical analyst who has written about the influence of these student associations on Western university campuses.
> 
> “Chinese students must still promote a positive image of China.”
> 
> Meanwhile, _Chinese diplomatic missions have made no secret of their support for students promoting Beijing’s line abroad_ [emphasis added].
> 
> After last month’s clashes at the University of Queensland, the consulate in Brisbane issued a statement in Chinese condemning Hong Kong students for “talk of separatism” and “igniting anger and sparking protests”. It praised counter-demonstrators for their “acts of patriotism”.
> 
> In New Zealand, after scuffles at the University of Auckland, the city’s consulate lauded students backing Beijing for their “spontaneous acts and deeds out of their love of China and love of Hong Kong”...
> https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/3022207/hong-kong-protests-uygur-camps-how-chinese-students-became



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

By Prof. Charles Burton, one of those rare Canadians who has grokked the nature of the Chicoms for quite a while:



> Xi Jinping may want to rule the world, but he has problems at home, too
> 
> Charles Burton is associate professor of political science at Brock University at St. Catharines, Ont., senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad, and former counsellor at the Canadian embassy in Beijing [as an academic on special assignment, 1991-93, type of position since eliminated,pity https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/experts/charles-burton/].
> 
> While the Hong Kong showdown continues to deteriorate in clouds of tear gas, hundreds of arrests and increasingly dark rhetoric out of Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party senior leadership has relocated to the seaside town of Beidaihe, 200 kilometres east of Beijing, for their summer retreat.
> 
> A party tradition since the 1950s, this is not simply two weeks of sun, sand and sea-bathing with the bodyguards. It is also about political factional posturing in secretive preparation for this fall’s policy debates. There will be a lot of politicking by the beach, as party General-Secretary Xi Jinping strives to reinforce the critical support he needs from the party and military elders, and to stave off any challenges to his authority over the next year.
> 
> But things may not go as smoothly as in past retreats. Among the elders attending Beidaihe is former strongman Jiang Zemin. At 92, Mr. Jiang is the patriarch of a significant faction of senior officials who have been severely discomfited by Mr. Xi’s purges, anti-corruption investigations and administrative restructuring to centralize party authority in his own office.
> 
> Now that China’s economy and foreign relations are in major turbulence, Mr. Xi is left holding the bag. Much of the problem stems from his attempts to turn back Deng Xiaoping’s legacy of politically accountable collective leadership and undo Mr. Deng’s program of openness to the outside world and market-based economic reform.
> 
> It is the betrayal of Mr. Deng’s commitment to 50 years of “one country, two systems” that is the source of Hong Kong’s unrest. China’s propaganda blames the United States as the “black hand” behind the protests, specifically accusing junior diplomat Julie Eadeh, a “trained subversion expert at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong,” of directing the whole thing. Besides being petty and ridiculous, it is appallingly disgraceful of China’s party-controlled press to openly name Ms. Eadeh’s spouse and two children – apparently an open invitation for the People’s Republic of China’s triad thug supporters to menace the family.
> 
> Mr. Xi’s mismanagement of the Hong Kong file strengthens the momentum of Taiwan’s pro-independence regime, seriously compounding the failure of Mr. Xi’s leadership in the eyes of Chinese nationalists who yearn for Taiwan’s reunification with the motherland.
> 
> He has aggressively asserted China’s goal to overtake the United States as the global military and political hegemon by 2050, using the Belt and Road Initiative to reorient the world’s economy toward Beijing. This determination is evidenced by shameless flaunting of accepted norms of trade and diplomacy. It is not just Canada that has been outraged by the arbitrary detainment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and China’s retaliatory banning of Canadian agricultural products on spurious grounds. In recent years, the Philippines, Japan, Norway, France and South Korea have all had comparable trade and consular pressures put on them for similar political reasons.
> 
> But now China’s geostrategic boldness has started to backfire, with a kick back from the United States unifying Republicans and Democrats alike against “the China threat.” The U.S.-China trade war is leading manufacturers with operations in China to pull up stakes and move to locations such as Vietnam, to avoid U.S. tariffs. Moreover, China’s plans to dominate and potentially control global telecommunications infrastructure through its telecom giant Huawei have now been shattered by U.S. opposition.
> 
> China’s economy – already unsteady due to pervasive corruption, as well as by overextended banks with too many bad loans on their books – now faces a crisis of business confidence and economic decline. Mr. Xi is unable to respond to U.S. demands that trade relations be fair, honest and reciprocal, lest he alienate too many of the Communist Party elites who ultimately sustain his grip on power.
> 
> Perhaps Mr. Xi has done the world a favour by exposing the true nature of the Communist Party’s long-range intentions, but as American commentator Gordon Chang has observed, ultimately his is “a militant, one-person regime that feels surrounded and threatened.”
> 
> A “surrounded and threatened” China feeling under siege does not bode well for making a rational conciliatory response to Hong Kong’s unrest. It also does not bode well for the future of Canada-China relations or for global peace. China desperately needs to find a way out of its political conundrum before it’s too late – for all involved.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-xi-jinping-may-want-to-rule-the-world-but-he-has-problems-at-home/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## daftandbarmy

One reason why Hong Kong might wind up being treated like a foreign invader by China... 


CHINA’S SECURITY PROBLEM
(Rand)

The twin security goals of preserving domestic order and well-being
and deterring external threats to Chinese territory are closely interrelated,
from the Chinese perspective. On the one hand, the maintenance
of domestic order and well-being is viewed as the sine qua non
for the defense of Chinese territory against outside threats. Specifically,
a weak, divided and conflictual, or “unjust” (i.e., highly coercive
and corrupt) leadership and an impoverished, disgruntled populace
are viewed as the primary sources of domestic instability and conflict
and invariably lead to a weakening of China’s defenses, which in turn
invite foreign manipulation and aggression. On the other hand,
maintaining a strong defense, eliciting political (and, during the premodern
period, cultural) deference from the periphery, preserving
the broader goal of Chinese regional centrality, and influencing the
actions of more distant powers are seen as absolutely necessary not
only to ensure regional order and deter or prevent foreign aggression
and territorial dismemberment but also to avert internal social unrest.
This is because a state that is unable to control its borders and
command the respect of foreign powers is seen as weak and unable
to rule its citizenry.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1121/mr1121.ch2.pdf


----------



## MarkOttawa

Aren't Canadian sociology profs wonderful?



> Professor Nathan Lauster says Vancouver’s China-money fears mirror Nazism. He just made millions selling home to China-money lobbyists
> _    UBC academic Nathan Lauster says the role of Chinese money is exaggerated and a ‘moral panic’, testifying in lawsuit aiming to axe Vancouver’s foreign buyer tax
> But at the same time, he was selling his home for C$3million (US$2.3 million), more than double its valuation, to two of the city’s top China-money lobbyists_
> 
> Ian Young (https://www.scmp.com/author/ian-young)
> 
> Godwin’s Law, as anyone remotely familiar with social media should know, posits the shift towards certainty that a comparison to Hitler or Nazism will be made, the longer any online discussion proceeds.
> 
> It’s usually a gambit of last resort. But Nathan Lauster – a professor in sociology at the University of British Columbia – went there with little prodding.
> 
> Focusing on the role of foreign money in Vancouver’s unaffordable real estate market “mirrors how you move from ‘socialism’ to ‘national socialism’”, he said on Twitter in November.
> 
> Lauster is no anonymous troll.
> 
> The author of the 2016 book The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, he has been an influential and dismissive voice when it comes to the role of Chinese money in Vancouver’s real estate unaffordability crisis.
> 
> Instead of the “exaggerated” role of Chinese investors, Lauster believes Vancouver should be worrying about single family homes, which he calls “invasive parasites”.
> 
> It’s a well-liked position by the development industry and supply-side circles.
> 
> Lauster has pressed his case widely in social and mainstream media – and in the court battle against Vancouver’s 20 per cent foreign buyer tax.
> 
> Lauster was asked to provide expert testimony by Chinese homebuyer Jing Li in her high-profile case against the BC government that seeks to have the tax deemed illegal. It is a wildly popular tax – backed by 81 per cent of BC residents in a 2018 poll. Support among residents of Asian ethnicity is even stronger than among whites, according to a previous survey.
> 
> Lauster volunteered to the court in a March 29, 2018, affidavit that “concerns over foreign buyers have taken on the characteristics of a moral panic”.
> 
> “This is not to say there aren’t investors living overseas and bidding up local properties in Metro Vancouver, but rather that their impact on the market overall has likely been exaggerated through the stylised and stereotyped social construction of the ‘foreign buyer’ problem, especially as it’s been identified as a particularly Chinese problem,” he said.
> 
> “As a result, changes in policy (ie: the Foreign Buyer Tax) have imposed real hardships on individuals … and have inflamed long-standing prejudices against (and within) the Chinese-Canadian community.”
> 
> What Lauster did not say in his affidavit was that at the time_ he was in the process of selling his Vancouver home for millions of dollars, at a price more than double its valuation, to two of the city’s most prominent China-money lobbyists, Pan Miaofei and Chen Yongtao_ [emphasis added].
> 
> *A C$3.09 million windfall*
> 
> This is not to say that Lauster’s views should be disqualified as insincere, or that he, Pan, or Chen, behaved improperly in the sale.
> 
> But it is one thing to publicly rubbish a phenomenon – and quite another to do so while privately pocketing millions of dollars as a result of that same phenomenon, courtesy of two of its most enthusiastic facilitators...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (centre) shakes hands with Pan Miaofei at a political fundraising dinner hosted in Pan's Vancouver mansion in November 2016. The dinner became the focus of a “cash for access” furore. Photo: Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the Wenzhou People's Government
> _...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2181447/professor-says-vancouvers-china-money-fears-mirror



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Further to above post, this from 2016:


> With Serious Chicom Links: "Influential Chinese-Canadians paying to attend private fundraisers with Trudeau"
> ...
> Former Liberal cabinet minister Raymond Chan, who was Mr. Trudeau’s British Columbia fundraiser in the 2015 election campaign, helps with fundraising activities on the West Coast, while Toronto business consultant Richard Zhou is a key organizer of these events in Ontario.
> 
> Mr. Chan was at the most recent Trudeau fundraiser, which was held on Nov. 7 at the West Vancouver mansion of B.C. developer Miaofei Pan [same fellow as in preceding post], a multimillionaire from Wenzhou province who immigrated to Canada a decade ago. More than 80 guests got their pictures taken with Mr. Trudeau at the $1,500 per ticket event, including Mr. Chan.
> 
> Mr. Pan told The Globe and Mail he lobbied the Prime Minister to make it easier for well-heeled investors from China to come to Canada. He said he told Mr. Trudeau the program put in place by the former Conservative government was “too harsh.”
> 
> In exchange for permanent residency, rich immigrants must invest $2-million and are subject to strict audits…
> 
> A Chinese government agency in Mr. Pan’s hometown that builds ties with and keeps tabs on expatriate Chinese, supplied photos of the Trudeau-Pan event to media in China. The Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the Wenzhou People’s Government promotes China’s interests abroad, according to former Canadian diplomat and China expert Charles Burton.
> 
> “That is an agency of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Burton told The Globe and Mail. “The fact that the photos appeared in the [Wenzhou Metropolis Daily] in China suggests that the people who participated in that activity must have been tasked by the Chinese state to try and promote the Chinese position with influential people in Canada. In this case, our Prime Minister.”
> 
> Mr. Pan is honorary chair of a Chinese-Canadian organization that is an unabashed backer of Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea [emphasis added, see “Ethnic Chinese Abroad: Once a Dragon, Always a Dragon Says Beijing“]…
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/mark-collins-with-serious-chicom-links-influential-chinese-canadians-paying-to-attend-private-fundraisers-with-trudeau/



Links to to other posts in one above no longer work, but do if copy and paste in "Search" box at top right.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

More on Dragon's scary reach in Canadian education (with videos):



> Chinese influence in Canada ‘alive and well,’ says student leader threatened by trolls
> 
> Canada is failing to combat the spread of Chinese influence that is “alive and well” throughout the country, one prominent student leader says.
> 
> And she argues the presence of politicians like former Ontario trade minister Michael Chan [see below after this quote] as a headliner at a rally last week to mobilize the Chinese diaspora against pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong is just another sign of how far Beijing’s influence has spread.
> 
> READ MORE: YouTube pulls 210 channels linked to Hong Kong protests influence campaign
> 
> “I’m definitely concerned,” said Chemi Lhamo, president of the student union at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, and a Canadian citizen of Tibetan heritage, in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson.
> 
> “These are the folks that are actually implementing the propaganda and amplifying the propaganda that the Chinese state is trying to control.”
> 
> WATCH: Ottawa has been weak responding to Beijing, expert says
> 
> Lhamo made headlines earlier this year when her election as student union president prompted a wave of abuse by Chinese trolls who mobilized online to threaten Lhamo’s position, her future — and even her life.
> 
> “Somehow the international Chinese community came to find out that I was running for the elections, but to be specific, it was more like a Tibetan running for the campaign. When they found out, they immediately released a petition online against me. In addition to that, they took it on social media and they started giving me comments in the thousands from rape threats to death threats — not only to me but my family members,” she said.
> 
> “There was a pattern in these comments. Everything was talking about Tibet and China.”
> 
> READ MORE: Over 900 Chinese Twitter, Facebook accounts disabled over ‘deceptive tactics’
> 
> Those attacks came both from abroad and at home. In some cases, she says she was even told by attackers that they went to school right on her campus.
> 
> And Lhamo believes what she experienced is part of a broader pattern of Chinese influence spread throughout Canada.
> 
> “It’s alive and well, and it’s creeping on us in every corner.”
> 
> Lhamo cited the influence the Chinese government is able to extend through the Confucius Institute, a network of hundreds of centres around the world funded by the Chinese government and branded as educational programs that offer services like Mandarin lessons to students.
> 
> But critics argue they are in fact a propaganda arm for the Chinese state used as a means to mobilize pro-Beijing actors in their regions.
> 
> WATCH: How far will China go to impose change in Hong Kong?
> 
> Last week, the Australian government scrapped Confucius Institutes in that country amid growing fears of the extent of Chinese influence and cited concerns about potential interference and inappropriate influence in its review of the programs.
> 
> The U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security committee also released a scathing report earlier this year calling for the centres to be shut down.
> 
> _In Canada, CSIS has already issued warnings about Chinese influence across all levels of government in this country and declassified intelligence reports pointed to the creation of the centres as part of China’s plans to exert soft power abroad_ [emphasis added].
> 
> But universities and public school systems have continued to sign agreements with the Confucius Institute amid a the backdrop of broader funding cuts for education and increasing demands for services that will prepare students to work in a world with growing Asian power.
> 
> There continue to be 12 Confucius Institutes across the country, along with regional programming with public school boards, with more than 20,000 students.
> 
> China has repeatedly said the goal of the centres is simply to teach Mandarin and increase awareness about China.
> 
> READ MORE: Conservatives want CSIS to investigate John McCallum for election interference
> 
> The New Brunswick government tried and failed to axe the programs earlier this year over concerns the institute was blacklisting topics that countered the Chinese state’s opinions. The Toronto District School Board also cancelled plans for the programs several years ago.
> 
> _Confucius Institutes and connected programming remain in public schools in Alberta, B.C, and other provinces, as well as numerous university campuses including Ottawa’s Carleton University, the University of Regina, the University of Saskatchewan, Toronto’s Seneca College and the University of Waterloo_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Lhamo says without a much stronger stance from the government, Chinese influence will continue to spread.
> 
> “There is so much more that we can do,” she said, suggesting attention should turn to students studying in Canada, many of whom she suggests are coming under intense pressure from the Chinese government back home to carry out activities abroad that advocate the state line.
> 
> “Chinese international students are one of the biggest cash cows for universities and academic institutions. It’s time that we take a stance and let them know their human rights record does not reflect international standards.”
> https://globalnews.ca/news/5804742/chinese-influence-canada/



From 2016 on Michael Chan (link at start no longer works, but does if copy and paste in "Search" box at top right)



> How Convenient: “Ontario minister Michael Chan defends China’s human-rights record”
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/mark-collins-how-convenient-ontario-minister-michael-chan-defends-chinas-human-rights-record/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Will Justin Trudeau or Andrew Scheer dare suggest similar action in Canada, what with the federal election close at hand and all those voters of Chinese origin?



> Australia investigates foreign interference at universities as fears of Chinese influence grow
> 
> A new task force will comprise of university staff and government officials, and will look at issues such as cyberattacks and national security
> The announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of China’s influence at Australian universities following a spate of cyberattacks and demonstrations
> 
> Australia on Wednesday [Aug. 28] launched a task force to clamp down on foreign interference at universities amid growing concerns about Chinese influence on college campuses.
> 
> Education Minister Dan Tehan said the task force, which will be equally comprised of university staff and government officials, would tackle the “intersection of national security, research, collaboration and a university’s autonomy”.
> 
> “Universities also understand the risk to their operations and to the national interest from cyberattacks and foreign interference and we are working constructively to address it,” Tehan said.
> 
> The initiative will include separate working groups tasked with cybersecurity, fostering a “positive security culture”, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring transparency in collaborations between universities and foreign entities.
> 
> “The task force has the potential to be a valuable channel to consult and coordinate efforts by the government and universities,” said Alex Joske, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.
> 
> “I hope it will lead to genuine action by universities, and encourage effective solutions that involve proactive measures from both government and universities.”
> 
> The announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of China’s influence at universities following a spate of cyberattacks, aggressive demonstrations by ultranationalist mainland students, and incidents of Australian academic research allegedly being used by Beijing to violate human rights. _It also follows the release of a report by the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies last week which warned that universities were taking a “multibillion-dollar gamble” due to a massive overreliance on Chinese students for revenue.
> 
> The report found that seven “too big to fail” universities had much higher numbers of Chinese students than universities in countries such as the United States and the UK, relying on their fees for 13-23 per cent of revenues_ [emphasis added--Canada?].
> 
> John Blaxland, a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at Australian National University in Canberra, said _the launch of the task force reflected a “mood shift” in Australia around the issue of foreign interference_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “Nobody wants to turn off the Chinese students but at the same time, one of the things that’s so attractive about our universities is that we’re open liberal institutions of learning,” Blaxland said. “And what we’ve seen, particularly in the last couple of weeks in Australia in response to what’s happening in Hong Kong, has been a little bit chilling.”
> 
> In recent weeks, nationalist [actually pro-Beijing] Chinese have staged at times violent counter-demonstrations against pro-democracy Hongkongers and their supporters in Australian cities including Melbourne and Brisbane.
> 
> On Monday, the University of Queensland in Brisbane said it had launched an investigation after the ASPI’s Joske published evidence that a firm founded by one of its professors had supplied technology used in the mass surveillance of Uygurs in westernmost Xinjiang. The professor, Heng Tao Shen, disputed the claims as “totally irresponsible” and “wrong”.
> 
> Last month, the University of Technology Sydney said it would review a A$10 million partnership with China Electronics Technology Group, a supplier of surveillance technology in Xinjiang, and Curtin University in Perth announced an investigation after an academic helped develop artificial intelligence technology used to pinpoint Chinese ethnic minorities [_YIKES!_]...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Students in Brisbane hold placards during a protest against the Chinese government’s funding of education organisations in Queensland. Photo: EPA-EFE_
> https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/3024742/australia-investigates-foreign-interference-universities



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Wiping out the Uyghurs--one way or another? Review of documentary on BBC:



> China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship
> _This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s hardline rule _
> 
> he drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. “It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
> 
> We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
> 
> Instead of murdering one Uighur mother, critics of Beijing contend, China is attempting something worse – eliminating a people. “There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. “That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of Xinjiang. “This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. “That’s a genocidal policy.”
> 
> Independently verifying Tursun’s treatment is scarcely possible, but this documentary heard claims of similar treatment in the province. A teacher and Communist party member told how she had been sent to teach Chinese at a detention camp for 2,500 Uighurs. She claimed not only to have heard detainees being tortured, but also to have learned from a nurse that women were given injections that had the same effect as the drink Tursun took. “They stop your periods and seriously affect reproductive organs,” she said.
> 
> China, we learned, denies these charges and claims to be committed to protecting ethnic minority identities. What its critics call detention camps, Beijing describes as “vocational education and training centres” resembling “boarding schools”. We cut to official footage of drawing, dancing and in one room a class singing in English “If you’re happy and you know it, shout ‘Yes sir!’” Which, while not proof of genocidal policy, was grim enough viewing.
> Sign up to hear about our weekend newspapers
> Read more
> 
> But without doubt, since 2013 when Xi Jinping became president and there was an attack in Tiananmen Square in which Uighur terrorists killed five people and injured 38, Beijing has cracked down on what it perceives as an Islamist threat from the province. That crackdown has included using smartphones and street cameras to create a surveillance state for Uighurs.
> 
> Should Britain roll out the red carpet to a country charged with crimes against humanity, of undermining freedom of speech and democracy in Hong Kong, of crushing freedom movements in Beijing, of – it was suggested here – creating a cult of personality around Xi the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao? “Better we engage with them so we can influence them,” said the former chancellor George Osborne.
> 
> But does the UK have any influence? Certainly not as much as we did in in the 19th century when, instead of trying to charm them into trade deals, we militarily subdued the Chinese to profitably drug them with opium. “Very few countries have any leverage at all,” said Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary. The rest of the world shrinks from criticising China’s human rights violations because we’re awed by its economic power and how we benefit from it, argued Panetta.
> 
> This first of a three-part series did what politicians dare not do, namely to raise hard questions, not just of Beijing, but of us. Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? The Chinese refer to the 19th century, during which the British oppressed them with two opium wars, as the Century of Humiliation. Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness...
> https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/29/china-a-new-world-order-review-are-we-conniving-with-a-genocidal-dictatorship



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Good grief! Trudeau has name a top comprador as our next person in Beijing:



> Dominic Barton named Canada’s new ambassador to China
> ...
> Mr. Barton 56, has been a prominent Canadian in international economic affairs, with a long career at consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, where he served as global managing partner for nine years, ending in 2018. He was most recently listed as global managing partner emeritus at McKinsey, although his biography was no longer available on the company’s website Wednesday [Sept. 4]...
> 
> “For the Canadian government to have somebody of Dominic Barton’s stature as ambassador would be seen as a very great success, a real coup,” said John Manley, the former deputy prime minister who also previously served as the president of the Business Council of Canada.
> 
> “Dominic is one of those few international business leaders who was able to meet at the very highest level with Chinese leadership when he visited China as the head of McKinsey. He’s very well-known in China,” he said...
> 
> Mr. Barton is a Rhodes scholar who was born in Uganda, and has lived in Asia, Europe and North America. He recently moved to Hong Kong [RING-SIDE SEAT, eh?], although he has said he maintained a home in Vancouver...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-dominic-barton-named-canadas-new-ambassador-to-china/



Aaargh! A bio:


> Dominic Barton is the global managing partner [now emeritius] of McKinsey & Company. In his 30 years with the firm, he has advised clients in a range of industries, including banking, consumer goods, high tech, and industrials. Prior to his current role, Dominic was based in Shanghai as McKinsey’s Asia chairman from 2004 to 2009. He led the Korea office from 2000 to 2004.
> 
> He is the chair of the Canadian Minister of Finance’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth and the chair of the Seoul International Business Advisory Council. He is also a trustee of the Brookings Institution, a member of the Singapore Economic Development Board’s International Advisory Council, and a member of the boards of Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City and the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
> 
> Dominic has authored more than 80 articles on the role of business in society, leadership, financial services, Asia, history, and the issues and opportunities facing markets worldwide. He is a coauthor, with Roberto Newell and Greg Wilson, of Dangerous Markets: Managing in Financial Crises (Wiley & Sons, 2002) and of China Vignettes: An Inside Look at China (Talisman, 2007)...
> https://www.fcltglobal.org/about/staff/staff-bio/dominic-barton



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## brihard

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Good grief! Trudeau has name a top comprador as our next person in Beijing:
> 
> Aaargh! A bio:
> Mark
> Ottawa



Sounds like a pretty qualified choice, I don’t see any obvious fault with him in the role.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Eminently qualified from the Chicoms point of view, and that of our Canadian compradors (https://www.britannica.com/topic/comprador)--see what his company, McKinsey, has been up to:


> How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments
> 
> Dec. 15, 2018
> 
> This year’s McKinsey & Company retreat in China was one to remember.
> 
> Hundreds of the company’s consultants frolicked in the desert, riding camels over sand dunes and mingling in tents linked by red carpets. Meetings took place in a cavernous banquet hall that resembled a sultan’s ornate court, with a sign overhead to capture the mood.
> 
> “I can’t keep calm, I work at McKinsey & Company,” it said.
> 
> Especially remarkable was the location: Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road city in China’s far west that is experiencing a major humanitarian crisis.
> 
> About four miles from where the McKinsey consultants discussed their work, which includes advising some of China’s most important state-owned companies, a sprawling internment camp had sprung up to hold thousands of ethnic Uighurs — part of a vast archipelago of indoctrination camps where the Chinese government has locked up as many as one million people.
> 
> One week before the McKinsey event, a United Nations committee had denounced the mass detentions and urged China to stop.
> Sign up for The Interpreter
> 
> Subscribe for original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week, from columnists Max Fisher and Amanda Taub.
> 
> But the political backdrop did not appear to bother the McKinsey consultants, who posted pictures on Instagram chronicling their Disney-like adventures. In fact, McKinsey’s involvement with the Chinese government goes much deeper than its odd choice to showcase its presence in the country.
> 
> For a quarter-century, the company has joined many American corporations in helping stoke China’s transition from an economic laggard to the world’s second-largest economy. But as China’s growth presents a muscular challenge to American dominance, Washington has become increasingly critical of some of Beijing’s signature policies, including the ones McKinsey has helped advance.
> Editors’ Picks
> Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?
> How a Trump Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Windfall for the Rich
> Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves?
> 
> One of McKinsey’s state-owned clients has even helped build China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, a major point of military tension with the United States.
> 
> It turns out that McKinsey’s role in China is just one example of its extensive — and sometimes contentious — work around the world, according to an investigation by The New York Times that included interviews with 40 current and former McKinsey employees, as well as dozens of their clients.
> 
> At a time when democracies and their basic values are increasingly under attack, the iconic American company has helped raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe, sometimes in ways that counter American interests.
> 
> Its clients have included Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy, Turkey under the autocratic leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and corruption-plagued governments in countries like South Africa.
> 
> In Ukraine, McKinsey and Paul Manafort — President Trump’s campaign chairman, later convicted of financial fraud — were paid by the same oligarch to help burnish the image of a disgraced presidential candidate, Viktor F. Yanukovych, recasting him as a reformer.
> 
> Once in office, Mr. Yanukovych rebuffed the West, sided with Russia and fled the country, accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. The events set off years of chaos in Ukraine and an international standoff with the Kremlin.
> 
> Inside Russia itself, McKinsey has worked with Kremlin-linked companies that have been placed under sanctions by Western governments — companies that the firm helped build up over the years and, in some cases, continues to advise...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china-russia.html



Sweet.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

One does not imagine the CCP is much less active in Canada, esp. greater Vancouver and Toronto areas:



> Chinese influence pervades Australian politics
> _Parliamentarian Gladys Liu’s exposed_
> 
> A legislator in Australia’s ruling coalition has admitted she had links with a communist group used by Beijing to advance its interests overseas. The potentially explosive revelation comes amid increasing scrutiny of political activities by ethnic Chinese in the country.
> 
> Gladys Liu, Australia’s first China-born member of parliament, confirmed on September 11 that she had an honorary role in the Guangdong provincial chapter of the China Overseas Exchange Association (COEA) from 2003-2015.
> 
> Then run by the Communist Party’s powerful State Council, the COEA is now part of the United Front Work Department, a shadowy state agency tasked with spreading Chinese influence abroad.
> 
> “I have resigned from many organizations and I am in the process of auditing any organizations who may have added me as a member without my knowledge or consent,” Liu said. “I do not wish my name to be used in any of these associations and I ask them to stop using my name.”
> 
> Liu did not refer to documents showing she had also belonged to the Shandong chapter of the COEA in 2010, but insisted she was “a proud Australian … and any suggestion contrary to this is deeply offensive.”
> 
> She has also denied reports that she has links with Ji Jianmin, president of Huaxing Arts Troupe, a cultural organization that is overseen by the State Council.
> 
> Ji has been identified as a junket operator who brings high-profile gamblers to the Crown Casino in Melbourne: one of those he brought to Australia recently was Ming Chai, a cousin of China’s leader Xi Jinping.
> 
> Interviewed about her political beliefs on Sky News, Liu declined three times to describe China’s actions in the South China Sea as illegal, saying only that she backed the Australian government’s position on the issue.
> 
> Canberra does not take sides in the dispute but accepted a ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague handed down in July 2016 that China’s wide-ranging claims to the sea in its nine-dash line map were not consistent with international law.
> 
> “Our relationship with China is one of mutual benefit and underpinned by our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. China is not a democracy and is run under an authoritarian system, Liu said in an apparent attempt to tamp down the controversy. “We have always been and will continue to be clear-eyed about our political differences, but do so based on mutual respect, as two sovereign nations.”
> 
> Prime Minister Scott Morrison [Liberal, actually conservative] said that Liu, who represents a Melbourne seat with a large Chinese population, is a “fit and proper” legislator.
> https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/chinese-influence-pervades-australian-politics/



Post from 2016 on Ontario (link at start no longer works but does if copy and paste in "Search" box at upper right):



> How Convenient: “Ontario minister Michael Chan defends China’s human-rights record”
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/mark-collins-how-convenient-ontario-minister-michael-chan-defends-chinas-human-rights-record/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

USAF (and other US services) look like they're on an increasingly sticky wicket faced with China:



> The high cost of survival in an air war with China
> 
> To gain the upper hand in air combat, it is often better to focus on the ground. That was the opinion of one early air power theorist; as General Giulio Douhet of the Italian army noted in 1921: "It is easier and more effective to destroy the enemy's aerial power by destroying his nests and eggs on the ground than to hunt his flying birds in the air." And for the better part of the past century, Douhet's maxim has shaped US Air Force (USAF) strategy, as its commanders have sought to make their air bases fortified and resilient against attack.
> 
> That philosophy prevailed until threats to US air bases all but disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past three decades, the service has focused its efforts on seeking efficiencies through consolidating operations to fewer, larger airfields.
> 
> But the era of efficiencies might now be over. As China buys and builds new long-range fighters, bombers, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles – as well as far-sighted satellites and surveillance aircraft – the USA is revisiting the idea of the vulnerable air base. A string of US and Allied facilities in the Western Pacific, including areas as far from any homeland as Andersen AFB in Guam are now viewed as exposed to potential attack from Beijing.
> 
> According to an August 2019 report by United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney [https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-strategy-military-spending-and-collective-defence-in-the-indo-pacific], in Australia: "This growing arsenal of accurate long-range missiles poses a major threat to almost all American, allied and partner bases, airstrips, ports and military installations in the Western Pacific.
> 
> "As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the [Chinese] missile threat challenges America's ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region.”
> 
> In response, the USAF is considering a new strategy known as distributed operations, a concept that calls for the service to operate from a greater number of more spread out air bases, of sizes small and large, so as to increase the number of targets an adversary would need to attack. In other words, the USAF has decided not to put all of its eggs in one basket.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _F-22 Raptors fly over Wake Island_
> 
> BETTER ODDS
> 
> The distributed operations concept increases the odds of aircraft surviving or avoiding being attacked, according to a USAF-commissioned study by the RAND Corporation, which was released to the public in July 2019 [https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2959.html].
> 
> "It's tough to defend, to defeat a… precision cruise missile with a big warhead," says RAND Corporation senior political scientist Alan Vick, one of the study's co-authors. "But then, it's very costly for them to have a weapon of that size and quality against every aircraft (and) location."
> 
> Distributed operations are also costly for the USA, however. As the report observes, more bases means more resources: anti-aircraft weapons, ammunition depots, communications equipment, fuel storage, aircraft hangars, maintenance personnel, soldiers to defend the airfield perimeter and headquarters staff. It could also mean a decentralised command and control structure, which could be complex and reliant on communications that are vulnerable to cyberattack.
> 
> To make such a strategy work, the USAF could use a mixture of three types of air bases: a stay-and-fight base, a drop-in facility and a fighter forward arming and refuelling point (FARP), says the RAND Corporation. The mixture of bases would have different strengths and weaknesses for various missions, given the available geography and resources the service has access to during a conflict.
> 
> A stay-and-fight base would likely be the furthest from combat zones and the most heavily fortified with active and passive defences. Active defences might include Patriot missiles for air defence and a THAAD high-altitude anti-ballistic missile defence system. Passive defence could include camouflage and concrete aircraft hangars, as well as dispersal of aircraft, fuel, and payloads across the airfield.
> 
> Drop-in and FARP facilities would have fewer defences. The former would only have enough strength to recover from an attack to evacuate aircraft. The latter would only be used for a few hours, enough time for a fighter to receive quick maintenance, fuel and ammunition, before an adversary would detect their location and launch an attack – effectively forcing the enemy to play whack-a-mole [read on]...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/the-high-cost-of-survival-in-an-air-war-with-china-460409/



Plus posts from 2016:



> USAF “Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With China”
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/mark-collins-usaf-officers-give-new-details-for-f-35-in-war-with-china/
> 
> RAND on War Between the Dragon and the Eagle
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/mark-collins-rand-on-war-between-the-dragon-and-the-eagle/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Long post on Intapundit today, as Michael Yon continues to report from Hong Kong. One thing of note is how China has quietly backed down on some tariffs, since the importation of food is a major concern of the government:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/342055/



> ”There is a tiny, tiny notice in the news today that China has backed off on its tariffs on US soy and pork.
> 
> Ya don’t say…
> 
> First of all, soy and pork are protein, which is a chronic problem in all national food chains, but more so in China. Between their traditional plant based diet and the cultural prestige of eating pork (the middle class literally measures its affluence by how many nights a week they eat pork and the lower classes and villages use pork as a celebratory meal), China’s protein consumption is very narrowly restricted to soy and pork (fish is common, but not nearly as available as soy and pork).
> 
> Second, by lifting the tariffs, China has just admitted it cannot produce enough protein for national consumption, both as a staple or as a preferred meat. Imagine a US shortage of wheat and chicken, with no real access to corn or beef, and a couple dozen urban areas of 20 millions or more with just a third arable land as now. That’s China.
> 
> So, what’s the problem with China’s agricultural industry? Basically, they simply do not have enough land to grow the volume of soy they need; and, their pork production is highly diffused and is ravaged by a massive and seemingly uncontrollable swine flu epidemic. In fact, it is estimated that up to 60% of China’s pigs are infected with the flu.



As well:


> While this seems to have little to do with defense or military matters, I would suggest it is a huge red shift event offering insights into both the underlying economic and organizational civilian support system of the Red Army and suggestive of a wider indigenous structural and organizational condition of the military and government writ large.
> 
> I believe we can draw significant conclusions from closely studying China’s responses to this food supply crisis and extrapolating our observations to the military to understand what they do under stressful conditions, what resources they deploy, and how they organize their response. Not to mention, how the civilian population responds to the military’s demands.
> 
> “Stipulated: The food supply chain is in fact a national security issue and it is a function of the military’s most basic needs. A lot can be learned by studying this issue.”



Lots of interesting things to watch lately


----------



## MarkOttawa

Seems this may have been linked as some not satisfied with government's public response:


> Exclusive: Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties – sources
> 
> Australian intelligence determined China was responsible for a cyber-attack on its national parliament and three largest political parties before the general election in May, five people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
> 
> Australia’s cyber intelligence agency - the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) - concluded in March that China’s Ministry of State Security was responsible for the attack, the five people with direct knowledge of the findings of the investigation told Reuters.
> 
> The five sources declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue. Reuters has not reviewed the classified report.
> 
> The _report, which also included input from the Department of Foreign Affairs, recommended keeping the findings secret in order to avoid disrupting trade relations with Beijing, two of the people said. The Australian government has not disclosed who it believes was behind the attack or any details of the report_ ]emphasis added].
> 
> In response to questions posed by Reuters, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office declined to comment on the attack, the report’s findings or whether Australia had privately raised the hack with China. The ASD also declined to comment.
> 
> China’s Foreign Ministry denied involvement in any sort of hacking attacks and said the internet was full of theories that were hard to trace.
> 
> “When investigating and determining the nature of online incidents there must be full proof of the facts, otherwise it’s just creating rumors and smearing others, pinning labels on people indiscriminately. We would like to stress that China is also a victim of internet attacks,” the Ministry said in a statement sent to Reuters.
> 
> “China hopes that Australia can meet China halfway, and do more to benefit mutual trust and cooperation between the two countries.”
> 
> China is Australia’s largest trading partner, dominating the purchase of Australian iron ore, coal and agricultural goods, buying more than one-third of the country’s total exports and sending more than a million tourists and students there each year.
> 
> Australian authorities felt there was a “very real prospect of damaging the economy” if it were to publicly accuse China over the attack, one of the people said.
> 
> *UNHINDERED ACCESS*
> 
> _Australia in February revealed hackers had breached the network of the Australian national parliament. Morrison said at the time that the attack was “sophisticated” and probably carried out by a foreign government. He did not name any government suspected of being involved_ [emphasis added].
> 
> When the hack was discovered, Australian lawmakers and their staff were told by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate to urgently change their passwords, according to a parliamentary statement at the time.
> 
> The ASD investigation quickly established that the hackers had also accessed the networks of the ruling Liberal party, its coalition partner the rural-based Nationals, and the opposition Labor party, two of the sources said.
> 
> The Labor Party did not respond to a request for comment. One person close to the party said it was informed of the findings, without providing details.
> 
> The timing of the attack, three months ahead of Australia’s election, and coming after the cyber-attack on the U.S. Democratic Party ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, had raised concerns of election interference, but there was no indication that information gathered by the hackers was used in any way, one of the sources said.
> 
> Morrison and his Liberal-National coalition defied polls to narrowly win the May election, a result Morrison described as a “miracle”...
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-china-cyber-exclusive/exclusive-australia-concluded-china-was-behind-hack-on-parliament-political-parties-sources-idUSKBN1W00VF



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

I cannot recall when, if ever, Canada has arrested anyone for spying for China:



> Ex-U.S. intelligence officer gets 10 years in Chinese espionage case
> 
> A former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officer who admitted he betrayed his country for financial gain was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years in federal prison for attempted espionage on behalf of China, the U.S. Justice Department said.
> 
> Ron Rockwell Hansen, 60, of Syracuse, Utah, pleaded guilty in March to trying to pass classified U.S. national defense information to China, and admitted to receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars as an agent for the Beijing government.
> 
> FBI agents arrested Hansen in June 2018 as he was on his way to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to board a flight to China, the Justice Department said.
> 
> As part of his guilty plea, Hansen acknowledged soliciting U.S. national security information that he knew China would find valuable from a fellow Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) case officer, and agreeing to sell that information to the Chinese.
> 
> The documents he received from the DIA officer related to U.S. military readiness. Hansen also admitted to having advised the DIA case officer how to record and transmit the documents without detection, and how to hide and launder any funds received as payment for those secrets.
> 
> Unbeknownst to Hansen, the case officer reported his conduct to the DIA and acted as an FBI informant in the case.
> 
> Hansen, who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Russian, was hired by the DIA as a civilian case officer in 2006 following his retirement from the U.S. Army as a warrant officer with an intelligence background, according to court records.
> 
> Chinese intelligence agents recruited him in 2014, he admitted.
> 
> _Hansen, who was sentenced by a federal judge in Salt Lake City, is one of three former American intelligence officers convicted in recent months on charges of espionage on behalf of China_ [emphasis added].
> 
> One of them, Kevin Patrick Mallory, a former CIA agent, was sentenced in May to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to transmit U.S. defense secrets to China. Another, former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, pleaded guilty to charges of spying for China and is awaiting sentencing.
> 
> "These cases show the breadth of the Chinese government's espionage efforts and the threat they pose to our national security," Assistant Attorney General John Demurs said in a statement. (Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
> http://news.trust.org/item/20190924222024-aiftk/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Blackadder1916

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> I cannot recall when, if ever, Canada has arrested anyone for spying for China:



The problem does not seem to be arresting Chinese spies but being able to successfully prosecute them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/case-of-hamilton-man-allegedly-spying-for-china-tangled-in-secrecy-1.5193658


> Case of Hamilton man allegedly spying for China, tangled in secrecy
> It has been more than five years since Qing Quentin Huang was arrested in Burlington, Ont.
> 
> The Canadian Press · Posted: Jun 28, 2019
> 
> The case of a Canadian man accused of trying to spy for China is once again tied up in mysterious closed-door proceedings over confidential information.
> 
> It has been more than five years since Qing Quentin Huang was arrested in Burlington, Ont., following an RCMP-led investigation called Project Seascape.
> 
> Huang, an employee of Lloyd's Register, a subcontractor to Irving Shipbuilding Inc., was charged under the Security of Information Act with attempting to communicate secrets to a foreign power.
> 
> . . . .



https://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2018/05/17/man-accused-of-spying-for-china-can-remain-in-canada-immigration-board-rules.html


> Man accused of spying for China can remain in Canada, immigration board rules
> Nicholas Keung Immigration Reporter 	Thu., May 17, 2018
> 
> A Chinese immigrant accused of being a spy can remain in Canada after the federal government lost an appeal to strip him of his permanent resident status.
> 
> In upholding a lower tribunal’s decision, the Immigration Appeal Division concluded that Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and his officials have failed to establish Yang Wang was a member of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) or Taiwan’s Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) to render him “inadmissible” to Canada.
> 
> While the 40-year-old Toronto man had admitted to providing information for both intelligence agencies, the appeal tribunal said the information — including details about the activities of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China — was obtained through “open source research” and personal knowledge.
> 
> . . . .


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start and end of major article:



> Fifth Column Fears: The Chinese Influence Campaign in the United States
> _The growing reach of PRC influence operations present a special challenge for Asian-Americans._
> 
> We were halfway through the lavish Chinese welcome banquet — the honey walnut prawns had just arrived — when the obligatory toasting for the USAF delegation began. I sighed regretfully but shot to my feet when I noticed the figure coming toward me, maotai glass in hand, was none other than our host and the head of the Chinese delegation, a high-ranking general in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force.
> 
> He was already a bit unsteady, but he ordered his aide to bring over another glass, and to invite someone else to my table — a friend of mine, a fellow Asian-American officer. He then waved his aide aside to pour the three glasses of maotai himself. A signal honor, and rather puzzling as neither my friend nor myself were more than middling rank.
> 
> The toast started out in standard fashion. “To your health.” Drink. “To your families.” Drink. Then came the twist. “And to remembering that blood is thicker than water. Chinese blood runs through you. You understand us, and know that no matter what flag you wear on your shoulders, you are Chinese first and foremost.”
> 
> I lifted the glass to my lips but did not drink. That particular line was, and is, a common phrase in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda specifically aimed at the Chinese diaspora. While that dinner was a number of years ago, the propaganda has not changed. In fact, Chinese influence operations in the United States have dramatically intensified and increased in sophistication over the last few years. This poses an unique and significant threat to Asian-Americans...
> 
> The U.S. government should invest more heavily in academia and begin outreach to academic organizations to increase understanding of CCP influence operations. PRC threats to U.S. university funding should be met with homegrown U.S. financial and informational support, to include diversification of the international student demographics and to publicly support Chinese students/researchers whom face PRC opprobrium/internet doxing for speaking their minds. Similarly, attempts by U.S. universities to self-censor for PRC financial gain – as North Carolina State University did in 2009 when they cancelled the Dalai Lama’s visit after the local Confucius Institute objected — should be met with very public U.S. Congressional questioning. Finally, the U.S. government should lend counterintelligence and Department of Justice support for countries, such as Australia and New Zealand [CANADA?], which face an even greater PRC influence threat against their polities. Just as China seeks to use Australia and New Zealand as a test case for influence operations, the United States can bolster its allies and simultaneously gain experience in working against PRC influence operations at home.
> 
> In the end, the final toast given by the Chinese general wasn’t completely untrue — “you understand us.” Asian-Americans, particularly those of the first or 1.5 generation, generally do have a bit more cultural/linguistic fluency when it comes to understanding and dealing with the CCP. One of the subtle satisfactions of working in the U.S. national security apparatus as an Asian-American is seeing the increasing diversity of the military, particularly over the last decade. This satisfaction is not simply representational, but also professional as well: One of the standard lines that the Chinese military likes to use during a disagreement is “you do not understand China!” — a line that has significantly less power when thrown into the faces of the Asian-American military officers or defense experts sitting on the other side of the table. If PRC influence operations are to be countered, then that understanding must be shared across all sectors of U.S. society.
> 
> _Eric Chan is a China/Korea strategist for the U.S. Air Force’s Checkmate office. Mr. Chan was previously the China, Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam Country Director at the U.S. Air Force’s International Affairs office, responsible for Foreign Military Sales to US allies and for engagement with the Chinese Air Force.
> 
> The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or SecuriFense._
> https://thediplomat.com/2019/09/fifth-column-fears-the-chinese-influence-campaign-in-the-united-states/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Petard

Considering climate change is emerging now as one of the central election points, I'd say it's worthwhile looking at China's part in this, and maybe how its propagation actually works in favour of what is likely China's "grand strategy"

Except for a small portion in Australia, China has possession of just about all the sources of rare earth elements, which are believed to be key in energy storage and technological advancement, technology that is the supposed hope out of this climate change crisis. China has bought up every possible source of this resource around the world, more specifically throughout Africa and South America, where often they are able to leverage host countries through debt traps, ensuring solid control of their natural resources. The massive "belt and road" project are sure signs, too, of the trade routes it intends to use to bring those resources to market. Now, it looks like it's even going after one of the few sources in the Western world, and it's in our backyard

 Trump's recent gaffe over buying Greenland, I think, was merely his old man brain flummoxing something very important about a geopolitical brief he no doubt got on the matter.  I believe this  summary by the Caspian report is a fair estimate of the situation, and why Trump might of said, jokingly or otherwise, that Greenland is for sale; it certainly looks like China might've already beat him to it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv9qHzwsvfM

While the Belt and Road project no doubt will service the demand for the natural sources it's pulling from Africa and South America, China has a problem in getting a relatively secure route to bring the resources it's mining in Greenland. But it certainly seems to have a friend in the Liberal Party of Canada, many of them in fact. Recently, even Gen (ret'd) Leslie espoused in China's favour on access through the Northwest passage. 
www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-agreeing-on-the-arctic-why-canada-sides-with-china-over-the-us-on/

Add to it, too, the conflicting message the Liberal old guard is sending behind the scenes, in regards to the Meng Wanzhou extradition hearings
https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/whose-side-is-jean-chretien-on/

And other leveraging, including over 5G
www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/chinas-offensive-on-canada-in-plain-sight/

This situation might look like a win-win, I suppose, to some proponents of fighting climate change through an upheaval of fossil fuel reliance with technological breakthroughs.  That it's China positioning itself to do this, by dominating the world's resources needed to effect this change, doesn't seem to be all that important to Canadians.  To some, the end does justify the means, or maybe nobody is really looking, so long as the investment dollars keep coming. I believe too many are ignoring this situation, especially warnings such as this one at the end of this article
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/china-silk-road-yellowknife-1.4782123



> If major investments are made in Canada's North by companies where China holds a significant interest, "it is a point of leverage" that China could potentially use to influence domestic policy, according to Lajeunesse...
> 
> Schumann said courting Chinese investment means balancing security concerns with a desire to bring money into the territory.
> "You've got to remember, these guys have all the money," he said.
> "We've got to pay attention to what they're doing — but it's got to line up with, not just what the Northwest Territories, but what Canada wants."




Too bad nobody wants to talk seriously about foreign policy in Canada, not even during an election


----------



## FJAG

Highlights from the Chinese 70th Anniversary Military parade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmp51YN-7wc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aObyRQN4fRQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofimgaO7Qck

Is it just my imagination or is every Chinese soldier exactly the same height (except for officers who all seem to be five inches shorter than the ORs). On top of that no one needs corrective lenses or a remedial fitness program.

Boy! Is Trump ever going to be jealous when he sees this parade.

 :cheers:


----------



## tomahawk6

One of the missiles seems to have a MIRV capability and could hit US targets in 30 minutes or so. In my book the PRC might have moved to the top of the threat list.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terry Glavin's super-sharp literary shiv plunged in deep:



> Liberals still kowtowing to China's thugs –– just with a bit more subtlety than usual
> _Just as nauseating is the surfeit of federal, provincial and municipal politicians who remain deeply integrated and indebted to Beijing's influence-pedlars and corporate lobbyists in Canada._
> 
> It was because Justin Trudeau decided to skip the federal leaders’ Munk Debate on Foreign Policy scheduled for this past Tuesday night [Oct. 1] at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto that the event was called off and quite a few embarrassing questions were avoided. Not least among those questions is this one: In the epic global struggle underway at the moment between totalitarianism and the rest of us, whose side is Canada really on, anyway?
> 
> In Hong Kong on Tuesday, police fired 900 rubber bullets, 190 bean bag rounds and roughly 1,400 tear gas canisters at tens of thousands of protesters who somehow managed to find their way to rallies to protest the Chinese Communist Party’s 70th birthday party, despite the city being practically on lockdown with dozens of malls and 11 Metro stations closed. It was the most violent day of civil unrest since the United Kingdom gave Beijing the keys to the city in 1997. The youngest of the 269 Hongkongers arrested was 12. The oldest was 71.
> 
> In Beijing, 15,000 troops marched in line with intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic drones from China’s new-warfare airborne armada in Tiananmen Square, filing past a massive parade stand where the megalomaniac Xi Jinping stood waving, dressed in a grey Mao suit. In Hong Kong, among the 74 people aged from 11 to 75 who were hospitalized Tuesday was 18-year-old high school student Tsang Chi-kin, now recovering with a collapsed lung after being shot by police in the chest at point-blank range.
> 
> It is bad enough that the Trudeau government’s policy has been to pretend none of this is even happening, and to persist in the catastrophic objective of ever-deeper economic integration with China that has dominated Liberal foreign policy and trade policy for a quarter of a century.
> 
> This remains the case despite Beijing’s hostage-taking of the diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and despite Beijing’s crippling embargo on a variety of Canadian agricultural exports, and despite Beijing’s militarization of its ambitious global “belt and road” initiative, the purpose of which Xi Jinping is helpfully explicit about. The point of it all is to disassemble the “rules based international order” that Liberals recite by rote as the wellspring of Canadian prosperity and security since the Second World War.
> 
> Just as nauseating is the surfeit of federal, provincial and municipal politicians who remain deeply integrated with and indebted to Beijing’s influence-pedlars and corporate lobbyists in Canada. It is also by rote that they recite the nauseating, predictably self-aggrandizing excuses their make for themselves. It’s always about the need for “dialogue,” and other such point-missing gibberish.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Harjit Sajjan, defence minister in the last government_ [still is the gov't, he's still the minister]_, was a guest of honour at a Sept. 22 reception and ceremony in Vancouver celebrating the 70th anniversary of the bloody and tyrannical rule of the Chinese Communist Party. PST_
> 
> Canadians long ago wised up to this, and so lately the Liberals kowtowing to Beijing prefer to do so quietly, hoping the rest of us won’t notice. Such was the case when it was revealed last weekend that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had been a guest of honour at a Sept. 22 reception and ceremony in Vancouver celebrating the 70th anniversary of the bloody and tyrannical rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> In Sajjan’s case, the excuse on offer was that he was attending in his capacity as the Liberal candidate in Vancouver South, and you know, diversity and all that, and besides, he didn’t stay for dinner, and _after all, he did say something about how Beijing “needed to address the consular cases” of Kovrig and Spavor. As if these were merely consular cases. As if these excuses absolve Sajjan of the indecency of serving as a photo-opportunity propaganda mannequin for the butchers of Beijing_ [emphasis added].
> 
> In Ottawa on Tuesday, a group of pro-democracy Hongkonger-Canadians were followed and harassed by pro-Beijing thugs as they left their small rally on Parliament Hill. They say they were stalked as their made their way along Wellington Street, blocked from entering O’Connor Street and surrounded until police arrived to escort them into the ByWard Market area. The group Ottawans Stand With HK say they have reported several death threats to Ottawa Police and the RCMP.
> 
> Across the country, in Richmond, B.C., the RCMP were called after a group of high school students who put up a “Lennon Wall” at the Aberdeen Skytrain station supporting Hong Kong’s democracy movement were harassed by a group of Beijing supporters who ripped down their display. In Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, a similar demonstration supporting the Hong Kong protests was attacked by pro-Beijing activists.
> 
> All this might have made for some useful context to a real-world crisis with its front lines in the streets of Hong Kong and deep implications for Canadian security and the Canadian economy, had the federal leaders’ foreign-policy debate gone ahead Tuesday night. Instead, the parties exchanged their usual, boring, fact-deficient goads and challenges.
> 
> Conservative leader Andrew Scheer announced that he’d cut foreign aid by 25 per cent, redirecting the savings to tax cuts and to sub-Saharan countries in genuine need. But he strayed into fantasy in his claim that more than $2 billion of Canada’s $6 billion foreign-aid outlay goes to “middle and upper-income countries,” some of which are anti-democratic pariahs. Scheer’s announcement could have been grounded in a useful critique of the way the Trudeau government handles its foreign-aid files in police states. But it wasn’t, and it came off instead like a sop to the rednecks and foreign-aid begrudgers who have bolted the Conservative Party for Maxime Bernier’s People Party of Canada.
> 
> The Liberals, meanwhile, lathered it on well enough all by themselves. Like this, in an Oct. 1 Liberal Party press release: “Scheer supported capitulation on NAFTA, and now he wants to renegotiate the deal, threatening to plunge Canada’s economy into crippling trade uncertainty.”
> 
> That’s something that can be said of Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party, which claims an intention to reopen the United States-Canada-Mexico free trade pact the three countries negotiated to replace NAFTA, following one of U.S. Donald Trump’s tantrums. But it’s not something that can be truthfully said of Scheer’s Conservatives.
> 
> Scheer insists, of course, that it was Trudeau who “capitulated” on NAFTA, but on the main Liberal allegation, here’s Scheer, two weeks ago, during a conversation with reporters on the Conservative campaign plane during an overnight flight to Vancouver: “We will proceed with the deal as Justin Trudeau signed it. We will inherit his failure, and we will do everything we can in my term as prime minister to fix the mess he has come back with.”
> 
> On foreign policy, the NDP has little to say of any use to anyone. As for the Greens, it’s all climate change, all the time, and fair enough.
> 
> The one good thing about the cancellation of the federal leaders’ Munk Debate on foreign policy is that Canadians were spared the embarrassment of watching their federal party leaders make excuses for themselves while the existential struggle for the future of democracy in the world is being fought street by street, mall by mall and plaza by plaza, in the streets of Hong Kong.
> https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-liberals-still-kowtowing-to-chinas-thugs-just-with-a-bit-more-subtlety-than-usual



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile foreign policy and China effectively absent from our election--note China has Swedish hostage and Sweden is actually showing leadership vs PRC (also Russian angle, Arctic/Belt and Road, Huawei at end):



> Sweden cautions European Union on Beijing-Moscow ties and ‘challenges’ posed by China
> 
> _ *Scandinavian country urges the European Union to adopt a ‘common and clear’ stance to deal with China’s growing geopolitical ambitions in Europe
> *Paper comes with Sweden’s relations with China at the lowest ebb among all EU member nations_
> 
> Sweden has unveiled a China strategy paper detailing Stockholm’s concerns about Beijing-Moscow ties and urging the European Union to adopt a “common and clear” position to “manage the challenges” posed by China’s growing geopolitical ambitions in Europe.
> 
> Released on Wednesday, a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping declared on the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic that “no force” could obstruct China’s advances, the paper comes as Sweden’s relations with China are at the lowest ebb among all EU member nations.
> 
> Former Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, a Swedish national born in China, has spent much of the past four years in detention for publishing politically sensitive materials.
> 
> In addition, the proliferation of Chinese investments across Europe is forcing Sweden – a traditional advocate of free trade – to move towards considering a national investment-screening mechanism.
> 
> Sweden’s strategy paper “calls for cooperation between the EU and the US in meeting security-related challenges stemming from China’s global rise”, said Bjorn Jerden, Asia programme head at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
> 
> China’s growing bond with the major power in Sweden’s backyard – Russia – also is stoking concern among Stockholm politicians, according to the document.
> 
> “China’s relationship with Russia is developing, even if linked with uncertainty,” said the paper, which the Swedish foreign ministry published after gathering input from the country’s major parliamentary party leaders.
> 
> “The relationship is bound together by a common interest in changing the international system for the benefit of both countries.”
> 
> The paper also drew attention to Sweden’s concerns over China’s effort to gain “greater influence over the Arctic”. Last year, China moved to extend its massive infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, to the far north by developing shipping lanes that global warming has opened up in the polar region.
> 
> Dubbing the proposed new routes the “Polar Silk Road”, China said it would encourage enterprises to build infrastructure and conduct commercial trial voyages along Arctic shipping routes.
> 
> While stressing that Sweden will fall into line with the EU on an overall China strategy, the paper indirectly castigates the bloc for failing to come up with a comprehensive plan for handling the world’s second-largest economy...
> 
> Sweden concedes in the paper that bilateral relations with China are in poor shape, even though it was the first Western country to recognise the communist power nearly seven decades ago.
> 
> “Sweden’s relations with China are adversely affected by a number of bilateral problems,” it said.
> 
> “_One of these is the case of the imprisoned Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, where Chinese authorities, despite demands from the Swedish government, refuse to fulfil the obligations China has under international consular agreements, and refuse to comply with Swedish demands for Gui’s release_ [emphasis added, do we make "demands"?].”
> 
> While calling for “more powerful cooperation” within the EU on handling China’s digital development, the paper did not mention Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies by name even when it referred to EU countries’ concerns over 5G development.
> 
> A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some Swedish parliamentary party leaders were hesitant to mention Huawei during the consultative stage for the foreign ministry’s paper.
> 
> Huawei has been portrayed as a cybersecurity threat by the EU, which is conducting a risk assessment based on member states’ concerns about the company’s dominance and omnipresence in next-generation 5G mobile development across Europe.
> 
> Swedish telecoms supplier Ericsson also is a major player in the 5G infrastructure market, although Huawei leads the field globally in technological advancement.
> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3031341/sweden-cautions-eu-beijing-moscow-ties-and-need-manage



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Journeyman

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> One of the missiles seems to have a MIRV capability and could hit US targets in 30 minutes or so. In my book the PRC might have moved to the top of the threat list.


Displacing who, in your opinion?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Yet another example of the Dragon spreading its wings abroad as its talons grasp for _Weltmacht_ (https://archive.org/details/FischerFritzGermanysAimsInTheFirstWorldWar/page/n4):



> China’s surveillance tech is spreading globally, raising concerns about Beijing’s influence
> 
> *China has created a vast surveillance apparatus at home consisting of millions of cameras equipped with facial recognition technology.
> *Now, some of the country’s largest firms have signed deals around the world to sell their tech abroad.
> *Experts raised concerns about data being siphoned back to China, authoritarian regimes using the tech to increase their power and ultimately the Chinese Communist Party having more influence abroad.
> 
> China’s push to export its surveillance technology via some of its biggest companies, including to liberal democracies, has raised concerns because of the risk of data being siphoned back to Beijing and the growing influence of the Communist Party, experts told CNBC.
> 
> The world’s second-largest economy has built a vast surveillance state comprised of millions of cameras powered by facial recognition software. The devices, perched on lamp posts and outside buildings and streets, are able to recognize individuals.
> 
> Some of China’s most valuable technology firms have been involved in such projects across the country. But this technology is now being exported as the nation’s technology firms expand their global footprint.
> 
> Chinese tech companies — particularly Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua, and ZTE — supply artificial intelligence surveillance technology in 63 countries, according to a September report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank. Of those nations, 36 have signed onto China’s massive infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, the report said, adding that Huawei supplies technology to the highest number of countries.
> 
> _Some of these so-called “smart city” projects, which include surveillance technologies, are underway in Western countries, particularly in Europe, including Germany, Spain and France, according to analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Experts warned of a number of risks including potential access to data by the Chinese government.
> 
> “I think that sometimes there is an assumption that ‘oh well when we roll out this technology we aren’t going to use it in a negative way, we are using it to provide services or we are using it in a way that is seen as acceptable, socially acceptable in our society,’” Samantha Hoffman, a fellow at ASPI’s Cyber Centre, told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast.
> 
> “But actually (we) can’t be sure of that because the difference isn’t necessarily how the technology is being deployed, but who has access to the data it’s collecting,” she said. “If it’s a Chinese company like Huawei, and that … data goes back to China and can be used by the party in whatever way that it chooses.”..
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/china-is-exporting-surveillance-tech-like-facial-recognition-globally.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now this--where's Canada:



> US puts visa restrictions on Chinese officials over abuses of Muslims in Xinjiang
> 
> *The U.S. puts visa restrictions on Chinese officials in response to abuses of Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
> *It follows a move from the Trump administration to blacklist 28 entities and companies.
> *It adds to tensions between the U.S. and China only two days before high-stakes trade talks are set to resume in Washington...
> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/us-puts-visa-restrictions-on-chinese-officials-over-abuses-of-muslims-in-xinjiang.html?__source=newsletter|breakingnewshttps://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/us-puts-visa-restrictions-on-chinese-officials-over-abuses-of-muslims-in-xinjiang.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Delink the Communist party from China in our language is the thrust of this article and prevent it's tentacles from reaching to far into Western society.

oops forgot link https://quillette.com/2019/07/22/when-the-lion-wakes-the-global-threat-of-the-chinese-communist-party/?fbclid=IwAR0kyx14m-g80D5_SJcVCTtKdN8ALwN8YKV06mGPbZThT2VWdvBC5EOkypU


----------



## Colin Parkinson

China upset about our ex-PM Harper going to Taiwan https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-issues-angry-criticism-of-stephen-harpers-visit-to-taiwan/


----------



## MarkOttawa

Something we should do and almost certainly won't--Chinese consulates general in Vancouver and Toronto especially big menaces:



> Under New Rule, Chinese Diplomats Must Notify State Dept. of Meetings in U.S.
> _State Department officials said the new measures were ordered in reciprocity for China’s strict limits on the actions of American diplomats there._
> 
> The United States has begun requiring Chinese diplomats to notify the State Department before any meetings they plan to have with local or state officials and with educational and research institutions, the State Department said Wednesday.
> 
> The move was a reaction to the Chinese government’s rules for American diplomats in China, a senior State Department official said. American diplomats are generally required to obtain the permission of Chinese officials in Beijing before they can travel to official meetings in the provinces or to visit institutions, the official said.
> 
> The new State Department requirement was still less onerous than that imposed by China. Chinese diplomats are not required to seek permission for the meetings; they need only to notify the State Department in advance.
> 
> One aim of the new restrictions was to get China to relent on its limits on the actions of American diplomats, the official said, adding that the United States had complained to the Chinese government about the regulations, to no avail.
> Sign up for The Interpreter
> 
> Subscribe for original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week, from columnists Max Fisher and Amanda Taub.
> 
> The new rule, described by State Department officials on the condition of anonymity, applies to officials working at all Chinese Missions in the United States and its territories, including at the United Nations.
> 
> The policy of reciprocity is sure to add to the growing tensions between the United States and China...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/asia/china-state-department-diplomats.html



E.g. Would be nice if we had a record of Michael Chan's meetings (doubt CSIS knew about all of them):

1)  Spookery in Canada: China, CSIS and…the Ontario Government
https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/mark-collins-spookery-in-canada-china-csis-and-the-ontario-government/

2) Spookery in Canada: China, CSIS and…the Ontario Government, Part 2
https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/mark-collins-spookery-in-canada-china-csis-and-the-ontario-government-part-2/

3) How Convenient: “Ontario minister Michael Chan defends China’s human-rights record”
https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/mark-collins-how-convenient-ontario-minister-michael-chan-defends-chinas-human-rights-record/

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

While the headline is overblown, the reality of internal divisions inside the CCP is something we tend to overlook:

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2019/10/xi-may-face-coup.html



> Xi may face a coup
> 
> [snip]
> The newspaper reported, "In Beijing’s system, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds a monopoly on power. But the party leadership is not a monolithic group. CCP leaders span a range of political associations, socioeconomic backgrounds, professional credentials, geographic associations and policy preferences. Two broad camps in the leadership vigorously vie for influence and control in post-Deng China: the elitist coalition, with its core faction of princelings (leaders who come from veteran revolutionary families), and the populist coalition, which primarily consists of so-called tuanpai (leaders who advanced their careers through the Chinese Communist Youth League)."
> 
> Elitists vs. populists. Sound familiar?
> 
> Chairman Xi is part of the former. Red China may not be immune from the worldwide rise in populism because populism is a reaction to the failure of elitists to protect the people. Factory closings in the rust belt in the 1970s led to the Reagan Revolution.



How this ties into issues like Hong Kong, Taiwan, the trade war with the United States and so on will be interesting to watch in the future.


----------



## MarkOttawa

This doesn't seem terribly practical to me:



> USAF looks for expeditionary precision landing system for Pacific
> 
> The US Air Force (USAF) is looking for a precision approach landing system to enable its aircraft to land at expeditionary air strips on islands in the Pacific Ocean.
> 
> The service is asking military contractors to submit white papers that outline component-level designs and trade-off analyses to determine the right mix of requirements necessary for a Small Footprint Precision Approach and Landing Capability (SF-PALC) system, it says in an online notice on 17 October.
> 
> The USAF would use information from the white papers to set requirements for a separate contract to fund development of prototypes from one or more manufacturers. A production contract could follow the prototyping phase, says the service.
> 
> The expeditionary precision approach landing system is needed to help the USAF carry out its Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy in the Pacific Ocean. The strategy is a response to China’s precision, long-range missiles, which could hit US aircraft parked on the tarmac. To avoid losses on the ground, the USAF plans to fly from a greater number of air bases, of sizes small and large, so as to increase the number of targets an adversary would need to attack.
> 
> However, the _agile-basing plan requires the service to constantly keep its aircraft on the move, so that the Chinese military doesn’t have time to spot and attack US jets_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “The ACE concept is basically having a jet land [at a remote location], then a team of maintainers re-arms and refuels the jet, and sends it back into the fight as quickly as possible,” says Master Sargent Edmund Nicholson of 67th aircraft maintenance unit, which is based at Kadena air base in Japan. He explained the concept via an USAF media release about an agile combat exercise at Fort Greely, Alaska in August 2019.
> 
> In order for a jet to land at a remote island air strip – a runway without the usual navigation and air traffic control infrastructure – the USAF needs portable equipment. The service wants its SF-PALC system to be small enough to fit onto one 463L pallet, which would be airlifted inside one Lockheed Martin C-130H cargo transport. The system must also be able to be setup and operated in a GPS-denied environment, says the USAF.
> 
> The SF-PALC system requirement comes after the US Navy awarded Raytheon a $235 million contract for 23 Joint Precision Approach and Landing Systems (JPALS) in May 2019. JPALS is a differential, GPS-based precision landing system that guides aircraft to a landing spot, typically on an aircraft carrier deck, though a land-based expeditionary unit is in development as well.
> 
> The navigation equipment is integrated into the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II and will be installed on the in-development Boeing MQ-25A Stingray unmanned in-flight refuelling vehicle. Raytheon has said it plans to demonstrate expeditionary versions of JPALS to the USAF.
> https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-looks-for-expeditionary-precision-landing-syste-461599/



End of a 2016 post:



> USAF “Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With China”
> ...
> All that basing thinking has rather a Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson feel about it to me.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/mark-collins-usaf-officers-give-new-details-for-f-35-in-war-with-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

I'm still eagerly awaiting the next similar arrest--serious China link (don't know about Ortis)--in Canada:



> Former intelligence official Roger Uren facing 30 charges for breaching national secrecy
> 
> A former Australian intelligence official is on bail after being arrested and charged with breaching national secrecy rules.
> 
> Roger Uren, who was an assistant director at the intelligence analysis agency, Office of National Assessments (ONA--now ONI, Office of National Intelligence [https://www.oni.gov.au/short-history-ona-oni], no exact equivalent here but there is Assessments Staff in PCO [a lot more staff than listed here https://geds-sage.gc.ca/en/GEDS?pgid=014&dn=ou%3DIAS-BEI%2C+ou%3DNSA-CNS%2C+ou%3DPCO-BCP%2C+o%3DGC%2C+c%3DCA]), is facing 30 charges of unauthorised dealing with records.
> 
> He appeared briefly in the ACT Magistrates Court yesterday, to answer the charges which police said arose out of a raid on his Canberra home in 2015 when classified documents were uncovered.
> 
> Police said the charges came under the Intelligence Services Act and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act.
> 
> In a statement, police alleged there was an unauthorised removal and retention of classified intelligence information from Mr Uren's place of employment.
> 
> Mr Uren resigned from his position at ONA  in 2001, and in 2011 was considered by then-prime minister Kevin Rudd as a potential Australian Ambassador to China.
> 
> He is married to Chinese-Australian lobbyist Sheri Yan, who was jailed in the United States for bribing then president of the United Nations General Assembly John Ashe.
> 
> Despite the raid happening four years ago, Mr Uren's prosecution was not approved until it came to Attorney-General Christian Porter's desk mid-this year.
> 
> "My consent was required as the charges relate to alleged offences under section 40J of the Intelligence Services Act 2001 and section 18A of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979," Mr Porter said in a statement.
> 
> "Each of these offences have specifically required the Attorney's consent for a prosecution to proceed since they were introduced in 2014."
> 
> Mr Porter said as the matter was now before the courts, it would not be appropriate to comment further.
> 
> Mr Uren will be back in court in February next year.
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-24/intelligence-official-roger-uren-faces-national-secrecy-charges/11634962



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Canadian prosecutions? After Kovrig and Spavor safe? What about Robert Schellenberg with death sentence now?



> US To Press China Espionage Cases Regardless Of Trade Talks: DOJ
> _“We didn’t bring one of these cases because of what’s going on on the trade front,” assistant attorney general John Demers said, “and we’re not going to drop them even if we reach an agreement.” _
> 
> The head of the Justice Department task force on China pledged today to continue prosecuting espionage cases regardless of trade negotiations with Beijing.
> 
> “I don’t do trade, and I try to keep our cases well apart from what’s going on the trade front,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers told the CyberTalks conference this morning, “because we didn’t bring one of these cases because of what’s going on on the trade front. And we’re not going to drop them even if we reach an agreement.”
> 
> “We’re going to stop doing cases about China intellectual property theft when the Chinese stop doing intellectual theft,” Demers continued. “If they agree to a trade agreement and they actually change their behavior, great…That’s ultimately what we’re really looking at.”
> 
> The Trump administration has been accused of inappropriately entangling trade, national security, domestic politics, and the president’s family business in its dealings with foreign powers. Demers himself was a presidential nominee, working at Boeing before Trump tapped him to head Justice’s National Security Division. He’s not a career DOJ lawyer. But Demers had significant experience, having previously worked in what was a brand-new division under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009, right after he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
> 
> Since Demers took charge in February 2018, the National Security Division has:
> 
> *brought multiple espionage cases against Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans alike,
> *charged Russian Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova for interfering in the 2018 election; and
> *brought charges against a government-owned Turkish bank for violating sanctions on       Iran. A key witness in that investigation was a former client of the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who had tried to get the case against him dropped.
> 
> Demers and his division have also worked with the Commerce Department to impose sanctions on a Chinese company tied to industrial espionage against the US. Last year, after Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. was accused of stealing intellectual property from US chipmaker Micron, Commerce placed Jinhua on its Entity List of companies restricted from doing business in the US. Unable to import US-made equipment for its factory, Jinhua was unable to use the stolen secrets to actually make chips, Demers said...
> https://breakingdefense.com/2019/10/china-espionage-cases-not-a-bargaining-chip-in-trade-doj/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Beware your smartphone, and much more:



> Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone
> _China’s use of technology for social control of its citizens is extensive – but it could affect users elsewhere too, says security analyst Samantha Hoffman_
> 
> Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s Data-Driven Power Expansion [https://www.aspi.org.au/report/engineering-global-consent-chinese-communist-partys-data-driven-power-expansion].
> 
> Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world’s knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes… that’s not really happened has it?
> 
> Bill Clinton said that, for China, controlling free speech online would be like “nailing Jell-O to the wall”. I wish he had been right. But unfortunately, there was too much focus on the great firewall of China and not enough on how the Chinese Communist party was trying to shape its external environment.
> 
> When did China pivot from seeing the internet as a US-generated threat to something it could use to discipline and punish its own population?
> 
> It’s not just the internet, it’s technology in general. If you go back to even the late 1970s and early 80s, the way the Chinese Communist party (CCP) talks about technology is as a tool of social management. It’s a way of not only coercive control, but also sort of cooperative control where you participate in your own management. It’s this idea of shaping the environment, shaping how people think, how they’re willing to act before they even know they’re making a choice. That’s the party’s idea.
> 
> When did that develop into what is called the social credit system?
> 
> Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin spoke about this in 2000. He said we need a social credit system to merge rule by law and rule by virtue. I don’t see it as different from the way Hannah Arendt describes how regimes attempt to make the law inseparable from ethics in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
> 
> How does the social credit system work for the average citizen? As they are going about their lives, are they continually earning and losing points based on their behaviour?
> 
> A pop cultural reference might be the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. But it isn’t the same. It’s not really a number score that goes up and down. There are multiple inputs. So you have, say, legal inputs, like a court record, and financial inputs. Then there are third-party inputs, such as surveillance video or data about your sentiment on social media. The system includes blacklists, records on public websites, and platforms to support decisions on creditworthiness that integrate things like “sentiment analysis”. This applies to companies and individuals. Muji’s Shanghai branch had a mark of dishonesty on its credit record with the Shanghai government because one of its products was labelled “Made in Taiwan”.
> 
> The number of people affected is enormous: 17.5 million people were prevented from buying flights in 2018. Is there much pushback from the Chinese population about this system?
> An average person might not see how it’s affecting them yet. Social credit is technology augmenting existing control methods. So if you’re used to that system, you aren’t necessarily seeing the change yet. Blacklists aren’t new, but the technology supporting this social management is. And over time, as it becomes more effective, that’s where more people will notice the impact.
> 
> So there isn’t much concept of user privacy or anonymising data in China?
> 
> Privacy matters to the average Chinese citizen and there are privacy regulations in place. But privacy stops where the party’s power begins. And so, you know, the party state might put controls on how companies can share data. But again privacy stops where the party’s power begins. And that’s a huge difference in the system.
> 
> One thing that’s interesting to keep in mind is the system itself. When we think about China’s authoritarianism, we think about surveillance cameras, we think about facial recognition. But we forget that a lot of the technology involved provides convenience. And control happens for convenience. Some of the technologies involved in increasing the party’s power are actually providing services – maybe Mussolini and his timely trains is a useful way of thinking about it.
> 
> The most egregious example of this surveillance technology would be in Xinjiang for controlling the Uighur [Muslim] population?
> 
> The most visibly coercive forms of what the party is doing are unfolding in Xinjiang. It’s a virtual police state. There are QR codes on people’s doors for when the party goes in to check on who is in. Some researchers have found that if someone leaves through the back door instead of the front door, that can be considered suspicious behaviour.
> 
> Is the wider Chinese population aware of how the technology is being used in Xinjiang? Do they realise this is a more enhanced version of what we’ve got in their own lives?
> 
> I don’t think people are aware of how bad it is. A lot of people don’t believe Western reporting. If they see it. Even if they do believe it, propaganda has shaped a bad public opinion of the Uighurs.
> 
> Do you think the Chinese Communist party has a file on you?
> 
> I imagine that they probably have a file on a lot of outspoken researchers. I try not to think about what mine would look like. In general, a lot of researchers on China have a fear, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, about losing access or the ability to go to China.
> 
> You have written about your fears that a commercial deal struck between Huawei and a Turkish mobile operator could be used to monitor the exiled Uighur population in Turkey.
> 
> Chinese tech giants like Huawei are signing agreements for smart cities globally – in April we at Aspi counted 75. These agreements include public security, licence-plate and facial recognition tools. As a local government you’re taking what is the cheapest and best product for your city. You’re deploying it in ways you’ve decided are reasonable, but what might be forgotten is that these services require data to be sent back to the company to keep it up to date – and who else has access to that data once the manufacturer has it? One agreement was made with Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. Turkey has about 10,000 Uighurs living in exile – that system could be used to further control and harass exiles and family members in China.
> 
> More generally, I found that the party central propaganda department has made cooperation agreements with a number of major Chinese tech companies. As their products are bedded in they become ways of collecting tons of data. A language translation tool, for instance, doesn’t sound like a surveillance tool but it’s a way to collect a lot of data. Technically it’s not different from what Google does but their intent is different – it’s about state security.
> 
> So western governments should be wary of installing Chinese-designed tech infrastructure in their cities?
> 
> Yes. It’s perhaps uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge, but the party is very clear about its intent. Its intent relates to state security. The party talks about “discourse power” – the party’s version of the truth being the only thing that’s accepted. The Chinese government ultimately controls all Chinese companies through its security legislation. You might be comfortable with someone collecting data to tailor advertising to you, but are you comfortable with sharing your data with a regime that has 1.5 million Uighurs imprisoned on the basis of their ethnic identity?
> 
> So we should be cautious about buying Chinese smartphones and smart home products?
> I would be. You may think “I’m not researching the CCP or testifying in Congress, so I don’t have anything to worry about”. But you don’t really know how that data is being collected and potentially used to shape your opinion and shape your decisions, among other things. Even understanding advertising and consumer preferences can feed into propaganda. Taken together, that can be used to influence an election or feelings about a particular issue.
> 
> Some of these elements of monitoring and nudging are present in western life. For instance, fitness tracking that earns you discounts on health insurance, or local authorities using machine learning to identify potential abuse victims. Should we be careful about letting this stuff into society?
> 
> We need to be very careful. It’s easy to see what the benefits are, but we aren’t adequately defining the risks. Some of the problems can be dealt with by introducing more data literacy programmes, so that individuals understand, say, the privacy issues concerning a home-security camera.
> 
> The Chinese party state is going to take advantage of the weaknesses in liberal democracies, whether they’re legal or cultural. They take advantage of our really weak data privacy laws. GDPR is a good step, but it doesn’t really deal with the core problem of technology that’s providing a service. By its nature the company providing the service collects and uses data. Who has access to that data, their ability to process it, and their intent is the problem.
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/26/china-technology-social-management-internet-social-credit-system?



And along several similar lines, an excerpt:



> Document Number Nine
> ...
> The most important of these diametric opposites concerns Western liberal values. In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily known as ‘Document Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’; ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.​1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public opinion on the internet’.
> 
> Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it. In effect, it was a decision to prove the Western boosters of the internet – holders of Friedman’s nutcracker view – wrong.
> 
> Between them, Griffiths and Strittmatter tell the story of how China arrived at this point, and what happened next. China took to the internet relatively late and relatively slowly: in 1994 there were only about 1500 internet users in China, most of them academics, with, according to Griffiths, ‘the entire country sharing the equivalent of what was a home connection in the US’. Today, the number of internet users in China is 830 million and counting, with most of them accessing it via smartphones. The party has fought many battles against internet freedom over the course of that quarter-century...
> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n19/john-lanchester/document-number-nine



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Gosh, we wouldn't want to be see as maybe racist by worrying about insider threat from Chinese espionage in federal government, would we?



> Federal employees concerned 'insider threat' training means spying on co-workers
> _One researcher who took course described it as 'James Bond-type' training_
> 
> At least two federal government departments have introduced training so staff can identify and report "insider threats," and it is raising concerns from employees who don't want to spy on their colleagues.
> 
> Insider threats are defined in the training documents as "purposeful, malicious action" by employees or contractors who have access to inside information, and who act "in opposition to the interests of the organization."
> 
> Since February, Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada have offered four on-site sessions to staff in Ottawa and Winnipeg, as well as providing online training to staff in other locations.
> 
> An online training module was added to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's security awareness training in August. The department says all employees have been asked to take it.
> 
> CBC News has obtained copies of both courses. They are slightly different because they were developed for specific departments, but they cover much of the same information.
> 
> Several scientists told CBC the training puts them in an awkward position of spying on their co-workers and partners, some of whom have dual citizenship with China. Some also have a relationship with Chinese universities and the Chinese Academy of Science, which sends fully sponsored students to study in Canada.
> 
> The training provides specific instructions on how to report their suspicions. One researcher who took the course described it as "James Bond-type" training.
> 
> "It is an issue that we federal scientists are treated like secret agents," said the scientist, one of several who asked not to be identified over fears of being reprimanded for speaking to the media.
> 
> Staff are being told it is an offence and a national threat to share their research results and data outside their departments without proper authorization.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _This page is a part of a training document meant to help employees at Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada identify and insider threats. (Health Canada/Public Health Agency of Canada)_
> 
> Scientists say waiting for that authorization is not always realistic or practical, and say the training was created by people who have no idea about the extent of international collaboration in research.
> 
> "We scientists work in a fast-evolving, globalized world where sharing data and ideas with colleagues in our fields is the way to generate new knowledge. Because science is ultra-specialized, the colleagues working in the same field are usually in other countries," one researcher told CBC.
> 
> *'There are real risks'*
> 
> The training is in response to directives from the Treasury Board of Canada outlined in the Policy on Government Security and the Directive on Security Management, both of which came into effect on July 1, 2019.
> 
> "As risk levels vary across organizations, it is up to each Deputy Head to ensure their department's compliance with this Policy," a spokesperson for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat wrote in an email in response to questions from CBC News.
> 
> While there are legitimate concerns, they have to be balanced with fairness, said one expert in Asian and transpacific relations.
> 
> "There are real risks. There are real concerns we have to deal with. But we have to do it in a way that respects individual integrity and privacy rights and, at the same time, makes people more aware that we are in a new era where technology is increasingly vital and increasingly seen as a national asset," said Paul Evans, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia.
> 
> Evans said the training provided to employees at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) provides several case examples, including that of Jeffrey Delisle, the Canadian naval intelligence officer who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2013 for selling secrets to Russia.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _The training course by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provides a list of warning signs that could have identified Canadian naval intelligence officer Jeffrey Delisle as a potential threat. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)_
> 
> The _other four agriculture examples involve scientists with connections to China_ [emphasis added].
> 
> *Yan Wengui and Zhang Weiqiang, who stole genetically modified rice seeds from Ventra Bioscience in Kansas and were apprehended for attempting to smuggle the secret grains (worth approximately $75 million US) to China. Yan was employed by the USDA. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
> 
> *Mo Hailong, who was caught stealing GMO corn seeds that he was planning to sell to a Chinese agricultural conglomerate. He had already stolen and sold about 500 kg of the seed to a Beijing-based company. Mo was sentenced to three years in prison.
> 
> *Huang Kexue, a Canadian scientist who worked for Cargill in Minnesota and stole and sold trade secrets and components to make a new food product. He sold these to parties in China, and also provided them for research to universities in China. Huang was sentenced to 87 months in prison.
> 
> *Klaus Nielsen, who was fired from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), along with fellow scientist Wei Ling Yu. Neilsen pleaded guilty to attempting to export an infectious agent to China and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Yu fled the country and is believed to be in China...
> 
> In the United States, the FBI is investigating hundreds of cases of possible Chinese intellectual property theft. The _agency has warned universities and research agencies that China is a serious counter-intelligence threat. It's created a chill with many Chinese scholars who fear racial profiling_ [emphasis added].
> 
> *'Overreaction can be worse than the problem'*
> 
> "The cases that have been most public in the United States and Canada have involved people of Chinese descent, and I_ think we have to be very careful in any way inferring that the loyalty or the integrity of people with Chinese names is a more serious concern than for others_ [emphasis added]," Evans said.
> 
> (Paul Evans, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, says steps to stop espionage need to be balanced with individual integrity and privacy rights.)
> 
> "The overreaction can be worse than the problem itself in harming the careers and the reputations of the vast majority of people of Chinese descent."..
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/federal-employees-concerned-insider-threat-training-means-spying-on-co-workers-1.5343194



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And now China and AI in the US:



> US Reliance on Chinese Students, Workers is a ‘Hard Problem,’ Say AI Commission Leaders
> 
> But despite concerns, Eric Schmidt and Bob Work warn that ‘decoupling’ from China “will hurt the United States.
> 
> The importance of artificial intelligence to national security is among the few areas of emerging consensus between the political right and left, and between Washington D.C. and Silicon Valley. But significant disagreement is emerging around the issue of tech talent and the large number of Chinese students studying in the United States and getting jobs in the tech industry.
> 
> Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and former Undersecretary of Defense Bob Work on Monday unveiled that finding and others in a new report for Congress from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which began operating in March. The commission focuses on how the U.S. can retain an edge over rivals like China in the development of artificial intelligence within national security areas and commercially. But, they said, the issue of tech talent in Silicon Valley and the reliance on Chinese students and workers in the United States, is a burgeoning issue of contention.
> 
> The good news out of the report is that policy-makers and defense leaders are addressing the bad news, which is that the United States’s position of tech leadership in AI is dissolving rapidly, said Work and Schmidt. The government still isn’t spending enough on AI research and development, despite some recent increases, and there is too much red tape around the Defense Department, they tell lawmakers. The Defense Department currently has about 600 different artificial intelligence projects and is working to unite them under the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. The report applauds many of the small, pathfinding projects coming out of the military but says the department has yet to scale them up successfully.  In other words, Schmidt and Work’s key concerns are ones with which most Defense Department leaders and politicians would agree.
> 
> The commission identified near unanimous concern of China surpassing U.S. capabilities on the battlefield, stealing intellectual property, and in general dominating research, development and commercialization of AI. It’s topic Schmidt discusses frequently, pointing out that China has made dominance in the field of AI by 2030 a core area of planning, and is now spending appropriately. Consensus on what to do about the high level of entanglement between the U.S. tech sector and China is far more elusive, particularly when it comes to people, according to both Schmidt and Work.
> 
> _Attracting foreign students and tech workers to the United States for years has been considered essential for U.S. technology-sector growth. Big tech firms employ an increasing number of Chinese-born computer science grads and post grads.Chinese students make up an increasingly large portion of undergrads in the United States. More than 350,000 Chinese Students were enrolled in U.S. universities in 2017. But as President Trump has targeted all aspects of China’s infiltration into the U.S. economy, Chinese students — and their talent — are beginning to look elsewhere.  Top U.S. graduate business programs report that applications from China are falling as those students turn away from American in favor of Asian schools.
> 
> “One of the things the commission investigated pretty carefully is how dependent we are on China today. The answer, which some people may not want to hear, is that we are dependent on Chinese researchers and Chinese graduate students,” said Schmidt.
> 
> Work called it “one of the hard problems,” that the commission has been grappling with_ [emphasis added]. “As you can imagine, because this is a national security commission, we’ve had some briefers who have really recommended decoupling [or separating economically] as much as you possibly can, because of the threats of [intellectual property] theft, etc. But then there’s another group that says, ‘No, in the area of AI, and especially in the area of research, entanglement is a virtuous thing.”
> 
> Some already are pushing for more decoupling...[lots more]
> https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/us-reliance-chinese-students-workers-hard-problem-say-ai-commission-leaders/161082/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And a UK Commons' committee on China and British universities--wake up Justin Trudeau and many others (our compradors, some naive, some not, have been selling Canada out for a long time). And note freedom of Conservative committee members to criticize their own government:



> 'Alarming' Chinese meddling at UK universities exposed in report
> _Chinese embassy appears to be coordinating efforts to curb academic freedom, say MPs_
> 
> Universities are not adequately responding to the growing risk of China and other “autocracies” influencing academic freedom in the UK, the foreign affairs select committee has said.
> 
> The report, rushed out before parliament is suspended pending the election, finds “alarming evidence” of Chinese interference on UK campuses, adding some of the activity seeking to restrict academic freedom appears to be coordinated by the Chinese embassy in London.
> 
> The report says: “There is clear evidence that autocracies are seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities, as well as limit the activities of researchers on university campuses. _Not enough is being done to protect academic freedom from financial, political and diplomatic pressure.”
> 
> The committee highlighted the role of China-funded Confucius Institutes officials in confiscating papers that mentioned Taiwan at an academic conference, the use of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association as an instrument of political interference and evidence that dissidents active while studying in the UK, such as Ayeshagul Nur Ibrahim, an Uighur Muslim, were being monitoring and her family in China being harassed_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The committee accuses some academic organisations, such as Million Plus, which represents 20 modern universities, of complacency.
> 
> Bill Rammell, the chair of Million Plus, told the committee he had “not heard one piece of evidence” that substantiated claims of foreign influence in universities.
> 
> The committee said the government’s focus was on protecting universities from intellectual property theft and risks arising from joint research projects. “This is not enough to protect academic freedom from other types of interference such as financial, political or diplomatic pressure,” the MPs said.
> 
> The _Foreign Office’s evidence to the committee highlighted the lack of government advice to universities, the report says, adding ministers have not coordinated approaches to the issue, either within Whitehall or with foreign governments such as Australia and the US_ [and Canada? emphasis added].
> 
> The report points out that a 2019 international education strategy white paper mentions China more than 20 times in the context of boosting education expertise to the Chinese market, but with no mention of security or interference.
> 
> The committee concluded: “The _battle for university students or trade deals should not outweigh the international standards which have brought freedom and prosperity to the UK and the wider world_ [emphasis added]. The government should provide any strategic advice to universities and not used its key sanction tools such as ‘Magnitsky powers’ to curb interference on human rights grounds.”
> 
> Ministers can curb interference through the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act passed 17 months ago, the report said.
> 
> However, ministers previously told the committee they could not use the so-called Magnitsky amendment, contained in the act, until the UK had left the EU. In June the FCO finally admitted this interpretation was legally incorrect, and the powers could be used independently of the EU while still an EU member.
> 
> The FCO has still to lay the necessary statutory instrument to introduce the power, 17 months after the act became law. The foreign affairs select committee pointed out that the power, touted by the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, in pre-Conservative party conference interviews, will be delayed still further by the general election.
> 
> The _committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, also asked the FCO to explain its failure to use sanctions in response to repression by state authorities in Hong Kong and Xinjiang_ [emphasis added]...
> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/05/alarming-chinese-meddling-at-uk-universities-exposed-in-report



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Remius

In what must be a reluctant but no other choice move by China...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-pork-beef-trudeau-1.5348532

I'm sure it must gnaw at them but people want their meat.


----------



## a_majoor

Austin Bay on the evolving Chinese response to the Hong Kong protests. The linguistic divide between Hong Kong and the northern Chinese is interesting, as well as the divide between the Chinese and Taiwanese. This adds another element to the mix:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/2019111381713.aspx



> On Point: Hong Kong in History's Lens
> by Austin Bay
> November 13, 2019
> 
> How will historians in 2060 frame the 2019 Hong Kong crisis?
> 
> "The first battle of the Second Cold War" is one possibility, though Russia's 2014 Crimean invasion deserves that cruel award.
> 
> Perhaps the first Cold War isn't over. The USSR's communist dictatorship collapsed in 1991. China's party tyranny didn't. In 1989, the Kremlin didn't order its puppet regimes to murder protesting citizens en masse. On Nov. 9,1989, the Berlin Wall cracked without a shot.
> 
> Not so in China. On June 4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army attacked peaceful pro-freedom protestors in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and murdered over 2,000 Chinese citizens.
> 
> Hong Kong's first major 2019 demonstration commemorated the Tiananmen Square massacre's 30th anniversary. That demonstration was pro-freedom, not anti-government.
> 
> The Hong Kong-Tiananmen Square connection suggests Hong Kong is a continuation of the 20th century's great battle between imperial tyrannies --monarchies, Reichskanzlers, Politburos -- and political systems that protect essential individual freedoms such as free expression and assembly.
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping is a tyrant. Xi and his Communist Party brutes run a police state that uses Karl Marx's bogus 19th-century theory of history as propaganda cover. Marxist-Socialist Workers Paradises -- plural -- whether in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela or China, have always employed terror and committed mass murder. Marxist tyrannies corrupt their own societies.
> 
> Hong Kong residents know that fellow Chinese living outside the Hong Kong special administrative region face totalitarian restrictions.
> 
> Mainland China today -- China under Beijing's boot -- is an authoritarian national socialist state. National socialist -- Nazi -- that's a German acronym. China's "state capitalist" system -- a corrupt nexus of government, industry and spies stealing technology -- gamed the international economic order until President Donald Trump's administration said no more.
> 
> There's more to it than tariffs. The Politburo knows China must reform its domestic economy, but that involves breaking the money-skimming "rice bowls" of connected party members and PLA senior officers, and permitting more freedom.
> 
> snip
> 
> Stuart Heaver (reporting from Hong Kong for The Independent) thinks Beijing is already invading. "There may be no tanks," Heaver wrote, but many locals believe "PLA troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police ..." They intend "to impose Tiananmen by stealth and create a climate of fear."
> 
> The suspect police "are often heard speaking in Putonghua dialect," Heaver writes. Putonghua is Mandarin (Beijing) Chinese. Most Hong Kongers speak the Cantonese dialect. Eighty-five to 95 million Chinese living along the south China coast speak Cantonese or Hakka, a related "southern" dialect.
> 
> Which leads to a linguistic connection that disturbs Beijing's mandarins (pun intended): Seventy percent of Taiwan's 24 million people speak Hakka.



Read the entore article at the link


----------



## The Bread Guy

Dredging waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back ...


			
				S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Somehow, I doubt (harvesting prisoners' organs) is ever truly going to stop in China considering the lucractive black market in organs that's already established there...


... here's the latest on that bit of Chinese culture:


> Despite repeated denials, China stands accused of a systematic cover-up to hide the continuing practice of forced organ harvesting and murder. The practice, described as “state-run mass murder” and valued at $1 billion each year, has supposedly been outlawed in the country. But a new report, published on November 14 in the BMC Medical Ethics journal, refutes this, accusing China of a “systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets,” as the killings continue.
> 
> In June, I reported on the China Tribunal in London, which found evidence of "forced organ harvesting" from Chinese prisoners, including Falun Gong practitioners and Uighur Muslims. The Tribunal’s final judgment concluded that this "forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, [and] the tribunal has had no evidence that the significant infrastructure associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled.”
> 
> The Tribunal used first-hand testimony from former detainees and the implausible accessibility of transplants to shape its findings. Those witness reports were horrific—including organ extractions on live victims who were subsequently killed by the procedures. With China’s illegal organ transplant industry said to be worth $1 billion each year, the country is determined to deflect the international outcry that has intensified as details of the organ harvesting have come to light. But this latest report casts doubt over claims of reform, exposing a material delta between the estimated number of transplants and the state’s official statistics ...


More @ link, or @ study noted in article here.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Canadian Uyghurs get some satisfaction, you gotta love that diplomacy with Chinese characteristics:



> Two Chinese representatives dropped from UBC business forum amid anger from Uyghur groups in Canada
> 
> A student forum aimed at promoting ties between the Canadian and Chinese business communities cancelled appearances by representatives of two Chinese companies that activists have accused of being involved in rights violations.
> 
> The two companies, SenseTime and Sina Weibo, had been invited by the University of British Columbia’s BizChina Club to deliver presentations at the forum, which was endorsed by UBC president Santa Ono and the Chinese consulate. However, after the speeches drew backlash from Uyghur groups in Canada this week, the two speakers – SenseTime’s Jimmy Zhou and Sina’s Lina Chen – were dropped from the program.
> 
> “Due to extenuating circumstances, our speakers from SenseTime and Sina Weibo will no longer be participating in the 2019 UBC China Forum. We apologize for the short notice and wish everyone will have a pleasant weekend at our event,” reads a note on the forum’s website.
> 
> The _forum, which took place in downtown Vancouver over the weekend, came under fire as SenseTime, a Chinese company that focuses on developing AI technologies, was blacklisted by the United States last month for its alleged involvement in China’s repression of its Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region.
> 
> “They contribute to the cultural genocide of the Uyghurs,” said Shalina Nurly, youth leader for the Vancouver Uyghur Association, adding she was very disappointed and shocked to see Mr. Zhou was invited to a Canadian university event_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Ms. Nurly’s group had planned two protests on both Saturday and Sunday, calling for banning Mr. Zhou’s speech, but cancelled the second one after two speakers were removed.
> 
> “It made me happy because we saw the result of our work and the fact that we stood up could make could make a difference,” she said in an interview on Sunday.
> 
> The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in a document that SenseTime, along with several other entities, was enabling activities contrary to the foreign-policy interests of the United States.
> 
> “Specifically, these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuse in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs,” the document says.
> 
> In response to the document, SenseTime said it was “deeply disappointed."
> 
> “We abide by all relevant laws and regulations of the jurisdictions in which we operate. We have been actively developing our AI code of ethics to ensure our technologies are used in a responsible way,” reads a statement on SenseTime’s website.
> 
> The company also says on its website that it partners with a number of big corporations in China, as well as the country’s government agencies such as the Public Security Department in Yunnan province and a public security bureau in Guangzhou. _In 2017, China’s tech giant Huawei and SenseTime jointly launched high-capacity face recognition technology.
> 
> A statement issued by the office of the Consulate-General of the People’s Republic of China in Vancouver Saturday says it encourages students’ efforts to promote China-Canada exchanges and appreciates their innovation and entrepreneurship. The consulate says it is against any attempts to “smear Chinese companies’ lawful and legitimate operations, obstruct the normal cooperation between China and Canada and target specific foreign businesses_ [emphasis added].”
> 
> Earlier this week, China expert Charles Burton, a professor at Brock University, said the UBC Board of Governors should intervene to withdraw the “shameful invitation” to Mr. Zhou.
> 
> Kurt Heinrich, senior director of UBC’s media relations, said the forum was a student initiative and the university was proud of its students who engage on global issues.
> 
> The university’s spokesman Erik Rolfsen said on Sunday that dropping the speakers was an independent decision made by the students.
> 
> Ms. Nurly said Ms. Chen, the chief editor of Sina Weibo, shouldn’t be invited either as the Twitter-like social media platform censors content that Beijing considers politically sensitive, including material about Xinjiang indoctrination centres.
> 
> “We know what’s going on, but they deleted it all,” she said.
> 
> People in China cannot read the Western media coverage about “the camps [on Weibo] because they don’t want it to be out there.”
> 
> The Globe and Mail reached out for comment from the student group that arranged the conference but was told organizers were too busy to speak Sunday. The Globe attempted to attend the sessions but was told only registered media were allowed. Requests to register for the conference last week were not answered.
> 
> SenseTime and Sina Weibo did not respond to e-mails on Sunday afternoon Pacific time.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-two-chinese-representatives-dropped-from-ubc-business-forum-amid-anger/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Apparently this was reported in various Canadian news sources, but I apparently missed them. Even with the unpleasantness between Canada and the PRC, we still sent representatives to the Chinese Military Games. From Lawfare:



> Despite Strained Bilateral Ties, Canada Participates in Chinese Military Games
> 
> In late October, the Canadian Armed Forces dispatched a large delegation to the seventh edition of the Military World Games, held in Wuhan, China. President Xi Jinping noted that the Military World Games provide a forum for military athletes from around the world to build bridges and to engage in “mutual learning.” The Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, broke the story, noting that “Ottawa didn’t issue any news release before or during the games to draw attention to Canada’s participation.” A Department of National Defense spokesperson told the Globe and Mail that Canada had sent “114 athletes, 57 coaches and support staff.”
> 
> Canada’s sending of a delegation of military athletes to China comes at a time of strained relations between Beijing and Ottawa. Canadian officials arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, in December 2018, in connection with a U.S. extradition request. Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes of British Columbia’s Supreme Court—the province’s superior trial court—has scheduled Meng’s formal extradition hearing for Jan. 22, 2020.
> 
> In response to Meng’s arrest, Beijing detained two Canadian citizens, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and then formally arrested the men in May 2019 on espionage charges. The Canadian government and international allies have condemned the arrests of the two Canadians as “arbitrary” and political. China also retaliated against Meng’s arrest by blocking Canadian canola exports in March, and by blocking Canadian pork and beef exports in June. On Nov. 5, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that China had lifted the ban on pork and beef exports. Experts have noted, however, that China’s move could be motivated more by the effect of African swine fever, which has decimated Chinese pig stock, rather than by Beijing’s desire for warmer relations. Despite the resumption of commodities trade, bilateral tensions remain strained, and Kovrig and Spavor remain imprisoned.
> 
> In a press release, China’s Embassy in Ottawa cited Canada’s participation in the games as proof that “China’s friends are all over the world” and that “in the future, we will have more and more friends in various fields.” The press release noted that Canada’s participation “speaks volumes” about China’s global reach. Canada’s involvement in the military games was widely decried by Canadian pundits and foreign service veterans. Mark Towhey, writing for the conservative Toronto Sun, argued that “as long as China continues to hold two innocent Canadian citizens in prison, Canada must stop pretending it’s business as usual between our two nations.” Towhey suggested that the military games were about more than sport, arguing that “Canada’s military is a tool of government and military action is an extension of diplomacy.” Another commentator, writing for Global News, cast the decision as “seriously misguided.” Guy St. Jacques, former Ambassador to China, called on Ottawa to reform its China strategy, arguing that “now that we have seen the dark side of China, we have to have a much more realistic approach to China.”
> 
> The United States has similarly called on Ottawa to rethink its China strategy. Back in May, Vice President Mike Pence visited Ottawa and asked Canada to exclude Huawei from 5G network construction. And in a recent interview with CBC, Susan Rice, who served as U.S. national security adviser between 2013 and 2017, spoke extensively about Sino-Canadian relations. Rice argued that Canada’s arrest of Meng was the correct decision and warned that “it’s not beneficial for Canada to back down” to Beijing. Like Pence, Rice cautioned Ottawa against allowing Huawei to build Canada’s 5G network, warning that “it gives the Chinese the ability, if they choose to use it, to access all kinds of information.” Ottawa has yet to make a decision on Huawei’s role in 5G network construction.
> 
> Domestically, the prime minister faces pressures from certain parts of the Canadian establishment to eschew the harder-line approach that Pence and Rice have promoted. The Globe and Mail has reported that Canadian intelligence agencies are “at odds over whether Ottawa” should block Huawei from its 5G networks, with at least one agency arguing that “robust testing and monitoring of Huawei’s … equipment could mitigate potential security risks.” In addition, certain Canadian businesspeople and political leaders want Ottawa to begin focusing again on increasing trade to China. The Globe and Mail has reported that the Canadian business community is “eager to move on after a year of friction.” Notably, Stephen McNeil, premier of the Province of Nova Scotia, has continually pushed for more trade with and investment in China. McNeil told the Globe that “the idea that we’re going to moralize and preach and lecture societies, in some cases 5,000 years old, hasn’t worked out very well,” and he hoped that “with time and continued engagement, the relationship will endure and grow.” David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China, tweeted that the business community’s pro-trade sentiments were “shameful.” In general, despite Susan Rice’s warnings and China’s treatment of Ottawa over the past year, it is clear that a stable cohort of voices within the Canadian political establishment are pushing for engagement and increased trade rather than for a firmer stand against Beijing.



Link  Links to other articles in original.


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLAAF wowser!



> Embarrassing mistake: Chinese magazine ‘accidentally’ reveals new top secret weapon
> _China appears to have been caught with its pants down after a state-run magazine accidentally published details of its top secret new weapon._
> 
> A centrefold graphic recently flourished intimate details of a Chinese bomber carrying a stark new weapon. State-controlled media has since gone into cover-up mode. But military analysts think Beijing may have been caught with its pants down.
> 
> The government produced Modern Ships magazine has splashed high-resolution computer-generated images of China’s most recent addition to its strategic bomber line-up – the H-6N – over the front and feature pages.
> 
> But that’s not what drew the eye of the world’s defence thinkers.
> 
> The graphics showed the new bomber carrying a huge ballistic missile slung under its fuselage. And that missile looks a lot like one of a family of ballistic weapons deployed by China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) as aircraft carrier killers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Beijing’s state-controlled Global Times immediately went into damage control mode, declaring, “The images are computer generated, merely conceptual and have no official background.”
> 
> But there’s far more to the story than the detailed conceptual images.
> 
> And this may confirm Western defence analysts’ worst fears.
> 
> “_If (this) is correct then this would be an impressive anti-ship standoff capability for the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), that would extend the utility of the DF-21D out well beyond the first island chain,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Malcolm Davis told Flight Global.
> 
> “That would theoretically match the ground-launched DF-26 anti-ship capable (intermediate ballistic missile), and increase the risk for US aircraft carrier battle groups … the Chinese are clearly trying to make it costlier for the US to project power into the western pacific, to the point where the US simply chooses not to intervene in a crisis_ [emphasis added].”
> 
> *OUT OF THE ORDINARY*
> 
> Defence enthusiasts noted several strange things about the latest N variant of China’s Xian H-6 series of strategic bombers when it was unveiled to the public at the 70th National Day parade in October.
> 
> The state-controlled Xinhua news service simply said it was a “homemade strategic bomber capable of air refuelling and long-range strike”.
> 
> But when a flight of three of the bombers flew over Beijing, military experts saw it doesn’t have bomb-bay doors. Instead, it has what appears to be new heavyweight attachment points in a recess along the centre-line of its fuselage.
> 
> Also noted was its modified, extended nose-cone and an air-to-air refuelling nozzle.
> 
> Speculation as to what this all meant was rife.
> 
> Even if the images posted yesterday were for the first time showing the underside of the latest H-6N bomber, these now clearly show not only the deleted bomb bay but also the semiconformal attachment for the new ballistic anti-ship missile.
> 
> (Images via Huitong's CMA-Blog) pic.twitter.com/QKPq79TqlF
> — @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) September 23, 2019
> 
> _Most observers settled on a disturbing prospect: that these changes enabled the bomber to carry huge, nuclear-capable or hypersonic-speed ballistic missiles_ [emphasis added].
> 
> If correct, it would become only the second nation to do so.
> 
> Russia displayed an air-launched ballistic missile, the hypersonic Kinzhal, in 2017. It was slung under a cold-war era MiG-31 interceptor.
> 
> _Another possibility, presented by the South China Morning Post, is that the H-6N can carry the large new supersonic semi-autonomous drones also revealed at the National Day parades.
> 
> “The semi-recessed area under the fuselage of the H-6N is designed to carry either the WZ-8 or the CJ-100,” an anonymous military source reportedly told the Post.
> 
> The WZ-8 is the supersonic drone and the CJ/DF-100 is a large new missile_ [emphasis added]...
> https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/embarrassing-mistake-chinese-magazine-accidentally-reveals-new-top-secret-weapon/news-story/99967f182da868ba6321d559cde96e62



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

I think its fake. To carry the DF by plane would defeat the purpose of the weapon. They have cruise missiles which are far easier to deploy.


----------



## a_majoor

A missile such as the one depicted would have a much shorter flight time and provide far less ability to respond than an ordinary cruise missile. It would also have a different flight path than that of a supersonic or even hypersonic missile, providing a possible means of exploiting gaps in the defensive coverage.

As always, this is only one piece of the puzzle. What is never discussed is how the Chinese would identify and track the target beyond the First Island Chain in order to dispatch and launch this (or any other) missile. The USN has long experience in operating near hostile waters (the USSR) and how to mask or minimize the presence of a ship or carrier battle group, so there are probably many different techniques that would make the job of finding the Americans difficult. This is not even taking improved SAM systems into account, much less the near term arrival of laser weapons.

As always, the dance between offence and defense continues.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Will Justin Trudeau's gov't even notice at political level?

1) China wants to ‘take over’ Australian politics, former spy chief warns



> Duncan Lewis tells newspaper ‘any person in political office is potentially a target’ for espionage and foreign interference
> He cited incidents of Chinese agents making large contributions to Australian political parties as part of a wide-ranging influence-peddling campaign
> https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3038873/china-wants-take-over-australian-politics-former-spy-chief



2) Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government



> A Chinese spy has risked his life to defect to Australia and is now offering a trove of unprecedented inside intelligence on how China conducts its interference operations abroad.
> 
> Wang “William” Liqiang is the first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover. He has revealed the identities of China’s senior military intelligence officers in Hong Kong, as well as providing details of how they fund and conduct political interference operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia.
> 
> Mr Wang has taken his material to Australia's counter-espionage agency, ASIO, and is seeking political asylum – potentially opening another front in Australia’s challenging bilateral relationship with China.
> 
> A sworn statement Mr Wang provided ASIO in October states: “I have personally been involved and participated in a series of espionage activities”. He faces certain detention and possible execution if he returns to China.
> 
> Mr Wang is currently at an undisclosed location in Sydney on a tourist visa and seeking urgent protection from the Australian government – a plea he says he has passed on in multiple meetings with ASIO.
> 
> In interviews with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, he has revealed in granular detail how Beijing covertly controls listed companies to fund intelligence operations, including the surveillance and profiling of dissidents and the co-opting of media organisations.
> 
> He has given previously unheard details about the kidnapping of five booksellers from Hong Kong and their rendition to the Chinese mainland. His testimony shows how Beijing’s spies are infiltrating Hong Kong’s democracy movement, manipulating Taiwan’s elections and operating with impunity in Australia.
> 
> ASIO has repeatedly warned that the current threat of foreign interference is “unprecedented” and that the number of foreign intelligence officers currently operating in Australia is higher than it was during the Cold War. ASIO has never publicly named China as a primary source of its concerns, as the government grapples with how to balance public awareness with the risk of diplomatic and economic retaliation.
> 
> However, on Friday, former ASIO boss Duncan Lewis said the Chinese government was seeking to "take over" Australia's political system through its "insidious" foreign interference operations.
> 
> Among his key revelations, Mr Wang said he had met the head of a deep-cover spy ring operating with impunity in Australia...[lots more]
> https://www.smh.com.au/national/defecting-chinese-spy-offers-information-trove-to-australian-government-20191122-p53d1l.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

Given that he is being protected at a secret location, I am guessing he had evidence to back his claims up not just statements, that said why hit the media, if true Beijing would be pulling any operatives it believed were compromised and covering up the existence of any operations. Either they are not worried about what he knows, or doesnt care because they can counter a single breach effectively.


----------



## MarkOttawa

1) Justin Trudeau's government's pathetic efforts to appease the Chicoms continue:



> Canada's defence minister says China is not an adversary
> 
> Canada's defence minister says he doesn't see China as an adversary, as a security conference in Halifax this weekend prepares to focus heavily on the Asian superpower.
> 
> Harjit Sajjan said while there are significant challenges in Canada's relationship with China -- including the detention by the Chinese of two Canadians -- there is co-operation on "certain aspects of trade," and now is the time to try to work together to find solutions.
> 
> "We don't consider China as an adversary," Sajjan told reporters at the Halifax International Security Forum on Friday [Nov. 22].
> 
> "Some of the things that China from a security perspective have been doing is concerning, and we need to be mindful of that. But it's only through the appropriate discussions that we are able to get back into a rules-based order."
> 
> Several of the sessions at the Halifax forum will deal with the country many geopolitical experts see as an emerging threat.
> 
> China-Canada relations have largely remained tense since the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor on espionage allegations last December, shortly after Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on an extradition request from the United States.
> 
> Many China observers believe relations will remain in limbo until Meng's case is resolved.
> 
> Forum president Peter Van Praagh wasn't as careful as Sajjan in his assessment, saying China can be characterized in a variety of ways including as a strategic competitor and adversary.
> 
> "I think it's clear that China and Canada do not share the same interests," Van Praagh said. "There is some intermingling on some issues, but China has a very different view of the world than Canada's view of the world."
> 
> Van Praagh said Canada and its democratic allies in Europe and Asia need to recognize that fact in order to be properly prepared to deal with it...
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-s-defence-minister-says-china-is-not-an-adversary-1.4698187



2) Whilst we continue to face diplomacy with Chinese characteristics:



> China's new envoy says Canadians should speak out against Hong Kong protests
> 
> Beijing has a new representative in Canada but his stern message to Ottawa remains the same as his predecessor's: release Huawei Technologies executive Meng Wanzhou, arrested in Vancouver nearly a year ago at the request of the United States.
> 
> In a roundtable interview Friday, Chinese ambassador Cong Peiwu also urged Canadians to speak out loudly against the "violent criminals" protesting for more freedom in Hong Kong, citing the risks to Canadian citizens and companies there.
> 
> "What happened in Hong Kong has nothing to do with democracy or human rights," said the 52-year-old Cong, who arrived in Ottawa two months ago.
> 
> Cong denounced U.S. legislation aimed at sanctioning Chinese and Hong Kong officials who abuse human rights. He cautioned Canada against any such action, suggesting it would cause "very bad damage" to the bilateral relationship "and that's not in the interest of Canada."
> 
> "We are determined to safeguard our national sovereignty, our core interests, our security," Cong said. "And we are determined to oppose any foreign intervention."
> 
> Relations between Ottawa and Beijing have been fractious since early last December, when Canadian authorities took Meng into custody over American allegations of violating sanctions on Iran. Her extradition case is before a Canadian court.
> 
> Soon after Meng was arrested, Beijing detained two Canadians, businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig, on allegations of undermining China's national security.
> 
> The developments are widely seen in Canada as retaliation for the detention of Meng.
> 
> Cong said Meng's arrest and pending extradition to the U.S. amount to arbitrary detention, leading to "the severe difficulties" Canada and China are experiencing.
> 
> The ambassador tried to play down any fears about allowing Huawei to help build Canada's next-generation 5G mobile networks...
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/china-s-new-envoy-says-canadians-should-speak-out-against-hong-kong-protests-1.4698025



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

Canadian Defence Minister: China is not our adversary

https://www.cp24.com/news/canada-s-defence-minister-says-china-is-not-an-adversary-1.4698229

What we have here is either a magical, talking rainbow unicorn or a very brilliant man with a strong desire to detail what "adversary" means in an asymmetrical state of affairs. China is the long term main adversary politically, economically but maybe he is right from a military perspective.


----------



## FJAG

Cloud Cover said:
			
		

> Canadian Defence Minister: China is not our adversary
> 
> https://www.cp24.com/news/canada-s-defence-minister-says-china-is-not-an-adversary-1.4698229
> 
> What we have here is either a magical, talking rainbow unicorn or a very brilliant man with a strong desire to detail what "adversary" means in an asymmetrical state of affairs. China is the long term main adversary politically, economically but maybe he is right from a military perspective.



He needs to re-read the section on "State Competition" at p. 50 of Strong, Secure, Engaged. 

 :cheers:


----------



## MarkOttawa

1) Meanwhile US senators of btoh parties go after us in Halifax on Huawei:



> Canada warned of fallout on Five Eyes relationship if Huawei allowed on 5G
> Social Sharing
> _U.S. lawmakers delivered stern warnings about the Chinese telecom giant at security forum_
> ...
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-warned-of-fallout-on-five-eyes-relationship-if-huawei-allowed-on-5g-1.5370992



2) As in Germany Chancellor Merkel's own party forces her to let parliament decide on Huawei/5G--where vote could well go against Chicoms. A transparency we won't see here:



> German parliament to decide on Huawei 5G involvement, Merkel's CDU party agrees
> 
> _Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) overwhelmingly approved a motion on Saturday to debate in parliament the involvement of controversial tech firm Huawei in building the nation's 5G network. _
> ...
> *Germany's other parties rule out Huawei*
> 
> Just days before CDU delegates met in Leipzig this weekend, nine security and foreign-policy experts with the CDU's coalition partners in Berlin, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), openly called in a policy paper for Germany to exclude "non-trustworthy manufacturers, especially if unconstitutionally controlled interference, manipulation or espionage cannot be ruled out."
> 
> Meanwhile, the environmentalist Greens, currently nipping at the heels of Chancellor Merkel's CDU in polls, also categorically rule out Huawei's involvement in Germany's 5G network. That raises the possibility that opposition parties and unruly coalition partners could stop Huawei from bidding on the project, even with Germany's most powerful politician open to the prospect...
> https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-to-decide-on-huawei-5g-involvement-merkels-cdu-party-agrees/a-51379848



What are chances that a majority could be found in our Commons to block Huawei?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Matthew Fisher is not best pleased with the approach of Justin Trudeau and his comprador friends to China:



> COMMENTARY: Canada’s new foreign minister must figure out how to deal with China
> 
> Figuring out a strategy for how to get along with the growing economic and military colossus will likely be the major preoccupation of Canadian foreign ministers and governments for the rest of this century. It should dominate the foreign policy agenda for next few years.
> 
> Whatever her strengths and her alleged power within cabinet, Chrystia Freeland was not often able to get past the Prime Minister’s Office to criticize China, though she did manage to clearly state recently Canada’s opposition to how Beijing was manhandling protesters in Hong Kong.
> 
> The Globe and Mail’s Steve Chase unearthed a nugget this week that _strongly suggests that in Freeland’s successor at foreign affairs, Francois-Philippe Champagne, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has found another China fanboy to complement his new ambassador to the Court of Chairman Xi, Dominic Barton_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Only two years ago, Champagne praised the Xi government in an interview that he gave to the state-backed China Global Television Network.
> 
> “In a world of uncertainty, of unpredictability, of questioning about the rules that have been established to govern our trading relationship, Canada, and I would say China, stand out as [a] beacon of stability, predictability, a rule-based system, a very inclusive society,” Champagne said.
> 
> This gushing declaration was of a piece with what Trudeau himself said six years ago, when he told a party fundraiser that the country that he most admired was China’s “basic dictatorship.”
> 
> Moreover, Champagne is a protégé and friend of Jean Chretien.
> 
> The former prime minister has been one of those loudly leading the charge to have Canada ignore its legal processes and end the extradition hearing of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who faces 13 charges of fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the U.S., in order to get China and Canada back to talking trade.
> 
> With Freeland keeping the U.S. trade file in addition to her new duties as what might best be called Canada’s first minister of national unity, that should leave Champagne with more time to seriously consider a balanced policy towards China rather than the lopsided, ardently pro-China policy favoured by the PMO and most of the country’s leading diplomats and business groups.
> 
> He should heed polls that suggest Canadians are far less keen on closer ties with Beijing than he and his government are.
> 
> The Liberals barely spoke about China or anything to do with foreign policy or national security during the recent federal election campaign. And Trudeau famously skipped the only television debate on foreign policy, causing the Munk School to entirely scrap that event.
> 
> Just about the only quasi-security commitment that Trudeau made during the campaign was an announcement that, if re-elected, the Liberals intended to try to untangle the military purchase process by creating a Defence Procurement Agency.
> 
> Trudeau has made clear that in leading a minority government during his second term, his intention will be to focus on domestic issues for the next few years.
> 
> Bringing home his peripatetic foreign minister, Freeland, underscores this commitment.
> 
> Though Freeland has been fawned over by the media for her handling of the foreign affairs ministry, she, Global Affairs Canada and the government, writ large, barely articulated any vision regarding the country’s place in the world. Truth be told, Canada does not really have a foreign policy.
> 
> There hasn’t been a statement of priorities and what, exactly, the country’s national interest is or should be. What Canadians have heard aplenty have been the usual self-congratulatory and utterly empty bromides about being advocates for NATO, NORAD, peace, stability and rule of law.
> 
> Champagne might wish to stop the Canadian practice of speaking so often about the importance of its alliances and demonstrate leadership within them or on its own. What has been urgently required for some time is a realistic national discussion about Canada’s rather limp standing in the world.
> 
> What Canadians have heard instead has been a lot of the usual nonsense about how the country punches above its weight and is regarded as a paragon of virtue.
> 
> Canada badly needs a foreign policy strategy that acknowledges that the world has profoundly changed. It must recognize that the Indo-Pacific, and not only China, is the realm of paramount importance.
> 
> This will, perforce, oblige Canada to pay less attention to its traditional partners in Europe, though it must keep a close watch on Russian intentions there, in the Middle East and in the High Arctic.
> 
> The Trudeau government has seemed to react to crises on an ad hoc and sometimes capricious basis during its first term. Much was made, and usually in a preachy way, about how bad the Venezuelan and Russian dictatorships were.
> 
> Yet little has been said about the growing list of outrages perpetrated by the Chinese dictatorship at home and abroad, including its meddling on Canadian university campuses, its relentless attempts to penetrate and co-opt Canadian political echelon and the staggering number of digital assaults that its hackers have been making on Canadian government and industry computer servers.
> 
> Nor has Canada taken a harder line with China since it kidnapped two Canadians nearly one year ago and held them in dire circumstances since, or slapped import controls on imports of Canadian pork, beef and canola in obvious retaliation for Canada putting Meng through the extradition process.
> 
> One consequence of Ottawa remaining in the grips of China trade fever, no matter what the cost to the country’s pride or principles, is that Canada has chosen to invest little in growing its economic and security relations with friendly, reliable Asian partners, or its presence and clout within APEC and especially ASEAN, which China has been busily fracturing by buying off its poorest members.
> 
> Canada has also chosen not to try to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, whose members are Japan, India, Australia and the U.S., which is something the Tories promised to do if elected.
> 
> While China is the elephant occupying more and more space in foreign ministry offices around the world, there are, of course, other pressing issues.
> 
> Canada had made hollow boasts about the global leadership that it has shown on the environment, yet there has been virtually no change in Canada’s failure to meet environmental targets since Stephen Harper was in power. Canada had made a noisy play for African UN votes to secure a non-voting seat on the Security Council, but paradoxically, only a few hundred Canadian peacekeepers spent 13 months in Mali.
> 
> Freeland failed to even visit Africa once and has not spoken much on the Middle East — despite the fact that, like Africa, it is full of UN votes that Trudeau allegedly covets.
> Story continues below advertisement
> 
> Not that you would know it in sleepy Canada, but the world is entering a highly unstable era where the most likely flashpoints will be in the maritime domain. China is constantly threatening to attack Taiwan and actively pursuing what the Rand Corporation has called “grey zone coercion” against the Philippines and Vietnam through outrageous and illegal territorial claims.
> 
> Further, China continues to harass fishermen and challenge others who build oil drilling platforms in the South China Sea while sending out its navy, coast guard and weaponized fishing militia to assert its claim to almost all of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
> 
> With every passing day, China has more of the means to do what it wants in some parts of the western Pacific. Over the past year alone, for example, it produced 19 new blue water warships. Canada may border three oceans and have the world’s longest coastline, but the entire Royal Canadian Navy’s surface war-fighting fleet consists of 12 vessels that are each 25 years older or more.
> 
> While Canada has been sleeping, the West has been on a long losing streak, not only in the Indo-Pacific but in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Its influence has receded in almost every important area and there has been no common strategy to halt the bleeding.
> Story continues below advertisement
> 
> All is not yet lost, though. Canada could, for example, help the West take back the initiative from China by advocating for the establishment of a NATO-like Asian security alliance of like-minded nations, by greatly increasing trade with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, and by working collaboratively with partners on big infrastructure programmes to prevent the island states of the South Pacific from falling further under Beijing’s spell.
> 
> This could be the template to do more of the same across the developing world to give smaller countries a democratic alternative to counter authoritarian China’s multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
> 
> Whether Canada will show such leadership is an open question. But the portents are not good.
> 
> Champagne has, in his own words, shown that on China he is an acolyte of Chretien and Canada’s new ambassador to Beijing, Barton. And Canada remains far more Euro-centric than Asian-centric.
> 
> A question Champagne should ask himself as he attends his first G20 foreign minister’s meeting in Japan this weekend is whether Canada is better off in geo-strategic terms today than it was four years ago and what might make it worse off in two or three years. The answers, if Ottawa is honest with itself, should ring alarm bells.
> 
> Will they?
> 
> Editor’s Note: the line which stated Chrystia Freeland ‘did not manage to clearly state recently Canada’s opposition to how Beijing was manhandling protesters in Hong Kong’ has been corrected to state that she did.
> 
> _Matthew Fisher is an international affairs columnist and foreign correspondent who has worked abroad for 35 years. You can follow him on Twitter at @mfisheroverseas_
> https://globalnews.ca/news/6199691/francois-philippe-champagne-china/



As for the government's priorities, Cabinet Committee on Global Affairs and Public Security has Minister of Innovation, Science & Industry as chair (Navdeep Bains) and Min of Economic Development and Official Languages as vice-chair (Mélanie Joly)--neither with experience foreign policy, defence or national security.
https://pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet-committees 

Plus:



> CHINA CABLES
> Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm
> A new leak of highly classified Chinese government documents reveals the operations manual for running the mass detention camps in Xinjiang and exposed the mechanics of the region’s system of mass surveillance...
> https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/exposed-chinas-operating-manuals-for-mass-internment-and-arrest-by-algorithm/
> 
> THE CHINA CABLES
> 'They can find out anything': Leaked documents show China's surveillance of Uighurs worldwide
> _Classified documents show China tracked members of its Uighur population around the world_ [including in Canada]...
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-uighurs-canada-secret-documents-1.5369835



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

Hence, taking a pass on the foreign policy debate was a smart move by Trudeaus campaign team:

“ Global Affairs Canada and the government, writ large, barely articulated any vision regarding the country’s place in the world. Truth be told, Canada does not really have a foreign policy.

There hasn’t been a statement of priorities and what, exactly, the country’s national interest is or should be. What Canadians have heard aplenty have been the usual self-congratulatory and utterly empty bromides about being advocates for NATO, NORAD, peace, stability and rule of law.”


----------



## tomahawk6

Local District elections are over in Hong Kong with the Government losing many council seats.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50531408

'A wipeout beyond imagination'
Stephen McDonell, BBC China correspondent, in Hong Kong
Outside the Yau Ma Tei North polling station, local residents lined up to gain entry so they could watch the vote count. The doors opened and they poured into the public viewing area.
Six months into an ongoing political crisis, people have lost faith in government institutions. They wanted to make sure that this process was fair and transparent. 
As they waited for the total in their own district council to be tallied, they could see the numbers coming in from elsewhere on their mobile phones.
By their facial expressions it was clear they couldn't believe what was unfolding, and people cheered in astonishment as one surprising result came in after another.
Nobody imagined such a comprehensive wipeout, and Carrie Lam's administration will no doubt come under renewed pressure to listen to the demands of protestors following such an overwhelming defeat for her and her allies.

Big winners and losers

More than 1,000 candidates ran for 452 district council seats which, for the first time, were all contested. A further 27 district seats are allocated to representatives of rural districts.
Pro-Beijing parties held the majority of these seats ahead of the election.
In one of the biggest losses for the pro-Beijing camp, lawmaker Junius Ho - one of Hong Kong's most controversial politicians - suffered a shock defeat. 

He was stabbed earlier this month by a man pretending to be a supporter. The lawmaker has openly voiced his support for Hong Kong's police force on multiple occasions. He was in July filmed shaking hands with a group of men - suspected of being triad gangsters - who later assaulted pro-democracy protesters.


----------



## MarkOttawa

And beware some academic ties with China--Canadian universities should be really waking up to this:



> UK academia's links to Chinese defence firms 'harmful for national security'
> _Report singles out Britain for ‘unprecedented levels of collaboration’ with China’s military_
> 
> Extensive links between British universities and Chinese defence companies, including missile manufacturers, could threaten UK national security interests, the author of a report on China’s research activity overseas has said.
> 
> The UK has been singled out as having unprecedented levels of collaboration with Chinese military companies in the analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) which identifies collaborations with scientists from China’s hypersonic missile programme and on research topics ranging from smart materials to robotics.
> 
> _Sixteen university labs around the world are identified as being run jointly by Chinese defence companies, or have major investments from them. Ten are based in the UK, with the University of Manchester and Imperial College London hosting six between them. The others are in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Austria_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “[Something] that really alarmed me was the level of collaboration with Chinese missile scientists,” said Alex Joske, the report’s [see here https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tracker ] author and an analyst at ASPI, referring to the UK collaborations. “I haven’t seen anything like Chinese missile manufacturers setting up these joint labs in other countries,” he added.
> 
> Earlier this month, a report by the foreign affairs select committee revealed “alarming evidence” of Chinese interference on UK campuses, adding that universities are not adequately responding to the growing risk of China and other “autocracies” influencing academic freedom in the UK.
> 
> The UK labs mentioned in the report include the Sino-British Joint Advanced Laboratory on Control System Technology at the University of Manchester and Imperial College London’s Advanced Structure Manufacturing Technology Laboratory. Both are partnerships with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, which develops space launch vehicles and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
> 
> Other labs highlighted in the report are based at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Nottingham. Research at the Strathclyde lab includes autonomous rendezvous systems for satellites, which could be used for docking, but also for anti-satellite missions.
> 
> Beyond their industrial collaborations with Chinese defence firms, dozens of British universities also work with Chinese military institutes, such as the PLA’s Army Engineering University and the National University of Defence Technology. The work ranges from hi-tech materials and design optimisation strategies to 5G networks and artificial intelligence programmes that can identify people in low-resolution surveillance footage, and control swarms of robotic vehicles on military patrols.
> 
> Bob Seely, a former Conservative MP and co-author of a critical report on Huawei for the Henry Jackson Society, said some universities appeared to have a “laissez-faire” attitude to the potential risks. “We are in danger of being extremely naive about this,” he said.
> 
> “We have to draw a line between what is beneficial for us and China and what is not so beneficial for us. I’m incredibly wary considering the amount of IP theft, espionage and cyberattacks that have come out of China. At the moment we haven’t got the balance right at all.”
> 
> Joske said that such research was often framed as “dual-use”, but that this concept was questionable when applied to collaborations with defence companies. “If you’re dealing with a company like a Chinese missile manufacturer you don’t really need to speculate about the use,” he said.
> 
> The analysis revealed what Joske described as a fundamental misalignment between the way universities approach research collaborations and how countries, including the UK, approach security interests. “Some of the collaborations that universities are engaged in with China are almost certainly harmful for national security and contributing to things that I don’t think the taxpayer would approve of,” he said.
> 
> He added that some laboratories ran risks of inadvertently violating export controls or laws around weapons of mass destruction...
> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/25/uk-academias-links-to-chinese-defence-firms-harmful-for-national-security



Plus on espionage _bona fides_ or not of defector to Australia, Wang Liqiang, also by Alex Joske:



> Defections are messy and we may never know the full story
> https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/defections-are-messy-and-we-may-never-know-the-full-story-20191123-p53dg6.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Terry Glavin sticks his shiv in and just keeps twisting--excerpts:


> Ottawa goes meek and gentle with Beijing
> _The Trudeau government’s newfound faith in ‘appropriate discussion’ is the Canadian equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’—an easy out when dealing with the China lobby_
> 
> With Beijing’s most determined allies decisively crushed by a democratic alliance in Hong Kong’s district elections over the weekend, at least somebody’s putting up some kind of a fight against Xi Jinping’s increasingly savage aggression and belligerence. Because it certainly isn’t Canada.
> 
> An unprecedented 71.2 per cent turnout on Sunday in the ordinarily humdrum local elections resulted in a massive triumph for pro-democracy candidates and a withering rebuke to the Chinese Communist Party and its puppet Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive. Out of 18 district councils, all formerly under the establishment’s control, 17 are now in the democratic camp. Of the 452 posts up for election, Hong Kong’s democrats took nearly 400 of them, quadrupling their seat share. Pro-Beijing parties lost 243 seats.
> 
> It was a lot less uplifting that while Hongkongers were streaming to the polling stations over the weekend, at the 11th annual Halifax International Security Forum here in Canada, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan telegraphed the strongest signal yet that after several months of dithering, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has decisively retreated into the Liberal Party’s traditional approach to relations with Beijing—appeasement, capitulation, and normalization.
> 
> “We don’t consider China as an adversary,” Sajjan said at the forum’s opening on Friday.
> 
> Hongkongers certainly do. So do the Uighurs of Xinjiang, a Muslim people whose persecution has accelerated to the point that at least a million of them are confined to concentration camps and forced-labour zones laid bare in the greatest detail yet in a trove of leaked Chinese  government documents just released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. So do Tibetans, whose dispossession and oppression over the past seven decades is now being replayed in Xinjiang—and whose tragic predicament, once a hallowed cause in Canada, is now rarely if ever even mentioned in polite company...
> 
> The findings of Canada’s own National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians contradicts the weird claims Sajjan made at the Halifax conference. Last April, in its first-ever annual report, the committee officially declared China a threat to Canada’s national security, owing mainly to Beijing’s hostile espionage, its cyber threats and its subversive overseas influence-peddling operations...
> 
> For several weeks now it has been increasingly evident that Trudeau’s government is willing to surrender a great deal and to draw that line where Beijing has always wanted it drawn—with diplomatic and corporate relations inside the relationship, and all those bothersome “Canadian values” about human rights, democratic accountability, the international rules-based order and the rule of law left entirely outside of it.
> 
> Beijing has always understood the Liberal Party as the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. And now Trudeau is giving every impression that the way to repair the 11-month-old crisis in Canada-China relations—as if putting things back together again should even be Canada’s objective in this at all—is to conform with Beijing’s expectations, to a fault...
> 
> As for Xi Jinping’s explicit determination to bring down the curtain on 70 years of the western-guided international order, here’s Sajjan: “Some of the things that China from a security perspective have been doing is concerning, and we need to be mindful of that. But it’s only through the appropriate discussions that we are able to get back into a rules-based order.”
> 
> So that’s it, then. Appropriate discussions will do the trick. Thoughts and prayers, in other words. In the U.S., that’s how they deal with the stranglehold of the gun lobby. In Canada, we’ve got the China lobby.
> 
> First came the September appointment of Dominic Barton as Canada’s new ambassador to Beijing. Barton took over from the disgraced China evangelist John McCallum, and while Beijing was sad to see McCallum go, Barton was the replacement China had hoped for. In August, at a multinational summit in Bangkok, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi quietly told Canadian officials as much. Barton came pre-approved by Beijing, in other words. You can see why.
> 
> Barton had been an adviser to the state-owned China Development Bank, and he’d spent several years swinging big-money deals in Shanghai. During his years as managing partner of McKinsey & Company, the global consulting giant had taken on several Chinese state-owned corporations as clients. Just one of them was an enterprise building islands in the South China Sea, which Xi Jinping has arbitrarily annexed in defiance of the United Nations. Last year, McKinsey held its glamorous annual retreat in Xinjiang, just a short walk from one of China’s several Uighur concentration camps.
> 
> ...[new foreign minister] Francois-Philippe Champagne, came straight out of the corporate sector when he was elected in 2015. He is not known to have ever uttered so much as a cautionary word about China.
> 
> Champagne is a protegé of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, which in itself is straight away a bad sign. Chrétien’s lasting foreign-policy legacy was his role in helping Beijing re-establish relations with western democracies in the years following the Tiananmen massacres of 1989. Chrétien has busied himself in the corporate consulting business in China, and giving governments terrible advice about China, ever since he left public office 15 years ago.
> 
> Last week, the _Globe and Mail’s_ Steven Chase came upon a 2017 interview Champagne gave to the China Global Television Network, a Communist Party propaganda platform. Champagne’s flattery of the Beijing regime was as preposterously gushing as it was objectively absurd: “In a world of uncertainty, of unpredictability, of questioning about the rules that have been established to govern our trading relationship, Canada and, I would say, China, stand out as [a] beacon of stability, predictability, a rule-based system, a very inclusive society.”
> 
> Rounding things off was last week’s elevation of Mary Ng to the post of minister of international trade. It’s a file that’s just tacked onto her previous cabinet portfolio—small business and export promotion. Hired as an appointments secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office after the 2015 federal election, Ng was a political unknown until only two years ago, when she was elected MP in Markham-Thornhill, the riding held by John McCallum.
> 
> Freeland brought McCallum’s mercifully-brief diplomatic assignment to an end in January after he publicly contradicted her strict rule-of-law insistence in the Meng Wanzhou case. He’s since gone on to the lucrative corporate consultation racket in China—a pattern with these people. Last July, McCallum admitted to the South China Morning Post that he’d been counselling his former contacts in China’s foreign ministry about how Beijing should conduct itself to better assure the favourable outcome of a Liberal victory in Canada’s upcoming federal election campaign...
> 
> As for Mary Ng, there are two highlights in her strangely meteoric rise to the international trade ministry. The first was the controversy shrouding her connections to pro-Beijing activists in Ontario’s Chinese-Canadian community, including her associations with Michael Chan, the former Ontario cabinet minister who has gone hoarse-voiced lately from parroting Beijing’s propaganda lies about the Hong Kong democracy movement. The second was that time in July when she posted a photograph of herself with Senator Peter Harder, formerly of the Canada-China Business Council, hamming it up in a Beijing ice cream parlour.
> 
> Not exactly a good look, as they say, for a government that claims to be so closely focused on the entombment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in some Beijing dungeon...
> 
> David Mulroney, the former Canadian ambassador to Beijing, told the CBC on Sunday that China is “the greatest threat to human freedom on the planet,” and that while Canada has managed to stand up to Russia, to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, “China gets a pass.”
> 
> That is an unimpeachable fact.
> 
> So while Canada accelerates its business-class rapprochements with Xi Jinping’s tyranny, the task of confronting the greatest threat to freedom on the planet has fallen to teenagers choking on tear gas in the streets of Hong Kong, fighting on almost entirely alone, with bows and arrows.
> https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/ottawa-goes-meek-and-gentle-with-beijing/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Read the whole story--this is bloody awful, will our gov't have the guts to say anything serious? Thank goodness for a few very good and assiduous reporters in our media--with video:



> B.C. politician breaks silence: China detained me, is interfering ‘in our democracy’
> 
> A veteran Chinese-Canadian politician is coming forward to reveal that upon landing at the Shanghai airport in November 2015, Chinese authorities improperly detained him, separated him from his wife for eight hours, confiscated and searched his B.C. government phone and accused him of “endangering national security” before cancelling his visa and ordering him to fly back to Canada.
> 
> And since his detention, he said, China’s interference in Canadian society has increased in myriad ways, including aggressive attempts to influence our political system and elected leaders, control Chinese-Canadian immigrants, and silence all criticism of Beijing’s policies.
> 
> Richard Lee, the B.C. Liberal MLA for Burnaby from 2001 to 2017, provided Global News with a letter outlining his allegations, sent on Jan. 1, 2019, to then-foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
> 
> Lee’s letter says he had planned to go public with his story after returning to Vancouver from Shanghai, but decided not to “in consideration of the potential damage to the relationship between China and Canada.”
> 
> ...since 2015, Lee claims he has seen increasing interference in Canada’s political system by China’s government, including private warnings from consular officials that Canadian politicians refrain from speaking out on issues that might anger China.
> 
> And after China jailed Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor on vague national security grounds in late 2018, Lee says he felt reminded of the injustice in his own case...
> https://globalnews.ca/news/6228973/b-c-politician-richard-lee-china-detained-interfering-democracy/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## YZT580

All you can do  is spend your money on any label that doesn't say made in China.  It is a little thing but at least it helps me not to be hypocritical.  Heck, even our flags say made in China


----------



## MarkOttawa

Australians being forced to wake up to Red China menace--note piece on Ireland at end:



> Suddenly, the Chinese Threat to Australia Seems Very Real
> 
> 
> 
> After a businessman said Chinese agents sought to implant him in Parliament, that revelation and other espionage cases have finally signaled the end of a “let’s get rich together” era.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> CANBERRA, Australia — A Chinese defector to Australia who detailed political interference by Beijing. A businessman found dead after telling the authorities about a Chinese plot to install him in Parliament. Suspicious men following critics of Beijing in major Australian cities.
> 
> For a country that just wants calm commerce with China — the propellant behind 28 years of steady growth — the revelations of the past week have delivered a jolt.
> 
> Fears of Chinese interference once seemed to hover indistinctly over Australia. Now, Beijing’s political ambitions, and the espionage operations that further them, suddenly feel local, concrete and ever-present.
> 
> “It’s become the inescapable issue,” said Hugh White, a former intelligence official who teaches strategic studies at the Australian National University. “We’ve underestimated how quickly China’s power has grown along with its ambition to use that power.”
> Sign up for the Australia Letter Newsletter
> 
> American officials often describe Australia as a test case, the ally close enough to Beijing to see what could be coming for others.
> 
> In public and in private, they’ve pushed Australia’s leaders to confront China more directly — pressure that may only grow after President Trump signed legislation to impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials over human rights abuses in Hong Kong.
> 
> Even as it confronts the specter of brazen espionage, Australia’s government has yet to draw clear boundaries for an autocratic giant that is both an economic partner and a threat to freedom, a conundrum faced by many countries, but more acutely by Australia.
> 
> Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to insist that Australia need not choose between China and the United States. A new foreign interference law has barely been enforced, and secrecy is so ingrained that even lawmakers and experts lack the in-depth information they need.
> 
> As a result, the country’s intelligence agencies have raised alarms about China in ways that most Australian politicians avoid. The agencies have never been flush with expertise on China, including Chinese speakers, yet they are now in charge of disentangling complex claims of nefarious deeds, all vigorously denied by China...[read on]
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/world/australia/china-spying-wang-liqiang-nick-zhao.html
Click to expand...


Meanwhile CCP is scaring overseas Chinese in Ireland and terrifying the few Uyghurs there:



> China has ‘a lot of spies’ in Ireland, activists claim
> CHINESE POLITICAL ACTIVISTS LIVING IN IRELAND CLAIM THAT OTHER CHINESE PEOPLE HERE ARE ‘KEEPING AN EYE ON EVERYONE’ FOR SIGNS OF DISLOYALTY TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY
> 
> It’s not often that prospective interviewees turn up at The Irish Times wearing face masks and reflector sunglasses, with black baseball hats pulled low over their foreheads. But that’s what happened when three supporters of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong agreed to be interviewed. All living in Dublin, two are from Hong Kong and the other from the Chinese mainland.
> 
> “They are killing people,” a woman from Hong Kong says soon after the interview began. “That is what is happening now. The Hong Kong government, and the police, they are really killing people.”
> 
> Each of the interviewees is concerned about the potential consequences should it become known that they had spoken with the Irish media. One has already had the experience of losing her job with a Chinese employer in Dublin after her image attending a protest here was posted on Chinese social media.
> 
> Over the past fortnight, The Irish Times has been speaking with people from the Tibetan and Hong Kong communities about living in Ireland while being careful not to come to the attention of the Beijing authorities. No one from the small Irish community of Uighur Turkic Muslims, from the northwestern province of Xinjiang, would agree to be interviewed...[lots more]
> https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/china-has-a-lot-of-spies-in-ireland-activists-claim-1.4097005



Mark
Ottawa


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Maclean's Magazine has published numerous articlea about Chinese influence in Canada and the Canadian government's lack of response. I did a quick search on "Startpage" using "macleans trudeau and china" and got a solid 2 1/2 pages of hits with articles outlining the problem.

The issue isn't just the government, Canadians as a whole seem uninterested in the issue (these articles are not hidden in academic journals or behind paywalls) so there is little call for the government to do anything about it. I suspect that the real wake up call will be when the issue is far to deeply entrenched to deal with, we already see Chinese officials apparently coordinating Chinese students in Canadian universities to make counter protests against supporters of the pro democracy protests in Hong Kong. Who knows what else is going on in the background?

Unless and until the public engages in the issue, there will likely be no response by the current government, and probably not buy any future government as well.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Maclean's Magazine has published numerous articlea about Chinese influence in Canada and the Canadian government's lack of response. I did a quick search on "Startpage" using "macleans trudeau and china" and got a solid 2 1/2 pages of hits with articles outlining the problem ... these articles are not hidden in academic journals or behind paywalls ...


I wonder how different things would be if some people weren't so adamant about _wanting_ the public to _*not*_ trust MSM like Maclean's?   #FakeNewsBoughtMediaUntilYouAgreeWithIt


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now here's something where Justin Trudeau could show that great Canadian "leadership" that the world, in some Canadians' minds, apparently craves--fat chance:



> Opinion: The U.S. should boycott Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics
> 
> The evidence of abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang has been mounting over the past year. Testimony from former detainees, satellite imagery and publicly available local government documentation have all pointed to the building of concentration camps, the detention of a million or more Uighurs and other Muslim minorities and rampant abuses against the detained, including torture and sexual violence. Conditions outside the camps are not much better, with a security apparatus that is oppressive and omnipresent.
> 
> The recent leak of the Xinjiang Papers — more than 400 pages of internal Chinese government documents — provide proof that China’s leaders are directly responsible for the abuses in Xinjiang. President Xi Jinping undoubtedly set the direction for that policy, with disastrous consequences for China’s Muslims.
> 
> Speaking on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Xinjiang Papers showed China’s intent to “effectively erase” the Uighur people. These are strong words and raise the question of whether China’s leaders have genocidal intent. Some reported abuses in Xinjiang — including forced sterilizations and the separation of children from their families — could, indeed, constitute genocide.
> 
> The question is what to do about this. The State Department has worked to publicize the plight of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and has placed visa restrictions on culpable individuals. The Commerce Department has issued a list of Chinese companies complicit in the abuses, barring Americans from doing business with them. The publication of the Xinjiang Papers should encourage the Treasury Department to impose sanctions on senior leaders, including Chen Quanguo, the Xinjiang party boss.
> 
> But more must be done. If the United States and other nations are to be successful in convincing China to moderate its policies in Xinjiang, they should target Xi directly. Fortunately, the international community has good leverage to use against him: Beijing will host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.
> 
> The International Olympic Committee should revisit its decision to award the Games to Beijing in light of the overwhelming evidence of Chinese crimes against the people in Xinjiang. Unfortunately, the IOC has shown that it’s incapable of standing up for human rights. That means that the United States and other concerned countries must act.
> 
> The Trump administration, with congressional support, should begin working now to build an international coalition that will call on the IOC to move or cancel the Games unless China closes the camps and ends abuses in Xinjiang.
> 
> If the IOC refuses to play ball, which is likely, the coalition should be prepared to threaten a boycott of the 2022 Olympics and to hold parallel “Freedom Games” if Beijing does not rapidly alter course. If the Trump administration fails to act, Congress could call on the U.S. Olympic Committee to announce its own boycott. If the committee refuses, Congress should look into revoking its federal charter.
> 
> It would be nice to separate sports from politics, but China uses international sport to advance its political interests. Just as Hu Jintao employed the 2008 Summer Games to signal China’s “arrival” on the world stage, Xi will use the 2022 Games to signal to his own people that his “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”is well underway. The 2022 Olympics will be a grand propaganda spectacle in which participating countries will play supporting roles.
> 
> A cancellation, relocation or boycott of the Games would mark a significant international and domestic embarrassment for Xi. News of the reasons behind such a development would certainly make its way past China’s Great Firewall. Using the Olympics as leverage could be quite effective because doing so would challenge Xi’s leadership.
> 
> If the U.S. fails to find international partners, Washington should be prepared for a solitary boycott. To participate in the Beijing 2022 Games despite the atrocities being committed against the Uighurs would be to acquiesce to those abuses. By standing up for human rights principles, the U.S. could inspire others to follow our lead while showing abusers that, when it comes to defending human rights, America is no paper tiger.
> 
> _Michael Mazza is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute. _
> https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-29/boycott-beijing-2022-olympics-uighurs-camps



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Sure, not directly related to China:



> ASIO takes lead as spy agencies are put on war footing
> 
> An elite intelligence taskforce led by ASIO, the Australian Signals Directorate and Defence intelligence will be created to put the country on a virtual war footing to combat national security threats from an unprecedented level of foreign interference and espionage.
> 
> The move will see the role of ASIO expand for the first time to share classified intelligence with Australian Federal Police on foreign interference. The pooling of intelligence — through security investigations conducted by ASIO and criminal investigations under the AFP — will help determine whether charges are laid against foreign targets or whether they are quietly thrown out of the country.
> 
> The taskforce will also bring in aerial and satellite intelligence-gathering used by the Defence Department’s Australian Geo­spatial-Intelligence Organisation, as well as drawing on Austrac’s ­financial intelligence capabilities.
> 
> The formation of the unit, which will begin with initial new funding of almost $90m, comes amid the Chinese spy scandal involving claims by defector Wang Liqiang that he was a Chinese spy. The validity of Mr Wang’s claims have been questioned as ASIO seeks to confirm his story while confirming that it is also investigating claims China sought to install an agent in Australia’s federal parliament.
> 
> The government said the creation of the taskforce was not ­related to the recent claims of Chinese interference and that it had been in development for months. It was, however, signed off by cabinet last week.
> 
> Scott Morrison confirmed the establishment of the Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce, saying it would elevate the intelligence agencies’ abilities to detect and disrupt foreign interference attempts and bring prosecutions under criminal espionage offences passed last year.
> 
> “Our No 1 priority is to keep Australians safe,” the Prime Minister said. “Our security and intelligence agencies have been clear that the threat from foreign interference has never been greater.
> 
> “This taskforce is our next step to combat those threats as they evolve and to identify and disrupt the very people who want to undermine our democracy and way of life. My government is constantly monitoring and reviewing the threats our country faces so our agencies have the right tools at their disposal.”..
> https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/asio-takes-lead-as-spy-agencies-are-put-onwar-footing/news-story/85ca619855e98408a03689fbc8be012f



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Sure, not directly related to China:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Story not behind paywall:



> Spies called in to oversee taskforce amid heightened foreign interference threat
> _Australia's domestic spy agency ASIO will lead a new taskforce aimed at strengthening Australia's response to the threat of foreign interference._
> 
> Key points:
> 
> The Government will spend almost $88 million to crack down on foreign interference
> It comes amid warnings foreign interference poses a greater threat than terrorism
> A spy-lead taskforce will oversee Australia's efforts to counter foreign efforts
> 
> The Federal Government plans to spend almost $88 million to establish a new Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce.
> 
> The taskforce will expand the resources of the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator — which sits within the Home Affair Department — to help "disrupt and deter anyone attempting to undermine our national interests".
> 
> "This threat has been evolving and we have been staying ahead of it by building that capability now over many years, and most recently this initiative, which improves the collaboration, ensures that the tools they have are world-class and they can work together to identify, disrupt and prosecute," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.
> 
> The taskforce will be led by a senior Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officer, and include investigators from the Australian Federal Police and staff from a range of security agencies.
> 
> The Government intends for it to increase intelligence collection, assessment, law enforcement capabilities and collaboration and decision-making between agencies to result in more disruptions of possible interference.
> 
> It comes amid heightened national security concerns raised by allegations of Chinese espionage, influence over political parties and multiple cyber attacks on universities and federal agencies.
> 
> Shortly before retiring earlier this year, outgoing ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis said foreign interference presented a greater threat than terrorism.
> 
> The taskforce comes a week after it was revealed Chinese man Wang Liqiang was seeking political asylum in Australia after going public with allegations about Chinese spying.
> 
> The Government has dismissed suggestions the taskforce was in response to that case, and insisted it had been under development for months.
> 
> It also comes amid suggestions China was grooming Bo "Nick" Zhao to be a Chinese spy inside Australia's Parliament.
> 
> He was found dead in a Melbourne motel room in March after reportedly approaching ASIO.
> 
> "On the advice that I've received, I don't have any concern in relation to issues domestically... in relation to this particular matter," Mr Dutton told reporters in Canberra on Monday.
> 
> "I think the [ASIO] director-general, though, will have something further to say in due course, and I'll let that investigation run its course...
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-02/asio-to-lead-foreign-interference-taskforce/11756060



Of course this is all related to China. Will Justin Trudeau and our compradors ever wake up and smell the Maotai?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## The Bread Guy

On the first anniversary of her detention, Huawei exec Meng Wanzhou waxes philosophical ...
_*"Time to read and paint: Detained Huawei executive pens poetic letter from house arrest"*_
Reading & painting -- just like all those Uighurs in Chinese custody, right?  

Here's her full blog post if you're interested - text also attached if you don't want to click on a Huawei link.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meng bemoans her sorry state, yet waxes philosophically on the opportunities it gives her for personal reflection and self-improvement. One wonders what Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor might say about their situations as they semi-rot in jail in China, not in a mansion with lots of freedom of movement and other liberties.

Funny old world. Know your enemies and stand fast. Got that, Justin and the Compradors?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And now the _Globe and Mail_, which has been hard on the China case for quite a few years, lets loose with both barrels:



> Beijing’s harshness is forcing Canada to rethink its China delusions
> 
> The one silver lining in the extradition case against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, now entering its second year, is that Beijing’s behaviour has awakened Canadians – including senior members of the Trudeau government – to the nature of China’s Communist Party regime. Many in Ottawa and the business community had talked themselves into believing fantasies about the hard men who run Beijing. Some imagined that, although China might play rough with other countries, Canada would somehow be entitled to special treatment.
> 
> Instead, Beijing has spent the last year giving Canada a special education in how it sees our not-at-all special relationship.
> 
> We should be thankful for the lessons. The Trudeau government, and the entire political and business establishment, must study them carefully. It may allow this country to finally get over its China delusions.
> 
> China, and the Communist regime that runs it, are not going anywhere. We will have to deal with them, hopefully on peaceful and respectful terms, for a long time to come. But the starting point for the relationship has to be Canada being honest with itself about who we are dealing with.
> 
> When Canada followed the rules of its extradition treaty with its closest ally, Beijing had no hesitation in taking two of our citizens hostage – there is no other way to describe what happened to Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig – with the price of ransom being Ms. Meng’s release.
> 
> All the decades’ worth of treacly odes to Dr. Norman Bethune, Mao’s pet Canadian; all the gratitude Canada supposed it was owed for early recognition of the Communist regime; all the alleged reverence for Trudeau père that allegedly would carry over to Trudeau fils – all turned out to be worth exactly nothing.
> 
> Totalitarian dictatorships are not sentimental. That’s not something Canada should have had to learn.
> 
> The two Michaels are of course still locked up, and there is no sign of their release. Yet despite the importance of their condition, the long-term goal of Canada’s China foreign policy is bigger than securing the safe return of two innocents.
> 
> Canada of course has to continue to demand their release. But it is essential that Ottawa understand that our prisoners in Beijing are also levers that can be used to pressure Canada into going silent on other matters – human rights, the rule of law, Chinese spying, Hong Kong, and a long list of worries that Washington and other Western governments have – in favour of focusing on what China wants, and how it wants Canada to behave so as to avoid being subjected to future hostage-takings.
> 
> Canada has never had a relationship like this. The Soviet Union was a superpower, but it was also a clear adversary. We joined the world’s most important military alliance to oppose it, and it was part of a separate economic system, with which we had almost no trade. The lines between the two worlds were thick and bright.
> 
> China, in contrast, is part of all of the formerly “Western” or “developed” world’s main institutions. It is our second-most important economic relationship, after the United States. And China is an economic success story; its growth over the past four decades has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
> 
> Yet China is also run by a regime that operates rather similar to how the Trump administration would if it were unfettered by such basic constraints as elections, independent judges, free speech or the rule of law [A STUPID BUT SADLY NECESSARY SOP TO MAINTAIN CREDIBILITY WITH CERTAIN CANADIANS].
> 
> While there was a time when its party dictatorship appeared to be moving closer to democratic norms, with the Communist Party dispensing with cults of personality and loosening party control, under Xi Jinping that trend is aggressively reversing. It is now clear that Beijing joined the international community’s institutions without sharing the international community’s practices and values.
> 
> To survive in this new world, Canada needs allies and alliances. Beijing has become expert at playing divide-and-conquer, punishing those who don’t do as they’re told and rewarding those that go along to get along. And too many, including Canada, have too often been too ready to go along.
> 
> From Sussex Drive to Bay Street, a lot of people would like nothing better than for the past year’s nastiness to be forgotten. But that would mean forgetting all the valuable lessons learned.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-beijings-harshness-is-forcing-canada-to-rethink-its-china-delusions/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## The Bread Guy

Hmmmmm ...


> The founder of Huawei says the Chinese tech giant is moving its U.S. research center to Canada due to American sanctions on the company.
> 
> In an interview with Toronto's Global and Mail newspaper, Ren Zhengfei said the move was necessary because Huawei would be blocked from interacting with U.S. employees.
> 
> Huawei Technologies Ltd. is the No. 2 global smartphone brand and the biggest maker of network gear for phone carriers. U.S. authorities say the company is a security risk, which Huawei denies, and announced curbs in May on its access to American components and technology.
> 
> The Trump administration announced a 90-day reprieve on some sales to Huawei. The government said that would apply to components and technology needed to support wireless networks in rural areas.
> Ren gave no details but Huawei confirmed in June it had cut 600 jobs at its Silicon Valley research center in Santa Clara, California, leaving about 250 employees. A Huawei spokesman said the company had no further comment.
> 
> ``The research and development center will move from the United States, and Canada will be the center,'' Ren said in a video excerpt of the interview on the Globe and Mail website. ``According to the U.S. ban, we couldn't communicate with, call, email or contact our own employees in the United States.'' ...


----------



## a_majoor

China's worst nightmare coming true: Hong Kong style (and inspired) protests appear to be starting in the mainland:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/chicom_nightmare_hong_kong_protests_spread_to_gigantic_guangdong.html



> *Chicom Nightmare: Hong Kong protests spread to gigantic Guangdong province*
> By Monica Showalter
> 
> The Chicoms have a problem.
> 
> Seems the Hong Kong protests they are so desperate to tamp down have started to ignite elsewhere, deep into China's cities.
> 
> Here's one the Chicoms really didn't want:
> 
> Protesters in southern Guangdong province, China, took to the streets last week to demand the communist government not build a polluting crematorium near their town, adopting slogans common to the Hong Kong protest movement, Time magazine noted on Monday.
> 
> The Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, which openly supports the anti-communist movement, reported the use of slogans such as "revolution of our times," which China considers seditious hate speech, and "just like you, Hong Kong!" in Guangdong. As China heavily censors coverage of the Hong Kong protests and bans all statements of support from the few permitted social media sites in the country, the adoption of the Hong Kong movement's slogans and tactics is a sign that people within Communist China are informing themselves regarding the protests through unapproved means.
> 
> The Guardian reports that the Chicoms stomped them out, like an out-of-control campfire.  But the danger to the regime remains.
> 
> As I argued earlier, this is Beijing's worst nightmare come to life:
> 
> In short, there's evidence that amid that sea of millions of Hongkongers protesting communism from China, some of them are mainland Chinese. Message: the mainland Chinese are getting ideas. The Chicoms of Beijing cannot wall them out from Hong Kong nor can they stop this.
> 
> And this raises the specter of what happens when they return to China, because many of these Chinese have their families there, and they will. Are these Chinese going to return back to China and spread that democracy 'virus' they passionately embraced in Hong Kong, kicking off similar protests in Chengdu, Tianjin, Harbin, Shenzhen, Wuhan and other giant cities to duplicate what the Hongkongers launched? It actually seems plausible. What's more, it will be an awakening as Chinese finally come to the realization that they deserve the same freedoms their fellow Chinese in Hong Kong have enjoyed until recently. When ten or twelve Chinese megacities start holding the kinds of protests Hong Kong is holding, Bejing's old gray rulers will have a hell of a problem on their hands. And that is their worst, their very worst, nightmare.
> 
> Not only is China failing to keep the revolt in Hong Kong out of the consciousness of the Chinese people, protests now are taking inspiration from the Hong Kongers.  And in the worst possible place: in Guangdong province, which is gargantuan and shares a common language with Hong Kong.  Here's the Straits Times of Singapore's description of where this is happening:
> 
> Guangdong, China's most prosperous province, lies at the heart of the Greater Bay Area — a mega economic zone that includes nine cities in the province, Hong Kong and Macau — and is hungry for capital, talent and technology[.]



Rest of the article is at the link. One of the takeaway points in the larger article is the province is full of people from all different parts of China, much like Alberta has Canadians from all parts of the Dominion flocking there for jobs. If the protests take root in Guangdong Province, there are linkages from there to every other region and ethnic group in China. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese deal with this.


----------



## MarkOttawa

More diplomacy with Chinese characteristics:


> Chinese ambassador warns Canada against adopting motion calling for sanctions
> _Ambassador Cong Peiwu reacted to comments by two Conservative senators_
> 
> China's ambassador to Canada is threatening what he called "very firm countermeasures" should Parliament adopt a motion calling for sanctions against Chinese leaders.
> 
> Ambassador Cong Peiwu reacted today to comments by two Conservative senators who are planning to table a motion next week calling on the Trudeau government to impose sanctions on China for its alleged human rights abuses.
> 
> Cong told reporters in Montreal that if the Senate and House of Commons were to adopt such a motion, it would be a serious violation of Chinese domestic affairs.
> 
> "We firmly oppose this kind of behaviour. And I think it'd cause serious damage to our bilateral relations ... we'll make very firm countermeasures to this," he said.
> 
> "It is not in the interest of the Canada side. So we do hope that we stop this kind of dangerous activity."
> 
> Sen. Leo Housakos told Maclean's magazine earlier this week that he and Sen. Thanh Hai Ngo think Canada needs to show leadership on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
> 
> Canada-China relations have been strained since Dec. 1, 2018, when RCMP arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver's airport, at the request of the United States.
> 
> Days later, two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — were detained in China on allegations of undermining national security, and the two men continue to be held in that country.
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-cong-sanctions-1.5386020



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Matthew Fisher lets Justin Trudeau and the compradors have it with both barrels:



> COMMENTARY: Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have been in a Chinese jail for one year
> 
> It will be one year this Tuesday that China has held both Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor hostage.
> 
> It is an anniversary that no Canadian will celebrate and few in other western countries know much about.
> 
> The detention of the two Michaels, what China has tried to do to try to thwart Hong Kong’s democratic protests, and the jailing of one million or more Uighur Muslims in harsh reeducation camps, have moved the needle so much that only one Canadian in 10 has a favourable view of China, according to a Nanos poll published four months ago.
> 
> Despite Canadians’ negative feelings about China, Beijing’s jailing of the two Michaels on spurious allegations, and the stiff trade sanctions that China has slapped on Canadian agricultural imports, _Ottawa remains hell-bent on its China First Policy. Prominent Canadians who have had close business ties to China, such as former prime minister Jean Chretien and Ottawa’s new ambassador, Dominic Barton, continue to rally Canadian business leaders to cash in on the bonanza over there_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Kovrig, a diplomat on extended leave from Global Affairs Canada and working as a senior analyst for International Crisis Group in Hong Kong was the first of the Michaels to be detained during a visit to Beijing. Not long afterwards, Spavor, a Korean-speaking entrepreneur who encourages closer cultural and business ties with North Korea, was seized in a town by Chinese authorities on the China-North Korea border. It is alleged that both Canadians had endangered China’s security.
> 
> The arrest of the two Michaels was in obvious retaliation for Canada having a few days earlier detained one of China’s most favoured daughters, Meng Wanzhou, while a court in Vancouver considers whether to extradite her to the United States to face 13 bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy charges. The allegations stem from accusations that Meng, as chief financial officer of China’s largest company, Huawei, which was started by her father, had violated American sanctions against Iran.
> 
> What appears to irk Canadians most is that although no charges have been filed yet against Kovrig and Spavor, they have been held under strong lights that are never turned off with no access to their families and only monthly consular visits. At the same time Meng was swiftly granted bail and has been living in her fancy Vancouver home. Other than wearing an ankle bracelet to make sure she does not leave the city, the billionairess has been free to swan around town while her father boasts that he has more money than Ottawa.
> 
> China’s former envoy to Ottawa, Lu Shaye, publicly accused Canadians of being “racists” and “white supremacists” because Meng had been stopped as she changed planes while flying from China to Mexico.
> 
> Such insults by an ambassador would usually provoke outrage and probably result in his expulsion. But _Canada’s timorous response to almost anything that China says or does these days has Canada looking spineless, weak-kneed or faint-hearted. Pick your body part_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The strategy seems to be to endure any abuse that China’s Communist dictatorship hurls, lest complaining distresses Chairman Xi Jinping. Publicly rebuking China might, of course, make the two Michaels’ dreadful situation even worse. Sadly, it is hard not to conclude that of equal or greater importance to the Canadian government is that if it were to respond to China as China has to Canada, it could scupper the eternal hope of much greater trade with that country — though based on the current circumstances, this looks like a fatuous pipe dream.
> 
> READ MORE: Huawei’s CEO wants to move research centre from U.S. to Canada: report
> 
> Huawei is heavily backed by the state and has 5G cell telephone technology that it is keen to sell in Canada and elsewhere. To curry favour with Ottawa, it made a bribe of sorts last week, announcing plans to move its North American research centre from the U.S. to Ontario.
> 
> Yet at almost the same moment China’s new ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu, fired another diplomatic rocket. Cong warned Canada of “very firm countermeasures” if it ordered sanctions against any officials responsible for actions against Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators and the appalling treatment of Uighers. A gloomy subtext to these outrages has been growing concern over how China might respond to Hong Kong-style civil disobedience by millions of Taiwanese if Beijing finally makes good on its longstanding promise to invade their prosperous democracy...[read on]
> https://globalnews.ca/news/6262649/michael-kovrig-michael-spavor-detention-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

That diplomacy with Chinese characteristics on the Hong Kong front, Canada noted:



> China launches PR blitz to combat ‘foreign interference’ in Hong Kong
> 
> _*Beijing’s ambassadors around the world are taking an assertive – and sometimes aggressive – stance against their hosts’ views on the city’s unrest
> *Analysts say heightened activism aims to prevent further internationalisation of China’s domestic issue_
> 
> China’s diplomats are waging an increasingly assertive public relations campaign to counter growing international criticism over its handling of the unrest in Hong Kong, now in its seventh month.
> 
> Diplomatic and political pundits believe the heightened activism among Chinese envoys underlines an overriding priority to prevent further internationalisation of what Beijing insists is an internal issue, in the wake of Washington’s support for the city’s anti-government protesters.
> 
> Already buffeted by a prolonged trade war, China’s relations with the United States deteriorated further when President Donald Trump last month signed into law the Hong Kong Democracy and Human Rights Act, which American lawmakers passed almost unanimously.
> 
> More alarmingly for Beijing, Hong Kong protesters have been campaigning for other countries to follow Washington’s lead and pass similar bills in support of their cause.
> 
> In response, ambassadors in Europe – where a major shift is under way in relations with China – and other countries along the geopolitical fault line between Beijing and Washington, are speaking out as never before.
> 
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi
> and his predecessor, Politburo member Yang Jiechi
> – who both serve on the Communist Party’s coordination group for Hong Kong and Macau affairs – have led the way in blasting what Beijing sees as foreign interference, as Australia, Canada and Europe have joined the US in voicing support for the Hong Kong protesters.
> In Britain, China’s longest-serving ambassador Liu Xiaoming
> has been especially busy since the mass protests broke out in early June.
> 
> He was among the first batch of Chinese officials to comment after the initial rally – two days before any official statements were issued by Beijing’s top bodies overseeing the city, the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong.
> 
> Apart from giving speeches and penning opinion pieces for newspapers around the world, Liu has so far hosted three press briefings specifically on Hong Kong and taken more than a dozen interviews from British, American and Chinese media outlets, according to his embassy’s website.
> 
> Liu’s messaging has been clear and consistent – unswerving support for the city’s embattled local government and police force and condemnation of foreign interference and the violence perpetrated by protesters.
> 
> His lead has been followed by Chinese envoys in other European countries, such as Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Finland and the Netherlands, who have also spoken out, sometimes repeatedly, on the issue.
> 
> _Ambassadors in Canada and Singapore, as well as dozens of others in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America have issued statements to local media, vigorously pushing Beijing’s official line on the demonstrations_ [emphasis added].
> 
> China’s foreign ministry and its diplomats in recent months have become visibly active on Twitter, which is blocked in mainland China, with envoys to the US, Britain, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Austria joining the service this year...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3041645/china-launches-pr-blitz-combat-foreign-interference-hong-kong



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And on the Confucius Institutes front:


> Belgian university closes its Chinese state-funded Confucius Institute after spying claims
> 
> _*Vrije Universiteit Brussel says cooperating with the institute is no longer consistent with its policies
> #Security services had accused Song Xinning, former head of the institute at the university, of being a recruiter for Chinese intelligence_
> 
> One of Belgium’s leading universities has decided to close the Chinese state-funded Confucius Institute
> on its campus, following accusations that the former head professor conducted espionage
> for China.
> 
> Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) confirmed that it would not extend its contract with the institute when the agreement expires next June, although it did not refer to the espionage claims.
> 
> The university said cooperation with Confucius Institute – whose stated aims include promoting Chinese language and culture and facilitating cultural exchanges – was “not in line with [our] principles of free research”, based on the information it had obtained.
> 
> “The university is of the opinion that cooperating with the institution is no longer consistent with its policies and objectives,” it said in a statement on its website.
> 
> _In October, Belgian security services accused Song Xinning, former head of the Confucius Institute at VUB, of working as a recruiter for Chinese intelligence.
> 
> The Belgian newspaper De Morgen reported that VUB had ignored a warning from the state security service about the institute’s activities_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Song was subsequently barred from entering the Schengen Area – comprising 26 European countries – for eight years.
> 
> In an earlier interview with the South China Morning Post, Song said Belgian immigration authorities had informed him on July 30 that his visa would not be renewed, because he “supported Chinese intelligence activities”...
> 
> Confucius Institutes, which are overseen by China’s Ministry of Education, have been set up in more than 480 higher education institutions around the world. Over the past decade, they have come under increased scrutiny from Western governments over allegations that they have links to espionage activities.
> 
> Confucius Institutes have been established in almost 500 higher education institutions globally. Photo: Doris LiuConfucius Institutes have been established in almost 500 higher education institutions globally. Photo: Doris Liu
> Confucius Institutes have been established in almost 500 higher education institutions globally. Photo: Doris Liu
> One of Belgium’s leading universities has decided to close the Chinese state-funded Confucius Institute
> on its campus, following accusations that the former head professor conducted espionage
> for China.
> 
> Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) confirmed that it would not extend its contract with the institute when the agreement expires next June, although it did not refer to the espionage claims.
> 
> The university said cooperation with Confucius Institute – whose stated aims include promoting Chinese language and culture and facilitating cultural exchanges – was “not in line with [our] principles of free research”, based on the information it had obtained.
> 
> “The university is of the opinion that cooperating with the institution is no longer consistent with its policies and objectives,” it said in a statement on its website.
> Song Xinning, pictured in 2016 at the University of Helsinki’s Confucius Institute, has been barred from entering a bloc of European countries. Photo: University of Helsinki website
> Song Xinning, pictured in 2016 at the University of Helsinki’s Confucius Institute, has been barred from entering a bloc of European countries. Photo: University of Helsinki website
> In October, Belgian security services accused Song Xinning
> , former head of the Confucius Institute at VUB, of working as a recruiter for Chinese intelligence.
> 
> The Belgian newspaper De Morgen reported that VUB had ignored a warning from the state security service about the institute’s activities.
> SUBSCRIBE TO US China Trade War
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> How Belgium became a den of spies and gateway for China
> 
> Song was subsequently barred from entering the Schengen Area – comprising 26 European countries – for eight years.
> 
> In an earlier interview with the South China Morning Post, Song said Belgian immigration authorities had informed him on July 30 that his visa would not be renewed, because he “supported Chinese intelligence activities”.
> 
> Song said the decision had followed his refusal to cooperate with a US diplomat based in Brussels. He denied sharing contact and work information with the Chinese authorities, or receiving help from them after his travel ban became public.
> 
> Jonathan Holslag, an international relations professor at VUB and one of the most vocal critics of VUB’s Confucius Institute, called the university’s decision “brave”.
> University of Michigan says it will cut ties with Confucius Institute
> 
> “This should stand as an example for many European universities,” he said. “It is also in the interest of Chinese students, because they are the main victims of the politicisation of academic exchanges and the suspicion that elicits.”
> 
> Confucius Institutes, which are overseen by China’s Ministry of Education, have been set up in more than 480 higher education institutions around the world. Over the past decade, they have come under increased scrutiny from Western governments over allegations that they have links to espionage activities.
> 
> Several of the institutes in the United States and Australia have been forced to close because of allegations that they had undue influence on campus, while several Chinese academics and researchers have been investigated, dismissed and even arrested in the US on suspicion of stealing intellectual property or failing to disclose funding ties with Chinese universities.
> 
> In Europe, the Confucius Institutes at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Stockholm University in Sweden and University Lyon in France have all been closed...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3041617/belgian-university-closes-its-chinese-state-funded-confucius



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

One way of looking at Xi Jinping:



> MLI's Policy-Maker of the Year: Xi Jinping
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> CCP General-Secretary Xi Jinping as the top Canadian policy-maker? Sadly, yes. Beijing has reshaped Canada in ways that most Canadians don’t fully appreciate, and we ignore Xi’s growing influence here at our peril.
> 
> *By Charles Burton, December 12, 2019*
> 
> Each year, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute looks back at who or what had the greatest impact on Canadian federal public policy over the past 12 months. That person or institution is named the Policy-Maker of the Year, and always graces the cover of the December issue of the institute’s flagship magazine, Inside Policy. This year is no exception.
> 
> Of course, this does not necessarily mean the most positive impact, although some of Canada’s leading lights have been so recognized, including Truth and Reconciliation Commission chair Murray Sinclair, former foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, former foreign minister John Baird, and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. But what we are really looking for is the one figure who has had a dominant role, for good or ill, in shaping government policy on the issues that matter most for Canadians.
> 
> Yet, this year a disheartening and desultory election campaign capped what has been a rather sorry year for fans of visionary political or policy leadership. We realized that the person who had done the most to shape public policy in Canada wasn’t even a Canadian. Indeed, on the question of who has done the most to reshape government policies, only one name truly comes to mind – Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General-Secretary Xi Jinping, though his impact on public policy is decidedly not in the best interests of Canadians.
> 
> Xi Jinping has forced more policy responses on Canada than any foreign leader, including even the US President. What follows lays out for our readers what we think has been Mr. Xi’s outsized policy influence in Canada...[read on]
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/policy-maker-year-xi-jinping/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting counterpoint looking at yet another fissure in the Chinese socio-political landscape. Once again, this isn't something which can be jumped aboard (at least not without proper understanding, as is detailed by the article in the link), and the situation likely isn't as dire as suggested, but along with all the other articles that point at various weak points in the Chinese facade, the overall impression is of a strong but brittle structure. If something were to fracture (and it might even be something no one is looking at right now), the possibility of a "cascade failure" is in the background:

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/fissures-in-facade.html



> Fissures in the Facade
> 
> [snip]
> A recent news item captures the anxieties of this wide swathe of people in a way that most outside coverage of China does not.
> 
> Here is the story as reported by the New York Times:
> On the first anniversary of her arrest in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, issued an open letter describing how she experienced fear, pain, disappointment, helplessness, torment and acceptance of the unknown.
> 
> She wrote at length about the support she received from her colleagues, about friendly people at a courthouse in Vancouver and about “numerous” Chinese online users who expressed their trust. Her letter, posted on Monday, was not well received on the Chinese internet, where Ms. Meng is known — in a term meant to be endearing — as “princess” because she is a daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei.
> 
> n the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo, many users posted the numbers 985, 996, 251 and 404 in the comment section below her letter. They were slyly referring to a former Huawei employee who graduated from one of the country’s top universities in a program code-named 985, worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week and was jailed for 251 days after he demanded severance pay when his contract wasn’t renewed.
> 
> His story went viral in China, generating angry responses online. That resulted in 404 error messages as articles and comments were deleted, a sign of China’s censors at work.
> 
> The former employee, Li Hongyuan, was eventually released from jail with no charges and received $15,000 in government compensation last week. He shared his story online last week, and that was when the hit to Huawei’s reputation began....
> 
> “One enjoyed a sunny Canadian mansion while the other enjoyed the cold and damp detention cell in Shenzhen,” Jiang Feng, a psychologist, commented on the Quora-like question-and-answer site Zhihu....
> 
> The anger on social media was also indicative of new insecurity among members of China’s middle class, who have never experienced an economic downturn and have always thought they had more protections than lower-paid migrant workers. People said they could see themselves in Mr. Li.
> 
> “Many middle-class Chinese used to believe that if they went to good schools, worked hard and cared little about the current affairs they would be able to realize their Chinese dreams,” a blogger wrote on Weibo. “Now their dreams are in tatters.”
> 
> Mr. Li, a Huawei employee for 12 years, negotiated a $48,000 severance package in March 2018, according to interviews he gave to Chinese media outlets. But he didn’t get an end-of-the-year bonus that he said had been promised to him. He sued Huawei in November last year.
> 
> A month later, he was detained in Shenzhen and accused of leaking commercial secrets. He was officially arrested in January on an extortion accusation. But he was released in August with no charges. He did not respond to interview requests.....
> 
> In a sign that many middle-class professionals are worried that what happened to Mr. Li could happen to them, online users circulated articles about jail life, especially in the Longgang detention center in Shenzhen, where Mr. Li spent more than eight months. Huawei is based in Shenzhen’s Longgang district.
> 
> Some online users are circulating a three-part blog post by a programmer who spent over a year in the detention center for working on gaming and gambling software. Gambling is illegal in China. The blogger wrote in detail what it was like to live in a 355-square-foot cell with 55 people in tropical weather — what they ate, wore and did every day....
> 
> Many Chinese are especially outraged by the degree to which news coverage and online responses have been censored. They say they feel helpless because they can’t criticize the government. Now they feel they are also not able to criticize a giant corporation.
> 
> One of the Weibo posts of Ms. Meng’s letter received 1,400 comments. Many simply said 251, the number of days Mr. Li was detained. Fewer than 10 comments, sympathetic ones, are still visible to the public.
> 
> “A company that’s too big to criticize is even scarier than a company that’s too big to fail,” Nie Huihua, an economics professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told the news site Jiemian on Tuesday.
> 
> Jiemian’s interview with Mr. Li, published on Monday, was deleted.[1]
> 
> [snip]
> 
> What is the most dangerous thought in modern China? Is it that the Party has jailed a million Uyghurs? That the Party has launched war on religion, speech, and a hundred other liberties? No, most Chinese do not care about these things; polling doesn't exist, but it would surprise me to learn that the majority of Chinese do not support the Party's policies fully in all of this. Anybody who has asked run-of-the-mill Chinese on the street what they think about Islam or minorities or  conditions that lead towards "luan" will understand this. Is it then that the Party has a history of violence and terror that left more Chinese dead than China's foreign enemies ever managed? That disconcerts Chinese who learn about it, though in my experience the shock is more at being lied to about their history than it is about actual death tolls. The regime can survive whispered conversations about Changchun and June 4th. The most subversive, explosive message you tell the Chinese people is something different. It goes like this:
> 
> The Party is a racket.  The guys at the top are not any different from the ones you deal with at the bottom. The Party exists to make sure their kids have a spot at the front of the line no matter how much more your kids deserve it. You are not forced to call Xi all these fancy titles because it will help him restore China to its ancestral glory: you are forced to do all of that so Xi Jinping's daughter gets into Harvard and his family racks up homes in Hong Kong. All of the taxes, the censorship, the ridiculous rules and regulations, the blustering about war, the hero-worship and the propaganda, the detention centers and the cameras—it is all a racket. You live a slave so that someone else's children can get ahead.
> 
> That is the fissure in the facade. It is whispered of. It is wondered at. Sooner or later, it will explode.



The rest of the article is available at the link


----------



## MarkOttawa

Looks like Germans turning seriously against Huawei for 5G:



> Angela Merkel faces revolt over Huawei as German lawmakers seek full ban
> *New bill in parliament seeks to allow exclusion of ‘untrustworthy’ 5G equipment vendors from all networks
> *Move goes beyond previous calls to ban Chinese telecoms firm from sensitive core network alone
> 
> German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a potential revolt in parliament by lawmakers seeking to override her China policy and effectively ban equipment supplier Huawei Technologies from the country’s fifth-generation wireless network.
> 
> A bill drafted by lawmakers in Merkel’s ruling coalition stipulates that German authorities should be able to exclude “untrustworthy” 5G equipment vendors from “core as well as peripheral networks”. That goes beyond previous calls that sought to ban the Chinese firm from the more sensitive core network alone.
> 
> The effort in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, is a major challenge to Merkel’s attempts at balancing security considerations over 5G with Germany’s delicate economic ties with China.
> 
> Hawks in her government, including German intelligence agencies and the Interior Ministry, have warned that Huawei’s ties to the government in Beijing pose a security risk.
> 
> While the draft does not explicitly name Huawei, it is tailored to the Chinese company and comes after months of debate about 5G security. Huawei has repeatedly denied allegations over potential espionage and sabotage.
> 
> The draft legislation obtained by Bloomberg News says that security guidelines set out by Merkel’s government, which include a certification process and a declaration of trustworthiness, do not go far enough.
> 
> _The political and legal systems in a vendor’s country of origin must also be taken into account, the draft says in a direct allusion to China_ [emphasis added].
> 
> While negotiators haggle over a final draft, the _stringent security standards set by lawmakers in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc and in the Social Democratic Party_ [emphasis added, both the parties in the Grand Coalition] illustrate the momentum building against the Shenzhen-based technology giant. CDU lawmakers approved a motion at a party convention last month calling for further restrictions.
> 
> Calling 5G technology Germany’s “digital nervous system”, lawmakers said that Europe already possessed two companies that represent an alternative to “state subsidised” competitors posing a threat – a reference to Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3041896/angela-merkel-faces-revolt-over-huawei-german-lawmakers-seek-full



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Edward Campbell

Although it's not a ban, _per se_, Norway (_Telenor_) has picked _Ericsson_ to be its key technology provider rather than _Huawei_.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Japan's now showing some balls vs the Dragon, we should pay attention:



> Japan’s defence chief hits out at Beijing on South China Sea, military build-up
> 
> _*Taro Kono, seen as a potential successor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, made the remarks days ahead of a meeting with Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe
> *His comments serve as a reminder for Beijing to play by the international rules even as ties with Tokyo warm, according to one analyst_
> 
> Japan’s Defence Minister Taro Kono has criticised China for its actions in the contested South China Sea
> and waters close to Japan, days before visiting Beijing to meet his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe.
> 
> “China is engaging in unilateral and coercive attempts to alter the status quo based on its own assertions that are incompatible with the existing international order,” Kono on Sunday at the Doha Forum, an international conference in Qatar.
> 
> The senior politician – who previously served as foreign minister and has been touted as a potential successor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
> – added that Japan “is also concerned about China’s rapid enhancement of its military power without transparency, including its nuclear and missile capabilities”, public broadcaster NHK reported.
> 
> “The rule of law, which is of critical importance to global stability and security, is a value shared by the international community, including China,” he said, adding that countries cannot be permitted to expand their spheres of influence by force and “aggressors must be forced to pay the cost”...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3042306/japans-defence-chief-hits-out-beijing-south-china-sea-military



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

How much longer will USN be able to operate anywhere near China in Western Pacific, and what about USAF, USMC bases in Guam, Okinawa, Japan, South Korea?



> China flexes air power muscles
> 
> Beijing’s vast military parade on 1 October offered further insight into its thinking about how to keep enemies on the back foot in its near seas.
> 
> The most notable aircraft in the flying display was the new Xian H-6N (pictured below), a long-term descendent of the Tupolev Tu-16 bomber – and a mainstay of Chinese naval airpower. The type featured an aerial refuelling probe that could, tanker resources permitting, greatly extend its range. More intriguingly, a concave belly replaced the bomb bay found on previous versions.
> 
> Early speculation suggested that this was to carry an air-launched version of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. This view changed, however, after the revelation of a pair of small, delta-shaped unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) designated the WZ-8. It is believed that the H-6N would deploy this vehicle from its belly. The WZ-8’s likely mission is to make a supersonic reconnaissance pass above enemy forces before landing at a friendly air base.
> 
> Such a capability, used in conjunction with other UAVs and sensor platforms, would be _one part of the robust sensor-to-shooter “kill-chain” Beijing requires to observe and rapidly attack enemy air bases and warships with cruise or ballistic missiles_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Beijing also showed off its DF-26 anti-ship-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile, as well as numerous short-range missiles that could be used to powerful effect against enemy air bases. Also displayed were DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicles mounted atop China Aerospace Science and Industry DF-17 missiles. After a ballistic launch, the weapon would glide to its target after release. Its ability to manoeuvre mid-flight is deemed to make it invulnerable to missile defences.
> 
> Uncertainty about how capable these systems are and their levels of development – or deployment – complicates work for military planners working for potential rivals such as the USA, Japan and Taiwan.
> 
> _Already China’s anti-access/area-denial strategy is having an impact on defence plans. Boeing’s developmental MQ-25 Stingray UAV will one day provide an improved refuelling capability for US aircraft carrier air wings, allowing the vessels to operate further from Chinese shores – though the tanking assets will take up valuable deck space_ [emphasis added]. To counter China’s growing navy, Washington is also brushing off its anti-ship missile capabilities, developing the Lockheed Martin AGM-158C long-range anti-ship missile.
> 
> Tokyo is keenly aware of Beijing’s growing capabilities. In October, the US Department of Defense cleared a $4.5 billion upgrade for 98 Mitsubishi F-15Js, with the type to receive an active electronically scanned array radar, new mission computers, and an upgraded electronic warfare system. Tokyo also continues to take delivery of up to 147 Lockheed F-35As, including 40 F-35Bs that will operate from two helicopter destroyers that will be converted to aircraft carriers.
> 
> Tokyo is also in the early stages of developing an all-new fighter, known variously as the F-3 or Future Fighter. This is likely to be a large, twin-engined jet with a heavy weapons payload.
> 
> It is a truism in defence circles that the Pentagon’s greatest ally in justifying defence procurement is Beijing. If recent years are any guide, 2020 will see continued speculation about Chinese capabilities, all fuelled by calculated stories in Chinese state media. And, in November, all eyes will be on Airshow China in Zhuhai, the biennial extravaganza of Chinese firepower.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/china-flexes-air-power-muscles/135864.article



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## FJAG

It's always quite interesting to see what capabilities China (and for that matter Russia) are developing and fielding on much smaller defence budgets. Perhaps we need to get back to Eisenhower's question about the US military-industrial complex. What the US needs to look at seriously is how to develop and field superior weapons system at much lower per unit costs. As it is, both Russia and China are winning the war of weapons' economics.

 :cheers:


----------



## a_majoor

A disturbing Christmas present from China:

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/12/help-im-being-held-prisoner.php



> POSTED ON DECEMBER 22, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CHINA
> HELP! I’M BEING HELD PRISONER…
> You’ve probably heard the old joke about the guy who opens a fortune cookie, and the paper says: “Help! I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory.”
> 
> Well, it actually happened, only it was a greeting card factory. The London Times reports:
> 
> When Florence Widdicombe opened a box of Tesco charity Christmas cards to send them to her friends, the six-year-old schoolgirl from Tooting, south London, was startled to find that one of them had already been used. The card, featuring a kitten in a Santa hat, contained a despairing message from a Chinese gulag.
> 
> “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China,” the message read in capital letters. “Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.” Florence had accidentally stumbled on a chilling link between British Christmas fun and Chinese human rights abuse.
> 
> POSTED ON DECEMBER 22, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CHINA
> HELP! I’M BEING HELD PRISONER…
> You’ve probably heard the old joke about the guy who opens a fortune cookie, and the paper says: “Help! I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory.”
> 
> Well, it actually happened, only it was a greeting card factory. The London Times reports:
> 
> When Florence Widdicombe opened a box of Tesco charity Christmas cards to send them to her friends, the six-year-old schoolgirl from Tooting, south London, was startled to find that one of them had already been used. The card, featuring a kitten in a Santa hat, contained a despairing message from a Chinese gulag.
> 
> “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China,” the message read in capital letters. “Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.” Florence had accidentally stumbled on a chilling link between British Christmas fun and Chinese human rights abuse.
> 
> The message in the card went on to say, “Use the link to contact Mr. Peter Humphrey.” The linked Times article is written by…Peter Humphrey.
> 
> Florence’s father Ben googled the name, and found a story about a former British journalist who had spent two years in jail in China — at the same Qingpu prison.
> 
> That journalist was me. …
> 
> I do not know the identities or nationalities of the prisoners who sneaked this note into the Tesco cards, but I have no doubt they are Qingpu prisoners who knew me before my release in June 2015 from the suburban prison where I spent nine of my 23 months.



The rest of the article is at the link. We may have to take action as a DIY project, carefully examining our purchases to ensure we are not buying Chinese goods or services whenever possible. The reason that it will have to be a DIY project is here:

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/ottawa-goes-meek-and-gentle-with-beijing/



> Ottawa goes meek and gentle with Beijing
> Terry Glavin: The Trudeau government’s newfound faith in ‘appropriate discussion’ is the Canadian equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’—an easy out when dealing with the China lobby
> by Terry GlavinNov 25, 2019
> 
> With Beijing’s most determined allies decisively crushed by a democratic alliance in Hong Kong’s district elections over the weekend, at least somebody’s putting up some kind of a fight against Xi Jinping’s increasingly savage aggression and belligerence. Because it certainly isn’t Canada.
> 
> An unprecedented 71.2 per cent turnout on Sunday in the ordinarily humdrum local elections resulted in a massive triumph for pro-democracy candidates and a withering rebuke to the Chinese Communist Party and its puppet Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive. Out of 18 district councils, all formerly under the establishment’s control, 17 are now in the democratic camp. Of the 452 posts up for election, Hong Kong’s democrats took nearly 400 of them, quadrupling their seat share. Pro-Beijing parties lost 243 seats.
> 
> It was a lot less uplifting that while Hongkongers were streaming to the polling stations over the weekend, at the 11th annual Halifax International Security Forum here in Canada, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan telegraphed the strongest signal yet that after several months of dithering, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has decisively retreated into the Liberal Party’s traditional approach to relations with Beijing—appeasement, capitulation, and normalization.
> 
> RELATED: Is Beijing sticking its nose into the election campaign in Markham?
> 
> “We don’t consider China as an adversary,” Sajjan said at the forum’s opening on Friday.
> 
> Hongkongers certainly do. So do the Uighurs of Xinjiang, a Muslim people whose persecution has accelerated to the point that at least a million of them are confined to concentration camps and forced-labour zones laid bare in the greatest detail yet in a trove of leaked Chinese  government documents just released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. So do Tibetans, whose dispossession and oppression over the past seven decades is now being replayed in Xinjiang—and whose tragic predicament, once a hallowed cause in Canada, is now rarely if ever even mentioned in polite company.



Rest of the article is at the link.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Statement from Chinese embassy, Ottawa:



> Chinese Embassy Spokesperson's Remarks
> 2019/12/22
> 
> Recently, some Canadian polititians made erroneous remarks on China-Canada relations and the cases of Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The Chinese side expresses strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition.
> 
> It should be pointed out that lately China-Canada relations have encountered serious difficulties. The responsibility lies completely with the Canadian side. Canada knows the root cause clearly. Attempting to gang up on China using "Megaphone Diplomacy" or pressuring China for unrelated matters is doomed to be in vain.We urge the Canadian side to reflect upon its wrongdoing, take China's solemn position seriously, immediately release Ms. Meng Wanzhou and ensure her safe return to China.
> 
> As to the cases involving two Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, they are suspected of conducting activities that endangered China's national security. Investigation on the two cases has been completed and they have been transferred to the procuratorial authority for prosecution following legal procedures. China's judicial authority handles cases in strict accordance with law and their legitimate rights and interests are guaranteed. The Chinese side urges the Canadian side to earnestly respect the spirit of rule of law and China's judicial sovereignty, and refrain from making irresponsible remarks.
> http://ca.china-embassy.org/eng/sgxw/t1726867.htm



DIPLOMACY WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

From US Congressional Research Service (sort of does what our Library of Parliament does as research for MPs, Senators--but on a vastly greater scale):



> Report to Congress on Chinese Naval Modernization
> December 23, 2019 10:42 AM
> 
> _The following is the Dec. 20, 2019 Congressional Research Service, China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress._
> 
> *From the report*
> 
> "In an international security environment of renewed great power competition, China’s military modernization effort, including its naval modernization effort, has become the top focus of U.S. defense planning and budgeting. China’s navy, which China has been steadily modernizing for roughly 25 years, since the early to mid-1990s, has become a formidable military force within China’s near-seas region, and it is conducting a growing number of operations in more-distant waters, including the broader waters of the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and waters around Europe. China’s navy is viewed as posing a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s ability to achieve and maintain wartime control of blue-water ocean areas in the Western Pacific—the first such challenge the U.S. Navy has faced since the end of the Cold War—and forms a key element of a Chinese challenge to the long-standing status of the United States as the leading military power in the Western Pacific.
> 
> China’s naval modernization effort encompasses a wide array of platform and weapon acquisition programs, including anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), submarines, surface ships, aircraft, unmanned vehicles (UVs), and supporting C4ISR (command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems. China’s naval modernization effort also includes improvements in maintenance and logistics, doctrine, personnel quality, education and training, and exercises.
> 
> China’s military modernization effort, including its naval modernization effort, is assessed as being aimed at developing capabilities for addressing the situation with Taiwan militarily, if need be; for achieving a greater degree of control or domination over China’s near-seas region, particularly the South China Sea; for enforcing China’s view that it has the right to regulate foreign military activities in its 200-mile maritime exclusive economic zone (EEZ); for defending China’s commercial sea lines of communication (SLOCs), particularly those linking China to the Persian Gulf; for displacing U.S. influence in the Western Pacific; and for asserting China’s status as the leading regional power and a major world power.
> 
> Consistent with these goals, observers believe China wants its navy to be capable of acting as part of a Chinese anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) force—a force that can deter U.S. intervention in a conflict in China’s near-seas region over Taiwan or some other issue, or failing that, delay the arrival or reduce the effectiveness of intervening U.S. forces. Additional missions for China’s navy include conducting maritime security (including antipiracy) operations, evacuating Chinese nationals from foreign countries when necessary, and conducting humanitarian assistance/disaster response (HA/DR) operations.
> 
> The U.S. Navy in recent years has taken a number of actions to counter China’s naval modernization effort. Among other things, the U.S. Navy has shifted a greater percentage of its fleet to the Pacific; assigned its most-capable new ships and aircraft and its best personnel to the Pacific; maintained or increased general presence operations, training and developmental exercises, and engagement and cooperation with allied and other navies in the Pacific; increased the planned future size of the Navy; initiated, increased, or accelerated numerous programs for developing new military technologies and acquiring new ships, aircraft, unmanned vehicles, and weapons; begun development of new operational concepts (i.e., new ways to employ Navy and Marine Corps forces) for countering Chinese maritime A2/AD forces; and signaled that the Navy in coming years will shift to a more-distributed fleet architecture that will feature a smaller portion of larger ships, a larger portion of smaller ships, and a substantially greater use of unmanned vehicles. The issue for Congress is whether the U.S. Navy is responding appropriately to China’s naval modernization effort."
> https://news.usni.org/2019/12/23/report-to-congress-on-chinese-naval-modernization



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

No Swedish kowtow to diplomacy with Chinese characteristics:



> China cools Sweden business ties after minister awards prize to Gui Minhai
> _Business trips called off after Swedish culture minister awards rights prize to detained dissident_
> 
> China has called off two business delegation visits to Sweden after Stockholm presented a rights prize to dissident Gui Minhai in defiance of Beijing’s threat of “counter-measures”.
> 
> Tensions between the two countries have been strained since Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen who is known for publishing scandalous books about Chinese political leaders out of a Hong Kong book shop, disappeared in 2015 before resurfacing on the mainland.
> 
> China had threatened “counter-measures” before 55-year-old Gui was awarded the Tucholsky award, which is given every year to a writer or a publisher being persecuted, threatened or in exile. The award was unveiled by Swedish culture minister, Amanda Lind, in November.
> 
> China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, said on Thursday [Dec. 19]: “As far as I know, two large delegations of businessmen who were planning to travel to Sweden have cancelled their trip.”
> 
> In early December, Sweden’s foreign ministry said Beijing had postponed a visit to Stockholm planned for 10 December to discuss trade. “China has no plans to return to this commission’s table at the moment. The ball is in the Swedish court. We are waiting,” Congyou said.
> 
> _Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven said in November the country would not give into threats_ [emphasis added, c'mon Justin].
> 
> Gui disappeared from a holiday home in Thailand in 2015. Several months later, he appeared on Chinese state television confessing to a fatal drink-driving accident from more than a decade earlier.
> 
> He served two years in prison but three months after his October 2017 release, he was again arrested while on a train to Beijing while travelling with Swedish diplomats.
> 
> This month, Sweden’s former ambassador to Beijing Anna Lindstedt was accused of brokering an unauthorised meeting to try to get Gui freed. Lindstedt now faces trial and could face years in jail if convicted.
> 
> Gui’s supporters and family have claimed his detainment is part of a political repression campaign orchestrated by Chinese authorities.
> 
> China is Sweden’s eighth-largest trading partner, according to the Swedish Institute for statistics.
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/china-cools-sweden-business-ties-after-minister-awards-prize-to-gui-minhai



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

US increasingly threatening to bring hammer down--hope Justin Trudeau and our compradors are paying attention:


> US security chief warns UK against Huawei
> _The warning comes as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to decide whether to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G network._
> 
> The U.S. national security adviser said giving Huawei access to the U.K.'s 5G network poses a risk to British intelligence services.
> 
> Robert O’Brien said in an interview published in the Financial Times Tuesday that the Chinese equipment supplier would let Beijing steal U.K. state secrets “wholesale.”
> 
> “It is somewhat shocking to us that folks in the U.K. would look at Huawei as some sort of a commercial decision.” He said, “5G is a national security decision.”
> 
> The warning comes as U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to decide whether to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G network.
> 
> The U.S. has repeatedly urged allies to avoid Huawei on the basis that the company is used by Beijing to spy. Huawei denies the allegations.
> 
> The U.K. has come under extra pressure since it forms part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
> 
> O’Brien said in the interview that people in Europe, Japan, New Zealand and Australia [CANADA?] were waking up to the risks posed by Huawei.
> 
> He _also used the interview to press German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been wavering on how to handle Huawei. Merkel is coming under pressure from lawmakers in her own party to shun the Chinese company, but is wary of doing so for fear of provoking reprisals.
> 
> “German citizens just are not ready to sign up for their state to become a vassal of Beijing_ [emphasis added],” O’Brien said.
> https://www.politico.eu/article/us-security-chief-warns-uk-against-huawei/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

It shouldn't even be a debate.  There are plenty of companies in Canada, the US, and Europe that can provide the 5G network -- it's not like China is the only player in town.  

While I realize there are trade considerations, as well as freeing the 2 Canadian political prisoners (and preventing more from being taken) -- once they are released, there shouldn't even be a debate about whether Huawei is allowed to build our network.   (I personally think the whole 5G thing is bulls**t anyway, but since we seem determined to build this nonsense, may as well have it built by a company we can trust/control ourselves)


----------



## a_majoor

A Chinese protester holds a sign saying "Heaven will destroy the CCP" while facing a police officer with a drawn pistol. Luckily, she was not shot and apparently was able to leave the protest safely. This is a much larger level of defiance than previously, and I think we all know that without external support and a "safe haven", this will ultimately not end well for Hong Kong. On the other hand, what will the fallout be in the Mainland? Taiwan? The Chinese Diaspora?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/hong-kong-police-aim-gun-at-protester-holding-epoch-times-poster_3184292.html



> Facing the Barrel of a Gun, Woman Holds Epoch Times Poster to Protest Hong Kong Police
> BY EVA FU
> 28 CommentsDecember 24, 2019 Updated: December 26, 2019Share
> 
> In a stunning show of defiance, an unarmed Hong Kong protester held up a poster produced by The Epoch Times’ Hong Kong edition while gesturing at a police officer who had pointed a pistol towards her.
> 
> The Epoch Times has been unable to identify the woman, but understands that the police did not fire the weapon and that the protester safely left the protest scene on Dec. 22.
> 
> The poster contains a message that has become popular among Hong Kong protesters, reading “Heaven Will Destroy the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party],” in both Chinese and English. The slogan has spread to street corners, walls, and artworks in Hong Kong amid pro-democracy protests in recent months.
> 
> One protester previously explained the slogan’s meaning as “may God have mercy to break down the Communist Party.”
> 
> “We want the CCP [to] completely break down,” he said.
> 
> "We've heard the protesters just now chanting something called 'Tian mie zhong gong,' what does that mean?"@news_ntd's @PaulGreaney_ asks the meaning of what #HongKongProtesters are chanting, "may God have mercy to break down the communist party." pic.twitter.com/McykXoztiw
> 
> — The Epoch Times – China Insider (@EpochTimesChina) December 6, 2019
> 
> The incident on Sunday was one of the latest in more than six months of Hong Kong protests in anger against what they see as the Chinese regime’s growing encroachment into the city’s affairs. Protesters have consistently called for five demands, including genuine universal suffrage and an independent investigation into alleged police brutality.
> 
> Protesters organized the Sunday rally in support of the suppressed Uyghur minority in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. That day, police also arrested at least two protesters attempting to burn a Chinese flag and used batons and pepper spray to disperse others.


----------



## CBH99

Wow.

The image grab above is literally the visual representation of the CCP's worst nightmare come true, when it comes to their image both at home and abroad.


Great timing on the part of the photographer.


----------



## a_majoor

More on the state of the Chinese financial system. I suspect they will be able to paper over the cracks for a while longer, but eventually the game of musical finances becomes impossible to sustain:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2019/12/20/chinas-13-trillion-problem-is-becoming-everyones/#61d9b9341445



> China’s $13 Trillion Problem Is Becoming Everyone’s
> William Pesek
> William PesekContributor
> Asia
> I write about economics, markets and policymaking throughout Asia.
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese President Xi Jinping
> Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, sings with performers during a cultural performance in Macau ... [+]AP PHOTO
> China’s Xi Jinping probably tops any list of people who can’t wait to see the back of 2019.
> 
> These last 12 months produced the slowest mainland growth since the early 1990s, the biggest pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong’s history and mounting criticism of Beijing’s human rights record. By taking such an authoritarian stance, Taiwan has slipped further away from Beijing’s grip, while some political wags questioned whether Communist Party members were losing faith in President Xi’s governing style.
> 
> But Xi has an even bigger challenge on his hands, and not just Donald Trump’s trade war antics. Make that 13 trillion challenges.
> 
> This figure refers to the size, in U.S. dollar terms, of China’s onshore bond market. And generally, its growth and development have long been touted as a vital rite of passage for the second-biggest economic power. The trouble with debt markets, though, is they tend to expose cracks in financial systems.
> 
> Herein lies Xi’s biggest problem. Keeping growth north of 6% is reasonably easy for a command economy. Even amid the trade war, Xi’s party can order up giant infrastructure projects, slash taxes and cajole local governments to ramp up fiscal stimulus. It has its own ATM—the People’s Bank of China.
> 
> Today In: Asia
> Trouble is, the more you borrow, the more investors can push back and the more even the most authoritarian of governments can lose control as punters vote with their feet. That risk is increasing along with a recent jump in private-sector debt defaults to a record high.
> 
> According to Fitch, 4.9% of private companies missed bond payments from January to November, up from 4.2% for all of 2018. When you combine state and private companies, China Inc.’s onshore defaults risks are growing apace—from none a few years back to at least $18 billion so far this year.
> 
> PROMOTED
> 
> There’s an obvious caveat here. We can only discuss the default risks we know about—the ones regulators in Beijing cop to, not those that are being papered over with public assistance.
> 
> Signs of stress are also emerging in the offshore debt market. So are this year, there have been at least $75 billion defaults. With well over $200 billion of debt maturing over the next 24 months, Standard and Poor’s warns of increasing missed payments episodes.
> 
> This trajectory collides with U.S. President Trump’s trade war. Ignore all that excitement over Trump’s “phase one” deal with Xi. It’s a polite ceasefire than won’t hold. With Trump getting zero from Xi in terms of re-ordering U.S.-China trade dynamics and facing the risk of removal from office, the odds of him lashing out anew at Asia are growing, not waning.
> 
> It means that Xi’s annus horribilis won’t end even as calendars switch to 2020. The year ahead may very well be the one in which China’s debt troubles supersede all else.
> 
> That’s saying a lot given the ongoing protests rocking Hong Kong and piercing the veneer of omnipotence Xi seeks to project. The same goes for next month’s election in Taiwan, where President Tsai Ing-wen, a China critic, is sailing toward a second term.
> 
> Tsai Ing-wen talks to the media.
> Presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen, talks to the media after the first televised policy address in ... [+]AP PHOTO/CHIANG YONG-YING
> The real problem, though, is that an increasingly unbalanced Chinese economy faces a third year of trade clashes. As the reviews of the phase one truce come in—tepid ones, at best—Trump may double down. That means even bigger tariffs, the White House targeting more mainland tech champions or pulling the trigger on 25% taxes on imports of cars and auto parts.
> 
> As Xi struggles to keep growth above 6%—his target for 2020—Beijing’s debt load and financial-system leverage will continue growing. Here, it’s worth noting recent comments from Ma Jun, an external adviser to China’s central bank. He told Securities Times newspaper that Beijing needs to reduce “systemic risks.”
> 
> Ma is particularly worried about excessive regional government borrowing setting off a “chain reaction” of defaults that unnerve markets. These local government financing vehicles, or LGFVs, have been at the center of the nation’s infrastructure boom. They’re the fuel driving the countless six-lane highways, international airports and white-elephant stadiums being built around the most populous nation.



The rest of the article is at the link. Missed bond payments is the most obvious issue going forward, and the cancerous growth of LGFVs "off the books" means that no one has any real idea of just how large the problem actually is. 2020 will be very "interesting" in the Chinese sense ("may you live in interesting times")


----------



## The Bread Guy

CBH99 said:
			
		

> ... *once they are released*, there shouldn't even be a debate about whether Huawei is allowed to build our network ...


That's the kicker - as long as the guys are prisoners, CHN still has the leverage.  And politically, it's becoming a hard-to-win for Canada:  reject Huawei, and they do other crap, leading to "WTF's the government doing?!?!?", and if Huawei is accepted, it leads to more "WTF's the government doing?!?!?"


----------



## CBH99

I agree with you on that, it really is pushing the GoC into a corner with zero truly good options.

Eventually, they will be released.  I imagine they will be put through a sham trial, found guilty, and then deported back to Canada & told they are never allowed to return.  This would allow the Chinese to save face, create the illusion of legitimacy in the proceedings, and move on from their end of things.

The Chinese aren't gaining anything from holding them prisoner, minus leverage to have Meng released.  

(Funny how the CCP can say on the one hand that Huawei isn't linked to the government, yet the government takes prisoners when something doesn't go the way Huawei wants.  Talk about hollow statements.)



Time for our government, regardless of political party, to take a good hard look at our relationship with China.  If between trade, human rights, influencing universities, pressuring or intimidating citizens, and trying to snake it's way into our communities via "Belt & Road" types of initiatives -- time to take a good hard look at who we do business with.

Lots of other countries need our agriculture exports, and due to the price of oil these days we aren't exporting as much as we used to.  Still plenty of countries that need that too, though.


----------



## MarkOttawa

And from Prof. Charles Burton (knows his China and his Chinese) on Huawei:



> Why Canada should not let Huawei into our 5G networks: Debunking five myths – Charles Burton for Inside Policy
> 
> Some Canadian commentators have approvingly quoted a Huawei Canada spokesman’s recent claims that, “We’re not villains in an espionage thriller. We’re a telecom network equipment provider.”
> 
> If it was only so simple. Huawei might not be a villain in a Bond novel, but it is certainly not just a normal telecom network equipment provider.
> 
> If it really were just a normal company, would anyone really expect China’s aggressive response to Canada’s lawful detainment of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, in full accordance with legal obligations under our extradition agreement with the United States? China has unlawfully detained and charged Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, re-evaluated the case of Robert Schellenberg, sentencing him to execution on drug charges, and banned multiple Canadian agricultural products.
> 
> In what world does a country apply such pressure on behalf of a single business executive of a normal telecom company? If Canada had done something similar to an executive of Ericsson, Nokia, or Samsung, which are also providers of 5G infrastructure, can anyone imagine any of their home countries (Sweden, Finland, South Korea, respective) taking such action?
> 
> The fact that Meng’s arrest had generated such a massive overreaction on China’s part, and one that shows no sign of abating, should put to rest this notion that Huawei is simply a normal company. And those commentators who deign to mention China’s “inexcusable over-reaction” should frankly know better.
> 
> With that out of the way, it might be useful to counter some myths that have most recently been raised about Huawei:
> 
> Myth one – “Huawei’s lead in 5G”
> 
> Rather than simply celebrating Huawei’s achievements in 5G, we should instead try to better understand why the company is able to be so competitive in the industry. And that goes directly to the support Beijing offers to its “national champion.” Over many decades, Huawei benefited from the Communist regime’s preferential treatment and financial largesse, including hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, heavily subsidized land for facilities, buildings and employee apartments, bonuses to top employees, and massive state loans, such as a $30 billion credit line with China Development Bank inked in 2009.
> 
> Yes, Huawei’s equipment may be initially cheaper than its competitors. But that is precisely because Huawei is supported by the deep pockets of the Communist regime. Huawei is also not the only game in town. Other telecoms giants, such as Ericsson or Nokia, are more than competitive in 5G; the former having 76 5G contracts (31 being public) and latter with 50, compared to Huawei’s 60 contracts. And their involvement would not come with the attendant security risks associated with Huawei.
> 
> 5G technology, one should recall, has hardware and component integration that is completely unique when compared to 3G and 4G, making Huawei’s involvement in the latter in Canada immaterial. Plus, 5G’s scope is massive – from driverless cars to refineries to electricity grids. This places a premium on ensuring that 5G equipment and expertise providers are completely trustworthy, even if this results in additional costs.
> 
> Myth two – “Canada risks losing out to G-7 peers — and China”
> 
> Merkel’s Germany has made some signals that it is open to allowing Huawei to compete as a possible supplier of 5G, albeit not without significant pushback. Her own party has even backed a motion allowing their Parliament veto on security criteria for 5G suppliers, and this security criteria specifically refers to the influence of a foreign country – a not-so-subtle nod to Huawei.
> 
> Meanwhile, the UK also appears more sanguine in their ability to manage the security risks posed by Huawei supplying 5G equipment. Yet this does not mean that Ottawa should mindlessly follow in the possible missteps of our allies.
> 
> One should recall that countries like the United States and Australia have moved to ban Huawei’s involvement in 5G. Japan has effectively done so as well. And New Zealand’s intelligence agency recently blocked a local telecoms operator from using Huawei’s equipment in 5G. Many countries in the EU are highly skeptical about involving Huawei in 5G.
> 
> And they are wary for good reasons – 5G’s complexity means it is exceptionally hard to certify that backbone equipment is safe. One can only manage risk, not eliminate it altogether. And it would be imprudent to assume that we can manage such risk indefinitely into the future. It is far wiser to eliminate such risk by opting for other 5G equipment providers
> 
> Canada’s position is also distinct. We are a member of the Five Eyes intelligence network, and not just any member – our communication networks are closely integrated with that of the United States, beyond even other Five Eyes partners. This is to say that Canada’s greenlighting of Huawei’s involvement in 5G would pose a unique risk as far as the Americans are concerned. Washington is unlikely to regard with equanimity a Canadian back door to our vital North American security-intelligence sharing for the Chinese Communist regime.
> 
> Myth three – “Huawei’s commitment to Canada”
> 
> If the issue was only about economics, the argument that Canada should accept Huawei’s involvement in 5G might have a case. It is cheaper to use Huawei. Their jobs can be well-paying. And they do employ many people in Canada.
> 
> Of course, we should also remember that Huawei has also been credibly accused of technology transfers and intellectual property theft from top tech companies like Cisco, Motorola, and Nortel (before its demise in 2009). Yes, Huawei now partners with many top-level Canadian universities in research, “obtaining millions of dollars in government grants.” However, in many cases, Huawei owns the intellectual property of the research, which gets transferred back to China. Those who cheerlead about the supposed benefits should also confront an uncomfortable reality: what about the economic consequences of allowing Huawei in 5G?
> 
> In any event, it is not simply an economic issue that can be addressed in isolation. Huawei’s involvement carries national security implications that cannot be ignored. There is a reason why the government undertakes national security reviews of foreign investment – as a means to protect against security threats, a requirement that must supersede the narrow economic interests of a company or sector.
> 
> Myth four – “Huawei and cyber-security”
> 
> It is clever to claim that there is no “tangible evidence” that Beijing has asked Huawei to spy. On one hand, it is immaterial. China’s own National Intelligence Law would allow Beijing to compel Huawei to support its intelligence activities. Notwithstanding Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s claim to the contrary, given the extent to which Beijing has helped subsidize its “national champion,” is there any doubt that Huawei would do what is demanded?
> 
> Simply put, we don’t need to have a smoking gun of Beijing asking Huawei to spy in the past. They have the absolute authority to compel Huawei to do so at any time.
> 
> And moreover, the claim that Huawei is completely above suspicion is simply false. Huawei has been credibly accused of a host of questionable activities – from enabling espionage and creating cyber vulnerabilities to IP theft or misappropriations. And then there are its many ties to China's state security services. Indeed, there is some evidence that Huawei is not the independent, employee-owned company that it presents itself to be – that Huawei Technologies is actually owned by a holding company, Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd, which is 99 percent owned by the CCP’s own Trade Union Committee (and 1 percent owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei).
> 
> With this in mind, it is easy to infer that Beijing has sanctioned Huawei to spy in the past – and it certainly can compel it do so in the future.
> 
> Myth five – “Huawei is a pawn in the US-China trade war”
> 
> The Trump administration may have tried to justify its steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada on the “specious grounds” of national security. And these tariffs did end following the successful negotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
> 
> Yet it would be a mistake to simply assume that Washington’s hardline approach to Huawei is on equally specious grounds or that it is simply a bargaining chip in the Sino-US trade war.
> 
> There is a bi-partisan consensus on the need for a tougher approach to China, including seeing Huawei’s involvement in 5G for what it is – a national security threat to the United States and its allies. It is one supported by the US military and its intelligences services, and those in many of its allies. Indeed, it was Australia that was the first country to raise concerns about Huawei and 5G.
> 
> Of course, President Trump remains ever erratic, and it is not within the realm of possibility that he’ll use Huawei as a bargaining chip in his dealings with Beijing. Yet that does not mean that the administration’s reasoning when it comes to Huawei is at all flawed.
> 
> Much as Canadian policy-makers had done with the broader China trade agenda, it is easy to look at Huawei and focus only on the potential economic benefits of giving Huawei free reign with 5G. Yet Huawei is not a normal telecommunications company, nor is 5G a normal communications network. Canada’s national security is at stake – and the federal government must be willing to make the hard choices to protect our security, even if this rocks the boat and disrupts the economic interests tied with Huawei and China.
> 
> _Charles Burton is Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad. He is a former counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing._
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-not-let-huawei-5g-networks-debunking-five-myths-charles-burton-inside-policy/



More on Prof. Burton:



> Charles Burton is Associate Professor at Brock University specializing in Comparative Politics, Government and Politics of China, Canada-China Relations and Human Rights. He served as Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy to China between 1991-1993 and 1998-2000. Prior to coming to Brock, Charles worked at the Communications Security Establishment of the Canadian Department of National Defence.
> 
> He received a PhD in 1987 from the University of Toronto after studies at Cambridge University (Oriental Studies) and Fudan University (History of Ancient Chinese Thought Program, Department of Philosophy, class of '77). He was an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Post-Doctoral Scholar in Political Science at University of Alberta, 1986-88.
> 
> He has published extensively on Chinese and North Korean affairs and Canada-China relations and has been commissioned to write reports on matters relating to Canada's relations with China for agencies of the Government of Canada. Charles is a frequent commentator on Chinese affairs in newspapers, radio and TV.
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/experts/charles-burton/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Not something any Liberal government will do, one suspects (Conservatives?):



> Canada can learn from Taiwan on relations with China: Marcus Kolga in the Toronto Star
> _The determination and clarity with which Taiwan has confronted the challenges to its fragile independence and democracy are encouraging and can serve as an example for Canada and its allies, writes Marcus Kolga_.
> 
> Few cherish the fragility of democracy more than the people of Taiwan. Located perilously close to an adversary seeking to undermine its sovereignty and democracy, Taiwan has developed remarkable resilience to China’s ongoing threats. This resilience will be put to the test on Saturday as voters cast ballots in Taiwan’s national elections.
> 
> Canada is no stranger to China's bully diplomacy. Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are entering their second year of arbitrary detention in China in response to the legal arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition request. And just last month, Chinese Ambassador Cong Peiwu threatened retaliation if Canada imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights abuses.
> 
> _Beijing’s aggressive influence operations within Canada have targeted elected officials at all government levels and riding level political party structures are under increasing threat of being compromised by groups connected to China’s local consulates and the United Front_ [emphasis added]. Platforms such as Facebook and WeChat regularly used by Beijing to spread disinformation about Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Even Canadian corporations operating in China are overtly threatened in Chinese state media if they don’t toe Beijing’s line.
> 
> Taiwan’s success in resisting China’s influence lies in the fact that they have developed defences against China’s objectives — namely, aggressive expansionism and the subjugation of smaller nations to Beijing’s direct influence.
> 
> As such, Taiwan has taken diversified trade, bolstered domestic defence industries, and reinforced democratic institutions to directly address China’s influence and information warfare.
> 
> This dedication to democracy has been put into action by Taiwanese Minister Audrey Tang, who is Taiwan’s first transgender cabinet minister and among the first anywhere in the world. She has developed an innovative open government policy that allows all citizens to directly contribute to the country’s policy-making process.
> 
> Tang is also responsible for overseeing the development of Taiwan’s countermeasures against Beijing’s disinformation attacks — without negatively affecting personal liberties, including freedom of expression.
> 
> When I recently met with Tang in Taipei, she explained that the Taiwanese government has developed a protocol for “working toward disarming disinformation that does not involve infringing of journalistic freedom.”
> 
> Within two hours of detecting a disinformation attack, the relevant Taiwanese ministries are required “to roll out clarification of 200 characters or less and at least two pictures.”
> 
> Tang says the Taiwanese counter-disinformation system is “now good enough that most [ministries] can deliver the clarifications within 60 minutes.” This rapid response is designed to defuse the disinformation narrative by getting ahead of it and stopping its spread on social media.
> 
> Through a unique agreement with Facebook, the company has agreed to adjust its algorithms so disinformation attacks no longer reach user news feeds. “You have to scroll for two hours to see [the story],” says Tang. “It’s like moving this into the spam folder: once they do that, it stops spreading.”
> 
> According to a Pew Research study, nearly half of all Canadians receive their daily news from social media, demonstrating our vulnerability to disinformation. While Ottawa introduced significant measures to address disinformation before the 2019 election, it fell short of publicly exposing disinformation campaigns. Nor did the government achieve agreements with social media platforms to protect the Canadian online information environment.
> 
> In December, Taiwan took the additional step of banning foreign funding and backing of political parties by “hostile external forces,” while Australia has passed legislation that requires individuals or groups that are acting on behalf of “foreign principals” to register with the government.
> 
> Despite Beijing’s efforts to undermine Taiwan’s elections and threats to unite Taiwan with mainland China by force, Taiwanese leaders are digging in. Former Taiwanese Minister of Defence Andrew Yang suggests Canada do the same, urging us to wake up by reminding our leaders that “Beijing does not conduct business abiding to international rules.”
> 
> The determination and clarity with which Taiwan has confronted the challenges to its fragile independence and democracy are encouraging and can serve as an example for Canada and its allies as they struggle to address their own growing problems with Beijing.
> 
> _Marcus Kolga is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute._
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-taiwan-relations-china-marcus-kolga-star/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> And from Prof. Charles Burton (knows his China and his Chinese) on Huawei:
> 
> More on Prof. Burton:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Piece mainly on UK with Germany noted--how long can Canada stay largely under the radar?



> Key Republicans seek ban on intel sharing with countries that use Huawei
> 
> Key House Republicans have introduced a bill that would bar U.S. intelligence sharing with countries that allow telecom giant Huawei in their next-generation wireless networks.
> 
> The Jan. 27 bill would potentially downgrade America’s “special relationship” with the U.K., which is reportedly expected to grant Huawei some access to its nascent 5G network. Such a move by London would be a loss for the Trump administration, which has aggressively campaigned against the company, arguing Chinese governments links to the firm mean it poses an espionage threat. (Huawei denies the allegations.)
> 
> “I think that if they make that decision that they have Huawei in their 5G, then we have to recalculate and reassess whether or not they can continue to be among our closest intel partners,” Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the bill’s sponsors and the No. 3 Republican in the House, told reporters Monday.
> 
> “I would urge the administration to go through and look at that. I think it would fundamentally alter the relationship we have with the U.K.,” if the U.K. adopts Huawei in its 5G network.
> 
> As Washington works to maintain America’s technological edge against China, it has been wrestling with just how to shape the role that Huawei is playing in developing 5G networks worldwide. Several China critics on Monday ― Cheney, Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. ― met with reporters to argue the lure of cheap telecom equipment, subsidized by the Chinese government, is not worth the risk of Beijing gaining access to the vast amounts of data that would travel over nations’ new networks.
> 
> _U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to decide as soon as this week whether to abide public and private warnings from President Donald Trump and other American officials. Johnson has, according to the Financial Times, been looking at imposing a market share cap on Huawei, which would allow it to provide non-core telecom gear, like the antennas and base stations seen on rooftops.
> 
> In Germany, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, Berlin’s top security official, was quoted Jan. 25 as saying Germany must be protected against espionage and sabotage, but estimated that shutting out Chinese providers could delay building the new network by five to 10 years_ [emphasis added].
> 
> “I don’t see that we can set up a 5G network in Germany in the short term without participation by Huawei,” Seehofer told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...
> 
> Though Banks, the lead sponsor of the House bill, predicted Monday it would attract bipartisan support, even some key Republicans were unprepared to take such a hard line against the U.K., a member of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence network ― which also includes the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
> 
> “Let’s wait until they make the decision and see what the decision is,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said Monday of lead British officials. “Our intelligence sharing, not only with Great Britain, but the ‘Five Eyes,’ and a handful of others is really critical. They’re dovetailed together, and they’re really important.”..
> https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/01/27/key-republicans-seek-ban-on-intel-sharing-with-countries-that-use-huawei/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

I still don't understand why building 5G networks is really all that urgent.

In the article above, Germany had said they need to be protected from espionage & sabotage...BUT...by shutting out Chinese providers, they may be looking at 5yrs before their 5G network is built.

Who cares?  Honestly, why the urgency?


We get it.  5G is "soooooo amazing" - yeah yeah, the same way 4G and LTE were "soooooooooo amazing" when they came out a few years ago.  Woopy.  Faster internet connections, faster upload/download speeds, and more applications for future technologies.  I still don't see an urgent need to get them built 'tomorrow' so to speak.   :dunno:


----------



## FJAG

I'm still working on a 3G phone. It sucks with data but works just fine as a phone and for messaging. I really don't need to send out pictures of what I had for lunch or see videos of some cat falling on it's ass.

I'm with you CBH99. No big whoopy although it can make certain business applications work better. That said, I don't see a five to ten year delay if Huawei is frozen out. Technology works a lot faster than that; even on that scale.

 :cheers:


----------



## CBH99

You mean you don't need to take a picture of every meal and post it to 3 different social media profiles?

FJAG, I appreciate you so much more now   :cheers:


----------



## tomahawk6

With the deathtoll at 100 Chinese companies are telling workers to stay home. This may help to limit exposure. Of course prison labor might see a spike in deaths.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51260149


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Piece mainly on UK with Germany noted--how long can Canada stay largely under the radar?
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Justin and His Compradors must be praying BoJo can sell his approach to Huawei/5G to Americans and that we then can get them to accept something similar for Canada. Meanwhile delay, delay, delay a decision:



> UK will allow Huawei to help build its 5G network despite US pressure
> 
> The British government said Tuesday [Jan. 28] that it will allow China's Huawei to help build the country's next generation of super-fast wireless networks, a decision that could undermine trade and intelligence ties with the United States.
> 
> The announcement follows months of public debate in the United Kingdom over how to respond to concerns raised by the US government about potential national security risks posed by Huawei components and the threat of Chinese cyber attacks.
> 
> UK mobile operators will be able to use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks but the company will be excluded from "security critical" core areas, according to a statement from the government.
> The Trump administration had been pressing for a total ban on Huawei products, alleging that Beijing could use the equipment for snooping. It had warned that US-UK intelligence sharing could be put at risk.
> 
> Under Chinese law, Chinese companies can be ordered to act under the direction of Beijing. Huawei has consistently denied that it would help the Chinese government to spy.
> 
> Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come under intense pressure, including from within his party, to agree to the US demands on Huawei. He discussed the issue with President Donald Trump in a phone call on Friday. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted Sunday that Britain faced a "momentous" decision on 5G.
> 
> Huawei already has a significant presence in UK wireless networks, and has been operating under supervision by government security agencies since 2003.
> 
> _"We've always treated them as a 'high risk vendor' and have worked to limit their use in the UK and put extra mitigations around their equipment and services," Ian Levy, technical director of the National Cyber Security Centre, said in a blog post_ [emphasis added]...
> 
> Huawei, which is a leader in 5G technology and also one of the world's biggest sellers of smartphones, has seen its business targeted in a concerted campaign by the United States. But its products are often described as superior and cheaper than those sold by European rivals Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson (ERIC). Some experts say that Huawei owes part of its success to favorable loans from the Chinese state, an assertion the company disputes.
> 
> The UK government said "high risk vendors" like Huawei will be excluded from all safety critical infrastructure, security critical "core" functions of the network and sensitive locations such as military sites and nuclear power stations.
> 
> _The company will also be limited to supplying 35% of network equipment and base stations, or carrying 35% of network traffic_ [emphasis added].
> 
> "The government is certain that these measures, taken together, will allow us to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cyber criminals, or state sponsored attacks," the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said in a statement...
> https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/tech/huawei-5g-uk/index.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## tomahawk6

Australia will quarantine citizens on Christmas isla.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51290312


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Justin and His Compradors must be praying BoJo can sell his approach to Huawei/5G to Americans and that we then can get them to accept something similar for Canada. Meanwhile delay, delay, delay a decision:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



What do Aussies understand about Huawei/5G that Brits, and likely our gov't don't?

1) 



> The man who stopped Huawei: A former spook speaks out
> 
> In late 2017, one of Australia’s top intelligence officials selected a team of his brightest telecommunications and cyber experts and assigned them a high priority task.
> 
> Simeon Gilding’s job at the Australian Signals Directorate was one of the most secretive in the agency - no mean feat in a place in which even the lowest order business is marked "classified". He was in charge of the people trying to launch attacks on Australia’s adversaries by hacking into phone and computer systems.
> 
> In an interview with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Gilding says he asked his team to work out how a foreign adversary could attack Australia’s 5G network based on one critical assumption: that this adversary was able to assert control over the company that was actually supplying and maintaining key components of the 5G network.
> 
> Next, Mr Gilding told them to figure out what defences could be put in place to prevent such an attack.
> 
> The answers he got informed Australia’s stunning 2018 decision to block Chinese firm Huawei from bidding to build the nation’s 5G network. It also throws into stark relief a decision made this week in Britain when, on Thursday, the UK government announced it would not follow Australia’s lead. Gilding's counterparts in British intelligence had produced a very different assessment to that of Gilding’s ASD officers: in the UK, Huawei will be welcomed to participate in the 5G rollout.
> The internet of everything
> 
> This technology, literally the fifth generation of mobile broadband, will be a crucial component of the "internet of things". It will connect every appliance in our homes and will carry the massive flows of data when trucks, trains, cars, power stations, hospitals and water utilities are automated and driverless. If a network is compromised, those doing the hacking could potentially infiltrate a host of critical infrastructure.
> 
> Gilding, who left ASD last year, insists he directed his team to find a way to mitigate the risk that the Chinese government could compel Huawei to compromise these digital superhighways in Australia.
> 
> “We wanted to come up with a package of mitigations to let Huawei in, and we put our best people on it,” says Gilding, who has never before been interviewed by the Australian media. “But we found we couldn’t.”
> 
> As it stands, cyber offensive teams run by spy agencies in places like China, the US and Australia must expend considerable time and effort to penetrate a secure network. “The costs are very high and it takes a huge amount of work by a big team,” Gilding says.
> 
> But if a cyber offensive team — government-employed hackers — can compel the actual company that is running the network to follow its orders, then the task becomes much, much easier.
> 
> Huawei argues that despite being headquartered in an authoritarian country where the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence and military apparatus reign supreme, it operates free of government influence. But Gilding doesn’t buy this. He also insists his problem is not with Huawei, but with the Chinese state’s record of cyber attacks on Australia - and the fact that it has the power to direct private firms to follow its commands.
> 
> “We are not anti-China by any means. It is just that China has form over a decade of large-scale hacks of our networks.”
> 
> *Mistaken assumptions*
> 
> The British decision to involve Huawei was, according to Gilding, based on the mistaken assumption that a country can apply “traditional” defences to stop a cyber attack launched with the help of a company running part or all of a 5G network. Gilding says this underestimates the capability of Chinese state hackers, who he calls “top tier.”
> 
> In carrying out Australia's assessment, his own team concluded that if they could coerce a network controller such as Huawei to insert complex code during a system update, they could gain control of parts of a 5G network and never be detected.
> 
> “They [the British] think they can manage the risk but we don’t think that is plausible given Huawei would be subject to direction from hostile intelligence services.”
> 
> Huawei Australia’s spokesman Jeremy Mitchell says ASD’s assessment relied on at outdated understanding of how 5G will work. He argues that multiple vendors can help run parts of a 5G network, mitigating the risk of compromise.
> 
> “We think the UK decision has been based on a long investment in finding how this technology works” by Britain’s intelligence experts, says Mitchell. “ASD had relied on a old version of 5G technology.”
> 
> Mitchell also says that if ASD’s concern is really about China, then it should equally apply to the other key players in the 5G debate, Nokia and Ericsson, as both manufacture in China and could also theoretically face demands from the government. Huawei is hoping the British decision will be replicated across the world and may even force a rethink in Australia and the US...[read on]
> https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-man-who-stopped-huawei-a-former-spook-speaks-out-20200131-p53wi6.html



2) More from Australian Strategic Policy Institute (by the Simon Gilding quoted above):



> 5G choices: a pivotal moment in world affairs
> 
> It is disappointing that the Brits are doing the wrong thing on 5G, having not exhausted other possibilities. Instead they have doubled down on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model to convince themselves that they can manage the risk that Chinese intelligence services could use Huawei’s access to UK telco networks to insert bad code.
> 
> 5G decisions reflect one of those quietly pivotal moments that crystallise a change in world affairs.
> 
> This is partly because the technology itself promises to be revolutionary, connecting not just humans but every device with a chip in it with super-fast, high-bandwidth and low-latency communications. That means if you have the keys to 5G networks, you will be trusted with the nervous system running down the backbone of every country which uses your gear and contracts you to service it. That includes critical infrastructure and safety-critical systems on which the lives and livelihoods of our citizens depend—traffic, power, water, food supply and hospitals. You get to be ‘The Borg’.
> 
> But 5G is also a touchstone for the coming age because it is the first in a line of revolutionary and highly intrusive emerging technologies in which China has invested heavily. Through means fair and foul, China has built world-leading companies with high-quality, competitive offerings for everything from video surveillance and industrial control systems to artificial intelligence and internet services via hyperscalers such as Tencent and Alibaba. So any decision to exclude Chinese companies from 5G is a threat to China’s economic and strategic positioning.
> 
> Having been caught off guard by BT’s decision to use Huawei equipment in the core of its network, in 2010 the UK government set up a Huawei-funded cybersecurity transparency centre ‘to mitigate any perceived risks arising from the involvement of Huawei in parts of the UK’s critical national infrastructure’ by evaluating Huawei products used in the UK telecommunications market.
> 
> Australia has taken a different approach and reached a different conclusion. I was part of the team in the Australian Signals Directorate that tried to design a suite of cybersecurity controls that would give the government confidence that hostile intelligence services could not leverage their national vendors to gain access to our 5G networks.
> 
> We developed pages of cybersecurity mitigation measures to see if it was possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor. But we failed.
> 
> We asked ourselves, if we had the powers akin to the 2017 Chinese Intelligence Law to direct a company which supplies 5G equipment to telco networks, what could we do with that and could anyone stop us?
> 
> We concluded that we could be awesome, no one would know and, if they did, we could plausibly deny our activities, safe in the knowledge that it would be too late to reverse billions of dollars’ worth of investment. And, ironically, our targets would be paying to build a platform for our own signals intelligence and offensive cyber operations...[read on]
> https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/5g-choices-a-pivotal-moment-in-world-affairs/



3) A Canadian intelligence history expert (he really is, but cyber stuff?) on our following UK's lead:



> Britain has let Huawei in. Will Canada follow?
> 
> _Wesley Wark is an expert on national security and intelligence and currently a visiting professor at the Centre on Public Management and Policy at the University of Ottawa. He provides consultancy advice to Canadian universities on strategic policy for cybersecurity research._
> 
> The British government announced on Tuesday its long-simmering decision on Huawei and next-generation 5G telecommunications development. This is a decision that will ring around the world – in Beijing, in Washington and in Ottawa.
> 
> The British authorities have decided to identify Huawei as a High Risk Vendor (HRV) but allow it a “restricted role” in building 5G networks. The security restriction is meant to keep Huawei equipment and software out of the more sensitive core elements of the network, which involve data management, storage and routing, while allowing Huawei to contribute to periphery hardware elements (antennae and base stations) – an essential but less sensitive part of the system.
> 
> Under the new British rules, Huawei equipment will only be allowed to constitute a maximum of 35 per cent of the total network periphery. Network providers will have three years to sort this out. Huawei will also be prevented from contributing any telecommunications gear to sites deemed to be infrastructure critical to national security (government operations, military bases etc.).
> 
> The decision is both expected and surprising. The previous Conservative government of Theresa May had come to a similar decision but was stymied by media leaks, which led to the downfall of a cabinet minister and a virulent political debate. No one could guess whether Boris Johnson would follow in Ms. May’s tracks and especially whether he would feel able to resist the intense U.S. pressure campaign to have Britain ban Huawei altogether. That campaign featured visits by high-level U.S. security officials, briefings on secret dossiers and even, according to media reports, a personal call between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Prime Minister. A pressure campaign targeting a close Western ally doesn’t get any more intense than that.
> 
> The threat raised by the Americans was loss of trust in Britain as an ally and, in particular, a cut-off from the vital intelligence-sharing arrangement known as the Five Eyes, which dates back to a postwar agreement signed between the two countries in 1946.
> 
> The British decision may mollify Beijing – or that at least must be the hope in London. Post-Brexit Britain will be looking to enhance its trade with China. The Chinese government, as Canadian officials know well, has deemed Huawei a “national champion” and exemplar of China’s new technological stature in the world.
> 
> The partial ban on Huawei will not mollify hard-liners in the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, but the British government hopes that it will be understood and supported by the U.S. intelligence community and private sector. What Mr. Trump will do in response to the failure of his pressure campaign will be fascinating to watch.
> 
> In Ottawa, all eyes will be on the British decision and on Washington’s reaction. Britain’s 5G announcement has long been awaited and may be considered a shield by the Liberal government, should it consider adopting a similar policy on Huawei.
> 
> Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, who plays a key role in the 5G decision, has indicated that Canada will base its policy on national-security calculations, but will also consider economic and geopolitical factors (read: U.S. and Chinese reactions).
> 
> The British decision provides a model that sensible Canadian policy should quickly follow to ensure that Canada does not lag in 5G implementation. 5G will ultimately revolutionize lives, at least in major urban centres. All advanced countries will want to be leaders and innovators, not laggards.The model is one of identifying security risks and mitigating them, not practising blanket bans with serious economic costs more for political and ideological purposes(and pleasing fair-weather allies) than security reasons.
> 
> If the Canadian government does follow the British path, there will be lots of work to do to adapt the philosophy of risk-management to Canadian circumstances. Decisions will have to be made on how exactly to define restrictions on companies like Huawei, how to establish security standards for all 5G providers, how to test and monitor compliance with security protocols, and how to regulate and protect data flows and try to erect some walls around Canadians’ privacy in a 5G world. Big government – at least in the sense of regulation, law and monitoring – will have to find ways to deal with potential Orwellian 5G Big Brothers.
> 
> A 5G decision, taken on its own security terms, may also provide an opening for the Canadian government to apply additional pressure on the Chinese government to release the two Michaels; Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor have now been detained for more than a year. This is not linkage politics or an appeasement-style “prisoner exchange” but a simple message to say that Canada makes its own sovereign-security decisions, is not a cat’s paw of the U.S. and is not animated by anti-Chinese sentiment.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-britain-has-let-huawei-in-will-canada-follow/



Clever bit of quietly playing the racist card in the last sentence. Of cource Canada should not be "animated by anti-Chinese sentiment"--but we certainly should be animated by anti-Chicom sentiment.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Then just remember this from 2012--US concern about Huawei long-standing and nothing to do with Trump:



> Former Nortel exec warns against working with Huawei
> _Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years_
> 
> Canadian companies should not work with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, a former security adviser at Nortel warns.
> 
> Brian Shields, who was the senior systems security adviser at failed Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, says working with Huawei is too big a risk. Shields alleges Huawei spent years hacking into Nortel's system and stealing information so it could compete with Nortel on world markets.
> 
> "These kind of things are not done by just average hackers. I believe these are nation-state [kinds] of activity," he told the CBC's Greg Weston, blaming China for the hacking.
> 
> "It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?" Shields said.
> 
> The _U.S. intelligence committee warned in a report Monday of the risk of spying that comes with working with Huawei and another Chinese telecommunications firm, ZTE. The committee said U.S. regulators should block attempted mergers and acquisitions by the firms, and that the government should avoid using components from those firms in their systems.
> 
> The head of the U.S. intelligence committee, Mike Rogers, told CBC News that Canada should also be wary_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The world’s second-largest telecommunications equipment supplier, Huawei is already providing high-speed networks for Bell Canada, Telus, SaskTel and Wind Mobile.
> 'It can't be trusted'
> 
> Shields says Canadians should be reluctant to let the company build systems and provide parts to companies here.
> 
> There's too great a potential for monitoring or breaking into companies with otherwise good security — or even the government, he says, "because the telecom's backbone that's being used to provide this communication, the hardware or software that's running, it can't be trusted."..
> In a separate interview airing Thursday on CBC Radio's As It Happens, Shields alleges Huawei spent 10 years hacking into Nortel's system. He's now advising Canadian companies not to work with the Chinese company.
> 
> "Absolutely they should not. If they care about the core infrastructure of the Canadian communications, this is a huge risk," Shields said.
> 
> "Remember, they've got this Communist Party over there right in their corporate offices. What are these people doing? Why is it such a close relationship with the Chinese government?"
> 
> Shields says there was a major change in the economic environment, which he believes was due to the hacking, which allowed Nortel's competitor to use information it otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
> 
> "When 2000 came along, then it was a downward slide. And that coincidentally is the year when Huawei started selling on the international market. How coincidental," Shields said.
> 
> Shields has previously blamed Chinese hackers for Nortel's demise [https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-chinese-hackers-1.1260591].
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-against-working-with-huawei-1.1137006



Plus this post from 2014 about Huawei in Ontario:



> Huawei’s Bigger Way in Canada
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/mark-collins-huaweis-bigger-way-in-canada/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Further to this,



> ...
> Despite Canadians’ negative feelings about China, Beijing’s jailing of the two Michaels on spurious allegations, and the stiff trade sanctions that China has slapped on Canadian agricultural imports, Ottawa remains hell-bent on its China First Policy. Prominent Canadians who have had close business ties to China, such as former prime minister Jean Chretien and Ottawa’s new ambassador, Dominic Barton, continue to rally Canadian business leaders to cash in on the bonanza over there [emphasis added]...
> https://milnet.ca/forums/threads/2941/post-1591481.html#msg1591481



now near the start of a post:



> Dominic Barton, or, is Canada's Goose Being Cooked by the Dragon?
> ...
> Our recently-appointed ambassador to China, Dominic Barton (a serious exemplar of Canadians of the comprador persuasion), testified February 5 before a special House of Commons committee on Canada-China relations that the opposition parties forced PM Justin Trudeu’s unwilling minority government to establish. Samples from three news stories...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/dominic-barton-or-is-canadas-goose-being-cooked-by-the-dragon/



*Update*: And note the US', er, laser focus here (and serious concern long predates Trump) to which Justin Trudeau's gov't should truly pay great heed:



> FBI Director Slams Chispies; Attorney General Slams Huawei
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/fbi-director-slams-chispys-attorney-general-slams-huawei/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

The start of a post that I hope summarizes the current Canada/Huawei/5G situation, based on excellent _Globe and Mail_ reporting:



> Huawei's 5G vs Canadian National Security, or, Do Our Cringing Capitalist Compradors Win?
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *FBI Director Slams Chi-Spies; Attorney General Slams Huawei*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> here’s a nicely leaked story in the _Globe and Mail_. The newspaper has been admirably on the Chicom case for quite some time (see from 2015: “Spookery in Canada: China, CSIS and…the Ontario Government“); overall this coverage firmly illustrates the need for well-staffed, well-paid and smart media (whatever the platform) if a democracy is in any sense to make informed and intelligent decisions:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Canada’s military wants Ottawa to ban Huawei from 5G*
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> ...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/huaweis-5g-vs-canadian-national-security-or-do-our-cringeing-capitalist-compradors-win/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Possible shape of the economic reset after the Coronavirus fades or burns out:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4323286-china-brutal-post-coronavirus-economic-reset



> *China: A Brutal Post-Coronavirus Economic Reset*
> Feb. 11, 2020 6:11 PM ET|3 comments  | Includes: CHN, CN, CXSE, FCA, FLCH, FXP, GXC, KGRN, PGJ, TDF, WCHN, XPP, YANG, YINN, YXI
> Albert Goldson
> 
> Summary
> China’s post-coronavirus economic landscape will look far different from today with profound political, economic, and social changes.
> 
> Chinese and foreign businesses will reduce operations while developing the type of emergency protocols and disaster recovery plans reserved for politically volatile countries in the extraction industries for future similar.
> 
> China’s government lack of credibility and inability to act rapidly to national emergencies may have planted the seeds of Hong Kong activism amongst the Mainlanders.
> 
> The coronavirus crisis continues to be highly fluid, and for this reason, the ability to accurately quantify its current and near-time economic impacts on the Chinese and world economies is impossible. To put it bluntly, the figures thrown around are nothing more than "back of the napkin" assumptions. Regardless, the current and near-future best guess financial figures for every industry are dire as everyone is in crisis management mode. Notwithstanding, let's take a beyond the horizon look at a post-coronavirus China.
> 
> The good news is that once crisis eventually comes to an end, the ensuing economic, financial and social damage will lead to steps to recovery.
> 
> The widespread mandatory lockdowns encompassing almost 60 million Chinese inhabitants mostly in the province of Hubei where the virus emerged in the city of Wuhan perversely serve as an economic cleansing - a pause and then reset - that will provide the fast-forward of what China actually looks like based on economic fundamentals.
> 
> After the coronavirus is contained, Chinese and foreign businesses will undertake a deep assessment of how to move forward. For sure China-specific contingency plans will be developed for future crises such as the coronavirus. Everyone was shockingly unprepared because a Black Swan calamity in the # 2 economy in the world was remote. An explanation might be that not only was the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak considered "ancient history", it never resulted in mass quarantine or adversely impacted an exploding Chinese economy.
> 
> Demand Destruction Dilemma
> The challenge now is post-coronavirus China with respect to economic growth and its impact domestically and internationally. I believe that the coronavirus serves as a catalyst to its other troubling crisis that I articulated in my 31 January 2020 SA article China's Crisis Management Stress Test that fast forwards China to its actual economic growth figures as dictated by fundamentals and exposes and confirms embarrassing flaws in the system.
> 
> With every business adversely impacted by the coronavirus outbreak, it's unlikely that any of them will want to return to pre-outbreak levels because of unprecedented demand destruction across all industries. Recovery and ramp-up will be painfully slow, and businesses will be justifiably quite cautious because it will be impossible to assess the cross-section of inter-connectivity and their unique industry-specific operational and financial abilities and needs. The challenge is that businesses usually face a supply issue, rarely a demand collapse which makes it difficult to project growth. No business is bad business.
> 
> Globally, the IMF has unofficially reported world economic growth at about 3% in 2019. As the coronavirus progresses, China, as the world's #2 economy under lockdown, will certainly put downward pressure on global growth towards 2.5%, which the IMF considers as recessionary. Domestically, China's 2020 growth GDP could fall to 4% or even lower contingent on the virus's strength and duration.
> 
> On the micro-level, businesses and private citizens realize the harsh realization that government protection with accurate and timely information is not forthcoming with respect to personal survival, not economic well-being. Chinese governmental leadership will not change its approach to handling this or any other future crisis and will continue to operate within the same rigid political protocol framework.
> 
> Chinese businesses may be more pragmatic and put in place internal protocols to handle future problems up to the point that it doesn't make the government lose face with respect to their inability to handle such dilemmas. The threshold will probably be not to distribute any future protocols rather they will be held privately by a tight trusted circle of executives.
> 
> Foreign businesses operating in China will reduce operations, develop emergency protocols and disaster recovery plans usually reserved for politically volatile countries. Employee evacuation plans are par for the course typical for companies operating in the extraction industries and will henceforth become standard procedure in China, the # 2 economy in the world.
> 
> During a protracted lockdown with respect to the coronavirus, China's heavily indebted enterprises (governmental and private) may not be able to retain their workers and be forced to lay them off. This could create and exacerbate social instability; a quickly manifesting threat because it's an issue of life or death, survival not political freedom like in Hong Kong. Few in the current generation know about economic hardship are accustomed to a high standard of living.
> 
> On the street, this crisis has indelibly changed the Chinese citizens' opinion on the government's ability to protect them. The future mindset will be one of self-preservation de facto future urban preppers: food, medicine and survival necessities. It's the Chinese government's worst nightmare: losing credibility in the medium to long term for immediate control - and ironically pushing the citizenry towards potential Hong Kong activism but on a higher level - literally life or death survival vs political freedom. It's a potential powder keg if the crisis worsens.
> 
> From a political perspective, regardless of whether democracy or autocracy, the "high table" leadership is rarely agile and doesn't engage in behavior modification even if it means their long-term survival. They deal problems exclusively with a blunt instrument. In China, dissent is politically dangerous because there are too many powerful interests endemic throughout the economy.



Long article, but well worth the read


----------



## The Bread Guy

10 Feb 2020, USA DOJ:


> A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans’ personal data and Equifax’s valuable trade secrets.
> 
> The nine-count indictment alleges that Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke
> (许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊) were members of the PLA’s 54th Research Institute, a component of the Chinese military.  They allegedly conspired with each other to hack into Equifax’s computer networks, maintain unauthorized access to those computers, and steal sensitive, personally identifiable information of approximately 145 million American victims.
> 
> “This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” said Attorney General William P. Barr, who made the announcement. “Today, we hold PLA hackers accountable for their criminal actions, and we remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the Internet’s cloak of anonymity and find the hackers that nation repeatedly deploys against us. Unfortunately, the Equifax hack fits a disturbing and unacceptable pattern of state-sponsored computer intrusions and thefts by China and its citizens that have targeted personally identifiable information, trade secrets, and other confidential information.”
> 
> According to the indictment, the defendants exploited a vulnerability in the Apache Struts Web Framework software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal.  They used this access to conduct reconnaissance of Equifax’s online dispute portal and to obtain login credentials that could be used to further navigate Equifax’s network.  The defendants spent several weeks running queries to identify Equifax’s database structure and searching for sensitive, personally identifiable information within Equifax’s system.  Once they accessed files of interest, the conspirators then stored the stolen information in temporary output files, compressed and divided the files, and ultimately were able to download and exfiltrate the data from Equifax’s network to computers outside the United States. In total, the attackers ran approximately 9,000 queries on Equifax’s system, obtaining names, birth dates and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens ...


13 Feb 2020, Chinese military media (links to archive.org capture of article):


> “The Chinese military has never engaged in any form of cyber theft. The US accusation is groundless and totally hegemonic,” said Senior Colonel Wuqian, spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defense, in a written statement published on Thursday.
> 
> The US Department of Justice recently announced charges against four Chinese military members for hacking a US credit reporting agency in 2017. In response, Senior Colonel Wu Qian said on Feb. 13 that the US accusation is groundless, totally hegemonic and judicial bullying. China firmly opposes this and strongly condemns it.
> 
> Wu Qian pointed out that China is a staunch defender of international cyber security. The Chinese government has always firmly opposed and cracked down on illegal cybercrimes in accordance with the law. The Chinese military has never engaged and participated in any form of cyber theft.
> 
> He said that it is an open secret with irrefutable proof that the US has long been violating international law and basic norms governing international relations by conducting large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber espionage, monitoring and surveillance activities against foreign governments, enterprises and individuals. From the case of WikiLeaks to Edward Snowden, the US still owes an explanation to the international community ...


----------



## MarkOttawa

Getting real hard to see an early resolution the Meng Wanzhou/Huawei/Kovrig/Spavor matters:



> U.S. charges Huawei, CFO Meng Wanzhou with conspiracy to steal trade secrets and racketeering
> 
> The U.S. government on Thursday [Feb. 13] filed a superseding indictment against the Chinese smartphone maker Huawei Technologies Co and its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou.
> 
> The indictment was filed in the federal court in Brooklyn, New York.
> 
> The superseding indictment charges Huawei with conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and conspiring to steal trade secrets from six U.S. technology companies in order to grow the company.
> 
> It also contains new allegations about the company’s involvement in countries subject to sanctions, such as Iran and North Korea.
> 
> The trade secret theft relates to internet router source code, cellular antenna technology and robotics.
> 
> Neither Huawei nor a lawyer for Meng immediately responded to requests for comment.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/us-business/article-us-files-superseding-indictment-against-huawei-technologies-cfo/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

Is Telus run by the CCP politbureau? https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/telus-5g-huawei-1.5462994


----------



## The Bread Guy

CloudCover said:
			
		

> Is Telus run by the CCP politbureau? https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/telus-5g-huawei-1.5462994


I take it you're not buying the Chinese military's denials, then?  ;D


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> The start of a post that I hope summarizes the current Canada/Huawei/5G situation, based on excellent _Globe and Mail_ reporting:
> 
> here’s a nicely leaked story in the _Globe and Mail_. The newspaper has been admirably on the Chicom case for quite some time (see from 2015: “Spookery in Canada: China, CSIS and…the Ontario Government“); overall this coverage firmly illustrates the need for well-staffed, well-paid and smart media (whatever the platform) if a democracy is in any sense to make informed and intelligent decisions:
> ...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/huaweis-5g-vs-canadian-national-security-or-do-our-cringeing-capitalist-compradors-win/
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Note who's saying this--Justin Trudeau better wake up right fast:



> ‘Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump see Huawei the same.’ 5G in Europe aligns America’s top political rivals
> 
> MUNICH ― U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed President Donald Trump’s warning to European allies that letting Chinese telecom giant Huawei build their next-generation communication network, or 5G, poses a grave threat ― a rare note of bipartisan harmony after a divisive impeachment.
> 
> In front of the cameras and behind the scenes at the international Munich Security Conference, Pelosi, Trump administration officials and lawmakers of both parties warned allies that China’s communist leaders could force the company to use its equipment for cyber espionage and and other subversive aims.
> 
> “Nations cannot cede telecommunications infrastructure to China for financial expediency,” said Pelosi, D-Calif. “Such an ill-conceived concession will only embolden [Chinese President Xi Jinping] as he undermines democratic values, human rights, economic independence and national security.”
> 
> With her remarks, Pelosi lends a strong voice to the Trump administration’s hard push for a blanket ban. She’s taken a less abrasive tack toward America’s European allies than the Trump administration, and sources say her position is fueled by years on the House Intelligence Committee and by constituents in the Bay Area, near Silicon Valley.
> 
> Pelosi said there was no bipartisan divide on the topic.
> 
> “We have an agreement in that regard, we put it in our [2020] national defense authorization bill because we believe it is a real danger,” she said. “We have to be very careful about how we go forward.”
> 
> Pelosi cast the adoption of Huawei equipment as enabling an autocracy over democracy, saying that the “most insidious form of aggression” would be to allow a communications network to be “dominated by a government who does not share our values.”
> 
> “We must invest in other viable options that will take us into the future while preserving our values and institutions,” she said, adding that Western leaders ought to build “something together that will be about freedom of information."..
> https://www.c4isrnet.com/congress/2020/02/14/nancy-pelosi-and-donald-trump-see-huawei-the-same-5g-in-europe-aligns-americas-top-political-rivals/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## GR66

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Note who's saying this--Justin Trudeau better wake up right fast:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



In some ways it doesn't matter if the risk of using Huawei can be mitigated in our 5G network like some (CSIS and the UK) suggest.  The fact is that we are deeply integrated with the US as our most important defence and trading partner.  If they refuse to let Huawei equipment be used due to the perceived risk then using that equipment ourselves with hurt our relationship with them.  

There may be an economic and technological cost to NOT using Huawei equipment but I doubt it would be as high as the political and economic cost that we'd face if we DO use Huawei equipment.


----------



## CBH99

Our economic and political relationship with the US will always be more important than any with China, period.  Especially over the long run.

That loyalty needs to be strong, and deeply ingrained in both countries if both countries are to protect each other - and that is a VERY real requirement.  Today.  Not at some point in the future.  Today.

I'm not a tech guy, but I'm guessing the Chinese can still do plenty of catastrophic damage even with a 30% share in the IT infrastructure in place.  I'm not sure how 'limiting' them to 30% somehow 'protects us' when information is exchanged at lightning speed throughout the network, and it also automatically gives them a 30% foot in the door if they choose to be dicks.  And it's the Chinese, they've already proven they aren't our friends.


Someone should also be telling Telus "absolutely not" - especially doing so before the Canadian government has made a decision on the 5G issue.


----------



## daftandbarmy

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Our economic and political relationship with the US will always be more important than any with China, period.  Especially over the long run.
> 
> That *loyalty* needs to be strong, and deeply ingrained in both countries



Loyalty? You mean like 'friendship', right?

"Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." Lord Palmerston


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Note who's saying this--Justin Trudeau better wake up right fast:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Now this after Nancy Pelosi in above post--Trump admin. is making all this rather confusing (as usual?):



> US won't change intelligence sharing policy with UK despite Huawei decision
> 
> Munich (CNN) The Trump administration will not change its intelligence sharing policy with the United Kingdom despite contentious disagreements over the UK's recent decision to rely on China's Huawei to help build its next generation of super-fast wireless networks, senior administration officials said Friday.
> Robert Blair, a top adviser to President Donald Trump who was recently named special representative for international telecommunications policy, said the United Kingdom would have to take a "hard look" at its decision to use Huawei equipment, but asserted that "there will be no erosion in our overall intelligence sharing."
> 
> The Trump administration had been pressing for a total ban on Huawei products, alleging that Beijing could use the equipment for snooping. It had warned that US-UK intelligence sharing could be put at risk.
> Last month, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson opted to go ahead with plans to let the Chinese company develop Britain's 5G network as part of his agenda of "leveling up" regions across the country through improved infrastructure.
> 
> Trump "tore into" Johnson in a phone call after the announcement was made, according to a person familiar with the call.
> 
> Following the UK decision, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would have a conversation with the UK "about how to proceed" after its decision. He noted that the US needed to evaluate what the UK's decision on 5G actually means.
> 
> "It's a little unclear precisely what they're going to permit and not permit so we need to take a little bit of time to evaluate that," Pompeo said in January. "But our view is we should have western systems with western rules and American information should only pass across a trusted network. We'll make sure we do that."
> 
> The UK argues that there is currently no alternative to Huawei and so it's forced to rely on the Chinese company until there is a compatible western technology...
> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/politics/us-uk-intelligence-sharing/index.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And then this--what is going on?


> Senior US delegation to fly to London to urge government to change its position on Huawei
> _In what will be seen as a sign of strain in UK-US relations, the delegation is expected to deliver a “b-----king” to British officials_
> 
> A delegation of senior US officials, including Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, will fly to London on Wednesday to raise concerns over Boris Johnson’s decision to give Huawei 5G access.
> 
> Mick Mulvaney is planning to come to Downing Street to “call for government to change its position,” a source close to the White House delegation said.
> 
> In what will be seen as a sign of strain in UK-US relations, the delegation is expected to deliver a “b-----king” to British officials, the source said.
> 
> They added: “One thing is on the agenda, and it’s not a trade deal. It is Huawei.”
> 
> Mr Johnson is set to publish the UK's mandate for trade talks with the US after next week’s half term recess.
> 
> It came amid concerns over the UK’s decision to downgrade its presence at the Munich Security...
> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/14/senior-us-delegation-fly-london-urge-government-change-position/



How tough will the admin. be on intelligence sharing with Canada, given the close intertwining of our networks, the power imbalance in the Americans’ favour, and the much greater benefit we get from the sharing than they do? Interesting times ahead.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

This post and "Comments" tries to pull several of Trump admin. and Huawei/5G developments together--title and conclusion:



> What Exactly is US Policy on Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing and Huawei/5G?
> ...
> Will the US be tougher on intelligence sharing with Canada, given the close intertwining of our networks, the power imbalance in the Americans’ favour, and the much greater benefit we get from the sharing than they do? Interesting times ahead.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/what-exactly-is-us-policy-on-five-eyes-intelligence-sharing-and-huawei-5g/comment-page-1/#comment-14546



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Post on China and US universities, Canadian angles at end:



> See What China is up to at US Universities
> ...
> One really wonders how much the Chicoms are up to in Canada since almost nothing becomes public and criminal cases are astonishingly rare. But see this [Harvard] case...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Canadian government scientist under investigation trained staff at Level 4 lab in China
> 
> Still no answers in probe of government scientists expelled from National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg
> 
> 
> 
> 
> One is almost tempted to think that CSIS and the RCMP are at least tacitly discouraged by our politicians in power and by senior civil servants from looking too closely at what the PRC is doing in this country. Especially now given the Meng Wanzhou extradition conflict with China and the taking hostage in response of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. And then there’s that dicey little matter of Huawei/5G.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/18/see-what-china-is-up-to-at-us-universities/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

One shudders to think what US may soon be saying to us about Huawei/5G:



> Furious senior Tories blast the government’s ‘incomprehensible’ attitude to Huawei and demand ministers act on the ‘deadly serious’ 5G warning from the US that intelligence sharing is at risk
> 
> US officials today met UK officials in Downing Street to discuss Huawei decision
> White House said giving Huawei role in 5G will impact on intelligence sharing
> Senior Tories now increasingly concerned and urging No10 to reconsider move
> Owen Paterson said granting Huawei a role in 5G network is 'incomprehensible'
> 
> Senior Tory MPs have demanded ministers act on 'deadly serious' warnings from the US that the involvement of Huawei in the construction of the UK's 5G network will put intelligence sharing at risk.
> 
> Owen Paterson, the former Cabinet minister, said the government's attitude to the Chinese tech giant was 'incomprehensible' given White House opposition to using the firm.
> 
> Mr Paterson is one of many Conservative MPs who are urging Downing Street to reverse its backing for Huawei and his intervention came after Donald Trump's acting chief of staff had crunch talks on the issue in Number 10 today.
> 
> Mick Mulvaney is understood to have led a delegation of US officials in a meeting with UK counterparts including Sir Edward Lister, one of Boris Johnson's top advisers.
> 
> The meeting came after Mr Mulvaney told an event last night that the UK's 5G decision on Huawei will have a 'direct and dramatic impact' on intelligence sharing with the US.
> 
> Washington has urged its allies not to do business with Huawei due to security concerns. But Huawei has always denied that it poses a security risk.
> 
> Mr Johnson announced at the end of January that the firm would be given a limited role in the UK's 5G network.
> 
> The decision sparked fury across the Atlantic and there is a growing Tory rebellion on the issue...[read on]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8023923/Donald-Trumps-acting-chief-staff-issues-stark-Huawei-warning-UK.html



Rather a barracking as the Brits say.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a lengthy post:



> The Dragon vs the Kangaroo and the Beaver
> 
> 1) The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation pulls few punches short of actually naming the People’s Republic of China. ‘Twould be nice if his Canadian counterpart, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) would speak so frankly but our current Liberal government would never permit that (see also the end of this section of the post):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Australia spy chief warns of “unprecedented” foreign espionage threat [actually counter-spy chief]...
> 
> 
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/the-dragon-vs-the-kangaroo-and-the-beaver/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post, note my comments on defence aspects at end:



> Canada and the Indo-Pacific Century: A Military/Naval Role?
> 
> Our former ambassador at Beijing, David Mulroney (tweets here, is very tough on the Chicoms), has some very good suggestions below but one on defence that I think should be avoided; first on China and India:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Navigating a New Canadian Course in the Indo-Pacific
> 
> This talk was delivered at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s annual dinner on February 19, 2020 [video here]
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/02/29/canada-and-the-indo-pacific-century-a-military-naval-role/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

Realistically, I don't know how much of an effective force we could contribute to a conflict against China anyway.

Between Japan, South Korea, USA, Australia -- as well as smaller countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, etc -- there are plenty of players, already allied, in any sort of military conflict against China.


We have 1 AOR & a handful of frigates available at any given time, and they are usually tied up in NATO operations around Europe, Persian Gulf, Africa.  Maybe, MAYBE we'd have 1 submarine available (Which we did have a deployed sub in that region of the world, monitoring North Korea sanctions), and that's about it.

On the air side, we could contribute a handful of fighters, a refueller, and maybe a few cargo planes to help with allied logistics.



Between the naval side & air side of things, sure...we could send over a force that could help contribute/reinforce allied efforts, and perhaps take up some secondary tasks so the adults can focus on the warfighting.  

I would think a solid focus on ASW between the Cyclones & new CSC, and being a real partner to the USN in the Atlantic would be a better & more useful area to focus our resources.    :2c:


----------



## daftandbarmy

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Realistically, I don't know how much of an effective force we could contribute to a conflict against China anyway.
> 
> Between Japan, South Korea, USA, Australia -- as well as smaller countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, etc -- there are plenty of players, already allied, in any sort of military conflict against China.
> 
> 
> We have 1 AOR & a handful of frigates available at any given time, and they are usually tied up in NATO operations around Europe, Persian Gulf, Africa.  Maybe, MAYBE we'd have 1 submarine available (Which we did have a deployed sub in that region of the world, monitoring North Korea sanctions), and that's about it.
> 
> On the air side, we could contribute a handful of fighters, a refueller, and maybe a few cargo planes to help with allied logistics.
> 
> 
> 
> Between the naval side & air side of things, sure...we could send over a force that could help contribute/reinforce allied efforts, and perhaps take up some secondary tasks so the adults can focus on the warfighting.
> 
> I would think a solid focus on ASW between the Cyclones & new CSC, and being a real partner to the USN in the Atlantic would be a better & more useful area to focus our resources.    :2c:



So we're doing (part of) a great job, according to Sun Tzu 

"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him." Sun Tzu


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of an article at _Proceedings_ of US Naval Institute:



> China’s Navy Will Be the World’s Largest in 2035
> By Rear Admiral Michael A. McDevitt, U.S. Navy (Retired)
> 
> It is difficult to appreciate just how fast China has been able to create a blue water navy. One way is to compare it to the other great navies of the world, as the chart below does. This comparison is not a top-to-bottom order of battle inventory in which every ship of every class is counted. Rather it is a comparison of the number of Chinese blue water warships to other nations that historically have demonstrated the ability to operate globally. The ship count totals are projected to the 2020-2021-time frame.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The chart shows that in terms of modern warships and submarines China far outstrips any erstwhile naval competitors, except for the United States. While the PLAN’s far-seas capabilities are impressive when measured against the rest of the world, the U.S. Navy’s still overshadow the PLAN—for now. Virtually all of the U.S. Navy’s warships are blue water capable because they are expected to operate globally. The United States has both a qualitative and quantitative advantage in aircraft carriers, high-end air defense cruisers and destroyers, large amphibious ships, and nuclear attack submarines. On the other hand, all of China’s ships—both the “blue water” ships listed above plus those not included in the chart because they are not “blue water” but are dedicated to “near seas” roles—are homeported in East Asia, providing a “home field advantage” over most of the U.S. Navy that is homeported thousands of miles away. What this means in practice is that on a daily basis virtually all of the Chinese Navy is either in port in China or operating in home waters in and around the First Island Chain. This yields a significant firepower advantage over the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
> 
> How Large will the PLAN be in 2035?
> 
> Chinese President Xi Xinping wants a “world class force.” He wants the naval modernization associated with becoming world class “to be largely completed by 2035,” just 15 years away. China has yet to publish its intended navy force structure objective, which remains a state secret. A few experts like Rick Joe and James Fanell, however, have published projections of PLAN strength in 2030. Building off their work and others’, here is my estimate of overall PLAN warship strength in 2035.
> 
> To speculate on what the PLAN will look like in 15 years, a good starting point is to assess what it has done in the past 15 years.  In this short decade and a half, China launched and/or commissioned 131 blue-water capable ships and built approximately 144 other warships destined for operations only in China’s near seas, for a grand total of approximately 275 new warships.  During several of these years China’s most modern ship yards were not yet in full production, so it is not unreasonable to forecast that over the next 15 years it could commission or launch 140 more blue-water ships to grow its far-seas capacity and to replace some of today’s blue water ships that were commissioned between 2005 and 2010. In sum, I predict the PLAN’s blue water capable ships in 2035 will number around 270 warships...
> https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/february/chinas-navy-will-be-worlds-largest-2035



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## brihard

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Start of an article at _Proceedings_ of US Naval Institute:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Adding on to the point about China's navy in its entirety being home ported in one part of the world- America, while possessing a huge navy, also possesses huge commitments. While starting with more blue water navy than China, their strategic interests are less resilient to combat attrition, I think. China doesn't need its navy to project power in the same way America does; America must preserve its navy so that it can. An American carrier sunk fighting China cannot project power to deter Russia, Iran, or North Korea. It cannot launch sorties against Syria, or supporting special forces in North or East Africa. Any fight America gets into will still exist concurrent with their other strategic interests and imperatives, so they can less afford to 'spend' their forces than China can. And I expect both sides know this.


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Start of an article at _Proceedings_ of US Naval Institute:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Friend familiar with naval and military matters observes about the PLA Navy:



> Straight line extrapolations often don't make it into actual history.



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Considerate Chicoms Provide Uyghurs with Free Vocational Training
> 
> That’s the line their ambassador to Canada is taking at the CDA Institute’s Annual Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence–story by the CBC’s Murray Brewster (tweets here)...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/considerate-chicoms-provide-uyghurs-with-free-vocational-training/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## OldSolduer

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Start of a post:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Bahaha this makes me laugh - free vocational training meaning breaking big rocks into little rocks, also known as "re-education"


----------



## MarkOttawa

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Bahaha this makes me laugh - free vocational training meaning breaking big rocks into little rocks, also known as "re-education"



Character building with Chinese characteristics.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## YZT580

And the 8 ft fence topped with barb is to give the residents peace of mind so they can sleep and not worry about break and enter.  Very thoughtful


----------



## MarkOttawa

RAAF arming up in face of PLA Navy:



> Australia ups the ante to counter China
> _Tindal airbase upgrade and purchase of long-range anti-ship missiles signals greater leadership role in the region _
> 
> Message to Beijing, loud and clear.
> 
> The friendly folks Down Under are stepping up their military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, and make no mistake, the crosshairs are entirely pointed at the growing power of China, says a special report from Prof. Paul Dibb at Real Clear Defense.
> 
> The first action is the announcement by Prime Minister Scott Morrison of a US$1.1 billion upgrade to the Royal Australian Air Force base at Tindal, to lengthen the runway so that US B-52 strategic bombers as well as RAAF KC-30 air-to-air refuelling aircraft can operate from there, writes Dibb, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.
> 
> It goes without saying, it would also benefit Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider long-range strategic stealth bomber, which could enter service in 2025.
> 
> The second is the _announcement by the US State Department that Australia has been cleared, at a cost of about US$1.4 billion, to purchase 200 AGM-158C long-range ship-killing missiles (LRASM), which can be fired from F/A-18 Super Hornets and F-35s_ [emphasis added], the report said.
> 
> Clearly, the coincidence of these two developments at the same time should not be underestimated by Chinese military analysts.
> 
> Morrison described the upgrades to Tindal as being “the sharp end of the spear” for Australian and US air operations in the Indo-Pacific, the report said.
> 
> The sharp end indeed.
> 
> As ASPI’s Peter Jennings observed, the decision to expand the Tindal airbase is perceived as a giant strategic step forward and could be the basis for a greater leadership role for Australia in the region, the report said...
> 
> When the upgrade, including major runway extensions, fuel stockpiles and engineering support, is completed, Tindal will be the most potent military base south of Guam, the report said.
> 
> And — for the time being — beyond the reach of Chinese conventional ballistic missiles.
> 
> The LRASMs will give Australia a highly capable stand-off anti-ship strike capability with much longer range than before, the report said.
> 
> Unclassified sources state that this _missile has a range of at least 500-600 kilometres. It can conduct autonomous targeting (moving ships and land targets), relying on on-board targeting systems and data links to acquire the target without GPS_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The missile is also designed with countermeasures to evade active defence systems, and, reportedly can share data to coordinate and attack in a swarm — the future direction of military weapons on all sides.
> 
> The actions represent a Herculean boost to Australia’s strike capabilities, following the retirement of the RAAF’s ancient F-111s and the fact that it takes forever for the navy’s diesel-electric Collins-class submarines to transit South Pacific waters, the report said.
> 
> For the first time since World War II, a major power is deploying military capabilities which are contesting strategic space in the “inner arc,” stretching from the Indonesian archipelago and Papua New Guinea down to Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
> 
> _Meantime, the US is also developing a ground-launched version of the latest Tomahawk maritime strike missile, a boost glide anti-ship missile, a hypersonic cruise missile and potentially a Pershing III anti-ship intermediate-range ballistic missile_ [emphasis added], the report said.
> 
> With ranges of around 1,000 kilometres to more than 3,000 kilometres, these sorts of weapons would enable Australia to strike at targets well into the South China Sea.
> https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/australia-ups-the-ante-to-counter-china/



Thank goodness the USAF has no need to ask our gov't to let B-52s operate out of Canada.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Conclusion of a post:



> The Dragon Claws Back on COVID-19–and much else
> ...
> I would frankly say that the Chicoms are a foreign influence/foreign interference (once known as subversion) threat coming at least to equal that ever posed by the Soviet Union.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/the-dragon-claws-back-on-covid-19-and-much-else/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> COVID-19 and the Dragon’s Foul Breath
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Dragon Claws Back on COVID-19–and much else
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I’m certain Canada’s current Liberal government will not even consider saying “Boo!” to Xi and the Chicoms (not a bad band name, eh?), what with Beijing’s Canadian hostages Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor much in mind (see here)–along with many other things such as simply being unwilling, in the face of all the evidence, to accept that “constructive engagement” with China is a failed policy. Now consider what’s going on with the Brits:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China will face ‘a reckoning’ over virus, Britain warns
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/covid-19-and-the-dragons-foul-breath/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> One shudders to think what US may soon be saying to us about Huawei/5G:
> 
> Rather a barracking as the Brits say.
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Start of a post:



> COVID-19 Help, or, Feds Damn’ Well Better Cut Huawei a Cheque
> 
> Further to the UPDATE at this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> COVID-19, or, Chicoms will Chicom, Australia Section
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Gary Mason, the _Globe and Mail’s_ national columnist based in Vancouver (tweets here)–no hardline neo-con–does take a hard line on Huawei’s “gift” of medical supplies:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> When it comes to Huawei, there’s no such thing as a free gift
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/covid-19-help-or-feds-damn-well-better-cut-huawei-a-cheque/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

How nice of them to send us the same medical supplies they secretly horded from Canada, Australia, Europe, and the US.  How unbelievably thoughtful!

I mean, at first I was suspicious.  Not just about EVERYTHING the Chinese have said and done, and their blatant attempts to influence the WHO and UN (Successfully too, mind you.)

When they discreetly directed Chinese owned companies - including smaller companies - to start going around and buying as many medical supplies as possible, and discreetly ship them back to China...it caused me to raise an eyebrow.  And when the Chinese embassies started to accept the packages & ship them back to China themselves as diplomatic parcels, I raised both eyebrows.

But, shame on me.  I must be a racist paranoid.  I'm embarrassed...



If only I had known that Huawei was actually collecting all of that equipment just so they could send everybody care packages in good will, and manipulate our dumb as f**k MP's that China is actually our friend.  And such a good friend indeed!  

And to think, they did that while the CFO of their company languishes away in her $15M mansion in sunny Vancouver...  can't believe how unconditionally giving they are.  Thank You China.  Truly.


^^ *This is the ONLY time I've ever wished we had an emoji of a middle finger*    :2c:


----------



## cavalryman

The Chinese Communist Party is an existential threat to humanity.  Change my mind


----------



## MarkOttawa

cavalryman said:
			
		

> The Chinese Communist Party is an existential threat to humanity.  Change my mind



Non-Han humanity?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## cavalryman

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Non-Han humanity?
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa


Non-Xi Jinping controlled genocidal state apparatus.  The Chinese people are as much victims of their rulers as anyone else.


----------



## MilEME09

I have said a few times if you want to hasten the fall of the CCP, offensive cyber attack, bring down the great firewall, and keep it down for atleast a month. The people will find the truth


----------



## FJAG

There was a time once where the truth mattered and set you free. Not so much these days.

 :stirpot:


----------



## CBH99

FJAG said:
			
		

> There was a time once where the truth mattered and set you free. Not so much these days.
> 
> :stirpot:




In China, it's actually the total opposite.

If your someone of interest - a prominent business person, doctor, scientist, social personality - and you start to tell too much of the truth...you disappear or end up imprisoned.  


More and more, I'm thinking China is very much turning out to be today's version of a pre-1939 Germany.


----------



## MilEME09

CBH99 said:
			
		

> In China, it's actually the total opposite.
> 
> If your someone of interest - a prominent business person, doctor, scientist, social personality - and you start to tell too much of the truth...you disappear or end up imprisoned.
> 
> 
> More and more, I'm thinking China is very much turning out to be today's version of a pre-1939 Germany.



Tibet can be compared to Austria, the 9 dash line islands are Czechoslovakia, but who will be the easts Poland? Taiwan? Mongolia? Japan? Vietnam?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The Chinese not to be outdone by Russia have their own vessel fire, except on a new one, ouch!! 

China's first big-deck amphibious assault ship, a huge vessel that was built in a miraculously short amount of time, caught fire on Saturday, April 11th, 2020. Photos and video showing the ship billowing large clouds of black smoke hit Chinese social media earlier in the day. The warship, which is the first of the new Type 075 class, was resting alongside the pier at its birthplace, Hudong–Zhonghua Shipbuilding in Shanghai, when the blaze broke out. 


https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32980/a-fire-has-broken-out-on-chinas-massive-new-type-075-amphibious-assault-ship?fbclid=IwAR1T_pWp-cE-THyFkO23zt8o-bdJFezYSfVIsrcfpe_jFemcrHCg-cpzynY


----------



## MilEME09

Looks pretty extensive judging by the scorching


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Couldn't have happened to a nicer navy.....  8)


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin P said:
			
		

> Couldn't have happened to a nicer navy.....  8)



I agree.


----------



## blacktriangle

Maybe someone was sending a message.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of wide-ranging post on PRC, COVID-19, note UK at 2):



> COVID-19 and the Curse/Menace of the Chicoms
> 
> 1) First a piece of which one of the co-authors is Irwin Cotler (justice minister 2003-06 in PM Paul Martin’s Liberal government, tweets here); listen up you Justin Trudeau Liberals:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Xi Jinping’s China did this
> 
> The corrupt, criminal regime wasted 40 days blocking information while it crushed domestic dissent and ensured COVID-19 would become a global pandemic
> 
> 
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/covid-19-and-the-curse-menace-of-the-chicoms/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/04/report-china-may-be-testing-nuclear-weapons-us-state-dept-says/?utm_campaign=alt&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=militarymemes


Well this could be a potentially worrying development, the evidence is very flimsy, but one doesnt dig at a nuclear test site for no reason.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile the repression of Tibetans just continues--start of a post:



> Dragon Working on Muting Tibetans
> 
> The post below deals with the PRC’s going after Muslims,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Considerate Chicoms Provide Uyghurs with Free Vocational Training
> 
> 
> 
> 
> but the CCP is not forgetting the Tibetans–at the _LA Times_, note the author at end:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Op-Ed: In Tibet, it’s a crime to even talk about the value of mother-tongue education
> 
> A year ago February, authorities in the highly restrictive Tibet Autonomous Region of China picked up Tsering Dorje, who lived in a village near Mt. Everest. They held him for a month in what they told him was a “reeducation facility,” where he says he was interrogated and beaten.
> 
> Dorje’s “crime”? A phone call with his brother, who lives outside China, in which they discussed the importance of Tibetan language instruction for their children. The local police who had intercepted the call told his family that such a conversation was a “political crime.”..
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/16/dragon-working-on-muting-tibetans/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Meanwhile the repression of Tibetans just continues--start of a post:
> 
> but the CCP is not forgetting the Tibetans–at the _LA Times_, note the author at end:
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/16/dragon-working-on-muting-tibetans/
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa




I know I've said it before, but I think I undersold my point.  China gives me this "Germany in 1937" vibe when it comes Jews being forced to wear armbands, and small territorial grabs, etc etc.  China seems so much worse though...Germany didn't have the technological ability to cripple communications all over the world, or disable healthcare systems & electrical grids.

30% market share to Hauwei, as an acceptable security risk in return for China's business?  Hell no.  Any computer expert can tell us that 30% access to a system might as well be 100% access to the system, as that 30% can be exploited pretty darn quickly when wanted.  (And they have the tech ability to do so easily.)


I think most people would be fine paying an extra dollar for a T-shirt, or a few extra bucks for other goods, if North American manufacturers could produce them without the unions driving the wages sky-high.  They make Saudi Arabia look like friendlier alternative...and anybody who can make Saudi Arabia look favourable compared to them, is someone we really outta' be examining our relationship with.    :2c:


----------



## MarkOttawa

CBH99 said:
			
		

> ...
> 30% market share to Hauwei, as an acceptable security risk in return for China's business?  Hell no.  Any computer expert can tell us that 30% access to a system might as well be 100% access to the system, as that 30% can be exploited pretty darn quickly when wanted.  (And they have the tech ability to do so easily.)





> Huawei on the agitprop offensive in EU:
> 
> Cybersecurity at top of Huawei’s agenda as Europe decides on 5G infrastructure
> *In the third of our eight-part series on Huawei, Zen Soo and Jane Zhang report on the company’s effort to gain support from major European economies, like Germany and the UK
> *Huawei had 91 total 5G network projects as of February, 47 of which are located in Europe
> 
> Entering Huawei Technologies’ cybersecurity transparency centre
> in Brussels, visitors could be forgiven for thinking it is a large exhibition facility.
> 
> The ground floor of this two-storey centre is replete with wood laminate flooring and clean white walls rigged with multiple screens, flashing slogans from PowerPoint slides such as “5G is a shared responsibility” and “A strong ecosystem is our best protection”.
> 
> “The centre is how we demonstrate openness, where we show our security approach strategy, research, Huawei’s software and hardware product development, and our supply chain,” said Marco Men, a senior security solution architect who regularly guides visitors through the exhibition. Visitors are also able to view flowcharts of Huawei’s product development and security testing processes...
> https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3079455/cybersecurity-top-huaweis-agenda-europe-decides-5g-infrastructure
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _A Huawei Technologies employee welcomes visitors at the company’s Cyber Security Transparency Centre in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: Handout_



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Meanwhile in China: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/china-begins-forced-evictions-africans-greyson-arnold/?trackingId=LjYAFwqw3rODxoYWBLVIpA%3D%3D


----------



## MarkOttawa

Conclusion by me athttps://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/huawei-5g-canada-and-covid-19-and-our-comprador-class/ a post based on a piece by the estimable Prof. Charles Burton on rejecting Huawei/5G:



> Huawei, 5G, Canada and…COVID-19 and our Comprador Class
> ...
> That “integrity” is the nub of it all. Canada’s political, economic and academic classes need to look deeply within themselves and consider if they wish to continue to be witting and willing compradors (SEE HERE) for the detestable rulers of the PRC. And to reflect most seriously about that in which they truly believe as they regurgitate their usual liberal platitudes–in the end is it all just about their bank accounts?
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/huawei-5g-canada-and-covid-19-and-our-comprador-class/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

The PRC's grasp for _Weltmach_t--start of a post:



> Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster on How to Appreciate, and Deal With, the Dragon
> 
> Brief excerpts from, and the conclusion of, an article originally in The Atlantic by President Trump’s first (of many) national security advisers; Canadians, especially Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, should pay realistic heed...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/lt-gen-h-r-mcmaster-on-how-to-appreciate-and-deal-with-the-dragon/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

A post based on recent Report to Congress by Congressional Research Service:



> What Does the Fast-Growing PLA Navy Mean for the US Navy (and others)?
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/what-does-the-fast-growing-pla-navy-mean-for-the-us-navy-and-others/



Mark Collins


----------



## FJAG

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> A post based on recent Report to Congress by Congressional Research Service:
> 
> Mark Collins



China plays a long game well, while the US gets distracted by squirrels.

 :cheers:


----------



## MarkOttawa

FJAG said:
			
		

> China plays a long game well, while the US gets distracted by squirrels.
> 
> :cheers:



E.g. the almost two-decades almost hysterical focus on the essentially minor threat from Islamic terrorism--compare with the patient and measured UK reaction to IRA terrorism. Conclusion of an earlier post of mine:



> Iraq War II, Intelligence… and Doug Feith
> ...
> Mr Feith is reviled by many for his role in the Bush adminstration’s defence department. In fact a bright fellow for all the flaws, see his memoir: War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. My read from it was that after 9/11 the Bush administration was so terrified of another attack (however unlikely via Iraq) that they would do about anything. Acting from a sense of perceived weakness and vulnerability, not real confidence or strength.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/mark-collins-iraq-war-ii-intelligence-and-doug-feith/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Colin Parkinson

I will disagree on the downplaying of the Islamic threat, they to play the long game, along with the short term.


----------



## FJAG

Colin P said:
			
		

> I will disagree on the downplaying of the Islamic threat, they to play the long game, along with the short term.



But not in a unified and organized way like the Chinese.

 :cheers:


----------



## Edward Campbell

FJAG said:
			
		

> China plays a long game well, while the US gets distracted by squirrels.
> 
> :cheers:



But, perhaps not coincidentally, the US, with all its checks and balances and the competition between departments and agencies and so on, plays the "short game" very, very well, indeed. 

Despite the small size of the Chinese innermost circle, less than ten (all men, right now, I think), _they seem, to me_, to need a lot of time to deliberate to make a short-term, _tactical_ decision. 

The Americans, on the other hand, seem able to bring thirty people, representing 10 different often competing factions, into a room and, half a morning later, arrive at an agreed _*tactical*_ solution to whatever problem they face. Some may argue that there is too much whiz-bang DARPA stiff and not enough Sun Tzu in Washington, but that's a quibble.

The Americans are not bad at _*strategic*_ decision-making ~ quite the opposite, in fact. I think American _*strategy*_ in 1941/42 (Roosevelt, Stimson, Knox, Morgentau and Marshall) was peerless and should be an example to every nation on how to do it right, the first time. But I also agree that the Chinese have often, over the past 3,000 years done it very well, too and many Chinese senior officials are philosophically conditioned to think in the long term.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post and a bit near the end (image is at the head of the post):








> COVID-19: The Chicoms and Canada, Australia and Sweden
> 
> A selection of recent news pieces that well illustrate the current Canadian government’s almost craven approach to relations with an increasing assertive and aggressive PRC (and almost unhinged, fearful of its own people and going hyper-nationalist to placate them?)...
> 
> Canada is back? The world needs more of this Canada? The minimal, not middle, power?..
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-the-chicoms-and-canada-australia-and-sweden/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## FJAG

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> ...
> The Americans are not bad at _*strategic*_ decision-making ~ quite the opposite, in fact. I think American _*strategy*_ in 1941/42 (Roosevelt, Stimson, Knox, Morgentau and Marshall) was peerless and should be an example to every nation on how to do it right, the first time. But I also agree that the Chinese have often, over the past 3,000 years done it very well, too and many Chinese senior officials are philosophically conditioned to think in the long term.



It strikes me the primary international strategy that the US has been following arose out of the post WW2 Domino Effect theory which was based on curtailing Communist expansion. While that had an original success vis a vis the Soviet Union, it has had a very limited effect vis a vis Chinese economic expansion.

It strikes me that these days (and by this I include more than the Trump administration but also a few of his predecessors) American strategic decision making has been more impulsive or reactive rather than deliberate or forward-looking. America, these days, seems to get easily distracted by peripheral issues; hence my "squirrel" comment.

op:


----------



## Kirkhill

https://globalnews.ca/news/6858818/coronavirus-china-united-front-canada-protective-equipment-shortage/

Colin flagged this on Facebook.  

Very long but justifiably so.  Mandatory read.

No indication that China created the virus.  But it is not unreasonable to suggest that China went from managing a crisis to creating an exploitable opportunity.  From progressing through "We have a problem" to "We have to take everyone else down with us" to "We can damage them more than we will be hurt."

And they certainly seem to have been prepared to exploit an opportunity when it presented itself.  They seem to have had assets in place.


There comes a time when the enemy decides to unmask their guns.  At that point they have to win because you now know their strength, location and intention.  

Is this an intentional unmasking or is this a forced premature unmasking?  

Either way I don't think the CCP is ever going to be perceived as a reliable partner again.  And for what its worth I think they have jumped the gun on this crisis.  I think they are likely  to lose more than they intended to gain.  Both overseas and at home.


----------



## Weinie

Chris Pook said:
			
		

> Either way I don't think the CCP is ever going to be perceived as a reliable partner again.  And for what its worth I think they have jumped the gun on this crisis.  I think they are likely  to lose more than they intended to gain.  Both overseas and at home.



The veneer on the Ming vases is starting to crack.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile in Hong Kong--start of a post:



> Hong Kong and the PRC: What One Country, Two Systems? Plus COVID-19
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hong Kong widens schism with China over coronavirus
> 
> 
> 
> 
> the PRC is making it clear that the “Special Administrative Region’s” days of serious autonomy are coming to an end. Here are the start and conclusion of a piece at Just Security by Alvin Y.H. Cheung (tweets here)...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/hong-kong-and-the-prc-what-one-country-two-systems-plus-covid-19/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile China's ambassador pats us on the head and says what good little boys and girls we are, unlike those nasty Americans--and by the way two Michaels are just fine, not to worry. When will this government get serious about the Chicoms? Don't bother to answer; they and their comprador friends have effectively been bought and paid or silenced by the Dragon's threatening behaviour:



> China likes Canada’s ‘cool head’ amid U.S. ‘smears’ over COVID-19, says envoy
> 
> China's envoy in Ottawa says that while the United States is "smearing" his country over COVID-19, the People's Republic appreciates Canada's "cool-headed" co-operation on battling the pandemic.
> 
> Ambassador Cong Peiwu also says he wants Canadians to know that Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor are healthy and getting good treatment in Chinese custody.
> 
> The two Canadians have been detained for more than 500 days and China cut off their visits from Canadian diplomats earlier in the year as part of its efforts to limit access to prisons during the pandemic.
> 
> In an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press, Cong said he has heard nothing new about a proposal by Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne to allow diplomats to conduct a "virtual" visit using the internet to check on Kovrig and Spavor.
> 
> They were imprisoned in December 2018 after Canada arrested Chinese high-tech executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant, plunging Sino-Canadian relations to a new low.
> 
> Cong says Canada and China are working closely to fight the pandemic, and that he is awaiting a report from his government on how a million face masks that Canada imported from China were found to be inadequate for health-care workers.
> 
> "China attaches high importance to export quality control. The competent departments have recently written out more rigorous regulatory measures," said Cong.
> 
> "We still are waiting for the response from the government because there was a report suggesting that some masks didn't meet the quality standards. We would like to see clarification, but still we haven't got an answer yet."
> 
> The legal issues in the Kovrig-Spavor-Meng dispute remain unchanged: China says Canada's arrest of Meng, who faces bank-fraud charges in the United States, is unjust; Canada says Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Spavor, an entrepreneur, were picked up arbitrarily.
> 
> But Cong positioned Canada as an important partner for China in the continuing battle against COVID-19 and he used the interview to unleash a counterattack against the U.S., which has temporarily suspended all funding to the World Health Organization.
> 
> Cong didn't not mention President Donald Trump by name, but he referred to his administration's accusations that the WHO covered up early aspects of the outbreak and that China initially withheld information about it from the organization.
> 
> More recently, Trump and his supporters have also been putting forth a conspiracy theory that an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan, China was the source of the pandemic. A U.S. intelligence statement released Thursday says the virus that causes COVID-19 was not deliberately engineered, but work is continuing to determine whether it might have escaped the Wuhan lab while being studied.
> 
> "China is sharing experience while the U.S. is smearing China," said Cong. "China has actively shared epidemic information and anti-epidemic experience with the WHO and many other countries including Canada." That co-operation has extended to 150 countries and international organizations, including on recent video conferences, he added.
> 
> "To shift the blame, some U.S. politicians try to launch a stigmatization campaign against China. Attacking and discrediting other countries will not save the time and lives lost."
> 
> Cong was also asked about Conservative politicians in Canada, who are demanding answers directly from the WHO and are questioning whether China has undue influence on the organization.
> 
> "It's a time to focus on the fight against the pandemic. Unfortunately, some politicians have greatly politicized the COVID-19 issue. Actually, we don't think it's the time for accusations and political manipulation," he replied.
> 
> Champagne and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have said that now is not the time for finger-pointing with the pandemic still a threat, but have suggested a reckoning could come later.
> 
> "I believe that Canada has adopted a cool-headed approach," Cong said.
> 
> "We appreciate that. The most important task, currently, is to focus our energy on fighting the pandemic."
> 
> He said China is committed to helping Canada receive all the medical equipment and supplies it needs during the pandemic. He also said China is grateful for Canada's shipping medical supplies to China early on.
> 
> China is preparing to ship 32 tons of diagnostic kits, N95 masks, isolation gowns and other equipment soon, Cong said.
> 
> China is also trying to smooth the passage of Canadian goods through Shanghai's crowded airports, he said, and added it currently has no restrictions on how long the ground crews of chartered cargo planes can wait on the ground to be loaded up.
> 
> China and Canada disagreed recently on whether that was a factor in two Canadian planes' returning from China without the medical supplies they were sent to pick up.
> 
> "Our two countries have a tradition of supporting each other in trying times," said Cong.
> 
> "As you could recall, during the most difficult period in our fight against the pandemic, the Canadian side provided us with assistance and support, and we value that very much. As the pandemic is spreading in Canada right now, we relate to the hardship the Canadian people are going through."
> 
> The status quo remains for Kovrig and Spavor, who are in Chinese prisons facing accusations of espionage. The Canadian government calls their arrests arbitrary. China continues to call for Meng's release, and Canada says her extradition case will have to be heard by the B.C. courts. The pandemic has all but halted those legal proceedings for the time being.
> 
> Cong said Kovrig was allowed a phone call to his father in March who was "seriously ill at the time," but he offered no other details. Kovrig and Spavor, along with other prisoners are all being given better food, and they are both being allowed a "higher frequency" of parcels and letters.
> 
> "They're in good and sound health," said Cong. "That's a message I would like to share with you."
> 
> This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 1, 2020.
> 
> Mike Blanchfield, The Canadian Press
> https://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2020/05/01/china-likes-canadas-cool-head-amid-u-s-smears-over-covid-19-says-envoy/#.XqxF9Z5KiUk



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> The Dragon vs the Kangaroo, or, Who’s the Sovereign?
> 
> Further to this post (note final paragraph),
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Huawei, 5G, Canada and…COVID-19 and our Comprador Class
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Peter Hartcher, political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, takes on his country’s own compradors and raises the fundamental matter related to dealing with the PRC’s drive to re-establish the Middle Kingdom’s past power…and more. In other words _Weltmacht_, as the Germans describe world power...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/the-dragon-vs-the-kangaroo-or-whos-the-sovereign/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

What about, say, our extremely intimate collaboration with US in NORAD if this government allows Huawei into Canada's 5G networks (further links at original):



> U.S. Mulls Pulling Spy Planes From Britain, Not Basing F-35s There Over Huawei 5G Plans: Report
> _The United States says the Chinese firm's work on the United Kingdom's national 5G network is a major security risk._
> 
> Members of the U.S. Senate are reportedly looking to block the future forward-deployment of two U.S. Air Force F-35A Joint Strike Fighter squadrons to the United Kingdom. This follows reports that the White House is considering withdrawing RC-135 spy planes and other intelligence assets, as well as other U.S. military personnel, from the country. At issue are security concerns over the U.K. government's decision to allow Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei to be among those working on the country's national 5G mobile phone and WiFi networks.
> 
> _The Telegraph_ newspaper in Britain first reported the effort to prevent the F-35As from going to the United Kingdom, which is a proposed addition to the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2021 Fiscal Year, on May 5, 2020. This same paper had reported that the White House was conducting its larger military and intelligence security review the day before.
> 
> The summary of the proposed addition to the NDAA, which is only now starting to take shape in Congress, would "prohibit the stationing of new aircraft at bases in host countries with at-risk vendors in their 5G or 6G networks." This could also upend any other forward-deployments of U.S. military aircraft to the United Kingdom or any other country that employs a telecommunications contractor, such as Huawei, that the United States deems to be a national security risk.
> 
> If this provision were to become law, it's not clear how this might impact plans to deploy U.S. Marine F-35Bs on the U.K. Royal Navy's aircraft carrier HMS _Queen Elizabeth_ during that ship's first operational cruise, which is set to occur in 2021. How this prohibition might apply to rotational deployments, such routine visits by Air Force heavy bombers, is unclear, too.
> 
> With regards to the broader White House review, forward-deployed RC-135 spy planes at RAF Mildenhall in southeast England are high on the list to be withdrawn if the U.K. government goes ahead with its 5G plans involving Huawei. The U.K. Royal Air Force is also an RC-135 operator, with its variants known as Airseekers, a program that is heavily tied together with its American counterparts. It's unclear if that cooperation could also be put in jeopardy should the U.K.'s 5G plans go forward.
> 
> Beyond that, the United Kingdom is part of the so-called "Five Eyes" intelligence network with the United States, along with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. This arrangement allows these five countries to rapidly share very sensitive information back and forth with each other and means that the United Kingdom hosts a wide variety of other permanent and rotating American intelligence assets.
> 
> This includes, but is certainly not limited to, deployments of U-2S Dragon Lady spy planes to RAF Mildenhall and RAF Fairford and the large U.S. Intelligence Community presence at RAF Menwith Hill. _The Telegraph_ also said that the White House review was exploring withdrawing up to 10,000 U.S. military personnel in total, including non-intelligence related elements, as well. The U.S. military has a large precense in the United Kingdom, in general, which includes other Air Force units, including a fighter wing equipped with F-15C/D Eagles and F-15E Strike Eagles, an aerial refueling wing with KC-135R tankers, and a special operations wing.
> 
> It's not news, of course, that the U.S. government has concerns about potential security risks posed by allowing a Chinese firm to have a significant role in establishing mobile data networks across the United Kingdom. The fear is that the Chinese government could leverage Huawei's involvement to either build in backdoors or otherwise gain access to these networks in the future and use them as a vector to penetrate into more sensitive systems. The Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly accused the company of having direct ties to the Chinese government, which is also well-known for using cyber attacks, as well as traditional espionage, to steal both commercial and government information.
> 
> The U.S. military, as well as the U.S. Intelligence Community, have only become ever-more reliant on computer networks over the years. The F-35, specifically, which the United Kingdom also operates, is heavily network-dependent, with its cloud-based Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) responsible for a host of mission planning, maintenance, and logistics functions. There have long been concerns about ALIS' vulnerability to cyber attacks.
> 
> "Our governments share a tremendous amount of security information," Mick Mulvaney, then Acting White House Chief of Staff, said at a gathering for students Oxford’s debating society in February. "We are very much concerned that integrity of that information is hardwired into your computer systems, and if you folks go forward with the decision to include Huawei, it will have a direct and dramatic impact on our ability to share information with you. Period, end of story."
> 
> That same month U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly harangued U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson over Huawei.
> 
> Of course, there is no indication that the United Kingdom would ever allow Huawei to be involved in work relating to any sensitive portions of its national 5G network. At the same time, in an ever-connected world, even general access to commercial networks can still present real security risks to military and other government personnel.
> 
> Beyond all that, the U.S. government has been in its own protracted spat with the Chinese firm, which has also been tied to an ongoing trade war between Washington and Beijing, since 2018. In May of that year, the Pentagon banned the sale of Huawei cell phones, as well as those from Chinese firm ZTE, on its bases, citing security risks. Seven months later, Canadian authorities then arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S. government.
> 
> In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice hit the company with a total of 23 separate indictments, including the theft of trade secrets and fraud. Then, in May 2019, President Trump essentially banned Huawei from operating in the United States entirely via executive order. The U.S. government has now also indicted Meng Wanzhou personally over stealing trade secrets and other charges, as well, which she denies.
> 
> The U.S. has sought to pressure other allies to drop Huawei from their own 5G network rollouts, too. Australia, another Five Eyes member, ultimately blocked the Chinese firm from its own national network plans. Members of the U.K. parliament from Boris Johnson's own Conservative Party have also been pushing him to terminate the deal with the telecommunications company.
> 
> Relations between Washington and Beijing, as well as the Chinese government and those of other countries, have also cooled significantly in the past few months amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Key issues are evidence that authorities in China covered up the initial outbreak and that they are still withholding important information that could help global efforts to combat the spread of the virus.
> 
> The White House security review and the push in the Senate to block the deployment of F-35s and other aircraft to the United Kingdom are only likely to add to the already mounting pressure on U.K. authorities to drop Huawei from its 5G plans.
> 
> _Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com_
> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33316/u-s-mulls-pulling-spy-planes-from-britain-not-basing-f-35s-there-over-huawei-5g-plans-report



And a related earlier post:



> Huawei, 5G, Canada and…COVID-19 and our Comprador Class
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/huawei-5g-canada-and-covid-19-and-our-comprador-class/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And the start of a post today (also notes at end a piece by Matthew Fisher):



> The Cringe-Worthy PM Justin Trudeau vs Comrade Xi Jinping
> 
> Further to this post and “Comments” (very relevant to Terry Glavin’s article below),
> 
> 
> 
> 
> COVID-19: The Chicoms and Canada, Australia and Sweden
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mr Glavin (tweets here) does a very nice number on our prime minister and his Liberal government...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/the-cringe-worthy-pm-justin-trudeau-vs-comrade-xi-jinping/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52606774?at_custom3=BBC+News&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom4=1E5D347C-92B4-11EA-BE7C-9EF439982C1E&at_campaign=64&at_custom2=facebook_page&at_medium=custom7

*Indian and Chinese troops 'clash on border' in Sikkim*

Seems like tension on the Border in this particular area is increasingly turning violent from sources I have read.


----------



## dapaterson

Two other Canadians sentenced to Chinese jail.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-immigrant-couple-who-sought-a-better-life-in-canada-now-jailed-in/


----------



## OldSolduer

dapaterson said:
			
		

> Two other Canadians sentenced to Chinese jail.
> 
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-immigrant-couple-who-sought-a-better-life-in-canada-now-jailed-in/



Anything from Ottawa? You know the statement like "we are concerned that Chinese authorities are arresting and detaining Canadian citizens and this is not the behavior we expect from a civilized nation". 

No?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post based on stories today from _Globe and Mail_ and Global News (latter getting better all the time):



> Pernicious Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in Canada (including United Front Work Dept.) and Our Government’s Limp Response
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Cringe-Worthy PM Justin Trudeau vs Comrade Xi Jinping
> 
> 
> 
> 
> the Chicoms are certainly engaging in a whole lot of that old-time subversion in our country, about which our government remains effectively mute. The start of two major news stories that both appeared May 12...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/pernicious-diplomacy-with-chinese-characteristics-in-canada-including-united-front-work-dept-and-our-governments-limp-response/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Red China vs Justin Trudeau’s Canada: “We’re all hostages now”
> 
> Further to this post which deals with many similar matters,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pernicious Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in Canada (including United Front Work Dept.) and Our Government’s Limp Response
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin, for his part, enters the lists once more...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/red-china-vs-justin-trudeaus-canada-were-all-hostages-now/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> A post based on recent Report to Congress by Congressional Research Service:
> 
> Mark Collins



Concluding scary item in May 14 "D-Brief" from _Defense One_ (further links at original):



> And finally today: The U.S. would be toast in a war with China, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes off a new book from Christian Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
> 
> How that would happen: “[U.S.] spy and communications satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam and Japan would be ‘inundated’ by precise missiles; our aircraft carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the refueling tankers they need would be shot down.”
> 
> Why so vulnerable out there in the Pacific? In part, because of “bureaucratic inertia compounded by entrenched interests. The Pentagon is good at doing what it did yesterday, and Congress insists on precisely that. We have been so busy buffing our legacy systems that, as Brose writes, ‘the United States got ambushed by the future.’”
> 
> As for responses less likely to lead to a large loss of U.S. life, “These smart systems exist,” Ignatius writes. “The Air Force’s unmanned XQ-58A, known as the ‘Valkyrie,’ is nearly as capable as a fighter but costs about 45 times less than an F-35; the Navy’s Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, known as the ‘Orca,’ is 300 times less costly than a $3.2 billion Virginia-class attack submarine.”
> 
> The problem: “[T]hese robots don’t have a lobby to rival the giant defense contractors.” Continue reading, here.
> https://www.defenseone.com/news/2020/05/the-d-brief-may-14-2020/165393/



And the conclusion of a 2016 post:



> US Navy: Carriers or Subs, with the Dragon in Mind
> ...
> So to “win” in a serious war a need to end up nuclear? Help.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/mark-collins-us-navy-carriers-or-subs-with-the-dragon-in-mind/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

From Oz think tank:



> Nuclear-armed submarines and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific
> 
> The maritime strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific is changing rapidly. The future of undersea nuclear deterrent forces has strategic, operational and force structure aspects for all major powers in the region. Strategic competition in an increasingly competitive environment has a significant maritime element, which itself is profoundly influenced by the continuing importance—and progressive expansion—of the region’s underwater nuclear deterrent forces.
> 
> To a greater extent than during the Cold War, both threatening and protecting such assets will be difficult to separate from other maritime campaigns. This particularly applies to potential anti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations in the East and South China Seas, as well as to India and Pakistan and to North Korea, creating uncertainty over the possibility of unplanned escalations and outright accidents.
> 
> Maintaining any kind of regional balance will, therefore, call for cool judgements on the part of all the players, judgements that will need to be continually revised in the light of technological innovation and force development.
> 
> The US Navy’s nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) force is central to the country’s nuclear arsenal. While the navy can’t be complacent about threats to the survivability of its submarines, until there are revolutionary developments in sensor technology, the combination of geography, oceanography, and platform and missile capabilities means that its at-sea deterrent will remain the most secure element of America’s nuclear force and thus receive high priority in funding.
> 
> The problem for the US Navy is that it will need to start replacing the Ohio class within the next decade, but the cost of 12 new Columbia-class submarines will severely limit its ability to regenerate all the other force elements that will be required to meet the combined challenges of China and Russia.
> 
> The navy’s efforts represent just one part of a strategy to push the US’s competitors off balance and regain the strategic initiative. An important maritime element is likely to be undermining China’s efforts to create an underwater ‘bastion’. Here, the Americans must weigh the benefits of actively threatening the security of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s SSBN force against the resource commitments that that would entail, as well as the complications that it could represent for alliance arrangements, notably with Japan and Australia.
> 
> In seeking to become the predominant maritime power in the western Pacific, China has its own problems of resources and technology. However attractive the concept of an at-sea deterrent force within its nuclear inventory may be, China must first extend the range of its submarine-launched missiles and considerably improve the stealth qualities of its missile submarines if it is to create a capability sufficient to pose a credible threat to the continental United States.
> 
> Russia’s challenges are in some ways parallel to those of the US, particularly its need to sustain an SSBN force while modernising the remainder of its navy. Maintaining an at-sea nuclear deterrent remains the highest priority. However, replacement of the older SSBN with the new Borey class must be consuming a very large share of the Russian navy’s resources. To the SSBN program must be added the need to renew the nuclear-powered attack submarine force and continue development of the ASW capabilities necessary to secure the bastions against potential attackers. The limited money available means that Russia’s maritime power-projection assets don’t enjoy the same level of attention.
> 
> Japan’s defence expansion, despite the tensions with China and the rise of the PLA Navy, has been relatively limited. Its most significant new elements are focused on developing amphibious forces capable of responding rapidly to any threat to the Ryukyu Islands, including the contested Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. Japan’s ASW efforts are much less visible in, but perhaps more significant for, its maritime strategy. Japan’s submarine force is slowly expanding, and the modernisation of its surface and air ASW forces continues.
> 
> Australia faces equivalent challenges. Because it is one of the few regional players with substantial high-technology capabilities, particularly in the ASW domain, Australia’s assistance will be eagerly sought by the Americans, just as they have long looked to Japan. While its defence expansion remains relatively constrained—and slow—Australia’s emerging force structure will provide both independent national capabilities and strategic weight in alliance terms in ways that are relatively new. Australia has been a regular presence in the South China Sea over many years, but the latest Indo-Pacific Endeavour task group deployments have been on a larger scale than the individual ship deployments of the recent past.
> 
> North Korea remains a wild card. Its efforts to develop an underwater nuclear deterrent are only a small part of the increasingly complex problem its future presents for neighbouring countries and the region as a whole.
> 
> India must balance its apparently unresolvable tensions with Pakistan against a developing strategic rivalry with China that has important maritime dimensions. The growing Chinese economic and military presence in the Indian Ocean threatens India’s self-image as the dominant power in the region. India’s interest in the South China Sea represents something of a riposte and a deliberate effort to complicate China’s maritime strategy.
> 
> On the other hand, the entry of the first Indian SSBN into operational service and the start of its deterrent patrols may have added to India’s nuclear capabilities, but they also create a hostage to fortune that the Indian Navy must factor into its dispositions. Whether Pakistan will add to India’s problems by embarking nuclear weapons in its submarine force is uncertain, as is the priority that the Pakistan Navy will give to locating and tracking Indian SSBNs.
> 
> In sum, strategic competition in the increasingly competitive Indo-Pacific has a significant maritime element. Distinguishing threatening and protecting nuclear assets from routine maritime campaigns is increasingly difficult. As SSBN capabilities proliferate, and ASW technology advances, maintaining a regional maritime balance will increase in complexity.
> 
> _This piece was produced as part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy: Undersea Deterrence Project, undertaken by the ANU National Security College. This article is a shortened version of chapter 2, ‘Maritime and naval power in the Indo-Pacific’, as published in the 2020 edited volume: The future of the undersea deterrent: a global survey. Support for this project was provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
> Author_
> 
> _James Goldrick served as a rear admiral in the Royal Australian Navy, has published widely on naval issues and now has appointments at UNSW Canberra, the ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and ANCORS (Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security). Image: US Strategic Command._
> https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/nuclear-armed-submarines-and-the-balance-of-power-in-the-indo-pacific/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Engaging with the Chicoms’ PRC–Time to Wake Up and Smell the Maotai
> 
> A Republican former congressman and then senator has now seen the light; how long will Justin Trudeau and his government remain, at least publicly, largely in the dark?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I’ve Changed My Mind About China. America Should Too...
> 
> 
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/engaging-with-the-chicoms-prc-time-to-wake-up-and-smell-the-maotai/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And what about continuing Chinese efforts to buy up Canadian assets (oil sands firms coming?):



> Ottawa urged to consider Beijing’s growing control over strategic minerals when weighing Chinese state firm’s bid for gold miner
> 
> China’s growing control over strategic minerals could be a threat to Canada’s national security, a former head of CSIS says, and Ottawa should recognize this when it reviews a proposed takeover of an Arctic gold mine by a Chinese state-owned conglomerate.
> 
> Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd., one of the world’s largest gold producers, is paying $207.4-million to buy TMAC Resources Inc., the latest struggling Canadian junior miner to be swept up by a larger and better-capitalized company.
> 
> The _deal will be among the first pored over by Ottawa after it announced in April that it would bring “enhanced scrutiny” to bear on acquisitions by foreign state-owned investors in a period where the COVID-19 pandemic has driven down the value of companies. China is the largest producer and consumer of gold in the world_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Richard Fadden, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service director from 2009 to 2013, said Ottawa should examine the proposed TMAC takeover within the larger picture of Canada’s national interests and Beijing’s strategy of gaining control over critical metals and minerals.
> 
> Chinese companies have not only been active buying up gold mines around the world but Shandong Gold Group, the state-owned parent company, signed up in 2015 to back a national Beijing effort to stockpile the precious metal, which is considered one of the best hedges against economic volatility.
> 
> China is also active in the Canadian North in zinc, a key rare-earth ingredient in making galvanized computers, cellphones and batteries.
> 
> MMG Ltd., whose major shareholder is the Chinese government, owns zinc and copper assets in the Izok and High Lake deposits in Nunavut. Those deposits could be worth billions of dollars to China if Ottawa goes ahead with a plan to build a road and a deep-water port to ship the zinc and copper out through the Northwest Passage.
> 
> _China’s designs on Northern Canadian minerals in part prompted a recent joint U.S.-Canada strategy to reshape global metallic supply chains to reduce reliance on China, which has moved aggressively to control rare-earth minerals that are critical to high-tech and military products_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Key minerals, such as zinc, lithium, cesium and cobalt, are used in an wide variety of products ranging from lasers, computer chips, electric vehicles, solar panels, smartphones and military equipment.
> 
> Mr. Fadden said that while gold is not part of the Canada-U.S. critical-mineral strategy, the precious metal should be added to the list.
> 
> Gold is not only viewed as a safe-haven investment in turbulent economic times, but it is widely used in the control systems of nuclear-power plants and nuclear-weapons facilities, he noted.
> 
> “I think gold is pretty important for the world economy. China has enough of a grip on the world economy as it is, given its capital assets, so I would include gold," Mr. Fadden said. “Governments should sit down, convene a bunch of experts and talk to our allies about it.”
> 
> Mr. Fadden, who was also national security adviser to Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, said there had been growing concerns within Canadian national-security agencies about how China was carefully investing in Canadian companies “so as to be beneath regulatory thresholds.”
> 
> “There was a worry that the Chinese seemed to be very knowledgeable about regulatory thresholds and were coming just underneath them and, as is well known, Chinese corporations abroad are required to comply with Chinese government directives,” he said. “If you had enough of these, either beneath regulatory thresholds or small investments, they would eventually be consolidated and there would not be very much anyone could do about it,”
> 
> Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada, said the TMAC takeover has “raised eyebrows” within the industry because Shandong Gold Group is a Chinese state-owned enterprise. It’s prompting discussion about how this takeover would fit into the Canada-U.S. strategy to limit China’s involvement in rare-earth minerals, he said.
> 
> “I think the action plan is pretty serious and I think the commitment by Canada and the U.S. to lessen their dependence on the Chinese for these materials is pretty serious,” Mr. Gratton said.
> 
> _If Ottawa were to reject the takeover, Mr. Gratton said it would “send a pretty strong message” that Canada has serious concerns about Chinese state-owned companies buying up resource industries in Canada_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Toronto-based _TMAC’s sole gold mine is in Hope Bay in western Nunavut, 160 kilometres above the Arctic Circle. The mine is situated near tidewater in the Northwest Passage_ emphasis added] a highly strategic shipping route connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
> 
> While a sale to Shandong could stave off financial ruin for TMAC, which has struggled to mine gold for a profit, it also raises questions about sovereignty in the Far North, national security, and whether Canada should allow China to scoop up a domestic resource company at a fire-sale price.
> 
> “China as a very large powerful authoritarian state acquiring assets in the Canadian Arctic, that concern is legitimate,” said Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia.
> 
> “It's not a reason for saying no to all investments. It's just a reason for being vigilant and that's what the Canadian government needs to do here.”
> 
> Arctic expert Rob Huebert, who teaches at the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies, said Canada should assume every Chinese state-owned investment in Canada is in part a strategic purchase for Beijing.
> 
> “You can’t separate it. It’s all part and parcel of the Silk Road initiative, which is ultimately the Chinese effort to become a global power,” Prof. Huebert said, referring to Beijing’s worldwide Belt and Road investment strategy.
> 
> However, he said Canada should probably approve the TMAC transaction because increased obligations imposed on resource development by the Trudeau government in recent years are making it harder to attract investors to Canada’s North.
> 
> “I think we have no choice – given the fact that almost everything else is being blocked in terms of development,” Prof. Huebert said. “It’s hard to see us being able to say no.”
> 
> The deal is subject to a review under the Investment Canada Act (ICA). Ottawa will assess whether the acquisition will be a “net benefit” to Canada and will look at factors such as jobs, revenue and the impact on the local Indigenous community.
> 
> The government will also conduct an initial screening that will look at the deal from a national-security viewpoint. If Ottawa suspects the deal could be damaging to national security, the transaction could undergo a more thorough review under section 25.3 of the ICA.
> 
> Canada has rejected deals on security grounds in the past, including the proposed $1.5-billion acquisition of Canadian construction giant Aecon Group by China’s CCCC International Holding Ltd. nearly two years ago.
> 
> While the local Inuit community near the Hope Bay mine doesn’t have veto power over the deal, it’s an important stakeholder. The Inuit own the land on which the mine was built, the Kitikmeot Inuit Association (KIA) has a royalty on it, and it also owns about 1 per cent of the common shares in TMAC.
> 
> Although the gold is high grade, the company’s mill has not done well. Shandong has the money to keep the operation going, invest in upgrades and guarantee employment.
> 
> But even if an acquisition looks good on paper, there are no guarantees it will be approved.
> 
> Since 2012, 22 foreign takeover deals have been reviewed under section 25.3 of the ICA. Fourteen of those were by Chinese investors, with the vast majority subsequently either blocked by the government, subject to divestitures, or withdrawn proactively by the Chinese buyer.
> 
> “Part of the challenge in dealing with these cases is you don’t know what you don’t know, and the government will always have a better understanding in their mind of what might be important to them," said Peter Glossop, Toronto-based foreign-investment lawyer with Osler.
> 
> One aspect of the deal likely to be examined is TMAC’s mine location in the Arctic and its proximity to the Northwest Passage.
> 
> “What we call proximity analysis is something that’s taken into account in a national-security context," Mr. Glossop said.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-urged-to-scrutinize-chinas-mining-activities-in-the-arctic-in/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

And here's a major piece, based largely on Chinese documents, on CCP's plans for PRC in the world:



> China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order
> _The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West_
> https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-plans-global-order



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

Mark, since you seem to be following China very closes, how do you think the near to medium term outlook will play out?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Re: Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread
« Reply #3732 on: Today at 15:20:44 »

    Quote

Mark, since you seem to be following China very closes, how do you think the near to medium term outlook will play out?

With great difficulty as many countries (including Japan) try to disentangle from PRC. Canada better choose where it really stands if it wants to keep any self-respect--and avoid probably some harsh responses from US (not just Trump, Democrats have really seen the light on CCP and also want to hit back).

Armed clashes with Taiwan, US, Japan  are, I fear, a real possibility (could be started by subordinate Chinese commander) leading to...?

Mark
Ottaw


----------



## MilEME09

Basically your predicting a new Taiwam Strait crisis and potential armed conflict in the region especially if countries flock to support Taiwan given how they handled covid 19 vs how the PRC did.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Not quite but something to be afraid of:



> PLA drills put Taiwan in crosshairs
> _Two Chinese military exercises are aimed at preparing for an invasion of the self-governing island territory_
> https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/pla-drills-put-taiwan-in-crosshairs/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Not quite but something to be afraid of:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



China may be emboldened by a weakened western military by covid 19. They could make a power play for the smaller islands, Taiwan does have decent anti air, missile and ship defense systems, however the Dragon has a lot of teeth.

In other news, pro democracy lawmakers removed from Hong Kong legislative assembly before vote on who becomes next  chair person 

https://thepostmillennial.com/chaos-ensues-as-hong-kong-pro-democracy-lawmakers-removed-from-heated-parliament-debate


----------



## FJAG

> Fears of global trade war with China after Beijing slaps 80 per cent tariff on Australian exports starting TODAY as brutal payback over country's call for coronavirus inquiry backed by 100 nations including the UK
> - Chinese government imposed a brutal and extraordinary 80 per cent tariff on Australian exports from today
> - Diplomatic relations between nations deteriorated as Australia called for probe into the spread of coronavirus
> - Britain and 100 other countries also demanded inquiry, leading to fears UK could be dragged into trade war
> - Chinese president Xi Jinping said today China acted 'with openness and transparency' in tackling outbreak
> 
> By DANYAL HUSSAIN FOR MAILONLINE and BRITTANY CHAIN FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
> 
> PUBLISHED: 14:58 EDT, 18 May 2020 | UPDATED: 18:00 EDT, 18 May 2020
> 
> There are fears Britain could be dragged into a global trade war with China after Beijing slapped an 80 per cent tariff on Australian exports as punishment for demanding an independent coronavirus inquiry - which 100 nations including the UK supported.
> 
> On Monday, the World Health Organization bowed to calls from most of its member states to launch an independent probe into how it managed the international response to coronavirus, which has been clouded by finger-pointing between the US and China.
> 
> The 'comprehensive evaluation', sought by a coalition of African, European and other countries, is intended to review 'lessons learned' from WHO's coordination of the global response to the virus outbreak.
> 
> The UK has also supported the call for an inquiry, though the one announced by the WHO is expected to stop short of looking into contentious issues such as the origins of the virus.
> 
> EU spokeswoman Virginie Battu-Henriksson said several key questions needed to be answered as part of a review: 'How did this pandemic spread? What is the epidemiology behind it? All this is absolutely crucial for us going forward to avoid another pandemic of this kind.'
> 
> Last month, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said China faces 'hard questions' about the source of the coronavirus pandemic, adding there would have to be a 'deep dive' into the facts around the outbreak.
> 
> He also said it wouldn't go back to 'business as usual' between the UK and China after the pandemic eases.
> 
> A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday: 'There will need to be a review into the pandemic, not least so that we can ensure we are better prepared for future global pandemics. The resolution at the World Health Assembly is an important step towards this.'
> 
> In April, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an independent probe into the deadly virus and the World Health Organisation's handling of the crisis.
> 
> In response, Chinese state media and leaders warned of trade retribution that could wipe $135billion from the Australian economy.
> 
> After weeks of threatening to boycott the meat and barley industries and restrict travel and foreign education opportunities, China on Monday announced an 80.5 per cent levy on barley exports starting on Tuesday.
> 
> Beijing claims Australia subsidised its farmers and dumped barley in China. The tax will remain in place for five years, China's Ministry of Commerce said.
> 
> ...



See rest of article here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8332719/Fears-global-trade-war-China-Beijing-slaps-80-cent-tariff-Australian-exports.html

 :cheers:


----------



## SeaKingTacco

So, presumably over a billion Chinese still gotta eat.

Ultimately, the cost of any tariff is paid by the consumer. In this case, the Chinese consumer.

What happens when the Chinese hit everyone with a tariff? There is a finite list of countries willing and capable of selling grain to China. Is their plan to hit them all with a tariff?

Sounds like they have a social cohesion problem brewing, at that the point where food starts to get real expensive or unobtainable.


----------



## MilEME09

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> So, presumably over a billion Chinese still gotta eat.
> 
> Ultimately, the cost of any tariff is paid by the consumer. In this case, the Chinese consumer.
> 
> What happens when the Chinese hit everyone with a tariff? There is a finite list of countries willing and capable of selling grain to China. Is their plan to hit them all with a tariff?
> 
> Sounds like they have a social cohesion problem brewing, at that the point where food starts to get real expensive or unobtainable.



Perhaps that is the plan, if people can't eat, the country will destroy it self. If China broke apart we would see atleast half a dozen countries form out of it.


----------



## Lumber

MilEME09 said:
			
		

> Perhaps that is the plan, if people can't eat, the country will destroy it self. If China broke apart we would see atleast half a dozen countries form out of it.



Which ones would we like, and which one's wouldn't we like?


----------



## MarkOttawa

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> So, presumably over a billion Chinese still gotta eat.
> 
> Ultimately, the cost of any tariff is paid by the consumer. In this case, the Chinese consumer.
> 
> What happens when the Chinese hit everyone with a tariff? There is a finite list of countries willing and capable of selling grain to China. Is their plan to hit them all with a tariff?
> 
> Sounds like they have a social cohesion problem brewing, at that the point where food starts to get real expensive or unobtainable.



And the start of a post on the state of China's economy:



> How Hard is COVID-19 Hitting China’s Economy?
> 
> Further to this post in February,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What Will Covid-19 Mean for Top Dragon Xi in 2020?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The excellent Nathan Vanderklippe (tweets here) of the Globe and Mail reports on the wide-spread effects of the “invisible enemy”...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/how-hard-is-covid-19-hitting-chinas-economy/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/05/indian-troops-rushed-to-border-amid-chinese-military-buildup/?utm_campaign=alt&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=militarymemes

India increases forces on Chinese border, prepares defensive positions.


Looks like a border conflict may be ready to break out


----------



## OldSolduer

Lumber said:
			
		

> Which ones would we like, and which one's wouldn't we like?



Good question. I don't know enough about China to form an opinion. 

Mongolia? How is their relationship with China these days?


----------



## MilEME09

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Good question. I don't know enough about China to form an opinion.
> 
> Mongolia? How is their relationship with China these days?



here's is a good assessment https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Mongolia-needs-allies-to-withstand-China-s-looming-threat

Long and the short of it, they are economically dependent on china right now, and that worries them, they got free of being a client state of the soviet union in 91, they do not want to become China's client state, but being sandwiched between Russia and China doesn't give them a lot of options for their exports, which is heavily mining based.


As well, here is a military assessment of Taiwan's new strategy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt6_S12OqOg


----------



## Edward Campbell

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Good question. I don't know enough about China to form an opinion.
> 
> Mongolia? How is their relationship with China these days?



Despite my very real worries about the specific direction_*s*_ (the plural matters) that Xi Jinping is taking, I remain convinced that Chinese *grand strategy* remains fairly simple and easy to see. China intends to:

1. Grow in strength until it is a global power, _at least_ on a par with America and Europe in every respect; and

2. Become THE dominant power in East Asia.

I think it's important to understand what China means by East Asia. In my opinion the Chinese mean everything East of the Yenesei River ...







... from the Arctic Ocean all the way South to the Timor Sea (the North Coast of Australia):






That does *NOT* mean that China wants to colonize East Asia. _I think_ that many Chinese scholars and officials think that China has too many 'foreign' territories (Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang) already. But it does want to dominate everything from Central and Eastern Siberia to Indonesia ... including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and so on. By 'dominate' I mean exercises at least the same sort of influence on all of them as the USA does on Canada.

_I believe_ the Chinese want America's military off of the Asian mainland. (I've discussed this before re Korea.) I also think that the Chinese are prepared, for the foreseeable future, to tolerate ~ even, in a way, welcome ~ American Forces in Japan and Australia as a kind of counterbalance which will reassure e.g. Thailand and the Philippines that their independence is safe.

China is 'contained' by Japan and America to the East with Guam as a HUGE, strategic resource and by India to the East. My (outdated and highly personal) opinion is that India cannot be defeated by China in any conflict ... the reverse is also,  very certainly, true. I don't think the Chinese mind sharing global superpower status with America and, perhaps, even India but I am certain they will not stand for being pushed back.

President Trump has a winning hand if he plays it well, but he needs to be careful ... I'm worried because I'm not sure he knows how to read America's balance sheet. (Remember Pierre Poilievre's recent questions to Bill Morneau about Canada's balance sheets? Assets, liabilities and equity, and who hold them, matter.)

My  :2c: and it's worth less than that.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post that has considerable relevance for Canada:



> How Should the UK Engage with the PRC?
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Engaging with the Chicoms’ PRC–Time to Wake Up and Smell the Maotai
> 
> 
> 
> 
> many of the issues the Brits are facing Canada does too, and from a much weaker overall position. We really do need the “coordinated response with our allies” advocated in the last paragraph below; but our government still seems too fearful of the Dragon’s wrath to try join such a response and move it forward. From the _Spectator_ (brought to my attention by a good friend in England)...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/how-should-the-uk-engage-with-the-prc/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

ERC- I believe the PLA openly operates on the ground in one or two of the ‘stans to the west when they feel the need. Something there very clearly annoys or worries them, and sooner or later it might become a flashpoint for a significant muscle flex. Thoughts?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Disengage, Decouple Economically from the Chicoms or…?
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Engaging with the Chicoms’ PRC–Time to Wake Up and Smell the Maotai
> 
> 
> 
> 
> just consider how vulnerable many countries are to retaliation by the PRC:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Fives Eyes allies urged to lessen dependence on China
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/disengage-decouple-economically-from-the-chicoms-or/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Post based on a piece by Matthew Fisher:



> Dragon vs Eagle: Western Pacific, Taiwan, Hong Kong
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Does US Lose non-Nuclear War with China?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> the excellent Matthew Fisher gives a nice round-up of the issues (the Canadian government being pretty muted as usual)–several news videos at the link:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> COMMENTARY: China shows off military strength as Beijing eyes new rules for Hong Kong
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> [Note first this May 21 story, a potentially very ominous development:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China drops word ‘peaceful’ in latest push for Taiwan ‘reunification’]
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/dragon-vs-eagle-western-pacific-taiwan-hong-kong/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## GR66

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Post based on a piece by Matthew Fisher:
> 
> 
> the excellent Matthew Fisher gives a nice round-up of the issues (the Canadian government being pretty muted as usual)–several news videos at the link:
> 
> [Note first this May 21 story, a potentially very ominous development:
> 
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/dragon-vs-eagle-western-pacific-taiwan-hong-kong/
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Just a quick comment on the one headline..."Does US Lose non-Nuclear War with China?".

It's important not to confuse winning battles with winning the war.  Perhaps China could disable US satellites, pummel Guam and drive US forces outside the South China Sea, but China as a nation is highly dependent on maritime trade for many essentials.  

What happens to China when the USN and Air Force establish a blockade of essential goods (fuel, food, raw resources, etc.) going into the country?  

How much of a "win" is undisputed control of some rocks in the ocean, neighbours that have been turned into enemies and material shortages at home?  

I don't think that any realistic concept of "beating" China in a war includes invasion, or even massive attacks on the Chinese mainland.  I think it's more about deterring (through threat of the long-term consequences) China from trying to take things from their neighbours by force.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Dragon Getting Ready to Devour Hong Kong–plus BoJo to Ban Huawei at last
> 
> Further to this post three weeks ago,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hong Kong and the PRC: What One Country, Two Systems? Plus COVID-19
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin (tweets here) expresses his outrage and his disappointment with Canada’s so far thoroughly feckless policy towards the PRC...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/dragon-getting-ready-to-devour-hong-kong-plus-bojo-to-ban-huawei-at-last/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

I doubt there is the actual will to punish China for violating it's agreement with the UK in regards to the hand over and one country, two systems. No wonder Taiwan has told the PRC to pound salt, Hong Kong is exactly what the RoC doesn't want, their rights stripped away. Sure we might get some harsh words from a few world leaders, a few economic repercussions around 5G networks and such but over all, baring anything game changing Hong Kong is done for.

By game changing I mean something the central government can't save face over, like say the Hong Kong police switching sides and joining the protesters, PLA garrison being taken over, etc...


Edit: CPC leadership candidate Erin O'toole has taken his stance on the issue

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/otoole-defend-freedom-in-hong-kong


----------



## MarkOttawa

Canada now stands alone in the Five Eyes on Huawei/5G (further links at original):



> Reports: UK to cut Huawei’s involvement in 5G network
> _Boris Johnson wants to reduce Chinese tech giant’s involvement in building network to zero by 2023, according to British media._
> 
> British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to reduce the role of Huawei in the U.K.'s 5G network in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, according to reports in the Guardian and the Telegraph.
> 
> Johnson has instructed officials to draft plans that would reduce Huawei's involvement in building the U.K.'s 5G phone network to zero by 2023, the Telegraph reported.
> 
> The move marks a departure from the U.K. government's previous position. In January, Johnson said he would allow the Chinese tech giant to build up to 35 percent of its 5G phone network but block access to "sensitive core" parts of the network.
> 
> The push for new plans comes amid growing backlash among Conservative MPs against Chinese investment and a lack of transparency around Beijing's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Telegraph.
> 
> The paper also reported Johnson hopes to ramp up trade talks with the United States, which has been one of the most vocal critics of the U.K.'s decision to allow Huawei into its market, citing security concerns.
> 
> The reports "simply don't make sense," Huawei Vice President Victor Zhang said in a statement. "As a private company, 100% owned by employees, which has operated in the UK for 20 years, our priority has been to help mobile and broadband companies keep Britain connected, which in this current health crisis has been more vital than ever. This is our proven track-record.”
> 
> Downing Street did not immediately respond to POLITICO's request for comment.
> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/23/reports-uk-to-cut-huaweis-involvement-in-5g-network-275218



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dimsum

I've started following Accented Cinema on Youtube.  He has good analysis/reviews on various movies and branches into other stuff (his most popular video is "why aren't Chinese swords as popular as Japanese swords in films?") but his video about patriotism is pretty illuminating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK4jasq2uY8


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start and near end of a post:



> UK and Huawei/5G: Dragon Says my Way or else; plus Canadian Crown v, Meng Wanzhou
> 
> Further to this post and “Comments”,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dragon Getting Ready to Devour Hong Kong–plus BoJo to Ban Huawei at last
> 
> 
> 
> 
> here’s yet another example of the PRC’s “Wolf Warrior” public diplomacy in a story by Will Glasgow (tweets here) of _The Australian_, note mentions of Canada–how can anyone (looking at you PM Trudeau) still think its possible to do normal business, or have decent relations, with the Chicoms these days?..
> 
> And what happens if the decision on dual criminality goes against Meng Wanzhou tomorrow (May 27) in her fight against extradition to the US? And will PM Trudeau’s justice minister dare approve an appeal of the decision if it goes in her favour?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Premature victory lap? Meng Wanzhou poses ahead of momentous court decision
> _Huawei executive spotted at celebratory weekend photo shoot on B.C. court steps_
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/uk-and-huawei-5g-dragon-says-my-way-or-else-plus-canadian-crown-v-meng-wanzhou/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Blackadder1916

The courthouse steps photo show may have been a bit premature.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou loses major court battle as B.C. judge rules extradition bid should proceed
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/meng-wanzhou-extradition-decision-1.5585737


> Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes released her decision Wednesday morning
> 
> Jason Proctor · CBC News · Posted: May 27, 2020 4:00 AM PT | Last Updated: 22 minutes ago
> 
> A B.C. Supreme Court judge has delivered a major blow to Meng Wanzhou, ruling that extradition proceedings against the Huawei executive should proceed.
> 
> In a widely anticipated decision on so-called double criminality, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes said the offence Meng is accused of by American prosecutors would be considered a crime if it occurred in Canada.
> 
> The 48-year-old chief financial officer of the telecommunications giant is charged with fraud in the United States for allegedly deceiving banks into a possible violation of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran.
> 
> In a 23-page ruling released Wednesday, Holmes said that the essence of Meng's alleged crime is fraud.
> 
> And the fact that Canada doesn't have the same economic sanctions against Iran as the U.S. wouldn't stop someone being prosecuted in Canada for the same offence.
> 
> "Canada's law of fraud looks beyond international boundaries," Holmes wrote in her decision.
> 
> "Ms. Meng's approach to the double criminality analysis would seriously limit Canada's ability to fulfil its international obligations in the extradition context for fraud and other economic crimes."
> 
> Meng appeared in court shortly after the public release of the decision, showing no visible reaction to the loss. She wore a mask as she took her place beside her defence lawyers in the courtroom.
> 
> Extradition hearings to proceed
> The executive was arrested at Vancouver's airport in December 2018 on an extradition warrant. She is accused of lying to an HSBC executive in Hong Kong about Huawei's control of a company that was said to be violating U.S. economic sanctions against Iran.
> 
> Prosecutors claim that Meng's alleged lies put banks at risk of prosecution and loss because they would be violating U.S. sanctions themselves in handling Huawei's finances.
> 
> . . .




And the question is what will be the Chinese government reaction, especially as it pertains to the two Canadians held in custody?


----------



## CBH99

I think one of the main reasons why our government hasn't taken a firm stance against China yet, is precisely because they wanted to secure the release of the two Canadians in custody before doing so.

On the surface, our government has been afraid to say anything bad about China.  And they are criticized for it, and rightfully so.  I imagine behind the scenes (key word is, I imagine...I could be completely wrong) -- I imagine this is because they wanted to secure their release, before making some key decisions on trade, Huawei, etc etc.




This will make things even more interesting.


My personal opinion, it's time for the 5 Eyes to truly come together in all aspects, and for the west to unite.  As much as we may not like Trump as President, it's better we have a solid friendly relationship with our family & neighbours to the south, especially with China in the rise.

We NEED them.  And they benefit greatly from us.  We all have friends and family on either side of the border, we share a continent, we share values and lifestyle, and we are lucky to have the world's greatest superpower as our good friend & next door neighbour.  With China on the rise, I think it's time to really solidify that relationship for all of the obvious reasons   :2c:


----------



## ModlrMike

Blackadder1916 said:
			
		

> And the question is what will be the Chinese government reaction, especially as it pertains to the two Canadians held in custody?



Indignation, outrage, and ugliness.


----------



## Cloud Cover

Chinese reaction: our two will swiftly have a sham trial, guilty verdict, harsh sentence, perhaps even death sentence (commutable upon return of their exec).


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> “Joint Statement from the UK, Australia, Canada, and United States on Hong Kong”, plus Terry Glavin (and Jonathan Manthorpe)
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dragon vs Hong Kong Cartoon of the Day, plus Globe and Mail’s Editorial
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I’m glad PM Trudeau’s government saw its way to agreeing with this sharpish text...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/28/joint-statement-from-the-uk-australia-canada-and-united-states-on-hong-kong-plus-terry-glavin/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/xi-jinping-to-chinese-military-prepare-for-worst-case-scenarios-2235615?amp=1&akamai-rum=off

China ramps up the rhetoric as tensions increase with India and the US.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> China vs India, or, the Himalayan Military Cockpit, Ladakh Section
> 
> This all just keeps going on–first a post from 2016:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Himalayan Military Cockpit, Indian Tanks to Ladakh Near China Section
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Now the current confrontation, from _Foreign Policy’s_ “South Asia Brief” by Ravi Agrawal (tweets here):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why India and China Are Sparring
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/05/29/china-vs-india-or-the-himalayan-military-cockpit-ladakh-section/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Further to above, this from Defense One's "D-Brief" on Trump and India, crazy (further links at original):



> President Trump says he’ll talk about China today (May 29) in a press conference at the White House. He seemed to suggest multiple times this week that he’s intrigued by China’s border dispute with India in the Himalaya mountains that we mentioned (via Reuters) three days ago. About that flashpoint, The Economist reported Thursday [May 28], “Chinese troops have crossed the undefined border with India at several points, some reportedly penetrating 3-4km over punishing terrain. They are said to have destroyed Indian posts and bridges, and dug in with tents and trenches.”
> 
> And today, “a detailed analysis of satellite images has shown extensive deployment of towed artillery and mechanised elements on the Chinese side, bringing Indian deployments within striking distance,” according to The Indian Express.
> 
> SecDef Esper spoke to his Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, today by phone, the Pentagon said in a statement today.
> 
> Tweeted Trump Wednesday morning: “We have informed both India and China that the United States is ready, willing and able to mediate or arbitrate their now raging border dispute. Thank you!”
> 
> Said Trump to reporters Thursday at the White House: “I can tell you, I did speak to [Indian] Prime Minister [Narenda] Modi. He’s not – he’s not in a good mood about what’s going on with China.”
> 
> However, _India’s The Hindu newspaper reports today from New Delhi, “There has been no recent contact between PM Modi and President Trump_ [emphasis added]. The last conversation between them was on 4 April 2020 on the subject of Hydroxychloroquine,” according to government officials reportedly “taken by surprise by the U.S. President’s comments.”
> 
> And in response to that Wednesday tweet, India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said that India and China were already “engaged with the Chinese side to peacefully resolve the issue.”
> 
> China’s foreign ministry said today there’s “no need for a third party in [that] border dispute with India,” Reuters reports from Beijing...
> https://www.defenseone.com/news/2020/05/the-d-brief-may-29-2020/165750/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## FJAG

> Bell, Telus to use Nokia and Ericsson, not Huawei, in building their next-generation 5G networks
> 
> All 3 major telecom companies in Canada will use European suppliers for 5G, in snub to Huawei
> Pete Evans · CBC News · Posted: Jun 02, 2020
> 
> BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. will both use equipment from Scandinavian component makers Nokia and Ericsson to build out their next-generation 5G networks in Canada.
> 
> BCE, the parent company of Bell, said Tuesday morning it will partner with Swedish telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson to build out its next generation wireless network, known as 5G.
> 
> That makes Ericsson just the second company that Bell will allow on its network, along with Finnish supplier Nokia, which Bell announced it would work with in February in its quarterly earnings release
> ...
> Rogers has had a long-standing partnership with Ericsson on its existing wireless networks, and announced in 2018 that it would use Ericsson equipment for its 5G network, which it started to roll out in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal earlier this year.



See whole article here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bce-5g-ericsson-1.5594601

 :cheers:


----------



## Good2Golf

Good to see that at least commercial business has some common sense when it comes to not pandering to the Chicoms. :nod:


----------



## SeaKingTacco

That is a nice break for the Liberals. Now they don’t have to make a decision.


----------



## FJAG

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> That is a nice break for the Liberals. Now they don’t have to make a decision.



The Liberals have two out of three covered. They're good at making no decisions and bad decisions. Now if only we could fine tune them into making good decisions ...

 ;D


----------



## YZT580

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> That is a nice break for the Liberals. Now they don’t have to make a decision.


They aren't off the hook that easily.  If China believes that the government can dictate the appropriate decision to the courts, and they do, they will definitely not believe that Canada can't tell private business where to look for suppliers and will rail against Ottawa  as a result.  Eventually Trudeau and company are going to have to take a stand.


----------



## MilEME09

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> That is a nice break for the Liberals. Now they don’t have to make a decision.



Or maybe they did? Don't need to announce a public position and incur china's wraith if private companies are pushed to not pick them any way.


----------



## Brad Sallows

The telcos and the federal government are not on particularly good terms.  The three major political parties all stand behind some variation of policies that require the major telcos to provide cheaper plans, and to pay more at spectrum auctions.  I doubt the telcos would do anything to give the federal government - regardless of party - any breaks dealing with the Chinese government.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start and end of a post based on an extensive article in the _Globe and Mail_:



> Huawei/5G: Canadian Telcos Taking some Action while PM Trudeau’s Government Won’t
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> British Tories really Hardening vs the PRC and Huawei
> 
> 
> 
> 
> now even some of our leading companies are waking up to a considerable extent and smelling the Chicom Maotai while the Liberals continue their endless dithering. No doubt hoping those telcos will take decisions the government desperately does not want to, in order not to offend the PRC:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> BCE, Telus pick European suppliers for 5G network gear, leaving Huawei role unclear
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Plus a story very relevant to the US legal case vs Meng Wanzhou:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exclusive: Huawei hid business operation in Iran after Reuters reported links to CFO
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> ...
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/huawei-5g-canadian-telcos-taking-some-action-while-pm-trudeaus-government-wont/
Click to expand...


----------



## Weinie

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> That is a nice break for the Liberals. Now they don’t have to make a decision.



Suspect there was significant economic pressure from south of the border. Canadian telecoms still rely on their US counterparts for a lot of their parts, and the US was not going Huawei way. Do agree that it gets the current government out of a particular bind, but also now exacerbates other CCP perceived slights from Canada. Watch this space op:


----------



## Kat Stevens

http://portalextras.com/up/1292490/china-to-send-10-000-riot-control-experts-to-us-and-canada-as-advisors-68020


----------



## Weinie

Target Up said:
			
		

> http://portalextras.com/up/1292490/china-to-send-10-000-riot-control-experts-to-us-and-canada-as-advisors-68020



 :rofl:


----------



## Weinie

For thought:

Xi Jinping will be ousted as leader of the CCP within the next 18-24 months. A combination of U.S, SE Asian, and European economic and political pushback, initiated by covid-19 but reflecting a (finally) serious re-assessment of the degree of influence/economic control that China has amassed (that we willingly acceded to in return for economic gain), will galvanize the CCP to act, realizing that Xi pulled the trigger on the "long game" about 20 years too early. 

Have marked my calendar. Will bet beers


----------



## MarkOttawa

On ne peut qu'espérer.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Weinie

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> On ne peut qu'espérer.
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Mark, 

Will meet you anywhere in Ottawa, and pay for the first beer, in celebration.


----------



## MarkOttawa

You're on.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## GR66

Sadly, events in the US are making it easier for China to claim a double standard when Western nations criticize them for their treatment of protesters as noted on the BBC website:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52912241


----------



## Brad Sallows

I doubt many people are stupid enough to follow China's lead in attempts to massage the treatment of protestors into the same frame.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Parliamentarians from Liberal Democracies, including Canada, versus the Dragon
> 
> Further to this post which features former Canadian federal justice minister Irwin Cotler, a Liberal (see second quote below for more on Mr Cotler),
> 
> 
> 
> 
> COVID-19 and the Curse/Menace of the Chicoms
> 
> 
> 
> 
> we now have a most encouraging development, one would love a reaction from PM Trudeau. First a story in the _South China Morning Post_:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 18 Western lawmakers form group to take ‘tougher stance’ on China
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/05/parliamentarians-from-liberal-democracies-including-canada-versus-the-dragon/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

The testimony by former ambassador to China David Mulroney is exceptionally worth the read and most remarkable from a retired most senior Canadian diplomat--note his implications about our rot within (further links at original):



> Cancelled testimony by David Mulroney raises alarm over government’s China policy
> 
> With the activities of Canada’s valuable Special Committee on Canada-China Relations sidelined by the government, parliamentarians were denied an important opportunity to hear from one of the country’s leading experts on dealing with the regime in Beijing.
> 
> In a new MLI commentary titled Open Memo to the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations, former Canadian ambassador to China and MLI’s newest advisory council member, David Mulroney, provides his thoughts on the increasingly cold Canada-China relationship. Mulroney was originally scheduled to appear before the Committee on March 23, 2020; however, this meeting has been postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
> 
> In his remarks, Mulroney expresses alarm over Canada’s tendency to ignore (and in effect, normalize) China’s egregious human rights violations and long-standing efforts to undermine democracy. This past year has seen increasingly aggressive tactics from Beijing as Communist Party authorities impose a ‘national security law’ on Hong Kong, undermine peace and security in the Indo-Pacific, and continue the brutal repression of the Uighur people. China’s authoritarian leaders have also sought to erase any international recognition of Taiwan.
> 
> Mulroney makes the case that Canada is not immune to China’s aggression, as was clearly demonstrated following the arrest of Meng Wanzhou. As a cruel retaliation, two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were arbitrarily detained, and China enacted a campaign of economic coercion against Canada.
> 
> “We were once a country that was willing to face up to such challenges,” says Mulroney. “We need to find that courage again.”
> 
> Moving forward, Mulroney urges the special committee to return to work.
> 
> “From my perspective, the opportunity to be part of this critical conversation about how we promote and defend Canadian interests in the face of an increasingly assertive and, at times adversarial China is something not to be missed, nor is the chance to be of some small service on an issue of national importance,” notes Mulroney.
> 
> He offers four suggestions that policy-makers should consider as they reframe their approach to China:
> 
> Effective diplomacy should reveal the truth as it is imperative for the government to be truthful to Canadians.
> The aim for any truly significant review is not just for policy clarity, but for coherence and coordination in its delivery. The ambassador must also be clearly and carefully aligned with the changing government policy.
> There will be no profound or purposeful China policy change if it is not owned or led by the Prime Minister.
> Protecting Canada’s interests will come with its costs and risks, however, failing to do so will be even more costly.
> 
> “We don’t need to insult or provoke China,” Mulroney explains. “But we do need a China policy that is smarter, much more selective, more honest, and, frankly, more courageous.”
> 
> Read the full commentary here.
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/cancelled-testimony-david-mulroney-raises-alarm-governments-china-policy/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Weinie

Thanks Mark. Very interesting read. Have been increasingly impressed by David Mulroney's candor. Excoriates both a former and current Liberal PM. Who knew :sarcasm:


----------



## Good2Golf

Canadians should be more attuned to what those in the know such as David Mulroney and Dick Fadden have been saying for some time.  We need to be on guard, Vice seeing what happened and saying, “yeah...they sure were right!”


----------



## MarkOttawa

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> Canadians should be more attuned to what those in the know such as David Mulroney and Dick Fadden have been saying for some time.  We need to be on guard, Vice seeing what happened and saying, “yeah...they sure were right!”





> Start of a post, Dick Fadden noted at it and a tweet from David Mulroney near the end:
> 
> Chicoms’ Pernicious United Front Work Dept. around the World, especially in Australia (and in Canada)
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pernicious Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in Canada (including United Front Work Dept.) and Our Government’s Limp Response
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Joanna Chiu (tweets here) of the _Toronto Star_’s Vancouver bureau has an article on a major report by an Australian think thank:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s foreign interference likely ‘widespread’ in Canada, says author of new report
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/09/chicoms-pernicious-united-front-work-dept-around-the-world-especially-in-australia-and-in-canada/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Start and conclusion of a post:



> “Elite Capture’, or, Chicoms’ Pernicious Influence and Interference in Canada–more on Compradors, United Front Work Department and Pols
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pernicious Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in Canada (including United Front Work Dept.) and Our Government’s Limp Response
> 
> 
> 
> 
> which at 2) features reporting by Sam Cooper (tweets here), we now have this (with videos) from the ace Global News investigative reporter:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why CSIS believes Canada is a ‘permissive target’ for China’s interference
> ...
> [Liberal MP David] McGuinty [chair of newish NSICOP] reiterated that the committee recommendations are bipartisan and straightforward, and the committee purposefully chose Australia as an exemplar to be considered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
> 
> “We believe the government needs to up its game when it comes to foreign interference,” he said. “There is lots of room for improvement [emphasis added].”..
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DAY.
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/24/elite-capture-or-chicoms-pernicious-influence-and-interference-in-canada-more-on-compradors-united-front-work-department-and-pols/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Colin Parkinson

I am still waiting for GreenPeace to go over to the South Pacific and protest the destruction of coral reefs by the PLN.


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin P said:
			
		

> I am still waiting for GreenPeace to go over to the South Pacific and protest the destruction of coral reefs by the PLN.



Hell will have frozen over and the Winnipeg Jets will win the Stanley Cup before that happens.

Besides only Western nations can big big bad polluters of the environment.


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Slime bag slave lords....a pox on the whole CCP



https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/china-says-kovrig-spavor-may-be-freed-if-canada-ends-meng-wanzhou-case/ar-BB15WlpJ?ocid=spartan-dhp-feeds

China has explicitly tied the fate of two detained Canadians to the release of Meng Wanzhou, joining the growing calls for Ottawa to intervene in the Huawei executive's extradition.
In a media briefing Wednesday, Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China's foreign ministry, cited comments made by Michael Kovrig's wife to the CBC and Reuters saying Canada's justice minister has the power to end Meng's extradition to the United States "at any point."

MORE AT LINK


----------



## QV

FBI Director Wray says over 2,000 active investigations tied to China.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fbi-director-wray-says-over-2-000-active-investigations-tied-to-china


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now in Australia--start of a post:



> Aussies Getting really Serious about Going After Chicoms’ Influence/Interference Activities
> 
> C’mon PM Trudeau, have the government you lead start taking active, public measures against these activities involving Canada and Canadians. Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chicoms’ Pernicious United Front Work Dept. around the World, especially in Australia (and in Canada)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> a report in the _NY Times_:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Australian Politician’s Home Raided in Chinese Influence Inquiry
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/27/aussies-getting-really-serious-about-going-after-chicoms-influence-interference-activities/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Kat Stevens

The most amazing part to me is that people still use the term "ChiComs".  Haven't seen that one in donkey's years.


----------



## MarkOttawa

I just like the term "Chicoms" because it is, well, accurate--been using the terms for yonks, e.g. from a 2104 post:



> Chicoms=Canadian Cabinet Splittism?
> ...
> Sources tell CBC that dissent reaches into cabinet room, with Jason Kenney and James Moore on one side, while John Baird and Joe Oliver would like closer trade ties with China…while the prime minister is somewhere in the middle…
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/mark-collins-chicomscanadian-cabinet-splittism/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Kat Stevens

I know, and I get nostalgic for all the old cold war hooha every time I see it! Not intended as a slight at all, and apologies if you took it that way.


----------



## CBH99

Do we want closer trade relations with China?

Or, are we wiser to expand and strengthen trade with other population dense countries, such as India?



As we all know, China manufactures a lot of the world's "stuff".  But that could change over the next few years as China steps on, insults, holds citizens hostage, and conducts influencing operations on world governments and foreign universities, among other institutions.

There are quite a few developing countries, with access to coastlines, that would love the opportunity to build up their local industries to become manufacturing hubs.


In terms of Canada, I _*believe*_ our biggest export to China is various agricultural products, wheats & grains, etc.  As the population of the world grows, can we not find another market for it fairly easily?



While everybody likes being able to go to Wal-Mart and buy a toaster for $12 (Cheaper than some fast food meals, which is kinda scary) -- I think most people would eventually accept paying $1 to $2 more for goods produced in a country that doesn't give us anywhere near the headache that China does.  

(Kidnapping 2 citizens and holding them in prison, while Meng sits in a mansion arrested on a legitimate warrant.  Unilaterally suspending trade, leaving our farmers in financial desperation.  Hauwei influence.  Chinese sponsored groups influencing university politics, local politicians, hording medical supplies during a pandemic they already knew was happening, etc etc etc.)



Many former diplomats, and senior academics with access to Chinese government officials, have regularly reported to us how little the Chinese government thinks of us.  They also referred to Australia as "gum on the bottom of their shoe."

Maybe it's time the west starts looking elsewhere to be the manufacturing hub for us?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CBH99 said:
			
		

> ...
> 
> As we all know, China manufactures a lot of the world's "stuff".  But that could change over the next few years as China steps on, insults, holds citizens hostage, and conducts influencing operations on world governments and foreign universities, among other institutions.
> 
> There are quite a few developing countries, with access to coastlines, that would love the opportunity to build up their local industries to become manufacturing hubs.
> 
> ...




China is already under pressure from other (Asian and African) _*low-cost-of-production economies*_ ~ Egypt, Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country), Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam all come to mind, as does, India, of course. China never quite caught up to Japan and South Korea in the high-end technology field (AI, robotics and telecommunications)  ~ despite its size and power, _Huawei_ is not on a qualitative par with, say, _Samsung_.


----------



## MarkOttawa

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China is already under pressure from other (Asian and African) _*low-cost-of-production economies*_ ~ Egypt, Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country), Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam all come to mind, as does, India, of course. China never quite caught up to Japan and South Korea in the high-end technology field (AI, robotics and telecommunications)  ~ despite its size and power, _Huawei_ is not on a qualitative par with, say, _Samsung_.



And Bangladesh, esp. for textiles.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## FJAG

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> China is already under pressure from other (Asian and African) _*low-cost-of-production economies*_ ~ Egypt, Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country), Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam all come to mind, as does, India, of course. China never quite caught up to Japan and South Korea in the high-end technology field (AI, robotics and telecommunications)  ~ despite its size and power, _Huawei_ is not on a qualitative par with, say, _Samsung_.



It's not so much what we buy from them, but what they buy from us that is what makes our politicians squeamish. 

In 2018 we exported some USD21 billion which dropped to around USD17.5 billion in 2019 much of which is natural resources and food stuffs. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/exports/china

Not sure how much of that China can do without but I would expect the agricultural sector would be a weak point and that might make the CPC as nervous about getting shirty with the Chinese as the LPC.

On the other hand, China is only our second largest trading partner (by far). We export around USD336 billion to the USA. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/exports-by-country

Makes you think about who we really need to suck up to, doesn't it?

 :cheers:


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

FJAG said:
			
		

> It's not so much what we buy from them, but what they buy from us that is what makes our politicians squeamish.
> 
> In 2018 we exported some USD21 billion which dropped to around USD17.5 billion in 2019 much of which is natural resources and food stuffs. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/exports/china
> 
> Not sure how much of that China can do without but I would expect the agricultural sector would be a weak point and that might make the CPC as nervous about getting shirty with the Chinese as the LPC.
> 
> On the other hand, China is only our second largest trading partner (by far). We export around USD336 billion to the USA. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/exports-by-country
> 
> Makes you think about who we really need to suck up to, doesn't it?
> 
> :cheers:



But they have that nasty two-party system...


----------



## CBH99

Agreed FJAG,

Good and bad, we are ultimately blessed to be right next door to the world's major superpower.  We all have family and friends on both sides of the border, and enjoy relatively free travel between the two.

And that was my ultimate point -- if a majority of our exports to China is food/agriculture, I'm sure we could find someone else who would happily take their place.



The world's population is swelling, and people need to eat.  I mentioned India because as another country with a population of 1 Billion+ -- could we not replace most of our exports that we have with China, yet have substantially less hassle?  

If the west helped support low-cost manufacturing in literally ANY of those other countries mentioned, I feel like we'd all be better off in the long run.  Relying on an emerging enemy as our source of a majority of our goods isn't going to pan out well in the long run, I fear.    :2c:


----------



## Weinie

CBH99 said:
			
		

> I mentioned India because as another country with a population of 1 Billion+ -- could we not replace most of our exports that we have with China, yet have substantially less hassle?



Perhaps the Indian government isn't interested in any increased trade with Canada, given the fact that the PM's coterie invited a convicted Sikh extremist to a reception in New Delhi. 
This is a long game, and you have to build up relations that are mutually beneficial to both countries. Not sure that India sees any value in looking the other way.
Then you have Chretien, Manley, and that whole former Liberal cabal who are joined at the hip with China. What is a poor PM supposed to do?  Go China. :trainwreck:


----------



## Colin Parkinson

India does not have the robust industrial base that China has nor the other infrastructure required. Quality control in India makes China look very good. India wants to get there, but has to cross a lot of bridges to get there and some of those are heavily cluttered with systemic corruption.


----------



## MarkOttawa

PRC continues to demonstrate it's almost no holds barred approach to matters--start of a post:



> Indeed, Looks like Chicoms Working Brutally to Cleanse Xinjiang of Uyghurs
> 
> Further to this post,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Seems like Chicoms may be Working eventually to Cleanse Xinjiang of Uyghurs
> 
> 
> 
> 
> we now have a major piece of reporting by the Associated Press:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China forces birth control on Muslim Uighurs to suppress population
> _4-year campaign in Xinjiang region is form of ‘demographic genocide,’ say some experts_
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/06/29/indeed-looks-like-chicoms-working-brutally-to-cleanse-xinjiang-of-uyghurs/
Click to expand...


Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dapaterson

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting a the passage of a new Chinese national security law targeting Hong Kong.



> China's parliament has passed national security legislation for Hong Kong, setting the stage for the most radical changes to the former British colony's way of life since it returned to Chinese rule almost 23 years ago.
> 
> Cable TV, citing an unidentified source, said the law was passed unanimously by the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress.
> 
> The legislation pushes Beijing further along a collision course with the United States, Britain and other Western governments, which have said it erodes the high degree of autonomy the global financial hub was granted at its July 1, 1997 handover.
> 
> A draft of the law has yet to be published. Beijing says the law, which comes in response to last year's pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, aims to tackle subversion, terrorism, separatism and collusion with foreign forces.
> 
> This month, China's official state agency Xinhua unveiled some of its provisions, including that it would supersede existing Hong Kong legislation and that the power of interpretation belongs to the Chinese parliament's top decision-making body, the National People's Congress Standing Committee.



https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-30/china-passes-new-national-security-law-for-hong-kong/12406178


----------



## OldSolduer

dapaterson said:
			
		

> The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting a the passage of a new Chinese national security law targeting Hong Kong.
> 
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-30/china-passes-new-national-security-law-for-hong-kong/12406178



That's an interesting but predictable action.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Colin P said:
			
		

> India does not have the robust industrial base that China has nor the other infrastructure required. Quality control in India makes China look very good. India wants to get there, but has to cross a lot of bridges to get there and some of those are heavily cluttered with systemic corruption.




I agree with Colin P, but India has some advantages over China, too: mainly stronger institutions which many experts agree are the only guarantor of long term growth and prosperity.

India is corrupt, but so is China in an ever more systemic way, but reform is easier ~ institutions, again. India is also hard to govern, being a pretty solid democracy, but that, too, can be an advantage.


----------



## MarkOttawa

PRC wants pieces out of lots of its neighbours--major article by a retired Indian Air Force air marshal at his site, "Air Power Asia), many maps:



> China’s Serious Border Disputes With Most Neighbours – Unilateral Approach – India the Bulwark – Comprehensive Story
> https://airpowerasia.com/2020/07/06/chinas-serious-border-disputes-with-most-neighbours-unilateral-approach-india-the-bulwark-comprehensive-story/



UPDATE: Two maps from the article:












Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Kirkhill

I was just looking at this yesterday and came up with my own map of "China's Flash Points"  I included all of the internal civil disorders I could find since 2000 - this turned out to include a large concentration in 2008 and 2011 which coincided with the Arab Spring and the Coloured Revolutions.   I also included India-Pakistan border disputes and the Japan-Russia island disputes as related flash points.

All things considered China doesn't look particularly stable internally, its hold on the west over non-Han territories looks particularly tenuous, and it doesn't seem to have been reading much Dale Carnegie these days.  

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard felt driven to publish this in the Telegraph 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/07/09/britain-should-not-quake-xi-jinping-china-has-already-peaked/



> The ledger is brutally clear. Xi Jinping’s regime has no allies of global economic weight or credibility.
> 
> Some *53 countries backed China’s treatment of Hong Kong in the UN Human Rights Council, a body now under the thumb of Beijing. They make up just 4pc of the world’s GDP.* Most are authoritarian states and statelets locked into the neo-colonial infrastructure nexus of the Belt & Road.
> 
> The only G20 member to have lined up on China’s side (and against Britain) was Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, a struggling middle income autocracy running out of places to sell its excess oil.
> 
> The list offers a revealing view of the strategic order emerging in the early 2020s. The rich Western and Asian democracies, which still control the international economic system, are coalescing into a united front. China is starting to pay the exorbitant price for its wolf warrior diplomacy.



China's Allies and Enemies



> The supporting countries: China, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Djibouti, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia,  Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, UAE, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
> 
> The opposing countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.



Pretty much China vs the OECD.

An invasion of China is never going to be a realistic prospect.  Just as invasions of Russia, Canada, the US and India aren't in the realm of reality.  But a containment strategy - economic and military blockade along the island perimeter of the China Seas and supporting India in its territorial disputes with China and Pakistan that does seem reasonable. It also presents opportunities to assist the Uighur and the Tibetans from India and Hong Kong and Guangdong from Taiwan and Vietnam.

Blockade was the answer to the USSR.  It was also the answer to Napoleon's Europe.  It also makes it easier for me to understand why the USMC might be putting a heavy bet on Coastal Artillery in support of allies (Japan, South Korea, Republic of China (which actually has a dormant claim to a Permanent Security Council seat having been usurped by communist insurgents), Phillipines, Indonesia, Borneo, Malaysia and Vietnam.

An awful lot of places to keep China busy and frustrated.


(Can't seem to attach the map).


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLA Navy's LHDs getting ever-honking bigger:

Chinese Type 075 Big Deck Amphib Preparing for Sea Trials

The Chinese Navy’s newest amphibious warfare asset, the Type 075 LHD (Landing Helicopter Dock) is setting sail for the first time, according to ship spotter reports.

The vessel, which was built in Shanghai, has been fitting out since it was floated on September 26, 2019. Candid photos surfacing on the Chinese language internet show it being fueled, and tugs readied.

The Type-075 represents a step-change in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) amphibious warfare capabilities. It will enable better over-the-horizon landing capabilities and improve air cover. And there are already _rumors of the follow-on Type-076 LHD which is expected to include EMALS (Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System) for unmanned combat aerial vehicles or crewed aircraft. At this stage, these rumors should be treated with caution. But they do give an indication of the direction PLAN amphibious capabilities are going_ [emphasis added].

In addition to the well-deck for Type 726 hovercraft (generally equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushion), the LHD will have a large rotor-wing component. This will include the Z-8 transport helicopter which is based on the French SA 321 Super Frelon. More modern types seen aboard, in mock-up form, include the naval variant of the Harbin Z-20 — an apparent copy of the Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk-Sea Hawk family.

There are also small rotor-wing UAVss including a Ka-27/28 HELIX anti-submarine warfare helicopter model aboard for deck tests.

Images in the public domain show a range of rotor-craft models aboard the Type 075. This is a common practice aboard Chinese warships and is a strong leading indicator of the operational air wing.

The ship suffered a fire on April 11, 2020. Although the fire was quickly put out and damage appeared minimal, smoke stains are still visible in the aft port-side near to the ramp.

The Hudong-Zhonghua yard in Shanghai where the lead Type 075 has been built has already launched a second ship. And analysis of commercial satellite imagery suggests that module for a third may be on its way. At the moment the yard is building the Type 054A frigate for the Pakistan Navy and, it appears, a Type 071 LPD for Thailand.

The _PLAN began development of the Type 075 in 2011 as a helicopter carrier that would displace about 35,000 tons — smaller than the U.S. 45,000-ton Wasp and America-class big decks. The unnamed ship launched last year_ [emphasis added].





https://news.usni.org/2020/07/29/chinese-type-075-big-deck-amphib-preparing-for-sea-trials

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile on the East China Sea front:



> US pledges to help Japan with 'unprecedented' Chinese incursions
> _Top commander sees Beijing's expansion in East China Sea as part of global challenge_
> 
> The U.S. is fully committed to help Tokyo handle China's repeated incursions into waters surrounding the Senkaku Islands, the commander of American forces in Japan said Wednesday.
> 
> "The United States is 100% absolutely steadfast in its commitment to help the government of Japan with the situation," Lt. Gen. Kevin Schneider, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Japan, said in an online news conference. "That's 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
> 
> Chinese government vessels have sailed into the contiguous zone of the Japanese-administered Senkakus -- an East China Sea island chain that Beijing claims as the Diaoyu -- for more than 100 straight days. Schneider called the situation "unprecedented."
> 
> Chinese ships usually "would go in and out a couple of times a month, and now we are seeing them basically park and truly challenge Japan's administration," he said.
> 
> "The duration of the incursions is beyond anything that we've seen in a long, long time," he said.
> 
> _Washington acknowledges that Japan administers the islands and has repeatedly said that the Senkaku Islands are covered by Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which commits the U.S. to defend aggression against territories under Japanese administration_ [emphasis added, Canada has no Pacific security treaty obligations].
> 
> But the U.S. has also said that it is neutral on the question of sovereignty, and for the most part has stayed away from the daily tensions between Japan and China in the waters.
> 
> Schneider's expression of explicit U.S. support is rare, and comes ahead of the end of a Chinese seasonal fishing ban scheduled for mid-August. Four years ago as many as 230 Chinese ships gathered around the Senkakus -- both fishing ships and Chinese Coast Guard vessels -- with some entering Japanese territorial waters.
> 
> He said that the U.S. was offering Japan surveillance and reconnaissance assistance to assess the situation.
> 
> It _comes a day after the U.S. and Australia pledged to forge a "network of nations" to check China, and also after the joint rejection by Washington and Canberra of Beijing's maritime claims in the South China Sea, where the People's Liberation Army is currently conducting live-fire drills_ [emphasis added--fine for Canada to give diplomatic support but CAF far too stretched to contribute anything of significance; though perhaps RCNavy/RCAF CP-140s could do exercises further west than RIMPAC].
> 
> In the South China Sea, the "nine-dash line" area claimed by Beijing overlaps the United Nations-mandated exclusive economic zones of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
> 
> Since the U.S. State Department formally rejected China's claims to the nine-dash line earlier this month, the _U.S. Navy has upped the ante by conducting trilateral naval drills with Japan and Australia, as well as bilateral exercises with India. There are reports that the four countries-- all part of the informal Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad -- could formulate a formal joint military coalition soon_ [emphasis added, still a lot of uncertainty in India, despite Ladakh border flare-up with PRC]...
> https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-China-tensions/US-pledges-to-help-Japan-with-unprecedented-Chinese-incursions



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## shawn5o

The Containment of China
by Lawrence A. Franklin
August 4, 2020 at 5:00 am

After China's many transgressions over the past 50 years -- including the theft of $600 billion of U.S. intellectual property each year; Beijing's malignant cover-up of the Covid-19 virus; the Communist regime's attempts to blind US airmen with lasers; constructing military islands in the South China Sea, and last month sending a massive fleet of 250 Chinese fishing vessels near the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, to name but a few -- the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping's stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World.

The ultimate objective of this initiative would be to prevent Communist China's aggression against the independent states of the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
China's walk-in-the-park takeover of Hong Kong -- an illegal appropriation -- undoubtedly served to whet China's expansionist appetite.

The first military containment of China could encompass a broad and multi-tiered defense perimeter in an arc extending from Japan's coastal waters, southeast to the continent of Australia, and northwest to the Himalayan borderlands between China and India, where China has already been attempting a land invasion. Although China's recent record of malign behavior has drawn the ire of many, China is encouragingly vulnerable. Fourteen states share sections of China's land borders, and the Chinese already have territorial disputes with 18 countries.

The leaders of China's Communist Party have been clear about China's territorial claims, particularly in the South China Sea. China's claim there, if realized, would include about 85% of the waters off China and most of the island archipelagos within the South China Sea. The United States needs to be unambiguously clear that it will physically block any Chinese effort to realize any baseless assertions of Chinese sovereignty. America's determination also needs be transparent so that Chinese leaders do not doubt U.S. resolve, in case China might be tempted to check it by staging a violent incident.

The firm tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's July 13 declaration that the U.S. rejects China's fake claims in the South China Sea as mostly illegal will probably be seen as "just words." The U.S. might need to convince Beijing that America and its allies have the political will to implement this containment. Pompeo also drew a line by asserting that the U.S. will defend the sovereignty of smaller South China Sea states -- a conflict with China's own often-stated claims.

For the U.S. to secure the endorsement of the Archipelago of Southeast Asian states, they first must be certain that the U.S. commitment to defend their sovereignty is unequivocal and permanent.

Many regional countries have been threatened by Chinese military assets and pushed to abandon their sovereign fishing and energy exploratory activities in waters claimed by China. In mid-June, for instance, a Chinese vessel rammed a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters near the Paracel Islands, an archipelago chain claimed by both China and Vietnam. China in 2019-2020 continued to infuriate Indonesia by claiming sovereignty of waters inside Indonesia's 200-mile economic zone, an area that would give Beijing sovereignty over the Indonesian Natuna Islands. In mid-April of this year, Malaysia was apparently shocked into the reality of China's aggressive claims when a Chinese vessel, along with several Chinese Coast Guard vessels, boldly entered Malaysian waters clearly within Malaysia's internationally recognized 200 hundred mile economic zone.

It seems to have been, however, the June 9, 2019 ramming and subsequent sinking of a Philippine fishing boat off Reed Bank in the Philippine Sea that had geopolitical ramifications. The incident happened shortly after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte reversed himself and decided to keep a military defense pact with the U.S. His turnabout permitted continued U.S. access to Philippine air and naval bases, thus preserving the decades-long defense treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines, an important link in any wall to contain China.

Given the many examples of China's aggressive behavior toward its neighbors, and with Taiwan now being openly threatened as well, another U.S. option, already undertaken, to lend substance to the military wall against China, was to send more U.S. military ships to the region.

A diplomatic plan might include a request that Australia -- which has not only been unbudgeable despite Chinese pressure, but also has friendly ties with all governments in the area -- host a summit of regional state political and military leaders. Representatives from the U.S., Japan, India, and Taiwan could attend, while permitting the host nation, Australia, to elicit the views and, one hopes, the commitment to contain the threat.
Subsequently, the U.S could dispatch policy and military teams to several regional states to discuss bilateral defense arrangements. These bilateral understandings could, in time, be linked up with already existing multinational defense organizations, such as "The Quad": Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. In September, for the first time, all four members of the Quad will probably participate together in the India-hosted Malabar military exercises. This multinational barrier for containment could be further concretized by continuous regional military exercises, arms sales, military training exchange programs, and operational planning, as well as ports, bases, and airport visitations. Countries could also be enjoined to cancel all commercial activity with China. Why fund one's enemy and make him stronger? This program functioned well in the Free World's "Cold War" with the Soviet Union.

For this multinational initiative to survive and evolve into a formidable edifice to frustrate any Chinese territorial aspirations, the U.S. must lead "from the front" by frequent "Freedom of Navigation" operations through contested straits and other sensitive waterways to reinforce the legitimacy of international law on the high seas. Some of these freedom of navigation operations could be conducted in the Formosa (Taiwan) Strait between Taiwan and China. Another exercise could be in the disputed waters of the Tokara and Miyako Straits near Japan and China.

Another U.S. move, in coordination of member states, would be to extend the existing program of the "Five Eyes" (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) arrangement of intelligence sharing, when it pertains to China, to other allies, perhaps initially India and Japan. The U.S. and its allies should probably be prepared for an attempt by China to initiate provocative action against one or more of the states in the region. In response, they might dispatch combat vessels to confront aggressors or rescue those who might need rescuing.

If China should respond to allied containment activities in a more robust military fashion, the massive naval and air power of the U.S. 7th Fleet, based in Yokouska, Japan, should be sufficient to check any aggressive Chinese moves. The 7th Fleet could also be substantially reinforced by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii. Any decision by the U.S. to adopt the military containment of China as a policy must assume that China might retaliate. China's leaders are surely hoping that the current U.S. administration's aversion to war will enable the Communists to pick off new territory with relative ease; the U.S. should not even let them think of such a possibility.

Spokespersons for member states should not hesitate to declare that it is the mandatory duty of free states to oppose the universal ambitions of the totalitarian Party-State of the People's Republic of China and its aim eclipsing the United States. This goal is made abundantly clear in their own publications, such as the May 19, 2019 Chinese Communist Party official organ, People's Daily and the Xinhua News Agency declaring "People's War" on America. The Party's narrative is that the U.S. administration is threatening all the people of China. One Chinese state CCTV anchor added that the "U.S. fights for greed and arrogance," but that "China will fight for a new world." It certainly will -- if we let it.

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16300/china-containment


----------



## mariomike

shawn5o said:
			
		

> https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16300/china-containment



Regarding Gatestone Institute,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute#Inaccurate_reports


----------



## shawn5o

mariomike said:
			
		

> Regarding Gatestone Institute,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute#Inaccurate_reports



It's a biased site. Is the article wrong?

And speaking of controversial things, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies


----------



## FJAG

Maybe this is why China is building it's fleet.



> 'They just pull up everything!' Chinese fleet raises fears for Galápagos sea life
> 
> A vast fishing armada off Ecuador’s biodiverse Pacific islands has stirred alarm over ‘indiscriminate’ fishing practices
> 
> Dan Collyns in Lima
> 
> Jonathan Green had been tracking a whale shark named Hope across the eastern Pacific for 280 days when the satellite transmissions from a GPS tag on her dorsal fin abruptly stopped.
> 
> It was not unusual for the GPS signal to go silent, even for weeks at a time, said Green, a scientist who has been studying the world’s largest fish for three decades in the unique marine ecosystem around the Galápagos Islands.
> 
> But then he looked at satellite images in the area where Hope was last tracked – more than a thousand nautical miles west of the islands – and noticed the ocean was being patrolled by hundreds of Chinese fishing boats.
> 
> “I began to look into it and found that at the very end of her track she began to speed up,” said Green, co-founder and director of the Galápagos Whale Shark Project.
> 
> “It went from one knot to six or seven knots for the last 32 minutes – which is, of course, the speed of a fishing boat,” he said.
> 
> The fishing vessels that Green saw on the satellite images are believed to belong to an enormous Chinese-flagged fleet which Ecuadorian authorities last week warned was just outside the Galápagos Islands’ territorial waters.
> 
> “I don’t have proof but my hypothesis is that she was caught by vessels from the same fleet which is now situated to the south of the islands,” Green told the Guardian. She is the third GPS-tracked whale shark to have gone missing in the last decade, he added.
> 
> The Chinese fleet, numbering more than 200 vessels, is in international waters just outside a maritime border around the Galápagos Islands and also Ecuador’s coastal waters, said Norman Wray, the islands’ governor.
> 
> Chinese fishing vessels come every year to the seas around the Galápagos, which were declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1978, but this year’s fleet is one of the largest seen in recent years. Of the 248 vessels, 243 are flagged to China including to companies with suspected records of illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing, according to research by C4ADS, a data analysis NGO.
> 
> The fleet includes fishing boats and refrigerated container – or reefer – ships to store enormous catches.
> 
> Transferring cargo between vessels is prohibited under international maritime law yet the Chinese flotilla has supply and storage ships along with longline and squid fishing boats.
> 
> “There are some fleets which don’t seem to abide by any regulations,” said Wray.
> 
> One captain of an Ecuadorian tuna boat saw the Chinese fishing boats up close in early July, before the end of the tuna season.
> 
> “They just pull up everything!” said the captain, who asked not to be named. “We are obliged to take a biologist aboard who checks our haul; if we catch a shark we have to put it back, but who controls them?”
> 
> He recalled navigating through the fleet at night, constantly changing course to avoid boats, as their lights illuminated the sea to attract squid to the surface.
> 
> “It was like looking at a city at night,” he said.
> 
> The longline fishing boats had up to 500 lines, each with thousands of fishhooks, he estimated, and claimed that some of the vessels would turn off their automatic tracking systems to avoid detection, particularly when operating in protected areas.
> 
> Chinese fishing practices first caught the attention of Ecuador in 2017 when its navy seized the Chinese reefer Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 within the Galápagos marine reserve. Inside its containers were 6,000 frozen sharks – including the endangered hammerhead shark and whale shark.
> 
> “It was a slaughterhouse,” said Green, describing the images of the cargo hold. “This kind of slaughter is going on on a massive scale in international waters and nobody is witnessing it.”
> 
> The seizure prompted protests outside the Chinese embassy in Quito; Ecuador fined the vessel $6m and the 20 Chinese crew-members were later jailed for up to four years for illegal fishing.
> 
> The arrival of the latest fleet has also stirred public outrage and a formal complaint by Ecuador as its navy is on alert for any incursion into Ecuadorian waters.
> 
> The Chinese embassy in Quito said that China was a “responsible fishing nation” with a “zero-tolerance” attitude towards illegal fishing. It had confirmed with Ecuador’s navy that all the Chinese fishing vessels were operating legally “and don’t represent a threat to anyone”, it said in a statement last month. On Thursday China announced a three-month fishing ban in the high seas west of the marine reserve, but it will not come into force until September.
> 
> Roque Sevilla, a former mayor of Quito, who is leading a team in charge of designing a “protection strategy” for the islands, said the fleet practices “indiscriminate fishing – regardless of species or age – which is causing a serious deterioration of the quality of fauna that we will have in our seas”.
> 
> Ecuador would establish a corridor of marine reserves with Pacific-facing neighbours Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to seal off important areas of marine diversity, Sevilla told the Guardian.
> 
> Protecting the Cocos Ridge, an underwater mountain range which connects the Galápagos Islands to mainland Costa Rica, and the Carnegie Ridge which links the archipelago to Ecuador and continental South America, could close off more than 200,000 sq nautical miles of ocean otherwise vulnerable to industrial fishing, he said.
> 
> He added Ecuador had called for a diplomatic meeting with Chile, Peru, Colombia and Panama to present a formal protest against China.
> 
> “When the Galápagos’s protected area was first created it was cutting edge,” said Matt Rand, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, “but compared to other newer marine protected areas Galápagos is now potentially lacking in size to protect the biodiversity.”
> 
> Milton Castillo, the Galápagos Islands’ representative for Ecuador’s human rights ombudsman’s office, said he had asked the prosecutor’s office to inspect the cargo holds of the Chinese ships based on the legal principle of the universal and extraterritorial protection of endangered species.
> 
> China’s distant-water fishing fleet is the biggest in the world, with nearly 17,000 vessels – 1,000 of which use “flags of convenience” and are registered in other countries, according to research by the Overseas Development Institute.
> 
> Green said the “explosion of life” created by the confluence of cold and warm ocean currents around the Galápagos Islands is exactly why the Chinese armada is hovering around the archipelago’s waters.
> 
> “The Galápagos marine reserve is a place of very great productivity, high biomass but also biodiversity,” he said. The longline fishing technique used by the fleet catch big fish like tuna, but also sharks, rays, turtles and marine mammals like sea lions and dolphins, he added.
> 
> “This is not fishing any more, it is simply destroying the resources of our oceans,” Green said. “We should ask whether any nation on this planet has the right to destroy what is common ground.”



https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/06/chinese-fleet-fishing-galapagos-islands-environment

 :tsktsk:


----------



## MarkOttawa

Macdonald-Laurier Institute has been leading the charge to get real about PRC and start cracking back (further links at original):



> Canada can no longer ignore foreign interference from China: Devin Tuttle, Marcus Kolga and Ai-Men Lau in the Province
> 
> It’s foolish to assume Canada is immune to the party’s foreign interference, as it’s already happening here, write Devin Tuttle, Marcus Kolga, and Ai-Men Lau.
> 
> By Devin Tuttle, Marcus Kolga, and Ai-Men Lau, August 18, 2020
> 
> The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on the foreign-interference tactics of Russia and China.
> 
> Since the beginning, both actively promoted disinformation and conspiracies about COVID-19’s origin and engaged in “mask diplomacy” to boost a favourable international profile.
> 
> There are allegations of Russian and Chinese hackers targeting organizations developing a COVID-19 vaccine. While Russia has made no secret of using hybrid warfare tactics against other countries, China has been much more clandestine in its operations.
> 
> Yet there are well-documented cases of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign-interference strategies. A report from V-Dem at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg found that Taiwan is subjected to more foreign interference from China than anywhere else. The CCP’s interference aims to engineer unification with Taiwan through the dissemination of disinformation on social media platforms, investment into Taiwanese media outlets, as well as co-opting actors and legacy institutions to suppress policies unfavourable to China.
> 
> Chinese foreign interference is not restricted to Asian states. A recording of former Australian Senator Sam Dastyari’s remarks at a 2016 news conference to Chinese reporters was obtained by Australian media. On the recording, Dastyari can be heard saying that Australia should respect China’s position on the South China Sea, a view in stark contrast to his own party’s stance. The news conference was organized by Chinese property developer Huang Xiangmo, who had picked up the Dastyari’s legal tab after the senator was sued by an advertising firm.
> 
> The scandal, which led to Dastyari’s resignation in 2017, sparked media investigations into the links between Australian politicians and CCP-linked money. It was uncovered that the largest donors to the Labour and Liberal parties were China-linked businesses, donating a total of $5.5 million AUS between 2013 to 2015.
> 
> It would be foolish to assume Canada is immune to the CCP’s foreign interference. In March, a report published by the all-party National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians warned that both the Russian and Chinese governments “target ethnocultural communities, seek to corrupt the political process, manipulate the media” and pose “a significant risk to the rights and freedoms of Canadians and to the country’s sovereignty.”
> 
> The Canadian Security Intelligence Service reported that Canada is an attractive target for the Chinese regime, warning that the CCP has won support of influential Canadians through economic means such as sweetheart business deals or lucrative board positions in China. A lack of public attention to Beijing’s campaign also provides incentive for Chinese foreign interference.
> 
> These attacks against Canadian democracy are already well underway. The case of Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur-Canadian activist (the Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking, persecuted minority in China), reveals coordination between Chinese students and Chinese consular officials against speech critical of China on Canadian university campuses.
> 
> Major media outlets publish articles under the guise of journalism from paid lobbyists on behalf of the Canadian Chinese Political Affairs Committee. Recently, several prominent Canadians penned an open letter to the prime minister to end the Vancouver-based extradition proceedings of Meng Wanzhou, deputy board chair and chief financial officer of telecom giant Huawei.
> 
> It is critical for the federal government to revamp Canada’s current strategies, regulations and policies to counteract a potential influence campaign from foreign actors such as China’s Communist Party regime. This will require greater coordination between our security agencies alongside key departments tasked with national security, including public safety, democratic institutions, global affairs and national defence. Canada should establish a National Centre for Strategic Communications and Digital Democracy that could effectively subvert and engage with attacks against our democracy.
> 
> Collaborative efforts should also extend beyond our institutions to improve information sharing between Five Eyes members, as well as working with social media companies and search engines to integrate digital tools to identify disinformation and misinformation.
> 
> Beyond these efforts, Canada would be wise to adopt digital tools to identify and monitor foreign-interference campaigns and readily share pervasive occurrences with the public.
> 
> If Canada is to maintain integrity in our democratic system, we should heed the warning signs.
> 
> _Devin Tuttle is a researcher at the University of Calgary in foreign policy and security studies; Marcus Kolga is a senior fellow; and Ai-Men Lau is a communications officer at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute._ [emphasis added]
> 
> Related posts:
> 
> Canada’s plan to counter foreign interference is a good start, but the work’s not done: Marcus Kolga in the Globe and Mail Measures announced last week by the Liberal government to address threats of foreign interference and...
> 
> Trolling Trudeau - Fears of Foreign Interference in Canada: Marcus Kolga for the Atlantic Council While the overall outcome of the 2019 Canadian federal election was not the result of...
> 
> Defending against foreign interference in our elections: Marcus Kolga for Inside Policy Our political leaders, candidates, the media and voters should be aware of foreign threats to...
> 
> Canada can learn from Taiwan on relations with China: Marcus Kolga in the Toronto Star The determination and clarity with which Taiwan has confronted the challenges to its fragile independence...
> 
> Beijing’s Online Manipulation and Interference During the Election: Marcus Kolga in the Epoch Times Beijing possesses both the means and motives to tamper with important national debates and will...
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-cannot-ignore-foreign-interference-china/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## shawn5o

What happens next is ??? and would it involve the west?


*China and India Move Advanced Fighter Jets to Himalayan Border*

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/08/20/china-and-india-move-advanced-fighter-jets-to-himalayan-border/

GABRIELLE REYES - 20 Aug 2020

Both India and China have deployed their most advanced fighter jets to airbases near their disputed Himalayan border, according to recent satellite imagery and local reports.
Commercial satellite imagery shows two Chinese J-20 stealth fighters have recently appeared at the Hotan airbase in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, Forbes reported on August 17. “It’s not clear whether there are more J-20s out west [in Xinjiang] than just two that are visible in the satellite photo. The Chinese air force possesses only around 40 J-20s,” the report noted.

…

On July 29, India sent five new Dassault Rafale fighter jets to Ladakh. Last week, the Hindustan Times reported that the jets had recently been “practicing night flying in the mountainous terrain” of India’s nearby Himachal Pradesh state, which borders Ladakh to the south. The local Indian squadron ordered the fighter jets’ pilots to practice flying in adverse conditions so that they “will be ready if the situation deteriorates on the … Line of Actual Control (LAC, India’s official name for the India-China border) in the Ladakh sector,” the newspaper wrote, quoting “people familiar with the matter.”

More here


----------



## shawn5o

What is China’s long game?


*China Is Pairing Attack Helicopters And Armed Drones (The Results Are Deadly)
PLA ground commanders are sending the message that integrated air-land operations will become the norm.*

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/china-pairing-attack-helicopters-and-armed-drones-results-are-deadly-167528

Here's What You Need To Remember: There are a few hurdles that must be overcome to make manned-unmanned teaming a reality. The human half of the team needs a control interface that will a lone human, such as a fighter or helicopter pilot, to easily control a swarm of drones with a few general commands. The machine half needs AI that can seamlessly coordinate the actions of hundreds of drones in response to a few simple instructions from a human operator.

The future of warfare is manned-unmanned teaming between manned platforms and robots (or at least until fully autonomous robots fight on their own).

With the United States and Russia vigorously pursuing that concept, it’s no surprise that China is testing attack helicopters operating alongside UAVs.

LINK


----------



## GR66

Janes is reporting that the Chinese PLA has conducted exercises using commercial ships as temporary flight decks.  

https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/exercise-demonstrates-pla-army-aviation-ability-to-use-commercial-ships-as-temporary-flight-decks

The exercise included refueling and re-arming of the attack helicopters.

I wonder if we'll see them also trying out the VTOL J-18 fighter on commercial ships.  Such a move could allow China to position fighters close to potential targets for a surprise attack if they can camouflage the flight deck to avoid detection.


----------



## dapaterson

Don't think a regular deck would hold up well to a VTOL aircraft; I suspect there would be a need to alter some materials / install some reinforcement.

But I'm not a maritime engineer (and, as I recall, Tom Clancy had the USSR do something similar in Red Storm Rising when they seized Iceland)...


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-tells-china-stop-making-threats-over-taiwan-hong-kong-2020-9?amp

Germany appears to of grown tired of Beijing's attitude and bully like tactics when something doesn't go its way, basically telling them to pound salt over a Czech politician visiting Taiwan.

If only more nations would do this, maybe some will follow germanys lead.


----------



## MarkOttawa

The menace of WeChat--quite a bit about Canada in this major NY Times article, two excerpts:



> Forget TikTok. China’s Powerhouse App Is WeChat, and Its Power Is Sweeping.
> _A vital connection for the Chinese diaspora, the app has also become a global conduit of Chinese state propaganda, surveillance and intimidation. The United States has proposed banning it._
> 
> Just after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Joanne Li realized the app that connected her to fellow Chinese immigrants had disconnected her from reality.
> 
> Everything she saw on the Chinese app, WeChat, indicated Donald J. Trump was an admired leader and impressive businessman. She believed it was the unquestioned consensus on the newly elected American president. “But then I started talking to some foreigners about him, non-Chinese,” she said. “I was totally confused.”
> 
> She began to read more widely, and Ms. Li, who lived in Toronto at the time, increasingly found WeChat filled with gossip, conspiracy theories and outright lies. One article claimed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada planned to legalize hard drugs. Another rumor purported that Canada had begun selling marijuana in grocery stores. A post from a news account in Shanghai warned Chinese people to take care lest they accidentally bring the drug back from Canada and get arrested.
> 
> She also questioned what was being said about China. When a top Huawei executive was arrested in Canada in 2018, articles from foreign news media were quickly censored on WeChat. Her Chinese friends both inside and outside China began to say that Canada had no justice, which contradicted her own experience. “All of a sudden I discovered talking to others about the issue didn’t make sense,” Ms. Li said. “It felt like if I only watched Chinese media, all of my thoughts would be different.”
> 
> Ms. Li had little choice but to take the bad with the good. Built to be everything for everyone, WeChat is indispensable.
> 
> For most Chinese people in China, WeChat is a sort of all-in-one app: a way to swap stories, talk to old classmates, pay bills, coordinate with co-workers, post envy-inducing vacation photos, buy stuff and get news. For the millions of members of China’s diaspora, it is the bridge that links them to the trappings of home, from family chatter to food photos...
> 
> Ms. Li felt the whipcrack of China’s internet controls firsthand when she returned to China in 2018 to take a real estate job. After her experience overseas, she sought to balance her news diet with groups that shared articles on world events. As the coronavirus spread in early 2020 and China’s relations with countries around the world strained, she posted an article on WeChat from the U.S. government-run Radio Free Asia about the deterioration of Chinese-Canadian diplomacy, a piece that would have been censored.
> 
> The next day, four police officers showed up at her family’s apartment. They carried guns and riot shields.
> 
> “My mother was terrified,” she said. “She turned white when she saw them.”
> 
> The police officers took Ms. Li, along with her phone and computer, to the local police station. She said they manacled her legs to a restraining device known as a tiger chair for questioning. They asked repeatedly about the article and her WeChat contacts overseas before locking her in a barred cell for the night.
> 
> Twice she was released, only to be dragged back to the station for fresh interrogation sessions. Ms. Li said an officer even insisted China had freedom of speech protections as he questioned her over what she had said online. “I didn’t say anything,” she said. “I just thought, what is your freedom of speech? Is it the freedom to drag me down to the police station and keep me night after sleepless night interrogating me?”
> 
> Finally, the police forced her to write out a confession and vow of support for China, then let her go...[read on]
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/technology/wechat-china-united-states.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## shawn5o

Another country is worried by the CCP plan to dominate the seas


*In Move Against China, Palau Invites Pentagon to Build New Bases in Pacific*

Jack Beyrer - SEPTEMBER 8, 2020 2:32 PM

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/in-move-against-china-palau-invites-pentagon-to-build-new-bases-in-pacific/

The Republic of Palau is moving against China by inviting the United States to build new military bases in the Pacific island country, the Wall Street Journal first reported Tuesday.

A small island nation located between Guam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, Palau occupies a critical region where Beijing has looked to expand its influence.

"Palau is a very important place in the Pacific," U.S. ambassador to Palau John Hennessey-Niland told the Journal. "Palau has suffered from predatory economic behavior and malign influence from the PRC. … Palau is a good friend of the United States and a great partner in the Pacific."

China, which has focused on asserting its influence over the neighboring South China Sea, now sports the largest navy fleet in the world and has constructed underwater warning systems and new aircraft carriers. The United States' growing relationship with Palau corresponds with Washington's efforts to counter Chinese supremacy in the region by developing stronger ties with allies.

"Our robust network of allies and partners remains the enduring asymmetric advantage we have over near-peer rivals, namely China, that attempt to undermine and subvert the rules-based order to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others," Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said in an August speech.

In recent months, the United States has conducted multiple freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea. In August, Department of Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Palaun ally Taiwan since 1979.

(Note: The WSJ article is subscription)


----------



## MarkOttawa

Canada and Australia, compare and contrast:

1) Canada:



> China threatens and intimidates people within Canada as Ottawa remains silent
> 
> Notwithstanding its nimble handling of a pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s government will be vulnerable in the next election if voters don’t see meaningful action replace Canada’s passive rhetoric on China’s human rights, trade and hostage diplomacy.
> 
> This summer, the Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights and the Commons Special Committee on Canada-China Relations heard harrowing testimony from witnesses who say Chinese government agents threaten them and their families in Canada and in China.
> 
> Canadian Chinese and Canadian Uighur activists told of being threatened with rape or even death if they keep speaking out against violations committed by China against the Uighurs, or the persecution of Hong Kong residents clinging to political rights.
> 
> Witnesses pleaded for Canada to stop this intimidation campaign being co-ordinated by the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and its consulates in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. All people in Canada are entitled to the protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including Chinese Canadians or citizens of China here in Canada as students or for other purposes.
> 
> Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s nonresponse to calls to protect Chinese Canadians amounts to tacit consent for Beijing to continue acting as if ethnic Chinese, Tibetans and Uighurs within Canada should still be subject to repression by China’s Communist regime.
> 
> Sadly, this is consistent with Canada’s nonaction on China. Regarding offering sanctuary to Hong Kong activists facing persecution due to repressive moves by Beijing, we are told that Ottawa is thinking it over. Ditto to applying Magnitsky sanctions against Chinese officials complicit in genocidal measures against Uighur people, including forced sterilization of women…”
> https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/09/08/china-threatens-and-intimidates-people-within-canada-as-ottawa-remains-silent.html



2) Australia:



> Australia revokes Chinese scholar visas and targets media officials, prompting furious China response
> 
> Senior Chinese media officials in Australia have been targeted and the visas of two leading Chinese scholars have been revoked in an unprecedented foreign interference investigation into a NSW political staffer, provoking a furious response from the Chinese Government.
> 
> The Chinese Government has sensationally used state media to accuse Australian authorities of secretly raiding the homes of four Chinese journalists in Australia in late June, after receiving questions from the ABC yesterday about the investigation.
> 
> The Chinese embassy did not reply to the ABC’s questions yesterday, but several state media organisations published articles overnight reporting details of the alleged raids and accusing Australia of “severely infring[ing] on the legitimate rights of Chinese journalists” and “hypocrisy in upholding so-called ‘freedom of the press'”.
> 
> The ABC has uncovered the identities of senior Chinese journalists and academics who have been drawn into the joint investigation by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
> 
> They include: the Australia bureau chief of China News Service, Tao Shelan; China Radio International’s Sydney bureau chief Li Dayong; prominent Chinese scholar and media commentator Professor Chen Hong; and another leading Australian studies scholar, Li Jianjun
> 
> The AFP-ASIO Foreign Interference Task Force is investigating an alleged plot by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to infiltrate New South Wales Parliament through the office of Labor backbencher Shaoquett Moselmane, using his former staffer John Zhang.
> 
> The AFP is investigating whether Mr Zhang used a chat group on the Chinese social media platform, WeChat, to encourage Mr Moselmane to advocate for the Chinese Government’s interests.
> 
> The journalists and academics have been drawn into the investigation over the alleged infiltration because they were members of the WeChat group.
> 
> Mr Zhang categorically denies the AFP’s allegations and is challenging the investigation in the High Court.
> 
> According to documents filed by Mr Zhang in the High Court, the AFP alleges he and others “concealed or failed to disclose to Mr Moselmane that they were acting on behalf of or in collaboration with Chinese State and Party apparatus”…’
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/chinese-scholars-have-visas-revoked-as-diplomatic-crisis-grows/12644022



Mark 
Ottawa


----------



## Donald H

Trump is quite likely only taking a harder line on China until after the election. That places the entire H.K. controversy in limbo. There are indications that Trump will begin to view China and Xi as favourably as he views Russia and Putin.

Trump did before he had to take a negative position against China for the political purpose of the coming election.


----------



## CBH99

Donald H said:
			
		

> Trump is quite likely only taking a harder line on China until after the election. That places the entire H.K. controversy in limbo. There are indications that Trump will begin to view China and Xi as favourably as he views Russia and Putin.
> 
> Trump did before he had to take a negative position against China for the political purpose of the coming election.




I have to respectfully disagree with you.

As much as the west likes to demonize Russia, Russia isn't really a threat in terms of it's political ambitions.

Does it want to remain relevant?  Absolutely.

Does it want to influence events in it's general sphere and in areas close to it's own borders?  Yes.

Does it want a stable region for which it can operate & expand it's economic interests, even if that means supporting evil dictators?  Yes.  (But before we point the finger at them for that, the USA does the same thing with Saudi Arabia.)


As much as we constantly release media reports about the threats that Russia poses & how the evil Russians are up to no good - like I've said before, from a sheer economic perspective, it isn't going to invade Europe anytime soon.  

Will they be a pain in the butt with disinformation campaigns, stir up trouble among ethnic Russian populations, etc etc?  Yes.  Russia isn't our friend.  But it isn't likely to be our military adversary anytime soon.  Russian air forces, as capable as they are, would be completely dominated by NATO air forces in the opening weeks (and I highly suspect much sooner) of a conflict.



China on the other hand?  China has emerged a very potent enemy, not only militarily but in terms of how they operate.  They make dealing with the Russians look pleasant in comparison.

Not only to they subtly subvert local politicians, but they subvert local industries also.  Universities, local supply trains, local businesses, local media coverage - not to mention the economic warfare they can wage against the west at the macro level.  

Taiwan and Hong Kong have been very real, and recent, examples of how little the Chinese leadership values human life, or any sort of freedom.  They consistently threaten to invade & kill an island of people who prefer democracy.  They impose, with force, themselves into Hong Kong and then immediately create a law that legalizes them to detail, interrogate, and imprison anybody who protests such actions.

They are openly preparing for war against the west in the SCS, and now have the world's largest navy.  Not only do they now have the world's largest navy, but they have modernized at a mind-blowing pace, in many ways catching up to the USA.  China and the USA openly discuss, in no subtle terms, of how they are basing assets against each other.  

Both openly discuss a conflict against each other, and are very much preparing for such a conflict - so much so that the USMC has realized they can no longer be America's second army, and have drastically reorganized themselves to fight in the SCS.



Even after the election, I highly doubt Trump and Xi will be 'buddies'.  He may have to pretend to bring the hammer down on Russia from time to time, but the tensions with China are very real regardless of who gets elected in November.   :2c:


----------



## Donald H

CBH99 said:
			
		

> I have to respectfully disagree with you.
> 
> As much as the west likes to demonize Russia, Russia isn't really a threat in terms of it's political ambitions.
> 
> Does it want to remain relevant?  Absolutely.
> 
> Does it want to influence events in it's general sphere and in areas close to it's own borders?  Yes.
> 
> Does it want a stable region for which it can operate & expand it's economic interests, even if that means supporting evil dictators?  Yes.  (But before we point the finger at them for that, the USA does the same thing with Saudi Arabia.)
> 
> 
> As much as we constantly release media reports about the threats that Russia poses & how the evil Russians are up to no good - like I've said before, from a sheer economic perspective, it isn't going to invade Europe anytime soon.
> 
> Will they be a pain in the butt with disinformation campaigns, stir up trouble among ethnic Russian populations, etc etc?  Yes.  Russia isn't our friend.  But it isn't likely to be our military adversary anytime soon.  Russian air forces, as capable as they are, would be completely dominated by NATO air forces in the opening weeks (and I highly suspect much sooner) of a conflict.
> 
> 
> 
> China on the other hand?  China has emerged a very potent enemy, not only militarily but in terms of how they operate.  They make dealing with the Russians look pleasant in comparison.
> 
> Not only to they subtly subvert local politicians, but they subvert local industries also.  Universities, local supply trains, local businesses, local media coverage - not to mention the economic warfare they can wage against the west at the macro level.
> 
> Taiwan and Hong Kong have been very real, and recent, examples of how little the Chinese leadership values human life, or any sort of freedom.  They consistently threaten to invade & kill an island of people who prefer democracy.  They impose, with force, themselves into Hong Kong and then immediately create a law that legalizes them to detail, interrogate, and imprison anybody who protests such actions.
> 
> They are openly preparing for war against the west in the SCS, and now have the world's largest navy.  Not only do they now have the world's largest navy, but they have modernized at a mind-blowing pace, in many ways catching up to the USA.  China and the USA openly discuss, in no subtle terms, of how they are basing assets against each other.
> 
> Both openly discuss a conflict against each other, and are very much preparing for such a conflict - so much so that the USMC has realized they can no longer be America's second army, and have drastically reorganized themselves to fight in the SCS.
> 
> 
> 
> Even after the election, I highly doubt Trump and Xi will be 'buddies'.  He may have to pretend to bring the hammer down on Russia from time to time, but the tensions with China are very real regardless of who gets elected in November.   :2c:



There's very little in that which I disagree on. But for now at least I think Trump's antiwar stance toward China is being under estimated, as well as his support for same. At least on China, but not much doubt on Russia.

I have to qualify that on Trump's reasons for good relations on Russia/Putin. There are various possible reasons for that being the case. You stated the facts but you didn't state the reasons in Trump's head.


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Canada and Australia, compare and contrast:



Now Canada and US, compare and contrast:

1) Canada:



> 'We know where your parents live': Hong Kong activists say Canadian police helpless against online threats
> _The committee probing Canada's relationship with China was shut down when Trudeau prorogued Parliament_
> 
> For Cherie Wong, the threats of rape and murder she receives on social media are only a semi-constant reminder that many supporters of the Chinese Communist Party see her as an enemy.
> 
> They're not what scares her the most.
> 
> Back in January, Wong — executive director and co-founder of Alliance Canada Hong Kong, a group pressing the Canadian government to defend the former British colony's democracy — flew to Vancouver for events associated with the alliance's launch. Someone had been keeping tabs on her, she said.
> 
> "My hotel room was booked by someone else as a security measure. And two days after the launch ... I received a threatening phone call to my hotel room demanding that I leave immediately, that these people are coming to collect me," she said.
> 
> "That was something that really shocked me."
> 
> Wong said she still doesn't know how her whereabouts were disclosed. She said she reported the call to the police but was told there was little they could do.
> 
> Wong's experience is one of a number of disturbing incidents reported to a new parliamentary committee tasked with looking into Canada's fraught relationship with China. The committee's proceedings were interrupted by the Trudeau government's decision to prorogue Parliament until later this month.
> 
> *Doxxed in the diaspora*
> 
> Wong said activists in her group had a foretaste of the impotence of Canadian police in the face of such harassment on August 17, 2019, when members of the Hong Kong diaspora rallied in 30 cities around the world to back Hong Kong's anti-extradition protests. They were met by counter-protesters waving Chinese flags.
> 
> Wong said she was one of a number of protest participants who were subsequently "doxxed" by online antagonists. "They took photos of me and started digging up my personal information, my email address, where I was living, my phone number," she said. "And [they] shared that kind of information maliciously through WeChat channels."
> 
> Hong Kong activists point to the similarities between the counter-protests that occurred in August 2019 — in almost every city that saw pro-Hong Kong demonstrations — as evidence that they are being centrally organized...
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-hong-kong-democracy-protests-chinese-embassy-canada-1.5717288



2) US:



> US reveals it has revoked more than 1,000 visas to Chinese nationals deemed security risks
> 
> More than 1,000 Chinese nationals have had their visas revoked by the United States since June, under a program aimed at graduate students and researchers believed to have ties to the Chinese military.
> The US State Department said in a statement Wednesday that "high-risk graduate students and research scholars" had been expelled, after they "were found to be subject to Presidential Proclamation 10043 and therefore ineligible for a visa."
> Issued by President Donald Trump at the end of May, and implemented beginning June 1, the proclamation claims that China "is engaged in a wide‑ranging and heavily resourced campaign to acquire sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property, in part to bolster the modernization and capability of its military, the People's Liberation Army."
> The State Department said the revocation of visas "safeguards US national security by limiting the PRC's ability to leverage Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States to steal United States technologies, intellectual property, and information to develop advanced military capabilities."
> 
> Speaking Wednesday, acting US Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said that "China has leveraged every aspect of its country including its economy, its military, and its diplomatic power, demonstrating a rejection of western liberal democracy and continually renewing its commitment to remake the world order in its own authoritarian image."..
> https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/china-us-visas-intl-hnk/index.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## OldSolduer

Too many view mainland China as a big cuddly panda where they can buy cheap stuff.


----------



## MarkOttawa

See the cartoons at the CCP's English-language mouthpiece, _Global Times_--e.g.:
https://www.google.com/search?q=global+times+panda+cartoons&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9hr7Q9N7rAhV7lnIEHcRYBvoQ_AUoAXoECDgQAw&biw=1025&bih=449







Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

Question for any ex-intelligence folks who may be familiar with NCIU, or similar units in law enforcement agencies.

If Chinese operatives were found to be 'collecting' individuals wanted by the CCP because of how vocal or dangerous they are to the CCP agenda, what actions (if any) could be taken?  (Obviously there is the Criminal Code as the primary tool for law enforcement agencies.)


----------



## shawn5o

Donald H said:
			
		

> Trump is quite likely only taking a harder line on China until after the election. That places the entire H.K. controversy in limbo. There are indications that Trump will begin to view China and Xi as favourably as he views Russia and Putin.
> 
> Trump did before he had to take a negative position against China for the political purpose of the coming election.



Hi Don

Nah, I think you're strecthing the whatever happens in the future but remember, trump has frequently verbally attacked China for years.  :2c:


----------



## MilEME09

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Question for any ex-intelligence folks who may be familiar with NCIU, or similar units in law enforcement agencies.
> 
> If Chinese operatives were found to be 'collecting' individuals wanted by the CCP because of how vocal or dangerous they are to the CCP agenda, what actions (if any) could be taken?  (Obviously there is the Criminal Code as the primary tool for law enforcement agencies.)



Well Uttering threats, intimidation of a public official (in some cases), being an agent of a foreign government just to name a couple off the top of my head. We need to start treating these groups watching and threatening individuals like the old soviet spy rings, and eliminate them.


----------



## FJAG

Recent report by Dept of Def to Congress



> Chinese military calls US ‘destroyer of world peace’ following critical DOD report
> China's Defense Ministry calls on U.S. to reflect on itself following critical report
> By Stephen Sorace | Fox News
> 
> China’s Defense Ministry has called the U.S. “the destroyer of world peace” in response to a critical Department of Defense report that said the country’s military buildup aims to “revise” the international order.
> 
> Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Wu Qian called the Sept. 2 report a “wanton distortion” of China’s aims and the relationship between the People’s Liberation Army and China’s 1.4 billion people.
> ...



See article here.

See full DoD report here.

 :cheers:


----------



## Retired AF Guy

On of the amazing things about China's treatment of Muslim Uighurs is how little outrage it has generated among Muslims countries/groups. However, as this article from Foreign Affairs says that may be changing.



> The Long Shadow of Xinjiang: Anger Grows in Muslim Countries at China’s Treatment of the Uighurs
> 
> By Nithin Coca
> 
> September 10, 2020
> 
> For years, evidence has accumulated of Chinese atrocities against minority groups in Xinjiang, the northwestern province that is home to the mostly Muslim Uighur people. Investigative journalists, researchers, and refugees paint a grim picture of mass surveillance, arbitrary arrest, forced labor, sprawling detention camps, torture, and murder. The Chinese government has not only engaged in political and cultural repression but taken specific aim at the Muslim faith: it has destroyed mosques, confiscated Korans, forbidden halal diets, and banned fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.
> 
> And yet the countries and entities that regularly criticize Israel, Myanmar, the United States, and other nations for their actions against Muslims have kept quiet about China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The governments of Muslim-majority states, Muslim religious leaders, and international institutions such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have avoided calling out the litany of abuses in Xinjiang. Some have accepted Chinese funds in support of infrastructure projects and even signed on to letters supporting China’s behavior in Xinjiang.
> 
> Civil society groups in Muslim-majority countries, however, are increasingly uncomfortable with their governments’ reticence. Activists are organizing boycotts, protests, and media campaigns in a bid to bring the plight of the Uighurs to broader attention. Their efforts are slowly shifting the behavior of their governments: Chinese investment and political influence may prevent many leaders from openly criticizing China, but opposition figures and officials at lower levels of government have begun to speak out in response to pressure from below.
> 
> China’s growing economic might has bought quiescence from many quarters. Many Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East have signed on to Beijing’s infrastructure and investment project known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Some of these countries now count China as their largest or second-largest trading partner, and they fear losing access to Chinese capital and to the Chinese market should they take outspoken positions on Xinjiang. Moreover, these governments may feel distant from the plight of a community that once lived at the heart of Asia’s greatest trading routes but now resides far from the political, religious, and economic centers of the Muslim world. The Palestinians, by contrast, live alongside some of Islam’s holiest sites and have never ceased to be a central concern of regional governments.
> 
> Activists—especially in the large Muslim-majority countries that permit the most space for media and civil society—are pressing their governments to make the Uighurs a priority. In Malaysia, Ahmad Farouk Musa, director of the Islamic Renaissance Front, a nongovernmental organization that raises awareness of human rights abuses perpetuated both by and against Muslims, has been organizing events, responding to Chinese propaganda in the media, and trying to push the new government to speak out for Uighurs. Thanks in part to its growing clout and the effectiveness of its campaigns, Malaysia withstood Chinese demands and declined to deport Uighur asylum seekers in 2019. Ahmad applauded his government’s decision. “We were able to say there was no valid reason for us to deport the asylum seekers back to China, because if we send them to China, we send them to the gallows,” Ahmad told me. “This has given Muslims and Malaysians a moral boost.”
> 
> In Indonesia, Azzam M. Izzulhaq, a social entrepreneur and founder of a small nonprofit foundation, took the brave step of traveling to Xinjiang in 2018, documented what he saw, and has been organizing events across the country to inform his compatriots of China’s actions in the province. He has built a broad following of more than 100,000 people on social media, appeared on national media, and begun to directly call on politicians—including President Joko Widodo—to speak out against Chinese abuses.
> 
> 
> And in Turkey, Kadir Akinci, a businessman who runs a machinery company, has successfully signed up dozens of local companies to boycott Chinese products in solidarity with the Uighurs, with his effort receiving wide attention in domestic media. Turkey has the largest community of Uighur émigrés, estimated at 50,000, and hosts the World Uyghur Congress, the umbrella organization for Uighur groups outside of China.
> 
> 
> Elsewhere, the cause of the Uighurs is even leading to violent unrest. In Pakistan, which receives considerable BRI funding, the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir has criticized Prime Minister Imran Khan and his ruling party for their close ties to Beijing. Militants have attacked Chinese nationals and businesses, citing China’s crimes against Muslims in Xinjiang.
> 
> Arabic-language news media, such as the New Arab and Al Jazeera, have reported on Xinjiang, and such coverage has since spread throughout the Middle East and become a hot topic of discussion on social media. Public outrage has grown as a result. According to the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, China’s repression of the Uighurs was mostly unknown in the Islamic world just two years ago. Now UHRP and other Uighur diaspora organizations, such as the World Uyghur Congress, say they are receiving a rising number of inquiries from across the Muslim world from people who want to know what they can do to help the Uighur cause.
> 
> As a result of this shift in public awareness, some politicians have begun to speak out. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party had been relatively silent until late 2018, when the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) raised the matter in parliament. The HDP’s pressure, along with growing agitation from Turkish Islamists, led Turkey’s Foreign Ministry to issue a statement in early 2019 condemning China for “violating the fundamental human rights of Uighur Turks and other Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.” In response to protests in Jakarta in late 2019, Indonesia’s foreign minister released a statement claiming that his government was “actively communicating with China on Uighur issues.” The government of Qatar has quietly but meaningfully removed itself from a letter signed by 37 nations—including several Muslim-majority ones—supporting China’s policies in Xinjiang.
> 
> MOVING THE MOUNTAIN
> 
> Such public rebukes may have little immediate impact on the policies of Muslim-majority countries toward China. Many Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, see China as a necessary counterweight to the United States—much the same way that they saw the United States as a counterweight to colonial European powers in the early twentieth century. Years of military alliances that resulted in an ever-expanding U.S. presence in the region, invasions, and overreach have left many governments in the Middle East with the impression that the United States is an untrustworthy partner. Today they turn to Beijing as the emerging power in the region. China has forged economic ties that have won it public esteem in the Middle East. Polls show that 50 percent of people in Middle Eastern countries had favorable views of China between 2005 and 2018 (by contrast, just 29 percent of Americans had positive views of China in that same period).
> 
> In the long run, however, China’s treatment of the Uighurs is a vulnerability that the governments of or political oppositions in Muslim-majority countries can raise in the event of a geopolitical spat, elections, or a trade dispute to quickly and perhaps permanently destroy China’s image with their populations. Neither the United States nor the countries of Europe, for all their faults and failures, had to answer for anything quite like a genocidal campaign against a domestic Muslim ethnic group.
> 
> Outrage over Xinjiang runs high in Southeast Asia.
> 
> Outrage over Xinjiang already runs high in Southeast Asia, which perhaps not coincidentally is disgruntled with other Chinese policies. China is pushing to expand BRI projects in Indonesia and Malaysia while simultaneously encroaching on the territorial waters of both countries. During the 2018 Malaysian general election, the opposition accused the government of agreeing to BRI deals that disproportionately benefited China during its winning campaign. When in power, it stopped the practice of deporting Uighur asylum seekers to China. Indonesia’s opposition staged protests supporting the Uighurs at Chinese consulates across the country during its 2019 presidential campaign. Since then, distrust of China has only grown—giving both leaders and opposition parties a powerful weapon to potentially mobilize public support in their favor. According to Pew Research Center polls, only 36 percent of Indonesians held a favorable opinion of China in 2019, a drop of 17 points from the previous year.
> 
> For now, China’s economic power gives it the latitude to repress Muslim Uighurs at home while building partnerships with Muslim nations abroad. But Beijing has painted itself into a corner. The evidence of cultural genocide is overwhelming, the destruction of Uighur mosques, cemeteries, shrines, and other cultural heritage sites impossible to deny. More people in Muslim-majority countries are becoming aware of Chinese actions in Xinjiang and beginning to see China as an anti-Muslim nation. As aggressive Chinese foreign policy angers the public in certain regions, such as Southeast Asia, governments will feel increasingly compelled to react. Beijing has acted with a sense of impunity in its northwestern province, but its abuses there could bedevil its foreign relations with the Muslim world in the years to come.
> 
> NITHIN COCA is a freelance journalist who covers political, social, and environmental issues across Asia.



Link


----------



## daftandbarmy

Retired AF Guy said:
			
		

> On of the amazing things about China's treatment of Muslim Uighurs is how little outrage it has generated among Muslims countries/groups. However, as this article from Foreign Affairs says that may be changing.
> 
> Link



It looks like Disney is helping to get the word out, unwittingly of course:

Disney criticised for filming Mulan in China's Xinjiang province

Disney is under fire for shooting its new film Mulan in parts of China where the government is accused of serious human rights abuses.

The final credits thank a government security agency in Xinjiang province, where about 1m people - mostly Muslim Uighurs - are thought to be detained.

The film was already the target of a boycott after its lead actress backed a crackdown on Hong Kong protesters.

China says it is fighting the "three evil forces" of separatism, terrorism, and extremism in Xinjiang and says the camps are voluntary schools for anti-extremism training.

In 2017 Mulan director Niki Caro posted photos on Instagram from the capital of Xinjiang. The production team behind the film also told the Architectural Digest magazine that they spent months in Xinjiang to research filming locations.

Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong has also condemned Disney, tweeting that viewers watching Mulan are "potentially complicit in the mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs".


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-54064654


----------



## MarkOttawa

While in Canada we wait. And wait. And wait. For our government of perpetual dither to make a decision on Huawei/5G:



> Ottawa looks set for a fight over $1-billion compensation for Huawei equipment
> 
> Canada is signalling it might not compensate major telecommunications providers if the federal government bans equipment made by China’s Huawei from 5G networks, setting up a potential fight over a bill that could hit $1-billion.
> 
> Canada, under pressure from the United States to ban Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd .gear on security grounds, is studying whether to allow the firm into the country’s next-generation 5G networks.
> 
> If Ottawa does announce a formal ban, the affected companies have made it clear they want compensation for tearing out their existing Huawei gear, said two sources close to the matter.
> 
> But the Liberal government, already pressing wireless providers to cut what it says are excessively high bills, seems less convinced.
> 
> “I’m not sure there is a solid legal case that we would have to compensate for making a proper national security decision,” said a government source who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation.
> 
> Federal politicians, said the source, also had to worry about “the public perception of handing over a billion dollars or more to very large companies.”
> 
> Ottawa has spent almost two years studying whether to allow Huawei into 5G networks and in June, with no sign of a decision coming any time soon, impatient Canadian providers took matters into their own hands.
> 
> Bell Canada and Telus Corp. said they would partner with Ericsson and Nokia Oyj, even though they use Huawei in their 4G networks.
> 
> Technical experts say it is hard to marry one company’s 5G equipment with 4G gear from another provider. This effectively means the decision to go with Ericsson would eventually force Telus and Bell to remove the Chinese firm’s 4G equipment.
> 
> Bell and Telus do not have to act immediately, since a crucial auction of spectrum needed for 5G networks will not happen until June, 2021.
> 
> In a February, 2019 filing, Telus said a ban without compensation could increase the cost of its 5G network deployment and make services more expensive for consumers.
> 
> Telus did not respond to a query as to whether it still felt the same way about compensation. Bell did not respond to a request for comment.
> 
> Scotiabank analysts said on June 2 it would cost Bell a total of between $300-million and $350-million over three to five years to strip out Huawei gear. At the same time, BMO estimated Telus had roughly double the exposure than that of Bell.
> 
> In March, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill to provide US$1-billion to help small providers replace equipment made by Huawei and Chinese firm ZTE.
> 
> Canada’s government is on track to run up the highest budget deficit since the Second World War as it tackles the coronavirus outbreak and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will on Sept 23 outline major measures to revive the economy.
> 
> “We obviously want to spend money on things we feel are going to grow the economy rather than on something like that [compensation],” the government source said.
> 
> One person directly familiar with the file took a more jaundiced view, noting that while Britain had told firms to remove their Huawei equipment, it had given them until 2027.
> 
> The person said this also happened to be the time when the gear would become obsolete and require replacement.
> 
> “I don’t think the thinking in the Canadian government is dissimilar with respect to that question,” said the person.
> 
> The office of Canada Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains – which will announce the decision on Huawei and 5G – said it would be premature to discuss future actions.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-looks-set-for-a-fight-over-1-billion-compensation-for-huawei/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## FJAG

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> While in Canada we wait. And wait. And wait. For our government of perpetual dither to make a decision on Huawei/5G:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Sticking your head up your butt is not dithering. It's a conscious policy decision.

In all seriousness though, the Canadian Telecoms have already made the decision against Huawei and therefore the point is moot and is saving the government from overtly peeing the Chinese off. Makes me wonder how much went on behind the scenes, though. I'd like to think there was some pressure from the government in that direction but in reality  :dunno:

 :worms:


----------



## CBH99

The Liberals have no idea how amazingly lucky they are, that they have somehow turned dithering & the inability to take decisive actions into something that we have benefited from in some ways.  

F-35 / future fighter replacement dithering?  Gave the US time to work out a lot of the bugs from the F-35, bring down the purchase price, lower operating costs, streamline maintenance, and update software to be FAR more favourable in all of those areas than if we'd purchased 10 years ago.

Huawei?  I understand wanting to walk a fine line until the Canadian political 'hostages' are released.  In my ignorant opinion, they've dithered on that too, and that should have been able to be discussed/negotiated ages ago.  I do understand them wanting to secure their release, prior to making an announcement that could potentially endanger them even further.

So, in the meantime, the telecom companies decide for themselves not to use Huawei gear.  Was their quiet pressure behind the scenes for them to go that direction from the government?  

I'm with FJAG on this one, as I think most of us are.  I HOPE so, but...  



While dithering on pipelines out west, major energy & agriculture projects, LNG pipelines throughout Ontario and Quebec, etc etc has crippled our ability to recover economically from COVID in a healthy or timely manner, it's surprised me how their absolute incompetence has somehow benefited us.  It's almost like a Mr. Bean sketch in some ways.


----------



## FJAG

Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century | Yes Prime Minister

 ;D


----------



## Good2Golf

> Federal politicians, said the source, also had to worry about “the public perception of handing over a billion dollars or more to very large companies.



:rofl:

Canadians have been Bombardiered, so nothing surprises us no. Since were racking up an additional $300+ BILLION, what’s another $1B to keep Huawei frozen out of stealing all our personal information hiding within our country’s telecom infrastructure?

Get on with it...lock ‘em out. 

:nod:


----------



## Dana381

FJAG said:
			
		

> Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century | Yes Prime Minister
> 
> ;D



 :rofl: That was great, true stuff is always the funniest stuff!  :rofl:


----------



## MarkOttawa

This looks very worrying, Canada involved:



> China's 'hybrid war': Beijing's mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal
> 
> A Chinese company with links to Beijing's military and intelligence networks has been amassing a vast database of detailed personal information on thousands of Australians, including prominent and influential figures.
> 
> A database of 2.4 million people, including more than 35,000 Australians, has been leaked from the Shenzhen company Zhenhua Data which is believed to be used by China's intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security.
> 
> Zhenhua has the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.
> 
> Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs.
> 
> It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours.
> 
> While much of the information has been "scraped" from open-source material, some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles.
> 
> The company is believed to have sourced some of its information from the so-called "dark web".
> 
> One intelligence analyst said the database was "Cambridge Analytica on steroids", referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign.
> 
> But this data dump goes much further, suggesting a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create intricate profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.
> 
> The _database has been shared with an international consortium of media outlets in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Australia, comprising the Australian Financial Review and the ABC_ [emphasis added]...
> 
> Of the 35,558 Australians on the database, there are state and federal politicians, military officers, diplomats, academics, civil servants, business executives, engineers, journalists, lawyers and accountants.
> 
> They range from the current and former prime ministers, to Atlassian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, and business figures David Gonski and Jennifer Westacott.
> 
> But there are _656 of the Australians featured on the list as being of "special interest" or "politically exposed". Exactly what the company means by either of these terms is unexplained, but the people on the list are disparate in occupation and background, and there seems little to no explanation in who has made the list_ [emphasis added].
> 
> The list includes current Victorian Supreme Court Judge Anthony Cavanough, retired Navy Admiral and former Lockheed Martin chief executive Raydon Gates, former ambassador to China Geoff Raby, ex Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle and former foreign minister Bob Carr.
> 
> Singer Natalie Imbruglia features in this list, along with One Nation co-founder David Oldfield, National Party President Larry Anthony, former treasurer Peter Costello's son Sebastian, ex-Labor MP Emma Husar, News Corp journalist Ellen Whinnett and rural businesswoman and ABC director Georgie Somerset...
> 
> The database was leaked to a US academic based in Vietnam, Professor Chris Balding, who until 2018 had worked at the elite Peking University before leaving China citing fears for his physical safety.
> 
> "China is absolutely building out a massive surveillance state both domestically and internationally," Professor Balding told the ABC.
> 
> "They're using a wide variety of tools — this one is taken primarily from public sources, there is non-public data in here, but it is taken primarily from public sources...
> 
> _Professor Balding has returned to the United States, leaving Vietnam after being advised it was no longer safe for him to be there.
> 
> It was also a grave risk taken by the person who leaked the database to him, who contacted him as he started publishing articles about Chinese tech giant Huawei_ [emphasis added]...
> 
> _Of the 250,000 records recovered, there are 52,000 on Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indian, 9,700 British, 5,000 Canadians, 2,100 Indonesians, 1,400 Malaysia and 138 from Papua New Guinea.
> 
> There are 793 New Zealanders profiled in the database, of whom 734 are tagged of special interest or politically exposed_ [emphasis added].
> 
> Zhenhua boasts it has about 20 "collection nodes" scattered around the world to vacuum enormous amounts of data and send back to China. Two of the nodes have been identified as being in Kansas in the United States and the South Korean capital Seoul. The Australian node has not been detected...
> 
> Zhenhua Data, established in 2018, is believed to be owned by China Zhenhua Electronics Group which in turn is owned by state-owned China Electronic Information Industry Group (CETC), a military research company which had an association with the University of Technology Sydney until 2019...
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-14/chinese-data-leak-linked-to-military-names-australians/12656668



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

Dana381 said:
			
		

> :rofl: That was great, true stuff is always the funniest stuff!  :rofl:




 :rofl:

I didn't know what to expect, I've never seen the show before.  Didn't realize it was a documentary!


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> This looks very worrying, Canada involved:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Now major _Globe and Mail_ story:

Chinese firm amasses trove of open-source data on influential Canadians
…
The company’s ambitions, though, extend far beyond its small real-estate footprint. It is building tools to process the world’s open-source information about influential people — culled from Twitter, criminal records, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos and more — into information that can be analyzed and used by universities, companies, government actors and the Chinese military. “Our client base is a bit special,” the woman said. It also claims to have built tools to manipulate content on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms. Facebook now says it has banned the company from its platform.

Zhenhua declined an interview request, saying it was not convenient to disclose trade secrets. The company’s website became inaccessible after The Globe and Mail visited its office, which is located in a government-backed business incubator building across the street from an investigative centre for the local Public Security Bureau — all of it a short drive from headquarters for some of China’s most important technology and civil-military companies, including Tencent and China Electronics Corp.

But The Globe and a consortium of international journalists have accessed an early copy of the company’s Overseas Key Information Database, which shows the type of information Zhenhua is collecting for use in China, including records of small-town mayors in western Canada, where Chinese diplomats have sought to curry favour. The company, led by a former IBM data centre management expert, has also described its work online in job postings, LinkedIn records, blog articles and software patents. One employee described work “mining the business needs of military customers for overseas data.” Zhenhua’s website listed a series of partners that include important military contractors. In total, it claims to have collected information on more than 2.4 million people, 650,000 organizations from over two billion articles of social media.

Together, the documents show a Chinese firm with a keen interest in advanced forms of warfare, the structure of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the use of social media to achieve military victories. The company has secured a software patent for a “social media account simulation system,” a title that connotes a tool for managing networks of fake social media usernames in a way that emulates human characteristics, making them more effective at spreading messages. Zhenhua’s name translates to “China Revival,” a reference to a mantra of the national rise sought by president Xi Jinping, who has proclaimed the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

“It seems to be collecting information about people who are around things that China would be interested in. The question is if this is a database of potential targets that could be used by the intelligence services of China to get what they want,” said Stephanie Carvin, a former national security analyst who viewed the database on behalf of The Globe and Mail. She is now an associate professor of international relations at Carleton University.

While Prof. Carvin said it wasn’t clear whether this was a database used by Chinese intelligence – or just a database created by a company hoping to sell it to Chinese intelligence – she found it curious that there were records on people like Ella-Grace Trudeau, the 11-year-old daughter of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Jeremy Fry, the adult son of longtime MP Hedy Fry. That, Prof. Carvin said, suggested an attempt to learn more not just about the people in power in Canada, but those around them.

“Why have these people in some kind of database? That, to me, is the question that national security agencies in the West have to figure out. That’s the thing I worry about,” Prof. Carvin said. “Is this an attempt to create a database of targetable individuals? And what are they trying to do with that?”

A version of the Zhenhua OKIDB database analyzed by The Globe contained nearly 16,000 entries mentioning Canada.

The database’s files seem to have been cobbled together from various sources: Some catalogue news stories, including hundreds of articles from The Globe itself, while others are archived Facebook posts from Donald Trump about trade tariffs. A large portion of the data appears to have been extracted from the business information website Crunchbase, and serves as a rolodex of social media accounts and contact information for people in all sorts of occupations, from tech executives to university professors. Roughly 70 per cent of the people captured in the data are men.

The database appears to contain a special focus on mayors of Western Canadian towns, as well as academics and bureaucrats who focus on international relations. However, the effort is broader than it is deep.

The vast majority of the files contain little more than accumulation of what can be found about the individuals on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. In some cases, where the person of interest had a police record, links are included to newspaper stories about their cases.

The mass-scraping of data contravenes Facebook’s policies, spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois said. “We have banned Shenzen Zhenhua Data Technology from our platform and sent a cease and desist letter to ordering them to stop,” she said. LinkedIn does “not permit the use of any software that scrapes or copies information from LinkedIn,” said spokesperson Billy Huang. “If any violation of our User Agreement is uncovered or reported we investigate and take necessary steps to protect our members’ information.”

A shorter list of 3,767 Canadians have been assigned a grade of 1, 2 or 3 by the creators of the database. Those assigned a 1 appeared to be people of direct influence, such as mayors, MPs, or senior civil servants, while those assigned a 2 were often relatives of people in power, such as Mr. Trudeau’s daughter and Ms. Fry’s son. Those assigned a grade of 3 often had criminal convictions, mostly for economic crimes.

Dozens of current and former MPs dot the list of those assigned a 1, including new Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, whose file, like most, includes only a seven-digit ID number and a link to the webpage of his official parliamentary profile.

Others who had files assigned a grade of 1 include senior bureaucrats at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Treasury Board, the Transportation Safety Board, the Export Development Canada – even the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The justice system appeared to be another focus of the database, which contains entries on judges up to and including current and former members of the Supreme Court of Canada…
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-chinese-firm-amasses-trove-of-open-source-data-on-influential/

Mark 
Ottawa


----------



## Donald H

shawn5o said:
			
		

> Hi Don
> 
> Nah, I think you're strecthing the whatever happens in the future but remember, trump has frequently verbally attacked China for years.  :2c:



I hear you Shawn, but I'm suggesting that Trump needs to appear to be taking a hard line on China right now for political purposes. 
One aspect of the conversation that is continually avoided is the question of Trump's support being antiwar. I've suggested that is a large portion and is consistent to the well known phrase, 'bring the troops home'. 

Your opinion?


----------



## shawn5o

Donald H said:
			
		

> I hear you Shawn, but I'm suggesting that Trump needs to appear to be taking a hard line on China right now for political purposes.
> One aspect of the conversation that is continually avoided is the question of Trump's support being antiwar. I've suggested that is a large portion and is consistent to the well known phrase, 'bring the troops home'.
> 
> Your opinion?



Good point Don

I think The Don will take a harder line towards China but that might cause a blowback or something like that. China and the US are (I think) the two biggest economies and they are entwined. How in hell are they going to seperate from each other? I don't think either can w/o upsetting world economy.

As for bring the troops home, CHB in a similar thread stated some good info/observations.

Cheers


----------



## a_majoor

More examples of Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" to compliment some of the upthread liinks:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhua_database/

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons
Compiled using mostly open-source intel, shines a light on extent of China’s surveillance activities
Tue 15 Sep 2020 // 06:27 UTC76 
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor



> A US academic has revealed the existence of 2.4-million-person database he says was compiled by a Chinese company known to supply intelligence, military, and security agencies. The researcher alleges the purpose of the database is enabling influence operations to be conducted against prominent and influential people outside China.
> 
> The academic is Chris Balding, an associate professor at the Fulbright University Vietnam.
> 
> And he says the company is company is named "Shenzhen Zhenhua".
> 
> Security researcher Robert Potter and Balding co-authored a paper [PDF] claiming the trove is known as the “Overseas Key Information Database” (OKIDB) and that while most of it could have been scraped from social media or other publicly-accessible sources, 10 to 20 per cent of it appears not to have come from any public source of information. The co-authors do not rule out hacking as the source of that data, but also say they can find no evidence of such activity.
> 
> “A fundamental purpose appears to be information warfare,” the pair stated.
> 
> Balding wrote on his blog that the database contains the following:
> 
> The information specifically targets influential individuals and institutions across a variety of industries. From politics to organized crime or technology and academia just to name a few, the database flows from sectors the Chinese state and linked enterprises are known to target.
> 
> The breadth of data is also staggering. It compiles information on everyone from key public individuals to low level individuals in an institution to better monitor and understand how to exert influence when needed.
> 
> The database includes details of politicians, diplomats, activists, academics, media figures, entrepreneurs, military officers and government employees. Subjects’ close relatives are also listed, along with contact details and affiliations with political and other organisations.
> 
> In the paper, the pair said all that data allows Chinese analysts “to track key influencers and how news and opinion moves through social media platforms.”
> 
> “The data collected about individuals and institutions and the overlaid analytic tools from social media platforms provide China enormous benefit in opinion formation, targeting, and messaging.”
> 
> It gets worse: “From the assembled data, it is also possible for China even in individualized meetings be able to craft messaging or target the individuals they deem necessary to target.”
> 
> Balding said the database is “technically complex using very advanced language, targeting, and classification tools.”



More on the link, but this, coupled with other information gathering exploits like the Chinese hack of the OPM database in 2015 (which contained the information of every single American who had applied for a security clearance), or the widespread infiltration of academic institutions provides the raw materials to create very detailed link diagrams, detailed dossiers of select individuals and theoretically gives the Chinese State the ability to wage war on individuals if they desire (how well they can do so is another question).

Certainly the parameters of defense are rapidly changing given these sorts of abilities, and Canada and the West will need to mobilize all the tools of DIME (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economics) in order to protect ourselves and our institutions.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Chicoms seeking retribution for our detention of Meng Wanzhou:



> Beijing Moves the Goalposts for Resumption of ‘Healthy’ Sino-Canadian Relations: J. Michael Cole for Inside Policy
> 
> _Undoubtedly frustrated with its inability to coerce Ottawa into releasing Meng, Beijing has decided to up the ante, making Kovrig and Spavor victims not of the Meng affair, but now making an example of them to punish Ottawa for its defiance, writes J. Michael Cole. _
> 
> Although China may be a relatively new fact of life for the majority of ordinary Canadians, for those who have lived under the shadow of its “rise,” it is a well-known fact that one constant to how the Chinese Communist Party conducts foreign relations is that nothing is ever constant. China’s envoy to Canada, Cong Peiwu, made that clear in an interview published in Montreal-based La Presse, with a warning that the release by Canada of Meng Wanzhou would not result in the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
> 
> The remark contradicts an earlier statement by Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, which suggested that Beijing could be amenable to releasing Kovrig and Spavor if Meng were set free. While we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Ambassador Cong’s comments do not reflect Beijing’s official policy on the matter, there is a higher likelihood that his remarks to Canadian media followed consultations with the Chinese government.
> 
> Cong leaves little doubt that a prisoner swap is out of the question. “The reason for their detention is completely different,” he observed. “Therefore, the two issues should be treated separately.” In fact, Cong signaled that Meng’s release was now a precondition for the resumption of healthy relations between Canada and China, adding that Canada’s arrest of Meng made it an “accomplice of the United States.”
> 
> If Cong’s remarks indeed reflect Beijing’s new policy, then it is clear that the goalposts have moved. Undoubtedly frustrated with its inability to coerce Ottawa into releasing Meng, Beijing has decided to up the ante, making Kovrig and Spavor victims not of the Meng affair, but now making an example of them to punish Ottawa for its defiance. Canada is not the first target of such kidnapping diplomacy — in recent years, Australian, Swedish, and Taiwanese nationals have also been disappeared by Chinese authorities amid a downturn in the relationship.
> 
> Ironically, Cong’s warning obviates what arguably was Beijing’s most potent leverage with Ottawa — hopes by many Canadians to see two of their own return home — in exchange for vague promises of the resumption of cordial ties with China. The problem is that there is no knowing how long this would last, as we cannot know what next “offense” by Canada would prompt the kidnapping of another of our nationals by China.
> 
> If Ottawa concedes, Beijing gets what it wants — Meng back — while underscoring the fact that, in its hierarchy of states, it is China, not smaller states, that gets to set the rules of the game. The only thing Canada would obtain in return is “healthy” relations, whose nature and duration would also be decided by Beijing. Based on the precedent set by Beijing with other countries, it’s easy to imagine that we’d get screwed. Weakness and contrition would only invite recidivism by Beijing, which would whittle away at Ottawa’s ability to set its own parameters for our relations with China.
> 
> Canada therefore has even less incentive now to set Meng free. However, tempting it may be to repair our relationship with China by giving it what it wants, we should never lose sight of who our real friends are. Disagreements with President Trump notwithstanding, there is absolutely no doubt that the United States is a much better and ideologically compatible friend.
> 
> The fate of Kovrig and Spavor is a brutal reminder of the risks of attracting Beijing’s displeasure now that its rulers have concluded that China is a first among equals. It also underscores the urgency of decoupling from China and for a reconfiguration of the global supply chain.
> 
> Since their arrest and descent into China’s Orwellian legal system, it had been generally acknowledged that by detaining them, Beijing was creating a “moral equivalence” which should have facilitated Meng’s release. Though it never was a good idea, maybe there was a time when a swap would have at least been possible. But that window has closed. Beijing is now “unshakably” set on retribution.
> 
> As General Marshall discovered in his Sisyphean endeavors to encourage unity in China following World War II, the CCP will always exploit weakness in its opponents, while using maximum propaganda to shift the blame for failure squarely on its opponents. It’s difficult to imagine what will secure freedom for Kovrig, Spavor, and the many others who have been kidnapped by China in recent years. It’s likely they will remain in detention for a while yet, probably until there is a change of attitude in Beijing.
> 
> We owe it to them to not give in to the CCP’s disregard for the norms of decency. We also owe it to them to deny Beijing the pleasure of depicting us as the reason for soured relations. If it wasn’t Meng, it would eventually have been something else, as China’s disputes with many other countries have shown. The worst that we could do is to give it what it wants.
> 
> _J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa and the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. His latest book, Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy, was published in July._
> https://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/beijing-moves-goalposts-resumption-healthy-sino-canadian-relations/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

China looks to the skies as well:

https://spacenews.com/new-study-looks-at-space-power-competition-through-chinas-lens/

New study looks at space power competition through China’s lens
by Sandra Erwin — September 20, 2020



> "China's Space Narrative" was released Sept. 17 by the U.S. Air Force Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute and the CNA nonprofit research center.
> WASHINGTON — A new study by the U.S. Air Force’s university think tank confirms the widely held view that China’s anti-satellite weapons pose a national security threat to the United States. But the study also highlights China’s use of soft power and diplomacy as potentially powerful weapons that could undermine the United States.
> 
> "China's Space Narrative” released Sept. 17, was a joint project by the U.S. Air Force Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute and the CNA nonprofit research center.
> 
> “As the era of great power competition continues to evolve, we must understand the full breadth and depth of the competition, how they think, and how they are likely to act or react,” Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute, writes in the introduction to the report.
> 
> CASI used publicly available native language resources to draw insights on how the Chinese view the U.S.-China space relationship.
> 
> “The two countries are in a long term competition in which China is attempting to become a global power, and part of this effort is being played out in space,” the study says.



The rest of the article discusses how China re-frames space issues in order to minimize the perception of their militarization, use of diplomatic tools to attempt to isolate the US on issues of space policy and even a discussion of how Chinese aerospace corporations should try to emulate SpaceX. Access to space resources could break multiple economic bottlenecks on Earth, so whoever can access this first will have a massive advantage (for example a single metallic asteroid a kilometer in diameter is thought to have about $22 trillion dollars in platinum group metals at current prices - even thought that amount of platinum would crash market prices, the availability of cheap platinum to use as industrial catalysts would certainly change multiple industries on Earth).


----------



## a_majoor

More on Huawei's issues. It is very likely that as part of China's "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, planting this equipment in national infrastructures is or was part of a long term process of preparing the Battlespace. Coupling real time communications monitoring with the massive databases of individuals such as identified up thread would make link diagrams, analysis and targeting of individuals and institutions far easier for the Chinese, while the Western powers would be at a very asymmetric disadvantage with no comparable form of access to China.

https://news.sky.com/story/gchq-discovered-nationally-significant-vulnerability-in-huawei-equipment-12086688

GCHQ discovered 'nationally significant' vulnerability in Huawei equipment
The issue in Huawei's equipment was initially withheld from the Chinese company and not reported due to security concerns.
Alexander J Martin, technology reporter



> Cyber security analysts tasked with investigating Huawei equipment used in the UK's telecommunications networks discovered a "nationally significant" vulnerability last year.
> 
> Investigators at the UK's Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) found an issue so severe that it was withheld from the company, according to an oversight report published on Thursday.
> 
> Vulnerabilities are usually software design failures which could allow hostile actors (in particular the Chinese state when it comes to Huawei) to conduct a cyber attack. They are not necessarily intentional and can't be seen as an indication of any hostile intent on the part of the developers themselves.
> 
> There is a hypothetical concern that Beijing could purposefully design some kind of deniable flaw in Huawei's equipment which it would know how to exploit - or that it could have been alerted to a potential attack vector once the issue was reported to Huawei.
> 
> The report explicitly states that the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - a part of GCHQ - "does not believe that the defects identified are as a result of Chinese state interference", and adds that there is no evidence the vulnerabilities were exploited.
> 
> Instead, the agency reported that "poor software engineering and cyber security processes lead to security and quality issues, including vulnerabilities" - and that "the increasing number and severity of vulnerabilities discovered" is of particular concern.



While the article goes on about how this was not intentional, given the level of access that Huawei or the Chinese government would have over the equipment once the flaws were identified, including in the article's own words "Other impacts could include being able to access user traffic or reconfiguration of the network elements."

Given China's behaviours over the last decade, it is difficult to discount the idea that this was intentional after all, and provided a convenient and deniable "backdoor" to equipment installed as part of national 5G networks.


----------



## FM07

Thucydides said:
			
		

> More on Huawei's issues. It is very likely that as part of China's "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, planting this equipment in national infrastructures is or was part of a long term process of preparing the Battlespace. Coupling real time communications monitoring with the massive databases of individuals such as identified up thread would make link diagrams, analysis and targeting of individuals and institutions far easier for the Chinese, while the Western powers would be at a very asymmetric disadvantage with no comparable form of access to China.
> 
> https://news.sky.com/story/gchq-discovered-nationally-significant-vulnerability-in-huawei-equipment-12086688
> 
> GCHQ discovered 'nationally significant' vulnerability in Huawei equipment
> The issue in Huawei's equipment was initially withheld from the Chinese company and not reported due to security concerns.
> Alexander J Martin, technology reporter
> 
> While the article goes on about how this was not intentional, given the level of access that Huawei or the Chinese government would have over the equipment once the flaws were identified, including in the article's own words "Other impacts could include being able to access user traffic or reconfiguration of the network elements."
> 
> Given China's behaviours over the last decade, it is difficult to discount the idea that this was intentional after all, and provided a convenient and deniable "backdoor" to equipment installed as part of national 5G networks.



Amazing.

It would have been like letting the burglar install the security system. Thank God the West has woken up to this egregious threat.


----------



## YZT580

the west minus Canada, so far!


----------



## CBH99

FMoore7 said:
			
		

> Amazing.
> 
> It would have been like letting the burglar install the security system. Thank God the West has woken up to this egregious threat.




Anybody with half a functioning brain could see the ploy for what it was, years ago.  It's only the politicians that have recently begun to catch on...  which I guess makes my comment about half a functioning brain null & void

Letting China manufacture and install our own telecommunication networks?  Or purchase and own our telecom companies, who then in turn install the infrastructure?  

There truly outta' be a "Criminally Incompetent" piece of legislation out there for national leadership  :facepalm:




Glad to see more & more pushback from the West in regards to this.


----------



## Donald H

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Anybody with half a functioning brain could see the ploy for what it was, years ago.  It's only the politicians that have recently begun to catch on...  which I guess makes my comment about half a functioning brain null & void
> 
> Letting China manufacture and install our own telecommunication networks?  Or purchase and own our telecom companies, who then in turn install the infrastructure?
> 
> There truly outta' be a "Criminally Incompetent" piece of legislation out there for national leadership  :facepalm:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Glad to see more & more pushback from the West in regards to this.



I have to disagree completely. It's nothing but superior 5G technology that contains nothing that can't be ferreted out by experts in the field so that our country's security isn't compromised.

 :cheers:


----------



## a_majoor

Chinese action creates a counter reaction:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/2020100622010.aspx

On Point: For China, the Quad Is a Diplomatic and Military Double Whammy
by Austin Bay
October 6, 2020



> This week's Quadrilateral Security Dialogue foreign ministers meeting in Tokyo signals that the so-called Quad has arrived as a global diplomatic combination. The Quad is already an Indo-Pacific military power.
> 
> For Beijing, the Quad's formation and solidification is a nightmare -- and China's communist government has only itself to blame.
> 
> In 2007, the Quad, at the behest of Japan, held its first informal meeting. At that meeting, Japan said all four nations regarded China as a disruptive actor in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This common concern should spur close cooperation to confront it.
> 
> For several reasons, India downplayed the initial meeting. Many Indians valued their nation's Cold War-era "non-alignment" policy. Tight military cooperation with the U.S. might betray that legacy. Australia, the U.S. and Japan have long-term bilateral and trilateral defense relationships. Indian and Australian military contacts are close, but India prized strategic autonomy and was suspicious of mutual defense commitments.
> 
> Moreover, in 2007, India carefully avoided the appearance of actively countering China. Economic cooperation with Beijing had potential benefits. Plus, New Delhi and Beijing were trying to peacefully resolve their border disputes in the Himalayas.
> 
> What a difference 13 years make, especially a baker's dozen scarred by Chinese imperialist territorial expansion, intellectual theft, military buildup and lawless behavior. China's fake South China Sea islands bristle with weapons and violate the Philippines' and Vietnam's maritime zones. Beijing recently announced its new hypersonic missiles can smash Guam, a sovereign American territory. Human rights organizations accuse Beijing of genocide against Turkic Uighurs and ethnic Tibetans.



What a difference indeed. "Containment" of China is happening as the nations surrounding the South China Sea, the First and Second Island chains and the rest of the world react to Chinese activities. IF China were not behaving in such a bellicose manner, I doubt that tariffs, "decoupling" and the formation of groups like the Quad would have happened at all.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile PM Trudeau et al. keep the muzzle on our cyber experts--note John Adams quoted in last para of excerpt:



> Canada watchdog mum as U.K. agency finds security defects in Huawei gear
> 
> Canada’s cybersecurity watchdog is refusing to say whether it found the same security and software defects in telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. that Britain’s cyberspy agency identified last week.
> 
> The British government’s National Cyber Security Centre, which oversees the vetting of Huawei gear and includes officials from Britain’s GCHQ signals intelligence agency, issued a report last Thursday citing ongoing security and software engineering problems with Huawei gear.
> 
> “Overall, the oversight board can only provide limited assurance that all risks to U.K. national security from Huawei’s involvement in the U.K.’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term,” the report said.
> 
> The British cybersecurity agency said if an “attacker has knowledge of these vulnerabilities and sufficient access to exploit them, they may be able to affect the operation of a U.K. network, in some cases causing it to cease operating correctly.”
> 
> The British said they do not believe the “defects identified are a result of Chinese state interference.”
> 
> Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, which handles cybersecurity and oversees the testing of Huawei gear, would not say if it found similar defects.
> 
> CSE set up independent labs in 2013, staffed by security analysts, that test all Huawei equipment. Unlike the British agency, CSE does not release annual reports on these tests.
> 
> The agency told The Globe and Mail the security review program for Huawei equipment prevents it from releasing the results.
> 
> “While non-disclosure agreements prohibit CSE from disclosing further details of this testing process, Canadians can rest assured that the government of Canada is working to make sure the strongest possible protections are in place,” CSE said in a statement.
> 
> John Adams, who ran CSE from 2005-2012, told The Globe on Monday [Oct. 5] it is “logical” that the cyberspy agency would have found the same flaws as the British. Mr. Adams said he does not trust Huawei equipment and believes Canada should join its Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners in banning the Chinese telecom giant’s equipment from next generation 5G mobile networks...
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-british-cyberagency-finds-security-defects-in-huawei-gear/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Meanwhile PM Trudeau et al. keep the muzzle on our cyber experts--note John Adams quoted in last para of excerpt:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa




One thing I've learned over the years is that Canadian agencies/units/organizations dedicated to operations regarding national security are quite often the most mum on their exploits, yet incredibly proficient at their jobs.

A good example is our very own JTF2.  We don't hear much about them, but we know they are out there doing what needs to be done, and doing it exceptionally well.


The fact that CSE doesn't publicly announce their concerns, doesn't bother me.  I trust they are some pretty smart folks who know what to look for when it comes to this stuff.  And due to the 'political hostage' situation, I imagine anything they have to say that is China related will be behind closed doors for the time being.

If they were truly being muzzled or ignored, to the detriment of our national security - I imagine 'something' would be mysteriously leaked to the press that would instantly draw attention to what they wanted the attention on.


:2c:


----------



## blacktriangle

No one from the Cdn S&I community needs to leak anything. I doubt it would accomplish much aside from landing the member(s) in hot water. 

Anyone that cares to look can already find enough open source reporting, as well as the published concerns of more prominent FVEY partners. 

The problem is, does anyone, elected or otherwise, actually care enough to make an issue out of it? It's part of the reason that DND owns the old Nortel Campus now...Canada is a soft target.

 :2c:


----------



## shawn5o

Australia seems to understand China and its actions


*Canada's feckless government needs to show some spine on China*
_When dealing with an international bully, restraint is rarely effective. Neither is handwringing, or keeping your head in the sand_

Author of the articleerek H. Burney, National Post
Publishing date:Oct 06, 2020  •  Last Updated 2 days ago  •  6 minute read

A new geopolitical order is taking shape. The globe is rapidly realigning under American and Chinese spheres of influence and the pandemic has only raised the stakes. How can Canada finally get serious about its internal stability and external security so it can effectively play a role as a middle power? That is the question this National Post series will answer. Today, Derek H. Burney on what Canada can learn from Australia when it comes to dealing with Beijing.

Canada’s approach on China is feckless, completely hamstrung by concerns about the illegal incarceration of the “two Michaels” (Kovrig and Spavor). This situation, for which the government seems to have no practical solution, leaves us, as the late John Crosbie would observe, “naked as a newt” in dealing with a government in Beijing that is not only authoritarian but increasingly coercive on global affairs.

Meanwhile, the seemingly endless and well-funded extradition process involving Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the founder of Huawei, is becoming more farcical by the day and may run inconclusively until the end of the decade.

In a recent letter to the prime minister I joined several other Canadians to suggest that the government propose to swap Meng for the two Michaels. That suggestion prompted moral outrage from the prime minister and others who claimed that it would violate the rule of law. None of the critics offered a practical alternative and yet all of them know that hostage swaps and other unusual means have been used countless times by many countries, including Canada, to resolve seemingly intractable international problems.

More at https://nationalpost.com/opinion/derek-h-burney-canadas-feckless-government-needs-to-show-some-spine-on-china


----------



## YZT580

shawn5o said:
			
		

> Australia seems to understand China and its actions
> 
> 
> *Canada's feckless government needs to show some spine on China*
> _When dealing with an international bully, restraint is rarely effective. Neither is handwringing, or keeping your head in the sand_
> 
> 
> In a recent letter to the prime minister I joined several other Canadians to suggest that the government propose to swap Meng for the two Michaels. That suggestion prompted moral outrage from the prime minister and others who claimed that it would violate the rule of law. None of the critics offered a practical alternative and yet all of them know that hostage swaps and other unusual means have been used countless times by many countries, including Canada, to resolve seemingly intractable international problems.
> 
> He starts by saying Canada should develop some spine and then he totally contradicts himself by saying we should do a prisoner swap and send her home which is where this thing all started in the first place.  Canada is in the same position as the US was in 1940 when it was sending iron, coal, and scrap steel to Japan where they were converting it into war materials: the elite were reaping the profits from marketing the very products that would shortly be killing their sons.  Our folks in Ottawa don't see any problem with trading with China.  They are addicted to saving a few pennies at the expense of their future and their freedom.  For 20 years or more we have been listening to the lie that China will become more westernised through contact: we just have to be patient.  The news says otherwise.  As the song says: Got along without you, before I met you gonna get along without you now.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Pretty tough stuff from our foreign minister:



> 50th anniversary of Canada-China diplomatic relations
> 
> From: Global Affairs Canada
> Statement
> 
> October 13, 2020 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada
> 
> The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Foreign Affairs, today issued the following statement:
> 
> “Today, Canada and China mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations.
> 
> “In 1970, the Government of Canada took an international leadership position by extending a hand to establish diplomatic relations with China, despite our different systems of government.
> 
> “The reason was simple, and the rationale widely shared: the community of nations could not sustainably isolate one-fifth of humanity from its international institutions. Dialogue, as challenging as it was, had to prevail over ignorance and fear.
> 
> “We continue to believe in the importance of our relationship. At the same time, this anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the foundation of our bilateral relations and the path ahead. Indeed, 50 years on, Canada takes a sober view in examining our relationship, considering the importance of mutual respect and reciprocity, adherence to rules and principles, including human rights, and achieving results that are in Canadian interests. It is unacceptable that any citizen be arbitrarily detained. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor must be brought home. This is something for which all Canadians stand united. The use of coercive diplomacy causes Canada to re-examine its approach, with a focus on multilateral cooperation.
> 
> “As a Pacific nation, Canada recognizes that its future is tied to peace, stability and prosperity in the region. As we build a new framework for relations with China, Canada will work with partners to hold the Chinese government accountable to its international obligations. The common future of Canada and China depends on the rule of law, respect for rights and freedoms and for people in all their diversity. At the same time, we will continue to seek dialogue and cooperation where it makes sense to do so.
> 
> “The bedrock of our relations—in the beginning and as it is now—remains the people of Canada and China. Together, we share long-standing connections that took root well before the establishment of diplomatic relations. These connections and the extraordinary contributions of Canadians of Chinese origin to Canada will outlive political cycles and continue to bring diversity and depth to our relationship for decades to come.”
> https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2020/10/50th-anniversary-of-canada-china-diplomatic-relations.html#shr-pg0



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Strategy page on the evolution of the PLA:

https://strategypage.com/htmw/htworld/articles/20201012.aspx

Forces: The Chinese Aspirational Army



> On paper the Chinese army looks pretty impressive, with 78 combat brigades and nearly as many specialized brigades. Over the last decade the Chinese army has been converting its divisions to brigades, many of them independent brigades like the American Brigade combat teams. That conversion is still underway, although by now nearly all the regiments that formerly comprised the major subunits of divisions have been converted to brigades.
> 
> The task of turning all those new brigades into well-equipped and trained ones is still underway. There are three types of combat brigades. The most potent is the heavy brigade, each with about a hundred tanks and dozens of tracked IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles) plus detachments of engineers and other specialists. The problem with these heavy brigades is that not all of them have the latest tanks. China has not built enough of its most modern tank to replace all the older models. As more of the latest tank enter service heavy brigades receive them and have to go through months of training to learn how to get the most out of them.
> 
> Then there are the medium brigades that are mainly infantry in wheeled IFVs. These are similar to American Stryker brigades but China only has a few of those so far, so most still older IFVs rather than the latest “Stryker class” wheeled IFVs. The heavy and medium brigades often have up to 5,000 troops, including all the smaller specialist detachments that make these brigades the equivalent of a small division.
> 
> Finally, there are dozens of light infantry brigades. Many of these are simply infantry who are transported by truck but the light brigades include some mountain brigades and several air assault (via helicopter) brigades. The Chinese Air force has seven airborne infantry brigades (4,000 troops each and the navy has three marine brigades (6,000 troops each).
> 
> snip
> 
> While China wants an army that can perform as well as Western forces, they won’t get it until they convert to an all-volunteer force and upgrade initial combat training to Western standards. China is switching to Western training methods but is not yet willing to spend what it takes to pay all the troops what they are worth. Currently the two-year conscripts are paid are paid $30-40 a month. The lowest ranking NCO makes more than twice that and the top NCOs (Sergeant Major) makes ten times what a conscript makes. For an all-volunteer force pay for everyone would have to go up to maintain differences between rank. That would begin at the very bottom, where new recruits would make two or three times what they get now. Living conditions (housing and food) have been improving rapidly during the last decade but career troops need to make enough to support a family.


----------



## CBH99

Those numbers are on a scale most western countries, minus the US, could even fathom.

And if you think the USMC was tired of being "America's 2nd Army..." -- PLAAF seems to have about as many infantry units as most Western countries.


I guess the good thing is that we'll never have to face off against China in an all-out ground war.  Geography forbids it.  India & Russia, maybe not so likely...


Like us, their geography dictates that they be an expeditionary force for the most part.


----------



## MarkOttawa

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Pretty tough stuff from our foreign minister:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



And from PM Trudeau:



> Trudeau vows to stand up to China’s coercive diplomacy
> 
> Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada intends to work with allies to challenge China’s “coercive diplomacy,” and warned that its use of arbitrary arrests, repression in Hong Kong and detention camps for Muslim minorities is “_not a particularly productive path_[emphasis added, see end of post].”
> 
> In marking the 50th anniversary of relations between Canada and the People’s Republic of China, Mr. Trudeau spoke more strongly than ever before about Beijing’s increasingly repressive and aggressive actions at home and abroad.
> 
> “It has put a significant strain on China-Canada relations,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters when asked on Tuesday how relations had changed since his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, opened diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1970.
> 
> The Prime Minster, who has been hesitant to publicly criticize China, called attention to the arrests of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the crackdown on civil rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong, as well as the treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, where more than one million are being held in so-called education camps.
> 
> “We will remain absolutely committed to working with our allies to ensure that China’s approach of coercive diplomacy, its arbitrary detention of two Canadian citizens alongside other citizens of other countries around the world is not viewed as a successful tactic by them,” he said...
> Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada intends to work with allies to challenge China’s “coercive diplomacy,” and warned that its use of arbitrary arrests, repression in Hong Kong and detention camps for Muslim minorities is “not a particularly productive path.”
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeau-vows-to-stand-up-to-chinas-coercive-diplomacy/



As for "productive" our woke-ish Liberals still don't seem able to comprehend the mindsets of very hard men. Stalin and his CPSU saw the gulags (http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/) as in fact quite "productive" for the USSR from their point of view; no doubt Xi's CCP sees the camps for Uyghurs as equally productive for the PRC.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> And from PM Trudeau:
> 
> As for "productive" our woke-ish Liberals still don't seem able to comprehend the mindsets of very hard men. Stalin and his CPSU saw the gulags (http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/) as in fact quite "productive" for the USSR from their point of view; no doubt Xi's CCP sees the camps for Uyghurs as equally productive for the PRC.
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa




If the rest of the world looks elsewhere for trading relationships, and builds up other countries to be the 'cheap crap manufacturer for Earth' - vastly deteriorating the world's trade with China - I have a feeling the CCP will find a way to replace Xi with someone more progressive.

Call me hopeful, or silly - probably both - but I doubt Xi will still be head of the CCP 3 years from now.   :2c:


----------



## MarkOttawa

CBH99 said:
			
		

> If the rest of the world looks elsewhere for trading relationships, and builds up other countries to be the 'cheap crap manufacturer for Earth' - vastly deteriorating the world's trade with China - I have a feeling the CCP will find a way to replace Xi with someone more progressive.
> 
> Call me hopeful, or silly - probably both - but I doubt Xi will still be head of the CCP 3 years from now.   :2c:



Meanwhile Xi doing his best to Mao-ize his hold on power:



> Xi Jinping to tighten grip on power with new rules for top policymaking bodies
> 
> *Draft gives details of Xi’s scope as general secretary of the ruling Communist Party and how the top organs should operate
> *Observer says it’s part of a long-term project to make regulations on almost every issue, with personal power ‘always embedded’
> 
> China’s ruling Communist Party is expected to pass a binding regulation on how its policymaking bodies operate at a plenum later this month, a move that will further strengthen President Xi Jinping’s grip on power.
> 
> More than 300 Central Committee members will discuss and approve the regulation at the party’s annual political meeting to be held in Beijing in the last week of October. The committee is in charge of party affairs and passes major party decisions when it meets at least once a year.
> 
> A draft of the regulation published by state media on Monday [Oct. 12] gives more details of the scope Xi has as general secretary of the party than previous documents. It also covers how the party’s top decision-making bodies operate – the 25-member Politburo and the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee.
> 
> Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of Study Times, a newspaper affiliated with the party’s top academy, said the regulation gives Xi more control.
> 
> “This regulation has more details of how the Central Committee should work than the Communist Party’s constitution,” Deng said. “It further elevates the status [of Xi] above other Politburo Standing Committee members as the general secretary is more like a convenor under the constitution.”
> 
> ...the general secretary has exclusive power to set the meeting agendas of the Politburo and its Standing Committee. Under the constitution, the general secretary only has the power to convene Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee meetings...
> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3105380/chinese-president-xi-jinping-set-tighten-grip-power-new-rules




Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

CBH99 said:
			
		

> Those numbers are on a scale most western countries, minus the US, could even fathom.
> 
> And if you think the USMC was tired of being "America's 2nd Army..." -- PLAAF seems to have about as many infantry units as most Western countries.
> 
> I guess the good thing is that we'll never have to face off against China in an all-out ground war.  Geography forbids it.  India & Russia, maybe not so likely...
> 
> Like us, their geography dictates that they be an expeditionary force for the most part.



Perhaps luckily for us, China is a "Continental" power, so a great deal of its military force needs to secure the borders against bordering nations, and a lot of Chinese military and paramilitary power is devoted to internal security (i.e. deployed against its own population). Geographically, there are very few land routes the Chinese can use to deploy the PLA (crossing vast deserts, the Himalayan mountains or the frozen Siberian tundra would be a huge challenge for anyone), while free access to the Pacific and Indian oceans is constrained by the First and Second Island chains and the Straight of Malacca - China will have huge difficulties in force projection or being an "expeditionary force" against determined opposition.

The bigger threat to us is Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, using economics, cyber, propaganda campaigns, establishing nodes of influence in our Universities, business and among politicians, lawfare and other unconventional tools well below the threshold of military response to confuse and weaken us - death by a thousand paper cuts rather than an epic battle in the Western Pacific Ocean.

We have our own tools like tariffs and "decoupling", and certainly need to step up our own diplomatic, information and economic game alongside ensuring our military forces are capable of meeting potential threats from the PLAN and PLAAF (and possibly actions by PLA SoF units) to really meet the threat. While not the same as the Soviet Union, I suspect the CCP and its organs and structures are also brittle and can be made to fail, much like the USSR collapsed. But it will be a long and sustained process, and I don't think enough people are even aware of what is going on, even at the highest levels, to effectively marshal our resources in the West.


----------



## CBH99

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Perhaps luckily for us, China is a "Continental" power, so a great deal of its military force needs to secure the borders against bordering nations, and a lot of Chinese military and paramilitary power is devoted to internal security (i.e. deployed against its own population). Geographically, there are very few land routes the Chinese can use to deploy the PLA (crossing vast deserts, the Himalayan mountains or the frozen Siberian tundra would be a huge challenge for anyone), while free access to the Pacific and Indian oceans is constrained by the First and Second Island chains and the Straight of Malacca - China will have huge difficulties in force projection or being an "expeditionary force" against determined opposition.
> 
> The bigger threat to us is Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, using economics, cyber, propaganda campaigns, establishing nodes of influence in our Universities, business and among politicians, lawfare and other unconventional tools well below the threshold of military response to confuse and weaken us - death by a thousand paper cuts rather than an epic battle in the Western Pacific Ocean.
> 
> We have our own tools like tariffs and "decoupling", and certainly need to step up our own diplomatic, information and economic game alongside ensuring our military forces are capable of meeting potential threats from the PLAN and PLAAF (and possibly actions by PLA SoF units) to really meet the threat. While not the same as the Soviet Union, I suspect the CCP and its organs and structures are also brittle and can be made to fail, much like the USSR collapsed. But it will be a long and sustained process, and I don't think enough people are even aware of what is going on, even at the highest levels, to effectively marshal our resources in the West.




Couldn't agree with you more on every single thing you said


----------



## blacktriangle

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Perhaps luckily for us, China is a "Continental" power, so a great deal of its military force needs to secure the borders against bordering nations, and a lot of Chinese military and paramilitary power is devoted to internal security (i.e. deployed against its own population). Geographically, there are very few land routes the Chinese can use to deploy the PLA (crossing vast deserts, the Himalayan mountains or the frozen Siberian tundra would be a huge challenge for anyone), while free access to the Pacific and Indian oceans is constrained by the First and Second Island chains and the Straight of Malacca - China will have huge difficulties in force projection or being an "expeditionary force" against determined opposition.
> 
> The bigger threat to us is Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, using economics, cyber, propaganda campaigns, establishing nodes of influence in our Universities, business and among politicians, lawfare and other unconventional tools well below the threshold of military response to confuse and weaken us - death by a thousand paper cuts rather than an epic battle in the Western Pacific Ocean.
> 
> We have our own tools like tariffs and "decoupling", and certainly need to step up our own diplomatic, information and economic game alongside ensuring our military forces are capable of meeting potential threats from the PLAN and PLAAF (and possibly actions by PLA SoF units) to really meet the threat. While not the same as the Soviet Union, I suspect the CCP and its organs and structures are also brittle and can be made to fail, much like the USSR collapsed. But it will be a long and sustained process, and I don't think enough people are even aware of what is going on, even at the highest levels, to effectively marshal our resources in the West.



Well said.


----------



## Weinie

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Perhaps luckily for us, China is a "Continental" power, so a great deal of its military force needs to secure the borders against bordering nations, and a lot of Chinese military and paramilitary power is devoted to internal security (i.e. deployed against its own population). Geographically, there are very few land routes the Chinese can use to deploy the PLA (crossing vast deserts, the Himalayan mountains or the frozen Siberian tundra would be a huge challenge for anyone), while free access to the Pacific and Indian oceans is constrained by the First and Second Island chains and the Straight of Malacca - China will have huge difficulties in force projection or being an "expeditionary force" against determined opposition.
> 
> The bigger threat to us is Chinese "Unrestricted Warfare" doctrine, using _*economics*_, cyber, propaganda campaigns, establishing nodes of influence in our Universities, business and among politicians, lawfare and other unconventional tools well below the threshold of military response to confuse and weaken us - death by a thousand paper cuts rather than an epic battle in the Western Pacific Ocean.
> 
> We have our own tools like tariffs and "decoupling", and certainly need to step up our own _*diplomatic, information and economic game*_ alongside ensuring our military forces are capable of meeting potential threats from the PLAN and PLAAF (and possibly actions by PLA SoF units) to really meet the threat. While not the same as the Soviet Union, I suspect the CCP and its organs and structures are also brittle and can be made to fail, much like the USSR collapsed. But it will be a long and sustained process, and I don't think enough people are even aware of what is going on, even at the highest levels, to effectively marshal our resources in the West.



The key points in your argument, (and the key takeaways) are economic, first and foremost, and then diplomatic and informational. Should China's economic development falter, (and we hold the key to this), Xi would be ousted fairly quickly. The CCP relies upon and is sustained on a promise of accelerating social and economic development for *China*. Should this be derailed, more pragmatic factions within the party would quickly emerge and oust the extant oligarchy. This would have several knock on effects that would be beneficial.


----------



## a_majoor

Weinie said:
			
		

> The key points in your argument, (and the key takeaways) are economic, first and foremost, and then diplomatic and informational. Should China's economic development falter, (and we hold the key to this), Xi would be ousted fairly quickly. The CCP relies upon and is sustained on a promise of accelerating social and economic development for *China*. Should this be derailed, more pragmatic factions within the party would quickly emerge and oust the extant oligarchy. This would have several knock on effects that would be beneficial.



Absolutely. But the other side of the coin is we need to unfetter _our own_ economic power, productivity and growth as well. Eliminating cancerous deficits and debts which burden entire generations to come, and looking carefully at the regulatory environment (I once read that the average small business owner in Ontario spends 30 hours each month doing paperwork and accounting for various levels of government - almost an entire working week is consumed in these tasks. If _we_ are only working 3 weeks out of every month in productive labour, while our potential adversaries are devoting the entire month (or a much larger fraction), then we are already well behind the 8 ball without any adversarial effort at all....) are likely the two highest impact actions any Western government could take.


----------



## CBH99

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Absolutely. But the other side of the coin is we need to unfetter _our own_ economic power, productivity and growth as well. Eliminating cancerous deficits and debts which burden entire generations to come, and looking carefully at the regulatory environment (I once read that the average small business owner in Ontario spends 30 hours each month doing paperwork and accounting for various levels of government - almost an entire working week is consumed in these tasks. If _we_ are only working 3 weeks out of every month in productive labour, while our potential adversaries are devoting the entire month (or a much larger fraction), then we are already well behind the 8 ball without any adversarial effort at all....) are likely the two highest impact actions any Western government could take.




I don't mean to derail this thread at all.  

Thucy just brought something up in his post, and I was actually JUST having this conversation with a work colleague a few hours ago - so I thought I'd share my b**sh*t crazy conspiracy theory here, just because it's related to the post above.



We talk a lot (in general, as a country) - as most other developed countries do - about our current national debt, borrowing, interest, and that we will never pay down our debt with the way things are being done now.  It's mentioned quite frequently by folks of all political and economic beliefs that we are passing our debt onto future generations, and the government will eventually no longer be able to afford the things it currently does as the debt will be unserviceable.

My absolutely ill-informed, nonsense filled, 'conspiracy theory' hunch on this is that... within 15 to 20 years, the entire world will have to seriously reform, and rethink, the way countries borrow & service national debt.  Aka - national debt will either be forgiven entirely, or drastically restructured.


No western or developed country can possibly hope to repay our national debt, even if our borrowing stopped right now.  At no point is any government going to post such record surpluses, year after year - while being able to afford everything it needs to - to be able to pay down any meaningful amount of their national debt.

Heck, the US is currently running a deficit of almost a TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.   


The conversation about national debt, and passing the debt onto future generations - that conversation I believe had more merit a few decades ago.  And maybe it still does.  I just don't see any way that any developed country would ever be able to pay back what they owe.  

And since it is not in the interest of ANY country on earth for another country to go bankrupt because of this situation, and most countries are in the same boat - I just have a feeling that a massive restructure of the system will take place before any country starts to seriously hammer away at their national debts.



*Let me respectfully remind all of you - this is my completely uninformed opinion, and should be taken as such.  *    :Tin-Foil-Hat:


----------



## blacktriangle

Ok, I'll take the bait! Money will stop mattering once the masses have finished transferring what wealth and labour potential they hold up the food chain to the truly powerful, who will use it to consolidate their influence and control of valuable commodities as well as the high-skilled labour needed to sustain their lifestyles. In a generation or less, they won't need the average worker anymore, so this is probably one last push to squeeze Jane & Joe Public for what they can, before they are either offered just enough subsistence to discourage open revolt, or are thrown to the wolves completely. All the while ensuring people cut back on consumption in the meantime, gotta save the resources and environment for the people that really matter as well as their descendants, right? 

Debt, climate change etc. Nah. Population will be the real struggle. And no one really wants to talk about that one. More people than ever before, and less need for them in society. I wonder what would be an easy way to control population that might present itself in the coming years?  

 :Tin-Foil-Hat:

Happy?  ;D


----------



## Brad Sallows

>I wonder what would be an easy way to control population that might present itself in the coming years?

Prosperity.  Prosperous societies have lower birth rates.  Don't know exactly what all the mechanisms are - there are undoubtedly multiple factors in play - but I can easily suppose that most of them hinge on prosperity making all sorts of good things available - abundant inexpensive energy, technologically advanced medical care and pollution mitigation, reliable and easily available birth control, more leisure options, etc, etc.  Most people don't naturally want to have 12 kids and spend their lives scraping by; prosperity gives them options.


----------



## shawn5o

Seems like he's going all the way


*President Xi Jinping tells China's troops to focus on 'preparing to go to war': reports*
_Xi's remarks come at a time when China's relationships around the world — including with Canada and the United States — are increasingly fraught_

Tyler Dawson
National Post
Oct 14, 2020  •  Last Updated 2 hours ago  •  3 minute read

As tension between China and Taiwan intensifies, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his nation’s troops to begin preparing for war, according to a report in Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

“(You should) focus your minds and energy on preparing to go to war, and stay highly vigilant,” Xi is quoted as saying in a report in the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper.

Xi made the remarks during a visit to inspect the marine corps at a military base in the Guangdong province. The purpose of his visit to the region was to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

But his remarks come at a time when China’s relationships around the world — including with Canada and the United States — are increasingly fraught.

Link


----------



## a_majoor

I will reserve remarks about the deficit/debt for a different thread (either revived or a split from this one), as the implications are far greater than "just" current great power competition, even if it materially affects the issue.

On the other hand:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/2020101594758.aspx

On Point: Huawei and the CCP's War for Information Dominance
by Austin Bay
October 15, 2020



> Long-term strategic struggles, like the U.S.-versus-China confrontation, do not submit to bombshell headlines and snapshot predictions. When very large and powerful political, economic and cultural organizations conflict, years judge the slow war process of achieving strategic gain or suffering damaging loss, not talking heads on 24/7 news outlets.
> 
> Some 30 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party and its intelligence agencies bet digital-information delivery dominance would be a decisive advantage in a long-term struggle for global dominance. I emphasize delivery, for dominating the material and physical (equipment and infrastructure) means for delivering digital information gives the dominator an edge in providing, denying or subverting content -- be it news, opinion or entertainment. Control the system, or be able to easily penetrate, manipulate or corrupt it, and you can secretly collect data on users, spy on users and, if you happen to be a CCP totalitarian, engage in intimate, personal blackmail in order to advance other political and economic schemes.
> 
> Denying the CCP global-information delivery dominance and its advantages is the strategic goal driving America's bid to ban equipment made by China's giant Huawei Technologies corporation, with its 5G communication systems a critical target.
> 
> Huawei also operates as an intelligence agency "cutout company," spying for the CCP. In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the company "an arm of the CCP's surveillance state." He also sketched the strategic struggle when he announced new economic and diplomatic measures to protect Americans' security and privacy "and the integrity of our 5G infrastructure from Beijing's malign influence."



The rest of the article is at the link, and it is interesting to see the details of how the CCP uses various forms of leverage to advance Huawei into nationa  systems and infrastructure.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Now this threatening “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy is unacceptable in the true sense of the word; PM Trudeau’s gov’t must make a substantively firm response. Like PNG the ambassador:



> ‘Chinese envoy warns Canada against granting asylum to Hong Kong protesters
> Cong Peiwu dismisses ‘coercive’ diplomacy claim connected with imprisonment of Spavor, Kovrig in China
> 
> The Chinese ambassador to Canada warned the Trudeau government today not to grant asylum to Hong Kong residents fleeing a widely criticized national security law imposed by Beijing.
> 
> “We strongly urge the Canadian side not (to) grant so-called political asylum to those violent criminals in Hong Kong,” Ambassador Cong Peiwu said in a video press conference from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.
> 
> He said that would amount to “interference in China’s domestic affairs, and certainly it will embolden those violent criminals.”
> 
> Hong Kong was supposed to operate under a “one country, two systems” deal after Britain handed its former colony over to Beijing in 1997 under an international agreement. But human rights and pro-democracy advocates say Beijing’s new national security law is undermining freedom in what is known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
> 
> “So if the Canadian side really cares about the stability and the prosperity in Hong Kong, and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport holders in Hong Kong, and the large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong SAR, you should support those efforts to fight violent crimes,” Cong said.
> 
> Cong also flatly rejected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertion that China is engaging in coercive diplomacy by imprisoning two Canadian men in retaliation for the arrest of a Chinese high-tech executive on an American extradition warrant. Meng Wanzhou is living under house arrest in Vancouver while her case wends through a British Columbia court…’
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-ambassador-hong-kong-spavor-kovrig-meng-huawei-1.5763677



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## dimsum

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> Now this threatening “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy is unacceptable in the true sense of the word; PM Trudeau’s gov’t must make a substantively firm response. Like PNG the ambassador:
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa



Wait, what did Papua New Guinea do?!   :rofl:


----------



## FJAG

> China unveils its terrifying weaponised 'drone troop' that can be launched from the back of a truck and strikes ground targets 'precisely'
> -A state-run firm recent tested a group of attacking unmanned aerial vehicles
> -Dubbed the 'drone swarm', they can be deployed from a truck or a helicopter
> -The flying weapons can change formation to attack the enemy on the ground
> -The details were released by its developer with propaganda footage of a drill
> 
> China has flaunted its latest military drones: a team of small attacking aircraft that can work together in midair to pinpoint and destroy targets on the ground.
> 
> The troop, dubbed the 'drone swarm' by its developer, can be launched from the back of a truck or a helicopter and strikes the enemy precisely, a propaganda video shows.
> 
> This is the first time China has put into use a group of unmanned aerial vehicles that operate as a unit to complete military tasks, according to their state-controlled manufacturer.
> 
> ...














See article here

 :worms:


----------



## MilEME09

https://calgaryherald.com/news/world/chinese-state-broadcaster-repeatedly-pans-away-as-xi-jinping-coughs-violently-during-key-speech/wcm/2231e6b1-04aa-4142-a9fe-1bc765aee320?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR39rGZKMEBmvGeBqruNkjTAf7aNl64-HEieLVxL05lz1gsihkZDS0AbdcY#Echobox=1602775977

Well now, is Xi sick? could he have covid 19? if so how much of China's leadership is actually sick as well?


----------



## blacktriangle

FJAG said:
			
		

> See article here
> 
> :worms:



So when are you starting your company? I'm sure you could find some willing to volunteer their time to help you out...  :nod:


----------



## OldSolduer

MilEME09 said:
			
		

> https://calgaryherald.com/news/world/chinese-state-broadcaster-repeatedly-pans-away-as-xi-jinping-coughs-violently-during-key-speech/wcm/2231e6b1-04aa-4142-a9fe-1bc765aee320?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR39rGZKMEBmvGeBqruNkjTAf7aNl64-HEieLVxL05lz1gsihkZDS0AbdcY#Echobox=1602775977
> 
> Well now, is Xi sick? could he have covid 19? if so how much of China's leadership is actually sick as well?


A good question. 

I wonder how many of the leadership were subjected to the 9mm cure....pure speculation on my part.


----------



## Jarnhamar

*China accuses Canada of condoning media criticism of Hong Kong comments*

_“If the Canadian side really cares about the stability and the prosperity in Hong Kong, and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport-holders in Hong Kong, and the large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong SAR, you should support those efforts to fight violent crimes,” Cong said in a video news conference from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.

Cong was asked whether his remarks amounted to a threat, to which he replied, “That is your interpretation.”_
https://globalnews.ca/news/7405084/china-canada-comments-ambassador/


----------



## Kat Stevens

Jarnhamar said:
			
		

> *China accuses Canada of condoning media criticism of Hong Kong comments*
> 
> _“If the Canadian side really cares about the stability and the prosperity in Hong Kong, and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport-holders in Hong Kong, and the large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong SAR, you should support those efforts to fight violent crimes,” Cong said in a video news conference from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.
> 
> Cong was asked whether his remarks amounted to a threat, to which he replied, “That is your interpretation.”_
> https://globalnews.ca/news/7405084/china-canada-comments-ambassador/



About as subtle as a smack in the head with a pillowcase full of doorknobs.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Dear PM Trudeau: C'mon man!



> Sweden bans Huawei, ZTE from upcoming 5G networks
> 
> Sweden on Tuesday [Oct. 20] banned on security grounds the use of telecom equipment from China’s Huawei and ZTE in its 5G network ahead of a spectrum auction scheduled for next month, joining other European nations that have restricted the role of Chinese suppliers.
> 
> Telecoms regulator PTS said here the decision followed advice from the country’s armed forces and security service, which described China as “one of the biggest threats against Sweden” [emphasis added, imagine a Canadian federal agency saying anything so frank].
> 
> European governments have been tightening controls on Chinese companies building 5G networks, following diplomatic pressure from Washington, which alleges Huawei equipment could be used by Beijing for spying. Huawei has repeatedly denied being a national security risk.
> 
> The United Kingdom in July ordered Huawei equipment to be purged completely from Britain’s 5G network by 2027, becoming one of the first European countries to do so.
> 
> China said that no “concrete evidence” that equipment from its companies pose threats to national security in Sweden had been provided.
> 
> “We urge the Government of Sweden to comply with market principles of open development and fair competition, revisit its decisions,” the Chinese embassy in Sweden said in a statement on its website.
> 
> Huawei and ZTE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
> 
> “The ban leaves network operators with less options and risks slowing the rollout of 5G in markets where competition is reduced,” said Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight.
> 
> In a potential sign it might retaliate, its telecoms regulator also issued a notice on Tuesday calling for stricter supervision of foreign telecoms companies in the country.
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-huawei/sweden-bans-huawei-zte-from-upcoming-5g-networks-idUSKBN2750VZ



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## CBH99

*“We urge the Government of Sweden to comply with market principles of open development and fair competition, revisit its decisions,” the Chinese embassy in Sweden said in a statement on its website.*


How about...

_"We urge the Government of China to comply with international law and not arbitrarily detain foreign citizens as political hostages,"_


Can't be a dick all the time, then cry when nobody wants to play


----------



## Colin Parkinson

“We urge the Government of Sweden China to comply with market principles of open development and fair competition, revisit its decisions,” 

Fixed it for ya


----------



## tomahawk6

Chinese bomber with large hypersonic missile.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a34416759/chinese-bomber-carrying-hypersonic-missile-video/


----------



## a_majoor

Taking "Unrestricted Warfare" to new levels:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/20/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors/

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors
By Sohrab AhmariOctober 20, 2020 | 8:04pm | Updated



> China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?
> 
> There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”
> 
> The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
> 
> snip
> 
> When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”
> 
> Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.
> 
> To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
> 
> Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”
> 
> It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”



And if that wasn't bad enough:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16662/china-fentanyl-source

China Is Killing Americans with Fentanyl - Deliberately
by Gordon G. Chang
October 21, 2020 at 5:00 am



> For one thing, the Communist Party, through its cells, controls every business of any consequence.... Beijing tightly controls the banking system and knows of money transfers instantaneously.... Furthermore, fentanyl cannot leave the country undetected, as virtually all shipped items are examined before departing Chinese soil.
> 
> Chinese gangs are large and far-flung. In China's near-totalitarian state, it is not possible for them to operate without the Communist Party's knowledge. And if the Party somehow does not know of a particular gang, it is because it has decided not to.
> 
> China's postal service has to know that it has become, among other things, the world's busiest drug mule.
> 
> The regime has adopted the doctrine of "Unrestricted Warfare," explained in a 1999 book of the same name by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The thesis of the authors, both Chinese Air Force colonels, is that China should not be bound by any rules or agreements in its attempt to take down the United States.... The regime, consequently, is using criminality as an instrument of state policy.... China's officials will stop at nothing to increase the power of their regime.



Actions which individually are below the threshold of military response, but collectively weaken and confuse the adversary, providing the death of a thousand paper cuts.


----------



## YZT580

no wonder that Justin admires the Chinese way of doing things.  Think of all the explanations and apologies that he could have left unsaid under their system


----------



## blacktriangle

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Actions which individually are below the threshold of military response, but collectively weaken and confuse the adversary, providing the death of a thousand paper cuts.



100%.


----------



## a_majoor

A fascinating read which really puts how China attempts to gain influence through politicians in context:

https://www.baldingsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/KVBJHB.pdf


----------



## MarkOttawa

I really wonder if this will work vs the PRC:



> Marines Hop Islands, Set Up Long-Range Fires as Force Preps for Clash with China
> 
> Marines in Japan got a look at what the Corps’ future missions could look like during a recent island-hopping naval exercise in the East China Sea.
> 
> After a small team of reconnaissance Marines landed on an island during the first-of-its-kind Exercise Noble Fury, a larger force swooped in on MV-22 Ospreys and AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters. The grunts “quickly seized control of the island, establishing defensive positions,” according to a news release on the exercise.
> 
> The Marines then coordinated with Seventh Fleet sailors, who had identified a target they couldn’t engage. After passing info along to the Marines ashore, an Air Force MC-130J Super Hercules landed on an expeditionary airfield in the middle of the night with a high-mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS.
> 
> “The HIMARS team fired a notional shot, destroying the target, and quickly loaded back into the MC-130J, taking off minutes after landing on the island,” the release states. The Marines then loaded into CH-53E Super Stallions, it adds, and “were on the move again to prepare for follow-on missions.”..
> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/10/22/marines-hop-islands-set-long-range-fires-force-preps-clash-china.html



As for the US Army:



> U.S. Army Flexes New Land-based, Anti-Ship Capabilities
> 
> Finding ever new and efficient ways to sink enemy ships is usually assigned to the U.S. Navy and, to a lesser extent, the Air Force, but not anymore.
> 
> Though still focused on its primary role of maneuvering against land forces and shooting down air and missile threats, the Army is quietly developing an arsenal of long-range maritime strike options.
> 
> As the Army carves out an offensive role in the Pentagon’s preparations for a mainly naval and air war with China, service officials now seek to develop a capacity for targeting and coordinating strikes on maritime targets with helicopter gunships in the near term and with long-range ballistic missiles by 2025…
> 
> Targeting ships from land-based artillery systems is not unique to the Army. The U.S. Marine Corps plans to introduce the Raytheon-Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile, firing the ground-based anti-ship cruise missile from a remotely operated Joint Light Tactical Vehicle...
> https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/missile-defense-weapons/us-army-flexes-new-land-based-anti-ship-capabilities



Duplication of efforts?

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

Not a duplication of efforts, but readying different tools to do the job. The PLAN will have a much different task defending against mobile missile batteries suddenly appearing on an island than defending against ramjet powered artillery shells being fired from US allied nations surrounding the South China Sea (or for that matter, the Americans using the long range cannon off the back deck of a transport ship).

Add to the mix lurking US attack submarines, USAF "arsenal aircraft" unloading large numbers of munitions at once, US Navy plans to fit hypersonic missiles to their destroyers or F-35s using stealth to move in close and identify (and sometimes attack) targets and the PLAN and PLAAF potentially have their hands full.

This isn't going to be a one sided game by any means, the Chinese have tools like ballistic missiles and SSK's which the US will find difficult to deal with as well. But in the back of my mind I think of the Battle of Jutland, where the battleship fleets of the Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy clashed - it ended as a technical stalemate, but other events like the economic blockade against Germany and the idea of a Communist Revolution infecting large parts of the German body politic ended up having a far greater impact on the war.


----------



## blacktriangle

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Not a duplication of efforts, but readying different tools to do the job. The PLAN will have a much different task defending against mobile missile batteries suddenly appearing on an island than defending against ramjet powered artillery shells being fired from US allied nations surrounding the South China Sea (or for that matter, the Americans using the long range cannon off the back deck of a transport ship).



Yup. No reason the US Army can't focus on bolstering partner nations by deploying and sustaining some very long range systems (both kinetic and otherwise) and allowing the USMC to focus on mobility and fighting within the contested areas themselves. It makes sense, at least to me, for each service to provide complimentary capabilities to achieve this overall goal. 

I just see all of this as a way to counter what China has already been doing for years, with the ultimate goal being containment, not open engagement.


----------



## MarkOttawa

The rot seems broad and deep--see this from a major story by the excellent investigative reporter Sam Cooper of Global News, note PM Trudeau angle at end of quote (further links and several images--rogues' galleries?--at original)::



> Suspects in alleged Markham illegal casino mansion linked to B.C. casino suspects
> 
> B.C. real estate developer Yongtao Chen stepped onto the podium in a Vancouver hotel ballroom and enthusiastically waved a red flag to a loud round of applause.
> 
> He had just accepted a new role as chairman of the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations (CACA) and was displaying their banner at an August 2018 political gala in Vancouver.
> 
> The alliance is a pro-Beijing umbrella group that says it represents about 100 Chinese community associations across Canada and works with Chinese state officials to build mutually beneficial ties between the two nations.
> 
> But Canadian intelligence sources suspect the organization is part of a network directed from Beijing to undertake both legal and illegal tasks abroad.
> 
> Some 400 people were in the crowd at the gala, decked out in tailored suits and evening gowns. The guests included China’s top consular officials in B.C. and Canadian politicians from all levels of government.
> 
> Chen pledged to build ties between community groups in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal and “unite entrepreneurs” under the alliance’s banner.
> 
> One of the entrepreneurs in the room was Yongtao Chen’s business partner, a Toronto real estate tycoon named Wei Wei.
> 
> But two years later, Wei is facing multiple criminal charges in relation to allegations that he was running illegal gambling operations out of his massive marble-floored 53-room mansion in Markham, Ont.
> 
> And according to law enforcement sources, the business and political ties of some CACA leaders like Wei and Yongtao Chen are of increasing concern for Canada’s national security as RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service investigators probe networks they believe may involve the hidden hand of the Chinese state and organized crime…
> 
> The connections of CACA leaders with alleged illegal casino operators including Jin and Wei appear to be in keeping with the practices utilized by Beijing’s so-called United Front, intelligence sources said. And the fact that alleged criminals and leaders from CACA frequently attend meetings endorsed by China’s official United Front Work Department supports this allegation, the sources say.
> 
> …experts such as David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, say the Party uses organized crime in United Front networks to infiltrate Western governments.
> 
> “There is a very tight, incestuous relationship between organized crime in China and within diaspora communities, and the United Front,” Mulroney said in an interview. “Co-opting criminal networks is one of the Party’s preferred tools for the infiltration of target organizations and communities for foreign interference operations.”
> 
> And a number of Canadian intelligence sources interviewed by Global News say it is suspected Beijing mobilizes leaders in business and politics in the United Front, while clandestinely using organized crime agents for illegal tasks including human smuggling and money laundering…
> 
> According to current and former Canadian intelligence officers, China has been very effective at using real estate and casino tycoons and their political donations to facilitate meetings between their government representatives and Canadian officials. One of the sources told Global News that Canada has failed to counter this increasing threat of ‘elite capture.’
> 
> In 2016 and 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participated in at least a handful of fundraising events in the Toronto and Vancouver regions that featured wealthy entrepreneurs such as Wei. A media report in the National Post also revealed that Trudeau met twice with Wei, including at a Toronto-area Liberal fundraiser in 2016.
> 
> Also with Wei at these meetings was a Chinese billionaire and member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Bin Zhang, who later made a $1-million donation to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the Globe and Mail previously reported.
> 
> A former CSIS intelligence officer told Global News that he was concerned about donations to the Trudeau foundation from a Chinese tycoon…
> https://globalnews.ca/news/7416772/markham-illegal-casino-mansion-b-c-casino-link/








Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/politics/article-chinese-canadian-groups-laud-belligerents-that-fight-against-canada/?utm_medium=Referrer%3A%20Social%20Network%20%2F%20Media&utm_campaign=Shared%20Web%20Article%20Links&__twitter_impression=true


Well now, China seems to be continuing to rewrite the history books to fit their own internal propaganda narrative. Can not wait to see how this one goes over.


----------



## dimsum

MilEME09 said:
			
		

> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/politics/article-chinese-canadian-groups-laud-belligerents-that-fight-against-canada/?utm_medium=Referrer%3A%20Social%20Network%20%2F%20Media&utm_campaign=Shared%20Web%20Article%20Links&__twitter_impression=true
> 
> 
> Well now, China seems to be continuing to rewrite the history books to fit their own internal propaganda narrative. Can not wait to see how this one goes over.



I particularly like the backpedalling at a great rate of knots at the end - "oh, did I share *that*?  Totally not what I wanted it to mean!"   :


----------



## a_majoor

Long article from the Gatestone Institute outlining the existential threat China is presenting to the West and indeed much of the world. "We" will need a steady and steadfast political leadership, and the ability and will to employ all the tools of DIME (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic) in order to meet the threat.

There is a great deal to digest in this, so I will provide the link for you to read:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16705/china-existential-threat


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting, at the time this was posted the election was still in progress:

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1323837231233142784

Chinese yuan tanking


----------



## a_majoor

An article on how diplomacy is changing the balance of forces in the Indian Ocean away from China, with the "Quad" (US, Japan, India, Australia) holding joint exercises. The fact this goes unremarked in the US press is also an interesting data point:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/20201103202646.aspx

On Point: India's Naval Exercise Indicates Trump Administration's China Policy Improved Indo-Pacific Security
by Austin Bay
November 3, 2020



> Perhaps in five years, an honest historian will publish an honest history assessing the positive diplomatic effects of President Donald Trump's administration's decision to challenge the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship's pervasive spying, economic trickery and utter disregard of international law.
> 
> The Trump administration has employed tough diplomatic and legal initiatives, and implemented economic and military policies that reduced the CCP's freedom of action. It rejected China's expansionist territorial claims.
> 
> I think the concrete U.S. response has had a powerful moral effect in Indo-Pacific nations that felt vulnerable and victimized by Beijing's one-on-one (bilateral) economic and military bullying. Big China versus a Small Neighbor was the CCP's preferred fight.
> 
> The Indian Navy's Malabar 2020 exercise, which began this week in the Indian Ocean, is a telling example of a major shift in India's public attitude toward China.
> 
> Sailors refer to India's "Malabar" fleet maneuvers as high-end maritime exercises. The first Malabar was held in 1992, when India invited the U.S. to participate in bilateral naval training.
> 
> India's diplomatic preparations and information campaign indicate Malabar 2020 is designed to send a message.
> 
> In October, the Indian Department of Defence made certain that everyone knew that, for the first time in 13 years, Australian warships would participate in a Malabar exercise -- along with India, Japan and the U.S. That announcement called attention to the Quad, shorthand for the Quadrilateral Security Dialog, which consists of India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.



China's actions have certainly invited pushback, but until 2016, the Americans really didn't provide a great deal of leadership, allowing China to continue pushing the other nations in the region. If American foreign policy remains steady, China can be constrained in a 21rst century version of "containment strategy". If not, then who knows where this might go?


----------



## a_majoor

China claims it has now successfully tested the DF-21 against a moving ship. If true, this could mean a major change to the balance of power in the Western Pacific

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/chinas-military-expansion-will-test-the-biden-administration/2020/12/03/9f05e92a-35a7-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html



> China’s military expansion will test the Biden administration
> Opinion by
> Josh Rogin
> Columnist
> Dec. 3, 2020 at 5:50 p.m. EST
> 
> The tectonic plates of the military balance in Asia are shifting underneath our feet. It’s happening slowly and inexorably, but over time the magnitude of the change is becoming vividly apparent. As the United States prepares to change its leadership, China’s military advancement and expansion are now a problem too glaring to ignore.
> Adm. Philip Davidson, who is nearing the end of his tour as the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has been warning about the changing military balance in Asia throughout his tenure. But his warnings have often fallen on deaf ears in a Washington mired in partisanship and dysfunction. The Trump administration talked a big game about meeting the challenge of China’s military encroachment, but Davidson’s calls for substantially more investment to restore the regional balance that has deterred Beijing for decades have gone largely unanswered.
> 
> China’s military has moved well past a strategy of simply defending its territory and is now modernizing with the objective of being able to operate and even fight far from its shores, Davidson told me in an interview conducted last month for the 2020 Halifax International Security Forum. Under President Xi Jinping, Davidson said, China has built advanced weapons systems, platforms and rocket forces that have altered the strategic environment in ways the United States has not sufficiently responded to.
> 
> “We are seeing great advances in their modernization efforts,” he said. “China will test more missiles, conventional and nuclear associated missiles this year than every other nation added together on the planet. So that gives you an idea of the scale of how these things are changing.”
> Davidson confirmed, for the first time from the U.S. government side, that China’s People’s Liberation Army has successfully tested an anti-ship ballistic missile against a moving ship. This was done as part of the PLA’s massive joint military exercises, which have been ongoing since the summer. These are often called “aircraft carrier killer” missiles, because they could threaten the United States’ most significant naval assets from long distances.



While AA/AD is essentially a reactive posture, it still means that traditional force projection and the right of innocent passage that are the cornerstones of American Grand Strategy are certainly going to be constrained in the Western Pacific without some major changes to strategy, tactics and even technologies. I have my doubts that any putative Biden Administration is going to make the necessary changes - I think we all remember the Obama Administration's "Pivot to Asia" was more theatrical than substantive, and the Democrats as a whole are certainly not going to take the aggressive measures necessary to root out Chinese influence in US politics, business and academia, much less continue aggressive trade actions and bolstering US allies in the region.


----------



## CBH99

He may not have much of a choice if China pushes too hard against Japan, Australia, Phillipines, Indonesia, etc etc.

It'll be interesting to see just how much the dems bend & tippy toe before it becomes too much of a problem to ignore.   :dunno:


----------



## 211RadOp

Latest on the two Michaels.



> *China says 2 Canadians have been indicted, tried*
> 
> The Associated Press
> Staff
> Contact
> 
> Published Thursday, December 10, 2020 6:10AM EST
> 
> BEIJING -- China's Foreign Ministry said Thursday that two Canadians held for two years in a case linked to a Huawei executive have been indicted and put on trial, but gave no details.
> 
> Former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor have been confined since December 10, 2018, just days after Canada detained Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the founder of the Chinese global communications equipment giant.
> 
> China has said Kovrig and Spavor were indicted June 19 by the Beijing prosecutor's office on "suspicion of spying for state secrets and intelligence.
> 
> Neither China or Canada has released specifics about their cases.
> 
> At a daily briefing Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said the two had been "arrested, indicted and tried," in what appeared to be the first public mention that they had been brought to court.
> 
> She reiterated that their cases and Meng's were "different in nature," with Meng's being a "purely political incident." Despite that, China has consistently linked the fate of the two Canadians to its demands that Meng be released immediately.
> 
> Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne issued a statement Wednesday marking their two years of captivity, saying; "These two Canadians are an absolute priority for our government, and we will continue to work tirelessly to secure their immediate release and to stand up for them as a government and as Canadians."
> 
> "I am struck by the integrity and strength of character the two have shown as they endure immense hardship that would shake anyone's faith in humanity," Champagne said.
> 
> The U.S. is seeking Meng's extradition from Canada on fraud charges. Her arrest severely damaged relations between Canada and China, which has also sentenced two other Canadians to death and suspended imports of canola from Canada.
> 
> Meng, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, is living in a luxury Vancouver home while her extradition case continues in a British Columbia court. The U.S. accuses Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to deceive banks and do business with Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.
> 
> It's not publicly known where Kovrig and Spavor are being held or under what conditions, although Canada's ambassador to China testified to a House of Commons committee this week that they were "robust."
> 
> Canadian diplomats had been denied all access to the two men from January to October because of coronavirus precautions cited by the Chinese side. On-site visits were banned and not even virtual visits were permitted.
> 
> Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has described China's approach as coercive diplomacy, spoke last month with U.S. President-elect Joe Biden about the case of the two men and said he expects Biden to be a good partner in persuading Beijing to release them.
> 
> Canada's Foreign Ministry did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment on Hua's remarks.



https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/china-says-2-canadians-have-been-indicted-tried-1.5225036


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Hmm
One has to ask why they would invest money in this, unless they intend to push the Arctic routes?

https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/china-launch-satellite-monitor-arctic-shipping-routes?fbclid=IwAR22m94x5MnwJsOf1vj2AJXG-Snu7z4Sg_RvTErLaU5hDh6V8dfmAS2U1n0


----------



## lenaitch

Colin P said:
			
		

> Hmm
> One has to ask why they would invest money in this, unless they intend to push the Arctic routes?
> 
> https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/china-launch-satellite-monitor-arctic-shipping-routes?fbclid=IwAR22m94x5MnwJsOf1vj2AJXG-Snu7z4Sg_RvTErLaU5hDh6V8dfmAS2U1n0



They call themselves a 'near arctic' nation, whatever that means.  All the better to manage their 'belt and road' trade routes tentacles.  Perhaps they just want to ensure safe air and ship passage to their upcoming property on Canadian soil.

https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2020/11/30/decision-on-chinese-purchase-of-arctic-mine-delayed-former-general-against-it/


----------



## a_majoor

A story to keep an eye on and follow up as they happen:

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6215946537001



> Major leak 'exposes' members and 'lifts the lid' on the Chinese Communist Party
> 13/12/2020|7min
> A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson.
> 
> Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity.
> 
> “It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said.
> 
> “What's amazing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the communist party, and who are now living and working all over the world, from Australia to the US to the UK,” Ms Markson said.
> 
> “But it's amazing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping”.
> 
> Ms Markson said the leak demonstrates party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even inside government agencies.
> 
> “Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members - who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said.
> 
> “Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”.
> 
> Ms Markson said the leak is a significant security breach likely to embarrass Xi Jinping.
> 
> “It is also going to embarrass some global companies who appear to have no plan in place to protect their intellectual property from theft. From economic espionage,” she said.
> 
> Ms Markson said the data was extracted from a Shanghai server by Chinese dissidents, whistleblowers, in April 2016, who have been using it for counter-intelligence purposes.
> 
> “It was then leaked in mid-September to the newly-formed international bi-partisan group, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China - and that group is made up of 150 legislators around the world.
> 
> “It was then provided to an international consortium of four media organisations, The Australian, The Sunday Mail in the UK, De Standaard in Belgium and a Swedish editor, to analyse over the past two months, and that's what we've done".
> 
> Ms Markson said it, “is worth noting that there's no suggestion that these members have committed espionage - but the concern is over whether Australia or these companies knew of the CCP members and if so have any steps been taken to protect their data and people”.



I wonder how many names from Canada will be on that list?


----------



## MarkOttawa

Lots more at _Daily Mail_, I'd bet Canada and Canadian interests are as infiltrated as anyone:



> Leaked files expose mass infiltration of UK firms by Chinese Communist Party including AstraZeneca, Rolls Royce, HSBC and Jaguar Land Rover
> *Loyal members of Chinese Communist Party are working in British consulates, universities and for some of the UK’s leading companies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal
> *Leaked database of 1.95m registered party members reveals how Beijing’s malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defence firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants
> *Some members, who swear oath to ‘guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life…and never betray the Party’, are understood to have jobs in British consulates
> …
> While there is no evidence that anyone on the party membership list has spied for China – and many sign up simply to boost their career prospects – experts say it defies credulity that some are not involved in espionage. Responding to the findings, an alliance of 30 MPs last night said they would be tabling an urgent question about the issue in the Commons.
> 
> Writing in The Mail on Sunday today, former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith says: ‘This investigation proves that members of the Chinese Communist Party are now spread around the globe, with members working for some of the world’s most important multinational corporations, academic institutions and our own diplomatic services.
> 
> ‘The Government must now move to expel and remove any members of the Communist Party from our Consuls throughout China. They can either serve the UK or the Chinese Communist Party. They cannot do both.’..[read on]
> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9046783/Leaked-files-expose-mass-infiltration-UK-firms-Chinese-Communist-Party.html



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

PRC nuking up, though not that much (yet?)--note hypersonics:

Note this nuke angle (and hypersonics):



> Report estimates Chinese nuclear stockpile at 350 warheads
> 
> A paper published by the Chicago, Illinois-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has estimated that China has 350 nuclear warheads, significantly more than that estimated by the U.S. Defense Department.
> 
> The report, written by Hans Kristensen, the director at the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and Matt Korda, a research associate at FAS, arrived at the number by counting both operational warheads and newer weapons “still in development.”
> 
> These weapons include hypersonic missiles, silo-based and road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, and their submarine-launched equivalents, bringing the total number of nuclear warheads to more that the “low 200s” estimated by the Pentagon in its 2020 report on China’s military.
> 
> The think tank’s report also said an estimated 272 of the 350 warheads in the People’s Liberation Army are operational. That estimate includes 204 land-based missile warheads, 48 submarine-launched warheads and 20 aircraft-delivered gravity bombs.
> 
> The latter mission had been dormant for a while, although it has recently been reconstituted with China said to be developing an air-launched ballistic missile with a possible nuclear capability. A Chinese Xi’an H-6 bomber was recently seen carrying what is believed to be a mock-up of a hypersonic boost-glide missile, although its development status is unclear.
> 
> The estimate of 350 nuclear warheads does not include the suspected air-launched ballistic/hypersonic missile, nor does it include the multiple, independent warheads that will be fitted on the DF-5C ICBM, potentially further increasing the size of China’s nuclear stockpile even after accounting for the retirement of older systems.
> 
> Nevertheless, the report noted that the size of the Chinese nuclear stockpile is still significantly below that of the United States and Russia, which have thousands of nuclear weapons in their respective stockpiles. The authors wrote that claims by the Trump administration’s special envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, that China is striving for a form of “nuclear parity” with the U.S. and Russia “appears to have little basis in reality.”..
> https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/12/14/report-estimates-chinese-nuclear-stockpile-at-350-warheads/



Mark 
Ottawa


----------



## FM07

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1209937.shtml

Chinese propaganda news site on Trudeau training the PLA. Comments section is something else.


----------



## daftandbarmy

“Quality may be better than quantity, but quantity has a quality all of its own.” V.I. Lenin 😊 


The battle of Chosin Reservoir

Lessons from the battles between America and China, 70 years on

When America and China went to war

Seventy years ago this month, Mao Zedong’s peasant army inflicted one of the worst military defeats on America in the country’s history. Over two weeks his “volunteer” fighters drove an army of 350,000 American soldiers and marines and their Korean allies the length of North Korea, from the Chinese border to hasty evacuations by land and sea. Though the Chinese suffered terrible casualties in the process and the war would continue for another three years (and technically has not ended), the American-led un force never again threatened to reunify the peninsula.

This humiliation was made worse by the fact that General Douglas MacArthur, the force’s megalomaniacal supremo, had only weeks before assured Harry Truman that the Chinese would not cross the Yalu river. His commanders duly denied that they had. When that became incredible, they claimed the cruelly ill-equipped Chinese—wearing cotton uniforms and canvas shoes for a high-altitude war fought at minus 30°C—were not a serious foe. An American general called them “a bunch of laundrymen”.

It was classic superpower hubris, deserving of the contempt expressed by Xi Jinping at a grand 70th-anniversary event in October. Having emerged victorious from the second world war, with fewer casualties than any other major participant (America’s covid death-toll is almost equal to its second-world-war combat toll), America in 1950 had a dangerous sense of impregnability, a racially infused contempt for Asian capability and a few generals with absurdly inflated status, including MacArthur. It might seem little wonder that America, consumed by the contemporary embarrassment of its president’s effort to steal an election, is barely commemorating its first and only war with China.

That does not denote shame, however. Notwithstanding Americans’ dewy-eyed view of their forces, public knowledge of their victories and defeats is similarly thin. American schools do not teach much military history and democracies do not mobilise people through a militaristic view of the past. In the case of the Korean war, the first “limited” war of the nuclear age, before that concept was well-understood, the forgetting has merely been especially pronounced. Yet the war retains cautionary lessons for both sides.

On one level it encapsulated the superpower’s enduring ability to self-correct. This was apparent even amid the debacle—as illustrated by the battlefield recollections Lexington heard this week from Jack Luckett, a 91-year-old retired marine. He was occupying a ridge above Chosin Reservoir, close to the northernmost point of MacArthur’s advance, on the night of November 27th 1950. Awakened by explosions, he saw a column of Chinese—eight men across—advancing in the glow of the defensive flares they had triggered. “We were vastly outnumbered,” he said. “We opened fire but they kept on coming. They were blowing bugles and firing on us while pouring down both sides of the ridge.”

Mao’s intelligence chiefs had assured him that, for all their superior technology, American soldiers lacked the belly for a fight. The ensuing 17-day battle, which Mr Luckett fought through until frostbite laid him low, gave the lie to that. Surrounded by 120,000 Chinese, the 1st Marine Division broke out and made a heroic fighting retreat through the frozen mountains. The marines—and a small British contingent fighting alongside them—suffered terrible casualties; only 11 of Mr Luckett’s company of 250 survived unscathed. Yet they evacuated their wounded and equipment while inflicting a far heavier toll on the Chinese. Mr Luckett’s marine division was reckoned to have disabled seven Chinese ones.

For a military institution whose small size, relative to the us army, has fuelled a tradition of mythologising and introspection, “Frozen Chosin” ranks alongside “Iwo Jima” in importance. “It’s not an overstatement to say marines credit the marines who fought in Korea with ending the debate about whether there should be a marine corps,” says General Joseph Dunford, a former marine-corps commandant (and recently retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff). His father celebrated his 20th birthday at Chosin reservoir on the day of the Chinese attack.

In the soul-searching that followed the American retreat, notes Max Hastings, a British historian, it is possible to see a familiar debate about the kind of superpower America should be. Deaf to the entreaties of allies, MacArthur refused to accept the limits to American power that his incompetence had helped display. He wanted to nuke the Chinese. Truman resisted and, after MacArthur sneakily appealed to his Republican backers in Congress, sacked the revered general. It may have cost him a second term. It also set a gold standard for civil-military relations that has since prevailed.

Truman’s multilateralism and restraint were also vindicated when his Republican successor, Dwight Eisenhower, maintained his conduct of the war. Better military leadership had by then stabilised the situation. America and China would both settle for their initial aims: respectively, securing South Korea, which would become one of the big successes of the late 20th century, and securing a Korean buffer against America’s presence in Asia. America lost 40,000 lives in the process; China maybe ten times as many.

First know your enemy

That Americans are not more interested in this momentous past ultimately reflects their restless democracy, which is too consumed by contemporary dramas to dwell on history. Current appearances notwithstanding, it is the source of American strength. Yet it is important to underline two lessons from America’s war with China. In a fog of misunderstanding, each side fatally underestimated the other. And each had a flawed idea of the other’s red lines, the tripwires that turn competition into conflict. The situation today might look very different. The two countries’ interdependence and mutual awareness are on another plane. But their potential for underestimation and misunderstanding is still hauntingly present; and perhaps growing with their rivalry.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/12/10/lessons-from-the-battles-between-america-and-china-70-years-on


----------



## MarkOttawa

Anybody ever consider the security side of some things? _Globe and Mail_ summary of full article behind paywall:



> Morning Update: Chinese state-owned fund among backers of company handling Canadian visa applications
> 
> Good morning,
> 
> One of China’s largest state-owned investment funds is among the biggest backers of a company the Canadian government uses to collect and process personal information from visa applicants around the world.
> 
> Here’s the chain of ownership: TT Services runs visa application centres for the Canadian government in 24 countries, offering services that include collecting fingerprints, photos, biographical information and other personal data. TT Services is owned by VFS Global, which began processing visas in China in 2008. Documents filed with Britain’s corporate registry show Chengdong Investment Corp. is a major contributing partner to VFS Global. And Chengdong is a subsidiary of China Investment Corp., a Chinese state-run giant.
> 
> This ownership structure has prompted some of Canada’s former foreign intelligence leaders [CSIS has only a minor foreign intelligence role] to warn that Ottawa should think carefully about trusting sensitive information to a company partly owned by the Chinese state. Chinese national law also requires any organization operating inside the country to co-operate with intelligence services.
> 
> This is the daily Morning Update newsletter. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for Morning Update and more than 20 more Globe newsletters on our newsletter signup page.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-morning-update-chinese-state-owned-fund-among-backers-of-company/



Full story:



> Chinese state-owned fund among backers of company handling Canadian visa applications
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chinese-state-owned-fund-among-backers-of-company-handling-canadian/



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## a_majoor

The United States reacts to joint Russian/Chinese patrols in the Pacific and Arctic. Of course this calls into question our ability to respond, especially in a meaningful way over a prolonged period of time:









						Air Force shows off might in Arctic
					

The U.S. Air Force flexed its muscle in a dramatic show of force this month, amid heightened concern at the Pentagon over the prospect of expanding great power military competition with nations such as Russia and China.




					www.washingtontimes.com
				






> Air Force shows off might in Arctic​By Mike Glenn - The Washington Times - Thursday, December 24, 2020
> The U.S. Air Force flexed its muscle in a dramatic show of force this month, amid heightened concern at the Pentagon over the prospect of expanding great power military competition with nations such as Russia and China.
> 
> In a World War II-style expression force, the Air Force‘s 354th Fighter Wing and the Alaska Air National Guard’s 168th Wing engaged more than 30 aircraft in a massive runway formation on December 18 at Eielson Air Force Base.
> The formation — known in military parlance as an “elephant walk” — was meant to test the rapid readiness of every flying unit at the base about 25 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Air Force officials said.
> 
> “The elephant walk isn’t only to practice our abilities to respond quickly,” Col. David Skalicky, operations group commander for the 354th Fighter Wing, was quoted as saying on an Air Force website. “This is to show our airmen who work behind the scenes what Eielson (Air Force Base) is about. It’s about showing our strength in the Arctic arena.”
> 
> While an Air Force statement on the event made no mention of China or Russia, the exercise occurred just four days before Russian and Chinese military forces made global headlines by flying a joint patrol mission over the Western Pacific.



Remainder of story at link


----------



## MilEME09

Apologise, Afghanistan tells China after busting its espionage cell in Kabul
					

Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security has detained 10 Chinese citizens accused of operating a terror cell in Kabul




					m.hindustantimes.com
				




China caught red handed by Afghanistan, Afghanistan refused to keep it quiet.


----------



## CBH99

I hate to sound overly simplistic, or crass.  But the Chinese government really are some of the ultimate forms of scum in the modern world.

No need to elaborate here, and I wouldn't even know where to begin if I started.  


Tentacles in everything, trying to influence governments, educational institutions, local politicians, national politicians, etc etc.  And for what purpose?  

Let governments decide what is best for their people, without coercion.  Allow educational institutions to be just that, places to learn & grow.  

All this 'shadow coercion' is really starting to piss me off.  Ever think the rest of the world doesn't want to emulate you China, for obvious reasons?


----------



## MilEME09

CBH99 said:


> I hate to sound overly simplistic, or crass.  But the Chinese government really are some of the ultimate forms of scum in the modern world.
> 
> No need to elaborate here, and I wouldn't even know where to begin if I started.
> 
> 
> Tentacles in everything, trying to influence governments, educational institutions, local politicians, national politicians, etc etc.  And for what purpose?
> 
> Let governments decide what is best for their people, without coercion.  Allow educational institutions to be just that, places to learn & grow.
> 
> All this 'shadow coercion' is really starting to piss me off.  Ever think the rest of the world doesn't want to emulate you China, for obvious reasons?


They have been playing the long game, recently it was exposed that party members had become deeply involved in major political and corporate entities around the world include the defense and pharmaceutical industries. It is no wonder they are able to control information as well as they do. We really need to up our counter espionage game as they have agents of the Chinese state everywhere.


----------



## MilEME09

Trump was briefed that China sought to pay non-state actors to attack US forces in Afghanistan | CNN Politics
					

United States President Donald Trump received unconfirmed information earlier this month that China sought to pay non-state actors to attack American forces in Afghanistan, a senior administration official told CNN.




					www.cnn.com
				




First Russia, now China paying for attacks on coalition forces.


----------



## blacktriangle

MilEME09 said:


> They have been playing the long game, recently it was exposed that party members had become deeply involved in major political and corporate entities around the world include the defense and pharmaceutical industries. It is no wonder they are able to control information as well as they do. We really need to up our counter espionage game as they have agents of the Chinese state everywhere.


I'm pretty sure Dick Fadden (former Director CSIS and DM of DND) was saying this years ago. I met him briefly, and he was probably the sharpest senior official I ever encountered. None of this should be a shock to anyone that's been paying attention over the last decade or so. Unfortunately, too many in Ottawa choose to turn a blind eye to reality and continue to ignore what was written in their introduction to international relations textbooks back in university. That, or they are complicit...


----------



## CBH99

Why would Russia or China need to pay 'non-state actors' to engage American forces in Afghanistan, when the Taliban have been doing so for almost 20yrs now out of their own ideology?


----------



## MilEME09

CBH99 said:


> Why would Russia or China need to pay 'non-state actors' to engage American forces in Afghanistan, when the Taliban have been doing so for almost 20yrs now out of their own ideology?


Money can be a big motivation, turned farmers into fighters against us after all.


----------



## shawn5o

Xi Jinping Orders Chinese Army to Prepare for War ‘at Any Second’

BEN WHEDON5 Jan 2021

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on Monday issued orders to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to prepare to “act at any second” and
maintain “full-time combat readiness,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Tuesday.

Xi previously tightened his personal control of the PLA, using his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC)
to appoint loyal officers and clean out suspect personnel under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.

More at https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/01/05/xi-jinping-orders-pla-prepare-war-any-second/


----------



## Weinie

shawn5o said:


> Xi Jinping Orders Chinese Army to Prepare for War ‘at Any Second’
> 
> BEN WHEDON5 Jan 2021
> 
> Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on Monday issued orders to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to prepare to “act at any second” and
> maintain “full-time combat readiness,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Tuesday.
> 
> Xi previously tightened his personal control of the PLA, using his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC)
> to appoint loyal officers and clean out suspect personnel under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.
> 
> More at https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/01/05/xi-jinping-orders-pla-prepare-war-any-second/


Shawn,

Have you really gone this far in your belief of what is on the Internet? Are you engaging in confirmatory bias to the point that you are not being objective ?

I am asking this because the actual events that happened between Chinese and Indian troops is the exact opposite of what the Breitbart story purports, and has been known for some months now.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

It would not be the first time domestically aimed propaganda triggered international concerns

Xi & Co. has been busy https://www.dw.com/en/hong-kong-pol...o-democracy-activists-in-crackdown/a-56139138








						Where is Jack Ma, China's e-commerce pioneer?
					

BEIJING — China’s best-known entrepreneur, e-commerce billionaire Jack Ma, made his fortune by taking big risks.The former English teacher founded Alibaba Group in 1999, when China had few internet users. Online payments service Alipay launched five years later, before regulators said such...




					ca.finance.yahoo.com


----------



## MarkOttawa

PLAAF’s Xian H-20 stealthy strategic bomber:




> *First Official Rendering Of China’s H-20 Stealth Bomber Emerges In Glitzy Recruiting Video
> A new official People’s Liberation Army Air Force recruiting video ends with a large flying-wing type aircraft shrouded in a white sheet.*
> 
> A new, slickly-produced recruitment video for China's People's Liberation Army Air Force, or PLAAF, closes with the first official rendering of any kind of the long-rumored H-20 stealth bomber. What we see shows a distinct resemblance to the U.S. Air Force’s B-2 Spirit and the future B-21 Raider, but we don’t know how much this depiction reflects the details of the actual design.
> 
> The PLAAF recruiting video first appeared on YouTube on January 5, 2021, and looks to be legitimate. A notice underneath says “CCTV [China Central Television] is funded in whole or in part by the Chinese government.”
> 
> Titled “Dream of Youth,” it presents a narrative that follows a single individual as they join China’s air force and become a fighter pilot. At its end, the video takes the viewer into a computer-rendered futuristic-looking hangar containing the stealth bomber, which is first seen under a sheet. This is similar to what we saw in another glitzy video that the state-run Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) released in 2018, which also aped a famous Northrop Grumman Superbowl ad that had teased the aircraft that became known as the B-21. In a reflection on the visor of a helmet, we then see the sheet being pulled off, revealing the front end of the aircraft…
> 
> In the meantime, the PLAAF, as well as the People’s Liberation Army Navy, have been actively demonstrating greater competence in longer-range bomber operations, including in exercises together with Russian bombers and from outposts in the contested South China Sea, using new derivatives of the H-6. This includes the still relatively young H-6N, which is designed to carry air-launched ballistic missiles, including ones that might be tipped with hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, and other outsized payloads, such as large high-speed drones, under its fuselage.
> 
> However, the underlying H-6 design is dated and can only be expanded upon so much, inherently limiting its utility as a long-range strategic platform, especially in the nuclear deterrent role. Existing reporting suggests that the H-20 will be able to carry 10 tons of munitions and have a maximum unrefueled range of around 5,000 miles, giving it substantially greater reach than any H-6 variant, especially if also armed with long-range land-attack cruise missiles.
> 
> The H-20 could also provide a valuable long-range conventional weapons truck of sorts for the PLAAF that has the ability to penetrate deeper into hostile territory to strike critical targets, such as command and control and air defense nodes, as well as airfields and other important infrastructure. This could all help pave the way for follow-on strikes by non-stealthy aircraft, as well.
> 
> This kind of capability would present significant new challenges for China’s opponents, including major potential adversaries, such as the United States and India, across the Asia-Pacific region. Modernized H-6s toting very-long-range standoff weapons and a possible future stealthy medium bomber, the latter of which you can read more about in this past War Zone piece, could also complement the H-20s to provide a very capable and flexible array of extended-range aerial strike options. The H-20 could also springboard a new robust leg of the Chinese nuclear deterrent, putting even the U.S. at risk…’





> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...lth-bomber-emerges-in-glitzy-recruiting-video




Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Cloud Cover

PLA Air Force SINKEX Ominous for USN and RN Carrier Strike Groups (CSG) at ranges of at least 1500 km and probably further,  China successfully test their IRBM and ALCM last year, targeting moving maneuvering vessels (converted freighters) and successfully sunk the vessels In the _South China Sea_. USN Aegis in area, tracked missiles and noted difficulties in tackling the targets. 



			https://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0007062412
		


DF 26 IRBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-26

https://www.navalnews.com/tag/ch-as-x-13/CH-AS-X-13:​DF 21 : https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...hed-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-toting-bomber

Obviously target ships can’t fight back and use countermeasures and tactics, but an attack on  CSG in sufficient numbers will overwhelm the defences including the AAW escort defences.  World War 5 is going to be a doozy as China pursues technology and quantity in its forces.


----------



## Weinie

Cloud Cover said:


> PLA Air Force SINKEX Ominous for USN and RN Carrier Strike Groups (CSG) at ranges of at least 1500 km and probably further,  China successfully test their IRBM and ALCM last year, targeting moving maneuvering vessels (converted freighters) and successfully sunk the vessels In the _South China Sea_. USN Aegis in area, tracked missiles and noted difficulties in tackling the targets.
> 
> 
> 
> https://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0007062412
> 
> 
> 
> DF 26 IRBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-26
> 
> https://www.navalnews.com/tag/ch-as-x-13/CH-AS-X-13:​DF 21 : https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...hed-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-toting-bomber
> 
> Obviously target ships can’t fight back and use countermeasures and tactics, but an attack on  CSG in sufficient numbers will overwhelm the defences including the AAW escort defences.  *World War 5* is going to be a doozy as China pursues technology and quantity in its forces.


I have been accused of missing the importance of global events; when exactly was WWIII and IV?


----------



## Cloud Cover

Weinie: it’s need to know, sorry you have to file an ATI and then appeal the denial.
My mistake it’s 3 or III or the next (really) big one.


----------



## Weinie

Cloud Cover said:


> Weinie: it’s need to know, sorry you have to file an ATI and then appeal the denial.
> My mistake it’s 3 or III or the next (really) big one.


OK, Thanks. ATI and appeal being slowly (read never) completed.

Standing by for whatever version of WW (X)  occurs.


----------



## FJAG

Now this is getting interesting:


> China authorises coast guard to fire on foreign vessels​Legislation also allows demolition of other countries’ structures built on Chinese-claimed reefs.
> 
> 23 Jan 2021
> China has passed a law that for the first time explicitly allows its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels, a move that could make the contested South China Sea and nearby waters more choppy.
> The Coast Guard Law passed on Friday empowers it to “take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons when national sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction are being illegally infringed upon by foreign organisations or individuals at sea”.



https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/23/china-authorises-coast-guard-to-fire-on-foreign-vessels-if

🍻


----------



## YZT580

Would this not constitute a virtual declaration of war?


----------



## daftandbarmy

YZT580 said:


> Would this not constitute a virtual declaration of war?


Well, it's a Navy thing. 

If you talk to a sailor, it seems they're always ready to open fire on something, for some reason, because 'Laws of the Sea' and all that


----------



## FJAG




----------



## Colin Parkinson

Hmmm, while I don't think they shoot at USN ships, they will shoot at any fishing vessel or other vessels including other Coast Guards trying to protect vessels carrying their flags in contested waters https://www.marinelink.com/news/chi...-01-25&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MR-ENews


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Some Chinese propaganda about one of the incidents in Chinese-Indian conflict.


----------



## daftandbarmy

I'm sure that the families of the 'two Michaels' are watching this with interest:


Vote passes recognizing China’s treatment of Uighurs as genocide​ 
Canadian lawmakers voted to support a motion formally recognizing China’s treatment of its ethnic Muslim Uighur population as a genocide on Monday.

The Conservative motion passed overwhelmingly in the House of Commons with 266 votes to zero. The Liberal cabinet abstained from voting.

An amendment to the motion, proposed by Bloc Quebecois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, calling on the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Olympic Games out of China if the genocide continues also passed 229 to 29 votes.

The Liberal cabinet’s abstention came on the heels of an already-strained relationship between Canada and China, intensified by the December 2018 arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the behest of the U.S. government and the arbitrary detentions of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in what has been widely viewed as retaliation.









						Vote passes recognizing China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide - National | Globalnews.ca
					

The Conservative motion passed overwhelmingly in the House of Commons with 266 votes to zero. The Liberal cabinet abstained from voting.




					globalnews.ca


----------



## ModlrMike

Stands in stark contrast to M103 which the Liberals so vigorously championed.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Voting bloc eh!


----------



## brihard

daftandbarmy said:


> I'm sure that the families of the 'two Michaels' are watching this with interest:
> 
> 
> Vote passes recognizing China’s treatment of Uighurs as genocide​
> Canadian lawmakers voted to support a motion formally recognizing China’s treatment of its ethnic Muslim Uighur population as a genocide on Monday.
> 
> The Conservative motion passed overwhelmingly in the House of Commons with 266 votes to zero. The Liberal cabinet abstained from voting.
> 
> An amendment to the motion, proposed by Bloc Quebecois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, calling on the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Olympic Games out of China if the genocide continues also passed 229 to 29 votes.
> 
> The Liberal cabinet’s abstention came on the heels of an already-strained relationship between Canada and China, intensified by the December 2018 arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the behest of the U.S. government and the arbitrary detentions of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in what has been widely viewed as retaliation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Vote passes recognizing China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide - National | Globalnews.ca
> 
> 
> The Conservative motion passed overwhelmingly in the House of Commons with 266 votes to zero. The Liberal cabinet abstained from voting.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> globalnews.ca


There’s no ‘win’ in the situation of the two Michaels. As a country we either accept being at the mercy of hostage diplomacy, or we don’t. What does the larger national interest command?


----------



## Weinie

brihard said:


> There’s no ‘win’ in the situation of the two Michaels. As a country we either accept being at the mercy of hostage diplomacy, or we don’t. What does the larger national interest command?


The larger national interest commands that Canada vociferously, and continually, demands the release of the two Michaels, and economics be damned. Below the radar diplomacy, as has been practiced since WWII, was a viable option during the Cold War, and perhaps up until 2010. With an increasingly belligerent CCP regime, utilizing their DIME-centric approach, Canada needs to disengage, immediately. 

There will be short term pains.  I would hope they will be offset  by a "Canada's Back" re-emergence on the world stage as a dispassionate observer  and mentor, with impeccable credentials, as we once were.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

and get everyone travelling to China to sign off on the risks doing so.


----------



## brihard

Weinie said:


> The larger national interest commands that Canada vociferously, and continually, demands the release of the two Michaels, and economics be damned. Below the radar diplomacy, as has been practiced since WWII, was a viable option during the Cold War, and perhaps up until 2010. With an increasingly belligerent CCP regime, utilizing their DIME-centric approach, Canada needs to disengage, immediately.
> 
> There will be short term pains.  I would hope they will be offset  by a "Canada's Back" re-emergence on the world stage as a dispassionate observer  and mentor, with impeccable credentials, as we once were.


Absolutely. I’m talking in the sense of not giving them what they want, and being realistic about what that will mean.

I fully believe that a multilateral policy of containing China’s aggression is very much in order at this point. At which point we enter a new Cold War where the axis is aligned roughly on which countries China can buy off versus those already aligned with us or which the west buys off better.


----------



## Weinie

The adoption of the motion in the HoC yesterday to accuse China of genocide was a start. 

And let's not forget that former senior Liberals and other influencers have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their links to China are vast. We appear to have our own "Gang of Five" who have influenced Canadian foreign policy. I suspect that the phone lines to PMO were burning in advance of the vote.

https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-liberal-party-and-the-rule-of-law/


----------



## YZT580

Does anyone else find the cabinet's absence from the vote and their token abstention more than a little arrogant?  Correct me please if I am wrong but I believe that the government of Canada is represented by the entire House.   The cabinet is not the government of Canada as was stated in their token abstention.   Thus, I believe that whenever a vote is held, the majority decision is the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives and therefore is the opinion of the government.


----------



## ModlrMike

It might be instructive to look at how China works against Canada, and against Australia. The difference being that Australia has a spine.


----------



## Fishbone Jones

It's easier to be absent than explain your lies. This way he can say he he didn't  vote against the motion. Mind, he didn't vote for it either. He would've been on the spot trying to explain his choice. Either Canadians would have been pissed or if he stood with Canada, his ChiCom masters would be the one pissed. 

It's easier to hide in the closet, start another crisis to take people's minds off Red China, then reappear after the channel is changed. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's Trudeau's modus operandi. His vaccination fiasco is already fading from memories.


----------



## daftandbarmy

I kind of agree with the Economist on this one. Words matter. They matter even more when global conflict, and 'genocide precedent' are at stake:


“Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang​To confront evil, the first step is to describe it accurately


When Ronald Reagan cried “tear down this wall”, everyone knew what he meant. There was a wall. It imprisoned East Germans. It had to come down. One day, it did. In the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, it is crucial that democracies tell the truth in plain language. Dictatorships will always lie and obfuscate to conceal their true nature. Democracies can tell it like it is. Bear this in mind when deciding what to call China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. On his last full day in office, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called it “genocide”. Although Joe Biden did not use that word this week in his first talk with Xi Jinping, China’s president, his administration has repeated it (see article) and lawmakers in Britain are mulling it (see article). But is it accurate?

By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocational training centres”. It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.

Calling it genocide depends on a definition rooted in a un convention which suggests that one need not actually kill anyone to commit it. Measures “intended to prevent births”, or inflicting “serious bodily or mental harm” will suffice, if their aim is “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. How large a part is not specified. In principle it is, alas, possible to imagine the destruction of an entire people by, for example, the systematic sterilisation of all women. But if conventions are worded with unusual broadness, they must also be used with special care. Until now, America’s State Department had applied the “genocide” label only to mass slaughter, and even then it often hesitated, for fear that uttering the term would create an expectation that it would intervene. It did not call Rwanda’s genocide a genocide until it was practically over.

America’s political rhetoric has thus undergone a dramatic shift, which has profound implications for the world’s most important bilateral relationship. By accusing China of genocide, it is sending the signal that its government has committed the most heinous of crimes. And yet at the same time it is proposing to deal with it over global warming, pandemics and trade.

Some campaigners think the rhetorical escalation is nonetheless wise. It will stoke useful outrage, they argue, rallying companies to shun Chinese suppliers and countries to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics. On the contrary, it is more likely to be counter-productive. For a start, it accomplishes nothing to exaggerate the Communist Party’s crimes in Xinjiang. Countless true stories of families torn apart and Uyghurs living in terror appal any humane listener. When ordinary Han Chinese hear them, as a few did on Clubhouse, a new social-media platform, which China has rushed to block, they are horrified (see article). By contrast, if America makes what sound like baseless allegations of mass killing, patriotic Chinese will be more likely to believe their government’s line, that Westerners lie about Xinjiang to tarnish a rising power.

Democracies face an unprecedented and delicate task when they deal with China, which is both a threat to global norms and an essential partner in tackling global crises such as climate change (see article). To refuse to engage with it is to endanger the world economy and the planet.
Mr Biden is right to decry China’s abuses, but he should do so truthfully. The country is committing crimes against humanity. By accusing it of genocide instead, in the absence of mass murder, America is diminishing the unique stigma of the term. Genocide should put a government beyond the pale; yet American officials will keep doing business with the regime they have branded genocidal. Future _genocidaires _will take comfort. 









						“Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang
					

To confront evil, the first step is to describe it accurately




					www.economist.com


----------



## Kat Stevens

daftandbarmy said:


> I kind of agree with the Economist on this one. Words matter. They matter even more when global conflict, and 'genocide precedent' are at stake:
> 
> 
> “Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang​To confront evil, the first step is to describe it accurately
> 
> 
> When Ronald Reagan cried “tear down this wall”, everyone knew what he meant. There was a wall. It imprisoned East Germans. It had to come down. One day, it did. In the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, it is crucial that democracies tell the truth in plain language. Dictatorships will always lie and obfuscate to conceal their true nature. Democracies can tell it like it is. Bear this in mind when deciding what to call China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. On his last full day in office, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called it “genocide”. Although Joe Biden did not use that word this week in his first talk with Xi Jinping, China’s president, his administration has repeated it (see article) and lawmakers in Britain are mulling it (see article). But is it accurate?
> 
> By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocational training centres”. It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.
> 
> Calling it genocide depends on a definition rooted in a un convention which suggests that one need not actually kill anyone to commit it. Measures “intended to prevent births”, or inflicting “serious bodily or mental harm” will suffice, if their aim is “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. How large a part is not specified. In principle it is, alas, possible to imagine the destruction of an entire people by, for example, the systematic sterilisation of all women. But if conventions are worded with unusual broadness, they must also be used with special care. Until now, America’s State Department had applied the “genocide” label only to mass slaughter, and even then it often hesitated, for fear that uttering the term would create an expectation that it would intervene. It did not call Rwanda’s genocide a genocide until it was practically over.
> 
> America’s political rhetoric has thus undergone a dramatic shift, which has profound implications for the world’s most important bilateral relationship. By accusing China of genocide, it is sending the signal that its government has committed the most heinous of crimes. And yet at the same time it is proposing to deal with it over global warming, pandemics and trade.
> 
> Some campaigners think the rhetorical escalation is nonetheless wise. It will stoke useful outrage, they argue, rallying companies to shun Chinese suppliers and countries to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics. On the contrary, it is more likely to be counter-productive. For a start, it accomplishes nothing to exaggerate the Communist Party’s crimes in Xinjiang. Countless true stories of families torn apart and Uyghurs living in terror appal any humane listener. When ordinary Han Chinese hear them, as a few did on Clubhouse, a new social-media platform, which China has rushed to block, they are horrified (see article). By contrast, if America makes what sound like baseless allegations of mass killing, patriotic Chinese will be more likely to believe their government’s line, that Westerners lie about Xinjiang to tarnish a rising power.
> 
> Democracies face an unprecedented and delicate task when they deal with China, which is both a threat to global norms and an essential partner in tackling global crises such as climate change (see article). To refuse to engage with it is to endanger the world economy and the planet.
> Mr Biden is right to decry China’s abuses, but he should do so truthfully. The country is committing crimes against humanity. By accusing it of genocide instead, in the absence of mass murder, America is diminishing the unique stigma of the term. Genocide should put a government beyond the pale; yet American officials will keep doing business with the regime they have branded genocidal. Future _genocidaires _will take comfort.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang
> 
> 
> To confront evil, the first step is to describe it accurately
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.economist.com


And yet everyone rolls on their backs and piddles a little when that word is used by the MCIC (man-child in charge) for the current day treatment of a certain group within Canada.


----------



## Weinie

daftandbarmy said:


> No.
> 
> I'm no fan of the 'National Man Baby',* but the principles of good diplomacy* suggests that they take the middle ground - for now (which must be really p*ssing off that sanctimonious, virtue signalling little pr*ck ).
> 
> 
> "A Liberal government source speaking on background said the cabinet abstained to draw a distinction between the government’s view and Parliament’s and to continue to address the issue diplomatically. Cabinet wants to address it with allies alongside the other issues Canada has with China, including the ongoing detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Commons vote on genocide in China likely to draw rebuke from Beijing: expert
> 
> 
> Other than Liberal cabinet ministers who abstained or failed to show, the motion received unanimous support, with many backbench Liberals voting in favour
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com


Good diplomacy presupposes that both, or all parties are seeking the most beneficial, or least harmful outcome.

China and the CCP seek to skew what they perceive as diplomatic matters wildly in their favour, and see any criticism as "meddling" in their domestic affairs.

China has benefited from international overt assistance and (CCP supported and encouraged) covert espionage and theft for 30 years. This has enabled them to advance economically, but there has been no concurrent (and naively expected) growth in any democratic sectors;, in fact, Western diplomatic and economic support has enabled the CCP to build an economic juggernaut, that they leveraged. They have subverted the domestic masses (their greatest fear) by building a middle class and encouraging all to aspire to this.

This will be a long fight, much like the West/USSR Cold War that finally culminated after 45 years. The economics of that game beat the Russians; pretty sure that the CCP has foisted that aboard.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Consider yourself warned, stay away from China and that includes flying through Hong Kong and Shanghai.









						Americans, Australians, British and Canadians Are Being Singled Out in China and I've Got Proof
					

One of the things I’ve done since the inception of this blog is try to help young people in trouble in China. Mostly this has involved my telling thousands of English teachers NOT to cause a stink with their employers that have not paid them. I tell them I understand why they are angering at




					harrisbricken.com


----------



## Edward Campbell

Slightly off-topic, but ...

The word *genocide* lost its value almost immediately after the UN said it was a thing. No one was content that the attempted genocide of the Jews in the 1930s and '40s could be all there was. The Jews could not be allowed that distinction ~ the crime was so horrific that others demanded that they, too, must be seen as victims of it; it was unfair that the Jews should be sole owners of the distinction. Even most Jews prefer the term *Holocaust* because it has a religious and symbolic sense ~ the ovens at Auschwitz, etc. 

Rant ends.


----------



## MilEME09

Matt Gurney: China is a hostile state and Trudeau is out of excuses for his silence
					

With Spavor and Kovrig going to trial and facing likely guilty verdicts, Canada needs to re-engage with its allies on China




					nationalpost.com
				




Our government loves to ignore and appease China.


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

Not sure how anyone else is interpreting this, but this looks a heck of a lot like they are building a strategic minerals reserve.  If I were Taiwan steps like this would make me feel increasingly nervous and I would be bumping up my military spending in a hurry.  I have a bad feeling Xi is guy who wants a legacy and "taking back Taiwan" regardless of the cost, is something that may fit his personality profile.









						The Moly Mystery. Why Is China Soaking Up The World’s Molybdenum?
					

China has soaked up a global surplus of molybdenum, a metal with a number of interesting uses ranging from oil drilling pipe to armaments.




					www.forbes.com


----------



## daftandbarmy

Cdn Blackshirt said:


> Not sure how anyone else is interpreting this, but this looks a heck of a lot like they are building a strategic minerals reserve.  If I were Taiwan steps like this would make me feel increasingly nervous and I would be bumping up my military spending in a hurry.  I have a bad feeling Xi is guy who wants a legacy and "taking back Taiwan" regardless of the cost, is something that may fit his personality profile.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Moly Mystery. Why Is China Soaking Up The World’s Molybdenum?
> 
> 
> China has soaked up a global surplus of molybdenum, a metal with a number of interesting uses ranging from oil drilling pipe to armaments.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.forbes.com



I'm pretty sure that any Chinese leader is only the figurehead for the wishes of the backroom puppet masters. It's a big mistake to think that Chinese government is, except in the most basic of ways, like ours.


----------



## Kirkhill

China's response to the USMC's Littoral Strategy?

USMC makes great play over revamping its structure to assist the USN in a containment strategy based on high tech missiles/EW/GBAD predicated on 30 Offshore Supply Vessels to be developed and delivered in the near future - assuming budget, congress and administrative approval.

US expressed intention is to develop a capability that can be deployed assuming the locals surrounding China agree that it may be deployed.

Meanwhile China builds 200 comparably sized trawlers - potential lily pads like the Marines potential OSVs - and parks them on the door step of one of the neighbours whose permission to deploy the US will require.  

Homes for the PLA, missiles and drones -

The US May.  The Chinese Do.



> "On Monday, a reconnaissance flight by the Philippine Air Force showed that 183 of them were still there. So, you basically have around 200 vessels that have been there for weeks now," says Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea.
> 
> "Satellite photos also show that the decks of these vessels are very, very clean. It's as if they're brand new," Batongbacal says.













						Chinese Ship Deployment Roils South China Sea
					

China has provoked international alarm by massing ships in the South China Sea near a reef claimed by both China and the Philippines. Manila protested, calling for the flotilla's immediate withdrawal.




					www.npr.org
				





And concurrently they orchestrate a Nuclear Attack run in the straits between Taiwan and the Phillipines.










						Taiwan reports largest incursion yet by Chinese military aircraft
					

Defence ministry says 20 aircraft entered its air defence identification zone




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## RangerRay

Another home run out of the park by Terry Glavin. An interesting thought experiment.









						Terry Glavin: Canada's record with China is one of national humiliation
					

Having the U.S. treat the two Michaels as Americans is what passes for a Canadian diplomatic triumph these days




					nationalpost.com


----------



## Kirkhill

Kirkhill said:


> China's response to the USMC's Littoral Strategy?
> 
> USMC makes great play over revamping its structure to assist the USN in a containment strategy based on high tech missiles/EW/GBAD predicated on 30 Offshore Supply Vessels to be developed and delivered in the near future - assuming budget, congress and administrative approval.
> 
> US expressed intention is to develop a capability that can be deployed assuming the locals surrounding China agree that it may be deployed.
> 
> Meanwhile China builds 200 comparably sized trawlers - potential lily pads like the Marines potential OSVs - and parks them on the door step of one of the neighbours whose permission to deploy the US will require.
> 
> Homes for the PLA, missiles and drones -
> 
> The US May.  The Chinese Do.
> 
> 
> View attachment 64791
> View attachment 64792
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Chinese Ship Deployment Roils South China Sea
> 
> 
> China has provoked international alarm by massing ships in the South China Sea near a reef claimed by both China and the Philippines. Manila protested, calling for the flotilla's immediate withdrawal.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.npr.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And concurrently they orchestrate a Nuclear Attack run in the straits between Taiwan and the Phillipines.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Taiwan reports largest incursion yet by Chinese military aircraft
> 
> 
> Defence ministry says 20 aircraft entered its air defence identification zone
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theguardian.com




Been looking at this situation and it struck me that there may be an opportunity for a good, old-fashioned cutting-out expedition.  One of the original tasks of marines every where and a great way to add new hulls to a navy's inventory in a hurry.

But then, I thought, that seems overly aggressive and antiquated in this day and age.  

Somebody has wilfully parked a couple of hundred new hulls in the Economic Exclusion Zone of the Philippines without authority and, apparently, abandoned them.  Time for the Philippines to call in the salvors.  They may need bailiffs to attend but I am reckoning that they could rapidly recover costs by putting them up for sail.

The hulls may not be suitable for manned duties but they would probably suffice for conversion to Large Unmanned Surface Vessels












						Pentagon 'Ghost Fleet' Ship Makes Record-Breaking Trip from Mobile to California - USNI News
					

One of the Pentagon’s two Overlord large unmanned surface vessels conducted a first-ever Panama Canal transit, sailing thousands of miles from the Gulf Coast to California in a major test of autonomous systems with few reliability issues along the way, the chief of naval operations told USNI...




					news.usni.org


----------



## Kirkhill

Apparently the Philippines can move in the bailiffs.  The Chinese government says that the ships at Whitsun Reef aren't officially government boats.  They are innocent commercial fishermen.  

Innocent fishermen intruding in the UN recognized Philippine Economic Exclusion Zone.









						Records Expose China’s Maritime Militia at Whitsun Reef
					

Beijing claims they are fishing vessels. The data shows otherwise.




					foreignpolicy.com
				




And in related news

Things are looking more fraught.  A proposed US Army Taiwan Tripwire - for Canadian consumption think "Hong Kong Brigade"  or "Singapore".
Personally I think that is a job for the Marines and their new Littoral Regiments.  They don't need to wait for their Light Amphibs.  The Air Force, the JHSVs and LCSs would get them to the coal face from Okinawa in short order.   At least before the bullets start flying.









						Taiwan Tripwire: A New Role For The U.S. Army In Deterring Chinese Aggression
					

A single U.S. Army brigade combat team stationed on Taiwan could make the difference between war and peace.




					www.forbes.com


----------



## Cdn Blackshirt

I'm getting significantly more concerned that the PRC has decided it no longer has to follow the global rules of etiquette and behaviour, and has adopted the mentality of the Middle Kingdom (that they are the center of the world).  If I were Taiwan, especially after seeing the PRC's behaviour in Hong Kong, I would be ramping up military spending on an urgent basis.  The Dragon is growing restless.....


----------



## FJAG

Kirkhill said:


> Apparently the Philippines can move in the bailiffs.  The Chinese government says that the ships at Whitsun Reef aren't officially government boats.  They are innocent commercial fishermen.
> 
> Innocent fishermen intruding in the UN recognized Philippine Economic Exclusion Zone.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Records Expose China’s Maritime Militia at Whitsun Reef
> 
> 
> Beijing claims they are fishing vessels. The data shows otherwise.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> foreignpolicy.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And in related news
> 
> Things are looking more fraught.  A proposed US Army Taiwan Tripwire - for Canadian consumption think "Hong Kong Brigade"  or "Singapore".
> Personally I think that is a job for the Marines and their new Littoral Regiments.  They don't need to wait for their Light Amphibs.  The Air Force, the JHSVs and LCSs would get them to the coal face from Okinawa in short order.   At least before the bullets start flying.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Taiwan Tripwire: A New Role For The U.S. Army In Deterring Chinese Aggression
> 
> 
> A single U.S. Army brigade combat team stationed on Taiwan could make the difference between war and peace.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.forbes.com



Looks like a role for an Army Multi-Domain Task Force  (plus)

🍻


----------



## Kirkhill

FJAG said:


> Looks like a role for an Army Multi-Domain Task Force  (plus)
> 
> 🍻



Great point FJAG.

Liz Truss is the Brit responsible for organizing British trade deals post-Brexit.  She has a presentation to make to the WTO after the recent releases of the Global Britain reviews. 



> On Tuesday night Whitehall sources said Ms Truss was concerned that the WTO has been “too soft on China for too long” and thinks it’s ludicrous that China is still classed as a “developing nation” by the WTO.





> “Pernicious practices by non-market economies like China have given trade a bad name, from forced labour and forced technology transfer to mass unreported subsidies and environmental degradation.”
> 
> China has repeatedly faced criticism over its industrial policy and the flooding of global markets with cheap Chinese goods such as steel; alleged mass intellectual property theft; and reported human rights abuses, including against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.



There has been some concern expressed that Britain has been too soft on China itself - much like Canada - pursuing cheap goods and a big market.

But the issue is that:

a) China is too big to fight
b) China is too big to ignore

But it also seems to me that China (and Russia for that matter) doesn't really want to fight.  They want to "win".  By other means. 

And it is those other means, in multiple domains, that need to be addressed.

Truss is addressing, in my opinion, the principal domain - the economic one.  Everything else follows from that. 

But it is only one domain.  And all the other domains need to be managed so we don't have another accident like Sarajevo 1914 or Pearl Harbor 1941.

Managing Multi-Domain Competition so that it doesn't accidentally become Multi-Domain Conflict.

Age old question:

When to offer the carrot?  When to use the stick? 

What is tolerable?









						China has given global trade a bad name, says Liz Truss
					

International Trade Secretary calls for World Trade Organisation to stand up to China's 'pernicious' practices and use of forced labour




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## MilEME09

Philippines amplifies demand for Chinese 'Maritime Militia' ships to leave EEZ waters
					

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission. China has not withdrawn all of its vessels moored at a reef




					americanmilitarynews.com
				




China continues its show down with the Philippines over Chinese flagged fishing fleet illegally in Philippines EEZ.


----------



## Kirkhill

Interesting.  True?  ???

On the other hand it conforms to my personal suspicions and broad brush sense of things.









						CCP Adviser Outlines Detailed Plan to Defeat US, Including Manipulating Elections
					

A leading Chinese professor—who is also an adviser to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—laid out a comprehensive plan ...




					www.theepochtimes.com


----------



## Colin Parkinson

China has already shown that it's willing to do such things, here in Canada and aboard, and to be fair the US and the USSR were doing the same in the Cold War. So why people think China would not do such is a bit beyond me.


----------



## Kirkhill

> The fishing vessels arrived one and two at a time, dropping anchor off the disputed Whitsun Reef near the Philippines. As the Chinese-flagged fleet grew larger, the vessels tethered themselves together, hunkering down for *a gray zone standoff *that has captured policymaker interest throughout the Pacific region.
> 
> And with that, Beijing burst Washington’s deterrence bubble.





> To be successful, the Defense Department must rethink its entire approach to *gray zone warfare* and embrace the notion that *combat is no longer binary*, particularly when confronting China’s maritime pursuits. The department must also jettison outdated, phased and overly rigid operational planning for a more flexible strategic framework that better addresses the reality of asymmetric competition. Just as Beijing need not launch an assault on Taipei to exert control over the island, neither must we wait until military hostilities have commenced to engage U.S. forces.











						Beijing has pierced Washington’s deterrence bubble. How can the US recover?
					

The fishing vessels arrived one and two at a time, dropping anchor off the disputed Whitsun Reef near the Philippines. As the Chinese-flagged fleet grew larger, the vessels tethered themselves together,...




					www.fdd.org
				




Constabulary Warfare?  

Armies protect the Constabulary which protects the Crown which protects the People.

Conventional warfare pits an army against an army trying to depose the Crown and impose a foreign Constabulary on the People.

But what happens when the People, or at least a significant segment of the People, perhaps with foreign infiltration, appear to oppose the Constabulary.  Does the Crown resort to using the Army against the People?  Or does it militarize the Constabulary to better deal with seditious elements?  Or, as in this case, foreign agents intentionally act illegally within the Crown's domain?  Does it immediately send gunboats up the Yangtze?  Or cruise missiles into Baghdad?

AOPVs and OPVs acting for the Coast Guard and the RCMP/Carabinieri/Gendarmerie/Garda against economic incursions forces the other guy to take the first swing with their Army.  

How do you force the other side to break cover first and give you a casus belli for a just war?


----------



## CBH99

Kirkhill said:


> Beijing has pierced Washington’s deterrence bubble. How can the US recover?
> 
> 
> The fishing vessels arrived one and two at a time, dropping anchor off the disputed Whitsun Reef near the Philippines. As the Chinese-flagged fleet grew larger, the vessels tethered themselves together,...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.fdd.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Constabulary Warfare?
> 
> Armies protect the Constabulary which protects the Crown which protects the People.
> 
> Conventional warfare pits an army against an army trying to depose the Crown and impose a foreign Constabulary on the People.
> 
> But what happens when the People, or at least a significant segment of the People, perhaps with foreign infiltration, appear to oppose the Constabulary.  Does the Crown resort to using the Army against the People?  Or does it militarize the Constabulary to better deal with seditious elements?  Or, as in this case, foreign agents intentionally act illegally within the Crown's domain?  Does it immediately send gunboats up the Yangtze?  Or cruise missiles into Baghdad?
> 
> AOPVs and OPVs acting for the Coast Guard and the RCMP/Carabinieri/Gendarmerie/Garda against economic incursions forces the other guy to take the first swing with their Army.
> 
> How do you force the other side to break cover first and give you a casus belli for a just war?


What's truly frightening is the combination of hard, soft, and what I'll dub 'intellectual' assets the Chinese seem to have in their gameplan.

Obviously, their military capabilities have been discussed at much length.  They can concentrate more assets in the SCS than the west possibly could, and those assets are supported with supporting fires of mind-blowing numbers.

Their devious, yet effective, soft power is just as much of a danger.  Whether it be their coast guard, or the 'fleet of trawlers' which just show up when the Chinese want something, protected by their well armed coast guard.


But the fact that the Chinese leadership is spry enough & forward thinking enough to build dedicated soft power assets such as the fishing fleet, coast guard, etc etc - built to give them a specific capability - and that they use international law in such a back-sided way that helps to further enable them towards their goals.

One thing is for certain...the Chinese have a very solid idea of what they want to accomplish, and what they need in order to do it.  They don't have the politics of western countries getting in the way.


----------



## RangerRay

More shameful obsequiousness from Trudeau to the CCP.









						Trudeau government threatens Halifax Security Forum over proposed Taiwan award
					

HFX wanted to honor Taiwan's president with the prestigious John McCain award. But Canada feared poking the Chinese bear.




					www.politico.com


----------



## MarkOttawa

And Taiwan sticks it to Justin:



> Taiwan says it would be an ‘affirmation and honour’ if President Tsai were to receive Halifax summit award​
> Taiwan says it would be honoured to receive an award from the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual event funded by the Canadian government.
> 
> Canada, however, has reportedly warned forum organizers that it will yank funding if the prize is given to Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, in a move that Politico.com attributed to fear of offending Chinese Communist Party.
> 
> Beijing considers the self-governing democracy of Taiwan a breakaway province despite the fact the Chinese Communist Party, which took power in 1949, has never ruled the island. China has been trying to isolate Taiwan from the international community over the past 50 years. Ms. Tsai was re-elected as its President by a landslide last year on a promise of defending the island’s democracy and standing up to China.
> 
> According to Politico.com, organizers of the Halifax International Security Forum decided to give its John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service to Ms. Tsai. The media outlet said when Canadian officials learned of the forum’s plans, they made it clear the Canadian government would pull support and funding if the prize was given to Taiwan’s President.
> 
> According to federal supplementary estimate documents from 2019-20, the Department of National Defence’s annual contribution to the forum is about $3-million.
> 
> Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, asked about the John McCain prize, said the Halifax forum is not run from Ottawa. “This organization is an independent organization, and they make their own decisions regarding these matters.”
> 
> Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs told The Globe and Mail it would be “an affirmation and an honour” should the prize be awarded to Ms. Tsai.
> 
> It said it was not confirming media reports that the forum “is unable to award President Tsai Ing-wen the John McCain Prize for Leadership in the Public Service owing to pressure from the Canadian government,” but only taking note of what has been published.
> 
> Joanne Ou, spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), noted the self-governing island has long had relations with the Halifax forum.
> 
> “Having long maintained close contact with HFX, Taiwan MOFA believes that if [the forum] were indeed to confer this prize upon President Tsai, it would be an affirmation and honour for both President Tsai and the people of Taiwan in their anti-pandemic efforts and democratic achievements,” Ms. Ou said in a statement.
> 
> However, she said, Taiwan will not attempt to interfere or sway the forum in making a decision on the matter...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Taiwan says it would be an ‘affirmation and honour’ if President Tsai were to receive Halifax summit award
> 
> 
> Canada, however, has reportedly warned forum organizers that it will yank funding if the prize is given to Tsai, apparently out of fear of offending the Chinese Communist Party
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com



Tee hee.

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Weinie

MarkOttawa said:


> And Taiwan sticks it to Justin:
> 
> 
> 
> Tee hee.
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa


Will he be a man, or a mouse?


----------



## Good2Golf

MarkOttawa said:


> And Taiwan sticks it to Justin:
> 
> 
> 
> Tee hee.
> 
> Mark
> Ottawa


Nice.   Looking forward to seeing him try and virtue signal outta that one...


----------



## CBH99

Good2Golf said:


> Nice.   Looking forward to seeing him try and virtue signal outta that one...
> 
> View attachment 64898


haha could not have found a better meme for this


----------



## daftandbarmy

CBH99 said:


> What's truly frightening is the combination of hard, soft, and what I'll dub 'intellectual' assets the Chinese seem to have in their gameplan.
> 
> Obviously, their military capabilities have been discussed at much length.  They can concentrate more assets in the SCS than the west possibly could, and those assets are supported with supporting fires of mind-blowing numbers.
> 
> Their devious, yet effective, soft power is just as much of a danger.  Whether it be their coast guard, or the 'fleet of trawlers' which just show up when the Chinese want something, protected by their well armed coast guard.
> 
> 
> But the fact that the Chinese leadership is spry enough & forward thinking enough to build dedicated soft power assets such as the fishing fleet, coast guard, etc etc - built to give them a specific capability - and that they use international law in such a back-sided way that helps to further enable them towards their goals.
> 
> One thing is for certain...the Chinese have a very solid idea of what they want to accomplish, and what they need in order to do it.  They don't have the politics of western countries getting in the way.



For those nations who have not done so already, there's a great argument for realigning ourselves to counter Russian and Chinese expansionism:


Countering Russian and Chinese Influence Activities Examining Democratic Vulnerabilities and Building Resiliency

Since 2014 and the events leading up to the annexation of Crimea, awareness and understanding of Russian malign influence activities across Europe and the United States have grown. More recently, Chinese influence activities in countries throughout the IndoPacific region have become the subject of growing scrutiny and concern. Whereas Russian influence efforts have aimed to disrupt and delegitimize democratic institutions, China has sought to permeate and influence democratic societies in order to coopt and constrain public debate on China and silence critics of the Chinese communist regime. 

The influence activities of these authoritarian regimes pose a common threat to democracies but in different ways and with varying degrees of success. The Covid-19 pandemic has shed new light on Russian and Chinese influence activities and created new opportunities for Moscow and Beijing to advance geopolitical goals through a range of influence operations, including through disinformation efforts. Despite greater awareness of the challenge to democracies posed by these authoritarian systems, governments need to develop better and more effective countermeasures.

There is a growing body of research which describes the strategies and tactics of influence activities—the supply of influence—coming from Moscow and Beijing. This research illuminates tactics and strategies as well but focuses on achieving a better understanding of how and why influence activities are consumed within democratic societies—the demand side of the equation. How does disinformation enter and shape the information ecosystem within democratic societies? In what ways do domestic actors benefit from the supply of foreign influence activities? Which efforts have been successful in influencing societies and political outcomes and why? Which activities have failed and why? It is with this in mind that CSIS set out to analyze Russian influence activities in the United Kingdom and Germany and Chinese influence activities in Japan and Australia.

We sought to better understand how these influence efforts play out in these four democracies and how these governments and societies have (or have not) responded. We examined which factors make countries particularly vulnerable to Chinese or Russian malign influence operations and identified the sources of resilience that enable democratic governments and polities to mitigate, fend off, or push back on malign efforts. We also sought to determine the degree to which China and Russia have been successful in influencing outcomes through their activities. Finally, we assess how the strategies and tactics used by Russia and China differ or converge.









						Countering Russian & Chinese Influence Activities
					

Download the Report  CSIS embarked on an ambitious year-long initiative to analyze Russian influence activities in the United Kingdom and Germany and Chinese influence activities in Japan and Australia. While a growing body of literature describes the strategies and tactics foreign influence...




					www.csis.org


----------



## RangerRay

Somehow I have my doubts that this government will take this report seriously. They seem to be awfully deferential to Beijing.


----------



## Kirkhill

A couple of interesting counters -

A curious, and momentary, gaffe on the part of the head of the Chinese CDC - declaring that their vaccines were not sufficiently effective.  Even though the Chinese are charging 10 times as much as the AstraZeneca vaccine.  China is looking at loss of influence, a diminished economy and a continued lock down - along with restive populations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xianjing and Tibet.  What happens if they lose the cities as well?









						In a dramatic turnaround, China has started to lose the Covid Cold War
					

The success of Beijing's lockdown pushed the West into an existential crisis. Now the capitalist world is winning




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				





Palau



> During World War I, the Japanese Empire annexed the islands after seizing them from Germany in 1914. Following World War I, the League of Nations formally placed the islands under Japanese administration as part of the South Seas Mandate. In World War II, Palau was used by Japan to support its 1941 invasion of the Philippines, which succeeded in 1942. The invasion overthrew the American-installed Commonwealth government in the Philippines and installed the Japanese-backed Second Philippine Republic in 1943.[19]





> During World War II, the United States captured Palau from Japan in 1944 after the costly Battle of Peleliu, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.












						Palau 'would welcome British aircraft carrier' to counter China's reach in Pacific says president
					

The Pacific island's president tells Telegraph that international partnerships are key to securing peace and stability




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				




China has been pressuring Palau economically (see Phillipines, Brunei, Australia....)

Meanwhile Palau happy to be seen associated with Anti-CCP nations.  Sailors get a run ashore.  Palau makes a dollar.  China sees Palau supported by foreign flags.


----------



## Kirkhill

And another Influence Activity option









						Boris Johnson urged to back new Royal Yacht Britannia as memorial to Prince Philip
					

MPs, Cabinet ministers and former Britannia captain back calls for successor to be named HMY The Duke of Edinburgh




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## Kirkhill

And just a reminder of the rules of the game per Saul Alinsky and Wikipedia



> The Rules​
> "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
> "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
> "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."
> "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
> "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
> "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
> "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
> "Keep the pressure on."
> "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. "
> "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
> "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."
> "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
> "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. "



Key rules (IMO) 1,4,6,9,13.


----------



## YZT580

daftandbarmy said:


> For those nations who have not done so already, there's a great argument for realigning ourselves to counter Russian and Chinese expansionism:
> 
> 
> Countering Russian and Chinese Influence Activities Examining Democratic Vulnerabilities and Building Resiliency
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Countering Russian & Chinese Influence Activities
> 
> 
> Download the Report  CSIS embarked on an ambitious year-long initiative to analyze Russian influence activities in the United Kingdom and Germany and Chinese influence activities in Japan and Australia. While a growing body of literature describes the strategies and tactics foreign influence...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.csis.org


The solution is simple but potentially painful in the short term:  stop buying.  Do what Trump did to a certain extent and slap punitive surcharges on every product stamped Made in China.  The west's only viable weapon is money.  We don't have either the resources or the will to use the threat of force to stop their advance in the China Sea.  None of the countries there can hope to stand up to a concerted attack as demonstrated by the fishing fleets and the Chinese efforts in the Spratleys.  But squeeze their income and maybe we can accomplish something.  Let China and Russia trade between themselves.


----------



## daftandbarmy

YZT580 said:


> The solution is simple but potentially painful in the short term:  stop buying.  Do what Trump did to a certain extent and slap punitive surcharges on every product stamped Made in China.  The west's only viable weapon is money.  We don't have either the resources or the will to use the threat of force to stop their advance in the China Sea.  None of the countries there can hope to stand up to a concerted attack as demonstrated by the fishing fleets and the Chinese efforts in the Spratleys.  But squeeze their income and maybe we can accomplish something.  Let China and Russia trade between themselves.



Well, I know people who had to move their orders out of China due to the Trump ban, so the Chinese moved their factories to Vietnam etc. They've been up and running quite nicely for a couple of years now, thanks very much.

There's a mental posture that we just don't have, in the West, that requires a solid and honest rethink about how we deal with non-Western Euro/NA countries who don't like us very much


----------



## MilEME09

China sends 25 warplanes into Taiwan's air defense zone, Taipei says | CNN
					

China sent 25 warplanes into Taiwan's air defense identification zone on Monday, the largest breach of that space since the island began regularly reporting such activity in September, Taiwan's Defense Ministry said.




					cnn.it
				




China keeping up the pressure on Taiwan, a 25 aircraft force harassing Taiwan ADIZ, I'm sure that put up the pucker factor for Taiwan.


----------



## MarkOttawa

1) Now CSIS annual report:



> Canada: Most espionage since Cold War amid pandemic​_The Canadian Security Intelligence has released its 2020 public report. The spy agency says that the frictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a rise in foreign spying and interference.
> 
> Espionage and foreign interference in or against Canada in 2020 was tracked "at levels not seen since the Cold War," a report published by Canada's spy agency said on Monday [April 12]...  _
> 
> The report underpinned cloak-and-dagger activities carried out by China and Russia.
> 
> The CSIS said that the two countries, along with other foreign states, continued to "covertly collect political, economic, and military information in Canada through targeted threat activities" in support of their own development ambitions.
> 
> "An _example of significant concern are activities by threat actors affiliated with the People's Republic of China that seek to leverage and exploit critical freedoms that are otherwise protected by Canadian society and the government in order to further the political interests of the Communist Party of China_ [emphasis added]," the report said.
> 
> The observations in the report come nearly two months after Vigneault in February identified China as posing a serious strategic threat to Canada, while the CSIS also for the first identified state-sponsored programs in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China as cyber crime threats late last year.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Canada: Most espionage since Cold War amid pandemic – DW – 04/13/2021
> 
> 
> The Canadian Security Intelligence has released its 2020 public report. The spy agency says that the frictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a rise in foreign spying and interference.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.dw.com



2) And from Chair of National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (a Liberal) following Committee's annual report--he wants more done to combat, in particular, PRC's foreign influence/interference activities in Canadian politics (India also likely active along these lines at lesser level):



> State actors are looking to join political parties to 'exert influence,' chair of security committee warns​Liberal MP David McGuinty says Canada's interference warning system should expand its mandate​
> Foreign governments are looking to meddle in Canada's democratic institutions and the government's foreign interference warning system should alert Canadians to state actors' "traditional" election tricks, says the chair of one of Canada's national security committees.
> 
> Liberal MP David McGuinty, who has headed the secretive National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians since its inception, said the internal panel set up in 2019 to sound the alarm on election interference — the "critical election incident public protocol panel" — _should have its mandate expanded to include old-school espionage techniques.
> 
> "What does that mean? That means volunteers signing up to work in campaign offices or campaign settings. It means individuals joining political parties and attending nomination meetings in order to attempt to exert influence. Usually, the motivation is directed in some way by a foreign government_ [emphasis added]," McGuinty told CBC News soon after NSICOP's 2020 report was tabled in the House of Commons on Monday [April 12, text https://www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2021-04-12-ar/annual_report_2020_public_en.pdf ].
> 
> "We've seen this, we've reported on it in 2019. We've seen more of this in this annual report. So we believe that traditional forms of interference ought to be included in the mandate of that five person political panel."
> 
> NSICOP, which is made up of MPs and Senators who are sworn to secrecy, has called out China and Russia in the past for using members of their diaspora populations to conduct foreign influence operations on their behalf.
> 
> "_Foreign states use direct and indirect contact to influence democratic and electoral institutions and processes by manipulating ethnocultural communities, persons in positions of authority or influence, and the media_ [emphasis added]," says the redacted 2020 report.
> 
> McGuinty said the committee has written a list of recommendations to the prime minister to shore up Canada's election interference warning system before the next campaign, whenever it comes.
> 
> Warning system panel should be expanded: NSICOP​
> The election panel was established in 2019 to alert the public to acts of election interference during the campaign period. The panel is made up of the clerk of the Privy Council, the federal national security and intelligence adviser, the deputy minister of justice, the deputy minister of public safety and the deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada (GAC).
> 
> If the panel finds evidence of a substantial threat to a free and fair election, it's supposed to tell the prime minister, political party officials and Elections Canada and then make a public announcement. The Privy Council Office said the panel did observe suspicious activities during the 2019 election but they never reached a level of seriousness that would have required the panel to go public.
> 
> NSICOP members said the government should consider adding other respected Canadians to the panel, such as retired jurists.
> 
> "The _committee is concerned that senior public servants appointed to the panel may be preoccupied with transition preparations during the writ period, and notes that an intervention by a non-partisan and high-profile group that includes prominent Canadians may carry more weight in the highly politicized context of an election_ [emphasis added]," said the report...
> 
> The committee's annual report encouraged Ottawa to take all of its recommendations seriously. Since the tabling of its first report in December 2018, the committee has made 23 recommendations to the government.
> 
> "The _government's response to the Committee's reports has been limited," notes the report.
> 
> "The committee recognizes that the government is not required to respond to its recommendations; however, the Committee believes that regular and substantive responses would contribute to strengthening the accountability and increasing the transparency of the security and intelligence community _[emphasis added]."
> 
> NSICOP was set up to to give certain parliamentarians access to top-secret materials and to allow them to question leaders in the security and intelligence community. It meets in secret and reports directly to the prime minister on national security matters.
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-espionage-security-mcguinty-1.5984361



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## OldSolduer

Weinie said:


> Will he be a man, or a mouse?


Or will he just go "uum uh its complicated"


----------



## Loachman

MarkOttawa said:


> 2) And from Chair of National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (a Liberal) following Committee's annual report--he wants more done to combat, in particular, PRC's foreign influence/interference activities in Canadian politics (India also likely active along these lines at lesser level):


I read that earlier today.

"The _government's response to the Committee's reports has been limited," notes the report._ Perhaps this hit too close to home.


----------



## MilEME09

John Ivison: This is no time for the Liberals to think of slashing defence spending
					

In the mid-1990s, awash with red ink, the Chrétien government chopped defence spending on the basis that no threat was so large that the U.S. couldn’t handle it




					nationalpost.com
				




More from the National post, with China surging we our selves need a pacific shift more then we already have. The question is where will our Latvia of the Pacific be?


----------



## FJAG

MilEME09 said:


> John Ivison: This is no time for the Liberals to think of slashing defence spending
> 
> 
> In the mid-1990s, awash with red ink, the Chrétien government chopped defence spending on the basis that no threat was so large that the U.S. couldn’t handle it
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> More from the National post, with China surging we our selves need a pacific shift more then we already have. The question is where will our Latvia of the Pacific be?





https://imgur.com/CHn6z8T


🍻


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

The best place for a Canadian "Latvia of the Pacific" would be onboard an Esquimalt based HMCS Bonaventure II. It would show how serious we are about the Pacific region and let us lead to the creation, or reincarnation rather, of SEATO. Integrated battle groups of Canadian carrier, Australian assault ships and combined destroyers/frigates and submarines would make a potent contribution to regional security, especially when paired with similar battle groups from the UK, the US, Japan and South Korea, even possibly India. You would have a nice encirclement of China, limiting it's ability to act as a bully in the region.

PS: And before people start saying: Oh! We can't afford a carrier": I am thinking about a carrier in style of the UK's Queen Elizabeth class. Highly automated with small crew (about 800) and a normal air wing in the 26-28 planes at about 500  air pers., surge capacity for full combat of about 50 airframes. We can expand the RCN and RCAF to do that without even getting close to the 2% of GDP we said we would soon be spending on defence.


----------



## MilEME09

Oldgateboatdriver said:


> The best place for a Canadian "Latvia of the Pacific" would be onboard an Esquimalt based HMCS Bonaventure II. It would show how serious we are about the Pacific region and let us lead to the creation, or reincarnation rather, of SEATO. Integrated battle groups of Canadian carrier, Australian assault ships and combined destroyers/frigates and submarines would make a potent contribution to regional security, especially when paired with similar battle groups from the UK, the US, Japan and South Korea, even possibly India. You would have a nice encirclement of China, limiting it's ability to act as a bully in the region.
> 
> PS: And before people start saying: Oh! We can't afford a carrier": I am thinking about a carrier in style of the UK's Queen Elizabeth class. Highly automated with small crew (about 800) and a normal air wing in the 26-28 planes at about 500  air pers., surge capacity for full combat of about 50 airframes. We can expand the RCN and RCAF to do that without even getting close to the 2% of GDP we said we would soon be spending on defence.


Or smaller scale, look at Japan and South Korea for smaller carriers that hold 12 to 24 airframes.


----------



## GR66

Oldgateboatdriver said:


> The best place for a Canadian "Latvia of the Pacific" would be onboard an Esquimalt based HMCS Bonaventure II. It would show how serious we are about the Pacific region and let us lead to the creation, or reincarnation rather, of SEATO. Integrated battle groups of Canadian carrier, Australian assault ships and combined destroyers/frigates and submarines would make a potent contribution to regional security, especially when paired with similar battle groups from the UK, the US, Japan and South Korea, even possibly India. You would have a nice encirclement of China, limiting it's ability to act as a bully in the region.
> 
> PS: And before people start saying: Oh! We can't afford a carrier": I am thinking about a carrier in style of the UK's Queen Elizabeth class. Highly automated with small crew (about 800) and a normal air wing in the 26-28 planes at about 500  air pers., surge capacity for full combat of about 50 airframes. We can expand the RCN and RCAF to do that without even getting close to the 2% of GDP we said we would soon be spending on defence.


Or ditch the expensive single, floating airfield and triple the number of fighters and add some transport aircraft to supply them in dispersed airfields with mobile AD/ASuW missile batteries?


----------



## daftandbarmy

GR66 said:


> Or ditch the expensive single, floating airfield and triple the number of fighters and add some transport aircraft to supply them in dispersed airfields with mobile AD/ASuW missile batteries?



I see your aircraft carrier and raise you an _*ice capable*_ aircraft carrier.

Now that would be a brand statement heard around the world


----------



## Kirkhill

daftandbarmy said:


> I see your aircraft carrier and raise you an _*ice capable*_ aircraft carrier.
> 
> Now that would be a brand statement heard around the world


And tomahawks all round.


----------



## Kirkhill

One of the notions put about by the Brits is that of an MRSS or Multi-Role Support Ship with an intention to build up to six of them, possibly replacing both the Albions and the Bays which will be pressed into service as interim Littoral Strike Ships.

These Multi-Role Support Ships look a lot like the Support Ships Davie was proposing.










						The future Multi Role Support Ships
					

Multi Role Support Ships will provide the platforms to deliver Littoral Strike from the early 2030s.




					ukdefencejournal.org.uk
				








__





						Ship
					





					www.davie.ca
				




It is also notable that the MRSS concept is being touted in conjunction with the Vanguard Strike Company which seems to have had some success against a USMC OpFor.  And that every ship of the RN is likely to include an RM Commando Troop/Platoon in its complement.



> Strike squad of just 100 Brit Marines smashed 1,500 US troops in war games drill​A STRIKE squad of just 100 Marines smashed 1,500 US troops in a war games drill.
> 
> The shock victory has revolutionised military thinking.
> 
> The £400million drill in California had to be cut short because the British victory was so swift and unexpected
> Our Future Commando Force attacked in the urban warfare exercise. Conventional tactics suggest they would need to heavily outnumber the defending Americans.
> 
> But working in eight teams of 12, they outmanoeuvred their rivals and used helicopter drones linked to screens on their chests to pinpoint weak spots.
> 
> The £400million drill in California had to be cut short because the British victory was so swift and unexpected.
> 
> Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, told The Sun yesterday: “This has overturned the principles of war. Mass is no longer the asset it once was — it is all about effect. If you concentrate your force, you are vulnerable.
> 
> “On the modern battlefield you want maximum dispersion to give your opponent maximum doubt.
> 
> “Then apply disposable technology that you don’t mind losing.”
> 
> Brigadier Dan Cheeseman, head of the Royal Navy’s hi-tech weapons wing, added: “This has turned around traditional thinking.”
> Yesterday, the Future Commando Force and the new “tier two” special forces’ Rangers Regiment — similar to the US’s Green Berets — unveiled hi-tech weapons at the MoD’s Bovington Camp in Dorset.
> 
> Troops are experimenting with flying grenades, remote-controlled mortar bombs and “throwbots” which can be lobbed into buildings before soldiers conduct dangerous room-clearance operations.
> 
> Dave Young, regimental sergeant-major of 3 Commando Brigade, said: “If we’d had this kit in Afghanistan, there is no doubt it would have saved lives.”
> 
> The Navy is planning an exercise this year to see if Marines in jet suits can board a ship.
> 
> The Rangers Regiment will fight alongside rebels and freedom fighters in other countries’ wars.











						British Military Current Events
					

So here's a thought. Put the better part of a heavy brigade's equipment into Europe. Keep a good portion in Canada as training equipment. Organize a manning ratio of enough Reg F to provide all key leadership, technical, planning etc roles into capable hands but man the largest bulk of the force...




					army.ca
				






Malaysia seems to have a broader definition of what an MRSS might be.





__





						Multi-role support ship - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## RangerRay

Another home run by Terry Glavin. I wish he would get more exposure in Canadian media. A lefty who gets it, in the same mould as Orwell.









						Terry Glavin: Canada humiliates itself once again with its shameful treatment of Taiwan's Tsai
					

The irony is that the former law professor embodies everything that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would want to be, but isn’t




					nationalpost.com


----------



## MarkOttawa

RangerRay said:


> A lefty who gets it, in the same mould as Orwell.


Terry is a good friend of mine. You are so bang on. A brilliant writer, a fierce moralist in his own way and, frankly, wasted on this country.

His mother worked for British SIGINT intercept service in WW II:

"Enigma SIGINT, or, “What Did You Do in the War, Mother?









						Mark Collins – Enigma SIGINT, or, “What Did You Do in the War, Mother?”
					

My friend Terry Glavin has drawn attention to this article about his ma (via this tweet): New West resident proud of her Top Secret work during the war …Photograph By Larry Wright Eileen Glav…




					mark3ds.wordpress.com
				




Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MilEME09

RangerRay said:


> Another home run by Terry Glavin. I wish he would get more exposure in Canadian media. A lefty who gets it, in the same mould as Orwell.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: Canada humiliates itself once again with its shameful treatment of Taiwan's Tsai
> 
> 
> The irony is that the former law professor embodies everything that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would want to be, but isn’t
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com


In my opinion we need to cater to Taiwan more and China less. Let Beijing be mad, time to hunt down there spies, secret PLA training cells in Canada (if rumors are true) and cripple their network of reach


----------



## Colin Parkinson

This applies to us as they can wipe out many of our fish stocks as well.









						The Strategic Significance of the Chinese Fishing Fleet
					

A naval officer discusses why China’s massive fishing fleet should be closely monitored by military planners because of its harmful activities below the threshold of conflict and its potential use as a paramilitary force.



					www.armyupress.army.mil
				



_The sheer tonnage of China’s sixteen thousand hull fishing fleet and the fleet’s illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) practices exert their own gravitational pull for diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic analysts globally. Contextualizing China’s massive fishing fleet within China’s grand strategy, identifying the most likely use case for the fleet, and assessing the most dangerous use case suggest the need for updates in the U.S. Department of Defense’s role in monitoring and addressing the assessed threats._


----------



## CBH99

Colin Parkinson said:


> This applies to us as they can wipe out many of our fish stocks as well.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Strategic Significance of the Chinese Fishing Fleet
> 
> 
> A naval officer discusses why China’s massive fishing fleet should be closely monitored by military planners because of its harmful activities below the threshold of conflict and its potential use as a paramilitary force.
> 
> 
> 
> www.armyupress.army.mil
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _The sheer tonnage of China’s sixteen thousand hull fishing fleet and the fleet’s illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) practices exert their own gravitational pull for diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic analysts globally. Contextualizing China’s massive fishing fleet within China’s grand strategy, identifying the most likely use case for the fleet, and assessing the most dangerous use case suggest the need for updates in the U.S. Department of Defense’s role in monitoring and addressing the assessed threats._


That would be quite the journey to make across the Pacific, and then back again, to fish.  

You aren’t wrong.  But talk about a long, slow trek...


----------



## Colin Parkinson

CBH99 It`s already happening
Chinese fishing armada plundered waters around Galápagos, data shows


----------



## GR66

Aside from the fishing...say China were to invade Taiwan and surround their invasion fleet with hundreds or thousands of fishing ships.  What would that do to our ability to target their warships with our missiles?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Not to mention dredgers. The goal is wear down your opponent even before the first shot. Now imagine if even a fraction of those dredgers/fishboats are armed with Anti-ship missiles or mines? China's latest weapon against Taiwan: the sand dredger


----------



## FJAG

So how do you feel about those carbon taxes now, Justin?



> China emitted more greenhouse gases in 2019 than all of the world's other developed nations put together​
> *Researchers estimated the greenhouse gas emissions of 190 different nations*
> *They considered gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide*
> *China accounted for 27% of the world's 52 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emissions*
> *However, on a per capita basis, China emits just less than the OECD average*
> *Per person, the globe's worst emitter is the US, at 7.6 tons a head to China's 10.1*
> By IAN RANDALL FOR MAILONLINE
> 
> PUBLISHED: 10:04 EDT, 7 May 2021 | UPDATED: 12:02 EDT, 7 May 2021
> 
> China released a greater volume of greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere in 2019 than all of the world's developed nations put together, a study has found.
> The eastern superpower has tripled its emission levels since the 1990s, crossing the 14 gigatons threshold for the first time ever in 2019.
> Emission estimates for 190 nations across the globe were calculated by experts from research firm Rhodium Group in tandem with Breakthrough Energy.
> 
> The analysis considered six greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride.
> Global emissions have risen 11.4 per cent in the last decade to reach 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, with China responsible for 27 per cent of this.
> The second-worst emitter was the US — accounting for 11 per cent of the total — with India edging out the EU for the first time to come in third at 6.6 per cent. ...



China emitted more greenhouse gases in 2019 than all developed nations

🍻


----------



## CBH99

Colin Parkinson said:


> CBH99 It`s already happening
> Chinese fishing armada plundered waters around Galápagos, data shows


-  The one lady's statement that for a month, they all watched in confusion as to what the massive Chinese fishing fleet was up to.  And then it became clear...  Ummmmmm...bit of an odd statement from someone who's full time job appears to be involved in the fight against illegal fishing   My guess right off the bat is that the fishing boats were, you know, fishing...  😅



Bigger picture though, and in all seriousness - the Chinese appear to be focused entirely on the short term spectrum when it comes to their vast and aggressive fishing practices.  I realize that people do need to eat, and fishing is an essential part of that -- but these activities seem to be fuelled far more by greed than necessity.  And you won't be able to eat if you end up depleting the entire population because nobody decided to think ahead, or think about the bigger picture.

**I recently watched a documentary called Seaspiracy.  If you ever want to be super angry to the point where you feel that you could easily find a fulfilling career by wiping out entire industries (I'm trying not to use language that advocates violence, but let's be real - some dickheads needs to go) - or sad/scared when you realize how much of the global ecosystem, including atmospheric composition & global warming issues are directly affected by shark populations - I highly recommend.  If you don't want to be angry or sad, then probably best to avoid it.  

Good movie though, and really shows just how deeply interconnected our ecosystem is.  And all of this overfishing, and trying to catch things such as sharks and squid, is having very real impacts globally.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Keeping in mind the fishing fleet is partly organized as a militia, so not only is it a commercial operation, but a paramilitary arm of the PLAN/CCP.


----------



## cavalryman

Let's face reality. The People's Republic of China poses an existential threat to the rest of the planet.


----------



## MilEME09

Philippines foreign sec. tells China: 'Get the f--k out' of West Philippines Sea
					

Philippines Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. told China to “get the f—k out” of what is known domestically as the West Philippines Sea in a post on




					americanmilitarynews.com
				




Phillipines is done talking nicely apparently


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Not a lot they can do though. Not helped by a President that jumps from bed to bed, so no one is sure who's side he is on today...


----------



## Altair

MilEME09 said:


> Philippines foreign sec. tells China: 'Get the f--k out' of West Philippines Sea
> 
> 
> Philippines Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. told China to “get the f—k out” of what is known domestically as the West Philippines Sea in a post on
> 
> 
> 
> 
> americanmilitarynews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Phillipines is done talking nicely apparently


I really do wish that all diplomats could talk like this without being fired.


----------



## dapaterson

Imagine if Jeff Bezos crossed some undocumented social line, and disappeared.

That's what happened to Jack Ma, head of Alibaba.









						The Documentary - Where is Jack Ma? - BBC Sounds
					

Days before his company embarked on a share listing, billionaire Jack Ma went missing




					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Kirkhill

China feeling nervous?  It must be lonely in the Celestial Kingdom when you know that everybody wants to be you.









						China, the victim? From behind the Great Wall is a government under siege by foreign threats
					

Activity by U.S. military ships and surveillance planes directed toward China has increased significantly under the Biden administration, a spokesperson for the Chinese Defense Ministry says.




					www.defensenews.com


----------



## CBH99

dapaterson said:


> Imagine if Jeff Bezos crossed some undocumented social line, and disappeared.
> 
> That's what happened to Jack Ma, head of Alibaba.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Documentary - Where is Jack Ma? - BBC Sounds
> 
> 
> Days before his company embarked on a share listing, billionaire Jack Ma went missing
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.bbc.co.uk


It's odd to say that I would be extremely surprised if they did anything to Jack Ma, given how high profile he is.  His company is world known, and he has become a popular figure online, and is frequently asked to be a speaker at a variety of events.  Given his wealth, status, and high profile -- I would be extremely surprised if he was 'disappeared' by the state, the same way a lowly commoner would be.  

Why I feel odd about the above is because I EQUALLY would be unsurprised if they silenced him somehow.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

This is likley to impact the supply and cost of solar panels here in North America Solar Panels from China: The Next Forced Labor Battleground: - Harris Bricken

_The campaign against Xinjiang cotton evidently rankled China, but a new focus of attention is emerging: solar panels. In the past, there were allegations “that forced labor in Xinjiang has been used to produce polysilicon, a key component for making solar panels.” Now a report from Sheffield Hallam University points to forced labor use in the “mining and processing of quartz, the raw material at the very start of the solar panel supply chain.”_


----------



## Kirkhill

> *China currently ranks *second, or perhaps even first, in the world in gross domestic product (although *78th in per capita GDP*),





			https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/china-rise-or-demise
		


The Chinese Communist Party gets to build guns by depriving its people of butter.  

How important are pride, honour and face to the average Han citizen?  To the non-Han citizens?


----------



## CBH99

Kirkhill said:


> https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/china-rise-or-demise
> 
> 
> 
> The Chinese Communist Party gets to build guns by depriving its people of butter.
> 
> How important are pride, honour and face to the average Han citizen?  To the non-Han citizens?


While VPNs are quite common, and not really enforced at all, a lot of Chinese citizens have lived their entire lives, grown up with their media & education, and are blissfully unaware of how their government is viewed by the outside world.  China does have "the great firewall of China" after all, and I would say large percentage of the population have been drinking the Kool-Aid they have been given since they were kids.  (The younger generation seems to regularly access the internet of the outside world.)

They have a very real national fervor happening right now, and it has been happening for over a decade.  A rapidly growing middle class, modern apartments, access to cars, and many of them with enough financial clout to be able to invest/travel/move outside of China.

Their history classes focus on what they endured as a country at the hands of the British Empire, as well as Japan during WW2.  They see themselves rising up, have the national energy to fuel those beliefs, the population to support those beliefs, the media constantly showing them new modern military equipment being commissioned, and the same media focusing on the 'over-reaching American empire meddling in China's affairs.'

(My sister just got back from China after being there for 18 months as a teacher.  Dozens of questions were fired her way!)

As far as the average citizen is concerned, I would imagine most of them are accepting the various situations/tensions more of less as they are being portrayed to them  🤷‍♂️


----------



## Kirkhill

So would a British Carrier in a Japanese port, or a Taiwanese port, be more of an irritant, more of a red rag, than a continued US presence?   China may see Britain in particular as an achievable propaganda defeat.  Australia as a British proxy as far as the Chinese are concerned?


----------



## MilEME09

If you want to hurt China, go aggressive on the cyber front, take down the great fire wall. If the nation could soak in the world unfiltered, it wouldn't take long for the collective thought to turn against Beijing, especially in non-han areas.


----------



## GR66

MilEME09 said:


> If you want to hurt China, go aggressive on the cyber front, take down the great fire wall. If the nation could soak in the world unfiltered, it wouldn't take long for the collective thought to turn against Beijing, especially in non-han areas.


You're talking about a cultural change here.  The party line had been indoctrinated into the Chinese population for generations.  I think you're underestimating the amount of time it would take for the average Chinese citizen to change the way they think about the world.  

I'm thinking you'd likely have to permanently take down the great fire wall and combine that with the same type of Voice of America push of information into China as was done in the USSR during the Cold War while at the same time dealing with Chinese counters to our actions.

And can anyone say with any certainty how much of an influence that VOA had on the eventual fall of the Soviet Union?  How much of it was the failing economy and the war in Afghanistan that turned the people against the regime rather than glimpses of the openness and freedom of the West?  And China is in a very different situation.  They are currently on the rise as a power and the government has succeeded in bringing millions of citizens out of poverty and their country to a new level of international power and prominence.  

I think sometimes we are blinded by our belief that because we whole heartedly embrace our Western Liberal Democracy and our way of life, so assume that everyone else automatically want to leave their own unique cultures behind and become just like us.  Wanting to be as wealthy as us doesn't necessarily mean they want our beliefs as well.

$.02


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Good news for the rest of the world






						CityNews
					






					www.citynews1130.com
				




_The 12 million births reported last year were down nearly one-fifth from 2019. About 40% were second children, down from 50% in 2017, according to Ning Jizhe, a statistics official who announced the figures on May 11.

The share of working-age people under 60 in China’s population of 1.4 billion fell to 63.3% last year from 70.1% a decade earlier, according to census data. The group aged 65 and older grew to 13.5% from 8.9%._


----------



## Edward Campbell

GR66 said:


> You're talking about a cultural change here.  The party line had been indoctrinated into the Chinese population for generations.  I think you're underestimating the amount of time it would take for the average Chinese citizen to change the way they think about the world.
> 
> I'm thinking you'd likely have to permanently take down the great fire wall and combine that with the same type of Voice of America push of information into China as was done in the USSR during the Cold War while at the same time dealing with Chinese counters to our actions.
> 
> And can anyone say with any certainty how much of an influence that VOA had on the eventual fall of the Soviet Union?  How much of it was the failing economy and the war in Afghanistan that turned the people against the regime rather than glimpses of the openness and freedom of the West?  And China is in a very different situation.  They are currently on the rise as a power and the government has succeeded in bringing millions of citizens out of poverty and their country to a new level of international power and prominence.
> 
> I think sometimes we are blinded by our belief that because we whole heartedly embrace our Western Liberal Democracy and our way of life, so assume that everyone else automatically want to leave their own unique cultures behind and become just like us.  Wanting to be as wealthy as us doesn't necessarily mean they want our beliefs as well.
> 
> $.02


Actually, rapid change is possible in China; I would offer 1949-1965 as an example. Seldom has any country, anywhere, ever, seen as rapid or as broad a socio-economic 'revolution' as China did, then. Maybe Britain in the late 18th century (1760-1790) and America and Germany in the 1830s, '40s and '50s. It had little to do with Mao and almost everything to do with Zhou Enlai, Soong Ching-ling and a few others.

Propaganda works. I think ~ cannot prove, of course, but I have examined it a fair amount ~ that Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and, above all, the BBC World Service had a massive impact on Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. I would suggests that the BBC did more than any other agency,,including the US Military, to contain the spread of Marxist-Leninist ideas in Asia. The World Service did not flog the Anglo-American line: but it was "liberal" and honest. Afro-Asian listeners were discerning enough.


----------



## dimsum

Colin Parkinson said:


> Good news for the rest of the world
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> CityNews
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.citynews1130.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _The 12 million births reported last year were down nearly one-fifth from 2019. About 40% were second children, down from 50% in 2017, according to Ning Jizhe, a statistics official who announced the figures on May 11.
> 
> The share of working-age people under 60 in China’s population of 1.4 billion fell to 63.3% last year from 70.1% a decade earlier, according to census data. The group aged 65 and older grew to 13.5% from 8.9%._


From the article:



> “The aging of the Chinese population grows faster than we expected,” said Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.


I'm not sure how that can be more than expected - it's not like people age faster or slower...


----------



## GR66

Edward Campbell said:


> Actually, rapid change is possible in China; I would offer 1949-1965 as an example. Seldom has any country, anywhere, ever, seen as rapid or as broad a socio-economic 'revolution' as China did, then. Maybe Britain in the late 18th century (1760-1790) and America and Germany in the 1830s, '40s and '50s. It had little to do with Mao and almost everything to do with Zhou Enlai, Soong Ching-ling and a few others.
> 
> Propaganda works. I think ~ cannot prove, of course, but I have examined it a fair amount ~ that Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and, above all, the BBC World Service had a massive impact on Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. I would suggests that the BBC did more than any other agency,,including the US Military, to contain the spread of Marxist-Leninist ideas in Asia. The World Service did not flog the Anglo-American line: but it was "liberal" and honest. Afro-Asian listeners were discerning enough.


If by rapid you mean 10-30 years then I'd agree change is possible (and in fact I think it will be likely...eventually...in China).  That kind of timeframe gives the Chinese government the opportunity to read the sea change and adjust to meet the changing demands of the population.

My impression from the original post however was that it was being suggested that if we somehow took down the great firewall that the people would fairly rapidly see the light and turn against the government in some kind of revolutionary way.  I find that scenario less likely...not impossible...but much less likely as long as the CCP is able to keep the Chinese economy growing.


----------



## Kirkhill

Further to internal stresses and strains in China









						China’s Inconvenient Truth
					

Behind China's triumphalist rhetoric lurks an inconvenient truth: China’s own society is fracturing in complex and challenging ways.




					www.foreignaffairs.com
				




Apparently, according to the article China is spending 216 Bn USD on internal security trying to keep the lids on.  More than it is officially claiming on Defence.   But the Defence claim is being low-balled.  At least in comparison with Western standards



> America may not even be the world’s biggest spender in real terms, let alone spend more than the next ten countries combined. His verdict: “despite China’s ridiculously low official defense spending figures, the value of its defense budget may have surpassed what the U.S. actually spends on defense.”
> 
> _Actually_ being the keyword.
> 
> As it turns out, China tries to ameliorate worries about its burgeoning military might by lowballing spending figures. It can acquire military personnel and hardware more cheaply than can the United States, giving it an edge in defense “purchasing power parity,” to borrow economists’ term. Meanwhile, much of the U.S. defense budget, now northwards of $700 billion per year, does not go to buying usable combat power. And what combat power it does buy is pricier than the equivalent for China’s People’s Liberation Army. For instance, _The Economist_ of London reports that the U.S. military pays junior folk _sixteen times_ more than their PLA counterparts.
> 
> These factors cancel out the apparent disparity between defense spending at least in part; Greenwalt suggests they cancel it out altogether. He points out that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has adjusted up Chinese defense spending from the official figure of $184 billion to $252 billion.
> 
> Drawing on research out of Australia, _The Economist_ estimates it at $518 billion—double SIPRI’s figure.
> 
> If the arithmetic understates China’s martial prowess, it overstates America’s. Representative Anthony Brown, the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, observes that the top line for U.S. defense budgets—$715 billion for this coming year if the Biden administration gets its way—misleads. “We spend $1 billion more on Medicare in the defense budget than we do on new tactical vehicles,” Brown reports. “We spend more on the Defense Health Program than we do on new ships. In total, some $200 billion in the defense budget are essentially for nondefense purposes—from salaries to health care to basic research.”
> 
> Deducting $200 billion from $715 billion in apparent U.S. defense spending yields $515 billion in real defense spending—a mite less than the _Economist_ tally for Chinese spending on the PLA.











						Stop Saying the U.S. Military Spends More Than China (It Might Not Matter)
					

China tries to ameliorate worries about its burgeoning military might by lowballing spending figures. It can acquire military personnel and hardware more cheaply than can the United States.




					www.19fortyfive.com
				




A high risk venture might be for the Brits to take the QE Task Force through the China Seas while Xi is feeling personally vulnerable.


----------



## Kirkhill

dimsum said:


> From the article:
> 
> 
> I'm not sure how that can be more than expected - it's not like people age faster or slower...



No, but perhaps they are being surprised by the choices or circumstances of the young.   

The young may be choosing not to have children.  The young may not be able to have children because there are more sperm donors than fertile wombs. The young may be leaving.  The young may be dying off earlier due to toxins, disease, depression or suicide.  That will shift your population curve to the right in a hurry.


----------



## MilEME09

New report details Beijing’s foreign influence operations in Canada
					

The report details how the United Front Work Department guides and controls an elaborate network of proxies and front organizations to intimidate and co-opt Chinese-Canadians as well as politicians, academics and business leaders




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




Surprised this story isn't getting more traction


----------



## QV

MilEME09 said:


> New report details Beijing’s foreign influence operations in Canada
> 
> 
> The report details how the United Front Work Department guides and controls an elaborate network of proxies and front organizations to intimidate and co-opt Chinese-Canadians as well as politicians, academics and business leaders
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Surprised this story isn't getting more traction


The very reasons it’s not should be a big red flag (no pun).


----------



## Remius

Page 3 of the Globe and Mail.  Not exactly relegated to the back.  Residential school issue is the main story right now.


----------



## Remius

national post has a similar story.









						China 'exporting their authoritarianism overseas' through Canadian institutions, Hong Kong advocate warns
					

China has sought to exert control over foreign politicians, academics, media, and other institutions in an attempt to grow its geopolitical position, the…




					nationalpost.com


----------



## dimsum

Kirkhill said:


> Further to internal stresses and strains in China
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China’s Inconvenient Truth
> 
> 
> Behind China's triumphalist rhetoric lurks an inconvenient truth: China’s own society is fracturing in complex and challenging ways.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.foreignaffairs.com


That is a great article.


----------



## Kirkhill

Xi’s Historic Mistake | by J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate
					

J. Bradford DeLong thinks the Chinese regime has made a fateful miscalculation by doubling down on centralization.




					www.project-syndicate.org


----------



## Kirkhill

Covid reorders the world's strategic landscape – but not as China expected
					

Repression, vaccination problems and now the Wuhan lab revelations are pushing the pendulum away from China and back to the West




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				




While I can be happy that the bloom is coming off China's rose, and Xi in particular,  I can't help but think things might be getting a little tetchy.  

Does Xi stay?  Does he quit? Does he get pushed? Does he do a Galtieri and invade the nearest island?


----------



## CBH99

Personally, I think the CCP quietly replace Xi within the next few years.  Ofcourse officially, Xi will step aside 'due to health reasons' or something like that, and support his replacement.  (Again, a show for the outside world.)

Xi, in all fairness, has done an amazing job at bringing China to where it is now.  A rapidly growing middle class, world renowned tourist attractions (minus the fact that tourists are too afraid to go to China now), the rapid modernization and professionalization of it's military, an aggressive foreign policy which has secured Chinese interests in dozens of countries around the world, more global influence than almost anybody else, etc.



But, in recent years, Xi has also created a lot of enemies...  

-  Tensions with the rest of the world are at an all time high, as he continues to hold citizens from a few different countries as political hostages.  Not only is he keeping foreigners incarcerated indefinitely, but relations with those countries are rocky, at best.  

The US, EU, and several others have refused to allow Chinese state companies to install or provide their 5G networks.


-  _IF_ Xi were to invade Taiwan, as he constantly hints at, it would be the end of China as a global player in it's current form.  Any attack/invasion of Taiwan would immediately result in massive amounts of civilian casualties, only to have the Chinese military oust a democratically elected government, and essentially take the entire country prisoner.  (Since most Taiwanese have been very clear, they would rather live in a democracy.)

^ It would be a political nightmare that not even China could cover up.  A democratically elected government, ousted.  The entire country essentially taken prison and forced to be part of the 'one China'.  News networks could finally talk about something other than Covid, as urban areas burn and the civilian death count just keeps rising.

Countries all over the world would immediately look to other countries to replace their trading relationship with China.  Other SE Asian countries (that also have beef with China right now) would absorb a ton of business, as countries and businesses alike would work as fast as possible to distance themselves from China.  Economic sanctions would actually cripple China, and the diplomatic actions taken (forbidding air travel from China, not granting entry visas, etc etc.)


-  Also, obviously, all of the nonsense around Covid hasn't helped either.  Add that to the mix, as well as the various dangers governments all over the world are openly announcing from Chinese-sponsored influence activities, and China is quite rapidly losing it's clout.  


-  Its most reliable allies are a handful of 3rd world countries, and only because they got swooned in with the "belt & road initiative".  How strong & how deep is their new found alliance with Russia?  In their case, 'the enemy of thy enemy is thy friend' I believe...I don't know how durable that alliance will be when SHTF.



Overall, looking within the next 10yrs, Xi is on his way to undoing all of the great things he has done.  I don't think the CCP will sit quietly by the sidelines as Xi destroys the future that many in China are excited for, and feel is well overdue.  


0.02


----------



## OldSolduer

CBH99 said:


> Personally, I think the CCP quietly replace Xi within the next few years.  Ofcourse officially, Xi will step aside 'due to health reasons' or something like that, and support his replacement.  (Again, a show for the outside world.)
> 
> 
> 0.02


No doubt its the lead therapy pyrotechnically injected health reason


----------



## MilEME09

Chinese nuclear plant likely leaking near 126 million people; disaster possible; US investigating reports say
					

On Monday a French nuclear company, Framatome, announced it is supporting efforts to resolve a "performance issue" with its Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in




					americanmilitarynews.com
				





Nuclear plant releasing radiation and gas above safety limits? Simply raise the safety limits! Cause China, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.


----------



## dimsum

MilEME09 said:


> Chinese nuclear plant likely leaking near 126 million people; disaster possible; US investigating reports say
> 
> 
> On Monday a French nuclear company, Framatome, announced it is supporting efforts to resolve a "performance issue" with its Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in
> 
> 
> 
> 
> americanmilitarynews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Nuclear plant releasing radiation and gas above safety limits? Simply raise the safety limits! Cause China, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.


That reactor isn't in the middle of nowhere either.  HK is part of that potentially-affected area.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Interesting, nice to see self inflicted wounds


----------



## ModlrMike

China is about to have a population catastrophe. The one, and later two child policies have skewed the sex at birth ratio to the point that it is estimated that there are now 30 million more men than women. This number may be artificially low, given under reporting of births, and the real number may be as high as 36 million. They are rapidly reaching the point where there are just not enough women to go around.  In addition, the accepted fertility rate required to replace a population is considered to be 2.1. China's current fertility rate approaches 1.5. Add to the problem the exceptionally low numbers of immigrants to China, and you have a population that is unable to sustain itself.


----------



## daftandbarmy

ModlrMike said:


> China is about to have a population catastrophe. The one, and later two child policies have skewed the sex at birth ratio to the point that it is estimated that there are now 30 million more men than women. This number may be artificially low, given under reporting of births, and the real number may be as high as 36 million. They are rapidly reaching the point where there are just not enough women to go around.  In addition, the accepted fertility rate required to replace a population is considered to be 2.1. China's current fertility rate approaches 1.5. Add to the problem the exceptionally low numbers of immigrants to China, and you have a population that is unable to sustain itself.



And countries with large numbers of younger men are more prone to going to war than 'older' populations.

Young Men and War: Could We Have Predicted the Distribution of Violent Conflicts at the End of the Millennium?​
In an attempt to answer this question, two psychologists from York University suggest that the size of a country's young male population can tell us if that country will engage in war or suffer from civil unrest. Their theory, which they call "the male age composition hypothesis," challenges the environmental security field's traditional model, which views conflict as the result of a variety of interrelated factors—particularly population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation.

According to Neil Wiener, the new hypothesis shares the environmental security model's concern with population growth. But rather than focusing on growth of a society's whole population, the male age composition hypothesis looks at the size of the young male population in comparison to the whole population. The theory does not consider environmental degradation as a factor and looks at resource scarcity and competition only in terms of a "biological/evolutionary view." Wiener and his colleague, Christian Mesquida, used the "non-moral" framework of evolutionary psychology to explain the occurrence (and non-occurrence) of "coalitional aggression," a term they use to refer to war and other forms of collective aggression.

Stated simply, the male age composition hypothesis claims that "countries with relatively large numbers of young males are more likely to experience episodes of coalitional aggression."









						Young Men and War: Could We Have Predicted the Distribution of Violent Conflicts at the End of the Millennium?
					






					www.wilsoncenter.org


----------



## MilEME09

A good little video about how China may be putting the environment and itès own people at risk in the name of progress, and their lax safety standards.


----------



## OldSolduer

MilEME09 said:


> A good little video about how China may be putting the environment and itès own people at risk in the name of progress, and their lax safety standards.


Well the Great Leap Forward and whatever else Mao dreamt up in his murderous mind seems to be present in this regime.


----------



## MilEME09

Chinese state-run op-ed threatens Japan attack for vowing to join US in protecting Taiwan: 'Japan would dig its own grave'
					

Chinese state-run publication Global Times published an op-ed Wednesday warning that “Japan would dig its own grave” is it interferes with Taiwan after




					americanmilitarynews.com
				




Japan struck a nerve, so time for the standard PRC threats.


----------



## FJAG

MilEME09 said:


> Chinese state-run op-ed threatens Japan attack for vowing to join US in protecting Taiwan: 'Japan would dig its own grave'
> 
> 
> Chinese state-run publication Global Times published an op-ed Wednesday warning that “Japan would dig its own grave” is it interferes with Taiwan after
> 
> 
> 
> 
> americanmilitarynews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Japan struck a nerve, so time for the standard PRC threats.


Looks like the Chinese don't even try to be subtle anymore.

🍻


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Tofu-dreg, i like it, I do pity the poor people who get taken by these shysters.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Look at life aboard a Chinese Missile Destroyer on Facebook  Log into Facebook


----------



## GK .Dundas

MilEME09 said:


> Chinese state-run op-ed threatens Japan attack for vowing to join US in protecting Taiwan: 'Japan would dig its own grave'
> 
> 
> Chinese state-run publication Global Times published an op-ed Wednesday warning that “Japan would dig its own grave” is it interferes with Taiwan after
> 
> 
> 
> 
> americanmilitarynews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Japan struck a nerve, so time for the standard PT


----------



## GK .Dundas

These days t
China threatens immolation on anyone who dares disagree with them on any subject no matter how insignificant.
I have taken to referring to the Chinese Foreign Ministry as the Ministry of Outrage..because they are always outraged about something.


----------



## dapaterson

Propublica has a sobering piece on Chinese extraterritorial actions targeting the Chinese diaspora.









						Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight
					

China sends covert teams abroad to bring back people accused — justifiably or not — of financial crimes. One New Jersey family was stalked as part of a global campaign that takes families hostage and pressures immigrants to serve as spies.




					www.propublica.org


----------



## MilEME09

Problems at China nuclear power plant are serious enough to warrant shutdown, French co-owner warns | CNN
					

The French power company that co-owns a nuclear plant in China would shut it down if it could, due to damage to the fuel rods, a spokesperson said -- but the decision is ultimately up to the plant's Chinese operator.




					edition.cnn.com
				




More in the slow impending nuclear disaster in the making due to lacks safety rules in China.


----------



## Dana381

CCP seems to have a great influence on youtube as well. Two videos posted by Colin and one posted by MilEME09 just last month are already taken down (page 202 of this forum).


----------



## MilEME09

I wonder how long before the masses get fed up at being treated like cattle in the CCPs plans. This flooding situation in China is being made worse by Dam operators who refused to release water before the heavy rainfall leading to massive discharge during the rain causing heavy flooring and mass casualties.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Not to mention some underling closed the tunnel to traffic and later was ordered to reopen it , leading to this. Been following this story for a few days now, they are desperately trying to cover it up. Look for some show trials tossing some people to the wolves if public anger continues to grow.


----------



## MilEME09

Nothing to see here, just China threatening to nuke Japan for saying they would protect Taiwan


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin Parkinson said:


> Not to mention some underling closed the tunnel to traffic and later was ordered to reopen it , leading to this. Been following this story for a few days now, they are desperately trying to cover it up. Look for some show trials tossing some people to the wolves if public anger continues to grow.


Or the tigers or the firing squad


----------



## MilEME09

How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda
					

The web of 350 fake social media profiles aims to discredit the West, sometimes with garish cartoons.



					www.bbc.com
				




How China uses fake social media to push its message


----------



## MilEME09

China embassy tweets racist attack on 26 western nations, then deletes it - here's the tweet
					

On Thursday, the Chinese Embassy in Antigua and Barbuda tweeted and then deleted a racially charged criticism of western officials who gathered in support




					americanmilitarynews.com
				




Chinese racism against western diplomats.......quickly taken down, likely as the mainland realized the optics


----------



## Colin Parkinson

I see these ships all the time in Vancouver









						Hidden Harbors: China’s State-backed Shipping Industry
					

Download the Brief  THE ISSUE Chinese companies are increasingly dominant across the maritime supply chain, aided by a complicated and opaque system of formal and informal state support that is unrivaled in size and scope. Combined state support to Chinese firms in the shipping and shipbuilding...




					www.csis.org
				




_THE ISSUE
Chinese companies are increasingly dominant across the maritime supply chain, aided by a complicated and opaque system of formal and informal state support that is unrivaled in size and scope.

Combined state support to Chinese firms in the shipping and shipbuilding industry totaled roughly $132 billion between 2010 and 2018, according to CSIS analysis. This includes financing from state banks ($127 billion) and direct subsidies ($5 billion). Owing to data limitations and the opacity of China’s political system, this conservative estimate does not include direct subsidies to unlisted firms, indirect subsidies, state-backed fundraising, preferential borrowing rates, and other nonmarket advantages from China’s state capitalist system._


----------



## Kirkhill

I don't know if anyone has already reported this on this site but I just came across the discussion in RealClearDefence yesterday.




> The array of both nuclear and conventional missiles in the Chinese inventory has steadily expanded. In addition to two dozen or so DF-31 ICBMs, the Chinese have been adding the DF-41, a mobile system that is* expected to* field China’s first MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles). This* will* substantially increase the number of warheads Beijing has aimed at American targets, while also making it harder for the US to target them.
> 
> Add to this the recent discovery of around 100 silos in China’s Gansu province, and another hundred silos in Xinjiang. China’s construction of some 250 missile silos *would be consistent* with the overall expansion of the PLARF, which includes increasing the number of MRBMs, IRBMs, and ICBMs. At the same time, *it would mark* at least an order of magnitude* expansion of China’s intercontinental warheads, from perhaps two dozen to more than 250* (which would not include the mobile DF-41s). *Should China decide to place MIRVs* atop these various new missiles, the Chinese* could begin *to approach Russian and American warhead numbers (each is allowed to deploy 1,500 warheads).











						China’s Nuclear Forces Swell: A Tri-Polar World? - Breaking Defense
					

The combination of a modern long-range bomber (the H-20), and an expanded seaborne ballistic missile force, as well as this massive inflation of the land-based ICBM component, makes China’s nuclear forces look far more like their “hegemonic” counterparts in Russia and the United States than the...




					breakingdefense.com
				




Apparently STRATCOM is concerned.



> “You’re not gonna find the definition of ‘strategic breakout’ in a doctrine or a manual — and I think it’s one of about four words in the Department of Defense that doesn’t have a definition buried in some joint pub somewhere — but it is significant and I don’t use the term lightly,” Adm. Charles Richard told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “Business as usual will not work.”











						STRATCOM Chief Warns Of Chinese ‘Strategic Breakout’ - Breaking Defense
					

“The breathtaking growth and strategic nuclear capability enables China to change their posture and their strategy," Adm. Charles Richard said.




					breakingdefense.com
				




But?



> *expansion of China’s intercontinental warheads, from perhaps two dozen to more than 250*



with speculation of achieving 1500 or more?  From an unknown, but speculative base of 24?


We don't know how many they have.  We don't know if they work.  We don't know if they have the technology.  We don't know if they have the manufacturing capability.

We do know that their SSNs and SSBNs are not a technology that they have pursued and apparently are relatively easy to track.

We do know that they have invested in mobile launchers.

We do know that they have been talking up their conventional ballistic missile, and hypersonic, capabilities.

We do know that they have demonstrated a willingness and an ability to build on a massive scale - empty cities, empty highways, pandemic hospitals - with scant attention to quality.

We do know that they have been paying attention to America's shift to conventional Precision Guidance Munitions, the USN/USMC/US Army missile strategy for the South China Seas.

We do know that they are as familiar with the swarm technologies as the US.



I suspect...

That it is less likely that China is going to increase its number of warheads threatening the US from 24 to 1500 while it is more likely that China is seeking to create/maintain uncertainty against a swarm of conventional US PGMs by creating more targets in which those 24 warheads could be located.

The US,  with its existing strike capabilities,  and even with its developing ones, could not be sure that it could prevent all of those 24 warheads reaching the US.  What would be the political effects in the US of just one of those leaking through and taking out Seattle or Indianapolis?  It is likely that the government of the day would be replaced never to be re-elected.  That is enough of a threat to keep the US from acting if, for example, China decided to cross the Taiwan Straits. Or China decided to "nationalize" its rare earth mines in Africa.


Chinese "Battleship"?


----------



## RangerRay

An example Beijing’s economic imperialism in the South Pacific.









						Meth, Vanilla and ‘Gulags’: How China Has Overtaken the South Pacific One Island at a Time
					

What’s happening in Tonga is a microcosm of China’s expanding global influence and why the United States is losing ground fast.




					www.politico.com


----------



## The Bread Guy

CHN releasing more details on the Spavor/Kovrig case via state media (links to archived version of article - text also attached in case link doesn't work)


> *Exclusive: Canadian Spavor took photos, videos of Chinese military equipment, sent them to Kovrig and outside China, source said*
> Fan Lingzhi and Cao Siqi, Global Times
> Published: Sep 01, 2021 08:16 PM
> 
> Canadian citizen Michael Spavor, who was sentenced in August to 11 years in prison for espionage and illegal provision of China's state secrets to foreign entities, was found to have taken photos and videos of Chinese military equipment on multiple occasions and illegally provided some of those photos to people outside China, a source close to the matter told the Global Times on Wednesday.
> 
> Spavor was convicted of spying on China's national secrets and was ordered deported from China, a court in Dandong, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, announced on August 11. Spavor was also ordered to have his personal property of 50,000 yuan ($7,715) confiscated.
> 
> The source revealed that during his stay in China, Spavor took photos and videos of Chinese military equipment on multiple occasions and illegally provided some of those photos to people outside China.
> 
> The photos and videos have been identified as second-tier state secrets. Spavor was a key informant of another Canadian defendant, Michael Kovrig, and provided him with information over a long period, the source said.
> 
> A court in Beijing opened the trial of former Canadian diplomat Kovrig over espionage charges on March 22. The verdict was said to be announced at a chosen time in accordance with the law.
> 
> The source said between 2017 and 2018, Kovrig entered China under the guise of a businessman and false pretext of commerce. In Beijing, Shanghai, Jilin and other places, through his associates, Kovrig gathered a large amount of undisclosed information related to China's national security, on which he wrote analytical reports. The information Kovrig gathered included second-tier state secrets and intelligence.
> 
> According to the source, Kovrig and Spavor have been in good health since being taken into custody. The detention centers pay close attention to their physical condition and carry out physical examinations periodically.
> 
> The relevant authorities have handed over letters and books to them, and arranged consular visits by Canadian Embassy officials in accordance with laws and regulations, including virtual visits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
> 
> "Their legitimate rights, including right of correspondence and consular visits, are guaranteed. In a humanitarian spirit and on a lawful basis, the relevant authorities take good care of their dietary and exercise needs. Both of them have had phone calls with their overseas family members," the source said.
> 
> As August 26 marked the 1,000th day since Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei, was detained in Canada, Chinese Ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu made a phone call with Meng to express his sympathy and denounce the misdeeds of the Canadian government. The ambassador urged Canada to take the collective public opinion of over 1.4 billion Chinese people seriously in demanding the immediate release of Meng.
> 
> However, some Canadian media and politicians continue to ignore the collective voice of the Chinese citizens. Nevertheless, they have been quick to connect the incident of Meng with the recent judgments in China of Spavor and Robert Schellenberg, another Canadian citizen who was sentenced to death for drug trafficking in August.
> 
> The Chinese Foreign Ministry and embassies have lashed out at Canada for ganging up with other countries over the cases of Spavor and Schellenberg, and urged these countries to respect the rule of law in China and stop politicizing judicial cases.


More from MSM here, here & here.


----------



## CBH99

So China wants Canada to listen to the “collective voices of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens” and release Meng?

China should listen then to the “collective voices of 37 million Canadians, and release Spavor & Kovrig.”

True, the numbers aren’t equal.  But the gestures are.  Send these two men home, we will send her home.  Boom, done, let’s move on.  


- Did I understand correctly that China announced the deportation of Spavor?  If so that is great news!

- To be fair, having Meng in custody for 1000 days while awaiting her court proceedings to eventually draw to a close isn’t really a shining example of an efficient system… 



I wish everybody would just be brutally honest with each other, and perhaps that is the case behind the scenes.  

“We arrested Meng on a US warrant, which only existed as a result of the trade war between the US and China at the time.  Despite other companies being given a slap on the wrist and bad PR, Meng is the only executive of a large international firm arrested and kept in custody since her arrest.  

Meng probably wouldn’t have been arrested otherwise.  

It’s blatantly obvious you arrested these two Canadian citizens shortly after Meng was arrested as leverage to have her release.  

Not a single person detained in this case should have been.  We will release Meng on the condition you will release Mr. Spavor and Mr. Kovrig…”


Simple agreement and we all move on.  Yes or no?  China can even take credit for the suggestion and the ‘successful negotiations with the puppet Canadians.’


----------



## lenaitch

CBH99 said:


> So China wants Canada to listen to the “collective voices of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens” and release Meng?
> 
> China should listen then to the “collective voices of 37 million Canadians, and release Spavor & Kovrig.”
> 
> True, the numbers aren’t equal.  But the gestures are.  Send these two men home, we will send her home.  Boom, done, let’s move on.
> 
> 
> - Did I understand correctly that China announced the deportation of Spavor?  If so that is great news!
> 
> - To be fair, having Meng in custody for 1000 days while awaiting her court proceedings to eventually draw to a close isn’t really a shining example of an efficient system…
> 
> 
> 
> I wish everybody would just be brutally honest with each other, and perhaps that is the case behind the scenes.
> 
> “We arrested Meng on a US warrant, which only existed as a result of the trade war between the US and China at the time.  Despite other companies being given a slap on the wrist and bad PR, Meng is the only executive of a large international firm arrested and kept in custody since her arrest.
> 
> Meng probably wouldn’t have been arrested otherwise.
> 
> It’s blatantly obvious you arrested these two Canadian citizens shortly after Meng was arrested as leverage to have her release.
> 
> Not a single person detained in this case should have been.  We will release Meng on the condition you will release Mr. Spavor and Mr. Kovrig…”
> 
> 
> Simple agreement and we all move on.  Yes or no?  China can even take credit for the suggestion and the ‘successful negotiations with the puppet Canadians.’



I suppose I'd be more sympathetic to Ms. Meng's plight if there was any comparison to her 'custody' and that of the two Michaels.  And, while 1000 days obviously isn't ideal, much of the process has involved her counsel being given every opportunity to present a defence (considering that this a hearing of the process, not the criminal allegations), as opposed to a closed trial and verdict before lunch without independent counsel.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

China flexes sea power with new foreign ship law
					

A new Chinese legal requirement demands that multiple classes of foreign vessels traversing waters claimed by Beijing must provide detailed information to state authorities and take aboard Chinese …




					asiatimes.com
				




_On August 27, China’s Maritime Safety Administration said in a statement that five categories of foreign vessels, namely submersibles, nuclear-powered vessels, ships carrying radioactive materials, ships carrying bulk oil, chemicals, liquefied gas or other toxic substances, as well as vessels that may endanger China’s maritime traffic safety, fall under the law.


Foreign vessels will be required to provide information including their ship names and numbers, recent locations, satellite telephone numbers and dangerous goods, according to the statement.

If their automatic identification systems do not work properly, they will need to report to China’s maritime authorities about their locations and speeds every two hours until they leave the country’s territorial waters, the statement said.  

At face value, these are not necessarily problematic provisions – unless the definition of “Chinese territorial waters” is interpreted to include nearly all of the South China Sea, as claimed in its wide-reaching and hotly contested nine-dash line.

The new rules were first made public on April 29 this year after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amended the Maritime Traffic Safety Law (MTSL), which was established in September 1983.

A full English version of the revised law, translated by Peking University Law School, can be seen on the website of Steamship Mutual, a mutual insurance association in the maritime space that provides risk pooling, information and representation._


----------



## RangerRay

Get the feeling we’re being kept out of the cool kids’ club?









						Aukus: UK, US and Australia launch pact to counter China
					

Beijing says the deal, involving nuclear-powered submarines, undermines regional peace.



					www.bbc.com


----------



## MilEME09

Major Chinese real-estate conglomerate Evergrande facing looming Bankruptcy as it admits it cannot pay back investors of its wealth management products. The resulting ripple to the Chinese economy if a company valued at over 300 billion were to go bankrupt would be enormous.


----------



## Weinie

MilEME09 said:


> Major Chinese real-estate conglomerate Evergrande facing looming Bankruptcy as it admits it cannot pay back investors of its wealth management products. The resulting ripple to the Chinese economy if a company valued at over 300 billion were to go bankrupt would be enormous.


Meh,

I think that this is more Western media crap.


----------



## Remius

Not so


Weinie said:


> Meh,
> 
> I think that this is more Western media crap.


 Not so sure.  This could be a major hit.


----------



## MilEME09

Weinie said:


> Meh,
> 
> I think that this is more Western media crap.


The commentator does raise the valid counter point that the CCP has a history of nationalizing failing companies, that said can they afford to do so when the company owes billions to people who have invested in homes and apartments that haven't even been built yet? $300 Billion is ssets inthe chinese real estate market is no laughing matter, doing a bit a research it appears accurate, the ripple to the Chinese economy could be disastrous.


----------



## YZT580

Their economy is long overdue for an adjustment.  They have been spending like a drunken liberal for years now.  Unfortunately, the solution is often to declare war somewhere in order to provide a distraction.  Look out Taiwan!


----------



## MilEME09

YZT580 said:


> Their economy is long overdue for an adjustment.  They have been spending like a drunken liberal for years now.  Unfortunately, the solution is often to declare war somewhere in order to provide a distraction.  Look out Taiwan!


Would make sense, same tactic they used with Tibet and Vietnam, though Vietnam actually fought back and won.


----------



## Remius

MilEME09 said:


> The commentator does raise the valid counter point that the CCP has a history of nationalizing failing companies, that said can they afford to do so when the company owes billions to people who have invested in homes and apartments that haven't even been built yet? $300 Billion is ssets inthe chinese real estate market is no laughing matter, doing a bit a research it appears accurate, the ripple to the Chinese economy could be disastrous.


I read a good article about the situation.  A gvt bailout might not be in the cards.


----------



## Remius

This article is from 2013 about China’s shadow bank system. 









						How Scary Is China's Shadow Banking System?
					

Andrew Milligan of Standard Life Investments says China's shadow banking system nothing to panic about, yet.




					www.forbes.com


----------



## MilEME09

Evergrande, China’s goliath developer is in major debt, here’s what it means - National | Globalnews.ca
					

Evergrande is the biggest casualty yet from the ruling Communist Party’s effort to rein in surging debt levels Beijing sees as a possible threat to the economy.




					globalnews.ca
				




Looks like it's hitting MSM now too


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

MilEME09 said:


> Evergrande, China’s goliath developer is in major debt, here’s what it means - National | Globalnews.ca
> 
> 
> Evergrande is the biggest casualty yet from the ruling Communist Party’s effort to rein in surging debt levels Beijing sees as a possible threat to the economy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> globalnews.ca
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Looks like it's hitting MSM now too


It hit the market two days ago.  DOW dropped 900 points.


----------



## brihard

Breaking news, Meng Wanzhou is explected to plead guilty in U.S. court today, and pay a fine as part of a plea deal. If accepted by the court, she's expected in Canadian court later today for a stay of the extradition proceedings, and could be free today.



			https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meng-wanzhou-us-court-1.6188093


----------



## Remius

brihard said:


> Breaking news, Meng Wanzhou is explected to plead guilty in U.S. court today, and pay a fine as part of a plea deal. If accepted by the court, she's expected in Canadian court later today for a stay of the extradition proceedings, and could be free today.
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meng-wanzhou-us-court-1.6188093


Wow.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

brihard said:


> Breaking news, Meng Wanzhou is explected to plead guilty in U.S. court today, and pay a fine as part of a plea deal. If accepted by the court, she's expected in Canadian court later today for a stay of the extradition proceedings, and could be free today.
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meng-wanzhou-us-court-1.6188093


Kind of a smart move, she avoids going to the US and perhaps staying as a guest or being "interviewed". Flies home a hero and then the CCP will claim she was blackmailed into paying the fine and was never really guilty.


----------



## brihard

Looks like US authorities have agreed to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement.


----------



## OldSolduer

brihard said:


> Looks like US authorities have agreed to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement.


I saw that as well. Interesting


----------



## daftandbarmy

brihard said:


> Breaking news, Meng Wanzhou is explected to plead guilty in U.S. court today, and pay a fine as part of a plea deal. If accepted by the court, she's expected in Canadian court later today for a stay of the extradition proceedings, and could be free today.
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meng-wanzhou-us-court-1.6188093


----------



## RangerRay

I assume that this will be good for the Two Michaels. I am sure that shortly after Ms. Meng is back in China, the Two Michaels will be deported back here. 

But I fear that the Liberals will think that it will be back to business as normal with Beijing.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

MilEME09 said:


> Would make sense, same tactic they used with Tibet and Vietnam, though Vietnam actually fought back and won.


No the US was dragged into Indochina by the French dismal failures to halt the Communists, the US had avoided the conflict for quite a long time. At the end of the day the NVA were pounded into submission and dragged to the Peace treaty table. It was after the US army left South Vietnam, and the US Congress restricted aid to to the SVA, that the Communists broke the agreement and invaded. The lessons to be learned is:

Your enemy makes big mistakes as well (Tet)
Your media will get it completely wrong  (NVA and VC were shattered after Tet, not winning, thanks Walter you wanker and you traitorous "B" Jane Fonda)
Don't believe Communists (or Islamists) to honour peace deals
Do bomb the docks where your enemy is getting resupplied, just avoid destroying Soviet ships in the process.


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin Parkinson said:


> Don't believe Communists (or Islamists) to honour peace deals


You hit that nail right on the motherf*cking head to quote that great poet Samuel L.


----------



## brihard

RangerRay said:


> I assume that this will be good for the Two Michaels. I am sure that shortly after Ms. Meng is back in China, the Two Michaels will be deported back here.
> 
> But I fear that the Liberals will think that it will be back to business as normal with Beijing.


Realistically we’re powerless on that. Canada abides by the rule of law; China doesn’t. As soon as the US no longer has a prosecution against her, there’s no legal grounds for us to hold her for extradition. She gets released and is free to go, full stop, regardless of what may happen with Kovrig and Spavor.


----------



## The Bread Guy

brihard said:


> ... Canada abides by the rule of law; China doesn’t ...


That right there - we'll see ...

Meanwhile, lots more details on the latest from U.S. DOJ ...


> ... “In entering into the deferred prosecution agreement, Meng has taken responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Nicole Boeckmann for the Eastern District of New York. “Her admissions in the statement of facts confirm that, while acting as the Chief Financial Officer for Huawei, Meng made multiple material misrepresentations to a senior executive of a financial institution regarding Huawei’s business operations in Iran in an effort to preserve Huawei’s banking relationship with the financial institution. The truth about Huawei’s business in Iran, which Meng concealed, would have been important to the financial institution’s decision to continue its banking relationship with Huawei. Meng’s admissions confirm the crux of the government’s allegations in the prosecution of this financial fraud — that Meng and her fellow Huawei employees engaged in a concerted effort to deceive global financial institutions, the U.S. government and the public about Huawei’s activities in Iran.” ...


Edited to add DPA/Statement of Facts ....


----------



## Colin Parkinson




----------



## OldSolduer

Just say no to Huawei. But I fear we won't.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Likely saying "yes" will be a pre-condition for release of the Micheal's


----------



## RangerRay

brihard said:


> Realistically we’re powerless on that. Canada abides by the rule of law; China doesn’t. As soon as the US no longer has a prosecution against her, there’s no legal grounds for us to hold her for extradition. She gets released and is free to go, full stop, regardless of what may happen with Kovrig and Spavor.


In past instances of Beijing’s hostage diplomacy, the Canadian hostages have been deported  a short time after the Chinese citizen was released. Can’t do it the same day because then Beijing can’t say they’re not hostages. 

We will have to wait and hope. And not let the Liberals go back to business as normal.


----------



## dapaterson

They've been released.  Around 20:40 EDT, their aircraft cleared Chinese airspace.

Live announcement by the PM on the air right now.


----------



## MilEME09

dapaterson said:


> They've been released.  Around 20:40 EDT, their aircraft cleared Chinese airspace.
> 
> Live announcement by the PM on the air right now.


You got to be kidding me, do not get me wrong, glad they are free but this hostage diplomacy BS needs to have consequences for China, they have essentially won.


----------



## dapaterson

The question becomes: what leverage do we have over China?


----------



## brihard

Frig me, that was fast. At least the Chinese had the common decency to be blatant.


----------



## MilEME09

dapaterson said:


> The question becomes: what leverage do we have over China?


Consideration how many Chinese billionaires have assets and property here, if we started taxing a ever living crap out of them, siezing assets, those people would probably press the CPC pretty hard.


----------



## dapaterson

Except a non-zero number of them are in Canada to stay with significant assets that the CCP would love to repatriate.


----------



## Brad Sallows

> They've been released.



Just like that.  It's as if the accusations against them were all bullshit and they were just hostages, and the Chinese government doesn't even have enough pride to pretend otherwise.


----------



## Good2Golf

Brad Sallows said:


> Just like that.  It's as if the accusations against them were all bullshit and they were just hostages, and the Chinese government doesn't even have enough pride to pretend otherwise.


Not enough pride, or more than enough (internationally-accepted) arrogance?


----------



## brihard

Now that they’re on the way home, time to ban Huawei from our infrastructure, and put a few Fox Hunt operatives in jail for IRPA offences if they can find some that’ll stick.


----------



## rnkelly

So Canada gets to say it followed the rule of law while two of our own languished for ages in a prison in China while their precious executive stayed in a luxurious house in Kits. Embarrassing that we (including the Americans) couldn’t have come to this conclusion sooner.


----------



## brihard

rnkelly said:


> So Canada gets to say it followed the rule of law while two of our own languished for ages in a prison in China while their precious executive stayed in a luxurious house in Kits. Embarrassing that we (including the Americans) couldn’t have come to this conclusion sooner.


American charges, Chinese suspect. The only option within our control would have been to cave.

But enough is enough, and it’s long past time that we get serious about treating China as the adversary it has chosen to be.


----------



## Weinie

Good2Golf said:


> Not enough pride, or more than enough (internationally-accepted) arrogance?


It has gone beyond arrogance. This was prima facie that China does not care what other nations think of them, they will do what they want to achieve their strategic ends. There is a reckoning coming.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The Chinese aren't even pretending it's anything else, it shows you what they think of Canada. "We don't care enough to pretend"


----------



## Good2Golf

Weinie said:


> It has gone beyond arrogance. This was prima facie that China does not care what other nations think of them, they will do what they want to achieve their strategic ends. There is a reckoning coming.


Whoa!  For a second there, I though you were talking about Canada’s government…


----------



## FJAG

Weinie said:


> It has gone beyond arrogance. This was prima facie that China does not care what other nations think of them, they will do what they want to achieve their strategic ends. There is a reckoning coming.


Then we better be pretty quick in setting up manufacturing facilities for the $75 billion of manufactured goods we get from there and find another market for the $25 billion of raw materials and agricultural goods we send their way.


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting story to follow is the collapse of the Evergrande group after essentially defaulting on $300 billion dollars in debt. Just to put it in perspective, this is about the same level of debt that Ontario has, or approaching a quarter of Canada's national debt.

It isn't entirely clear how the CCP intends to resolve this - obviously there will be lots of high and tight "haircuts", the question is who is going to eat the losses? Some links with various stories:



			Could China’s House of Cards Finally Collapse? «  Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog
		










						To bail out or not to bail out: China’s Evergrande dilemma
					

The Evergrande Group, one of China's biggest real-estate developers, owes more than $300 billion to a number of lenders. Is it too big to fail, or will China bail it out?




					qz.com
				












						Evergrande crashes as China dumps ‘build, build, build’ playbook
					

Beijing is changing the nation’s growth model and the heavily indebted Evergrande has become the first casualty.




					www.afr.com
				




The long term effects will also be interesting to follow. Evergrande isn't the only overleveraged company in China, just the most visible. And just what sorts of linkages are there between these companies, the State banks and the rest of the Chinese economy? Regardless of how this goes down, there will be a lot of questions to be answered.


----------



## Weinie

FJAG said:


> Then we better be pretty quick in setting up manufacturing facilities for the $75 billion of manufactured goods we get from there and find another market for the $25 billion of raw materials and agricultural goods we send their way.


It won't be Canada that does the reckoning.


----------



## Brad Sallows

> Not enough pride



Yes.  Ordinarily they would go through some charade to maintain a pretence of substance to save "face" (ie. wait a few weeks), but we know they were full of shit, they knew we knew they were full of shit, and they lack the spine to even pretend there was a matter of substance involved.


----------



## Czech_pivo

Well who didn’t see this coming.









						China frees detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor
					

Two Canadian citizens who were detained by Beijing for more than 1,000 days have arrived back in Canada on Sunday morning, greeted by the country’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau The plane carrying Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor arrived in Calgary, a location which had not been publicly...




					news.google.com
				




Now that they are out, sue to join AUKUS and a pox on their Communist house.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Meanwhile the Chinese Real Estate market (notice one them failed to come down)


----------



## MilEME09

How about we ban exporting thermal coal to China? That would hurt them and appease the environmental activists!


----------



## RangerRay

Why Terry Glavin doesn’t get more exposure is beyond me. 









						Terry Glavin: Justin Trudeau went all in on China a decade ago — and nothing can shake his resolve
					

Justin Trudeau has been singularly focused on trade with China, regardless of what the country's sadistic leadership does




					nationalpost.com


----------



## Good2Golf

Maybe in 2023, enough Canadians will come to recognize Trudeau for President Xi’s puppet that he is, that we may have some slim hope of turning HMCS Pander2Dictators from its current destructive Leadmark…


----------



## The Bread Guy

MilEME09 said:


> ... this hostage diplomacy BS needs to have consequences for China ...


No, no, no, you have it aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall wrong - here's China's take (links to archived version of article, not to Chinese site - highlights mine) .....


> ... Although some Western media outlets and politicians claimed the releasing of the two Canadians was an example of "hostage diplomacy," experts said Meng was indeed a "political hostage" taken by the US and Canada, noting that mounting evidence throughout the legal proceedings during Meng's fight against extradition showed she was the victim of political prosecution.
> 
> "In Spavor's case, imposing the order of deportation means he may not serve his jailtime in China but will be deported back to Canada. *It leaves certain room for indictment while unleashing a gesture of goodwill*," Qin Qianhong, a constitutional law professor at Wuhan University, told the Global Times.
> 
> Kovrig and Spavor were prosecuted by the Prosecutor General's Office in China for suspected crimes undermining China's national security in June 2020.
> 
> Kovrig was accused of using an ordinary passport and business visa to enter China to steal sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China since 2017, while Spavor was accused of being a key source of intelligence for Kovrig.
> 
> Spavor was found to have taken photos and videos of Chinese military equipment on multiple occasions and illegally provided some of those photos to people outside China, which have been identified as second-tier state secrets, a source close to the matter told the Global Times on September 1 ...


Full screed also attached in case archive link doesn't work.


----------



## RangerRay

Terry Glavin: Only Chinese strongman Xi Jinping knows why the Michaels were released
					

Canadians have every reason to feel disgusted, embarrassed, ashamed and angry




					nationalpost.com


----------



## Remius

Maybe China wanted all of this cleared up because of this:









						China applies to join Pacific trade pact to boost economic clout
					

Japan said it would have to determine if China meets the "extremely high standards" of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after the world's second-biggest economy formally applied to join.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## daftandbarmy

Remius said:


> Maybe China wanted all of this cleared up because of this:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China applies to join Pacific trade pact to boost economic clout
> 
> 
> Japan said it would have to determine if China meets the "extremely high standards" of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after the world's second-biggest economy formally applied to join.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.reuters.com



I wonder if running concentration camps would disqualify a country from being able to join a trade pact?


----------



## Remius

I think they have more than just that as disqualifiers


----------



## RangerRay

Remius said:


> Maybe China wanted all of this cleared up because of this:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China applies to join Pacific trade pact to boost economic clout
> 
> 
> Japan said it would have to determine if China meets the "extremely high standards" of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after the world's second-biggest economy formally applied to join.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.reuters.com


I thought the whole point of the TPP was to counteract Beijing?


----------



## KevinB

RangerRay said:


> I thought the whole point of the TPP was to counteract Beijing?


It is -- I suspect this is just a stunt by China to portray an aggrieved party again.


----------



## Remius

KevinB said:


> It is -- I suspect this is just a stunt by China to portray an aggrieved party again.


Trying to get ahead of Taiwan applying.


----------



## MilEME09

The great Chinese layoff, the potential for 45 million unemployed, combined with the impending collapse of evergrande. The Chinese economy is in for hurt, could this lead to the demise of the ccp?


----------



## dimsum

MilEME09 said:


> The great Chinese layoff, the potential for 45 million unemployed, combined with the impending collapse of evergrande. The Chinese economy is in for hurt, could this lead to the demise of the ccp?


How trustworthy is China Insights as a channel?  Never heard of them before.


----------



## MilEME09

dimsum said:


> How trustworthy is China Insights as a channel?  Never heard of them before.


They seem to be fairly accurate, as they tend to use upen source data for the videos they make, as a result they are only as trustworthy as the data they have, but they try to show both CCP numbers and other data sources to compare.


----------



## Blackadder1916

error


----------



## Kirkhill

No lights, no power, no water....









						‘Unprecedented’ power cuts in China hits homes, factories
					

Northeastern China is experiencing power cuts because of coal shortages and the tightening of emissions standards.




					www.aljazeera.com
				











						China hit by power cuts and factory closures as energy crisis bites
					

The world’s top coal consumer implements power rationing as supplies dwindle ahead of winter




					www.theguardian.com
				











						China's energy crisis will rock the whole world
					

Country's power failure looms over Europe's own crisis - but there may be a silver lining




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				




California Current Power Outages









						U.K. Faces Winter Blackouts Risk After Fire Knocks Out Cable
					

Winter blackouts are now a real possibility after a fire took out a key cable that ships electricity to the U.K. from France.




					www.bloomberg.com
				












						Petrol shortage: Is the fuel crisis improving?
					

Only 127 fuel drivers from the EU have applied for the temporary visas designed to tackle the crisis.



					www.bbc.com
				




If only we knew how to make power when we needed it.  By burning stuff perhaps?  Stuff we knew where it was and we could get it when we needed it?

On the other hand this has to be the answer to the conspiracy theory that Green Energy is a Chinese plot.  Apparently they believe this stuff as well.  Go figure.


----------



## MilEME09

38 Chinese warplanes infiltrate Taiwan’s air defense zone in largest reported breach
					

On Friday, China sent a new record-setting 38 warplanes towards Taiwan, including 32 fighter jets, four nuclear-capable bombers, an anti-submarine warfare




					americanmilitarynews.com
				




China continues to push Taiwan to the breaking point, continuous mass breaches force Taiwan to send aircraft to intercept, the more they do it, the less time crews have for maintenance, don't need to fight them in the sky if they all break down on the ground.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Stand to!

The threat of China invading Taiwan is growing every day. What the U.S. can do to stop it.​The Chinese military has already begun gray zone operations. An all-out attack on Taiwan looms if Beijing continues to escalate.

In his speech celebrating the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary last week, Chairman Xi Jinping proclaimed that China has never bullied or oppressed the people of any other country. Yet that is exactly what Beijing is doing to Taiwan, and its intensifying aggression toward the democratic island is increasingly raising concerns that it will try to take it by force.

The question is not whether the United States should defend Taiwan during war but how to prevent war in the first place. Now is the time to strengthen U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation.

For years, world leaders have been hesitant to respond to China’s military aggression in the region. But Beijing’s escalating rhetoric and military developments are pushing Washington and its allies to work together in ways never done before, such as the joint U.S.-Japanese military planning for a conflict with China over Taiwan. Just Monday, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso declared that in the case of an attack on Taiwan, “Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together."

“Unifying Taiwan by force” as a Chinese policy has existed since Chairman Mao Zedong coined the term. Though the onset of the Korean War spared Taiwan such a fate at that time, China’s unfulfilled aspirations continue to haunt the Communist Party. In recent years, Xi has tied the annexation of Taiwan, which split from the Chinese mainland amid civil war in 1949, to his “China dream” for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In the eyes of Communist Party elites, unifying Taiwan is the final piece in making China great again.

The Communist Party now controls the most powerful military in Asia, the People’s Liberation Army, and Beijing’s increasing sense of urgency to annex Taiwan is evident in major changes to its military posture. Beijing understands that the United States is the most significant obstacle to its conquest of Taiwan, and has transformed its force to specifically offset U.S. operational advantages in the Pacific theater. To this end, the Chinese military has developed anti-ship ballistic missiles, attack submarines and an array of air and naval platforms for conducting saturation attacks to overwhelm enemies, all supported by space-based systems that make it more integrated and lethal.









						Opinion | The likelihood of China invading Taiwan increases every day. What the U.S. should do.
					

The Chinese military has already begun gray zone operations. An all-out attack on Taiwan looms if Beijing continues to escalate.




					www.nbcnews.com


----------



## dimsum

Goldman Flags $8.2 Trillion Threat Worse Than China Evergrande
					

Goldman Sachs says the total debt of local government financing vehicles rose to $8.2 at the end of 2020.




					www.forbes.com


----------



## Kirkhill

dimsum said:


> Goldman Flags $8.2 Trillion Threat Worse Than China Evergrande
> 
> 
> Goldman Sachs says the total debt of local government financing vehicles rose to $8.2 at the end of 2020.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.forbes.com






> Argentine military and intelligence cooperation with the Reagan Administration ended in 1982, when *Argentina seized the British territory of the Falkland Islands in an attempt to quell domestic and economic unrest.* The move was condemned by the US, who provided intelligence to the British government in its quest to regain control over the islands.
> 
> Falklands War[edit]​
> 
> 
> This section *needs additional citations for verification*. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. _(April 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)_
> See also: Falklands War
> 
> 
> 
> Galtieri in the Falkland Islands
> By April 1982, Galtieri had been in office for four months and his popularity was low.[15] On 2 April, on his orders, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands, a United Kingdom territory subject to a long-standing Argentine claim.
> 
> Initially the invasion was popular in Argentina, and the anti-junta demonstrations were replaced by patriotic demonstrations in support of Galtieri.
> 
> Galtieri and most of his government mistakenly believed the UK would not respond militarily[16][14]
> 
> The British government led by the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, dispatched a naval task force to retake the islands militarily if Argentina refused to comply with a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate Argentine withdrawal. Argentina did not comply with the resolution which resulted in a surrender to British forces on 14 June 1982, after which Argentine forces were escorted back to Argentina.[_citation needed_]
> 
> Defeat, fall from power, trial and prison[edit]​On 14 June 1982, the Falklands' capital, Stanley, was retaken by British forces. Within days Galtieri was removed from power, and he spent the next 18 months at a well-protected country retreat while democracy was restored to Argentina. Along with other members of the former junta, he was arrested in late 1983 and charged in a military court with human rights violations during the Dirty War and with mismanaging the Falklands War. The Argentine Army's internal investigation, known as the Rattenbach report after the general who led it,[17] recommended that those responsible for the misconduct of the war be prosecuted under the Code of Military Justice.[18] In 1986 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.[19]
> 
> Galtieri was cleared of the civil rights charges in December 1985, but (together with the Air Force and Navy commanders-in-chief) in May 1986 he was found guilty of mishandling the war and sentenced to prison. All three appealed in a civil court, and the prosecution appealed for heavier sentences. In November 1988 the original sentences were confirmed, and all three commanders were stripped of their rank. In 1989, Galtieri and 39 other officers of the dictatorship received President Carlos Menem's pardon.[20]


----------



## OldSolduer

That oughta learn the Argies.....


----------



## daftandbarmy

OldSolduer said:


> That oughta learn the Argies.....



Sadly, no, it seems.


Germany rejects Argentina's claim on Falklands recognition​
Germany on Friday rejected a claim by Argentina that a request by airline Lufthansa to fly over Argentina en route to the Falkland Islands implied a recognition of them as Argentine territory.

Argentina and Britain have long disputed ownership of the Falklands, with Argentina claiming sovereignty over the British-run islands it calls the Malvinas. The dispute led to a brief war in 1982.

Lufthansa said it made the request for two flights supporting a polar research expedition because the normal route via Cape Town has been suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A German foreign ministry spokesman said the federal government’s position on the Falkland Islands had not changed.

“The activities of private companies cannot be attributed to the Federal Republic of Germany and have no international consequences,” he said.









						Germany rejects Argentina's claim on Falklands recognition
					

Germany on Friday rejected a claim by Argentina that a request by airline Lufthansa to fly over Argentina en route to the Falkland Islands implied a recognition of them as Argentine territory.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## brihard

daftandbarmy said:


> Stand to!
> 
> The threat of China invading Taiwan is growing every day. What the U.S. can do to stop it.​The Chinese military has already begun gray zone operations. An all-out attack on Taiwan looms if Beijing continues to escalate.
> 
> In his speech celebrating the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary last week, Chairman Xi Jinping proclaimed that China has never bullied or oppressed the people of any other country. Yet that is exactly what Beijing is doing to Taiwan, and its intensifying aggression toward the democratic island is increasingly raising concerns that it will try to take it by force.
> 
> The question is not whether the United States should defend Taiwan during war but how to prevent war in the first place. Now is the time to strengthen U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation.
> 
> For years, world leaders have been hesitant to respond to China’s military aggression in the region. But Beijing’s escalating rhetoric and military developments are pushing Washington and its allies to work together in ways never done before, such as the joint U.S.-Japanese military planning for a conflict with China over Taiwan. Just Monday, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso declared that in the case of an attack on Taiwan, “Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together."
> 
> “Unifying Taiwan by force” as a Chinese policy has existed since Chairman Mao Zedong coined the term. Though the onset of the Korean War spared Taiwan such a fate at that time, China’s unfulfilled aspirations continue to haunt the Communist Party. In recent years, Xi has tied the annexation of Taiwan, which split from the Chinese mainland amid civil war in 1949, to his “China dream” for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In the eyes of Communist Party elites, unifying Taiwan is the final piece in making China great again.
> 
> The Communist Party now controls the most powerful military in Asia, the People’s Liberation Army, and Beijing’s increasing sense of urgency to annex Taiwan is evident in major changes to its military posture. Beijing understands that the United States is the most significant obstacle to its conquest of Taiwan, and has transformed its force to specifically offset U.S. operational advantages in the Pacific theater. To this end, the Chinese military has developed anti-ship ballistic missiles, attack submarines and an array of air and naval platforms for conducting saturation attacks to overwhelm enemies, all supported by space-based systems that make it more integrated and lethal.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Opinion | The likelihood of China invading Taiwan increases every day. What the U.S. should do.
> 
> 
> The Chinese military has already begun gray zone operations. An all-out attack on Taiwan looms if Beijing continues to escalate.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.nbcnews.com


Kill the amphibs. If they can’t put troops with heavy equipment ashore, the rest is mostly academic. The thing with a war of naked aggression is they’d need to win decisively and quickly and then reestablish economic relations before it costs more than it’s worth.

As long as Taiwan and allies preserve the ability to deny safe crossing of the ‘moat’, an invasion is not viable.


----------



## MilEME09

brihard said:


> Kill the amphibs. If they can’t put troops with heavy equipment ashore, the rest is mostly academic. The thing with a war of naked aggression is they’d need to win decisively and quickly and then reestablish economic relations before it costs more than it’s worth.
> 
> As long as Taiwan and allies preserve the ability to deny safe crossing of the ‘moat’, an invasion is not viable.


That's why Taiwan is investing in fast attack boats that carry a pair of anti ship missiles. Overwhelm Chinese surface ships with mass volume of fire. Same thing on land, small trucks that are quick


----------



## MilEME09

Taiwan president warns of 'catastrophic' consequences for peace if it falls to China
					

'It would signal that in today's global contest of values, authoritarianism has the upper hand over democracy,' President Tsai Ing-wen warns




					nationalpost.com
				




China is playing a dangerous game, and someone with an ichy trigger finger is all it takes to make this go pear shaped. At this point in my opinion we need to start standing upto China, before this becomes this generations war.


----------



## Weinie

brihard said:


> Kill the amphibs. If they can’t put troops with heavy equipment ashore, the rest is mostly academic. The thing with a war of naked aggression is they’d need to win decisively and quickly and then reestablish economic relations before it costs more than it’s worth.
> 
> As long as Taiwan and allies preserve the ability to deny safe crossing of the ‘moat’, an invasion is not viable.


China could very quickly disrupt/destroy, through a very precise missile campaign, C2, airfields, essential services, and naval bases , in Taiwan in a heartbeat. Amphibs would be launching as the missiles landed. The question then becomes, what do we do with a population that despises us, and will adopt a COIN approach.


----------



## Brad Sallows

Given China's economic/market problems right now, the last thing they need is an international embargo on their exports.


----------



## Weinie

Brad Sallows said:


> Given China's economic/market problems right now, the last thing they need is an international embargo on their exports.


One shouldn't underestimate the megalomania/irrationality of a dictator.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Weinie said:


> One shouldn't underestimate the megalomania/irrationality of a dictator.


I only take hope in the idea that for every dictator, there still tends to be folks in the systems willing to stick an ice pick into said dictator, if only to take over or rein him in - although how easy/hard that is to do varies from dictatorship to dictatorship.

Who knows who Xi Jinping's Beppo Römer is? 😉


----------



## Edward Campbell

Brad, Weenie and Bread Guy are all on the right track. Neither China, itself, nor Xi Jinping is invulnerable to those "events, dear boy, events" that bring down leaders, governments and, indeed, nations and empires. The very nature of oligarchical rule is its greatest weakness; the very nature of democracy, where leaders must test ideas and plans against the wishes/will of the people, is its greatest strength. There is no guarantee that America is in permanent, irreversible decline ~ it might be likely but it's not cast in stone. Equally, China's rise need not go on and on and on ... there will be obstacles and any leader may stumble and fall.


----------



## Weinie

The Bread Guy said:


> I only take hope in the idea that for every dictator, there still tends to be folks in the systems willing to stick an ice pick into said dictator, if only to take over or rein him in - although how easy/hard that is to do varies from dictatorship to dictatorship.
> 
> Who knows who Xi Jinping's Beppo Römer is? 😉


Bet he isn't named Beppo Romer.


----------



## dimsum

Weinie said:


> Bet he isn't named Beppo Romer.


Given how the "elite" may lose their wealth due to some of those said economic problems, it might be closer to a Claus von Stauffenberg.


----------



## CBH99

The Bread Guy said:


> I only take hope in the idea that for every dictator, there still tends to be folks in the systems willing to stick an ice pick into said dictator, if only to take over or rein him in - although how easy/hard that is to do varies from dictatorship to dictatorship.
> 
> Who knows who Xi Jinping's Beppo Römer is? 😉


I think the CCP will be his version of Romer, just without the assassination part. 

The CCP still has plenty of wise old men in it’s ranks, complimented by many enterprising young men with a much better ‘finger on the pulse’ of the world.  

China can’t succeed if the rest of the world is boycotting China in one way or another.  

A severe lack of tourism due to a legitimate fear of being taken political hostage, being excluded from various countries’ 5G networks and completions, many countries looking to have their goods manufactured in places other than China, China’s devastating impact on various environmental issues, etc.  

Xi Jinping has done a great job of sparking Chinese potential on the world stage.  China is now more powerful militarily and politically than ever before, and their citizens have enjoyed a rapidly growing middle class.  

To China, Jinping will leave a great legacy that will be difficult to live up to.  But the powers who pull the strings from the shadows probably realize that it is to the benefit of China that his time as President has to come to an end within the next few years.


----------



## KevinB

CBH99 said:


> - his time as President has to come to an end within the next few years.


Which is why it is IMHO even more unstable NOW than many feel.

When you have a stated goal and limited time - you can feel cornered or trapped - and need to strike out.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Xi Jinping has, _I suspect_, a "deliverology" problem. He has promised a lot ~ belt and road, global superpower, self-sufficiency, etc ~ but, thus far, he hasn't delivered much. He has, also, broken, decisively, with Deng Xiaoping and that _may_ have been a major strategic blunder. (I say _may_ because I'm really not sure how much of my analysis is based on good, broad reading and how much is just hope.)

I see, elsewhere, that the so-called 'Shanghai Gang,' which was Jiang Zemin's power-base, a resoundingly free-market group that hews closely to Deng's doctrine, is being openly, albeit cautiously critical of Xi's rule. I haven't heard anything similar from Hu Jintao's 'progressive' wing. The point is that there is internal opposition and, for whatever reason ~ maybe just a political pressure release valve being opened ~ it is making noise.

My (very personal) sense is that the Chinese Communist Party has been losing popularity over the past 25 years and the rate at which it is declining is accelerating. People have learned that they can join the middle class through their own efforts, without having to join the party. That makes it harder and harder to develop leadership cadres ~ a previously rigorous process ~ that are loyal to the top level. Unlike Mao, Deng Xiaoping encouraged (limited, to be sure) factionalism as he tried to broaden the base of the CCP. Xi Jinping seems, to me, to have tried to go back to Mao. My (very personal, again) sense is that Mao is not (and never really was) popular ~ feared? yes; popular? no! Dang, on the other hand, is still revered.

Maybe I'm reading the wrong journals; maybe my own (deeply held) prejudices are getting in the way. Anyway, my pretty low value 🪙.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Meanwhile, there's a renewed commitment to communist ideals driving China even further away from the West, economically at any rate.

Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning​After 40 years of allowing the market to play an expanding role in driving prosperity, China’s leaders have remembered something important — they’re Communists.

Xi Jinping smiled and hinted at a policy bombshell that would soon roil stock markets from Shanghai to New York.

It was mid-June, and the most powerful Chinese Communist Party leader since Mao Zedong was holding court at an after-school club for elementary students in the remote city of Xining. Acknowledging the growing pressure on students and their parents to spend time and money on private tutoring, Xi promised to ease their burden. 

“We must not have out-of-school tutors doing things in place of teachers,” he said. “Now, the education departments are rectifying this.”

While Xi’s comments went largely unnoticed by global investors at the time, the crackdown on tutoring companies that followed has become the starkest illustration yet of the Chinese president’s commitment to a sweeping new vision for the world’s second-largest economy — one where the interests of investors take a distant third place to ensuring social stability and national security.

Call it progressive authoritarianism. From exhausted couriers in the gig economy, to stressed parents struggling with ever-rising housing prices and tuition fees, to small businesses battling tech monopolies, Xi is swinging the cudgel of state power in support of the squeezed middle class. These challenges aren’t unique to China, but the policy response has been.

Weeks after Xi’s school visit, China said private education had been “hijacked by capital” and ordered tutoring companies to become non-profits, accelerating a selloff that at its most extreme erased $1.5 trillion from Chinese stocks and dented the portfolios of some of the biggest names in global finance. 

Combined with new requirements for data security reviews ahead of overseas IPOs, directives for food-delivery firms to pay staff a living wage and escalating curbs on unaffordable housing, the tutoring crackdown has triggered a growing realization that the old rules of Chinese business no longer apply, and left investors wondering which sector will be the next target for regulators.

For decades, even as they kept strict control over strategic sectors like banking and oil, China’s leaders gave entrepreneurs and investors freedom to drive the adoption of new technologies and open up fresh opportunities for growth. Deng Xiaoping set the tone back in the mid-1980s when he said it was OK if some got rich first. Now, with growth slowing and relations with the U.S. increasingly hostile, they’re emphasizing different goals: common prosperity and national security.

“This marks a watershed shift in China’s policy priorities,” said Liao Ming, Beijing-based founder of Prospect Avenue Capital, which manages $500 million. “The government is going after industries that are creating the most social discontent.” 

And, true to their Communist roots, China’s leaders have no problem trampling on the interests of venture capital, private equity or stock investors when they conflict with its long-term development plan. Liao said that focus is now on what has been dubbed the “three big mountains”: the crushing burden of payments for education, healthcare and property.

For now, tech is still the main target. In a flurry of action Friday, authorities summoned the country’s largest technology companies for a lecture on data security, vowed better oversight of overseas share listings and accused ride-hailing companies of stifling competition.
New Development Phase​China this year began a “new development phase,” according to Xi. It puts three priorities ahead of unfettered growth:

National security, which includes control of data and greater self-reliance in technology
Common prosperity, which aims to curb inequalities that have soared in recent decades
Stability, which means tamping down discontent among China’s middle class 
If Xi executes on his vision — and that is still a big if — there will be important beneficiaries: stretched workers, stressed parents, and squeezed start-ups. 

But so far, the losers have been more visible: tech billionaires and their backers in the stock market, highly leveraged property companies including China Evergrande Group, and foreign venture capital firms that had hoped to take Chinese companies public in the U.S.
For international investors, many of whom got burned by this year’s regulatory onslaught, the old rule was that to make money in China it was necessary to align with the Communist Party’s priorities. The dawning realization is that finding common ground may be increasingly hard to do. 

Companies and investors have been “behind the curve” when it comes to anticipating regulation in China, Ren Yi, a Harvard-educated social media commentator known as Chairman Rabbit, wrote in an online commentary that has received more than 100,000 views.  Education researcher Feng Siyuan says investors should have seen the education regulations coming: Xi had said more than two years ago the sector shouldn’t be profit driven.

Part of Xi’s motivation is desire for popular support ahead of the once-in-a-decade leadership transition next year, where he is expected to buck tradition and stay on as party chief for a third term. Growing discontent, including sporadic strikes among delivery workers, have rattled the stability-obsessed party.

Wearing the distinctive yellow shirt of Chinese delivery service Meituan, whose profits have boomed during the pandemic, 22-year-old motorbike courier Mr. Tang complains about the lack of medical insurance. “There’s nothing I can do about it if Meituan doesn’t pay for it,” he added. “The wealth gap between people in this society is too big”.

The downside for investors is that a bigger slice of the pie for workers like Mr. Tang has to come at the expense of the owners of capital. Meituan lost as much as $63 billion of market value last week after Beijing ordered it to improve worker protections.

China’s leaders won’t be shedding tears for the losses of foreign stock holders. The bigger risk for Beijing: Heavy state intervention might dampen the animal spirits that drive private investment and reverse an integration with the global economy that has helped drive growth in the last four decades.

Tech Trauma​
Following the logic of the prison yard, Beijing signaled the start of the new era for entrepreneurs and investors by taking a swing at the biggest inmate: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma. On Nov. 3, the initial public offering of Ant Group Co. — the finance arm of Ma’s empire, which was set to surpass Saudi Aramco as the biggest public listing of all time — was unceremoniously squashed.

The regulatory pace intensified after December, when a top economic planning meeting chaired by Xi vowed to rein in the “disorderly expansion of capital,” signaling the move against Alibaba was part of a wider campaign backed by the apex of Chinese power.

At first, investors thought the phrase referred to anti-monopoly efforts aimed at shrinking the power of tech giants, which had converted their vast profits into venture-capital investments spanning almost every sector. That narrative was bolstered by the 18.2 billion yuan fine slapped on Alibaba by anti-monopoly authorities in April. 

But developments in recent weeks suggest the slogan goes further. In some sectors, private capital, especially foreign capital, may not be wanted at all.

At the start of July, China’s cybersecurity regulator said tech firms with more than a million users would need to pass a review before listing overseas. Regulators made an example of Didi Global Inc — China’s answer to Uber — which had squeaked through a U.S. IPO just before the new regulations, removing it from app stores in the country and hammering its valuation.

Later that month, China’s top administrative body, the State Council, ordered companies teaching the school curriculum in the $100 billion after-school tutoring sector to become non-profits and banned them from pursuing IPOs or taking foreign capital. The semi-legal Variable Interest Entity, or VIE, structure adopted by the likes of Alibaba to go public abroad was singled out for top-level criticism for the first time.
While investors in the tutoring sector — a focus of major funds from Temasek to Warburg Pincus — lamented the new rules, many Chinese parents welcomed them.


Beijing is betting that the gravitational pull of an economy that will likely continue to generate more billions of dollars of growth opportunities than any other gives them leeway to throw their weight around, even if some global investors get whacked in the process.

At least some of the evidence suggests they might be right. Foreign investment continues to flow into China, including through domestic bond and stock markets which continue opening to overseas capital. For all the talk of decoupling, China’s exports to the U.S. keep rising.

Still, structural shifts in policy have a slow burn impact. The benefits of pro-market reforms culminating in China’s 2001 entry to WTO played out over the best part of a decade before the 2008 financial crisis halted the export boom. The costs of Beijing’s new turn away from the market will also take time to show. Even if the Communist Party continues to deliver on growth, the focus on common prosperity suggests investors will have to settle for a smaller share of the spoils.










						Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning
					

China’s leaders have remembered something important — they’re Communists.




					www.bloomberg.com


----------



## a_majoor

Outside of the economic turmoil in China now that the property and real estate market is seeing massive defaults (a second company has defaulted), Chinese debt diplomacy may also cause economic problems.

The Chinese expended huge amounts of money to build these "string of pearls" ports/naval bases, and have become the de facto owners, but the ports themselves don't make any money, and how long will nations like Siri Lanka continue to pour money into repaying loans (often for the benefit of corrupt local elites)? Third World nations nationalized (expropriated) lots of corporate property in the past, and there is no reason they couldn't do the same to China. It's not like the Chinese can take the port home with them:






						Zerohedge
					

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero




					www.zerohedge.com
				









						Zerohedge
					

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero




					www.zerohedge.com
				












						The story of Hambantota Port: a flunking token of political corruption
					

In just seven years, Sri Lanka’s Port of Hambantota went from a bastion of hope to a dead weight that turned the developing economy into China’s debtor.




					www.ship-technology.com
				




So there may be another shock or series of shocks as poor nations stop filling Chinese coffers - cutting off another flow of funds.


----------



## dimsum

Media Bias check for Zerohedge:



> *Overall, we rate ZeroHedge an extreme right-biased conspiracy website based on the promotion of false/misleading/debunked information that routinely denigrates the left*





> ZeroHedge
> 
> 
> CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE Sources in the Conspiracy-Pseudoscience category may publish unverifiable information that is not always supported by evidence.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> mediabiasfactcheck.com


----------



## The Bread Guy

Not so "secret" anymore, I guess ...

*"US special forces secretly training troops in Taiwan – report"* (Turkish media)
*"U.S. troops rotating into Taiwan for training -sources"* (Reuters)
_*"US special ops forces secretly training Taiwan's military, says Pentagon official"*_ (Agence-France Presse via France 24)
*"(U.S.) Lawmakers say they were in the dark on US troop deployment to Taiwan"* (Politico via South China Morning Post)
*"US troops’ secret presence in Taiwan island ‘no real threat,’ but could ‘bring China’s reunification closer’ "* (Chinese Communist Party media - links to archived version to avoid linking to CHN server)
*"US’ revelation of troops in Taiwan will only hasten cross-Straits war: Global Times editorial"* (Chinese Communist Party media - links to archived version to avoid linking to CHN server)


----------



## CBH99

In one media release by the CCP… “It may bring our reunion closer to happening.”  

Aaaawwwww, you’re ‘Reunion’?  We didn’t know you loved Taiwan so much that this whole thing was reuniting with them… that’s sweet.  


Another media release by CCP, literally on the same day…  “This may hasten the war we all know is coming.”

Wait China, earlier you said you wanted a reunion?  It sounds more and more like a kidnapping tho…  🤷🏼‍♂️


If China does eventually go ‘full possessive ex-boyfriend’ on Taiwan, it will be doing itself a huge disservice for too many reasons to list right now.  

But militarily, if it plunges that region into armed conflict, an invasion of Taiwan will only serve to weaken the Chinese military substantially at a time when it’s military needs to be strongest.  0.02


(Remember when we mentioned the other day whether Xi Jingping would be ousted by his own party?  Yeah I think that would be hastened too, to be honest.)


----------



## Altair

If China haven't learned that amphibious and airborne invasions are amongst the most difficult and logistically complicated operations to pull off trying to invade Taiwan would be a very easy way to get up to speed in that regard.


----------



## Dana381

CBH99 said:


> (Remember when we mentioned the other day whether Xi Jingping would be ousted by his own party?  Yeah I think that would be hastened too, to be honest.)


If it fails I think your right. If successful however I could see him gaining much popularity amongst the CCP. 

During the Falklands war Galtieri was a hero when the invasion succeeded but ended up ousted because he couldn't hold onto it. 

The China/Taiwan affair may play out similar. China's history of war with the west has ended with draws (Korea/Vietnam). If they do decide to attack Taiwan they will fully expect to get away with it and I don't think the west has the political will to stop them.

Think Afghanistan; very little political backlash for pulling out and handing the country back to a terrorist regime that at least in part was responsible for an attack on American soil.

The American military kept it secret till today that they have been in Taiwan for a year now. They knew that it would be too unpopular back home.

If China Invades Taiwan in my opinion the majority of people in the west will not support their militaries backing Taiwan in a war. They will be afraid of WWIII with China. Too many Neville Chamberlains that will accept China's lies for fear of all out war.

Just my $0.02


----------



## daftandbarmy

And it looks like the 2022 Winter Olympics will not allow any nasty foreigners in to watch. I guess this kind of qualifies as a hostile takeover?

Overseas fans banned from 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics​The Olympic Committee welcomed the decision to have Chinese spectators for the February event after Tokyo games were held with empty stadiums due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing will be held without fans from overseas with tickets restricted to fans living in China because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced.

The IOC also said only fully vaccinated participants at the Games, which start on February 4, would be exempt from a 21-day quarantine upon arrival, unless athletes can provide a “justified medical exemption”.









						Overseas fans banned from 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
					

IOC welcomed the decision to have Chinese spectators after Tokyo games were held with empty stadiums due to COVID-19.




					www.aljazeera.com


----------



## CBH99

Dana381 said:


> If it fails I think your right. If successful however I could see him gaining much popularity amongst the CCP.
> 
> During the Falklands war Galtieri was a hero when the invasion succeeded but ended up ousted because he couldn't hold onto it.
> 
> The China/Taiwan affair may play out similar. China's history of war with the west has ended with draws (Korea/Vietnam). If they do decide to attack Taiwan they will fully expect to get away with it and I don't think the west has the political will to stop them.
> 
> Think Afghanistan; very little political backlash for pulling out and handing the country back to a terrorist regime that at least in part was responsible for an attack on American soil.
> 
> The American military kept it secret till today that they have been in Taiwan for a year now. They knew that it would be too unpopular back home.
> 
> If China Invades Taiwan in my opinion the majority of people in the west will not support their militaries backing Taiwan in a war. They will be afraid of WWIII with China. Too many Neville Chamberlains that will accept China's lies for fear of all out war.
> 
> Just my $0.02


I can’t find anything in your post that I disagree with.  All in all, I think you’re right and your logic is sound.  

EXCEPT… for one minor deviation 😉


I think China invading Taiwan - regardless of whether they win or lose - would be the end of Xi Jingping.  

The only real question would be how long would it take for the CCP to have a suitable replacement in place prior to removing Xi.   


The big difference between the Falklands example, and modern China, is the world didn’t rely on the Falklands to manufacture a majority of it’s goods on the cheap.  

Nor did Argentina piss off it’s neighbours and present them with such a sinister threat in their future.  Nor did Argentina’s neighbours spend the last decade plus arming themselves specifically with Argentina in mind.  


-  If China wins (and they will) it won’t do so without MASSIVE civilian casualties in Taiwan.  These numbers will be far higher than what the west is used to seeing, and the media footage will be gruesome and quite savage. 

Western countries will rush to find alternate suppliers for their goods, as none of them will want a trading relationship that supports what China is doing.  

Western politicians will feed their fish what the fish want.  Big corporations will rush to set up factories in other countries nearby, western countries will freeze trade agreements & review such, and before you know it China has yet ANOTHER income problem.  


-  Western countries will use this as the excuse they’ve been blatantly searching for in excluding Chinese companies from bidding on projects that involve national security, re 5G networks.  


-  Taiwan is armed to the teeth.  

Will China eventually succeed just in terms of sheer numbers?  Yes.  But at what cost?

China would lose AT LEAST dozens of aircraft, warships, transport ships, along with plenty of other military assets.  

These are now assets that can’t be used until replaced (both hardware and trained operator) at a time when the US and Japan would be engaging Chinese forces also.  That’s a best case scenario for China too… having Australia, India, and South Korea jump into the fight would make things even worse.  


China would start the conflict as the influential power that it is - a regional superpower without question.  

China would end the conflict as a country with severed trade relationships with almost all western countries, shut out from bidding on a lot of projects in the west, a mass exodus of large international corporations that would be moving their assets to another country, and a military that would be substantially degraded.  

Even if no other country came to Taiwan’s aid, Taiwan could take out enough of China’s warfighting assets to put its ambitions behind by at least a few years.  (I feel like Taiwan will be a pissed off Honey Badger if it needs to be)


Overall, I don’t see the CCP seeing the above in China’s best interest (aka their best interest.)

So even if China wins the short term fight against Taiwan, the overall scenario would be the end of Xi Jingping.  


Just my 0.02 cents, and I could very well be wrong.  🍻


----------



## RangerRay

Don’t underestimate the Canadian corporate butt-snorkelers’ ability to rehabilitate Beijing’s reputation. Just see how quickly they did it after Tianamin Square.  Jean Chrétien and the Canada-China Business Council played a huge role in that.


----------



## CBH99

RangerRay said:


> Don’t underestimate the Canadian corporate butt-snorkelers’ ability to rehabilitate Beijing’s reputation. Just see how quickly they did it after Tianamin Square.  Jean Chrétien and the Canada-China Business Council played a huge role in that.


I’m genuinely saddened yet not surprised. 

I need to Google it, as I don’t know anything about that specifically.  But only to learn the details - the premise of what you say sounds maddeningly plausible and likely…



Maybe somebody else in the west can start to kiss China’s a** after the ‘pretty big skirmish’ is over?  

I’m not sure why we are, it isn’t really doing us a ton of good anyway.


----------



## Altair

CBH99 said:


> I can’t find anything in your post that I disagree with.  All in all, I think you’re right and your logic is sound.
> 
> EXCEPT… for one minor deviation 😉
> 
> 
> I think China invading Taiwan - regardless of whether they win or lose - would be the end of Xi Jingping.
> 
> The only real question would be how long would it take for the CCP to have a suitable replacement in place prior to removing Xi.
> 
> 
> The big difference between the Falklands example, and modern China, is the world didn’t rely on the Falklands to manufacture a majority of it’s goods on the cheap.
> 
> Nor did Argentina piss off it’s neighbours and present them with such a sinister threat in their future.  Nor did Argentina’s neighbours spend the last decade plus arming themselves specifically with Argentina in mind.
> 
> 
> -  If China wins (and they will) it won’t do so without MASSIVE civilian casualties in Taiwan.  These numbers will be far higher than what the west is used to seeing, and the media footage will be gruesome and quite savage.
> 
> Western countries will rush to find alternate suppliers for their goods, as none of them will want a trading relationship that supports what China is doing.
> 
> Western politicians will feed their fish what the fish want.  Big corporations will rush to set up factories in other countries nearby, western countries will freeze trade agreements & review such, and before you know it China has yet ANOTHER income problem.
> 
> 
> -  Western countries will use this as the excuse they’ve been blatantly searching for in excluding Chinese companies from bidding on projects that involve national security, re 5G networks.
> 
> 
> -  Taiwan is armed to the teeth.
> 
> Will China eventually succeed just in terms of sheer numbers?  Yes.  But at what cost?
> 
> China would lose AT LEAST dozens of aircraft, warships, transport ships, along with plenty of other military assets.
> 
> These are now assets that can’t be used until replaced (both hardware and trained operator) at a time when the US and Japan would be engaging Chinese forces also.  That’s a best case scenario for China too… having Australia, India, and South Korea jump into the fight would make things even worse.
> 
> 
> China would start the conflict as the influential power that it is - a regional superpower without question.
> 
> China would end the conflict as a country with severed trade relationships with almost all western countries, shut out from bidding on a lot of projects in the west, a mass exodus of large international corporations that would be moving their assets to another country, and a military that would be substantially degraded.
> 
> Even if no other country came to Taiwan’s aid, Taiwan could take out enough of China’s warfighting assets to put its ambitions behind by at least a few years.  (I feel like Taiwan will be a pissed off Honey Badger if it needs to be)
> 
> 
> Overall, I don’t see the CCP seeing the above in China’s best interest (aka their best interest.)
> 
> So even if China wins the short term fight against Taiwan, the overall scenario would be the end of Xi Jingping.
> 
> 
> Just my 0.02 cents, and I could very well be wrong.  🍻


I don't think any invasion of Taiwan is as clear cut as you make it sound.

Taiwan doesn't have many ideal amphibious invasion sites, and those it does have are amongst the most fortified places on earth. It would make Omaha Beach on d day look like a walk in the park. And Taiwan would absolutely wreck the east coast of mainland China. Taiwan holds a lot of intermediate and long range missiles which could hit most of the population centers of Eastern China and I don't think China could stop all of them.

Taiwan, I suspect, would also mine to hell the Taiwan strait making resupply and troop transport from China to Taiwan a challenging prospect.

Lastly, any invasion would be seen coming months in advance, with the naval buildup and troop movements being hard to mask.

Toss in a modern military and any support from west, especially the USA and or Japan and China won't win.

The only question is if the west has the stomach to stand with Taiwan.


----------



## MilEME09

Any conflict will go either one of two ways, either China will prove to be a paper tiger, and by that I mean while they have the men and equipment, poor tactics and decision making leads to their defeat.

Taiwan just needs to prevent a landing, the PLAN still only has 10 modern ships capable of deploying troops to shore. Given Taiwan strategy of swarm tactics, if the PLAN goes in over confidant, they will loose their key surface ships.

The other outcome is an utter steam roll invasion with a brutal Crack down on any civilians of a insurgency breaks out. China would prevent media into the island due to "security concerns " preventing international coverage in order to hide their brutality.


----------



## Altair

MilEME09 said:


> Any conflict will go either one of two ways, either China will prove to be a paper tiger, and by that I mean while they have the men and equipment, poor tactics and decision making leads to their defeat.
> 
> Taiwan just needs to prevent a landing, the PLAN still only has 10 modern ships capable of deploying troops to shore. Given Taiwan strategy of swarm tactics, if the PLAN goes in over confidant, they will loose their key surface ships.
> 
> The other outcome is an utter steam roll invasion with a brutal Crack down on any civilians of a insurgency breaks out. China would prevent media into the island due to "security concerns " preventing international coverage in order to hide their brutality.


Yes, China needs a lot of factors to go right.

Taiwan just needs 1.

Also, China should not underestimate the MAD doctrine. Taiwan would absolutely decimate the Chinese East coast if it came right down to it.


----------



## Czech_pivo

CBH99 said:


> I can’t find anything in your post that I disagree with.  All in all, I think you’re right and your logic is sound.
> 
> EXCEPT… for one minor deviation 😉
> 
> 
> I think China invading Taiwan - regardless of whether they win or lose - would be the end of Xi Jingping.
> 
> The only real question would be how long would it take for the CCP to have a suitable replacement in place prior to removing Xi.
> 
> 
> The big difference between the Falklands example, and modern China, is the world didn’t rely on the Falklands to manufacture a majority of it’s goods on the cheap.
> 
> Nor did Argentina piss off it’s neighbours and present them with such a sinister threat in their future.  Nor did Argentina’s neighbours spend the last decade plus arming themselves specifically with Argentina in mind.
> 
> 
> -  If China wins (and they will) it won’t do so without MASSIVE civilian casualties in Taiwan.  These numbers will be far higher than what the west is used to seeing, and the media footage will be gruesome and quite savage.
> 
> Western countries will rush to find alternate suppliers for their goods, as none of them will want a trading relationship that supports what China is doing.
> 
> Western politicians will feed their fish what the fish want.  Big corporations will rush to set up factories in other countries nearby, western countries will freeze trade agreements & review such, and before you know it China has yet ANOTHER income problem.
> 
> 
> -  Western countries will use this as the excuse they’ve been blatantly searching for in excluding Chinese companies from bidding on projects that involve national security, re 5G networks.
> 
> 
> -  Taiwan is armed to the teeth.
> 
> Will China eventually succeed just in terms of sheer numbers?  Yes.  But at what cost?
> 
> China would lose AT LEAST dozens of aircraft, warships, transport ships, along with plenty of other military assets.
> 
> These are now assets that can’t be used until replaced (both hardware and trained operator) at a time when the US and Japan would be engaging Chinese forces also.  That’s a best case scenario for China too… having Australia, India, and South Korea jump into the fight would make things even worse.
> 
> 
> China would start the conflict as the influential power that it is - a regional superpower without question.
> 
> China would end the conflict as a country with severed trade relationships with almost all western countries, shut out from bidding on a lot of projects in the west, a mass exodus of large international corporations that would be moving their assets to another country, and a military that would be substantially degraded.
> 
> Even if no other country came to Taiwan’s aid, Taiwan could take out enough of China’s warfighting assets to put its ambitions behind by at least a few years.  (I feel like Taiwan will be a pissed off Honey Badger if it needs to be)
> 
> 
> Overall, I don’t see the CCP seeing the above in China’s best interest (aka their best interest.)
> 
> So even if China wins the short term fight against Taiwan, the overall scenario would be the end of Xi Jingping.
> 
> 
> Just my 0.02 cents, and I could very well be wrong.  🍻



Let's look at this from another angle - the Korean angle - if the 'West' sits on its hands while Taiwan goes down fighting, does this not embolden 'Kim the Youngest' in North Korea to make a play for the South?  

Hell, why not even launch his attack a few days after the CCP launches theirs on Taiwan when it become apparent that the West is not going to support Taiwan?  Yes the US has boots on the ground in SK but what if the North Koreans (and the CCP) make it public that they will not be attacking US positions in SK?  By attacking SK, it almost guarantees that the US will not move any assets in SK or Japan out to help out Taiwan as they won't want to thin out their assets in the area (and the Japanese would demand that they don't). Moving CCP troops directly into NK assures their sovereignty while giving them the ability to ravage SK cities and industrial complexes.  The US wouldn't be able to handle a two front war in essence. 
If Taiwan does down and SK is burnt to the ground but not taken over, left to rebuild parts of this infrastructure and industries, what does that do to the US's existing and potential allies in the Asian theatre?  Will that not make it more difficult for the US to cultivate and enhance alliances?  

Remember, the Chinese play the long game and us the West have ADHD.  I completely agree about the flight of capital out of China and it becoming a pryha state but they can always turn to others for some of their needs to be meet - Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc.  It's almost like the situation with the Taliban in Af'stan - we have the watches but they have the time.....


----------



## Altair

Czech_pivo said:


> Let's look at this from another angle - the Korean angle - if the 'West' sits on its hands while Taiwan goes down fighting, does this not embolden 'Kim the Youngest' in North Korea to make a play for the South?
> 
> Hell, why not even launch his attack a few days after the CCP launches theirs on Taiwan when it become apparent that the West is not going to support Taiwan?  Yes the US has boots on the ground in SK but what if the North Koreans (and the CCP) make it public that they will not be attacking US positions in SK?  By attacking SK, it almost guarantees that the US will not move any assets in SK or Japan out to help out Taiwan as they won't want to thin out their assets in the area (and the Japanese would demand that they don't). Moving CCP troops directly into NK assures their sovereignty while giving them the ability to ravage SK cities and industrial complexes.  The US wouldn't be able to handle a two front war in essence.
> If Taiwan does down and SK is burnt to the ground but not taken over, left to rebuild parts of this infrastructure and industries, what does that do to the US's existing and potential allies in the Asian theatre?  Will that not make it more difficult for the US to cultivate and enhance alliances?
> 
> Remember, the Chinese play the long game and us the West have ADHD.  I completely agree about the flight of capital out of China and it becoming a pryha state but they can always turn to others for some of their needs to be meet - Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc.  It's almost like the situation with the Taliban in Af'stan - we have the watches but they have the time.....


The USA is very capable of keeping troops on the ground in nations that want them.

Japan, Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia.

I have no doubt Taiwan would welcome American forces there for the coming century if the USA was willing to risk the wrath of the CCP.


----------



## MilEME09

Altair said:


> The USA is very capable of keeping troops on the ground in nations that want them.
> 
> Japan, Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia.
> 
> I have no doubt Taiwan would welcome American forces there for the coming century if the USA was willing to risk the wrath of the CCP.


Well reports are coming to light yesterday of US special forces in Taiwan to train local forces, that's huge and going to anger China, but now also offers a trip wire, if China attacks and causes American casualties, this goes pear-shaped very fast.


----------



## Altair

MilEME09 said:


> Well reports are coming to light yesterday of US special forces in Taiwan to train local forces, that's huge and going to anger China, but now also offers a trip wire, if China attacks and causes American casualties, this goes pear-shaped very fast.


China needs to walk the tightrope here as much as America does.

They have a limited window in which they can play on western war fatigue and work on their military, especially navy and amphibious buildup.

If they start shit now and rile up the American public and government,  there will be US troops in Taiwan. America will flood Taiwan with high tech military equipment. 

China is engaged in some serious Sabre rattling but if they draw it out and draw blood they will very quickly find out how they are not prepared for what comes next.


----------



## MilEME09

Altair said:


> China needs to walk the tightrope here as much as America does.
> 
> They have a limited window in which they can play on western war fatigue and work on their military, especially navy and amphibious buildup.
> 
> If they start shit now and rile up the American public and government,  there will be US troops in Taiwan. America will flood Taiwan with high tech military equipment.
> 
> China is engaged in some serious Sabre rattling but if they draw it out and draw blood they will very quickly find out how they are not prepared for what comes next.


Agreed, both sides have to thread the needle, but it's a much finer needle for China.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Czech_pivo said:


> Let's look at this from another angle - the Korean angle - if the 'West' sits on its hands while Taiwan goes down fighting, does this not embolden 'Kim the Youngest' in North Korea to make a play for the South?
> 
> Hell, why not even launch his attack a few days after the CCP launches theirs on Taiwan when it become apparent that the West is not going to support Taiwan?  Yes the US has boots on the ground in SK but what if the North Koreans (and the CCP) make it public that they will not be attacking US positions in SK?  By attacking SK, it almost guarantees that the US will not move any assets in SK or Japan out to help out Taiwan as they won't want to thin out their assets in the area (and the Japanese would demand that they don't). Moving CCP troops directly into NK assures their sovereignty while giving them the ability to ravage SK cities and industrial complexes.  The US wouldn't be able to handle a two front war in essence.
> If Taiwan does down and SK is burnt to the ground but not taken over, left to rebuild parts of this infrastructure and industries, what does that do to the US's existing and potential allies in the Asian theatre?  Will that not make it more difficult for the US to cultivate and enhance alliances?
> 
> Remember, the Chinese play the long game and us the West have ADHD.  I completely agree about the flight of capital out of China and it becoming a pryha state but they can always turn to others for some of their needs to be meet - Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc.  It's almost like the situation with the Taliban in Af'stan - we have the watches but they have the time.....


if the North Attacked at the same time, that would cause the US to intervene on both fronts and things would get very hot, likely all conventional though, as neither side wants or could handle a nuclear war, even with just tactical nukes.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Then there's this issue, of course, which tends to be conveniently forgotten by many:


----------



## Dana381

CBH99 said:


> The big difference between the Falklands example, and modern China, is the world didn’t rely on the Falklands to manufacture a majority of it’s goods on the cheap.
> 
> Nor did Argentina piss off it’s neighbours and present them with such a sinister threat in their future.  Nor did Argentina’s neighbours spend the last decade plus arming themselves specifically with Argentina in mind.



Your looking at the differences, I'm looking at the similarities. Both leaders are/were facing dwindling public support. Both have territories that they believe belong to them and both have a population that has had years of indoctrination convincing them that the people living there really want to be liberated from their occupying governments. Argentinian soldiers were surprised by the amount of British citizens they encountered when they arrived in the Falklands. They were led to believe through years of indoctrination in the schools that the Falkland residents were Argentinians who desperately wanted to be liberated from the British.

I don't know much about the Chinese school system but I believe I am safe to assume they have been subject to the same type of indoctrination when it comes to Taiwan. Xi will be a national hero for reclaiming Taiwan and the CCP will not be able to remove him without looking like they are against China.


CBH99 said:


> Western countries will rush to find alternate suppliers for their goods, as none of them will want a trading relationship that supports what China is doing.
> 
> Western politicians will feed their fish what the fish want.  Big corporations will rush to set up factories in other countries nearby, western countries will freeze trade agreements & review such, and before you know it China has yet ANOTHER income problem.
> 
> 
> -  Western countries will use this as the excuse they’ve been blatantly searching for in excluding Chinese companies from bidding on projects that involve national security, re 5G networks.



I agree with RangerRay's take that money talks and western countries will turn a blind eye to the war and continue to produce goods in China. I am continually amazed at what western people will accept from China. Ugyhur genocide and concentration camps, Taking Canadians hostage (Two Michaels), Blatantly copying western designs without paying royalties, Pressuring Chinese people living in the west by threatening their family still in China. If these have not swayed them war with Taiwan will not.

I myself actively avoid Chinese made goods where possible because of this.

Remember IBM made the punch card computers the Nazi's used to sort the Jews and Russian prisoners determining which ones to exterminate and which ones to send to labour camps. I do believe they knew what the were being used for and agreed with it in principle.



CBH99 said:


> -  Taiwan is armed to the teeth.
> 
> Will China eventually succeed just in terms of sheer numbers?  Yes.  But at what cost?
> 
> China would lose AT LEAST dozens of aircraft, warships, transport ships, along with plenty of other military assets.
> 
> These are now assets that can’t be used until replaced (both hardware and trained operator) at a time when the US and Japan would be engaging Chinese forces also.  That’s a best case scenario for China too… having Australia, India, and South Korea jump into the fight would make things even worse.



China will succeed if the west does nothing! I believe the west will do nothing because the western people do not want war, they are too busy arguing about Covid issues while giving losers trophy's for showing up. So what if Taiwan becomes a part of China again, it was theirs before! Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland all over again. 

China will lie to the west that and say that they are only interested in reclaiming Taiwan and if allowed to do so they won't have to use their nukes or some other threat that scares the west more than the annexation of Taiwan. It worked for Hitler in the Sudetenland, it worked for Russia in Ukraine with Crimea.



Czech_pivo said:


> Remember, the Chinese play the long game and us the West have ADHD.  I completely agree about the flight of capital out of China and it becoming a pryha state but they can always turn to others for some of their needs to be meet - Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc.  It's almost like the situation with the Taliban in Af'stan - we have the watches but they have the time.....



The Chinese *HAVE* been playing the long game. They have been investing in cyber warfare and espionage for years now. China could very well have people in place in Taiwan that are in a position to prevent Taiwan reacting to a Chinese Invasion. They will likely shut down communications so the Taiwan military cannot coordinate their defense. Allowing them to just walk in and take the country.



MilEME09 said:


> Agreed, both sides have to thread the needle, but it's a much finer needle for China.



My observation is China doesn't thread needles, they do what they want and if you disagree with them they cry foul and take a tantrum kicking and screaming like a toddler. I.e. Trump's trade war with China.

In the early days of Covid they had the World Health Organization convincing country leaders that if they closed their borders to China it would be seen as racist and harm their trade with China. Meanwhile they used their pressure tactics to have Chinese nationals buy up masks and medical gear and ship it back to China. While also convincing Canada's government to donate supplies to them effectively draining our supplies and causing how many cases of Covid in Canada?

They are like a spoiled child and will take what they want to hell with whoever gets in their way.

World War Three is coming and it will start in China. It's just a matter of when!

Again this is just my $0.02 and what do I know?


----------



## Altair

Dana381 said:


> My observation is China doesn't thread needles, they do what they want and if you disagree with them they cry foul and take a tantrum kicking and screaming like a toddler. I.e. Trump's trade war with China.
> 
> In the early days of Covid they had the World Health Organization convincing country leaders that if they closed their borders to China it would be seen as racist and harm their trade with China. Meanwhile they used their pressure tactics to have Chinese nationals buy up masks and medical gear and ship it back to China. While also convincing Canada's government to donate supplies to them effectively draining our supplies and causing how many cases of Covid in Canada?
> 
> They are like a spoiled child and will take what they want to hell with whoever gets in their way.
> 
> World War Three is coming and it will start in China. It's just a matter of when!
> 
> Again this is just my $0.02 and what do I know?


If China didn't need to thread needles they would be bombing Taiwan right now.

The fact that they are not says they are playing it safe.

And Taiwan could win versus China with enough outside support. Modern anti Air missiles. Modern anti ship missiles. Stealth fighters. A large stockpile of medium sized and long range missiles.  Enough ammunition to last for a year under blockade. Doesn't really need boots on the ground, although that would help.


----------



## Dana381

Altair said:


> If China didn't need to thread needles they would be bombing Taiwan right now.
> 
> The fact that they are not says they are playing it safe.
> 
> And Taiwan could win versus China with enough outside support. Modern anti Air missiles. Modern anti ship missiles. Stealth fighters. A large stockpile of medium sized and long range missiles.  Enough ammunition to last for a year under blockade. Doesn't really need boots on the ground, although that would help.



I agree with you whole heartedly, Taiwan could win with enough support. I don't believe that support will be there when sh#t hits the fan!
The U.S has never publicly backed up Taiwan. I believe they are officially neutral.

I believe that China has been laying the ground work for an invasion for a while. And now they are testing defenses and gathering intel









						A Record-Setting 56 Chinese Warplanes Flew Into Taiwan's Air Defense Zone Today
					

A spike in Chinese aerial activity has seen almost 150 military aircraft sent into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone so far this month.




					www.thedrive.com


----------



## MilEME09

Dana381 said:


> I agree with you whole heartedly, Taiwan could win with enough support. I don't believe that support will be there when sh#t hits the fan!
> The U.S has never publicly backed up Taiwan. I believe they are officially neutral.
> 
> I believe that China has been laying the ground work for an invasion for a while. And now they are testing defenses and gathering intel
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A Record-Setting 56 Chinese Warplanes Flew Into Taiwan's Air Defense Zone Today
> 
> 
> A spike in Chinese aerial activity has seen almost 150 military aircraft sent into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone so far this month.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.thedrive.com


Officially the Taiwan relations act sets in stone the US commitment to defend the island. If they didnt, their would be no saving face and no one would take American treaty commitments seriously.


----------



## Dana381

> The Taiwan Relations Act does not guarantee the U.S. will intervene militarily if the PRC attacks or invades Taiwan nor does it relinquish it, as its primary purpose is to ensure the US's Taiwan policy will not be changed unilaterally by the president and ensure any decision to defend Taiwan will be made with the consent of Congress. The act states that "the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capabilities". However, the decision about the nature and quantity of defense services that America will provide to Taiwan is to be determined by the President and Congress. America's policy has been called "strategic ambiguity", and it is designed to dissuade Taiwan from a unilateral declaration of independence, and to dissuade the PRC from unilaterally unifying Taiwan with the PRC.[_citation needed_]
> 
> The act further stipulates that the United States will "consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States".
> 
> The act requires the United States to have a policy "to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character", and "to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan." Successive U.S. administrations have sold arms to Taiwan in compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act despite demands from the PRC that the U.S. follow the legally non-binding Three Joint Communiques and the U.S. government's proclaimed One-China policy (which differs from the PRC's interpretation of its one-China principle).


Above quote from Wikipedia.

U.S. does not say it will defend Taiwan just provide arms to Taiwan if they choose to buy them. It stops short of promising U.S military intervention. That gives the U.S. the out it needs to do nothing.

I stand corrected, they are not officially neutral. I was going by memory and that failed me again. I apologize.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Dana381 said:


> Your looking at the differences, I'm looking at the similarities. Both leaders are/were facing dwindling public support. Both have territories that they believe belong to them and both have a population that has had years of indoctrination convincing them that the people living there really want to be liberated from their occupying governments. Argentinian soldiers were surprised by the amount of British citizens they encountered when they arrived in the Falklands. They were led to believe through years of indoctrination in the schools that the Falkland residents were Argentinians who desperately wanted to be liberated from the British.
> 
> I don't know much about the Chinese school system but I believe I am safe to assume they have been subject to the same type of indoctrination when it comes to Taiwan. Xi will be a national hero for reclaiming Taiwan and the CCP will not be able to remove him without looking like they are against China.
> 
> 
> I agree with RangerRay's take that money talks and western countries will turn a blind eye to the war and continue to produce goods in China. I am continually amazed at what western people will accept from China. Ugyhur genocide and concentration camps, Taking Canadians hostage (Two Michaels), Blatantly copying western designs without paying royalties, Pressuring Chinese people living in the west by threatening their family still in China. If these have not swayed them war with Taiwan will not.
> 
> I myself actively avoid Chinese made goods where possible because of this.
> 
> Remember IBM made the punch card computers the Nazi's used to sort the Jews and Russian prisoners determining which ones to exterminate and which ones to send to labour camps. I do believe they knew what the were being used for and agreed with it in principle.
> 
> 
> 
> China will succeed if the west does nothing! I believe the west will do nothing because the western people do not want war, they are too busy arguing about Covid issues while giving losers trophy's for showing up. So what if Taiwan becomes a part of China again, it was theirs before! Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland all over again.
> 
> China will lie to the west that and say that they are only interested in reclaiming Taiwan and if allowed to do so they won't have to use their nukes or some other threat that scares the west more than the annexation of Taiwan. It worked for Hitler in the Sudetenland, it worked for Russia in Ukraine with Crimea.
> 
> 
> 
> The Chinese *HAVE* been playing the long game. They have been investing in cyber warfare and espionage for years now. China could very well have people in place in Taiwan that are in a position to prevent Taiwan reacting to a Chinese Invasion. They will likely shut down communications so the Taiwan military cannot coordinate their defense. Allowing them to just walk in and take the country.
> 
> 
> 
> My observation is China doesn't thread needles, they do what they want and if you disagree with them they cry foul and take a tantrum kicking and screaming like a toddler. I.e. Trump's trade war with China.
> 
> In the early days of Covid they had the World Health Organization convincing country leaders that if they closed their borders to China it would be seen as racist and harm their trade with China. Meanwhile they used their pressure tactics to have Chinese nationals buy up masks and medical gear and ship it back to China. While also convincing Canada's government to donate supplies to them effectively draining our supplies and causing how many cases of Covid in Canada?
> 
> They are like a spoiled child and will take what they want to hell with whoever gets in their way.
> 
> World War Three is coming and it will start in China. It's just a matter of when!
> 
> Again this is just my $0.02 and what do I know?


China has stepped up it's activity to wear down the Taiwanese forces, using military aircraft to intrude into their airspace. At sea Chinese dredging and fishing fleets violate the agreed upon territorial waters in mass numbers. First steps will be PRC swallowing the island close to the Mainland and seeing what the response is. Likely Taiwan is going to sacrifice those islands as they will be untenable and maintain it's forces to protect the main island. As for undercover agents, no doubt the PRC has placed them there and no doubt the Taiwanese know most of them and leave them alone so they can track them.


----------



## Altair

Colin Parkinson said:


> China has stepped up it's activity to wear down the Taiwanese forces, using military aircraft to intrude into their airspace. At sea Chinese dredging and fishing fleets violate the agreed upon territorial waters in mass numbers. First steps will be PRC swallowing the island close to the Mainland and seeing what the response is. Likely Taiwan is going to sacrifice those islands as they will be untenable and maintain it's forces to protect the main island. As for undercover agents, no doubt the PRC has placed them there and no doubt the Taiwanese know most of them and leave them alone so they can track them.


If I was Taiwan I would be making those islands the most hard to invade fortresses just to give the Chinese a hint of what's to come if they hit the main island.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Colin Parkinson said:


> China has stepped up it's activity to wear down the Taiwanese forces, using military aircraft to intrude into their airspace. At sea Chinese dredging and fishing fleets violate the agreed upon territorial waters in mass numbers. First steps will be PRC swallowing the island close to the Mainland and seeing what the response is. Likely Taiwan is going to sacrifice those islands as they will be untenable and maintain it's forces to protect the main island. As for undercover agents, no doubt the PRC has placed them there and no doubt the Taiwanese know most of them and leave them alone so they can track them.



I'm sorry but you have been misled, Comrade. It's the Taiwanese who are spying on China 


China uses new tactic in campaign against Taiwan with spy accusations​
TAIPEI (Reuters) - China has opened a new front in its pressure campaign against Taiwan with a series of spying allegations and confessions aired on state television, denounced on the democratic island as entrapment and another reason for people to fear visiting China.

China views Taiwan as its sovereign territory and has stepped up a campaign to assert its claim, including sending fighter jets near the island.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen says the island will not provoke but will defend itself.

Starting on Sunday evening, Chinese state television has been showing what it says are detained Taiwanese spies who have been operating in China, and confessing to their crimes.

China, under its Thunder-2020 campaign, has cracked hundreds of cases orchestrated by Taiwan’s intelligence forces to “infiltrate and damage” and set up a network of spies, state television said.

The Global Times, a widely read Chinese tabloid run by the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, said on Wednesday the revelations were a warning to “Taiwan separatist forces”.









						China uses new tactic in campaign against Taiwan with spy accusations
					

China has opened a new front in its pressure campaign against Taiwan with a series of spying allegations and confessions aired on state television, denounced on the democratic island as entrapment and another reason for people to fear visiting China.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## MilEME09

They both play that game back and forth, only China has a temper tantrum when caught


----------



## The Bread Guy

Latest tea leaves to be read ....
*"China's Xi vows 'reunification' with Taiwan, but holds off threatening force"* (Reuters)


> ... Speaking at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Xi said the Chinese people have a "glorious tradition" of opposing separatism.
> 
> "Taiwan independence separatism is the biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland, and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation," he said on the anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the last imperial dynasty in 1911.
> 
> Peaceful "reunification" best meets the overall interests of the Taiwanese people, but China will protect its sovereignty and unity, he added ...


*"Xi stresses peaceful reunification, calls Taiwan secessionists 'serious threat' to national rejuvenation"* (CHN Communist Party media, links to archived version)


> ... National reunification by peaceful means best serves the interests of the Chinese nation as a whole, including compatriots in Taiwan, Xi remarked at the gathering.
> 
> "Compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits should stand on the right side of history and join hands to achieve China's complete reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," Xi said.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Xi delivered very strong and sharp remarks with a clear message to "Taiwan independence" secessionists, Yok Mu-ming, former president of the pro-reunification New Party of Taiwan, told the Global Times on Saturday.
> 
> "If those secessionists don't stop, the mainland will take relevant measures," Yok said. Yok even predicted that the Taiwan question "will be resolved within two years."
> 
> He also mentioned on his personal social media accounts earlier that the deadline for solving the Taiwan question will be 2024. "Hopefully, we'll embrace the reunification and the national rejuvenation together." ...


----------



## daftandbarmy

MilEME09 said:


> They both play that game back and forth, only China has a temper tantrum when caught



More reasons to be extra vigilant these days:


"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

- Leonard H. Courtney


----------



## MilEME09

It would appear the domestic issues keep increasing for the CCP,  climate disasters causing more and more damage. This can also explain the increased attention on Taiwan and the south China sea. By focusing on external factors to distract the people from internal problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they invaded in order to prop up domestic support


----------



## Dana381

MilEME09 said:


> It would appear the domestic issues keep increasing for the CCP,  climate disasters causing more and more damage. This can also explain the increased attention on Taiwan and the south China sea. By focusing on external factors to distract the people from internal problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they invaded in order to prop up domestic support



 Rat's are unpredictable when backed into a corner or facing being ousted from their party!

An attack on Taiwan becomes more likely as Xi's position in the CCP becomes more threatened.


----------



## MilEME09

China Vows To Take Control Of Taiwan, Sparking International Fears Of War
					

After a week of violating Taiwanese airspace and posturing in a threatening manner, China's fearless leader has vowed to reunify Taiwan with the rest of China.




					funker530.com
				




Xi Jinping in latest speech vows to take control of Taiwan. Sounds like war to me


----------



## daftandbarmy

MilEME09 said:


> China Vows To Take Control Of Taiwan, Sparking International Fears Of War
> 
> 
> After a week of violating Taiwanese airspace and posturing in a threatening manner, China's fearless leader has vowed to reunify Taiwan with the rest of China.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> funker530.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Xi Jinping in latest speech vows to take control of Taiwan. Sounds like war to me



Well, the article's author is a former USMC machine gunner so it might just be wishful thinking


----------



## CBH99

Dana381 said:


> The U.S has never publicly backed up Taiwan. I believe they are officially neutral.
> 
> I believe that China has been laying the ground work for an invasion for a while. And now they are testing defenses and gathering intel


Never underestimate the power of underhanded diplomacy, proxy states, false flag operations, or provoking a response while acting surprised at said response, etc. 

Japan has vowed to intervene if China invades Taiwan.  Japan’s military, while ‘defensive in nature’ due to treaty obligations, shouldn’t be remotely underestimated.  

The US, by Treaty, is obligated to defend Japan if it were to be attacked.  (Hence the stationing of substantial assets in Japan.)

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the US uses this arrangement to get involved, officially, if things kick off.  



You also say the US has never officially backed Taiwan.  Not true.  

The US recently approved the sale of advanced F-16’s, an upgrade package for Taiwan’s F-16 fleet, as well as a variety of other arms sales.  

The US actively supports Taiwan with sales/upgrade packages, as well as US SOF instructing Taiwanese military.  (Just recently made public, China not too happy about it.)

The US also regularly sails ships through the Taiwan Straight to exercise Freedom of the Seas.  It is also very much a show of force, and is a reminder to China that America is around.   



All of your points are solid though Dana381.  It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds.   🍻


----------



## Good2Golf

Dana381 said:


> Taiwanese Microchip Production Analysis - LinkIf it fails I think your right. If successful however I could see him gaining much popularity amongst the CCP.
> 
> During the Falklands war Galtieri was a hero when the invasion succeeded but ended up ousted because he couldn't hold onto it.
> 
> The China/Taiwan affair may play out similar. China's history of war with the west has ended with draws (Korea/Vietnam). If they do decide to attack Taiwan they will fully expect to get away with it and I don't think the west has the political will to stop them.
> 
> Think Afghanistan; very little political backlash for pulling out and handing the country back to a terrorist regime that at least in part was responsible for an attack on American soil.
> 
> The American military kept it secret till today that they have been in Taiwan for a year now. They knew that it would be too unpopular back home.
> 
> If China Invades Taiwan in my opinion the majority of people in the west will not support their militaries backing Taiwan in a war. They will be afraid of WWIII with China. Too many Neville Chamberlains that will accept China's lies for fear of all out war.
> 
> Just my $0.02



This is essentially all about _semiconductors_.

Taiwan will not be another Afghanistan.  Taiwan is responsible for a massive share of global chip production and I don’t think the West (or at least the US) has any intention to let China de facto control global chip production.   

The quote below in yellow says it all…

Link



> Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry
> 
> At the foundation of today’s technology, semiconductors have been regarded as the “new oil” of the 21st century. Omnipresent in our daily life (ranging from mobile phones, to cars and fighter jets), the semiconductor industry is becoming a crucial element of national security, moving beyond matters related to global trade.
> 
> Taiwan holds a near monopoly in this security-related product. Responsible for 63% of global semiconductor market share, Taiwan lies at the heart of the semiconductor industry, reaching an output value of 3 trillion NTD in 2020 (107.53 billion USD). As a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (臺灣積體電路製造公司,TSMC) accounts for 54% of the global semiconductor market share. The demand for the chips below 10 nm (the most advanced chips available thus far) is towering and is estimated to become the largest portion of monthly installed capacity share in 2024. Currently, in the global market of chips below 10 nanometers, TSMC is the major supplier (accounting for 84% of the pure foundry revenue in 2020). The only competitor producing chips below 10 nm is Samsung of South Korea with a 14% of pure foundry revenue in 2020. So far, the major clients of TSMC, such as China and the US, do not have the capacity to produce their own advanced semiconductors. As a result, Taiwan has become an indispensable link in the global production of semiconductors.
> 
> 
> 
> Geopolitical Significance
> 
> The geopolitical significance of semiconductors can best be illustrated by a quote from Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security: _“Whoever controls the design and production of these microchips, they will set the course for the 21st century.”_ As the primary semiconductor supplier to the US and China, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry plays a vital role on the global scene from a geopolitical perspective. Up to 90% of the semiconductors applied by US technological companies – including Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm – rely on Taiwanese manufacturing. According to estimations by the US Semiconductor Industry Association, a complete disruption of the global semiconductor supply chain would cause a 490 billion USD annual loss in revenue for global electronic device producers worldwide. Therefore, in order to secure the supply of semiconductors, the US has a growing incentive to safeguard Taiwan’s status and prevent heavy economic and political costs to be borne by the US and the rest of the world.
> 
> Furthermore, China’s reliance on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry may have China think twice and refrain from using military force against Taiwan in the short term. Taiwan’s outsized influence can serve as a “silicon shield”, as coined by Craig Addison in _Silicon Shield: Taiwan’s Protection Against Chinese Attack_. In it, Addison claims that the rising importance of Taiwan in the global semiconductor supply chain may deter China from military action in the near future. To maintain this “shield”, Taiwan would need to stay ahead of its competitors, to keep its indispensable position in the global semiconductor supply chain and preserve its competitive advantage.
> 
> In particular, Taiwan’s geopolitical significance has been highlighted during the semiconductor shortage caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a letter to Mei Hua Wang (Taiwan’s Minister of Economy) in February 2021, Peter Altmaier (Germany’s Minister of Economy) urged Taiwan to boost its production of semiconductors, emphasising the severe consequences faced by the German automotive industry due to the scarcity of these components.


----------



## Dana381

Interesting read G2G, 

I did not know Taiwan had such a huge share in semiconductors. Certainly would make both sides much more interested in Taiwan.  It gives the U.S. a self protection reason to help Taiwan which might tip the balance in their favour. We will see.


----------



## Czech_pivo

I’m still of the belief to expect the CCP to feint one way but move the other. 
Bullies never, ever like to take on a foe that is willing to put up enough of a fight that the Bully could lose outright or take enough of a beating to lose all street cred. To me that is the CCP - Taiwan scenario. I’d look for the CCP pick some other much lower hanging fruit - more seizing of islets in the 9 dash zone, maybe bullying the Philippines and seizing a few of their claimed islets. The Philippines is sort of a de-facto US protectorate and by doing so makes the US look weak in their eyes. 
I still think the puppet in NK will have a role to play in all of this.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Taiwan's latest take ....

_*"Tsai pledges to defend Taiwan amid China threat in National Day speech"*_  (Taiwan news agency)
_*"Tsai Ing-wen says Taiwan must ‘resist annexation’ – a day after Xi Jinping’s call for reunification"*_  (South China Morning Post)
_*"Taiwan will not 'bow to pressure' from China after 'reunification' calls"*_  (United Press International)
_*"Taiwan rejects China’s ‘path’ amid show of military force"*_  (Associated Press)
_*"Taiwan president says island does not seek military confrontation* -- But amid rising tensions with China, Tsai Ing-wen says island will do what is necessary to defend itself ..."_  (Al Jazeera English)
_*"China-Taiwan tensions: We will not bow to Beijing pressure, says leader"*_  (BBC)
_*"China slams Tsai Ing-wen's speech, says China must be reunified" *_(CHN state media - links to archived article, not to CHN server)


----------



## Fishbone Jones

With his recent Afghan debacle, his implied ties to Red China, his socialist views and the current state of US politics, I don't think biden would do a single thing to help Taiwan against the ChiComs.


----------



## CBH99

Fishbone Jones said:


> With his recent Afghan debacle, his implied ties to Red China, his socialist views and the current state of US politics, I don't think biden would do a single thing to help Taiwan against the ChiComs.


The tricky part, and the part I’m genuinely enjoying while reading this thread, is that there are solid reasons for whichever course of action one thinks would happen.  

Wars are great for national unity, and to bring people together to focus on a common enemy.  We shouldn’t forget how valuable of a tool that can be.  

Wars are great for the economy.  The US may be doing better economically than it was a few years ago, but I’ve learned to never be surprised at how much money the US is willing to give defence contractors.  

The ‘arms industry’ truly is a huge part of the economy… manufacturing planes, helicopters, vehicles, missiles, etc.  Uniforms, kit, construction/maintenance of infrastructure, local economies supported by military presence, increased enrolment in college/university, increased enrolment in high-tech educational programs, R&D funding, etc etc.   

It truly is an investment on that side of the border.  


So I really see it going either way.  Either instant engagement, or slower engagement via proxy engagements.  (I.e., Japan gets involved, and the US gets involved to protect Japan.)

But I can’t imagine the US sitting by and doing nothing.  Not after a decade + of loudly vocalizing their support for Taiwan’s independence.  


0.02


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Meanwhile, pass the popcorn. I await the massed protests outside of the Chinese Consulate in Vancouver by the "Climate Activists"


----------



## Altair

CBH99 said:


> The tricky part, and the part I’m genuinely enjoying while reading this thread, is that there are solid reasons for whichever course of action one thinks would happen.
> 
> Wars are great for national unity, and to bring people together to focus on a common enemy.  We shouldn’t forget how valuable of a tool that can be.
> 
> Wars are great for the economy.  The US may be doing better economically than it was a few years ago, but I’ve learned to never be surprised at how much money the US is willing to give defence contractors.
> 
> The ‘arms industry’ truly is a huge part of the economy… manufacturing planes, helicopters, vehicles, missiles, etc.  Uniforms, kit, construction/maintenance of infrastructure, local economies supported by military presence, increased enrolment in college/university, increased enrolment in high-tech educational programs, R&D funding, etc etc.
> 
> It truly is an investment on that side of the border.
> 
> 
> So I really see it going either way.  Either instant engagement, or slower engagement via proxy engagements.  (I.e., Japan gets involved, and the US gets involved to protect Japan.)
> 
> But I can’t imagine the US sitting by and doing nothing.  Not after a decade + of loudly vocalizing their support for Taiwan’s independence.
> 
> 
> 0.02


especially not after using the pivot to the pacific as their reasoning for leaving Afghanistan amongst other things. 

This seems to be a bi partisan consensus in America that China is the next target of american foreign policy.


----------



## MilEME09

Colin Parkinson said:


> Meanwhile, pass the popcorn. I await the massed protests outside of the Chinese Consulate in Vancouver by the "Climate Activists"


Let's just cut off thermal coal to China, pretty sure we can bring a death blow to the PRC if planned right. Their economy is hurting, we make it worse and the people will turn on the CPC.


----------



## daftandbarmy

MilEME09 said:


> Let's just cut off thermal coal to China, pretty sure we can bring a death blow to the PRC if planned right. Their economy is hurting, we make it worse and the people will turn on the CPC.



Hmmmm.... where have I heard of that 'cutting an Asian super power off from their key energy supply' thing before?

Oh, I remember now:

Events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor​

Japan's fear of being colonized and the government's expansionist policies led to its own Imperialism in Asia and Pacific in order to join the Great Powers, which only constituted of white nations. The Japanese government saw the need to be a colonial power to be modern, therefore, Western.[1][2] In addition, series of racist laws fanned further resentment in Japan. These laws enforced segregation and barring Japanese (and often Chinese) from citizenship, land ownership and immigration.[2]

Over the next decade, Japan expanded slowly into China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all imports into China, including war supplies purchased from the U.S. This move prompted the United States to embargo all oil exports, leading the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) to estimate it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining and to support the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. Planning had been underway for some time on an attack on the "Southern Resource Area" to add it to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Japan envisioned in the Pacific.






						Events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## Altair

I'm always surprised Russia doesn't export more coal to China. 

China needs more and Russia has tons. I'm assuming its a lack of infrastructure in the Russian far east.


----------



## Good2Golf

Hardly are reason to not consider “economic persuasion.”  If CCP is goings to go ‘full-crazy’ anyway, perhaps having a domestic energy shortage that influences the people might make them consider options. Xi Jinping isn’t Kim Yong Un…yet…


----------



## Colin Parkinson

It was Kuwait not wanting to give Saddam some time and loan forgiveness that lead to GW1. Concur with D&B, don't box them in, but don't help them either.


----------



## OldSolduer

Altair said:


> I'm always surprised Russia doesn't export more coal to China.
> 
> China needs more and Russia has tons. I'm assuming its a lack of infrastructure in the Russian far east.


Could be that Russians and the Chinese don't always play well together.


----------



## Czech_pivo

OldSolduer said:


> Could be that Russians and the Chinese don't always play well together.


The Russian's don't like or trust the Chinese. They are nervous about their backyard suddenly having a large number of unwanted guests appearing.


----------



## Altair

OldSolduer said:


> Could be that Russians and the Chinese don't always play well together.


Ya, it's weird.

The world's second largest coal reserves after Australia is Russia.

A large chunk of it in the Russian far east.

From a business point of view its a no brainer. Unless Russia is worried about investing to exploit it and have to China suddenly move to other sources of energy.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Altair said:


> Ya, it's weird.
> 
> The world's second largest coal reserves after Australia is Russia.
> 
> A large chunk of it in the Russian far east.
> 
> From a business point of view its a no brainer. Unless Russia is worried about investing to exploit it and have to China suddenly move to other sources of energy.


Many Chinese _*believe*_ that the so-called 'Russian Far East' is Asian and that it should not be part of European (barbaric) Russia. Some Chinese scholars/commentators believe that China should act (interesting word, "ac") to persuade the Asian peoples of Siberia to come independent.

The Russians, for their part, KNOW that the Chinese despise them ABD that China covets the resources and, above all, water in the "Russian Far East."

Russia and China can be fair-weather-friends when it suits them, but, even in 2008, when Russia wanted to destabilize the US dollars, the Chinese put their own interests ahead of hurting the USA.


----------



## JLB50

In 1969 the Soviet Union and China fought a series of skirmishes over an area of the far east that was controlled by the Soviet Union but claimed by China.  It involved tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of troops on both sides and resulted in deaths probably numbering in the thousands. We'lll never know for sure the total number of casualties as China has suppressed much of the information  on what really happened.  Supposedly Chinese troops were poised to invade and to penetrate far into Siberia and to cut the Russian supply lines.   

Expecting that was going to happen and realizing that much of Russia's far eastern lands could be lost TTYL the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. met with the young administration of President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and said that the Soviet Union was planning what amounted to a full scale nuclear strike on China itself, including major cities.  Kissinger replied that the U.S. had hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in South Vietnam and South Korea who would then be exposed to nuclear fallout, which would then necessitate a military response by the U.S. against the Soviets.  Kissinger then strongly urged the ambassador to settle with China over land claims. And eventually the Russians and the Chinese did reach a settlement on some of the most contentious land claims although many differences still exist on both sides.  What very nearly became a total war helped spur the United States to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China.  

The 1969 conflict was not the only one.  As others here have stated, major differences between Russia and China go back a long, long time and probably will continue well into the future.


----------



## Kirkhill

Afghanistan and China.  Taliban, Uighurs, Sunni, Shia, Han, Turks, Persians and Arabs. Oh my!




			https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2021-10-14/afghanistan-quagmire-threatens-to-lure-in-china


----------



## OldSolduer

Kirkhill said:


> Afghanistan and China.  Taliban, Uighurs, Sunni, Shia, Han, Turks, Persians and Arabs. Oh my!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2021-10-14/afghanistan-quagmire-threatens-to-lure-in-china


We have a Kazakh working here - he looks totally Asian.


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-warships-taiwan-strait-1.6214303
		


Oh my guess we are passing off the red panda


----------



## daftandbarmy

MilEME09 said:


> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-warships-taiwan-strait-1.6214303
> 
> 
> 
> Oh my guess we are passing off the red panda



And the retaliation:

Hong Kong bans Air Canada passenger flights from Vancouver for 2 weeks due to COVID-19 exposure​


			https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/hong-kong-vancouver-passenger-ban-oct-1.6214465


----------



## SeaKingTacco

daftandbarmy said:


> And the retaliation:
> 
> Hong Kong bans Air Canada passenger flights from Vancouver for 2 weeks due to COVID-19 exposure​
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/hong-kong-vancouver-passenger-ban-oct-1.6214465


Well that is lucky for us.…

Maybe we need to up the “health and safety inspections“ of Chinese owned vessels in Vancouver. Can’t be too careful…


----------



## OldSolduer

MilEME09 said:


> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-warships-taiwan-strait-1.6214303
> 
> 
> 
> Oh my guess we are passing off the red panda



Don’t piss off Red Pandas, that is Stelli’s favourite animal grrrrr


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Edward Campbell said:


> Many Chinese _*believe*_ that the so-called 'Russian Far East' is Asian and that it should not be part of European (barbaric) Russia. Some Chinese scholars/commentators believe that China should act (interesting word, "ac") to persuade the Asian peoples of Siberia to come independent.
> 
> The Russians, for their part, KNOW that the Chinese despise them ABD that China covets the resources and, above all, water in the "Russian Far East."
> 
> Russia and China can be fair-weather-friends when it suits them, but, even in 2008, when Russia wanted to destabilize the US dollars, the Chinese put their own interests ahead of hurting the USA.


There is a book you might like to read The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale Of Espionage, The Silk Road, And The Rise Of Modern Chi...

_On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Czar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty''s sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last czarist agent in the so–called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China''s modernization, from education reform and foreign investment to Tibet''s struggle for independence.

On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boards that same train, intent on following in Mannerheim''s footsteps. Initially banned from China, Tamm devises a cover and retraces Mannerheim''s route across the Silk Road, discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago.

Along the way, Tamm offers piercing insights into China''s past that raise troubling questions about its future. Can the Communist Party truly open China to the outside world yet keep Western ideas such as democracy and freedom at bay, just as Qing officials mistakenly believed? What can reform during the late Qing Dynasty teach us about the spectacular transformation of China today? As Confucius once wrote, "Study the past if you would divine the future," and that is just what Tamm does in The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds._


----------



## MarkOttawa

Colin Parkinson said:


> There is a book you might like to read The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale Of Espionage, The Silk Road, And The Rise Of Modern Chi...
> 
> _On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Czar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty''s sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last czarist agent in the so–called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China''s modernization, from education reform and foreign investment to Tibet''s struggle for independence.
> 
> On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boards that same train, intent on following in Mannerheim''s footsteps. Initially banned from China, Tamm devises a cover and retraces Mannerheim''s route across the Silk Road, discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago.
> 
> Along the way, Tamm offers piercing insights into China''s past that raise troubling questions about its future. Can the Communist Party truly open China to the outside world yet keep Western ideas such as democracy and freedom at bay, just as Qing officials mistakenly believed? What can reform during the late Qing Dynasty teach us about the spectacular transformation of China today? As Confucius once wrote, "Study the past if you would divine the future," and that is just what Tamm does in The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds._


Have read, excellent book. The bit on the cover illustrates how Tamm was prescient about repression of ethnic minorities, esp. Uyghurs of Xinjiang; remember at the time of von Mannerheim's trip (quite a fellow) the Han grip on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) was much weaker and Tibet was effectively independent.



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## The Bread Guy

MilEME09 said:


> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-warships-taiwan-strait-1.6214303
> 
> 
> 
> Oh my guess we are passing off the red panda


Next ....


> A group of 10 naval vessels from China and Russia sailed through a strait separating Japan's main island and its northern island of Hokkaido on Monday, the Japanese government said, adding that it is closely watching such activities.
> 
> It was the first time Japan has confirmed the passage of Chinese and Russian naval vessels sailing together through the Tsugaru Strait, which separates the Sea of Japan from the Pacific ...


----------



## Colin Parkinson

A response was expected, this sort of response is ok as no one gets killed and lots of opportunity to gather intelligence data.


----------



## Kirkhill

> MELBOURNE, Australia – China has for the first time showed off retired 1950s era fighter jets that have been converted to unmanned drones, with satellite photos of two of its east coast bases near Taiwan showing a large number of the jets on site.












						China shows off drones recycled from Soviet-era fighter jets
					

China has for the first time showed off retired 1950s era fighter jets that have been converted to unmanned drones, with satellite photos of two of its east coast bases near Taiwan showing a large number of the jets on site.




					www.defensenews.com


----------



## daftandbarmy

Chinese airshow offers glimpse at military’s new drones​By Mike Yeo
 Thursday, Sep 30


MELBOURNE, Australia – China has put a number of operational and prototype unmanned aircraft designs on display at the ongoing Zhuhai Airshow, giving an insight to its increasingly wide range of unmanned systems in service.

These include fast, air-launched reconnaissance systems and stealthy unmanned combat air vehicles, or UCAVs, that are already in service with the country’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). The exhibit highlights the effort China’s defense industry has made to broaden the types of drones the military has fielded.

Among the types on display is the Guizhou Aircraft Industry Corporation WZ-7 Xianglong – “Soaring Dragon” – high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft. An example was present at the show’s static display while a second airframe was on display at the booth of state-owned aerospace and defense conglomerate Aviation Industry Corporation of China, or AVIC.

This is an unmanned reconnaissance type (WZ stands for Wu Zhen, which is short for “unmanned reconnaissance,, and is powered by a single, domestically produced turbojet engine believed to have been derived from a Russian design.










						Chinese airshow offers glimpse at military’s new drones
					

China has put a number of operational and prototype unmanned aircraft designs on display at the ongoing Zhuhai Airshow, giving an insight to its increasingly wide range of unmanned systems in service.




					www.defensenews.com


----------



## Dana381

The White House Had to Row Back Biden's Comments After He Suggested the US Would Defend Taiwan From an Attack by China
					

A White House spokesperson subsequently said the president's comments on Taiwan had not signaled a shift in policy.




					sofrep.com
				




The U.S government can't seem to decide if they will defend Taiwan or not.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Lot of uproar about this:

Questions Linger Over China’s Reported Hypersonic Space Weapon Test​
"There are a lot of things that are in the realms of feasibility and [...] we need to worry about that," Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said.​
In the wake of a hair-raising report of a secret Chinese hypersonic space weapons test, a denial by the Chinese government, and doubly vague public remarks from the US Air Force chief, security observers have been left this week with more questions than answers about what exactly may have circled the planet just weeks ago and how big of a threat it could be to US security.

It also has prompted larger questions about the state of strategic nuclear stability, but that complex issue warrants a story on its own.

For now, perhaps of greatest concern in the long run for US-China relations, a number of analysts said, is that the dearth of factual information about the test seems to be fueling the growing trend within US national security circles of seeing Beijing’s actions through a worst-case lens.


Dana381 said:


> The White House Had to Row Back Biden's Comments After He Suggested the US Would Defend Taiwan From an Attack by China
> 
> 
> A White House spokesperson subsequently said the president's comments on Taiwan had not signaled a shift in policy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> sofrep.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The U.S government can't seem to decide if they will defend Taiwan or not.


That's why the policy is called "strategic ambiguity" :








						'Strategic Ambiguity' on Taiwan Apparent as White House Walks Back Biden Comments
					

After the president says the US is committed to defending the island, Beijing warns the US against encouraging Taiwan independence




					www.voanews.com
				




Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Fishbone Jones

*"and is powered by a single, domestically produced turbojet engine believed to have been derived from a Russian design."*

Sounds like PC speak for 'Yeah, we stole the design and reverse engineered it'


----------



## MilEME09

Preparing for war with China over Taiwan: Full Comment with Anthony Furey
					

Beijing’s threats to invade Taiwan are getting serious. Military tensions are ramping up. And a war — perhaps even a Third World War — is not out of the…




					nationalpost.com
				




If, and that is a big if we a headed to armed conflict with China, if it some how stays non-nuclear, it would likely become the bloodiest war we will ever see for generations.


----------



## Czech_pivo

Anyone have a read of this?  The timing would have been very close to when the new AOPS Harry DeWolf would be in the area.  Just another reminder that we need to get our kit in order.









						Coast Guard encountered Chinese warships in the Aleutians in August
					

The Coast Guard encountered a flotilla of Chinese warships 46 miles off the Aleutian Islands at the end of August, inside of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone.




					www.alaskapublic.org
				





An article written after the above occurred.  Again, we need to be a part of the conversation and the solution on this with the Americans.  Its a long, lonely ride from Esquimalt through the Aleutians to finally reach our new AOPS stompings grounds in the western end of the North West Passage.









						Is China worried about an Arctic choke point?
					

Four Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy ships recently deployed to the waters off Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Jeremy Greenwood examines whether Beijing might be concerned that the narrow Bering Strait could be a choke point for its access to the Arctic.




					www.brookings.edu
				




"Beijing highlighted the importance of access to the region, stating, “The utilization of sea routes and exploration and development of the resources in the Arctic may have a huge impact on the energy strategy and economic development of China,"

“China sees itself not only as having interests in the Arctic but also as being on course — over the period from 2015 to 2030 — to become a ‘polar great power.’” For that, the Bering Strait is essential."

"Chinese polar research icebreaker, _Xuelong 2_, was also deployed in the Arctic, just north of Alaska, and transited the Bering Strait on its way home around the same time of this deployment."  _*- 'just north of Alaska' *- so basically at the entrance to the western gate for the North West Passage....again, was any of this covered in the Canadian media 6-8 weeks aga, oh no, we were too busy having a completely useless Federal Election!!!_


----------



## KevinB

New variants of Chinese stealth fighters break cover
					

Two new variants of China’s stealth fighters have broken cover in the past three days, including China’s next carrier-based fighter, hinted at during a recent air show.




					www.defensenews.com
				




and perhaps more concerning...









						China could invade Taiwan ‘soon,’ says former Australian PM Abbott
					

A former Australian prime minister said Friday he thinks China could “soon” invade Taiwan or otherwise escalate and that the West should now be planning its military and economic response.




					www.defensenews.com


----------



## MilEME09

Chinese debt crisis worsening


----------



## Czech_pivo

MilEME09 said:


> Chinese debt crisis worsening


There will be a tipping point sooner or later. The markets will turn south very quickly when the time comes.


----------



## Czech_pivo

Edward Campbell said:


> Many Chinese _*believe*_ that the so-called 'Russian Far East' is Asian and that it should not be part of European (barbaric) Russia. Some Chinese scholars/commentators believe that China should act (interesting word, "ac") to persuade the Asian peoples of Siberia to come independent.
> 
> The Russians, for their part, KNOW that the Chinese despise them ABD that China covets the resources and, above all, water in the "Russian Far East."
> 
> Russia and China can be fair-weather-friends when it suits them, but, even in 2008, when Russia wanted to destabilize the US dollars, the Chinese put their own interests ahead of hurting the USA.


I just  placed an order for this book on Amazon.  _Always open to more suggestions on good books_.  Here's one that I've recently picked up but haven't the chance to read as I'm still going through "Galicia Division" by Michael Logusz - *'The Invention of Russia, the rise of Putin and the age of fake news'* by Arkady Ostrovsky.


----------



## CBH99

Czech_pivo said:


> I just  placed an order for this book on Amazon.  _Always open to more suggestions on good books_.  Here's one that I've recently picked up but haven't the chance to read as I'm still going through "Galicia Division" by Michael Logusz - *'The Invention of Russia, the rise of Putin and the age of fake news'* by Arkady Ostrovsky.


How is it?  May pick it up over the weekend


----------



## CBH99

KevinB said:


> New variants of Chinese stealth fighters break cover
> 
> 
> Two new variants of China’s stealth fighters have broken cover in the past three days, including China’s next carrier-based fighter, hinted at during a recent air show.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.defensenews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> and perhaps more concerning...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China could invade Taiwan ‘soon,’ says former Australian PM Abbott
> 
> 
> A former Australian prime minister said Friday he thinks China could “soon” invade Taiwan or otherwise escalate and that the West should now be planning its military and economic response.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.defensenews.com


I’ve been somewhat confused as of late, when I see articles with similar titles, which state that China may ‘soon’ be ready to invade. 

If China wanted to invade tomorrow, they could.  

No?


----------



## Edward Campbell

CBH99 said:


> I’ve been somewhat confused as of late, when I see articles with similar titles, which state that China may ‘soon’ be ready to invade.
> 
> If China wanted to invade tomorrow, they could.
> 
> No?


As many much wiser and more experienced people than I will tell you, the two most complex and dangerous operations in war are:

1. An airborne assault ~ against anything, it gets worse if there are air defences; and

2. An amphibious landing, especially against a defended locality.

The only ways to invade Taiwan are by air and/or sea. Taiwan is not a weakling. It is modern air defences and it plans and trains to meet and defeat an amphibious assault.

I was impressed, ten to 30 years ago when I used to visit China on a fairly regular basis, on how much the People's Liberation Army (Navy and Army) seemed to be improving in professionalism but there is a nagging question: can you buy skill? The PLA has a lot of shiny new equipment and it is, now, a large professional force but I still wonder if it is ready and able to undertake either, much less both of the two most complex operations in war.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

MilEME09 said:


> Chinese debt crisis worsening


Australia stopped importing aluminium from China for ship building due to poor quality and impurities.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Edward Campbell said:


> As many much wiser and more experienced people than I will tell you, the two most complex and dangerous operations in war are:
> 
> 1. An airborne assault ~ against anything, it gets worse if there are air defences; and
> 
> 2. An amphibious landing, especially against a defended locality.
> 
> The only ways to invade Taiwan are by air and/or sea. Taiwan is not a weakling. It is modern air defences and it plans and trains to meet and defeat an amphibious assault.
> 
> I was impressed, ten to 30 years ago when I used to visit China on a fairly regular basis, on how much the People's Liberation Army (Navy and Army) seemed to be improving in professionalism but there is a nagging question: can you buy skill? The PLA has a lot of shiny new equipment and it is, now, a large professional force but I still wonder if it is ready and able to undertake either, much less both of the two most complex operations in war.




Which is why the Chinese prefer an indirect approach, IIRC:


Why China-Taiwan Relations Are So Tense​
*How has China tried to intimidate Taiwan?*​China has employed a variety of coercive tactics short of armed conflict, and it has ramped up these measures since Tsai’s election in 2016. Its objective is to wear down Taiwan and prompt the island’s people to conclude that their best option is unification with the mainland. To that end, China has increased the frequency and scale of patrols of PLA bombers, fighter jets, and surveillance aircraft over and around Taiwan. It has also increasingly sails its warships and aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait in shows of force.

Taiwan has reported that thousands of cyberattacks from China target its government agencies every day. These attacks have soared in recent years. In 2020, Taipei accused four Chinese groups of hacking into at least ten Taiwanese government agencies and six thousand official email accounts since 2018 to try to access government data and personal information.

Beijing has also used nonmilitary measures to pressure Taiwan. In 2016, China suspended a cross-strait communication mechanism with the main Taiwan liaison office. It restricted tourism to Taiwan, and the number of mainland tourists visiting Taiwan has fallen from a high of over 4 million in 2015 to 2.7 million in 2019. China has also pressured global corporations, including airlines and hotel chains, to list Taiwan as a Chinese province. 

*Has Beijing undermined Taiwan’s democracy?*​ In addition to the tactics described above, China has ramped up interference in Taiwan’s elections. Its methods include spreading disinformation on social media and increasing its control over Taiwanese media outlets. In the 2020 election, for example, China spread disinformation in an apparent effort to damage Tsai and boost the KMT’s presidential candidate. Such efforts are part of China’s larger strategy of employing coercion to erode trust in Taiwan’s political system and sow divisions in Taiwanese society. However, experts view the DPP’s success in recent elections, including Tsai’s reelection in 2020, as a rebuke of Beijing.

Taiwan’s democracy is relatively young. The KMT governed under martial law from 1949 to 1987. During that time, political dissent was harshly repressed and Taiwanese who had long inhabited the island before 1945 faced discrimination. Taiwan held its first free legislative elections in 1992 and its first presidential elections in 1996. Since then, it has peacefully transferred power between parties several times.

Despite Chinese threats, Taiwan appears to have so far bucked the trend of backsliding afflicting democracies around the world. In 2020, the_ Economist_’s Democracy Index [PDF] labeled Taiwan a “full democracy” for the first time and ranked it eleventh-most democratic overall, up from thirty-first the previous year. That is higher than its Asian neighbors (Japan ranked twenty-first and South Korea ranked twenty-third) and the United States, which ranked twenty-fifth. Recent elections have seen high voter turnout.









						Why China-Taiwan Relations Are So Tense
					

Taiwan has the potential to be a flash point in U.S.-China relations. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taipei in 2022 heightened tensions.




					www.cfr.org


----------



## Czech_pivo

CBH99 said:


> How is it?  May pick it up over the weekend


Which one, lol. Still waiting for the Chinese poli book to arrive. If asking about The Galicia Division its a good read, though I do find the author to be slanted a bit towards justifying the Ukrainians motives for joining.


----------



## CBH99

<slightly off topic still, sorry>

At work we have a ‘mandatory book club’ of sorts.  Someone will choose a leadership book, we all read roughly a chapter a week and then take an hour on Thursdays to actually discuss what we took away from it.  

It’s actually lead to some really good conversations.  


Another guy and myself both finally convinced management to go with “ Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink.  

We are really hoping that the people who get the most out of that book is our senior management.  I didn’t learn anything about history in any part of the world by reading it, but it was a good read regardless.


----------



## MilEME09

An affair almost right at the top of the CCP, not unsurprising, but these events tend to bring people down, and with the internal power battle in the CCP heating up as Xi seeks a 3rd term, factions in the CCP are trying to take each other down


----------



## dimsum

MilEME09 said:


> An affair almost right at the top of the CCP, not unsurprising, but these events tend to bring people down, and with the internal power battle in the CCP heating up as Xi seeks a 3rd term, factions in the CCP are trying to take each other down


Link is broken


----------



## MilEME09

dimsum said:


> Link is broken


----------



## Czech_pivo

When watching that I can't help but remembering the words of Solzhenitsyn - 'The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world." 

The world needs to wake up and realise the evil that lies within the CCP and its followers before it's too late for us all.


----------



## MilEME09

‘Inconceivable’ Australia would not join U.S. to defend Taiwan, Australian defence minister says
					

Australian defence minister says Australia would join U.S. in defence of Taiwan




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




Coalition to defend Taiwan appears to be forming


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Hmmm, well this has interesting implications


			China's disappearing ships: The latest headache for the global supply chain


----------



## GR66

If you were the paranoid type you might wonder if something like this could be used as a cover to draft a bunch of commercial vessels into military service...say to transport troops and equipment through those coastal waters to an unnamed, nearby island...


----------



## MilEME09

GR66 said:


> If you were the paranoid type you might wonder if something like this could be used as a cover to draft a bunch of commercial vessels into military service...say to transport troops and equipment through those coastal waters to an unnamed, nearby island...


you mean like an invasion of Taiwan, like how the soviets used commercial airlines to invade Afghanistan?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Some more, China working hard to isolate Taiwan economy









						Doing Business in or with Taiwan Could Mean Trouble with China
					

Doing business in or with Taiwan is likelier to get tougher for those who also do business in or with China.




					harrisbricken.com


----------



## Colin Parkinson

GR66 said:


> If you were the paranoid type you might wonder if something like this could be used as a cover to draft a bunch of commercial vessels into military service...say to transport troops and equipment through those coastal waters to an unnamed, nearby island...


It's a good region to be paranoid in.


----------



## dapaterson

Desipte some reports China is foreclosing on the only international airport in Uganda (arguably best known for Operation Jonathan, both Chinese and Ugandan authorities are downplaying those claims.









						We shall not confiscate Entebbe Airport over debts- China
					

Nile Post - We shall not confiscate Entebbe Airport over debts- China Africa




					nilepost.co.ug


----------



## dimsum

dapaterson said:


> both Chinese and Ugandan authorities are downplaying those claims.


"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."


----------



## MilEME09

Colin Parkinson said:


> Some more, China working hard to isolate Taiwan economy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Doing Business in or with Taiwan Could Mean Trouble with China
> 
> 
> Doing business in or with Taiwan is likelier to get tougher for those who also do business in or with China.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> harrisbricken.com


More people are opening up to Taiwan, making China increasingly desperate to de legitimize then as much as possible. Hardee they try though, the worse the CCP looks.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

dapaterson said:


> Desipte some reports China is foreclosing on the only international airport in Uganda (arguably best known for Operation Jonathan, both Chinese and Ugandan authorities are downplaying those claims.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> We shall not confiscate Entebbe Airport over debts- China
> 
> 
> Nile Post - We shall not confiscate Entebbe Airport over debts- China Africa
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nilepost.co.ug


Problem of course for the CCP, is that there are limited option if Uganda does not want to pay, they can go all heavy on them, but I doubt China can afford to maintain a airborne brigade in central Africa for long by air.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The Philippines are partly at fault for not bolstering their claim as much as they should. I have seen footage on what remains of this LST and it's disgusting. The US should buy/give an older jack up rig with combined, lighthouse, helipad, Electronic monitoring system, modern crew quarters in place of the rig, to replace the LST. Then slowly add a proper dock and build a jetty to protect it. 









						Philippines Rejects China's Demand To Remove BRP Sierra Madre From Disputed Shoal
					

(Reuters) – The Philippines will not remove a dilapidated navy ship grounded on an atoll in the South China Sea, its defense chief said on Thursday, rejecting a demand by...




					gcaptain.com


----------



## MilEME09

Taiwan scrambles jets after 27 Chinese planes enter buffer zone
					

Taiwan's Defence Ministry scrambled combat aircraft to "warn" the Chinese planes to leave.




					www.forces.net
				




China will keep doing this to normalize ot, then one day when they think it's just a normal incursion, China will finally strike.

Taiwan isn't dumb, they won't be baited into firing the first shot


----------



## YZT580

MilEME09 said:


> Taiwan scrambles jets after 27 Chinese planes enter buffer zone
> 
> 
> Taiwan's Defence Ministry scrambled combat aircraft to "warn" the Chinese planes to leave.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.forces.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China will keep doing this to normalize ot, then one day when they think it's just a normal incursion, China will finally strike.
> 
> Taiwan isn't dumb, they won't be baited into firing the first shot


unless one pilot finally breaks under the stress.  That is what concerns me: everyone has a breaking point


----------



## Good2Golf

Meanwhile, the US takes judicial action against a Chinese intelligence officer trying to steal secrets of GE’s carbon turbofan engine technology.

Jury Convicts Chinese Intelligence Officer of Espionage Crimes, Attempting to Steal Trade Secrets


----------



## RangerRay

New article from Terry Glavin on Beijing’s interference in the last Federal Election. 









						Terry Glavin: China's disinformation campaign against Canada's election is undeniable
					

But Taiwan and Hong Kong take the brunt of Beijing’s global assault on democracy




					nationalpost.com
				




And the quoted article from DisinfoWatch. 









						DisinfoWatch Report
					

Examining coordinated influence operations targeting the 2021 Canadian federal elections.




					disinfowatch.org
				




This should be bigger news than it is.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

RangerRay said:


> New article from Terry Glavin on Beijing’s interference in the last Federal Election.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: China's disinformation campaign against Canada's election is undeniable
> 
> 
> But Taiwan and Hong Kong take the brunt of Beijing’s global assault on democracy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And the quoted article from DisinfoWatch.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> DisinfoWatch Report
> 
> 
> Examining coordinated influence operations targeting the 2021 Canadian federal elections.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> disinfowatch.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This should be bigger news than it is.


Do think that the people that (potentially) benefitted from the interference (and I am not accusing any Canadian political party of actually cooperating/colluding with the CCP) are really going to call attention to it?


----------



## Dana381

It's all in the spin, if the media in this country wasn't so damn liberal the headlines would read something like "Liberals win election because of threats to Chinese Canadians" 
For a guy who loves to stand up for minority rights why won't he do something about CCP threats to Chinese Canadians? What backroom deals has he made with the CCP? I feel like he wants make Canada a Chinese province, or he is acting like it already is. Maybe that's why five eyes is now three eyes?


----------



## dimsum

Dana381 said:


> I feel like he wants make Canada a Chinese province, or he is acting like it already is.


Could you elaborate on that?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The PLN is only one aspect of the maritime threat of China as most of it's neighbours know all to well.

_While Russia has employed “Little Green Men” surreptitiously in Crimea, China uses its own “Little Blue Men” to support Near Seas claims. As the U.S. military operates near Beijing’s artificially-built South China Sea (SCS) features and seeks to prevent Beijing from ejecting foreign claimants from places like Second Thomas Shoal, it may well face surveillance and harassment from China’s maritime militia. Washington and its allies and partners must therefore understand how these irregular forces are commanded and controlled, before they are surprised and stymied by them.

China has long organized its civilian mariners into maritime militia, largely out of necessity. Recent years have seen a surge of emphasis on maritime militia building and increasing this unique force’s capabilities; however it is difficult to ascertain who or what entity within China’s government has ordered such emphasis. One can point to Xi Jinping’s visit to the Tanmen Maritime Militia in 2013, after which maritime militia building oriented toward the SCS has seen growth in places like Hainan, Guangdong, and Guangxi. Yet local militia training and organization plans prior to this date had already emphasized the training of maritime militia units._












						Directing China’s “Little Blue Men”: Uncovering the Maritime Militia Command Structure | Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative
					

While Russia has employed “Little Green Men” surreptitiously in Crimea, China uses its own “Little Blue Men” to support Near Seas claims. As the U.S. military operates near Beijing’s artificially-built South China Sea (SCS) features and seeks to prevent Beijing from ejecting foreign claimants...




					amti.csis.org


----------



## daftandbarmy

China understudies Castro 

China, Nicaragua re-establish ties in blow to US, Taiwan​

BEIJING/TAIPEI, Dec 10 (Reuters) - China and Nicaragua re-established diplomatic ties on Friday after the country broke relations with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, boosting Beijing in a part of the world long considered the United States' backyard and angering Washington.

China has increased military and political pressure on Taiwan to accept its sovereignty claims, drawing anger from the democratically ruled island, which has repeatedly said it would not be bullied and has the right to international participation.

China's Foreign Ministry, announcing the decision after meetings with Nicaragua's finance minister and two of President Daniel Ortega's sons in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, said the country had made the "correct choice" which conformed to "people's aspirations".
The break with Taiwan shrinks the island's dwindling pool of international allies and is a blow to the United States.

It follows months of worsening ties between Ortega and Washington, and came on the day the U.S. State Department said it had applied sanctions to Nestor Moncada Lau, a national security adviser to Ortega, alleging he operates an import and customs fraud scheme to enrich members of Ortega's government.

The U.S. State Department said Nicaragua's decision did not reflect the will of the Nicaraguan people because its government was not freely elected.









						China and Nicaragua re-establish ties in blow to U.S. and Taiwan
					

China and Nicaragua re-established diplomatic ties on Friday after the Central American country broke relations with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, boosting Beijing in a part of the world long considered the United States' backyard and angering Washington.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## Brad Sallows

Good to see Nicaragua rediscovering its '80s groove.


----------



## Brad Sallows

If the allegations are correct, or reasonably so, maybe this will convince the Canadian government to firmly choose a side.

China Committing Cultural Genocide against Tibetan Children
.


----------



## YZT580

Brad Sallows said:


> If the allegations are correct, or reasonably so, maybe this will convince the Canadian government to firmly choose a side.
> 
> China Committing Cultural Genocide against Tibetan Children
> .


Justin won't do anything that will reduce the profits enjoyed by his backers


----------



## QV

YZT580 said:


> Justin won't do anything that will reduce the profits enjoyed by his backers


That’s Justincredible 

(credit to Pierre Poilievre)


----------



## Altair

Got to love the hypocrisy in Washington,  as they themselves do not recognize Taiwan as the official China.


----------



## Brad Sallows

Taiwan doesn't have to be "official China" to be recognized.  It's only a matter of time now.


----------



## CBH99

YZT580 said:


> Justin won't do anything that will reduce the profits enjoyed by his backers


I’m not so sure…

He seems pretty intent on destroying, or at least damaging, some of the key sectors of the Canadian economy.  

Surely that has to hurt some of his backers…


----------



## CBH99

daftandbarmy said:


> China understudies Castro
> 
> China, Nicaragua re-establish ties in blow to US, Taiwan​
> 
> BEIJING/TAIPEI, Dec 10 (Reuters) - China and Nicaragua re-established diplomatic ties on Friday after the country broke relations with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, boosting Beijing in a part of the world long considered the United States' backyard and angering Washington.
> 
> China has increased military and political pressure on Taiwan to accept its sovereignty claims, drawing anger from the democratically ruled island, which has repeatedly said it would not be bullied and has the right to international participation.
> 
> China's Foreign Ministry, announcing the decision after meetings with Nicaragua's finance minister and two of President Daniel Ortega's sons in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, said the country had made the "correct choice" which conformed to "people's aspirations".
> The break with Taiwan shrinks the island's dwindling pool of international allies and is a blow to the United States.
> 
> It follows months of worsening ties between Ortega and Washington, and came on the day the U.S. State Department said it had applied sanctions to Nestor Moncada Lau, a national security adviser to Ortega, alleging he operates an import and customs fraud scheme to enrich members of Ortega's government.
> 
> The U.S. State Department said Nicaragua's decision did not reflect the will of the Nicaraguan people because its government was not freely elected.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China and Nicaragua re-establish ties in blow to U.S. and Taiwan
> 
> 
> China and Nicaragua re-established diplomatic ties on Friday after the Central American country broke relations with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, boosting Beijing in a part of the world long considered the United States' backyard and angering Washington.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.reuters.com


Wow… _slow clap_ …what a great victory…

Nicaragua is no longer officially recognizing Taiwan, and has broken off diplomatic ties?  

That is such a big deal.  Like wow.  How will the US and/or Taiwan ever survive without Nicaragua as an ally?  

You’re screwed now Taiwan…


----------



## Good2Golf

CBH99 said:


> I’m not so sure…
> 
> He seems pretty intent on destroying, or at least damaging, some of the key sectors of the Canadian economy.
> 
> Surely that has to hurt some of his backers…


If they’re not directly or secondarily linked to the Power Corporation, then and only then do they not matter…like Western O&G…


----------



## Edward Campbell

CBH99 said:


> I’m not so sure…
> 
> He seems pretty intent on destroying, or at least damaging, some of the key sectors of the Canadian economy.
> 
> Surely that has to hurt some of his backers…


Many of his key backers ~ think Power Corp, just as one example ~ divested from Canada, especially, about 25 years ago and invested, heavily in Asia, especially in China. Just after 9/11 and after the invasion of Iraq, and even more, after the _Great Recession_ of 2008, a lot of people began to bet against the USA. The only competitor was China. Xi Jinping changed a lot of minds but Donald Trump and, now, Joe Biden make it hard to see America as a place where your investments will grow.

I, personally, _suspect_ that his "backers" exercise a helluva lot more control over Canada's social, economic, trade, defence and foreign policies than do Prime Minister Trudeau and his PMO and the entire Trudeau cabinet put together.


----------



## daftandbarmy

CBH99 said:


> Wow… _slow clap_ …what a great victory…
> 
> Nicaragua is no longer officially recognizing Taiwan, and has broken off diplomatic ties?
> 
> That is such a big deal.  Like wow.  How will the US and/or Taiwan ever survive without Nicaragua as an ally?
> 
> You’re screwed now Taiwan…



It's OK, they've teamed up with China at the UN to (ironically) ensure that human rights are looked after:

China, Russia, Nicaragua, Bangladesh Win Seats On UN Organ Overseeing Human Rights​
 UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, condemned the recent election of serial human rights abusers China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to the 54-nation Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a top UN body that regulates human rights groups, oversees the UN women’s rights commission, and adopts resolutions on a vast array of global issues ranging from internet freedom to the treatment of prisoners.

“It’s an outrage,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch. “Electing repressive regimes like China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to a key UN council, which has the power to expel human rights groups from the UN, is like picking a pyromaniac to be fire chief.”

UN Watch called on UN chief Antonio Guterres, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet and the EU’s Federica Mogherini to condemn the election of dictatorships to ECOSOC.









						China, Russia, Nicaragua, Bangladesh Win Seats On UN Organ Overseeing Human Rights - UN Watch
					

GENEVA, June 19, 2019 — UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, condemned the recent election of serial human rights abusers China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to the 54-nation Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a top UN body that regulates human rights groups, oversees...



					unwatch.org


----------



## Brad Sallows

Nothing any skeptic might employ to damage the credibility of the UN is as effective as what the UN does to itself.


----------



## CBH99

Brad Sallows said:


> Nothing any skeptic might employ to damage the credibility of the UN is as effective as what the UN does to itself.


Isn’t that the blunt truth of it… 🤦🏼‍♂️


----------



## Dana381

daftandbarmy said:


> It's OK, they've teamed up with China at the UN to (ironically) ensure that human rights are looked after:
> 
> China, Russia, Nicaragua, Bangladesh Win Seats On UN Organ Overseeing Human Rights​
> UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, condemned the recent election of serial human rights abusers China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to the 54-nation Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a top UN body that regulates human rights groups, oversees the UN women’s rights commission, and adopts resolutions on a vast array of global issues ranging from internet freedom to the treatment of prisoners.
> 
> “It’s an outrage,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch. “Electing repressive regimes like China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to a key UN council, which has the power to expel human rights groups from the UN, is like picking a pyromaniac to be fire chief.”
> 
> UN Watch called on UN chief Antonio Guterres, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet and the EU’s Federica Mogherini to condemn the election of dictatorships to ECOSOC.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> China, Russia, Nicaragua, Bangladesh Win Seats On UN Organ Overseeing Human Rights - UN Watch
> 
> 
> GENEVA, June 19, 2019 — UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, condemned the recent election of serial human rights abusers China, Russia, Nicaragua and Bangladesh to the 54-nation Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a top UN body that regulates human rights groups, oversees...
> 
> 
> 
> unwatch.org



I'm not at all surprised. If the UN prevented human rights abusers from being elected to ECOSOC then they would have to do something about their abuses. As long as there are abusers on the panel the panel will never vote to intervene. The UN does not want to do anything that will piss off its member nations because they pay dues. Those four countries by 1/2 a Trillion dollars to the UN.  Therefore the UN will never accomplish anything meaningful.



			Contributions received for 2021 for the UN Regular Budget  - Committee on Contributions - UN General Assembly


----------



## OldSolduer

Brad Sallows said:


> Nothing any skeptic might employ to damage the credibility of the UN is as effective as what the UN does to itself.


Well said. And I agree.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Good one US, real own goal, the PRC must be loving this stupidity 









						The curious case of a map and a disappearing Taiwan minister at U.S. democracy summit
					

WASHINGTON — A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide…




					ottawacitizen.com


----------



## Altair

Colin Parkinson said:


> Good one US, real own goal, the PRC must be loving this stupidity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The curious case of a map and a disappearing Taiwan minister at U.S. democracy summit
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON — A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide…
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ottawacitizen.com


Same country making a big deal about Nicaragua.

Goodness.


----------



## Good2Golf

Meh. 

At some point, nations will stop fawning and apologizing to China for its repressive, dictatorial regime.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Good2Golf said:


> Meh.
> 
> At some point, nations will stop fawning and apologizing to China for its repressive, dictatorial regime.



Nations might. Some of their leaders might not...

Justin Trudeau,  then running for the leadership of his party in 2013, was given a lob-ball question from a supporter at a “Ladies Night” meet-and-greet in Toronto: “Which nation, besides Canada, which nation’s administration do you most admire, and why?”

The future prime minister’s odd answer: “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China ….”

China? Why China?

“Because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green  fastest…we need to start investing in solar.'”









						NOTEBOOK: Asked what country he most admires, Trudeau’s answer is no longer China - National | Globalnews.ca
					

It’s useful to remember that, back then, he was the front-runner in a race to be the leader of the third party in Parliament. The NDP was the Official Opposition. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were the government.




					globalnews.ca


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good2Golf said:


> Meh.
> 
> At some point, nations will stop fawning and apologizing to China for its repressive, dictatorial regime.



I agree, but it's going to take some real leadership and a commitment to BOTH doing the right things AND to doing things right. I'm not sure that the US Gov't, as currently constituted and led, is well equipped to do that. I thought that the last US administration was, to be charitable, gawd awful, but I'm afraid that this one is little better.

The divisions in America ~ social, political and _cultural_ ~ are  deep and getting deeper and that makes it difficult for a fundamentally decent man with a solid foreign policy record, and Joe Biden scores well on both counts, to make the right choices and to execute policies well.

The rest of the world ~ Australia being, perhaps, a notable exception because it lives in a rough neighbourhood far, far away from the policeman ~ isn't prepared to lead, either. Japan? Germany? France? Britain? India? South Korea? Would anyone follow any of them?

The West needs America but, first, America needs to heal itself.

< rant ends >


----------



## MilEME09

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/huawei-surveillance-china/
		


Leaked documents suggest Huawei has been using its tech to help the Chinese government since 2016 to identify people using its surveillance systems.

Gee sounds like a lovely group we want to have access to our industry.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Russian Rail have transported 1 000 000 transit containers from China to Europe since the start of Y2021


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Looking for resources, submarine routes or preparing to push their boundary claims










						Illegal Strategy: China Suspected Of Unauthorized Sea Floor Survey In Pacific - Naval News
					

China’s growing fleet of survey ships continue to cause friction in the Pacific region. One of the most modern and capable has been operating in the small country of Palau’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This emphasizes the strategic importance of the small island chains in the region.




					www.navalnews.com


----------



## RangerRay

Very disappointing. 









						Conservative Party will not seek to bring back Commons China committee
					

The Conservatives say there are other pressing priorities, such as examining the federal government’s handling of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August, 2021




					www.theglobeandmail.com


----------



## Good2Golf

RangerRay said:


> Very disappointing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Conservative Party will not seek to bring back Commons China committee
> 
> 
> The Conservatives say there are other pressing priorities, such as examining the federal government’s handling of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August, 2021
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com


Indeed.

O’Toole & Coy need just as big a boot to their asses as does Team Red.


----------



## CBH99

MilEME09 said:


> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/huawei-surveillance-china/
> 
> 
> 
> Leaked documents suggest Huawei has been using its tech to help the Chinese government since 2016 to identify people using its surveillance systems.
> 
> Gee sounds like a lovely group we want to have access to our industry.


And I think we would all mostly agree, if they were allowed to build/manage our 5G networks, they would be identifying people and collecting metadata over here as well.  

Post something online about China, while at a coffee shop or even in a text?  May come back to haunt you one day…


----------



## OceanBonfire

> “The repeated cases of the most senior level of Taiwan armed forces officers being convicted of espionage has got to have a psychological effect on the officer corps and in the ranks.” - Retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Grant Newsham











						Chinese spies have penetrated Taiwan’s military, case documents reveal
					

Taiwan’s spycatchers are battling a sustained Chinese espionage campaign. Even the security detail of President Tsai Ing-wen has been compromised.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## CBH99

OceanBonfire said:


> Chinese spies have penetrated Taiwan’s military, case documents reveal
> 
> 
> Taiwan’s spycatchers are battling a sustained Chinese espionage campaign. Even the security detail of President Tsai Ing-wen has been compromised.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.reuters.com


I think we all knew that Chinese operatives would be well-embedded in Taiwan’s armed forces for quite some time now.  

But for her own protection detail to have snakes in the grass?  


China truly is a type of adversary we haven’t seen the likes of before.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I would _*guess*_ that the same is true in reverse: I *suspect* that there are some admirals and generals and senior officials in the Chinese military and security apparatus who are on Taiwan's payroll. The difference might be that we don't hear about it when they are caught or someone is running a very good double-cross game.


----------



## Good2Golf

CBH99 said:


> I think we all knew that Chinese operatives would be well-embedded in Taiwan’s armed forces for quite some time now.
> 
> But for her own protection detail to have snakes in the grass?


Ask Indira Ghandi how that worked out for her… 🤔


----------



## Czech_pivo

Here's an interesting article coming from a German V-Admiral today, discussing Bayern's deployment to a 6 month tour of SE Asia.

Possibly signaling a shift in policy by the new German Chancellor?

Germany’s head of navy calls China’s naval power buildup ‘explosive’ and a cause of worry​"Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schonbach said China is increasing the size of its navy by the equivalent of the entire French navy every four years"









						Germany's head of navy calls China's naval power buildup 'explosive' and a cause of worry
					

The frigate Bayern is sailing through the South China Sea in the first deployment of a German warship to the Indo-Pacific in almost 20 years.




					www.cnbc.com


----------



## The Bread Guy

Careful, folks ...


> An Australian defence review has found there are no national security grounds to overturn the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company, following calls to abandon the deal.
> 
> The recommendation from the review makes it more difficult for Canberra to revoke the deal with Landbridge Group, which was confirmed as the subject of an inquiry in May amid growing concerns about Beijing’s impact on Australia’s national security ...


----------



## MilEME09

Did China cost a conservative MP his seat the last election? Researchers at McGill says its possible 









						Globe editorial: Did China target a Conservative MP in Canada’s last federal election?
					

McGill University researchers have published a paper arguing that the case of former MP Kenny Chiu clearly demonstrates that ‘Canada remains vulnerable to the security risk constituted by foreign interference’




					www.theglobeandmail.com


----------



## CBH99

The Bread Guy said:


> Careful, folks ...


No national security grounds, in allowing a Chinese company to own and operate a major port?  

In a country that has to import nearly everything it needs… pretty sure the country that is constantly making open threats, undertaking adversarial political moves, overtly undermining their democracy, etc - should _not_ be owning or in charge of a major port. 


0.02


----------



## dimsum

CBH99 said:


> No national security grounds, in allowing a Chinese company to own and operate a major port?
> 
> In a country that has to import nearly everything it needs… pretty sure the country that is constantly making open threats, undertaking adversarial political moves, overtly undermining their democracy, etc - should _not_ be owning or in charge of a major port.
> 
> 
> 0.02


Not to mention that Darwin is where USMC (and potentially other US assets) are located on a rotating basis, and that Australian Army (1st Bde at Robertson barracks) and RAN units (patrol boats at HMAS Coonawarra) are also based there.


----------



## Kirkhill

Based on the public discussions of what the US is planning in capabililties this is one picture of what China might be facing.

First Line - First Island Chain

30 times JLTV/NSM - Rogue Fires - NMESIS Platoons of the USMC - 185 km reach moved around 6000 km of Island Frontage by 30 Light Amphibious Warships.  Line extends from Singapore and Malaysia, through Brunei, Vietnam and the Philippines, to Taiwan and then to Busan in S Korea.  
Backed by HIMARS Trucks launching 500 km PrSM missiles

Organized into three Littoral Combat Regiments each with its own Service Support Battalion and Air Defence Battalion.

Backed by a 40 knot fleet of 14 monohull LCS, 17 trimaran LCS and 15 catamaran EPFs for log support.  The 31 LCS hulls also all mount the same 185km NSMs employed by the USMC Rogue Fires Platoons.  In addition the hulls have the ability to move a lot of marines and their trucks, LAVs and UAVs.

2nd Line - 2nd Island Chain

Anchored on Guam  with flanks secured forward at Darwin in Northern Australia and Adak in the Aleutians.   Protected by Medium Range Capabilities of the SM6 and the GLCM missiles as well as, prospectively, the LR Hyper Sonic weapons. Secure allies in Australia in the south and Japan in the North.

3rd Line - Hawaii  

Pearl Harbor 
USN / USMC

4th Line - Conus and Alaska
USAF and US Army

From China's viewpoint that could be seen as a containment strategy.


----------



## MilEME09

Trouble For Chinese Navy In South China Sea? Philippines Accepts BrahMos Offer For Anti-Ship Missile System
					





					swarajyamag.com
				




Philippines ups the stakes by acquiring the Brahmos from India. With a speed of Mach 2.8, it's is likely a Chinese ship that lacks modern defenses would be able to intercept in time. A few could cover much of the south China sea. This would be a big threat to the PLAN once online.


----------



## armrdsoul77

Team USA Advises Athletes Heading to Beijing Olympics to Leave Their Phones at Home


----------



## Fishbone Jones

There should be a complete boycott of these games. The more face Red China loses, the better, IMO.


----------



## Kirkhill

Kirkhill said:


> View attachment 68073
> 
> Based on the public discussions of what the US is planning in capabililties this is one picture of what China might be facing.
> 
> First Line - First Island Chain
> 
> 30 times JLTV/NSM - Rogue Fires - NMESIS Platoons of the USMC - 185 km reach moved around 6000 km of Island Frontage by 30 Light Amphibious Warships.  Line extends from Singapore and Malaysia, through Brunei, Vietnam and the Philippines, to Taiwan and then to Busan in S Korea.
> Backed by HIMARS Trucks launching 500 km PrSM missiles
> 
> Organized into three Littoral Combat Regiments each with its own Service Support Battalion and Air Defence Battalion.
> 
> Backed by a 40 knot fleet of 14 monohull LCS, 17 trimaran LCS and 15 catamaran EPFs for log support.  The 31 LCS hulls also all mount the same 185km NSMs employed by the USMC Rogue Fires Platoons.  In addition the hulls have the ability to move a lot of marines and their trucks, LAVs and UAVs.
> 
> 2nd Line - 2nd Island Chain
> 
> Anchored on Guam  with flanks secured forward at Darwin in Northern Australia and Adak in the Aleutians.   Protected by Medium Range Capabilities of the SM6 and the GLCM missiles as well as, prospectively, the LR Hyper Sonic weapons. Secure allies in Australia in the south and Japan in the North.
> 
> 3rd Line - Hawaii
> 
> Pearl Harbor
> USN / USMC
> 
> 4th Line - Conus and Alaska
> USAF and US Army
> 
> From China's viewpoint that could be seen as a containment strategy.




Revision - 

The monohull LCS, the problematic ones from the Great Lakes, are being deployed out of Florida to the Caribbean.   Only the Austal Catamaran fleet of Independence Class LCS (recently armed with the same NSM used by the USMC Littoral Regiments) and the Spearhead Class Joint High Speed Vessels (EPFs) are being deployed to the Indo-Pacific region.   Austal is also a lead contender for the Light Amphibious Warship.


----------



## Kirkhill

Just noting the open deck concept for the LAW landing ship.

That suggests this:



Meaning that those 30 Light Amphibious Warships, with ROGUE and HIMARS vehicles on board might also be considered as Bombards capable of contributing to the fight with their on board cargo.   The missiles could be launched at sea, or the launchers could be disembarked and launched from the shore.


----------



## Altair

China’s ambassador to US warns of possible military conflict over Taiwan
					

Unusually explicit reference to prospect of war comes as tensions over island’s future continue to rise




					www.theguardian.com
				





> China’s ambassador to the US has said the two countries could face a “military conflict” over the future of Taiwan, in an unusually explicit reference to the prospect of war.
> 
> “The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” Qin Gang told the US public broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR), on Friday. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”
> m/world/2022/jan/28/china-ambassador-us-warns-possible-military-conflict-taiwan



Act 2 begins...


----------



## Good2Golf

While Taiwan stocks up on supplies ahead of any actions by China.

Taiwan ‘buys 20,400 bottles of Lithuanian rum rejected by China


----------



## SeaKingTacco

Good2Golf said:


> While Taiwan stocks up on supplies ahead of any actions by China.
> 
> Taiwan ‘buys 20,400 bottles of Lithuanian rum rejected by China


Anyone know if Lithuanian rum is any good?


----------



## Good2Golf

SeaKingTacco said:


> Anyone know if Lithuanian rum is any good?


Worth a try! 🥃


----------



## RangerRay

SeaKingTacco said:


> Anyone know if Lithuanian rum is any good?


I would trust their vodka before I trust their rum!


----------



## dapaterson

Krupnikas enters the conversation.


----------



## KevinB

Italian intelligence watchdog flags small, sneaky foreign takeovers in defense
					

Italy’s intelligence watchdog has called for tighter, U.S.-style monitoring of corporate acquisitions after allegations that China quietly purchased an Italian military drone maker that supplied Italy’s special forces.




					www.defensenews.com
				




Whoops...


----------



## KevinB

China not wanting Russian to be the only douchenozzle these days.








						‘Serious safety incident’: Chinese ship shone laser at Australian aircraft, defence says
					

Department condemns ‘unsafe military conduct’ after laser detected coming from People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Colin Parkinson

I just saw someone mention a container from China is costing them $20,000 at the moment , when it used to be $4500 and the tranist time is an extra month.








						Container Rates Climb On China Lockdowns
					

By Kevin Varley and Ann Koh (Bloomberg) The number of container ships waiting off Qingdao, one of China’s biggest ports, is continuing to rise as the country doubles down on...




					gcaptain.com


----------



## Kirkhill

Xi's very bad month?









						Xi Jinping’s Faltering Foreign Policy
					

The war in Ukraine and the perils of strongman rule.




					www.foreignaffairs.com


----------



## OceanBonfire

> Berger said several times during the interview “no other operation is more complicated” than an amphibious invasion. He added there are problems of logistics and sustainment that need to be addressed once ashore, although having the ability to enter from the sea and air gives the invader mobility to overcome defenses.
> 
> The “sheer difficulty” of forcible entry “highlight why we [Navy and Marine Corps] have to train.











						CMC Berger: Russian Logistics Failures in Ukraine ‘Should Give Pause’ to Taiwan Invasion Planners - USNI News
					

Stalled Russian forces across a number of fronts in Ukraine “should give pause” to Chinese military planners looking across more than 100 miles of water at Taiwan as an amphibious invasion target, Gen. David Berger, Marine Corps commandant, said Wednesday. Any amphibious invasion “is not going...




					news.usni.org


----------



## OceanBonfire

> A top U.S. commander says China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea. U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. John C. Aquilino says the increasingly aggressive moves threaten all nations operating nearby.
> 
> “I think over the past 20 years we’ve witnessed the largest military buildup since World War II by the PRC,” Aquilino told the AP, using the initials of China’s formal name. “That buildup of weaponization is destabilizing to the region.”
> 
> ...
> 
> A U.N.-backed arbitration tribunal that handled the case invalidated China’s sweeping historical claims in the South China Sea under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing dismissed the ruling as sham and continues to defy it.











						AP Exclusive: US admiral says China fully militarized isles
					

OVER THE SOUTH CHINA SEA (AP) — China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment, and fighter jets in an increasingly aggressive move that threatens...




					apnews.com


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Oh god, those poor people likley had time to realize they were going to die.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1505966330746339328





						China Eastern 737-800 Crashes With 132 Onboard | Aviation Week Network
					

A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 123 passengers and nine crew members has crashed into the mountains near Wuzhou, southern China; the airline is reportedly grounding its fleet of 75 737-800 aircraft.




					aviationweek.com


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Anyone interested in a 1.5hr long webinar on how the current conflict impacts doing business in China can register here



			https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/2394961047370904332?source=Email-Blast


----------



## Edward Campbell

Altair said:


> China’s ambassador to US warns of possible military conflict over Taiwan
> 
> 
> Unusually explicit reference to prospect of war comes as tensions over island’s future continue to rise
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theguardian.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Act 2 begins...


I am of the view that before China takes any military action against Taiwan the Chinese leadership will insist that two conditions must be met:

1. China must be nearly totally certain that it is able to defeat Taiwan AND America and, very possible, also Japan and India at the same time; and
2. China must be nearly self-sufficeint. By that I mean economically able to withstand a nearly total Western boycott - something substantially greater than the economic and political sanctions that Russia faces right now.

It seems to me that neither of those conditions exists now and they are, _my guess_, not going to exist until after 2030. In fact China's fairly obvious demographic, economic and social problems may make the whole thing impossible.

But, politically, the timetable might not matter; there might be a better way for China, post Xi Jinping - who is 70 years old -  to achieve regional hegemony without fighting and "absorb" Taiwan into the _Sinosphere_ before 2050.


----------



## suffolkowner

Edward Campbell said:


> I am of the view that before China takes any military action against Taiwan the Chinese leadership will insist that two conditions must be met:
> 
> 1. China must be nearly totally certain that it is able to defeat Taiwan AND America and, very possible, also Japan and India at the same time; and
> 2. China must be nearly self-sufficeint. By that I mean economically able to withstand a nearly total Western boycott - something substantially greater than the economic and political sanctions that Russia faces right now.
> 
> It seems to me that neither of those conditions exists now and they are, _my guess_, not going to exist until after 2030. In fact China's fairly obvious demographic, economic and social problems may make the whole thing impossible.
> 
> But, politically, the timetable might not matter; there might be a better way for China, post Xi Jinping - who is 70 years old -  to achieve regional hegemony without fighting and "absorb" Taiwan into the _Sinosphere_ before 2050.


Predicated on the not unreasonable assumption that there are more rational and astute people in a position of power and influence in China than in Russia


----------



## SeaKingTacco

suffolkowner said:


> Predicated on the not unreasonable assumption that there are more rational and astute people in a position of power and influence in China than in Russia


My sense is (and it is only a sense) that the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has significantly more more factions and significantly more ability to provide a challenge function to Xi Jingping than anything that exists in Putin’s Russia. Xi could more easily find himself  “retired”, if he were to press a bad hand…


----------



## OldSolduer

SeaKingTacco said:


> My sense is (and it is only a sense) that the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has significantly more more factions and significantly more ability to provide a challenge function to Xi Jingping than anything that exists in Putin’s Russia. Xi could more easily find himself  “retired”, if he were to press a bad hand…


"retired" has several possible meanings - if you get my drift. 

"Comrade Xi please accompany this fine squad of PLA soldiers to that wall - if you please."


----------



## Kirkhill

China has been behaving itself.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1521583467758239745


I also saw an article yesterday IIRC talking about Canadian diplomats getting a message from the Chinese saying that they recognized there had been problems in the past but they would like to put things back the way they were.   The Canadians felt the Chinese were talking past them for relay to the US.

I kind of think SKT and OS may have the rights of this thing.  Xi may have made himself vulnerable by hitching his horse to Vlad's wagon.  Vlad is vulnerable.  Russia's technology isn't looking so good.  And the West is showing enough sticktoitiveness to make business very difficult these days.


----------



## Edward Campbell

All the things about which Lee Kuan Yew and Anson Chan warned Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao for 15 of the last 25 years are coming to pass. Xi Jinping didn't/doesn't want to hear those views but the reality is, _I suspect,_ being noticed by him and his closest advisors. They must be wondering how good (effective, professional, etc) their military really is. He and his inner circle must be wondering if Lee and Chan were right about the many weaknesses that are inherent in autocracies.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The Real Meaning of COVID-zero​I got an email from a friend/client yesterday and I liked it so much I got his approval to run it, lightly edited to strip out any possible identifiers and with links added. This friend/client runs what was for a long time a very successful manufacturing business in China. He owns and operates a company that makes high quality products, mostly for export.

I wanted to run the email here because this person has lived and operated in China for a long time, knows China well, and is very-clear eyed (almost to the point of true neutrality) regarding what has transpired in China over the last 15+ years. Without further ado, here is the email.

It has been a struggle for business survival. Things are getting pretty dire, but I think we will get through it. We need a couple of years to rebuild, and then look at how we exit.

I had an epiphany some time back and have been weighing uts validity while observing how things have played out over the last few months. I guess it is obvious when you think about it, but what I realized was that the Chinese people are not citizens. The word “citizen’ comes with ideas on roles and responsibilities, political rights and even protection by the sovereign. But in China ordinary people are not citizens; they are akin to livestock, where the government’s concern is their welfare. I did not come up with this idea and I’m seeing it more often on social media and it seems to be increasing in popularity and I would say that is because it’s true. When you apply this framework to what has gone on in China, particularly lately, everything becomes clear. I was born on a farm and lived there until I went off to college so it is a world I understand well.

When our livestock got really sick, we often had to shoot them. Sometimes it something terrible like when blowflies would lay their eggs under the animal’s skin and the larvae (maggots) would eat their way into the animal’s flesh until it collapsed from sepsis and exhaustion. Other times they would eat something poisonous or just get sick from unknown causes. We took every precaution to try to ensure they were healthy and produced good meat. After all, they were our living. Treating them when sick was a regular activity in the blowfly season, but sometimes it was kinder to shoot them. If they had something infectious, then that was an even bigger problem. The priority was to keep the flock healthy, not the individual, so culling was normal.

When you apply this model to China , it works very well. The patronising top-down CCP model is about controlling and managing the flock. The pandemic, of course, makes the parallel as overt as can be, but the drivers of the current actions by the CCP are inherent in the system. Dangerous political ideas need to be culled, as do politically infected persons, or even groups likely to be infected, such as the Uighurs. It reminds me of Camus’ Plague.

Some may say that this applies to all authoritarian regimes, and now, especially, Russia, where Putin talks about the need for cleansing the country of filthy elements. There are overlaps, in that both involve ethno-nationalism, but the difference is in the all-embracing ideology that underlies “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era”. It is ethno-nationalism, but it claims to explain all other ideas in terms of the one idea: Marxism. Just as is true of religious extremists, with the CCP, there can only be one correct view, and all other views are subsumed, or shut down.

When we see people in China dragged out of their homes by the “Big Whites” it is being done for the greater good. No abuse of the individual is taboo if the justification is the health of the flock. No suffering is problematic if it is for the greater good. When I tell officials here that we will go bankrupt if they do not allow us to process our material (due to some idiotic notion that Covid may have been carried from France to China in an unrefrigerated container that left France 3 months ago) they say that “it is not just you, everybody has to suffer until the pandemic is brought under control”. The real reason for this is bureaucratic butt protection, but the fact that they can get away with it is because we are just sheeple. Our rights are not a problem because, in fact, we have none.

There are two great ironies in all of this. One is that Marxism is a foreign idea, yet the Chinese Communist Party rejects almost all foreign ideas as being unsuited to China. There can be no debate about democracy (unless it is Chinese democracy à la John Lee’s “election” as Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive), about human rights or about individual freedom, ostensibly because they are “foreign ideas”.

The other great irony is that Chinese society is one of the most inequitable in the world, whether you look at the gini index or whether you see how people treat each other. The stratification is obviously Confucian and it has not changed under Communism, except that rather than respect flowing upwards, contempt flows down. Maybe it was always like that. The real reason Jack Ma was cut down was because he mistakenly assumed that a mere merchant could presume to criticise his betters – the bureaucrats who have the inalienable right to run the show. This elitism is as Chinese as it gets. It has been there in every Chinese dynasty since the Han, and probably before, and it is there today in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

This is China today and I have no doubt this will be China tomorrow as well.
Yesterday, in a Financial Times piece on China’s draconian lockdowns, a reason (not in any way at odds with what is stated above) for the strictness of the lockdowns was posited:
Despite the intensifying economic pain, few expect Xi to relax his zero-Covid campaign before securing an unprecedented third term in power at a party congress later this year. The strategy “has become a political crusade — a political tool to test the loyalty of officials”, says Henry Gao, a China expert at Singapore Management University. “That’s far more important to Xi than a few more digits of GDP growth.”
I will next week write more regarding my thoughts on the lockdowns, with a focus on how they are impacting foreign businesses and why I am 99 percent certain they will increase in their reach and in their duration.









						The Real Meaning of COVID-zero.
					

I got an email from a friend/client yesterday and I liked it so much I got his approval to run it, lightly edited to strip out any possible identifiers and with links added. This friend/client runs what was for a long time a very successful manufacturing business in China. He owns and operates a...




					harrisbricken.com


----------



## Brad Sallows

About the invasion bottleneck... (Twitter thread).


----------



## QV

Colin Parkinson said:


> The Real Meaning of COVID-zero​I got an email from a friend/client yesterday and I liked it so much I got his approval to run it, lightly edited to strip out any possible identifiers and with links added. This friend/client runs what was for a long time a very successful manufacturing business in China. He owns and operates a company that makes high quality products, mostly for export.
> 
> I wanted to run the email here because this person has lived and operated in China for a long time, knows China well, and is very-clear eyed (almost to the point of true neutrality) regarding what has transpired in China over the last 15+ years. Without further ado, here is the email.
> 
> It has been a struggle for business survival. Things are getting pretty dire, but I think we will get through it. We need a couple of years to rebuild, and then look at how we exit.
> 
> I had an epiphany some time back and have been weighing uts validity while observing how things have played out over the last few months. I guess it is obvious when you think about it, but what I realized was that the Chinese people are not citizens. The word “citizen’ comes with ideas on roles and responsibilities, political rights and even protection by the sovereign. But in China ordinary people are not citizens; they are akin to livestock, where the government’s concern is their welfare. I did not come up with this idea and I’m seeing it more often on social media and it seems to be increasing in popularity and I would say that is because it’s true. When you apply this framework to what has gone on in China, particularly lately, everything becomes clear. I was born on a farm and lived there until I went off to college so it is a world I understand well.
> 
> When our livestock got really sick, we often had to shoot them. Sometimes it something terrible like when blowflies would lay their eggs under the animal’s skin and the larvae (maggots) would eat their way into the animal’s flesh until it collapsed from sepsis and exhaustion. Other times they would eat something poisonous or just get sick from unknown causes. We took every precaution to try to ensure they were healthy and produced good meat. After all, they were our living. Treating them when sick was a regular activity in the blowfly season, but sometimes it was kinder to shoot them. If they had something infectious, then that was an even bigger problem. The priority was to keep the flock healthy, not the individual, so culling was normal.
> 
> When you apply this model to China , it works very well. The patronising top-down CCP model is about controlling and managing the flock. The pandemic, of course, makes the parallel as overt as can be, but the drivers of the current actions by the CCP are inherent in the system. Dangerous political ideas need to be culled, as do politically infected persons, or even groups likely to be infected, such as the Uighurs. It reminds me of Camus’ Plague.
> 
> Some may say that this applies to all authoritarian regimes, and now, especially, Russia, where Putin talks about the need for cleansing the country of filthy elements. There are overlaps, in that both involve ethno-nationalism, but the difference is in the all-embracing ideology that underlies “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era”. It is ethno-nationalism, but it claims to explain all other ideas in terms of the one idea: Marxism. Just as is true of religious extremists, with the CCP, there can only be one correct view, and all other views are subsumed, or shut down.
> 
> When we see people in China dragged out of their homes by the “Big Whites” it is being done for the greater good. No abuse of the individual is taboo if the justification is the health of the flock. No suffering is problematic if it is for the greater good. When I tell officials here that we will go bankrupt if they do not allow us to process our material (due to some idiotic notion that Covid may have been carried from France to China in an unrefrigerated container that left France 3 months ago) they say that “it is not just you, everybody has to suffer until the pandemic is brought under control”. The real reason for this is bureaucratic butt protection, but the fact that they can get away with it is because we are just sheeple. Our rights are not a problem because, in fact, we have none.
> 
> There are two great ironies in all of this. One is that Marxism is a foreign idea, yet the Chinese Communist Party rejects almost all foreign ideas as being unsuited to China. There can be no debate about democracy (unless it is Chinese democracy à la John Lee’s “election” as Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive), about human rights or about individual freedom, ostensibly because they are “foreign ideas”.
> 
> The other great irony is that Chinese society is one of the most inequitable in the world, whether you look at the gini index or whether you see how people treat each other. The stratification is obviously Confucian and it has not changed under Communism, except that rather than respect flowing upwards, contempt flows down. Maybe it was always like that. The real reason Jack Ma was cut down was because he mistakenly assumed that a mere merchant could presume to criticise his betters – the bureaucrats who have the inalienable right to run the show. This elitism is as Chinese as it gets. It has been there in every Chinese dynasty since the Han, and probably before, and it is there today in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
> 
> This is China today and I have no doubt this will be China tomorrow as well.
> Yesterday, in a Financial Times piece on China’s draconian lockdowns, a reason (not in any way at odds with what is stated above) for the strictness of the lockdowns was posited:
> Despite the intensifying economic pain, few expect Xi to relax his zero-Covid campaign before securing an unprecedented third term in power at a party congress later this year. The strategy “has become a political crusade — a political tool to test the loyalty of officials”, says Henry Gao, a China expert at Singapore Management University. “That’s far more important to Xi than a few more digits of GDP growth.”
> I will next week write more regarding my thoughts on the lockdowns, with a focus on how they are impacting foreign businesses and why I am 99 percent certain they will increase in their reach and in their duration.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Real Meaning of COVID-zero.
> 
> 
> I got an email from a friend/client yesterday and I liked it so much I got his approval to run it, lightly edited to strip out any possible identifiers and with links added. This friend/client runs what was for a long time a very successful manufacturing business in China. He owns and operates a...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> harrisbricken.com



I see parallels.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Well about time!!  Huawei banned from Canada's 5G network.



> Canada banning China’s Huawei Technologies, ZTE from 5G telecom networks​By The Canadian Press — The Canadian Press — May 19 2022
> 
> OTTAWA — The Liberal government says it is banning Chinese vendors Huawei Technologies and ZTE from Canada's long-awaited blueprint for next-generation mobile networks.
> 
> The development of 5G, or fifth-generation, networks will give people speedier online connections and provide vast data capacity to meet ravenous demand as more devices link to the internet and innovations such as autonomous vehicles emerge.
> 
> The Opposition Conservatives and other critics have long pressed the Liberals to deny Huawei a role in building the country's 5G infrastructure, saying it would allow Beijing to spy on Canadians more easily.
> 
> Some say Huawei's participation could give it access to an array of digital information gleaned from how, when and where Canadian customers use internet-connected devices.
> 
> In turn, the theory goes, Chinese security agencies could force the company to hand over the personal information.
> 
> ZTE is a partially state-owned Chinese technology company that specializes in telecommunications.
> 
> Three of Canada's partners in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance — the United States, Britain and Australia — have taken decisive steps to curb the use of Huawei gear in their countries' respective 5G networks.
> 
> Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino also says the Liberal government will introduce legislation to further strengthen Canada's telecommunications system and create a framework to protect national security.
> 
> This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 19, 2022.
> 
> The Canadian Press



 Link


----------



## Colin Parkinson

A good article on the potentiel threat the Chinese merchant marine poses, although the article does not mention the fishing fleet and the large flotillas of dredgers currently harassing Taiwan. The article also reflect the state of the US Merchant marine and is written from their perspective.


China Has Militarized Seafarers Says US Navy Report


----------



## OldSolduer

Retired AF Guy said:


> Well about time!!  Huawei banned from Canada's 5G network.
> 
> 
> 
> Link


Just say no….


----------



## QV

Canada alarmed as Chinese fighter pilots ‘buzz’ Canadian planes over international waters


----------



## The Bread Guy

QV said:


> Canada alarmed as Chinese fighter pilots ‘buzz’ Canadian planes over international waters


The info-machine version ....


> The Canadian Armed Forces can confirm that, on several occasions during this most recent iteration of Operation NEON, interactions occurred between our Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora long-range patrol aircraft and aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
> 
> In these interactions, PLAAF aircraft did not adhere to international air safety norms. These interactions are unprofessional and/or put the safety of our RCAF personnel at risk. In some instances, the RCAF aircrew felt sufficiently at risk that they had to quickly modify their own flight path in order to increase separation and avoid a potential collision with the intercepting aircraft.
> 
> These interactions are well-documented by our aircrew for professional internal analysis.
> 
> The aircrews in several PLAAF aircraft are very clearly visible as they approach and attempt to divert our patrol aircraft from their flight path ...


----------



## Kirkhill

Interesting time, and location, to be asking for a conversation about competition.

The Chinese are credited with looking at the long term.  I wonder if 100 days qualifies as long term.  For Harold Wilson a week was a long time.  100 days is 14 weeks.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1532732644559028229


----------



## Spencer100

Kirkhill said:


> Interesting time, and location, to be asking for a conversation about competition.
> 
> The Chinese are credited with looking at the long term.  I wonder if 100 days qualifies as long term.  For Harold Wilson a week was a long time.  100 days is 14 weeks.
> 
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1532732644559028229


Is it an adjustment?  They see the weakness of Russia and its military.  They then take a look at themselves and think well we have some of the same stuff we have purchased or stolen tech.  It's not preformed as well as we were lead to believe it could.  So let's slow down and rethink.   

In the meantime let's get some cheap resources from Russia.


----------



## daftandbarmy

More statements of the obvious....

FBI and MI5 leaders give unprecedented joint warning on Chinese spying

*Christopher Wray joins Ken McCallum in London, calling Beijing the ‘biggest long-term threat to economic security’*

The head of the FBI and the leader of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency have delivered an unprecedented joint address raising fresh alarm about the Chinese government, warning business leaders that Beijing is determined to steal their technology for competitive gain.

In a speech at MI5’s London headquarters intended as a show of western solidarity, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, stood alongside the MI5 director general, Ken McCallum. Wray reaffirmed longstanding concerns about economic espionage and hacking operations by China as well as the Chinese government’s efforts to stifle dissent abroad.

“We consistently see that it’s the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security, and by ‘our’, I mean both of our nations, along with our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” Wray said.

He told the audience the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market”.

Ken McCallum said MI5 was running seven times as many investigations into China as it had been four years ago and planned to “grow as much again” to tackle the widespread attempts at inference which pervade “so many aspects of our national life”.

“Today is the first time the heads of the FBI and MI5 have shared a public platform,” McCallum said. “We’re doing so to send the clearest signal we can on a massive shared challenge: China.”

FBI and MI5 leaders give unprecedented joint warning on Chinese spying


----------



## QV

This will be virtually ignored in Canada.


----------



## Good2Golf

QV said:


> This will be virtually ignored in Canada.


----------



## OldSolduer

QV said:


> This will be virtually ignored in Canada.


Hell ignored, we have Members of Parliament who have had "foreign affairs" with Chinese nationals. And that has been completely ignored and forgotten.


----------



## Dana381

OldSolduer said:


> Hell ignored, we have Members of Parliament who have had "foreign affairs" with Chinese nationals. And that has been completely ignored and forgotten.


I wouldn't be surprised if every prostitute in Ottawa was on the ccp payroll


----------



## dapaterson

China's real estate bubble appears to be popping, and taking down developers and banks with it.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1546501017105305601


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The government knew this was a problem and was trying to scale back the size of the bubble, without bursting it.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

This could get very interesting


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1549798923061141506


----------



## Fishbone Jones

Colin Parkinson said:


> This could get very interesting
> 
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1549798923061141506


....and don't think for a minute that the PMO isn't watching this very carefully.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Awesome...


----------



## OldSolduer

Fishbone Jones said:


> ....and don't think for a minute that the PMO isn't watching this very carefully.


Of course he is. He's an admirer of China - he stated that in 2015 IIRC, that should have been a red flag.....


----------



## GK .Dundas

I suspect that whatever admiration he may have for their" ability to turn on a dime" has probably taken a pretty good beating.
Turns out they're even more locked into a system and one that lacks a great deal more flexibility, then we are.
I suspect that it's been a painful education and it's not over yet.
Dealing with the Chinese is like dealing a spoiled 3 year old who's prone to temper tantrums.
Some years back I started to referring to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the " Ministry of Outrage...as in We're outraged about well just about everything.


----------



## RangerRay

Canada must put China ‘front and centre’ in Indo-Pacific strategy or it risks irrelevance, experts say
					

The first draft of the federal government’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which it has been quietly formulating since 2020, made no mention of China, sources say




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




What a shock. The panel of “experts” that is consulting on our long awaited “Indo-Pacific Strategy” are mostly corporate butt-snorkelers of the Beijing government.


----------



## Kirkhill

@Edward Campbell

How would China react to a weak Russia, an unstable Kazakhstan, a passive aggressive Mongolia, and trials and tribulations with the Uighur and Tibetans?

China has a 5000 year war going with the Mongols and Turks of the Steppes.





Anchor the Left Flank with Turkey and Ukraine supported by the Baltic States and anchor the Right Flank with  Taiwan and Korea supported by Japan, Australia and the US.

And then there is the North.

And all those unoccupied islands and all that ice....  Barriers?  Or Aircraft Carriers?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Well, Alexander Gabuev (a Senior Fellow at the _Carnegie Endowment for International Peace_) says, in* Foreign Affairs*, that we may be returning to a 13th century model where Russia, which has had to turn, cap-in-hand, to China because of Western sanctions/isolation, will be a Chinese vessel state, again. That should worry us.


----------



## Good2Golf

Indeed!  Far more worrying for sure, than if Russia tried to reestablish itself on the world stage on its own.


----------



## Spencer100

Edward Campbell said:


> Well, Alexander Gabuev (a Senior Fellow at the _Carnegie Endowment for International Peace_) says, in* Foreign Affairs*, that we may be returning to a 13th century model where Russia, which has had to turn, cap-in-hand, to China because of Western sanctions/isolation, will be a Chinese vessel state, again. That should worry us.


As I was saying over on the Ukrainian thread.  China is bigger long term problem.  I guess I don't really understand Russia but I have thought they would have been an ally first against Radical Islam and then now as a buffer to China.  But I guess they still want to be at the head table.  

Russia is now the junior partner between China and themselves.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Interesting, if true I wonder if some governments might be funding some people?









						Sinosure and Deliberately Bringing China Down, Factory by Factory
					

About six months ago, in Deliberately Bringing China Down, Factory by Factory, I wrote about a couple of Americans who were buying product on credit from Chinese factories, with no intention of ever making the required second payment: The “this” to which I am referring is an underground (I say...




					harrisbricken.com


----------



## CBH99

Colin Parkinson said:


> Interesting, if true I wonder if some governments might be funding some people?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sinosure and Deliberately Bringing China Down, Factory by Factory
> 
> 
> About six months ago, in Deliberately Bringing China Down, Factory by Factory, I wrote about a couple of Americans who were buying product on credit from Chinese factories, with no intention of ever making the required second payment: The “this” to which I am referring is an underground (I say...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> harrisbricken.com


I love the creativity behind the idea, these folks are smarter than I.  I also like the layers of security they’ve given themselves to an extent, and their motive is clear - drain money from the CCP.

I honestly think I’m too lazy to go as far as them - nor confident in myself enough mentally to not sweat that I’d get caught somehow.


----------



## KevinB

Even the Germans felt the need to posture 








						German Air Force takes flight for first Indo-Pacific deployment
					

“We want to demonstrate that we can be in Asia within a day,” said Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, the service’s chief of staff.




					www.defensenews.com


----------



## Kirkhill

This article emphasises the impact on Putin's Russia.  I believe the impact is as great, if not greater, on Xi's China.

The CSTO is largely made up of Silk Road nations - nations that have no particular historical affinity to either Han China or Muscovite Russia.



> Tajikistan is hosting the drills, called “Regional Cooperation 22,” while U.S. Central Command organized them, according to the State Department. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—each members of Russia’s collective defense organization, akin to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—are all participating.
> 
> Mongolia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan are also joining in on the exercises, which are set to last until August 20.



The western end of the Silk Road is "anchored" by Chechenya, Dagestan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Ukraine.
The eastern end is likewise anchored by the Koreas and Japan.
China is penetrated by the culturally related Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the people of Inner Mongolia.  Tibet has common cause with those nations as well as with Taiwan and Hong Kong.

And, of course, then there is India.

If Vlad loses the his grip then China loses the Silk Road.









						Putin’s ‘Loyal’ Friends Host Rendezvous With His #1 Enemy
					

While Putin touts his strong alliances during wartime, several countries in Russia’s defense bloc are participating in military exercises with the U.S. like it’s business as usual.



					www.thedailybeast.com


----------



## KevinB

Kirkhill said:


> If Vlad loses the his grip then China loses the Silk Road.


China gains more customers with US Dollars…

China isn’t stupid, they are probably better capitalists than we are.  They are quite willing to flex MIL assets in the short time, to create a better long game financial win.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

Kirkhill said:


> This article emphasises the impact on Putin's Russia.  I believe the impact is as great, if not greater, on Xi's China.
> 
> The CSTO is largely made up of Silk Road nations - nations that have no particular historical affinity to either Han China or Muscovite Russia.
> 
> 
> 
> The western end of the Silk Road is "anchored" by Chechenya, Dagestan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Ukraine.
> The eastern end is likewise anchored by the Koreas and Japan.
> China is penetrated by the culturally related Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the people of Inner Mongolia.  Tibet has common cause with those nations as well as with Taiwan and Hong Kong.
> 
> And, of course, then there is India.
> 
> If Vlad loses the his grip then China loses the Silk Road.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Putin’s ‘Loyal’ Friends Host Rendezvous With His #1 Enemy
> 
> 
> While Putin touts his strong alliances during wartime, several countries in Russia’s defense bloc are participating in military exercises with the U.S. like it’s business as usual.
> 
> 
> 
> www.thedailybeast.com


I highly recommend reading “Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford. It brings into focus China’s goals and also, in a way, explains the current conflict in Ukraine.


----------



## Kirkhill

KevinB said:


> China gains more customers with US Dollars…
> 
> China isn’t stupid, they are probably better capitalists than we are.  They are quite willing to flex MIL assets in the short time, to create a better long game financial win.



China? Yes.

Xi?  Maybe

The PLA?


----------



## Kirkhill

SeaKingTacco said:


> I highly recommend reading “Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford. It brings into focus China’s goals and also, in a way, explains the current conflict in Ukraine.




My own personal take is that while Genghis Khan is important he is a continuation of a line of nomads - warriors, pastoralists and traders - that can be continuously dated back to the Maykop Bronze Age of 3700 BC-3000 BC.

The culture includes all the modern Stans and Mongolias, but it also includes Khazars, Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Alans, Huns, Cimmerians and Scythians as well as the Yamnaya. That culture is not a creation of Genghis  and it is certainly not dependent on the Han Chinese, or Islam for that matter, for its identity.

The culture created Temujin and turned him into Genghis Khan.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Dr Richard Haass is always worth a read - in my opinion he is spot on, here.

"What we saw was a reaction – more accurately, an overreaction – of choice. The scale and complexity of the response indicates that it had long been planned, suggesting that if the Pelosi trip had not taken place, some other development would have been cited as a pretext to “justify” China’s actions.

China’s increasingly fraught internal political and economic situation goes a long way toward explaining Xi’s reaction. His priority is to be appointed to an unprecedented third term as leader of the Communist Party of China; but the country’s economic performance, for decades the principal source of legitimacy for China’s leaders, can no longer be counted on as growth slows, unemployment rises, and financial bubbles burst. Xi’s insistence on maintaining a zero-COVID policy is also drawing criticism domestically and reducing economic growth.

Increasingly, it appears that Xi is turning to nationalism as a substitute. When it comes to generating popular support in China, nothing competes with asserting the mainland’s sovereignty over Taiwan."

"The danger is obvious. With China indicating that its military activities close to Taiwan are the new normal, there is greater risk of an accident that spirals out of control. Even more dangerous is that China will determine that “peaceful reunification” is fading as a real option – in no small part because China alienated many Taiwanese when it violated its commitment to “one country, two systems” after it regained control of Hong Kong. In such a scenario, China may decide that it must act militarily against Taiwan to bring an end to the democratic example Taiwan sets and to head off any perceived move toward independence."

"The US also needs a sensible and disciplined Taiwan policy. The US should continue to stand by its one-China policy, which for over 40 years has finessed the ultimate relationship between the mainland and Taiwan. There is no place for unilateral action, be it aggression by the mainland or assertions of independence by Taiwan. Final status will be what it will be; what should matter from the US perspective is that it be determined peacefully and with the consent of the Taiwanese people."


----------



## Good2Golf

Edward Campbell said:


> Increasingly, it appears that Xi is turning to nationalism as a substitute. When it comes to generating popular support in China, nothing competes with asserting the mainland’s sovereignty over Taiwan."


In that regard, Mr. Campbell, perhaps Xi is testing the waters by applying a dab of Putinism to his portfolio…outward confrontation to galvanize domestic support? 🤔


----------



## Spencer100

RCN sails through the Straight.  HMCS Vancouver sail with a USN destroyer



			Canadian frigate passes through Taiwan Strait with U.S. warship amid high tensions
		










						USS Higgins Joins Canadian Warship to Transit Taiwan Strait - USNI News
					

USS Higgins (DDG-76) conducted a Taiwan Strait transit on Tuesday, the Navy announced. Higgins performed the transit in cooperation with Royal Canadian Navy Halifax-class frigate HMCS Vancouver (FFH-331), according to a Tuesday Navy news release. The strait transit was done outside of any...




					news.usni.org


----------



## OldSolduer

Kirkhill said:


> My own personal take is that while Genghis Khan is important he is a continuation of a line of nomads - warriors, pastoralists and traders - that can be continuously dated back to the Maykop Bronze Age of 3700 BC-3000 BC.
> 
> The culture includes all the modern Stans and Mongolias, but it also includes Khazars, Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Alans, Huns, Cimmerians and Scythians as well as the Yamnaya. That culture is not a creation of Genghis  and it is certainly not dependent on the Han Chinese, or Islam for that matter, for its identity.
> 
> The culture created Temujin and turned him into Genghis Khan.


You sir are a wealth of knowledge.  I'm infantry so a bit ADHD and tend not to focus on any one subject - but Ghengis fascinates me.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Canada, finally, gets a wee bit serious - or less comical, anyway: "*Trudeau to name career diplomat Jennifer May as Canada’s first female ambassador to China*."

The article says that "The sources said Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly pushed Mr. Trudeau to approve the appointment of Ms. May because she speaks fluent Mandarin and handled human rights and political issues as first secretary at the Canadian embassy in Beijing from 2000-2004." I'm about 99% sure that's rubbish. Ms Joly pushed no-one for anything except, maybe, for a bigger limo. Marta Morgan, the Deputy at Global Affairs, has been negotiating steadily with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Ms May is the logical choice.

Beijing may not be through lashing Canada but they also want better diplomatic and trade relations and that means that both Canada and China need a more senior Canadian diplomat in Beijing.


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward Campbell said:


> Dr Richard Haass is always worth a read - in my opinion he is spot on, here.
> 
> "What we saw was a reaction – more accurately, an overreaction – of choice. The scale and complexity of the response indicates that it had long been planned, suggesting that if the Pelosi trip had not taken place, some other development would have been cited as a pretext to “justify” China’s actions.
> 
> China’s increasingly fraught internal political and economic situation goes a long way toward explaining Xi’s reaction. His priority is to be appointed to an unprecedented third term as leader of the Communist Party of China; but the country’s economic performance, for decades the principal source of legitimacy for China’s leaders, can no longer be counted on as growth slows, unemployment rises, and financial bubbles burst. Xi’s insistence on maintaining a zero-COVID policy is also drawing criticism domestically and reducing economic growth.
> 
> Increasingly, it appears that Xi is turning to nationalism as a substitute. When it comes to generating popular support in China, nothing competes with asserting the mainland’s sovereignty over Taiwan."
> 
> "The danger is obvious. With China indicating that its military activities close to Taiwan are the new normal, there is greater risk of an accident that spirals out of control. Even more dangerous is that China will determine that “peaceful reunification” is fading as a real option – in no small part because China alienated many Taiwanese when it violated its commitment to “one country, two systems” after it regained control of Hong Kong. In such a scenario, China may decide that it must act militarily against Taiwan to bring an end to the democratic example Taiwan sets and to head off any perceived move toward independence."
> 
> "The US also needs a sensible and disciplined Taiwan policy. The US should continue to stand by its one-China policy, which for over 40 years has finessed the ultimate relationship between the mainland and Taiwan. There is no place for unilateral action, be it aggression by the mainland or assertions of independence by Taiwan. Final status will be what it will be; what should matter from the US perspective is that it be determined peacefully and with the consent of the Taiwanese people."











						Ukraine’s success spurs call for rapid reform of Taiwan’s defence strategy
					

Retired admiral Lee Hsi-ming, once the top military officer in Taiwan, has written a book urging Taiwan to speed up reforms that embrace the same guerrilla warfare strategies that Ukraine is using to thwart Russia’s invasion




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




I wonder if Xi and China might not be more worried about Taiwan adopting a Home Guard type of defence, after the style of the Ukrainians.

If Taiwan gets into the business of building cheap, high quality knock offs of AT4s and NLAWs to equip its own Home Guard, along with lots of drones, it occurs to me it is not only Chinese tanks in Taiwan that might be put at risk.  It is a lot easier to smuggle a container of them across borders than fighters and tanks.  And if Poland, Turkey and Korea got into the game as well it might put a new slant on people's liberation armies.  Getting weapons like that, even M72s, into the hands of Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers could  make for interesting times.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kirkhill said:


> Ukraine’s success spurs call for rapid reform of Taiwan’s defence strategy
> 
> 
> Retired admiral Lee Hsi-ming, once the top military officer in Taiwan, has written a book urging Taiwan to speed up reforms that embrace the same guerrilla warfare strategies that Ukraine is using to thwart Russia’s invasion
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I wonder if Xi and China might not be more worried about Taiwan adopting a Home Guard type of defence, after the style of the Ukrainians.
> 
> If Taiwan gets into the business of building cheap, high quality knock offs of AT4s and NLAWs to equip its own Home Guard, along with lots of drones, it occurs to me it is not only Chinese tanks in Taiwan that might be put at risk.  It is a lot easier to smuggle a container of them across borders than fighters and tanks.  And if Poland, Turkey and Korea got into the game as well it might put a new slant on people's liberation armies.  Getting weapons like that, even M72s, into the hands of Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers could  make for interesting times.


Some experts say that "*The year 2027 looms large for Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed will one day be brought under Beijing’s control. That’s when, as U.S. Admiral Philip Davidson, then-head of Indo-Pacific Command, informed a Senate committee in 2021, China will have acquired the capacity to take Taiwan by force. Last week, CNN reported CIA deputy director David Cohen as saying that while Mr. Xi has not made the decision to invade Taiwan, he wants the People’s Liberation Army to have the capability by 2027.*"

We were taught - I think it's an almost universal staff college notion - that the two most complex operations in war are:

1. An opposed amphibious assaut; and/or​2. An opposed airborne assault.​
 My _guess_ is that PLA senior staff know that, too.

I haven't actually spoken to any PLA officers for more than 10 years. Back then I _guessed_ that they were focused on converting a _levée en masse _into a useful professional army that could invade Taiwan (or someplace else) but I also _guessed_ that they saw it as the work of a generation. Maybe the generation is up and 2027 is the right time but I really don't envy the guys who may have to implement it.

The way the US-led West has supported Ukraine - however imperfectly - must also give the Chinese pause.


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward Campbell said:


> Some experts say that "*The year 2027 looms large for Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed will one day be brought under Beijing’s control. That’s when, as U.S. Admiral Philip Davidson, then-head of Indo-Pacific Command, informed a Senate committee in 2021, China will have acquired the capacity to take Taiwan by force. Last week, CNN reported CIA deputy director David Cohen as saying that while Mr. Xi has not made the decision to invade Taiwan, he wants the People’s Liberation Army to have the capability by 2027.*"
> 
> We were taught - I think it's an almost universal staff college notion - that the two most complex operations in war are:
> 
> 1. An opposed amphibious assaut; and/or​2. An opposed airborne assault.​
> My _guess_ is that PLA senior staff know that, too.
> 
> I haven't actually spoken to any PLA officers for more than 10 years. Back then I _guessed_ that they were focused on converting a _levée en masse _into a useful professional army that could invade Taiwan (or someplace else) but I also _guessed_ that they saw it as the work of a generation. Maybe the generation is up and 2027 is the right time but I really don't envy the guys who may have to implement it.
> 
> The way the US-led West has supported Ukraine - however imperfectly - must also give the Chinese pause.



Whether Chinese, Russian or even Westerners (based on Iraq and Afghanistan), life doesn't seem to be getting any easier for "invaders/liberators" anywhere.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Another look at the China-Russia "partnership," this time from Konrad Yakabuski in there _Globe and Mail_:

"*When Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Xi Jinping just before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, the two leaders made a show of solidarity that led many Western analysts to conclude that Russia had China’s tacit backing when it invaded Ukraine only days later *... [but] ... *By the time the two leaders met again last week in Uzbekistan, where they were attending a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the tone of their exchanges had shifted dramatically. Mr. Putin found himself having to account for his bad behaviour in Ukraine *...  *“We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Mr. Putin said at the opening of their meeting. “We understand your questions and concerns in this regard.*”"

I agree fully with Mr Yakabuski when he says that "*China is Russia’s natural ally only to the extent the two countries have a shared interest in countering U.S. hegemony in international affairs. But Mr. Putin has turned out to be a far less stable “friend” than Mr. Xi had likely ever bargained for. He may even feel burned by the Russian President’s February promise of a swift and easy victory in Ukraine.*"

Both Xi and Putin "*clearly underestimated the extent to which Mr. Biden, so soon after pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, would risk putting U.S. credibility on the line again. The U.S. President has insisted that his country will not put boots on the ground in Ukraine. That, he has said, would be a precursor to a Third World War. But U.S.-supplied weapons and intelligence have made all the difference in Ukraine up to now.*" And this gives Xi Jinping cause to worry about how the US might lead the West if Taiwan is attacked.

He concludes that "*the relationship between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin appears to have entered a new phase. The Chinese leader is clearly none too impressed with his Russian counterpart’s strategic errors and has likely grown wiser to Mr. Putin’s shortcomings. The alliance the two men struck in February is now unlikely to lead to the degree of co-operation between their countries that they had predicted then. That is good news for the rest of the world.*"

While that might be "good news," the bad news is that Russia is increasingly dependent on China as its nearly only source of finance - the unconvertible RMB. That gives China unfettered access to Russia enormous natural resource base. China, *IF* it can improve its own _technological/innovative/creative_ industrial base (i.e. make chips that work, etc), would be very nearly self-sufficient - something that some analysts think is a sort of strategic nirvana; the only other places that I can think of that could be "self sufficient" would be:

1. A largely *united* Western Europe with _control_ over Africa's resource base; or​2. A politically united - from the Rio Grande to the North Pole - North America.​


----------



## RangerRay

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I know the Chinese Communist Party is running all kinds of agents and other bad actors in Canada, but police stations?









						Chinese police establish stations overseas in ‘worrying’ crackdown on citizens abroad
					

A recent report by Safeguard Defenders reveals China has opened up unofficial police stations across five continents, including Canada, ‘persuading’ more than 230,000 people to return from abroad




					www.theglobeandmail.com


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good read from dissident scholar (both word matter a lot) Cai Xia in the current _Foreign. Affairs_.

"Not long ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping was riding high ... [but, now, while] ... Outwardly, Xi still projects confidence. In a speech in January 2021, he declared China “invincible.” But behind the scenes, his power is being questioned as never before. By discarding China’s long tradition of collective rule and creating a cult of personality reminiscent of the one that surrounded Mao, Xi has rankled party insiders. A series of policy missteps, meanwhile, have disappointed even supporters. Xi’s reversal of economic reforms and his inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic have shattered his image as a hero of everyday people. In the shadows, resentment among CCP elites is rising."

There is no way to guarantee leadership transitions in autocracies - Xi proved that in China by overturning Deng's plan for term limits.

"At the CCP’s 20th National Party Congress this fall, Xi expects that he will be given a third five-year term. And even if the growing irritation among some party elites means that his bid will not go entirely uncontested, he will probably succeed. But that success will bring more turbulence down the road. Emboldened by the unprecedented additional term, Xi will likely tighten his grip even further domestically and raise his ambitions internationally. As Xi’s rule becomes more extreme, the infighting and resentment he has already triggered will only grow stronger. The competition between various factions within the party will get more intense, complicated, and brutal than ever before ... [and] ... At that point, China may experience a vicious cycle in which Xi reacts to the perceived sense of threat by taking ever bolder actions that generate even more pushback. Trapped in an echo chamber and desperately seeking redemption, he may even do something catastrophically ill advised, such as attack Taiwan. Xi may well ruin something China has earned over the course of four decades: a reputation for steady, competent leadership. In fact, he already has."

A primer, from an expert former in sider, one how the Chinese power structure works - she likens it to the Mafia:

"In many respects, the CCP has changed little since the party took power in 1949. Now, as then, the party exercises absolute control over China, ruling over its military, its administration, and its rubber-stamp legislature. The party hierarchy, in turn, answers to the Politburo Standing Committee, the top decision-making body in China. Composed of anywhere from five to nine members of the broader Politburo, the Standing Committee is headed by the party’s general secretary, China’s paramount leader. Since 2012, that has been Xi ... [while] ... The details of how the Standing Committee operates are a closely guarded secret, but it is widely known that many decisions are made through the circulation of documents dealing with major policy questions, in the margins of which the committee’s members add comments. The papers are written by top leaders in ministries and other party organs, as well as experts from the best universities and think tanks, and to have one’s memo circulated among the Standing Committee members is considered a credit to the writer’s home institution. When I was a professor, the Central Party School set a quota for the production of such memos of about one a month. Authors whose memos were read by the Standing Committee were rewarded with the equivalent of roughly $1,500—more than a professor’s monthly salary ... [but] ... Another feature of the party system has remained constant: the importance of personal connections. When it comes to one’s rise within the party hierarchy, individual relationships, including one’s family reputation and Communist pedigree, matter as much as competence and ideology ... [and] ... That was certainly the case with Xi’s career. Contrary to Chinese propaganda and the assessment of many Western analysts that he rose through his talent, the opposite is true. Xi benefited immensely from the connections of his father, Xi Zhongxun, a CCP leader with impeccable revolutionary credentials who served briefly as propaganda minister under Mao ... [Xi had many stumble but, finally] ...  family connections intervened. In 1992, after Xi’s mother wrote a plea to the new party leader in Fujian, Jia Qinglin, Xi was transferred to the provincial capital. At that point, his career took off ... [and] ... As all lower-level cadres know, to climb the CCP ladder, one must find a higher-level boss. In Xi’s case, this proved easy enough, since many party leaders held his father in high esteem. His first and most important mentor was Geng Biao, a top diplomatic and military official who had once worked for Xi’s father. In 1979, he took on the younger Xi as a secretary. The need for such patrons early on has knock-on effects decades down the line. High-level officials each have their own “lineages,” as insiders call these groups of protégés, which amount to de facto factions within the CCP. Indeed, disputes that are framed as ideological and policy debates within the CCP are often something much less sophisticated: power struggles among various lineages. Such a system can also lead to tangled webs of personal loyalty. If one’s mentor falls out of favor, the effect is the professional equivalent of being orphaned ... [finally] ... Outsiders may find it helpful to think of the CCP as more of a mafia organization than a political party. The head of the party is the don, and below him sit the underbosses, or the Standing Committee. These men traditionally parcel out power, with each responsible for certain areas—foreign policy, the economy, personnel, anticorruption, and so on. They are also supposed to serve as the big boss’s consiglieres, advising him on their areas of responsibility. Outside the Standing Committee are the other 18 members of the Politburo, who are next in the line of succession for the Standing Committee. They can be thought of as the mafia’s capos, carrying out Xi’s orders to eliminate perceived threats in the hope of staying in the good graces of the don. As a perk of their position, they are allowed to enrich themselves as they see fit, seizing property and businesses without penalty. And like the mafia, the party uses blunt tools to get what it wants: bribery, extortion, even violence."

_I think_ that, 25_ish_+ years ago, Deng Xiaoping actually wanted to *democratize* China - not make it a liberal democracy, not even to make it a conservative democracy like Singapore, but to give the rapidly emerging middle class some greater say in managing their own country. I also think that his views were shared by some, but *not a majority*, of senior officials, including by his successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. But the opposition was always strong and Xi was parti of it. 

Cai Xia continues: "Although the power of personal connections and the flexibility of formal rules have remained constant since Communist China’s founding, one thing has shifted over time: the degree to which power is concentrated in a single man. From the mid-1960s onward, Mao had absolute control and the final say on all matters, even if he exercised his power episodically and was officially merely first among equals. But when Deng Xiaoping became China’s de facto leader in 1978, he chipped away at Mao’s one-man, lifelong dictatorship ... [and] ... Deng restricted China’s presidency to two five-year terms and established a form of collective leadership, allowing other officials—first Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang—to serve as head of the party, even if he remained the power behind the throne. In 1987, the CCP decided to reform the process for selecting members of the Central Committee, the party’s nominal overseer and the body from which Politburo members are chosen. For the first time, the party proposed more candidates than there were seats—hardly a democratic election, but a step in the right direction ... [and] ... Seeking to avoid a repeat of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, when Maoist propaganda reached its apogee, Deng also sought to prevent any leader from forming a cult of personality ... [thus] ... In 1982, China’s leaders went so far as to write into the party constitution a ban on cults of personality, which they viewed as uniquely dangerous."

"Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, deepened the political reforms. ... [and] ... When Hu Jintao took over from Jiang in 2002, China moved even further toward collective leadership. Hu ruled with the consent of the nine members of the Standing Committee, a clique known as the “nine dragons controlling the water.” There were downsides to this egalitarian approach. A single member of the Standing Committee could veto any decision, driving the perception of Hu as a weak leader unable to overcome gridlock. For nearly a decade, the economic reforms that began under Deng stalled. But there were upsides, too, since the need for consensus prevented careless decisions. When SARS broke out in China during his first year in office, for instance, Hu acted prudently, firing China’s health minister for covering up the extent of the outbreak, and encouraging cadres to report infections truthfully."

Xi, who, ironically, rose towards power under the "reformed" system, has turned back the clock.

Then, " When Xi took the reins, many in the West hailed him as a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev. Some imagined that, like the Soviet Union’s final leader, Xi would embrace radical reforms, releasing the state’s grip on the economy and democratizing the political system. That, of course, turned out to be a fantasy. Instead, Xi, a devoted student of Mao and just as eager to leave his mark on history, has worked to establish his absolute power. And because previous reforms failed to place real checks and balances on the party leader, he has succeeded. Now, as under Mao, China is a one-man show ... [but, Cai Xia adds, very correctly] ... The more a political system centers on a single leader, the more the flaws and peculiarities of that leader matter. And in the case of Xi, the leader is thin-skinned, stubborn, and dictatorial ... [and] ... In any political system, unchecked power is dangerous. Detached from reality and freed from the constraint of consensus, a leader can act rashly, implementing policies that are unwise, unpopular, or both. Not surprisingly, then, Xi’s know-it-all style of rule has led to a number of disastrous decisions. The common theme is an inability to grasp the practical effect of his directives."

After analyzing the probably outcome of another Xi Jinping political history, Cia Xia concludes: "*The only viable way of changing course, so far as I can see, is also the scariest and deadliest: a humiliating defeat in a war. If Xi were to attack Taiwan, his likeliest target, there is a good chance that the war would not go as planned, and Taiwan, with American help, would be able to resist invasion and inflict grave damage on mainland China. In that event, the elites and the masses would abandon Xi, paving the way for not only his personal downfall but perhaps even the collapse of the CCP as we know it. For precedent, one would have to go back to the eighteenth century, when Emperor Qianlong failed in his quest to expand China’s realm to Central Asia, Burma, and Vietnam. Predictably, China suffered a mortifying loss in the First Sino-Japanese War, setting the stage for the downfall of the Qing dynasty and kicking off a long period of political upheaval. Emperors are not always forever.*"

It's a long article, I know many of you don't subscribe to _Foreign Affairs_ but every single library worthy of the name does. If your library doesn't then you need a new Base Commander or mayor.


----------



## Czech_pivo

Edward Campbell said:


> Another look at the China-Russia "partnership," this time from Konrad Yakabuski in there _Globe and Mail_:
> 
> "*When Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Xi Jinping just before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, the two leaders made a show of solidarity that led many Western analysts to conclude that Russia had China’s tacit backing when it invaded Ukraine only days later *... [but] ... *By the time the two leaders met again last week in Uzbekistan, where they were attending a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the tone of their exchanges had shifted dramatically. Mr. Putin found himself having to account for his bad behaviour in Ukraine *...  *“We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Mr. Putin said at the opening of their meeting. “We understand your questions and concerns in this regard.*”"
> 
> I agree fully with Mr Yakabuski when he says that "*China is Russia’s natural ally only to the extent the two countries have a shared interest in countering U.S. hegemony in international affairs. But Mr. Putin has turned out to be a far less stable “friend” than Mr. Xi had likely ever bargained for. He may even feel burned by the Russian President’s February promise of a swift and easy victory in Ukraine.*"
> 
> Both Xi and Putin "*clearly underestimated the extent to which Mr. Biden, so soon after pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, would risk putting U.S. credibility on the line again. The U.S. President has insisted that his country will not put boots on the ground in Ukraine. That, he has said, would be a precursor to a Third World War. But U.S.-supplied weapons and intelligence have made all the difference in Ukraine up to now.*" And this gives Xi Jinping cause to worry about how the US might lead the West if Taiwan is attacked.
> 
> He concludes that "*the relationship between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin appears to have entered a new phase. The Chinese leader is clearly none too impressed with his Russian counterpart’s strategic errors and has likely grown wiser to Mr. Putin’s shortcomings. The alliance the two men struck in February is now unlikely to lead to the degree of co-operation between their countries that they had predicted then. That is good news for the rest of the world.*"
> 
> While that might be "good news," the bad news is that Russia is increasingly dependent on China as its nearly only source of finance - the unconvertible RMB. That gives China unfettered access to Russia enormous natural resource base. China, *IF* it can improve its own _technological/innovative/creative_ industrial base (i.e. make chips that work, etc), would be very nearly self-sufficient - something that some analysts think is a sort of strategic nirvana; the only other places that I can think of that could be "self sufficient" would be:
> 
> 1. A largely *united* Western Europe with _control_ over Africa's resource base; or​2. A politically united - from the Rio Grande to the North Pole - North America.​


Question - What role, if any, does the resources of S. America play in this new 'Great Game'?  Could these resources replace those of Africa?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Czech_pivo said:


> Question - What role, if any, does the resources of S. America play in this new 'Great Game'?  Could these resources replace those of Africa?


Off the top of my head: China tried South America _circa_ 1995-2000 with proposals for seaports in Brazil and Peru and even a canal across Nicaragua to rival Panama but then switched to Africa because the political situations in Latin America are too difficult, even for the Chinese.

South America is resource rich and it is more sophisticated than Africa but the political situation is nightmarish.


----------



## Good2Golf

Good read, Mr. Campbell. Thanks for that.  So would you see that a critical window would be Post-Congress and lead-up/telegraphing of intent to act against Taiwan?  Assessment and parsing of I&Ws against Taiwan will be key, one would think.


----------



## Czech_pivo

Edward Campbell said:


> Off the top of my head: China tried South America _circa_ 1995-2000 with proposals for seaports in Brazil and Peru and even a canal across Nicaragua to rival Panama but then switched to Africa because the political situations in Latin America are too difficult, even for the Chinese.
> 
> South America is resource rich and it is more sophisticated than Africa but the political situation is nightmarish.


Is S. America even an option to the Chinese due to the Monroe Doctrine?  Is only Africa 'up for grabs' because of this?


----------



## KevinB

Czech_pivo said:


> Is S. America even an option to the Chinese due to the Monroe Doctrine?  Is only Africa 'up for grabs' because of this?


Religion is more of an issue in SA than our interference.  

Africa is a mess, but it’s a mess that we nor Europe really want to get involved in (again).  I’m curious if a renewed Uk will push back into Africa to attempt to dislodge the Chinese.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I worry that Xi, likes almost all autocrats, is a less than really good manager and, again like most autocrats, has ended up being surrounded by yes-men rather then by good advisors.

It's been a _looooong_ time since I was in the staff college but I still remember the complexity of both airborne and amphibious operations. I'm not sure the PLA is up for either, much less both ... there's been no *Jubilee*, no *Husky*, no *Torch *where Chinese forces might have tried both. But I'm _guessing_ that many top Chinese admirals and generals are talking Xi that they can do it ... just like some Russian generals told Putin "we can do it, boss."

*IF* Xi invades Taiwan and fails then there may be another Chinese civil war.


----------



## KevinB

@Edward Campbell I suspect that there are an equal number of PLA and PLN brass saying it will not work. 
     If they believed it would work, I suspect they would have jumped off shortly after Russian forces crossed into Ukraine. 
 I also believe the Chinese have seen exactly how well Western weaponry work versus Russian systems, looked at their systems similarities to Russia, and done calculations based on the range of their objective, and come back with, let’s table this for the foreseeable future. 

I don’t think Xi wants to gamble his future and the future of CCP like he’s seen VVP do in Russia.   He may need a win, but he also doesn’t want to jump into a near guaranteed loss either.


----------



## Edward Campbell

For those looking for a more in-depth analysis of Xi Jinping, the man, this - a series of podcasts by Sue-Lin Wong in _The Economist_, might be of interest.


----------



## FJAG

KevinB said:


> I also believe the Chinese have seen exactly how well Western weaponry work versus Russian systems, looked at their systems similarities to Russia, and done calculations based on the range of their objective, and come back with, let’s table this for the foreseeable future.


I wonder if they've also evaluated the West's slipping stocks of such weapons and it's limited capability to quickly ramp up production. Sustainment of critical systems seems to be the West's weak link.

It strikes me that Iran and Turkey are producing more of certain systems, albeit ones with less than equal performance, which are adequate for several major roles.


----------



## Brad Sallows

I suspect an attempted invasion of Taiwan would be decided in the first few days by air and naval forces, and that ample ammunition exists for that period of time.


----------



## FJAG

Brad Sallows said:


> I suspect an attempted invasion of Taiwan would be decided in the first few days by air and naval forces, and that ample ammunition exists for that period of time.


Isn't that what Russia thought a half a year ago?


----------



## Czech_pivo

Brad Sallows said:


> I suspect an attempted invasion of Taiwan would be decided in the first few days by air and naval forces, and that ample ammunition exists for that period of time.


What about the possible approach of a low intensity environment where the PLA decides to 'starve out' the island by blocking food, oil, gas, vital supplies.  Basically a blockade.


----------



## Good2Golf

FJAG said:


> Isn't that what Russia thought a half a year ago?


For a myopic, deluded view of a three-day action leading to a victory parade in Kyiv, yes…more than enough munitions.

For in incredibly ill-assessed, planned and executed action lasting 70 times (and counting) duration of the intended quick op, clearly a faulty Estimate/Appreciation.


----------



## KevinB

FJAG said:


> I wonder if they've also evaluated the West's slipping stocks of such weapons and it's limited capability to quickly ramp up production. Sustainment of critical systems seems to be the West's weak link.


I don’t think the West (serious countries that is) have seriously depleted their stocks. 
   LocMart, Raytheon etc have been double timing it on replacements even before the USG pumped a bunch of new contracts to them.  


FJAG said:


> It strikes me that Iran and Turkey are producing more of certain systems, albeit ones with less than equal performance, which are adequate for several major roles.


In the land of the Blind, the One Eyed Man is King


----------



## Brad Sallows

The reason I think there's enough ammunition is that I also think the air and naval platforms needed to fire it will suffer losses more consequential than a tank here and a couple of IFVs there.


----------



## Czech_pivo

KevinB said:


> I don’t think the West (serious countries that is) have seriously depleted their stocks.
> LocMart, Raytheon etc have been double timing it on replacements even before the USG pumped a bunch of new contracts to them.
> 
> In the land of the Blind, the One Eyed Man is King


Reminds me of an old Russian Proverb.

One day a peasant is out fishing and he catches a huge pike.  Before he gaffs the pike it speaks to him and says 'wait, I'm a magical pike, I can grant you 1 wish.' At first the peasant is confused and can't believe his luck. As he starts to speak and tell the pike of his 1 wish, the pike stops him and say's, 'be careful what you wish for, *because whatever you ask for, I will grant your worst enemy double what I grant you*.'  So the peasant stops and begins to think, long and careful before he asks for his 1 wish.  He then says to the pike, 'I'm ready, for my 1 wish, I want you to poke out 1 of my eyes'......


----------



## Dana381

Chinese antics around Taiwan may well be a smoke show. The real take over is likely happening inside Taiwan. I don't know much about Taiwanese politics but China is likely working hard to get a foothold on the next possible president. Tsai Ing-wen the incumbent is ineligible to run again.whoever wins may well just allow China to come in and take over without firing a shot. The right leverage and they can control anyone.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

They were slowly succeeding on that, then they doubled down on HK and combined with the treatment of the Uyghurs. Now no one is in doubt what the "One China, Two One System" is going to look like. A big shift away from interconnection with the Mainland has taken place.


----------



## ModlrMike

Nothing to see here folks...

Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way?​
Opinion: Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way?


----------



## Kirkhill

Vlad may not be the only one with restless support.

I guess you can only make enemies of your neighbours for so long before somebody takes notice.









						President Xi, Schooled By The Oldest Veteran
					

A 105-year-old party senior delivers Xi a message. Reform and opening up is China's only route, argues Song Ping.




					tippinsights.com


----------



## OldSolduer

Kirkhill said:


> Vlad may not be the only one with restless support.
> 
> I guess you can only make enemies of your neighbours for so long before somebody takes notice.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> President Xi, Schooled By The Oldest Veteran
> 
> 
> A 105-year-old party senior delivers Xi a message. Reform and opening up is China's only route, argues Song Ping.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> tippinsights.com


Has the party senior survived long enough or will he survive to see 106? Or will the poor comrade perish ?


----------



## Kirkhill

OldSolduer said:


> Has the party senior survived long enough or will he survive to see 106? Or will the poor comrade perish ?


I was wondering if @Edward Campbell had any insight on the original article - any sense of the validity of the claims there.


----------



## Edward Campbell

More from The Economist:

"China was once, centuries ago, the world’s biggest economy. Many analysts expect it to regain that distinction in due course. But a host of difficulties besetting the Asian giant, some of which are self-inflicted, will delay the day it overtakes America to return to pole position. A growing number of economists now think that day may never arrive ... [and] ... China’s population is over four times bigger than America’s. Its economy could therefore surpass America’s in scale long before it matches it in sophistication. Its GDP per person needs to reach only a quarter of America’s for its total GDP to become the biggest in the world. By one measure, China has already achieved that modest feat. Its GDP overtook America’s in 2016 when translated into dollars at “purchasing-power parity”, a method that tries to tally up the goods and services in each country using the same international prices."

But, "China’s GDP still lags far behind America’s when converted into dollars using the more familiar exchange rates that prevail in the currency markets. It reached $17.7trn in 2021 compared with America’s $23trn. And China’s growth has been hampered by its zero-covid policy (which responds to every outbreak of the virus with severe lockdowns) as well as a property slump, unreformed state-owned enterprises and a continuing tech war with America. The government’s aggressive regulation of previously booming sectors, such as tech and education, has also depressed the mood. China’s economy expanded by an impressive 8.1% in 2021, but it will be lucky to grow by even 3% this year ... and] ... In the longer term, China’s ageing population will mean further difficulties. The workforce could shrink by 15% over the next 15 years, according to some estimates. Capital Economics, a consultancy, thinks China’s GDP might draw close to America’s or even surpass it by the mid-2030s only to fall behind again as its demographic decline asserts itself."

Finally: "One of the hardest and most neglected questions in this debate is what will happen to the exchange rate between the two countries and to prices within them. Goods and services in China are still substantially cheaper than in America on average. If China does continue to narrow the productivity gap with America, its prices should also converge, either through a stronger currency or faster inflation. These movements can make a big difference. Goldman Sachs, for example, predicts that China’s GDP will exceed $38trn in 2031, at the prices and exchange rates prevailing in that year. That would be more than double its present total and enough to make it the world’s biggest economy. But not all of that elevation will come from economic growth. Much of it will also come from higher prices and currency appreciation. According to the forecast, China’s GDP will be about 47% bigger in real terms in 2031 than it was ten years earlier (an average growth rate of less than 4% a year). Its prices will be roughly 30% higher, and its exchange rate will be almost 13% stronger. It is the combination of these three factors, rather than growth alone, that will determine whether China ever becomes the world’s undisputed economic heavyweight champion. "


----------



## CBH99

ModlrMike said:


> Nothing to see here folks...
> 
> Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way?​
> Opinion: Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way?


Globe & Mail, go 🖕🏻 

Why do I have to create a free account just to read a news article?  Like really?  If I can read the article with an account that is free…why make me create it in the first place?

<This.  This is the type of stupid nonsense which just creates a hassle for people, nothing more.>


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Edward Campbell said:


> More from The Economist:
> 
> "China was once, centuries ago, the world’s biggest economy. Many analysts expect it to regain that distinction in due course. But a host of difficulties besetting the Asian giant, some of which are self-inflicted, will delay the day it overtakes America to return to pole position. A growing number of economists now think that day may never arrive ... [and] ... China’s population is over four times bigger than America’s. Its economy could therefore surpass America’s in scale long before it matches it in sophistication. Its GDP per person needs to reach only a quarter of America’s for its total GDP to become the biggest in the world. By one measure, China has already achieved that modest feat. Its GDP overtook America’s in 2016 when translated into dollars at “purchasing-power parity”, a method that tries to tally up the goods and services in each country using the same international prices."
> 
> But, "China’s GDP still lags far behind America’s when converted into dollars using the more familiar exchange rates that prevail in the currency markets. It reached $17.7trn in 2021 compared with America’s $23trn. And China’s growth has been hampered by its zero-covid policy (which responds to every outbreak of the virus with severe lockdowns) as well as a property slump, unreformed state-owned enterprises and a continuing tech war with America. The government’s aggressive regulation of previously booming sectors, such as tech and education, has also depressed the mood. China’s economy expanded by an impressive 8.1% in 2021, but it will be lucky to grow by even 3% this year ... and] ... In the longer term, China’s ageing population will mean further difficulties. The workforce could shrink by 15% over the next 15 years, according to some estimates. Capital Economics, a consultancy, thinks China’s GDP might draw close to America’s or even surpass it by the mid-2030s only to fall behind again as its demographic decline asserts itself."
> 
> Finally: "One of the hardest and most neglected questions in this debate is what will happen to the exchange rate between the two countries and to prices within them. Goods and services in China are still substantially cheaper than in America on average. If China does continue to narrow the productivity gap with America, its prices should also converge, either through a stronger currency or faster inflation. These movements can make a big difference. Goldman Sachs, for example, predicts that China’s GDP will exceed $38trn in 2031, at the prices and exchange rates prevailing in that year. That would be more than double its present total and enough to make it the world’s biggest economy. But not all of that elevation will come from economic growth. Much of it will also come from higher prices and currency appreciation. According to the forecast, China’s GDP will be about 47% bigger in real terms in 2031 than it was ten years earlier (an average growth rate of less than 4% a year). Its prices will be roughly 30% higher, and its exchange rate will be almost 13% stronger. It is the combination of these three factors, rather than growth alone, that will determine whether China ever becomes the world’s undisputed economic heavyweight champion. "


10 years ago, my friend who did a lot of business there remarked that the Chinese were "offshoring" production as internal Chinese labour costs were raising and Chinese workers expected a higher wage and benfits.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Colin Parkinson said:


> 10 years ago, my friend who did a lot of business there remarked that the Chinese were "offshoring" production as internal Chinese labour costs were raising and Chinese workers expected a higher wage and benfits.


That was and, as far as I can see, still is the case. The Philippines was one of the bigger beneficiaries.

It _seemed, to me_, that while South Korea (and Taiwan) learned to work smarter and smarter, China just hiked wages. I remember a visit to Korea (mid 1990s) where I saw massive automation, but many, many well paid workers supporting and maintaining the robotic systems. In China I just saw the same old, same old but with annual wage increases. That was not how Deng Xiaoping hoped it would work.

Another anecdote from the early 2000s - the _Technion_ (one of the world's best schools, better in the opinion many experts, that either CalTech or MIT) had the same number of Post Doc vacancies for South Korea (pop: 50 million, Taiwan (pop: 20 million) and China (pop: 1 Billion plus).


----------



## Kirkhill

To Xi or not to Xi...



> .... if you’re worried about the rise of China, maybe you should be rooting for Xi to have another five-year term, or even two or three more. Consider what he’s achieved in his ten years at the top.





			https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/10/12/xi_jinping_when_enough_is_too_much_858568.html


----------



## OceanBonfire

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1582417903747751936


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Not the first time ex-servicemen have worked against the foreign policy of the UK


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin Parkinson said:


> Not the first time ex-servicemen have worked against the foreign policy of the UK


We Canadians teach other countries how to curl and play hockey. I am not aware of any former CAF member working for China.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

OldSolduer said:


> We Canadians teach other countries how to curl and play hockey. I am not aware of any former CAF member working for China.


I was referring to ex-British servicemen and officers


----------



## OceanBonfire

> The Department of National Defence is looking into reports that the Chinese government might be paying Canadian military fighter jet pilots to train Beijing’s air force.











						Is China recruiting Canadian fighter jet pilots? Defence department probing reports - National | Globalnews.ca
					

"We are aware of these reports, and we are looking into this further with federal partners," confirmed a spokesperson for the department of national defence in a Friday statement.




					globalnews.ca


----------



## RangerRay

Sounds like a surprising source is parroting Freeland’s comments about decoupling from Beijing and other authoritarian states. 









						Time for Western ‘decoupling’ from China and other authoritarian states, says innovation minister
					

François-Philippe Champagne becomes second cabinet minister to publicly raise the prospect of decreasing trade with authoritarian countries such as China and Russia




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




Time for Western ‘decoupling’ from China and other authoritarian states, says innovation minister


> STEVEN CHASE
> 
> PUBLISHED OCTOBER 21 2022, 9:30PM
> 
> Canada’s Innovation Minister says he believes there’s a Western consensus forming to decouple from, or reduce trade with, China and other authoritarian countries.
> 
> 
> François-Philippe Champagne was speaking Friday before a business audience in Washington at a “fireside chat” event sponsored by groups including the Canadian embassy, the Canadian American Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
> 
> 
> Mr. Champagne is the second federal cabinet minister in the last two weeks to talk publicly about decreasing trade with countries such as China and Russia. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, speaking in Washington on Oct. 11, also talked of the need to embrace policies that shift trade to friendly partners and like-minded democracies: a “friend-shoring” approach that would reduce commercial relations with adversarial countries.
> 
> 
> Their comments reinforce public anticipation for Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s coming Indo-Pacific strategy. The term – first championed by Japan and embraced by Australia and the United States – refers to an effort to build common cause between India and Asia-Pacific neighbours with burgeoning middle-class populations that share an interest in addressing China’sgrowing influence in the region, given Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea and other ocean trade routes.
> 
> Mr. Champagne on Friday talked up the need for closer co-operation on industrial strategies with the United States, which has taken several deliberate steps in recent months to reduce electric-vehicle technology dependence on China, and to deny Chinese companies access to American semiconductor chips and related technology.
> 
> “What we want is certainly a decoupling, certainly from China and I would say other regimes in the world which don’t share the same values,” Mr. Champagne told the Washington audience.
> 
> “I think we’re coming to a day and age where citizens – and you see it with trade agreements that have been framed around the world – people want to trade with people who share, usually, the same values,” he said, adding “and, I think, countries which have the high standards with respect to human dignity, with respect to environmental law, to labour law.”
> 
> The Innovation Minister cited a titanium mining operation in Canada as an example of how the U.S. can rely on the country’s critical minerals instead of offshore supplies. Mining giant Rio Tinto and the Canadian government are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize a metals processing plant that would handle titanium. He said the titanium powder produced would enable “3-D printing of titanium parts” that could be used by the “defence establishment in the United States.”
> 
> Mr. Champagne said Canada’s renewable energy supplies, its skilled work force and its critical minerals should make this country a supplier of choice for allies.
> 
> “The economy of the 21st century relies on what we have in abundance in Canada.”
> 
> Speaking to reporters Friday, the Innovation Minister said he’s pitched the U.S. on conducting testing and packaging of North American-made microchips in Canada instead of outsourcing this work to China or other Asian countries.
> 
> Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, said the shift in messaging from the Canadian government on trade policy has been a bit abrupt.
> 
> He said he believes the Ottawa is trying to ensure that Canadian companies do not find themselves on the wrong side of measures taken by the United States to restructure their supply chains in the name of security.
> 
> “The eagerness of trying to demonstrate the important of Canada to the United States has left some question marks about what our global trade policy is. It makes good sense to reduce our economic vulnerability to authoritarian countries and to strengthen partnerships with other democracies, but taken at face value, some of the statements in the last week would upend our trade policy and it deserves a little bit more explanation,” Mr. Paris said.
> 
> “Suddenly Canada seems more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to disconnecting ourselves from countries that aren’t democracies.”
> 
> In 2021, Canada and Mexico were originally excluded from a Biden administration plan to give American buyers a tax credit for electric vehicles, and only after a significant lobbying campaign was the measure changed in 2022 to include vehicles made in the two neighbours. The measure also restricts where critical minerals for batteries can be sourced to free trade agreement partners of the United States, cutting out China.
> 
> Washington recently introduced measures to restrict the sale of semiconductor chips and technology to China, and the U.S.’s allies will be under scrutiny to ensure they are complying and not representing a security risk to the country.


----------



## Furniture

RangerRay said:


> Sounds like a surprising source is parroting Freeland’s comments about decoupling from Beijing and other authoritarian states.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Time for Western ‘decoupling’ from China and other authoritarian states, says innovation minister
> 
> 
> François-Philippe Champagne becomes second cabinet minister to publicly raise the prospect of decreasing trade with authoritarian countries such as China and Russia
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Time for Western ‘decoupling’ from China and other authoritarian states, says innovation minister


Perhaps the US has finally laid out what the consequences are for GoC not acting like adults.

Though maybe the former GAC minister has always been personally on-side with Freeland's stance.


----------



## Kirkhill

.... a bit abrupt ....



> Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, said the shift in messaging from the Canadian government on trade policy has been a bit abrupt.



I have principles.  And if you don't like them I have others.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

Kirkhill said:


> .... a bit abrupt ....
> 
> 
> 
> I have principles.  And if you don't like them I have others.


A bit abrupt?

I am at a loss for words.


----------



## Kirkhill

SeaKingTacco said:


> A bit abrupt?
> 
> I am at a loss for words.



Now I'm really curious to hear what Joly has to say....I almost said "for herself".... but I sense that would be inappropriate.


----------



## SupersonicMax

OldSolduer said:


> We Canadians teach other countries how to curl and play hockey.* I am not aware of any former CAF member working for China*.


Don’t be so sure…


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Well seems their numbers were just a tad off. However I suspect the railway will become an important part of the region regardless.


----------



## Kirkhill

Colin Parkinson said:


> Well seems their numbers were just a tad off. However I suspect the railway will become an important part of the region regardless.



It seems the Chinese are determined to outdo the Brits at everything...



> The *Cape to Cairo Railway* was an unfinished project to create a railway line crossing Africa from south to north. It would have been the largest and most important railway of that continent. It was planned as a link between Cape Town in South Africa and Port Said in Egypt.[1][2]
> 
> The project was never completed. Important parts which were completed have been inoperative for many years, due to wars and lack of maintenance by the former colonies.
> 
> This plan was initiated at the end of the 19th century, during the time of Western colonial rule, largely under the vision of Cecil Rhodes, in the attempt to connect adjacent African possessions of the British Empire through a continuous line from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt.[_citation needed_][3]











						Cape to Cairo Railway - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				






Meanwhile it seems their ability to evaluate the feasibility on foreign projects is no better than their domestic capability


----------



## FJAG

Furniture said:


> Perhaps the US has finally laid out what the consequences are for GoC not acting like adults.
> 
> Though maybe the former GAC minister has always been personally on-side with Freeland's stance.


I'll wait to see if "Sox" has anything to say on the subject. With this bunch I wouldn't be surprised if they have a message set for our southern neighbours and a "business as usual" agenda under the table.

🍻


----------



## Edward Campbell

Here is a useful (quite recent - just 3 weeks ago) discussion between Condoleezza Rice (Hoover Institution) and Kevin Rudd (Asia Society). The aim is to promote Mr Rudd's new book but he and Dr Rice have an interesting conversation about why Xi Jinping thinks the way he does and about the limits off his ability to "see" the world.


----------



## Weinie

Edward Campbell said:


> Here is a useful (quite recent - just 3 weeks ago) discussion between Condoleezza Rice (Hoover Institution) and Kevin Rudd (Asia Society). The aim is to promote Mr Rudd's new book but he and Dr Rice have an interesting conversation about why Xi Jinping thinks the way he does and about the limits off his ability to "see" the world.


Thanks Ted, for posting that. Very insightful.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Something I got in my email today




*Critical minerals decision another MLI victory on Canada-China policy*

_The federal government’s about-face is yet another in a long line of policy victories for MLI whose experts have long urged wariness in dealing with China._



*OTTAWA, ON (November 4, 2022):* The federal government has announced that Chinese state-owned enterprises must immediately divest their stakes in three Canadian critical mineral companies. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute has been at the forefront of warning about the dangers of China’s growing influence over critical minerals worldwide and Canadian supply chains in particular and welcomes this policy reversal from Ottawa.

MLI’s large body of work on this issue has included:

Over 880 mentions of MLI experts and authors in national and international media, commenting specifically on how China’s dominance of critical minerals poses a threat to Canada’s interests.
Papers, commentaries, and other publications discussing strategic resources (such as critical minerals and energy resources) in the context of authoritarian threats from countries like Russia and China.
Expert webinars on why it is crucial for Canada to seize a leadership role on critical minerals.
Parliamentary testimony from MLI experts, such as Senior Fellows Charles Burton and Jeff Kucharski’s comments at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology on the subject of Chinese ownership over Canada’s critical minerals.
Additionally, Senior Fellows Charles Burton, Stephen Nagy, J. Michael Cole, and Jonathan Berkshire Miller have appeared frequently before the Special Committee of the House of Commons on Canada-China Relations.

“Ottawa appears to be recognizing with greater clarity the true nature of the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party regime,” says MLI Senior Fellow Charles Burton. “Though this recognition has been slow in coming about, the federal government has been sending encouraging signals as of late.”

This most recent decision fits into a pattern of MLI successes combatting China’s attempts to subordinate Canada’s interests to those of the Communist Party regime in China. Other major victories have included the blocking of the Shandong Gold-TMAC Resources takeover, the blocking of the Aecon deal and, perhaps most importantly, stopping Huawei from being involved in Canada’s 5G infrastructure.

MLI was also the leading voice urging caution on the Nexen-CNOOC deal and sounded the alarm in early 2022 when our government failed to do a security review when a Chinese state-owned enterprise sought to purchase a Canadian lithium producer operating in Argentina.

These are but a few notable examples of a clear trend: MLI is leading the debate on Canada-China relations. And we are being noticed for our work. 

Our efforts have been so successful that they have attracted the ire of China’s diplomatic representatives; the Institute is proud to have been officially condemned by the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.

According to MLI Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley, “MLI has a unique distinction: we are the only think tank in Canada to be denounced by Beijing and blacklisted by Russia.

“Ottawa’s move to protect Canada’s critical mineral supply chains from Chinese state influence is a welcome change in approach from the government. It is good to see that Canada’s decision-makers are waking up to the threat posed by China about which our experts have long warned.”

For further information, media are invited to contact:

Skander Belouizdad
Communications Officer
613-482-8327 x111
skander.belouizdad@macdonaldlaurier.ca


----------



## RangerRay

Not good at all. Heads should be rolling if true. 









						Canada facing ‘aggressive games’ from China, others amid interference report: Trudeau - National | Globalnews.ca
					

In January, Canadian intelligence officials presented Justin Trudeau and several cabinet ministers with allegations of Beijing’s efforts to further its influence in Canada.




					globalnews.ca


----------



## FSTO

Just watched a documentary on Prime about the Chinese one Child policy. Holy bloody hell, how anyone can think that this is a rational regime that certain members of our leadership class seem to think they can work with. 

China is run by power mad psychopaths and woe to us if we think that there is any reason for us to engage in any good faith relations with them.


----------



## RangerRay

A Terry Glavin triple-header. 









						Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
					

Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy




					nationalpost.com
				












						Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
					

All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.




					therealstory.substack.com
				












						Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
					

More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.




					therealstory.substack.com
				




In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


----------



## dimsum

RangerRay said:


> A Terry Glavin triple-header.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
> 
> 
> Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
> 
> 
> All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
> 
> 
> More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


I'm not so sure.

The Aussies leased the port of Darwin to a Chinese firm for 99 years.


----------



## RangerRay

dimsum said:


> I'm not so sure.
> 
> The Aussies leased the port of Darwin to a Chinese firm for 99 years.


Someone should go to jail for that too. Insane!


----------



## Good2Golf

RangerRay said:


> A Terry Glavin triple-header.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
> 
> 
> Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
> 
> 
> All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
> 
> 
> More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


At least the US’ patience and tolerance final ran its course and Canada is ‘on orders’ to shape up or wave bye bye as the G6 moves on without it.


----------



## KevinB

RangerRay said:


> A Terry Glavin triple-header.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
> 
> 
> Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
> 
> 
> All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
> 
> 
> More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


Don’t rule out heart attacks and single vehicle accidents…


----------



## OldSolduer

KevinB said:


> Don’t rule out heart attacks and single vehicle accidents…


Traffic accidents ala Mugabe style.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

RangerRay said:


> A Terry Glavin triple-header.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
> 
> 
> Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
> 
> 
> All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
> 
> 
> More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


If this is not the lead in Question Period on Monday, the CPC is incompetent.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

RangerRay said:


> A Terry Glavin triple-header.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Terry Glavin: What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?
> 
> 
> Intelligence officials have shouted into the void for years about Beijing's interference in federal elections and public policy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nationalpost.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 1.
> 
> 
> All the king's horses aren't going to make a difference. Not this time. It's too late.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dominic Barton, and the Damage Done. Part 2.
> 
> 
> More from the shadows cast by the Liberals' very own Mephistopheles in the glaring light of a scandal involving Beijing's operatives in Canada. With unreported malfeasance from Moscow to Istanbul.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> therealstory.substack.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In any other country, this would be a huge scandal and people would be arrested.


I knew the Liberals were cosy with the Chinese, but it actually appears they have been owned lock, stock and barrel by the CCP, if this is accurate.


----------



## Furniture

SeaKingTacco said:


> If this is not the lead in Question Period on Monday, the CPC is incompetent.


Or they are owned as well...


----------



## OldSolduer

SeaKingTacco said:


> I knew the Liberals were cosy with the Chinese, but it actually appears they have been owned lock, stock and barrel by the CCP, if this is accurate.


NO ONE took JT to task for his "basic admiration for China" and asked "Hey Mr candidate for PM just WTF do you mean? China is a Communist country, you fuking dolt"


----------



## childs56

OldSolduer said:


> NO ONE took JT to task for his "basic admiration for China" and asked "Hey Mr candidate for PM just WTF do you mean? China is a Communist country, you fuking dolt"


I do not think your allowed to call the leader of our country a "dolt" I would not want you getting a warning for name calling the head of state as I did.


----------



## RangerRay

Former Chrétien advisor Warren Kinsella wants names. Canadians need to know who these politicians and staffers are.









						KINSELLA: Identities of candidates paid by China during election remain secret
					

Here is a tale of two countries, with two very different stories to tell about foreign interference in elections.




					torontosun.com


----------



## RangerRay

And now even the house organ of the Liberal Party has taken notice and wants names. 









						Opinion | Don’t brush off attempts to undermine our democracy. We should know which politicians got China’s money
					

We learned this week that CSIS warned China has targeted this country with a “vast campaign of foreign interference.” Isn’t this something we should know more about?




					www.thestar.com


----------



## OldSolduer

childs56 said:


> I do not think your allowed to call the leader of our country a "dolt" I would not want you getting a warning for name calling the head of state as I did.


I am only calling it as I see it - in fact "dolt" is mild compared to "dunderhead", "village idiot", "Stupid oaf" or "Stupid fat hobbit". All which fit except Hobbits aren't that stupid.


----------



## Edward Campbell

At the risk of boring you with very recent political "history," there is, still, today, in 2022, a substantial wing of the Liberal Party that _believes_ that Pierre Trudeau was right.

In 1968 Pierre Trudeau, along with a great many - likely a solid majority of the younger (age 16-30) cohort - _believed_ _(I think_ that's the right word) that the USA, in pursuit off unrestrained free-market capitalism for the world, was a greater threat to world peace than were China and the USSR and Marxist-Leninist communism. The Vietnam war energized that cohort and made their politics matter.

Pierre Trudeau wanted to detach Canada from the American orbit, but that was, as he discovered, much easier said than done. First, he bumped into a large minority, in his own Liberal Party, led by e.g. Paul Martin Sr and Mitchell Sharp, that disagreed. Second, his friends in the Euro-American socialist movement wanted to "reform" America, not cast it and its leadership and protection aside.

Pierre Trudeau was not, in any comprehensible way, a Liberal he certainly wasn't a _liberal_. In the 1960s he was, politically, on the socially _progressive_/anti-American wing of the then newly formed NDP. But he became symbolic of Canada in the 1960s and even when new leaders, like John Manley, disavowed almost every single one of Pierre Trudeau's policies they remained loyal to the brand ... and 21st century Liberals remain equally loyal to the brand name and equally committed to what they _believe_ Pierre Trudeau wanted.

-----

Edited to add: I believe that one of the few things that Justin Trudeau *believes* - and not just because Gerry Butts and Katie Telford tell him to believe it - is that his father was great man and his ideas are still good, today.


----------



## Edward Campbell

It looks like President Biden will deliver a fairly pointed waring to China in Indonesia.


----------



## rmc_wannabe

childs56 said:


> I do not think your allowed to call the leader of our country a "dolt" I would not want you getting a warning for name calling the head of state as I did.


PMJT is the leader of a political party that happens to be thr Head of Government at this time. HM The King and Her Excellency the GG by right of His Majesty are our Heads of State. 

I unfortunately feel our proximity to the U.S. seems to influence opinion on where that office sits in the pecking order; even if constitutionally its literally just the Executive Branch of government. 

PMJT has behaved like a dolt. He has acted like a buffoon, a charlatan, an embarrassment, and frankly, a threat to our national security and international standing.

I wish our elected MPs had a spine, like their cousins across the Pond, and would stage even the smallest of coups to gain some teeth back from the PMO/PCO.


----------



## FSTO

^^
David Herle, a Liberal operative had a good interview with Steve Paikin and they talked about his book on John Turner. The one thing that they pointed out a couple of times was how the young punks in short pants in the PMO have so destroyed the idea of Member of Parliament Independence.









						Steve Paikin: An Intimate Biography of Canada's 17th Prime Minister
					

SUBSCRIBE :  Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Stitcher  |  Google Podcasts  |  YouTube  |  RSS     Twitter          Instagram          Facebook




					www.airquotesmedia.com


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

The Rebellion gave us Responsible Governement.

To mis-quote Marko Raimius: " A little rebellion from time to time is not necessarily a bad thing".

If the MP's of all parties stopped seeing themselves as members of the government or of the governement in waiting (which as simple MP they are not - only PM and ministers are) with the express aim of becoming ministers and instead rebelled and, banding together, rebelled and reformed all the rules that have been put in place over the years _by the governement_ and parties to control them, they could regain their position as overwatchers of the executive and regain both their place in our system and the respect from the citizenry that the job should entail.


----------



## dimsum

RangerRay said:


> And now even the house organ of the Liberal Party has taken notice and wants names.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Opinion | Don’t brush off attempts to undermine our democracy. We should know which politicians got China’s money
> 
> 
> We learned this week that CSIS warned China has targeted this country with a “vast campaign of foreign interference.” Isn’t this something we should know more about?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.thestar.com


I'd say that's more the G&M.  The Star is between Lib/NDP.


----------



## FSTO

^^
Committee work should be where the MP's hold the cabinet and the public service to account for their actions. Not a kangaroo court of gotcha. If the cabinet is confident that their actions are above board and in the public interest they should not be against having to answer pointed questions from the member of parliament from Flin Flon - Cranberry Portage. Sadly it is not like this and therefore, especially during this time of everyone having a platform to broadcast their thoughts, the lack of accountability causes conspiracy theories and refusal to believe to become rampant.


----------



## Good2Golf

Edward Campbell said:


> It looks like President Biden will deliver a fairly pointed waring to China in Indonesia.


I’m seeing some channeling of Teddy Roosevelt’s _Big Stick_ from more than 120 years ago within the machinations of the current US administration.


----------



## rmc_wannabe

FSTO said:


> ^^
> Committee work should be where the MP's hold the cabinet and the public service to account for their actions. Not a kangaroo court of gotcha. If the cabinet is confident that their actions are above board and in the public interest they should not be against having to answer pointed questions from the member of parliament from Flin Flon - Cranberry Portage. Sadly it is not like this and therefore, especially during this time of everyone having a platform to broadcast their thoughts, the lack of accountability causes conspiracy theories and refusal to believe to become rampant.


It's almost fitting that this discussion morphed out of a Chinese Political thread.

What is described above is how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. Instead, what he have at the moment is very much akin to how the Soviet councils worked: "yes you're a party member. Yes you sit on committees. Yes we're definitely conducting government business stuff...but everything is controlled centrally and God help you if your opinion runs counter to that of the party..." 

Both the LPC and CPC have both been proponents of this kind of "democracy" in respect to parliamentary independence.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

SeaKingTacco said:


> I knew the Liberals were cosy with the Chinese, but it actually appears they have been owned lock, stock and barrel by the CCP, if this is accurate.


Big time. Former PM Jean Chretien is a lobbyist for various Chinese companies and if we had something like the US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) he would be at the top of the list. Another example, François-Philippe Champagne when he was Foreign Minister owed a Chinese  State bank $1.2 million dollars  for property owned in London, UK.  Makes  you kind of wonder how he got his security clearance with that hanging over him?

And during the Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor hostage taking Liberal Party stalwarts like Chretien, Eddie Goldenberg, John Manley and David MacCallum were all out there stating that Canada should cave in and make a deal with China for their release.


----------



## Kirkhill

Two other Liberal stalwarts with China ties.









						Pierre Trudeau’s China legacy looms large ahead of PM’s first official visit
					

As Justin Trudeau leaves Canada for his own first visit to China as Prime Minister, shadows of his father will occupy every room he enters, as his hosts see in him a chance to revive the collegiality they once enjoyed




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				









						Maurice Strong: background
					

Maurice Strong globalized the environmental movement.




					www.mauricestrong.net


----------



## Good2Golf

Kirkhill said:


> Two other Liberal stalwarts with China ties.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pierre Trudeau’s China legacy looms large ahead of PM’s first official visit
> 
> 
> As Justin Trudeau leaves Canada for his own first visit to China as Prime Minister, shadows of his father will occupy every room he enters, as his hosts see in him a chance to revive the collegiality they once enjoyed
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com



Quite a sopping piece…


> Still, China greeted Mr. Trudeau's election last year with talk of a new "golden era" with Canada.


…but not golden enough to de-imprison Michael x 2 until Canada answered China’s not-so-subtle blackmail to free Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou…


----------



## daftandbarmy

I'm just interested to see how this flagrant violation of our sovereignty by China will be addressed by the Champagne Socialists Trudeau government:


RCMP investigating Chinese 'police' stations in Canada​
Human rights group says more than 50 exist worldwide, including 3 in Greater Toronto Area​​There are at least three Chinese police outposts in and around Toronto in predominantly Chinese neighbourhoods, according to a report by human rights group Safeguard Defenders who say they’re being used to pressure some nationals to return to China. Now, the RCMP says it’s investigating whether any criminal activity is taking place.

The RCMP says it's investigating Chinese "police" stations in Canada.

This comes after the Spain-based human rights group Safeguard Defenders reported that more than 50 exist worldwide, including three in the 
Greater Toronto Area in predominantly Chinese communities.

They include a residential home and single-storey commercial building in Markham and a convenience store in Scarborough.

"In most countries, we believe it's a network of individuals, rather than ... a physical police station where people will be dragged into," said Laura Harth, a campaign director at Safeguard Defenders.

"It's completely illegal under international law. It's a severe violation of territorial sovereignty."



			https://www.cbc.ca/news/rcmp-investigating-chinese-police-stations-canada-1.6627166#:~:text=RCMP%20to%20investigate%20Chinese%20police%20'service%20stations'&text=There%20are%20at%20least%20three,nationals%20to%20return%20to%20China.


----------



## RangerRay

dimsum said:


> I'd say that's more the G&M.  The Star is between Lib/NDP.


I remember sometime ago, hearing from a well known commentator ( can’t remember who) that the unofficial motto of the Star is “Think NDP, vote Liberal”. Others more knowledgeable than I have used the term “house organ of the Liberal Party” describing the Star. 

The Globe seems more “conservative” in that it seems to editorialize for the Laurentian establishment and conserving the institutions. They appear to be anti-Liberal/pro-Tory when it comes to defending those institutions, and will go anti-Tory/pro-Liberal when the shoe is on the other foot.


----------



## RangerRay

Retired AF Guy said:


> Big time. Former PM Jean Chretien is a lobbyist for various Chinese companies and if we had something like the US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) he would be at the top of the list. Another example, François-Philippe Champagne when he was Foreign Minister owed a Chinese  State bank $1.2 million dollars  for property owned in London, UK.  Makes  you kind of wonder how he got his security clearance with that hanging over him?
> 
> And during the Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor hostage taking Liberal Party stalwarts like Chretien, Eddie Goldenberg, John Manley and David MacCallum were all out there stating that Canada should cave in and make a deal with China for their release.


Don’t forget Peter Harder and Dominic Barton. MacCallum was especially greasy in his pro-Beijing pimping.


----------



## rmc_wannabe

RangerRay said:


> MacCallum was especially greasy in his pro-Beijing pimping.


Emperor Palpatine has shown his true colours many times over the years. I hope he finally gets what's coming to him eventually.


----------



## FSTO

RangerRay said:


> Don’t forget Peter Harder and Dominic Barton. MacCallum was especially greasy in his pro-Beijing pimping.


Drunken, slopping in grease, POS.


----------



## OldSolduer

FSTO said:


> Drunken, slopping in grease, POS.


Cut into little bits by a very pretty woman speaking with and impeccable British accent. Yeah Rey!!!


----------



## daftandbarmy

Wow... this is pretty cool:

U.S. military weighs funding mining projects in Canada amid rivalry with China​ 
Canadian companies told they qualify under Defense Production Act                               

 The Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters in Washington, is being asked to fund civilian projects to build more reliable supply chains of critical minerals that are vital in everything from products like electronics, cars and batteries, to weapons. Canadian companies are entitled to apply. (Jason Reed/Reuters)               

The United States military has been quietly soliciting applications for Canadian mining projects that want American public funding through a major national security initiative.

It's part of an increasingly urgent priority of the U.S. government: lessening dependence on China for critical minerals that are vital in everything from civilian goods such as electronics, cars and batteries, to weapons.

It illustrates how Canadian mining is becoming the nexus of a colossal geopolitical struggle. Ottawa just pushed Chinese state-owned companies out of the sector, and the U.S. is now considering moving public funding in.






						U.S. military weighs funding mining projects in Canada amid rivalry with China
					






					www-cbc-ca.cdn.ampproject.org


----------



## KevinB

I think they meant Ottawa was strongly encouraged to push the Chinese out…

Carrot and the stick.


----------



## Edward Campbell

More, from *The Economist*, on US-China and ASEAN's worries:

"Young, motivated and connected: South-East Asia today is probably the world’s most dynamic region. Its nearly 700m people are disproportionately youthful. They are keen to learn, innovate and apply themselves. And, more than anywhere else in an increasingly protectionist world, they see their future prosperity as part of a global economy, supporting open trade and exchange much more often than opposing it. (The tragedy of Myanmar, in the grip of a ruthless, inward-looking junta, is the exception that proves the rule.) As the region emerges from the pandemic, the interest of outside investors is piqued, above all in Indonesia. In the past, South-East Asia’s most populous country has underperformed. But under President Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, a new drive for growth is under way, one that is more open to foreign investment than previously, including in new areas such as electric-vehicle (ev) batteries."

"South-East Asian leaders might be expected to relish all the attention on their region. Instead, the summitry finds many in a nervous, even unhappy, mood. One reason is President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Most South-East Asians do not feel that it is their fight, and only a minority of the region’s governments have openly condemned Russia’s aggression. But Asian leaders have to grapple with the consequences of the war, like disrupted food supplies and rising prices. Though neither Mr Putin nor President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine are attending the summit, Jokowi tried hard to bring them there and get them to talk. As he stressed in an interview with The Economist on the eve of the summit, dialogue is the essential precondition for progress on any thorny issue."

"... to all leaders in Asia, the faraway war in Ukraine offers a bracing lesson—about the signal importance of peace in their own region. As the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, bluntly put it at a national-day rally in August: “Look at how things have gone wrong in Europe. Can you be sure that things cannot go wrong in our region too? Better get real, and be psychologically prepared.” Last week Cambodia’s strongman, Hun Sen, whose turn it was to host the annual round of summitry staged by the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (asean), said that the region was “now at the most uncertain juncture” even as it desired peace, security and sustainable growth. Mr Hun Sen referred vaguely to the “strategic challenges we all face”."

"In public, Asian policymakers are rarely more forthcoming about what those challenges are. In private, they are clear: a downward spiral in relations between China and America. President Xi emerged all-powerful from the Chinese Communist Party’s five-yearly congress. He packed the Politburo Standing Committee with loyalists and spoke of a titanic struggle with an American-led West. For his part, President Biden announced in early October draconian controls to stop Chinese companies benefiting from American technology, notably in the fields of chip design and artificial intelligence. This year he has also broken with a decades-long policy of rhetorical obfuscation in which America refused openly to commit itself to defending Taiwan, the self-governing island whose eventual unification with the mainland is the Communist Party’s most sacred tenet."

"Technology and Taiwan: of the two, Taiwan is of more existential concern to South-East Asian policymakers. They have long worried about a superpower clash. But in the past, the speculation was more about a conflict in the South China Sea, where China’s vague but expansive “nine-dash line” encompasses nearly the whole sea and where it has built military installations on offshore reefs. Now, says a regional diplomat, the worry is all about Taiwan. “The nine-dash line,” the diplomat says. “That’s not a red line. [For China] Taiwan is the real red line.”"

"In that context, regional strategists are alarmed by the American shift in rhetoric. They deplore the visit to Taiwan in August by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, as needlessly provocative. China responded with live-fire military exercises all around the island. They are nervous about the consequences if Ms Pelosi’s potential Republican replacement, Kevin McCarthy, follows through on his promise to visit Taiwan too. Regional policymakers think, as do some analysts and business types in America, that the Biden administration has gone too far ... [and] ... They are also worried that a shortage of trust acts as an obstacle to communication. Mutual disdain only grows. A South-East Asian who talks to both sides says that Chinese officials look at America’s political polarisation as proof of great-power decline. The Americans assume that, with Mr Xi’s dominance, their counterparts are merely “messenger boys”, with no authority of their own. Both sides complain that conversations are superficial. What is missing, says the diplomat, is that officials are not pulling their counterparts aside for frank discussions over how to defuse tensions. “The quality of conversations [needed] to help prevent crisis are just lacking,” he says. The pandemic, in reducing face-to-face meetings, has not helped."

"As for the weaponisation of technology against China, even America’s closest friends in South-East Asia worry that the Biden administration is leading the region down a dangerous road. Its overwhelming desire to keep China down, they say, forces countries to take sides in ways that make them highly uncomfortable. Singapore has already accepted that in a bifurcated world where technology is “friend-shored”, the city-state will end up hewing to American-led supply chains. But what if America extends sanctions to tech-heavy Chinese firms operating outside China? This, says one Singaporean official, would create an enormous dilemma for a place whose reputation is built on being a safe, predictable and open business jurisdiction. As for Indonesia’s budding ev industry, will America one day force it to choose between it and China?"

"Mr Biden and his team are aware of some of the region’s concerns. Arriving in Cambodia straight from the climate summit in Egypt, the American president assured ASEAN it was “at the heart” of his policy in the Indo-Pacific region. He promised a “new era” of co-operation. Certainly, says one political leader, South-East Asians want engagement with America to be within a more “balanced” framework. So where, he asks, are the carrots? ... [but] ... Mr Biden’s new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, America’s proposition for economic engagement in the region, provides not much investment and next to no new access for Asian firms to American markets. Areas where America could make a big difference, such as helping finance the region’s transition to a low-carbon economy, remain largely unexplored. Only a few pockets of his administration, such as the Department of Commerce, are pushing for more openness. Much of the administration’s Asia policy, say many in South-East Asia, is driven by anti-China ideology."

"There, too, Mr Biden is aware of such concerns. After all, some analysts and business leaders back home also believe he badly needs to stabilise ties with China. Acknowledging the worries is a key point of his meeting with Mr Xi on November 14th in Bali. Mr Biden’s officials suggest the meeting will help put a floor under relations between the two countries. Few in Asia think it is a floor that relations cannot before long crash through."


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good article by Omer Aziz in the _*Globe and Mail*_:

----------​
"In November, 2017, when I was still a foreign policy adviser in the federal government, the big topic of discussion was Beijing’s pursuit of a free-trade deal with Canada. Officials in Ottawa seemed almost giddy about the idea. In meetings, people repeated common assumptions about China being more or less a benevolent actor, and how it was in Canada’s economic interest to lock in more deals with Beijing.

But our business community, academics and foreign policy gurus got China completely wrong. Beijing was not trying to be our friend, much less our partner: It was trying to split apart the Western alliance, starting with Canada. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Beijing that December, he was, unsurprisingly, given the cold shoulder. Canada had been baited.

Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly gave a major speech in Toronto that offered a preview of a radically different – and much needed – approach to China. For the last two years, a new “Indo-Pacific” strategy has been in the works and apparently will be released soon. In her speech, Ms. Joly called China “an increasingly disruptive global power.” This comes after a report that earlier this year, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) briefed the Prime Minister’s Office about Chinese interference in the 2019 federal election.

The delay in this foreign policy change has been troubling, and not just because the world is changing rapidly. If the same false assumptions about China continue to underlie the new policy, Canada will suffer.

To put it simply: The People’s Republic of China is the No. 1 economic, strategic, technological, political and security threat to the Western world for the next century – and it’s not even close. The Chinese Communist Party will continue to pose a direct threat to not just the Western world’s interests, but also our values. The challenge has existed for years now, but academics, business leaders, and policymakers too often looked away, because there was always more money to be made.

Now, we must be clear about what this threat represents. Last month, the White House released its National Security Strategy, and explicitly declared that China had both “the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.” Despite being the greatest beneficiary of that same system of rules, China seeks to create an entirely different world – one in which autocracies thrive, the powerful subdue the powerless, and the citizen – including the more than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang who have been detained in “re-education” camps – is indoctrinated and then decimated by a surveillance state that never stops watching.

Canada’s foreign policy needs to address China and the world as it is. The core components of our coming strategy should include shoring up democratic alliances in the region and playing a leadership role rather than acting as a bystander. Canada should work with China where there are mutual interests – such as on climate and public health – but it should do so cautiously and prudently. We should deepen ties with countries in South America and Africa, where China has been active, and support democratic efforts to check China on every front. On all other issues – such as elections, human rights and the rule of law – Canada must unapologetically champion its values.

At home, Canada must ensure the integrity of its elections, help businesses safeguard their trade secrets, and strengthen its cyber infrastructure. There should be a life-in-prison penalty for any citizen or resident found guilty of passing off intelligence to Beijing, and a ban on the export of any high-tech equipment to China. More importantly, institutions such as universities, businesses and the Department of Foreign Affairs must free themselves of the groupthink that has dominated discussions about China for three decades. The Foreign Affairs Minister and Prime Minister, in particular, should be receiving objective advice on China and the Indo-Pacific that is untainted by bias. At a minimum, we must have the knowledge and foresight to compete in this new world of rising autocracies – and that requires having a clear strategy backed by action.

China is one of the world’s cradles of civilization, but it is now run by a cabal that has absorbed the lessons from totalitarian dictatorships of the past. This will be a long struggle that will require patience. “Let China sleep,” goes a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, “for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” China has already awoken, bided its time, and built its strength. Now the real challenge begins."

----------​I can only wish that something more than a tiny, insignificant minority of Canadians will ever read it.


----------



## Rifleman62

Yet China is designated a developing country by the WTF.



> *The WTO agreements include numerous provisions giving developing and least-developed countries special rights or extra leniency* — “special and differential treatment”. Among these are provisions that allow developed countries to treat developing countries more favourably than other WTO members.



China, a country of wpns of mass destruction, with the means to deliver, a military of 2.5 million (largest in the world), miliary budget of USD 230 million (estimated).


----------



## daftandbarmy

Rifleman62 said:


> Yet China is designated a developing country by the WTF.
> 
> 
> 
> China, a country of wpns of mass destruction, with the means to deliver, a military of 2.5 million (largest in the world), miliary budget of USD 230 million (estimated).



It's OK, our foreign aid payments should help them develop faster 


Few Canadians know about aid given to China​
Federal agencies paid out a total $6.5 billion in foreign aid worldwide in 2020 according to government stats. 

A total $14.2 million went to China.

Cabinet in a separate report tabled in the Commons detailed a portion of Chinese aid, a total $941,140 in grants awarded through a Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.

“The Fund provides modest funding for small scale, but high impact projects,” said the report.

Spending included:
• $37,654 to “foster dialogue on the challenges of young female offenders” in China;
• $31,791 on “empowerment” to “help low income single mothers and girls grow up happily”;
• $30,801 on “enhancing environmental justice and ecological restoration”;
• $18,668 to “advocate equal reproductive rights for non-married women and lesbians”;
• $1,248 for “increasing understanding” of sanitation workers.









						Few Canadians know about aid given to China
					

Federal agencies paid out a total $6.5 billion in foreign aid worldwide in 2020 according to government stats. A total $14.2 million went to China.




					www.westernstandard.news


----------



## Bruce Monkhouse

Just read on CP24 news, that flashes across the screen, that an employee of Hydro-Quebec just got nailed on espionage charges for passing info to China.


----------



## OldSolduer

Rifleman62 said:


> Yet China is designated a developing country by the WTF.
> 
> 
> 
> China, a country of wpns of mass destruction, with the means to deliver, a military of 2.5 million (largest in the world), miliary budget of USD 230 million (estimated).


Yet some in our government admire China....


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Bruce Monkhouse said:


> Just read on CP24 news, that flashes across the screen, that an employee of Hydro-Quebec just got nailed on espionage charges for passing info to China.


Impeccable timing I must say.

More here from the Canadian Press:



> RCMP arrest Hydro-Québec employee allegedly sending secrets to China
> 
> By The Canadian Press — The Canadian Press — Nov 14 2022
> 
> MONTREAL — A Montreal-area Hydro-Québec employee is being charged with espionage after allegedly providing trade secrets to China "to the detriment of Canada's economic interests," the RCMP said Monday.
> 
> Yuesheng Wang, 35, was arrested at his home in Candiac, south of Montreal, on Monday.
> 
> He will appear in court in Longueuil, Que., Tuesday to be charged with "obtaining trade secrets in the course of his duties with Hydro-Québec," according to an RCMP spokesman. He will also be charged with using a computer without authorization, and with fraud and breach of trust by a public officer.
> 
> RCMP Insp. David Beaudoin told reporters this is the first time in Canada that someone has faced the economic espionage charge, which falls under the Security of Information Act.
> 
> "This investigation is of great importance for us and sends a clear message," he said a news conference at the RCMP's Quebec headquarters in Westmount. "It demonstrates our commitment and that of our partners to work with at-risk sectors."
> 
> He said Wang is accused of obtaining "industrial secrets" in the course of his duties at Hydro-Québec.
> 
> Wang, he said, allegedly did research for Chinese research centres and a Chinese university, and published scientific articles and filed patents associated with them rather than with Hydro-Québec. He also allegedly used information without his employer's consent, harming Hydro-Québec's intellectual property, he said.
> 
> Beaudoin declined to say whether the accused was paid by China for his alleged actions.
> 
> The offences are alleged to have taken place between February 2018 and October 2022. The espionage charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, he said.
> 
> In a news release, the RCMP said its national security enforcement team began an investigation in August after receiving a complaint from Hydro-Québec's corporate security branch.
> 
> "Foreign actor interference is a priority for many law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world," the RCMP wrote. "Hydro-Québec is considered a critical infrastructure and a strategic interest to be protected."
> 
> In a statement, Hydro-Québec said Wang was a researcher who worked on battery materials with the Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage, known as CETEES. The utility said its security team launched its own investigation before flagging authorities. It added that Wang's employment has been terminated.
> 
> “Our detection and intervention mechanisms allowed our investigators to bring this matter to the attention of the RCMP, with whom we have worked closely ever since," said Dominic Roy, senior director responsible for corporate security.
> 
> "No organization is safe from a situation like this one, which is why we must always remain vigilant and transparent, and we must not tolerate violations of the company’s code of ethics."
> 
> The employee did not have access to information related to Hydro-Québec's "core mission," and his accesses were revoked when suspicions arose, the company added. It said the centre where he worked develops technology for electric vehicles and energy storage systems.
> 
> While it's the first time the trade secrets charge has been laid in Canada, Beaudoin said foreign interference is a growing priority for law enforcement.
> 
> "We are more and more active in that sphere because we do believe that it is a subject that directly affects national security," he said. "Because of our increased involvement, we are looking at many more files than we used to in the past, and because of that today we were able to lay the criminal charges."
> 
> Wang will remain in detention until his court appearance, he added. Beaudoin could not confirm whether Wang is a Canadian citizen.
> 
> 
> This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2022.
> 
> Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press



 Link


----------



## SeaKingTacco

daftandbarmy said:


> It's OK, our foreign aid payments should help them develop faster
> 
> 
> Few Canadians know about aid given to China​
> Federal agencies paid out a total $6.5 billion in foreign aid worldwide in 2020 according to government stats.
> 
> A total $14.2 million went to China.
> 
> Cabinet in a separate report tabled in the Commons detailed a portion of Chinese aid, a total $941,140 in grants awarded through a Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
> 
> “The Fund provides modest funding for small scale, but high impact projects,” said the report.
> 
> Spending included:
> • $37,654 to “foster dialogue on the challenges of young female offenders” in China;
> • $31,791 on “empowerment” to “help low income single mothers and girls grow up happily”;
> • $30,801 on “enhancing environmental justice and ecological restoration”;
> • $18,668 to “advocate equal reproductive rights for non-married women and lesbians”;
> • $1,248 for “increasing understanding” of sanitation workers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Few Canadians know about aid given to China
> 
> 
> Federal agencies paid out a total $6.5 billion in foreign aid worldwide in 2020 according to government stats. A total $14.2 million went to China.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.westernstandard.news


Increasing understanding of sanitation workers?


----------



## daftandbarmy

SeaKingTacco said:


> Increasing understanding of sanitation workers?



Yes, except in Wuhan wet markets apparently


----------



## Retired AF Guy

Interesting. After years of non-action against Chinese interference in Canadian affiars we are starting to see some action. First, there was the  Quebec Hyrdo  worker arrested for allegedly selling secrets to China, and now a prominent Toronto businessman is under investigation for possible foreign interference. More here from Global News:



> Toronto businessman allegedly focus of Chinese interference probes: sources​By Sam Cooper Global News Published November 16, 2022
> 
> Aprominent businessman in Toronto’s Chinese community is the subject of two separate investigations involving foreign interference, sources tell Global News, both related to a series of briefings and memos that Canadian security officials allegedly gave to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau beginning in January.
> 
> The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has investigated Wei Chengyi for his alleged role in a covert scheme that facilitated large-fund transfers meant to advance Beijing’s interests in Canada’s 2019 federal election, sources said.
> 
> According to RCMP sources, national security investigators are also probing Wei for possible links to several properties in Toronto and Vancouver allegedly used as so-called Chinese government “police stations,” which are believed to secretly host agents from China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS.)
> 
> The owner of the Ontario and British Columbia supermarket chain Foody Mart, Wei is also “permanent honorary chairman” of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations (CTCCO), a local umbrella group for dozens of associations that promotes ties to Beijing and consular officials.
> 
> Wei has not yet responded to repeated phone calls from Global News, emails or two, hand-delivered letters with detailed questions about the two alleged probes or his relationship with the Chinese government.
> 
> But in a brief phone response from CTCCO, a man who identified himself to a Global News reporter as a CTCCO official said that allegations that Wei and CTCCO are involved in a Chinese foreign-interference campaign are “nonsense.”
> 
> “No, we are never involved in those allegations,” the unidentified CTCCO official said. “I don’t want to give my name. But don’t use those allegations without evidence.”
> No criminal charges have been laid against Wei.
> 
> Officials from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa and the Toronto Consulate did not respond to questions about Wei and the CTCCO.
> 
> Global News reported last week that early this year, sources say Canadian intelligence officials started briefing Justin Trudeau and several cabinet ministers that the People’s Republic of China has allegedly been targeting Canada with a vast campaign of foreign interference, including attempts to influence the 2019 federal election.
> 
> One of the specific allegations detailed the funding of a clandestine network that involved at least 11 federal candidates running in the contest, according to Global News sources.
> 
> The briefing did not identify the politicians in the running, but Global News independently confirmed through separate sources that members of the alleged network — which sources say include federal campaign staffers — represented both Liberal and Conservative parties.
> 
> Responding to questions about the briefings last week, Prime Minister Trudeau did not acknowledge receiving the intelligence but did accuse China and other countries of playing “aggressive games” with democracies and insisted his government has taken significant measures to strengthen the integrity of the elections process.
> 
> At the G20 summit Tuesday, a government source disclosed to media that Trudeau privately discussed interference among other issues with China’s President Xi Jinping. But on Wednesday, Xi chided the Canadian PM for publicly disclosing the conversations, and disputed the content of their previous discussions.
> 
> “That’s not appropriate,” Xi said.
> 
> On Tuesday, foreign minister Melanie Joly told reporters she raised the issue with her Chinese counterpart and warned that Canada would not accept “any form of meddling in our governments, in our elections, and we won’t tolerate any form of foreign interferences.”
> *The Cash Flow*​As part of the 2022 briefings, intelligence sources say that CSIS also warned Trudeau and several cabinet members that the Chinese government uses local proxies to transfer significant sums of money aimed at helping the PRC advance its agenda.
> 
> Even if allegations regarding Wei’s role as an actor for the Chinese Communist Party are proven to be true, there is no foreign interference law prohibiting him from doing so.
> 
> The allegations highlight escalating tension between a government that seems reluctant to rankle Canada’s second-largest trading partner, China, and a security establishment seeking tighter rules against foreign interference.
> 
> “Unlike its partners in Australia and the United States, Canada lacks a method by which to effectively register and track the activities of those who are acting on the behalf of the interests of foreign states, as well as an effective means by which to punish interference,” said Akshay Singh, a security scholar with the Council on International Policy. “Absent these guidelines, proxies or ‘co-optees’ can work on behalf of the interests of a foreign government, with little scrutiny.”
> 
> A bipartisan panel of parliamentarians in Ottawa has repeatedly recommended the Trudeau government table such laws. Police and intelligence officers have been warning senior Canadian officials since at least 2010 about China’s aggressive incursions, sources said, including secret Ministry of Public Security repatriation operations.
> 
> Sources aware of investigations into the alleged covert funding methods that CSIS believes the Toronto consulate uses allege that Wei and the organization he’s tied to, the CTCCO, acted as intermediaries in the covert funding activity in 2019.
> 
> The sources alleged Wei and CTCCO transferred about $250,000 from the consulate to an Ontario MPP and a federal candidate staffer, who in turn distributed the funds to the 11 or more candidates and other campaign staffers.
> 
> Warrants cleared by federal judges allow CSIS to intercept communications of Chinese consulate officials; by extension, these intercepts might capture politicians and staffers who might be in contact with the diplomats.
> 
> Responding to questions from Global News, a lawyer for the MPP in question said the allegations are untrue, and stated: “Be advised that the allegations that a sitting member of the Provincial Legislature and loyal Canadian is treasonous and an operative of a foreign power is clearly defamatory.”
> 
> The alleged 2022 briefing also references an alleged $1-million transfer in 2014 from the Toronto Consulate to unidentified local proxy groups to finance rallies in favour of the Toronto District School Board’s doomed deal with the Confucius Institute, a cultural education program which the U.S. State Department contends is run by the United Front Work Department.
> 
> The United Front Work Department is a primary organ of President Xi’s vast, global-interference campaigns, according to the 2022 briefs. However, Beijing has denied that it uses the United Front to support Chinese Communist Party policy abroad, and last week Chinese officials said the nation doesn’t interfere in Canadian affairs.
> 
> Sources with awareness of CSIS probes allege that Wei and CTCCO are among the unidentified, local proxies who received part of the $1 million disbursed by the Toronto Consulate.
> 
> In an interview, former Asia-Pacific desk CSIS officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya said he voluntarily provided testimony to a TDSB committee arguing against the deal in 2014, which ultimately fell through after much grassroots protest from parents and pro-democracy members of the Chinese community.
> 
> “The Confucius Institutes do represent a threat for the Canadian government,” Juneau-Katsuya commented at the Oct. 1, 2014, hearing.
> 
> Juneau-Katsuya, who was not with CSIS but working privately as a security consultant in 2014, said he cited open-source records to allege that Wei and the CTCCO are linked to the United Front Work Department.
> 
> However, at these hearings in 2014, some community leaders reportedly countered that Confucius Institutes would benefit Canada and enrich language and cultural programs outside of school hours.
> Juneau-Katsuya said he is not surprised by the allegations reported by Global News from the 2022 briefs. He said CSIS and the RCMP have been monitoring “very aggressive operational initiatives coming from the Toronto Chinese Consulate for several decades.”
> 
> When approached for comment for this story, however, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino’s office appeared to downplay the severity of CSIS’s alleged 2022 briefs.
> 
> “We established a non-partisan panel to evaluate influence and interference in 2019,” wrote spokesman Alexander Cohen. “The panel announced their findings after both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, stating clearly that they did not detect foreign interference threatening Canada’s ability to have a free and fair election.”
> *Stations linked to Fujian police bureaus*​A report issued by the Spanish human-rights group SafeGuard Defenders identified more than 50 police stations worldwide allegedly used for Operation Fox Hunt. The group cited Chinese state records to link the locations to police bureaus in Fujian, a Mainland province.
> 
> The SafeGuard findings say that three secret stations are in the Greater Toronto Area, and RCMP sources have alleged to Global News that Wei Chengyi has ties to two of them.
> 
> Launched by President Xi Jinping in 2014, Fox Hunt is billed by CCP as a worldwide program to repatriate fugitive tycoons and corrupt officials who’ve absconded with ill-gotten gains.
> Enforcement officials such as FBI director Christopher Wray, however, take a different view. “Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world,” he said two years ago. “We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations.”
> In the 2022 briefs, CSIS echoed the allegation, explaining that Chinese police have been running “forced repatriation” operations as part of Fox Hunt but did not identify any locations or suspects, intelligence sources familiar with the information say.
> 
> According to SafeGuard, the three stations are located in Markham and Scarborough — Toronto suburbs with large, politically diverse communities of Chinese expatriates — and are related to Fox Hunt activities.
> 
> Canadian national security units are deeply concerned, sources said, because agents of the MPS, a national security and foreign espionage arm for Beijing, are suspected to be covertly operating from these stations. Sources added that MPS agents view Canada as an easy operating environment for Chinese state actors.
> 
> However, in a response sent to the Guardian last week about the stations identified by SafeGuard, the Chinese embassy in Ottawa confirmed the addresses but rejected the notion these locations are nesting areas for secret police agents.
> 
> Instead, the embassy insisted the stations provided community outreach for expatriates: “For services such as driver’s license renewal, it is necessary to have eyesight, hearing and physical examination.
> 
> National security investigators are also looking into Wei’s connection to a suspected location in Vancouver, which investigators did not identify. Global News could not independently verify its existence.
> 
> Also In an effort to independently verify the allegations regarding the Toronto locations, Global News searched for land-title records for one property in Scarborough and one in Markham that RCMP sources allege Wei has ties to.
> 
> One of the title searches did not turn up any overt connection to Wei. But the second, a low-rise office at 220 Royal Crest Court, a Markham industrial plaza, listed Canada Toronto Fuqing Business Association as its owner. The office building was empty when a Global News reporter visited the location to seek comment on Monday.
> 
> That association has ties to the CTCCO: Wei and another CTCCO leader are named on its website as their permanent honorary chairmen. An employee told Global News on Monday that Wei also could not be reached at a Toronto business address listed on the Fuqing website.
> 
> The Fuqing group was started in June 2019, its website said, under the guidance of the United Front Work Department and various Fujian government agencies.
> 
> The RCMP did not respond directly to questions about Wei’s alleged connection to the secret Chinese police stations.
> 
> “The RCMP is actively investigating reports of criminal activity in relation to the so-called ‘police” stations,’” a statement said. “As the RCMP is currently investigating the incident, there will be no further comment on the matter at this time.”
> 
> CSIS also did not respond to questions about Wei, saying that in order to preserve the integrity of its operations, it was unable to comment on the specifics of its investigations.
> 
> But, responding to general questions about Fox Hunt operations and CSIS investigations into China’s foreign interference, CSIS told Global News that Fox Hunt is a “global covert” tool of Xi’s repression abroad, and the United Front Work Department facilitates these state-backed operations.
> “These activities constitute a threat to Canada’s sovereignty and to the safety of Canadians,” a November 2022 CSIS statement said.



 Link


----------



## RangerRay

The good grey Globe isn’t impressed with Trudeau’s handling of China. 









						Globe editorial: On Chinese election interference, the Trudeau government is talking loudly and doing nothing
					

The Trudeau government is in the midst of a long-overdue reappraisal of its relationship with China. Canada needs substantial action to change our laws so that foreign powers cannot mess with our democracy




					www.theglobeandmail.com


----------



## Halifax Tar

Interesting opinion piece









						Opinion: Trudeau should be thanking Xi for their awkward G20 encounter
					

The leaders’ confrontation has distracted from Ottawa’s relative silence on China’s alleged assault on Canada’s democracy




					www.theglobeandmail.com
				




"But for those inclined to see the exchange as either an indictment of Mr. Trudeau’s weakness or a tribute to his strength: arrogant and contemptuous is Chinese leaders’ default mode. It wasn’t the first time, after all, that a Chinese leader had talked down to a Canadian prime minister. Recall the public rebuke prime minister Stephen Harper received in 2009 – on an official visit – from then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, for not having visited sooner. *The difference is that last time, much of the Canadian media and political class sided with China*".

"The record of Liberal entanglement with Beijing is, in retrospect, staggering: the fundraising dinners with Chinese billionaires; the compromised ambassadorships of John McCallum and Dominic Barton; the eager pursuit of a free trade deal, even to the point of considering an extradition treaty as a side-letter; the presence of all those Liberal grandees on the Canada-China Business Council."


----------



## Kirkhill

Halifax Tar said:


> Interesting opinion piece
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Opinion: Trudeau should be thanking Xi for their awkward G20 encounter
> 
> 
> The leaders’ confrontation has distracted from Ottawa’s relative silence on China’s alleged assault on Canada’s democracy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theglobeandmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "But for those inclined to see the exchange as either an indictment of Mr. Trudeau’s weakness or a tribute to his strength: arrogant and contemptuous is Chinese leaders’ default mode. It wasn’t the first time, after all, that a Chinese leader had talked down to a Canadian prime minister. Recall the public rebuke prime minister Stephen Harper received in 2009 – on an official visit – from then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, for not having visited sooner. *The difference is that last time, much of the Canadian media and political class sided with China*".
> 
> "The record of Liberal entanglement with Beijing is, in retrospect, staggering: the fundraising dinners with Chinese billionaires; the compromised ambassadorships of John McCallum and Dominic Barton; the eager pursuit of a free trade deal, even to the point of considering an extradition treaty as a side-letter; the presence of all those Liberal grandees on the Canada-China Business Council."



*The difference is that last time, much of the Canadian media and political class sided with China*".

The difference is that last time , much of the Canadian media and political class saw the issue entirely through the parochial prism of Canadian politics.

Blue man bad.
Red man good.


----------



## Halifax Tar

Kirkhill said:


> *The difference is that last time, much of the Canadian media and political class sided with China*".
> 
> The difference is that last time , much of the Canadian media and political class saw the issue entirely through the parochial prism of Canadian politics.
> 
> Blue man bad.
> Red man good.



That's exactly what Mr Coyne said.


----------



## daftandbarmy

I'm so confused, as is the Prime Minister it seems. He was briefed by CSIS in January... 


PM Trudeau says that he does not know the 11 candidates in the 2019 election who were alleged to have received money from China. Trudeau says he has instructed his officials to examine the issue and they will pass that info on to the parl committee looking into this #cdnpoli


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594340133641543680


----------



## Rifleman62

Who are "his official's"?
Trudeau believes "his truths".
The two in the picture look good together.


----------



## Halifax Tar

daftandbarmy said:


> I'm so confused, as is the Prime Minister it seems. He was briefed by CSIS in January...
> 
> 
> PM Trudeau says that he does not know the 11 candidates in the 2019 election who were alleged to have received money from China. Trudeau says he has instructed his officials to examine the issue and they will pass that info on to the parl committee looking into this #cdnpoli
> 
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594340133641543680



I call


----------



## YZT580

daftandbarmy said:


> I'm so confused, as is the Prime Minister it seems. He was briefed by CSIS in January...
> 
> 
> PM Trudeau says that he does not know the 11 candidates in the 2019 election who were alleged to have received money from China. Trudeau says he has instructed his officials to examine the issue and they will pass that info on to the parl committee looking into this #cdnpoli
> 
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594340133641543680


Here is an appropriate description:   When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.


----------



## Fishbone Jones

daftandbarmy said:


> I'm so confused, as is the Prime Minister it seems. He was briefed by CSIS in January...
> 
> 
> PM Trudeau says that he does not know the 11 candidates in the 2019 election who were alleged to have received money from China. Trudeau says he has instructed his officials to examine the issue and they will pass that info on to the parl committee looking into this #cdnpoli
> 
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594340133641543680


He's probably the major recipient of the cash. The other ten, in my estimation, are likely split between Toronto and Vancouver.


----------



## MilEME09

Fishbone Jones said:


> He's probably the major recipient of the cash. The other ten, in my estimation, are likely split between Toronto and Vancouver.


Large amount of cash was pushed into caogary and Edmonton lib candidates as well


----------



## RangerRay

Another Terry Glavin article on Trudeau and Beijing’s weird relationship.   Most of the article is free but the remainder is behind a paywall 









						National Security In A "Post-National" State.
					

Is it whatever the Trudeau government says it is?




					therealstory.substack.com


----------



## RangerRay

Mills Bomb said:


> *Tinfoil hat hypothetical*
> 
> So what happens if it turns out JT was one of the MP's that China covertly funded? Given stories like this one, it may not be as far-fetched as some want to believe?
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3863266
> 
> 
> 
> "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to defend his party's fundraising methods in the House of Commons Tuesday after media reports emerged revealing he attended a fundraiser with a Chinese businessman who went on to donate $200,000 to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation"
> 
> Given how sketchy this entire situation is, it may be unresolvable since the party in power could be the one that benefitted the most from covert Chinese funding and simply decide to cover this whole mess up. I mean, what are they gonna do, be honest with us? Tell us that in fact the Chinese did help them? They don't seem interested in really coming clean and telling us anything, it seems like they are actually more focused on bringing up other controversial topics like gun laws to bring heat off of the situation and trying to move past and dismiss it.
> 
> Maybe it is just tinfoil, but you would think if it was, and maybe it is, and the LPC are truly interested in "transparent government" wouldn't we already have the answers and know exactly who was foreign funded? That's super messed up. And there's nothing everyday Canadian's can really do about it.
> 
> What would the repercussions even be if this turned out to be the case, if anything?
> 
> How do we potentially deal with a party holding power if we know the way they came to that power was partially threw foreign funding by one of our biggest adversaries? And how will this effect our relationship with our Western allies if proven true and the party refuses to leave?
> 
> I realize this might be pretty far-fetched but at the same time the lack of transparency on this topic is pure conspiracy fuel.


A few years ago, there was a big, public investigation about a similar situation in the US.  Names were named, people were indicted and convicted. 

Here, crickets.


----------



## Weinie

RangerRay said:


> A few years ago, there was a big, public investigation about a similar situation in the US.  Names were named, people were indicted and convicted.
> 
> Here, crickets.


Where there is smoke...........there is fire lying.


----------



## Kirkhill

Bai Lan?  Let it rot?

Anybody heard about this?


----------



## Fishbone Jones

World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab declares on Chinese state TV: 'China is a model for many nations'​"I think it’s a role model for many countries," Schwab said, before qualifying that he thinks each country should make its own decisions about what system it wants to adapt.

"‘Stakeholder capitalism,’ a model I first proposed a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges," he wrote. "We should seize this moment to ensure that stakeholder capitalism remains the new dominant model."









						World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab declares on Chinese state TV: 'China is a model for many nations'
					

World Economic Forum founder and Chair Klaus Schwab told CGTN, a Chinese state-run news outlet, he believes China is a model for many other countries.




					www.foxnews.com


----------



## OldSolduer

When JT said he had an admiration for China no one fuckjng listened. 
People went gaga cause he was PETs offspring.

How can people be so stupid?


----------



## Fishbone Jones

OldSolduer said:


> When JT said he had an admiration for China no one fuckjng listened.
> People went gaga cause he was PETs offspring.
> 
> How can people be so stupid?


I asked that when his dad was elected and I asked again in 2015.
I have yet to receive an answer.


----------



## Kirkhill

Seminal documents for PET

Rerum Novarum
Quadragessimo Anno


----------



## Spencer100

For those that follow China and these guys.   It most likely will not lead to anything but.






Interesting none the less. 


Iran, China,.....Russia?

What is the saying....may you live in interesting times....


----------



## daftandbarmy

Bad China, no Freedom...


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596865896240537601


----------



## dimsum

Weaponized sarcasm.  

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596897623385989121


----------



## Edward Campbell

This story, from a few days ago, should scare the livin' bejeezus out of Xi Jinping - not because the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) gave President Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) a thrashing at the polls (the Taiwan local elections a bit like US mid-terms and it is chance for the voters to punish the national governing party) but rather because it says that one of his fundamental political assumption is wrong.

That assumption is that Western style democracy is not a good fit for East Asia. The theory, which_ I am fairly certain_ Xi Jiinping *believes*, quite firmly, says that East Asia is conservative in there Confucian sense and that Anglo-American democracy, with its emphasis on the individual as the holder of all rights and society being the result of individuals voluntarily accepting limits on some of their rights for the common good (like everyone driving on this or that side of the road, for example), is ill-suited to Asia. The Taiwan elections and experience in Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea suggest that Xi is wrong.

For years and years former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew made regular trips top Beijing where leaders like Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao cleared their calendars for a full day while the old man told them about the advantages of democracy and the way that his Peoples' Action Party had, effectively, achieved one party rule. Some old those leaders listened; Xi Jinping rejects the whole notion ... but the evidence is mounting that a robust multi-party democracy works well in East Asia and that, as Lee forecast, when prosperity rises so does the people's desire to have a greater say in their governance.

I don't think there is a whole lot of distance *in real, strategic substance* in how the Taiwan's Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party view Taiwan's relationship with China. What we have is more akin to Canadian Conservatives and Liberals fighting for public support on, primarily, domestic issues and that's what ought to scare Xi Jinping: Chinese people using politics and democracy to manage their one lives. It goes against everything he is trying to do.

While I agree that East Asia is, very largely, _*Confucian*_ and, therefore, averse to our sort of *liberal* philosophy, there is nothing in Confucianism that says that ones personal ethics and morality, including familial responsibility and so on is, in any way, incompatible with conservative democracy. 

Xi Jinping has been following a bad assumption. I hope he knows that, for China's sake.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to beat people up we go...



__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1597672106354843649


----------



## Edward Campbell

This, from _Reuters_ in there _Globe and Mail_, is worth a read.

China is NOT collapsing; it is still a formidable economy and a great power by most measures.

BUT: China is stagnating. Neighbours, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are eating China's lunch, so to say, by producing more and more cheap consumer good and components for almost everything under the sun. Some of those ASEAN neighbours are outclassing China in technology - producing higher grade components than China can.

While the current unrest in China is 99% COVID related there is also,_ I suspect _(I no longer have a handful of trustworthy sources in China), an undercurrent of middle class angst as the government fails, again and again, make things measurably better for a few hundred million people. IF that angst turns to real anger then Xi Jinping has a HUGE, maybe insurmountable problem. He has promised a lot, publicly, but his _deliverology_ is noticeably weak. His predecessors, for the past 45 years, promised little and delivered a lot; Xi has promised a lot and delivered next to nothing, except a military buildup which doesn't put money into most Chinese pay-packets.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Another lengthy but very useful read in _Foreign Affairs_ - you local library should subscribe to _Foreign Affairs_, if you don't. If you library doesn't then complain loud and long to the base commander or mayor or whoever - a library that doesn't subscribe is not with the name.

Anyway the key takeaway comes early:

"It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.” "

Some insightful ideas about tXi's thinking:

"One key to understanding Xi is to look at his interpretations of history. It is well known that Putin once declared the Soviet Union’s collapse to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Less well understood is the extent to which the Soviet collapse also haunts Xi and how it functions as a fundamental guide to the Chinese leader’s actions. 

In December 2012, just after becoming general secretary, Xi gave a closed-door speech to cadres in Guangdong Province, excerpts of which were leaked and published by a Chinese journalist in early 2013. Xi’s speech, framed as a cautionary tale, provided an early window into his worldview:



> Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. . . . It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.


Xi’s mention of “historic nihilism” may have been an implicit criticism of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had faulted the record of his predecessors. But the explicit villain in Xi’s speech was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening) reforms set the stage for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “A few people tried to save the Soviet Union,” Xi said. “They seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship. Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” The phrase “the tools of dictatorship”—the idea that it is essential for the party and especially its top leader to control the military, the security apparatus, propaganda, government data, ideology, and the economy—would recur again and again in Xi’s speeches and official guidance over the next decade."

And:

"Xi believes that we are today witnessing a “qualitative leap” in world affairs, where China has moved to center stage and the U.S.-anchored Western order is breaking down. As Xi said in his speech published in April 2021:



> The world today is undergoing a great change in situation unseen in a century. Since the most recent period, the most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, “chaos,” and this trend appears likely to continue.


Xi depicts the current historical period as one of great risk and opportunity. It is his “historical mission” to exploit the inflection point and push history along its inexorable course through a process of “struggle,” which includes identifying internal and external enemies, isolating them, and mobilizing the party and its acolytes against them."

The authors conclude that:

"The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator."

So, back tot he main point: "It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict."

It's called containment ...


----------



## Kirkhill

Edward Campbell said:


> Another lengthy but very useful read in _Foreign Affairs_ - you local library should subscribe to _Foreign Affairs_, if you don't. If you library doesn't then complain loud and long to the base commander or mayor or whoever - a library that doesn't subscribe is not with the name.
> 
> Anyway the key takeaway comes early:
> 
> "It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.” "
> 
> Some insightful ideas about tXi's thinking:
> 
> "One key to understanding Xi is to look at his interpretations of history. It is well known that Putin once declared the Soviet Union’s collapse to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Less well understood is the extent to which the Soviet collapse also haunts Xi and how it functions as a fundamental guide to the Chinese leader’s actions.
> 
> In December 2012, just after becoming general secretary, Xi gave a closed-door speech to cadres in Guangdong Province, excerpts of which were leaked and published by a Chinese journalist in early 2013. Xi’s speech, framed as a cautionary tale, provided an early window into his worldview:
> 
> 
> Xi’s mention of “historic nihilism” may have been an implicit criticism of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had faulted the record of his predecessors. But the explicit villain in Xi’s speech was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening) reforms set the stage for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “A few people tried to save the Soviet Union,” Xi said. “They seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship. Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” The phrase “the tools of dictatorship”—the idea that it is essential for the party and especially its top leader to control the military, the security apparatus, propaganda, government data, ideology, and the economy—would recur again and again in Xi’s speeches and official guidance over the next decade."
> 
> And:
> 
> "Xi believes that we are today witnessing a “qualitative leap” in world affairs, where China has moved to center stage and the U.S.-anchored Western order is breaking down. As Xi said in his speech published in April 2021:
> 
> 
> Xi depicts the current historical period as one of great risk and opportunity. It is his “historical mission” to exploit the inflection point and push history along its inexorable course through a process of “struggle,” which includes identifying internal and external enemies, isolating them, and mobilizing the party and its acolytes against them."
> 
> The authors conclude that:
> 
> "The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator."
> 
> So, back tot he main point: "It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict."
> 
> It's called containment ...




This lead paragraph deserves highlighting I think



> the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all. These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.



It serves both to instruct on Xi's aims and on the degree of obfuscation it projects.


Interesting in terms of Wolf Warriors, Canadian elections and Canadian universities.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Edward Campbell said:


> Another lengthy but very useful read in _Foreign Affairs_ - you local library should subscribe to _Foreign Affairs_, if you don't. If you library doesn't then complain loud and long to the base commander or mayor or whoever - a library that doesn't subscribe is not with the name.
> 
> Anyway the key takeaway comes early:
> 
> "It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.” "



The Spratleys enter the chat:

China's military said on Tuesday it drove away a U.S. guided-missile cruiser that "illegally intruded" into waters near the South China Sea's Spratly Islands, an assertion the U.S. Navy disputed.

"The actions of the U.S. military seriously violated China's sovereignty and security," said Tian Junli, spokesman for the Southern Theatre Command of the People's Liberation Army.

The ship in question, the USS Chancellorsville guided-missile cruiser, had recently sailed through the Taiwan Strait.









						China says it drove away U.S. cruiser near Spratly Islands
					

China's military said on Tuesday it drove away a U.S. guided-missile cruiser that "illegally intruded" into waters near the South China Sea's Spratly Islands, an assertion the U.S. Navy disputed.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## Edward Campbell

Good article in _*The Economist *_by Aaron Friedberg who  is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is a member of the bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and the author of “Getting China Wrong.”

"Three times in the past century," he says, "the countries of the democratic West have tried and failed to create a global order built on the same liberal principles as their domestic political regimes":

After the First World War - Woodrow Wilson, League of Nation, etc;
Starting _circa_ 1948, the creation of a global "liberal" order; and
After the collapse of the USSR the US-led West pursued a strategy off _enlargement _rather than _containment_.
The first and third failed, the second is staggering along .. sorta.

Professor Friedberg says trying to integrate Xci Jinping's China into our global, _*liberal*_ world order is a fool's errand. 

My take is that it can work ... Xi Jinping is coming up on his 70th birthday; he is,_ I suspect_, facing growing, albeit inchoate, internal opposition questioning because he has promised a lot - by 2025 - and has delivered two third;'s of five eighth's of Sweet Fancy Adams. China is falling behind; cost are rising, wages are static; Taiwan remains stubbornly independent.

_My guess_, maybe it's just a hope, is that Xi cannot last until his 80th birthday - June 2033 , and his successors will be in the Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, with whom we could deal.

A lot of really smart people _seem to *believe*_ that the Chinese are too conservative (Confucian) to ever adopt _*near-iiberal *_values - I think Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan say that's not true.


----------



## RangerRay

A good step.  From Sam Cooper and Stewart Bell. 









						RCMP foreign interference investigators visit B.C. friendship society  | Globalnews.ca
					

The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team conducted interviews at the Wenzhou Friendship Society.




					globalnews.ca


----------



## Good2Golf

RangerRay said:


> A good step.  From Sam Cooper and Stewart Bell.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> RCMP foreign interference investigators visit B.C. friendship society  | Globalnews.ca
> 
> 
> The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team conducted interviews at the Wenzhou Friendship Society.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> globalnews.ca


Any wagers that the NSIA doesn’t believe there’s an issue? 🤔


----------



## OldSolduer

"Wenzhou Friendship Society" - the name itself should be a clue that while appearing friendly they are in fact here to undermine our country.


----------



## RangerRay

Good2Golf said:


> Any wagers that the NSIA doesn’t believe there’s an issue? 🤔


Her Wiki page describes her as “hawkish” on China. I don’t know enough about her to say otherwise.


----------



## Good2Golf

RangerRay said:


> Her Wiki page describes her as “hawkish” on China. I don’t know enough about her to say otherwise.


Wiki v. action/deeds…

She does not come across as ‘hawkish’ at all, to me. 



			https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6679443


----------



## Edward Campbell

Tanvi Madan, who is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says, in a useful article in a recent edition of_* Foreign Affairs*_ (OK, I'm a bit behind in my reading) that "Beijing has called for the [2020 and earlier] border crisis to be set aside and for diplomatic, defense, and economic cooperation to resume now that Chinese and Indian troops have disengaged at some of the points of friction. But New Delhi has called for further disengagement—the standing down of troops from more flash points—and for de-escalation, that is, a reversal of the military and infrastructure buildups that have taken place on both sides of the border over the last two and a half years. China is unlikely to agree to the latter, and India will not unilaterally de-escalate. Moreover, India does not believe the border issue can be set aside. It sees peace and tranquility at the border as a precondition for a normal Sino-Indian relationship. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not meet with Xi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in September, the first time such a meeting did not occur—a clear signal that India is not yet willing to return to business as usual with China."

The outcome, she says, is that "The heightened concern about China has also manifested in domestic policy. The Modi government has gone from initially seeking increased economic ties with China to imposing restrictions or extra scrutiny on a range of Chinese activities in India. It does not seek to decouple from China so much as it wants to disentangle India from China—an approach designed not to eliminate economic ties but to identify and reduce India’s vulnerabilities in critical sectors."

Dr Madan reminds us that "India has long sought to maintain its strategic autonomy, refusing to be drawn into alliances. Now, however, it is at least aligning with countries to address the threat China poses. India is now willing to cooperate more closely with the United States, even at the risk of angering China. It signed a geospatial intelligence agreement with the United States in October 2020; is conducting high-altitude exercises with the U.S. Army near the Chinese-Indian border this month; has become more involved in the Indo-Pacific partnership known as the Quad (that features Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) despite Chinese and Russian objections; has participated in a range of maritime exercises with its Quad partners; signed a logistics-sharing agreement with Vietnam in June 2022; and in January 2022 reached a deal to sell BrahMos missiles (jointly developed by India and Russia) to the Philippines .. [and] ... India once tiptoed around China’s sensitivities regarding perceived threats to its sovereignty. New Delhi is no longer being as deferential. Modi has publicly acknowledged calls he has made with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, a departure from his past reluctance to do so. And the Indian Air Force facilitated the Dalai Lama’s month-long visit to Ladakh in July 2022. In a departure from common practice, the Indian foreign ministry in September did not punt on a question about Xinjiang, the Muslim-majority province in the west of China. It twice noted that a UN human rights report had highlighted “the serious maltreatment of minorities” inside China. In recent weeks, the Indian government has also spoken critically about the “militarization of the Taiwan Strait,” refused to reiterate a “one China” policy (that would acknowledge Taiwan as a part of China and the People’s Republic of China as the only legal government of China) despite Beijing’s calls to do so, and urged restraint and warned against any unilateral change to the status quo after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August."

In short, "With its 2020 actions at the border, Beijing has stalled, if not reversed, years of deepening Sino-Indian ties. It has also, counterproductively, facilitated the strengthening of Indian partnerships with many Chinese rivals. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, recently alluded to the broad scope of competition between the two countries, sketching a very different vision of Asia than the one proposed by Beijing. On their part, India’s partners, including the United States, have wondered to what extent India can be brought onside in an alignment against China. These countries should approach India with both pragmatism and ambition. They should have realistic expectations about what New Delhi might be able to do in the Indo-Pacific, given its border-related, regional, and domestic priorities. And they should recognize that while India will compete with China, it will not compete in exactly the same way as the United States or Japan do. But they should not have too little ambition, assuming India will reject deeper cooperation—after all, New Delhi’s traditional diffidence has turned to more willing engagement in recent years. India will steer its own ship, but it is tacking in the direction of those interested in balancing Chinese power and influence in the region and around the world." As the title of her article says, "*China has lost India,*" China will come to regret that and it may be another nail in Xi's coffin.


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## Brad Sallows

"Be prepared to work with the US" is not a bad position to take for any unaligned or semi-unaligned neighbour of China.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Brad Sallows said:


> "Be prepared to work with the US" is not a bad position to take for any unaligned or semi-unaligned neighbour of China.


And Professor John Ikenberry tells us, in a recent article in _Foreign Affairs_, why betting against America is not a good idea.

It has become popular, he says, to believe that "The U.S.-led world ... is giving way to something new—a post-American, post-Western, postliberal order marked by great-power competition and the economic and geopolitical ascendance of China." But he says,  "the United States is not foundering. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and circumstances that will continue to make the United States the dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. To be sure, no one knows the future, and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, shifting, and difficult-to-grasp political forces and by choices made by people living in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world persist. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinctive traits and capacities have come more clearly into view ... [and] ... The mistake made by prophets of American decline is to see the United States and its liberal order as just another empire on the wane. The wheel of history turns, empires come and go—and now, they suggest, it is time for the United States to fade into senescence. Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old-style empire. But its role in the world rests on much more than its past imperial behavior; U.S. power draws not only on brute strength but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity. The global order the United States has built since the end of World War II is best seen not as an empire but as a world system, a sprawling multifaceted political formation, rich in vicissitudes, that creates opportunity for people across the planet."

Now, I believe that Professor Ikenberry is a bit too shortsighted. The "ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity" go all the way back to the 16th century. They are Anglo-Scandinavian-Dutch AND, quite lately, American ideas, institutions and values that have spread, very, very imperfectly through much of the world. But whether they are American or Anglo-American or Euro-American matters less than the fact, and I agree with prof Ikenberry that it is a fact, that they still animate international relations and grand strategy today.


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## Edward Campbell

Edward Campbell said:


> And Professor John Ikenberry tells us, in a recent article in _Foreign Affairs_, why betting against America is not a good idea.
> 
> It has become popular, he says, to believe that "The U.S.-led world ... is giving way to something new—a post-American, post-Western, postliberal order marked by great-power competition and the economic and geopolitical ascendance of China." But he says,  "the United States is not foundering. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and circumstances that will continue to make the United States the dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. To be sure, no one knows the future, and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, shifting, and difficult-to-grasp political forces and by choices made by people living in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world persist. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinctive traits and capacities have come more clearly into view ... [and] ... The mistake made by prophets of American decline is to see the United States and its liberal order as just another empire on the wane. The wheel of history turns, empires come and go—and now, they suggest, it is time for the United States to fade into senescence. Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old-style empire. But its role in the world rests on much more than its past imperial behavior; U.S. power draws not only on brute strength but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity. The global order the United States has built since the end of World War II is best seen not as an empire but as a world system, a sprawling multifaceted political formation, rich in vicissitudes, that creates opportunity for people across the planet."
> 
> Now, I believe that Professor Ikenberry is a bit too shortsighted. The "ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity" go all the way back to the 16th century. They are Anglo-Scandinavian-Dutch AND, quite lately, American ideas, institutions and values that have spread, very, very imperfectly through much of the world. But whether they are American or Anglo-American or Euro-American matters less than the fact, and I agree with prof Ikenberry that it is a fact, that they still animate international relations and grand strategy today.


I'm sorry for the too many typos, etc. My eyes are not a good as I might wish and my next (semi-annual now) examination isn't until Feb, and I'm not getting any younger and that means,_ inter alia_, that my attention to detail is not what it once was. The only good news is that Xi Jinping is also getting older and older, day-by-day, as it happens, and younger men are sniffing at the edges, looking for the keys to power.


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## Kirkhill

Edward Campbell said:


> The "ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity" go all the way back to the 16th century. They are Anglo-Scandinavian-Dutch AND, quite lately, American ideas, institutions and values that have spread, very, very imperfectly through much of the world.



Could we call them Reformation ideas?


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## Kirkhill

Further to the Reformation theme  

There are those to whom the Truth is Revealed and there are those who are believers.  Reading bad books is a sin.

Janet Daley



> We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions
> 
> Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying​












						Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying
					

We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				





As the year in which life officially returned to normal comes to an end, we must ask an uncomfortable question. What on earth just happened? We have lived through a period of what would once have been the unthinkable suspension of basic freedoms: interventions by the state into personal life that even most totalitarian governments would not have dared to impose. And we, along with most (not all) of the democratic societies of the West, accepted it. Before that era slips into the fog of convenient forgetfulness, it is absolutely imperative that we – the country as a whole – hold a thorough post hoc examination, because our governing classes have certainly learnt something they will remember.

The critical lesson that has been indelibly absorbed by people in power, and those who advise them, is that fear works. There is, it turns out, almost nothing that a population (even one as brave and insouciant as Britain’s) will not give up if they are systematically, relentlessly frightened.

The Covid phenomenon has provided an invaluable training session in public mind-control techniques: the formula was refined – with the assistance of sophisticated advertising and opinion-forming advice – to an astonishingly successful blend of mass anxiety (your life is in danger) and moral coercion (you are putting other people’s lives in danger). But it was not just the endless repetition of that message that accomplished the almost universal, and quite unexpected, compliance. It was the comprehensive suppression of dissent even when it came from expert sources – and the prohibition on argument even when it was accompanied by counter-evidence – that really did the trick. Now the prescription is readily available for any governing elite hoping to initiate a policy likely to meet with strong public resistance. First tell people that they, or their children and grandchildren, will die if they do not comply. Then prohibit any mitigating argument or critique of this prediction.

If the laws of the land do not permit you to stamp out all such deviant opinions, you can simply orchestrate an avalanche of opprobrium and disrepute on those who express them so that their professional reputations are undermined. But that is yesterday’s battle. Covid – as a historic event – is over. Let’s talk about how the Fear programme, now an accepted part of the armoury of democratic politics, is likely to work in the present and future. As it happens, there is what looks like a remarkably similar model of anxiety-plus-moral-blackmail being applied to the matter of climate change. Note: these observations have no bearing on whether or not there is a true “climate crisis”. What I want to consider is how the policies that are being formulated to address it are being framed.

Words are terribly important here. There seems to be an alarming similarity between the language in which the climate campaign is being conducted and the one used to sell the authoritarian Covid lockdowns. There is, for example, a curious anthropomorphising of the threat in both cases. The virus was depicted regularly by both politicians and their medical officials as a sentient adversary with an “agenda” (that word was, believe it or not, was actually used) to destroy human lives. It was likened to a wartime enemy – except that it was more sinister because it was “invisible”. This was not strictly true, of course: it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope as was demonstrated repeatedly in scary images widely reproduced in the media. Now, the Planet (the word is usually capitalised as if it were a proper name) is being described as if it too was a conscious being whose innocent life was being threatened by the thoughtless rapaciousness of human beings. So we – and our inclinations – are once again the potential danger.

None of this nonsense has anything to do with science. It is the language of horror movies or particularly gruesome fairy tales designed to frighten children into good behaviour. The great offence that is being committed by these machinations, in fact, is against scientific endeavour itself, which relies on disagreement and open debate to progress. Somehow, we have found ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict the inviolable truth of authority. Who would have thought that, centuries after the Enlightenment, we would return to Galileo vs the Vatican? This is not intended to imply that religious belief is always the enemy of scientific rationality. I personally believe that human intelligence is the greatest of God’s gifts and that the traducing of it is truly sinful as well as utterly irresponsible. As it happened, there was one more affirmation of the irreplaceable importance of intellect and inventiveness just last week with the successful experiment in nuclear fusion, which may, literally, save the future of all those who inhabit the earth (if, in fact, it is genuinely in danger).

What intelligence and innovation rely on above all is criticism and disputation. That is the nature of the thing. It should be what education is for. We cannot, must not, stop fighting for the right to disagree. It is appalling that it has become necessary to legislate to enforce this freedom on academic institutions that were once dedicated to free discussion. The imperatives that must be taught to the young have not changed since Plato’s day. Argue. Question. Disagree. Expose received ideas to rigorous interrogation. Express doubt when you are unpersuaded. Seek truth through endless dialogue. Certainly some mistakes will be made in the name of liberty, but they can only be corrected if we do not, literally, lose our minds in the name of safety. The lines by Dylan Thomas, which were intended to be about physical death, could just as easily be applied to the death of Reason:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”


----------



## Kirkhill

The Errors of modern society






						The Syllabus Of Errors - Papal Encyclicals
					

I. PANTHEISM, NATURALISM AND ABSOLUTE RATIONALISM 1. There exists no Supreme, all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe, and God is identical with the nature of things, and is, therefore, subject to changes. In effect, God is produced in … Continue reading →




					www.papalencyclicals.net


----------



## daftandbarmy

Kirkhill said:


> The Errors of modern society
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Syllabus Of Errors - Papal Encyclicals
> 
> 
> I. PANTHEISM, NATURALISM AND ABSOLUTE RATIONALISM 1. There exists no Supreme, all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe, and God is identical with the nature of things, and is, therefore, subject to changes. In effect, God is produced in … Continue reading →
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.papalencyclicals.net




"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

Cardinal Richelieu


----------



## Good2Golf

Kirkhill said:


> Further to the Reformation theme
> 
> There are those to whom the Truth is Revealed and there are those who are believers.  Reading bad books is a sin.
> 
> Janet Daley
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying
> 
> 
> We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.telegraph.co.uk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> As the year in which life officially returned to normal comes to an end, we must ask an uncomfortable question. What on earth just happened? We have lived through a period of what would once have been the unthinkable suspension of basic freedoms: interventions by the state into personal life that even most totalitarian governments would not have dared to impose. And we, along with most (not all) of the democratic societies of the West, accepted it. Before that era slips into the fog of convenient forgetfulness, it is absolutely imperative that we – the country as a whole – hold a thorough post hoc examination, because our governing classes have certainly learnt something they will remember.
> 
> The critical lesson that has been indelibly absorbed by people in power, and those who advise them, is that fear works. There is, it turns out, almost nothing that a population (even one as brave and insouciant as Britain’s) will not give up if they are systematically, relentlessly frightened.
> 
> The Covid phenomenon has provided an invaluable training session in public mind-control techniques: the formula was refined – with the assistance of sophisticated advertising and opinion-forming advice – to an astonishingly successful blend of mass anxiety (your life is in danger) and moral coercion (you are putting other people’s lives in danger). But it was not just the endless repetition of that message that accomplished the almost universal, and quite unexpected, compliance. It was the comprehensive suppression of dissent even when it came from expert sources – and the prohibition on argument even when it was accompanied by counter-evidence – that really did the trick. Now the prescription is readily available for any governing elite hoping to initiate a policy likely to meet with strong public resistance. First tell people that they, or their children and grandchildren, will die if they do not comply. Then prohibit any mitigating argument or critique of this prediction.
> 
> If the laws of the land do not permit you to stamp out all such deviant opinions, you can simply orchestrate an avalanche of opprobrium and disrepute on those who express them so that their professional reputations are undermined. But that is yesterday’s battle. Covid – as a historic event – is over. Let’s talk about how the Fear programme, now an accepted part of the armoury of democratic politics, is likely to work in the present and future. As it happens, there is what looks like a remarkably similar model of anxiety-plus-moral-blackmail being applied to the matter of climate change. Note: these observations have no bearing on whether or not there is a true “climate crisis”. What I want to consider is how the policies that are being formulated to address it are being framed.
> 
> Words are terribly important here. There seems to be an alarming similarity between the language in which the climate campaign is being conducted and the one used to sell the authoritarian Covid lockdowns. There is, for example, a curious anthropomorphising of the threat in both cases. The virus was depicted regularly by both politicians and their medical officials as a sentient adversary with an “agenda” (that word was, believe it or not, was actually used) to destroy human lives. It was likened to a wartime enemy – except that it was more sinister because it was “invisible”. This was not strictly true, of course: it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope as was demonstrated repeatedly in scary images widely reproduced in the media. Now, the Planet (the word is usually capitalised as if it were a proper name) is being described as if it too was a conscious being whose innocent life was being threatened by the thoughtless rapaciousness of human beings. So we – and our inclinations – are once again the potential danger.
> 
> None of this nonsense has anything to do with science. It is the language of horror movies or particularly gruesome fairy tales designed to frighten children into good behaviour. The great offence that is being committed by these machinations, in fact, is against scientific endeavour itself, which relies on disagreement and open debate to progress. Somehow, we have found ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict the inviolable truth of authority. Who would have thought that, centuries after the Enlightenment, we would return to Galileo vs the Vatican? This is not intended to imply that religious belief is always the enemy of scientific rationality. I personally believe that human intelligence is the greatest of God’s gifts and that the traducing of it is truly sinful as well as utterly irresponsible. As it happened, there was one more affirmation of the irreplaceable importance of intellect and inventiveness just last week with the successful experiment in nuclear fusion, which may, literally, save the future of all those who inhabit the earth (if, in fact, it is genuinely in danger).
> 
> What intelligence and innovation rely on above all is criticism and disputation. That is the nature of the thing. It should be what education is for. We cannot, must not, stop fighting for the right to disagree. It is appalling that it has become necessary to legislate to enforce this freedom on academic institutions that were once dedicated to free discussion. The imperatives that must be taught to the young have not changed since Plato’s day. Argue. Question. Disagree. Expose received ideas to rigorous interrogation. Express doubt when you are unpersuaded. Seek truth through endless dialogue. Certainly some mistakes will be made in the name of liberty, but they can only be corrected if we do not, literally, lose our minds in the name of safety. The lines by Dylan Thomas, which were intended to be about physical death, could just as easily be applied to the death of Reason:
> 
> “Do not go gentle into that good night,
> 
> Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”


“An abundance of caution” trumps Science, it would seem.


----------



## daftandbarmy

I wonder how this death toll will impact their political (in) stability...

New models predict at least 1 million deaths in China amid covid surge​
A fast-spreading covid-19 outbreak in China has researchers predicting a surge in virus-related deaths next year, with several analyses forecasting more than 1 million fatalities in a country that until now has largely kept the coronavirus in check.

Earlier this month, China dramatically loosened its strict “zero covid” policies following a wave of protests in towns and cities where residents were fed up with years of stringent lockdowns, mass testing and centralized quarantines. The demonstrations marked the most significant show of public dissent in China in years.

But many of China’s 1.4 billion people remain vulnerable to the virus because of limited exposure, low vaccination rates and poor investment in emergency care. And now, funeral homes and crematoriums in Beijing, the capital, are struggling to keep up with demand, Reuters reported.
Covid spreads and medical staff sicken after China relaxes restrictions

On Friday, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research institute at the University of Washington in Seattle, projected that China’s covid-19 death toll would spike to more than 322,000 by April. An analysis of the report by Reuters found that China could see more than 1 million coronavirus deaths in 2023 — up from an official toll now of just 5,235.

That would put China’s death toll on par with the United States, where 1.1 million people have died of covid-19 since the pandemic began.
“However way we look at it, it’s very likely that the next few months are going to be quite challenging for China,” IHME director Christopher Murray said in a video statement earlier this month. “The populations at greatest risk in the world are those that have avoided a lot of transmission and have gaps in vaccination. And that’s exactly the case for China.”

The virus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 — and quickly spread around the globe. But after that initial outbreak, Chinese authorities embarked on a hard-line strategy to prevent transmission, closing the country’s borders, isolating patients and their contacts, and in some cases locking down entire cities to keep the virus from circulating.

As new, more infectious variants appeared — including omicron and its offshoots — the strategy became less effective, experts say, while angering residents who watched as the rest of the world opened up.

The virus was already spreading “intensively” in China before authorities relaxed restrictions on Dec. 7, the World Health Organization said last week.

“There’s a narrative at the moment that China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden the disease is out of control,” the WHO’s emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said at a news conference Wednesday. “The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore.”
Chinese lock themselves down, hoard medicine over fear of new covid wave

Still, a separate study published last week by researchers in Hong Kong predicted that 684 people per million would die if China reopened without a mass vaccination booster campaign and other measures. According to a Bloomberg News analysis, that would add up to about 964,000 deaths over the course of the reopening.

China’s official coronavirus vaccination rate is 90 percent, which includes two doses of its domestically produced vaccines. But those shots, which use older technology, have lower efficacy rates than messenger RNA vaccines and offer weaker protection against new variants, experts say.

Another problem in China is vaccine hesitancy, particularly among the elderly. Just 40 percent of Chinese older than 80 have received a booster shot.

China’s “vaccine induced immunity has waned over time and with low booster uptake and no natural infections, the population is more susceptible to severe disease,” said Airfinity, a London-based health analytics firm.

Airfinity’s own models, released in late November, projected between 1.3 million and 2.1 million deaths in China if the government abruptly ended its zero-covid policy.

Other estimates have been even bleaker. Also in November, epidemiologists led by Zhou Jiatong, the head of the Center for Disease Control in China’s Guangxi region, estimated that more than 2 million people could die if the country suffered a covid-19 surge similar to the one that hit Hong Kong in the spring.

Because China stopped publicizing asymptomatic cases — and appeared to tighten its definition of a covid death — earlier this month, the IHME and others used Hong Kong’s omicron outbreak to inform their models. The variant ripped through the densely populated region, and within three months, the population of just 7.4 million saw more than a million new coronavirus cases and some 7,000 deaths.
As infections rise, China stops counting asymptomatic cases

Now, the severity of China’s coronavirus surge is being reported largely anecdotally, with stories of deserted streets, strained hospitals and funeral homes, and pharmacies being emptied of fever medication and traditional remedies.

Murray, the IHME director, said China has several options. It could slow the transition away from zero covid to avoid overwhelming hospitals. It could also change course and try to inoculate residents with mRNA vaccines or increase access to antiviral medications such as Paxlovid.
Last week, Pfizer signed an agreement with the state-owned China Meheco Group Co. to import and distribute Paxlovid on the mainland, Bloomberg News reported.

The Hong Kong-based researchers also wrote that waiting a month to reopen and using that time to increase booster and antiviral coverage could reduce cumulative deaths in China by 26 percent.

“Although the surge of disease burden posed by reopening in December 2022 — January 2023 would likely overload most local health systems nationwide, a reopening strategy that combines vaccination, antiviral treatment and [public health and social measures] could allow China to exit zero-COVID more safely,” they wrote.



			https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/18/china-covid-model-deaths/


----------



## Colin Parkinson

China and Japan butting heads


----------

